Flash Archives

I DEFINITELY NEVER LOVED YOU by Cory Bennet

November 6, 2020 · Creative Nonfiction

It’s that time of year when California burns. It will peak in the Fall when the shadows begin to grow longer. There was a lightning storm across the Bay Area last night and fires today and ash falling from the gray sky. My knee is torn up from skating but I’m restless tonight so I cruise the neighborhood inhaling the poison air.

Once the fire had torn through my parents’ neighborhood, we tried to return but the cops had all the roads closed. My stepdad knew a way through an orchard. We came upon the house and it still stood. The land was black and smoldering in places. There were two deer trapped between our fence and the fire line. Twisted limbs, charred skin, organs exposed. My stepdad and I dug two graves and buried them together in silence at dusk.

I had Bobby cut the sleeves off my Ceremony long sleeve in his apartment on a day I couldn’t stop crying. We bought snacks from the dollar store and watched Nightmare on Elm Street 3. Passing me the joint he asked what was the matter. I said, “Everything.”

I’ve been reading about Catholic saints and the desert fathers. The Shobogenzo is on my nightstand, and I understand none of it. I've read it twice. I pray, I speak to my dead friends, I sit cross-legged on the hardwood floor, I think of my father swaying from his noose like a metronome.

It’s the violence, my mother told me once, that my blood has collectively faced. It’s the drugs. It’s the gutshot my great-grandfather took and his daughter's lethal abortion in an alley off Market Street. It’s the fact that it becomes a list. Categorical. I did not believe how violent lives, violent deaths, could be transmitted through cells. Mom told me I had a weak imagination and placed her cigarette on the edge of the table to watch the ash collect and fall.

My father once said I kept him alive and I wonder what changed that. He told me once he would never go back to prison. Six years ago he was looking down the barrel of a 25 year bid. He kept his word.

I go entire days without laughing, without cracking a smile, without moving my mouth at all. Not even to eat. Only rubbing my tongue in the space where a tooth got kicked out.

I can see the stadium lights of my high school from the backyard. My ex-girlfriend’s parents live up the street.

Last night I was taking out the trash and the orange cat who hangs out in my wheel well was laying in the driveway. He was dead, it was obvious in how not alive he looked. I didn’t know if he belonged to any of the neighbors so I knocked on doors but no one answered. I grabbed an old shirt from my closet and draped it over his body, muttering something I remembered from Catechism: ...and I will abolish the bow, the sword, and war from the land; and I will make you lie down in safety.

After I read the Gucci Mane book I texted Juice: Guwop prolific as fuck. He said What? The Young Thug song? And I said Nah man, Gucci Mane, East Atlanta Santa. Juice believes the real Gucci is dead, and the sober and healthy Gucci is a replacement, a replicant. I ate an Adderall and took a sip of my diet coke, tonguing the hole in my mouth where that tooth used to be.

I had to get out of bed. It was my dead friend’s birthday and some of us agreed to have dinner, but I didn’t want to go. One year ago I had my hands around his neck, trying to keep him from hemorrhaging when he got stabbed in the throat. I lost. His frantic eyes searched but couldn’t focus. I told him it was okay and that we’d look after his family. He died and I left before the ambulance arrived.

I got dressed and ate some more Adderall and pocketed a Klonopin and nicotine patches. I thought of shards of glass in the blades of grass. I thought of cumming on lusty lady death.

I’m just so bored of everything. Nothing surprises me anymore, even when it does. I clip my toenails and gather them to place inside an empty diet coke can. I ejaculate indiscriminately on my socks. I sit slouched in NA meetings and feel grateful for absolutely nothing.

I was watching my mom’s house for a few days during the week in the middle of August. I took the days off work so I could hang out with the pets and get stoned. She lives out in the country on about five acres of pasture at the bottom of a valley, with my stepdad who is there for her and always comes home at night.

There was a thud at the window and Mila barked and ran to the door. I got off the couch to see what it was. Outside the window, a tiny bird lay on the ground, its tiny beak opening and closing. I knew it was going to die but felt panicked like I had to do something. I couldn’t just wait it out. I scooped the bird into my hands and submerged it in my dog's bucket of water. I can’t say if dying the other way would have been better. The corpse floated to the top.

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KETCHUP by Rebecca Gransden

November 4, 2020 · Fiction

Ketchup went missing. I made some posters and taped them around the neighbourhood.

Lost

Ketchup

Black and white cat. 7 yrs old. White socks. White spot on head (see pic). Last seen yesterday (Sept 27th) in the Glenwood area.

Reward for information. Call us on ***** **** **** even if it’s bad news. Please return Ketchup if you have him, no questions asked. Ketchup is really missed.

Every telegraph pole, lamppost, or empty surface around the nearest blocks had a poster attached. If Ketchup didn’t return, I planned to extend the search area to streets farther away.

After a sleepless night I got out of bed to find Regina already up, eyes red. I hadn’t seen her eyes like that since her dad punched her brother at our reception. She looked at me, headphones on, guitars blistering, some track I couldn’t make out. I grabbed a handful of dry cereal and then my bike and rode, coming back every few hours to break her heart with no sign of Ketchup. She worked from home and wanted to be there in case he came back, but she greeted me each time with the same red eyes that said Ketchup hadn’t returned.

On the third day of Ketchup’s absence I had to go in to work. Sticky air met me as I left the bar, having spent my time cleaning. There had been no real rain for weeks, and the baked concrete of the day turned stale in the evenings. I collected my bike from the locked courtyard behind the bar and took off in the direction of home.

