Flash Archives

BEACH HOUSE by Jenny Stalter

February 20, 2020 · Fiction

Our house faces neither east nor west and sits in shadow. The tiny green house with the too much wicker. The tinted glass dishes full of seashells and tapestries accented with smooth beach glass. Oil paintings of seagulls. Mom really went for the beach look. Most people acquire a life over a lifetime, but it’s like she stopped in 1986. Stopped making a home, stopped making herself. The house smells like sour sweat and coconut rum. Mom, drunk on the couch as a permanent fixture, her robe hanging off the sofa, mouth open. I place a pillow under her head and some water and aspirin on the coffee table.

Rum stains map a torment of constellations on the carpet. I used to move furniture to hide them but there are too many now. To navigate the living room I step on the stains one at a time, like stamping out bad memories. When I was younger I delighted in listening to the conch shell that sat on our coffee table. I wanted to hear the ocean. Now every detail of this house feels like being swept out to sea.

I meet Danielle in English class. We’re the only girls wearing fishnets and Docs. She passes me a note with a colored pencil drawing of a munched-up apple that says HARD CORE.

Danielle is the first girl I ever kiss. When we finally fuck she is like an anchor. Danielle works part time as a lifeguard at the Y, which means she wears a whistle. It gives her a distinct air of authority that really gets me going. She’s the one in charge, like, if I’m running too fast, she can blow her whistle and make me stop. Or if I am drowning right there in my living room, she can jump in and save me. I tell her about my fondness for the whistle, how I feel like my life, my mom, my house are swallowing me like the sea, and she is the lifeguard. After I tell her this, when we fuck, if she is ready for me to come, she blows the whistle hard.

We’re laying on my bed smoking a blunt and drinking wine. Mom is gone or drunk, the TV is going in the living room. Daytime talk shows.

“Do I fuck more like a cowboy or a bronco?” I ask her.

“I think maybe like a bronco” she says.

“On a scale of one to ten, rate me.”

“I thought we were using a mammalian rating system?” She laughs.

“It’s numerical now. Rate me one to ten.”

She kisses me. After a minute and a pull off the wine bottle she says, “If I could tell you how to fall in love, I would tell you to hold back enough so you don’t let people take pieces of you. You’re too eager to give it all away.”

I hate that she sees me so clearly. She knows what my crass mother and shadow house have made me. I wonder what exactly I’m giving away. Probably my heart. That’s what people say about love. And I do love her.

“What do you think we are, inside our bodies? Souls? Life force? Like what even is any of that?” she asks, blowing smoke rings.

I think of grocery store meat. Blood-red hunks of shrink-wrapped muscle that once moved beasts around. What’s left when life leaves. The thought makes me feel more connected to Danielle, like we are the same. The hunk of muscle that is my heart moves my blood. She has one too, and it pumps her blood and moves her body. We move and talk and fuck and play because our hearts are shrink-wrapped inside us. But my other heart, the other kind people talk about, is not inside me anymore. It exists outside, like grocery store meat, and Danielle takes it with her every time she leaves.

But I forget about all of it when she slides her hand up my skirt. Sex with Danielle is like listening to the conch shell in my living room. I never heard the ocean. I hear my own space cupped back to me, an echo reinforcing myself. In these tight moments with her, my life is not a fearsome abyss about to swallow me up. It is a woman stripping herself of her jewels—beach glass rubbed smooth, her seashell teeth, making herself naked. And it’s all left for me like gifts on the shore.

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I DIDN’T MEAN TO WRITE THIS. by Susan Rukeyser

February 17, 2020 · Creative Nonfiction

I meant to write about young environmental activist Greta Thunberg and her impact, how she was received on her recent visit to the US. I loved how uncomfortable Greta made the “grown-ups,” including me. I was dismayed and unsurprised by the sexism chucked at her like crumpled, plastic water bottles: How dare she not smile?

But Greta’s visit coincided with the final stages of my divorce, and—perhaps you understand?—in that tender time, everything was metaphor.

I read about a funeral held for a 700-year-old Icelandic glacier which had melted to the point that it could no longer move. It was considered “dead ice.”

“I feel ya,” I said to a picture of grey rock, all that was left.

Greta got me thinking about damage and denial and when is late too late? “The house is on fire,” she said, and it is, but it is also drowning. I watched YouTube videos of glaciers breaking apart, or calving. In one, tourists on the deck of an Alaskan cruise ship startle at the CRACK, then ooh and aah as one chunk after another of thick blue ice pulls free and collapses into roiling seawater. Some people cheer, others cry out, recognizing the tragedy they are witnessing. I wonder if they feel the spray on their faces, even at their safe distance. I wonder if they know there is nowhere on Earth that is safe. I wonder if they would admit to the thrill of watching the destruction of something beautiful. Or if they’d simply say, “How sad.”

