Flash

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.

WE ETERNAL BEINGS by Jody Sperling

March 3, 2019

Mary died earlier this week: went into the hospital for routine foot ulcer debridement—common with diabetics—developed a staph infection, went under for a lung treatment and never woke from the anesthesia. We knew Mary from back in the day. I’d moved to Omaha to live with my grandparents, found Jesus (it’s not what you think) so I sent my buddy to live with them (proselytizers got to be proselytizing). My grandparents prayed before every meal.

Mary was a banker who worked with my buddy in Omaha. Obesity led to her diabetes, which triggered her demise.

Demise. What a word. It sounds too clinical for its purpose. Demise is the word doctors use to justify premature deaths: stillborns, sudden heart attacks, “complications with x,” drug overdoses. Arise rhymes with demise, as in “Arise, Lazarus come out of the grave,” which is what Jesus said to his buddy, dead in the grave four days.

By the time my buddy moved to Omaha to live with my grandparents I was a recovered alcoholic, well on my way to conservative Christianity. Recovered is a loose term, given my troubles in years following, but this isn’t that story.

I’d taken work on a rat and mouse rig in the Uintah Mountains. When my buddy called I requested vacation, because he told me he’d gotten his second DUI. I came down hard on him. “You’re on an arrow’s path to hell,” I said. “You need to repent” (a fancy word for “move to Omaha”). My harsh tone surprised him. The old me had been soft: understanding and compassionate. We talked for a while and I said, “Pack your shit. You’re moving to Omaha.”

The demise of my water pump occurred just outside Big Springs, halfway between Denver and nowhere*. A local repair shop charged me eight hundred: five for towing and three for service. That set me back a ways, but I still can’t remember where all the rest of the money went, because I worked for years in the oil fields. Hemorrhaging cash is almost as common a disease in America as diabetes.

*Rabbit trail? Nowhere might have a secret meaning: “no-where” or “now-here.” Odd insights seem profound when you’re writing alone in a hotel room far from home.

The mechanic had my Blazer hoisted six five feet in the air. There were several five-gallon buckets nearby, all full of Unleaded 85. The smell of gas most closely resembles the flavor of MSG. The mechanic said, “It always happens this way, right after you’ve filled up.”

My grandparents agreed to house my buddy because (a) I talked about him often: what a dear, dear friend, what a good, good guy, what a rough, rough hand he’d been dealt, and probably (b) I angled the whole he’s-close-to-accepting-Jesus-as-his-personal-Lord-and-Savior card, but mostly because (c) I told them how he’d saved my life once (good story for another day).

My buddy got a job at US Bank, he called it “Us Bank,” as in “we,” and that is where he met Mary. Mary in the Bible was the sister of Lazarus. This is not significant outside of the active whirring of my brain to see the connection: a false corollary like so many others.

I had complex feelings toward Mary. On the one hand, I found her funny. She was one of those women whose egos had no bounds. She really believed the world owed her. If there was ever anything wrong at work it was someone else’s fault. If anything good happened, she had made it happen. I am drawn to people with outsized egos. But also, too, Mary had a slight odor, mildewed, washed but not dried, perhaps lusty: Does lust have an odor? If I remember correctly, she brushed her teeth with hydrogen peroxide because she’d heard on some TV doctor show that toothpaste caused brain damage.

My wife’s father recently stopped drinking sodapop because it causes brain damage. Apparently a megastudy found that those who drink twelve ounces of carbonated, sweet beverages a day experience a shrinking of the hippocampus. Don’t bother me to look this up, but I seem to recall that the hippocampus is where emotion lives.

Mary and my buddy and I met one day sometime after midnight at VI off L Street. We drank coffee heavy with cream and ate French Silk Pie. I think highly of France, love silk and adore pie. The three together are, today, the only trinity I care about. Between every bite of pie we drank a cup of coffee, and since we couldn’t eat another bite until our coffee was full, we’d leave our jackets on our chairs to signal we’d return and go outside into the windy cold of Nebraskan November to smoke cigarettes and shiver.

