FICTION Archives

ON LOCATION by Corey Miller

November 2, 2019 · Fiction

Actor Wanted

I’m sitting on the 22” x 14” x 9” life I just purchased, about to board in Blueberry Maine. Stickers of “Fragile” and “Contents Known To Cause Cancer In The State Of California,” label what’s left of me: clothes, a deck of cards, spare change, and my photo album.

Every American has been to the Salty Dog Café and wears this damn shirt you bought me to blend in. The train brings an oily coal in the air. My mind returns to working the factory. I can see the machine press opening then crushing, waiting for me to stick my head in. I’ve got nothing left here so I’m coming for you. I drag my life aboard, planning to use the cards to make money for stamps. I no longer have a return address.

Supporting Character in a Dark Comedy

Boston has history like a marriage. Signed documents humans fuck up. I’m Robert Smith with The Cure, dancing in circles over the sea. The ocean looks as clear as gin on the rocks with spruce trees as straws – just like heaven.

I saw you on TV once, in the background. Some sitcom; you were drinking beer and touching his arm. Were you directed to?

The woman across the aisle orders a cocktail from the cart and tightens her lips in an unsolicited smile. She’s given one of those baby bottles of liquor. It’s hardly a gulp and she only adds half the vial as if the chemistry is off and might explode. I turn to the window to see what state I’m in now.

Previous Experience Not Needed

Kentucky smells like limestone and horse shit. I see the rickhouses along the tracks, like prisons for bourbon barrels. If we stopped I would help them escape, scratch the oak until splinters inject the sweetness into my bloodstream. The devil’s cut for my angel’s share.

My parents used to throw parties all the time when I was a child. They would pass out all around the house. There was always someone in my bed so I’d clean up to make them happy. The glasses were half full, I didn’t want to dump it all down the drain.

Worn-Out Male 30-40

We rattle through Misery. I close my eyes from the other passengers. I smell of horseradish, pungent and stinging. The passengers haven’t seen the films that reel on the back of my eyelids. That’s us, you say. That’s me pursuing my acting dream and that’s you finally getting to see the world. You’re the American in Paris. If I could dance like Gene Kelly, I’d spin out of this dream sequence.

It’s getting hotter the further southwest we go. Filming on location and these costume changes have me working up a sweat. The woman across the aisle buys another cocktail today. I stare at the half gulp not added and want to cough for her attention.

The cart comes back around and she throws out the ounce of liquor remaining. I follow the garbage bag until it’s left unattended and dig through it. In my hands the bottle seems to grow. It’s now the size of a guitar. I slide my fingers down the strings over the frets. I want to return home and stop exploring this foreign world. I’m not sure if this is the former character or the upcoming role I want to play. Surrendering to a drop of liquid, it fixes me—my little pickup.

Must Be Willing To Change Appearance

I write down a monologue to audition for you. I sing it out loud, born to play the part. The passengers mumble the back-up vocals. The scene has ended for my character.

I study the farthest landscape I’ve ever reached. It’s all turquoise and dirt. Now that’s the real us. Why can’t we become a new person whenever we want? A lonely factory worker struggling with disease one day, a hero ready to change the next. A snake willing to shed its skin.

I rent a car and start down a new path. What’s a Ford Fusion fusing together? Probably two things that don’t fit naturally. The vehicle stops in Arizona to see what’s so grand. I yell out to hear someone comfort me. This could be my home with the hills struggling upwards then hitting rock bottom.

Traffic in Los Angeles is a standstill. My first shower in days washes away the old me. I put on a suit to get into character. I’ve rehearsed this a hundred times. Just stick to the script.

I see you on set, my eyes a camera out of focus. I hear your voice, the dreams I had during fights I slept through. This pilot looks promising, like it could run for seasons.

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DEAD FLOWERS by Rasmenia Massoud

November 1, 2019 · Fiction

We didn't know how to talk to Troy's new girl. Then again, we didn't know how to talk to the last one, either. Sunny, giggling girls flocked around him, their shiny polished nails drawn to his brown arms and the thick blond waves of hair that touched his shoulders.

