Flash

THE VAMPIRE BOYFRIEND by Jessica Drake-Thomas

March 20, 2019

I started ghost writing romance because it was under the table. I make good money, people are reading my work, and best of all, no one has to know where I am. These days, paranormal romance seems to be the big thing with humans. Specifically, Vampire Boyfriends. I don’t mind werewolves, aliens, or even dragon shifters. They’re all harmless enough. But I refuse to write about Vampire Boyfriends. When you live in the shadows, some things just hit too close to the truth. Anton Chekhov had a theory about guns in stories — if a gun is placed into a narrative, then it will go off, sooner or later. Like Chekhov's Gun, the Vampire Boyfriend has a timer, as well — once he’s in your life, it’s only a matter of time before the trigger is pulled and he loses control. He’s hardwired to desire you. Your blood sings to him, and he’d like you to believe that it is only he, and he alone, who desires you to the exclusion of all else. But what calls to him is his hunger. Do not be fooled. The way to the Vampire Boyfriend’s little dead heart is his stomach.

The Vampire Boyfriend is the ultimate apex predator. His physical beauty is staggering — he reminds you of all of the greatest sculptures — every feature has been polished to perfection by immortality. He has it all — the face of an angel, the mane of a wild stallion, the six pack of the Gods, the bone structure of Khal Drogo. You can barely contain your desire for him, and it sparkles through your eyes, seeps out of your pores. It’s like perfume to him— almost primed to perfection. He’s studied all of the great romances. He was alive to see them for himself — Antony and Cleopatra, Tristan and Iseult, Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. He is able to mimic the correct movements and brings out all of the trappings of the perfect romance—perfectly aged wines he bottled himself, bouquets of roses like blood splatter, his hand placed just so on your lower back. He makes you wait just long enough to move on to the next step, until your need for him is so great, it’s consuming you like wild fire. He’s had centuries to practice, and his timing is on point. He wants you to be intoxicated, so you miss the red flags. He wants to own you, to possess you, wholly. You are the queen of his heart, and he will tell you: you are his.

The Vampire Boyfriend, despite living in a world that contains feminism and women’s rights, has still retained his antiquated notion that the object of his affections requires around the clock protection. He will call it “old-fashioned.” He will call it “chivalry.” You will not have to lift a finger, pay for a thing, or worry about other males ogling you. He moves faster than physics can explain, he has more money than a dragon, and he can easily hold all weaker males in check. Despite your claims that you are a modern woman and wish to be treated as such, he will gnash his fangs and turn a deaf ear in your direction. He’s stuck in the Dark Ages, when women were thought of as property. When women existed only to please men. When women were too delicate to stand alone. Let’s call it what it is: defending his food source. He’s trying to put you in a box. Literally.

You’ll stay, despite your misgivings. Despite the little slips, here and there. You will always stay, because you believe in the façade that he has created. After all, he looks so human. And he cares for you, as if you are a garden. Heed this—Dead things cannot nurture. They can only support growth through rot. The Vampire Boyfriend is incapable of decomposition. He is like a stone. He’s just so good at playing the loving partner. You’ll stay, of course. You’ll stay despite the fact that time, for you, is running out.

You’ll fight, naturally, because you’ll feel strangled by his over-attention. He’ll say that he’s trying to protect you. That he’s afraid of losing you. That the world is a dangerous place for humans. Chances are, he’ll be proven right because if one Vampire Boyfriend exists, then there are others who think and act just like him. Chances are, another Vampire Boyfriend will smell the combination of your blood mixed with desire, and come hunting. Or, perhaps, he has a long-standing grudge with your Vampire Boyfriend, as they do. Chances are, he’ll attack you, leaving your current Vampire Boyfriend the opportunity to become your hero.

You will become comforted by his attentions whilst you are healing after the attack from the rival vampire. Your Vampire Boyfriend will care for you in every way. He’ll blind you to his faults with his displays of goodness, snuggle you with his ice-cold arms. Stroke your hair with long-nailed fingers. He’ll make you forget everything — like his recent tantrum, your fight last week, that guy from the bar who he murdered for looking at you. He’ll whisper sweet things into your ear, nuzzle his ice-chunk nose over your carotid artery. He’s not really thinking about you, but the delicious river, oozing beneath your skin. How the scent of your blood seeps through the bandages. Now that he’s fought another vampire, he’s starving. Everything he says and does will lull you into a stupor, so that you will not fight back. He will make you forget everything, who you are, who you were, and the gaping wound of his tooth-filled mouth as he finally loses control.

There is a door that I could open, in order to tie this up with a neat bow. But I won’t, because he might be lurking on the other side, waiting to be invited back in. I have run too far for him to find me now. The scars where his teeth tore open my throat have not been smoothed away by time or immortality. But know this: a story about a man who wants to possess you isn’t a romantic story. It’s a story about a beautiful, cold monster and lengths he will go to satisfy his hunger.

