Flash

sam phillips

BE SCARED OF YOUR YOUNG by Sam Phillips

What if it’s all torn down, she asked me.

I thought this was an odd question coming out of such young mouth. I wondered what exactly it was they teaching her at the preschool. We, me and her mother, me and my wife, are giving nearly half of our income to to that place.

What if it’s all torn down, she asked again and I had to figure out how to reply.

Time was running out.

Well what if what is all torn down?

My reply was hopeful, I wanted the next words she said to recapture her innocence.

The people that we love, and things that we love, and the thoughts that we think, what if it all falls apart?

Damn it. I realized I was in a spot. I was in a spot and after I got out of that spot I was going to have to go down to the preschool and find out what exactly the curriculum was. This was too advanced I thought. You can’t make my daughter think this deeply without my knowledge, or my consent.

Where did you get that idea, I replied to her.

What’s an idea?

An idea is a thought, like an opinion.

What’s an opinion?

You know, how I might say ‘I think that blue is a good color,’ I said while pointing to my shirt to show her again what blue was.

Oh, well what if those thinks don’t work anymore?

Well why wouldn’t they?

I don’t trust you.

Her eyes seemed blank, the words didn’t affect her and they did affect me because I knew I was losing control. I hate losing control and I hate knowing that I’m losing control even more. I like when the people around me can at least be nice enough to let me pretend that I still have it. I like when people pretend they still have it too. Then we can all go along thinking that we all have control, when in reality there’s just no possible way.

Why don’t you trust me?

Because you lie.

No I don’t darling, when do I lie?

You lie every night.

No I don’t.

Then why do you pretend to look around for monsters when you can’t even see them?

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s.f. wright

THE PAINTER by S.F. Wright

Lands wanted to be the next Jackson Pollack; his parents and siblings told him he should pursue a field in which he could get a real job. But Lands couldn’t see himself as a professional, and he figured, while he had the chance (his parents would pay for college, even if it was art school), he might as well study what he wanted.

Art school was, at times, memorable. Lands didn’t live the promiscuous, bohemian lifestyle he imagined an artist-in-training would, but he did get laid once (a fellow student who later left school to join a religious convent after a bad acid trip); he also developed a taste for booze: scotch, whiskey, gin—he loved it all. Alcohol made Lands’ life seem better than it was, and if he was too depressed for liquor to help him achieve even that, booze would still make Lands forget: that he had no future, that only with incredible luck would he ever make it with his art, that he’d probably spend his life working undesirable jobs and painting in obscurity.

After graduating, Lands lived in an apartment with two friends from school. But soon, even with two roommates and Lands’ working as a waiter and record store clerk, the city got too expensive. Lands had to move out; with nowhere else to go, he moved back with his mother. (Lands’ father had died of a heart attack when Lands was in art school.)

He got a job at a Pearl Art and Craft Supply. He still went to the city, but more and more frequently he visited alone, his friendships from art school dwindling. Usually Lands stayed home; shut himself in his room with a bottle of gin, vodka, or bourbon; and drank: not only to forget the day at Pearl Arts and Craft Supply, but also to numb himself to the fact that his was a squandered, sad, and hopeless existence. Lands’ mother disapproved of her son’s drinking; she’d yell at Lands when he passed out on the floor. But there wasn’t much she could do except kick Lands out, which she wouldn’t do.

When Lands was thirty-four, his mother sold the house and bought a condo. Also, Pearl Art and Craft Supply closed, leaving Lands unemployed.

He moved with his mother, having nowhere else to go, and for a while Lands remained unemployed. But he liked getting up when he wanted, drinking whenever he felt like it, and having no responsibilities. Lands even started to paint again (the condo’s extra bedroom had decent light for it), but his mother soon grew tired of her son’s not working. And what little savings Lands had was quickly going toward booze. So at thirty-five, he had to look for a job, and he applied to the Barnes and Noble which was situated across the street from the former Pearl Art and Craft Supply (now a Modell’s Sporting Goods).

Lands got hired. His mother was happy. Lands was depressed. He was able to get a daily seven-to-three shift, which meant he could drink if he had work the next day, as long as he started when he got home and cut himself off before it got too late. But Lands disliked the work, and he hated the customers and crowds. Only the first two hours he didn’t mind, when the store was empty except for other employees, and he shelved books.

For years Lands did this: working seven to three, five days a week; drinking when he got home; cutting himself off when he had to work the next morning; getting obliviously drunk when he had the following day off. His mother simply lived with his drunkenness, and as long as Lands kept it behind his bedroom door, mostly didn’t say anything.

Holidays were awkward. Lands would go to one of his siblings’ houses, or they’d come to the condo; and the elephant in the room was always what a failure Lands was: still living at home, no one in his life except for his mother. Or at least it felt like the elephant in the room to Lands. He saw himself as a failure, and couldn’t imagine how anyone else, especially his siblings, wouldn’t either.

