Short

YOU WANT TO HEAR A LOVE STORY by Ashton Russell

September 24, 2021

He flirted with you at work. You were 16 and he was 23. He would hold his hands behind his back to mimic how you walked away from the server board in the kitchen. Because you were uncomfortable in your own body. Your ass felt too big, the way you walked too bouncy. Sitting at the bar at work eating before the doors opened, he sat down beside you and pushed his hand up your thigh not saying anything. He followed you out to the parking lot up the hill where staff parked. He asked if he could drive your Volkswagen. He had never been in one before. You felt like you might throw up if you said yes. But you did anyway.

You drove around together a few times after work, riding in the dark along old dirt roads outside of town. The lights from the dashboard illuminating both your faces. He invited you over to his parents’ house where he was staying temporarily but you couldn’t go inside. He told you he hated it. He was used to being on his own, but he had to figure some things out right now. He walked you to your car parked on the street out front after talking to each other for hours. And he kissed you. You didn’t know what to do with your hands, if you should close your eyes.

Walking around the block at his parents’ house, hiding because a bug spray truck came by blasting fumes for mosquitoes. Sitting in the driveway on the back of a truck bed. He leaned in to kiss you and reached his hands up under your shirt. The first time his fingers grazed the outside of your underwear. You felt light, like floating. You noticed his shorts, how he was hard against his leg. You had never seen that before.

The drives you would take together. Making out and listening to music. How you danced in the street in his parent’s neighborhood. Kissing and swinging in the backyard. Always together at night, always in secret. He didn’t want you telling people at work or friends that you knew him. He gave you a piece of art the size of a bookmark that he had made. He was moving soon. He wrote on the back, to my friend - July 2003 my mom's birthday.

He left for grad school in the summer. The first time he called you and left a message, Hey it’s J—. My number is 9xx-xxx-xxxx. You missed it because you were out eating with your parents. You didn’t like the cell phone and kept forgetting to take it with you. How he called randomly, every few weeks. Always leaving you excited and confused. He told you about school and about his work. You were so nervous on the phone, shaking from the excitement. But you never had anything interesting to say. You were still in high school, still a kid living in a sad small town. He told you about how he used to love watching you walk away at the restaurant. The white skirt you wore was see through. The thong underneath drove him crazy.

You took Polaroids when you were 17, posing in a mini skirt. Sitting on the counter at a laundromat eating a banana, your legs angled in a way to show off your underwear. Standing in front of a window in your friend’s apartment, topless, turning to look back at the camera with a smile. Mailing them to him as a gift. You knew he probably had other girls. But were they young with perfect tits like you? Getting into the bathtub when he would call, the sounds the water made as your naked body gently moved around. Innocent.

He came home that Christmas and showed up at the restaurant. Sat down beside you but acted like he was talking to old coworkers. Got invited to a party that everyone was going to. He said he wouldn’t be able to come. Telling you the way you feel about me is the way I feel about someone else. Then showing up to the party and kissing you on Christmas Day. He said, damn girl you trying to kill me? How it took less than a week for him to call you again. But he kept playing, telling you that you were too young. That he has someone else. But you still heard from him every few weeks. He still wanted you, he said. But it was time and space. It was age.

Six months later you would be together. He came home and called you to meet up at a park. Sitting on a swing while he stood over you with his hands in his pockets, he asked you if you were still a virgin. He wasn’t mad but he said he wanted to be your first. He would take you camping in Virginia your first weekend of college and you would finally have sex with him in a tent in the woods. He made you banana and peanut butter sandwiches and sat at the picnic table playing his guitar. It was cool in the mornings, nothing like where you were from. And he wore a long sleeve thermal shirt over his t-shirt and shorts.

The first year — “Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy” playing as you drove down sunny streets in Chapel Hill in his green ford explorer. Shows at the Cat's Cradle. Eighteen and seeing Arcade Fire on their first tour. Parties where you were the only one under 21. How he didn’t want you telling people how old you were. Just say in college. Keep it simple. But one of his roommates didn’t like you. She knew you were young.

The smell of his art studio. Like plaster and paint and a sweet fruit mixed together. The room had no windows, like a white cinderblock cage. The giant desktop computer in the lab all the grad students used. You standing in the background waiting while he checks his emails. He didn’t have a computer at home. The Fedora hat you bought him that he lost and wasn’t really sorry about.

Telling you, don’t eat fast food. Don’t eat meat. You are going to leave me one day for a younger guy. The band he had, “Tennis”. How he sang “I only called you to hear myself talking to you”.

The first trip to NYC. Hand jobs in a taxicab. Doing lines of coke in a bathroom at a bar you were too young to get into. Having sex, you on top, when your friend walked in on you both. You went to the MOMA but felt overwhelmed after six floors of art. The sound of the high school bands practicing for the Thanksgiving Day parade at 3 am. Right outside the window of the apartment you were both in. How small the kitchen was, how groceries could be delivered to you.

He wrote you a letter and sent it in the mail saying, one day we can say the things we both know each other feel. Then shortly after he said I love you in person and for some reason it took you months to say it back. You wanted to but each time the moment seemed right your voice was gone. Coming down weekends from college to stay with him in his house in Carrboro that he shared with two other grad students. The perfectly rectangular window in the living room with no shades covering it, the green lawn and shady trees. They didn’t have a TV and they all acted like this was a statement. The one piece of art you remember, a photograph of a stack of towels pinned directly above the toilet in the shared bathroom.

His bed was on the floor and he had no comforter. There were nights when you would wake to him rubbing up against you, your naked body moving with his, both of you half asleep and not speaking. Getting up in the morning wondering if that was a dream. The first few months those weekend visits would involve so much sex you would come back to school sore, moving stiffly while your friends all made fun of you. But you always faked it with him. And you started to think other girls lied about sex too.

He made you dinners and you listened to “Iron and Wine” while he cooked. He liked to go to Weaver Street Market with the dog, get coffee and hang out on the lawn with the crowds. But you felt shy and uncomfortable. You had never seen a grocery store like this one, where milk was served in glass bottles that you had to bring back. Where food was from the farm in town and people were around outside playing music and making spontaneous art. He took you to art shows, sometimes he was in them and sometimes he wasn’t. But he always wanted you to have an opinion, to share your thoughts. But all you thought about was how could some of these things be called art? Pencil drawings on torn off pieces of paper. For sale for fifty dollars?

His thesis show that spring before he graduated. His parents came up and it felt awkward. Everyone knew you were the young girl he hung out with. The one who was in high school. But his mother was cold when she gave you a distracted side hug. They bought him an Apple laptop - the solid white MacBook. But he still didn’t have a cell phone.

Living with him the summer after sophomore year. His duplex in Durham. When you came to stay — bags packed in the trunk of your bug — you walked in to see he had flowers on the counter and Hey Ash written in bright colored magnetic letters on the old white fridge. The overgrown backyard that you never went into. Standing on the side porch steps, watching his dog do his business. The perfectly sunny kitchen with the Formica round countertop. The walls painted white over so many years the paint was peeling off in thick layers. Taking a nap on a sunny afternoon and the buzzer for the dryer going off. He got up confused and turned off the bathroom light. How you laughed about it for days. The time he reached up to turn off the overhead light on the spinning ceiling fan and as the light went out the globe crashed around you.

Going to Baltimore for a week-long art festival. You helped sell the merch for his art collective. But it was hot, and you hated it. The city was dirty, and it scared you to see so many people living on the street. You had to sleep on the floor in a room full of other artists because everyone was broke, and no one could get a hotel. All people he called friends but many you had never met before. He bought you a handmade wallet, it was a vintage green pattern with a few buttons sewn on it. Everyone went to dinner at a place that claimed to be a favorite of John Waters, it had a giant mural of constellations on the wall and you tried mussels for the first time.

Back in Durham you got a job serving ice cream at a Ben and Jerry’s next door to the Whole Foods. He made fun of the job but loved that you came home smelling like cake batter every night. You didn’t have friends and you spent a lot of time alone. He said, you watch too much TV, you don’t try to meet people. He took you to shows, CD release parties, Art exhibits and museums but you always felt like an imposter. You weren’t an artist; you weren’t in a band. You were just the cool guy's girlfriend.

He moved into a house with a guy who wasn’t an artist in Raleigh your junior and senior years. He liked baseball and was getting an MBA. He wore a top hat unironically. And you both laughed at him behind his back. Did he really need the top hot and the pipe to get laid? Did he think he was an intellectual?

Having an awkward conversation in the bedroom, his bedroom, the thin wall not much distance from the top hat roommate. Sitting on the chair in the corner of the room and him asking you if you ever got off during sex. You worried the roommate might hear you both speaking. You were a bad liar so you told him maybe you just couldn’t, maybe something was wrong with your body. But sometimes his mouth worked, just not always.

The Christmas party they had, 2007. It was an ugly sweater party which you had never heard of before. The first-place prize was a VHS tape of Oprah. His band played from one of the rooms in the house. They used it as a workspace/studio/band room. It had brown paneled walls, the kind with random round black circles that from a distance looked like roaches. There was a new bass player, his name was Kyle and you couldn’t stop looking at him. Did he have to be so cute, so young and tall and lean? Shows with the band at The Cave, being uncomfortable around all the older people. Sitting at the merch table to help sell the album they recorded a few years before. The stickers he drew of two tennis rackets stuck together.

Going to the beach for Spring Break senior year. It was cold and you didn’t like the town. It was lonesome and boring and nothing like the beaches you grew up around in Florida. He asked you to marry him after dinner in the hotel room. You were laying on your side, uncomfortable after the food. He said he was going to ask on the beach, but he was scared he would drop the ring. You didn’t wear it much; told him you weren’t crazy about jewelry and you didn’t want to lose it. He got mad that it took you a week to tell anyone about the engagement.

The time his roommate brought a girl home at two a.m., woke you up fucking her in the room next door. Her moans so loud and overdone. You imagined him naked but his top hat still on while he took her from behind. You had an early flight to NYC again. Your 21st birthday. The bedroom door opened, and a naked woman stood in silhouette. She was lost, she said. You had him get up and check the house, you were scared. The next morning, early showers and packing. There was a blood trail from the bedroom to the backdoor and out onto the brick stairs leading to the grass. She had cut her foot wandering around the house in the dark, but no one explained what it was cut on. The city didn’t feel the same the second time. The first step on the subway, trying to get to your hotel. A homeless guy was shouting about all the years he had been arrested, taking off one piece of clothing for each year he was locked up. You had a headache and just wanted to get to the room. But it was a disappointment, the window looked out to a brick wall and the bathroom was shared with everyone else on the floor.

Your best friend bought a bottle of Dom Perignon and made you a dinner of gnocchi that she learned in culinary school the week before. You took polaroid’s of drinking and eating at her apartment. The one you still have; he’s bent over with you on his back. You’re laughing but looking away. And he is looking at the floor.

Getting tattoos together. He drew both. One on his arm, an outline of the state you were both from. And yours on your wrist, the state with the state flower. Now you forever have his artwork on you. With you.

Moving in finally after graduation but feeling like you were totally lost. Working at NC State for a Christmas tree genetics department. Watering, planting, and killing Christmas trees all summer long. The professor went somewhere in South Asia and brought you back an evil eye charm. It rests on your bookshelf today. Listening to the Bob Dylan song “I’ll Keep It with Mine”, the only thing that would calm the constant anxiety. How the sky looked too big, how it hurt to see the clouds. You would drive around with the visor down every day, just to hide the sky. You felt you might float away into it the way a balloon does when you let it go.

Feeling pressure from your parents to pick a dress, a place. Order invitations. Who will be the bridesmaids? But did you even want a wedding? Thinking of walking in front of all those people made your hands start to sweat.

Moving to a small town closer to his community college job but somehow it was your fault. Because you were the one who was always scared of the city. But the apartment was too new, too white and you both didn’t seem to fit in it right. Getting let go from NC State and being unemployed. It was 2008 and no one was hiring. Drinking all the time but trying to hide it.

Going to the college reunion in the fall and sleeping with an old professor in the back seat of your car. He told you were a great writer, he wanted to help you with your career, he said. He put his hand on your knee when he drove you to the store for cigarettes. Because you had too many white wines at the gala. The dress was an ugly yellow and black mini. The sex was drunk and clumsy. And he said he didn’t want to get you pregnant. The professor had a wife and kid already.

You came home the next morning hungover and on your period. He was waiting in the living room with the apartment perfectly clean. He said he missed you and you ran into the bathroom. You said you didn’t feel good through the door. He wanted to help, and you wanted to throw up. You said, you don’t want to marry me. And it felt like a line someone else said.

How he wrote fuck you in jelly on an orange peel one morning after you made breakfast. How he never laughed at any of your jokes but always laughed at his own. When you left, he cried, lying in bed calling you names as you packed your bag at 6 am. He was a nasty crier and it was the first time he had cried in almost ten years.

He emailed you to say he had your camera charger and how he had to take a one-time prescription for anxiety, that you represent a bad time in his life. You drove up to get the rest of your things on New Year’s. He wanted to get a few drinks and you did, but you ended up crying. He wanted to know who was texting you, why are you checking your phone so much, is it a guy? He said you would get married in a year, be pregnant with babies and living back at home. He wanted to sleep together one more time, but you said no. He said this would be the last time you would see each other. And he was right.

But it wouldn’t be the last time you spoke, the last time he would reach out to you. Or you would reach out to him, desperate for his approval but never understanding why. And those times he would email or message, it would feel like he was standing right in the room. Even 13 years later – when he said he went to “Kill Devil Hills”, the last time I was there was with you. Him messaging you while vacationing with his wife and kid. You are driving to daycare to pick up your own two boys. States away, decades away.

I LIKE PICKUP TRUCKS by Kayla Soyer-Stein

September 17, 2021

Here is what I am doing this summer:

1) Drinking.2) Riding around in the backs of pickup trucks.

There’s not much else to do on this island.

Tonight me and Kate think we are the drunkest we’ve ever been. We are outside the bowling alley and looking up at the sky at this one star, which is chasing us all over the place and about to fall on Kate’s head. LOOK OUT, I scream and Kate covers her face and falls all over me, knocking me down, and we both lie in the wet grass and laugh like witches.

Hey what are you doing all the way over there, Riley yells, come back over here. So me and Kate fall to our feet and trip over there where everyone else—Sadie, Adam, Benjamin, Max, and Riley—is sitting outside this little house, I don’t know whose, across from the bowling alley, drinking the beer that Adam bought because he is twenty-eight. Sadie is getting really close to him, giving him a back massage. I look over at her to see if she is having fun because she found out a few weeks ago that her father has cancer and will probably die soon. Her little sisters are living on the mainland with her mother who is working an extra job there for the summer. And her older sister Melody who is only seventeen is pregnant and living with the man who raped her two years before, only here they don’t call it rape. Don’t judge her, Sadie always says, they’re in love and besides, every girl on the island does the same things that Melody does, except Melody is the only one who gets caught.

You have to be careful what you say around Sadie because even though she hates living on this island, she gets very offended whenever anyone says anything bad about it. Like if I was the one who said that about every girl on the island doing those things, she might never speak to me again. We are practically sisters though, at least we have been every summer since we were eight and nine, when Sadie’s family moved out of the house next to ours and Sadie basically moved in with me and my mother.

They’re summer people, Sadie always explains about us, carefully pronouncing the R at the end of summer, and it’s true: we’re not really summer jerks or as islanders say summah jerks, because my family has been coming here since before most islanders were born, and our house is just a small old one walking distance from town, not one of those ones down a private road that leads to the ocean, and we don’t have boats or parties or really much of a social life, my mom just likes to come here and read and go on walks and pick blueberries and I don’t do anything unless it’s with Sadie. Still, it’s like she’s saying mentally handicapped instead of retarded.

Kate lately has been saying retarded all over the place—like that’s so retarded, or whoops! I’m retarded—and when my mom tries to get her to stop, she rolls her eyes as if we didn’t both attend the same hippie private school our whole lives until we graduated eighth grade last year and Kate went on to public school as if it were her own superior idea, as if it wasn’t just because she’d been rejected by all the private high schools she applied to. It was lucky though because at public school she learned how to drink and smoke and wear eyeliner, so I learned those things from her, and Sadie apparently was busy learning them here at the same time, so that this summer minus the eyeliner we can finally all do them together, which is such a relief and exciting, like finding out we all speak the same language.

It’s a relief especially because the last time Kate was here, three years ago, it was a problem because she and Sadie did not get along. Specifically, Sadie thought Kate was a snob, by which I think she meant show-off, because Kate rode a boys’ bike and taught us how to play Red Rose, the game of pinching each others’ forearms until they were covered in bruises, and in Truth or Dare her dares were always things like: run down to the end of the driveway naked and stand there until at least one car drives by, which she couldn’t understand why Sadie refused to do, especially since Sadie, unlike Kate, was still totally flat-chested. But the truth is that Sadie probably wouldn’t have liked any of my friends when we were that age, because I was still pretty much her only friend then, and in the summer, unless someone was visiting, she was mine.

Now that Sadie has her own life on the island, though, she and Kate seem to have reached some new understanding. I’m not sure what it is exactly, but it’s like they have something in common, something that I might not have in common with either of them. For example: this morning we were riding our bikes to the quarry and right near the swamp that used to be the town ball field there was this green snake in the middle of the road. It was pretty big compared to most wild snakes I’ve seen, and instead of slithering head first the way most snakes do, it was working its way peacefully across the road sideways, like a big S rewriting and rewriting itself, so that it seemed like by the time it got to where it was going it wouldn’t even be the same snake, but a new, refreshed version. Usually I’m afraid of snakes, and I won’t even look at the ones my mom finds under the rotting boards in the yard, but for some reason I liked this one. The way it moved was so cool and strange.

Hey, I screamed to Sadie and Kate, who had both biked on ahead without noticing. HEY! DID YOU SEE THIS SNAKE?! And then, just as they stopped and put their feet on the ground and turned their heads, a car drove by right over the snake and cut it in half, and all of the different snakes it seemed to have been while it was alive disappeared back inside that one cut-in-half body, and suddenly instead of watching a snake doing its weird sideways thing, I was staring at its guts or whatever snakes have oozing out onto the pavement and feeling like I might throw up.

Don’t just stand there looking at it, Sadie yelled back at me. Jesus fucking Christ! Get out of the road! Sadie has been saying Jesus fucking Christ a lot this summer, but she used to say Jeezum, a word I have never heard used anywhere except here.

And I knew, because I know Sadie, that what she meant was don’t just stand there looking like you have nothing better to do than notice a stupid snake that got cut in half, like you’ve never seen a snake before, and like no one has anything more important to do than swerve out of the way to avoid hitting you. Looking, in other words, like a summer jerk, the kind who thinks it’s okay to bike on the wrong side of the road, who thinks she can just walk down the middle of Main Street barefoot, who expects restaurants to serve breakfast until noon on weekdays, who pronounces frappe fra-PAY and laughs and asks what the difference is between it and a milkshake.

Kate didn’t say anything but I could tell by the way she turned and put her foot back on the pedal that she was on Sadie’s side, not for the same reasons as Sadie, exactly, which she couldn’t have understood, but for some reason of her own which amounted to the same thing.

A woman in a pink shirt leans out the window of the bowling alley. If you’re drinking alcohol, shame on you!, she shouts. And if you’re underage you’re going to have to take that beer somewhere else. I can’t have you kids drinking on my property.

Can’t have you kids drinking on my property, Max repeats, except he’s not actually saying the words, just echoing the rhythm of the sentence in high-pitched woman noises.

Well, we can’t be here anymore so we all get into pickup trucks. Adam and Benjamin have them. I like pickup trucks because you can sit in the back. I am the only one who thinks to do this, everyone else scrambles into the front and flips around with the radio.

Yessss! I love this song, I hear Kate say, because she is like that, even though it’s a country station and she hates country music and I’m pretty sure she has never heard whatever song this is before in her life. She’s just saying it to impress Benjamin, Max, and/or Riley—I can hear them all talking through the little sliding window in the back of the extended cab. Adam’s truck does not have an extended cab, which is why nobody is in it with him except for Sadie.

