Flash

THE PROBLEM WAS STARTING by Alex Behr

April 21, 2019

The problem was coming up with reasons to scoop rice on the plate one more night. The stove worked. She could boil water. Pasta. Rice. Pasta. Rice. Boil and pour and scoop and swallow. The problem was the streetlight. The streetlight leaked through the blinds, and she could put the extra pillow over her head, but she feared the nightmares. She waited until the birds started singing or squawking or whatever they did at 4 a.m. from branches the cat couldn’t reach.

The problem was her son: she forgot to smile at him. But she scooped the rice. She scooped the pasta. She scraped off the leftovers and filled and emptied the dishwasher. She forgot to shave her legs. There’s hair on her toes. The problem was the weather forecast cycling through the months, and the egg yolk and wine glass stains on the tablecloth. The pieces of dried cat food stuck to the linoleum. The problem was she couldn’t delete the voice-mail messages from her ex-lover.

The problem was that photo of her on his phone (and hers), where she sits on his kitchen chair with orange peels balanced on her nipples. Her tits look fine, but she has bags under her eyes and looks demented. What is happy? This? Coming off sex drugs for the first time in years (divorce, you know) is like coming off cocaine addiction: but she never was an addict. She only saw them on TV.

The problem was the orange peel photo somehow getting on her son’s friend’s Instagram account. (She never locks her screen.) She wasn’t a follower of her son’s friend, Josh, but she was on the PTA with Josh’s mom, Nancy. She got an urgent text message from Nancy through Instagram with the photo—a black bar over her eyes, and one over her tits. Nancy was Christian. Nancy sent a sad-face emoji with it and had typed many words, but by then the phone was thrown against the wall and the screen had shattered.

Oh, my god. She ran upstairs. Her son was in bed, under the covers, though it was the afternoon. The blinds were down. His phone was powered off, a bad sign. “I have to quit school. I hate you.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“I can’t stop thinking about you having sex.”

“Don’t think about that!”

“I can’t help it. It’s in this part of my brain,” he pointed to his right temple, near a large pimple. Her son was fourteen, and growing so much he went through two boxes of cereal a day, but he still had a stuffed bear under his pillows.

“You shouldn’t think about me having sex. It’s gross,” she said. “Do you think about Dad having sex?”

“I don’t worry about him.”

He refused to go to school. He hit tennis balls over the back wall into the Georges’ pool. She watched him from the screen porch. It was easier to be silent with her son, too. She replayed the dead sex in her mind. The brain lit up the same parts through memories as if they were happening. Her ex-lover promised they would forget each other. He got colder the more she cried. She wondered how memories shifted and moved to different parts of the brain. Like clothes in a dry cleaners.

Late-night Google was her companion. Dopamine and acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter, helped form memories and damned her to nightmares. Her ex-lover said she was exquisite. He’d had cataract surgery; he couldn’t see her clearly. Did she end up in a Mary Gaitskill story on purpose?

The whole thing, all thirteen on/off months, was like having sex in a hospice, waiting for the death tone, but in this case the music was the krautrock group Can. They met in her ex-lover’s four-poster bed, whenever the wife stayed at her sister’s, or hotel rooms with wrought iron bedframes. Yoga straps. Useful. Do anything. Don’t leave marks. He can bruise. You can’t. Don’t look when his phone lights up. Don’t assume others. We are holes.

Her son didn’t go back to school. Everyone he knew had seen his mom’s tits. She told the school counselor she would homeschool him. Instead, she bought them two prime tickets to see the Australian Open, blowing out the last savings from the divorce.

She’d lost language during sex. Language rushed back on the plane with crying babies. Her son’s head rested on the fold-down tray table, while air currents buffered the plane above clouds. A red gash between them. Only in the air did people walk up and down aisles with blue pillows around their necks. She’d had a pain in her shoulder for months, during the sex thing, and her left hand would go numb at any thought of him, or any story that required empathy.

When the wife came back for good and the marriage closed down, he said it might still open for others, but not her. The parts that want to come close and insert into other parts ... that he would put the same parts into strangers, and them in him, and it would be the same release as with her. That is one clue. But he memorized her taste.

