FICTION Archives

THE FULL LENGTH OF THE WALL by Darren Nuzzo and Toddy Smith

April 13, 2020 · Fiction

I watched him do it—down there in the alley beside our house. “Up to no good,” my wife said. “Can you handle it, Sam?” she asked of me. “I’ll handle it,” I told her. But I just watched. I watched this tall man from our bedroom window standing in the alley, near our things, near my wife’s car she’s almost paid off, near the flowers finally blooming from finger-painted pots, near my daughter’s purple tricycle we won in a raffle just last week, near all the things a husband is supposed to protect. I opened the window and leaned my head out. I cleared my throat to sell it to my wife that I might have it in me to yell, just how a man has it in him to yell. But I just watched. I watched this man spell his name with pee on our red brick wall. He had two hands on it. He moved left to right, knees slightly bent and angled outward so that his jeans wouldn’t drop any further. His long flannel was pulled up and stuffed between his teeth. His hips thrust forward like he was doing the limbo. He shuffled the length of the wall like a number of things that might shuffle the shoreline: a fisherman, a photographer, a lifeguard — no, not just a crab. He traveled a great distance, something I’ve never had to do being given such a short, weak name: Sam. But this guy, he really moved. The full length of the wall, like I’ve said. Two hands on it, like I’ve said. And just like that, it was over. He opened his mouth and let his shirt hang. Pulled up his pants, buckled his belt. He stepped back from the wall. Centered himself in front of his work. Admired it briefly. Pulled out his phone to take a picture. Held the camera sideways, had to. The wall lit up, eleven letters dripping down red bricks: Constantine. Now that’s a name.

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SHORT STORY AS MODERNIST WITH HUMAN BRAIN by John Milas

April 11, 2020 · Fiction

for Marianne

My classmates and I were waiting in line to hold a human cadaver’s brain. I took it with both hands when it was my turn. It was gray and smelled like tequila because we’d pulled it from a bucket of brains soaking in alcohol. It was heavy as if a generation of memories had accumulated within its rubbery noodles like a pile of dust. I thought if I dropped the brain on the floor by accident it would probably bounce like a spare tire.

My professor brought our class to the cadaver lab on campus because she told us it would be a uniquely human experience and it would change our lives. This was for a graduate-level course on modernism that my advisor told me to take. This was supposed to make us feel less alone in the world, but I thought it was pointless and I didn’t know why I had to be there. I had told my professor as much in her office, but attendance was mandatory because the field trip was listed on the syllabus.

I thought we’d end up in some dark cellar with concrete slabs displaying dead bodies that looked like they might come back to life at any moment. Instead, we walked into a bright classroom with about six cadavers laid out on stainless steel tables. The cadavers were so dead they looked fake. They were so dead they looked like they had always been dead.

My professor had been to a cadaver lab before, so when we first strolled in as a posse of modernists she walked right up to the nearest cadaver after putting on some blue gloves. She started picking things up, such as this dead person’s heart and liver. A med student in a white coat told me the brain I was holding belonged to the same man whose heart my professor was practically kneading like dough, as if she were massaging the rhythm back into it. I was close enough to see that the third finger on the dead man’s left hand was constricted by the ghost of a wedding ring. Each of his organs looked as dry as a gourd.

“This one died of leukemia,” one of the med students said to my professor.

“Right,” my professor said and pointed at the body. “That’s why his liver is so enlarged.” She knew things about leukemia and livers already. She knew something about everything it seemed. She impressed a lot of people. Her med student was impressed and they both started poking around together, inspecting the cadaver’s scalp, which the med student pulled off like a hat. The two of them looked closely at the dead man’s shriveled up eyes from inside the top of his skull and I felt bad for him with all that pink residue in his hollow head.

