Flash Archives

STICK FIGURES by Sara Solberg

February 18, 2022 · Creative Nonfiction

In an eastern New Mexico desert, amid a forest of mesquite and bluestem grass, overlooking nothing but miles upon miles of iron-pressed, sunbaked earth, sits the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP for short). On the surface, it looks like any other government base: a simple grid of unremarkable squat buildings, the tan color of which bleeds into the surrounding arid landscape. But step into one of the elevators that spend their days bobbing up and down WIPP’s vertical mine shafts, ferrying hard-hatted workers between ground level and the ancient salt bed 2,150 feet below, and it’s a different story.

One of the few deep geological repositories in the world, WIPP’s raison d'être is to store the radioactive waste produced by the US’s nuclear reactors. While the facility is only licensed for 10,000 years, the barrels of waste that get buried there will be harmful to humans much longer than that—250,000 years, to be exact. But with its rising popularity as a cleaner, more reliable, more land-efficient alternative to other forms of energy like fossil fuels and solar, both nuclear power and the often lethal byproducts that come with it seem here to stay.

Storage is one thing. What happens to that storage after we’re gone is another matter entirely.

…

A few months before my mom died, I asked her for a favor.

“I just want Dad to have something he can keep going back to,” I said, feet folded up onto the recliner in Mom’s office nook while I watched her work at her desk. I spent a lot of time like this in those days, trailing behind her around the house like I used to when I was little, desperate to soak in her presence while I still could. “You know. For different occasions and stuff.”

Outside the window her desk faced, a cardinal swooped back and forth across the bronzed orange trees lining the border of our yard.

Her bare brow furrowed beneath the rim of her fleece cap. “Write him cards?” The cancer had spread to Mom’s throat by then, and her voice was rough, her words sounding as though they’d been scoured raw with a steel dish scrubber before being set free.

I rocked back and forth, springs creaking as the chair bobbed in time with my rhythm. “Yeah. And on the envelopes you can put things like ‘open this on our anniversary,’ or ‘open this when you’re having a bad day’ or something. Like on Pinterest.”

Mom, ever allergic to technology, didn’t know what Pinterest was.

“Like a letters to your future self kind of thing. But for Dad.” Trying to prepare for the future was another thing I did a lot of in those days. But how can a person prepare for something that can only be understood in hindsight?

When I looked outside again, the cardinal was gone.

…

In 1981, the US Department of Energy commissioned a multitalented team of experts (physicists, engineers, environmental scientists, political scientists, sociologists, archeologists and behavioral psychologists, to name a few) in anticipation of the Yucca Mountain geological repository that was to be built. Though plans were ultimately scrapped in favor of the repository in New Mexico, the team—christened the Human Interference Task Force—became founding members in the emerging field of nuclear semiotics. The sole purpose of this field is to answer one thing: How do we stop generations 10,000+ years into the future from unearthing radioactive waste?

Similar to WIPP, it’s a deceptively simple question on the surface that gains immediate complexity with a little digging. Creating a warning message that will be understood by people 10,000 years out is the bare minimum goal of nuclear semioticians. Ideally, such a message would not only last a couple hundred thousand years in addition to that, but could also be deciphered instantaneously—an unmistakable Turn Back Now; Do Not Pass Go; Do Not Collect $200 that can be understood by any person in any context. But 10,000 years is already double the length of recorded human history. 250,000 years is almost as long as Homo sapiens have existed.

To come up with a clear message that will not only survive in meaning, but in material form—something that will resist the decay of time, that won’t wither like a plant carcass in the searing New Mexican heat, eroded by nature or chipped away by human hands—is almost incogitable.

…

I stopped by Target to find some cards that looked worthy of being the message bearers to my future, widowed dad from his future, deceased wife. The fluorescent lights reflected off the white shelves and white tiles and white ceiling, and it felt like I was the dead one, ascended to a heaven that resembled the gift section of a department store. The Hallmark dogs with their halos and wings only solidified the mirage.

I stood in front of the blank, boxed cards for several minutes, trying to choose from an assortment simultaneously too meager and too diverse. What, I wondered, was the appropriate design for a situation like mine? Colorful circles, bumping up against one another in random patterns like marbles tossed across a floor? Shadows of birds balanced on a wire, twittering quarter and eighth notes that trailed in a wispy string above their heads? The tidy, monochromatic lineup of trees, each a different shade of blue? What design most strongly said, I’m sorry I died? What most said, I was thinking of you then, even if I can’t be there with you now?

I ended up buying two boxes of flower prints: the first a diverse bouquet, the second a wreath of roses and daisies, in the center of which perched a green and yellow, vaguely bohemian sparrow. Its one visible eye, just a small black dot on its turned away face, stared into the distance, perhaps contemplating the wrapping paper a few feet away, or maybe its own two-dimensional existence, frozen on paper until it was either destroyed or disintegrated with age.

Mom loved flowers—loved the wild bouquets I’d sometimes pick for her, loved getting dirt under her fingernails pulling weeds from the garden. Mom loved birds, going as far as to get a few birdwatching guide books so she’d be able to identify the species that tended to hover around the backyard feeders. She loved life.

The cards weren’t enough. They were never going to be enough. But they were better than nothing at all.

…

Numerous solutions to the nuclear semiotics riddle have been proposed since the 1980s, each with their own unique shortcomings. Perhaps the most commonly suggested warning is a simple written message—Rosetta Stones whose multilingual inscriptions can be updated every handful of decades for indefinite millennia. Languages, though, are as alive as the people who use them, ever-changing as they age. It’s only taken six centuries for the English used in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales to become unreadable to modern English speakers. Given the infinite unknowns that await humanity, it’s an act of pure faith to believe a message written today will still be translatable 10,000 years out.

Some have suggested using pictograms; Carl Sagan famously insisted the most effective message would be a simple skull and crossbones. But symbols, like language, are ever-evolving. Before it became an omen of death during the Golden Age of Piracy, the skull and crossbones was used by the Knights Templar as a symbol of the Christian rebirth. Today, it’s inseparable from children’s Halloween costumes and Disney movies featuring Johnny Depp.

