Short

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.

Read More »

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.

Read More »

WILD RELEASE by Evan James Sheldon

November 26, 2021

The ballroom was empty except for stacks of chairs along the walls and the man staring at the ceiling. With no one around him in that large space he looked very small.

I waved my arms over my head but the man didn’t notice and kept on staring at the ceiling. He was off in his own world. I pulled out my weed pen, which most people mistook for a flash drive. Even though weed was now legal, I was still secretive. Learned furtive behavior from all my high school friends having misdemeanors for possession. 

The Toy Voyager conference was still going on in the adjacent area, but I had sneaked away. All the too-bright smiles and handwritten name tags and coffee breath. Everyone was holding a toy, speaking of exotic destinations—Borneo, Florence, Kyoto, Melbourne—but then again everywhere felt exotic compared to the gray carpet and fluorescent lighting of the Denver hotel.

I hadn’t come for the conference but I hadn’t not come for it either. Once every couple of months I rented a room at the Longmore Hotel in downtown Denver, and pretended I was someone else—a Trevor, a Curtis, a Sylvester—with a random job and I drifted around the lobby and hotel bar, drinking, chatting with people in town on business, or occasionally, people in for a conference. My day job consisted of testing websites and I made a bit of extra money on the side filling out online surveys. These little holidays at the Longmore were my main social interactions.

Spending a weekend as someone else started as a joke with myself, but then I didn’t stop. It's not that I was unhappy with my life, but maybe I was bored. You start doing a thing, in my case testing websites, and before you know it, it has grown and occupied more space than you ever intended. You become a "Website Tester" like this defines you, and to some degree it did, and it was oddly freeing pretending to be someone else. To imagine myself a life with more mystery than a computer screen, to build out a character who made more sense to me, as me. Isn't this the goal of all us modern folk, a perceived, whether correct or not, self-actualization?

This time, when I booked my normal room, I saw Toy Voyagers were going to be using Ballroom C, so on a whim I bought a semi-rare, and unopened, Big-Bird headed Pez dispenser. The plastic wrapping crinkled in my pants pocket when I shifted. Maybe that was what finally drew the man’s attention. With just the two of us in Ballroom A, his voice echoed and reverberated all around me.

If the mass of a thing is less than the volume of the atmosphere it displaces, that thing will float, he said. If this room was filled with Radon, whales could fly, there’s certainly enough room. Wouldn’t that be something? He looked over at me, smiling. But then, of course, we’d be dead.

He came over and held out his hand. My name is Rufus, he said. I went to shake his hand but was still holding my weed pen, so I awkwardly held it out on my palm. He took a drag and handed it back, glanced at my name tag. Thanks Colton. Terrible weed though. I’m a gummy man myself, though I prefer a drink over both. I didn’t say anything. Can’t you just imagine them swimming through the air in here? Two Blues and a Humpback at least.

He patted my shoulder and left the room.

 

I spent the remainder of the evening as I normally did during my hotel escapades. I was Colton, a dairy farmer who struck it big when Skittles bought my farm at an outrageous price to build a packaging plant. I chatted with a couple businesswomen in from Atlanta, a man wearing a pencil mustache heading to Aspen the following morning, three ladies who I quickly realized were not into me, but rather each other. I bought us all Butter Baby shots, and moved along. No one doubted my story despite its outlandishness, and no one seemed that interested either, and maybe that was what led me back to the bar top alone and then to my room for an early night.

 

I spotted Rufus the next morning, milling among the Toy Voyagers, which surprised me. It shouldn’t have, based on our interaction before. What kind of person wonders about flying whales? That kind of eccentricity seemed a perfect fit for this conference. He was holding something small and colorful in one hand and talking to a woman with a massive plush rabbit in her arms. She held it the way a child might, both arms wrapped around its middle while its head lolled to one side. With the size of the bunny, and the fact that Rufus and the woman were roughly the same height, they both looked like children. He winked at me when he saw me looking.

Mr. Jones here, the woman said as I drew near enough to hear, he’s spent a lot of time in Alaska, King Salmon primarily. I like to say that Mr. Jones is a cold weather rabbit.

They both laughed.

This is my friend, Rufus said without gesturing. He could have been talking about either of us. The toy in his hand turned out to be an old, primary-colored helicopter, made of wood and equipped with a pull-string. It was chipped and clunky, a nostalgic relic. Something people save not because they need it or it works or it does anything for them, but because they’ve attached some emotional value to it. I’m sure there was a great backstory; his grandfather left it for him before the war and he was flying it the day they heard the news that Pappy wouldn’t be coming back. Its propellers spun and spun as the tears, proud though they were, ran down his face. He’d never flown it so high before and never so after. Or something like that.

Tell me. What do you think Mr. Jones has seen on his journeys? Rufus asked.

I nearly excused myself then, as I had already heard so many stories about the wonders these toys had experienced. Crystal waterfalls in the moonlight, a campfire on the open Serengeti, strange rituals guessed at because of some smudge on the toy’s arm. It was all too much.

Oh! The woman’s whole body lit up. I like to imagine his adventures as a series of interlinked moments, small wonders he holds close to his heart. Things that, when they’re spoken out into the world are diminished, the words won’t ever quite add up. But he’s brimming with them. I can feel it. She squeezed Mr. Jones then. I bet she didn’t even know she was doing it. Anyway, I’m just a host, the toys are the real adventurers. 

I had learned that most toys were sent on to other hosts who then documented the journey and sent the toy out again. If you sent a toy somewhere other than a designated host, it was called a “wild release,” a much more risky venture.

I tried not to make a face. I had become quite good at masking my thoughts. You had to at these kinds of things talking with people like this. Give a polite nod, smile convincingly and excuse yourself. Rufus, however, seemed actually moved by the woman’s philosophy.

But before he could respond we were interrupted by a man holding a replica of Mr. Jones, though the man’s bunny was pink instead of sky blue. They erupted into laughter that out of all the toys they might have the same ones at the same conference.

Small world. I did my best to smile, and disengaged. Rufus followed.

Want to get out of here? he asked.

I looked around the conference room: the table displaying where notable hosts lived, a tall, thin man showing a group how to properly arrange a GoPro no matter how odd the toy’s shape, the podium where a speaker was due at any moment to lecture on proper shipping methods. I nodded and led the way, even though I didn’t know where I was going.

 

I wandered out of the entrance and headed to my right. Less than a block away I found a bar, Cloud 9, that claimed to feature live music. We sat at a booth with a good view of the entrance. It was dim except for the unadorned single light-bulbs hanging over the couple of booths and hightops. They were the kind that emphasized the filament, brand new but trying to look old. A few people sat at the bar and a guy with an acoustic guitar was tuning it quietly in the corner.

Rufus set his toy helicopter on the table. Cloud 9 specialized in champagne and mimosas. He went to the bar and got us a carafe of something green and bubbly. Two glasses. Did you know that one flute of champagne can hold up to twenty million bubbles? Rufus asked as he filled the champagne flutes.

I laughed and shook my head. He smiled.

No it’s true. Champagne has so much CO2 that you have to release up to eighty percent of it when bottling, or else the pressure will cause the bottles to burst.

The guitarist announced he would begin playing soon, thanked us all for coming, like he was the draw. The mimosa tasted like kiwi and melon and something grassy I couldn’t place.

So what toy did you bring to send away? he asked.

I pulled the Pez dispenser out of my pocket and set it on the table, embarrassed though I didn’t know why.

Ah. You’re not really a Toy Voyager then are you? That’s okay. It is fun to watch everyone get all whimsical about sending toys on vacation. I get it. I’ll keep playing along. He took a drink from his green flute and winked at me.

I’d never been called out before. Most people just accepted what I told them, because 1) why would I lie 2) I was good at it 3) and my least favorite, but often the most probable, they didn’t care enough to wonder if I was lying.

I debated diving deeper into my persona, maybe storming out, but a part of me wanted to know how he’d figured me out.

A group of toy voyagers came in and went straight to the bar top. A man waved the bartender down to order a Mai Tai for his Donatello action figure. They all laughed and began debating whether Donatello would like a Mai Tai or if he was more of a Coors Light kind of ninja turtle.

What makes you say that? I asked.

That’s not the kind of toy you send to see the world. Plus, I see the way you look at them. He gestured to the Toy Voyagers. It’s not a look of understanding, of community. You don’t like these people or what they’re into.

I don’t have to like everyone in a group to still find their actions interesting and fulfilling.

He nodded, but I could tell he didn’t believe me.

What about you? Why are you here? You don’t seem like you belong either?

What makes you say that? he asked, smiling as though he enjoyed repeating me.

Well, you keep sneaking off for one. And you don’t seem like you’re interested. 

It turned out Rufus was one of the original organizers of Toy Voyagers and an ex high school science teacher. We had quite a bit in common; we were both in our thirties and lived alone, maybe similarly bored, we both liked pulpy western novels, listened to poppy, British rock.

But when I asked about the Toy Voyagers, that’s where the similarities stopped. Six years ago his wife had gotten sick, and all of the sudden she couldn’t leave the house. They’d loved to travel so he started sending out stuffed animals to make her happy, a kind of vicarious journey. He wanted her to have something concrete to imagine in a far off place, something to venture where they no longer could. People heard about what he was doing and it grew from there. The local news had even done a feel-good feature on them. He made a website, started holding conferences.

The guitarist began his set: lounge-y covers of Beach Boys songs. We listened for a minute as he sang “Good Vibrations” like he was Sinatra. He had a great voice.

Did it work? I asked.

What work? Rufus’ eyes were on the guitarist.

Did sending the toys out make your wife happy?

He laughed. God no. She hated it, but I didn’t realize it. I was just trying to give her an aspect of her old life she no longer had access to, but she wasn’t interested in her old life. She didn’t say anything and by the time she told me, it was too late. All these different people loved it. People all over the world. I couldn’t take it away from them. He downed the rest of his drink and refilled it. Now it’s what I do. I make enough money to just do this. I don’t really even need to be here. The whole thing practically runs itself. He paused and looked at me for a long moment. I expected some sort of scientific ramble about the connectedness of people, or a statistic about the number of countries involved. Instead, he said, Did you know that Dr. Seuss cheated on his wife while she was dying of cancer? I didn’t say anything. Excuse me for a sec, he said.

He got up with his helicopter and walked to the guitarist, who was in between songs. Rufus dropped some cash into the open guitar case on the floor and set the helicopter in there as well, leaned over and spoke to the guitarist, who nodded.

Rufus returned as the guitarist started speaking. This next one goes out to those wild kids at the bar top with the toys. Not sure what I’m going to do with this helicopter though.

Send it far away, yelled the man with the Mai Tai and Donatello figurine. The guitarist began playing “I Get Around” and Rufus raised his drink toward the Toy Voyagers. I’d never seen a group of people more elated.

 

The conference ended and I went back to clicking on things on the internet, but over the next few months Rufus and I kept in contact. We would text each other about new bands or terrible stick-‘em-up lines from whatever we were reading. Sometimes I would look up odd facts and make some up too. He normally found me out.

At some point, apparently he marked me down as a host on the website. I began to receive stuffed animals of all sorts—my favorites were the dinosaurs—and I made up stories about them, what they did in the Mile-Hi City. It was a joke between us, a tongue-in-cheek participation in something neither of us believed in. Or not really. I did bring one sort of alien thing with light-up tentacles camping up in Rocky Mountain National Park and took pictures of it like it was running through the trees, escaping the terrible humans coming for it.

I looked forward to our back and forth. I don’t know what he got out of it. Maybe it felt good being able to talk about the thing he created and be able to make fun of it at the same time?

When the toys kept coming, I began taking them out to restaurants and bars. I got a few snickers, many sad smiles, but on the whole people seemed genuinely interested. Once I explained the situation, sometimes together we’d make up a bizarre story about the stuffed Koala’s night out, sometimes they’d invite me and the toy to the bathroom for a couple of lines, sometimes an after party, another bar, another experience. I told Rufus’s story over and over, leaving out how his wife really didn’t like the idea and the odd thing he said about Dr. Seuss, and people ate it up.

And all of it I relayed to Rufus. I don’t know if he liked how involved I became or if it was some odd joke to him. Maybe it was both. If I had learned anything from Toy Voyaging it was that a person could be totally sincere and playing around at the same time.

One day, he let slip that he was living in Cheyenne, Wyoming, just a few hour’s drive north from Denver. Once I found out how close we were, I bugged him to come down, but he refused, said he was more of a stay-at-home kind of guy these days, but I could come up if I wanted. It was kind of a brush off, but I had just received a plush whale named Ernest and thought it might be funny to bring Ernest to Cheyenne and maybe rig something with some clear fishing line so it looked like it was flying. Rufus seemed to be withdrawing, responding slower and slower to my messages, sometimes not at all, and I thought a joke based on when we first met might cheer him up. Plus, it was now fall and the leaves were changing. It would be a beautiful drive and I could snag a couple lovely pics of Ernest along the way.

 

I got into Cheyenne on Saturday afternoon. Rufus lived in a two-bedroom townhome in the Fox Farms subdivision. When I pulled up he was standing, smoking on the second level patio that overlooked the parking lot and a drab playground filled with tan plastic slides and pea gravel. No one was playing there. After a couple minutes, he came down to greet me.

He looked terrible, like he hadn’t been sleeping, like he’d definitely been drinking. His hair, which in Denver was cropped close to his head, had grown out but without apparent intent. He was wearing a hoodie and sweatpants and he waved me in.

Boxes, opened and unopened, sat against the wall and on the counter a few bags of Taco Grande with crumpled up, sauced wrappers were slowly hardening next to a half-eaten pan of cornbread. No empty bottles but I guessed he hadn’t really expected me to come and had rushed to clean what he found most damning.

We sat on his grey, corduroy-upholstered couch on opposite ends so we had to turn just a bit to see one another. There were no other chairs I could see.

He asked about my drive, how I was doing, work, etc. I asked similar questions, but he would only answer with good while nodding and looking at his clasped hands in his lap. No winking. He finally asked if I wanted a drink and I said sure and he got us two Natural Lights from the fridge. He sunk just a bit further into the couch and finally really looked at me.

Hey. Do you remember what I said about Dr. Seuss, in that bar in Denver?

I told him I did, though I wasn’t exactly sure why he’d told me.

You’re not dumb. You figured it out.

I told him I had guesses for sure.

Ha. Guesses. When Emily was really sick, right at her worst, that’s when I did it. No big story. A random hookup. We met at a bar and went back to her place. Rachel. Rachel was her name. She had short blonde hair.

I didn’t say anything. We both drank for a second. He rolled the can back and forth between his palms like he was trying to warm it up.

I was drunk and when I woke up the next morning she was gone. Left me in her apartment by myself. That was back in Boston of course.

Boston?

Yeah. Before I moved out here, I just picked a random place and came out after.

After your wife died?

Rufus sat up straighter with a confused, almost irritated look on his face. Died? She didn’t die. Emily made a full recovery. I left, or she kicked me out, it doesn’t really matter. And it didn’t matter where I went, I just couldn’t stay there. Not after all I put her through. She remarried this summer during that conference in Denver. Some guy named Torrance. He took a big pull from his beer. What kind of name is Torrance?

 

I asked if I could smoke and he told me he was only renting so we went out on the patio. Leaves were starting to fall and a cold breeze swept a whirling group of reds and golds and browns noisily across the asphalt of the parking lot. Rufus leaned on the white metal railing with his arms crossed.

Do you remember that helicopter I dropped into the guitar case at the mimosa joint? I saw one of the Toy Voyagers buy it from him before we left. Do you think they sent it on? 

I have no idea, maybe they kept it as a memento. I said. Hang on. I ran downstairs and grabbed Ernest.

When I brought it back onto the patio and passed it to him, Rufus started crying. I didn’t say anything, just let him cry. 

Holding the whale in his arms, he looked big, the biggest I’d ever seen him. I waited in silence until he finished crying and when he held it out for me to take it back, I waved him off.

I left later that day and drove back to Denver. I tried emailing him over the next few weeks but he didn’t respond. I let it drop, thinking he would reach out at some point, from somewhere. I wondered then how long we’d keep in touch, how long he’d stay in Cheyenne. Boston was far, a whole country away, but I doubted it was far enough. Not for him, and not like this.

