Flash Archives

UNFINISHED by David Osgood

June 17, 2021 · Fiction

My wife brushes her teeth in the shower and doesn’t spit, so the toothpaste foams around her mouth and drips down her chin onto her breasts. It reminds me of the two people I fear the most: my mother and my dentist. Tonya oversleeps again. She is starting to look like her mother. I burn my wife’s sprouted grains toast because I hate her new Vegan diet. She doesn’t notice because it is covered with half-ripe avocado. I crisp up a whole package of uncured maple bacon to give her something to complain about.

Tonya yells at her mom like a teenager, though she is only twelve. I cannot imagine what the house will be like when I leave and she doesn’t have an audience. She and I lock rolled eyes. It’s the only thing we have in common that keeps us from falling apart.

On the way to school, Tonya mentions drugs. I tell her I smoked pot in college, but that’s about it. I try to remember what it was like when I was her age. I feel bad for Tonya, having a mentally vacant dad and an emotionally unstable mom. No wonder she is doing drugs already. I picture Drew Barrymore doing a line of cocaine off a Tiger Beat magazine with Jonathan Taylor Thomas on the cover. Maybe I just wasn’t as cool as the other kids, sweaty palms and counting down from ten to muster up the courage to kiss my girlfriend. She broke up with me and the other kids called me a prude. I entered high school with the enormous false sense of confidence that I would sleep with every girl in my class. When that didn’t happen, I drank to feel something, then drank not to feel anything, then just drank.

Tonya opens her car door before I come to a complete stop. She runs up to a group of girls and hugs them all at the same time, showing off what looks like a tattoo on her backside. I drive away thinking I should be upset or disappointed or concerned in some way. I wave begrudgingly at an over-caffeinated school mom tipping her oversized coffee cup to my obvious right of way like she is performing a humanitarian feat. I fantasize about her tailing me home where we drink mimosas and cheat.

I locate the piece of oversized luggage we used to take on family vacations and pull it down from the closet shelf; I find a tampon, a trial-size body lotion, and a foldable toothbrush in the bottom of it. I pack up everything I can fit into it, sit on top of the full suitcase, and get lost in a ceiling stain.

Tonya and her mother come home, furious I missed their calls and voicemails and texts. They stomp up the stairs like walking temper tantrums, following the noises to the bedroom. I look down at them from the attic through a large hole in the ceiling where the stain used to be. “I cut a stain out,” I manage to utter. “I’ll replace it.” They look up at me as if to confirm my suspicions that the father-daughter dance was not, in fact, cancelled this year.

My wife makes curry for dinner and Tonya stays at the table for the entire meal. She asks if we are getting a divorce and I tell her no I just hate my life and she says join the club and we smile like a familiar pain masking a deeper one. She looks high but I don’t say anything. My wife doesn’t talk to me for the rest of the night, even when I am unpacking the enormous suitcase and cleaning plaster off the bedroom floor. I pretend to sleep while she cries; she sleeps and I get up to pay bills in the dark.

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MY LAST DINNER WITH THE CARPENTERS by Alyssa Asquith

June 16, 2021 · Fiction

The dinner invitation had not come at a convenient time. In any event, I wasn’t dressed; I couldn’t remember when I’d last been dressed. Most of my clothing had been eaten by moths or rats years ago, and the stuff that remained—leather, mostly—was brittle and dry, like old toast.

Besides, my teeth had begun to fall out. I’d lost one the day before, and two more by the morning. I think I must have swallowed them.

But I couldn’t refuse the Carpenters. The fact of the matter was that Mr. Carpenter had been looking forward to the evening all week, at least according to Mrs. Carpenter, and they were old friends of mine—perhaps the oldest—and it had been too long (much too long, as Mrs. Carpenter so kindly put it) since I’d paid them a visit. So I dressed myself in my very best curtain—a soft, delicate thing, made of cotton—and set out as soon as I could.

The world outside was ugly and crowded. Seagulls waited on chimneys and terraces, eyeing the brown rats that swarmed underfoot. Lines of old men stood on street corners, begging. Some begged for food; some begged for money. Some begged for teeth. I walked with my jaw clenched and my lips sealed. When I arrived, Mrs. Carpenter had already set the dinner out on the table. I was late.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Time must have gotten away from me.”

Mrs. Carpenter’s expression was tired, but not unkind. Since our last visit, her hair had turned from black to gray. “It’s been getting away from all of us,” she said.

From the corner, I could see Mr. Carpenter watching me. His eyes were round and large, like a bird’s.