The next logical step after individual pictograms is a series of them. A narrative. A comic strip depicting a person dying after they’re exposed to the radioactive waste buried below. Stories and stick figures, after all, are two of the few universals that have existed as long as humans have been around. But even then, there’s no guarantee future humans will interpret a comic strip in left to right sequence. Read right to left, it becomes a resurrection story.

Other solutions have included everything from folktales to atomic priesthoods to bioluminescent cats that will glow when they’re within a certain distance of a repository.

And others still have said it’s all a lost cause. Humans have always had a compulsion to excavate. To know. To remember our forgotten histories. Surely, any warning message we leave is just as likely to be seen as an invitation. Why waste our own finite time on earth trying to protect some distant perhaps?

…

Mom bought a small, hinged box from Hobby Lobby to put the cards in—one that resembled a pirate’s treasure chest, complete with an arched top and fake iron plating. It sat in my room for weeks after her funeral, wrapped in a plastic grocery bag to shield it from dust, shoved to the far corner beneath my bed.

As I promised her I’d do, I gave it to my dad once things settled down and the reality of our new lives had started to take shape. There was nothing I could think to say in response to his tears or shaking hands when he reached out to take it—no comforting Hallmark platitudes, no way to boil down the immensity of our loss into something comprehensible.

That’s the paradox of such situations: finding a way to communicate the incommunicable.

I left my parent’s bedroom in silence, quietly closing the door behind me.

…

Many people mistakenly assume WIPP is located where it is because it’s remote. As survivors of disasters like Fukushima can attest, after all, living in the vicinity of radioactive material isn’t an enviable position. In actuality though, the facility owes its placement to one thing, and one thing only: the 2,000 feet of continuous salt below.

The remnant of a sea that evaporated 250 million years ago, the salt bed is an ideal burial ground for nuclear waste for multiple reasons. It’s accessible. It’s malleable, and therefore easy to mine. It’s geologically stable, and impermeable by water.

But above all else, salt is capable of healing. Eventually, 75 years or so after WIPP’s mine is filled to capacity and closed off, left to sit for time immemorial—either remembered or forgotten, as all things are—the salt will collapse around the barrels of waste. It will collapse, and then it will begin to stitch itself together, fractures and fissures filling over the course of a few decades until the barrels have been wholly encapsulated, the surface sealed once more.

I wonder what scars will remain.

Crow Jonah Norlander

CAROUSEL BAR / DOWN IN HOLY CROSS by Autumn Holladay

February 14, 2022 · Fiction

Carousel Bar

I miss 99-cent margaritas served at the old strip from 6:00 a.m. to noon. I’d sit and sip and watch the sex workers rest on slot machine stools after their shift. Most tourists weren’t around at that hour—just the cleaners and the junkies and the loners, and I thought they were my kind of people. The bartender invited me to shower with her after her shift. I believed there was no better way to spend my last day in Vegas.

Her name was Holly. She wore a leather corset and when she took it off, tattoos took its place. I wore a pencil skirt and a silky blouse and when she took them off, my skin was bare. I was 21. I think she was 40. All we did was bathe. She told me she missed her daughter. I asked what happened to her. She pretended not to hear and washed my hair.

Dear guy from Boston, remember when you took me to dinner at the Bellagio because you wanted to fuck me at the Circus Circus? You said Hunter S. Thompson was your favorite writer. But the room was mine and I didn’t invite you in.

I was more interested in the old people blowing their retirement and the people getting married upstairs and the whole place reeking of cigarettes and Lysol and where the fuck was the carousel bar?

I saw you on the news. I thought being an anchorman suited you: you loved to talk and I loved to turn you off. Click. What was your line then? I have a girlfriend but don’t worry, you leaned in, I’m a bad boyfriend. It seemed like a line a boy inherits from his father.

I have a friend who worked at the Circus Circus. Her name is Megan. She was there when I was there, but I didn’t know her then. Megan has stories about dusty brothels and sandstorms and pole dancers and 3:00 a.m. cigarettes and missing her dad. She can’t tell them anymore though. Megan lost her head. She was hit by a car walking home one day. The car didn’t stop.

Megan isn’t dead. I am with her now as she looks out the hospital window.

“Megan,” I say, “do you remember the carousel bar? How people came from all over to see it and sometimes it was there and sometimes it was gone and sometimes they swore they sat at it even when it was closed?”

She smiles and her head doesn't nod and her head doesn't shake and today we can pretend.

Down in Holy Cross

There is only one sunset in New Orleans. To get to it, you drive down Robertson to cross over the canal by Poland. And maybe you laugh because the street before the bridge is Kentucky and the one after is Tennessee. But before you discover this, you’re stuck on the ramp, waiting for the bridge to come down.

You wait, your car slanted up on the ramp as you watch the bridge rise up and up and hear the ship’s horn calling below. If this was your first time, maybe you’d feel impatient. Sometimes it takes twenty minutes for that bridge to come down. But you’re thankful you have a car. You think of all the people who died trying to cross here, either on foot or bike. Then you laugh because the people in the van in front of you get out and start dancing, their music blasting, and it all seems so ridiculous. The horn blows again. The ship makes it through. The bridge lowers. The people rush back into their car. You go up and up then down, but not too fast because you have to make a right at the first light. And you do.

You drive slowly. There are a lot of potholes and kids running around. When you reach the motherload of potholes, the one larger than the street itself, you let the car sink in and out and make another right. It’s funny driving in New Orleans. All of the bumps and stops make it feel like you're riding in a carriage. You go on and on down the road, all slow and careful, until you see a big green hill that leads to the levee.

You continue down Sister Street and you see the ramp for the St. Claude Bridge, but you are crossing underneath it. The road narrows quite a bit and you go real slow this time because it's dark under there and you never know who’s waiting.