 

A few months later I went back to the Longmore. I didn't really want to pretend to be someone else, and I remembered how I felt during my weekends there, but it was hazy, the loneliness dampened by time. I think a part of me had become nostalgic for my former self. Or imagined that previous life as more than it was. Whatever it was, I skipped the room and just went straight to the bar.

I ordered a mezcal Old Fashioned and spun around on my stool so I could survey the room. A group of men in suits laughed at one of their crew with an animated expression on his face. A woman read a book and drank a glass of white wine, but she kept looking up, searching for something or someone. Three people still in ski gear sipped hot toddies and recounted their day. A mother scolded a child who had been trying to escape her while the father ordered several drinks at once. No one knew me. I could have been anybody from anywhere, with wild stories, adventures beyond the humdrum of all these little daily tragedies. I gulped down the rest of my drink and got up to leave when I felt someone at my elbow. It was the Mai Tai/Donatello guy.

Didn’t I see you at the last conference? he asked. He was in a suit, no action figure present.

I debated for a moment, but he seemed so genuine, so grateful to have found another Toy Voyager, I relented. Yeah. I actually think I saw you over at Cloud 9, I said.

He shook his head, embarrassed and amused. Damn. We got messed up that night. All the toys got mixed up if you know what I mean.

I had no clue, but I didn’t want to tell him that, and I felt myself slipping into my old way, searching for the most probable persona. He flagged the bartender down and ordered two more of what I was having without asking what it was.

Anyway, terrible about what happened. Is that why you’re back? A few more of us were supposed to come by. He looked at his watch.

Wait. What happened? Did prices go up on shipping? I asked. He laughed but it was closer to a scoff than a demonstration of real amusement.

No. About Rufus. He died.

He went on to give too many details, but when he got to the part about how they found him hanging from his balcony, my mind glossed over. I heard what he said but the words slid past me without registering meaning.

I thought about how when Aldous Huxley was on his deathbed dying of cancer, he asked his wife for LSD. He died tripping. I don’t know why I thought of that, except that maybe he saw the world as Dr. Seuss drew it–full of Sneetches and Foo Foo the Snoo–and I wondered what Rufus saw at the end. I kept picturing the empty playground and cold leaves rattling.

I interrupted him to ask about Rufus’s toy helicopter, if he knew where it was.

I sent it on, he said. I’m sure that’s what he would have wanted.

A few more Toy Voyagers arrived and when introduced I was surprised that I gave my actual name.

Read More »

LOVERS by Michael Farfel

November 23, 2021

The two of them live in a small house that overlooks a somehow smaller lake. He has family money and neither of them have to work, but he finds meaning in his work (development—of what? we're not quite sure) and she writes poems. The house is ancient and the rooms are cold.  They often lay in bed until long past midmorning, even sometimes past noon. They argue about who will make coffee, always finally decided by who has to pee first. It's usually her.

The house, which the locals say is as old as bones, is older. It is rickety and clicks and clacks and wheezes with every movement. When they make breakfast and he cracks the eggs, he cracks them ever so carefully so as not to upset the balance of the floorboards. When they fuck, in their small bedroom, on their nearly invisible bed, it is a cautious practice—albiet lurid, albiet lecherous. Any wrong breath or wrong leaning, any bad attitudes or misremembered lovers, and the house could crumble and fold them up between rotted joists and rust. Anything and that dear dwelling could diminish, tenfold. So they take precautions. And when he scrambles eggs he does so with loving kindness and when she pours coffee she does so slowly and they both take it black.

 

She’s known she wanted to be a poet since long before she knew anything. When she was a baby she almost never stopped crying. Her mother said in the first two years she was sure she had cried enough to fill an ocean. The only thing that helped, and her mother tried near everything, were books. The forests her father worked were always moving and there were rarely ever libraries nearby. So her mother reread their small collection. No children’s books. In fact, the one that did the best, not only kept her from wailing but helped her and her mother sleep on nights when her father took to drinking was War and Peace.

She's never read it herself, but did inherit her mother’s copy. Now when she has writer’s block, which is nearly always, she sleeps with it in their bed. Her husband found it endearing at first, but grew to hate it. Their bed is already so small.

She remembers very little of the story. It may not have even been Tolstoy that her mother had read to her when she was a child, rather some other’s opus. She swears she remembers endless wars and no small amount of confused young lovers, but couldn’t that be any work of art—any book ever written, whether stretched to its limit or condensed into some opaque metaphor?

 

She often tried to explain to her husband why she needed to sleep with the book. It was always a rambling mess—a jostling of non-philosophies and inclinations. Something about the beauty of brevity and how over time, the novel, War and Peace in this case, becomes less a literary object and more an interpretation of itself. And because of that, it's not so much the reading of a book that's important but the proximity one has to books—her argument always had kernels of clarity, but was mostly quite confusing. Always near the end of her tirade she would become flustered and swear off poetry and all things literary. To which her husband would say something like, “What about your poem about the frog? I really like that one.”

 

pale, little frog

on a lily pad

when I

looked up

you

were gone.

 

Occasionally he would peel the book out of her hands as she slept. Its corners often bumped into him as he tried to adjust. And on nights when she was under the full control of nightmares they’d both wake up with papercuts. She often woke up with a bruise the shape of the book against her chest. A blue-purple nightscape below her collar bone. A bad look, he’d say. Unhealthy. Whenever he got the chance, after she had fully succumbed to sleep, he’d pull back each finger—pinky, ring, birdie, pointer, thumb—and carefully unwrap Tolstoy’s tome and place it quietly on the bedside table.

Even if she just read the damned thing, he thought. To think of the book as just an object taking up room in their small house eventually drove him mad. There were days when it was all he could think about. During his morning coffee and his commute to work he’d picture it. The version she had, and often held, was old. The corners were all worn, nearly to the bone, and each page feathered at its ends. It was once lusterful, but now mostly gray and the words on the cover were blurred and in some places, completely erased. The thin paper was so translucent that it couldn’t even burn, he thought. Not even a spark.

 

One night, he decided it was time to get rid of it. Her quiet pale face was outlined and highlighted by the moon and the glow of the lake below. Her lips were held just open and revealed the whites of her teeth. Their criss-cross patterned bedsheets wrapped around her shoulders and her waist. A perfect moment captured, he thought. Beautiful, he whispered. And the book was free. He crept out of bed with it pressed against his stomach.

The lake, he thought, the one below their house that is somehow smaller than the house, somehow smaller even than their small bed, that’s where I’ll get rid of this damned thing. Tie it to a rock and throw it into the sea. He marched in the moonlight, briskly, but not so quickly as to alert the wolves. Just one foot in front of the other until he stood above the moonfull waters.

He had never opened the book before. In all the time they had been married and all the times he had pulled it from her hands, he never once felt compelled. Before he threw it into the water he sat on a black rock that half circled the lake and opened to the middle:

 

Napoleon...

 

He slammed it shut. “I’d rather not,” he said and pushed the book as deep into the lake as he could. Once the whole thing was submerged he apologized to the quiet night and laid on the rock and watched the new ripples ripple in the water until none were left. Over his shoulder their house looked so fragile. Its old timbers and forgotten windows shook with every wayward draft.

          

The next morning she woke up alone and overturned their room looking for the novel. First she took apart her drawers. Every article of clothing was cast across the room. Every small keepsake from her life that she had kept was pushed and rolled aside. Her father’s charms and her mother’s too, chucked. All the while, she called out for her husband. She checked her body for the memories of the book—no papercuts, no imprint on her abdomen. She checked the fridge and on top of every hanging picture and under every hanging plant, even in the percolator.

Have I been betrayed? she wondered. The man who I share with every ounce of blood I can muster? Could he, in his helpful, nasty way, his hopeful, nosey attempts at fixing, have betrayed my trust? Stolen my last connection, last bastion, last pillar? She shook with sorrow. The house was as unsteady now as it had ever been. She barely made it across the kitchen to her writing desk without tripping.

“That bastard threw my book in the lake, I know it,” she said aloud.

It took all her concentration to scribble him a note as the stilts and slats and timbers of the home wavered with her anger.  

 

You,

 

Just as I was starting to understand it. Just as soon as I was prepared to get rid of it myself.I’m headed down to the lake to fish it out. If, by god, I retrieve it then all is forgiven. If not——I will feel awful for an awfully long time.

 

yours forever——

 

As she added the finishing touch to the note, a heart around her name, the house began its descent. At first their bedroom collapsed. Then the kitchen. Fire burst out of the oven and all the windows shattered. She folded the note. The ceramics in the bathroom ruptured and water jettisoned into the light fixtures and there were more flames. She placed the note on her writing desk and put her pen away. As she left and slammed the door the house let out a final, tired groan and ceased to be.

 

From the road, and perhaps from space, it was a spectacular scene. The house was quite old. Filled with lifetimes of sometimes happy, sometimes angry, sometimes nothing. Once it twisted up completely and its guts were discharged, a plume of blackness and redness erupted in all directions. Flames became a mountainscape and split the sky into stained glass portions. The intensities of the sun melted and reflected and chased each other through the hills. The lake evaporated and the trees wilted and turned to ash. Songbirds circled and mountain goats hid. There was a howling-crying sound that bore up from the earth as it swallowed what was left.

When the earth did finally settle, in place of the house was a greenness with the odd little flower here and there. And the lake, a crater now, had nothing but the book at its center. The smoke gathered into clouds and headed west. On the rock that half-circled the once-lake the husband and wife sat quietly.

 

An old man, a local, first on the scene after the dust had settled, said he had never seen anything like it. The two of them were shivering and telling jokes—covered from head to toe in dirt and falling pollen. He offered them a blanket and explained to them that they had survived something strange. He told them, and in later years, his grandchildren, that it shouldn’t have happened as it did. That the whole town knew the house would eventually fall, but not like this. He told the two that they shouldn’t have survived, that even the termites and the ants had been cremated. He handed them his canteen and they drank greedily. They thanked him and pointed toward the lake. 

He made his way to its center and picked up the book. The cover and spine were nearly gone and most of the bulk of its contents had been melted and reformed into a rock.

“This yours?” he yelled back.

They shrugged and held each other close.

 

He sat with the object for a while and pondered it. Where it had once been something, it was now no more than a stone. He looked back at the couple, who were, to his mind, in some degree of shock, and waved. 

Read More »

JOE-DOG by Michael Haller

November 12, 2021

Joe was helping his ex-girlfriend Claire move out of her apartment (“the apartment where I grew as a person more than my previous four apartments”) while simultaneously helping his recycled girlfriend Lori move into the same apartment. (“Fucking creepy, I’m disinfecting this place when she’s gone.”) The apartment was a one-bedroom in trashy-trendy North Cumminsville, a blighted warehouse district in one of the mid-sized Ohio cities beginning with the letter C (not Canton, not Chillicothe, not Coshocton). Claire could no longer afford the rent in NC due to unpaid bills and the troubles they bring, and middleman Joe, a friend of the landlord, cluelessly arranged for Lori to meet the owner and win first right of refusal, without thinking that they might cross paths during the move. Joe chose to ignore any emotional discomfort this scenario caused by not thinking about it, and not thinking about “emotional-type things,” as Joe referred to them, was something he saw as an asset. His job, he told himself, was laborer; he was a packhorse helping one person move out and another move in. His secondary job, after the heavy lifting, was to stay out of the way, not make eye contact, and speak only when spoken to. His third job, if necessary, was peacekeeper, because the two women were no longer friends, all because of Joe. First, Joe dated Lori, then cheated on Lori by sleeping with her friend Claire, without Lori’s knowledge of course and without Joe’s knowledge that they were friends. Nor did Claire know that Joe was dating Lori until the two women were at a bar discussing the wonderful man they’d been seeing, who they discovered was the same man when they held up their phones and showed each other pictures of their beloved. Their smiles turned to eye-bulging disbelief, then mutual inquisition and accusation that launched a feud conducted in-person, via text, email, social media, and phone when they learned of each other’s “betrayal” (Lori’s term), an accusation Claire took issue with, because she didn’t know Lori was seeing Joe and said ignorance was the more accurate word to describe her part, the mutual recriminations and accusations causing them to distrust each other more than they distrusted Joe, who, because they adored him, and because he was the type of man in short supply—he had enough brains that he wouldn’t be called stupid, but not enough brains that he was smarter than either woman, who thought themselves alpha females. And he was so attractive it was like he was covered with chocolate syrup they wanted to lick off: 6’ 1,” 200 lbs., tousled brown hair, naturally muscular—“work muscles, not gym muscles,” Claire said—he worked in a lumber yard and could carry eight 2 x 8s stacked on each shoulder up a flight of twenty steps—with a strong upper body, and well-proportioned in all other areas, which was everywhere.

An impartial observer, however, may have cited Joe for unethical boundary crossing, breaking of trust, psychological damage inflicted on both women, with no certainty that even more damage wouldn’t be inflicted on them or on other women Lori and Claire were unaware of. Joe skated happily along, as another of his assets was his lack of introspection, although he wasn’t introspective enough to know this was an asset until his ex-lover Bruce Ford (he, him)—with whom Joe had his first, longest, deepest, and most intense sexual and romantic relationship (although Joe never thought of it that way)—told Joe, “Your gift is your lack of self-awareness regarding the negative impact you have on people—which self-knowledge would destroy anyone with scruples—while simultaneously you inflate the positive impact you have on others, so that you see yourself not as the pariah you should see yourself as, and should be seen as by others, but as a savior to anyone you love, is how you see yourself, a benefactor or kindly bestower of yourself onto others,” said Bruce Ford when Joe left him to date Lori. “Borderline sociopath in other words is how I would describe you, although your love is indeed the most wonderful gift I’ve ever received, so I’m not faulting you for your flaws, just pointing them out, and any time you want to come over for a back rub or foot massage—platonic, of course, I’m a one-man kind of guy, I don’t share—please, don’t hesitate.”

“Cool,” Joe said on his way out the door for the last time, then, “Well, I’ll see you around dude.”

Lori was parked in Bruce’s driveway honking the horn for Joe to hurry up.

“What did you see in him anyhow?” she asked as they drove away.

“See in him? Like, why did I hang out with him?”

“Yeah.”

“You know? That’s a good question. We’ve known each other forever—we were born on the same day, same year, same hospital, we lived three doors apart—”

“Ok, I understand. It’s not really important, as long as you keep getting tested once a week for the next six months.”

“Right on,” Joe said, sitting in the passenger seat, strumming an acoustic guitar left-handed, the fretboard sticking out the window.

 

***

 

While Bruce Ford was correct that Joe lacked introspection, it was not true that he lacked compassion, empathy, tolerance, and a natural ability to forgive and forget, so intrinsic to his nature that he was unaware he possessed these gifts and didn’t understand that others often lacked them. The emotional upheavals Joe caused always surprised him, as probably his deepest philosophical approach to life came from a cereal box interview with a surfer he read when he was a kid, something to the effect that life is calm seas and life is waves, and how you ride the waves determines whether or not you survive, it’s nothing personal the ocean has against you, it’s just something you put up with and try not to go under, and when he read this at age twelve, Joe internalized it and transmogrified it into an all-encompassing worldview that could be summarized as “go with the flow and don’t worry about things beyond your control,” and Joe would tell his friends, after the emotional devastations he caused, that his “victims” were fighting forces beyond their control (i.e., his behavior) and they should accept his actions, not fight them or question them, just go with the flow and you’ll be fine. This is how he explained his behavior to Lori and Claire, who were appalled at his brazen stupidity, but also fascinated that a beautiful grown man could have such a simple way of looking at things. They then thought maybe it wasn’t simple, that perhaps Joe was a savant, or Buddhist, maybe, not through studying but by natural disposition, he had, they reasoned, an advanced, sophisticated understanding of life and they were the dumb ones for not comprehending his God-given enlightenment, and all he was trying to do was share his wisdom with them.

After Claire was fully moved out (“eradicated” was Lori’s term) and psychically removed with three days of continual sage-burning that created an odor that permeated the entire 1920s apartment building where she lived, Joe moved his things back in because Claire had thrown them out the windows.

