Short

PAYCHECK by Joseph Grantham

June 10, 2018

Scott had a reading in St. Louis and Julia couldn’t go with him because she had to teach, so I went with him because I lived in their house and was unemployed and Scott needed company.

We drove to a gas station and Scott bought cigarettes and then we drove halfway to St. Louis and while we were driving Scott showed me his favorite albums by Nick Cave and we smoked a lot of cigarettes and then we got a room in a hotel in a place called Santa Claus, Indiana.

It was late at night and we were hungry and we drove past a Taco Bell but I didn’t want Taco Bell because once, when I was eighteen, I ate a chalupa from Taco Bell and it made me shit water while vomiting for an entire night and on into the morning.

But we found another Mexican restaurant that was open and that was where we ate.

I ordered chicken flautas and the chicken inside of the flautas was blackened and tough like beef jerky but with less flavor than beef jerky and Scott ordered tacos and he said they weren’t any good.

I asked Scott about Finnegan’s Wake and if he’d read it and, if he had, if he’d liked it.

He said he had read it and he said oh yeah he liked it.

I pointed a flauta at Scott and asked him if he could explain Finnegan’s Wake to me so that I didn’t have to read it.

Scott explained Finnegan’s Wake to me while I chewed on a charred chicken flauta and I was tired but the way he explained it to me made sense and then we got the check and I paid the bill because I felt bad for making us choose that particular Mexican restaurant over the Taco Bell, where Scott had wanted to eat, and Scott thanked me and we left and went back to our hotel.

The hotel lobby smelled like body odor and the girl behind the front desk smiled at us as we walked past her and to our room.

There were two beds in the hotel room and a television on a table and a desk.

Scott sat on a bed and looked at his laptop and I sat on a bed and looked at my laptop and on the television Willem Dafoe was interviewed by someone.

We listened to Willem Dafoe for a while and then the interview ended and another episode of the same interview program with the same interviewer came on, except that this time the interviewer was interviewing former professional baseball player Alex Rodriguez.

Alex Rodriguez was less interesting than Willem Dafoe and Scott turned off the television.

He closed his laptop and said he was going to bed but that I could stay up as late as I wanted.

He turned off his light and I closed my laptop and turned off my light.

The next morning we drove to St. Louis.

Scott’s publisher paid for our hotel room and Scott made sure they got us one near the bookstore where Scott was going to read.

We checked into the hotel and my pants were loose and I remembered that I forgot to bring my belt with me.

I asked the woman at the front desk if she knew where I could find a belt in St. Louis and she laughed and thought about it for a little while and then she told me about a Target that was far away from the hotel and the bookstore and so I decided I wouldn’t get a belt and would just pull up my pants whenever I had to.

Scott and I went to our room and set our things down and sat down on our beds and Scott looked at his laptop and I looked at my laptop and then I asked Scott if he wanted to go get a cup of coffee because I looked up a list of the best coffee places in St. Louis and I felt like having a good cup of coffee.

He laughed at me and said sure, he’d go get a cup of coffee with me if I wanted to go get a cup of coffee, and I said something about how I thought it’d be a nice way to see some of St. Louis.

I used an app on my phone to call us a car and we waited in front of the hotel and I pulled up my pants and the car pulled up in front of us.

I told Scott that we were going to the highest ranked coffee place in St. Louis and he smiled and nodded and I know he didn’t care and our driver kept driving and I noticed we were leaving the city.

Our driver drove us out of the interesting looking part of St. Louis and down a long road and finally stopped in front of a nondescript office building.

I was confused but when I looked at my phone it said that we were at the right place and I noticed that the coffee place was on the first floor of the nondescript office building.

We went inside the coffee shop and there were men wearing polo shirts tucked into khaki pants and belts with holsters on them for their cellphones and they were all sitting at tables looking at their laptops.

I ordered a coffee and asked Scott if he wanted one and he said okay, and I bought the coffees because I felt bad for dragging Scott all the way out to this boring building and we waited for ten minutes while the barista ground our beans and made us individual pour over coffees.

The coffee was okay and we went outside with it and smoked cigarettes while I called us another car.

We went back to the hotel and from the hotel we walked a few blocks to the bookstore and we decided to look around at the books in the bookstore before the reading.

In the bookstore we didn’t see much but Scott convinced me to buy a couple of Milan Kundera novels and for some reason I was surprised that Scott liked Milan Kundera.

After I bought the books we walked outside and decided to get dinner and Scott seemed nervous and like he wasn’t hungry, so we chose the first place we saw.

The first place we saw was across the street from the bookstore and it was a Mexican restaurant.

I ordered a burrito and Scott ordered a couple of tacos.

I ordered chips and salsa to share with Scott but he didn’t want any of the chips and salsa so I ate all of it and, with the burrito, it was a lot of food compared to Scott’s two tacos.

Scott and I split the bill and then we walked back across the street to the bookstore and they were setting up the reading in the children’s section.

Scott seemed unsure about the whole thing and a bookseller whose name I can’t remember greeted us and shook Scott’s hand and told Scott that he thought the prose in his new book was beautiful and Scott nodded and told the bookseller thank you.

The bookseller nodded and reemphasized how beautiful he thought the prose was in Scott’s new book and Scott smiled and said thank you.

The bookseller asked Scott if he needed a drink or anything and Scott said no but I asked the bookseller if I could have a bottle of water and he went into a closet and found one for me.

I thanked the bookseller and then he told us we should probably get things started so we followed him into the children’s section where a small group of people were gathered.

Everyone was sitting on the floor and there was a table with a tub of beer on it and Scott told me I should go get a beer and I wanted a beer and so I went to go get one.

I asked the man behind the tub of beers if the beers were free and he said of course and I took one and went back to where Scott now sat, crosslegged on the carpet.

The carpet was bright and colorful, neon greens and pinks, and covered with letters from the alphabet and trains and train tracks and places where you could play hopscotch if you wanted to play hopscotch but no one was playing hopscotch.

A couple of poets were supposed to read with Scott but one of them didn’t show up because her flight got canceled or because she said her flight got canceled and the bookseller asked Scott if he would read one of her poems to start the reading.

For some reason I thought Scott would say no but he didn’t hesitate and he said yes of course.

And then everyone quieted down and clutched their shins and Scott stood up and walked into the center of the children’s section and read the poem by the poet who didn’t show up.

I almost burst out laughing while Scott read the poem but not because the poem was bad or because Scott did a bad job reading it but because it was clear Scott didn’t write the words and they didn’t mean anything to him.

Scott finished reading the poem by the poet who wasn’t there and then he sat back down next to me and I told him good job and I drank from my can of beer.

The poet who was there stood up and walked into the center of the children’s section and introduced himself and then he told a story about the poem he was going to read and how it was about something horrible that had happened to him when he was a little boy and the story he told was a lot more interesting than the poem he read.

He did this a few more times, telling the story behind the poem that happened to be a lot more interesting than the poem and then reading the poem that seemed to be a vague, lifeless rendering of the story he’d just told.

I drank from my can of beer.

The poet finished reading and everyone clapped and I stood up and went over to the tub of beers and grabbed another beer and then went and sat back down.

Scott stood up and walked into the center of the children’s section and he read a part from his new book that I’d told him to read because I was sick of hearing him read the same part he always read at the other readings I’d seen him do.

And while he read, people laughed and cringed and suddenly got very quiet and then laughed again and shook their heads and then Scott was done reading the section from his new book.

And then he recited a poem called “Little Orphant Annie” by James Whitcomb Riley and he put my name in the poem in the part where Riley mentions a little boy who won’t say his prayers and it made me laugh so hard that I teared up and I drank from my can of beer and stood up and walked to the back of the bookstore because I was laughing so hard.

I had a buzz from the two beers because I hadn’t had any alcohol since I’d lived with Scott and Julia and it seemed like it’d been a while.

And then the reading was over and I told Scott good job and he said thanks and that he’d recited that “Little Orphant Annie” poem so many times and that people were probably so tired of hearing him doing that.

He said that this was the last reading he was ever going to do.

He was done.

Before we left the bookstore, the bookseller stopped us and told Scott how wonderful his reading was and how he thought that Scott’s new book was beautiful and Scott thanked him for everything and we said goodnight.

Outside, a woman closer to my age than Scott’s stopped Scott and told him how much she loved his work and Scott said thank you and introduced her to me and told her that I was a writer too and I laughed and  pulled up my pants and shook her hand.

She asked us what we were doing for the rest of the night and Scott looked at me and then at her and said that we were probably just going to go back to the hotel and go to sleep because we had a long drive back to West Virginia the next day.

She gave me her phone number and said that if we wanted to get breakfast the next morning before our drive, we should text her and she’d take us to a good place.

We thanked her and said goodnight and started walking back to the hotel.

Scott told me he was sorry about wanting to go back to the hotel and that if I wanted to go out drinking with the woman I should.

I laughed and said it was okay and that I wanted to go back to the hotel too but that I wanted to get a cup of coffee and maybe a snack to bring back to the room.

We walked to a Starbucks but it was closed and we walked to a cookie store but they didn’t sell coffee and then a man approached us and told us about how St. Louis was a racist city and how he was just visiting from Ohio and he had cancer and all of the white people he’d talked to seemed afraid of him but not us.

We told him we were sorry about that, about the racism, and he told us again that he had cancer and could we spare some change.

But we didn’t have any cash or change in our pockets and we told him that and he looked annoyed and walked away and said something to himself about how this cancer wasn’t going to cure itself.

And then we found a Whole Foods behind our hotel.

I got a coffee and then we browsed the snacks for a while and Scott picked out a big bag of chips and I was picking out a bunch of individual cookies to put in a box but then Scott suggested that I pick a box of cookies that was already prepackaged, so I put back all of the individual cookies and threw the box in the garbage and then grabbed a box of the prepackaged cookies and we paid and brought everything back to the hotel room.

Scott sat on his bed and I sat on my bed and he shared his chips with me and I shared the box of cookies with him.

He asked if I wanted to watch a short animated documentary about the country singer Johnny Paycheck and I did so he brought his laptop over to my bed and we sat there on the bed with the laptop between us and we ate chips and cookies and I learned about how Johnny Paycheck once shot a guy in the face and how if you wanted to quit your job the best way to do it was to tell your boss to take the job and shove it.

Then we got into our beds and went to sleep and at seven in the morning we left the hotel.

We drove back to Beckley, stopping only for gas and cigarettes and crackers and chips and beef jerky and candy and cigarettes and for most of the drive we listened to country music and Scott told me about each singer and each band and each song.

When we got back to the house Julia was making dinner and we sat down at the table in the kitchen and then we all ate dinner and told Julia about the trip.

And Scott and I thought about it and decided that the trip probably wasn’t worth it for Scott’s publisher or for Scott but that we still managed to have a good time.

And Scott said it was the last time he was going to do something like that and then he gathered everyone’s plates and cups and rinsed off all of the dishes in the sink and put them in the dishwasher.

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bob raymonda

SATURDAY NIGHT BLUES, OR THAT ONE TIME FRANNY TOOK PATRICE OUT by Bob Raymonda

May 30, 2018

Patrice walks into her kitchen, opens the cupboard, pulls out a box of Kraft macaroni and cheese, and sighs. She’s wearing a matching set of duck pajamas with a thinly rolled joint clamped between the corner of her lips. She runs the tap to fill a half-washed pot and lights the joint on the stovetop before setting the water to boil.

The clock on her microwave flashes twelve. The power went out last Wednesday and she just can’t bring herself to reset it. Her anxiety calms as she smokes and watches the bubbles start to collect at the bottom of the pot.

What the hell do you think you’re doing? The voice comes from nowhere and is husky like it’s had one too many Virginia Slims.

Patrice brushes a stray hair back around her ear and mumbles, “Making dinner.”

A stray tentacle creeps out from behind her back. It’s slimy and has thick black hair covering it. It’s wearing a gaudy wristwatch, which it holds unnecessarily close to her face.

Bitch, it’s 7 o’clock.

Patrice dumps the bag of noodles into the boiling water and turns down the heat. She takes another drag of her joint and grabs a can of beer from the fridge. “And your point is?”

My point is that we told Jessie that we’d meet her for tacos and tequila at 7:45 and you haven’t even taken a shower today.

In the blink of an eye, another tentacle appears and pulls the joint out of her lips, stubbing it out in an ashtray on the counter. A third removes the boiling macaroni from the burner and a fourth smacks Patrice directly in the cheek.

Get your game face on, girl. We’re gonna get it in tonight.

Patrice grimaces, trying her best to overcome the beast on her back.

“God dammit, Franny, stop that.”

She manages to strain the macaroni and dump in a pad of butter and the packet of Nickelodeon-orange powdered cheese into the pot. She dodges another smack from the fourth tentacle and gets her pathetic dinner into a chipped ceramic bowl. She gathers the bowl, ashtray, and the beer and brings them with her into her living room.