Maybe you think of the time last May when you rushed to roll up your windows. A swarm of termites waited for you. There are no termites now. You make it through and up ahead is a big yellow school bus that has sat there since you moved down and probably will always be there. You laugh about the first time you saw it. You were supposed to meet her here and thought her friends were living in it, but really she wanted you to meet her at the house just behind it.

A turn on Burgundy and you’re almost there. You drive up to the gravel patch, by the old baseball field, and think of the time it was just a hole, spitting out water until it flooded the entire street. The Great Burgundy River you waded through. Broken branches and garbage rubbed against your thighs as you waded to the gray double shotgun on your right. You park your car on the sidewalk because it is the safest place to park, but you don’t get out just yet. You sit and stare at the house.

Its ugly gray steps that lead to the torn-up, mustard chair on the porch. And you just stare at it. This is where it all started and ended. You don’t think that, but feel it. You try not to think about it at all. But it comes anyway. Her body. The couch. Cold. Alone. Gone. Never again.

You get out of the car, but you don’t go to the door. You don’t know the people who live there anymore.

Instead, you turn back down the street and walk slowly by the house on the corner because you’ve always admired their garden and today their amaryllis is in bloom. It is a delight to see the bright orange flower pop out from the evergreens. Then you're at the wooden fence and the German Shepherd that always barks, barks, and you go on and cross the street to the parking lot.

Needles and weeds are scattered along the pavement. You follow the little pathway under the live oak tree and you’re in front of the old Holy Cross School. You don’t go inside. You've been inside before. Instead you walk around it through the field along Deslonde Street. The grass is tall, but not too tall, yet. And you go on, slowly, because there are holes mixed in and then you are at the bottom of the levee and you walk up it amongst the yellow flowers and then when you look up again, there is the Mississippi.

There is a swing set on the tower of the levee marker now. Two boys stand there with a long walking stick and point out across the water. They drop their stick and start swinging and you walk past them to the purple rock and sit.

Seagulls fly across the gray and violet sky and ducks swim below. You watch the seagulls land on the water, chasing the ducks out of their fishing spot. You see the boats go by, creating waves across the water, and wonder how the birds manage to fight the current. Then you watch the sun sink below the towers of the CBD where it glows an orange halo around the old Naval base at the End of the World. It is hard to see with the light glittering across the waves, but you keep your eyes open and wonder about the gray sky with the big orange crack running through it.

This is the only sunset in New Orleans.

Before it gets too dark, you get up to walk along the levee. You walk because you know it is there and right now you want to see it, and there it is— the little rock with the words “Be Brave” spray painted black across it. And when you look up again, all that is left are the city lights.

Crow Jonah Norlander

A RIOT OF THE HUMAN HEART by Jillian Luft

February 11, 2022 · Creative Nonfiction

Boston is burning itself over a baseball game. Outside of Fenway, the local evening news zooms in on a few torched sedans. Undercarriages in flames like hibachi grills. White boy ruddy faces rejoicing. Game 4 of the 2003 ACLS. A Red Sox victory.

I care about baseball because I love you. I want to wake you up to celebrate Johnny Damon and Pedro Martinez and all those other shaggy-haired rascals hellbent on breaking the curse. Once you view the game highlights, I want you to bang me against the TV, so my bare ass kisses static. I want you to tell me it’s all okay, that it’s only the oysters like you said—no, slurred—before you passed out with puke on your tongue.

Boston ties with the Yankees for the series. So, they revel and pelt the pavements with their empties. Some brawl in bars while others lay waste to their beloved hometown with spray paint and gasoline and alcohol-impaired decision-making. At first, I don't understand why their response to winning is as if they’d lost. Then I think about all the times I lucked out when I thought myself doomed. Hope, victory, delusion—whatever you want to call it— can feel like you’ve managed to cage death. Like you have to edge closer and reach through those bars to truly know what you’re up against. Like you can only make sense of your good fortune by testing it.

I watch you in your clammy, fucked-up sleep. You’ve been this way for hours. Still and corpse-like. You don’t stir, but you sweat. God, do you sweat. You’ve got that after-vomit sheen, skin the color of a dead tooth. You’re still wearing your good clothes but we’re not going anywhere.

In my new lacy underthings, I slump against the bed frame. I glimpse my wan face in the mirror and behold a pouty, bare-breasted child. I contemplate the ways my skin folds when I cry, the way my eyes retreat into my babyfat cheeks but leave wet traces. The way I look when I’m alone: pathetic but honest.

The celebration-cum-riot continues. Drunken, gap-toothed bros too close to the camera. Mouths like clogged drains. I wonder if I could spy the mayhem outside our hotel window, but I’ve no idea where Fenway is. I’ve seen so little of this city since we arrived this morning. Just a raw bar kiosk in Quincy Market, the inside of a Victoria’s Secret, a basement Mexican restaurant in Faneuil Hall, and a shitload of Dunkin’ Donuts. If I didn’t know about Paul Revere and the cobblestones, I’d think there’s no rich history here. Except for sports, of course.

The truth is I don’t need history. I’m happy to be lulled—no, fooled— by the present, the way our bodies find ways to collide from moment to moment, the way your hands and mouth and dick quiet my fears, make me forget about everything else but us.

It feels like grief when you’re lost to me like this. I worry you’ll wake up and forget—no, remember—what we’ve done. You’ll see it differently and then you won’t see me at all.

You blame the oysters, but I ate them too. It’s not bad seafood and it’s more than the booze or the drugs—though they certainly play their part. It’s that you haven’t seen your boys in months now, that you are reminded of your youngest when we landed at Logan because it’s his namesake. It’s the foggy realization that even in these clandestine and anonymous spaces where no one knows our sordid origin story, the odds of this working out don’t change. Wherever we go, there we are—totally tragic and out of control. The havoc our passion creates is literally making you sick, but you’ll never admit it.