Hunger pangs irritated me, but despite the discomfort I swerved around a corner, deciding to take the long way back with the intention of checking that the posters with Ketchup’s details were still in place.

A telegraph pole resided at the end of the approaching avenue. The streetlight farther along had lit up earlier than the others and it created a strange light when mixed with the lemony dusk. I clutched at my bike’s brakes and they squeaked with dry dust. The dark wood of the telegraph pole really made the white poster attached to it stand out. I glanced at the poster, ready to ride away. Something wrong with the picture. I bumped the bike’s front wheel up onto the pavement and walked the bike closer to the pole.

There, where Ketchup’s picture should’ve been, another image had been placed—black and white, a printed reproduction of an old photograph, glued into position to cover Ketchup. A figure stood mid-picture, dressed as a cat, the costume sagging around the body, tail ragged and floppy, the head rounded and cushioned, large eyes, ears slightly flattened, a checkered bowtie around the neck. Hard to tell what colour the costume would have been, but something about the shade of grey made me guess at light brown. The figure in the cat suit stood on a suburban street, a street indistinguishable from any around the neighbourhood. Waving a raised paw, the cat person posed in front of a garden that appeared to be from another era, as did the small 1950s house.

I reached out my hand, slowly, pointing, and then placed my finger on the poster, tentatively running my fingertip along the outside edge of the image. Whoever had put the new photograph there had been careful when attaching it, the glue or paste firmly adhering its edges to the poster underneath and at the same time using just enough of the substance to not soak through or spill out onto the surrounding poster.

I ripped the poster down. It came off mostly intact and I put it in my backpack. Wondering if I should tell Regina about it or not, I shuffled my bike back onto the road and continued along the avenue.

Distracted by my thoughts I almost sailed past the next location of a poster, this time a lamppost. This lamppost hadn’t lit up yet, like the malfunctioning one I’d left behind. Before I got close to it I could tell that Ketchup’s picture had been tampered with again, the same image placed over it, a black and white shot of a figure in a cat costume, holding still for an unknown photographer.

I travelled the neighbourhood, ripping down every poster, Ketchup’s picture smothered by this new image. When I got home my backpack was bulging. I walked into the kitchen, part of me hoping Regina was out somewhere, as I knew I had to tell her, but didn’t know what the hell I was supposed to say. Regina looked up at me from her place at the kitchen table, partially torn posters scattered over the tabletop. What posters I’d failed to locate she’d apparently already dealt with.

Regina spent some hours the next day reprinting Ketchup’s poster. I called in sick and re-postered the neighbourhood. It didn’t even occur to me to be concerned that we hadn’t received a single call about Ketchup.

Exhausted, I closed the back door on the dark midnight behind me and staggered into the spare room we’d made into a den. Curling up on our small sofa, bile shifted my guts, steadily rising until I couldn’t stand it. I got up and went to get my bike.

Outside, night insects flitted between gardens. A hush came down driveways. I rode around the streets, protectively gazing over the posters I’d taped up in daylight hours, all as I’d left them.

My head pounded. I’d been awake too long. A sudden swell of uninvited emotion hit my chest as the light from a lamppost struck Ketchup’s picture from a peculiar angle, causing the image to halo in my vision. I shook my head, halted my bike in the middle of the street. No good being out here. Go home.

I took off, rounding a corner, aiming for the shortest route back.

About halfway down the street a figure stood next to a lamppost, arms up and reaching for a poster. I clutched at my brakes, screeching the bike’s tires, and stopped. The figure rotated its head in my direction, a head adorned with a cat’s face. Dressed in full costume, the figure clutched at a bundle of papers under its arm and turned to run.

For a moment I froze, but as the figure rushed towards a section of street in shadow, where it would be possible to slip out of sight, I felt myself press the bike peddles into action and before I realized what I was doing I was chasing it.

The person was fast, wearing trainers, not cat costume feet. It reached the darker stretch of road and upped its speed, rushing ahead under high black trees, branches overhanging from unkempt gardens.

I felt a bump, then something wedged beneath me awkwardly and sent my back wheel skidding out from under me. The ground hit me quick, my shoulder taking the worst of the fall.

I lifted my head to see the figure turn, the person having heard the accident. The cat costume was identical to the one pictured in the photograph, but sorrier, worn, the lightish brown colour I’d imagined, the same checkered bowtie skew-whiff around its neck. The figure raised a paw, mimicking the pose in the image, and scrambled to flee and was gone.

Lost

I recovered myself and hobbled back home, a bruised shoulder and sprained ankle the result of the night’s efforts.

The following evening I sat with Regina, both of us trying to watch TV but taking very little of the streaming film in. Around eleven pm, when tiredness had enabled us both to doze on the sofa, our heads roused at the sound of a car coming to a loud stop on the road outside. We paused as a few moments of quietness passed, then listened to indistinct noises echoing from out front. A car door slammed and almost immediately the car sped away.

Regina looked at me, then stood up, moving to the den’s window and peeking out from behind the closed curtain.

A harsh sound resonated from the kitchen behind us, a noise we’d heard so many times previously. The cat flap.

A dark blob rushed past the den door. It came back along the hallway, slower this time, a cat shape, weaving around, as though regaining its bearings. Ketchup walked into the den, a lopsided checkered bowtie attached to his neck.

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GRIEF IS AN EMPTY SHELL by Robert Julius

November 2, 2020 · Creative Nonfiction

When I left for California in the summer of 2013, I knew what I was leaving behind. I was abandoning a home that had grown toxic over the years, from my mother’s addiction and the ensuing fights between her and my father. I was leaving behind the rural countryside of western Pennsylvania. I was leaving behind two best friends, two brothers, two parents, and a sister who had been in and out of prison for the last five years. I was also leaving behind an old me, and all my old pastimes, including my terrarium of land hermit crabs that I had taken care of for the past ten years.

