Flash

WAKE, ZIPLINE by Angelo Maneage

June 1, 2019

The waters are synchronized. There is a decanter of coffee fuming. Grandma is sad.

Eating pizza, strangely. Songs are playing, strangely, and I catch one directly above the table we are at in this separate room (but all the doors were open, so it was more like a section of a bigger room, like a house is a room with sections of itself). My grandma, aunt, grandpa, my Uncle Bobby are all sitting here, with a few other people and pastries that are covered that I’m told to eat but confused to because they are not eaten.

Pizza boxes were stacked sort of like one row was pepperoni and one wasn’t. They were both cheese. There are eight ounce waters next to them, in a square, being taken in a diagonal. This feels like it means something. Uncle Bobby asks if he could have a pop, but we told him no.

She tells me this exactly that way: “Grandma is sad.” She shows me houses on her phone, ones that she looked at because my grandpa wants to move, Aunt Chrissy shows me a house too. 20 pizza boxes are behind us; Uncle Bobby looks as if he might take the empty ones. The pastor’s wife, I forget her name (I’m not sure if that is rude or not because she remembers mine), talks with my grandma while I’m looking at her phone.

This house is a ranch, it’s red and long. There is a lake by it; grandma loves the lake, she always gets a pass to the one at the city every year. I went with her once and there was a dead bird in the water.

The house is sold.

A voice plays over all of our thoughts. The pastor’s wife is behind me so I give grandma her phone back; I don’t want the wife to touch my head, but she might.

Her voice is sloshy. Sincere about markets, or catering, death, something about money in a donation. Something in or on her eyes that I’m not sure I like; exhaustion in her voice and she always has a limp, but her lids seem to character act. I really might be angry because my mom’s fiancé is tall so his legs have nowhere to go but down while he’s driving; I spilled coffee on my pants I’d just picked up from the tailor.

There is a setting up of a camera. Two voices but mostly one. It’s a bit sloshy. That one starts to talk. It’s definitely Gary. I want to see this. I want to hear it. Everybody is talking; nobody is even eating pizza. Aunt Chrissy tells me this is Gary, but I already knew that. I listen, staring; I get up and push the way to the section where its watched.

—

A large room; the Gospel House. You can see the pipes or vents, whatever they are, from the ceiling from the floor. Carpeted. Very beige. This is a church that is for ex-mafia men in the local area, and their wives and families; it is very warming.

Pictures of Gary are in stations every 14 steps, I counted. In a collage, not making a larger Gary, but something of that. Like if he were a square, which he wasn’t; he’d smoked in a funeral several times before, jumped in the pool, drank in the car immediately after without putting a towel down.

He always looked old, I’d noticed. Youthful wrinkles, strangely. In a way he never looked healthy, but there was something confusing that with his beam. He would pick you up and put you on his shoulders if you were a certain height and weight, and carry you around, and you would be in the pool, somehow, he would be on your shoulders then, fighting a stranger you’d never seen, laughing, the stranger too, with another stranger you’d might have seen before holding the other up. Splashing in every picture, there’s something hinting at a Hawaiian shirt.

It isn’t really a traditional church or clergy, so I thought maybe that they would have left his body out of our site. And it didn’t feel too good to see him immediately; it felt like I was invading or like I wasn’t prepared, as prepared as he was. I’d never been that close to death, I don’t think. Or influence.

His daughters, crying, congratulated me for graduating college; I’d met them before in younger cases. Congratulations, you.

Wearing my cap, I hugged them, individually. I met a cousin I’d met before, also waiting in line. She’s older, crying. She uses Facebook to look at me, she mentions; she congratulates me.

My mom’s fiancé says he heard about 30 properties the family is keeping and how expensive that is, money, money, people, pool boy, and admiring that reality.

Gary is surrounded by flowers.

The video projected above a piano on four screens. A still silence, near movement, near the end. One man clapped once, but after that first contact understood that nobody will and began to warm his hands up.

Picture dark, grainy curtains. This is heaven, he says.

—

I realized my pants were unzipped in the hallway with all the people I’d just met with; at the last funeral I was at, my pants ripped as my grandpa and I lowered his mother’s urn into the ground. I zip them up.

My mom wants to go home. She had been crying for a few years, today especially; I had been weird all day too. She talked about how she’d gotten him an autographed football and how it was displayed on the shrine, I saw, and how good it made her feel. This made me feel good; this made me feel like we’d all missed a point.

I hadn’t been told that they were going to do this, but everybody brought bags of sand and began to fill the room with them. Each section, water is shot in from Pat and firemen outside with hoses. The whole fire department is here. Everybody is here. Even people my aunt works with, and her customers. Dons, city workers; everybody is cheering, dancing in the middle while the filler is poured. An inflated ball is in the crowd. Another. A volley ball net.

We are at the beach. Gary is dead.