Here was this man who had elected to become an organ donor when he signed up for a driver’s license. He was lying politely on the table and he looked like he was made of plastic. His brain was cold as hell and soggy like a wet basketball. The two halves of it moved independently as I twisted each of them around. I wondered if I could tear the halves apart by twisting far enough, if I could take the logic part of the brain and separate it from the passion part of the brain so easily. Then I would have two separate brains and each half would be less complicated on its own. Someone cleared their throat behind me. I remembered my classmates were still waiting in line to take their turn. I handed the brain to the next person. My gloves dripped alcohol. I did not tear them off or toss them into the nearby wastebasket. I tried to play it cool like I was bored and wanted to be somewhere else, but I had nowhere to hide. I knew my professor was across the room watching me as I stared at my empty blue hands.

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CONSIDER RAVIOLI by Jane-Rebecca Cannarella

April 10, 2020 · Fiction

We’re three in a row and it’s warm like the way the bottom of a plate is hot and comforting after you microwave leftovers. Colleen and Sean both throw off heat to my right and my left, so much blue between both of them like the most blistering parts of a fire. And Colleen wants to know why no one will consider the plight of the ravioli. Pierogis and poptarts are pockets and appreciated. So she wants to know why I won’t give ravioli another chance. What’s to hate? We’re calling them raviolis even though the word is already pluralized but it adds to the gentleness. My heart is all valves and pulleys; with blood sluggish in the in-between seat at the bar. Like three uneven legs on a stool, we fun fight in a rapidly unwinding late afternoon.

Time is a fragmented line from a middle-school notebook, like how you start to write a note but then get called on to answer a question during class. Hours become skipping stunted pen strokes, and Colleen says she's going to open a ravioli stand and name it after me. A little plea for the pockets to get the grandstand they deserve. It’ll make a killing.

Everything needs a little more sympathy and people find comfort from other people. Like the way this dude at the bar who thinks Colleen is cute comes over and we pet his wool sweater. It’s warm and tender like throwing spaghetti against a wall and it sticks because it’s perfect. And who am I to hold a grudge?

Nutrients are nutritious. What if I’m the disagreeable one here? The sort of disagreeable like a person yelling at you for making the meatballs wrong when all you wanted to do was cook your loved one dinner. And while I never ate the meatballs in question, I do know that they were perfect in the way that you just know something. It's the same way that bodies make their own lightning and it travels right to your sternum in shocks and surprises. That sort of knowing. Perfection doesn’t go unnoticed if you actually care.

And we are three in a row. Drinking past our bedtimes on a school night, maybe we'll stay at this bar in South Philly forever? But they’re running out of red wine for Colleen. So I guess we have until the last mini-bottle of wine since it’s the thread of time from the start of hanging out to the end. And until they cut the thread, we’ll elbow lean on the glassy wood bar talking so fast.

I am in the pocket of warmth and red wine is a river in the underworld pulling us all into the winter of the evening. For what it’s worth, I would stay here for another six months with the three of us hothouse flowers blooming indoors during the coldest season. And throughout the frost, I could use the time left to consider the ravioli and all sorts of other things, too.

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THE GATED COMMUNITY by Joseph Pfister

April 9, 2020 · Fiction

We received the brochure in the mail. It was printed on that thick paper, the fancy kind, with raised lettering. ESCAPE TO FLORIDA! it read. YOUR OWN PRIVATE PARADISE AWAITS! Everyone in our subdivision got one, but that didn’t matter. It was February, the ground brittle with snow. We were ready for a change.

Overnight, developers transformed miles of Florida swamp into a mecca for the recently retired. Walk out your back door onto replicas of Sawgrass, Augusta, Pebble Beach! Work up a sweat on our racquetball courts! Cool off with water aerobics! Jazzercise! Sure, the amenities sounded nice. For most of us, though, that wasn’t the real draw. The development was owned by a famous mogul, someone our age, who had made his millions while we were raising kids, debasing ourselves at nine-to-five jobs, and paying off the interest on our thirty-year mortgages.

