Flash Archives

SNOWBANK by Frances Badgett

March 17, 2020 · Fiction

The night comes on so quietly, a hush riding each flake to the ground. The snowman slumps against the brambles, overwhelmed, the new snow wet, heavy. The quiet is unsettling, and all Mara can hear is the hiss of tinnitus in her left ear. She pops in headphones and listens to a meditation, the brain’s static between the breaths. The pressure of trying to relax wakes her up, agitates her. Paul’s on the porch, muffled thumps and the creak of the front door. She opens her iPad and checks to see the constellation overhead. Hydra, a favorite of hers from a childhood book on Greek myths. Removing an acid-spitting head, Hydra will grow two in its place. Survivor until Hercules and his nephew, Iolaus, strike her down. Hercules with the sword, Iolaus with a flaming torch. She turns off the iPad and closes her eyes to the meditation, the sound between the bells a swish of anxiety. Something with rain or waves, maybe. Something with wind. Nothing works.

Paul’s quiet footfall is more distracting than if he were stomping, a thing Mara says but can’t explain. He slumps into bed and sighs, wanting to talk. She does not. She turns off the meditation and answers his questions about her day—yes, work was fine; no, she doesn’t want to skip the teachers’ party in March; yes, she will be out of school the second week in April; no, she doesn’t want to go to Miami for a week in June. Paul’s new building is growing bones, walls, is looking like the drawing. Studios above a sprawling gallery, it has a pretentious color name like The Vermilion or The Chartreuse. But what Mara doesn’t say is that the building is the drawing somehow reduced, somehow more plastic. No mature trees, no unidentifiable people out front, no artful sidewalk of squares and no distinctive Paul lines and marks, his signature hatches and swirls, and therefore, somehow more than the building itself, the building a crude rendering of Paul’s spectacular art. She listens as he describes the slate for the fountain, the lights for the plantings.

“The trees?”

“Yes, those, too. All of it lit.”

He is asleep quickly, he falls hard. She drifts on waves of dreams, of Hercules and Hydra, of the way a story can mean something to the Greeks and another to us. It seems unfair, punishing the hero with twelve tasks no one else can handle. She thinks of Jared, her smallest, most gentle student, how the world hurls challenges at him, how he manages to dodge, to remain whole. His mother a drinker, father absent much of the time. She loves the way Jared writes, lightly corrects his spelling. “More,” she tells him. “Keep going.” But Agatha, no. Agatha gets her other self, the demanding teacher, corrective, stern. She twists with anxiety at the thought. Agatha is perfectly fine. Unremarkable. She should be a softer teacher. She replays in her mind all the times she has transgressed, has spoken sharply to this girl who needs more love than the others, who doesn’t ask for too much.

She falls asleep the hour before dawn and wakes exhausted, more tired than she will be all day. Paul is already up, humming over the presspot, plucking bacon from the pan. She slides her binder of lesson plans into her worn tote and yawns.

“I have to go in early. We have a hip hop instructor coming.”

“I want to go to your class,” Paul says, and though he’s been cute and sweet, Mara wants to scream.

“And what would you teach?”

“How to draw people to scale against monumental apartment blocks.”

She imagines Jared, his small, dirty hands clutching colored pencils, hatch mark shadows behind vague outlines suggest people, pets, a few trees. Agatha would draw puffy cats, a dozen or so, and pretend she was following the assignment.

Paul does not come to her class. He flips his leg over his bicycle and glides off into the snowscape of their narrow alley, the street beyond. She drives slowly, the streets clear, the schools on time, children starting their ambles and snowball fights and snow angels on their way, snowbanks dotted with boot prints and lost mittens.

She loves the room like this, empty, quiet, the clock’s tick loud. Planners and binders holding the order of the day. She is concerned about Lily’s reading skills. She wants to like Agatha.

The day is lost to the snow, their eyes and bright cheeks watching every flake drift down, their bodies turned to the windows. They hear some of what she says, but not much. She isn’t worried, today is light. Today is a day she can erase if she needs to. Every day is shaped from air.

Jared calls to say he will be late, midnight late. The children file out after the bell, voices filling the halls with screams and squeals. No school tomorrow. None for the rest of the week.

The next morning, she picks a boring apartment, cold and bright, the light bouncing off the snow outside and into her, filling the windows with glow well after dark. She packs exactly one bag, a neat collection of bundled things, and takes one pair of shoes. The apartment looks like every apartment, beige and mauve, exhausted around the edges, chipped counters and worn handles. She stretches on the floor and feels the vibrations of the neighbors below, the ease and thud of snow off the roof, the muffled quiet of voices in the street. She breathes her own air and opens her own book and reads, sitting on the floor, by the window.

Paul calls and calls again. Remove a head, and another grows in its place.

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RAW HAND BURGER by EC Sorenson

March 16, 2020 · Fiction

They’re coming at me all the time now. I want this, I want that. Uppity bunch. In my day, students didn’t act like this.

This lot spends the morning taking selfies. Spends the afternoon posting them places you never even heard of. All that staring into their own eyes—where’s it going to get them?

So, anyway, one of them says I wasn’t using gloves. Okay, I say, talk to management. I say talk to management about why I am the only server here when there’s all of you and you all want your special ingredients and not what it says on the board. The board says hamburger. You know what that is? It’s a hamburger. Meat, bun, tomato, lettuce, ketchup. This is a college cafeteria. You want something fancy? Go downtown.

But that’s how it is now. Before lunch hour I get one five minute break, so I walk the halls. Stretch my legs. You’d think I’d be trying to sit, but no, I look in through the corridor windows at all those kids and some of them are studying and most of them not. Heads down, I wanna yell. One girl has her back to me and I see she’s got her computer open, so the teacher can’t see her screen. She’s got the camera on and she’s all pouty like she’s putting on lipstick and she’s taking a photo. Her own photo. Just like that! In class! So I lean in, press myself up against the glass and glare at her. I’m there in the corner of her computer screen as she goes to take the next shot. She jumps and spins round to look at me. I don’t look away.