Lands’ taste for and love of alcohol refined and honed itself into a discerning palate and passion for bourbon: Old Gran-Dad, Maker’s Mark, Jack Daniel’s. Good bourbon was expensive, though, and consequentially, Lands didn’t save much money. But he figured, What would I be saving it for anyway?

Lands still went to a museum every couple of months: the MOMA, the Met, the Guggenheim. Sometimes he thought he might see someone from art school. He never did.

And every few months or so, Lands would take a fresh canvas and put it on his easel. He’d stare at the canvas at first, but after a few sips of bourbon Lands would get inspired; he’d paint religiously for ten, fifteen minutes, thinking he was creating something of genius. But then Lands would get tired and feel more like drinking than creating, and he’d tell himself that he’d resume working on the painting the next day. He’d wake up the next morning, hungover, though, and look at these streaks of paint as nothing but a futile, aborted attempt at art. Lands would consider the painting with shame, and then throw the canvas out; he’d then try to forget what he thought was a terrible effort, even though he really didn’t know any more if it was or wasn’t, and then he’d get ready for work.

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LIL ULYSSES 666 by Paul Curran

It feels weird talking to a camera. I must look like a terrorist or a school shooter. I'll turn off the light. That's better. Your music sucks anyway. What makes you say that? I thought it sounded funny. You're the one who asked me here. 

Let's rape and kill some kid. Do you mean physically or metaphorically? I mean metaphysically. That's predictable. Many lyrics are worse. Are you taking notes?

I heard you faked your own death. Glued on a beard and hitched a boat ride to Indonesia. Killed a backpacker and stole her passport. I've got the scars to prove it. Everything I worry about sounds foolish in comparison. A blow to the head. Jet lag, boredom, neurosis. Meditation, spaghetti, asphyxiation. One day the tide might bring you something clean that slipped off the edge of a boat. I shot up the last of our heroin in a public toilet on the banks of the Ganges and vomited so much an astronaut was drilling through the wall. The pornographic ideal of becoming happens to people to ease delusions of failure. Each problem overcome is a peculiar masochistic achievement. The result a skillful pregnancy.

Is there nothing better in this world than nibbling rat poison and watching security monitors? I'm either too tired to answer that or ... Amazing. Truly beautiful. Take a look.

In recent weeks I've written so many rhymes about so many people and forgotten what they said or what they call the method of remembering. If we brand this an album it might result in a return invitation to speak at a linguistics conference in a derelict beachside town.

Hey, kid. Do you mind if we rape and kill you? I don't care. Can I hold your bag? Why so heavy? The room's at the top of the stairs. Some of the steps are broken. Don't touch the banister.

It's so quiet around here. All these dumb fantasies. We've become so good at predicting what we're going to say it's impossible to distinguish. Last night I put a portable fan in the sink and plugged it into the shaving socket with a travel adaptor. The smell made me cry. Again. Is it even possible to mentally relate? That neck, that depth, that blood sting, the boy who found a grave in that dampened bed.

Have you got a direct line to the source? We are a model. Excessively pointless and eternally lucid. In order for anything to happen, there must be space, space, space. That sounds like the same lyric. Sometimes I miss her. I never knew you did remixes. There are times when safe words must be recycled, wiped clean, altered beyond recognition. Shit like that. Gut readings. Heart beatings. Off the record. I regret everything.

What are you thinking about? Oxcarts and farmers on bicycles and motorbikes dragging supplies along the beach road. Covered in red dirt and dust. The grass nothing but rust, sparse clumps around fields, growing from ruined colonial buildings. Children playing with guns, needles, human and animal remains, garbage lining alleyways. The nervous laughter of rubbing cracked skulls on undeveloped crotches.

Spin something else. Have we got any more drugs? I can't move. Let's get some more drugs. I've gone blind. I want some more drugs. I can't hear you. Whenever your limbs twitch it's like someone's sending me a secret message. A crude nail hammered through the head on a missing person's poster. Our entire species destroyed by narrative. Have you got a dictionary? I had one somewhere ... I can't even find anything.

What if you had another superpower? A really hot girl, not as hot as her brother. Guess what's for lunch? Breakfast? Is this track even music? I poured gasoline over his back and set him on fire with a lighted candle handed to me by a fortune teller. The trail of wax went on forever. I was going to talk to him but it never happened. Love is weird. Anyway, thanks for listening.

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kevin sampsell

THE RAZOR by Kevin Sampsell

This is the black shirt my ex-wife gave me before the divorce. The one her father used to wear. I have another one just like it, but it has long sleeves. These short sleeves fit me better. I imagine her dad wearing it. Standing outside, on the roof of his house, a cool breeze blowing through the looseness of the cloth, against his sloping shoulders. His arms, freckled and tired at the end. Patches of gray hair, waving.

I wonder if he died in this shirt. Probably not. You don’t pick a black shirt to die in. I look in my closet and wonder what shirt I would pick if I knew I was going to die. Maybe something sturdy and tough, like denim. Perhaps a brown t-shirt, the color of camouflage or dirt. I think it would be uncomfortable to wear a tie. Too much like a circle closing, choking, squeezing me.

