Short

PARENTHETICAL by J. A Gullickson

April 21, 2025

The floor-to-ceiling windows let in so much light that the office is sweltering. Before the sun emerges from behind the tree line, the HVAC system will turn on. These brisk breaths signal the start of a new day for the company. Graham cycles through the presentation again, sinking deeper into his chair. Each slide features a corporate incantation coldly justifying decisions few care for. Key stakeholders have already made up their minds. This is only a formality.In the center of the cube farm lives Hannah. She stares blankly at the two screens in front of her, cursor gliding back and forth between them. The monitors exist separately, but within the technological sinew is a bridge which allows digital matter to travel between them.Here is Peter, some steps away, behind a closed door. Its frosted glass turns men into shapes from another place. He paces back and forth, waiting for the call. This urgency keeps the machine going.In seven years’ time, Graham will run Creative Services. Nine years from now, in Q2, Hannah will be promoted to SVP of Strategy. Peter will give the company over two decades of his life, eventually becoming Chief Technological Officer, before having an aneurysm at his desk late one Friday evening. He won’t be found until the following Monday morning.They will spend more of their lifetime with the company than their own families. That is to be expected. They owe it to the company who grants them paid time off, who provides them the means to pay for medicine, who needs the drones to exist. Graham and Hannah and Peter are just some of the thousands of employees who put in over 40 hours a week for the good of the company. Their roles are utterly meaningless. They’re all in this together. They’re like a family, after all.The drones don’t know the disease festering within. It started ten weeks ago. A group of kings in department store suits, who are seldom seen by their subjects, committed the unthinkable. At their roundtable, tucked away in the cavernous complex of the company, a meeting was held announcing the purported invasion and takeover of their rival Grant Holdings’ shining star: Parenthetical. The lifeblood of the portfolio, Parenthetical is a SaaS titan with a staggering 73% market share in the programmatic space. AdAge calls it “the last omnichannel platform the industry will ever need”.In Q4, a press release announcing the future of Parenthetical will be blasted out to relevant media outlets. The process begins here. The press release will be written by copywriter Felicia K. and will then be delivered to her creative manager, then submitted to the proofreading vendor, then returned to her creative manager, then reassigned to Felicia K. for edits, then delivered to her creative manager, then resubmitted to the proofreading vendor, then returned to her creative manager, then reviewed by her creative manager, then delivered to the creative director, then approved by the creative director, then submitted to the Chief Creative Officer, then returned to the creative director with massive edits, then rewritten by the creative director, then submitted to the Chief Creative Officer, then approved by the Chief Creative Officer, then submitted to Compliance for approval, then returned to the Chief Creative Officer with some light edits, then reassigned to the creative director with light edits, then submitted to the Chief Creative Officer with revisions, then approved by the Chief Creative Officer, then approved by Compliance, and then submitted to the Board, then it is approved, then it is sent to the public relations agency Stealth in Chicago to be released on Tuesday at 10AM Eastern Standard Time. This is the process. It does not forgive. Felicia K. will not recognize her work when she sees the news on CNN’s homepage. She’ll send a link of the article to Hannah on Microsoft Teams. She’ll tell Hannah she thought she wrote something else entirely. The process always transforms what it receives. At the time of its acquisition, Parenthetical employed close to 800 employees across the country with off-shore teams in the Philippines and India. This does not account for the unknown number of contractors currently working for Parenthetical, whose engagements span from a number of months to several years. The loaded gun Felicia K. thought she wrote would be the start of the swift and merciless gutting. The calendar invite is a death sentence. The words “All Hands Meeting” careens into inboxes companywide. A hushed chorus of uncertainty begins to throb.The impending restructuring awakes something. From the darkest depths of legal teams, parent companies, and non-disclosure agreements, a cruelty is set into motion. It will infect the workforce that once drove Parenthetical. Operations will reorganize. Departments will realign. Generations will cease. Bloodlines will end.The Parenthetical US IT team will unfortunately not be part of the migration. Once the merger is complete, they will be let go with a respectable (four-weeks’ pay) severance package. Two months following the announcement, former Parenthetical Network Architect Reggie C. will get a flat tire while driving to the second round of a job interview, then get hit by a car, then be paralyzed from the neck down for the next 19 years, then, at 58, he will purposefully drive his motorized wheelchair hard enough into the corner of the kitchen counter to split his forehead open. He does this while his wife, Terri, is getting groceries two miles away. He will continue to drive his head into the corner of the kitchen counter until he loses consciousness, then bleed out before Terri returns home. A year and a half after being laid off, former Parenthetical Senior Systems Analyst Erin M. will wrap her minivan around a mighty sycamore .6 miles from her home, then the impact of the collision will cause her daughter’s car seat to fail, then, as Erin slips into a warm endless sleep, she will try to take the glass out of her motionless daughter’s hair.Parenthetical grants its clients access to premium advertising channels, leveraging their catalog of quality inventory from over 170 supply partners to achieve campaign objectives effectively. Clients can harness the transformative power of Parenthetical’s in-platform AI optimization for their ad groups. Users can boost CPMs on top-performing inventory, trim underperforming inventory, and strategically direct spend in real time to their chosen KPIs. Enabled across ten dimensions, Parenthetical’s AI optimization, known as Parrot, revolutionizes efficiency across channels and audiences and unleashes the potential of Parenthetical’s optimization engine for a revamped advertising strategy.The Parenthetical marketing team is let go immediately. They receive a respectable (four-weeks’ pay) severance package. Two years after being laid off, former Parenthetical Marketing Manager Braam C. will become a family annihilator, then extended family members will be on the local news talking about how “there were signs” and how “we should’ve listened.” Six years after this, his life and crimes become the fodder of a bonus episode of a murder podcast for subscribers who pay $5 a month. Former Parenthetical Paid Media Analyst Keiko W. is approached by a headhunter on behalf of Henkel North American Consumer Goods, then is hired to work on the Persil laundry detergent marketing team, then Keiko W. develops acuphagia, a form of pica, then she chokes on a clear thumbtack in her car in the office parking lot. Former Parenthetical Social Media Manager Kevin A. marries his fiancé, Liam, two weeks after being laid off, then the newlyweds take advantage of Kevin A.’s newfound freedom from the workforce and plan a last-minute trip to South Africa as an impromptu honeymoon, then Kevin A. is mauled to death by a Boerboel in an alley while waiting for Liam to finish purchasing fruit from a vendor. Parenthetical bridges the gap between modern marketers and the advanced advertising tech required in today’s dynamic media landscape. It is a proverbial gateway to advertising across top DSP platforms like The Trade Desk, Amazon, and more. Clients can manage campaigns across various channels and devices easily and at their convenience. Clients can elevate their marketing strategies with Parenthetical’s suite of audience-targeting solutions. Digital marketers can benefit from first-party data onboarding, tap into cutting-edge third-party targeting tools, implement precision ABM targeting, and explore a wide array of tailored options. Parenthetical’s award-winning customer service teams playfully boast they are available twenty-five hours a day, eight days a week.The Parenthetical accounts team never stand a chance. They do, however, receive a very respectable (four-weeks’ pay) severance package. In the weeks following her termination, Former Parenthetical Client Success Manager Aubrey E. hires Ji Hwang on Fiverr to perform a resume audit and will quickly discover many of her skills are non-transferable. She still doesn’t have a job 18 months later. She will write one final note that will be added to her connection request on LinkedIn to Senior Recruiter Craig Motton at King Global Staffing Solutions which will read I think I’m done trying now. Cheers! Officer Wilmer Brusch will find her in her apartment bathtub four days later after a wellness check is called in, and Officer Brusch will find she sliced into the interior of her left forearm so deep the knife was stuck in her radius.Parker, Thomas & Associates has an ambitious goal for their client, Therapan: increase online sales by a minimum of 50% within two years. To achieve this, the focus must extend beyond mere visibility to a comprehensive strategy encompassing a broad range of online tactics. Target audiences were meticulously identified based on product categories. This involved a strategic blend of first-party and third-party data to formulate effective targeting strategies. A multifaceted targeting strategy unfolded, incorporating behavioral, retargeting, and contextual targeting. Specific campaigns and creatives were tailored to diverse promotions, strategically boosting sales across different product categories. Despite constituting only 3-5% of the monthly visitor traffic, the traffic driven to the site through the campaign substantially impacted 25-50% of online sales. The Return on Advertising Spend, or ROA for the uninitiated, ranged from 5x to 20x– a testament to the efficiency of the strategy. This outcome was attributed to collecting user data via the Parenthetical Smart Container Tag, consolidating insights from all website visitors driven by various media sources. The online revenue saw a 65% increase over the two-year advertising period, surpassing the initial goal of a 50% boost. This success has paved the way for future expansions, with plans to set even more ambitious goals in the upcoming years. The surge in demand prompted the expansion of the factory’s production to three shifts, underscoring the tangible impact of the advertising efforts on Therapan’s overall business operations.In 1999, Fred Gunnar was a Senior Account Representative at Jones Intercable, based in Georgetown, Colorado. During his 12 years with the company, Fred Gunnar accrued several thousand shares of company stock as part of his elected compensation package. The Comcast Corporation acquired Jones Intercable in 1999. Fred Gunnar received a large lump sum for his shares on top of a respectable (16-weeks’ pay) severance package. Fred Gunnar left Colorado shortly after Jones Intercable was acquired by The Comcast Corporation. Fred Gunnar has not worked in over 25 years. Fred Gunnar is a proud grandfather.The most disturbing aspect of this plague is how indiscriminately it kills. Parenthetical employees believed in their work. They reveled in the chance to become storied titans in the industry. With one indifferent sigh and slash of a pen, everything becomes small. So many creative sprints, workshops, one on ones—insignificant. So goes the acquisition ritual which pumps red through the beating heart of America.It takes 17 weeks for Parenthetical to be completely absorbed. Upon acquisition, Former Chief Executive Officer Martin P. receives a respectable (104-weeks’ pay) contract payout package and then Gold Private Equity offers Martin P. a fractional Chief Marketing Officer role at HanWool Corporation’s English speaking satellite office in Berlin. Former Chief Operating Officer Michael L. receives a respectable (208-weeks’ pay) payout and then retires. He is currently exploring the pharmaceutical industry after gaining interest in the Actiq Lollipop, a delivery device for fentanyl which combines the pain reliever with fillers and sweeteners. After developing diabetes in his mid-forties, Michael L. is interested in developing a sugar-free version. Former Chief Marketing Officer Elias N. receives a respectable (104-weeks’ pay) payout, takes a contract Chief Marketing Officer role with MullenLowe Group and advises the leadership team of both MediaHub and MullenLowe Profero.Graham, Hannah, and Peter don’t have much to say about Parenthetical. Graham is swamped this week. The brainstorming meeting for a holiday campaign was less than fruitful and really set him behind. Hannah needs to finish that deck about last month’s paid digital campaigns. The A/B testing yielded some rather interesting results that the strategy team should see sooner rather than later. Peter has a wedding he’s going to this weekend. He has a blinding headache right now, though. The floor-to-ceiling windows stand like monoliths after sunset. The HVAC system breathes its last breath at 7PM. The air in the office will slowly become stale and acrid over the next two days. On Monday, someone will cry in the handicap bathroom stall and everyone will pretend they don’t hear anything. Maybe a glass of water will help.

