FICTION Archives

SALT IN THE BODY by Kelsey Ipsen

May 22, 2020 · Fiction

Ghosts do not come to me because I grew up by the ocean and my body is still full of salt.

Girl; all limbs, all eyes and sudden fearlessness, dared the waves to become bigger and they did. And of course she was sucked under, tossed about, close enough to death. Of course she was rag-doll, rag-doll, rag-doll. Remember when your body was your body but now it is not. The feeling is like this. I know my body is other things, is waves, is salt. Is once a house/a host/a body with another body’s cells in it. The other body’s cells are still inside me, touching my own cells, and we will be like this forever. An adult body contains 250g of salt meaning I am a walking mix of salt and you. Meaning I was right all along while I was under the waves thinking this is it, thinking this is what I really am. Women understand that ownership of the body is an untruth. I think men only discover this when they are dying.

If I have one piece of advice it is this: if you have not yet learned to be terrified of the ocean you should learn to be terrified of the ocean.

I have heard a needle inside me break through to water like an explosion. I have heard shells chaotic over each other as the ocean breathes out. We are all crashing against each other. We are all life trapped in flesh gods trying. We are only meant to be born screaming. I only wanted your loudest sound.

Noises in the night can be explained away by morning, but the depths of the ocean will just swallow you whole.

Whispers in my ear are not spiritual phenomena, they are voices from me telling me something I don’t want to hear but need to hear: Don’t forget to breathe. Don’t forget the shape of your abdomen, duneless. Don’t forget the length of arms, you can use them to reach in, to grab someone out of the waves, to make someone bird—forever sky, never drowning.

The depths of the ocean, when explained, are still uninhabitable.

I cannot follow you if you do not scream, baby. Scream. Small kicks can’t sound louder than this. You only ever heard me. You only ever heard me from under water.

Ghosts, when explained, will let the water flow right through them.

I am the ocean and you are the ghost. I am still here without you here. I want to know how to breathe when I can’t breathe. I need to know that the salt in my body will surface me. I need to know that the next wave makes sound. I need to know that the next wave makes something other than this.

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A GROCERY LIST FOR A SAND DUNE by K Chiucarello

May 20, 2020 · Fiction

The grains could never contain me.

I had always been a shape-shifting blurry little thing packed tall behind foundation slabs, their windows blown out with the shutters ringing loose, paint chipping off the front tooth. When the coastline birthed me, I was a miracle of wonder: pretty as a Cadillac slicked straight, my mother said. Daughters of the fishermen ran atop me, ribbons rippling in the breeze, pairs of feet driving down towards my candied belly, full of a momentum that had me wanting the snow. I explained by long way of lecture to the hills what it was like to direct spoonfuls of yourself into the hands of others. There was a neighboring boy I had liked and we traded weather forecasts as pendants of desire. Wind high today, flood lines low tomorrow.

One evening, with all the stars dipped neatly above us, I called my boy over and he came to lay with me. My mother made us chocolate covered strawberries and we barricaded the fruit between our bodies. I slowly confessed to his ear, thigh over thigh, my long-game: I had wanted to be a mountain and I would stop at nothing to become so. I knew there were steps I needed to take to present as a mountain and so I hardened my insides blackening them to licorice. I draped my body on ice, hoping it would freeze over or melt down. It wasn’t until I swallowed a house whole did anyone pause to consider that maybe my consumption lay beyond my spit.

The house I came to first held me spellbound. I lowered myself over its roof, loosening my hands around giving door-frames of wood and rotting glossed varnish. I ravished a bathtub clean in one audacious gulp and next made my way over to the pillars on the front porch that echoed onto the beached landscape. There I would sit for a week or two or three months or nine, hoping my hunger would diminish. I swam laps in my appetite for destruction, reclining, sipping its cherry taste through a straw, my lips tender as foie gras in the summertime. Soft uniforms of breeze had whipped me into a devotion that only the birds now could see, a feeding frenzy gone absolutely rogue.

The townspeople became fascinated with me. Newspaper headlines read I was a virgin daiquiri, all cream, no bite, stretching itself half-baked out in the cracks of walls. That was the last dare I took.

I spilled my way into the next thirty-seven homes rowed up pretty as pigs in a glass showcase, butcher hooks still drooling crooked off of my mouth. I choked down gardens filled with kale, celery, radishes, heirloom tomatoes. I swallowed one girl in my path simply because she had been there and I had little time to spare before someone would catch up with me. The village began to protest, construction workers bulldozing forks blunt into my ambered sides, the mayor frantically binding my chest. I tested this suffocation and stilled, taking time to do up my hair, pinning wisps out of my face. On the fourth day of silence I bubbled through twice as tight, yeast toppling pyramids onto each other.

Everyone evacuated. My mother and the boy ran parallel to me, adjusting themselves in a mirror of rupture. I had no more houses in sight. I stood there plush in the shadow of myself, a town buried under scoops of thawing sweetness. I had done it; I had become my mountain. Once in a blue moon I ruminated on what I needed to do there to get here, on things that needed to capsize for me to stand erect. I took a bottle of port to wash it all down.

It wasn’t until the liquid reached my toes did I feel a shifting beneath me,

a hot magma afterglow for thought.

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SING TO ME THE ONE ABOUT THE RIGHTEOUS EMBRACE OF THE INEFFABLE by Pat Foran

May 19, 2020 · Fiction

Something

My name is Phineas and if I can get the pose right, a photograph of me will appear in the 1979-80 Ridgid Tools Two-Year wall calendar.

In a two-piece and six-inch heels, I am holding a No. 930 1/2-inch D-Handle Reversing Drill like it’s a semi-automatic weapon.

“I need a little more…something, Phineas,” the photographer said. “A little more serendipity, a little more world-weariness. Show me a righteous embrace of the ineffable. And a little more gam.”

***

Level

We were fixing up a place that needed fixing up. We were going to live there. Her parents were helping, although it was more like I was helping and they were fixing.

“Can you hand me that level?” her dad said.

“What’s a level?” I said.

***

Someday

It’s the voice on the radio, the voice from the moon. The one that sings about someday and orders the Tour of Italy at Olive Garden. The one you listen for when you’re cold. The one that holds your hand.

***

Beaming

I turned to watch her walking down the aisle.

I saw her mother, dressed in fuchsia, freaking a little and fumbling with plastic aisle markers that were melting in the 95-degree heat.

