Flash

A SELECTION OF ESSENTIAL K(NOT)S by Anita Goveas

November 29, 2018

How to tie a Slip Knot

A simple loop in a piece of rope, this functions well by itself on the surface. It’s easy to undo, remake. The void it creates is reaching out for something, wanting purpose, to be entwined. Some may tell you it cannot be defined, but these are the people who tell tales of elusive mermaids and fiercely protective sea-serpents.

How to tie the Fisherman's Knot

Tie a loose knot with the working end of a rope around another rope. Best used to tie two separate but equal pieces together quickly, but not so quickly that they don’t know what they’re getting into. Can be pulled in two different directions to test it, such as thinking of long nights at sea with the world rocking under your feet versus searching for the salty taste of zephyrs.

How to tie the Backup Knot

If you have established the Fisherman’s Knot will probably hold, but it is inexplicably filled with yearning for something it cannot touch and can hardly describe, wrap the free end of a rope around an extra piece. Work the end back to the primary knot, for extra security against slippage such as dreams filled by the memory of water droplets against scales.

How to tie the Water Knot or Ring Bend

This is the best knot for webbing, for straps or harness, not for unexpected connective tissue developing between fingers or toes, or other throwbacks. Tie an overhand knot in one end leaving a measured length free, for a given definition of freedom that changes every day. Retrace the knot in the opposite direction and pull tight. Be sure to inspect for signs of slippage such as falling into stagnant water and not coming up for air.

How to tie the Constrictor Knot

If tied carefully, it grips to itself and cannot be undone. One mistake and many years of hard work can be released like an oyster expelling its pearl. Starting in front of the desired object, wrap from right to left, bind and cross over. Remember to make enough eye-contact for dominance but not so much that it makes you consider the impact of these actions.

Repeat until there is no searching, no dreaming, no falling. Revel in the rawness as the rope burns your hands. Ignore the voices chanting that the more you try and hold onto something that doesn’t belong to you, the more likely it is to find a way to slither out of your grasp.

ARBORIST by Lanny Durbin

November 28, 2018

Guy was just standing there in my backyard. He was hacking at the Sweet Gumball Tree that reached up through powerlines and my touched my neighbor’s roof with its old, outstretched arms. Chopping at it with an axe. I’d been watching him for fifteen minutes from my kitchen window. He’d barely gotten through the stiff bark. The spiky little gumballs that grew from the tree’s veins were raining down on him. He just kept chopping, chopping, chopping.

This was bullshit. I’d called off work again, spent the morning willing myself from the bed. I’d driven across town to the used video game store and bought a Sega Genesis. I was depressed and I was going to try to numb it by sinking into some old soft memory for the day, because that’s what you do sometimes when you’re depressed, you line up every futile gesture you can think of. I was going to play Zombies Ate My Neighbors until things cleared up or until my boyfriend came home and shamed me, whichever came first.

I watched him chop away. He looked so angry yet so determined. I decided I should find out why he was trying and so far failing to kill my tree.

“Why are you chopping at this tree?” I asked as I approached.

“S’posed to do it,” he said.

“Yeah, okay, but I mean...you know.”

It seemed that the man couldn’t be reasoned with.

“Who sent you?” I asked. I didn’t see a work truck around or any orange flags or a company logo on his grey T-shirt. He didn’t have the build of a city worker, that burly, greasy look. He was skinny and soft like me. “Do you have some ID or something?”

“No ID,” he said. “Listen, buddy, I work for the city. Tree removal.”

“But this tree doesn’t need removed.”

“Says who.”

“Me. It’s my tree.”

The man stopped hacking then. He considered me and considered the tree again. “Is it really anyone’s tree?”

“Mine. My house, my yard, my tree.”

“But think about it. You didn’t plant this tree. Way too old, look at it. Can you own something that’s already there? It’s just there?”

“What is happening right now?”

He wiped the sweat from his forehead and swung the axe at the tree again. I went back inside. I poured a glass of water and drank it over the sink. I stared at the brown tile behind the sink, wondered what the hell just happened out there. He had me stumped, no pun intended. I wondered if I was getting pranked. I sat down on the couch and tried to focus on the video game again. Still, the chopping continued over the digital bleeps. I poured another glass of water and went back into the yard.

“What about this,” I said to the guy’s back. “If the tree’s not mine then it’s not yours either. By your own logic this tree belongs to no man, so what gives you the right?”

He stopped and leaned against the axe while he reflected on my inquest. Finally he said, “Well, got me there.”

“I suppose,” I said. I handed him the glass of water. “Hot as hell out here.”

He smiled and drank up.

“Can I assume that you’ll stop chopping my tree down now?”

“I’ve already gotten through the bark though,” he said. “Would seem cruel to stop now. Listen, I don’t know what I’m doing here.”

“You’re telling me.”

