Flash Archives

HOW TO PRONOUNCE BON IVER by Holden Tyler Wright

September 27, 2021 · Creative Nonfiction

The day after New Year’s, my neighbor—who strummed his guitar at 2 in the morning singing tone-deaf Beatles covers—asked me for a ride. My other neighbor, Isaac, kept the TV on 24/7, just loud enough to be heard in the corner I pressed my bed into, peppering my nights with laugh tracks. Beyond him, Ruth stayed up knitting. I knew this because she made me an endearingly hideous hat and a too-short scarf. We were all insomniacs. I was the only student among us, and saw my living situation as a stepping stone into something greater. I wondered how the other three got locked into crappy efficiency apartments in their middle age. “We look out for each other, here,” Ruth had told me with a wink, watching me pull on her lopsided beanie.

So, I gave my neighbor the ride. I couldn’t tell you his name, because he’d never told me, and at that point I was embarrassed to ask. “I got to pick up my car from the shop,” he deadpanned to the passenger window. “I ran someone over. That’s how I wrecked it. She died. The other guy was okay though.”

I had no appropriate response. “That’s terrible,” I managed, “any way you slice it.”

“It was raining,” he excused himself. “I didn’t see them. Nobody’s pressing charges or anything.” He aimed a finger across the street. “Can we stop at CVS first? My stomach’s been hurting. Doctor’s don’t know why.”

I waited in the car listening to Bon Iver while my neighbor got his prescription. It was a gray day, the streets still glossy from an earlier shower.

Bon Iver reminded me of my sister’s shitty ex-boyfriend, who scoffed at my mispronunciation: Bawn Eye-vur. The boyfriend played basketball but was too short to make the local community college team and became assistant manager instead. When my sister brought Muggsy—as he called himself—home, he talked sports with my father, complimented my mother’s cooking, distributed animal crackers to the kids, ran thin fingers through his coiffed blonde hair. Muggsy was white and Mormon, like us, which made him “safe” in my parents’ eyes. Though by the time they broke up, it was clear to each of us that he was anything but safe.

“It’s French,” Muggsy explained, unveiling his dentist’s-son teeth. “Bon hiver. It means ‘good winter.’” Now I say it wrong on purpose.

The sign at the car garage said, “Closed Weekends,” but my neighbor summoned someone by rattling the door. The guy wore basketball shorts and a scowl fierce enough to fend off the cold. After some conversation, my neighbor got back into the car. “They don’t have it here,” he told me. “I’m gonna have to figure this out.” He closed his eyes, sighed as if this were the thing that might do him in. Down the street stood a billboard for a funeral home that featured a leering young woman draped in white fur and holding a lap dog. “Happy Holidays!” it read.

My neighbor didn’t buckle up on the drive home, and every thirty seconds my car chimed a wordless warning. Each iteration felt louder and longer than the last.

He cleaned his glasses and nodded at the car stereo. “This Peter Gabriel?” he asked.

“Bon Iver,” I told him.

I worried my neighbor might interpret the alarm as a serious problem, a precursor to the hood suddenly jackknifing open or the tires going ragged. Worse, he might think something was wrong with me for ignoring the noise. If my neighbor met another person who listened to Bon Iver, he might think I was an idiot for mispronouncing their name. Maybe he blamed me for the racket my car was making. Maybe he gripped his armrest, afraid I might go slicing through a red light and into oncoming traffic.

The alarm sounded again and again. Each slick intersection held its watery double. I didn’t know how to tell my neighbor it was his fault.

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ALBTRAUM by Corey Miller

September 22, 2021 · Fiction

I coax Mother’s wheelchair through Newark terminal to our United gate. I pray she knows where she is—where she is going.

I can’t understand her anymore; sensing death she no longer speaks in English. She dreams of her hometown, Essen, Germany. Unaccustomed mother tongue, I download Duolingo on my iPhone to learn Deutsche. To decipher her code.