We’re transplants, snowbirds from the Midwest. Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio. Emigres from America’s heartland, headed south to avoid the worst of our arthritic knees, the patches of black ice lurking between our houses and cars. Our children are grown or mostly grown; they went to good schools, earned expensive liberal arts educations that taught them words like “adscititious,” and “calliope.” Now they live on the coasts and have families of their own, 401(k)s, juicers in their kitchens, and pay mind-boggling sums for rent. Our grandchildren play piano, win science-fair competitions, vacation in the Hamptons. They don’t come to visit us. They’re too busy.

The mogul appears only on weekends. He brings his moody wife, his spoiled children, his entourage of men with peppered gray hair, expensive suits, beady eyes. They join him at all the board meetings.

We like the mogul immediately. He’s full of bombast and unrefined charm. A minor celebrity. We like him because he’s outspoken. A straight-shooter who talks tough, who doesn’t kowtow to anyone. Despite rumors that he hasn’t paid some of his contractors and there are several finished houses still sitting empty, we remain south Florida’s most-desirable gated community. To help keep costs down, the mogul buses in illegals to clean the streets, landscape our lawns, water the golf course. He pays them half of what he pays his other workers, he tells us with near-euphoric glee. Sometimes even less.

There’s already a gate around our community—twelve feet tall, wrought-iron. Dour-faced guards check our IDs at the entrance and prowl the overwatered grounds at night, but the mogul insists we’re still not safe. We need a bigger gate. A better one. Built from only the finest in American-made steel.

Yes, of course! we say. Anything to keep us safe! But how will we pay for it? Our pensions, our monthly social security checks only stretch so far. We already can’t afford to fly to visit our grandchildren.

The illegals, of course, the mogul explains. They’ll pay for it.

Spring rolls in to summer. The air swelters. Every surface weeps moisture. The rain in Florida, we learn, is nothing like the rain in Lincoln or Sioux Falls. The swamp swells. Sinkholes appear like giant, angry mouths. They swallow golf balls, whole golf carts. We dream, sometimes, they will swallow us, our homes, our wives.

It is so hot, we can’t even golf. We stay in. We knit. We watch the news. One night, a guard catches two illegals—a mother, her child—trying to cross the golf course.

What should we do with them? we ask the mogul. It’s our golf course, after all. There are signs posted everywhere—No Trespassing!—and the gate! How could they have not seen the gate?

These are just the first, the mogul warns. We have to make an example of them—before they unionize!

And so the mother and child are separated, placed in cages on the back nine. They’re given blankets—we’re not monsters, after all—and calling cards that charge $7.99 a minute. With good behavior, they’ll be “eligible for reunification” in eight to twelve months, the mogul’s people tell us. The next night, security catches three more. The night after that, five. Then eight. We stuff them in with the mother, her child. We deny them toothbrushes. We purchase megaphones and shout that they will never see their loved ones again. We don’t have enough water to let them bathe and water the back nine, so we limit showers to once a week. The lines at our doctor’s offices and Walgreen’s are already too long, so we ignore their persistent coughs, their occasional fevers.

Still, they keep coming.

They watch us through the gaps in their cages, where they stand, crammed like cordwood, their enormous eyes black as gator holes. It’s impossible to enjoy iced tea on our fake stucco porches anymore, so we move our afternoon bridge games indoors. Our own children won’t return our calls. We imagine them, our sons, our daughters, talking about us in hushed tones at dinner parties. The five-dollar checks we send our grandchildren on their birthdays go uncashed.

After some of the more timid among us, those with less-hearty constitutions, begin to worry—they don’t want our community to develop a reputation, after all—the mogul reminds us that he didn’t get where he is by being nice. And, besides, if we don’t like it, we can leave.

But where would we go? We’ve been here so long, we can barely remember the lines, the contours of the world outside our gates. A world without walls, without the freezer-chill of doctor’s offices, and the sweet smell of rotting citrus. We departed our old lives so long ago, we’re not even sure we could survive in that vast, disorienting macrocosm beyond our borders, even if we had to.