DAY JOB by Jon Conley

March 19, 2019

She was a big rottweiler who had had cancer for a time now. She was very big and sad and unable to move well so I went with Dr. Highmore to the house. I brought along a large contractor's garbage bag and I don't think I said anything the whole time. I never said a word in these situations though I had done this many times, been a pallbearer. Although, I would assist in assisted canicides before carrying the bodies away and I don't know that a pallbearer ever assists assisted homicides. Anyway, I’m not a shy person.

With the bag rolled up in my back pocket, I reached my left arm under her neck to put her in a headlock. I put my right arm over her shoulders like a good old pal and she did not care and I grabbed what I guess you would call her elbow, making a tight ring around it with my middle finger and thumb before twisting slightly to make the vein visible. She still did not care. The family cried along and stayed in the room until well after she was dead. I want to say that there was a candle burning but that would be very hopeful of memory. I waited and put my head down but inside I wondered when they were going to move. One of them would eventually take charge and usher the other out of the room to continue grieving somewhere else.

And when they finally did leave I lifted the now piss-soaked towel she lay on top of and I slid the garbage bag under the haunches. If a dog sat long enough that the piss soaked through the towel, the outside of the garbage bag would always get piss on it. And in the struggle to move the body around, the piss would end up on my scrubs, which was common enough for the job but bothered me still.

I tried to lift her with my knees and not my back. She was heavy and Dr. Highmore was built like a reed so I would do it alone. If you lift a body and can't keep her level, there are plenty of fluids beyond piss that would love to take the opportunity to slosh around in the bag. And depending on how well you tie her up, there could be leaks. But eventually I did put her in the van and back to the practice and into a freezer. In Cleveland I would have burned it myself and prepared the ashes but here someone came once a week to retrieve the frozen bodies.

For dinner that night I made spaghetti with a meat and tomato sauce and I washed all of the dishes instead of leaving them to soak until the morning. When I took out the garbage that night I was as scared as I always am taking out the garbage, imagining something or someone coming from behind me as I make my way back.

DRIVING THROUGH by Bojana Stojcic

March 18, 2019

We drove through the city today. We didn’t stop. We just drove through. We didn’t want to get out of the truck and grabbed take-away coffee with ground cinnamon in a drive-thru shared by a coffee shop and a bank, which was super convenient so while sipping it we made some transfers and paid bills. In the meantime, it started to drizzle, which was a drag and one more reason not to leave the truck. Besides, we got hungry, and decided to order low-carb turkey club lettuce wraps to go at a drive-thru diner. While listening to the live traffic news, we watched cars creating a line and moving in one direction. After that, we dropped some Xmas cards in a drive-thru mailbox and had our car washed in a two-lane drive-thru car wash. We both find high-pressure water jets ideal for our truck as it looks all shiny and new without anyone touching it, which we hate. B.J. gulped down his food in a split second and pulled into a Sweet Inspirations drive-in for some yummy donuts.

Hiiiiii, the female voice shrieked enthusiastically. What can I get you, Sir?

I’d like two donuts with dark chocolate and coconut, replied B.J. leaning toward the mic.

Got it. Anything to drink, Sir?

Yes, a strawberry-flavored still water and a diet Coke, please.

We had to wait some since it was crowded at the pick-up window, which sucked.

Did you know, B.J. tried to cheer me up, they had an EOTF service in McDonald’s in the UK.

What’s EOTF?

Experience of the Future, obviously. The thing is, there’s a third window.

Third window? For real?

Yes, the person at the second window tells you to pull up to the third one if you have a larger order and have to wait longer than usual. Basically, this fast-forward window cuts down on wait times significantly.

That’s kewl.

Right?

Totally.

Anyway, we didn’t wait too long after all. I was happy we chose a drive-in restaurant this time because it allows cars to park next to each other. We really enjoyed our dessert, watching other cars parking and driving by and the sky turning red. We couldn’t actually see the sunset because of the skyscrapers, but I bet it was amazing. I reminded B.J. of a drive-thru grocery store as our fridge’s chronically empty but we eventually had a change of heart, figuring we’d be better off without as we hadn’t perused Easy Breakfast Recipes yet. So we picked up something light for the following morning: a skinny high-protein Oreo milkshake for me and a peanut butter and jelly protein smoothie for him. B.J. said we mustn’t forget a drive-thru liquor store to buy some beer for later in the evening. It would have been a bummer if we had. We also stopped by a drive-thru pharmacy to get a lavender-based sleep remedy since we have both had trouble falling asleep lately.

Have we mentioned we met at a drive-in movie theater? No? Do you know we got married a couple of weeks later in Vegas? We so did, interestingly at a special drive-thru chapel. Those were the days.