Things were that way. People came and went. Stuck together like it was life and death in one moment, an almost forgotten odd character in a funny anecdote the next.

To a girl who'd had a few and met Troy for the first time, it might've seemed as if he'd been forged by some golden god of hair metal, but Brad and I laughed and watched him cut the sleeves and collars off his concert t-shirts so they'd show off his arms and chest hair, combing his fingers through his mane to make it perfect. Accidental sexiness is a carefully crafted look.

Troy's previous girl peed on Brad's couch. For days, Brad threatened to find another roommate, and criticized Troy for going out with a girl who couldn't handle her booze and let it go all over the leather couch. There was no sense in pointing out the couch was vinyl, or that the blanket she and Troy were curled up in soaked up most of her drunken pee.

"We're not buying any more booze for minors." Brad turned to me. "Except you, Justine. You're housebroken."

I smiled, feeling validated because back then, flattery and belittling other women often looked the same.

We laughed off Brad's ranting, and Troy found a new girl. She rolled around on the living room floor in her cut-off shorts, showing the three of us her ass cheeks while we sat on a tattered sleeping bag that now served as a sofa cover. A movie played in the VHS, but we were watching Troy's girl, who refused a chair, preferring to lay on the floor, sitting up now and then to smear more lotion onto her legs.

"I like lotion," she said, giggling as she squirted another gob into her hand. I wondered how long she could keep rubbing the stuff on her skin before gummy gobs began balling up on her fingers.

Brad and I looked at one another, stifling laughter, and took our beers outside. Maybe she'd pee on the couch. Maybe she'd leave a greasy lotion smear in the middle of the living room. Maybe she'd be gone and replaced in a week. None of it mattered because by the same time the following year, Brad had a new roommate. Troy chopped off his wavy heavy metal hair and joined the Navy. The 25-year-old stripper Brad was fucking behind my back would be nursing their kid on the vinyl pee couch as I became a memory, sweating through the graveyard shift in a plastics factory, still a year away from being able to buy my own booze.

We drank and smoked outside on the wooden steps leading up to the trailer door. Brad peeked inside and snorted. He shook his head, squinting his blue eyes, pushing his shaggy brown hair from his face. That shaggy brown hair was just a few years from falling out completely. "That chick, what's her name? Annie? Amy? What the fuck is the deal with the lotion?"

I shrug. "You know how it is with Troy's girlfriends. It's always something." Brad offers to buy me my own barrel of lotion. Leaning on each other, we laugh until tears blur our already doubled vision. We laugh because of the weirdness Troy always brought around, and because we thought he was the fool, and we were so smart. Like we knew something he didn't. Like we knew anything about what was real, or how to make anything last.

I try to stand and realize how drunk I am. Brad gets to his feet, teeters a bit, then staggers across the dirt road to a dried up sunflower, dying from the summer heat. He reels as he yanks and pulls at it until it's free from the Earth and returns to me, holding out his prize. Behind him, in the distance, the first glimpse of sunrise appears, warning that another night is coming to an end.

"What is this?" I'm swaying, gripping his arm for balance.

"My gift to you," he says, "To immortalize this moment."

"And what's so special about this moment?"

"Nothing. We're here," he says. "That's all."

He shrugs, stumbles again, and pulls me tighter to him, crispy dead flower fragments falling around us.

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THE BABY by Jamy Bond

October 28, 2019 · Fiction

One morning, she told me the story of how her friend’s baby died in a car accident.

“They were stopped at a red light. Someone came up from behind and slammed into them. My friend thought immediately of her baby in the back seat, but when she turned around to reach for it, she saw the baby’s head pop off, its arms and legs break, its chest cave in.”

All I could think about at school that day was the baby. Its head popping off. We were supposed to practice writing our letters, but every time I came to the lower case i—with its slender body and bubbly, round head—I thought of the baby, its head ripping away from its neck, flying up into the air. Did it hit the roof of the car, I wondered, or roll onto the floor? Did it cry?