Let’s go, I say. So then we are streaming through the night and the air is cold hitting my face and my hair is flying around crazily. I look up at the stars and I can’t even see the one that was following Kate earlier, and I want to tell her but she is sitting in front and can’t hear me, I’ve been screaming this whole time and no one can hear me OH MY GOD SLOW DOWN I’M GOING TO DIE SLOW DOWN SLOW DOWN! I think of this accident that happened a few weeks ago and of the boy in a coma in the hospital on the mainland and how something like that happens here at least once a year, and I know Benjamin is drunk and shouldn’t be driving but at the same time I think this is the most fun I’ve ever had. I think it in exactly those words, a complete, self-contained sentence, which layers itself on top of itself in my head until I stop screaming and Benjamin finally slows down because apparently we are in town, or the village as summer jerks call it, or downstreet as islanders do, all meaning Main Street, which if I had thought about it is probably where I would have guessed we were going.

I can tell you everything on Main Street with my eyes closed, not just everything that’s here now but also everything that used to be here. There’s the tiny post office where Sadie’s mom used to work, with the eagles carved out of granite from the quarries in front. There’s the hardware store where two old men used to sit on stools by the door and smoke pipes and hand out brown paper bags to any kid who came in, and each bag had an orange inside and some perfectly stale ginger snaps, and the smell and texture of the orange peel and ginger snaps and paper bag all mixed together in this way where it was like those three things were meant to be together, always. There’s the IGA which is the island’s one supermarket, and next to that, the gift shop that used to be Gibson’s, which was sort of a general store that used to sell penny candy, with all the jars lined up on shelves that were built into the walls. There’s the bank and the store that rents videos and sells T-shirts, and the new fancy restaurant that I have never been to, and the art gallery, and two real estate offices, and the Pizza Cove where we sometimes go to play pool.

The Pinching Claw, at the end of the street, is one thing that hasn’t changed yet, where me and Sadie used to get ice cream sundaes literally every day after swimming from Melody’s old friend Christine, who works there, who we all used to play with when we were little, but who has a baby now and is so fat that you can hardly tell her apart from her mother, who also works at the Pinching Claw. We stopped going there last year not because the new place that opened down by the ferry terminal was better, but because we felt awkward ordering from Christine, whose fatness not only made it hard to recognize her sometimes but also seemed to make it hard for her to recognize us, and she glared out at us through the takeout window in a dull, impersonal way, which we thought was the same way she glared at all the customers but then sometimes we were afraid it was a special glare, just for us.

Anyway, all that is lined up on one side of the street, and on the other side is the parking lot, which is probably the most beautiful parking lot in the world, or maybe the only parking lot that could ever be called beautiful. There are benches facing the harbor and you can sit on them and eat takeout from the Pinching Claw if you want to, and throw french fries to the seagulls and watch the ferries come in and out.

It’s one of those places where me and Sadie used to go but where my mother would tell us to stay away from after dark, because even she knew that, like the playground and the frog pond, it would be taken over by smoking, drinking, swearing teenagers, except now we are those teenagers and we’ve taken over not only the parking lot but also the upstairs room with the pine cone wallpaper in my mother’s house, and the front yard where we have pitched a tent which is where we prefer to sleep so that we can smoke and make noise and come and go as we please.

My mother knows we went bowling tonight but she has no idea where we are now or who we are hanging out with—she doesn’t even know who these people are. She’s probably asleep by now anyway but if she’s not and she asks us tomorrow what we did we can always tell her we ran into Matt, this boy from Boston we met at the quarry last summer who my mother likes and whose mother she knows. We can tell her we went night swimming, which is something we’ve done before with Matt. My mother used to take me and Sadie night swimming once or twice every year—she would park on the road side of the main quarry and stand shivering on the rocks with a flashlight, watching us take turns diving off the low ledge.

When we went with Matt, though, we decided to go to the other quarry, the one invisible from the road, where some granola-y summer jerks swim naked during the day and island boys sneak around in the bushes and spy on them. We’d never been there before, and we thought night would be a good time to see what it was like without having to look at a bunch of naked people or be naked ourselves. It was obviously much better than the regular quarry. You couldn’t see or hear any cars, for one thing, and the whole thing was completely surrounded by trees. The water was so still and black you could not tell it apart from the sky, and there was a high, flat rock jutting out into the middle of it which me and Sadie climbed up onto in the moonlight to undress, and when we climbed back down to dip our feet in the water Matt had already made the mistake of taking off all his clothes, and I saw his dick for a second before he noticed that we were not about to take off our bras and underwear and then he quickly pulled his shorts back up as if nothing had happened.

Benjamin turns off the radio and stops the truck just in time for me to hear Riley yell: You faggot! I’m going to beat your ass! He is just joking around with Max but still, I’m shocked to hear him talk this way because the last time I saw him he was wearing a T-shirt with my favorite band’s name on it which made me think that he was different from the other island boys, sort of an outsider, more sensitive and aware of what was going on, and I thought maybe he dreamed of getting out of here and doing something, like maybe being some kind of artist or musician, and I imagined that it was similar to the way I feel about my high school, how different and superior I feel to everyone there, all the preppy girls who listen to the same shitty music and dress the same, and how I know there is something much better in store for me. And all of this sort of made me like Riley before, I mean sort of have a crush on him, even though his hair is long and greasy and he has terrible skin, but it occurs to me now that I know nothing about him, or any of these people besides Kate and Sadie, and this scares me and makes me feel suddenly homesick, not for my mom or our house the way it is now but for how it used to be here, the things me and Sadie and Melody used to do, like play poker with penny candy on the braided rug in the living room, and how the hairs from that rug would stick to the Sour Patch Kids and Swedish Fish, and the rug itself became sticky and dandruffed with sour sugar until finally my mom rolled it up and took it to the dump. It’s stupid because those things don’t even exist anymore but I still feel like I’m betraying them somehow, like the fact that they don’t exist anymore is my fault.

I jump down from the back of the truck and everyone else climbs out of the front and we all stand around under the giant seagull statue holding brown paper bags crumpled around cans of beer. What are we doing? I ask, because we all know it’s only a matter of time before the cop shows up and we have to go somewhere else. Kate starts telling me how Riley told her about a party he knows of at someone’s house not too far from here, and that lots of people there are going to be rolling, and if we get there soon enough we can probably roll too.

Rolling? I repeat.

She looks at me like I’m mentally handicapped. You know, like, taking ecstasy?

I know what rolling means, I say. I just think it’s stupid to call it that.

Why? Riley asks, but Kate doesn’t ask why. That’s because she knows what I’m talking about, how she once told me all the words people at her new school have for smoking pot, like puff and blaze, and we agreed that we would rather never smoke again than talk that way. We never specifically discussed the term rolling since neither of us have ever done ecstasy before, but obviously it’s the same sort of thing.

Never mind, I tell Riley.

It’s not really a party, he says, just some people hanging out. Not the kind of party you girls are probably used to, anyway. But they said they have some extra pills if you want to buy some.

I look at Kate like: What kind of party does he think we’re used to? But she looks so excited, it’s like she’s been waiting her whole life for this opportunity. So I go over to consult with Sadie about it, who is still sitting with Adam in his truck. I can see their faces turned towards each other in the dark, Sadie’s long hair hiding her expression like a curtain and the smoke from her cigarette drifting out the window.

I’m sorry about your dad, I hear Adam say when I get closer, and that’s when I remember that there is stuff going on in Sadie’s life that none of us have been talking about, stuff that has nothing to do with me or Kate or the fact that it is summer but that Sadie has obviously been thinking about this whole time. I hear her say awkwardly: Thank you, just as she sees me come up to the window and then I pretend that I didn’t hear anything they just said and I start telling her about the party Riley told us about and how people are going to do ecstasy at it.

That sounds fun, Sadie says. You and Kate should go.

I give her this look, like: Really?

What, Sadie says.

I think maybe it’s the ecstasy she’s not excited about, and since I’m not even sure I want to do it myself, I say: Well, what are you guys going to do, then? Do you want to go swimming?

We’re just going to stay here a while, Adam says. It’s the first time he’s said anything to me directly, and for the first time I really get a good look at him: shaggy dirty blond hair, small blue eyes, flannel shirt. I still don’t see what makes Sadie think he’s so cute, or how it’s even possible for someone that old to be cute.

You guys should go, she says again, this time like she’s actually trying to convince me. I’ll meet up with you later. Okay?

So now we’re standing in the kitchen with a bunch of people we don’t know, eating orange popcorn and gummy worms out of giant bags while we wait for the ecstasy to kick in.

Where the hell is Sadie, anyway? someone asks, a big guy with a red face and his pants still tucked into rubber boots from the haul.

Her and Adam are having sex, I say without really thinking about it.

Holy shit, they are? says a blond girl with glasses and a tattoo of a butterfly on her shoulder. She also has a black eye, but no one else seems to notice this and she is acting so normal I wonder if I could be hallucinating.

No, I say, I just made that up. But... it is a possibility.

Hmmmmmm, we all say and widen our eyes at each other, and I like this new way of talking I seem to have developed, this way of just saying whatever comes into my head. I see my reflection in the dark window over the sink and its beauty is almost obscene.

But oh my god I am so cold. My teeth are chattering.

My heart is beating really fast, I say. Is that normal? Does anyone else feel like their heart is beating really, really, really fast?

She’s rolling, the same guy with the lobster boots says, and it occurs to me that if I am rolling, there is nothing I can do about it, nothing that can make me stop rolling or roll back the other way, and that even if something is wrong and my heart is not supposed to be beating like this, there is nothing I can do now to make it stop beating like this because whatever it is has happened, it’s happening, and you can’t make things unhappen.

She’s freaking out, the guy says. He looks like he might be starting to freak out, himself. I clench my teeth hard to make them stop chattering.

No she’s not, says the girl with the black eye, she’s fine. Come with me, she says, and I follow her down a hallway and through a door into the bathroom, where it is blindingly bright and there is a mirror so shiny it makes me nervous, like at any second our wild faces could leap out and kiss us.

Close your eyes, the girl says, and give me your hand.

Our hands and arms are two icicles that melt as soon as they slide into each other and combine to form one slithery half-liquid creature that seems to have a whole life and feelings of its own.

Oh my god, I say, what are you doing, what is that?

She laughs and I open my eyes and see that she is holding a small pale green bottle of lotion in her other hand and that it is the kind that smells like cucumbers, and then I notice for the first time that our hands smell like cucumbers and I laugh too.

Are you okay now? She says.

I nod, and it’s true: I am okay, I feel great.

We go into the living room and I sit down next to Riley on the couch, I mean loveseat. Apparently I’ve forgiven him for the language he used in the parking lot. Are you rolling? I ask him.

Riley nods like a maniac and falls into my shoulder. But I thought you hated that word, he says into my ear. It sounds like I love you, the way he says it, and I’m kind of flattered but at the same time I feel like things are maybe moving too fast, and by things I don’t just mean whatever with Riley but things in general, everything.

I do hate it, I say. I just said it because I’m rolling.

On the other side of the coffee table, Kate laughs very loudly. I almost forgot she was here, but now I’m so glad to see her that I get up and move over to her side of the coffee table and sit on the couch next to her and lie down and put my head in her lap.

Kate thinks I’m funny, I announce. Kate, do you think I’m funny?

Sometimes, Kate says, looking down at me, yes.

Kate is looking very queenly and indulgent tonight, like a beautiful mother who thinks her daughter is even more beautiful than she is. I want to tell her this but I know it doesn’t make sense so instead I start telling her how happy I am that she is here, that we are both here, and how lucky we are, and how lucky it is that she and Sadie are friends this summer instead of hating each other, because I want them to like each other, because they are my two best friends and my two favorite people, and I’m so glad we’ve finally all reached this point together where it’s like we all speak the same language and it’s not just because I’m on ecstasy that I’m saying this, it’s really true, I’ve always thought it, I mean I thought it a long time ago before we took the ecstasy and nothing is going to change after it wears off.

Kate is smiling at me.

What?

You’re talking really fast, she says.

Meanwhile, Riley’s eyes are practically bugging out of his head and he’s drumming a beat on his leg with his fingers like he’s been waiting and waiting for me to finish talking so that he can say what he wants to say, which is: Let’s dance.

No, say me and Kate.

Don’t you want to dance? He says.

No, we say louder.

Come on, he says, I have so much energy, and leaps up from the loveseat and starts blasting this terrible goth music or whatever and jumping and spinning around the room tossing his hair like a crazy person. Now I’m back to not liking him. I can’t make up my mind.

Let’s get out of here, yells Kate. She grabs my hand and pulls me up off the couch and we run outside into the backyard where it is quiet, and then we go around the other side of the house to the road and we walk slowly along it, still holding hands in the dark, until we come to a hill and I realize that it’s the hill that leads up to the playground so we go up there and sit in the swings. Kate picks a normal swing, low to the ground, but I choose the one that is shaped like a horse, where you sit in the saddle and pump by pressing your feet against a metal bar in the front. This horse swing is smudgy white with a blue mane in the daylight and I’m familiar with the way it is broken, like the horse is crippled and leaning onto one of its sides, and each time I pump my feet against the bar it makes a long, shrill, whining noise that you can hear from my house, which you would also be able to see from up here if it were light out.

We should have a house here, Kate says. After college. You, me, and Sadie. We could just live like this for the rest of our lives.

You mean, like, on ecstasy?

Noooo. Just you know, like this. And we could grow blueberries in the backyard and sell them at the farmers’ market.

And blackberries, I say.

Yeah. And raspberries.

We could grow every kind of berry.

But what would we do in the winter?

In the winter we could make pies.

We’re holding hands again while we swing and we twist our fingers into a tight knot that feels like a promise, and we agree to tell Sadie about our plan when we get back to the tent. Then after a while we stop swinging and lie down in the grass, and Kate puts her head on my stomach and I play with her hair while she softly pinches my arm, over and over, and at first we keep talking about what our house will be like and how great it will be to do whatever we want in it, but then after that we’re just lying there, and that is fun too. We stay like that for what might be hours.

Then something happens. It’s like a change in the light, although the actual light hasn’t changed yet. I don’t know how else to describe it but it’s like instead of being up there on this thing where everything is beautiful and amazing and great, you’re down here again and that feeling is washing over you in waves—or else the opposite feeling, which is like a terrible sadness, is washing over you in waves, it’s hard to tell which one is washing over which. But waves, literally, you can feel them in your chest, you can practically see them rolling up in front of you, cold and salty and gray like you are at the beach, the beach here which is not flat and bright with sand like other beaches, but sharp and craggy with gray rocks covered in barnacles that cut your feet and fog so thick sometimes you can barely see the ocean, only hear it. Which is not to say the beach here isn’t beautiful because it is. It’s maybe even more beautiful, it’s just a different kind of beach.

Do you remember that snake? I say suddenly.

What snake? Kate says.

It got hit by a car.

Oh. Yeah.

The sideways one, I add, and she nods like she knows what I mean. I’m not actually sure why I just thought of that snake, and there’s nothing I want to say about it in particular, so we just sit there for a little while longer in silence. I feel like I’m swimming, like a combination of being weightless and trying hard to keep my head above the surface.

Are you sad? Kate says finally, like she is reading my mind.

Kind of, I say. No. I just feel kind of weird.

Yeah, me too, she says. Let’s go back.

When we get back to the house where everyone was before, there are just a few people left smoking quietly on the porch. The girl with the black eye is there and it obviously really is a black eye. Riley is there too, and another guy and girl I don’t recognize. The guy mutters: What’s up. Everyone else just nods when they see us.

Sadie was here looking for you, Riley says. We told her you went home.

The sun is finally starting to come up now, but the fog is out too so it’s not like we can see the whole sunrise. The light, though, while we are walking back to our tent is pale and bright and more beautiful than any light I’ve ever seen. I can’t stop staring at it, as if the light itself is something special and specific to stare at, and not just something that is everywhere shining on other things.

So what happened? Me and Kate look at Sadie expectantly. She settles into her sleeping bag and fusses with the pillow. What happened?

What do you think happened?

Everyone thought you and Adam were fucking, Kate says. We laugh a little.

Right, Sadie says and closes her eyes. There is silence for a moment as we try to decide if she is telling the truth.

Really?

Yeah.

We digest this quietly. That’s weird, I say finally. Was it... fun?

Yeah, Sadie says, oh my god I am so tired.

I’m pretty sure I won’t sleep for the rest of my life, and I think of all the things I should ask Sadie, like did it hurt and is she going to see Adam again? But I can tell that Sadie is removed from us now, defensively wrapped in her sleeping bag. Me and Kate will go back to the city and our separate schools, and next year instead of coming here for the whole summer I’ll go to Spain with my dad and Sadie’s dad will be dead, and this night is something we will never speak of again.

What I finally ask is: Did you do it in the truck?

No, says Sadie, we went into a house. I can’t talk anymore, she says, I really need to get some sleep. And she closes her eyes and lies very still in her sleeping bag, but she’s still awake. I can tell by her face.

COLLEGIATE GOTHIC by Daniel Felsenthal

September 10, 2021

Summer

I met Miles on move-in day after my advising troop finished doing icebreakers and trust falls. Actually, I met his dad first.

“Herman Kahn,” said a man wearing a fleece embroidered with the mascot of our university on the breast, and beneath it, the words Class of ‘72. He extended his hand as though he were a freshman himself, but looked at his son, and their dance gave the impression of a family whose dynamics were more important than people outside of the family.

“Miles! Care enough about someone other than yourself to meet your neighbor?”

“I told you not to wear that stupid fleece, Dad. You’re embarrassing me.” Miles’ eyes hardly passed over mine, “Hi,” and then he turned back to Herman, “Please leave before I never talk to you again.”

My parents would disown me if I acted so rude, but Herman obeyed.

“Wanna go to a party?” Miles asked.

He learned from his older sister, also an alumnus of our university, that freshmen usually go out in large, aimless-seeming packs, so we should assemble a group.

“A group of girls,” he clarified. “More than one penis in a room is practically a gay club around here.”

Unlike Herman, Miles wore a yarmulke. I thought religiosity got squeezed out with each generation by America, sex, capitalism, and the same festering animosity that led Miles and his dad to scream at one another. Or at least this was the case in my family. The children of churchgoers mostly seemed to stop believing in God around the same time we stopped believing in Santa Claus. Still, we maintained a basic respect for our parents’ authority. Miles, on the other hand, became a religious Jew after his parents split up, when he got close to a youth group leader at his temple, and he despised his dad, blamed him for divorcing his mom and messing up his childhood, which was a doubly fraught perspective since he’d come to Herman’s alma mater.

“I was shut out of the other Ivies,” Miles explained to me.

I was accepted by a few, but went here because it was the only school that offered me enough financial aid.

Maybe Miles’ family legacy accounted for his self-confidence. He acted like a bro with other guys, but surprisingly, charmed the finer sex. Enough girls jammed into his room that a few people had to stand on his bed while we passed around a fifth of Belvedere his mom gave him as a present for being salutatorian of his high school class. Everyone smiled and wanted to be liked by everyone else, and people who would never have spoken to me in high school were so friendly that it felt as though going to the same school were a bigger commonality than being of the same race, or faith, or having the same amount of money.

“Miles acts this way because he is Jewish,” my mom would tell me, if she and my dad were here. But they left that morning, so I pushed her prejudices out of my brain.

Walking to the frats, we passed around an Ocean Spray bottle of orange juice we spiked with the rest of the liquor. Miles led us up the steps and past the scratched, peeling columns of the mansion where the brothers of Rho Beta Rho lived and drank. One yelled, “If you have less than four girls for every guy, you’re not going to get into our party.”

“That’s insane,” Alicia told the bouncer, a bearded sophomore.

Luckily, we got in before she vomited and Sarah took her home.

The brothers invited us upstairs to smoke a joint, probably because they were trying to woo Miles. It was the second time I’d gotten high in my life, an opportunity that never arose until last summer.

My roommate, Rizwan, came and went all the next morning, chatting on the phone in Arabic, but apologized for waking me. The only furniture he brought was the rug he lay between his desk and bed. He wanted to hang out with Miles and me, and Miles was polite, yet cool—and sort of unfriendly.

The two of us got drunk on a few bottles of Petite Sirah he stole from his stepdad, who had a beach house in the Hamptons with a wine cellar. At a party thrown by Tau Tau Tau, we danced on every girl not surrounded by a protective shield of friends. Someone wearing a shot glass as a necklace kissed me, and when she backed my body across the dance floor and into a wood panel beneath the stuffed head of a moose, I slipped my hand under her waistband. She was wet, and pawed at my erection through my pants, but then she pulled away and would not dance with me anymore.

I met Anna Merriweather at the campus cantina, where I picked up a meat lover’s slice to sop up the liquor. While we dawdled back to the quad, I told her about Miles.

“I’m not sure why he wants to be friends with me,” I said. “Because he seems to be kind of racist. But everyone makes jokes about people’s race and stuff here. I guess it’s OK now that we have a black president.”

