Short

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?

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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.

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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. 

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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.”

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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.

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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?’

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BABIES DON’T KEEP by Janelle Bassett

June 18, 2021

I packed my blue kiddie-sized suitcase that said “Off to Grandma’s House.” In went the socks that I liked to roll down into ankle worms. In went the hairbrush with my spelling bee name tag stuck on the handle to claim it as mine—just like the dark greasy hair wound through it.

Usually the suitcase referred to my dark-haired Grandma, because that's where I took it. This time I was packing for a trip to my red-haired Grandma’s, but the suitcase was still right about where I was headed.

I put in a wax air freshener shaped like a teddy bear. The bear wore blue jeans and I’d melted his head into his shoulders with a lamp light. I meant to—had wished for a real flame and quicker dripping. The bear was a victim but still smelled like sea breeze. I always sniffed my victim before going to sleep. Routines were secretly holding me together.

I hoped my mom would pack a bag for my sister. Without help, her bag would be only Tootsie Rolls, trolls, and hard objects for pelting me when I most deserved it. No underwear, just projectiles.

I finished packing my suitcase hours before I was to be taken anywhere. I sat on my bed with my shoes buckled and looked in the mirror and saw the kind of girl who packed her bag hours early and then put on her shoes and looked in the mirror and watched herself pat-pat her bag to make sure it was staying ready.

I watched Grandma pull up through my sheer curtains. She parked her tan Buick, put her purse on her shoulder then, remembering she was in a small town where purse snatchings were rare and she could acquire her granddaughters for free, set her purse back down.

My mom let me open the door. Grandma was no longer her mother-in-law, so Mom was under no obligation to smile, coo, or offer her pigs-in-a-blanket when she came around. Mom put out her cigarette and put both feet on the floor—she no longer needed to impress but that didn’t mean she wanted to be caught all bunched up and puffing away.

“Look at you, all ready to go! I guess you didn’t have time to brush your hair. Where’s your sister?”

Grandma stood there fragrant and put together, masterfully middle-aged. She was the only person in my life who wore outfits and not just clothes. This gave her a certain authority over my hair. Her go-to look was bright multi-colored tops tucked into solid slacks, plus jazzy belts, beaucoup jewelry, a crisp hairdo, shoulder purse and foo-foo perfume. She had a high slim waist and it seemed like her whole past and future revolved around that fact—her middle being so easy to locate.

Grandma looked past me and saw my mom sitting up straight and not on fire. “How are you doing, Mandy?”

Mom said she was “getting along fine” but did not offer examples of her fineness or ask any questions in return. Instead she got up to see what was keeping my sister from getting this woman off her porch.

I was telling Grandma that I’d packed a swimsuit just-in-case when we heard yelling.

“It’s time to go. Right now!”

“I want to bring my (unintelligible)!”

“You can’t! It doesn’t fit in your bag! Just take everything from inside and pack it. Same thing.”

Grandma and I heard a scream that started upright then dropped to the floor. Then we heard the crunchy brown carpet take some abuse from Tara’s fists and heels. I thought good. That carpet deserved it.

I bet Grandma wished she had her purse to look through while she stood through this tantrum—she could have feigned gum-rifling to break the tension.

I told her, “I better go see what’s going on.”

She looked in at our couch and said, “I’ll guess I’ll wait in the car.”

When I walked in Tara was still pounding and my mom had her face in her hands. Mom saw me and offered, “She wants to bring her entire drawer.”

Tara stopped moving and crying so that her justification wasn’t coming from an out-of-control animal. “I need to bring it because Chomp-Chomp sleeps in there. It’s her bed!”

Chomp-Chomp was my sister’s stuffed rabbit who I’d never ever seen sleep anywhere other than in Tara’s twin bed, in the crook of her arm. I said, “Why can’t she bring the drawer?”

“Because… it’s part of the dresser.”

“We will bring it back.” I made it into a “we” situation, like the idea was gathering momentum. Practically everyone thinks bringing the whole drawer is a reasonable idea.

Tara looked at me to forgive me for about twenty percent of how I’d treated her up until that moment. I had to keep her tipped slightly toward me with these moments of understanding so she didn’t hit me too hard when she hit me too hard.

Mom said, “It’s heavy. And what would your grandma think?”

From the floor Tara watched to see if I was pulling for her strong enough to get past the next, logistical hurdle.

“We’ll tell her it’s a Reed family tradition—that your family has traveled with their dresser drawers for centuries. One guy started it and then that became the way it was done. Like how Johnny Appleseed’s descendants probably still wear pots on their heads.”

Tara put her ankle on her opposite knee and said “Yeah” like she’d just been taking a casual floor rest or doing a yoga pose and not wigging out about a detachable piece of furniture.

Mom must have realized how close she was to being free from us for two days. “Fine. But I’m not carrying it out to her car. You two will have to manage.” She gave us each a kiss on the cheek, went into her room, and shut the door.

As Tara and I lugged the dresser drawer across the lawn we remarked conspiratorially on how light it was, really, and how well Chomp-Chomp would sleep in the city. Grandma popped the trunk without comment. We didn’t even have to tell her about the Reed tradition, she could tell by our unkept hair that we came with a fair amount of straggly reasoning.

***

Tara and I rode in the backseat because Grandma had plastic shopping bags in the front and didn’t offer to move them. Also, we needed to be close enough to fight and huff at each other without getting neck cricks.

Grandma never asked about school or friends or if we’ve been nice to Mommy. She wanted to spend time with us, not with a five- and a seven-year-old. She knew our day-to-day lives were boring struggles and that nothing that happened at school was worth sharing, so instead she told us about her life.

I was glad I didn’t have to produce answers like, “Yes, my teacher is very nice, she grades in green instead of red” but I did want to tell someone about getting under my desk for earthquake drills in my dress and how the cold concrete floor felt on my underwear when I leaned back into a full crouch. And about my daily work digging out tree roots at recess. Every day I exposed more tendrils and every day I became less articulate.

Grandma told us about selling high-end stuffed animals to rich children and the parents who wanted to shut them up, and about her new dummy cat who tried to sleep on the wrought iron headboard but kept falling into the crack between the bed and the wall with a squawk that must have meant “I thought this time would be different!”

I filed away all this incoming information. I looked like a blank incapable child who might sit watching houseflies, but I was a Rolodex in cotton tights. These stories were clues and demonstrations I might need someday when I learned how to be a person.

Tara looked out the window. This made me furious. I wanted to hurt her so that I didn’t have to think about how she saw the world when I was busy with my own investigation.

I whispered to her, “You smell like the dog when she first wakes up.”

She frowned, hurt and small, and tried to kick me.

Grandma said, “Stop that fighting or you won’t get to see what’s in these bags.”

Tara stopped so I gave her a victorious look because even though we both stood to gain from the bags she had already sustained my critical comment while I remained unkicked.

Tara told Grandma that we’d each gotten a puppy from a neighborhood litter. Spunk, the puppy she’d chosen, was still alive and chasing cars while the dog I’d chosen, Lucky, was killed by a car just as soon as I’d named him. Tara said, “Isn’t that kind of funny? Lucky?”

And Grandma laughed because it was kind of funny when you weren’t the owner and the namer of the unlucky pup.

So Tara kicked me back without compromising the bag of goodies, and while I stewed about the comedic, deflating death of my pet I was also relieved that my sister had tipped us back to even. I did my best damage in retribution.