COUSIN FRANCINE by Lynn Marie Rossi

April 7, 2025

All my cousin Francine wanted to ask about when I got to Georgia was 9/11. “You probably saw everything,” she said as we sat cross-legged on her bed.“I was seven,” I said. “That was a long time ago.” By then, I was ten, with only vague memories of that day: my mother talking my father out of packing suitcases; the sound of people shouting outside before my mother shut the windows, fearful of dust and chemicals. But Francine wanted falling bodies and clouds of ash. “You’re, like, right next to Ground Zero!” “We live on the Upper West Side,” I said. Geography meant nothing to Francine. She was thirteen and sitting in her bedroom felt like being in the presence of a wild animal. She spoke flatly, tamping down whatever Southern accent she might have, wore bruise-colored eye shadow, and painted her nails matte black. Her bedroom walls were covered with bands I’d only vaguely heard of: Simple Plan, Good Charlotte, My Chemical Romance. Their images were cut from magazines or printed from school computers, all held up with Scotch tape, paper trembling in currents of central air conditioning. Below her oversized Taking Back Sunday hoodie, she wore tank tops and already had boobs. On her wrists, she wore jelly sex-bracelets, though I noticed she rolled her sleeves down to hide them whenever she was actually out in public. “Guys grab at the ones that mean the thing they want from you. The black ones mean sex,” she explained to me, “and the blue ones are blowjobs.”“What?”“Blowjobs. Those are when you suck on a guy’s dick.”I was only vaguely certain what a dick was, with little idea of what would happen if you sucked on one. “Have you ever done that?”She shook her head. “Not yet. But I practice.” She didn’t elaborate. After years of refusing the invitations of friends who vacationed in Florida, my parents finally felt obligated to say “Yes,” and left me at my aunt and uncle’s place outside Atlanta on their way. “Less than a week,” my father told me as he lifted my bags from the rental car trunk. My left ear hadn’t unpopped after the plane landed, and I opened and closed my jaw, barely listening.“Just four days,” my mother said. “Four long days.” The whole trip made her antsy and irritable in the same way as waiting in line in the grocery store. She had a native New Yorker’s idea of the South, made nervous by such “conservative” and “backwards” people. Dad pointed out that she’d grown up on Staten Island.My aunt and uncle’s house was a giant McMansion in a neighborhood full of them. Each looked cobbled from scraps of brick and fake stone and vinyl siding. Juliet balconies jutted from two-car garages. Pool pumps harmonized in backyards. The mid-August air was unbearable; nobody had trees and there weren’t any sidewalks.Inside, photographs lined the wall beside the staircase, one of which showed me, fresh-birthed in a hospital crib. “Can’t get over you becoming a young woman!” Aunt Jane stared at me as I dragged my suitcase up the steps. “Me neither!” I didn’t know what to do besides match her breathless energy. She showed me to the guest bedroom, where their dog, Pierre, spent most of the day. He was an old Bichon with perpetually wet, brown fur around his mouth. He hated me immediately, growling from his place on the bed. “Oh, P, stop it! Be nice to your cousin.” Jane shooed him away. He scurried, wheezing, off into the hall. “He’ll get used to it. Maybe he’ll try snuggling with you!”“Here’s hoping!” Within minutes of my uncle returning home from his car dealership, we were gathered at the table, eating Stouffer’s macaroni and cheese. The small crocodile on Uncle Chris’s polo was askew; Francine later told me she’d unstitched every one in his wardrobe after being grounded for downloading music on Kazaa. Jane did her best to reattach them, and Chris still wore the shirts out of spite. After sunset, my mother called to tell me they’d made it to Florida. “There was a snake in the condo. Your father threw a shoe.”“And missed.” They took turns complaining over the phone about their accommodations, never asking how things were with me. After twenty minutes of me saying “oh” or “mm-hmm,” we hung up. I found Francine watching an anime about pirates. “It’s really far along,” she said. “It'd be hard to catch you up on the plot.” Uncle Chris was asleep in front of one of their many other televisions. Aunt Jane sat at the kitchen island with a glass of wine and an issue of Better Homes and Gardens, staring intently at copper pots hanging above the stove.I snuck through the sliding glass doors and out to the back deck. Night was no cooler than day. I pulled up a chair to the edge of the pool and watched a dead frog float from one end to the other. For the first time, I sensed I’d been set up for a lifetime of comparing everything to New York. Once the others went to bed, I ventured back inside. Through the dark, I found my bedroom. I couldn’t figure out how to work the lamp on the bedside table, then cried for a while before realizing I had to pee and had no idea where the upstairs bathroom was. I panicked, shaking below the covers. Finally, seeing no better option, I squatted in a corner of the bedroom and went on the carpet. In the morning, everybody blamed Pierre, who took a scolding from Aunt Jane with his head down, drool dripping from his tiny lips. Uncle Chris scrubbed the carpet with Resolve, leaving a bleachy splotch.Breakfast was microwaved sausage and egg sandwiches, soggy and chewy. Aunt Jane had “so many errands!” so Francine and I got into her PT Cruiser with her and set off. The drive was all six-lane roads and chain restaurants. It wasn’t until we arrived at the mall that I saw a human being outside of a car.Aunt Jane dropped us off at the multiplex entrance. “Napoleon Dynamo starts in twenty minutes—here’s money. France, I’ll text ya.”The instant the car pulled away, Francine walked briskly through the mall doors, going in the opposite direction of the theater, texting on her cherry red Razr. “We’re not going to the movie?” I asked, trying to hide my disappointment. “No,” she said. “I already saw it. Mom just always forgets what I’ve been up to the instant it’s over.”“Oh.”“You can go, though.”“It’s okay. I don’t really want to.”“No, you should go. I’m meeting somebody.”“Can I come?”She sighed. “Look, can you just give me an hour by myself? Maybe a bit more? I can’t have some little kid following me around the whole time. We’ll meet back at this fountain?” She pointed at a bubbling monstrosity at the center of a large atrium nearby. People sat here and there at tables along its rim, eating buttery soft pretzels. I noticed a boy lurking among the fake palm trees. He stood with a hunch and wore baggy, black clothes, his pant legs criss-crossed by straps and a chain wallet. Hair dangled down over his face, but I saw his eyes lock on Francine.“Meeting that guy?” I asked.Francine looked panicked, then put her hand on my shoulder. “Look, I’m not telling you to fuck off because I don’t think you’re cool. I do. You’re my cool, New York cousin. You can handle yourself. But that dumbass doesn’t know that. He’s just gonna see you as a little kid. Though you’re not.”I nodded. “Thanks.”“And because you’re cool, I know you won’t say anything to my parents.”“Of course.”“An hour.”“An hour.”Wandering around, I realized that I’d never set foot in an actual mall. I found an FYE and browsed the CD racks, picking one up now and then and listening to thirty-second song samples at a headphone station. The whole mall smelled like floor wax, burgers, and perfume. Pacsun kids loitered in Pacsun; Hot Topic kids in Hot Topic. For a time, I wandered the dark recesses of an Abercrombie, holding too-big spaghetti-strap shirts up to my torso.In the food court, I spotted Francine and the boy at a table, eating samples of orange chicken from small white cups. He held his hands out to her like he was begging for something. My cousin sighed and looked up at the skylights. Finally, with a tilt of her head, she gestured towards the restrooms, and the two of them walked together in that direction. The boy’s face was a grimace of nervous excitement; his slouch straightened. My first instinct was to follow them, but I didn’t. Instead I walked back towards the fountain. On the way, I saw a group of small children gathered around a Kiwanis Club-sponsored coin funnel, pennies circling as they slowly succumbed to gravity. While my aunt and uncle slept, Francine and I watched Invader Zim in the den. Pierre lay at my feet; I’d brokered peace at dinner by feeding him a chicken nugget under the table. “That boy you were hanging out with,” I said. “How old is he?”“Ha. He’s forty-seven. He’s my math teacher.”“Seriously.”“He’s fifteen. Met him at Chick-fil-A a couple weeks ago.”“I saw you and him going into the bathrooms.” “Yeah?” Francine kept her eyes on the TV, though I could tell she was worried about what I’d ask.“Were you doing drugs?”She laughed. “Drugs? No. Not that it’s your fucking business.”“Sorry.” When the episode ended, Francine flipped to MTV2 in time to watch a Fall Out Boy music video.“If you have to know,” she said when the song was over. “I was showing him my vagina.” My stomach went weightless. “He asked me to shave it for him, and he wanted proof that I did. So we went into a bathroom stall and I showed him.”I knew about pubic hair from everything I’d seen on the internet, and had been wondering about when my own would come in, but hearing someone talk about the subject of their vagina so bluntly threw me off. “Did he show you anything?”“No. He was scared. Told me to trust him, that he has a big dick, blah blah. Typical.” She turned to me. “Look, Marie. If a guy ever asks you to do anything like that, you don’t have to. If you don’t want. Don’t let him make you think it’s something you want, either. Okay? Just want whatever it is you want. Like, the minute I can get my nipples pierced, I’m gonna. But because I want to. Not for anyone else.” It was the most straightforward anybody had been with me about the matter of my body, or of the one I’d soon have.“Alright. Thanks.” I wanted to hug her, demand she teach me more, but stopped myself. Sometime after that, I fell asleep on the couch. When I woke up, Francine had wrapped me in a blanket and left a glass of water on the coffee table beside me, which tasted bubbly and odd in the early morning. On my last day in Georgia, it rained. We sat around watching daytime television. Francine scratched at her crotch. Uncle Chris clicked around on the computer doing research for a fantasy football draft, commenting out loud every few minutes about how slow the computer had gotten since it had been used for all that downloading. Aunt Jane puttered around the house.“Alright,” she said just before noon. “We can’t sit around here all day. Summer’s wasting! If we have to stay inside, we can go to Babyland!”“Jesus Christ, Mom,” Francine said, furiously typing text messages.“Don’t.” “Why would we want to do baby stuff?”“Hey! Watch it.”“Right, Marie?” My cousin turned to me. “We’re too old for it?”I shrugged. “I don’t even know what it is.”“Cabbage Patch Kids place. It’s like a theme park of dolls. Out in an even more boring suburb than this one.”I remembered having one of the dolls as a little girl, with yarn hair and a blue dress. Once, I threw it up in the air the way I’d seen adults do with real babies and its plastic face knocked me in the face and split my lip. “I had one of those a while ago,” I said.“See, Mom? We’re too old. It’s creepy.”“What if I said that I wanted to go?” Aunt Jane asked. “Would that be enough? If I asked that you do something for me? Unless you feel like sticking around here with your father, hearing him mutter about pretend football.”Uncle Chris didn’t turn from the monitor. “Please, girls, go. It’ll make her happy.”“And we can have lunch at Bojangles.” Aunt Jane dangled her car keys off her fingers. Francine roused herself from the recliner with a sigh and I followed. Inside Babyland, dolls stared impassively from their shelves. Little girls squealed and ran from place to place, picking up their new toys and bringing them to a small office where a woman dressed as a nurse made them take an adoption oath, fingers raised in the air, swearing they’d take seriously the responsibilities of motherhood.Following the mass of mothers and daughters, we came to a nursery staged behind enormous windows, the glass smudged. . In bassinets, dolls wore cloth diapers. Aunt Jane looked delighted. . A mechanical stork twisted back and forth above our heads, beak chattering. When it faced us head-on, I saw that one eye blinked while the other stayed half shut like it was having a stroke. Finally, we got to the central room. Most of the space was taken up by a fake patch of dirt. Doll’s heads stuck out here and there like ripe cabbages on beds of leaves. In the center of everything was a tree, a plaster monstrosity whose limbs reached up to the ceiling. In its trunk were round television screens where gestating doll fetuses were visible, floating in green-tinted amniotic fluid. Tubing snaked from plastic IV drips into different points in the soil, their sloshing contents labeled IMAGINATION.“Have you been here before?” I asked Francine.“Every couple of years,” she said. “I was into it before I realized how fucked up it all is. Trying to make women okay with becoming, like, breeding cows.”“It’s just toys,” I offered.“Not down here, it’s not.”Another nurse appeared, speaking into a headset microphone. “Mother Cabbage is getting ready to have a baby!” She pulled out a large caliper and measured the tree’s trunk. “She’s five leaves dilated!” The doll heads writhed in place around her as she described a magic dust that fell invisibly from the branches above. “It determines whether she has a girl or a boy. Which are we looking for today?”The crowd of women and girls shouted for a boy. The nurse stuck a plastic speculum into a space in the roots, and with feigned effort pulled from the depths a naked doll with a full head of hair and rosy cheeks. “Looks like this one is gonna get a new home right away. ” She handed the doll to a nearby child who immediately held it close to her chest. Aunt Jane and the other mothers applauded. When the birth was over, we slowly retraced our steps back to the entrance. I followed Francine in a daze while Aunt Jane lingered at the glass cabinets displaying the vintage toys, then insisted on buying me a t-shirt I knew I’d never wear. Out in the lot, a child melted down; somehow, her brand new doll burst a seam somewhere between the shop and the car, and stuffing bled from the hole, blowing in tufts across the asphalt.

* * *

It wasn’t until years later that I saw Francine again. She visited New York for a weekend right before I finished college. I met her at a bar near Penn Station. She dragged a suitcase, ready to head to JFK the moment we finished. Gone were the hoodie and jeans, replaced by a tunic dress and leggings; she’d stopped hiding her accent, giving her words a drawl I found musical.I thought about bringing up that trip to Georgia, but couldn’t fit it into the conversation, not wanting to resurrect those girls we’d been. But I felt I owed her somehow. The advice she’d given me, while imperfect, was the first I’d been offered to guide me. By the time we met as women, I’d stumbled and fucked up plenty, and wanted to share it all with her as we sat, filling one another in on what we’d missed. If she lived closer, I thought, we might’ve been like sisters.I haven’t seen her since, of course. A month after that day in the cafe, she met the man who eventually became her husband. They live in Boulder now with two children. They send me a Christmas card each year.“Oh,” she said as she finished her drink, looking at her phone. “Plane’s delayed.”“Huh. Well. Anything else you wanted to see?” My life, New York City, all I had to offer: it all seemed insufficient.“What would you do with two hours?” Francine smiled, deferring to me, waiting for an answer, for me to open her world up in the way she’d opened mine.

THE COIN by Rose Hollander

April 4, 2025

I spent my twenties working at a bike shop in a midwestern college town. The town was thick with rationality, overflowing from the university. Despite this, I believed in God. The strength of my belief shifted from day to day, but when I stood in church each Sunday my faith was strong again. My boyfriend, Don, agreed to come to church after two months of dating. “I can see it’s important to you,” he said. “So I’ll come. But don’t count on any sudden transformation when I hear the organ music.”And I knew that he was right, that his guard was up too high. To Don, faith was a failing grade in a physics class. “If God wanted me to believe in Him, He wouldn’t have given me the capacity for rational thought,” he would say. Sometimes Don’s lack of faith upset me. I didn’t want to fight, so I just tried to ignore this divide, this one thing we did not, could not share. I knew that trying to convert him would only end badly.Still, I couldn’t help feeling a little giddy that Sunday when he finally came with me to church. We walked hand in hand from my apartment to First Congregational. There was a light drizzle. Halfway there, it turned into a heavy rain. Don had come prepared; he held a purple umbrella over the both of us, and I barely got wet. The service was beautiful. I always find it beautiful. Don fidgeted next to me, and I started to feel like a mother who was dragging her kid around. Then he whispered, “The stained glass is shining right on you. It’s turning you orange, sunset orange. You look incredibly sexy,” he said, and I stopped feeling like a mother who was dragging her kid around.“Is a sunset really that sexy?” I said, barely moving my lips. The pastor was talking about the binding of Isaac. Don thought about that for a while. Then, as the pastor reached the conclusion that the ram was there the whole time, if only Abraham could see it, Don touched my shoulder. “A sunset is beautiful,” he said. “Because it reminds you that you’re not in control. That the Earth will spin no matter how you try to stop it. Even if you want to prolong a moment forever.”I took his hand, and I began to pray in earnest. I prayed for all the usual things: my health, and my mother’s, and my father’s, and Don’s. A promotion at the bike shop. World peace. And, gripping Don’s hand in mine, I prayed for that moment to last just a little bit longer. After the service there was always a small reception. Each week, one family was tasked with bringing pastries and soft drinks for the congregation. This week the Robinsons had set the bar high. On the white plastic tablecloth lay donuts, danishes, bagels, muffins — it was almost too much. I had to look away. “Nice spread,” said Don. He was eyeing an everything bagel. “Find me something, okay?” I said. “I’m going to find a bathroom.”When I got back, Don was nowhere to be found. I saw an abandoned everything bagel on the table. It had one bite taken out of it. Where was he?Someone coughed and I turned. It was Pastor Baumann, with Don at his side. “You’ve got a nice friend here, Miss Brown,” said the pastor. He had a smear of yellow mustard on his upper lip. “Mr. Wilson and I just had a very nice talk.”He gave Don a pat on the shoulder. “I need to thank Mrs. Robinson for this spread. But I’m glad to have met you, Mr. Wilson. I’m sure I’ll be seeing you again.” And he was off.“Aw, I’m sorry Pastor Baumann cornered you,” I said, putting my arm around Don. “He can be a little intense.”Don looked at me oddly. “No, I liked him. We had a really interesting talk. I’ll have to tell you about it later.”I thought he would tell me about it when we walked back, but we didn’t talk. The rain stopped and started again, and Don remained deep in thought. We didn’t talk about the trip the rest of the day. Don left for the library to do a problem set, and I made some tea and watched TV. During a commercial break, I got a call from Don.“Marie,” he said. “I’d like to come with you to church again next Sunday. Would that be okay?”“To church?” I said. “I mean, of course that would be okay. But, why?”He was silent for a moment. “I don’t know. I just spent three hours working on an econometrics problem set. The whole problem set, the whole course, is based on the assumption that statistical distributions hold over frequent trials of an experiment. But the pastor…”“Baumann’s not that charismatic,” I said. “I don’t know what he could have said to you…”“It’s not exactly what he said,” Don said. “He showed me something.”“What, his new book?”“No,” said Don. “He showed me that I’ve been wrong. That’s everybody’s wrong, he showed me-”“What the hell,” I said, but he didn’t seem to hear me. “He showed me evidence,” Don said, passion rising in his voice. “That statistics, physics, biology — that they all present an incomplete picture of our world.”“Baby, you were with him for ten minutes. What the hell did he show you?”Don sighed. “He flipped a coin. He flipped it again and again, and he knew what it would land on every time.”“Well, it was weighted,” I said, without really thinking about it. “Obviously.”“Marie,” he said. “It was my coin. I had change from when we got coffee the other day…”“Let’s talk about this later,” I said. I hung up. I was shaking a little, but I didn’t know why. Don wanted to go to church again. That was good news, right? Don was realizing that science presented an incomplete picture of the world. This was what I had always known. God controls everything. But (and this was important) God controls it in a consistent way. Not breaking all His worldly patterns for some random pastor from some arbitrary town in the Midwest. And surely He hadn’t. Surely Pastor Baumann had just tricked Don. But why would he do something like that? When I called Pastor Baumann and explained what had happened, he was silent for a moment. Then he laughed. “I’m glad my little explanation had such an effect on the boy,” he said. “But, to be honest, I don’t understand why it works.”“Pastor Baumann, I already come to church every week,” I said. “I already believe. You don’t need to pretend you have magic powers to recruit me.”“Pretend?” said the pastor. “Marie, you hurt me. I never lie. As King David wrote in Psalms, ‘The righteous hates falsehood.’”“So,” I said. “Just to be clear. You’re claiming that you have magic powers over quarters?”Baumann chuckled. “Well, not exactly. But probabilities go a little wonky around me. A 50:50 coin flip turns into 70:30, or a 1:6 dice roll becomes 1:2. I haven’t tested it comprehensively, it’s just something I’ve noticed that newcomers to the church, like your friend, are often interested in.”“I don’t understand,” I said. “How do you know the changed odds?”“Well, I don’t really know,” said the pastor. “But if I call ‘4’ on a dice roll, it usually comes up on the first roll.”“It doesn’t sound like you’ve tested it at all scientifically,” I said.Pastor Baumann laughed again. “Well, Marie, we’re not really in the business of scientific testing here, are we?”The call turned to small talk, and I put up water to boil. When the tea was ready, I turned on the television to watch reruns. There was a small pile of change on the coffee table. “Heads,” I said. I tossed a quarter in the air; it came down sloppily, glancing off my arm and skidding onto the floor. It was heads. My heart beat sped up. Maybe Pastor Baumann was telling the truth, but he didn’t know the full story. Maybe God had temporarily altered the laws of probability for everybody. I flipped the coin again. “Heads!” I caught it neatly on my inner arm. Visions flashed through my head: I could go to the casino, make a thousand dollars. I could buy a new mattress, or take a class at the university. It was tails. Maybe it had been tails for Baumann, too, and he had cheated, somehow. My explanations were getting more pathetic.Don had left one of his physics textbooks on the couch. It weighed about five pounds. I flipped to a page in the middle. “For a point mass moving in a circle of radius r in the xy plane, we have the planar symmetry,” I read, before the rest of the page became blurry. There was nothing in here that was going to help me understand Baumann’s claim. I would have better luck going to the library and looking for books on magic tricks. A small voice inside of me coughed. They said the same about Jesus, it said. They said he was just doing magic tricks. But the pastor wasn’t the younger son of God. I was sure of that, if not much else. Pastor Baumann, with his habit of getting mustard all over his face, had to be mortal. The pastor was just lying. But why would he lie? If he was lying about this, what else was he lying about? This line of thinking gave me a headache, so I was glad when the doorbell rang. It was Don. He was disheveled. His shirt was wrinkled, hair matted; there were bags under his eyes. And he was beaming from ear to ear.“Baby, I’ve been in the library all day,” he said. He took my hand. “I read everything. I read Lewis and Chesterton and Torrey, and God, I get it now.” I took a step back. I didn’t know what to say. “Okay. Okay. Let’s just watch some TV, yeah?”“TV!” He scoffed. “How can I watch TV, when I want to just– go outside and breathe it all in, all of God’s creations. The fresh-cut grass and the new flowers and– and you.” He took me in his arms. “I love you,” he murmured. “I love you I love you I love you. And I love God, for thinking you up.”I leaned into him, unable to speak. We were so close we may as well have one person. Then he stepped back. “Let’s pray now,” he said. “I want to pray with you.”“I’ve always wanted to pray together,” I said, but I didn’t quite know if it was true. It felt odd, kneeling beside him, thanking God in silent sync. How much overlap was there between our prayers? I didn’t know what to believe now — what Don learned in his classes or what I had believed my whole life. Could either system of belief co-exist with the pastor’s professed gift? I felt like Don and I were little kids in daycare, playing next to each other with different toy trucks. But maybe, just maybe, as we knelt together, eyes shut tight, we were asking God the same questions with our silent prayers. Don and I broke up about a month later. He read more and more about Christianity until he wouldn’t talk about anything else. The bylines on his books shifted from Lewis and Chesterton to Scott Hahn and Jerry Falwell. Soon First Congregational, my church, was too laid back for him. He wanted to go to the Catholic church by the river. He wanted me to wear more modest clothing. He didn’t want to have sex. When he stayed over, he would sleep on the couch. If I walked by him in a t-shirt and underwear, he would sigh, or make a big show of covering his eyes. “Thanks a lot, Marie,” he’d say. “You’re really helping me out here.” His tone hurt more than his words. So I moved on. I got a promotion at the bike shop, but I knew I didn’t want to stay in this town forever: constantly meeting new college students in the coffee shops and bars, finding it harder and harder to talk to them the older I got. I didn’t go to First Congregational every Sunday anymore. I didn’t know what to believe. I peeked in from time to time. The people filling the pews looked so confident, so sure of themselves and their God. And Pastor Baumann spoke to them as seriously about the fall from Eden as he had spoken to me about his powers over probability. One foggy April Sunday, about a year after I broke up with Don, I was walking to the coffeeshop. I was on my phone, scrolling through Zillow, when I heard someone call my name. “Marie,” he said again. It was Don, only partially obscured by the fog. He looked different; older. He had a short beard, and wore a suit. “Don,” I said. I didn’t really have any questions for him. “How have you been?”“I’ve been good,” he said softly, and I said the same, and that was that. As I continued walking home, I felt uneasy. It was like speaking with a different person: a stranger. We used to talk all night. We used to share so much. I felt a sudden anger towards Pastor Baumann, as if he had stolen something from me. I stopped short. I wasn’t going home. I crossed the street and began to walk to the church. There was a service going on. I checked my watch; it was 10 o’ clock. Most congregants sat in the first few rows, except for a little boy and his mother. They sat in the last row. The boy sat straight and proud in a stiff little suit. The tie was all wrong. He stared straight ahead, so he didn’t notice his mother’s sideway glances. I could see the pride in her eyes. Her little boy, grown up enough to behave in church. When they got back home she would ask him what he thought of the sermon, and she would act surprised by whatever he said. “I never thought of it like that,” she might say. “I bet Pastor Baumann hasn’t either.” The anger that had reared when I saw Don came up into my throat. It closed up my throat and I couldn’t breathe. Two hours later, I knocked on the door of the pastor’s office. “Marie, what a pleasant surprise,” he said, beaming. “Come in, please.”“I need to know,” I said. “I need to know if you were telling the truth. I lost someone who was important to me. He’s a different person. His life is on a different course. You’ve done so much damage, you don’t even know-”“You’re babbling,” said Baumann. He got up and closed the door behind me. “Sit down, and I will tell you anything you want to know.”“Flip a coin for me,” I said. “Show me that everybody else is wrong.” The pastor raised an eyebrow. I fished in my pocket and handed him a dime. “If you’d like,” he said. “But you shouldn’t take so much meaning from it.”“Just get on with it,” I said, and he looked mildly shocked. “Fine,” said Baumann. “Heads.” He flipped the dime and I craned to look at it, resting on his forearm. Roosevelt grinned back at me.“Again,” I said. The pastor sighed and called tails, it was tails.“Again.” He called heads, and it was heads.“Again, again.” “Tails.” The coin flew through the air and Baumann smacked it on his forearm. I saw an olive branch and started to tear up. “Tails,” he said, and flipped again. It was heads. I thanked God and walked out of that place, into the dense April fog. It started to rain and the droplets fell down into the grass, just like they were supposed to.