If you never join Twitter, does Donald Trump still make a sound? Oh, yes, I’m afraid so. Every day, in that crowded, sweaty, cacophonous room that is Twitter, your President rages and lies and misspells words, demonstrating that he is neither a great dealmaker nor a good man. We resist and ignore and wish him gone, but we remain frozen in this cruel reality.

But, lately: a promising tremor, as whistle-blows reverberate through ice. Justice moves glacier-slow, but it moves. We are not yet dead ice.

Once the fissure appears, it’s just a matter of time before the CRACK.

I didn’t mean to write about divorce.

Which, in my case, this time, was overdue and bloodless, but still—a casting out, or off; a smack to the bruise of past divisions. The worst: calving from the glacier of my extended family, cousin birthday parties and wedding dances and annual reunions, holiday cards with photos of kids I don’t know.

(Sunk deep in that old, familial ice: a Polaroid of me, age 14 or worse, at one of those family parties, smiling like I wanted to be more like them and less like me.)

When I slipped underwater, the cold was a shock, but I got used to it. I stopped pretending to be frozen.

Who knows, now, in this destabilized climate, what weather will come? Maybe a surprising cold snap, to reshape us, again, hard as ice? On an unseasonably warm day, who knows what seeds might take hold.

Or maybe we will stay fluid forever, curving into experience, slipping through impasse, dancing in eddies that catch, then release us, infused with fresh biology: mineral, animal, botanical. We will bear it all.

We must be willing to drown for our transformation, I scribbled one moody night. We must be willing to give ourselves to the cold, dark unknown as we descend and decide: Will I bother to resurface, again?

What has cleaved itself free cannot be reclaimed—thank Nature, if not God. We will grieve for our ruined illusions, of course, even as we wave them goodbye.

I did not mean to write this.

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SUBFLOOR by Jason Fox

February 16, 2020 · Fiction

Your refrigerator is yawning. It spills an egg-yellow rectangle on the floor. A ticking clock somewhere beyond. Then the fridge door closes and seals itself with a magnetic kiss. Plum dawn darkness washes in. You barefoot-shuffle through a current of cold air. Past your trash can and over some spilled coffee grounds that stick to your feet.

It starts in this good morning darkness. First, a warmth coming from below the floorboards. Not possible. This carriage house, which is more a renovated barn, was built in 1880. It has only earth beneath the floors. No basement, no crawl space, just a few inches of air above raw dirt.

Still, you imagine something like ashy coals buried in the dirt. Or a sliver of the sun broken off during an eclipse and warming the wood from below.

A few steps further and you feel the wood has begun to buckle. Uneven planks rising and falling. It’s warm when you press your hand to the undulating planks. You get on your knees, lower your face to a gap between planks, and sniff. Mildew and moth eggs. A dampness that reminds you of sheep.

The nail on Scott’s right index finger is gone. He’d brought over a crowbar and toolbox thirty minutes after you’d called. His wide nail bed indented like a peach’s gently sunken contour.

He taps the floorboards and listens. I’d like to see for myself what’s below.

You rub the floor with your thumb and tell him, There can’t be much more than dirt, and the warmth feels a little good.

Feels good, sure. But the wood’s unwell. Can’t fix what I don’t understand.

He lowers his head, palpates the warm wood planks like the floor’s an injured horse. You think he looks like the type of man who might heal horses. Let them nibble to health on his fingers. Eat away his nails for the keratin. Lick salt from his skin.

His eyes are still closed as a garbage truck rumbles into the alley outside your window, grabbing trash bins with pneumatic arms and shaking them upside down into its thrashing hopper. The noise fades into the distance and you know he’s listening for something below and that you shouldn’t speak, but you say, How would you do it?

Two hours later, he’s pulled up a six-foot by three-foot rectangle of planks.

Your hands are sore and tingling with small abrasions from helping him claw out dirt. Enough to pile up a chair-sized mound in the corner of your living room. He passes you a hammer, and the cool heft of it soothes your aching hands. Nail them down right where I’ve marked. Hard.

He crawls in with a flashlight against his chest. As you’re placing the boards on top of him, he tells you, And keep an eye on my tool box, I’ll need it when I get out.

How will I know when that’s gonna be?

I’ll knock five times in a row, like this. And he taps his flashlight five times against the warm wood.