So, yes, we tell the mogul. Yes. We’ll follow anywhere.

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ALL WORKED UP by Linda McMullen

April 8, 2020 · Fiction

He often simply appears in my office, insouciant grin and silver hair: “I want to show you something.” In the age of #metoo, he is carefully respectful of a female subordinate. No hands ever touch in the exchange of—

A binder with reference documents, paginated and neatly tabbed; a viciously indiscreet email from a colleague; a rare compliment on a memo from his own supervisor… Whatever it is. For my eyes.

For me.

Or: I’ve written his remarks for a major briefing the next day, and he invites me to pull up a chair, next to him, so we can amend and annotate. We talk about politics—TV, movies, books—and our colleagues—

—our spouses.

Or: By 7 p.m., he says, “I just want to go home and sit on my couch.”

I say, “Me, too.”

He grins, “You want to be on my couch?”

And then: half-laughing alarm. “Please forget I just said that.” The word career-ending hovers; I am painfully aware of my own femininity. But he doesn’t want to stifle the burgeoning… unspoken… whatever, either, so he launches into an anecdote about his runaway mouth. And one or the other of us references a “No touching!” moment from Arrested Development.

Because.

And I shut my door, sometimes; I try to dispel this abysmally adolescent captivation. I tell my private rosary: I’m a mother. A professional. An adult. I adore my husband.

And I—we—

—chose work rooted in realism. And devoted to the art of the achievable.

Then I remember we have a meeting to prep.

Or we have a joint phone call in his office.

And our building has an open-door ethos.

And so I open it again. And I vacillate between self-loathing at becoming such a morally compromised cliché and vapid daydreams that would embarrass a self-aware twelve-year-old.

He pops his head in the door. And I try, so very hard, to suck in my cheeks.

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DEADBOLT by Kami Westhoff

March 31, 2020 · Fiction

In her dreams, she can walk. She unclips the cord that connects her to the Emergency switch, swings her bloated-log legs from the bed until her feet find her one-in-a-million prints in her purple slippers. Though it’s been over a year since she’s stood unassisted, her legs neither quake nor collapse. Her wheelchair sits next to her nightstand, a foam donut pillow the color of bile positioned just-right by her caregiver.

She thrusts her foot forward. It meets the earth as though it’s the ice she and her first husband carved into arcs and spirals, tufts of ice fluffing the pond’s surface. She shivers at the wind blowing from the north valley, her feet numbing through slippers. Her husband navigates the ice like a first language, bending to steady wind-milling children, scooping the fallen into his arms. Something clenches inside her when he lifts a fallen girl, and their plum-sized baby in utero flexes fingers into fists.

Her roommate’s bed has not been remade since she was relocated. She lifts the afghan, fluffs it until it lays flat on the bed. The wall above the dresser is decorated with photos of children, grandchildren, siblings, spouses, some might be her own, but she doesn’t stop to wonder. She’s had to make certain sacrifices to walk.

The hallway is an illuminated labyrinth. She smells a uric twinge, nothing like the tang of the cotton diapers of her daughter. It’s ranked by haloperidol, clozapine, memantine, valium. Her hands flutter and clench, roll and gather as she changes the soiled sheets from her daughter’s bed. The world was too much for her daughter, her body determined to starve her before her first birthday. The doctor once called her “tiny on the inside,” urethra too narrow, uterus too petite, wrists too delicate for the heavy-hold, ankles unsteady, even on friendly terrain. Her daughter had been trying to sky since birth, while her mother, heavy in all the wrong ways, was born to burrow.

A strip of light slashes the carpet’s taupe. The room it comes from belongs to “Dante Simpson.” The “D” drags her to Dad, who is only allowed one function in her memory: he must save her. She’d read that a parent saves their child’s life an average of forty-five times before the age of two. This saving is a last-second lift from the neighbor’s German Shepherd, Bode—her father tells her this story every time her fingertips navigate the zigzag scars on his calf. Her own scars are like fissures beneath the earth of subcutaneous tissue. The scar from her daughter intersects the one from the hysterectomy. Sometimes she wakes too early from the anesthesia, and the doctor behind the shocked-white barrier sheet, nothing but a strip of eyes between scrub mask and hat, says something that sounds like a prayer, and she’s back in the hallway.

