Flash Archives

FAILURE TO BREATHE by Emily Withnall

June 17, 2020 · Fiction

The diaphragm wheezed and gasped. It was a broken accordion and with each push, the squeaking and squawking that emerged were evidence that it should surrender. There was no hope and what’s more, the attempts were painful—and embarrassing.

The diaphragm felt defeated. This was an old, familiar feeling. It had never lived up to its full capacity, but over the years, awkward swimming lessons and less awkward singing lessons had strengthened it. The diaphragm knew what it was like to be useful and strong and to provide the satisfying, deep inhale and long sustained exhale. It was capable and even when it didn’t live up to its full potential, its self-esteem was always growing.

The diaphragm had never liked roller coasters but it had to admit that the roller coaster was the best metaphor for its trajectory. Roller coasters were clichés though, so the diaphragm felt it had to reconsider this framing. Maybe it was like hiking a mountain. It had done well with hikes, but not with hikes over 10,000 feet. Pumping air through asthmatic lungs was a tall order. Still, the diaphragm had done the best it could. What had all appeared like an uphill path, leading past the stars and to the very edges of the ever-expanding universe, was just like everyone else’s path. A lovely, if arduous, ascent… but with nowhere left to go but down.

The diaphragm felt guilt in admitting defeat. What would happen to the body if it just laid down and took a forever nap? Would it be accused of murder? It had never heard of a diaphragm being accused of murder, but there was a first for everything. An accusation would surely lead to conviction. A life behind bars. That wouldn’t do the body any good, but the criminal justice system further breaks what is already broken, so such an outcome would be in keeping with history.

The diaphragm was glum at this point and wanted to rewind time, but time was like a cassette tape with all the ribbon hanging out and knotted. Even if the diaphragm could untangle the ribbon and find a pencil to slowly wind it back in, would reliving the pain be worth it for the joy? Especially if it turned out that the tape was Alanis Morissette. It would even be worth caterwauling to “You Oughta Know” if the diaphragm could just fix some things. If it could go back and choose not to self-sabotage. If it could go back and do deeper therapy.

The diaphragm had been rendered a sad, flat balloon because the body was wracked with grief. Love, the kind that seeps in and stays, had alchemized between the body it belonged to and the body containing another diaphragm. The other diaphragm was even weaker and rarely provided its body with a full breath. There were sad reasons for this but also hope for breathing at full capacity. The two bodies felt promise and possibility and a love with family in it—a new feeling for both of the bodies. Together, both diaphragms experienced breathing that was deeper than ever before. The future was full of the richest oxygen.

Then, the other body walked away. The love stayed behind because it was too late to get it out. Love had spread everywhere and filled spaces not occupied by organs. Love blocked the middle of the chest like a bandage applied so tight the wound festers and skin dies at the edges.

The diaphragm supposed that it should blame love, or the chest, or the lungs. Or maybe it should blame the air, so filled with coal dust and exhaust and micro-plastics. Maybe, in not trying, it was actually saving itself.

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NO, YEAH. by Erin Gallagher

June 16, 2020 · Creative Nonfiction

“You can play games or you can end it and move on.”

Lit by twinkly string lights atop a shiny marble counter, apparently we’re not fucking around anymore. Soft pink and blue bulbs create a calm ambiance, steam rises from big porcelain mugs of herbal tea, and we are sparing no emotional expense. Play games: win, lose, flip your phone upside-down and wait two hours, three hours, reciprocate every unit of time you’ve ever waited, multiplied by three. We’re not talking about me (this time), and my advice is out of character, it’s...hopeful:

“Yeah, no, maybe just act as you normally would. Don’t do anything impulsively when you’re frustrated. You won’t get what you’re looking for, and it will make you feel worse.” I nod, take a sip of sparkling water, as a mature, well-adjusted adult does. I guess I never found it necessary to...give myself the same advice. Overthinking? I’m not familiar. The constant need to get in the last word? I’ve never heard of it.

In the winter, sufficiently settled into my new home, the sky began to darken earlier and earlier, and I started going on first dates. Many dates. How many cocktail bars are in New York City? Waves rose up and crashed, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, all booked. Reprieve of quiet for a few weeks followed, while the pack narrowed and we allowed ourselves to lean into the mortifying reality of being known, before inevitably, turning into nothing: wisps of air, almost like a ghost. But not technically ghosting,

“I didn’t technically ghost him,” I clutch a vodka soda under my arm, my focus remaining on the glowing screen before me.

“You did, and you should feel bad. Every time someone ghosts, the world becomes a worse place.” I’m being scolded at Brooklyn Bowl, surrounded by tie-dye T-shirts, she goes on, “We’re hurting each other and not thinking about it. Each time, we make it normal, and it shouldn’t be.”