JUDGMENTAL CAT ON A WINDOWSILL by C. M. Lindley

May 29, 2019

On their second date, he will wear a shirt half tucked in, un-ironed, rolled up to the elbows. She’ll see the various tattoos on his arms but the one of a peony will be the one that confirms where she goes that night. “I went home w/ W,” she will text a friend, but the message will not go through, and so the next morning, she will imagine she might have imagined the whole thing. He will take them back to his house on J Street. He will still smell of saffron and garlic. Her family will still not want her around. There will be a judgmental cat on the windowsill, staring through her like it knows her biggest baddest secret, and she will say, trying to hide fear, Is that thing yours? I’m allergic. He will reply, No, dear, it’s the neighbors, and he will give her a look like she’s the only item in the pantry, the human equivalent of a half-eaten saltine sleeve, and she will squint her eyes at him and think, oh no, and become embarrassed for the both of them. She will have already been there too long, shown too much, promised the incorrect amount. But she will have been taught no way out other than through. So when Will unbuttons the top of his shirt she will scoot closer, keep an iron hand on her trembling thighs to quell them, lick her lips in that way she learned, reach for his belt, take a deep breath and—wait. Never mind. He will only want to watch a movie.

A city nestled against the water’s edge, the American River, God’s River, some call it. Not her, though. She hates the river because it connects her new neighborhood to her old. In her new neighborhood, there’s a pool. For weeks she has spent every day at the pool, her body a sponge of chlorine, other people’s urine, small black hairs, water to drown tiny ears. Three boys are at the opposite end of the pool. One of the boys, turned up-nose, patchy neck, lies all the way down on the ground, while the others count how long his stomach can make contact with the hot pavement before he pussies out. The word pussy echoes, sits behinds her on the plastic chase lounge—

—bending in the middle.

Hey, aren’t you that one girl? She turns around to see a fourth boy, Scout Nelson, son of Jerry, known for being the youngest person in her previous town to stay the night at a mental institution because he refused to stop wearing a racist Halloween costume to school. It was only a matter of time before someone recognized her. The past is the present is the past just pretending to be something it’s not. Pussy pussy pussy.

She lost her mind when, at age seven, she ran over her cat’s tail in a radio flyer wagon three times. First as an accident, second on purpose, and third as an accident no one believed was an accident. She was not much of a people person or an animal person or a defendable person and she had within her, a delicate flower wilting at an alarming rate and a penchant for laughing at violent images on television. When the cat was hit its third and final time, she placed it’s then severed tail in an egg-yolk yellow pillowcase and ran out to the river in a panic. She jumped in feet first, even though she had sensitive feet and was not a good swimmer. As she struggled, the current began to ruin her brand new shoes and her nicely plaited hair. Paradoxically, the deeper she went into the river, the shallower she got. She could not go back, tried to not go back, but three policemen found her while fishing off duty, and returned her home, safely. Weeks later, the pillowcase bubbled to the surface of the river like a young coconut and a man, Benjamin Weaver, father of Samuel, was getting in his daily dip when he came across a strange object in the middle of the water. When he opened the pillowcase he found nothing in it, and so, somewhere in the American river, there remains a floating tail. And elsewhere, an imbalanced cat on someone else’s windowsill, cocking its head, forever waiting, just waiting for you.

SARAH W. by T.S.J. Harling

May 28, 2019

There is not yet a ghost in this place, but there will be. A long time ago there was a school, then another school, and then different offices. I lived in a house with an upstairs and a downstairs, a basement and an attic. We were a family. I was a girl. This is what I remember, not what I imagine. Although nothing can be verified without a living body, here with me, to speak and either object or affirm.Then, I was always in an act. Of laughing, talking, dancing. There were others around me, other girls, and we made up our own music. One of us was often upset about something. I was there, I was real, I was one of them. We drew breath. Then I became someone else. I live here now. The other girls live in their own houses. We can only communicate telepathically and in silence. I listen not to their voices but to the drumbeats of my neighbours around me on each side, which both hem me in and keep me alive. I think I would stop breathing if they quietly left, one by one. For now, each day and night they come and go; footsteps back and forth, submerged voices, TVs going on and off, doors opening and closing. Meanwhile I cling to the floor for dear life. Don’t leave me, I say. Don’t leave me. I am still here. I live. Feels like I can feel the circulation of the earth, a slowed sensation, ever turning away. Gravity isn’t strong enough. Not like it used to be. While they sleep or when they go out I have to listen for other noises to keep me in the room. The low hum of the fridge. The click of the boiler resetting. Air moving in and out of my nose. Sometimes, if I’m lucky, the rain falls against the window, or a dog will bark. I am in all parts of this home. In the corners of the ceiling, when I can’t get back down, scratching the walls. Behind the door. In the corridor. Standing on the rug in the centre of the room, smiling as you walk in. I’m here, I know I am, don’t say I am not. I have opened the doors of the cupboards in the kitchen. I have pulled the chair up to eat at the table. I have slept on the sofa. I have run the taps in the bathroom. I have looked out of the window, waiting for him to come home. I have tidied, cleaned and put away. I have hung my coat on the hooks by the front door. You don’t believe in ghosts. You will be ok.

