Farewell TransmissionBy Wren Donovan
Wren Donovan (she/her) lives in Tennessee. She studied at Millsaps College, UNC-Chapel Hill, and University of Southern Mississippi. When not writing, Wren reads history books and Tarot cards and lurks on twitter @WrenDonovan. Her poetry can be found in Orca, Poetry South, Cumberland River Review, Yellow Arrow, Harpy Hybrid Review, and elsewhere including WrenDonovan.com.
By Theodore Heil
Theodore Heil is a writer based in New York. He is interested in dreams, ephemera, and other spaces of transience. His work can be found or is forthcoming in Book of Matches Literary Journal, the Bitter Melon Review, and Love & Squalor Magazine. You can find him on Twitter @theodoreheil.
By Donald Ryan
Pop had already turned to drink long before that one mayor bought the place from the bank. Momma didn’t like it, though she never outright said anything; she also didn’t blame him. The spirits kept his spirit. But that didn’t mean we sons would spend all night at the bar with him. I tried a time or two, each time clear that needed to be Pop’s time. The box store where he managed to scrape up thirty hours a week or so both drained him and gave him no outlet for his wealth of how-to know-how. Pop knew before the second paycheck which aisle every screw, pipe, bit, and hinge was on. Aisles were all anyone ever asked about.
But it was never like Pop lived at the bar. When there was a full bottle and sitting weather, he’d make a night of sitting in the white, plastic porch chair, out there no different than the lightning bugs and cicadas. And once his belly got as warm as the night, he’d start talking about Momma’s inklings, then drift into things my older brothers probably already knew and some things I’m sure they never would. One thing, though, Pop never talked of getting out. So much of what was built up crumbled on his watch, albeit no fault of his own. Like most folk around town, he could blame Uncle Sam, could blame the economy. Still, Pop could only blame himself.
You see, when you and your brothers were just kids, he’d say, I knew nothing more than wanting to build a path of better things than the one I ended up on. And now, here we are in yet another cycle of June bugs, anything with potential worth showing already buried within no sight at all.
He’d catch the nip’s dribble on the back of his hand.
Then he’d say to it, I got to be at work early.
This had less to do with the shift starting around a late-for-him 10 or 11 and more to mean he was done with the subject, that or any. He wouldn’t let the bottle take advantage of him opening up. He was the store, and the store was closed. There was nothing that could come about to change the done that was done.
One night, out alone on the porch, my attention was split between watching heat lightning coil around bruised clouds and a paperback novel mostly spent bookmarked around my finger when headlights cut up the drive belonging to a gray truck that wasn’t Pop’s. The passenger door opened and after a brief pause for concern, knew from the backlit silhouette it was Pop’s graceful stagger traipsing up the beams.
I stood with the intention to help him up the stairs but did not move. Did not want to overstep the pride of the old man. The truck didn’t back out the drive until Pop was up and on the porch.
That was Elliot, Pop offered, looking towards the front door. Don’t know his last name. Mc-something or O-something. Don’t matter. Nice enough fellow. Pop waited a beat, allowing the unnecessary justification to settle into the point. My truck’s still up at Tally’s, he said. You mind in the morning?
Shouldn’t be a problem, I said as if there was a schedule to clear.
That’d be appreciated. Gives me a spell to rest my aches.
Pop chose to rest them out on the porch when what his aches most needed was bed. If he woke Momma she’d make it the night’s mission to plan a hell of a worse morning. Tufts of laughter came from something only Pop knew to find funny. Made the drunk, old man seem buoyant, almost innocent. Sure enough, he’d feel the load come morning. So right then, we didn’t need Momma spoiling his fun.
I snuck in to get Pop a glass of water. Wasn’t sneaking really, just felt like it. If I’d gone in before Pop’s return I would’ve walked on in with no thought other than guiding the screen door to the frame. But although stone-cold sober, the intoxication of the moment dropped me off to late nights with a curfew. Of myself being carried home too late. Of the nights met with Pop and Momma waiting up in the living room, frustration in one chair, disappointment in the other. Of nights thinking I was scot-free only to get a scolding before a breakfast I couldn’t stomach. Then came these last few years. Since graduating there hadn’t been nearly such strict impositions. I was left to set my own limits which, admittedly, were still sometimes met with tacit frustrations and disappointments. Now slinking sober in the shadows, my heart raced in silent excitement louder than the precision tap of closing the cabinet door.
The screen, however, nothing could stop that late-night squeal no matter how softly guided. It’d always been loudest at this hour.
I set a glass of water on the table next to Pop.
What am I supposed to do with this fish piss? he said. Go get the getting.
The screen door was sure to wake Momma.
When I came back out, I’d gotten the wrong get. Pop proceeded to half-describe a location hidden in plain sight I’d never seen. A secret now I was privy to, although I can only assume one of my brothers had surely stumbled upon this cubby in the roll-down desk where Pop used to balance the store’s books. The flask, right where half-described, hidden by a small door. But then again, one never knew with Pop. Might be the only one privy. Our folks were tolerant of a lot of mischief, had to be with three boys as we always heard, but the roll-down desk was an absolute. Even with expressed permission, it still felt unforgivable. As I reached, the old mischief swelled again, a rush far exceeding merely getting a glass of water. If Momma had heard any of this back and forth, she never showed from her bedroom.
The flask I handed to Pop had a tree chiseled into it, guessing an oak, crude and beautiful, dead center, umbrellaing towards the edge of a circle. Fine find, said Pop. He unscrewed and flicked the lid on its hinge. He sniffed the loot inside. This was your Pap’s flask, said Pop, and before Pap, I don’t know; probably used to pay off some man’s debt. And next, it’s probably only right it gets handed down to Ricky, him being the oldest and in line to inherit shit but this old man’s debts. But this, he tapped his finger on the branches, ain’t nothing but a pretty, worn-out piece of tin. In its time, held mostly swill. But what’s in here now, it for sure ain’t swill.
Pop swigged then clicked his teeth. He stared down at his thumb’s graze across the engraving. Yup, he said. Then he put his attention into the darkness just off the porch and slumped the flask towards me. This is the last batch of Will Hopkins, he said. You know who I mean?
I said, Maybe if I saw him.
Pop let out a har, single and hearty, from the gut. Ain’t no seeing of ol’ Hops nowadays if he stays where he should in the dirt they put him in. He used to come in town to the store. Probably saw him back when, just never knew it. He’d loiter around like the rest of them, the difference being he’d make a few regular purchases. For his ‘renovations.’ The boys would fire back, ‘What you renovating, Hops?’ and he’d smooth as butter on the wet days and fluster over on the dry say his kitchen or his bathroom, anything with pipes, either way not a dollop of sarcasm as if everyone in town ain’t already know about his ‘renovations.’ Although, he was real particular with who he showed. I’d seen it a time or two. So it was never no bother when he didn’t pay cash-in-hand upfront. I’d full well turn around and return a bit of that cash back to his hand, no how. All was well. All was just as well.
I put my nose to the lip and breathed in like a sommelier. Out of curiosity, not knowing what I was doing. Or maybe to catch a glimpse of what I had myself in for. There was something sweet in the kerosene. A rush to the forefront. Sasha. And damn it all, when I’d not thought that name in months. The spice, not hot like pepper but sweet like ginger. Sweet like vanilla. The only girl I could say with any confidence I ever loved. The way she broke my heart, probably the last. To think I’d finally got away. Then there it was, memory’s inescapable grand return. There was that hand lotion she’d lather on after she was done washing the brushes in the garage full of paintings I wasn’t allowed to see until she told me they were done, which wasn’t very often. Saw maybe two paintings over that last summer. Saw that one with the owl. It’ll always be my favorite painting, even if I’m the only person ever to see it.
Don’t be shy, now. It’ll bite, sure, Pop said, but it’ll bite sweet.
I took one to the head.
And it did kick.
And sure enough, a sweetness did sneak in.
Ol’ Hops boasted running it through magnolias. The flowers? Wood? Never knew. He took that one with him, God help him. All I know is that’s what he called this batch. Magnolia. ‘Holds on for no one,’ he’d say. Pop laughed at this.
I smiled, not yet grasping what was funny. Truly smiled at the sound of Pop’s laughter.
I shot back another, a bit more, a bit braver. Let the bite take hold. And Pop laughed again, letting the sweetness mingle without another word into the warm night-song of cicadas and lightning.
Donald Ryan is the author of Don Bronco’s (Working Title) Shell from Malarkey Books. Other works have appeared in Bullshit Lit, Reckon Review, The Daily Drunk, The Lumiere Review, Autofocus’s How to Write a Novel anthology, and elsewhere. Donald Ryan solely exists online dot com and at dryanswords.
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.
