Tag: fiction

Categories
Across the Wire Vol. 7

The Fifth Hit

by Tyler Plofker

September 2, 2026

Robert D. Manfred Jr., Commissioner

The Office of the Commissioner of Baseball

1271 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY, 10020

Dear Mr. Robert Manfred,

I hope you and your family are well and looking forward to the Labor Day weekend. The sun is so warm this time of year. This is Jimmy Granes of the Baltimore Orioles. The reason for this letter is to apprise you of my efforts in identifying the Fifth Hit. I hope you will be patient with me; I do not want to leave anything out or anything unclear.

Being a student of the game yourself, you will recall that during Game 1 of the 1886 World’s Championship Series, Chicago White Stockings’ cleanup hitter Fred “Dandelion” Pfeffer was thrown out at second base trying to stretch his RBI single into a double. It is my contention that Pfeffer’s mistake was not an unintentional baserunning blunder, but rather, the first public attempt at finding the Fifth Hit. Before Game 7 of the 1925 World Series between the Washington Senators and the Pittsburgh Pirates, the infield dirt was doused in gasoline and set on fire; ostensibly to dry the rain-soaked diamond, however, contemporaneous records paint a different picture. The diary entry of William McKeen (second-in-command groundskeeper) for October 15th, 1925, reads simply, “It did not work.” Again and again, these trials show up. Aparicio’s fall at third. Germany Schaefer and his steals of first. Manny being Manny? More accurately, in my view: Manny being an astute and diligent investigator of the Fifth Hit.

Single, Double, Triple, Homerun. Single, Double, Triple, Homerun. When did the thought of a fifth emerge? Infielder Mike McGeary and Third Baseman Warren White’s letter correspondence from the years 1885–1891 provides the earliest written evidence. McGeary writes of his ideas (“[A] plump Belgian Draught, salivating on an autumn day”) and White gives his own. McGeary rails against the fools who accuse him of “game-fixing.” White writes, “Time is no longer of a benefit to us.” I have seen these letters, have been allowed to study them through the goodwill of their descendants. White’s great-great-great-grandson, Paul, is a fabulous baker, a wonderful baker; the man can really bake.

In the 1930s, there were a number of ballplayers—dimwits, morons—who argued that the Fifth Hit was merely an inside-the-park homerun; i.e., that the homerun can and must be separated into inside-the-park and outside-the-park and, therefore, five hits. But this was rightfully and forcefully mocked by their successors, and is clearly absurd—inside-the-park and outside-the-park are two different manifestations of one kind of hit, in the same way as one can have a ground-rule double and a traditional double, or a single and a bunt single. These are different flavors of the hit they correspond to, not entirely new ones. Dobermanns and Shih Tzu are both types of dogs. I am sure you agree, Mr. Manfred.

I learned of all of this—though unconsciously, I feel it must have been with me from the start, from the very beginning—only this past off-season. Reading Christy Mathewson’s 1912 baseball history/instruction manual/collection of anecdotes, “Pitching in a Pinch; Or, Baseball from the Inside,” I was struck by this passage:

Then Lobert, the tantalizing Teuton with the bow-legs, whacked out a home run into the left-field bleachers and slowed at third with a mocking smile on his face which would have gotten the late Job’s goat. You would have thought he’d done something more than knock a four-bagger.

“[S]omething more than knock a four-bagger.”

From there, I simply followed the thread. Clear on the history, from the first day of this year’s spring training, I began.

I have attempted more than could possibly be listed here. I have concluded a triple by springing up on my left foot and then striking the base with the intermediate phalanx of my right pinky. I have—and I’m sure you’ve seen the footage—I have hit a bouncing single up the middle and marched, half-step, straight from the bag to the bleachers in center, pulling up my uniform, revealing my pale belly, slapping it as if a dholak drum. I have hit a smoking line drive while visualizing the preposterous mustache of Dr. Thomas Wang (more on the languid doctor later). I have smashed (absolutely barreled) balls with all manner of things in my mouth. A grape. A roofing nail. A hornet. One night, with no one else in the ballpark, I sliced a ball down the line, slid prone into second base, and slowly and meticulously gyrated my groin against it until fruition; but, while a pleasurable double, the hit remained, no less and no more, a double.

