Flash

ELSA LANCHESTER’S ABORTION by J. Edward Kruft

February 10, 2019

Her own parents never married – an intentional thumbing of the nose to Victorian-era London – and she wondered, as she watched her husband padding off toward the pool, leaving his statuette on the piano, if she hadn’t best done the same. She loved Charles, and she was relatively certain he loved her – at the very least he adored her – but after four years as Mrs. Charles Laughton, Elsa was well aware of her husband’s preferences and proclivities and while on the surface it didn’t bother her to the degree a wife should be bothered, things changed that morning.

Kate approached, clutching her own golden statue (clutching it, thought Elsa, as though it were made of solid gold as opposed to merely plated). She was not overly fond of Kate, but she tried to smile as though she were.

“Elsa, why the long face?” asked Kate. “I should think you’d be very pleased on Charles’ behalf. It’s a marvelous little trophy, don’t you think?” Elsa lifted her husband’s statuette from the piano. It was only then that she noticed it was not yet engraved, and something about that felt empty, and that triggered a sudden and dizzying fear of what the rest of her life might very well be like.

She excused herself without comment (causing Kate’s face to draw) and walked in the direction she’d seen her husband make his exit. He was there, by the pool, smoking with Walter and George (whose gorgeous house this was, high above Sunset Strip). Elsa walked to the edge of the blue lawn to where three evenly spaced palms swayed in the cool mid-March breeze. And as she went to adjust her stole to cover her bare shoulders, a sudden and violent wave of nausea swept from her toes to her throat and nearly without warning, she vomited into the ivy that covered the raised beds, and in doing so, she unwittingly encouraged a rat to come out of hiding. Elsa screamed. And just like in the movies, the low hum of party conversation came to a screeching halt. Looking up, she saw Charles charging toward her, calling: “Elsa. Are you all right? Are you all right, my darling?” In that moment, despite it all, she was certain they would be together for many years to come (it would be, in fact, until his death, almost thirty years hence). At her side now, Charles lifted her stole to cover her shoulders and then took both of her hands in his. “Elsa?” he asked.

“I’m fine, Charles. Just tired.”

“But my dear, you screamed.”

“Oh yes,” she said, having already forgotten. “There was a rat.”

“How hideous,” he said, moving her away from the ivy.

“I hate to ruin your night, Charles,” began Elsa.

“Don’t be silly, my dear,” said Charles. “I shall take you home at once. I’ve tired of the crowds at any rate. It will be nice to be just the two of us again.”

“Yes,” agreed Elsa. “Just the two of us.”

She had made up her mind.

ROBOT MOTHER by Brittany Weeks

February 8, 2019

How is Raptor. Who is Raptor. I forgot your boyfriend’s name. Raptor sent me an article about the water temple in Ocarina of Time. The article is from 2007.

Everly’s warmth is calculated. In her eyes I might be God too. Everly is asking for help strategically, she is earning love. My throat is tight and small and my arms weigh into the ground, Everly is amused by my amusement. When her voice becomes sticky sweet and high and she innocently dances on doe legs that look shaky but move quickly around Raptor, her eyes light up as he struts directly into her trap, Everly’s eyes meet mine, I taste metallic and then I taste sweet, I have bit my own tongue.

Raptor needs: small frequent rewards; task completion; he needs challenges that are flattering but not impossible. Everly knows how to monitor his brain chemistry. She keeps his serotonin fluctuation at the perfect rate to induce addiction. Everly is not a psychologist.

After pressing SPF 50 into my skin Everly balances club masters over my face and I swat her away when she attempts to fix the brim of my hat. Everly told me once that she dove head first into icy water and that immersion in cold shocked and stopped her from having her period forever. I heard Raptor once on the phone telling someone about an article he read about techno-fundamentalism. He said Everly has a metal screw in her left knee from an accident when she was a child and I am certain that is not true and I can’t shake the image of Everly with mechanical valves in her heart medical metal arteries and veins and I imagine that Everly watches me from the ceiling while I sleep and reads my mind and somehow instead of making me feel guilty this fantasy makes me feel safe and warm and calm like being wrapped in an electric blanket. I point to the oranges packed in the Tupperware that Everly and I had prepared earlier that day when Raptor was doing work in the yard and she removes the peel and passes over an innocuous slice. As my hands shake and messages are fired from my brain and lost in a fog that grows suspended between my mind and my body she watches without judgment, and when I look at her forehead and look out to other parts of the beach she reaches over and takes the orange slice and effortlessly feeds it to me, relieving my hands, who still make the motion as though the orange slice is still there, as though they might still accomplish the job. I taste metallic and then sweet, Everly wets a paper towel and dabs my mouth, her lips have pruned and a faint line appears between her brows, she is concerned, I have bit my own tongue.

