CONDEMNED by C. Cimmone

My mother smoked her favorite cigarettes in the kitchen. Smoke billowed out into the living room and crept down the halls. A small television muffled the evening news as the three of us chewed away at overdone meat. Splatters of hot bacon grease slid down our throats as my father hurried through tough threads of roast. He ran the tractor after supper; and my mother splashed hot water around in the sink as she yelled at me for not finishing the black-eyed peas. “Black eyed peas are good luck,” she’d belt. 

Holiday evenings were much the same. “Too much sage is good for the gut,” she’d remind us, as she broke cornbread into a large dish. She made one dish without turkey for my father. She made a second dish for him to carry to work. She made a third dish for the rest of us. My brothers leaned against my mother’s kitchen cabinets, laughing at stories she let out in little slivers. Her hands shook with an audience, but my brothers’ wives smoked cigarettes in the kitchen, too, and she was happy to hand them her lighter across the dining table.

Sometimes, when the kitchen offered German Chocolate cake, my mother pulled out a foggy plastic bag filled with red dominoes. My aunt Rita laughed at my mother’s stories and my father shuffled the red chunks as loud as he could. The white dots banged into each other as my mother grinned, lighting another cigarette and shaking her head at my father. My father grinned at my aunt Rita and for a moment, we were glad my mother was not mixing or wiping.

When the kitchen was empty, calls would come in. My mother pulled the long, curly line across the kitchen floor. The line tapped the linoleum tiles as she rested in her kitchen chair. The crisp cellophane crinkle of cigarettes held until she announced, “Dorothy has died.” My father and I watched the television in silence on these evenings of grief; and the kitchen gears paused.

After years of the kitchen exhausting itself between moppings and meals, crying children and daily newspapers, my mother’s bones stuck here and there. Her fingers cracked like eggshells and her eyes served as measuring spoons. She crept down the hall and curled herself into a bed, hidden away in the back bedroom. Her kitchen chair sat empty as black tar spilled like burnt grease down my mother’s face.

With no oil, the kitchen gears began to rust. The linoleum on the floor began to peel up at the edges and the oven hinges refused to do anything but screech. The dining room table began to collect crumbs along its midline and the closed cabinets held their breath of cigarette smoke. The lights from the ceiling began to sag, long screws pulling heavily from the sheetrock. Everything in the kitchen sagged. Everything moaned.

My father sat alone with his grief. The living room chugged along with his vanilla wafers and tiny wrenches. He took the phone from the wall, wound its long cord around the base and the receiver, and placed it in the hallway closet. He took his meals at the coffee table, as the refrigerator--now empty--hummed in place of the kitchen’s small television. The sink tarnished near the drains, but still overlooked the window as, “having a window over your kitchen sink is good luck.” 

The roaches crept in as the lights began to flicker out of life and a rat made his home in the bottom of the oven. Pale acidic powder grew from behind the hands of the clock and the kitchen counters began to rot out small crevices for new life to sneak in with sticky legs. Like a dying branch, the kitchen darkened and calloused. The remaining pieces of the house were still green and growing, as the kitchen bore a hole right through its center.

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NORA LIVES IN PIECES by Mason Parker

Everything crashed into its true form following the blackout in New Orleans when Nora missed her flight and we drove to Little Rock, buzzing as trashy manic fairies. The Ozarks flopped and rolled, redefining themselves every few miles. Nora had proposed to me after pissing on the fence of an electrical transfer station somewhere outside of Austin where the grass grew through the chain link. I laughed at her, and she said, “I’m fucking serious, mate.”

“You wouldn’t want to marry me, Nora.”

“Fuck man, I love America. We could get dual citizenship.”

“It wouldn’t be worth it. I’m a difficult person.”

We forgot about it driving all the way to the bayou after picking up three Adderall from a Phish fan off 6th street. We made it to Lake Charles, but I couldn’t keep my eyes open. When I laid down, I couldn’t sleep. The next morning, I-10 was closed, and we didn’t get to New Orleans until dark. It smelled wet, and Nora’s eyes swallowed everything around her.  

In those years, when we were bumping up against each other, it never registered how the interactions were shaping things. I was pushed up against myself and wanted to torment everyone around me. Torment, perhaps, is not the right word, but shape, engineer—that’s more accurate. I just wanted to take up emotional space. There was nothing intimate between us, because I had laundered all my affections for someone who viewed me as a bridge to carry them over those chasms between bouts of Real Love. In those moments they were afraid of falling, of being consumed by loneliness. 