“I thought this would do the trick,” he said, almost as he if he was just thinking out loud. “See, I don’t work for the city. It’s just, well, things aren’t going so good for me. I don’t know anymore. I wanted to be an arborist when I was a boy but now I’m too old to follow that dream, huh?”

“I don’t think arborists just chop trees for no reason,” I said. “They study them?”

“Study, chop down, what’s the difference.”

He looked like he could cry. I walked away and went into my garage. It was packed full of shit my boyfriend James and I had bought and never used. We’d come to the realization that there wasn’t anything left that we liked in one another, so we started buying shit. To fill the space, I don’t know, but now I understood this man in my back yard chopping my tree. In my garage there was a brand new axe we’d bought for some reason. I had to peel the plastic sticker off the handle.

“Know what,” I said to the guy when I returned. “I hate this tree.”

We started hacking at it together, one on either side. Maybe if we’d been better prepared we would have gotten one of those long, two-manned saws. We chopped together, the spiky gumballs raining down hard. Bugs crawl away, squirrels took the hint and hopped to another tree, birds wondered what the hell. The guts of the tree really started to show, pale and splintered. My arms were killing me already.

Still, it felt good. Something was loose inside again.

James came home from work and flipped. The guy and I shook hands and he walk on, axe over his shoulder. I think of him now when I see an arborist on the landscaping TV show and wonder if he’s okay. I think of him when I don’t want to see James anymore. I think of him when I wonder what’s wrong with me. I think of him, and I wait for him to come back so we can finish chopping down this fucking gumball tree.

TIME-EATERS by Kaiter Enless

November 27, 2018

“I don't have no problem.”

“Sure seem like you do.”

He shook his head, a fractional gesture, noticeable only due the couple's proximity.

“Well, I don't. Was you what started yappin.”

She folded her arms below her breasts, turning slightly away, staring at nothing, muttering, “Fine.”

“Yeah. It is. Why you being this way, Lyla? Ain't never was like this between us before. Now, all a sudden, you're constantly screwing up your face, hmph-ing all over the place, snapping at me for no good reason, constantly try'n ta start something...”

“Ain't try'n ta start nothing.”

“Good, cuz there ain't nothing to start.”

She made an expression that was midway betwixt the spitting-upon-of-disgust and the-self-indulgent-sigh-of-petty transgression. Harmon Kessel finished his frozen yogurt, threw it in the parking-lot trash can and turned to his girl with a expression she could not place and then fished out a cigarette and stuck it between his blood-red lips and stood smoking and watching the gulls turn circles in the thermals above the pavement.

It was one big cliché. A stupid and boring one, Harmon thought to himself with mild irritation. This venomous exchange and the countless ones that had gone before it. He was not a intemperate man but his reserve – like as every others – had its limits and in Lyla's constant scrapping he was finding his. He blew a circle of smoke up and out over the parking lot before the ramshackle plaza, proud he'd remembered how.

“We've had this conversation before, Bluebird, and before we had it, we heard it.”

She turned to look at him from the corners of her eyes. He didn't like that. The way she side-eyed him as if he weren't worth the fullness of attention, as if he were merely a speck of colorful paint, floating at the terminus of all perception.

“What are you on about?”

“It's the same argument I always hear from couples – that everyone hears – whether its from memories of my parents or from the parents of my friends or from my friends, newly-wed, or from some book or movie. I've heard it and so have you. I reckon people have been hearing it since they was able to do so. People arguing bout nothing. Eating up time. We're time eaters. Time eaters what pay no mind to whats on their plate. That's our problem as a species.”

She cracked an awkward smile, frailer and less broad than it used to be. He dearly missed the way she used to smile, a little slice of moon with the twin suns of her dark coffee eyes shining above it.

“Anyone ever tell you that you're strange?”

Harmon took a drag, considering. Nodded and spoke flatly.

“Bout once a week nowadays.”

