Flash

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.

THE DEATH OF JANNICK MEISNER by Avee Chaudhuri

November 7, 2018

David Tilker is a brewer located in San Antonio, Texas, and he hired me last spring to write his biography. During his vetting process he read some of my work, including two stories here at X-R-A-Y about a character named Jannick Meisner. In the second of these stories, “I Was Married By A German Expressionist,” Jannick officiates a wedding for two close friends and orchestrates a violent and spectacular confrontation with a guest during the ceremony. This guest is actually Jannick’s secret lover. Jannick’s antics intrigued David Tilker and he asked, in a hopeful tone, if the events of that purported work of fiction were based in truth and whether Jannick Meisner might actually be a real life individual.

Jannick Meisner is real, I admit. His audacity is real. The danger he once posed is real. I met him first in Lake Charles. We were drinking buddies. And we had many mutual friends and I too was a guest at that infamous wedding, on the bride’s side. I witnessed the whole fight. For his own amusement, Jannick had fisticuffs at a wedding he was presiding over. Tilker’s immediate reaction was: you have got to find this bastard, this iconoclast, and bring him to San Antonio. David Tilker was getting married and he wanted the Jannick Meisner treatment.

The finder’s fee was considerable, enough to keep me in single malt scotch for a year, so I agreed to the preposterous task of drawing Meisner out. I first traveled to Lake Charles to search for Meisner at his usual haunt, Pappy’s Bar and Grill. According to the regulars, he had gone to New Orleans to join the Merchant Marine. So I then went to New Orleans and endured the hipsters and tourists and confederate flag wavers and the lousy goddamn smell of the place. I found Meisner’s ship, just back from Kolkata, and his captain complained that Jannick had abandoned the crew in Ho Chi Minh City, to trade in exotic birds.

That night I phoned Tilker to give him an update. He became excitable, “Yes! Follow the goddamn Bavarian to the ends of the earth, if you must.” David Tilker had become infatuated with Meisner and had even started taking German lessons at Texas State University.

So I went to Vietnam. It is a vibrant country. The people are remarkable. Meisner had gotten into trouble with the local authorities and had fled across the border into Laos. And from there he had gone to Myanmar, all the while traveling with a contingent of small, colorful, rare birds he had captured and trained to circle above him and terrorize any who might reproach him, or show any unkindness to children or defenseless women. In point of fact, he became a sort of myth on the Indochinese peninsula, protector of the innocent, that sort of mawkish thing. But like all lawgivers he had flaws, in his case an obsession with orgasm control. His partner would have to bring him to the threshold and stop, and repeat and stop, all day. The criteria for loving Jannick physically was simply burdensome. According to the people I interviewed, ranging from simple villagers to high powered businessmen in Bangkok, he never reciprocated.

In Singapore, exhausted, I confirmed Meisner had chartered a flight to Brussels, and in Brussels I tracked down an apartment he had rented. I went there armed with whiskey and diazepam, only to find that the apartment had been recently abandoned and that it contained the corpses of six murdered Interpol agents. Jannick was the target of an expansive investigation into the smuggling of endangered species.

“Jesus fucking Christ” I said volubly at a cafe afterwards, and they scoffed at me as if I were yet another Ugly American.

“I’m coming home,” I told Tilker in an email. He was not amused but he understood. Meisner had gone completely unhinged.

I flew back to the States in August of 2018, after months away. In early September, I was reading all the local Texas newspapers for the sports pages. I’m not proud to admit it, but I’m a bit of a gambler and I like to bet primarily on high school women’s bowling. And yes, there is a sexual element to it, if we are being frank. Out of Marathon, I happened to glance at the Life & Culture section. There was a photograph of Jannick Meisner, though the caption read Jeff Coolbody, standing next to the sculpture of what appeared to be a deformed giraffe.

After Brussels, Jannick had come back to the States and settled in West Texas. Every day huge shipments of animal feces were carted to him on the Missouri Pacific or some other rail line and he would take the feces and shape them into the animals which produced them. This was an artistic medium that began in Russia, Jannick told me. He’d sold the birds and in turn had received enough money to afford the logistics of his art, the cooperation of the railroads and zookeepers, et cetera. I went to visit him and he welcomed me with a five course meal.