You worry that a few of the nails felt like they’d sunk into flesh on the other side, but Scott doesn’t yelp or even remark, so you continue to cover him with the planks.

You sit for a long time looking at the uneven patch of wood. It feels good to know that a man with a missing fingernail is breathing the damp air beneath your floor.

After twenty-four hours, you ask Scott if he needs anything. He taps once, which, you presume, means nothing. You lay your head where you think his chest probably is and feel the warmth of the wood turn your ear cherry red.

Three weeks pass and the wood continues to warp. Eventually there’s a gap big enough to peer into. Scott’s right eye blinks in the dirty dark. You ask how it’s going and he doesn’t respond. Are you learning anything about the wood? A single knock from below.

You remind yourself that he’ll knock five times when he’s ready.

Over the next few months, a cold wind pulls all the leaves to the ground. The trees become a guttural growl, a loud jutting out of earth. They move through the sky, picking up bits of color, remembering cats that clung to their limbs by tiny claws.

You let a strong eggnog drip down to Scott at Christmas. He must get a little drunk because over the next several nights you hear something like a giggle rise from below.

In February your aunt dies. Then you get soft and wet with the flu. Your fever gets so high that you dream you’re an empanada without even closing your eyes. Feverish, naked, and confused by grief, you camp out on top of Scott in a pile of scratchy wool blankets. Although he says nothing, the floor feels good. It’s the warmth of a spring meadow where you’re shielded from the breeze by tall grasses all around you. The sun brushes warm nickels against your eyelids as a fluorescent orange lion licks at the back of your mind.

The ground below you hums with insects and reptiles and a breathing through the grasses. The ground knocks five times and you caress it. It knocks five times again and warm vibrations spill into your chest, stirring a current of cool, damp air that had settled in your legs.

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THE PROSPECTIVE, OR WHAT I TELL THE MAN IN THE CAFE by Sudha Balagopal

February 12, 2020 · Fiction

My parents sent me to the movies with a man they found in the matrimonial columns of the Mumbai newspaper. They told me he was a romantic, a Bollywood aficionado. Perfect for someone like me who read Austen. They made concessions for this prospective from America, sending me out with a man for the first time, alone, at age twenty-one.

My eyebrows stung—they'd been threaded and shaped into perfect crescents. The crimson on my nails and lips felt vulgar. I wanted to pull out the pins in my French braid, let my hair loose.

***

You ask to meet with me and you stare at your potato chips as if you don't recall 1989. The snack bag of chips has spilt its contents on the table. Your hair is gray and the glasses outsize. I recognize the brand of jeans and shoes.

***

The Prospective purchased a movie-theater-sized sack of crispy potato wafers flavored with red chili powder. I politely declined when he offered to buy me one. We settled into our seats early, watched trailers for yet-to-be released movies and a series of product advertisements. A condom ad appeared on-screen; I averted my gaze, counted the the shiny buttons embedded on the outside seams of his jeans. I studied his sneakers.They appeared gray in the theater's light, not white. Two children is enough, an actress sang.

At the end of the evening the hired car driver who brought us to the theater took us back.

Questions thrummed in my head. The Prospective, in a post-celluloid trance, asked to be dropped off before me, blaming jetlag for his tiredness.

I thanked the driver when I got home, offered him a tip. The driver said the girl yesterday wasn't as polite or as generous.

***

You ask to meet with me and you pulverize the chips with your fingers.

***

The Prospective's parents called and said their son would like to marry me before he returned to America.

I asked my parents why a twenty-nine-year-old would choose me. What criteria did he use? Shouldn't he have asked me what I wanted? I didn't know what I wanted, did he know what he wanted? They said I asked too many questions, made wedding arrangements.

Six days later, The Prospective's parents called to say he'd met this girl on a bus, “in true Bollywood style.” He married bus-girl on our wedding date.

***

You fold and refold the check the waitress has placed on the table. It disappears in your oily palm.

You asked to meet with me to talk about my son, twenty-two, still in college, and your daughter, a high-maintenance twenty-eight with a four-year-old child.

What do you think I'll say?

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CINNAMON by Gina Marie Bernard

February 10, 2020 · Fiction

“Your mother should have had them tear you from her womb,” my stepmom says. “For the wicked shall not inherit the kingdom of God.”

I flinch but know better than to reply.

“What the hell, Darlene? You can’t say that shit,” my dad says from his recliner in the living room. As usual, it sounds more like a request.

“I speak the Lord’s truth,” she replies, emphasizing each syllable with the wooden spoon she has pointed at him. “He will not abide your daughter acting like some filthy dyke.”