“Can't say I'm surprised.” She was flipping through her phone now, less than half-listening. Harmon took another drag, his expression falling into a drab blankness. He'd meant the statement as a joke. She used to laugh at that sort of thing, at his dry, off-kilter humor drive by flat overstatements of the commonplace. Just two years ago she'd have been cackling like a hyena. Now she couldn't seem to tell when he was being serious or not. Harmon thought maybe in him some fault lay for that; maybe he was too serious, too tense on the thread of life, like as his father had said. He never smiled anymore. It was just his way. One of the gulls swooped down to the parking lot and pecked a greasy hamburger wrapper that some litterbug had left behind. Prodding with its baldish beak til it found a fry. As Harmon watch it abscond with its prize and flutter up into the shine he wondered why he couldn't feel sadness. Given the situation, it seemed appropriate; like as it would be the normal response. For all Lyla's accusations of peculiarity, Harmon had always considered himself a relatively normal person. Average in most ways. Average height, average looks, or maybe, a little above average looks, average job ghostwriting with under average pay, average build, maybe leaner than most. Lean but muscular. It was only when it came to his mind that any peculiarities began to manifest themselves, odd turns of phrase and archaic words which pleased his ear and so oft poured from his lips; ruminations on the state of things that seemed beyond all ken, save his own. His grandfather had once said that Harmon spoke like a man that were unweaving a secret loom that only he could see. The random girls at the bar thought it was “sophisticated,” their boyfriends “pretentious,” Harmon's amiable acquaintances just said he “talked funny.” He took a long drag of the fervid Fortuna and thought on the phrase “amiable acquaintances.” Most of what he had that were social were such. He reckoned he didn't have any friends. Not anymore. None save Lyla. Only she was different. Friend and lover. Sweetheart since high school. A bond worked for nearly 12 years. Most of the others he'd withdrawn from. He liked his solitude and hated hypocrites, whiners and backstabbers of every stripe and in his estimation the great writing mass were usually some combination of the aforementioned. His snail-like ways had never caused him any trouble, like some he'd knew who'd moan about being misunderstood. Most people weren't hard to understand and if one found oneself alone it was only for two reasons: because one were worse than all or because one were better and didn't seek to lead. Harmon knew he weren't the latter as the socially ostracized were merely the plaything of the moment for him, no different than changing a tire or scaling a blue gill. Just another thing to do. But he wasn't too sure about the former.

He looked away from the gull. Back to his girl.

She was still on her phone, drifting towards the passenger-side door.

“I've gotta meet, Serena.”

“Right, right. Art show.”

Harmon finished off his cigarette, dropped it to the blacktop and crushed it out beneath his heel with a faded serpentine hissing and then got in after the girl and drove out of the frozen yogurt shop where they'd shared their second kiss, the gravel sputtering beneath the ceaseless, half-deflated wheels of the battered 1990 Ford Escort Hatchback.

He looked over at her and smiled.

“I had a good time with you. Been too long, Bluebird.”

“Yeah.” She replied without excitement, gaze still fixed to her phone, as if afraid to look up. He guessed she was still talking to Serena or one of her other art school friends he'd never met.

His smile faded and he drove the rest of the journey in silence, smoking and tapping the ash out the crack of the window and watching it sputter in butterfly whorls into the oblivion-warp beyond the ambit of the roiling machine.

SURVIVOR! by Julia Tausch

November 25, 2018

The grouchy buildings of The Six, the dirty snow’s hectic dance – it was all far beneath me now. Keely, my thirteen year-old niece, had taught me to call Toronto “The Six.” She reeked of perfume that seemed to combine garbage with vetiver and beets but was surely expensive. The smell emboldened me – rot and beauty enmeshed. It blurred my warring worries and desires.

So far, I loved flying. The soothing keen of the engines; my seat a mini-empire, a customizable media-pod; the shiny dossier in my seatback pocket pregnant with a secret I was itching to share. I loved, instantly, the neighbours I was nestled between – a rumple-suited man with a sparse ring of gossamer hair, a woman with a large mole on her cheek in head-to-toe baby pink (sweat suit, eye mask, neck-pillow), both asleep since before we taxied out. I loved, too, the slim aisle of knobbly carpet between the banks of seats, the flight attendants gliding along, resplendent, serene, behatted.

I had to stop thinking like this or I might talk like this on TV. No one liked the type of person who said “behatted.” Partly I’d been spending time with Keely to emulate her guarded vocal fry. It sounded so lovely, like she had countless better things to do than finish her words, let alone her thoughts. If Keely had been chosen to compete on Team Togorna upon the pristine beaches of Laos she would simply drape her bikinied body over a log and wait while the other contestants wept snottily, suffered night terrors, sprained their ankles and yelled about rice. Then she’d saunter home with the million dollar prize.

But it wasn’t Keely with seven bright bikinis folded into neat knots in her backpack. It was me. Yes, it had been her who’d helped me pick them at some ungodly store on Yonge. Street where the squealing staff descended like jackals; it had been her who’d insisted upon the very thorough waxing her clique swore by. At thirteen. But this had seemed like a good time to follow her lead.

Over post-wax salads I’d spluttered “I can’t go! Who’ll take care of Nana? The new meds make her so withdrawn. She hardly talks and when she does...she told me about her and your grandpa’s final fight last night as if it were yesterday! If we just knew what it was, I’d feel better, but…Your mom can’t look after her, she’s so…busy. She doesn’t –”

Keely cut me off. “Oh my god,” she said. “Suzy? Don’t even stress.”