Raptor watches her every move and moves a beach bag so that she can have a seat and he stands to go and grill a vegan patty on top of a blood-stained meat rack, gently browning each side, her faithful servant. He tells the audience about an article he read about transhumanism and gauges her reaction expertly. Raptor, a meteorologist. He adjusts his take on the article carefully, micro correcting his course according to the reading of her brow. It was an interesting article, and as a slight ruffle appears it was a far reaching article, and as the ruffle melts into amusement it was well written and insightful, Raptor reaches blindly in every direction to explore this new assertion and we watch him generate a beautiful bespoke narrative custom tailored on the spot with slight frayed edges but seams tight and the functionality that is still sound, still there, it is a dependable textile and he surveys it with pride and slight bewilderment at his own skill or luck, he holds it up like a trophy, there is a drop of sweat on his lip, it is sunny, Raptor is athletic and sharp and he is tan and he looks like a God he is naive and boyish and powerful.

THE SWANS WHO SAY MOM by Amanda Claire Buckley

February 6, 2019

The mother punches a mouth in the wall, and we climb through it. The mother punches a throat in the wall and the father puts a picture of daisies over it. We walk along the linings of the lungs and whisper we love our mother quietly to ourselves. We walk along the wall until it becomes the bottom of a lake. We walk along the bottom of the lake in the wall and we murmur to each other about our situation: our murmurs rise up like captions to cartoons. The bubbles fall out of the mouths of swans—we love our mother they say on the surface.

The mother bakes a soufflé with the father. The mother bakes a scuffle with the father. The soufflé sits on the windowsill until we love our mother too loud from within the walls and it breaks. The mother punches the pore of a sponge in the wall and we absorb the shock of it. The scum from the pan where the soufflé sat cooking in butter is caked on the edges of the holes in the sponge. We stare at the grime and ask innocent is what we’re supposed to suck on? The mother punches a fried egg in the wall and the father puts a hand over it, breaks it like the soufflé. He spackles we love our mother inside and we read it out loud as punishment. We suckle the sun yellow paste dry.

We crab walk with our noses scrapping against the inside of wallpaper towards the kitchen every morning. We crabs, with our translucent baby shells, move within the walls towards the kitchen as if from sand to water. We can’t make it to the table, to the sea, even though the father pulled out the chairs as far as he could—the mother’s lungs get in our way. Even from within the lungs we smell it: burnt toast, oh boy (eyes exploring the underside of our hairline) we love our mother. The house is the mother. We live inside her.

The timer goes off. The mother soufflés and we will be scalped. The wall’s lips purse and ours shut. We’ve learned how to choke from the asbestos. The mother soufflés and her throat runs like yolk and she tosses the sponge into her bag and puts her mouth to the ignition of the SUV don’t tell her, father we dropped her wallet and keys into the batter on accident we swear father and baked it at 375 degrees. She put it on the windowsill herself, though. That wasn’t us. It wasn’t our fault, but now we are hot boxed in the walls. 375 degrees. We are baked within her. We attempt to walk the circumference off. Around and around the bottom of the lake with the creamy water on top of us and the captions to the cartoons are written on the beaks of the swans following us.

We step on a packet of ketchup on the floor in the walls of the lake and it explodes we love our mother and the bubbles of red sugar float up to the top. The swans swim over the innards. Tomato blood trails their belly feathers and when other families visit the lake, they wonder what went wrong with the red belly beauties. The swans respond, mom. The swans honk, mom. Mom. Mom.

BLOOD! by Oliver Zarandi

February 5, 2019

The elderly lady bleeds every day in my favourite cafe. The owner accommodates this and surrounds her with buckets. He mops it up. Sometimes he puts her in a bathtub, right there in the centre of the café, and she fills it up, laughing and bleeding. People applaud and remark on her unique nature.