We started on dinner at once. Mr. and Mrs. Carpenter sat on one side of the table, while I sat on the other. This seemed proper. As I took my first bite, I found that the turkey was cold and hard, like ice.

“How long were you waiting?” I asked Mrs. Carpenter.

She waved a hand. “Don’t give it a second thought,” she said.

Both Carpenters, I noticed, had filled their plates, though neither had begun to eat. I lifted another forkful to my mouth, then paused. Mrs. Carpenter was smiling at me.

“How’s your cat?” she asked.

“Dead,” I said. “Dead for quite some time, actually.” I lowered my fork. “How’s your daughter?”

“Gone,” Mrs. Carpenter said.

There was a long silence.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said.

Mrs. Carpenter’s smile had vanished.

I took another bite of turkey. One of my front teeth broke off and landed on the plate with an audible, tinkling sound.

Mr. Carpenter watched it fall with rapt attention.

“Again, I’m terribly sorry,” I said. “For being so late. I really do apologize.”

Mrs. Carpenter shook her head. Her eyes were far-off and misty, as if she were thinking of something else. I took the fallen tooth off my plate and slipped it into my pocket.

“You and Clara used to play together,” Mrs. Carpenter said. “Don’t you remember?”

“I remember,” I said.

“You would sit out on the floor,” she said, pointing. “Just right there. Playing cards. Doing magic tricks.”

I nodded, once. Already, I had begun to feel unbearably sad.

Another silence followed. Mr. Carpenter’s gaze was still fixed on my plate, but the whites of his eyes had begun to glisten, as if with tears. I was gripped by an urge to reach out to him, to place my hand on his and leave it there, just for a moment.

Instead, I took another bite of turkey. As I chewed, I felt a second tooth crack; both Carpenters were watching me, their faces tense and unhappy. Slowly, I lifted a hand to my mouth and spit the tooth into my napkin.

My walk home was littered with old furniture, stray animals, and small children. I was saddened to see so many things without homes. Once or twice, I thought I caught a glimpse of my old cat—my wonderful, black-and-white boy, who had spent so many evenings curled up on my chest. It’s too easy to see the dead in the living. The cats I did see would hiss and growl and sometimes bark, like hyenas.

A few blocks from home, I did, by chance, encounter the Carpenters’ young daughter, Clara. We were walking on the same side of the road, heading in opposite directions. Her hair, like her mother’s, had begun to gray, but I recognized her by the way that she moved: rhythmically, and with small, careful steps, like a dancer. When I stopped, she looked up, as if by instinct.

“Clara,” I said.

She ran to me and threw her arms around my waist. I placed a hand on her head. She was smaller than I had remembered.

“My teeth are falling out, Clara,” I said.

She stepped back. For one, breathless moment, I thought she might speak, and a faint memory (the sound of her voice, perhaps) seemed to hang in the silence between us.

Instead, she reached into the back of her mouth—wincing, very briefly, as if from pain—and produced a tiny, shimmering tooth, almost perfectly white. She placed the tooth in my trembling palm and closed my fingers around it, one by one.

Clara’s is the only tooth I have left. All my others have gone.

It’s a little thing—a milk tooth, most likely—and much too easy to swallow. For safekeeping, I have wedged it in between my first and second toe.

I can’t say when my next dinner will come. Outside, the seagulls feed on the rats. The old men have stopped begging.

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MY BROTHER, MY MOTHER, MY FATHER, AND I by C. Beston

June 11, 2021 · Fiction

My brother asks if, when he is older, he will grow as big as our father. I tell him the best thing to steal from the supermarket is a glass pint of milk. You drink the milk, then return the bottle for two dollars.

My mother asks me to stack plates and glasses in our high cabinets. Reach for vinegar at the store. Every year she shrinks. I wonder when she won’t be able to push a shopping cart. If I will set her in the child’s seat and hand her tomatoes and oranges to inspect, one by one, before placing them in whispering plastic bags.

My father, in his fine suits, is not bothered by the freezer-cold of the supermarket in summer. He points to cuts of meat as the butcher’s breath fogs the plexiglass. I shiver, my linen dress thin, concrete cold pressing through my sandals. My brother retreats to the dairy case after my nod. The milk bottle he can slip into his sweatshirt pocket, whistling as I pay. My father watches each cent on the screen.

I cradle every paper bag, thoughts of tomatoes crushed and steak exposed through torn plastic and the vinegar bottle shattering. The smell in my sandals, pulling slivers of glass from my feet.