D-O-D-E-C-A-P-H-O-N-I-C by Bryce Jones

May 27, 2019

The composer used his Guggenheim and several other grants for the purchase of twelve children. Pitching for conditioned octave he specified three teens with tinsel, flinty, and flintiest timbres, five prepubescent boys whose vocal chords had rashes of uniquely layered crackle, and four soprano toddlers of separately valued screech. His house’s twelve TV rooms were built for private occupancy. In one the tube was empty and the toddler hit the screen. Enacted blurs of violence against the reflective surface. Posing afterwards flexed muscles, elbows out-crotched biceps straining. Kissing a mirage of Barbie while she lasted hand-lined in the air. The screen was beat-up, the toddler’d been tough and had seen it was good. Still an icon of themselves that dissipate to unreflected flesh. The toddler took the screws out and peeled back the TV’s carriage. Crawled inside and stayed there. Scheduled variegated winks that shadow mask their vision, splotched phosphenes on the screen’s inside and elide them with the medium.

A man crouched up a mountain. Or watched a woman take a bath. Or grew ficuses from out of his head. The boy couldn’t tell. But he wanted the man to see himself back to the bath.

One teen watched a GIF of their face turning “pretty” – resuming back to “ugly” – back to “pretty.” One teen watched a GIF of their sperm turning moldy. One teen watched a GIF of everything they ever wanted.

A different toddler learned the functionality of language as taught to them by webinar – stroke of paredoliac light moving “mouth’s” of data – that removed the T/V schema of deitic utterance. Said there is no you or your or me when speech has taken over. What there is instead’s a mucus-y infection of slurred out individuals. Try unsyntaxed antimeria so separate from coresense for freedom.

All twelve children were formed of isolate abstractions.

The composer rotate soloists, duos, trios, quartets. Made two sextets (unfixed members) and a sole dodecatet.

Tonal clusters of antiphonal collapse.

Movement 1:

[The toddler speaks from the grille of their degut tv]

– I just hum [humming]. It fills me up and empties me if I don’t move the hum. Just float out of breath on an unchanging tone. Though there is rhythm of my choosing underneath the surface. If I want. I don’t always. Or usually. I just hum. When it’s desealed from my lungs completely I still hear it in the TV. We cancel each other out. The TV and me [humming].

Movement 26:

[The three teens]

– I can’t air myself out. Like open up a window maybe open up my mouth ma – You two need to be stuck somewhere else, somewhere not with me, okay? Be – uchs seem nice. I’m a couch potato, couch protector – different if it’s on the inside on the outside’s worse – I was talking. I can’t believe I’m blabbed out. I liv – We’re dimorphs of pretty and ugl – rncob me? Thank u, next – dden in virginity or something taking over?

Movement 53:

[A toddler who watched Skinemax, the one known boy so far, the second teen, a boy who watched laparoscopic footage]

– Detective Moist Mackintosh made the scene – Yes, generic, better – Hostage situation: a female sex-addict overtook the volleyball team – I’ve forced the impulses of arousal to signify disgust – He should have dual the footage and let audiences vote: a scribbled hillbilly or naked woman – vomit’s not as gross as mold – Mack goes in. A pro – The focus on exteriors is tautological. A kino eye should roam inside – A masterful retcon: Mack gets horny.

Movement 94:

[The toddler taught through webinar, a boy who stared at static and one who saw 24 Hour Psycho, a toddler who watched AI created music videos, and a boy who saw slideshows of clickbait]

– “Put on your doll faces” – paraorganed throughin musical.ly – Every star visits this denture doctor – Bad biddence childisms – I’m numb – “In paradise” – Debunked claimant: Had he been kissed by God his face would have vanished – We shed the varnish of our body with every movement – “I’m a human being” – Spillish of (d)ef(f)ecting communicants – I stay nicely numb – Deblooded – Where there is no temperature.

Movement 151:

[Together]

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AFEFEZSI GDFGDFGRSFGDFHFDHZCXI

TEEVSDF HDFIMLESSEDVVDSFSDFVAI

ESADEHII TBYZXCMASS0DKSSFKFSDM

ZLKOSRBFBFHNJKNLINOISEASCZSFSDI

MOTHERS by Melanie Czerwinski

May 26, 2019

Liv’s mother called, but Liv’s mother always called. I imagined her eggshell sheets on what would soon be her deathbed, the waxy fake ferns in the corner of the nursing home room. I imagined her bloated face on her dead body, as waxy as the fake plants. Disgusting.

The aides were the ones who actually called. They would hold the phone up to her mother’s cheek, and she’d huff into the receiver about how she missed her daughter and how she should come visit. She was always out of breath. Liv would listen to the messages, then delete them without calling back. She’d go back to clacking away at her laptop keyboard, pronounced taps when she hit the spacebar, as if nothing had happened, as if her mother wasn’t on hospice.

