Short

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.”

BEACH LAND by Lucas Flatt

December 9, 2024

Bushels of sargassum had washed up among the rental chairs. They clogged the beach. And so, fittingly, the day began with disappointment.Marjorie hated it, done up in strawberry print and pale as the moon with sunblock on her little face, thick like cream cheese. She scooped and hurled the stuff away from the chairs, scowling, haranguing the clods of seaweed.Gracie, implacable behind her sunglasses, rummaging through something on her phone, wouldn’t look Paul in the face.Paul toed the pile before his chair. “It’s got berries. We’ll make wine out of it.” Gracie frowned.“I have our tagline: ‘It’s not gone off…it just tastes like that.’”Their daughter made a move for the water and Gracie half-stood, but the little girl sat instead to pout in the damp sand a yard back from the water, to throw into the surf a limp plastic shark, and Gracie settled back into her seat.“It just tastes like that,” Paul said again.The sun climbed and bore into their left sides. Their little girl returned to the work of casting off the seaweed and asked, as ever, for the hundredth time that morning, “Will you play?”Paul took a branch of the sargassum and gave it a long sniff. “Notes of ocean water and fish butt.” “Will you play with me?”“It’s the answer we’ve been looking for–we’ll have to move down here to set up the vineyards.”“Will you play with me?”“I guess we’ll have to cultivate in the ocean. How much is ocean per acre?”Gracie groaned and put her thin hands over her face.“You’d think it’s less than beachfront, at least.”“You play with me.”Gracie lifted her hands, their shadows imprinting on the tight skin around her mouth. “Who are you talking to?”

***

By the pool, Paul still watched Gracie’s face in profile while she watched Marjorie swim with two brothers around her age, one probably younger and the other older by as much. She’d asked the boys to play; she’d ask anyone.Paul asked Gracie, “Why are you mad at me?” He couldn’t stop himself asking.“I’m not mad. Everything is fine.”If Paul ever heard the expression “everything is fine” again he vowed to pick a direction and run forever. Forever for his body would not be long or far, but he hoped his soul, such as it was, might propel then from his eyeballs and keep going at least a little farther.For now he climbed down the pool steps and swam to the deep end and floated there. And just as on each prior afternoon, he recognized that he did not care if he sank or emerged or simply dematerialized. “That’s my daddy,” Marj told the boys.This brought him back. He sang, “Do do, do do,” went under, holding one hand up vertical like a fin. When he caught hold of his daughter’s ankle, she didn’t squeal or kick. The thin bones of her ankles felt reedy and the clouds came across the sun and Paul closed his eyes and lay there long as he could, until she pulled away.

***

On the pretense of buying ice cream for them all, Paul went down to the taco place across the parking lot from their condo and waited in a long line to order a drink. He’d been sober almost seven years. When the sandblasted Heidi asked his order, Paul teared up. She opened her gray eyes wide, as if to say, This isn’t the line for existential crises, and he ordered a rum and Coke. He never used to drink rum and Cokes. He’d drunk beer, which made him fat, which made him uglier.It occurred to him, squeezing into a stool at the far corner of the bar, away from the lines for drinks and tacos, that he might be feeling sorry for himself. That seemed possible. He took a sip. It helped, a little. The weight of the guilt of breaking another promise to Gracie never fell onto him. It just floated up there with the rest of it. A woman near his age took the empty seat beside him despite a good line of empty stools stretching back to the crowded part of the bar. “This seat taken?” She looked him dead in the eyes.“No.”She resembled his high school sweetheart, or at least how he imagined her twenty years later: small face shaped like a heart, round body, hair dyed an aggressive crimson, very tanned. Maybe local, though this bar seemed to be for tourists. She wore a Gov’t Mule t-shirt with the sleeves cut off. “I’m Jen.” “Paul.” They clinked their glasses. He took a bigger drink and the rum curled his lip. “Guh.”“Not much of a drinker?”“No. I always think I’ll like it. Whiskey.” He looked at his drink. “Rum. Whatever. It looks good on commercials.”She slugged her drink, which looked like rum without the soda, and smacked her lips. “Love it.”“It just tastes like what it is. Like you put corn or wheat or whatever in a barrel and left it there and forgot it and then came back and poured it in a glass.”“Well you got some soda pop in there. That should help.” She muttered something, maybe “pussy,” and killed her drink.“Did you call me a ‘pussy?’”She gave him another long look. “What if I did?”Paul considered this. He didn’t have an answer. He said, “I’m not,” but didn’t believe it.“Put your arm up,” Jen said. She slapped the bartop.“I’m sorry?” Paul pulled back on his stool.“Do it, pussy.” “Are we going to arm wrestle?”“You’re goddamn right.”He won without much effort, but when he’d pinned her hand they left theirs clasped on the sticky bar. Paul’s last clear thought before he made himself let go and take another drink was, Buddy, this is getting out of hand.

***

They grunted and tried to dry-hump in the front seat of her SUV, some kind of Jeep, but didn’t fit well behind the steering wheel. Paul wished like Hell he’d look out over her shoulder and see Gracie likewise straddling some douchebag somewhere in the half-empty parking lot. Maybe also in a cobalt-colored Jeep. But all the Jeeps were empty save this one, steaming up.“Yes,” Jen stage-moaned.Her butt-bone dug into his thigh. “Shift a little,” Paul said.“Ooh.”“Uh huh.” Just as things became pleasantly frictive, Jen pushed back till she squashed against the wheel and said, "I don’t know if I want to.”This was a relief. “Me either,” Paul said. “I already feel guilty.”“Me, too. I'm married. We're separated. I came down here to spend my savings and drink myself to death, I guess. Like that Nicholas Cage movie.""Face/off.""Yeah." Jen reached down to the console for a pack of Camel Lights. "Let's just talk.""Ok. It's kind of hot in here.""I didn't mean dirty talk.""I wasn't.""Tell me something about yourself, Paul." She stayed on his lap and felt in her shorts for a lighter.Paul thought. "I always park in the same place at the grocery store so I don't have to look for my car.""That's honestly fascinating.""It is?""No, Paul. I wish you'd told me any other thing in the world."“Where’s your husband?” Paul tried not to sound peevish, but mostly everything he said these days did.“Home. Birmingham.”“Why are you split up?”“He wants me to stop drinking. I told him I’d quit the first of the month.” Today was the tenth. “My wife told me I had to ‘get over it’.” Paul waited for Jen to ask about “it.” She did not. “I think I want a divorce. I’ll probably tell her about this. That’ll do it.”“Don’t tell her.”Paul ran his hands through his hair. “I don’t know how not to.”“Just don’t.”“That’s the problem. I just do. Every little thing that bothers me, it’s like I have to. It burns in here if I don’t.” Paul rubbed his solar plexus."OK, tell her, then. Sounds like it won’t matter. Because I’m sure she didn't mean to marry a big whiny bitch." She slid into the passenger seat and lit her cigarette.Paul considered. “That’s probably true.”"She must be a profoundly strong woman to put up with you. You should run back to her fast as your mismatched legs can take you." "I forget my legs are different sizes."They both regarded Paul's legs. Jen frowned. "I'm afraid I never will." Paul coughed and popped open the driver’s side door. "Well, enjoy drinking yourself to death." He hung in the doorway, waiting for her snappy retort, but when none came he looked back at Jen's tight-lipped profile. She stared ahead at the sunset through the steamed-up windshield. This was a record, two women he'd put that long face on in a single afternoon.When he'd made it halfway to the cross walk toward the beach he looked back and saw Jen pouring the last of a bottle out of her window. She nodded to him and jumped the curb and screeched off toward highway 98.Or anyway that's what he pretended he'd seen, not looking either way at the intersection, just watching his legs carry him to the water.