By Lamb
The goal was to round the four halls of the home alone. Just once. No walker, no nurse, supported only by my will. I’d hardly made it to the kitchen when my left thumb tendon spasmed, then my whole hand, brittling in pain, and I felt myself unsteady, and I said, Help, she’s falling! And there was Geri with a chair, an almond blanket folded squarely in the seat, which she opened large and tucked behind my calves as I sat. Like Alma, the other Filipino, she is different from the others. She does her job in the style of divine employment. I’m never unsurprised by her care. She wheeled me through the hallway to my requested spot outside the room of two residents named Franklin, whose door is usually kept open for the steady flow of medications, allowing a plane of morning sun past the threshold into the hallway for a few hours. My room gets light only in the afternoon, and not without a punishing heat. Alone and warm, I closed my eyes and began to bend the real about me, to wrap myself in a more persuasive fabric. Surrendering one power, another entered, and I grew, and the goal was now to rove San Bernardino, to dance what landscapes roll beyond this place for what might make my blood run quick again. Tall, I rise, breaking through the layers overhead into the day, greedy for the freshness ushered by my giant lungs, staring at the world in miniature, looking down on the way I used to live, spitefully forgetting every odor, every slap and hurtful word. From up here, I appreciate the beauty of the facility. The flat and graveled roof, wires curling faintly on its surface, the suggestion of parched grass in the courtyard, sliding glass and patios alight and lining the perimeter, door mats made of braided rags. What does it say about a person, to imagine herself tall as a chapel? Probably nothing, I hear John say, by which he always meant, Something, probably. And leaving thoughts of John for my new form, I am tall again, vigorous and standing like a myth above the nursing home, long as to retire the horizon with one stride, strong as to go again, again, however many times I’d like. My legs are steely in this reverie, unloosed from time and swelling, their movements streaked with lusty shine from my Italian loafers, oiled and in cherry leather. I skip the cold mountain crown, swishing my skirt over suburban clumps of houses, schools and groceries. I spend a week sleeping on the shore, in the soft contour of sand, licked awake on the sabbath by the waxing tide, my skin glowing. And now I’m hungry as a child for something from a tree, and so I drag my wooden heels ten miles inland, devastating every hillside in my drowsiness until I’m back in Bonsall, and as I slip into the avocado grove behind my childhood home, I assume my normal, sorry shape, though still walking unimpaired and with an even coloring. How familiar here. I remove my loafers, my stockings. By the dizzy, melancholic smell, the way I press into the soil, I know hot rain has flooded these trees, causing roots to rot, and, yes, I see, the leaves are yellow at the tips. There is dieback in the canopies, which are thinning like bouquets at the end of honeymoon. The boughs bowing morosely with their loads. The flush has borne too much fruit too soon. And I hear them murmuring, the trees. Another season’s work to pests, they say, to pot. Our babies scabbed like stones by feeding thrips. I walk between the rows, listening. More than once I feel a fledgling branch run its fingers through my hair. And when I stop to rest, my weakness returning, I see how time would have these trees: more bugs come to feed, mother borers and their eggs, limbs weak with holes and dropping as if with stricken hearts. A young man, handsome as a Christian, buys the grove at discount, teaching himself and his sons to rouse life from the roots. He bellies all around the trunks, spreading black mulch with his hands. The boys hide from the chore behind the trees, kicking skins, throwing pits to barely miss each other’s heads. I laugh and laugh, and as I feel time pass again as minutes, I decide I’ve met the limit of my fantasy, trying to open my eyes, failing to return to the home, to my chair in my spot of light in the hallway outside the Franklin room, and I fear I will remain here alone to haunt the happy promise of this family, jealous for my own son, for myself, of all that could have been ours, and I open my eyes again and scream to no effect, and wonder if I’ve bent things far enough this time to break. And I begin to understand how joyless death would be if a forever resignation to our imagined Edens.
Lamb is an American writer.
By Sheldon Birnie
The sun cut through the clouds over the lake, lighting up the water like a goddamn miracle. Like how they painted them, back whenever they gave a damn about oil paintings of majestic landscapes. My son, out frolicking as the waves lapped gently ashore. He moved like a sea otter, whenever he got in the water and really got going.
That magic hour before bedtime and sunset, mosquitos and darkness, he just played and played and played while I sat on the white sand, strewn with mayfly husks and zebra mussel shells, drinking navy strength gin and a half a lime. Three pelicans flew in from beyond the point, hovering just above the water, waiting on a fish to dummy up to the surface. I swear I remember every splash, every ripple, though I know that can’t be true. Not after all this time.
The other day a friend caught me unawares, staring out at that same spot of water of an evening. A spot I return to again and again, summer after summer. I’d been dozing, buddy claims. I’d lost track of time, I’ll admit. May have hit my limit on gin. I shot up in a panic, empty cup tumbling from my fingers to the sand, stumbling into the water, calling, calling out for my boy. I thought I’d lost him, out there in the waves. Thought he’d been there, only moments ago, splashing as he had that July evening, decades earlier.
Of course he hadn’t been. I’d lost him long ago, years after that evening in the waves. But it’s that evening I come back to. My little sea otter splashing, and those three pelicans flying low.
Sheldon Birnie is a writer, dad, and beer league hockey player from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, and the author of Where the Pavement Turns to Sand, a collection of short stories (Makarkey, 2023)
By Jess Gallerie
browsing for a new lower L5 disc, we catch each other’s tired eyes as a mistaken love you! spills from another customer’s mouth, directed at the woman behind the front desk. Maybe the customer meant to say thank you. The front desk woman who is I-shaped—beautifully upright—doesn’t respond. We stifle our laughter while thumbing through a catalog of bones, and you mouth something to me that I don’t understand. We’re here to pick out spinal discs like tiles for a kitchen backsplash. I want to renovate my life. I want a full cord reconstruction. I secretly hope to improve my communication skills. The underwater sounds of an MRI machine thump overhead, a reminder that we could all drown tomorrow. Saltwater dribbles down my chin when I try asking if the C7 comes in more colors. You smile and nod and pretend to follow along. Somehow, wordlessly, we decide on a beautiful and expensive L3 lumbar. I feel new for a moment, but my parting words to the front desk woman still come out gurgled and wrong—they sound a lot like love you! when what I meant to say was thank you and love my new spine.
Jess Gallerie is a writer from New York, living in South Florida. More of their short fiction is published or forthcoming in Bodega, Hunger Mountain Review, BRUISER, and HAD, among others. They’re currently writing a novel about a grocery store worker at the so-called end of the world.
By Kirsti MacKenzie
Jess says the Australian couple has a crush on me. We’re eating lunch on Naxos in the blistering sun. The square is quiet but for tourists buzzing past on motorbikes. Says it around a mouthful of chicken gyro. I can’t tell if she’s pissed or amused because her eyes are hidden behind knockoff RayBans she bought at a gift shop in Athens.
“How do you know?”
She tilts her head, chewing. “They laugh too hard at your jokes.”
“I’m funny.”
“Not that funny.”
We spent the first night before the trip fucking because we agreed: no fucking on the boat. Day broke over Santorini and we sipped coffee stupidly, watching cruise ships idle in the Aegean. When it was time to go to the south port we were sunburnt and met an older couple on the boat. Thought maybe it was just the four of us until more showed. One American, who announced that she was newly divorced. One tour guide, a handsome middle-aged Spaniard. And one last couple: Tom and Amanda from Australia.
“They’re always inviting you places,” she says. “But not me.”
“You’re implied.”
She squinches her nose like nah.
The guide tried to teach us to sail ‘til he realized we were all useless. Everyone promptly got sea sick except for us and the divorcee. We stuck these scopolamine patches behind our ears. Magic. The Australians sat in the galley, playing crazy eights and taking turns throwing up. I waited to use the john while Tom yakked. Amanda dealt me in. I was gone half an hour and Jess came looking. Took two islands for her to bring it up.
“They’re Australian,” I say. “Friendly.”
“Don’t play dumb, Ben,” she says. “It’s not a good look.”
~*~
On Paros we go for a group dinner. In the harbor, fishing boats knock together. Locals drink espresso under the rippling cafe awnings. Octopus hang over wooden railings, drying in the late sun. Jess takes pictures with her phone. Tom and Amanda stray from the group onto a stone breakwall. Tom catches my eye, waves me over.
“See,” gloats Jess.
“You’re being ridiculous.”
“Oh, am I?”
I don’t want to give her the satisfaction but when she trails after me onto the breakwall Tom frowns, says something to Amanda.
“Coincidence,” I say.
“Sure,” says Jess.
Jess wanders toward a little stone tower at the end of the breakwall, leveling her camera phone at different angles.
“What’d you get up to today,” asks Amanda.
“Swimming,” I say.
“We’re going to rent four-wheelers tomorrow,” says Tom. “You should come.”
“Sure,” I say. “I’ll ask Jess.”
Tom cuts Amanda a look, then turns back to me. “You two been together long?”
“Two years.”
Tom whistles.
“She’s quite,” says Amanda, “something.”
“Sure is,” says Tom. “Something, alright.”
“Gonna pop the question?” asks Amanda.
“Like what do you want for dinner?” I joke.
Big, open-mouthed laughs. A little too loud, a little too long.
~*~
The restaurant tables slope toward the harbor wall. String lights hang above us. Servers bustle past with flaming platters of saganaki and jugs of sangria. Across the table, Jess sits next to the divorcee and our Spanish guide. The Australians sit on my side of the table. Stray cats wait underfoot for scraps. The older couple never joins us for dinner.
“Well,” says the divorcee, squeezing the Spaniard’s arm. “Look at us.”
The Spaniard signals for another ouzo. He orders for the table. Squid breaded and fried, head and all. Whole sea bass spread wide on beds of rice with strings of lemons trailing from their insides. Grilled octopus arms crowning salads. Chewy, boiled tentacles and whole, unshelled shrimp on beds of linguine, nestled next to calamari and open mussels.
“They’re so—” says Tom.
“—whole,” finishes Amanda.
We tuck into the meal, taking a bit of everything. The Spaniard cracks his shrimp and sucks the meat from his fingers. The divorcee asks him what part of the squid she should start with. Tom and Amanda take turns spearing tentacle bits from the pasta, giggling.
“Ben,” says Amanda. “You have to try this.”
She spears a boiled tentacle chunk and rotates her fork in the linguine, then holds it up to my face. Tom watches us. Across the fork I see Jess’ eyebrows jump.
“That’s cool,” I say.
“Just try it,” says Tom.
“Chewy,” says Amanda. “Won’t kill you.”
She holds the fork closer to my mouth. The Spaniard drains his wine, looking pained. The divorcee has her nails and fork dug into a mussel. Her mouth hangs open. Jess puts her cutlery down, tents her fingers over her dinner plate.
“C’mon,” says Amanda.
When I open my mouth to protest, she shoves the fork toward my lips. I splutter and the food falls to my lap, leaving a greasy patch on my pant leg. Stray cats dart to pick up the fallen treat.
“Fumbled that one, mate,” says Tom.
~*~
We pick a beach on Mykonos that’s only kind-of nude. EDM thumps from the beach clubs behind us as we settle on reclining beds under a thatched umbrella. About half the sunbathing women are topless. Old Greek men stand naked in the surf, gold chained and pot-bellied, hands braced against their lower backs like pregnant women. Jess lies on her stomach, paperback spread under her chin. I reach across and unhook her bikini top.
“Should ask Tom and Amanda first,” she says.
“Don’t start.”
“They tried to spoon feed you.”