My brother lines ten milk bottles under his bed, which I will return. Twenty dollars. He asks, would I buy him some cigarettes and stamps. A chocolate bar. A can of sardines. And keep the change.

My mother takes the car to the store, readjusting the driver’s seat each time. My father curses when he pushes it back, forgets to fix the side mirrors. Soon my mother will hand me the keys, and I will sit forward, tapping pedals with the end of my shoe.

My father asks me to bring him the milk after dinner. He smooths the waxed cardboard of the carton with his palm – his hand so large his fingers fit around it. He thanks me, and says to put it back where it came from.

I drop the change from my brother’s bottles into an old jam jar. The pennies splash against the glass. I can’t overhear my parents’ conversation.

My brother will not come to the store when I drive. He chases the dog to the backyard instead. His head almost seems to brush the door frame.

My mother lets me borrow her deep straw tote, which I clutter with scarves and receipts. I couldn’t slip a bottle anywhere inside this dress. I could nest it inside the bag.

My father’s face is beet-red when he comes for me, huddled in that back office where the starched-shirt man took phone calls while I pulled threads from the hem of my dress. He takes the car, I walk home. At the front door, my arm arcs higher to fit my key to the lock.

I thought shrinking took longer.

Dinner is being served, my brother the last to arrive. He fills the doorway. Only I turn to see his broken glass smile.

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SHOPPING AT TARGET WITH MY E̶X̶-̶L̶O̶V̶E̶R̶ FRIEND by Cat Dixon

June 10, 2021 · Creative Nonfiction

You say you need to find an ointment that your father asked for, so we’re in the pharmacy department: shelves full of pain relief, allergy relief, gas relief, dietary supplements. Last year I heard that big brand companies pay more for eye-level shelf space; someone had studied how we shop, and then schemed and plotted for that cough syrup and nose spray’s spot. You’re searching the shelves closest to the floor, and I keep getting in the way. The aisles are crowded with carts and gray-haired ladies—excuse me—so I wander to the end-cap filled with bandages and Neosporin. I select the pink and white polka dot no-name band-aid box and return to your side to put it in the cart. You raise an eyebrow. For my daughter, I answer, and throw in kid sunscreen—not the expensive kind with the baby’s diaper falling off—lotion that’s thick and blinding white and probably expires before the end of summer. After finding what your father needs, we stroll to the groceries. Again, you’re looking for a sale—cans of chili and soup—and I’m eyeing the refried beans with the green label “Vegetarian.” In the next aisle, I drop a plastic sleeve of gum and a box of gumdrops next to the sunscreen. My items take up most of the cart, for you have placed yours next to the handlebar where a baby would sit, where my purse would normally rest. We go down every aisle with you pushing those squeaky wheels, and after an hour, we head to the registers. We both dislike self-checkout so we wait. At the conveyor belt, you place everything together—unsorted—and insist on paying for my items along with yours. I’ve learned not to argue when a man says he’s paying, but I say thank you five times, and outside I watch as you put the cart back in the corral, rebag, and make sure your items are in their own sack. You carry everything, including my 24-case of Diet Pepsi. We load up my trunk and then yours. You ask if I want to grab a bite to eat, and I say, let me pay. Now we’re in a Dairy Queen booth. You slurp a milkshake, using the straw as a spoon, and I munch on hot French fries and chicken strips. As we shopped, we discussed your father’s health condition, my discipline challenges with the kids, and American consumerism, but now I ask about the past. Why did you respond to that desperate email a dozen years ago when you were six hours away by car and un-tethered to Omaha? Back then, we hadn’t spoken in six months when I sent you that note: I was getting a divorce, my husband arrested, my skin bruised. I expect you to say that you had loved me all along, a city bench at that Dodge Street bus stop that sits undeterred through snow, ice, and wind, waiting for the thaw and all those commuters to return in the spring. You say, pity. You say, friend. I wonder if everything has been done out of pity for I am a pitiful creature who has spent years wandering grocery stores and malls hunting for the best deal, only to fall victim to my flat feet. I want to ask what kind of pity makes a man put his hands down a woman’s pants, finger her till she comes, over and over. But I don’t. Perhaps it’s pride that lifts my head, puts a smile on my face while I nod as if I have known all along that you, with that straw hanging out of your mouth, never intended to take me home. I’ve been left alone to spoil.

