Author:

By M.M. Kaufman

It was my last year of college and there was not one person on that campus that was not in love with Georgia at first sight.

I could tell you about her never-been-dyed blonde hair, thick and straight like dried hay that catches the sun. Do you want to hear about her button nose or her slow, loping gait, or maybe her thin, flat frame that made me think of a sexy paper doll come to life? Would you like to hear about her freckles? Because more than a decade later, I still love thinking about them.

  I could tell you more about her. What she studied. Her life goals. Her background. Her hobbies. But do I need to? All you need to know is that I was crushed in her presence like you are at eight or fourteen or twenty-two or forty-five. I hope we never lose the ability to be halted and held by beauty.

But let’s go to that drunken night in 2011. American Apparel had college-age women’s fashion in a goddamn chokehold. For the party that night on our small but magical women’s college campus, I wore a matching navy set of American Apparel lingerie and nothing else. I layered the lacy high-waisted panties over the thong because I was going for a slutty Zooey Deschanel meets Mad Men meets some sad, flat female character in a Tao Lin novel. We were all in costumes that night rather than traditional party outfits. Maybe it was some kind of spirit week? Georgia wore tight black jeans, a black v-neck tee, and a black eye-mask and big brimmed hat à la Zorro. The all-black set off her Midwest tan and blonde hair and the effect was nothing short of bewitching. She was sweet and approachable, but her beauty and the all-black was intimidating. Looking at her that night, I felt like I’d been lit on fire.

Youth was a part of it. Cusp of graduation and adulthood was a part of it. But I think the hopeful anything-can-happen-tonight buzz I felt as I chased her around the campus-wide party can be felt at any age. The rest of the parts were alcohol. 

We’d all made it to the campus hub—an overly bright building with open staircases and tall windows. My drunk ass was fumbling around on heeled booties as I drooled after Georgia. Hindsight cannot tell me if Georgia ever knew about my feelings for her. She was so even- keeled, so go-with-the-flow, I had never seen any emotion affect her. I’ll never know if she had any idea that we were all in love with her. I wouldn’t have put it past her to have known and not said anything to save us the embarrassment. She was kind down to her thin, sexy little bones and completely without airs. I need you to know this about her because of what happens next. 

Georgia, maybe riding that same hopeful high of anything-could-happen-tonight, plucked a fire extinguisher from the wall and—overcome with giggles—mumbled something like, “I wonder how this works.”

I was drenched in a foamy white spray, from my big Zooey Deschanel bangs down to my sexy librarian booties.

I laughed it off. We carried on. The night continued in common college party fashion. Our lives continued in common well-adjusted women fashion. 

But we’re not ending the story here. Because the story actually ends here, more than ten years later, when I realize that a crush is not just a figurative term for how pining after someone makes you feel. It also means the object of desire in question, my Georgia, was crushed too. She was crushed into something flat and one-dimensional, like a sexy paper doll. I had a feeling that simile was going to bite me in the ass. 

By crushing, yearning, pining, fantasizing about fucking freckles, I didn’t know one real thing about her. I got what I deserved—a face full of dousing chemical spray—not for liking a girl, not for being too cowardly to voice my feelings, but for seeing her as nothing more than something I wanted. So really, who extinguished who?

M.M. Kaufman is a writer based in Georgia. She is a Fulbright Scholar and earned an MFA in the University of New Orleans’ Creative Writing Workshop. She is currently the Managing Editor at Rejection Letters and team member for Micro Podcast. Her fiction is published with The Normal School, Hobart, Metonym Journal, Sundog Lit, Daily Drunk Mag, (mac)ro(mic), HAD, Olney Magazine, Pine Hills Review, Maudlin House, jmww, Major 7th Magazine, Rejection Letters, JAKE, and elsewhere. Find her on Twitter @mm_kaufman and on her website mmkaufman.com.

By Brittany Ackerman

It was the summer I was obsessed with the gas station stickers, the ones where you put in fifty cents and got a whole sleeve. I never even peeled them off their transfer paper. I collected them and kept them intact as if saving them for another time when I was ready. Ready for what? I have no idea. I was always saving things for later. I liked the Lisa Frank stickers best. Bears and tigers and dolphins, seals and pandas and even aliens. They were so unlike real animals in the real world. They were unbridled in their intense saturation of color.