“Jesus. You’re jealous.”
We should be laughing, but she gets like this sometimes. Notices someone, stews about it, goads me into a fight. She props herself on her elbows, rests her chin on her palms.
“It’s not like that,” she says finally.
“Then explain it to me.”
“Did they invite you to do anything today?”
I clamp my mouth shut, fuming. I could lie to her, but lying would make it worse.
“Four-wheeling.”
Sea wind whips past us. She brushes strands of her hair out of her face, re-ties her ponytail. When she sits up, her bikini top falls. I want to take it back now. Want to tell her to cover up. Her nipples perk in the breeze. Two women next to us smile and whisper to each other.
“They like you,” she says.
“So?” I explode. “I’m not going to fuck—”
“No,” she says. “It’s not about that. This happens everywhere we go. You’re quiet and you’re serious and you come off—I don’t know—scholarly, maybe. But then something happens. You crack a joke. Something small, a surprise. This little gift. They laugh and laugh and laugh and all of a sudden, you’ve got them. People just—like you. You don’t even have to try.”
I suck my cheeks and bite down. “You said I wasn’t funny.”
“I lied.”
The lifeguard, a young Greek guy, climbs the stand next to us. I can see him peeking down at Jess’ boobs and I want to punch him.
“People like you, too,” I say.
“They didn’t ask me to go.”
“You hate ATVs.”
“Still,” she says.
~*~
When we get back to the boat Tom and Amanda are passing a magnum of bubbles back and forth. Chug chug. I ask them how it went with the ATVs. Amanda holds her left hand out.
“He asked me what I want for dinner,” she says. “For the rest of our lives.”
“What?” whispers Jess.
Tom gives her a strange look. And it pops out of her: one brief, damning hah. He takes a big swig, stares her down. And I see it now: her blurt, her guileless reactivity, her lack of poker face, choking on her foot always. Strange, to see her this way. To have the things I love made charmless in the eyes of another. The way I’ll never be able to unsee it.
“It’s not—” Jess sputters, gesturing at me. “—I just mean—you invited—”
“She means congrats,” I say.
“Headed for dinner, to celebrate,” says Tom. “Should come, mate.”
Jess purses her lips, expels a bunch of air. Pushes past me, headed for our cabin.
“Windmills,” I say. “We’re going to see them.”
I find her perched on the bottom bunk, flexing her toes. Her ponytail is falling out, thick and wavy from the salty breeze. I climb the top bunk, lean my head and shoulders over the edge. Dull thumping sounds from Tom and Amanda’s cabin. She looks up at me.
“Don’t ever.”
“What.”
“While four-wheeling,” she says. “And for the love of god, don’t invite anyone.”
Maybe she should be jealous of them. She’s always wanted to elope. If I had a ring, this would be the time to give it to her. Not on the beach. Not under the windmills. Not at a restaurant while the sunset explodes across the sea. Now. But I don’t have a ring. We’ll go on like this for seven more years. Nine days on a boat with six other people will be the closest thing we ever get to a honeymoon. I want to tell her, to explain, but all I do is agree: Never ever.
“They broke the rule.”
“Rule?”
Jess looks toward the thumping sounds. “No fucking on the boat.”
“People like you,” I say. “I like you.”
“You have to.”
“No,” I say. “I really don’t.”
And she laughs then, so loud and so long that the thumping stops.
Kirsti MacKenzie (@KeersteeMack) is a writer and editor in chief of Major 7th Magazine. Her writing has been published in X-R-A-Y, Rejection Letters, trampset, Autofocus, Identity Theory and elsewhere. Her best work can be found in dive bar bathroom stalls. You can read the rest here.
By Dan Eastman
In the morning, I cram my large body into my car. I drive a maroon 2013 Hyundai Elantra. It’s sun bleached and riddled with dents from teenagers crashing shopping carts into it. Weather’s hot as fuck and my shirt sticks to my back with sweat, which I then lean against the seat. I pray the AC is up to the day’s challenge.
Heading into the highway, I scream at other drivers to let me merge in front of them. I punch the dashboard when a pair of 18-wheelers box me in behind another 18-wheeler.
When a driver in another lane passes me, it’s personal, a competition. I floor it to 80. He still passes me.
How anyone stays sober through this I don’t know.
There is a direct relationship between my grip on the wheel and my detachment from reality. At a stoplight, I look over into the opposite lane and do not envy the herd of cars backed up to the horizon. I see a twisted abstraction of motorcycle and flesh and I curse the irresponsibility of the assholes that caused the accident bringing us to a crawl. Stupid assholes.
I remember the comedy podcast I have playing. I imagine the Elantra in a ditch, cops coming upon my corpse, and Bert Kreischer’s stupid fucking laugh still playing out of the speakers. I turn it off.
I’m running late. I must become more car than man. We are all vehicles. Our pleather and beige interiors marked with coffee stains and smoke break ash. All of us racing to jobs we hate.
Arriving with minutes to spare, I let the relief and reliable air conditioning wash over me. I let the cortisol and blood pressure drop. I thank the mercy of managers I’ve never met that view me as an asset, an abstraction.
Somewhere on Earth, a zen monk meditates on the beauty of all sentient beings. I envy him. I want what he has but no. I am inflexible. My foot will never touch the gas pedal from the lotus position.
Dan Eastman is a father, husband, and all around chill dude. He lives in Allentown.
By Kevin M. Kearney
Iberia wanted to know if I’d seen a Clean Out.
In my first two months at The Home, I’d seen plenty of things. Wayne slugging Keno during afternoon meds. Sophia launching her used tampon across the cafeteria. Stephen showing off his enlarged scrotum, a mass of skin I mistook for an overinflated volleyball.
It was my first real job. I think I liked it.
The Home was a world away from my quiet life with Mom, who was proud I’d landed a steady gig and amazed by the stories I returned with each night. “Unbelievable!” she’d say, every time, even when, objectively speaking, many of them were believable. These were people who’d lived on the street for years and sometimes skipped their anti-psychosis meds. It’s all relative, I guess. She’d been at Rite Aid for close to two decades. No one showed off their enlarged scrotums there, at least as far as I knew.
But Iberia, who’d been at The Home since its founding, told me everything I’d seen was nothing compared with a Clean Out. “You know Hoarders?”
I nodded, remembering an episode where the crew discovered a freezer full of dead cats.
“Those people?” She paused, letting the question float in the air between us. “Lightweights.”
The Clean Out was for Ms. Sandra, whom our Manager said had died in her sleep. It was a turn-of-phrase I hadn’t heard since I was little, one I’d since decided was bullshit. Nobody died in their sleep—they had aneurysms, or choked on their vomit, or suffered massive heart attacks. Maybe something had happened while they’d been in bed, but it wasn’t sleep that got them. “Overdose,” Iberia whispered on our walk to the room and mimed a needle striking her forearm.
The room smelled like sawdust and damp laundry. When Iberia turned on the overhead lights, I heard scuttling along the wall. Mice, I figured, though I prepared myself for something bigger to sprint across the floor. I removed a contractor bag from our cart and whipped it open like a jet-black parachute, hoping the sound might scare off whatever was hiding in the shadows.
Iberia was at Ms. Sandra’s desk, staring down at something. “Fuck me,” she said, and laughed. I got closer and saw what she meant: it was an open jewelry box with close to a dozen golden bands inside, each of them holding a shimmering rock. “Are these diamonds?” she asked, bringing one of the rings up to the overhead fluorescent.
They all looked like copies of Mom’s engagement ring, the one she still wore even though it’d been years since Dad passed. “I don’t like the look of a naked hand,” she told me once. “I don’t like how people assume.” Dad bought her the ring before he had money for a real one. According to Mom, it was a placeholder, though he never got around to replacing it. I don’t remember if it’s something they talked about before he passed. He’s been gone so long that sometimes I struggle to remember specific details. The color of his eyes, the way he laughed. Small things that feel enormous.
“Could be cubic,” I told Iberia, using the same shorthand Mom had passed on to so many well-meaning admirers, a self-conscious reflex she was never able to kick. “Imitation diamond.”
Iberia slipped the band on her finger and stretched her arm, trying to see how her hand might look to a stranger. “Feels real,” she said. It looked immaculate. “Clean Outs aren’t usually this good.” She took the ring off, then tried on another.
Our Manager had informed us that any valuables—“sentimental, monetary, or otherwise”—needed to be cataloged and then brought to the Front Office so they could be delivered to the next of kin. “I guess we should tag it,” I said.
Iberia kept admiring her hand. “Did you know Ms. Sandra?”
I didn’t, not in any meaningful way. She’d lived on the Women’s Floor, a part of The Home I avoided at all costs. She ate her meals alone, muttering in front of an open Bible. Our only real interactions were in the meds line. She’d swallow her lithium and Lexapro in silence, then thank me for my work. “You are a nice little boy,” she used to say in high-pitched tone, like something from Sesame Street. When I first told Mom the story, I did the same voice and she laughed and laughed. The next morning, I poured her a cup of coffee and she smiled. “You are a nice little boy,” she said.
“She didn’t have any family, really,” Iberia said. “Maybe a cousin or something. Distant, you know? Practically strangers.”
“So…” I said, hoping Iberia wouldn’t make me ask the question.
“So?” She was smirking, apparently enjoying my discomfort.
I took a deep breath. “So, you’re saying you don’t think we should tag it.”
“I’m saying a distant cousin doesn’t deserve it more than us.” She waved her hand as she spoke, the glittering crystal following her movements. “A distant cousin wasn’t serving dinner. A distant cousin wasn’t giving meds.”
I knew it was wrong, at least legally. It was theft, according to Network protocol, and what our Manager had said, and probably a number of official documents I’d signed without reading. But I didn’t say anything when Iberia handed me one of the rings, didn’t object when she told me we’d be fine so long as we kept our stories straight.
Mom would have questions. Like how I could afford a diamond on $13/hour. Like why I’d buy something so expensive when I was theoretically saving for my own apartment.
I figured I’d eventually have a plan.
That night, Mom asked about the shift, and I told her it was slow. I wondered if she could tell that I was lying, if she could somehow see the ring in my pocket. When I got upstairs, I stashed it in my nightstand. That was a year ago. It’s still there.