I hate her, I tell my husband, I hate her with all my heart.

He says nothing because he’s a coward. He carries on reading his newspaper and ignores me. He has beady eyes and untrustworthy hands. He has the bony toes of a medieval Jesus.

I tell him don’t you ignore me. Don’t you remember my life?

I remember, he says. Your life is one filled with tragedies. I may order another soup.

My parents were two torso-less lugs who beat me silly with rolled up newspapers. They made me eat sharp foods and made me sleep in difficult spaces, cramming me in suitcases, washing machines, dog houses. Of course, my parents were taller than me, so I only remembered their feet. Mother and her painted toenails, father and his cracked ones.

But I grew up. I grew taller, taller than my parents and I came to know them only by the tops of their heads, two dumb scalps that got smaller with time until they both died of a cancer I didn’t care to know more about.

I demanded to know why this old lady was allowed to bleed so freely in the café.

I click my fingers at the owner. Why, I ask, why can she bleed everywhere?

I’m sorry, but she’s a regular.

Everybody was afraid of the old lady, I thought. Today, for example, she bled so hard that it came out of her ears, her mouth and eyes and made several toddlers vomit over their eggs.

I turn to my husband and pity him. He’s smaller than I am. His hair is a badly formed birds nest on his head, a whirl of thin twigs. To carry on the bird comparisons, may I add that he has a pigeon chest?

We do not get along much anymore. He’s a pint sized intellectual and like most men, he doesn’t say he knows more than me, but his eyes do the talking. I sit there and look at him and he can feel me seething at this bleeding old lady and he glances up and blinks twice, slowly, and his lips purse as if to say shush shush my darling wife of mine, don’t cause a scene.

Don’t cause a scene, I say to him. Don’t you know what I’ve been through in my life?

He says he does, but the old lady is old and she’s rich, richer than us, and there are certain times when we have to allow certain things, times when we must concede and just let it happen.

We go home that evening and I look at our house with scorn. Everything in that house was his decision. The bookshelves, the carpets, the sofas, the ottoman and the paintings, the spice racks and kitchen island, everything. Maybe because my wonderful husband is so small, so miniature, the house is an extension of his body. We go to bed inside his body and I sleep thinking of the bleeding lady and how she is celebrated.

The next morning, I decide to see what my own blood looks like, so I take a butter knife and drive it into my arm and twist it this way and that. I’m screaming, but the scream seems so dramatic, so utterly ridiculous that even my husband laughs.

Ha ha! What a terribly witch-like sound, my darling wife, he says as he take the knife and butters a croissant. I realise how ridiculous I’m being and sit down with him at the breakfast table and read the morning news.

A terrorist attack has killed thirteen people at a metro station in Paris.

My bleeding stops but my anger doesn’t. I sit there at the table as my tiny husband wears tiny Trotsky glasses, as he reads and his brain gets fat with facts and there I am, ignored, thinking of those people dead at the metro station, all their blood pooling into some huge jar somewhere in my mind. I feel an agitation in my body and I start shaking. The breakfast table starts to rattle with my convulsions and the toast rack falls down, the eggs on my husband’s plate wobble and jump, the tea pot jerks and the croissants shed their skin entirely.

My husband laughs and shakes his head and says thirteen dead! Trust the French to moan about such a low number! Try a hundred! Try two hundred! Now that’s really dead.

We return to the café for lunch. We order sausages and hash browns, coffee and tea and we sit there and glut ourselves on everything in an attempt, I believe, to fill the void that is our lives.

The waiter today looks like a rat with good clothing.

I’m unhappy with our marriage and I’ve been masturbating next to your face for thirteen years, I say over the sausage to my husband.

That’s just great, he says. I’m happy for you. But he’s engrossed in the bleeding lady. Everybody is. Chairs are positioned to look at her and people even start to touch her.

The more the merrier, she says in a bathtub of blood. She slams her chubby gout hand on the side of the tub. Bring me a mug, friends! The waiter brings her one and she scoops out a mug full of blood and passes it to my husband.

