Flash Archives

HOW I LEARNT TO DRIVE by Roseline Mgbodichinma

March 15, 2021 · Fiction

Sometimes brown girls can wear black. Not the colour, but a mood, a presence, a halo. I hold my aunt's hand as she struggles with the chain. I want to tell her there’s no use, it can’t cage her spirit, but I stop myself.The Ward smells of grudges and longing. What is madness, if not a pile of lost love and mercy? There is something about blue that’s retrograde. It's the colour of sky fading into evening, the colour of hospital bedsheets the severe cases lie on. Scratch on the walls suggest a previous occupant might have had claws. Blue is the look in my Aunt's eye that means a vacuum, the hotness of tears rolling down her caramel onyx face.The perfume of catarrh and puss-filled wounds is close to disinfected avocado. These markings on the wall remind me of history class. After this no one can convince me cavemen were completely sane. Everyone here is brought in with a sense of urgency, like preparation for a carnival. Their escorts try to make sense of the nonsensical, to explain how the patient went from drinking coffee to grabbing their niece’s collar bones and picking dirt off the ground. Suddenly dust tasted like coca and stones turned to bread, their grin turned to the devil’s.This is a home of monologues. Here, the self is both actor and spectator; the protagonist, an extra, a prop forever tied to insanity. My aunt is still struggling, she is remembering objects. Says we should bring her the basin of eggs she bought decades ago. Says I should return the bus fare she gave me for school. She wants to microwave a can of water.I know beauty can distort the truth. That evening she wore a mustard top and grey shorts. Her curls blew out bouncy like springs. I should have sensed her stream of consciousness when she climbed onto six-inch stilettos to go to the market? I can’t forget that evening. The phone rang nonstop. When I picked up, a stranger described her nakedness. Said she stood sulking like an offering, ready to bolt at the sight of clothes or a helping hand.Emergency is an efficient teacher. The first time I got behind the wheel of a car, was to drive my aunt to the hospital. I buckled the seat belt and evaded turns like the plague. A doctor pulled her from the backseat; she believed it was a kidnapping. He assumed my novice driving was from shock, but any ignition will start when a vein of worry inserts a key.The nurse pumps liquid into her bloodstream and she lays sly like a toad. She wakes up a wilding, hence the chain. She calls for the husband who swallowed her sanity as sleeping pills, the one who murmured 'I do' on the altar with his diseased mouth. She asks for her purse, the one she left at the mercy of the road, the one waiting there for thieves.Maybe new memories will grow when we abandon the old ones.

Crow Jonah Norlander

THE HEAT by Connor Thompson

March 12, 2021 · Fiction

Because of the heat, she decides to sleep downstairs. “This old townhouse funnels the stuff upwards like acid reflux,” she says. She slips from the sheets, props the standing fan under her arm.

It’s fine by him; he relishes in spreading out on the bed without her. (Starfishing, she calls it.) He listens to her footsteps recede on the stairs and unfurls his limbs to the four corners of the mattress. Above him the ceiling fan carves circles in the air, striving to please.

Two days ago an ambulance came down their street at an un-ambulance-y pace and pulled its left two wheels up onto the sidewalk in front of a house three doors down. The paramedics brought out an old woman and tucked her into the back. One by one, as if on bad knees, the wheels clunked gingerly back onto the street and the ambulance pulled away. The lights twirled without spirit. No siren.

She says, “I hope when I go they put their back into it. I want to scream through the streets. Blast through red lights. I want the people to know that death is in their midst.”

“It’s the heat,” he says. “This almost visible heat, creeping through the neighborhoods and stripping life away.”

“This heat,” she says. “This sludgy, quicksand heat, with nowhere to go but into us.”

He can almost taste it: like a membrane on his tongue, hints of moist metal and decay. She can almost hear it: the vibrations in the space between the molecules, the science-fiction throb of radiation.

They hear of toddlers desiccated in the back seats of SUVs; dogs too. They shake their heads at these distant tragedies. “This evil heat,” he says. “You can almost smell it, can’t you? It’s like, it’s like . . .” He doesn’t finish the thought.

In the morning she is gone before he awakes, the pull-out couch a swamp of sheet and pillow. Her scent is there, her residue, among the creases and stains. He lifts the edge and folds the evidence of their sleeping arrangement back into itself.

At this moment she is in their car, among other cars, waiting for a light to change. Sweat beads on her temples, her dress shirt already translucent with moisture. She shields her eyes against the rising sun. The radio tells her not to hope.

She gets home at seven.

“Two more ambulances today,” he says.

“They’re dropping like flies,” she says.

They sleep apart again.

“It’s on you,” she says. “It’s coming off you in waves.”

In the silence, he hears the clunk of the couch being pulled out. When he stretches out his joints creak and tingle and sigh.

He surprises her by getting up when she gets up. He is sitting in the kitchen when she emerges from the shower. He says he wants to get a start on the day. She has told him: you need to attack life, you need to be proactive. Lately, she tells him: you need to find a job. She is pleased to see a stack of resumes on the table in front of him.