SOLITUDE by Sebastian Castillo

April 2, 2025

The purchasing of books is life’s finest pleasure. And while I often have a stack of them unread, they are read eventually, and therefore this habit does not seem excessive or indulgent to me. It is perhaps a bourgeois affectation—there is something embarrassing of an over-large personal library—but there are certainly less healthy ways to spend one’s money. I am no stranger to that, certainly. If God and constancy may will it, that period of my life is closed shut, like a book I’d like to forget entirely. Those pages are wine-soaked anyhow, grainy with drug-powder, the words to those many stories smudged and barely legible. Yet unfortunately, I had upset an important balance: I was buying too many. If I bought, say, four books, I would read three of them immediately, and leave the last for some later time. But now I was acquiring more than ever. While I am a prodigious reader, I couldn’t keep up. Yes, I am one of the top admirers of literature in the world, currently, and anyone in my life (the few, that is) can attest to that. So, as you can see, this position of mine had gotten the better of me. I could count at least 150 books in my possession I had not yet read. Many of these books were purchased during various publisher’s and bookseller’s flash sales, when a $18 paperback can be purchased for a measly six, shipping included. It’s hard to stop oneself in those moments, erratically clicking on as many attractive titles as memory allowed me to recall. And now, well, 150 books! That’s simply too many left unread in one’s possession, and so I promised myself I would buy no more until that pile had shrunk by half. And, in the case I badly wanted to read a book I did not have access to, very badly wanted to do this, then I would either have to wait, or see if it was available at the public library. God, grant me constancy!I went to the library to acquire Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal. This book had been recommended to me by a well-meaning friend. The recommender, the doorman of my building, said it read to him like something I would dream (I often tell him my dreams, for he is the only friend who tolerates this, always a smile on plump Horacio’s cherubic face). Well, of course I found this comparison flattering, and felt I needed to read it as soon as possible. Sometimes books announce their presence to you, like some vagabond courier knocking haggard upon the castle walls with an important message. Leaving the library with the slim volume (it is a mere 80-page novella, among the best kinds of books there are), I flipped through its pages and was left agog: the prior library patron had annotated it. And not merely lightly annotated—they had underlined, circled, and written words in the margins of almost every page of the book. It is a public book, and they had made it private. My reading, effectively, had doubled: not only would I read Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal, but I’d have to read this phantom reader’s version as well. I considered returning it. I did not want this person’s version of Too Loud a Solitude. I didn’t even know them. What if they had very bad ideas? I feared their version of the novella would merge with the one printed by the publisher, and they would, unknowingly, from the past, destroy the effects of this book on me.I tried to ignore this phantom reader’s pointing and gesturing as I read. The plot of the book was simple enough: an old man destroys books using a hydraulic press. It is not clear why. He is completely insane and an alcoholic. But why did this phantom reader insist on underlining the fact that this drunk and insane man had worked at this hydraulic press for 35 years? The narrator repeats this fact, it’s true, yet this reader felt it necessary to highlight the number of years every time. I could not feel anything but contempt for this version of Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal. It does not matter that this old man has been at this work of destroying books for 35 years. It could have been 40 years, or 20. The effect would remain the same. The author had merely made an arbitrary decision. 35 years. Yes, authors enjoy doing a bit of this all the time: the marquis went out at seven in the evening and so on. The curtains in my room are blue (they are white).This phantom reader-cum-writer (for now, they had written their own version of Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal, which we could call Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal 2, or perhaps, My Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal by Anonymous) had many things to say about the book in question. Some of their marginal notes said: “love for destruction” and “destruction” and “against common sense” and “discovery” and “loneliness in society” and “weird tenderness to work tools” and “power of books” and “USSR?” and at the end of the book were a series of furious notes, completely and utterly illegible.Was this person fucking stupid? Were they just a fucking complete fucking idiot? A total degenerate moron? They had heavily underlined or added multiple stars (drawn as if the person holding the pen were in fact an illiterate child or a mental invalid) to the following words or phrases: “slaughterhouse” (heavily underlined, starred), “too loud a solitude” (heavily starred, if you can believe it), “the heavens are not humane” (underlined multiple times), “too loud a solitude” again (heavily starred, again). When I had finally reached the end of Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal, I felt annihilated. Not by the novel in question, no, but by this phantom reader-cum-writer’s new version of the book. Their stupidity, I found, was so boundless I felt certain then that the human project was completely doomed. Completely, utterly doomed. Nothing would ever get better. Things would only get worse. Every day, I realized, was a testament to this fact: life itself was the experience of being surrounded by entropy, atrophy, and necrosis. But most importantly, it was a testament to boundless stupidity. Nothing should have existed in the first place. And in fact, it was the stupidity of nothingness to have created existence by accident.I realized, then, there was only one thing left for me to do. I would either have to hang myself (the thought of which turned my stomach), or I would have to kill this person. Anonymous. For they had done something of irreparable harm: they had forever damaged Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal which had led me to lose complete faith in the human project. I could not merely go out and buy myself my own copy and read it again, unsullied by this silly and ridiculous and more importantly, very stupid person. That initial phantom reading will have forever imprinted on me, and therefore, completely and utterly destroyed Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal—a book, incidentally, I did not really like, which is in many ways beside the point. The only punishment I could fathom was to end their life. Because then I could say we will truly have had a tit-for-tat: I will have altered the course of their existence (by ending it) in exchange for their having ruined my experience of Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal, a book I didn’t like, and more importantly for causing me to lose faith in the human project. It’s possible I would have liked this book much more had I not first encountered it in this fallen state, and perhaps then, I could have gone on living in a satisfactory manner. The human project could have seemed salvageable. I could have continued to eat breakfast and so on, I could have continued to make love with beautiful women and so on, but now I had lost complete faith in the human project, and everything, utterly everything, had become equally ruined.But, of course, I first needed to find out who they were. This proved trickier than I imagined, the more I thought of it: I had assumed, perhaps incorrectly, that it was the previous library patron who had done this. But in fact, it could have been the patron before that one, or the one before that, or the antepenultimate lender. The more I thought of this possibility, the more I felt enraged: they had not only permanently ruined this book for me, but for, perhaps, an entire population of readers. There could, by all rights, be a small city of now permanently damaged readers, who are to walk around for the rest of their lives with this version of Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal residing within their forever diminished personhood. So, in fact, one of the reasons the human project was doomed, utterly and completely doomed, could have been for the fact that—given so many readers had read this version of this version of Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal—they too had given up on the human project, and they too had lost the will to improve the conditions of life in any achievable fashion. And if this were to happen to several people, all from the same source, then that hopelessness would spread like a bacterium. And as we know, when something of that nature goes untreated, it’s over. It’s completely over. In many ways, I thought to myself, it was conceivable that this version of Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal could be the inaugurating gesture of the human apocalypse itself. If I did not do something about it, if I did not stop it right then and there, I would be allowing the annihilation of all that was good and true and meaningful on our planet. I was so overwhelmed by the realization I felt the need to consume my third bowl of chocolate cereal for the day (I would typically admit only two), and this I always did in my study, which I called my suicide den, where I kept all my books, hundreds of them scattered in idiosyncratically designed piles for reasons which I cannot address.It struck me, then, that the passage of my thinking had led me off toward an unexpected detour: while at first I thought I had lost all faith in the human project—and, indeed, I had—I was now, quite ironically, put in the position to save the possibility of the human being by ensuring that no other person would ever read this book. If some of the damage had already been done, and surely it had, I could at the very least stop it dead in its tracks. And so, of course, while some people, a small band of citizens, surely, will have been permanently damaged (and I forever would be one among their number—their leader?), I had the power to prevent this insipid disease from spreading, and in that way, save the possibility of the human being. And yet: I felt a profound sympathy for my fellow comrades. Who were they? Had they all hanged themselves? Perhaps they were spreading their necrosis—no fault of their own—in our little community, irreparably poisoning all with ears to hear. So now, I realized, my labor had not doubled, but grown exponentially: not only would I have to kill Anonymous, this phantom reader-cum-writer, but I would have to kill all who had read this volume—out of pity, and diligence, of course—so that they could not spread their human necrosis as a result of having read Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal by Anonymous.This would be much easier than I had at first anticipated. My only other friend in the world, besides Horacio, was Sherman, the steward of our public library. Now, this might strike one as curious. How could such a prodigious purchaser of books be on good terms with a librarian? Surely, one might think that the average librarian would treat me with a bit of suspicion: I was a profligate and erratic purchaser of books. But no, this was not the case. Sherman was my next-door neighbor. I live in 7-H and he lives in 7-G. In fact, it was Sherman who had convinced me to come to the library in the first place: I was carrying inside a bundle of books that had recently been delivered to me, when I complained about the excess of my habit, in passing. Sherman, ever the perfectly polite neighbor, chuckled and said, “You should stop by the library, then,” he said, “not that you’ll need it, it seems.” I admit to having found this last remark a little distasteful. Not that I would need it? One always needs books. More and more books… For there is nothing but books. (People are disposable. The human project is doomed, after all. But books are something else, and of course literature is better than life.) I forgave him for his careless comment, but I have not forgotten it. In the morning I knocked on Sherman’s door. He had just finished his breakfast and was preparing to leave for work. I sheepishly submitted to him my request: is there any chance he could tell me how many people had rented out Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal, and, if so, could he give me their names? I crafted an excuse: I wanted to do an art project, I said (an art project!): I would photograph, and interview each prior patron who had rented the book, and I would have an individual discussion with each of them. This way, I said, all of these prior patrons will have unwittingly been in a book club, in the future, without knowing it; and by sharing their unique perspective on the book, the art project would demonstrate the importance and trans-historical value of literature, that great unifier of the human project, I said. Once finished, I would collect these interviews in a book, which I would call Solitude. “I’m really not supposed to do that sort of thing,” he said. I could see Sherman was chuffed. Bits of flax seed stuck unattractively to his teeth, and I could hear his toddler child sing a dullard song to herself from the living room. She threw her toy at the toy dog. “But that’s such a great idea. I’m sure our director would agree. We’re always trying to find some way to drum up interest in the library. I would have to get his permission. Come by later, and I’ll see what I can do.”I was thrilled. Little did he know, of course, that he had just quite literally signed several people’s death warrants. For indeed I would seek out each one of these patrons, and need to kill them all. My logic was: if I confronted Anonymous about his scribbles, if I approached this strange idiot man at his house with a copy of this version of Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal and, shaking the slim volume, asked, “Did you do this? Did you mark up this library book?” he would naturally lie. There is no denying he would lie. And so, as a safety precaution, I would have to kill each and every single one of these readers of this version of Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal, to ensure the success of my plan. I would be the last living being poisoned by this text, I would have to suffer that my whole life, but I will have stopped an inchoate bacterium from spreading any further than it needed to, and by doing so, I will have saved the possibility of the person. I returned to my quarters and took a nap. I no longer had to work, because of my lottery winnings, and subsequently had taken on an irregular schedule: I would wake very early in the morning, read 60 or 80 pages of whatever book was currently on my pile, then take my breakfast and sleep for three or four hours. In the late afternoon I would rise, and either visit the park, read more, or begin my long and slow dinner preparations. Then I would eat, and read even more until I felt my eyes grow heavy in their sockets, and sleep for the evening. But today things would be different: I needed the extra rest to gather my strength for my forthcoming travels and revenge plot.As I was leaving my building, I was struck by a horrific thought: had Horacio—who first recommended this book to me after all—acquired this book from the library? Would I have to kill my poor friend, dear Horacio, a wonderful and cherubic man, a stalwart of all that was valuable in the human project, etc.? And, indeed, if he had read this library copy, and had somehow survived its assault, perhaps my calculations were in error? Perhaps it was only I who had been so damaged by Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal by Anonymous, and my entire revenge plot upon which I was to embark was an unforgivable calumny against these innocent souls (save for, of course, Anonymous, who deserved death no matter what). I stood in my building lobby and wept. Please, no! Horacio was sitting on his stool looking at something on his phone. It was surprisingly sunny outside, despite the time of day, though perhaps I had been indoors for too long. I could barely manage a word to him.“Good afternoon, Mr. Sebastián,” he said to me, bright and cheerful as always.“Horacio,” I said, “I have a very important question to ask you. It is of too much importance I can scarcely tell you… Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal. How did you read this book?”“I started on the first page.”“No, no, Horacio… Where… did you get this copy?”“Oh. My cousin lent it to me. He’s getting his degree and had to read it for a creative writing class. He said it was too crazy and made him laugh too much.”“So, you didn’t get it from the library?”“My cousin lent me his copy. Did you like it?”I embraced Horacio and kissed him on the lips. He would be saved! The human project! Ah! “You’re crazy man!” he said, laughing, and pushed me off him.“Horacio! The human project! Ah! I will make you its king, my good man! I will make you the governor of a little ínsula, just like Sancho Panza! Except actually! Ah!”“Thank you, Mr. Sebastián,” he said, and returned to the endeavor of his phone.My walk to the library felt blissful and light. I was doing something important, finally. I had been reading all this while as preparation, I now realized. Literature was the preparation, and I was preparing myself for something. And finally: here it was. The future of the human project, in my hands. I would have to do something awful, something unbelievably violent, depraved, and disgusting, but it would be for something far, far greater than I could have imagined. The possibility of the human.The library was mostly empty. Though I had been inside it but a few days prior, I had somehow forgotten its incredibly high ceilings, its battered bookshelves and threadbare reading chairs, its trademark musty smell—almost like tobacco, though no patron or worker had smoked a cigarette inside its walls for many decades now. Sherman was by the computers, helping an elderly woman with the device. She was pointing at the screen, and yelling at him. Yet his face was the picture of warmth and composure. Sherman, the human project! Ah! I tarried by the front desk.“Sebastián!” Sherman said, once he was finished, approaching me. “I’m glad you could make it. Unfortunately, I have some bad news.”I feared this possibility. The director was onto me, then. He saw through my ruse. He must have taken a glance at Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal, and probably felt sick to his stomach, seeing how marked up it had been, and then realized what an effect something like that could have on a future reader—indeed potentially driving that reader to an unforeseen madness that would transform into bloodlust. He knew what I was after. He had now become my new enemy. The director. I would have to devise a different plan of attack.“I didn’t even have to speak to the director,” Sherman continued. “When I checked the records, it looked like the book had only ever been rented out a single time before you, by one of our long-time regulars, Harold Pinter. Funny about the name. No relation to the writer, of course. Anyway, yeah, Harold sadly passed away last year. He was quite old.”“Passed away?” “Well, he stopped coming in, which we all thought was strange—he was practically here every day—and then Shannon found out he had died in his house. One of his neighbors found him. His wife had died a few years back and he became a real regular, as I was saying. He was pretty lonely. He had a terrible habit of marking up all the books he took out from us. I politely admonished him but he just smiled. I didn’t have the heart to do anything about it. He just wanted to be around people. Poor guy. Don’t know if he had children. Anyway, I double checked and it looks like you were the first person to check out this book since him.”“Are you certain?” I asked. “Sherman, are you absolutely certain no other person has read this copy of Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal?” I was once again nearing tears. The human project. The possibility of the person.“Yeah, it’s a shame,” he said. “No one reads anymore.”