While the sage was still burning, and Joe had brought in his last bundle of clothes, Lori closed the door of the apartment, stood with her back against it so Joe couldn’t leave, and told him to take off his clothes. Joe was happy to comply, because he believed nudity, for him, at least, was the ideal state, and also because women, and men, liked looking at him, and because Joe was a people-pleaser more than anything, he was happy to give them something to look at. Only this time Lori told him to kneel on all fours and “stick your ass up high.” She removed her leather belt, doubled it in two, and slapped his ass so hard he howled in pain. Before he was able to ask what she was doing, she spanked him again. The belt left red marks on Joe’s rear, and when he saw Lori pull her arm back for another spank, he crawled to her and bit her between the legs. She was wearing jeans, and it wasn’t a ferocious bite, so she didn’t feel much, but seeing Joe’s beautiful face at her crotch inspired her to wrap the leather belt around his neck and tighten it like a leash that she used to pull Joe around the apartment. Joe played along, because Joe loved to play, even though this particular game was new to him. Little did he know it was also new to Lori, but she was assertive in a way that made Joe think this was something she’d wanted as soon as they had the chance. She pulled him into the kitchen and placed him in the corner--naked, leashed and collared. She removed a large plastic mixing bowl from a cabinet, filled it with water, and set it in front of Joe. She then took a drinking glass from the cabinet, wrapped it in a dish towel, and pounded the towel-wrapped glass with a hammer until it was broken into hundreds of shards that she sprinkled on the kitchen floor so that if Joe tried to crawl or walk out of the kitchen, he would cut his hands, feet, or knees.

“Don’t move,” Lori said.

“What the hell, babe? I thought we were cool.”

“Yeah, we’re cool. But do me a favor and get on all fours and start drinking from the bowl.”

Joe plunged his face into the bowl and suctioned water into his mouth.

“Not like that. Lap it. Lap it like a dog!” she said, and barked.

Joe started lapping the water, and that’s when she grabbed her phone off the kitchen table and photographed a naked Joe drinking water like a dog from a mixing bowl.

  

***

 

An hour later, after they made love, Joe asked Lori if she would put him on the leash again or if it was a one-time thing.

“I’m pretty sure it’ll happen again,” was her answer, as she massaged between his legs and coaxed another erection that she used to get herself off one more time.

 

***

 

Little did they know that before Claire moved out, she installed three surveillance cameras in strategic spots throughout the apartment so she could perhaps blackmail Lori, or at least embarrass her. One of the cameras was in a ceiling fan over the dining room table, angled toward the kitchen, providing a perfect shot of Joe’s slave-dog performance. Another camera was in the bedroom, and one was in the living room. Claire watched the tapes when she got home at 3:30 a.m. after tending bar for eight hours and getting stoned with a coworker. She was appalled at what she saw and then so aroused that she masturbated four times before falling asleep around 5:00.

Not much changed over the next month. Lori and Joe spent almost every night together, and almost every night, Claire came home and masturbated watching them. A routine had developed. Claire fell asleep blissed out and woke up anticipating the following night’s debauchery. She remembered that she had installed the cameras for purposes of blackmail, but she discovered instead that she was a voyeur, and this discovery lowered her self-esteem a bit, but not enough to stop her from watching. But her subterfuge made her paranoid. What if someone was watching her? She began thinking that perhaps her pot-bellied landlord—whose T-shirt always rode an inch above his beltline, revealing pale skin barely visible through a jungle of pubic hair that seemingly went from his crotch up to his neck, for more of the same hair sprouted from his shirt collar—installed cameras when Claire was at work, and while she masturbated to tapes of Joe and Lori, he masturbated to tapes of her.

“Does weed cause paranoia?” Claire asked Google, and Google said yes, around ten million different articles said yes, depending on what strain of bud was smoked, and what the smoker’s pre-buzz state of mind was, yes, paranoia was possible. Also, a tendency toward feeling guilty in general could be exacerbated by the herb. Claire decided she would drink more whiskey and smoke less dope, but whiskey made her angry, so she went back to weed.

“Does weed make women horny?” was the next thing Claire asked Google, and the answer, repeated ten million times, was that a woman’s horniness while elevated depended on what strain of bud was smoked, what time of month it was, the smoker’s level of fatigue before lighting up, and also, any pre-buzz anticipation of impending sex might intensify the desire for carnal annihilation.

 

***

 

Bruce Ford meanwhile was pining for Joe-Dog. Although he’d had a few lovers in the two years after Joe left, it was Joe he remembered most. He devised a plan: He would contact Claire and suggest she invite Joe over for a friendly chat. Bruce would already be in Claire’s apartment—in fact, he and Claire would be in bed, under the blankets, fully clothed of course because Bruce had only seen two women naked. (One was his mother [trauma!] and the other was a new-in-the-neighborhood fourteen--year-old named Brandy Sinclair, who had volunteered to be gangbanged by five boys of her choosing, two of them Bruce and Joe, but he was overcome with nausea when he saw her lying naked on the bed, her skin a sickly white, surrounded by the boys, touching and squeezing her until she took Kenny Listerman’s hand and put it between her legs. Bruce wanted to stay and watch the boys undress, but Brandy’s nakedness was a shock so troubling that he had to leave, and Joe followed.) Bruce hoped that, assuming Claire went along with the plan, Joe would see his two exes in bed and feel the whammo! of karmic devastation when he realized that what goes around comes around. Or something like that, is how Bruce Ford envisioned his destabilization of Joe-Dog, an emotional destruction he hoped would be so severe that Joe would plead with Bruce to come to his senses and “leave that woman and come with me.” Bruce then thought this scenario mightn’t happen. Perhaps Joe would get in bed with them, only to find they were clothed.

Bruce went to the Corner Pub, where Claire tended bar, a cinder-block hellhole as drab as its name might suggest. Upon entering, one noticed the low, drop ceiling, the absence of windows, wobbly tables surrounded by mismatching chairs, and almost no lighting except for the minimum the bartender needed to pour drinks and count change. In years past, the pub had featured non-nude dancers on a stage the size of a ping pong table, now home to the establishment’s lone pinball machine. Bruce had been there a few times with Joe and feared for his safety—bathroom graffiti included the message “if you’re reading this, you’re a fag”—so he dressed as straight as he knew how (which to Bruce meant cowboy attire) and practiced talking without the effeminate lisp he knew he talked with ever since recording himself saying the Pledge of Allegiance as a fourteen-year-old to see how obvious it was he was gay. (“I pledge allegiance to the fag—flag!—I pledge allegiance to the fag, oh god, the flag the flag…the flaggots…” and he stopped there because he knew he was doomed to announcing his gayness every time he spoke.)

Bruce came in and sat two seats away from a man somewhere in his sixties, who looked at him and said “Jesus Christ” and moved to the other end of the bar.

“What are you doing here?” Claire asked when she came over. “Are you trying to get killed?”

“Is it obvious?”

“No one dresses like that anymore.”

“It’s not macho?”

“It’s ridiculous. Gay men haven’t dressed like that since the ‘70s. You could at least have worn a shirt under your vest. And take that bandana off your neck!”

Bruce removed the bandana, eyeing the old drunk at the end of the bar, who, Bruce noticed, was staring at him with either hatred or lust.

“I think your other customer rather likes my attire.”

“Don’t. Ex-cop. Hates gays. Hates everyone except other ex-cops. Look at me.” Bruce looked at her. “Ignore him.”

“Okay, I’ll ignore him. But to answer your question why I’m here, I’m here because I have a proposition.”

Claire said his idea was silly and that he should forget about Joe and find someone else.

That night at 4 a.m., Bruce’s phone rang.

“Let’s do it,” an intoxicated Claire said. “I think it can work. But we have to invite Lori. I’ll set it up. I’ll propose a make-up party. I’ll invite both of them, and you’ll already be here in bed and I’ll get up to use the bathroom and I’ll get in bed with you and invite them into the bedroom.”

“Then what happens?”

“Then what happens? How should I know? We haven’t done this yet. I can’t predict the future.”

“What are you doing? You’re all huffy and puffy like you want to have phone sex but as you know, I do not lean in that direction.”

“I’m watching a…tape…..oh fuck! Oh fuck ohfuckinggod…”

“What sort of tape are you watching?”

“It’s…oh god…oh god…it’s Joe and—Joe and Lori!”

“What are you talking about? You have a tape of them fucking?”

“Hundreds. Every night. Before I moved out I installed cameras.”

“Oh. My. God. Can I come over? I need to see this. I mean, I’ll put my hand over Lori or something because that would ruin it, but if I can see Joe…”

“Hurry. Bring weed.”

“Girl, I am walking out the door.”

They fell asleep at six and Bruce woke at eight with an erection poking Claire’s lower back. It woke her up too, and she reached behind her and began massaging it. Bruce was aghast, but it felt so good that he came two minutes later, breathing heavily into the back of Claire’s head and noting with surprise the pleasant aromas coming from her hair.

“Mmmm…” Claire said. “Feel better?”

“Oh my god, I’m so sorry,” Bruce said, but Claire’s hand was still holding his spent but semi-hard penis, and he didn’t tell her to let go. Her hair smelled so floral, and the skin on her hand was a little rough—sandpapery, almost—like Joe’s hands—probably from twisting off thousands of bottle caps the last few years.

“Back to sleep now,” she said and took her hand away.

Bruce rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling. He was overcome with self-loathing for betraying the cause, as he now thought of his queerness, a politically and socially revolutionary lifestyle that threatened the status quo and rejected everything it stood for, meaning all of the insipid love songs and commercials and TV shows and movies and billboards that glamorized straight life by showing happy couples and unhappy couples and their children and cheerful dogs and that congratulated itself when, once every five years, they sort of got it right in a movie or TV show regarding what it was like to be a real man, which is how Bruce thought of himself every time he made love with a man. But this episode with Claire? He was confused. He stopped thinking about it, got dressed, and went home.

 

***

 

As the make-up party approached, the women no longer felt threatened by each other, but they didn’t know this because their friendship hadn’t recovered to the point where they shared secrets or exposed vulnerability. Lori walked with what she imagined was a triumphant air—regal, actually, because she possessed the man everyone wanted. She was victrix. She pictured herself a mythical Roman empress, a goddess of beauty and war who inspired her men to kill barbarians in every corner of the empire. She would exalt herself by ordering the Senate to proclaim her “eternal wife of Jupiter,” reassigning Juno as wet nurse to their sucklings. Claire’s satisfaction, on the other hand, came from her deepening attraction to Bruce, who was the second most beautiful man she’d slept with, after Joe.

The men were less enthused with the make-up party. Joe’s usual go-with-the-flow attitude was slightly disturbed at the thought of being in the same room with three people he’d had sex with. And although the gathering was Bruce’s idea, he too was confused, because for the first time ever, he was attracted to a woman. He was so upset he consulted a psychologist to see if he was either insane or a degenerate, but the shrink, who seldom made eye contact during the session, said that as long as he was engaging in consensual and legal behavior, there was nothing wrong. “The guilt, or shame, you feel toward this woman…Betsy?...Let me make an analogy: All your life, you hated watermelon. Didn’t matter if you put ice cream on it or brown sugar or deep fried it. Point is, you never liked watermelon. And then one day you’re at a picnic, and people are eating watermelon, and you get a craving for watermelon. Who knows why? So you get a slice of watermelon and take a bite. You slowly chew it into a pulp and swallow. You don’t throw up. You end up eating five slices, and on the way home, you stop and buy a twenty-pounder that you eat within a day.”

 

***

 

The make-up party happened on a Saturday night, two months after Bruce suggested it to Claire. He arrived early to help prepare the snacks and tidy up. But they scratched the idea of getting in bed together and somehow using a façade of intimacy to hurt Joe and Lori, because they’d developed a true intimacy over the last two months that would be damaged if they used it to play a joke on their guests. Bruce was now thinking of himself as bisexual, and Claire was wondering why she was only attracted to bi-guys—first Joe, now Bruce. But what really complicated things was their curiosity: Bruce was now thinking about Lori’s shiny blonde hair, and Claire had never forgotten certain looks Lori gave her during their three-year friendship: penetrating, lingering looks when it seemed Lori’s eyes throbbed, or pulsed, as they stared at each other. She’d never had any serious lesbian fantasies besides the daydream of making out with a beautiful woman, preferably on the beach at full moon. And the other fantasy of being caressed and catered to by three or four naked sorority girls. And also the fantasy of cuddling with a lovely but tragic divorced woman, giving each other the healing love they needed before finding another man to wreck their lives. But Claire had neglected to watch tapes of Joe and Lori when they weren’t having sex. If she had, she might not have been surprised when she opened the door at 8:00 to see Lori dressed as some sort of Roman goddess, wearing a sheer toga-thing, and Joe dressed as a shirtless gladiator.

Claire and Bruce were gollywomped with lust when the Romans walked into their apartment, but Bruce recovered quickly.

“Joe, are you one of those Roman slaves who gets crucified for having a bad attitude?”

“Hey Bruce,” he said and hugged his former lover. Bruce lost all motor control and would have collapsed if Joe hadn’t held him tight.

Claire had lost fifteen pounds since Lori last saw her, and had dyed her hair a deep auburn with a jawline bob that framed her face like the Sutton Hoo helmet. Two inches taller than herself, Lori’s feeling of superiority diminished somewhat looking up into Claire’s dark eyes ringed with black eyeliner. “My god, she’s turned goth,” Lori thought, looking at Claire, who she only ever befriended in the first place because she liked to be out in public with prettier women, as a way of attracting the men the pretty girls didn’t want.“Are you two”— she nodded at Bruce, who had recovered enough strength to stand on his own “—a couple?”Claire scratched her nails through Bruce’s thick black hair.“Is that what we are, darling?”

“Well, I’ve never been one for labels,” he said, Claire’s nails sending sparks through his body. “Are you two a couple or just…friends?”

“It’s too soon to call us a couple because there’s a trust issue”—and she shot a hateful look at Claire that softened into fascination with her makeover, “but uh,” looking from Claire to Bruce—“things are going well.”

 

The evening passed pleasantly at first, everyone slightly guarded until the marijuana was passed around. Within minutes, it seemed more than four people were in Claire’s apartment, as the volume of conversation, music, and laughter increased two-fold, then three-fold. A connective warmth passed through all four as their social armor fell off, replaced by a renewed trust and mutual interest that wasn’t a bogus effect of the herb, rather, the bud seemed to have breathed life into their former selves—spontaneous and trusting, everyone abuzz with the feeling (not yet knowledge) that they were still friends, instinctively drawn to each other, just like old times, which for Joe and Bruce was twenty-four years. Claire and Lori had known each other just three years, but they got along so well (before the rupture) that they felt like they would be lifelong friends.

As the evening wore on, Joe and Bruce ended up in the kitchen, drinking beer and getting reacquainted. Joe had put on one of Bruce’s white t-shirts, a bit small but better for the way it clung to his torso and exposed enough bicep that every time Joe raised his beer bottle, a hump of muscle formed that Bruce wanted to kiss, lick, bite, caress, slap his cock against. Claire and Lori sat on the couch, near enough that their knees could have touched if one had leaned toward the other. It’s possible that Bruce backed Joe against the refrigerator and leaned in close to kiss him, but instead rubbed his face against Joe’s to feel his stubble. It’s possible that Joe placed his hand on Bruce’s chest, either to back him off or because the adventurous boy in Joe was still alive to Bruce, and holding his hand there was like a magnet that kept Bruce near. None of this was seen by the women in the living room, who now had relaxed enough that their knees were resting against each other’s. Lori looked at Claire’s black-stockinged legs and told herself she needed black stockings…but would she look as slutty-hot as Claire? And what Claire could see of Lori’s legs, from mid-thigh down to sandaled feet, caused her to lose track of their conversation about work as she daydreamed about rubbing lotion on her friend’s thighs.

Joe and Bruce came in from the kitchen and sat next to the person they began the night with, but there’s no reason to believe that in the coming weeks alliances and attractions wouldn’t shift, in a less bruising way than before. With the good feelings and restored trust flowing in every direction, it’s best to think that, whatever the outcome of the renewed affection, the foursome’s friendship had entered a new phase that would see the bed-hopping and eavesdropping recede. Although it’s too early to predict who will end up with whom, the fact that friendship is being restored might be seen as a sign of emotional growth. And Joe, who had never thought of himself as the center of attention (because he seldom thought of himself at all), was relieved that his friends weren’t fussing over him. He could relax and go with this new flow and see where it took him.