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AT A LEMON-COLORED HOUSE ON CALLE D by Ray Ball

June 7, 2021 · Fiction

The day before Myradis Guzmán died, the tropical sun boiled off some of the rainwater that shrouded and smoothed the cracks in Havana’s sidewalks. She sorted grains of rice and hung out laundry under the watchful eye of a statuette of Yemayá. She chatted with neighbors on her way to ETECSA. When she arrived, she secured her place as la última and slipped into a wisp of shade to wait her turn. After her heart suddenly stopped, her body remained in her house for over a week, while her brother Yordani navigated bureaucratic tapestries of red tape. Waiting was so much a part of life that it continued after death. In that limbo where the paint continued to shrivel and peel, Yordani opened all the windows as night fell, and friends came by with bottles of rum to toast the departed.

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HUNGER PAINS by Lindy Biller

June 3, 2021 · Fiction

Eating nacho-flavored cauliflower chips is like eating the crisp skeletons of dead leaves. Still, there are far worse things I could be doing with my mouth. I sit at a drop-leaf table, grinding the so-called chips between my teeth, and you streak around our apartment, rabbit-like. You’re terrible at acting cool, aloof, whatever you want to call it, and I will always love this about you. You are tender to the bone. “Why am I doing this, what if I fuck the whole thing up?” you say, although you’re not really asking.

I stand up, ignoring the subtle aftertaste of nail polish remover. “What are you looking for?”

You drag a hand through your melting chocolate hair. I want to dip into you like a strawberry. “The cord,” you say. “The good one.”

We have two power cords for your amp and only one of them works. I stand stone-still in the middle of the apartment, mentally retracing our steps. Then I go to the coat closet and dig through the pile of mittens and scarves we threw there a few weeks ago, after the last cold snap.

“Here,” I say, holding out the tangled-up cord.

You grab me and kiss me on the mouth, without warning, and don’t seem to mind the cheese dust on my lips. You taste like organic bison jerky and coconut oil chapstick. The idea that anyone could enjoy that combination makes no sense, but oh god do I want a bite of you. I curl my fingernails into the soft fur at the nape of your neck.

“You’ll be great,” I tell you and I mean it. Also, I am ready to go to the venue, where there will be witnesses.

You stow the cord in your bag. I grab my purse, which I have crammed full of foods that supposedly nourish. Raw almonds, plantain chips, two small, armored clementines. What I want is a brownie, what I want is an entire pizza, a sheet cake sagging under clouds of buttercream, a bag of salt and vinegar potato chips, what I really want is none of those things. But I’ve read that when you consume all your calories from sugar, your stomach empties fast. You end up hungrier than before.

Your fingers slip between mine, unsuspecting. I carry your bag of tangled wires out to the car and sneak a dried fig between my lips while you drive.

The show is pretty good. You are amazing, and sexy as hell. I stand toward the front, drinking whiskey sours, smelling the dinner menus and deodorant preferences and body odor of all the people sardined around me. It’s a full house. I’m proud of you, even though the crowd isn’t here for you, exactly. Most of them are here to see the girl who plays the synths and sings with a voice like whipped cream, sweet and smooth and swirled on top of something more substantial. This morning, her bass player apparently woke up with food poisoning from an all-you-can-eat sushi buffet and the whipped-cream girl texted you. Wanna sub in tonight? She included a string of suggestive emojis, peaches and eggplants and drops of water and winking faces, which I noticed before you thought to angle your phone away from me. I can’t remember what her band is called. There are fliers everywhere but I didn’t read any of them. I know it’s something sultry and weird. Foxblush or Labial Wine, maybe. Her music is all airy keys and airy vocals; things floating, ghostlike. It makes me feel a little lost. I need music I can feel between my teeth. At home, you slam chords into the old piano, you sing with a voice like browned butter. I dig through my purse. What was I thinking. Clementines. Plantain chips. None of this will do. I go up to the bar and ask for another whiskey and two full-size Snickers bars, figuring the bartender won’t judge me, and if he does, fuck him.

It takes 75% of the emergency chocolate, peanuts collapsing between my stiff jaws, caramel sticking to the flats of my molars, to feel better. I stuff the remaining half into my purse and sip my whiskey blank-faced, like a good hipster girlfriend of the band. On stage, the girl with the creamy voice says something to you, and you laugh and say something back, leaning close so she can hear, and I lick the chocolate off my teeth.

After the show, you are glowing. You can’t believe how well it went. I help you wind up your cord, the one that still works, and the guitar player invites us out for drinks.

“I want to get home,” I say. “You go ahead.”

“Nah. I want to be with you.”