AN EXCERPT FROM ‘AMERICAN LIT’ by Jennifer Greidus

March 10, 2025

While Ollie and I get stoned in his car every morning before school, I use my phone to take online career quizzes. I think in reverse, responding as I believe Mr. Stewart would. My mission is to find the amalgam of answers that triggers the “teacher” verdict. Only then will I know everything to say and do around him. My favorite quiz—and the most thorough—was created by an Ivy League school to assist its undergrads. I log into that one about once a day. Among others, my hypothetical responses produced these career options: CPA, correctional officer, lawyer, architect, and copy editor. What a prospective correctional officer would be doing attending that school is beyond me. In any case, I have yet to see “twelfth-grade AP English teacher” pop up as the answer. Always grumpy before the first bell of the day, Ollie broods and smokes between bites of a fast-food breakfast burrito. If I bother him with a question or to tell him he’s dropped some hot sauce on his car’s cheap upholstery, all I get are grunts or lazy hand signals; so, lately, I’ve been focusing on these quizzes. You read the instructions before beginning any assembly. Yes. You avoid arguing, even when you know you are right. No. You always let someone know if she has a crumb on her face. Yes.You are usually patient when someone is late to an appointment with you. No. You don’t mind getting your hands dirty. No idea. That last one gets me every time. It might be the one that fucks up the algorithm. During each class, if only for ten or our allotted forty-two minutes, Mr. Stewart, the thirty-something academic genius who corrects me with a verbal whip whenever I say which instead of that, lectures from a post directly in front of my desk. The twenty square inches of zipper and fabric and subtle bumps and lumps inside his pants leave me overheated and dimwitted. If he’s speaking, I don’t know it. My interest lies only in his stretched fly, an ass of granite, and a minimalist leather belt that ties it all together. Never has a single crease spoiled the light starch of his fitted dress shirts. His monthly haircut ensures every deep-brown strand is in place. Premature crow’s feet appear when he squints or graces me with one of his infrequent smiles. From afar, I’d look twice. From this close, I can’t look away. “Dan.” Ollie tosses a wad of paper at my cheek. “Knock it off. You’re sucking your pen like a dick.” Mr. Stewart’s head jerks in our direction. “Daniel. Oliver. I can only imagine you’re interrupting me because you have a question. Otherwise—” “Hey, Mr. Stewart, I have a question.” Ollie and I both look to the right at Jesse, who yawns, his hand half-raised with an index finger pointed at our teacher. He wears the same jeans, hoodies, and T-shirts, sometimes three days in a row. He’s consistently stoned, and he always has a fucking question. “Says here,” Jesse announces, “Mr. Hart Crane got drunk and fell off a boat.” He taps his thumb against the back pages of the poetry anthology we’ve been reading. Mr. Stewart stares him down. “What’s your question, Jesse?” “Well, yeah,” he continues, slowly flipping one of his shoes onto its side with the big toe of a socked foot, “the bios are more interesting than the poems. Can we read those first?” “We can,” Mr. Stewart says, “but we will not.”Mr. Stewart believes grammar should be everyone’s thing. When I think about him, I think, me and him, him and I, he and I, fuck it, forget it. He enjoys saying, “I do not understand why, on the verge of adulthood, none of you knows how to put together a sentence.” There’s more to him than his obsession with grammar. We’ve spent a couple months in brief, after-class conversations concerning my future and books. We talk about tennis. Despite playing hungover, disliking the drills, and hating the parts where I need to run, I’m good at it. Most days, he asks me, “Daniel, how did you fare at tennis practice yesterday?” And I always blather, “Good. Pretty good. Really good.” It’s tough gawking at a stashed but still conspicuous penis for almost an hour and then trying to keep pace in conversation with its owner after the bell. All I want to do this year is have sex with him. It is my single goal. With a speck of effort, I’ll conquer tennis at my club and on my school team, keep one sober eye on my handpicked senior schedule, and slide into one of the two schools of my choice in autumn. Having Mr. Stewart will be the sweetener. Audacity has been my stratagem for months—I’ve even flustered him a few times—but aside from some sideways glances and closed-lipped smiles, the flirting is meager, as difficult as trying to budge a piano with my pinkie. After class, Ollie jostles me and kicks my shin. “Move it. You’re like a girl with him.” At six-foot-three, Ollie’s body eclipses mine by four inches and forty pounds, and I take a second to regain composure before he shoves me again. “Why can’t you want the corduroy Chemistry guy? The one with the brown fingernails? English teacher. Such a cliché, man.” Right on time, Mr. Stewart looks my way. “Daniel? A word.” “Unbelievable.” Ollie snorts. “He asks you to stay like every day now. Hurry up.” Ollie heads for the exit as I pack up and amble to my teacher’s desk. Rather than acknowledge me, Mr. Stewart contemplates whatever’s on his laptop. I’m used to this delay; the silence Mr. Stewart and I share while I wait is the preamble to these afternoon one-acts. At the beginning of the year, I would fidget and cough, uncertain if I should speak while he wordlessly tidied his desk or erased the whiteboard. Now I wait calmly and open a bag of homemade turkey jerky from my pocket. Drying meat on a rack for eight hours on a Sunday is the only way my mom knows how to show me she cares. Other than this gift economy, we are no more than roommates. Mr. Stewart remains seated, and, as always, I stand across from him, the width of the desk keeping him three feet out of my reach. As I chew the dried meat, the aroma of the chalky cinnamon candies he enjoys hits me. I confuse his hold-on-a-moment smile for a speak-your-mind smile and forge ahead. “Great suit today.” He lifts his eyes. “How was tennis practice yesterday?” “You know,” I say, “instead of asking me all the time, you could come. See for yourself. Nobody else does.” “Your parents don’t go?” The wheels of his chair squeak as he pushes back from the desk. He places both hands behind his head, stretching and expanding his chest until the shirt might as well be skin. “My mother’s in a world of her own, and my father—” I am distracted when he crosses his legs, resting an ankle on his knee. The landscape is crotch, all the crotch I could want. I force myself to look at his face. “And my father’s dead.” “Oh.” His hands drop to his lap. “I’m sorry. I didn’t—” My one-knuckled knock against his desk shuts him up. “Anyway. I only play tennis because he wanted me to stick with it. That and a partial scholarship. Really, I just want to sit around at home without pants, but it seems wrong to ditch it now.” “May I ask how he died?” I tear at some more jerky with my teeth, and, as I’ve done every one of the last five-hundred times someone’s asked me that, I grunt and huff. A crumb of jerky falls to his desk. When he winces at the morsel, I swipe it to the floor with my thumb. The smudge from my thumb causes a more pronounced wince, which I ignore. “Everyone knows how he died. Shot? Three years ago? Remember that?” “That’s—you’re that Daniel.” He sucks in a quick breath through pursed lips. “I apologize for being indelicate. Why have you never told me?” I glance to the right as kids in the hallway rush past his open door. “It didn’t come up.” “It must have,” he insists, resting his elbows on his desk and craning his neck toward me, as if he’s inviting me to tell him a secret. I hope to put him onto the scent of a new topic. “So, what have you been reading lately?” He drums his fingers on the desk, holding tight to the matter while pondering how he missed that gruesome part of my biography. “What about your mother? She can’t manage to support you at a few matches?” My mother can’t manage much, except boyfriends, and barely even that. “My mom and I have this unspoken arrangement that lets us have almost nothing to do with each other.” I hold up the plastic bag stuffed with jerky. “But she does make me this. So, you know, not all bad.” The crow’s feet deepen with concern. “You understand you can talk to me about it anytime, right?” “That is never going to happen. No offense.” I’d rather not add my desire for Mr. Stewart to the existing tangled knot of emotions about my dad. For the past three years, I’ve chosen only guys who are nothing like my father. There’s complicated shit there—I know it—and I’ll save it for my twenties. “I understand,” Mr. Stewart says and opens his middle drawer. “On a lighter note, I brought you a book.” He produces an inch thick paperback, pristine, black with cubes of primary colors on its cover. “Please. Take it.” When I hesitate, eyeing it like it might be homework, he shakes it once. “Take it. If you like Wilde, you’ll like this.” With a tilt of my head, I acknowledge what we must both know: Oscar Wilde is the gateway drug to the entire gay canon. Although we talk about literature a lot, this is the first time he’s given me something specific and extracurricular to read. I finger the edges of the book. “Who’s Joe Orton?” “Playwright. Give it a try. Let me know what you think.” He lifts his laptop bag onto his desk, slips a hand into the side pocket, and comes up with a new tin of cinnamon candies. His manicured nails work open the plastic at its corner. I quickly check out my hands. They are dirty and rough, the left one scarred from a battle I had with Ollie in fourth grade; he jammed a ballpoint into the meaty flesh between my thumb and forefinger, all over a bike. “So,” I say, slapping the book against my palm, “is this toilet reading or bedtime reading?” The corner of his mouth twitches, as it does when he refuses to laugh, despite his obvious amusement. I suspect he wants to maintain a humorless teacher-pupil dynamic. This time, he gives in to a brief smile. “Daniel, I have to ask. Are you high right now?” “Nope.” I am. “Just the same, some advice is in order. Use Visine. Get your hair out of your eyes. And whose shirt is that you’re wearing? Who is Greg? Have you absconded with his work shirt? Is Greg a plumber?” I touch the patch on my shirt as if this mysterious plumber is close to my heart. First, I know I’m not going to get eye drops; I’ve long since passed giving a shit if I seem baked. Second, it’s been a few days since I looked in the mirror, and fuck that anyway. Last, this shirt has been my wingman so many times, I owe it a hand job. “Mr. Stewart, do you run?” “Why do you ask?” “Because your body looks like you run.” The muscles of his jaw must ache from all the clenching he’s doing right now. “Tenth period is calling you.” Students for his next class have begun to file in. I grin and turn on my heel. I’m not a foot out of the classroom before Ollie snatches my sleeve and drags me down the hallway. “You sounded like an asshole. Why don’t you spend your time on something that can actually go somewhere?”