As we’re growing old, we normally talk about death and such. When you die, I told B.J. the other day, I’ll go to the drive-thru funeral home to get your remains and scatter you all over our favorite drive-thru joints.

Don’t you sometimes wish there was a drive-thru hug station, B.J. uttered, melancholically staring into space on our way back home.

WOODEN SKY by Max Halper

March 17, 2019

She has beautiful veins. Like stained glass, he thinks. But everything is stained glass when he’s this high. Everything is one big hallowed tableau. This is what church endeavors to be, he thinks, on his back. If church and heroin did a collaboration, he’d be the Pope of that shit. The Dope Pope. Pope-on-some-Dope. He watches her veins through lashy eyes. He watches the needle, erect, rapacious. The back of his brain whistles, like tea in another room. He has no memory of anyone ever making tea. He must’ve seen it in a movie. But it’s tea. Everybody knows what tea sounds like. He doesn’t need a movie to tell him. He was born with that shit. Her veins, like stained glass. Like milky light. Like milky tea. He’s so fucking high. He did a huge shot. He should tell her not to do such a huge shot. Like she would listen. And he really can’t speak. He really can’t move. But it doesn’t matter; where does he have to go? Go to work? Go to school? Go to church? She feeds the needle to her vein. Even supine, his eyes two hairline fractures, he can see she’s doing a huge shot. She’s got the belt really choked. There’s gonna be a lot of light on this one. It’s gonna hit her like a fist. Like a train. But she deserves it. She deserves the light, as much as she can get. All he wants is for her to be happy. All he wants is for everyone to be happy.

∞

Fat, like tunnels. A needle finds its stride in veins so fat. Everything about her is stride. Everything about her is fat. Beautiful, fat stride. Everything about her is church. “You’re fucking church, baby.” She bounces the needle on her fat veins. He wants to bounce on her fat veins. “You’re church,” but he’s not convinced words are coming out. He’s so fucking high. He did a huge shot. The whistling is abrading, like a bomb went off. Or maybe that’s only what happens in movies. He wouldn’t know. Movies are liars. Everything is liars. Everything except her. She’s church, and he’s the Pope. And together they’re the fucking Vatican. Together they consecrate the masses. She feeds the needle to her vein. It’s a hungry vein, fills its plate, doesn’t even say grace. The belt slides off her arm and her whole body rumples into a smaller body. Her head swoops and dangles. The bed sags as if someone else has climbed onto it. Gouache light bubbles around the fringes of the motel curtains. Everything is static. Everything about everything is one big hallowed tableau vivant.

∞

They make her happy, and that’s all he wants. That’s all anyone wants. The bed feels fat, like stained glass he thinks. But he’s so fucking high. He did a huge shot. So much light on it. It’s completely the middle of the day, despite where the sun may be. He’s so far on his back he might as well be upside-down. He can barely see her through the jungle of eyelashes. She is a snarl of veins. A derelict church. That seething squeal is venting from her, a building crowded with children and fire. She hasn’t moved in a long time. But neither has he. Maybe she’s thinking the same thing about him. Thinking that… thinking that… what was he thinking? He’s so fucking high. He feels borne through a tunnel, pliant, prodigal. It furls him along the bed. There’s a smell, somewhere else. Dead flowers. Spoiled milk. But smells happen. It’s nobody’s fault. Nothing is anybody’s fault. Everything that happens happens to us. We are laic, we cannot read what’s written down. We just nod. We stand when You ask us. We repeat after You.

∞

Like estuaries from the sky. Estuaries seen from the sky. A smell like the mouth of a river, brine and blubber. Rounded, milkless glass. Something scuttles fitfully across the sandy bed, burrows, disappears. Oily seagulls charge into wind. The ocean is a silent maniac. There may have been someone else in the room, with too many shadows across their face. But they’ve gone. Now it’s just the two of them again. Him and her. Like it should be. Like it always has been. He is only himself when he is alone with her. This is who he actually is. Some people think they are only what other people think they are. But how can this be? How can you exist only in someone else’s mind? He’s so high. So fucked. He hasn’t moved in years. He might be growing moss and mushrooms, boarding mollusks. She is a fallen tree, half swallowed by the wet ground. They are ruins. A once great civilization. They used to roll heads down the temple stairs to their flock. Now they are barely discernable from the jungle itself. They used to be fat. Now they are rickety. They used to hear music. Now they hear only a shrill frequency, a dwindling pool of radiation. He feels a puissant kinship to the atrophy. It is beautiful. A beautiful return. If he didn’t know any better he’d say it is all a metaphor for death. But of course there are no metaphors for death. Only for being alive.