Once, on an off day, I thought I found it in the maneuvers of a gas station attendant. I had hit what appeared to be an infield single the day before—could every moment since then, every step and every breath, the shoveled putout in the bottom of the inning, the bumper-to-bumper drive home, the morning coffee with too much Sweet’n Low, could it all have been part of it, part of the Fifth Hit which had now just ended with my gas station attendant, a Mr. Francisco Marcello Capionne—whose hair leaves a lot to be desired—a Mr. Francisco Marcello Capionne, jiggling the aluminum nozzle free, letting the gasoline drip and drip and drip onto the back wheel of my 2024 Lincoln Navigator? But the thought left me as quickly as it came. No, not this time. I paid the man in banknotes.

You know, of course, that I am slashing .314/.427/.658, good for a 193 wRC+, Mr. Robert Manfred? I am leading the league in fWAR by a two-win margin. Over the last three seasons combined, I have accrued almost 28% more value than the man behind me. This is to say: the manager lets me do what I want. Old Tony Mansolino does not believe, but he does not stop me. “Keep it mostly in blowouts,” he says. “I’ll try, skip,” I say, winking. Yesterday I licked home plate clean.

Sometimes I have doubts. Sometimes I wallow. Sometimes the thought pops into my head that this life is nothing but an inexhaustible maze of horrors. But then I remember Mike McGeary’s 28th letter to Warren White, McGeary’s 28th letter to White in which he states, “I know it in its absence.”

In the 17th chapter of the first Book of Samuel it is written, “And he took his staff in his hand, and chose him five smooth stones out of the brook, and put them in a shepherd’s bag which he had, even in a scrip; and his sling was in his hand: and he drew near to the Philistine.” Plato claims the five regular polyhedra—tetrahedron, hexahedron, octahedron, icosahedron, dodecahedron—to be the fundamental building blocks of the physical world. The Hadith enumerate five distinct pillars of Islam. The Pandava brothers (Yudhishthira, Bhima, Arjuna, Nakula, Sahadeva) of the Mahabharata number five. The Fir Bolg chieftains of the Lebor Gabála Érenn number five. Celestial mechanics describes five points, referred to as Lagrange points, where the gravitational pull and centripetal force between any celestial masses are necessarily and always in perfect equilibrium. There are five basic human senses. Five fingers to a hand, five toes to a foot. The Five Holy Wounds of Christ.

Let us not beat around the bush any longer, my esteemed, handsome, well-groomed friend. Let us put all the marbles from the bag onto the end table. The fact is this: My languid, hilariously-mustachioed Dr. Thomas Wang, he of the curled, trembling upper lip and eyes like golden rubies, told me a week ago what I already knew: I am dying. My pancreas is not cooperating with the rest of my body. My remaining time is best denominated in months. You, as such an intelligent baseball man, Mr. Manfred, may have noticed the 193 wRC+ mentioned above, while exceptional, is a whopping 34 points lesser than what I was running as of the end of July. My production will continue to dip and soon I will no longer be able to play; soon I will be counting scuffs on the ceiling and my only hits will be into the bedpan. 

Really, this letter is not a briefing; it is a request. If I do not find the Fifth Hit in my dwindling inhales—and I may not, I have no doubt I may not—this letter is a request. Open the fields, Mr. Robert Manfred. Open the fields. That is my request. Fields across this great, lush, green country; men and women and children swinging, experimenting. Making the rules up as they go. New rules no one has ever thought of and old ones no one is left to remember. Thousands and thousands of baseball diamonds, at every school, at every campground, at every workplace. At every prison and every hospital courtyard. In the abandoned alley behind P.S. 112 and in the middle of the White House South Lawn. Long-tressed women snorkeling in Chesapeake Bay. Maybe there is a horseshoe crab. Men of all sizes giving yellow-throated birds something nice. Perhaps a small bear filled with sand. Young girls eating cotton candy through their nose and wiggling out their last baby tooth, tossing it, hitting it real good alright with a metal bat. Little boys hopped up on Shirley Temples, so many Shirley Temples, outrageously above any reasonable serving size recommendation of Shirley Temples, jitterbugging wild to Songs of the North American Bullfrog. A film projector that doesn’t work well. Big-time scrapes, thorn bites left unbandaged. Pencils. Become the commissioner of the Fifth Hit, Mr. Robert Manfred, help us find it. It will require a great deal of funding, I understand. I understand that. Start at the top. Reach out to the President. If the fool can get but one thing right, let it be this. And if he refuses, turn to local government, private money. Problems there, then turn to the charity and the goodwill of the people. The people, Mr. Manfred. Get the funds however you must and build. If you don’t want to admit what the push is for, that is okay. If you don’t think the public is ready for that, that is alright. Just say the initiative is to “grow the game” or to “positively impact health.” The people will understand, intuitively, what needs to be done. You, Mr. Robert Manfred, born into a family of five—mother, father, brother, sister, and you, born a boy and now the commissioner of the Major Leagues—you, Mr. Robert Manfred, know that better than anybody.

