Short

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

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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THE KRASNERS by Aaron Kreuter

When I think back to those days it is fear that I remember, fear that I keep returning to, fear that I cannot get away from. First there’s the free-floating, general fear of adolescence: the fear of fitting in, the fear of saying the right thing, the fear of a body under revolt. And, for the most part, it wasn’t on the school playground or the mall food court, but at Kol B’Seder, the Reform synagogue my parents joined when I was twelve, where the major battles against these fears were waged. I fell in love in those hallways, made friends during those Thursday evening and Saturday morning classes, tested boundaries, discovered limits, and, thanks to a liberal focus on the Holocaust, came face-to-face with the depravity that every human society is capable of. We read harrowing accounts of Jewish children from Germany, Poland, and Holland, had elderly survivors come speak to us every couple of months, and on Yom HaShoah, we watched the videos. All the kids would pile into the sanctuary—I would sit with Mitzy, Erin, and Stephanie, and sometimes Paul Cohen would leave his own friends and come join us—and we would watch archival footage of the camps, interviews with survivors, fictional retellings of the Wannsee conference, of the Warsaw Uprising, of the Nuremberg Trials. How many years of watching tractors organize hills of bodies does it take to give you lifelong nightmares (of course, the burn of the Holocaust was always immediately remedied with the balm of Israel: footage of the Declaration of Independence, grainy news briefs on the pioneering Israeli spirit, the wonders of the Kibbutz, the marvel of Tel Aviv, the Jewish city built in the desert)?

My shul life was separate, distinct, from my school one, a parallel narrative to my daily existence, a place where I could reinvent myself, learn from my social blunders, try new things. My parents found what they were looking for too, I suppose: having recently relocated from Montreal, and knowing nobody in Toronto, they managed to find friends, connection, community. We were invited in with open arms: Friday night potlucks, Saturday morning services that would end almost every week with a bagels-and-tuna Kiddush celebrating the most recent bar or bat mitzvah, the holidays strung through the Jewish year like an uneven necklace; there were retreats, clubs, brotherhoods, sisterhoods, youth groups, Torah study groups, lecture series, sports leagues, cooking classes, and it was all ours for the admission price of membership and the sacrifice of sitting through forty-five minutes of guitar-backed prayers most Friday nights.

But that’s not what I’m here to tell you about; I’m here to tell you about the Krasners. The Krasners were royalty at Kol B’Seder, one of the original six founding families. David Krasner was president-emeritus, head usher, and a major donor and philanthropist, his name appearing regularly in both the Jewish and city papers. He was a big man, with a deep, commanding voice, and we were all terrified of him (as head usher he especially picked on Erin, who happened to often be the loudest person in the room). Geri Krasner was president of the sisterhood, second soloist in the choir, and head of fundraising for the shul’s annual trip to Israel. Though unofficial, they had two seats reserved for them in the second row of the sanctuary, where, unless they were on one of their frequent family trips to New York City, they would be found every Friday night, Saturday morning, guest lecture, and holiday large or small. They had five children: Joanna, Neta, Yoni, Daniel, and Stephanie. Joanna and Neta were older than us and were both off in the States at small, expensive liberal arts colleges; Yoni and Daniel both played competitive hockey and were hardly ever around; Stephanie, who was a year older than I was, played guitar, wrote short stories about desperate people lost in grotesque urban environments, wore her sisters’ hand-me-downs, and was as confident as you would expect a beautiful, rich, creative, sheltered fourteen-year-old to be. She was the only Krasner child to spend time with us. Does it even need to be said that I was in love with her? I don’t know if I recall the first time we were invited to the Krasners’ mansion, or if all of those early nights are jumbled in my memory (how my parents managed to ingratiate themselves so quickly into Kol B’Seder’s inner circle I have no idea). What I do know is that in the fall of my thirteenth year, my bar mitzvah already receding into the past, we were there almost every Saturday night, along with five or six other families from the shul: the Brickmans, the Golds, the Cohens, the Mitzcovitzes, the Hoffmans, the Krasners, and us. They were raucous nights of food, arguments, unrequited teenage passion, discovery.

The Krasner estate was situated on two acres of forest off the Bridal Path, and still is, without a doubt, the biggest house I have ever been in. Though unbelievably large—not deep, but wide—it was old, unrenovated, and deeply lived in. The front door opened into a tiled foyer, the double-wide white-carpet staircase spiraling to the second floor. When the kitchen was built in the mid-eighties it must have been state-of-the-art, and had a separate eating area and breakfast nook; the dining room table could easily sit sixteen; and the living and family room walls were adorned with David and Geri’s various awards, commendations, and photos of trips to Israel and the family at their New York apartment. A door in the kitchen led into the mudroom, which was the size of our school gym, with big sliding doors leading out to the woods and ravine behind the house and three separate entrances to the three self-contained heated garages. Next to the mudroom was the indoor pool, next to the indoor pool was the old stables that Krasner had renovated into a floor hockey rink for the boys, complete with stands and a scoreboard. We never went upstairs.

The basement, accessible from an open staircase in the living room and a dark, enclosed one off the pool that used to lead to the servant quarters, was a long narrow hallway traversing the length of the house, with keypad-locked doors on either side. The only room in the basement we had access to was the entertainment room, which was where we spent most of our time. We could shut the door while we were down there, be as loud and silly as we wanted: mostly we would watch Arnold Schwarzenegger VHSes and listen to Adam Sandler albums, kill ourselves laughing at Paul Cohen’s jokes and dirty behaviour. Paul brimmed with sexual innuendo, Sandler-influenced voices, and what I guess I would call now teenage bravura; without his own friends around, Paul lavished us with attention. I would try to laugh just the right amount, be careful what I said, hope my absolute devotion to the seventeen-year-old Paul was not as obvious to everybody else as it was to me, try and not break out in sweat whenever Stephanie Krasner was on the same side of the room as me, strumming her guitar or reading one of her thrillingly dark stories. Regular nights in the life of a shy, sensitive boy.

 

There is one night in particular that I would continue to go back to again and again, as if to locate some sense of forewarning, of premonition. My uncle Menachem had joined the Montreal exodus, was staying with us for a few weeks before his visa came through and he could head to the coast, where he had some friends in a folk band that were going to take him on as guitar tech, and he had joined us at the Krasners for Saturday night dinner. It was after we had eaten and everybody under thirty-five had already gone to the basement, but I was still sitting at the table, next to my Mom. I was fascinated by my uncle, enthralled by the way he engaged with others. He just didn’t follow the same social conventions of the other adults in my life: he would argue, he would cut, he wouldn’t let hyperbole or hypocrisy or xenophobia pass him by. He wore his curly hair halfway between short and acceptably long, had shown up at our door with nothing but a worn banjo case and a suitcase full of old sweaters and threadbare slacks, and was vocally opposed to every single thing I was being taught to value: the Western world, the market economy, the eons-long persecution of the Jews. It was like nothing I had ever known, and to see him in the same room as David Krasner was worth missing out on whatever was going on downstairs.

As I knew they would, it was only a few minutes into their coffee before they got into it. They had been talking about the situation in Quebec, when Geri Krasner mentioned something about Israel. As I remember it now, I happened to be looking at my parents as a wave of worry passed over their faces.

“Israel? Israel?” Menachem said. “I don’t see what Israel has to do with any of this.” My mother and Menachem grew up in a strict religious household; their father, my grandfather, was a famous rabbi of some kind, he wrote a treatise on some arcane Talmudic matter that was still required reading to those who read treatises on arcane Talmudic matters. When he died everything religious in their household disappeared, which included my grandfather’s fervent Zionism. Joining Kol B’Seder was the first non-secular thing my mother had done since she was a teenager, and for the month he was with us Menachem never tired of making fun of her for it.

Geri looked personally hurt. “Israel has everything to do with it,” she said. “Israel is what keeps us safe.”

“Safe? Safe?! I can tell you, I don’t feel safe knowing that, as it turns out, when you give Jews an army and a nuclear bomb they mistreat it as readily as anybody else. The state of Israel was supposed to be a bastion of ethical power, a light unto the nations, and look what they’ve done with it! Oppression, occupation, racism, all backed—not to mention—by US money and warplanes!” Menachem was talking animatedly, using his hands for emphasis, his curls bouncing against his forehead.

“You’re a very strange man,” Geri said, barely controlling her anger. “How can you say these things, with the way the world is going right now? With what’s happening in our own country for Christ’s sake?!”

“I still feel safer here, knowing I’m not a part of the machinery of occupation. Sometimes it’s better to be the powerless one.”

At this, all eyes turned to Krasner. David, unlike my uncle and Geri, was calm, collected, loudly sipping his coffee. We all knew his story, he came once a year to religious school to remind anyone who could possibly forget: his parents were born over there, in Europe, were survivors. They had lost three children, David’s ghost siblings, as well as their entire extended families; the climax of David’s harrowing familial saga, which he would always build to with exquisite suspense, centered on his mother’s white gold engagement ring, which she had kept hidden, with great difficulty, until, in 1944, she traded it for the roast chicken and civilian clothes that ended up saving their lives. After spending two years as DPs in Europe they had come to Canada with absolutely nothing, spent the rest of their lives working and building a life for David. When Krasner Sr. died, the young Krasner took over his father’s small factory, and within ten years had turned it into the international company it was today. David’s talk to us would always end with him imploring us to not grow too complacent: “it could happen again, even here, even in Canada,” he would intone in his most stentorian voice. Imagine unloading that on a bunch of children. The last time he had spoken, Stephanie had raised her hand (is it any wonder Stephanie’s stories were so bleak?). “Daddy,” she asked, “what are you doing to fight against complacency? We seem pretty complacent to me.” As in love with her as I already was, now I was in awe of her—pushing back against the most feared man at shul, no matter that it was also her father. “Don’t underestimate your old man, Stephy,” Krasner had said, causing some cautious laughter from the audience, “I’m in a constant state of preparedness. Nothing is going to catch us off guard. Trust me.” But I’m getting away from the story. Back to the kitchen table: surely David wouldn’t let Menachem’s comment slide, and it looked like he was getting ready to speak, but Menachem beat him to it. The slight pause in conversation had pushed him into an even higher level of agitation.

“I can’t believe a smart woman like you would fall for their propaganda. Some Jews get some guns and we’re all supposed to bow down to them, let them do whatever they please in our name? That’s not how the world works. Wrong is wrong. The abuse of power is the abuse of power, no matter who’s committing it in whose name! We are not the only ones who can be victimized!”

“Now, Menachem,” my father said, attempting to neutralize the situation, “be reasonable.”

“I am being reasonable. It’s these sheeple that aren’t being reasonable!” Watching Menachem on the offensive I couldn’t help thinking about how that very afternoon I had walked into our family room to find him sobbing to the international news, his half-strung banjo forgotten in his lap.

My mother, who usually let Menachem go on without pushing back, got involved. “Do you think Israel has the right to exist?” she asked, softly, as if afraid of the answer.

Menachem grinned. “As much as any other nation state has the right to exist. So, not so much.”

Everyone started talking over each other at this point, until David cleared his throat. It was as if we were at shul and he told us to stop being so loud in the hallway during services: the adults, even Menachem, his hands frozen mid-gesticulation, stopped yelling and turned to him.

David took his time before speaking. “So what you’re saying, Menachem,” he said finally, “is that if, god forbid, our little project of western democracy cracks apart, and fascists—or only-god-knows-what-worse—come into power and start targeting Jews again, you wouldn’t accept Israel’s protection, be first in line to board one of their planes?”

Menachem looked like he had been hit in the gut. He sat for a minute, slumped in his chair, his face full of anguish. Unlike the right-to-exist question, he was apparently unprepared for this one: I don’t think the problem had ever been presented to him like that before. A different kind of person would have pretended to be unfazed, but not my uncle. He would never lie, even to people like David Krasner, whom he detested with the unique fervor of the anarchist, pacifist guitar tech he was.

“Oh, I would go, why not? I don’t have a death wish. But I’ll tell you one thing, Mr. Krasner. I wouldn’t sit idly over there in your ‘promised land.’ I would join the fight for social justice, for peace, for equal rights. One barbarity does not legitimate another.” He said the last sentence again, quietly, to himself.

David laughed softly, sipped his coffee. It was obvious that as far as he was concerned, he had won. “Did you hear the latest from the US congress?” Geri said, changing topics. “These are truly dark times.”

The room slipped back into its usual chatty noise and I went downstairs.

 

It must have been soon after that night that we broke into the Krasners’ house for the first time. Menachem had recently left, the whole family seeing him off at the airport, but what I remember far more vividly than what would end up being the last time any of us saw Menachem, what I still see when I wake up in the morning, is the look of surprised joy on Paul’s face when the window to the indoor hockey rink he had unlatched the night before swung open from the outside. Paul climbed through and opened the door for us, still grinning. The Krasners were in New York City for the week, so we knew the house would be empty. We walked through the dark hockey rink, the cavernous pool room, and took the back staircase into the long basement hallway. I was terrified, but not more terrified than when I had to play baseball during gym, or whenever I was talking to Stephanie Krasner, or any other number of social situations I found myself in on a weekly basis. With Paul’s infectious confidence it was hard to stay afraid.

Every door in the basement was shut, but Mitzy knew the code to the entertainment room. The first few times we broke in, we would just hang out, play video games, listen to CDs and watch movies. It was like a regular Saturday night there, except unsanctioned, except without any adults. Except without Stephanie. On our third time, with Paul’s urging, we ventured upstairs, and I got my first look at Stephanie’s bedroom. It was everything I imagined it to be: thick warm carpet, guitar cases neatly stacked by the window, camp photos, necklaces, a four-poster bed with a heavy white duvet, a white desk with a red typewriter centered perfectly on it. The door to the walk-in closet was slightly ajar, and there was a pair of red underwear caught on the lip of the wicker laundry basket next to her bed. I didn’t dare touch anything; this was sacred territory to my hormone-addled mind. I lagged behind for a few minutes before catching up to everybody in the master bedroom. We jumped on the bed, which must have been a triple-king; Erin had us all in stitches as she pretended to be Geri singing in the shower, turning on one of the three heads and soaking Mitzy; Paul pretended to stick various items into various holes.

Eventually we toweled the wet bathroom floor, smoothed the bed, and left the way we came, Paul carefully closing the hockey rink window behind us. That night we drove back to the suburbs and went for burgers and fries. Erin put the jawbreaker she had been working on all night on the table before picking up her burger. I was reveling in the intoxicating effects of belonging, of being with Paul as he grinned his way through his burger, but when I saw that Erin had a bracelet on her wrist that an hour ago was most definitely on Stephanie’s night table, the high I had somewhat diminished, though not enough to stop me from going back to the Krasners the night after, and the night after that.

 

The Saturday when the Krasners were back from NYC we were all there, as usual. After dinner, all the kids went down to the basement, but the door to our usual hang-out wouldn’t open.

“Daddy must have changed the code again,” Stephanie said. She went to the stairs and started calling for her father.

