Short

POSSUM STORY by Kayla Jean

March 18, 2022

We were going to scrape that possum off the road because somebody had to do it. That’s what our Dads said, trucks rattling in neighboring driveways, complaining about the borough workers, asking nobody in particular where their taxes went, if not to cleaning up a dead possum right in the middle of the intersection. The Biology teacher had even joked about dissecting it for class, because it was the intersection right next to the high school and so every student and every teacher saw it, curled up and still in the mornings then somehow more freshly dead in the afternoons.

It was my idea, but I’d only thought of it because I was trying to impress Gina.

“No, no sorry. Maybe I wasn’t clear” Gina said.

A garden shovel dangled from the Walmart cashier’s limp wrist.

“We meant like, one of the orange ones. One for snow shoveling. Wide like.” I spread my hands out past my shoulders.

“In May? Okay well, I’ll go check the back, we might have some left over from last season.”

Behind us, the claw machine was a swirl of hot pinks and bubblegum blues. A carnival song crackled from its speaker.

Gina tore open a bag of peach rings and we yanked them apart with our back molars. I watched her lips suck on the pale yellow underbellies of the candies and wondered, again, how Duck could have ever dumped her for a mousy-looking, furniture modeling sophomore.

We still weren’t clear on the specifics of furniture modeling. Neither of us understood how placing a fifteen-year-old girl next to staged warehouse sectionals made them look any more appealing.  When we talked about it, which was at least twice a day, Gina said it had to be the trashiest modeling job you could get around here, and that was saying something because there were lots of girls modeling bikinis for vape shops.

I reached for another peach ring but Gina rolled the bag up and shoved it in her back pocket.

“I think we’re good for now.” Her tiger-striped belly button ring glinted at me from between her cropped tank top and rolled-up Soffe shorts. She was always yanking food away and making me feel embarrassed for wanting it in the first place.

She’d done it when we were kids, best friends who got our ears pierced together at Claire’s and then shared Auntie Anne’s pretzel nuggets to celebrate. Yanked them to her side of the table and said I was eating too much too fast. And she was doing it now, since we’d reconnected two months ago.

We stopped being best friends in December of fifth grade. From their weather sealed deck, Gina’s family watched as my dad scaled a pine tree in our yard and sawed the top clean off. He said it was our Christmas tree for the year and he didn’t want to hear another word about it. Her dad laughed, gave a thumbs up. Her mom kept a French manicured hand to her mouth. The next day during indoor recess we played M.A.S.H. It was my turn and the game said I’d marry a plumber. The verdict was out on how many kids and whether we’d live in a mansion or a shack. Gina brought up the tree in front of everyone. It’s gaudy, she said, gaudy and trashy. I knew the words weren’t hers. They globbed on the desk like spilled oatmeal, stuck there and burned my cheeks up. What’s gaudy mean? A boy asked. Tacky, she said, proud of herself for remembering her mother’s synonym. And ugly, she added after a pause, that word all her own. I snagged the hall pass, sped walked to the bathroom. After that I was too ashamed to knock on her door anymore and she didn’t seem to miss playing with me.

Then last month, Gina was knocking on my door again, asking for rides to and from school since Duck dumped her. In exchange, she let me borrow Cosmo magazines, taught me about matte lipsticks and bikini waxes, told me my butt looked good in American Eagle jeans, and said I was too smart for any of the guys at school. I lived for those compliments.

 Duck also happened to be in my Physics class. She would pry for information as I drove us home from school, taking the backroads so I could smoke half a Marlboro Gold and shove the other half back into the pack. I strained my ears during Physics and wrote everything Duck said about the furniture model in the margins of my notebook. They got sushi at the mall, they were going to the party at Kandace’s house, he’d found a tie to match her prom dress.

The cashier emerged from the storage room doors thrusting the snow shovel in the air like a splintery trophy.

It was a twenty-minute drive back to the possum. Cherry blossom petals fell onto my windshield like fat, pink snowflakes. Gina’s thighs were splayed out to the sides, the shovel propped on the passenger’s mat in between them. If I squinted and unfocused my eyes just right, it was winter, it was snowing, Gina and I were kids again going to make some money with our shovel. We didn’t know anything of heartbreak or the lengths you go to make it stop.

I’d never dated anyone for as long as Gina dated Duck. Eight months. But in ninth grade, I smoked weed for the first time with Chris and he fingered me so hard in the woods behind the park that it broke my hymen. When he dumped me for a more popular girl I wrote the lyrics to “Cut Here” by the Cure on my arms in Sharpie and hid them under my black long-sleeved shirts. So I did know something of heartbreak, even if it wasn’t as freshly snapped as Gina’s.

Gina passed me our plastic water bottle of Pinnacle Whipped. I gulped and felt her eyes on me and clenched my face muscles so they wouldn’t grimace then handed it back to her.

She took a medium-sized sip and screwed the cap on, paused, opened it again, and took another sip. I wiggled my hand and she handed it back.

She started to flick the window control lever with her index finger, making a thwack-thwack-thwack sound. I turned up the music.

“What the fuck even is this?”

I turned it back down and took another sip.

She kept flicking her finger against the lever. Thwack-thwack-thwack.

The edges of the road smeared like oily pastels. The mud into the spruce, magnolias into the last bit of orange at the base of the sky.

Thwack-thwack-thwack.

Gina was always attempting to rid herself of the pain in pathetic spurts like this.

I’d watched her furiously apply mascara to her top lids like she was trying to rip them off. Seen her accidentally breaking pencil tips, grinding them into stubs at the sharpener, conveniently located by the door, waiting for Duck and his new girlfriend to walk down the hall. Slam the passenger side door so hard like she could trap her pain in my Jetta if she just shut it fast enough.

There were easier ways, I knew. I could have told her about pressing a shaving razor into my thigh and how it had a much higher payoff than her minuscule leaks of rage. But I was worried she’d call me a freak so I kept my mouth shut.

 

I put it in park in the middle of the intersection and flipped the hazards on. We approached the possum in silence out of respect for the dead or fear of people peering out of their closed curtains, or both.

Eighteen-wheelers rattled past on the interstate, jostling what was left of the possum’s fur. Its guts were mostly flat now, organs indistinguishable, just one small sheet of deep pink. Mouth open with razor teeth lurched forward. I’d seen it only in quick glances from cars. Now, it started to transform into something more real and more dead than I’d previously imagined. Above us, the traffic light switched colors, green light splashed over Gina’s babydoll face. The vodka squirmed in my stomach.

I squatted on the ground, held the black trash bag open with both hands. Gina pushed at its body with the shovel, slowly peeling it from the road. One string of guts stuck to the asphalt. I had to bury my hands in the bag and break the cord while Gina held the shovel still.

 The possum teetered on the edge of the bright orange shovel. I was floating over my body, the burning tendons in my calves from squatting the only thing tethering me to it.

“Shit, car,” Gina said, and flung the possum into the bag. It made a smooth, crinkle sound when it landed. I was suddenly all too aware of my arms, the weight of the blood pumping through them, the thickness of my skin held somehow together, keeping me from leaking out into the world.

I stared up at Gina, sandy brown hair wisped by trails of diesel fumes, perfect bare nails clenching the now brown blood-stained shovel. The light turned red. I bunched the top of the bag, tucked it down, made a loop, pulled it through, and stood up.

“Nevermind. Turning.” Gina didn’t look relieved, but she hadn’t looked stressed at the sight of the car to begin with. I hoped a car would come, that we’d have to toss the garbage bag to the side of the road and high tail it out of there. Maybe Gina hoped that too.

“I guess… the trunk?” I shrugged my shoulders a little to make the question seem more casual, like this was just another bag of clothes for Goodwill.

Gina was like I’d never seen her before. She folded her thumbs over and over each other in her lap. No thwacking now, just the slick sound of her skin rubbing against itself. The air in the car tasted flat, like all the bubbliness had leaked out while we were scooping up the possum.

She’d heard all about Duck and his new girlfriend from me, but she’d never actually seen them together. They had all different classes and lunch periods. I could tell she was thinking about how sick she might feel when she really saw the furniture model’s house.

“We should finish this bottle, yah know, in case we get pulled over or something.” I lit one of my half-smoked Marlboro Lights.

“Literally not gonna ever happen with how slow you drive but, okay.”

Gina sipped, then handed the bottle to me to finish off, her saliva glistening on the rim as I wrapped my lips around it.

It was supposed to be simple. Identify the furniture model’s house by her car: A white Nissan Maxima with a tye-dye girls volleyball sticker on the back windshield. Open the trunk. Grab the possum. Drop the possum on her front porch. Run.

Gina twisted her torso towards the window as we pulled into the development. This was it. She was going to rid my car of the possum and with it all of her anger and bitterness and heartache over Duck.

My foot hovered above the gas pedal. We circled through cul de sac after cul de sac of beige siding and gaudy fake stone houses.

Nearing the end of our first complete circle around the development, I rutsched around in my seat trying to squash the tingling in my bladder.

“Maybe she parks in the garage?” I offered. Gina’s iPhone glowed a pixelated blue as she made the rounds: Instagram, Facebook, Twitter.

“Nothing. Nothing from either of them all night.”

No posts meant they were holed up in Duck’s bedroom, wrestling around on his waterbed, or watching Fight Club and making out on his futon. It didn’t matter exactly what they were doing, just that it was precious and private enough to keep them off the internet on a Friday night.

Gina let her phone drop face down onto the grey floor mat.

I circled us around again, trying to manifest the Nissan into existence, trying to ignore my growing need to pee.

On the third go-round, a porch light whipped on. I steered us to the other end of the development and switched the headlights off. Blood thudded in my ears. Gina bit at her index finger for a few seconds until she realized she’d used that hand to touch the shovel that touched the possum and she rolled down the window to spit. The whole of my existence seemed reduced to the burning in my bladder.

“I have to piss”

“So do it” Gina kept her head turned away from me.

The grass covered my flip-flopped feet in sludge as I walked towards the trees. I squatted down and steadied my head as the sound of my car idling and my pee hitting the grass and crickets swelled all around. I watched Gina’s silhouette swat tears from her eyes. I knew we weren’t going to find her house and that after this Gina probably wouldn’t care all that much about hanging out with me and that I’d be stuck with the possum, left to dispose of it on my own.

“Let’s go around one more time?” Gina said when I got back to the car.

I drove us even slower this time, pretending to look closely at each house for any evidence that a furniture model might live there, trying not to think about Duck or Gina or the dead possum or having to go back into school on Monday or how embarrassed I felt that my plan failed and how bad I’d want to use my razor later or how now Gina was going to keep slamming my car door for the foreseeable future since she couldn’t get her revenge, trying to focus instead on the swing sets and Mercedes Benz’s and lifted trucks and well-manicured lawns and stop signs. I could tell Gina was trying not to think about things too because her right leg was bouncing up and down really fast.

I officially gave up on looking for the furniture model’s house. Her car wasn’t there. Everyone’s blinds were shut and lit from behind by the glow of flat-screen TVs. I wished we had brought more vodka. Gina’s leg suddenly stopped shaking and she held up a dainty wrist.

“Here is fine.”

I pulled the lever and the trunk popped. Gina slid out. In the rearview mirror, I watched her heave the bag up and hold it to her chest. Glossy black glinted under the street light. She walked up to the front porch and kneeled on the slate steps. She patted it once, like she’d reached some kind of truce with the possum.  Gina knew, and I knew that it didn’t even matter whose house it was. Then she stood, pivoted on the heels of her mustard yellow flip-flops.

Back in the car, Gina switched on the overhead light, dug around for the peach rings.

“Yours if you want them,” she tossed the bag into my lap.

The ridged bottom landed on my thighs. I opened them, let the bag slip down just a little and then I squeezed together until it scraped me.

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POTATO NECK by Genevieve Jagger

March 11, 2022

She isn’t the most beautiful woman I have ever seen but I haven’t seen a woman in eight months or more and am turning, quickly, to dust. By haven’t seen a woman I mean haven’t seen Leanne, though either way it’s hot sand, glass and friction. It’s a wonder my cabin doesn’t go up in flames, everything made of wood as it is, working on myself at night as I do. It would only take one spark.

She is sitting out on a small mound of grass that I think of as the stoop, her back turned to me. It faces a dirty strip of road that leads to a potholed road that leads to a regular road that leads to the motorway. Here there are the caravan cabins, as I have come to think of them, given their oblong shape, their tendency to live where the caravans pitch. It’s autumn now. Gales of leaves, holidays over, wind a growing penetration. Almost all the cabins are empty. Caravans all dragged out of sight. 

She’s wearing a dress that looks like a potato sack, but I realise it’s supposed to be that way. Despite its form, stiff and consuming, it has an honesty of colour which tells me it is brand new. Simple haircut. No shorts. Goosebumps surely. I squint.

The wind disguises the click of the door, so she doesn’t hear me coming. She is focussed on the maple tree in the grove just in front of her. It spits seeds to the ground like helicopters crashing. She watches their blades as they twirl. I am focussed on the back of her head, her short hair – mousy brown turning peroxide dead at the ends. Another helicopter bombs to the ground, only to be blown up to the sky again. Disaster here is bright. It plays constantly, on loop. 

‘Ahoy’ I call, unsocialised. There is an owl who spends the nights screaming in my chimney. The blunt confusion of the sound has obliterated many things. 

Potato Neck turns. ‘You,’ she says, and I get a proper look.

Freckly skin. Short eyelashes. Her features gnarled and dented. Intense. Almost troll-like, honestly. Her nose is a language I don’t understand. It has a mole. Not necessarily on it, but beside it. Around it. An ominous darkness, in the crevice of her nose and cheek. It pulls at my pupils like a black hole. 

‘Me?’ I ask.  

She nods, playing with the fringe of her sack. ‘I was just about to come over and ask you something.’ She points to the cabin beside mine. ‘We’re neighbours.’

‘Right.’

‘But I can’t really think of how to say it.’ 

‘Okay.’

‘I think I’m going to put it bluntly. You seem like maybe you wouldn’t mind.’

‘Alright.’

‘It’s just that I have a bit of a habit…’

I accidentally tune her out. She turns and bends in the middle, reaches down to the stoop and returns with a new look in her eye. Her irises are a heinous pale blue; the skin beneath them yellowed; her hands are lavender; the bold bones of her knuckles, harsh pink; her palms are open and somehow… green. 

Potato Neck is covered in goosebumps. I look down and realise she is holding the biggest jar of weed I have seen in my life.

‘… so, please don’t think I want to tell you this, I promise you, I hate this, but I just have to know – Do you have any tobacco? And does your stove have a light?’ 

The air waits and hangs. Prematurely begins to slow. I nod. 

‘Yeah. Follow me.’ 

 

*

 

I set the jar down on the coffee table. It’s the only table I have, and the only thing that differs my cabin from the others. Sitting low on the floorboards, in front of the two-seater sofa, and the fireplace I’ve never lit. It’s oval shaped, made of strong mahogany and embellished round the edges. Bright little birdies painted in gold. It was Leanne’s and I took it when I left. 

‘Oh my fucking god,’ Potato Neck says, staring at the jars, standing on my rug. 

‘I know.’ 

‘They look good.’ 

They look weird because they look like siblings. Glass-eyed. Gleaming. Matching orange lids on their heads. Identical, in size, shape and amour, perfectly opposite in every other way. Her jar, sweaty, reeking and ripe. It taints the air. Mine, weathered, old, and brown – dry like everything else. 

‘Why do you keep it like that?’ she asks. 

‘I buy it in bulk, and I hate the plastic packet. The pictures of lungs. The guy with the throat.’ 

‘Is yours a Rossini’s jar?’ 

‘Sorry?’ 

She’s pointing.

‘The lid. Pasta sauce. Rossini’s, no?’

‘No.’  

Potato Neck is slumped into my sofa and I am standing in front of her. 

‘What then?’

I start: ‘I used to work in a sweet shop, part time. I took home some bonbons,’ but she speaks over my final word.

‘Ash, I think we need to roll a spliff.’  

I ask her, ‘Sorry, how do you know my name?’ 

But she’s gone. Already moved on. To the jars, to pinching and mixing. A pack of papers appearing from seemingly nowhere. Her sack has no pockets. No bra straps, so no way for her to hold things like Leanne. It isn’t until later when I am lying in my single bed and my head feels like the concept of a plum and my hands like two spiders who love me in turns, that I realise actually, they were probably mine. 

 

*

 

One of us has one thing, and the other has the other, and neither of us has both. We live in holiday homes in Scotland, where summer is irregular, near a loch that is not Loch Lomond. October when it rains can be lonely. Circumstance makes life feel miraculous.

It has been ten months, ten, not eight, since I have seen anyone without pork breath and an Adam’s apple. My friend, Barry, lives next to a big supermarket, about forty minutes away. He brings me goods on a three-week rotation because I don’t know how to drive a car. Groceries, tobacco, a hell of a lot of soup. When Leanne’s heart froze and I went away, Barry offered to do the drops – because Barry is a good friend that way. 

I do not know why Potato Neck is here. I ask and she doesn’t tell me. 

The green tint sets in. The cherry glow at the end of a joint, the harsh vibrance of my burning throat – these things come, and they never leave. Everything that we do is either pre-smoke, post-smoke or during. My memory works without beginnings or ends. 

The world falls out of its tight and inscrutable order. 

 

*

 

The door slams open. Potato Neck tramps out from the bathroom, aghast. That distance, from the tiled square of shower, toilet, sink, to the part outside the door, dubbed ‘hallway’, is tiny. Still, she makes it look like a stride. 

‘What?’ I say. I have a banana in my upturned palms, and I am impressed by its skin, velveteen, and stunned by the strange weight of it. You are a fruit, I think, and giggle. Potato Neck is wearing pyjama shorts patterned with watermelon seeds and my t-shirt, but I don’t know how. She doesn’t like to stay over. It has a bat on it. I ask her, ‘Did you take that?’ 

‘There’s a spot on my tit.’ 

‘Wha-at?’ 

‘A spot on my tit. A pimple on my breast.’

‘You’re telling me about your breast?’ 

She swipes me over the back of the head as she walks back into the living room, crossing the wires on the ground. I don’t know why I brought it with me, but I have a Gamecube here. A bunch of games. Even two controllers. We’re playing right now. I forgot that’s what we’re doing. She asked me – can we play your Gamecube?

‘Ash.’ 

‘I’m sorry.’ 

‘Can you not be a weird fucking man for a moment.’

But I’m not distracted about her breasts. I’m distracted about the whole world. This is all new to me. This flavour in my mouth. Not unfriendly. Like spoons and bitter leaves. I didn’t realise how fucking huge a thought could be. I didn’t realise how much space there is between any two things. I am walking down a long hall of mirrors, shooting myself the finger guns and there’s one million of me, finger-gunning back. Potato Neck is still talking about her breast. 

‘What’s wrong with your breast?’ 

She huffs. I’m leaning a little far to the left. 

‘It has a spot.’ 

‘So?’ 

‘It’s a boob. I’ve never had a spot on my boob before.’ 

‘You can get spots everywhere. No one ever told you you can get spots everywhere?’ 

‘No. No one ever gave me the tit spot talk. I thought it was cancer. Then I popped it.’ 

‘That’s ridiculous.’ 

‘Oh, sure.’ 

Potato Neck crushes me at Mario Kart, whizzing around corners, dropping bananas as Toad. I thought she would have chosen someone more like Bowser, on account of her eyebrows, but what is that supposed to mean? I was right at least that she doesn’t play Peach.  I’m Luigi but I’m not doing well. I’m finally catching up to the conversation we’ve just had. There is no outfit in which Potato Neck has breasts and so I think of them like a washing board. One single raspberry smooshed through slanted sides. She’s lapped me now, whizzing round the track without needing to control. She’s waiting. Has been waiting for a while.   

 

*

 

Blood flows down my face. From the wound on my head to the corner of my mouth, as if I am both drink and straw. Potato Neck is touching the sweat on my back.

‘I think you’ve cut your spine.’

‘And my head?’ 

‘Obviously your head.’

We were sitting down on the stoop having our morning first when I said: We sit down here every day. Why don’t we go and sit up there? And Potato Neck grinned like I’d finally managed to be interesting. She stood up in her gummy sandals, put the joint to hold in her mouth. ‘You’re right,’ she said and climbed up the maple like a monkey. 

I stayed sat for a moment, trying to look up her limp purple skirt. I thought I saw stripes, exactly like this pair of boxers I own, but I checked and I’m wearing those.

‘You hit every branch.’ 

‘I know.’  

Potato Neck helps me back to the stoop. Her hands are stained green from moss.

‘It’s funny because I had a dream like this as well.’ 

‘I’m not interested in your dreams.’

‘Except it wasn’t me. It was you that fell, and I had to carry you. I had goat legs.’  

The stoop rises up beneath us. Potato Neck puts the cardboard roach back into my mouth. It’s made from a jaffa cake box. Blood pools, ruins my clothes. She sets fire to the ashy end. I feel like a cowboy. I tell her. 

Potato Neck doesn’t respond. 

I push the bitter end into the dirt of the ground and discover that I am woozy – but like two kinds of woozy that rub on each other. My thumb reaches out to hold the hem of her sack. I recover but it leaves a rusty stain. 

 

*

 

‘What have you got? I’d kill for pizza.’ 

Potato Neck’s hands in my cereal box. 

‘I don’t know. I don’t really use the fridge.’ 

‘Let me have a look.’ 

I’m zoned out on the sofa, legs dangling over the side. I’m having a waking nap. I haven’t had one in a long time which is weird because I used to have them always. Lying on Leanne’s loft bed, where the light had to bend to meet the ceiling. It was so nice up there, with all her stuffed animals, lined up like a marching band. My favourite was the elephant with the knob shaped nose – his name was Brian. Leanne herself could be gone for hours.

Potato Neck stomps into the kitchen, cupboard bang, bang, banging as she roots through each one thrice. 

‘You don’t have basil?’ 

‘I don’t have fucking pepper.’

‘Fair point.’

Sometimes Brian would stare at me when I wanked in Leanne’s bed. He looked like he understood. The rest I’d have to pluck by their scrawny necks and turn to face the wall. Leanne had this duck with mean little eyes, like he always had something to think. I was fond of Brian though.  

‘I keep finding bruises all over my body,’ Potato Neck says. It’s true. I’ve been spotting them too. Rotten blooms all over her toothpick legs. 

‘Are you clumsy?’ 

‘I don’t think so.’ 

She is. 

She is clearing the table around me, bringing plates, knives, forks, water in a tumbler because I don’t own a jug. She takes our bonbon and Rossini’s jars and puts them on the windowsill. They look redundant and therefore purposeful. Like old lady potpourri. 

‘Sit up.’ 

Dinner is presented, made broadly of tortillas, found in the back of the cupboard; half a tube of tomato puree spread across the top. And what would be a pizza without grated cheese? It oozes slowly. A tranquilising vision. Potato Neck sets down a bowl of scabs. 

‘For toppings. You don’t have any vegetables and I figure scratchings are still pork. I thought they should be optional.’ 

‘Thank you,’ I say.

She is wearing a bright red turtleneck and some ratty jogging bottoms. We sprinkle our pizzas liberally with scabs. I fold my first slice and put it whole into my mouth. 

‘Uh fuh-hin luh fooh.’

‘You love me?’ she nips, sparkling. 

‘Uh luh FOOH! FOOH!’ 

Potato Neck leans over and pokes the big bulge in my cheek. She tilts her slice above her head and the toppings go sliding into her mouth. 

‘When did you buy cheese?’ 

She shakes her head. 

‘It was in that fridge you don’t use.’ 

My jaw stops.

‘This is my cheese?’ 

‘Well, yeah. I mean, I didn’t think you’d care.’ 

