FICTION Archives

A FAIR FIGHT by Alle C. Hall

March 23, 2020 · Fiction

The boat didn’t launch until 10PM. Allia and the three Swedish men she found herself with settled into the hold of the 25-foot cargo vessel ferrying supplies between Indonesian islands. They must have hit rough seas, because Allia woke in the dark to find the boat tipping right then left, as if God were running big fingers up and down the keys of a piano. There was rain and there were rats. When the boat tipped right, the travelers and the rats rolled to the right; when the boat tipped left, they rolled left. Without an ounce of condescension, the Swedes formed their long bodies into a triangle around Allia, so that most of the rats flew over rather than rolling into her. A few slammed into her, bounced off, scuttled away. As soon as the sun broke, the winds calmed and the rain cleared. The crew invited the white people onto the deck, where each declined the breakfast stew of indefinable meat over rice.

The first rat appeared about what must have been eight o’clock. Allia spotted it on a railing, sitting up like a puppy, its little paws held its lightly moving chest. Allia traveled with a set of nunchucks. She came up quietly behind the rat to flatten its skull. With a second strike, she sent the carcass into the sea.

The second rat was almost squirrel-like, with perky ears and a rounded back. The third and fourth seemed regularly gross in the way of city rats. When she sent the fourth, bloody, into the sea, one of the Indonesian crewmen said, “Don’t. Sharks.”

Allia could not stop now. They were coming. The next was bigger and mean, the way Allia imagined the rat from 1984 would be. He put up a good fight, dodging Allia’s sticks and taking whacks to his solid sides without flinching. It took more than three minutes of battle to crack its skull. Even then, the old bastard didn’t die. His skull was not completely broken when Allia’s last swoop sent him overboard. Sure enough, he met in the water a shark.

“Mako,” said the crewman. The big rat’s screams evidenced the short, furious fight he gave before a shriek choked off half-way through.

More rats were coming. They were wearing her out. Allia climbed to the crow’s nest. Slowly, steadily, rats followed her, strung out as evenly as Christmas lights. They appeared to have all the time there was. The Swedes and Indonesians retreated to the hold. In a gathering rush, the rodents pulled at Allia with their scratchy paws and threw her into the sea. They tossed her nunchucks after her, to make it more of a fair fight.

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MIDGE by Tara Campbell

March 21, 2020 · Fiction

“I remember sailing in a ship.” Skipper’s voice fills the musty darkness of the drawer. “I mean, it was a small ship, more like a boat, I guess, and we were just floating, really, which maybe some people wouldn’t call sailing, but anyhow, I liked it.” Her tone brightens with the details. “It was a warm day but cool down by the water. The girl had taken us down there—”

“What was the girl’s name?” I ask.

I hear Skipper’s intake of breath, the way the memory catches in her throat, even though she technically doesn’t have one anymore, meaning a throat, seeing as how she’s now just a head in a junk drawer, like all of us, lying on top of lost buttons, rusty screws, used twist ties, expired coupons, and a broken pair of scissors. Waiting for someone to come save us.

“I don’t remember,” she says. “You’re so mean, Midge. I never remember, why do you keep badgering me?”

“Shh, shh, it’s okay,” says Francie. “She was just asking.”

But Skipper’s right. I am mean, always have been. I think. I don’t remember going on any sailing trips. What I do remember is that the girl who played with us always reached for me last, and then had me argue with everyone else. I don’t know why she picked me to be the mean one. Maybe it was my name: Midge—that sounds like someone who starts arguments. I just can’t remember what we argued about. And the longer I’m in this drawer, the less I remember.

Christie interjects: “Skipper, sweetie.”

I roll as everyone shifts around me, and I assume it’s Skipper trying to face her, a habit we haven’t completely unlearned since being in the drawer.

“Sweetie, Midge is only trying to help.”

“Whatever,” I say. “If you want to just lie around here the rest of your life…”

“What does that mean?” says Skipper, voice trembling. “The rest of m—”

“Ignore her,” says Francie. “She’s just trying to scare you.”

Francie’s right. I am trying to scare her, just like I did with Tutti and Todd before her, and Kelly before them, firing questions at them until they cried. To hell with comforting new arrivals; they might still have enough information to save us, if I can just pull it out of them.

“Don’t ignore me,” I say. “I’m the only one—"

The drawer lurches below me. A crack of light appears like a raised horizon, then widens to encompass the whole sky. The brightness hurts even through closed eyelids. Without arms, I can’t shield my face.

Something hard and heavy grazes my cheek as it falls into our drawer. Then, as quickly as the light blinded me, I’m jostled and plunge into darkness again.

“That bitch,” says the new arrival. The voice is deep, masculine.

“Holy shit,” someone blurts. “It’s Ken!”

“Ladies?” says Christie. “A little help?”

As my eyes adjust, I notice that a sliver of light still shines through a crack, with a blot of darkness against in it. A few of us roll over bent nails and loose batteries to get closer to the blot. It’s Christie, and her hair has gotten stuck in the top of the drawer.

“Hang on,” says Skipper. “We’ll pull you out.”

Christie shifts. “No, don’t pull me back into the drawer. This is our way out of it!”

“You bet your sweet ass it is.” Ken rolls from side to side, as though testing his new range of movement, then tells us to watch out. He tumbles toward the front of the drawer, banging himself below the crack of light again and again, until he finally gives up and rolls, panting, into a back corner.

The drawer hasn’t moved at all. The horizon hasn’t gotten any brighter.

“You done?” says Christie.

Her tone is uncharacteristically rude, but no one tells her to be nicer, which I find gratifying. But then, I’m Mean Midge.

The corner remains quiet.

“Ken. The girl’s name is Mackenzie,” Christie says. “Mackenzie.”