I’ve seen so many dead people wearing ties. How do you get a tie on a dead person?

Once, a friend of mine had acquired a bunch of mannequins. He took the old clothes of his dead brother and dressed them all. These statue-like objects were easy to care for. He’d use a cat hair remover on them. He’d roll it over the shoulders and down the arms, and then smooth any wrinkles with an iron. He’d look into their flat eyes and talk to them.

Humans have to stay presentable when they’re alive and also when they’re dead. My friend didn’t believe these mannequins to be alive or dead, but rather in a state of limbo.

Sometimes, I catch a glimpse of myself in a mirror and wonder if I even look human. Last year was the most depressing year. Last year, her father died. That’s how I got this shirt. Her and her siblings went through his stuff and divided it up.

Last year was when we got divorced. Last year was when we stopped talking. Last year was when we tried to replace each other.

As I shave my face in the bathroom mirror, I realize the electric razor I’m using also belonged to her father’s. I’m touching my face with it, pushing it into my skin. I never have understood how these razors work. Something rotating under the surface, grabbing a hold of my whiskers, pulling them out quickly with a slight burn. This razor also touched her father’s face, made it smooth and presentable. It vibrated in his hand when he was looking into his own eyes in a mirror, thinking about his life.

Maybe while wearing this black shirt.

One of my earliest memories is walking by a fancy new department store with my mother when I was probably four. One of the giant display windows had two mannequins in it, wearing bright polka-dot shirts and flared jeans, posed in front of a wall of pulsing multi-colored lights. There were about ten other people standing there, smiling and enjoying the lights and the strangeness of the mannequins’ poses, as if they were in mid-dance. There was a murmur of thumping disco behind the glass, but I could be imaging that part. Right before we started to walk away, one of the mannequins moved. People gasped. And then the other one moved, and people laughed. They were doing small silly dance moves. I smiled too, though I was confused. Sometimes mannequins are real, my mother said.

We stayed and watched the dancing mannequins, like an animal you’d watch at a zoo. Another little boy and his mother walked up and the mannequins suddenly stopped moving. The people laughed again, knowing it was because of the new spectators. The magic of them stopping, being completely still, statue-like, statuesque, not human but wearing human clothes, looking better than most humans, but also pretending not to be human, was something I didn’t really want to think about but ended up pondering a lot when I was a kid.

I watched the two mannequins and also the faces of the mother and son watching them, waiting for them to witness that surprising moment of movement. The silly dance. Everyone laughing. The very second when something dead comes to life.

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nayt rundquist

DUETS AND THE CRACK IN EVERYTHING by Nayt Rundquist

She’ll break open the world, just a bit, and tell them how they’ll end, how they’ll get there, who’ll wrong them along the way. They’ll drown in it, their fates, choking to take it all in, no matter how certain they’d been they could swim. But she’ll be there, on the shore, waiting to pull them sputtering back to present, steaming stew to fend off the chill.

Creaking floorboards in her age-shriveling hut groan as she grunts across them, fists stabbing her curving spine. Her clawhand brandishes her knife, her only artifact that still carries a sheen. The blade slices into its aria she dances to through arthritic muscle memory reinforced by years, decades, centuries? of their duets. But it’s imperfect—a jagged slice through one molecule, split in lopsided halves.

Crack in everything as she punctures a hole in the universe—just a little one, barely big enough to see through—with a finger gnarled and knotted as a tree root. And it pulls at her soulstuffs, tears at it, whipping it like her hair when she walked alone through that hurricane. But she’s used to this vacuum; she knows it and can stand it. And she folds the knife back on itself, back through the years, back through its own past, sharpening it ’til it’s like brand new, ’til it is brand new, ’til it’s sharper than when He’d plunged it into her heart.

Flawless melody this time, and she harmonizes—humming just soft enough of a hoarse to match the vibrations in her chest to those of her instrument. Carrots, ugly and gnarled as her fingers, are first for the cauldron. The knife breezes through, whispering so quiet only the carrot can hear.

She stitches up that crack in everything with a hasty swipe of a clawhand, smearing ethereal sludge through the air, through spacetime. She’ll find that blood last Tuesday and three months in the future. The crack would have self-sealed eventually, but best not to chance it. He’d left them open, slathering gashes—pus-oozing wounds in the flesh of existence. The lesions still find her, dragging behind them slathering reminders of Him, of how He’d haunted her, hunted her, made love to her, whispering so softly only her heart could hear.

Her door will moan open, as He had moaned. A visitor will arrive. She’ll stumble to add more vegetables to the cauldron. She’ll be so off her time, this guest will have a long wait, a longer reading—a deeper well to surface from.