We checked into a hotel in Baton Rouge and caught a cab to the French quarter.

The cabbie said, “There’s been a lot of robberies lately. Plenty of cab drivers getting their cashboxes stolen. That’s why I carry this…” He pulled out a .50 caliber pistol from the center console. 

“Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,” said Nora. “Did he just pull out a huge gun? Holy shit that is so fucking American. I have never even seen a gun before.”

From some angles the firearm was a shadowy, invisible thing, and from others it glistened with a mechanical beauty under the spectrum of neon lights piercing the window tint as we drove down Canal street. Stepping out of the cab there were two mingling bodies engaged in an acrobatic performance. They seemed to be merging, appendages growing from one another, legs and arms like fingers woven together.   

By most measures, it was a bad trip. Everything had gone wrong. But I finally came to recognize Nora as she was—a movement I could not control, floating into my life in Prague where she had a fuck you tone toward everyone but me, and I never understood why. Nora became a perceptible junction of turmoil amid an expanse of purposelessness. Then the big blur came, and I woke up to an alarm clock. 

“We need to get you to the airport.” 

“Just a bit more sleep then.” 

We woke up two hours after Nora’s flight took off. The first leg of her trip back to London. She called the airline. She could get home if we made it to Little Rock that afternoon. It was a tedious drive through the swamps, and the humidity hurt my head. We listened to Christian talk radio explain why transmogrification was not weird. The roads remained clear, and we made it in six hours.  

As she got out of the car, she said, “The offer will always be on the table. I will leave my future husbands for you. So, just let me know.”

I smiled at her, “I’ll let you know, Nora.”

On the drive home, I was alone and I-40 was long. The Ozarks gave way to the plains—a yellow, dry surface endlessly inhaling the landscape. I thought of Nora on her flight, pestering some old man sitting next to her, coaxing him into three whiskey shots. I haven’t seen Nora since that afternoon, but when I think of her, she appears to me as countless swirling pieces. The car was quiet then and I heard only the humming of the asphalt and the air as I breathed in and out through my nose. On the edge of the west, there were clouds. 

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LISTING by Michael Todd Cohen

MARBLEHEAD, MA — ESTATE SALE BY YOUNGEST SON 4 bedroom / 4.5 bath with 5,679 sq ft. of ample space for nuclear family on .26 acres.

Below listed are the items for sale and a description of the property. Not listed but offered for the specific buyer: being told as a child you would be disowned if gay.

BASEMENT Offered in sale: workbench at which father and youngest son built miniature soapbox derby car for Cub Scout competition. Mostly father—who hip-checked son saying,

“watch out, watch out,” as his hulky frame jostled miniature car parts into a sleek red bullet. Son did not win derby. A warm, enveloping hug was given as compensation along with the statement: “They cheated. This is bullshit. I saw the guy squeeze the wheels before he put ours on the track.”LIVING ROOM The ground floor affords a large living room with tile floor in good condition despite the dog’s old-age accidents which could not be prevented because the slight-voiced mother couldn’t yell without coughing. Honestly, it was for naught with a deaf dog.

Offered in sale: a 47” television cabinet. We regret we can’t offer a larger television, but the mother cried when the father brought home a 50” to watch golf on because it “overwhelmed the space."

Additionally offered in sale: a well-loved reclining chair swathed in striped fabric to be deodorized, prior to sale, of what the father referred to as medication-induced “chemical farts."DINING ROOM An open plan allows for a sizable dining table next to the kitchen. This is not offered as part of the sale, but it is not hard to find a dining table to fight around. 

Offered in sale: double-sided fireplace with slate ledge. Ledge has some wear from mother standing on it to reach father’s lips for a kiss—silent and sweet—while youngest son looked on and wondered what boy he would kiss on a ledge or a stoop or a doorstep one day and what would happen when he did.

FAMILY ROOM Offered in sale: a Bose sound system and a sun-bleached blue couch where the father lay in semi-darkness listening to Enya after returning from chemo sessions in Boston.

KITCHEN Boasting an abundance of natural light, the kitchen offers overhead and under-counter cabinet space containing a red pitcher, drinking glass and bag of rice that the mother used to teach the youngest son how to pour neatly from one vessel into another, her hand over his in gentle guidance.

Offered in sale: a double-door refrigerator with room for two shopping bags filled with live lobsters that the father often lay onto the cold floor tile in a mock “race” despite youngest son’s whinnies of fearful protest.