I saw her grandmother, who also was dressed in fuchsia or maybe off-fuchsia.

I saw her father. He was dressed in black. Her father was a practical man, a provider man, a good man. In many ways, a man I was nothing like.

There was a tap on my shoulder and turned to face the tap. Red-faced in the sun, pregnant out to here and presumably miserable, the judge was smiling. Beaming. “Hot enough for you?” she asked.

***

Everything

I’d written the lyrics for “I Just Want To Be Your Everything,” a big hit for Andy Gibb back in the day, and I’d been invited to serve on a panel at a songwriters convention in Kennebunkport, Maine.

During the Q&A, a young girl asked: “What does ‘Everything’ mean—or, more to the point, what did you intend for it to mean when you wrote this song?”

I waxed on the nature of that which is and the vastness of the all, citing instances in popular music within which this is-ness manifested in one individual seeing the is and the all in another individual—witness “You Are Everything (and Everything Is You),” the fabulous Stylistics record. There’s “Everything Is Archie,” perhaps the finest example of a paean to pantheism the world’s heard. But for all-encompassing is-ness and the unbeatable all of it all, nothing tops Donny Hathaway’s “Everything Is Everything.”

The girl, who identified herself as a freelance correspondent for the Neil Armstrong Elementary School Post-Gazette, exhaled with what might have been a combination of impatience and contempt.

“I guess you don’t understand my question,” she said.

***

Taking Names and TRL

A little before dark and a little after the end of the beginning, we saw a toucan taking names on Lexington Avenue.

“Just routine,” the toucan said.

We held the children tight, but they wriggled out of the hold. A pink parchment sky opened, possibly to show itself to the various and sundry sporadic believers, which included Nathan Hale impersonators, anthem buskers and non-committal arena rockers.

“When are we going to visit the set of Total Request Live?” the children said.

***

That One Sade Song

If you were cold and I were cold and the lights were cold and the rabbit ears were cold as daffodils, I would sing that one Sade song to you. Or maybe the cold-calling moon would sing it to us instead.

***

My Name Is

My name is not Mud, but it is.

Just like shame isn’t dread and shame isn’t fear and shame isn’t the smoke-ring halo I think I’ll see if I look in the mirror while I’m shaving. But it is. It's all those things.

Shame also is Cliff Robertson, a guest villain on Batman c. 1967.

When I was 20, I wrote a song titled “My Name Is Mud.” It's about a guy saying, “I know my name is Mud, and I know I’m something of a disgrace, and I’m probably dead to you, but I hope you'll stay with me, metaphorically speaking, in the event the Mud thing isn’t actually a thing.”

It's a thing. It's like when you lose your voice and you can’t sing anymore, or lose your voice so you can’t talk anymore. You can’t sing to people, you can't talk to them, you can't tell them anymore. You can't tell. Also, you can’t tie your shoes.

***

Neither One of Us

We were listening and not listening to the northeast wind, which wondered if we'd considered talking things out.

We were listening and not listening to the Voice of America, which asked who do you think you're fooling?

We were listening and not listening to Gladys Knight sing about two people who didn't want to be the first to say it.

"It's not the first of us who says it, but the first to say it again, again, and then again," I said, listening to the sound of you, not listening. "The first to say it so the words take us over the hanging bridge, clickety-clack, to the next ridge, where we pick clover, reconsider the sun, and decide who gets the Fiddle-Leaf Fig Tree, and who gets the Peace Lily."

***

A Full Fuller Fullest Blue

I was to be the last stand-up comedian ever to perform at the Fuller Brush Company annual meeting and golf outing.

“I was proud of you, once, you know,” my ex said, slurping Red Velvet Cupcake Blue Bunny ice cream out of a straw.

“I know you were, and if you knew how much I thought I loved you for it, you would…know it,” I said, leaping out of bed and into the living room, where the Fuller Brush men were waiting.

The Fuller Brush men asked me if I planned to work blue during my routine. I said I wasn’t sure what constituted blue these days.

“We don't need any of that wistful, underlying sadness stuff. Nothing poignant, no pathos—no song sung blue every garden grows one," they said. "Embrace the moment, yes, strike a pose, sure, but remember your audience. And no life insurance jokes. Hear what we’re saying?”

“I hear what you’re saying,” I said.

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IT ALL STARTED WHEN THE CHALLENGER EXPLODED by Shannon Frost Greenstein

May 17, 2020 · Fiction

I sit, tense, breathless, eyes glued to the screen.

I am thirteen years old.

It is cold outside, the kind of cold that stings the tip of your nose and bites deep in your lungs when you inhale.

It is almost time. We’ve been waiting all morning. I’ve been looking forward to this for weeks, obsessively following the news for mention of launch preparations, reading Christa McAuliffe’s simple biography in The Inquirer: an ordinary history teacher, just imagine!

I’ve been lying awake at night, thinking about the infinite nature of space until infinity blew my mind and I couldn’t grasp the concept any more.

“Jordan, will you sit back from the television? You’re going to ruin your eyes.”

My mother, in a gesture of love and true understanding of my inner workings, has let me stay home from school. My father is at work, my sister at school—God forbid she misses a day of basking in her popularity—despite my mother’s offer to let her skip as well. It is just my mother and I, pajamas and mugs of cocoa even at eleven a.m., basking in America’s superiority over Russia and the limitless potential of travelling the universe.

The vestiges of Kennedy’s Space Race, the moon in our corner, the epitome of the country’s collective grit and sheer will.

I want to be an astronaut. More than anything in the world, I want to be an astronaut. I’ve got it all worked out, even as I attempt to navigate puberty and peer pressure and bad choices. I’m going to graduate high school with a scholarship to an Ivy League college, where I will be pre-med and graduate with honors, and then join the military so they’ll pay for my med school. I’m going to learn to fly and be an on-flight doctor, and then I’m going to apply to NASA’s Astronaut Candidate Program.

This has been the plan for as long as I can remember. I am a good student, a hard worker, disciplined, focused. I know what I want, and I’m sure I know what it will take to get there.

“What time is it?” I ask my mother impatiently.

“It’s 11:30. It’ll be any minute.”

The last time I would look forward to anything so guilelessly, so naively. The end of innocence, a swan song, the curtain call of childhood.