Months ago, Liv’s mother was biding her time in the nursing home simply because she was overweight. Immobility due to obesity, the doctors told her. It pissed her off. I could understand some of her anger. Her father, a spindly man, spent his last days caring for her, wiping her ass, all of that. He had a heart attack and dropped dead at her bedside and she only bothered to call 911 after he was still for half an hour. She admitted to this, for some reason.

She had a custom-built wheelchair to accommodate her size, but I don’t think it got much use. Probably only to transfer to the toilet and shower. It wasn’t cheap, since it was outside of what insurance would cover, and Liv always regretted getting it. She should just squeeze into a normal one, she would say under her breath. She cursed her mother’s otherwise good health as those who she deemed more worthy of living passed away one by one. It just isn’t fair, she said, she doesn’t even try. I wondered if all those curses were what made the cancer suddenly sprout in her mother’s uterus. Liv nearly sounded happy when she received the news, and I swear I saw a devil’s smile pulling at her lips as she held the phone to her ear. She figuratively swatted Satan’s hands away from her mouth and forced a frown.

We drove to the nursing home. Things weren’t looking so good, according to the doctor. It was the beginning of March, but it was 76 degrees out with a slight breeze. Birds were tweeting, little frogs were peeping. But there were no bright flowers or green leaves, just empty branches and tan, dead grass. None of it added up.

My mother had a story for days like this, when people enthusiastically rolled down their windows and hung their arms out of their cars.

“When I was in high school, I was on the bus,” she would start, “and it was a totally normal day. There was this guy in front of us in a Cadillac with his arm out the window. He swerved too close to the other lane, and the car coming the opposite way took his arm clean off. I remember all the blood and his arm laying on the pavement.”

I never believed the story, and I had heard it since I was in middle school.

“Never put your arm out the window,” she always ended the story with, wagging her finger. Once I got my own car, I did it just to spite her.

I would have been more comfortable if Liv were preemptively mourning her mother. She had a quiet excitement around her. This was her first time visiting since her mother’s diagnosis; they only ever talked on the phone because of Liv’s compromised immune system. She was risking getting sick just so she could see her mother with tubes hooked up to her, her eyes barely opened.

I dropped Liv off and drove to a nearby Starbucks to wait. Indie pop was flowing from the hidden speakers. The inside smelled astringent, like it had just been cleaned top to bottom with assorted chemicals after a murder. I ordered a caramel macchiato and sat. The woman to my left was wearing a taffy pink sweater, the same color as my compact of birth control from high school. The vent behind her legs rattled. Caramel sauce snuck onto my upper lip when I tipped the cup to take a sip.

I scrolled through my phone, smiling at something on my feed then actively stopping myself. I was trying to blend in. I thought about Liv’s dying mother, and the smile easily went away, hiding, like thinking of unsightly things to kill an erection.

“If it goes any further, I would call the police,” the taffy woman said to one of her friends. Their conversation then shifted to whispers so I wouldn’t hear, but I strained my ears anyway. Something about an elementary school child divulging a story of abuse to a guidance counselor, but that could have been an unrelated story. Despite the temperature, the heat was still on, and the small of my back was starting to sweat. I was thankful when my phone rang.

“Come get me,” Liv said, sniffling. She was crying. I had no idea why she was crying. Was it because her mother hadn’t died yet?

I walked out of the Starbucks and paused when I got to the parking lot. The frogs had gotten louder as the sun began to set. There was a chill in the air now, and I briefly remembered scrolling past the weather report saying that temperatures were going to be dropping. I suddenly felt aware of my place in the world, an arresting feeling. My place was equally as important as Liv’s mother and the people who passed who she viewed as more important. I wanted to tell her about my epiphany, but as I plopped myself into the driver’s seat, I realized she wouldn’t want to hear it. Hearing that her mother had an important place in the world would infuriate her. I muted the radio and drove.

THE PASSENGER by Anthony Dragonetti

May 24, 2019

When I can’t think of what to do, I have no choice but to go fast. I grab my car keys from under a pile of crumpled receipts by the door. I’d throw them out, but what if I need them someday? I could be audited. I could need an alibi. I focus back on the keys. It’s important to avoid rabbit holes. I can feel my tongue in my mouth. It’s time to go.

I get in my car and fly out of my condo development’s parking lot in reverse and swing forward towards the ramp to I-295. It’s a little after midnight, 25 degrees out, and I love New Jersey. I should open the windows. The cold air might straighten me out a bit. My instincts are taking me to the Turnpike. Okay, I tell my instincts, that is where we will go.

I’m cruising up 295, but not too fast, not yet. The cops have nothing to do and they like to sit on the median. I think I see a cop car up ahead and glide over into the right lane, slowing down, signal on like I’m preparing to exit. Good evening, officer. I’m on my way home from work. Late shift, you know how it is. Newborn at home. Me and the little lady haven’t been sleeping much, as you can imagine. You got kids? I’m still working out the script when I roll by the shadow that I thought was a cruiser. I say goodbye to my new wife and child.