Returning Mother to her homeland, I use all of my sick days from work, expecting to catch a bug at some point throughout the year. I’ve never traveled outside of America. My passport on the verge of expiring.

Mother’s lips are as tight as a treasure chest when it’s time for her medicine. The airport terminal eyes us foreign. Vacationers ready for a good time, not to witness the end of the line. I force her to consume healing capsules. The army of tablets are protection, so she won’t panic in public, believing she teleported there.

Duolingo is good at teaching single words and building up to sentences.

Good day. Guten Tag. Goodbye. Auf Wiedersehen.

I am a man. Ich bin ein Mann.

I am a strong man. Ich bin ein stark Mann.

Meine Mutter hasn’t been back to Deutschland since she was twenty, arriving in America with unborn me. She recalls stories of riding her Westphalian horse through the town center as a Mädchen. She raised me by herself in America. She would always talk about how much of the world she experienced growing up, how much of the world I missed by tending her needs.

On the plane, meine Mutter doesn’t speak—she screams. Her body is a guitar string, wound tight and vibrating. The other passengers all look the same to me as I pan between them, restraining my final family member. The crew is bilingual. They say Mother cries of foals and mares. They watch me force the pills down her throat like I want her to throw up. An inflight map depicts a plane surrounded by water.

Growing up, Mother would tell me I was gifted when the other boys called me names at baseball practice. She would tell me I was strong and I’d accomplish greatness. What if that’s a mantra mothers are required to preach? A page from The Mother’s Playbook. I didn’t have time for friends when my mother required all of my love. Now I cook softer foods, my opinion of makeup turned into application, I accompany her up and down each step.

My mind is a freezer thawing. Memories sitting in ice trays, warming back into water and evaporating. Did meine Mutter dye these thoughts different colors? Grün, blau, und rot cubes containing the times we cantered the horses bareback through open fields of clover. Bits of purple memories kicked into my backside, the shape of a horseshoe.

We fly into Dusseldorf because the airport in Essen is classified as a minor unscheduled facility. “Essen” in Deutsche means “to eat.” A town made of food, I think. A whole gingerbread village where everyone can be a cookie-cutter friend. The little I know isn’t enough to save me here.

Pushing her wheelchair across cobblestones through the treeless Altstadt to the train station is like pushing against a wall. The resistance ist stark. Ich bin stark.

In Deutschland, you count starting with your thumb as if everything is A-OK. Four is spelled “vier” but is pronounced “fear.” Ich bin ein stark Mann.

Mutter peers at statues, mouth agape. I learn of a German word that doesn’t translate into English well: Gemütlichkeit. It’s a feeling of warmth usually associated with having close friends present.

The city smells like it’s been here since the start of time. Aromatic honey and barley overflow from the shops and the peddlers manage raw food with their bare hands. “Hell” means “bright.” The sun is hell, berating my doubt and casting shadows of those who stand tall.

I hesitate translating the train system. Lists and screens and platforms — I don’t want to go the wrong way.

The stories she told me always ended with how her Westphalian died of colic. Pferde can’t vomit because their esophagus contains muscles shoving in one direction, the inability to vomit can tangle their insides.

We board the train with assistance from the conductor; he lowers a bridge to mind the gap and wheel aboard. The towns come and go, divided by farmland large enough to home a cow for each resident. Shelter is necessary for livestock, but I wonder if, like humans, there’s such thing as too much. I ask Mother if she knows where she is. “Wo sind wir?” She smiles as she collapses out of her wheelchair, crumbling onto the floor. The doors slide open, the conductor announces Essen, next stop Bochum. I see banners hung in the station that I cannot read, yet, it feels like the vertebrae in my spine have realigned. Pictures of horses jumping obstacles and pulling plows for Equitana, one of the largest horse festivals. Meine Mutter smiles, not looking outside. She locks eyes with me and I can see the years she’s bartered for this final moment of clarity — for the pair of us.