I sip cocoa, I fidget, I stare at the images reflected on the television: The launch pad at Cape Canaveral morphs into a stock photo of the NASA command center that’s replaced by a reporter, hugging herself against the unseasonable cold, describing conditions and sensations the astronauts will face over the next several minutes.

“Are you excited?” my mother says.

“Are you kidding?”

I don’t have to shift my face from the screen to know she is smiling, that she doesn’t mind my tone. I know they say a mother is always closest to her firstborn, that the second child is neglected in both attention and love. That’s not the case in our family, just like a lot of things are not the case in our family. My mother and I share a bond that is creepily extrasensory, that borders on clairvoyance or telepathy.

We did. Then I fucked up. It started that day, watching the Challenger.

“Do you know how proud I would be if I’m ever there,” my mother says, “in the crowd at Kennedy Space Center, waiting for you to take off?”

She supports my dream, perhaps subconsciously driven to counteract my sister’s grand, lifetime aspiration to amount to a supermodel and fitness spokeswoman. Every straight-A report card I bring home is prominently displayed on the fridge; I get a whole paragraph to myself detailing all my accomplishments in the yearly family Christmas newsletter. I’m excused from boring family get-togethers and church services if I “have to study.” I’m several grade levels ahead in STEM subjects, and even have a special “gifted” IEP at school that allows me to study trigonometry while everyone else works on binomials.

“You will be,” I assure her absentmindedly, practically manic with anxiety, with anticipation.

There is no doubt this will be me someday. I mean, I’ve been saving for space camp with all my birthday and Christmas money for two years. How could I possibly ever be anything but an astronaut?

“I think something’s happening, I think something’s happening,” I shout, up on my knees on the floor, directly in front of the television, unable to control the volume of my voice, my fingers clenched, my jaw clenched, ecstatic to be watching the Challenger launch with my mother behind me on the couch. It’s only us, gazing in wonder at the culmination of human brainpower to this point, the trophy of generations upon generations of evolution, the ability to explore space.

Three minutes appear on a giant screen, counting down, the seconds ticking away like little eternities, each number illuminated for a lifetime before finally surrendering to the next digit.

I squeal, my hands balled into fists, my eyes burning because I am forgetting to blink. At this moment, I am sure the universe is affirming my plans, my destiny. Just as I always have, I feel a pull, a calling almost religious in nature, toward the billions of stars and planets and moons out in the great beyond.

Christa McAuliffe wanted that, too. She wanted it, just like you wanted it. Imagine what her last moments were like. Do you think she had time to regret ever signing on to be a Payload Specialist before she died? Do you think she was alive when she hit the water?

The clock counts down.

Two minutes. One and a half minutes.

“Come on,” I shout at the television, believing I can speed up the process in Florida from my living room in Philadelphia.

A minute.

The longest minute of my life. Except for many minutes which would come after takeoff.

“I love you, Jordan,” my mother says suddenly. I tear my gaze away from the screen to look over my shoulder at her briefly. She’s grinning, her eyes bright, unable to sit still as her hands flutter around her hair, her collar, her mug. This is just as exciting for her. I feel kindred, a flash of pride about having brought this joy into her life. At this moment, I am already an astronaut, just by the sheer weight of both of our beliefs—certainties—that it is what will come to pass.

Remember that time you thought you were going to be an astronaut?

“I love you, too,” I say happily, bubbling from within with exhilaration.

A minute. Forty-five seconds.

The clock is stubborn, exploiting time’s relativity, insisting on stretching the spaces between each second to impossible lengths. It ticks down, and the camera zooms in for a close-up of the shuttle, where things are starting to happen.

Challenger begins to tremble slightly and then shake in earnest, a vibration I can almost feel through the television, across the states and into my teeth. Smoke billows, and I see the flickering of flame.

Ten seconds. Five. Zero.

Against nature, against God’s design, in an awe-inspiring show of ability and triumph over the elements, Challenger takes off, rising up like a revolutionary, fighting gravity to lift its bulk upwards and upwards into the sky and through the atmosphere.

“Yes,” I shout, rising up myself, on my feet as if I’m taking off as well. I feel something foreign and natural at the same time, something I can’t begin to describe, but which I would later come to recognize as something sexual, the endorphin-rush of orgasm, an orgasm of possibility and expansion and the human experience.

It continues to ascend, smoke and fire trailing the shuttle like its own comet’s tail. I am already wishing I could see it enter the stratosphere, exit it, enter and exit the exosphere, enter open space. Everything in the world is as it should be. I am truly happy.

Challenger explodes.

There is more fire and smoke, but also shrapnel, chunks of engines and rockets and ceramics and body parts and dreams. Challenger, disembodied, plummets to the Earth in pieces, like heaven is weeping the kibble of human invention.

There is no God.

“What?” I cannot grasp what is happening.

The debris hits the ocean at an unfathomable speed. Plumes of smoke still hang in the air like huge lazy clouds, the only evidence that seven people once lived their dream for 73 seconds.

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BERMUDA by Danny Cherry Jr.

May 17, 2020 · Fiction

It was somewhere between the fifth and eighth rendition of the “birthday song” when I began to see the appeal of a tight noose and a wobbly stool. That’s what this job did to me. I prayed to the chain restaurant gods to put me out of my misery, but all I heard instead was the firework-like pops of sizzling meat and the chefs’ philosophical debate over which one of the new girls had the fattest ass.

I sat on the milk crates in the kitchen and scrolled through the social media feed of my ex acting school classmates and hate-liked as many of their photos as possible. This one got a gig in a commercial. That one got a stage play role. Another somehow got a role in a big-budget film. In the group message, they asked how my luck was going. I responded with the truth. “I think I may have found my most challenging role yet.” They sent back happy faces and hearts. I responded with “thank you” and enough exclamation points to emphasize my happiness.

Then a sinister sound low below the chefs’ passionate debate grew louder, closer, like the music in slasher-films right before the victim’s throat got slit and the carotid artery splattered against the curtains.

“Alright, Diggity Dog customers!” The manager and crew continued to shout and clap their hands. “We have a special birthday guest today!”

I closed my eyes. “Fuck me.”

I filed in and clapped along. “Happy happy birthday! From our crew to you!” And with each mangled verse of the song, what little pride still lingered evacuated my body.