“Steph, Steph, it’s all right, I have a master,” Yoni, who had sprained his wrist and so had to miss practice that night, said. He pulled a tiny, shiny key from his pocket, and inserted it into the bottom of the keypad. The lock clicked open.

“How’d you get that?” Stephanie asked as we spilled into the room.

“Dad made a new one when he thought he lost this one; I found it at the bottom of the pool,” he said. “What? Don’t make that face! This is our house.”

“Why is your dad so obsessed with keeping all these doors locked?” I asked Stephanie after we sat down on the couch. Paul, Mitzy, and Yoni were loudly playing video games, shouting out insults and knocking controllers out of hands. I would never have been able to ask Stephanie such a complicated question even a week ago; breaking into the house had empowered me—I had a secret.

“Oh, daddy’s just weird like that.”

“What are in those other rooms, anyways?”

Stephanie smiled at me and my heart stoppered in my throat. “You don’t want to know,” she said.

“Maybe it’s bodies!” Erin said. I hadn’t even noticed that she had sat down next to us.

“Just like one of your stories,” I said, turning back to Stephanie.

She laughed, almost shyly, and my heart popped out of my throat and anchored in my stomach.

 

A few weeks later, a Wednesday night, the Krasner family back in NYC for some Jewish leaders gala, I got a text message from Paul: “come outside.” I grabbed my shoes and coat and went out to Paul’s idling car; Mitzy was riding shotgun, the latest Smith and Wesson catalogue in his lap, so I got into the back, next to Erin. “Show him Mitz!” Paul called as he pulled away from my house. With a flourish, Mitz produced something out of his pocket: the Krasner master key. I laughed uncomfortably.

“What are we going to do with that?” I asked.

“What’d you think we’re going to do, little buddy?” Paul asked. I looked out the window. We were leaving the suburbs.

I opened my mouth to protest—who knows what would have happened, what would have been different if I had said something?—but at that moment Erin grabbed my hand. I was so startled it was as though my life rebooted and started over again at that exact instant. After ten minutes of us holding hands I stole a glance at Erin. She smiled at me, her jawbreaker pushed into one cheek. I was so infatuated with Stephanie that I had never really given Erin much attention before, she had just always been there—how had I not noticed her mischievous eyes, her scrawniness, her cropped hair, her cheeks aglow in the swiping streetlights? I don’t think I took a breath on the thirty-minute drive to the Krasners’.

We parked at the end of the street, walked casually along the sidewalkless road before cutting across the lawn and sprinting into the back of their property. Paul scampered through the window and let us in. Five minutes later we were standing at the end of the basement hallway. All those doors; all those possibilities. “Fuck it, let’s eat,” Paul said, and we began.

We worked our way down the hall, each door opening with the click of the key in the lock. We discovered: a dark room, shelves of film, stations for the various washes, the intoxicating chemical stink; a workout room, benches and weights and a wall of mirrors; a wine cellar; a whiskey cellar; a room of VHSes organized and labelled on floor-to-ceiling shelves; a dusty library; and, behind the second last door on the right, a room full of gold.

How many people get to experience entering a room that is full of gold? Well, we did. It was the smallest room we had been in so far, grey carpet, bare white walls, and, piled neatly in the middle, was a pyramid of dull gold bricks, about as tall as I was. The looks on our faces must have been priceless; Mitzy looked like he had ascended to heaven. “Look at all that gold!” Paul shouted in his goofiest Sandler voice. We didn’t get any further than that room, but oh, did we celebrate, dancing around the gold, yelling with adrenaline, holding the bars above our heads, though they were heavy enough that I couldn’t keep one up for more than a minute.

Somewhere in the revelry Erin grabbed my hand. “Come with me,” she said. We went down the hall and into the entertainment room. I had never been in there with only one other person before and it seemed unnaturally large. Erin pushed me onto the couch. “Kiss me,” she said, her sugary-sour breath on my face. I kissed her, and we fell onto the floor.

The next day Paul was waiting in the parking lot of my elementary school, something he had never done before. I happened to be leaving at the same time as the vice principal, and I watched as she gave Paul, who was sitting on the hood of his car smoking a cigarette, a dirty look as she got into her car; I waited until she had pulled out of the lot before going over to him. I sensed right away that something about Paul had changed: he looked up at me with eyes that had been bent to a single purpose. “We’re going back tonight,” he said, as we drove the suburban streets, the newscaster on the radio talking about the emergency meeting just called at the UN. “Mitzy got his older bro to rent us a truck. And Erin had a great idea.”

This is always the hardest part of the story. Sure, I can tell you about my doubts, the debate I held in my head. But the end result will always be the same: I went along with it.

We stole eighty-five gold bricks from the Krasners’ basement that night. My arms were sore for almost a week (a few days later when we gave the first bars to the launderer Paul had somehow found, we learned that they were Good Delivery regulation bars, 12.4 kg, 400 troy ounces, exactly eleven inches long, each one worth about half a million US dollars). Paul had it all planned out: we took apart the pyramid, hauled it out to Mitzy who was waiting down the snow-dusted street in the van, and rebuilt it with regular house bricks Paul bought at the hardware store and spray-painted gold (this was Erin’s ‘great idea’: a sort-of extra fuck you to Krasner, I guess). We were so used to being in the Krasners’ when we weren’t supposed to, that there was no sense of urgency. We worked slowly, carefully. When we were almost finished building the fake pyramid, Erin took my hand, and I followed her down the hall, up the front stairs, across the kitchen, up the main stairs, and into Stephanie’s bedroom. She plopped down on Stephanie’s wide bed, popped the jawbreaker out of her mouth and dropped it onto Stephanie’s night table. “I bought some condoms,” she said, her eyes sparkling. “I think we can afford them now.” I hesitated, but she grabbed my arms and pulled me onto her. We melted into the downy whiteness of the bed. I was transgressing all over the place.

The next morning I woke up a multimillionaire, a criminal, and, seemingly most important of all, newly sexually active.

You can imagine what happened next, can’t you? Picture it: Paul was in grade eleven, Mitzy and Erin were in grade nine, I was in grade eight, not even in high school yet! But that didn’t stop us from burning through hundreds of thousands of dollars those first few weeks. We threw massive parties. Paul rented a three-bedroom penthouse apartment in the highrise near the mall where we could keep all of our purchases, had a vault installed in one of the bedrooms to store the gold, which we sold one at a time to various shady characters. At first, Erin and I continued our love-making.

What can I say? The gold changed me, it changed all of us. We spent with abandon, fuelled our wildest whims. We didn’t think of saving any of it. What did we know about long term GICs, safe investments, real estate? Mitzy started collecting high-end knives and guns, moved to LA before the borders closed and you could still bribe your way into the States. Erin got into rave promoting, always had a gaggle of glassy-eyed, spiky haired rave girls and boys surrounding her (they called her ‘mommy.’ It was weird). It hit Paul hardest of all. It wasn’t long before the money let his addictive side take over. As for myself, I wasn’t much better: without the aid of alcohol, drugs, or a warm body, I could no longer fall asleep; I stopped communicating with my parents; the halcyon days at Kol B’Seder receded into the past; everything I did, saw, or thought was filtered through the money. At the time, though, I barely noticed. We were kings and queens, riding high.

But I told you this was a story of fear, and it is. By the middle of high school I had bought my way to being among the coolest, most popular kids in school. I had slept with two thirds of the girls in my suburbs, one sixth of the guys, had everything I could ever want. But we were out of gold. Paul had let his addictions take him into some dark places, and we lost him to heroin and the teeming underground of criminals and drug dealers that had taken over most of downtown Toronto; the last time I saw him he begged me for a bar of gold, but I didn’t have any to give him, I didn’t save a single penny, and I’m not too sure I would have even if I could. I was a cold, calculating hedonist. Eventually, of course, I blew it with Erin, and then, like the conceited fool I had become, I blew it even more spectacularly with Stephanie. The second-last time I saw her, at the Skydome, during one of the first major registration events, she told me that something very valuable had been stolen from her father.

“I’m sure he’ll be fine,” I had said arrogantly. Stephanie was as vivacious as ever, and talking to her reminded me of my innocent childhood adoration. Shortly after we had stolen the gold from her father, Stephanie had transferred to a private school in New York; who knows what rumours about me had reached her, what she thought. I had heard that since she’d been back in Toronto she’d been working as a journalist for one of the last private newspapers—which, like all the others, had by then been shut down—and I was of course too self absorbed to ask what she was doing now.

“You don’t know anything about it, do you?” she asked.

“What? Of course not!”

She looked at me through narrow eyes. She sighed. “It’s really bad,” she said. “Really, really bad. Daddy had made certain—guarantees. And now he’s not going to be able to come through on them. And you heard he lost the business, right? We have to sell the house.”

“What? You’re kidding!” I was so delusional, I was still gauging my chances of hooking up with her.

Stephanie scoffed.

“Is it really so hard to believe? Look around you, things are not good.”

“It’s just like one of your stories,” I said.

She looked at me like I was sub-human. She spoke, slowly, sadly. “If you can’t see the difference between the two, you’re more lost than I thought.”

“I love you,” I said in a burst of recklessness that had become second nature to me. She looked stunned. A long moment passed. She studied me with her narrowed eyes. My mood soured.

“What happened to you, huh?” she said eventually. “You used to be such a nice, sweet boy.”

I had a quick retort for her, of course; those days, I had a quick retort for everything (though I would be lying if I didn’t say that this was the first time in four years that I started to doubt myself; a tiny little rip, but from then on there was nothing I could do from stopping the real world from seeping in, accumulating).

Unlike Stephanie, Krasner himself never confronted any of us—did he even suspect? In any case, what does it matter, the gold was gone; our fates were sealed. In the end Krasner had become more complacent than he thought, in his poorly protected mansion, in his brotherhood meetings, in his trust in the rule of law. In a padlocked room in his basement he didn’t bother to check on until it was too late. How angry at himself he must have been when it all came crashing down. A few short months after that conversation with Stephanie, the tanks would be rolling along Rideau, along Robson, along University, and the true terror would begin. But this, of course, is the part you already know, the part we all know all too well.

Let me just say this, then, in lieu of a proper ending. In the coming years, there would be survival. There would be horror. Horror stacked upon horror, humankind finally teetering too far over the very edge of the abyss. There would be compromise. There would be escape—though, of course, there ended up being no one to save us, no airplanes to lift us to freedom, and there never had been. For a very few, there would even be honour (I hope Menachem, wherever he is, managed to hold onto his ideals; for so many of us that was the first thing to go). But it was only after everything else, only after I heard what happened to the Krasners, what happened to Stephanie, that there would be guilt, terrible, body-slamming guilt. Guilt so stupendous, so unimaginably vast, that it drowns out everything else, becomes indistinguishable from the fear that follows me through all the days of my endangered life.

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THE ROAD 2 NOWHERE by KKUURRTT

My friend Brian joined a cult. He was always doing stupid shit like that. This one time when we were fifteen he jumped off a bridge cause fucking Mike Langer dared him to. He broke his shinbone when he hit the water and spent the rest of summer in a cast. It wasn’t all bad though. Langer sold weed and gave him a half-ounce for free because he felt terrible about daring him to do it even though we were playing Truth or Dare on a bridge which was dumb on everybody’s part. Honestly, we’re lucky it came up as short as it did on broken bones. We smoked that grass all summer long and had the time of our lives in many respects, so sometimes you come up on the downstroke I guess. 

They were called Harmony Home and were based out of—fuck—actually, I don’t know where they were based out of even. I’m not gonna sit here and pretend like I have the facts. I don’t have the facts. I don’t have shit. All I know is they are spread out across the country and Brian got roped into it while living in Seattle trying to write grunge songs even though rock has been dead since before Sonic Youth broke up. 

He and I lost touch like most people who went to high school together. Come on, don’t lie to yourself and tell me some bullshit line about how you still have the exact same friends as the ones you grew up with. You totally might still talk to the homies from way back but it’s not the same, is it? Something’s definitely missing, even if you’ve never been able to place exactly what that missing was. With Brian, it was always a whole bunch of weird shit that just didn’t compute. It made a whole hell of a lot more sense when he turned out to be the type of dude to get roped into following a guy named Steven LightSource like he’s the second coming of Christ. Sell his shit and shave his hair and go full steam ahead like other people do with stand-up comedy or Kickstarter campaigns or love. 

Like the majority of Brian’s acquaintances, I saw this all go down on Facebook. It went from wow Brian’s posting an awful lot about this, to shit well ok, now he’s signing off permanently to join them in the woods and become one with himself and the universe simultaneously. All right buddy whatever makes your knees knock at night. The real problem was that Brian wasn’t the only one. This wasn’t some isolated incident or anything. Harmony Home has more followers than Jesus. I think I know three or four to be honest. 

But now I’m on a bus with his Dad up to central Oregon, heading towards the compound they think he might possibly, theoretically, hopefully be at. Nobody has heard hare nor hide nor hello from him for well over twelve months and they are getting worried that maybe he drank the Kool-Aid or worse, but I don’t know what’s worse. I’m here because Bill asked me to come up with him. Bill was my Basketball coach in middle school and he still plays golf with my Dad. He thinks that since Brian and I have been friends since childhood seeing me will trigger something and make him be all like yeah, let’s fuck this popsicle stand. I’m not so sure about that, but it beats working. If Bill’s gonna pay me the money I’d normally make painting houses for him, fine I’ll be his deprogrammer. I’ll be whatever he wants me to be. 

We cross the border and the bus pulls off the highway following a sign for McDonalds. 1.2 Miles says the sign but who’s counting. There’s a Jack in the Box across the street but we stop at McDonalds. Coffee and fuel so when we finally land and are ready to get to work it’s not like shit let’s get a bagel first. I don’t know what Mr. Rollins has planned but I don’t do so hot on an empty stomach. 

“You want anything?” I ask the old man. His wearied eyes pour over a book about Harmony House that he took out from the library over by my house. He didn’t sleep a wink all ride. I slept like a baby. 

“Bill?” 

“Oh, uh…” he says, trying to pretend like he heard me the first time. “Large coffee, cream, two sugars,” he responds as if present and accounted for this whole time. “And I don’t know, an Egg McMuffin or whatever you can get them to leave cheese off of.” 

“Roger.”

I hop off the bus, feet hitting pavement simultaneously. Sometimes I imagine myself landing skateboard tricks that I’ve never been brave enough to try in real life. 

Fiddle around with the pipe in my pocket as I make my way around back instead of through the entrance like I’m supposed to. Next to a dumpster I sprinkle some green in the thumbprint indent on top of the bowl. I ground this flower up before we left, knowing full well that if I wanted to smoke anything this trip it would have to do it fast and loose. Lips, lighter, and the smoke hits my lungs. Hold it for a five count like I’ve been doing since Brian and I first started back in 2002. I have to be stoned to make it through this weekend. Or maybe it will be just the reminder that Brian needs to help snap his brain back to basics. Get all those cultoids so faded that they’ll be like this shit is wack, man you saved us, and those pretty cult girls will be like show me what a real man fucks like. 