I had an affinity for the unicorn family. They lived in a neon world where all day they could be found hurdling over rainbows or galloping through fields of hearts. I pretended it was my mom and me, the two of them frolicking, so happy.

We were driving back to Sedona from North Scottsdale. We’d spent the evening in Rawhide, an old Western town that promised gunfights, panning for gold, a saloon-esque steakhouse, and plenty of western themed gift shops. A cowboy hat with a pink star sat on the floor of the car below me. I’d have this hat until college. I’d wear it many-a-Halloween when I’d dress up as a cowgirl in a denim skirt and a button-down shirt tied up to reveal my midriff. The hat would follow me from New York to Florida and I’d only get rid of it when it started to seem childish as I prepared to leave for college. But at Rawhide, I absolutely had to have that hat.

We’d had the steak dinner with loaded mashed potatoes and unlimited fountain Pepsi. We’d seen the gunfight in all of its dramatics. We’d perused the gift shop, hence the cowboy hat, and we’d even gone on a horse-drawn wagon ride.

It was the summer my dad was still leaving us all the time to smoke cigarettes. It seemed like every outing was punctuated with his sudden leaving to smoke. The smoke permeated everything: the car, our clothes, the immediate air around us. My mom hated it. So my dad skipped out on the horse ride while my mom, brother, and me sat in the wagon and got pulled around the dusty grounds. Halfway through the ride, my mom started cackling, “Our horse won’t stop pissing!” The stream was unending and hit the ground hard with a splash, sending up steam. My brother and I started laughing too. Although I remember being sort of mad. I’d wanted to enjoy the ride, to pretend I was a cowgirl and that this was, in fact, my horse and he was taking me to the saloon to meet my cowboy, my love.  

I wanted to be in my imagination where anything was possible. That summer, I was rarely in reality. I was in my head and in other places and in other times. We took so many family trips and did so many extravagant things, but I painted a life for myself that was even more vivid and exciting. It wasn’t a phase. It was who I was becoming.

My mom and brother wouldn’t shut up about the horse and the pissing. I looked for my dad, scanned the crowd for his black Ralph Lauren Polo shirt and jeans, his Sperry Topsiders. But as the day turned to night, I couldn’t find him. He was out there, somewhere, also separate, but in a way of his choosing.  

My mom took my brother and me over to pan for gold where a man in a flannel button-down and a wide brim cowboy hat showed us what to do. There was a waist-high station filled with sand and covered with water. The cowboy demonstrated how to tilt the pan into the water and then swirl it around leaving only rocks in its place. If we found gold, we were supposed to call out, “Gold Rush!”

We started panning and found that there were all sorts of special stones in the sand. Tiger’s Eye, Quartz, Turquoise, Aquamarine, Citrine, Obsidian. My mom held out a small velvet bag where we put the stones we wanted to keep. I imagined making a necklace with one of the precious gems and wearing it to school to make all the other girls jealous.  

And then a kid a few feet away from us yelled “Gold Rush!” and one of the cowboys came running. It was a whole ordeal with a magnifying glass and examining the rocks closely until the miner proclaimed the kid had in fact struck gold. My brother threw down his pan into the dirt and stormed off. My mom followed after him. I kept panning, wanting to find gold of my own. The stones were pretty, but gold was the goal. Gold was what we were all there for.  

I kept shuffling down the station and tilting the pan into the water and sand and swirling it around as I brought it to the surface. It was all gravel, useless, worthless gravel, as if everyone had already panned the place clean. And then, a gilded fleck caught my eye and I brought a small piece of gold to the surface, emerging like an answered prayer.

“Gold Rush!” I yelled and the cowboy came to my side. He did the same theatrical inspection and then declared I’d struck gold, too. I held the gold in my hands as if it might have come to life at any moment. My mom and brother returned. My brother had a look on his face like he knew something about the world that I didn’t. He plucked the gold from my hand and squinted at it, rubbed it between his pointer finger and thumb. “Fool’s gold,” he laughed. I grabbed it back from him. I put it into the velvet bag with the rest of my stones. The thing is, I don’t remember if I cried when he said it, or after when he walked away back toward the car. I don’t know if my mom tried to convince me the gold was real, if anyone cared whether or not I believed.

