When I fly my suicidal nine year old to DC for neuropsychological testing by Blake Bell
All the bodies of water below us are shining circles. They look up at me, like eyes.
SWELL by Lamb
We went 0-fer at the tournament, but La Jolla Sports Park has this insanely soft grass, these big ol triangle canopies with shade for days that make it hard to not feel like a winner. But, yeah, on the ride back it was getting dark, and since Jesús and the busdriver are chill, a few of us, just the boys, really, we went to the very back and kicked it, stretched ourselves across the aisle to just vibe for a while, each in his own row. By the way the busdriver smiled at us in his mirror, you could tell he’d have joined us if he didn’t have to drive the bus. Like I said, he’s chill with Jesús. We were a few flat stanleys back there, relaxing, half-sleeping as we listened to the road gentle in our backs. Then Douggie folded himself over the back of his seat, so his arms were loose and swaying, and told us the entire plot of Rosemary’s Baby.Now, as I lie in bed trying to unfocus my eyes to stop a hundred faces from appearing in the ceiling, what doesn’t make sense is how someone like Douggie, nice guy, nice parents, Christian, I’m pretty sure, ends up watching a movie like that, and why he’d bring it up on the bus, when everything was perfectly quiet, just as we’d finished forgetting about our big loss. How could you have something so evil inside of you and not know? I don’t know how that’s possible. Then again, as I rub my swollen shins together, I don’t know why some bruises are dark purple, and others orange.
THE TEST by Arpita Roy
A man is pelting stones at a dog. In this story, because it is an old story, the dog is going to become a secret test for his humanity. The man is going to think to himself, if only I had known that this was a secret test, I would’ve chosen to keep the stones hidden inside my shoes. But the man doesn’t know and cannot choose, so he chooses stones and well, the dog was already there. As a child, the man had been a boy, small, and as a small boy, the man had seen his big father pelt stones at a dog and that dog had never turned out to be a test. It was a good ol’ non-test, regular dog with a regular bark, howling, when the pelted stones hit its body. A thwap and then the twin stones thwap thwap; the dog’s howl a mix of wince and surprise. But this dog on this day is a test dog, so when the man pelts his second stone – he would’ve anyway stopped after three – the test dog transforms into a god. God says son you failed and in reality the stones, too, were disguises of time, like I am, and thus for every stone cast, you’ve now lost a decade of your life. The man looks at god and wonders how he is going to break this news to his wife or his kids – or his landowner who will ask him to pay his debt. And what about his daughter’s surgery. And what about that mango tree he had planted. In ten years, he was going to hold their delicious flesh. And what about – At the end of this long thought, the man looks at god and says okay. He swallows the last stone.
BREAKING by Emily Rinkema
On the designated day for punishing mothers, those of us who got our applications in early enough show up, mothers in tow. Most look like they came willingly, walking ahead of their children, mostly daughters, but not mine. I had to sedate her to get her in the car.I paid for the deluxe package, which includes interrogation. The application allowed three questions. Two were easy: What really happened to the kitten I brought home in third grade? And, Why did you only let me shave my legs to my knees until I was sixteen? The third was harder to decide on, but I went with, How can Kant’s categorical imperative ever truly be a reliable guide to moral obligations if humans lack rational agency?I prop Mom up next to me to wait our turn for interrogation. She puts her head on my shoulder, but only because her neck won’t hold it up. I may have over sedated her. I take a granola bar out of my bag and Mom lifts her head enough to give me the look that says I can’t believe you’re eating again.The door opens after only a few minutes and a mother and daughter come out of the room. They have both been crying. The mother is missing a few teeth and a finger, has bruises on her neck, is soaking wet. For a moment, I wonder if I am overreacting, if maybe it’s not too late to cancel and take Mom home, but then I see her sit up straight, roll her shoulders. I can tell she is judging the other mother for being weak, for breaking. She gives me that smile that says she can’t believe I chose to wear these shoes in public and cracks her knuckles.