Franny is a gigantic parasite that latches onto Patrice with hundreds of tiny suction cups. Patrice has to cut holes in all of her clothing so she doesn’t suffocate, which has proven awkward in professional settings but works alright otherwise. Franny’s been around for as long as she can remember, but the two still can’t manage to agree on anything.

Patrice, it’s fucking depressing in here. We’ve gotta get out.

Franny and Patrice’s living room is covered in unopened mail and discarded takeout containers. There’s a Trainspotting poster on one wall and a shelf full of books on the other that were all Randy’s, but he hasn’t lived here in months and never came back for his stuff.

Patrice turns a Making a Murderer on Netflix. She settles into the pleather couch after kicking aside her electric blanket and says, “Franny, I don’t care what you or Jessie or that guy Chet you made us bring home last week have to say about it. Nothing is getting in between me and that murderer tonight.”

I’m not so sure about that.

Patrice snorts and grabs a throw pillow, putting it behind her head and muffling Franny’s voice. One of Franny’s tentacles starts to slither out from underneath her, but she bats at it with her fork before taking her first bite, followed immediately by a huge swig of beer.

“Ahhhh,” she moans, burping, “that hits the spot.”

Come on, Patty, you’re not gonna really live until you get outta those ducky pajamas and into something much less comfortable.

“Fat chance,” Patrice says, relighting the roach and turning the volume up on the TV.

Franny gives Patrice a few minutes. Even lets her think that she’s going to get her way, letting those sweet-talking Wisconsin lawyers lull her into a false sense of security. The minute Patrice’s guard is down, all of Franny’s tentacles are on deck.

With the first, she knocks Patrice’s beer into the bowl of macaroni and cheese, ruining it.

With the second, she throws the remote at the television, cracking the glass, and knocking it off the wall.

“What the fuck!” Patrice shouts.

Franny, laughing, takes her third and fourth tentacles and inserts both of them into Patrice’s ears. The woman’s eyes glaze over with a milky white film and she stops resisting. She stands and walks like a zombie to the bedroom; Franny chuckling the whole way there.

When Patrice comes to, they’re in front of the mirror and Franny is putting the finishing touches on her make-up. The tentacles on the left tending to her foundation and lipstick while those on the right do their best to do anything with her hair.

“Come on, Franny, next week. I promise”

Jessie’s been blowing your phone up. We’re already late. Let’s go.

Patrice glances down and notices the hideous dress that Franny has them in. Bright turquoise and covered in hideous sequins and low cut in the back, so the parasite can be the center of every conversation like she always is. “I look like a fucking clown.”

Mmm mmm mmm, girl. You look good.

Patrice tries to seize control for a second, grabbing a bottle of rubbing alcohol and makeup wipes out of the medicine cabinet, but Franny notices and slides two her tentacles back into Patrice’s ears.

After what feels like moments, the two of them are walking into Harry’s Burritos. The Weeknd is playing over the loudspeakers and Jessie is sitting by herself, a plate of half-finished-half-congealed nachos in front of her.

“Where the hell were you two?” she spits.

Patrice goes to speak, but Franny pipes up, pulling out the tentacle with the watch and pointing at her heavily rouged cheeks: Someone tried to bail on you.

Jessie rolls her eyes and slurs, “I ordered us margaritas, but you took so long that I had to drink them both.”

“That’s alright,” she says. Patrice’s voice is so soft compared to Franny’s that she isn’t even sure if Jessie hears her.

This is my song, Franny says, her tentacles waving in the air. Patrice takes a sip of water and glances around the room. She catches the bartender’s glare as he’s staring at them. It’s Chet. She’s had a crush on him for months, and she really should thank Franny for helping her seal the deal, but she has a hard time thanking Franny for just about anything when she’d usually rather be at home sleeping.

Chet grabs a bottle of mezcal and four shot glasses. He fills them up and sets them on a tray, abandoning his post to join them.

“What’s up girls, how’re you doing tonight?”

Chet! My favorite man in the world.

Jessie gives Patrice a little wink, “Oh, we’re good honey, how’re you?”

Chet smiles at the three of them as he passes out the shots, saving Patrice’s for last. He grazes her hand as he says, “I’m doing great. Shift’s just starting, but I’m taking this one with you anyway.”

Patrice’s face goes flush, but she raises her glass with the rest of them and whispers, “Good to see you too, Chet.”

I’ll bet it is, Patty.

Franny and Jessie cackle and one of Franny’s tentacles reaches out and smacks Chet on the ass. Now it's his turn to blush.

“Look, ladies, I’ve gotta go get back to the bar, but don’t you go anywhere on me,” he says, stacking the glasses and throwing a towel over his perfectly lanky shoulder, “stick around long enough, Franny, and I’ll let you eat the worm.”

I’ll bet you will, she whispers, Jessie cackling even louder this time.

“Be careful what you wish for,” Patty says, speaking up, “you keep talking like that and Franny’s got a worm of her own to show you.”

Chet shoots her another glance as he walks away, smiling with only half of his mouth. Patrice fucking hates how right Franny is; Steven Avery’s got nothing on Chet and she knows it.

For the next hour and a half, Jessie and Franny inhale twelve tacos between the two of them. Patrice enjoys two. Chet keeps sending them drinks and they keep drinking them, and before any of them know it, Harry’s is closing. Jessie stumbles outside to call a cab and Franny, for the first time all night, keeps quiet and lets Patrice do the talking.

“You wanna come by tonight?” she says, looking up into those big grey eyes of his and biting her lower lip.

Chet doesn’t say anything. He just turns the lights off in the bar and grabs Patrice by the wrist, leading her out to his car. He doesn’t even make a face as Franny slides her hairy tentacles all over his hips. He’s got one thing on his mind and one thing only: Patrice.

Back at home, Patrice is nervous for a minute that Chet’ll say something about the mess, even though it looks exactly the same as it did last week, give or take a room temperature pot of mac’n’cheese. Netflix asks if she’s still watching Making a Murderer, but she pushes Chet into her room and leaves the lights off. Franny hasn’t made a peep since they left the bar, only occasionally groping Chet, but still letting Patrice stay in control.

The three tumble around in the dark in her bed and Patrice wonders, for a minute, if it’s the part of Franny that’s snuck her way inside of Chet that gets him off, but she doesn’t mention it. Just lets the two of them pass out in a tangle of limbs and tentacles and sweat and condom wrappers and grabs her phone. It’s three o’clock in the morning on a Wednesday and she’s gotta work in a few hours, but she’s wide awake. She lights up another joint from her bedside table and looks at Instagram, immediately finding her way to Randy’s profile. She can’t stop obsessing over the new girl in all of his photos, even though Chet is still ass naked and only two feet away from her.

Franny, who Patrice is convinced is sated for the night, mumbles one last time before snoring: Aren’t you glad we went out?

Patrice, still scrolling through pictures of Randy’s new, slightly younger, slightly thinner, definitely more blonde version of her, answers: Yes.

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kristin garth

95 IN QUEENS by KRISTIN GARTH

May 22, 2018
JONATHANIt’s five past. The bookstore owner with the crooked back eyes me as if I’m a suspicious character. Sinister I wear like a Brooks Brothers suit.  Not suspicious.Six past. If I’d been thinking, I’d have sent these things UPS. If I’d been thinking, I would have dumped her majestic, manipulative ass a year ago. If I’d been … with Lauren, there’s never been a lot of …Nine past. There’s little worse in the world than a three-piece suit and a tie in the middle of a July heat wave in Queens. And women with crooked backs.Ten past.LAURENI’m wearing a pleated black skirt, Mary Jane heels, a white turtleneck because Jonathan likes a girl in a turtleneck.  He likes his girls in white.I’m running, in heels, down a street I hope is Tyrell. I’ve asked three people for help.  None even stop to hear my question.Something drips down my cheek.  Not sure if it’s sweat or tears or both. It hits my mouth.  It’s salty. I lick my lips.It’s fifteen past. He will not wait.TRICIA“Coffee, blackI rest my fingers on a spoon centered on a violet linen napkin, take a New York City breath.  I’m here, but she’s here too. And, right now, she’s with him.IRENE WESTER, PROPRIETER, WESTERDAY, 13 TYRELL STREETI’m an old widow who sells old things: books mostly, furniture, clothes. I know things. Like this thing stalking outside my store for 20 full minutes scaring off customers, a gargoyle.Comes inside.  Pulls out a silk hanky, wipes his forehead with it all dainty-like.Wanders here and there, touches everything, careful. Uses the smallest surface area of skin contact possible, like it’s all infected with the plague. Keeps eyeing the door.  Has some smart-ass ideas of not putting books back where they go.I eyeball him then. “No, sir. We do not.”Grimaces.  Brings a stack of books, a money clip, on top, with a devil creature face, pulls a hundred dollar bill. Goes right back outside to stalk my front door.JONATHAN“It’s twelve fucking thirty.”Her hair is hanging against her red cheeks like thin, wet snakes.“Lauren?”Pants turn to sobs. On a public sidewalk, she throws herself at my feet. Screams a word I do understand: Daddy.Through the glass, I make unfortunate eye contact with the scowling old bookstore owner.  I look away, to the voluptuous 33-year-old howling at my feet on a sidewalk in broad daylight.“Hello, Hannah.”I hail us a cab.TRICIAThree cups of coffee and five chapters later, I pull out my phone. An hour. He told me half that, tops.The blonde 20-something waiter hovers, faithfully attentive to my coffee cup  covered now with my palm. I offer him a sweet tea southern smile. Any more caffeine, and that smile’s going full-on smirk.I’m the good girl. I cannot risk a smirk.JONATHAN“Little one, I’m going to require some patience. Been a bit of a snag.”I hear the ache in her breath.“At the end of the block, there’s a vintage toy store with a carousel. Pick out a doll. Daddy will buy it in half an hour.”LAUREN“Daddy, I don’t feel well.”He’s got a frown.“Where’s my pink sheets, Daddy?”Daddy used to wrap me in pink sheets, tell me bedtime stories.  He slept inside with me.“I’m going to lie down on the couch.”I feel all bad inside.“Wrap me up in the pink sheets, Daddy.”JONATHAN“You’ve done your best,” Tricia tells me, holding her Little Red Riding Hood doll bribe in the kitchen. “She’s faking.”I nod. “I know.”“I don’t think you really believe she’s faking. We both know that you’ve derived a lot of,” Tricia’s choosing her words, “pleasure from this idea of her multiple personalities.”I contemplate an argument, but Tricia deserves the truth.“You’re right. Part of me still wants to believe. Part of me has this,” I cringe, “weakness.”I hear Hannah crying. Not Lauren. Hannah. I have an impulse to find her pink sheets and wrap her in them.  Pink sheets I threw out three weeks ago.TRICIA“She’s in there talking to someone,” I’m realizing I am trapped in an apartment with a crazy person.“She’s just babbling,” he says casually. “She does this.”Maybe more than one.“It really does sound like she’s talking to somebody.”“Tricia, who in the hell would she be talking to?”That’s a very good question, I think.  Say nothing.“I don’t think she’s talking to anybody.” He goes to check though.   Just in case.ROSCOE PATTERSON, EMT, QUEENS EMERGENCY MEDICAL SERVICESWe receive a dispatch at 3:59 p.m., 225 Andrus #14, woman caller. Report is not unusual: “They’re killing me.” An unidentified male intercepted the call, said the woman is delirious. Police are inside when we arrive.A woman’s on the floor, kicking, screaming.  If she were a child, I would say “having a temper tantrum.” Most definitely adult though. Early to mid 30’s, guess.Mr. Jonathan Braxton (the resident) tells us that Ms. Hawthorne (the screamer) is his confused guest. Complained of dizziness, exhaustion after moving some items.We discuss options.   Ms. Hawthorne quiets herself. She’s sits up, criss-cross-apple-sauce, wide-eyed, like a little girl watching adult making decisions.“Do you need to go to the hospital?”One of the two officers speaks to her.  Mr. Braxton fidgets.“Tricia get her some water. I think she’ll drink it now.”Ms. Hawthorne nods.The officers look at us with a shrug. Whole bunch of nothing.“Kinky fuckery of the beautiful and the demented,” my analysis to Ray on the way out the door, off to more craziness with an uglier view.TRICIAI’m in the kitchen. Refrigerator door’s open.  Close to the living room as I can be -- with an excuse.  He’s screaming at her.  This anger sounds delicious.  I want a taste.  If he surprises me while I’m standing here spying, I’ll reach for the red and white paper boxes of Chinese food.  We haven’t had dinner.  I’m being thoughtful. He’ll kiss me on the forehead.JONATHANHannah’s asleep. Tricia’s asleep. I’m awake contemplating hanging myself from pink sheets.LAURENI wake up in half light/half dark, unsure where I am. I remember, soft and slow, walking, getting lost, Daddy. Hannah? Oh, Hannah.JONATHANTricia wakes me, breakfast in bed.  "Did I burn the toast too much?”“Tricia, you know, I like it burnt.”Any other day, I would punish this amateur-hour incitement of praise.  She’s been through a lot, though, little one. I feel compassionate. Write down the date.“Now, get dressed because we have a special date this morning.”It’s Alice in Wonderland, Queens Theatre in the Park.TRICIAThe bathroom door is stuck. I push. It doesn’t move.“Jonathan?”He appears in the hallway.“The bathroom door is stuck.”“What?”He tries.“It –is- stuck.  What in the hell?”He kicks the door.  It budges.  We hear a groan.  He kicks again. It opens enough I work my way inside. Lauren is on the bathroom floor, her body lodged against the door.JONATHAN“How were we to know we were hurting you, Lauren?  You’re not even supposed to be here.  Tricia and I will be out. When we return, we expect you and your things to be gone. Is that clear?She bats big blue eyes at me, Hannah’s eyes. Though this is not Hannah. This person I want to slap. She pouts, Hannah’s lips. I want to do it twice.“I’m sorry,” she whines, “to mess up your plans by passing out in my weakened condition.”This is Lauren.  I want no part of this person. Not sure I ever did. She was the cost of Hannah.MONICA WRIGHT, TICKET TAKER, QUEEN’S THEATER IN THE PARKIn line, there’s this man.  You can’t help but notice him.It’s his hands, toying with two tickets. Rubbing them rhythmically between mesmerizer’s digits as he talks quietly to a miniature woman in white with braids.His hands are massive, broad across the palms, twice the size of mine. Delicate, long fingers, powder pale, absolutely blank, as unmarked as a newborn. Nails protrude past the fingertips. They’re shaped into points.I’m holding myself back from stepping forward, towards those fingertips brushing stray hairs out of my eyes while I smile – the way the woman with the braids does.  She isn’t even that good looking.His eyes fix on me, the smallest fraction of time I can imagine.  They hold me still like an enchantment until I’m dropped, and he returns to his clueless companion.Do you remember cornflower blue, from the 48 crayon box? His eyes are cornflower blue.“Tricia, I don’t want her anymore. She’s dead to me. Do you understand? Lauren, Hannah, everybody. I don’t want any of it anymore.”The woman with the braids looks at the ground. She doesn’t seem happy. He hasn’t said he wants her.“This is your weekend, Tricia. The rest will go as planned.” He touches her on the nose.  My nose tingles in sympathy with the current of that touch. He turns to me with the tickets. I take them.  A shy peek into cornflowers makes my cheeks burn.“Thank you, child.”Our fingers touch.Thank you, child. Huh.TRICIAKey in the lock, Jonathan pauses. As the door opens, I hear wet words, blubbers and gurgles.Lauren left at noon.  Hannah took her place.JONATHANI’m hiding in my own kitchen.“Shhhhhh, Tricia.”Rubbing fingers over that alabaster babydoll wrist, I raise it to my lips and kiss the delta of veins that meet at her wrist.“We’re not going to do a thing. We’re going to sit here and let her rot on a couch. When we’re tired of sitting here, we’re going to go on about our day as if that rotten corpse has been carted away, and we never even noticed it was there.”I speak it theatrically.  Little Hannah, in the living room, knows where she stands.LAURENMean.  Why’s he so mean? He said forever. He said, “I will love Hannah, forever.” He wants me to die here. I won’t die here. He’s a bad Daddy. He tells lies. He said forever.  He said it inside the pink sheets.TRICIAHe’s making dinner reservations.  Looking across the kitchen at me, I see, for the first time since Lauren arrived, a smile.Then his eyes change. It’s Hannah.  Running at him, fists in the air, drool on the side of her face, like some large, round dog. Gone mad. He drops the phone.LAURENAaaaaahhh’m noooot gunna duh ayeDuh aye.JONATHANI kick her in the stomach, gut reaction of a student of the marital arts. Attack what is attackable; defend what is defendable. She folds in two, falls, a thud of bones and flesh against kitchen tile. Out of some strange sympathy, I fall, too.LAURENI’m wearing a shapeless blue knit shift, comfortable shoes, sitting in a waiting room of a health clinic in Atlanta.  Near me are a few crying children, a teenage girl in a miniscule spandex dress, a couple of women who look like me. My name is called. ALICE WAYNE, OB-GYN, EAST ATLANTA HEALTH SERVICES33 year old female, Caucasian. Black hair. 5’5”, 140 pounds, Lauren Hawthorne.Gynecological examination following a miscarriage after a fall down some stairs.  I notice substantial bruising on thighs, upper arms, abdominal region of the patient.I inquire about support regarding her loss.  Informed partner does not know that she was pregnant.Too many falls down stairs you hear, in my occupation, to be statistically viable.“Ms. Hawthorne, for what it’s worth, you and stairs don’t seem to do each other much good. The stairs don’t care either way; you should.”LAUREN95 in Queens.  A lot can depend on things like weather. Sometimes it’s the biggest, baddest wolf of all.
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stephen mortland

