Flash Archives

SECOND HONEYMOON by Michael Czyzniejewski

August 30, 2021 · Fiction

I met my wife on our honeymoons, the ones we were taking with other people. Both of us went parasailing when our newlywed spouses were too afraid. A storm came in just as we lifted into the air and we were caught in its path. Our lines got detached, sending us parasailing into the horizon. We woke up on a deserted island.

Two months later, firmly in love, we were found by crab photographers. Coincidentally, our spouses back home fell in love, too, assuming we were dead. At the press conference after our rescue, the four of us laughed about how things work out. Soon we were all divorced and remarried to the right people, no hard feelings.

On the island, I’d heard so much about my soon-to-be in-laws. They lived in Minneapolis but didn’t wear sweaters. They were lapsed Lutherans, they line-danced, and they played competitive Jenga. They ran an apiary.

My parents had been dentists in Toledo. They were both dead: parasailing accident on their twenty-fifth anniversary vacation—not from a storm, but by flying straight into a bridge. Miami renamed the bridge after them. It has a toll—it leads to an island where flamingos are bred—but they gave me an ID card, said I could cross for free. I was eight. I still have never been to Florida.

My new wife, Barbi, took me to see her parents after our wedding. I was allergic to bee stings and afraid to go. Barbi described their suits, the kind beekeepers wear in cartoons. She’d worked with bees her entire life and had only been stung once, on the tip of her right nipple. She swore it made her sting-proof: Bees were her chicken pox. We’d been through a lot together, I figured, agreeing to go. If I died from asphyxiation I knew she’d genuinely feel horrible.

Barbi’s mom looked exactly like Barbi, twenty years older, more of a big sister than a mom. Maybe she was future Barbi, sent back in time to pose as her own mother. She also didn’t care for me—she was a staunch fan of Barbi’s original husband, Santino, the guy now married to my original wife, Sue Ellen. Santino reminded Barbi’s mom of a boy she’d dated in high school, a boy who died visiting her at midnight, climbing the trellis to her bedroom, falling and impaling himself on the lawn sprinkler. Naturally, Santino had to be this old beau reincarnated, in love with Barbi, her genetic doppelganger. Barbi’s mom asked how our flight was. Barbi said it felt long. Her mom replied, “Santino knew the value of first class.” She looked my way. “You, sir, are no Santino.”

Barbi’s dad came in from beekeeping. He was still wearing the outfit, including the hat, a pith helmet with black netting veiling his face. He took off his glove to shake my hand, churning it like butter. He told me he loved me, leaning in to kiss me, pushing his net into my mouth. He removed his headgear. He looked exactly like me. If Barbi was the genetic copy of her mom, I was that for her dad. Helmet off, he leaned in for that kiss. “I love you,” he said. “Son.”

Barbi’s mom had readied pot roast with potatoes and carrots. It tasted sweet, like candied pot roast. “You can really taste the honey,” Barbi said. I coughed, as allergic to honey as I was to bee stings. By the time I hit the floor, my hands swelled to twice their size. Just before my eyes shut, I saw Barbi’s dad straddling me, the epinephrine injector from my pocket in his fist. A pinhead of air seeped into my lungs. I fell unconscious.

I woke up in Barbi’s bedroom. Barbi leapt to my side when she saw me stir, kissing me up and down, crying from joy that I was alive. After she calmed herself, she asked why I’d eaten that pot roast if I was allergic to honey. I replied that I’d never had pot roast with honey. She laughed, asked where I’d grown up, Mars?!

Her dad stuck his head in. I thanked him for saving my life. He told me he loved me. Barbi’s mom, from the hallway, told him to ask if I wanted more pot roast. Her dad laughed like it was the funniest joke he’d ever heard. He came in and kissed Barbi on the lips then kissed me again, this time on the forehead.

“Feel better, Champ,” he said.

Barbi shut the door when Dad departed. She came toward me, unbuttoning her blouse, mounting my abdomen. I told her I didn’t think this was the time. I still couldn’t breathe right. That’s what makes it so appealing, she said, everything that made her happy all in one place: her parents, her bedroom, me. As she undid my belt, she shared a funny thought: “What if I got pregnant right here, our first night together with my folks?” I laughed like it was the funniest joke I’d ever heard.

Afterward, Barbi asleep, I got up to use the bathroom. I walked past her parents’ room. Her dad was sitting on the bed. I only caught a glimpse, but I would have sworn he was masturbating.

I stepped into the bathroom just as Barbi’s mom was coming out. It was dark, pitch. Before I could say anything, she put her arms around my neck, whispered, Are you ready for me? and attached her mouth to mine, prying open my lips. I tried to stop her, but she pushed me against the wall, forcing her tongue past my teeth, her thigh into my crotch. I pictured the horror that was on its way, her finding out it was me, not Barbi’s dad. Or maybe she knew already. She kissed me deeper and I tasted sweetness on her tongue, something from her palate, perhaps from between her teeth.

My heart raced, my throat closed, my eyes shut, replacing one type of darkness with another.

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BEAN HEADS by Mila Jaroniec

August 26, 2021 · Creative Nonfiction

In the little free library was a hand-sewn chapbook with poems from all the poets who had read at Bean Heads. The open mic was every Friday and gray men would shuffle in to crinkle coffee-stained pages at the microphone. It was an Event. There were gasps and snaps and silence. I didn’t understand it. Here I was, fifteen years old and crafting big papers about The Count of Monte Cristo, and someone had written this:

Amoral Amnesty

A parliament of stalking butlers

Deafening silence over the telephone

The Pope flows like running water

Calligraphy makes the Queen go blind.

The poets must be on to something though because even now, after all my university degrees and formal trainings, this is still the only poem I know by heart.

The only other girl at Bean Heads was a barista. I envied her job, if only for the fact that she got to smell coffee and look at people instead of smell steramine and look at their food remains. She asked me the Cambridge equivalent of What do you want to be when you grow up? which was, What are you gonna do when you get out of here? Cambridge, New York was a tiny town that maybe after a couple beers could pass for a bootleg Stars Hollow, but I was too underage and nervous to make friends so after work I’d go straight back to my godfather’s place to listen to Lacuna Coil and smoke Ecstasy herbal cigarettes and write down my dreams. I made boxes of mac & cheese and took them upstairs to eat alone.

I told the barista I didn’t know what I was going to do but I wanted to write. She asked if I’d ever heard of NYLON Magazine. I hadn’t. She said it was her favorite and the next day she brought in a copy.

Growing up in Stow, Ohio, all the magazines for sale at the Discount Drug Mart in the early 2000s were different versions of the same thing. Glamour and Cosmo and Vogue, tailored to caricatures of women it seemed a lot of work to learn how to be. Down a step, Seventeen magazine showed smiling girls who had solid friendships and butterfly clips, whose problems had to do with what extracurriculars to give up because they were president of too many. I wonder how my life would’ve been different if I’d known about Rookie then, but if you’re always validated, there’s nothing left to push against.