Fate is funny. I mean like a joke. The shadow cop sends me towards the offramp where my headlights catch a stoned looking teenager on the side of the road with a thumb sticking out half-assed. He isn’t even looking in the direction of traffic. For a second, I think this is part two of my imagining things, but he is quite real as he jumps out of the way after I almost bump him with my fender. I roll to a stop alongside him.

He vaguely looks pissed, more confused. I lean over towards the passenger side window to talk to him.

Man, what are you doing out here? Who even hitchhikes anymore? It’s the middle of the night.

He tries to focus on my face and process my words. He says he got into a fight with his girlfriend and she kicked him out. He’s seriously fucked up and can’t get himself home. His phone is dead, and he’s broke. I tell him to get in before he freezes to death or someone decides to chop him up.

We’re riding up 295 in awkward silence for a bit. I realize I forgot to ask him where he’s headed, and it doesn’t seem to dawn on him he should be asking where I’m going.

Uh, where should I be taking you? Your parents live nearby or something?

“No, I don’t live with my parents. I’ve got a friend a few miles up the road I can crash with, if he’s home. Got to get off at 36.”

Providing that information seems to have used up his brain reserves and he slips back into half-consciousness. We’ve got a little time together and sitting in silence with another person in close quarters makes me nervous. I turn on a playlist of classic hardcore to keep my energy up. GBH kicks on and my mood stabilizes while the opening chords of Sick Boy scream out of dying speakers. I feel electric again, licking my lips.

My passenger rouses out of his stupor, agitated by the metallic noise. He’s looking closer to being part of this universe.

“Come on, dude. Can’t you put on something chill? I’m dying here.”

Hey, I’m the one giving you a ride out of the goodness of my own heart. You’d still be standing out there in the cold or a cop would have picked you up by now. Then where would you be?

“I’ve been arrested before. Who cares? They throw you in rehab. Juvenile records are sealed. At least I could sleep there.”

I lower the music as a compromise because now I feel bad, but I need to keep it on to maintain. My cortisol is on a steady drip. The road is empty ahead, so I take the kid in all sullen, skinny, and hooded. Painfully typical and therefore someone I want to protect. I ask him what his name is, and he says Tommy.

Tommy, Tommy, I say.

“Yeah, man. What’s yours?”

So, I tell him.

Then we sit quietly again until he blurts out that he wants to die. I turn the music off completely and ask him what he said. He repeats his wish. My brain is white lightning.

I say Tommy. Tommy, you can’t think like that. You’re just a kid. Shit isn’t even bad, yet.

“You don’t know anything about me. My parents are fucked up. I don’t talk to them. School sucks. I’m failing. I just ruined things with my girlfriend, who is basically the only thing in my life that isn’t trash. I make things worse for everybody. Seriously. Who would want to deal with me? I don’t blame her.”

“Okay, that sounds bad. But that doesn’t mean things will stay bad. You can turn it around. You seem like a smart guy.”

“Dude, I’m stupid. Smart guy. I wish I was dead. I’m so sick of this.”

You don’t.

“I do.”

Are you absolutely sure of this, says the heat rising in my chest.

He nods at me.

If you say so, man. And then I floor it.

We’re hurtling down a dark 295. There are a few cars on the road, but they stay away from the left lane when they see me coming. I look briefly over at the kid and notice traces of concern. I decide to commit. The engine is trying to kick back but forget it. The machine will hold up because I need it to. I’ve never needed anything so badly. Tommy squeaks.

“36 is coming up!”

I peel over across 2 lanes and brake tightly to make the offramp. The kid’s holding onto the dashboard.

“What are you doing!”

I know this whole area. I know every backroad. This entire state is mine. Everything you see is mine. We’re flying through the streets. I’m getting lucky with the lights. No one is out around here at this hour and I know where the cops usually wait. The elementary school isn’t too far now.

“Please, stop! We’re going to crash. Jesus Christ. Oh, Jesus fucking Christ. Please, dude.”

I ignore him. It’s hard, I won’t lie. I must stay the course now. We reach the school. It’s one of those long straightaways into a parking lot deep in the property. The lot is empty. Perfect. The car hits the entrance and we’re flying straight towards the school building.

“No! You’re going to kill us! Stop the car!”

Yes. That’s the idea.

“No stop stop please don’t kill me please don’t. I don’t want to die.”

I slam on the brakes and spin the wheel. The tires scream loud enough to shatter glass, I would think, but nothing seems to explode. We’re spinning. I’ve done all I can. It’s luck now, so I close my eyes.

The car stops maybe three feet from the building, facing away from it. I’m so wired I can’t feel my arms. I turn to Tommy and give him a triumphant grin. He starts screaming what aren’t even words. Well, they might be words, but they aren’t forming meaning for me right now. I speak calmly, but loudly, to try to get through to him.

Tommy, you have to understand what I did was for your own good. I believe fate brought us together on this night. You reached a crisis point and I was guided to you by forces that I, frankly, can’t explain. I was brought into your life the moment you needed me most. What are the chances? What are the odds? I did what I had to do. I had to show you that you didn’t really want to die. If I could, I’d show you how your death would affect the world. Unfortunately, my powers are limited. I hope you understand. You have to keep living, Tommy. There is so much more to do. I hope you wake up tomorrow with a new lease on life and cherish this second chance that you have been given.