It was at this moment when I realized I wasn’t lying to my friends; this was my most challenging role yet: a 20-something post graduate with a useless degree and a job in the hometown he practically sold his kidney to escape. And I was nailing it.

“Welcome to Diggity Dog where our franks are as pleasant as our customers. What will you be having today?”

I smiled at the four-top table and passed out the menus with vigor. I nodded as they ordered but watched our mascot through the window on the sidewalk spin an arrow up and over his head like a helicopter, letting people know we had a special going on: two franks for the price of one. That damned arrow worked better than the Pied Piper, but instead of attracting kids, it summoned all of the plant workers and foremen and their overly made-up wives, along with their gaggles of children who somehow always turned their food into a mosaic on the floor.

The parking lot was full with F-150s and jacked up trucks with confederate flags hanging from the back. I would guess there were more rifles and AR-15s in the parking lot than the weapons cache at our Sheriff’s department.

At dinner once, one of my classmates asked, “Is your hometown like ‘Friday Night Lights’?” We were at our favorite restaurant, which sat atop a skyscraper that sliced through the clouds in the sky. The glass buildings across the way looked like pitch-black monoliths, like giant Carbonado diamonds, with the exception of squares of light that came from individual rooms and offices.

I sipped my twenty dollar drink. “Yea, I guess it’s like ‘Friday Night Lights,’ except fewer black people.” She and my other friends laughed, and one made a white hipster comment about how quaint it must be and how they’d love to visit one day, just to see one of our antique stores. Or to see the stars in the sky. But there were no stars in those skies; a constant orange tinge from the gasoline plant’s flames loomed over the town night and day.

I told them no, they didn’t want to visit. My town was nicknamed “Bermuda” because no one ever left. One of my friends put an arm on my shoulder and said, “That’s not true,” and shot me a corny, soap-opera gaze. We laughed and toasted a night that was foggier than the early mornings over the New York waterfront.

That was a year ago. Now, I was back home, where the Confederacy and football were kings, where bonfires often replaced house parties, and when there were house parties, they were thrown by those whose parents could afford two-month vacations in Europe. The type of parties where I’d be the black fly-on-the-wall and every group would swat me away and whisper “who invited him?” The type of parties where the few black people who were there huddled up off to the side in their letterman jackets. I wasn’t permitted into that group either. I was the “faggot” in the drama club.

Bermuda is a place I spent many years trying to escape. I applied for a “Minority In The Arts” grant and took out student loans so I could find myself in a city of millions. And I did it. It required thousands of miles, six figures, and four years. I chiseled out the person who I always was and made friends, had girlfriends, and went on misadventures in the city. I stayed in an apartment with rickety floors and cockroaches big enough that we considered asking them to go half on rent with us.

It was hard to accept I wasn't there anymore. As I take this table’s order, I wish I could take back the joke I made about people never leaving Bermuda. If that were true, I would never leave this fucking hellhole ever again, and I’d be doomed to spend the rest of my life clapping and singing happy birthday songs to the very people I tried to escape.

A woman with snow-white hair sat at one of my tables. She wielded sarcasm like only Baby Boomers could, using a smile to dampen the stab of her patronizing remarks. I wanted to remind her she shouldn’t expect five-star service from a place with ten three-star reviews and several food safety violations, then I remembered the lengthening zeros in my student debt balance and shut the fuck up. “I’ll take it back, ma’am.”

My next table wasn’t much better. Two baggy-eyed parents clung to their cups of coffee as if they contained the water from the Fountain of Youth and allowed their kids to scribble with red crayon on the walls. My tongue-biting and forced courtesy only netted me the loose change from the bottom of their jeans and a dollar older than the coffee we served. I accepted the “tip” with a smile.

I ambled to the kitchen with another dissatisfied patron’s dirty dishes in my hand. Then I heard it.

“Squirt?”

I froze. The old nickname excavated old memories I had buried under expensive therapy and four years of distance. I turned to see a table full of people from my high school days.

“Darius ‘Squirt’ Miller,” he said again. I stood like a sentry as he flashed his smile at me. My body reacted like he was an apex predator baring his teeth. While I stayed in character, I placed the dishes in a bin near the kitchen entrance and dragged my body towards the table.

He asked, “How you been?”

“Been good.”

“You’re a big-time actor yet?”

The memory of my stint as “Dead Guy #3” on Law & Order came to mind. “I do all right.”

The wrinkles under his eyes and his stray strands of remaining hair read like the life-lines of someone who had their vitality and motivation sucked dry after years in a town that eats people’s souls and shits out withered clones. He raised his arm to shake my hand. “Well, that’s good to hear, man.” Muscle memory told me to flinch, but I tightened up and gripped his hand in return before I walked away.

Some last words were said to my back. “It’s good to have you back in town, Squirt.”

I walked away and sped up once I was out of eye-sight, throwing my one-second finger up at my tables, flashing my smile, and letting them know I’d be right back. I went into the restroom where somebody stood in front of the faucet. I hid out in a stall and waited for the hissing of the faucet to stop.

When the door opened and closed, I took one deep breath, balled up my apron, and screamed. I screamed into it like it was a vacuum in space that could swallow my frustrations, like it was an endless void where I could deposit my angst. The apron muffled my shouts, but my throat strained. I belted and belted until I felt Bermuda’s sharp talons unleash itself from me. I got up when I heard the door open again. I walked out and straightened my apron.

When I got back to the floor, the table of ex-high school classmates was clear. I was directed to a new table by the hostess; they looked like truckers. I clutched the menus and, for a moment, pretended as if I was back in art school. I closed my eyes, whispered my lines, and asked myself what the character’s motivation was: not to be broken down again by the antagonist, this town.

I took out a pen and notepad and smiled at the truckers. “Welcome to Diggity Dog where our franks are as pleasant as our customers. What will you be having today?”

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ONE DRUNKEN M. LEVAR IN RELATION TO SMALL GROUP by Scott Malone

May 16, 2020 · Fiction

To ease elaborations, an assumption will be made for the reader. That, from sober perspectives, stupor-induced antics most commonly associated with alcoholics are the chaotic, frenzied movements of temporarily broken brains; they contain zero scientific insights. This case intends to show Academia why the understanding is incorrect. And that, under objective lenses of scientific method and reason, significant behavioral patterns emerge in those chronically inebriated.