My father looks from her to me. He shrugs and mouths, “I tried.” Then he escapes to the garage to pretend to work on his Mustang.

Darlene turns her back to me, adjusts the blue flame beneath her breakfast, and stirs.

Nails have been driven through my eyes. My lips are dry, tongue thick as jerky. Bile sours my throat.

“The rod and reproof give wisdom, but a child left to herself brings shame to her mother,” she intones.

“You’re not my—”

“Must you be my shame? My life’s great error?” she asks, reaching for the alphabetized spice rack above the stove. Her stomach exerts just enough force to shift the Whirlpool, dislocating its gas connection.

My father and I are sitting in the backyard on what’s left of the couch when the first fire truck arrives—a steady din in my ears, much of our house strewn far beyond the alley. I’m certain an EMT asks me what has happened, how I’ve escaped this calamity unscathed. But honestly? I’m still marveling at the gaping hole my stepmother’s lower jaw has punched through our television.

Later—is it already next week?—I stand at a drunken edge of linoleum, a heavy-duty garbage bag in my hand. My father is on his ladder outside, drilling deck screws through a patchwork of tarps covering the borders of the explosion. I push aside a corner of blue polyethylene and hop down into the yard. For the most part, the grass here is scorched to the roots.

Stooping, I gather pieces of OSB, insulation, vinyl siding. Halfway to the alley, I discover the anodized saucepan my stepmother had been tending. Its silicone-covered handle is twisted but unmelted. What’s left of her last meal encrusts the inside—steel-cut oats and dried cranberries. I drop it in the bag and move on.

Thirty minutes later, my father runs out of screws and makes a run to Home Depot. My Hefty now bulges. I tie a knot with the bowstrings and lug it to the city garbage can standing sentry beside our garage.

I hear the crows arguing before I see them. The three birds dance in the long grass at the foot of a telephone pole up the alley, harassing one another in a raucous spray of black feathers.

“Fuck off,” I tell them, approaching.

They fuck off but circle back to alight in the upper branches of a white pine on our neighbor’s property.

I push the weeds aside with the toe of my Converse. Is that a dead squirrel? No, it’s just a tossed KFC drumstick gnawed to the gray bone.

Of course it’s neither of these things.

I stare dumbly at Darlene’s left hand. It’s crawling with ants and is missing the ring and pinky fingers; the first two, though, curl in towards her thumb like talons.

She is holding a spice jar.

“Well, what do you know,” I say to the crows. “Cumin.”

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HEADLESS HORSEMAN by Liz Fyne

February 9, 2020 · Fiction

Years ago I had a terrible dream that my cat was guillotined. Afterward she rolled her eyes this way and that, and it came to me that as a head you have no options. Questions spin through your mind on their way out forever and you want to cry and flail but all you can do is roll your eyes.

In my case there was no guillotine. What happened was more of a spontaneous disconnect, because the junction was loose and my life was full of shaking. People say bronco busting can detach your kidneys, but no one warns about the psychic earthquakes from heartbreak—

I imagine standing in stalls at night stroking velvet nostrils of bronco horses, and I wonder how they keep from shaking off their tails and ears. Their eyeballs and toes. Being just a head I have much time to think and no place to go. At times I shift my gaze to my body that has drifted in the wrong direction, crawling on hands and knees. It has accumulated dust on its belly because it sleeps on the floor where no one cleans.

My body might be lost forever except the bedroom door is closed. So my headless corpus creeps in circles. At times it seems frustrated and bangs against the wall. Over and over.

Stop! I want to say. Come back and be with me! But I cannot speak so I just blink my eyes.

There is a love, a great and endless love, between the head and the body. Between the body and all its parts. This love keeps them together, all the bodies and heads and parts. But sometimes, in the event of heartbreak, that love grows weak. Parts loosen their relative grips. Things go horribly wrong.

Horses that seem normal in the rodeo ring search and search for their missing parts: tails left trampled in the dirt, ears that twitch in the sand. I learned this when I went back night after night, in my mind, to stroke the noses.

One nose in the sand, I stroked that one too. It blew hot horse breath from lungs lying nearby.

Time stands still in the rodeo ring but in the bedroom time is passing. My body and I need each other to live. We are locked together in a tiny space so there’s a chance we could reconnect. I tell myself this as day is night is day and my body crawls far and near.

Unless someone opens the door and my body creeps through.

I don’t know who is in charge of the door.

***

It’s a new experience for me, losing my head. New just as love is new and newborn and then still and stillborn. Then life becomes a thing of breaking. It becomes putrefaction that is yours to eat and eat and never stop.