You will hear the ice dispenser on the fridge churning from time-to-time, like when the youngest son came down to the living room in the middle of the night for lack of sleep and saw his dead father on the television guffawing in the audience of a comedy festival he attended the year before. It was Father’s Day. God has a bizarre sense of occasion.

BEDROOMS Up three easy steps are four bedrooms of good size, including a primary suite. 

Off the hallway is a small office, formerly “maintained” by the mother, with tax papers and medical bills exploding outward like a burst whitehead. Papers to be removed prior to sale.

To the left is a bedroom with an orange shag carpet and an en suite bathroom including shower stall. Offered in sale: a full-length mirror with some smudging from where the youngest son mashed his face into it, stared himself in his own eyes, and said, “I’m gay.”

Also included: a laptop with a start-up screen featuring a picture of actor Chris O’Donnell, a twin-size bed with salvageable springs that weren’t put to the test with much more than sweaty solo action while thinking about actor Chris O’Donnell, and a small sound system with CD tray and radio used to drown out the father’s intermittent vomiting in the primary bedroom.

DRIVEWAY Asphalt in good condition with minimal wear from garage sales, car washes, a Bar-Mitzvah party and the night the youngest son confessed his truth to the oldest brother and stopped there, forgoing his own peace of mind for peace in the moments he had left with the father. 

Offered in sale: repeating he knew anyway in your head as a salve.

GARAGE Space for two vehicles, including champagne colored 1997 Chevy Blazer offered in sale. Blazer is in good condition with 38,000 miles from youngest son driving away regret: Essex antique shops, Danvers strip malls and the Marblehead Lighthouse, staring into a roiling sea. There are minor grip marks on the steering wheel from where he bore down; knowing a thing and trying to unknow it.

PRIMARY BEDROOM Cavernous space with a glamorous oversized wood-paneled walk-in closet.

Offered in sale: the father’s clothes that hang like meat in a butcher’s freezer—stiff and gruesome.

Not included in sale: a California king size bed that the mother will take with her to the house in Swampscott so she can sleep in the same divot she’s made over thirty years and sometimes run her hand over the one he made too; like an incantation to bring him back.

 

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A MOST DEPRESSING WEEK by Chris Milam

Monday

I tell my therapist that her milkshake brings all the depressives to the yard. She laughs. I laugh. I don't tell her I spent hours the night before trying to think of something funny to say to her. I also think: I love you. I think: you plus me equals happiness. I think: when does this session end? I think: I want to sleep with you to help murder the pain. She goes on about reframing or something. I'm still focusing on my joke. Time's up. Fuck.

Tuesday

A murder case on Dateline. A beautiful wife is found dead in the snow in Ohio. I know it's the husband. It's always the husband. Plus he had a girlfriend on the side. Fast forward to the end. Guess what? It was the husband. I think: I knew it. I think: what do I do now? I think: I really want to die because I'm so depressed. I think: just do it, coward. But I don't do it. Instead, I watch more true crime. Men doing terrible things to women all day long. It's revolting. I don't leave the couch. I smoke a shit ton of cigarettes. I don't eat. I don't sleep. I miss my therapist.

Wednesday and Thursday 

Nothing. 48 hours of blue death. I can't move. I don't want to move. Though I want to fly with birds, maybe a sparrow or a crow, just soar far away from the darkness inside me. I want to stare at the sun and let it melt my sadness. I want to stop breathing. I want my therapist. I feel lonely. No, worse than that. I feel completely devoid of life. I am nothing. I take my pills. Candy for the mentally ill. I think: please work your magic. I think: will I ever feel normal? I think: maybe I should take the whole bottle of pills. I think: goodbye, everyone. At night, I stare at the ceiling. I don't count sheep, I count things I've lost.

The weekend 

I pick up my daughter and her best friend and go to the roller rink. She’s a bit awkward on skates, but she holds her own. I watch and watch her. She doesn’t see me looking at her. I’m glad. She prefers I not stare at her. She prefers I keep my distance. I’m not cool enough for her. She’s at that weird age where adults are not to be seen. I don’t tell her it hurts me a little. I don’t tell her how much I need her love and approval. I don't tell her about the black days. I look around the place. I think: all the other dads here are better than me. I think: they are kinder and more loving and less sad. I think: I want to disappear. I want to dissolve in my chair. I also want to be them. They seem so content. I buy the girls pizza and drinks before leaving.