THAT ABSENCE YOU SEE WAS FORMED BY MY FRIEND’S FATHER by Stephen Mortland

May 21, 2018

JORDAN

To imagine what Jordan’s dad looked like, I pictured Jordan’s face stripped of his mother’s features. It was like clearing away layers of earth to find the remains of some unidentifiable structure. The scavenged and featureless result was the face of his invisible dad.

Jordan planned on changing his last name when he got married. The disembodied and scarred face of his father heard about it and showed up in Jordan’s dream the night before the wedding. “The name was fine for twenty-something years,” he said, “and now what, it’s not?”

“I learned how to wear your name,” Jordan said, “I wore it kind of hanging off my shoulders so that my neck wouldn’t be constantly sore. But Lindsay doesn’t deserve it, look at her, it would destroy her.”

“You’re right,” said the disfigured tiki mask that was Jordan’s dream father. “Let her keep her own name.”

“I can’t do that. She asked me for a name. I’ve got to give her something to make sure she’ll never run away.”

“Do you know how hard it is to love a baby all of the time?” The face asked.

Jordan woke up, got married, and they took his mother’s name. It was a good name and the right decision; his dad’s name was cursed. That’s what he told Lindsay when she asked, it’s what he told his mother, and it’s what he told me. The name was cursed, and the wedding was the perfect time to get rid of it.

He and Lindsay had a little boy of their own a year later. That little boy began asking for a name. They gave him the pure and unspoiled name they’d taken at their wedding. Jordan couldn’t help but tremble as he gave it to the boy. He trembled because he knew that if he’d given the child his father’s name instead, the curse would have turned him invisible and buried him beneath countless layers of earth.

#

LOGAN

I never met Logan’s dad, but I saw a picture of him. He’d been sick for a long time, and everyone knew he’d be dead soon. In the picture he was wearing a hat with military pins. He was young and handsome and looked the way all dads should look before they become fathers.

His dying didn’t make me worry for my own father, it just made me sad for Logan. He was quiet through it all, and that made it so much worse. I wished he would cry, and yell, and refuse to go to the funeral. I would support him. We’d run away into the woods behind his house. We’d bring the picture of his dad and tape it to a wall of a cabin. We would talk like his dad was still sick, and by that I mean we wouldn’t talk about him at all. We would ignore the picture. His perpetual sickness would afford us the silence Logan wanted. We would keep death close at hand, but never at our door. And we would be happy like that. We would ride snowboards in the winter, break branches off of trees in the summer, and listen to Blink-182.

My dad was healthy, but I’d tape a picture of him to the wall anyway and pretend he was sick as well. We’d teach each other to shave with BIC razors and be dads for one another. Two thirteen year old dad-boys living in the woods, that’s what I wanted for Logan. But instead he got a viewing, and a funeral, and all the sympathies he never asked for.

#

AARON

I don’t know exactly why I think Aaron's dad was an asshole, except that Aaron never talked about him, and Aaron’s mom seemed sad. His mom was the only mom I knew who wasn’t a Christian, but she was so sweet you’d never have guessed it. She kept alpacas in their backyard and made scarves out of their fleece.

Aaron changed his last name, but he didn’t wait until he got married. He did it as soon as he went off to college and stopped believing in God. God was trying to talk him into keeping the name, saying to him, “Aaron, come on, everything happens for a reason,” and, “Aaron, buddy, we need to forgive.”

Aaron told God that it seemed unfair, and he didn’t want the name anymore. He wanted his mom’s name, because she was sweet, even if she didn’t love God (which really, he reiterated, made the sweetness all the more genuine).

“Think of it this way,” God replied, “sins are like buildings, some are big (i.e. your father’s) and some are tiny (i.e. your mother’s). But Me, I’m in heaven, and in heaven, looking down, all I see is the tops of the buildings, I don’t know which ones are tall or short, I just know everyone’s got one.”

Aaron didn’t saying anything back to God, in fact he quit talking to him altogether. Before God goes to bed at night, and before He eats a meal, he still sometimes talks to Aaron, hoping to make a difference, hoping to get a response.

#

DEV

Dev’s dad is going to lose his foot. The doctor’s gave him special shoes and said, “If you don’t wear these shoes, you’re going to lose your foot; we’ll cut it off.” He calls Dev sometimes to ask for help moving furniture (on account of his foot hurts).

“Are you wearing the shoe?” Dev asks.

“Every once in a while, but it’s pretty uncomfortable.”

So he’s going to lose the foot. Dev thinks he wants to lose the foot. Not that he wants it gone, but it would give him an excuse to move less, to stay in his chair and watch television.

He calls Dev on Dev’s birthday while he and I are walking around Meijer with my daughter. He tells Dev the usual stories—stories from a childhood that Dev doesn’t remember. The stories are from before he and Dev’s mom got a divorce. Dev looks at me like, I’m sorry, and like, This will only be a minute. My daughter is looking at the fish in the Meijer fish tank, pointing to a dead one and making noises like she’s pretending to snore.

I only know about one of Dev’s birthdays (aside from the one he spent shopping at Meijer with me and my daughter). It was the only time he had a real birthday party. Somebody bought him a VHS video tutorial for Tech Deck skateboards—the miniature skateboards you control with your fingers. After opening the gifts, all the kids went outside to play, but Dev stayed inside by himself and practiced Tech Deck maneuvers. Tech Decks are great for kids like Dev who want to stay inside, but they’re also great for people who only have one foot and are still interested in skateboarding.

My daughter waved goodbye to the dead fish and blew it a kiss. Then she ran to Dev and let him hold her while he forgot (again) the stories he could never remember.

I imagined Dev without a foot, standing in the aisle with a nub at the end of his leg. It was frightening. I knew my fear was insensitive, and I hated that I was frightened of it. Stop staring, I thought, it’s impolite. How would he get around though? How would he ever leave this town with only one foot? I’ll go with him, I thought, and he can set his hand on my shoulder while we walk past the county line and on toward wherever. But no, I can’t go. I have a daughter, and she loves the fish here, in Meijer. Remembering her, I got nervous, because he was still holding her, hobbling down the cereal aisle, and what if he fell over?

#

STEPHEN

When my dad was in college he drank too much. His apartment was filled with empty bottles, and his stairwell was filled with drunks passed out and strewn along the walls. He drank and drank but always remained thirsty, and his friends said, “Drink more, we highly recommend it.”

One day, after drinking his normal excessive amount, he got into the driver’s seat of a car. The car, too, was filled with empty bottles. He knew he shouldn’t, but he began driving down the interstate, doing his best to keep the car between the appropriate lines. Blue lights flashed, and he saw a State Police in his rearview mirror. He pulled the car over and waited for the end of his life.

He wanted to think, It’s been a good life, but he couldn’t. It’s been a life full of empty bottles and drunk bodies, he thought. It’s been a life half-lived, and I still have never fallen in love. The State Police was knocking on his window. The aroma from all of the bottles and from the beer soaked into the fabric of the cushions drifted out the open window and crawled into the nostrils of the man come to end his life.

“You were swerving a little back there.”

“I know. It’s because my life has only been half-lived, and I’m only half a man.”

“I see. I don’t think I can write you a ticket for that.”

“No, you can’t. It’s not against the law to live a half-life. I wish it was. I wish you could write me a ticket, and I could take it to the courthouse and pay it, and my half-life would be remedied. I’d finally get rid of all of these bottles, and I’d fall in love, have a child, name him after me.”

“I’m going to let you off with a warning this time. But, on a personal note, I’m worried about you.”

Just like that, the man who had the power to end my dad’s life returned to his car and drove away. It was this strange act of mercy that carried my dad home that night, and laid him in his bed, and woke him in the morning. It was this strange act of mercy that recycled all his bottles and woke all of his drunk friends, hugging them goodbye. It was this strange act of mercy that pulled him from New Jersey to Indiana and arranged a date with my mother’s sister and then later with my mother. And it was this strange act of mercy that whispered in his ear, “A half-life can be a whole-life if you need it to be.”