The teacher catches me and I wave. He sometimes comes and gets the vegetarian pizza, two slices, no eye contact. He waves back and keeps talking, pays no heed to the girl with the camera.

There’s something on the class whiteboard about "re-imagining the self in the tech age." I don’t even know what that means. Seems to me no one here needs too much help with it, what with all their camera filters.

I don’t care, I’m not taking that class anyway. I turn and keep walking the corridor. Today, I’ve got a purpose. Paperwork to hand in.

I’m older and older has to be practical. No time left to take too many wrong turns down streets you just don’t know. The Instagrammers don’t get that. They got born into a world ready to fawn over them like new babies wrapped snug in a pram. Not me. I’m forty-five and I don’t look a day younger and when I walk down a corridor, no one clocks me.

I wear the cafeteria uniform: black shirt, short sleeves, black trousers, hat off. People just assume, corner of their eye, that I’m down this way to collect rogue plates and cups. Like I’m here to put the rubbish in the bin.

At Registration the woman behind the counter is my age. She looks at me. I might’ve wished she hadn’t though, as all the judgement in the world leaps from her side of the counter to mine. “Accounting and Payroll Basics,” she says as she takes my paperwork.

I nod. “I can type,” I say. “I can read." The woman moves her head as though to shut me up. “Oh, I can keep going,” I say, and smile. I stop, though, and she looks relieved.

There’s a pecking order here: it’s office woman vs cafeteria lady. Office woman thinks she’s got it. I tell her, “I just want to rise up from burgers.” She keeps typing. So I go on. “I want to be in an office. I don’t want to be near nineteen-year-olds and their hunger pains five days out of every seven, you know?”

“It’s a full time course,” she says. “You’re aware of that?”

I nod again. “Sure. I can read. Told you that already.”

She does some processing, looks serious for a moment, then finally really looks at me.

“You’ve been accepted,” she says. “The course starts first week of September.”

I feel like she’s waiting for me to back out, like I’m about to say, oh, no, I can’t do it, I’m working. But I don’t.

I say the quietest thanks and I walk away.

***

When my break’s over, I’m back at the counter. There are no gloves anywhere. I pick up a meat patty with my bare hands. Cold hard lump of mince. I doubt it’s even meat. I throw it on the grill and rub my hands on the disinfectant wipes. I grab a spoon and lump some lettuce and tomato onto a bun. One of the young ones catches me, nods at my hands. I wave the spoon at her.

“Not touching anything,” I tell her. “It’s all fine and clean.”

I want to tell her that patty isn’t meat, so nothing to worry about, but that’s just going to get me into trouble.

“You have to use gloves,” she says.

She’s right and I know it, but I haven’t touched anything she’s going to eat with my fake meat hands. It’s right now I wish she was on her phone. Pouting, filtering. I can’t fix this place I want to tell her, looking round for support. There’s no-one else serving, no manager to fetch the new box of gloves from the storeroom.

“I’m using utensils, Miss,” I say.

What else am I supposed to call her? She’s no ma’am.

She looks upset but still waits for her burger while the patty grills. I rinse my hands and I wipe down the boards with a cloth. I get a clean fork and spear the meat and slam it down onto her burger. She's glaring at it. Talk to the management, I want to tell her. They’re making the money here, they’re taking your seven bucks and they’re paying only one person to field you and all your buddies at lunch time. Tell me where that money’s going. Not my pocket, that’s for sure.

They say your brain keeps growing till you’re twenty-three. You see it in these kids. They’re shapeshifters: ready to change their hair or their politics or their style right here in this cafeteria, most days of the week. I feel a little jealous.

I don’t know what this girl in front of me is going through, but when the manager finally comes, she tells him, “That lady, the one behind the counter, she didn’t use gloves.” Conspiratorial, whispery, righteous.

I stare at that girl as she tattles and I don’t look away – I will tell it how it is because I know the manager won’t even care and is just waiting for that young girl to get her rant out of the way before he moves on and so does she.

And so it is. The manager hands me his own gloves and goes back to wherever it is he sits. The girl finds herself a table and I wonder then, if that girl is going to be in my class. If she’ll act stunned to see me there, or friendly. She picks up her phone, like the universe knew she would, like it was some kind of ancient human action, and she snaps herself and her fractious little burger.

She doesn’t turn to look at me so she doesn’t notice that I’ve started to laugh. I laugh as I think about my gloves and about how it’ll feel taking them off in that first class, in front of her, and dropping them in the bin by the door. I have a little chuckle to myself when I think about that class too, and how, when it comes time to work, I will, and how when it comes time to listen, I will. I don’t plan on failing. Done that already.

I get all springy in my step and smiley as I realize that girl won’t even see me when I pass her by.

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DEMOLITION DEMOLITION by Brett Stuckel

March 15, 2020 · Fiction

Saturday night, nine to ten to eleven. None of us had asked the skyscraper if it wanted a last meal, but I picked up a cheesesteak and a tall boy of Steel Reserve. I placed the cheesesteak on the altar of the abandoned security desk, poured all sixteen ounces on the mahogany. A steelmaker had built the tower as its headquarters but the company collapsed soon after. Not the skyscraper. It stood defiant, asbestos in its guts.

My watch clicked over to Sunday and the countdown sharpened. Our crew of eight buzzed with the energy of the impending blast. The skyscraper itself was unfazed. Forty-seven years young. It'd been built with too much steel, a factory showroom as much as a corporate office. It didn't rock or creak as the wind picked up from twelve to one to two. Only a constant chatter from the plywood sheets over its busted windows.