It becomes thinking you walk the apocalypse road when in fact the Earth is new once more and the Horsemen fled long ago, leaving four tired nags destined for the meat wagon except the rodeo gets them instead.

But before that happens my body walks alone and headless and those sad mangy beasts bar the way. So my body climbs atop the black nag of War. With blood on its face and gore on its feet War horse lunges through history and my body feels—

The Crusades, Antietam, Gettysburg and Vietnam—

Until an old fart who owns the OK Rodeo in South Texas finds four abandoned horses, one running madly in circles, and he lures them with oats.

Such ignominy in their end.

***

All is fair in love and war. That’s what they say. Because really love and war are the same thing. Because now my body lies headless in the corner where it’s given up. It no longer crawls. It no longer rides the night like tales of yore. It rests in silence while I watch, blinking against the dust on my lashes.

It will not come back. It’s wandered too far and what did it find but blood and death. Hate and fear and everything that makes love impossible.

This is what we are, the casualties of discord. In the end it kills us all.

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IN THE TIME OF CLIMATE CHANGE (APOCALYPTIC VIEWFINDER #1) by Kathryn Kulpa

February 8, 2020 · Fiction

Flashing Obama

I was feeding the cats and Barack Obama was there, at my back door, standing on the deck. He wore aviator sunglasses and a blue chambray shirt and jeans. I wanted to let him in but I had to keep one hand on my belt loop because I didn’t have a belt and my pants kept slipping and how awful would it be if my pants fell down in front of Obama?

I had things I wanted to talk about with Obama. I wanted him to convince Joe Biden to drop out of the race. Joe Biden is not our man, I wanted to tell him. Although I sort of liked that cop-buddy movie thing they used to have going on.

Obama was like that one ex you don’t hate. The one you’d go back to, if you could. Only he’s dead or married or something, so you can’t.

But Heaven Knows

I was happy drunk, spinning in circles in my backyard. I wore a flouncy skirt with tiny broken bits of mirror sewn into every flounce, and when I whirled and twirled, they could see me on the moon.

Zombie Café

We were sitting in the zombie café.

No one would notice us as long as we pretended to be dead like them.

We ordered ice cream sundaes. We didn’t say a word when the waitress brought us Mexican soda instead. Tall green bottles of Sprite with paper straws.

The thing about zombies is they never complain about bad customer service.

Vomitorium

The world was covered in vomit. A sea of vomit, only a sea has a shore, a line where dry land begins, and this didn’t.

There were places you could go to get away. Tall, fortified buildings that somehow were still climate-controlled and had fresh air piped in. The people who could afford to live there met to discuss the state of the world. One man showed a diagram explaining how humans could be genetically modified to grow gills.

The adapted surface dwellers, he said, would thus be able to perform manual labor for those who lived in the towers.

I lost interest in what was said after that. Obviously nothing had changed.

Saddle Shoes

I opened my bedroom door and saddle shoes came dancing out from under my bed. They were doing a two-step. I was frightened but vindicated. I had always known my room was haunted.

Country Club

I was at a country club, being chased by a man in a golf cart. I kept running, looking for places to hide. I knew I couldn’t tell anyone he was chasing me, because he owned the club. I knew this had happened before.

I hid in the pool house. Inside I found a diary. It was open to a page that said:

Help me

No one will help me

He took me and tied me up and drowned me

I ran outside and jumped in the pool. Something was floating there, long hair waving like baby snakes.

Briefly

An old man singing into a 1920s Rudy Vallee megaphone:

Oh, she was young and per-ty

I was old and dir-ty

But I had lots of money

So she said she’d be my honey-bun tonight!

A Wing and a Prayer

He was flying, almost out of gas. Somewhere over Kansas, Oklahoma? Long flat plains, plowed fields. Somewhere that was not yet underwater.

He was flying under the radar. There was no radar. No instruments, no airport he could find. No sleep. Guided by stars.

The moon lit a white steeple and he saw a town, could even make out the shapes of people, gathering, pointing. He made a low pass, returned.

Then he saw something he hadn’t seen for a while. Lights. Sparks that flickered, then grew. Torches, lanterns, flashlights. Two rows of lights, a runway. A wide, empty street, and lights to guide his way. Calling him down.

As he came in for a landing he saw them looking up at him, holding their lights, waiting. Waiting for news, for hope. How long had it been since a stranger had come here? He had fallen out of the sky and they didn’t know if he was an angel or a demon.

The worst thing was, he didn’t know either.