The next day I take them to see a horror movie. They debate who has to sit next to me. I don’t tell my daughter that I feel hurt again. I don’t tell her to please sit next time to me, it will make me happy. I don’t say anything. They eat popcorn loudly. The movie is terrible and predictable. On the drive home, I secretly listen to their conversation. They talk about boys. I think: please stop talking about boys. I think: boys only want one thing. I think: boys grow into men who kill their wives and are shown on Dateline. I don’t speak the entire way to my house. I take them home the next morning. I tell my daughter I love you. She mumbles something that sounds nothing like I love you, too. I think: I’m going to miss you. I think: you are so beautiful. I think: don’t go, honey.

Monday 

I have no funny lines for my therapist. We talk about depression and anxiety and techniques to cope and whatnot. I just stare at anything other than her. I wish I were a poet so I could tell her how gorgeous and special she is using better words than gorgeous and special. I think: I'm not a poet. I think: I want to crawl in her mouth and knock on her heart. I have questions to ask of that muscle. I think: will her heartbeat be a song, a melodic longing for the client sitting in front of her? I think: please cure me, fix me, remake me. Baptize me. Love me. I think: stop being delusional you fool. In a flash, time's up. Fuck. I think: I survived another week. 

 

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LAND LEGS by E.D. WELCH

Bittersweet day, this final one together. Frighteningly agenda-less, we wander through the aisles of small, art-filled stores, awkward in each other's company, unaccustomed to hanging out like this. “Do you want to go into this one?” I ask him at each store. 

“I don't care.” His only reply.

I learn he likes art galleries—oil paintings, to be exact. I didn't know.

Our aimlessness leads us eventually to the beach, where we find our land legs again. The beach: yes, we spent many, many hours at the beach together during his childhood, so this we know how to do. He shows me the tide pools, the crabs, the anemones. We watch the little mini-pools of ocean water caught in the rocks, populated with hermit crabs of every size and shape. Small ones, smaller yet, and ones so tiny you can hardly see them except for miniscule hair-like legs scrambling from under tiny spotted shells. 

“Pick one up,” I suggest. When he does, holding it pinched carefully between thumb and forefinger, I say, “Now promise it you won't put it into a bathtub.” 

His face breaks into a shy smile at the memory: When he was a preschooler on one of his first forays to the beach, he collected twelve hermit crabs, and I let him take them back to the house where we were staying. That evening I ran his bath water and stepped out while he climbed into the tub. When I returned a minute later, there he sat in the bathtub, a dozen dead hermit crabs floating around him. He thought he was doing them a favor by putting them back in the closest thing he had to the ocean. 

Now, he returns the crab to the tide pool and scrambles over the rocks—not in the carefree way like he used to—rather, heavier, wooden. But still. It's nice to see him silhouetted against the ocean, to talk to him with the beat of the waves pounding in stereo. We don't say much, and I feel bad about it at first. But what can I say? Stay clean gets old after a while, and we already discussed Hurricane Katrina ad nauseum. So I struggle to accept the silence as we walk. It's okay, I finally decide: part of supporting him is just being with him, just being there.

We finally leave the beach and have dinner out with one of his counselors. “Don't stay in your head, man,” the counselor tells him, thumping his own forehead, “it's dangerous in there.” My kid gives a crooked grin of acknowledgement. I sit across the table, look at the two of them, and wish I could stay. 

While they eat, I push the food around on my plate, wondering how I’ll manage to board a plane in the morning, to leave my neediest child alone here. Sure, we have a great post-rehab structure in place: a solid sober-living home, counselors, scheduled outpatient work with the rehab place. His bases are covered, and I feel good about what we accomplished in such a short time this week. 

But still. Going home is hard to do. It's like leaving your preemie in the hospital. 

After dinner, he is antsy to get to the AA meeting. 

“Stop right here, Mom,” he says as we’re driving down the beach strip. “I’ve gotta save a seat at the meeting.”

I slide my eyes right at him: he cares where he sits? This same boy who, just a month ago, refused to go to meetings? I pause in the side street, wondering why he’s really asking me to stop. 

“On Saturday nights it’s packed in there, standing room only.” He leaps from the car, taking those huge twenty-year-old bounds across the sidewalk. 

The car is empty for a moment, vacuum-like, then he’s back, energy in his wake. 

We drive to the rehab house to drop off his things: the alarm clock and towels we bought today, the only possessions he has here besides a few clothes. He takes the same kind of enthusiastic bounds into the house. I follow to drop off a check. The night-duty guy looks at me. “You taking him to an AA meeting? You bringing him back?” Before I can answer, he starts talking about my son’s last relapse. “He’s young. He was walking back from AA and—” he throws his hands up “—these girls asked him to come inside and party.” He says girls like he would say pigs. “It’s hard on these guys when they’re so young, you know?”