She’d almost left her purse and iPhone by the charging station at the gate. She forgot to pluck the dark hairs on her chin and didn’t monitor her butter intake. The problem was her ex-lover’s last email. He’d love to be friends, but casual. The words vibrated on her new screen. He has no headroom because this is the worst, most harrowing time he has had so far with his wife. He wants her to be a friend who won’t care about him. She—with the perfect tits (maybe the wife’s are too)—is sincerely great, but he is not coming on to her. Gifts are forbidden: friends don’t send friends chocolate.

She had to scrape her skin off and grow new skin, reconstruct her body from the nights of drinking scotch, being thrown on the bed, dozens of times, but never food in the fridge. Cookbooks of the married kind. Never opened. Don’t spill lo mein on the sheets.

Before the flight she’d texted, No, we can’t be friends, and more words in anguish, and a few clever things, and he texted, Peace. Healing. Respect. And his initial. In case she forgot.

He bites her all over in a public park. He wants on the Fuck Train, and then he wants off. His head is on a stake. The problem are all the skulls, lined up on stakes, the sweet procession of ex-lovers, and now one more.

A baby was wailing behind them on the plane. She said to her son, in the chill, “Should we kill the baby?” She tested out her old personality. Could she mother again?

He beat on the tray table with his knuckles, listening to Queen. Bopping his head. Took out his ear buds. “What?” She repeated herself. She hated doing that.

“Think you’re funny?” her son said. “Think you’re funny about killing a baby?”

“He’s crying.” But she laughed. It felt. Good. She woke every morning feeling dead. Her secret. She monitored the icon of the plane on the map of the Pacific, not letting herself think of what would happen if it, and them, fell.

“Did you know when you were little, we put the toilet seat up on an airplane, and you put your balls right where men pee?” She would crawl out of this bad thing.

“That’s sick. That means my balls have been to exotic places.” Her son showed her his phone. “If it’s 11:59 a.m. in Melbourne, tomorrow, why can’t they predict the future for us?”

MEALS OF OUR CHILDREN by Will Gilmer

April 19, 2019

I put chicken breasts next to the eggs to thaw and wonder if these eggs were born from the birds whose bodies will become my dinner. I pull out oil from olives that will never become trees and baby bean sprouts who will never know pods of their own.

I make double in case Trevor decides to come down for dinner. I know it’ll matter on how many pills he took, how much he slept today, and if he’s even here. When he vanishes I “run the circuit”, drive from flop house to flop house scanning over the buffet of now familiar faces until I find his.

Each time a little more of him is gone, consumed by a hunger no home cooked meal can sate.

Gnaw marks, like the ones on his old teething ring, appeared when the doctor gave him Tramadol after hurting his shoulder during the Homecoming game. Incisors scars ran up his arms when they moved him to Norco after X-Rays showed a labrum tear. Now I’m losing him, one mouthful at a time, as broken needle teeth pile up next to the burnt spoon on his dresser.

I try to make him unappetizing; season him with love, baste him with therapy, dredge him in rehab. But he was too tasty from the start.

I know the day will come when I’ll run the circuit for the last time. I’ll find him like leftovers; cold, flavorless, forgotten. In those dark hours after the “I’m sorrys” and the “If there’s anything I can dos”, after the hushed whispers of “He should have been a better dad”, it’ll lick its lips and come for me.

I’ll make the perfect dessert.

SIX FEET, BLEEK, AND BURIED by Exodus Oktavia Brownlow

April 15, 2019

Six feet could be ten feet.

Six feet could be sixty.

Six feet was not a lot. Six feet was one of him.

It starts with an ending.

Bleek, a man with big hips. They curved against the box. And he saw their fullness. The mirror reflected. Lying, they looked more grave. And he understood why. Why they gave him such looks. Why they envied his curves.

Six feet could be ten feet.

Six feet could be fifty.

Six feet was not a lot. One new fridge—a big box.

Bleek had an old iPhone. With service still intact. It was safe on his chest. No chance of slipping down. The place was un-spacious. His span, stunted, no chance. One small mercy, a fan. The taste of air was sweet.

Six feet could be ten feet.

Six feet could be forty.

Six feet was not a lot. One thing of Bubble Tape.

His ragged breath, cut off. His cracked inhales, deprived. Fairy-princess music. He fumbled with the phone. Sickening sweaty hands. It was so very hot. So very hard to breathe. The sound had been a text. And he knew it was them. Was the music a jape? Was it reassurance? Or a cruel reminder? Bleek could not decide which.

Six feet could be ten feet.

Six feet could be thirty.