Above her, higher than the second floor where people are in early stages, the third floor, where caregivers smoke and gulp coffee to get through weeks of doubles, is an August sky she hasn’t seen in two years. Stars spatter pinpricks of gas and dust people mistake for light, which is to say, for life. Sky is no longer sky for her. If she were to punch #3194# into the number pad at the front door, drift from the exhalation of the all-but-dead, the thrust of last words love ones carve into tongue, throat, gut to try and fail to translate later, beyond the streetlamps that pale the night, and if she were to look up, she’d see the storm of black and violet erupting on her cheek, her lip stitched with tiny black crosses, blackhole thumbprints twinned on her bone-bright throat.

Something somewhere cries: maybe a fussy hinge, or a northern mockingbird, and she lifts her newborn from its crib. The effort cricks her—the baby’s shoulders nearly split her into one only days earlier. Her breasts throb with the rush of milk that pricks like something barbed. And there is that fence on their property line that plucked tiny bulbs of raspberry blood on her back when she didn’t crouch deep. It’s hard to hold onto a baby sometimes, no matter how hard you try, and everything around you says let go. He’s there again, his voice a bomb in her kitchen, the baby a lit fuse against her chest. She believes him when he says he’s not fucking around, promises to forget it ever happened, what she thought she saw.

Laughter scatters across the hallway, but it’s trenched before she can ride its wave. It’s maybe what she misses most, laughter so expansive it cannot gather sound. Like a scream underwater, or into pillow, or in the woods past the barbed wire fence the night she thought he was too drunk to notice her slink from their bed, the baby’s grunt and whimper, the clunk of the backdoor deadbolt.

In this place, all hallways lead exactly where you started, though it always feels like the first time. Her room is as she left it—all at once her childhood bedroom, the room where he reminded her he could take anything he wanted whenever he wanted it, the room her second husband moved her bed into when he couldn’t stand the trench her body caused the mattress, the room where she pressed her mouth to her baby’s ear, voice a steady hot hush of Shhhh, palm a cradle beneath its moist diaper, the room where she lay, feet, pale and useless as fish in a fistfight, hands in a constant flurry of fuss, heart refusing to untether her body from the stubborn habit of beat.

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TO TEACH by Tyler Barton

March 30, 2020 · Fiction

Whenever she passes a picture she’s in, Jewell closes her eyes. She laughs. Jewell’s earlobes are drippingly long, and her granddaughter Tanny would like to see them pierced nine, maybe ten times. This makes Jewell laugh. Jewell has been convinced by friends to join the poetry club, because, they say, Jewell is always finishing their sentences with a slant rhyme, and damnit they want the real thing! Jewell laughs at them. The poetry teacher is a bear of a man at a pottery wheel until Jewell is told he is the pottery teacher. Jewell laughs through her apology. The poetry teacher is twirling with joy at something Lucille Clifton said. “That woman is a loon,” a poet in a wheelchair whispers. Laughing, Jewell watches the poetry teacher teach, but then she sees that the poetry teacher walked out of her apartment that morning and screamed a mean thing because she saw a ticket on her windshield, but then—and this is what tickles Jewell—when she saw that it was only a papery yellow ginkgo leaf, the poetry teacher screamed an even meaner thing. Jewell discovers this moment in the poetry teacher like a crumb in a man’s beard. As the poetry teacher speaks of inspiration and fearlessness and squeezing the muse’s two cheeks, Jewell sees through to the room where both screams started, small as pepper seeds. Jewell’s hand is up. The poetry teacher says, “Yes, you?” Jewell slides down out of her chair and crawls across the carpet toward her. “Here,” she says. “It’s a haiku.” Jewell doesn’t listen to her classmates’ gasps as she peels a leaf from the woman’s shoe. The yellowness turns to orange in her mouth. Then, blue. She can’t laugh while she chews or she’ll puke.