But its bones will creak as it shambles over the threshold. Its claws rasp off the knob, still enough left alive, nearly alive, within to confuse its way through old habits. Heelbones will click ’cross warped floorboards, worn through leather skin from such shambling—stalking. Wisps of remnant hair drift in the gasps of wind it’ll welcome into her home, a jaundiced, shriveled husk drowning in the breeze.

She could shriek a thousand spells, infinite curses, wards, hexes, repellents, but it’s heard those excuses before. Instead, she’ll watch. Cast her eyes into the abyssal pools sunken into its blanched, parchment skull. There, within those swirling pools of nothing, of absolute absence, she’ll find the one thing she dares not search for—the one crack that can’t be mended, that would tear existence from itself, and the universe and everything that ever was and will be and might be and shouldn’t be but will be anyway will whisper out of existence—softer than His nothings, softer than her knife through carrots. Oblivion will be silent. It shows her her own future in this where without a when.

And it’ll sway there, three steps into her home. Creak as what remains of its leathery skin twitches and shifts over shredded muscle. Creak as its eyes clutch hers as tightly as He had, as tightly as she’d grasped his shirt. And her eyes will ask its the same question they’d asked His.

And she’ll get the same answer as it shudders, turns, and slouches back out the door, as though forgetting its reason for stabbing back into her home.

Her breath shivers back into her brittle ribcage, and she digs free the roots that held her in place. She gropes her way to the table and crumples back into her seat, into her stupor, into her waiting.

Still clutched in her clawhand, the knife sings her a solo, so soft it isn’t sure she can hear.

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jennifer greidus

ALTOIDS BURN SO GOOD by Jennifer Greidus

Cheetah’s mom is dead. So’s his dad. He lives with his almost-deaf uncle Grant. His uncle plays a lot of solitaire and has a lot of different girlfriends. When Cheetah was in fourth grade, Uncle Grant was a volunteer fireman. He laughed a lot. He made casseroles and brought them over on Sundays. Now, Uncle Grant doesn’t put out fires, cook, or even laugh. For three months, he hasn’t left the apartment. Uncle Grant made Cheetah change the locks because the rent’s been overdue since June.

Cheetah would like to be a volunteer fireman, but he can’t until he’s eighteen. That’s three years from now. He might have to have a GED, too. He can’t remember and doesn’t know if he’ll bother if that’s the case.

Uncle Grant sleeps hard, and his girlfriends come and go. They bring him Wendy’s, wake him, feed him, fuck, and leave. When they forget to bring extra salt packets for his fries, Cheetah knows it. The girlfriends get apologetic, and they’re loud about it so Uncle Grant can hear their remorse, how they know they’re stupid.

Most of the girlfriends think Cheetah is cute, almost handsome. They flirt with him. He thinks they think statutory rape accusations are only for men.

One girlfriend, Jeanette, is especially frisky. Tonight, she seeks him out. After the fast food and the fucking, she leaves Uncle Grant’s bedroom and joins Cheetah in the living room. He was just thinking about jerking off again into one of the hundred fast food napkins Uncle Grant left on the floor next to the recliner.

Jeanette touches his shoulder. “Aren’t you bored here alone all day?”

“Nope.”

“Do you have a girlfriend?”

“Nope.”

“Do you want one?” She lights a cigarette and plops down on the coffee table, next to where Cheetah’s propped his feet. She pinches his big toe and blows smoke in front of his face. She nods at the TV. “How about we watch something more upbeat.”

She squeezes the arch of his foot. Her pink nails--homemade manicure--dig into his sock. He yanks his foot free because it tickles. For the first time, he takes his eyes off the Cops marathon and looks in her eyes. “I like this show. I like it a lot.”

“Looks like you like it a little too much.” She nods at the mound of crumpled paper products next to the chair, all sticky with Cheetah’s jizz. The one on top is from just fifteen minutes ago, and it crowns the lot of at least fifty others like it.

“Whatever. Can I have a cigarette?”

“You’re too young,” she says, although she’s retrieving one from the pack.

Just as she pulls it out, Cheetah says, “Just kidding. You were gonna give me one, weren’t you? Pathetic.”

Jeanette glares at him, but after a lifetime’s vying for men’s attention and approval, she seems used to this cruelty. Her eyes widen as if she expects an apology. Cheetah sees the same eyes on every one of Uncle Grant’s girlfriends: searching for the next person who’ll give them the feeling that they matter in some way.

“Why do you come here?” Cheetah says. “To be treated like shit? Used. It’s kinda disgusting.”

“We like each other. It’s just some fun.” She lights up and cocks her head to the left. “It’d be nice to leave the house sometime, though.”

Cheetah snorts. “Good luck with that.”

“He’s a homebody.”

Cheetah sits up and turns down the volume on Cops. He leans forward, elbows on his knees. He puts his face nearer hers. “You know he’s fucking, like, twelve other chicks, right? You don’t see all those fast food bags in the trash? You don’t ever go to Burger King, do you? No. You’re a Wendy’s chick. Fridays. Nine o’clock. Wendy’s.”