Six feet was not a lot. It was just some inches.

He read literature. “How are things going, friend?” And Bleek replied, “Just fine.” “This downtime is quite nice.” A lightning fast response. “Haha, now that’s funny!” They praised him from above. “You’re fucking funny, friend!” Bleek sent an emoji. The impish kind, slant eyes. He added, “I know this.” A thumbs up and time down.

Six feet could be ten feet.

Six feet could be twenty.

Six feet was not a lot. His walking span was that.

They tossed him in the box. Calling him every name. Freaky-Faggot-Fucker. Short men threw him inside. A complete set of six. One had his long left leg. The other had his right. One had his long right arm. The other had his left. One had his nice-sized head. And one short man just watched. They dropped in a small fan. They dumped in an iPhone. They closed the box’s lid. They buried him alive.

One group of fans watched him. He watched the six men back. Was it his height and heels? Was it his curves and jeans? Was it his femaleness? Bleek could not decide which. “Excuse me, friend,” said one. The man held up something. “Self-lighting mirror, friend?” Bleek studied the small man. He had on a Lowes’ vest. Bleek posed in the mirror. His reflection glowed back. “Absolutely,” Bleek said.

It ends with an onset. Bleek pursued a new fridge. His steps devoured floors. Lowes had not been prepared. His hips swayed side to side. His heels clacked and sought praise. And his mouth chewed tape gum.

BUMMING by Chelsea Harris

April 14, 2019

We’re outside the corner store bumming smokes off each other. He’s a redhead, says he’s got a bad habit of picking his face. The whole thing covered in craters. Our friend shows up, Andy. He’s got something to show us. We take a drive.

Up the road there’s a car. Totaled. Hit a tree. We get out of ours and I slam the door, hard, a privilege. There’s someone inside the wreck. A crumpled napkin. A pair of puckered lips. Andy tries to pull her out but her body has been deflated. I poke at the airbags. She’s dead, the redhead says. He isn’t wrong. We head back to Andy’s, a real shithole. He gets a beer, leaves his fridge wide open. We join him out back, on the porch. He says, I look at it two ways. Either we do something with the body or we don’t. Redhead smiles, his fingers scratching at a fresh one on his cheek, What did you have in mind?

Before I knew it we were hauling her onto the pavement. Her hair matted in jellied blood. Arms twisted up like a pretzel from the fair. Her eyes had popped from the impact. Face swollen. Andy jabs at her sticky thighs with the toe of his boot. What now? I ask. They scoop her up by her arms, drag her to the edge of the woods. Redhead hocks a loogie back towards the car. Squeezes a big one by his eyebrow, rubs the goo between his fingers. I tell them we should leave her. I tell them we should call the cops. They both laugh, turn around to look at me, nothing but a Barbie, a toy for them to play with. Don’t be a pussy, they say, Check her glovebox. Inside I find some money, a joint, a weathered photograph. It’s of her and a woman. They’ve got their arms draped over each other like a shawl. They’re laughing. I shove it in my back pocket, take the joint over to the boys.

It takes them an hour. Their hands choked in blood. Redhead’s got it all over his face in big smears like jam on toast. They leave her body, the hole in her chest clogged, her clothes in a heap beside her. We drive back to Andy’s, the radio buzzing. Redhead holds it in his lap like a puppy. They roll down the windows, barbed gusts of wind slashing my face. The night a hole, waiting to swallow me up. When we get back, Redhead plops it on the kitchen table. A gummy, tacky mess. A wad of chewed gum. A punctured water balloon. The boys take turns snorting snow. I sit against the wall, the clock above me pulsing to the beat of itself. My shoes stick to the kitchen tile. Want some? Andy asks. Redhead blows snot into his hand, wipes it on the back of his jeans. I join them at the table.

We wake to sirens. Our bodies spliced together on the floor. I pull a sweater over my head, gather my hair into a bun. Before I have time to stand Andy is by the freezer, his head buried deep inside, a fog of frost folding over him. I feel Redhead behind me, his presence a cloud suspended over the back of the couch. He puts his hand on my shoulder. Time to play, he says, silent enough that only I can hear it.