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SEVEN IS A HOLY NUMBER by Jen Julian

March 28, 2020 · Fiction

And yes, that is how many children she has, and I’m talking of course about Mrs. Goth, who every year selects one of her children to be her favorite in a ceremony she performs for us: a blessed clique of friends and neighbors. She lines the children up on the lawn in white folding chairs, and we like to watch their faces brighten with tension, their shoulders rigid, and we like the springy carnal heat of late June, which makes us feel pagan. Mrs. Goth is not intentionally pagan. The truth is, she schedules the ceremony while her husband is away at a yearly business conference. He doesn’t know about any of this.

Supposedly, this ceremony started as a joke, though now Mrs. Goth and the children take it deadly serious. Angelina, the eldest at nineteen, came all the way back from her college in California to participate, even though she hasn’t been favorite in ten years. The current favorite is Jacob, who’s eleven. He took the honor from Margo, thirteen, the previous year, and yes, any observer might think Mrs. Goth is transferring the title in a sequence, from oldest to youngest and back again, or that she’s otherwise appeasing all of her children with a soft and predictable pattern, as Mrs. Goth, who never so much as squeaks a word at community council meetings, gives the impression of being a soft and predictable lady. But this is not the case when it comes to her children. Margo was the favorite four years ago when the honor went to Emma, Jacob’s twin, only to jump back to Margo the following year. We knew from the look of shock on the children’s faces—and the specific look of shameful pleasure on the face of Margo—that Mrs. Goth’s choice was unexpected. We knew intimately the demon grin of Oliver, the second eldest, who was favorite two years in a row before finally seeing the title passed along again to Charlotte, the third eldest, who once snatched it so gleefully from the baby she was scolded by her mother in front of us and went to bed early for the shame. The baby is Wanda. Along with Angelina before her, Wanda hasn’t received the title since.

This year, on this evening, the dayglow wanes and the lightning bugs come out. Mrs. Goth has set up a table of pinwheel sandwiches and expensive cheese, which we peck fretfully, and a crystal bowl of boozy punch, which drowns the lightning bugs and makes our conversation sparkle. The children, still stiff in their lawn chairs, are dressed in church clothes. Their feet root to the ground like dandelions. Their mother is a kind and obsequious hostess, but when she’s making her choice, she tucks her hand behind her back like a decorated general. Yes, in the past, we have put money in a pot, though that’s not the point. We have never tried to persuade Mrs. Goth to choose one child over another. The point is that it’s not anyone’s choice but hers, because we don’t know what elegant criterial chart Mrs. Goth goes by, and we have decided that any one of her children are average enough be the favorite at any time, that they are all equal parts charming and irritating, intelligent and stupid, and they vary almost meaninglessly when it comes to their creativity, sense of humor, athletic prowess, political awareness, and physical grace and style. By now, all have made neighborhood contributions they can be proud of—Jacob’s YouTube videos and Charlotte’s paper craft and Oliver’s volunteer campaign work for the county warden—though Emma’s newspaper-worthy success last year with amateur theater told us that measurable accomplishments are not the deciding factor for Mrs. Goth. Or, maybe, Mrs. Goth thought Emma’s performance in The Gondoliers wasn’t any good, and who are we to argue with that.

The children, if they know their mother’s criteria, have said nothing about it to the other neighborhood children, or maybe they have, and everyone involved is sworn to keep it secret from us grown-ups, the same way we’re sworn to keep the ceremony secret from Mr. Goth. But we wouldn’t want to know the criteria, even if we knew how to find out, because we like to think the favorite is more divined than selected, because we have talked about it over drinks on back porches, around fire pits and masonry ovens, and in the shallows of our swimming pools: this is our I Ching, this is the primal blood-spill of chicken entrails, this is our peek through the door of the celestial house. Neither we nor the children have the power to control this outcome and nothing can prepare us for it, but that is where power is, and here in this neighborhood power spirals its infinite coil into the secret mind of Mrs. Goth.