***

We’d been driving for two hours when we stopped at a gas station. Grandma needed to fill up and said we could get a snack, which meant candy because we weren’t the kind of girls to walk out with a bag of pretzels.

Tara and I stayed in the car while Grandma pumped. We wordlessly watched Grandma push buttons while the back of her belt sparkled for us. When she turned around with the nozzle she tapped it on the window, like a fun-loving warning. Give me a smile with your hands up where I can see ‘em.

Inside the gas station I found the candy aisle and decided to get Sixlets which are like rounder M&M’s, with even more of that factory-made taste (bouquet of dye with notes of clanking).

Before I could finalize my choice by swiping it off the rack, I saw a man in the next aisle. He was in the salt aisle: chips, peanut butter crackers, jerky sticks, mixed nuts. He held a bag of Funyuns and I recognized him immediately. If I hadn’t been with my Grandma I might not have made such swift connections. I might have thought, “Bus driver? Farm hand? Yoyo’s Pop-Pop?” But in that context I easily remembered that he had once been my low-level, temporary, menacing Grandpa. An image of him reclining on the couch leering and sneering in pajama pants made my stomach grasp at my inner-skin for balance and composure.

I froze and tried to understand the implications of this sighting and whether I wanted to be recognized by this man. I scanned for Tara. She was safe with Grandma and the cold drinks. I considered army-crawling to them but I knew the Sixlets would make me a conspicuous rattlesnake.

He hadn’t noticed me yet. Then I recalled how unremarkable and forgettable a child I was. People never remembered me. I had to be formally introduced to my great-grandmother each holiday and every picnic. I could probably do a cha-cha dance with several packages of Sixlets and this past-Grandpa wouldn’t even look up.

This was a relief. This Grandpa had, for a brief time, been the partner of my red-haired Grandma who was now only feet away with the cold drinks. I didn’t know if they had been married or simply boyfriend and girlfriend, but I think they lived together. His razor and comb had been in her bathroom with her seashell art and her round cakes of pink soap.

I’d only picked up slivers about their relationship. From listening to adult conversations I’d learned that he’d been stealing from Grandma and had done the same with other women, that he’d pushed a girlfriend down concrete steps, that he’d gone by other names, that he was bad inside—wanting and taking. All while smelling of sharp pine. But the final point of all the gathered slivers was this: she’d gotten away from him.

Until then. When he loomed one aisle over with his Funyuns.

I wanted to sound an alarm and be an alarm. I didn’t want to be unremarkable but ultra-remarkable, like a swirling flame that screams in beeps.

“Hey! Hey you! You’re my grand baby! Aren’t you my little grand baby?”

He was looking over and down at me, identifying me correctly. Except I was never his and he knew me from ages five to six, when I could read and shower alone and wear bodysuits—so not a baby.

I decided not to speak but to cower. So much for being an alarm, for swirling in response to danger. In the heat of the moment I was all prey, all rabbit, begging for mercy only with my eyes.

“You are my grand-baby ain’t ya? You’ve grown. You’re gettin’ lady legs!”

He was leaning on the rack between us and studying me like his eyes were the sun and I grew into a woman only under his edifying watch. I didn’t know he was drunk but I knew he was loose in a way that meant anything could happen. And that the “anything” felt tipped toward bad and toward irrevocable.

He knew I was scared and this only brightened his beam.

I heard my grandma’s shoes tipping across the store. I saw her approach, looking only right-at-me because she’d had previous experience with his mean and binding focus.

She stopped at the entrance to my aisle. “Come on over here.”

She was my well-dressed embassy.

Tara was at her side, looking frightened and like she forgave me for another twenty percent of my awful behavior because she disliked seeing me in a vulnerable situation.

“Well, looky here. Pretty Miss Dreena. Here with our grandbabies. Looking so nice.”

Grandma didn’t acknowledge him or meet his eye and I understood all the strength she had in her—her strength in that moment and in the moment she finally kicked him out. I understood her strength in the moments I couldn’t imagine, like what bad men did when they had the chance, and moments I wasn’t privy to, moments from before I was born, like when she was ten and a neighbor boy pushed her down, lifted her skirt, and stood over her because he wanted her to know he could do more if he felt like it. In that moment her strength kept the truth of that powerlessness from penetrating her being.

I took my Sixlets and went to Grandma. She held my hand and led us to the checkout. She looked straight ahead but Tara and I were weaker and watched him following us.

“Where are my three beautiful girls heading tonight?”

Two people were in front of us in line. Grandma gripped our skulls and turned our faces away from him.

“Where are you taking my grandbabies?” His voice was becoming more threatening and more cajoling.

I started to cry. It felt like he could do whatever he wanted since he’d claimed me as his. His grandbaby.

Grandma pulled me into her hip. We were next in line.

Tara saw my tears and turned back to yell, “We are not your grandbabies! And you smell like your dog when she first wakes up!”

He laughed and he came closer, both actions that made the tears come harder.

Grandma had to yank the Sixlets from my upset hand to pay for them.

He was right beside us, nearest to me. He called Grandma’s name. He called her “the little wife.” He asked where we were going over and over.

The woman behind the counter said, “Is there a problem here?” and I wanted to scream an affirmative and scramble behind the counter with her, back with the telephones and the guns and the propriety.

But Grandma very coolly said we were fine and closed her purse and handed us our candy.

She said to us, “We are going to walk to the car and drive away.”

I just knew he’d follow us and scratch at my window until he saw that none of my haughty confidence remained. I knew he wanted to put his yellow teeth in my face and feed off my disgust.

But once we started toward the door he stopped shouting and simply let us go. We got in and we drove away, just like Grandma said. I looked out the window at the gas station. He hadn’t emerged. He wasn’t chasing us.

We were not his grandbabies.

As she pulled back onto the road Grandma asked, “Are you girls okay?”

As Tara said, “No” I said, “He didn’t even remember my name.”

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GENIUS by T.J. Larkey

June 4, 2021

I'd been a process server my whole life.

Well not really.

I remember my dad driving me around a lot after school, leaving the car running as he knocked on strangers’ doors.

At seven seeing his Vietnam Vet fearlessness for the first time, ducking a crackhead wielding a broken lawn lamp.

At fifteen working in his house/office, and at seventeen feeling so lucky to have a job that didn’t leave me smelling like grease.

And at nineteen using the savings to move away to California.

So it really only felt like it.

Like I’d never done, and wouldn’t ever do, anything else.

The rightful heir to King Larkey of Larkey Process Professionals.

 

 

I was driving to work in Tempe, hungover.

One of those apartment complexes I’d served since high-school, the same drive in the same car down the 101 freeway.

It was hot out when I left but even hotter when I got there.

I took a minute to get used to it with the windows down while I plugged in my headphones and found the right playlist, titled “That Real Shit.”

Then I started my circular walk around.

The same walk.

Est. 2010.

“Hi there!”—bitch-ass subservient tone—“Is ___ or ___ home?”—sheepish smile—“This is a late rent notice from the leasing office for you.”

And when done right, the response: “Thanks(?)”

It wasn’t hard to pull off.

Placating their anger with idiot grins and clown dances.

Climbing staircases like I expected a statue of myself hands to the clouds to be built at the top.

Dancing through the parking lot, shoulders and head bobbing.

Tapping lightly and rhythmically on doors to match the song I was listening to privately so others could enjoy it too.