“How was school?” she asked when I got home.

“I keep thinking about the baby.”

“My friend’s baby? Oh, what a tragedy. To think of a baby crushed to death! What an awful thing. Honey, let me sit down for a minute. Put your arms around me. That poor, poor baby.”

I dreamed about the baby. It wasn’t a baby in my dream, but a little girl like me, and I could see her from her mother’s perspective in the front seat: her eyes bugging out just as her head explodes. Blood spouting from her open neck, spraying the seats and windows in bright red.

The next day at school, I kept hearing a baby’s cry. I heard it in the clang of metal lockers, in the slam of heavy classroom doors, in the screams of children on the playground. While I stood at the craft table cutting Valentine hearts out of pink construction paper, my hands started to shake and I broke out in a sweat.

“What’s wrong, do you have a fever?” Ms. Albert said.

“No,” I told her. “I can’t stop thinking about the baby.”

“What baby?”

“The baby my mother told me about. The one in the car accident. The baby whose head popped off. The baby that was crushed to death.”

“Come here,” Ms. Albert said and led me down the hall to the nurse’s office.

I told the nurse about the baby, the dream, my shaking hands.

She called my mother.

I could hear the nurse’s voice go from puzzled to concerned to, finally, empathetic.

“Yes, they do tend to exaggerate. Even make stuff up.”

She hung up the phone.

“Time to return to class, my dear,” she said and pulled me down the hall.

Back in the classroom, it was story time. I lay down on a soft rug and listened to a story about cats.

“What’s wrong with you?” my mother said when I walked into the house. “I never said that.”

“What?”

“I told you her baby died in a car accident. I never said anything about its head popping off or its arms and legs. That’s ridiculous. How embarrassing! You have a very vivid imagination.”

She sent me to my room to wait for dinner, so I played with the Baby Alive doll I’d gotten for Christmas. There were batteries at the small of her back, beneath her pink, lacy onesie, that made her mouth open and close. She came with food and diapers. Her food was a packet of cherry powder that you mixed with water until it turned into goo. I loved feeding her that goo on a tiny pink spoon with a butterfly handle. Soon after she swallowed it, a creamy pink slime would appear in her diaper.

I had used all of the food and diapers on Christmas day, and my mother refused to buy more because it was messy. So for now, I just pretended to feed my baby, scooping air into her pulsing mouth with that tiny spoon.

“Eat up,” I said, “you must be hungry,” and I imagined her emaciated and starving, skin draping from her baby bones.

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TUESDAY AT THE MONASTERY by Amy Barnes

October 27, 2019 · Fiction

We reverently chop up Brother Francisco.

Deo Optimo Maximo.

After morning prayers, that’s we do on Tuesday. Laid on the dining room table, our former dining partners resemble dinner chickens we used to eat together, reduced to skeletal bones. We carefully cut away flesh and organs and eyeballs and hair. Stripped of their robes, we leave only skulls covered in skin, brains removed as if we are Egyptian mummy makers, not religious brothers.

I measure a place for my living hands on the arched crypt walls, bits of his skin clinging like gloves. Laid flat. Stretched out. A hand is twenty-seven bones. You can create with a hand. A leg has only two main bones.

On Monday, we make nails that our vows don’t allow us to buy; each piece of iron pounded into miniature crucifixion spikes. Nails ready to be pounded into palms and femurs and skulls. We pray over each nail in our teeth and under the heavy hammers, living spit bathing something for the dead.

Wednesday is bone cleaning day. Bones are exhumed from their graves still reeking of death stench. We put them carefully in buckets ready for creating new forms, some left as full skeletons to recline in the crypts, robed as if they are alive. There are never enough bones. I begin to find joy in administering last rites to my brothers.

I wonder what I will become. Where will my brothers nail me on Thursday, the day of the walls? A pelvis chandelier, light coming from where urine once flowed? Maybe vertebrae circle-nailed like flowers with finger stems?