Yeah, I know.

My son reappears, freshly cologned. “Let’s go.”

I drive him to the meeting, knowing I won’t see him again before I leave. How do you say goodbye on the side of the road in front of AA? How do you impart everything you want to say during that one stopset—that one pause in time? 

“Kiddo…” I begin. But it’s hopeless; there’s just too much to say. I make him wait while I climb out of the car to hug him.

He holds me tight for a long moment. “Thanks, Mom.”

And then he’s gone. I watch long enough to see him disappear into the seated crowd, the way I used to watch the kids walk into school. I pray his land legs will hold.

 

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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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MY MAMMAW’S BOYFRIEND by Dalton Monk

He looks like Stan Lee. And we call him that behind his back. Stan Lee’s real name is Marvin. Right now I’m in Marvin’s truck and we’re parked at the grocery store. He goes inside, and I stay in the backseat of the truck, which is old, the fabric cutting loose in the corners. It’s full of long cucumbers and cobwebs and ants. And a putrid smell that can only come from an old man, specifically an old man that looks like Stan Lee and wears Stan Lee glasses. This is an old man I hardly know. I sit in the hot truck for a while, comparing this man I barely know who looks like Stan Lee to my Pappaw who is dead. Stories often spill from Marvin’s lips at the dinner table. He’ll say things like how he just about had to knock so-and-so’s block off and how he’d told so-and-so to get lost and how he, Marvin, was so suave. He has a grandson named Trevor that comes to Clendenin with his Tonka trucks and toys and his speech impediment. I can hear him now saying his own name and he sounds like this: Twevol. Marvin is old or maybe he just looks old. And all of us think Mammaw is out of his league, which is an interesting thing to think about your Mammaw.

So, here I am in Marvin’s truck. And I’m twelve and the backseat smells and I’m sweating from the summer heat and closed doors and from being surrounded by all the odd-looking vegetables.

But I’m remembering now. I’m not twelve. I’m twenty-four. And that truck probably now belongs to Marvin’s son or maybe even his grandson Trevor who says his name like this: Twevol. Or maybe the truck sits in a junkyard, still filled with vegetables, still just as ripe as ever. Or maybe another old man bought the old truck and he’s dating someone else’s Mammaw and maybe he also looks like Stan Lee.

Marvin doesn’t own the truck anymore because Marvin is dead. He fell off the roof of Mammaw’s house—I don’t really know what he was doing up there except trying to prove to Mammaw what a man he was. I imagine him saying something like, “Look at this, this’ll be a story, won’t it.” And it is, I guess. He fell on the gravel beneath the gutters where my cousin Daniel and I had, just earlier that summer, picked up the smallest rocks and tried to throw them into the Elk River. 

But this is where the old man named Marvin who was dating my Mammaw and who looked like Stan Lee fell, where the pain caused him to go into a coma, where the healing caused him to get better, so much better that he was at the next Thanksgiving dinner, telling stories that all of us knew were lies, where the healing then turned back into something that was killing him, something that made him go back to the hospital, which is where he died, but here he is, actually, not dead, but very much alive, getting back into the truck with me in the backseat where I’m keeping my arms at my sides, a loaf of bread placed in my lap, and now here is Mammaw, who I forgot had come with us, and they’re both in the front seat smiling and the day is hot and Marvin starts telling stories and Mammaw listens and I listen and we both know he’s lying, but we hang on to every word because whether it’s true or not, whether he’s remembered something the wrong way or in a way that romanticizes everything, it’s a story, and it makes us forget about the sweat on our arms, the musty smell in this truck, and the death before us and the death to come, and we just breathe and we listen and we listen and we listen. 

 

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SONG FOR AN EMPTY WORLD by Miles Coombe

The road is lit with street lamps. It's weak, bulbs on the edge of giving out, but the glow is still there.

I am in his bed, a fresh bruise over his eye this time, and curled into his side. He feels smaller with my arms around him. My eyes are closed and I see an explosion of grey in a room too white to be real, and where I know there should be screaming, my own included, there is only static. He wakes, with a hammering heart and a cry on the tip of his tongue. Something inside him has fractured and a crack in his skin slips from the corner of his eye and falls over the bridge of his nose. I think my chest is caving in, that my lungs have stopped working. Something about the glassy look in his eyes makes me feel exposed. He was beautiful in a sort of starving way, like there was always something more he needed. Clearly, he was more lost than I was. Sometimes he stared at nothing and cried. He was gone, into his head, curled into a ball on the floor.