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PLANT REPLANT by Jon Berger

May 11, 2018

I smoked Bubba Kush with my cousin Will. He got it from a guy who grew hydroponics.  It was my first time smoking anything other than midgrade. Will had this evil clown hookah thing with hoses hanging out of its head. His friend Joe got so stoned the clown gave him a panic attack.

On the drive home I kept checking myself because it felt like I was pissing my pants and driving felt like a videogame. I got home and went to the bathroom to find out I was totally dry.

The next morning I’m driving back to my Grandmas still high and cozy, speeding down the bumpy road in my 98’ Bonneville with too many miles on it. Gridded up farm fields on all sides. These giant white windmills were being built in the middle of the fields to collect energy. Looking like Godzilla seagulls waving around lost with nothing to break.

Me and my cousin were working on repo houses in the city. This rich guy bought up a bunch of abandoned homes from the bank and hired us to fix them so he could flip them for a profit. I was supposed to be in school but I’d rather be making money.

I pulled into my Grandmas driveway. Will was sitting on the front porch, tying his shoes while smoking a cigarette. He’d been living with Grandma since his mom died of cancer. So like 4 years.

“We got a problem,” he said as I was walking up.

“What’s up?” I said.

“Grandma is fucking with my shit.”

He stood up and I followed him to the back yard where he was growing an 8 foot tall marijuana plant. It was sativa, his baby.

“Grandma has some of those windmill guys coming over to inspect the land next week. She’s pissed and says the plants gotta go.”

“Can’t we just cover it up or something?”

Will shrugged. “I don’t know. Grandma wants it gone. We’ll get like four grand for having the windmill on the property.”

“Four grand? That’s it?”

“Wind ain’t oil, bro.”

“Fuck, man. You serious?”

“I’m thinking we can replant it at that house we’re working on in Sanford,” he said exhaling smoke.

“Can we just harvest it now? I mean at least we’d get something out of it.”

“No, it’s too early, it’d be no good.” He grabbed a branch, “Look, these buds are all tiny and green still. Don’t even got sugar on ‘em.”

“You think replanting will work?”

“Shit if I know, but we gotta try. I’m not about to just throw it away.”

We grabbed a five gallon bucket from the barn, put some water in it and started digging out the plant with shovels. We lifted it up the best we could, keeping the roots intact while lowering it into the bucket.

Will drove an S10 truck without a topper.

We laid the plant down in the bed of the truck and packed more dirt into the bucket. Marijuana leaves were poking out everywhere and the plant was hanging out over the tailgate. Will jammed the tailgate up and bent the top of the plant. We took a blue tarp and tied it down over the plant, tucking in all the branches. We stood back and looked. Will did this thing with his hands that Hollywood directors do to get their camera angles right or whatever. You could definitely tell we were hauling some type of vegetation.

We got into the truck and I grabbed the clipboard to roll a joint on the way. We stopped at the corner store to get energy drinks and cold cuts. It had a big gravel lot and the store used to be a big farm house. It was all white with newish siding and a black roof. The upstairs of the store was apartments.

Misty was working. She was friends with Will and would sell me beer on the weekends. She moved out here a couple years ago. She had weird line and dot tattoos she did herself without giving them much thought. Misty laughed her ass off when we showed her the weed tree under the tarp and then wished us good luck.

The Sanford house was on the other side of town. We drove through thick traffic, high as ever. I put on sunglasses and just sat back. A cop had a guy pulled over. A new Cadillac. Will laughed saying that’s why you don’t buy flashy cars. My stomach jumped to my chest as we drove past them. We were normal. I thought about how normal we must look, but maybe we were too normal. Will tapped his brakes, pulling over slightly, giving the cop standing on the side of the road more room. It felt like forever to get past him but he never gave us a look.

We pulled into the driveway of the house. It was a big two story house on a backroad. Not very old. Someone with money had built it. I had to paint over the height lines on the wall where the parents measured their kids growing. We only had half the roof shingled. The roof was peaked and we had to nail in 2-by-4s into it so we didn’t slip off.

There was a patch of woods in the back with some good shade. The soil was sandy. Not that farm field clay the plant grew in, but we didn’t have a choice.

We dug a hole and put the plant and dirt inside of the bucket into the sand hole in the woods. We gave it some water and got a ladder to cut some tree branches off so the plant would get more sun. Will didn’t think if it would help but like he kept saying, “we had to try.”

***

The leaves turned brown after two days. After a week it was dead. It just fell apart. Will said he could get more seeds from the same guy he bought his weed from. It just cost money, but we had work. He said it was a setback. He said these repo houses were good money. He said buying more seeds and not giving up on growing bud was like investing your money and yourself into something bigger.

***

Grandma got a windmill built on the farmland. She got her check from the energy people. Grandma and Will started saying how late at night the windmills were making this noise that you couldn’t really hear. I didn’t know what they were talking about until I was out there late one night. It kinda sounded like a low static but still plugged your ears with a deafening emptiness. You couldn’t hear the bugs or a passing car or anything. Everyone who had a windmill built on their land was complaining about it. The company who built the windmills wouldn’t do anything about it. Everyone started sleeping with earplugs in.

All windmills had a red blinking light on top of them. All the lights blinked at the same time. At night you could see all across the open sky, hundreds of floating lights blinking at once, going forever looking like laser stars that spied on everyone in their old farmhouses that didn’t really farm anymore.

***

Will installed electricity in the barn, so we could always have a fridge full of booze. He threw a party to celebrate the new electricity in the barn. He let me invite some of my high school friends.

It was late and everyone was fucked up off good weed and Boones Farms and cheap blue cans of beer with white mountains on them.

Joe had been doing cocaine. At around midnight went to his car and came back with an AK-47. He was drunk too and giggling with a red face. Will didn’t let Joe work with us because he said Joe was an idiot.

We all went out to the edge of the field and started shooting at the windmill. The bullets had tracers on them. So you could see where you were shooting by watching your bullets that looked like mini comets. The trick was to wait for the red windmill light to blink so you kinda knew where to aim. The gun was heavy and solid. All metal and wood, it kicked like crazy, the stock jabbing into my shoulder. The muzzle flash made me see spots and the sound of the gunshots made my ears ring. I pulled the trigger so fast that the gun started to kick up and I lost control of it, the tracer bullets flying up into space. Every time a bullet hit the windmill you could hear this sharp ping that echoed off it. Everyone cheered and drank when that happened.

I noticed Misty was standing back smoking a cigarette, watching all of us with her arms crossed.

I walked over to her. “Misty, you going to shoot the gun?” I said pointing with my beer hand at the new person shooting. I was pretty wasted, leaning as I pointed, still seeing blue, green and yellow spots from the muzzle flashes.

“No, I don’t do guns.”

“It’s just fun though.”

“I think you need a better approach.”

“Like what?”

“Like climb up there and spray paint a giant dick on it.”

I closed my left eye to see straight and said, “I like how you think, but how would I get up there and do that.”

Misty tossed her head back and laughed, showing all her teeth. She said it wasn’t a big deal and that she did her thesis in college on the social implications of erotic street art and that we would climb the windmill and graffiti a giant dick on it together.

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“YEEZUS IN FURS” EXCERPT by Shane Jesse Christmass

May 9, 2018

NINE CELEBRITIES WHO ARE HONESTLY LOW-KEY WITCHES. Cult Leader is vice chairman of a shady company. He exerts political influence. He commits securities fraud. Bomb crews scurry across the alien surface. Red lumps beneath my skin. Skateboarding to the awful motel. Car door slams as I watch morning cartoons. Dirty jeans purchased from thrift store. Smoke coming from a small paper packet. Burnt tyre beneath steel chassis. An invisible tether tied to small rockets. Cult Leader performs several skateboard tricks. Cult Leader talks about nakedness. Cult Leader brushes his dark hair. Cult Leader tells me about his secret pleasures, about his charming nudity, his exquisite curves and exuberant fleshiness. I have similar tan lines to the Cult Leader. Unconscious as I plug into the brain-computer interfaces. Technological actuators inspect anus. A steel belt around male genitals. Cult Leader has retractable wings. High-tech surgical gloves provide sense enhancements as the Cult Leader rubs them on my skin. Electrical properties in the projectile night. Cult members camp beneath Washington Bridge. Small talk from Manhattan to Washington. Close-range gunfire and faces on the front of fashion magazines. The icy undergrounds of Broadway. Subhuman cyborgs storm the bloodied jungle. The tongue of a piss whore. Biker guys with money clips. Cult Leader has a castration problem. Apartment block full of Hepatitis C. Night dissolves into amyl nitrate and excessive money. Disease and other strong scents on my fingers. Tongues stapled to bus seat. Photographer is now in the doctor’s care. Transsexual patients meet with prominent physicians. Large metropolitan areas are swallowed by technological gadgets. Hand gestures delivered by cybernetic systems. Translucent images across a magenta sphere. Fetish photographers infiltrate the cumulus planet talking about their fine art aesthetics and other gleeful perversions. Performance artists, prima donnas and British perverts are hauled before the Conservative government by an over-anxious police force. The lead actor details his complex sexual history. Photographers detail sex inside the hotel suites of San Francisco. My muscles soothed by the hot bath. Cult Leader wears a tracksuit. Bodies disappear beneath undersea debris. The body parts of migrant workers are found in the water supplies. Mutations and fatal wounds. Weapons hidden in the wild grass. Chain-link fence gleams in the late afternoon sun. Deep sleep on the forest floor. I wear a thin sweater under the grey-blue sky. Police siren in the sunlight. Blank paper inside the money box. Cult Leader’s laughter through the cigarette smoke. Nude men shatter windows. Erotic escapades performed by serious professional actors. Cult Leader concocts a banana cocktail. ESP from the arterial mud and tar pits. Pepsi-Cola immersed in my connective tissue. Whole body transplants performed on actual human beings. Toxins in digital form. Deforestation under a black gradient sky. Monochrome destruction. Fresh intrusions of sex and penetrating taboos. Sensibility meters and MTV-style production values. Phone-sex lines run by cybersex gurus. Sex for pleasure and sex for punishment. $2- $ 3.50/min. - lonely girls will pay up to $500 for your special services. Adults looking for an older woman. Cult Leader talks to various paraphiliacs and then reads the latest Sears catalogue. Water bottles in empty bunkers. Dead volcano at the end of a narrow path. Human arm disappears amongst experimental images. A tall figure in a silk cape with high cheekbones. Factory buildings marked with gunfire. High wire fence around the factory grounds. Fleshlights and wet clothes. A sensory richness and social fulfilment. Cult Leader eats maggots and chewing gum. He is aged in his mid-to-late 20s. Toilet bowls and car doors. Electronic skin for burn victims. Debridement therapy to provide sensation in my hands. A couple of hours. Gunshot rings out. Call girls made from a vague shape. A giant bowl of weed on a plastic lawn chair. Cult Leader sits in the squalid backyard talking on his cell phone. Heavy machine guns poke from red brick houses. Cult Leader anticipates a brutal ambush. Cult Leader wears a Wal-Mart t-shirt. Human voices at a wonderful party. Pharmacists and street kids play with sticky tape. Elevator doors creak into brilliant sunshine. Motionless acne on the misogynist’s skull. Red background on the hospital rooftop. Weird figures in the yellow night. A grotesque desire to wear animal garb. Diabolical fiends working for the police force. Moth-eaten gloves cover the carnal visual cortex. Heterosexual male chases tween sex. Cult Leader faces erroneous accusations. Fringe scientists adorned in sunglasses, ponytails and surrounded by arrogant people. Bartender handing out cool drugs. Satanic session conducted in a drunken manner. Sex maniac is an average nibbler. Sex in transcendent halls. Sharp knives used as props in pornographic material. White sunshine flickers over hospital rooftop. Moments later. NYC. A lit cigarette being smoked in slow motion. Ambulance siren behind glass windows. Latex gloves over San Francisco. Emotional problems discussed in the eye clinic. Dark mysteries on the computer network. Original Soundtrack of orgasm and initial experiments conducted on psychoactive drugs. Cult Leader conducts erotic yoga classes, but also discusses a monkish abstinence from all sensual indulgence. Mantras and eyewash. Dirty clothes drying after a monsoon. Slick hair and cigarettes. Psychiatrist struck by the car lights. Arctic air captured in a mushroom cloud. Nightclub evenings consumed by erotic performances. Slowly laughter fades and the vigorous bodies reapply their cancerous attachments. Proteins inserted into eardrum. Elastic ashtrays purchased from a retail electronics store. Copper pipes in the rear-view mirror. Discrete sounds and further sound rises. Smooth eyelids and slowly the Cult Leader’s fingers float. The flesh of a doll’s head. Leg bone over inch-thick carpet. Overstuffed bodies stuffed with banknotes. Head bones that contain cocaine. An apelike tumour that covers the whole city. Free cigarettes made from steam. Foodstuffs like huge pacifiers. Cult Leader sipping a vanilla milkshake in the back of a yellow cab. Water vapour on the window seat. Quiet voices behind the bathroom door. Macho facades in a homosexual loop. Sudden nausea from looking at the shop windows. Cult Leader engages in somatic sensations and slow motion sensuality. Transmissive diseases in the cannibal world. Trains in the rail yard. Blood throughout NYC. A nasty smear of shit in the toilet cubicle. Infectious fantasies played out by a sexual penetrator. Disease and social status. Erections and eye contact. The physical boundaries of the body. Electric current with a luminescent aura. Sensations ripple through endless orgasms. Cult Leader in silver high-heels. The early incarnations of human forms. Underworld guns abandoned on a mountain road. Rainy night in NYC. A high population with surplus children. Well-armed police talking in medieval languages. Barefoot labourers driving semi-submersible vessels. An electric butt plug on a small table in Guatemala. LED indicator lights and pulse output. Power control knobs and fine adjustments. Mechanisms and claws. Police wagon beneath the Brooklyn Bridge. Dirt. Windblown. Refrigerators. Cardboard. Rotten. Wall Street Journal.