“I’m only going to apply at places with air conditioning,” he says.

While she waits for a light to change he sits on the couch where she sleeps and watches the ambulances come up the street. They clamber onto the sidewalks and swallow up the bodies the paramedics present like offerings. The bodies are not all elderly—one is a woman no more than forty.

The resumes are still on the table when she gets home. He tells her about the ambulances, about the younger woman. She can see it has rattled him. “The traffic is getting lighter,” she says.

The next morning they awake in their separate beds to a line of ambulances blocking the street and she stays home from work. The electricity is off. A battery-powered radio tells them to expect rolling blackouts. Together they sit on the couch and watch the parade of corpses: elderly, adult, teenaged, infant, wheeled one by one towards the ambulances, placed gently inside. He imagines the bodies dissolving, like a candy on the tongue.

Their sweat is permanent, a second skin they never shed. They eat crackers and tuna for lunch. “Weird,” she says, “without the hum of the house.” The silence spreads out beneath them. Its depth makes them uneasy, like open water, like anything too vast to have an edge.

There is a flurry of activity at the end of the street. One paramedic is fighting another paramedic because, it seems, one paramedic has stolen the corpse out of the back of the other paramedic’s ambulance. They flail at each other and tear their uniforms. The first paramedic throws a punch and knocks the other one out. A third paramedic scoops up the unconscious paramedic and places him in the back of his ambulance.

“This heat,” he says.

The next day there are no ambulances.

She says, “I wonder . . .”

They knock on their neighbor’s door and it swings inward. They take a box of cereal and a bottle of soda from the pantry before they go. In each house, they snatch a sort of treasure: a can of soup, a pair of slippers, a book of piano music. It feels both right and wrong. It feels to him like they are following instincts now that they had long ago suppressed. They are in the eighth house and she is standing in the living room with an umbrella propped under her arm when she announces she doesn’t feel well.

He checks the last few houses on his own. In one he finds an aquarium with two orange fish swimming around. He gets it halfway home before the sweat on his hands causes it to slip and crash to the sidewalk. The fish twitch on the concrete and are still.

In the kitchen, he pours them glasses of warm soda. She sits at the table with her head in her hands. They use the resumes as coasters.

That night he stretches to the corners of the bed. His shoulders grind like unclutched gears, hips scream like ocean liners colliding. He stretches further than he ever has before. His fingers and toes flick in the air over the lip of the mattress and he thinks how easy it would be to simply break apart.

But then she is there above him. He moves over and she climbs in. She runs her fingertips over his chest, paints pictures of glaciers and mountain valleys and coral reefs and low clouds. Above them, the ceiling fan is still.

In the morning her hand is on his chest, except it isn’t. It’s just her heat that is there.

He finds her in the bathtub and she is mostly gone. He puts his hand on her forehead. It’s cooler in the porcelain, she says. He turns the tap and water comes out. Not warm or cold, just water. There is no answer when he calls for an ambulance. He leaves the water on but it does not cool her, nor does it wash her away.

That night he is stretching on the bed when the power comes on. The house spasms, resuscitated, the current rushing in like blood returning to a sleeping limb, tingly and hopeful. Above him, the ceiling fan resumes its half-hearted ambulations. He curls his limbs back into himself and blinks in the midst of such sudden life.

Crow Jonah Norlander

HOME SOON FOR A HOME COOKED MEAL by Paul Rousseau

March 11, 2021 · Fiction

Dad is not here, but he should be, soon, from work. He doesn’t drink and he’s not having an affair. He is a big man, I know. He likes red meat and horseradish. My sister’s boyfriend works, too, at the train depot, but him and my sister are both upstairs already.

Mom puts butter rolls in the oven at 425 degrees. Lying on my back in the family room, I have my feet on the grille of our gas fireplace. I test myself to see how long I can rest my feet on the glass part where it’s hot. I’ve seen mom try it. Ten seconds, fifteen. My feet are like tiny sock puppets. I know it’s time to remove them from the charred surface when they curl up. I grit my teeth at twenty seconds.

My feet shrivel like burning plastic melting over a lighter. Over a match. Over a box of matches. Over a bonfire. The protective screen is plagued with black singe marks from the loose threads that burn off and stick.

I switch from the glass to the grille again and the heat follows. I rub my toes from top to bottom between the gold looking bars. A tone sounds as I strum across them like a xylophone from the blue-hot place at the center of the fake logs. From Hell. The notes are too close together. Too similar in pitch. I test the dissonance, louder each time, blaming it on a goblin who strikes the bars using a tiny foot mallet. He crawls in and out with a finger over his mouth, hushing me. I test mom’s patience. She doesn’t want him in our home.

Next, my heels are treated, hitting the hot pressure points and nerve endings. I lie there with my mouth open like a doll’s, arms out, very limp. My cheeks’ spider-leg veins are reflected in the gold paint, flushed and prickly. Mom had to come get me from school early today. But it’s late now, or just dark. I check the clock on the VCR. It is 5:30 PM, in January, in Minnesota. It is dark. Dad should be home soon for a home cooked meal.