Read More »

CAROLINE EATS HER FEELINGS by Gabrielle McAree

November 5, 2021

I half-expect Chris to be draped in an American flag like a patriotic version of Jesus. Since enlisting, he’s all pro-war now, existing in a blind state of sacrosanctity. He shits red, white, and blue, and has Uncle Sam on speed dial. They grab beers together, talk sports. Bald and uniformed, no one would know that just last week Chris lit illegal fireworks off his parent’s pontoon and drank vodka tonics before noon. That he suffocated lizards and shot small dogs with bb-guns, gratified a Wendy’s. Growing up, his parents thought he was going to be a serial killer, not a soldier. Now, he tucks his shirts in and says, “Yes, ma’am.” Ana saw him help an old lady cross the street, so I guess Chris is a regular boy scout now.

Back when we were together, Chris never pulled out. I used to resent him for this, but I don’t anymore. I wouldn’t have minded getting pregnant, not really. It would have been a nine-month holiday of glazed donuts, pickles drenched in peanut butter, being lazy. I could have handled the morning sickness, the swollen feet, the back aches, the weight gain. I would have survived. I think about dying my hair neon green so my conservative family can discuss it behind my back. But boxed dye never lasts, and I hate wearing those plastic gloves. It’s not like I would be a good mom or anything. I’m not an idiot. Moms have ponytails that swoosh and schedule doctor’s appointments and eat fresh fruit. They floss. I barely remember to brush my teeth. Ana says Cadet Chris is coming over around 2. I hope to have an aneurysm before 2.

Outside, Dad’s nose is already peeling. His cap is on backwards, and he’s wearing a cutoff tank, the one with the bald eagle on it. His smile expands beyond his face as he fires up the grill. I haven’t seen Chris since he asked if he could hit me during sex. I said no, and he joined the army that afternoon. Ana’s convinced he enlisted as a form of self-punishment. It’s because he’s a sadist, but he doesn’t want to be a sadist, she said. I thought about submitting myself to him as an experiment—mostly, because it would be something to do—but I was tired and really wanted someone to paint my nails a happy person color. Getting hit for someone else’s pleasure just sounded hard. I knew I wouldn’t be getting anything out of it. Pain never excited me all that much. I already hated myself enough.

When my dad’s friend, Eddie, got laid off, he moved into the guest room for a couple months. Eddie made it a routine to piss while I was in the shower. I never told anyone about it, but it felt morally wrong, like killing an animal or running a red light on purpose. I started paying attention to how I shampooed my hair and thought about kissing Eddie on the mouth and telling people about it so he could go to jail. Really, I just wanted attention, and that didn’t sound like a good enough reason to ruin his life. When Eddie left, Mom let me binge-watch cartoons and never made me shower if I didn’t want to.

I lace up my tennis shoes and throw on a skimpy white tank top. There’s a ketchup stain near the bottom, so I tuck it into my waistband. My hair is so greasy that it looks brown. Dark, like dad likes it. I clasp the necklace Chris got me for my birthday around my neck, tight enough that it feels like he’s choking me. There’s already a red mark thrashed across my neck like a tiger stripe. I look pretty in an uncomfortable way—in the way bad car crashes and deep gash wounds are also kind of beautiful. Downstairs, Mom is playing old people music, something sad and twangy. She’s a pescatarian now, which is just an excuse for her to order sushi whenever she wants. Mom doesn’t care about animals. Once, she opened the backdoor so Jamie, my pet ferret, would run away. It ran and ran and ran.

“Caroline!” she yells. 

Her voice is so stupid.

“What?”

I wish I had a stereo so I could blare it and then everyone would know I’m going through something and leave me alone. I stare at myself in the mirror and open my mouth as big as I can. I watch, waiting for something to escape it; the big, black hole inside me. Nothing happens.

“Come downstairs.”

I draw black eyeliner under my eyes and apply Dad’s stick deodorant. Ana’s toothpaste is caked to the mirror like permanent marker. Nose hairs clog the sink. Mom’s stopped cleaning the house on grounds of combating the patriarchy. She’s tired of being ‘oppressed.’ Now, the house is always dirty, and Ana and I aren’t allowed to have friends over. Not unless we clean the house, which neither of us are interested in doing. The barbecue is fine though because it’s outside. People can come over if they don’t go inside.

I stomp down the stairs to the kitchen. Mom hands me a cookie with red and blue sprinkles on it. Her lipstick is drawn above her lips, and her self-tanner is blotchy. There’s orange residue all over her white t-shirt. I wish she’d just poison herself in a bed of UV rays and get it over with. That would be less embarrassing, but she loves to embarrass me.

“You’re welcome,” she says. “For the cookie.”

“It would be better if it wasn’t store bought.”

She calls me an ungrateful little shit, and I don’t argue with her. 

I shove the entire cookie in my mouth and eat a second while she lectures me about getting a job and moving out and starting a family. I go outside while she’s mid-sentence. From the window, I watch her throw her hands up in the air in exasperation. I wonder if she truly hates me or if she’s just a bitch because she doesn’t love me and wishes she did and doesn’t know how to channel that energy without being called a “bad mom” by the neighbors. Dad’s face is clouded by grill steam. He’s already got a beer bottle in his left hand.

“Mom is on a Come-to-Jesus kick,” I say. “It’s exhausting. What’s happening? Do you not fuck her anymore?”

Dad laughs. “Cut your mom some slack. She thought you’d go on to cure cancer or something. You were such a driven child.”

“So, what? I’m a massive disappointment now?”

“Yeah. Something like that. Hey, toss me the paddies.”

Dad wipes his face with his King of the Grill apron and readies his tongs. I swear, he’s only happy when he’s manning the grill. I become very aware of my teeth against my tongue. They feel weak, like in seconds they’ll dissolve into the ether, leaving me toothless. 

“Dad, why are we celebrating Chris?”

“Caroline, come on.” He evenly distributes the paddies across the grill as if he’s going to be judged by a celebrity chef. “He’s going to the army.”

“Yeah, but he’s a prick.”

“Everybody’s a prick.” Dad downs the rest of the beer and hands it to me. “Get me another, would you?”

On my way to the cooler, Dad says my hair looks better dark. I go upstairs to research the dinosaurs. I want to understand how they wiped themselves out or why they did nothing when they realized they were getting wiped out. When I hear Chris’ voice, I hide under my covers, disappointed that I can’t disappear. As a child, I thought magicians could do that for a person. From the window, I see him. He’s wearing an America flag shirt, just like I knew he would.

***

When I move 90-miles north to Chicago, I start seeing a banker who works for some nondescriptive hedge fund. He has big teeth and a bad hairline and always wears three-piece suits that remind me of mobsters. He lives in an apartment with glass walls and steel appliances. From his room, you can see Millennium Park. I put my forehead against the window and watch. Down below, the people look like ants, the cars: bugs, the trees: miniature and decorative, pieces from a tiny Christmas village. The banker wants me to do rich people stuff, like read my horoscope and drink $7 iced coffees. My horoscope is never what I want  it to be, and the coffee is shit. I draft hate mail to the horoscope column and leave one-star reviews for the coffee chains. During the day, I paint and repaint my nails pink and yellow and blue. I hide the evidence of my cheese danish binges, buried at the bottom of the trash. When I’m alone, I dive into manic depressive episodes so deep that I lose consciousness. I flush chunks of my hair down the toilet; all of my clothes are too big. I’ve spent my entire life letting myself off the hook for being pretty.

Sometimes, I feel like a mannequin in the banker’s apartment, or a hospital patient. I check my wrists for bandages, for an identification bracelet, but there’s never anything there. His place is clean and sterile, like a psych ward. Once, I spent an entire day looking for hidden surveillance cameras or peep holes. I found nothing. I crave human interaction. Touch. Taste. Smell. I’m afraid to go outside without the banker. He pays for everything, so I quit my server job and move into his guest bedroom when he asks. The curtains are peach, and there are 12 decorative pillows. I don’t know what to do with all of them. I throw three out the window.

My mother calls to ask how I’m keeping. I tell her I’ve met Jesus in the shape of a rich balding man. She cautions me to be careful and to not take drugs from strangers. She doesn’t want to read about me in the paper; it would be disgustingly predictable for me to overdose. I laugh at this because I know she’s trying to be funny, but mothers aren’t wired that way. I think about telling her I’m pregnant. I don’t though because it would only be worth it if I could see her face, and I honestly don’t know how she’d react. She might be happy.

The banker is 23 years older than me. He tells his friends he’s intimidated by my ‘supreme youth’ but in a productive way, like standing next to someone who is significantly taller, or richer, smarter. This doesn’t bother me because he buys me expensive gifts wrapped in tissue paper. I act surprised when I open them and thank him, nauseatingly. When I’m in a good mood, I clap. This gets him off and always leads to hair-pulling, hate sex. The banker leaves bite marks and bruises down my spine like a trail of polka dots. It isn’t as bad as it sounds. It’s easy, being submissive. You don’t have to do anything. I’ve stopped looking at him when he’s inside me. His pupils expand so big that his eyes turn black. I don’t know how to be loved, I think. This is why I’m like this. I’m not capable. It’s my mother’s fault. It’s easier to blame her than to accept responsibility. The banker is probably the devil. Not Jesus. I know this. I lie still anyway.

Because I am the banker’s plaything, I lose all sense of self-worth. I stop eating cheese danishes and deprive myself of water, soap, sunlight, cartoons, flowers, fresh air. I stare at blank screens and watch Lego-people in long coats walk to work and then, eight hours later, walk home. When Ana comes to visit during her holiday break, she calls me a ‘malnourished zombie.’

“By the way,” Ana says, pausing to inhale what’s left of her salad. I move my fork around in a circular motion, but my salad stays untouched. I can’t imagine chewing. “Chris was promoted. Apparently, he’s doing well in the army.”

I think about the day Chris pounded into me so hard, I couldn’t walk. When I mentioned it, afterwards, he said I needed to toughen up. I cried while he rinsed off in the shower. He always showered afterwards. He said it was to rid himself of me.

Even my salad mocks me. “Good for him.”

“You look like shit, Caroline. Like, real shit.” 

Ana’s hair has grown out. It touches her shoulders now, which means it’s been months since we’ve seen one another. Specks of red lipstick clump together at the corners of her mouth. If I were in a comedic mood, I’d ask if she’s taken to drinking people’s blood. It wouldn’t surprise me. As a child, she ripped the heads of our Barbies off with her teeth. Her eyes are pale, as if someone’s put a layer of fog over them. It seems like I’m seeing her nose for the first time. I don’t actually know anything about her, but she’s family, so it doesn’t matter.

“Thanks. I feel like shit.” I push my salad away. “So, did you get a nose job or what?”

“Jesus. You can’t just ask people if they got a nose job.”

“You’re not people. You’re my sister. I thought that made me immune to formalities, or like, being politically correct. I can be a dick because we’re blood.”

“Yeah. No. That’s definitely not how it works.”

Ana wants to complain about the salad. “It has an aggressive amount of lettuce,” she says. “Nobody actually likes lettuce. They just order salad to be perceived as a person who orders it. Like if you eat salad, you automatically have your shit together.”

We throw our salads into the wastebin and go to a burger joint down the street. Ana orders two double cheeseburgers with fries. She offers to pay, so I let her. The banker doesn’t give me an allowance. He doesn’t want to monetize our relationship. I pay for nothing.

“I think we eat so much because we were denied real pleasure as children,” Ana says. Burger juice swims down her chin and onto her orange Camp Tecumseh t-shirt. She went with our high school class. I was out with strep throat and never got a shirt.

“Yeah. You’re probably right.” 

I cover my mouth with my hand. The banker watches me eat, so I have to pretend I’m a polite person. He doesn’t want me to gain weight. He says it would mess up his image of dating a younger person. This is baseless, I think, because young people are fat too. My mother never gave me seconds and kept me on a calorie intake plan, so this isn’t shocking to me.

Ana burps and doesn’t say, ‘Excuse me.’ I find her disregard for manners intoxicating. I want to drink her in hopes that I’ll become her, in hopes that I can burp in public and get away with it, in hopes that I won’t be stuck, chained to this stranger in three-piece suits. “So,” she says. “When are you going to introduce me to Eric?”

“Who?”

“The banker.”

A breeze comes in from the left, forcing me to acknowledge my surroundings. Yes, weather exists. Global warming is real. People wear coats and hats when it’s cold. Birds fly horizontally. We adhere to stoplights and abide by laws made by old men in white wigs. We avoid sugar and dark sodas, drugs, strangers, alligators, sharks. People complete 30 minutes of daily exercise and check-up with their doctors. There’s a whole society of people out there, a whole system. I readjust my sweater to hide my collar bones. They’re sharp now. My hips too. If I run into something, I bruise. Whenever I see myself naked, I gag. It’s hard to believe someone with money finds me attractive. It must be a fetish.

“Oh. I forget he’s an actual person with a name.”

Ana scoffs at this. Since getting older, it’s become harder for us to gage one another’s feelings. She can’t tell when I’m serious or kidding, which depresses me, and I can’t tell if she’s mad or hungry, which depresses her. Though, Ana does have a buffet of problems she decides she wants to talk about. There’s this rash on her forearms that won’t go away, her roommate wants to fuck her to see if she’s bisexual, she’s meditating with a 40-year-old mom she met on Facebook Marketplace, and she doesn’t think she wants to be a veterinarian anymore. She had to dissect a black cat in class and didn’t make it to the bathroom. Puked orange specs all over the hallway. Everyone talked about it. Even the professors.

“Maybe I should drop out of college,” Ana says. “Like you.”

We both laugh at this. I wish the banker were here to tell me how to act. A group of loud-talking students come into the burger joint. I wish I could leave.

“Yeah. No,” I say. “Don’t do that.” 

I close my eyes and pretend I’m on an abandoned island. Just me, floating in zero gravity space with no air circulation. The burger feels heavy in my hands. Finishing it will be impossible, I know that. I blink until Ana comes back into focus. I wouldn’t be shocked if she weren’t here at all and I were just imagining her because I miss her. I reach out to touch her, and she squeezes my hand. She asks if I’m ok, but I know she doesn’t want the real answer. I’m older. I look at my hands as if they’re not mine, but his. 

“So, have you seen Chris?” I ask.

“No. He comes back this weekend. It might be good for you to see him. Dad’s doing a barbecue. Come on, you love his barbecues.”

“No? I hate barbecues. Of any kind. Especially Dad’s.”

“If you come maybe Dad will shut up about you.” She swallows a fistful of fries without breathing. “Oh. By the way, he’s in love with that Rite Aid girl. I swear to God he would ask Mom for a hall pass if he knew she wouldn’t leave him. It’s pathetic. He goes to Rite Aid, like, twice a day. He’s all depressed because of you.”

Dad only calls me on the weekends when he’s drunk. He’s taking me leaving personally. It’s not like you had a bad childhood, he slurs. Was it really that awful? I tell him no. It wasn’t. I wasn’t beaten or chained to a wall. They bought me rollerblades when I asked for them and got me birthday cakes with the correct number of candles. The banker told me that growing up, he lived in a one-bedroom apartment with his entire family. If you compared the banker and my upbringings side-by-side, I had a rich life. I know that. I wanted for nothing.

Sometimes, Dad and I stay on the line just to listen to each other breathe. I pretend we’re looking at the same moon, which is stupid because we are looking at the same moon. I never invite him to Chicago. I’m embarrassed of how I’ll act if he actually showed up. Of how he’ll act. I don’t think I can survive being pitied by anyone, especially him, but I do feel bad about leaving him with Mom and Ana. Objectively, they’re the worst. But he’s learned how to use the Miracle Mop, which I guess is a good thing. The house is cleaner than it’s been in years.

“Caroline, you should come home and see everyone,” Ana urges. This time her voice is short, like she doesn’t care about my feelings. She takes the burger out of my hands and shoves it into her mouth. I don’t stop her. “We’re actually worried about you.”

I hate what “we’re” insinuates. I picture the entire family and the neighbors and my 9th grade Algebra teacher all got together to discuss my well-being, like as a public debate. I’m not in the family group message anymore. No one fills me in on breakups or appointments or sales. It’s as if they think I’m incapable of handling information.

“Well, don’t. I’m fine.”

“Yeah. Ok. You’re fine.”

I consider spitting in her face for the sole purpose of contaminating her so people in our family can worry about her too. I stand up because she’s finished our food, and I don’t see the point in continuing a conversation neither of us are going to win.