Now here I was with my bathing suits. What Keely had said had dug its little nails into my brainstem. I held a picture in my mind of her face when she spoke those words in the jubilant light of the juice bar: blank save for a crinkle of irritation and maybe, even as her eyes flicked back to her phone, a slight clench connoting concern. Hard to tell; therein lay the power. I carried it with me as we hurtled toward Bangkok. I would not stress.

An hour in I ordered sparkling wine and reviewed the waivers I’d signed, the big font disclaimers, the glossy photos in my dossier. The beach, the host, huts and tents from seasons past, old teammates hugging, robust again after their emaciating ordeals. Soon this would be me. In Bangkok I would meet Team Togorna, board a private jet, and fly to our secret locale. I sipped and the bubbles exploded, tiny pricks of pleasant pain against my tongue.

Last I’d drunk sparkling wine had been at Keely’s mother’s – my sister Kendra’s– wedding. During the dancing I’d plucked a ball of spun sugar off the cake and held it as I gazed out the window of the restaurant Kendra’s new wife owned – fifty-seventh floor of a bank building. I wept because the highway-coloured lake and red-eyed towers were at once so achingly beautiful and familiar as death; my sister had been, in her sparkling dress, like something of spun sugar herself; our mother wouldn’t take her dark glasses off; and Keely had ignored me all night in favour of some new goth cousins. I could never have imagined then slicing through that smoky sky.

But now! My seatmates snored lightly, the window gone the fuzzy gray of no-time. Service-summoning dings offset the engine’s low drone. Again I scanned the disclaimers. I didn’t do great on no food; probably I’d cry a few times. But no sleep? Please. I spent most nights awake, inhaling my shows (competitions only – you can have your teen moms), recording strategies in Excel. By week three I could predict the final two.

Some nights I drove the five minutes to my mother’s, held a mirror to her sleeping face, and waited for the fog. Just in case.

Other times I went to the 24-hour gym. At thirty-seven I had a slamming body in spite of my dead-end desk job plus a brain that pulsed with the will and tools to win.

Don’t even stress.

When I closed my eyes, I saw it. The crew erecting their equipment like spindly totems behind a scrim of blowing sand. The wavy-haired host in his cabana, studying the games and their rules. The craggy, reddish cliffs hugged by humps of verdant jungle, blurred at the edges like so much smudged pastel. The elegant swath of sea – now turquoise, now beige and irate. Though my journey had just begun, I could see, too, the end, as it actually came to pass. When I stood for hours on a stump – no mother on my mind, abs engaged, ignoring the sweat that snaked around the buttons of my sun-singed spine until immunity was mine. When I addressed the council for the final time – just as I’d rehearsed back in The Six – the steamy jungle redolent with freshness and decay. When they listened and I won and could, at last, make it rain.

alone i am always smoking by Clare Schneider

November 21, 2018

Tobacco companies support nicotine patches because, studies have shown, that without counseling, nicotine replacement therapy hardly ever works. Tobacco companies view all “nicotine products as a way to support smoking”

i quit smoking for you and then you left me. this seems unfair.

Girls who start smoking before age 15 are nearly 50 percent more likely to get breast cancer

a woman watches me intently as i smoke outside a restaurant

a man walks past me while i'm on the phone smoking

someone sees me smoking in my car and rolls up their window

my drunk uncle rubs my shoulder after i go outside to smoke

“you’ll lose that pretty complexion of yours if you keep doing that”

i am wearing a see-through shirt. A mother walks by me with her child, they are holding hands.

She yanks him close to her, like i might try and take him away. i remember i am smoking. i put my jacket on.

Secondhand smoke was first determined to be causally associated with lung cancer in 1986

Will fake coughs when we walk by a middle-aged man smoking by the post-office.

“Smokers are bad”

“well, they’re not bad, smoking is bad.”

“no, it’s bad.”

he can’t hold complex, apposing ideas because he is 7.

Ryan called me a horn-god. i mean, dog. And then left me. he left me!

and now i wear these stupid patches all over my back.

the patches big tobacco wants me to wear.

a man at the bar notices the patch peeking out from my shirt.

“what’s that” he says pushing it like a butt. i mean a button.

i have compiled a list:

20 percent more smokers quit after a $1 price increase

The more smoking kids see on screen, the more likely they are to smoke

Girls who started smoking before age 15 are nearly 50 percent more likely to get breast cancer

Studies have shown i quit smoking for you and then you left me

when i was 18 i got “you are a child of the universe” tattooed on me.

“who is you?” you ask facetiously.

i roll a cigarette. i smoke it out your window.

Last week on acid i threw my cigarettes out your window.

“i'm going to quit.”

The next morning i went and got my cigarettes from where they’d landed in the driveway.

my loves, i’m sorry, i will never leave you.