KC the Cat misleads me behind my back, going one way, a pirouette, then the other.

“You tricked me,” I say. “Your loss. I was going to pet you.”

KC the Cat is five years old. I am thirteen, but mom says I have an old soul.

Dad walks in and trips on my boots in the mudroom.

“What did I say this morning? What did I tell you to do?” he asks, out of breath from almost falling to the floor on the wet dirt-rug.

“You were supposed to move these! There needs to be an unobstructed walking path!” He doesn’t drink, he’s not having an affair. He is just angry. I think work makes him angry. Mom says that’s just the way he is.

“We have a shoe bin!” He yells.

Dad holds his knee while coming at me, through the kitchen, down the single step into the living room where I continue to stir, slowly. I picture him clumsily dashing on all fours like an injured farm animal.

He slaps the back of my head. I feel my hair get matted up. He orders me to spit on my palm, I do, and then he presses the damp side against the hot glass of the fireplace where I just had my feet. It hisses. Mom screams. Dad is trying to catch his breath. He grabs at his chest. He falls to the floor. All the noise makes my sister and her boyfriend come downstairs. My sister covers her mouth with her hand.

“Jesus Christ,” her boyfriend says.

The fire alarm goes off. The butter rolls are burning in the oven. My hand is burning. My sister’s ears are burning. Her boyfriend goes to fan the smoke detector with a blanket. He is used to furnaces and steam engines and heat. Dad is seizing on the carpet. I get up and open a door. KC the Cat runs out into the snow. I look at the neighbor’s chimney, and the chimney next to theirs. I look at the exhausting smoke and wonder if it’s from the combustion of wood or gas.

