Author:

By Mike Andrelczyk

The phone rang. It was Donnie. He thanked me for dropping off the mail and wanted to know if I would bring him four Burger King cheeseburgers, two fries and two Dr. Peppers and said he’d pay me back. 

I agreed mostly because he had one leg and lived with a parrot named Mr. Whistler and his wife was dead and he just sat in a chair and watched the weather channel all day. 

I went into my room, got some money, packed my one-hitter and picked up my keys.

Grandma was still napping in front of the tv. BET was airing one of those daytime courtroom shows. I heard the tv judge say “guilty” as I walked out the door.

I took the long way to Burger King through the rich development and smoked and noticed how pretty much every cloud looked like a submarine. There were five big clouds and they all looked like submarines. Slowly gathering forces and moving to attack. I swerved to miss an SUV parked in the street, made a right and went down a street that took me out of the neighborhood. 

The weed made me hungry. Soon I was staring at a menu with pictures of hamburgers, onion rings and chicken tenders and telling someone I couldn’t see how many cheeseburgers, fries and sodas I wanted to buy. I bought some cheeseburgers for myself and one for Grandma too.

I paid for the food and took a handful of Donnie’s fries and ate them. They were so salty that I needed a sip of one of Donnie’s Dr. Peppers. I merged into the traffic.

I passed the outlet mall and I saw a woman walking down the shoulder of the highway holding a leash with an iguana on the end and pink umbrella above her head. It wasn’t raining. The iguana on a leash made me feel anxious and suddenly remembered that Sebald died of a heart attack while driving.  

I reached into the Burger King bag and unwrapped a cheeseburger and ate it in four bites. 

*

The weather channel was blasting. The screen displayed a satellite image of a hurricane swirling over the Bahamas. For a man that never left the house, Donnie was obsessed with the weather. It made sense I supposed. His parrot Mr. Whistler squawked and scrabbled around his cage when I walked in. Donnie smiled seeing the Burger King bag. 

“Delivery man!” he said. He pointed to a $5 bill on the table. It didn’t cover the cost of his food but I picked it up without saying anything. 

“How’s Grandma?”

“She’s good. Napping. Hi Mr. Whistler!” I said approaching the cage. 

The parrot took three quick side-hops along his perch and pressed himself against the cage bars. I stuck my finger near his beak and he sort of bit it a little. 

“Could you microwave those burgers for me? I do them for one-minute. But pause it at thirty seconds and open the door to let the hot air out. Can I have that soda?” 

I handed him the Dr. Pepper and went into the kitchen.

“Could you wash my leg before you go?”

“Yeah, sure.” 

Every once in a while Donnie would ask me to clean his leg. He’d remove his prosthetic leg and then I’d take some disinfectant spray and wipe it down with a paper towel. Sometimes I had to help him out of his chair and into the bathroom if he was struggling to get up. 

I put a burger in the microwave and went over the kitchen table where he had a basket of various medicines. I looked through the pill bottles like I was perusing a magazine rack. There were a lot. I found the Percocet and carried the bottle over to the microwave. I waited for the microwave to beep then twisted the cap. I put another burger in and spilled about ten pills into a napkin when the microwave beeped again. I folded the napkin and put it in my pocket and placed the burgers on a paper plate along with some fries and served them to Donnie. He ate.

Then Donnie removed his leg. I cleaned off the prosthetic while we watched the weather channel. A radar image tracked the hurricane as it moved closer to the tip of Florida. I thought about what it must be like to lose a limb. To not be whole. To know a part of you is gone forever and to accept there would be things in life you couldn’t do anymore. It seemed like some sort of early death. Or another life. I thought about losses and gains. The front side of a coin is called the obverse. I didn’t think I’d deal with losing a limb very well. I wasn’t really a strong person. Some people seemed to adjust pretty well though. Acceptance was the key I supposed. 

I finished with the prosthetic leg and helped Donnie put it back on. 

“All set?” I asked.

“Yeah, thanks.”

That was it. Donnie was the one-legged burger king reigning from his throne. Watching the storms of the world destroy everything. 

I went outside. It was a beautiful day. A submarine was cruising through the sky. I crossed the street and went inside.

******

Mike Andrelczyk is the author of four collections of poetry including “!!!” coming out on Ghost City Press in May. He lives in Pennsylvania. On Twitter @MikeAndrelczyk and Instagram mike_andrelczyk.

By Dylan Smith

Heirs to an abandoned house in the mountains, my two bigger brothers and I came up from the city to confront our father, the town’s retired fire chief and an unhinged, binge-drinking dead-beat of a drunk, but he was gone. 

Great clouds of towering grief gathered above the gate. Our barn had burned down two winters before, and though its absence had abstracted into an empty haunting presence beyond the doors of the gate, not a lot was actually lost. A tractor, some chestnut boards; some old chains and a few chickens and some rope. It was more about the insurance money our father had collected. It was about what had not been done with it. 

Flowers of wrought-iron ornamented the family gate. Both my brothers are younger than me, but by then they had grown much bigger, and so they towered like these familiar trees, always swaying beyond and above me. 

In spite of their strength and their grace, my brothers failed to force the broken gate. Something about the sensor was gone—this was years ago, the family gate was always broken, and so it only shut—and that’s when we phoned the gate guy again. His work would remain a mystery to me, yet another hour’s heaving from behind those iron flowers, and he said the sensor was beyond him still. 

I imagined big flowers blooming between this gate guy and me. Maybe a mountain wind would part a maple limb, I imagined, laying it loudly along the gate. Then the gate guy might yell out, fall back, and we might have rolled around together out there in the gravel, laughing, or rolling beyond the gate and into town together, becoming one big cosmic rock together, maybe fucking even, our laughter like the rain. 