We watch her children, seated with calm and anxious dignity, sweaty hands folded in their laps. Their toes recoil like worms in their sandals as their mother strides by again. She’s still deciding. We watch and hold our breaths as she bends down and opens the ceremonial bin, brings out the dried laurel crown, silk ribbons dangling. Every year, we smell its delicate bay scent spicing the lawn, hanging over the heads of the children. But which head? Whose perfect head? We lean forward to hear Mrs. Goth’s whispers: Who is it this time? Who is it? We think: How long can we hold this ecstatic breath? We think: how will the universe have realigned when Mr. Goth comes back home?

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GLAD YOU’RE HERE by Dan Shiffman

March 27, 2020 · Fiction

You are the one who goes back for the remaining Christmas presents while the rest of the family hugs in puffy coats by the doorway. The straps on the duffel bags pulled from the trunk of the car are rough and chilled. When you come inside, everyone is already seated around the fireplace or in the kitchen.

They ask a smiling question or two, then the conversation floats to the other side of the room. The dog—it’s a golden retriever; it used to be a Schnauzer—stretches and walks over looking for attention and reassurance. You pour a glass of Coke, then sit back and listen. When you stop petting the dog’s head, it strokes sharp nails against your knee and looks you in the eye until you start petting it again. No one exactly blames you for moving to another continent.

It’s really great that you get to see so much of the world, they often say to you. Can you get peanut butter there? What about taxes? You do like your quiet routines in foreign places, the picnics by the river when your small, glassy apartment gets too hot. One of your favorite things to do wherever you find yourself is walk around and look at stuff; Spazierengehen the Germans call it. It’s hard to explain precisely, and you’ve stopped trying. Much of what you do is seen as nice and interesting in a mild, ill-defined way.

And yet they keep wondering why France or Lebanon doesn’t have one of their own who can do what you do. And maybe you programmed wind turbine software in Hokkaido for a year, but Hokkaido doesn’t fully exist until your in-laws’ wealthy, adventurous friends visit there and write a long Facebook post about it. No one goes where they go. That’s the consensus in the room.

When you had an appendectomy in Ankara, you spent one night in the hospital. The air conditioning was broken and the grandson of the jaundiced man sleeping next to you fanned him with a bath towel. You remember the flutter, snap, and air reaching you. When your sister or her neighbor or your aunt had an appendectomy in Akron, she got some kind of allergic rash where they stuck her with the IV and the doctors couldn’t figure it out. They had never seen anything quite like it and wanted to keep her in the hospital for another night but the insurance company was being a pain in the ass, so she had to call them herself for approval and they put her on hold for an hour. There is a chattering urgency about their lives that always seems to be in the process of being reported. This kind of detail is no longer available to you—at least not when you’re here.

When your mother dies, you live farthest away and grief mixes with jet lag throughout your week back in Baltimore or Pocatello. The other mourners standing around platters at the reception form tight circles, and for a few seconds, you look at the blouses and jackets of your siblings or cousins. You walk to the circle and place your hand on the back of an elbow that, for a moment, neither pulls away nor moves to let you enter.

When you help put an extra leaf on the sturdy oak dining room table before the meal, your in-law or cousin or uncle finds the latch under the table before you do. You know where it is, you just needed a moment to find it, like the moment it takes to locate the wiper control on the rental car before you pull away from the airport after a long-haul flight and drive here, passing your old high school and the new movie theater before turning off the state highway.