***

At the showers by the beach access were a few sandals and someone’s boogie-board leaning against a splintery railing. It wore the Tasmanian Devil and seemed too small for Paul, who stole it anyway. If he’d ever stolen anything before, he couldn’t recall it. He thought someone might shout for him to stop, but there was no one around.By sunset the beach was empty save the kid who rented chairs who stood up from his tented kiosk and welcomed Paul by name. “I just broke down your chairs,” he said, apologetic but not offering to set them back.Paul waved him off. “Thanks, Brayden.”“Hunter,” the kid said, still apologetic. Paul nodded and headed in. The tide was out and he had to walk a good way before the water reached his knees. One family watched him from the sandbar.He waded to the bar, went over into deeper water and began to float on the boogie board. The water was warm and he paddled out, unhurried, wondering how far he could get. There was some kind of fishing boat puttering along the horizon. When he looked back, the beach was far and someone–probably Brayden–stood cupping their eyes and looking out, probably at him. He waved; the person didn’t wave back.The waves came heavier and he had to hold on to the boogie board to keep it under his flabby torso. The family on the bar were looking out at something his way. Here it is, he told himself. It’s time. He really wanted another drink, shuddered away the image of Jen in her Jeep, glad at least not to have to explain that to Gracie, or anyone.Out of habit, he still imagined himself explaining, how he’d bring it up, what combination of words would yield which response. He didn’t know how to stop. But what he wasn’t imagining, despite blinking hard several times and wiping the salty haze from his eyes, despite truly hoping that he was, were the sizable dorsal fins trolling toward him from farther out to sea. The people on the sandbar shouted.“Fuck,” Paul said.The sharks neared. They circled, two fins, one significantly larger than the other, like a mother and child, perhaps. A father and child. He was going to die as some kind of hunting lesson for a shark.He held very still, but the circling closed and closed. He tried to pull himself up entirely on the beach board but the scrabbling only seemed to excite the sharks.He decided to try something. He lied to himself. Paul, you can fight off these sharks.It helped. He said out loud, “I’m OK. This is going to be alright.” And just before the shark clamped down on his leg–the smaller shark on the smaller leg–he finally had it, just a glimmering thought, but halfway to a plan that possibly might save his marriage.“Ah, fuck!” It really hurt.

***

In the end, he did fight away the sharks. In his shrieking and flailing he kicked something several times. It didn’t fight back. He must taste bad, was the only logical conclusion. The sharks circled. They trailed away, possibly regrouping.When his panic ebbed, he felt himself and found what he guessed to be a decent tear in his calf. Blood came smokily up in the water rolling around his board.For once, his mind was truly blank. Then there was a great noise and he violently peed himself. It was an air horn blast. The fishing boat had spotted him in the dying light and shone some kind of spot his way. It trundled on. Somehow he knew the sharks were gone.Any semblance of life-altering epiphany had voided with his bladder. He let go of the board, slipped into the water with his eyes closed, and shouted away his air, his breath bubbling and his head immediately light. He was deep enough to turn all the way over and with his head facing down he kicked out his arms and legs and sank. He opened his eyes to the saltwater, expecting silty purple-black, but found instead a tawny haze. Then it was like he could breathe in some kind of air bubble, and in the golden light he saw someone, a person, smiling at him. A radiant woman. She wasn’t a mermaid. She had on a pastel blouse and very kind, pale blue eyes, and a gnarled hand with swollen knuckles reaching out for his. He took it. It was his mother, who he’d not thought about in maybe a week. She shook her head and held his hand. She looked into his eyes and then Paul rolled over into the purple-black and kicked up into the spotlight of the fishing boat.

***

After the old couple had helped him aboard with a rope and a lot of undignified scrambling, his shorts halfway down his ass, his leg bleeding on the boat’s slick beige finish, Paul sat in the cockpit with blankets around him and a towel done up on his head. The old lady had gone somewhere out of sight looking for a first aid kid. The bite on his calf was curved and long as a hand.The old man, Hank, sat above him and worried with a radio. “We watched you for a while but you seemed like a strong swimmer. We didn’t think anything until we saw the sharks.”“That’s OK,” Paul told him again, touched, honestly, to be called a good swimmer. He loved compliments.“What were you doing out there?”He was cold. It was hard to remember. “I guess I meant to drown myself.”“Huh.” The old man, Hank, turned that over in his head. “Well, we could get you out past the sharks a ways and let you out.”The old woman, Joanne, was back in the cockpit with a box and flashlight. She gave her husband a long look, shaking her head. “God damn it, Hank.”

***

The last of the sun burned out and the navigation lights glowed so that the horizon dimmed away and they were just rocking on the purple-black. It might well have been outer space.Hank gestured around them to the boat itself. He’d been extolling it for a while, Paul thought. They were borrowing it from a friend. “If we buy it, we get to name it, of course. What should we call her?”Paul knew without thinking. “Sweet bitch of the evening time.”Hank squinted at Paul, turning this too over in his head. “Did you say ‘time’ or ‘tide?’”“Tide.” Paul liked that better.

***

Heading in, Paul played out what he would tell Gracie. He thought about seeing his mother and that she wanted to tell him something. What was it? What had he been thinking before the sharks attacked?“What was your name?” Hank asked.“Carlos.” He lied, and felt better, and it was coming back, the answer to everything. He leaned against the cockpit railing and closed his eyes. “Carlos Santoya. My folks are from Spain.”When the dock came into view Paul said, “Hey, I think I was just in shock before. I wasn’t really trying to drown myself.”“Oh yeah?” Hank frowned. “Nope. I was training. Boogie boarding. Walton County, regionals.”“Regionals?”“Oh yeah.” Paul nodded with big emphasis. More emphasis than he’d had in years. All of it, surging back.

***

He came into the condo wild-eyed, angry for no reason that Gracie wasn’t waiting at the door, and found her on the couch, Marj sleeping with her head in her mother’s lap. Don’t blow it, he told himself, knowing that he was.She asked, “Are you OK?”“No. God, no. I need to go to the hospital.”She looked at his bandaged calf.“Did you get hit by a car?” “No!” Paul’s hands curled into fists, which Gracie hated.“You don’t have to.” She looked down at Marj, awake now, feigning sleep. “You don’t have to be an asshole. Where were you?”“It doesn’t matter. I need to go to the hospital.”“Let me see it.” Gracie reached for Paul who pulled back.“Not for that. Not that kind of hospital.”And they were fighting, and the girl was awake. Before Paul could get a handle on himself, she was carrying Marj into the bedroom, locking the door.