I would not have put it past our father to have sabotaged the family gate. 

“How else can you explain his always being gone and coming back, if the doors of the gate can only shut?”

Shrugging, the gate guy suggested almost anything was possible. As the newest volunteer at our father’s old department, he’d been first to arrive when our barn was burning. I admired the lean earnestness I found in his beardless features. His eyes were a sober blue, his working hands ungloved and noticeably clean, and now our breaths made shapes together, forming foggy blossoms of the winter air. 

“But it’s more likely something to do with the weather,” the gate guy said. “It’s been a long winter yet. Sometimes these sensors just freeze.”

That’s when the tallest and youngest and brightest of my brothers walked into the woods to piss. As a kid he’d suffered a serious injury to his left leg, and so he mirrored our father’s ruined gait as he went. But his head was always way up in the clouds, curious and wandering, and appreciating art, and in spite of his chronic pain, he is still sensitive to the most subtle of emotive signals and shifts. You can watch him read your changing face. Through the leafless trees you could see he was contemplating the problem with our gate. 

When he returned from the wood, which had really been rocked by the wind while he was in it, my youngest brother held up a sacred-looking stick. He said it had reminded him of the walking stick our father uses; that it had nearly beat him over his head as it fell from above. 

He suggested the gate guy try striking the sensor with it. 

To my surprise, this worked—and as the gate guy struck the broken sensor twice, holding up the miracle stick, our family gate opened to the first moments of spring, the clouds of winter parting briefly above my brothers, whose new shadows came together as one in a hug and stretched up that treacherous hill toward our house, where through the barn’s absence I saw the windows of our childhood home were glistening—or glittering in this new, glittery light—and I was reminded of how rainbows formed from sticky-notes had filled the windows once, the paper squares bleached by decades of exposure to the sun. 

The rainbows were to protect the birds from crashing in—our mother’s technique—robins coming home from wherever they winter.

But by then my brothers and I knew better than that. Our mother was dead, and her sticky-note rainbows were gone. So was the barn, and our father was a stinking drunk, and soon the gate guy would be gone with our miracle stick too. 

We knew the sky would shut. Soon it would be singular and threatening and near again. We knew the way the world worked. 

With an air of camaraderie and confidence in our newly formed crew—and because beyond the gate our family’s farm truck had four flat tires—the gate guy offered to take us from farm to farm in search of our father. 

When on a real tear our father sought refuge inside barns, or stables, and being as it was about midday, we agreed our first stop on the way into town should be Sissy’s. 

Most farmhouse wells up there stink of dead snakes and sulphur, but not Sissy’s. Sissy’s land had been graced by a spring—perfect crystal water pouring from a pipe—and so she’d crafted a covenant with the town, one allowing her water to flow for everyone, and forever, in perpetuity, like a fountain in a fable. 

All along the mountain road men outside trucks shoveled gravel into holes, and my youngest brother wondered why. 

“I think the holes are formed by ice heaves,” the gate guy said. 

My brothers had climbed into the back of his van and were laying among the gate guy’s tools and cords; his hinges and latches and spare iron parts. The gate guy’s fire pager was mounted to the dash. When I looked up into the rear-view mirror, my middle brother was there on his stomach, holding our miracle stick and smiling. 

The gate guy drove us down the mountain, past the old library building, then the place that sold beer and chips and gasoline, and past our father’s old firehouse, where all the red garage doors were shut, we came to a familiar clearing with a view of the reservoir. 

Above us the wind had brought about more towering clouds, and the reservoir reflected a single windswept tone of monotony and gray beyond us. The gate guy had been explaining ice heaves; how water gets into the pores of the asphalt, then freezes, forming little wedges that break up the road. 

“Do you know Sissy very well,” I asked. 

“Oh, sure. I lived without plumbing for a while. Came down to her spring for my water. Saw her standing out there all the time.”

“Is she still painting?” 

“I didn’t know she painted. I heard she’s getting old.”

My youngest brother told the gate guy how Sissy used to come to our school to teach us art. How we’d heard she kept dead birds in her freezer.

“Legend was that if a bird crashed into the schoolhouse window, she’d probably try to scoop it up and take it home and freeze it for her paintings of birds.”

My youngest brother loved this myth. He looked up at me in the rear-view mirror, and both of my brothers were laughing. 

“One of her out-sheds has a view of the reservoir,” I said. “We haven’t seen her stuff in a while, but she used to use the out-shed as a studio. Our mother and her were close.” 

The gate guy touched his fire pager in a nervous gesture that reminded me of my father, then gently turned on the van radio. A panel was discussing the previous summer’s drought. The consensus was that soon there would be no water. My youngest brother had started to ask an earnest question about our father’s replacement at the department, but before the gate guy could answer him, we’d turned onto Sissy’s road, and soon we’d arrived at her spring. 

People from all over came to Sissy’s to fill their plastic jugs with water from the roadside pipe. From spring to road, the pipe had been run underground, passing under her gate, so Sissy was not disturbed by the cars idling constantly across the way. 

By design you had to push open Sissy’s ancient gate. I got out of the van to do it, and through the bars I noticed Sissy’s famous maple trees were gone. There had once been a kind of grove of them protecting her old stone house from the wind and the road, and the syrup Sissy made was well known around the town. Hills of hay fields rolled up, then down to the right, and you could see her out-shed studio and the many stables, and her barn, and above the willow trees that lined her creek you could see a gray glimpse of the reservoir, and beyond the reservoir was the town. 