This trip is intended as an escape. A respite from the harsh demands of your wife’s lawyer, the real repercussions of our workplace romance, the tenuous nature of our cohabitation. Sober truths await us in Florida, bitter and anti-climactic like the Ecstasy comedown we recently shared at your best friend’s wedding.

I hoped for an evening of memorable romance, some sort of affirmation that the hardship, the wild impulses, the inevitable hurt, the inadvertent destruction, the sheer and total dysfunction of it all is worth it. I hoped, at the very least, you’d take me to Cheer’s.

But I refuse to wallow. This is our vacation, goddammit. We’re in Boston and we’re in love. I grab the stationery off the nightstand, uncap the pen with my teeth. I lay on my stomach like a homesick camper, my head resting at your feet. While I stare at your stubbly mask of a face, I pen you a love letter. You’re my destiny and I find a dozen eloquent—no, florid and insincere ways— to tell you so. I write about everything but tonight except to say that when you’re sleeping you look pure, except to say I know forever and it’s you.

Eventually you wake up and reach for me, chapped lips forming excuses. I silence you with my girlish grin, gift you the notepad with mute anticipation. When you read my words, you cry just enough to seem genuine. Your voice is sturdy and weighted with promises far too heavy to keep. You say I love you like it’s an instant replay. You chant my many pet names until I nearly forget who I am. This is the way I like it best: to be lost in your perception of me; to place faith in mutual fantasy; to root for us, the underdogs, whose love will win out if they continue to ignore the rest.

When we return to Florida, your wife finds my letter in your glove compartment. I thought you’d be more discreet, more appreciative of this private—no, performative—testimony. She rips it to shreds; makes you promise I’m gone. And you do but then you don’t. Until you do.

I realize now what I’ve lost, you say. You tell me I need to find another place to live, another person to love. And I wonder who’s really lost what when I whisper, okay, while clenching a throw pillow that probably once belonged to her. And that night, as I thrash and wail in our big white bed, lost in all that I’m losing, calling out to you on the couch, pleading for you to come and hold me, the back of you sighing my name with pity and indifference, I still think I can turn this around. I’ve done it before. Like that night in Boston. I can assure us that what we have is kismet, record-breaking chemistry, a riot of the human heart that can’t be contained. I refuse to let all the rapture—no, destruction—be for nothing.

Everything hinges on Game 7 of the ACLS: a trip to the World Series, the reversal of a curse, a city’s restored belief in themselves. Part of me—no, nearly all of me—thinks you’ll come back if the Red Sox pull this off. At Yankee Stadium, a tired yet determined Martinez remains on the mound long after he should. His manager checks in with him but decides not to pull him out. And when Wakefield closes in the 11th inning and Aaron Boone nails a home run, it’s not the result of some sinister voodoo. If the fans were honest with themselves, they’d admit it was the way the game was played.

Crow Jonah Norlander

VIRGINS by K-Ming Chang

February 9, 2022 · Fiction

Sixth grade was the year I met Melanie. She’d transferred from private school, Catholic, and around her neck was a copper locket with the Virgin Mary’s portrait inside it. It was the first white person I’d ever seen, minus the wasian in our class who had freckles even in the crack of her ass. The first time Melanie showed me what was inside her locket, we were changing together in the concrete-walled locker room, right in front of the window spattered with flies that spanned the gym teacher’s office. Everyone knew those were the worst lockers to get, the ones in front of the window, because inside the office was our lesbian gym teacher with breath like bug spray and gray pubic hair at her temples. She never wore a bra under her gray T-shirt, and so her nipples pecked out at us like twin beaks, twitching as she chased us on the blacktop, blowing the whistle that meant run, bitch. While the lesbian gym teacher paced the length of the window, looking out at us, I was bent over, trying to cross my arms over my chest while simultaneously bucking off my teal terrycloth T-shirt. When I glanced beside me at Melanie, I saw that she could change from her pink baby-doll T-shirt into her gym shirt without undressing at all, and that she could do it with her shorts too, some kind of magic, the uniform descending over her like an eyelid, clean as the sky when it swaps its skin from morning to evening. Melanie saw me looking and said she’d teach me. It involved acrobatic choreography, yanking my original shirt out of the sleeve of my substitute, threading my head precisely. She was fleshy like a chicken breast, so I was impressed by the elegance of her undressing, and it was satisfying to be naked next to someone who wasn’t yet whittled into any shape. In comparison, I was a silver skewer, I was a preened wing, I had a few bones showing. Beside her, I glittered like the locket that swung from her neck when she bent, scabbing over her chest. When I asked her why Mary’s first name was Virgin, she said because Mary gave birth as one. That doesn’t make sense, I said, did they check to see it was really a baby and not just a really big shit? Melanie turned away from me, but I could still see the puckered purple line at the back of her neck where she carried the weight of that face.