***

That’s how Paul imagined it, provided the old Paul. The elevator smelled like cat urine and some kind of slime glazed the carpet. He braced himself at the door, punched in the code and slipped in quietly, limping, laden with ice-cream.Marj slept in the bottom bunk and he knelt there and tousled her hair.“Paul?” Gracie looked asleep, and scared, standing in the kitchen.“Sorry, babe. What a night!”“Where were you?”“Let’s get this in the freezer.” He limped there for effect. “I went to talk to Brayden about the chairs.”“Who? Hunter? The chair guy?”“Yeah, and there was all this pandemonium.”Only now did she seem to notice his limping.“Oh my God!”“People were running around. They were pointing at something in the water.”“Oh my God.”Paul closed the freezer. “There were some kids out there and this lady was just yelling, ‘Come back, come back,’ and people were watching. The lifeguard was dragging over a kayak or something.”“You went in?”“Well, I’m a pretty good swimmer. But it was just instinct. I didn’t really even know what was happening. I went in with my shoes and everything.” “You got bit by a shark?”“A little one.” Paul held his hands apart yay far.Gracie made some kind of squeal and wrapped him up. Marj climbed out of the bunk bed, mostly asleep, came dragging her blanket and wrapped up their legs.“Oooh, easy,” Paul said. But it didn’t really hurt. “Daddy’s a hero,” Gracie said. She was crying hard into his shoulder.“No, no,” he said. “It was the lifeguard who got the kids.”

***

Later, with Marj back asleep and the ice cream containers stuck to the coffee table with the spoons standing up together, Paul and Gracie held each other on the couch.“I’m gonna fix everything.”She squeezed like maybe she believed him.“Oh yeah?”“Oh yeah.”She pulled back and put her hand on his collarbone, her eyes wet. “I want you to know, you don’t have to change yourself. You don’t need to be a different person for me to love you.”He pulled her in. “I know that.” He grinned over her out the balcony window. Lying felt better and better.She called him a hero again. He let her. “I guess I am,” he said. He tried to push away any kind of questions. The only one kept resurfacing was, what now? How does this end? Maybe that’s what his mother wanted to tell him. She’d seemed worried. That had been her way. But not now, maybe. Why should she? She was like a mermaid queen all gold and radiant in robes that billowed in the undertow, emerald scales. Or maybe she wasn’t. She’d just been his mother, underwater, quite unhappy. Her pale eyes pleaded. She was mouthing something, but there wasn’t any sound, of course, underneath all that water. Probably she’d wanted to tell him not to start this. You light it, you build it up, you’re glowing and you’re billowing, it seems like you’re coasting over, it seems like the answer, but when do you stop feeding the fire?He looked out into the dark toward the ocean where heaven must be. He wished he could tell her. It was OK. For once he had the answer. You never do. Not ever.