But now, without her maple trees, you could see directly into Sissy’s old stone house.

I got back into the van and told my brothers about the missing trees. They heaved a single mournful sigh. The gate guy touched his fire pager again. The presence of these pagers had always made me anxious. My memories of childhood are haunted by the inevitable threat of their sound.

All down Sissy’s gravel drive, wooden ladders leaned against squat apple trees. We found her atop the ladder closest to the house, preparing for an afternoon of pruning. Sissy stepped down slowly off the ladder to say hello, but right away I saw the way she’d aged. It was more in her eyes than anywhere else. They were blue but bloodshot, or dulled, and kind of sagging, their edges raw and red in the wind. As she wiped her hands on a cornflower apron, nodding hello, it was clear she wasn’t sure of who we were. 

“Sissy,” I said. “Our father—the fire chief—have you seen him? Our mother was April. Your old friend.” 

Sissy said hadn’t seen him, our father, and then started in about the history of her spring. Both my brothers stood over her, nodding and smiling. The willow trees by the creek went bending in the wind, and the gate guy was leaning against the miracle stick. 

We’d all heard the speech before, but I’d heard it a thousand times. As much a history of our mountain town as it was a history of her family and spring, her speech always started with the fact that one hundred years ago, the state had flooded her family’s farm in order to build the reservoir, moving them farther up the mountain. When the state transplanted Sissy’s family, no one knew of the spring. But Sissy’s grandfather found it, and he drilled an artesian well when Sissy was just a girl. When her parents died they left Sissy the land, and on and on, and later she’d marry an old hay farmer named Mick. Together they created a covenant with the town. Now when Sissy is gone, no matter who takes ownership of the property, the spring is to be protected. 

“In perpetuity,” Sissy famously said. 

But by the end of her speech, Sissy had all but forgotten we were there. This used to happen to my father when he was drinking. Sometimes he would catch a familiar rhythm, some deeply familial pattern of speech to sweep him away, or out of whatever barroom he’d trapped us in. As a teenager, I found it’s about breaking up this familiar rhythm. Once interrupted, my father could usually snap right back. 

I took off my gloves and clapped into the cold wind. 

“Sissy,” I said, clapping. “Sissy—what happened to your maple trees?” 

“My maples. Yes, you remember my maples. The tree guy said they meant a danger to the house. All this wind, he might have been right. It happened in the autumn. The tree guy came with a crew and took them.”

 “Will you show us the stumps? Will you walk us up there so we can see?”

And as our crew moved toward the old stone house, I took my middle brother by the arm of his winter coat. I told him to go looking for our father. 

“Just the usual spots,” I said. 

The gate guy turned, having heard me, and offered to go looking for him too. 

“Good. Then I’ll try to get Sissy to take us to the out-shed.” I gestured toward my youngest brother, who was helping Sissy up the hill with his limp. “We’ll buy you guys a little time, but also I think he’d like to see Sissy’s paintings.”

“Okay. And while we’re at it we’ll check her freezer for birds.”

“Wait—no,” I said. “Man, no. Please. Don’t go into the house. Just the usual spots. Stick to around the stables and the barn.”

But my middle brother had already gone, pretending not to hear me. 

Shrugging, the gate guy handed me the miracle stick. 

He turned toward the wind, and with his back to me he was laughing.

Sissy’s out-shed windows made up the whole south wall, accepting as much winter light as a structure could, and like all great studios, hers had become completely encased in the remnants of her work.  

I remember the last embers of a fire glowing red in a stove to the right, but everything else was blue. Three heavy tables at the center of the room held tin containers of thinners and brushes, pencils and paints, but because Sissy worked by easel, my eye was constantly brought back to her canvas at the center of the room. 

Sissy seemed to paint a single motif: an oval pool of shining water in the saddle of two blue mountains. Sissy’s studio sheltered hundreds of these works. Yet each of the paintings were distinct, each canvas alive with something refreshing and totally new. 

Beside the work in progress was a palette of varying blues, the paint applied so thickly that the picture had taken three-dimensions, with the mountain’s textures casting shadows down the work and falling into the shining oval shape, as if it were a carving or relief. 

Sissy entered the studio behind us. 

“Sissy,” my youngest brother said. “Sissy, these paintings.”

Sissy filled a glass of water in a slop sink beside the stove. Slowly she drank it, then went to a stool before the wall of windows. Black and blue clouds rolled in above the willow trees, and beyond the willow trees was the reservoir. A shining blue clarity had returned to Sissy’s eyes.

“When I was about your boys’ age, long before I met Mick, I used to hike that mountain to the fire tower with my paints. They kept the tower unlocked in those days. A few nights’ rations, a jug of water and a good bucket. All you’d ever need. And those windows. It’s where I painted best. Mick built me this studio. On good days I’m able to find my fire tower feeling in here too.”

Sissy stood, scanning a shelf of art books against the left wall. Then her eyes fell across the closest work table, where from the materials of her art she lifted a bottle-sized hourglass. 

The studio windows shook. The sand inside the hourglass was black. 

“Your mother gave me this hourglass as a gift after Mick. She said to imagine each grain of sand is a day passing, and the little pinch in the glass is my grief. All the sad days passing so swiftly through the pinch. It’s from a poem. I never understood it much until now, seeing you boys here and all alone.”

Sissy handed my brother the hourglass and my brother, the giant genius that he is, handed Sissy our miracle stick. 

“Sissy, it’s a magic stick. Maybe you can use it to hike to your tower.”

“Yes—wow. Magic. Thank you, son. It seems it.”