Drink up little leathery man, she says and he does. She repeats this for everybody in the café and there they all are, drinking this fat wenches blood, the centre of attention, finally validated.

I stand up and leave the café.

I’m in the car and I pass other cars, beeping my horn the entire way. Out of way you bastards, I say and my voice is swallowed in the sound of traffic, the sounds of screaming and talking.

I arrive at the top of the mountain that surrounds the city and I think of that fat bleeding bitch and scream loud and hard, hard enough that I feel my chest go raw and for the first time in a while I feel like I’m being heard, even if it is just the wind listening.

THE GHOST OF 623 LAMPLIGHTER SQUARE by Alex S. French

February 3, 2019

“Good morning,” she says, coffee buzzing in her grip.

“How’s it going,” Mike states, doesn’t ask.

“Living the dream,” Dave quips. Sarcastic? Who can tell.

“Do anything interesting over the weekend?” she tries.

Mike staggers to the bathroom. Door thud her only reply. Dave surveys the break room awkwardly: ceiling panes, Nestea packets, trashcan—anything but her eyes. She sighs and walks away.

Meeting Agenda:

First item: The jokes.

“Happy to gather for another meeting that could have been an email,” Stan chuckles.

“Ope, looks like Greg’s got the Monday face,” Andrew pokes.

“Did I have a hard weekend, or hardly any weekend at all is what I always say,” Jerry says, like always.

Peanut brittle laughter snaps between their jaws, staccato starts finish with chewy, contented murmurs. She never liked such sugar.

Second item: CEO Carl walks in late. Begins meeting with a greedy clap.

“So the numbers, the numbers are looking good. Up 12.4 percent over last March, but that’s counting NB3s like they’re NB1s…” Pinging jargon ricochets round floating clichés. She waits for one to hit. Hopes that it kills. Unreferenced numbers provide the backdrop, a gray curtain of statistical rain. The assault continues for 28 straight minutes.

“Look, our top priority is the bottom line, so trust the metrics, guys. We need to follow the actuaries’ roadmap if we want to land this plane with a boatload of goodies. Questions?”

Third item: Argument.

Jason pipes up, all folded arms and knitted brow, “I need the UWs to lower premiums if I’m going to be able to compete on top level firms.”

“We can’t go lower than our state approved rates,” Chester shrugs.

“That’s true,” she says, “but we can use the new metrics to apply to the state for a transition flex to bring down premiums on business that we really want.”

“What about the flex rate? I know Barry’s used a flex rate before!” Mark yells.

“We need to reapply for the transition rates,” she helps.

“We don’t have a flex rate.” Reggie objects.

“We can get this—we just need to apply!” No matter how she says it, no one seems to hear. She spins around in her chair, but no one seems to notice. She coughs and speaks again, but no one seems to care.

CEO Carl interjects, slaps his hands on the table. “Ah, I love this dynamism! This is what it’s all about! A back and forth, to and fro battle that’s going to paddle us forward. Good work, everyone, let’s make this work great!”

Final notes: No solution reached. Circle back on it next week.

(Remember donuts for Jerry’s birthday.)

Taylor from accounting saunters into the cubi-pod. “What-what, you turds—bonuses have arrived! Who’s ready for a li’l Shots Roulette? Bonus picked out of the hat pays the bill! Mike, Dave, Stan, Greg, Andrew, Jerry, Jason, Chester, Mark, Reggie: I know you bronanas are in!”

High fives are exchanged. Coats are grabbed. The digital clock strikes four and the room empties. She is alone. Her bonus envelope lies abandoned on the floor. But when she picks it up, she finds another underneath. Clean of footprints. Uncrumpled. Her coworker Barry’s name printed on the front. He didn’t make it in today. He doesn’t make it in on a lot of Mondays.

It isn’t right; she slices open the bonus letters.

She knows it isn’t right; she looks at her check amount, sees an extra digit in his.

She’s always known; she was right.

She doesn’t even bother resealing the envelopes. Her face falls Zen. A smile flickers at her lips. And sparks alight in the irises of her eyes.

There were lots of stories as to how 623 Lamplighter Square burned down. Electrical fire. That coffee pot was always sketch. Insurance arson. Apparently the business wasn’t doing well; they’d fallen behind the market’s current premiums and rates. Teenagers. Because.