My stomach and my mouth separate. I can taste so much fat and suddenly the foulness of the pork. It’s in my teeth. Coated like sand on the inside of my cheeks. That cheese has been there longer than I have, wrapped in cellophane, condensation growing, lit up by the fridge bulb. Behind a thin veil of plastic, I have been watching the mould. It blooms and then it sweats. I gag. 

Potato Neck watches me. ‘What’s your fucking problem?’ 

‘I can’t eat that.’ 

‘It’s cheese. It ages. I cut the mould off.’ 

‘Jesus Christ.’ 

I stand and the cabin is a boat. Stumble drunkenly from dining room to hall.

‘Pussy,’ she mutters, as I shut the bathroom door.

 

*

 

When the smoke is inside of my body, nausea becomes an abstract thing. A thing that is held by my body but not is my body, not anymore. It’s stronger, more competent at ripping down my defences – but it can be spoken to. Persuaded. I wet my face and the excess drips onto my jeans. Yank them down and then fold in the middle. My asshole puckers and puckers and cannot shit. In front of the toilet there is a mirror. Desire has darkened my eyes. 

The most beautiful thing I’ve ever eaten is Leanne’s custard tart. Her own warped recipe. It tasted only of nutmeg and eggs. The feeble hope of an erection helps to lever the ache of my bowels. 

‘You’re fucking disgusting,’ I murmur, and wipe. 

 

*

 

When she does stay, she’s awake before I am. Hands dipping from jar to paper to jar.

‘That owl is a fucking cunt.’ 

 

*

 

One night we listen to the same album three times in a row because it is very good. Potato Neck makes us go top to tail because she wants to lie on the bed. She lights up and gets ash all over my blankets. 

‘Are you a lesbian?’ I ask her. 

‘Excuse me?’ 

‘I’m just wondering.’

‘Why?’ 

‘I don’t know. I thought maybe I was getting a… vibe.’ 

‘Do you hate women?’ 

‘Whoa.’ 

‘You’d fucking love it if I was a lesbian.’ 

‘I didn’t mean to ask.’ 

Potato Neck sits up. She’s sitting on my pillow. A song is playing now that an hour ago we almost cried at. 

‘Ash, you know I’m not even remotely attracted to you, don’t you?’

I don’t know why she feels the need to say that. I turn my head in disgust. 

‘What is it?’ she asks.

‘Your feet.’ 

 

*

 

We’re walking back to the cabin from the stoop and all of life is flashes and frames, strung out like the film of a film. Dirt road. Shaking tree. My shoes. The memory of Leanne’s ass, like a heart with a hole. A helicopter lands safely on my shoulder. I am looking into the night shadow of Potato Neck’s mole and at none of the space around it. 

She grabs onto my wrist. 

‘Don’t grab me. I might throw up.’ 

She grabs anyway. Drops. 

I ask, ‘Are you okay?’ 

She’s crouching on the floor. On the slidey wooden step before the door of my cabin. She’s clinging to my leg. 

‘Are you okay? I’m gonna fall.’  

She doesn’t listen. Soles skidding.

‘No, seriously.’ 

Is she crying? I yelp, ‘Potato Neck, stand up.’ 

She looks up. Eyes tearless except for laughter. 

‘Potato Neck?!’ she shrieks. 

I don’t understand what’s funny. I shove through the unlocked door.  

‘I need to lie on the floorboards.’

My knees collapse to the floor. Body flopping. Potato Neck crawls over and hangs directly above my head while I try to look up at the ceiling. 

‘Potato Neck? What does that even mean? Poh-tay-toe Neck.’

Her hazy pupils have turned her eyes into eight balls. 

I ignore her. ‘What were you laughing at?’ I whine.  

‘Every time you smoke – you shit, or you puke. I think you’ve got IBS. Are you crying?’

‘No!’ I am. I’m crying. 

‘Do you have chocolate?’ she asks.

‘No. I don’t know how to breathe.’ 

‘Stay on the floor.’ 

And then she abandons me. Sprints away, leaving the front door open. I rip my socks off, sobbing now, and the cool air soothes the soles of my feet – but something about that comfort is devastating to me. My body is confused and hard again. Leanne, Leanne, Leanne. Drinking vodka ginger, heavy on the ginger. Kneading me when I needed her. Now I can’t get anything out. Now I’m stuffed up and rancid. And when I try to think of her voice, I think wub, wub, wub and when I want to cum, I can’t. Was I so terrible? Potato Neck reappears with something purple in her freakishly small hand. Shining, crackling wrapper stripped easily to reveal the treat. Chocolate. Dairy milk. She kneels and drops a piece into my mouth.

I ask her, indistinctly ‘Will you sleep on the sofa?’ 

Potato Neck shakes her head no, but says, ‘fine.’ 

 

*

 

It’s late. I wake halfway, disoriented, inside a cloud that is not soft like hamster fur, but nauseating like smoke. They’re thick in the haze together. The heavy rub of a man’s voice reveals the needling crack of Potato Neck’s. 

‘But why do you do that? Why pay for him like that? You could rent the place out and do anything. I don’t get it.’ 

It makes sense to me that she is saying these words.

‘I know – but it’s Ash. I’d do anything for that man. We’re like brothers.’ 

‘There’s no one I’d do that for.’ 

‘What about Francis?’

The sound of her sack, mid-shuffle. ‘Hmph.’

‘He’d do it for me,’ he says, ‘You have to be that person if you ever want someone to give you good back. That’s how that shit goes, you know?’

‘Still.’

‘You don’t understand Ash. I don’t care how long you’ve spent with him. Around me he’s open, but he’s a little wimp around women.’ 

‘Maybe that’s the problem.’ 

‘Well, how about this? One time, I got my drink spiked at this weird disco night we went to. I was on the light-up dance floor when this wave hit me. I couldn’t breathe. All this shit was coming up through my nose. I had a panic attack that felt like a stroke. But Ash was on it. Holding me up. He saw it before I did. Didn’t miss a beat.’

Sounds of smoking, passing, smoking. 

‘Then – right as we’re about to leave, his neck swivels and he turns like some fucking hawk to this table by the door. There’s a man with his fingers in a drink. Same drink as mine: pink lady cocktail. I think – makes sense. Who the fuck is trying to spike me? The cunt was having his second try.’

He takes a deep and shuddering breath. ‘You know what Ash did?’ 

‘What?’

‘Ash punched him in the face. Lights out. Goodnight. Bye bye. So, if it wasn’t for him then me and that girl could have died. That’s who Ash is at his centre.’

He reaches down and fondly pats my foot. 

‘But, Barry…’ she says. The words wince with frustration. I never get to know what that thought was going to be. Instead, she tells a story of her own, about the day I fell out a tree, about blood and smoke and how I looked something like a cowboy.  

She says, ‘You know. That didn’t really touch the sides for me. All the tobacco, I think. Shall I just roll a straight blunt?’

And without questioning her reasoning I fall back asleep. In the morning, she, and the weed, are gone. She does not leave me a note. 

 

*

 

Alright, in fairness, it isn’t like I haven’t noticed her. Of course, I have – as disturbing as she is. I put my hand on her leg. 

We were sitting in her cabin at the time, the only time I went. Waiting to smell this candle she had. The wax was the pale morning blue of her sack. It was scented A Calm & Quiet Place. 

‘Where did you get the dress that looks like that?’ 

Her sofa was the same as mine, but she fit more easily into it. Her hands a little pile in her lap. Fingers heaped indelicately. Scraps. 

Potato Neck watched the wick of the candle. 

‘Do you mean the colour?’ 

‘I do.’ 

‘I don’t remember.’

I nodded. The air wanted us to stay so still, and we did. Shoulders pressed together.

‘You must have gotten it from somewhere. It looks new.’ 

‘Maybe it was my sister’s. She gives me clothes all the time.’ 

‘You have a sister?’ 

‘I have three.’ 

‘Oh. I’m an only child.’

‘That makes sense.’

What else? She didn’t keep her clothes on the floor, so nothing for me to see there. She didn’t have a TV. There were some books, but no titles I recognised. I didn’t use her bathroom because I couldn’t work out how to say I wanted to. She didn’t care about stuffed animals. Her bed sheets were cream. There was a candle and a constant creak. 

‘If I knew how to fix pipes, I would help you with that.’ 

‘My pipes are fine.’ 

‘They don’t whine like that if they’re fine.’

Potato Neck smiled, but with scrutiny. She considered me for a moment. 

‘I’ll show you.’ 

She stood and led me round the sofa, up the hall and into the nook that was the bedroom. Beside the bed she had shoved a little table, dingy and covered in stickers peeled off. Atop the table, a bright red tray... white grate, spinning wheel. Hamster cage. 

I gasped like a small boy, sat down and then stood up from her bed.

‘Can I sit?’

‘You can.’

She knelt and ran a nail along the grate. The hamster came running. His fur was the softest grey, not like smoke, but like a cloud. His ears, brown and speckled, were made of a skin so thin so you could see the veins within like tiny purple rivers. She opened the door. He climbed into her palms. 

‘He has petal ears,’ I said. 

‘His name is Tomahawk.’ 

‘Tomahawk!’  

Tomahawk traversed Potato Neck’s fingers as if they were rungs on a ladder. He had bean paws and they clung to her wrist. His nose twitched and it made his whiskers vibrate. Before I could ask to, I was holding him.

‘He has the biggest balls I’ve ever seen! His fur!’ 

‘Now smell him.’ 

I cupped Tomahawk tentatively under the bum, lifted him up to my nose. I inhaled. Like printer paper and corn. I inhaled again. Tomahawk walked into my sleeve. 

'You’ve kept him a secret,’ I grinned.

‘He’s mine,’ Potato Neck said – and she didn’t look pretty, but she looked something else instead. Can a girl be handsome? I had something of an urge to touch her, since we started smoking all the time, but I also had urges to touch everything. We faced each other. Cross legged on a military-style single bed. Tomahawk emerged from the hem of my jumper. 

‘That’s my crotch, Little Tommo. Come here.’ 

I put my open hand on Potato Neck’s thigh, then left it there, upturned.  Tomahawk crawled off. I left it there longer. Potato Neck gazed at her son. Beneath the sagging neck of her jumper, she was wearing my t-shirt again. 

‘Ash,’ she said. 

I moved my hand. 

‘How do you afford to be here?’

I sniffed, ‘I used to work really hard.’ 

But it didn’t feel like the end of the question. 

We stayed there with Tomahawk for a long time, passing him back and forth. Eventually the scent of peace had warmed to the air. Eventually we were tired of each other. We turned the lights on to destroy the flickering darkness. I walked back to my cabin alone. 

 

*

 

All at once we’re running low on marijuana. 

The tobacco levels are steady, but the weed is just powder. She’s crying. There’s a bloody tampon floating high in my toilet, too. When Leanne’s monthly came around, she would sob until I brought her chips and cheese. Earlier, I accidentally stubbed my toe and had to spend an hour in bed. I understand. 

I go outside and ring up Barry, climbing up onto my roof for signal. I haven’t spoken to him in a while. I tell him only what I need to.

‘I’ve got you. I’ve got you. Dude, that’s so cool you’re making friends. I saw Leanne with her girlfriend the other day. I was like, oh what the fuck – dyke from hell! They were buying lottery tickets.’ 

‘That’s cool. Listen, I also need something else. Do you still know that guy, Dean?’

‘Man. Dean’s in the fucking Emirates. I know Kyle now. He’s alright. Good man. We play Warcraft sometimes. I place my orders on there. Right in the middle of Thunderbluff!’ 

Barry laughs at himself and it widens the phone line. A throaty friendly sound. I look inside my chimney and find a nest with three eggs. 

I tell him my order. I tell him exactly how much.

Barry whistles in awe. His cheek and his stubble are close in my ear.

‘Fuck, Ash. Man, you’re living in the woods.’ 

 

*

 

Potato Neck emerges with me when Barry arrives in his big red van. He parks, making dust on the drive, outside of her cabin instead of mine.  He drags open the door and my groceries appear, along with two stacks of flat boxes. They smell strongly of barbecue sauce.  

Potato Neck leaps on them. ‘Oh my god, I love you.’ 

Her eyes are red from the J’s of the day. She’s wearing her potato sack – rusty thumbprint slightly darker on the hem. Her neck looks just as inhuman as it did when we first met. I’m proud, but then she looks up.  

‘Barry!’ 

‘Phoebe!’ 

They’re hugging. 

‘How’s Arthur? How’s Katie?’ 

‘They’re great. They’re living with Arthur’s dad. He’s a mountaineer. He helps with their business. Katie started taking her t-shirt thing seriously.’ 

‘Good for her!’

I am standing with two grocery bags, one in each hand. They’re filled with soup cans and again he has only chosen tomato. 

‘You two know each other,’ I say. 

Potato Neck shrugs, body floppy and happy. She explains, ‘Out of touch friends.’ 

Barry wraps her up in bear hug number two. She seems perfectly contented in his sweat. 

 

*

 

Leanne’s table is moved so the pizza boxes can be laid like a tapestry. For some reason, I didn’t think that Barry would stay for dinner. He’s raking through my cupboards now and the wood sounds ugly and thin. 

‘Where’s the spirits?’ he asks. 

‘Don’t have any.’

‘Shit. Not even beer? Not even poof juice?’

Potato Neck emerges from the bathroom, grins momentarily at the pizza on the floor. ‘No alcohol. Only weed. And don’t call it ‘poof juice’. She collects the jars from the windowsill. ‘Do you want me to roll? It’s tight for three but I can manage.’ 

I stare at Barry hard until he catches my drift, and his eyes light up. 

‘Actually, Phoebe… me and Ash got you a gift.’

He points drastically to one unpacked bag.  I can see the orange lid. Potato Neck shrieks. 

Barry’s jar is poorly washed, still scummed with smears of tomato – but it is packed. Full to the fucking brim. Barry knows what Rossini’s is. Barry knows Kyle.

 

*

 

We eat pizza in three sessions across the course of the night. We each smoke our own massive blunt, and then another, and maybe another. Barry says don’t worry, I won’t drive, I’ll sleep on your floor, I’ll borrow a pair of your underpants. I want to say, ‘you wouldn’t fit them’, but I can’t because she’ll think I’m a leaching cunt. She probably already does – she knows by now that this cabin isn’t mine. I barely even rent it because Barry is a philanthropist. I didn’t tell her as such, but it makes sense that she’d figure it out.   

I don’t know why but I’m not in the mood tonight for some big, fun thing like this. I feel frigid, uncomfortable, covered in goosebumps. None of my tokes seem to go all the way through. Barry and Potato Neck talk sporadically about the people that both of them know and I deduce, through listening, that they once worked in some Mexican place together – and that means Barry has probably once spoken about her to me. Potato Neck nudges for a story but I don’t have one. I tell her that he never mentioned a Phoebe and Barry says, ‘I definitely did.’ I have been sitting in one position on the floor for a very long time and I realise I’m scared to move from it. I’m cold and my organs ache. Conversation is wandering probably towards Leanne. My eyes are closed and my head is by the leg of her table. 

I make a decision to give up and pass out. 

Most days I wish it was tomorrow. 

 

*

 

I have IBS. The jars are still nearly full. Somehow the first comes last. Potato Neck demands a walk. 

She dons my trousers, my jumper and my second pair of boots, pausing at the door to take my good coat. We press out across the turning dirt. Down to the forest and the spitting maple tree. It’s a helicopter elephant graveyard. 

I point. 

‘It’s a helicopter elephant graveyard.’

She snorts at me. ‘Feeling good?’ 

I nod a lot.

She says, ‘I’m glad.’

‘Woods are kind of spooky though.’ 

I look up and the sky is only an inch away from black and that means it is still blue. The night air is sweet down my stained throat. The moon is gripped by the trees, empty-handed. Wet leaves have been falling for weeks. They’re wadding under my shoes. Potato Neck’s hands look almost like the bare trees, but softer. Less spindly. Not spiderlike. 

‘Little arms,’ I say.

‘Are you alright?’ 

‘I’m dizzy.’ 

She puts her hands on me. Steers me to the ground.

‘Sit in the mulch,’ she orders.  

‘If I needed to vomit, would you judge me?’ 

‘No.’ 

‘Weed makes you sick too?’ 

‘No.’ But she says it kindly. 

I keel over, getting mud up my wrists, gripping sopping handfuls of leaves for their coldness. My body heaves but I don’t let it puke. Instead, a negotiation. I’m in the foetal position. Here. In this random patch of land, somewhere nowhere. Previously inconsiderable. Who knew that could happen? The nausea passes and I grin up at the moon, grin up at the whole sky and at all the tall trunks that occupy it, but especially the moon. 

I’m so stoned.

Above me, Potato Neck laughs. ‘You’ll get over it.’

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OUTING by Serkan Görkemli

March 4, 2022

By the time I show up for our weekly outing on Thursday evening, my friend Yaprak has already ordered the first bottle of red wine. We’re meeting on the patio of Büyük Truva Oteli, one of the oldest and most expensive hotels on the shore of the Dardanelles in downtown Çanakkale in northwestern Turkey.

She beckons me with her left hand to our quiet corner. Her right hand puts out one of the many cigarettes she has already smoked. The night is young, and I’ve brought two packs of Camels just in case. I’m a little late, and I already know what she’ll say. 

“Enis, where the fuck have you been, you ibne?” she says and laughs.

Yaprak’s the only one who can call me a fag. The only one I’d let. 

“Didn’t you have enough of your new boyfriend’s dick yet?” she whispers. Her whispering is another person’s talking. 

I look around to see if anyone has heard her. I’ve tried telling her not to be so loud when she says such things, to no avail. 

“Have you had enough of Mehmet’s yet?” I ask.

I’ve been dating my boyfriend for only two months. She and Mehmet have been together for almost six months now. 

“Well, his, yes. Dick in general, hell no,” she says and shakes an empty plastic bottle at the waiter for more water. 

A few mezes—feta cheese, shepherd’s salad, stuffed grape leaves and pepper, moussaka, and sautéed liver—are laid out on the table for our all-night noshing. She pours wine into my glass and drops the bottle into an ice bucket, which is sweating rivulets that seep into the white tablecloth. In the July heat, we like even our red wine cold.

“Trouble in paradise?”

“No, it’s just… Things change, you know.”

She’s being vague, but I get it. We’re both forty-five and have yet to settle down. Neither of us remembers how many men have passed through our lives, she as a two-time divorcee who dates to find her next husband and me as a gey man who can only date because I cannot get married. Yet our hearts, encrusted with heartbreak, both real and imagined, still have room for a teenager’s excitement about a new beginning and a mid-lifer’s hope that it’ll be different this time.

“Siktir et, let’s drink to boyfriends past and present,” she says. 

Yaprak’s cursing like a sailor contrasts with her rather delicate name, which means “leaf.” She’s been like that since we first met in high school, except now she has the life experience to back it up. She’s the only child of one of Çanakkale’s most prominent families—her father is the head of the Chamber of Commerce and her mother’s a lawyer—and she’s an accomplished architect who is not beholden to anyone, so she can speak her mind. She’s what my guy friends and I call taşaklı kadın, a woman with balls. 

I laugh and raise my glass, “To boyfriends. May we never run out of them.”

“Amin,” she says, gulps down the last of her wine, and immediately sips from her water. “Drink, drink, drink,” she says, gesturing to my sweating glass of water, and gets up. “I’ve got to pee.” 

We’ll be prodding one another like loving yet annoying mothers throughout the night to drink plenty of water amid the summer heat to avoid a massive hangover in the morning. 

This restaurant is one of the best places in Çanakkale to view the sunset. I take it all in: couples strolling arm-in-arm, parents dragging behind kids preoccupied with Maraș ice cream in one hand and trailing a balloon from the other, and groups of young men smoking or roughhousing on the promenade of the Dardanelles. 

Further down the promenade on our side of the strait, the fake behemoth of a Trojan horse built for the Hollywood movie broods as it towers over those strolling by. Hard to believe that Brad Pitt hid in it, and that it came all the way from America. The historic site of Troy is about a half-hour car ride from the city center. Naturally, the downtown Büyük Truva Oteli we’re drinking at tonight is pompously named after it: The Big Troy Hotel. Cheap plaster reliefs depicting war scenes with soldiers, horses, and chariots adorn the inside of the building. Ah, the star-crossed lovers: Paris who abducted Helen, “the face that launched a thousand ships,” and Achilles—Brad Pitt—and his male companion Patroclus—Garrett … Somebody. And the carnage and the heartbreak that ensued. I’ve seen the film in English with Turkish subtitles.

My gaze shifts to the clientele populating the nearby tables in the garden restaurant: businessmen in suits probably discussing the vagaries of the economy; their sun-kissed wives or mistresses with perfectly coiffed hair and revealing blouses debating the merits of the dishes and the drinks they ordered; and foreign tourists in T-shirts and jeans imbibing rakı, indulging in mezes, and taking selfies in the waning sunlight. I wonder if there are any gey men in the crowd. Occasional eye contact might offer a clue, but I can’t be sure or take the risk of finding out. I’d check Hornet, the gey dating app popular since Turkey’s Grindr ban a few years ago, on my iPhone, but I’ve promised Yaprak, and myself, to give my current boyfriend a serious shot, so I squash the urge by emptying my wine glass and taking a long drag on my cigarette. The combination of smoke, wine, and heat makes my head spin, so I hydrate. Yaprak would approve.

#

“Allah’ım, we didn’t even say a proper merhaba! How boy-crazy are we? Come, give me a hug!”

As we embrace, her low-cut orange summer dress, printed with red hibiscuses, shimmers in the sun. She’s wearing Ambre Solaire bronzing sunblock with coconut oil. Her hair is in a ponytail, the sides of her head wetted with water to cool down and keep stray hairs in place. And of course, her sunglasses are glued to her face, never to come off until after sunset in the summer. Like she always says, she’s a woman of a certain age, so she needs to take care of her skin, especially around the eyes.

“You look great and smell delicious,” I say. 

“Thank you. So do you. I like that baby beard you got going,” she says as she runs her index finger down the side of my face. “How’re things? How’re you?”

“Iyiyim, I just moved to my new office at school, and started reading up on policies and protocols. Necessary evil.”

“Oh yes, Mr. Vice Principal. Congrats again! Çin çin.” 

We clink and drink to my promotion one more time. 

“How do you like it so far?”

“It’s nice. Bigger office with a better view of the schoolyard. It’s quiet at the moment, and I’m excited about not teaching. But it’ll be crazy soon enough—I need to handle detentions and more parents, of course.”

“Ah, parents are the worst,” she says and laughs.

“I wish all parents were like you, canım. How’s Jale?” 

Jale, her fourteen-year-old daughter and only child, who attends the middle school where I work, came out as lesbian a few weeks ago.

“She’s good. We’re learning new things every day.”

“Like what?”

“Vocabulary, people, questions. All of it.”

“Care to elaborate?” I light a cigarette and pass it to her. I light another for myself.

“Thanks, şeker.” She takes a long drag and exhales sideways before she speaks. “She’s been staying up late and reading stuff online.”

I raise my eyebrows.

“It’s not what you think. I’m not spying on her. She told me herself.”

“Okay, what did she tell you about?”

“Well, words. Lots of them. When we were growing up, it was just heteroseksüel, transseksüel, and homoseksüel. Now, it’s panseksüel, nabinary, baç. Who knows how many more—fuck, I feel like I’m being dragged under by a riptide of words.”

“Umm, yeah, I know some of those words. And don’t forget biseksüel.” 

“Of course. How could I? When Jale first came out, I thought she was confused or biseksüel—I mean she’s so young, how could she know for sure?”

“Yes, I remember that. You hoped so, so that she’d have a way out.” 

She purses her lips. I can’t see her eyes behind her shades. 

“You know I accept my child and will support her no matter what. I just want her to be happy.”

“I know, I know,” I say, “I’ll drink to that.” We drink again. “So, what else have you learned about?”