Crow Jonah Norlander

SELF-MAINTENANCE by John Chrostek

March 10, 2021 · Fiction

I live at the bottom of an old apartment tower and my tub won’t stop filling up with water. The building, weary from a century of American life, funnels its sewage down through my unit’s pipes until it all gets stuck up tight and rises with a fury, bubbling and nasty from the drain. For days, my every waking moment has been spent dumping bucket after bucket of the hot, dim water down the toilet and calling out for help. The calling out is pointless, of course, for what raw marrow remains of my voice gets trapped in my apartment, chipping at the paint on the walls, reaching no one. I know I would be furious—a half-starved monkey abandoned in a foreclosed amusement park—if I wasn’t sure deep down that I deserved this.Outside my bedroom window (left open day and night to minimize the build-up of moisture,) my unremarkable residential street has been overrun with a parade of screamers, all guttural grunts and challenges to fight discomforted passersby. At first the chaos left me unsettled, but as time passed and I dumped the water time and again, as I slept in fitful shifts on the cold linoleum tiling. Their thick-tongued cries sounded less like invading hellspawn and more like troubled family. I now love my feral kin as they howl, piss and rummage through the waste of the decadent, as they rage against society and the water rising quickly from the tub. I sing their praises as they set about their holy work and I mine, drawing strength from solidarity.One downside: there has been little time to eat. If I leave the tub unattended for an hour, the water recognizes my absence and rises twice as quickly. Fine, I think, for what is the body but water? I remind myself of the religious function of fasting; how it forges impeccable resolve within a human soul committed to its lessons. I admit, I am unsure which god can be accredited for flushing my cell phone with the bath water, for the dogged persistence of the cup to runneth over, but there is meaning in this for me, a message I must decode. Everything is water. Life is a cycle. A buried sin grows toxic flowers. I assure you, gods, I am listening!At night, I see-dream a polar bear squatting on a Caribbean coastline. His fur is matted with oily refuse and he is singing in a language I do not know. I am holding two halves of a coconut filled with milky juice topped with cherry blossoms. I hand the bear a juice and motion for him to drink it. His eyes sparkle with bright pain. The world may be shrinking, but all the good is gathering, I offer. No, he replies, there are just less good things. We drink our coconuts in brotherhood as the black tide comes rolling in.This juice tastes like shit, I think to myself, until I wake up and realize that the tub is flooding again. I rise, my pajama onesie soaked with backwash, and get to work. My back is sore and my senses are foggy and muted, but my muscles have learned their labor well these past few days. Twenty-seven flushes and at last the water is back below the rim, but the floor is drenched and so am I. This calls for towels.The door to the bathroom will not open. It has no lock, nothing to block it shut. It must be swollen from the water, I realize, and start to laugh. I tug and jiggle the doorknob, but the door will not open and I laugh a little harder. I slam my hands into the door, loose palm, closed fist, elbows and shin and forehead but the damn thing doesn’t budge. I’m not laughing but I hear my body laughing wild and loud, laughing like blood and I couldn’t stop it if I tried.Faintly from the other side I hear the glimmering jingle of keys and a shiver plays on my neck. A loud knock on the hallway door, footsteps and a voice, “Hello? Is anyone in here?” Another knock. “There’ve been several noise complaints, reports of howling?” I cry out for help, slamming myself into the bathroom door.“Alright, I’m coming in.” The sound of the keys again. The front door opens. “Oh, my goodness there’s water everywhere!”“Hello! I’m in here! Get me out!” I beg, weeping from relief. I explain the situation with the bathroom door and the tub and the days of interminable hardship and panic through the wood of the door.“I see. We should be able to help you out shortly. Have you filled out a work order yet by any chance?”I explain the fate of my phone, the days of panicked cries for help with colorful yet restrained poetic language.“Uh-huh. Well, I’ll place a call with our plumber, we should have someone out here in a day or two. Until then, do you have a hairdryer or space heater you could use to dry out the space a bit?”No.“Okay. Well stay put, help is on the way. We can discuss the cost of damages once this has all gotten settled, all right?”Outside, the screamers scream in concentrated numbers. The property manager stomps over to the open window facing out into the street. There seems to be a disagreement between the screamers growing in intensity.“Get a job, filthy ingrates!” He yells as he struggles to close the windowpane. He calls back to me, his voice raised, “Next time you get locked in the bathroom, be sure to keep these closed. Don’t want a security issue!”A shout. Glass breaking in the other room. I hear the manager stagger back from the window towards my bathroom door. I ask what happened, what that noise was, why the screamers now laugh with joy. “Help is coming! Stay put!” The front door opens and shuts with alarming speed. I press my hands to the door and feel heat from the other side. I am numb.Outside, the screamers cheer, “Shows that asshole! Throw another one!”A pause. Glass, heat, a sound like a thunderbolt five miles away, the piercing ring of the fire alarm from the kitchen. Above me, the frantic footsteps of evacuation. I take a step back from the door and slip, falling backwards onto the tile, by sheer luck avoiding hitting my head on the edge of the toilet. Thud. Terrible pain in my lower back as it strikes the floor, spasming from repetition, neglect and repetition.I lie there, unable to move. The screamers sing a drinking song as tenants flood into the street. Babies cry, dogs yelp and bark, frantic from the cacophony. I listen for the sounds of footsteps coming my way, for signs of help, but every human sound seems distant. The bathroom window! With great effort, I pull myself up off the floor. If I can get myself up on the rim of the tub, I can climb through the slim bathroom window, I can—The bars. The bars on the bathroom window.“Sure,” I nod and reply. I lie back down on the tile. It hurt to sit up anyway. I take stock of the situation, trying my best to think things through. Everything is water. My clothes are drenched. If the smoke starts entering the room, it’s best to be down on the floor with the oxygen. I should be safe until the firefighters arrive. The property manager will tell them just where to find me. Life is a cycle. The fire’s heat will dry out the bathroom door, enough to get it open. If I conserve my strength, I might be able to make it out. Is this the lesson I’m meant to learn, that a bad situation always leads to good in time? I think of my hard-earned wisdom, the bliss of a potential escape, the new life awaiting me on the other side of cleansing fire. After all, how did I end up here? A buried sin grows toxic flowers. You tricky gods. What sick root compelled me, hardship after hardship, to stay? All your dramatics, all your chaos, your unending parade of thwarted joys and heartbreaks, the whole blue pitter bill of the earth just to show me how powerful I really am! I am in your debt; I am your thankful servant and faithful pupil till the end! There is nothing to fear anymore. Nothing to fight. This is the ultimate freedom, the total liberation of the spirit!I hear a noise like copper groaning from below, a churn and bubbles, and all at once black water starts flowing from the tub, pooling over the porcelain canyon and flooding all around me as the crystal bathroom doorknob shines with the light of the fire. Distantly, my body again begins to laugh.

Crow Jonah Norlander

A LOST AND WORDLESS FEELING by Becca Yenser

March 8, 2021 · Fiction

for Abby Vasquez

All of our friends are dying but they are the ones to blame, so we shut up about it and sit outside at their old favorite bars, drinking set-ups until we puke. The bars are named after animals or phrases: Red Fox, Crow Bar, Haymaker, Lost and Found.

Our friends shot themselves in one-room apartments, jumped from bridges, hung themselves from garage ropes. They had dark hair, shiny hair, green eyes, red beards, brown eyes, dimples, scars, cellulite. They stooped when they walked, or danced on bikes, or wore layered sweatshirts instead of coats. They played drums, drank beer, bagged groceries, sat houses, or watched other people’s children.

Our friends killed themselves but told us about it first, for too long, first in the winters, then in the summers. Winter: bleak but soon over. Summer: swimming and cheap beer and too many Fourth of July parties. We listened, didn’t listen, stopped calling, called all the time.

Our friends had ideas. They liked Marx, they liked Beauvoir, they hated Ayn Rand or loved her. They liked Beavis and Butt-head and Cake and were in love with sad, sexy singers like Karen O. They spit when they talked, they had bad breath, they wore Gold Toe socks from Sears and Roebuck, or maybe just Sears.

One of our friends stepped off the St. Johns bridge but wore her red cape so that she looked like a capital A going down. Everyone tried to rescue her, or no one did, and we kept swimming, or stopped, or held our breaths, or breathed too much, or went silent, or said, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus when we heard the news, that all of our friends were dead.