But no one blamed the ghost. How could they blame someone whom they refused to notice?

She’s moved on to a better place now. Some think it’s Canada. Some think it’s the future. She calls it a place her own. Either way, she lives in limbo no more.

HOME by Madeline Anthes

February 1, 2019

You say you’d follow him anywhere, so when he asks you to move across the country, you do. You say you’d do anything for love, and you love him.

He wants you to love your life with him.

You try.

Your rented house has plain beige walls. It’s in a suburb and has a fenced-in yard. You don’t have dogs or children to use it.

The kitchen is tiny. You bump into each other every night as you fix your lunches for the next day. You’re watching infants at a childcare center. You change diapers and clean spills all day. You hate it, but there aren’t any teaching jobs in October.

You say you’ll keep looking for another job. He has his new dream job, after all.

A career. He’s managing a plant, staying late, getting tipsy at corporate dinners. He comes home rosy cheeked and full of stories about men with names like Bill and Frank. You are never invited.

The point is he’s happy. You tell him you’ll keep trying.

He’s heard you tossing at night, seen you staring at the beige walls, watched you bite the inside of your cheek until your mouth fills with the taste of rust.

He asks you over and over what he can do.

You tell him you miss the sound of the ocean, and the feel of salt air through a cracked window. How the ceiling fan would press the air down and make you feel heavy when you were falling asleep.

He buys a machine that plays the sound of crashing waves and plugs in a fan next to your bed.

You tell him you miss how sand piled in the corners of the kitchen. You miss how the wind carried bits of shell and coral, and how you’d find flecks of it stuck to your scalp when you showered. You miss how you could scratch and scratch all day and still find bits of grit under your nails.

You find a bag of potting sand in the hall closet and perfectly-formed piles near the fridge. One night you wake to him sprinkling sand in your hair; it pools on your pillow and sticks to the sheets. It makes your skin itch.

You tell him it’s the air and the smell and the way people dress. You tell him it’s the way you could close your eyes and feel present, alive, like a current connected you to the walls of the house. You miss belonging.

He brings in jars of sea air and wears flip flops around the house. He wears Bermuda shorts and Hawaiian shirts to the grocery store. He looks like a parody of your old life together.

What more could you want, he asks you. What else can he do?

You tell him you don’t want anything else. There’s nothing else he can do.

You can’t replicate the heartbeat of a town, or the rhythm of a household, or the texture of a life. Even if you went back now, it’d all be different.

So you listen to your sound machine and step over the piles of sand. You tell him it’s time to start a new life.

At night, you run your fingers along your scalp and look under your nails for traces of sand.

DOMESTIC TERRORIST by Meeah Williams

January 29, 2019

That morning I had my usual breakfast: a bowl of pimples soaked in apple cider vinegar. However, this morning the pimples were inflamed. Each pimple had a little demon erupting from its infected head and each demon was bending over and showing me its hairy ass.

The meter lady came to the door and wanted to read my tonsils. I said “I don’t have tonsils anymore. They were removed when I was five.” She said, “Exactly” and made an angry hash mark on her little clipboard beside my name. I threw a symbolic kitten at her back as she clomped down the path to her armored dune buggy and roared away.

My life was like a lot of people’s lives except it had my name on it.

My boyfriend looked up from his laptop and asked me, “how many people do you suppose you have kill to be technically considered a serial killer? Is three the minimum or will only two do?”

When I asked him why he wanted to know he ran off into the living room and peered out coyly from the cactus farm I’d planted there.

My life was like a suitcase a stranger thrust into my hand at the train station, running off before I could object.

I’m left standing here on the platform waiting for a train with the rest of the hyenas. I didn’t see the point of going any further but the policeman said, “Well you sure as hell can’t stay here” and shoved me through the closing doors.

I took the only seat still available, beside a morbidly obese man already taking up most of the seat beside him. I asked him, “Do you happen to know where this train is headed?”

He said, “No. But wherever it’s going I hope they serve hamburgers there.”

This seemed to me a singularly significant and wise response under the circumstances. My respect for him climbed a millimeter. So I asked him, “Do you think I’m the type of girl a serial killer would mind killing?”

He said, “It just so happens that the first thing I thought when you entered the train was ‘that’s the kind of girl a serial killer wouldn’t mind killing.’”