I walk Ana to the bus station, her chunky black suitcase wedged between us for safety. Her skin is prettier than mine. Better. Clearer. If I didn’t know her, I’d say she’s a character from Greek mythology. Helena. Artemis. Cassandra. I want to ask her how she does it, but my voice is a box of broken pencils. I can’t imagine expending effort on my physical appearance. No one sees me besides the banker, and he likes me this way. He likes sad and broken.

There’s a family with two young kids waiting beside us. The kids are kicking each other’s shins, and the parents are smoking obliviously, pretending their children don’t belong to them. Men in big suits yell into cell phones. A younger couple with acne laces their fingers together as if the physical pressure of their hands will morph them into a singular entity. A middle-aged man wearing trainers reads a beat-up paperback. I want to know where they’re all going. I want to know who’s out there waiting for them. I want them to invite me.

“About the nose job,” I start.

Ana puts up her hand to stop me. “Don’t. It’s fine, really.”

“It looks good,” I tell her. “And I’m not just saying that. It seriously does.”

She touches her nose and smiles. “Thanks.”

The train pulls up and Ana gets on without hugging me. She doesn’t turn around to see if I’m still there, but I wave her off because we’re family and that’s what family does.

I walk all the way back to the banker’s apartment. By the time I get inside, my clothes are soaked through. It’s dark outside.

***

A week later, I’m down five pounds and sensitive to light. The banker wants to take me out for steak and mashed potatoes, but I don’t have an appetite. I turn on Cartoon Network for noise. The banker goes down on me while Tom and Jerry chase each other around a mansion with lots of chairs. I haven’t shaved, but the banker doesn’t mind. His work friends are bringing their wives to the dinner. He says this like it’s enticing, as if I actually care about his work friends and their wives.

“I’m not a wife,” I tell him. The television glare hurts my eyes, but I keep looking. I register nothing. I don’t even know what’s on the screen anymore. I hear myself say: “If you really want me to go, then you’ll have to propose to me.”

The banker gets down on one knee without asking if I’m being serious or just joking. 

The next day, I have a rock on my left hand, weighing down my finger. It’s difficult to perform simple tasks, like brush my teeth, drink coffee, masturbate. I don’t take off the rock in fear that I’ll lose it or flush it down the toilet on purpose or pawn it.  

When I call home to tell my family I’m engaged, Chris answers. I know it’s him by the sound of his breathing. I’ve been gone almost a year now.

“Caroline? Is that you?” he asks. His voice is high, like someone punched him in the nuts as a hate crime. He clears his throat. His voice lowers. “It’s me. It’s Chris. Chris Hannon.” 

I pull the phone away from my face, slowly, and stare at it wondering how the telephone towers fucked up this massive, but it’s my home line.

“Don’t hang up,” he says. 

I only stay on the line because he sounds pathetic, which makes me pulse. Everywhere.

“Why are you answering my parent’s phone?”

“We’re having a barbecue. I just got back. From war, you know?”

“Oh. Yeah. Ok.” 

I hold onto the wall to keep myself upright. Outside, a family sets up a picnic at the park. Two parents, one daughter. They laugh and drink lemonade and swat away the bees. I cross my fingers, hoping the little girl gets stung so I can see what she looks like when she cries.

“Aren’t you going to ask how I’m doing?” Chris says.

“No. You can tell me if you want, but I won’t actually listen.”

I’m surprised at how easy it is for me to say this. It’s like I’m slipping back into the old version of myself, putting on an old pair of jeans. But not really.

Chris laughs. I imagine squeezing the inside of his brain with my hands until it pops. Until it rains little pieces of Chris’ red, white, and blue brain. I hate him or whatever.

“You were in my macaroni and cheese yesterday,” he says. “And on the milk carton and at the movies. I dream about you too. I don’t know what that means, but I think I miss you.”

I sink down onto the floor of the banker’s apartment and try to recall Chris’ face from memory. I feel like a wet dishrag spread out across a long table. Chris could whip me with it, the rag, and I would stand there, pointing to all the places he missed. I wonder if you ever stop loving the first person you loved. If you loved someone once, you probably always do.

“Ok. Great. Can you put my dad on the line?”

Chris wants to apologize, but I tell him it’s ok. He didn’t try to kill me or anything permanent, he just wanted to inflict pain on me. He wanted to hit me and leave visible marks and make me cry. He didn’t do anything that bad. Not really.

“Can I come visit you?” he asks. “In Chicago.”

I drag a loose nail on the inside of my thigh until my skin bursts open. My thick, crimson blood paints the banker’s floor. I watch, excitedly.

When we first got together in the 9th grade, Chris prided himself on doing nice things for me. He bought me food, opened doors, let me wear his letterman jacket, complimented me. It was the first time anyone had gone out of their way to make me feel special. I don’t know what happened to him, to Chris, but he got mean. For a while, I thought it wasn’t his fault. I thought maybe he got struck by lightning and lost all of his positive atoms. In my head, this seemed better than any possible alternative. 

I swallow. “No. I don’t think that’s a good idea. I want to talk to my dad now.”

Dad ruffles with the phone. He’s drunk, I can tell, and in a way, I’m relieved. I know he’ll be diplomatic about the whole marriage thing. He won’t make a scene.

“Married?” he asks. “Who to? Jesus, Caroline. Why are you breaking my heart during a barbecue?”

“He’s a banker in Chicago. I’m marrying him because he asked me to.”

“Well, shit. That’s not a very good reason to marry someone. But, it’s your decision.”

I breathe a deep breath, so deep I’m convinced my insides are getting eviscerated with a paper shredder. I stay on the line, and when I close my eyes, I’m 13 again. Using strawberry soap in the shower. Singing along to the radio. Sneaking cookies with Ana. Running through the sprinkler. Laughing at nothing. I notice Eddie watch me through the cracks in the shower. My teeth chatter though the water is hot. My shoulders are scalded pink. I wonder how my life would look had I told my parents about Eddie. Maybe he’d have gotten help or been put on medication or jailed. Maybe he’d be a father. A husband. A good lover. A person and not a monster.

His skeleton fingers show up in my nightmares. His dark hair clouds most of my judgements. I wonder where Eddie is. If he’s alive. If he’s happy. If he’s miserable. If he goes into other girl’s rooms. Sometimes, when I shower, I think of him. I wonder if he’d still want to watch me shower now that I’m older. Now that I’m 25. I think it’s why I started seeing the banker in the first place. In the right light, I swear he looks just like Eddie.

Read More »

THE SPRING PAGEANT by Richard Mirabella

November 4, 2021

Danny’s niece, Joan, sat at the newspaper covered folding table in front of the TV and painted the bear head he’d made for her school’s spring pageant. He trusted her with the head, when he would trust no one else with something he’d made, especially a child, but Joan understood how special it was to create objects. Joan didn’t destroy, and never had as far as he knew. Craig and Shannon, her parents, hadn’t complained about it anyway. Every book Danny ever gave Joan still existed intact. 

From the entryway of the kitchen, Danny watched her lay brown paint over the bear head’s surface. He’d painstakingly smoothed with gloss and then textured it so that when painted it would have the appearance of fur. Now and then he came to stand by her, but he’d only had to explain the technique to her once. At the stove, he heated up oil for fried chicken, her favorite.

Joan was eight-years-old, and her parents were dead. Craig and Shannon, two nice people, one of whom was Danny’s brother, were killed in a car accident. It was almost mundane. His brother had been conventional, sweet, a little dull. When Craig asked Danny to be Joan’s guardian in the unlikely event something was to happen to him and his wife, Danny accepted, because the something would never occur. Craig and Shannon would grow old and Joan would mature with and test them, but it hadn’t happened. Here she was in his apartment, brushing brown and black paint on a papier-mache head. 

“I want my bear to have blue eyes,” Joan said.

“Why?” Danny called from the kitchen.

Joan didn’t answer. The bear should have brown eyes or black. He’d let her paint the eyes blue and she’d see the mistake. He still didn’t like to tell her what to do. It didn’t come naturally to him.

Joan had once loved Danny loudly. Before her parents died, when he visited them, she wanted to sit next to him, or on him, while he ate or talked. She said, “Uncle Danny! Uncle Danny” if his attention strayed for a moment, and he’d have an urge to shove her off of him. God, what a horrible thing to think, but he wasn’t used to someone hanging all over him, never liked or wanted kids. Now, they only hugged if he asked if she wanted a hug and she’d say, “Of course, Uncle Danny.” Maybe she still loved him, but in a quiet way.

Tonight, he could have been fucking. He wanted it constantly now that he didn’t have time for it, and it was torture how easy it would be to find someone. He was young and when he looked in the mirror, he saw his temporary beauty. Strange to think of his brother in those moments, but he did. Craig, in the driver’s seat, crushed. How beautiful to have a body. The flesh would fall away from the bone someday. All this sculpture he’d been working on for ten years, all of this trying to put something together, to make life and a body out of armature and material, clay, or paper and glue, whatever, made him think about what lived under the skin. Joan, when he had his arms around her, felt as frail as an old lady, and she went out into the world every day and survived.

They ate the fried chicken, and after went back into the living room to watch Adventure Time together, the only show they both liked. The bear’s blue eyes had dried.

“It doesn’t look right,” Joan said.

“I told you.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“Oh yeah. I meant to,” he said.

The bear’s mouth hung slightly open, so when Joan wore it, she’d see out of it, as if the bear had swallowed her. He’d painted the inside black, except for a vivid red tongue.

Joan dipped a brush into dark brown and dabbed it over the blue eyes, took up another brush and circled the dark brown with a paler brown. When that dried, Danny touched two dots of white paint in each iris and the eyes came alive. They looked too much like human eyes, but when he saw how happy they made Joan, who smiled without stopping herself, he loved them. They might have made his best work of art together. He wished he could take some of the freedom he’d felt putting this mask together and bring it with him to his other work, which he labored over in the most boring manner, trying to find meaning within a piece, a reason for making it, aside from the desire to build. Sometimes it’s just a bear head, the best one you can muster.

In the morning, with the light a sad pink out the kitchen window, he made pancakes with peanut butter chips, and they sat at the table in what he thought of as their dining room, a small space between the living room and kitchen. 

“I had a dream that the Easter Bunny was a slaughterer,” Joan said. “He had a machete.”

She never told him her dreams. He tried not to visibly thrill.

“Jeez, really? Slaughterer?” Where had she come up with that word? One of her shows or books or games. How much of the world did she already know, if not understand? What other disgust could be introduced once your parents have been annihilated? 

Joan shoveled a soft wedge of pancake into her mouth and stared at the bear head still on the folding table in the living room. It was only a bit larger than her own head, enough to fit over her.

“Can I bring the head with me to school?”

“No, I don’t want you carrying it around all day. I’ll bring it to you.”

“I won’t carry it around,” Joan said. “I’ll wear it.”

“I don’t think that’ll go over with Ms. Felice,” Danny said.

Joan emptied her plate and brought it to the sink and ran water over it. Before they left the house, she passed the bear and tapped it on the head.

#

He arrived at 3:00 PM to help set up for the show. Somehow, he’d become the type of person who volunteered. Last week, he’d found himself standing in an elementary school art room with his roll of brushes from home, painting a giant wood panel, which he had provided—something he’d found years ago and had intended to use for a project that never developed. He moved the panel now, with Ms. Felice’s help, out of the art room, down the hall, and onto the stage in the gymnasium/auditorium.

“Thank you, Danny,” Ms. Felice said. “This is really beautiful.”

She liked him, he knew. She was a good-looking woman, younger, and it made him nervous, even though he didn’t want her. So, he tried to be kind, but not too friendly. 

“Very welcome,” he said.

The panel looked good in this space, in the dimness, with the curtains closed. He’d painted evergreens, like Joan wanted, and giant strawberries in the grass, according to her specifications. An odd landscape, he thought, which he liked, but the school could keep it for next year’s pageant. Joan would certainly be in the play again. It was the only thing she’d been excited about for months. In May, two weeks from now, her parents would be dead a year.

On the other end of the stage, Ms. Felice placed some of the props that had been passed down through the generations. Ugly things, basically. She unrolled a carpet of fake grass and the mustiness reached him from ten feet away. From a saggy cardboard box she removed three sections of a fake Christmas tree and clicked them together. 

Down on the folding chairs, the third graders gabbed and fidgeted, some of them already in costume. Joan had taken the bear head from him when he arrived and put it on, and still wore it. Why she wanted to stand around in it for so long, he didn’t know. Wasn’t it uncomfortable, sweaty? he asked. She shook the head.

Soon, the parents arrived, along with the first, second, and fourth grade classes. The place filled with chiming voices, screeching laughter, adults talking, chairs scraping the floor. Danny stayed back to help Joan with the rest of her costume, which Ms. Felice had made. Joan climbed into it and zipped it up. He liked it and told Ms. Felice it looked well-made. She flushed and babbled about what a compliment it was for an artist to appreciate the work she’d done. Joan resembled a stuffed animal, but with the more refined bear head the effect became slightly unsettling. From a distance, she looked less like a costumed eight-year-old, and more like an actual animal. Not really a bear cub, unless that cub had been starved to the brink of death.

Once he joined the audience, sitting in the last row, his palms went cold and wet. A cool dribble ran through the center of his body. He jittered, afraid for Joan, though she didn’t show any fear. This was a play for kids! No one cared about the quality. He smeared his palms on his jeans. He wanted Joan to be good. He wanted her to be happy. Just let her have this. 

After the lights went down, and Ms. Felice introduced the class, he felt better. The stage glowed bright yellow, and music started from somewhere, through speakers; a ghostly piano. A performer in a sparrow costume hobbled to the front of the stage and sat in a large nest made of straw. Once they’d gotten down into it and their legs disappeared, they looked like a giant bird. There were real, smooth brown and grey feathers, and the mask impressed him. Eyes gleamed black and dangerous, seeking an insect to devour. This little school. They didn’t mess around. 

The kids sang a song about the sun coming out and making the sky happy. Some voices were muffled behind masks. The kids without masks—one boy dressed as a farmer, his feet bare, and a girl in an Easter dress—carried the song for those whose voices didn’t project.

When the song ended, the story began, but it was such a nothing kind of story that Danny didn’t bother following it. Where was Joan? After the song, she’d disappeared. No one had interacted with her.

“But what if we can’t find the magic egg?” the girl in the dress said to the farmer. 

Danny caught sight of Joan. She’d been there the whole time, positioned in the dark by a panel of wood, next to the bare, false Christmas tree. Was she supposed to be standing there like that? He craned his neck to try to find Ms. Felice at the front of the audience. She shifted in her chair, held up her arm and pointed at something, whispered at the stage. He missed a bit of dialogue that made the audience laugh. Still, Joan stood and watched from her place in the dark, the white around her bear eyes visible in the gloom. Another song. The other children cleared the stage, leaving the farmer to sing it alone. The little boy didn’t appear nervous.

Joan stayed still until the song ended. The other children reappeared, and as they did, Joan joined them. She lurked, crouched and held her paws in front of her. The sparrow sat in its nest again and eyed the audience with one empty eye. Joan leapt at the farm boy and shoved him off the stage where he thumped at the feet of the front row and squealed. Ms. Felice shot to her feet and went to him. The other children turned and looked around at each other, wondering who had pushed the farm boy off the stage, except for the sparrow, who didn’t seem to be aware of anything. A boy dressed as an insect of some kind, didn’t seem bothered by the violence either. He zipped around the stage, playing his part, dedicated to his insect life. At any moment, the sparrow might snap him up. The audience made noises. The boy’s parents were at the stage. Joan stomped after a little girl in a bunny costume and climbed onto her. The girl couldn’t hold Joan’s weight, so she crumpled. Once she’d fallen, Joan left her there and moved on. Before she went after another victim, Ms. Felice appeared and put her arms around her and pulled her off the stage. 

Frozen, a bell clanged inside Danny’s head, and he saw himself, a character in a movie, running through the halls of the school looking for an exit. No one knew him. They didn’t know Joan belonged to him.

He hurried up the aisle and climbed onto the stage where some of the other kids were crying, their parents coming for them, calling names.

Backstage, Ms. Felice no longer held Joan, but leaned against a wall on the other side of the room from her looking at the little bear.

“Ms. Felice,” Danny said, but didn’t know what else to say.

“Joan,” he said.

Had another child switched costumes with her? She stood as she had on stage, still and quiet in the dark. It looked as if she wasn’t breathing.

“Joan, come here.”

Ms. Felice came away from the wall and stood next to him. “Do you know what’s going on?” she said.