“One day, I’m a heteroseksüel, and the next day, I’m a sapioseksüel. Who knew?”

“What?”

“See, even you don’t know it. And you call yourself gey!”

“Shall I return my gey card, Madam?”

“It means I’m attracted to intelligence.”

“Not to worry then. You’re still heterosexual.” 

She gives me the middle finger and continues, “It’s true. I’ve only married and slept with intelligent guys. Et kafalılar turn me off.” 

“What about Mehmet?” 

Her boyfriend didn’t go to college.

“Come on, Enis, there’re plenty of meatheads with college degrees.”

“True. Ah, the meatheads, they don’t get enough credit either way. They may not be marriage material, but they have a different set of skills. Maybe you shouldn’t date to marry for a change?”

“The old me would say I’m too old for that shit, but the new me screams who the hell knows!?”

“I like the new you.” I raise my glass, and we drink the remaining wine in our glasses. 

She refills us and smokes. She leaves her cigarette in her mouth, wrinkling her nose and squinting from the smoke as she says, “I mean how do I know I’m heteroseksüel? I might be biseksüel. I’ve married both guys I fell in love with, as soon as they reciprocated. Maybe I’ve never met the right woman.”

“Well, it’s not that changeable. I can tell you that. You’d know by now, even if you’ve never slept with a woman.” 

“How’re you so sure? Is there a test or something that I’m not aware of?”

“Yes, it’s called the head-turn test. For me, it’s always been about who makes my head turn on the street. That’s always been guys. Even when I was in denial.”

“What’s your type, again? I forgot how you put it.”

“Broad-shouldered and narrow-hipped guys get me going.” 

“So, a model. Every man’s dream, gey or straight. How original.”

I poke my tongue at her. 

“How can you be so sure? You haven’t always been with such guys.”

“My point exactly. Where’re they now?”

She stops for a moment. More wine. “Fine. What do you think about panseksüellik?”

“What’s that?”

“Your gey card, please, Beyefendi?” She extends her hand, palm up. 

I pretend to get it from my wallet and hand it to her. She throws my imaginary gey card over her shoulder toward a table of all-male bankers behind her. The waiter had forgotten to remove the Rezervasyon: Akbank sign from the table. One of them looks our way. Did my card hit him?

“Bullseye. I think the cute, tall guy at the table behind you caught it.” 

She turns around to look before I tell her not to. She turns back and licks her lips.

“Ahem. Now that my uninformed gayness is out of the way, let me guess: Panseksüel means someone who likes everyone?”

She giggles. “Let me educate you, Mr. Vice Principal. One of Jale’s friends is panseksüel and loves a house. Jale just told me.” 

“What? You mean like getting off at the thought of a beautiful villa or something?”

“Yes.”

“You’re joking!”

“No, I’m not. Jale has a lot of LeGeBeTe friends, and she told me that one of them is a panseksüel in that way.”

“Uh, that’d be a fetish. I think they’re making a fool out of you.”

“Who’s being narrow-minded now?” She crosses her arms and raises an eyebrow.

I don’t respond immediately. I top off our glasses and empty the bottle. She looks around for the waiter and flags him.  

I’m amused and surprised by her confusion. How could an intelligent person who draws plans for the interior of high-rise buildings all over the world for an American firm be so confused about matters of sexuality? Is she, or are we, already drunk? My mind drifts to the world outside Çanakkale; on the fiftieth anniversary of Stonewall in America, Onur Yürüyüşü, the Pride Parade, is banned in Ankara, Istanbul, Izmir, Antalya, and Mersin. My Twitter feed tells me that even in America, ignorant homofobikler are in power. Yaprak is certainly more open-minded than my parents, who’ve known about me for more than a decade now. What’s the big deal if she’s a little confused—and drunk at the moment? I decide to go with the flow and not irritate her further. I make a mental note to look up panseksüellik later. 

“Tamam, I promise to be more open-minded if I can get my gey card back.”

“You’ll get it in the mail in seven to ten business days. Call 1-800-031-6969 to activate when you receive it.” 

“Teşekkürler, Madam. What other words have you learned?”

“Nabinary,” she says timidly.

“Not male or female?” 

“Yes. This is the one that bothers me the most. Jale says that maybe she is nabinary.”

“So what?”

“If she’s not a man or a woman, what is she?”

“Nabinary. You need to free your mind.” I can’t help it. 

She grabs the bottle from the metal bucket with a clang, jostling some ice water onto the table, and fills our glasses to the brim. She puts it back with another clang, splashing more water. She takes off her sunglasses and puts them in front of her. The sun has yet to fully set. 

“Please no joking. This one hurts my heart.” She puts her hand on her bosom and tears up. “We can say ‘nabinary’ back and forth between us, but the world is cruel, and I want my child to be happy.” She dabs her eyes with her pink cloth napkin. 

“I’m sorry,” I say and hold her free hand. “You’ve been a great mother—a Gezi Park annesi. You went all the way to Istanbul for the protests. You’ve made yourself an activist. How many women are there like you in this country?”

“Please don’t call me a Gezi annesi. It reminds me of mothers whose children have been injured with tear gas canisters and plastic bullets. Or even killed. And it’s gotten worse.”

“Fine, but Jale is lucky to have a mom who accepts and loves her.”

“I don’t know how to protect her. She wants to go to the unofficial Onur Yürüyüșü gathering in Izmir or Istanbul next year. I could take her, but the thought of her experiencing gas and bullets during her first parade kills me.” 

“Well, maybe you shouldn’t go until you feel it’s safe.” 

She sighs. “But really, when is it going to be safe?”

“I don’t know, but things will probably get worse before they get better.”

“That’s what I was thinking, too.” 

“You’ve got to tell her that.”

“I agree, but just the fact that I need to tell her that hurts.” 

“Maalesef.” I get up, pull my chair next to hers, and sit, putting my arm around her. “I mean what I said: You’re doing a lot just by being there for Jale. In the few weeks since she came out, you’ve come a long way, light years farther than my parents, who keep quiet and act like everything is the same.” I look away to quell the ache stirring in my chest. “All you can do is be there for her and let her find her own way. Like we all had to do. You can’t control the world.”

She nods and kisses me on the cheek. I give her a hug before returning to my side of the table, and propose a toast, “To mothers like you.” 

“To friends like you,” she says and drinks. “While we’re on the subject, Jale has been chatting with Aslı, this older girl, online.” 

“How much older?”

“Jale says she’s sixteen. And she wants to meet her. Enis, you should talk to Jale.” 

“What about?”

“Well, you’re a normal gey, not like my friend Tamer from college.”

“Normal gey?” I scoff. “What’s wrong with Tamer?”

“Nothing, really, he’s just very flamboyant and sleeps around. As if that’s his life’s goal. You know the type. I want Jale to have a more wholesome influence in her life. Not become a barfly.”

“Well, I was once like him. Is that how you thought about me then?”

“Come on, you and Tamer are not the same.”

“Her neyse.” There are more important matters than Tamer. “As I told you before, Jale shouldn’t know about me yet.”

“About that,” she says and simpers.

“You told her, didn’t you?”

“I had to. And she was so excited about it. If you were in my shoes, you would want her to have someone to talk to, wouldn’t you?” 

I can’t believe she played the mother card. I take a deep breath, rub my face with both hands as if it’s the end of a prayer, and exhale. I finish off what remains of yet another glass of wine despite a sudden wave of nausea. 

My head spins as I stumble toward the men’s room inside the hotel. I realize the sun has fully set. The night is upon us, and the darkness that drapes the Dardanelles in the distance makes it look like it’s been snatched away, leaving an abyss in its place.

#

As I squeeze out the last few drops of urine, I smolder at Yaprak’s reckless behavior. I zip up, wash my hands, and check my hair. I have a short haircut that butches me up. Summer freckles on my face. I see a fledgling pimple on the side of my head. How did I miss it? I feel a pinprick of pain as I squeeze it. It’s now a puffy pink spot. I splash my face with cool water. 

As I’m about to leave the restroom, one of the Akbank men enters. He looks at me. I nod. He doesn’t nod back. Does he know about me? Did he hear us talk? I pull down the collar of my T-shirt with my index finger. The sun might be out for the night, but it’s still hot. 

When I step back outdoors, I feel all eyes are on me. I walk through the flotsam of tables carefully to avoid stumbling and drawing more attention to myself. Yaprak is laughing and gesturing as she chats with the tall businessman from the Akbank table. Has she told him about me? I get why her chatting with random men bothers her boyfriend Mehmet. They stop talking, and she turns back to our table just before I arrive. 

“Are you alright? You seem flushed. Drink water.”

“Is it that obvious? I just popped a pimple.” 

“Iğrenç,” she winces.

“I’ll tell you what’s gross. Your outing me to Jale, a child.”

“Come on,” she says, “You know her. She looks up to you. And she knows not to tell.”

I lean forward and glare at her. “You want me fired?”

“I’ll make sure she won’t tell anyone.” 

“Let’s hope she’s not as trusting of people as you are.”

“You’ve always been like this.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s like when we dated in high school. You didn’t want anyone to know. Honestly, I never understood it.”

“It’s not the same. It didn’t feel right. It wasn’t right.”

“So, it still doesn’t feel right?”

“Don’t you dare.” I pound the table. 

“Calm down. No more wine for you,” she says and puts on a smile. Tencere dibin kara, seninki benden kara—pot calling the kettle’s bottom sooty. 

I pour myself another glass of wine. I light a Camel. I make a point of offering her neither. She gives me a sheepish look and fills her own glass. We’re determined to drown it all in red.

“Look, I’m sorry,” she says. “You’ve known her since she was a baby. She won’t tell. I promise.”

“We’ll see. Maybe she already has.” I’m determined not to let her off the hook that easy. “And make sure you don’t blab about her, either.”

“I know how to protect my child. Don’t lecture me on parenting.”

“I just want to make sure you understand. We’re not characters in the Yaprak show of open-mindedness.”

“Siktir git,” she says loudly enough to turn several heads our way. She pushes her chair back and stands up unsteadily. 

I’ve finally gotten a rise out of her, so I pile on. “See, this is what you heterolar don’t get.” I shake my cigarette-holding right hand at her. “You don’t walk in kuir shoes, so you don’t get to tell. Got it?” 

She’d storm into the hotel except she’s drunk. She turns around slowly and walks as if she is an old lady with leg problems. I don’t go after her. For the moment, I want her to feel bad. When she finally reaches the building, she grabs the arm of the waiter at the door and holds onto it as she speaks to him. It looks like she needs support to stand up, but I know her. I bet she ordered another bottle of red. 

#

While Yaprak pouts in the restroom, I pull out my iPhone and call her boyfriend Mehmet. 

“Who’s this?” an unfamiliar voice on the other end asks.

Shit, I misdialed. It’s the new, other Mehmet, the school janitor, in my contacts. I was told to save his number for building-related emergencies. 

“I’m sorry, I dialed the wrong number,” I say, trying not to slur my words. 

He hangs up without saying anything. Fortunately, he doesn’t have my number yet.

The waiter brings a bottle of Kavaklıdere Yakut. Yaprak is definitely coming back. 

I squint at my phone as if I’m nearsighted or really old and can barely pick out the names. I navigate to the two Mehmets in my contacts. No last names. I tap each Mehmet with my fingertip to view their numbers. Not that I memorized them. Who does that these days? Mehmet the janitor lives near the school, and I know my work area code, so I call the other one. 

“Nooldu?” he says. No greeting, no warmth, no nothing. He’s always like that with me, as if I’m not man enough for him. 

“Yaprak,” I say and can’t find the words, like I’m intimidated by him all of a sudden. 

“Is she okay?” 

I hear music and people talking loudly in the background. 

“She’s okay. Where are you?” 

“Eceabat.”

A half-hour ferry ride away, on the other side of the Dardanelles. He lives there, born and raised, and owns a furniture store. They met when Yaprak was doing pro bono consulting for a family friend there. I don’t know what Yaprak sees in him. He doesn’t have a college degree, and he reminds me of my dad sometimes. He is a typical man in the way he neglects her. 

  “What’re you up to?” I ask.

“Hanging out. Entertaining some guests.” 

“Anyone I know?” 

“You don’t know them. Why’s she not calling me herself? Put her on.” 

Bossy. Maybe that’s what she likes about him. That, or he has a big dick.

Which he does. She told me herself.

“She’s just drunk and in the restroom. You know how she gets.”

“Of course, what else,” he mutters. 

Maybe there really is trouble in paradise. 

“Can you come get her?” 

“At this hour? Not sure. And my guests.”

“We argued a little.” 

He ignores that bit of information because he knows how we get when we drink together.

“Hold on, I’m checking the summer ferry schedule.” 

He won’t make it. I already knew that. 

“It’s past midnight. I missed it. The next one is at 2 am,” he says. 

“No worries. I’ll see what I can do. I’ll text you if we need you. Görüşürüz.” 

I see that Yaprak is on her way back. As she approaches, I tally the signs of drunkenness. Her face is flushed, her hair is somewhat disheveled, even though she probably put in some effort to keep it together, and one of the spaghetti straps of her orange dress has fallen below her shoulder.

“Who were you talking to?”

“Mehmet.”

“Why, did he call you?

“No, I called him.”

“Why?” 

“Well, you’re too drunk, and as your boyfriend, he should come and take care of you.”

“What the fuck, Enis?” 

“What?” I feign ignorance.

“You know.” She holds her forehead like she’s received news of death. Dramatic.

“Why are you coming between me and my boyfriend?” she asks.

“I’m not.”

“Yes, you are. He doesn’t want me to drink, and you call him and tell him that I’m drunk.”

“Well, I didn’t know that.”

“Now you do. Stay the fuck out of my relationship.” She’s ready to pounce on me like a lioness.

We are quiet for a minute and drink from the Yakut I’ve poured for both of us. 

“I know what you’re doing,” she continues. “You’re still mad at me, so you step over me and call my boyfriend.” 

That’s exactly it. “I don’t know where you’re getting that.” 

“Allah kahretsin, stop playing games!” She’s the one pounding the table this time. Her other strap falls. I reach out to pull it over her shoulder. She cringes and slaps my hand. “Don’t touch me.” 

“Tamam, tamam, I’m sorry,” I say, “I’m just drunk.”

She leans back and takes a deep breath. “Have I ever come between you and your boyfriends? Did I call Alpay when he was fucking around behind your back, and you knew it?”

“What’s my ex have to do with this?” I ask. We’re experts at pushing each other’s buttons.

“It wasn’t easy for me to see you being disrespected, but I’ve never disrespected you. I expect the same.”

She literally held my hand through that debacle and many others since.

“I said I’m sorry. What else do you want me to do?” 

“Call Mehmet back and tell him that I don’t need him. Now.” 

I dial Mehmet and am about to tell him exactly that when the sleepy and angry voice of the school janitor says, “Brother, you misdialed again. Stop calling me!” He hangs up. 

I start giggling and almost fall off my chair. 

“What’s so funny?” Yaprak asks.

“Hold on, I’ll tell you. Let me call your Mehmet first.”

“My Mehmet?”

I hold my index finger up at her as I dial Mehmet. I tell him we don’t need him. 

He says, “Tamam,” and hangs up. 

I tell Yaprak about misdialing the janitor twice. I get the giggles again, which makes Yaprak smile in spite of herself. Her smile is encouraging. Maybe she’ll forgive me. I get up and put my arm around her. She doesn’t move, except for turning her head sideways and offering me her cheek. I give her a peck on the cheek. As I move back to my seat, my head is spinning.

We avoid eye contact and don’t say anything for several minutes. The late-night sea breeze exhales through the emptying patio. 

I rub my eyes and say, “We shouldn’t have ordered this last bottle. It’s so late. And I have a morning meeting.”

“You can leave,” she says, “I want to stay a bit more and finish the Yakut.” 

She’s still sore from our altercation. I am, too, and it doesn’t feel right to leave her drinking alone, but I need to go home. “Are you sure?” 

“Yes,” she says, “I’ll take a cab.”

We both took the bus here today so that we could drink as much as we wanted.

“Call me if you need me.”

“I will.” She doesn’t get up, so I go to her, kiss her on the cheek again, and say hoşçakal. 

As I stumble out of the restaurant and shuffle through the hotel, I fumble for my wallet and apartment keys to make sure I have them. I hail a cab at the front entrance.

Once on my way, I sit back and enjoy the cool night breeze caressing my face and gliding through my hair. 

Then I remember my mental note about looking up panseksüellik. I Google it: “Pansexuality, or omnisexuality, is the sexual, romantic, or emotional attraction toward people regardless of their sex or gender identity.”

Interesting. I return my iPhone to my pocket and lean back. My mind drifts to Yaprak and myself: in high school, when we were mere kids trying to fit the mold; in college, when she studied in Istanbul and I in Izmir, but we stayed in touch and became even closer after I came out; and now, after so many years and so many boyfriends. She’s family. 

I pull out my phone and text her that I’ll speak with Jale, followed by two emojis: a heart and a hug. I add the Wikipedia link to my favorites; it could be handy when I talk to Jale. 

When I arrive at my apartment, I take off my clothes and set my alarm so that I can wake up and check on Yaprak in an hour. Just as I’m falling asleep, I hear the faint ping of an arriving text. I squint at my phone and make out her text: “Teşekkürler, I knew you would!” followed by her signature trio of emojis I cherish: a rock star, a middle finger, and a kiss.

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CAN’T DIE IN PORTLAND, MAINE by Scott Laudati

February 25, 2022

It was summer everywhere but Portland, Maine. From Brooklyn to Portsmouth road crews sat along I-95 and stared longingly into the finality of their existence. This was it. The winters too cold and the summers too hot. Fall was spoken about with the nostalgia of an old folk song, and spring, of course, ran shorter than a rainy weekend. The crews spent the entirety of these uncomfortable months working on the sides of roads while everyone sped by on their way to somewhere better, or worse. The only time the two groups interacted was when a motorist fell asleep and drove over the short wall of orange cones. “At least we have a job,” one hardhat probably said to the other. And none of them ever walked into traffic; they never even thought about it. But Seal thought about it as he drove past those crews on his way straight north from New York City. In fact, it was all he thought about. Of his existence. Of walking into traffic and freeing himself from the nightmare of being a man.

Seal liked Portland because he never sweat there. It was the beginning of June when he drove by the 7-11 on Congress Street and parked his car behind Longfellow Square. He stopped to play a game of pinball in a laundromat then walked down to Casco Bay. He saw a few crabs running in the muck left behind by a receding tide. He smelled his favorite smell: the chopped bait used in lobster traps—a rotting stink caked into the wooden hulls of lobster boats and imbedded deep beneath the nails of watermen—a stink that grew stronger as their boats headed back to the docks after a day at sea. And he saw his favorite bird: the black backed gull, almost the size of a pelican. Dozens of them gathered and erupted with long calls just as returning lobster boats became visible. The gulls sailed down on the docks with singular focus, arguing for prime spots where a few scraps might get tossed their way.

Yes, Seal liked Portland. He didn’t like kids and their fat parents bumbling around complaining about the price of lobster rolls. Or how they waited in line for hours to try French fries dipped in duck grease. Or how his serenity was continually broken by car horns and idiots screwing up the simple crosswalk directions in ways only tourists can. But all in all, he thought Portland was probably his favorite city. 

Seal didn’t know why he cared about having a favorite city. He was 35 and totally broke; a feat he couldn’t quite understand being that his whole previous year had been spent under piers in Brooklyn rebuilding dock pilings. And when he tried, he couldn’t really remember anything from that time. He wanted to. He wanted to explain to everyone the way your hands feel in January when seawater gets under your gloves. The real maddening blind rage your body goes into when you can feel parts of it dying for $22 an hour. He wanted to tell them that quitting was the only sane thing to do in an insane world. But nobody actually cares about anyone else, so he didn’t bother. And he was thinking about that last winter now and it didn’t seem like it had really been him who’d gone through it. What did his mind do while he hit concrete with a hammer 40 hours a week, week after week? He had no idea. He could remember his ex-girlfriends. His priests. The people he’d once called his best friends. The moment when it all stopped being possible and everything just morphed into varying levels of impossible. What was the point? Did he ever really have a chance?

Now 35 years had gone by. A whole lifetime and nothing to show for it.

He stepped into the water of Casco Bay—the freezing water, replenished daily with new freezing water brought down by the Labrador Current from Halifax and beyond. He cursed but he was committed. After all, it was the same familiar cold he’d known on those days floating under the piers that finally brought him to this. The days spent soaking wet, icicles growing off his clothes and weighing him down like his limbs were the branches of an old tree, sailing into the eternal blackness of a pit whose middle saw no light, the sounds of a city above muffled and rounded out into some inaudible animal roar, like he was sailing around the Congo itself, but caught there in the real heart of darkness, seeing no more than the radius of his headlamp, or occasionally when a hose or machine exploded unexpectedly he might get a second to see his surroundings until the fireball or a fountain of sparks arched into the river, plummeting his world back into the unimaginable desert of darkness again.

Yes. He was going to kill himself one way or the other. It’ll be a better world without me, he thought, one less loser consuming the dwindling water supply. He was up to his neck now. Well, here we go. He took one last breath as a commotion began up on a dock—a high New England dock that had to account for the 30-foot swing between tides. He turned to look and saw the same crowd who just before had been ruining his peace with stupid human moments like: “See how fat I look? That’s a terrible picture, take another one!” and their dad or boyfriend grumbled that this wasn’t what they’d spent all year working for, but still, feeling obligated to prove to their friends watching on the internet that their lives were perfect, repositioned themselves for a more professional stance, and hoped somehow that through a filter or maybe God’s love this next picture would suffice, and they wouldn’t have to endure any more berating in front of the other tourists.

But now they all pointed at Seal, screaming, “HELP.”

That was when he saw a dog, thrashing wildly under the dock, being bounced against barnacle covered pier legs and letting out a fading yelp with each hit. Seal hated people, all people, on some days even his own mother, but he loved dogs, all dogs, and he didn’t hesitate a second before swimming madly to the drowning creature.

Blood seeped out of the dog and thickened the surrounding water like a chemical spill. Barnacles worse than serrated knives attacked their bodies and Seal took a good sticking as he caught up to the dog. It was a big pit bull, probably the king of many dog parks, but it submitted immediately into his arms, and paddled the best it could, not just to assist, but because it was a good dog, and it didn’t want to be a burden to anyone, even upon its possible death.

But it did not die. Seal got the dog up onto the beach and saw that the wounds were basically superficial. The dog was exhausted more than anything else, and after a few seconds of heavy panting his tail began to wag like a toy coming back to life. “You’re a good dog,” Seal said, and patted the dog’s stomach to reassure him. It was a beautiful moment. Man and dog lying there under the fading summer sun. Blessed with this Maine shore. A savior and a life saved. Nothing could mean more than this. 

A blonde girl with a tattoo above her eyebrow and a shirt that said “PUSSY IS THE POWER” slid down the embankment toward them like a skier with no skis. “Cornwall. Cornwall, my poor doggy,” she said. “Is he ok?”

“He’s ok,” Seal said. “He is what he’s supposed to be—a good dog.”

“I can’t believe you were out in the water already. If you hadn’t been there Cornwall would be dead. You’re a hero. You saved my dog’s life. It’s a miracle.”

Was it a miracle? If he hadn’t decided to kill himself once and for all, about seven hours ago in Brooklyn, he never would’ve driven here, he never would’ve gotten into the cold water, and Cornwall would be a floating snack bar filling the stomach of every crab and seagull in the bay. Was this fate? His life now had meaning. He was a man who’d found his moment. For the first time not marginalized by circumstance and bad luck. I am The Peoples’ Champ, he thought, I am indeed a hero.