And that’s when the fire siren rose slowly out of the blue, slowly through the windows and rising high above the wind as it rose from the center of town, and soon the sound had filled the room. 

Outside Sissy’s studio, we found the gate guy’s van pulling down the long gravel drive. Blue lights flashing. We met my middle brother beside the maple stumps. The gate guy had already pulled open Sissy’s gate. 

“His pager said limbs down on wires,” my middle brother said, his voice rising over the siren and the wind. “His pager said, limbs down on wires with sparks and fire.”

The four of us watched him shut the gate against the wind, wave without ceremony, drive away.

The town’s fire siren stopped. 

Sissy stood beside me with the miracle stick. Over the storm, you could hear trucks and cars idling in wait for their water. 

*********

Dylan Smith is a writer working in New York with stories in X-R-A-Y Lit, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and elsewhere online. Also he tweets sometimes @dylan_a_smith

By Michael McSweeney

I decided late on December 29th that I wanted some Christmas decorations for my apartment. Tim and I were drinking cheap beer because nobody in town could get the stuff I really wanted. The stuff I really needed. I was irritated, the beer too warm, stomach full of hot knots. I thought about decorations after Tim said that I had all this empty space in my apartment right after we’d talked about the nothing we’d each gotten up to for Christmas.

I’m gonna get some Christmas decorations, I said. 

It’s too late, Tim said. He slumped in my dad’s old sunken armchair and for a few quiet moments we decayed within my apartment’s bare walls. 

Like we had when I was a kid, I said. Mom had these big boxes of decorations. Took her days to set it all up. Stockings, little train, all that shit. 

Then Tim asked, Where are you gonna get decorations?

I felt my pants for my phone and didn’t find it, then asked, What time is it?

10:46. Nothing’s open.

What about that house next to Anne’s?

What about it?

They got that big inflatable Santa.

Jesus.

Set it up in the living room. Right here. Sit him on the couch.

Tim drained his beer can and squeezed his fingers. Made the metal croak.

Ho-ho-ho! I bellowed. 

Tim winced and shifted in the chair.

Those things are loud as hell, he said. The fans for them, I mean. To stay inflated.

I bet they cost a fortune. All that power.

Yeah.

How do people afford those?

No idea.

What do you call them, rich people but not from around here?

Carpetbaggers!

Pricks.

Right!

I finished my beer and nestled the can against its brothers and sisters on the living room table. I took my pack of cigarettes from the table and opened it. The only one left was the lucky, filter up, and I’d long held to the custom of smoking the lucky on the way to the gas station around the corner. Old dying into the new. Keep the gap of nicotine at bay. My call center job was a shit gig but it brought enough cash in to maintain a steady flow of smokes.

Let’s go to the store, I said.

It’s too fucking cold, man. 

I’ll drive. 

We opened new beers on the drive to the gas station and opened two more on the way back. I didn’t know how many I’d downed. My field of vision slipped a belt. Mixed and molten. Windows, streetlights, a fractal Christmas smash still hoary from predawn snow. Glowing fir trees winked as we passed. I told Tim about the time I, small and six years old, snuck down the stairs for water and found my parents drunk and laughing and shoving presents beneath the tree in the den. Told him how it was the lie to which my parents first confessed. How I always questioned whether they told me the truth, even if I really did believe them, just to press the nerve of that early mistake. 

I felt the gravity of an answer and hit the brakes. Shoved my door open.

Zack, Tim said.

This is it, I said. Tim. Tim, I said again. Come on.

What? 

Decorations, motherfucker.

My boots crunched across the snow-glazed lawn of the church, Unitarian I think. Days difficult to remember. A scrapwood stable framed a plastic nativity scene. Plastic Mary, plastic Joseph, plastic lambs, plastic baby Jesus. An angel hung from a nail. A small spotlight cradled them in a dim-white oval. 

Come on, I said to them.

Tim came up behind me as I stooped to scoop the lambs. 

Grab them, I said. C’mon.

I opened my trunk and placed the lambs inside, then turned to receive plastic baby Jesus from Tim. I cradled plastic baby Jesus. I didn’t want to hurt it. Him. I nestled plastic baby Jesus between the lambs.

Don’t want you to move, I told plastic baby Jesus. 

Tim came back with Joseph and Mary tucked beneath his arms. We laid them on top of the others and I lowered the trunk door carefully. Back in the car, I felt around for a beer but only found one so I handed it to Tim.

Lemme get a sip of that, I said as he opened the can. 

Tim drank some of his beer and then gave it to me.

Family, he said. Family drive. Whole family. 

That’s the spirit, I said.

Christmas spirit, said Tim, and he laughed. 

We recreated the nativity scene in my living room. Draped scarves around Mary and Joseph. Constructed a manger for plastic baby Jesus with an empty 30-rack and some old newspaper. I pulled some ratty ski hats over the ears of the lambs. I took the pile of old pizza boxes from the kitchen and assembled an unsteady stable. When it was done, we staggered back onto the couch and gazed in silence.

When was the last time you went to church? I asked.

Tim rubbed his lips with his fingers. Years, he said. When my cousin got married.

Catholic church?

Yeah. 

I used to go. 

Oh yeah?

All through school. Something about it helped. Anxiety didn’t feel so bad. 

I stood and tottered into the kitchen. Searched the refrigerator until I found a can of beer. An old one with a taste I didn’t like. On my way back I stopped by the pizza box stable and adjusted Joseph’s scarf. He looked cold. Like my dad always did. 