From middle school well into high school, I had been a land hermit crab enthusiast. I could explain the difference between the many species that lived around the world—how both Coenobita clypeatus and Coenobita brevimanus possess large purple claws but can be differentiated by the eyestalks and other exoskeletal differences, how one is native to the Caribbean and the other to Indonesia. I had collected crabs from all over the world, investing thousands of dollars into their care. My favorite crab, Mako, had belonged to my colony for an entire decade. I watched him grow from the size of a gumball to the size of a large apple.

Land hermit crabs are a tropical species. Though sold in pet stores and beach kiosks for cheap, their proper care is costly, and their survival demands expertise. They require constant monitoring of humidity and temperature, access to both freshwater and seawater, as well as moist substrate deep enough so that a crab can completely bury itself in order to molt. Even when given the most proper care, no member of the Coenobita species will successfully reproduce in captivity, which means that all land hermit crabs sold in pet stores or beach stands have been taken away from their native tropical habitats. California showed me how a single year can undo a decade. When I returned home from college that first summer, all of my hermit crabs—some dozen of them—had passed away under my mother’s care. Grief is an empty shell—or in this case, plural. Shells.

Part of me knew my mother wasn’t fully capable of caring for them herself, even with the detailed instructions I had left. They dried out, or starved, or were kept in a climate too cool. I didn’t know. Besides, by then, I had changed. I had given up my passion for biology and had chosen to pursue writing. I was in a stable relationship with a boy I loved. I was thinking of California and how I couldn’t wait to return. Orange County beckoned. My sophomore year was going well until October. I was woken by a call from my father. My mother had been hospitalized after complications from her gallbladder surgery.

“It’s serious this time,” he said. We were used to my mother’s frequent hospital stays, but I knew the implication these words carried.

I flew back to Pennsylvania. One day later, my mother drew her last breath.

After returning home from the hospital, I saw my terrarium, still on display in the living room, even a year after the colony had passed away. My father said that he liked the way it looked. The set-up was beautiful, crafted over the last decade to mimic the hermit crabs’ native environments, but without the familiar crawl of the crabs, the terrarium lacked spirit. Appalling, I thought, to stare into the tank and see only the empty seashells of the hermit crabs that had once lived in them.

Taking care of the hermit crabs had coincided with some of the hardest years of my adolescence. I had spent many long periods observing the crabs, calming myself on the nights that my mother would land herself in the hospital for drinking too much. I liked trying to understand their habits and what motivated them. There were friendships and pairings, as well as enemies. Sometimes, there was even cannibalism—one hermit crab would dig up another while it was in the fresh molten stage, a time at which the exoskeleton is at its softest, and tear the vulnerable crab apart, limb from limb. They were a mystery to me as much as they were something I could understand.

Days after my mom passed away, I finally lugged the 55-gallon terrarium into the basement with the help of my brother. Upstairs, the living room now appeared emptier without it, but in those weeks following my mother’s death, was there any part of life that emptiness had not touched? I fiddled through the shells that were left behind. There was a polished jade shell, as well as a long turritella I had put in as an experiment, not thinking any of the crabs would actually make use of it because of its impractical length—but Mako, like me, was something of a fashionista, and made it his home. Then, there was the great triton shell which had been home to many crabs—first, a Coenobita violascens rescued from bad pet store conditions, then belonging to Mako (of course) and finally, another crab who lived in the shell until the colony collapsed in my absence. The shells weren’t just shells. They were sentimental, physical objects of memory. Hours of my life had been spent gazing at the crabs who animated these shells, shells that had come from land and sea, produced by the great mollusks of the world. That great triton shell, named after the son of the Greek god of the sea, had first existed somewhere in the Indo-Pacific islands before the snail died and made room for a hermit crab to transform emptiness into something habitable.

We can live here, they seem to say. We can make this a home.

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LACERATION by Victoria Buitron

November 1, 2020 · Creative Nonfiction

When an iguana’s tail falls off after a scare, I’ve wondered if it feels the pain of a halted human heart or the shame a woman feels after being sexually assaulted in public. On many mornings, I’ve rested on a hammock below robust mango trees hoping an iguana didn’t fall on me. If a branch buckled under its weight, the crack of thin bark would reach me before I could see a green smear plop onto the ground. I’d cover my head with my arms or a book in startled anticipation. Once, my dog woke from a nap beside me and began to chase an iguana until it escaped up a tree, leaving the remnants of its panic behind. Tiny reptiles left parts of themselves around my house—shreds of their peeling skin and minute tails—but never green and black-lined flesh more than a foot long. It trembled a bit at first, as if it didn’t know yet it had been dislodged from a body, the cells still hungering for new oxygen. Eventually, it became still, leaving me to wonder what threshold of fear is required for self-amputation. How many times had I been frightened enough throughout my life that a part of me would have severed? Here I was, with those moments and my body still with me, although no longer whole, quivering at times like a loose tail after being chased.

An iguana’s stump remains a wound the first few days until it slowly begins to mend. The new tail grows the color of spoiled lime, darker, like the healing matte of a scab. The former part of them is out there, most likely in the spot they were most afraid, wasting away, and perhaps they look back at this new self, hoping there’ll never be another scare to fragment them once more. Because—if it were to happen again—how much of them would be left?