“drugs do wired things” i say gravely over coffee. “i mean weird.”

you cried and told me you were so glad i quit. you cried!

i think you cried because your dad died.

so glad, you wept.

but then you left me. so i’m not sure why you’re glad.

once when i was drunk and in Fiji i asked a man for a lighter but he said he didn’t have one. But he sat down next to me anyways. and he bought me a drink. and he agreed to go swimming in the ocean with me even though it was night time and he was cold. and he saw me in my underwear. and when he swam close to me i swam away. and he said hey wait. and i laughed. and when we got out of the water and i started to roll a cigarette he said: don’t roll another one, you just smoked one and i laughed but then he got upset: smoking isn't attractive. and i laughed. But then he got upset: you know its unhealthy, right and i already swam for you and you’ve smoked so much already tonight. and i laughed. but he got upset: it’s me or the cigarette. and i laughed but he was serious. he was so serious he screamed it at me: it’s me or the cigarette.

and i smoked the cigarette and it was so good.

Big tobacco, I will never leave you.

THE FILTHY OLD MAN by Connor Goodwin

November 16, 2018

The filthy old man crunched his hand and tossed an empty can over his shoulder, eyes on the road. It landed on a pile of other cans and started a noisy avalanche of aluminum. Some of the crushed cans were tied up in yellow plastic bags from Super Saver, but most were loose and littered the floor. When he had time, he’d take them to the can guy.

The can guy operated out of a parking lot. It was just him and a bunch of flies. The compactor looked like a tall semi-trailer. At the base was a conveyor belt that carried the cans on high. We called it the Stairway to Heaven. Heaven smelled like stale beer, like the old man’s winter coat before he got filthy. When he had time.

The filthy old man lived in a van. And the van, like the man, was filthy. No one would be surprised if, one day, the garbage men mistook the van for a dumpster and lifted it and shook its contents loose. Out would pour a never-ending waterfall of trash: cans, wrappers, newspaper, plastic bags, yellow paperbacks, scraps of paper, half-empty Gatorade bottles, hairballs, plastics of all kinds, spoons, coffee lids, magazines, yogurt cups, sun-bleached clothes, dirty socks, soccer shoes, baseballs and gloves, dirt, loads of boogers, Barnes and Noble receipts. Only one thing belonged and that was the ice scraper. The ice scraper, of course, was broken and frankly, ought to’ve been thrown away.

The filthy old man climbed atop his dirty gold van. He smelled Heaven. Then he nosedived down like a torpedo, curled into a tight cannonball, flipped round three times and stuck the landing. He thrust his arms skyward in triumph and out his raggedy sleeves flew dirty handkerchiefs and stained playing cards. Ice scraper in hand, he planted it like a flag and did a little jig once around. His swinging legs kicked trash in every direction. He then withdrew the ice scraper like Excalibur and batted and golfed away loads of cans in such a fury that he kicked up a cloud of dust.

When the air finally cleared, everyone could see the cherry he sculpted. The cherry was actually a pulpit. And from his mountaintop, the filthy old man surveyed the land. He leaned back and hawked up a loogie and slingshot it into an empty can of beans. Ping!

This signaled the sermon had begun. A nation of crusty men, with nowhere to go but around, gathered to hear his sermon. The filthy old man’s face was nothing more than a red scab - a scab he picked and picked and never let heal, like an irritable volcano. And boy he glowed. He was spitting fire from the pulpit.

The filthy old man’s sermon began: He who is filthy, let him filthy be still. And the crusties below shouted Amen! Then he recapped last week’s games and the crusties nodded knowingly. Some high-fived and some fell to their knees and wept. Then he lamented the price of gas and the dirty wars in the Middle East that hurt or helped Middle West ethanol. The crusties nodded along, Amen! He ended with a prayer and that prayer was a dirty knock-knock joke.

Then he shoved his pulpit off the peak and leaped aboard and rode down the trash mountain to join his crusty congregation below. A cloud of flies trailed in his wake. More converts.

He’d been to Heaven and back. Why not kick the can down the road.

COMPLACENCY DESCRIBED BY TEST SUBJECT 6 by Cavin Bryce Gonzalez

November 15, 2018

The terrarium has always been. It’s made of glass with a great mesh lid on top. A lamp provides warmth throughout the day. We were once scientists and art teachers and coffee baristas. Now we’re just people. Some still go by their name. Some go by titles. They call me Six because I was the sixth one to wake up here.

When the mesh lid is drawn back and The Hand reaches down from above to deliver food and presents we rush to the center, fight for our scraps despite there being enough. The youngest of us scuttle off with bread and grapes, the strongest take turkey legs and bottled wine. Often enough a quarrel ends in a draw, even the weak get a taste of luxuries like cheese and kiwi fruit.