Jeanette frowns and looks down. She fingers the chipped glass of the coffee table surface. Cheetah feels like shit about what he said. He can’t take it back, though; she’ll be here all night, thinking she has a friend.

He picks at one of the coffee table’s legs, bitten up from a Shih Tzu they had last year but who died. Cheetah had locked the dog in the bathroom before school because the dog always chewed Cheetah’s cum-crusty underwear. The dog clawed and ripped at the chipboard bathroom door all day. When Cheetah got home, he found the dog’s tongue impaled with a thick dagger of wood. The floor and the dog were slick with vomit. With his fingers, Cheetah pushed past the vomitus in the dog’s mouth and tugged a five-inch piece from its throat.

Jeanette squeezes Cheetah’s knee. “Anyway, no girlfriend for you?”

“What’s your spirit animal?”

“What?”

“Spirit animal,” Cheetah says, sitting back in the recliner and turning up the volume a little. “You know. Native Americans. Those totem pole things?”

Jeanette slides her ass across the table, so Cheetah’s thigh is within reach. She squeezes that. “I don’t know. I’ve always felt special about jellyfish.”

Cheetah mutes the TV again and sneers at her. “You think the Native Americans gave a fuck about jellyfish?”

He feels a pull in his groin. He checks the time on his phone. It’s been about a half-hour since he came. He needs to do it again soon, or he’ll start to think about the Shih Tzu, dropping out of high school, and his parents, who were shot by a disgruntled bus driver on their way home from a Revival meeting in Pittsburgh. If Cheetah keeps ejaculating, he’ll never be sad again.

He stands and tosses the remote on the chair. “I know you know where the door is. I’m going to bed.” He’s not going to bed. He’s going to the bathroom to come in the toilet. Maybe the sink. Sometimes Uncle Grant leaves piss unflushed, and it creeps Cheetah out for a little while.    

His dick is sore, as usual, and his hand is rough. This is the seventh time he’s come today. At this point in the day, the callouses make it better. He shoots in the sink and rinses the dime-sized glop down the drain. He’s surprised when much of anything comes out of him at all.

He stands in front of the bathroom mirror and pops an Altoid. He hates the mints. Loves to hate them. They burn the fuck out of his cheek, and he knows they’re supposed to, that someone made them this way. The mints must be meant to burn the fuck out of your cheek, and the world knows nothing bad is going to happen if you like that burn, because they’ve done tests on bunnies or whatever. The bunnies thought Altoids burned so good.

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anastasia jill

THE DAY THE WORLD ENDED by Anastasia Jill

THE DAY THE WORLD ENDED, we lost our power first as lights and machines shut down like stale organs folding into their lives without blood. Mucus membranes settled in the trenches of my eyelid and produced chemical tears.

“It’s okay,” we told ourselves. “I am not afraid.”

After a few hours, lungs couldn’t take it, clawed their way out of our rib and sacrificed themselves to the noxious gasses. My nuke tipped fingers counted the columns remaining down our spine. We only got to three before the vapor consumed us.

“It’s okay,” we said again. “I am not afraid.”

Other bodies collapsed around us -- metal bodies, furry bodies, red meat bodies were starved by lasers and flooded out with a mix of water and dust from monuments collapsing. We do not shut down alongside them because we have to be strong, we have to eat their remains to sustain the infrastructure of our being. Our skin shed like orange peels and left a sweaty smell.

“That’s not any smell,” we said. “That’s explosive pixie dust and sweat.”

Lumps filled with sewage make tumors on what remains of our flesh, satellites to monitor bones for any sign of decay. Our bellies swell with water, and fish take shelter in the tissue until we are of egg and fetus, ready to repopulate once the disaster ends.

The building around us begins to fall in plastic sheets, like it were never reinforced with brick or mortar or the human hand. We watch the sun safe in the sky, mocking our imminent downfall.

“It’s okay,” we tell the sun. “I would mock us too.”

Everything stops and we are quiet until the Earth puts its head in an astral lap, throwing the continents and all its inhabitants like toys into a bright pink bin. Of course, at the point, we are mostly zombie, clung to life only by the stem of brain. China and Seychelles, France and Timor-Lest, the Koreas, Eritrea, Maldives, the States are names in a ground mouth housing us all like cars in a parking lot. We are all displaced. We have no home now because today, the world decided to pack us in its bags and end. Land is chipped at the corners, chemicals nibbling at their corners like rats. Like the rats that are, somehow, surviving, that we have to eat until everyone else dies.

The Earth continues to rotate while explosions liter its back. A dusty hand the size of a globe reaches up, and counts its spine the way I did. It gets further than three, but no further than five. The hand eroded off, and any second now, we know that we are next and will die alone.

Because God is alone the day he makes the universe out of nothing at all.

And there is nothing left when the planet implodes -- at the end, there is only us and light, cowering behind a pyramid snapped in the middle like a twig. Earth is formless and empty, fat lumps of sand and warm water and no life, no sign we were ever here.