Crow Jonah Norlander

LIVER MUSH IS AN ESSAY ABOUT MY MOM by Graham Irvin

March 3, 2021 · Creative Nonfiction

I want to talk about liver mush. Liver mush is a breakfast meat from Western North Carolina made of boiled pork parts and corn meal. It’s my favorite breakfast meat. It’s my favorite word.

Liver mush is more than pork parts and corn meal, though. There is also sage and black pepper. But, liver mush is more than breakfast and sustenance too. It’s something close to that, but not exactly.

It’s home but not home, but not exactly.

Liver mush is more than a piece of fried pork parts and corn meal. Liver mush is more than old white dinner plates in my mom’s kitchen at the table with the tile square top. Liver mush is more than feeling the sun on the top of my face and forehead and hairline, not looking out the window because I know it will be blindingly bright. It’s almost that, but not exactly. Liver mush is just a word, but the word means nothing to almost everyone and to me it means cracking open my skull and pureeing my memories into a grey mush that makes sense to the world.

Liver mush means as close as I can get you there with me at my mom’s kitchen table. It means we ride through downtown Kannapolis past the empty law offices and clothing stores. It means we stop to see the Dale Earnhardt statue and watch people get their photos taken below him and get our photos taken below him. It means my mom’s dog is loud and mean but gets used to you fast. It means my mom’s dog wants you to rub his belly now. It means my mom wants to know what we have planned and how long we want to stay and if we’re hungry and if she can help with anything. It means she hugs you right away. It means my bedroom hasn’t changed since high school. It means you’re going to make fun of the framed National Honor Society certificate because it I worked really hard to get it, and the framed puzzle of Time Square because I cared so much about New York, and the skateboard posters on the back of the door because the men are all 50 now.

Liver mush means we skip dinner with my mom and drive to Charlotte and my mom understands but we know it hurts her and we apologize but we know it’s not enough. It means we meet D and T at Common Market and sing karaoke at Snug Harbor and D and T are still together and Snug Harbor is still open. It means D isn’t surrounded by people I don’t know and living in an uptown apartment and doesn’t offer us coke. It means he hasn’t left for California yet.

It means we have enough time to get burgers and shots at The Diamond and I drive home drunk, 45 minutes on the interstate at 4 a.m., and even though we try our hardest to be quiet, we set off the alarm and wake up the dog and my mom says, “Grahamer, you okay?” and asks if I’ve been drinking when she smells it on me and I always deny it. It means we don’t brush our teeth and sleep in my high school bed together.

It means my mom still makes us breakfast in the morning, even though we’re hungover and not hungry and have to go back soon. It means I finally convince you to try liver mush because you made it this far so, why not?

It means you say it’s not that bad.

It means you say it’s actually pretty good.

It means you’re blown away by how good liver mush is with a name like liver mush.

Every time I tell my mom I have to go back I don’t say the word home because it hurts her feelings. She says, “Can’t you stay?” and I say, “No” and she says, “I was just picking.”

In my childhood bedroom, I put dirty clothes in the bottom of my overnight bag and decide to make the bed, even though my mom will change the sheets when I leave to keep busy while the house is empty.

When I hug my mom and tell her I love her and hug her again and tell her I love her again and tell her I’ll text her when I get there and tell her I’ll be safe on the drive, I feel home but not home for the rest of the day.

Liver mush means something like that.

x-r-a-y magazine

SEXY REXY’S HOMECOMING FEAST by Steve Gergley

February 26, 2021 · Fiction

For his fortieth birthday, Lance bought himself a red-tailed boa and named it Sexy Rexy. When he returned to his empty apartment, he masturbated to a video on Pornhub called “MASSIVELY JACKED STUD ANNIHILATES SUBMISSIVE TWINK.” Then he turned off his phone and set up Sexy Rexy’s living enclosure, feeding tank, and hide box. For dinner Lance ate an entire chocolate cake and washed it down with half a bottle of champagne. Then he smoked a pack of Marlboro Lights and threw up in the bathroom for half an hour. After a long, hot shower in which he threw up one more time and sobbed for ten straight minutes, Lance fed three mice to Sexy Rexy. The salesman at the exotic pet store had warned Lance not to feed Sexy Rexy more than two mice per week. But this was a special occasion. And besides, Lance thought to himself, rules are made to be broken. Before dropping the first pre-killed mouse into Sexy Rexy’s feeding tank, Lance held it by the tail and looked at its tiny legs dangling in the air. Then he named the mouse after a man he had known in the past.

He named the first mouse after the priest who got him drunk off sacramental wine at age eleven.

He named the second mouse after his father, who pushed his head through a window after walking in on him making out with the running back from the JV football team.

He named the third mouse after his college suitemate who od’d on xannys and vodka, the only man he had ever loved.