On our way out of town we pass her. A string of yellow tape tacked up around her body. A tow truck in the midst of hauling her car away. We listen to the news on the radio. Redhead and Andy snicker in the front seat. We pass exit after exit, every sign a blur. Three hours in we stop. A rest area. The boys pull the cooler out of the trunk. Open it up. Touch it, Redhead prods with a smile. His teeth are brown, gums bright red, the toilet after a period shit. He grabs my arm, yanks me close. Come on, it’s got special powers. Andy laughs. I pull myself away, away from them, away from the car. You’re a fucking pussy, Redhead coos. Andy runs at me, eyes thumping like a drum. I race towards the bathrooms, hoping I can lock myself inside, but I’m too slow. His hand catches my wrist, nails scraping my skin like hot iron. His way of branding me. He pulls me to the pavement, pins me down, climbs on top of my chest. His face plump with rage. He socks me once, then again. My head goes numb. Vision dim. I hear Redhead slam the trunk shut, feel them scoop me up, toss me back inside.

We make it to a motel outside of Denton. All of us pressed into a full-sized bed. The boys strung out, their hands on my thighs. The TV blinking a scramble of shifts in front of us, the bed illuminated in a blue pixel haze. I reach for the remote. Outside, Andy’s car is on fire. I hear a boom, glass bursting onto the pavement. People yell, their voices strangled by the flames. The motel manager knocks on our door. Three long whacks. I scurry off the bed, out from underneath them. They roll over to face each other. Redhead’s got a few new ones busting from his forehead. A cluster of fresh eggs. The motel manager tells me I better get dressed and get down there, tells me he’s already called 911. I shut the door, look down, untamed pubes erupting from my panties. Andy sits up, wiping his eyes. I take a beer out of the fridge, park myself beside him, offer him a sip. The cooler is in the car, I say, waiting, holding my breath. Redhead stirs behind us. Andy takes another drink. I expect it to hurt, but I barely feel a thing.

ETYMON STREET VIEW by Mike Corrao

April 8, 2019

She (subject) receives a note which says, “I am without past.” On the backside is a photograph of a street sign: Roberta Ave. The crossroad is obscured. What used to be green is now dull and graying. Its metal spine curves to the left. Backgrounds are warped by time. The subject is tasked with determining the origins of this symbol. Finding what has been vacated of context. Erasures performed without audience. Certain criteria are arranged to flesh out her process. Suites are dressed in ethernet cables and blue light filters. Rounds of copper are blanketed in rubberized shells. She moves through a set of localized databases. Dragging her feet along the surface of the excavation site. Playing with direct keywords and terminology. Each result yields answers specific to its location. One meaning does not proliferate into the next. One prominent figure does not name a second street after themself. In Waukesha, Wisconsin she finds a Roberta without a source. The avenue appears without momentum, emerging quietly from a larger grid. Harrison, Frame, Wabash, Estberg, Douglass, Roberta, Coolidge, Hoover. Incipit formulas and procedures are unveiled:

All names have an origin. If they are one word, they will come from one place. If they are many words, they will converge from many places.

In the case of the former, said source might be of significance to specific people involved in its creation, zoning, or development. Specific Robertas. Those famous or related.

If the name has no origin here (which it does not), then its origin might arise from better hidden minutiae. Roberta who performed a charitable act. Significant strangers. Offhanded mentions of artists or architects. Misheard introductions.

When a street is unimportant, that is to say, not worth thoroughly documenting, it might appear to abruptly jump from not existing at all to having existed forever. Somewhere between the years of 1974 and 1986, Roberta Avenue is conceived.

An unspecified individual (under government employ) signs forms that are assumed to exist and names the street after someone (something, somewhere) for some particular reason. The individual then shifts interest to another street and loses any tangible connection to Roberta.

Over time, the relationship between land and language become obscured. What was once straightforward can quickly spread into endless and ever-changing labyrinths. The entropic nature of duration disrupts these pathways. A mountainside road becomes Silver Lake Drive. A coastal boulevard becomes Pine Street.

What is left is hard to identify. She sways through luminous corridors. “My tactility is measured in lumens.” Her hands collapse around strands of frayed monitor hair. What is visible is rendered haptic. What is spoken is rendered real. New data accumulates. Particles of dirt climb from key to nail bed. Neural structures materialize in the periphery, but again this etymology is without its source. Metonyms form chains, linking from part to whole. From whole to greater whole. Roberta extends her reach across liminal spaces. Ennui in posture. Dancing around the virtual ballroom. “Your physiology is tested for anomalies.” White text crawls across the screen, but she does not pursue this lead. Instead, she continues her excavation. Old web pages map outdated countrysides. Where roads crawl through unwieldy topographies, each hill flattened and repurposed.