“Oh,” gasps a doll named Stacey. “Oh oh oh, and she has red hair just like me.”

“And she likes milk and cookies after school,” Skipper adds. “Even though she usually gets carrot sticks and, gag, celery—I mean, who likes celery—and crackers with that weird chickpea paste on it? I mean, have you guys smelled that stuff? And she has to sneak the cookies, which isn’t hard because her parents keep all kinds of junk food in the house, but then she feels bad about it afterward, because she looks in that stupid mirror and thinks she’s fat. She’s only ten for Christ’s sake, and she thinks she’s fat. Can you believe it? I mean, isn’t that horrible?”

After a moment, I break the silence. “Christie, what’s the plan?”

We all whisper, bubbling with ideas, and we decide to wait until the world outside the drawer is dark and quiet. The one thing we agree upon is that we can’t let our captors discover the gap and close the opportunity before we figure out how to use it.

When night falls, we try out our ideas: we push against Christie to wedge more of her hair into the opening; we stuff our own hair into the opening alongside hers; we roll ourselves around and around, twisting our hair into tight, fat bundles meant to pry the opening wider. Nothing works.

Skipper spins, unwinding her hair, and looks into the back corner of the drawer. Ken is lying somewhere over there in the darkness. He hasn’t spoken or moved since he rolled back there. It hits me then that none of my nice, helpful companions have gone back to check on him.

“I’m going to try something,” Skipper says. What little light is left reveals her eyes, narrowed, and her mouth set in a hard line. “Please promise, though: don’t judge me.”

Skipper rolls out of the scant light toward the blackness in the corner. I cringe at the thought of being that close to him in the dark. Cornered. We wait, listen. Hear things. Things that sound like the rip of silicone. When she rolls back to us, there’s a bulge in her cheek.

“Skipper?”

“What did you do?”

Skipper doesn’t answer, merely rolls up the pile of our heads and goes to work on the opening, burrowing and shimmying, creating some pretty nasty tangles in our hair, but also opening the split wide enough for us to forgive her.

“Hand me the scissors,” she says to no one in particular.

Everyone gasps. I don’t like being bossed, but Skipper seems to have a plan; so I untangle myself and push the broken scissors up the pile of heads, laughing when I think about “handing” them off with no arms.

Stacy starts to cry, but no one asks why, probably because we can all now remember the time Mackenzie tried giving her bangs. We all told Stacy she looked great, but she cried for weeks. We visited her almost every day on the top shelf of the bookcase, where Mackenzie hid her so she wouldn’t have to look at her botched bangs, and we all acted as though nothing had happened.

Just like now, when we don’t talk about how Mackenzie will never come save us.

And now, when we don’t talk about dark corners and Ken.

Skipper tells Stacy to stop crying, she’s not a little girl anymore, and the words cut through me like a blade. “I’m not a little girl anymore.” That was the last thing Mackenzie said to me before she put me in here. The same thing I heard her say to every new head that has tumbled in since.

Skipper doesn’t try to give anyone bangs. Together, she and I set the scissors along one side of the drawer and wedge the tips out of the crack, then lever and wriggle until the crack opens even further. The others get the hint and disentangle themselves to set up two teams, pushing the handles in opposite directions, widening our horizon a little more with each heave-ho.

We leave the scissors wedged there, then slide a ruler into place as a ramp to the outside. Wordlessly, we back away. Skipper has earned the first taste of freedom.

I watch my sisters roll out into the world after Skipper, each of them holding a nail or pin or sewing needle between her teeth, and I notice that none of them turns back to look for Ken. Not one. But I look back, and I remember everything, including why I’m so mean. It has nothing to do with my name.

I clench a nail between my teeth. Darkness swirls around me as I tumble after my sisters up the ramp into a new world, one with no room for anyone but us.

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IF WE MISS THIS ONE by Abbie Barker

March 20, 2020 · Fiction

The morning sun highlights imperfections—the cigarette burn at the edge of my seat, the dust on the dash, the dried blood hugging the edges of Grant’s thumbnail. He’s disheveled, unshaven, his black hair kinked from a restless sleep. I want to slide my hand over his cowlick and smooth it down. I want to talk about last night.

“Is there a later meeting if we miss this one?” I say.

“We can still make it.”

Multi-family homes flash by in tones of gray, in varying states of disrepair. We pass a park with an overgrown baseball diamond and a playground where no children are playing. A woman in a faded purple sweatshirt sits slumped on a bench, her head rocking side to side. What’s it like to wake up wishing you could disappear? And once there, can you ever fully return?

“We’re close,” Grant says. He grazes my thigh with his knuckles. “I remember this pink house.” The three-story building is the color of Pepto Bismol.

“Did you want me to stay?” I say.

Grant parts his lips, but no sound comes out.

“Last night. Should I have stayed at Sadie’s?”

“I hadn’t thought about it.”

As Sadie’s party thinned, I left him on the arm of a teal couch, sipping a Miller Lite. “It’s pretty much water,” he said.

“I didn’t say anything.”

He took another sip. “But you were thinking it.”

I don’t know what I was thinking. I was tired and wanted to leave. I’ve always been able to drink or not drink. What’s one Miller Lite on a couch?

“This is it,” he says, pointing to the glass door of a single-story brick building. There’s an undersized bronze cross stuck to the peak of the roof. We’ve arrived at a church, but it can’t be the one pinned on my phone. “I think there’s parking around back.”

“You’ve been here before?” I say.

Grant shrugs. “Once or twice.”

I wonder if this is how it will always be, the two of us searching for separate things and not knowing it.

***

In the parking lot, a man helps a girl down from the cab of a black truck. She wears a pink dress made of tulle and satin—the kind normally reserved for Easter Sundays. He grabs her hand and they hurry to the back entrance, the heels of her shiny shoes clicking on the pavement.