But sometimes, the same or another in-law or cousin or uncle lets you briefly into the tension he has with someone else in the house today. He sighs, tilts his head, mutters, “She really should think about that the next time she. . .” Ancient radiators ping against the muffled laughter of a story being told in another room. You know better than to take sides, and, besides, you no longer have the right to take sides. Even showing concern feels like a violation of some kind of agreement you should have accepted when you decided to renew your contract in Norway or Hong Kong. The revelation closes, and the table pinches against the added leaf. He doesn’t say anything else. It’s only a little while longer to dinner.

You aren’t the black sheep, the troublemaker, the failure. You aren’t a scapegoat exactly. Animated feelings are directed toward these people. These uncles and sisters don’t even need to show up to have these emotions aimed at them. Listen, they are being talked about right now. You genuinely try to show up at least once a year.

You didn’t mean to be condescending about their overscheduling, helicopter parenting, multiple cars, politics or whatever. Different versions of the same things, you’ve discovered, happen in most places anyway. And, if you brought any of this up or tried to clarify further what you were really trying to say, they might even agree with you, then tell you about a plan that has already been made: We are going out for ice cream! Save the date for the wedding! We’ve rented a cabin; maybe you can come this summer.

You scoot forward on the couch and clear your throat. You might have something to say, something that would surprise them because it is neither exotic nor judgmental. It’s really quite ordinary. Maybe an ailment or complaint about telemarketers—yes, they have these over there too—but the dog, their damned dog, wedges its muzzle between your knees.

The thing is you don’t really have something to say, just a jello-ish, passing desire to do so. You bite on a cheese covered Triscuit and slouch back silently against the couch. You’ve left some crumbs on the dog’s slightly oily muzzle, but no one else has noticed, including the dog. She’s just glad that you’re here.

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GLASS by Ross McMeekin

March 26, 2020 · Fiction

My neighbor wants to know about the fish tank, whether it still holds water. I want to know the same about the river running along the highway. There’s a lot of agriculture upstream, a lot of fields to irrigate. It’s midsummer, the sun is merciless, and the snowpack is gone.

He rubs his finger on the glass, looks at it, and wipes his jeans. I need more money than I can make from this yard sale, and I think he knows it.

“So what did you keep in the tank?” he asks.

“A better place than this.” I kept tropical fish—a huge waste of money—but the tank was beautiful, and my job at the distributor didn’t have an end date. I grew coral and had LED lights that made them glow. It drew your eyes from across the room.

He nods to the hose against the siding of the house. “Do you mind?”

“Be my guest.” The man wears his jeans like a rancher, but his T-shirt is a size too large. The giveaway is his hair—it has the kind of sheen and lay that you can only pay for. He’s playing local. He has land that gets the water from the river. I know it. He heads over and turns on the water and starts filling up the tank, all the way until it spills over the side. He could have believed me, that the tank was fine, but I understand. A leak can appear from nowhere, at any time, and before you can mend it, everything inside is gone.

He comes back, the tank dripping. “Checks out,” he says. “You leaving town?”

“Greener pastures,” I say.

The things we all say are the things that have all been said. Any conversation is confined to the form, like how a river may swirl and eddy, but it’s always beholden to the banks.

“You and everyone.” He nods to my cell phone in my hand. I’m waiting on calls for some jobs I applied to in the city. There’s no job here that deserves me; I hope never to have to reconsider that comment.

“You know,” he says, “I was talking to a guy at Albertson’s the other day, and he told me that if your cell phone drops in the water, all you need to do is put it in a bag of rice for an hour, and poof, all of the moisture is gone. That simple.”

“I’ve heard that,” I say, and it’s true. I’ve heard it before a dozen times. What makes the comment surprising to people isn’t that rice will soak up moisture—that’s what rice does—it’s that it will soak it up even from a piece of technology.

“So what are you going to use it for?” I ask, nodding to the tank.

“A snake.” He laughs. “I know. But once you capture it in glass, it’s easier to believe it loves you back.”

“It’s a shame, isn’t it?” I say. He looks at me like he’s lost. We’re more alike than he’s pretending we are. “I tell you what,” I say. “How about you name your price and we’ll go up from there?"

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