Then I said, I really believed. Man. I really did. Then those fucking, those child fuckers. Right? I couldn’t like, couldn’t stomach that one. Just shitty answers to it all. All of them.

All of them, said Tim.

Child fuckers.

Child fuckers.

My mom really believed, I said. I used to go with her. Not every Sunday but a lot of Sundays. I had a good childhood. I guess I don’t remember a lot of it now. It feels good, from here. 

I cleared some of the debris on the table to make room for my beer. My childhood felt like a good thing as I shoved the empty cans and food cartons aside. 

I miss it. I miss her, I said.

I looked over at Tim. His head rested back against the couch and his mouth hung open. I thought of the lips of a whale.

Do you believe? I asked. 

I shook his arm and Tim opened his eyes.

Believe, I said. Do you?

Don’t know, he said. Tim scrunched his face and shifted his body. Goddamn back, he said. Goddamn.

Did you ever ask God for something? I asked.

Sure, said Tim. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and bits of lip skin clung to it as his hand fell away. I ask God for things all the time, he said. 

Like what?

God, let me wake up tomorrow.

Why do you ask that?

Uncle died in his sleep. Don’t ever want that. Not knowing. Goddamn way to go. Like, would you even know?

One long dream.

Yeah.

I wish my mom died in her sleep.

Sorry.

She was awake. Looking right at me.

Tim looked at me, then said, I’m really sorry. 

He looked like he meant it.

I miss going to church with her, I said. I miss her. 

Tears stared back at me as I wiped my face on my sleeve. Still wearing my jacket. I pointed at plastic baby Jesus in the pizza box stable. 

We don’t know shit about him, I said. I mean, we got the Bible. But who knows what they cut out? Next to nothing about his childhood. Wonder if he went to church with his mom. Temple.

Temple, Tim said.

I hope he had a good one, I said. A good childhood. Here’s to you, I said to plastic baby Jesus.

Tim and I said nothing for a long time. Then he said, I gotta go, man. 

Tim rose from the couch. His knees crackled.

You good to drive? I asked.

Not really, he said.

Tim departed. Left the door ajar. I stared into the dark cavity of the hallway outside my apartment. Wondered what might emerge from it. Approach, consume, absolve me. I’ve done a lot of wrong things and there alone another crept up on me. Plastic baby Jesus. He deserved to be home, his real home, not the fake one I’d made. I thought about what my mom would say but couldn’t remember exactly how she spoke. Her vocal river bends. Memories buried too far, ignored too long to be unearthed when I needed them. I wept and gazed at the holy family across the room, frozen in time.

I stood and took plastic baby Jesus from the 30-rack manger. Pulled the scarves from Mary and Joseph and wrapped him. In me stirred a flickering purpose, something dim, something maybe enough. I don’t remember leaving home or locking up. But there was sweat and a hill and a wooden stable washed in pale floodlight. Miles walked and burnt into my ruined feet, my pebbled knees. I tightened the scarves as I laid plastic baby Jesus in his bed of straw.

Not enough, I said.

It was easy to break into the church. I found an unlocked window and lowered myself, plastic baby Jesus hugged against my chest, into a wide recreation room. Metal folding chairs stood in half-moon obedience. I found the chapel upstairs, stole a splash of holy water and took a pew near the back. Somewhere distant, maybe in my head, an alarm squealed. I didn’t care. Warmth swelled inside me. Plastic baby Jesus was safe. I remembered midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, white candles in paper-plate bouquets, being part of something greater. My mother’s singing. Mezzo-soprano, a breathing loving lullaby. I sang, too, not well, but it made her smile. No forgetting that. Her hand on me. Me.

A hand on me. Burned my shoulder. Let’s go, asshole, a man’s voice bled.  

On my feet again. Plastic baby Jesus banged against the floorboards, unraveled from his bed of scarves. Christ exposed, me exposed, now banished against a squad car’s glare. An anger red and blue. 

Has God arrived? I asked the hand on my shoulder. No answer. Just force, toward the end, the law’s own church. 

I hurled my body and escaped the hand. Chewed the dirt and snow. Wriggled like a legless dog, closer to my mom. I could see her through the church walls, past the priest who shivered by the door. Bathed by Christmas fire, wings sprouted from her lips, clutching plastic baby Jesus while she sang. Oh come let us adore him.

*******

Michael McSweeney is a writer and editor from Massachusetts. His first novel, Heroman, is forthcoming from Expat Press.

By Emily Costa

The boys were six and sitting on the trampoline. Jonah was explaining the rules of the trampoline to Bobby. Bobby was ripping up the little helicopter seeds that had fallen and chucking them into the long grass. 

Are you listening? Jonah asked Bobby.

Their moms sat in lawn chairs, drinking glasses of orange juice mixed with a little bit of vodka. Their moms were doing this playdate because of a natural escalation in school pick-up small-talk.

Lucy said, how’s Jonah doing in class? Bobby is really progressing in math. Multiplication, even.

Marie said, oh, Jonah’s reading chapter books now. Crazy how time flies.

Jonah and Bobby were jumping high, trying to hit the maple branch hanging over the trampoline. The cicadas were doing their long, wind-up buzz.

Lucy said, Bobby reads a chapter book a night.

Marie said, same with Jonah. We have to rotate the books. He gets bored. We’re thinking he might need to skip a grade.

Bobby tucked his arms in, landed heavy in a sit. Jonah bounced too high and hit the metal frame coming down. He landed on his arm.

Lucy said, oh, did Mrs. Cavallo talk to you about that? She mentioned it to me during parent-teacher night. Said maybe we needed to think about a special program, too.

A special program? Marie asked. Like an advanced program?