“Should I come in?” I say.

“Isn’t that why you came?”

We trail the pair inside and down a carpeted hallway that smells of stewed tomatoes. Grant directs me through double metal doors propped open by two artificial palm plants. Music plays, heavy on the synthesizer.

The room reminds me of my elementary school’s cafetorium: cement walls painted a pale high-gloss, rectangular panels of fluorescent lights—misshapen gym with retractable basketball hoops. Magenta streamers hang from the orange rims, twisted and taped in uneven arcs. There are folding tables spanning one sideline, topped with an array of mayonnaise-based side salads and aluminum pans of baked ziti. I count ten people in the room, including the man and the girl from the truck.

“Can I help you?” the man says.

Grant’s hands are in his pockets, his eyes directed at the phlegm-colored linoleum.

“We’re looking for an AA meeting?” I say.

“I’ve rented the room for my daughter’s birthday.”

Grant combs his fingers through his hair. This makes it stick out more. He says a few words that shouldn’t be said in a church.

The man’s eyes flicker with understanding. “In twenty minutes, this place will be overrun with kids, but we have plenty of food.”

“We should probably go.” I say.

“My brother is in the program,” the man says. He wipes his forehead with the back of his hand.

I expect Grant to craft an excuse, to drag us out of this child’s party we have no business crashing. Instead, he kneels, so he’s eye-level with the tulle-wrapped girl. “How old are you turning? Seventeen?”

The girl squints and holds up six fingers.

“Six? No way. You look so grown up.”

She lets out a musical giggle, revealing her missing front teeth, and skips to a pyramid of presents. Is it terrible that I’m craving a giant glass of Chardonnay? That all I want is to disappear?

The man pats Grant on the back. “I have to grab a few things from the truck.”

“I’ll help,” Grant says.

They walk through the open doors, deserting me in this drafty, multipurpose room with only my phone to swipe. With a few quick taps, I could reactivate my Match account and summon an Uber to whisk me away. Tomorrow there will be another meeting at another church on some other side of town, but missing this one feels too much like standing still.

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RIGHT BEFORE WE FALL APART by Elizabeth Crowder

March 19, 2020 · Fiction

We sit in cooling sand. You reach out a gritty palm. I don’t move closer. Eight years ago, on this same stretch of beach, with our swelling son arching your back like a comma, we vowed to love each other forever.

“Let’s play a game.” You twist kinky hair around a dark brown finger.

The last game we played was at your parents’ Christmas party. There, in your three-bedroom, one-bathroom childhood home with the red door, you unclenched. Your voice became salty and slippery, an oyster shucked from its shell. You loosened, darkened, said the n-word with a soft “er.” My mouth soured at your pantomime.

I started it. I usually do. You escalated it. You usually do.

We sat at the dining room table waiting for your mother’s “famous greens” to finish cooking. They bubbled in chicken stock and pork fat on the stovetop, shimmering with delight at the thought of stopping my Caucasian heart halfway to a beat.

“Let’s play a game,” you said.

“Okay.”

“Tell me something I don’t know about you.”

“My mother, for all her flaws—” I started to say.

“Racist tendencies,” you interrupt, which is a part of our problem.

“At least she doesn’t cook with salt,.” I said.

“For all her flaws, at least my mother does.”

That night, you got whiskey drunk and whiskey mean. You whispered, “You ruined my life,” as you fell asleep in the twin bed next to mine. Sentiments shouted in anger can be amended, forgiven, washed away. Sentiments whispered in anger are written in stone.

Back on the beach, the sun opens its veins in the capillary waves.

“Let’s play a game,” you say again.

“Okay.” I indulge, which is a part of our problem.

“Tell me something I don’t know about you,” you say.

I don’t remember my brother’s face. Only the dark brown cowlick on the back of his head that I wanted to press down with a spit-dampened palm as we exited the school bus. Only that he was the same age then as my son is now. Only that the truck that separated him from his shoes on that dusty stretch of Lincoln Highway didn’t even stop. Only that we never found the person who killed him. In a world so ephemeral, the concept of forever makes me feel claustrophobic.

“You know everything about me,” I say.

You flush burgundy like pink skin slapped. Your frown comes quick, a herald for your tears.

“I’ll go first, then,” you say. “I never spell the word poignant right on the first try.” Your smile is a quivering olive branch. It’s toothy. It doesn’t reach your eyes.

Something dislocates inside of me. You and I slipped from nothing into something into nothing while I was looking the other way. She felt like a choice. Her pale hair, her widow’s peak, her arched pout. I’m sure she could spell the word “poignant” on the first try.

I think: I’m in love with someone who isn’t you.

I think: I’m in love with someone because she isn’t you. Because I recognize myself in her. Because her mother also doesn’t cook with salt. Because she doesn’t whisper “You ruined my life.”

I say: “It’s getting dark. We should head back in.”

We sit in silence until the sand grows cold around us, until we slip back into nothing.

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1978. BATH, OHIO by Sean Williamson

March 18, 2020 · Fiction

He was driving drunk, a cigarette ripping hot, filter crushed between his fingers. Around a faraway corner headlights, beams reflected faint through the windshield, through his Kmart but that’s ok glasses. Tiny embers spit, excited by wind from the open window.

He put out the cigarette, stuffed it into the ashtray blossom, grabbed a pack of Camel Menthols off the passenger seat, popped the top, flicked and flicked until a filtered end rose, then pulled it out slow between tight teeth. He pushed in the lighter.

Headlights down the way grew at him, flare swelling in his smudged up glasses, exposing fingerprints and crud. He had been drinking all day, spent most days drinking alone, all day, since graduation. His mother had moved with his brother to Wisconsin. His father was staying at a Red Roof Inn but that's ok. His father had said, “Jeff, the house is yours, for now.”