My buddy only ever smoked socially. He could go weeks, even months, without a cigarette and not suffer. Then, in one night he’d smoke a pack—a whole pack—with no consequences. Mary and I were both card-carrying Mentholites.

I briefly worked myself into a two-pack-a-day habit during my stint in the oil fields. I worked with Chris the driller on a two-man, rat and mouse crew. Chris was big in the naturally-born-to-kill kind of way. He was thick everywhere. Thick legs, thick arms, thick neck, thick nose, thick tongue, he was thick, thick. Chris smoked three packs of cigarettes daily. When he wasn’t smoking he hung suspended from a tree by tenterhooks pierced through his shoulder meat. Suspensions create a religious high, they say. Look it up. People do it.

Because Chris smoked so much, I smoked a whole lot more. Odd as it may sound, if I smoked, I couldn’t smell Chris’s smoke, and I’d just get so damn tired of smelling Marb Reds all day long. Smoking was a break from smelling smoke so I smoked and smoked and smoked. That’s how it goes.

I didn’t actually answer when my buddy called me about Mary dying. I was checking into a hotel: I’m on the road this week in Albuquerque for work. When I dropped my bags on the hotel bed and as I was taking a dump, which is a sacred routine that helps cleanse me from the day’s troubles and reorients me to the important matters that lie ahead between end-of-work and time-for-bed, I saw he’d called. I called back and we talked work. Where I go, he goes, so we’re coworkers again which is how we met over a decade ago at a restaurant where he served and I hosted.

I’m the big cheese now, and he’s the little cheese—title-wise—but it’s not that way between us. I rely on his good reputation since he was a referral of mine. The more he succeeds the better I look: if I’ve learned one thing about Christianity, it’s all about appearances.

My buddy just got back from Spain, where he spent a week with his wife. They got free lodging over there through a friend of his. I’ve never traveled abroad. Not really. I spent a day in Juarez many years ago on a church mission trip. My grandparents wanted me to experience Christian Charity and since they footed the rent, what could I say? (That’s not charitable. I wanted to go but for all the wrong reasons. Remind me to tell you that one some other day.)

The kicker is, my buddy’s wife didn’t have a good time in Spain, he tells me, because she didn’t get to call the shots. He says she doesn’t do well when other people are leading and planning. Apparently his wife has a strong personality, he said. “Like you,” he said.

I don’t want to be compared to his wife. She is not on my list of favorite people. I wonder if she’ll need surgery someday. We all need surgery from time to time.

I’ve risen twice from Propofol (since they say the third time’s a charm, I won’t be going under again). The first time I was a baby in need of some kind of urethral correction. I guess I was born with six or eight holes perforating the length of my shaft. The other surgery was to repair my left ear, which heard so well it bled constantly. As a four-year-old I could hear the whispers of the dead, and it kept me awake at night. They said, “Call us out of the grave. We eternal beings. Arise, arise.”

INHERITANCE by Cavin Bryce Gonzalez

February 27, 2019

When she came hopping out of the bathroom holding an instrument that I mistook as a thermometer I was appalled that someone could be so happy about running a fever. She threw her arms around me and squeezed, squeezed like she hated me. But she didn’t hate me. She loved me. And that’s when I saw the two little lines, bright pink, glaring at me.

It’s been four months since then. We’re having a boy. Every day her womb grows, life gestates. All of our friends are so excited. “You’re glowing!” they say. Or “About time!”

Every night I watch him while she sleeps. I imagine a little me in there, stuck to a feeding tube and unaware of the great big world waiting to pounce. My wife will smile while unconscious, sometimes her hands will go instinctively to her womb and move in small, precise circles. That baby is made of exactly 50% of my chromosomes and 50% of hers. Mine are 100% fucked. When our son grows, will his resentment for life grow like an awkward peach fuzz? Will he become angry easily, contemplate killing himself before he’s even old enough to drive?