ENTRAILS & TUBES. No musical compositions. The back entrance to the Lenox Hill Hospital. Pipes on the ceiling, frosting snow bed in some other hemisphere. Overpass. Dirt. Windblown dust. You let it all pass. Your hair is unkempt. Unruly. Ridiculous. The sun rises over the tips of Brooklyn. You glisten. Under the Gowanus Expressway – hieroglyphics. Tactile worlds. Footmarks on the sidewalk. Steamboats at the bottom of the East River. Depressed cheekbones of a police officer. Infrawaves collide in the provisional world. Corridors of the Lenox Hill Hospital. Broken fingers in plaster. A nurse-in-charge sitting in the nurse-in-charge chair. You’re outside the hospital. Smog plumes over Queensbridge Houses. Oil-tankers run aground on Orchard Beach. Tobacco and barley pour from the tanker’s side. The Atlantic Ocean is in remiss, oily existence. A wine glass shatters. CIA torture, uncorrupted by mind, abolished worlds. Down in the corner of the pebbled glass, neat, small letters spell out your name. I gulp Spanish brandy. Breath expels. Hallucinations of children. Stink of sulphur and acne creams. Boiling oil is doused on a bowed dog, a hound. I gulp again. Hooded Iraqis in embers, whole body torture, rectal bleeding, bromine knuckles, cracked Murphy Drips, a metre of dead bees, pain. You turn left, sudden fears. Armoured vehicles to the right of soldiers. Smouldering houses with fire fighters strip off their clothes. Toiletries burnt by enormous ironing surfaces. You get close enough to see the pained expressions on their faces. NYC bombed back to Year Zero. Mouths open but no sound coming out. Canons adjusted. Canons erupting. Cacophony. Dust and bullshit. Parasites in the blood stream making the user immune to commit acts of treason. Panel beaters pound the steel body of the abandoned cars. Scrap metal, flint sparks, shattered glass. The vehicle is in flame. You drop your wine glass. You’re bored, depressed, stacked and tied up in twine. Movie poster torn on alley wall. Rain sodden. Half-snivelling songs come from the outside. Immense sunshine over cold fields. Car parks at the front entrance of a tenement. Dew drops emulsify under the girders of Robert F. Kennedy Bridge. Crypto-anarchists make settlements near Hell Gate. Orange headbands around their foreheads. Donut sellers on the forecourt of the United Nations. Concurrent damage caused by BGM-109 Tomahawks. You with a minty-fresh mouth. Enemy Identified Man. Jacket pocket rubs against you. You take your sunglasses off. Her gaze is ancient times. You struggle for breath. A bus, repeat, a bus. Soldiers hang out smoking Camels. A glimpse of their murderous results in the newspaper headlines. In a wood cabin. Warm bed this morning. You don’t use a tape measure. The voice of command, a paper bag full of prolapse. You get into the car. You burrow into the trees. After about forty minutes, you give up and head back to the subway. A new side part in my hair. You lay flat on the ground. You complete your work inside the company’s holiday villa. You read the instruction manual several times. There is more than one narrative in the instruction manual. You work beside vacuum gauges under hot sweat steam and pressure overhead. You are alone - once more - working. Track suits / brand name. Billboard’s advertising TV documentaries that outline the beauty and savagery of the human contribution. The process of strengthening and integrating CPU into plastic brain moulds. You slide into midnight. Crimson-stained. Emotional signs include sighs and deep breaths. The door opens. Take that money. Polluted lobsters with identification bracelets around pincers. You take a swig of synthetic water. Wife wields her hips over husband. The dawn on a projection screen. Nothing brings my attention to it. The sun rises. Xerox of a Xerox over Manhattan. Bubbling fat on my skin. Bright lights, loud music, young kids. Husband’s wife is a cardboard cut-out. She is the doorway. She turns the music off. She’s doused in blonde mechanisms. A torn genus of deadly moth. The wife lurks in the good values of degeneracy. You tear your clothes off, actions recorded in unpublished histogram. Unfamiliar people irritate. Jetsam falls away from a dead man. The dying art of breath. You disappear under your cotton dress. This nightmare of a giant man, his red mouth moves, disposing of him, let alone murdering him. You stare madly at me. Downtown in the South end of the city, a mist-hung gun whips up the mob. BWAP BWAP. You sob in the pale dawn. Someone else screams. The strange assignment of lace doused over wife. Dinner chairs burn in a Pizza Hut car park. You open the window. Drinks at four. Several minutes later, sweat forms on your brow. Constant unfolding elements. You notice the disgust. I press demands onto you. Vermouth in a trough. Television light projectiles in the night vibrant against your skin. Some talk about nurses. Faces gleam through the Manhattan haze. One old man altogether on bench in Washington Square. Fashion magazines tangled up. Old Spice and Pepsodent. I do hate you.OFFAL IN A BUCKET. Rib cages turn in serrated gristle. Cult Leader’s finger on the elevator button. Hospital hallway outside emergency room. Cult Leader closes her locker door. An elevator button. The elevator arrives. The doors open. A nurse pulls a chair from beneath a patient who is tied up. The nurse rifles through the patient’s suit jacket for a coffee cup. The nurse gnaws her teeth into cedar wood. Cult Leader takes a closer look at her. Ivory tusks hang from wooden-framed structures. Sick smell through the ventilators. The smell draws Cult Leader to this moment. The window. Out from the window, precipitation of the world. Sick rises from the valley. A tree. Cult Leader hears pharmacists, their families. Street kids inside rolls of sticky tape. Septic scars over Cult Leader’s chest. A yellow star on the charcoaled door of the landlord’s flat. Cult Leader gets onto a different path. The elevator doors open. Cult Leader looks around. She gets in. Her hand presses a button. Eighth floor. The doors of the lift wheeze. They expire. They stutter and then close. A handful of glue. The elevator creaks. The eighth floor. A petting zoo. Cult Leader exits, turns to her left, pushes through a door. The fire escape. Brilliant sunshine rushes in. A searing whiteness. Scores of locusts. Crows noisily fly around. Cunning-like. Cult Leader taps the side of her head. Motionless thoughts. Her neck is dry, flaky, plastic. Acne skin. Everything that’s apparent is usually impossible at hand. Meatheads on the motorway. Skull flags with red background. Contrary personalities irascible and dull. Sunshine. The hospital rooftop. Moth-eaten air. Carnal images in the visual cortex. Broken wrist. An orderly pushes Cult Leader off the hospital roof. A murder list. Chock-full inside Cult Leader’s brain. No leftovers. War stops war. The world stops instantly. The passing of End Times. Shit bubbles on concrete. Cult Leader’s body designed by bureaucrats. Cult Leader wades through pornographic material. Her mouth slavers. White sunshine flickers. CUT TO: EXT. HOSPITAL ROOFTOP - MOMENTS LATER. The skyline. NYC in the distance. The sun behind the NYC. Magnificent rays between gaps of the buildings. Cult Leader’s arms over the ledge of the rooftop. A lit cigarette between her fingers. People on the far side of the roof. Cult Leader ignores them. More drags from her cigarette. Cult Leader pauses, exhales, draws again, then flicks the cigarette from her fingers. The cigarette falls and spindles in slow motion. It hits the bitumen below. The cigarette sparks as it hits the ground. Cult Leader watches it the whole way down. Cult Leader looks up. One last look at NYC. Figures of three men go past the camera. Physical objects extend in space-time. Half-smoked joints. No joy inside the hospital. Glass windows, calmness, moonlight, ambulance sirens. Cult Leader slides off her chair. Slowly. She talks on the telephone. She pulls gloves from her coat. She works her hair in front of the mirror. An orderly punches her. Shadowboxing from behind. Cult Leader turns to the orderly. They discuss relativity and quantum mechanics. Cult Leader has no idea if it’s a dream. She enjoys her role.
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simon graham

GAME THEORY by Simon Graham

May 6, 2018

For a time I dated a girl who was also an orphan. It was really great at first, us being orphans together. We had no responsibilities or allegiances, and we had plenty of money.

Sarah and I used our money to play games. I liked games because they stopped me thinking about doing what I had done prior to dating Sarah, which was putting my body against hot surfaces. I had done this because it made me stop thinking about being an orphan and because there are very few fun games to play on your own.

Sarah liked games as well. She didn’t have a problem with burning herself, but she did have a problem with depriving herself. That was what she called it. She said, I like playing games because when I’m playing them I forget that I’m meant to be depriving myself.

I have a theory that all orphans like games.

One game Sarah and I played was called Cat. Sarah came up with it. In this game, Sarah moved first, and her first move was buying a cat. My first move was telling Sarah that I’m allergic to cats.

Sarah’s second move was insisting the cat sleep with us in the bed. My second move was getting hives all over my body, even my genitals.

Sarah’s next move was naming the cat after a serial killer from the 1980’s.

She was an orphan, Sarah said.

My response was refusing to use the name because it was in bad taste. I called her Cat instead.

Sarah’s next move was yelling at me.

How is A_____ not an appropriate name? She yelled after Cat brought home a decapitated bird.

The next day I placed an anonymous tip with the real estate that there was a cat in Unit 3.

The real estate slipped a letter under our door. It read: You have two weeks to rid the apartment of all pets or, as per Section 45c of the code, you will be evicted.

I thought this was such a good move, but Sarah had a brilliant counter up her sleeve. Her move was telling me that Cat had become part of the family and so we had no choice but to move apartments. The reason this was a game-winning move was because it led the game of Cat into the new game of Moving, and this was the ideal – for there to never be a gap of time in between games, no gap of time in which I would think of hot surfaces or in which Sarah would think, I better make up for the past month of not depriving myself by depriving myself twice as much as I normally would.  

~

A few months later Sarah and I played a game called Guidance. The idea of this game was that Sarah and I would both pay to receive guidance from someone who gave it for a living.

Guidance came about because one morning after not sleeping all night Sarah said, I think we need serious help.

We can’t just play games forever, she said, and I will deprive myself if we are not playing games, and maybe even if we are.

At the time we were playing a game called Drugs. The end of the Moving game had led us to meeting our new neighbours. They were playing the Drugs game and so taught us how to play it too.

It was a good game at first. Like, really good. But it had become a bad game. It was repetitive and demanded so much of us. It seemed like there would be no winner to the game, no end.

We just need a new game, I said to Sarah. I get it. This Drugs game is getting old.

Let’s go to a therapist, Sarah said.

I said, That doesn’t sound very fun. That sounds like the opposite of fun.

It’s not supposed to be fun, she said. It’s not a game.

I said, How about we compromise by turning us getting guidance into a game?

I’m not sure, Sarah said at first, but after a day she came around because she knew that compromise is integral to all relationships, and also because part of Sarah was scared of what would happen should she stop playing games.

For Guidance, Sarah filled a hat full of names of people in our town who gave guidance for a living. There was a rabbi, a pastor, an analyst, a psychic, a yogi, et cetera. Sarah picked out a priest. I picked out a clairvoyant.

I had no idea what a clairvoyant actually did and so I thought, Guidance is a fun game, full of surprise and intrigue.

But I was very disappointed by Guidance. Let me tell you why.

First of all, the clairvoyant’s eyebrows didn’t move and she made me pay upfront.

Second of all, the clairvoyant’s first move was too bold. Games are meant to start subtle and then escalate. Her move was staring into my eyes for a long time. Like twenty minutes, or maybe even longer.

The clairvoyant then played more moves, it apparently being okay in Guidance for one person to just play as many moves as they like while the other player sits in silence and watches.