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THE CROW CAME ONE MORNING AND WHAT’S LEFT TO WONDER? by Derek Maine

September 15, 2021 · Fiction

He takes his shoes off by the door. A solemn peek in the hotel mirror suggests pleated pants, starched shirt, taut tie, he’s running out of matching letters to describe his appearance which is always, and only, just that. To himself he appears as an apparition. Do others see him, he wonders often. The meetings today went well. He sold himself. Passed himself off as one of them. Someone they could trust. Someone they could have a beer with. At a baseball game. A hot dog too. He is not that someone. He hasn’t had a beer in some very long time. A hot dog would upset his stomach, surely. He calls his home. No one answers. Everything is being created or dying and he obsesses over which. The crow circled above his house this morning, before he left for his work trip, and that is another thing he has been considering. He steps forward toward the television then steps back. The room looks like all the other rooms. Describing it would kill it, surely. Has he used surely twice? He has. He wishes he hadn’t but it’s too late to change it, he sighs. Someone else is in the room, came in with him. It’s him the other way. There are always two, wherever he goes. He is an unwilling participant in an argument for argument’s sake which has raged on within him for 39 years. Whenever he picks up a new trick, or learns a new phrase, the other way does too. It bores him. He wishes there was another way, but he only contains enough energy to wish. He seeks nothing, he has done no serious investigation. He avoids the television, walking further into the room, not wanting to stir up an anger. He pulls the curtain to reveal a view of the highway. What a stupid way to live, he says to no one. The phone rings. He picks it up and says something like, “hello.” It is not 1979, in case you were wondering. It is a year, but not that one. His wife is on the other end of the line. He can hear his children screaming in the background. They love him. They miss him. They say goodbye and he hangs up the phone. He wonders who they love. He considers who they miss. It is not him. It is their projection of him. He is too many things at once to miss. He is too many things at once to love, he thinks. He is listless, the other way suggests he could be lifeless, if he’d like. He doesn’t want to be listless or lifeless. His co-pay is too rich for any other state of being. He distrusts professionals of all varieties, preferring amateurs or, better yet, people and things to happen with no explanation whatsoever. Plus, what books have the therapists read? It only ever shows you, on the websites, which insurance they accept. It never digs into their relationship to literature, being the only thing that matters to him. Since he mentioned websites, he can delete the part about it not being 1979. He doesn’t want to. It is a nod to an earlier work. He is conscious of building an oeuvre, even if he still has to look up the word every time to spell it correctly. It’s the “e” after the “o” that always trips him up. His wife sends him a text. She is privy to his rhythms. Suggests he use the hotel treadmill to stave off the thing that doesn’t have to come. He’s missing cigarettes. He’s not missing beer, but he’s always missing cigarettes. He does not want to exercise. He does not know what, or how, to be. It disheartens him. It unsettles him. He will do nothing to improve his prospects of knowing, or being, or being any other way. It is the only way he knows. He is not going to leave the hotel room. He is not going to change clothes or shower or turn on the television or open his computer to write or go outside for a walk or eat any food or think about anything other than how he is feeling, which is an absence, and occurs to him to be the only thing happening in the entire world at the moment. He masturbates when it is time to masturbate. He takes a Tylenol PM when it is time to take a Tylenol PM. He lay on top of the sheets, naked, unable to sleep. He takes a second Tylenol PM when it is time to take a second Tylenol PM. The couple next door is having sex. Or the person next door is watching pornography, whatever the case may be. His wife is jealous of his work trips, his time away from home, his peace away from the kids. But she does not have to be him, he thinks. He does, he’s sure of it. He is in pain at how brief life is. And how poor of a showing he’s made thus far. His oeuvre is weak and wildly inconsistent. He would like to be different, but he does not know how. He wonders what he would write about if he could write anything at all, writing being all he’d like to do, though he’s never examined why, and he’s terribly aware that if he were to, he might find something else to dislike about himself, and so he does nothing. He tries to conjure an image but comes away, as usual, with nothing but formlessness. He is unable to imagine a red dot. Or tap into any visual. It is all, instead, a constant flow of language. He has a business degree and a loneliness he’s immediately thrust onto everyone he’s ever been intimate with, and an immediate regret. He’s lost the plot, control of the narrative, not a natural editor, too fat around the belly, bags under the eyes – the Tylenol PM never works, wondering what the crow wants with him, if anything, probably nothing, he’s made babies and has a life insurance policy and isn’t sure there’s much else left for him to do. He pulls into his driveway. It is the next day now, if that makes any kind of difference. His wife kisses him softly on the lips, she’s headed out to a yoga class. The kids are out playing with friends. He takes his shoes off by the door. A solemn peek in the bedroom mirror suggests pleated pants, starched shirt, taut tie, he’s running out of matching letters to describe his appearance which is always, and only, just that. To himself he appears as an apparition. Do others see him, he wonders often.