An Egg McMuffin hold the American for the old man and the Big Breakfast with Hotcakes for me, two large coffees, all the cream all the sugar. The girl behind the counter is this beautiful girl who couldn’t have been older than seventeen. Too much eyeshadow on, like maybe she was trying to look older but probably really because she listens to punk rock and is too young to have style with it. I want to talk to her about The Misfits or Morrissey but I’m too stoned to sound like a normal human and would probably just seem like I’m hitting on her. Which I guess I sort of would be, but only not really. It’s fun to flirt with teenage girls the same way it is with old ladies, like they love it and it makes them feel special but nothing’s going to come of it, because come on. Man those peepers pop and I could get absolutely lost in them for a lifetime if I didn’t have business to take care of, like literal transactional business. 

“$17.18” she says like we’re talking about anything else. I want to say something clever. Same as you, right? Seventeen? Eighteen? And then she’d smile at me and we’d get out of there and I’d take her under my wing and protect her like Cherie Currie and the Runaways, but after a while with those doe eyes batting at me all the time we’d become something more and go live in Portland where this kind of age gap is not only accepted it’s encouraged. We’d open a coffee-shop/book-store/performance-space where we could live happily ever after and I wouldn’t have to deal with any of this bullshit.

Instead I say, “uhh yeah,” and fish into my pockets for that crumpled twenty I shoved in there on my way out of the house. I accidentally pull the pipe out with the bill and boy do those mascara monsters take in an eyeful like it’s some sort of lost fucking Indiana Jones treasure, but I guess it would be to a girl in East Klamath Falls, Oregon who probably hasn’t even heard of The Melvins yet. My eyes are shifty but we still manage to make contact. I smile uncomfortably, knowing I’ve blown it with the love of my life but it didn’t matter because I’ll never see her again. I pay with a $20 and don’t even wait for the change. 

The whole bus is waiting for me after another quick detour to get high again adds an extra five past the time I was supposed to be back. Bill won’t let them leave though like he’s some sort of stand up guy for having my back, but really it’s just that he knows he can’t handle any of this without me. Imagine that! Me being a support system for anything! My therapist would be so proud. 

“Thanks Bill.” I hand him the bag and plop my ass into the seat that’s meant for a man about four inches shorter and forty pounds lighter. 

“Bus driver says we’re about two hours outside of Bend. We’ll rent a car there and get a hotel for the night. Get our heads screwed on right before we hit the road again.” “Okay.”

Bill sleeps the whole way to Bend and I can’t stop thinking. Funny. 

Sitting in this Holiday Inn, I look out the window at a Best Buy across the concrete. The sun is out and Bill is snoring louder than a motorcycle with a fresh muffler testing out its new system at Sturgis. VRZZZZZTT—VRZZZZZZT—VRZZZZZZZT. Poor Guy. Guess I would be tuckered out too if I was dealing with the most stressful thing I’d ever dealt with. The hardest thing I had to do was bury my Mom, but my Dad did most of the work and it was so long ago now that I don’t remember if the pain was really that real or I’m just imagining it now. 

I decide to take a stroll through the store and end up in the DVD section looking at the back of The Master hoping to gain some inkling of insight. Hmmm… Philip Seymour Hoffman gone too soon, that’s the best I got. I place it back on the shelf and move up the alphabet to Cheech & Chong: Up in Smoke, which reminds me… 

Behind the box store next to the folded boxes, I’m cheefing through a bowl like there’s four or five of us passing it around. But it’s just me. It’s always just me. I don’t know why any of this matters. 

When I wake up Bill’s already down having a hotel breakfast. I take a seat with my plate of sausage links and look at my Dad’s friend and not my friend’s Dad. He’s head down in that book again like it’s got the solution to his problems and isn’t just leaving him with a better understanding of why his son left his no-job, no-girlfriend, living-in-his-parents-basement existence behind. I roll the meat tubes around with my fork wondering what really makes this man in front of me tick. Is it really about saving his son? Or is it more about saving face? What if his son already is saved? What if after we get there father and son look each other in the eyes and we just turn around and go home? Nothing needs saving here he’ll say and we’ll take the long ride back to Carlsbad in complete silence. I swear if that happens I won’t say a word. 

From Bend we fill up on gas twice, get a cup of coffee each, and I take approximately one piss. When we end up in a town called Burns I know it’s the place before Bill even tells me. It’s just got the vibe. 

Turns out Bill never really had too much of a plan, which I find out the hard way after he drives through town and parks somewhere inconspicuous on the outskirts. He turns to me and says: “So what do you got?” Like I’m the one here to save my son. 

“Uhh…” I say. “Shit,” he says.

He drops me off at the diner, Frank & Marys, with a vague plan of “finding out information.” I put it in quotes because he did when he said it like there was some sort of extra meaning I wasn’t entirely getting. He tells me that he’d do it if he could but he can’t because he looks like a cop. That he’ll sit in his car and think of next steps while I dig around with the locals. Bill leaves me with a twenty and a boot out the passenger side and tells me to call him if I find anything.

Tuna Melt, Coffee all the milk all the sugar. Sit at the counter and MARY, that’s what her name tag says, can hardly even look at me when she takes my order. Another young person stumbling around Burns looking for the quick and easy path to salvation that Steven LightSource advertised on his YouTube channel. I watched one or two of the videos when Brian first disappeared but it all seemed like metaphysical mumbo jumbo to me with the real truths hidden behind the paywall. 

“For 9.99 a month you can have unlimited access to the ‘Source of Eternal Happiness.’ Subscribe here.” No thanks. I’ve got Netflix

Mary drops off my plate and it clatters on the counter like it only can in cartoons. She tops off my coffee letting it steam just like I like it, piping hot, too much to even drink yet. I want to ask if she knows where Harmony House is but know it would become some awkward thing where I have to backtrack and explain myself like no I’m not trying to join—my friend is there and I’m trying to rescue him—I don’t have to explain myself to you MARY.

A girl slides in next to me and orders a bacon cheeseburger and a Coke. She’s pretty in a way directly marketed to me like when you’re talking about a product on the phone and then all of a sudden that exact product is in your Instagram feed. She smiles at me. I turn away.

“Do I know you from somewhere?” she asks.“Yeah yeah.” I say brushing her off.“No seriously,” she continues. “Kurt?”

I mean that’s my name so obviously I turn.

“Oh my God that is you! What are you doing out here?” She says.“I should ask you the same thing.”

I take a look at her face trying to place it. It does look familiar, but my mind has been playing tricks on me lately. The other day I watched an entire movie start to finish before realizing I’d seen it already. The last frame was a total oh shit you’ve seen this moment, but with two whole hours of NOTHING before that.

We eye each other for a long time while she makes faces that she must think will help jog something. They don’t. Finally: “Sam? Samantha Kersaw…”

Still nothing.

“Come on. We dated for a little at ASU. I sold mushrooms.”FUCK I had dated this girl. I think. Pretty sure I broke up with her over text. “Oh shit! How’ve you been?” I say, trying to deflect years of built-up anxiety in the turn of a friendly phrase.

“Great, Kurt. I’ve been really great.” She says before jumping right into it like she’s got no shame whatsoever about being in a cult. Because I guess to her it’s not a cult. It just is. “Have you heard of Harmony Home?”

What utter convenience, right? Travel 700 miles just to run into a girl I used to fuck in college. Or did we ever? It’s not that surprising though, not really. Harmony Home has a tendency to target former or current drug abusers like Brian, Sam and myself. It’s part of their ‘thing’ according to that New York Times exposé that Bill read out loud from on the first leg of our trip. And plus, the world is a minuscule place full of happenstance and coincidence. Synchronicity is as universal as any other thing that happens regularly.

“It’s the um—” I want to say cult I want to say cult I want to say cult—“religious organization that I see on the news all the time.” 

“Exactly! My husband and I run the Oregon chapter. It’s a dream come true really. I was so lost when you knew me back in college. Tune in, turn on, drop out was right. Just had the wrong turn on.”

Is she talking about me?

Mary scoffs as she delivers Sam’s order with the same level of spite she had with mine. Cartoon Clatter 2: The Animated Adventures of Platey and Cuppy. “Cheeseburger and Coke,” she says through gritted teeth, staring Samantha down like they’re old enemies who have had this confrontation many many times before. “You people aren’t welcome here anymore.”

“Please be reasona—”

Mary turns away, without filling me up even though I could clearly use it. My eye stays on the coffee swirling behind the glass. “Come on, let’s take a booth,” Samantha says to me. “Catch up.”

I see Mary making eye contact like don’t do it man but I can’t help myself. We pull into the stretched red leather of the booth. Classic diner fare. She barely gives me a moment to breathe before rocketing right back in.

“So, what’s the real reason you’re all the way out here in the middle of nowhere? You’re interested, right? Came to see what all the fuss is about? I can sense it on you.” I pause.

For what feels like forever.

And maybe it was.

Maybe it was 2 and 1/2 minutes.

Maybe it was eternity and she aged a thousand generations right in front of my face. Maybe it was 2 and a 1/2 seconds.

We’ll never know.

After that I say the only thing I can think to say: “You smoke?”

She doesn’t look over her shoulder, doesn’t hesitate, doesn’t look me in the eyes and tell me that every decision I’ve ever made has been wrong and I need to give up such filthy habits. No. She says, “Yeah, sure.”

I drop the twenty and we get the fuck out of there.

We smoke that bowl and then another one on the drive to Harmony Home. We pass the pipe back and forth in silence as her Jeep bounces on dirt roads that will probably never be paved. If Bill were smart he’d be following us right now, but I refuse to look over my shoulder and check. Fact of the matter is he’s not very smart. He’s probably sitting in a supermarket parking lot crying into his phone about how badly he’s failed as a father. I heard him doing that once to his girlfriend so I can only assume it's what he does every time I’m out of earshot. Maybe he’s got his finger hovering over my name in his phone, too afraid to find out what I’ve found. He never calls.

Sam rests a hand on my thigh and I feel something for the first time in a long time. It’s a familiar touch, but if I’m being completely honest, it’s not one I totally recognize. I remember a girl selling mushrooms and I remember this face, but I don’t really remember being with her in that kind of way. Life was a blur back then, Xanned out more often than not. What the fuck is wrong with me? This is not my beautiful house, this is not my beautiful wife, how did I get here? Fuck, I’m high.

Windows down as we roll up to our destination and I’m greeted by a chorus of friendliness in a clearing cut out of the woods just for us. A giant mansion stands behind them like they even make houses this big? Step out of the car and both feet land at the same time like it’s some sort of compulsion. I swear it’s not. I pass through a gauntlet of smiles that look like they’ve been tipped off and waiting for my arrival. “Hi, welcome to Harmony Home, I’m Jennifer.”

“Oh, he’s got such a beautiful aura. Where did he come from?”“Once in a Lifetime, brother. Same as it ever was.”

“Anything you need just let me know, I’m your guy. Glad to have you here with us.” At the end of this hallway of humans I see a guy I know. Hey, I know that guy! “Welcome, my friend,” Brian says as I approach. His head is shaved, with a smile planted far further than ear to ear. I wonder if it connects in the back of his head or what. I don’t think I’ve ever seen his eyes as lit up and alive as they are right now. Nothing needs saving here. Turn around and go home. Brian pecks Samantha on the cheek and I slowly but surely connect the dots to who exactly is married to whom. Now, that’s fucking happenstance. 

Arm on my back, Brian draws me nearer to the house. Samantha and the thirty-some others follow behind. No processional, no pomp, none of that shit. No overly excitable people asking if I’d ever heard of their lord and savior. These weren’t brainwashed monkeys. No. They are people, just regular guys and gals splitting off into casual conversations that have nothing to do with saving my soul.

I had expectations and these weren’t them.

Turns out that the ‘Source of Eternal Happiness’ isn’t anything we didn’t already have inside of us this whole time. We are in control of our own destiny. Harmony Home simply provides daily affirmations and necessities to those who seek to live a life in peace and with purpose. For $9.99 a month. Not so bad if you ask me.

I wonder how long Bill ended up waiting before he went home.

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HAZARD by Nicholas Rall

Ethel and Edith tried to keep their eyes open, resting in a square of brownish dying grass; an empty lot. There used to be a family who lived there, and I could see the kids play in the driveway from our window, until men with big, yellow machines tore it down and it stayed like that until the girls took me with them. They’d been in the neighborhood for a few hours, walking through about half the state of Florida, staying close to the interstate. Usually they could get a ride but not that night, and it was time to rest.

The area they found themselves in was hidden in the woods next to the interstate; the kind of place you don't remember, until an image of a dozen houses, smothered, overtaken by weeds, comes to your mind later after a bad day at work, a nightmare maybe, lingering residue from a trip through Florida you took a few years earlier.

They were drawn to his truck, a red Ford Ranger from the 1970’s, which was in perfect condition and probably inherited from a recently dead relative. He hadn't had enough time to neglect it, to let it rot into one of the other rusty clumps in the neighborhood—at least not on the outside.

Unknown to him, I'm sure, the girls watched as he walked to the curb and climbed into his truck. They thought they might find something useful in his garage or, at least, a shady place to rest. The garage door was busted, unable to lower all the way, leaving about a foot and a half of space open; just enough for the two of them to squeeze underneath.

Below all the tangles of the Earth, that old house might have had a scabby, reddish brown, rusted roof. Maybe it was painted a pale pink, and a tiny, concrete slab of a “porch” was the last thing your feet would touch before you entered through the ripped screen door. I don't remember.

The girls were disappointed when their eyes adjusted to the light. Only a set of six rusty metal racks lined the walls stacked mostly with empty buckets, car cleaning supplies, some oil, degreaser, and even a few broken garden tools, which had to come from somewhere else; somewhere that could sustain a real garden, not just thick, untamed weeds. The floor was cluttered with pieces of machines, unorganized in damp cardboard boxes—junk and not much else.

Nothing was of much use to them, except a large, navy tarp that was a little dirty but only with dust and leaves. Ethel found it crammed inside a brown bucket, and they’d be able to use it to protect some of their belongings, because it might rain soon. It was just after eight in the morning when they entered the man’s garage; it would rain soon… The tarp was thick, industrial grade, so they figured maybe the man worked in construction or did when he was younger. It certainly was an improvement over their current method of protecting their belongings which was to wrap everything in any plastic bags they could find; sometimes this included trashcan lining from cans inside gas station restrooms.

They sat in the man’s garage to cool off, until the sun finally went down. That summer held a record for years as the hottest in Florida, but even on an average year there was wet heat in the air—the kind usually only produced at dry cleaners, only the pleasant hint of fabric cleaner was absent. Instead, this air smelled like it had expired.

The girls walked all night, and they needed to rest now, for a few hours, until the man came home or until they woke up. They laid on their blanket  in the corner of the garage and vanished beneath the skyline of boxes.

“How long do you think he’ll be gone?” asked Edith, “he’s probably at work, huh?”

“Yeah, he’s probably at work, where do you think he works Edie?” Ethel wondered.