When we want to forget it, succumb to the apocalypse and lay ourselves out for the horses to dine on, our guts twitch and jerk. Our navels implode, and suddenly, the ocean is full of baby fishes.

The sea lights up again and becomes alive, a vault of blue and golden stars to fall into at night. With this vision, we step out from the wreckage. We see the world; it’s beautiful. It is over, but able to be rebuilt.

“That’s something,” we say. “Really something.”

We pick up the countries like puzzle pieces and put them back in place around the fishes. We look around at the new world, and rest in the knowledge that it may be good, someday.

The day the world ended was the day it began again. The toxins were flushed and we woke up in a hospital bed, ready to work and rebuild.

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zachary kennedy lopez

SALT by Zachary Kennedy-Lopez

You’ve come to cherish the fragility of snails, come to love them in a small sort of way. When you see one attempting to cross the sidewalk, you pick it up—and it shrinks from you—and you move it to the other side. When it rains, you become more careful, you walk home with the light on your phone on. When you step on a snail in the dark, the shape and timbre of that sound taps something deep within you, and you imagine paying someone to take a needle and ink and carve colored lines into you, marking your own skin with a rendering of a snail as a sort of penance for all you’ve crushed. You think about what meaning could be assigned to a snail shell: home, vitality, retreat. You imagine a snail your own size, and wonder how strong the shell would be then.

/

Your parents have a corner lot with a sizeable yard, on which for years they’ve grown fruits and vegetables. You had corn when you were young, blueberries too, and raspberries, cherries, squash, and grapes. Many of the plants and trees had to be wrapped in black mesh so that the ever-present birds, snailkind, and deer wouldn’t make off with everything.

You’d heard, likely from someone at school, that salting a slug or a snail would cause it to shrivel and vanish, and you wanted to try it—not out of maliciousness, but because you are, always have been, insatiably curious. You knew nothing of the chemical properties of salt, and that you could pour salt on something in the world and cause it to disappear seemed a form of magic, a formula that tapped into something hidden about the rules of existing. Likewise, for some time as a child, you thought that spraying water on wasps would kill them, extinguish them as though they were flame, but you discovered one summer that this was untrue.

Once, when your mother was working in the beds behind the house, and she’d removed a slug or a snail from a plant, you asked if you could salt it.

She said no, and reminded you that salting the slug or snail would kill it. You hadn’t considered the implications of ending a life, that snuffing out a being so small and inconsequential was still killing, and her response stopped you short.

You’ve never salted a slug or a snail, but you imagine them bending in upon themselves, as might someone in the throes of vomiting, shrinking, becoming less pliant, contorting like a receipt tossed into a fire.

/

You think of your manager, the one who’s vegan and has a pupil shaped like keyhole. You think of how he was heartsick for so long when they couldn’t get the baby bird out of the walls of his office, couldn’t lure it down through the air vent. You think of how he told you about an injured animal he picked up on the side of the road—a blackbird, or a raccoon, you can’t quite recall—and you remember how he’d been quiet one day because the sanctuary had called to say the animal didn’t make it, that it had died, and even he was surprised at how broken up he was. You think of how you asked him about the shape of his pupil, and you even had the word ready, coloboma—a word, incidentally, that appears in a story by one of your instructors, a story you return to again and again, even-though-slash-because you’re convinced you’ll never understand all the pieces in play, a story that you’ve had your own students read—but you come to your manager armed with this word, and he says no, that’s not it at all. He tells you about how he was wilder in his youth, how he and some friends had been on the banks of a river, when one of them lobbed a beer bottle from a distance, and it struck him in the face, exploding on impact. Your manager has scars on his forehead, and a nose that never straightened out. He tells you that some of the glass entered his eye, and he had to be awake when the doctors attempted to remove it. Each time the surgeon brought the utensils up close, his eye twitched instinctively, seeking escape, trying to evade being touched. The cycle repeated once, twice, again, until finally the surgeon told your manager to quit fucking moving his eyes unless he wanted to go blind.

/

Your manager, who was nearing fifty when you worked for him, had an older brother who died in his twenties. It might’ve been suicide, it might’ve been a drunk driver—another thing you wish you could remember. But his brother was involved in theater, like your husband, and your manager tells you that your husband reminds him a lot of his brother.

You saw Alejandro Iñárritu’s film Birdman with your husband, and when it was over, you looked at him and said, Don’t ever do that to me.

/

You bought a shirt recently and a pair of jeans, both massively marked down. One tags reads Made in Madagascar, the other Made in Indonesia. You think of a conversation with your brother about the $6 H&M t-shirts advertised as being eco-conscious, made with organic cotton, Made in Malaysia. Your brother says something like, Mmp, yep, child fingers made that.

/

When you were younger, but old enough for your parents to leave you and your brother at home unsupervised, you went to one of the cupboards and took down a repurposed butter tub filled with salt. You carried it through the house to your brother’s room, and said, Look, I found sugar. He licked a finger and dipped it into the white mass, stuck it in his mouth.