Something builds inside me. A storm, a tornado, untamed and unchecked, threatening to burst free. It’s the feeling that pushes at my skin when I can’t sleep, when I feel like I can’t breathe, when my ears are ringing. 

The world spins so fast it turns to a motion blur of shadows and dim lamp light, and the off-white colour of the wall has turned blue. My head is spinning, everything is spinning, I feel all the air from my lungs recede, and stars swim in my vision. Time narrows down to a single point, a tape recording over itself.

The city lives and breathes on around us. 

 

you were still in the ambulancewhen the cops suggested you’re the onewho tried to burn it down

All I could hear was the empty horizon and his warmth that filled it to the brim. He was nearly there, close enough he could taste the gray on his tongue like cotton wool. The edges of his voice tinged with a gentleness only reserved for the sweetest, prettiest things he saw. There are patterns in my periphery as the world bends and sways around me, like branches of young trees caught in the wind. The evening is quiet now, a sort of careful stillness that would be so easy and awful to break. He welcomes its hold, falls limp and boneless as it swaddles him in its folds. Eyes shut, mouth parted, it’s peaceful in this deep silence, weightless and still.

 

here I blur into you

I kiss him until the kiss consumes us both. The music has long since stopped and neither of us notices. The lethargy of the high washes over us in gentle waves and we fall asleep curled around each other. I’m falling into him, against him, under him, at his knees, on his back. Everything is falling, everything is collapsing and sliding and slipping, losing grip and sinking, one last point of contact, one last kiss, one last chance, one last abyss to topple into. When he kisses me it's desperate, it's pleading, it’s begging, every midnight cross-faded wish pressed between us like a prayer. 

If there was a colour to those days, a colour for me and him, a colour for kisses and pills and dying, it is every colour of pink and blue, the dark lights and the pale shadows in the almost darkness. The memories are blurry but the colours are still there, cutting like knives. I am aching. I feel like I’m drowning and on fire at the same time. I just know that the space around my heart, where all the horrible things build up, thick, and wet, and poisonous - the space I flooded with opioids, weed and pills - is suddenly, blessedly empty. As though someone has reached in and scraped it all away. 

 

he’s spent too many nights in too many places curled up around himselfwishing someone else was thereand now someone is

When he presses against me, terribly thin body, yet grounding as a heavy blanket, his mind slips into my own, his eyes are shut, but not tight, and his mouth is open slightly. I can feel the shallow rush of breath over my skin. If not for the frenzy he had been in a minute earlier, I might have believed he was sleeping. If not for the wet itch of tears running onto my neck, I might have believed he was peaceful. His words hurt, they burned like a brand, but I shut my ears to the flow of his voice and try to ignore the pain in it. I look the boy dead in his eyes, searching for an answer behind the tortoiseshell. There's a desperation at the edge of his iris, fear evident, but he still doesn't look away. Eyes raking over inconspicuous bandages, brushing fingertips over bruised faces, running lips along bloody knuckles. Another collision. A car crash, our bodies strewn across the road, across the mattress, blood on the asphalt, teeth pulled blood up under the skin, gasoline in the air, the scent of sweat. Sharing bottles, cigarettes, forehead to forehead with breath intermingling, afraid to make it real, until we had nothing left to lose.

 

Yes, Lucas was Lucas. He drank vodka from the bottle at 11am. Snorted pills off the floor. Spoke Dutch while high. Was often dangerously malnourished. Had unexplained bruises in blues and yellows. Sniffed glue in the park after school. He was loud and obnoxious and loved hitting people in the face. That was daytime Lucas, Lucas while awake. But at night, it was Luca. Maybe I comforted him because I knew he was haunted by thoughts of the street and the memories of all that came before. But perhaps we both felt this way and, for some reason, I comforted him the way he did me. Two jagged pieces of a puzzle that together make a complete picture. The nights were broken, fragments of shattered sleep and soaring highs. When I would gasp for breath and be unable to shake the fear out of my face and arms because I was still falling, it was he, Luca, who, with bruised yet nimble hands, caressed my face to still the fall. The nights were the best because it was when he and I were in each others’ presence the longest and in a strange way, most lucidly. At night, when he was illuminated by the moonlight, he was totally different. At night, when we were tangled together, he was all the stars in the sky, soft angles and gentle otherworldly melodies. A song for an empty world.