Turning from her side, Edith laid flat, staring up into his garage ceiling.

“Bucket Factory,” she replied, “and he’s in charge of those little plastic pieces that go on the metal handles…”

“Yeah,” Ethel replied. “Yeah I think that's right.”

I don’t remember a time before the heat … At first, I thought we didn’t have electricity because of how much I’d sweat, even though the man would crack the windows just a bit. I could hear the hum most then, and sometimes they even got into the house—the bugs. He would kill them, so I always protected them and hid them in my cup.

Maybe the house was air conditioned, but he never turned it on. Anyway, there had to be power coming from somewhere because I do remember watching the TV; a small black square placed on top of his dresser. The room had a light green carpet and a big bed. I remember the bed; it had tall white beams on all four corners and was raised enough to where I needed his help to get on to the top of it. The man had a stack of tapes, a dozen or so, but he never brought home new ones. Every once in a while, I’ll remember when I see an actor from one of the tapes on the TV, but I can never recall their names. I think I dreamt them up now and then, but there’s one I’d always look for that was my favorite … A woman, who was a scientist or vet, and her daughter living in Africa adopted a baby gorilla who was being hunted by poachers. When I can’t sleep I think of that movie; a jungle, and the sounds and smell of the jungle help me sleep. Usually at some point in the night, he’d turn off the tape and that’s when I would use the buzzing hum to fall asleep, which was usually more soothing than the movie.

When the girls awoke, light no longer shone in from the gap of the garage. With no way of telling time, they assumed they had slept for at least twelve hours. After gathering their things, they crawled through the black slit they entered. The man’s truck was back; windows rolled down, the cab was not cluttered like his garage—empty with nothing but a few of his crumbs on the floor.

“Looks like it can’t be too late, everyone’s still up. I hear sitcoms coming from that house, so it’s only about seven o’clock,” Ethel observed, standing in the same spot of dead grass she stood in outside of the man’s house hours ago.

“Yeah, I bet he just got off work, just pulled out his dinner from the microwave,” Edith replied as she walked back towards his house to the front door.

“I’ll ask if we can borrow the keys.”

A few weeks after her seventeenth birthday, Ethel had inherited some land that a second cousin of hers was impatiently waiting to hand over, and he had just informed her that that if she did not officially claim the land by the end of the month, he’d trade it to a friend of his for cattle. Part of her was fine was this, as something about living steady in Nebraska made her sick. Edith, born in the same hospital room just six months after Ethel though, figured her best friend  should  be the one to pocket the money from the land. They both liked walking and staying in new places each night, which could only be better with a steady amount of money, so she pushed the two of them through the South.

I heard something that could only be possible in a dream. I have to be dreaming because the man was right beside me, holding me. I felt his chest moving up and down against my back, as his hairy arms wrapped around my stomach … I had never seen anyone else in the house besides the man, but, when the girls walked past the door, I wasn’t scared. I was sure I was asleep. Maybe I should have been scared, but I wasn’t.

A soft buzzing just above my belly began and spread through my body… I knew they’d leave—I wished they’d take me with them. I closed my eyes, focusing on the buzzing outside until Ethel gently rubbed my cheek with her thumb and then lifted a finger to her lips, “Shhh.”

I was small enough then for her to carry easily, my chin sat on Ethel’s shoulders, and with hand over my eye I peeked through as the movie continued on the screen. Edith took the pillow I’d been using and pushed it down onto the man’s face, as the bugs began to hum louder than I'd ever heard before, welcoming me outside into their world.

Ethel, she was the first person I remember who felt real. She was tall, pale, with a thin face and light grey eyes. She and Edith both were frighteningly skinny, with bones showing through that never should.

She sat with me down in the cab of the man’s truck, playing with my hair, which was longer than hers. She pulled her fingers through one greasy, knotted tangle at a time, asking me questions in the same gentle way in which she unraveled my hair, but I had no answers for her, not even a name.

Soon, I heard the front door shut and Edith climbed in the passenger seat, as she vaguely smiled at me, handing me a garbage bag full of a couple of my toys and clothes she could find around the house. I smiled back but her dark, long hair was in her face, covering her eyes. When she wrapped her hair up with a tie she slid off of her wrist, I could see her light blue eyes. Darkness dripped from them, and I was not sure if she was a boy or a girl. I had only seen teenagers in movies.

Ethel drove through the night, as I rested my head against the glass window. I tried to listen to the wind; warm on my face, sneaking through a crack, not uncomfortable but pleasant and calming. We stopped at a gas station for a map. The girls asked me if I’d like to help them find our way. I did. I could not believe the lines and landmarks on the paper turn into real places, and I loved hearing Ethel and Edith talk. I stayed up with them all night just listening and directing a turn when needed, until my eyelids got so heavy they shut down. I woke up to the heavy orange light of the earth and glimpses of cars and trucks of all shapes and sizing speeding past me in every direction.

The truck screeched into the gas station parking lot. Ethel firmly held my hand and led me through the glass, double doors to use the bathroom and find some breakfast. I grabbed a Fruity Pebbles cereal bar, chocolate milk, and some peanuts.

Mesmerized by the blue and grey eyes that seemed to understand everything before them, I could feel their lives overshadowing mine. They didn't act like the teenagers on the tapes.

The concrete beneath his truck was cracked and dry, laid years ago but never maintained. Every few hours they came across long smooth stretches though.

“Do you think this is a good engine?” asked Edith.

“No … I don’t think so, not really,” Ethel replied with both hands gripped around the leather wheel.

“Yeah,”  agreed Edith. “It sounds weak ...” She paused for a minute.

“How many days do you think it took to build this whole truck?”

Ethel replied instantly, “Twelve days for the frame.”

“How long do you think it’s gonna take us to get to  your cousin's house?” Edith asked, resting her head against the glass.

“About a day, should be there by tomorrow around this time.”

“God I fucking hate him,” Edith groaned.

Ethel smirked. “Maybe he’s not so bad now. We won’t have to stay long.”

I ate on the curb below the pump, while Ethel fed the truck its breakfast. The sun made her hair glow tangerine. She caught me looking and let me know she thought that my hair was pretty and would be even prettier if I let her brush it, but I still did not let her.

The hidden insides of the man's truck were rotten and started to smell. The wheel began to shake in Ethel’s hands, spreading throughout the entire truck. The stink became suffocating. Ethel pulled onto the side of the road along an endless wooden fence. Soon a thick, black smoke rose from the engine, high above us.

A grey-haired, serious woman hauling a horse trailer pulled up, with six noses peeking through the metal grating. She told Ethel how we could scrap the truck. Ethel drove a few more miles and the truck died next to a field with one cow. On the other side of the field a thousand giant plastic tubes were being stored.

The bugs sounded a lot like the ones from where we came; squally and screechy. Edith and I played tag and hide-and-go-seek in the tubes. Focused, as quiet as possible, trying to hold my breath in the darkness of the thick, black plastic, I turned my head towards the opposite end, to scout the other direction, and Edith appeared out of nowhere. I froze, nearly falling off the edge, which had to be a 30-foot drop, but she grabbed me in time. She knew how bad she’d scared me because she held me for a long time before we climbed down.

That night we stayed in a marigold motel that was long and had one wooden door everyone had to come and go through. The inside looked like one long hallway with a thousand doors on each side, each a different shade of rust.

The owners were an older husband and wife, and did not want to rent out a room to Ethel. They said she was too young, but she insisted she was eighteen and eventually, they believed her.

Now I can only imagine them as people, mostly with faces like mine  but they had such sluggish attitudes and so they seemed to me to be actual slugs. I can actually remember, once the night attendant checked in, the two of them sliding their way down the hall, passing us as we entered our room, squeezing into a hole at the end of the hall, half the size of their thick, slimy bodies.

The motel sat next to a highway where the air was much drier than where we had come from. I could still hear the bugs, louder actually, and I hoped that they were following somehow.

We walked across the parking lot to a dusty green building that had a plastic man, on its roof, with a mustache and chef’s hat holding a pizza, larger than all three of our bodies combined.

While we sat on the bed, the television showed Kentucky commercials. A man screamed “Sale! Sale! Sale!” in front of a thousand cars. I knew he was nervous.

I took a warm bath, and fell asleep in Ethel’s oversized jacket. When she took the jacket off to wrap me in it, it was like she took off her shell and bones protruded out stretching her skin. I slept at the foot of the bed, curled up into a little ball. I had no trouble falling asleep once the air conditioner began to buzz. As the cool air flooded my nostrils and into my head, I dreamt of Ethel, Edith, and myself in the truck, driving through the night. I followed the truck from high above in the sky, flying with thousands of other round little pink bugs, buzzing…

A knock on our door woke me. Edith  didn’t move but Ethel shot up, and, as she saw me looking at the door, she rubbed my head until I fell back asleep.

The next morning, she told us to be very quiet getting ready because a priest had fallen asleep outside our door. She said the owners (the slugs) probably called him because we looked like we needed help. We saw him lying on one of the pillows in the motel lobby. Ethel lifted me over his body into Edith’s arms, and I saw a sliver of his face. His beard was white, thickest at his cheeks, thinning the higher it went. He tried to sleep like I did, in a little ball, but his long body formed a scribble.

With the money left from the truck, Ethel said we could buy bus tickets to Nebraska.

We walked for hours to get to the bus station, but I didn’t care. I loved it. I saw things I didn’t know the world had. I hadn’t known there were so many kinds of cars and so many people. Some people were eating hotdogs outside of a big white church and I ate so many I got a stomach ache. We got some bottles of water and marched on to the Hazard Greyhound Station—nothing was wrong with it, that was just the name of the town, a mining town. Edith said her Dad used to watch a funny show about some boys in Hazard but that it was nothing like what we saw.

Maybe the smoke from the man’s dead truck seeped into the sky and made everything in Hazard tinted by a shadow and much worse than TV.

Edith sat with me while Ethel bought the tickets. At first we were the only people in the station, but soon another bus dropped off a load. Some stayed and waited for another to carry them off, but some were supposed to be in Hazard. Ethel came back and told us our bus to Nebraska arrived at 3:00 a.m.

The girls agreed that they’d rather explore the town than sit in the Greyhound station for 16 hours. I was relieved because I wanted to walk more and I was disappointed to be going on the bus already. Edith was very interested in the mountains. They didn’t look how I’d imagine mountains in real life because they were not as tall as I thought they should be. She wanted to go up into them and explore, but Ethel shook her head at the idea. A small second hand store was across the street, and Ethel motioned us there instead.

I had walked off over to the videotape aisle, looking at all of the covers. The man only had about 12 or so tapes I had watched over and over again, so I never knew anymore existed. I was mesmerized by a cover with a plane crashing into the ocean but lost all interest in the tape when a deep voice echoed from the opposite end of the aisle.

It was the priest who had been asleep at our door earlier. Today, he was serious with determination in his voice. He began to walk towards me, so I ran to Ethel, checking out at the front. “You! Just stop, for just one moment please stop, I need to talk with you…’’ he called to us.

I hadn’t had to say anything, so maybe it was on my face or I was holding her wrist too tight, but she knew something was wrong before she even heard his voice.

“I’ll talk to him, okay? I know him… Don’t worry,” said the cashier, whose name tag read “August.”

“Father, what’s the matter? What’s going on here?” August called down the aisle, “Why are you bothering these kids? I have some leftovers … Father, have you eaten lunch? Go wait in the break room for me, I’ll be in in five.”

August scanned Ethel’s final item, “I think he’s just a little hungry.”

When I saw that priest again, alarms went off in every part of my body, but Ethel knew how to turn them off. She calmly finished checking out, and she led me outside where Edith was sitting outside on the curb smoking a cigarette. Ethel gave her a look, just a slight look, and she joined us, as we quickly walked away from the store back toward the mountains…

“You think he’s even a real priest? asked Edith. “Probably,” Ethel replied. “God’s looking for us maybe, maybe he’s trying to take us straight to heaven.” This made them both laugh for a while, and it made me laugh too.

Ethel asked if I’d like to hold her bags, and she said it was my job because she knew I could keep them safe. She had picked out some clothes for me. I walked between them. They looked like opposite sisters.  Ethel always wore white, light colors, blonde hair, but not yellow; sort of like dead grass. Edith, dyed her hair black, always wearing dark layers of clothes. She always said that was her real hair color, usually with wide open eyes and her tongue out past her chin because she knew I never believed her.

Ethel said, "We should probably go walk in the woods for a while.”

It must have stopped raining right before we got in because climbing up the hill covered us in mud. When we got up to the top, Edith put a little dollop of mud on my nose. I thought she was being mean until she giggled.

I helped Ethel and Edith set up the tarp from the man’s garage. The air beneath the trees smelled clean and safe... Once we were set up and sitting on the tarp, Ethel and Edith started telling me how much fun the bus would be, how the two of them met on the bus when they were just a little older than me, and how they would walk to their stop together. Every morning, Ethel played with my hair again, and I fell asleep to a mix of their memories and the sounds of all sorts of things moving in the woods. Soon I could hear all the other bugs, waiting for me.

Ethel tried her best not to wake me up, but as soon as I heard the man’s voice I clung to her, unable to look behind me. I pretended to be asleep. I knew the man would take me away; I knew the priest would take me back to the heat, to the expired air. I knew I would somehow end up back in the man’s house, even if he was not there. I would be there alone, in the heat, but this time in silence without even the comfort of the bugs … This priest, I was sure, had already convinced the girls that I was much better off in his care, and I became angry at them for becoming so easily convinced. I began to plan my escape into the woods, until I heard … laughter, comfortable laughter. The three of them were already making light of what was a misunderstanding.

The priest, dropping all sense of authority he tried to present earlier, explained that the reason he had been chasing us around Hazard was to beg us not to move there. He said they just could not take anyone in, that there was a waitlist for jobs for people who were born in the town and there was simply nothing for us there.

Ethel explained our issues: on our way home from spending the summer helping our grandmother on her farm in Florida, Ethel’s faithful truck of 3 years, her first truck, had finally “crapped out” on her, most likely due to the strain put on it at the farm.  It was okay because our father had just promised her a new car for her senior year.

My memories of him are mostly from Ethel and Edith keeping them alive. They actually kept in touch with the priest for a few years, giving life updates grounded mostly in truth with the addition of a fictional grandmother in Florida, but he hasn’t written back in about five years. Edith thinks he’s dead but Ethel’s not so sure. Sometimes the idea of taking a family road trip back to Hazard comes up but it just hasn’t worked out yet.

We spent our remaining hours in Hazard under the care of the priest. The inside of his home had a shaggy brown carpet that stretched through all the rooms, bordered by walls, pasted with orange wallpaper with faded brown stripes. In the living room, he had a big box of a TV and a collection of tapes—even more than I had at the man's house. I injected one into the machine about a lamb who wanted nothing more than to be eaten by God.