NYLON was beyond this. No diet tips, no harrowing sex advice, no recommendations for jaw placement during a blow job. There were record recommendations and reviews of actual books. Young fashion designers who made nonsensical clothes worn by stoned-looking models and hand-drawn products on the beauty page. Chartreuse lipstick, three pairs of socks on a pair of untoned calves stuffed inside fuschia jelly platforms, unbrushed hair and absurdly short bangs. Fashion that made you go What the fuck? No $2000 trench coats that were fucking beige. And there was something else: the Private Icon.

Each month the Private Icon centered a heroine or set of heroines from a cult film, with a description of what made them iconic plus a recommended list of clothes and products with which to emulate their style. Alabama from True Romance. Catherine Deneuve in The Hunger. Winona and Angelina, the OG fucked up gal pals in Girl, Interrupted. According to NYLON, canonization was not only possible, it was accessible by formula. Instead of becoming Your Best Self, as the other magazines instructed you to do, you could play characters. If you were having a hard time becoming somebody on your own, you could assemble the conflux of elements that had made somebody else unforgettable. If you wanted, you could buy the exact shade of lipstick worn by Penny Lane.

I wish I could live in New York and write for NYLON, the barista said.

And that was that, and then we went back to being dishwasher and barista, not going out after work and not saying much more to each other, and sooner or later the summer ended and I took my under-the-table money and went home, along with the copy of NYLON and the chapbook with “Amoral Amnesty” in it. Eventually I moved to New York and replaced the Ecstasy cigarettes with menthols and the mac & cheese with salads. I kept eating in my room alone.

The magazines came every month to my Alphabet City apartment. I had a Victoria’s Secret Angel for a downstairs neighbor and got my nails done next to Justin Vivian Bond. I tried interesting things with scarves and lipstick and bought an ugly pair of Miu Miu sandals at the Buffalo Exchange down the street. They were so ugly not one single person liked them on Instagram. And they fell apart on my way to buy a raw activated coconut something—you had to eat like an It Girl, which was something like the Private Icon in real time and involved a lot of raw organics punctuated by the occasional craving for a Big Mac and fries—after which I dumped the sandals in a trashcan on Avenue B and walked the rest of the way to Rawvolution barefoot, really living.

And then: I did end up writing for NYLON. I emailed an editor on the suggestion of my girlfriend and got a freelance gig writing beauty articles. Well sooner or later I would be hired to write features, I thought, and go on assignments, and the world would open up. I felt justified in having subscribed to NYLON, stacking the magazines up in a pile along the wall for lack of a bookshelf, knowing I could write anything in there better than the people they hired. None of that happened. A handful of my pieces were published online. They weren’t hiring staff writers anymore, they said, on account of the budget. I started a series called “Beauty and the Book” that made It Girls out of indie novel heroines. The series died after one installment. Nothing I did ever made it to print.

And so: the closest I came to being an It Girl was walking home from Hell’s Kitchen in the rain at 3:30 in the morning wearing Jeffrey Campbell Litas when they were still cool and a see-through Skingraft dress with a leather harness and no bra, finally skinny from Adderall and out of my mind on cocaine, posing for invisible cameras in the empty glow streets of Times Square. A show for no audience. That time, and the time a Teen Vogue editor tried on my Balmain coat and tweeted, I am tweeting from inside a Balmain coat, or the time I went to The Standard at the High Line with a pretty girl who convinced me we were pretty enough to get in upstairs sans guest list, and was right, and we left our dates downstairs playing pool even though I suspected there was no guest list, and was right, and had $18 vodka gimlets across from Rosie Huntington-Whitely. That’s my life in magazine copy.

And you were right about New York. It is expensive. NYLON still owes me a hundred and fifty dollars and they stopped answering my emails.

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OGOPOGO LIVES by Sheldon Birnie

August 25, 2021 · Fiction

It was Canada Day by the big lake and everyone was right fucked up.

After the fireworks show on the beach wrapped up, the crowd took to the streets. Things were getting messy. Drunk girls held on to each other, hiking miniskirts up around hips to piss off the wharf into the black waters below, howling. One fell in, came up splashing, laughing. Muscle dummies squared off in the road, blocking traffic, letting the blood out of each other. Strip clubs up and down the lakeshore were packed, dancers raking in the money hand over fist. A police helicopter circled above, spotlight illuminating scenes of depravity that would make Bosch blush.

Kevin and his buddies were right in the middle of it. Floating on waves of psilocybin and pilsner, they drifted from a backyard barbecue and booze up just south of the highway over to the beach to take in the beautiful explosions, then stumbled aimlessly along among the throng as it poured back through downtown. One buddy disappeared into a dance club, one popped into the peelers, another just drifted off, mumbling at trees and trying to open locked cars he thought might be his, until Kevin was alone again, swaying slightly in front of a street punk busking for change.

“We’re gonna be rich,” the big boy in patched pants and a sleeveless jacket sang, voice gravelly as the arid valley soil all around. The battered guitar he strummed upside down had the words “Mr Awesome” scrawled in Sharpie along the body. “Because the Ogopogo lives.”

“Fuckin eh,” Kevin mumbled, tossing the dude a buck before shuffling off, away from the echoing horns and sirens and drunken hollering towards a park by the water. The song’s expression of hope buoys him onward.

Squirrels chase each other up around and over the branches of an American elm. Crouched on a mattress in an alley, a man leans away from a dry handy to vomit on the hot concrete. Further up, among the aging bungalows, a couple are full on fucking on the hood of a beige Toyota Corolla.

The road crosses a stream dried up in the summer heat. Little more than a ditch, really, full of trash and brambly weeds and emanating a foul stank. How many such streams, sometime and former means of shunting moisture down the valley towards the big sink, had been paved right over or rerouted beneath concrete? Fuck only knows. But Kevin follows the one he’s stumbled across west until he hits beach access.

Blessedly, nobody’s fucking here. Visibly, at least. Dogs barking, Kevin flips his rotting kicks off, letting the grimy sand squelch dryly between his toes. He sits down where the black water laps the shore, shoves his feet into the cool wet void with a deep sigh. That’s the ticket.

Sounds of the city drift up the lake. The chopper, sirens, odd car alarm blaring, and drone of ceaseless traffic become background chatter, white noise.

“We’re gonna be rich,” Kevin hums, sipping warm soda and rum, wide eyes staring out at stars rippling off the water. “Because the Ogopogo lives.”

The lake is deep.

The lake is long.

The lake is wide.

Must be plenty of places for a big bastard fish or whatever to frolic or lay about down there. How long he stares, sitting there, Kevin doesn’t know or care to find out. He’s content, watching the interplay of light and dark, wondering if a prehistoric beast from the deep will emerge before his eyes or not. Isn’t counting on it. Isn’t disappointed when it fails to appear. Knows, if he were Ogopogo, he sure as shit wouldn’t be showing his face on Canada Day. No way José. Save that for the solstice. Or the equinox. A full moon, or maybe the new? Some pagan holiday, anyway, as ordained by the stars or the moon or whatever calendar the pagans planned their parties by. The alignment of the planets, perhaps?