Every night before I fall asleep, I tell myself I’ll wake up in the morning, walk downstairs, and finally hand Mom the ring. “It’s mine,” I hear myself saying. I hear myself believing. “And now I want it to be yours.”
Kevin M. Kearney‘s writing has appeared in Slate, Stereogum, X-R-A-Y, and elsewhere. His novel HOW TO KEEP TIME was released in 2022 by Thirty West. More at kevinmkearney.com.
By Chuckry Vengadam
Everybody at the pregame is white. Which is good. Spending most of my first two years of college exclusively with Indian people left my friend-diversity imbalanced, so it was time to step outside my ethnic comfort zone and into this frat brother’s living room. Around the room are dudes in pastel-colored button-up shirts, but it’s hard to see exactly what color they’re wearing, or even the details of their face, because the only light in the living room comes from a dim lamp in the corner. It’s unclear whether the guys around me are frat brothers or rushees like me. Guys file in and out of the fluorescent kitchen to refill their cups, temporarily exposed like a flash photograph before dissolving back into the party’s murky interior, and others stand around the room, making idle chatter or scrolling through their phones. As I notice I’m the only Indian person in the room, my heart jumps and I assume it’s just my social status rising, but nope—it’s the unfamiliar, frightening realization that I know nobody there.
I didn’t tell my roommates I was here. They wouldn’t understand. They’re brown like me, so the idea of joining the University of Michigan’s Greek life was a laughable aspiration. We’re simple folk. Our conversations are often complaints about class, dreams for the future, and stupid inside jokes, usually over ashed joints and late night games of Super Smash Bros. If I tried explaining to them why I’m rushing a frat, they’d laugh. Me, in a frat? This smooth-faced pothead bookworm rubbing shoulders with beer-chugging dudebros? “Are you okay?” they’d ask. “Just come watch a movie, dude.”
So yes, part of joining a frat was to become cool and attract women, but another part was the thrill. Rushing Pi Kappa Phi (affectionately called “Pi Kapps”) in secret made it fun, scandalous even, the idea of sneaking off to join white folk in the late evening for a nightcap or twelve, the exhilaration of leaving my normal life behind in favor of something new, even if only for a while, like clothes after a shopping spree. And besides, this was more of a tour for me than a serious commitment. I wouldn’t really get in, would I?
They’re blaring some generic pop music at this pregame. I knock back a few gulps of jungle juice to fuel my confidence. This other dude walks by, short brown hair, slanted eyes, sort of, and I recognize him from one of my classes. Marco. I wave. He looks Asian–or maybe half-Asian—so, thank God, I’m no longer the only cultural representative at this event. There’s another outsider, someone perhaps more out-of-place than me. He seems to recognize me and suppresses a smile as he waves, his mouth opening the bare minimum to signal communication from afar. He comes over.
I say, “Whattup?”
“Not much, man, just chilling,” I think his face is emotionless, but I don’t really see it because the pop music is so loud we have to yell into each other’s ears.
“You rushing?” I ask.
“Yeah.”
“Cool.”
“You?”
“Yep.”
I’ve made a friend.
Which isn’t super surprising, because at the Pi Kapps meet-and-greet the previous week, I nailed it. I bro-high-fived several bulky frat bros on entrance, the kind where you slap palms and pull each other in, then half-hug with the other arm. I sat at their sticky dining table in a small room with walls of chipped paint. The brothers seated around the table were pink-faced and wore Timberlands, long hair stuffed under backwards caps, beer in or near their hands, like a dinner party for deadbeat dads. This one bigger guy asked me to tell him about my hometown in two words, so I said, “boredom and Republicans,” earning me some laughs and pats on the back. I knew I had a shot.
The thing was, the rush coordinator told me in his nasally voice, that pledging would take maybe fifteen to twenty hours a week. He listed some of the expected responsibilities. Cleaning up after parties, tutoring other frat members, cooking breakfast, and a bunch of other chores. I’m sure there was more left unspoken, like chugging a gallon of milk or running through a cornfield naked covered in lube or other equally clever hazing rituals. The problem is that I already spend an extra fifteen hours per week for Michigan Izzat, the competitive all-male Bollywood Fusion dance team I’m on, and there is no way I can do both. I’ll have to choose.
Minutes after I meet Marco, girls stride through the door. Short girls, tall girls, blonde girls, girls wearing yoga pants, girls wearing lipstick, girls with ponytails. A fantastic diversity of white girls. I’m excited. They’re half the reason I’m here. Fraternities grant you entire crowds of perfectly manufactured white women. You don’t find them at Bollywood dance competitions or Izzat parties. One of the girls approaches me. I clench, and my solo cup crinkles.
“Are you in my Chemistry class?” she asks.
“No.”
“Are you sure?” A little smile plays on her lips.
“Yeah, I’m not taking Chemistry, so definitely not,” I say, idiot that I am.
She excuses herself to talk to her friends, who gather in the kitchen to drain all the jungle juice from its vessel and oust me from my comfortable fortress. I’m in the living room, alone again. I search for people to talk to, but I’m not sure what to say. Most of the parties I go to have Indian people there, where everyone knows someone, and meeting new people’s easy because there’s always at least one mutual friend. Here, I’m on my own, searching for an entrance into the conversation.
My inspiration for rushing is my friend’s roommate from freshman year. Skinny, hunched over, daddy-longlegs-looking white kid. Always wore a hat as though preparing to go bald. When the three of us played video games in his dorm, he’d bless us with stories of how drunk or high he got while pledging. How many girls he’d hooked up with. He’d tell us this with a pinch of chewing tobacco tucked behind his lower lip, and then he’d throw a tantrum when he lost the game. But the thing was, he had good weed, dozens of friends, and a sex life, so I wanted—needed—to be like him, even if he and his frat brothers would get so cross-faded they’d pass out on bean bags in his dorm, their stupid mouths open as they held plastic cups full of their own dip spit.
My own plastic cup is, again, nearly empty as I stand in the corner of the living room trying to look casual. Some of the girls are perched on couches, pretending to be interested in what the collared-shirts standing above them have to say. By this point, considering my chug rate and smaller stature, I’m likely drunker than the rest. Cute white girl was a botched attempt. But that’s okay. The guys on Izzat would’ve gaped if I told them a white girl even talked to me. I could imagine them grabbing their hair, eyes bugging out, squatting on the ground in overdone displays of surprise. “Broooo, no wayyyy!” they’d say, and I’d just be like, “Yep.” Once the theatrics wore off, they’d circle me like sharks. “Why don’t you make some moves?” they’d say, the air thick with hoots and hollers.
To which I’d probably just smile and shrug, hands raised, because I was used to this. Bro-endorsed hookup culture is par for the course at a Bollywood collegiate dance team event: at the first night’s mixer, you find cute girls and “plant some seeds” by being boyishly charming and showing them attention; then, during your performance the next evening, you make repeated eye contact (especially during the sexy parts); and finally, at the afterparty, you pound five shots of tequila whose quality you severely overestimate before finding them and initiating a hot, sweaty grind session that would bring a proud tear to the eye of middle school you. Embarking on this journey was hard for me, though. I was a shy kid—a late bloomer, my parents said—so those first couple years of college, I had a hard enough time making friends, let alone romancing women, let alone drunkenly coordinating the loss of my virginity at national dance performances.
Half a cup of jungle juice later, I consider leaving this pregame until one fellow finally catches my eye: a big, bulky, WWE-champion-looking Indian dude talking to a couple of sorority girls in the corner. I approach, and he greets me with a, “Yo, what’s good, rushee!” He has an Indian accent. His shoulders are the size of helmets. He bro-high-fives me, which has now become a physically tiring greeting. His name is Yeshwanth. “Call me Yesh, though. How’s it going?”
“It’s good, man.” I suddenly have everything and nothing to say. What do I ask this fellow? What do I ask one who’s successfully infiltrated the whites so easily? His skin is dark and porous, his beard short but thick. He must be at least twice my weight, even though he isn’t much taller than me. Nothing about him matches the Pi Kapps brand of pimply pink faces and dip lip I’d grown accustomed to thus far, so I’m taken aback. “What do you like about Pi Kapps?”
He shakes his head and pauses for a moment, trying to wipe the drunkenness from his brain, and then looks at me with a kind of mentorly confidence. “This is where it’s at, dude. You don’t get this kind of brotherhood anywhere else.”
“Not even at other frats? What about OGP?” Omega Gamma Pi is our campus’s Indian fraternity, whose parties my brown friends and I would check out since they’d happily ply us with free booze and weed to convince us, a gaggle of wide-eyed Indian boys fresh from the suburbs, to join them next semester. “What about them?”
“Eh.” He waves dismissively and laughs. “Just a waste of your time, man.”
“I’m on Michigan Izzat,” I say, leaning right up to his ear as the music grows louder. “You know AJ Sarangi? Koushik Yadati?”
“Maybe?” He squints and nods his head with doubt. “That the dance team?”
I nod. “I wanna pledge Pi Kapps, but I don’t think I can do Izzat at the same time.”
“Listen, bro,” he slurs. He pulls me close, his wrestler arm wrapped around my shoulder, his other arm gesturing, like a big brother explaining how something worked. “I get why you wanna stay with them. They’re pretty tight knit. But you’re never really gonna have as much fun with that crew.”
My stomach sinks, but he has a point. The Indian community on our campus has a reputation for exclusivity. They don’t spend time with white people. Izzat boys would throw parties every other weekend, and the same people would go to each one, each browner than the last. Go to one and you’ll hear the same Bhangra songs mixed with hip hop beats. You’ll hear the same conversations about which girls on other dance teams are “down” and which aren’t. You won’t see a white face or hear “Sweet Caroline.” You won’t see the rest of the world.
Yesh’s eyes glaze over. I don’t believe him. He’s drunk and doesn’t know what he’s talking about. But he’s honest and friendly. And he’s the real deal, though, plucked out of Mumbai and into Michigan on a student visa, accented heavily, a little wild in his gestures with his head tilting as he spoke, not like the knockoff desis I dance with, so why wouldn’t I listen to him?