I didn’t master Melanie’s undressing method for another three weeks, but our skin solidarity strengthened—sometimes she’d hold up her baby-doll shirt as a curtain so that the lesbian gym teacher wouldn’t see me through the window while I fumbled with my sleeves—and I discovered several things about Melanie: first, that she wore that mare-haired woman around her neck by choice, which confused me because the woman wasn’t even pretty or a celebrity; second, that she lived two streets away from me, in an apartment building where a husband-wife murder-suicide had occurred in the past year; and third, that she didn’t know we had three holes. This was evident one day in the locker room when I chose to change in a bathroom stall—I made fun of the girls who did that, the ones who still looked like wishbones, who had no fat buttered to their chests at all—because my tampon leaked and I didn’t want to flash the stain at our lesbian gym teacher, who might interpret it as a mating call, the way birds grow bright feathers on their breasts to attract females. When I left the bathroom and joined Melanie at the exit of the locker room, she asked why I’d changed on my own, and I said I’d gotten it, and Melanie said, oh, I haven’t gotten mine yet, I thought I did last year, but actually I just peed blood because my brother threw me at the TV, he was playing Call of Duty, so how do you know if it’s blood you’re peeing or the actual thing, and I said, you idiot, it doesn’t come out of that hole, and she said what hole, and I had to explain there were three—I held my fingers up to her nose and furled them down one at a time—the pee one, the poop one, and the period one. Melanie said oh, like the five holes, the five wounds Jesus bore, and I said no, three. Three holes. And only one of them likes to bleed, Melanie said, I wonder why. She said she thought everything came out of one hole, kind of like the spout of a soft serve machine, where sometimes it’s a vanilla swirl, sometimes it comes out chocolate, and sometime it’s a chocolate-and-vanilla braided swirl, and I said what the hell are you talking about. Melanie didn’t like when I said hell, and always chained her voice to mine: O, she added abruptly. You can’t say what the hello, I told her, because no one says that. Then we were separated on the blacktop, split up and lined up along rows of spray-painted numbers, 1-60—Melanie was in the tens because her last name was An, and I was in the thirties because my last name was Hsiao. I watched her as we did our stretches, our gym teacher up in front, fiddling with the whistle in her mouth like a nipple, strands of her spit suspended in the air when she pulled it away from her lips, a cobweb that stickied all our hands. I watched the fabric of Melanie’s black jersey shorts strain itself sheer as she bent over to touch her left toe, her underwear showing through—My Melody print—and I was embarrassed that for all her sorcery with sleeves in the locker room, I could see the dark sweat stain rivering the crack of her ass, flooding its bed. She bent over further, her fingertips skimming the blacktop, and for a second before she yanked it back up, the hem of her skirt scrolled all the way down to her chin and I saw that she wasn’t wearing a bra, that she had nipples small and pink, like the ceiling of pimples I plucked off my buttocks, flicking the skin into the toilet, her belly button an outie, its shadow hanging like a berry, and I reached forward to pluck it with my tongue before looking away, looking somewhere that could not implicate me or my teeth. Something wet released between my legs, hot as a finger seaming my skin, and I thought I’d pissed myself before remembering it was my week. I ran from my number thirty-one into the locker room bathroom, looking down at the jellied blood, so much of it. Then it was Melanie standing outside the stall and knocking with her knees, asking what had happened, and I told her to go into the teacher’s office and look in the lost-and-found for some shorts. I turned away from her voice and looked down into the toilet, dropping my underwear into it, the water turning that color of beef blood in the trenches of a Styrofoam tray. Melanie paused outside the door, and I said hurry, hurry, and she said, did you know this is punishment for Eve’s sin? And I said, oh my god, now is not the time for you to be a Christian. Get pants. But Melanie lingered outside the door, and finally I sighed and said come in, look at what you’ve done to me, look at what I’ll have to live with if you don’t help me. In the stall, she bent over the toilet and stared at the wad of my underwear, rafting up like an organ, pulsing and winged, and said I bet this is what an abortion looks like, don’t you think it’s sad, and I said no, just help me flush it. I pressed on the handle with my toe and watched as it slithered down before getting snagged, the toilet hacking it back up, butchered water splashing our ankles and veining the floor. Shit, I said, shit, and reached in to tug it out. No, don’t get rid of it, she said, catching my wrist. We panted, flinching at the water that would ring our socks with permanent stains, and she moved my wrist up to her lips, latched her mouth to the center of my palm, the tip of her tongue plunging a hole there, circling its rim before threading through me, and between my legs was the wet again, bloodless and bearing her face.

Crow Jonah Norlander

Y by Thomas Thatcher

February 7, 2022 · Fiction

I picked up the BB gun. I carried it to the road over my shoulder. Then eventually I pointed it at an oncoming car. The driver didn’t see me. He was driving slowly and he didn’t see me with the BB gun. He was about to hear Tsshh Krr. Copper-coated premium BB’s. I thought it might have cracked the windshield but it hit and skipped off the windshield. Boom and the smoke of the incense, which came with the prayers of the saints, ascended up before God out of the angel's hand (Rev.8:4)

We needed bread and I didn’t have any bread. When I get some I’ll get us our own apartment. I went to the road because I was having trouble telling Yardane all of the truth. I was saying some of it but not all. So I pulled the trigger. The driver slammed his brakes. I jumped and made off like a coyote. Yardane closed the screen door, reluctantly. The driver and the car kept going. I stepped over branches and made my way back up the driveway. Dogs are barking. We all felt better. Love made perfect.

Yardane walks into Penn Station. She passes by a guy in uniform with his buddies in uniforms and they all have guns. Yardane doesn’t care. She just doesn’t want me to have a gun. She calls me when she finds her seat and talks delicately. I’m excited and I’m sitting on the front steps zooming in and out of the line that means “train tracks” on the maps application.

They have now compassed us in our steps: they have set their eyes bowing down to the earth; (Psalm17:11) So I looked down the driveway and saw all of its dirt and rocks. I ate the blackberries I had in my hand. I think, fuck I’m doing better. She sounds like herself. She sounds sweet. What an awesome combination; Yardane and blackberries.

I’ll cook lentil soup for us tonight. She will put her arms around me, then her leg around my leg, when I’m washing the bowls and spoons. We are so good. I went into the bathroom, put my head under the faucet, and swallowed an oxy. I went into my grandmother's guest room and looked around for a place to crawl into. I’ll leave in a couple of hours and pick up Yardane at the Providence Amtrak Station.

I’m curled up. I think about her and I in a city. I’ll buy a dirt-bike and we’ll fuck the city up. I saw the city and I saw no temple therein: for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it. And the city had no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it: for the glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof. (Rev.21:22-23) We are in the black Ford pick-up truck and we’re leaving the Providence Amtrak Station.

I say, “We’re going to Cape Cod. D’you want watch me hit 90,”

She is holding my leg. She is sitting in the middle seat next to me. I tell her to take the wheel and she says she hates taking the wheel. I kiss her forehead and she takes the wheel.

Vincent called me 2 times so I called him back. We made a plan to go to an NA meeting and then get food at Friendly’s. I tell him Yardane and I will pick him and his girlfriend up in an hour. The dog is barking. I thought about yelling but quietly said her name to myself.