“Thanks,” I said. “That’s the nicest thing anyone has said to me all day.”

“Don’t mention it,” he said.

We both seemed to intuit the conversation could only go downhill from there and so neither of us risked the exchange of a single additional word. The scenery flew past us in the windows like the contents of a blender mixing up a rat smoothie.

I must have dozed. When I woke up I was still alive. The train had stopped in the middle of nowhere. My throat had not been cut. I was not disemboweled. In other words, I had no excuse for remaining on the train. I would have to disembark. I said goodbye to the morbidly obese man on the platform. I picked up my suitcase and headed for the taxi stand.

My life was like a bomb that a stranger had foisted on me and warned me not to tell anyone about or else.

I slid into the first available taxi. The driver looked into the rearview mirror. “Where to ma’am?”

I closed my eyes. “Five-four-three-two-one,” I said.

I opened my eyes. Everything was still there.

The driver said, “Five-four-three-two-one where, ma’am?”

“Never mind. Just take me to wherever you have polar bears in this town. I think seeing some polar bears is just the thing I need right now. If you don’t have polar bears, then I guess anywhere you can get a decent plate of pancakes.”

The cab pulled away from the curb.

“Five-four-three-two-one,” I muttered under my breath.

I opened my eyes.

Everything was still there.

GARGOYLE by Zac Smith

January 28, 2019

I sit on the front porch to get out of the apartment, to watch the children practice soccer in the field across the street. My neighbor comes in and out with his dogs. Every time, I pet the dogs while he tries not to make eye contact.

He is out of shape. Tall, but bloated. I see this. I remind him by looking at his body. When he looks at me, I look at his stomach. His gut, how it pokes out between the drapes of his flannel shirts. As I look at his gut, he looks at my gut. He thinks about his health, my health. Our health. He thinks about my heart surgery: quadruple bypass. He thinks about my recovery: slow and pitiful. He thinks about the future. His future, my future, our future.

I’ve seen him with junk food, bags of takeout, six-packs on the weekends. I leave the dregs of my own takeout meals on the top of the trash can out front, piles of styrofoam and foil and leaking sauces the first thing he sees when he stashes the remnants of his own sad refuse.

I pet his dogs. I can find all their sweet spots with ease, they wag their tails, they stare at me lovingly, ignoring him, ignoring the walk he is trying to take them on, and I tell him how I used to have dogs, how they slept in my bed, how we used to go on walks on days like this, and I describe their illnesses, their deaths – I describe putting them down, and I describe my loneliness thereafter, the sadness that came, and how I never got another dog, and how I came to only have cats, which I hate, because they are horrible things that stay inside and ignore me.

But I shrug, because what am I going to do? Nothing – there is nothing I can do.

I pet his dogs and I tell him about my first cat. It was my daughter’s – she moved in with me for three months, brought her cat, taught me how to care for it, then she moved out, left the cat, and I haven’t seen her since, no contact, not a word, for years, it’s been years and I don’t know why, and sometimes all I do is wonder, I wonder why she’s gone, because she’s gone, she’s a ghost, but I still have her cat, at least, I guess, and I ask him how his wife is doing, because I know she’s pregnant, it’s their first baby, it’s beautiful that it’s happening, I’m so happy for them, and I pet the dogs while he watches the kids play soccer in the field across the street, thinking, worrying, about to tug on their leashes and try to escape, so I let him go with a smile and he wanders off into the sunshine, dogs pulling in all directions because it’s so nice out, just a perfect day, I am going to keep sitting here and enjoy it.

I am a gargoyle. I am a bad omen, a shadow that haunts our front stoop, and I will wait for him to come back, for him to let me pet the dogs some more, to let me tell him more things about what comes next; I want to tell him about the cats I have now, how they yowl at night and crawl on me in the dark, how they were my ex-wife’s cats, how I never asked for them and she just left them here when she left, and tell him about my ex-wife, about her leaving, about all the things she left behind when she did, about how the unwanted cats just pile up, how everything just piles up, up and up and up and in any case I don’t think I could even climb all the stairs right now, God, there are so many stairs, I’m out of breath just thinking about them – I have to go slow, I have to halt and breathe and wheeze, I have to balance on the last stair and squeeze in through the door so the cats don’t get out, and then I have to sit in the stale air, sit with all the cat hair, with all the bills and old gauze and medicines in their little orange jars, with the old boxes of old things, the bad memories, the bad things to come and the sun just feels so nice, it’s so nice to be outside, it’s nice to walk the dogs, to watch the kids play soccer, to talk to someone, to be somewhere else, to get out, to get out while you can before you can’t, and there, there he is, I can see him now.