She skims a series of land acquisition and zoning documents. No new information comes to the surface. Phone calls lead to answering machines and non sequitur transfers. Landlines form matrices under guise of the rhizome. Disembodied voices dictate a lipid yawn. Keys displaced by an external pressure. She sifts through prophetic audio files and CCTV footage. The natural slouch of the human physique makes her nauseous. Each figure that wobbles across the monitor. The slow pan of the camera. “Towers form under veil of ash.” She returns to the photograph. Searching through image aggregators and video archives. Long-dead strangers construct each house in zig-zag patterns along the avenue. Surveys form jagged plots of land. She again shifts focus, moving from historical evidence to abstract representations.

Foreign documents rise out of the engine. Where dataplasm has begun to coagulate. Radio waves are dragged under the surface by spore densities “I speak to you as if we have not spoken before.” But this is a lie. There is a familiarity in the candidness of the white text. “We reconvene after the fires are out.” Roberta Ave consumes its own identity. The machine feeds on its own afterbirth. Nourished by the infrastructures which reveal its parentage. Clergymen divinate the body in paraffin. In this web of connections, each thread has been severed. White text mocks with conspiratorial glee. “You see only what has been present.” Phantom limbs caress her interior, feigning their introduction. In which these new appendages might continue her search while she is away—passive and unconscious.

Roberta Ave taunts her with hints of information. “SUBJECT gifts [redacted] namesake to new passage.” The sign mutates. The metal spine straightening its posture. Anachronistic compulsions render previous data collecting methods obsolete. Street names rearrange themselves. Harrison, Roberta, Estberg, Douglass, Coolidge, Hoover, Frame, Wabash. Script removed from its plate. She fears that each name is without purpose, without origin or incipit. There is no event to create this creature. It stumbles haphazardly through time, appearing before and after its predicted creation. She finds obscured photographs and scrawled notes.

Computational deities form a new lexicon. She watches as they reorient each previously scanned and cleared database. Roberta Ave disappears from familiar places, and reappears in previously unseen alcoves. The machine unhinges its yaw. And the subject is gifted the phantom limbs that she has been promised. New appendages climb from her hips and shoulders. Anatomy expanding / Exoskeleton forming. She feasts on etymon. With tendrils latching to electrical currents and expanding the circumference of the circuit. Molluscular mouth siphoning power for the ever-growing mechanism. A new praxis must be organized. Where these phantom limbs may continue working through unconscious states. Collecting and categorizing the mass of data as the body lies dormant. She allows these sentient extensions of her self to carry on through intermission.

THE FIRST TIME I PERFORMED by Benjamin Niespodziany

April 7, 2019

The first time I performed in Russia was under the direction of the king. His daughter's best friend's wedding was held in a refurbished factory that once made statues of the great whirling dervishes. I was the third piece of the matryoshka at the wedding, jumping out of a cloud once the song started to play. The fellow who fell after me broke his leg, and the rest of the event was a medical disaster. The king got drunk. We still got paid.

The first time I performed in Penn Station, an overweight man asked me to be his wife. He said he had a basement down the street that was just for me. My top hat grew full of spare change, and an eyeless woman snatched it. She hopped on the next train just as the doors closed and showed me her dead white eyes. The rats fast scurried up my shirt. I ate a napkin, swallowed a receipt. I slept on the floor and dreamed about warmth.

The first time I performed on a beach in Vietnam, I passed out. Woke with nightfall, covered in sunburns. The local entertainers told me to wrap up head to toe in clothing. They wore bandannas over their faces and asked for fast massages. I took off the next week and soaked in aloe vera. Plucked fruit I had never seen from a tree I could hardly reach. I bathed in a cave while the locals prayed about King Kong's promised return. A rude man in my canoe ate my shoes then offered me coffee. I laughed at a three-legged calf. I deserved it. The sunsets were so damn beautiful, less cheap than the noodles.

The first time I performed at the circus, I was a lower-level balancing act. Most of us were hungover, unsober, tip-toeing gracefully into our next sip. I slipped into a spin but caught myself and avoided disaster. No one but the director noticed my error. I was never asked back. As I left, I said farewell to the lion as it ate the trapeze artist's vibrator inside of his cage, a cage nicer than mine.