We are only one step above putting skulls on sticks to frighten towns into not sinning or not disobeying the king. But it is more than that. We pray over these bones, counting them each like rosary beads. I walk the hallway and prayer for my brothers caught in bone purgatory.

Deo Optimo Maximo.

I see myself as more artist than necromanist. My skills as an architect pre-vows gives me the spatial skills to complete these silent tasks. I taste the iron nails and never quite wash the smell of death from my robes. I know they will choose my place carefully, laying out my bone design, my hands creating beauty after I am gone. It will become my penance.

What you are now we used to be; what we are now you will be...

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WOMEN’S RUGBY by Krys Malcolm Belc

October 26, 2019 · Fiction

We were big, and we were rough, with our tough hands our tough faces our knotted knees caked with dirt our mouthguards we spit into our hands to yell at each other between plays, and we found each other, all the women like us, here, where we could hit each other, were supposed to hit each other—again and again we hit—arms against legs, shoulders into torsos we ripped each other to the ground again and again, this hitting we’d been waiting for our entire lives, this conflict, this violence that our bodies felt like they were meant to do, violence our brothers the guys in the neighborhood the men on our hometown football teams got to do earlier, easier, than us, but we’d earned our hitting—waiting for a time when we, too, could have bodies meant to hit and rip, without mothers sneering without girls in our classes snorting and whispering at us as we lumbered by in the hallways as we crushed everyone in gym class flying around tracks flying up ropes, here in women’s rugby we could hit each other—which was really an excuse to touch each other—over and over again on those long Saturdays, getting up in the morning together shoveling down cereal in the dining hall together taking turns lying back on the athletic trainer’s table to get our knees our shoulders our heads taped up warming up lazily in the September sun tackling hitting touching stripping down to our sports bras after the game to shake our filthy jerseys into the washbag, and then we partied together, still caked in mud dirty and stinking we could be like men then, all day on Saturday, no showers, burgers off the grill no plates no napkins ketchup out of a slobbering bottle we passed around, endless cheap beer in red cups, all those songs, brownies lifted out of cafeteria trays with muddy hands, standing around the courtyard in our filthy rugby socks and sandals, touching each other there at the party we’d been waiting for for years—we were people who hit other people for fun and because we had to, because the more we hit the more being people who hit other people defined who we were—and we’d found each other, finally, and sang until the end of the day when we could finally go to bed with each other, laughing at the men who designed our dorm showers, where we got clean together, in the cold industrial communal reminders of architects and engineers who could never imagine us.

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TOOAFRAIDTOASK by Steve Gergley

October 25, 2019 · Fiction

_{Posted by u/samuraijake14 - 2 hours ago}

Does anyone else have this problem or is it just me?