I shift my focus to my vodka soda. I’ve been making excuses for myself. A wave crashes upon me and I struggle because I feel too much. But yet, after I find my footing, I continue on as though I’m still underwater. I didn’t know what to say. I still don’t. I see stars in my periphery, wipe a loose piece of cheap glitter out of my eyelashes. My tab is still open at the bar. In the back of my mind I dream of telepathically closing it, from inside of the backseat of a taxi. I could bypass the crowd and go straight outside, ask the driver if it’s possible to take me back to two weeks ago, when I handled something poorly. The band starts to play. In a few hours, karma will make its way back around and I’ll be hurt the same way I hurt someone else. What would Co-Star say about this?

Which is worse: sitting down and writing about how I’m feeling in a meaningful way, or going on a first date and using self-deprecating humor as a defense mechanism, while I get drunk in the middle of the week, all in the name of pursuing monogamy? I don’t want a boyfriend, but I do want to be a writer, I’ll go on one more date. It’s a new year, but I never said what that would mean. Speak what into existence? I want whichever cocktail has gin. It comes in a jar? Sure, fine. These are pictures of my dog, these are stories about the years I traveled the world, these are brief silences. This isn’t it. We part ways after one drink, and once he crosses the street, I go back inside, have another round and give my phone number to the bartender. It’s for my writing.

Blue (sometimes green) and grey bubbles carry my mood up and down, waves roll onto the shore and retreat into the sea. You’ll have more time to focus on your life when you’re no longer checking the views on your Instagram story. We share our anecdotes and we overhear them all the same, over glasses of wine, coffee, the boys behind me in the bubble tea shop, the girls next to me on the subway. As I write these words, a girl at the counter in the cafe speaks about a guy who is a “bad texter.” My friends and I exchange knowing glances. I bite my lip. Who do you know who is a “good texter?” We tell each other “you’re too good for this,” we type it, we speak it, we scrawl it across walls that we’ve built up around ourselves. I say it confidently to the people in my life. To myself I know it to be true, but sometimes I waver and I don’t know why. I wake up in the morning to messages I sent to a friend, after walking with her to her apartment in the middle of the night,

“...You’re one of the best people I know...Please don’t sleep on the floor...”

One ghost will haunt me a little more than the rest. At low points, I’ll look for attention in the wrong places, but I won’t act on it, I don’t believe in ghosts. (But can you be afraid of something you don’t believe in?) I used to live in a flat that was haunted, on the twelfth floor of a mint green building in Hong Kong. We banned ghost talk inside the apartment because we were scared of angering her. This ghost had a feminine energy. I can’t explain it. I tell this story on a third date, in a cash-only dive bar on my block that has a name I can’t remember or maybe I’ve never learned. I can see in his eyes, he thinks that I’m naive. He’s looking down at my chest, maybe he’s not as interested in ghost stories.

We drink natural wine at a dimly lit countertop. I wore this same top on a different first date two months earlier. It snowed that earlier night, and I walked to the bar, wishing I could just glide past the adorned windows and continue to venture through the cold. I pulled a second tiny straw from behind the counter, because one tiny straw is not sufficient to absorb a gin and tonic, and he asked if I needed to drink faster to deal with being around him. This isn’t it. I drew a heart in the snow on a car window outside, spent the rest night thinking of the falafel wrap I would buy on my way home. This time, the mood is lighter. My paisley blouse is under a spring jacket, the uncharacteristically warmer weather is discombobulating. It’s still winter, and I’m still booking myself too busy. He knows more about natural wine than I do. I don’t know anything about natural wine. I make a mental note to bring my friends here, to this place; we’ll tell the same kinds of stories and I’ll remember the idea of someone sitting with me in front of the natural wine and oysters, someone who I’ll never see again. I’ve never liked oysters.

It’s all fun, until one morning, or one evening, or one moment, it’s not. How well do we really know anyone? I feel clear-headed and calm, the peace that comes from having the upper hand. I don’t play games, but I don’t want to lose. The peace descends into chaos, circles that I’ve talked my way around and around; I don’t want to spend any more time trying to figure him out, but inevitably, I will and I do. Friends I’ve known my whole life still surprise me. Everyone we know will either be there forever, in our life, or, they won’t. This will last or it will end. It’s simple. It’s simple.