And if they did get angry: just silently absorbing the shit with a smile, that half-lie in the back of my brain whispering seductively, “I’m not the bad guy, I have my own problems paying rent, and it might as well be me and not those dead-eyed chain-smoking creatures from the court.”

 

 

“Hi there!”

An elderly woman so happy to have company she didn’t understand what was happening.

A college kid too bro’d out to respond with anything but, “Fersher dood.”

A mom of three with a toddler on her hip, talking on the phone, too busy for words but angry enough to give me a look I wouldn’t forget.

I served and served.

Thinking only of ways not to have to serve anymore.

Fantasizing about anything else.

Numbing my surroundings with rap music.

Drifting into your life bringing change but on to the next door so quick you felt violated.

Stuntin’ like my daddy.

 

 

The rapper in my headphones was talking about being awesome, getting money because he was awesome.

I thought about becoming a rapper.

Another rapper made me laugh.

I thought about being a comedian.

The next rapper said, “Name one genius that ain’t crazy,” and I thought about being a genius.

Dear Kanye, is there another option for crazy people other than being a genius?

Dear Self, you are not a genius.

No.

No fucking way.

Not even sure why you’re thinking that you fu—

“What do you want!?”

A big shirtless thing in a dark room, standing behind a half-open door, looking at me.

“Sorry,” I said, popping out my headphones. “Is Kyle home?”

“Kyle who?”

“Kyle”—checking paper—“Lind?”

“Nope.”

“Oh, okay, well, I have a notice here for him from the Leasing Office.”

“Kay.”

“Could you give it to him?”

“Nah there’s no Kyle here.”

“Uhh”—I looked at the paper, the number on the door—“But this is the apartment number listed, and it’s from the leasing office. Also I’ve served you before man.”

“There’s no Kyle.”

“None Kyles?”

“There are zero Kyles here.”

He closed the door.

I folded the paper up to tuck it in the door, then tucked it in the door.

He pushed it out.

I tucked it in again.

The door opened.

He said, “I will kill you dude, seriously.”

I said, “I will die willingly, just try it.”

No I didn’t.

I walked away briskly with my hands at my sides like I hadn’t heard him.

Because I am not the bad guy.

I just can’t do anything else.

I’m crazy for not doing something else.

Name one crazy that ain’t genius.

 

 

I got to my car and locked the door.

Laughing nervously.

There were still more notices to be served at the complex but I didn’t feel like serving them so I did my special process server trick that wasn’t really a trick and was actually just crumpling them up and throwing them on the floor underneath the passenger seat.

I had sparkling water cans, fast food wrappers, gas station pizza boxes, and my little snack bag down there too.

I grabbed my little snack bag.

Pulled out a beef stick thing (extra-large, to carry me through the rest of that day) and ate slowly, trying not to have a panic attack.

Then I checked my remaining work.

Only two stops left.

One on the way home, and one out of the way.

I decided to pull another process server trick.

Which really was a trick where you serve the close one and type the other into GPS so you know how long it would take to get to the place you didn’t really go to but then write the time down like you did go to it and then drive home where it is safe instead.

Because fuck all of Arizona except my apartment.

Especially Tempe.

Fuck every resident of Tempe, past and present, except the celebrated hip hop trio Injury Reserve.

Yeah—Tempe—yeah you—we were never really friends.

The absolute worst (I’d done no research whatsoever) stretch of college-ness ever.

College town, party town, number one at being the worst town, cop town, fuck town U.S.A.

I drove out of it as fast as possible.

 

 

Downtown Phoenix, the old historic neighborhood, off the 10 freeway at 7th Ave.

Out of College Town and into Artsy/Murderous/Fancy/Opinion Town.

I passed the old timey hipster diner on 10th..

Then past a row of houses all similarly beaten down until I hit the newest looking of them, with a small white gate like those in the old movies.

There was a dog barking as soon as I got out of my car and when I approached the gate, he made himself known.

Big drooling bastard, a killer, absolutely beautiful.

He poked his nose out of the gate, barking viciously at me.

Hello gorgeous—I said, reaching out my hand and almost losing it.

What beautiful teeth you have—I thought, smiling maniacally.

Suicide by man’s best friend—I fantasized.

The door opened behind him.

His barking stopped.

His owner said things and when I said things back his (the dog’s) barking started up again.

“Sorry! He usually stops.”

I said it was okay, that dogs acted differently around me than they usually do.

“He/She is not usually like this”—I heard that a lot.

My dick and balls had been sniffed, nuzzled, borderline molested by almost every dog I’d ever met.

They can smell genius—I thought, hiding a smirk.

“A notice! From the Realty Company!”

I waved the paper and the man understood.

He walked out and received it from me graciously but was not happy about it.

An understanding.

That feeling when people knew you were just doing your job and you had no control over the way landlords or realty companies operated.

It was something like a head nod between strangers on the sidewalk or when you find a loose cigarette under your passenger seat, under all that garbage—so human, so good.

“Have a nice day!” I said, but what I meant was I love you. “Sorry to bother you.”

“No worries!” he said.

 

 

Back at home I loaded the bad news papers along with the service info into my printer/scanner and sent them off to my dad’s office/home.

I was sitting on my hard little futon couch trying to get comfortable.

Drinking beer very fast.

A movie on in the background.

But distracted by my neck pain and my back pain and my asshole pain.

Prostatitis—or Trucker’s disease—from sitting on your ass too long.

I also wasn’t breathing very well.

I’d been hit in the face too many times, taken a few drunken headers on rock and concrete, and the result was a skull that didn’t sit right on my neck.

I had daily stretches and exercises created by this Russian-Israeli physicist named Moshe Feldenkrais—the only thing that worked, even after seeing doctor after doctor specializing in everything from the heart to TMJ to the psyche—but I hadn’t done them in a while.

I drank instead—i.e. lazy—until the pain went away and I didn’t care as much about my short breath or my racing heart.

Just as I was feeling a little better, my phone went off.

I ignored it.

It went off again.

I saw on the screen that it was the big man.

“Hey Boss.”

Like we were in the middle of a conversation already: “Did you serve that Buckeye?”

I lied and told him I had.

The papers were scanning now.

It was just my printer, that piece of shit printer.

“Never mind the printer, the guy said you didn’t serve it.”

“What guy?”

“The owner of the house. He lives next door and said he didn’t see you, or the notice on the door. He was watching all day.”

I said why would he do that.

My dad said that the owner wanted to see how the guy reacted to being served.

I said what a bitch.

My dad said you didn’t serve it did you?

I said how dare you question my work ethic.

No I didn’t.

I apologized, said that this was the first time—only because Buckeye was so far away—and that I was grateful for him and that it wouldn’t happen again and that I loved him.

“Cut the crap. I know it won’t happen again,” he said. “You’ll lose your license. You want to lose your license? You want to leave me stranded doing everything by myself for weeks?”

“No.”

I hung up the phone.

Guzzled some cold coffee.

And walked out of my apartment and into my car.

My asshole still hurt.

 

 

Buckeye.

A sort-of town out in the desert you never think of unless you’re driving through it to California, or you’re a process server.

A long two-lane road with not much to look at except signs and roadside memorials.

I had a tendency to seek out roadside memorials, a habit since I’d made the drive to Los Angeles and back so many times.

And I saw a few really new and beautiful looking ones and couldn’t help zoning out.

Feeling (something).