“It’s like that back in England, too,” she said skeptically. “Everyone going on about being English instead of being British, being Egyptian instead of being English, being Irish instead of being British.”

I was shocked she liked me. After we kissed for a couple of minutes, Anna pulled away. “Oh my God, I’m pissed.”

She wanted to come back to my room, though, where we kissed some more, my hand underneath her bra for so long that my hand went numb. Rizwan opened the door, closed it again.

“Sorry!”

Later, I went to the bathroom and rested my head against the partition until I threw up.

Fall

I got into college because of my art portfolio, which I thought was pretty good, and my high school teachers and college counselors and obviously some of the admissions people thought it was very good. Still, I was studying Economics, because my parents insisted I take practical classes. Most of them were three-hundred-person lectures, in amphitheaters, with professors who lectured from slides. My only seminar, Craft of Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean, fulfilled a distribution requirement. Our first day, we went in a circle and introduced ourselves by saying a little about our interests in the world of art history. I said that I liked Vincent van Gogh.

“We won’t be studying Impressionism,” Dr. Villani said. She smiled at the rest of the students while they laughed.

“I know that,” I said, feeling my face redden.

My work study job was at the DVD rental library, and Miles sometimes did his homework with me behind the desk. There were two posters hanging there, one from Pulp Fiction and the same Shepard Fairey portrait of Obama I tacked to my wall when he got the nomination a couple of years ago. We ate at the Hillel dining hall after, where the food was kosher and relatively good, and Miles told me about his ex-girlfriend. She had split him into two people, one who stayed at home in a perennial act of lovemaking—he had burning, halcyon memories of crossing Central Park at night after their parents went to bed—and another who left Manhattan for his freshman year of college. Only her father was Jewish, Miles explained to me. That was one problem. But the reason they broke up before he arrived on campus and she left for Wash U. was because they decided that college was a time to meet new people, to grow and change. He and she got coffee together over fall break, and after crying, in a turn I did not expect, they had sex.

“But what about her mom’s religion?” I almost asked.

“I’ve felt even worse since then.”

He set a care package from his mom in the lounge mini-fridge.

“Why?”

“Because now I’m more confused than I’ve ever been,” he shrugged. “I’ll probably just call Herman later.”

“Don’t you reject him and all that he represents?”

“Of course I do. Did I tell you he’s engaged again? To a twenty-eight year old. He promised my sister that he wouldn’t. But she proposed last week.”

Every several days, I met up with Anna. Sober, she seemed as unsure about making a move as I was. We spent a lot of time sitting on her bed, holding hands, and sometimes we just got together and talked, or made out a little bit before or after we studied. Other times, we ate and I listened while she complained about her classes.

Anna and Miles liked to tease each other. She made fun of the books on his shelf, his love of Ernest Hemingway. He goaded her for being British.

“English,” she corrected him.

Her laugh was so loud that people knocked on the door and asked us to quiet down, and other times because Miles blasted music through his speakers. Around midnight, he kicked us out to give his girlfriend a goodnight call.

Our whole hall welcomed her with open arms when she stayed over for a long weekend. Everyone thought she and Miles were so cute, bringing a sunny, adult feeling to our dorm. She was morose, though, and I knew their relationship was not going to work out. She frowned a lot, stood with her arms crossed. Miles took her to dinner at restaurants downtown, stores, and an a-cappella show. She hardly looked at me, as though she had no idea that I was his best friend. They spent a lot of time on the couch in the common area beneath a blanket, her head on his chest while they watched Glee on his computer.

Our hallmate, Krista, pulled back the corner of a lump of foil to show me a dollop of red and blue frosting.

“Oh, fuck,” I said. “Can I have some?”

“I baked this cake for Miles, because he’s sad that his girlfriend left. We were all going to get dinner in the dining hall later. Then we’ll eat the cake after.”

“I have plans with Anna.”

“Who’s Anna?”

“You know, the British girl who hangs around here sometimes.”

“Oh, her,” said Krista. “She seems full of herself. Miles is your best friend.” She touched my arm and her eyes widened. “He needs you.”

“What’s this I hear,” cried Shaad from down the hall. “You’re skipping out on hall dinner?”

A chorus of people echoed them—Chris, Pritam, Bonnie, Jessica. “Hall dinner,” they said.

Everyone went, besides Rizwan. He never hung out with us. It started in the beginning of the year when we partied at the frats. They rejected him at the door, along with a bunch of other guys. Too many sausages. Not enough women. And then, weirdly, he rejected them. Greek organizations hated personal freedom, he pontificated one morning, yet still they were such an American tradition. In the ponderous, pompous way he communicated everything, he pointed out how people in the U.S. secretly loved to give up their individuality to the collective. Then, they covered their tracks by claiming that individual rights mattered to them. The rest of us silently disengaged.

“Was there a hall dinner tonight?” he asked in our room. A book was open on his desk.

“Just one for Kahn, because his girlfriend went back to her own school. We tried to find you, but you weren’t around,” I lied, and adopted a friendlier tone while Rizwan glanced at his phone. “You get up to anything wild, dude?”

“I went to Lush downtown with Suhel.”

“But you don’t drink.”

“No.”

Rizwan was always going to clubs with his Saudi friends. I didn’t really know what sober people did at clubs. I would probably never go to a bar until I was a senior because I couldn’t afford a fake ID, unless I stopped buying weed and never ate out again. Anyway, Rizwan was from a rich family.

The rest of his time was a mystery to me, although I imagine that he spent it studying, since he read constantly and was apparently really smart, at least according to Anna, who was in his Kierkegaard class. Usually, when I got back from hanging with her or Miles, Rizwan was asleep, sideways across the bed with his computer next to him or a book on his chest, a neon paper wristband on his hand. Around seven in the morning, he descended to the dining hall for breakfast, and returned to our room by eight, where he prayed in a whisper so quiet that it seldom woke me. All morning, he worked at his desk. I usually opened my eyes a few times, and peering from the protection of my covers to see Rizwan hunched over his papers, I knew that I could get several more hours of rest before my first class began at ten.

“Anna told me that the bouncers at Lush harass the underaged girls they let in.”

“Well,” he reasoned, “if they’re going to be doing illegal things, they can’t expect to be protected by the law.”

“You’re doing an illegal thing. The drinking age is twenty-one in this country.”

“The owner is Saudi. He’s the one breaking the law.”

“Don’t be a misogynist.”

Rizwan stared at me. I packed my pipe with weed and set up a fan by the window because he fussed about the smell. The book on his desk had a Latin title. In the beginning of the year, he planned to be a Physics major, but then he began double-majoring in Philosophy, announcing this development to our hall with great enthusiasm, as though we should care about a bunch of dead Germans.

I slid into bed. He asked, “Have you ever read any Ludwig Wittgenstein or Bertrand Russell?”

“No.”

“You haven’t?”

I shook my head. “What does Ludwig do, build pianos?”

Rizwan laughed. “He’s an Austrian philosopher. There are many homosexuals in Europe and America, aren’t there?”

“No more than there are anywhere else.”

“I don’t think homosexuality is immoral.”

“Thanks for sharing, Rizwan.”

“My professor told us that Wittgenstein and Russell are gay so easily it was like he was telling us they were roommates.”

“If I had a gay roommate,” I said. “I would have to put a rat trap in front of my butthole every night.”

Rizwan jolted, as though what I said was disturbing.

“It was a joke,” I explained.

“Do you like it here? I hate it here. I’ve had a cold since I arrived in this city.”

“Ew,” I said. “Stay on your side of the room. And for God’s sake, cover your mouth when you sneeze.”

I switched off the clip lamp on my bed frame.

“I want to go to California. Have you ever been? The weather here is so bad. I feel it’s contributing to my depression.”

I slapped my hand across my eyes. “Would you turn that down?”

Rizwan shut his light off and put on this stupid headlamp he had, which made it seem as though a worm was growing from his skull. When I suggested that he hang something on his side of the room, just to brighten things up and help me avoid my own sadness, he showed me a poster he found on the internet of Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein. The famous men floated in an asteroid belt, staring at the cosmos.

“They are unintimidated by the concerns of other people,” he said. “But I will never be that way.”

Winter

Anna and I had sex for the first time just when we got back from Christmas Break. After so much anxiety about losing my virginity, it was gone in an instant, but the second time, I was just as frightened as I had been the first. She blew me while I lay on my back and stared up at the picture of Audrey Hepburn that her roommate Victoire hung over her desk. Anna never told me that she wanted me to reciprocate. Putting the condom on, I felt like I was dialing a stranger on the phone, listening to it ring before the person on the other end picks up. Then she dozed off, and I felt both restless and like I was getting sick. I texted her after creeping out of her room in the middle of the night.

“At the very least, you could have bloody woken me,” she replied.

My cold mounted the day after she broke up with me, only to dissolve into a dry hack I wanted to lose. It was Spring Rush, and frat row crawled with freshmen, trampling each other to impress the brothers and sisters. In my seminar, Dr. Villani stopped lecturing to pass me a box of tissues, but when she handed back our term papers, I felt the familiar flutter of getting good grades. You communicate your ideas so clearly, she wrote in the margins, dotting my word choices with three plus marks. She called me over once class was done and asked about my health.

“When I first went away to school, I had a cough that lasted two years.”

“I’m drinking ginger tea.”

“Eat Vitamin C,” she advised.

Art, a biology major from PR, and a few other brothers from Rho Beta Rho came to my dorm with a fancy, embossed envelope. I knew I had a chance there. One drunken night, a sophomore let slip that the fraternity’s charter required them to recruit members for diversity, plus Art, whose real name was Arturo, liked me. The Caucasian brothers flanking him carried a bid for Miles, who had not been to the fraternity all semester.

“He was our top choice. Do you know where he is?”

“He’s always at Hillel now.”

“Shit,” said one brother. “They got him.”

“What?”

“I had a Bar Mitzvah just like everyone, but the Hassids, they're a cult,” he said, as though I had become a man within the Jewish faith, too.

A fatter brother sniffed the air. “I hate this dorm. I have traumatic, smell-induced memories of my freshman year here, man. Curry and steamed cabbage. My roommate fucking emanated that shit.”

For the next two months, I went on a run with the other pledges every morning at six. We played tackle football after, and I broke three fingers and sprained my wrist. We drank every night: liquor, beer, curdled milk, hot sauce, the collected spit of Rho Beta Rho. Each week, I did the calculus problem sets of a senior. I did a junior’s dry cleaning.

“If any of us catch you hanging out with friends, or seeing girls, or even so much as taking a walk, you will no longer be a member of our brotherhood,” they told us on the one day we had off from pledging.

Another evening, they hung us upside down and poured beer down our nostrils. They bound our feet and wrists, broke glasses in the basement, and turned the lights off, “Crawl around for an hour.”

I thought of withdrawing myself as a pledge, but Art told me to stay, insisting that stuff got better. The brothers were not half as racist as they sounded, he said, and unless I was gay or something—Art looked at me with suspicion—I had nothing to worry about. He invited me up to his room and cleaned my wounds after the glass crawl, “We talk about getting rid of pledging traditions like this every year.” I leaned back on his bed, not needing to try so hard around Art. I could be myself, or at least act the way that I had acted with him in the past. But I had always been trying too hard, and so I had to keep trying hard or else he might think I was not the freshman that he had originally championed in front of the brothers. After all, there were so many reasons that Rho Beta Rho wouldn’t want me, of course, the main reason being that I’m Korean.

Spring

For Spring Break, the brothers went to Cancún, and Anna got marooned on campus like me. “I told my parents that joining a frat was how you got the best jobs in America,” I said when we crossed paths in the quad, the first time we saw each other since we broke up. “But they’ll just act so disappointed in me if I go home, and I definitely can’t afford the airfare to Mexico.”

“You know you really hurt me.”

“I did?”

Back in my dorm, I waded through the clothing flung on the floor, the ketchup-smeared plate by the foot of my dresser, and the mug with the thick film to clear a path for Anna. We lay on the covers of my bed and chatted.

“Rizwan’s been super passive-aggressive lately,” I said.

She glanced at the floor. “I wonder why.”

“I’ve spent the last week scrubbing gunk from the frat house basement. I literally cannot lift another finger until I’m a full brother next week.”

Rizwan burst in after a couple minutes, grinning, but the moment he saw me his expression changed.

“Would you pick this up?” He pointed at a T-shirt that lay crumpled by the leg of his chair. “It’s a basic matter of respect.”

“We’re in school. Respect doesn’t matter until we’re older.”

“Our lives mean less than other people’s?”

Rizwan annoyed me for being right, but Anna liked him. A few days later, the three of us hung out, with everyone else gone for their ski trips, beach parties, or families’ mansions. When I mentioned I hadn’t seen Miles in a while, Rizwan said he hated college.

“Besides Suhel, I have no friends, and Suhel and I are not always so compatible. If I take a semester’s leave, though, I risk losing my visa.”

“Everyone hates it here,” Anna shook her head.

“I don’t,” I said, but in truth I just never asked myself whether I liked college.

We streamed Iron Man 2 under the covers in my bed. I woke up to see Rizwan’s sleep-calm face, inches away from my own, and when I reached for Anna, she was gone. I moved my hand, which was numb under Rizwan’s ribs, and closed my eyes again.

Miles sent me an email before break ended:

I have to say i’ve been lying to you lately. First off, my girlfriend and I broke off all contact a couple of months ago, big surprise, which rocked me. I couldn’t focus on my homework. I just don’t care anymore. I didn’t want to tell you. Frankly, i dropped three of my classes as well, so I didn’t fail. Now my family is furious with me. They’re so wrapped up in these stupid American values that they dont know what’s actually important anymore. Anyway, this might be hard to understand, but im moving to Israel next week and joining an Orthodox community.

I knocked on his door to find it open, the bed stripped bare, the bookshelves empty.

Through the wall, I heard Rizwan jump up and down, overjoyed and full of future.

“I’ve been accepted to Stanford as a transfer! I’m moving to California!”

Summer

The summer has nothing to do with any other season. I spent most of it alone, staring at the plants in the garden and basking in the sun. I had begun to paint again, the first time since freshman year began.

I hadn’t left campus. Everyone else was gone, which made it a better place. I worked for Dr. Villani while she and her husband were on an archaeological dig. Most of my tasks involved house- and dog-sitting in their beautiful nineteenth-century redbrick, but she also asked me to conduct some research, for which I received a stipend, so my parents couldn’t complain that I was spoiled and lazy. “The block you live on is dangerous.” They read police blotters, sending me worried emails about crime.

In August, Art took the train down from New Jersey. He stayed in the room that belonged to the Villanis’ daughter, who was college-bound next year, on vacation with her mom and dad. Her list of prospective schools was pinned on her bulletin board next to a reel of photobooth pictures she took at prom with her friends. Her dream acceptances were the same as mine.

Art took me to a bar the first night of his visit, where he said I would get served as long as I looked confident and didn’t hesitate when asked for my drink order. (“Well rum and coke,” I practiced.) When we got home, because I told him not to do it in the backyard, he puked on the neighbor’s stoop.

In the morning, after taking turns over the toilet, we agreed that we would never drink again. But at night, we opened a bottle of whiskey we found in the liquor cabinet, and I leaned over and kissed him. Art was reluctant at first, but soon we were in the teenager’s room, jerking each other off on top of her bedspread. Art knocked over one of her field hockey trophies. We laughed. I blew him, and he blew me, and when I woke again Art was still asleep, rays of light sluicing through the windows.

He squirmed away when I touched him, making up some excuse about his sister’s birthday in West Orange, which meant he had to leave immediately. I sat in the living room and cried for a little while, and then I bleached the bathroom, threw the sheets in the wash, and did a few hours of work before I took Otis on a long walk, far from campus, in the townie parts where Obama signs grew sparser.

Otis lifted his leg. He pooped. We both grew tired. We trudged on. Eventually, I happened upon a Methodist church with a Korean pastor. The sun set over a slight hill in the distance. Across the street, an old, stooped white man emerged from his house, approaching the giant flag pole that protruded like an erection from one of the front beams, and began to pull on the ropes. I watched him lower the flag, which he would hoist each morning to the tip of its pole again. It was a military tradition, I knew, that some veterans carried into civilian life. There was a twenty-something ex-marine like this in my hometown, a flag hitched to his porch’s banister. Every night, he hit the bars downtown.

“Stay away from him,” my parents told me, “Army men are evil.”

But I always thought he looked so harmless, drunk enough that he could hardly walk, much less fire a gun. And if he died from liver disease, he would be this age forever. An immortal hero, I thought when I was a child. Now that I’m older, I think he was just another character. Someone to remind us how much young men sacrifice in the name of youth.

LOVEBIRD by Tex Gresham

September 3, 2021

Most people have no idea what goes on in retirement communities. They don’t care to know. When your kids dropped you off at Del Largo Sueño a few years go, they made tearful promises to visit, but you never saw a tear fall. They faked guilt to hide the happiness that they wouldn’t have to watch you die. Your son, Clifford, and his new wife didn’t stay long enough for you to unpack and hang your sweaters. Your daughter waited around, and then she asked for “gas money.” She’d been biting her cheek all day, her eyes sunken like little pits from whatever drug she’d decided to date that month. Gas money...like you’re too old and stupid to know the truth.

But the currency of their false guilt didn’t amount to much considering you haven’t seen your son or daughter since that day. You’ve forgotten about them, mostly. This place makes it easy. And they’ve likely forgotten about you too. A whole life lived, seeds planted so that an existence can be remembered, and it’s all forgotten like a fart in a high wind.

And you’re not going to talk about your ex-wife. She died trying to throw a toaster in your bathwater. She doesn’t deserve the headspace. None of this is about them anyway. This is about your life at seventy-nine, when you finally found something worth living for.

You’re cruising in Hank Hubbert’s E-Z Go that’s done up to look like a seafoam green ‘57 Chevy BelAir. He’s got the pedal down, the wind flapping the six hairs you have left. It feels like you’re going 80mph, but you’re probably going about 10mph. Hank passes you a joint of Birdbrain OG Kush. You take a drag, even though the doctor told you to stick to edibles. Golf clubs rattle in bags in the back. Hank’s got a shotgun in his golf bag for skeet shoot.

As you pass a group of women finishing up a game of bocce ball, Hank says, “I got a nine-iron they can use. Guaranteed to give ‘em a hole in one.”

Laughing rattles the emphysema in your lungs, but who cares?

Hank points to one of the ladies you’ve never seen. Must be new. What you do notice are the gloves on Hank’s hands. He’s been wearing them lately. You haven’t seen him without them for the past week or so. “That’s Marion Chapel. New broad. She’s got all the boys under a spell around here.”

You say, “I can see why.” Even though you can’t. She’s nothing special.

Hank says, “Maybe. But boy, does she have a daughter I’d give away the rest of my pension for.”

You say, “Does she?” and Hank laughs. But you really want to know: does she?

Men like Hank––and this place is all Hanks––usually get at women in the community as a way to get closer to their daughters. And sometimes sons, if that’s their boat. These Hanks think that these daughters desire them just as much. You’ve never had an interest in them. The younger they are, the more you’re aware of how hopeless they are. They believe the world is tailored to the young. It’s not. The world isn’t even a place for people. Not anymore. You see the young ones, the ones that Hank and all the Hanks go for, and you feel sad.

There is someone in the community that has you wholly unable to look at any woman, young or old. Not even Hank knows about her.

Sun City, AZ is a place that wouldn’t exist if not for the Almost Dead. And Del Largo Sueño is its capital. You have everything here. Whole Foods, AMC theaters, two Greg Norman-designed T-National golf courses, a wildlife refuge with any animal you can imagine, six marijuana dispensaries, twenty-one restaurants that stay open late––for those who eat dinner after 6pm––and a four-story recreation center.

After midnight, the top floor of the rec center transforms into a gambling den to rival any casino in Vegas. There’s no blackjack or Texas Hold ‘Em. People don’t bet on horse races or football games. No thirty-large on hard eight. No slot handles. People put money on the death pool. Everyone’s name and odds on a blackboard, behind the makeshift bar. You’re sitting at 30-to-1 to die within the year. Suicide voids all bets. You put five-large against yourself. Other than that, you don’t play the games anymore.

You sit alone at a table near the back of the room. You sip on seltzer water with a twist of lime, even though you’re not thirsty. The light in the room’s dim and the music––the Jerry Lee Lewis version of “Whole Lotta Shakin Goin On”––coming out of the speakers is loud enough so those who left their hearing aids at home can hear it. You scan the room, playing the part of yourself very well.