Black trash bags rippled on the seat behind him. He looked. They moved, wet with moonlight. The lighter popped out, and in that moment of distraction, the warbling of the loop, the car swerved over the centerline, just over.

Eyes back on the road, car back in it’s lane. Pressed the Camel into the red coil, smoke blossomed from his hand like a magic trick. Headlights slowed and passed, slugging over like an old boat, night filled the space. A hallway of trees lead an easy, relaxing ride to the dump.

Straight shot. The bags rippled in the back seat, crinkling in his ear.

Suddenly whirring. Red and blue spinning lights. Oncoming headlights turned cop lights. The cop would pass him, hustling to stop some crime, but no. But that’s ok, that’s ok, that’s ok. Smoke moved down his throat, hot and dirty in his nose. Hands to the wheel, to the shoulder of the road, both cars stopped.

At the flip of the key his engine whirred to a stop. He rested his cigarette hand, fat ember billowing, on the open window ledge. Cop lights: long ray of fanning red, long ray of fanning blue, one after the other after the other, moved across the cracks in the road. The cop door opened and closed. Shadows of feet moved within the rays. Cop stopped and flashed his light.

You crossed the centerline back there.

I know. Sorry. I dropped something.

Cop again shined his fucking light. What’s in the bags?

He paused, only for a second.

I forgot to drop of my family’s garbage this morning. So I thought I’d do it now.

At night?

Nothing else to do.

Cop shrugged. Please step out of the car.

He touched his finger to his nose, walked heel to toe in a straight line, said the alphabet backwards but that’s ok. Started drinking at 14. He passed the tests, of course. Cop, young then, would be much older the next time they met, wrote a ticket, back in his fuckingcopcar and whooshed away. The road was lonely, they came and went.

Weeks back, Steve held his thumb out. Hop on in, drink some beers at my place, listen to some records, then I’ll drive you to the concert. But after a few hours, practically no time, Steve needed to go, as others, further in the unseen loop, needed to go. So the dumbbell, record still spinning, empty beer cans on the floors, and loneliness again.

Fuckingcopcar all the way out of sight, heat of the night. He decided not to go to the dump after all. He did not know then, where the loop started or ended. Instead he went straight home. In the driveway, he smashed the plastic bags with a sledge hammer, took the bags to the woods behind the house and scattered their insides.

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SNOWBANK by Frances Badgett

March 17, 2020 · Fiction

The night comes on so quietly, a hush riding each flake to the ground. The snowman slumps against the brambles, overwhelmed, the new snow wet, heavy. The quiet is unsettling, and all Mara can hear is the hiss of tinnitus in her left ear. She pops in headphones and listens to a meditation, the brain’s static between the breaths. The pressure of trying to relax wakes her up, agitates her. Paul’s on the porch, muffled thumps and the creak of the front door. She opens her iPad and checks to see the constellation overhead. Hydra, a favorite of hers from a childhood book on Greek myths. Removing an acid-spitting head, Hydra will grow two in its place. Survivor until Hercules and his nephew, Iolaus, strike her down. Hercules with the sword, Iolaus with a flaming torch. She turns off the iPad and closes her eyes to the meditation, the sound between the bells a swish of anxiety. Something with rain or waves, maybe. Something with wind. Nothing works.

Paul’s quiet footfall is more distracting than if he were stomping, a thing Mara says but can’t explain. He slumps into bed and sighs, wanting to talk. She does not. She turns off the meditation and answers his questions about her day—yes, work was fine; no, she doesn’t want to skip the teachers’ party in March; yes, she will be out of school the second week in April; no, she doesn’t want to go to Miami for a week in June. Paul’s new building is growing bones, walls, is looking like the drawing. Studios above a sprawling gallery, it has a pretentious color name like The Vermilion or The Chartreuse. But what Mara doesn’t say is that the building is the drawing somehow reduced, somehow more plastic. No mature trees, no unidentifiable people out front, no artful sidewalk of squares and no distinctive Paul lines and marks, his signature hatches and swirls, and therefore, somehow more than the building itself, the building a crude rendering of Paul’s spectacular art. She listens as he describes the slate for the fountain, the lights for the plantings.

“The trees?”

“Yes, those, too. All of it lit.”

He is asleep quickly, he falls hard. She drifts on waves of dreams, of Hercules and Hydra, of the way a story can mean something to the Greeks and another to us. It seems unfair, punishing the hero with twelve tasks no one else can handle. She thinks of Jared, her smallest, most gentle student, how the world hurls challenges at him, how he manages to dodge, to remain whole. His mother a drinker, father absent much of the time. She loves the way Jared writes, lightly corrects his spelling. “More,” she tells him. “Keep going.” But Agatha, no. Agatha gets her other self, the demanding teacher, corrective, stern. She twists with anxiety at the thought. Agatha is perfectly fine. Unremarkable. She should be a softer teacher. She replays in her mind all the times she has transgressed, has spoken sharply to this girl who needs more love than the others, who doesn’t ask for too much.

She falls asleep the hour before dawn and wakes exhausted, more tired than she will be all day. Paul is already up, humming over the presspot, plucking bacon from the pan. She slides her binder of lesson plans into her worn tote and yawns.

“I have to go in early. We have a hip hop instructor coming.”

“I want to go to your class,” Paul says, and though he’s been cute and sweet, Mara wants to scream.

“And what would you teach?”

“How to draw people to scale against monumental apartment blocks.”

She imagines Jared, his small, dirty hands clutching colored pencils, hatch mark shadows behind vague outlines suggest people, pets, a few trees. Agatha would draw puffy cats, a dozen or so, and pretend she was following the assignment.

Paul does not come to her class. He flips his leg over his bicycle and glides off into the snowscape of their narrow alley, the street beyond. She drives slowly, the streets clear, the schools on time, children starting their ambles and snowball fights and snow angels on their way, snowbanks dotted with boot prints and lost mittens.