I watched the lamb travel the world, trying to prove it’s worth to God, sitting between the girls on the priest’s tan, leather couch. It was well worn. It must have been passed down to him. Everything in his home seemed like it had always been there—maybe God had built it for him? I’ve never gone to church, but the man back in Florida used to pray and read me things from the bible. This priest said he had not held a service in over six years because most of the people in Hazard had shifted their faith from God to something else, though he never explained what. Ethel later told me her mama loved God more than her, which is why she left…

The bus station’s light was almost green; unnatural and flickering. Ethel checked us in, and the station was full tonight with a few dozen people who lined the blue plastic coated benches, some greeted the priest by first name. A few people had already boarded; one man looked like he was a professional bus rider. Soon it was time to leave and the girls asked me to pick a seat, so I led them to the middle of the bus, where its engine hummed the loudest.

As we pulled away, the three of us looked out the window. Outside the station, the priest had gathered a handful of people from off of a bus coming from Arizona, begging them to avoid Hazard as a potential place to settle down.

When we finally arrived in Nebraska, we went straight to meet Ethel’s cousin to claim her land. Sometimes in the beginning, he’d come over for dinner, but they never talked much. They could never click, so they stopped trying to.

They sat at a rotting wooden table in the grass, in the shadow of a less rotted barn—the barn we lived in for a month before we could afford to build a traditional house—signing what needed to be signed.

I was drawn over to the dirt. Inside of a big plot of dirt surrounded by 20-foot-tall mulberry trees, I could hear something moving beneath; a new kind of buzz.

As I began to dig in the earth, each clump was dense with white worms—more worm than dirt. They were beautiful, not the typical limp earthworm, but these were powerful, fat, white worms. I called the girls over, soon, the three of us were in a trance.

The worms circled through the dirt like dolphins.

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ARE YOU MY MOTHER? by Allie Zenwirth

A

I used to get these pangs of want, filled with unnamable desires. You would find me jumping. You would find me erratic. I want to make something. I want to dance with somebody… I want to feel the heat with somebody… yeah... With somebody who loves me. Я хочу. I want… I want… I want… I don’t know… I want…  If you were that stranger at the bar you would ask me, “How do you have so much energy?” and I would say, “I don’t know,” and then  jeté away. 

Now I’m drained, all my juice is gone. Instead of yelling at people to, “Wake up!” I’m alone in a desert of darkness, amputated, stuck on scalding asphalt, bleeding as I push myself forward by my stumps one inch at a time into a never-ending nightmare. Nobody’s home inside me. My voice is deeper and flatter, allowing my new apartment-mate to clock me as trans:

New Apartment Mate: Can I ask you a question?

Allie Zenwirth: Sure

New Apartment mate: Your voice is very thick

Allie Zenwirth:

New Apartment Mate: (winks, gives thumbs up)

I am in a manhole of wanting to die. The lid standing between me and the street weighs 249 lbs (as manhole covers are wont).

My therapist points out that my suicidality is reasonable.* That makes me feel better. 

*he phrases it differently.

B

In the beginning of 2020, Corona Time, New York was the epicenter. I stayed with my Russian professor in Yonkers for a month, and during one particular dinner, as I talked everyone’s heads off about the Community, I got a text. 

Father: How are you feeling?

I announced: “Guess who just texted me?” I consumed everyone. “That’s a weird text, right? The first time in months: ‘How are you feeling?’ How should I respond?” 

From my father’s perspective, a concern regarding my health was reasonable. About half of the Chasidic community was infected by the virus. He was. My mom was. His brothers were. My mom’s siblings were. 

I had a follow up call with my father who said he’ll call me back, but he never did. However, the virus gave my mom an excuse to talk with me again. We hadn’t spoken in a year.

C

For a while, her disembodied voice was a grounding presence. She was someone to talk to when I moved back to my room in Jersey City. A windowless basement room in which I couldn’t stand upright, without A/C, and infested with both cockroaches and ants. Housing-wise, things improved when I paid the extra $150 and moved up to the second floor. I was still unemployed, alone, without many friends. 

D

Throughout my years at Sarah Lawrence College, I would be on the verge of homelessness during the winter breaks when the campus closed, relying on the kindness of strangers. During the break my senior year, January of 2019, I called my mother, asking her if she wanted to get together. Just like the year before, she asked if she could think about it and call me back. After three days, she decided she would be down to meet, but just like the year before, it would need to be in secret. We discussed our options and my mom determined it would be as if we were to have an affair. We would book a hotel room.

The following Wednesday morning, after eating two egg and cheese English Muffins I had gotten from Dunkin’ the night before, I looked out the window of a room in Hotel Le Blu and watched as a woman approached the hotel. She had gained weight. As usual she was wearing body-covering dark-colored clothing and false hair.

My mother entered the hotel and came up the elevator. I found her in the hallway, looking lost. I hugged her as if she were a pillow. Going into the room she put down her bags of Greek yogurt for herself and homemade cookies for me and we sat down on chairs facing each other. She got straight down to what she wanted to tell me.

Mom: I love you.

Me: I love you too.

Mom: I like talking with you on the phone.

Me: I like talking with you too. 

Mom: I know you are well intentioned, but you writing a memoir has been incredibly hurtful to me. I know you think you’re doing it for the right reasons, but I don’t think it’s ok that you expect me to keep talking with you.

Me: Is it because I am writing about you? I could use a pseudonym. 

Mom: Being written about is part of it. You know I’m a private person. 

Me: (nods unsure)

Mom: But...

The real problem? I would be writing negatively about the Community.

E

Talking with my mother in the bowels of my basement room was not all bliss. We would argue in almost hour-long bursts. Strangers would look at me strangely as I broke the silence of the night, making laps around my neighborhood, raising my voice in vehemence. She argued that I wasn’t Paul Revere rousing the colonials, that my memoir was not whistleblowing, that I was sharing with the world a warped version of the Chasidic Community, one driven by hatred and personal grievance. 

I argued that the Chasidic Community was a place where human rights were being violated. 

In August of 2020, when my mother recruited an aunt and an uncle to help refute my claims, when three people telling me that my experience in the Community was my own fault* became too much, I told my mother so. I told her we could continue to speak but I will not be gaslighted. She stopped calling me. 

*My mother will laugh. How predictable: another conversation that I warp and misconstrue. What else is new?

F

So now here I am in September of 2020, isolated, with a deadness all too familiar. My feelings blend with those of my still-in-Community-self, the mirage of pain I left behind in 2016, when I escaped. An experience I hoped would never return.

G

In 2011, when I was thirteen, I would sit beside Halberstam, a rabbi who was also a therapist, in the uncomfortable chair besides his desk, waiting. The darkness that had surrounded me since the age of five had turned into a throbbing pain. I was waiting for Halberstam to tell me why. To prescribe me some Advil. 

Like a pediatrician walking into a room saying, “Hi, how are you doing?” who would hear a few symptoms then confidently declare, “So here is what I’m going to do,” Halberstam found the problem: it was my parents. They had been putting “interjections” in my brain, programming me to believe that I deserved to be miserable. He implied that I was abused. I had never liked my parents, but I never realized their terribleness. “Oh boy, poor me.”

Halberstam’s abuse theory was not based on anything I said. I found out later that my mother had been seeing him as a patient as well. He must have based it on what my mother told him during her therapy. Something real. Unwilling and unable to tell me the truth, he turned it into something vague, which turned into “my parents are abusing me.” He didn’t bother to check in and see if that was my lived experience. He didn’t bother to check in and see if that was what made me unable to see anything but bleakness.

H

In 2014, after my second hospitalization in a psych ward, at sixteen, my mother and I became friends. Prison inmates. My mother shared that she never wanted me to be born. I was grateful she told me as it meant I wasn’t making things up. For a while, that was all that was mentioned of it. Then, in 2020, during the few months we resumed talking, my mother added that she didn’t want to get married either. She described her increasing dread as the wedding date had drawn nearer.

I

In 2020, when we would be on the phone, I argued that the Community was to blame for her marriage and my birth. The Community made her get married to someone she didn’t know at 18, and made her pump out one kid after the other. But in her mind the fault was her own. She could have decided not to get married and be ostracized. She chose to get married because deep down she wanted to. “We all need connection.” She could have gone on birth control even though she wasn’t allowed to without permission from a judge. She chose to have kids to prove to the world that you can have kids and not love them.

J

Sister Cathleen (Margaret Qualley) is a novice in training at a nunnery in Novitiate (2017).  She is intimacy repressed to the extent that she can’t bear hearing the object of her desire, Sister Emmanuelle (Rebecca Dyan), read the bible. One night, Sister Emmanuelle wakes up to a knock on her door. She opens it a crack.

Sister Emmanuelle: (whispers) You can’t be here

Sister Cathleen: (inaudible pleading)

Sister Emmanuelle: Okay

They both sit down on the bed nervous. LONG pause.

Sister Cathleen: Do you remember… Do you remember when you asked what I was starving for? I just want to be comforted… please will you just comfort me… please… please will you just… please will you just… please I just want to be comforted… please will you just comfort me... Please… Please… Please… Please will you just comfort me… Please will you just comfort me…

Unable to shut up until she is held, kissed, smothered, and eaten. 

I feel that.

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THE SIDE DOOR by Michael Farfel

Wendy wore black. He loved that most about her. She made her way over, careful, slow steps, like a deer, like he was extending bits of food. “Your arms are smaller than mine. I just need to loosen that nut. But I can't reach it,” Carl said over the exposed engine.“Smaller,” she repeated and made a show of flexing her arms. He laughed, “You're just more compact, is all. Come on, sweetheart. Give it a throw?”She pulled her hair into a ponytail. Maybe it was her hair he loved most. She bent over the engine and maneuvered the socket into place. She had to stand on her toes. He leaned back and watched. Maybe it was her ass he loved most. She worked cautiously at first. One hand resting on the carburetor for balance. She held the wrench awkwardly—difficult to find leverage in such a small space.“Fucking thing,” said Carl.  Wendy looked at him, sad-eyed. “It’s not a big deal. Can’t we just take it to the shop?”Carl shook his head and smiled, “Let me back in there. I’ll get the fucker off.”“Patience, Carl. Patience.”She adjusted the socket wrench so that she could get both hands to it. With one elbow framed against the air filter she was able to apply more torque.  “Careful,” Carl said. Her face turned red as she put more of her body weight into the push.“Careful,” Carl repeated, leaning over the far side of the engine.With one more deep breath the nut broke loose and Wendy’s hand punched through to the engine block. She jumped back and let out a feral yelp. “God dammit,” Carl said. “Are you okay?”She held the new wound to her lips and a line of blood crept down her chin. Her wide, watery eyes glared with unwavering intensity. “Let's go to the sink and have a look.” He handed her a clean rag and she pulled her hand away from her mouth. Carl’s heart skipped a beat when he saw how much it was bleeding. They made it to the sink and she placed it under the cool water.“What the fuck?” he said. She didn’t dare look. The blood ceased its flow abruptly and you could see bone, as clear as day and white as snow. “What the fuck?” Carl repeated. “Is it bad?” she asked through clenched teeth.“We just need to get you to a doctor. Jesus. Oh God.” They took his work truck and he punched it out of the driveway. He couldn’t look at her. Her complexion pallored as shadows of street signs danced across her face. Occasionally she'd touch her hand to her lips.“Turn on the radio or something,” she said. “I can’t bear to listen to the throbbing.”He fumbled with the radio dial. Country music blared.

My love was deep for this Mexican maiden, 

He moved to turn it down, but she shook her head. 

One night a wild young cowboy came in,

He dared a quick glance at her hand. The wound had grown to twice its size—more and more bone.“Don’t pick,” he cried out. “We’re almost there, just a few more miles.”

with wicked Felina, the girl that I loved.

 He let her out in front of the emergency room doors. By the time he joined her inside she was already sitting.There were four other people waiting: a mother and her son, a short-haired woman and a square-shaped man. Each—except the mother—had injuries similar to Wendy’s. The boy’s outstretched elbow showed a swath of bone the size of an egg. The short-haired woman held her face in her hands, looking forward toward nothing, and under her right eye was the same thing. Bright white. Smaller than the boy’s and in the shape of Illinois. The square-shaped man had a gash across his forehead. The flickering of the fluorescent bulb cast the injury in stuttered light.Carl sat down next to Wendy and touched her good hand, “What’s going on here?”“What do you mean?” she was annoyed with the question and didn’t hide it. “I’m waiting for them to come get me and put me back together, Carl. Because of you.”He blinked his eyes as a sudden headache built above his nose. “But, what about them?” he motioned his head toward the others.She scanned the room then looked at him and shook her head. “That's none of our business Carl. You need to stay focused.”Three of her knuckles were now totally revealed and the injury crept up the back of her hand. He sat with her for what felt like forever. Fifteen minutes. Occasionally the square-shaped man would hum and the short-haired woman would make a show of adjusting in her seat. Carl focused on his feet. Every time he looked up their wounds seemed to grow. His heart thumped in his ears.“I’m going to see what’s taking so long,” he said, mostly to himself as he stood.The nurse working the front desk didn’t acknowledge him immediately, eventually pointing to an intercom button. She was safely tucked behind a plastic window.He pressed, “What’s going on here?”“Excuse me?” she responded.“Wendy. She’s been over there for an eternity. Fifteen minutes. Twenty. Her hand, it’s...” he looked back at Wendy and took a deep breath, “... falling apart. It’s a major issue. We need help.” His words knocked together. “Right now, please. Right fucking now.”“Sir, please watch your language. We’ll get to her soon enough.”He looked over his shoulder again. The mother and son both looked at him. The boy’s wound now nearly encompassed his whole arm.“When?” Carl whispered. “Please.”“Sir, I assure you help is on the way.”“She’ll die out here, you stupid bitch.”The mother covered her son’s ears and gasped. Carl felt the eyes of the room dig into him.The nurse smiled and nodded, “Okay sir, I’m gonna call security now.” “I’m so sorry,” said Carl, “I just…” he put his face in his hands. The nurse was already on the phone, still nodding. Before he could turn around security had arrived. Two men. A small man with a small mustache and a much larger man. The smaller man wore the clothes of an hourly security guard with an emblem on his chest reminiscent of Nazi-era aesthetic, meant to strike fear. The larger was an actual police officer. Barrel chested, gun at the ready, super-human smile.“Everything alright here?” asked the officer, never losing eye contact.“Yeah, is everything all right?” repeated the security guard, never making eye contact.Carl nodded. “Fine, fine. Just waiting in the waiting room with Wendy.”“Who’s Wendy?” asked the officer.The security guard opened his mouth, but the officer lifted his hand in protest, always smiling.“What does it matter who? She’s sick and they won’t help her.” He pointed at the nurse. “They lack urgency. There is no urgency here.”“How about we step outside for a minute, Mister… What did you say your name was?”“No,” Carl said. “Wendy needs me.”“Wendy’s fine,” the officer said and motioned for the security guard to move behind Carl. “We’re gonna take this conversation outside. Let the autumn air cool us.” The officer winked.“No,” Carl repeated.The officer's gaze faltered for a quick second, he seemed to be examining something just outside of Carl. “Only two ways, sir. There’s the front door and there’s the side door. Do you understand?” the officer said, eyes refocused. Carl looked back and forth from the guard to the officer.  Nothing was making sense.“You see, I'm the side door,” the officer continued. “I exist as an act of kindness. Pure kindness. Unburdened by evil. You understand?”Carl laughed nervously, “You have the wrong guy. I’m here for Wendy. Her skin is—it’s melting.”In one lightning-fast movement, Carl was on the ground. The officer had pulled Carl’s arm one way and swept his legs the other. Guiding him down in an almost tender embrace.The security guard yipped and clapped his hands together. “Great. Wow,” he yelled out.The officer leaned over Carl, his smile ever wider, and said “The side door, then.”  Carl looked back at Wendy as the officer pushed him down a long hallway. She seemed fine. She smiled a full smile and Carl remembered that that was why he loved her most. Her teeth. Strange that he would’ve forgotten that, he thought. He waved and immediately regretted it because when she waved back he could see that her hand was mostly bone now. He felt himself scream, but couldn’t hear anything.The officer and the guard accompanied Carl all the way to his car.“Now, I’m gonna let you sit out here. Wendy is a beautiful woman. I’d hate for her to be stranded. But just remember what I told you.” “Two ways?” asked Carl looking up from his driver’s seat.“There is only one way, Carl.” The officer finally stopped smiling.The guard did two fast punches in the air and yelled out, “One way, buddy,” and slammed Carl’s door.
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SOMETHING SERIOUS by Austin Putty

For whatever reason, I didn't want to lie to myself and say it wasn't cheating. No matter how undecided I was about Glenn, whether I was using the evening as a test to see if I really loved him or not, the fact of the matter was that I had agreed to the blind date and had therefore opened myself to the possibility of cheating. Of that in itself, I was undoubtedly guilty, but guilt, oddly, wasn't the emotion that came over me—it was irritation. That feeling was blown away, though, the moment I shook my date's frosty, glistening hand. 