 

a low humming settled over the empty housessomething he's never heard beforeit sounds almost like stirring, like waking

And then, the sky would turn from navy to indigo, violet to magenta, amber to yellow, and yellow to that horrid oversaturated, fragmented blue. And in the light, as all supernatural creatures do, he would retreat, to the kitchen, to get a morning cup of black coffee, splashed with vodka. And when I followed him, Luca was lost.

It was Lucas again.

We stand there, looking at each other in the middle of the empty street – two boys, one high and the other sobering, words on their tongues that do not make it out into the waking world.

 

loneliness grows around us like mouldhe only used my name when he knew I was sinking

The night is suffocating, the sky too wide above him and the houses too big. He picks up the pace, staring intently at the asphalt beneath his feet. He’s running, almost tripping because he can barely see. The tears don’t fall, that would be too certain, he thinks. That would make it all just a little too real. 

The road is lit with street lamps. It's weak, bulbs on the edge of giving out, but the glow is still there.

 

 

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HAM SANDWICH, DRY by Caroljean Gavin

One day, in the middle of the week, a Wednesday or a Thursday, in the humid summer, with the air conditioner broken, and the ceiling fan so feeble, I fell asleep under my down alternative comforter and had a dream of walking through a lush field, thick blades of grass slithered against my legs, dandelions swung in the breeze, little hammocks for lazing bees, and when I woke up, covered in a loose sweat, I walked down the stairs step by step, blinking my eyes open, open and closed, flexing my fingers, balling my fists, and I went to the fridge, drew out some ham, folded it out gently over the white bread I just bought the day before, two loaves for the price of one at the Harris Teeter, and you know what, I didn’t have any tomatoes, or any lettuce, and guess what, I didn’t have any mayonnaise, so guess what, I just ate it like that, just dry, and guess what, that was completely bullshit, all of it, every word I just put down, complete bullshit. This is supposed to be nonfiction, and I’m supposed to tell the truth and only the truth so help me god, so help me, God, the truth is none of that happened, the truth is that I tried to write as boring an opening to this essay as I could think of so you wouldn’t make it this far, and the truth is I gave this the most boring title I could come up with so when you came to it, you would look at it and you would think to yourself, “Snore!” and your eye would jump to one of the other titles, surely, something with a big, bright, unusual noun would pop out to you, and you would be happy with that, and I would be safe, but the truth, the no-bullshit thing is I am never safe, even though I am really good at manipulating words, and saying things that are technically true, like when my husband asks me full of disbelief, “You don’t look at other men?” and I say no I don’t, and he fills in his own meaning, which is that I’m a weirdo, but at least he doesn’t have to worry about me cheating, and I don’t tell my secrets, I don’t tell them to myself, I don’t say, “No, that’s not why.” I flirt with the truth, “I don’t watch much porn, I don’t like watching men and women have sex,” when the truth is I like watching women have sex, and I don’t watch much porn, because women don’t have sex like that, because I want to see two women who are genuinely hot for each other, who fall all over and into each other, who don’t look up at a camera, and don’t lick their own lips and trace their long, sharp finger nails up their own naked thighs, and the truth is I want to see two women truly caught up in making love, in fucking, and the truth is I want to be one of those women, and the truth is I’m not straight, not even a little, even though I stand by the “I want to fuck Eddie Vedder” note I wrote to my friend sophomore year, and the truth is I’m out as bi, well kind of sort of, to some people, not really, and I know, I know I should claim myself, my identity, who I am, and I should probably leave my husband, even though I love him, and I should let my kids see me happy no matter who I’m with, but my own happiness has never in my life been the first happiness that matters, and I am not young anymore, and I am not cute anymore, and no woman would even want me anyway, so why tear up my family’s life like that just to be profoundly lonely on my own terms, and even all that isn’t true, because I started writing this so I could write, so I could finally tell the one secret I’ve been keeping my whole life, and I was going to get to it right away, but then I stopped myself, hey, there’s this other thing, it’s a pretty big secret, and it’s risky, my husband might read it, or his mom might see it, and other people might be angry at me, might think that I’m telling people that they don’t need to live their own truth, which is not what I’m saying at all, and I know you really are getting bored with me, and I know you really are getting tired of me, and believe me, believe me, I am trying to tell you, but my heart is racing, and my littlest kid is running around and he keeps digging his nails into my arm and hopping on the table and taking my fingers off my keyboard, and I think I’m going to cry, and I think I’m going to be sick and the thing is I know, that day, that summer day years and years and years and years ago, a day in the middle of the week, when that girl Melanie who lived in the same apartment complex as us came over, and there was a card table folded out in the middle of my room with a blanket over it, and we hid under it and pretended like we were camping, and she thought of a game which was to take off our pants and touch each other on our privates, and I know that as far as kids go, that happens, but the thing also was I didn’t want to do it, I didn’t like how it felt, and I didn’t like that we were hidden, that even in the moment I knew it was a secret I was going to keep all my life because it was meant to be, and I felt so much shame, I felt like all the people who touched my mom on her privates when she didn’t want them to, because I don’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t know my mom was molested by her father and brother and raped by boyfriends, and I knew this was a sex thing even at 5 or 6 and I was dirty, and that was what I was supposed to feel with sex stuff, and the thing is, and I didn’t even know that when I started writing this, but here it is, sex was not supposed to feel good, or pleasurable, so when I felt that way, later on, with men, again and again, I knew that was just the way it was, just the way it was supposed to be, and so I never really questioned my attraction to men, of course women aren’t attracted to men, that was the assumption I always went on, of course we’re not, because men are gross, and blank, and rough in the bad ways, no woman is really attracted to a man is what I thought, but they’re what we have, what we’re stuck with, so we say we have crushes on male celebrities that kind of look like girls or women our own age and when we’re older we wonder if straight people are drawn more to movie characters they identify with or those who they want to want to sleep with, and we remember the first time we saw Ghostbusters and Sigourney Weaver and we Google things like, “How to tell if I’m gay,” when the answer is, “If You’re Constantly Googling to See if You Might Be a Lesbian, guess what, YOU ARE A LESBIAN!” but I don’t like labels, and I’m not going to call myself a lesbian, I haven’t earned it, I haven’t earned identity, don’t you see, I let myself be swallowed, I make it happen. I can disappear so quickly I didn’t even realize I missed the mayonnaise until I finished the sandwich and a snack bag of salt and vinegar Lay’s and was so thirsty I had to drink two full glasses of water before I went back up to finish my nap.