“This is my dream. I dreamt of this since I was a boy in Munich,” he said.

“And what of Tilker’s wedding? He’ll pay you handsomely,” I said.

“But I’m happy. I am at peace,” Meisner said to me and I believed him. He bid me Gute Nacht, reminding me of the spare room and the full liquor cabinet and the Wi-Fi password before shuffling off to bed.

Perhaps this will surprise no one, but the death I speak of is not literal. It is the death of an idea: the insane, cornered, malevolent, discerning German. He is no longer that person, and he can no longer be properly embellished, at least by a serial abuser like me. His artistic conceit is odd, very odd, but he is earnest about it, like a young child coloring. Nothing to disparage there, though certainly nothing to lionize. And there is no twist, by the way. I promise you. Were this one of my usual accounts, Jannick would have died while working on an elephant. Its torso would collapse on top of him.

All I can say is that Jannick was alive and happy and real when I left him. He works under aliases obviously. He cannot stay in Marathon forever, since he is still a wanted man. He’ll be moving soon, I imagine, but follow the smell and look on his works.

ANIMALS by Lily Hackett

November 5, 2018

I only ordered so I could have the wine got for the cat’s man. But in the takeaway box, they had black shells and polished eyes. They had big claws. I searched for ‘Clawed prawns’. Crayfish. I left a message. I saw one twitch, thrash in the sauce. Its shining eyes were on me. It crawled out from the tub. The seven legs went click across the tub’s rim and click click, softly, on the wooden table. It moved clumsily, trailing chopped shallot. The second followed. Each was as long as my hand. They had toad bellies and dog whiskers. They were flat and black as lice.

They might begin to skitter. If they dropped off the table, I would have to stamp them underfoot. And I hated the sound of small things cracking, spines of game birds, or the muffled shatter of a snail shell. They crayfish were moving faster, going click click, softly, on the wooden table. I was slow opening drawers so nothing slammed. I rustled out a pyrex salad bowl. I turned the bowl quick onto the table like a dome. I trapped both, but snipped a leg with the glass rim. It felt worse to hurt them than it would to hurt something nice. Seeing one bug crippled, guilt only made me want them dead. I thought I could fume them dead. I lit four cigarettes and edged them one by one under the dome. When the plush smoke cleared they seemed bigger but had clustered their legs under.

I could see white body through their joints’ splits. Their shells wheezed and popped. I couldn’t know if it hurt, if growing was something that they did, or that happened to them. Their eyes were too polished to see inside. They shook the shells loose. Through the glass and their bodies I saw the tiny violet systems. I liked their sudden fleshness, could trick my eye that they were hairless pink kittens. I wasn’t soft. I stoned a grouse once and made myself wring it finished. I watched the dome. They ate their shells. I pushed the leg back into the dome and one ate that. I watched their spindled mouths. Their bodies had grown so they pressed flush up against the glass. Flesh hardened, fused, and the one new shell made one new bug. It had a quantity of legs, four eyes, and one stout, glossy tail. It was as orange as new peel all over. I had looked so long and closely that it couldn’t disgust me. It was like a terrible thought, that through repetition of thinking stops its horror and becomes the mind’s friend. Plus, I had no choice. I couldn’t ring vets anymore. It was big though. I lit two more cigarettes, and edged them under the dome to keep it still. I went and ran a bathful. I came back into the kitchen. I lifted the dome. The shell against the glass went click click. I wrapped the bug in a clean tea-towel and held it tight to my body. I didn’t love it - I didn’t want it to snip me. A one leg trailed on my arm. I meant to place it gently but I threw it off me. It scraped the tub’s avocado coat. It was very tangerine against dull green. The scrape sound called to the twin enamel of my mouth. I didn’t want to have to fume the whole room. I got the bottle from the kitchen, pulled the thick cork, smelling straw and alcohol. I poured it on and into the bug in the tub. I sat on the avocado toilet and had a swig. I laughed, I was sick in the avocado sink, I rinsed it away. I went to bed. I came down and put a chair against the bathroom door. I went to bed.