∞

Protuberant, proud. They stand when she asks. They repeat after her. He cannot see them because her arms and neck are buried in blankets, but he knows they are there. Wherever she goes, her veins follow. What would she look like if You removed everything except her veins, walked her around like that, made her try to live? Something gliding along the seafloor. Pliant, deracinated coral. He laughs. But it’s not funny. It’s wretched, a wretched image. “I’m sorry,” he breathes. He doesn’t want violence done to her, even in his mind. She’s had enough of that for a lifetime. For ten. He never means to think the things he thinks. How is even that out of his control? There is a knock at the door of the motel room. A muffled voice from outside. He sidles his dry eyes over. The chain-lock dangles free. Hadn’t he secured it when they’d first come in? He remembers doing so. When he was a kid he watched his older brother cut the eyes off a snail with a pair of Mickey Mouse scissors. The snail hadn’t bled. It hadn’t tried to get away. He’d asked his brother if it could feel pain. “Can you?” It was a good question. He still doesn’t know the answer for sure. He knows that she feels pain. He sees it in the ditches of her face. In the graying of her skin. He hears it when she speaks, when she cums, when blood whistles through the tunnels of her veins. He smells it wafting from her drowned flowers. Her spoiled milk. The door opens. Garish light gushes in, overloads the room with truth. The housekeeper stands half inside. Her eyes narrow. Her nose crinkles. For a moment all is still. A tableau of discovery. Then she recedes, closes the door, and the tawdry light deliquesces. He rolls his eyes back into place. She has not moved in a long time.

∞

Despite the bruises. Because of the bruises. It was the first thing he noticed about her. A girl who wore her bruises on the outside. On her arms and legs. On her neck and on her back. Purple and yellow and brown. A garden of woe. She was barely hanging on when he met her. The earth whirled with such ferocity, strove to cast her into space. She clung to roots, wheedled herself beneath roots and down into the soil and buried herself in the dark there. It was not lavish, but it was safe. He understood that she could never come out. But she was light deprived, anemic. So he brought the light to her, and he burrowed into the dirt with her, and they’ve been there ever since. Together they ride out the furious, bucking planet. Together they are rooted in place. He finds he is awake enough to roll over. The bed whistles beneath him, as if to get his attention. Light gathers around the periphery of the curtains like an infection. He does his best not to jostle the bed. She needs her rest, as much as she can get. If it were possible he would let her sleep forever. But of course everyone wakes up eventually. There is only one cigarette. He’ll leave it for her. She’ll need it more than he does. And she’ll be hungry. Maybe he’ll walk to the Gulf and get some snacks. A fresh pack of cigarettes. That will make her happy. All he wants is for her to be happy. She is his church. She is the sky. He touches her bruised, milky skin. It is cold and dry. She did a huge shot. He never means to think the things he thinks. Sometimes it’s like his thoughts come from somewhere else, from someone else. Hurry and get her food. Cross the interstate. It might take awhile. Be back before she wakes, so that she doesn’t, for a second, think he abandoned her.

LOOK WHERE WE’RE GOING by Anna Vangala Jones

March 15, 2019

Nina had informed him of the unplanned pregnancy that morning, as casually as she was now asking him to admire her appearance. She spun away from enjoying her reflection in the mirror to face him. She spread her arms and twitched her hips. “How do I look?"

Amol observed his light haired, light eyed girlfriend, dressed in an Indian sari and covered in ostentatious gold jewelry, with a mixture of pride and amusement. She looked wonderful and yet wrong at the same time. Like an excited young girl playing dress up. So precious but not real.

"You look amazing." He sat down on the bed they shared most nights in his modestly sized Manhattan apartment. Nina described the color on the walls as a drab and dependable gray, without being asked. The blanket on the bed was black and Nina's sari in front of him was an electric blend of pinks, yellows, and greens.

"Your sister taught me how to drape and pin the sari last week. I did okay?"

He smiled. "Better than some Indian women I know."

"Give me a break." She returned to the mirror, putting the final touches on her appearance and applying a ruby red to her pale lips.

He stood up to find sandals to complement his long beige kurta. They were headed to his cousin's Hindu wedding in Connecticut. Nina tossed her lipstick onto the bed. Irritated, he picked it up and walked over to the vanity to return it to its place.

"We should get on the road now. Don't want to be late."

Amol knew he was kidding himself. With Nina coming along, of course they’d be late. Amol’s mother, with her quiet dignity and grace, believed beyond a shadow of a doubt that loud, cursing, irresponsible Nina was nothing but a fling. Something Amol had to get out of his system.

Amol’s mother knew her meticulous son needed someone who would drop her clothes in the laundry hamper in the evening. Not step out of her pants and skirts, leaving them discarded on the floor like some kind of helpful chalk outline to aid him in tracing her last steps. He needed someone who would understand and respect their Hindu customs and beliefs. Not try them on like a costume when it suited her. Someone he could actually take to temple and family gatherings, with no sense of dread that he was teetering on the edge, about to make one wrong move and plummet. The girl didn’t have to be brown, his mother insisted. She just couldn’t be Nina.