He’s already left the car by this point, disappearing into the night, a speck that I can still make out at the edges of my headlights. When I crash later, for real, I don’t know if I’ll remember every detail of this. My only hope is that Tommy knows, deep down, I am his friend and I honestly meant everything I said.

MY DAYS by Emily James

May 23, 2019

We hold hands and listen to him read our vows, grey mustache puffing above his breath. I picture him sucking a cigarette outside, a Bible tucked to his body, white robe blowing in the wind. Behind us, my mother's arms hang from the hospital gown, her limp limbs our altar. Her eyes closed, two still coins. Our daughter keeps grabbing the wires. We unclasp our hands again and again. Stop it, we angry whisper. Come back. The beeps are steady, at least. Her moans have subsided, at least. Yes, I will take him, at least in sickness, at most in health. Her body, my life’s centerpiece. Deflated arms dangling, that I watched from the kitchen table kneading dishes in the sink, biceps flexed with the pop of a Budweiser tab, elbows bent so fiercely while sliding open the TV table. And her fingernails that feathered my forehead those nights when the blinds shut out the moon. Now, she is all skin cascading from bone, she is almost remains. I do, I say. I will. His slanted gaze reaching for comfort to hand to me, all sterile pads and latex gloves and Toxic Waste Only bins behind us. She isn’t dressed, I think again. My eyes stay open, wet, but the images still come. Magenta gowns we would have tried on in front of a three-way mirror, I’d sit and argue hot from cheap champagne, no, that’s better for your figure, no, that won’t be easy with a bra. Fat seeping from her sides that we never loved enough.

I like this one, she would’ve said. It’s kind of nice.

It’s my day, Mom, I’d remind her. My day.

But now, here, as I promise myself to him, my daughter pulling rolling curtains open and closed and open and closed, our rental priest with his to-do list in his back pocket, I can see it was never mine, everything that’s mine belonged to her, because I was her, and without her, I’ll be someone else. This world will be someplace new, the kind of place where you say I do as your mother dies in a metal bed behind you, and there will be no magenta, no music, only fluorescent lights beaming on a beige, cushion-less chair. We stand boxed in by corners and cracks, dust-covered and uncared for, three generations becoming two. My little girl squeals and jumps on the linoleum, yellow pigtails flying up and down, up and down, and all the days to come unfold before me, they are all my days, they are decks and decks of cards that have fallen everywhere, cutting my palms, slicing me to pieces.

AJAR by Ankita Banerjee

May 19, 2019

He was at the counter flirting with a pixie cut. My eyes followed him the whole evening and I didn’t know what to do with myself. So I ordered my fifth gin and tonic, and when Sofie asked, “Why don’t you go talk to him?” I sniggered.

It started raining outside – the worst kind. He was now purring to the little black dress at the corner table. She was small, with a little hunch on her back. I went out for a cig and argued with the voice in my head.

“Perhaps it’s life coming to a full circle.”

“Or this is how I will again make a fool of myself if I stay any longer.”

“Perhaps he has changed.”

“He was sniffing the humpy’s hair like a wild bunny prepping up for a restroom quickie. So most likely, no.”

I took a deep drag on cigarette under the parking shade when the Apocalypse came.

He said, “So we meet again”. I said, “Shut up” and we kissed - through the cataclysm and until the end of the cervix of etcetera.

Later when we called an Uber and drove past the old town, the wisps of the night harked back to the old days when our world was lit with a thousand glowing worms. Back in the apartment we fucked, like old times - on the couch, against the door, in the tub, on the desk chair. When we craved food, I popped some corns.

It was the next best thing to cigarette after sex.

The sweat still turned the top of his ear bright pink. He still swirled his tongue clockwise inside the mouth like a broken down washing machine. I still felt clouds forming in my belly when he watched me getting off.

I knew him, he knew me, and at that point it was all that mattered.

When the rain softened outside he pulled up the blinds a little and carried me in front of the mirror. In the sodium lights from down the street he glistened like a gorgeous tornado and I melted in his clasp. He lifted my hair and whispered softly, “Are you real?” I think he asked that to the girl in the mirror, hence I said nothing. I wasn’t sure if I knew her.

For the brief moments we slept – on and off – I saw fragments of a dream that never reached its finish line. But he was there, making the same old grunting noises while asleep, and at that point it was all that mattered.

In the morning he left without kissing goodbye, just like old times. Later I found his note on my desk.

When Sofie asked, “Are you going to see him again?” I simply shrugged.

The following year I heard he had joined a cult. One day he just left home and hitchhiked down South to find faith, or drugs, or a secret subway to the heaven.

Sofie smirked. “Who knew he could find a different obsession?” I took a long chug of my beer and pushed down the lump in my throat.