I finish my drink and stumble over to the kitchen to negotiate with the sorority girls guarding the jungle juice for a few sips when the rush event coordinator, his face a concerning shade of hot pink, enters the room. “Rushees, get on the buses,” he yells. People pass confused looks to each other, in part, I’m sure, because they’re shocked to hear such a loud expulsion of air through nasal passageways alone. “I said, rushees, get on the fucking buses, now.”
He jogs out of the house towards the first bus before I can ask where we are going. I look around, where I’m alone at this dying party with no one except my new friend Marco, who’s so drunk he can talk about nothing besides how drunk he is, and my new cultural advisor Yesh, who’s so drunk he leans against the wall, alone, staring into space, like the last book on a bookshelf. These would be my new brothers. I check the time. It’s past 11pm, and part of me wants to call it a night. I’ve acquired enough satisfying experiences, and I don’t know where these mysterious school buses are going. If I leave now, I can get home, get a little high if there’s any weed left, maybe play Melee with my roommates for a few hours if they’re awake. Then, the bus engines start, the cool white boys tossing half-empty solo cups on the lawn and giving zero fucks file into the vehicles, and man they look cool, so I join.
The ride lasts almost fifty minutes, our buses lazily careening down an empty highway through bumfuck nowhere Michigan. Yelling and whooping fill the whole bus. Guys keep standing and pointing at each other across the aisle, everyone else says, “Ayyy,” and I have no idea what they’re talking about. All I have is stupid Marco slouched next to me. The most useful part about him is the plastic water bottle full of vodka he brought onto the bus. Before dance competitions, our liaisons would similarly bring us secret liquor in water bottles so we could get sloshed in the auditorium after our performance. A much more preferable experience to this, I think, and I fight the urge to reminisce.
Instead, I ask Marco, “Where do you think we’re going?” to which he replies, “I’m so fucked up.” I ask, “Why are you rushing?” to which he replies by spitting on the floor. He leans forward and presses his forehead into the back of the seat in front of us. It stretches, and his eyebrows peel upwards so that each time the bus hits a bump, his raised-eyebrow face bobbles up and down. I can imagine having to mop up his vomit from the frat house floor in a month. He starts snoring, and I take the water bottle from his limp hand and glug down the rest of the liquor.
The bus squeals when it pulls off the lonely highway and up to a small building surrounded by nothing but air and grass. It’s clear from the line of depressed sixty-year-olds at the cash machine inside that this is either a casino or an inconveniently located Wells Fargo. We push through the next door and see, under the glow of invasive fluorescent lights, a few tables for blackjack and poker, a few slot machines, and many more old people wordlessly playing cards. No one has their cell phones out; no one speaks to each other. It’s a peaceful communal gathering, until, like a tsunami of fresh testosterone, twenty-five frat bros and rushees whoop and holler their way inside.
Risk-averse in most ways, I pull up a seat at the blackjack table just to watch. No one else is around for me to talk to. Marco sits a few seats down, his face pressed into the green felt of the table as his arm somehow stays upright to hold his cards. Yesh was too drunk to come. The other frat bros have dispersed, most headed to the small bar against the far wall for cheap PBRs. No music plays. The building is dead silent, except for the shuffling of cards and the growls of white boys. The hollow-eyed dealer, resigned to his duty, says very few words. There are no girls here. They were just at the pregame to lube us up, I realize, to get us excited before the big event. It’s just us and the geriatrics taking turns losing money.
Here’s where I employ my superpower. Here’s where I Febreze a situation I “should” like even if it smells like shit. I scan each segment of the casino and excuse its degeneracy: the senior citizens stone-silent in line for the ATM probably just had a long week, the drunken frat bros howling at the poker tables are just blowing off steam, the owners of this establishment must be proud to serve such a diverse set of patrons late into the night. Forget that I hate gambling, that I don’t like anyone here, that I’m bored and tired. My gut churns, but I bury it. Everyone else is having fun, after all. It’s what I do when I explore something new. I make it my home and forget where I come from. I bury myself, and I lose everything.
“How’s it going?” asks the rush coordinator, his nasal voice snapping me out of my daze.
“I’m doing great,” I say. “This is…so cool.”
His long brown hair has stayed slicked back, and his lower lip protrudes with a chubby bump that I try not to stare at. He slaps a hand on my shoulder. “Listen, man, if you join, you can have great nights like this for the rest of college.”
I think about this. I think about having fantastic nights at this rural money dumpster for the remaining two most formative years of my life. I imagine myself arm in arm with the white girl whose Chemistry class I’m not in, leading her into a casino, softly slipping a pinch of chewing tobacco inside my cheek like a jewel stashed for safekeeping, and playing blackjack with expressionless retirees for three hours. My stomach drops, and I feel a slow-release shock, this cocktail of trepidation, panic, and thrill, the kind that comes when your parents tell you you’re moving to a town you’ve never visited. Then, the rush coordinator, eyes glazed over, speech slurred, seals the deal. In three throaty loogies, he spits tobacco into his own beer cup and drinks it back up with a smile.
Dear God. I have no more Febreze for this.
I used most of it on Izzat. Forget about the brutal practice schedule and wannabe frat culture; performing for an audience is sexy beyond imagination. We’d line up on stage, our hearts thumping, as beautiful college girls from Texas or Ohio or wherever eye us from their seats. The music would start. The voice in my head would stop, and, for the next eight minutes, I’d feel the clarity that machines must have when they’re turned on. Who my teammates were didn’t matter; it was just about giving myself completely to this beautiful routine. Afterwards, there’d be thunderous applause, and we’d hug and jump and scream before shuttling to our hotels, draining bottles, and heading to a late-night afterparty at some glitzy club.
Dancing with Izzat is like working at a startup, though: long hours, big risks, huge payoff, guaranteed burnout. I shouldn’t have been surprised—we are twenty testosterized dudes desperately looking for a spotlight. We spend hours making sure our arm and leg angles match and formations are symmetrical. Captains yell at us to push harder, to keep our facial expressions up, to stop socializing and focus. We push ourselves four hours some nights, and I come home at two in the morning for a breath of fresh weed before sleeping like a corpse. Homework slips through the cracks. I wake up at noon and skip class. I lay around in bed worrying about school. It’s no wonder I wanted to quit Izzat to rush a frat, with its shinier status and fewer grueling athletics. It felt like, in the company of male friendships, a promotion from traveling consultant to senior associate. It felt like something I’d earned. But now here I am, nearly two years into college, watching a potential mentor figure silently ingest his own tobacco juice.
Since Uber doesn’t yet exist, I cannot make an Irish goodbye from the casino. Instead, I suffer while I wait for the buses to rev back up. Silently, I watch my comrades lose all their money at Blackjack to the older clientele, but they don’t seem to care. Their eyes are completely soulless. Some nod off right there at the table. Others hold their own, chatting up the other clientele, who mostly grunt in response. I imagine the Izzat boys here, and it’s a fun thought. I can see them pour into this establishment instead of Pi Kapps, can feel the frenzied looks we’d receive as we literally beat our chests after winning a round. They’d take control of the aux, blast Bollywood mashups, pat each other on the back, all of us laughing and dancing on the tabletops. It’d be fun, in another world.
Eventually, we board the buses again, this time without the rush coordinator commanding us, just marching in sullenly, like commuters before a work day. I can’t find Marco on the bus, but I imagine he went home the same way he came to the casino—snoring, forehead sticking to the seat in front of him and mouth loudly open. The buses reach the pregame house again, its lawn devastated with torn grass, plastic cups, and vomit. It’s dark, and the shadow splayed in front of the porch is either Yesh’s prone body or a huge shrub. I make it back home, where my roommates are asleep, and I slip into bed, thinking of how many cups I’d have to clean up off Pi Kapps’ lawn if I were to pledge, and what those cups might contain, and I shudder with relief, happy to be alone.
Chuckry Vengadam was born and raised near Detroit, Michigan. His work has been published in the El Portal literary magazine as well as a self-published essay collection, Late Bloomer, about a few of his life’s inflection points, which you can order here. He lives in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn.
By Dylan Smith
For the last three days I’ve been alone up here in my shack. Drying out, coming down, recovering. It’s been hell since I took the last of Chris’s pills but I’m through the worst of it at least. No more mirages on the edges of imagined things. No more violent voices in the night—no visions. Just a gentle breeze through the midnight leaves, a soft gust swirling through the eye of the storm of my life. My shack is like a hole in the side of this mountain. I’m holed up inside it like a vagabond, a fugitive, a thief. Nothing left but bandit rations now. Shitty coffee, cans of beans, blahblahblah—I’m hungry. Dawn fires built to boil water brought up in buckets from the muddy creek and this mountain wind moves through me tonight—I am no man, a ghost. My outhouse hole is almost full. Subterranean snowcapped mountain. Winter’s ashes and sawdust sprinkled down on decades upon decades of human shit. I wonder if Alma ever took one in there. God, I hope so. Then a part of her would be near. Art certainly has—that I know for sure. Still no sign of him yet. Nightmare from last night: Art mowing lawns in denim short-shorts and a wizard hat. Chris coming up behind him on horseback in the dark. Come and see. The barn down below both black and brightly burning.
No rain. No moon. No beer.
Still no word from Alma either.