How sweet you are. Layers upon layers of flaky devotion. Not boring, though. Not uncomplicated. You did angle your phone away from me, you did shoot a furtive glance at my face to see if I’d noticed, and that only makes you more enticing. A slivered almond crust. A hint of cayenne, just enough to burn the back of my throat. You could’ve gone out tonight with that airy dollop of whipped cream and I’m sure she would’ve fucked you, if you wanted. Maybe she would’ve done more. Not because of her sultry band name, or the plunging neckline that showed her sternum, sugar-spun, pressing through milky skin. I’m not trying to stereotype anyone. It’s just, the way she looked at you. I squeeze your hand.

“I need a smoke,” I say. “Meet you at the car?”

You nod, still glowing. “Love you, babe.”

I love you too. That’s why I can’t have you in small plates, unhurried sips, delicate bites at the end of a cocktail fork. Not like the others. I’ll wait and wait until you’re ready for my hunger, until you’re prepared to be swallowed whole and your bones spit back up in random order. I’ll wait if it takes forever. But I hope it doesn’t, because there are only so many ways to trick your body into believing it’s full.

I go out into the alley behind the building, where bands load and unload through a dented garage door, and I light a cigarette, and wait for the creamy voiced girl to come out with her keyboard. There’s no one else around. This is a local show. She doesn’t have roadies or adoring fans or even a friend with her. When she sees me, we recognize each other immediately, even though we’ve never met. I ask her, and she nods, and oh god she’s so good going down, the mouthfeel silkier than expected, the flavor malty and rich. I make a mental list so I can recreate parts of her later, in our tiny galley kitchen, and feed her to you. There are notes of sweet cream, as expected, and salted caramel and tart cherry and raw hazelnut and cold brew coffee. Thankfully, there is no trace of cauliflower. When I’ve had my fill, she takes a turn, and it hurts, the way she cleans her teeth with my rib bones, and I surrender to it. I wonder what she tastes in me. I wonder, if you ever end up fucking her, if you’ll taste it, too.

After she’s finished, I put my bones back together, mostly how they were before. We share a cigarette and go our separate ways. You’re waiting at the car and you hold the door open for me. I can smell your warmth, like bread baking. I can hear your rabbit’s heart. But my lips still taste of sweet cream, and it’s enough to get me home without biting, without even showing my teeth.

Crow Jonah Norlander

SOUR by Wilson Koewing

June 2, 2021 · Fiction

To escape the midsummer heat, I ducked inside a bar specializing in sour beers on the fringes of Five Points in Denver. I ordered from the happy hour menu, drank sour pours then had my debit card declined.

“I tried it nine times,” the shaggy hair bartender said.

“Try it again.”

“Won’t go through.”

“I don’t know what to tell you.”

Another bartender, one of those effortlessly beautiful women who always seem marooned in restaurants, came over.

“Nice ink,” I said, noticing an eight ball on her wrist.

“Do you have another card?” she asked.

“I don’t,” I said. “Where do you play?

“Tarantulas.”

“Well, something has to give,” the shaggy hair bartender said, crossing his arms.

She leaned close, “If I cover this, can you Venmo me in a couple days?”

“Sure,” I said. “I could do that.”

She wrote her Venmo name on a ticket.

Outside, I smoked on the sidewalk under the late afternoon sun.

It wasn’t so much that I was poor, it was more that I didn’t work. My folks sent money sometimes and if they didn’t, I lived modest, rode couches and occasionally ate meals I wasn’t certain I could pay for.

Almost everyone who lived downtown were millennials, working for startups or dispensaries or in the service industry saving for ski bum winters. Either that or virus fired, so nobody cared if you were broke. The prevailing belief was we wouldn’t always be. If you could get in with the right people, asking if you could Venmo later was better than credit.

I went inside a liquor store up the street. I assumed I had some money on my card, just not enough for the tab.

The card ran.

I exited with a pint of tequila. A guy passed by, down on his luck, and asked for a smoke. I gave him one and offered the pint.

“Nah,” he said. “Gave up drinking.”

“What’s your story?”

“Man…”

“How many cigarettes for you to tell me your story?”

He clasped his hands behind his head and cut down an alley growing smaller and smaller as he went. I tucked the tequila in my pocket and headed toward downtown.

Denver was beautiful at dusk. The buildings appeared rusted in front of the sky.

When the sun slid behind the Rockies it bathed the front range in hard shadow creating, for about twenty minutes, a soft half-light that made the city feel quiet and surreal.

I passed through the tent town on Stout. I had friends who lived there. They weren’t bums but were considered as such. Really, they were burnt out on the bullshit.

Hundreds of tents lined the sidewalks. Trash tumbled by on a furnace breeze. I planned to check in but didn’t consider the time.