Kevin wonders if Ogie ever gets lonely, cruising the depths of this primeval waterway? Is there a mate it has longed for, over the ages, who was lost, cut off in some upper channel, when the glacial flood waters receded? Does it pine, lowing in an age-old subsonic language, beneath the waves, for its long-lost lover?

There’s no way they’ll ever be reunited, Kevin knows. But does Ogie? Has it accepted eternal solitude, or does it hold out, hopelessly, for a miracle? Ten thousand years is a long time to pine. How does a monster as ancient as Ogie measure the passing of epochs?

Such solitude has Kevin feeling blue. Where has his love gone? Over the hills and far, far away by now. Of that he is sure. She told him that much, at least, when she left weeks earlier. What drove that love from him? Something akin to a change in climate, personal if not meteorological. Way it goes, he knows. The way it goes.

Would she return? She’d told Kevin not to hold his breath. So he won’t.

Kevin takes a long pull of warm drink, smacks his lips and gets back up to his feet. The sounds of the city have diminished, but not disappeared. Hours remain before the sun pokes above the valley to the east, though the sky is beginning to lighten.

To the north, a small mountain looms. A provincial or regional park of some sort—he’s never really been clear—with dusty trails snaking up to its peak. Kevin’s climbed it before, sober as a judge, and high as a kite, and most everywhere in between. From the top, eyes can see far and wide before the lake swings out of sight behind the hills in either direction.

Whistling the beggar punk’s tune, Kevin figures he may as well climb. See what he can see. Should Ogie or something of similar lost mythology pass by in the early light before dawn, could he spot it from up here? If not up here, then where?

He is off. Up, up, whistling away.

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SPLENDOR IN THE CORN by Kate Jayroe

August 24, 2021 · Fiction

I am such a hot, sad wraith. Open-mouthed, I sob in the park on quarantine walks. I listen to ‘Til Tuesday. I ramble as far as possible from every other person there. Fuck the Frisbee golfers. I’m processing the three most harrowing break ups of my life. I’d been with none of the people involved, save myself. One is the man I’d been sleeping with. A hot, aging punk with a scarred nipple from self-piercing as a teen in his parents’ kitchen. I liked to squeeze the scar tissue in bed between two digits, other hand busy down below. It ended because he does not fall in love. A sort of policy. It ended because he called me “Carolyn” on Friday the 13th, his own swollen digits inside me. It ended because I cried watching him sleep, knowing it was a mistake to have let it last as long as it had. Another, a best gal pal whom I called “wife” for years. Wifed me as well. A mutual She/They connection. You know. Nowadays. We slept together or not all over town and the world. Drank together. Gymed together. Bathed together. Ate salads with fried chicken. Ate ass and watched the Criterion Channel. Snorted ketamine. It ended because I began sleeping with the punk and she began sleeping with his best friend, a surfing therapist who named his dog after himself and brought crab dip to potluck type gatherings. The third: a kindly Midwesterner who did basically nothing. Once a year, he traveled across state lines for an annual event where I likewise was present and had crossed state lines in preparation. He sits crisscross applesauce all the other days in a cornfield, until his wife calls him home for supper. He sighs, looks around one last time. Then he gets up, dusts off his khakis, and crosses the threshold to a warm hearth. Some would call him spiritually touched. A holy man of modern times who cares not for wages or liquor. He leaves his marriage bed cold. But the cornfield! Warm with his breath. His tight, little buttocks. In a hungry vision in the park, the angel Gabriel tells me to go to the cornfield via tractor and seduce the man within. Gabriel says: Do not be afraid of the Frisbee golfers. In general, they are socially distancing at a proficient level. Intercourse among the corn is how you heal. Ride a John Deere for your journey. Enjoy the slow sights of a cursed nation. Nothing runs like a Deere. I understand you two have sporadically dry humped for several years while both attending an annual event which holds sentimental value in terms of content and locale. If you bag the final one, they’ll all be done. Mark my words. Gabriel’s haircut looks a lot like Aimee Mann’s haircut in the “Voices Carry” music video. The angel dissipates into a cruel, clear sky. Publicly visible menstrual blood dots my grey yoga pants. A consecrated mark upon my miserable flesh. I see Kansas. I see cows. I see COVID, dancing in the very air. Salome, before the silver platter. I see outdoor church services with The Word of God booming all around, nourishing the grass and torturing bees. I hear the tractor’s slow death as I approach Ohio’s edge. I ask Gabriel to help me make my country mission. The tractor goes kaput at the outskirts of my silken destination. Each ear has such girth. Morning dew smooched each tip. All these blooming cobs are tall sex incarnate and I feel something dropping deep in the deepest goddamned pit of me. Immersed in a labyrinthine patina of gold and green, I don’t know where to go. How long may I live off corn? Grilled. Creamed. Pops. Pop Secret. It has been hours or half of one. I lie down and nap, under the dumb watch of a caftan-wearing scarecrow. I awaken! The heat of the day. Shall I perish in this maze of desire? I’ve all but left hope, when I hear a rustle. A school of greasy teens emerge. I call out: Youths! Please help. I’m looking for the man who does nothing. It’s paramount we rut among the corn. They laugh in demon song. Good luck with that, says the one in front. You’re not far. Keep along this path. We see him each week and bring offerings. He wants nothing of our joy. The youths did not lead me astray. I shortly see khaki out the corner of my eye. His eyes, mouth closed. He breathes in the way we are instructed to breathe for optimal health. He is surrounded by offerings of the youths. Brazzers DVDs, Wild Turkey 101, whippets, fidget spinners, pop sockets, magnum condoms, greeting cards, wild flowers, a cheeseburger. Gingerly, I mimic his sitting and face him. Slow as a cat, he opens his eyes. He bares teeth. Well! He says. Well, well. Well. I stroke his face. He sucks my pinky. We nuzzle as old horses might. I kiss his lips. He gently puts a hand up. You’re great, he says. I can’t. This isn’t across state lines. Corn won’t allow it. Besides, you know there’s someone I love very much in a nearby warm home. You’ve made me ill with unresolved desire! I’m shouting. The angel Gabriel brought me here! We must rut! Please, give me your spirit. At least a 69. Here, he says. He slides a Brazzers DVD my way. An ear of this stuff is bigger than me anyways. If you’d like, I can sit here with my eyes closed while you bring yourself to climax. I think there’s a portable DVD player, nearby. Gabriel will understand. I cum so hard, I see Gabriel’s smile. My heartbreak rushes out of me. Silken waterfall. What now? I ask. We sit here, he says. Then, we go home. Corn, for dinner.

Crow Jonah Norlander

THE MASTIFF by Max Halper

August 23, 2021 · Fiction

“My life is over,” I said in the dark my first night inside.

A full minute passed. “Shut the fuck up,” said my cellmate.

A month later I hanged myself. I did it from the bunk with my undershirt. There was no pain. My cellmate slept through it. When he woke up I was so dead I seemed more a facet of the cell than an occupant. He looked at me and nodded, as if my body imparted some keen insight. He determined I had managed to escape, had bored a tunnel through the only wall in the prison they could not reinforce. Now I scrambled toward freedom, through darkness on hands and knees, driven by desperate hope, spying a glint of light, quickening—only it wasn’t light, but a trick of the eye, and the darkness twisted onward. My cellmate relocated my commissary to his side of the cell, and then sat on his bunk and waited for the doors to open for roll call.