Then the girl started sobbing and put her head against Seal’s chest. The pandemic was over but he realized it had been a year since a woman touched him, and he liked it. She pulled her head away and apologized for the wet mess of her face, but she didn’t really sound sorry and he thought she looked pretty good.

“We’re catching an REI Line out of here in an hour and heading back to Asheville,” she said.

“Ohhhh, you’re a gutterpunk.” He pointed at the tattoo on her face. “That makes sense. You don’t smell like a gutterpunk, though.”

“Have you ever done it?”

“No.”

“Come with us.”

“I can’t.”

“You have to! There’s a zoo we’ll pass in New Jersey. They have hyenas and you can feed them popcorn. Have you ever fed popcorn to a hyena?”

“That does sound pretty good. But I was supposed to kill myself. I only stopped to save your dog.”

“Come to the popcorn zoo with me. You can’t kill yourself now. That would be absurd. And I’ll feel responsible.”

She was right. It did seem ridiculous now. Seal’s life had gone from completely meaningless to almost the guarantee that he was going to get laid if he could just hang on a little while longer. I can always kill myself tomorrow, he thought.

They left the beach hand in hand and the dog never strayed more than a foot away. They crossed Munjoy Hill and she lay down in the street in front of the lighthouse and told Seal to take a picture of her from an angle that made the lighthouse look like an erection growing from her crotch. Then they went down to the railyard and sat in the weeds.

“If you can count the bolts in the wheel, it means the train is going slow enough for you to jump on,” she said. “I’ll go first. When I get on, you toss Cornwall up to me, then climb up.”

A freight train that had to be two miles long crawled by. They waited for the engine car to follow a bend out of view and sat silently while the oil cars followed one by one. Eventually the boxcars were up. 

“Let’s go,” she said.

She threw her bag into an open boxcar and it disappeared inside. Then she put both of her hands on its floor and hoisted herself up. 

“Ok,” she said. “Get ready, Cornwall.”

Seal and Cornwall were slow trotting along with the speed of the train. She laid on her stomach and extended both hands out from the boxcar. Cornwall was pretty seasoned at this and basically jumped up and landed in her arms. Once the dog got situated, she reached her arms out for Seal. He was ready. Suddenly a big jolt jerked the train back and forth and then it started to speed up.

“Hurry,” she said.

Seal started to fall behind. His feet slipped on gravel laid along the side of the tracks and made a full sprint impossible. Do it, he said to himself, you’ve got one shot at this. 

He lunged at the open door. Both of his hands slapped the floor next to the girl and her dog, but there was nothing to grip. For a second it looked like he had it but then his hands started to slide and the momentum of gravity pulled his lower half under the train. Then he was on the ground. He saw his legs bounce limply between the bottom of the train and the tracks before  they disappeared out the other side. He looked at the open boxcar, growing further away, and her face, her beautiful face decaying into some kind of horror, etched into the last seconds of his memory. And the dog, too. Cornwall’s mouth moved in vicious agony, teeth bared and unforgiving, barking with no sound.

Will the hyenas get enough popcorn tonight? he wondered. Will they go to bed hungry?

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NAKED by Tim Lane

January 28, 2022

My boys are naked every chance they get and this morning is perfect for it. The light is clear and hot, unmuddled by rain or fog. And they have an excuse — they’ve just eaten ice cream and so made a mess of their clothes. I am here, but I am not seeing them, stupefied by the warmth that comes so rarely this far north. My mind wanders and trips down alleyways of my past, looking for trouble or regret. When my wife left for work this morning, she gave me a look. Truth be told, she’s getting a little tired of me. 

By the time I notice what they are doing, the older one, who is four, is already stripped. The younger one is only two and still unable to get his shirt over a head that is much larger than his body would seem to be able to support. He shrieks like he does any time he is met by a problem–from skinned knee to stubborn pistachio nut. The older one comes to help, a good big brother or a torturer, or both, pulling the shirt up in ruthless heave-hos. The younger one is lost inside it, crying all the harder, from pain or darkness, who can tell. Only he stops the very instant he is free. 

This did not used to be a problem, the nudity. In fact most of any day that was hot enough, and plenty that weren’t, my boys spent naked. However, the old backyard fence that was there when we moved in had come down in the winter months. Eight feet high at least, gray, rain-loved, and blooming moss and lichen. I noticed it listing to the side one morning as I brought out a bag of trash. I pressed upon it with my palms and it kissed off from the side of the garage, rusted nails letting go, and stooped over the yard. Then I kicked it, partly because I had a vision, sudden and clear, of what we might do with a more open space, and partly because I wanted to see what violence from the end of my foot might look like. The fence fell down and immediately our yard opened up like lungs which had been waiting to take a full breath. 

The line of where the fence had stood remained for a few weeks. A strip of thin, pale grass like the first skin after a wound. Soon, though, weeds took over. The thin, leggy kind with delicate, pink flowers.

Having no fence created a problem I hadn’t, in my rush, considered. Our yard, which abutted a narrow lane that led to the back parkinglot of an apartment complex, was now exposed to anyone from that building walking by. Dog walkers, couples, kids on bikes, a pale, young smoker with a collection of animal onesies she wore baggy and ironically. My wife was concerned that without the fence, thieves would relieve us of our tricycles and tomato starts. Perverts would haunt our back windows.

“The fence was rotten,” I told her. “If the perverts wanted to get in, it wasn’t stopping them.”

“The fence did more than we probably know,” she said. “Just the idea of it.”

“OK, but it came down,” I said. “So, what was I supposed to do?”

“Listen,” I told my boys now. “Those bodies aren’t for everyone.” 

Their bowed little legs, plump bellies, uncircumsized penises with the tiny, fleshy bit at the end. 

“It’s only OK for our family, so let's put on our undies at least.”

“Every day, all the time?” the older one said. “We used to be naked in our yard. It’s our bodies! It’s our choice if we want to be naked!”

“Yeah,” the younger one chimed, the sycophant, the pugilist. “If you don’t let us be naked, you’re outta here!”

His scrunched up face, eyelids half-closed, voice pitched downward but unable to hang onto lower registers — it was all, I knew, an imitation of me. And I found it incredibly endearing, fucking cute to be clear, though a little frightening, to think that my face screwed up like an ogre’s in moments of anger. In any event, I relented. One, because they were playing with each other without needing a thing from me, and so giving me a little peace; two because my wife had pointed out recently that I had become stricter the longer I stayed home with the boys; and three, because my mind had turned a corner in its wanderings and met with a thing from my past, fully formed and wriggle-wet. A memory I felt compelled to tangle with.

 

I had studied abroad in Chile the first half of my senior year of college. I wasn’t a leader, never in my life, but somehow, when I got there, the others looked to me. It was probably because I was the oldest one in the program. I felt the responsibility of it like balancing a broom upright on the tip of my finger. If I put in enough legwork, I could keep it afloat. I practiced the clench of appearing, always, to not care. I didn’t linger, I affected independence, I floated ideas about which bars to go to next, I sang karaoke. It was exhilarating, exhausting. I got better at it.

In any case, two weeks after arriving, my school went on a break. I was going to use the time to head up north, see the Atacama Desert, check off the first item on a list I planned to complete in my time there. My big study abroad. To my surprise, a small group of who I considered to be the coolest in the program rallied around my plan and came with me. Quite by accident, it took on the aura of exclusivity, with me at the center. One guy, Tom, even asked my permission, as if I had it to give, to invite along another student, Howard. Howard lived with a host family next to Tom’s and was brash and often ridiculous. Meaning drunk. Howard had already managed to turn off many in the program with his antics. Only Tom, universally liked, who attended his same college in Washington, still stood with him. I said of course Howard could come along, struck to be considered an authority, and I came off as being quite magnanimous. “You’re a good guy,” Tom said and I said nothing, only nodding, thrilled and protective over what I felt he’d given me. 

We spent a night in an apartment in a town I can’t remember now. Only that it looked more beautiful in the guide book than by our eyes. At Howard’s suggestion, we played something called the Elephant Game. Tom knew it. It involved clapping in a rhythm, each assigned an animal, and when your turn came, you had to make the sign of the animal in the space of a clap, and then the sign for someone else’s animal within the next. The lowest animal in the game was the naked mole rat. The sign you did as the mole rat was to grip yourself and shiver. I got to know the action very well as I was constantly stuck in the role. It seemed like a wire sparked and lost the information it carried whenever I tried to remember an animal other than the mole rat. So there I was, shivering the whole night through. 

But the game succeeded in getting us all very drunk; and in endearing Howard, to some extent, into the group, which seemed to thrill Tom.

 

A night later and we were staying in an apartment in a beautiful city by the sea. It had poems graffitied on the walls. If you knew where to look, you could eat a good meal for a few dollars and drink for a few more. We played the Elephant Game until the owner of the apartment pounded on the door and told us to stop; the clapping was too loud.

So we went for a walk. Through streets romantically lit, alongside a marina with boats we had seen earlier, each of us taking pictures in front of their colorful hulls. Now everything was gray and wet. But it was thrilling to be kicked out, to be drunk, to be so far away from our normal lives. This feeling, I believe, led Charlie, a woman with a narrow face and sleepy eyes, to decide that we should all strip down and swim in the water. The idea caught, and first Howard, with his goose-honk laugh, stripped down, and then everyone but me joined in. The group picked their way over large, angular boulders and down to the oily, black water. They screamed; they laughed. I stayed behind, and Charlie, covering her small breasts with her arm, asked me why. 

The truth was that I didn’t want to be naked. I was too skinny, I had a scar by my belly button, and moles, like they were an infestation of the animal, dug up all across my chest. And also, I was ashamed of how my penis would look. Uncircumsized, canted-to-the-left. Would it shrink in the cold?

“I just don’t feel comfortable,” I said.

“Oh,” she said, and in her eyes I saw the broom tumble, smack the floor. So I sat on the rocks for a while, uncomfortable with watching the others, a barrier between clothed and not. I walked home alone, counting how many of the streetlights were broken, bulbs gaping mouths with uneven fangs. 

 

Still later and we were in the desert and I had nosebleeds most nights. Howard was desperate to pick up a girl and somehow the entire group, even Charlie, became invested in his quest. But none of the local women were interested in him and finally he insisted that he didn’t care. 

“It’s their faces,” he said. “Being in the sun so much kind of fucks up their faces.”

“Jesus, are you an asshole,” Charlie said.

I didn’t agree with Howard. Or, probably, the me at that time knew enough not to admit that I agreed with Howard, but I could see what he was saying. It was an intense, constant glare in the Atacama and I was young. Too young to read codes. 

“Maybe he’s just saying what other people really think, deep down,” I said. “But he just doesn’t have a filter. Doesn’t dress it up in what he’s supposed to say.”

Charlie looked at me and shook her head. “It’s racist to say a whole group of people aren’t attractive.”

I stayed quiet, as did everyone else, even Howard, which was so rare as to be eerie. Tom clapped his hands and said we should all check out the Cueca; they were performing soon. 

We went to the town square and bought beers. Dancers shuffled around in a big tent waving handkerchiefs in the air. It was admirable and disciplined. My nose began bleeding and I raided the napkin dispenser to staunch the flow, trying to laugh it off, but nobody else seemed to be able to look at me and the mess of my face. It just kept coming. Howard plucked a fresh napkin and tried to join the dance. His arm in the air, fluttering the paper up and down, he approached the dancers who all stayed, tight-lipped, on their steps. My group laughed, even as they ignored me, even as they traded knowing looks of what a dumbass Howard was. Tom yelled in a hoarse voice for him to get the fuck back to the table. 

Howard is a kindergarten teacher now, I think. Tom might do something with insurance. Charlie writes for a magazine and lives in Denver.

 

The older son wants to know if I think it is hot enough for them to fill up the pool and I tell them, yes, sure, nodding my head, reminding myself to be present. Be present — too much is spent outside of this. When I got laid off, I decided to see it as a blessing, as a time to be present with my kids when they are so young. And yet, it’s a constant struggle. So much easier to slide backward into myself, looking for something, I don’t know what. A path out? A choice to a different future?

I go inside and I start to make lunch. Macaroni and cheese. Cut up apples. Peanut butter and celery sticks. My second cup of coffee, what I cling to for the later half of the day, instant. Cherish this, my wife often tells me. What you’re feeling is society’s pressure on you as a male. A breadwinner. You are doing the most important work. The. Most. I have made a mistake, I sometimes find myself thinking when my guard is down. I am stuck in a muddy mistake.

Then I hear the younger one talking in that adorable way he has. Half in this world, half in the other, imagining as he goes, sputtering sound effects, little clippings of phrases, sayings. He is happiest when he is inside his imagination. They are constantly demanding I join in, and I do, sometimes, when I can’t find a way out of it. To me, the practice is exhausting. Pretending to be a raccoon or a T-Rex. I joke with my wife about it. I call it my beautiful sacrifice. If it were up to my boys, we’d never stop pretending we were something else. 

I go out on the back porch and see Cal, the man who lives in the apartment complex and survives on god knows what and also cans. He collects them, a huffing, rotund machine with thick eyeglasses and a rubber grin. When he remembers me, he likes to talk to me. He tells me his theories on why the conservatives are having a moment, or how the homeless are lazy and that’s why he gets most of what he wants. His competition, he sneers, would rather sleep. Other times I’ve said hello as we passed, asked him how it was going, and he has looked at me as if frightened, and hustled on. 

Cal’s laughing now at something my older son is doing. I remember when they were even younger and we stripped them in parks, on benches, anywhere, to change their diapers. When you are so young, your body is public. It is unformed, unclaimed by even yourself, and so free. The child feels no shame. That changes somewhere along the way. My sons don’t have it yet. And I know I will have to give it to them. Which is also taking something away.  

I rush out, my hands still wet, they smell of garlic, and find that my boy is juggling his penis. He finds it hilarious, we all do in my house. Hand over hand, it really does look like juggling. But it shouldn’t be here, it shouldn’t be now.

“Hey,” I say. “You need to get over here and get dressed, both of you.”

“I will throw you in a tree!” the younger one says.

“I don’t like your serious voice,” the older says.

I smile at Cal. I don’t want this to be weird even though I know that later on I’ll fantasize about the terrible things he was trying to elicit from my boys and scheme ways I’d hurt him. An ugly purpose, but a purpose all the same. It’s in line with how sometimes, I’ll read horrible news stories about a recent shooting and imagine myself into the scene, charging the shooter, taking him down, being lauded the hero. For now, though, I don’t want to be rude. Because we see each other all the time and I do believe, deep down, he’s harmless. Maybe he has some kind of condition. On the spectrum. His big, threadbare t-shirts are mostly clean. His glasses are constantly fogging up. My wife gave him my old winter gloves last December. He was just talking, after all, laughing, it was funny, and there is no fence there anymore. What was he supposed to do? 

“You need clothes, I keep telling you,” I say once I get the boys inside.

“But we were in our own yard,” the older one says. “And you say it’s our body.”

“It is your body,” I say. “And it’s only for you.”

“But, Daddy.”

“No,” I say, definitely breaking through into Serious Voice territory, into something like yelling. “You put your clothes on or you don’t go outside, do you understand me? I’m trying to keep you safe.”

“You always ruin my day,” the older says. 

“You’re being disresponsible!” The younger says. 

Cal is striding off, his huge t-shirt tucked into basketball shorts, Ikea bags in each hand. 

 

I have never been in a fight. Not a real one. But there was once, back in Chile, near the end of my time abroad, when I was leaving a bar and two men plucked my hat from off my head. I asked for it back and they laughed at me. One of them pretended like he had a gun, reaching into his coat, so I turned and walked the other way. But they followed me, kicking me and punching me as I went. I was much taller than them, and sloshing drunk, so I hardly felt the blows. Still, they kept adding up inside of me until finally, in an instinct that was quicker than any thought, I reached back, grabbed a foot as it kicked me and pulled up. The man lost his feet, fell onto the sidewalk, the back of his head into the cement like a watermelon dropped in the supermarket. I ran as fast as I could, turning at random streets to lose these men who may or may not have been about to shoot me. When I came across a phone booth, I called Howard, who was dating Charlie by then. He’d often told me of the fights he’d gotten into in the small, spread-wide desert town he’d grown up in, how he didn’t mind them, in fact liked them, was good at them. He answered on the third ring and I told him where I was, what had happened, how I needed his help. I wanted to find those men and fight them. Get my hat back. Beat the shit out of them. But he was sleepy, this was very late, and he asked me if I was alone now. If I was safe. I was, the men were nowhere in sight.

“Then just go to bed,” he told me.

When I got home, I undressed in my bedroom and looked at my body in the mirror. I had purple and green bruises up and down my legs. They would be worse in the morning.

 

Maybe I will tell my wife about this later, when she is home from the real world, and maybe it will hold her attention better than my stories about the boys refusing to put on their clothes, or making a mess of things, or the tiny, fierce joy of taking a nap, my arm under each of their necks, heavy and breathing in the same rhythm.

But when she gets home, I don’t tell her any of it because by then, the story seems meaningless, just like most of these days. Instead, she has her life to tell me about, the one she enters daily, leaving us behind. A world of real push and pull. Boss and coworkers. Drama. And I tell her my opinions, strategies, thoughts on what she should do out there. 

 

A few weeks later, I go for a walk, leaving the boys practicing magic tricks with my wife. They are disappearing crayons, quarters, stuffed rabbits. They are pulling gauzy scarves from empty tubes, toothpicks from empty palms. I was having a hard time acting shocked by their antics. My wife said I should leave, take some time to myself.

It is a beautiful day again and I am trying to take my mind off the spinning, gentle haunt of a life lived any kind of way. I circle the block, and then the next. I know all of these places and yet, even after three years here, I notice new things just put up or invisible to me before. A slackline between two dying trees. A small fairy kingdom built in the hollow of an enormous oak that has released its pollen and bulged my eyes. A doll dressed half as a devil, half an angel, nailed onto the pillar of someone’s porch. 

On my way home, I see a man in the courtyard of the apartments, lying with his shirt off and his pants down, close to his knees. He is having a hard time breathing. Each intake whistles and stuffs. I am afraid, seeing this, and I look around, but there is nobody else here. Then I recognize him. It’s Cal, having some kind of emergency.

“Cal?” I say.

“Are you OK?” I edge nearer.

“Can you hear me?”

I call 911. I hear ambulances far off. I’ve checked his pulse, I’ve elevated his head. And then, though it is hard and takes all the grip I can manage in my fingers, I push his shorts back up, over his pale, pocked, yogurt-pour flesh. His crisp, white underpants. The shy stub of his penis almost lost in a wiry nest of hair.

“Let me just get you situated, man,” I say.

Cal is breathing, and maybe he sees me, and maybe he’s already gone. Soon there is a collection of busy men and women applying devices and counts and hands to his failing body. But then I see from the way the activities of the workers, paramedics and firepeople suddenly slacken, that he is dead now, and his body doesn’t matter one bit to him anymore. 

And I think, a small complete thing formed instantly in the front of my brain: I have a broken heart. 

I go home and hold this all within until the boys are in bed. Then I tell my wife. She doesn’t remember, at first, who Cal is. But after I describe him, his trundling walk, his cans, his cold, naked hands in the winter, the gloves she gave him, she remembers and is sad in a new way. She is crying.

I tell her of the time I was walking and the boys were ahead of me, tiny blurs on those three-wheel scooters, and he came out from his apartment and told them to stop, to wait for me. When I got to him, I apologized. 

“I have sons of my own,” he said. “The instinct never goes away, to protect them, just like the day they were born.”

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IS IT OK IF WE DISCUSS YOUR SISTER? by Mitchell Duran

January 21, 2022

On the day of her funeral, twisted roots and ashen rocks jutted from the edges of the concrete vault. I had never seen a grave before. I had never seen a casket. I had never seen Earth displaced with that kind care and disregard.

After carrying her, side by side with the family, our fingers stiff from the cold of morning, we placed her final bed on the mechanical lowering-device. A part of me wanted to do it myself. The impulse felt foreign, but close. A part of another part. After, I was told the help always did it, that we were allowed to carry her but not lower. I didn’t ask why.

All I remember is feeling ungrateful.

We stepped back onto the grass, wet from a light mist. Northern fog always rolled over the mountains at that time. Some of us went to stand underneath the provided tent. I stayed close, with the scattered leaves off the dry limbs of the trees spinning around my feet. In the distance, I saw a pile of dirt that would later be used to cover her forever—soon, the debris and rubble, the sticks, and stones would be as much a part of her as we once were. 

And as old friends stood next to fresh wreaths and held burning candles near her waxy smiling portrait, I finally saw what everyone else saw, I finally felt what everyone else felt. Against my own will, I had become like them. 

#

Where was she?  

Why did she go? 

Would she ever meet me on the other side of the river?

#

I was sitting in my parent’s Prius, the windows rolled up, when my cell phone rang. The shock of sound jolted me. For a second, total silence provided an inkling of peace. A seagull had shit on the corner of the windshield. I didn’t bother cleaning it up. I could barely put up a fight.

"Please grab flowers after you’re done with your appointment,” Mom said.

“Ok.”

“I don’t want to go to the store before we go tomorrow.”

Mom. She was crying. I looked at my eyes in the rear-view mirror. Nothing. Blank. Give her something bastard, I told myself. Nothing.

"Make sure about the flowers," Mom repeated. “Your clothes are ready in the laundry room too, for tomorrow. Remember the flowers, ok?”

Mom’s voice wavered the way sunlight does across moving water. 

“Yes,” I said. “I got it.”

I hung up or she did.

It didn’t matter.

I slid my phone back into my pocket and opened the driver side door.

#

About a year after everything, I started seeing a psychiatrist about repetition. I’d deemed them ‘Psych’ for short. In the throes of death names no longer mattered. During our visits, Psych felt more like an entity than a person. People were fallible, vulnerable, and easily taken. Sometimes Psych was faceless, a blotch sitting in a chair asking me questions, trying to get answers out of me that I couldn’t give reason to. They consistently brought up the word “cycle”.

"Everything is repeated," I insisted.

"Life is a cycle," Psych disagreed. They did this to get me talking. 

"Can cycles be identical?" I asked.

"Technically not. Some cycles are extremely similar, but no two cycles are exactly the same. Are two people's lives ever exactly the same?"

"I wouldn't know. I don't know that many people. Maybe."

"You’re seventeen. You know lots of people, like your friends and family.”

“They don’t count.”

Psych clicked their pen out and in, out and in. I hated that. It was a nervous habit that humanized them. I didn’t like that. It made me resent them, a trick forcing my mind to recognize their life. I didn’t want that. I didn’t want to get that close.

"The word cycle is used by people too ignorant and afraid to use the word repetition,” I said. “They are scared of the truth that everything is repeated for the next generation, the next group, the next of the next of the next. We shift things around, give things to one another to tilt life to make it look different, but things remain the same. Everything contains the same primal function from the beginning of time, only now, there’s more distance due to our own creation out of fear. Music is still music, words are still words, paintings are still paintings, love is still love, and death is still death. These ‘differences’ in rituals are degrees of separation that end up confusing people and strays them from the truth. All this is going to end one day for them, completely out of their control, suddenly, whether they like it or not.”

Psych looked up from their pad of paper. It was the first time all day. I could see their annoyance from our lack of progress. Let them feel it. Their failure had nothing to do with me.

“Can I tell you something?” they asked.

“Aren’t you supposed to ask stuff?”

“Your mother informed me about your sister,” they said, ignoring my quip. “Which is why you are here Camden. Is it ok if I ask you some questions about her?"

I leaned forward on the couch with my hands clasped between my legs. There was a dot of sweat on their hairline. Again, I tried to ignore any physical reaction to the moment we were in, but it was hard, nearly impossible. On top of that, they saw that I was staring. Nonchalantly, they took out a thin white napkin, dabbed the sweat, then threw it away without a thought.

“Can I have some water?” I asked. 

They motioned to the paper cups and pitcher beside me.