Like moths to light, Drunks are attracted to groups of people. More so, if the group is standing. A strange phenomenon—especially considering a Drunk’s near-constant lack of balance—that’s generated a sort of mythos-cult following in underground psychology. However, regardless of notoriety, no peer-reviewed articles exist concerning correlations between a) size of group and/or b) subject’s inebriation level with c) likelihood of unsolicited intrusion.

Until now.

“One Drunken M. Levar in Relation to Small Group” proudly announces the first documented case of Group-Influenced Drunken Intrusion, or GIDI.

Catalyzation Group size, shockingly small: Amethyst standing beside Trudin and Baco’s booth for drink orders.

Considered the local drunk by the local drunks, Mitch (male, 49, Drunk) was known by Pub’s bartenders as the regular whom under no circumstance should be served liquor, lest ye wanted a gremlin climbing the tar-stained walls, wielding darts, threatening whichever unlucky bastard nearest the jukebox with acupuncture if they dared not play “Behind Blue Eyes” again.

Sidenote: Mitch’s eyes are blue.

After stumbling half-zipped from the men’s room, Mitch shuffled toward Trudin’s booth and managed landing a heavy hand on Amethyst’s shoulder for balance before anyone realized what was unfolding.

“CIGARRETTE,” Mitch announced, limp and slack-jawed.

Labored breathing, its flammable scent, increased agitation flickering behind sunken eyes—all clear evidence that, somewhere throughout the night, Amethyst had made the crucial mistake of serving Mitch the Evil Spirits.

“What?” Trudin asked the Drunk.

Mitch gave a cross-eyed smoking gesture for clarification and Amethyst shook his hand off her shoulder, tipping the belligerent forward, palm-to-table, where he vented halitosis fumes at Trudin with closer proximity.

“A CIGARETTE,” the Drunk elaborated.

Trudin faced Amethyst, avoiding the brunt of vile breath, and said, “Just the tab, Amber-thyst,” before directing full attention toward the GIDI.

“What about a cigarette?” Baco chimed in.

It’s believed Mitch planned on saying, “DO YOU HAVE ONE?” But this is unconfirmed, because the question never aired. His brain was instead forced to make an emergency interruption, updating the body on the severity of its equilibrium crisis. Firing last-ditch messages at the legs, the brain alerted both to spread out: WARNING, GAIN WIDER STANCE IMMEDIATELY.

Unfortunately, brains are also quite susceptible liquor, sadly, and left leg information was accidentally sent to the right. The result: a catastrophic crossing of extremities.

Mitch—legs buckling inward like a full-bladdered schoolboy—was spun a sharp 180° and sent staggering away from the booth, collecting speed while the brain calculated adjustments needed to offset its acute angle with the floor. Feet pigeon-toed, flopping onto locked knees, desperate to stay ahead the leaning tower of drunken mass. Acceleration continued along this trajectory until critical velocity was reached. Then, breaking into a spastic run before feet lost all contact with floor, Mitch was sent free-falling toward the bar, headfirst.

Lacking a proper variable for drunken luck, it’s unknown mathematically how Mitch’s skull missed the bar—forehead grazing the corner’s edge close enough to lift a tuft of thinning hair. And thus, thanks only to probability, damage sustained from the fall was mitigated to a 1/4” gash on Mitch’s chin where he’d caught a barstool’s polished seat and added four wooden legs to his already horizontal two.

Impact with Pub’s floor culminates the first recorded GIDI, concludes “One Drunken M. Levar in Relation to Small Group” on a successful note.

With Mitch’s life-threatening response validating the alternative hypothesis, this groundbreaking case raises many questions, insinuates underlying cause. Chance a deeper meaning lurks within the phenomenon alone warrants future research.

Acknowledgements: There’s no denying the burden placed on those unfortunate enough to have crossed Mitch’s path that night, but it’s Academia that’s truly indebted.

So, here’s to you, Mr. Levar, for all that was sacrificed as tribute to knowledge.

And, in summary, one final commendation is required for the way Mr. Levar concluded the GIDI. Because Mitch didn’t simply prove his case, he rested it with style and grace seldom seen by Science: disproving long-held standings that a Drunk’s actions possess no inherent value while simultaneously paying homage to History’s most iconic science experiment with his very own rendition of Galileo’s “Falling Objects” test.

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IRENE by Sarah MW

May 15, 2020 · Fiction

“Fancy a bite of my banana, Miss?”

Teenage faces have a soft bluntness to them, a button-like quality as they wait to be chiseled out to their full adult contour. Joe’s face was the same, though unlike the others it sported a uniquely impressive beard, far from usual in a fifteen-year-old. He was grisly and monstrous; I heard he’d fucked his way through most of the pretty girls in year ten and eleven. Simpering, gum-chewing girls with clotted mascara and deep-set insecurities. He swung back, all too pleased with himself in his plastic chair, forcibly recumbent, legs wide like a broken easel.

I was a newly anointed high school teacher, fast baptized into the daily ritual of having my boundaries teased, stretched, and overstepped. I thought my greatest power might have been the ability to put on a show of indifference.

“No thanks, Joe.”

The indifference thing didn’t really work. They simply became more inventive in their provocations. An orange once, for instance, just missing the back of my head, hitting the whiteboard with a satisfying smack. Whittled down, waiting each day for the evening bus, I was a totally flimsy and broken thing. Better to wait for the very last one, or else be targeted again, naked by the shelterless stop, cat-called down from the top deck of the school bus.

Each day, disembarking the bus, entering that village, it seemed time at some point had been discontinued. Before starting there, I’d envisaged a forgivably backwards, warm, and well-meaning community: soft, thatched buildings, the post office, a local shop, and sheep. What I met with was the darker heart of a pretty English county, its deprived and neglected inner core. Filthy vehicles lined the pavements, lucky if they were still running. Right-wing vitriol was rampant as union jack flags hung defiantly in front room windows. Then there was the school: a five-story, brutalist nightmare, old-style attitudes cast in concrete.

Time stood uncannily statuary in those breeze-blocked, ascetic walls. I felt it, having turned to senior teachers about the hounding and harassment. My concerns were greeted with laughter from older women in shapeless cardigans who told me they’d be thrilled with such attention. The male counterpart of the staff body offered even less hope; in their mid-fifties, on average, with blackened teeth and overhanging bellies, and a scoring system among them for all new female staff. I’d been forewarned of this by my new manager, as she reassured me between giggles that it was "just a bit of fun."