Low expectations, or disappointment? Delete the number, or never save it in the first place? These things come in waves. These things are all fun and games. I feel relieved. I don’t feel anything. I feel rejected. I feel neglected. I feel foolish. I’m smiling in the back of an Uber, going over the Williamsburg Bridge. I’m crying on the street on a rainy Tuesday morning. How much of the feeling is the drama? How much do you like the attention? What have you learned about yourself?

“You’re saying you don’t?,” I ask across a small table, fingers tapping on an almost-empty bottle of beer.

He shakes his head, “I do. I said, ‘no, yeah,’ but I don’t think you heard the 'yeah.’”

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PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION by Zac Smith

June 15, 2020 · Fiction

Emo Phillips stands on a train. He thinks about all the fucked-up people he knows and wonders if people think he’s as fucked-up as he thinks other people are. The train conductor/engineer/driver person clicks on the intercom and thanks everyone for riding the train. Emo Phillips feels like he has never been thanked for riding public transportation.

“Hey, am I fucked-up?” Emo Phillips asks.

“What,” says Dan Brown. Dan Brown is looking at an advertisement for furniture. The train conductor/engineer/driver person clicks on the intercom and apologizes for the slow pace of the train. Emo Phillips takes off his mittens. The advertisements for furniture are very sexually explicit–in one advertisement, there is a picture of two men having passionate sex on top of a dresser–and Dan Brown feels incredibly unloved. He doesn’t want to be on the train anymore.

“Like, am I weird, I guess,” Emo Phillips says. “Like, is there stuff weird about me. To people”

“Yeah, dude, uh…I guess. Or not,” says Don Brown (easier to type than Dan Brown). The furniture advertisement seems really fucked up. “But yeah, probably.” He imagines himself making love on top of a dresser for a photoshoot. He imagines himself being paid $7,000 in twenty-dollar bills for the photoshoot. He imagines not telling his lover about the photoshoot and using some of the money to buy a new dresser because of how good it was to be fucked on that kind of dresser during the photoshoot.

The train conductor/engineer/driver person clicks on the intercom and suggests that more people should get off at the next stop so the train can go faster, because of the weight of the people. Almost everyone on the train checks to see what the next stop is.

“What?” asks Emo Philips (one l, spell check seems cool with this). He is looking at the advertisement. The man penetrating the other man in the advertisement has an Emo Philips tattoo on his right shoulder. The man being penetrated has his head flat on top of the dresser, looking away from the camera.

Emo Philips feels worried. He remembers that the furniture store from the advertisement is at the next stop.

don brown (no caps) clarifies that he doesn’t know what Emo is asking. They are lovers, and they are on the train, and The train conductor/engineer/driver person clicks on the intercom (copy pasting this now) and begins to cry into the microphone thing, pleading for everyone to leave.

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THE PAIN WE DON’T TALK ABOUT by Amina Frances

June 13, 2020 · Fiction

I was six years old when my mother strapped me into the buggy of her bicycle and steered us both into oncoming traffic on the stretch of road behind the Mulberry Street house. A teen driver swerved and clipped us at fifteen miles an hour. I’ve had a raging pain at the center of my back ever since.

My father wrote off the accident as another one of my mother’s spells—silly little things—as if they were nothing more than temporary lapses in judgement. Maybe they were. Then again, maybe they weren’t. My Aunt May always said the woman had a death wish. Maybe she did. Then again, maybe she didn’t.

Other than a hairline fracture on my thoracic vertebra—twelfth from the top—I walked away with a clean bill of health.

“Your mother is staying with a friend,” my father assured me on our drive home from the hospital. “She’ll come home soon. Don’t worry.” I didn’t.

I dream of my mother often. She’s wearing a wilted linen dress, traipsing barefoot through an enchanted forest. Her wild black hair is cropped at her shoulders. She still wears her wedding ring. Aunt May’s gold chain clings to her neck.

She never did come home. I was glad. I didn’t miss her. My father still goes looking for her in nearby towns on the weekends. I don’t miss him either.

I spent most of middle school flat on my back, my eyes glued to a popcorn ceiling, Nick at Nite and Growing Pains reruns blaring in the background. By thirteen, I was convinced that there was a village of Keebler elves tinkering away inside of me. Every now and again, they’d lose a hammer between my eyes or drop a nail in my rib cage. Clumsy little things.

Sometimes at night, I still hear the clanking in my ears. It’s been twenty-two years since the accident. The sound of tiny feet shuffling across my bones still comforts me.

I told my husband about the elves. He says that’s why I never sleep. He works at the hospital as an ultrasound technician. That’s how we met. That’s how I meet most people.

It’s just us two, for the most part, my husband and I. And the elves. And my college roommate, Maeve, on occasion. We live a thirty-minute drive from JFK. She says we keep her plane tickets cheap.