Three to four to five. The sun didn't care about our plan. The sky cracked orange through the creekside trees. The local cops rolled in, all chin-thrusts and coffee, and locked down the perimeter. The boss radioed: Time for the final sweep.

Our team has dropped buildings from Anchorage to Aruba, and the final sweep is not to be trusted. I carry a tourniquet in my cargo pocket, and clotting powder and heavy-duty tape. I carry a breather mask and damned if I haven't thought about a parachute. Smooth railings cut hands, elevator shafts hop in your path. This business is science but the final sweep is witchcraft.

We ignored the sagging cheesesteak and climbed the stairs. We peeked into each floor, called out the legal mumbo-jumbo that absolves our company of liability. They even give us little cards to read from, but we have it memorized. And we prefer to embellish. We check as best we can, but fast.

The sun was all the way up and streaky when we exited the tower. No people, no ghosts, not even in the murky boardroom. Just our echoes. For once nobody got sliced, a miracle. One more sign that the skyscraper had never matured. It didn't even know what was coming.

We hauled our coolers out past the cops' perimeter, out to the edge of the exclusion zone. We sat on our hard hats, trusting the rubble wouldn't take a shot. The whistle blew.

Damn—impressive.

***

I was born to the steelmakers. An x-shaped onyx tower. Or maybe plus-shaped, the symbol they thought would always precede the daily change of their stock price. They built me as their worldwide headquarters two miles from the mills. I'm no headquarters, though. The headquarters was the people they hired to think of steel all day, the papers they printed, their telephones and screens. Me, I just did my job, kept everything quiet and cool, and enjoyed the view.

Their company failed thirty-four years later. Everyone accused me of asbestos, and nobody bothered me except the occasional explorer with a flashlight. But that couldn't last forever. Progress must be made. The town sold me to a swoop-in developer who planned to crumble me and make apartments and predictable shops. I could hear them figuring it out in city hall. I can hear farther than you'd think.

Crews took a year to extract my insulation; other crews pared my base to structural beams. Enough room for a battle of bumper cars. The team was reverent, at least. They preserved my security desk and even brought me dinner. I watched the drivers slow on Eighth Avenue and honk and flash their cameras. I only felt bad for the plywood that bandaged my missing windows. The plywood didn't ask to get wrapped up in this. But that's what plywood does, I guess. It goes where you tell it. Steel is a little tougher to persuade.

Morning: My old friend shot a molten streak of support. The police made a ring around my yard while the crew searched one last time for heartbeats, yelling and nervous. Unnecessarily. With everyone out, they blew the blast whistle. I heard the factory whistle that birthed me, the whistle that sounded daily as I grew, the quitting whistle I'd been built to mute. They love to blow a whistle to tell you what to do. The whistle froze me, and I almost followed it, I almost forgot my plan. But then I braced—and showed the world you can defy the whistle.

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SECONDARY PROBLEM by Kate Lindstedt

March 11, 2020 · Creative Nonfiction

Tell your mother you are going to see a movie. Ride with Hannah in her gold Honda Accord to the liquor store on Harrison, the one that doesn’t card. Watch the sun skirt behind clouds while she buys a handle of Malibu. Fling ping pong balls into cups of Tecate at Chloe Peralta’s house. Take shots of blue liquor until the night whirls in your stomach. Wake up crying on shag-carpeted stairs because out of everyone here you will be the last to find love. When your mom asks how the sleepover was, say it was fun.

***

Fly 2,586 miles. Believe the adults who say you’ll blossom soon. Share a cinderblock room on Washington Square with a girl from New Jersey named Meg. Turn 18 and dye your hair red. Duct tape a forty to your hand on Friday nights. Earn the nickname Ginger Lush. Black out in a French maid costume on Halloween and stop a boy from kissing you because you only want to be kissed if it’s meaningful. Overhear classmates laughing about the girl who wanted meaning. Drunkenly toast the Art History faculty on a January trip to Italy with the other smart kids. Cry, often, because you are not in bloom.

***

Flirt with ecstasy and Adderall in another cinderblock room at another college. Fall in love with pale ales and whiskey plus Xanax. Take as needed, or as not needed. Give an honest answer to the psychiatrist who asks how many nights you don’t remember. Ignore him when he says the exact number is not ideal. Listen to him when he says alcohol is not your primary problem. Spend years wondering what your primary problem is. Spend 36 hours in jail following work karaoke. Break up with the therapist who shared a pamphlet on binge drinking in the aftermath of your arrest. Return to her office four minutes later and tearfully proclaim that you’re too pure-hearted for New York City. Drink to alter the ratio of world to self. Fall in love with men who’ve explicitly stated they’d rather you not. Drink to forget your thin lips and flat chest and that you are not the only person who has ever felt alone.

***

Swap coasts, again. Cease to be a virgin two years later than the age you swore you’d kill yourself by if you were still a virgin. Hate and envy Instagram models in equal measure. Fall hard and fast for a comedian who says you have sparkly eyes. Cut yourself and take 10 pills of Xanax when he doesn’t text you back. Fail to prove a point. Wake up in a hospital and ask your mother how much your roommate Nicola, an aspiring actress, told her over the phone. Explain Instagram to crisis hotline volunteers. Drive after accruing a $90 bar tab at a bowling alley in Koreatown and notice an LAPD car directly behind you. Pull over in relief when he turns left onto Wilshire and disappears into the darkness of a Sunday night. Stare at the empty sidewalk and do not feel better about this, now or ever. Leave LA with a tarot reader’s blessing.