The way time worked inside was tricky: it smeared, pooled. Coagulated. Time curdled in prison. Then again, it was possible that time worked like this on the outside too. My cellmate could not remember. Sometimes he counted in his head, to try and stabilize the time, to ground it. He counted slowly. If he stopped counting, or ran out of numbers, the time would disfigure. He counted then, there on his bunk, waiting for the doors, my body hardening beside him.

Four years later he was released. They excavated his property from storage and led him out through door after door. The doors locked shut behind him. It was late November. The sky was the same gray as the prison’s interior. A van pulled up to take him to the bus. He climbed into the passenger seat and the van drove down a road he remembered only vaguely, as if from a dream. In the side-view mirror, the edges and angles of the prison distilled into points and counterpoints. The gray sky crashed over it all and the road buckled. A car whooshed past in the opposite direction, full of people.

“Something happened,” the ticket agent said. “Down in the city. No buses that way.”

My cellmate shook his head. “I’ll just take whatever’s going south.”

“No buses south,” she said. “You’re going to have to wait.”

My cellmate stood aside. A television mounted to the wall ran ads for cars and drugs. A woman on a bench near the bathrooms gawped into her phone. A pair of children chased one another along the perimeter of the terminal, their sneakers squealing on the concrete floor. A teenaged boy leaned across the counter at the convenience kiosk and whispered to the teenaged girl tending the register. A man in a suit slept on a bench beneath the television, surrounded by suitcases. My cellmate tried to determine what each of them was in for.

An hour later the ticket agent announced that all buses were cancelled indefinitely. My cellmate went to the door of the terminal and waited for a guard to release it. It doesn’t work like that here, he reminded himself. It was cold enough to snow; the sky whorled off into tangled sheets of gray. A bus driver stood beside a concrete pillar, smoking. “Which way is south?” my cellmate asked.

The bus driver jerked his head.

My cellmate walked off without anyone’s permission. Something akin to homesickness gathered at the base of his skull.

He walked along the shoulder. The road essed through a corridor of rufous trees. Acorns skittered around his feet. He had a dream while still inside that he walked along the shoulder of a country road in late autumn. He didn’t know where he was going, or where he’d been. He just walked, my cellmate, then he woke up in his cell. He remembered this dream only now, and felt suddenly unbalanced, as if the whole thing had listed to the side. He counted in his head; when he ran out of numbers, he told himself, his eyes would open, and he would be back inside.

No trains running southbound. No trains running at all. It was too late to keep walking. My cellmate had the $160 he’d gone in with plus the $150 in gate money they’d handed him on his way out. He got a room at a motel by the station. The room had two twin beds. He sat on one, then the other. He watched the door. The room sloped endlessly in all directions. His shadow spiraled along his arms. That night he dreamed he crawled through a tunnel toward a guttering light. The tunnel emptied into his cell. He lay on his bunk and fell asleep and woke up in the motel. It was still dark. He parted the curtains. A light on the solitary telephone pole by the road revealed a veil of languid snowflakes. There were no cars in the motel lot. He drank from the faucet, pocketed a bar of soap from the shower. He waited at the door.

He walked south along the train tracks. Snow gathered in his hair and across his shoulders. Daylight stole uncertainly around the crests of the trees; sometimes it seemed to retreat, and grow darker.

White sky, blue air, purple trees. My cellmate could not feel his toes. One-thousand-nine. One-thousand-ten. A silence of geese scored through the falling snow. Ahead, the train tracks disappeared into the mouth of a tunnel at the base of a speckled mountain. One-thousand-eleven. My cellmate took long steps. His breath bled through the cracks in his lips. The mountain was affixed at its distance. One-thousand-twelve. He curled his arms around himself. One-thousand-thirteen. One-thousand-fourteen. The snow flitted. The mountain maintained its size and shape.

It was impossible to determine for how long he walked through the tunnel. A full minute. Twelve years. It was pitch-black. He felt along the cold, rough wall. He counted, but the distance between each number—One-thousand-four-hundred-twenty-four, one-thousand-four-hundred-twenty-five—was immeasurable. The tunnel twisted onward. Years ago there was a blackout in the prison. It lasted days. The inmates were not allowed candles, and the staff refused to part with their precious supply of flashlights. There was disconcertion. One of the inmates, Gideon, a cop-killer, suggested they all tell stories to pass the time. Most of them grumbled off to their cells. The few remaining gathered in the dark dayroom. Gideon asked who wanted to go first, but no one volunteered.

A dog trailed him along the train tracks. When he stopped, the dog stopped, expressionless in the uneasy snow.

The shops, restaurants, and single motel in Wallkill were closed. He slept in the stairwell of a stout brick building off the main street. A man came down the stairs, paused and looked at him, then left into the dark morning. My cellmate continued south soon after. The clouds broke apart, and the sky behind was pale. The train tracks ran along a ridge overlooking the highway and the river. Cars traveled only northbound. Further along the traffic hardened, until the whole thing came to a standstill. Where the river crooked sharply east, two jets screamed suddenly from the north, scored through the sky so low my cellmate ducked, and thundered off toward the horizon. Later, he beheld a swarm of helicopters affixed high overhead, black specks biding their distance. He felt assailable below.

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BOY RACER WILL HAVE HIS REVENGE by Brendan Sheehan

August 19, 2021 · Fiction

Boy Racer fell from the sky, fully formed. He was born a lanky sixteen-year-old with perfect skin and a tricked-out car.

Boy Racer couldn’t remember anything before 1996, the start of his junior year at Santa Carla High. He couldn’t remember buying his car—a purple Maxima with a super wing spoiler, suicide doors, and lime-green underglow. He couldn’t remember choosing his wardrobe—a closet full of wifebeater shirts, Cuban link chains, and Adidas 3-Stripes pants. He couldn’t make sense of why he always smelled of Cool Water cologne or why even after a shower his Caesar cut was still shellacked with gel.

Boy Racer was only capable of swaggering. He tried to walk like regular people, tried to slouch and plod, but Boy Racer’s body rejected everything his mind desired.

He asked his foster father—a police chief who allowed Boy Racer to speed and run stop signs without so much as a warning—what his real name was. His father shrugged. You’re just Boy Racer. When we found you that’s what everybody was already calling you.

***

Santa Carla High’s claim to fame was its absence of sports teams and high percentage of mopey students. The mopey students at Santa Carla High wanted the handsome Boy Racer dead. They’d gotten it into their heads that Boy Racer was too kindhearted, too wealthy, had too many girlfriends in surrounding towns.

Boy Racer worked hard to dispel these rumors. He stopped students in the hallways and told them he was just a myth, the creation of a vindictive person, a megalomaniac with a grudge. He wrote an op-ed for the school paper explaining how he was still a virgin, how he also struggled with sadness and depression. He described in detail his dumpy ranch house with its chipped walls, dead shrubs, and empty aboveground pool.