I first spotted Irene whizzing by down the stone staircase, a ladder of gaping slats through which, four stories up, I’d look down and eye the building’s ever-threatening concrete base. She had no specific classroom of her own, and so stomped by purposefully in her studded heeled boots, up and down, every day. Her smile exposed black holes and golden glints in its crooks that I found simultaneously threatening and charming.

“Lovely day,” she beamed, approaching me during one break time in her extravagant sun hat, weather-beaten face upturned towards the sun's glare. Her bright fuchsia lipstick screamed youthfulness and vitality, and was jarring set against her long, ashtray grey hair. Irene told me she was the union representative for the school—was I a member? A woman’s place is in her union, she laughed. I noticed she had a habit of licking her two front teeth and pouting in the interim of her speaking. She oozed gratitude and ease and really didn’t seem like a teacher at all. More like a carefree member of the public who just happened to pass by. Her gaze probed deep as I asked her what it was that she taught.

“Life,” she announced, smiling, a statement that seemed to me underpinned with limitless profundity. What she meant was Citizenship and Religious Studies, though she had gifted it with a totally endearing rebrand. There was a knowing in her eyes, and I longed to swim in it.

One uncharacteristically shady summer’s night, as I stood wilting as ever by the bus-stop, it seemed like a beautiful, cosmic twist of fate when an aging camper van pulled over. Irene slid the door open from the backseat to let me in.

“I would have offered you a lift before, but Angus can be so unreliable." To this, Angus emitted an incoherent groan of disapproval and went back to wildly eyeballing the road ahead. If I was to deduce correctly—from that all too familiar cat piss stench—I’d passed on the hum-drum reliability of the public bus that evening to be driven home down dark country side-roads by a speed-induced stranger.

Angus was ten years Irene’s senior and bore all the signs of having lived life at full throttle: bald with blotched tattoos, skin like worn-out elastic, the vocal timbre of an old dog choking on its leash.

“Here you are.”

Irene passed me the lidless whisky bottle while she sparked up a spliff. The anesthetic burn of the whisky, coupled with our lively conversation, proved the ultimate salve to whatever had gone on before. His gaze fixed on the road, Angus stretched his arm backwards, signaling for me to pass the bottle to him.

School night after school night, we drove home in Irene’s van. Every night I was excited by the endless countryside hills that made my belly flop, by the dubious mechanics of the van, the questionable noises it made, its axles like bones threatening to snap at any moment. With every speed-bump, we’d come to a gasping halt, the van’s metalwork would shudder, and the window panes would violently smack at their frames. I loved how the unpredictability of the country roads would have us arc and sway in the backseat, taking care to balance the booze between us: sometimes whisky, sometimes wine in any old dirty glass. As we took yet another winding bend, my body lifted and careered into the window, while her sparrow-like legs would momentarily crush mine.

“International Women’s Day!” Angus yelled once jubilantly, as we bundled in, procuring three bottles of cheap white wine from between his legs. We stopped halfway at an off-license for tobacco, where there was a beautiful Bullmastiff on a walk on the road opposite. Majestic as anything, flexing its thick, taut sinew with each stride. Irene turned to me.

“He looks just like my Rocco. My Rocco, I lost him."

That night I visited Irene’s house for the first time. They lived a few villages west of the school; village, again, a term strikingly incongruous with the thing it designated. All around were characterless squares of ill-furnished prefabs and happy reprobates pulling wheelies at oncoming traffic. A cavernous hole had been left at the core of the place after the coal mines were shut down in the nineties.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Irene pointed out as we hopped out the van, “but this place is beautiful. I love our village. Look at this ancient woodland all around. This is the one place in a hundred miles’ radius you’ll hear a skylark’s call.”

Irene told me there was an open door policy all around the village. On entering her home I registered a cluster of growling gents in anoraks, proliferating all about the dining table and kitchen benches like a kind of algae. The whole place itself gave off airs of an unattended to spare room and seemed crooked at every angle. Angus thrust a warm can of Scrumpy Jack into my hand and invited me to roll myself a spliff from his Tupperware supply. From this point on, the night twirled all around me in a heady carousel of space cakes, roll-ups, more Scrumpy’s, more spliffs. The door remained open, and a little girl named Star came in and fussed about me, braiding my hair, dancing as if around a maypole.

At some point, Irene stole me away to the quiet of the garden. Angus and his clan—those hungry jackals—continued to congregate excitedly about the platter of intoxicants on offer in the dining room table. With all I’d ingested, I had to focus hard on tuning out the relentless physiological interference as Irene spoke to me in grave and weighty tones. I learned she just turned sixteen when they were married. On their wedding night, he’d chased her round the house with an axe, having regretted it all. The following decades brought four kids who took turns hanging off the pram as she marched to the community library day after day, pursuing three different masters degrees. "Shakespeare, the working class hero" was the thesis of which she’d been most proud.

The picture she painted of Angus’s own very separate history saw him elevated to the level of folkloric legend.

“He’s a man unto himself. All the women in this village have either wanted to have him or have had him. His cock, I am telling you, is like nothing you’ve ever seen.”

I wondered if it was as wiry and strangled looking as his wrinkled old neck. She told me he let her have her fun too. On her fortieth birthday, he passed her a condom and gave his permission to fuck whomsoever she wanted. Irene had reached that point of inebriety where the urge to share was all-consuming. Next she told me she was a lesbian, could only ever come when thinking about women. The receptors in my brain were straining to compute the flurry of information, to disentangle the scrambled signal, the fuzz that infiltrated my mind.

“I want to tell you something I’ve never told anyone.”

It made sense that she would have been assured by then of my sheer unshockability.

“You know my Rocco I told you about? Well my Rocco and I, we were in a relationship,” she said and paused. “But I promise you it was totally consensual. He would always be the one to initiate."

I nodded, not sure what else to do. All the while I imagined it: Angus fucking his way around the village with his monster cock, whilst Irene sought comfort with her Bullmastiff Rocco. I pictured the power of his strong hind legs, the curvature of his rippling muscle in all its urgent sexuality, her dainty frame curled neatly beneath.