ok so i know this is going to sound super weird and stuff but please just try to bear with me becuase ive never asked strangers on reddit for advice like this but i swear this is a serious question and im not trolling because this is a real thing that happens to me all the time now and i dont know how to fix it and im too scared to ask my friends or parents about it because of what they might say. Ok so what i wanted to ask is if anyone else gets too scared to poop because they are afraid that a snake will crawl up out of the toilet hole while their sitting there with nothing to protect their bits. im asking because a few days ago i saw a story online (it was on msn or yahoo or someother place that talks about real news, so i think its true) about this woman who was in the bathroom of her house in florida and then she lifted up the toilet lid to do her business but before she sat down she saw a big snake crawling up out of the hole in her toilet where the poop gets flushed away and it turns out that something had happened to the pipes under her house and the snake got in from there and then it crawled all the way up into her toilet from the back. so i guess my question is if anyone else ever sees something like that and gets so scared and cant stop thinking about it to the point that they now cant do even the most normal things in their life like pooping because ever since i read that story i get really scared when i feel the need to poop because what if something like that happens to me? BTW im 14M and i live in northern florida (tallahassee area) so its not like i live right next door to the toilet snake lady, but i do live in the same state so i cant stop thinking that if something so scary like that can happen to a random lady who lives kind of close, then whats stopping something like that from happening to me? now anytime i even think about pooping my mind goes crazy on its own and instantly imagines the most horrible thing that could possibly happen like the other day when i was at my friend terrys house and i needed to go to the bathroom, but then right after i got there and closed the door i saw a mind movie of me sitting on the toilet and getting bitten on the butt by a snake coming up out of the toilet hole and it was really scary because my mind showed me all the horrible details even tho i didnt want it to and even after i tried really hard to think about something else i couldnt and instead i just kept seeing the horrible mind movie of me getting bitten and my body starting to shake and jerk from the poison and me smashing my face against the hard floor and my teeth hitting the tiles really hard and breaking all over the place and it seemed so real that i could almost feel it happening and then in the mind movie i started throwing up uncontrollably and blood was everywhere and in the movie i knew i was dying so i started yelling for my mom because i was so scared and then no matter how hard the real me tried to think of something else, like fortnite or the new slipknot song or that awesome fight with levi from attack on titan, i couldnt stop seeing myself dying horribly and it was so awful to the point that in real life i started crying and i could barely breathe and it was so embarrassing because terry had to call my mom and ask her to come pick me up and even after mom was there i couldnt stop my body from shaking so i just spent the rest of the day in bed and i didnt go to school the next day. i only ask these things because that day was one of the worst in my entire life and im shaking right now just thinking about it but a similar thing happens now every time i have to poop and i dont know what to do or how to make it go away. i know this post has been rambling on for a while and im sorry about that but i just get so incredibly scared sometimes about all the awful stuff in the news and about all the terrible things that could happen to me and my friends and family and i cant stop wondering why everyone is always arguing so much about stuff that seems really obvious like how the other day when my english teacher mrs collins told the class that men and women are exactly the same in every single way, but how is that even possible when girls have lady bits and guys have dongs and girls can get pregnant and guys cant? literally everyone already knows that stuff so why would she even say something that everyone already knows is wrong? so i guess my real question is just why is everything in the world so confusing and scary? also any tips re: my pooping dilemma would be cool thx

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THE HEFT OF IT by Lisa Kenway

October 24, 2019 · Fiction

‘Any questions, Mrs Brown?’

Doctors were all so young these days. So full of talk. I shook my head. Malignant. How much more did I need to know?

Dr Wong smiled quietly, as though sharing a secret, and slid a purple cardboard box across the desk. I half-expected her to offer me an assortment of macarons. Those powdery spaceships that melt on your tongue and stick to the roof of your mouth. And aren’t a patch on the chewy coconut biscuits Grandma used to make. Macaroons, they were called—what a difference a single o made.

I could picture a plate of macaroons alongside the crochet coaster under Dr Wong’s mug. The coaster had a scalloped edge, like the fine linen Grandma brought out of storage for tea parties when I was a girl. I must have been about five when I snuck into the quiet of her bedroom with one of those precious doilies, held the delicate French lace up to the light, poked my fingers through the petals. And marvelled at the beauty of a bouquet made out of holes. Grandma had seemed ancient then, but couldn’t have been more than fifty. The clink of bone china and the music of Vivaldi soared in my ears. Refined. Contained. Immaculate.

Instead of a macaron, Dr Wong reached into the box and pulled out what looked like a jellyfish. The weight of the implant surprised me. I didn’t expect this alien creature, this giant gelatinous eyeball, not that I had given it any thought. What was the point of vanity at my age? I prodded its smooth surface, pressed my finger in as hard as I could then let go to watch the depression spring back into place. Shuffled the dense hemisphere from hand to hand.

The surgeon sighed. She had kind eyes. ‘We don’t have to do immediate recon. If you’re not sure, I can do a staged procedure.’

I rolled the implant back into the box and she closed the lid. Raised lettering on top spelled out the word ‘Motiva’. Why would anyone choose that name for a line of fake bosoms? Was it meant to be uplifting? To motivate recovery? It sounded like a brand of sanitary napkins. Or shapewear. Singlets and spencers came to mind, and my five-year-old self, hiding in Grandma’s wardrobe while she undressed, hoping to catch a glimpse of cotton and lace. And underneath, the angry scar that ran diagonally across her flat chest.