Years later, he still brings this up.

/

Your husband won’t touch pecan pie. Hasn’t since he was a child, when his grandfather made one and substituted the sugar with salt by accident. Your husband and his sister complained, said, This doesn’t taste right. Their grandfather was furious and forced them to finish their pie. He was a man steeped in the belief that food on a plate is a contract: you finish what you take, you finish what you’re given. When your husband tells you this, he says, Because that’s a great way to teach a child about obesity. There are things you sometimes forget about your husband: that he was not as slim as he is now, that there are years of his childhood he’s blacked out.

Your husband’s grandfather cut himself a slice of pie, ate one bite, and threw out the rest without saying a word.

/

A member of your cohort tells you no, you’ve got it wrong, salt doesn’t dessicate snailkind, just the opposite—they bubble up, boil over, and melt.

In a way, both are right: as salt removes the water from the body, a snail emits a slime in order to protect itself. The bubbling, the boil—that’s the air leaving as the snail shrinks, compresses, has nowhere else to hide.

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andrew miller

6:54 by Andrew Miller

I arrive at 6:55. I climb the stairwell to the main lobby, swipe my badge to access the elevators. I wait. I have earbuds in and keep my eyes dipped so that no one acknowledges me. I enter the elevator. I exit the elevator at my floor. I begin my work day in silence. I attempt to spend as much of my workday as possible in silence.

I arrive at 6:56. I climb the stairwell to the main lobby, swipe my badge to access the elevators. I wait. I have earbuds in and keep my eyes dipped. I say nothing to the hellos and good mornings around me. I enter the elevator. I exit the elevator on 39. I begin my work day in silence. I attempt to spend as much of my workday alone as possible.

I arrive at 6:47. I climb the stairwell to the main lobby, in front of me is a man wearing a jacket just like mine. He swipes his badge to access the elevators. I swipe my badge. He wears a smile on his face. I wear my earbuds and dip my eyes when he turns to see which elevator doors will open. He greets the other workers congregating for the elevator. I remain silent.

I arrive at 7:03. I walk briskly to swipe in. The man with my coat is behind me. I drop my badge and he retrieves it.

“Thank you,” I say.

His hair is cut the same as mine. He wears the same shoes and the same pants. His black sweater snug around his pinpoint collared shirt. He smiles and says, “You’re welcome.”

Around us are several people waiting on the elevators. The elevators are always so slow. I wonder what it takes to say hello. To say good morning. To begin my work day in this other way.

I arrive at 6:54. I climb the stairwell to the main lobby. The man who looks like me is already waiting for an elevator. I swipe my badge. I remove my earbuds. I do not dip my eyes. I breathe out. He smiles. I say, “Good morning.”

He turns his back to me and doesn’t say anything. I look away and catch my distorted reflection in the closing elevator doors.

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jeff phillips

THE CUPS by Jeff Phillips

Orel Gammon stopped wearing his cup the second day he played in the "majors." This wasn't the Major League Baseball. The rec center named their little league for ages 10-12, “the majors.” For all who played in “the minors” before it, this new league was a big deal. It meant kids pitched, and the kids pitched harder than the pussyfoot dads, who were notorious for tossing slow balls to make their kids feel like all-stars when they knocked a homer over the fence. League rules in the majors required that kids wear cups over their crotch, something all the preteens got a kick out of, except Orel Gammon, gangly and doe-eyed as if everything around him could be a danger.

The snug cup hijacked Orel’s mind when he stepped up to the plate, causing him to whiff bad. It was all he could picture when he didn't reach up in time to snatch that line drive inches from his head at shortstop. He could hear his dad groan from the stands. Quickly he was getting a reputation as a space cadet, and was looking at a possible rotation out in left field, or a permanent role as a bench warmer if he didn't nip it in the bud, not to mention a silent ride home with a dad unsure of what to say if he couldn't say “good job.”

That cup could wreck his 3 year stint in the majors if he didn't ultimately shirk the rule. The constant pressure of a hard plastic dome around his genitals could be much more damaging than the thrust of a catcher's mitt into his groin during a slide into home plate. His teammates continued to mock this accessory. Big Scottie, tall but rain-thin, his mouth stained red by a raspberry chewing gum, made a clicking noise with his bright tongue as he drummed between his legs. Big Scottie looked no different than a ghoul after feasting on flesh.

Rewind 5 years: when a much smaller Orel went to his first real Major League Baseball game. He was in awe as they entered the massive stadium where electric organ jingles buoyed the wafting of hot dogs and popcorn. It was souvenir cup day at Wrigley Field, all beverages came with a reusable container showcasing a century’s evolution of the Cub’s uniform. After the 4th inning, Orel's dad led him to a set of empty seats he’d spotted closer to the 3rd baseline. It was an overcast and windy day in late April, and the sold out game wasn't brimming to its capacity. A few specks of rain prompted a smattering of blue ponchos in the bleachers they could see across the field, but the precipitation held off. As they settled into their new seats, Mr. Gammon watched intently as the Cubs went up to bat, but Orel was distracted by the braying in the row behind him, a few feet to his left.