“So," Psych maintained, "would it be alright if we discussed your sister?”

The water, after I dumped it onto my head, as it ran through my hair, over my face, and onto my shirt, was colder than I expected. Psych’s eyes reminded me of what my Mom's eyes looked like at Ally’s funeral: defeated and bewildered. I remembered my father’s eyes: hate, anger, and the need to lash out at God but everyone knows that you can’t reach Him.

"Sure," I answered. "Let's talk about my sister."

#

The priest cleared his throat and squeezed the podium so I could see the whites of his knuckles before he began.

"To lose a child is the hardest trial a parent can be asked by God to endure. We are born, we are raised, and we live as well as we can until the Lord beckons us back to his kingdom." 

The crowd was dressed in black. The long, wooden pews were worn and scratched. We sat inside a large stone church, still and quiet as the priest spoke. Before entering, I felt a light rain on my cheeks and forehead. Immediately, I imagined her, Ally, my baby sister, somewhere above us crying, wishing she could be there with us.

My seat was uncomfortable and tight. Mom and Dad were beside me, silent. Ever since the divorce, I hadn’t seen them sit so close together. Mom dabbed her handkerchief to her eye as she cried. Dad gripped his hands until they shook. Mine were flat in my lap.

"And when we are faced with such trials,” the priest continued, “we must go to God for guidance. Some may be reluctant to do so because of one's anger but, I ask you to remember, that anger and hatred were blessed to us by Him. Without God, we would have nothing.”

I hadn’t been allowed to see Ally's body yet. I looked up at the ceiling and imagined what Ally saw laying in the coffin, but realized her eyes were closed and would never open again. I felt so young, so stupid, and naïve. In a violent gust of wind that rattled the church doors, I could hear life laughing at me.

The priest paused and the immense silence that followed brought on a sensation to weep. It began in the middle of my chest, near my heart and lungs; a shaking panic. My throat tightened, my eyes watered, and my breath felt like it had been stripped from me. I couldn't breathe. Was I dying to keep Ally company, wherever she was? My throat released and the choking sobs brought on a fever of hysteria mixed with rage. The fact that life had forced this pain upon me was incomprehensible. I wanted it out of my mind. It felt like a bullet ricocheting around in my skull. Mom’s hand touched my shoulder, but there was no comfort in it, only a disdainful, broken acceptance. The helplessness curled up inside of me and did not release.

Outside, I heard a dog barking in the distance, angry at something.

Later, when this moment became a faded picture too hazy to be a memory but too real to be imagined, I would feel guilty about my lack of control. I’d recall the suddenness of that reaction, the crisp, sharp spontaneity of feeling that eternal sorrow for the very first time.

"Life does not give us any wishes," the priest said, "for we are the wishes of God. Only God can wish. We are his dreams. We must strive to make his glory a reality on this plane. Ally is with Him now and, if you have faith and believe in our Lord, then you are with him too.”

The priest looked down at our fractured family, his face solemn and heavy.

“If you are with Him and Ally is with Him then, in a way, you are together through His good graces. When you leave this holy place, walk with her in the afternoon. Walk with her in the light of the moon. Walk with her always. Let her never leave you.”

When we were asked to rise and say goodbye, I hesitated to look down at Ally’s body.  Like a child, I was afraid. So, I stared at her tiny feet in shoes I didn’t recognize, then her stiff legs, her delicate hands in thin white gloves she would never wear if she were alive. When I got to her face, I didn’t recognize it. There was no blood in her cheeks, her lips. Her life had been taken somewhere else. Ally was no longer there. I understood then what people meant about our bodies being shells for who we really were. Everything was imagined. Built up over time. We were nothing but carriers of the effects of our experiences. Ally had been allowed so little.

As we carried her out of the church, down the stairs and over dry, fallen leaves that cracked and broke underneath our feet, the sun did not come through the thick clouds overhead like it did in the movies, signifying some new beginning. 

It was plain: she was not there. She was gone. We were left without her. This was what life would be like now. 

All of it. 

#

After the funeral, after the wake, after everyone went home, I walked a small dirt path along a hiking trail close to Mom’s house. There was a little bridge we used to cross that Ally was afraid to walk over. It always bugged me the way she forced me to hold her hand. She feared how fast the river moved beneath us. I remember feeling embarrassed guiding her along, even though no one else was ever there. As I crossed the bridge, wanting nothing more than to help her again, I recalled walking along that same river, together.

“So, what are you learning in school?” Ally asked me.

I hesitated. “I don’t know. Sophomore year stuff?”

"I’m learning about geology." Ally paused. “Lots to do with rocks."

"Rocks?" I stammered, not remembering a time when I learned about rocks in school. “That’s kind of a dumb thing to be excited about.”

"I don't know," she grinned. "There are so many different kinds. They give you all these books and I read them all.”

Ally loved information in whatever form it took. Mom and Dad loved that about her. It seemed that her entire life was about acing tests, playing on the best sports teams, and surrounding herself with an endless number of friends. Her parent teacher conferences were like an award show. Her whole life seemed to be effortless. Nothing could hurt her.

Ally moved to the edge of the river and crouched to observe the rippling water.

“I can almost see myself in the water, Cam,” Ally said. “Like I’m looking in a mirror.”

The brown blackish surface was so smooth it looked like marble or the brass casing of a bullet. I couldn’t tell how fast the water was going. The rain hit hard that Fall. I’d never seen the river so deep that I couldn’t see the rocks at the bottom. Across from us was a large hill that escaped upward as if leading all the way to the light blue sky. There were no clouds, only bird’s wings spread gliding between the trees. Ally bent down, her bare knees in the dirt, and looked at her reflection in the water. 

“Did you like it when Mom and Dad were together or not together?”

“Geez,” I said, shaking my head. “It’s different.”

“I wish I remembered more. I’m scared to talk to them about it. I feel like they’d get mad.”

“Why?”

“Maybe they’d think I was blaming them?”

“Have you thought about this a lot?”

“Haven’t you?”

I shrugged. “What can I do?”

“Nothing I guess.”

I had the impulse to comfort her but realized I didn’t know how.

Ally dipped her fingers in and fluttered them, creating tiny droplets in the air that quickly fell and dissolved. I stepped away, half to get some space from her and her question, half to walk further up the trail. I bent down to pick up a stick to fling into the brush, when I heard something fall into the river.

I turned to find Ally gone. I hadn’t been there. Ally, my sister, my sister, my little sister.

Tiny pebbles dug into my skin as I dove for the riverbank. Ally’s hand reached out and I managed to grab her before dipping back under. I pulled as I pushed myself back in the dirt, trying to be both strong and gentle as I got over the edge and dragged us away from the current. She was on her back, crying, soaked to the bone. I brought her up onto my chest and held her close to stop the shivering.

“It’s ok,” I tried to tell her. “I’m here. I’m sorry. I’m here. I’m here.”

I thought of that moment as I threw myself in at the same exact spot. My body, shocked by the cold, was immediately pulled under. I let it. This is what I deserve, I thought. This is my punishment. As my breath thinned, the current shifted downriver, sending me into a sandy embankment. The river spit me out like rotted meat. Who was I to decide what to do with my life? I managed to crawl onto the path with no one to keep me from shivering but myself. Up in the night sky, the stars were bright and far away.

#

"Jump!" I screamed at Ally. She was tip toeing on my favorite jumping rock, the one I always dove from whenever we visited the big river up north. “It’ll be fine!”

Dad took us up one weekend. Since he and Mom divorced, Dad needed company. They had been married since they were sixteen. I didn’t know what that was like. I could only see the effects: the absence at the dinner table, the nights of him coming home drunk, the breakfasts Ally or I would make for each other because he couldn’t get out of bed. The loss of love left Dad sick and neither of us knew how to make him feel better.

Ally shivering on top of the rock. In the water, my skin felt like it was in that mixed state of warm and numb, almost like my head was the only thing attached to my body. Everything from the rippling river to the cars careening on the road that day was moving to its own music.

  "If you jump in," I said, holding myself still with the tips of my toes, “you won't be cold anymore. You gotta' jump in." 

"I was freezing swimming over here! How do you know that?"

"Because I feel fine!" I yelled. "Look at me. I'm not shivering at all."

"You're lying again. I can tell!"

She stutter-stepped to the edge, looked over, shook her head, and backed away.

"The fall will only last a second and then you'll be in the water. I promise.”

"You promise?" Ally’s eyes were big and scared, but I knew she could do it.

"Promise," I said as I dove under the surface of the water, heading toward the rock. I heard a distant splash and knew Ally had finally jumped. I smiled, letting the river water run into my mouth and through my teeth. I kicked my legs and reached out my arms, propelling myself to the shore ahead.

Popping out of the water, I stopped and looked up into the forest. The road was twenty feet away from the river and I could hear cars and trucks rushing by. I listened to the river and felt the sun and saw the leaves rattling in the trees. I rushed up the slick surface of the dark green and black rock, gripping tight on the one hold there was, and pushed myself up with my legs. The floor was wet from Ally’s hesitation. I laughed and called out to her.

"You almost made a lake up here, Ally!" I shouted scanning the river. 

I couldn’t see her. I looked on the other side of the bank. There were broken branches and debris. She wasn't where I had been swimming. I looked downriver, thinking maybe I’d see her bobbing along towards Dad. She wasn't there. I only saw the water, its tiny white ripples folding over one another, brown and dark blue, white rays of sunlight streaking over it. A slow tingle started around my temples and my eyes began to water. My hands started to shake, and my chest tightened. If I took a breath, if I did anything, my fear might become a reality. 

"Ally," I yelled. “Ally! Where are you?"

I looked upriver, thinking maybe she had accidentally gone the wrong way. She was small. She was young. She didn't know left from right or down from up, why would she know which way to go? Maybe the river had taken her downstream and I couldn’t see her? She must have been so scared. I thought maybe she was playing a trick on me. I looked across the river into the brush to see if she was hiding behind a tree or down in the leaves. She wasn't there. She couldn't have gotten herself across the river that fast anyways. The tingling stopped, and breath burst back into my lungs. I looked downriver and saw nothing. I saw the bridge with its two large arches, the sun bright against the stone. I couldn't see Dad.

Where was Ally?

I dove into the river, scraping the tip of my nose along the rocks. Why was the water suddenly so shallow? It hadn’t been when I had jumped in feet first. Had I convinced myself it was deep to get Ally to jump? I felt stones and sand mix together and the grittiness rub against my skin as I thrashed around, spinning in circles, trying to see everywhere at once. The birds that had been flying from branch to branch had stopped. A wind blew over the river, stinging my eyes. I watched small, inch high ripples begin, peak, and melt.

Then, I saw her face down, silhouetted against the light blue water. 

I swam as hard as I could, my skin no longer numb but burning.

When I reached her, I turned her over, held her body in my arms, looked at her smooth, small face, and knew she was dead.

#

I held a tiny Dixie cup of water in my hand. Psych had moved the pitcher of water and a stack of five or six cups on the coffee table next to them.

"Camden, how are you feeling after last week?" Psych asked.

"Refreshed," I said.

"Do you feel you've made any progress with what you're able to share?”

I took a sip of my water and looked out the window, noticing the cars on the road. Trees stood unwavering and naked. If I had turned around when I got out of the water rather than stopping to look up into that stupid forest and listen to those stupid trucks rushing past, I might have been able to save her. The nibbled edge of the cup I chewed on fell away from my lips and rested on my knee. It wouldn't have made a lick of a difference anyway. She was dead when I got to her. I couldn’t have done anything. 

"She broke her neck," I said. 

The words mirrored the cold reality I felt but had yet to articulate. I had no idea if the truth should have given me some kind of catharsis. All I could do was continue. 

"She dove in head first because I told her it was deep enough for any kind of jump. She was young. I was trying to get her to come with me. We..." I stammered, feeling that same choke I felt when I couldn't find her. I looked out the window again. A woman glided along the sidewalk with her dog.

Psych nodded.

"And, I had her little body in my arms and her eyes were open, and she was looking at me, not breathing or anything, but staring up at me blankly, unable to say or show me anything. I couldn't help her. She was gone and the river was pushing me because my legs had started to shake and my arms…I’d grown so weak all of a sudden. Maybe it was from being in the water for so long, but I couldn't hold her up, so I let the river take some of her, her weight, I mean. I let the river take us both down the small rapids where the trout would rest in the shallow pools, where the sun would shine all day, making the water warm. I never figured out why the trout would sit in that specific spot like that, but now I see they must like it there because of the heat. It's funny, because I always thought fish were such cold things and I only figured it out because as we floated down and passed through that warm spot it wasn't warm, it was hot, like boiled water. It surprised me. Then, I remembered Ally couldn't feel anything that I was feeling. She would never be able to feel anything ever again. Maybe in another way, in a way that no living person knows how, but the way we felt things…that was finished for her.”

Psych put their pad of paper and pen down.

"You must understand Camden, Ally's death was an accident. There was nothing you could have done about it. Some people, people you will perhaps talk with later in life, may call it an act of God or a freak accident or other things, but these labels are only there to make you feel better about what happened or give it reason."

I said nothing. 

"It’s a very hard thing to understand and live with Camden, things happening without reason. It’s extremely close to the idea of chaos. If there is no reason for the death of someone you love, then how can you live day-to-day and not go crazy?”

"I don't know.”

"You are innocent,” Psych told me. “Know that.”

I shifted and turned to the pitcher of water and poured myself another glass.

"How do you see yourself dealing with this event over the next four or five years? I imagine you are going to college soon. How do you think you will handle it there?"

"How will I handle it?" An image of Ally reading her science books at her desk with only her overhead lamplight flashed across my mind. All was quiet around her.

"Yes," Psych said.

"Miss her. Think of her. See her in anything I think is beautiful. Know that she is gone and accept it in a sort of melancholy fact of life that everyone you know, and love, will one day have to be buried. Some later, some sooner. Some now, some hundreds of years from now. Always remembering that she had more time than others and that I am grateful for the time that I had with her. Live for her. Love for her. Grow and feel everything doubly as much because she never had the chance. Never let her go. Keep her picture by my bed. Let her walk with me when I walk alone.” I exhaled. “That maybe one day I'll see her on the other side of the river and have the courage to go to her, take her hand, and walk with her.”

"I think that is a very good start, Camden."

“Yeah,” I sighed, rubbing the sting out my eyes. “It’s something.”

#

One night, I had a dream. I was alone walking along a river’s edge. Tiny pebbles and sand fell into the water as I walked on loose dirt. How I had come to be there, I didn't know. I realized it was the same river Ally had fallen into, the one I threw myself in, the one who denied me.

The air was still and cold, with my breath visible moving through the still scene. I came to a junction that led to a hill where the path crested and then descended, a path I had been up and over many times, but in the dream I couldn’t remember what lay past it. Two large redwood trees stood on either side of the hill’s arch, seeming to grow right up into the sky. I went to walk toward the hill, but then heard Ally's voice behind me.

"I want to go home.”

I turned to face her. She looked the same: small, with her brown hair to her shoulders; her almond eyes reflecting the sun; those tiny lips that barely parted when she spoke. She was at least ten feet away from me, but I could still smell the lemon sun-tan lotion Mom would put on her whenever we would go out walking. I felt so grateful and full of love. I begged my mind to accept this was real, fearing the acknowledgement I was in a dream would force me to wake up.

I stopped and looked into her eyes. They were wet, on the verge of crying. There was nothing I could do. 

We walked up the hill and down into a valley. Thin scattered trees stretched up into the sky, standing like toothpicks, swaying back and forth. No sunlight broke through their leaves—

it was like we’d walked into a room with the light switched off. We reached another river. Ally went ahead and dipped the tip of her pointer finger into the water and whirled it around. I was coming up behind her when she told me she couldn't see her reflection. I looked over her shoulder and couldn't see mine either. 

I stepped back as Ally stood and turned to me. Her face was so clear. She smiled. The sound of the river trickled behind her and the sun shining down through the leaves of the trees cast her in an impenetrable white light. I lost sight of her like I had at the river. Out of that same panic, I reached for her, desperately wanting to feel her tiny hand in mine, but the light dimmed. The sound of the current lessened, the sun grew fainter, and the ground that had been moist and loose became hard and brittle. 

Ally was gone.

I was by myself again.

When I woke, my hands were clenched so tight it took a few minutes before my fingers relaxed. I swung my legs over the edge of the bed and looked across the hall into Ally's old room, feeling that same choke in the center of my chest. I thought I saw an outline of her hunched over her desk, a pencil in-between her fingers. I blinked and it became what it really was: a desk with an empty chair. The tightness in my chest relaxed. 

“You still dream of her,” I told myself. “She's still there.”

I got up and looked out my window. It was a new day. Ally was with me and far away. She was always like that - close but distant. That was our kind of love. 

The thin river behind our house moved slowly over the stones, down the tiny waterfall, and into the drainpipe that led to the hiking path. I listened to the crows chattering. There was a gang of them perched in the trees. Their jet-black feathers clashed with the light blue sky and olive-green leaves. They showed up en masse whenever the bugs were buzzing around. Ally always hated those crows.

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SQUAT STANDS by Richie Smith

January 7, 2022

The high school gym was filled with jocks and weight lifters and I didn’t fit in with any of them. People like Irving Ackerman, the strongest Jewish kid in the school. 

Irving didn’t know me. I lifted the lowest level of weights, but I resolved to change this. I was going to work out to grow big and strong.

I found a body building program in the back of a comic book.

“Universal Body Building” had the logo of a muscle man hugging a sexy woman and promised to send me weekly lessons which would transform me into a hunk of muscle.

In order to start the program, I needed squat stands. 

“Dad, can you buy me squat stands?” I asked the next morning at breakfast.

 “Squat stands are expensive,” he said, biting into his English muffin. He drank dark liquid that wasn’t coffee. He didn’t understand the importance of body building, but by the time he finished eating, he realized I was disappointed.

“Maybe you can have squat stands for Hanukah,” he said when he got home later that night. “I’ll see if Dan Lurie has them.”

Dan Lurie was a bodybuilder with a retail store in Canarsie.

“Can we get the stands tonight?” I asked, as if squats were a life-saving intervention.

It was the last night of Hanukah, 6:15 PM on a weeknight and the store closed at seven.

For some reason, perhaps guilt, my father agreed and we sped on the Belt Parkway to Dan Lurie, weaving in and out of lanes at a high speed so I could get squat stands.

Unlike the shining stainless steel squat stands I had seen in various gyms and at school, these squat stands were flat black with square bases that rattled on our uneven basement floor.

I started the Universal Body Building Program, but couldn’t keep up with the lessons or the twelve dollar monthly payments. Even though I had squat stands, I still had weak quads, and soon, I also had a collection agency coming after me.

I did squats for a few more weeks on my own and then moved on to smoking pot instead.

I spent school days getting high, but I still wanted to get strong. I still had a man crush on Irving Ackerman, now a senior and possibly the strongest Jew in the world. He was musclebound from all the furniture he lifted at his father’s store: Ackerman’s Eclectic Antiques, one of the famous high school dozen that could bench press the entire rack. He gave up wrestling to become a body builder.

Sometimes I followed Ackerman in school. I admired his Herculean walk, the wide lats and bulky thighs that never allowed him to bring his arms or legs together. He seemed the perfect person to lift weights with, if only I could get him to notice me. 

My only hope to gain favor with Ackerman was a scaly one-eyed kid with a limp named Gallo, who hobbled alongside Ackerman like a pilot fish. Gallo also happened to sell pot, so one day when I was buying a joint, I asked if he ever lifted weights with Ackerman.

Gallo looked at me sideways, compensating for his glass eye. “We lift all the time, man.”

Gallo didn’t seem muscular but he was tough. “You want to lift with me? You’re not going to be able to lift with Irving until you bulk up a little.”

I hesitated, not wanting to be alone with Gallo, but I realized this was probably my only chance.

“I’ll lift with you,” I said. “You have weights?”

“Of course I got weights. I got lots of weights. More than you can ever lift.”

“Should I come over after school?”

“Sure, come the fuck over. If you don’t mind cat piss. I got cat piss all over the basement. That’s where the weights are.”

“I’m allergic to cats,” I said thinking about the horrible smell of cat piss and Gallo actually looked pissed although I couldn’t tell if he was looking at me. He was one of the few people I knew who would actually look better with an eye patch.

“You got weights?” he said finally.

“Yeah, I have weights but I don’t know if there’s enough for you. How much you lift?”

“I lift lots. What you got?”

“I don’t know, maybe one sixty.”

“That’s weak. Smith, you’re pretty fucking weak.”

“I got squat stands.”

“I’ll be over at three,” he said.

After school, Gallo showed up at my house in a leather jacket reeking of pot. His dress shirt underneath was unbuttoned to reveal a gigantic metallic cross. He limped across our foyer in sweatpants without underwear.

I introduced Gallo to my mother and he winked at her with his glass eye.

I showed him the weights in the basement.

“Vinyl weights? That’s so weak, Smith. But I like the squat stands. Fucking Dan Lurie. You know, he was supposed to be Lou Ferrigno’s understudy for the Incredible Hulk.”

“Cool. You ready to lift?”

“I need a ruler,” Gallo said. “I gotta measure the handgrip position and make sure it’s even on both sides.”

“Richid can I speak to you?”

I hated being interrupted by my mother.”

“Mom, do we have a ruler?”

“Richid. Come upstairs.”

I left Gallo behind to set up the weights and went upstairs.

“I don’t like the looks of that kid,” my mother said.

“Mom, stop judging my friends.”

She handed me an envelope. “You also have mail from a collection agency.” 

I lifted weights with Gallo for over an hour and we didn’t lift much. After each set we had to wait while he painstakingly measured the distance between hand positions on the bar.

“You don’t want it uneven, otherwise one arm will be stronger than the other,” he said.

I didn’t criticize Gallo, but I had watched Irving Ackerman lift and it only took him a minute between sets. Maybe that’s why Irving was huge and Gallo wasn’t.

I decided this would be the last time we would lift together but Gallo called me the next night and the night after and every day asked if we would lift after school. My mother continued to complain that he was a creepy kid and a bad influence, and despite all the lifting I never got any bigger because we spent most of the time measuring our hand positions. I was afraid to tell Gallo to stop calling me, so I went along with it until one night when he called, instead of asking me to lift, he asked if I wanted to go to a party.

I said yes but made the mistake of telling my parents.

“You’re not going to a party with that kid,” my mother said at the dinner table.

My father grabbed another lamb chop. “Which kid?” 

“The kid with the weights,” said my mother.

“You mean the kid that comes over every day? The kid with the cross and the glass eye who refuses to wear a jock strap?”

“Yeah. That kid.”

“That kid means trouble. Forget about it.”

 “That kid is best friends with Irving Ackerman,” I said. 

Everyone knew Irving. At least everyone Jewish did.

“Irving’s huge,” said my father. 

“That gentile kid doesn’t look like an athlete,” said my mother.

“Irving’s an athlete,” said my father. “He’s a wrestler. He doesn’t have collection agencies coming after him. I don’t want you going to any parties. Have the party here.”

“No way,” I said and stormed away from the table. 

But, I thought about it. If I had a party, Irving Ackerman would most certainly come, and he would see my squat stands. Hopefully he would be impressed.

“I’m having the party at my place,” I told Gallo the next day. We were on the exit ramp where the cool people in school smoked cigarettes. I didn’t smoke cigarettes but speaking with Gallo gave me an excuse to hang out there. 

“You think people will come?” I asked, but I was really referring to Irving Ackerman.

Gallo blew smoke out of his mouth sideways, in the opposite direction of his drifting glass eye. “People might come,” he said. “Will your parents be home?”

“Of course not,” I said, preparing for the argument with my parents.

“We have to be home,” said my father. “Otherwise it’s illegal for you to have a party.”

I knew this wasn’t true.