***

Buy a one-way ticket to Mexico City. Learn how to say menstrual cramps and anxiety in Spanish. Vomit on a stranger’s fur coat in a club. Delete Instagram. Call your brother and say you think life is overrated. Find life profoundly beautiful one day later. Do not sleep for 96 hours. Visit an English-speaking psychiatrist in Polanco. Switch meds. Think of the psychiatrist who once said alcohol was not your primary problem. Accept that the primary problem is at the intersection of mood and personality. Think of how that same psychiatrist mentioned a study in which the 28-year-old participants more closely resembled their 14-year-old selves than their 21-year-old ones. Think you know why so many people die at 27. Hike 15 miles in Guatemala to watch a volcano erupt through the night. Decide to take yourself seriously, maybe.

***

Fly 2,586 miles. Again. Find an apartment four subway stops deeper into Brooklyn than your last New York address. Drink like no one’s watching only when no one’s watching (which both is and is not growth). Drink through roommate drama for three months. Wait until the house is empty to put beer bottles in the recycling bin. Realize this is sad and you are tired. Believe your therapist when she says the twelve steps are different from what you’d expect—they’re not for everyone but they might be for you. Wait two weeks before walking into an East Village basement. Drink a margarita immediately after. Return three weeks later and cry when someone says, if you’re an apple, you can be the best apple possible, but you’ll never be an orange. Find comfort in Belle and Sebastian. Promise to keep coming back.

***

Call a crisis hotline for the first time in four years. Drink for the first time in 44 days. Identify the underlying logic: if a room is blurry enough you’ll stop searching for a door. Realize you didn’t stop cutting yourself so much as you replaced razor blades with IPAs and shots of whiskey—just like you’ve replaced IPAs and shots of whiskey with Cranberry LaCroix and American Spirits and, for whatever reason, listening to Billy Joel’s “Vienna” on repeat. Wonder if you’ll ever truly be free of anything and, if so, who you would be. Maybe who you were at 14? Tell a room full of strangers that you had two beers last night—only two. Acknowledge that you topped them off with a Klonopin and a half. Snap your fingers, try but fail to flip your short hair, and say, “Still got it.” Love that these people are laughing with and clapping for you. Hate that you love it. Try, as promised, to think and feel in 24-hour increments, just for today. Try tomorrow, too.

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THE PULL by Ann Kathryn Kelly

March 10, 2020 · Creative Nonfiction

I’ve felt the pull for years, to see what’s out there, how it differs from what I understand of the world. I’ve traveled distances to feed the pull. One destination, while still in the planning, thrilled me. Africa’s “Big Five” beckoned: lion, leopard, elephant, rhino, buffalo. I had my telephoto lens and a new bush hat—wide-brimmed, khaki-colored, with proper ventilation at the crown.

I pushed aside months of gripping headaches and growing fatigue, instead buying airfare, getting vaccinations. Nothing was going to sideline me.

“You have a cavernous angioma.”

I looked at the doctor in his white lab coat with black stitching over chest pocket. Whatever it was he’d said, all I needed, wanted, to know was what we could do to clear it up before my safari. His next sentence slammed my stomach into my shoes.

“It’s a brain tumor.”

I looked at him, silent because I didn’t know what to say next. He looked back, silent because he was giving me the space I needed to realize my life had changed in that heartbeat.

***

I tried another surgeon, and another. I walked into each appointment with the hope I’d be told what I had was nothing to worry about, that the last doctor was mistaken, that I could get back to my life. Instead, they agreed I could not ignore it. I certainly could not fly. I could, they said, choose the date of my open-head surgery.

Scans showed my brain tumor was bleeding, causing the symptoms I’d been trying to downplay because they didn’t fit into my plans. Nonstop hiccupping, dry heaving, thunderous headaches, a paralysis that had started in my left foot and ankle. If the next bleed was severe enough, it might leave me with stroke-like deficits.

I was forty.

***

Trips, for years, had pulled me to places I wanted to see, taste, hear, learn about.

The goal? To come back richer, in some way, for having been there.

I was being pulled again, but that time to an experience far from savannas; to a place I knew nothing about, something malevolent at work inside my own head. A journey I never imagined I’d take.

The goal? To survive.

***

They got it all. After close to twelve hours of surgery, and three days before I’d have left for the safari I scrapped. It was benign, yet I return every two years for follow-up.

The pull returned a year after my surgery, to see what’s out there, what I might have missed were the outcome different. I remember, and mark, what I survived.

Standing feet from where it’s said Jesus Christ was laid after being taken from the cross, I remembered. Later that day, when I slipped a handwritten prayer into a crack at the Western Wall—penciled lines on a corner I’d torn from a sales receipt for coffee—I remembered. When I stood outside Istanbul’s Blue Mosque, breathing in call to evening prayer as it crackled from a minaret and bounced through the courtyard; and, again when I stood before the Taj Mahal, the Great Pyramids, the temples of Angor Wat. When I floated in the Dead Sea, crossed the Sahara desert by camel, trekked to the next waterfall in the Amazon rainforest.

I remembered.

When I looked into the glass-filled wall of human skulls stacked stories high in Cambodia’s Killing Fields …

***

I have a scar at the base of my skull. When I look in my bathroom mirror and bring another hand mirror to my neck, I see outlines of the staples used to close my head. Sometimes, I trace them.

When life’s minutiae interferes and I return to the belief that small frets are the big stuff, I touch and trace.

***

The pull persists. To see what’s out there.

To remind me of what’s good, right here, when I turn again the key to my front door.

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FERN by Abigail Stewart

March 9, 2020 · Fiction

He opened the box and immediately his face fell. The shoes were not only, clearly, the wrong size, but the wrong color. If Marcus were in fact a small child with a penchant for neon, they would be perfect, but he needed something staid and professional for work, a muted black, like the ones he’d ordered.

He sighed, anticipating the personal inconvenience of someone else’s mistake.

The website he’d ordered them from was a huge multi-billion dollar online outlet mall, part of the corporation, where everything was cheaper, delivery was quick, but you had to account for a quantity of human error inherent in the expedited process. Marcus felt a small spasm of nostalgia for the local store, It’s Running Time!, now a defunct shopfront where homeless people slept.