I don’t remember leaving Rawhide, but I know that we all got in the car and headed back to Sedona for the rest of our trip out West. We’d stay a few more days and then fly back to New York. I’d keep the stones for a long time until they didn’t mean anything to me anymore, like the cowboy hat, like so many other objects of youth that are everything until they are junk.

I was asleep when my dad stopped at the gas station for cigarettes and my brother paid fifty cents to get me stickers. Two aliens drive a psychedelic Volkswagen Beetle and give the peace sign. A panda dressed in overalls carries a bucket of rainbow paint. A unicorn shakes her mane at the moon whose mouth is open in shock, in awe.  

And then they made one more stop on the side of the road. I imagine my mom must have slid her knees out from under my head. I imagine her fishing through her purse, feeling the velvet bag of stones and then finding the camera to hand over to my dad. I imagine him lining up the shot of my brother against the backdrop of the Grand Canyon, the picture that someday I will find in a family album and keep for myself.

I didn’t have to ask why my brother got me the stickers.  

Rawhide closed down in 2005 and was bulldozed, turned into condos, the same year my brother started doing opiates. The new location opened in 2006 in Chandler, Arizona, where it hosts concerts and weddings. I know that my dad no longer smokes cigarettes after he had two heart attacks in 2010. I know my mom loves her job teaching middle school because maybe it’s another chance to make kids happy. I know I went away for college and then stayed away. I know I have my own family now.  

Sometimes when my daughter is playing by herself, I wonder what’s going on in her mind. Is she telling herself a story? Is she destined to make believe? 

When she picks up a yellow block, does it remind her of the sun?

Brittany Ackerman is a writer from Riverdale, New York. She earned her BA in English from Indiana University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Florida Atlantic University.  She has led workshops for UCLA’s Extension, The Porch, HerStry, Write or Die, and Lighthouse Writers.  She is a 3x Pushcart Prize Nominee and her work has been featured in The Sun, MUTHA, Jewish Book Council, Lit Hub, The Los Angeles Review, No Tokens, Joyland, and more. Her first collection of essays, The Perpetual Motion Machine, was published with Red Hen Press in 2018, and her debut novel, The Brittanys, is out now with Vintage.  Her Substack is called taking the stairs.

By Josh Olsen

I’ve been obsessed with this photograph for months. It’s a photograph of a copy of a photograph taken with my mom’s prepaid cell phone. I’d never seen it until my mom sent it to me buried in a text, and I’ve been obsessed with it for months.

The photograph is of my mom and my grandma, posed together on the grass. They’re in Orlando, Florida, in 1974, where my mom, my grandparents, and my uncle, my mom’s younger brother, were briefly transplanted from Wisconsin while my grandpa worked as a chiropractor. My mom says the photograph was taken at a company picnic for my grandma’s job at Robinson’s Department Store, in the Orlando Fashion Square mall, and I wonder who the photographer was, and why he was even there. Was he hired by Robinson’s for the company picnic or was he just a freelance photographer taking pictures in the park? 

In the photograph, my grandma is sitting on her side, propped up on her right arm, with her wild black hair blowing away from her face. My mom is posed on her hands and knees, prowling behind my grandma, staring straight into the camera. She looks 21 but my mom is only 14 years old, and my grandma is 34. They look more like sisters. 

In less than a few years, my mom’s family will be back in Wisconsin, my grandpa will no longer be a chiropractor, and shortly thereafter, I will be born. My mom will be a mother at 18 years old and my grandma will be a grandmother at 38. I made my mom a grandmother at 37, and my grandmother a great grandmother at 57 – it’s a rare achievement in my family to make it past 20 years old without becoming a parent – but that’s beside the point.

Something happened in Orlando that would forever alter my mom’s relationship with her mother. They both knew it. My mom’s whole family knew it. Her grades plummeted, her attitude changed, she even ran away from home a couple times, and one of the times my mom ran away, something happened to her. Something happened to my mom in Orlando. 