People around me though, they didn’t seem to be appreciating the view as much.

They were going twenty-five to thirty over the limit and swerving around me like assholes.

A testament to Man’s big fallacy that even the roads with the highest body counts never seemed to deter them from driving like assholes.

One asshole rode my bumper in a way that said: “I’m angry with you and need you to know it.”

Another asshole flashed his lights at me.

And the toughest of assholes—of course—throwing a potentially fatal fit so I can feel punished and shamed.

Yes absolutely, sorry, and thank you.

A single head nod and a smile for you, no eye-contact no matter how long you honk.

A one-handed clap for you, while the other rubs my sweaty stringy-haired balls.

A silent and immortal don’t care to all and good night—don’t even care how tired it is to say it.

You’re welcome.

I made it there safely.

 

 

A lot of the neighborhoods out in the middle of the desert were very nice and had protective gates because of the secluded area surrounding them.

Small winding road surrounded by cacti that lead into a narrow passageway with a keypad and nothing else.

I didn’t have a gate code though.

I looked at the notice for a gate code but there was no gate code.

I didn’t have any room to move to the side for others to get through to the keypad so I sat there waiting for cars for a few minutes.

No cars came or went—the community looked small.

I called the number on the notice—no answer.

I wasn’t expecting an answer.

It was late and most of the realty companies or landlords didn’t answer calls, afraid (I'm guessing) they’d have to speak like a real human with someone they were potentially kicking out onto the street.

Uhh-unh—that was mine and my dad’s job.

“Speak forth,” Dad said.

“Hey I’m stuck at a gate, do we have anything about a code? I tried calling already.”

My dad said he’d look and then went to look and then came back to the phone to tell me he didn't find anything.

“Someone will come through eventually,” he said. “Just wait.”

So I waited.

Rolled down the windows.

Lit a cigarette.

Listened to the desert sounds.

Smelled a pleasant familiar scent from a plant (they were all over Arizona) that I wanted to know the name of but didn’t know the name of because I was too dumb/lazy/disconnected to remember.

A few minutes of that until a car pulled up to the gate from the other side.

The exit side, which was not connected to the enter side.

I waited until the car was halfway out and then turned slowly toward him in case the gate closed back up quickly.

When the car was fully through, I sped up and, almost immediately, had to slam on the brakes.

Because the car leaving had slammed on his brakes first, blocking me on purpose.

I reached for the notice, evidence I wasn’t a thief, and rolled down the window.

The man in the blockade car had rolled his window down too, to give me a look.

There was something to that look.

I flashed my notice and yelled, “I’m a process server!”

Smirking, he replied, “I’m president of the Homeowners Association.”

“Oh!”

“Yep. And I don’t know you.”

“Well fuck,” I said, then blacked out from disgust/anger. “Fuckety fuck shit blah blah (something about asking him if he’d like to be president of the ‘being headbutted to death association’) fuck and more fuck fucks.”

“Real nice,” he said, and drove off after seeing the gate had closed completely.

I reached for one of the cans under my passenger seat and threw it at him, hitting my hand on my door and missing badly because the can had no weight to it.

That useless adrenaline pumping through me now, shame and hatred adding to the trash medley smell.

Twenty minutes passed.

I was getting tired.

I pulled up to the gate, inspected it for weakness, decided I could go face-down through the bottom.

I pulled my car around and then onto another street close by, parked it.

As I walked through the desert I had a nightmare/fantasy about being bitten by a rattlesnake and having to go through many trials to save my own life, then being awarded some kind of certificate that entailed never having to work again.

I got to the gate, dropped to my hands and knees, took a deep breath, made it through, scuffing up my shirt.

My GPS took me past all these houses that looked the same.

It was taking longer than I’d anticipated and I started getting paranoid about my car being towed.

I picked up the pace, started a jog that turned into a run, until I was at the house.

“Hi there, is—”

“You alright man?”

A man not much older than me, staring at the sweat and pavement residue on my shirt.

“Yeah,” I said, still trying to catch my breath. “Just had to crawl under the gate.”

“Why’d you do that?”

“The president denied me safe passage.”

He laughed: “Oh, umm, okay, do you want some water or something?”

“Really? Yeah that’d be great thank you.”

He walked away, leaving the door open, came back with a big glass of ice water.

I drank it slowly but forgot to do the polite thing and not touch it to my lips.

He didn’t seem like he cared.

“So what’s up?”

I looked down at the notice. “I have a thing here, for you, I think.”

“Nice.”

“No I mean, a bad thing. It’s a late rent notice. The wording on here is scary but really it’s just like a warning. The owner of the house has to do a lot more paperwork in order to kick you out, so you have time to pay.”

“Oh no worries,” he said, jerking his thumb at the house next door. “I know the guy. Knew something was coming eventually.”

I handed the paper and the empty glass over to him.

“Thank you,” I said, then stood there waiting in case he wanted to get anything out of his system.

“So hey, can I ask you something,” he said. “Do you do just these, or like, do you do the whole process serving thing?”

“You asking if I do what (Actor) does in (Movie About Process Server)?”

“Hell yeah man. One of my all-time favorites. In high school I wanted to do exactly that job.”

“Yeah, I can imagine, that was the golden age for us.”

“So you just like drive around all day getting stoned or what? You must have some crazy stories too.”

“Not really. Served a guy who flashed his gun and asked me if I wanted to ‘catch some lead’ once, but I just laughed and he kept the gun in his waistband the whole time.”

“Oh shit, you gotta be careful out there.”

“Yeah definitely, I have a routine though.”

“A real pro huh?”

“You could say that. I’ve been doing it my whole life. I mean kind of my whole life.”

He held out his fist and I bumped it.

“Anyway,” I said. “Sorry to bother you.”

“All good man, take it easy.”

“You too,” I said, and walked back to the gate to crawl under it.

I made it to my car, which hadn’t been towed.

Then I drove home.

Feeling an embarrassing level of excitement for the weekend approaching.

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SALAD GIRLS by CK Kane

May 28, 2021

I don’t want my mom to die not because I like her, but because she’ll be the nastiest ghost. Unrelenting in death. I just know it. I pull her boots off like always. Using both hands, I make an ugly face and lean my body trying to pull. She moans like always. Whenever she’s not on a horse she’s in this bed. Crumbs of caked mud and crap get on the white sheets as the second boot finally gives and I almost fly across the room. Still in her breeches and a turtleneck, she pulls the covers over her save for a long black braid. The lived-in covers smell like dandruff.

*

A bell sound rattles sharp metallic through my bedroom.  Our doorbell almost never rings, so I don’t get up right away, I just freeze with my hand stuffed down my jeans, distracted from my drawing.

Downstairs in the doorway, she looks like one of the paper cut-out puppets I used to make. Just a dark shape. I recognize her but I don’t know if I should act like it.

“Karl,” says her mouth, like those wax lips we used to get at Halloween that weren’t exactly candy. She smells like the smoking section. Hi Auntie Deb, I say to her grin. A force allows me to stand a certain distance away from her, like the back of a magnet. It almost tickles when I step closer. She hears my mom wailing from upstairs through the walls and her down comforter. I don’t notice until she does.

Outside the bedroom the groaning is unbearable.

Auntie Deb leans in: “Ever since your father, huh.”

I nod, but I don’t remember.

I’m glad I don’t feel much. There’s no room in this house for anyone else’s feelings.