Grass is something to smell. The sun is so warm this time of year.

With love and sincerely yours,

Jimmy Granes

Tyler Plofker is a writer in NYC.

Categories
Across The Wire Vol. 6

Magnolia from The Heartbreakers

By Dan Duffy  

Her cheekbones sat sharp—right up under her water colored eyes. Her cheeks pooled into loose hounddog jowls. Her skin, the rough and tanned leather typical of smokers late in the game.  

painting courtesy of Red Danielson (2025)

She wore pink scrubs and an old pair of white tennis shoes. She drank black coffee from a mug printed over with an image of a steamboat chugging up the Mississippi. White steam clouds floated over the boat against a baby blue sky. Her hand was steady as she lowered the cup back to the table.  

Folger’s is shit, she thought.  

Her legs crossed like stilts at the knees. She sighed and crossed her hands in her lap. She looked across the blank yard. The veinlike limbs of varied hardwoods thicketed grey and tan beyond the tall black iron fence at the bottom of the hill. Them trees are pitiful, she thought. 

She checked her black Casio and saw it was 7:07. She pushed into the thin cushions of the plastic lawn love seat. She picked up her cigarettes and lighter from the glass table. The smoke felt dry in her lungs and she wretched wetly before her chest settled into regular albeit ragged breaths.  

She reflected back on her thoughts beginning before she crawled out of her bunk into the darkness. She thought about how they started before her spirit had time to orient itself in the black morning room. She hated the thoughts. She thought they were a total nuisance. Thoughts no one normal would ever think. 

She drew from the deep background of her mind the knowledge none of these things were true. Yet she found herself unable to let go of this new copy of the old story. Every morning was like starting over in this way. She breathed in through her nose. An old trick learned in the Midwest recovery scene. 

Here I am, she thought.

I am alive. I have my Kamels and the lawn is alive and them trees are alive and the Folger’s is shit but it is still black and warm and warmin me and givin me one of the two remainin buzzes. Folger’s and Kamels and the trees and the cardinal just landed there on the feeder. Barnfire’s soul come to see me in the morning. 

She slurped her coffee and let her breath out after an eight count. She accepted her and her suicidal brain would dance this dance of breath and neurosis until the end of days. She laughed at them. She imagined their voice was a wooly faced man in a suit in the fetal position sucking his thumb on the membranelike bottom floor of her brain. She imagined brushing his hair and cooing him as he trembled and wept. An old ego vision from the early days. 

A breeze washed up from the south across her nose, her crowsfeet, the lines around her mouth as she smoked. A clump of ash fell to the concrete patio as she lowered her hand. Lightbeams played through the leaves. The sky smoky blue. 

It all reminded her of the morning in Dixie, Alabama when she’d stolen Deddy’s cigarettes off the Formica counter. She’d stared at them under the yellow light overhead of the stove, where they sat next to his gold keys, for a long minute, before she snatched them up and walked out the back sliding glass door. She’d busted six matches before she got one to stay lit on the front end of the Winston. She’d remained proud for years on account she hadn’t coughed on the first one.  

She thought the house they’d grown up in a poor one. All shingles and no roof. The backyard full of beer cans and spent propane tanks—cigarette butts, dog shit and ashes. She still cringed at the thought of it. She thought she’d tried to talk straighter, clearer, whiter—more like some person from New York would talk—on account of the house. The clapboard painted a dark emerald. She always thought the guy who painted it must’ve been drunk or high as hell as the coats were as swirled and thick as Van Gogh’s buttermilk impastos over olive trees. 