My date was a hulking figure shaped in three spherical lumps. He introduced himself as Derek, and I told him I was Tushara. We were at a hibachi grill. When he sat down, he took off his mistletoe-patterned scarf and bowler hat. I slid into the chair next to him, still a bit stunned. I had a suspicion that, underneath that beige turtleneck he was wearing, he had buttons going down his chest. His carrot nose was pierced, and I was surprised to find myself liking it. The rest of him was harder to swallow. 

My date was a snowman. Like, a real, actual snowman.

Still, Derek seemed well-mannered enough. He ordered a water with extra ice. I got saké, warm. A delicate Chinese fiddle played over the restaurant’s speakers, its melody broken by the clatter of plates and silverware. Waiters who passed couldn't help but slow their gait to look at him, to say much less of the dinner-goers at their tables. I didn't like all the attention he drew. It was embarrassing, and it made me want to leave. 

After taking a drink, Derek cleared his throat and turned toward me.

"To address the elephant in the room, there’s nothing magical about the hat. I’m just bald underneath."

I forced a laugh, bad as the joke was, then took a sip of my saké to keep from rolling my eyes. "Solid icebreaker," I said, not intending for it to come across as sarcastic as it did. The night was already so much weirder than I'd imagined it. I couldn't even cheat like a normal person. In my whole life I had never cheated on anyone, so whatever this date was turning into felt karmic.  

"Thanks," he said. He patted his forehead with a napkin. "Any questions about my, uh, corporal situation? I know it’s a bit of a shock."

"I'm not even sure what to ask," I said. It was hard to look him in his eyes. They were two beady coals, right there plumb on his otherwise guileless visage. It was unsettling. 

"It's fine. You don't need to force yourself. I know it takes some getting used to," said Derek. He filled the pause with another sip from his glass. 

I pulled my phone out of my purse and sent a flurry of question marks and angry emojis to Mary, the co-worker who had set us up. She had asked me the other day how things were going with Glenn, what our Christmas and New Year's plans were and so on. Mary tends to get her hopes up for me in a way I find annoying, so I'd lied and told her I'd broken it off with him. When she asked me why I had dumped him, I gave her part of the truth—that he had asked me to move in with him, and that I didn't want things to go any further than they already had. It wasn't exactly a lie since I had been leaning in that direction. I still hadn't given Glenn an answer. 

Anyways, I told her I didn’t do blind dates on principle, but she kept pushing after the story about Glenn. She said Derek was a friend from the north who had come down on business —an equivocation if I'd ever heard one. If I were to get up and leave him at the restaurant, I knew I would never hear the end of it from her. I didn’t have many friends left at work. I won’t pretend that wasn’t my fault. 

"So, how long have you been working with Mary at the preschool?" asked Derek. I kept my gaze focused on the lotus-themed wallpaper hoping to get through as much of the conversation—and the night—as possible without having to look at him. I was already being rude, so what did it matter?

"Pretty much since I graduated," I said. 

"College?"

"Mhm-hmm. Going on about three years now."

"Working with kids is difficult," said Derek. "I'll bet you're really passionate about your work."

"No. I figured out I don't like kids." 

"Should a preschool teacher be saying that?"

I shrugged. "I hate kids and the kids hate me."

Derek was quiet for a moment. Then he snorted. "You're funny. Mary's a little snarky too. Makes sense you two would get along."

"I tolerate her." I looked down and noticed my legs bouncing, so I crossed them. "How do you know Mary?'

"You could say we grew up in the same neighborhood." 

"Did Mary... build you?" I asked. I felt my face grow hot at the stupidity of the question, of the situation. 

"No," Derek said with a laugh, "but I did spend a lot of time with her whenever school let out."  

"Interesting," I said, although I was completely uninterested. In fact, the answer left me even more confused and irritated. I picked up the menu and wondered if Derek would pay for me. Surely, he would. He seemed like the type, and I deserved a free meal out of the night, at the very least.

"I’ve never been to a place like this before, where they make the food right in front of you," said Derek, smiling. "I’m excited."

My eyes were glued to the menu. "I’m excited for you," I said. The conversation was headed for another stalling point when the chef appeared at our table and began to put on a show of flipping knives. Derek watched, an expression of wonderment on his face, but something about it seemed strained. I heard a rhythmic ticking noise, though what it was I couldn't place. The chef tossed a bottle of cooking oil in the air, caught it, and squirted its contents across the grill. He brought out a lighter, gave it a flick, and the oil burst into a plume of flame in front of us. 

Though his body was already pure white, Derek seemed to pale. He raised the two twigs that formed his eyebrows, his mouth slightly agape. "Wow," he said, and he began to fan himself. It gave me an idea about the ticking noise. I looked behind Derek’s chair and, sure enough, he was dripping water from his backside onto the floor. 

"Are you okay?" I asked. It came out quieter than I meant it to, as if he were a child who had wet himself and I was trying to be discrete so as not to humiliate him. 

Derek jolted upright in his chair. "I'm fine. I'm good. Something wrong?"

"Well, it's just that you're..."

"What? Something in my teeth?" he said. His grin was polite, but the corners of his mouth were tense. 

"You're dripping." I felt embarrassed saying it, for some reason. Derek's façade broke for a millisecond, and his lip twitched. 

"Really?" he asked, turning around to check. "I hadn't noticed."

"As long as you know," I said. Had I known what was about to happen, I wouldn't have let him off so easily, but what did I know of talking snowmen? I don't tell diabetics how to control their blood sugar, so why would I nag a snowman I had just met over his body temperature?

"Appetizers?" the chef asked, and Derek and I agreed to shrimp and rice, no eggs for my portion. As the chef went to work chopping onions and pushing around clumps of short grain, the heat of his culinary performance soared. He erected flamethrowers and volcanoes out of his ingredients, and then, when they were piping hot, launched them playfully toward our plates and mouths. A flung piece of shrimp lodged itself into Derek’s chin like a harpoon, the steam allowing it to burrow deeper after impact. 

The chef, seeming a bit unsure how to deal with the situation, looked at it and said, "Now it’s shrimp on ice!" Derek laughed in good humor, but he was grimacing. I wondered how much more he could take, why he was trying so hard to make a good impression. I had been sending him nothing but bad signals. 

Derek’s patience with the chef’s unintentional torture and my cold attitude reminded me of Glenn, in a way—how his selflessness always made things more uncomfortable than they needed to be. Mary had told me the other day that it had taken her husband a week to notice she'd dyed her hair a shade lighter. Not Glenn, though. If I was quiet for so much as a second, he’d ask me what was wrong. When I stayed over at his place on the weekends, I couldn’t even change into a new T-shirt without him feeling the need to tell me I looked pretty in it. Maybe he sensed I was getting cold feet about us. And regardless of the thought behind it, it’s kind of dumb to compliment someone for wearing pajamas, isn’t it? 

Glenn’s a nice man, and, at first, I thought his fussing over me was cute. I’d been in a string of casual relationships for a while, so when Glenn came along, I thought I was ready for something serious. But the more time we spent together, the more Glenn’s concern became smothering, his deference annoying. When I told him I had started weekly therapy, he grabbed me all suddenly and started whispering sweetly how proud he was of me, how good and courageous my decision was. I didn’t know if I had a boyfriend or a second therapist. 

Still, there’s something about Glenn I couldn’t get away from. He’s brave, I think, in ways that I’m not. The kind of bravery that lets you do karaoke sober. He’s generous, adventurous, open-minded. When we spent a weekend in New Orleans back in August, he gave a ten-dollar bill to every street performer we came across, even the suspicious drummer kid smoking a roach outside Jackson Park. Nights like those, Glenn could be the best person in the world.

It was easy to fantasize about our breakup and whatever came after when I was alone, but I always felt weak when I was with him, and I would start second-guessing everything. That's probably the thing I hate about myself the most—I'm never cynical enough when it matters. 

Poor Derek was trickling, but somehow he and I had made it through the preparation of the main course. The chef lit up another oil splatter to clean the grill, and Derek endured it wearing that same pained grin. Singe marks speckled his arms and sagging dimples. 

"Buddy loves to kick up the temperature, doesn’t he?" said Derek.

"Are you sure you're okay?" I asked. "Yeah.” Derek’s eyes widened, and he nodded vigorously. “Don’t worry about me. He’s turning the grill off and we’ve got our dinner here. Let’s go ahead and eat." 

Derek lifted a spoonful of fried rice to his mouth. In an instant, his snowball hand slid off his wrist and plopped down like a blob of yogurt, spoon and all. A middle-aged woman eating tempura in the booth across from us let out a sharp gasp. Everyone in the restaurant turned and froze. Our chef, who had been in the middle of wiping down the grill, looked over to the manager at the front of the restaurant for rescue. The manager only shook his head and ducked behind the lectern. I stared at Derek's mushy hand resting atop the mound of fried rice on his plate like an overzealous dollop of mayonnaise. 

"God, this is so embarrassing," muttered Derek. His idiot smile finally disappeared.   

I found myself scooping Derek's slushy hand off his plate and putting it into an empty cup. 

I locked eyes with the manager as he was peeking over the lectern. I mouthed, "Check, please." 

***

Lately, Glenn had been pushing for us to get to know each other’s families more. His family was small—he’d lost his parents when he was young, and both he and his sister had been raised by an older aunt. I think it would have been easier if it was a big family. I come from a big family, so I can trust in generational distance and my louder cousins to keep things superficial, but Glenn’s family is claustrophobic. I can't ask Glenn if I forget someone's name. There's only three of them. And as much as he wanted me to get along with them, I didn’t want to spend all my Sunday afternoons with his nosy aunt and hermit sister. 

I thought about how I might end things with Glenn. Glenn and I had never told anyone, nor did we speak about it much, but we had begun as a one-night thing, originally. For me, Glenn had sprung into existence from the corner of a bar. I figured, at first, that was where I would eventually return him. He was good in bed, so I replied whenever he texted me, and Glenn pushed our relationship along from there. He was the one who had asked us to become exclusive, he was the one who had changed our dates from coffee shops and bars to sit-down restaurants and weekend trips, and he was the one who had asked me to move in with him. Wouldn’t it be fitting then if I ended things by slipping out of his life as easily as he had slid into mine? To tell him that I had cheated on him with a gentlemanly, bohemian snowman because, like I had always tried to tell him, I wasn’t cut out for anything serious?

I feel like I’m misrepresenting Glenn, or maybe it's that I can only say how he acts when he’s around me. He teaches math at a Catholic high school. He’s an assistant coach on their football team. I’ve been to some of their games, and I’ve seen Glenn chew out his students in front of the crowd, in front of their parents and siblings and friends. God knows who else. The Glenn on the sideline who spits and yells is not the one I talk to every day, so it makes me worry if other parts of him I don’t like will surface given time. That's the point of dating, isn't it? To be around someone until you figure out why it'll never work between you? Sometimes it takes one evening and other times it takes a year of saying yes until you can't any longer.   

***

Derek had his head inside one of the freezer doors in the frozen section. We were in a Walmart, the one across the street from the hibachi place. Vapor leaked out around him along with the hum of the freezers. I was shivering with my arms folded across my chest. Shoppers prodded their carts around us in the aisle, and I wordlessly apologized to each. Mary still hadn't texted me back. 

"I’ll be fine, just give me a second," said Derek. I stood a measure back from him and the freezer, waiting. We had gotten his hand reattached, but I wanted to make sure he was out of danger before I took off. He had lied about his condition in the restaurant, after all.

"Does this happen a lot?" I asked.

"No, I’m usually pretty good about managing it. Doctor says it’s anxiety."

"I mean the melting."

"Yeah. It gets worse when I’m nervous. I’m a nervous melter," said Derek. I felt bad about it, but the remark made me snicker. Derek missed it though, his bulbous head resting between a stack of DiGiornos. It was a bit of a shame, too, since he had been trying so hard to get me to laugh at dinner. I doubted he would say anything half as funny in the remainder of our time.

"I haven’t been out in a while," said Derek. "I bet I look pathetic."

"You’re fine. I haven’t been out in a long time either."

Derek turned his head. "Oh yeah? What’s the story there?"

I thought about lying to him. Instead I said, "I’m not really sure what I want, if I’m being honest."

Derek took his head out of the freezer and rolled it around his shoulders like a ball in a socket joint, casual as a morning stretch. “Silver Bells” crooned softly over the store's speakers. It was December, after all. 

"That’s understandable," said Derek. "Everybody goes at their own pace. Take me: I’ve called off two weddings last-minute, but I’m trying to put myself out there again." 

"You had a fiancé? You’ve had two fiancés?" I tried to imagine Derek getting down on one knee. 

"And both times I got cold feet. I mean, I always have cold feet, but—"

"No, I got you," I said. Derek caught me smirking that time. He grinned and smoothed his soft-serve scalp. 

"It’s scary, you know? Normal relationship stuff is frightening on its own, but I’m a snowman. There’s a lot of uncertainty that comes with that. A bad weather report could kill me, so how could I ever be a life partner to someone?" 