While my wife chatters about whether our child will play sports or be an artist all I can imagine is our son hiding in the bathroom, running a razor blade across his forearm and sobbing. I imagine our child taking too many pills, driving drunk into a barricade and bleeding out on the pavement; scared and alone and relieved that it’s all soon to be over. Schizophrenia, melanoma, bipolar disorder, acid reflux, overly empathetic tendencies, and a thin skin. Our child will be born broken and it’s my fault. He will try to fill his life with menial time killers; scrapbooking, soccer, friends, drugs. Whatever he may want. At the end of the day nothing will his void. Not fame, not fortune, not love. He will inherit all of my sins. He will struggle his whole life to understand why he feels this way but he won’t figure it out. Not ever.

MICROWAVE OVEN by Estrella del Valle (translated by Toshiya Kamei)

February 25, 2019

Don't say my name, don't say my name, when you know I have died, don't say my name.

-Roque Dalton

I don't know how it happened. I only remember walking in the woods with my strawberry basket. I wanted to pick a lot of strawberries on the way because my grandmother likes homemade cakes. She used to make them before she bought her house and had to spend many hours outside. She made them with egg white foams. The secret is to beat yolks and butter well, first yolks, then butter, and whip it for a long time, pour in the mixture of flour and milk. Finally make half of the egg whites fluff up. It's easy, no? She cuts the sponge cake horizontally in thirds with a thread and on the first layer she puts walnut custard, made with real walnut, strawberry jam, made from natural strawberries, not the kind you find in a supermarket. Then she puts the last layer, which she bakes in the oven. She starts decorating it with meringue. She makes a lot of figures, roses, leaves, and faces. She can even put the birthday person's name with one hand. She's an artist. I kept walking, looking for strawberries for her cake, but I didn't find any. That's why when I saw you coming in. I thought you were a doll, dressed up like that, so elegant. You even look like Ken, Barbie's boyfriend. Then I thought you came for my grandma's cake. But I know that man sent you here. Well, tell him no. I'm tired of playing house. Like I said, I'm sick of playing husband and wife. I lost interest in cooking a long time ago, after the day when I was so hungry I went to look for strawberries for the cake and couldn't find the woods anywhere. Nobody knew where the woods were. I was tired of asking directions, so I left and walked along Broadway, from West College to Seventh Street. I kept walking with my basket until it became dark, and I didn't know how to get back home. When I realized I was lost, I thought about going back the same way, but I hadn't left breadcrumbs because with this husband we never had enough bread to put into our mouths. When we got married, my dad told him, "Take good care of my little princess." That's what my dad told him, but he didn't even listen. I walked to Seventh and arrived at St. Vincent Jewelry Center. I wanted my princess tiara to go back to my house, to my dad. I went to the tiara display counter with my empty basket. The saleswoman and other women stared at my tattered clothes and bleeding toenails. I was bleeding all over the blue carpet, my blood, which wasn't blue like the carpet, kept oozing. I don't know how it happened, the lights went out, then screams came. I don't remember anyone coming to my rescue with his sword and white horse. Only you have showed up here, with your doll-like face, your well-ironed suit, and your CD on your back that repeats the same promise you'll never keep because he doesn't want to see me. I want you to know this once and for all. I don't need him anymore because the doctor, who likes me, told me if I continue to be a good girl, as I have been, he'll buy me Barbie's microwave oven, with its flour and all the dishes for the cake.

B.C. by Patrick Reid

February 24, 2019

I am running as a conservative in the primaries. My name is a big one, recognizable throughout most of the world. Last month I was on a cruise with my wife and her family. There were two formal nights. My belly. My belly heaved and burst over my belt, and on sauce night, I dropped a splash onto my button down, right on the part of my belly that, when I sit down, has the same presence as a balance ball.