I was on a bus from Guayaquil to Milagro, and a man sat next to me and began to speak. I could tell we used to share the same skin color, but he looked so tan it seemed like he had been chafed by the sun. He showed me his ID and talked about how he was a different man from that photo. He had angered his parents by getting dreads and making the beach his home. I nodded, looked out the window as if I’d never seen the fields of banana around us. Whenever the door opened, a thick heat engulfed us as men with sweat dotting their lips sold empanadas withered by the sun. Before we arrived in my town, he announced he was getting off. I was relieved that I could enjoy some silence for the rest of the ride, but as he got up, positioned one foot in the aisle and one in our row, he grabbed my head with his hands and collided his mouth with mine. It happened so fast that I could barely push him off me, but it was enough to leave his spit on my lips. I heard him cackle as he scurried off the bus.

Maybe the difference between an iguana and me is that although we are both capable of fear, only one of us is capable of shame. The fear rushed through me when he was still on me, then came the shame, and by the time I got to the bus stop, my feelings were tangled in guilt. I shouldn’t have said a word. I should have put on headphones. I shouldn’t have given him a chance. I wanted to leave my lips behind and grow new ones, gargle vinegar until my face became numb and his taste fled my mouth. Instead, I simmered myself within scalding water—my body a fragmentation of what it was when I woke up that day. In the adrenaline of thoughts, I wished that my hair had fallen off in his hands as evidence of what he took from me. Take it, I would have said. May the sever haunt you.

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DING! by Will Finlayson

October 28, 2020 · Fiction

The kid must have defected. He’s still lying there in the dirt—red-faced and full-uniformed, one arm in the pig’s water trough, that red insignia hot on his sleeve—and what should they do with him? They point fishing spears and pitchforks and kitchen knives at him. Tie him up in the barn that’s what’s to do, Nema says. Kill him right here and now is what it is to do, says Jenko. It’s that we should turn him in to a judge, Harlem says. Isn’t that the wartime law? So they tell Harlem that he should take the kid to the city, but It’s a long way, Harlem says and they laugh at him and agree that they should just kill the kid themselves.

So they take the kid north of the fields and give him a shovel and tell him to dig. And the kid cries as he digs and digs and they all kind of sit around and watch for a while. And when they realize it’s going to take most of the day they settle in, start a fire and cook sausages. And the sausages are so good they go back to town and Lima slaughters that crippled lamb because she’s been waiting for a reason and they come back with a big pot and steaks and potatoes and boil a boil-everything soup and invite everyone. Gorchak brings bread from his bakery and Jardo has fresh cheese. They even give some to the kid before they make him go back to the hole to keep digging and digging.

Then DING! and the crowd of them look up from over their soup bowls toward the knee-deep hole. DING! DING! They walk over and look down where the kid is digging and look at that. Keep digging, they say. Dig around it, and the kid does. And as the kid scoops dirt away from the metal they can see that it’s a long black cylinder, a fossil, Bera says. No, no, and at the top end of the cylinder a hole, a chimney, Marki says. It can’t be. And as the dirt comes away it gets more and more obvious to the kid the shape of it, the weight of it in the ground, he knows it, the memory of the sound of it, that it’s a cannon, the kid says.

A cannon! oh wow, oh no, what do—how did and where? and who should and how could it? But the kid just keeps digging because this is something, he thinks, and by sunset he gets down to the rotted wood base and then he has the whole long barrel out and a few rusty cannonballs and by the light of lanterns and with every eye peering over his shoulders he steps out of the hole and wipes his forehead. I’ve never seen does it still could it actually? and they look to the kid and the kid hops back down and fiddles with the vent where the fuse would go and smiles a little smile and nods his head sure.

And so they do what the kid says to do, which is to go and bring washcloths and buckets for cleaning the cannonballs. If anyone can find a long pole they could use to clean the bore. Bring a long sample of yarn, a finger of wax, matches, rags and oil, all the gunpowder you’ve got thank you. And as the equipment comes in the kid points out the positions: you stand here and work the thumbstall be careful. You worm the barrel you work the wet sponge, the dry sponge. You’re the Powder Monkey, the Rammer, the Primer, and they fight over who gets what job.

Listen, the kid says crouched down inside a ring of white eyes, the whole crowd of the town standing close around or far away with their hands over a child’s ears or squatting low to the ground or holding a bowl of second or third soup and spilling most of it on their fingers. This is the friction primer, and when I pull it, and everyone nods their heads like of course, sure, and they turn to look out into the dark forest where the metal ball will boom forward just like they imagine how they want it to and blast through a tree, or maybe two trees, and they think of the crater in the earth, the way they’ll step down into it, how deep and how wide. And Ready! the kid says who’s wrapping the pull-string so tight around his fist he could bleed.

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TASTINGS by Colin Lubner

October 26, 2020 · Fiction

Nose

So once upon a time this chick gets a job with her boyfriend at a liquor store and two months in he quits after some regular has a seizure and crashes forehead first into a refrigerated shelf of Sierra Nevada.

In the incident’s aftermath she calls the drunk a drunk. Her boyfriend, meanwhile, deems the victim a sort of tragicomic invalid. And while they hadn’t contemplated separation prior to this fight, not once, this divide is by itself enough. He’s a romantic. She doesn’t know who she is.They are different people, he tells her. She agrees.

This is some year in the early aughts and craft beer is not yet a Thing.

She stays at the store. He moves to Nevada (unrelated). She unlearns and relearns terms like nose and head and funk. He texts her ten times a year or so. Mostly late at night. The next morning she always asks how he is but he rarely if ever responds.

When everything happens it does so all at once. Craft beer is massive and she has a nose for marketable notes. She is a manager. She is married to a man who taps kegs.