The mopey students refused to listen, refused to believe. When Boy Racer passed them in the parking lot, they exchanged disgusted whispers. What’s with the hot car and flawless skin? Boy Racer really thinks he owns this school.

Boy Racer coped with his outcast status by driving fast. He sped down Santa Carla’s coast in his Maxima, hugging corners, hopping curbs, drifting, floating, a glowing lime-green ghost that couldn’t convince anyone it was possessed.

***

Boy Racer always ate lunch alone. He sat in the corner of the cafeteria and watched the goths, the mopiest of the mopey students. Boy Racer dreamed. He dreamed he was Keith, the leader of the goths. Keith wore black leather gloves and a black trench coat. Keith didn’t drive a car; he rode a dirt bike. Keith didn’t need gel; his bleach blonde hair swooped back naturally.

Boy Racer wished he had a goth girlfriend like Moon with her studded choker, lips painted Night Bird, pasty legs squeezed into ripped fishnets. He fantasized about going down on her while Bauhaus played on the stereo and a skull candle burned. He imagined Moon tasting like clove cigarettes. He imagined her clawing his hair and screaming out Beelzebub’s name when she climaxed.

The air conditioning in the cafeteria was always turned up high and Boy Racer shivered in his wifebeater. When Keith and the goths bumped into him on purpose, Boy Racer felt their warm skin and wanted to be warm as well.

***

The flyers appeared on Halloween. Santa Carla High was papered with hundreds of Xeroxes of Boy Racer’s face, chin lifted, wise-ass smirk. Printed above his face in bold letters were the words: Victory Begins When You Kill Something Pretty. Boy Racer ran through the halls ripping down the flyers. He wept while all the mopey students chanted. Fake tears! Fake tears!

Boy Racer sat in the front seat of his Maxima, a pile of crumpled flyers on his lap. He wailed, begged God to open the sky and take him back. That’s when he saw Keith in the rearview mirror. The wind split and suspended the tails of his trench coat like ashen wings. A hatred for pristine creatures forced Keith’s mouth into a rictus grin. Walking toward Boy Racer’s car, he waved a homemade blowtorch.

Boy Racer didn’t run. He simply pulled his seatbelt across his chest and locked the doors. As the spoiler ignited and flames engulfed the body of the car, Boy Racer cursed Santa Carla High. He cursed them with happiness, light, Mariah Carey, and a championship football team. His Adidas 3-Stripes melted easily, congealing in globs against the charred skin of his legs. Darkness closed in on Boy Racer. He inhaled the sweet stink of burning Cool Water and glimpsed Moon in the distance, mascara smeared, mouthing what he wanted to believe was I love you.

x-r-a-y magazine

SIMON & SCHUSTER by Marc Tweed

August 18, 2021 · Fiction

Bill Gunderson was more than a coworker to me, in fact I’d gone kayaking with Bill maybe three weeks before they chucked his severed head off the 29th floor of the Pemberton Building. He was our top seller the year before that ordeal, three out of four quarters. The guy was a data security sales machine. It was a windy evening this happened. I remember his head making a sound like an empty coconut when it hit the concrete and bounced twenty feet in the air, coming to rest directly in front of my girlfriend, Veraldine, whose exquisite face elongated soundlessly. We were in shock, of course. We looked at each other like what on God’s green earth? I nudged the head away from her with the toe of my oxford and when it rolled over so we could see the face, I said, “Oh my God, that’s Bill Gunderson.”

This was all over the news. Someone posted footage from a street camera on YouTube and last I checked it had 2.7 million views. You remember this from the news? I haven’t checked the YouTube video for months now. But it shows everything. At least the part about Bill’s head.

How this came about, Veraldine and I happened to be shopping downtown by the Pemberton after having an early dinner on the north side at Hooligans III. Yes, that’s correct, Hooligans III between the check-cashing place and the furniture store that used to be nice. I had a whole thing arranged with the server at Hooligans III; the ring would be at the bottom of a ramekin of ranch dressing.

Do you know Terry? That’s the server with the big curly hair, with a big, broad, beaten face, kind of wide and bovine. A nice guy. Just looks like he’s been compressed somehow, into something impenetrably dense.

Anyway, Veraldine and I were making small talk, catching up about our days and I just felt like she was acting funny, like she was gathering up the courage to say something to me? It was making me nervous. You know me. My mind immediately goes to a dark place. I was wondering if that day of all days was going to be the day she was going to acknowledge I’m really not that impressive of a person. Paranoid, I guess. I tend to feel subpar. So when I saw Terry over her shoulder heading our way with the Lava Hot Spud Skins and ranch I waved him away as nonchalantly as I could. He turned around, thank God.

I needed to know what was what before I went through with this ring business, right?

Well it turned out this was the deal. Veraldine had big news indeed, but nothing to do with me. Whew. She said, “Simon & Schuster is going to publish The Bird With the Prismatic Eyes!” Holy shit, I thought. Simon & Schuster is going to publish The Bird With the Prismatic Eyes!

I said, “Honey, that is fantastic!” and I took her hands in mine and it occurred to me I better not steal her thunder with my whole deal about wanting to spend the rest of my life with her. I figured I should delay that whole extravaganza for a least an hour. So I said hold that thought I want to hear all about Simon & Schuster but let me use the bathroom first.

I found Terry in the hallway between the kitchen and the bathrooms and I said, “Let’s fish that ring out of the ranch dressing and you can put it in the tiramisu later.”

He nodded seriously. I can always count on Terry.

So back at the table Veraldine and I were in a celebratory mood.

I mean, I’m so proud, right? She’s so creative. She let me read multiple drafts of this thing before she ever sent it out and I have to tell you it is really good! Like each time I couldn’t put it down. It’s about a man with a kind of kaleidoscope vision who sees people as tightly interlocking puzzles of individual molecules and each molecule is kind of its own entity with even smaller molecules and so on. The guy is a detective and he uses his kaleidoscope power to solve mysteries but he has a mystery of his own: the mystery of his personal origins. His parents, in other words. That’s the main thrust of the book. All he knows is someone left him on a church doorstep in a cardboard box with this strange little bird figurine. So he’s obsessed with that.

Simon & Schuster!

Anyway, I was proud of her because for the year and a half we’d been dating she’d worked on this manuscript feverishly every day while still somehow making time for me. I don’t think she sleeps.

There was an easiness between us. People noticed it. And I’m a big reader.

So we were finishing a second round of cocktails and beaming at each other in a kind of speechless delirium when Terry brought out the Lava Hot Spud Skins, sans ring. I was trying not to screw things up, trying to make sure she knew how happy I was for her. And I really was. Am, in fact. I always will be proud of Veraldine, I swear it as I sit staring at rows and rows of bottles in the manner of a crumbling statue.

I was figuring dessert was going to come at exactly the right time. We made it through the appetizer and another drink, laughing, and split a Caesar salad after that. Got cozier and cozier. And I’m high on all the love and spirits, thinking the rest of my life begins at dessert. Then I saw Terry coming our way shaking his head and I said to myself fuck.