Auntie Deb click-clacks into my mother’s room, chattering.

Lydia, what did you take.

Lydia, this boy must be close to six feet already.

 

Her fingernail is a shade of red I’ve never seen before, almost brown, almost purple. It faintly scratches along the grain of the sheets: “My God, these cost more than my whole life and you wear your barn clothes to sleep?”

I remember a party a few years ago in a different town in Connecticut, one that seemed like the black & white version of our town. After the party I asked my mom if we were filthy rich. And she grabbed my face so hard and shook it and said, “Who taught you how to speak like that? Someone said that, you haven’t heard that in this house, who said that, who taught you that?”

I felt extra dumb. That was the last time I’d seen Auntie Deb until now.

The phone makes its wild sound to remind us it’s off the hook, its cord of tired curls swinging like a noose in waning lopes. My mom keeps it that way. Auntie Deb unplugs the phone from the wall and hangs it up, hard. She sits on the bed and rubs my mom’s back and I watch from the doorway, feeling the magnet feeling but also an upset. Like ticklish surgery.

The fingernail traces my mom like chalk through the dandruff horse shit covers.

“So skinny, Lydia. How do you stay so thin?”

My mom rolls her eyes, I’m not sure if it’s voluntary.

Coke and toast, I say.

Auntie Deb looks at me.

I tell her she only eats Coke and toast. Real Coke, not diet. White toast, I clean up the crumbs. With butter.

I think about my mom’s deliberate, aggressive cracking of a can of Coke. Almost violent. A sound I try to flee the room before I have to hear. The craziest burps, too. You’d never think such a skinny lady would have these Homer Simpson burps. But when I burped she told me I was disgusting and she hated me. I don’t burp around her anymore.

*

Auntie Deb in my room is awkward like Herman Munster, like she’s going to break something even though nothing is really breakable.

“How old are you, thirteen? You have the room of an old man.”

Her eyeballs swirl around like she’s worried about stalactites threatening to fall from the ceiling and impale her.

What if I am an old man, I reply to the back of her head.

*

Pepsi is the scraggly cat who paces around Auntie Deb’s porch. I call to him with a Psst psst psst. He glances at me before I go inside. Auntie Deb gets off the phone in her kitchen and tells me my mom is doing ok. The kitchen is yellow, everything. I hand her a refrigerator magnet. I stole it from a gift shop at Schiphol airport last summer when I visited Oma and Opa. It’s a small pair of wooden clogs. I guess I thought I might give it to someone at school. They hadn’t seen me in years. Oma was so upset by how much I resemble my dad she wouldn’t look at me. Opa and I would take walks through Oud-Zuid and return to their creaky house on Amstelveenseweg with something new every day: art supplies, a travel chess set, a little dinosaur sculpture, or just some still-warm bread.

“Aren’t you sweet,” her hand grasps the clogs and the fingernail presses them onto the fridge.

“What’s this for?”

I tell her, you know, for watching me or whatever.

I chop a fat golden onion on the cutting board like she tells me to. Stinging drips pour from my nose and I slip.

Blood squirts from my fingertip in weird beats and I wonder if I’ll need a stitch, I think so. Auntie Deb click-clacks over, standing worriedly behind me. I smell the smoking section and also her rose perfume, “Because people to whom the Virgin Mother has appeared, you know, they all report smelling roses first. An overwhelming aroma of rose. Rhapsodic.” The fingernails pinch my blood-finger and lift it to the wax Halloween lips like mini hors d’oeuvres.

And then she sucks.

*

The living room is like a garage sale. I do my homework and Pepsi stares at me through the window’s lacy curtain. My finger is starting to peel from where Auntie Deb filled it with superglue. She always has this cha-cha music playing and I guess it’s supposed to be cheerful but it’s so, so sad. It’s loud enough to hear above all else but also it fades into the carpet fluff like snowfall. I let Pepsi inside and he mews around my legs. Auntie Deb click-clacks out of the kitchen in an apron that she double-tied around her waist, pleased.

“I’m skinnier than your mom, now.”

Her mouth is a purple hole in her face from drinking wine. She notices Pepsi after a while and the purple hole contorts:

“Get him out of here or I’ll break that cat’s neck so fast your head’ll spin, don’t think I won’t do it.”

I carry Pepsi outside and remember my mom used to follow threats with so fast your head’ll spin when she still said things to me, and it always seemed so ghoulish.

The corduroy chair swallows me. Its coils are spent, its dimensions cartoonish. Auntie Deb sips from a chipped crystal cup on the floral couch and taps through the channels as the glow of the TV illuminates the purple hole. She asks if I remember my dad and if so can I still hear his voice saying things, because she can, and she wonders if they’re the same things. I tell her they’re not the same things because he didn’t speak in English to me, which bothered my mom. The purple hole smiles.

“God forbid Lydia feel excluded.”

 An audience looms around us. Saint relics and porcelain figurines of poodles, butterflies and Siamese cats peek from their shelves, dead-eyed.

“He liked—” the purple hole corrects itself in a tone even lower in its gravel throat. “He wanted me, your father.”

I join her on the couch, entering her ticklish force field.  She palms my skull. Her fingernails sift through my hair, letting it fall back into place like she’s flipping through pages in a book. Roses. Rhapsodic. She holds her cup to my face and my teeth clank the crystal when I gulp down her wine.

*

After my dad died a guy started coming over to tune the baby grand piano. He was balding and had drawn on a widow’s peak with black crayon, it looked like. My mom was awfully friendly to him, it wasn’t like her, she was drinking. My stomach flipped clunkily and I told Widow’s Peak about my dead dad while he tapped the same key over and over. My mom dragged me into the pantry and pinned my shoulders to the floor with her knees and gripped my little neck and said through her big square teeth that if I ever embarrassed her like that again she’d kill me, she’d fucking kill. me. Her eyes burned like the nostrils of one of her horses as a big glob of spit dangled from her mouth to my forehead. It splat right between my eyes and it smelled like her breath and her sobs. When she slammed the door, dry pasta rained on me.

*

Auntie Deb watches me eat while she puffs a cigarette, her eyes warming while I tell her bad stories about my mom like she asks me to. The kitchen yellow is bright and sick. Ash dances near my pancake but I still eat it. When I’m done, she tightens the belt on her robe and takes my plate away and says:

“Do you know what our mother did to us? Women are evil, you know. Rotten. Sick.”

*

The bathwater splashes up and down, up and down until I explode. Auntie Deb says I’ll get an infection, I’ll get backed up, if she doesn’t milk me. I can do it myself but her house, her rules. I stare at the same spot of tile grout when it happens. After the bath, I grab a towel and cover up quick. She is a scarecrow blocking the doorway. I tell her I haven’t had a headache in a while but she insists, it’s preventative, it’s better absorbed this way. I put one foot on the closed toilet seat and dig my toes into the carpet material seat cover. Through a rubber glove I feel the fingernail press the tablets inside of me as I try not to clench.

In bed, I picture an agonized, ancient tree trunk stuck inside another tree trunk at the bottom of the sea.

You don’t have to prove your feelings if you don’t have them.

You don’t have to have feelings.

In the dark things are easier.

That’s what I say.

*

When the cha-cha music isn’t playing, I can play whatever I want. Auntie Deb tries to like it.