My mom won’t tell me what happened, but I think I already know. I remember her once alluding to what happened, back when I was too young to hear such things about my mom, after I heard her screaming about it one of the many nights she fought with my stepdad. Something he did to her had triggered her, decades before I was even aware of that term, decades before it was used as a term of derision lobbed at people who were mocked for being overly sensitive or weak minded. Something my stepdad had done to my mom in their bedroom had triggered her, and she began to scream and cry for help, she began to fight back, while my baby brother and I listened and cried in our bedroom, and the following morning, she told me that she had experienced flashbacks of what happened to her in Orlando. 

It wasn’t unlike my mom to share the most intimate details of her life with me, even when I was a child. I distinctly remember her picking me up one time after an otherwise typically pleasant weekend spent with my grandparents, around the same time as that screaming fight with my stepdad. Throughout the first half of my life, I spent a lot of extended weekends with my grandparents, and even occasionally lived with them, until I permanently moved in when I was 16 years old, after my mom divorced my stepdad. I can’t remember if this one particular weekend was before or after her most recent fight with my stepdad, but either would make sense. 

I threw my duffel bag into the backseat of our powder blue Ford and turned the radio to the local Top 40 station – Z93. My mom seemed uncharacteristically solemn, so I anticipated that something was out of the ordinary, yet she waited until we were a few miles down the road before revealing her big news. 

“I’m pregnant,” she said, and I instantly began to weep. I cried for many selfish reasons, but the only one that really mattered was that I knew that the father of her new baby, my first sister-to-be, was not her husband – my stepdad – and I knew this because it had been less than a couple months since she introduced me to the man she had been sleeping with on the side. 

“Why are you telling me?” I said through tears. She confessed that she had no intention to reveal to her husband, or anyone else, the identity of her unborn child’s father, and she expected me to keep it a secret, which I did, until she was ready to tell the truth, four years later, when she became pregnant again by another man who was not her husband. 

She could always count on me to keep a secret. 

It’s been well over 40 years now, and she won’t talk about what happened in Orlando, but I remember what she had screamed about during that fight with my stepdad, and what she confessed the following morning. 

There’s a sense of intimacy and comfort in this photograph from 1974 that I’ve never seen expressed between my mom and grandma, even in their most tender moments, even while they mourned my grandpa’s death, and so I assume that whatever it was that happened to my mom in Orlando, this photograph must’ve been taken before it happened. 

“Do you have the original?” I ask my mom, and she says yes. “If you’re willing to send it to me, Katie can try to clean it up,” I offer, but what comes in the mail isn’t the original, it’s a printed copy of the image she sent in a text. I thank her when I receive it, but I ask again about the original copy of the photograph. 

The next time I talk to my grandma during our weekly phone call, I mention the photograph from Orlando, and she immediately accuses my mom of stealing it from her. I try to distract her and ask about the company picnic, her job at Robinson’s, my grandpa’s abbreviated career as a chiropractor, and other details about their brief life in Orlando, but now all she wants to talk about is my mom stealing photographs from her photo albums. 

“She thinks they’re all just hers for the taking,” my grandma says. “She thinks she’s going to get them all after I die, so she just helps herself.” My grandma doesn’t like to talk about Orlando, and she admits that her and my grandpa’s decision to move there was one of the biggest mistakes of their lives. The only memory she willingly shares is the time a repairman came to her door, and he was a dead ringer for Richard Speck, the man who murdered eight women – all student nurses – in one night in Chicago, my grandma’s hometown, where she met and fell in love with my grandpa while he was a student at The National College of Chiropractic. When she saw the Richard Speck doppelgänger at her door in Orlando, she briefly feared for her life, even though she knew Speck was serving eight consecutive life sentences in prison. 

I ask my mom if she took the photograph from my grandma’s photo album, and while she is angry at me, at first, for bringing it up to my grandma, for asking her about the photograph, she eventually admits that’s what she’s done. 

“But why didn’t you just ask her first before you took it?” I say, and she excuses her actions by saying that if she did, my grandma would just say no, no questions asked, and this is how she justifies taking it from her. If my mom and grandma are incapable of communicating about something as innocuous as sharing family photographs, I imagine they’re beyond the point of talking about what happened to my mom in Orlando. 

“I’d love to see the original photograph, if you can find it,” I say to my mom. 