They lived after a few empty lots at the end of a road at the edge of Dixie. The city came in and turned it from dirt to oystershell in ’68. The houses up the street were mildly better than theirs insofar as their paint jobs were cleaner and their boards were straighter, and their yards were free of the trash so dominant in hers.     

She was halfway through the first Winston as she felt hands bury into and grip her shoulders and skin touch cool against her cheek as she smelled a rosy waft from the sweet olive bush near the door. 

“Hey!” said a voice like a bell.  

A smile wrapped her head. She turned and looked up into the pale diamond eyes, the suddenly strong jaw, the round nose, the dirty blonde hair in loose curls draped around the face of Barnfire. Her warm breath on her breath. 

“The hell you doin smokin a cigarette?” 

“Bein a man,” Chastity said. 

“You a man now?” 

“I am today.”   

Chastity felt a darkness in the center of the morning as she watched the cardinal hop up on the powerline. She slurped her coffee. Her bestfriend Rebecca Barnfire had come to see her from up the road.  

They’d run the town with boys in trucks till they were old enough to leave. The big trees’d all been logged out before they were born. The Service-planted-pines were just starting to grow back once they got older.  

Chastity’s father drank Bud heavies and smoked dope on the back porch when he was home in the mornings and nights. He slaughtered cows down at the slaughterhouse. The oystershell ran out by the time the road got to their house and there were big washed out holes in it and he refused to pay for the dirt work.  

He, her daddy, Charles Lee, liked to sit with his shirt off and stare at the moon. The FM band was set on 98.5 and the presence of the eternal darkness beckoned across the yard and into the fields which stretched out to the baby pines at the edge of Monroe County. He was not without the loving thoughts any man may have of his child and the universe from which she emerged. His tears ran silent down his crooked face in the moonlight and Charley Pride played on the radio. 

Chastity and Rebecca played with the dirt clods and cigarettes until they were old enough to pick up whiskey and pills. Once they’d found those—in Doctor Mellingham’s offices, in the plasticwood cabinetry, in the fields—they relied upon them the way they saw the girls growing up across the street rely on Jesus. The headlights of the old Fords lit the path to the beer joint on Friday nights down at Bill Bleaker’s Creekbed Jamboree.  

Rebecca wolfwhistled at the Southern rock four piece from Montgomery. She made her face sparkle and lowered her eyes and picked up her rose patterned cotton dress and spun once she felt the shaggyheaded frontman’s eyes. 

Chastity bit the aluminum bar at Bleaker’s with a fury her ancestors would understand. She heard stories of her grandaddy drinking the county dry through the wars—too drunk to report for duty. Back then her face was sharp and clear: like a mirror on fire. Light freckles covered the high cheekbone, the hard jaw and the hawknose. Her eyes the color of some mystic sea water. The boys from the schools the county over didn’t know what to make of her and she and Barnfire bit their heads off at their leisure.  

Once they drove west for Orange Beach under the cover of more moonlight. They watched the world turn from pure pine wood to saltwater and sand. The beach was eternal on either side and the sea went on forever in front of them and the beach disappeared into the pines at their backs. Gas lanterns burned from where they hung under the eaves of the fishing huts out on stilts at the end of long and winding piers over the water. They got naked and swum out in the saltwater. They kissed and fell asleep that way in the wet sand under the moon.

There was no evilness between them on the drive back and the air was as clear as Alabama itself. There was a silence between them which was longer and greater than the world. They stopped at bait shop for burgers and made love in the parking lot after running their hands across the neon rainbow of plastic lures, under a canopy of nylon lines. They put more ice in the Playmate and bought another sixer of Miller once they’d toweled down. The beach highway burned under the truck and the sea oats stubbled the sand on the sides of the road.  

They left everything behind and moved to Pensacola and lived in the beach bars up and down the coast. Barnfire’s folks wondered where she was. They shot bottles like skeet with twelve gauges on the beach with roughnecks in from the rigs one night. The road hummed under them wherever they went and they gave no care for trouble. Barnfire’s face grew rounder and they got jobs in the kitchens and rented a bungalow. They spent their money on beer and cigarettes and lived for the sight of the beach and night unoccluded by condos or casinos.  

Crank broke up the scene in ’78 and she remembered the feeling of the morning she left for the north with no idea where she would stop next. She saw Rebecca crying with her top off on the teal motel comforter—her palms upturned to the ceiling and her blonde hair a darkstreaked beautiful mess of waves. She’d kissed her on the forehead and put the bag in the back of the truck as Magnolia from the Heartbreakers debuted on the radio.  