He didn’t want to talk to Joan while she wore the bear head, but she didn’t move to take it off. The air smelled sour, as if someone had spilled milk days ago. Yesterday, he would have gone to her without a problem and pulled the mask off, took her by the arm and brought her to the car, even if she screamed and cried, but today he couldn’t cross the room to her.

“Are you a bear?” Danny asked.

Joan didn’t speak. Danny tried to think of later, when this had ended. She would be in trouble. They’d spend a silent hour in front of the TV, and she’d go to bed without saying goodnight.

“You should take her home now,” Ms. Felice said. She sounded afraid. She wanted Joan away from her.

He didn’t want to take her home. You will live here now, with the props—Ms. Felice will fold you up and put you in a trunk until next year’s spring pageant. 

“Joan,” Ms. Felice said. “I’m disappointed. You know I care about you so much, but I’m disappointed.”

The bear didn’t move its head, not an inch.

“We’re sorry,” Danny said.

“She might be in trouble. Ryan might be hurt badly.”

“You have my number,” Danny said. The stage wasn’t that high. Ryan would be fine, but it didn’t matter. The parents were angry, and they’d come for him.

“Take her home,” Ms. Felice said.

“I will. I am.”

“Do it, then” Ms. Felice said.

Neither of them needed to do anything. The little bear came out of the dark and walked toward them, between them, and out the door into the hallway. Danny went after her, afraid the parents might see her. He wanted to get out of the place, get her into the car where they would figure things out. 

The setting sun filled the car with intense light, bright and real, and Joan still wouldn’t remove the head. He didn’t ask why she’d pushed Ryan off the stage or jumped on the bunny girl. They drove without the radio. A short trip home, but his body felt weighted down. A magnetic energy poured out of Joan from the passenger seat, and he wanted to look at her. He didn’t take his eyes off the road.

When they got home, they walked up the stairs, and in the echoing space, her silence chilled him. He touched her on a furry shoulder and she allowed it, but didn’t react to it, only waited for him. Keeping his hand there, he squatted before her, taking in the smell that came off the body in front of him—a mixture of things, of whatever the costume was made of, some synthetic fiber, the paint and glue, sweat from within. Unlike Joan’s smell, which he knew now as much as his own. He slid his other hand onto her opposite shoulder and with a quick movement he pulled the mask from her. Her face appeared, red and soaked, her hair slicked over her forehead and cheeks, her eyes bloodshot and tired. He hurried her to the bathroom, ran the water cold and splashed her face, and she screamed as if he were setting her on fire.

#

He thought, before catching himself, that he should call Craig and ask him what to do, but Craig was dead. So, he’d call Dr. Keyes in the morning if Joan wasn’t back to normal. After her bath, she wanted to go to sleep. Not hungry. He couldn’t tempt her with a piece of cold leftover fried chicken, which she always said was the best part of making fried chicken for dinner. She fell asleep immediately, and he sat in the room with her for a long time, looking at his phone, scrolling and scrolling, not taking anything in.

In the morning, she awoke, and he informed her that they would not be leaving the house today. He made breakfast and she ate it. Without prompting, she went into the living room to watch TV. Before she’d gotten up that morning, he’d put the bear costume in the closet in his bedroom. This day would be the hardest, and he’d think about it more than the spring pageant in the coming years. He washed the dishes, let the phone ring and ring, never did call Dr. Keyes, sat with Joan and watched TV, turned off the TV and insisted they read, insisted they draw, and throughout it all she didn’t speak, not until the sun had gone down and she turned to him and said “Are we going to eat today?” He realized he hadn’t made lunch or dinner. He ordered pizza and turned on music while they ate.

The next day, Ms. Felice called, and he spoke to her for a long time, closed in his room, while Joan completed her assignments at the kitchen table. Ryan hadn’t been seriously hurt, but his parents were incensed. They wanted an apology, and he may have to pay some medical bills for a broken finger. She had done her best to deescalate the situation. She wanted him to know she cared very much for Joan. Did he want to get together some time to talk more about Joan and her care?

What to say about Joan? He didn’t have words for what he felt, for his experience of her now. 

“Maybe, the costume allowed her to be angry,” Ms. Felice said. “And out of it, things will go back to normal.”

It sounded nice and neat to him, but in his gut, he knew it wasn’t the case.

#

Uncle Danny sleeping. She watched him. Nothing woke him up because he was so tired all the time now, because of her. Having to take care of her. He slept quiet, not snoring like daddy used to. She got the bear out of the closet where she knew he’d put it. Went very slow out of the room and through the rest of the apartment, out the door and down the stairs, the whole time thinking he was going to yell at her or run down and grab her. 

He didn’t know she was a night creature. Glowing eyes at night. She saw everything in the dark. At the bottom of the stairs, she climbed into the bear and zipped it, but waited to put the head on, carried it with her until she reached Fletcher Park, the prettiest park with the nicest trees and water. She didn’t care about the playground, swings, the sports fields. None of that. She liked the trails. In Under the Wooded Grove, when Jeremy was lost in the woods and he found the hedgehogs who were curled up in balls, each with the power diamonds inside, he was disappointed because the diamonds could send him home so easy. So, he threw them in the creek. That was her favorite book. 

The trees were just getting leaves on them which meant it was summer soon. Tall light-posts lined the trail. She put the bear head on. Sometimes there were people here and she’d be scared because there weren’t supposed to be people here after dark. Not tonight, though. No people. If she needed to, she’d jump into the trees on either side of the path and be quiet. It always felt like she had a reason for coming here. She didn’t know the reason and it was frustrating to not know. She couldn’t sleep but got good at pretending for Uncle Danny. Once she’d come out here in the night air, she’d go back home and normally get to sleep. Only if she’d come out here first.

Ahead, something moved on the trail, something small. When she got closer, she saw a tiny animal running in circles around and around and around, racing itself. She didn’t like how it did that. Why was it doing that? Around and around. It freaked her out and she knew something was wrong with it. At the end of the trail was the pond where the ducks were. When they came here, Uncle Danny pointed. Look at the ducks, like she couldn’t see them. She preferred a lake or the ocean. 

She crept closer to the tiny animal, a mouse she now saw. It didn’t notice her and run away like it should have, only chased itself in circles, stopping now and then, starting again. Joan watched it for several minutes, then backed away, afraid to turn her back to it. 

#

Something had fallen between he and Joan that wouldn’t lift, and it hadn’t been there before the spring pageant. Their lives before that day faded from his mind. He sometimes caught himself thinking of scenes from the play, images of the sparrow’s eye peering at him from the stage, and the little insect boy fluttering about. These two had something in common with Joan. Dedication to being animals. He tried and failed to treat her as he’d always treated her. There were moments when he understood that he’d failed her, and those thoughts squeezed his throat, and he had to push them away too quickly to evaluate them. 

She was Joan, after all. His brother’s child. He did everything as the weeks after the pageant passed—fed her, washed her clothes, brought her to school, watched her favorite shows with her, bought her another book from her favorite series. Underneath all of this lived the mistake he made each day without realizing it until it was too late. He feared her for a moment with every interaction, and it spoiled the air around them. 

 One night a few months after the pageant, he awoke sweating, shivering, his body molded out of wet sand. He’d been dreaming of pain in his head, and here it was when he awoke, following him out of the dream. A figure stood a few feet from the bed, human-shaped except for the head. 

“You’re pretty sick,” she said.

“Yes. How did you know?” He sounded so frightened. For a moment, he had the ridiculous suspicion she’d poisoned him.

“You were yelling. You’re shaking.”

She was steady as a hunk of granite lodged in the earth. Didn’t come closer for a long time. When she did, she put her hand on his forehead. He felt an elemental indifference running through him, coming from her hand. Keeping her palm pressed against him, she slid it down to his cheek, where it cooled him.

His brother used to ask him if he worried about being alone, and he said of course he did. Wondered if straight people got asked that question as much as queer people. Well, you won’t be anyway, Craig had said. You have us, and you have Joan. 

He did have her, in a way his brother never expected. Full time. When her hand touched him, he imagined that he was so sick he was dying. He couldn’t lift himself from the bed and Joan wasn’t strong enough. In a minute, he’d ask her to call an ambulance if he couldn’t get out of bed himself. She was here, and maybe she’d be there on his final day. Not in the room, but there, in his life. He hoped.

Joan standing next to him. She wore the bear head and he didn’t ask her to take it off. Crying in front of her would be like crying in front of a river. He breathed to calm himself and tried to remember he was young and strong. Like his brother had been. An error inside of him could delete him from the world. He wouldn’t even know it, that’s how easy it would be. It’d take Joan a moment to notice something had changed. She’d take her hand back when she realized he’d left the room, and stare at his long, empty body on the bed, a broken tree in her path.

Read More »

MR. DUBECKI’S SECRET MENU by Kyle Seibel

October 22, 2021

Mr. Dubecki is the first person I tell about the people humping in the men’s restroom because he is the franchise owner slash store manager for one thing, but also because he’s the only other person here after Greg went home sick and Rocky’s brother picked him up early and the new girl who’s training on the window would only get in the way, so she got cut and Mr. Dubecki said he’d come by to help me close. 

Near the end of the shift I go to clean the facilities and what I find is that it’s a four-legs-under-the-stall kind of situation, which I relay back to Mr. Dubecki, who rubs his face like this is the last thing he needs, people humping in the bathroom, oh perfect. I don’t think this is the only Taco Bell he owns, but I can see from his face that this was the Taco Bell Mr. Dubecki had hoped people would never hump in.

I follow him into the bathroom and you can basically tell from the noises that it’s two guys and they’re not hiding it, not even close. We’re both standing outside the stall and I’m waiting for Mr. Dubecki to lay down the law but he doesn’t. The panting and grunting is coming from the stall but when I look at Mr. Dubecki his face is far away. I nudge him and he clears his throat real loud but that does not stop the humping. Mr. Dubecki knocks on the stall door. Hello, Mr. Dubecki says. The humping stops.

What do you want, a voice says.

Mr. Dubecki sputters without sound, like his mind is grasping for a response that makes sense and cannot find one. I jump in and say, We want you to stop humping in this Taco Bell.

This seems to put the world back together for Mr. Dubecki. He follows up by saying, Yes, please leave this Taco Bell. We allow them a moment of silence to consider our demands.

Fine, okay, whatever, says the voice. 

We wait outside while they reorder themselves and Mr. Dubecki holds the door open for them. They’re two pretty regular looking guys. Mr. Dubecki asks them to please not come back to this Taco Bell. 

After we close up, when Mr. Dubecki is locking the doors, he says, Thank you for that back there, and nods in the direction of the bathrooms and I tell him, No problem. He says, You’re okay, you know that? When you started, I was eh, not so sure about you. Thought you’d be here through the summer and then go back to school. But hey, you stuck around and I’m happy, really. You’re one of the good ones. He says it like I’ve cleared some bar with him on a personal level and what comes next is going to be a whole new thing between us. 

He says, I have two questions for you. I say, Okay. And he says my first question is this: how would you like to make five hundred dollars and my second question is this: do you believe that stealing something back that was yours first, yours to begin with, that someone stole from you, do you believe that has both a legal and moral justification? 

I think about it for a second and then say yes to both. 

There are some things, Mr. Dubecki explains, some things in the basement of his house that belonged to him and there had been a situation where now he wasn’t allowed back there so much on the order of the future ex-Mrs. Dubecki who was being pretty unreasonable, truth be told. And what he needed, what he really needed, was someone who could keep their cool, just like I did back in the bathroom, just a guy who calls a ball a ball and a strike a strike. Someone who can find a few boxes of stuff the future ex-Mrs. Dubecki would never miss. He says that she hasn’t even been in the basement for a year. Do it during the daytime when she’d be at work and the kid would be at school. There’s a fake rock with a key in it and he says he can draw me a map, so easy. Five hundred bucks. Mr. Dubecki says that he sure could use five hundred bucks, the divorce and all, but this stuff I’m going to get, it means that much to him. 

I think about it for a second and then say, Okay, Mr. Dubecki, and he smiles and says, Please call me George, and I say, Okay, George, and we make a plan for the coming Tuesday.

#

On Tuesday I find the key in the fake stone just like Mr. Dubecki said and when I open the door into the house everything is covered with buttery light from the big windows and it’s all over the white carpet and all over the white furniture. 

I find the basement no problem, find the shelves no problem, find the three boxes no problem. They’re pretty heavy so I’m taking them one at a time. I’m on my first trip to the car when I hear a small voice from above say, Hello?

It’s the kid. Mr. Dubecki’s son. He’s standing at the top of the stairs. I say, Hello, and he says, Hello, and I say, I’m one of your dad’s special friends. He says, Okay, and I say, I came to get some of his things, and he says, My mom will be back later, and I say, Okay, and he says, Okay.

He looks like a little Mr. Dubecki. Same moon face and turned-up nose. He sits on the top of the stairs and watches me go back and forth. Supervising.

This is my last one, I say, nodding at the box I’m holding, and the kid says, Okay. 

I ask him what grade he’s in and he says third. He asks me what grade I’m in and I say I’m sort of in college. He asks me what that means and I say, Well, I’m supposed to be in college. 

Kind of like how you’re supposed to be in school, I say, and he says, Yeah but I got sent home. My mom had to come get me. 

Some kind of fight, I say and he shakes his head. 

He asks if I’ve ever heard of a game called Charlie Charlie and I say no and he asks me if I want to play, and I say, Does it take very long, and he smiles and runs off and comes back with two pencils and a piece of paper.

We go to the kitchen and he draws a cross in the center of the paper, making four boxes. In the top two boxes he writes YES and then NO and then on the bottom two boxes he writes NO and then YES so that each quadrant contains a word and is reflected diagonally across from the other. He lays one pencil down along the horizontal line and the other one he balances on top except this one is along the vertical line and he asks me what I want to know. 

What do you mean, I say.

You ask Charlie what you want to know, he says. Any question, yes or no.

Who’s Charlie, I ask and he says that Charlie is a demon or something and so I think about it for a second and then say, Will I be rich one day? 

The kid nods and grabs my hands to make a circle around the piece of paper. He closes his eyes and says, Charlie Charlie, come out to play. We’ve asked our question, now what do you say? We wait a few seconds and sure enough the pencil on top, the one balancing, starts to wobble and then swivels to point at both NOs. 

Well shit, I say to the kid, and he asks me if I want to know the trick. 

He says you do it with your nose. Just blow with your nose really lightly and it’s enough to move the pencil but not enough for anyone to notice. 

Not bad, I tell him. Why’d you get sent home?

The kid looks away. He says, I asked Charlie if everyone was going to die and then I made Charlie say yes we all would. He looks back at me. Some kids started crying, he says.

Jesus, I say.

But it’s true, he says.

I guess, I say. And then, Don’t tell your mom I was here.

Don’t tell my dad I got in trouble.

We shake on it and I give him a little punch on the shoulder. I tell him, You’re okay, you know that, and he shrugs like he doesn’t really believe me and it’s at that moment when the future ex-Mrs. Dubecki walks in the front door with a few bags of groceries to see a strange man in her kitchen who is touching her son.

#

Hello, I say, and she says, What the fuck is happening, who the fuck are you, get the fuck away from him, what the fuck, what the fuck, I’m calling the police right now, you sick bastard.

The kid says, Mom, stop, he’s one of dad’s special friends, and I say whoa a whole bunch of times in a row while I try to think of what to tell her.

George, I say, stepping back from the kid. George sent me to get some of his things. The basement, the boxes in the basement. The key in the rock. Then I saw the kid. Jesus, please don’t call the police.

The future ex-Mrs. Dubecki looks at me, looks at her phone, looks at the oranges that rolled out of the grocery bag she dropped when she saw me, bends down to pick them up, starts crying, slumps over, and then kind of rolls to prop herself up against the white couch. The kid goes over to her and says I’m sorry and then I say I’m sorry. And because it would be weird if she didn’t, the future ex-Mrs. Dubecki says, I’m sorry. Then we all do it again. Each one of us says sorry again and then I decide to pick up the oranges which breaks the spell.

I put the groceries on the kitchen counter. Mrs. Dubecki watches me. She’s standing up now, assessing me. You’re pretty young, she says, and I say, I guess so, and she suppresses a sob while saying, Are you happy. I don’t know what to say, so I say, I guess so, and she blubbers, Together, with George, you’re happy together at least?