Crow Jonah Norlander

CONSIDER YOURSELF HOME by Aimée Keeble

February 25, 2021 · Fiction

You and I at the window with our bandit teeth all exposed. Mine tallow, yours anodizing with the stale gold of nicotine, crap coffee that lives petrified in a jar. I’m your artful baby and I slip into shops first and blast back my chest. Hiya! And you coyote low behind me scoping with your dull sly eyes. Side by side at a counter and you’re velvet and torn at the creases but I’m no better (no worse) and my shirt is soppy and sags, better to stuff the gaps with. We’re proud as we unwrap our sandwiches in front of the clean people behind the counter in their maroon uniforms, blameless and blood dark as cardinals. Why thank you, you pass me bread royally and your beard is tangerine with soap splatter. Have a sip of this fruity soda! And we crack aluminum and toast ourselves, tangling our wrists so we may drink from each other’s cup.

We hip-bump all the little cafes in Piccadilly, vulnerable as soft bovine things all white in the neck. Who would suspect us! As I pass you a chocolate bar right off the counter where the cash is moved around. We steal not because we are poor, or because we are hungry, we need to, as an act of frenzied paddling above this capitalistic floatsum, this accepted inhalation of the little and wild self. How are we to traverse the choke of a system which finger-flicks each vertebra as it commands: work and earn and the toil scrubs itself anew- an ouroboros exfoliation of fat cat/have-not SLAVE TO THE RYTHM (system).

I pop a chocolate-covered peanut into your moving lips and lean into your ear that I’ve got more sugar below my waistband. I re-cross my legs and the hidden jiggles.

When discovered:

Oh! But I thought you—

No, no I’m so sorry, I thought you had—

Our harmonizing laughter, we point at each other and yip. I eye your eye as our throats arch back.

And then we wait to see which weaker one of us today will cough up the money. More often times you, your back half crooked in a Fagan arch turning coins on the counter counting and I against your leg with all the nonchalance of a tiger.

Later, sated on salt and side by side in the cobbled streets, hands in our long coats. We with our swinging heads, sniffing the windows of Berwick Street, Frith Street, past the dancing girls on Great Windmill.

You knick me a novelty pepper shaker from a sex shop, half of the set, a pig on its hind legs reaching—caught mid-coitus now humping empty air. Its hard-pink body in my fist as we prowl on to Seven Dials. I scream at you darling, wait! And move into an astrology shop, coming back to you minutes later (just minutes!) and ask you what part of your kangaroo get-up can hold a star, what folds of you can I squeeze a bit of heaven into? Just a tarot card my love, the sun one. They were loose and I was quick.

London shakes herself and the rain sparks down. A green window, the one we love. The one our eyes pour light into. You hold the door for me and sudden sanctification—my avenging waist, the villain of me clatters as a broken blade. The bookstore, chapel in which we lower our heads. We keep our hands to ourselves here. With reverence, we pet the fatty spines, near exhausted from so many temporary thumbs. Like the rind of something reptilian, red, green, yellow—all unalloyed in their shelves. Lightly we sneak open their pages, careful of their columns. You are hunting but now you are an angel all in metal. I know you are looking for poems to read, aloud, quietly, the words will climax in my hair.

In the middle of the unboastful floor flayed bare by old sunlight I spin slowly. You, older than me by thirteen years, I wait to watch you (as you always do,) pull your own book from some obscure place into a more friendly view. Here, beside the great shuddering monster gullet of Soho, there is no trouble and I wait for you to show me.

Crow Jonah Norlander

BIRDS AREN’T REAL by D.T. ROBBINS

February 24, 2021 · Fiction

My girlfriend tells me something’s off in our relationship. Says we’re missing a spark or magic or whatever she calls it.

I go, Oh, you wanna see magic?

She goes, Yeah, idiot, I just said that.

So, I wrap an old t-shirt around her eyes and lead her out into the field behind our apartment. It’s all a big surprise. The ice chest is full of beers and pastrami sandwiches and the chocolate cookies she baked last month. I put a slice of bread in a Ziplock bag with the cookies to keep them fresh. The cookies stay moist and soft, and the bread gets dry and ugly. Success!

We’re walking for a while when she says her feet hurt. There’s always something to complain about, isn’t there? A little foot pain never killed anyone. Sometimes you’ve gotta pay the price. Magic ain’t free, you know. The hum of electricity gets louder, ricocheting off the clouds the closer we get.

I tell her we’re here and take the shirt off her eyes. See? There they are, I say, pointing. Just look at those things—all perched up on the powerlines without a goddamn care in the world. Dozens of them in rows, twisting their necks and heads, fluttering their wings, cooing, cooing and cawing, cawing.

She goes, The fuck is this?

I go, It’s magic!

Those are just birds.

I drop the ice chest, hear one of the cans spray open inside. Just birds? There’s no way you’re serious. If you’re being serious, you’re out of your mind.

She stares at me, then the birds, then me.

I put my hands on her shoulders, look at her real seriously, and drop the motherfucking truth bomb: Birds aren’t real.

A hawk circles above us. It swoops down, grabs a rat or snake or something, flies off with it into the blue picture screen above us.