Chicago was a mean city and she’d found a new side of herself called heroin  which she hated. It was a total loss of confidence which forced her into the denizened Midwestern nights like black steel burning on the highway. She fought with several men and lost and her face took on a crushed bruisedness in the silver mirrors. You could see the outline of her bones in her arms, and the thin cotton dresses from home she’d once  been loved in went grey and ragged. 

She flew a sign on the interstate. The mega highway wind would blow her hair back and she remembered crying without tears more than once as she waited for the dollars of strangers.  

One night she found herself with enough money to enter under the Christmas lighted ceiling of Robichaux’s in the old Polish part of town. Past a row of clapboard houses not unlike the ones from the street she grew up on. There was a warm brownness to the night air. She’d seen a father and son throw a ball back and forth with a dog in one of the dozens of chainlinked backyards on the walk to the bar. She’d heard about it  through her new friend Henry James who was a night thief and a busker in the central city.  

She ordered a shift beer and looked up at the lights. A ball game played in the crook of the ceiling and she let her eyes drift past it. She flexed her jaw and felt like she’d been kicked in the mouth. She felt the cold come in from the door and turned to see a man in a black leather jacket and blue jeans brush powder from his shoulders and take off his beanie. She was overcome with the sensation of life having eclipsed her entirely. It was as if the last breath of her childhood self had blown out the door with the man’s entrance. She felt slurried as she nodded her head toward him. He was brickjawed and grey stubbled and he walked past her to the other end of the bar.  

She watched him finish his one beer. Magnolia leaves in sunlight against a blue sky blurred in the back of her head as she was overcome with the old desire for Alabama. The depression was a deep navy. There was no one to call in the homestate any longer. There might as well have been no Alabama.  

She covered her pint glass with a coaster and put her hat on and walked out to the sound of Bocephus singing notes on fishing from the jukebox. She sat on the cold black iron bench out front and felt nothing as she smoked. A boxtruck pushed through the slush and cast golden beams on the wet black road. She wanted to go to the mission and sleep. She wanted to never have another drink. She cursed the old man with his shirt off in the backyard in the moonlight.  

I got what he got. And it’s all I got.  

The truck pushed back by going the other direction and she thought of flagging it down for a ride to the mission.  

She blew her hands and looked up to the clear black sky. She began to walk toward the mission with the vision of the field beyond the trash of her youth in her mind like a warm spirit guiding her feet in the direction of the sense of a sound mind. Her pulse quickened and her body warmed. She was all of a sudden sure of what was going to happen next. She would walk all the way to the mission: the clear five miles. She would pay the dollar fifty for the bed and ask to borrow one of their towels. She’d get on her knees and pray next to the bunk, her elbows at rest on the baby blue waffle blanket, like she did as a baby in Dixie. 

She’d wake up the next morning at six to beat the crowd. She’d pray again, and have another shower, and see if she could get a comb for her hair. If she could, she’d comb it out slow and easy like the rain which then fell on her as she walked. She’d hit the eight o’clock meeting at Southland. She’d make the ten block walk there from the mission. She’d hope to see one of the women she knew there with some time. One of  those pure women in the golden light of God—their steely hair healthy, well brushed down to their shoulders and secured by expensive clips.  

She’d ask the one which called to her to guide her and she’d call her everyday and do what she said. She’d find a way to get the dollar fifty for the mission and live there the rest of her life if she had to until she found somewhere better. If she never found anywhere better it would be okay as long as she didn’t drink whiskey or get high ever again. She’d fly a sign for an hour or two a day and look for a job the rest of the time. If she had to she’d fly a sign for the rest of her life. She’d try and buy a better shirt as soon as she got the chance.  

And it all went as close to this as one could imagine. She stayed at the mission for three months and got a job in one. She sold coffee off a street cart at less than minimum wage and saved up enough in three months to move into an Oxford House further north. She worked the cart for another three months before getting on at the Donton Square McDonald’s where she made manager in two years. She kept her hair pinned back and her hands clean at work. She watched the odd reflective grey towers of the city in the mornings on the train on the way to work. The sun hit the sides of the towers and she felt alive through her muscles and face. Lightbeams fell through the shadows and crossed her face in diagonal lines those mornings on the train.  