Watermelons and kiwi’s are the same, possibly. I’m holding a small watermelon-kiwi. I bite into it and I feel the skin get stuck in between my teeth and I don’t care that much. This one is nice, it's sweet and drips on my shirt. Walking with Yardane up the handicap ramp is tiring. I think about her and I both looking at the handicap ramp when we got here and feeling retarded.

I found two seats in the back and pulled her wrist so we looked attached at the hip. We entered and exited the room 2 times before I found our spots. She said very softly, “Remedial NA” and I knew she meant her and I needed extra help. She made me laugh over the moment of silence for those still suffering. We are suffering. We are suffering and playing with debris. I stop thinking about where I’ll be when everyone who has not received the mark goes high, higher and I listen. Someone is sharing. I’m giving them my attention but Yardane is sitting next to me. I’m ready, I think. It might happen soon. Are you ready. Is Yardane ready. Yes, yes.

Later on we drove past a gate. It looked old. 4 of us sat in the big pick-up truck and it was quiet. Vincent’s girl needed a ride home so she was with us too. Vincent made some light-hearted jokes about her in front of her and then they kissed and she got out of the backseat and disappeared. I knew what was going on when we passed the gate and parked in this abandoned parking lot in a weird part of town. She had told us on the ride there that her new tent was nice and, if her stuff wasn’t all around, sleeps 4 people.

Vincent asked me if I was serious about getting into bull-riding. I told him yes I was. I asked him if he wanted a small tin of chewing tobacco I bought. I said the taste isn’t all bad. I said, “it’s actually minty,” I was staring at the woods in the headlights. And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea. And I … saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband (Rev.21:1-2).

Tornado warning. The truck will be gone. Tornado. It’ll get shot up to a black storm in the sky. My dirt bike will be gone too. The tornado is moving north-west, south-west, west, south, and north. Not the usual winds but powerful winds. It’s the end of Eastern Massachusetts. But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only (Matt.24:36). I called my mom to tell her.

It’s finally going to be real. The life after this life. The life with Yardane after this life with Yardane. She will feel my emotions really hard in the after-life. For the first time she will have no doubts at all about how real everything is. I’ll be found, my body devastated and not resembling me, against a rock, maintaining the stoic face that I was never able to make in my time alive. For wheresoever the carcase is, there will the eagles be gathered together (Matt.24:28) Darkness, clouds, and more wind.

That night Yardane stepped over me and I grabbed her leg. I love her legs. I called her a doll and kissed her thigh. I lit another cigarette and handed it to her. Sitting on the front steps with Yardane makes my faith stronger. Everything is going to be alright in a couple of seconds. I heard it too. She heard a bang. You possibly heard it. And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind (Rev.6:13).

And she picked up pieces of space and pieces of the moon. We picked up metal sharp objects and pointed them at each other, giggling. A meteor hit an airplane above us. We smile together. The town is going to be under water, maybe. There’s a small barn made for chickens that we crawl into and there she kissed my arm. She’s almost asleep. Her small body made a Z shape and then it made a G shape.

I can reach and touch her toes. I can touch her knees underneath white cloth. A frock that we agreed on was modest. I clad myself in XL black gym shorts and an XXL green T-shirt. She likes when my clothes are sometimes falling off like a shepherd who holds his robe up while herding. The pebbles on our driveway. Her leather shoes on the pebbles. There was something (Maybe a ribbon tied on her ponytail, or the pattern of her stockings) that reminded me of Sunday school.

Crow Jonah Norlander

FIFTY-FIVE AND OLDER by Christopher Notarnicola

February 4, 2022 · Fiction

I’m about to be sick on the front porch. Granddad is at the back, beating his cane against the screen door to scare the Muscovy ducks. The neighbors understand—nobody wants duck mess on the walkway. We’ve split a buttered bagel and yesterday’s half pot. He’s probably finishing breakfast while my first bite slips from my tongue in a string of saliva, landing like egg yolk in the flowerbed. I gag. The neighbors have a hard time with my prolonged presence, though no one seems to have heard my heaving. Drum and bass in the front drive after midnight, and in come the questions via landline. Granddad could tell them nothing they would readily understand—the loss of a wife can only excuse so much noise. Two ducks have made their way around front, three puffy ducklings in tow. The adults are black and white with red growths around the eyes and bills. The little ones are yellow with brown over top, stumbling along, chittering through their perfect beaks. I find it hard to understand how a creature can bear such mutation. Granddad has stopped with his cane. And I am surprised to see that a butterfly casts a shadow. The coffee has gone lukewarm again, which seems to be better, and the sip goes down. More ducklings round the flowerbed, intrigued by my aborted breakfast. A gag sends them off. The older ducks are past the mailbox, crossing the neighbor’s front walk, leading the brood. The neighbor’s door opens a crack, and slivers of gold reach for the lawn. My stomach flips, pulling me to the mulch. The coffee comes up with a burn. Bile sinks in the shade of a peace lily. Out back, Granddad has started with his cane again.

Crow Jonah Norlander

ALERT by Caelyn Cobb

February 2, 2022 · Fiction

We all regret downloading that crime reporting app. “I’ve learned that I’m always a few blocks from some guy swinging a chain,” our friend says at dinner. For us, it’s gunshots or fires. Gunshots reported, four hundred feet. One mile. Six hundred yards. People on the app give these alerts thousands of likes. That’s what you get, someone comments. “Probably just fireworks,” I say. Those distances don’t feel that close. One mile might as well be a different universe. They have a different congresswoman and everything.

When we’re getting ready for bed the app says there’s a fire at Food Universe. Their lemons are always moldy and they don’t even have goat cheese. Burn, motherfucker! the commenters cheer. A few weeks ago the worst pizzeria in the neighborhood burned down at three in the morning. That time everyone on the app was devastated. Where will I get my pizza now? Literally anywhere else, we both agreed. Now the pizzeria is almost done rebuilding. We walked by and the door was open: white tiles accented with green, all the chrome new and shining.