‘I can give you time, if you need it. But no more than a week or two.’ The surgeon cradled my gnarled fist in her hands. Her voice was soothing, unhurried, but outside the door another ten women waited, clutching handkerchiefs and trailing support people.

‘Do whatever you think’s best, Doctor.’

In the waiting room, darling Becca tugged at a loose thread on her sweater and rose to her feet. ‘Ready to go, Nanna?’

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EMPATHY! by Janice Kang

October 18, 2019 · Fiction

X MARKS THE SPOT. your larynx and syntax are open-winded, words flitting downwards like a map ever-expanding. here is the way to diamond treasure, to sparrow bones and mud. and thus these words are splintered halfway through: cherubic and chthonic — the diary of a child with a knife down their warm pulse. for, in an inventory of dreams, there is no spare air which you can hold in your palms.

SHE REACHES THE X. she takes the other half. grey neutrality, she dons a grey turtleneck and sits among lone wolf sighs, wading in strange breaths. she cannot speak. she is the penumbra of what you cut free in 2016, sun soaked.

you smile against winds. the maiden in velvet pats along the bow around your torso, holding together all of your organs like a corset. you must conform, she seems to say, but hazes lull over you, incohesive fragments. your smile is warm, her hands traversing your body map of thorns and whimsies asunder to the way your lashes point downwards. naught of you can be whole . . . in tonight's dream, you are a ballerina breaking your toes for the first time. when you wake, you are feral nerve damage. you think: trauma conceives something strange. you think: it stains your teeth and dances to eulogies in minor chords.

in another dream, cast in the in-betweens, for you are never fully awake, you are watching a performance, and the maiden leads you into a dark corridor. it turns into a blue field. you remember a piece of something. a bee kills itself on your skin. you wake up and scream, paralyzed like vitrification has overcome the bout of you.

YOU CHASE AFTER HER. the maiden covers you in papercuts made up of love. honey-naught and honey-rot. it is morning. she finds you tucked under your soft wood table, a camerashutter going off in tandem with the rain showers and your breaths. her gaze is light upon your bowed crown, blue and quiet. you never turn off your computer, because there is an itch wholly interlaced in the dip of your chest. i feel that — but she is gone. you await the next moonrise. a friend tries to speak to you from outside the inventory, faces covered by sheer drapes. rulers of the sun and moon, they say, you think, you fall asleep on the tiles. you have created a kingdom where the trauma brews, a malediction inside your throat. it seems that you must have taken someone's poisoned apple for your own.

SHE CONFESSES TO YOU WITH HER NOSE ON YOUR SHOULDER, THAT YOU ARE ONE. that i am you. it is her fingers that glue your eyes together so that you are always asleep. so that you are always filled with rotten cigars in alleys, laughter stuck inside your larynx — someone else's, full and acoustic. she wants the rest of your diamond treasures, though she is but the fig skin against your heels. you chase yourself in circles, compeers and giggling comrades within one soft body, one slipping from a torn viscera. you are out of breath.

when you stare at yourself in the mirror, there is drip-drop agony, but she holds you close and mouths that she is sorry.

WE COEXIST. there is so much space between my arms and sides. i think that there are violent couplet galaxies trying to wrap around my indigo bones, colliding only because she tells them to. i want to put my computer to deep sleep tonight, for this empty epiphany is so dear to my open heart. i hold hands with myself and lay to rest against the dents in my walls. i glue my lashes into one. i wish to be so one that i cannot taste the remnants of anger and aches — so that my dreams are my own, not a labwork of wide-eyed empaths making me blue with windpipe lacks.

(i wake up without a voice.)