Not only were they out of tiramisu, they were out of the only other dessert Veraldine and I like, which is peach cobbler. So I was going to have to explain to her why I was ordering us the coconut cream pie, which neither of us cared for too much. Too gelatinous. Weird flecks of something chewy.

“I think I’ll just skip dessert,” she said in her high, hoarse patter.

I told her I’d have her for dessert and she giggled and coughed into a fist.

I said, “Let’s drive downtown, look at the decorations.”

The lights were up for the holidays and the shops were open and I said I wouldn’t mind stopping into Swenfield’s to try on some slacks I saw online.

She was in a fine mood and said, “You read my mind.”

She’s like that. We were like that. Everyone said we were like psychic twins.

Terry slipped the ring back to me when I paid and wished me luck. Under his breath, of course.

Veraldine and I drove downtown. It took forever to park but the lights were magic. I had an idea on the way over. I was thinking, they put up a huge Christmas tree in Swenfield’s every year and I figured it would be pretty classy to get down on one knee in front of it. It’s twenty-five feet tall, right there in the middle of the store, under a big domed skylight. Everyone knows the spot.

I was sweating bullets at this point. I felt completely out of control. The ring-in-the-ranch-dressing plan had been rehearsed in my head (and, honestly, recited to Terry) over and over for weeks and there I was improvising. As Veraldine and I strolled, arm in arm under the downtown Christmas lights I thanked God for those three drinks we had at dinner.

We were two blocks from Swenfield’s when this little old man called out to us. He was bent over and bald in a dirty plaid suit and I was thinking he looked sort of like an urban leprechaun as he scuttled over to us in front of an upscale furniture store on the first floor of the Pemberton Building.

He said, “This is the best block” and swept his spiny little arms around without moving his head, like an arthritic tour guide.

Veraldine smiled at him, her teeth bright against the dark plum lipstick that drives me wild with longing even now when I see her across a packed bar with a large group of people I don’t know. I mean who are these people? Are these people from work? New friends from some literary cabal?

So I said to the old man, “We’ll take your word for it but you’re right, it’s pretty fancy, sir.”

He pointed at Veraldine and said, “Not as fancy as this one.”

I said, “She’s a famous author, too!” and we all had a laugh.

It would be weeks before I’d wake up in the middle of the night and remember what Bill Gunderson said after we’d demolished a case of Bud and he seemed like someone else. His face leered out of the darkness, the campfire written crazily across his sweaty forehead.

“Sometimes you just take what’s yours. You don’t wait for someone to realize it’s yours and give it to you. You tell them with your actions,” he said.

So Veraldine and I parted ways with the little man in front of the furniture store and started walking in the direction of Swenfield’s, electricity and a thousand little lights singing in the sharp evening air. I felt the ring in my pocket. I couldn’t stop running my fingers over it. Over and over and over. This was the single most important thing I was ever going to do and no god damn missing dessert…nothing was going to stop me. And I’m sorry if I’m getting emotional. I just miss Veraldine. I miss her so much.

Crow Jonah Norlander

THE WHALES WILL THANK HER by Julie Chen

August 17, 2021 · Fiction

She seeks to save water when using the toilet. If it's yellow, let it mellow, though she knows that can lead to malodor, so she makes sure to flush before she goes out or to bed, or if she hasn’t hydrated well and her pee is a deep autumnal mustard, like her favorite sweater.

When she goes grocery shopping, she uses tote bags, of which she has many. The real challenge is to also bring those plastic bags in which one weighs produce. One can avoid them with fruits like bananas, whose peels are thick enough to shield from germs, but grapes are a different matter.

But sometimes she forgets even a tote. Or when she does bring a tote, she forgets to ask the cashier to refrain from giving her a plastic bag, so she just extricates her things in front of them, avoiding their gaze, surely offended as she rejects their gift.

And sometimes she doesn’t have the courage to do this so she just takes the wasteful plastic bag, feeling like the scum of the earth. When she gets home, she stashes it in the cupboard in which she hides her other shameful plastic bags, and swears this is the last of her cowardice.

She supposes she has a reason for all this scrupulousness and self-loathing: to be good. The whales will thank her. In heaven, she’ll swim through the air and nuzzle them. Also sea lions, serpentine mammals with warm blood and smooth skin, no sharp creases or ashy elbows like on her own craggy body.

Her lover is petite and hairless, with legs barer than her own. When he is on top, she grabs him by his narrow shoulders and pulls him close, so she feels his ribs, small, smooth nubs, bury in her large, useless breasts. He feels so delicate she wants to smother him.

Postcoital, he falls right asleep while she pulls out her phone. She plays Tetris and Candy Crush, games where the goal is to disappear things. She keeps the volume on, the bleep bloops flitting above his heavy snores.

One night, she plays games into the morning light. At breakfast, she drinks three cups of coffee. Her body feels flipped inside out, each heartbeat rippling the surface of her skin like a stone skipping across a pond. She looks at her lover’s face across the table and imagines his right eyebrow rotating clockwise 90 degrees and sliding down to meet the top of his right nostril—no, it would actually be neater if it were rotated counterclockwise, the focus of the parabola tangent to the nostril flare. Take the other eyebrow too, and make it symmetric, a hyperbola. Shift the lips up, omitting the philtrum, its insipid indentation; now more than ever, either commit or disappear! Everything clicks into place and flashes white and—

She blinks and his face returns to normal.

They break up. They have different values. He works at a tech company that supplies him unlimited individually packaged foods: drinks, yogurts, granola bars, pickles. He is addicted to sparkling water. When they went on walks, he’d stop at bodegas to buy it even when she offered him her reusable bottle, which she refilled in bathroom sinks.

They hadn’t lived together, which was how she’d gotten away with the yellow-mellow trick. Still, the space in her home feels extraneous now. So she goes to the library during the day and works there, remote copy-editing, adding and deleting commas to the rhythms of students whispering and old men coughing into their borrowed newspapers.

Unlike at the coffee shop, at the library she can bring her travel mug and Tupperwared snacks and can use the bathroom whenever she wants, not once or twice per purchase—baked goods only, to avoid single-use cups—or whatever the etiquette is. Today, the last person to use toilet hadn't flushed. They were moderately hydrated, not clear, but not unhealthily dark either. She wonders if she should flush before she pees but judges that the walls of the toilet bowl are sufficiently deep such that it is unlikely that her pee stream would splash drops of the old pee onto her genitals. She had looked it up, pee isn't actually sterile, plus it’s gross to touch someone else’s and she isn't crazy. She’ll only save water by peeing into someone else’s pee under special circumstances.

Crow Jonah Norlander

TO RIDER STRONG by Jade Hidle

August 16, 2021 · Creative Nonfiction

You won’t remember me. It’s been twenty-nine years since my last letter.

I always did my homework alone, because my mother didn’t know enough English to help. I always finished it early, so that I could watch you on Boy Meets World. Your gapped-tooth mischievous grin, your chokers, your hair-flipping. I knew bad boys at school, but we didn’t have any like you. You were a white bad boy, which is a good bad boy. And you made being wounded look so cool.

I thought you would understand and that you would then elevate me to your level, turn my hurt into cool too.