The first time I performed my last performance was earlier today. The sky was gray, vacant of both sunshine and stars. I was flawlessly processing the Macarena on a tight rope when the opera house caught fire. At first, everyone cheered, thinking it part of the show, but when the song went silent and I properly screamed atop the balance beam, the audience knew it was real. We are all outside now, wrapped in firefighter blankets, watching the building burn, the ash dancing with the already damp sky. It felt like the end of a black and white movie but with fewer cigarettes. I put in my resignation and waited for the curtain to close.

LITTLE SISTER, WHY HAVEN’T WE HEARD FROM YOU? by Timothy Boudreau

April 4, 2019

We remember the shy teenager who visited aunts and uncles with a novel and a piece of knitting. The adult in an over-sized sweater, huddled in a corner over a cup of tea.

Though separated by ten years we had similar interests and for a time considered ourselves creative people.

We always meant to collaborate. What happened?

Especially now I feel you may have insight to offer. Wisdom from a place unknown to the rest of us.

Thus enclosed find a few ideas. Feel free to alter them in any way. Merge your memories. Melt your vision over mine like caramel over an apple.

Our story about a brother and sister. Begin as children, the brother thirteen, the sister three, sitting in his lap with a book. Enchanted castles, blue cheerful moons, talking animals, silver stars shining. His eyes on the page, her head tilted to watch him as he reads.

A sense of trust. A sharing of words and imagination. Her then soft hand on his knee. Her shaking laughter, curls bouncing, when he mimics the animal sounds.

We must allow ourselves to make brave mistakes. There will be opportunities for lyricism. There should be a place for deep feeling.

Her heart. A condition she was born with. Poor circulation; its inefficiency. Later this might be a metaphor for other things.

The essay she writes in her single semester at UVM, detested by her sour coven of dormmates. Her brother tries first to bully her into believing it isn’t any good. We must tell it from her side. Stress its shimmering quietude. Its common sense and strength.

Sister, while you consider this know also that Uncle Fred and Aunt Josie miss you terribly. Mother awaits word. She sits near the phone while looking out the kitchen window. Lights a candle; listens for the wind.

In our story perhaps the brother finds for a time a female companion. Jittery, frail, tongue-tied with strangers, his hands fluttering birds—yet still. The family at a loss how to explain his good fortune. Sensitive to his sister’s loneliness, when he calls he tries not to sound giddy.

It would be realistic to write a scene after the brother’s companion breaks it off. The sister is called, a sobbing message left. He mangles and repeats the phrase, But I didn’t do anything wrong. The words likely unintelligible due to the sobbing, though he’ll never know if his sister listens. Or if she does whether able to understand.

The sister calls some months later.

“I’m sorry but I can’t be there. Seeing Mom now makes me crazy. I have to get away.”

“Away” is a series of apartments in towns no further than an hour distant. “Away” is a bedroom to which she returns after work to read and knit, as a wind rattles the windows.

On long winter nights she masters a variety of stitches. Cabled, seed, herringbone. Waffled, cross, garter, farrow. Dreams of the undulating line formed by a succession of purls; knit stitches in mounded V’s.

Little Sister, as you read these understand we’re trying everything. Mother’s idea to spend time in your favorite places. At the Reading Room in the Prescott Library; on the bench next to the birdbath; along the winding path through mother’s birches where we try not to imagine you as a fallen leaf fading into the forest floor.

The sense of dislocation, a misplacing of years, when the older brother at last visits one of her apartments. After not having seen or spoken to her. She has called because she needs money. Her building is dark, shabby; the apartment cramped. Around the living room saucers with crumbs and saucy smears. Empty wine bottles under an end table with cracked legs.

“I’m working again.”

“I’m glad to hear.”

She asks, “Are you still at the office?”

“Yes.”

“Do you still hate it?”

He spends at most an hour. The sister is experiencing various ailments and takes miscellaneous prescriptions. She wears several sweaters. Her hair is gray at the temples though she is twenty-eight. The brother’s hair entirely white.

“The blue and white pills are for my heart. They regulate the pulse.”

“What are the yellow ones for?”

“Anxiety.”

Her skin a pellucid blue the paleness of water-reflected moonlight.

“Do they help?”

“No.”

Had we known your heart was as serious. We worried but didn’t know it was worse than suspected.

We swear we would’ve been there to put our arms around you.