X MARKS THE SPOT. SHE REACHES THE X. YOU CHASE AFTER HER. SHE CONFESSES TO YOU WITH HER NOSE ON YOUR SHOULDER, THAT YOU ARE ONE. WE COEXIST

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FAREWELL PROTECTION by Jordan Clark

October 16, 2019 · Fiction

The still sweltering sun’s kitty-corner to the late afternoon moon—similar to yesterday, but we didn’t go inside then either. Gravel crunches under the weight of a wheeling propane tank behind the brittle fence; little shuffles treading alongside it. There’s chatter, glasses clinking through a screen door, and a white folding table aggressively flipping and clipping into place. We listen to its prongs scuttle and then a grill igniting shortly after.

Standing in our dying grass, setting my paper plate down as I offer to smear her white from top to bottom. But she tells me it was chunky—cottage cheese-y.

She finagled a mealy group of noodles into a skeletal chaise; two cup the nape of her neck and coddle her shoulder blades while another bears the brunt of it all—sinking beneath her crossed ankles. Wincing, she searches—unrelentingly—for the sweet spot. Her armpits are being rubbed tender. Flecks of foam flake off; sprinkling the slightly sloshing water like dead ants after a spray. Some get caught in her spatchcocked hair, some near the barren jacuzzi.

Lounging, playing her mirror—though my supports far less potent, dull even—I scope between my toes to pity hers and her thickly cracked calluses. They’re encrusted in asphalt as if she’d eternally misplaced her shoes. Her plush skin’s discoloring around the open slots of her nylon bathing suit—the one she’d bought on a whim, the one that’s hiding her full bladder, the one she’ll incontestably drape over and let drip from the curtain rod tonight. Little beads of sweat caviar hang in her arms incoming buds.

I teased her a bit; saying how she’s going to turn into the membrane of a tangerine, how she’ll peel, and how I’ll twiddle her snakeskin until it disintegrates. But it’s moot. Her stubbornness is to be adored.

She should’ve gone to war. All too simply could she have withstood the most brutal waterboardings. Cinch her down, wrench a towel over her face—let her nooks and crannies flourish—then pour; gallon after gallon, and she’d be fine. No gasp. No whimper.

The rippling water entrances me as she continues wiggling. I watch it marble and listen to the party revving up next door.

Content and gooey; I pluck and pry at the clotted sunscreen braided in my chest hair.

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LINOLEUM FLOOR by Mark Tulin

October 15, 2019 · Fiction

It’s morning. Circa 1972. I turn over in bed and gaze down at my gray marble linoleum floor. It’s coming up around the edges, and there are all sorts of dirty stains, punctures, and dried bubblegum spots on it. I remember when it was new. My father laid it down himself. He brushed on glue, applied the linoleum, trimmed the corners with a sharp razor so it could snugly fit against the walls, and hammered the baseboards in with long, skinny nails.

The window shade over my bed hangs crooked off to the right with one of its brackets dangling on a thread. If I try to pull it up, the window shade will collapse, and I don’t want people to look in my room at night.

The room is in the shape of a small rectangle and tends to get very stuffy in the summer. I turn on the little rotating fan that sits on the metal desk, even though the fan just circulates hot air. My mother found the desk on trash day. She gave a neighbor five-bucks to haul it up the stairs to my room. My mother quickly put a bunch of crap on it, like a green rotary phone, a 13-inch TV, a grimy fan, and a small reading lamp. Now I can’t use the desk to do my homework because there’s no space to put down my spiral binder and books.

Inside the desk drawer are my old baby records like DPT, Polio, and Smallpox vaccinations. My mother listed the dates and times of every shot and chronicled every doctor I saw. She documented that I was 6 pounds and 7 ounces at birth, and that I had hazel eyes and a little tuft of brown hair on the crown of my head. I pretty much look the same but lost most of my baby fat.

Old report cards are also stuffed in the drawer. They are yellowing and stuck together with small pieces of tape. All my evil deeds are thoroughly noted in red ink, my poor math skills emphasized with capital Ds, and my inability to pay attention in Mr. Fisher’s Science Class had labeled me a major class disturbance.

It’s the afternoon. I smell the sandy, metallic dust in my room, and my eyes follow the little lint balls floating in midair as the sunlight shines through the open window. Sometimes my mother sweeps the linoleum floor, but that’s a waste because the broom just brings up more dust and she rarely gets all the dirt into a dustpan.