It is some year in the late teens and she’s in her early thirties when she gets on a Greyhound and goes.

It is winter. She loves the smell of winter. It is a smell she has lost the ability to describe.

Tongue

So once upon a time this kid taps kegs at a brewery named Tastings while during the day he gets his degree in Advertising and Strategic Marketing.

On the night his boss smashes a glass into the nose of some nondescript drunk their most popular drink is a 7.5% Baltic porter. Twice already it’s kicked. The beer’s name is Omega Wolf and on its label anthropomorphic wolves toast glasses across a card-strewn slab of ice-crusted moraine. For reasons the kid has yet to fully understand this is his favorite design.

His boss is a thirty-something woman of whom he has always been unreasonably afraid. That the glass she smashed is half-full of Dank Quixote (a New England IPA, 7.1%) fundamentally alters the irrationality of this fear. Who smashes a half-full glass? Who smashes a glass at all?

He mops up glittering chunks and the sweet-bitter smell of citrus and hops. He’s grateful that the glass only broke upon hitting the floor, that she was denied any implications of abnormality, of inhuman strength, of all-too-womanly instability. He breathes through his nose. He swallows saliva that tastes of chemicals and fermented grains. She tells him she’ll pay him double if he pulls a solo close. She presses a rag to the man’s hemorrhaging nose with dismaying grace.

Yes, he says. How could he not?

Everyone is already gone, but the dregs of their drinks remain. Shuffling along the bar, glugging flat half-glasses of IPAs and DIPAs and Belgians, he catalogs their tastes: lipstick, cigarettes. Forty flavors of bitterness. A chapstick sweetness he associates for some forgotten reason with loss.

He does this in full view of the over-the-bar security camera. He does this with a certain determined despair.

He is stumbling by the time he stumbles, exhausted, into his dorm. By now his tongue’s become an evil leech latched to the roof of his mouth. He brushes his teeth until his wrist is sore.

Throat

So once upon a time this knight goes to Vegas before their hockey-playing Knights are a Thing. For a stretch of years he is variably unhappy. At last he decides to forsake whatever by leaving his home he’d meant to seek. He heads back east.

Near Albuquerque he holes up in a motel and busses into town with the intent of finishing someone else’s half-finished pint. He is so, so fucking broke. He has never been this broke. He is a broken fucking man.

In a brewery named Tastings he finds an abundance. He pays four dollars for a session on special. As he’s reaching for his third Bonus Beer his former girlfriend breaks his nose. He remembers, dimly, an unnamed man stumbling and shattering frosted glass. He gapes.

In the car she listens to music he remembers her hating. Hip-hop, folk pop. Reanimated jazz. He wishes the radio were off. In their lack of silence all potentiality has been zapped. He looks out the window but the sky past the streetlights is a jaundiced black and he can see no stars.

She asks him where he wants her to go and he says he doesn’t know.

By the time they find the motel she is on the phone with someone else. There is a ring on her finger. Earlier there was not. Light from a nearby lamp does not catch on its facets. It is a small, dull thing, easily forgotten. He exits the vehicle.

She finds him stuck outside the door, struggling to unlace his shoes. His nose has again begun to bleed. His throat tastes of copper and oats and other notes he can no longer afford. He has forgotten whether this woman was ever someone to him. He has forgotten if she is now untying or tying his shoes. He decides to say something. He is at a loss for what to say. He clears his throat.

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ROADSIDE MELTDOWN AFTER ULTRAPLEX WEEKEND by Rebecca Gransden

October 23, 2020 · Fiction

Loose teeth in the hot tub. Sun on bug splatter eruptions. Bodies pile in dreamy aftermath.

A bearded chubby man is in the summer house, performative human berserker, rewatching footage of a winter streaker. Somewhere inside the main house schoolgirls dance around a fish tank.

Hairy boom licker in a sunlit bedroom, sweating to his parents’ bootleg. Too shy to risk playing his untitled demo, because it’s flammable. Twin motor lips frozen wrongly. Heavy. Smasher. Forever.

Monster spinster reclines on a duck egg blue deckchair and sucks on a bombsicle. Sweetener for evil. The largest prescription sunglasses you’ve ever seen. She’s the only one who vomited, and she led the cheering. Everyone loves her from a distance, she’s the queen.

Cults hang out at the end of the garden, burning plastic masks on a portable barbecue grill. Their pity party becomes a panic picnic. Water pistols filled with cough syrup spray green over string vests.

The runner is punished for his monohole, poked ribs with rolled up magazines, his face the cover star. He was famous until he felt. He sits on a broken rocking horse beside a fence, looking defeated in a Hawaiian shirt. A coughing fit sees a sticky tooth sprint from his grinning mouth.

A few try-hard students take the ultimate trip to sunburn and feel the drip jam. Gangs are carrying boxes. Bottomless helium damage. Extra bubbles cast shadows over the bare skin of a sleeping minx. The host moves across carpet like he’s got worms and writes acne angst in stardust. Algae on the taps. His milky heart bursts apart and all his yesterdays end up yours.

We spraypaint the road on our way out. The sun sets and a dark glow descends. The girls compare all the times their boyfriends have tried to smother them. Kim wins.

The late evening air stinks of petrol and smoke, like someone is burning the last flowers on the planet. It’s difficult not to sing when walking the road and waiting for a ride.

There’s always someone who claims they can remember before they were born. Imagine the pulse and the seed, unreleased.

Roadside under the moody gloom of darkening equinox skies.

Warm, eating melted Starburst in the beautiful night. Standing over a decaying python.