Vampire Town

Everyone was a vampire now, or maybe not everyone—where would they get new victims? Whose blood would they suck?—but it felt like everyone. It felt like you’d be better off to cut your losses and find somewhere else to live. A place vampires hadn’t found, if there was such a place. I walked home from my vampire high school with its vampire teachers and vampire kids, the vampire football team kicking around something red and wet, the vampire cheerleaders leaping into the air, then hovering in a bat-winged pyramid.

They always had to show off, those vampire girls.

I was tired of fighting them for so long. I needed my mom to tell me to keep fighting, that it would all be worth it. I needed her to make me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich cut into six triangles, exactly the same size.

But my house felt empty. When I called my mom she didn’t answer right away, and then she came out of her bedroom with a man who was not my father (I knew this, because my father was dead). She tried to introduce him, her vampire boyfriend, but I wasn’t going to go there. I wasn’t going to make nice with my new vampire stepfather.

How could you betray Dad like that? I asked.

Her face was weary and she looked way past me, an adult kind of tiredness I hadn’t reached yet and didn’t want to know.

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WHOSE HUNGER by Kristen Estabrook

February 3, 2020 · Creative Nonfiction

In the hours prior to dinner, she studied her reflection in the mirror, checking and rechecking the flaws in her complexion, adjusting and readjusting the height of her hair, while thinking about sex. On their second date, he had asked about sex. He had asked if she was ready. She was not.

“It’s only the second date,” she had said.

She wondered if he would ask again and expected that he would. She wondered what she would say this time. That it was only the third?

Then she remembered. Her period.

Her period! She was on her period.

That worked out well, she thought.

That would be her reason.

After dinner and the dishes, the woman and the man leaned into each other’s bodies, against the counter at first, then onto his bed. Clothed at first, then unclothed.

“Should I get a condom?” he asked.

“I’m on my period,” she whispered.

“I don’t mind,” he said.

Frantically, she thought. She had no other reason. Her mind dug, searching for something, some other explanation, anything. Nothing came.

“Okay,” she said.

He kissed her harder.

“You might want to take your stuff out,” he said.

Oh, right, yes. She went to the bathroom to take her stuff out. Alone in the bathroom, she thought about changing her mind. She thought about what she might say.

Listen, she could say, This is all moving a bit fast. Maybe we should wait.

But then he would know. He would know that she lied.

If you didn’t want to have sex, why wouldn’t you just say that? he would ask.

She wanted him to think of her as strong and confident. As a woman who asserted her thoughts, her desires, her opinions. She wanted him to think of her as someone other than herself.

Staring at her reflection in the mirror, holding her stuff in her hand, she thought about wanting him. She thought about wanting to want him. She did, didn’t she? Want him? He wanted her. And she didn’t feel that strongly either way. Her neutrality paled in comparison to his desire. What was the point in waiting, anyway?

Besides, she’d already gone through the trouble of taking her stuff out.

After it was done, he reached for his phone. She laid her head on his chest, hoping this touch would give her something sex hadn’t. He held his phone in his hands. She went to the bathroom to put her stuff back inside. When she returned, she found him reading. He had work to do. She knew not to overstay her welcome.

She walked home feeling self-conscious. She passed men waiting for the bus. They watched her. She focused her attention on keeping her eyes forward and her chin tilted slightly upwards, avoiding their gaze. She was sure they knew. She had that look and that smell about her, distinctly belonging to sex.

She called a friend.

She was afraid it had been too soon, that she had rushed, that she had given him the one thing he wanted, and now that he’d gotten it, she’d never hear from him again. The friend was kind.

“He’ll call,” the friend said. “What date was this?”

“The fourth,” she lied.

“Oh, the fourth?” the friend said. “You’re fine.”

She re-imagined the dialogue, feeding lines to her searching mind, hours too late:

“Should I get a condom?” he would ask.

“No thanks, I’d rather not have sex,” she would say.

It was so obvious. So obvious and so simple. So simple and so stupid that this most obvious "no thanks" hadn’t come to mind. It just wasn’t what she had prepared.

She’d read a study years before about humans’ inability to act in a given situation unless they’d previously imagined how they would behave:

There is a chance you will become so overwhelmed by the perilous overflow of ambiguous information that you will do nothing. You will float away and leave a senseless statue in your place. If no one comes to your aid, you will die.¹

The author cited a scientist, John Leach, who said that 75 percent of people cannot reason during catastrophic events or impending doom. Survival, he says, depends on preparation. The ones who survive are the ones who have prepared for the worst and have practiced ahead of time.

She had done this. She had planned exactly what she would say. But she had only prepared one means of escape, that was the trouble. That was her downfall. Now she was one of them: a senseless statue, floated away, one of the seventy-five percent. She couldn’t decide if it was comforting or discomforting to be among the majority.