“I used to be a backup singer for a rock’n’roller. With one or two other gals. We did our hair like a bunch of lettuce on top of our heads and wore lots of rouge on the apples of our cheeks. We started calling ourselves the salad girls.”

The bathroom door handle jiggles open. Her house her rules.

The fingernail pokes my stomach hard through the water splashing on every syllable. “Some-times-I-think-you’re-a-fag-got.”

When she slams the door, a brass ring from around the handle shimmies around and around before wobbling to a stop on the tile, sealing the quiet.

*

Charcoal scribbles hard like someone else is moving my hand for me and when I look up the art teacher looks away quickly and the other kids are already leaving. The guidance counselor’s voice, a phony pleading KARL, yanks me like bad entertainment off a stage into his office.

I tell him it’s art, it doesn’t mean anything. He says art always means something. Well, mine doesn’t. I sling my backpack over one shoulder and put my hair behind my ears on the way out.

The Janitor squeaks a wheeled bucket down the hall. He has deep eye sockets that make him look like an old picture. The soapy water sloshes floral and sweet and I’m nauseous as I run by his sunken face to get out. He might have said something to me or maybe his mouth just moved the way people missing teeth churn their face around their empty mouths.

*

Pepsi makes little snacking sounds when I give him the rest of my chicken dinner. The wind crackles through his parched fur the way it would move through dried grass and he’s happy I think. I focus on that.

“WHO THE FUCK IS IN MY BED?”

A dull punch to the throat wakes me. Coughing and gasping, there’s a blur, a frustrated ape straddling me, bopping the mattress beneath us. A gold chain grazes my eyes and I hear the swooshing of a windbreaker. Sour cologne and crunchy hair gel. Auntie Deb materializes in a talcum whirl and breaks it up. He’s still swinging. Straining between labored breaths, Auntie Deb introduces us.

“Karl, this is my son. Ronnie.”

I ask her if she means my cousin Ronnie.

Heaving, with his mother’s arms locking his by the elbows, Ronnie says, “I don’t got any cousins.”

I remind him our moms are sisters, that makes us cousins.

“I DON’T GOT. ANY COUSINS.”

Ronnie sleeps off his episode on the floral couch in an angel white tracksuit. His big wet eyes make his Disney-long lashes cling in damp spikes. His buttony nose is like a child with a cold’s or one of those Precious Moments figures you get for your first holy communion. I imagine a little ceramic statue of Ronnie, on his knees in his white tracksuit clasping a gold chain rosary. On the shelf of a Hallmark. A laugh I didn’t know I had falls out of me, bounces off my chin and down my chest like a spat-out mouthful of Cheerios. Auntie Deb looks at him from the yellow kitchen table, I can’t tell if she’s sad or embarrassed or both. She tells me that Ronnie’s dad worked in a crematorium.

“It’s no good for a person, to breathe death all day, it does something to them.” Her voice sounds like it’s asking me permission, like she wants forgiveness for living the way she has and birthing the couch angel.

*

Auntie Deb click-clacks down the hallway through clusters of students and their parents whispering over cookies and juice. There’s an invisible forest fire that follows her and once she passes everyone seems wilted, perplexed. Being at the school in the evening feels vulgar. The art teacher raises his eyebrows as he ushers her into his classroom, closing the door behind them, making me wait in the hall.

A group of classmates laugh and stare from afar. One of them, a girl, leaves the group and walks towards me purposefully, like she’s doing something brazen and wants to seem cool about it. Like she does badass spooky shit all the time. Like it wasn’t a dare. She tells me she thinks I’m good at drawing and that she might go to Europe in the summer and if she goes to Amsterdam can I teach her a word in Dutch maybe? I say misschien which means maybe. She adds that she doesn’t believe the things she’s heard about me—that I torture animals or that I left a kid in a coma at my last school.

A chair screeches, Auntie Deb is yelling at the art teacher. I open the door. “He’s not zany”, she mocks, “he’s-just-a-fag-got,” whacking the art teacher’s desk with my rolled-up grades on each sound. He winces as she raises the roll like she’s gonna hit him, a warning. She click-clacks right towards me and stops.

“Call his mother all you want. She’s unwell. I’m in charge now.”

The fingernails clamp my arm and she glares at the girl I was talking to and asks me, on our way through the spiritless juice and cookie crowd, “Who was that little tramp?”

*

Ronnie slurps stew in the yellow chair across from me. Each time Auntie Deb says something to me he slurps louder. The fingernails walk up my leg under the yellow table. I ask how my mom is and the fingernails stop and dig. “She’s home. She’s been home, Karl. She doesn’t want to see you. She doesn’t care.”

“WHAT THE FUCK MOM?”

 Ronnie pulls the hand away from my leg.

“Oh God forgive ya, Ronnie, for using that language with me,” barks Auntie Deb, cradling her lonely hand.

His Precious Moments face reddens when he asks what was that about. She tells him my mother is very disturbed so I need kindness, as much of it as I can get. Ronnie slams his fist on the table in front of me, rattling the salt and pepper shakers.

“SHE LOVES ME MORE,” he spews in my face. He gets up and backs away. The loaded slingshot pull of the screen door spring is like held breath behind him when he stops to announce, “YOU’RE NEVER GONNA SEE PEPSI AGAIN” before he stomps towards his car.

The fingernails rub my shoulders as I finish my stew, ripping off pieces of a dinner roll and dunking them in the remains. I’m entitled. She asks me do I want to kill my mommy and that she would help me and we would get away with it. I shake my head no and stuff more stew-soaked dinner roll into my mouth calmly. She yanks her hands away, disgusted by my serenity.

The house is warm, but it’s not mine.

*

I kick a twig down the road on my walk back to Auntie Deb’s. The sun’s exit behind me creates a monstrous silhouette. It reminds me of when Auntie Deb showed up at our door that time. And her shape projected through the foyer, eating it up like black smoke. Consumed. I realize I forgot my sketchbook.

I try two different doors before I find one unlocked and the school’s so empty even my shadow echoes. The locker room lights buzz and then dip, buzz and dip. When I see the janitor, his dopey stance is sheepish like I busted him doing something wrong. Maybe it’s the jumpsuit making him a bow-legged toddler with a sagging diaper. He asks me what I’ve got there and I tell him some drawings but he walks over my words and says filth. He waddles towards me and says it again.

“Filth.”

His homeless mouth makes the shape of filth this time with no sound. He tugs at himself. I become rubber cement all clumsy and stuck. His hand forces mine to feel him get bigger through the jumpsuit.

The toilet tank lid is in clunky pieces next to him. The blood smells like something you shouldn’t. I don’t remember. I look away and think when I look back this won’t be real but there it is, a flesh-filled jumpsuit slumped and stuck to the floor. A wet teabag. This has to be a dream. I’m dreaming. Pressure fills the space around my body and I shake ‘cause Auntie Deb is gonna be so pissed I’m taking so long. Supper is important.

I stand right over him, his entire face caved in now, a collapsed building. A discarded Halloween mask on a paved street. His ghost eyes are milky blue hard-boiled eggs splayed in different directions like a gorilla’s tits. Spit fills my mouth and seeps from the corners. I poke the body with a pen and it’s so crazy, I stab him with the pen all over, each time: does that hurt, does that hurt, does that hurt? I step back, my shoes peeling off the floor with sticky syrup sounds. I take a running jump and land on his chest, clunk, I think I broke his ribs. He’s surprisingly sturdy. I jump up and down until I almost lose my balance on his squishy gut. I imagine his organs are water balloons and I’m popping them. Like bubble wrap. I lift up his arm and drop it, thunk. My jeans and sweater and shoes are spattered.