"I can't quite understand that," I said, "but I can empathize. I used to think I was going to marry the guy I dated through high school and college, but he dumped me senior year. I loved him––he was my first love—so I feel like I never really learned how to date until I was older, and now it feels like all the good men are taken or maybe I still don't know how to look. I don't know. I sound whiny and simple when I say all of this out loud." 

"No, it's not simple or stupid or anything," Derek said. Our eyes met. 

"Listen, Tushara, I’m sorry about dinner. Mary probably twisted your arm into coming. I won’t be hurt if you want to cut out." Again, Derek put forth a weak smile. 

"Maybe that's for the best." I crossed my wrists behind me, and my fingers tethered themselves onto the handle of a freezer door I didn't know was there. Across from us, I spotted a tub of Very Berry ice cream. "Actually, I’m up to grabbing dessert if you want." 

Derek raised a twiggy eyebrow. "Really? You know a good bakery around here?"

"I was thinking ice cream. You down for ice cream?"

"Can’t. I have sensitive teeth," he said.

"You’re joking."

"Of course I’m joking," said Derek. "I’m a snowman. I’m always down for ice cream." 

When I had the tub in my hands and closed the freezer door, I saw Derek gleaming behind me. It didn't seem forced like it was at the restaurant, either.

"What?" I said.

"Nothing," he said. "I just think you're a good person, is all." 

I wasn't sure I agreed. I've never been one to like compliments, especially unexpected ones. I may have blushed a little. That's all I'll say. But then I remembered Glenn, and whatever had been warming inside me vanished.

We took the ice cream and a packet of plastic spoons to the car. Something about the way Derek brought his head low to ease himself into the passenger seat caught me. He had to adjust the seat to give himself more room, but even once settled you could hardly fit a hand between his head and the car ceiling, and his left arm smothered the entire middle console. He swallowed up space no matter where he was—like Glenn, you couldn't ignore him if you wanted to—but being boxed inside the car with Derek magnified his presence, made me notice just how immense he was. I, on the other hand, had always felt a bit sad at how little I filled the space around me. I'd have to lean my whole body over to rest my arm on the console as nonchalantly as Derek. The distance between me and him was all on my end. 

"Can you move your hand?" I asked. Derek complied, and I slammed the tub of ice cream down on the console. We opened it, digging our spoons in. Derek’s lips turned pink and purple. The color of the ice cream diffused around his chin like a drop of paint in clear water. I put my spoon down and reached across to touch the coloring. Derek's face had the same texture as packed snow. 

"There’s something I have to tell you," I said, and Derek cocked his head. "I’m with someone right now, and I’m thinking about leaving him. He wants me to move in, and I like him —I really do—but I'm scared. I keep making up all these excuses and explanations, but I don't know what I'm afraid of." 

I looked down and saw that my hands were shaking. I brought them into my lap to keep it hidden. Derek leaned back and mulled over my confession with a bite of strawberry ice cream. The car was off, and the radio was off, so I heard nothing but the crunching of Derek’s enigmatic maw, a sound that reminded me of boots on fresh snow. 

"You should leave him," said Derek.

"I’m surprised that’s your answer."

"Really? Did I seem like an optimist?" 

"You were just talking about putting yourself out there."

Derek laughed. "I guess I was. But I think, in most cases, if you have doubts about something important, you should play it safe. You and I are paranoid people. I have my reasons, and I'm sure you have yours."

"Maybe, but look at us," I said. "This has obviously not worked for either of us." Derek crossed his arms and leaned into the window, away from me, but I continued. "I think we should try something bold for once."

Derek knit his stick eyebrows together and sighed. "I don’t know about you, but I’ve already faced mortal danger tonight, and I’m getting a little tired."

"It’s okay," I said, "because I’ll be the one taking all the risk this time." I leaned over, closed my eyes, and pressed my lips against Derek's. It took him a moment to register what was happening, but eventually he got around to kissing me back. I expected at least a shiver, but instead I only felt numb sloshing my tongue around the insides of his frozen mouth. It wasn't satisfying but it wasn't horrible either. More than anything, I was saddened at how little Glenn came to mind. There was no sinful thrill or overwhelming guilt. No invasive, on-the-fly comparisons. This was a man who loved me, and I could hardly think of him in the act of cheating on him except for noticing how little I noticed him. .I climbed on top of Derek, and he pulled off my cardigan. My inner thighs felt like fire, his lap was so cold. 

My mother used to tell me that my grandparents had lived almost their entire lives without ever having seen the snow. It was only when they came to America in their twilight years that they had first felt its gentle sting upon their cheeks and upturned palms, but the new experience had shaken them deeply. Nothing reminds you of the fact that you are a warm-bodied, living being more than the shock of cold. I knew that Derek and I would never speak again after that night, and I knew Glenn and I weren’t going to make it either. 

What happened next—it didn't matter anymore whether I was making a mistake or not. All that mattered was that I knew what I wanted in that moment, so I held tight to it. Mary would chew my ear off once I told her everything, and that was fine. I still had time to figure my life out. This was a winter story, but the seeds of spring were still packed tightly beneath the frost.

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MY MOM TOLD ME TO EAT TINY SANDWICHES by Dough Mahoney

my mom took a picture of me walking to the car. she took a picture of me in the car. we drove towards eatonton, georgia.

i wanted to vape but couldn’t. or i could, but it would ruin the trip. i didn’t vape.

i read a few pages from black jacobins.

i asked how long the drive was going to take. five hours, my dad said. i thought he was joking. i asked if he was joking. he said he wasn’t joking. five hours isn’t too long, i said.

i drank coffee from a thermos. i finished the coffee. i ate a couple jolly ranchers. my dad asked for a jolly rancher. i haven’t had a jolly rancher in fifteen years, he said. fuck, he said. this is good.

my mom put the address into her phone, but my dad said he wanted to look at the directions on the car dash gps. but my mom wanted to take the scenic route. but the car dash gps would only take us the fastest route. but my dad really wanted to use the car dash gps, even though the phone gps hooks up to the car’s bluetooth, and can announce the directions over the speakers. i said we can take the scenic route and listen to mom’s phone, or take the short route and dad could use the car dash gps. he asked why the car dash gps couldn’t take us the scenic route and i said i didn’t know. we listened to my mom's phone. my mom’s phone told my dad to get off the highway and onto a two lane road. my dad asked why we were getting off the highway and i said because we just agreed to take the scenic route. he got off the highway.

i decided to relax and look out the window at the united states of america. the united states of america looked shitty. we passed a lot of crumbling houses and dollar generals and advanced auto parts. the small businesses looked decrepit and old and were mostly no longer in business. we passed a pyramid shaped building that was all roof. it was a roofed pyramid. upon further inspection, it was a roofing business. they had multiple flags supporting the reelection of the sitting president.

eventually my mom had to pee. we tried to pee inside a dairy queen but the dairy queen was drive thru only. we can just go through the drive-thru, my mom said. but we came here to pee, my dad said. did you want ice cream though? my mom said. my dad said he didn’t want ice cream. i saw a popeyes chicken across the street. i said we could go there maybe. my dad said people have been shooting each other to get their chicken sandwich. i said i had the sandwich a couple months ago and that it was really good. my dad asked me if i had to shoot anyone to get the sandwich and i said no. i just drove through the drive through and bought it, i said. i ate it in my car. he asked if i fixed my car’s air conditioning and i said i hadn’t. you ate a chicken sandwich alone in your hot car? he said. yeah, i said. why? he said. i said i was doing laundry and popeyes was close to the laundromat. cool.

we drove to a gas station/tiny sandwich restaurant. i put on my mask and went inside. i vaped in the bathroom. i hit the vape four times. didn’t want to leave the bathroom. did a big one and left the bathroom, feeling light headed. to my mom i said, does dad want popeyes or should i get some tiny sandwiches from the tiny sandwich place? my mom told me to eat tiny sandwiches. i walked from the gas station part of the store to the tiny sandwich part of the store. i ordered three tiny chicken sandwiches. my dad left the gas station part of the store and entered the tiny sandwich part of the store. what are you getting? i said. he said he didn’t know. the lady said she was ready to take his order. he looked at the menu. i envied how quickly he was able to decide. tiny hotdog, he said. and a tiny chicken sandwich. i ate the tiny sandwiches in the car. my dad ate his tiny sandwich. my mom asked for a bite. she took a bite and moved her head away from the tiny sandwich and she had a whole pickle slice in her mouth. you took my whole pickle, my dad said. it slipped out, my mom said. there was a lot of mayonnaise on the tiny chicken sandwiches, but i enjoyed them regardless.

i fell asleep for a couple hours. when i woke up my dad kept saying piggly wiggly or publix, piggly wiggly or publix. publix, my mom said. we drove past the cottage/country club neighborhood where we were staying and drove eight more miles and then we were at publix. inside publix my mom said get whatever you want. i walked to where the soda waters were and got two twelve packs of soda water. what is that? my dad said. life source, i thought. soda waters, i said. soda waters, my dad said. we bought more stuff. there were a lot of people inside the publix. felt like too many people. we’re going to get the corona virus, my dad said. i was at costco the other day and this guy got mad at an employee. he said, ‘how can you tell me to wear a mask when you can’t even wear yours right? your nose is hanging out of your mask.’ they had to kick him out. i said i didn’t understand why people couldn’t just wear their masks without getting upset. i said i saw a video the other day where a dad and his teenage son were in a grocery store and the dad was yelling about not wanting to wear a mask and trying to fight the employees and his son had to literally pick him up and carry him out of the store. i said, he yelled ‘i’ll fight you pussies’ and then yelled ‘i’ll fuck a retard’ while being carried out of the store by his teenage son. my dad thought that was funny. we shared a laugh. i shared a laugh with dad. my mom took a picture of me sharing a laugh with my dad. she showed me the laugh sharing picture. you couldn’t tell we were sharing a laugh because we had our masks on.

we all walked toward the restroom. my dad walked in the restroom after me. i was in a stall and he was at the urinal. i wanted to vape but didn’t want dad to see the vapor. i peed and looked at my phone, hoping my dad would finish pissing and leave the bathroom so i could vape in the stall. he finished peeing and walked toward the sink. i thought that he might think it was weird if i stayed in the bathroom stall after i had already obviously finished peeing, so i walked out of the stall. my dad dried his hands and left the bathroom. i washed my hands and then dried them and went back into the stall and vaped three times. left the bathroom. didn’t feel like i had vaped enough. felt ready to be at the house so i could vape more leisurely and frequently.

my mom said she was getting really hot. my sister was also with us but didn’t do or say anything interesting so i haven’t mentioned her yet, but she was there the whole time. so my mom was talking about getting a hot flash. she said she needed to sit down. i told her to go sit in the car and give me the list and we could get everything else. she was sweating heavily and said she was feeling dizzy but didn’t want to go sit in the air conditioned car and drink a gatorade for some reason so she just kept saying she was hot and dizzy until we left. she ate a burrito thing in the car and drank a gatorade and said she felt better.

we stopped by a water sports place because my dad wanted to look at the boat we were renting. him and my sister went inside and i stayed in the car with my mom. my dad texted my mom and said we had to come inside and sign waivers. my dad and sister were watching a video on a computer screen and my dad said we had to watch. so we were just standing there because there weren’t chairs. a cop repeated a slogan about the importance of life jackets. something like keep it on georgia. not sure if that’s what it was. should remember because he said it many times but i don’t. pass boats on the left. if a boat is heading straight at you swerve to the right. the water cop said something about what green, red, and whites buoys meant but i stopped paying attention. my dad asked a teenage employee questions and he answered exclusively by saying i think so, until my dad asked if big people like him can wakeboard and he said, i think so… yes. drove and arrived at the cottage airbnb neighborhood where we would be staying for the next three days. it was in a gated community. a lady at the gate asked for the address we are heading to and my dad said 128 [something] and the lady walked into a shed-looking building to type something into a computer, presumably. my mom said it’s actually 129 [something]. my dad hurried out of the car and walked into the shed, which i wasn’t sure if he was allowed to do, but he came back outside and everything was fine, it’s fine to go in the shed i guess.

we drove to the house. unpacked stuff. i vaped in the bathroom. felt good. my dad opened a beer. or a twisted tea. not sure. my mom made a joke about how much wine she brought. we talked about the cottage. we all agreed the cottage was good. walked upstairs to where i was staying. there were two queen beds in the room, facing each other. i sent a picture of the queens beds to my friend and he replied obscenely haunted energy, then said i feel like this is the last text i’m ever going to get from you. i didn’t text back. my mom said we should fill our thermos with sangria and walk to the lake. so we did that. my parents sat on adirondack chairs on a small man-made beach. there was pool behind us. why are we doing this? we should be at the pool, my mom said. we walked back to the house to put on suits. i lead the way, cutting through people’s yards and a golf course. my parents doubted that i knew where i was going but i assured them that i have an incredible sense of direction. i navigated us flawlessly back to the cottage, unsurprisingly. i looked at my phone and it was 7:30. it’s 7:30, i said. should we go to the pool? my mom said. it’s gonna be dark, i think, but i’m down for whatever, i said. everyone said they were down for whatever. my mom said maybe we should just relax at the house. we all said that sounded good because we were all down for whatever.

my mom poured wine. i poured wine. my dad drank a twisted tea or a beer. my sister put on her roller skates and skated around. we sat on the porch. my mom told me to tell my sister that she’s good at roller blading. you’re really at roller blading, i said. my mom took a picture of me telling my sister that she’s really good at roller blading. i went on youtube and typed ‘how to..’ ‘how to uncork a wine bottle without an opener’ popped up and ‘how to get your dog to pee in a toilet’ popped up because i had searched those things on youtube recently. i finished typing ‘how to wakeboard beginner’ and watched videos. the idea to standing up is to let the boat do the work. let the boat do the work, i need to remember this, i thought. i searched wakeboard crashes and beginner wakeboarding tricks. my dad told me i should focus on just getting up. i said i wanted to watch trick tutorials just in case i was a natural. we went inside and my dad gave me a self help book. 12 rules for life by jordan peterson. i asked him if he’s read it and he said no but he listened to most of the audiobook. he said he’s trying to read things above his thinking level. said he didn’t understand the book but thought i would like it. um, my mom drank more wine and a line of conversation happened between her and my dad and they ended up having a push-up contest and tying with five push ups each. we sat on the couches. i noticed my mom and dad stopped drinking alcohol so i also stopped drinking alcohol. i looked at my phone for a minute and then i looked up and my family seemed to have disappeared. my dad yelled dough mahoney, which is my name, and i walked up stairs and they were sitting in the upstairs living room. dad wanted us all to sit in here, my mom said. we sat in the upstairs living room for probably 30 seconds and then my mom said she was going to bed. i said it’s like an hour past y’all’s usual bedtime, and my dad said he’s been staying up until midnight recently searching craigslist for a pressure washer and then said he was going to bed. i borrowed some floss and said goodnight. i locked the door and vaped heavily and opened twitter. theo posted a video of jordan peterson on joe rogan’s podcast talking about how he went on an all meat diet and then drank apple cider vinegar and couldn’t sleep for 25 days. i searched jordan peterson on youtube and watched two minutes of a compilation video of jordan peterson explaining why he refuses to call people by their proper pronouns. no further investigation of jordan peterson was required. i read a book about the stock market. i stared at the empty bed directly across from me and decided not to think about it.