Sometimes we’ll meet by the waterfall and talk about life before we were here. Stories are told of late night talks with friends and first sexual encounters. We like to discuss old sitcoms and favorite restaurants-- none of us know whether these are still active facets of the community we left behind but it’s all we have to remember. Stories about great canyons and tropical forests are told around fire pits. Here, we just have a couple dome houses and a giant wheel to spin around in. It smells like Home-Depot. The Doctor likes to pick up our bedding, composed mostly of shredded newspapers, and read the scraps of information out loud. We always get a kick about what’s bothering the outsiders; politics and celebrity gossip run rampant in headlines still. Imagine if they had to fight for their bread.

At first we wanted to leave, who wouldn’t? We missed our friends and families. We missed our movie theatres, our dogs, and local super markets. But eventually we realized it wasn't going to happen. Whoever wants us here will keep us here, and that’s fine. You might lose an ear or a finger, but still, once everybody is fed it’s not so bad. We have everything we need besides organized rations; friends, doctors, make-shift lovers, and even though our reflection looks at us from beyond the glass we don’t crave to be there anymore. Life inside the terrarium is fine, maybe even better. We have no bills, no appearances to keep up. There’s no pressure to have kids or get a degree. Things are simple. Primal, perhaps even evil when stomachs get rumbling, but incredibly simple. And that’s enough for us.

GARBAGE GIRL by Jules Archer

November 13, 2018

It's trash day. I know it by the cramps in my belly. Not the calendar on the fridge. Or the City of Evanston's website. Or my mother's finger, poked in the face of my father as a reminder to take out the trash because last night's rotisserie is starting to smell.

Once a month, ever since I turned twelve, my cycle's synced to the sound of the garbage truck. Not the full moon or the new moon or the tides. I cramp and menstruate on trash day. My stomach is like Adele, rolling in the deep. But I can't make a peep to anyone because I'm just a garbage girl in a recycling world.

From my bedroom window, I see the solid waste services truck outside. The awkward clang of its arm against plastic can. Aching cramps pulse in my hips, my lower back. The trash can is hauled high, and then dumped. Right on schedule, I bleed.

My mother takes me to a doctor. I tell him about the pain in my belly. She interrupts him to explain the problem with my reproductive organs to me. My mother says, The technical term for it is abdomen. Use medical terminology, Lucy. Use your brain. She takes my hand, presses it lower, near my hipbone, the curve of my pelvis. She slaps my flesh. Hard. She does it again. She sounds it out, says, This is your ab-dough-man. It's where your cramps live. It's where you try to be a woman. Make yourself one if you can.

The doctor watches from a corner. He prescribes only a muted smile. It's the same one my father wore when he left, because no shit, buddy, my mother's awful.

My cycle has changed. Sometimes the cramps arrive on trash day. Sometimes they come at the strangest of times. Like when my mother says to keep it the fuck down or get out of her face. Or the time I overhear a slice of President Trump's speech on TV. Or the day Molly McGrew laughs and announces to the class that my father really ran off with a barmaid. I take a swing at her head. The blood starts to gush out of me. Teachers gather. She's fine, I tell them. She's not the one bleeding.

I Google, what is the definition of trash?

From dictionary.com—

anything worthless, useless, or discarded; rubbish.
foolish or pointless ideas, talk, or writing; nonsense.
a worthless or disreputable person.

Milo, a boy from English class, kisses me, says he loves me. He touches me in nice places and shows me the messy tattoos on his hairless body. The shamrock for luck. The heart for his dead sister. The bed is soft, the room warm, and we take off our clothes. I lean in and bite at his lip very gently. And then I begin to bleed all over the bed. I am early, not due for another week, so perhaps this is a sign. Milo draws back, his face made miserable by nature. You ruined the mood, he says, and I tug on his hair and say, you're right, but it's better than getting ruined by you.

I come to think of my period as a little friend who tells me a monthly secret. When the boy with long hair promises forever, or a piece of litter blows across the ground, or when a college friend promises to pay me back, or when I visit my mother one weekend and she tells me to remember the time she almost ran me over, just think about that, Lucy, think about that, and all I can do is picture shoving her down the staircase, shoving a tampon down her loudmouth gullet, I take a breath. I close my eyes. I use my body. I let it work for me. Let it get me out alive.

Pads and tampons won't cut it any longer. Instead, I sit on the couch, bleeding alone, a rag between my legs, and ruin my pajamas. I send my professor an email. I ask to retake the chemistry test next week. If I leave the house, I'll drown the world. I watch my marmalade-colored kitten paw at the front door. Hear the rumble of the garbage truck. Usually, I'd make my way out to the sidewalk to wave at Ned, my residential curbside collector, and he'd say, Lovely Lucy, how's your new kitten, does she still cry at night, and I'd say, No, not today. Not anymore.

Over coffee, my father apologizes for leaving. Though it is my time of the month, I do not bleed (it holds off until later, when a customer at the pharmacy claims he never received his Xanax prescription), and I accept his apology. This worries me because I wonder if I rely too much on my body. If I try too hard to gauge the garbage of the world with my gut. But I know this is what the world wants me to do. Trick myself out of trusting myself. So they can be the last piece of trash to touch you.