“We promise not to bother you,” said my mother.

“I just have to warn you,” I said. “Some of the kids smoke cigarettes, and there may be beer there.”

“We weren’t born yesterday,” said my father. “Just use common sense.”

Unlike the parties these kids were used to, I presumed my house was different. I had “a finished basement.” They were used to sitting around on bridge chairs next to an oil burner.

I set up the stereo I earned as a gift after my Bar Mitzvah, with the turntable on top and the 8-track cassette player. 

My mother wanted to hang crepe paper decorations. I nixed that.

“It’s a party for cool people,” I said. “Not a sweet-sixteen.”

I was delighted to see how quickly the tough kids swarmed in. Soon it was smoky, loud and crowded.

At the peak of the party, and fashionably late, Irving Ackerman arrived with Gallo limping down the stairs behind him.

Irving Ackerman saw everyone guzzling Rolling Rock and Miller light. He saw the bucket of Alabama Slammers I mixed in a garbage can as well as Theresa Milliken vomiting into a paper bag in the corner of my basement. Immediately he smiled.

Gallo pointed at my squat stands and Irving nodded his approval.

I handed Irving a beer and he shook my hand.

I blasted Emerson Lake and Palmer.

“Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends. We’re so glad you could attend come inside come inside.”

 Joey, the biggest burnout in the class, asked Gallo to watch his beer while he was taking a pee.

Gallo nodded, placing the bottle on the table next to him. “Yeah, I’ll keep my eye on it,” he said with a laugh, and reached to yank out his glass eye—but Irving stopped him.

Doors slammed.

People made out. Everyone smoked weed. There were joints and pipes and even a bong.

Joey switched on Black Sabbath, sandwiching his head with my Bar Mitzvah speakers blasting Iron Man into each ear.

Things spiraled out of control.

The smell of pot drifted up through our wilting ceiling.

People fought to get into the small basement bathroom pounding on the aluminum shower and it sounded like thunder.

In the laundry room, someone made a torch out of a can of Wizard toilet spray, singeing my mother’s negligee.

Kids carved their initials in the bathroom door. Someone shellacked my father’s college pennant. Foam rubber torn from our couch rained like confetti.

Out of desperation, I went upstairs to seek advice from my parents.

“What the hell’s going on down there?” asked my father. “Are people smoking marijuana?”

“I’m not sure,” I lied. “Maybe.”

“Everyone has to leave now.”

“I can’t just ask everyone to split,” I said. “It’s the middle of a party.” 

“They’re destroying our house.”

Ending the party seemed very uncool, but I knew my parents were right.

“If you don’t ask them to leave,” my father said, “I will.”

My mother shrugged. “Just tell them someone called the police.” 

“Yes,” said my father, “the cops are on the way.”

I spread the word.

“The pigs are onto us,” said Gallo. “Party’s over.” He and Irving were the first to leave.

Eventually everyone was gone, except for Tomlinson, a short, shy kid still hiding in our cedar closet. My mother dragged him out by the ears.

The basement simmered like a crater after a mortar blast.

That Monday after the party I was kind of popular at school. I had trashed my entire basement and supposedly the cops visited. Apparently this met the very definition of a cool party.

I hung out with the smokers on the exit ramp between periods and some of the cool people even acknowledged me.

A car screeched in the distance, tires shredding over asphalt and Gallo pulled up in his souped up Camaro. The passenger window lowered and Irving Ackerman waved me over, tan and handsome in sunglasses. Up close, the leather of his jacket was soft and grainy, a much higher quality than Gallo’s. He was drinking a beer.

“Great party, Smith,” he said. 

A compliment from Irving Ackerman.

“Thanks for coming,” I said. “It was a cool time.”

“Very cool,” said Ackerman. “Here,” he said. “Finish the beer. We should lift sometime.”

“That would be great,” I said holding the beer as the car screeched away and for the first time in a while, I felt oddly victorious, even invincible. 

But fifteen minutes later I was suspended for the possession of alcohol on school property; suspended for holding a beer handed to me by the one kid I truly idolized.

And three months after that, Gallo was on the local news, arrested for trying to steal a safe from our elementary school.

I never lifted with Ackerman. A year later I left for college and my parents gave away the squat stands.

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STORYTIME by Robyn Blocker

December 31, 2021

What’s up, beautiful people?

So y’all know how when you type the first couple letters of an email address and a list of contacts pops up—all the ones that start with that letter? 

Like, imagine it’s “D” for Dave, the guy you’re hooking up with. Not Hot Dave with the boat or Quik Lube Dave with the ink, but the Dave whose brother OD’d back in ’99 at the rock pit behind the Big House. Right, Sad Dave. The Dave you send naked pictures to as an inside-joke cue that you want to buy from him. (Rumor alert! It was Pollie Carsen that gave Sad Dave’s brother that heroin!)  

Tonight you’re on the edge. You’ve deprived yourself of spontaneous self-destruction for eighty-nine days and can’t take another minute of good choices that only feel good because they’re hard. You ache to raise hell you’re too old for: to bust windows and noses, floor pedals, run reds, blaze bowls, break hearts, tag bridges and burn them and screw in the ashes. 

You’re gonna send Sad Dave some spank bank selfies, so you type “D,” but here’s what happens: since you’re always trying to do ten tasks at once to keep your mind off wonderful things that’ll kill you, you somehow get the cursor positioned one contact name below Dave’s, on the email of your daughter, the YouTube influencer who’s gotten big telling stories about her life, her day, her peeps, her fam, her world, and the social injustices in it. People love her for her self-awareness, her willingness to own her flaws, her unending desire to do the painful dirty work of fixing them.

Like Dave, her name starts with D. You were seventeen, still a silly romantic, when you had D’Laynie, and you wanted all your future kids to be D’s just like their daddy. He was not named Dave, but you’ve forbidden yourself from speaking his name ‘cause it’ll make you think of him, and that’ll make you cry. (Rumor alert! Pollie Carsen gave D-Boy herpes and smoked his first two child support checks before he died in a 4-car pileup on I-35!)   

You think, Hoooo girl, do NOT send those pics to D’Laynie. Think she hates you now? Just wait. You start to fix your error, to click UP back to Dave’s name. But of all the bad choices you could make right now, he’s the familiar one. What you want is to shut your eyes, squeeze your nose, and cannonball down into a moment whose depth you cannot gauge from this height. 

You close your eyes and click a name. Open eyes, but don’t look at who’s getting the pictures. Just SEND.  

You’ve maybe just bashed your life out on a new kind of rock bottom, and you feel more alive than you have in months. You sit back, take a selfie, delete it. Habit. (Your grandma Belle-Ruth always asks, “Who you trying to erase, girl?”) Finish your Diet Coke,  gargle, go to bed. And before sleep comes, think, There’s 90 days clean again, Pollie Carsen. Aren’t you getting tired of starting over?

*

Late morning. Wake up. Shit’s hit the fan. Four missed calls from Belle-Ruth. One voicemail. She says, “Pollie, honey, did you… say… something to D’Laynie? She’s gone and made a…You know what? Just come over.”

 Heart pounding, you check your inbox. Nothing. For one moment, you think the pics went to Sad Dave after all. You check your Sent mail. Wrong. She got them. 

You go to D’Laynie’s YouTube page. She has 100K subscribers and a new profile pic, a dramatic ¾ silhouette of herself on the balcony of the Austin apartment she shares with two friends. Looking good: sunlight glowing on honey-golden skin. Tall and twiggy. Red lips, teeth perfect. Cold-shoulder white blouse and huge, yellow-mirrored shades. Great hair. His hair, his general look. No shit. As if your radioactive redheadedness could have elbowed its way past D-Boy’s black curls. Recessive genes, you think. Recessive. Recede. Back away. Back away from your baby in every way and stay far, far away.

What happened was this: you fucked up bigly. Hid meth in her diapers, left her alone while you partied. Shit like that. 

When your mom adopted her and kicked you out, you went on a grand couch-surfing tour of all the drug dens in the county. At some point, you realized, Shit, this is bad! Got clean.  Moved in with your grandma Belle-Ruth out in the sticks. Realized, Shit, I’m a mother! Presented sober self to mom and begged to see D’Laynie. Got permission. Freaked out. Showed up high to special arranged lunch. Permission revoked. Got clean again. Finally got lunch with D’Laynie, but by this time she was old enough to give you THE most devastating burns to grace the air this side of the former Mason Dixon Line. (Girl already had a way with words!) Got unclean, the dirtiest of uncleans. Belle-Ruth said, Get clean, darling. You said, Not this time, B.R. Went to your mom’s house, pointed a gun at her in the kitchen and strongly suggested she give you money, not realizing D’Laynie was hiding in the bathroom with the house phone, adding a real doozy to the list of bad moments involving her mess of a mama. 

There’s more, but it’s a rinse-and-repeat-for-fifteen-years kind of thing, if you get me?

So look. Here’s where we stand now: When anyone asks, you say you’ve seen, like, three of D’Laynie’s videos. Hey, you’re not some estranged-daughter-stalker weirdo! And hey, who’s got that kind of free time, right? Hah hah!

Straight talk, though? You are that stalker weirdo, you do have that kind of free time, and you’ve watched every woke public service announcement, storytime, and social commentary D’Laynie ever made until you could imagine how it’d be to chill with her on a couch in an alternate reality where you never screwed up: girl-talk, green smoothies, yoga, and a general veneer of intimacy so foreign to you that you can only insert it in your fantasies through symbols: y’all get the same color nail polish by accident; you know when she’s due for a period, an oil change, a new boyfriend, a new girlfriend, another round of under-eye filler (“Storytime: Yes I’m Vain, Yes I’m Working On It, Until Then I No Longer Look Exhausted.”)

Two weeks ago, upon discovering just how much time you spend watching D’Laynie’s videos, Belle-Ruth suggested you take a two-week break from online stalking (“Not healthy, honey.”) Now it occurs to you that the beginning of your D’Laynie withdrawal coincided with the beginning of a steep increase in reckless behavior: skipping brushing. Not checking if you got your house keys before you go out to your car. Unprotected sex with Sad Dave. Sending nudes to your daughter. 

D’Laynie’s posted four new videos since the last time you lurked: “I’m a Feminist but I’m Trying to Get Thicc;” “Storytime: My Indian Trip Showed Me I Was a Materialistic Brat”; “Storytime: I Adopted a Rescue Dog!;” and “Storytime: My Mother.” 

Your heart: one half plummets with shame, the other soars with unexpected hope. You’ve thrown an explosive at your daughter, and if nothing else, it’s blasted a hole in your irrelevance to her.

Pace. Breathe. Push play on “Storytime: My Mother,” and there’s your girl frowning at her lap in devastating silence, face scrubbed, eyelids naked and pallid, hair wrapped in a green silk scarf. Night face. Vulnerability face. God, you’ve missed her face. Voice husky with feeling, she goes: “Yeah, I…don’t even know how to start this one…” and cuts and tries again. 

It’s 22.36 minutes long. You watch it all. Belle-Ruth calls you twice. Decline. Decline. All your attention is balanced on this moment. You’re absorbed in the words D’Laynie is choosing for your story: “Small town, infamous juvenile delinquent, teen mother, high school dropout, substance abuse, constantly in jail or rehab, self-destructive, scary, broken promises, a parasite, a liar, a leech on my great-grandmother, pathetic…”

Her anger sings from the screen. She holds nothing back: all your antics and trespasses. But for whatever reason, she’s chosen not to mention the most recent terrible thing you’ve done: your body: her inbox. And she finishes the story with this: I want to forgive her, and I will one day, but not yet. And when I do, it will be for me, not for her.

You try to remind yourself that this is not good. This is a screwup. This is endgame kind of shit, and yet you still have the perverse sense that it’s a beginning. D’Laynie’s either thinking about you right now or trying hard to push you out of her mind. This is more than you’ve had with her since the long-ago days when you could have had everything. Fuck, man, this is something.

*

Three minutes later, you’re rounding off onto the gravel drive of the Big House, a red brick testament to old money that finds its way to you only in the conditional drops and driblets that Belle-Ruth’s good sense allows. With more money, you’d be dead. With less, panhandling up in town at the V.A. hospital, the Baptist Church, the Quik Lube, Buck’s BBQ.

A portion of these Carsen driblets finances your pick-up, another portion the single-wide trailer you live in a quarter mile behind the Big House. Your trailer’s next to a cluster of sun-bleached rocks and the lake where, twenty years ago, thirty teenagers drank and smoked and swam for your eighteenth birthday while Sad Dave’s brother laid down in the bed of his F-150 and never woke up. 

 Belle-Ruth’s sitting up on the balcony that runs the length of the second floor, hand shading eyes, batwing sleeve hanging down to her hips. She’s as skinny as you yet favors voluminous, gauzy tunics that billow, float, and alight on her bones with the deliberation of a butterfly landing on a barbed wire fence. “It’s the Pisces in me,” she always says of her fluttering clothes. To this, you always reply, “You old ho! How’d you fit a Pisces in there?” Gets her every time. 

At the kitchen table, you and Belle-Ruth break the silence at the same moment. 

You: “So, I watched it.”

 Belle-Ruth: “Did you see it?” 

“Jinx!” you say.

Belle-Ruth waits for more. When nothing comes, she smacks her little pink lips and sets down her coffee cup. “Pollie, why’d D’Laynie just up and make that out of the blue? What put you on her mind?” 

You meet Belle-Ruth’s eyes and shrug. “Beats me. Maybe she saw an Amtrak go off rail and hit a bus and was like, ‘Hey! Speaking of trainwrecks…’”

“Hey, now, none of that,” Belle Ruth says. She fixes her sleeve, which has flopped up inside-out over her elbow like the ear of a hound, and frowns. “You didn’t say anything to her?” 

“In response?”

“Beforehand.”

“Nuh-uh.” You take a big sip of coffee to wash down this bullshit. “Maybe she just needed to vent. Maybe the pain was building up in her and went kaboom last night.”

Belle-Ruth’s pink lips pucker into an angry little bubblegum-like wad. “Hell, honey, that pain was at the bottom of her lake. She dredged it up herself for the Internet for some thumbs up.” She shakes her head. “I gotta say, I’m disappointed. First that stupid tattoo, now this.”

You fix breakfast while Belle-Ruth takes her shower. When the food’s on the table, you take out your phone and check the comments on “Storytime: My Mother.” The most recent are:

 “Incredible how one of the kindest humans on earth came from a selfish bitch.”

“Your mother is a narcissist.” 

 “Hugs to you, D’L! You are SO strong! Anytime you forget just remember you ARE NOT LIKE HER.”

“Forget her. Some people are just toxic, and if healthy people try to love them, they get poisoned.”  

D’Laynie’s pinned her own comment to the top of the scroll: gratitude for everyone’s kind words and a call on her fans to donate to a substance abuse research institute. 

You close the app. Something’s trying to get your attention. It’s in your head, positioned right behind your conscious thoughts at pervy proximity. You know what it is, and that’s why you won’t turn your full attention to it. You take a selfie and delete it. Maybe Belle-Ruth’s right. Maybe your selfies are a thing, like you’re trying to delete more than pictures. Or maybe you’re just trying to see what the universe, your sole and constant audience, sees whenever you pretend to ignore the thing in your head that wants you to look directly at it. The wanting.

In her video “Storytime: How I Learned to Stop Feeling Superior for Being Agnostic,” D’Laynie concluded, “What I believe, and this is just my belief, okay? Is that the universe, God, or whatever you’re called upon to name it, is deaf. It doesn’t hear prayers, thoughts, hopes, or wishes. It only sees the effects of what we do and say to other people on Earth. Get it? Doing and saying are how we petition the universe. So please, leave a comment and tell me: what are you doing on Earth, and why are you doing this?” 

What are you doing? You’re digging up the number for D’Laynie you’ve had buried deep in your phone for years—the number you filched once from Belle-Ruth’s handwritten contact book and never dialed. 

You’re hitting Call on the number, and you’re waiting and shaking. The third ring gives way to an electronic screech and an out of service notice.

Now what are you doing? You’re starting an email to Sad Dave. (No texts on days he’s got his kid.)  Lifting your shirt, unclasping your bra, taking a pic of your boobs. 

Why are you doing this? Because the gravity is strong around the old rabbit hole. 

You never send the email because a clatter of rolling thumps and a scream comes from the direction of the stairs. You run for the sound, and there’s poor little Belle-Ruth sprawled on the landing, groaning terribly, face twisted in pain, ankle fractured.

*

 Standing outside the open door of Belle-Ruth’s hospital room, you overhear your mom advise her to recover in a nursing home, where she’ll be taken care of by “good, trained people who know what they’re doing.” 

Belle-Ruth will have none of that. “Pollie will do just fine, thank you.”

“Pollie?” your mom’s voice brays in a tone suggesting they aren’t talking about the same person. “Pollie will cook? Clean?” She lowers her voice. “Not steal your painkillers?”

A blue-scrubbed nurse walks by in the corridor where you’re lurking. You recognize her from high school, and judging from her uh-oh look, she obviously recognizes you—the  “most likely” for all unprintable yearbookisms. 

“Hey, how you doing?” you say. 

She shakes her head and keeps walking. 

When Belle-Ruth gets discharged, you move into the Big House with her. Note to self, you think on your first night. Don’t steal painkillers.

You first shacked up here at seventeen, after your dad threw a suitcase at you while your mom swung a bawling D’Laynie up on her hip and screamed, “Go break your grandmother’s heart now that you’re done with ours!” 

Back then, you chose the bedroom at the very end of the hall so that Belle-Ruth wouldn’t smell your cigarettes. And if she ever got the inclination to eavesdrop on your phone calls, it’d be a lonnnnng walk from her room to yours—plenty of time for her to rethink her lack of trust in you. But now, this room reminds you too much of things that’ll ruin your life since you spent so much time here thinking of them, and this reminding immediately leads to a reflexive wanting. So this time, you choose the room that was your mom’s when she was a kid. The one you never entered, since it made you think of her. 

You’re lying in your bed in this clean, safe space one afternoon, taking and erasing selfies and debating whether or not to start re-stalking D’Laynie, when you hear the crunch of tires on gravel. You step out on the balcony and glimpse a blue hybrid wending through the tree-lined drive. 

Outside, you start down the sidewalk, passing rose trellis, birdbath, pissing-boy fountain, and the rusted remains of your childhood swimming pool—a repurposed cattle trough.

One rear door of the visitor’s car is open. A shadow moves in the backseat. At your approach, the shadow backs out and becomes a leggy girl in mom jeans and a vintage college-logo sweatshirt. She bends to flick a grasshopper off her leg, and you see that one side of her head is shaved to display a tiny tattoo of the words “Nothing but the Truth” on the scalp above her ear. 

“D’Laynie,” you say.

She turns to you, and your own reflection, fishbowl-distorted, peers out from the lenses of her yellow-mirrored sunglasses. 

Right when normal people would hug, you and your daughter square off and face each other across seven feet of deaf, watchful universe, kicking the silence back and forth with stony game faces. The spring air is neither hot nor cold, the sun’s effect a treat for Texans: blinding bright but not hot. “Yankee Sunshine,” Belle-Ruth calls it.  You never notice weather unless it’s extreme, but today, in this charged silence, the neutrality is screaming.

 D’Laynie finally tilts her head back. “’Sup, Pollie?” she says with an ironic I-don’t-really-say-words like ‘sup’ intonation.

“Hey,” you croak. “Why aren’t you in school?” 

D’Laynie winces and looks up at the sky, like Sky, can you believe this idiot? “Spring break?” she says. “Hello?”

“Ah, right. Well, what you doing way out here, girl?”

 “I want to say hi to GG.  Plus, Destiny needs to stretch her legs.”

Destiny needs to…Are you supposed to know what that means? Is it an allusion to your past, some poetic way to call a truce? You stare. D’Laynie gestures to the backseat. You look inside. Huddled on the floor as far from the open door as possible is a small white mop of a dog with an orange ribbon stuck to the front of its collar.

 “Hi, fwuffbucket!” you coo. The dog raises sad, guilty eyes, trembles, whimpers, tries to turn and bops her head against the door. You step away, look at D’Laynie, twist your body into an apology.

D’Laynie takes off her sunglasses, rolls her eyes, and says, “Nah, it’s fine. Everything scares her. That’s her thing.” 

*

 It takes D’Laynie a while to coax Destiny from the car. The trick is accomplished with a strategic combination of treats and ignoring. 

Entering the Big House is a blur in your memory. While D’Laynie and Belle-Ruth hug and greet, you step back and recede from the scene like a Victorian servant.

By the time D’Laynie is next to Belle-Ruth on the pull-out in the downstairs living room, telling her about the rescuing of dogs, you’re cross-legged on the floor getting sniffed up by Destiny. 

“And like, obviously, my followers are super supportive and motivating,” D’Laynie says. She frowns and scratches her head. “Wow. Okay. So I’m suddenly hearing how creepy that sounds. ‘My followers.’” 

“It sure does,” Belle-Ruth says, “but it’s not your fault that’s what they’re called, honey.” 

D’Laynie takes out her phone and starts typing. “Sorry, gimme a sec. Want to make a note about that.” 

“What’s the orange ribbon for on the collar?” asks Belle-Ruth.

 D’Laynie glances from her screen over to Destiny. “Oh,” she says, still typing, “that’s for awareness of at-risk-animals. She’s had so much trauma. Her first owners were these assholes who would hit her and kick her and stuff.” She finishes typing and puts the phone down. “Sorry, rude,” she says. “Yeah, then she had puppies, and they separated her from them too soon, and she got super anxious and would pee everywhere. Then she went to this guy who’s, like, all about rehabbing traumatized dogs. She got comfortable with him, but his boyfriend moved in, and Destiny was like ‘yeah nah, you suck’ and bit him when he was giving her food.”

Destiny is sitting now, gazing up at you. You think to her, Is this true? Do you bite the hands of the people who feed you?

 “Then she went to this lady who takes in lots of rescues,” D’Laynie goes on, “but they never accepted her in their pack for some reason, and she got really depressed and anxious and started nipping and destroying stuff, so back to the shelter. She got good again, but, you know, a lot of people aren’t comfortable adopting a dog with that kind of history. When I got her, she was on the Kill List.”

You cock your head at Destiny, think to her, Kill List sucks, don’t it, baby girl? She puts a paw on your knee, like Girl, don’t I know it?

 “Is that how she got her name?” Belle-Ruth asks. “‘Destiny?’”

“Ugh. I know,” D’Laynie says. “It sounds like a stripper name. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But that’s the name she knows, so I kept it. Hah. Not that it’s getting me any points. She’s never even jumped in my lap, dude. Not once. And she’s a lap dog. Sometimes she won’t even eat when I’m in the same room as her.”

“Aw, give it more time,” Belle-Ruth says. “What’s it been? A month?”

D’Laynie nods and frowns. “Yeah. Whatever, you know? My friend’s dog didn’t warm up to him for like, a year.”

You pipe up from your corner: “I was this close to naming you ‘Destiny.’” 

Everyone turns to you, even Destiny herself, who’d been engaged in a butt-scratch. You’re holding one hand up, index finger and thumb nearly touching. “Heads D’Laynie,” you say, “tails Destiny.”

Belle-Ruth squawks a laugh. 

D’Laynie yells, “Dude, no! I would never forgive you!” 

“It actually came up tails,” you add, “but I like to give fate a run for its money.”

D’Laynie pulls a pillow over her head, falls forward, face-plants into it charmingly, and gives a muffled scream. Destiny does not like that shit at all. She yelps and runs from the room like there’s a fire under her furry little ass. 

*

Lemme just say: the Big House is not the kind of place where you want to lose a tiny, freaked-out dog. Lotsa ins. Lotsa unders.

Destiny’s not in the downstairs bathroom; not under the kitchen, dining room, or pool tables, in the music room under the piano, in your late grandpa’s old office, or the laundry room.

