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THE WHOLE PLACE WAS DARK BY DONALD RYAN

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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.

Issue 3 Issue 3 Non-Fiction

EXTINGUISHED BY M.M. KAUFMAN

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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.

Issue 3 Issue 3 Non-Fiction

FOOL’S GOLD BY BRITTANY ACKERMAN

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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.

Issue 3 Issue 3 Non-Fiction

ORLANDO, 1974 BY JOSH OLSEN

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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.

Issue 3 Issue 3 Non-Fiction

BUGS, BAGS, BIBLES, AND SUCH BY DAISY CASHIN

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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.

Issue 3 Issue 3 Fiction

REVERIE BY LAMB

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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.

Issue 3 Issue 3 Fiction

ALL IN YOUR HEAD BY BROOKE SEGARRA

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By Brooke Segarra

When I told my mom that my dad touched me once, I might have said, “I think dad touched me once. On my vagina.” I can’t remember the exact wording. Things never come out the way you want to say them, but what was clear is that my father touched me in a way that I can’t hold safely in my memory and I can’t put down. But why should this awkwardly worded declaration have given my mom alarm when it did not fit in with her reality? She just said, oh, your father, facetiously, and divulged to me for the first time that my great uncle touched her as a little girl repeatedly. I guess her telling me that was her version of walking out of the room like I had done to my grandmother with Dementia when she thought I was her dead husband and our realities did not align. For my mom, there was no way that the man she married, had sex with, had us with, and did laundry for could be a pervert. It was not in her reality that she could be living in conditions where something like that happened to her daughter. Not necessarily me, just ‘her daughter.’ The mysterious ‘daughter’ that she knew she’d have one day when she was five dreaming of a home and a white picket fence. The daughter she hoped to have when she became an adult and had me, the daughter who could never live up to this fictitious daughter who she knew so well. This daughter was like her imaginary friend who would stand next to me, and she would talk to. Maybe she would have noticed me, her real daughter, if I had teared up when I told her, “I think dad touched me once. On my vagina.” But, I couldn’t tear up about this incident with my dad, because I wasn’t sad about it. I wasn’t sad that he touched me. I guess my mom and I were both unable to be in that reality. The reality in which my father touched me. But somehow, the conditions were just right that night and I glitched the Matrix because, for a brief moment, she had heard me. If she hadn’t, she never would have told me about her experience with her uncle. I know because, before that night, her and I had never talked about sex before. We never talked about changing bodies or puberty. When I got my first period I didn’t tell her, and it’s only now that I realize why she was on the verge of hysterics when she found my Tinkerbell underwear in my closet with droplets of blood on the panty lining. For a fleeting moment, she had come face to face with the very real possibility that she had raised some pervert’s fucking wet dream.
Mom, do you think that just because dad always gave you the last spring roll when we ordered takeout that he was softer when touching me than your molester? Do you think because I just woke up to blood and pain that I have the privilege of doubt about my college rapist? The privilege of second-guessing? The college nurse would not buy it. I had to point out to her the purity ring on my finger that I was still fucking wearing because, to me, until I met my partner Russell, sex, regardless of how much I wanted it, was the most terrifying thing. But why should it have been? I was scared to have my first sexual experience, not realizing that the worst had already happened. I had already had it. But because it was with my father, I was unable to recognize it.

Sometimes I feel like half an abuse victim. Like a Frankenstein. Someone who doesn’t know or feel pain like she should. Like the rest of you do. Like someone who only got half abused. Someone never finished the job. And now I’m stuck in this weird purgatory.