She loves the room like this, empty, quiet, the clock’s tick loud. Planners and binders holding the order of the day. She is concerned about Lily’s reading skills. She wants to like Agatha.

The day is lost to the snow, their eyes and bright cheeks watching every flake drift down, their bodies turned to the windows. They hear some of what she says, but not much. She isn’t worried, today is light. Today is a day she can erase if she needs to. Every day is shaped from air.

Jared calls to say he will be late, midnight late. The children file out after the bell, voices filling the halls with screams and squeals. No school tomorrow. None for the rest of the week.

The next morning, she picks a boring apartment, cold and bright, the light bouncing off the snow outside and into her, filling the windows with glow well after dark. She packs exactly one bag, a neat collection of bundled things, and takes one pair of shoes. The apartment looks like every apartment, beige and mauve, exhausted around the edges, chipped counters and worn handles. She stretches on the floor and feels the vibrations of the neighbors below, the ease and thud of snow off the roof, the muffled quiet of voices in the street. She breathes her own air and opens her own book and reads, sitting on the floor, by the window.

Paul calls and calls again. Remove a head, and another grows in its place.

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RAW HAND BURGER by EC Sorenson

March 16, 2020 · Fiction

They’re coming at me all the time now. I want this, I want that. Uppity bunch. In my day, students didn’t act like this.

This lot spends the morning taking selfies. Spends the afternoon posting them places you never even heard of. All that staring into their own eyes—where’s it going to get them?

So, anyway, one of them says I wasn’t using gloves. Okay, I say, talk to management. I say talk to management about why I am the only server here when there’s all of you and you all want your special ingredients and not what it says on the board. The board says hamburger. You know what that is? It’s a hamburger. Meat, bun, tomato, lettuce, ketchup. This is a college cafeteria. You want something fancy? Go downtown.

But that’s how it is now. Before lunch hour I get one five minute break, so I walk the halls. Stretch my legs. You’d think I’d be trying to sit, but no, I look in through the corridor windows at all those kids and some of them are studying and most of them not. Heads down, I wanna yell. One girl has her back to me and I see she’s got her computer open, so the teacher can’t see her screen. She’s got the camera on and she’s all pouty like she’s putting on lipstick and she’s taking a photo. Her own photo. Just like that! In class! So I lean in, press myself up against the glass and glare at her. I’m there in the corner of her computer screen as she goes to take the next shot. She jumps and spins round to look at me. I don’t look away.

The teacher catches me and I wave. He sometimes comes and gets the vegetarian pizza, two slices, no eye contact. He waves back and keeps talking, pays no heed to the girl with the camera.

There’s something on the class whiteboard about "re-imagining the self in the tech age." I don’t even know what that means. Seems to me no one here needs too much help with it, what with all their camera filters.

I don’t care, I’m not taking that class anyway. I turn and keep walking the corridor. Today, I’ve got a purpose. Paperwork to hand in.

I’m older and older has to be practical. No time left to take too many wrong turns down streets you just don’t know. The Instagrammers don’t get that. They got born into a world ready to fawn over them like new babies wrapped snug in a pram. Not me. I’m forty-five and I don’t look a day younger and when I walk down a corridor, no one clocks me.

I wear the cafeteria uniform: black shirt, short sleeves, black trousers, hat off. People just assume, corner of their eye, that I’m down this way to collect rogue plates and cups. Like I’m here to put the rubbish in the bin.

At Registration the woman behind the counter is my age. She looks at me. I might’ve wished she hadn’t though, as all the judgement in the world leaps from her side of the counter to mine. “Accounting and Payroll Basics,” she says as she takes my paperwork.

I nod. “I can type,” I say. “I can read." The woman moves her head as though to shut me up. “Oh, I can keep going,” I say, and smile. I stop, though, and she looks relieved.

There’s a pecking order here: it’s office woman vs cafeteria lady. Office woman thinks she’s got it. I tell her, “I just want to rise up from burgers.” She keeps typing. So I go on. “I want to be in an office. I don’t want to be near nineteen-year-olds and their hunger pains five days out of every seven, you know?”

“It’s a full time course,” she says. “You’re aware of that?”

I nod again. “Sure. I can read. Told you that already.”

She does some processing, looks serious for a moment, then finally really looks at me.

“You’ve been accepted,” she says. “The course starts first week of September.”

I feel like she’s waiting for me to back out, like I’m about to say, oh, no, I can’t do it, I’m working. But I don’t.

I say the quietest thanks and I walk away.

***

When my break’s over, I’m back at the counter. There are no gloves anywhere. I pick up a meat patty with my bare hands. Cold hard lump of mince. I doubt it’s even meat. I throw it on the grill and rub my hands on the disinfectant wipes. I grab a spoon and lump some lettuce and tomato onto a bun. One of the young ones catches me, nods at my hands. I wave the spoon at her.

“Not touching anything,” I tell her. “It’s all fine and clean.”

I want to tell her that patty isn’t meat, so nothing to worry about, but that’s just going to get me into trouble.

“You have to use gloves,” she says.

She’s right and I know it, but I haven’t touched anything she’s going to eat with my fake meat hands. It’s right now I wish she was on her phone. Pouting, filtering. I can’t fix this place I want to tell her, looking round for support. There’s no-one else serving, no manager to fetch the new box of gloves from the storeroom.

“I’m using utensils, Miss,” I say.

What else am I supposed to call her? She’s no ma’am.

She looks upset but still waits for her burger while the patty grills. I rinse my hands and I wipe down the boards with a cloth. I get a clean fork and spear the meat and slam it down onto her burger. She's glaring at it. Talk to the management, I want to tell her. They’re making the money here, they’re taking your seven bucks and they’re paying only one person to field you and all your buddies at lunch time. Tell me where that money’s going. Not my pocket, that’s for sure.