Well, I think he’s doing okay. It’s not like we work together all that much, I say. The future ex-Mrs. Dubecki’s face changes. She puts her hands on her hips and she asks me how I know George and I tell her Taco Bell, and she says, Oh, Jesus, I thought you were his—I don’t know what they call it—boyfriend, I guess.

Oh, I say. 

You didn’t know, she says.

No, I say. 

Well, she says. Neither did I for a long time. 

The kid runs off upstairs. We put the groceries away together, she and I. After, she walks me to the door. I’m not evil, she says. I’m getting my mind around it. Good days and bad days. I mean, there’s a version of myself that’s happy for him and I’m going to be that woman. Really.

I tell her I think that’s a good way to think about it and she asks me if he’s doing okay and I think of Mr. Dubecki’s face in the bathroom, far away.

Ask Charlie, I say.

#

I’m closing that night at Taco Bell and Mr. Dubecki comes by to get the boxes from me. He counts out five one-hundred-dollar bills. He asks me if I had any issues and I say, Not really.

Mr. Dubecki is putting the last box in his car when he stops and asks me if I want to see inside the boxes and I say, Okay. We’re standing around the trunk of his Camry in the Taco Bell parking and what’s inside the boxes is yearbooks and photos and letters and book reports and birthday cards and school newspaper articles and Christmas lists and dental x-rays and baseball cards and bronze baby shoes and souvenir mugs and swim meet ribbons and playbills and bible camp postcards and wrestling trophies and license plates and standardized test scores and watercolor paintings and Mr. Dubecki takes out each item, gives a one-word description, then passes it to me and I look at it and then put it back in the box. It feels like church. We do it for all three boxes and when we’re done, Mr. Dubecki steps back to take it all in. 

Well, he says finally and grabs a box and starts walking toward the dumpster. C’mon, he says to me, and I grab a box and follow him. I ask him if he wants to maybe just keep the photos and he stares at me. Especially not the photos, he says. We throw it all away. 

The purge fills Mr. Dubecki with nervous energy and he bounces alongside me as I walk back towards the Taco Bell to finish my shift. He puts his hand on the door before I can open it. 

I’m going to let you in on a little secret, he tells me, and I say, Okay.

His mouth is pressed into a hard line and his eyes are narrowed to make two deep creases in his forehead. There’s something called the enchirito, he says. It’s not on any menu, but I can teach you how to make one for your shift meal, if you want. It’s basically a smothered burrito if you’ve ever had one of those, but it’s really, really good. I keep asking corporate to put it on the menu, but they always ignore me. Truth is, they’re not ready for everyone to experience the enchirito. 

Mr. Dubecki’s face goes far away. Maybe they’re right, he says. He opens the door for me and we go back to the kitchen and he starts gathering the ingredients. Mr. Dubecki’s skin is shiny under the fluorescent lights. He looks brand new, fresh out of the packaging. 

Okay, he says, tying an apron on. What I’m about to show you is extremely sensitive information.

I watch him run around and I write down the recipe. I tell him his secrets are safe with me.

Read More »

YOU MET DEATH ON LEX by Vi Khi Nao + Jessica Alexander

October 8, 2021
and asked her to meet you at a hotel in BrooklynYou would not meet her in Vegas where the sounds of your mother’smovements came through the walls between your roomsMeanwhile, in another state Death courted our brothers on Uber and GrinderAs you removed one blind eye from the invisible pocket of your black braYou realized that your memory of your brother had an invisible purseWith its zipper sewn on its side and its contents were pennies or wishesSo when they hit the surface of your eye the world you knew rippledBack then all you wanted was a plate of black olives impaled by toothpickscharred from a wild fire that raged Northern CaliforniaIn winter, you wanted a fireplace, too, and a thick soupyou weren’t allergic toDuring autumn rain the earthworm on your sternum writhedAnd you were deciding whether to die or live your life weddedTo Zinfandel’s fading legs or to walk through an inch of snowTo buy three mangosteens from a corner grocery storeBack when I knew none of this and knew you less, I climbed wetStairwells, snowflakes melted on my eyelashes, and clumps of snow fell off the trees,which were heavy and shaggy and white and greenI pulled myself close beneath my heavy coat and the train I got on began movingIn and out of the elongated, silvery body of an eel while the conductorSpoke through his amplified microphone attached like a second, semi-translucent,chain-mail-like skin, “Do you need anything? Say chocolate?” And, the trainyeel obediently responded, which surprised you greatly, “The compressor in me is broken.It’s like the heart of the AC and, no, all I need is a new shoulder, honey.”As if the train seat had been a bassinet, the engine a chimneycoughing up clouds, I knew that I would drift off in smoke and for another yearOr two I’d doze. Back then I told everyoneMy favorite thing about Pennsylvania is leaving Pennsylvania on a train.Especially after Clarice Lispector spit black tobacco into a tin can and left itnear the railing. I have always known this about love: the ground youplace it on does not exist. I knew, too, that sleep is not a type of aonairwine, situated above my consciousness, waiting for their insomnia of volcanicash to make me drift like a listless soul. Beneath that Lispector phlegm, that thickoral mucus, hint of smoke and ash, was an answer to a question I had not yet learned to ask.So, all the way to Brooklyn, I slept.  The train rocked my body back and forthlike a jug of water inside of a stroller. From the window view, the effervescenttrees were woefully mourning their winter-torn sleeves, standing tall and hip-widelike pregnant women in a dream, I exited the train, and climbed the stairs to your hotel room,where you lay on your back begging Death to let you sleep on the railroad trackor take pesticides in the countryside with South Korea. The winter had beenlong and wet and when, in a dream’s sunset, I crept up the steps, I like tothink Death heard what you could not hear yet,because she startled and she left and the sun spread, warm and diluted, onthe backs of my eyelids and I woke just as the train screamed into PennStation’s open mouth.  With the grayish duffel bag strapped over my left shoulder,I lowered and bowed my head while my feet slowly marchedthrough the crowd’s soporific mourning of procession.Each human head was a dark blue, wilted tulip, its witless petals droopedand sagged heavily against the gullible sound of footsteps amplifying andtriangulating the proximity of my distance. I shoveled along the cylindricalcement walls, into the yellow glow of a stairwell, and stepped up just as thesun set on Vernon Boulevard.Meanwhile, on the other side of Pulaski Bridge, maybe 40 minuteswalking distance, you sobbed intermittently into a grocery bag which wavedlike a half-staffed, mortified flag in the wind, & eventually it floated away from youas you stopped at the corner of Nassau where clumps of sooty snow hadmelted and frozen again and the walk sign flashed white and you crossedthe avenue just like the living do. The short walk was the longest walk you ever tookin your very short life—the compelling wind was pushing you and you likea pregnant woman, pushing you towards the metro, pushing you into the pavement,pushing you into the snow. By then it was night and I stood beside a giant windowon the 21st floor of 474 48th Avenue watching the Empire State Buildingchange color. The black sky was perforated with a thousand tiny squaresof light, each one ushering me, like a Russian novel, into its own domestictragedy: a tv glowing in a living room, a couple eating take out at a kitchencounter, a man smoked on a narrow balcony and curled himself against the wind.To stand beyond the reach of weather, I discovered, was yet anotherway I may be lonely. It was all emptiness, staring into the private things thatcouldn’t stare back at me. Sometimes the intimacy of distancewas too much. The glasses on the ridge of my nose refused to be that lonelyrose, fading, wilting from that indeterminate breath that had fogged up their glass.I took the elevator down 21 flights to the street where black cabs stoodwaiting and a driver asked if he was waiting for me. I assumed no onewas and I crossed the street. At that point, I had met you twice.Once I took an Uber to a restaurant where clavicles were juxtaposedbetween wooden and metal chairs shifting in and out of periphery, butyour clavicle was most prominent of all. You sat diagonally from me, silentlysipping hot water with a wedge of lemon, your fingers spread with gentlestrength around the teacup’s opening. You ordered salmon and ate slowlywith your eyes shyly downcast. For a moment, I sat inside the soft light ofyour quiet pleasure, the setting sun lit the wooden table and glowedagainst your profile. You squinted slightly, and delicately speared small flakes ofsalmon. You hardly spoke save when someone said I was adorable, and you shylyraised your eyes to mine and you agreed. When you left, the placeyou sat was stainless and the sun fell behind you, leaving the city in adismal neglect of chance. I, however, collected myself and you placed mein a box called Wisdom. I waited by the light for life to change her colorsfrom infancy to myopia. You waited and waited for the city to changewhat we were unable to change until four years into the future. That evening,sitting with my legs curled up by the hotel bed, I thoughtabout my brother, Jim, who had a way of holding me tight inhis arms when we slept. Years later, when he took a large bubblebath full of foam in India, I kept on having a recurring dream of Jimdying and of having to announce the devastating news to new peopleeach night. We met, the first time, inside a crowded conventioncenter. Djuna Barnes, famous fictionist, wore a cowboy hat. She stoodseveral rows from me, and laughed with such exquisite abandon. By contrast,you stood patient as the sunlight, and I leaned toward yourwarmth the way some plants twist out of shade. I have alwaysbeen so reticent in the company of others, my sapphic shynesspeeling out of me like a clementine in front of a bay of unripe avocados oroverripe raspberries. You gave me chocolate and two books and later, thenext day or the day after that, I could not stop crying while I waited for mytrain to come and take me back.Four years ago, in that endless Pennsylvania winter,I wrote you, “All I do is grade papers but I have a fold-out.”It was a faceless message, the kind written in the quiet, iridescentrecess of my idleness, the kind that arrived after a storm has been builtright into the towering headdress of a tornado, the kind that walkedout of you like a vagrant beggar from a beach house near the sea. When Iwas young, I coped with my queerness, my handsome isolation, myoverwrought loneliness by smoking weed, one string ofvaporous vapor ornamentation after another, by the window and climbingthrough it after dark. My body was strikingly vigorous, though I spentmost of its innocent muscularity by being restlessly listless, walking inand out of kitchen doors like I knew the difference between having awallet and David Foster Wallace. You were reticent and precise. The windblew into a window and the stacks of papers before each paidgrader swirled around the room, save yours, which you held downwith your free hand, while tapping your sharpened pencilagainst the tabletop. The others, limp and languid like overwateredhouseplants, shuffled listlessly between the window and the vendingmachine. You did not hear them. Your focus was unparalleled, your eyesscanned the page, you made a swift mark, and moved on. They nudgedtheir papers to your side of the table. I cannot help but picture them: boorishbrothers and grinning stepsisters, turning the key in the lock, and leaving. Youdid not notice. You turned the page, and tapped your pencil againstthe tabletop. Then it was five o’clock, a winter night. The castratedphotographer pushed his bike over the ice and up the rollinghills and past the frosted cornfields to your door. I wonder what it was liketo say goodnight. Your profile, your steady eyes fixed on the horizon,and your silence, while he confessed he’d like to dip his fist into your head.He said it would come out sweet and soaked in golden honey. He painted you a blurrypicture of yourself. Your wrist bone bent oddly to the left. He had a sheep’s headshipped to you from Morocco and a Nordic Wolffish from the Arctic Circle.He wrote a sonnet each day and sent them in a box he’d carved fromwhalebone inside a box made of glue and pigeon’s nests. You did notknow what to do with all of these intoxicated gifts. You could not carrythem around and so you bought a plastic storage box, foldedeach gift neatly into scented tissue paper, and closed the lid. I wroteyou in Pennsylvania. I said, “I have a fold-out,” then I put onmy headphones and spent the evening walking under the yellowglow of street lamps, the red brick, the sparkling snow. That wasnot the same year. I walked like a downcast philosopherbeneath the Kinzua Bridge, measuring my time and distance slowly. All ofmy vacant thoughts were in the clouds, waiting for theprecipitation of a long- lost meaty memory of meeting a futureyou to rain back down to me, storming my petite form into anambulated oblivion. My life has been this long, arduous academic road.My head always in the dense pages. Those long endless paragraphswhere the wheat, the cornfield, and the muted stone of an idea traveledback and forth between prolixity and nothingness. From time to time, Iwonder if you would marry me even after our galaxy stoppedexpanding. I wonder on nights like this if you would mutely climbinside my submarine and sit beside me until all the speed boats spedpast. I wanted to walk beside you up a narrow stairwell with arms fullof paper bags and rice and cabbage and keys jangling in your hand. Iwondered whether you’d love me more if we fell onto the bed orif instead, I scrubbed the crisper down before dumping the vegetables in, orwhether you’d forgive me if I slept and the sound of engines carriedmy dream to the beach and if a smog curtain closed behind me and if Iwent on wondering whether you liked wrist bones or clavicles best, or if Iwent on wanting, in spite of it, to fold my mouth around your hip, would you know?Would you hold my face in your hands like a melon and carry my head home?We’d hardly met. I was learning so many words do not mean whatI thought they did. I have come to understand moisture in a very differentway. Words often, despite my heavy proclivity for wanting them to, do nothave much moisture in them. They lack water and something else.Something I can’t pin my fingers on. Something to do with acousticsignals or density or the waxy content in the cranium of dolphins. Afterreaching into my armpits in the dark afternoon many years later fortwo wheats and three stones, I found your fingers cracking out laughinglike they heard a terrible knock- knock joke from the edge of theiralpha-keratin. I wonder if you would love me less if all my clocks andobligations cracked wide open and I oozed out, formless as raw egg or if Iwas not ticklish or if I owned an orange cat. The kind that spoke Cantoneseor Vietnamese with a Southern drawl. The kind that a mandarin orangewould mistake for its distant, house-arrested cousin. Some morningswhen I woke up in the early light to unlower the blinds,the kind that made you more sultry and less formal in the Houstondarkness, I imagined you being a fruit basket that someoneaccidentally left on the third floor of a vacant apartment complex. Therewere bell peppers that didn’t shake like bells and there were mythologiesin you that didn’t arrive with a broken chariot on its coeval asphalt.In times like these, you don’t ever take the elevator with me to the rooftopwith the lavish bar and flamboyant cocktails that night we orderedcabernet and sunk into the plush cushions and did not drink a sip of it and I feltas if I’d stepped inside a future where I did not exist or a memory thatbelonged entirely to someone else. The night was all around us and, foran instant, I was certain it was me and not my brother who was dead.But in the morning when I raised the blindsyour stillness, which is either that of a hummingbirdor its opposite, is so exquisitely composite and fatalistic and soI try hard to step inside of it. A fantasy you once told me.I lean over you. I brush your cheek. My neck crowned bya collar of trees. I say, Baby, how did you sleep? I slept poorly andunevenly—like my subconsciousness sat on an old- fashionedscale—the owlgift vintage—the kind that represents truth and fairness. Buton the other side, the other side of your amnesia, the one you had onlyknown briefly and intermittently, the one outweighing everythingabout the rapid heartbeats of raven who sat (unevenly) on an old redwoodtree by the side of road. Compelled by distance and sadness, I swiftly cupyour face like an old beggar cleaning knives for the endangered denizensof the foggy city he dreams up each night, then watches swirl slowlydown the drain of each morning, leaving his belly full of asadness that is jagged and undefined. It is possible,of course, to miss someone who sleeps beside you, too,and so I remove a hybrid hyacinth from a drawer of atree and whisper soporific leaves into it so that it is alwaysfalling asleep by exfoliating into what you alwayslove and can love. There is a mist waiting outside like a widow.Her eyes are soft and wet with tears or sweat from running upan evanescent hill. I try to run my hands through her near the mulberrywell as a way of telling you that I wish your heartbeat smelled like a teakettle with fresh mint stuck in its sprout: metallic and fresh and bloomingwith an arc of wheat. Longing so thick makes my handssomnolent, even my knuckles lull the handle of ateakettle to sleep. In your absence, I pour hot water up intoa mug, with a wedge of lemon and take the steam into myselfas if I were pulling on your breath. Meanwhile, a livestreamof the Governor’s address drones on in the background, I sighinto a kitchen that is newly emptied of you and the kettle sighs,too, and the governor says it’s impossible to quantify suffering.But I have drifted to a time long before Ida or Covid-19, I amrousing my Manhattan- bound self from a dream,and pulling her by her winter sleeves, up the endless stepsof a Brooklyn hotel, ordering death to leave.
Read More »

KERNEL PANIC by Rebecca Rubenstein

October 1, 2021

When his mind went blank, Benno walked to the water store. Smack-dab in the middle of a strip mall a block downhill from his apartment, it was the kind of place that didn’t pull punches. It sold water, and vessels with which to hold water, and that was it. 