LESS DEAD by Samir Sirk Morató
When asked, Dad says, Don’t worry about Ximena—she’s just a girl good at running away, but you find a shoebox of condoms, calling cards, Selena CDs, baby name lists, and blush palettes squashed between a bed leg and a wall, the last of Ximena in her whirlwind-emptied room, which reminds you of Diva Fridays:Come on, she’d say, I’ll teach you about eyeshadow, before putting her heavy handed brushstrokes on your lids, which made you miss Marco—who lived in her room before he too fled—all cropped shirts, eyeliner, and laughter mixed with hair oil and truancy.He had a box of condoms too.The animals look like them, you tell Mom. She doesn’t understand that squirrels are gnawing with baby teeth, raccoons developing pink palms, vultures singing raspy cumbia, your beagle watching you through Marco’s eyes rimmed in black skin; she sees only laundry, lunch boxes, and outlines.One Saturday, after you follow these animals into high weeds, burrs on your socks, Dad-tied pigtails on your head, you find the rotted lumps they’re eating: skin and bear paw people-fingers and maggots plated on shattered bones. It smells like basement.Your dad says it’s just deer. Leave it alone.Later, a woman calls you, asking if you’ve seen Ximena. She barely speaks English. You finger landline phone curls, safe and bored, before saying No.No have money to call again, she says, so please—Get more money then.You hang up.Many bad, fun runaways later, when police turn your boneyard into a poppy field of flags and shoot your animals for evidence, Mom weeps, vowing I didn’t know, while you tell yourself that you lied to be good, to be a girl missed, knowing you lied for no reason at all.
THREE MICROS THAT TICK by Daniel Seifert
Yesterday came the decreeAnd today it comes into force. We must all fight like Plains Indians, from here on.That means cool your arrows. Your axe must sleep in the ground while you win prestige by counting coup: Curl yourself like a puff of wind. Inch your body to the enemy. Closer to his neck, where the soft hair curls against his pulse. Touch his body with your coup stick—you have won. Steal his horse if you want; beat the darkening air with your cries. But the battle is over now, if you want it.
***
Press playWe are the narrators in his head. The man who each night plugs us in his ear and listens to stories. Alchemised from the page by our mouths, paid by the hour.We’re in bright studios far away, but we know the man is in bed when he kisses our lips to his ears.Dark-time. Pillow. Moulded rubber in shells of skin. The marvellous intimacy of audio.And we have a burning question: why does he listen in the dark, when he falls asleep so fast? Like bathtub water pulled down narrow pipes? Oh, time made foam. And we have a theory: he likes the way we read from scripts, threading words to thick red scarves that press his horizontal skin. He likes the way murderers are always caught, in the end. He likes how he forgets what we said last night and how he can rewind to the good parts—just before the foam hits.***
ColtYoung horse shimmering between the plain and sky. Blue falling to four-legged black, to land on dirty green.Old man who calls himself a cowboy. Walks to the horse thinking how can it still stand. Madyoung thing kicking in a red barn door and the door kicking back, snap. Just like that, a sentence passed.Old man touches young horse snout whispering blue-sky words. Speaking in fact to the mouth of a holster, the handle of his gun. And green just waiting.
TRANSITIONAL WORDS by Reza Jabrani
I’m dating her for her looks but she’s ugly. And she’s ugly. Plus, she’s ugly. Ok, I’m not sure how these two relate, complement, contradict, combine. She has lice. The lice are nice. Alive. On me, on her, raucous nibbling on our heads, in my bed. The most action I’ve seen all century. Maybe. I’m only twelve. Or thirty. I don’t know what the last century was like. For me. For anyone. What my past lives were like. She asks me to comb her hair. Not for lice, or any sort of grooming, but because it gets her off. Despite the fact that it gets her off. Ergo, it gets her off. On the contrary. In addition. I look for the lice anyway. Looney Tune lice. Jazz band lice. Lice living exciting lice lives in the great metropolises of Licedom. She’s on the edge of the bed clipping her toenails. I hear them land on the faux-wood flooring with a world-ending asteroid thud. Sayonara, she says to the dead dinosaurs made double-dead now. I think I’d like to fuck a T-Rex. Be fucked by a T-Rex. The Jurassic orgasmic. Love in the tar pits, at the sticky, clinging end of things. While seeing T. Rex. Marc Bolan shimmering like a glam rock god, speakers the size of whole ecosystems. I think a lot. I’m ugly, I think. Thinking is ugly. Do lice think? I ask her, Do lice think? I’m not a louse, she says, so how should I know? Because, I say. Therefore, I say. Furthermore.