I sit down on a changing bench and flip through my sketchbook, showing him my drawings and explaining them. I marvel at the sound of my voice. I pause, feeling truly heard, and I giggle. Almost ecstatically. And then I draw him.

My syrup feet make Band-Aid rip sounds all the way through the school parking lot. I’ll walk all night until I get to Mom’s house.

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LONELINESS AND HEARTACHE IN THE DISCARDED APPLE CORE PIT OF AMERICA’S ROTTED DREAM FOR AND OF ITSELF by Nathaniel Duggan

May 21, 2021

Lately Frank has been feeling especially Frank-like, his days reduced to the potato chip crumbs he has failed to brush from his lap—as if he, the essence of himself, is a shirt that can be slipped on or off and has been worn perhaps a few too many weeks in a row. He wets the bed more than when he was a child, although back then his piss was hot and searing as shame, whereas now it is simply cold as a metal unexpectedly touched. His sweat, too, is cold. His dreams are muggy as incest, bratty stepsiblings fucked. He works at a deli sandwich shop, his shifts spent fondling various meats through disposable plastic. He is 32-years old and having trouble, lately, imagining what will fill all the years left ahead of him.

On his days off, Frank visits his mother. At one point Frank had friends; then, suddenly, as if through a magician’s whirling trick of smoke and exploding pigeons, he woke and did not have friends. They had vanished. They had slipped into the cracks of better lives, found secret passageways hidden behind their medicine cabinets into mortgages and tropical island vacations and jobs with business suits, places thoroughly and utterly inaccessible to the Franks of the world.

“Maybe you could try grad school,” his mother suggests over lunch. “You always did so well in school. Or what about teaching English overseas? Plenty of young people are teaching English overseas these days, they’re saying.”

“You always do this,” Frank says. “This is all we ever talk about. Can’t we ever talk about anything else?”

“You were just always so good in school,” his mother says.

The previous day, Frank remembers, he fucked up a wrap at work. The wrap had folded wrong, split against the bend of itself, crumbled and unspooled. He’d looked at his coworker, Kyle, in mock-shock. “How do you fuck up a wrap,” he said.

Kyle was in his early twenties and attending community college, acne still surging like meteor showers across his face. He was grinning.

“Yes you did,” Kyle said. “You sure did fuck that one up. But hey, there’re children starving in Africa, there are tiny babies without food or homes or mothers, and one fucked up wrap doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of their suffering.”

In response, Frank slam-dunked the wrap into the trash can. Across the service counter, customers were watching. Frank felt strange and unreal, felt almost, as if in a video game, unbeatable—like there were forces trying to defeat him and they could not.

That kind of thing happened sometimes, he knew. In certain moments, a hatch opened in your brain, and you crawled up and out through it to escape the piloted machine of yourself, got far enough from your own way of seeing that your life became as unrecognizable to you as a telescoped planet, and for a moment, then, even beneath the insect-splotched lightbulbs of your workplace, everything kind of glimmered like it was covered in fresh dew.

Of course, like anything else those flashes ended. The customers coughed impatiently. Kyle shuffled his feet and suggested they get back to work, he and Frank. You were just you, after all. There was no way, as of yet—as discovered and postulated by scientists, by physicists in nuclear basements and engineers pale-faced by the rays of computer screens stared into late at night—to be anyone else. So Frank made the wrap. Although really he did not want to make the wrap. He wanted instead to talk about how those children overseas were only starving because of American bombs and governmental policy destabilizing their infrastructure.

“You were always so good in school,” his mother says again in the dining room, her voice a sigh. as faint now as a tapping on a windowpane.

Although it’s bright summer, all the lights in the house are on, making the space look cold and drained of the day. They finish the meal in silence. Afterwards, his mother excuses herself to the bathroom. Frank hears her run the shower and then, muffled by the water, quietly scream.

Frank gets in his car and does a few laps around the neighborhood. He is not drunk but he feels the dilation of drunkenness, as if there are air bubbles moving in his bloodstream. This is the suburb where he grew up, adjacent to the city where his current apartment is. It occurs to him he has not made it very far outside of his life, the neatly cropped and segmented lawn of it. When he returns to his mother’s house, all the lights are off, and he finds her asleep on the living room couch, sprawled and open-mouthed as a child.

 

***

 

After a lunchtime rush, Frank asks Kyle, “So what’s up this weekend? Any parties?”

He means it as a joke. He has always assumed that Kyle, still living with his parents, returns home to play video games after each shift. To his surprise, Kyle freezes at this question, the color draining from his face.

“I mean,” Kyle says. “Well, it wouldn’t really be your kind of scene. Kind of a different crowd. I mean, younger. No offense, dude.”

On Frank’s smoking break, the clouds roil apocalyptically in the sky above. He tries to light his cigarette with a dramatic flourish, like it’s the last cigarette he’ll smoke before the ash-black end of the world. He thinks about a boy he kissed at a New Year’s party five years ago who he hasn’t seen or spoken to since.

“We just had such a connection,” he says when he steps back into the kitchen.

“Wait,” Kyle says. “This isn’t about what’s-his-name, is it?”

“Brian,” Frank says. “We just really kicked it off. We had such a spark.”

“Jesus,” Kyle says. “We’re not really talking about this for the thousandth time again this week, are we? Didn’t that happen like, a century ago? Just let it go, man. Please let’s not talk about this again.”

When Frank gets back to his apartment, he doesn’t turn on any lights. He eats a prepared supermarket meal by the orange glow a streetlamp tosses against his bedroom wall and drinks half a beer. Teaching overseas…He imagines himself copy and pasted, a file moved but otherwise unmodified, into China, South Korea. In the scene he is in a classroom and the students around him are faceless. He himself in the scene is faceless—actually, he is censored out, a digital conglomeration of squares. After his lessons he would probably go back to an apartment no bigger than the one he currently occupies, eat a prepared supermarket meal, and drink half a beer. The thought makes him feel bereft of hope, like in the second act of a summer blockbuster where aliens have invaded the earth and toppled the government—the part where the heroes lose and fog shrouds the horizon. Faceless Frank. The problem with leaving for anywhere else, he suspects, pulling the covers over his head, is that he would have to go there with himself.

 

***

 

And so for a while, for a couple several years and decades, Frank feels formless. He feels like a cookie cutter shape, its limits defined and rigid, but its details bludgeoned, the features misshapen as blurs. He gets enraged every now and again at his mother. For what reason, after all, did she have to create him? To force him pink and vulnerable into the cruelty that is the world? He feels often and especially like a supervillain abomination, like a—ha ha—a Frankenstein, and when he visits her, he screams and shatters her plates. He still works for minimum wage wrapping sandwiches. He is 36, and then he is 47. Kyle has long since quit, graduated with his college degree and gone off somewhere probably to teach English overseas. Frank himself has begun to drink at an admittedly destructive rate, although he does this in a subtle, calculated way that doesn’t feel so much like blatant annihilation of the self but rather quiet sabotage, trapdoors and tripwires laced intricately throughout his heart. He feels, now, like he is a spy in the country of himself, engaging in acts of treason, and so appropriately one morning he calls his ex-boyfriend Adam.