Wait, she says. You mean, like, we’re living in a simulation—the Matrix or something?

I shake my head no, gulping one of the beers that busted open in the ice chest. Not at all, I tell her. People who think shit like that are just weird. I mean the birds aren’t real.

She reaches in the ice chest, grabs the Ziplock bag of cookies, and walks back toward our apartment. So much for magic, I yell.

I’m six or seven beers deep, watching the birds chill on the powerlines, watching the clouds pass, listening to the wind and the electricity intertwine and envelop me in my own little cocoon.

One of the birds asks, What’s your problem, dude?

I sit up, swig my beer. I don’t have a problem, I say.

Thirty or so of them all turn their heads to me like the ticking of the long hand on a clock.

The powerlines stop humming.

They go, Oh yeah? Then why’d you tell her we’re not real? All their beaks move, one voice, stereo, super cool. What’s your angle, friend? We’re as real as you.

Horse shit! I’m flesh and blood. My heart beats like a steady drum. There’s poison in my veins. When I sleep, I dream, I nightmare. You, you’re a fraud. And you know it. You’re an illusion of the mind. And you can’t convince me otherwise.

The birds levitate from the wires, fly in a furious circle. Their feathers fling from their bodies, become liquid, like hot magma, forming an ooey-gooey black blanket, snuffing out the sun. They cover me, a big bubble of darkness and energy. It sort of reminds me of that Pauly Shore movie, Bio-Dome, but better. A hologram of my girlfriend rises beneath me. She looks super pissed. Very realistic. Her hips start shaking and her eyes roll into the back of her head, shine bright neon pink. I’m into it.

Dance with me, she says.

I throw my hands in the air, I don’t even care. My legs move this way and that, shaking my shit like I know what to do with it.

She smiles wide, wide, wider. Birds with wings of fire fly out from behind her teeth, straight at me like bullets. I duck and cover. The echo of their screeching—radio static. I look up at my hologram girlfriend. She flaps her arms, flies away.

I stand there, not knowing who I like better: my hologram girlfriend or my real girlfriend. My feet are warm. I look down, I’m standing on a powerline. It sizzles like a plate of fajitas. My tennis shoes are melting. The skin around my toes goes drip, drip, drip. I watch it fall into the abyss below. A tornado of birds surrounds me, screaming: It’s not real. You’re not real. They’re not real. It’s so not, not! We’re not real. What is real? Are you really surely real? Who, then? For reals?

One of the birds comes and sits on my shoulder. It’s heavy. Like, weighs-as-much-as-I-weigh kind of heavy. I can’t hold my balance, slip, and fall into the abyss. I land on a giant slice of white bread, sink inside. A giant hand reaches for me, grabs a giant cookie, retracts. I’m in the Ziplock bag. Light expands and I see my real girlfriend sitting at our white IKEA kitchen table, crying, with chocolate smeared at the corners of her mouth. I never noticed how messy of an eater she is. I shout her name. She doesn’t hear me. My insides shrivel, dry out. My tongue turns to crust. I am dry, dead bread. Her hand reaches in, grabs me. Our kitchen walls scroll by like a movie in fast-forward, then I’m falling down, down, down. I reach the bottom of the trashcan. The lid closes and it’s back to black.

I can’t open my eyes because one of the birds crapped on my face. It smells like a nursing home or a bar right after closing. I wipe it away with the shirt my girlfriend left before she went back to the apartment. The ice chest is upside down, ice spilled over and melted. Empty beer cans everywhere, suds on the lips. Sandwiches gone. The powerlines hum quietly. Stars shine down on the wet grass. And those fucking birds? They’re still there. I pick up my things, head home.

There’s a note on the counter. It says, I can’t do this anymore. I’m sorry. There’s leftovers in the fridge. Take care of yourself.

I crumple the note, throw it in the trash, next to the rotten piece of bread. And there I am.

x-r-a-y magazine

THE PURPLE TREE by Alienor Bombarde

February 21, 2021 · Fiction

It was not her favorite tree. It was simply where the children met. The tree was tall, its purple leaves like curtains, shielding its trunk. It was where, when she was four years old, she first saw Pasang.

Pasang was the first and only newcomer the children ever knew. His father had come to work on construction plans. Pasang had a round face and a soft pink mouth. Even before she knew that people could use mouths for anything other than eating and drinking, she liked the look of it, its softness and slight downward turn.

Those were the days, this was the place, where no one was excluded from village games. It was the summer, when children roamed the furthest over the rolling hills. As far as the next village, almost.

Pasang joined in while his parents were still unpacking. When Pasang caught her, he did not pull her hair, or kick or slam her hard against the rough earth. Pasang tapped her arm and ran away.

She decided that, should she ever need a prince, she would choose Pasang. In the stories her mother told, all heroines had princes or pet bears. They seemed a necessary accessory.

When she told Pasang she loved him, he blinked his large, quiet eyes. She imagined he did not know what love was. He said he loved her, too. She accepted it as the appropriate response. For two autumns, Pasang was her prince. Naturally, she made sure he knew his place. Princes should never get too ahead of themselves, or of their Princesses.