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NO TAKE BACKS by Nikki Volpicelli

October 21, 2020 · Fiction

The phone calls and it makes me anxious. I mean the phone rings, a person calls. It’s been so long, I forget what to do.

“Britt, you there?”

I hang up. Princess. Who else? She’s the only one who still remembers the landline to my dad’s house. Her dad’s house. Ours. Was. Past-tense. She calls back immediately, and this time I know better than to answer just because it rings.

I haven’t talked to my sister in 10 years and I don’t plan on starting now. It’s not sibling rivalry, not just two girls fighting over a boy. Sure, back in high school, he was popular, but he used it to his advantage. He was a blonde-haired Wile E. Coyote, preying on innocent girls with late-night texts like your fun ;)︎. He had good breath because he was always chewing Winterfresh gum. That shouldn’t have been important, but most County boys’ mouths were either full of stringy tobacco or rotting teeth, or both. He had a smile that spread into dimples and up to his teal eyes. But he was Wile E. Coyote—an idiotic predator. That part she’ll never admit because she married him. I saw the picture she posted from outside the courthouse. Just the two of them and that piece of paper got 104 likes. Then they had the twins—Annabelle and Johanna—blonde, like him.

Today I barely recognize him in the photos she posts—the hard hat, belly, beard, lunch box. So much has changed, down to the stretched-out Fighting Irish tattoo on his left rib, but one thing hasn’t. I still fucking hate him.

***

The gum was to cover up the smell of the whiskey he kept in the bed of his cherry-red beater truck. The truck had only one bumper sticker: Bush / Cheney ‘04. It was 2005, and he was the only guy in high school old enough to vote. I saw it that morning as he pulled out of the driveway, right after he kissed me on the cheek. I stood there alone, still dizzy, looking down at my phone. One text, 12:41 am, unread: You awake ;)︎?

My brain felt full of liquor and void of everything else. Questions caught in my throat, anger rose like heat. I let it all out right there in the gravel, bright orange bile mixed with snot. I didn’t even have the energy to cover it with dust.

Sometimes I wonder if it was just a game and eventually, he got tired and picked some girl to marry. Then I remember, she’s not just some girl. My sister pursued him, despite or because of what I told her: It was a party, we were drinking a lot. I went upstairs to go to bed, alone, and I know I locked the door.

I made her pinky swear not to tell our dad; he had single-father venom, he could kill. Then I told her everything—the farmhouse attic, its walls that bent to a peak, the wicker chair in the corner, the morning light slicing the sheets. That shitty tattoo, his chest, less tight than it looked with clothes on. It was something out of a prairie home horror film.

Fifteen years have passed and I can still picture her sitting there, eyes wide, taking it all in. I thought she’d say let’s go get the guy, slash his tires, something sisterly.

Instead, she asked, “But if you locked the door, how’d he get in?”

***

When we were young, Princess would take my favorite toys and if I wouldn’t part with one, she’d call it stupid. Nobody wants that thing, anyway. She’d leave me in the living room with my doll and the dog, sunning his belly in front of the sliding glass doors. That’s where I’d play, petting his warm fur with American Girl Molly’s plastic hand, pretending I couldn’t hear her giggling in our bedroom. “We’re having so much fun in here!” she’d say through the shut door, but I knew she was sitting in there alone, seething. I guess I never really trusted her, either.

***

The house is in dad’s name, so I don’t own it, but I’ve lived in it, peacefully, quietly, alone, for the last decade since he died and she left. Back when he got sick, Princess spent every night at Sportsters bar from happy hour to close while I sat with him for what seemed like all of 2010, Christmas to Christmas, changing his sheets and underwear, spraying Febreeze all over his death bedroom. I’d sleep on the couch so I could hear every cough and labored breath.

It was quiet that night, until 4 a.m., when the sliding doors opened and shut. I heard her sneaking around, whispering. I knew she wasn’t alone, I could smell the gum. Night after night, the sting of peppermint would wake me like a bad dream until she finally bullied him into moving in together. I watched from the window as he lifted her boxes into the bed of his truck—that same truck, with dents all over. When they left, I locked the door and checked it five times.

***

Ring, Ring, Ring. She’s not calling for me, she’s calling for the house. She’s wanted it for herself ever since they moved into that cramped apartment in town. Now she’s got the husband, the twins, the money—and what do I have, other than a dead man’s barely-verbal blessing? It’s my fault, I should’ve gotten rid of the landline. Dead people don’t need landlines.

House hunting is what she called it on Facebook, after announcing his promotion. As soon as I saw it I knew there was only one house she was hunting for: mine.

Well, I’m not going anywhere. Just to my bedroom, where it's quiet. I turn the doorknob right to left to right to left to right, the only way to know for sure. I’m safe in my teenage tomb with Abercrombie bags taped to the walls, my nightlight, and a handle of vodka under the bed. Tonight I’ll drink it gone, first to wash down 4 milligrams of Alprazolam, then to keep me company as I scroll through Instagram and wait for sleep. I see baby blankets with numbers on them. I see two white wine glasses and an orange sunset. I see all the happy couples I haven’t spoken to since high school. I see an ad for a true crime game: Discover the evidence, collect the clues, solve the crime. What a stupid game. In real life, you can lay it all out on the table and still, no one will believe you. I take one more pill and go to sleep.

In my dream, we’re five, six years old, and Princess opens the door, tells me to come in and play. She says the game is hair trade—a real sister act. Ours is the same mousy-brown, but she wants mine anyway. She says the only way to do it is to tear right from the root, one giant tug, just like ripping off a bandage. Once I do this, there’s no going back.