Here he comes.

ROTTEN TOOTH by Kim Magowan & Michelle Ross

January 27, 2019

Blinking in the darkness of the school auditorium, Rajiv spots his ex-wife Sangita. Her filmy green shawl is flung over the back of the empty seat beside her, reminding him of how their daughter, Alisha, puts a plate and cutlery out for her imaginary friend, Mr. Potato (not to be confused with the toy with the interchangeable facial features). The first time she did this, Rajiv thought Alisha was setting a place for her mother, and he’d wondered if the intention might actually conjure Sangita.

“You saving that seat for Todd?” Rajiv asks Sangita. Her boyfriend, pink-faced with thick, blond hair: Todd looks like a mayonnaise-based potato salad. Every time Alisha talks about Mr. Potato, Todd’s face is what Rajiv sees. If only she’d chosen some other produce as her friend’s namesake. Even Mr. Frisée or Mr. Dandelion Greens would leave a less bitter taste on Rajiv’s tongue.

Sangita sighs. “I thought you said talking to me was like having a cavity filled.”

“Root canal,” Rajiv says.

When Alisha first set that place for Mr. Potato, two years ago, Rajiv half believed Sangita would materialize, even though he knew perfectly well she was in Bermuda with Todd. Probably spreading aloe on Todd’s grotesque, sunburnt, mole-studded back. In movies, when children announced a presence the adults couldn’t see, those children were generally onto something. Rajiv sliced some frozen cookie dough and put it in the oven, just in case, so if Sangita miraculously walked in, the house wouldn’t smell only of takeout curry.

“You like to suffer,” Sangita says. “You like to feel sorry for yourself.”

“But after a root canal, the pain goes away,” says Rajiv.

Sangita looks at him with pity. “You need to find a seat. The concert will start any minute now.”

Rajiv finds a lone unoccupied chair two rows behind Sangita and watches as Todd settles in beside her, roping his thick arm around Sangita’s shoulders.

Then the curtain opens, and the band director thanks them for coming. He talks about the piece with which the concert will open, Bach’s “Sheep May Safely Graze.” A lullaby, he calls it. He explains the opening lines to them: “Sheep may safely graze and pasture/When a shepherd guards them well.” It was written, he tells them, for the birthday of Duke Christian, a patron of Bach, the nobleman praised for protecting his citizen flock.

Rajiv watches Todd massage Sangita’s neck with one of his giant, boiled ham hands, watches her whisper something to him. “My work is just as important as yours fucking is,” Sangita once whispered in Rajiv’s ear at a preschool play. This just after he’d kissed her cheek. Rajiv knew that things were often not what they appeared. He also knew that thinking like this was ridiculous when the thing you hoped you saw wrong was your ex-wife and her new—no, not new—partner.

The song the children play is so gentle that the music is like a hand rubbing soft circles onto Rajiv’s back, telling him to lie down and rest. “Let go of your troubles, weary travelers”: that had been Alisha’s one line in that school play.

Rajiv remembers the root canal he’d gotten ten years ago. How tender the endodontist was with him. The miracle of the Novocain sponging up his pain. And then after, when the pain was gone for good, how he had felt smitten with that endodontist for removing the thing so excruciating he’d consumed nothing but liquids for three weeks.

His analogy was all wrong. Sangita was no root canal. She was a rotten tooth. Not that she was to blame. When Rajiv first went to the dentist about his pain, he insisted the diagnosis had to be wrong. He routinely flossed. He hardly ate sweets. Then the dentist had explained that his tooth had a hairline fracture. Rajiv grinded his teeth in his sleep. That’s how the infection had gotten in: when he was unawares, convinced he’d done everything right.