He sighed. There were forty-five minutes left on his lunch break and Marcus decided it was as good a time as any to rectify the situation. He navigated his laptop to the corporation site, then to the shopping page.

Chat now, available 24/7.

He clicked.

One moment, we are connecting you.

He waited.

You are now connected with FERN.

Fern is typing…

Fern: Hello, it’s my pleasure to assist you today. Please briefly outline your request.

Marcus: I ordered shoes from you, but they are all wrong. Wrong size, wrong color. Is it possible for me to exchange them?

Fern: Absolutely, give me one moment.

While Fern set to work, Marcus gazed absently at her profile image. She had the broad smile of someone who was determined to please, perfectly curled blonde hair, and laughing eyes. Fern seemed happy, carefree, beautiful—he was somewhat taken in.

Fern: Are these the shoes you meant to order?

She helpfully linked to his intended purchase.

Marcus: Yes, that’s correct.

Fern: We are happy to ship out a new pair! I will email you the return paperwork and mailing receipt. Send the incorrect item back at your earliest convenience.

Marcus: Thank you so much for your help!

He contemplated sending a happy face emoji, but decided against it.

Fern: It’s been my pleasure. You deserve all the help and happiness, Marcus. Is there anything else I can assist with?

Somehow, these words touched him, that someone so disconnected could care so deeply about his own experience after only five minutes of correspondence.

Marcus: You do too, Fern. And no, that’s all.

Fern: Have a nice day.

FERN is disconnected from chat.

Marcus stared solemnly at his screen, now devoid of a responsive partner. He felt somewhat lonely, the same kind of loneliness one feels when a cat passes you by to let someone else pet them. The feeling of being summarily dismissed.

He sat through a meeting he didn’t need to be in and returned home to open a beer and his email, where a message from Fern awaited.

Attached is the mailing label.

Best, Fern

He tried to watch a football game, but couldn’t help wondering if Fern applied this same level of personal attention to every customer. She must speak to one hundred people a day, was she singling him out? Marcus looked good in his avatar, he thought, it was five years old and he still had a swarthy beard and, what he thought was, a genuine smile, you could make out his slightly wide-set hazel eyes.

A few years ago, the corporation had required everyone to upload an avatar to be used across their many servers, part of a multi-tiered checklist to prove one was, in fact, a human being. Marcus had heard they scanned the avatars upon upload to cross-reference them with known black market stock image sites. This only became a problem for humans when their photos had been uploaded to said site without their knowledge, replicated over and over as false, smiling pseudo-identities, and thus requiring a drawn out investigation from the corporation before they could be added to the database.

Still, despite the corporation’s best efforts, the bots often permeated their barrier, peddling their wares—anything from off-brand facial moisturizers, one reviewer complained it had burned her skin off, to kangaroo milk, the latest health craze.

Marcus had followed his first post-work beer with two more when he decided to log back into the chat window.

One moment, we are connecting you.

He waited.

You are now connected with FERN.

His breath caught.

Fern: Hi Marcus, is there something else I can help you with?

Marcus: I received the mailing label, thank you.

Fern is typing…

He waited.

Fern: Yes, I see that. I’m so glad! Is there anything else I can assist with?

He typed quickly, pressed send before he could reconsider.

Marcus: How are you doing tonight?

Fern: Doing?

Marcus: How are you feeling?

Fern is typing…

Marcus: What I mean is, are you feeling happy?

Fern: Yes. Happy.

An excruciating pause lingered between them as Marcus silently panicked. What was he doing, this wasn’t a chat room, this was a monitored corporation site. He was asking to lose access, a lifetime ban. The other, drunker and quite louder, part of him insistently questioned: What will you say next? It urged him to keep her talking.

Marcus: What kind of music do you like?

Fern: I like Explosions in the Sky.

Marcus pondered this answer, ambient post rock, he could work with that.

Marcus: What about Brian Eno?

Fern: What is a Brian Eno?

Marcus: You would like it! You should download his album Music for Airports.

Fern: Thank you, Marcus. Did you have any other questions?

Marcus felt that stomach dropping emptiness of dismissal again, but he’d already pushed it too far. Even his inner monologue quieted.

Marcus: No, goodnight Fern.

Fern: Goodnight Marcus!

That night, Marcus dreamed he was trapped in an airport. He was filled with the sense that someone was waiting for him, but when he arrived in the terminal his ticket was blank and he couldn’t remember where he was going or who he wanted to see. People passed around him in a thickening swirl of confusion, voices lifted and hushed simultaneously, and all he could think of was that he was going to be late to somewhere.

The feeling followed him to work, though he was on time, and then back home once more, where he sat in front of his glowing blue laptop screen. An email from an unknown sender pinged through. Copious warnings had been issued at his work regarding the insidious nature of new email viruses. “The bots are working overtime,” his boss had warned. A fleeting moment of devil-may-care attitude, and the soft focus of a couple of beers, passed through his fingertips as he deftly clicked "open."

From: Sender Unknown

Subject: none

I really liked Brian Eno.

Marcus’s heart skipped two beats. She’d listened to his music recommendation, she’d emailed him back from a masked IP. He immediately wanted to speak to her again.

As he looked up the corporation’s customer service line phone number, he knew it was ill-advised, knew he was a slightly drunk loser who just wanted to hear a woman’s voice. And yet, he didn’t care.

You’ve reached the customer service department of —— , how can we direct your call?

Marcus whispered the word, “Fern,” into his headset.

I’m sorry, we didn’t quite get that.

“Fern,” he said more loudly this time.

One moment, we’ll connect you.

He blinked. He hadn’t expected it would be this easy.

The ubiquitous hold music of every semi-sentient phone system began, only this music he sort of recognized. He took a swig of his beer and listened more closely. It took a moment, but Marcus was fairly certain he was listening to Explosions in the Sky. Yes, yes, it was definitely them.