“Upstairs, then,” you say, and D’Laynie’s expression darkens. 

“I forgot how huge this place is,” she says, following you up, adding in a softer voice, “You know, considering there are people in Hong Kong literally living in cages, it’s almost obscene.”

You have no clue what to say to this. “Destiny!” you call out. 

Destiny’s not under Belle-Ruth’s bed, the table with her sewing machine, or in the piles of wispy Piscean fabrics in the corner. Not in the attached bath, any of the bedrooms or closets on the back-facing side of the house, or the room that was yours twenty years ago, its carpet still littered with cigarette burns. You’re bending, stooping, crawling on all fours, craning neck. You’re invested. Not since hide-and-seek with your cousins have you searched so hard for something wholesome. An adventure—just you and D’Laynie! Today, you’re going to be by her side at the happy moment she finds her lost dog. From now on, every memory of the relief she’s about to feel will be associated with you. You’re shaking with giddiness, one dog away from bursting into laughter.

What’s weird is how D’Laynie talks nonstop as you search, remarking on even the unremarkable with the blasé fluency of a real estate agent high on cough syrup. “This room’s pretty except, ugh, drapes and ruffles everywhere, come on, GG, let’s exit the ‘80s, and ah, a bathroom that smells like Chanel No. 5 and ancient rolls of toilet paper. Leaving ruffles, we find ourselves in oh, look, it’s a Mad Men set.” 

At one point, she stops and interrupts this syrupy tour with an exclamation: “Where is she? This is seriously annoying!” It becomes plain as day to you that you’re the sole explorer on this mommy/daughter quest—your companion was never feeling it.

As you and D’Laynie enter your bedroom, the final unturned stone, you see what has happened and what will happen: your distracted ass left the balcony door ajar earlier. D’Laynie will find Destiny out there, gather her up, and leave. And nothing will be changed. Something epic was supposed to happen on this dog search but didn’t. Maybe it needed more time. Maybe one of you missed a cue, dropped a line. Or maybe one of you, sensing a portal to connection, bricked it up with words. 

Following D’Laynie out the balcony door, you think, Please, God, give me more time with her. The universe doesn’t hear prayers, though; it only sees what we do. What you do as you walk onto the balcony is turn the inside lock when pulling the door shut. You haven’t touched that lock in years. You don’t ask yourself which direction locks and which unlocks, don’t pause to test it. Maybe you’ll be lucky. Don’t pause to wonder whether locked or unlocked is lucky.

Destiny’s sitting on the far edge of the balcony, gazing at the pastures beyond like she’s considering buying the place. When D’Laynie approaches, she raises her hackles and growls. 

“Whoa. Okay, baby girl,” D’Laynie says. But her eyes don’t say okay baby girl to you. They say, Well fuck you, too, dog. “Gonna get her treats,” she says, and heads for the door. 

You put your hands on the rail, shut your eyes, flinch when you hear the clunk of the unyielding handle behind you. The sound reminds you of being handcuffed—not in the fun way. You wonder what is wrong with you, what possessed you, what did you expect?  

 “Uh. Pollie?” D’Laynie says. 

You try the handle yourself as if there’s some trick to it, then try the doors of the other two front-facing bedrooms. All locked.

*

So we’re waiting, right? And D’Laynie’s pacing at wedding procession speed. Step . . . swing arms . . . step. This gives her plenty of time at non-talking-distance from you. Eventually, at the opposite end of the balcony, she starts her favorite yoga flow from that video she uploaded last winter with her fitness friend. You watch from the other end, mirror neurons firing hard. You’ve followed along to that workout a million times. 

When her phone rings, D’Laynie leaps out of warrior pose and answers it. 

“Billy Reese!” Belle-Ruth, breathless, triumphant, announces over speaker. “Just got to the feed store over in town but’ll swing by here on his way home. Hot damn, I’m good. Second person I called!”

“How long?” D’Laynie asks.

“Oh. An hour, maybe?”

D’Laynie raises her head to the balcony roof and groans. “Dude, there’s nobody close?”

A pause.

“You . . .  are . . . welcome,” Belle-Ruth says, and oh shit, you hear it—tension, compaction, the mama-bear-in-the-box winding up. 

D’Laynie laughs. “Sorry. Thank you! It’s just what are we supposed to do out here for an hour?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Belle-Ruth answers in a sarcastic little tune. “Maybe chat? It’s not like you and your mother don’t have anything to talk about.”

“That’s interesting,” D’Laynie says, examining her fingernails. “And just what are we supposed to talk about?” 

“She saw the video, honey. Storytime. And believe me, I get it. She has not been an angel.” 

“Oh my God,” D’Laynie mouths, rolling her eyes. 

“But your mother’s trying to turn her life around, and putting the worst parts of her out there for the world like that so total strangers can kick her? Nuh-uh. Completely uncalled for.”

“GG, you ‘re cutting out,” says D’Laynie, her voice tight. “Can’t hear you. Call you back later.” She ends the call, tilts her head back, crosses her arms, and gives you a vinegary grin. “Uncalled for, huh?” 

 “I know,” you say. “I know.”

“For the record, I have nothing to say to you, there’s nothing I want to hear from you, and I’m not sorry for the video.”

“I know. You shouldn’t be. I deserved it.”

She makes an exasperated sound and flips her palm up. “It wasn’t for you. It wasn’t some punishment. It had nothing to do with you. It just happened to be about you.”

You nod. “I know.”

“Would you stop saying that?”

Destiny is zig-zagging across the balcony, button nose glued to the concrete. You sit in a deck chair and watch her stubby tail bloop back and forth in enjoyment of invisible ecstacies. “I just want you to know—” you begin.

D’Laynie claps loudly, and Destiny flinches. “Nope. Not happening,” she says. Her eyes are wide and locked to yours, mouth alternating between a grin and a grimace. The clap, you realize, was for you. You feel an anger you don’t have the right to feel, so you drop it and stomp it into ashes. 

“What’s not happening?” you ask.

“You and I are not talking.”

“So why did you come today?” you ask. “You knew I was here, right?”

D’Laynie looks like she’s trying to keep the lid on a wild laugh. “Yesssss, Pollie, yesssss. And that is the point. You really think people can trust you? Like people can just believe you’re not, like, I don’t know, getting high and trashing the house and begging GG not to say anything about it?” 

You’re offended, but you can’t be, so you’re not. You’re disappointed in your daughter’s meanness to you, but you can’t be, so you’re not. You’re sad that her on-screen persona is for everybody but you, sad you don’t count as an audience. Sad that the decisions you’ve made, even the ones you had no say in, have rendered you voiceless. You can be sad. Nobody minds you feeling sad. What you can’t do (because you did it too many times before, exploited it, manipulated and gaslit with it) is allow yourself the luxury of crying.

So you just nod and say, “Okay, well, that’s understandable. That’s fair.” 

Then this happens: Destiny zips past D’Laynie, jumps into your lap, and starts spinning out a comfy spot on your thighs. 

“Oh, come on!” D’Laynie says. “Seriously?” She puts her hands under Destiny’s belly and starts to lift (which you can tell right away is a big, big mistake, but you say nothing because your brain’s too busy learning what it feels like to be trusted this much). Destiny snarls and growls, flailing, enraged, squirming like she’s caught on a hook. D’Laynie, stunned by the reaction, holds her at arm’s length until Destiny manages one good twist that brings her jaws within snapping distance of D’Laynie’s skin. 

D’Laynie screams, drops Destiny back into your lap, and slaps the dog’s rump hard. Destiny’s response is a cry so angry, offended, and disappointed that you can almost feel it resonating in your own throat, a proxy for your disallowed feelings. 

Destiny scrambles up your body, climbing like you’re a cliff wall, claws scratching your chest. You don’t mind. You welcome it. This is the pain chain: You hurt D’Laynie, so D’Laynie hurt Destiny, so Destiny hurts you.  

When Destiny’s muzzle is next to your ear, you stroke her fur and tell her it’s okay. Her orange ribbon is coming loose. Don’t fix it. Let D’Laynie notice it and see it as symbolic and feel punished by it.

D’Laynie has backed away. She breathes fast in choppy bursts. “I am so sorry,” she whispers. “I don’t know why I did that. I swear I have never, ever done that.”

You raise your eyebrows, and D’Laynie shakes her head as if the brows had spoken. She raises her arms up over her head, guilty hands open wide, eyes pouring. “How could I do that? What is wrong with me? Why did I do that?”

There I am in her, you think. You want to wound her, just a little. 

 “Because you’ve done everything right,” you say, “everything you were supposed to, but she still doesn’t like you, and that pisses you off.”

“No,” D’Laynie says. There’s more fight in this word than is warranted, and you know that you were right. She has been punished. 

Speak her language, you think now. You can do it, you’ve seen every upload. You know exactly who she wants to be. “You’re not used to not being liked,” you say, “because you’re an honest-to-God amazing person who gets treated like one most of the time. But this dog’s giving you insane shade that probably feels pretty personal, so it’s screwing with your self-esteem and your mental health.”

For a second, she looks like she’s about to tell you you’re an idiot, but instead drops to the ground and buries her face in her hands. “Oh my God,” she says. She cries a little, then laughs a little about the crying. She raises her head, wipes her face, says, “You’re actually right, dude. How are you actually right? Like, how did you know that?”

You know how, but you don’t tell her—not then, at least. You know because Destiny’s a creature in stories, and so are you, and there’s nothing more enraging than a difficult character who doesn’t understand they burned out the audience long ago—that it’s time to end happy now so that everyone who rooted and fought for them through all that drama gets the warm fuzzies they deserve. 

Instead of answering, you say, “You should give her to somebody else.”

 “I can’t,” she answers into the back of her hand. “She’s been dicked around too much already.” 

“Hey, if this is how it is between you two, keeping her may be dicking her around, too.”

“But I can’t just tell everybody, ‘Oh, I’m gonna adopt this dog. This is the right thing to do, and I’m gonna do it,’ and then say, ‘Oh, never mind! It sucked. It was too hard.’ Do you have any idea how that would look? Like, what kind of message would that send to everybody?” She rubs a hand through her hair slowly, thinking, and adds, “Plus, like, that poor dog.”

You’re about to ask, Who is ‘everybody?’ Who’s looking? but then remember there are thousands of everybodies for D’Laynie, countless souls who get off on watching her be an amazing human being. 

Out on the road ahead, the red pick-up truck of Billy Reese, your rescuer, is moving toward the Big House turn-in.

“I’ll tell you what you do,” you say. 

*

The sun just set. D’Laynie still has an hour-long drive ahead, but she had to charge her cell. Now she’s walking around Belle-Ruth’s kitchen positioning items, reconsidering, shifting them an inch to the left or right: Destiny’s leash and harness heaped nonchalantly on the kitchen table (but not so nonchalantly that you couldn’t recognize them for what they are in a single glance); bag of dog food in a corner of Belle-Ruth’s pantry, label conveniently smoothed out and readable; Destiny in her plush bed in the middle of the kitchen floor—obviously not the bed’s forever-space, but suitable for the opening montage of what needs to be D’Laynie’s most powerful, transcendent, realest storytime ever—the live-streamed tale of how two scared, struggling, at-risk souls found comfort and courage in each other, and how, without even trying to, they showed the world they belonged together. 

You wheel Belle-Ruth over to a spot that will be off-camera. “Sure you wanna do this?” she asks. She’s looking at you, but it’s D’Laynie who answers:

“Oh, absolutely. It’s best when the feels are still steaming.” She unplugs her phone from the charger, licks her lips. “Ready, P?” she asks—voice encouraging, eyes a little worried. Maybe she knew Belle-Ruth was talking to you and didn’t want you to have time to consider take-backs.

You nod. “Ready.”

She counts down from three and hits Record. You and Belle-Ruth stay hidden as D’Laynie walks softly around the kitchen, silent, camera taking in everything dog-related. Good stuff. You can feel the mystery already. 

When she’s got it all, D’Laynie sets the phone on top of a coffee can, sits at the kitchen table, smiles, waves with both hands, and says,

“What is up, my beautiful people? What you just saw is not my kitchen, but yes, that is my dog, Destiny. You guys will not believe what has happened! I . . . have got a story . . . for you. Where do I even start? Um, okay. First, you guys know it’s spring break . . .”

While D’Laynie goes on, you start thinking about stories, how people always fuss about finding the true one. As if every situation’s got one real version out there the universe accepts as gospel. As if there aren’t different interpretations, different storytellers, villains becoming heroes and funny parts becoming sad parts with a single switch of perspective.

As if the universe listens to stories at all and doesn’t just stare at our hands and hearts, like, Hey, creature, what are you doing, and why?   

“ . . . and then I got locked on a balcony in the middle of nowhere for an hour and a half with Destiny and Pollie. Y’all already know Destiny. Well, this . . . is Pollie.” 

On cue, you walk into the shot, sit down next to D’Laynie, and wave. But your heart sinks: you barely recognize yourself. You look no different than usual, yet you look so wrong on your daughter’s screen. Why are you next to her? What did you do? What the hell is this? Whatever it is, you can’t hold onto it. Too much. Too soon. Something in you will fuck this up or die trying. You need the familiar, a return to status quo, despite the horrors that live there. 

In the last moments before your story begins, you know exactly what you’ll do when you finish telling it: text Dave some skin.

It’s okay. Maybe you won’t open the bag. Maybe you’ll just hold it. 

You’d never just hold it.

Oh, no. Are you doing this again? You’re gonna do this again. 

Please, please, please, universe, leave me a comment and tell me not to do this again. 

“Pollie!” D’Laynie says, turning to you, sparkling with forgiveness. “What do you want to say to all the beautiful people out there?”

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THE GRANDE CALAMITY DIAMOND DESCENDS INTO THE MAELSTRÖM by Dolan Morgan

December 24, 2021

I needed a break. So when my brother gifted me the cruise ticket, it felt like he’d done something useful for once. But there was a catch.

“It sinks on purpose,” my brother said, laughing. “Like, while you’re on the thing. Straight into the ocean, down it goes. The whole big ship. And they don’t tell you when, it’s a surprise. One minute you’re over by the pool deck in margaritaville or whatever, and then—wham! The boat is sinking, just like that. You’re gonna love it.”

Byron worked in real estate and routinely ended up with promotional items that nobody could ever want outside the fever-dream of 30-year mortgages. Over the years, he’d given me a rubber ham you could heat in the oven to smell “authentic ham smells” and a golf club you can pee into discreetly, just like you’ve always wanted. Did I play golf? No. Did I love ham smell? No. But was I sure my brother loved me? Sort of. This season had been kind to him, which always meant his sort-of-love would be more pronounced, a trait he’d no doubt inherited from our father, another sleazeball if ever there was one, and he must have really fallen into some big commissions because he significantly upped his game and got me passage to this new cruise line experience where, apparently, the ship sinks while you’re on it and then you get heroically rescued. 

A cruise is nice, but after the past shitty year—or decade if I’m being honest—what I really wanted was a whole new life. Sort of like the cowardly lion, tinman, and scarecrow all wrapped up into one: a new personality, a new body, and a new brain would be great, thank you very much. But for now, this ridiculous cruise would have to do. In some respects, the trip itself wasn’t such a terrible idea, I had to admit; by transporting everything about me into entirely new surroundings, perhaps I’d feel different by mere dint of the juxtaposition. That’s probably why people travel in general, I thought: not to see new places, but to fool themselves into thinking they’re new too. The artist Josef Albers could make the exact same blue look completely different just by putting it next to different shades of pink. I wanted that to happen to me. Maybe this insane cruise could be the shade that rendered my life anew. Like Dorothy, suddenly in technicolor.

“You’re gonna love it,” he said again, taking a bite of tortellini. “It’s pathartic.”

Pathartic? I didn’t ask Byron to clarify if he meant “cathartic” or “pathetic” because, while either option seemed plausible, my inability to discern the difference seemed especially apt. “Thank you,” I said. “I really appreciate this.”  I might have meant it. 

The trip commenced in two weeks. I needed to prepare. 

*

I scheduled time off, packed “only the necessities,” a task that gave me no shortage of absurd anxiety—What are the necessities? What do I need? Do I really need a toothbrush? I think I do, but what does that say about me? Why can’t I rough-mouth it like a real man, like my ancestors?—and soon found myself standing on a crowded dock in a busy sunlit harbor, half-empty suitcase in hand, staring up at the gleaming white facade of the Grande Calamity Diamond, preparing to embark on “The Disaster of a Lifetime” and really wishing I had brought a goddamn toothbrush. What the hell. I’ll be the last person they rescue, I thought, if my screams emanate a week’s worth of theme-restaurant halitosis.

Maybe I could purchase one at some overpriced harbor store before departing? I scanned the seaport. Lines of people in cargo shorts, sandals, and floppy hats weaved around each other like thick ropes grinding into an ever-tightening knot of leisure and luggage. The glint of a newsstand kiosk reflected above the throng’s heads, but it might as well have been a hundred miles away. I’d have to get a toothbrush onboard at the Sink or Swim Souvenir Shop. Far out over the water, I saw clouds darkening the horizon, a storm headed north toward home. I was glad to be embarking on the cruise, headed south, away from all that grey into a bright new blue. 

The embarking process was long, but soon I was settled on the ship and into my private cabin. I had a single bed, a desk, a chair, cubbies to stash my belongings, and a few feet to stretch myself out. A diminutive porthole afforded a view of sweaty tourists en route to their own ships, but soon it would cast about over endless ocean waves. I was genuinely looking forward to it. A horn sounded, announcing our departure.

Back at home, I’d watched orientation videos breaking down the cruise’s itinerary. With R having only just moved out, I welcomed any distraction from my thoughts. The basic parameters of the sinking were outlined by a man with a bright smile and light blazer. At a designated hour, he said, alarm bells would ring and the ship-wide intercom system would inform passengers of a critical hull breach. The catalysts differ each outing, but past causes included icebergs, coral reefs, and mythical creatures like kraken and kaiju. 

In reality, a series of doors in the ship’s exterior are deliberately opened, allowing for the methodical intake of water followed by gradual descent into the ocean, a process monitored continuously by experts. Passengers can enjoy the excitement on deck, then gather on lifeboats, or float about with inflatable vests to watch the process unfold. VIP passengers can even stay aboard throughout, riding the boat deep beneath the surface in sealed rooms. A nearby contingent of medically-trained staff emerges on dinghies and helicopters after the spectacle is complete, ferrying passengers to a second luxury-class ship where the remainder of the itinerary can be enjoyed. 

Unpacking my bags, I recalled the candid online reviews I’d read while trying to avoid the pile of things R left behind on the table.  “It was amazing and life-altering,” wrote one woman in a 5-star review, “I honestly thought I was going to die.” 

I tried to understand what could possibly motivate these people, myself among them now, to want this. 

Tired from the sun, I dozed in and out of sleep as I recalled Edgar Allen Poe’s “A Descent into the Maelström,” wherein the characters feel drawn to a massive whirlpool near the edge of the world, desiring its depths despite the danger. Is this what I wanted? I recalled that as a child, I was obsessed by kidnappings. I thought about them often in grade school, their own maelstrom of strangers, hands, and cars. I carried impromptu weapons in my pocket: chains, pens, anything that could hurt someone if I was dragged into their vortex. 

After what seemed like seconds, I woke suddenly, jerked by some force. Unsure of how much time had passed, I looked out the porthole and saw only ocean, the harbor long gone. A safety bell rang out, followed by static. Was this it? Were we about to sink? An announcement did not declare a hull breach; rather, the ship had diverted course to avoid choppy waters from the storm to our north. Was this part of the act? Still half in dreams, I stared at the waves. They looked motionless to me. “Be sure to try the salmon croquettes at the Reef Bar,” the announcement added. “Complimentary today only.” 

The thought of eating reminded me: I needed that toothbrush. 

I stepped out of my cabin and into the hall. Rubbing my eyes and making my way toward the main deck, I passed families encumbered by endless bags, elderly couples trundling bravely arm in arm, twenty-somethings well on their way to inebriation, dumbstruck kids covered in sunscreen and chocolate, giggling teenagers headed for the pool. 

I didn’t realize kids were allowed on the cruise. I wondered if they’d appreciate the experience. Inspecting a “you are here” map, charting my route to the souvenir shop, I mulled the common conception that young people remain oblivious to existential concerns, a myth perpetuated by those who have forgotten the mystery and insanity of their own childhood. “Thin places” are locations where our world and other realms are supposedly closest together, where hauntings and strange traversals are most prevalent, and pretty much everything is a thin place to young people, I thought. I took a left at a large arcade, passed through an impressive casino, and ascended a chain of escalators. A frenzied crew member rushed past me as if pursued by an assailant, her blue polo shirt drenched in sweat. Two additional crew members, similarly harried, followed soon after, pushing me roughly aside as they passed. 

My sleazeball father pushed Byron once when he robbed our house after my mother kicked him out. I must have been six or seven at the time. I arrived home on the bus to see my dad surrounded by police, blood dripping down his shirt. He claimed he was only there to take “what was his,” which apparently included my brother’s bike and my television. What if, rather than just random objects, I wondered, he’d thought of me and Byron as rightfully “his” as well? 

For months I feared he would show up at school or while I was out playing. The fact that, at the time, I still loved him desperately—and could not comprehend his new absence—complicated these fears. Byron was home at the time of the robbery and absolutely terrified. He told the police he “couldn’t tell if it was really happening.” We never spoke of it. Afterward, he could only sleep with the closet door firmly closed. I think, more than anything, I was jealous of his proximity to that rip in reality, to that thin place. I wanted to be dragged through a hole in our universe, wanted the twister to pick me up and drop me in a new world, where I could become something else, too. 

But become what? A shitty real estate agent?

I arrived at the souvenir shop and was shocked to find it much bigger than anticipated. Three stories tall at least and the width of a city block. Organization was chaotic, encouraging passengers to browse longer and purchase more, so I roamed the aisles haphazardly in search of a toothbrush. The items were the kind of crap that Byron would love. Stupid, corny, impractical. Yet, like Byron as well: clearly profitable. What would happen to all of these goods when the ship sank? Did they have some method for protecting it all? I did not understand the underlying economics of this cruise. Should I get something for Byron? I realized it was quite possible I had never given him anything other than a card, let alone authentic ham smells. The thought made me want to disappear. What would it be like to go missing here? I recalled a safety video I’d seen when I was six or so, a video that provided instruction regarding exactly what a child should do if they were lost. 

I recalled, in fact, trying to orchestrate a scenario in which to enact those very instructions.

Browsing in a department store with my dad, who I did not yet understand to be a sleazeball, I waited for the right moment—and then fell quietly behind his stride. I slipped down an aisle when he wasn’t looking. Soon I could hear him calling for me through the shelves but did not answer. When I felt I was sufficiently “missing,” when I knew I had crossed over into that other realm, my own land of Oz where rules faded away, I took off as fast as possible toward the store’s information desk, where I could, as the safety video suggested, drag myself back to reality by requesting the woman behind the counter page my dad over the intercom. I recalled the thrill of that experience, of being gone from this world, and of the anguish in my father’s face—and my confusion at having caused it; I thought of R, too, and how I had fallen quietly out of step with her as well. How I wasn’t there when she looked for me. I thought of the anguish in her face, and my confusion at having caused it, as I pondered the cruise and its promise of disaster. 

Still no toothbrush.

Rack after spinning rack of postcards, keychains, shot glasses, snow globes, and pewter dolphins called out to me, but there were no personal hygiene stands. Nor did there seem to be anyone working here. Or even shopping for that matter. I was essentially alone in this knickknack wasteland. An old fear gripped me in that isolation, but only gently. For the first time, I noticed that seat belts were built at regular intervals into the floor. They looked surreal and out of place. Like an ear growing from a back. Maelstrom of people, cars, and hands. Maneuvering myself around one of the spinning racks of trinkets, my body rotated like the hand of a clock as I tried to get a better look at a pair of sunglasses, and I recalled the only time I probably could have been abducted—were it not for my use of a similar rotating maneuver. 