Bobby was calling Jonah a baby. Did you hurt your arm, little baby?

Yeah, like a talented and gifted program, Lucy said.

Marie cleared her throat. We—yeah, we had that in preschool, she said. Jonah started reading so early, we didn’t know what to do with him.

Jonah rubbed his arm. The boys climbed off the trampoline. I’m not a baby, Jonah said. He stood in front of Bobby, fist at his side.

Really? Lucy said. I didn’t know they even offered those classes that young. 

Yeah, Marie said. It’s a very rare thing.

You are a baby, baby, Bobby said. He threw a stick at Jonah’s head and missed.

Lucy got up.

Marie got up, too.

Jonah pulled a big rock out of the dirt with two hands, but Bobby moved close to block it, wrestled it from his grip.

Lucy and Marie looked at each other, turned away when their eyes met. They moved toward the boys. Lucy paused. Marie stopped, too.

Bobby pushed Jonah. Jonah lost his balance, regained it, and pushed Bobby.

Marie felt Lucy watching her. Felt a heat. Laser-vision. One of those evil powers Jonah always gave the villains he sketched. The power to melt. The power to destroy. She kept her eyes on Jonah and Bobby. She took a sip of her drink. She imagined she had skin of impenetrable metal. Some undiscovered element from some undiscovered planet.

Bobby was bigger than Jonah, stocky and strong. But Marie remembered the way Jonah had made her nipples bleed when she’d nursed him his first year, the way he sometimes killed small animals—frogs, butterflies. She remembered the time he hit the dog.

The boys locked up, fell onto the grass. Bobby on top. He yanked a clump of Jonah’s hair. Jonah made a high-pitched yodeling sound, but he didn’t cry. Marie dug her nails into her palms. Lucy crossed her arms. She’d left her drink on the grass near her seat. A helicopter seed twirled toward it but missed.

Jonah clawed at Bobby’s eyes. Bobby covered his face. Jonah got up and kicked Bobby in his soft stomach. Lucy made a sucking-in sound, bent down, hands on her thighs.

Jonah said, get up, fat boy. Marie bit her lip.

Bobby got up and socked Jonah in the gut. He doubled over. Bobby hit him in the face. Jonah fell.

Get up, Marie said through clenched teeth. C’mon. Get up get up get up.

*******

Emily Costa is the author of Until It Feels Right (Autofocus Books). Her work can be found in X-R-A-Y, Hobart, Wigleaf, and elsewhere. You can follow her on Twitter @emilylauracosta.

By Steve Anwyll

On the platform an old woman sells churros and other fried foods from a cart. I eye them as we hurry. I’m hungry but not. A clear plastic sack of little wagon wheels intrigues me. Announced by the breeze our train comes roaring into the station.  We get on. 

Lindsey and I sit close. Black denim pant legs touch. Her head leans against my shoulder and I rest mine on hers. Perfect fit. Full colour ads of smiling idiots holding diplomas in the sky and dating apps promising a love halal compete for my attention. The noise of it hurts. So I eye the man across from me. 

Big and fat. Dark blue cargo pants covered in grey dust. The name of a building company screen printed over his heart. A reminder this is my last day in town. By midnight I’ll be on a bus headed away from all my friends and a woman who makes me feel like a man. By Monday I’ll be back at a machine printing on shirts for men like him to get dirty in.

Why can’t I be free?

Backpack between his wide open legs his gut hangs over his crotch. I stare as he stuffs his mouth full of the wagon wheels I saw the old woman peddling. Over the clamour of the train on the tracks I hear a crunch. Lindsey and I just came from a taqueria we’ve been to so often we call it our place. I ate carnitas and barbacoa and lengua to the point of discomfort. But still. 

Her and I chat as the train heads into Manhattan. It’s easy to forget where I am though. Subway or the Metro. Brooklyn or Montréal. People trying to get home. Back to the bed they woke up in. All of them thinking of hot showers and a reprieve from the din of being awake. Looking through a crowd and seeing we’re all going the same place in different ways I remember, I’m a part of the whole.

So I renounce my individuality as I put my hand on her thigh, squeeze. She lifts her head and smiles. I wink to hide the deep down dread I feel. Of going home. Me and my apartment and no one to call. The few friends I have remind me of a life I no longer belong to. If it wasn’t for an international border I’d stay. 

Call the landlord on Monday. 

The fat man across from me nudges his friend who’s equally as plump. Shakes the bag of wagon wheels at him. The eyes of his friend are laconic as he paws a few out. Like a pervert in the bushes I watch him incognito. I gain pleasure from seeing him chew. Same as the creep in the shadows caressing himself I wonder, how long can I control my urges?

Lindsey breaks my trance as she asks what time does your bus leave? I remind her it pulls out of the station at one past midnight. I watch her cute face cringe and my heart cracks in two. The last five days passed quicker than we thought. Playing around in a house she’s watching while the owners are away. There’s a fireplace and a yard and a fine old beagle with grey in his hair who barks at the letter carrier each day.

Small things make it harder to leave. 

I’ve lived in Montréal ten years now. Wandered its streets and rode its trains. But I’m a citizen only in address. I was married. A situation that breeds isolation. We often disagreed on what makes a good friend. She liked stability. I craved excitement.

I convinced myself that French was getting in the way.

So here, in a city where English is accepted everywhere, I raise my voice over the sound of so many others, excuse me…my man…what the hell are those things you’re eating?

He laughs. Crumbs blowing all over his shirt and his eyes sparkle blue like Caribbean waters. Shrugging his heavy shoulders innocently he smiles a big silly grin. His voice tinged by Spanish he tells me, I don’t know man…I bought ‘em one time…they delicious…now, you know, I see the woman selling ‘em and I buy another bag.