“It takes the same jaw force to bite through your pinkie finger as it does a medium sized carrot,” Maeve mentioned on her most recent pass through.

Later, I told my husband as much.

“That isn’t true,” he said.

“How would you know?”

“Because Maeve’s not a doctor.”

“Neither are you.”

I have trinkets from Maeve’s travels sprinkled throughout the house. They gather dust on bookshelves and mantles where pictures of small children should be, but aren’t. Rose quartz from Brazil, porcelain from France, a capsule of water from the Dead Sea.

Maeve grew up with an agoraphobe mother. Her father died when she was fifteen. Scars line the insides of her wrists—fleshy, pink orbs that look like stars when I squint. I study them when she sleeps.

I spotted the Big Dipper once, two inches shy of her elbow crease. I thought about asking if she’d done it on purpose. Imaginative little thing. But Maeve’s pain isn’t up for discussion. We talked about elves and loneliness and broken spines instead.

“I bet you could do it if you wanted to,” Maeve said the morning after our conversation about carrots and cannibalistic jaws.

“Bite through my pinkie?” I asked.

“Anything,” she sighed.

Maeve tucked a stray hair behind her ear. The rest of her flyaways were secured by a bandanna she’d swindled off of a market vendor in Morocco. She sat next to the window in her Carhart jeans and an open back sweater. The light struck her like a Renaissance painting—all bright whites and shadows. My eyes grazed over her ski-jump nose and her winding, elf-less spine. It was then that I decided I would bottle her up and absorb her, one flesh orb at a time.

Two months after Maeve left for a yoga retreat in Tibet, the elves worked up a storm. I was forced to quit my gig at the call center. My husband cut his shifts at the hospital. He says getting better is a full-time job.

At night, I hold on to Maeve’s rose quartz in one hand. I put my other hand in my mouth. My pinkie finger feels at home between my molars. Sometimes I stand there, staring at myself in the bathroom mirror for hours, waiting for the elves to stop working or my jaw to go slack. Whichever comes first.

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THE FIRST TIME I WATCHED PORN by Tyler Dempsey

June 11, 2020 · Fiction

In sixth grade (1997), my friend Tom invited me to church because I was a heathen and poor. (We drifted when he got really into drugs later, but from ages 11 to 14, we were close.)

Because my mom worked—Dad vanished in 1990, returned for three days in 2014, and then vanished again—and I lived too far from school to ride the bus, what started as walking with Tom to church together on Wednesdays after school grew into going to Tom’s house weekdays until my mom got off work.

Tom and I practiced kickflips in the driveway for an hour, then listened to CKY or stared at the neighbor’s caged raccoon until I had to go. The rural Midwest hadn’t caught up with the rest of America yet.

Tom’s dad was unemployed but had money: Cool Dad. He sat around smoking cigarettes, and once a month got excited (stoned) and made toast, holing-out a “nest” in the crispy bread before frying an egg inside. His dad also slyly placed Playboys in plain sight. We managed to get a centerfold unglued long enough to look at it. Seventies-era. I was afraid and jealous of the body hair.

Most times, Tom’s dad was nowhere around.

During alternating weeks we went to Tom’s mom and stepdad’s. They had lives, so it sucked there more than at his dad’s. The two houses were night and day. No dirt-road skating there. No psychotic caged animals next door. But the similarity was the smell: like you ate an ashtray, vomited, and left a wet tea bag on top.

The only entertainment was the family’s Great Pyrenees repeatedly getting run over by cars. Every day we’d hunt for new skid marks in his rotten fur. And sometimes we found cool stuff in the woods, like antique Coca-Cola signs, or a rifle suspected in a murder. We were all alone.

Tom was normal. By living vicariously through him and his family’s resources, I convinced myself, against all evidence, that I was too.

I was shy concerning sex—both from church vitriol and rural existence best described as macabre. Forty-six kids in my graduating class, same since first grade. Meaning, classmates knew more about you than your parents, and there was no “other crowd” in which to hide. Hell for a sensitive introvert. Hate, judgement, bullying were amplified a million-fold. I wasn’t bisexual, so I only had a shot at half of them and still had to out-cool all the other boys.

At his mom’s, Tom was crushingly depressed and, without warning me, flipped to The Adult Channels. I was used to TV with around six channels at home, and these channels were in the 800s, like Tom had black market access. It took a minute for me to absorb what was happening, not only because I’d never seen porn, but because his parents didn’t officially “get” these channels.

Imagine. Muzak, halfhearted moans. Static. White noise. Like a movie theater ravaged by a magnitude 7.0 earthquake. Images frozen between frames. A black bar split the screen. Set it all in motion. Sliding up, diagonally, left. Sometimes a breast (?) or asscheek (?) scuttled past.