“What’s your obsession with this photograph?” she says in a rapid stream of near illegible voice-to-text messages and claims that neither she nor my grandma have the original. “The photographer had the original,” she says, “and he gave us a copy of that, so why do you care if the one I sent is a copy?” I felt like the conversation was getting lost in semantics but couldn’t think to say anything other than, “because those things matter to me.” 

If you have a T206 Honus Wagner baseball card, it matters if you have the original or a reprint, I was thinking to myself, but then I was also thinking to myself, am I really comparing a photograph of my mom and grandma to the T206 Honus Wagner, a baseball card that once sold for over three million dollars? 

“If you ever find the original, I would like to see it in person,” I said. 

“But you never care about the photos I do send you,” she said. 

My mom often mails me stacks of unsolicited copies of family photographs, copies of family photographs I already have copies of, copies of family photographs I gave to her, copies of family photographs I took with my own camera. They arrive in thick envelopes plastered in stamps, so many superfluous stamps, and with my name, and variations on my nickname, and mailing address written all over the envelope. Envelopes decorated with stickers and doodles and hand-drawn hearts and Xs and Os. Envelopes that smelled like patchouli. I imagine the post office must hate my mom’s envelopes. 

The photographs inside the envelopes also come adorned with stickers and doodles and notes on the back and often have the corners of the photographs rounded off with scissors, evidence that they were removed from a frame once too small for the photograph. And always, the photographs come with a letter, handwritten in cursive on a sheet of yellow legal pad paper. 

My grandparents grew to dread my mom’s yellow legal pad letters, the letters my mom would send when she needed help. My mom was a writer. She only had an audience of two, her mom and dad, but she was a fucking writer. She wrote when the phone bill was overdue. She wrote when her car wouldn’t start. She wrote when she didn’t have money for groceries or school clothes. She wrote when there was another baby on the way. She couldn’t stand to ask for help in person, or over the phone, where she would have to engage in a two-way conversation, and so she would write a letter, where she could soliloquize uninterrupted. And after my grandparents bailed her out, again and again, she wrote a letter to thank them and promise it would never happen again, things would get better soon. But she never wrote to them about what happened to her in Orlando. She never asked for their help with that. 

Still, my mom compulsively purchases notebooks, and before she has the chance to fill one, she misplaces it and buys another, and another, and another. The last time my mom needed to move back into my grandparent’s house, she filled their garage with her stuff. My grandma said my mom had boxes full of notebooks, most of them barely used. My grandma told me she was going to rent a dumpster and get my uncle and his sons to help throw all of her “garbage” away, but my mom slowly moved it all out, and into a storage unit, box by box, carload by carload, before she had her way. 

“I have so much stuff saved for you,” my mom wrote in her most recent letter to me. My mom’s single bedroom, public housing apartment, and probably at least one storage unit, overflows with every photograph, scrap, and artifact that reminds her of her four children – me, my brother, and my two sisters. This is our inheritance. 

Every time my mom sends me something, she wants me to promise I won’t throw it away. She’s saved it all for all of these years, and she wants to ensure it doesn’t end up in the trash, but I’ll admit that a lot of it does. I try to keep as much as possible, but when you indiscriminately save everything, does anything have any value? 

My certificate of baptism, inscribed by the priest who was murdered in his own church, arrives in a crumpled plastic grocery bag with baby teeth and clippings from my first haircut and pages torn out of coloring books and a concert ticket stub from the Muppet Babies Live and years of less than stellar report cards and birthday cards and Valentine’s Day cards and Halloween cards and Easter cards. 

My mom recently told me she has nearly 40 photo albums to give me, 40 full albums of photographs and miscellaneous ephemera, nearly one photo album for every year of my life, but the one photograph I really want is the photograph of my mom and grandma in Orlando, Florida in 1974, but now she tells me she can’t find it, and my grandma can’t find hers, because my mom took it, and the copy of a copy my mom mailed me is the only copy we have.

Josh Olsen is a librarian, a columnist for SlamWrestling,net, and the co-creator of Gimmick Press, an independent micro publisher of pop culture inspired literature and art. His latest book of micro essays, Things You Never Knew Existed, was published by Roadside Press.