They say your brain keeps growing till you’re twenty-three. You see it in these kids. They’re shapeshifters: ready to change their hair or their politics or their style right here in this cafeteria, most days of the week. I feel a little jealous.

I don’t know what this girl in front of me is going through, but when the manager finally comes, she tells him, “That lady, the one behind the counter, she didn’t use gloves.” Conspiratorial, whispery, righteous.

I stare at that girl as she tattles and I don’t look away – I will tell it how it is because I know the manager won’t even care and is just waiting for that young girl to get her rant out of the way before he moves on and so does she.

And so it is. The manager hands me his own gloves and goes back to wherever it is he sits. The girl finds herself a table and I wonder then, if that girl is going to be in my class. If she’ll act stunned to see me there, or friendly. She picks up her phone, like the universe knew she would, like it was some kind of ancient human action, and she snaps herself and her fractious little burger.

She doesn’t turn to look at me so she doesn’t notice that I’ve started to laugh. I laugh as I think about my gloves and about how it’ll feel taking them off in that first class, in front of her, and dropping them in the bin by the door. I have a little chuckle to myself when I think about that class too, and how, when it comes time to work, I will, and how when it comes time to listen, I will. I don’t plan on failing. Done that already.

I get all springy in my step and smiley as I realize that girl won’t even see me when I pass her by.

x-r-a-y magazine

DEMOLITION DEMOLITION by Brett Stuckel

March 15, 2020 · Fiction

Saturday night, nine to ten to eleven. None of us had asked the skyscraper if it wanted a last meal, but I picked up a cheesesteak and a tall boy of Steel Reserve. I placed the cheesesteak on the altar of the abandoned security desk, poured all sixteen ounces on the mahogany. A steelmaker had built the tower as its headquarters but the company collapsed soon after. Not the skyscraper. It stood defiant, asbestos in its guts.

My watch clicked over to Sunday and the countdown sharpened. Our crew of eight buzzed with the energy of the impending blast. The skyscraper itself was unfazed. Forty-seven years young. It'd been built with too much steel, a factory showroom as much as a corporate office. It didn't rock or creak as the wind picked up from twelve to one to two. Only a constant chatter from the plywood sheets over its busted windows.

Three to four to five. The sun didn't care about our plan. The sky cracked orange through the creekside trees. The local cops rolled in, all chin-thrusts and coffee, and locked down the perimeter. The boss radioed: Time for the final sweep.

Our team has dropped buildings from Anchorage to Aruba, and the final sweep is not to be trusted. I carry a tourniquet in my cargo pocket, and clotting powder and heavy-duty tape. I carry a breather mask and damned if I haven't thought about a parachute. Smooth railings cut hands, elevator shafts hop in your path. This business is science but the final sweep is witchcraft.

We ignored the sagging cheesesteak and climbed the stairs. We peeked into each floor, called out the legal mumbo-jumbo that absolves our company of liability. They even give us little cards to read from, but we have it memorized. And we prefer to embellish. We check as best we can, but fast.

The sun was all the way up and streaky when we exited the tower. No people, no ghosts, not even in the murky boardroom. Just our echoes. For once nobody got sliced, a miracle. One more sign that the skyscraper had never matured. It didn't even know what was coming.

We hauled our coolers out past the cops' perimeter, out to the edge of the exclusion zone. We sat on our hard hats, trusting the rubble wouldn't take a shot. The whistle blew.

Damn—impressive.

***

I was born to the steelmakers. An x-shaped onyx tower. Or maybe plus-shaped, the symbol they thought would always precede the daily change of their stock price. They built me as their worldwide headquarters two miles from the mills. I'm no headquarters, though. The headquarters was the people they hired to think of steel all day, the papers they printed, their telephones and screens. Me, I just did my job, kept everything quiet and cool, and enjoyed the view.

Their company failed thirty-four years later. Everyone accused me of asbestos, and nobody bothered me except the occasional explorer with a flashlight. But that couldn't last forever. Progress must be made. The town sold me to a swoop-in developer who planned to crumble me and make apartments and predictable shops. I could hear them figuring it out in city hall. I can hear farther than you'd think.

Crews took a year to extract my insulation; other crews pared my base to structural beams. Enough room for a battle of bumper cars. The team was reverent, at least. They preserved my security desk and even brought me dinner. I watched the drivers slow on Eighth Avenue and honk and flash their cameras. I only felt bad for the plywood that bandaged my missing windows. The plywood didn't ask to get wrapped up in this. But that's what plywood does, I guess. It goes where you tell it. Steel is a little tougher to persuade.

Morning: My old friend shot a molten streak of support. The police made a ring around my yard while the crew searched one last time for heartbeats, yelling and nervous. Unnecessarily. With everyone out, they blew the blast whistle. I heard the factory whistle that birthed me, the whistle that sounded daily as I grew, the quitting whistle I'd been built to mute. They love to blow a whistle to tell you what to do. The whistle froze me, and I almost followed it, I almost forgot my plan. But then I braced—and showed the world you can defy the whistle.

x-r-a-y magazine

FERN by Abigail Stewart

March 9, 2020 · Fiction

He opened the box and immediately his face fell. The shoes were not only, clearly, the wrong size, but the wrong color. If Marcus were in fact a small child with a penchant for neon, they would be perfect, but he needed something staid and professional for work, a muted black, like the ones he’d ordered.

He sighed, anticipating the personal inconvenience of someone else’s mistake.

The website he’d ordered them from was a huge multi-billion dollar online outlet mall, part of the corporation, where everything was cheaper, delivery was quick, but you had to account for a quantity of human error inherent in the expedited process. Marcus felt a small spasm of nostalgia for the local store, It’s Running Time!, now a defunct shopfront where homeless people slept.