Horrified. On the edge of my seat. Was this normal? Is Tom “gay,” whatever that was? Was I gay? My pants grew uncomfortable in the low light.

And Tom just sipped his Dr. Pepper.

On the porch, I sat, holding my head. Stared intently at the oak trees out front, dog bounding toward me as if hit by a landmine.

I was scared, alone, slightly aroused. I needed help. I was stuck in America’s Middling West, my mind craving answers that were just out of reach to questions unidentifiable.

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THE WITCH IS DEAD by Katherine Gleason

June 11, 2020 · Fiction

Jamey sprawls across the sofa. I place the box of Ding Dongs on the coffee table, and she laughs.

“You remember,” I say.

“Of course,” she says. “Mom loved those.”

“And pretended she didn’t. We need coffee.” I slip into my galley kitchen and mix a few grams of a fruity Ethiopian with the usual beans. The blueberry overtones will blunt the waxiness of the chocolate.

Cups in one hand, French press in the other, I trip over the cat, fall to one knee and, fists closed tight, stop myself with elbows planted on the back of the couch.

Jamey springs up and rushes over. “Great save,” she says, settling the mugs on the table.

My cheeks burn. Jamey would never trip over her cat. If she did, she’d land like a swan, a swoop of wing and slender leg.

I plop myself down on the couch. “Hey, look,” I say, holding the press aloft. “I didn’t spill a drop.”

“Brava,” she says and perches on my desk.

Now I’m supposed to ask, How was your trip? Then I’m to whine the required ooo and sigh the desired ahhh. I feel my knee, exaggerate my wince, and that’s when I notice.

“Maybe ice it,” she says.

“You moved the lamp,” I say.

“It looks so nice on the cabinet.”

“I like it on my desk.”

“You have to admit you can see it better.” She sweeps her arm in an arc, displaying her superior design sensibility.

“It’s my lamp.” I press the sore spot on my knee, hard.

“It’s Mummy’s lamp, Mummy’s favorite.”

“It was Mummy’s lamp.”

She purses her lips.

“Where’s Kitty?” I ask.

“Sulking in the bedroom.” Jamey peers through the doorway. “She’s fine.”

“I don’t come to your house and rearrange your furniture.”

“Oh, please,” she says.

The cat glides back into the room. I pour the coffee.

“I almost forgot.” Jamey digs in her purse and produces a small paper bag. “From the organic pet place.”

“The one on Ninth.”

She shakes the bag, tears it open. Kitty jogs to her, rubs against her leg, snaps up the treat, meows for more.

“One more?” Jamey asks.

I nod.

Jamey doles out another crispy bit, stows the bag in my desk drawer, drops herself beside me on the couch. “We’re opening these, right?” She grabs the box of Ding Dongs.

“You do the honors.” We each unwrap a cake. “Do we dare?” I ask.

We giggle and bite into our boxed chocolate confections.

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SCURRY by Vanessa Chan

June 8, 2020 · Creative Nonfiction

As a killer pandemic swept through the world, my mother died from cancer, alone in a Minnesotan hospice facility. A thousand miles away, also alone in my Brooklyn apartment, I held my breath as my heart caved into itself, salted with guilt.

A week later, I encountered my first common New York house centipede. He winked at me from the white walls of my apartment, wobbling on his many legs. “HELP ME,” I scream-texted at friends, paramours, anyone who would listen.

The centipede began dashing madly up my wall, pausing as if to catch his breath, then continuing his ascent. I envied him, exempt from social distancing, able to sneak into dark crevices, able to run everywhere unmasked, able to be with other centipedes he might love. No one in our family could be with my mother during her final weeks; the pandemic robbed us of the last decency of death, the comfort of each other.

I took photos of the centipede, then videos, one sound-on to capture my cussing, and one sound-off to capture the abject loneliness of the encounter. Sitting on my floor with my centipede content, I was reminded that bug removal, whether smacking a mosquito that landed on a child’s fleshy arm, or prying a flea off a fleshy family dog, was a distinctly matriarchal domain in our Malaysian home. “Only the boys are scared,” my mom would say, gesturing at my father and brother, legs curled off the floor in fear of a scurrying insect. “Not us.” I was also reminded that my mother, who usually received my photographic mundanity, and who laughed at all my jokes, was gone.

As I glowered at the centipede and contemplated all modes of murder, he sprinted—balancing precariously on the right-angle that separates wall from ceiling—straight into a spider’s web coiled on the corner of my windowsill. He struggled, tangled himself further into the strings, then tipped upside down, his many legs scratching the air, the futile dance of the already doomed.