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MALE ENDURANCES by Nora MacLeod

My college friend asked me out for drinks and named a bar equidistant to our offices and apartments. The last time I went there a dentist had hit on me with his Argentinian friend who claimed he worked for the CIA. The time before that I’d fainted on the sidewalk during a first date, it was the best date of my life. Arriving at the bar, I felt as though I was returning to the dumping ground of a dead body, coming back to touch his hair and maybe sit on his rotting face.

In a dream I felt I knew he was the one because he presented to me a pair of beautiful pink shoes and then proceeded to eat them—peeling them apart like sliced lox, wetting his face.

Men are always asking me if I’ve just made a sound.

I know a relationship is over when I am lent books.

He had raped his ex-fiancé and that wasn’t even a deal breaker on the first date, or the fourteenth.

I watched the men fighting on the screen and then the faces of the spectators beside me, all betraying a humorous indifference. And my date, I couldn’t look at him. Goosebumps came in waves and I shuddered, realizing that tonight he would beat the shit out of me in bed.

I said, I don’t know how to feel, I am a cold corpse. She said, Try acupuncture.

Somebody using Foley’s photo on a dating app—or it looks just like him, or I can’t tell—so I reverse Google-image-search the photo and swipe right and pray for a miracle.

Two men who know each other have said the same strange thing to me in bed, but I will not repeat it here. 

By the time I got out of the shower he had prepared himself breakfast and was bent over his laptop. He felt safe in there, like a small, dirty, white dog, loved too much by someone, constantly at risk of rupturing and spilling his guts everywhere. Himself, neither filthy nor unhealthy, but his mind, his character, threatening uncanny flaccid explosion. 

I’m annoyed when men I date or sleep with tell me that I have a cruel undertone or that I seem annoyed with everything they say or do. But I am truly disturbed to hear from a man that I am seeing now that I am kind, too kind and understanding, confirming my own worst fears and beliefs. 

There is a kind of truth: I can tell a man that domestic violence spikes on the day of the Super Bowl and they nod and say, Oh. It does not matter if this is factually true because it is another kind of truth, one that is substantiated by the man’s reluctance to be moved. 

He had escaped his head—it was an optimistic meditation on rebirth. I’m not so concerned with his head, but when it does enter my mind it is peeking out from between my legs dripping in more ways than one. 

You know what is triter than a dream? Saying that dreams are uninteresting. I swear to god if you don’t take your hand off of your dick I am going to cut it off. 

It isn’t about war—it’s about exhuming a dead man’s dick. 

If you knock on anything long enough, it will become a door. I was specifically not expecting you. 

I like not having a steady boyfriend because it means I have to carry less in my purse.

Manufacturing faith, manufacturing emotions. The best time to break someone is during the Christmas season. 

He didn’t even come that night; I think he was high on cocaine. I didn’t mention to him that I’d had unprotected sex with three strange men earlier that month. 

This was it. I’d been in the city long enough to be sitting in this bar with some guy, who loved this bar, the same bar where I met my ex years ago. The same restaurants, same haunts, all these guys liked the same drinks. And before my ex, I’d played pool in the back room with another ex, all three of these guys would grope me in the dark corners and pay for everything with cash.  

I clutched my overly full stomach and let it come out in my skirt. I could appear believably three months pregnant. 

At first I’d squinted to avoid the gory photos, but once the heat passed through my face I looked more closely at the series of tightly cropped video stills. While still alive, the face he assumed was disgusted—what other expression was there to have?

And the blade was so small. Not at all what I’d imagined. I thought a ‘beheading’ required a guillotine, a machete. That knife could have made it through TSA. He didn’t look like himself with his head shaved and his body in the wrong place. 

In high school I published poems about the death of my brother. My favorite brother, my parents’ favorite. He called my mother from Iraq and she would cry for hours after their brief lovely talks. He never asked to speak with me and I was never mentioned. I’m so glad that my mother never took an interest in anything I did. If she had, the shitty poems would have tested our relationship.

I heard my brother’s voice as I remember it from the 9-1-1 calls on a news report that I’d watched online after a short ad for Sea World.  

His shaved head looked filthy and the stuff came off on the palms of my hands. I asked, Do you want me to sit you up in the car? Do you want me to get someone? No words came to him. So I propped him up against his own rear wheel and went on. 

A dead man’s doppelganger becomes undone by the hole in his pocket disappearing.

Looking at cell phone shame videos online of "Pervs Jerking-Off on the Subway." 

I told him I’d had a miscarriage. I didn’t say it was his, but I didn’t say it wasn’t. His horror more so reflected his fear of me than his pity. That I would have been pregnant, that I would have carried a child long enough to call what had happened a miscarriage, that’s what stole his color. He would never think to cross me again, to even talk about this with another single person. I’d stolen something from him and without consequence. In truth I’d never been pregnant in my life. And this moment amounted to a belief that it was impossible to become pregnant. 

Before I could catch my breath he turned out the bedside lamp. He grasped me and began speaking with a tone that I’d never experienced before. His voice was round and his heavy arms held me to make the sounds travel all the way through me. He said, When I was in college my sister died. She moved south with her boyfriend because he was in the Army and he strangled her. That night I slept more deeply than I had in recent memory. 

He took out a drawstring bag. You don't want to know what's in here, he said. I wasn’t frightened. I wasn’t anything. I couldn't think or rather was resigned not to think. Then I looked, I focused on him, his arms. The way he held the bag away from his body, up at his eye level, was like he was greeting a baby. 

I went downtown, down to my favorite neighborhood for shopping. I told myself that I had errands but really I was looking to indulge in a dress that I imagined I’d wear to the funeral of the man I was sleeping with. When I got out of the subway I checked my phone for the time and saw that he had texted me a vague message potentially threatening suicide. I doubt my pulse quickened because this had happened before.

There is nothing defining men from one another until one is severed from himself. I want you to carve out of me all the good stuff. 

Then he sent me a picture of his erect penis looking dry and unappetizing in the flash. On it he had written my name with a black gel ballpoint, which was funny because my name means pool of sorrow. And I could imagine mere moments later that he’d produce from his own pen a splashy pool of sorrow, disappearing ink. 

I printed out hundreds of copies of that photo on pre-addressed, stamped postcards and put one in every copy of his new book that I could find in lower Manhattan. 

Do you remember when we were friends, I’m not sure we ever were. 

The drink has an entire sprig of rosemary in it. Laughing, I say, I have no sense of humor about this. Laughing, my college friend recounts her break up. 

“Do not fuck with a world sensation.”

 

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LETTERS TO MACKENZIE by Blake L. Bell

I

We were wild girls. Raised with dirty feet, tangled hair. Our dogs followed us down the roads we walked, but our mommas rarely did. We played hard, fought hard, loved hard. Fate cheated us from being sisters, so we bound ourselves together with blood ritual. We couldn’t go downstairs to the kitchen to get a knife, afraid of waking momma. Instead, we broke a jar in the upstairs bathroom and sliced our thumbs open; our skin peeled back, vessels bursting and spilling over. We pressed our cuts together and imagined our blood forever combined. “Soul sisters,” we said, sucking the ruby blossoms clean.

II

Our world was complicated. Drunk, aggressive father figures. Stressed, underappreciated mothers. Unchecked tempers, overactive imaginations. Our world was filled to the brim, but it was never full without each other. 

Our favorite spot was the pasture. We hung out by the ditch which split the open field from where the silos were. We were terrified of those silos. “People die in them,” our big sisters told us. On the opposite end of the field, a wooded area backed up to Gigi’s house. We rarely went there either. “When trees are that close together, something’s hiding in them,” our sisters said.

We named the cows we recognized: Dippin’ Dot the spotted, Esmeralda the jeweled, and Hercules, the Brahma bull. We made up stories about them. Hercules was the dad or the husband, depending on the day. “Hercules! Buy Esmeralda new jewelry. Her nose ring is gettin’ crusty.”

“Stand on top of the hay bale and wait till they get close, then we’ll jump on their backs.” 

But the animals were usually impartial to us. Except the day they charged us.

The cows and bull were up by the ditch, and we were walking across, closer to the wooded area. The next minute blurs. Hercules charged, and the cows followed. We ran for our lives hoping to reach the fence in time. Our bare feral feet crushed the leaves beneath us and tore on the fence as we clamored over it, chased by a stampede. 

III

We were so much alike. We looked alike, laughed alike. Our wavy brown hair and round blue eyes fooled strangers into believing we were sisters. We had rotten tempers and little impulse control.

Our savagery at home never matched how we were told to behave in school. We went to equally strict Catholic schools for elementary and middle. We neither liked nor understood their many rules. We may have been somewhat neglected at home, but in that, we found a freedom that set us apart.

We went to the same high school in ninth grade, the Durham School: an expensive, non-denominational religious school, a disaster, for both of us. We didn’t have a prayer of fitting in with our divorced mothers and our middle-class-income households. We lacked the social manners those kids had. While those kids knew how to behave, we were still in the pasture.

We befriended Katy, who lived in the Country Club of Louisiana and was a Durham kid through and through. “Y’all don’t have promise rings?” she asked before long. “We all have them.”

“What’s a promise ring?”

“Your father gives it to you for protection. It’s a promise between you and God. You know, not to do stuff with boys.”

We didn’t trust promises. Not all fathers were protectors. 

Her mother disliked us almost instantly. Our families were not like hers. They respected my attorney dad, but their noses wrinkled at my two-time divorcee mom with her four children and beat up Suburban, which she proudly called “The Beast.” Did it matter that she was a lawyer, too? Your dad played and coached rugby, laughed at blood pooling in grown men’s mouths. Katy’s father cleaned our cuts and complained when we came home dirty and bleeding from a neighborhood romp.

You were jealous of each other. Who was the best friend? I’m sorry I chose Katy’s side. She was new, and maybe we were sick of each other? Of liking the same boys? You must have been sick of reassuring me I was beautiful too, that they wanted me, too. I was jealous of both of you, but the green monster on my back shrank around Katy, lighter sans the years that fed, piled on flesh, around you.

We defaced each other’s lockers with hurtful words and gave our best withering glares. Our cold war heated up at lunch one day. We met by chance, outside between the lockers and the cafeteria. You turned to me, asked, “Why did you write “slut” on my locker?”

“Because it's true.” I’m still sorry for that.

The next thing I knew, I was catching your fist from hitting my face. Frustrated, you turned and punched Katy instead. Hysteria broke loose after a girl in our grade yelled into the cafeteria, “Fight! There’s a fight outside!”

Katy cried and cried and cried in the principal's office; I could hear her pleas from the next room. I shut down, turned vacant as the disciplinarian ranted, already desensitized to angry men and too young to untangle fault and blame. I pictured my mother’s weary face. My father having to pick up the phone once again. Another call from an authority, another possible expulsion. I don’t know what you did in there, but you were quiet. I imagine, maybe romantically so, you behaved similarly to me.

Katy’s mom smoothed things over with the principal. She was the victim, and we were the perpetrators. No matter that most of the writing on your locker was in Katy’s handwriting, no matter that Katy and I had done most of the instigating. She wasn’t punished, but we ended up with in-school suspensions, and by that time, we were sneaking out of our respective cells to chat and joke with each other. All was well again, almost like our fights when we were kids.

Our parents referred to us going to the same school as what it was: a failed experiment. I made terrible grades and was often in detention; you struggled with the commute from your house. You transferred to another private school in your neighborhood, and I ended up at a public school close to mine. We made new friends and lived in different worlds. After our freshman year, we slowly went separate ways through the rest of high school. We’d talk here and there but never like we used to. There was no defining moment or dramatic exit, our friendship just faded.

IV

By our first semester of college, we hadn’t spoken in well over a year. That first day, I walked into a spacious auditorium with hundreds of seats and hundreds of people for Art History 101. Feeling overwhelmed, I picked a random row in the middle of the room. At the center, your fishbowl eyes and long, curly brown hair looked up at me. You made that face you always have, where your eyes bulge and your mouth opens, where excitement and energy surge across those high cheekbones. “No way,” you said.

We hugged each other tight. It would not have been strange to see each other on campus, as we would many times throughout the coming years, but we had chosen the same class section, the same row, and ultimately, the same seats. We took this as a sign and skipped our classes to hang out. We never were productive together. Our relationship existed only in a state of play. We had no idea how to be serious, to work, or to function in the outside world around each other. “We should do this more often,” we said, back at your friend’s apartment, high, and laughing together again, as if years had not passed between us. But after that day, beyond stunted waves on campus, we didn’t see each other for a long time. 

Did something pass between us that afternoon? Some subconscious thing that knew our lives were changing? The older I got, the more I resented memories of our childhood, of the extent of my stepfather’s violence. Happy memories of choosing to play in the pasture with you transformed into desperate longings to get out of the house. To separate myself from my mother sobbing over dirty dishes, from my baby brother’s broken foot, smashed between the folds of a kicked recliner. Did he ever hurt you, too, Mack?

From what mom says, we were still alike in our early twenties—we were unmoored. Is that true? Did you do too many drugs? Did you surround yourself with men who only loved parts of you? I only saw you once during those years when you happened to be dating my friend’s cousin. Did you worry about me, then? Maybe I should have worried more about you. Did he ever hurt you?

V

Years have passed since we have seen each other face to face. Your dad died this summer. Before him, your maw maw and your stepbrother, too. But more recently, your father, Mason. You found him on the floor in his apartment. Sounds of ten-year-old you, crying for him that night at the beach—when you got so homesick, he drove to Alabama to pick you up three days early—echoed in my ears, as if I’d strapped two conch shells to the hollows of my head, desperate to hear the sea. 

But he didn’t always come get you, did he? Doesn’t matter now. Your memories of him will tinge with sadness and pride. His anger: righteous indignation. His inconsistency: genius. You’ll measure time by his passing, the prized befores, the distorted durings, the long afters. There will be so many afters.

Let’s transform these truths into one of the scary stories we used to tell each other at night in our tent at the beach. None of this was real. Your dad was alive behind that apartment door you knocked on before breaking in. He is alive, headphones on, music blaring, smoking a joint. Oblivious to the world around him and blissful.

Maybe this kind of thing should or could bring us together, but I appreciate and fear the gulf between us. The thought of you is too heavy. Discomfort comes with an oldest friend. You know all the smells of our childhood—grass, blood, whiskey.

VI

I accepted your friend request on Facebook last month and combed through careful, new photographs of a luminous you, showing all your teeth in Cheshire grins mixed with equally careful pictures of your family, the living and the dead, mingling still in your photo albums. I heard your elastic voice in messages you sent me filled with smiley faces and exclamation points. I know I said I’d call, but I won’t. Guilt is only enough to spur my hand, to write, to reminisce. My world is too full, and I fear your added weight would send its contents spilling over the edges like blood rushing out of old wounds.

 

 

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