I wondered how he is managing in the cold. He had always been a beach guy after all. I wondered if he has shaved his head now. I wondered if we could find each other across the room ever again.

When I wake up in the middle of the day, feeling like a spurned ashtray, I go back to his note over and over again.

“Until next time”, it said.

But how long is one exasecond anyway?

GOOD BOY by Kailash Srinivasan

May 17, 2019

It was a mistake trusting your parents will come back to get you. It was a mistake turning your back to them, clapping idiot-like at the spinning top that lit up red in the dark. They left for Bombay, leaving you behind in Delhi with your grandma, your paati.

Its summer—the city is a furnace, everything is melting. Your paati slips in the bathroom and fractures both her legs. With weights, pulleys, her legs hang in the air, like the hands of a clock: 2.10 p.m. Her loose, burnt-brown flesh hangs loose from her thighs.

In brown shorts and a white t-shirt with stripes, you have your music notebook in your clammy hand, revealing wet phantom finger-prints around its spine when you change hands. A Donald Duck label in the front has your details:

Name: Sethumohan;

Class: III;

Age: 8 yrs old.

She wants to pee. You slide the aluminium dish between her legs, her thigh-flesh jiggles. You wait for her bladder to empty. When she grunts, you carefully pull it out with both your hands, carry it to the door. You hold your breath and drain the dish, watching the piss form black globules on the dry earth.

She hands you her metal ruler, which you bury deep between her cast and her skin and scratch her calf, her ankle, and with your nails between her toes that wiggle. You follow her instructions: left, no, no, right, up, up, down...ah!

“Okay, leave. You’re late,” she says. “Leave the door open.”

You hesitate.

“Run,” she barks and you’re out the door.

“Look everyone, Sethu finally decided to show up to class.” Arun, your vocal teacher, tells the rest of the students, stretching the vowels in your name like a chewing gum. He moves his limp wrists and motions for you to sit next to him. You sing for a bit. Then he asks, as always, for the other students to leave. The house is empty. You know what this means. But still, you try. You get up to follow them. You can’t go yet he tells you. He smiles, his hand is on your thigh. You walk to his bedroom.

Arun turns off the lights and pulls close the curtains, bolts the door. The sudden withdrawal of light, gives the room the cold, dark look of night.

“Let’s begin,” he says. He means the game. He calls it, ‘Adventures of the Night Explorer’: the goal is to identify different parts of each other’s bodies by touching. You know the drill, you know where everything is on his body; however, pretense is a big part of the game.

It’s your turn first so you feel your way in the darkness. Your tiny hands land on his mouth.

“Your lips.”

“Correct. My turn,” says Arun.

You lay still on the bed, trying your best to not make a sound. Arun places his sticky, fleshy palm on your stomach.

“Your bum.”

“No, my tummy,” you say, in a condescending tone. He likes it.

“Your stomach?” Arun says and lifts your shirt. He tickles you until you beg him to stop. You have to laugh, you have to enjoy it. Else, he gets mad.

“My turn.” Your eyes have adjusted to the light and you’re able to see clearly, but you continue to pretend like you have a secret. You also reach for his stomach but to make it more believable, you pretend to think.

“You give up?” he says.

“It’s your— .”

Before you can answer, Arun pulls your hand and slips it into his pyjamas, whose strings are already loose.

It swells in your hand until it’s a Popsicle. You know what it is, not by its official name yet, by what your grandma calls it: Choochoo. You have held yours many times, moving it like a hose to see how far up the wall your pee can go. You know it’s wrong, it’s something you aren’t supposed to be doing. If you tell your grandma, she won’t believe you. You could tell your parents, though your letter will end up like the rest, somewhere under a pile of old newspapers? You know they don’t read them. You know this because once they were visiting and you sat next to your dad, smiling shyly, giddy with excitement, and then blinked at your mum. Surely, they must have got you the latest Superman comic book. But the morning bled into noon and noon melted into night and a whole week went by. They hadn’t, and you never asked.

Arun wants you to move your hand up and down. How many times does he need to teach you? He makes these little sounds, takes these short breaths, before finally your fingers are wet like you’d just dipped them in a bottle of glue.

“You still haven’t guessed. You lose”

“Choochoo,” you say. It’s a game and you still want to win.

“Is that what you call yours?” Arun chuckles. “Let’s see if you have one.”

When you’re leaving he says, “See you tomorrow.” He expects you to bob your head, so you bob your head.

Grandma wants to know about your class, what you learned.

“Sing me something,” she says. You say you have to wash your hands first.

“Good boy,” she calls you. She says you should always wash your hands when you come home from outside. “Wash your feet, too.”

GNOSTIC BAPTISTE by Gregg Williard

May 16, 2019

“I found him.”

“Him who?”

“Gnostic Baptiste!”

“The spam tag?”