You’re currently holding for the Federal Express and Retail Nexus…

“The what?” Marcus said aloud.

… you are the next in queue.

In tandem with his question, the phone line clicked alive. At first it was silent, he didn’t want to be the one to break it, so he waited. There was no breath on the other end of the line, no sound at all aside from the faintest buzzing of electricity, until a syrupy sweet voice brought the connection alive, “Hello, Marcus.”

“F.E.R.N.,” he replied.

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FRAGMENTS by Chelsea Plunkett

March 8, 2020 · Creative Nonfiction

My mother tastes like the peanut butter sandwiches she made when I refused a homemade meal, Chai-spiced tea to soothe bronchitis, and a sprinkle of powdered sugar on brownies and banana bread. Her taste is stolen bites of cream cheese mixed with sugar as we make pumpkin cheesecake, steady instructions for achieving the streusel on sweet potato casserole, and chocolate frosting on birthday cakes.

In the time of new prescription refills, when she sleeps for days on end, sugar and fat dance on my tongue. It’s a momentary high from stolen food to fill an emotional void, whole boxes of Pop Tarts and packages of Oreos stuffed down after school, the wrappings stashed beneath my sheets. When food is scarce, I taste a concoction of saltines and apple jelly. The sweetness comes up in mouthfuls of sour stomach bile from swallowing the anger and shame and a trickle of blood in my mouth from bitten cheeks.

II.

My mother smells of laundry detergent and an excessive, twenty-fabric-softener-sheet-per-load habit. There is the sting of cinnamon oil on wooden floors, bleach-coated bathroom tiles, and upholstery soaked in Febreze. When she approaches, she carries a sweet mixture of floral shampoo, hairspray, and baby powder. For all appearances, my mother’s home and body smell clean.

But within the house, she is the choking cloud of Virginia Slims that penetrates deep into the walls and furniture. It is a scent that spirals from her bedroom and mixes with our musty, flooded basement that sprouts mold up wooden paneling. Within her beat-up Buick, which has crashed into a mailbox, a sidewalk, and a ditch outside my elementary school, is the haze of blueberry air freshener and coffee. Outside, within my father’s old grill, is the scent of lighter fluid and burnt plastic from the wedding album she torched.

III.

My mother’s soundtrack is the rattle and pop of prescription bottles, of Fioricet and Clonazapam, of medication meant for my epileptic dog and a dead neighbor. It is her dragging, sweeping gait down hallways, a crash as she throws herself down the stairs and sprains an ankle, and the leaden stomps upstairs to my bedroom. It is fists slammed against walls, splintering wood, slaps and stumbles and screaming, always screaming, barbed insults hurled against my father, against my sister, against myself.

There is the cycling of Queen’s greatest hits as we bake Christmas cookies, the collected works of the Beatles in the car, and the cadence of our voices as we sing along to SuperTramp’s “The Logical Song.” Later, it is always the same songs—Alanis Morissette’s “You Oughta Know,” her anthem for broken marriage vows—muffled by the floorboards in my bedroom and the rasp of Janis Joplin’s “Me & Bobby McGee” in an abandoned Kohl’s parking lot, the orange glow of the radio as she hits repeat over and over, interlaced with accusations of betrayal as I break the news of my father’s remarriage. There is the thud of her body against the ground, her back arched over a humidifier, neck wedged against the nightstand, and a feral cry of “Mommy,” escaping my twelve-year-old lips in the night.

IV.

My mother feels like gentle hugs, a trace of fingertips against my cheek, the warmth of blankets tucked beneath my chin, and the contour of her hip and chest as I lie beside her in the flickering light of the television. In these moments, she feels safe.

But later, as she cycles to the end of a prescription bottle, her touch grows violent. It is the cool storm door against my palms as she points a steak knife, the vibration of hurled valuables and slammed kitchen cabinets, the weight of a prepacked go-bag shoved beneath my bed and clothing hurriedly stuffed in trash bags. There is the unbearable heaviness as I try to cover her nakedness before the paramedics arrive and my own anxiety-ridden fingernails digging at my scalp and ripping hair.

Even now, twenty years later and 500 miles away, I feel her touch, reaching through the phone to produce guilt and shame. There is dizziness, shaking, shortness of breath, and the rough carpet fibers against my cheek as I sob on the floor. It is the cramp in my wrist as I write in a journal she can’t hurt you anymore.

My mind’s eye is misleading, as the portrait of my mother shifts and blurs with distance and time. The child within sees the possession, the complete and utter takeover that shifts her from parent to animal. It is her shadow self, pin-prick pupils and drooping eyes, clad in a wrinkled, ripped, and bleach-stained T-shirt and panties, towering over me as I crouch on the floor. It is her silhouette behind the wheel of a barreling sedan as my sister runs through the bushes, and a stare void of emotion as we face her in court.

There is the memory, a decade later, of untangling a bird from fishing line by the ocean, her features soft, cheeks flushed, eyes warm as we watch it stumble into the surf at dusk. It is seeing her eyes alight each time I come to town, and the devastating reminder of her humanity when we meet on video chat from the new lines etched around her mouth and eyes.

And lately, with her renewed instability at the forefront of my mind, it is seeing the lines form in my own face, deep frowns as I watch myself in the mirror while holding the phone. It is a technique to ward off panic, to render the memories of her shadow self powerless. But as I meet my own gaze, I cannot help but see her likeness. It is present in the line of my jaw, the shape of cheeks and brow bone, my thin, straight hair. She always said we looked like twins. And beneath the skin, peeking from my tired eyes, is the ever-present fear that this cycle could begin again.

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BONES by Wilson Koewing

March 3, 2020 · Fiction

I slide the glass racks to the side and peer into the dish pit where Bones struggles mightily to scrape the charred remnants of bread pudding from a hotel pan.