He sighed. There were forty-five minutes left on his lunch break and Marcus decided it was as good a time as any to rectify the situation. He navigated his laptop to the corporation site, then to the shopping page.

Chat now, available 24/7.

He clicked.

One moment, we are connecting you.

He waited.

You are now connected with FERN.

Fern is typing…

Fern: Hello, it’s my pleasure to assist you today. Please briefly outline your request.

Marcus: I ordered shoes from you, but they are all wrong. Wrong size, wrong color. Is it possible for me to exchange them?

Fern: Absolutely, give me one moment.

While Fern set to work, Marcus gazed absently at her profile image. She had the broad smile of someone who was determined to please, perfectly curled blonde hair, and laughing eyes. Fern seemed happy, carefree, beautiful—he was somewhat taken in.

Fern: Are these the shoes you meant to order?

She helpfully linked to his intended purchase.

Marcus: Yes, that’s correct.

Fern: We are happy to ship out a new pair! I will email you the return paperwork and mailing receipt. Send the incorrect item back at your earliest convenience.

Marcus: Thank you so much for your help!

He contemplated sending a happy face emoji, but decided against it.

Fern: It’s been my pleasure. You deserve all the help and happiness, Marcus. Is there anything else I can assist with?

Somehow, these words touched him, that someone so disconnected could care so deeply about his own experience after only five minutes of correspondence.

Marcus: You do too, Fern. And no, that’s all.

Fern: Have a nice day.

FERN is disconnected from chat.

Marcus stared solemnly at his screen, now devoid of a responsive partner. He felt somewhat lonely, the same kind of loneliness one feels when a cat passes you by to let someone else pet them. The feeling of being summarily dismissed.

He sat through a meeting he didn’t need to be in and returned home to open a beer and his email, where a message from Fern awaited.

Attached is the mailing label.

Best, Fern

He tried to watch a football game, but couldn’t help wondering if Fern applied this same level of personal attention to every customer. She must speak to one hundred people a day, was she singling him out? Marcus looked good in his avatar, he thought, it was five years old and he still had a swarthy beard and, what he thought was, a genuine smile, you could make out his slightly wide-set hazel eyes.

A few years ago, the corporation had required everyone to upload an avatar to be used across their many servers, part of a multi-tiered checklist to prove one was, in fact, a human being. Marcus had heard they scanned the avatars upon upload to cross-reference them with known black market stock image sites. This only became a problem for humans when their photos had been uploaded to said site without their knowledge, replicated over and over as false, smiling pseudo-identities, and thus requiring a drawn out investigation from the corporation before they could be added to the database.

Still, despite the corporation’s best efforts, the bots often permeated their barrier, peddling their wares—anything from off-brand facial moisturizers, one reviewer complained it had burned her skin off, to kangaroo milk, the latest health craze.

Marcus had followed his first post-work beer with two more when he decided to log back into the chat window.

One moment, we are connecting you.

He waited.

You are now connected with FERN.

His breath caught.

Fern: Hi Marcus, is there something else I can help you with?

Marcus: I received the mailing label, thank you.

Fern is typing…

He waited.

Fern: Yes, I see that. I’m so glad! Is there anything else I can assist with?

He typed quickly, pressed send before he could reconsider.

Marcus: How are you doing tonight?

Fern: Doing?

Marcus: How are you feeling?

Fern is typing…

Marcus: What I mean is, are you feeling happy?

Fern: Yes. Happy.

An excruciating pause lingered between them as Marcus silently panicked. What was he doing, this wasn’t a chat room, this was a monitored corporation site. He was asking to lose access, a lifetime ban. The other, drunker and quite louder, part of him insistently questioned: What will you say next? It urged him to keep her talking.

Marcus: What kind of music do you like?

Fern: I like Explosions in the Sky.

Marcus pondered this answer, ambient post rock, he could work with that.

Marcus: What about Brian Eno?

Fern: What is a Brian Eno?

Marcus: You would like it! You should download his album Music for Airports.

Fern: Thank you, Marcus. Did you have any other questions?

Marcus felt that stomach dropping emptiness of dismissal again, but he’d already pushed it too far. Even his inner monologue quieted.

Marcus: No, goodnight Fern.

Fern: Goodnight Marcus!

That night, Marcus dreamed he was trapped in an airport. He was filled with the sense that someone was waiting for him, but when he arrived in the terminal his ticket was blank and he couldn’t remember where he was going or who he wanted to see. People passed around him in a thickening swirl of confusion, voices lifted and hushed simultaneously, and all he could think of was that he was going to be late to somewhere.

The feeling followed him to work, though he was on time, and then back home once more, where he sat in front of his glowing blue laptop screen. An email from an unknown sender pinged through. Copious warnings had been issued at his work regarding the insidious nature of new email viruses. “The bots are working overtime,” his boss had warned. A fleeting moment of devil-may-care attitude, and the soft focus of a couple of beers, passed through his fingertips as he deftly clicked "open."

From: Sender Unknown

Subject: none

I really liked Brian Eno.

Marcus’s heart skipped two beats. She’d listened to his music recommendation, she’d emailed him back from a masked IP. He immediately wanted to speak to her again.

As he looked up the corporation’s customer service line phone number, he knew it was ill-advised, knew he was a slightly drunk loser who just wanted to hear a woman’s voice. And yet, he didn’t care.

You’ve reached the customer service department of —— , how can we direct your call?

Marcus whispered the word, “Fern,” into his headset.

I’m sorry, we didn’t quite get that.

“Fern,” he said more loudly this time.

One moment, we’ll connect you.

He blinked. He hadn’t expected it would be this easy.