The tattoo artist frowns at the drawing I hand him. He's handsome with a scruffy beard and bed head-like hair, and wears a bowling shirt embroidered with the name Scott. He says, Is this. . .? A tampon, I finish. I point near my hipbone. But it's a friendly tampon. With little arms and legs and a smile and everything.

The tattoo artist laughs. It's a laugh I want to crawl into. Earlier this week I saw him standing beneath the awning of the tattoo parlor. I liked the delicate way he flipped his butterfly knife back and forth, and now I want to see the way he wields a tattoo pen.

I ask, Can you do it?

He stares at me in awe. His eyes, a beautiful, chocolaty brown, crinkle. He grins, says, I can do anything. Where do you want it?

I hear my mother's voice in my head. Abdomen. Interrupting. Like I knew she would.

Right here, I say. I pull up my shirt. Jerk down the waistband of my jeans. I give my skin a light slap. Right on my belly.

The tattoo artist leans down. He studiously examines my stomach, up-close and with fervor. Runs petal-soft fingers over my hipbone. This looks good, he says, and his breath is so warm against my skin, he could steam open my ovaries.

On our wedding night, my husband dances me across the threshold of our honeymoon suite. His palm brands the small of my back. His hand curls around mine like smoke from a fire. Scott says, Remember that time I gave you a tampon tattoo and when I was finished, you cried? It was two years ago, but of course I remember. I kiss his lips, slip my hands into his pockets. You made me happy, I say. With you I knew I could always wear white.

I Google, What to do when trash collection service is interrupted?

Before bed, my daughter eats slices of Satsuma orange and drinks warm milk dashed with cinnamon. She strips off her pajamas, runs around the table naked. I crouch beside her. A tendril of juice runs down her pale Buddha belly. I wipe it away. All that innocence, all that wild. I suck the sweetness from my finger.

Do you love my tummy, mama, she says, rising on tiptoes to loop light arms around my neck.

To the moon and back, I say, telling her a line that is not mine as I watch Scott roll the garbage can to the curb for tomorrow's collection. A red sun backlights him, the falling rain, and I feel the way the blood collects hot down below, the way it readies itself for another day of trash.

SO COME BACK, I AM WAITING by Marston Hefner

November 12, 2018

“You won’t see me again.”

I thought she was wrong. This is such a small city. I thought I saw her at the farmer’s market. I thought I saw her at my yoga studio. She is everywhere I go.

Her name is Leah. She is the woman who causes me mental pain.

If you asked me if I loved her, I’d say of course. I wouldn’t even make exaggerated hand motions.

It is her, driving my car down the 101 after a weekend in San Francisco. I’m in the passenger seat listening to my iPod. She puts her hand on mine and speaks, but I can’t hear what she is saying. I pull off my headphones.

“Can you stop listening to music?” she asks.

“Sure.” I put my hand in her lap. I’m happy to be with her, but I’m also tired of being with her. It’s been a long weekend. We’re always moving when we’re together. Vacations are filled with activities. We equate movement with life. “I want you all to myself,” she says.

It is her, not dying but I think she is dying in the Emergency Room in Lake Arrowhead. She has a urinary tract infection that messed with her bladder or something. I’m sitting across from her dying face. She’s pale and smiling at me. Fluids move into her veins since she’s also dehydrated. She’s dying and I’m looking at her face and she’s smiling at me. I have to be strong. She has no time for the I-will-die-for-you part of me. She has no time for my depression. So I am the strong boyfriend, holding her hand.

Or it is her, at a Halloween Party at my father’s house. She’s dressed as Dexter’s victim, and I am Dexter. Her costume is great. She is exquisite. She has Saran Wrap around her naked body. We didn’t realize she won’t be able to pee in her costume until she was already in her costume. After a while, we go into my room so she can change. She pees and walks into my bedroom. I pick her up and place her on the sink.

It is her, watching Drunk History with me. We’ve been living at my father’s house for a few days, and we watch Dexter and Drunk History before we make love and then fall asleep. I order the usual fruit bowl for the two of us. A butler brings it in. We’re in bed, looking at a tv that seems too old to be in the room. We’re in a room with pink and white striped wallpaper. We’re in a room with light fixtures that are plastic and black. This was once my mother’s room, but I don’t recognize the room. I don’t recognize the house I’m in.

But with Leah, I am home.

Then there were those other times.

“I mean what kind of father would you really be?”

She felt the love story I wrote about her was too much.

She broke up with me for no reason and came back.

She asked, “But how can you be so certain about me?”

“I just am,” I said.

“I wish I had that.”