No one was around. Everybody was in the dinner line over at the mission.

I crossed Broadway to the 16th Street Mall. The only sign of life was businesspeople scurrying from office buildings.

I continued in the direction of the river looking for Cosmo. He sometimes got high at the confluence. Cosmo was a wild Russian who climbed cranes for Instagram posts. Finding him was dumb luck. His phone only worked when he had wi-fi.

I walked down Little Raven by the high-rise residential along the St. Vrain, crossed the pedestrian bridge into Lo-Hi, and spotted him on the rocks by the water.

“Fuck it,” he said as I approached. “If they don’t construct more buildings, I’m leaving.”

“Back to the Kremlin?” I asked, offering the tequila.

“Pacific Northwest,” he said. “Seattle is growing faster than Denver.”

“Rainy up there.”

“Good,” he said. “I’m sick of all this sunshine.”

“I like it,” I said. “Keeps my depression at bay.”

“Americans,” he laughed. “You think every day should be sunshine.”

As night fell, we got high and watched the windows of the buildings around downtown light up. Around ten, we entered the lobby of the Block 162 South tower. The guy at the desk was asleep. We climbed the stairs to the third floor and took the elevator to the 45th. Once you got a few floors up you could take the elevators without a key.

We accessed the roof through a door with an alarm that Cosmo disarmed with scotch tape. I peered over the ledge. The city took on a green haze. Quiet. The sway of the building was evident and that, coupled with the slow crawl of the cars below, created an Einstein on the bus effect, which is why I couldn’t jump on cranes.

Cosmo was unfazed.

“Be careful,” I said.

“If I lose my grip, I won’t feel a thing.”

He hung off the ledge, dropped onto a platform, sprinted and leapt onto the long arm of a crane where he dangled by one hand and took a selfie before pulling himself up, moving fast along the arm which led to an under construction building several hundred yards away. I lost sight of him along the way but knew he would make his way down through the building, fucking with whatever hapless security guard happened to be working. I wouldn’t see him again.

I smoked and stared west toward the front range which was visible because of light pollution from the city. From up there, the gradual climb of the peaks humbled, and if you stared long enough, the crisp black of the horizon started to push back.

I rode the elevator down and stepped outside. The return to witnessing life at normal scale always shocks the system. I walked over to Tarantula’s, which was only a few blocks away. The bartender from the sour house mentioned she played there. I figured since I asked it might be on her mind. Maybe we’d run into each other and shoot a game. If not, I’d play for beers, maybe win a few then call around for somewhere to crash.

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THE SOUND OF VIOLENCE by Ryan Norman

May 26, 2021 · Creative Nonfiction

Usually the orchard was all light, sunburn cooled by a welcome breeze, but not that day. Fog crept up from the river and swallowed every tree in its path, whetting its appetite for the too short grass that cut like blades, soaking the cicadas’ song. I sat on a cold cinder block and watched my boyfriend wash his car, questioning why he would shine it on such a gloomy day, but daring not to say it aloud. His phone rang and I looked at myself in the shiny apple red door. Winked. Shot some finger guns. Fell to the floor.“What are you doing? I have to go do something. Stay here,” he ordered.“I want to come. Where are you going? How long will you be gone?”“A deer’s trapped in a fence in the upper orchard. I have to kill it, or it’ll make a big hole in the fence, or break its neck.”“I’m coming.”

I didn’t know deer screamed until that day. I watched in awe, my eyes wet, standing at a distance from this huge creature, all muscle, as it screamed into the damp air. Thrashing wildly against an almost invisible wire fence, its antlers trapped, entangled with imminent death until finally all went quiet. I touched my forehead and pulled away sticky droplets on my fingertips. That welcome breeze returned, and my heart sank. I had never witnessed death, and never imagined I would. He told me the deer would be skinned, the meat eaten. Nothing would go to waste. But I sat in silence as the truck hurtled past trees into the thick of fog, uncomfortably aware that in the open bed lay a blood-soaked deer, jiggling stiffly with every pebble on the road. I imagined the process of preparing the deer for consumption, sliding a sharp knife between the skin and muscle. I knew some details. The indignity of it all. Hanging it by its hind feet to drain the blood, eyes wide open like black holes. But hadn’t I done the same?