CRJ

OTTERS AT THE ZOO by Christopher Allen

September 13, 2021 · Fiction

My imaginary son is learning about otters in imaginary third grade. He has to write a report. I think he’s a bit young for reports, but his imaginary teacher, Mrs. Florida, thinks otherwise. Two hundred words. Due Monday.

So I plan a trip to the imaginary zoo though my imaginary son says the fastest way to learn about otters is the Internet. He spends all his internet time reading about sea otters. He’s an official member of the Otter Appreciation Society.

Did you know, he says, that otters can talk? He whistles, growls, says he’s learning Otterish, says he doesn’t have time for a zoo when he’s got 42,689 search results to get through for “All Things Otter.”

But the fresh air, I say. The snake house. Churros.

Nah, he says.

There’ll be imaginary sea otters, I say. Real ones.

He’s already in the car.

My imaginary son is just big enough to sit in the front without his imaginary car seat. He buckles up, smiles like that click is the most adult thing in the world. And maybe it is. He asks how far the imaginary zoo is, and I say it’s seven carrot sticks and that tuna fish sandwich in his imaginary backpack. He tucks into the sandwich.

My imaginary son’s obsession with sea otters is nothing new. Ever since he hatched from my thigh he’s been a little otter fellow. I allow it. A boy needs a hobby. I collected stamps.

Did you know, he munches, that ninety percent of sea otters live on the coast of Alaska?

I didn’t, I say, and he says, We live in Delaware.

A shame, I say. Where do the other ten percent live?

Did you know, he says, they store food in their armpits?

That’s gross, I say.

Super gross, he says like super gross is the best thing ever.

The imaginary zoo is hopping today. It’s the birth of Wen, the imaginary panda. It’s been all over the news. We’re waiting to enter the imaginary panda pavilion when I spot the churros cart. I’m starving, and we’ve been waiting in the queue for what seems like a million carrot sticks, so I tell my imaginary son to hold our place while I grab us churros. I return with the most aromatic imaginary confection to the same queue, the same panda pavilion, but no imaginary son.

Have you seen a kid? Have you seen a kid? I say to the parents in the queue.

This is a zoo, someone says. It’s an ocean of kids.

He’s eight, I say, looks like a miniature me. Like this, I say, and squish my cheeks up into my imaginary son’s goofy face.

You left your kid? someone says, For churros?

I run up and down the queue—Have you seen my kid?—getting only judgmental glares for taking my eyes off him for four seconds, but then I hear him beyond a cobblestone path. He’s jumping up and down squealing Otterish on a platform made for kids so they can traumatize the sea otters below.

He settles when he sees me, knows I’m not the kind of dad who’d haul off or why I oughta. He knows I’m just grateful for every moment he decides to stay. Did you know, he says, that otter mothers leave their babies floating on the water when they look for food? He takes a churro from the bag, and it may be the cinnamon and sugar dusting the air between us, but I feel a breeze of something real, something unfamiliar like, I don’t know, but that’s just it, isn’t it? I don’t know.

Why is that? I ask.

Their fur’s too thick, he says. They can’t swim under water. But they float great. He smiles and throws an imaginary fish to the otters below.