By Daisy Cashin

My partner Arty and I received an email last week from our rental company. It was the third in as many months. The first was to inform us that our rent would be raised by three hundred dollars. The second was to make sure nobody let any more strangers into the building. Our neighbors let in some bible salesmen a few weeks prior, and they stole some packages on the way out. 

The lady who handles the correspondence is named Diana. I hate Diana. I have never met Diana, but I imagine she dresses her rescued pit bull in little pink doggy shoes and Carhartt vests and sends her children to yoga camp in the summer. She’s violently cheerful and only ever has bad news. If someone were to be axe murdered in our building, her subsequent email would read: 

Good morning, friends! Just reaching out to let you know that there is an axe murderer in the building. Your next-door neighbors were brutally murdered on Tuesday, but rest assured, the super will be there around 3:00 to clean the guts off the floor. 

Have a wonderful day!

Diana

In the third, most recent email, Diana told us that our next-door neighbors found bed bugs and that we might have bed bugs. She said an exterminator would be by in a few days to spray. In the meantime, we were told to wash our clothes and put them in bags. I wished the neighbors had been murdered instead. I wished the exterminator was coming for me.

When our clothes and sheets were clean, we put them into big black trash bags. Then Arty put her body in a trash bag, and we counted how many body parts we could fit in a trash bag—quite a few, especially if dismembered.

The bags quickly consumed me. The day before the exterminators came, I woke up like a pissy teenager, walked into the living room, and looked at the big pile of trash bags. Arty was tying up another bag for the pile. I huffed and asked, “Why do we have so much stuff?” Arty pulled the blue strings on the black bag real tight like she was trying to strangle a spy, then shot a look at me like, if you don’t get your unhelpful ass from ’round me, I’m going to chop you up into little pieces and STUFF you into one of these bags. She wasn’t playing, and I would have deserved it. So, I fled to Manhattan in a lazy fit of cowardice. 

On the J train, I sat next to a shirtless man. He held a water bottle full of gin in one hand and a beaten-up Bible in the other. After a big swig of gin, he read a verse out loud. Then he looked up from the Bible, stared at the people across from him, and hollered, “Look! It says right here. The plague is coming! Can’t you see, you idiots!” Everyone looked at the ground and clutched their bags. Then he continued, “See! We are all witnesses. Genesis only repeats itself! Over and over! Look, here, you idiots, it’s just Genesis over and over again.” 

“Mmhm,” I hummed, not out of biblical enthusiasm, but because I fully understood that there’s nothing quite like a water bottle full of gin to make one think they know something about God. 

But then the angry monk turned his head and gave me a pat of acknowledgment on my bicep. “See, you get it,” he said, “It’s all right here,” and pointed to his Bible. Then he stood as the train stopped at Marcy Avenue, opened his arms, and hollered, “BABYLON!” When the doors opened, he disappeared.

One stop later, I got off the train at Delancey and Essex and walked to Tompkins Square Park. I found a bench in the sun and smoked a cigarette and stared at all the wonderful weirdos boozing and grooving and the intolerable phone-holding fuckwits talking about real estate and mindful dog rearing. The sun fell through the trees, and there was less stuff.

Halfway through my cigarette, I heard the unmistakable “Excuse me, sir,” of someone who wanted something from me. I waited until the noise became unavoidable then looked down the line of benches. Seven benches down, a person in a pink dress wiggled their bare feet over their socks drying in the sun and waved. “Excuse me, sir, what’s a girl got to do to get a cigarette around here?”

I’d already survived the bible-thumping, so I figured, what the hell? And held out a cigarette. With a smile, the bench person tiptoed towards me, and her pink floral dress floated behind her like she was flying. Her smile was wide, and her skin was loose and leathery like she’d been lost at sea for some time. “Oh, goody! Thank you so much. I’m Steve,” she said sincerely. 

“Hi, Steve,” I said.

“Have you ever had a shit ton of bad luck?” Steve asked. I looked at Steve, unsure what this had to do with the cigarette. She grinned and continued, “You know, like everything for four or five years goes to absolute shit, then, all of a sudden, after all that shit, you get some amazing news, and that pile of shit that once seemed so massive now seems so small. Have you ever experienced that?” 

I thought too deeply for a moment and came to no real conclusion. “I’m not entirely sure. I’ve got bed bugs,” I said.