Slipping back into the house, I took to mounting the steep staircase to the bathroom, using my arms to straddle the wall and banister. On my way, I caught an old picture of Irene. I was stunned by the blackness of her hair, as well as her overall startling beauty; here was the original image of which I’d only ever encountered the negative. Was she Rocco’s girl back then? After, as I was pissing, I noted the absence of any type of hygiene product about—no soap, no shampoo, nothing. I remembered how Irene told me she takes a bath every morning, that she never showered, and so must have spent each morning stewing in the brine of yesterday’s filth.

I tried to get back downstairs, and that’s when I fucked up. I tumbled from the very first step.

***

I woke up to the gentle thrum of Radio 4 and the cold wind that set the window off rattling on the hinge holding it ajar. I was laid, fully-clothed, in their sheetless marital bed, nestled between the pair of them like a fledgling bird. My cracked ribs made it impossible to move, so I lay there immovable for some time after.

***

Irene and I shared goodbyes that were drawn out and insubstantial. I moved schools soon after, and we texted a couple of times. The last I heard from her was a phone call to tell me she’d had a stroke and that she wasn’t teaching Life anymore.

Rocco <3

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COLLABORATION by Parker Young

May 14, 2020 · Fiction

I was writing a fantastic tale about two little sheep who have nowhere to go but up. The main question that animates the whole story is, will the sheep go up? It seems that they should—they have no reason not to. Certainly, they can’t go any further down. We all have limits.

Anyway, that was the story I was writing, and the writing was going quite well until my wife began changing the words of the story at night, when I wasn’t looking. I’ve got no proof, of course, it’s only a feeling I have, but a strong one. For example, one of the two sheep is now a female sheep. I can’t remember writing a female sheep into the story at all, but there it is, and its name is Tina. On the other hand, I was never dead-set on writing a story about two male sheep, so I suppose it’s possible that I was the one who made one of the sheep male and the other female and named the female one Tina. There’s nothing wrong with a sheep named Tina, and I would never claim otherwise. But it’s suspicious. But from there it gets worse because my wife’s name is Tina and my name is Colin, and can you guess what the male sheep’s name is?

I should ask Tina what’s going on.

***

A new development. The sheep are no longer sheep—now they are people. People who walk upright and spend lots of time watching tennis. This is troubling because I would never write about tennis. I love to watch tennis myself and spend an embarrassing amount of time doing so, but I would never go so far as to write it into a story of mine, especially not a story about two people like Tina and Colin. Yes, I’m a tennis-watching type of person through and through, but I’m determined to hide such proclivities from the world for as long as possible, and so I can’t help but suspect that my wife is interfering with my story and changing the words all around at night, when I’m not looking. This is a serious charge because I barely ever sleep. Therefore, in order for her to change the words of my story all around, she would have to spend hours pretending to sleep, waiting attentively for the precise moment when I’ve actually drifted off for my 45 minutes or so. Then and only then would she be able to strike, affecting change in my story about Tina and Colin, who used to be sheep and had nowhere to go but up. Writing all about the time they spend watching professional tennis, which I would never, ever do. The writing about it, that is.

I think I should ask Tina what’s going on.

***

The final straw. The Colin character has disappeared completely from my story, which is now a Tina story about Tina things. Tina alone in restaurants, Tina alone on the train, Tina, who used to be a sheep with nowhere to go but up, watching professional tennis and drinking too much. It’s my personal opinion that in the story she drinks too much, but the narrative never acknowledges the possibility. Whoever wrote the narrative never even suggests that Tina might have a problem with drinking too much. A real problem. But a problem that has nothing to do with the story’s original question, which was, if my memory serves me: these sheep who have nowhere to go but up, will they go up? Or not? It seems that they should.

I decide to throw the story away because I don’t want to read about Tina any more, certainly not if she’s going to go on drinking gin and watching tennis for god only knows how many more pages. Making eyes at strangers. Maybe she is actually enjoying herself, come to think of it, but no, I can’t go on reading it or writing it or whatever.

Tina, I say, can I ask you something?

But she’s drunk. Tina rarely drinks, and so it only takes a few hours out with friends to render her inoperable. I decide to ask later. Until such a time as I can ask her what is going on, I’ll postpone throwing away the document, a story about two little sheep who have nowhere to go but down, although it seems they should go up.

Wait a second. How can it be that they have nowhere to go but down when I have this feeling, a powerful feeling, that they should go up? I suppose that could be the very dynamic that brings the story to life. Or brought it to life. It’s a moot point now, because, if my memory serves, it’s now a story about Tina who watches tennis and drinks deadly quantities of alcohol. Nothing like my Tina. Not really.

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NEIGHBORS by Will Cordeiro

May 12, 2020 · Fiction

It was an in-service day at school, and the bus dropped me off at home three hours earlier than usual. The doors were locked. The extra key was gone. I tried to wedge a screen-window open. The neighbor saw me trying to break into my house. He invited me over. Reluctantly, I said okay.

My neighbor had me sit on a big velvet chair and handed me some chocolate milk and a plate of vanilla wafers. After I’d eaten them, he said he wanted to show me something. He opened a door to what looked like a closet. He entered a narrow vestibule, a corridor of some sort. He waved back at me. I followed him along the length of a gently sloping hallway by focusing on the bald spot at the top of his head. Otherwise, he almost vanished down in the darkness. Just when I thought I’d lost him, a light snapped on; a row of glass cases glared back at me.

I was blinded, squinted, stared while grimacing at distorted faces half dissolved in the sterile halogen radiance—at my own face multiplied and floating in the mirroring glass until my eyes adjusted. “My collection,” he said, sweeping an open palm around the room.

He had been living in the house next door for as long as anyone remembered. My father rarely exchanged more than a couple words with him, though. My father distrusted most people, especially after mother died. Consequently, I didn’t know my neighbor’s name.

“What do you think?” the man asked, smiling. He ran his fingers through a wispy tuft of hair, pushing it over his bald spot. He leaned in toward me, and his eyes disappeared behind the milky luster reflected in his pinched-looking wireframes. He breathed out an odor of sourdough and ripe mayonnaise.

I concentrated on my environment: on the gallery-white walls, on the close musty air. I turned to gaze at the surrounding cases. Inside them, I could now see, were little mousetraps of every description, coil-loaded ones and glue traps and ones that captured the rodent alive. Strangest of all, each one was baited with cheese or peanut-butter, set and ready to spring at any moment.