On top of my head are a bazillion strands of hair, each plugging some quiet open mouth on my scalp, begging me to say no. It’s my choice, but it never felt that way. I pull on my ponytail until my head is howling angry, until I can’t think, I can only see her in front of me, pulling hers—a skeptic’s eyes under those thick lashes, making sure I’m pulling as hard as she is. I see that bratty smile crawl up her cheeks and I pull until I can’t see anymore.

There’s a knock at the door, somewhere between one room and the other, a world away, and then, a scream: her scream. She’s screaming; it’s working. I ignore it. I’m too busy playing the game, a game I’ve finally won.

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FRIDGE by Xueyi Zhou

October 16, 2020 · Fiction

Say you just move into a new apartment. A freshly finished apartment with a lingering smell of paint. The apartment is not big but it’s your own, and that’s something. You work hard for it, wall by wall, for a tiny cell in a honeycomb. However, a bare box with only a man inside seems more like a lock-up than a lodging, which means now you need appliances. Your choices are limited by the small space and your thin wallet. But you decide to treat yourself, to get something nice. To make it cozier, more like home. You are torn between an air-conditioner and a fridge. An air-conditioner is important, especially when you are settling in a hot city. It’s unbearable most days, with the biting heat and the biting mosquitoes. However, a fridge sounds like money better spent. You grew up with a constant hunger and it pains you to see food go bad and get thrown into the bin. Also, you can take advantage of the AC late in the office after your boss leaves, since he never pays for overtime and hasn’t spotted anything wrong with the utility bill. The transaction is fair so long as you don’t press your lucky temperature too low.

You know what? Make it the fridge.

Now you’ve decided to buy a fridge as your first home appliance. That’s a big step. You need to choose carefully which fridge to bring home. Cheap fridges suck out more electricity and break down frequently. Besides, you don’t like the look of them. They are too tacky, with poorly-lined flower patterns pretending to be luxurious. The Japanese one looks inviting. Much more attractive, actually. Almost too perfect, too out-of-reach. You roam around the mall collecting sidelong looks and silent contempt from the saleswomen, still empty-handed. Then you see a bright white fridge at the corner tagged “on sale.” The price is marked way down due to a small scratch at the front door. You inspect its label to find that it was made in Germany. The suspicious low price now makes sense. You know how the Germans are. They take things very seriously. The fridge works well and you have a secret fondness for German products, for their reliability, even though you have never been to Germany, nor have you ever met a German. You take out your credit card and swipe away your next month’s salary and bring the fridge home. Back-breaking inconvenience for an extra saving of delivery fee makes it a sweeter deal.

You carefully place the fridge in the kitchen, the center piece of the puzzle. Your sweat forms a little mirror on the floor and you smell worse than the paint, but you don’t care. The fridge looks beautiful, even with the scratch. In fact, the scratch is what brings life to it, like a painting by Fontana, breaking the line between dream and reality. A cut from which life pours in and flushes out possibilities. The fridge fills the apartment and life fills you. You feel like you are not alone, a new feeling after your mother died. The fridge is freezing inside, but its surface is warm. You touch the scratch gently as if touching a wrinkle on someone’s face. The scratch is the only reason you can afford a nice German fridge.

Next you visit the supermarket. You spend rather generously, taking all quality food to the cashier without hesitation. A packet of Japanese noodles, a jar of Australian jam, and, of course, a bottle of Parisian water. They are not cheap but it’s OK, take a breath and loosen up a bit. You are holding the basket handle too tight as if those things could escape. You feel like you and your fridge deserve them. You two deserve something good once in a while. Don’t run away. You are allowed to have them. The girl at the cashier asks you whether you would like to have a free magnet. “Sign up for our membership and the magnet is yours. You can save 2% with every purchase.” You mumble to yourself what a rich-people’s scam, and you will not set foot in this pretentious supermarket again, but the magnet grips you at first glance. You recognize that it is the Golden Gate Bridge. Plus, what’s the point of buying a fridge without dressing it up with a magnet? You surrender your credit card and swipe again, carefully pocket the magnet and out you go on the road, with a bag of heavier debts.

You enter your apartment and open the fridge. It has the new fridge smell, somewhat similar to what you remember smelling in the hospital. A smell of nothing-ness, dominant by its absence, a smell you will never forget. You put all the countries into the fridge: Japan, Australia, France. All the countries you and your mother have never been to. Now they are all inside your new fridge. Oh, don’t forget, there’s one more: USA. You stick the magnet onto the front door, not to cover the scratch but to decorate it, and to be decorated. But wait, no, something is off. Right! You turn your wallet inside out and insert a tiny photo between the fridge and the Golden Gate Bridge. It’s a very tiny photo, taken a long time ago. The cheap ink keeps fading but you can still see the woman’s face, though faint, much prettier than the face you saw at the funeral. Suddenly you notice the fridge is as rectangular as a coffin. No matter where you are from—Japan, Australia, France, USA—eventually you end up inside a rectangular ice box. You are at lost for a moment until the warmth emitted by the fridge pulls you back. Everything has been improving, you think. You even have a nice German-made fridge now, with all the fancy countries in it. You stroke the scratch again and say thank you, and get ready to leave for work again. Before you go you take a reluctant final look, at the bright new fridge with a scratch, a Golden Gate Bridge and your mother and a world inside it. You look closer into the silhouette in the photo. The cheap ink is fading and the black is no longer black. It fades into a Chinese red, a color that reminds you of blood and good omens.