In an adjacent soundproofed room, men and women play Russian roulette. They handle the gun with maddeningly calm smiles. A table next to yours plays Guess the Pill. They slam hundreds into a pile on the table. There’s a line of crushed pill next to an unlabeled orange bottle.

“Two hundred on that being a klonopin,” says someone whose name you’ll never remember.

“Double that it’s a proto-pumper,” says another whose name is just as lost.

The one betting two hundred snorts the powdery line. You get up from the table, make your way across the room. In the time it takes you to get to the fight studio, Two Hundred clutches his chest and drops dead. Everyone scrambles to the bar to collect on the death pool.

You pass a table where Marion Chapel sits at the center of a group of Hanks that look like babies begging for their mother’s tit. Another Hank joins the table, bows as he hands Marion a drink. She’s eating up the attention, laughing like a broad right out of a Bogart movie. A candle on the table casts a moving light on the underside of her face, and the effect is unsettling. Her eyes break away from the attention and meet yours. They’re serious eyes, and you can’t hold onto them very long.

The only game that interested you here was the Fight. In the studio where, during the day, women shuffle through arthritic Zumba, some of the former boxing coaches have set up a makeshift fight. Men don’t fight here. Animals do. Mostly ostriches. Taken from the wildlife refuge. Hopped up on Viagra and Vicodin, the old veterinarians and one retired zookeeper usually haul the birds back here on their flatbed E-Z gos. You used to join them.

The setup is simple: two enter, one leaves. Anyone who’s never seen ostriches fight, it’s terrible. They kick the hell out of each other with taloned feet until gaping wounds and blood loss results in one victory and one death. You used to have a sure bet: a big strong alpha male. He’d never lose a fight––until he did. And with that one, you lost a lot of money. But that’s not why you stopped.

It was because of Rati.

There she is. Standing in the sun rays of a new, cloudless day. Birds sing overhead, a soundtrack of everyday magic. This moment is just for you and her.

You know she’s seen you by the way she drops down to her knees, wings spread, feathers shaking. Her head lolls back and forth, neck puffed out. Even though her head’s moving like one of those inflatable men at car dealerships, her eyes stay primally focused on you. Your eyes never leave hers. You haven’t taken Cialis today, but the pressure in your groin is a liberation from the weight of Time and Death.

Rati chirps and growls, pulling deep within that struthio body to let you know how she feels. You run your fingers along the letters etched into the wood of her corral gate: R-A-T-I. Rati. A gorgeous word. Ra-Ti...the tongue taking a trip two steps down the palate to tap, at two, on the teeth...One of the first things you’ve ever said to her. But you forget where you heard it originally.

Love has never been in your DNA. You cared for people in your life. Shared laughter and sadness. But you never loved, nor did you feel loved. Your children are just waiting for the moment they don’t have to think of you and realize you’re still someone on this earth––not in it. You never loved your job, despite keeping it for forty years. Who in the hell would ever say they love being a maintenance technician for a cheap airline.

But the love you feel down to your essence for Rati is so pure. More than any lust or longing you’ve ever had. It is true. Her dance tells you she feels the same. Her feet tap out the word: L-O-V-E. Never did you think those letters would come together into a recognizable shape.

You know some would say you’re just playing into loneliness. Being abandoned by your children hurts, but it doesn’t hurt enough to be lonely. Maybe Rati’s doing the same, given that her lifemate was killed in the ring sometime last year. But what is love but a way to prove loneliness wrong?

She comes closer to the fence and you can smell her. The way her feet crunch the grass, thud heavy against the earth, you find comfort in that power. The new male they brought in after Rati’s mate was killed stands in the middle of the field, watching her come to you. You can tell he doesn’t like you, that he believes she’s his. She isn’t. She’s mine.

You don’t know what Rati would do if she knew that her lifemate was your sure thing, your big alpha male. You made more money on his fights than you ever did working a real job. You also wonder what she would do if she knew you had bet against her mate before his last match. You knew he wasn’t a sure thing anymore. A part of you hides the fact––even from yourself––that you didn’t want him to be a sure thing, not after you saw Rati for the first time. You wanted him gone. And she doesn’t need to know these things. That chapter in your life is over now. Unconnected to the one you’re in now. Together. Besides, you don’t play the games anymore. She doesn’t need to know anything other than your love.

Rati leans her head over the railing. You slide a hand along her face, around the back of her head. You cradle her like this, slowly pulling her face toward yours. You kiss.

You move to her ear and whisper, “I want you to come home with me.”

She shakes, her beak making this clacking sound. You reach over and slip the latch from the gate, which swings open silently. She eases out of her pen. You take her by the wing and the two of you walk.

“And you’re still taking the levodopa and carbidopa twice a day?”

“Yes.” You are.

“And the donepezil and galantamine?”

“Of course.” But you’re not.

Dr. Kosinski’s office always makes you want to lie. He’s got a face like a baby pushing out a big poop. The way he looks at you, at all of the Almost Deads, it’s obvious he hates his life because of how useless his practice has become. Why waste time on the Almost Dead?

“And how’s the diet?”

“I have bacon sometimes.”

“You shouldn’t be doing that. You know, and I know you know this because I’ve said it but I’ll repeat it: eggs are an important part of this diet. The omega-3 reacts positively with donepezil and will rejuvenate brain function. Bacon throws that off.”

“I remember you saying something about that.”

Dr. Kosinski flips through your chart, though you’re sure that’s theatrics. There’s no way, after all this time, he doesn’t have your chart memorized. “Your drug test didn’t come back. Your urine ate through the plastic cup, but so did everyone else’s so what can I do?”

He looks at you with raised eyebrows, expecting you to bow your head like a shamed child. You run your tongue over your dentures, feeling stray pieces of bacon. He looks down at your chart again.

“What brings you in today?”

You say, “My testicles have been tingling. They hurt. And I’ve been having dreams about having children.”

“You don’t have testicles. After the cancer.”

“But these dreams feel real. And it’s not like I have one or two kids. I’ve got like fifteen. Maybe twenty.”

“That’s a side effect of the galantamine.”

Again, you don’t tell him you’ve stopped taking that months ago. Instead, you say, “And what about the tingling? In my testicles.”

“Describe the tingling.”

“It’s this fullness. Pressure. I can’t say it’s unpleasant. I feel stronger sometimes.”

“That’s a good thing, yes?”

You shrug.

“Other than that, are you noticing anything different with your body? Your penis? Fingers? Mouth?”

“Different how?”

Dr. Kosinski closes your chart. “Some of the other more sexually active residents have complained about recent changes to their body. Like within the last week or so.”

“Changes.”

“One came to me complaining of jock itch. I checked him and his entire groin area looked like cooled lava. Marbled skin. Open sores. Another patient...had it in his mouth. Really terrible stuff. ”

“My jock itch is jock itch.”

“There’s been more. And there’s a common thread. Now I’m not supposed to name names, but you never remember half of this stuff, right?”

“Who are you again?”

“Have you come into contact with Marion Chapel?”

“Never.”

“Are you sexually active here?”

“Not at the moment.” You don’t tell him about Rati, mostly because she technically isn’t part of the community.

“Good. Until I figure this out, don’t. I suspect a kind of STD. All you old-timers grew up in the nuclear age. Who the hell knows what you’ve got going on inside you. I’m going to send some blood samples out for testing. In the meantime, no sex.”

“Is that all?” You interrupt his self-talk. You understand what he means about the radiation. No one knows what all that nuclear testing did to the air. But if it had changed anything, it would have long ago. This is something else––if it’s even real at all. A part of you thinks Dr. Kosinski’s just pulling both your legs.

This thing with Rati, it’s got nothing to do with radiation. You know that in your heart. It’s real, not a side effect.

Dr. Kosinski snaps on a latex glove. “Actually, I’d like to check your prostate. Make sure this pressure you’re feeling isn’t cancer.” He lubes his finger. “You know the drill.”

You do.

“Whoa! Christ, what am I seeing here?”

Hank moves away from you and Rati, hands covering his face in a way that reminds you of Dracula being shown a crucifix. Embarrassment could be a thing right now if you were interested in feeling embarrassed. Hank barged in without knocking. This is now his problem, not yours. The record player spins and Spanky and Our Gang continue to belt out “Lazy Day.”

The way Rati pushes against your naked body reintroduces you to your soul. Which helps you ignore the way Hank’s half-hidden face twists in disgust. He doesn’t know what this is like. Never will.

“I...I...don’t want to know…” Hank backs out of the room, but he doesn’t leave. He’s not wearing the gloves. The finger he points at you looks like marbled, melted skin. A boil on the tip of his finger threatens to pop and squirt at you. He stands on the other side of the doorway.

“What do you want, Hank?” With your body and mind in a warm bath of relaxation––a feeling similar to what it must be like to die––you talk without anger. It doesn’t sound like your voice.

“What am I seeing?”

“It’s exactly what you think it is.”

“You’re...doing that...with an ostrich.”

“Her name’s Rati.”

“I know what the thing’s name is.” Hank finishes with a fist against the wall. You’re sure he’d rather kick something, but Hank can barely lift his diabetic legs. He shuffles when he walks. “It’s an ostrich.”

“Yes, she is.” You know he can’t imagine what it’s like. The feeling of her beak. That when two birds make love it’s called cloaca kisses––you looked that up. It’s a beautiful phrase. Tender. Sensual. Hank can’t imagine what it’s like. It’s all just fucking to him.

“Why are you doing this?”

A part of you wants to answer: love. But it’s something else he wouldn’t understand. He doesn’t have a Rati. You especially don’t want to tell him that you and Rati married each other the night before. You feel it boiling on the tip of your tongue, like your tongue’s got one of those boils that’re all over Hank’s fingers.

You say, “She makes me feel good.”

“Christ….Are you still taking your meds?”

“Are you?”

“No, but I’m not in bed with an ostrich.”

“Is that what you came here for?”

“I came here to tell you someone called the community center asking for you. Someone named Dianne.”

Daughter-in-law Dianne. Only one you know who wouldn’t know enough to call your direct number. Your son married a flapjack from Seattle who appraises damaged houses in Middle-America caught in Tornado Alley. The one time you met her she said things like Clutched the damn deal and Suckers aren’t born every minute...they die every second. You don’t know much about her, but you know enough to know you’re glad about how little you know. The reasons why she would call and not your son are all not good.

“Did she leave a number?” You move to get up and put clothes on, but Rati reaches over and engulfs you with her wing. It’s warm, so you stay with her.

“She did.” Then, after a beat, “I can’t believe you’re in there with that thing.”

“Get over it, Hank. When you’ve been worshipping at the church of Marion Chapel, I didn’t say anything.”

“Marion is a human being. She’s real.”

“Real enough to make your hand like that, right Hank?”

Nothing from Hank. You can picture him on the other side of the wall, looking at his fingertips, their little lips pursing at him.

You say, “Leave the number. I’ll call later.”

You can hear Hank move, rustle some papers, write the number. He’s probably got the little mouths whispering the number to him. He can’t remember anything. You doubt if he’ll remember this, but you know he will. He’s talking to himself, or the little mouths. For the first time since you met him, he sounds like the classic grumpy old man everyone believes old men become. You supposed both of you are. Except he doesn’t have a Rati.

He says, “Here’s the number. But listen: you’re not...This thing, it isn’t going to last. You and that thing together.”

“This thing is my wife.” When you say it, Rati shivers, lets out a purring sound. Her beak nuzzles against your neck. You look down at her feet and notice how tense her claws are. She could pounce on Hank and it’d be over for him in a breath.

Hank sighs. “You need help.”

“You need something, Hank. You’re a lonely man.”

“Like an ostrich?”

“Like an ostrich.”

Hank leaves without saying anything. Rati pulls at you and you roll over. Your hip cracks. It’s usually followed by a pain you have to grit your teeth to get through, but right now doesn’t hurt. Right now, you fall into each other for the fourth or fifth time today. Dianne can wait. Bad news always has a shelf life of forever. It’s not as important as this moment.

You reach over and place your hand on Rati’s stomach, the eggs inside already bloating her body. Eggs. Plural. You forget that about birds.

They say a comedy ends with a wedding and a tragedy with a funeral. Life is neither, so you usually get both.

When you call Dianne, she can barely form a sentence. Hysterical is the word you’re not supposed to use, but that’s exactly what it is. She doesn’t have to say anything. You already know.

But eventually, she gets it out.

Your son, Clifford, had a thing for public pools. Being in public pools while elderly women did their aerobics. Putting his genitals against the water jets during this time. What he didn’t know is that the water has to go somewhere. It went up, inside. His bladder exploded. What you think happened is that he confused his bladder popping for some intense sexual gratification and he went about the day, stunned and confused. He bled from the inside and the damage was too much.

Dianne says this, more or less. You can tell she’s trying to leave out details, so you piece the rest together. She doesn’t seem to care about this oddity in Clifford’s life. She’s more interested in transforming his death into her tragedy.

You say, “I’m sorry for your loss.”

She says, “Thank you.” And nothing else. You wonder if she’s forgotten that Clifford’s your son. You’ve forgotten, Clifford did too. So it’s not out of reach. Before you can say anything else, she hangs up.

You want more than anything to be back in Rati’s arms. But when you turn around to leave, Marion Chapel’s there. So is Hank. And about ten other residents of Del Largo Sueño. A mob with canes and hearing aids instead of pitchforks and burning torches.

Marion Chapel says, “Hank tells me some disturbing things about you.” The skin on her neck has that cooled lava look.

Hank says, “Where is it?”

You say, “Where’s what?”

“The bird.”

“She flew away.”

You want to run, but you can’t. And even if you could shuffle out of this, there are men in this mob who can shuffle faster than you. Hank comes close to you. He’s trying to get friendly.

He whispers, “Listen: just let this be over. I don’t want them to do this to you.”

You don’t think about it. You rear back and slam your fist against Hank’s nose. Every bone in your hand shatters like tortilla chips. Hank stumbles back, blood splooshing from his nose. He’s shocked, desperate. He screams.

And the mob descends on you like a bad dream.

“No, you can’t do this!”

You’ve already tried to overpower Hank, but you’re on the ground now. He stands over you. Something cracked when you hit the rec center’s unkind floor. You can’t feel the pain yet. You try to stand, but your legs are too loose.

“Stay down, you old bastard.” Hank’s got his wrinkled hands balled into fists. “I told you this thing wouldn’t last.”

Other people in the mob mumble similar things. Someone laughs. Someone says Poor sonofabitch is over the edge.

You can’t stay down. The way men in the mob have Rati by the neck, the way her head trashes. You rage. The two old-timers who run the death pool hold the door open to the Zumba studio. “Turn Turn Turn” by The Byrds spills out of the studio, casting a twisted optimism over everything. Inside, the male ostrich waits, feathers fluffed, its chest puffed. Its big legs step in place, massive talons clacking against the polished wood floor. Two of the stronger residents stand behind the safety of a raised DJ booth and hold the male ostrich back with a long leash. Hank takes Rati and shoves her toward the door.

“Stop, goddammit. That’s my wife!”

Everyone laughs. You push yourself up. Your hand slips and your face cracks against the floor. Your dentures clatter out of your mouth. The skin on your chin splits and blood runs freely. You haven’t been taking your coagulant.

“This is horrible. I can’t look at him,” says Marion Chapel. She’s at the front of the mob gathered for the upcoming fight. The men who surround her are all disfigured from the Marion Chapel Disease. They’ve all got a sedated, awestruck glaze to their faces.

Hank says, “You should’ve just gotten together with Marion. Or one of the nice human women here.”

Someone in the crowd says, “Or men.”

Marion says, “I would’ve never been with him.”

Hank says, “There are plenty of people who need someone in their lives. Not this bird.”

Hank almost has her all the way in the Zumba studio.

You shout, “Wait.”

Hank stops, giving you a chance to look Rati in the eyes. You two hold the look, connect like you always did at her pen. You say to her, “I’m sorry.” Then you turn to Hank and say, “Let me fight instead.”

Hank’s face drops. Rati freezes, eyes go wide. No one speaks. Everyone starts trading looks that say Now this could be something different.

Marion says, “He doesn’t know what he’s saying.”

Hank says, “That thing in there’ll kill you in a second.”

You say, “Maybe. But that means it won’t kill her. Or my children.”

A collective, “Your what?”

You say, “I’ve got pretty good odds on the death pool there. I’m not killing myself. I will fight. Let me do this.”

One of the guys who runs the death pool hurries out of the studio and starts collecting bets from the mob. He keeps shouting odds that change with every bet made. Hank pulls some money out of his pocket and slips it into the bookie’s palm. He looks back at you and the two of you share a smile like you’re friends again.

You say, “Against me.”

He says, “A sure thing.”

“I’ve got money on the death pool. Give it to my wife when this is over.”

Hank nods. “Sure. I can do that. Whatever you need.”

But you can’t imagine Hank bringing the money to Rati in her pen, or turning that money into something Rati might need––or that your children will need. You can’t imagine that Hank won’t make Rati fight anymore, or that your children won’t grow up to fight for the entertainment of the next rotation of residents of Del Largo Sueño. What you can imagine is Hank taking the cash, buying himself a new E-Z Go, taking Marion Chapel out for a high-dollar early bird. You know he’s just saying yes so you’ll get in there and die quick.

Someone shouts from the mob, “Let the man take a cane or something.”

Someone answers, “If he does, change the odds.”

Hank helps you up. Whatever cracked in your hip isn’t keeping you from taking small steps toward the studio. You shuffle past Rati and she cranes her neck in front of your face. You slide your hand down her beak to the side of her face. Her eyes are wet. A tear falls. You try and catch it, but you’re too slow. You try to say I love you but without your dentures it comes out as an all-gums I thopff eww. She looks around, pecking absently at things in the way ostriches do. She pecks at your hand, then at your shirt. She picks up a pill that’s fallen onto the floor and shakes it down her throat.

Hank shoves you through the door. You stay on your feet, but it hurts to do so.

He says, “See you on the other side.”

It occurs to you that if there is somewhere after this, it’s a place where Hank will be as well. You want to say I hope not, but you know it’ll come out sounding like a wet sneeze. So you give him a middle finger that’s bordering on arthritic.

From the mob, you hear someone say, “They make huge omelets. Lots of omegas.”

Hank shuts the door. Locks it. The Byrds keep singing turn turn turn, but everything here stays the same.

This is where it ends. Standing in the studio. Joints made of sand. Dentures gone, all gums. Prostate feeling like a hot rock. Every ounce of you bloody and fragile. The male ostrich is twice your height, its body like an idling train. Massive. Ready to do damage. It stomps the floor. The vibration rings through your bones, makes your hip whine. You try and stand a little straighter.

You look over at the window, at all the ravenous faces ready to watch you die. Impatient for the small time between now and then. There isn’t an ounce of sadness or awareness. Your eyes stop on Rati. She pecks at the window, the space between the two of you so little but impossible to cross.

You slip ahead in time. To a future where you and Rati have a home that’s somewhere not here. Rati’s in your backyard, laying your children in a shallow hole, returning to that hole twice a day to turn your children so they don’t spoil. You’re in the house, still healing from the fight. When she comes inside, you will make a joke about her head in the sand. She will peck at you playfully. You two will sleep together every night, comfortable and warm. Loved. She will lift you both physically and emotionally. She knows exactly who you are. You know everything she can be. You both are in a place where people don’t point, where your love isn’t cursed. And eventually, your children join. Dozens of perfect little ones, better than you could ever be. Each time they beat their wings, your name will be the wind that lifts them. It all seems real. A place where you are strong and possible, where your children are happy and loved.

JUST GIVE ME A FUNERAL by Greg Gerke

August 27, 2021

On Thanksgiving, the southbound 1 train stopped at 96th Street and, to the surprise of the few people in the last car, an older woman with a sunbaked face in a big-brimmed gardening hat blocked the doors with a fold-up shopping cart and started to load four large bags of possessions into the space. She balanced the rectangular cart front wheels in and back out, over the gap between the car and platform, to jam the doors while hefting the bags around it and safely inside. Where did this rail-thin woman, probably 5’4”, get the strength? a young man on his way to his Aunt’s loft in Tribeca for Thanksgiving dinner asked himself. She struggled but squeezed the first one over, though it ripped on the cart and newspapers splayed across the floor like the emptying of a fishing net’s haul. The operator yelled for the doors in the rear to be unblocked. The woman waved with a storied nonchalance and, proceeding to bag two, hummed some tune popular when everyone smoked and legions loved to dance. A couple shook their heads understandingly, but then moored them in something like impatience; they didn’t want to be late for their short-fused family on this pregnant day. A lonesome man who had been just like her ten years ago, but now had an SRO that he was on his way to after an early free Thanksgiving dinner at a homeless organization, faintly recognized the striking presence and called the name he thought her parents had christened her—she did not answer. Bag two was wider than one and she had to angle the cart more. Whistling a crescendo, she parked the ripped one at the very back of the car, then slowly gathered bag two and pasted it on top, a sculptor's addition. She waited for the clenched doors to open to go out and get the rest. Someone near the front of the car yelled for her to hurry up and someone else Fuck you’d him. The conductor chided again, adding, Two seconds and I call the police...one-two. Okay. I know who you are. The woman kept her head down and continued with bag three and the young man and the ex-homeless man sprinted to help her and they got everything in and the doors closed and the train powered on to 86th street. A reminder, ladies and gentlemen, please do not block...