If my mind’s active, I don’t think about dust or about wheezing or if that annoying gurgle at the bottom of my throat will ever stop. But if I’m bored and restless, I notice everything as if my internal organs are on loudspeaker and I have X-ray eyes that can see the minutest details of my existence.

I try to cough up phlegm periodically to clear my airways, but no matter how much I hawk, the wheeze always remains deep in the bottom of my lungs like a sunken treasure that no one could ever pull out. The doctor tries to help, but he says that there’s no cure. “You have to have good asthma maintenance,” is all he says, and gives me a bunch of steroids like unwrapped presents to take home.

Once, he stuck a long, snaking metal tube down my lungs trying to dislodge a thick glob of phlegm. There was a camera at the end of the tube and a monitor showing the inside of my lungs and what nasty stuff was happening. But I couldn’t look at the screen when the doctor was pointing because he was choking me to death. After my face turned blue and I waved my hands in desperation several times, he pulled the damn thing out. I told him never to try that again or my mother would sue the hell out of him.

I dig into my pocket and feel my emergency inhaler just in case I need it. It’s my life support, and I’m careful not to overuse it. One night I must have taken fifty puffs, and I ended up in the emergency room, which resulted in one week in the hospital with tubes in my arms and up my nostrils. I had lost ten pounds in the hospital that week, couldn’t sleep, and all I thought about was how the hell am I going to get out of there.

It’s days like this with nothing to do that I spend a lot of time thinking in my room. I wonder what life will have in store for me and what I will become in ten or twenty years. I often get headaches just thinking about it because I have no clue. My father wants me to work for him in his produce store on the highway. I want to be a rock singer like Mick Jagger or a baseball pitcher like Nolan Ryan, something where I can be famous and where girls would notice me. All my mother says about my future is “Get a respectable job selling washers and dryers at Sears & Roebucks so you can wear a shirt and tie.”

It’s nighttime. Even though my head feels achy, I lay in bed enjoying the cool breeze coming through the window screen. I turn to the side of the bed where I look out of the window and wait for it to rain. I love watching clouds burst into a million scattered raindrops and hearing the jarring combination of thunder and lightning shake and rattle the night.

I know I should be falling asleep, but I’m wheezy again and pull out my inhaler and take two puffs. The inhaler makes me hyper, so I walk around the linoleum floor in my bare feet and open my closet. There's my glen plaid bar mitzvah suit hanging along with the plush Hebrew bag stuffed with yarmulkes and prayer shawls. My old blue cub scout uniform with the badges sewn to the shirt hangs there too, a little dull with age. The Louisville Slugger baseball bat that Uncle Perry bought lays on its side, and my Mickey Mantle glove with a hardball is tucked in the corner. I wonder how long these things will be in my closet. I wonder what new closets that I’ll have when I get older and what different things will be inside of them.

The next morning, I wake to a soaking wet bed. When I remove the sheets, the stains ingrained in the mattress look like my personal urine signature. They are my emotional wounds, sores that have never healed and seem to linger in this putrid air. They are many times that I unintentionally pissed the bed in my shame-ridden childhood. I try to convince my mother that it’s only spilled water, an accident. Of course, she doesn’t believe me. So, I let the bed dry, sprinkle some Talc Powder on it, and turn the mattress over, as if it were a fresh new start.

About an hour later, I pick up the receiver of the lime-green rotary telephone, and I hear Jeff’s voice. We talk about seeing Godzilla at the Tyson and scheme how much money we can get from our parents for candy and hoagies. I tell him that I really want to see Village of the Damned at the Castor and that I can’t wait to buy a meatball grinder from Dante’s Inferno. I quickly get dressed, and before I know it, I’m walking in the bright sunshine on Longshore Avenue toward my friend’s house with Ticket to Ride playing in my head. The air is super clean from last night's rain. My body feels energized as I take bouncy steps in my Converse Hi Tops on the cement sidewalk that seems to lead me to the Promise Land.

x-r-a-y magazine

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