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ALTO by Kathryn M. Barber

October 12, 2020 · Creative Nonfiction

We’ve spent this summer in your house, the one that belongs to your father, the one that’s brimming to the top with a hundred thousand ghosts. Memories haunt this house: your parents, still together; your brother, asleep down the hall; your college girlfriend, alive, her laugh echoing across the staircase. We sleep beneath a framed photograph of that girl you loved so much, the one whose car went off that bridge we drive across every day. She’s the only thing that reminds me you’re capable of love, that it can even exist inside you. The way you grieve her is the last living thing that makes me not afraid of you—and I am, I’m so afraid of you: I was afraid that night on the pier, that night out on the highway, every time your hand reaches for that handgun beside the bed. I’m afraid of the way you laugh when I’m angry.

The only time I’m not afraid of you is when you play the piano. Your fingers trace those keys you know by memory, and I worship the sound that comes out of it, bathe in it, roll it over on my tongue and suck it in and out through my teeth. It suffocates me, and I hold my breath. As long as that music is moving through you, you’re something else, someone else, somewhere else.

I quit playing piano when I was fifteen, when I could still hear the notes of “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?” coming from the piano in my parents’ old house, the one we lugged all the way from my grandmother’s house in Mississippi. My aunt would come from Richmond, and her fingers were the same as those ivory keys; she had grown up inside that Yamaha. You quit and you’ll regret it the rest of your whole life my mama said, and I didn’t believe her then but I do now, because I understand now that somehow, if I could still play, I wouldn’t be here sitting, listening to you. If I could make the sounds you’re making right now, I’d be long gone. If I could remember the notes written inside your hands, in your every vein, if I could remember how to be on my own, I wouldn’t need you.

I had four piano teachers, kept starting over time and time again. The first one, Mrs. H, taught violin and piano, and while I was waiting for my turn, I’d sit out in the horse stalls with her daughter, my best friend, and we’d brush the horses’ manes, braid their tails, shovel out the barn until her mama had to come outside and get me. We were eight and her parents’ house was on the state line, and because her parents’ bedroom fell on the Tennessee side, it was long distance for me to call her fifteen minutes down the road on the Virginia side. We only got to see each other at church on Sundays, when we’d share a Frostie root beer from the drink machine in the hallway, and it would taste sour in our mouths after Mr. Bowling gave us pieces of Big Red chewing gum on the way into the sanctuary. Her mama was my favorite until her daddy convinced the deacons to convince my daddy to resign his church and start over somewhere else.

There were two more piano teachers in between that first one and the last one, between missing shoveling those horse stalls with my favorite friend and the one who taught me I didn’t need notes to play music.

The last one was my ninth grade English teacher, Mrs Rodeheaver. She was Pentecostal and she told me she could teach me to play by ear and I didn’t believe her. She said we didn’t need to read music when we could feel it—said she could teach me to feel music in way it that my ears would hear it and my fingers would know how to play it , that all those years struggling to read music wouldn’t matter anymore, that I wouldn’t need those mnemonic devices Mrs. H taught me to remember which keys were which letters.

I didn’t mean to quit. I was just taking a break during tennis season; the practices kept conflicting. I didn’t mean to never resume those lessons in that Pentecostal church sanctuary at the bottom of the hill. I didn’t know then it was my last lesson. I can feel music now harder than I ever could back then, but I can’t remember how to make it come out of my fingers, can’t remember which ones go where and which ones make which sounds, can’t connect my heart to my head to my hands like she taught me to. That last day, we were standing by the piano, and Mrs. Rodeheaver was telling me to sing louder, sing louder, and my weak airy soprano voice squeaked and faltered. I couldn’t make the notes come out right. I could feel them, could feel them in every centimeter of me, couldn’t make them come out loud, strong.

Louder, she said.

I sang the note louder.

No, she said. Louder. From your diaphragm. From deep down inside of you. From the deepest parts of you.

I sang the note again.

Louder, she said. I want you to break these stained glass windows.

So I did, I did, louder, louder, louder. She kept making me sing that same damn note until we could both feel my voice coming back off those church pews. Until I felt like the secondary version of my own note could’ve knocked me over.

You’re not a soprano, she told me, grinning. You’re an alto.

I asked her why she didn’t just tell me that the first week we started, months ago. She smiled, made me keep singing those notes over and over until I found the strength of my voice, understood. She never really answered me, but she didn’t have to, I knew then what I know now: that sometimes you have to sing the wrong note over and over again until it comes out the right way and then you know things your brain could never have known because the music told you. Because the music told you. Some things you can’t know until the music tells you.

You’ve never heard me sing, never seen me inside any song except yours: the way I swing my body when your fingers glide across the piano I can’t remember how to play. Every song we listen to, every track we play, belongs to you,. None of it is mine. You don’t know anything of the basement I was lying in the night I fell in love with Deana Carter or the back porch where only Garth Brooks held me or the lined shuffles of my boots across that beer-sticky dance floor just off I-75. You’ve never heard my voice echo across a church sanctuary.

And you won’t hear the breath I’ll let out as I turn up my radio and drive away from your house for the last time. You won’t hear the songs I’ll sing a few weeks from now under North Carolina skies as I let you go—no, not you, the hope of you, what you could’ve been. What I hoped you were. You won’t be able to name the piano medleys in the songs that carry me to sleep. You’ll never know the ballads that fortify my bones, deteriorate my fear of you. You’ll never see the record player by the window, the screen that separates the porch swing from stacks of country records that remind me I am free I am free I am free.

For now, for tonight, you’ll keep playing the piano, and I’ll keep suffocating in you, and I’ll keep singing soprano. Tomorrow, tomorrow, I’ll hear Mrs. Rodeheaver saying you’re an alto you’re an alto you’re an alto and I’ll sing that note over and over again until I remember who I was before you.

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