The woman sat in the corner, her hand roosting in the bag atop the ripped one, while the two others lived on the seats facing her with the cart wedged against them, a bungee cord tied to the right side wheels. Her articles carried a reek, but a temperate one—mold, not body odor. She once owned an array of expensive soaps and cleansers during her early years, continuing into her first marriage to the heir of a manufacturing magnate in Western Massachusetts, a fat man who kept her cooped until his early demise after five years of hell. The two other bags were full of clothes, books, papers, miscellany, and about a dozen cell phones she’d found in the last year. She wore a large threadbare coat over a sweater, a cardigan, a long-sleeved puce pajama top, and a three-year-old tee-shirt from the city’s marathon. Over her black long johns was a colorful but marred dress she’d found in a Hell’s Kitchen dumpster—a piece made in Mexico that the previous owner wore once for Cinco de Mayo at her job as a hostess. That its new owner spoke Spanish was lost on the dress. She spoke French, too. She’d actually been a governess, spending a year in Paris with a family who lived off money from past sales of Impressionist paintings. A non-practicing Jew, she closed her eyes and wrote something on her hand with a cheap pen. It was a question about the fitness of her heart, more an approbation, and though she’d had health scares, her heart was unencumbered. The ex-homeless man called her name again and this time she tendered annoyance and announced, without looking, You might have my name, but you don’t have my numbers. I’m just trying to be nice, he said. Don’t you remember me? At Stuy Cove, years ago. Night of that wind storm. I got an apartment. I’m working in an electronics store. You got to get off the street. Let them help you. She heard his words, but desiring them to have no meaning, they didn’t. I’m looking through you, she said. Yeah, he said. Happy Thanksgiving to you.

The young man, who’d gone back to sexting with some fashion designer in San Francisco, peered at the woman, wanting to understand her story, her fall, but in a choose-your-own-adventure type of equation where he could play it out as a video game, taking on the role of a vampire that swoops in and sucks the life out of her without having to talk it out, downloading her story through her blood, now his. He certainly didn’t want to smell her, though she looked okay for a homeless woman, like she’d had a cute face in her twenties, even forties, and carried an aristocratic air, like she was from Paris or—no, Paris. But shouldn’t he treat her with a little respect? Like she lived on the street. The street. All she had was in these bags, so double fuck for her. He turned his music back on. The girl from San Francisco sexted back in quaggy San Franciscan fashion, My cunt is singing, I will survive...

She had grown out of her name—she’d told herself this so many times it was true. Names only confused the issue. As a child, what did she care about her name? She just wanted to be and she’d gotten that at last, aside from the interfering governmental and police forces. She lived without time, gladly and free. When tired, she slept. When she had to, she peed. When relaxed, she ate. Nothing mattered except the minute she was in. And because of her age and gender, she was constantly given things, even from other homeless people. Still, she used a hip pocket psychology to explain what she’d become, forever erasing what brought her there.

The 1 train would terminate in a destination appealing to her kind. People were allowed to sit all night in the Staten Island Ferry terminal, though they needed to clear every two hours for a security check. Battery Park? A designated tourist and rat zone only, even locals weren’t encouraged to be there—could someone who didn’t know better have a picnic next to those species, the fresh-faced throngs headed to Lady Liberty and Ellis Island, and the not-too-good abstract art projects? But it was at Franklin she would exit. Stash her stuff, as she knew the rotating station agents, and go to Moore Street, where this abandoned building marked for demolition miraculously still stood. She’d gotten the gate combination from another castaway who’d picked it and set two old mattresses on the second story a hundred yards away from each other, adding bright neon tape to outline enormous holes in the floor. This embittered man, who didn’t like the human race, except her, had gone to New Jersey for the holiday and wouldn’t be back till Saturday. She didn’t listen to all he said, too used to his jibes and weak come-ons, but when he let something important slip, she recorded it at once.

In the black of the day’s new darkness, she kicked at a fat rat’s shadow and went to her mattress, at the head of which stood a rickety chair whose back spindles were broken. She reclined on the droopy bed, using a wool sweater as a mattress liner, and unpeeled the paper-top off a tin full of linguini that someone placed on her cart last night sometime after ten. She finger-picked a noodle. The sauce’s rich butter and cream pulled her up, reminding her she hadn’t eaten all day, and she crossed her legs, removed a stolen restaurant fork from her jacket, wiped it with a napkin, and began to eat.

The wind picked up and whooshed through the gaps and holes on her floor and down from those above her. At least she didn’t have to fend off gawkers, outreach, police, and the ever-present deviants who would fuck a woman if she had no head. A fire engine from Ladder 8 on Varick blared and she tested the air but only came away with herself, the coagulated food, vermin, and muck. The man said they might have a month’s more reprieve because some insider who supported the squat told him the funding for construction had some hiccup. Maybe till the 15th, maybe the New Year. You’ll know when you get here, he said.

The wind roiled some newspapers to lift off the ground like flashing kites in the dusky light. She chewed the gelatinous noodles by rote, like her stomach just had to be plugged into food. She had few opinions about gastronomy—she’d once taught her charges that word—and ate things she never used to, like eggplant and tofu. A shaking spotted hand raised an unwieldy Evian bottle refilled hundreds of times since she’d found it in August. If she cared about anything it was drinking water. It held off disease and sickness and assured her body function. Once she’d carried a Campari bottle for months, proud of it not breaking, until she dropped it on her socked foot one night, leaving a dark Rorschach blot of pain she limped on for three months.

A magnificent crash around the corner. Another piece of the ceiling must have collapsed. She closed the food, put it back in its bag, and tied it up. With a toothpick, she combed her teeth, glazed eyes darting across the room with half their usual alertness. She slept best right after the initial dark—the later lonelier hours, the hour of the wolf and of hounds, had too many demons to gain peace. With the energy of the holiday depopulating the city, tonight was different—she had little cause in the reprieve. Everything had darkened and she brought out a small taper, affixing it atop a cheap chrome candle holder. Then she lit it with a moan after dusting the area of rat and mice pellets, something she had first put off out of greed for the new pure solitude, her last great gift. She lay back, musing at the flicking shadows. She powered on a small music thingamajig she’d found, using one earphone to hear a jazz album.

Many decades ago she’d lived in Amsterdam with her second husband, a high diplomat and attaché, during a year of Kennedy. She had so much rare and expensive jewelry to warrant special insurance—what a fuss. They lived in the redoubtable Willemspark neighborhood near the large rectangular evergreening Vondelpark, filled with softly still waterways and many Dutch Red Chestnuts and birches. A small mansion of intricate brickwork. Three stories, with a housekeeper and a cook, a piano room, a painting by Mondrian. The year she ruled there, she became a quasi French Lieutenant’s Woman, having two miscarriages on top of the two before (to cement her childless life), a surprising affair, and a widening expansion of her consciousness (she’d again chosen a man who needed to control her—never again!) as her sheltered years in New England fell away like brittle discolored leaves she once could not shed. As weapons turned the world inside out, other rumblings fractured the cultural and psychic bedrock. She’d matured away from her country and she came to accommodate something she had no control over—her fate. Fate had given her the type of beauty and intelligence easily coveted and she interchanged it for what she fancied—not so much experience as a kind of electricity that should never be thought vain, but parsimonious in not obviously having to whet every appetite she developed. As much as she thought life could instruct, it did not obviate her from experiencing any splendor. Again and again, she kept getting what she probably wanted, freely accepting attention, adulation, and a minor fame—and then she kept getting more of it, as her stuffy husband would view her askance over Eggs Benedict, watching as the beautiful bird transformed and rose higher into something clearly not meant for him. With no child and no connection beyond the name, his title suffered some as he became known as the husband of her, the American who speaks like Katherine Hepburn, but looks like Garbo. Who could be in Vogue and would be except for his position in the government. She—whom everyone wanted, pitying him his certain loss of her.

One December evening they went as guests of the embassy to a strange midnight concert to hear the rhythms of their countrymen. She’d not heard much jazz, not been exposed, though music had passed many of her hours. She’d played piano from an early age without distinction and then had some jaundiced years on the flute. Excitable, but out of love with him, she accompanied. Performance by the most grand musicians could throw off the tourniquet she always imagined pinioned on her soul. So much could go wrong up there, but it never did. Performers seemed to be filmed and not present, outside the realm of fallibility—she could not fathom how they crisply, expertly burst out, blood pulsing, while others watched or listened or both, waiting for triumph and disaster. The great conductors: Bernstein in New York, von Karajan in Berlin, Sir Colin Davis in London, were gods. Motion pictures were intriguing and she had her favorites. But Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster weren’t people magically in her space—they were distant and magnified on the silver screen, distorted. They spoke catchy words, but their manner was a little cold, a little unreal. Music had no antecedent, no story, it impressed by degrees, in the awing conceptions enfranchised notes spurred on sound; time in music didn’t govern, it shook the body into primordial understanding. She’d easily fallen in love with her husband because music did something for him as well, though he didn’t view it in such a spiritual manner as she, rather in some patriotic vein, where it uplifted and made one’s capacity for moral living larger. He’d mentioned jazz off-handedly, after seeing acts in DC semi-regularly by himself.

Why such a late concert? It was the second of two and to be up late on a Saturday instilled some chicness onto those who weren’t, except for their money and status, both false markers. Not everyone respected such a time but the band began playing early before everyone had been seated and after one peppy piece with simply too many notes, the saxophone leader went into his rendition of a tune she knew well. Hearing his hornbreath blow the words, she checked herself because even if it was on some level gimmicky, it seemed miraculous. This burly black: full face, full suit, pressing and pressing, fulminating in a way that Oscar Hammerstein and certainly goody goody Julie Andrews had no purchase on—exhorting? She didn’t know the word, but felt it. Do you like it? her husband asked. Sssh, yes. The long version of the short song went on and a stoic part of her started to despise it: the dissonance, the down and dirty, the unbridled quality, the racial swing. She felt disturbed. Long periods of sound in the other pieces held no meaning for her and felt hardly structured—yet, they did engage because she was mentally fleeing, upset. If she didn’t care she’d be asleep, eyes open. She couldn’t leave. On and on, the unseemly flow attacked, blasting through the detritus she fruitlessly threw back, leaving the notes to clash, their subsequent syncopation always freshly re-conjured. Where could this go? How could it even continue to thrive? Why would they be rewarded for it with money? She separately focused on each of the quartet’s members and then went back to the main man. Some pillar Michelangelo might have sculpted, an enormous rock vividly alive in more than its allotted space—dead at forty of cancer and drugs. She wanted to kiss the giant lips making that terrible beauty.

Halfway into the third song, she told herself the music was foolish. He might be a genius, but his music would only drive one to vice and after a few more measures of that song, which she’d later find out was “Mr. P.C.,” she felt sickened by her life of lies.

She could still hear the man’s music some fifty years later. Deep, dark, but incredibly clear. Its matrix carried more and more and she ultimately defined it as tender and fully compassionate, yet cooly uncalculated—round and whole, even if pain did exist. It still extracted an unmistakable flavor, like the boiling of bones.

Everything comprising her life then had ended, but she had this—a moment that made time miraculous. Something millions wished they could have experienced. The tame jazz in her earphone eventually crept back. She had to resume her life, which as lives went was difficult, but not intolerable. Everybody would want the story of how she lost it all and how she ended up here, in an abandoned building with whatever other indelicacies ready to be heaped on her. She didn’t like stories. They weren’t as valuable as people thought—only experience. Stories were simply antecedents of the real—travel, work, meeting people. So many lived by aperçus, as if they were all wannabe French philosophers, people she never read anyway. She had nothing to say, no advice and no hope for her future. She couldn’t live with people, but some remaining seed hopelessly yearned for companionship. At least someone she could look at without wanting to tear his heart from his chest, who didn’t tamp her urge to complain—he’d already be well attuned to the stalactites deposited about her perceptions.

After months and months of lengthened days, the nights had precedence, stretching more and more, as the earth rounded the sun, bodies ruling human time. There. Something still weighed. Didn’t that prove she did have a part in society? If she had someone to recount what befell her and what she thought about it—but she couldn’t help it. This was how she’d changed in her life, from a mouse to a lion, and finally a raccoon. A few gun-shy people were concerned but mostly to massage their own egos. They gave her things and listened to the litanies with cloistered, embarrassed ears. They didn’t know the moment they became uninterested, something keenly perceived at once, would singe her. But what else could she speak of? Her life, a constant battle—how could she not complain? Bitterness forever tinting her bright green eyes a shade darker. Just give me a funeral, she said to one of these people, a woman who worked at a CVS on the Upper West Side near her frequent staging ground. A thirty-two-year-old who commuted from the Bronx, she wanted to go back to school for nursing, but could never get the applications together on time. A slightly overweight woman who smiled often and told her that she herself had been homeless for a summer after a boyfriend beat her up and kicked her out of their Orlando apartment. This woman baked her things, cakes and homemade bread—she made double portions of her lunches during the week, some delicacy placed in a rescued Chinese takeout container and a brown bag, with a folded napkin and a plastic fork or spoon. On each occasion she said, Thank you, my dear, thinking about the giver’s own mother and wondering if they still had a relationship, though she never asked. And just last week, after the first freezing night of the winter (her feet still felt cold at nine in the morning, to remain chilled till late afternoon), she received what turned out to be shepherd's pie with a little less enthusiasm. Awake through hours of bitter cold, it suddenly didn’t surprise her that she could just die. Not that she should, but she could finally latch onto the honorable finale instead of another long subway trip, another night frozen. Fuck this world, fuck life. Thoughts she would never let into her public lexicon. And that cloudy morning, still fogged with cold, the young woman peered, waiting for the gracious phrase and wink she usually bestowed following the hand-off, but the old woman trembled inside because she was aware of her complicity, her involvement in another’s emotional well being. Just give me a funeral...she said quietly. Then uttered the very passive-aggressive New York type of plea again, with more seriousness. Just give me a funeral. A gloss on her own mother’s, You’ll miss me when I’m gone. Even with no sun in her eyes, she shaded them to see the youth in front of her—Jasmine, she came to learn was her name. I’ll be alright, dear. Don’t mind my little jokes. You get to work now, but Theresa wouldn’t move because she sensed a lie.

Really, dear, really. It’s frustration.

Jasmine then delivered what she’d turned over many times before, during her days at the register and at home on the couch, seeing a homeless person appear comet-like on her television shows. You can stay with me, Emma, adding her name in a loving, pitying way. You can have a couch. Stay for a few weeks, you can.

No, dear, please.

Jasmine hesitated. Wet-eyed, she said, I have to make sure. I can’t let something—Don’t hurt yourself, don’t.

No, no, and she patted Jasmine on her back. I won’t, I won’t.

Do you promise?

Yes, I promise you. Go on now, it’s after nine.

In Tribeca, she sat up cross-legged, again working a pick through every crevice of her teeth. Things which would remain. Maybe she’d spend the next weeks accepting death. Her bluster would eventually fail her. The end would be on its way, not because she had no one but because she had nothing left to accomplish.

The building creaked in the wind and she remembered her parents, briefly. Small, silent people who never wanted to be a bother. Whatever did they want for her? She wasn’t interested in the answer. In the end, it had all been enough. From the high to the low, or was it the other way? Had she arrived at one or the other?

THROUGH THE LAUNDROMAT WINDOW by Rachel L.E. Klammer

August 20, 2021

Jane watches the world from across the laundromat. Her apartment window affords a view of the parking lot and inside the laundromat. Jane watches a plump and elderly man wash horse blankets for the third time that month. A sign near his machine says ‘please do not wash horse blankets.’

Jane has been watching the laundromat for three months, ever since she first moved to town during the ever-clinging winter. It is April now, and still snow and melting icicles crawl over building roofs. There will be snow lumped in the edges of some valleys and higher altitudes of the park into July.

Jane watches for Dale. She had not started by watching for Dale, but now it takes up much of her time. The window is foggy—the cold creeps in from under the edges and there is a draft, so Jane stuffs damp towels against the cracks so that she does not grow so cold at the window. Dale does not come, though the falling sun shines starbursts against her eyes in stinging heat, and leaves there dappled, dark, soft things. On the street below a man with a beer gut talks to another man, and the road could be one large slab of sidewalk with how rarely cars come by. One of the men holds a rake, and Jane wonders what they could be raking, as there are no leaves on the pavement. Do people rake pavement?

Jane passes the time by working on her art. She cuts shapes from the broad bodies of leaves like one might carve a linoleum block. She had pressed her desk against the window in her living room so that she could work and watch at the same time. She cuts patterns in leaves—intricate, delicate things, like birds with their hollow bones. Sometimes she carves poems, but other times she cuts animals or scenes. No one had wanted her leaves for a very long time, but now she is meant to be working—for a small gallery in Boston, thousands of miles away. Her aunt had given her the keys to a Gardiner apartment (the one with the west-facing window that looked out over the last block of town, and Yellowstone National Park behind it), because that was the thing artists did—retreat somewhere to work, like you put in one thing and out comes another thing.

Jane’s leaves are not right for cutting, because they have grown too dry since the fall, so she has to soak them in tubs of water in the fridge, and sometimes they are too sludgy and they tear. Jane does not leave her apartment so much anymore. The stretch of the pavement is not such a flat thing, and it rears often in front of Jane if she steps outside, spins her the way children spin, sick after carnival rides.

Jane is wiping at the leaves, trying to clean the sludge from their surface when Dale’s van pulls up. Jane jumps from her seat and grabs her camera from where it perches on the back of her couch.

Dale steps out of a grey-paneled van, one with curtains over the back windows and rust creeping up the bumper. Jane hadn’t known who Dale was at first—a man or a woman, and so had named them Dale, though it is so obvious now that Jane knows how to look. She had taught herself (had been taught) to appreciate the boundaries of things which were Dale the same way she had learned to appreciate modernism in art school.

Dale looks like the people at Jane’s art school on the west coast, with bleached hair half-shaved but long on top, and a tank top ripped so low Jane can see the sharp protrusion of ribs through binoculars. Dale wears a new tank top today, not one of the repurposed band tees that Jane usually sees (singers she has always heard of, but never heard)—but instead it is black and reads ‘fuck off’ in faint grey lettering, like one had dragged paintbrush bristles, jagged and stiff over still-wet cloth. Jane snaps a picture.

Dale has one laundry bag, always: an old pillowcase with stains on the bottom, faint rings of grey. Dale showers sometimes in the small stalls at the back of the laundromat, and they have a separate pillowcase for that for clean clothing and soap. That pillowcase has more stains where soap bottles had burst during the mountain climb, too much pressure or too little, as Dale’s van drove in and out of the park. Jane thinks Dale has come from lower places, where deer and coyote lope shambling, in smaller valleys that do not freeze, but suspend, always, in hanging humidity.

Jane presses the round of the binoculars to her eyes until cold metal fades to hot sting. Dale does not shower this time, butwashes their laundry on delicate with powdery detergent from a Ziploc bag. They tumble dry only half of it, laying out socks and base layers on the bench outside in the sun. Jane can see the fuzz of the wool, the pill of it, the wet imprints it leaves behind on wood, the way the dark damp seeps into the texture of the grain and creeps there, beyond the boundaries of the sock. Dale sits at the table near the window where they can watch the bench. The table is an old rusted thing taken from the local coffee shop when they had left it on the curb. One of Dale’s feet is propped up on the sill across from them, and Jane can see the cut of their boots, hard, old, and chapping, with mud-dried laces. Dale has strings, earbuds, hanging from their ears. Jane couldn’t see them before she had bought the binoculars from the woman at the E.L.K. Shop, but now she sees them clearly: white cord aged yellow and brittle.