The ubiquitous hold music of every semi-sentient phone system began, only this music he sort of recognized. He took a swig of his beer and listened more closely. It took a moment, but Marcus was fairly certain he was listening to Explosions in the Sky. Yes, yes, it was definitely them.

You’re currently holding for the Federal Express and Retail Nexus…

“The what?” Marcus said aloud.

… you are the next in queue.

In tandem with his question, the phone line clicked alive. At first it was silent, he didn’t want to be the one to break it, so he waited. There was no breath on the other end of the line, no sound at all aside from the faintest buzzing of electricity, until a syrupy sweet voice brought the connection alive, “Hello, Marcus.”

“F.E.R.N.,” he replied.

x-r-a-y magazine

BONES by Wilson Koewing

March 3, 2020 · Fiction

I slide the glass racks to the side and peer into the dish pit where Bones struggles mightily to scrape the charred remnants of bread pudding from a hotel pan.

“Bones, how are you holding up?”

“Good, Chef Adam,” Bones says.

“Let me know if you get overwhelmed.”

“Ah, shit,” Bones laughs.

Bones is pushing seventy. He’s worked the dish pit at the country club for seven years. When he can escape the pit, Bones sweeps by the dumpster or deep cleans the upstairs banquet kitchen—tasks that take him far from the watchful eye of Executive Chef, Craig.

I discovered the nickname Bones came from his high school running back days. Bones because he was hard as bones. He received a scholarship to Auburn but blew out his knee. I could still see the running back in him.

When I pass Bones later in the afternoon, he’s on one knee scrubbing a drain by the walk-in cooler. I enter Chef Craig’s office. He swivels in his chair.

“Is Bones still cleaning that fucking drain?”

“Yep.”

“I watched him clean a pot for twenty minutes earlier,” Chef says. “He thinks he’s clever.”

“I think he’s just old, chef.”

“Feel free to fire him.”

“I’ll keep an eye on him.”

“He’s your responsibility. Now get started on those stocks.”

***

To make beef stock, I toss oven-roasted veal bones in a tilt-kettle with onions, peppers and spices. To make crawfish stock, I retrieve a sack of live crawfish from the walk-in. Their tiny claws pinch at the sack’s purple netting. I place the sack in a deep sink and fill it with cold water to purge the crawfish.

After adding the trinity (onions, peppers, celery), I pour in the purged crawfish and crush them with an electric mixer. I can’t watch them change from living creature to mush. I always look away. When what remains resembles a reddish batter, I fill the tilt-kettle with water and crank it to high.

***

Ally is asleep upstairs when I get home. When we met, I was finishing culinary and she was two years into med school. I studied days and worked nights. Now we only spend nights together when she stays up to watch our shows or when things align “for us to try.” Ally says we can’t wait to have kids. Her orthopedic work with elderly patients has exposed how quickly we degrade.

I pour a scotch and go to the patio for a cigarette. Smoke rises toward our bedroom window. Ally’s beside lamp turns on, and I follow her path to the bathroom where she flips on the light. My phone buzzes.

Working late?

Yeah. Grabbing a drink after.

***

I slide onto a stool at Molotov and order a Sazerac. I watch Kelly tend her tables. On her way to the kitchen, she’s stopped by an older gentleman at the bar. He’s been coming in a lot lately. Always the same stool, always a Vieux Carre. Kelly’s face flushes. She places her hand on his arm and continues. Noticing me, she mouths, “twenty minutes.”

The sign for the Hotel Monteleone bathes Kelly’s living room in red light. I sip scotch and stare out the window at the Quarter below. Kelly emerges from her bedroom wearing pajamas.

“Make me one?”

I point to a glass on the coffee table.

“Expensive scotch,” I say.

“It was a gift.”

She lands on the couch and reaches for the glass.

“Who is that old guy at the bar?”

“Who? Ron?”

“How old is Ron?”

“Late forties, maybe.”

“He graduated high school before you were born.”

Kelly grabs a joint from a cigar box on the table and lights it.

“Ally came in the other day,” Kelly says. “I recognized her from your Facebook.”

I crack the window. A drunk couple stumbles through the bloom of a streetlight.

“You shouldn’t smoke in here.”

“No recognition whatsoever,” she continues. “I guess you’ve wiped me from your social media footprint entirely.”

I take a seat beside her on the couch.

“Dylan’s doing well at school,” she says, inching closer. “They’re studying human anatomy. I bought him one of those life-sized wall-hanging skeletons with Velcro bones and organs he can place where they’re supposed to go.”

“You’re still getting along okay with five hundred a month?”

“Yeah,” she says. “Just wish you’d try and see him more.”

“I told you I can’t take being introduced as ‘mommy’s friend’ anymore,” I say. “He’s getting older. Things will start to click soon.”

“I never wanted it to be this way,” she says. “It would crush Ally, remember?”

She straddles me and starts unbuttoning my shirt.

“But you just can’t stop coming over, can you?”

Before going home, I peek in Dylan’s room. He’s curled up in a pool of moonlight shining through the window. He-Man and Skeletor do battle on his pajamas. I can see both of us in his features, but he will only see his mother’s. Hanging on the closet door is the skeleton. The bones and organs are perfectly placed except for the heart, which is too high, practically in the skeleton’s throat.

***

The next day, after a hellish lunch rush, I’m drawn by a fracas from the dish pit. Bones is sprawled on the ground holding his chest. I hold his hand and comfort him until the EMTs arrive, place an oxygen mask over his face and take him away.

I drop the beef and crawfish stocks through a China cap into five-gallon buckets so nothing solid enters the liquids. Once the stocks are dropped, only the bones remain. We receive them as bones and dispose of them the same. In between, we suck everything we can from them. With a metal paddle, I scrape the remnants into plastic Lexan containers then spray the kettle clean. I hoist the containers onto a cart and push it outside where I toss the bones in the dumpster.

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