“It’s not just a tag! I wasn’t even running a simple traceroute function before I get a local postal address. So I go there…”

“Wait a second. I need a beer for this.” Alex and I had worked together for 3 years out of the Attorney General’s Office, doing tech consulting for an anti-spam task force. Alex was one of the best systems designers I knew, parlaying hacker-honed skills into the legit and the lucrative. But the thankless and poorly- paid search for spammers had become his holy grail. I thought I’d seen him at his most weirdly obsessive, but this was different. I popped two beers and handed him one, but he just put it on the table and kept pacing.

“You’re saying there’s a person named Gnostic Baptiste?”

He stopped and his eyes got too bright. “A…’person’?”

He finally fell onto the couch and rubbed his hands through his hair.

“…I find the place. An abandoned warehouse by the yards. Not a computer in sight. No phones. No jacks. No Wi-Fi. Nothing. Zip. Except this fat kid in a swivel chair. When I get close he stands up and says, ‘I am Gnostic Baptiste. Spread the word.”

I reached out to pat him on the arm. He shrank back. “Don’t touch me! I’m infected!”

“Infected?”

He sprang off the couch and bent over, clutching his crotch. “Here. Look.” He booted his computer and tapped the keys. “You see?” The screen showed a word document. Alex was typing out a solid block of spam:

BIGGER AND THICKER WITH GNOSTIC BAPTISTE!

GIGANTIC ORGAN COCK FROM GNOSTIC BAPTISTE!

BOOST HER WET HAPPY WITH VIAGRA PENIS PATCH

FOR ULTRA HARD PENILE SEXUAL WITH 100 MG

X 10 PILLS PRICE CHEAPER MASSIVE COCK WITH

75% OFF ROLEX, MORADO GUCCI VACHERON

WATCHES WITH EXTRA LONG COCK FOR HER

PLEASURE FROM MR. GNOSTIC BAPTISTE!

“I don’t get it.”

“Shit, Rob! Look at the keys I’m hitting!” He slowed down so I could see:

t-h-e q-u-i-c-k b-r-o-w-n f-o-x j-u-m-p-e-d o-v-e-r t-h-e

“Wow. Something with the keyboard?”

“It’s not the keys!” He went to my desktop. The same thing happened. We tried the four other computers in my apartment.

They only showed spam.

“Effing weird. We’ll run diagnostics. Entangled zombie shit. “

He grabbed between his legs and crawled into a corner, rocking and whispering to himself. I went to him but he waved me away and staggered back to his feet, bent over and clutching his crotch again. “Gotta’ show you.” He undid his belt and pulled down his jeans and tattered underwear. A hot, yeasty smell filled the room. His penis heaved out of his pants, drooping low from his pubic hair to coil around his leg all the way to his ankle. Even limp it was thick and solid enough to hold a dozen or more silver wristwatches along its impossible length. We both stared, breathless, as it unwound and thudded to the floor. Despite the weight of the watches, it reared up five feet into the air and stayed there, swaying. The glans was round and fat as a grapefruit, like an orchid starved for heat. Alex finally looked at me and I could see the same thought behind his eyes: and he’s not even hard. He went rigid reciting a spam rant in whispers.

“’…massive cock growth for ultra-hard and thick penile enlargement with 75% off all Rolex, Gucci, Vacheron Viagra watches from Mr. Gnostic Baptiste…”

“Alex…!”

“You understand now, Rob? I’m the tangled zombie. I’m fucking spam.” He hefted his cock in both hands and swung it against his leg. After cursing through several floppy misses the weighted organ wrapped itself tightly back around his thigh and down to his shoe. He tugged his jeans up over the pulsing coil and limped to the door.

“Where are you going?”

“I gotta’ find him.”

“Wait.”

“Don’t touch me, Rob! You’ll spend every cent you’ve got on shit watches or Viagra or West African gold ingots or horny Russian mail-order brides or pictures of teen girls having sex with horses or…”

I blocked the door. “You bought the Ultra Viagra, or some shit, and took it?”

As if in answer his penis pressed, then strained against the side of his jeans. “So, what if I did? It was that or be sucked in. I told you—I’m fucking spam! You have no conception of what it feels like! To actually fuck spam! “

His erection was so stiff now that Alex could no longer bend his leg. The denim swelled. The seams popped in low, hectoring snicks. The glans wiggled and squeezed out the bottom of his jeans, white and loamy as dough. The material gave way with a shrieking rent, and his penis sprang across the room. I felt like I’d been hit by a bus. When I came to the door was on one hinge and Alex was gone.

Who, or what, was Gnostic Baptiste? I never saw any trace of him, or of Alex, either. But I know that the moment I get back online again they’ll both be there, selling watches, Nigerian gold ingots, low cost Viagra or Russian teen brides. And waiting for me. And whatever it was that Alex was powerless to resist – the promise of sex beyond any sex he’d ever known, the fucking of spam incarnate with a penis of freaks – will be popping up or dancing across or seeping into every move I make online. The only sanctuary is in silence, and cunning; an electronic chastity that will leave me alone under GPS dumb stars. Now when I walk through L.A.N. parties and Wi-Fi fields I can almost feel a tingling along the back of my hands and up and down my spine. And sometimes it even makes me hard.