Most of the clairvoyant’s moves involved saying things about me that could apply to anyone.

She said, for example, that our galaxy is in a spiritual period known as Kali Yuga.

She said, It is a time marked by evil and impurities.

I said, That sounds about right.

She said, I think you’re feeling these energies in a very acute way.

I said, Well sure, who isn’t?

She said, Times of destruction can lead to true freedom.

I asked, Is that what the next game will be? Freedom?

She said, Our time has run out.

Guidance is a very strange game, I thought on the way home from the clairvoyant. I didn’t understand why people found it so fun. I didn’t understand why so many people had been playing it for thousands of years. I knew I had only been playing the game for one day, but I couldn’t help feel like there weren’t enough rules.

At home, I asked Sarah whether she was enjoying Guidance, she having seen her priest that day as well.

Sarah said, I like Guidance. It is a fun game.

I said, It seems like anyone can play Guidance. It seems like some people have been playing it forever and are still not very good at it but think they are.

Sarah said, The priest told me I should stop playing all other games and just play Guidance. He said my next move in Guidance should be getting sober.

I said, It’s not a game if someone else decides your moves for you.

Sarah said, Maybe Guidance isn’t a game.

~

I didn’t like where Guidance was headed. I wanted to play a different game, but I knew that this is not how games work. A game had to end on its own, or turn into another game, the way Cat turned into Moving and Moving into Drugs and Drugs into Guidance.

Sarah went again to the church to play Guidance with the priest. She came back and said I was wrong, there were rules to Guidance, and then she handed me a tome of rules, rules that seemed to be irrelevant not just to the game but to our place and time.

It was an awful game, this Guidance. There was either no rules or too many. But I was in a real pickle because I wanted to spend time with Sarah and yet she all she was doing with her time was playing Guidance.

I did some thinking and came up with five options:

  1. Suck it up and play Guidance with Sarah (Boring).
  2. Think about hot surfaces again (Terrifying, not an option).
  3. Play Guidance with someone else (Boring and also likely to make me feel very sad as not with Sarah, leading then to 2. Terrifying, not an option).
  4.  Playing a different game with someone else (Maybe not boring but still likely to make me feel very sad as not with Sarah, leading then to 2. Terrifying, not an option).
  5. Find a game to play by myself (See 4.).

I nonetheless tried 4. and 5. to ensure they did in fact lead to 2.

I went to the neighbors’ house and asked what they were doing. They said they were playing Drugs. I said, Do you mind if I join?

They said, Not at all.

So I played Drugs with them for a while, until they both played the move of passing out.

Then I played the game of Drugs with myself for a while. For whatever reason, I hadn’t realised until that moment that Drugs was a game you could play on your own. How good it would have been to play Drugs before I met Sarah?

It was a lot of fun, playing Drugs on my own. I thought, I can do this. I can play this game forever. But then, no. Not forever. For one night. Or maybe two. I tried two. After the second night I realised that people don’t play Drugs by themselves because it quickly stops being a game. It becomes like hot surfaces and depriving yourself in that you need to play a new game in order to stop thinking about it.

It was then I told Sarah that I was having a really hard time. I said, I keep thinking about hot surfaces, Sarah. I need to play a game.

So Sarah said, Well come down and play Guidance with the priest and I tomorrow.

I thought about my options. About hot surfaces. About the importance of us being orphans together. I looked at Cat and then turned to Sarah and said, Guidance sounds like a great idea.

~

So that’s how Sarah and I came to play Guidance for seven years.

It was a long time to be playing the same game. It was boring for the most part. There were no real surprises anymore, us having both memorised the rules, the moves, the strategies.

Sometimes I wanted to play Drugs again. Or Moving. Or even Cat (Cat died). But mainly Drugs. Each time I thought this, Sarah would remind me that Drugs is only fun for a day or two and I would nod and say, Yes, Sarah. You’re right.

Sarah was fine with Guidance being boring because she thought the next game would be Paradise. She said it’s a small sacrifice to play this boring game when the next will be so much fun.

We can play Paradise with our parents, she said. Imagine that. Can you just imagine?

I imagined. Sarah and I spent hours lying in bed together, imagining. Sometimes I would joke that the game we were playing should be called Imagine not Guidance, but Sarah would look at me very sternly and say, That is the kind of thinking that will stop us from playing Paradise.

It makes me sad to think about Sarah saying this now. Mainly because she was wrong. The next game was not Paradise. After the car accident, Guidance definitely ended, but the next game, the game I’m playing right now, has no Sarah and no parents. It can’t be Paradise.

I’m not sure what to call this game. Maybe Floating. Maybe Void. Whatever it’s called, it’s an okay game. There is no Sarah and no parents but there are no hot surfaces either. There is nothing, which now that I think about it means the clairvoyant was the closest to being right. I feel free. Completely free.

That’s a good name. Free.

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LILLY AND THE NINE-TOED WOMAN by Toom Bucksaw

April 27, 2018

Lilly brushed her teeth and saw another woman’s face in the mirror. She stared into her eyes and wished she could ask that woman where the fourth toe of her left foot had gone. Why hadn’t she taken better care of herself? Didn’t she know Lilly would need her toes someday? Lilly pulled her socks on and tried to forgive her.

In the big room Ellis was still sleeping on the floor with his head on the couch. The mechanical blinds on the window were creakily opening and shafts of sunlight were pooling on his face. Lilly didn’t let him sleep with her anymore because he came home late, but most importantly his drunken pratfalls into bed forced her to wake up and become accustomed to the weird way her sheets rested on a body that wasn’t her own once more before going back to sleep. He’d been more of a roommate than a boyfriend since the operation anyway.

Lilly crossed the big room and slid her card in her reward kiosk.

“Congratulations,” it said. “Thirty three point three repeating chips have been awarded to your account. Check back tomorrow at sunrise for fresh new chips. Tomorrow, the sun will rise at six thirty one A.M. Today’s temperature is fifty six degrees. Would you like a receipt?”

She couldn’t change the volume on this model, not that she cared to. Ellis stirred, like he did every morning; his breathing was shallower now and less rhythmic and she knew that she’d woken him up. Lilly was glad he had enough sense to play dead until she left. She allowed the kiosk printer to work loudly at a nine and a half inch receipt covered in full-color advertisements. The price of the ink was worth Ellis’s furrowed brow.

Lilly rode the mover to work and waded through that same gauntlet of obligated empathy and “if you need anything call me” eyes that had lined the path to her cubicle since the operation and showed no sign of abating. Her new photo I.D. still wasn’t scanning right at the check-in. She pulled out her old I.D. with her old face on it and the guard waved her through.

She was once the fastest typist in her department. The clacking of keys from her cubicle used to be the centerpiece of her floor; two years ago her secret santa had given her an extremely loud keyboard and when its keys rang out from her desk her coworkers were not annoyed but proud that they should share a floor with such an efficient worker. Now the nine-toed woman’s fat, dumb fingers had cost the company 1,325.638 chips in typos and clerical errors. She typed as quietly as she could so no one could hear how slowly she did it.

She typed so slowly that her mind wandered and filled the gaps between each keystroke. She thought mostly of when she was taller, thinner and whiter and of when Ellis slept beside her, and she pretended that he’d embrace her when she got home, pretended he’d be there at all.

The sun had set on the city when work got out and the mover was crammed with people. Rain pounded the street and drenched the commuters on this unenclosed section of the mover. Lilly stood under someone’s balcony out of the rain and swiped through the faces of the single men she shared this metropolis with. She’d been fielding these digital men for a little while now, about as long as Ellis had been sleeping in the big room, and to her disappointment she’d realized that as long as she shared rent with the only man she wanted and allowed him to eat from her refrigerator, she’d always want him.

Lately, there’d been one possible exception.

“You free tonight? Would love to finally meet,” Brandon messaged her. Her phone vibrated and with it her entire being. Brandon had started an acquaintance with her shortly after she’d made her profile, and he was the only one whose messages she watched for. He was everything she could have hoped for in a man she met through a chat box. He didn’t come on strong and most of all he didn’t tell her how much he “loved Mexican”. She’d been told the nine-toed woman was Bolivian, anyway.

She smiled at Brandon that night in the dim light of a mediterranean place Ellis had taken her once when he had had money. “Now that’s what I like to see,” he said. “Do it again.” She couldn’t help but smile again, and laugh as she hadn’t since the time when she’d had her own ten toes to walk on. “The way your lips curl when you smile.” He closed his eyes and did that kissing motion with his fingers she supposed French chefs did when they see a great soufflé .

She told Brandon about her job and how the nine-toed woman’s ten fat fingers had ruined her prestige. He laughed, but his laughter died quickly. He asked what else bothered her about her body. She told him about her missing fourth toe, and when he asked her what had happened to it she told him they didn’t tell her things like that. “Don’t you ever wonder?” he asked, his face wrinkling oddly in a charged confusion. The expression caught her off guard. She made an ambivalent expression that involved a shrug, raised eyebrows and a shake of the head and thought she saw some curious shade fall over him, but it was gone as soon as she noticed it.

Brandon ate and Lilly watched his jaws grind his food into paste. Handsome, handsomer than Ellis maybe. Ellis’s mind-life insurance certainly wouldn’t cover a body with such a strong chin, at least. A man could sell a chin like that and live pretty well. He was nice, perhaps overly so, but there are worse things to be, she thought, and you can’t buy nice the same way you can buy a better chin. She traced his eyes as he ate and when he went to the restroom she smiled only for herself, feeling her lips curl the way Brandon liked and for the first time finding herself liking it too.

Ellis was gone when she led Brandon through the kitchen and into the big room, the front door sliding itself shut behind her. Some mechanism misfired as it always did during the locking routine and some metal clanged inside the door. The sound was loud enough to wake her up most mornings when Ellis came stumbling through, but tonight she hardly heard it.

She could already feel his hands on her. At dinner she’d looked over each of his fingers from tip to knuckle and couldn’t help but see the monetary value inherent to their beauty. She imagined herself like a greedy cartoon character, some oil tycoon or gold prospector, archaic dollar signs flickering in her eyes, wanting to feel that monetary value inside her, as if it would somehow increase her own.

The door to her bedroom malfunctioned and beeped at her. She leaned her back against the stubborn door and smiled through a sigh. Brandon caught up with her and her body, not anyone else’s, was pinned between the heat of Brandon and the deep space chill of the metal door and it was her body, not anyone else’s, that became increasingly exposed as the clothing she concealed it under fell to the floor piece by piece.

His fingers crept along her outline and they kissed under the flickering tubes in her ceiling. His touch made her feel expensive. He caressed the curves of her “budget” 700,000 chip body the way Ellis had caressed the body of the woman she’d been before. That woman seemed alien to her now. She’d feared that using another woman’s body to have sex would feel strange, wrong, or possibly like some twisted late-capitalist form of rape, but it was just the opposite. Feeling Brandon inside her, knowing he was there only because she was exactly who she was, made that body, finally, miraculously, her own.

When they finished, they laid against the couch Lilly usually found Ellis dangling off of in the morning and stared at the soft blinking lights on the reward kiosk across the room. Brandon talked more about the place he went on holidays, out west where the mover didn’t reach and you could even see stars if the moon was new. He showed her a picture on his phone of the perfect blue water you could rent a room beside. She pinched her fingers on the screen and enlarged the image to see a fisherman on the lake.

The utter solitude of that figure stirred something in her chest; she wanted immediately for Brandon to take her there, onto the water, where they could float on the waves of that blue mirror and be near no one but themselves. How little she knew about this man meant nothing to her. She knew enough. She knew that he was Brandon, that he wanted her, and that the fisherman was calling to her from across time.

She swiped the image aside and saw another much like it. This time the focus of the picture was on the snowcapped mountains that cut across the sky. Brandon reached for the phone, but she moved it away from his grasp.

She swiped again. A picnic blanket, with sandwiches on paper plates, spread across sand.

At first she didn’t notice it, but as her eyes crawled along the pixels that made up the enchanting image of rural bliss, they tripped over an object of singular Wrongness, a chaotic thing impinging upon the scene of rustic tranquility Lilly had never known. It was her own maimed foot.

Brandon snatched at the phone and ripped it out of her hand, muttering some curse under his breath. Her flesh dragged across the screen, sliding the photo and revealing a portrait of her own pudgy, olive face, her hair lightly tossed in the lake-blown breeze. She looked happy. She did a better job with her make-up than Lilly could.

She could only confront the face of the nine-toed woman for a moment before the screen went black and Brandon thrust the phone into his pocket. He stood shirtless putting on his belt. Lilly watched him from the floor, her reclaimed sense of self nothing but a foolish sex-fueled lark now in the tightening prison of Other flesh. “What was my name?” she asked.

Brandon pulled his shirt over his head and paused, his mouth hanging open. He shook his handsome head and started across the big room toward the door.