One day in December, they went to the river together. She dared him to go in, so he took off his shoes and dipped his toes in the icy water, his jaw clenched. Pasang did not cry out. She took off her shoes, tied her dress around her shoulders, let the water sting her thighs. When he got out of the water, they both knew she had won.

She told him nothing could hurt her. It was January, the air cold and smelling of the cookies his mother was baking. Pasang said she was lying. So she insisted. No one had killed her so far, she said, so it must be impossible for her to die. Her neck was special, she told him.

Pasang reached, curious. He wrapped his fingers around her neck and pressed, gently at first, and then harder, wondering how long she would resist.

“See! See!” she cried, defiantly, determined not to be the first to give in. “It doesn’t hurt.”

Pasang let go. He said he had to go to Goba’s house. Goba was the teacher’s son. He was spoilt and liked no one, except Pasang, who was the only one he did not consider beneath him. When Goba played with Pasang, she would follow the older girls around. These playtimes were interesting, but older girls were scary to copy.

The older girls had invented a game. One had to place a leg inside passageways and slam the door as hard as one could. The girls showed off their bruises. She had never seen any of them shed a tear.

The little girl tried it one day after school. On her own, in case it hurt and she cried. She picked the school’s heaviest door for the bruises. She was small for her age and half the size of the older girls. She still had a lot to prove.

When the door swung shut on her foot, she screamed so loud grown-ups came running. Goba’s mother found her and carried her home.

When the older girls, and Goba and Pasang, came round to look at her swollen, bandaged foot, they looked at her with fascination and grudging respect. Pasang’s mother baked her cookies. Sometimes Pasang would come and draw beside her. Goba and his mother came too, with books and games, but Goba scowled at her and begged Pasang to play outside.

When her foot healed and she could play tag again, Pasang never chased her, though she was one of the smallest and the easiest to catch. This infuriated Goba, who took it as a sign of Pasang’s affection. Goba had a tantrum every time he saw her.

Sometimes they would sit beneath the purple tree, just so Goba wouldn’t see them. They watched the grass shudder in the breeze and held each other’s hand. Once, they kissed each other on the lips. They promised to keep it a secret.

When she was six, and Pasang seven, the construction plans were finished, and Pasang’s father had to move away. He needed to help another village plan. The village children were sad. Their parents said roads were being built all over the country, like the one which would soon allow them to get to the city.

“Once I am sixteen," she told Pasang beneath the purple tree, "I will come to find you."

“Once I am a grown-up, I will come back here and marry you.”

It seemed like an appropriate adventure for a Princess. Pasang gave her a necklace, a gold heart on a chain. It was just the kind of heart-shape she liked. She swore she would never take it off.

After Pasang left, Goba no longer had Pasang to impress, and his hatred of her intensified. He bullied her. Goba was taller and stronger than the other boys, so that they were obliged to bully her, too.

She understood this, for she had known them their whole lives. Likewise, when she bit them until they cried, they understood, too, and never showed their mothers the marks she left.

Roads were built across the country. Grown-ups talked about property value, and the mayor asked some people to sell their land and houses and move away. People had never had money, they had always had homes instead, but they welcomed this change as an inevitability. When she was eight years old, her parents packed all their belongings into boxes. They moved hundreds of miles away, leaving behind the river and trees, green valleys and orange sunrises with streaks of pink. Her school walk became a bus ride. Around her, grey streets and a grey school so tall you could barely see the heavy, grey sky. But she was happy. She never had to bite anyone again.

The city took her in, and soon she forgot the village and Goba and the countryside.

Decades later, one day in April, she was driving, her husband and children in the car. Her husband was a man of the city, his childhood was nothing like hers.

"I used to live here," she said.

She peered out of the window at the harvested land. No one could live here. Not now. The valleys had turned into factories and farms. Everything else was replaced, deserted. Only the church remained, and its cemetery. The river flowed across the valley, still.

She stopped the car to take her children to see. They walked up the hill where she had played. A figure stood beneath a tree, leaning against the trunk and staring at the dried-out grass. The tree’s leaves were purple, veiling the slope.

The stranger saw the family coming. He moved as if to leave, and affected polite embarrassment. Then he stopped in his tracks, his eyes widened and his mouth hung open.

"Lotus?" he called.

She looked at him, bewildered, trying to place this bearded man. How did she know him? Lotus took in his round face, his quiet eyes, and the soft, pink mouth. Love flooded through her.

"Pasang?"

They began to laugh and struggled to stop. They went towards each other and hugged each other’s new and grown up bodies. They collapsed against each other in one long, shocked, unstoppable giggle. He kissed her cheek, then went to shake her husband's hand.

"My, you're all very tall," he said to her children. They blushed, knowing they weren’t tall at all.

Lotus looked at the tree, at the grass. She wanted to talk to Pasang about all that happened since their childhood. She touched the necklace she had always worn, that chain with a gold heart. Pasang saw it and smiled. They both looked back at the tree.

x-r-a-y magazine

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