DEAR PHONE MAN by Karris Rae

November 22, 2024

Hello. I am Roy Whitaker. I have mailed you before, or maybe not you but someone else at your office, because my phone has been disconnected. I think this is because you think I am dead, but I am not dead, so I would like you to please reconnect my phone. I am waiting on a call from my daughter and if I have no phone I will never get it. And I would shimmy up that pole and see if I could reattach it myself only I am pretty old anymore and I do not have a little neighbor boy or young man or really anyone to help me. So you can see why I am stressed.I have mailed your office every week for two months and still every day my mailbox is empty. You have probably noticed that I have not been paying my bill. I refuse to pay for something I do not have, which is a working phone. How could it be so hard to find my house when it is the only one even around. I am waiting here with my toolkit and if you tell me ahead of time I will make sun tea.Maybe if I tell you why this is so important, you will make sure it gets done. See, there are these five girls in my house. Wait no, I will start with the rooms so when I get to the girls you can imagine them each looking the way they do. So to start, my house has six rooms. A living room, a bedroom, a bathroom, a porch (which is not really a room only it is screened in and I think anywhere bugs can not go is a room), a kitchen (which also has a dining table) and another bedroom. I do not need two bedrooms, but it was already there, so now that is where the phone lives. All the other rooms have a girl, and they all kind of look like my daughter, only I guess she is an adult now and the girls in my house are different ages. I do not really know I do not know when they got here but one day when I came in from knocking icicles off the front porch light there she was, sitting at the dining table. About gave me a heart attack! She looked cold and tiny, and I did not have any coats her size, so I wrapped her up in a blanket, and in the summer, I take it off. The kitchen girl is probably my favorite one. Her head is down, like she is praying before dinner, even though she never eats. I peeked under her hair once at her face and not to be rude, because I know she can not help looking like that, but I will never do that again. But I like her because when she is praying like that, I think about how lucky I am to have a full pantry, which we did not always have, plus that even if my phone is disconnected (which, it is) at least they did not come to take the whole phone when they thought I died. Which, I did not.And just so you know, I did not take these girls away from places they should be. I have tried to give them food and ask them, would they like to go home? But they never move or talk or eat, or nothing. It is okay that they are here. There are all kinds of animals in those woods and I would not want them out fighting coyotes and bobcats for sleeping places. There are even black bears. Only, I wish that they would talk to me because no one else is here, and even if my daughter is trying to call me she can not because my phone is disconnected. But you can tell I am alive because alive men are the ones who write letters. So, that is the kitchen and dining girl. The porch girl is the youngest. She has a face like the other one, and her, I kind of wish she would move because she is on my porch swing so I am afraid to use it, because if I swing too hard maybe she will slide right off. I sit beside her on the swing (not swinging) and we watch the sunset together. It is like when my daughter would come home for the summer every year. She was such a little thing back then and had so much energy, good Lord, but she would settle down in the evening to say good night to the sun. And then it was back to bouncing off the walls. But when she was all quiet looking at the sun I could see the beautiful grown woman I am sure she became. Actually maybe, this one is my favorite. I hope you are still reading, sir, because I have not forgotten about you. It is just important that you know about the girls so when I tell you what the phone is doing to them, you will understand why we have to make it stop. And that means reconnecting my phone, and fixing this whole not-dead kerfuffle.The girl in my bedroom gives me the heebie-jeebies. I feel bad about this, so when you do come here to fix the phone please do not tell her. First of all there is the way she looks, which, as I have said, the way these girls look is not my favorite. But probably cats were creepy to the first people they lived with, too. Staring, and such. Which is what this girl does, sitting there in the rocking chair that looks right at my bed. It was hard to get used to and this is why I leave the light on when I sleep now. Which means you have one less excuse about finding my house, because even if you got really lost and showed up way after dark, you would see the light on. You must not have tried very hard.There is one thing I like about the girl in my room, which is, she is the only one that moves (usually, but I will get to that). She rocks back and forth so the chair creaks. Sometimes she touches the chair with her nails and it makes quiet noises like tck tck tck. I always liked sleeping while someone else knits a hat or nurses her baby or takes notes for night school after her husband goes to bed. Anyway, long as I face the other way and keep the light on, I sleep way better now that the girl is there. And if anyone ever breaks in and tries to kill me or some such, she will scare the bejesus out of them. There are two more, yet. And I know that some people would think it is weird that I am just an old lonely man with all these little girls in my house, but I like to see it as, if a stray cat came and had her babies on my porch I would suddenly have a lot of cats. I did not pick it, and even I tried to just leave them there, but then my daughter named the babiest one Pretzel and once the darn thing is named, it is too late to put it back. I even tried not to name the girls, calling them the bedroom girl and such, but then that became her name before I knew it. My own father told me “Whitaker” means wheat field. I guess a lot of names are plain like that, Pretzel (because she twists all up to lick her rear), Bedroom Girl, Whitaker (wheat field), and Hope.Actually right now I am sitting beside the girl in the living room. This girl is mostly just quiet and keeps me company while I work on important things like this letter. She is the quietest child I ever heard of, and she does not distract me, or ask questions about nothing like normal children do. The last book she read was Jane Eyre. Or, she was looking at it and when I walked through the house at night for a glass of water or something, usually because I did not want the bedroom girl looking at me anymore, it would remind me to turn the page. When the books are out of pages I get a different one for her. These are not my books, I mean, I guess I own them now, but I did not buy them. They are all women’s books, like Jane Eyre and Little Women and Wuthering Heights. Sometimes when I have a few glasses (my mother always said find what you love and let it kill you, I love Scotch) I read to the living room girl. I do not know if she likes it or even hears. Sometimes I come to a sentence or something that feels like I have read it before, even though I have not, and I hear it in my wife’s voice. Then I stop reading for the day. Then there is the one in the bathroom. I did not leave her last because I like her less, but she is kind of hard to put into words and I had to think. The reason for that is, she is only inside the mirror. Or maybe she is outside it but also invisible, but I am a little nervous to touch the place where she is standing. I do not touch any of them if I can help it. That one must not be wearing shoes, because when I drip water on the floor it pools around in the shape of small, naked feet. Like a footprint but the opposite. Her feet are shaped the same as mine, with a high, girly arch that is not good for playing sports. She is lucky she is a girl. I maybe am not lucky for that, though, because her being a girl is why I have to wrap a towel all around myself before I take my pants off in there. It is also uncomfortable to hold the towel up while I am having my time on the toilet so she does not see anything shameful. As a man, I am sure you understand. Or maybe this is the first time I’ve thought you’re maybe the receptionist? In which case, I am sorry for bothering a lady with details like that. Please give this letter to the phone man and he will know what to do.Anyway, I started putting a towel down on the floor when I step out of the shower, so no more puddles, which means no more footprints. The ladies, my daughter and my wife (now ex-wife, I guess), complained about that forl so many years, and I only changed once they were both gone. It is funny