Maybe because I can’t walk in this narrative with conviction, my brother Danny can’t believe me. When I tell him about the leering, the comments, and the touches, they are either not quite recognizable as abuse or not abusive enough, you paranoid bitch. I thought he was old enough that I could talk to him about it. I thought we had enough distance from it, with neither of us being under our parents’ roof anymore, that we could talk about it. But I was wrong, and the only reason I brought it up, paranoid bitch that I am, is because I wanted to know if he noticed any of these tensions. If he sensed what I sensed from dad. But he didn’t and mom didn’t. So if this only exists in my brain, does this reality exist at all? I’m sorry I keep bringing up the one moment in high school my dad walked into my bedroom when I was pretending to be asleep and put his hand on my pussy. It’s not usually something I think about. I spend much more of my waking time counting and making meaningless lists.

When I think of my father I think of the pungent scent of his breath, the knots in my stomach, and the wanting him to feel good. I wanted to make him feel good. So I never bothered him with me. I was a good girl. My problems would never be big enough that they couldn’t just be solved by mom. I would never ask for anything. Everything he could give was enough, and all was okay. Even every one of his mistakes. Being okay with cruelty doesn’t mean that you are okay. It’s all so emotionally rough, I think I keep using the touching thing to just smooth things out. For there to be something truly awful. If there is something truly awful then I would have a right to speak. To speak on everything. And I guess it’s not right. I’m giving him a lot of credit. Maybe it’s unfair of me to write all these scenes of violence. It’s not like they happened all the time. Or even most of the time? Most of the time, he was just sitting in that recliner in the basement drinking a generic brand of Coke and watching TV. Sometimes reading a book. Most of the time doing both at once which always confused me. He spent a lot of time in that basement. Looking back on it now it was kind of like a luxurious prison cell. He could have gone out with his friends, but he kept flipping through the channels because there’s so little to see on the TV which was easier than seeing the house that needed to get fixed, mom’s two bowls of ice cream every night, the blood pad stain on my wall-to-wall bedroom carpet because the sticky side of the Always pad got stuck to my foot, and the neighborhood he placed us in that had two break-ins on our street. Once, I asked dad to make sure he locked our back door when he came into the house after his cigarette at dusk. He was amused. Maybe because I never made many demands of him. He assured me that if someone broke in he would kill them. I knew there were some knives in his nightstand. He never had a gun fearing that, if he did, he might one day become a guy on the six o’clock news. He would be that guy on the news for me though. I knew that. He would kill for me — if he had to. Kill because of me — if he had to. I’m the last person he would want to hurt, which is why, if he ever read this, I fear he’d lose his temper, and kill me.

Do you think my murderer will think twice about killing me because him and I could stand next to one another and smile in a family photo at Christmas? Which was really for you, mom. Because we weren’t facing one another. We were facing you. We were smiling for you.
I do not like writing this down. It feels powerful and uncomfortable. I wish you would have listened to me, mom. Heard what I said, so you could have handled it. But I guess now I have to handle it, because the daughter I hope I have — I think I know her too well.
Like you, at the end of the day, I don’t know what to believe, and I don’t know what I want, but I believe that the bar will never run out of alcohol and I will have another drink. I will have another drink if Russell and I go out, so I’m not left alone to drink alone and count. I’d rather listen to someone else’s problems than count to myself. Counting to myself gives me headaches after a few hours. At the bar, Russell will talk to me about work and some drama with a co-worker and his new desk seat, and I will be a good listener as I swallow the beer, and in the aftertaste of wheat, simultaneously feel all these emotional things he doesn’t want to know about me that I swallow, at the bar, sitting pretty.

Brooke Segarra is a fiction writer in Brooklyn, NY. Her stories have appeared in Hobart Pulp, Maudlin House, Grimoire Magazine, Wyldcraft Magazine, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a novel. You can find her online at brookesegarra.com

Issue 3 Issue 3 Fiction

THREE PELICANS BY SHELDON BIRNIE

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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)

Issue 3 Issue 3 Fiction

AT THE SPINE STORE, TOGETHER BY JESS GALLERIE

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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.

Issue 3 Issue 3 Fiction

FUMBLED THAT ONE, MATE BY KIRSTI MACKENZIE

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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.