Jane watches for a long while at the empty spaces until Dale finally gathers all their laundry, bundles it into their van, and drives away. Jane can see, still, the pile of dirt their shoes left on the windowsill, and the drying patches of wet in the sun. That night, when she lays in bed and the lights from the windows cast shadows past the leaves she has hung there, she thinks of her first night in Gardiner.

Jane had met a man at the bar that first night, still sweaty from moving boxes despite the dry air and cheeks just starting to peel. Her bangs hung low over her eyes, and she’d always meant to trim them but kept stalling before the barber door like a pinwheel turning over and over in the breeze. The bar is easier, dark and dank, lit by dust-covered neon and half-burnt bulbs. Rocko worked in the park, and she’d thought he was such a kind old man if not a little leery, but then weren’t they all like that? Wasn’t that the price one paid for their conversation and their beer, slid over harmlessly before one even knew they had entered the transaction?

Rocko had tried to fuck Jane on the street outside the laundromat—had first invited her over, and then had grabbed her arm and covered her mouth with his own, and Jane had closed her eyes and tried to think of how not to hurt his feelings, of how still to be good. Jane had tried to wait until he was finished, to explain, to tell him, no I’m sorry, you’re very sweet, but I have a boyfriend, a father, a brother. But Rocko hadn’t finished, had trailed the wet surface of his tongue down her face and neck and the start of her chest and left patches of sticky, pimpling skin, had reached his hand down the front of her jeans to scratch at underwear that still needed changing after the trip and Jane thought of old, crusty discharge catching against his fingers and lodging under his nails.

I’m sorry, Jane had said, I need to shower. I’m not very clean. I’m very tired. I’m sorry, I’ll be right back down, I just need to change, I’m sorry.

Jane sat in front of the window in her apartment and watched him until he left, and wondered what she might say to him if she saw him again.

———

Jane likes to make jarred oatmeal for breakfast. he mixes oats and milk in mason jars before she goes to bed because that is what people in videos do: five-minute Facebook recipes that scroll through her feed betweens ads and classmates who seem less familiar than they are. Jane doesn’t sleep much, so when she pads from bed in the morning, shaking with cold and low blood sugar, with eyes that burn with the effort to focus, the oats are still chewy and gummy. She sits and eats them by the window, wrapped still in her comforter, stomach aching, acid, with each bite.

Jane does not see Dale that morning because nobody does laundry two days in a row unless you are the old woman who lives in the cabin three blocks away. The goat woman comes every morning at 6:30, the same time the younger woman (a night waiter at the bar where Jane met Rocko) unlocks the door. The waiter has two young children, Jane thinks. That is why the waiter works two jobs, but sometimes people work two jobs even without children, so maybe the woman has no children. Maybe the woman is working off college loans, or maybe she just likes laundromats like Jane does.

Jane thinks the goat woman has to do laundry every morning because she lives with goats in her cabin, and Jane does not think goats can be potty trained, so the woman washes linens often, and Jane wonders if it might not be better for her to get her own washing machine. She wonders, if the woman really does have a cabin, she must also have a yard, and a place for a wash bin and clothesline. She wonders if the goats prefer the indoors, the feel of couch fiber and carpet, if they chew at siding and cords, or if they would rather be outdoors, fenced in her yard and munching on weeds.

Jane watches when the goat woman leaves an hour later, carrying big piles of fabric, bunched under and beneath and around the overhang of her breasts, the wedge of her stomach. Jane checks her email for messages from her mom, even though they have not emailed in a long while. There are emails from JoAnn Fabric telling her there is a sale on winter patterns, but nothing from anyone else. Sometimes, Jane pretends that JoAnn is an old woman, like a grandmother who is invested in fabric deals and doesn’t know she shouldn’t email so much, or that there are no fabric stores for miles.

Jane has a friend in the park, Jack, old enough to be her father, who she met that first week in the line at the grocery store. Jane hadn’t made eye contact with him, had stared at the way his shoes ghosted over cracks and gouged linoleum, but still he had talked to her and asked her where she was from. Jack had bought her coffee and she had taken it because she did not know how not to. He had been kind, and funny. He had asked about her life before, in Boston. He had asked about her art. Jane wanted him to like her. Jane wants him to like her.

Jane texts Jack things she finds funny throughout the day. Things like ‘horse blanket man is washing horse blankets again’ and ‘here's a picture of a nuthatch that is building a nest on my windowsill.’ He responds sometimes, with his own quip or something about the park, but most of the time he doesn’t and Jane works on her leaves and thinks about how, in a few short years, they’ll crumble to dust.

Jane gets angry, sometimes. Sometimes, Jane gets angry and punches herself, slams her arms against countertops and then gets angrier that she is too weak to do much damage, punches the drywall like a child punching through a pillow. Sometimes Jane can watch burst blood vessels bloom like mulberries buried beneath her skin, but never real bruises. She wonders what people would say about real bruises, what people would say if Rocko had fucked her there on the street against the hard surface of the brick wall.

Jane wants to write ‘look, I fell in the shower :(’ and send a picture of her mottled arm. Instead she says ‘I think the nuthatch had babies :).’ Jack texts back a smiley face.

That night, Jane dreams of women’s bodies, the way she drew them in art school—the smooth expanse of them, where pores and nipples and hair and mouth were rubbed out to nothing. She dreams of them, scrawled like boneless things, without muscle or sinew, on the surface of her bed, staring up or down or anywhere. She dreams her hands sink in when she touches them, that flesh falls away to bone—not bone, marrow—until she is them and they are her.

———

Dale does not come back the next day, because nobody does laundry every other day. Jane wonders what they are doing—if they live, always in the van, or if there is some place, some town somewhere, that contains Dale the way a pitcher holds water—how Dale pours. If Dale fills or is filled.

Jane is running out of oats, so she does not eat breakfast. Jane wonders if she could offer enough money to have the grocery store bring the groceries to her door, but the thought of dialing the phone makes her hands shake. They only have two employees, she thinks—one to stock shelves and another to work the register. One employee must come early, to squeeze guacamole from bags in the back room, to cut fruit and fry chicken.

Jane sits at her desk and works on her leaves, but they are too dry now and crumble beneath her fingers. She will not be able to get more, and the thought sits with her, hollow. She thinks of art galleries in Boston, bricked walls and cigarette butts. Jane checks her email and her phone. Jane looks at the mailbox from the top of the stairs. Jane sits by her window and watches the passing cars.

Jane feels her thoughts like one feels water, the rush of it around body—does it move, flow, or is it still? Does she move around it? Does it move around her?

As the sun disappears behind the swell of the mountains, she sees a paneled van.

Jane’s breath catches—the snap of surface tension when raindrop meets pond. Dale parks, always paralleled, wheels mashing against curb. A horn honks, once, twice, three times—a man leans out a truck window. He yells at Dale as Dale steps out of their van, mud splattered up the front of their pants, and flips him off.

Jane watches Dale walk inside, trailing dirt. Jane watches Dale’s hands, the red scrape of them, hanging thin patches of white skin and crusting blood dragging over the rip in a jean. Jane watches Dale strip to underwear in front of the machines, watches as their skin drags muddy dapples forward and back across the surface of their ribs with each turn, sports bra and boxer shorts and uneven, creeping tan, splotchy and browned.

Jane thinks they must know that she watches them, and the feeling excites her, makes her want to peel back the glass of her window like Saran from dough. Dale showers in the stalls that line the back wall—tall doors with no finish that are gouged over and crept in mold, and as she waits she remembers.

Jane remembers Rocko against the brick wall outside, remembers her cousin’s body years before, bracketed around her, pinning her to the wall behind his bed, remembers her own body, limp and brassy like a doll, the taste of her cousin’s mouth like nothing, the feel of nothing but wet and soft like the inside of a gourd before one had pulled the guts out for baking, the wet snap of it between fingers and caught beneath nails.

Jane watches Dale leave, watches them wrest on clothing still damp from the dryer, watches them spread damp towels over the dashboard of their van before driving around the corner and north—the only road out of town. Jane wonders where they sleep, if it is beneath trees or parked somewhere covered over in headlights, curtains pulled shut in the back.

Jane thinks of them, of breasts that aren’t mounds, that don’t erupt violently from skin like burgeoning pustules, but instead rise gently, sitting low enough to be nothing but a suggestion. She thinks of women, slung over in mud with hair that is not hair, but tangled, matted, bare feet and chipped nails. She thinks of women, not smoothed or planed, but rough, hewn over like sandpaper, the sting of them, the cut of their skin, and hers.

———

Jane talks to herself like her parents used to talk to her. Calls herself stupid when she thinks of a trip to the grocery store where she couldn’t manage to get the cashier to smile back at her. She thinks of the texts she sends to Jack and almost blocks his number, thinks of Dale, of their eyes meeting through the double windows and starts to cry. Later, when she cuts at leaves too soggy to tear, she tells herself she’s invisible, that she could fade out to almost nothing, take the apartment with her and live forever on the second floor of the building across from the laundromat—unrecognizable. How wonderful it would be, to be unobservable, to be unable to talk or act or do anything. A self-contained ecosystem, thought with no reaction. She thinks of following Dale’s van, grows uncomfortable at the idea that it could exist anywhere else besides the laundromat, that it doesn't simply fade away when it turns the corner of the block.

When Jane dreams, she dreams of Dale, crawling over the cold of her body. She dreams of swells, pushed together until they hurt, of flat chests and hair where it shouldn't be. She thinks of smooth plastic, the things that should be beneath her jeans, underwear and then—?

The not real Jane—the dream Jane—asks Dale if they love her.

Dale says no.

BOY CRAZY by Lauren Barbato

August 13, 2021

The young married women at the conference upstate agree that it’s nice to be around someone so boy crazy. That’s how they say it: boy crazy.

The young married women help you flirt with Ben, the writer from Seattle via Georgia. They accompany you to the pricey cocktail bar downtown and conveniently leave early. Ben walks you down a sleepy street with few lights to your tiny cabin rental. You show each other your tattoos as mosquitos nibble your ankles.

In three years, you’ll be married, the young married women say. We want to come to the wedding.

***

Lawrence returns from his school-sponsored trip to France and says I love you. No, he doesn’t say it; he writes it on college-ruled paper. The note is tucked inside a black beret wrapped in a plastic Kmart bag.

You read this note on the bus, scrunched in the corner of the three-seater as your two best friends chat about the fight that broke out in gym class. You read the words a second, third, fourth time and flick your hoop earrings. From your seat, you can see Lawrence walking to his bus. Triumphant. You read the words a fifth, sixth, seventh time and memorize the way the L curls at the bottom, how the v attaches itself to the e.

You tell Lawrence the next day that he’s just your friend. You say it just like that: Just my friend.

Your grandmother spots Lawrence after Christmas Eve Mass. While standing in front of baby Jesus in the manger, she asks, Why don’t you give Lawrence a kiss? You turn away from her and baby Jesus and Lawrence, who still follows you around sometimes, almost reluctantly.

Roman is your first real kiss, three years later. The next year, you fuck his best friend on a camping trip in the Pine Barrens.

I want to punch him, Roman says. You sip beers by the community pool, your ankles rolling in the water. The best friend takes ten years to say, I’m sorry, but we’ll get to that.

Tyler is an architect-in-training who you meet the first week of college. You don’t want to let anyone know that you can’t remember your first kiss. It may have been on the quad, or the mosaic-tiled bench outside the library, or one of the lumpy red leather couches in the corner of the late-night coffee shop. You bring Hershey bars and cappuccinos to his windowless art studio; he leaves animated marginalia in all your paperbacks. You sleep next to each other for nine months but don’t sleep together.

You make out with the best friend when Tyler is in Italy with his family, leaving you at home for the summer in the suburbs. The best friend takes you to the park at midnight, where you kick off your rubber flip flops and crawl into the plastic tunnel connecting the twisty slide to the monkey bars. You find yourself on top of him in the tunnel, your tank top rolled to the waist. All you do is kiss. The best friend says he feels guilty, but you still don’t know why.

In this version, you are the cheater and you don’t believe it.

You choose not to believe it.

Scott likes to straddle your body and put himself in your mouth. He pushes you against a wall during junior year and leaves you there, still and silent. You get in your car and drive west on Pico Boulevard to wander around a mall with no money. You meet a Russian man in a coffee shop and accept an invitation to his Westside apartment.

You wake up with bruises lining your inner thighs. You take the long way home, driving south on the PCH until you end up in a biker bar at the edge of Orange County. Your friends don’t call or look for you because this is what you always do. You’re always out with a boy, they say when you return to the apartment smelling like stale popcorn and Marlboro Reds. This is just how you are.

Scott calls you the next morning, asks you out for lunch, but he never says he’s sorry. You break up with him at your spot, the Indian buffet on Vermont, and walk four blocks in the wrong direction.

In this version, you read Madame Bovary for class and cry when she swallows the rat poison.

You fuck the best friend on the floor of his parents’ basement. He’s twenty-five now and lives with his girlfriend. You’ve recently turned twenty-one. Rug burns coat your knees. The best friend opens the back door to smoke a joint. He tells you he’s applying to law schools in Los Angeles. You nap on blankets and throw pillows until 6 a.m. and when you wake, you think of Los Angeles.

You think you might love him if he lets you.

You forget the part where he’s in love with someone else.

The best friend never comes to Los Angeles, which is something you should’ve known. You spend the summer in the Southern California sun, writing some very strange flash fiction that contains the phrase foreign moths. What are they, these foreign moths? Tourists on autopilot? You say something potentially interesting, potentially cliché, about desire. That it needs to be replenished. You are a foreign moth spiraling with desire.

You don’t want to be a foreign moth.

The next trip home, you don’t see the best friend, who texts you constantly even though he’s with his girlfriend and her family. He’s always tied up with something. On Christmas Eve, you chain-smoke in your parents’ basement and find a photograph of your grandmother, dated 1946. She looks like a Polish Lauren Bacall. She looks like a woman who would have said, I love you to many boys and left them in the morning.

A boy cums on your chest and tells you to leave.

A boy lifts you up, props you against a wall.

A boy kisses your roommate but follows you to your bed. This boy says you’re sweet.

This boy refuses to leave.

Erik texts you while you’re naked in Ted’s bed. He writes something about your nipple hair, how you should trim it for the next guy. He only texts you now to keep track of your movements on that short stretch of highway between Los Angeles and Long Beach. You throw your phone onto the floor and smile when Ted enters the room with a glass of whiskey.

In this version, you are twenty-two with a man twelve years your senior. You like to think you are in love with him.

She knows she is in love with him.

He knows he is not in love with her.

You have to text Erik when you accidentally make a baby, and when you accidentally make a baby, there are no congratulations. When Ted finds out, he’s relieved it’s not his. He leaves town on holiday two days before your abortion.

Erik drives you to the appointment, watches you pass through the clinic’s wide metal doors. He roams the nearby strip malls as a counselor presses you about your boys. You say you’ve slept with twenty, maybe. You say you’re the eighth woman Erik has gotten pregnant, definitely.

He is a bad boy, the counselor says.

And you are a nice girl.

You think about Ted often when you’re with John, the Ph.D. student. You get a job in Beverly Hills and drive past Ted’s house in Culver City. You think about him at the movies, during Oscar season. He texts you one night and invites you to the karaoke bar across from the Sony lot. You say you can’t, you need more notice, but you do not say you’re living with John. You know Ted understands.

He keeps inviting you.

In this version, you are not the cheater but you’re wondering.

You do the right thing and you’re conflicted.

Don’t be a foreign moth, you think. Be a butterfly.

But you still feel like a foreign moth, fluttering on an enclosed, darkened porch.

The summer between L.A. and Boston, the best friend kisses you on the empty Shore boardwalk at midnight. It lingers, it’s gentle, and that’s all it is. He mentions breaking up with his girlfriend; you don’t mention John. The best friend drives you to your parents’ house and follows you up the driveway. You kiss his cheek. Thank you, you say. Good luck with everything.

In this version, you’re the cheater but you’re not the only one.

You think it may work this time.

In Boston, you live with John in a one-bedroom apartment in a narrow brownstone on the north slope of Beacon Hill. You fuck John for the first time in six months. Two hours later, in your work cubicle, rubbing your thighs in those scratchy wool slacks, you reread the email from the best friend, who’s in Paris.

Smoking a cigarette on a balcony and thinking of you.

You visit Roman at the MIT radio station, where he hosts a late-night show that plays only Scandinavian electro-pop. He tells you the best friend got engaged in Paris. You walk along the Charles on the Cambridge side, view the jagged Boston skyline for the first time, and decline calls from the best friend.

You fuck Leo in his tiny room on the third floor of a Victorian house in Jamaica Plain. It’s easy to lie to John about this as you—still new to Boston—are really into making friends: a work friend, a girl friend, a just-a-friend friend.

You lie to John for three more weeks, and you only tell him because he finds you, still in your tights and sheer pink shirtdress, on the stiff Ikea couch. A pillow covers your face. John asks if you are okay. Have you ever cried in front of him before?

In this version, you are the cheater and it did work.

You are the cheater and you’re sorry.

Really, you’re relieved.

Leo likes that you’re taken. He moves in shortly after you move into your Brighton studio. He goes through your phone one morning, finds a stray text from Ted. He curses you, curses Ted.

Hey, Ted texts, how’s life?

Leo notices that you’ve changed all your passwords. He says I love you with a high-pitched inflection. He questions his love for you or, really, he is questioning yours.

The best friend texts you constantly. He thinks about you sucking his dick at work. He thinks about fucking you on the copier. You make me so fucking hard, he writes.

So hot, you write back.

You file unemployment benefits and wonder about everywhere else you could live. A studio in Brooklyn or Jersey City, commuting to a cushy media job in the city. You’re tired of Leo, who throws up all along Commonwealth Avenue as you drag him home each night.

You travel to Paris and a Frenchman pulls you into the doorway of an unlit Montmartre storefront. His name, you can’t remember. Damien? Guillaume? He guides you by the elbow toward the main boulevard, past the Cafe des Deux Moulins, the Amelie cafe, where he bought you beer and asked if you were an American Evangeliste. He whispers je t’aime je t’aime je t’aime. Oh, these Frenchmen. How much, you think, they sound like Leo. How much, you think, they move like the best friend.

A boy wants you to cum for him.

A boy wants you to cum on this dick.

A boy grabs your throat, covers your mouth.

A boy hooks his fingers past your bottom teeth. Take it, he says, and you bite down.

You travel to L.A. because you’ve decided that you may love Scott. You tell him this as you stumble across Hyperion Avenue toward a comedy club where Scott is performing. Scott tells you it means a lot, but he never says it back.

Ted texts you six days before his wedding: Hi, how’s life? Ted is marrying a woman in Connecticut. A woman his own age. You know this because you Googled him the other month.

She likes to think he is in love with her.

She knows he is not in love with her.

You lean against the popcorn-textured sides of Scott’s balcony and count the Our Lady of Guadalupes dotting front stoops. You know you can circle these streets forever: Fig, Avenue 50, Sunset Boulevard. Remember, when it used to be Vermont, Hoover, Adams? You could circle these streets for decades without ever claiming them.

Ted doesn’t respond to your text message. How long will you keep waiting?

You delete his number; Scott’s too.

You move to North Jersey, sign up for an online dating profile, and date people you’ll never see again. Hi, you say, how are you? The coffee’s not that strong here, is that a Brooklyn thing? You ask them about their profiles, how they said they were looking for someone who wears cute, not boring, underwear. Are boy shorts too boring? What about gray cotton briefs? Do you prefer nylon and lace? You don’t own any matching sets, shop mostly at Marshall’s and TJ Maxx. Thank you for calling me pretty, you say, but you wouldn’t like my underwear.

A boy wants to hear I love you.

A boy wants to cum with you.

A boy says, Be happy, you deserve it.

That boy wants to make you bleed.

***

You drive Ben to New York City. It rains, and you forgot an umbrella, and your white cotton dress, embroidered with gold and bronze lizards, quickly becomes soaked. Ben buys you a hot dog and you wait out the summer storm beneath a canopy of scaffolding. You’re sure he can see your mismatched bra and panties through your cotton dress, which now clings to your thighs.

Post-storm, you take Ben to the Strand, where you press against him in the corner of the book stacks. You show each other the books you’ve read and always wanted to read. You wander the Village, pointing at million-dollar brownstones. The city is sweaty and hazy but twilight still breaks through, coating the Hudson in pink dust. Now you and Ben are sitting on the railing, scoping out boats, and you try to remember all of this so one day you can say I had this moment and it was romantic in all the textbook ways.

You never get that kiss: The thing you thought you wanted.

Ben sends you a book, and you send him one back. You write a cheesy note, something about being students of light, which you stole from another, better writer. You hope he doesn’t judge your marginalia, which you once thought was clever but now just seems silly.