GRIP by Claire Hopple

January 25, 2019

Let us tell you about Louise. At the moment we started to really pay attention, she was stuck behind a vehicle that read “Criminal Transport Unit - Dept. of Corrections” on the highway.

When traffic cleared and she finally made it to the park, she was handed a universal key to all the glass showcases by her father.

“Add more furnishings to the blue-tongue skink cage,” he said, gesturing toward an open box on a picnic table.

Louise pulled what looked to be a mini tiki hut and micro lounge chairs out of the box and headed toward the showcases. The skinks did not seem to react to the new arrangement, though Louise thought it could’ve been because they were far too large to fit into the chairs.

Here she was working with her father and living with her father and somehow her brother Bill had made it all the way to Colorado, even if he was transporting dead bodies for a living.

Naturally, he loved to tell everyone about picking up Joe Cocker’s body, who passed away on December 22, 2014 in a place called Crawford, Colorado, population 431.

“Too many cigarettes,” Bill always said, like he and Joe were buds.

Just as Louise noticed how the park pavilion smelled exactly like camp in some murky way, her father came back over.

“If things get...if they go...if things become cumbersome today, the code word’s sarsaparilla,” he garbled.

She opened her mouth to reply and he said “what” in a way that wasn’t really a question and she said “nothing,” but it was really that if something actually went down today, she would panic and not remember any real, helpful words let alone any code words, especially one like sarsaparilla.

He was off to prep the leopard geckos. She wasn’t allowed to touch them because they could lose their tails if handled too roughly.

Sure, Louise was offended that her father thought she wasn’t up for a task like that, but she was also relieved. One of the leopard geckos had this pendulous tumor that she couldn’t help staring at.

This party was for some family friends of theirs. Mitchell, the father of Chase the birthday boy, used to be the older kid on the block when Louise was at her most aesthetically vulnerable.

She noted that she’d first seen him practice-making-out with a front door screen, and now she was watching him unclasp his son from a carseat.

Even these days, he would take his glasses off and Louise found that looking at his actual eyeballs would be this very personal thing. He would seem naked in a way that was more naked than nakedness, and she couldn’t look at him but also couldn’t not look at him.

The crash was more of a beginning than an ending. In the early party pandemonium, no one saw who did it. But the smashed cage was a reality nonetheless.

The Pacman frog’s cage was shattered, though it looked like he (she? it?) had escaped. Of course, the amphibian with “an easygoing nature ideal for a life of captivity” was the one set free. We had witnessed Louise do a little research of her own on these creatures, though we’re not sure exactly why she wanted to impress her own dad.

A pink Post-it lay beside the glass with the words:

For E.G.

As if the destructive behavior were lovingly devoted to this person.

Well, that was what we called the tipping point for Louise. A crowd had formed. She turned the moment into a confessional.

“I have a habit of stealing phone books off of my neighbors’ stoops,” she began.

We knew this, and the neighbors did too, but they were so thankful they didn’t have to dispose of them that they didn’t say a word.

“I stack them in the basement closet that houses the water heater,” she continued.

She was losing them.

“I - I think it’s because things have gotten out of hand. I was fired. The woman who replaced me was supposedly hired just because the CEO hit her with his Range Rover while she was crossing the street. This phone book collection is my only grip on life.”

There was a pause.

“Well, we all knew that,” said her father from somewhere in the group.

She didn’t know what to make of this.

The glass shards fell through the slits in the picnic table, landing somewhere just behind her and the memory of her pride.

As soon as we heard her outward yearning we knew no more exotic animal birthday fun would be had that day.

We found that Louise had reached that point in adulthood where she thought everyone flying planes and cutting people open should be older than her, but they were not. Not always.

Meanwhile, she spent her time doing things like compiling lists of words that were rarely unpaired. Like how nothing ever seems to “spurt” except blood.

That, and we knew for a fact she was waiting out the crinkly man four houses down. He was bound to die soon or at least move into a home, and she was preparing a way for them both. She thought he had no mortgage or family left and that this would work out for her. She helped him paint his siding three weeks ago and we think she was really helping herself.

Anyway, it was easy for us to see that her one regret in life was not just one but multiple. And that maybe she was secretly hoping that we were all axolotls, who have cannibalistic tendencies but if bitten, can regenerate their body parts over time.