Eight or nine at the time, I wandered our quiet neighborhood alone, deep in summer, when a small red car began tailing me. Within, I could make out the face of a middle-aged man with greying hair. His car slowed to my walking pace. Anxious, I turned around and headed the other way, just in case. Moments later, I heard tires twisting in the loose gravel on the country road behind me. He had also turned around; I was the cause, or perhaps the prey. My suspicions affirmed, I ran ahead, around a corner, and into a tall stand of bushes near a field, slipping behind the leaves, only seconds before the car rounded the corner into view, trailing after me. The driver pulled up next to the bushes and drove forward to peer around them. I rotated along the tall shrub, staying just out of sight. He reversed to check the other side. I slid again in the opposite direction, always keeping the bush between us. We repeated this dance until he either came to the conclusion that I wasn’t there or tired of the steps. I ran home, terrified. The police confirmed that a man in a car of similar description had been beckoning young boys to ride away with him. What world awaited within the red car? Regardless of my fascinations, I cowered when faced with the actual prospect of abduction. I didn’t feel new. I didn’t feel changed. I felt awful.

I consulted a confusing store map, travelled up and down the floors, and eventually found the check-out register. The cashier, a small, bemused man of indeterminate age wearing sunglasses, was sorry to inform me that the Sink or Swim Souvenir Shop did not sell toothbrushes; however, he was delighted to share that a complimentary brush in the shape of a shark could be delivered to my cabin, free of charge. Armed with this assurance, I exited the knickknack wasteland. I emerged empty handed, yes, but also with relief, vowing never to return, and stepped into the late afternoon sun. 

Except it wasn’t the sun boring down on me now—no, it was rain. 

Heavy, hammering the deck in torrents. 

I took shelter under an awning, but cold gusts of wind sent sheets of water horizontal, pelting my legs, soaking my shorts. Across an expanse of chaise lounges, wooden tables, and poolside chairs, half-naked passengers ran for cover, holding pool floaties and towels over their heads, signalling that rain had only just arrived. Clearly, the distant storm I’d seen earlier had veered off course and intersected the Grande Calamity Diamond’s route. Feelings of futility washed over me, a sense of inescapable greyness. There was no outrunning the clouds I thought I’d left at home, no land of Oz, only a farm covered in dust. R was right about me. No wonder she left. The same with my father. Of course he didn’t kidnap me. Who would? Lightning shot down from the sky into the water and a clap of thunder rose up over the roar of rain. I cringed at the cliche of my own mind. I still didn’t even have a toothbrush. 

A brief sprint delivered me to the warmth and dryness of the Deep Dive Bar, a large room decorated in the style of an old dockworker’s pub, where I found a coterie of stunned passengers huddling in wet clothes. I leaned on a knotted table to catch my breath and turned back toward the open door, out of which we all could observe the downpour—in addition to a new phenomenon made plain in our stomachs: the tilting of the ship, its slow rise and lurching descent. I found the feeling worse when looking at the sea and so turned toward the bar’s interior. Heavy ropes, wooden barrels, and wide nets completed the ambience. Amid the small crowd, I spotted the same sweaty crew member who had hurried past me earlier. She looked terrified.

Over the intercom, a voice burst through static: “This is the ship’s captain. You may have noticed the inclement weather. Please avoid open-air common spaces until it passes. As well, out of an abundance of caution, we regret to inform you that this outing of the Grande Calamity Diamond will be unable to sink as planned, because the ship’s systems will require thorough post-storm maintenance before attempting any dive.” A wave of groans resounded among the sopping passengers. “Your safety is our first priority. Complimentary tote bags will be delivered to your cabin. Game rooms will be free for the remainder of the trip. Open-bar hours are hereby extended indefinitely.” 

Above the din of bitter murmurs, the bartender called out, “Well, anybody want a drink?”

 

*

With nowhere to go, we all got to know each other over beers, but it was the frenzied crew member, Julie, clearly at the end of her rope and ready to share company secrets, who set the tone for the evening. She divulged the real reason our sinking had been cancelled—not merely “out of an abundance of caution,” but something much worse: our sister ship had capsized in the storm. 

The one carrying our rescue team. 

A ship just like ours, caught off guard in the same rough waters, now wrecked in the sea.

Luckily, they were able to rescue themselves, but would be unable to do the same for us. 

That’s why she and her colleagues were running around so frantically earlier in the day—because they didn’t know what the hell was happening. And now look where we are, she said, waving toward the door. 

Her transparency, along with a little alcohol and shock, loosened everyone up, and soon folks were describing why they had hoped to sink into the ocean. I mean, these things weren’t shared directly, but were shared nonetheless.

For example, one woman, empathizing with Julie, vented at length about her job, about the incompetent assholes that lorded over her, and the need to let off some steam; only as an aside did she mention her mother’s recent passing, the painful year that had preceded it, and the sense of mystery that still hovered over mundane tasks, the ethereal veil draped across her days and through which she could only barely seem to reach, and the distance that stretched between her and her children, her husband, her siblings. In the book, The City and The City, two different metropolises occupy the same exact space, each folded into the other. The woman's story felt much the same.

Or there was the young couple who cited a love of adventure, listing off various daring climbs, jumps, and glides they’d undertaken together. One might easily have missed the jokes the man made throughout, gags about the adorability of not understanding one another, the amusement of never seeing each other completely, with punchlines that felt innocuous on their own but which, in their steady accumulation, betrayed a kind of shadow mirroring how the couple’s hands never touched. As the storm bellowed onward, I had the feeling that the only true “thin places” were other people. Apparitions and strange traversals. 

Even the older man who blathered on about his joyful desire to submit himself to the vast beauty of the natural world could not avoid referencing a quiet feeling of dissociation barely kept at bay by chasing some novel experience. 

I tried to imagine what I betrayed about myself, other than my terrible breath, when I asserted to everyone that I was really only here because the ticket was free, mostly to appease my brother, and that I just needed a break after a hard year, and that I hoped to feel different, or at least to not feel like this anymore. I mean, could they see my fear, could they see my father standing behind me, always reaching his sleazeball hand around my face in the dark to pull me backward through myself and away from my life, from R, from Byron, from anything I tried to love? Or, rather, could they see that my father had nothing to do with it and that it was always my own hands that wrestled me from what I wanted? Was this pathartic? There was no telling—because in a moment we learned the sinking was back on, but not for a reason any of us could have wanted.

The frenzied crew member’s walkie-talkie foreshadowed the news. It beeped three times before an authoritative voice on the other end inquired if she was with passengers, then stated flatly, “Julie, we need you to usher everyone to the VIP hold—now.” Julie’s eyes widened and everything about her demeanor changed. In seconds, she was out of her chair, back straight, keys in hand. The intercom clicked on and the captain informed us that circumstances had deteriorated, the surface conditions in the water had become life-threatening, and we would shortly attempt an emergency dive in the hopes of waiting out the storm below. 

Someone asked if this was really happening. Was it part of the cruise?

Julie assured us it was really happening. Then, after consulting her walkie, she outlined our emergency route to the VIP hold, a sealed space where we could ride safely into the deep. This VIP hold was apparently the one and only Sink or Swim Souvenir Shop, and reaching it involved a short sprint across the deck. The rain-soaked dash afforded a quick glance into the storm. Its scale resisted comprehension. 

Under a green sky, strong currents dragged our ship horizontally, amid a procession of smaller boats and debris, hundreds upon hundreds, some tipped or sinking, in what looked like an enormous gyre, spiraling all in a great arc.

Despite there being over a thousand passengers, the Souvenir Shop easily accommodated everyone. Once within, Julie directed us to an aisle where we could lie on our backs and make an L shape with our bodies, our feet propped in the air against a shelf of dumb t-shirts. The shelving unit would act as our seat, she said, once the ship tilted vertical for its descent. 

The ship will soon tilt vertically, she repeated. 

The aft deck would be in the air above us, with the foredeck leading the way into the depths below. Sink or Swim Souvenirs is pretty close to the back of the ship, she added, so we’ll end up pretty high in the air. You’re going to feel it. The floor, which would soon become a wall, contained those same surreal seat belts I’d spotted earlier, safety features intended to prevent passengers from tumbling down to the store’s distant edge—soon to be fifty feet below us. The sound of a motor echoed through the space, and thick metal doors descended along the perimeter, sealing us in with a vacuum hiss. 

The ship shuddered, and the shelves rattled flimsily. Staring straight at the ceiling, I fastened my seat belt and heard it click. My mouth tasted terrible. The seat belt was too tight. I felt for a moment like I was finally getting into that red car. 

Then the ship began to lift.

It happened quickly, much faster than I thought it would. We arced forward into the air, as if catapulted in slow motion, reaching a zenith and hovering there only for a moment. Dangling. Silence. Like the top of a rollercoaster. Then, with a lurch, the descent commenced. People screamed.

Seated to my left, the man from the couple at the bar turned to me and said, “I think this is all just part of the act. This is what we paid for.” He was crying and looked as if he wanted me to answer a question that went unasked. I didn’t know what to say and certainly didn’t mention what I’d seen of the storm as we ran across the deck—the long, dark arc of some enormous gyre in which we currently spun, headed who knows where.

The image immediately brought to mind again Poe’s “Descent Into the Maelström.” How did that story end? Curiously, I recalled that the plot revolved around two brothers, and that both of them ended up in the maelstrom, slowly dragged toward its center on a small, powerless boat. I couldn’t help but picture the two as Byron and me. Trying to escape the spinning waves, one of the brothers figures out that the maelstrom functions like a sorting machine, dragging heavier objects inward and spitting lighter objects back out, returning them to the world. They would need to abandon the safety of their heavy boat and take hold of something lighter to escape. One brother stubbornly rejects this theory and hangs tight to the security and familiarity of the vessel. The other escapes by letting go—but helplessly watches as their sibling, gripping tightly, falls into the dark center of the world.

But which brother was I? Was I holding on or letting go?

I thought of my empty apartment, Byron’s dumb job and big smile, and I could feel my stomach rising upward as the descent quickened. 

The man next to me grabbed my hand. I closed my eyes and squeezed back.

Five stars.

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MEPHISTOPHELES by Emily Kiernan

December 10, 2021

Judging by the state of his teeth, the vet estimated he was five years old, but Ella thought he was older than that—a persistent street-cat scrawniness, knots they could never comb out of his long, black fur. She’d had pets before, but he inspired a desperate love in her the others had not, a need to hoist him up in her arms and wrap his skinny body in hers, to protect him. The friend who had found him in the alley behind the Get Go station called him FluffFluff, but Ella had been reading Faust, and she named him Mephistopheles.

She and Alan adopted him when they first moved into the house; they were just married, in a new town far from home. Adopting Mephistopheles was another reflection of the bright sheen of their lives, their seemingly infinite expansion. In theory they were a trio, but Meph was mostly Ella’s. At night he would curl into the curve of her stomach and look at Alan like a party guest overstaying his welcome. Sometimes, when Meph followed her into the bathroom to lace himself between her legs while she peed, Alan would shake his head from the bedroom, saying, “You know that cat’s a pervert, right?”

 

The first sign that something was wrong appeared in late December. They’d bought Mephistopheles a plastic collar advertising pheromones the internet said would stop him from pissing on the furniture when they went out of town. The day they put it on him, he sat by the locked basement stairs, yowling as they passed, jamming his paws into the gap between door and floorboards. The house was old and creaky and seemed a little haunted—lights that flickered, strange sounds in the walls. They joked the pheromones were ghost pheromones, that Mephistopheles wanted to descend to the world below, to be with his demon family once more. It was funny, mostly, but there was something disconcerting in his glassy eyes, the weird insistence with which he wailed up at them.

“Don’t let him into the basement,” Ella said, panicked at the thought of stacked boxes and open cans of paint stripper. And something else too—she hated the basement; it gave her the feeling of a steady, malevolent gaze.

Alan slipped an arm around her waist. “I won’t,” he said. “It’s creepy as fuck down there.”

 

Then it was Christmas, and they marinated in eggnog and pine and the clamoring love of nieces and nephews. They didn’t think about Mephistopheles for a week, except when the pet sitter texted Ella photos, and she would pass her phone for Alan to see: Meph’s eyes glowing from underneath the bed, Meph sprawled across Ella’s pillows, Meph pressed against the basement door, staring up at the camera. On Christmas Eve they had dinner with Aunts Miriam and Sylvia, and Sylvia kept pushing the wine on them, opening new bottles and refilling their glasses without asking. Afterwards, Alan’s parents went over to the neighbors’ to meet someone’s new baby, and Ella and Alan didn’t have a condom and decided they didn’t care. She felt woozy the next morning and curled herself into an old armchair as they opened presents, feeling like everyone knew.

Every night after they held whispered conferences in the dark of his childhood bedroom, wondering at themselves—measuring their recklessness and their capacity for its consequences.

“How bad would it be?”  she said. “We’ve kept Meph alive.”

She could feel Alan’s gaze—the flat smile that said he was deciding how seriously to take her. They’d had this conversation before: bad genes or climate change or the state of public education in this country. Always they agreed in the end, and always the questions sprouted back like plucked hairs.

“I don’t think it’s the right time,” he said. “Look at this world. You think it’s crying out for new life to be added to the pile?”

She closed her eyes and imagined something bright and bursting within her. “Isn’t it always?” she said.

 

When they got home—nearly midnight, lugging bags, an open tupperware of cookies in Ella’s hand—Mephistopheles was lying like a ragdoll on the sofa, half-fallen into the crack between the cushions. Ella sat beside him, shaking her hand against his side.

“You sleeping, Meph?” she said, hearing the edge in her voice: he’d been too still. He cracked an eye, extended a paw. Working her hand down into the scruffy mane around his neck, Ella felt the pheromone collar, pocked and scarred from where he’d scratched it with his claws. She undid the strap and handed it to Alan. “I think this worked too well,” she said. “He seems really stoned.”

They went to bed, agreeing that whatever had been in the collar would work its way out of his system overnight. Meph did not follow them up the stairs to their bedroom. They heard him jump down from the couch and take a few steps into the hallway, stopping at the cellar and mewing against the closed door.

 

The next weeks turned icy, a wintery claustrophobia settling over the house. Before, Meph had liked to sit in Ella’s green armchair while she worked, batting her hands for attention, but now he stayed downstairs all day, interrupting his naps only at Ella’s worried insistence. She and Alan conferred over him in hushed voices, like he was a sick baby they didn’t want to wake. Alan said cats slept seventeen hours a day, but Ella knew that something wasn’t right, though neither, she had to admit, did anything seem precisely wrong. He ate his food and used his litter box. He purred when they pet him. Still, every morning she stumbled out of bed and searched for him, half convinced she would find him stiff.

“Maybe he’s dehydrated,” Alan said. It was past midnight—Ella had woken him with her tossing, stomach cramped with worry. “I think cats are prone to that. Take him to the vet tomorrow, they’ll pump him full of fluids. He’ll be fine.”

 

The vet was closed the next day, so Ella went to Costco and bought a thirty-two pack of wet cat food. She bought a package of pregnancy tests too, and thought it was a funny thing to buy in bulk—how many could she need? But that night, when she pulled one from its pink packaging and held it below the stream of her pee, no lines appeared. Two lines meant pregnant, one line meant not, and no lines meant, she supposed, that she did not really exist, that she was a specter drifting through her house and her body and her days.

When she googled the brand of the test, she found they’d had a few bad batches—she should throw the whole box away. Instead she pushed it to the back of her underwear drawer and covered it with black tights with runs in their thighs. She thought of Alan whispering to her in bed, “It’s not a good deal. We have great lives, why bargain that away?”

“We’d get something in return,” she’d told him. “We’d love it.” But he’d rolled onto his side and stared out the bedroom window at the cop cars flashing their lights along the street.

“Anything you love you can lose,” he’d said. “Don’t bet your heart on anything alive.”

 

She mixed the cat food with two tablespoons of water and put it on the floor. When Meph did not get up, she brought it over to where he was pressed into the arm of the couch and held it beneath his nose. He took one bite, another. She sat beside him, wiping up the slurry when he pushed drops onto the upholstery. He ate half the can, then began to spasm and gurgle like he was having a hairball. Ella stroked along his stomach until he was quiet again.

 

In the morning she took Mephistopheles to the vet, and Alan went to the airport. He would be away for two weeks, attending a string of dubiously important meetings. Ella didn’t want him to go and was surprised by her own neediness. She invented worries about the weather, about planes sliding off ice-slick runways, but he only smiled and kissed her goodbye.

At the veterinarian's office, Mephistopheles jumped down from the table and roamed around the exam room, mewling out his indignation. The vet looked at his teeth and eyes, up his nose, cooing to him as she did. She stuck a cotton swab into his ear, and it came away black with something that looked like spring mud or coffee grounds. “He’s got a little infection,” she said. “Pretty common in Persians.” She took his temperature, and her expression changed. She squinted at Mephistopheles as if he’d admitted to something.

“That’s much too high,” she said, and Ella felt her pulse flutter.

 

They were sent home with antibiotics and instructions to call back right away if he got worse. Ella lay beside him on the couch, stroking along the spine that seemed harder against her palm than it used to. From somewhere above them came the heavy clatter of footsteps—or, Ella reminded herself, something that sounded like footsteps. Hot water moving through the radiators, the floorboards contracting in dry, winter air. Ella wondered if anyone had ever died in the house. She wondered if there were bodies buried in the basement. Perhaps that’s what she felt down there, those angry, forgotten eyes raking her back as she bent to take laundry from the machine. But the rest of the house felt different, animated by some other force; three times in the first month they’d lived there, she’d dreamed of a woman in the attic, pacing the floor with a baby in her arms. The baby was skinny and sick and wailing, and when the woman turned her face, it was frantic, wisps of hair caught in the corners of her mouth.

Above Ella, the footsteps stopped, started again. She got up and went to the basement stairs to check the lock. Meph followed her, stumbling a few steps sideways. He looked at the closed door, then up at her face.

 

That night Ella carried Mephistopheles into bed with her, and he allowed himself to be arranged, stretched out in Alan’s spot like a miniature replacement. Her stomach felt unsettled, and when she closed her eyes it was worse, like the bed was a ship at sea. She drifted to sleep only to wake with a start, reaching out to feel the unmoving form beside her, unable to close her eyes until she was sure she felt his breath beneath her hand. Sometime after midnight, she began to hear the footsteps again, coming from the attic or the slope of the roof, quick, tapping strides above her head. The pipes, she told herself, repeating it in the darkness. The pipes, the pipes, the pipes.

 

Alan called midmorning, and Ella told him about the footsteps in the attic.

“Probably just squirrels,” he said. 

“Squirrels,” she repeated, staring down into a bowl of cereal she had poured for herself and no longer wanted. “How would it be squirrels?”

The line crackled. His voice was breathy and thin, like he was shouting to her over a far distance.

“...get out of the cold,” he was saying. “Living in the ceiling.”

She picked up a spoon and swirled it through the flakes in her bowl, extracting a chunk of freeze-dried strawberry and cracking it between her teeth. “It didn’t sound like squirrels,” she said.

 

By Friday the bedroom smelled of death. It must have been squirrels after all, Ella decided, sniffing the air and imagining the odor like a cartoon hand, beckoning her to its source. A squirrel with a woman’s exhausted footfalls had crawled into the ceiling and died. Mephistopheles hid under the bed most of the day, except when she dragged him out by his back legs to give him his medicine, which he accepted with an eerie calm. She’d taken him back to the vet when he seemed to be growing only stranger and more distant. They’d given her an additional antibiotic and some ear drops and told her to come back if he stopped eating. But he was still eating. He wasn’t standing up more than twice a day, and he wasn’t playing with her shoe laces as she tied them, and he wasn’t purring when she pushed her fingers into his thick fur. But he was eating.

She had thought they might keep him at the veterinary office, observe him or give him an IV or, she didn’t know what—take it out of her hands. She had not realized she’d wanted this until the vet tech had given her a bottle of medicine and started explaining the dosage, and she’d felt her stomach drop. She knew it was an awful thing to wish for. She ought to want him close, to coddle and mother him. But wouldn’t it be better if he was with someone who loved him less? Someone who would see him for what he was rather than getting lost in the anxious pauses between his breaths? Isn’t that the problem with love, and the price of it?

 

She woke to the sound of footsteps. She sat up in the bed, staring at the ceiling as if to look through it, but seeing only the cracks in the plaster and the ways they seemed to shift in the darkness. The smell was stronger than it had been before—not rotting away but rotting into the structure of the house.

“Hello?” she called out, and thought she heard the slightest pause in the movement, a second’s hesitation before the next foot fell. Beside her, she could see the glow of Mephistopheles’ eyes, watching the same spot as her own.

 

On the phone with Alan, she felt maudlin, her heart racing for no reason she could name.

“What if I can’t make him better?” she asked. “What if I give up?”

 

Two a.m. or maybe three. She sat in the green armchair in the attic with Meph sleeping on her lap. Sometime after midnight, he’d begun twitching—weird, spasmodic jerks of his neck, his tongue darting out against his cheek, then back into the dark hole of his mouth. She hadn’t known what to do, and so had picked him up and carried him, shushing and soothing. When he’d finally calmed, they’d been in the attic, and so she’d stayed there, letting him rest. She spoke aloud, not to him. She said, “Did you wish he would die? Did you wish he would hurry up and die already?” The noises seemed to be coming from the roof now, or maybe from somewhere far below.

 

A lump formed in the skin behind his left ear. At first she only noticed it when she massaged both sides of his head at once, carefully comparing the rigid structures of bone and the soft spaces between. She closed her eyes to make the differences clearer. By the next day, she could see it easily, a red bulge the size of an apricot. 

 

She took another test from the box, and this time it did not tell her she was a ghost. Two pink slashes appeared before she’d even moved the stick to the sink for the three-minute wait. The thing she felt was neither surprise nor its opposite, but something akin to ceremony, the awful sanctity of weddings and funerals and sacrifices of virgins in flowing white gowns. All the ways one might know love and lose oneself to it. Afterwards, Mephistopheles jumped up on the bed beside her and butted his head against her stomach, and for a moment she thought, maybe.

 

The sound of footsteps again, and Mephistopheles crying. The footsteps louder than they had ever been, an angry rat-a-tat, a struggle or a dance or an endless cycle of anxious pacing—steps and steps and steps leading nowhere. Pipes, she told herself, squirrels, but the words were meaningless, empty sounds. She tried to think of Alan’s voice or the weight of him in the bed beside her, but the memory felt distant and sleep-blurred. The noise Mephistopheles was making sounded strangled now, wan. When she reached out for him, she found that he was wet, a viscous liquid soaked through his fur. She leapt for the light and saw the sheets covered with blood, thick red streaks from his head to his front legs, yellow pus hanging in tendrils from his whiskers. The thing on his neck had opened. He was whining low in his throat, a noise that rose and fell like breath.

She gathered him in her arms, letting the soak spread onto her shirt and sink to the skin of her chest. She was rushing with him—where? Down the stairs in the dim light of the bedroom, half-running, stumbling onto the landing. In the front hall, she set him down by the basement stairs. He went quiet, staring at her with eyes that caught the scraps of streetlight coming through the front window. The house was silent now; her fingernails jittered against the door as she twisted the lock.

Her voice sounded desperate and strained in the quiet. “I did everything I could to care for you.”

She pulled open the door. For a moment he sat there, still and watching her. Then Mephistopheles stood without swaying for the first time in weeks, and walked through the door. From the darkness below, she heard his voice, a small, inquiring note chirping up to her. And after a moment, she stepped through to follow him.

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