“You know what my father would have called that?” you asked. I did, but I didn’t say it. Some things shouldn’t be said, even if it was someone else who said them.

A siren wails. A woman who lives across from the grocery store posts a video. We expect smoke, black and billowing, red-orange lights flashing, but it’s nothing. Y’all are fuckin dumbasses, a commenter says. Fuck you, someone else replies. Laugh emoji. Thumbs up. Some people aren’t laughing. Some people have darker things to say. The siren is still going, farther away—who knows to where. Someone on the app will figure it out. Someone on the app is probably there already.

The local paper tweets that a woman set herself on fire. She was trying to get bedbugs out of her car. “Can you even get bedbugs in your car?” you want to know. They could be anywhere, I remind you. When we had them in that first apartment I would see them in the hallway. If only someone would set fire to that place. Sometimes fire is the only option. Your grandma told us that’s what they did back in the forties: big bonfires of their beds and chairs and clothes, right on the sidewalk. Someone on the app is probably filming that burning car right now, getting thousands of fire emoji reactions. 366 yards away, the woman is probably already in the ambulance, a paramedic rubbing silver into her wounds, pushing medication to keep her calm.

Another siren. My phone buzzes. I turn it to silent and roll onto my side to sleep. You’re still sitting up, awake, the bright white square of your phone lighting up the hollows of your face, vigilant.

Crow Jonah Norlander

HALF-SISTERS by Kristen M. Ploetz

January 26, 2022 · Fiction

red + blue

Her birthstone is amethyst and she has his blue eyes. At the fair, he buys her a purple balloon; when it slips from her grip, he buys her another and ties it to her wrist, winks as he promises, this one will always stay. When he reads to her at night he points to the lupine in Miss Rumphius and tells her about the importance of family. On sunny days he holds her hand as they meander through rocky tide pools where they look for the purple arms of sea stars under shimmering water. She steps barefoot on an urchin and he wipes away her tears. When she is eight, he walks her from house to house on Halloween, a wizard dressed in purple and gold who still believes in magic and forever. A week later, in the wake of a November hurricane that gives birth to a lilac sky, he tells her he’s leaving and not coming back. Her veins purple with sorrow, her breath uneven and shallow as she waits and waits for things to go back to the way they were. Each night she dots lavender oil on her temples and wrists to coax slumber, to quiet the heartpound in her ears. Her mother buys her an orchid for the south-facing sill in her room and still tucks grape BubbleYum in her lunches, but everything remains irrevocable and broken.

Years pass. She finally musters the nerve to visit on Christmas. Over runny pie and under the heavyweight safety of her hoodie she discovers devotion doesn’t come with a lifetime guarantee. She texts her mother from the bathroom: can u pick me up? total waste of time, wipes her eyes on her sleeve as she strides past the table.

He drives her to her first year at the university, an offer her mother forces her to accept because he has the truck and she can’t get the day off. They ride in silence except when he nods toward the hills and says, That’s where the grapes grow. It is the last time she’ll ever be within arm’s reach, confirms the magic of him withered on the vine too long ago. She tacks her course schedule to the cork board above her desk and sets a cup of pencils under the box store lamp, drops a sharpener in the top drawer. Her lavender bunny with the missing ear and folded belly leans against her pillow just like it has since she was a toddler. She vows to sketch out her own life from this new beginning, to study only beautiful things. In art class she discovers violet is a spectral color with its own wavelength, that purple is similar to the eye but a fundamental difference exists—just like him before and after. She is seduced by Claude’s violettomania and Vincent’s ear, doesn’t think either of them were mad but bruised somewhere deep inside like her. She draws on the warm backs of friends, plants iris and crocus between valleys of scapulae, and soon drops out to apprentice and hone her craft where a neon tube hangs in the dirty bay of a street level window, the periwinkle argon glow of Tattoo City a beacon for those who seek something that lasts. Her first client pays her in tears and a fistful of tens, bares her shoulder and talks about how heliotrope is a flower of devotion, once the permissible color of half-mourning after weeks of wearing black, talks about how she buried her sister five weeks ago. Dots of blood trail the needle. She thinks of the urchin that pierced the sole of her foot that one summer. Her attention breaks when the woman says, Do you have any sisters? She draws pale purple ink into her needle and thinks about how November is drawing near, how it will soon be time to buy another orchid for her window sill.

yellow + blue

Her birthstone is emerald and she has his blue eyes. On her first birthday, he ties a green balloon to the back of her high chair, watches it shrink and pucker over a few days before he tucks the cool flap of latex into a memory box at the back of the closet. He doesn’t want to forget this time. He reads her The Wizard of Oz, points to the Emerald City and alludes to the importance of home; her eyes are heavy with sleep when his lies of omission come easy. On sunny days, he holds her hand along the rocky tide pools where they look for sea lettuce under the shimmering water, where he guides her to pockets of soft sand and smooth, algae-coated stone so her flesh remains unbroken. He shields his eyes from the glare bouncing off the water, averts his gaze from a purple constellation of sea stars. On Halloween night he walks her from house to house; she is Tinkerbell and waves her wand as she says, I love you, Daddy, effortlessly beguiling him with her captive magic.

One Christmas—the one when she gets the parakeet she names Limey Lime—a teenage girl comes for dessert wearing an oversized hoodie in a clearance rack shade of purple. Her mother is silent when she sets down the festive green plates runny with apple filling and whipped cream, “Holly Jolly Christmas” bleating from the living room stereo. There is something familiar about the girl, something in her frowning profile. After two bites of pie, the girl spends a long time in the bathroom. Her father throws his napkin on his chair and knocks on the bathroom door, comes back a few minutes later with his lips pressed into a thin, angry line. The girl emerges while the plates are being cleared and a horn beeps out front. The girl doesn’t say goodbye, doesn’t ever come back.