how that works sometimes. The bad thing is that she never gets any older, but I do. When she stands behind me it is like a side by side comparison of our faces and wrinkles, or no wrinkles, depending. And her with not a lot of other things on her face either, eyes and so forth. Me, I never thought I would have so many. Wrinkles, I mean, not eyes. I always thought I would die sometime in my twenties, which I guess is why I made the decisions I did. And here I am, so many years later, and I never stopped making decisions the way I do. And now it is too late to change.See, this is why you have to fix the phone, sooner than later. Some people I am sure have months to sit around with their thumbs up their behinds, waiting for the future. And maybe I am wrong today about dying tomorrow, but I am running out of days to be wrong. Me and my daughter, we have not talked in a while and I just want to know is she okay, is she married, does she hate me. And then when I die for real you can have my phone and anything else you want, I do not care. Only I do not know what you would do with the girls because a school would maybe not know what to do with them. I guess I had better be not-dead for as long as I can.Unless you would be willing to take them home with you? Would you do that for a tired old man? They do not need much, but I can not stand the thought of them here all alone after the Lord calls my name. Especially as the critters and plants all creep into the house, and you people cut my electricity and water too. That girl in the bedroom sitting alone in the dark for who knows how long, making little tck noises for no one. No one around to even see the bathroom girl, who otherwise kind of is not anywhere. Maybe I think too much of myself, but I feel like they need me as much as I need them. Anyway, just consider about it. But I have not even gotten to the part where I explain how the girls and the telephone are all part of one big thing. What I mean by that is, I think the girls like when the telephone rings, and they do not like it when it doesn’t. The telephone has to ring every once in a while or else they get restless and start moving around, which is fine, only I would be lying if I said it doesn’t make me nervous. As I said, after her brothers and sisters all ran away I used to have a little cat named Pretzel (this is before she got eaten by coyotes) and she was such a smart cat, she knew when it was dinnertime. She followed me around until I thought oh no! I forgot to feed Pretzel, and when I did she would go back to mostly ignoring me. But like in that way of ignoring that actually means love. Poor thing, I never should have put her out that night she got eaten, only I was so mad at Hope for throwing out half her dinner again, like I wasn’t busting my rump to put food on the table. Another bad decision.But when the telephone does not ring for a while, the girls follow me like Pretzel used to, wanting something, only real slow. So slow I can not really tell they’re moving, only when I leave a room and come back, I realize they’ve moved a whole bunch back to their normal spots. And it is very hard to read their faces, because they do not look like mine and yours (probably, I can not see you), but I am pretty sure the look on their faces is not happy. Usually this is when I get a call from a telemarketer, or those awful phone banking people, and it puts them in their places for a while. But no such luck these days. Please do not say you won’t take them now. I am sure that you, a Phone Man, probably have a better phone than anyone else. You probably get calls all the time from your friends and ex-wife and daughter. Actually, my girls might be happier with you, and if I was a better man I would beg you to please take them now. But as I said, I have always made bad decisions.I have to say, the worst one for the moving is the bathroom girl. These days I shower with the curtain open, even with the water going all everywhere. Else when I open my eyes from washing my hair, I see the shapes of little fingertips poking into the curtain. And then I rip it back, wham! There is her reflection of her standing on the other side, reaching for where I was not two seconds ago, not in the corner where she belongs at. At least when there is water everywhere (and I do not bother with the towel on the floor anymore), I can see the not-footprints coming to me. Somehow that makes me feel better. It means she is not just in the mirror, so I do not have to worry about seeing her behind me upside-down in my spoon when I stir my coffee. I will be honest and say that I have not been washing myself as much as I should, but after all, there is no one around to offend their nose. To be clear I do not think she would do anything bad even if she did get her fingers around that curtain but it is hard to explain, I do not want her to touch me. The way her little fingers curl is like when you are so angry that there aren’t any real thoughts in your head, just noise. I know how that goes. Please Lord let her not touch me.These last few days I have not been sure where to sleep. Usually the bedroom is a good place, but now that the girl in there is moving, I can not fall asleep. It is like she gets up out of the chair in slow motion. It puts her in positions other people can not hold for so long. I dragged a chair over beside her so I could try to match her, and maybe it is because she has young legs, but I can not do what she does, hovering with my legs bent for hours. And the whole time it is tck tck tck with her nails only when she’s out of the chair they are making that noise against each other, not wood. Sometimes I dream that she is making that noise against my teeth.So when the tcking gets too close I take my pillow and my blanket and I go to the living room. I do not really know what the living room girl wants me to do when she gets like this because she keeps standing up and the book falls out of her lap. But she stares down into her empty hands like the book is still there. It makes me wonder if she ever wanted the book at all, or if there has always been something on her hands only she can see. So she shuffles toward me with her head down and her fingers spread as if asking what have I done, and meanwhile I am just trying to sleep. I know when it is time to go back to the bedroom when I hear her feet slide through dust. My ex-wife would say I should vacuum more, but she never trusted that I have reasons for the things I do.And the thing of it is, and it is hard to tell, but I think that the girls are getting faster. The tcking and sliding noises come a little earlier every night. I had to move from my bed to the couch and from the couch to the bed again last night. I will probably have to from now on. Whatever room I am in, there she comes, all wanting something except what? I already let them stay under my roof out of the cold and away from the animals. I even gave the one books. What else could they want from me?Are you starting to understand the pickle I am in? This whole time I have to keep moving from room to room. I never fall all the way asleep so I can hear when they get too close. I do not shower for very long either, and when the weather is nice sometimes I go outside and use the hose instead. But hose water is so cold, and I know there is no one around to watch, but I do not like being naked outside and my feet all muddy, especially when the cold has shrunk me all up (if you know what I mean). It is just not the best situation. And I keep feeling like maybe this is the day I die (not from the girls who I am sure would never hurt me but maybe their skin feels like a dead thing’s and I never liked that), all before I ever hear Hope’s grown-up voice. I know that your phone office probably did not realize all of this when you disconnected my phone line. And maybe still you are thinking oh, he should just leave, but I can not leave, because this is the only phone number my daughter ever had for me. I can not leave and I can not die because if I do, I will never tell her that I did not mean to mess everything up with my bad little decisions every day.Thank you for reading my letter. I know it is probably longer than most of the letters you have to read, but if I may, it is also your job. I hope this will convince you that I need help and that your company are the ones to do it, because as I have said, this situation is not the best. And thank you for taking the girls to your house after I am gone. They will be going to a good home.I hate to ask, but could you do one more thing for me? It is a very little job, but it is everything to me. Please, if something happens, please tell my daughter that I am sorry I was not a part of her life for so long. I would like to say so much more but I do not want the message to be so long you forget the most important parts. I will put out some sun tea today so it is ready when you get here. I also have cards.Sincerely,Roy Whitaker