Near the end of our story he runs into his sister at an outdoor event. She wears a paisley blouse and skirt; she is drunk, perhaps high. Hair short, wrists and shoulders tattooed, wearing sunglasses though rain threatens. Her fingers sketch intangible shapes in the air. She is with an older man with a cane, shawl and silver medallion. He is charming, in fact riveting. The brother knows at once that they are involved.

The man’s handshake is firm. “Ah, the brother. I’ve heard so much.”

After they part she watches her brother’s bent figure walk away. “Bye now. See you never.”

Little Sister, we wonder about your modes of communication. Mother’s clock that mysteriously stops and starts; inexplicable slamming doors; phenomena of other kinds. We want to believe these are signs.

We can’t be sure the extent of the powers you’ve grown into. We wonder by what hidden currents you’ll arrive, via what vivid strikes of multi-colored lightning. Some of us are afraid but we feel sure you’ll make the attempt.

No reason for our story to conclude with her body in bed, limbs splayed, eyelids frozen open, tongue visible between parted lips. But the family has read that approaching the final moment the dying sometimes experience an enveloping warmth and comfort. An immersion in an embracing light. Perhaps later the opportunity to reach out for those left behind. Little Sister, please don’t tell us we’ve heard it wrong.

GENTLY USED by Olivia Holbrook

April 3, 2019

I sit outside on the hard concrete, feeling the cold seep through the fabric against my thighs, then through my skin, then to my bones. I hold the mug in my hands, they’re shaking. The warmth feels like something distant, warming my palms, making them sweat, while the air numbs my knuckles. And fingers. I see the light in the clouds, reflecting off of something that only my dilated pupils can see. It’s morning. But we’re still here, and I’m still seeing the patterns in the sky that are telling my brain, “you just might not make it to that dentist appointment later, babygirl." He’s passed out on the couch inside. If I force my eyes away from the colors dancing in the sky and look through the glass, I can see his feet dangling off the end, his skin blending with the mahogany wood as my brain keeps the world melting and twisting. I turn back and try to stare up into the sun, trying to take in all of that blinding beautiful light with my eyes that are so black and so tired from seeing what isn’t really there.

We had dropped at midnight, the acrid taste seeping out from under my tongue. For some reason I had expected the paper to melt, I know paper doesn’t melt, but still my throat had been surprised as the little square, sapped of its chemicals, forced its way down. I look at my phone, nine fifty four am. It has been such a long night. I can feel every minute spent shivering, then curled up in bed, our bodies pressed together in the hope that somehow his skin against mine would force our muscles to relax, our jaws to unclench, the shivering to stop. I can feel those minutes like wrinkles embedded into my skin. I spent so much time looking at the skin. The transparent skin stretched tightly over the writhing, pulsing veins running along my palms, now safely hidden away against the hot ceramic inscribed with: “Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself”.

I look down at my shoulder. I see the grittiness of my skin, a tell tale sign that I have been sweating, covering myself in salt and life and God it has been such a long night. My eyes, so tired of seeing, but forced open from the drugs still flowing through my brain, land upon lines. Thin white scars, relics from a time when I had not yet learned how to love myself through the pain.

I think of an old denim jacket, hanging up in a thrift store, the edges frayed, the blue, once dark and saturated with indigo dye, faded to something soft, and just a little patchy. The seams are puckering, curling the edges of the collar, from that time, or all of those times, that someone decided to throw it in the dryer rather than waiting for the thick fabric to air dry, telling themselves that it would just make the jacket softer, no harm done. The kind of jacket that makes you go: “wow, you sure have been loved” which really means: “wow, someone took shit care of you.”

I look down at my shoulder, covered in sweat, and hair, and little, smooth, white lines that cut through the pores, and I feel at once all of the hands that have kneaded their way into my skin down to my bones.

I think of thin brown hands with tapering fingers that reach down to a place untouched and push their way through the delicate pink skin all the way up to my chest where they hold on to my heart, only a little bit too tightly, until they decide they don’t want to anymore. They squeeze before letting go, leaving fingerprints that stay embedded in the flesh to always remind me that these hands no longer want me. I think of fingers with skin like mine, just a little too pale to be beautiful, and nails covered with chipping black paint, running along my neck down to my chest with a gentleness that I have never felt in my life. These hands make me feel like porcelain. I think of hands known by sight but never by touch before now, before we are both a little bit broken. These hands hit me and I learn that it is not safe to have skin made of porcelain when so many hands don’t know how to hold on to something without breaking it. I think of hands that are golden and covered in an ashy layer of chalk or salt. These hands are wide and strong and dig into the skin that I have turned into clay in the hope that it will not break again. They leave white fingerprints wherever they grab at me, trying to pull me closer without letting me get closer and I see that having skin like clay will only leave me shaped into something by hands that are not my own and I think that this might be worse than breaking.