“Oh, honey, then you know what the hell I’m talking about.” Steve laughed and looked at the end of her still unlit cigarette. “Do you have a light? I’m sorry. I’m not always so needy.”

I held out my lighter. Steve lit the cigarette and took a deep drag. On her first exhale, she smiled and said, “Damn, American Spirits sure are the best. It’s fewer chemicals, and they burn slow.”

“That’s right,” I said, trying to kill the conversation.

“Do you think they’re telling the truth when they say there are no extra chemicals in these things?” Steve asked.

“No chance,” I responded.

“You’re probably right, damn tricksters. That’s all it is, you know, this life thing. It’s just one big trick. I would know. If there’s one thing I know, it’s tricks. I’ve been turning tricks since the eighties,” Steve giggled, tilting her head back and watching the smoke in the sun. Again, on an exhale, she said, “So, how long do you think we have left?”

“How do you mean?” I asked.

“Like on earth. Us humans. How long do you think we have left? Four years, five years?”

“Give or take,” I responded, “Ten years if we’re lucky. Ten minutes if that horny Russian lobs a couple of nukes into Europe.”

“Hey, don’t forget the aliens! It could be that the world ended years ago, and we don’t even know it’s over yet. Anyways, good luck with the bed bugs. I’ll leave you to it. I’ve just had some terrific news!” Steve said and bounced expectantly into the park. 

I sat for a minute and wondered what news Steve had just received. What sort of news would nullify five years of shit news? A new job. A bag of heroin. A new apartment. A first date. Cured of cancer. Met an alien. Realized it was all over or just beginning. 

Then I wondered how I got to be such a baby. I wondered why it was that a couple of damn bugs could make me want to give up on it all, make me move back to that comfortable bottom right corner of America and die slow like I had done all my life. I wondered why I wasn’t more like Steve. I wondered why I hadn’t found God in a water bottle full of gin in so long. I closed my eyes and went boo hoo, boo hoo inside my skull. 

Since I was sad for no reason, I figured I’d give myself a reason, so I called my Nana with dementia down there at Brown Hearth Retirement Community in Christiansburg, Virginia. After the second unanswered ring, I hoped more and more she wouldn’t pick up. By the third ring, I thought, phew, she must be playing bingo. But on the fourth ring, someone answered, and I thought, wow, Nana sounds great. Then I realized it was her caretaker. 

When my Nana finally came to the phone, she said, “Mmm, hello?” and I introduced myself over and over. Eventually, she asked, “So what’s going on? Where are you living these days? Catch me up on everything.”

“I’m in New York,” I responded, scratching a red bump on my arm.

“New York? Now, remind me, is that far away from here? Are you far away from home?”

“Pretty far,” I said.

Then Nana went silent, and I could hear the wheels turning in her mind, but the wheels weren’t connected to anything. They were just tires rolling down a dark forever hill past infinite beat-up Buicks sitting on cinderblocks. Eventually, she said, “So what are you doing there? Why are you so far from home?”

“I’m trying to be a writer,” I said.

“Well, how’s it going?” 

“I’ve got bed bugs.”

Without pause, Nana gasped and said, “Oh, sweety, how exciting. That is just wonderful. I am so happy for you.” 

My boohoo turned into a haha, and I said, “Pretty cool, right?” 

“Cool indeed,” she replied, “It is just so great to hear your voice.”

“It’s nice to hear your voice, too,” I said. 

There was another heavy pause, and I heard the wheels rolling down that damn hill again. My eyes started leaking like an old garden hose, and I clenched my teeth. Then, Nana cleared her throat and said, “So, where are you living these days? What’s new? Catch me up on everything.” 

I scratched hard at the red bumps on my arms and caught her up again and again. And it was all itchy love and lovely pain, and it ended and began and lived and died and forgot and remembered because that’s all it ever is. It’s just one big trick—genesis over and over again.

Daisy Cashin is a writer surviving in New York City via Southwest Virginia and Charleston, South Carolina. His work has appeared in Pere Ube, Esoterica Magazine, and HAD. He is currently at work on his novel Dirt Pusher, a cheery tale about a grave digger named Joe. Fans of love and loathing can find his chaos missives at ihatethesepeople.substack.com.