THIS MINE OF MINE by Brandon Forinash

October 28, 2024

You wouldn’t guess it looking at me now, but I had a pretty ordinary childhood and early adulthood. My parents weren’t rich, but we weren’t poor either. I grew up in one of those suburbs where every house is a variation of four basic designs. I went to a state school for college and took out student loans. I got a job in a satellite city which had nothing to do with what I studied in university. Along the way, I had several more or less serious relationships which, by the time I was twenty six, made me rethink my definition of love.Anyways, all of that changed, kind of got lost in terms of my identity, when I became a mining camp in South America.I should explain.I did one of those DNA/ancestry tests and found out, along with the fact I’m not even a little bit Irish, that my body contained a very scarce earth mineral. I didn’t know anything about the mineral at the time. For legal reasons I can’t tell you what it was. All I can say is you probably interact with it every day. It is used to make a very small but essential component in a technology you could certainly live without, but with a markedly lower quality of life.So I found out I was largely Scottish (what?!) and I also contained this random mineral and I needed to cut back on sugars because I’m genetically predisposed to diabetes, but I got on with my life. I stopped eating cereal for breakfast and the movie Braveheart hit somewhat different, but other than that, no big deal. Except I started to get these letters and emails with offers to buy the mineral rights to my body. I ignored them at first, because it seemed like a ridiculous premise, but then the mayor showed up at my door.“James!” he said. “May I call you Jim?”“It’s the same number of syllables, but sure.”“Jim, I’d like to talk to you about a little proposition.”I could see where this was going. “Sir—”“Now hold on a second. I want to ask you to sell your mineral rights to the city. Opening a mine in your body would be a big thing for our town. It’d mean jobs for a lot of people and growth for our struggling businesses. Not to mention, it would help me out a great deal in the upcoming election, and then I’d be in a position to help you.”I could see the reasoning. It weighed kind of heavy on me. But I also didn’t want to be mined, didn’t know what I would be after the process, so I politely refused.“Jim,” he said, “I am so disappointed in you.”So they filed a petition for eminent domain to obtain the rights to mine this rare essential mineral from my body, and they won. They had vastly better lawyers. In retrospect, I like to imagine my lawyers, by comparison, as hand-puppets who are comically bungling the legal process. A flurry of felt and misplaced documents while the tall one flapped, “I thought you were supposed to file the grievance for harassment of our client”, and the short one would respond, “Harassment? You’re the biggest ass I know!” Sorry, I harbor a lot of resentment from the experience.We lost in court. I couldn’t stop it. And even though I was opposed to it, there was a kind of wild exuberance in those early days. Hungrily, they used pressured water to blow off my top soil, revealing rich veins of ore for the drills and bulldozers to excavate. They carved great pits in me ringed by long ramps for trucks to haul out the essential minerals from my body. They used blast charges to break up the larger rocks and expose deeper deposits.Everybody made money, and not just the people directly profiting on my scarce earth mineral. The local university received a nice endowment and brought in some of the top minds in engineering. A wife of one of the big-wigs in the mining company was a former ballerina, I think, so her husband helped build an opera house near downtown. This whole new arts district sprung up after that with nice restaurants and boutique stores and increasingly expensive art galleries that locals couldn’t afford. After a few years, I could sense the city’s feeling about the mine, and me, had shifted. I would be at a party in the backyard of a small old house, the kind of house realtors now described as “craftsman” when they listed them for 3x their old value, and somebody would say something. About how the city had lost some of its charm, or how a lot of the poorer (if I’m being honest, minority) residents were being priced out of their homes and businesses by all the affluent (white) newcomers. Who were always referred to as Californians, even if they weren’t. Somebody would mention that they have a friend who’s a doctor and their friend had told them they were seeing more and more children born with heart defects and they think it was from the runoff at the mine.And then people would remember that I kinda sorta am the mine (people would sometimes forget because by then I wore a lot of baggier clothes to hide my scarred landscape). They’d apologize and do the whole, “That’s just what I heard,” thing.And I would say to them, “No, I get it. I agree! But there’s nothing I can do.”There would be an awkward feeling at the party after that. The taste of the local craft beer would be less hoppy. I’d make some excuse to leave early, and then I made excuses to not go in the first place. And then I stopped getting invited to things at all, which I told myself was what I wanted.At that point I was in my early thirties, still paying off the student loans, and the city had grown out and then surrounded our satellite (not a little bit fueled by the mine). The scandal with the runoff and the heart defects briefly made national headlines. A question actually got asked about it at one of the Democratic national debates—I really liked what Elizabeth Warren had to say (sigh). There was a protest at me for a couple of weeks, if you can imagine how that feels. And then they closed the mine and sold my mineral rights to a firm out of China. I had some suspicions, had seen a lot of new faces in and around the mine, and then the mayor confirmed it.“Jim,” he said, “The city council, the city planner, the railroad commission…well, we all talked about it and we think the best thing we can do for the city is move on from the mine.”I didn’t know what to say at first. And when I did, I thought better of it.You might disagree, but I’ve learned from past relationships that when someone says they’re leaving you (or, in this case, that you’re leaving them) it’s pretty pointless to argue and can only lead to hurt feelings. You ask what you did wrong, what you could have done better, and find out she doesn’t like how passive you are. And when you say you were just trying to go with the flow, she asks why, in finger quotes, “going with the flow”, means that every evening y’all get dinner delivered and watch Netflix/HBO/Disney+. You suddenly have to revise everything about yourself and your relationship, because you always appreciated those evenings settling in on the couch with her, coming home from a job you didn’t fully understand.So I didn’t make a fuss about it. I left this city my essential mineral had helped build, and the Chinese firm placed me in a narrow valley which had been carved by glaciers over many millennia. The glaciers were all gone now, but the mountains remained, and a river ran between them which emptied into the sea through a Pacific port city (I can’t remember the name. I never had a chance to visit). It was rather stunning and for a while, as they brought in the mining equipment and built sheds and a refinery out of aluminum siding, cinder block dormitories and outhouses for the miners, brought in modular housing for management, as miles of pipes were laid to bring up water from the river—Forgive me, where was I?So they placed me in this valley carved by glaciers, and while the camp was being built, I got to hike the hills, go up into the mountains. I’d look down at the mining camp, look down the valley at the local village, the adobe and rust colored buildings, the green and yellow fields being farmed. I would turn to my security contractor—one or more would always accompany me—and I would point and ask if we could visit. And they would shake their heads. Just to eat, I would gesture. No, no, they would shake their heads.Still, it was a nice break, rather joyful being up there, the smell of the earth. But once the work got started, I didn’t get out much again. My experience as a mine had been different when I was located outside a major city. I would watch the trucks go in and out of me. As each new pit was dug I could feel the detritus, the tailings, moved and dumped into the last disused pit inside me. But there was so much I hadn’t seen which I had been kind of oblivious to as I was locked in my day-to-day or sat at home, scrolling Instagram, ordering food for delivery.There at the mining camp, there wasn’t any hiding it, that rough work reopening the mine. The filled pits were dug out again. Dams were carved into me and filled with the runoff and debris, the water variably a metallic yellow or azure blue. Great mounds of tailings were set around me. When the wind came through the camp it would create a cloud of dirt and gravel which would hang at the level of your mouth and eyes until it rolled down the valley, following the river.At night local diggers would mine with picks and shovels and buckets. They built these shacks or set up tents at the periphery of me and dug down, made rough mine shafts into my fingers and toes. I wouldn’t feel it while they dug during the night, but in the morning there was tingling in my extremities. Even though I didn’t tell anyone, couldn’t tell anyone, didn’t speak the language, I watched as more and more uniformed men with guns showed up around the camp.I think I knew what was going to happen.And then everything did.The security forces cracked down on the local diggers. The locals protested and blocked the roads into the mines. More security forces and the military came in to break up the protests. The protesters threw rocks. The military had guns. The roads were cleared, but costs had gone up and output had diminished. The company cut staff, denied raises. The miners went on strike. The local diggers continued to dig, but had to take greater risks. There were accidents. Some diggers lit tires on fire to try to break up some rock. They were poisoned by the smoke and nearly died. The strike was broken by the government with some concessions made for raises, but corners were cut at the mine. Farmers complained that some of their cattle died after drinking at a nearby stream. The company trucked in water. I saw all that coming. I didn’t expect the flood.I don’t know what I could have done. Even if I knew, I didn’t speak Spanish and they didn’t speak English, and I didn’t have much of a chance to learn. The miners had enough of their work from the day to eat with me in the canteen. There was a security contractor I nicknamed Kurt, and some evenings he would sit down with me and play cards while he worked on a fifth of vodka or rum. And I would try to talk to him, but he didn’t really say anything. Therefore, ‘Kurt’.Still, when the dam failed and the tailings flooded down into the river, and the river flooded the village downstream, it was my dam. It was my inattention to detail, my callousness, my attempt to cut corners, maybe knowing that if the dam broke, it wouldn’t have to be me who paid for it. Because I didn’t want to pay so much for it, for the lifestyle I’d had growing up in the states that I didn’t think, or really didn’t care, to live without. So it was my dirt and debris and polluted water, flooding that village and killing those 17 people.I think they were mostly the very old or the very young.The company paid those families the cost of a life, about 120k, and they built for the villagers a brand new village. And the mining continued, until at some point there wasn’t any more me left to mine. It actually took going past that point. It took the cave-in of my left cheek, for my lungs to collapse, and finally a dip in the stock market, an inevitable tragedy experienced by a few after several tragedies of the many, before the mining actually stopped.Nobody told me it would happen. It didn’t happen all at once.At first the equipment left, and then some days later the workers, and then the security personnel. I was empty for a while, there in that great valley carved by glaciers, amid the slanted cinderblock buildings. But then armed rebels came in and claimed me. They brought in local diggers who surveyed my last ribs, talked about mining into the spine of me. They shook their heads. The rebels pointed their AK-47s and then the diggers tried for months.They tried, painfully, and the rebels became increasingly quarrelsome with the diggers and each other, until the winter/summer rains came and they quit the mine, went off to raid the local villages once more for supplies, and then go north. It rained and rained. I waited for something to happen. I watched the muddy road that ran up to me and tried my best to stay dry. And then an old woman, definitely a local, came and she placed flowers against the heart of me, and she got down on her knees, there in the mud, and she prayed. I am sure she was grieving the death of a digger, but the way I felt, I was a thing to be grieved too, and not totally for myself, for the death of the mine too, and all the potential that I had carried so deeply.What I’d become, I don’t know how to put it into words. I had been beautiful once. I know that isn’t attractive for a man to say about himself. But I look back at old pictures of me, and I really was something to look at, even though I didn’t know it at the time.I’d stopped looking at myself in the mirror a long time ago. I think I disassociated from my body. I think it was something I needed to do or else I would have lost it. But for once I took a look at myself. Everything that had been done in the mine was written into my skin and muscle, fat and bone. What hadn’t been excavated was mostly debris. There were these rivulets of waste running off my abdomen, pooling around my hip bones.But more than that, people had died in me. I was a crime scene. I was a cemetary. I had been gutted and fished and swallowed up, time and again. I had been displaced, not only my being, but also the various parts of me, across the world. I didn’t know how to talk to people anymore, because—let’s say that you ask me about the weather—I don’t know if you mean the weather here or at my elbow, my left shin, behind my right ear. I stammer. My fluency—let me try to get this right—my ability to speak and to talk about myself and my place in the world and all of the things going on in it.I’m sorry. Please forgive me.I really meant to say something just then, but I can’t tell you now what it was. There’s so much to it, and so little left of me.So I watched the woman pray in the mud, and I tried to pray with her. She crossed herself and then got up and then she walked away.And so I got up, and nobody tried to stop me, and I used every last dollar and sol that I had hidden away, and I went home, back to the U.S. It took a long time, and there was some hard going along the way, but I finally came home, and I found the city had prospered. It had shaken off its roots as a mining town, and it was now this beautiful gem of a city, but the mayor had lost his seat (which I was happy to see). Where my mine had been was now a golf course and a shopping complex.I was getting a coffee with a friend there just the other day. We spent the afternoon catching up; she’d recently gotten engaged and I was so happy for her I didn’t really go into my stuff. It was late November and she asked if we could talk and shop. We were in a store, I won’t tell you which, but I had this undeniable feeling a certain product contained a very small part of me. I picked it up; I turned it over. I looked at the price. I tried to calculate how much it would cost to buy back everything, all of me, to pay for all of the damage to everyone and everything. The math was beyond my imagination.So I put it back. I can’t really afford to be frivolous right now. I’m still paying off my student loans.