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ALT TEXT FOR A CANDID AUDIENCE PHOTO by Taylor Alexandra Duffy

September 8, 2021 · Fiction

With thanks to Dr. Zaneta M. Thayer, biological anthropologist

CRJ

EXPERIENCERS by Emily Costa

September 6, 2021 · Fiction

Your girlfriend believes that at some point during the last year or so her father has been abducted by aliens and replaced with a human-like shell. She believes visits still happen, routinely and systematically, that they must pull him up there with that classic tractor beam, or else he meets them somewhere in the woods, and they do tests and probe him and check on his progress. Progress with what, you wonder, but she’s still talking. She says they return him dead-eyed. She’s got it all laid out. She keeps a little journal by her bed to jot down the nights, to keep track of his behavior. She says on Mondays and Thursdays he leaves in the middle of the night. The front light’s on motion detector and shines into her window. She hears his tires crunch driveway gravel. Then, he’s there again at cereal time, normal.

She’s telling you this because she trusts you, she says, finally she trusts you.

You wonder if this means you can move on from spending the night in her bed just making out, from jerking off in your room when you get home. You hate that you think that, especially considering what you’re doing now: driving down route 63 with her, tailing her dad’s BMW, trying to find what she’s calling an “entry point.” Your crappy Toyota is having some issue with acceleration—it’s stuttering, slow—but you need to maintain distance anyway. Your girlfriend is biting the sides of her fingernails. She is messing with the radio. She is telling you hang back and speed up.

Your girlfriend’s mom is at home, zonked on Valium. You’d left your own father similarly zonked, head back, on the couch. Something in his nightly regimen knocks him out but you’re not sure which pill. You make a mental note to ask the doctor. Maybe you could even ask the nurse at treatment while he dozes and you’re stuck in the sticky chair next to him, flipping through a book, unable to focus on the words. Maybe it’s the disease itself. But you try not to think about that, and your girlfriend is saying are you listening? and you are and you aren’t.

Because the thing is you know where her dad goes. It’s easy to infer, even though you’ve only met the guy once. The way he smiles, the over-cheer in his voice. Like he’s making up for something. But your girlfriend doesn’t see it. Or, she doesn’t want to see it. And you can’t just come out and tell her the warm thing her father’s enveloped in isn’t some human-sized test-tube filled with space goo. So you’re just waiting for the thing to happen. And it’ll happen tonight: you’ll follow the father all the way to the other woman’s house. There will be no object in the sky, no abduction, no jump in the clock. Just a split-level with its porch light on. The door will open. You’ll both catch a glimpse of her as she pulls him inside. Your girlfriend will look at you in a way you’ll never forget, and you won’t be sure how to make your face look, how to mirror surprise.

But before that, you’re driving, and you know, and she doesn’t, and you can’t tell her, and it’s all hanging there in the air, and you start to wonder if you’re a bad person—your most frequent thought—because you want the thing to happen already, to get it over with, to end up on the other side of it, but you don’t want to say the words. You can barely even think them.

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“I’M TELLING YOU YOU’RE GONNA LOVE IT” by Eros Livieratos

September 1, 2021 · Fiction

“I’m telling you, you’re gonna love it.”“There is absolutely no way I’m going to like it.” “Come on, it won’t be that bad.”“It sounds awful.”“So?”

James was always trying to get me to do shit. The first time I ate glass, they were there, egging me on. They posted a clip of it on their story while I was picking at my gums. I remember them saying,

“If Lucas Abela¹ can do it, why can’t you?”

So, I swallowed some. We kept on hanging out. What else would I do? Their suggestions kept getting a little riskier, a bit more reckless. When they convinced me to try robbing a grave, I declined. I wasn’t into it. My ma would hate me for it. So, James said,

“You’ll never be an R.L. Stine² character.”

And for whatever reason, that really did it. I dug up a grave, but it turns out, they lock some coffins so all I took were the ghosts.

I haven’t been sleeping right. I thought this thing with James wasn’t going to work out. Their hot pink leather pants and infected stick-n-pokes couldn’t be in my life any longer. I was going to break it off. I thought maybe I’d text them and this would all be settled. They were already at my door.