CROWN MOLDING by Elijah Sparkman
There was a hippopotamus that lived in the middle of a shark tank. And when the sharks were concerned about the health of the hippopotamus, they called a doctor who was a penguin. The penguin liked a girl named Cindy and every night they played hide-and-go-seek out in the barn. I know this because I am the hospital bed that the hippopotamus died on. While dying, the hippopotamus grasped me tight. There is an indent the size of him still inside me. It was unfortunate, because he couldn’t have a peaceful death. The secretary dropped something on the button that made the loud speaker go off in every room. And she didn’t notice. Because blaring out of every speaker in every room was one side of the phone conversation she was having: “Hahaha, Marianne” she said, “You’re so goddam funny, but it’s not even like that. It’s more like he’s shy. It’s more like, well, you know, he’s always thinking. I know. I know. But even the other day, we’re, like, in the dining room and we’re having a conversation or at least I’m telling him about like the bullshit that bitch Nancy the nurse said to me about the time card, but like, well, you know, it’s what people do, I’m telling him about my day, and like, well, what it feels like to me is that he’s not even listening. I go, ‘Daniel! What the fuck? Do you want this relationship to end right fucking now?’ And he’s like, ‘No Honey, sorry Baby, I was just checking out your apartment.’ Yeah, I know. He says, ‘The crown molding, I’m just wondering how they did it this way, the top notched off like that’ and something like that or whatever. Oh shit, my water bottle, it’s—”
HOW I SPROUTED WINGS by Beth Kanter
A moth grayer than I knocked on my apartment door this morning demanding that I bake her a three-tiered Meyer lemon birthday cake topped with aster, mint, rose, milkweed, and vervain. I agreed for I know what it is to crave flowers and frosting on the anniversary of one’s own arrival. So I went to the alley behind my building and whipped, blended, and folded handfuls of dirt and dandelion stems as my grandmother taught me to do long ago. Water from a rusting hose nozzle the recipe’s only binding agent. At the stroke of midnight, I presented the birthday girl with the confection and sang to her with the force of an orchestra. We cried and ate until we fell asleep on the cold Linoleum floor. When the sun rose, the painted lady had gone and my kitchen was crawling with caterpillars.
THE SENTIENT, BUDDHIST TOMATO GREETS ITS DESTINY by Christy Tending
We have 100 words for green, none of which they are privy to, and all of which are an essential part of this process. We reach our way toward the sun, our skin stretching to accommodate the water in our bellies, surrounding next year’s seeds for next year’s tomatoes. It is not insignificant to remember that we hold infinite life. That there is our finite purpose, and there is the part of us that, invincibly, will live on in every year to come, so long as this land exists, so long as someone is willing to accept volunteers.She runs her hand along my leaf and inhales. I do not know what this means except it points to aliveness and a temporary season, and our shared duty. For me to grow; and for her to nourish and then to pluck. There is dignity in the plucking, in the careful washing, in the careful selection of the knife.It is not pain but dharma to be sliced over a salad, skin still warm, or tucked into a tart for dinner, to feed the people she loves around the little aluminum table in the shade that I can see if I crane my stem just so. Sometimes my leaves flutter in the breeze that carries their laughter east, so that I might hear it as it reverberates against the tiny flowers that will become fruit and then a part of everything. They will bite into us, laughing as juice drips onto their chins and all of the stretching and wind and slurping up water will be worth it. The way we have all turned our faces to the sky to know that we are here, before all of us surrender to what it is we came to do.