Amol, even as he rebelled for the first time and resisted his mother, wondered if she was right. The baby made it all so much more troubling somehow. What if this unpredictable life of his was simply a precursor to the one yet to happen?

Thanks to Nina, he'd found himself on a flight to Greece in only their third week of dating because she was just really into her new Mediterranean cookbook and wanted to see the birthplace of it all. It was at her insistence that they woke up in the dead of night once to go ride their bikes through a pitch black Central Park in the winter. Amol could still remember how the cold had seized every muscle of his body, until they screamed and ached, and then the exhilarating release when the wind whistling in his ears and the crunch of the white frost beneath his wheels made him laugh. Without Nina, he would have ordered takeout from the little Greek hole in the wall down the street or just exercised on the bike machine at his gym under the warm, comfortable glow of a heater.

He tried to picture the steady, reliable partner he hadn’t met yet, but she had no face. And yet a part of him still wanted her. Was waiting for her. Assumed they’d find each other someday. Then Nina’s chatter in the car paused.

"You're too quiet. What’s wrong?"

Amol was surprised Nina noticed.

"It’s the baby."

“I knew it.” She was trying to catch his eye, he could tell, but he avoided her penetrating gaze. The road stretching long and unknown in front of him was all he could see.

“I have to look where I’m going.” He felt her pressing up against his arm as he drove on without turning to face her, the gold chain of her elaborate, chunky necklace leaving an uncomfortable indent in his skin through his thin sleeve.

"We can do this,” she said.

"I—I don't want to.”

The next few moments felt gaping and cold. The gray seatbelt cut into his flesh. Darkness had fallen. They were almost at the wedding venue.

"I wasn't expecting this.” He released the steering wheel, hot from his tight grip and cold from his sweat, and reached out to rest his hand on her knee. The fabric of her sari felt scratchy and thick to his touch.

She shifted her knee so that his hand dropped to her seat.

He turned back to the road in time to see the deer, a light brown blur, dart out in front of the car. He jerked the wheel with both hands and his eyes widened as the world spun into a dizzying shock of colors in the heavy darkness.

Once his brain started whirring again and sensation surged through his body, Amol became aware that he was alive. Nina’s hand touched his face.

“We’re alright,” she said. “We’re okay. So is the deer.”

Amol rolled the window down. He felt the pressure in his head and lungs lessen as the cold air rushed in and he laughed. The sound circled him and Nina both, banding them together tighter and tighter, until they could hardly breathe. Her teeth scraped his cheekbone as her kisses attacked him, hungry and wanting. He closed his eyes and listened. All he could hear was the violent beating of their three hearts.

NAKED STEW by Michael Graves

March 11, 2019

Today is Saturday, another date with my kitchen floor. While Gram’s famous hot dog stew simmers, I admire the double-mopped laminate that has already been host to four veteran potlucks.

Kurt’s pickup bleats, turning into the driveway. Spears of oak and birch fill the sagging bed. Kurt sees me at the screen door and side grins, his cauliflower ears pink from the chill.

“Floors are dry,” I holler.

He almost tumbles from the cab. “You sure? Want me to drive around the block a few times like last week?”

“Just don’t get shit all over. Please? You’re covered in sawdust.”

Kurt thumps the hood, smirking wildly. “Jesus, Henry! What do you want me to do?” He hops up on the porch.

I smell schnapps, gasoline. I smell Kurt’s smoke-drenched hair.

“Don’t fuck my house up,” I say, eye-smiling.

He stamps off his boots. Wood flecks ping about. He strips his sweatshirt and his under shirt. A pale yellow spotlight of dust quickly surrounds him.

“Ms. May will call the police again,” I say.

Scrap has even nested in Kurt’s crooked trail of navel hair. He unzips his jeans and wrestles them down.

“What are you…?”

“If I take everything off, I can’t make a mess.” He steps from the puddle of denim.

“Unbelievable. Punk." I say and smirk.

With a rude boy grin, Kurt strips off his boxer shorts, faded tan lines agleam. He knocks on the prosthetic arm he calls Bixby. “What about this old bad boy? Want him off too?”

Ms. May’s drapes part. “Get inside,” I say, coughing from my laughter.

When preparing Gram’s hot dog stew, I become steeped in the fixings. Onion, celery, and basil stitch into my flesh for days.

I pass Kurt the thawed bread heels. After chugging a glass of milk, he arches over a large bowl. He slurps and gobbles the brew of discount links.

“I hope you don’t catch cold,” I say.

Kurt glances down at his bare cock. He snickers.

“How was the wood haul?” I say.

“Not bad. Jessie’s chainsaw shit the bed by eleven. That blew. Filled up all our trucks though. I’ll get one more load if it kills me.”