THE OSTRICH ECONOMY by Audrey Lee

September 23, 2024

Cammie has a Hermés Birkin pulled up on a resale website. She pushes the blinding screen towards my face across the white tablecloth between us. She’s talked about wanting a Birkin before, but I didn’t really think about it that much. “It’s ostrich leather,” Cammie says, and she pouts. Her raspy voice is hushed over the trepid steakhouse pianist on the baby grand. What does it take in life to become a steakhouse pianist? “It’s an investment piece. Ostrich leather is going to have better resale value than cow leather. But it's much less than crocodile.” The orange pinpricked leather looks like a nest of mosquitos stuck themselves into the smooth hide and had a feast. “How much?” I ask, hesitant as I take a bite of the rare filet alone on the massive plate in front of me. I really don’t like fat. I’ve carved the excess off to the side because I asked the waiter to tell the kitchen to remove any fat after the steak had been grilled, but no one listened. Grease pools across the glassy steakhouse plate.Cammie’s turn to hesitate. She shrugs and glances away. “Nineteen thousand dollars.”God. I choke. When I glance up at Cammie, I can’t breathe. She is beautiful and unimpressed. Her taut cheekbones and the small point of her nose are lit only by the flickering tea candle. Tense wrinkles cast shadows under her eyes. I panic, less at choking, and more at my beautiful, unimpressed, embarrassed girlfriend. I grasp for my napkin. I remember when she would have hidden a laugh in her own napkin instead of watching me cover my mouth, as the chewed, swollen wad of meat rolls up into the back of my throat. I take the wad down again with a desperate gulp of water. Cammie looks away and sighs as I clear my throat. “I’m sorry,” I dab at my mouth with the napkin and glance around. No one at the other tables saw me. . Only Cammie, but she’s the last person who wanted to. “Just chew your food,” she says. She brings the rim of the glass of Sangiovese to her plumped lips that I so want to kiss when I don’t have ice water dripping from my mouth like a blubbering, drooly baby. I watch as she tips the wine back along her tongue, and her eyes look beyond the rim of the glass. She’s not looking at me, but she’s looking at something far behind my shoulder. I get to kiss her, lips sweet with wine, later that night, and she almost smiles at me. “Thank you for dinner,” she whispers, the small point of her nose brushing up to mine. I watch her naked back rising and falling under the plush duvet next to me in bed. She has a small tattoo on her ribcage that she got when she was eighteen of her grandmother’s name in thin cursive. It sinks in the concave skin between two ribs. She wants it removed. I can’t stop looking at handbags. Bong would say That’s so gay. On my walk to the office through Battery Park I spot bags made of saffiano leather, pebbled leather, and calfskin. A few are coated in scales but I doubt that they are real snakeskin, or crocodile. None are ostrich leather with its swollen, plucked pinpoints. This is a universal male experience: to buy your girlfriend or wife the very expensive handbag or jewelry or shoes that she asks for, or to tell her not right now and that you’d consider it closer to Christmas or for her birthday? I think my mother would tell me to marry her first, but two-and-a-half years together was too soon. I think my father would tell me to just keep her happy, look at all I do for your mother but I was bad at that. I made Cammie happy when I broke up with her friend Samantha to date her instead. Sam was bright, but at the bar she could barely order for herself. In our last year at Columbia, Cammie was getting her J.D. I was splitting my time between class, rotations at BNY Mellon, and spending my analyst paycheck on blow in the bathroom of Soho House. She clocked me for what I was: doing what I was supposed to do. Desperate. Stumbling. Too caught up in my own pride. She was calculated. She was going to be such a good lawyer. Had I made her happy since then? I got my MBA. I deleted my blow dealer’s number from my phone. I work seventy-hour weeks to pay for rare steaks and two Soho House memberships, and handbags, and maybe even an engagement ring. I take this elevator to the thirty-sixth floor of my office to put up with my bosses. She is rarely impressed. Neither are my bosses at work, which is what keeps me meeting expectations. Bong says she’s always busting your balls. He says she’s bleeding you dry, man. Bong knocks on my office door at end of day, right before the sun dips below the horizon on the Hudson. He walks in before I can answer. I call him Bong to Cammie and when I told her to never repeat that, I put my finger to her lips, shushing her. She kissed my hand. Her eyes smiled at me. “He’s gotta be the most relaxed motherfucker in IB. I know he doesn’t smoke, but he’s just… disheveled. He went to UCLA anyway.” Cammie told me a few months later after last year’s company holiday party that Bong was a little drunk. He told her he had a Xanax prescription because otherwise, he’d throw himself off the bridge. “Hey,” he says.“I’m finishing up.”“Jason and I are going to get drinks at P.J. Clarke’s. Come with.” I look up from my computer. “Jason?”“Junior director.” “I’ve never met him. P.J. Clarke’s?”I lean back in my seat. Bong is on the fritz: his hair is more disheveled, his shirt is more crumpled, but his eyes are wide open like saucers. “You’re freaking me out.” “We need to talk,” Bong says. “With Jason?” I stand up from the desk and start to pack my stuff. “Yes,” says Bong. “Get your shit together.”We take the elevator down from the thirty-sixth floor to solid ground and walk to P.J. Clarke’s in complete silence. I think that Cammie wouldn’t touch a place like P.J. Clarke’s. She’d be embarrassed to know that I’d even stepped inside. She would scoff at the checkered tablecloths and paper menus with crosswords for children printed on the back. “Why are we here?”Bong walks me over to the bar where Jason is sitting. I’d seen him around the office and we’d spoken once or twice in passing. He is younger and baby-faced. His Brooks Brothers sport coat is tossed over the seat next to him, presumably for me to sit at. He’s got a leather messenger bag by his seat, his phone face down on the bar next to a bottle of Bud Light. He stands up from the pleather barstool, stone faced, and claps me on the back. “Is this an intervention?” I ask. I feel like I could chew the tension between the three of us. Bong and Jason sit down and I follow. “We need you not to yell,” says Bong. They were very diplomatic about it all. The situation was laid out as dull as a boardroom meeting. There was no needful reason to yell because they were right. Why P.J. Clarke’s? Because no one at P.J. Clarke’s knew us if I did yell. This was a good strategy on their behalf, but P.J. Clarke’s was not where I wanted my relationship with Cammie to end. Jason pulled up screenshots on his phone of Cammie’s Hinge. The first photo was a selfie that she had posted on her Instagram. Her lips were just healed, and they were pursed slightly around