HUNTING & GATHERING by Keely Curttright

February 26, 2025

Margot is a speck of red in her bright winter coat, scurrying up the cracked and litter-strewn sidewalk, her mousy brown hair a sad pinprick at the center of this speck and her breath a puff of vapor before her. This is, at least, how she envisions herself. She rarely leaves the apartment anymore, but when she does, she finds herself imagining her appearance, always as something unsuspecting and insignificant. She has tried to give up this habit but can’t help herself. A bug-eyed pigeon hops across the sidewalk and pecks at a discarded bag of Cool Ranch Doritos. As Margot passes, it removes its head from the bag and eyes her suspiciously. Margot stuffs her hands deeper into her coat pockets. Her right hand curls around a folded piece of scrap paper, which contains a list of everything she and her boyfriend Louis need for that evening and the coming week.Grocery shopping gives Margot a sense of purpose, a destination, something to talk about when Louis returns from work and asks what she has been up to all day. It also serves as an excuse to put off doing the things she is supposed to do: practice piano, call her grandfather, apply for open positions in her field, tasks that have become both unthinkable and unavoidable during the hours she spends alone in their apartment, collecting unemployment checks.This evening, Haley and Shane, their downstairs neighbors, are coming over for dinner, a plan that makes Margot feel decidedly adult. Louis and Shane often run into each other in the hallway heading to and from work, their months of friendly interactions always punctuated by the suggestion that they get together soon. Margot’s encounters with the couple have been mostly one-sided: their dog barking in response to her footsteps on the basement stairs as she carries down a load of laundry, and the muffled sound of their voices seeping through the floorboards. While moving damp clothing from the washer to the dryer, Margot once heard them arguing, voices raised and easier to discern. “We’ve gone over this so many times,” Haley said. Margot moved the laundry along quickly and made her way back up the steps without lingering long enough to determine what the fight was about. Shane had invited Louis and Margot over for dinner the week prior. Their apartment was furnished with the previous tenant's lumpy red couch, stacks of books, thrifted paintings, mismatched wooden dining chairs, and other second-hand items that gave the impression of history and warmth. It felt like they had always lived there.Margot approaches the intersection across from the store. As she waits for the light to change, she watches the cars speed by, the faces inside blurred and briefly visible, none of them bothering to look out at her. The light turns red, and one car hurtles through the intersection. The rest slow to a crawl, and she cautiously makes her way across the crosswalk’s staggered white lines.Inside the store, she picks up a shopping basket. A wet coupon papers the bottom, and produce stickers adhere to the sides. She walks towards the produce section in want of strawberries, pears, a lemon and fresh herbs. In the grocery store, Margot gravitates towards the things she wants with ease. She picks up several containers of strawberries, examining the bottoms for mold and rotting juice, and places the freshest one in the bottom of her basket. Over the course of the past few months, she has come to find that grocery stores imbue her with a sense of calm that little else has since she lost her job. The towering supplies of neatly stacked cans, brightly colored boxes, and fresh produce evoke a feeling of orderliness, endlessness, and preparation. Consumed by these feelings, she often leaves the store with the odd additional item. Several months ago, she picked up a sack of flour, for which she had no use, only the inclination that she needed to be prepared.A mist settles over the broccoli, condensing into small droplets of water between each of the individual florets. She shakes two heads of broccoli and bags them. The parsley and cilantro are sopping wet. She picks off several stalks of each with browned, slimy leaves before bagging the remaining green, intact bunches. She moves, transfixed, from one fresh green thing to another until everything has been crossed off her list.Her basket weighs heavy, and she sets it on the floor as she waits in the checkout line, kicking it forward as the line moves every so often. It extends down the aisle, past the candy and the granola bars back to the breakfast cereal and maple syrup. It is the only open checkout lane in the entire store.The woman in front of her pushes a cart filled to the brim with everything from hamburger buns to low-fat ice cream sandwiches that will surely melt by the time she reaches the cashier. Margot appraises her own basket, free of frozen items, in a self-congratulatory fashion. She has gotten better at this at least, she thinks. She is improving.She and Louis have lived together for six months, and she thought that she would be used to it by now. She thought she would ease into the bliss of domesticity. Instead, she has become debilitatingly aware of herself. When Louis is home, she second-guesses her every move, concerned about whether she is reading often enough to appear interesting, concerned about how her skin looks each night after she has removed her makeup, and whether Louis is sick of eating the three things she knows how to make for dinner. All her actions feel heightened in his presence, on display. Tonight, Margot plans on making falafel and pita sandwiches for dinner, which she has made too few times to count among the recipes she is least likely to botch. She wonders if she should pick up an extra can of chickpeas but decides it is probably too late. Nearly at the front of the line, she watches the woman with the crowded shopping cart place her items on the checkout conveyor belt. The box of Nestle low-fat ice cream sandwiches perspires. The hamburger buns are squished, frowning faces.Margot emerges from the grocery store, the automatic doors parting slowly before her, her armpits sweating. Her big red coat protects her from the welts that would otherwise form on her shoulder from the weight of her over-packed shopping bags. She maneuvers herself between the barricades intended to prevent shopping cart theft, trying not to crush the produce.When Margot looks up, she sees it for the first time, its back turned to her. The strap on one of her bags slips from her shoulder. The hawk angles its body to ensure there is no visible threat from the opposite direction. Its yellow eyes stare unblinkingly, and it arches its wings back, spreading them casually, as if to remind her of its size. The hawk sits atop a dead pigeon with ruffled oil-slick feathers and one beady eye still open. Dried blood coats the feathers around the pigeon's neck. The hawk eyes Margot sharply, as if to say, this is my dead pigeon. As if it believes Margot might tear the pigeon from its talons, stuff it in with her groceries and make off with it. The hawk blinks but maintains its gaze, watching Margot with a ferocity so foreign that she feels almost ashamed. She remembers for a moment what it is like to want something with such conviction. Margot pulls the strap of her tote back over her shoulder. She scurries through the parking lot, eyes averted, realizing that she has forgotten the almond milk. Glancing back toward the store, she sees the hawk’s beak deep in the pigeon’s neck, its body torn in an unceremonious fashion. All that remains is a head, a gaping red tangle of innards and some stray feathers. The hawk lifts its head to regard Margot, blood dripping from its beak. Its wings flinch, threatening to take flight.Margot rushes home, keeping a brisk pace, and, for the first time in recent memory, paying absolutely no mind to her own appearance. The sound of beating wings follows her. Wisps of hair are matted to her forehead. She stops at the crosswalk, waiting for the light to change, but her insides remain frenzied, churning, in perpetual motion. She is repulsed by her own scent.She enters the building, locking the vestibule door behind her and checking it twice, as if the hawk might open the door and follow her. She laughs and shakes her head, trying to clear her thoughts. She makes her way up the three flights of stairs to their apartment, her grocery bags jostling against the walls and stair-rail, then slips her key into the deadbolt and pulls it back out the slightest bit before turning it. The lock on their door is temperamental, and Margot finds herself at odds with it more often than not.She enters the apartment and pauses long enough to observe the tell-tale signs of Louis’s early arrival home from work: his bag and shoes discarded hastily by the door, the faint hum of the television in the living room. Margot, at once, feels comforted and resentful, her precious alone time cut short. She endeavors to extend it a bit longer by going unnoticed, quietly moving throughout the kitchen, gently opening and closing the refrigerator and cabinet doors, putting each item in place.She removes her coat, and the acrid smell of her body overwhelms her. She puts her coat back on and smooths her tangled hair with both hands then walks into the living room.“I thought I heard you!” Louis grins.Margot perches self-consciously on the coffee table. “You’re home early.” “My boss said I could leave after I closed our last ticket.” “Any particularly bad ones today?”“The usual. Manager insists their computer isn’t working, but they just forgot to turn the monitor on. Another employee wants me to reset their login information for the third time this week.” He rolls his eyes. “I guess I should be thankful nothing exciting happened.”Louis turns his attention back to the television, where a nature documentary plays quietly, something about the strange and colorful birds of the rainforest. Louis pats the space beside him on the couch. Margot hesitates for a moment, watching the bird on the screen perform an elaborate courtship ritual. The bird opens his neon yellow mouth to screech, fans out his black neck feathers, and reveals his shimmering turquoise chest. He hops around the unsuspecting female, distinguished by her dull coloring. “A little too much for my taste,” Margot says. She relents and sits next to Louis, the full weight of her body, winter coat and all, sinking into the couch.“Thank god. I don’t think I could pull that off.” Louis’s eyes remain fixed on the television, and his voice sounds far away like it often does at the end of a long work week. The documentary moves on to another bird with flame-like feathers. Louis begins reading an article on his phone. “So. I'm being hunted," Margot says matter-of-factly. "By what, may I ask?" Louis returns to her, his face suddenly serious, his eyes searching and concerned. He has always been good at playing along. He understands her in this way at least, which is what Margot loves about him.She widens her eyes and exhales slowly, performatively. "A hawk."Louis's features take on an exaggerated quality, certain, now, that this is a game. He gets up and walks to the window. His body is lean, his hair dark and messy. He runs a hand through it, deep in thought. Margot joins him by the window, looking out at the vacant lot adjacent to their building. In the warmer months, it is overgrown in an otherworldly way. Weeds appear prehistoric, stretching several feet up into the air with leaves the size of Margot's head. Their living room windows provide a spectacularly close-up view of the trees’ tangled branches and the squirrels and birds that occupy them. However, at this particular moment, the tree closest to them is uncharacteristically quiet. Margot follows Louis's gaze toward the tree at the back of the lot. Between two of the branches, Margot discerns the outline of a rigid and imposing creature. The markings are similar to those of the one she saw earlier, a brown and white mottled pattern on its chest and deeper brown on the wings and head. Margot recognizes its penetrating gaze.Louis turns to her. "So this guy’s more your type?" His eyes sparkle with a playful quality that suggests he believes the hawk’s presence to be a mere coincidence.The hawk's head rotates, as if beyond its own control. A squirrel climbs up the neighboring tree in a frenzy. The hawk spreads its wings ever so slightly and hops down, one branch closer. The squirrel pauses, its tail twitching spastically, the rest of its body unmoving. The hawk dives quickly, extends its legs, and collects the squirrel with its talons. Margot and Louis watch the entire thing."Poor squirrel," says Louis.Margot nods, watching the branches from which the hawk dove tremble. The vacant lot breathes a sigh of relief, a feeling that eludes her.Louis stretches his arms above his head and yawns. “I should get cleaned up.” He walks off toward the bathroom. Margot lingers by the window for a moment before making her way back to the bedroom. She can hear the shower running in the bathroom. She sheds her coat and peels off her turtleneck, balls it up, and uses it to wipe her underarms before applying an extra layer of deodorant. The floral scent of the deodorant mixes with the sour scent of her body. She pulls on a fresh t-shirt and brushes her hair back into a ponytail then steps back to assess herself in the mirror. Her reflection looks presentable but unfamiliar. She doesn’t recognize this girl with her hair up and face flushed.She pulls the soaked chickpeas and fresh herbs from the fridge and lines them up next to the onion, garlic, and spices on the counter. She disregards the step ladder in the corner and climbs atop the counter, stretching to reach the food processor stored above the cabinets. Balancing the processor in one hand, she uses the other to steady herself as she descends. She wobbles. Her wrist bends awkwardly, and the food processor falls, sending its lid and sharp innards skittering across the kitchen floor. Margot slides off the counter and exhales sharply before collecting the lid and blades, which she washes carefully in the sink. She tries to move slowly and deliberately. The shower turns off, and Louis yells from the bathroom, “Everything alright out there?” “All good!” Margot reassembles the food processor. She drains the chickpeas and adds them to the processor’s bowl. She roughly chops the herbs and onion, wielding her largest kitchen knife with trepidation. It feels as if everything in the kitchen has turned against her, poised to fall, break, and slice at will. The parsley and cilantro stain the cutting board green. She adds them to the food processor along with the onion, spices, baking soda and chickpea flour, then presses the pulse button repeatedly and watches as the ingredients crumble violently. She spoons the green, grainy blend into a bowl and places it in the fridge. Margot allows herself a glance out the kitchen window, which has a more limited view of the lot. The outer pane is caked with unreachable dust and debris, but she can see that the trees are still. She feels that she is not alone. She turns back to the counter and begins to take the food processor apart to wash in the sink. She scrubs and rinses out the lid with warm soapy water then picks up the blade. Something bumps into her from behind. “Sorry, coming through!” Louis pulls open the refrigerator door and grabs the water pitcher. He reaches above Margot’s head to open the cabinet containing their chipped and cloudy glassware. Margot looks down at her hand. Her thumb is bleeding. The red runs over her hand and dilutes with the warm water.“Jesus, Margot.” Louis places the pitcher and glass on the counter, takes the blade from her hand and sets it down in the sink. He moves her hand under the faucet, and the sting of the cut wanes. The water rushes over her thumb, leaving a clean, precise line. “It’s nothing,” she says. She pulls her hand back from the faucet, and the sting returns. “Could you just grab a couple band aids?”“Of course.” Louis rushes off to the bathroom and returns with the first aid kit. He rifles through it, finding only band aids that are either too big or small. He pulls out a roll of gauze and tape, which seems quaint to Margot. “This might actually work better.”Margot holds her bleeding thumb out, and he winds the gauze around it several times then secures it with the tape. “Good as new,” Margot says. She gives Louis a thumbs up. “I’m so sorry,” he says. “Not your fault. I was the one holding a blade and not paying attention.” “Can I do anything else?”“Don’t worry about it, really.” Margot scrubs and rinses off the blade. “There’s not enough room in here for two.”“I guess you could say that.” Louis smiles weakly. “If you need me, I’ll be in the living room, okay?”“Okay!” Margot lines up the hummus ingredients in front of the reassembled food processor, falling back into the rhythm of preparing dinner. She watches once again as the hummus ingredients break down and fold into one another, becoming something new and more uniform in color. The falafel is frying when Margot hears a faint knock on the apartment door. She spoons the falafel balls from the pan to a plate. Louis rushes through the kitchen towards the door. "I'll get it!"Shane and Haley enter, their faces reddened and chapped from the cold. "Sorry we're late. We were on the porch and lost track of time.” "A hawk's been circling the building,” Shane adds. Louis takes their coats and hangs them up then leads them over to the living room. Margot removes the falafel from the pot of oil on the stove, placing them one by one on a paper towel."A cooper's hawk," Shane says. "I grew up on a farm outside the city. We’d see them all the time. Every so often we'd lose a chicken.""Awful." Haley shakes her head and looks down. Curly brown hair falls over her face."We saw it hunt a squirrel earlier actually," Louis says."I never actually saw one kill a chicken, but the thought really got to me.""There's something so unnatural about a bird hunting another bird," Haley says.The room is quiet when Margot enters with the plate of falafel. She sets it down on the small dining table next to the hummus, cucumber salad, and pickled red onions. The plates are all mismatched, a collection of both Margot and Louis's scratched and worn dinnerware accumulated throughout college. The table is wobbly and made from medium-density fiberboard, used primarily as a surface for storing Margot’s untouched keyboard piano or for playing the occasional board game. Even Shane and Haley's apartment full of hand-me-downs had a dining table with four chairs.Louis cranes his neck to peer out the window. "Looks like he's heading out now.""She," Shane corrects. "The big ones are the females actually."Margot feels a sudden tenderness for the hawk. While Louis, Shane, and Haley fill up their plates, she gazes at the tree at the back of the lot. The sun must have set while she was making dinner, making it difficult to see anything at all, but the lot appears empty. She feels no relief, only disappointment. She continues to watch the window, observing her own reflection, faint and ghostly, everything about her wavering and illuminated by the overhead light. There is a spot of grease on her shirt."Thank you, Margot," Haley says and Shane echoes.Louis approaches and puts his hand on her shoulder. "Sorry your friend didn't stick around."Margot attempts to rearrange her features into what she hopes is a pleasant expression, turns around and shrugs. "I don't think I prepared enough vermin to feed five anyways.” Louis laughs, and Margot feels the rush of gratification she always does when she manages to make him laugh. He moves back over towards his chair with his plate, and Margot makes her way over to the table where she half-heartedly assembles a falafel wrap. After spending an hour or two preparing a meal, she often finds herself uninterested in eating it."These are really good," Shane says. He takes another bite of his wrap, already nearly gone, and wipes the corner of his mouth with the back of his hand. Despite being several years older than Margot, he has a disarmingly boyish quality that reminds her of her younger brother."Did you make all of this from scratch?" Haley asks. Her legs are crossed, her plate resting on top of them. Her voice is quiet and gentle. Margot allows herself to feel proud for a moment. "I did." She had never prepared a meal for someone else, much less enjoyed doing so, until she started dating Louis. "Hummus is easy. The falafel isn't even that difficult to make. It's really just frying it that I'm not so great at.""Don't take this the wrong way," Louis starts. "But I think these are even better than the other time you made them. They're crispier on the outside."Margot can't help but take it the wrong way for just a moment. "It takes me months to really get any recipe down," Haley jumps in. "Of course it only takes Shane one or two tries.""Only because it's my job." Shane works as a line cook at an upscale restaurant downtown."Does one of you usually do the cooking, or do you split it up?" Margot asks. Shane and Haley look at each other and laugh. "I'd like to say it's an even split, but I know Haley ends up doing most of it either because she's on her own at home or it's the last thing I want to do when I’m home from work.""You used to enjoy it, though, before you started working as a cook?" Louis asks. He puts his arm around Margot, who briefly appreciates the gesture before feeling stifled, incapable of getting up off the couch to add more to her plate or grab another drink without appearing cold and dismissive. Half of her sandwich remains on her plate, and her glass is nearly completely full. "Oh, yeah," Shane says. "I loved it before, even as a kid. My brothers would make fun of me for wanting to stay inside with my mom and help with dinner. At first, it was just a way to avoid working outside, and then I really fell in love with it. You know, spending an hour or so preparing the different parts of the meal, watching it come together, and then the satisfaction of watching everyone enjoy it.""Cooking a meal for someone else does feel special," Haley says. "I'm not nearly as creative or thoughtful with the things I make when you're not home."Margot thinks of all the times she has tried to make something new for dinner, something she thinks that Louis will like. She recalls all the burnt and undercooked and oversalted and underripe portions of meals that she has reserved for her own plate, wanting Louis to have the best. The secrecy of it brings her a bit of joy. There are some tender acts that it would feel shameful, even false, to bring attention to. "I know I don't cook as often as you, but the few times I have, I did find myself thinking, okay, I get what people find rewarding about cooking and sharing a meal with someone you love." He glances at Margot with a look of such complete tenderness that she averts her eyes. It is as if a small helpless creature has rolled over before her, exposing its soft, pink underbelly. She places her hand in Louis's free hand, the one not around her shoulder, and squeezes it, unsure what this gesture means even to her."Anyone want anything else to drink?" she asks, already drifting toward the kitchen.Louis says something, but she isn't paying attention. She grabs two seltzers and a lime from the refrigerator, then places them on the few inches of available counter space. She sets the lime on the cutting board and turns to grab a clean, though blunt, knife from the silverware drawer. She looks out through the small and grimy kitchen window. The vacant lot is illuminated by the harsh outdoor light of the house on the opposite side, which reflects off the fresh snow on the ground. Against the stark white of the snow, a stain appears red and bright and mesmerizing. Margot moves closer to the window, her nose nearly pressed up against the glass. At the center of this stain, Margot discerns something resembling a head with large, protruding ears, the upper half of a small mammal’s body, and spilling out from it, pink sinewy innards. The head is small and round, turned unnaturally.Margot feels ill with excitement. She has a sudden urge to rush outside, stand beside this strange offering, and look up at the trees with arms outstretched. Instead, she fills two glasses with ice and seltzer, tops them off with slices of lime, and walks back to the living room. She does not mention the rabbit to their guests. She does not even mention it to Louis after Shane and Haley leave. She sleeps dreamlessly and wakes early the next morning as the sun rises. She pushes back the covers, careful not to disturb Louis. Sleep softens his features. Awake, his face is dynamic: brows raised, eyes sparkling, the corners of his mouth upturned, always on the verge of breaking into a sly grin. Now, with his eyes closed and his lips slightly parted, he appears defenseless. Standing in the doorway, Margot feels as if she has intruded on a private, sacred moment, something belonging to Louis alone. She resists the urge to avert her eyes. Louis rolls over, and she sees that his cheek bears the imprint of their wrinkled sheets. Involuntarily, she steps back toward the bed, places her uninjured hand on his cheek and kisses his head lightly. He stirs, and she feels guilty about sneaking out, even though it’s only to the lot next door. Margot tiptoes to the living room. Outside the window, the sun pushes itself up over the horizon, igniting the sky. Briefly, the leafless trees in the vacant lot appear to be on fire. Some of the snow has melted, but Margot can still make out the muddied red patch at the far end of the lot. She pulls her winter coat over her pajamas and grabs the closest pair of shoes she can find, Louis’s sneakers. Her hair is unbrushed, and she doesn’t stop to check her reflection in the mirror on the way out. Heading down the stairs, she nearly trips over her own feet.The city thaws around her. Rock salt covers the sidewalk, and what was once pure and wondrous turns to gray slush. A discarded candy wrapper peeks out from a pile of shoveled snow. She cuts across the lot. The rabbit is gone. A few tufts of brown fur remain. Margot exhales, and her breath, stale with sleep, clouds the air around her. She steps back towards the apartment building, dead leaves crunching beneath Louis’s shoes. In the periphery of her vision, she senses movement. Turning slightly, she looks at the sharp, bare branches of the tree above her. The hawk is perched on one of the lower branches. It cranes its neck downward, yellow eyes fixed on Margot. She is close enough to see its downy chest feathers. The hawk’s features appear smaller and gentler, its eyes round and attentive. She notices that the feathers on its chin are completely white. The hawk feels like something she could reach out and touch.The hawk opens its beak and emits a piercing series of cries that settle into the air. It arches its wings back and out, nearly doubling in size. It pushes off from the tree, wings completely outstretched, and cries once more before swooping downwards with its legs extended, talons poised to grasp. Margot stands taller, locked in place, her eyes closed. Above, she feels the steady, rhythmic beating of its wings. She is ready—to be touched, to be eaten, to be seen.