I smile, nod along as he speaks. Look him up and down. Like all the men I’ve ever known his back is bent. His clothes and boots are filthy. Evidence of long days passed doing something that’s hard on body and soul. I know what it’s like. I’ve been standing twenty years now.

A bag of fried garbage can be exactly what you need. 

You want to try ‘em, he asks. Of course. Spittle flies from my mouth. It’s been watering all along. I watch his fingers as he pulls two wagon wheels from the bag. His skin is cracked like mine. Do his knuckles hurt? Does he wonder if it’s all a waste of time?

This I don’t ask. Instead I politely take the wagon wheels from his hand as he offers them in silence. I remember the plague. Accepting food from a stranger was the same as asking to die. I was certain we’d lose our humanity. It’s nice to see I was wrong, that we can still go out and find a little love. 

For what else is sharing food?

In my palm the wagon wheels are lighter than air. Lindsey watches. Him as well. Pressure as I raise one to my lips, take a bite. It’s sweet but not. Crunchy and airy and reminds me of something I can’t place from when I was a kid and thought life would get easier. 

What do you think? he asks, the blue in his eyes sparkling again. I nod. Continue to chew. When I swallow I tell him he’s right. They are delicious. And I regret not grabbing a sack before the train came into the station. He shakes the bag at Lindsey. 

You want to try little lady?

She declines. I tell her she’s nuts and give her a small piece of mine. Reluctantly she nibbles. Her face shows enjoyment as she chews, nods her head like she’s listening to her favourite song and says yum. I get a rush of happiness watching her. I soak up the experience. In a few hours I’ll be by myself again.

After that the conversation dwindles. Lindsey opens her phone to look up what we just ate. Chicharrones de harina. Fried flour. I think of telling the man. Letting him in on what he’s been eating. But I don’t. No point. I leave him to his bliss. The truth doesn’t always make life better. 

When the train pulls into 14th Street-Union Square Lindsey and I get up. I hold her arm not wanting to lose her. The doors hesitate before opening. I tell the man stay out of trouble. I don’t hear him respond. The platform is filled with the noise of people trying to get home when all I want to do is stay.

I tighten my grip.

******

Steve Anwyll is the author of Welfare (Tyrant Books) and can be found online @oneloveasshole

By Bill Whitten

“I am a miserable fool…”

Blue, blue is the grass along the River Vézère. Above the sound of its rushing water I hear the mechanical cry of a Kestrel. I imagine something small and grey struggling in its claws.

“I have one-hundred-and-sixty pages of notes for a twelve hundred word article…”

I sit with Helen Dentritis – a twenty-five year old Greek with pink lips and black hair cut straight across her forehead – in a mustard Citroën DS in the parking lot of Lascaux II. We are surrounded by black, pine-covered mountains and loud German tourists.

Twenty feet from the Citroen, Johnny, in his butter-colored lounge suit, crunches back and forth across the pea-gravel of the parking lot. Henri-Paul, seemingly ready to be whipped aloft by the flaring tails of his cobalt overcoat, follows closely after him. 

How thin and short the men are. Like rats. Like beautiful, talented rats.

“I am an academic, a translator. Not a journalist…”

I rub the bridge of my nose between my index finger and thumb and theorize with absolute confidence that Johnny is the first person from Jamaica, Queens ever to set foot in the Black Perigord. 

“Self-pity is not charming, Rook. No one forced you to write about Johnny.”  

Of course, she’s right. I accepted the assignment to pen an article about a disreputable rock musician of my own free will. It is entirely due to a weakness of character. My well-meaning ex-girlfriend’s brother-in-law is the editor of the Soho Weekly News. ‘Since you are already in Paris’, he suggested during an all too brief phone-call, ‘I’ll pay you 250USD to meet up with Johnny, pal around with him for a few weeks and then jot down a feuilleton.’

And thus I follow after him like a dog, like a man put under a spell. 

Meanwhile, Johnny and Henri-Paul wait for a man named Swann to emerge from the replica caves where he’s been gazing upon aurochs, deer, horses, scenes of murder and other enigmatic, primordial images.  

The wind blows fragments of the their conversation through the open windows of the Citroen. 

Henri-Paul: My Uncle Auguste saw the original paintings – before Lascaux I was closed in 1963. To him, the reproductions in Lascaux II are no more than shadows of the originals…

Johnny (lighting a cigarette): It’s the destruction of our patrimony…it’s a theft of our…

Henri-Paul: He claimed that when modern men were confronted with the original cave paintings it caused them to lose faith in their way of life. Men would see the images and then abandon their wives, their children…

Johnny:  I knew it…It’s as I’ve been saying.

Henri-Paul: The government shut it down because it was too…uncanny….too destabilizing.

The man named Swann wears a backpack filled with stolen Japanese microchips. He will hand over the backpack to Johnny. When Johnny returns to Paris he will deliver the microchips to an editor at Tel Quel named Alain. Alain is a Soviet agent. The microchips are so new, so advanced, that not even the Americans have seen them. Upon delivery, the chips will be spirited off to the Angstrem factory in Zelenograd to be reverse-engineered. Johnny, for his troubles, will be paid 50,000 francs.

Johnny’s fame, as I have learned over the weeks that I have spent with him, touring France, Belgium and Germany, derives not only from his musical skills but also from his protracted self-immolation. When his fans buy their tickets they expect a human sacrifice, failing that, they will settle for a concert given by a cadaver animated by narcotics.