Disoriented as I was, I suspected I must be standing directly beneath my own house. In fact, underneath my own room, if my sense of direction could be trusted. I heard footfalls, muffled shouts from above. I thought I heard my pull-string robot, its voice repeating, There’s a snake in my boot! Someone’s poisoned the waterhole. Reach for the sky!

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ANOTHER ROAD TRIP STORY by DS Levy

May 11, 2020 · Fiction

Two months ago, after flirting with a handsome Ojibwa who poured stiff Margaritinas, Fonda tottered over to the slots and maxed out her credit card, setting her back two grand. Which is why, heading south on I-31 after an afternoon wine-tasting in Traverse City, I’m surprised when she tells us from the back seat that her inner voice just whispered: Twenty bucks will move your spirit toward prosperity.

Since her heart bypass last year, Fonda’s been on speaking terms with her gut. “You know that ‘feeling?’” she says. “Well, I’m finally listening.”

“Did your gut mention how long you’ll have to play?” Bets wants to know. “’Cause I can’t afford to call in sick tomorrow.”

“Twenty bucks,” Fonda promises.

***

The giant marquee in front of the Little River Casino & Resort advertises “Only Tonight! Bitty KISS!” Bitty looks exactly like Gene Simmons—shiny black Brillo pad of hair, dark sunglasses, plumped up lips—except he and his sidekicks are little people.

“Could be interesting,” Bets says, snapping her gum. She and I can’t afford to gamble. We like to joke that our monthly Social Security checks barely cover our ass-ettes. Sure, Bets works part-time at Lowe’s “making do,” and I get a chunk of my husband’s life insurance, but still, we’re pinching retirement pennies.

Fonda can’t afford to gamble either, but she doesn’t let that stop her. She’s been on disability for twenty years since she and her former boyfriend, who turned out to be “another manic phase,” dumped his Harley in the UP. She’s got a steal rod in her thigh, but it doesn’t interfere with her pulling the one-armed bandits.

Fonda walks ten steps ahead of us, the smell of easy money and cafeteria grease wafting through the electronic doors along with a gush of stale AC. For her, this Neon Oz with binkety-dinkety computerized sirens is her idea of heaven, enough buzz and bling to seduce the most tone-deaf sinner. After she pays to play, she waves adios amigas and wanders across the casino looking for a hot machine with a cushy seat.

Bets and I wander off, weaving around gamblers with fanny packs and credit cards tethered to lanyards, dependable oxygen tanks pushed aside. Though penny-pinchers, we’re not above being hypocrites and agree to splurge on All-You-Can-Eat Crab Legs and Prime Rib buffet for $29.99. But before we track the scent, we pass a dark, quiet bar. We’re on our third snake bites, watching a big-screen of the floor, when all hell breaks loose. Lights flash, bells ring. Someone’s hit the Big One.

“Come on,” says Bets.

We slither off our stools and stumble out onto the floor where a crowd has gathered.

A guy shouts, “It’s letting go of 300 grand!”

“Quick, what do you call a group of gamblers watching someone hit a jackpot?” a grizzled guy with a leather Hell’s Angels vest asks me. Before I can guess, he answers, “Jealous.”

An old man with a flannel shirt scratches his gray beard. “Man, I just played that machine.”

Bets and I pray that when folks part like the Red Sea it’ll be Fonda sitting there in a stream of gold coins. She’s been struggling to pay her monthly trailer rent and has hinted she might get bounced soon.

But when we push through the gawkers, all we see is a dazed gambler with outstretched hands, coins spilling out of an ecstatic machine into an overflowing plastic pail, a strobe light flickering, rapturing the winner to the Almighty Slot Machine in the Sky. And when the winner turns around, she has pink bangs and an “I Went to Vegas and This Is All I Got” T-shirt—definitely not Fonda.

***

We find our Fonda in the snack lounge with a chocolate soft-serve ice cream cone. Turns out she blew ten dollars before her gut spoke up, told her she was wasting her time and money, and that it was hungry. She stares at the overhead flat-screen TVs—kickboxing, Canadian curling, the World Poker Tour. A skinny guy on one screen jumps up and kicks his opponent square in the jaw.

“These slots are so tight,” Fonda says, “they squeak.”

Bets asks her if she’s seen the handsome Ojibwa bartender. Fonda shakes her head. “Has the night off.”

***

On our way out, we pass the crowded auditorium where the Bitty KISS concert is just getting started.

“C’mon,” I say. “We’re so late, we’ve got plenty of time.”

Bitty and his band come on stage. Not only does he sing, he raps and thrusts out his red salamander tongue. If he wasn’t so darn cute—if you could imagine him taller—he could almost pass for the real deal.

There’s only a handful of people in the crowd, so we move down to the front row and watch as Bitty dances over to the edge of the stage singing “I Was Made for Loving You.” He bends down and stretches out his tiny hand. Bets reaches out, and he starts singing to her. Up close, under the lights, he looks 110-years-old.

I stare. It’s wrong to stare. Yet it feels wrong not to. Bitty pumps his bulbous fists, spits into the hot mic, thrusts his bantam hips.

When the song’s over, I poke Bets and Fonda: “Taxi’s leaving.”

***

We stroll past indoor ponds with fake lily pads, our ears thrumming from the music. Outside, a silent gray dawn is just starting its show.

Fonda and Bets worry I’ll fall asleep driving and make a big deal about keeping me awake. But as soon as we hit the road, they’re both out, heads slung back, snoring.

Wide awake, I keep thinking about Bitty. How we all sang along, our mouths moving without our hearts’ concern. I feel bad I watched the show with the same enthusiasm I’d watch a car wreck. The whole evening seemed strained—Bets and I tossing back shots, Fonda wanting so damn bad for those machines to cough out cash. This is our life now, I think. Holy hell.

I scan the highway. Up here, if it’s not suicidal venison, it’s crazy wolves or raucous raccoons.

We’ve got the road to ourselves. If I push it a little, we should make it back in time so Bets can get to her job at Walmart.

This retired life. It’s having time without money, or money without time. It’s watching days fly by like the birch and fir trees along this highway. It’s friendship and sadness and what-ifs and maybe-nots and who-knows. It’s a bad poker hand on a hot table, or a cold slot machine that suddenly sizzles.

Up ahead, three sets of green eyes glow from the dark forest. I slow down, not because I my gut says I should, but because I know how it feels to be hit hard.

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