June 16
Today I woke early and limped up to the Glasshouse to find some food. A freezer in the basement full of bags of fruit and fish. I let the fish thaw bare on the bluestone poolside while I floated in the salty blue water. From the pool ledge I looked out over familiar trailers and trees and in through the windows of giant empty mansions, and through my telescope I spotted Alma’s greenhouse, the creek, her kitchen. My Volvo looked like a grave newly dug in the grass beside Art’s barn, the dusty dead black of it reflecting no light. Let the dead bury the dead. No light. I thought about my poems as I floated. My narrowing path. My secrets. My vision’s been blurry in the left eye still, but back in the city Chris’s new girlfriend, Sarah, she super-glued the cut. I never should have buzzed up to that apartment. I had holes in my socks, no boots, so I had to—it was a necessary mistake. Sarah noticed the cut above my eye right away. Asked a lot of questions, reasonable ones I had no honest answers to. She looked me up and down a lot. Said she thought I was crying blood. The place was incredible though. Windows overlooking the park. Sarah told me the apartment had once been her grandpa’s. Apparently her grandpa was dead. I’d taken the last of Chris’s pills on the elevator up and was stealing a lot of paranoid glances out the windows: the cathedral, my Volvo, the torn up city street. I think it freaked Sarah out. The cathedral bells rang out at random with the rise and fall of the playground down below. I have to be sure I’m not getting towed, I told her. Sarah had bright eyes. Paint covered pajama bottoms. Green crocs. I thought I recognized her from somewhere, I still don’t know where from yet. I asked if I could take a shower. Sarah hesitated. I offered up more lies and she laughed and led me into her room. This is where I work, she said. Left me alone with her paintings for a while. They were big. I loved them. Each seemed to be throwing a birthday party for itself. I found a bag of Chris’s stuff in the closet. Some clean underwear and socks, Chris’s boots. The disco ball from our first apartment in the city, and this new journal. I stuffed it all into my duffle bag. Got cleaned up. That’s when Sarah knocked. She had a tube of super glue for the cut. Okay, I said. She sat me on a stool in front of my favorite painting. It had an umbrella in it, an actual umbrella. I asked about the painting. Up top and to the left she had flattened the black umbrella and underneath that was a row of upside-down yellow inventory paper. A perfectly balanced composition. Powerful work. Purple glitter paint swirled and smeared and Sarah pointed to a splatter of shining confetti letters. That’s the alphabet, she said. And some numbers. Right. And this white stuff on the umbrella here is Glass Balloons. I looked up at her. Glass Balloons? Yeah, Sarah said. She was looking at the picture. I just find this stuff, you know. The umbrella I found in Chinatown, the yellow paper I think came from a friend. I looked closer. Glass Balloons! The white stuff seemed to be what glued the umbrella down over blurry streaks of dayglo blue and orange buildings and glitter and the picture looked like a curb in the city to me now—like a birthday party had blown up downtown and this was the perfect happy rubble of it, the colors streaming in a kind of easy crayon rain, and the graph paper even formed a grid.
Sarah had pink and blue paint on her wrist. Even her smell was a little familiar. First she cleaned the cut with alcohol. Q-tips and gauze were involved. My hair still dripped wet from the shower and I asked how she knew how to do this. I grew up with a lot of brothers, she said. Sarah squeezed the cut. Applied the glue. She did it all gently though, gently. You’re going to have a gnarly scar, she said. That’s okay. I don’t care. Your hands smell just like flowers.
The Glasshouse refracted the daylight into rainbows and spangled them across the pool water at dusk. I washed the bird shit and blood from my jeans, then flung the legs over a tree branch to dry them. I could have ironed my clothes with a rock. That’s how hot it’s been. Birds soared up into the sun-shot air and dove back down in whirling black circles through the heat. I made a fire. Ate the fish. The sun went down behind the smoke drift and mountains. I wonder where the wind comes from?
I’ve been avoiding the inevitable, the unfolding calamity of my life.
Alma. The city. Everything I’ve taken from Chris.
It’s midnight now. Starlight shining through the pines.
I can still feel the sunshine in my jeans. Glass Balloons.
Every time a tree creaks I think it’s Chris hiking up to kill me.
June 17
This morning I found Art standing over a hole in one of the barren hay fields behind Alma’s garden. His hands were on his hips, his hat pulled down low against the sun. We waved as I approached but he didn’t smile at me or nod or speak. I watched him notice my new boots, my limp. He made a show of shaking his head. I stood beside him and put my hands on my hips too, kind of mocking him, trying to get a laugh. It didn’t work. I looked down into the hole. The hole looked deep. I didn’t know what was going on. Art knelt down and pulled up a tangle of red and blue wire from within it. The back of his sky blue shirt had been bleached from the sun and a length of rope led down deep into the narrow dark. The rope was attached to a back plastic pipe. The hole was as wide as the middle of a sunflower and it was lined with thick black metal pipe and the wind sounded like water rushing down through the trees.
Art looked up.
“It’s like the Endless Hole.”
“What?”
“You never heard of that guy? This guy from back in the day. On the radio. He’d always call in about having an Endless Hole in his yard.”
“Never heard of that.”
“Figures.”
Art stood. A red car came struggling around the corner. An old lady from up the road named Ruth. Art and I had done some work on her cottage. We waved as she went slowly by.
I took off my sunglasses. Art noticed the cut above my eye.
I hadn’t been to work in over a week.
Finally Art smiled.
“Somebody sure kicked your ass.”
“Yeah.”
“How’d you get ahold of new boots?”
“Chris gave me these,” I said. “Hand-me-down boots.”
Art laughed. Shook his head, scratched his beard. He laughed and laughed.
“What? I’m serious.”
“Sure you are, Sunshine.”
“No, seriously. What? They’re steel-toed. He gave me these as a gift.”
“Guy kicks your ass and gives you the boots to remember him by? You can’t bullshit me, Sunshine. I know Chris didn’t give you any free boots.”
I looked down at a burn hole in the right tongue of my boot. From when Chris left them leaning against the wood stove to dry. That was just last winter. Stepped straight through some ice as we walked across the creek.
The air all around us felt huge and hot and still. My rib still hurts whenever I laugh or cry or scream, so I tried to hold everything in. A bird cried out. I didn’t know what kind it was. I took shallow breaths. Another rush of wind came down from high up on the mountain and it flattened out along the tops of trees and banged open the gate to Alma’s garden. All around us the leaves turned inside out, sparkled a thousand shades of Beck’s. Art’s favorite beer. The gate slapped shut—then it flew open again. Now the air was still.
“Is she home?”
“Is who home?”
“Alma, man.”
“No—nobody’s home. Not anywhere. It’s been a ghost town.”
“Have you heard from her at all?”
“Heard from who—from Alma? Why would I?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t heard from her either.”
“Says the guy who’s never had his phone charged for as long as I’ve known him alive. You expecting her to write you a letter?”
“I don’t know.”
“You see that’s your problem, Sunshine. You’re even worse than I was. At first I thought she might be up there with you. Like a honeymoon kind of thing. But then I saw your sorry broken tracks limping up the trail alone.”
“You could have come up and checked on me at least. I was pretty sick.”
“Yeah, well. Seemed natural enough to me. You and that lonely poet life. Even lone wolves come down from the hills when they’re hungry.”
It was hard work pulling up the well pump. A hundred feet of water line and rope. The water line was slick and dark with earth and mud and it got lighter and more clay-colored the farther it went down. I didn’t have any gloves and my newly cleaned jeans got immediately muddy. Art walked the line out across the drought clenched field, holding it above his head as he went, and I struggled to pull the last of it up by the rope. The pump was fancier than I imagined it would be. Stainless steel cylinder. Somehow pretty shiny still. Art came back through the field, heat waves shimmering above the swaying burnt hay. More like something you’d shoot into space, I said. But the connections were all rusted and shitty above the pump, and I noticed the rope had frayed. Art examined the wiring. Said the thing had burnt itself out.
Art pointed at the date imprinted on the metal.
“I was your age when this went down.”
His shirt was soaked with sweat.
I looked closer. The date said 1991.
“That’s the year I was born,” I said.
Another car came around the corner quick—“Cop,” I said, standing.
Art looked up. No sirens or lights. The sheriff just waved as he hauled ass past the barn. Art waved back. I did not. The sheriff disappeared into the trees.
Art cut the well pump wire with his knife.
I knelt down again.
“You make everything we do look suspicious,” Art said.
“Weren’t you about my age when you found work up here?”
“Something like that.”
“Then wouldn’t you have been here when this well pump was put in?”
“It’s possible,” Art said. He looked up at the cop dust being blown away by the wind, then back down into the hole, frowning. “Yes—I guess anything’s possible. Maybe I helped the last guy do it. I don’t know—probably not. Long time now. Don’t really remember either way.”
Back up at the barn Art offered me a beer. I told him I’d been dry since my cathedral experience in the city. Something strange must have happened in there. Spiritual maybe. Art just shrugged. Alma’s well pump dead in his hands. Like a caveman carrying some kind of futuristic bone. He ducked into the dark of the barn.
I walked over to where my Volvo was parked in the grass. The Citibike was in there still. That was not good. My stomach rolled. I saw my duffle bag there too and remembered hiding Calder’s wizard hat under the seat. That was also not good. Shame. Fear. Guilt. I sat in a shady spot where the grass meets the gravel.
The grass was dry from no rain and my arms felt tired from the work. It felt good to be tired in that way again. It must have been right around noon, the shadows of the trees all coiled up and black. Art lunged back out of the barn with a beer and took a seat on a stone slab by my car. He had mowed all around the car and the grass underneath it looked greener than the rest. Tall and healthy to the bumper. Art looked down at the grass now too. The bottle in his hand was green and dewy and it dripped in a wonderful way. Beck’s. A beer did sound pretty good. I didn’t know what day it was. Not that it mattered. Art opened the bottle with his knife.
“I need you to move this car off my grass.”
“I can’t,” I said.
“Why not.”
“It’s broken.”
“Broken how.”
“I don’t know. It broke down. I had to get it towed up here.”
“You had this vehicle toward up here from New York City?”
“Yeah.”
“Sunshine—”
“Somebody down there would have charged me money. I figured we could fix it up here for cheap.”
“Cheap? You make no sense, Sunshine. You’re out of your goddamn mind.”
“Chris pays for whatever it’s called—roadside assistance. I happened to have his card. Free tows for the first ninety-something miles. The lady charged me an extra eighty bucks for the Citibike. But it was still pretty cheap.”
“And did Chris hand-you-down that bicycle too?”
“Look. The tow truck lady tried to jump it. The radio comes on but it wouldn’t start. Nothing happened.”
“Okay.”
“Will you help me fix it?”
Art shook his head and laughed. My jeans were heavy with sweat and muddy water. I looked up the hill. The air was so hot that it rippled, and Alma’s farmhouse flapped like a flag in the heat.