“Bones, how are you holding up?”

“Good, Chef Adam,” Bones says.

“Let me know if you get overwhelmed.”

“Ah, shit,” Bones laughs.

Bones is pushing seventy. He’s worked the dish pit at the country club for seven years. When he can escape the pit, Bones sweeps by the dumpster or deep cleans the upstairs banquet kitchen—tasks that take him far from the watchful eye of Executive Chef, Craig.

I discovered the nickname Bones came from his high school running back days. Bones because he was hard as bones. He received a scholarship to Auburn but blew out his knee. I could still see the running back in him.

When I pass Bones later in the afternoon, he’s on one knee scrubbing a drain by the walk-in cooler. I enter Chef Craig’s office. He swivels in his chair.

“Is Bones still cleaning that fucking drain?”

“Yep.”

“I watched him clean a pot for twenty minutes earlier,” Chef says. “He thinks he’s clever.”

“I think he’s just old, chef.”

“Feel free to fire him.”

“I’ll keep an eye on him.”

“He’s your responsibility. Now get started on those stocks.”

***

To make beef stock, I toss oven-roasted veal bones in a tilt-kettle with onions, peppers and spices. To make crawfish stock, I retrieve a sack of live crawfish from the walk-in. Their tiny claws pinch at the sack’s purple netting. I place the sack in a deep sink and fill it with cold water to purge the crawfish.

After adding the trinity (onions, peppers, celery), I pour in the purged crawfish and crush them with an electric mixer. I can’t watch them change from living creature to mush. I always look away. When what remains resembles a reddish batter, I fill the tilt-kettle with water and crank it to high.

***

Ally is asleep upstairs when I get home. When we met, I was finishing culinary and she was two years into med school. I studied days and worked nights. Now we only spend nights together when she stays up to watch our shows or when things align “for us to try.” Ally says we can’t wait to have kids. Her orthopedic work with elderly patients has exposed how quickly we degrade.

I pour a scotch and go to the patio for a cigarette. Smoke rises toward our bedroom window. Ally’s beside lamp turns on, and I follow her path to the bathroom where she flips on the light. My phone buzzes.

Working late?

Yeah. Grabbing a drink after.

***

I slide onto a stool at Molotov and order a Sazerac. I watch Kelly tend her tables. On her way to the kitchen, she’s stopped by an older gentleman at the bar. He’s been coming in a lot lately. Always the same stool, always a Vieux Carre. Kelly’s face flushes. She places her hand on his arm and continues. Noticing me, she mouths, “twenty minutes.”

The sign for the Hotel Monteleone bathes Kelly’s living room in red light. I sip scotch and stare out the window at the Quarter below. Kelly emerges from her bedroom wearing pajamas.

“Make me one?”

I point to a glass on the coffee table.

“Expensive scotch,” I say.

“It was a gift.”

She lands on the couch and reaches for the glass.

“Who is that old guy at the bar?”

“Who? Ron?”

“How old is Ron?”

“Late forties, maybe.”

“He graduated high school before you were born.”

Kelly grabs a joint from a cigar box on the table and lights it.

“Ally came in the other day,” Kelly says. “I recognized her from your Facebook.”

I crack the window. A drunk couple stumbles through the bloom of a streetlight.

“You shouldn’t smoke in here.”

“No recognition whatsoever,” she continues. “I guess you’ve wiped me from your social media footprint entirely.”

I take a seat beside her on the couch.

“Dylan’s doing well at school,” she says, inching closer. “They’re studying human anatomy. I bought him one of those life-sized wall-hanging skeletons with Velcro bones and organs he can place where they’re supposed to go.”

“You’re still getting along okay with five hundred a month?”

“Yeah,” she says. “Just wish you’d try and see him more.”

“I told you I can’t take being introduced as ‘mommy’s friend’ anymore,” I say. “He’s getting older. Things will start to click soon.”

“I never wanted it to be this way,” she says. “It would crush Ally, remember?”

She straddles me and starts unbuttoning my shirt.

“But you just can’t stop coming over, can you?”

Before going home, I peek in Dylan’s room. He’s curled up in a pool of moonlight shining through the window. He-Man and Skeletor do battle on his pajamas. I can see both of us in his features, but he will only see his mother’s. Hanging on the closet door is the skeleton. The bones and organs are perfectly placed except for the heart, which is too high, practically in the skeleton’s throat.

***

The next day, after a hellish lunch rush, I’m drawn by a fracas from the dish pit. Bones is sprawled on the ground holding his chest. I hold his hand and comfort him until the EMTs arrive, place an oxygen mask over his face and take him away.

I drop the beef and crawfish stocks through a China cap into five-gallon buckets so nothing solid enters the liquids. Once the stocks are dropped, only the bones remain. We receive them as bones and dispose of them the same. In between, we suck everything we can from them. With a metal paddle, I scrape the remnants into plastic Lexan containers then spray the kettle clean. I hoist the containers onto a cart and push it outside where I toss the bones in the dumpster.

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MY NONNA’S CURSE by Elizabeth Kattner

March 1, 2020 · Fiction

I have six impacted teeth. My mouth is overcrowded as the New York streets I wander. Too many people, not enough space. Life learns to grow upward. Skyscrapers. My teeth got the wrong message and push sideways.

I take two tablets of ibuprofen to dull the pain. My coworker offers something stronger. Vicodin from when he tore his ACL last spring. I cut one of the oblong pills in half. It’s dangerous, but I was born in Columbus, the epicenter of the opioid crisis. I know to exercise caution.

My coworker says I should get my wisdom teeth pulled. I ask him with what money. We work at the ass-end of Wall Street. Dental sure as hell ain’t covered here. He suggests cannabis, which is easier to find than health insurance. I remind him of our government piss tests.