She remembered the days, long since passed, when she made decisions about her body with only her body in mind. Feeling hungry, she fed her body. Feeling thirsty, she hydrated her body. Feeling tight, she stretched her body. This body relied on her. If she did not care for it, who would?

With him, she made a decision about her body with his body in mind. His hunger, his thirst her primary motivation. She cared for his body over her own. Who cared for hers?

¹ David McRaney, You Are Not So Smart: Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook and 46 Other Ways You’re Deluding Yourself (Oneworld Publications, 2019).

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FAIR NIGHT NUMBER ONE by Tom Weller

February 2, 2020 · Fiction

Scrap Boys have each other. Scrap Boy 1, Scrap Boy 2, Scrap Boy 3, three prepubescent bodies lean and sharp as barbed wire, three backyard haircuts, three thunder-clap voices, three tornado spirits joined like the three chambers of a rattler’s heart. And tonight the Scrap Boys have the fair. Tonight they have snow cones and onion rings and rides that spin the Scrap Boys around and around and around and around until they can’t tell up from down. Tonight they have rock songs banging out of rickety speakers rattling their ribs. Tonight the Scrap Boys breathe humid night air full of promises of big winnings shouted by the bulldog-faced men running the milk can toss and the shooting range. Tonight they walk together, shoulder to shoulder to shoulder, bare chested and loud through the swirling crowd. Tonight the Scrap Boys watch mothers pull their toddlers closer when the Scrap Boys walk by.

Tonight the skinny blonde girls from school eat cotton candy, pink clouds of sugar filling their hands, their mouths, sticky and sweet. They travel the midway in a pack, five of them, their hair sparkling under the lights that flash from the Gravitron. They speak in high twittery syllables, voices like birdsong, call each other slut and bitch and laugh and laugh and laugh, but when the Scrap Boys call out to the skinny blonde girls from school, the girls don’t call back. The girls look at the Scrap Boys, look past the Scrap Boys, look through the Scrap Boys. Under the gaze of the skinny blonde girls, the Scrap Boys become ghosts.

Tonight the ghost Scrap Boys haunt the fair studying girls with an astronomer’s zeal, keep a tally of all the different girl bodies spinning through the universe of the midway, each new body an epiphany, each new body worthy of further study, if only there was time for that, if only there were not so many other bodies demanding attention, if only it was possible. The tall bodies, the short bodies, the brown bodies, the white bodies, the hard bodies, the thick bodies, they all spark a longing in the ghost Scrap Boys, a heat like an electrical fire crackling where their blood used to be.

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BABES by Ian Anderson

January 31, 2020 · Fiction

She wants to know how it works.

It’s easy, he tells her. You create a profile on the Babes app, upload a couple pictures of your baby, fill out the profile, and then people can start Holding. Thirty dollars for the first hour; five dollars for each additional fifteen minutes.

They’re pushing their toddlers in the swings next to each other. She only knows him from the playground, but he’s always seemed like a good dad. Engaged. Attentive. The worst thing she can say about him is that he has a mustache. It surprises her to learn that he rents out his child.

It’s safe?

It’s safer than taxis, he says.

She never knew taxis were a barometer for safety. Can you be there while the person is Holding?

It’s frowned upon. He did it the first couple of times, but it seemed pointless, a waste of time. The app has the Holder’s personal information, so they wouldn’t get far if they did something; and besides, it was a good time to run errands, read a book, take a nap.

She asks what people did with his baby when he stayed.

One guy wanted to use the baby to pick up women. One woman was meeting an ex she feared was trying to rekindle their relationship. Then there was the woman who just wanted to hold his child. She swayed back and forth. She sniffed the child’s head. She cried in awful, wet sobs that reminded him of cooked spaghetti. He was embarrassed to be there. That’s when he decided: No more sticking around.

***

That night, she sits in bed. An episode of Fixer Upper she’s seen ten times before streams on Hulu. Her husband snores obnoxiously. He had been out earlier for his fantasy football draft and came back smelling of cigars and whiskey. He was a little drunk. It’s only 9 PM. There was a time in her life when she would have still been getting ready to go out on a Saturday night, but this is her life now. She wouldn’t change anything about it, but she does get bored. Maybe that’s why she downloads Babes. Maybe it’s curiosity, like the times she considers—but not really considers—creating a fake Match.com profile. There’s so much to modern life she’s missed, can’t even comprehend, because she wasn’t born ten years later. The app finishes downloading. She signs up with a fake name as a Holder. There are reviews of babies. She reads them:

Tyler—A plump Hold. Laughed a lot. (five stars)

Zara—Good Hold, would recommend. Pooped tho. Knocks her down a star for me. (three stars)

Jordan—Baby didn’t look like picture. (one star)

She sees a baby with impossibly round cheeks, a swirl of strawberry hair, and fat little hands grasping a fat little foot. She knows this baby. It is her baby. Her stomach feels like it’s being sucked down a drain. The urge to check on her child commands her to the nursery. It’s ridiculous, she knows; of course the baby is there, but she still feels cool relief when she sees her child balled into sleep. In the dark of the nursery, she sits in the rocking chair; the glow of the phone illuminates her face in cold light. She reads her baby’s profile. There is a short bio. It has no mention of her, the mother. She cycles through emotions like she’s scrolling through Instagram posts: anger, betrayal, confusion, anger again, and again, and again. She looks up how to report someone on the app but can’t find anything.

Who would do something like this? What was their endgame? She can’t figure it out. She thumbs the button below her child’s picture that reads “Schedule a Hold.” The only times available are Sunday afternoons. Like a new show on Netflix, it comes to her all at once.

They call them Daddy Days. Every week her husband takes their little one on special trips. To the zoo. To the art museum. To see the latest Pixar movie in IMAX. Or so he’s told her.

Her head is spinning. Her body is electric. She’s so mad she could cry. She looks again at her baby and imagines all the strange arms that have cradled the child, all the little whispers that have filled their perfect cup ears, all the credit card transactions. What did these Holdings pay for? She wonders. Suddenly, everything in the house looks cheap and vicious.

***

His stupid face is scrunched against the pillow. It reminds her of of an empty latex Halloween mask. She tries to wake him with a shove of the shoulder, but he’s dead to the world like a bricked phone. In an irrational world, she decides, you have to hold your anger like a knife to the throat. It’s the only thing the world will understand. She slaps her husband across his sleep-creased face.

It works.

Her husband is more confused than hurt. He holds his cheek like he has a toothache. He asks her what’s going on.

She shows him her phone, their child’s face cut awkwardly into a circle below the Babes logo. Her husband says nothing. If this were a cartoon, a piano would fall out of the sky in this moment, land on his head, and he would walk around the room, his body springing up and down like an accordion. But this isn’t a cartoon. This is real life, and it gets more bizarre by the second.

There are questions she wants to ask: How many times has he rented out their child to strangers? Did he at least stay to make sure everything was okay? Why couldn’t he just be cheating on her? Before tonight, that was the worst thing she could imagine him doing, but what could be worse than this? If there’s an app for everything, she thinks, where are the apps you actually need? Where can she download the app that will help her navigate a moment like this, when her life is cracking like the screen of a dropped phone? In the end, she decides, there’s only one question to ask. It’s the only one that matters right now. Why?

He swings his feet over the side of the bed. He runs a hand through his thinning hair, rubs his neck like the answers are somewhere back there and just needs retrieving. He talks of the price of Postmates, the rate hike for Netflix, the downturn in the market, and the new Disney+ service. Surely, they’ll need to subscribe to Disney+. She can’t understand any of this. He says he wants to be a provider. He talks about a husband’s purpose, a father’s purpose, a man’s purpose. He wants his family to know a life of Hulu with no commercials.

That’s fucked, she tells him. She leaves the room and enters the nursery. She picks up her sleeping child. The baby opens their eyes for a moment, as if to make sure of whom is holding them. She whispers to her child that everything is going to be okay. She wants to believe it. Her husband is in the doorway. He asks her what she’s doing.

She tells him that they’re leaving.

Where does she plans to go at an hour like this, he wants to know.

Not to prostitute their child, she tells him as she walks past; but the truth is, she doesn't know what she’s doing. She’s making it up one step at a time.

He follows them down the stairs. She puts on shoes and picks up the diaper bag. He asks her what she thinks she’s doing when she posts pictures of their child on Facebook. He tells her that she does it for the Likes; she does it for the comments; to rack up the notifications. He asks her if she actually thinks she’s above it all, that she’s better than anyone. He tells her not to kid herself. At least he’s providing something for the family and not his ego.

She doesn’t close the front door as she leaves. She doesn’t look back to see if her husband is watching. She holds her baby so close that she thinks she’ll never let go. The sky is clear, and the moon hangs low and full. She can see the road ahead of her in all its details. There’s an all-night diner a mile away. It seems as good a destination as any. She’ll carry her baby all the way. And when she gets there, she’ll...well, she doesn’t know what she’ll do. She doesn't know what comes next.

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