Nevertheless, under the watchful eye of his new manager and paraclete, Christopher, the guitar-player has quit drugs and begun the long process of putting his life and career back on track. The punters, of course, hope for a relapse. Johnny, exhibiting a fatalism typical of his Sicilian heritage, believes that crime and rock and roll are intertwined and accepts that he will always remain in close proximity to danger. 

His difficulties are endless; jealous band-mates, a hostile press, a vindictive ex-wife, a complement of children that he is forbidden to see, problems with the IRS. 

It all amounts to a shortage of money. One can never have enough money. 

I am not supposed to know about the microchips, but Henri-Paul, an Ecole Normale dropout who grew up in Montignac, tells me everything. 

Johnny’s neck is wrapped in a long violet scarf. He tugs at it as he turns and watches Swann walk toward him. Swann is dressed in a grey blazer, white shirt and blue jeans – the same clothes he wore while working as Alain Delon’s stuntman in the just-wrapped production of Pour la Peau d’un Flic. 

“I’ve seen better artwork on the stall walls of a truck-stop toilet in Texarkana.” 

When Johnny heard that Swann, in transit from Sardinia, wanted to meet somewhere between Paris and the Dordogne Department, Johnny insisted that Swann first see the paintings at Lascaux. Everyone on earth should see them. That Johnny is a connoisseur of the works of the cavemen of Lascaux is surprising, yet when I think of his performances and acknowledge that they are events more primitive ritual than concert, it makes sense. Aesthetic violence is always his goal. Be it in his brutal, minimalist guitar playing or in his impromptu scabrous, psycho-sexual monologues. The same theatre of cruelty that can be glimpsed in the galleries of Lascaux is also on offer whenever Johnny takes the stage at the Gibus Club or Max’s Kansas City.

Johnny smiles. His is the face of a thief. “If you weren’t so stupid, Swann, you’d notice that the painters used the cracks in the cave walls, the flaws of the material, as compositional tools. A lump of anthracite becomes a spot on a horse, a crack becomes an antler.” 

“You’ve been living in France too long, Johnny.” Even with a discolored, split front tooth Swann’s smile is pleasant. 

The men make their farewells and Johnny and Henri-Paul climb into the Citroen.

In the back seat, Helen sighs. Johnny met her on a snowy December morning in the Jardin du Sénat. An intellectual, she’s written for Libé, L’Infini and many others. This enchanted creature, this archetypically Mediterranean beauty displays, despite her enormous mental acuity, a great patience for Johnny’s lapses and idiosyncrasies. 

Johnny, like many rock musicians is a consummate sufferer; he cultivates the deepest level of suffering and has learned every possible way to exploit it. That fateful morning, as he wandered the garden, pale, grim, lost, wearing an expression of a man at sea, Helen hid behind a tree and watched him, unaware of his fame, his notoriety, his moral gluttony. 

Eventually, she left her hiding place and her swift, tiny steps roused him as he gazed upon the Fontaine es Quatre-Parties-du-Monde. It was something like love at first sight. 

Helen, of course, introduced Johnny to Alain.

Château d’Urfé, built in 1224 was once the possession of Cathar nobleman Bernard de Garrel. Albigensian crusader Alphonse de Monsoon took the castle and installed a garrison. When Garrel retook it, Monsoon was strangled in his bed. In later times the castle was periodically abandoned and reoccupied, until those enemies of every religion, the Jacobins, razed it to its foundations. A hotel now occupies the site. It is here we retrieve our belongings, check out and begin the trek back to Paris.

Helen wrote her dissertation on Simone Weil and naturally holds a deep interest in the Cathars. She ignites one of Johnny‘s Marlboro Lights: “Reactionaries like to say that the Paris Commune began here among the Cathars. They accuse Marxists of being crypto-Gnostics, crypto-Manicheans forever trying to beget Heaven on Earth. Of course, Marxists share with the Gnostics a belief that the world is fallen, depraved, obscene and that only a transmission of a kind of secret knowledge can allow for the realm of Satan to be overthrown.”

At the wheel I speak, perhaps only to myself: “We will need petrol very, very soon.”

Johnny pulls a wad of francs from his pocket and passes it to me over my right shoulder. “Here you go, Rook.”

Eventually, Helen continues: “Secretly, I agree with them. Marx, Engels, Lenin belong in the same tradition as Marcion, Valentinus, Mani. I feel a secret thrill whenever a fascist accuses me or one of my comrades of being a Gnostic. Yes, yes, I want to tell them. I am one of the Perfecti and I, unlike you, will receive the Consolamentum upon my death. But of course I can’t say a word.”

Henri-Paul pushes his index finger against the bridge of his sunglasses and sneers. “As Genet said; it is more beautiful to betray a cause than to be faithful to it.”

Johnny stares out the window, Swann’s backpack clasped to his chest in the fashion of a schoolgirl. His eyes are black, depthless. 

I edit my article in my head as I drive:

Before the mutation took place that allowed homo sapien to speak, did archaic humans have a signature recognizable cry like that of the blue jay, the horse or the wolf? 

Johnny’s music is the color of black hair. It is the sound of machines being manipulated by addicts and criminals under conditions of destitution. All love is wretchedness. This music does not impart anything approaching truth but instead offers a profound sense of the morbid, the uncontrollable, the unwholesome….

*******

Bill Whitten is a musician and writer.  He is the founding member of St. Johnny, Grand Mal and currently records under the nom de guerre William Carlos Whitten. His latest album Ecstatic Laments was released in June 2022. His book BRUTES, a collection of short fiction was released in January 2022.