He shows her the world, gives her every spare moment: quetzals of Guatemala and grassy Irish coasts and malachite beads being strung onto necklaces by Kenyan women and the undulating green of the Northern Lights, every summer endless and carefree in that verdant filter of childhood. Hears about her first kiss near the back nine of the country club, helps heal the heartbreak with a week of mint chip double scoops he picks up on the way home from work. When he drops her off at college, he slides the edge of an American Express under the heirloom Emeralite lamp she plucked from his home office, says he’ll text her later that day. She studies botany, presses her cheeks against woodland mosses during field studies, mounts ferns onto large pages in the university herbarium late into the night, talks for hours with her father when he calls every Sunday. With a loan he never actually wants her to pay back, she opens a small flower shop in a trendy pocket of Knoxville, watches him hang the palm frond wallpaper and dig holes for young gingkos in the sidewalk planter and paint the potting bench Kermit green. Friday nights on her veranda she sips absinthe cocktails with friends in their own private l’heure verte where she tells them—every time—This was Van Gogh’s green muse before they talk about the virtue of being loved by so many, how it comes so easy. The business blooms and she can’t believe her luck at selling succulents and air plants to the Instagram masses, has a four-leaf clover etched onto her hip as Ink Street hums with a green krypton glow outside the picture window. She watches the needle drag across her skin and rests her hand above her still-taut belly as she watches, imagines the day her blue-eyed child will bounce on her father’s knee, wonders whatever happened to that girl that one Christmas, if she is happier now, happy like her.

Crow Jonah Norlander

THREE SELECTIONS FROM MORE ANIMIST BABBLE (A WIP) by Bram Riddlebarger

January 24, 2022 · Fiction

The Hornworm and the Green Tomato

The hornworm had eaten the better part of the upper reaches of the tomato plant.

The green tomato was petrified. It was already late in the season and now this.

“YOU BETTER NOT EAT ME,” screamed the green tomato as the hornworm cast glances its way.

“I’m so fucking horny,” said the hornworm. Its rear horn rigid.

“I’ll BE RED IN A FEW DAYS,” negotiated/bargained/pleaded the green tomato with a faint blush.

“You’ll be red-y now,” leered the worm. It ashed a cigarette as tobacco worms did. The cherry burned.

The hornworm bit deeply. The sexual juices of the green tomato grew into flight.

Fern

“Nobody loves me,” said the fern.

The water of the pond reflected a gray sky.

“I hate this fucking job,” said the fern.

The wind blew across the cubicle of the earth.

“There’s no future,” said the fern. “No hope for a better life.”

The western fires had all died.

But they would return.

“It’s cold out here. I’m freezing to death!” said the fern.

The sun set on the ridgeline.

“Even Job was better off than me,” said the fern. Its fronds covered its face.

The fern swayed as the cold settled in from on high.

“Boy, you sure are a sensitive fella aren’t you?” asked the sedge grasses grown brown and brittle. “What kinda fern are you anyway?”

The fern’s nose cleared with the change in season.

“A sensitive fern,” said the fern.

The sedge fashioned a casket for the fern.

The first frost set in.

The Bumblebee and the Stink Bug

for Graham

The bumblebee sat exhausted on the large green leaf of a delicata squash plant overtaking the beans. The bumblebee was covered head to toe in orange pollen. It had been up since 4am. It barely slept at all.

“Fucking shit,” the bumblebee cursed. It combed the pollen to fly.

A stink bug watched from the next row of beans.

“God, I’d murder someone to be carefree,” said the bumblebee taking longer than the regulated 15 minute break.

“That’s not pollen, baby,” said the stink bug. “It’s just my sexual juices.”

Crow Jonah Norlander

COURT MANDATED THERAPY by Sage Tyrtle

January 19, 2022 · Fiction

Bill is not having flashbacks to Vietnam. Even though the shiny-haired psychiatrist says there's no doubt at all, even though the list of symptoms looks like his autobiography. Bill sits on the burnt orange couch. He looks at the palm frond wallpaper. He says in his most even tone, "No, I believe you're mistaken," and he's being careful because if the psychiatrist decides that he's a danger to himself or others then he could end up a Thorazine zombie like Harry Alessi up at the sanitarium. Bill clears his throat and makes himself look into the psychiatrist's eyes. Makes himself say, "But let's explore it further."

Bill is not having flashbacks to Vietnam. Yesterday, when Bill was kneeling on the floor at the local Goodwill, keening, he wasn't hearing gunfire. He couldn't feel socks that had been wet for so long they were disintegrating. His hands weren't dripping in blood. Bill didn't feel the horror the psychiatrist is telling him he felt, and avoiding places that remind him of the war won't help. When Bill was on the floor, shaking his head in response to the Goodwill manager who was pleading with him to leave, he was holding a Holly Hobby doll.

Bill is not having flashbacks to Vietnam. Yesterday, curled into a ball on the floor in the Goodwill, he was also in 1971, he was also back at the house in Munroe Falls. He was ripping his draft notice into a hundred pieces and flushing those pieces down the toilet. He was stuffing clothes into a duffel bag. He was emptying the Green Giant Frozen Peas box of his mother's pin money with a muttered apology. He was walking backwards on the highway, sticking out his thumb, muttering, "North, just north," to the drivers. He was thinking of his Canadian wife who bounced out of bed at 5 AM, who made up silly songs whenever she saw a bumblebee, who never existed. The tiny apartment they never shared in Montreal and their imaginary little girl named Judy. Who pointed at the picture in the book he was reading and said, "I am Sylvester and you are the Magic Pebble, okay?" He is mourning his nineteen-year-old self, his gentleness in the years before he reported for duty, Sir.

Bill is not having flashbacks to Vietnam. But he nods and nods and tries to remember how to grin in a way that is convincing. He shakes the psychiatrist's hand and promises to fill that prescription, doctor, and when he makes it outside he sits on a park bench where a pigeon flies over and looks up at him with bright eyes. He rips the prescription into a hundred pieces. He lets the wind take them.

Crow Jonah Norlander

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