So I took risks for you. There had just been another shooting in our housing project when I asked my mom if I could walk to the store by myself. I think she only said yes because it was just a domestic dispute, which is not a term in the Vietnamese that I grew up with.

I followed her advice to walk like I knew where I was going, as if I was up to urgent business, even if I felt scared or got lost. No eye contact. That invites people to kidnap you, she’d warned. I passed the landlord’s office where I’d perform stories to get extended grace periods on the rent check. I passed the laundromat where I played boat in the rolling carts and collected empty boxes of single-use dryer sheets to make beds for my toys that I took extra good care of so as not to seem ungrateful to her passing refugee glares.

I hurried past the TCBY frozen yogurt shop where my mom and I met my dad when he picked me up on his weekends; she didn’t want him coming to our door anymore. Her new boyfriend was jealous and resentful that my dad was white. Like you. Maybe he will be jealous of you, too.

I made it to the Lucky’s supermarket that greeted me with the swish of automated doors and a gust of air conditioning. I felt fancy. Maybe that’s why I didn’t stoop to steal you on the cover of Tiger Beat Magazine. Maybe it’s because my mom told me that when she, at the same age I was when I fell in love with you, tried to steal an apple from the market but was interrupted by Viet Cong spraying bullets. One killed her neighbor who dropped dead in front of her where she hid in a drainage ditch. I can still hear the thud. As kids do, she thought that everything bad that happened was because of her. So I paid for the Tiger Beat with money I’d found or saved from lost teeth.

I paid, but I still felt ashamed. She’d always taught me not to flush my pee in order to save money on the water bill, and here I was spending money on magazines. I slipped the magazine under my shirt and into my outgrown waistband as I walked up the stairs to our unit. She zeroed in on my paper-flat stomach immediately. I hurried to the bedroom she and I shared, and for some reason she let me go.

When she was home, I’d sit in the closet where I usually pretended that my dolls faced catastrophic forces of nature, barely surviving. Here, I organized toys so that I appeared to be doing something while I daydreamed of you, whom I protected from the worst of my imagination. Daydreaming was a risk too, a waste of time, I’d been shown. When she was gone, I pulled the magazine out from under our mattress or in between the volumes of books my dad sent me—anywhere I thought she wouldn’t look and find you, this desire I had outside of her. I stared at your pictures until my vision blurred you into movement—winking, beckoning—whatever I thought romantic gestures were at nine years old.

When the pages were worn enough for me to start flipping through the rest of the magazine, I discovered addresses in the back. There were P.O. boxes of agencies where readers—I—could write letters to teen heartthrobs—you, the good bad white boy.

I wrote you a letter. It started out normal enough. I mimicked niceties about your show. You’re a really good actor. Then I conflated you and your character. I felt bad that your dad isn’t around. Then it got sad fast. I wrote to you about how stressful it was to be poor and not have enough money to help my mom out because she was always stressed and that’s why a part of me didn’t want to help her, which makes me feel guilty, and then she brings these boyfriends over—I miss my dad as much as you, or Shawn, did on the show—because I know she hopes they will pay some of our bills, but that means more time my mom spends away from me, and that is good and bad. Even though we can’t understand each other, we’re all the other has.

I held onto the letter for days. I was afraid to send it because then you’d know me—you’d know her—better than anybody. I didn’t tell anyone anything. I didn’t think anything I had to say was important, but here I was putting it all in rainbow Bic ink and getting all congested from tearing up but holding it in.

When she found the magazine, Mom said she always wanted a kid who was famous.

So I decided to send the letter. My dad worked at the post office, so I always had holiday stamps. I mailed a Christmas stamp to you in the summer.

It wasn’t until fall that you responded. My hands trembled as I sliced open the envelope imprinted with more postal ink than you’d think it would take to get a letter from the nice part of LA to our part of LA. There was a lot of possibility in that moment. I’d hoped that you’d read every word and grow a crush on me too, not because I was suffering, but because of how I wrote about it, how I was surviving it.

You responded with merely a signed photograph.

I knew it was fake too. My mom had shown me how to tell the difference when I had to sign some documents for her. You’d had some assistant open my letter, unfold my life in ink, and stamp your signature on a black-and-white picture of you perched on the type of stool that I imagine they have in acting classes. You treated me the same as everyone else who wrote you a letter. I sat in the closet with my hurt and the photograph, barely surviving.

I’d told my dad when I wrote the letter—not what was in it—but just that I had. I told him I used one of the stamps he gave me. He said it was cool, and I remember feeling better about it, then. My dad, after all, was the one who showed me movies and shows and music and taught me to love all of it. But something in me must have known that parental “cool” was just to cover up concern about this kid’s new phase of writing fat letters to strangers. I must have known, at some level, that no one thought what I was doing was “cool,” certainly not you. I must have known because I burned the next letter I wrote to you with a match from my mom’s fishbowl collection of matchbooks from restaurants her boyfriends took her to.

I never wrote back to you, never bothered to even Google you (when that became a thing), until now. I’m telling people that I’m writing all these letters to people who I know have forgotten me—I’m sure now, child star, that you never even saw my letter, never saw my name—so that my daughters won’t forget me. But I think what I’m really doing is trying to remember myself. So, I guess, in a way, I’m always writing back to you.

x-r-a-y magazine

STRAWBERRY by James Jacob Hatfield

August 12, 2021 · Fiction

It’s not because I have Alzheimer’s, I’ve always been like this. The most fun I get nowadays is when I find things I lost.

But I do remember her journal is underneath the couch. Before I’d never think to read her journal. But now that she’s gone I’d better retrieve it or else I’d forget about her completely.

Reaching under our couch is like sticking your hand into that ominous hole in the wall of a cave. Feeling for a lever. Pencils. Dog toys. Remotes. Items that are sorely missed only when they’re needed. And are treasured only for the moments after they’re found and used. Then start their journey on being lost again. My hand grazes the profile edge of a gun trigger and my heart makes an excited lurch into my sinuses.

Henry appears and says there’s some strawberries in the kitchen. My lips get cold.

Henry is on the opposite side of the island in the kitchen that we’re standing in now. He looks at me and rolls his lips in and tries to smile.

Henry holds the pseudosmile. Points to his lips.

I hear a noise resembling a yawn and realize it’s my own voice going “Huh?”

“You have something on your lips.” Henry says.

One lick and my tongue detects strawberries. I’m allergic, I think. Something happens when I eat something. Pretty sure it’s strawberries.

My hand keeps sending food to my mouth.

“What are you doing here, Henry?” I ask.

Henry leans his lower back against the counter. Presses his palms down to push up his shoulders and does that little head shake that says “I dunno.”

Henry, he hasn’t aged a day since we left for college. Dresses the same too. Tight black hoodie. One time right before graduation I almost killed him. I think it’s what galvanized our friendship. If you go down Lake Wheeler Road, past some of the old monstrous farmer estates, you’ll see an enormous oak tree with a huge patch of bark damaged like a gorilla is covered with hair except its chest. A blemish made by Henry and me. My Volkswagen Golf got wrapped around it. It was a manual. Diesel. I guess I got distracted. Didn’t keep my eyes on the road. Because I couldn’t. Mainly because it wouldn’t stop moving. God, I loved that car.