I heard another screech from that unfamiliar bird. I couldn’t figure out what it was.
“Next time you’d better taper off instead of cold turkey,” Art said. “It’s supposed to be safer that way. They say cold turkey like that could kill you.”
“Okay. But will you help me fix the car? I’m out of water.”
“Fine, Sunshine. A lack of power. I’ll try to take a look at it tomorrow.”
The bird call came from high up in the woods. I felt relief. I wanted to ask Art what kind of bird it was, but suddenly a silence had settled in all around us. The air felt still like the surface of calm water. I didn’t want to disrupt it. I closed my eyes. Some time passed. Art went back and forth to the barn for Beck’s but I stayed still, and soon there was a kind of opening, and a door, and beyond that everything was wonderful—the moment I entered upon was everywhere, it was perfect—something had separated me from my senses and now there was no space and no time and no language (so no me) and it was all spiraling up and up and down into one formless edgeless endless red door way deep down within me opening, opening in me where the light and dark had never been divided.
“This stone has a sparkle to it,” Art said.
His words sounded distant, lovely, alien, strange.
I opened my eyes. Art had three empty bottles beside him on the rock and his hat was hanging from his knee. We’d left Alma’s water line out in the field and it unfurled down below like a hundred foot snake. I took a deep breath. My rib didn’t hurt so bad anymore. The shadows of the trees had lengthened back out. I wondered how much time had gone by.
“Wow—Sunshine, look up—it’s the hawk.”
The hawk looked dark against the blue sky soaring, hanging as high as the well went deep.
“You ever read any Homer, Old Man?”
“Hey, easy. I’m not that old.”
“ that hawk is an omen,” I said. “It’s a drifter, no mission—floating just for us. How wonderful.”
“Speak for yourself, Sunshine. You sound like a dirty hippie. We’ve got missions—go look inside that barn. We’ve got plenty of missions.”
Art finished his Beck’s. The hawk’s shadow spun counter-clockwise over the roof of the barn and a blurry truck passed by blackly. Still not Alma. Art got up to get another.
“What the hell,” I said. “I’ll take one.”
Art came back with four and handed me his knife.
“Plenty of missions, Sunshine—too many missions. The only thing we lacked today was a little bit of, whatever—whatever it is—wait, what was it?”
The hawk cried out—it screeched.
I laughed. Beck’s. Pop-pop. The logo is a key.
I always figured I knew what a hawk sounded like.
I guess I was always wrong.
Dylan Smith is looking for a job if anyone knows of any jobs in Brooklyn.
By Cletus Crow
Excaliburs
I forge a sword that cuts through passive aggressive bullshit. It’s the only way I can love you. You forge a sword that cuts through bipolar mania. It’s the only way I can listen. When our blades clash, we’re happy. We fight to the death.
T.H. White’s The Once and Future King
Lancelot is one ugly cuss. He fucks Guenever, King Arthur’s queen. Arthur is one spineless cuck. Arthur and Lancelot are friends. If I’m Lancelot, I don’t know it. If I’m Guenever, I regret it. I’m Arthur sitting on the edge of our bed. Mascara runs down your face like lava. There is no joust.
Cletus Crow’s poetry collection, Phallic Symbols, is available from Pig Roast Publishing.
By Julián Martinez
Good morning, I am reaching out today to make clear some topics that came up during our interview last week regarding my prior employment. I was formerly employed by a public figure known across the globe for their ubiquitous impact and influence across culture, media and beyond. What you may not know is that this public figure is, and has been, a company and not one individual.
I was responsible for the management of paid actors who portrayed this figure in public and sometimes private spaces, while the operation was overseen by a think tank that included investors, political advisors, financiers, and myself since November of 2023. Prior to that, this public figure (who I am not legally allowed to name) was a living individual by whom I was originally employed in 2018.
My legal obligation to maintain the anonymity of this person has been in effect since my signing of a non-disclosure agreement, although this may have been nullified on October 23rd, 2023, when this individual set the paper copy of said agreement on fire in my living room, shortly before what was later referred to as “the personal-professional merger.” Thus, because of the uncertain status of this agreement, I am unsure of what can and cannot be shared without direct retaliation.
I feel it is only right to inform you, looking ahead to my in-person interview with you tomorrow afternoon for the Director of Development role, to address the gap in my resume which you remarked upon in conversation. To clarify, I am sharing some of the more sensitive, “gossip-y” (for lack of a better word) details to give context to the skills and capabilities I would bring to your team.
Though my time with Drake— fuck! Fuck. Sorry! Didn’t mean to write Drake. I could backspace and delete that, but you know fucking what? It feels good to type that. It’s like, oh, who’s that one pop star? I know his name. Tip of my tongue. Oh, fuck me! Drake! Lil’ ole Canadian rapper and entrepreneur, now a nominal figurehead for what is projected to be one of the most powerful groups of leaders in the world. I mean, you name ‘em. You think of a fucked-up rich person, and they’ve got their meat hooks in Drake’s carcass and I’ve shaken those hooks like hands.
The shit I’ve seen! You don’t know the half of it. You don’t know at all! I’ve never even said this shit out loud in the privacy of my bathroom or over text or even thought about it. God forgive me for all the suffering I’ve helped put innocent people through. God forgive me for what I had to do to Aubrey.
I don’t think the rich and famous, if they believe their own lies as much as he did, have any real friends, but we got to trusting one another. When he broke into my house, I thought he was my then-girlfriend Gina, but I reached for the other side of the bed and there she was, asleep. So I hopped out of bed and turned the light on and I saw a big dark blob in front of me ‘cause I’d forgot to put my glasses on. I said, “What the fuck are you doing?” and he said my name, all soft like I was the in-the-flesh angel my mother named me after, the way he was so good at making his words gentle and pleading in love songs, and I just broke down crying ‘cause I hadn’t heard that voice in months.
Once I threw my glasses on, I saw he looked like shit, which was surreal. Gone was the manicure and face care. He’d lost a lot of weight but his face was bloated. He was wearing all the same designer clothes as before but he smelled like alleyway. He was crying but when I went in for a hug his face hardened and he punched me in the stomach. Speaking of hardened, you don’t want to know the people I’ve seen with James Harden. Anyway, he hit me and I went down and Gina screamed and called the police. That’s when Aubrey really lost it.
He thrashed everything onto the floor— tables, dressers, cabinets— then he sounded like he was crying for real and asked where I kept the work documents I’d told him about, licensing agreements and actors’ contracts. I wanted to tell him no, but I just walked into my office, found the key to the drawer and held the folder out to him. It wasn’t fear. It felt like opening the door to a restaurant for your friend as the two of you walk in. I mean, I was going to name my firstborn child after this guy for changing my life. Gina never agreed with that, but Gina and I never had a kid, so it doesn’t matter.
I knew he’d been keeping money from me and the team, that he’d been hiding all sorts of secrets, leveraging dirt on us to other industry players, playing mind games to keep control until he disappeared when the merger was first discussed by the Board. Aubrey was a liability to OVO and the Drake brand, so we kept our careers alive even if he couldn’t do the same for himself. He was an unstable megalomaniac who I knew I’d never see again, so I gave him the papers. I watched him burn them in front of me then drop the ball of fire onto my couch. “We’re free, baby, we’re free,” he said as the red-and-blue lights painted his face.
The cops took him away and the firefighters put out the flames but no one came back to ask us any questions. The patrol car was involved in an accident on the freeway. After the merger, which would’ve finalized whether the B&E by Aubrey had happened or not, my new manager called me to the conference room and informed me that my position as Assistant Coordinator would be phased out as the operation moved forward. I didn’t ask any questions— I was so zonked from pills in those days.
Drugs were how me and Aubrey got close. It’s like I was doubling my dosage to make up for his absence. Jesus, this feels good to write out. To just not stop, to say it all— and that’s not even all of it! I could write books about this shit, but they’d kill me first. I thought they were trying to for a while, what with all the Jehovah’s Witnesses that came by my front door around that time. They’d leave pamphlets in my mailbox about repenting from the Devil twice a week. Business insider magazines, pharmaceutical freebies, pink slips for the car note, notices about soon-ending medical insurance, and Devil letters.
I couldn’t repent from the Devil. I was the Devil my entire twenties. One time I answered the door and— I mean, I was too fucked up— told the missionary at the door or whatever they call themselves that I would shoot them before they shot me, and I did. Well, I thought I shot them but I’d just thrown up a rocket of tequila and tomato juice onto their shirt. They never rang again but they kept leaving their pamphlets— I wonder what codes of silence they’re bound to.
Anyways, I’ll delete this shit in a second. Just feels good to let it out over a couple drinks. Not good, really. Dumb that I haven’t put it into words before. What I should say in this email is don’t fuck with me, Mr. New Probably Boss, because I will have a goon chop your child’s fucking lips off your face with the push of one button if you so much as cut me in line for the Keurig tomorrow. And if I don’t get your stupid little job I swear to God I will sever yo
Sent from my iPhone
Julián Martinez (he/him) is the son of Mexican and Cuban immigrants and is from Waukegan, IL. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in HAD, Hooligan Mag, Little Engines, The Sonora Review and elsewhere. His chapbook, ThisPlace Is Covered Head to Toe In Shit, is out in August 2024 with Ghost City Press. Find him online @martinezfjulian or martinezfjulian.com, or IRL in Chicago.
By Alexandra Naughton
originally published by Cosmonauts Avenue, November 2017
I tell you it’s okay, and you won’t think it again, but I’ve already filed it away to torture myself with whenever I want to bring myself down a notch. Another little trophy to take home from a plot against myself.
I’ve wanted to disappear, just be nothing. It’s so alluring to feel like nothing and then actually be like nothing, but still be present. Like it’s an ideal, a fiction. It’s only something you can try to do.
I’m writing out only the parts I like to remember.
I can be nothing, like how I feel at parties: you can see me but I’m not there. Colors and sounds wash over me like I’m miniature, standing inside of a pinball machine feeling lost and everything’s banging around and lighting up and making noise and I keep turning my head to try to keep up like a floating dust particle to focus on.
I can be invisible inside the chattering cacophony of a sweaty crowd, covered in so much, too much. I can block me out and lose me.