“Have you tried salvia³ before?”

“No. No James, I’m done. I’m tired. I kind of just want to get a job.”

James looked at me for a moment. They looked me up and down, they lingered on the down. Their red-heart earring dangled like a pendulum. Their eyes intent, staring into my hips for what felt like an eternity.

“No. Nope. I don’t think we should keep hanging out. I don’t think we’re good for each other—”

James’ lips moved up and down, slowly, mocking me. They patted their bald head and rubbed their flat stomach and began screeching. Howling.

“Do you remember that time Hanatarash⁴ bulldozed that club?”

“No. What? I wasn’t alive. Wasn’t that in the 80s?”

“What if I told you, I could get us a bulldozer?” Their green eyes lit up with what my ma would call, “the devil’s passion.” I know this, it isn’t going to happen again.

“James, I’m done. I haven’t slept in months. I think I need to get exorcised?”

“Jen, you will never ever be a moderately well-known but still largely obscure harsh-noise artist if you don’t do this. Like, nobody will like you.” I finally heard it. The teeth still left in their mouth clicked with each syllable and everything was clarity. I wasn’t going to fall for it.

“Where would you even work, anyway? Nobody’s hiring.” James’ shoulders dropped. It felt like I was talking to someone else. They weren’t interested in trying to bulldoze a basement gig anymore.

“I don’t know, I really don’t want to but like rent’s coming up and—”

“What?”

“I was just going to start delivering packages, like just for a few weeks or something”

“I still have this bag of salvia.”

“I really don’t—”

“I’m telling you, you’re gonna love it.”

“There is absolutely no way I’m going to like it.”

Lucas Abela is an Australian harsh noise musician known for creating and playing an instrument comprised of glass and contact microphones. The instrument is played by mouth and by hand.
That guy who wrote Goosebumps.
A mistake.
Japanese harsh noise band from the 80s that pioneered the genre and received notoriety from being banned from several countries after bulldozing a club as one of their performances.

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TECHNO SHOW by Lucy Zhou

August 31, 2021 · Fiction

In a post-Covid world, we joke, the first thing we’ll do is go to a techno show. Yeah, like the kind in someone’s basement that smells of bathwater or underneath a freeway pass for better acoustics—remember that last show we went to? Where we had to slink ungracefully through a doggy door in the fence and squish through ferns that tickled our palms before we came across the path, illuminated by Carla’s bright-pink hair. There will be a Halloween-store fog machine, a drumline of clanging pots and pans, and those little umbrellas in everyone’s red Solo cup. Most people are just huffing down straight gin. Your ex’s new girlfriend is the one DJing, and you suddenly feel very petty and small, even though this is the ex who inhaled paint thinner and said your calves were horsey when he was high. But still—you look around for his signature shaved head and are relieved that he’s not here. And if he is, you couldn’t care less. So yeah, at this techno show, everyone is wearing a slick black mask in some intersection between goth and UX designer. In the bright darkness, we k-hole as if we aren’t terrified of being near stranger bodies, wrapped in tender-damp heat, after almost two years of only talking to low-res avatars on a screen. We suddenly have nothing to say. No one brings up how Jay would have been the first one shuffling up a storm, except his parents took him off the ventilator a month ago. None of us could go to the family-only funeral. Or how Tony has to sit down for most of the set after getting sick in the first wave. But we sit down with him in the middle of the dance floor, watch the crowd bob nervously and grow old. We leave after an hour. On the way home, Carla drives because she’s doing some alcohol detox, and we mouth off about how the music was whack, no, the people, no, it was the general vibe and like, what the heck was up with those little umbrellas? It’s all very predictable, you know, this idea of an after, as easy as getting used to a ghost. And Jay laughs at this like a donkey in heat from the backseat, as if to remind us that he’s still here, still kicking. By the time we turn back to make sure, he’s already gone.

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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.

x-r-a-y magazine

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.

x-r-a-y magazine

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