Descending the stairs in a southern New York lab, wearing clothes on top of clothes to keep out the formaldehyde—a sticky stench—entering a room with two dead bodies given to science. We were assigned a cadaver, a trick of the language to distance ourselves from the fact that we would be cutting into dead people with scalpels. Uncovering secrets. Naming muscles, veins, arteries. Draping white cloth for dignity. Digging into intercostal muscles with no breath sounds. A smell that hasn’t left me. And when the draping slipped, an image that hasn’t left me either. All that muscle. Exposed on a stainless-steel table. So much gray. Could I really judge my farmer boyfriend for killing a deer when I cut into a human?

He had been offended by that lab as much as I was saddened by killing a trapped deer. He had told me to stay. Wasn’t it my own fault? But life carried on. Sadness blurred. Judgment faded. We went about our usual things, no hang ups. Trivia on Wednesdays, sunsets on the roof, cider on the porch watching the train rush by. Until we drunkenly ran through the woods one night, searching for a waterfall. We set up camp in a small clearing on the property of the orchard. A tent built for one. We stopped to eat over fire, a hunk of meat thrown onto a cast iron skillet. He fed me a small piece and it was nothing I recognized. I asked him what it was, and he asked, “Remember that deer?” And it tasted of pain and fear. It tasted of violence. I spat it out.

The moon guided us to water, as she is wont to do, and the rushing sound plummeting past wet, slick stone drowned our voices. We left our clothes on the dirt embankment and swam in silver flecked streams, our bodies glowing green underwater and star white on top. I watched him there, standing in a warrior’s pose on an outcropping of rocks among the frothy water, drunk on apples, and admired every inch of his marble-carved body. Maybe I was drunk on apples, too. Everything began to wobble, so we went back to his tent. He laid down, just another naked body in the summer night, his skin still cold from the green river. The moon cast his skin gray as he laid there on a slab of earth, no modesty, just the thin floor of his tent. I covered his face with my palm, his breath heavy, fog caught in my lifeline, obscuring love, and lust; my tongue a scalpel plunging deep into him. I wondered at his muscles quaking with each scream, stealing the silence of the night until I was full.

Crow Jonah Norlander

REWIND by Amy Wang

May 24, 2021 · Fiction

This is before the bed at my new apartment feels especially wide and I wake up crying over things I barely remember; before the two years during which every night I hear the tell-tale groaning of a broken stairway as it is about to collapse under the weight of ashes and a leaping fire in the second after I fall asleep; this is before I have to start going to therapy in order to keep from crying every time I pass the cafe where you used to buy me peppermint lattes, before I begin reminding myself that it is my fault, my words that manifested into fire and brimstone and inferno and consumed everything I had once loved. This is before they show me your body, or what’s left of it, before they tell me that you were trapped under a fallen beam, your spine melting into the burgundy corduroy of our sofa cushions as your eyelashes turned into dust. This is before I wait on the sidewalk, cold despite the heat of the flames that still roar above my head, waiting, waiting for you to appear, for your head to pop out from the doorway; this is before the moment that I realize that you weren’t going to, before the moment I knew that you couldn’t. This is before the roof collapses and buries you under it, before that first fire and before the final one; this is before I stumble down a rickety flight of steps as soon as the alarm sounds, at the first sign of smoke, before too many first-hand experiences acclimate me to the dangers of heat.

This is before I make you sleep on the couch, before I shut the door of our bedroom without even giving you a blanket. This is before the argument that even led to that fire in the first place. This is before I get sick of the way you laugh, before you burn the edges of the painting my mom had given me for my twenty-sixth birthday and I scream at you for doing it. This is before the coiled heat of irritability begins lacing itself every weekday night, before we lose our ability to have conversations without our words melting into the barrel of a gun primed to explode.

This is before you lose your job and we downsize to a shitty apartment two hours away from the house you used to say we would raise our kids in. This is before our two year anniversary, during which you light the entire cake on fire courtesy of cooking oil, because you “thought it was undercooked.” This is before you get diagnosed as a clinical pyromaniac and before I have to go through every room of our house, flipping over sofa cushions in case lighters are hiding underneath. This is before I realize that you have a problem falling in love with things that hurt you, and judging from how long I’ve stayed, so do I. This is before I wake up to find the quilt smoking around me, to your thumb flicking a lighter as your fingers hover gently over flame. This is before we move in together, and my father tells me that you will never make me happy because you have never known stability and I tell him to fuck off. This is before I have to take over making dinner because all too often what you make is burnt black, because you forget to turn off the stove while you’re busy staring at the flames. This is before I ask you why you smoke so much, and you tell me that it’s because you crave warmth.