“Channel five said a nor’easter might be on the way.”

“They don’t know shit.” He crushes two heels and begins to smear them with crumb-speckled margarine. “I’m gonna pack our porch, Henry. Biggest wood pile you’ve ever seen. Keep us warm all winter.”

I stare at Kurt’s new eagle tattoo, scabbing on his chest.

“This tastes great,” he tells me. “Best batch, I’d say.”

My entire face crinkles. Immediately, I’m huffing. “I followed her recipe. It should be the same.”

Kurt mimics my sigh in jest. “Yours tastes different.”

“It shouldn’t.”

Shrugging, he says, “But it does. Better maybe. It’s so good, it’s giving me a chub.” Kurt begins to swill the stew loudly, defiantly. He grins, a potato chunk clinging to his lip.

I swat the air.

He says, “Hey…how ‘bout you take off your clothes too? Shouldn’t have to be naked all by my myself.”

Cars stream by, chugging toward Sunday services. Some tap their horns, and we wave with Irish coffee smiles.

Clad in cowhide gloves, I stack wood, row after row, tidy and flush. I hear a pop and then scuffing behind the pile. “What the fuck?”

Kurt bends down and aims his cell phone flashlight into the rear gaps. He kicks the heap thrice. An opossum thrusts out its pointed white face. It lunges. It hisses.

“Jesus Christ!” I vault backwards and drop a wedge of oak.

Kurt cackles, his breath prancing in the frosty air. “I can see a family of ‘em.”

“Don’t get bit.”

“They don’t bite, Henry.”

“Yeah, they do,” I say. “They have teeth, right?”

“She’s just protecting her babies. Anyway, when opossums get really, like really scared, they play dead.”

I shed my gloves. “That fucker will attack me. Like when I’m taking out the trash.”

Kurt shakes his head. He points to the opposite side of the porch. “Let's put the wood over there instead. Move the boot trays, the shovels. I’ll get a tarp or some shit.”

I grind my slipper into the cold slate. “Can’t we scare them away?”

“Naw.” His face softens. “We’ll leave ‘em. They’re just tryin’ to set up shop. Same boat as us.”

IN PATIENT by Jenn Stroud Rossmann

March 10, 2019

When the IV pump pings to warn of an occlusion, she no longer waits for someone in scrubs to respond; she unkinks the tubing herself. In the hierarchy of beeps the IV occlusion alert is low, outranked by the chirping pulse-Ox monitor and the angry squawk of the bedside fall detection mat. King EKG checkmates them all.

He dislikes her charts and schedules, cringes when she calls the nurses by name and remembers their children and hobbies. Order is a dangerous illusion. He imagines himself on a science fair poster, her little bean sprout in a milk carton. He is in exactly the same position on Monday when the nurse from Friday says, Yes, the beach was lovely, thanks for asking. The beach can go fuck itself.

She has noticed they’re the youngest people here. They are the ward’s doomed lovers: buds severed before blooming and all. Yesterday she saw a patient making her shuffling rounds, hugely pregnant, her belly a prow. He was sleeping when the woman walked by. “Perspective,” she tells him later. “I can’t even imagine.”

His hands and feet are numb, rubbery and distant as if he’d sat on them too long. Barefoot on the sand would probably feel like walking on the moon. Compression boots on his calves perform a programmed sequence of rhythmic squeezes. A gentle hiss accompanies each release. In the time it takes to count to eighty-seven, they will begin squeezing again.

She can imagine, she has envisioned all the worst things. Each prognosis a coin to flip: an 84% chance of five more years leaves 16% of design space. It was her job to create optimized solutions for stakeholder specs, before it was her job to dose him with Ativan and rub his extremities with mint oil for the neuropathy. This is the only time he does not shrink from her touch. He says he feels unlovable this way. But she has already imagined that this may be the only way from now on; this may be the best it will ever be.

Again with the damn peppermint oil. Somebody on one of her message boards must’ve claimed it gave auntie or grandma relief. He hasn’t been online in weeks, but he is tempted to grab her phone to broadcast: The oil is bullshit. Also, forget the antinausea diet, smuggle in burritos. He misses food that wasn’t engineered to be bland.

His first week in the hospital, she was putting away his laundry when she found the ring box. She does not know whether he’d bought it before the diagnosis. She does not know whether she cares.

On the TV mounted in the corner, he watches nature shows. He resisted these – a message board favorite – at first, afraid of zither music and gazelles loping in slow motion. He does not want to be lulled into anything like comfort. Yet he’s compelled by the red foxes taunting a grizzly bear lumbering behind; the squirrel who thinks he’s outsmarted the hawk only to be swooped upon by a thunder of talons and beak.