They decide to meet on the beach. It is late fall. They lay out their towels and then lay on top of their towels, side by side.

“That gull keeps circling me,” Adam says. “Are you seeing this? Maybe it thinks I’m dead. That I’m a carcass. A corpse.” 

“Jesus,” Frank says. “You never change. Everything’s always about you, isn’t it?”

There are leaves scattered about the beach, autumn red, like so many cooked crabs spilled. Seagulls keep pinwheeling overhead. The ocean sounds the way the inside of an empty shell sounds. The weather is cloudy, and it’s one of those days where you cannot tell if it is a buoy washing ashore or a headless, half-eaten seal.

Afterwards they get a hotel. Adam turns on the television. There is a rerun of “Shark Week” playing. “Shark Week” is a TV series produced annually that, for an entire week, dedicates itself to shark-based content—divers getting into deep-sea cages with sharks, lifeguards interviewed regarding shark-based deaths on their beaches, entomological investigations into the history of sharks and the possible existence of super sharks, ancient and lurking things at the bottom of the ocean the size of sunken ships.

Frank is realizing sex will probably not happen tonight.

This is, simply, not a situation in which sex between two people can occur.

Shark Week keeps playing, a rerun of a rerun’s idea of itself. Frank and Adam fall asleep together fully clothed, and the next day after leaving the hotel they do not talk ever again.

Later a decision will be made by ad agencies and corporate lawyers to transform “Shark Week” into “Shark Month.” And after this proves a rousing success, they will extend it even further, until there are entire Shark-themed calendar years, and before you know it your very life has become a Shark Week rerun regurgitated and interrupted regularly by commercials.

That night as Frank fell asleep against Adam’s warmth, he dreamed of a room black with mirrors—every inch of it paneled with glass such that the light inside bounced continually and endlessly until its expiration, leaving nothing then but darkness. Although he could not see, Frank was aware of his reflection in the mirrors, multiplied a million times over. He could sense it there moving in all that glass like a hole in the back of his head, a hole the size of the moon—no. A hole the size of the disappearance of the moon.

 

***

 

One Friday Frank goes to the bar alone.

No one there talks to him, and he does not talk to anyone.

He spends several nights in a row eating fast food in his car in empty supermarket parking lots.

Late November a centipede scuttles down his neck.

Somewhere a terrorist whispers the word “galvanize” in a Wendy’s before ordering chili cheese fries.

Overall love is renounced across the globe, as is life, death, inner city bus drivers.

Various presidents and prime ministers acknowledge in hastily assembled press releases that nothing will ever happen to anyone ever again.

People are a bit perplexed by this—should they feel secured or doomed?

More worrying, they realize: can they even still tell the difference?

Each day sheds the skin of itself and slithers into the next. On interstates everywhere rodents dart in front of roaring 18-wheelers. The chipmunks have grown crazed and carnivorous, caught—on camera!—gnawing one another’s bones. Fathers are blamed for America. Founding, suburban, whatever, it is the father’s fault, whether he was absent or perhaps so present his touch reaches across the span of centuries to tangle each life and word and thought of his great-great-grandchildren like puppet string. And so a feeling of doom pervades and closes each day. Schoolteachers drive to little league baseball fields late at night and shoot their brains out atop dusty mounds that seem almost Martian in the moonlight. The stock market, meanwhile, does pretty well.

Frank tells his doctor, “I feel displaced and without purpose. I am utterly depressed. I know I have a drinking problem, but the problem is not the drinking, the problem is what causes the drinking, the problem drinks itself dry, it is an abscess, I feel it as a scabbed drought on the back of my skull where fluid cannot help but lump and end in an aneurysm because it is a lack that must be filled, because nothing always wants something. In this sense, the symptom is the same as the cure.”

“Yes,” the doctor says, hands stuffed deep into Frank’s mouth. “OK. Frank, you know I’m a dentist. Have you thought about seeing a professional regarding this?”

Frank is 54-years old, driving to his mother’s house.

They argue over salad.

Frank is intrigued to find himself so self-righteous while so full of greens. The same mouth spitting acid at his mother is chewing vegetation, mincing arugula into mushed bits—what could be less threatening than grazing on grass? Yet she gets so small when he attacks her. To Frank her retreat is contemptible, her face crumpling in on itself like a beer can’s crushing, even her wrinkles wrinkled, sad eyes lost in folded decades of skin. But he knows, when he goes outside to smoke a cigarette, that he cannot blame her—she is only trying to help. He should not be so hard on her. Sometimes it is necessary to shrink yourself, he understands. Sometimes, confronted with the vast, metropolitan sprawl of life and its disappointments, you have to reduce yourself to your smallest unit, to slip rodent-like through the cracks and avoid all that gargantuan existential nonsense, those questions, asteroid-sized and incoming, Why am I here, Where am I going, and What am I going to make for dinner?

 

***

 

Life becomes a four-walled thing for Frank, always closing in, a phone ringing at midnight and an unfamiliar voice asking, “Is your refrigerator running?” He is suspicious of nostalgia, the sugared deceit of it. Any moment can become nostalgic with enough refraction, any person can be yearned for if placed at a far enough distance.

His heart, the bargained yard sale of it, continues to pump. He does not find love. He is 60, his mother is dead and he has inherited her house. He sleeps each night in the guest bedroom and he washes the sheets after.

One afternoon in the supermarket he runs into Kyle. It has been, it seems, generations since he last saw Kyle. His acne is gone. His hair gleams and he is wearing a business suit and tie. He looks, Frank muses, professional—which begs the question, then, professional of what exactly, of teeth, of blue-gloved hands plunged into the gape of a mouth, of football, of politics, of sandwiches, of teaching overseas…

“Frank,” Kyle says. “Oh, hey! How have you been?”

“Kyle,” Frank says. “Not bad, man. What’re you up to these days?”

They talk for a while. Kyle has one of those jobs and is living one of those lives—“You know how it goes,” he says, and Frank does, and together they nod their heads in understanding. Kyle would like to catch up, he invites Frank to dinner. As they part ways, Frank reflects that so much happens in the supermarket, so many people loveless and wandering and checking their eggs before purchasing. The parking lot is vast as an airplane landing strip, and as he navigates it he feels the distinct melancholy that comes with a journey’s beginning or end. Where did he park again?

And then it is 1am and the leaves of the trees in his neighborhood are limned by orange streetlight and there is no moon. A moonless night: imagine, Frank thinks, to be –less, to be, in a word, without. Frankless, he thinks. He cannot sleep. He leaves the guest room and makes the walk down the hallway to his original bedroom, the one he slept in as a child. The floor creaks beneath him as if he is an intruder in his own house. The bedroom is a belly of darkness and trapped air, the lights off and the shades drawn tight, everything perfectly preserved by the stale smell of dust. He crawls into his old bed, pulls the blankets to his chin, and closes his eyes. His eyelids are shut tight but he is utterly awake. Somewhere in the house there is a window open and the breeze it lets in sounds like his mother’s soft sighing. Secure as he is beneath his sheets, he feels cast-off and drifting, like an island untethered. He feels like someone else, someone completely and thoroughly not-Frank: like an old childhood friend of himself, one of the kids he had been close to in grade school before they had moved somewhere away and irrevocably exotic, to Florida or Hawaii; a friend lost then, but coming back now, rendered strange and unknowable by so many decades apart, yet familiar as a constellation is far, returning to a place they had never properly left.

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