I can make my expressions invisible, like friends really don’t even get it, so I try to describe it calmly while getting brushed off and eventually overheating but frozen on the outside like a surprised animal about to get hit by a car that other people talk about and it sounds unbelievable until you see it yourself, until you are that animal in the crosswalk.
You, my new you of the moment, the you who finds me waiting for a friend at a coffee shop, the you who finds me online where I post my thoughts, you tend to like me better when I’m bendable, when I don’t voice preferences. You like me better when I open myself up for your inspection. All laid out on the asphalt, straddling me and wetting yourself in my cold sweat. Asking so many questions, wanting to know things that I don’t. You like poking at my soft parts. Pulling meat out and squishing it in your fingers like plastic wrapped factory bread. Examining me, taking me apart out of curiosity and discarding when it gets too messy and you’re just over it. Starting something you don’t want to finish or put back.
You can shrink me, make me feel small. You can empower yourself that way. Lean on me until you’ve sunken me into the mud and I’m stuck there for a while. Make me invisible that way, that ordinary way you do. That subtle way you do. Make me not know myself, make me lose myself so you can find yourself.
Make everything feel invisible like you’re not as nice as you think you are. So accustomed to taking up space, making yourself loudest. Make me invisible like I made a joke and only you heard me, so you said it louder and everyone laughed. Like this happens so often I wonder if I am even speaking out loud sometimes, start gaslighting myself, under some invisible control. Make me invisible for your satisfaction. It’s a secret, not something you would share.
Make all the efforts of others invisible because it isn’t cool to care but you are still the only one who matters and if you’re unhappy then we’re all unhappy. Waysided because even though I am neglecting what matters to me to better suit you it is still not enough. Getting projected onto. And at first I am happy to be whatever you want me to be. I offer myself up freely, willingly. You ask and I oblige. And I’m happy to, at first. Because I’m not sure what to do besides listen and trust you.
Why make invisible always my first choice, my go to? I guess I’ve always wanted to be a ghost. I guess I’ve always tried to make myself smaller. Make it harder for people to find me.
Make it easier, existing on an at-will basis. Silently watching, listening, wandering around aimlessly, and enjoying it unseen. Easier to slip away.
What am I saying here? Something about commodification of the flesh. Something about finding it customary. Something about being just another bitch who is feeling things.
Is there subtext here? Maybe we should workshop it. Let it become someone else’s text. Edit me out, flesh and all.
Invisible like something insidious. Invisible like destitute. Invisible like displacement. Invisible like disassociation and you think I’m just being dramatic. Invisible and there is no one who can help. Invisible and no one can hear you scream, or they hear but no one looks up. Invisible and you know they can see you, they’re just pretending they can’t.
Invisible and they’re laughing about it.
Alexandra Naughton is the author of ten poetry collections. Her first novel, American Mary, won the 2015 Mainline contest by Civil Coping Mechanisms and was published in 2016. Her work has been featured in Dusie, Sporklet, sin cesar, Maudlin House, carte blanche, and elsewhere. She writes Talk About It on Substack, and organizes the Bring A Blanket reading series in Philadelphia. Find her on instagram @alexandranaughton and twitter @alexandranaught
By Matt Starr
The other night, my in-laws texted my wife: There’s this guy on The Voice from Matt’s hometown.
They texted his name and age, and my wife asked, “Do you know him?”
I said, “Yeah, I know him.”
I pulled up the clip on Twitter, and sure enough, it was him. Looked a little different but sounded the same. Voice like a rock blanket, smoothing out a stone. Scraping away the rough edges. Not perfect, or really my cup of tea, even, but compelling in its heartfelt way. He was singing a country song.
I don’t watch shows like The Voice, but my understanding of how it goes is this: There are four judges sitting in chairs. They start off with their backs turned to the stage, and a contestant begins singing. If the judges like the voice, they hit a button, and their chair will dramatically turn to face the singer.
When one of the judges smacked her button about thirty seconds into the number, it was like I was spinning around with her. Back to this bar from my early twenties. The Speakeasy was all wood and old-school fixtures and dim lighting. They’d tell you that was on purpose. To create a warm, nostalgic ambiance, but it was really so we couldn’t see how sad we all were. Maybe you were supposed to feel better drowning your misery at a place that wasn’t suffused in seedy neon, the Prohibition vibes intended to feel classier than, say, the sports bar down the road with its quarter wing nights, swarming flatscreens, and Journey cover bands. I don’t know. I didn’t feel better anywhere.
That night the guy who would later be a contestant on NBC’s The Voice was on this platform they’d fashioned in the front corner of the bar. Growling something or another into the mic. Long hair, highlight-streaked and curly. I’d seen him somewhere, but I couldn’t put my finger on it until he finished his set and ambled over and plopped down on the stool next to me.
We sat beside each other for a few minutes, sipping our beers out of pint glasses, separated by that awkward void in which someone wants to say something but doesn’t know how. I was buzzed, and by buzzed I mean drunk. He broke the silence.
“Do I know you?”
“I think we take classes together. Over at Genesis.”
“I knew it.” He snapped his fingers and we shared a laugh.
The laugh said: Ain’t it some bullshit that people get away with the things they do every day, but not us, no, we just happened to get caught when we did, and now we have to drag our sorry asses to class at eight o’clock every Saturday morning and fork out sixty bones to hear some poor underpaid social worker read off of a page that has About.com printed across the top, and if we’re lucky, if, at eleven o’clock, after all the group therapy and cigarette breaks, we blow and hum into this tiny plastic box and it comes up goose eggs, we get to come back and do it all over again?
“How’d you wind up here?” I asked, meaning the situation rather than the place. But were they really all that different?
“They got me coming home from a gig. Blew right at the limit. Can’t beat it, huh?”
I shook my head. Pretty standard stuff.
“I don’t know, man,” he continued, looking into the backbar mirror. “My dad’s a preacher. I always felt like I let him down by trying to do music instead of preaching like him. And now this.”
I’m still not sure what I did for him to volunteer this information to a stranger. But in a way, I guess I knew. Sometimes you speak truth into the darkness, hoping it won’t find its way back to the light. Or, that by the time it does, it won’t be the truth anymore.
“What about you?” he asked.
It hit me in a flash. The abbreviated whoop of the cruiser’s siren at 7:30 in the morning. Saying my ABCs backwards. The bald cop who put me in cuffs. The expression on my mama’s face.
“My dad’s dead,” I said to him.
He nodded. You don’t always have to understand.
On The Voice, across time and space, he finished his audition. Told the judges where he was from. I hit the home button.
If, after all is said and done, on the day of my judgment, if there’s even a God in the first place, if I am faced with the backs of four chairs, surrounded by a constellation of souls, an audience of faceless angels, if I sing about pain and heartache and regret and everything in between, if I belt the words until I am hoarse, if I empty my lungs, will anyone turn to listen?
###
Matt Starr is from North Carolina.
By Justin Carter
The only time I ever went to Manny’s house, I thought someone was fucking with me. I was out with a couple of the guys and we were trying to find somewhere we could go to smoke some weed, and R.J. suggested Manny’s place. I didn’t really know Manny—he was one of R.J.’s friends out in Newell who he worked with. I’d only met him twice, both times out at this coffee shop that a lot of people frequented. But he had a house and didn’t live with his parents, so that was good enough for us.
Soon as we pulled into the driveway though, I knew we were making a mistake.
One of the front windows was shattered, part of it covered up with a blue tarp and the rest of it was just hanging open. The garage door was off its hinges. Half the driveway was just trash bags.
“Dude. What the fuck.”
R.J. was unfazed. “A place is a place.”
We walked right through the unlocked front door and found Manny inside watching the Home Shopping Network on mute and listening to Dragonforce on his phone. He looked at us, nodded, turned back to the television. We just kind of stood there for fifteen seconds.
Manny motioned to the screen. “Y’all ever try one of those air fryer things? Shit looks sweet.”
R.J. laughed and we made our way to the couch. The room was real sparse—a couch that looked like it’d been pulled out of a dumpster, a recliner that was in surprisingly good shape, a coffee table that I’m pretty sure Manny built himself, and then this huge television playing infomercials for cooking equipment. I mean, it was the nicest fucking television set and it was so out of place.
We got high, because that’s what we were there for. At some point Craig, the third guy, left. I guess he must have called someone for a ride. I dunno, he got up to go to the bathroom and never came back. I was too blitzed to really pay attention.
When I smoke too much weed, I do this thing where I just like to wander around, so I did that. Walked in and out of all of Manny’s rooms. And then I opened the door to this spare bedroom in the back of the house.
And Jesus, I immediately regretted that.
The whole room, every wall, window, even the ceiling, were covered in these sigils drawn with a Sharpie. I mean, there were hundreds of them, and then I looked down and saw this huge pentagram carved into the floor. Fuck. We had to get out of there.
I turned around and Manny was standing right behind me. I screamed. Didn’t mean to, but I couldn’t help it.
“Shit man,” he said. “Didn’t mean to scare you.” I just stood there. He pretty quickly realized what was up. “This shit was like this when I moved in.”
“Oh.” I wasn’t sure I believed him.
“Yeah, I try to not come in here. It gives me the fucking heebies.”
He took a step toward me. At least I think he did.
“It’s…weird man,” I said.
“Bad vibes, for sure.”
I heard R.J. cough in the other room, but it didn’t sound like a weed cough. We’d shared enough joints for me to know what that sounded like. This one was different. Something was wrong with it, something was wrong with all of this. Manny took another step, or maybe I was the one taking the steps. R.J. coughed again. It sounded wet, like he was choking.
“Is he okay?,” I asked.
“Why wouldn’t he be?” Another step closer. I looked down and I was standing in the middle of the pentagram. Had I always been? There was one more cough. Another step from Manny. I want to say he was smiling but I was too scared to look at his face.
Justin Carter is the author of Brazos (Belle Point Press, 2024). His short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in BULL, HAD, Passages North, Rejection Letters, and other spaces. Originally from the Texas Gulf Coast, Justin currently lives in Iowa and works as a sports writer and editor.