People kept saying, “Maybe it’s for the best. Your mom wouldn’t want you to see her this way. Remember her the way she was.” But now my memories are darkened by bitterness; there’s no peace in wondering if she stared quietly at the ceiling alone, or if she clawed at the sheets, the air.

If I were a centipede, I wouldn’t stop to catch my breath on walls or run mindlessly into a predator’s web. I’d rush across state lines, hold my mother’s hand, tell her I loved her. I’d remind her how, in fact, it was she who first told me the difference between a millipede and a centipede—that the millipede, common to Malaysia, was not venomous, but that most centipedes are in fact venomous, and to stay away from them.

But Mom, I would protest, my group-text friends say New York house centipedes are the good guys—they eat other bugs, and don’t bite unless provoked. In fact, the internet says what centipedes do isn’t biting, because they aren’t using their mouths or teeth. What they’re doing is poking you with one of their many legs, a sharp kick, so you get out of the way.

“Well then, get out of the way!” my mother would say. “No need to pick a fight.”

As though listening, my multi-legged menace tugged through the webby mess and inexplicably, miraculously, freed himself! Resuming speed, the centipede scurried up and down my wall, a dance of the victorious. He paused right at my eye level, as though proud of his achievements.

Somewhere, my mom laughed.

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SPAWN by Isabelle Correa

June 6, 2020 · Fiction

I was a thing among other things in the hazy scene of his bedroom after shotgunning a beer for the first time. I remember the red pocket knife and the aluminum bending into itself to make room for the blade so that the hole I pressed my mouth to was an inverted flower. I remember finishing first. I remember finding his room and collapsing on the bed in the wrong direction, my legs where his head would go, my bare feet propped against the wall on the bottom of a poster for an alien movie I’d never seen, my toes covering the names of producers and directors. I thought of the game we had played earlier that night of Never Have I Ever. Never have I ever sucked someone off. Never have I ever seen this alien movie. Never have I ever been so dizzy. I closed my eyes and went elsewhere, to the last time it felt good to be wild.

***

In creek water up to our knees, she lifted a two and a half foot carp with her hands. She scooped it into the bed of her forearms, held it like a baby in a tantrum, then tossed it onto land where it flopped convulsively to death. Usually, every spawning season, we killed them with pitchforks our dad provided (invasive mud-suckers, he muttered), but that year there were so many of them you could practically cross from one side to the next walking on the slimy brown backs of them, so we rested our bloodied tools on the rocky bank and went straight in. I tried to follow her lead, as little sisters often do, but I kept lunging at the water and coming up holding air. She mocked me, as big sisters often do, saying I looked like I was trying to make out with myself. She turned her back to me, wrapped her wet arms all the way around her torso, becoming two people suddenly instead of one, moaning, mmmm, yes, mmm. She grabbed a fistful of her own hair, the other hand reaching hopefully for the pocket of her jeans.

Disgusting, I told her.

Like you would know, she said.

Like I’d want to, I shot back, as again I thrust myself into the water and came up with nothing.

Then we went back to spearing them. You had to get one at an angle in the gut, and when you did, they lashed out in every direction. The wooden handle became alive with the fight of them. It was a deep vibration, like the time the boy down the road dared me to touch the electric fence, but a reversed feeling, like this time I was the fence.

Then we sat on the rocks taking count. Eight mud-suckers scattered about us.

I asked her, what was it like?

She said, kissing is like swimming forever but never getting tired.

I said, gross. I meant how did it feel to catch one like that? To hold it?

She shrugged. I guess it felt good? Or whatever? And why do you care? She cupped her face in her hands with one scale the size of a penny stuck fluttering on a knuckle, a translucent white flag.

Looking dreamily across the creek to the pasture of dairy cows she said, last night, Jeremy kissed me with tongue. It was weird and wet but good, like the movies.

I rolled my eyes then watched one carp still gasping at my feet, the circle of its mouth shrinking and growing and shrinking and growing.

I told her, I can imagine.

***

Years after the creek day, weeks after the shotgun night, our dad kicked me out at the age of not even old enough to drive for the crime of useless slut what were you thinking. My sister stopped me mid-manic-bag-packing as I was wondering what does a girl even need, really need, to leave and keep going (a jacket, a bus ticket, a reason), held my bruised cheek in her palm and said, he’s dead to us, then followed me down the long dirt driveway.

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EXPANSE by Tyler Dillow

June 4, 2020 · Fiction

She talks to me at the bar. She talks about him. Him, the fucking bastard. How could you not fall in love with him and how could you not hate him? She talks back at me.