TOPPLED by Julie Zuckerman

March 7, 2019

The crowds coursing the streets below Marjorie’s apartment cheer and chant, and she hurries downstairs. Withered wives and working girls, wheelchair-bound and beach-bronzed beauties, one of the most spectacular sights she’s seen in her 68 years. They beckon to Marjorie, but she hesitates, grounded in place. Her uneasiness hovers around her like a swarm of midges. The most beaten down have ascended on the capital, together with bejeweled matrons of Madison Avenue, minivan-driving moms, and those in thread-bare, torn coats. With each stride, they discard the delicate attributes absorbed since birth, casting aside mantles of caregiver, nurturer, defender, peacemaker, forgiver, family gluer.

The words Wait! I’m coming stick in her throat. She forces one giant gulp of air into her lungs and steps forward into the surge. With each stride, she is fortified, the cloud of midges thinning. Her guilt and worry float skyward, popping like bubbles.

Like Miriam the prophetess with timbrels in hand, the women flock towards freedom. Their songs scuff away eternities of subjugation and restraint. It’s a spontaneous outpouring of sisterhood that transcends politics and unites them on a chromosomal level; no planning or secret social networks were necessary.

The men, smug in their constructs of superiority, do not see them coming.

This is not the Women’s March of 2017, which was cathartic, yes. But barely a blip in the battle.

A reverberation ripples through the crowd, a breathless, hushed moment, followed by an eruption of thunderous, whooping cheers. Marjorie stands on her tiptoes to see the DC skyline forever changed: the ultimate phallus, the iconic Washington Monument, topples. The mechanics of how this is happening, the intricacies of the organization, or whether a vote was taken are questions she can ask later. It’s a prodigious moment; every neuron in Marjorie is wide awake, electric, prickly with possibilities she’d never imagined.

They swarm the Capitol, the White House, the Supreme Court, the Smithsonians. Once, she revered these institutions, the massive memorials and erections of glory, the cherry blossoms, the reflecting pools. The first text she receives is from her sister: the same thing is happening simultaneously in every state capital and major city around the world. From her daughter, in every place of business and in the armed forces. And from her daughters-in-law, in every home.

Near the war memorials – Vietnam, Korea, and the vainglorious World War II construction – Marjorie experiences a bodily sensation of being rent in two, the Red Sea splitting inside her, painful and cleansing at once.

In the shadow of Lincoln, she weeps with a fierceness that hasn’t flared since her mother’s funeral three decades ago. Today’s torrent is different, a mixture of euphoria and awe, a twinge of exhilarating terror, amazement that life can still surprise in a good way. Someone offers her a tissue, a hug, and takes her by the hand to keep walking.

She is one of the lucky ones – never raped or molested, or subject to overt brutality or degradation due to gender, race or sexual preference. But a lifetime of slights, catcalls, indignation, covert biases, crude jokes, and commands meant to chip away at self-worth and keep men in positions of power are enough to fuel her rage into a colossal conflagration.

Only males under the age of 5 will be spared. Marjorie’s mind flits to her ex – she’s long past hating him, but: hah! – and then to her two grown sons, which is more complicated. With each passing year, she’s understood her sons are average, more takers than givers, molded in their father’s image. Her eldest hounds her to get more exercise. He chucks her zero-fat yogurts, determined to be the arbiter of her health. His younger brother cares more for his cars and gadgets than his children. On occasion, they are kind, but their attempts bring her little comfort. She feels more kinship with her daughters-in-law. With every woman walking beside her. She doesn’t blame her boys for any real evil in the world, but she will not miss them too much.

Once a year, Marjorie will spill out drops of wine with her pinky to remind herself that oppressors and their bystanders also deserve compassion. But now, she closes her eyes and gives thanks she will never be controlled again. The freedom to be fully herself is exquisite; she’d not known the extent of her hunger until today. She tilts her head to the sky and spreads her arms like an eagle, ready to soar.

THE WHOLE FLOW by Angie McCullagh

March 5, 2019

I try to become liquid like she told me. I pour myself into heavy-bottomed glasses and over nubby sofas and down rucked, tan chests. I puddle onto the floor and sometimes throw myself into the wind only to splash back on bug-splattered windshields.

To survive, she said, you have to learn to go with it. But my mother’s advice is bad. I learn this when my boy is first diagnosed and I think we can do it, I am flexible, Watch me drain my whole body into his syringes and make him better. I will do anything, anything at all.

The first night in the hospital I settle, like a pond, around his little frame and burble his favorite songs. I don’t sleep, not even for a second. In the morning his dad visits and says to me, you look like shit.

He sits with our boy while I shower in the bathroom with no soap and hold the safety bar to keep from slipping down the drain.

We are back at home where his dad doesn’t live. Wind shakes the walls, roaring that I should’ve prevented my boy’s illness and I dissolve in my own salty tears. It is darkest December, but globules of insulin gleam from needle tips, reflected in multi-colored holiday lights.