There was a pounding on the metal. “Lilly,” Ellis slurred from beyond it, “unlock this shit.”

Brandon opened the door using the terminal and Ellis tumbled through it, immediately falling onto the kitchen floor, not taking any note of the man in his way. The door slid shut and Brandon’s footsteps faded down the hall. Lilly lay naked on the big room floor, listening to Ellis breathe against the grubby kitchen tile and felt a shred of intimacy sharing the floor with him, however far away. She thought about the lake and her hair blowing in its wind as if it were a memory and looked around at the things that didn’t belong to her, the reward kiosk ready to distribute another woman’s chips, the refrigerator stocked with another woman’s food, another woman’s ex-lover sleeping in the dirt of another woman’s sloven apartment. Some cluster of cells in her wanted to run after Brandon and tell him it didn’t matter what her name was, that she would be whoever he wanted her to be, as long as he would have her, but she couldn’t be sure if those were another woman’s desires.

She let him disappear along the mover and stayed there somewhere inside the nine-toed woman, wondering if two halves made a whole.

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“LIVEBLOG” EXCERPT by Megan Boyle

April 23, 2018

MARCH 27, 2013

1:20AM: going to change up the game. really. um. this is really going to happen. so, in grad school, my dad and his friend motivated themselves to finish their dissertations by agreeing to mail one $100 check to the nixon administration for every day late.

so.

here is what i must do by tomorrow 12AM, this is my ‘dissertation:’

-return attorney’s phone call about accident settlement i’m receiving

-write and print cover letter at library

-mail apartment application binder

-mail book packages

-call dad about getting keys to storage unit thursday

-refill birth control

-pack one box

-shower

-drink kale smoothie

here is what happens if i fail to complete ONE of these tasks, this is my ‘nixon fund:’

when i receive the accident settlement, i will have 50% of the bills printed and set them on fire in a trash can.

the settlement—the last i’ve heard—is slightly more than what i had in my savings account this fall.

i don’t want to talk about how long it took to spend. the sum of money, without 50% of its bills destroyed, is enough to ‘start being a person again,’ for a comfortable, in my view, amount of time, as i settle into a job, a more stable routine, a life that allows me to envision a future for myself, less commas, etc.

the stakes are very high. these are very high stakes.

OH SHIT I HAVE TO ADD A STAKE, HEIGHTENED SHORT-TERM STAKE, SO YOU WILL KNOW ABOUT THE LONG-TERM THING IN CASE I STOP LIVEBLOGGING BEFORE THE LONG-TERM THING—

if i fail to complete any task on the list, i will post a picture of my naked ass ‘as is’ on this liveblog. oh, that’s nothing, you say? you say this is mere child’s play?

THE ASS CHEEKS WILL BE SPREAD.

now i know people tend to enjoy pictures of women’s asses. most people. or. i guess most people would find the pictures interesting, at least. some people, not most people. okay. but consider this: i have my period, so if i fail to shower…that’s all. just consider this. i’m sorry in advance. now you will be rooting for me maybe.

i am dreading this so hard and i am so excited. so excited about dreadful tomorrow. such high stakes. jesus. i’m completely serious about both of these things. if i fail to complete the tasks and fail to complete my punishments, any person has the right to kill me. this is my will, i’m saying this, this can be legally binding: if i ever end up murdered by a person, i am hereby decreeing it ‘not their fault,’ if that does anything—i do not want them to be punished. i wouldn’t want that anyway. but. just so the world knows, if it makes any difference—if they killed me it would be less like ‘murder’ and more like ‘performing a civic duty.’

i’m not kidding. i know this sounds funny or whatever but i’m not kidding. GOODNIGHT, INTERNET. LOOK OUT.

FOR TOMORROW.

BABY’S DAY OUT TOMORROW. A REAL B.D.O. TOMORROW, B.D.O. OF MONUMENTAL PROPORTIONS. TAKING MYSELF TO…TOWN. MAKING MYSELF THE MAYOR. OF THE TOWN. THERE IS A TOWN, BY THE WAY. WHEN EX-BOYFRIEND AND MOM ARE AWAY THE SHITHEAD COMES OUT TO PLAY. UFF. TRY AND MESS. B.D.O. 2013.

SIGNING OFF,

YOUR LITTLE BITCHES FOREVER,

LEGALLY BINDINGLY YOURS,

ME AND DUNKIN DONUTS COFFEE CUP

6:04AM: this is not off to a good start. sometimes if i’m alone and i’m supposed to be going to sleep i get ‘the fear.’ big reveal thing: i slept in my parents’ bed at least once a week until i was maybe 12 years old. if i wasn’t sleeping in their bed, they let me sleep on a sleeping bag on the floor. when i was a baby i would cry and not sleep. when i got older i wouldn’t cry but still couldn’t sleep. remember watching ‘mash’ re-runs and infomercials on the couch around age 8, with the volume low so my parents wouldn’t hear.

remember there being ‘events.’ after giving up/giving in to me, parents would be like, ‘maybe we’ll try to make megan sleep in her bed again, wanna try again meg?’ i’d be like ‘yeah let’s do this.’ they’d be like ‘okay, how about the fifth of july?’

this is the routine that needed to be established for me to fall asleep in my bed:

  1. say goodnight to all my ‘friends’ (in my memory there was like, a wall of stuffed animals almost, filling half of my bed)
  2. either parent reads three storybooks
  3. mom improvises a few stories with magical undertones
  4. dad sits on the floor by bed and we meditate until i’m sleeping

when i was 12 or 13 my parents gave me a portable TV and i’d watch the home shopping network in bed. think that’s part of why i like ASMR videos, would experience ASMR looking at HSN. have never told anyone all of this to the extent i’m typing it now, i think—that it was a rare occasion for me to sleep in my bed. i was a scared little asshole.

tonight i felt ‘the fear.’ ‘the fear’ causes me to do ritual/preparation-like things. i don’t feel it as much anymore, after living alone for three and a half years, but sometimes if there’s a small change i still feel it. i didn’t do the thing where i check all the places another person can be tonight. here is what happened:

STAGE 1: VAGUE FOREBODING SHIT

-peed, replaced tampon. saw roach on my conditioner and thought ‘this doesn’t bode well. the bugs have returned. it’s on my conditioner, like what i’ll use tomorrow. should i kill it?’ then i could see its head being separate from its body, like it had a little neck or something. seemed hard to kill.-washed face and brushed teeth while feeling the first stages of ‘the fear’ where i’m like, just looking around differently. looking at things more carefully.-ate 1mg xanax, via ‘it’ll lessen [something] about dying.’-refreshed dry cat food and gave them wet food thinking ‘if i die tonight they will have enough to eat until ex-boyfriend returns.’-rubbed experimental ‘nighttime lotion’ on face and neck. think a parent gave it to me. this felt like ‘a protective ritual.’-made bed and brushed crumbs/debris stuff off the sheet. this was just for fun.-dressed in cherry-printed pajama pants given to me by former baltimore neighbor/co-worker, current close friend and ‘will always be one of my favorite people who i love and aspire to be like in some way’ person, chelsea. was going to leave on shirt i was wearing today, which chelsea also has and bought before we knew each other, then thought: ‘no. it will be too perfect: ‘she died wearing the clothes of someone she wished she was more like,’ then it’ll definitely happen.’ in the past i’ve thought i could increase probability of airplane landing safely if i’d listen to weird al or other unrealistic music to die to.-applied protective clothing layer: long-sleeved shirt ex-boyfriend bought the day of his 2010 baltimore reading, when he stayed the night at my apartment and we had fun platonic fun all night and the next day.

STAGE 2: PLAN DEFENSE AND FLEE

-tried different lighting schemes. the best lighting to let someone know there is a person inside, ready to attack. fussing with lighting is what kicked me into stage 2, where i actually start imagining scenarios where i’ll be confronted with the thing that’s going to ‘get me.’-gathered all knives and scissors and placed them under pillow (however, this means if whatever has come to ‘get me’ hasn’t brought a weapon, which it would’ve, i feel, it’d have to find even scarier and probably more painful blunt objects to use to kill me. like, technically anything in here could kill me). i have sharp things ready, because i think i’d be better at stabbing than clobbering or [who knows].-stowed car keys and phone under other pillow.-in stage 2 i have locked the bedroom door, but. i don’t know. undecided on this one tonight. i want cats to be able to roam freely around apartment, maybe sleep near me.

STAGE 3: WAIT IT OUT

-you just wait it out. that’s all you do. either you’re awake all night or you beat it.

getting sleepy. alvie is acting especially jumpy, pacing and chirping. does not bode well. told myself i’d better be sleeping before it was light outside and now it’s looking bluer out there goddamnit. actually though, this is good, because now i have more visibility out my window. earlier when it was darker, i ‘knew’ the face from ‘suspiria’ was on the other side of my curtains. goosebumps looking for picture of face, like, entire google image search, even now, thinking about looking at it.

fear seems manageable tonight. it helped to type this, like now i’m processing faster because i moved stuff to my external hard drive. drinking coconut water. shirley is here. about to sleep, sun is up, okay. ‘you got this.’ B.D.O. tomorrow.

2:55PM: had set alarm for 1PM. not boding well. B.D.O. got a mean case of the not-boding-wells. drinking yesterday’s dunkin donuts coffee. so far i woke, which i guess is more than what i was expecting i’d do today, last night, so...no that’s setting the bar low.

3:28PM: finally answered phone to tell telemarketers to stop calling. so. that was not on the list of things i want to accomplish today but it should’ve been. going to shower and make smoothie now. *NOTIFICATION: THIS WILL BE THE LAST TIME I SAY ‘GOING TO DO      ,’ BECAUSE BOY DOES THAT EVER MAKE ME NOT WANT TO DO THINGS.

4:43PM: woman is yelling ‘fuck you you dumbass bitch, you stupid ass ho’ out window. man is yelling in return. would’ve been cool if i’d had an expensive microphone when we moved in, so i could’ve been keeping an audio scrapbook of the sounds of 4th and jefferson. last night around 3:30AM a rooster was crowing. it continued until i went to my bedroom a little before 6AM. imagine: a rooster, somewhere out there in the expansive wasteland of a dark philadelphia morning. philly sucks man.

kale smoothie: made and drank that shit. -1 shitter from that list.

thought, while scooping out cantaloupe seeds ‘…with the strength to open melons with a butter knife, the agility of a blender on ice, and the brute force of a thousand butter sticks, megan [discontinued thought].’ heard blender about to fall and ran from toilet to avert a famed ‘tao lin smoothie disaster of instagram proportions’ (didn’t even wipe) (serious about averting that disaster) (disaster averted).

called attorney. he’s calling tomorrow with new settlement offer. after that mom and i could go to court, to get more money. the guy who hit us doesn’t have to pay, it’s all corporations, so. i don’t know. i don’t really care. court seems hard.

assembled packages to mail. not going to make it to post office before they close. will have to fed-ex everything. fuck it, that’s good. the post office would’ve. stalled. because i need fed-ex for the real estate thing anyway.

i put stickers on two envelopes ‘for good luck’ and rubbed them in a ‘special secret pattern,’ thinking of the part in ‘me and you and everyone we know’ where she touches the neon dots on her steering wheel.

horn honked twice and a man said ‘hey. i love you. mucho. peace’ as car drove away.

have responded to more emails per capita than like, ever, i think. four responses so far without spending 15- 90 minutes on them. proud of me. baby’s fucking day out.

answered another telemarketer. taking this shit out.

baby’s fucking. gonna take this shower. take this shower out. fucking. i want a cigarette first. thought ‘no, you can smoke when you’re dead.’

no i need the small reward of smoking right now.

so happy i didn’t add ‘quit smoking’ to my punishment if i don’t get shit done today. i was about to do that. it would be hard to live in a world with a nasty photo of my ass on the internet, not enough money to start being a person again, and without the small reward of smoking.

small rewards: only way things happen.

6:01PM: if i have enough time i want to eat a molly to write a draft of my ‘cover letter.’ (the letter basically just has to say: i’m a nice person, i’m responsible, i have had jobs before, there are jobs i would like to have in your area, nursing home jobs, i want to help old people dress themselves and eat because they are as close to death as me and i understand feeling that and wanting help, i am going places) (the letter has seemed hard to write because i feel like i can’t just say those things, i have to like…prove myself…by vaguely…just writing vaguely). would be good for perspective, maybe, to have ‘on molly’ letter and ‘toned down’ letter. seems hilarious: ‘two-years-jobless woman with emotional problems takes molly to help her write vaguely-worded letter recommending herself as apartment building tenant.’

molly-eating might be destructive. fed-ex and library close at 9PM. shower has not been taken but don’t you worry, i have ideas about how to conserve precious shower-time.

responded to another email. seems important, to keep this ‘email streak’ going. fucking taking it out.