On the front patio of the bar, she lies next to me and the inner mass of a star collapses inside her. The star collapses inside her earthly body. The star collapses the lives of crumpled people—people shrinking, people expanding.

Have you seen that Lars Von Trier film—fuck—what’s it called? You know the one where the leading actress is blonde and white and she lays in the river or whatever in her wedding dress. You know like Ophelia.

I don’t know her name.

I say to her, Do you remember when this state was asleep? Heavy air surrounds us, but we are just sitting. Am I him? Am I the him she talks about, that fucking bastard. I hope not, but I hope. She says, We were always asleep, we were aware of what surrounds us.

Maybe, I’m this man. Do you believe in heaven?

You’re talking about Melancholia. What about it? That Ophelia metaphor was always a little too much for me, I say.

She’s always collapsing, always frantic, always calm—these are the signs of my favorite people. The kind of people I fall in love with, the kind of people dipping spoons into the universe.

I leave her. I go home.

She calls me. She is at some truck stop. Her car got a flat. She breathes through the phone. She breathes like the flints hills—this is the sound of her crashing. Can you come? Will you help me?

I do not care. I drive to get her. I breathe and she breathes. We are at a truck stop—inflating and deflating.

She holds my hand. She feels like every shock of wheat—dirty, holy, filthy.

She eats M&Ms, one at a time, and sips Coke in-between bites. She laughs. The creamy pastels from the sun in the skyline melt into her. When she looks at me, I see her. She looks at me as if she is alone. And she is.

When you hold my hand, I’m connected. I’m running through a wire and you’re the transmission signal, I say.

Water drops and fog stick to her apartment. I kiss her. She tastes like sweet grain.

Do you believe in heaven? Like a heaven you can touch?

I stretch across her. She talks about that man again. She talks about how he understands her. How he believes in her without a word. It all sounds made up. It’s all sounds made for hate. I hate him. She exhales and constellations beat my chest and he beats me. He beats my chest. I collapse. I collapse and come together through her body.

Thick grassland and hedgerows roll by the window as we drive. You shake just like the trees. The trees stop shaking and her hair is frizzy. Her hairy is frizzy and moves like the light of a star. I’m as real as everything. I breathe like she did. The car stops and I breathe like I did before.

She leans on my car. Smoke billows out of the hood. The wind picks up. She walks to the ditch and picks a wild flower. I used to put these in mason jars when I was little. My grandma and I would add food coloring to the water and in a few hours the petals wouldn’t be white anymore. I think about her as a child. I am convinced she is real.

She walks into the field. Grass and weeds up to her knees. She spins and spins. She spins, until I want to spin, but I don’t. I stay next to the car. A weight presses down on me, the soil quakes, I feel her breath. I take from the world. I take and I want to give, but I can’t. My feet drag forward.

She collapses.

I know the answer now. This is as close as I will get to believing.

She hasn’t gotten up yet.

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MEMORY PALACE AS MAZE by Kate Tooley

June 3, 2020 · Fiction

“Words fail…” No one says that anymore, but sometimes she still thinks it. She hears it in her mother’s squeaky, horsehair voice, the one that meant sarcasm: when her father put all the pots and pans in the oven to “clean them,” when the neighbor dressed her Persian cat in a tutu…But that’s not the only time words fail—quick footsteps behind her at two a.m., Ginny waving from airport pick-up after two months in Tucson, her dog’s muscles going slack before the vet has finished emptying the syringe—these are also things that cause a blank space, a lapse in words. And sometimes the words are simply too big. They’re too much the wrong shape, and she can see that trying to get them into someone’s ears will be a square-peg-round-hole kind of situation. She learned about that when she was nine years old.

Her memory also lapses, almost constantly. She pulls a photograph of her ten-year-old self from a disintegrating paper Eckerd’s photo bag. (Until that moment she thought it was “Eckerds” with a built in “s.” There are as many kinks in her memory as there are in her DNA.) She tries to make eye contact with the girl in the photo, thinks: “I don’t remember this day, don’t remember that shirt, or why I look like I’m being eaten alive by army ants.” She knows she should remember pain like that, but at first, she doesn’t.

Every place she lived is a part of her memory palace, each room a discrete snapshot, a roll of film exposed by dented drywall or juice-spill-stiff carpeting. In between rooms, though, her memory lapses: In the living room she remembers building forts out of sofa cushions or bringing someone home at two-fifteen a.m. and doing things you should never do on a couch you share with roommates. These do not happen in the same house, but both happen in living rooms. But between that room and the kitchen, she sometimes loses years, months. The time the chocolate cake exploded in the oven happened ten years after she last built a castle out of pillows. And in the other kitchen, they drank the cheap rum punch on her twenty-third birthday, a long time after she stained the couch.