This is before all of that. It is summer, and the groves of orange trees that we always drove by whenever we went on road trips are laden with ripe fruit. The air is filled with citrus and lies thickly and still and syrupy over the two of us. The sun is always golden and red and dying; the sky is always flame-pink; every oxygen atom in the space around us is perfectly seared salmon. You have yet to break your leg at the construction site where you work, and on Sunday afternoons, you still flip over the chain-link fence, filling your pockets with mandarins and handing them off to the kids that live on our street. On Wednesday afternoons, we go driving in your old Toyota, windows down, heat warnings and fire danger signs wavering in strips of silver, summer mirages slipping over the horizon and through our fingertips as you rewind the CD in the stereo. We are comfortable still, the two of us, caught in the divot between the awkwardness of learning to love and the exhaustion of forgetting how to. I lean in for a kiss, and when our lips touch, your skin is so hot it feels like fire. I think, to myself, that I would give anything, anything to stay in this moment. You are lovely, next to me. Your smile is incandescent.

Crow Jonah Norlander

A DAUGHTER NEEDS A NAME LIKE AN AMULET by Sara Comito

May 20, 2021 · Fiction

She wakes up laughing at her dream that she is a chest of drawers with a single knob in the middle. She wakes to find her belly button has popped like a Butterball turkey thermometer. She dreams she is eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. She wakes and makes a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. She drinks from the milk carton and guzzles down half its contents. She dreams she is a milk carton. She wakes to find her nightgown is wet with her first milk. Mmmmmm she breathes. It smells delicious. She dreams she is weighing grapefruits in her palm at the supermarket while making sure the other customers aren't looking. She wakes to find her breasts painfully engorged. She takes a long, hot shower. She dreams her boyfriend is drinking at the bar. She wakes to find he has not come home. She calls the bar. The bartender who knows both of them says, Ummm, nope, haven't seen him. She gets up and sits on the couch, falling into a slumber. She dreams she is leaning against a vibrating washing machine. She wakes to find the cat purring, curled up on her belly. She starts upstairs and notices snowy boot prints on the carpet. The boyfriend is open-mouthed and snoring on the bed. She returns to the couch. She dreams she is eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. She writes “milk” on the shopping list on the fridge. That evening she dozes on the couch, book falling closed on her belly. The telephone startles her awake. She had just had her tests that day and all is well, but the midwife tells her to come outside to watch the northern lights. The midwife has brought a pot of soup. She dreams she is a moon with an elliptical orbit. When she is at her closest point to her huge planet, she is squeezed so she might burst. She wakes to find she is having Braxton Hicks contractions. She feels her belly and is surprised at how strong and tight it is. This makes her smile. She dreams she is a tree being chopped down. She wakes to her boyfriend beating on the door. She has locked him out. It will be a long night. She dreams she is a tree whose roots gently surround a squirrel sleeping in a hollow. Roots penetrate the earth and even come out of places they're not supposed to, like her branches and leaves. She sees the veins of the leaves, pumping red, illuminated from behind by the sun. She wakes to a loud pop she can both feel and hear. The contractions leave her breathless. She stumbles to the phone and has to stop halfway there. She calls the midwife, just down the street. The midwife says, Shit, it's sounds like you're transitioning already. She drops the receiver and lurches to the bathroom. Her bowels empty spasmodically while she vomits soup into the sink. The midwife uses her own key and runs up the stairs to find her on the floor of the bathroom. A second set of heavy footsteps up the stairs – the doula. Oh, thank god. She delivers after four hours from precipitous start to precipitous finish. The baby is fine, better than fine. Perfect. A girl, which she did not dream but somehow knew. The snowy villas are lit up in ambulance red while green aurora dances overhead. On the gurney down the stairs she is being pulled from her body the way the baby was. All she sees is red. She thinks about primary colors. The midwife's voice somewhere up above calls her back, You have a lot of work to do here, young lady. Don't you dare leave us. She feels the way she does when she's trying to ignore an alarm clock. At last her sense of obligation brings her back. It is snowing. Each snowflake shimmers pink. The most beautiful thing she's ever seen. In the emergency room, a doctor reaches in and pulls out the placenta, turning her inside out. She hears fabric ripping, the kind of thunder that sounds like the sky is zipping apart. You've lost most of your blood, the doctor tells her. The midwife holds her hand. She dreams about holding a bowl of red Jello. She can't steady her hands so it will stop wobbling. She wakes up kneading her belly. So empty, so loose. A haunted house. This is the one thing they don't tell you about, she says to nobody. The baby is warming in a compartment near the bed. The companion chair is empty. A nurse walks by and notices she's awake, approaches the bedside. She smiles. Good morning. Are you ready to hold your baby?

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