BOLOGNA by Sean Hayes

January 24, 2025

We stood on top of our worlds as we knew them. The fall could kill us. Or worse. All part of the thrill. Henny, Walsh, and I were on the last level of scaffolding wrapped around the Bronson Windmill in Fairfield. We were heading into our senior year at Greenfield College Preparatory School. If you think we had on boat shoes judging from the last sentence, you’re wrong. Only Henny and I had on boat shoes. Walsh wore oversized flipflops with bottle openers on the soles. We sat down, dangling our feet over the edge of the scaffolding, swinging them back and forth above the hundred foot drop. Our cargo shorts were still damp from earlier when we jumped off the cliffs at Devil’s Glen into the river below, oblivious the devil was ever there or ever anywhere.Henny and Walsh were two of my best friends. I looked over at them. Walsh with his pellet gun slung over his shoulder and his Marine haircut to be like his older brother over in Afghanistan. Henny had our communal bong, Sir Bubbles Puffington II, in the padded bong case, slung over his shoulder like it was a bazooka. His babyface was angelic and devilish at the same time. Henny was short for Hennessy. He always told everyone he was from the Hennessy Cognac family. He wasn’t. His dad worked on Wall Street.I sat beside Henny and Walsh with a plastic bag full of three Coors Light forties from the bodega in Bridgeport that never ID’d us. I handed them their forties and we twisted the caps off.“Boat shoes are the cowboy boots of Connecticut.” Henny clicked the toes of his shoes together.“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.” Walsh laughed.I looked out at the view. The windmill was on the tallest hill in town. We had a panoramic view. The kinda view suckers in our town paid millions of dollars to wake up to every morning. Ours was better though because it was free. Free for a limited time only though. The windmill used to power a dairy farm in the 1800s for some dude named Bronson. Then it was a nonfunctioning windmill for awhile, preserved to remind everyone of what came before us. Then a cell phone company bought it and decided to repurpose it into a cell tower which was why the scaffolding was up that summer. It was still gonna be a windmill on the outside, but it was gonna be a windmill wired to the gills with cell phone stuff too. Change can be crazy like that, turning a historic windmill into a cell tower, restoring it so it didn’t fall in on itself, didn’t just crumble to pieces. As for us three, we were falling in on ourselves a little up there at the top of our worlds as we knew them.I looked up at the sky. A high-flying jet from JFK or Laguardia was a fly buzzing over the clear blue edge of God’s dead face. God was dead to me then. Every plane, even high-flying ones, still looked like another news cycle. Walsh took his pellet gun off his shoulder and aimed it at the far off plane. I looked out instead of up, at Long Island Sound, what we call The Sound in Connecticut. To the east was The Sound, then Long Island itself, then the Atlantic. To the south, The City. The horizon aligned with the last level of scaffolding so perfectly at some angles it looked like a gangplank leading directly to the Manhattan skyline where things happened. We didn’t climb up for the view though. The view was a byproduct like resin caked in our bong. We climbed up to shout fuck you down at our town below, the words echoing back at us, too young to know what being on top of our worlds meant.It was the summer of 2004. The summer we climbed that damn windmill every chance we got. But that night was our last. After we smoked the bong and threw our empty forty bottles up in the air, after Walsh shot at them and missed, after the bottles shattered on a stonewall below, and after we shouted our fuck yous and climbed back down, we got in a bit of a pickle. We were smoking the bong again in Henny’s Jeep on the road beneath the windmill. Henny and Walsh were in the front seats. I was always paranoid, so I turned around and looked out the back window. A cop car had materialized outta nowhere a few hundred feet behind us. A cop got out, drew his handgun, aimed it down at the asphalt and tiptoed towards our car. I turned around and hunched into the front seats.“Cop, for real.” I placed the smoking bong between my legs in the backseat, covering the mouthpiece with my palm.Henny sprayed the Ozium and put all the windows down. We trained for this regularly. We were prepared. I looked out the back window again. The cop continued his slow march, one step at a time. When he got to the back bumper, I faced forward and stared straight ahead. I shoved my bag of weed under the driver seat. In my peripheral, the cop was almost at the driver-side window. That was when Walsh got out of the passenger seat. Walsh had his hands up. I didn’t know if it was because the cop told him to put his hands up, or he did it to show the cop he wasn’t holding anything. It was a blur. “Just meeting up to go out for the night.” Walsh walked towards his brother’s Wrangler he was allowed to drive while his brother was off at war. “I’m getting in my car. We’re leaving now. Sorry for any trouble, Officer.”The cop seemed confused. The cop holstered his gun and continued walking up to the driver-side window. He bent down to look at Henny. He looked like a rookie, only a few years older than us maybe. I cupped my palm over the bong even harder.“What’s on your lap?” the cop asked Henny.Henny was a smart dude. He was no idiot. He’d tell the cop it was oregano, spices for our youth group’s pizza night. He’d say anything except a bag of weed, Officer.“A bag of weed, Officer,” Henny said.A bag of weed, Officer. The honesty angle. The cop will understand. He was a teenager not too long ago.“Outta the car!” Rookie Cop screamed. “Put your hands above your heads where I can see them.”I took my hand off the bong. There wasn’t any smoke left anyway. Things got hazy for a few minutes. More cops arrived. Next thing I remember was us sitting on a curb with our hands cuffed behind our backs, unable to swat away mosquitoes eating us alive. So many cop cars it looked like a murder scene. Our wallets, cell phones, bags of weed, the bong, and the pellet gun were on the hood of Henny’s car.Rookie Cop told another cop “Three Stooges here were shooting that pellet gun on private property and smoking that big bong.” Rookie Cop had his hand on his holstered gun. “I responded to a shots fired call, guns blazing. Lady reported three men on top of the windmill shooting a gun. You believe it?”The other cop swatted a mosquito on his forearm, smushing it into blood and said “Don’t look like these three’ll be curing cancer anytime soon.”So the three of us sat on the curb with our hands cuffed behind our backs like a real meeting of the minds. I stared at our warped reflections on a cop car door. Walsh was crying. He struggled to wipe his tears with his shoulder because of his glasses. He kept muttering our lives were over, that colleges wouldn’t take us with criminal records. I looked over at Henny who had this smirk on his face like getting arrested was something to cross off his bucket list. I looked at myself. My hair was cut high and tight because Mom never let me grow it out and it was so blonde I got called Village of the Damned kid at school sometimes. I’d be lying if I said part of me didn’t think getting arrested was badass. I’d also be lying if I told you part of me wasn’t scared shitless.“I need the three bags in the back of the Jeep,” I told the cops. “My parents are divorced. I’m going to my dad’s tonight.”I was always explaining my parent’s divorce to people and not because I wanted to. And I was always having to lug around my duffel bag, backpack, and PS2 in its travel case whenever I went from one house to the other.“Relax, sweetheart.” One of the cops said. “You’ll get your bags.”The cops finished searching Henny and Walsh’s cars. Read us our rights. Crammed us into the back of one cop car. Our hands still cuffed and smushed behind our backs. We weren’t buckled in with seatbelts. Rookie Cop got in the car, turned it on, and hit the gas. But the cop car was still in park. The engine revved so loud all the other cops stopped what they were doing to laugh and bust Rookie Cop’s balls. I was surprised cops made mistakes too. I thought about asking him if they taught him that in the academy. Make the other cops laugh, bust his balls back after he busted ours, you know, live a little. Cops and robbers shit. But I remained silent.Once Rookie Cop figured out how to put the car in drive, we drove off. “Born in the U.S.A.” by Bruce Springsteen was playing on the radio. Reality hit me when we passed Mom and Pat’s house. Pat was my stepdad. It was the house I’d gotten picked up from less than an hour before, after I finished an SAT practice test and Mom searched my bags and my cargo short pockets for drugs, but she didn’t check the waistband of my boxers where I stashed the half ounce. I saw our white house with green shutters. Our golden retriever, Max, ran along the Invisible Fence line at the edge of his existence. I saw the giant sun-faded American flag that Pat had fastened to a clothesline he nailed between two trees almost three years ago, the week after The Towers fell and everyone put those little plastic flags in their car windows. The flag was three thousand ghosts flailing in the August breeze. The flag was a lot of things I didn’t understand.Rookie Cop drummed the steering wheel with his thumbs, softly singing the chorus to “Born in the U.S.A.” and mumble singing the verses. Every turn felt like the game Jell-O, our weight shifting into each other with the curving hills of backcountry Fairfield as we passed big houses with nuclear green lawns. Downtown, the houses got smaller, but the lawns were still nuclear green. Bush and Kerry yard signs everywhere. Sidewalks appeared. Everyone was staring at our meeting of the minds going on in the back of that cramped cop car. Joggers. Dog-walkers. Labs and golden retrievers. Lance-Armstrong-looking wannabes on expensive bikes. Young commuter couples walking into restaurants. Moms or nannies pushing babies in strollers with ridiculously oversized wheels. Old men with War Veteran snapbacks watering their driveways with gardenhoses. A gang of kids with glow stick necklaces around their necks about to bike through the haunted graveyard. OxyContin-addicted Phishheads from our youth group who robbed us for a half pound of pot smoking cigs outside the pizza shop they work at. Even a laminated memorial picture stapled to a tree, the picture of this kid who killed himself driving drunk a year ago. All of them had eyes that followed us. I was facing the kinds of consequences Mom and Pat had tried to prevent for years. They were always saying they didn’t want to see me end up like my stepbrother Ralphie. He’d faced all kinds of consequences from drugs.We passed Fairfield train station. Commuters walked up the stairs from a northbound local. If we hadn’t gotten arrested, we’d have driven in circles smoking the bong until we ended up at McDonald’s and ordered McDoubles with Big Mac sauce off the Dollar Menu. Henny would’ve dropped me off at the train station for the last train out of Fairfield, the 11:48 local to Stamford. I’d’ve taken the forty minute train ride, transferring once in Stamford onto the local to Grand Central which stopped in Cos Cob, a neighborhood of Greenwich without mansions, where Dad lived. Every Monday night and every other weekend, I went to Dad’s where I had no curfew, unlike Mom’s where I had to be home at 10PM sharp.Rookie Cop pulled into the back of the police station as Bruce screamed at the end of the song. We were unloaded from the car in an area resembling a grocery store loading dock. Henny and I smirked when we looked at each other. Walsh didn’t smirk whatsoever. We were led single-file into the station like a sad little parade. Henny and I were being charged with possession of marijuana (our separate bags were combined, a little cop trick, but still weighed a gram and a half short of a felony) and possession of drug paraphernalia. Walsh was being charged with the same, plus something about the pellet gun. Rookie Cop led me over to the fingerprint station. As he pressed and rolled each fingertip into the ink pad, then onto their little squares on the sheet of paper, I stared at a McGruff the Crime Dog poster. I’d met McGruff once when he came to my school in third grade for a D.A.R.E. rally while a uniformed cop helped him waddle around the gym. On the walk back to our classroom, we’d all seen it. A bald man with an upper and lower body much-like Scruff’s, but human hands smoking a cigarette and eating a sandwich. Scruff’s hollow head and front paw gloves were lying on the grass beneath the man’s paws. It was like learning Santa Claus wasn’t real. Scruff couldn’t take a bite out of a sandwich, let alone crime.When the fingerprinting was over, the ink stained my fingertips, smudges I’d carry into the future. Another cop took my mugshot. It was nice not having someone telling me to smile a real smile for once which was what Mom always said. I called Dad instead of Mom for my phone call. I’d’ve rather stayed in jail than gone back to Mom’s that night and faced Pat who sometimes cared so much about me I wondered if he cared about me at all or if maybe it was some long gone version of himself he was trying to save.“Dad, I got arrested. I’m at the Fairfield Police Station,” I said.“Jesus Christ, Sean. You were arrested a month ago.”That was true. I’d been arrested the month before in the parking lot of this Connecticut fast food chain called Duchess for yelling the chorus to “Tubthumping” by Chumbawamba at the top of my lungs and also for underage drinking. It was only a summons. No handcuffs. No cell. Just twenty hours community service and some fines.“What happened?” Dad asked.“We were smoking pot.”“I’m leaving now.” Dad sighed. I heard my stepmom, Paula, in the background, saying “What is it? What happened?” Then dial tone.I was led to a cell by a desk job cop. The cement block walls in the small row of cells made everything echo. A drunk guy in a wrinkled suit with no tie was in one of the other cells. He had his hands on the bars. He reminded me of the pirate trying to coax the keys to the cell from the dog while the jail burned in the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disney World. “When am I getting outta here?” the drunk guy asked. Desk Job remained silent and pointed at the empty cell for me. I walked in. The bars slammed shut behind me. I was alone. I thought about how being arrested would effect the future Mom had planned for me. College, all that stuff. The future I had planned for myself didn’t exist.Walsh was led to my cell shortly after. I wanted to say something to him like it was gonna be alright, but I wasn’t sure if things would be alright. Henny was dumped in shortly after Walsh. We were quiet for a while. The air-conditioning was blasting. It was freezing.“Our lives are over,” Walsh said. “I’m eighteen. I’m gonna be charged as an adult.”“It was some pot and a pellet gun,” Henny said. “We’ll be fine. Fuck the cops.”Henny gave the finger to the camera mounted to the ceiling. I shook my head and slouched up against the cement wall. My teeth clattered from the cold. Walsh cried again. In the moment, I felt strong not crying. I felt like a man, like an adult, like I was ready for the real world, though it would still be three months until I could legally buy cigarettes and blunt wraps or fight a war for oil or vote for one moron or another. My mind back then told me when you get arrested for smoking pot and shooting a pellet gun and you don’t cry, you become a man. Walsh was the manliest of us three. That was the weird thing. I pulled my arms and my head into my t-shirt so it was a little tent. There was a buzzing sound. I peered out through one of my sleeves. Desk Job came into the hallway, opened the cell door with a set of keys, and told Walsh his parents were there. Walsh got up and told the cop his life was over. Desk Job remained silent as he led Walsh away.I thought about Ralphie again. About how he’d been arrested a couple times. About how he ended up. About how Mom and Pat were gonna say I was on the same road as him, a predestined path to destruction because they’d been saying that since they caught me with a pack of EZ-Widers and a few weed stems and seeds freshman year and acted like I was shooting dope into my jugular. I already knew drugs were bad. I also knew they were good. And cool. I already knew drugs were bad though because of how Ralphie ended up, but I wasn’t doing the kind of drug he ended up doing. I swore to God on my mother on my father on my life I never ever would.“I got the munchies.” Henny laughed as he laid back on the bunk with his hands behind his head. “Do you think we’ll get any Burger King? My cousin got Burger King when he got arrested. Or bologna sandwiches like the TV shows?”I told him I didn’t think so. I told him I didn’t think we’d get any Burger King like his cousin or bologna sandwiches like the TV shows. I needed to tell myself something too. I needed to be like, self, listen up, when you’re in a holding cell, there’s always something you need to tell yourself. You need to tell yourself don’t be the god of poor decisions. You need to tell yourself don’t be the god of anything as a matter of fact. You need to tell yourself you're powerless over most of the things you wanna control and everything you think you know about life when you’re seventeen is bologna. You need to tell yourself you’re an idiot kid dousing his life in gasoline. But you don’t tell yourself anything like that because you haven’t lived enough to know the difference between what you can and cannot change. You need to ruin your life before you can tell yourself not to ruin your life. So instead, you sit and you wait for your parents to bail you out. You sit and you wait next to a drunk man in a suit with his hands on the bars like the cell is on fire and the keys are gone. You sit and you wait for the cell to burn down around you or for the cell to burn you up with it. You sit and you wait and from the top of your world you scream fuck you down at anyone trying to save you. You sit and you wait and you scream and all you hear are your own echoes.

SKIES OF AMERICA by Mike Barthel

December 23, 2024

Lydia was in the Sam's Club reaching for a box containing three boxes of cereal when the lanky man pushed his flatbed cart uncomfortably close to her flatbed cart."As you can see, I have a compendium of canning jars," he said. "Are you also interested in canning?"She squinted at his selection, six jars with glass handles that said “Wine-O-Clock” instead of “Ball.” Feeling charitable and a little intrigued, she said, "Did a whole shelf of asparagus this weekend. You need the tall jars for those."The man nodded stiffly. "And do you enjoy dining at Cook Out? My favorite order is the chicken quesadilla with another chicken quesadilla and a third chicken quesadilla as well."Lydia laughed, leaning on her cart. He sounded like he'd watched a video called How to make casual conversation with new acquaintances. "I'm partial to the spicy chicken, the corn dog, and chili. With an Oreo shake.""Uh huh, uh huh, uh huh," the man said. "And do you also work at the spaceport?'"Well…I'd call it the flight center," Lydia said. "Or just Marshall. Are you new here?""No!" the main barked. "I am a longtime employee. And let me tell you. Those clowns!""Yeah, they got some problems, don't they?" Lydia said. "I tell you, if they do one more reorg and fuck with my reporting structure I'm about likely to drive a golf cart over a retaining wall. For all the good that'd do."The man looked at her intently. "Why do you think we've never gone to Mars?"Lydia gave the man a once-over. It seemed like a line, like he wanted to debate her. She straightened up, maybe trying to intimidate him a little. Lydia was tall and bulky, with short hair and wide pants. A woman of substance, an old coworker had called her, which pissed Lydia off until she realized he kinda liked women of substance. You're gonna get slapped if you try that line on some other lady, she told him, drinking coffee in her backyard a few weeks later, robe open to the autumn breeze."You know what?" she said. "You remind me of my ex-husband. Ed. Well, dead husband. He went to Afghanistan and came back different. More fun. Kind of a hoot, actually. But you know how it is. That brain stuff catches up with you eventually.”"Does it?" the man asked.Lydia retrieved a box containing two bottles of ranch dressing from a shelf. "Hey, you want to go out tonight? The Duke's Bonnet downtown, maybe 8ish.""I'd love to," the man said, a slight look of panic in his eyes.Lydia began pushing her flatbed away. "What's your name, anyway?""Tyvee," he said."Tyvee?" Lydia said, stopping short. "Like teevee but Tyvee?""Tyvee," he repeated, the panic seeming to mount.“Isn’t that funny,” she said. “A funny name for a funny guy. I’ll see you tonight.”