“I don’t remember what I did today.” I tell Henry in my kitchen.

“Funeral.” Henry says.

“Whose?”

“Don’t know. Didn’t go. But you seemed real upset about it.” Henry says.

I’m trying to forget something that’s begging to be remembered, from some other realm or reality. I know when I’m forgetting because my mind goes blank and all I see is a dream of a silhouette. There’s shape and there’s sound but nothing distinct. I pull up my hand and see the bottom of the strawberry I was eating.

Strawberries … are yummy … it’s a green hat with the pale, uneatable part of the berry pinched between my fingers. It looks like bloodstained brain matter on the back of the head of someone who swallowed the business end of a revolver.

I feel self-conscious and look up to see if Henry notices I’m taking too long and acting weird.

“Wait. Hey Henry, did you say funeral?” I shout.

My heart horse-kicks my ribs and there’s a heat of color funneling behind my eyes. I erupt from within. As if pixelated light was exploding out of my body. That’s why the gun felt so delicious. There’s an electric freedom in knowing I don’t have to stay alive if I don’t want to.

“What?” Henry says as he came out of the downstairs bathroom.

My fight-or-flight senses tear out the back of my head, like a bunch of wires unplugged in one violent yank. I suddenly have no needs.

The birds chime in the wind while watching the unique angle of the sun this good Earth gives us every single day … man, this is how I should have spent all my time … God, I feel weird. Is this what it is to be present? Am I dying? I can’t remember what my wife Irene looked like but … or was it Iris? Irene-Iris. Ireneiris. Yeah. That was her name. She was my wife. This is getting worse really quick. If I don’t get a hold of my thoughts I’ll forget about her forever. The microwave clock says it’s two on the dot. How many more hours until I can go to bed and not feel worried? Where’s Ireneiris? Where’s Henry?

“Henry!”

“What? I’m right here.”

It sounds as if he is saying it right into my ear, but he’s standing at the back of the property. I spot him as a dot through the window above the kitchen sink. I still feel weird. I need my ears to pop. It’s two forty-seven on the microwave.

“Let’s walk.” Henry says. His words tickle and vibrate my ear bones.

It’s still the afternoon, but grey storm clouds have formed. The temperature drops a couple. The wind is stale and humid. I touch the back of my head and feel nothing. Henry’s been quiet while we’ve been walking. I want to ask if we took drugs but won’t. Because if he says no that would mean I’m actually going crazy. Bad thought. Bad thought.

Calm down. Breath normal. You’re not going to feel like this forever.

Henry pivots right on Lake Wheeler Road. He looks like he’s wearing eye shadow.

“Henry, have you been eating?” I ask.

“No, man.” Henry whispers. Then folds his arms and shivers. He sounds irritated like I should have already known that. Like I forgot something.

I see him stumble. And it starts to rain. And he does this performance dance piece: falls, then gets up halfway, then slips, then repeat. I pull him up by the shoulders. And his tight black hoodie unanchored from his body which was no longer there. In the distance I hear the sounds of metallic bone-folding chaos drenched in diesel. There’s my Golf. Bad thought. Manual. Bad thought. Two door. Slouched like a wet towel around the tree’s trunk. Bad thought. Police car. Bad thought. Paramedics run right past me like I’m not even there. I remember this.

Past and present tense became one another like water washes water. I’m witnessing my own memories.

I try to peek over and see what my younger self looked like but my mind can’t process it. The area where my face should be is a warped blind spot. I see the EMTs moving a crash test dummy with a wig with hair styled like Henry’s. The cop takes the crash test dummy and puts it in the trunk of his squad car and leaves. Henry emerged from behind the tree when everyone else left. He waved me over as he turned around.

Everything past the tree is desolate. Lifetimes pass. Parched and exhausted, I’m following Henry on my hands and knees crawling through the desert. I see a mirage of a tiny dancing city appearing out of red canyons in the distance. Henry ventured forward. I give up and collapse.

I shout at Henry, but he doesn’t hear me. As he walks away his footprints immediately filled in with red desert sand. My insides wretch at the thought of open casket funerals. Ireneiris requested no cosmetic changes to her appearance for her funeral. The further the distance between Henry and me grew, the more I felt a separation not unlike a spirit and a body divorcing. Either he or I were fading away. The elusive Other being forgotten. I must be hallucinating, or dying.

With my knees in the sand and the figure of the figment of Henry eroding in the blowing curtain of sand. I only felt brief relief in knowing what is impossible. Lost in the transiency of spirits who are everactive. Now I desire only clarity.

I need to be with her again in some form. I need to go home.

I turn toward the tiny dancing oasis in the sunset, away from Henry. The city on the dune turned out to be a bunch of whack jobs living in tents in the middle of the desert. And what they drew from their wells may look like water, but last time I checked water shouldn’t smell like mangy rotten dog dick and have an iridescent shimmer. The first time I drank it I passed out. Then I shot myself in a scary dream and woke up feeling selfish. So I drank it a second time.

And I dreamt I was back in my childhood backyard. It was the time of day where the bottom of the sky was a rosy peach neon exploding up above faint magenta. My favorite weather. Paradise.

And I felt a soft voice taze me: Enter through! The door of the morning mist to the afterbirth of defined things. This is where you go. A cold wet field damp with sky.

And I whip around. The voice chimes and sparkles with dew. And I whip around. The memory of the cold dew is sharp on my feet. Standing still, I let my body heat melt the water which allows me to acclimate to this terrestrial plain. That excitement of combing an expensive rug with your toes. Borderline orgasm; euphoria. The world compresses into a tube-like shape that I am ushered through. It’s as if I’m walking through the shoot of a playground slide, as if my world is forming around me each step and Longleaf Pines start springing out of the sand dunes until desert and forest are one. I remember this city. I have a house here with my wife.

Oh God. Irene? … Iris? … I really … I miss her more than I can handle. The moment she left this world I could feel my life being sucked away. And as if that thought was a magic spell, I’m in my living room with feet freezing cold and clammy.

I feel lost in my own house.

I shuffle, barely lifting my feet on the carpet.

It’s like her spirit disintegrated into every corner of every wall in this house. Every blemish, every unfolded blanket, every mismatched coffee mug. Everything.

I don’t know how I can live like this. All freedom curdles into a demand for sacrifice. It feels like someone else’s bad thoughts got planted in my head.

I reach underneath the couch. Feel for something heavy.

With the gun in my hand, I roll my wrist like I’m opening a book to point it at my face. Look down.

And I realize what I’m really holding on to.

I let the pages of her journal fall open into my hands. There are words written across the middle in her script. Damn. She’s good.

It says “Keep going.”

And it all clicks. I was never alive and never will

be dead. I do not exist but I feel like I do. And I

disassemble at an atomic level clearing the

psychic real estate required to lay back

and suffer the natural exitance of my natural flesh. It was

an honor and a privilege to love you.

x-r-a-y magazine

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