 

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VEGAS by Mackenzie Moore

I shudder, feeling the heat as I approach the straightaway where all you see are the shells of casinos looming. Blink-182 cranking, asking me what my age was, again. I keep ticking past billboards that tell me when the buffets will return. I jam my foot down on the accelerator. Tempt fate with out-of-state plates.

I think about five months earlier when we peeled away, me from the curb at Terminal 2, and him off to the Mirage for the weekend. It feels like years. I-15 north is an unavoidable corridor, but I hadn’t considered that I’d get a visual reminder of how much we’d splintered in a couple dozen axial rotations. How it doesn’t take a flight, or a drive, or much at all. You can survive thousands of miles apart and months on the road, only for it to blow up in your face less than a mile from home. Tell Zoom to use that as their marketing hook.

The wheeze of a beige Super Duty trying to edge me out of the left lane would piss me off, usually—it would underscore how tiny my car is, and that in it, I’m basically flyswatter bait on the freeway. But the growling hum at the bumper just feels like another twitch, or tremble, like the ones radiating up through my floorboards back in LA. You know, like when the downstairs neighbor turns the air conditioner from dehumidify to cool. A nuance so distinctive you’d bet your paycheck on it. When I merged out of LAX those months ago, the transmission seized immediately, the tach shot to 4. I should have known, because just like the floorboards, it’s hard to deny when the Earth shudders, but why linger on some small roll indicating a piece of life is about to go sliding out the door. 

***

When you stay long enough, you become salaried on estimating limits, knowing where the plateau levels off matters; don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Because sticking your thumb on the exact moment of how long someone can drive without getting drowsy, or how long you can wander on foot before devolving into hungry-tired bickering matters. It means you’re really fucking great at anticipating, at predicting patterns, at working within reason.

But approximation is an art. Science dictates you’ll only go so far, so fast on medium grade gas. You’ll keep moving, sure, even if you skimp on maintenance. Thing is, the little corroded pockets will keep digging deeper, and only later—maybe once you’ve finally started to spring for premium when you’re deep in airport traffic, or alone in the Mojave desert, will the shudders come. 

And maybe with 1,000 miles to go, hearing the low reverberations that confirm something was wrong, you’ll finally pay attention to the low roll, preparing you for when the tectonic plates start shifting. 

 

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