her teeth, the angle of the phone camera low enough that her eyes looked down on you in disdain. Camilla, 28. From Bethesda, Maryland, but lives in our apartment in Murray Hill. Associate, of Counsel. Columbia graduate. Capricorn. Figuring out her dating goals. Her other photos were of her and her girlfriends at Le Bain, at her sister’s wedding in a lavender bridesmaid’s gown that she had desperately hated, and a photo I had taken of her pinching the stem of an espresso martini glass at a Soho House party. She was in an oversized blazer cut down to her chest, staring down the camera like she could kill it. A fact about her that surprises people? She wanted to become a nun until high school. Give her travel tips for… Portofino, where we had talked about traveling for our three-year anniversary. A green flag for her? Spontaneity. And I knew all of this about her. But this wasn’t for me to care about anymore. Cammie had answered one of Jason’s prompts: I’m looking for… the best Sazerac in Manhattan, Jason had answered. Cammie said she loved the one at Apothéke in Chinatown, why didn’t the two of them meet up after work this week? Jason said “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” after every sentence. He couldn’t have been more sorry. He was sniffling and couldn’t make eye contact. He had no idea she was Cammie, as in, my girlfriend Cammie. She had no idea he worked in my office. He was right. He found her Instagram, checked her tagged photos, and recognized the photos I’d tagged her in. He asked Bong if Cammie and I were dating.“I looked at him like what the fuck are you talking about?” Bong said, hushed. “Like, of course, you’re dating. You’ve been dating for-fucking-ever. Good luck prying her out of your arms. How’d you even get this idea of going out with her? And then he showed me his conversation with her on Hinge, and I was, like, oh shit.”“I’m sorry if you didn’t want to know,” said Jason. “I’m sorry. I unmatched with her. Immediately. Never got drinks. She doesn’t know I’ve told you, or anyone. I’m sorry.” I’ve been staring at Jason’s open phone, cast aside on the dull wood bar. The screenshots of Cammie’s Hinge profile glow, then dim as the phone just sits while Jason and Bong stare at me in desperation. They fill the air with apologies. They wanted to do the right thing. They wanted me to say something. They are terrified. Finally, the phone screen turns to black, and Cammie’s taut cheekbones and pointed nose and eyes are gone. And it was all very diplomatic, and very fast. I hear myself tell Jason “Thank you. I have nothing against you. You did the right thing, and I respect that.” I hear myself ask Bong if we can leave. I am watching myself being diplomatic and calm from behind my eyes, where complete numbness sits heavy in my chest. A cinderblock. A hydraulic press. Cammie lying on top of me in bed. I swing my coat over my shoulders and clap Jason on the back. Bong rushes out of P.J. Clarke’s behind me. “You gonna be okay, man?” I keep walking. “Hey,” Bong yells behind me. “Hey! You’re not gonna kill her, are you?” I stop. I watch myself turn towards him and hear myself say “I’m not that kind of guy. I just need to go home.”“You’re not gonna kill yourself?”“I thought you were gonna do that.”“What?” It’s been a year and a half and I haven’t spoken to Cammie. I haven’t seen Bong. Or Jason, or the thirty-sixth floor. That doesn’t matter to me, and I don’t care about them. On my walk to the coop, the summer squall of cicadas hisses in the maple trees, from the gutters on the roof, wherever the hard-shelled bugs are screaming and fucking and dying. My boots are covered in shit and dirt. Everything smells like hot shit and dirt: earthy, putrid, sour. I went to the Governor’s Ball one time and it smells worse than the portable toilets used by thousands of sweaty office job workers rolling on molly. The trepid tittering of the ostriches reaches a fever pitch as I unlock the collapsing coop door and seven bowing, writhing, growling birds teeter outside into the sunlight. They rasp and cluck. Their taut faces and thin, pale necks ebb and bounce as they stick their faces into the brown grass and feast. Their bird eyes roll in the sockets with wrinkles collecting underneath them. They are dumb, savage creatures. I check on the incubator with ten bulbous ostrich eggs baking inside. It barely needs to be turned on in the summer heat of Arkansas. I got here with four monogrammed suitcases that still sit on the floor where my mattress is, in the apartment above the garage. I had walked into JFK and thought I’d go visit my parents in Chapel Hill. By the time I got to Charlotte I thought I’d kill myself. The flight to Little Rock was three gates from where I landed. No one asked questions, and I’m happy they didn’t.But that doesn’t matter to me, now. I’ve got four acres, paid for in cash. I bought eight African black-necked ostrich chicks from a wildlife farm I tracked down in Eureka for $250 a bird. The man who sold them to me didn’t tell me his name. He had a silver knob pierced in his eyebrow and the top of his head was bald; strings of long, white hair tangled around his sunburnt shoulders. The 2017 Toyota Tacoma I got off a used car lot was $19,250. A Birkin, I thought to myself, and a bird. I took P.J. home as a puppy in it. My neighbor’s golden lab had puppies and I picked one up. That was the only time I’ve seen them in a year and a half because they asked if I was from animal control. They were suspicious of me. I told them no.I push through another door that separates the coop from storage. The hides, strung up to dry, flutter in the drafty breeze. They are ghastly, pale, amorphous spreads, like maps, every follicle a pinpoint. This was the first ostrich I’d skinned of the eight chicks. She was a sweet bird. She never growled at me, or tried to kick me like some of the other birds did. She didn’t put up a fight. I sliced her open. I strung her up. I plucked her feathers to sell wholesale, each bone begging to stay in her skin. I watched myself butcher her, all diplomatic and fast and about it. Of course it was gross and at one point I threw up in the dry grass outside, where the other birds trot over to inspect the vomit. I let them be. P.J. herded them away. I let the birds distract me. The process of mopping up the blood, carving off the fat, plucking and cleaning and fleshing and cleaning and tanning and scrubbing and salting and tanning and wringing the leather out is excessive for a handbag. I have the bag designed in my head. I haven’t thought about how I’d get it to Cammie yet, or where she is or who she’s with. I don’t want to think about this. She hasn’t found me, or at least hasn’t tried to. I care for the birds, really. When I sell the bird’s eggs at a farmer’s market, I get comments that I’m different, that I can’t be from around here, where was I from? How’d I get to ostrich farming in Arkansas? Did I have a family nearby, a wife? And I smile. I watch myself tell these well-meaning locals It was a long time coming. Something God had planned for me. But that doesn’t matter. None of it does. It’s just me and the birds, now.