In college, a friend and I used the balance ball to do sit ups, 35 each, 3 times, on Fridays, back when my core was titanium.

Crumbs sneak in and around my button down, so when I stood up on those cruise dinners, I left a warm, heart-shaped, crumb-outlined impressions in the leather. I couldn't wait to get off that boat. My wife encouraged me to talk to the natives on St. Maarten, people selling coconuts on the side of the road with a lost look in their eye. The jungle was right behind the main road along the beach where, in the bright woods—it was a windy and overcast day, and the silver tropic air trembled—I saw a few natives kneeling, shirtless, in a clearing, in what looked like a prayer or some voodoo ritual. Off the ferry from the pier to the island, one who had dreadlocks down to his waist shouted at me from faraway. I turned and saw him staring at me through a crowd, pointing, a wild person with a rabid look.

I am still sensitive about taking off my shirt. In St. Maarten, I swam, even dunked my head under. I am 54, young for a politician. I was out of breath quickly.

“It's like a zoo, but all the animals got loose,” I muttered in the general direction of my wife, who floated 5 feet away.

“What's that honey?” she said pleasantly.

“It's like that Jurassic Park movie.”

My voice is often called rich, a deep, gravelly melodic baritone.

People come from all over the world to hear me speak. My expression conveys just the right amount of dry humor, but mostly a sense of severe gravity. I usually have a straight face which appears to many as a scowl but comes from lionheartedness rather than coldheartedness.

I share my rhetoric gravitas and sense of humor with my brother, a (now retired) Miami Dade police officer, who helped us get a massive discount on this cruise, and who texts me daily, finding some of the funniest race- and police-related videos on the internet. I do not know where he finds the stuff. I would go on to text him that night about my day.

Last week I visited my son at Boston College, at his dorm. He said he was completely moved in but needed a desk chair, and our neighbor had been about to throw a perfectly usable one in the dump. My son is 19 and a political science major. He is taller than his father and in better physical condition, though not in as good condition as I was at his age, a little doughy, soft at the haunches, with round, flabby love handles despite a well-toned upper body and core. At Boston College, he minors in Libertarianism, and the two of us discuss what to do about the state of Liberalism in this country. There are people at his school, he tells me, he just wants to pummel. “FAGGOTS!” He sometimes shouts, mid-sentence, even mid-word, a kind of Tourette he has developed since college, which brings his face to shuddering, reddening, then cooling, like a coal, eyes shooting off past me, just over my shoulder, then gradually holding in that phantom direction, as if some enraging and fearful vision squeezes him like a whole-body cramp, then slowly releases its grip.

Bringing the chair to his room, I walked in on him having sex. He was having sex with a girl in the doggystyle position, facing away, so I could only see his ass, her ass, and the back of their heads. I noticed his hair had been cut in an immaculate fade since the last time I saw him. I made an awkward “o” with my mouth and closed the door as quietly as possible. That night he was crying in my lap, apologizing, saying I never should have seen that. Finally I told him all young men experience this. My old man, in my Yale days, walked into my room while I had 3 girls naked at once. I felt ashamed until he told me that his old man walked in on him, his old man on him, and on and on. Of course, this was a lie to console him, and it worked.

I am a very smart man. Always have been. In middle school in the 70s, my best friend was a retarded kid who I would beat up as often as possible. He would try to fight back, but I was too big and strong. I would push him to the grass, put his arms around his back! The fights would often be over wiffle ball games. If I won, he would throw the bat at me! So I would get the bat and chase him throughout the yard! His yard went into the woods, and I would chase him in there, beat him up until he was moaning in the dirt!

I would laugh because he mixed up b’s and d’s. I was always at the house when his parents were fighting. There were several theories that accounted for his retarded state. One, he fell out of a shopping cart three feet onto tile floor as an infant. Two, when he was three, his head was half eaten and clawed into by a Rottweiler. One time he locked me in the shed in his backyard. It was so dark. I was so angry!