The cat’s man had this pregnant cat. It’s body was like a sack. At the time I was still walking out, buying stock cubes, buying medicine. The cat dragged her slack along the ground. I wondered if she might fray her belly on the pavement, if she might split, over by the betting places, and spill her kids. The man really loved it, called it Miss, Lady. I also wondered if when the cat split, just one small boy would spill, with a tail and tiny incisors. They’d have to lock the cat’s man up for crimes of sickness. It followed me back. It settled, fat and loose in the front of the machine. I was half-cut from stopping off. ‘Littel woman’ I said. I opened a tin of curried chicken. She settled her head away from it. ‘Spoiled bitc’ I said. The cat wouldn’t eat. It wouldn’t leave either. She was a serene thing, queenly feeling. I imagined the cat’s man placing sushi-grade on his flat tongue for nibbling. I kicked her belly. She split like a sack. Seven kittens spilled onto tile. The cat couldn’t live, bled and died. I was practical. Bricked rabbits in lanes with tics in their eyes. I filled the mop bucket. I drowned them with quickness and skill. It was all found out somehow. They hissed in shops. I couldn’t buy the things I needed or call anyone about the crayfish.

In the morning I took the chair from the door. The crayfish was grown dog-big. I used what I had to make it quiet. Christmas ales with big percents. Hot Mahon gin with a windmill on the bottle. Advocaat, split in the bathwater. ‘I won’t let you drink aloen’ I said. I think it roamed at night. I heard click click when I woke having headaches. It was always back in the tub by morning. ‘Yur sly’ I said.

I clicked a video. A chef spoke strictly. ‘Lobsters feel no pain’. She took a glistening knife and struck through the head. She boiled salt water. ‘It’ll feel at home’ she said. She smirked. She took a different knife and cracked the shell in half. She picked out white chunks and dipped them in melted butter. ‘Respect it’ she said. Clicked. A lobster in boiling water made a whistling sound. ‘This is not a scream. This is air leaving the shell’. A woman in a foreign country chopped the chubby legs off a crab while it was living. She burned onions. A living crab in another pan. This one had its legs and was grabbing ginger to its mouth, eating what seasoned it. I ordered a knife. Japanese. Clicked. Videos: my knife cutting tomatoes so thinly they looked like glass. My knife cleanly halving a single sheet of paper. I ordered butter, wrapped in wax paper, from Normandy.

The crayfish was on the turn, looked rotten with black spots. The water was black, particularly grisly: stout and blue curacao. It tried to roam again. I pushed it back into the water and buttered the sides of the tub, a trick done once or so on ladybugs. The knife came rolled in tan canvas, tied with leather string. I practised it on day cushions. I couldn’t use fruit or the like – didn’t keep much fresh in – but didn’t before really either. I brought it to the bathroom. After days I saw white flesh in the splits. The shell whistled like an old home. The body shivered off the shell. I dropped the knife through water through into the head. It was brainless, without pain. Black punch slopped. I drained the bath. I thought I might mount the heavy shell, like a fisherman, if I could easily learn how.

I went and melted six pats of that good butter in a pan, swirling it so the curds couldn’t catch. But when I returned to the bathroom, the body looked grey, like its tracts were filled with ash. I gripped again and sliced meat from it. It was sour, sick-tasting. I felt briefly grieved for six or so planned meals. I set the knife back on the avocado sink. I put a towel across the body and heaved it up. It was big-dog big. I carried it through the kitchen and through double door onto the garden. Outside was brown. Everything was dying according to its time. I dumped the bundle and took to the spade, Irish, made with oiled red wood. It wasn’t much under: the information had dictated deeper. But nothing had disturbed it except myself. Inside, a dozen other bundles. I rolled the crayfish in. ‘Iam a practical woman’ I said to the spiders on the leaves. ‘Repsect it’ I said to the flies gummed up in the webs.