Water cooler jugs lined the walls on one side, and empty aquariums formed a barricade on the other, and the floors teemed with pallets of imported bottled water—glacier runoff from Iceland and Switzerland and all the lands. Metallic shelving flanked each side of the store, and on those shelves sat sturdy, eco-friendly water bottles, rows and rows of them in bright, cloying colors. Shocking pink and neon-yellow and toxic-sludge-green and orange the shade of emergency road cones. No blue, though. 

“We used to sell blue,” Azazel, one of the two brothers who owned the store, told Benno once. “But they drew a bad element, so we stopped.” 

The store always seemed empty whenever Benno dropped by or passed it on his way to do laundry next door, so he asked Azazel would he please be more specific? As far as Benno could tell, there was a good chance he was the brothers’ only customer. Azazel dropped his voice to a whisper and put his hand to his chest, as though he’d been wearing a wire and wanted to convey he was sorry, he wasn’t really a snitch, this information would be for Benno’s ears only. 

“Techie scum,” Azazel said. “They’re fucking everywhere these days, ruining the neighborhood.”

A handful of odd jobs filled Benno’s time, and one day, while he was trying to create a series of crosswords for the local alt-weekly, his mind shut down completely. The puzzle was movie-themed, but he couldn’t remember which Bergman was the director and which was the actress, and before he knew it, a thick fog had settled in without intent to leave. This was happening with some frequency, and Benno thought maybe, if he had good health insurance, something other than what the state provided for low- to no-income people like him, this would be the kind of thing to get checked out by a specialist. But just the prospect was laughable; these were penny-pinching times and he could barely even afford a 10-for-$20 frozen pizza deal at Safeway after all his bills were paid up. Instead of just googling what he needed to know, Benno exited his crossword-making app, turned off his computer, and headed downhill.

Edgar, the other brother who owned the water store, was sitting behind the cash register when Benno arrived. The little bell on the rim of the door jangled, but Edgar didn’t look up from the detective novel he was reading. Even when Benno cleared his throat, the bushy-browed man kept his eyes on the paperback, sucking a slushy through a long red straw.

“Hey, Edge.” This was the nickname Azazel liked to use, and Benno thought it might snap his brother out of it. “Earth to Edge?” 

Edgar stuck his index finger in the air, a swift and sharp gesture that gave Benno pause. “If you’re going to interrupt me while I’m mid-paragraph,” the man sneered, “you can take your ass elsewhere.”

It was almost 2 p.m., the golden hour when the brothers usually traded shifts. Azazel was better to shoot the shit with. He kept current on the news and knew more about what was going on in the neighborhood. During their chats, he usually filled Benno in on who’d been cited for public urination the night before, or, more seriously, whose shop was being offered a buyout by the local real estate sharks dead-set on gentrifying their corner of the city. There were already condos going up on either end of the main thoroughfare, and there was chatter about a pilates studio taking over the space where a bookstore had sat for nearly thirty years, before it shuttered suddenly due to an egregious rent hike. 

Edgar, on the other hand, lived in an alternate universe: men wore trench coats, called women dames and broads, smoked cigarettes like they provided nutrients. In Edgar’s world, the organized criminals still walked around with feathered fedoras and tommy guns, not low-foam lattes and realtor business cards.

“Have you ever considered selling something other than water? Maybe get some tropical fish for these?” Benno tapped on the glass of one of the aquariums like there were already some beauties of the sea swimming inside. He had never been to Hawaii or Fiji or the Bahamas, but he’d seen photos of snorkelers in pristine pools, their faces surrounded by candy-striped fins and iridescent fins and gauzy green fins you might mistake for seaweed.

Edgar sighed. “Don’t you have somewhere better to be? Someone else you can bug today?” 

He still didn’t take his eyes off his book, and to Benno it looked like he was talking to it, like Edgar was scolding one of its characters instead of him. One of the lowlifes. One of the floozies.

“I could help you get some,” Benno offered. “I know a guy who knows a guy.”

Edgar snorted. “Benno, how long have you been coming in here? Two years? Three? You can’t pull one on me. The only fish you have access to are the ones that live in your freezer.”

It was true: Benno liked fish sticks a lot. They were affordable and filling. But in this moment, he regretted mentioning it to the brothers only to have the information used against him. It was the type of sabotage that reminded him of childhood. In the third grade, Benno made a terrible miscalculation about the secrecy of eight-year-olds. During a sleepover with his best friend—a wisp of a boy who called himself Jo-Jo, even though his name was Aleksandr—Benno revealed something deep and dark that had been plaguing him for months. Any night now, Benno warned Jo-Jo, ants were going to crawl into his eye sockets while he slept and create a worker colony in his brain. Benno couldn’t shake the thought. It was part of why he’d opted to stay home from sleep-away camp that summer, why he refused to visit his cousins in the Upper Peninsula. All it took was one fatal brush with the wrong log. The closer Benno was to nature, he reasoned, the more likely the ants would come. Jo-Jo listened with that glistening, rapturous stare of his, nodded when Benno said he was terrified. Then Jo-Jo hugged his friend and declared he would protect him, and they even spat into their palms and shook on it, Jo-Jo swearing on his parents’ antique rattan furniture that he would never, ever, ever tell. 

But the next week at school, when Benno accidentally ate his whole chocolate chip cookie at lunch, even though he’d promised to share it with his best friend, Jo-Jo went ballistic. On the playground at recess, he pushed Benno to the ground. He grabbed a fistful of Benno’s hair and pulled hard. He slapped Benno clean across the mouth and called him a liar. “You don’t know what a promise is!” Jo-Jo screamed. He slapped Benno again, and again, each hit harder, forcing Benno’s lips into the ridges of his teeth and drawing blood. 

And then Jo-Jo told everyone within earshot what Benno had told him. It didn’t matter that there were only a few kids around—by the end of the day, their entire class would know, maybe even the whole third grade. That’s how things worked. 

“You’re a big weirdo baby!” Jo-Jo cried. “I hope the ants crawl into your brain! I hope they eat you from the inside out!” Then Jo-Jo began chanting Antsy Nancy. 

At first, the other kids didn’t know what to do. They looked at one another inquisitively. Did Benno deserve this? What, truly, was his crime? But then another kid joined the chant. And another. Soon, it was all Benno could hear, a droning choral arrangement not unlike the ones that filled his ears on Sundays at church. Antsy Nancy. Antsy Nancy. The name stuck hard, like gum pressed against a stucco wall. Benno was Antsy Nancy for years, until junior high, when his parents got divorced and his mom moved them away from everything: that one-trick town, those unforgiving kids, that shitty excuse for a best friend.

That was probably when Benno should have figured he wasn’t cut out for the world, that he was doomed to be a weirdo forever. But he kept soldiering on, kept telling himself life was bound to get better once he became a grownup. 

And then he became a grownup and life did not get better, no sir. Benno just shifted into a more permanent state of hopelessness. Far as he could tell, the only things he had going for him were his rent-controlled studio and a loosely-defined friendship with two guys who ran a store that was, in all likelihood, a front for drugs or money laundering or both.

The overhead light in the water store flickered for a moment, and Benno wondered if the bulb was about to pop. 

“Where’s Azazel?” he said.

Edgar shifted in his chair. “He’s coming in later today. His laptop keeps crashing, so he’s getting it fixed.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

Edgar sighed, and for the first time since Benno had entered the store, the man looked up from his novel. “I don’t know,” he said slowly, enunciating every word. “Something called ‘canal panic,’ I think? You’ll have to ask Az when he shows. I don’t know shit about computers.”

Benno left. Edgar knew he wouldn’t buy anything, and it was only a matter of minutes before the man would really lose his mind. Benno had seen it happen. It wasn’t pretty. Sometimes the brothers got into it, and the screaming and insults would peak until Azazel threatened to enroll his brother in anger management classes and Edgar threatened to kick his brother’s ass until there was no more ass left to kick. Only once did a knife appear, and Benno remembered this moment often: the way Azazel put up his hands, saying, “Be cool, be cool,” and Edgar shouting, “Give me a fucking reason to be cool,” and the long, tense few minutes when it seemed like anything might happen, even murder. Benno had left that day thinking maybe he shouldn’t come back anymore, maybe the store would be a crime scene next time, where instead of water there’d be nothing but pools of blood. But he couldn’t stay away forever, not until the store became another real estate casualty and was gone for good.

At home, Benno’s fridge didn’t have much in it that wasn’t expired, so he opened the cabinet above the stove and took out a tin of baked beans. During those awful Antsy Nancy years, he’d developed a habit of coming home after school and eating Chef Boyardee straight from the can. He didn’t mind that the tomato sauce wasn’t heated through, or that the ground meat bits in the center of the ravioli were cold. He just wanted something that tasted familiar. He figured he might not have any friends, or any social consistency, but at least he could depend on the predictable comfort of processed pasta. Now, as an adult, Benno did the same with baked beans. Plunging his fork in, he stirred to unstick and loosen the beans, and the sweetness of the brown sugar in the sauce and the salty, nubbed texture of the bacon pleased him.

On the couch, Benno opened his laptop. Between mouthfuls of beans, he searched for “canal panic” and scrolled, but all he got was a plethora of articles about swans attacking tourists and buildings in Venice threatening to collapse. Then he noticed the prompt: did he mean to type “kernel panic”?

Kernel panic, he learned, was an unrecoverable system error. The heart of a computer’s operating system is called a “kernel” and when something goes wrong—say, the code of the operating system is subtly corrupted, or on a larger scale, the memory the operating system uses can’t be read from or written to—the computer shuts down. It feels random, Benno read, but the computer effectively jumps ship to protect itself from more damage. Almost as if to say: “I can’t trust myself to go on without further harming my most integral parts.”

Was the same thing happening to Benno? Was this why his memory kept shifting in and out? His fear of the ant colony had never subsided, not really—had they finally found their way in? Had they set up shop inside his brain and were they now busy chipping away at it? Ants can carry massive amounts of weight—were they rearranging his gray matter, carting pieces to and fro, reorganizing his pathways? Maybe, Benno thought, his memory issues were his brain’s way of fighting against the ants. It knew something was wrong, and by shutting off from time to time, the most critical part of him was defending itself from certain doom.

The fizziness in Benno’s mind had swelled, and his workday, he knew, was over. So he finished his beans, popped a CBD gummy, and let sleep overwhelm him.

Several hours passed, and when Benno finally woke, the sky had grown dark. His phone assured him it wasn’t as late as he thought, and he wondered if he could catch Azazel before the man closed up shop for the evening. It would be nice to see a friendly face. And maybe Azazel would know what to do about his worsening memory problem. Benno threw on a hoodie and his sneakers and walked back down the hill. 

 When he arrived at the water store, Azazel and Edgar were both behind the register. The two were eating a sub they’d split down the middle. Breadcrumbs dotted the counter, and Edgar had mayo splotched on his stubbled chin. It looked like something else, like he’d been doing a whole lot of something else, and for a hot minute Benno thought maybe he should keep walking, do a lap around the block, grab a $1 hot dog from 7-11, and head home. But Azazel saw him and waved, and it felt like a waste to not even say hi.

“Twice in one day. To what do we owe the pleasure?” Edgar smirked, and Benno almost turned right back around, but Azazel punched his brother in the shoulder and said, “Edge, don’t be an asshole. B, you know you can come in here whenever you want.”

Benno sucked his teeth, stifling a grin. “How’s your laptop?” he asked.

Azazel shook his head. “They’re keeping it overnight. Like it’s a sick animal.”

“They might have to put it down,” Edgar interjected, then pitched his voice up, “Did you have time to say goodbye, Az? Give it a good pet?” He nudged his brother, cackling, but Azazel didn’t take the bait. Edgar’s sense of humor was almost as out-of-touch as all those old books he loved to read.

“That’s a shame,” Benno said. “I hope they can fix it.”

“You and me both. Having to buy a new one would murder my finances.”

Azazel had the most remarkable way of phrasing his woes, and Benno was about to say as much when Edgar rammed his fist against the counter.

“What the hell, man?” Azazel looked at his brother like Edgar had just tried to pop him in the jaw. “What is wrong with you today?”

Edgar shrugged. “There was an ant.”

“You don’t need to crush it like it’s a goddamn cockroach. Do you want to break our fucking countertop again?”

A few months before, during one of their fights, Edgar had cracked the glass. In the midst of an outburst, he’d slammed his fist down with such force, the surface had splintered, webbing as though a bullet, not bone, had found its way through. The faintest of shards had embedded in his knuckles, causing the skin to glisten for days, until Azazel finally removed them with a pair of tweezers. Sometimes, Benno envisioned Edgar’s home and how it must have walls full of holes the size and shape of his fists. Benno couldn’t imagine living with that kind of anger—what it must do to the mind, eating the raw parts whole.

Azazel wiped up the bug’s body, smearing it with a napkin. Benno noticed a few more on the counter, idling near the register, and hoped Edgar wouldn’t see. But the man’s eyes weren’t downcast. Benno realized they were fixed on him.  

“What is that?” Edgar’s eyes had suddenly gone wide, the same way Benno’s had as a kid, when Jo-Jo had wailed on him on the playground and all their classmates had waited around nervously to see what would happen next. The terror in those eyes. The uncertainty.

“Sorry?” Benno looked behind him, and all around, but all he saw were the same pallets, the same jugs, the same empty aquariums that were always there.

“No, no.” Edgar shook his head and pointed. “That. What the hell just came out of your mouth?”

Benno pawed at his lips. Had he felt something before? A slight tingling, perhaps? But then his lips were often chapped, often buzzing with discomfort. At first Benno’s fingers looked like they always did: slightly pruned, the cuticles ragged from years of nail-biting. But then he saw what Edgar saw: small black ants crawling around, crossing his nail beds, punctuating his fingertips like errant commas.

Azazel had his hand on his chest, like that time he told Benno about the blue bottles. “What in the world? B, are you okay?”

Benno wanted to say yes, of course, there was absolutely nothing to worry about. He liked to steal sugar packets from the coffee shop down the street—maybe one had ripped open in his hoodie pocket and attracted a few of the critters. But when he looked down, Benno saw a swarm of ants marching down the front of his hoodie. There were maybe fifty of them, and they seemed to come out of nowhere. They certainly weren’t crawling out of his pockets. The lot of them crossed at a diagonal, an insect sash clean across his chest.

After that, it didn’t take long for an entire army to descend. It happened in what felt like seconds. At first Benno thought they were only emerging from his mouth, but then he felt a tickle in his nostrils and his ear canals, and he knew the ants were finding their way out of those holes, too. He had no idea what to do. He couldn’t keep them in. They just kept coming. 

And then he began to vomit. 

Wads of ants fell from his mouth. If Benno had seen it in a movie, he would not have been able to suspend his disbelief. They were rounded and gnarled—like hairballs but alive. 

It was around the time that Benno coughed up the fifth or sixth antball that Azazel called 911. There were ants everywhere. On the floor. On the pallets. Hugging the rims of the fancy glacier runoff water bottles. Benno could tell Edgar was screaming at him, because his mouth was moving and his face had morphed into the kind of red that skin takes on when you are either irate or asphyxiating. But Benno could barely hear him; the ants had blocked up his ears completely. 

Benno swung his arms around, as though it would help. He swung his hips and his ass and the brute stretch of his legs. As though making his body seismic would create a quake so severe, the rattle would rupture the ants’ hearts and they would just die on the spot. But they didn’t die. They kept coming. They kept coming and coming and clinging to every single part of him, and in his mounting panic, Benno wished his body would just shut itself down. Maybe that would end the nightmare: if his body jumped ship. But that’s the problem with the body—it does what it wants, when it wants. It’s animal like that. Benno understood full well you couldn’t will yourself into a coma, just like you couldn’t will people to be your friends, just like you couldn’t will friends to keep your secrets, just like you couldn’t will secrets back into the dark so your life would turn out differently. Would turn out better. Some things, Benno understood with clarity now, are beyond one’s control. 

And so the ants kept coming. They didn’t stop. They wouldn’t stop, Benno knew, they were as permanent as the parts of him he loved and the parts of him he despised. They would keep coming until, somehow, Benno burst, and all that remained would be piles and piles of ants, surrounded by water that could very well drown them.  

Read More »