You go to a friend’s wedding and drink Chardonnay alone on a steep hill overlooking lower Manhattan. Why don’t you invite Ben? Your mother had asked. But Ben is still searching for a job in Seattle and besides, a teacher once told you don’t put all your eggs in one basket. That teacher never wanted you to get married.

Sometimes, you still text Ben fragments of poems or a quote you really like. There are always buzzwords like weight and distortion. There’s always one about sadness and memory and the color blue.

On the way home from the wedding, you drive north on Route 35, trace the rolling hills along the shore. You pull over at WaWa, throw up in a parking-lot shrub, and buy a soft, salty pretzel.

Now you date a man named Hector. You hope he never buys you a beret. He doesn’t write I love you, but he says it. A little too soon. You don’t say it back for another month.

A little too soon.

And things with Hector are good. You fall asleep like old married couples, open books at your sides. You wake like new lovers. It’s comfortable and exciting and you think, maybe you’re doing this right.

You meet Ben at another conference. The conference is in Washington, D.C., where the best friend lives. On the drive down, you think about texting the best friend, even though you haven’t talked in over two years. You don’t want to see him, but you like the idea of seeing him.

The last time you saw the best friend, you were in D.C. for yet another conference, this time during the heart of summer. You meet the best friend at a sports bar in Tarrytown, where he introduces you to Bri. The best friend is getting married in six weeks, and Bri is not his fiancee. Bri talks in the plural, everything is a we, and you sip your beer slowly to curb a smile as she tells you about their plans to go kayaking in the fall and snowboarding in the winter.

Oh really?

You take the best friend onto the smoking patio and tell him he’s in trouble—a line you always wanted to say to a cheating man. The best friend explains that Bri had his abortion last March. He drove her to the clinic and paid for the procedure. You are, briefly, jealous. I’m sorry, the best friend finally says.

Oh really?

On that Amtrak ride back to Jersey, you keep a running list of cities you cannot travel to: Los Angeles, Paris, Boston, D.C.

But now you are traveling to D.C., driving south on I-95, and something tells you to text Ben. You bump into him at the convention center later that day. He’s shaved his beard, gotten new tortoiseshell glasses. He looks thinner and healthier. You know he is scanning your weight gain, the purple circles swelling under your eyes, your gray hairs sticking up like twisted wire. He listens to everything you say, laughs when you know he shouldn’t. He’s being polite.

Your friend says Ben has a good way about him.

You know you said it too soon.

Ben invites you for drinks in Logan Circle and your knees touch beneath the table—a habit, not an accident. You never mention Hector. You want to kiss him, but something about the way Ben holds himself signals that he knows. He gives you two hugs and makes plans for the next day.

In this version, you are not the cheater and you’re wistful.

You are awake at 2 a.m. in the hotel lobby, sipping a Manhattan diluted from ice.

You are waiting four hours for the hotel Starbucks to open.

You scroll through Facebook on your phone and see random remembrances to a man you met only several times.

Breck wanted to produce your movie, or so he said, back when you were twenty-three. He invites you to a mid-priced Mexican restaurant on La Brea to talk shop. He loves your script, your personality, and your eyes. He has three sons and a fiancée. He gets you drunk off margaritas. You aren’t sure if he read your script.

Now his friends are posting articles from an Arkansas news source: Man found dead after falling through fence at a construction site. Victim stopped twelve times for public intoxication since 2009.

You pause your scrolling. You had no idea about his drinking, about all these different Brecks. You could be cliché. You could say we never know another person. That, in the end, we’re just ourselves.

You text Ben goodbye and drive back to New Jersey.

In the spring, Hector stands behind you each night at the bar but never says a word. He retracts his I love yous. He lies on your couch with his forearms pressed over his eyes. This is not enough, he says. He needs more sex. He needs it every night.

Should this really be that complicated?

Hector accuses you of flirting at the bar. He yells at you in front of his friends, who laugh as you trip on your way out. He follows you home but doesn’t speak. You shout at him. What are you shouting? You fall fifty feet from your front door, into an asphalt pit that was once a sunken basketball court or, maybe, a shallow public pool.

Leave me alone.

Why are you crying?

And on the pavement, in this shallow pool or pit or whatever it is, you think of Breck. You like to think this is different; the nouns and pronouns have changed. Woman falls into asphalt pit at Newark apartment complex. Woman chips tooth, bleeds from lip. You like to think that in this version, you are not yourself.

Leave me alone.

Hector leaves you alone.

And a boy no longer follows you home. A boy no longer wants you to cum on his dick.

A boy no longer makes you scream.

A boy lets go, and so does another, and another.

A boy no longer covers your mouth, but Shush, the boys still say.

Shush.

CRISP EDGES by Helena Pantsis

July 30, 2021

Bud reached into the chip bag. It crinkled, loud and coarse by the cheap, jagged foil. He dug his hand around the salt-covered potatoes, angling for the perfect one. You never want to start too big. You have to aim for those mid-range chips, the ones the size of a beer bottle’s bottom. He pulled one out, smacked his lips around it, and sucked on the tips of his fingers before going in for another. He couldn’t stop. That’s how they get you, the chip companies, the corporate potato pigs, by drowning their spuds in moreish delicacies that rot your teeth and erode your stomach lining. Bud was a sucker for anything with vinegar on it, anything that made his teeth vibrate, thin and on the verge of shattering. Pulling out another chip, he paused to look at it. It was familiar. He spun it around, tilted it forward, and Jesus Christ, there he was.

Martin Short.

“Jesus Christ, look at this,” Bud spat the crumbs of the half-chewed potato chip from his mouth.

Sitting across the sofa, Denise leaned towards Bud with her eyes half-lidded. She’d had enough of his bullshit.

“What?” she said.

Bud flung the chip closer to her, tilting it upwards so she could see it in better light.

“It’s a potato chip,” she said. “And?”

“That’s Martin Fucking Short.”

“Who?”

Sometimes the age gap between Bud and Denise wasn’t so bad. As long as you didn’t think about the fact that when she was born, he was graduating high school, and when she was applying to universities, he was in the middle of his first divorce. And as long as you didn’t think about the fact she didn’t know who Martin Fucking Short was.

“Martin Short!” he spoke louder, as if the volume would awaken something in her.

“Three Amigos? Father of the Bride? Legend of Saturday Night Live?”

Her face remained blank, unfazed by his manic spiraling into filmography recitation. Bud scoffed, gently placed his chip on the coffee table, and pulled up a photo on his phone.

“Oh!” Denise chimed with recognition. “He was Jack Frost! In the third Santa Clause.”

Bud didn’t have a clue what she was talking about.

“Okay,” he picked up the chip again, holding it alongside his phone. “See?”

Denise stopped for a moment to consider. The salt built up triangular in the middle, emulating what could be a nose, and the chip had burn lines resembling what could be eyes along its top. She supposed it could be him.

“I guess,” she said. “It just looks like a random face.”

Bud was flabbergasted.

“You’re kidding!” he said. “It’s a spitting image.”

“I don’t really see what the big deal is,” Denise went to grab for it, intent on eating it.

“Woah! No way,” Bud placed the chip on the far side of the table, away from her.

“What are you gonna do with it?” she asked, confounded.

“This has gotta be worth something,” Bud spoke confidently, picking the chip up and waving it in the air as he made to leave the room. “Just you see.”

Bud set his chip up in the study. Laying down a crisp, white page of A4 paper where the sun shone. He placed his chip in the middle, positioning it to the ideal angle, and opened the camera on his phone. Bud took a series of photos, all those which best captured the Martin Short of the chip. Bud uploaded the pictures to eBay, setting a starting price for auction at $50.

“You’re fucking kidding,” Denise said upon finding the stagnant bidding war on Bud’s computer. “No one’s gonna pay fifty bucks for a chip.”

“Not just a chip,” Bud said. “An exact fried potato replica of beloved actor Martin Short.” He pointed to the description he’d keyed into the item information.

“I think those are baked,” Denise said.

Bud kept the chip in a ziplock bag tucked in the back of the ice cube drawer in the freezer. They never went in there. The pair of them were accustomed to the summer heat and dealt with it better by removing layers. He’d looked up the best way to preserve a chip—he didn’t want Martin to go stale.

When Marl and Sue came over for drinks and a chat Bud told them about Martin the chip. About how he had put the chip on eBay, and about how you wouldn’t believe the likeness! And here’s the photos to prove it.

“I guess I see it,” Marl said, even though they couldn’t really. “So people actually buy that type of thing?”

“All the time!” Bud’s voice rose in excitement. “It’s practically memorabilia!”

Bud had spent hours staring at the glowing screen of his phone in their bed at night, his back turned to Denise. People were inclined to buy all kinds of things if they were attached to a celebrity. A piece of lint from Lindsay Lohan’s sweater from the 2005 Teen Choice Awards. A leaf in the shape of Javier Bardem’s head. Hair from David Schwimmer found on the set of ER circa 1996. A tile in the shape of an airborne Christina Applegate, if you squinted your eyes hard enough. And here he had Martin Fucking Short. A legend. A comedic genius. A star of stage and screen. Of course it was going to sell.

“Enough about that stupid chip,” Denise groaned, standing up abruptly to refill her guests’ coffee cups.

Sue sat awkwardly between them, gazing back and forth between the pair and then to Marl with her eyebrows raised.

“It’s really okay,” She said. “Um, maybe we could see it.”

“Oh no,” Bud shook his head, ignoring Denise, “I don’t want anything to happen to it.”

“Oh my God, Bud. Give it a rest, it’s a potato.” Denise rolled her eyes, dropping back down into her seat. “You haven’t even got a single bid on it.”

In the weeks after, Bud joined multiple online forums and Facebook groups, and signed up for innumerable newsletters on celebrities and Martin Short and selling memorabilia. He watched auctions on eBay, noting the number of watchers and bidders and starting and selling prices. Bud also stopped making love to Denise entirely.

When his auction ended, unsold, Bud re-uploaded his chip with the tips and tricks he’d learned from his research. He shared the link to his auction across Martin Short fan blogs and Facebook pages on celebrity collectables and subreddits on potatoes with faces. Slowly, starting his Martin chip at a price of $10, severely below retail value, Bud began to get some interest. One bid, then two, then the two going back and forth, then a third, and a forth, and suddenly, over twenty bids. With four days still left on the chip’s sale, the bidding price had skyrocketed to over $400.

Bud considered all the things he’d do with the money. He’d get a full back tattoo. He’d take all his friends out for a meal. He’d drink ’til his skin turned yellow. He’d fix the radio in his car. No, he thought, he’d save it, put it towards moving out of this dump.

Bud approached Denise returning home from work, ecstatic by the new interest in his Martin chip and his newfound wealth. She looked tired, moody, unapproachable. Bud considered for a moment not telling her. She’d probably use it to fix the heater or retile the bathroom. Besides, she’d never believed in him to begin with.

“What?” she spoke roughly in response to his vague stare, dropping her bag onto the counter.

“Four-hundred dollars,” he blurted out.

“You’re not buying any more blow right now, we can’t afford it.”

Bud hadn’t thought about that in weeks. He shook his head.

“No, I don’t need it. That’s how much the chip’s at. The auction.”

Denise furrowed her brows, sliding her jacket off and removing her shoes.

“What?” she asked, half paying attention.

Bud took his phone out, opening eBay and seeing the bid had risen to $530. He thrust the phone towards Denise. Her mouth fell open and she dropped her shoes so she could hold the phone closer.

“What the fuck?” she gasped, then began laughing. She stomped her feet like a child and threw her arms around Bud. “Five hundred fucking dollars!”

Things were really looking up. Denise let Bud choose the movie at night, and the pair of them would sit laughing at whatever crazy antic Martin Short got himself into. Bud dyed his hair a dusty brown, fixed his front teeth, and began putting on a wonky American accent at times to rise a laugh from Denise. The pair of them had never gotten along so well. Denise kept an eye on Bud’s eBay like it was the stock market, and boy were her shares climbing.

It was nice at first, then she began to speak about it as if the chip was theirs, as if Martin was their inside joke, their little secret. Denise was so happy about it, it made Bud’s skin crawl. She hadn’t even heard of Martin Short, yet now she was beyond ecstatic that this man’s face was making them money in leaps and bounds. She started to shop with less regard for home brand and sale items and began leaving late for work and arriving home before her shift ended. She was the breadwinner of the pair, or at least she was before Martin chip started pitching in.

The price rose: $900, $1000, $1100, $2000. It gave Bud goosebumps mainly, before anything else, because he was right. He knew it and Denise knew it, but the anticipation in her eyes was delight not reluctant resignation. God, why did he want it so bad?

The chip bag crinkled as Bud's hand swan dove to the bottom, him slouching on the living room sofa and gorging on salt as he did routinely. He filled his mouth with palmful after palmful of chips while glued to eBay on his phone. He emitted an auction-and-potato-chip-induced sweat. He stank of salt and chin fat. The price soared beyond anything the pair of them had ever imagined: $3000, $3500, $3900, $4300. He put the phone down, his heartbeat quickening. Denise came rushing in, her own phone glowing.

“Four fucking thousand!” she yelled.

Martin Short was his celebrity, his chip, but the reward was theirs together. He considered the money. It’d be nice to have. He could settle debts. He could pay for the veneers and hair job he’d gotten. He could get that back tat. Sure, the money would be nice. Bud put his phone down and watched the price rise and the countdown drop. He drifted backward towards the refrigerator. Denise called from the other room, relaying information he could see for himself.

Bud bent down, opened the freezer drawer, and pulled the little ice tray drawer where Martin chip lay. He grabbed the ziplock bag, slid the chip out, and stared at it. Martin’s eyes were screaming.

“Five-thousand dollars!” Denise yelled.

Bud held the chip gently. It was cold and crisp as the day he’d found it. Then he laid the chip on his tongue. He felt a chill run through him. The countdown on the auction ended. The price read $5200. Denise came rushing in, eyes wide and smile cracking. Bud closed his mouth and swallowed the chip swiftly without chewing. He felt the potato’s edges scratch the inside of his throat. Denise looked confused, then horrified.

“What the fuck did you do?” she said.

And Bud didn’t know. But he wanted to say, “I told you so.”

THE CELEBRATION by Zac Smith

July 14, 2021

Usually, when my week was shitty, I liked to order Thai food... I was the only one in the family who liked Thai food, which meant I didn’t get to order it much... But since I was getting divorced and living alone in a shitty apartment, I got to order it as much as I wanted... I was getting into it in a big way, basically... Since most weeks were shitty, I ordered Thai food most weekends... And I never got sick of it... Thai food is varied and complex... It can be very exciting, but also comforting... A perfect cuisine... I like Thai basil, which is a special kind of basil... I like the other flavors, too, but you know what I mean... Thai basil is especially good... So basically, in most ways, Thai food is perfect, is how I feel... And most of my weeks were shitty... So I wanted something perfect to level things out... I ordered Thai food to celebrate my shitty week, basically... I called it “celebrating” my shitty week because I thought that if I called it “celebrating” my shitty week, it’d feel good, like my week wasn’t actually shitty for shitty reasons, but just that I had accomplished something by getting through it—whatever it was—that made the week shitty... And the “celebration” thing usually worked... It made me feel like I had accomplished something by having a shitty week... Plus my cat came back... That was actually good... I liked my cat... That deserved an actual celebration, I thought, looking at the online menu system... And Thai food is good for a celebration... And that milk tea with the little tapioca balls is good for a celebration... Most people call it bubble tea and I liked it a lot... I liked the bubbles... I liked the tea... The whole fuckin’ she-bang, you know... The whole tea-ball game... Heh... So I ordered some bubble tea to go with my celebratory noodles and soup and those fried tofu things... I went all out, basically... I even ordered it for delivery instead of takeout... Oh yeah... Since I was really celebrating, I was really celebrating, you know... I was kicking back in a big fucking way... I told my cat to hold onto his ass, you know, because we were about to go nuts... And then it arrived and I laid out the food on my table... A little of this, a little of that... I put on some music... I gave my cat one of the triangle tofu things and he was like oh yeah, daddy... But I was most looking forward to the bubble tea to get things going... The fireworks that signified the start of the celebration... The bubble tea from that Thai place comes in a plastic cup with a plastic film/lid on top... You have to jab this special, thick straw that comes with it into the film/lid on top... And you suck up the bubbles and milk tea through the big fat straw... It’s, like, the best part of the celebration... The pop of the straw through the film/lid, I mean... It’s like a starting pistol or some shit... Like, ready, set, go motherfucker... So when I heard that pop, I was pretty excited... Like, basically, peak excitement... I was ready... I was set... I was going... To suck up those little bubbles... That first suck was the cherry on top of the firework sundae to celebrate another shitty week crossed off the calendar or whatever... I opened up the paper bag that everything had come in, you know, looking to get that special, fat straw... Rifling around, you know, getting good and excited... But I’m sure by now you’ve guessed that this is where we find out there was no straw... And you’re guessing right... (There was no straw)... So I thought, Shit... Basically, I was like, My celebration is ruined... I had the bubble tea... But no way to drink it... It’s like... Shit, man... I was so fucking down about it... I’m sure you can think of something to compare it to... It was like a Twilight Zone kind of twist... I had all this bubble tea but no way to drink it... It sucked (heh)... Everything was starting to suck... But I didn’t want it to suck... And I didn’t want my food to get cold... And time was running out... The suck was starting to creep in... That creep-suck... So I started eating, just to get the party going... I figured I could come up with something... I figured I could get the bubble tea popping off just right if I was calm and patient... I wanted it to be a good night in spite of the flaws and challenges, you know... I wanted to drink and enjoy my bubble tea, of course, but there was the food, too... I ate some, you know... But I was distracted... I mean, I was actually pretty pissed off... I was getting stressed out... Chewing and slurping and feeling real upset, basically... I thought about calling back the Thai place but that was stupid... They weren’t gonna send a guy back out to my shitty apartment just to give me a straw... And I didn’t want that to happen... The delivery driver would feel like shit... And I’d feel like shit... I ate my tofu triangle things, but instead of thinking about how good they tasted, I was still thinking about the missing straw... Like, instead of thinking, Yummy yummy, I just thought, Fuck this, fuck this... Just that, over and over... Or sometimes I thought, Fucking straw... All the triangles were gone and I hadn’t even enjoyed them... I still didn’t have a plan... But I wanted to persevere... I wanted to win... That felt good, thinking about it in terms of winning... Because at that moment, I was losing... And I’ll admit that I considered giving up... But then I decided, No, you know what, fuck that, I’m gonna win... I had to figure out how to drink the bubble tea without the thick straw... It was simply a have to kind of situation... I thought about how stupid I had been... I had been too dependent on the random whims and mistakes of other people... I was never really in control, basically... Maybe even my entire life, just pissing my pants and hoping for someone to come and change me... (I’m not sure that makes any sense, but, whatever)... So I thought about it while I started eating my pad see ewe, you know, those fat noodles with the Thai basil in it... I was in planning mode... I needed some ideas... So my first thought was that I could use a normal (skinny) straw and a spoon... Root beer float style... The old suck and scoop, you know... Yeah, that seemed good... I walked over to the Takeout Condiments and Other Bullshit drawer... There were a couple (skinny) straws in there because you never know... And there I was, in search of a straw... So, it’s like, maybe I did know, you know... I felt good about my Takeout Condiments and Other Bullshit drawer, basically... My friend Big Bruiser Dope Boy turned me onto this kind of drawer, but that’s not really relevant to the story... Then I opened my normal silverware drawer and got a good spoon... One of the small spoons that fit nicely in my mouth... You know the kind... Like a teaspoon, I guess... A good spoon for the old suck and scoop lifestyle... I went back and ripped off the plastic film/lid of the bubble tea all the way off... It felt like I was about to do some real raw dog shit to this bubble tea... I didn’t like seeing the tea that way, you know... But I had to persevere... I stuck the straw in and readied the spoon... I sucked up some tea... The old suck part of the suck and scoop... And it tasted great... I was like, Oh yeah, good tea, just missing one thing: some motherfucking bubbles... So I scooped up some of the motherfuckers (bubbles)... Moving onto the scoop part of the old suck and scoop, now... But there was ice in the cup... I hadn’t really planned on that... The ice was small, but still large, kind of... They crowded out the bubbles... So I had a spoonful of bubbles and ice cubes... Not ideal... Not good to be honest... I tried to slurp up a bubble with my lips with the tea still in my mouth... You know, trying to get the balance right... But I accidentally slurped up some of the ice, too... And like, oh man, the ice just ruined it all... Tea, bubbles, and ice?... No thank you... It sucked... Like, I didn’t want to crunch the cubes while trying to enjoy those little squishy motherfuckers and milky tea... So I tried spitting out the ice but it was hard to do... Try to imagine it, you know, juggling all that shit in your mouth... So the tea dribbled out of my mouth... And there was still some ice in there... Total opposite of the goal... Just full-on failure... But I figured I just had to power through, crunch up the ice in my mouth... I crunched away, man... And it was a bad experience overall... I didn’t like it very much at all... So I had to try something else... I ate some pad see ewe noodles and thought about it again... I figured I could suck up some tea with the skinny straw, but then use the straw to latch onto one of the bubbles, like, use the suction to pick up one bubble at a time... I remembered doing that shit with, like, uh... No idea, actually... But I knew I could do it... And then somehow leverage the bubble into my mouth... I thought, Alright, yeah... That seemed possible... So I sucked up some tea... I cornered one of the bubbles with my straw... I sucked on the straw... The suction worked... I was like, nice, hell yeah... I took the straw out of my mouth and put my finger over the hole... I lifted the straw... I was getting somewhere... But all the bubbles, like, it was weird... They all stuck together... It was insane... Like as soon as one bubble left the tea, it turned into a bubble magnet... All these other bubbles were along for the ride... And, all together like that, the bubble frenzy got too heavy, I guess... And the suction through the straw couldn’t hold them all up... They all plopped back into the tea... I was like, What the fuck... Maybe it was a fluke... So I tried it again... You know, suck, slurp, suck, grab, lift... Come on, man... But then... Plop... And I thought, God fucking dammit... It just wasn’t working... I ate some more pad see ewe... I just chewed it all up without thinking about the Thai basil, the skinny little caramelized onions, the little bits of egg... I was just thinking about the tea and the bubbles and the way that physics kept fucking me over... I was just chewing and scheming, basically... I had to get the bubbles individually... That was clear to me... The root beer float approach seemed good for that, but then there was the ice problem... So, yeah, there it is, I had to get rid of the ice... So I went and got a bowl... I poured the tea and bubbles and ice into the bowl, soup style... Fuck the straw, you know... Just go at it with the spoon... Bubble tea soup, basically... But that fucking ice was still causing problems... I scooped out a cube with my teaspoon... And it was pretty difficult... Surprisingly difficult, actually... But I got one out, you know, because I was persevering... I had removed one, but it was only one of many... One of, like, thirty little ice cubes... I went for some more but they danced away from my spoon... I thought, Little piece of shit ice cubes... It was obvious that it was gonna take forever... One cube at a time was just, ugh... I needed a better approach... So I decided to get the ice out with my fingers... Yeah, I know, but I figured I could corral all the cubes together and then scoop them out with my hand... A man’s hands, you know, they can do a lot of things... Beautiful instruments, basically... My hands could do almost anything... I put my fingers into the tea soup... And, you know, it didn’t feel great... Like, my dirty fingers just sloshing around in my tea... But I got most of the ice cubes out... Which was progress... It was what I wanted, you know... And then I figured I could finally go back to eating it like soup... No more straw, just full-on spoon time... But the fucking bubbles... I don’t know what it was about them, but every time I tried to scoop a few out, every bubble would stick into the bubble mass again... It was that fucking magnet shit all over again... I couldn’t separate them at all... And the tea was getting warmer because all the ice was gone... And it wasn’t really appetizing anymore, like, knowing I had fingered it all up... Thinking back on my beautiful man hands and all the dumb shit we had done together before eating... Thinking back on when the last time I washed them was... So I was feeling really defeated, basically... And the more I thought about it, I was getting more and more grossed out by the room-temperature, dirty-ass bubble tea soup I had made... So you know what... And it hurts to say this... But I just gave up... I dumped the whole fucking mess into sink... And like, you know, frosting on the cake kinda shit, the bubble mass clogged the sink hole... And I was, like, ugh, just, so fucking, ugh... So, you know, I stuck my fingers in and plucked out the gooey mass... I was feeling pretty grossed out and sad... I put the gooey mass into the garbage... I washed my hands... I sat down at the table... I looked at the rest of my pad see ewe... And this hurts to say, too, but I didn’t feel like eating it anymore... It didn’t look like food anymore... It just looked like garbage... Like, I mean, I had this epiphany, I guess... In less than a minute, probably, all this food would just be sitting in the trashcan along with the gooey ball mess and the egg shells and coffee grounds and broken glass and whatever else was in there from earlier in the week... And I was stuck with this thought about how food turns into garbage, just really ruminating on it... Thinking, like, Man, there’s almost no difference... I reasoned that maybe there was no difference... Food, garbage, food, garbage... I was looking at my food, but also looking at garbage... That’s all it was... And I thought about what a celebration was supposed to be... I thought about how maybe celebrations are a time when we distract ourselves from recognizing that everything around us is either made of garbage or slowly turning into garbage... And this celebration had failed... I saw everything for what it was: garbage, garbage, garbage... And I even felt myself decomposing... My skin flaking off... My blood turning cold and gooey... My bones buckling under the weight... I was garbage, too... What are people but walking corpses, I thought... What are corpses but special garbage, I thought... I looked at all the garbage on the table... I looked at my place in the world, my place as human, as corpse, as garbage... My place in the giant landfill... And then I realized that everything was normal... This was just how everything always is... I just hadn’t been paying attention... So I cleaned it all up... I put the garbage into the garbage... I rinsed the dishes... I took a long, sad shit... I washed my hands... I fed my cat... I went to bed... I was so fucking depressed... And I had to prepare for the next week... I thought about the week coming up... All the shit I’d have to get through just to make it to the next celebration... I thought maybe I’d try pizza... Or maybe just some Arby’s or something... I didn’t fucking know... I just wanted it all to end.