***

At the bar, Lydia introduced Tyvee to her friends, all widows or divorcees. She finished at Delia, wearing, as she usually did, a rock tee tucked into high-waisted jeans. "This is Tyvee," Lydia said, "I think he might be a spy. And this is Delia. She works at the base, too."Tyvee said, "Why do you think we've never been to Mars?""Mars?" Delia said. "You kidding me? We haven't even been to the moon in who knows how long.” The jeans allowed Delia to make strategic use of her butt, and she used it here to box out Tyvee, in favor of Lydia. “Always seemed like a suicide mission to me anyways. You’d just be trading bodies for data.""Do you work with Lydia?" Tyvee said. "Doing repairs?"Delia laughed. "Has she been feeding you a line? We do clerical work. They mostly only let men in the build spaces.""We started the same week," Lydia said. "My Ed and her Jesse got a job here together after their service was up. Deployed together, too."Tyvee nodded aggressively. "Did Jesse come back fun, too?""No," Delia said, "he did not."There was a silence, and then Lydia pointed out the front window, which had been painted with lizard green letters advertising 99-cent wing Wednesdays and three dollar Miller Mondays. "Holy shit. It's the guy with the hearse. You are in for a treat."They all piled into a long black car with bottles of liquor clanking in a plastic rack, and the driver took off, fast enough for Tyvee to look a little queasy. The air conditioner wasn't working, so they rolled the windows down, all sweating in the summer heat. Lydia and her friends began reminiscing about their husbands' funerals."Twenty-one gun salute?" one cried."Twenty-one gun salute!" the rest replied, cackling."Goddamn, that thing was noisy as hell," Lydia said. "I just about cussed aloud when that first volley pierced the clear blue sky.""Remember when I pretended I was so gosh-darned bereft that I was gonna throw myself on the fuckin' coffin?" Delia said.Lydia slammed her glass down on an armrest, splashing the brown liquid on fuzzed, blue fabric. "Oh my God, you were being such an asshole.""Everyone staring at me all sad-eyed. Thank God you were holding me back, like, Honey, cut it the fuck out, hissing in my ear. Otherwise I would’ve had to fake a Charlie horse to keep my own godforsaken body out of that hole.”"It was not the time for irony," Lydia said.Delia toasted her, ice cubes clinking wetly. "Then when is?"A few more turns and the hearse stopped, and the widows and divorcees all stumbled out. Tyvee grabbed Lydia's arm for support, his lanky body heavier than it appeared. He's drunk as hell, Lydia thought, but said, "You OK, hon?""I saw your house from orbit," Tyvee said, “knew it was a spaceport, a launchpad for probes or a maintenance shop. A place of expertise. It glowed from the air, a massive, brilliant display, blaring and blinking like the sign of some distant planetary system. A darkness evincing rotation. The unmistakable signal of an eclipse." "You saying you wanna get out of here?" Lydia asked. "I can show you the bright lights."

***

As Lydia drove through her neighborhood with Tyvee in the passenger seat—it was unclear where his car was—there was no mistaking which house was hers. Its glow rose above the roofs of her neighbors' brick colonials and vinyl-sided ranches, bursts of reds and greens interrupting brilliant white. She turned onto her street and the full scope of her Christmas decorations became clear. They engulfed the whole house. "There it is!" Tyvee said, pointing. "I want to see everything. The repair bay on the side. The research and development lab at the center. Your deck, where you lay out your plans for interstellar travel.""Oh yeah," Lydia said, "They're right in there with my Heisman trophy and Academy award."In the garage, an inflatable Jesus held an inflatable Santa by the neck. An inflatable banner said "JESUS FIRST." Lydia punched Jesus causally in the face, in a way that suggested she did it every time she came home. Inside, the rooms were piled with shipping boxes and parts. As Lydia made Tyvee another drink, he plucked a metal doodad from atop a table. "And what is this for?" he asked."Servo motor," Lydia said, putting her hand on his back and rubbing in little circles. "Moves Santa's hand so it looks like he's scratching his balls. Just like Ed used to. God rest his soul." She perched on the table and took a long drink. "But now it's just me here. We've got the place to ourselves."Tyvee seemed to steel himself. "Lydia, you're right. I am a spy," he said. "Oh, okay," Lydia said, freshly intrigued. "And I'm a high-ranking Soviet apparatchik.""I'm from another planet,” Tyvee went on, ignoring her, “far, far away from here. My project—the one I’ve spent forty of your years on—is to determine what's to be done about civilizations, thousands of them across the galaxy, that have the technical resources to travel between planets but never make it into the stars. How to get them there. And I think I've almost got it.""Mmm-hmm," she said, kissing his hand. "And what's your theory, Herr Doktor?""It's spaceports like these. Skunkworks, staffed by a hardscrabble crew of tinkerers and mercenaries. I've found them on every planet. Glowing dimly, but insistently, from space. If we just give them a little boost, all of you, well. You can all join us in the stars." He grabbed her hand. "And you're the perfect spokesperson for my project. Articulate, charismatic. I've already informed my organization about you. Preparations are being made. You're going to be famous."She grabbed her hand back, hopped down from the table. "Are you fucking with me? You gotta be fucking with me. Is this a prank? Did Delia put you up to this?"Tyvee ignored her, pawing through a green plastic bin full of parts."OK. I'll play along. These are decorations, Mr. Alien," she said, pulling up a cord from a winder on the floor. "Christmas lights. I don't build spaceships. I buy inflatables at the Home Depot and mount 'em on my roof. With some custom mods."This finally got to Tyvee. "I don't understand.""Come outside."She led him out her front door, which caught on its frame, as if it were rarely used. From the house next door, someone yelled "Lydia! It's July!" She stuck a finger their way.When they reached the middle of the street, Lydia said, "Now, turn around."Tyvee saw the glow of her house then, up close for the first time. Dots of tiny lights covered every inch of the walls and roof, criss-crossing lines of colored blobs snaking their way up her tree trunks. "It's not a beacon?" Tyvee said, "It serves no purpose?""Well, I dunno about that," Lydia said, "It has its uses."Tyvee looked closer, at the figures on the roof and the lawn. One Santa was helping a baby elf with long, straight blonde hair kick a ball. Another was holding the hand of Mrs. Claus, who was laid up in bed. Another Santa, behind a puffy craps table, had his hands in the air, cheering, clapped on the back by ecstatic-looking elves throwing red and green chips in the air, their arcs indicated by curved tubes of LED lights."Are they all your Ed?" he asked."Yep, that’s him helping our daughter learn soccer, that there's him taking care of me at the hospital, and that there's the time he went on a forty-eight roll run," Lydia said, lighting a cigarette. "And of course, being strangled by Jesus in the garage, like he was by all of his goddamn bosses. Same type of folks who decide things at the base. Who decide not to go to Mars, like you keep asking about. Who, in the guise of our local government, send me these fines and threatening fuckin’ letters." She took a drag, blew it toward the moon—a waning crescent. Almost extinguished, but soon to return. "Ed passed just before Christmas a few years back," she continued. "After the funeral and all finished up, and our daughter went back to Atlanta, I just didn't have the heart to take the decorations down. Came to like 'em up there, welcoming me home, so I figured I'd add some more. If I made it bright enough, maybe he could see me." She shook her head. "But I guess you saw me instead, huh?"Lydia looked down. Tyvee had collapsed to the street, arms around his knees. Lydia stuck the cigarette between her lips and tried to drag him up by his armpits. "Hey now," she said, "none of that.""You just leave these lights on all the time," he said. "There's no reason. It serves no purpose. This isn't a spaceport at all. You're nothing like the people I found everywhere else. Your neighbors hate you. I hate you, too. You're ruining my career."The man wasn't budging and Lyrida gave up on dragging him to safety. Some people just can't be helped, she thought."Well," she said, brushing her hands off, "you'll be happy to hear that the city is making me take 'em down. Delia's coming over this weekend to help. Thousands in fines I can't pay. Finally they said they'd shut off my power.""Why would they do that?" Tyvee said, coming out of his ball."Just jealous, I suppose,” Lydia said. "You don't know what it's like to be us, to be one of the little lights. God forbid you want to do something special. Or even just work a steady job and raise your family. They've got a purpose for you. Maybe that purpose is to be small and keep the books. Maybe that purpose is to die. And if you have the temerity to make yourself bigger, or to come back alive, they just chew you up and bury you in the ground.""That's so sad," Tyvee said, struggling to his feet, "You're all so sad."She clapped him on the back, like the elves did Ed. "Cheer up, baby," she said. "After all, it's Christmas." And her laugh, sharp and cackling, rose up through the night air like a lost rocket in search of somewhere to land.

VISUAL SNOW by Drew Willis

December 19, 2024

Dano wondered whether he might be too old to be a Dano. He got the name like he got self-consciousness. It had happened without a pinpointable moment of happening. When he came online, it was online with him. Now he was twenty-eight, a functional boozehound, in debt big time. He was a salesman at a local music shop and had been for ten years. He was regionally famous. If you said “Dano” in certain bars, at least one person would perk up and say, “Oh, Dano rocks,” or “Fuckin’ Danooooooo.” He was likely the most naturally gifted guitar player in the state of Nevada, though he rarely played in public. His headaches were getting worse and more frequent, his vision was becoming increasingly messed up by floaters, halos, and static. And Frankie, his childhood bud, one of his five roommates, had become an officially missing person. “Could I be a Daniel?” Dano wondered.

Because of Dano’s skill, people often asked him why he or his band weren’t bigger, why they never toured or moved out to LA or Seattle to try to make it big. He tried, for a while, to explain the space that music occupied in his mind. It was like an alternate dimension. A trip. Undulating colors. Shapes that bent the sense-making parts of the brain. Time as totality. Where there is no order but things are always happening. It demanded a certain form of attention. He needed to be careful with it. He so wanted to escape his life. This was dangerous. The path afforded by the music space was not a way out but a way in. A way into the present; a way to know, not run from, his suffering. He knew, if he let it, that chasing glory, the adoration of so many strangers, could warp that space. Turn the way in into a way out. A justification for his being alive. A form of redemption, the thing he wanted most. The thing he detested. After a while he just started saying, “That’s not the point.”The night that Frankie took off, some of the crew came by their place. Dano had some Millers. People were in constant motion, coming in from smoking, going out to smoke. Erika, jazz bassist turned grindcore vocalist, was there. Erika asked Dano for a cigarette. Dano said he loved her. “You say that to everybody,” she said. It was true. “Yeah, that’s true,” said Dano. “That’s true. Fair point. I’m sorry. I just. I feel good.” “You look it. Why don’t you go play us a little something on the ol’ acoustic?” “I can’t.”“How come?”“I just can’t right now.” “Our Dano is suddenly shy?” “Not exactly.”“People don’t get into music like you because they want to stand all humble in the corner.” “Why do you do it?” The smoke that Erika exhaled was exaggerated by her breath in the cold. “‘Cause I’m pissed,” she said. “And I want people to see that I’m pissed. And know why. I can’t talk about why I’m pissed without sounding weird. But I can show it. And I can turn this like ugly thing into ugly music that’s actually, kind of, beautiful,” she said. Dano’s cigarette had grown an ash appendage. He wanted to say something, a lot of something, but he didn’t know how, and he was sorry for telling Erika he loved her in the way he had. “Can I have a Miller?” she said. They went inside. Frankie was out of his room, shirtless and pale, holding a whiskey bottle with maybe a quarter left. “Let’s get one in ya,” he said to the room. The bottle went around. Dano got Erika a Miller. Which spilled over with foam as she opened it. The lines on her flannel shirt vibrated. How long had they been doing that, he wondered.“Danoman, can I talk to you a minute?” Frankie said. Dano was not up for talking the way Frankie wanted to talk. It was an almost nightly thing:1) Frankie gets drunk and needs Dano. 2) Frankie details every soul crushing aspect of his work day. 3) Dano makes him feel better. 4) Frankie says he’s miserable. Hopeless. 5) Dano tells him that it sounds real serious, that he’s sorry, that his friends are there for him, that life is worth living and is there anything he can do for him? 6) Frankie smiles, says, “That’s okay, brother. Thank you. You always know what to say.” Dano tried his best to focus on Frankie’s face. There was definitely a change taking place there, the eye bags no longer a byproduct of the partying, but of something heavier, something drawing deeper lines. “Sure, man. We can chat,” Dano said.

III

Frankie had been what people call “big hearted” since Dano had known him. When they were thirteen, loitering outside the Hilton casino as they did most summers, a drunk guy locked eyes with young Dano. The guy was shredded, salon tanned skin under a small tanktop. He was short for a grownup but seemed massive to Dano. “That fucking kid’s looking at me,” the guy said to his group. “That kid’s looking at me.” The group laughed. They tried to move on. Dano got nervous. He was small for thirteen. The guy would murder him. “He’s looking at me,” the guy said. He tried to move toward Dano. His group laughed, held him back, told him to chill. “They’re kids, man,” they said. The guy pushed his old lady off him. Was that his old lady? Or was that a random? The guy moved toward Dano. There were too many things moving all at the same time. Frankie stepped between Dano and the guy. The guy pushed Frankie. Frankie fell onto his ass. The guy swung wide, lost his feet. His friends rushed him and got him through the shoulders and were dragging him away as the guy screamed at Dano. “Sorry, he’s real fucked up,” the guy’s friends said. Dano tried to hide his shaking. “Thanks, man,” he said to Frankie. “No worries,” Frankie said. Frankie would have taken that beating for Dano a thousand times over, would have taken it for anybody gathered at their place the night he disappeared. Dano sipped his Miller. He knew. He followed Frankie down the hall. He knew, but he did not want to hear it. He wanted to go to his room and shut the door. He wanted to go to the space inside him that held the music. He wanted to find something that was in him now, something he could not name but was in there and important. Frankie took a pull from a half-full bottle on the dresser. He would have done anything for Dano. They had been through more together than either would say out loud. “What’s up, man?” Dano asked. “Oh, you know, bud,” Frankie said. Frankie offered Dano the bottle, and Dano had a little pull. “Work’s been getting to me,” Frankie said. “I feel that. We’re in our busy season too,” said Dano. “I know I just gotta keep my head down, but it’s hard.”“I don’t know that you have to keep your head down, exactly.”“I guess. I’ve already worked sixty hours this week. I had over 120 hours on my last check.” Static formed over Frankie’s skin. Pixels shimmering in waves. “How about we go outside? It’s a party. What if we drown our sorrows a little?” The static over Frankie’s face arranged itself in disbelief. Frankie thought. “Alright,” he said. “Do you want a smoke?”“Nah.” The kickback went on like it had. Frankie stayed in his room, door closed. Erika got up on the coffee table, sang about being young and wanting to leave the place you grew up in. Dano went to his room, searched the music space within. There was nothing save the party noise barely muffled by his door. He searched, fingers over string. Indents in his calloused tips. He stayed like that for a while, years maybe, until he heard a slamming door. The tenor of the party noises changed. Erika’s voice, concerned. In the front room, Frankie swayed, hand on the front door for balance. “You can’t drive, man,” somebody said. Frankie looked at Dano. Through him. Frankie opened the door. Was out in the cold desert night, alone for a moment. Dano followed, reaching for the waist of Frankie’s sweatpants. Dano caught him up. Dano tried to get his arms around Frankie. Frankie pushed, clipping Dano’s jaw with an open palm. Frankie was in his Ranger. Frankie had the doors locked. Dano pounded on the window and pulled at the door handle. Frankie’s engine started. Frankie was pulling away. Dano hit the driver side window with the butt of his fist and reached beneath the wiper blades and hoped for something holdable. He got himself in front of the truck somehow, and Frankie stopped. Dano’s breath was huge in the headlights. Frankie revved the engine, peeled. Dano fell. Frankie stopped. He revved again as Dano got on his feet. Frankie peeled again, and Dano knew he wouldn’t stop. Something in the truck’s motion told him that this time was for real, and he felt his body moving out of the way, reaching for the side view mirror that held Frankie in moonlit profile. He ran with the truck, with Frankie, as long as he could, reaching, kicking at the door. Their friends had gathered outside. Dano punched a hole in the wood fence that ran parallel to their street. Somewhere, outside the city, in the desert, a fanged and starving body hunted. The mountains continued their falling into gravel. Dano’s head hurt. He wanted to leave this. Get out of his life. The music space was far away. And he did not want to go there. He saw no way inward. He wanted out. A savior, a heaven to hope for, something. Frankie’s taillights were around the corner, gone save for the streaks of afterimage they left smeared beneath the streetlights for Dano alone.