And if for some reason she were to cease to exist through a rare blood cancer—did you know someone is diagnosed with blood cancer every 3 minutes?—maybe she’d cease to exist in my head. Because every moment she is alive means there is an objective possibility that she will come back.

We have split 5 times. She has come back to me 5 times.

I am writing a book about my father’s death, but the book is really about Leah. Many times, I’ve written stories that have eventually happened in real life. I wrote about a man dating a woman in a wheelchair, and then I dated a woman in a wheelchair. I wrote about a man who was uncomfortable in an AA meeting, and now I’m in AA.

I wrote a book about a man grieving his father’s death as he falls hard for a woman named Leah.

When my father died, Leah sends me a text, even after I told her to never talk to me again if she didn’t want it to be romantic. She knows every time she reaches out to me, I grab on tightly. She writes her condolences. She says if I need an ear, there is hers. So I tell her I’d like her ear and to see her for coffee.

When I see her, she is shorter than I remember. It has been 4 years since seeing her face to face. She is always breathing heavy. She is always sweating. She pulls her hair from her face.

We walk. We go to an Organic Café/Dinner spot. We don’t talk about us. I am disappointed. It doesn’t seem like she feels anything for me.

But she tells me over the phone she loves me but I know she’s just in love with being in love.

The day after she breaks up with me.

A month later she texts me again.

“Can we talk?” she asks.

“Yes.”

“I like you so much and I’m afraid how much I like you. I’m afraid of what people will think. I want to take it slow because I’m going to be all in if this real. It feels so right on so many levels.”

The day after, she forgets to call me. When she does, she says, “Like on an emotional level we are 100% compatible, but I just don’t see you in a physical way. I don’t think. I’m sorry.”

“Are you really, really doing this again?”

“It’s not like we were boyfriend and girlfriend or anything like that."

OPEN TO AN OCEAN by Tommy Dean

November 8, 2018

He circles the fountain like an animal pushed out of his habitat. The heat smothers his body. It’s the tenth day above ninety, and still they—the powerful men he imagines sitting in a tall building chewing on ice and swiveling in office chairs whose leather seats cool these men’s backs as they laugh at the little boys like him—won’t open up the water tower reserves. He flaps his hands at the sun, but it trains its unforgiving eye on his narrow shoulders. He’s heard about invisible rays, but today they punch and slap, making his skin as tight as the tops of conga drums.

His mother calls to him from their lofty apartment until her voice breaks. It’s even hotter in the room he shares with his Uncle and older brother. They pass a cigarette back and forth, argue about politics that they are too poor to change, their words pouting in the rising smoke.

“Go play,” they say. “Be a kid, Damian.”

He wants to ask them why he can’t be a kid in his room, one who colors or reads books, who gets to lay in the bed for once and not the pile of blankets on the floor. Why must he have to run and jump, and be the plaything of gnats and wasps?

But they bully him with their bodies, their sloping shoulders, and cantaloupe necks, their voices chasing him out the door and into the street, where though he mingles with trash and dust, there is space to twirl, to hoot, and cry behind the grocer’s dumpster’s because he can’t reach the lids.

The alleys offer shadows, the closest he can come to sunblock, but there are noises of machines and of ghouls, legends of harm that take him back to the fountain. He scuffs his feet along the brick, wishing they were wedges of cheese or sliced watermelon. He bends his head over his knees and sniffs. He waits for the birds, but they no longer linger or scuttle across the stone path, no longer squawk for a piece of bread. They hide somewhere not so far away, but still, they remain unreachable. Like the river of his mother's eyes where the happiness has receded away from the banks, making everything dull with cracked dirt.

And still, she calls for him, because even without water, even with the searing heat, her instinct is to love him, and so he begins to dance. Soft humming from the well of his lungs gives him rhythm, round and round the spigot buried beneath the brick. Faster his body lurches, arms raised toward the sky in a toddler's desperation, until the people gather around him, air springing from their lips. The ground shakes beneath his feet, soles of his shoes clopping, echoing, calling for his mother to join him. Two, three days, he keeps watch for his mother, the people babbling her name, though he’s never spoken it out loud. They are connected like a string between tin cans, vibrations from his dance catching on the wind, sound so pungent, his mother almost falls from her window as she leans toward him ready to receive the pieces of him he’s willing to sacrifice for these first drops of rain, her tears running rustily down her cheek. The people shouting, “Now, boy, you’ve done it,” and “Don’t stop!” and “They won’t ignore us now.”

But they do, these men in their towers, lazing in their pools, watching with frozen grins until the boy collapses. Only then do they relent, a swipe of a hand, and their machines come alive sending a streaking signal toward the ground, quick as lightning, but soundless, as the pipes gurgle and then gush, the fountain erupting. The mother wades through the crowd, women parting, children hiccuping as they are held back until this mother touches her child near his neck, water seething around his nose and mouth. His eyes open to an ocean.