Two teens with pube stashes and sleeveless jerseys retrieved discarded souvenir cups from among clusters of peanut shells on the ground, and then stuffed them down their sweat pants, not even stopping to drain the backwash. Orel heard their yelps and heehaws as beer soaked through the gray cotton. They'd position the cups over their privates and point its shape outward like a long sawed-off beak. When a batter hit the ball the two would rise and cheer and pound on the hard edge of their amplified phallus. They would bark and Orel was terrified at what these two beasts behind him might be capable of, and Orel got a taste of it when a foul ball came his way. He reached up, thinking he could catch it, not realizing the two teens were closing in right behind him. They were also going for the ball, edging him out. A brunt force slammed into his elbow. The cup behind the fabric had made contact, igniting the throb of a thousand fiery pins across his funny bone.

The two teens didn't acknowledge the collision, neither did his dad. Everyone was so engaged by the ball bouncing in the stands above them, the racing of drunk men to get it.

One of the teens adjusted his cup, inches away from Orel's face. He could smell the beer that was dripping down the boy's leg. The rumbles and the roaring all around him only reinforced them as monstrous. Prior to this he had heard ball games on the radio, seen some on the TV. It was as if now he had been sucked into the static pop of crowds and so he recoiled, thinking this thing was going to come at him again and it'd be nighty night for good.

His dad heard him shriek and looked down, disappointment stretching all corners of his face. "You enjoying any of this? If you want me to take you home, you're going to have to wait another inning. We paid a lot for these tickets." Orel was at a loss on how to describe what it was that bothered him and why he felt so icky. It wasn’t the game but brute shapes beneath some gross kids’ pants!

After the next inning, without even asking him if he still wanted to go, an agitated Mr. Gammon yanked his hand and led him out. As they went up the aisle, Orel could see the two teens had each found another cup to cram down and form a double headed schlong. The sweat pants appeared even wetter.

It was a few years before father and son went to another baseball game, but Orel had begun reassuring his dad of their shared interest with long sessions of catch in the backyard. When they did go to their next Cubs game, Orel was relieved it wasn't on souvenir cup day. He was bigger now, but he was still on the lookout for horseplay that might make him shudder. When they saw Ryne Sandberg hit a grand slam it was the happiest he'd ever seen his dad, and Orel hoped to make a big play on the field someday to elicit the same intensity of glee.

When Orel saw his teammates knocking their cups to show how hard it was and how invincible their balls were, his sense memory conjured up the cup’s bottom edge bashing into his elbow, the shrill pubescent voices echoed in his ears, and he was aware that at any minute, something nasty could poke at him and ruin all the fun of a favorite pastime. A knuckle would rap, then another would call out a response and it was an endless loop until the coach made some changes and sent everyone out onto the field except him. The coach waved him back and said he thought it best for him to take a breather and get his head back in it. As the other kids took their positions, Orel could hear his dad say to his mom, “looks like Orel’s not playing anymore.” And Orel wanted to call out through the green cinder blocks, “no dad, I'm still playing! Just taking a breather, trying to get my head back in it! Trying to shake the smell of damp grass and gotta remind myself the field out there isn’t a mess of sweaty, matted pubes!” He tried to summon the courage to excuse himself to use the bathroom next to the concession shack, where he could reach down his pants and dispose of his musty cup in the trash.

A kid on the other team named Trevor hit the ball into the outfield and made it to second base. He would've been out had Reggie, or as the 12-year-old supposed superstar deemed himself, the Regginator, actually set his foot down on the base when he caught the ball that was thrown back from left field, instead of the dirt several inches to the side of it. The Regginator tried to protest the call, but the ump repeated his original judgment: safe.

"Know how to use your feet?" The runner teased.

Offended, the Regginator reached out and tried to pull off the runner's helmet. Despite the ump pointing to Trevor moments before and shouting safe, Orel could see that protective apparel was only an illusion in this game, easy to peel away before the pounce.

"No touching other players!" The ump ejected the Regginator. The dismissed second baseman kicked the dirt but obeyed. As he returned to the dugout, Orel asked his coach, "am I back in?"

"No, sorry guy, we got Ben warming up out in the bullpen. Ben! Go cover second!"

The Regginator took a seat next to Orel and cussed the ump under his breath. “Dick bag!”

“Learn to settle down, guy!” The coach gave him a friendly, though aggressive, squeeze on the shoulder.

Orel was caged with an animal. His desire to flee was now amplified. But he didn’t want his dad to see him walking away from the field while the game was still being played. So Orel tried to slide away from the Regginator to a spot further down the bench, until his teammate turned and asked “wanna help gangbang that bitch of an ump in the junk?”

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