She’s said careful goodbyes to all the rooms she’s ever lived in. She is haunted enough by people. Sometimes the goodbye was a hard look and a slamming door: Bette Davis in her head. “What a dump.” Sometimes it was fixing the protruding head of a nail in her memory, because she knew that if she remembered that nail, she would remember the moment before she learned what it was to feel irreparably helpless. Sometimes these were the same goodbyes.

Time does not respect pain. It tears months out of your memory and then subjects you to minute-by-minute replays. It does not wait for you to feel safe and happy to bring back days you’ve tried to banish.

Time and mothers. Her mother has sent this box of things: stuffed animals, mugs, photos, T-shirts. They are “downsizing.” She calls her parents dutifully but does not go home to visit. Her mother has resorted to the mail to bring up the past.

The package arrived on Tuesday, so today at six forty-five, four days after seeing the photo, after finding out there is no “s” in Eckerd, she drinks a sour beer and gets ready for a Halloween party. She shoves a pin in her hair and remembers, in color, about the army ants, the invisible ones that were biting her in the photo. She wishes she’d let the photo stick to the paper and fade in a back drawer, where someday some cousin’s child, after a funeral, would dump everything into a garbage bag because they have kids to pick up from school and only so much time to clear out drawers crammed with memories.

Just as she got the too-small pair of purple stockings above her knees, she remembered—in spite of herself—in spite of closing the door to that room firmly. It was the day they’d moved into the apartment, and the downstairs neighbor introduced himself, warned her parents about keeping the windows closed in the summer because of the smell from the dumpster. It was the first time she felt like a cat with its fur on end, immediately and irrationally afraid. She knew it was “irrational” because her mother said what a nice man he was, and her father invited the man over for dinner. Afterward, her mother made her pose in front of the building. She stood off balance in the itchy, pine straw-covered flower plantings and tried to make a place inside herself for a feeling no one wanted her to have.

He earned a standing invitation, so every Wednesday, she pretended to have a stomach ache. It was better not to eat than to sit by him through meatloaf or chicken n dumplings. Once her mom figured out the game, she got either switched or grounded; she preferred the switch. She never went into the downstairs neighbor’s apartment, no matter how many times he invited her to come play with his Pomeranian, Vlad, who carried a stuffed squeaker lamb everywhere. The kind of dream-fear that roots your feet to railroad tracks kept her on the other side of his sun-heated tin doorsill. She couldn’t remember when she learned that doors had sills. Had she known then what it was called, that thin strip of metal that marked the boundary between marginally safe and unsafe? She’d forgotten until now. Isn’t it funny that it sounds like dorsal? Like the back fin on a dolphin, which was her best friend Robyn’s favorite animal.

It was Robyn she was supposed to meet that day. Robyn walked Vlad as a summer job and insisted they meet in front of the downstairs neighbor’s apartment. They planned to stake out the pool and wait for the ice cream truck; Robyn owed her a rocket pop. It was Robyn’s voice, a voice she knew like music, that went off-pitch with fear, and made her hand shoot to the door that should have been locked. It was Robyn who she saw at his feet. She didn’t do anything. She didn't say anything. There weren’t words in her mouth.

She knew, without the downstairs neighbor saying, that no one would believe her. He grilled out with her dad, and her mom always said what nice manners he had. She did not have to be told: Iwillkillyou, Iwillkillyourparents, Iwillkillrobyn. She knew these things were true, and so she begged for a bunk bed that felt like a castle and told her parents that she and Robyn had a fight about school. Eventually her mom gave up on switching her, and she would hide in her bunk bed and listen to his voice rattling on and on about WWII history, big government, and “kids these days” from behind the closed door.

When she was sixteen, she slammed that front door for the last time and got caught inside the past for a full minute. The nail still sticks up from the handrail at a right angle, and she can still feel the thick laces of her light-up, princess sneakers. The nail is the last thing she remembers before she went to meet Robyn downstairs, will be the last thing she remembers about leaving home. She wonders if finding the picture is the end of the story, remembering she knew before she knew and making that somehow the moral of the story. She wonders if she could find Robyn on Facebook, if she wanted to, and what would be the point anyway. She wonders if she should tell her parents, crack open their memories like eggs and beat them to a froth.

She leaves the photo on top of her bedside table. Later, at the party, dressed as a fortune teller, she starts conversations by asking people if they know it’s called a “doorsill.”

Words fail.

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