6:14PM: just took out another telemarketer. his name was chris. fucking told chris. he will not soon forget that polite request to take a phone number off a list.

who gave my number to a website where…these health insurance people call you? did i do that, somehow?

6:37PM: took that fucking shower out. here was my secret: i never said i had to wash my hair! OH NO! OH NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!! that foreboding roach on that conditioner bottle last night—how little did it know about how much it would bode!!!!!!!!

‘boding’ seems to be an integral aspect of ‘baby’s day out’

i am using ‘boding’ loosely…or…um…think it’s just fun to say it…things boding well…my decisions being influenced by ‘boding’…being a bode daddy…

thought of a good insult: i wouldn’t fuck him with your tampon

shit just re-read list, i forgot about refilling birth control, CVS will still be open i hope SHIT

6:47PM: wearing black flats with twinkly gemstone decorations on the toes. check out fucking twinkle toes over here. baby’s day out with the twinkle toes over here. boding all over the place. boding everywhere, in all directions, out of control boding. twinkling it up.

6:53pm: I’m stalling, shit. Why do I stall like this. Pay attention to your stalling Boyle.

6:58pm: drove past a dead kennedys-looking guy crossing street lighting a cigarette as I was lighting a cigarette. Better believe I head-checked.

7:00pm: sometimes smoking cigarettes feels physically horrible. pulled into CVS parking lot.

7:04pm: the pharmacist said my address. I said ‘yup, that’s the one’ like how Alex Trebek said ‘trout: that’s the fish.’ I don’t have any refills left. Shit. Does this count? Shit…doctor’s office closes at 5pm. Did not account for ‘no refill’ variable. Shit. I don’t know if this counts yet. I think it doesn’t, I didn’t know.

7:08pm: not going to eat the Molly. Molly-eating does not bode well. Driving to library.

7:10pm: want to watch a YouTube compilation of cars making outrageously unnecessary k-turns.

7:15PM: took picture of sky while waiting for parking meter kiosk to print receipt. stood on a cement fixture for a better view. man’s voice from behind me said ‘beautiful, isn’t it.’ he was an old man, maybe in a uniform. i said ‘yeah, look at all the colors.’ after i said ‘colors’ he turned his head to look at me.

8:13PM: at library. eyes got watery as hell typing this: ‘My family has generously offered to continue supporting me, but I want Beach View Apartments to be the place I launch my new independent life—I want Rockaway Park to be my home for years to come.’

how did i write it. i mean it, but…it looks vulnerable, phrased that way. i feel so fake writing cover letter-type things. that weird subtext of ‘if the person reading this suspects i’m writing to influence their decision, which is my only reason for writing this, i will sound disingenuous.’

9:14pm: sometimes hearing snippets of an argument between men who don’t seem to know each other. Suspenseful ass coin dispensing process on library printer.

Discovered 24 hour FedEx hell yeah.

Sat in car, emotionally assembling liveblog manuscript in folder formerly containing lease/apartment building application, given to me by Colin.

Walked to park by American-looking museum buildings. Started walking vaguely in direction of FedEx. Lit a cigarette while looking somewhere in the distance. Thought ‘proud American moment. America.’ Realized I didn’t know where I was walking and had left phone with directions on it in car. Proud American moment. America: I think I live here.

Do people know when I’m not being serious…

Walking to FedEx. Just passed a man dragging a heavy garbage bag. Would like to say ‘we did a modest mutual head-check,’ but it was more like ‘which one of us is going to hurt the other one, uh oh’

9:26pm: walked a little more then saw welcoming lights of 24 hour FedEx.

9:47pm: wandered around FedEx. Stood at a counter. Another wandering woman stood ‘competitively’ beside me. A man with a ponytail did things to a machine in a vaguely employees-only area. Wandering woman wandered somewhere and I didn’t see her again. A woman with a nametag that said ‘Lulu’ approached. She said ‘I can help you over here,’ not moving her eyebrows much. I non-laid-back-ly said ‘oh great thanks, thank you.’ Followed her to a shipping counter she stood behind. ‘I could see you walking around over there, lookin like that,’ she said. ‘Oh heh, yeah I was doing that,’ I said. Since entering, it’d occurred to me that they might not ship 24 hours. I said ‘shit, is it too late to ship things?’ Lulu made a face like. Um. Lulu was being this way to me like how I would be to honestly confused customers. Like, pleasantly surprised that a person would come in who didn’t think they knew all the answers. I was happy to be that person, the not-knowing-all-the-answers-already person, for Lulu.

I started to give Lulu the two envelopes I was holding. She said ‘you don’t need to buy that, we can just do this part for free’ and placed two puffy white FedEx envelopes between us. I said ‘oh. Oh yeah, well that would be great, thanks. The other ones, yeah, no good.’ She smiled in her no-eyebrows-moving Lulu way, looking mostly at a computer.

She told me to fill out forms and left me alone to do that. The moment after I’d finished, she returned. Noticed her pastel blue nail polish was similar to my mint green, but her nails looked manicured. I wanted to say something about this, like something you would say, like, ‘springtime: time for nails,’ but couldn’t think of a normal-person thing like that to say. Lulu said ‘I’m cold, it’s cold in here, isn’t it?’ I nodded big and said ‘yeah it is, it’s really cold in here. And I bet for you…yeah, your short sleeves, man.’ I didn't think it was cold. Somehow this did not sound awkward.

Lulu processed the packages and asked me questions. When I answered it felt like we understood something about the customer-employee dynamic, like ‘no one really knows what’s going on, we have to say these words that someone faraway at FedEx invented. We are the people between FedEx and the things we want.’ Like I was thinking ‘I want this to be mailed but I don’t care how and I don’t know what’s going to happen when I leave’ and Lulu was thinking ‘I am at work and things about this place are normal to me; maybe ideally I’d be doing something else, but right now I’m helping this person, I know how to help them and after I do my job I don’t know what’s going to happen.’

Lulu said ‘I’m gonna close it now’ about my envelope. I said ‘oh great, thanks. Yeah, it would’ve been like ‘oh no, big mistake’ if it was closed and the wrong package.’ Rested my eyes on a box behind the counter with ‘IRONLUNG’ printed on the side in large letters. Lulu said ‘okay you can pay now.’ I grabbed the phone, thinking it was the credit card swiping device. Lulu laughed and said ‘no, you give the card to me.’ I laughed a little and handed her my card as I said ‘I thought, you know. It looks like one of those things.’ She handed me a stapled receipt but didn’t let go. I watched the receipt and nodded while she said when the packages would arrive in other places, something about a tracking number, going online. Then she let me take the receipt. I smiled, said ‘thank you so much’ as I walked to the door, studiously looking at the receipt without reading it. I stopped and turned to face where Lulu now stood, in the middle of the store. I said ‘wait, don’t I have to sign?’ She laughed and said ‘no that’s it.’ I smiled like a big idiot and said ‘thanks’ as I exited FedEx, feeling mildly like Judd Nelson at the end of ‘the Breakfast Club,’ raising his hand triumphantly with Molly Ringwald’s earring in his ear as the frame freezes before the credits.

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eilot tuerie

CUCK by Eîlot Tuerie

April 20, 2018

I have had sex in a church with a girl who lied that she was under the age of consent. I have tied someone up and left them on my bed while I had sex with someone else. I have had sex with three different people at different times on the same day. I have had sex with someone whose eyes watered as she remained perfectly still on the floor of my girlfriend’s living room. I had sex with someone who hadn’t had sex in such a long time that she bled all over the dining room rug. I have cut off someone’s hair and used it to whip them until they bruised. I was arrested for interfering in an arrest and during my stay in the holding cell was solicited by a Mexican transsexual prostitute to whom I gladly gave my number; two weeks later, the charges were dropped, but the prostitute never called. At thirteen, I had sex for the first time; I got her pregnant. I have been responsible for at least one abortion each decade I have been sexually active. I have had sex with a woman who let me put out my cigarettes on her tits. I had sex with someone who came so many times her limbs went numb and she passed out. I have never done heroin. I have had simulated sex with the carcass of opossum. I have had sex in a cave with a girl my best friend wanted. I have never had sex with a Scientologist. At times, I feel impulsive: I have had sex with numerous people I just met. I had sex with my sister; we enjoyed ourselves very much but decided not to have sex again. I discovered The Joy of Sex and a vibrator in a drawer beside my mother’s bed. As far as sex is possible, at eight, I got involved with the girl next door; we’d pretend we were in a rocket ship leaving earth at the precise moment the planet was ending, then, at that moment, we had sex; or, she’d pretend she was walking home and I would attack her; her mother caught on and told us we weren’t permitted to play in the house; when we tried to have sex behind the chimney on the side of her house, an older boy saw us, ran over, and accused us of having sex; we never got together again. When I encounter an old man or an old woman, I wonder what their sex life was like when they were young. I have had sex in a closet only once. I have had sexual fantasies about my stepfather but not about my stepmother. I often have fantasies about having sex with the people with whom I work. I cannot have sex if the bed is making noise. The first time I was invited to a bondage party, I pierced the host six times across his perineum while he was fastened to a leather harness suspended from the ceiling, during the last piercing I had sex with his friend, a lesbian, bending her over his suspended body; when I finished, he threatened me, screaming obscenities in several languages; the following week, he visited me at work and asked if I would attend his next party. The last time my mother asked me, “What’s new?” I told her I had fisted a man, she hung up and never spoke to me again. I have had two sexually transmitted diseases: the first, from a nineteen-year-old Jewish girl in summer of 1997; the second, from a 40-something-year-old Korean woman in summer of 2012. I have had sex in a movie theater only once. I have had sex in the daytime in a public garden in Bakersfield. I have had sex in the toilet of a diner in Luang Prabang. I have had sex in a staircase during a citywide blackout. One of sexiest photographs of me in high school shows me wearing Krista Johnson’s cheerleader uniform at the junior- senior girls’ flag football game. After sex, I don’t know how to feel when a woman tells me she is glad I didn’t murder her. I had sex under a catamaran on Maui with a girl with a shaved head who had cancer. I sometimes wonder if Charles, the man who invited me to my first sex party, is dead by now; he had a diamond embedded between his front two teeth and claimed to have had sex with his son. I remember when I was a kid and the local teen pervert, who was maybe five years older than me, would give Kristen and I instructions to get into various sex positions with our clothes on. The desire to have sex with a non-human animal is not strong. What is it about having sex during a riot? I know an artist who meditates on his girlfriend’s vagina to sell paintings. I have had sex with more than one hundred women, I wonder if that’s a few or a lot. I have had sexual fantasies about being fucked by a man with severe burns on his face and body. I have had sexual fantasies about fucking a woman with leprosy. I have used a condom twice. I have masturbated in front of a man. I relate more with the women in porn videos than with the men; I am so attracted to women that I wish I were one. I knew a woman who smoked with her feet. I’m turned on by the taste of alcohol on a woman’s mouth. I have made-out with two people who were HIV+: a woman and a man; I don’t remember their names. I worked for a middle-aged woman confined to a couch; I cleaned her apartment once a week; I used to dust, vacuum, and wash all the rooms: kitchen, bathroom, living room, both bedrooms. Every other week I did laundry, yard work, and occasionally brought her groceries upstairs. In the garage, I used to sniff her underwear. Once, I used her underwear to come before putting them in the wash. Another time, before bringing her clean clothes up, I used her underwear again. My favorite part of a man’s body is his cock, when it’s hard. In the parking lot of the funeral home, I glimpsed my dead mother’s big toe as the funeral director carefully wheeled her upon a gurney into the vestibule. From my bedroom window, I called down to a woman wearing a short skirt who was limping; she came inside, we talked, and, seconds later, we kissed. I have had sex with an amputee. When a woman yawns, I imagine coming in her mouth. For a year, I collected the hair that I found on the bed pillows and bathroom floor of an older, Japanese woman I was seeing. On Coronado Street, in the hospital supply store windows, the mannequins wear nurse outfits with nylons that only go up to the middle of their thighs. Once, to entertain me as I paddled a canoe in a marsh, the woman I was seeing kept opening her legs. I sometimes wonder what happened to Ron, the short, portly, dirty old man who kept me company at the thrift store where I worked and who told me stories about the revolution in Portugal and his threesomes with nurses at the hospital where he worked; he read my palm once and stared at me horrified. Noticing my long hair hanging below my baseball helmet, a man asked my mother if I was a girl. I have gone to many gay bars but I have never gone home with a stranger after meeting them there. I once went home with a man who bought me a donut. I am being courted by a gay man I met on Facebook; I have not yet fantasized about giving him satisfaction. I have a fetish for acne but equally strong is my fetish for women who wear lots of makeup. I knew a girl whose feet would perspire whenever she got turned on. My grandfather later lived with his mistress, who’d become his second wife, and in their recreation room there was a psychedelic poster showing twelve nude couples, each one in a different sexual position, in line with the signs of the zodiac.

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