Dano wondered: “If I am not a Daniel, what am I?”The local music shop was in trouble. It was almost Christmas, and they were still sitting on most of their inventory. Foot traffic was negligible. They adjusted truss rods, swapped out pickups, repaired speakers and amplifiers, sold strings and vintage Gibsons and replacement parts for drum kits made in the nineties. To keep up his contracts with the major manufacturers, the shop owner had to purchase in quantities that hadn’t made business sense in decades. There were boxed guitars everywhere. Dano wiped countertops, updated inventory, tagged, labeled, arranged. A truck pulled up that needed unloading. The guys unloaded it. They smoked by the dumpster. Frankie had not come back. Dano was like you. All he wanted was a little mercy. “Kids don’t want to play rock music anymore,” said Sal, the manager. “Nobody wants a guitar. You know how much action you used to be able to get just by saying you were in a band? Now it’s, No, I’ll just sit on my ass with my phone, thanks. I’ll just be a DJ and press play on my computer like an asshole.” Sal looked toward some place that was just for him. “I don’t know anymore,” he said. “You know what, Sal?” Dano said. “Me neither.”Dano went down to the shop’s basement and stretched out in the narrow makeshift hallway where they kept the repair parts. The only cameraless spot left in America. He opened the band’s Instagram page and looked around. The initial wave of concern and support for Frankie had collapsed faster than he’d hoped. No more stories. Everyone that warranted contacting had been contacted. Dano had called, dm’d, driven. Frankie’s family had no idea where he might be, hadn’t heard anything, and other than his sister, none of them seemed to care much. There was nothing else to do. No one had even seen the truck. Dano’s eyes vibrated. Over everything, there was snow falling all the time that only he could see.The shop closed every day at 6:00. On Christmas Eve, after hours without a customer, Sal told the crew, “You guys can probably head out.” It was 5:27.

On Christmas Day, Dano and his brother met their dad for lunch at the Lucky Beaver Bar & Burger. “I heard about your friend. Frankie. It’s too bad. He’s a good kid,” their dad said. He was on his second beer. He looked old. “Yeah,” the boys said. There were a couple guys at the bar. Giants-Eagles on the tvs. One woman worked serving and bartending. When she opened the door to the kitchen, Dano saw, framed for a second in that space, two cooks kicking back, watching an unseen screen, smiling. “It’s what happens when you get older. Won’t be the last, I can tell you that,” their dad said. “He’s not dead,” Dano said. “Right,” their dad said.The snow in Dano’s eyes got bad. Randy said something Dano couldn’t follow. His brother’s mouth was moving, his eyes locked on their dad. His baby brother, a little kid crying through missing teeth and then a man, tall and imposing, with bigger and more capable hands than Dano’s, hands already bent from work, moving in wider and wider circles over empty beer bottles. The vein standing out now in their old man’s temple. Snow falling just for Dano. He remembered the first time Frankie hit him. They’d taken mushrooms before a house party up the street. He couldn’t remember who was there, only the sense of moving bodies. Doors. Carpet. Laughter. At some point, Frankie got down on his back on the concrete stoop, an X of limbs. He stared up the porchlight, smiling. Dano looked down at him. Frankie pointed up. “There’s snow everywhere,” he said. “I can’t even see you.” Dano got him on his feet. People on the stoop laughed. Their mouths were too long. “You don’t wanna fight me, do you?” Frankie said. “What?” Dano said. “You’re not trying to get tough with me?” said Frankie.Frankie contorted his face. The look became sound, a supersonic boom through Dano. “Are you trying to get tough with me?” Dano said. Frankie hit him square in the forehead. Dano didn’t even feel it, barely perceived Frankie’s fist in motion. Frankie recoiled, holding his hand. He held it up to the silent crowd on the stoop. It was already swelling. Laughter from everywhere again. Somehow the same laughter. As if the too long mouths had never stopped, as if they would always be there, on that stoop, laughing. Later that night, the night in which Frankie hit Dano for the first time, they walked home together. They sat on the couch in the front room. Dano showed Frankie a Youtube video. Frankie showed Dano a Youtube video. Frankie got on his knees and got Dano’s cock in his mouth. Dano didn’t realize what was happening until it was almost over. He did the same for Frankie. When the birds started chirping, when there was light outside and the spring smells came through the window, Dano put on Despisers of the Body’s new record. “What does he say right there, right before the drums come in?” Frankie asked. “I will not debase my suffering by seeking its end,” Dano told him. Dano’s head was on Frankie’s chest. His fingers moved over Frankie’s still swelling hand. “What does that mean?” Frankie said. “I don’t know,” Dano said. In the Lucky Beaver, as the bartender poured a double and Randy’s hands went around the table, somebody, a Giant or Eagle, scored. One of the guys at the bar stood up, hooted, hollered. Dano let the snow fall. His dad did not look beautiful in it. The Lucky Beaver did not suddenly glow. Dano did not need to convince his pops that Frankie was still alive. Frankie did not need to come back from wherever he’d gone to prove his being mattered. If you are really gone, he thought, I will never say that your life was not enough.

GIFTS MY MOM GAVE ME by Tex Gresham

December 17, 2024

She was told to smile. She was always told to smile at the start of her shift. Cammie, give ‘em that smile. Not a suggestion, but mandatory. And she’d give it to ‘em.But tonight…The clients in here tonight crave holly jolly and so most say Smile, baby as they slip a tip in the thin hip strip of her thong. It’s the floor clients who say this mostly––the newcomers, the one-and-done-ers, the lonely men looking at her instead of looking at those waiting for them to get home this eve. The ones who walk in unnoticed. The ones who order the Santa’s Steak & Spaghetti Special, rare and wet, and slurp the blood-soaked noodles and smack open-mouthed and stare at her like a toddler holding an iPad as she gives them a preview of what they could get the full attraction of in a private room.They say Smile, baby with words traveled on breath tomato-tanged and beer-burped.And, of course, she does.It’s just business, a job. Nothing personal on her end. Everything personal on theirs. She’s used to it by now. There’s a joke about a guy who gets a dancer’s number and tells his friends No, dude, she actually likes me. Usually she laughs at this.But tonight…Each time she hears Smile, the words are like whispered slivers of glass in her heart. She tries not to assume to know anything about the clients or picture in her mind the lives they wear beyond the doors. Being neutral to who they are helps her play her role and convince these clients to give up what they would to someone else if it wasn’t her. A job. A game. It’s her life.But tonight…All she can picture are the families these men hide away from, sees these wives and children and she wants to think Taking them for granted but that’s the kind of thought that makes smiling real hard. Harder than it already is on days like today. This time of year… The idea of taking people for granted and then you no longer have them around, can’t tell them Thank you for being in my life because they no longer are…She struts by a man who sucks salt and cream sauce off his sausage-thick finger and runs that spit-slick finger up her arm as she passes. She stops, wags a finger at him, slow like wheat fields in the wind, and through the best smile she’s got says, “No no, sweetheart. No touching.”And the man laughs and chokes a little on the food in his mouth––a mouth so full that the mashed up food is both on his tongue and already halfway down his throat. His other hand, the one not still uncomfortably close to her, caresses his crotch in a three-finger pinch and roll.She keeps moving.The DJ crackles over the intercom with, “Now on the stage. Vixxxen.” Stretching out the “x” so that it hisses like a snake. The high-twang guitar of “Jingle Bell Rock” kicks in and half the place starts clapping along vaguely on tempo.Vixxxen comes out in her all-red break-away one piece and thigh highs. She’s got bells attached to the ankles of her 8-inch platforms and they jangle each time she heel bangs. The Santa hat on her head doesn’t move as she does a brass monkey.Cammie turns away from the stage and notices a man sitting at a high top against the back wall. Alone. Maybe forty or fifty. Not eating the special. Not watching Vixxxen. Just sitting and sipping. Waiting for someone to come to him. So Cammie does.She slides up next to him, runs a finger from one shoulder to the other. Up close she can smell his cologne and see that his hair is more gray than color and that his face has more lines than smooth. Older than she thought. Maybe sixty. Not wearing a ring––because most men who have them keep them on when they come in here. Want all the girls to know, thinks it makes them forbidden. But it just makes them look like schmucks. And this one isn’t wearing a ring. When she touches him, he seems to both tense up and resign. Almost like his head drops.She says, “Hi, baby. What’re you doing over here alone?”“Just sitting…”“And no one’s come talk to ya?”He shakes his head.“Well I’m here now. So time to cheer up.” She puts her face down closer to the table so that he has no choice but to look at her. When he does, she plasters that mandatory smile on her face, cartoonishly wide. Trying hard to be the right shade of aggressively cute men his age melt over.“Yeah,” he says, but doesn’t show any sign of cheering up.Any of the other girls would’ve rolled their eyes or walked away or both. But Cammie presses on. Knows what’s here in front of her.“You look like you got a lot on your mind.”“I do.”“Well… You wanna go to a private room and we can talk about it?”He nods. He feels around his pants like he’s looking for lost keys. Takes a quick hitched breath.And she takes his hand. But he doesn’t move. His feet stay anchored to the floor. He grabs the glass of wine and downs the rest of it.“Oh, baby… You can take it to the room with you. You don’t have to––”But it’s gone, down his throat.She says, “Okay then.” And leads him out of the main room. Down a blue hallway, into Private Room 2. And shuts the door.She eases him into a recliner that no one can tell is Costco cheap because of the room’s redlight darkness, and the two agree on a ten minute private dance. She sets her phone timer, opens Spotify, and pushes play on a holiday playlist. She eases out of her clothes.Halfway through those ten minutes she’s perfected counting up in the head, she notices wetness on his face. Some clients sweat in the private rooms. Sweat bad. Nerves and old age and the tension that maybe this is the time the dancer will finally give them something extra. She’d feel that wetness on her bare skin through their clothes or on her fingers, salty slick, as she caressed their faces or necks. The reek of their bad diets and bad habits seeping out in that sweat.But tonight…This isn’t sweat.She slows, hips pumping gently on his lap. She looks him in the face. He doesn’t look up at her, still hasn’t, eyes finding everything else in the room but hers.She says, “Babe… Are you crying?”A beat, like he’s trying to dig up a lie. But he doesn’t say anything.“I ain’t that bad, am I?” A joke because who wants to give a private dance to a crying man. Though it’s hardly the first time. Usually the tears come from guilt. But that’s not what this is, is it?“No no no. Not at all. It’s not you. It’s just…” And like he can barely find the words: “I miss my mom.”She stops moving, sits still in his lap in a thong and nothing else.He adds, “I always miss her this time of year.” And because she's already been tiptoeing around the thought tonight, already been fighting the stomach pit numb that tonight and tomorrow bring for her now and for the last six years, and because the sudden change catches her off guard, she says, “Me too.”He looks at her. “You too? But you’re so young.”“Sometimes it happens, baby.”“You think it gets easier but it doesn’t. Tonight… This, all this, holiday or whatever… It’ll never be the same for the rest of my life and… I just want to give her a gift tomorrow. Or open something she thought I’d like.”“Sometimes that’s just how it goes. No more gifts when they’re gone, ya know? But…”“But what?”She tosses her hair back with both hands. Runs her fingers through one side. Rubs an itch at the tip of her nose with her palm. Then looks at him with that mask she’s been wearing gone. This is her, really.“Can I tell you a story that might cheer you up?”“Please.” And he really means it.She adjusts how she’s sitting in his lap, like she’s preparing herself for a story that she’s been holding onto for too long, hasn’t told anyone. She shakes out her nerves, tossing around her hands and hair in a playful way, and then performs.“Can you keep a secret?”He nods, already leaned in and interested.“Well… My real name…is Ezlynn.”“Oh… It’s not Cammie Soul?”“Ha ha, funny guy. Thought you were supposed to be sad or something.”He looks down with his whole head. But she didn’t mean it like that. She lifts his head back up with a finger to chin so that his eyes are on hers again as she talks.“So my name is Ezlynn. Which is a good name if you ask me. But it’s an unusual name. You ever met an Ezlynn before?”He shakes his head, eyes stationary on her.“Right. Me neither. I was named after my grandmother. My mom… She said she loved that name––Ezlynn––and wanted to say it all the time. Growing up I hated it, wanted to be Christine or something. But now… I love it too. Mom was right.”“It’s a good name.”She puts a finger on his lips.“So… I was at the store the other day. Thinking as I always do but especially this time of year––I wish I woulda spent more time with mom. When all a’sudden this lady comes down the aisle, looking right at me. Like I’m in trouble––maybe a wife whose husband gave me up when the bank statement came in. And she says Are you Ezlynn? and I think Oh shit. I’m ready to start throwin hands, ya know? And so I say Yeah, so what? and she goes Your mother is looking for you.“And I kinda went all cold, couldn’t really say anything. Maybe I said something like My mother? because the lady goes Yeah, this real petite woman with red hair. And now I don’t know if you can tell in these lights, but two of the many gifts my mother gave me is this head of luscious red hair and this petite body.”She bounces on him once. The side of his mouth lifts in a half-smirk that feels like a courtesy. His eyes look like they’re begging for this story to give him something. So she continues.“I got my nose from my daddy. But so this woman is describing my mother. My mother. Who is dead. And she’s looking for me? And this lady goes Yeah, she’s up at the front of the store. Come with me. But I can barely move cuz I’m kinda like freaking out. Right? Who wouldn’t? But I start following her. And the closer we get to the front I’m like fully expecting to turn the corner and see my mom up there waiting for me, that the last six years have been some kind of mistake.“But…“Of course it’s not, ya know?“We get up there and it’s this women who looks nothing like my mom, even though she’s petite and her hair’s red. And she’s talking to this little girl, maybe ten or something, saying things like Ezlynn, I told you not to blah blah blah. Standard worried mom stuff.“And so the lady who came up to me in the aisle stops and goes Oh… I guess she found her. Guess you’re not the right Ezlynn. And I just kinda go Yeah cuz what else can I say? “And had that been the end of it I woulda been like That was weird and moved on but the lady said What are the odds? and I said What do you mean? and she said Well it’s weird… My name is Ezlynn too. Named after my grandmother.“My mouth musta been wide open cuz she said I know. Three Ezlynns in the same place. What are the odds? But it wasn’t just three. It was five. Three here and the two we were named after. All there in that one moment.“The lady smiled at me in a dismissive kinda way and then left. And I kinda shuffled back to my cart thinking Your mother is looking for you.”She stops talking. Realizes he’s staring at her, tears in his eyes again.He says, “You are very lucky.”“Lucky?”“People go their whole lives without getting a gift like that. Something to help them… believe.”“Or it was a coincidence…”“No… That was something.” “There ya go, sweetheart. That’s the good thinking.”And then he says, “Doesn’t that make you feel good?”“About what?”“That you got an answer. That you were thinking of her and she answered. Let you know she was there… That you aren’t alone.”Her phone jangles a fake fire alarm. The timer she’d set just in case the up in the head counting got away from her. Which it did.She says, “Oh geez… I’m sorry. I spent all your time talking. Here… Let me set it again so that––”She reaches for her phone, but he reaches out and grabs her hand. Stops her. She lets him.He says, “No.”She feels her eyebrows go up high. “No?”“This was more than enough. Thank you.” Says it like he really means it.And they don’t say anything else as she stands and gets dressed. Stage music throbs through the walls, fills the silence with some heavy metal version of a Christmas melody. He stands, adjusts his clothes. She guides him to the door with a hand on his shoulder. She can’t feel sweat through his clothes. He stops in the doorway and she looks at him, the two standing close. She has to look up to meet his eyes. Tall.He says, “Do you think she was there?”“Maybe…”“Do you think she’s here now?”She lets out the weakest laugh you’ve ever heard. Then, “No… I think she knows to give me some privacy.”He smiles, nods. His eyes break away from hers. Go up to the door frame, to the mistletoe hanging there. She sees it too, wonders who put it here. She smiles at him, then kisses the tips of her three fingers––ring, middle, pointer––and places those three fingers gently on his forehead. He closes his eyes, breathes in deep. Like he’s just been given a blessing.“Thank you.”And then he hands her five hundred dollars, crisp bills folded over. She takes it.And before he’s gone and she never sees him again, he says, “I don’t know if anyone has said this yet and meant it but… Merry Christmas.”The smile that comes across her face doesn’t feel like one she’s been told to give. She says, “You too.”And then he’s gone.She goes back out to the floor and wanders, not really looking for another client. Not really interested in anything other than what he said. It was something.Because maybe it was.But tonight…She watches Crystal on stage, also all in red, also with a Santa hat stuck to her head.“Saw you go private with that sad one.” Prancer walks up to Cammie and gets within kissing distance. She always does this. “You told him that one story, didn’t you?”She shows Prancer the money.“Biiiiiitch,” stretching it out in that playfully jealous way. “You buying me a drink later.”“Alright, alright.”And then Prancer struts away on heels tall enough to be illegal, throwing her ass-length blonde hair around like it’s her best quality. Maybe it is.All of the girls think it’s a made up story, just something to tell when she finds the sad ones. A way to scheme them out of a few more bucks than they were willing to give. Maybe it is.But it’s also real. It happened. Exactly as she told it. Not something recent, but it happened. And she knows exactly what it means to her.So tonight…Ezlynn stands there, not seeing. Only listening. Trying to feel that something he said it was. Trying to feel like her mom was there is there always will be there. And just like the five Ezlynns all in the same place at the same time, the song playing as Crystal dances brings all of that coincidence that maybe isn’t coincidence at all into a new kind of focus that makes smiling feel okay and makes her heart do exactly as the song says for the reason the songs says: And hearts will be glowing when loved ones are nearIt’s the most wonderful time of the year. And then Crystal’s heel bang brings her back and she’s okay with it.She squeezes the money and says, “Thank you, mom.”