I’m hurting him. He yells and cries. I’m so sorry, I say before every poke, my heart pounding like a shaggy, water-logged thing.

After a few months, he stops crying, only bites his bottom lip hard and looks away.

She comes to visit with her tequila in a peroxide bottle and miles of beaded leather wrapped around her wrists. It’s too bad he got sick but you will adjust. Life is fluid.

She is her own undertow and I splash wildly, finding that fight is a solid object to hold onto.

When she watches the boy so I can take a run, then lets his blood sugar drop so low the juice box in his hand shakes as he tries to lift it to his mouth, I tell her to leave.

My new anger is hard and heavy, an anchor that has always been there without my knowing. I feel no ire toward my boy (why would I?) but fury at everything else – his disease, my mother, the man who promised his life to me until things became difficult and sodden and he breast stroked away with hardly a glance backward.

It is now just the boy and me and boxes of a chemical his own body can’t supply and also the beta fish in a bowl I bought to cheer him up. We sit in a small rowboat, bobbing. If you were to pull back from the tiny craft, a sunset pink behind us and a whole gray ocean slippery with fish and other sealife below, we would look like two brightly colored scraps barely tethered by my outrage, which is better, at least, than liquefying and drowning.

PISS by Chad Miller

March 4, 2019

Every time I piss myself, I get the job. Every time. It’s a fact. The first time I pissed myself was in the restroom at the office park with the ring of palm trees, before an interview. Let’s just agree my stream was spirited and leave the cause. Piss ricocheted. I cleaned what I could at the sink.

I got that job back-coding home remodeler websites with a soaked crotch.

I wore gray slacks.

The stain became a black hole the recruiter must have hoped to gaze my dick through. That hope, or is it the smell, that hypnotizes every hiring officer?

Hell, I don’t know.

Every time.

Opie, welcome aboard.

Opie, when can you start?

That coding job.

The arcade job.

Managing here.

It’s like the one time when I was a kid.

A friend and I were chasing his younger sister’s friends. Our car lights interrupted them wrapping their house in toilet paper. I grabbed his floorboard bat. A neighbor with a shotgun in his yard called cops on us.

I caught up to my prankster but did nothing. He was an island boy, homesick probably. We walked backed side-by-side to the house and flashing circus. I used the bat as a cane. We didn’t speak.

Anyway, the police officer yelled at my friend every time I back-talked. The boy was silent, respectful, but I quipped at the cop. His fetish get-up, the baton. I tease more often than I piss—I’m funny with it—but it was setting the officer off.

The boy got the brunt of the cop’s ire and I dodged it all because he dressed like a punk and I look like a television star. Blond hair. Crystal eyes. So lean any muscle I have looks like a bulge I worked after. I wear polos and khakis. My friend dressed like a punk. Bandanna over black spikes. Waffle thermals under a skull tee and cut jean shorts. Flannel tied at his waist, a suburban kilt. Boots that could pin your throat.

I sass a cop without repercussion. I piss myself and get away with it. Even get a job for it. I’m homegrown, homemade. The stank of an all-American boy. I’m scratch-and-sniff TV.

Opie.

That’s my nickname.

Opie.

It’s not one bit a part of my real name.

Opie’s a character from TV.

A small-town sheriff’s kid on fifties TV.

A ginger kid in black and white.

The time I pissed myself at the shitty concert with the sprawling band of wind instruments and chimes, when I got the prepper copy job right at the bar from a stranger, that guy called me Opie without even knowing it was my nickname, that’s how fitting the name is. How fitted.

Everybody loves an Opie.

Every body.

It’s mob mentality.

I one time took a receptionist job away from a clean black girl even though I pissed the CEO—right onto his wingtips while we shook hands—so I know my privilege is messy.

The girl stepped in my pool. Her flats whined to the elevator.

We made awful comments.

This job? This job I pissed myself for almost a day and still got it, with a signing bonus. Didn’t clean myself up. I wasn’t even awake enough to. What’s the point anyway?

People think I’m together even though they know about the pot and the cocaine and stealing alcohol from a couple of jobs, the DUI, the time in jail for possession, for dealing, for hit and run. I hit my father when he wouldn’t hit me. I owe everyone who’s given me anything. I’m very open and honest and write everything down on my applications.

Everyone smells redemption when I walk into a room. They’re intoxicated by the arc they see me on.

Like they’re watching TV.

The fifties sheriff show had other characters. All white, but a fair cast. There was the aunt the widowed sheriff and Opie lived with. Plump. Like she was swinging a cauldron under her housedress. And there was Opie’s teacher, the sheriff’s love interest. And the mailman. There was the barber and monkey-dumb mechanic. And there was a drunk who slept off the worst of it in jail, Otis.

No one calls me Otis though.

I’m not an Otis.

I can’t be. I can’t.

Otis is dumpy.