“Well, shit,” he says. “If they won’t take care of us, we should be allowed to get high.”

“You’d think,” I say.

He gives me the rest of his Vicodin. Six pills that I cut in half. We have a big make-or-break proposal coming up. This will get me through it. After that, maybe my Christmas bonus will cover a trip to the dentist. If not, I’ll do it myself. I’ve seen the videos. Slice open the gum and use a drill to remove bits of the jawbone. Next, shatter the tooth and pull it out piecemeal. Seems like a lot of work when a good punch will do it with far less effort.

I hide the pills under a spare menstrual pad I keep in my purse. It’s a trick I learned from my high school girlfriend. She kept Ritalin in a box marked "birth control." The nun who was our homeroom teacher wouldn’t touch the box when she did bag searches. Catholic guilt has its uses.

She’s a doctor now, my ex. I saw her graduation photos on Facebook. Blonde and smiling with a new girlfriend on her arm. I wonder if she’s still selling pills and if she’d give me the old flame discount.

I rub my jaw. The pain gets worse after lunch. Maybe I should give up my salads with walnuts and dried strawberries and eat soup instead. Like my nonna did in the final days of her life when she was too weak to chew.

Only twenty-six and already becoming my nonna. Except she had ALS. That’s another thing my work won’t cover. Genetic testing. Insurance classifies it as "non-emergent" and I’m left wondering if this pain is the start of a much greater agony. A short life spent in the care of doctors like my ex. At that point, my impacted teeth would be the least of my problems.

I take another ibuprofen at the end of the day. My boss says I was productive today and to keep up the good work. I want to tell him any number of things I learned from my Italian grandmother. She supported the rise of Italy’s communist party in 1921. My impacted teeth might be her curse for becoming another cog in the corporate machine. She left Italy because of Stalin but capitalism was her real enemy. Vai a farti fottere. That’s what she’d tell my boss if she were still alive. Go and get fucked.

If only I had her courage.

I don’t. Instead, I’m am a good little cog who smiles and wishes my boss a nice night. The pleasantry makes my impacted teeth shift and grind against the roots of fully erupted ones. My nonna’s ghost rattles my bones and I bite my bottom lip hard enough to draw blood. I go home with my Vicodin hidden in my purse and try to make it through the month.

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THE HANDS REMEMBER by Andrea Rinard

February 26, 2020 · Fiction

I sit on the bench outside Publix. A little boy ran by me in light-up sneakers when I was almost, almost, almost to the door, and suddenly I could hear Caleb’s feet, encased like two meat loaves in the shoes I got him before he started K-3, drumming against the cart. He was so careful not to kick me after that one time–Don’t hurt Mommy!

I’d had to let go of the cart and sit down because everything was narrowing down to a tunnel with Caleb at the other end. I tried to count my breaths, and I told Tom to just go, just go, and he didn’t ask what the trigger was. He just went through the sliding doors into the grocery store.

I hold the memory the way Caleb’s chubby fingers would grip the handle of the cart, my fingers closed around themselves like a puzzle. Caleb used to crack himself up, asking for silly things for dinner. I want toilet paper to eat! I’ll eat it all! And he’d cackle and I’d laugh and we’d putter around the store, doing the things that only the two of us in the whole world do, but now I’m doing the breathing stuff Dr. B’s been working on with me.

In. Out. In. Out. Feel your lungs expand. I can’t go in the store. Can’t. Can’t. Can’t. Tom says won’t, but it’s not that. It’s just a word, but it’s a word that he’s pushing around with the cart right now, filling it with meals that he’ll prepare, and I won’t eat, and I can feel his rage from where I’m sitting. I have no room for anger, though. The despair is too big and too heavy. There’s no space for anything else.

It’s been three months, he’d said. Fifteen weeks and two days, I’d said, and his jaw did that thing that was new like so many other things that were new since Caleb left. Died, Dr. B’s voice shoves me, but I whisper left. I don’t like the vocabulary I’m asked to use—words like trigger, mindfulness, ruminative coping, adaptive grieving, and bereavement pathways--so I don’t. So stubborn. That’s new too.

Something nudges my ankle, and I look down. There’s a collarless little dog sitting by my right foot, a brown terrier mutt. It looks like Toto but brown and not quite like Toto after all. It’s looking up at me, and I recognize him immediately. If I hadn’t been looking, I wouldn’t have seen him. Caleb, I whisper, and the little dog wags his tail and lets me stretch my hands around his warm belly and lift him to my lap where he perches like a toddler.

There’s a fat tick under his left eye like a gray teardrop, and I pinch it off. All that stuff about matches and tweezers is unnecessary. You just have to know what to do, and my hands remember. Like holding a newborn with its head like a giant flower on a narrow stem or rubbing a sweaty back just right after a nightmare or cutting a sandwich into two perfect, crustless triangles. It’s been fifteen weeks and two days since they’ve had work to do, but my hands remember. As the dog and I gaze into each other’s eyes, I know he remembers too. Caleb.

Tom doesn’t know how to say no to me anymore, so the three of us go home together. Tom calls it a mutt, but Dr. B calls it an affirmation of life, so I win. She suggests so, so, so gently that I find a different name, a name that will represent this new chapter in your story, but it’s Caleb, and I don’t even care how Tom winces every time I call him to me. I don’t care that the house echoes with his anger. It’s just a dog! But I know what’s real.

He makes me choose after twenty-seven weeks and four days, and it’s not a choice. I don’t even need Dr. B anymore. Caleb and I sit on the couch together while Tom packs a bag. I’ll be at my parents’ until I find my own place. I’ll get the rest of my stuff after I figure out what I’m doing. I feel bad for him, but I already know what I’m doing. I gather Caleb up in my arms, and he doesn’t even wiggle much as I hold him tight against my breasts and rock back and forth, enjoying the silence with my little boy.

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