OPEN MOUTHED by Kwan Ann Tan

July 9, 2021

I knew I was in trouble the moment my co-worker caught me humming the female part to the last duet in La Boheme.

‘That sounds familiar,’ Lucy said as we stacked rows and rows of fragrant soap. ‘My grandmother loves that opera. She’s never seen it in person though, which is a shame. Maybe I should bring her one of these days.’

We laughed and continued restocking the shelves. It was a job that made a pair of opera tickets near impossible. The sound system crackled to life, and my faint memories of the song were drowned out by saccharine pop, making the store artificially cheery.

‘You know what happens in the end of that opera, right?’ Lucy asked, putting a final soap in place.

I did, having read the Wikipedia summary on the bus this morning. But I said nothing.

‘She dies.’

That morning, I awoke before the music started, and lay in the dark, waiting.

I had never been an early riser, but every morning I now shook myself awake in restless anticipation for the performance to start. I arose with scales in my ears, which quickly mellowed out to softer voice exercises then, as I down a cold, half-hearted breakfast, the songs. It was no secret there was an opera singer living in my building, even my letting agent muttered that she hoped I liked music when I signed the contracts. I had already heard multiple curses and shouts from other neighbours in a futile attempt to stop her from practicing so early.

I knew some of the more famous songs. Arias from Carmen, The Magic Flute, and Madame Butterfly, my father played for me on a CD when I was younger. To him, opera was the highest mark of civilization. He lived in fear that one day someone might catch him unfamiliar with some aspect of Western culture, exposing him for the farmer’s son that he was. In turn, he fed me a diet of strange facts and fancies, until I picked up the habit. My phone was filled with tabs from Wikipedia, online dictionary entries for opera terminology, and YouTube video compilations with titles like ‘top ten best opera singers in history.’

Sometimes on my way to work, I caught sight of the opera singer’s harried personal assistant, balancing coffees on a drink carrier and nearly spilling them in a rush to open the front door. She barely had time to nod before disappearing into the mysterious depths of the opera singer’s ground floor flat.

When I left that morning, I couldn’t resist the urge to look at the singer’s window. She stood in the dark lit by faint sunrise glow, mouth trilling wildly in a perfect O. She stopped when our eyes met, mouth still open, daring me to complain about the noise. Even in the dim light, I could see that she was beautiful.

As I walked away, she resumed her song, like a concert performance suddenly unmuted.

My neighbour on the 2nd floor, a single mother with an always inexplicably sticky daughter, moved out on Saturday. I helped—she was lovely. She often dropped by with food as if her motherly spirit couldn’t help but overflow onto anyone younger than her. I was sad to see her go but I would miss her casserole more. Knowing she would never accept a gift from me, I hid a care package of soaps and lotions in one of her unsealed moving boxes by the door.

‘I don’t want to leave but I have to,’ she said wistfully, looking at the mess strewn around the small flat. I had tripped over a mobile and was trying to free myself without destroying it. ‘My little girl’s nursery teacher advised me to stop speaking French at home but that’s exactly the problem—I don’t speak a word of French.’

She leaned down to give an affectionate peck on her daughter’s cheek. As if to illustrate her point, the girl burst into a sweet rendition of Carmen’s Habanera. Although the tune was right, it replicated none of the words’ meaning.

She sighed in resignation. ‘I don’t think she understands what it all means, but she sings in reply to everything now.’

I wondered what the opera-singer would make of this. If they ever met they could sing in reply to each other, making new meaning from the old songs.

‘Between you and me,’ my neighbour lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper, ‘I’m hoping the new place doesn’t come with a built-in alarm clock—god knows a child is loud enough in the mornings.’

The first time the opera-singer spoke to me, she mistook me for her personal assistant.

To be honest, we looked nothing alike. Her assistant was a willowy blonde nearly a head taller than me and a graceful heap of angles and bones hidden under a carefully draped cardigan. Meanwhile, I inherited my father’s farmer son stockiness and, because I refused to listen to my mother’s advice to stay out of the sun, had a noticeably darker skin tone. Still: the hallway was dark, and the clock had just ticked past six. Still: like a siren, the sound of her voice lured me into her cave. I never stood a chance.

‘There you are,’ she said in a low voice as I entered the building. It had been a long day at work, and I was looking forward to having the evening to myself. I stopped short in the doorway, face cloaked by shadow. I glanced over my shoulder, wondering if she was really talking to me. The opera-singer wore a dark veil and a black dress with beads that glinted faintly.

She tapped her doorframe impatiently. ‘Well? You’re letting the cold in, which you know is bad for my throat. Close the door and come in quickly, I need you.’

Like a shrouded wraith, she passed through the door and left me to run after her so the flat door wouldn’t shut in my face.

Before I migrated to the gloomy British Isles, I had never lived in a flat before. My family was proud of the fact that we were 三世同堂: three generations living under the same roof. My grandparents and parents still lived in the same concrete and corrugated metal roofed house, and I had grown up close to the sun, moving easily in and out of the outdoors like it was a second home.

Here, things were different. A house was something that hid you from the elements. Somewhere you could pretend that the outside didn’t exist.

Standing there at the opening of the opera-singer’s flat, for a brief moment, I imagined I had stepped into the backstage of a theatre. I didn’t know where to look first. The walls were covered in poster-sized theatre bills, many of which in she was the star, her face in posed expressions of emotion, her name in large capitals at the bottom. I learned her name when a piece of fan mail was delivered to my mailbox by accident. Vases of luxurious hothouse flowers battled to stay alive, stuck in that heady, perfumed stage of half-rot. A costume rack stood to attention in the corner, where the opera-singer had tried on and discarded a few outfits already—the white and gold cotton of an Egyptian queen, the heavy petticoat and bustle of a 16th century noblewoman, the flattering cut of a tongue-in-cheek suit clearly made for a woman.

‘You smell different,’ she noted, not bothering to look at me. I didn’t move, unsure if she would catch me the next moment. ‘A bit like a soap store.’

She had already collapsed into a red velvet upholstered chaise longue and had an eye mask on. There was no chance I would be found out. Just as I was about to reply, she gestured to a neat pyramid of clementines on an ornately carved table beside her.

I stepped forward gingerly, trying to leave as little of my presence on the carpet as possible. In that moment I didn’t think of how it looked, the upstairs neighbour who had lied her way in and now was preparing to, well, I could have done anything to her. A series of dramatic scenes flashed through my mind: my hand holding a dagger, like a horror film, where the opera-singer was the beautiful victim; my hand carefully touching her face, as if she were a fairytale princess cursed to sleep forever; my hand reaching out to tenderly stroke her hair, the eye-mask falling off as she looked at me properly for the first time. Our eyes would meet, and instead of terror, I would see understanding, a mutual accord that we had fallen in love.

‘Sometime this year,’ she said, leaving her mouth slack so there was no room for me to mistake her order. Whether out of sheer habit or not, her mouth was curved in a perfect O.

I moved faster, squatted next to the table and peeled the clementine, not caring that the pith and peel lodged themselves in my nail beds and would stain my fingernails orange until I next had a shower. Out of habit, I peeled them the same way my mother did: in a single unbroken strip that curled into a spiral.

When the clementine sat naked in my palm, I split it into its segments and rocked back on my heels, sitting as close to her as I dared, lifting a single fragrant slice to her mouth. Her tongue darted out to taste the juice beading on the edges of the clementine. Then, so my fingers would be safe, she took the piece between her front teeth and retreated to chew her prize. I trembled when her lips brushed my fingers. Even her chewing was measured, and I could see her throat shifting in a smooth ripple as the juice and pulp moved down into the cavity of her body.

I sat there for what could have been seconds or hours, like a supplicant endlessly twisting the rosary around their fingers. If I had continued the motions of peeling and lifting any longer, I’m sure I would have forgotten my own name, where I had come from, what I was doing there.

The sound of the building door opening broke the spell. I cast around wildly and tried to gather my bearings. I dropped the orange half on the carpet and crushed it underfoot in my haste to run from the room. If this was a comic opera, I would have dived somewhere ridiculous to hide—underneath the chaise langue the opera-singer sat on as I watched the action on the main stage. But self-preservation kicked in, and I pushed past the door just as the assistant entered, my head doggedly lowered, so all I saw was a flash of shoes and a small cry coming from her mouth. It was too late for her to do anything. I had already taken the stairs three at a time, sprinted into my flat, and slammed the door shut.

I laid like a dying starfish on my cold floor. My heart struggled to escape my chest.

Over the next few weeks, I did everything I could to avoid the opera-singer and her assistant short of scaling the wall to my flat. I left the house a half hour before the assistant turned up. When I walked past her window, if the opera-singer had started already, I resolutely did not turn around. I stopped humming opera at work, I tried to move past the obsession, I even bought earplugs to distract myself from the morning concerts.

I kept dreaming of her voice. Sometimes I was plunged into complete darkness, with only her music coaxing me to relax and become absorbed by the dark space. Other times she sang without words. Just an endless wave of noise that spilled into her real-life vocal warm-ups.

On a Saturday, weeks after I entered the opera-singer’s house, I left the house around 1 when I would usually avoid leaving or entering. Saturdays were matinee days and there was too much of a chance of meeting her. In the past, her leaving for the theatre was a spectacle that I watched from my bedroom window. When I heard the slowly chugging engine of a taxi waiting on the road, I waited too, to see what the opera-singer would be wearing. From what I understood (the occasional manager did come to shout through her windows), the opera-singer lived her life perpetually late to her next appointment. She dressed and rehearsed at home as much as possible, hardly ever leaving her flat except to travel to the theatre or go on stupendous shopping trips and expensive dinners with men that kissed her cheek as they parted ways on the doorstep. When she did make it to the theatre, it was very often down to the wire—literally flinging herself onstage the moment she arrived.

So that Saturday, as I descended the stairs, she spoke to me.

When I recall it now, she must have been waiting there for me in silence, half-shadowed by evening light. I was on the last flight of stairs before the ground floor, distracted by digging through my bag to make sure that I had my wallet.

‘Can you help me with this?’ She asked. ‘I would ask my assistant, but she’s not in today. She’s sick again. People really need to take better care of themselves.’

I froze at the sound of her voice and looked up.

She was facing away from me, the curve of her spine exposed in a lace dress with a silk slip inside. The help she needed was clear. There was a row of many, many tiny pearl buttons that needed to be done up at the back. Each step I took towards her brought a new detail to my eyes: the angular planes of her shoulder blades, the smooth, unblemished surface of her skin.

The opera-singer stood perfectly still, like a hunter waiting for its prey to slip into a trap.

I fell right into it. It was as if I had dissociated and was watching the scene from outside my body, staring at our two figures as if we were set onstage.

My fingers were sure and steady as they made their way up the dress. When they were done up, they looked like an iridescent spinal cord, one I could pluck like an instrument’s string. My fingers were practically on her skin. The gentle heat emanating from her hypnotised me. She was silent the whole way through until the second-to-last button.

‘Do you want to watch me sing this afternoon?’ she asked.

The final button slid into place, as did the rest of my life.

The opera-singer’s manager shut me away in a box that no one else seemed to be in, rolling his eyes and complaining about my attire the whole way through. The crowds we squeezed through were a mixed bag. There were young and old audiences rippling with excitement, murmuring the opera-singer’s name. Glancing at the programme, I smiled when I saw the performance was going to be La Boheme.

I quickly realised why no one else was in the box once the opera started. It was set behind the stage rather than in front. You couldn’t help but be in the spotlight, part of another dimension, onstage being watched by an audience with eyes like tadpoles. The crowd hadn’t realised there was a courtship unfolding outside the opera they watched.

I watched the glossy back of the opera-singer’s head as she twirled across the stage. My favourite part of La Boheme—when Musetta sings a waltz to try and win over Marcello—was riveting. She was singing to an overweight Marcello clearly past his prime, but it didn’t matter. The lilting tones drew me in and tied me down. My father had played it for me as a child. The waltz was transformed before me, a song sung for my ears alone. The only living thing onstage was my opera-singer. As she hit her triumphant high note, she flicked her eyes to my box, a grin on her lips.

I left the box. After the song was over and the lovers had fallen irresistibly into one another’s arms, I fled to the bathroom to compose myself. Trembling in front of the endless rows of mirrors in the black-marbled bathroom, I stood weakly at a sink, trying to banish the red from my cheeks with cold water.

Her manager tracked me down just as the curtains drew over the final act. ‘She wants to see you,’ he said with a slight sneer.

In the dressing room, she had miraculously returned into the high necked, pearl buttoned dress, as if she had never taken it off in the first place.

‘I’m starving,’ she said. ‘We should get dinner.’

We were whisked out the side doors, avoiding anyone who wanted a picture or autograph, to a quiet all-night breakfast cafe down a deserted alley.

We drank wine with our English breakfast. She fed me a scone dripping in clotted cream and jam. She talked—more than I did—about her life and her art. It took her some time to shed the skin of her performance, she said, and talking about it helped her feel like herself. She told me her real name, apparently a different one from her stage name, and offered I should call her a pet name instead. The only type of jam she liked was strawberry, never raspberry, because the seeds in the latter got stuck in her teeth. The sweater I wore reminded her of an old schoolteacher she had a crush on. She loved travelling but hated flying. She’d been to Malaysia once on a layover to Australia. Her favourite novels were mysteries, and a close second was space opera. ‘It’s impossible for us to be alone,’ she said, smiling. ‘I just don’t believe that’s how the universe works.’

We spent another hour before sliding, tipsy, into the taxi waiting for her outside. When we finally drew up, I saw people walking to the train station to begin their daily commutes. The sound of the key unlocking the door seemed as if it might wake up the whole building. We passed by her flat, and I said goodnight as she opened the door.

‘Aren’t you going to come in?’ She asked.

Without waiting for an answer she disappeared into the yellow glow of her flat. The door remained open.

I followed.

I slept that first night deeply and without dreams.

The sunlight woke me, not song. From the angle of the sun entering her window, I knew that it was well past my usual waking time. I had missed my shift at the soap store. The opera-singer was curled up by my side, one arm thrown over my ribcage.

I wondered if I should leave, awkwardly shuffling out the flat, praying no one in the building saw me. Before I could decide, the opera-singer’s assistant flung the door open and stared at us in the bed. The opera-singer awoke and stood by the bed.

‘Eileen?’ She said as the assistant relayed the singer’s plans for the day. ‘You’re fired. Leave the schedule outside.’

The assistant let out a small cry, sunk to the ground and clung to the opera-singer’s knees. Throughout the exchange I feigned sleep but I felt my face slowly turning red.

Only when I heard the door close, and the front door slam did I open an eye to peek at the scene. The opera-singer stood by the window, peeling the skin of an apple with a sharp knife, letting it dangle down in a curl. When she saw I was awake she smiled gently.

‘I seem to have lost an assistant,’ she said. ‘Would you mind taking over until I find a new one?’