I am the denim jacket, worn and faded and stretched by too many hands. My body, like all bodies, is used, not in the “you only used me for my body, you asshole” type of way, but in the way that makes old denim jackets so much more comfortable than new ones. I laugh as I look at the mug in my hands. How silly to suggest we could ever do anything in the bodies we are given other than to try to find ourselves.

WHO LET THE DOGS OUT? by Josh Olsen

April 2, 2019

Instead of buying a new costume for Kelso, our 7-year-old Aussie/Collie mix, we repurposed an easy one from years before, and strapped a small rubber jockey to his harness. All of the puppy parents at the doggy daycare costume party kept referring to Kelso as a jockey, although technically he was the horse in the horse and jockey relationship, but still I failed to correct them, not wanting to be the asshole who insists the green guy with the bolts in his neck is actually “Frankenstein’s Monster,” not Frankenstein. There were no fewer than three dogs dressed like Wonder Woman, and one as Robin (Batman’s young ward). Diego the Chihuahua was a piñata, Nigel the Corgi was a sushi roll, and Gladys the Leonberger, who was only 8 months old and already nearing 100 pounds, required no costume. The party was professionally catered. We ate sliders, potato salad, hand cut potato chips, and Chicago style hot dogs, and I discreetly shared my scraps with Kelso. There was not one but two live DJs, both of them dressed in flashy evening clubwear - one with a silver fedora - and they switched tracks as each dog was called to the stage. For Manny the Miniature Poodle, who was dressed like Beetlejuice and accompanied by his mother, who was either dressed like Winona Ryder’s character or just an aging goth, the DJ played “Jump in the Line” by Harry Belafonte. For Goose the Australian Shepherd, who was dressed like a werewolf, they played “Werewolves of London.” And when the DJ couldn’t find a suitable track to match the dog/costume combination, they played “Who Let the Dogs Out,” the innocuous Baja Men hit. The costume contest was judged by three local “celebrities,” one of which was the owner of a bakery (for humans), who wore a full Scooby-Doo costume. Most of the contest entrants won a prize, and even those who didn’t, such as Kelso, received a complimentary bag of treats. From start to finish, the entire event was little more than two hours long, and being the grand soiree that it was, almost no one shat on the floor.

SHARP PAIN by Andrew Ciaccio

March 31, 2019

You can get by just fine being dull. You can actually do very well for yourself.

My husband was an accountant in suburban Oklahoma at an office above an Applebee’s. He made six figures and drank from a coffee mug with Mount Rushmore engraved on it. He did this every day for 20-some years. Then on a snowy Tuesday, standing at the microwave in his windswept khakis, watching his leftover casserole go round-and-round, he lost his edge. Out the window, kids skated on a makeshift ice rink in the strip mall parking lot. The casserole boiled over then exploded as he walked out of the building, leaving the dead hum of fluorescents behind.

I was in the kitchen chopping onions for goulash when he walked in and took the knife out of my hand. He threw it in a 50-gallon black trash bag where it clanked against the other serrated knives already at the bottom. He moved down the granite counter, throwing in a butcher knife and paring knife. “Anything sharp has to go,” he said tossing in a peeler. I sat down at the table with tears in my eyes. “Damn onions!” he shouted back, disappearing into the garage with the bag slung over his shoulder.

He emptied the fishing hooks from his tackle box. He tossed in drill bits, needle nose pliers and a putty knife from his workbench. He dismantled the lawn mower and bagged the blades. Then up the stairs to my office. He riffled through my desk, took out a pair of scissors and emptied the stapler. He examined two pencils, threw the sharpest one in. He moved through dressers and drawers, shelves and crawl spaces. When he came to the last closet at the end of the hallway, he stopped. I watched the blood drain from his face like he’d been cut lengthwise. Out of a plastic bin, he brought up a pair of little pink ice skates. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. The blades went out of focus as the sharp realization of what was really lost came clear.