One morning five years in she was cleaning the windows in the front of the restaurant when her pocket buzzed and she answered her phone.  

Her sister’s voice on the other end of the black line asked if she’d “heard the  news” about their father.  

“No,” she’d said.  

“He killed himself this morning with a knife in his bedroom. Stabbed himself in the heart three times and fell back on the bed and died. Dixie police found him stomach up.” 

Chastity watched a shirtless man, with a dirty blonde beard, in swimtrunks, cross the street. He knelt on one knee. She heard him cry out like a hurt bear through the plateglass over her sister’s static voice on the line. 

She met her sister three days later, down in Dixie, at a grey hotel on Highway Eight. It was a small, sad service. There were only a few Presbyterians the old bastard had long since abandoned. Chastity thought his head was bloated to unreasonably red and wide proportions even for an alcoholic. His hands folded on top of one another like a schoolboy’s on his football field of a chest. His shoulders met the white padding interior of the casket on either side. His mouth drawn in a thin anti-smile and the black holes of his nose erupted in pubic-like hair. She crossed herself at the sight of him and kneeled by his casket. She said the old prayers under her breath and the new ones she’d learned in Chicago.  

She couldn’t bring herself to kiss his forehead; the specter of this failure would haunt her for decades. They closed the box and drove him out on Highway Eight to the Dixie Historic Cemetery. She rode with her sister in her silver sedan behind the hearse. The church people only made one more carload. Highway Eight emptied out into the fields past the Sonic and the Advanced Autoparts. The fields were bright green; to  Chastity, they looked more alive than all of Chicago combined. Her sister’s car windows were oilstreaked and the clear coat on her hood had come off in two big boils of rust and sunbaked metal.  

The cemetery backed up to a soy field. It was encircled by a couple scraggly pines and a half dead cedar in which a couple turkey vultures’d made their roost. The two Hall brothers from Hall Funeral Home brought out the riser cart and set it up for their father. They wore matching auburn and navy check sportscoats, navy slacks, shiny black loafers and salt and pepper hair trimmed down to a neat half inch. 

The older brother, James, opened the back of the hearse. “Awlright Miss Chastity, now, let’s gone head and get yah daddy home baby.”      

The younger brother, Beau, pulled the casket out of the back and slid it onto the riser, in one precise pull, as James held the riser steady.  Chastity turned and watched the two Presbyterians pile out of a big white pickup.  The young, skinny one—with his thick brown hair combed over in a quaff—pushed his checkered shirt deeper into the belted waist of his khakis and curled his lip as he squinted. A bald man who drove strowed right up to the casket and patted it like a dog with a pale hand. 

“We’re gonna miss ol Charles Lee down at the chewch,” he said. “He was a helluva card, but I believe the man had a good heart. People are gonna say what they say about anybody, but I believe Charles Lee had a good heart.”  

Chastity brushed some hair away from her mouth where it’d been caught. A breeze blew through and kicked up dust in their faces. Her sister threw her hand up and guarded her eyes.  

They found themselves over by the hole in the ground the Halls dug before dawn. James Hall held his slim, leatherbound copy of the Gospel against his chest with his dark and shining hands. He wore a forlorn look of patronage as he looked over the small crowd with his back to the field. He looked as though he was prepared to deliver a life sentence to a man of equal nobility. He opened his mouth to speak but it was so dry he mashed his tongue against the roof of his mouth before he opened it again and spoke.  

“The ribbon of life is cut in the dyin days of a dyin land.”  

His tongue felt thick and pasty against the dry roof of his mouth. He gulped what spit he had left down before he spoke again. 

“It is through this ribbon we walk, and cross this ribbon we mus live. It is in the mornins, alone fields such as this, where we mus pray and say, ‘I too am a man in this land. I too will cast my seed across the clean of the earth, and ass Gawd to provide whatever providence he may deem suitable to my existence.’”  

He took a small step forward. He rocked back on his heels as he lifted his toes and then tapped them down against the dirt.  

“’Jesus was a cross maker’ it has been sung. ‘Jesus was a cross maker.’ A man amongst men. A fishermen of men amongst fishermen. The Leaven carryin the secret of the Leaven to the unleaven flock of the world. Charles Lee was one of the other. He was in one of these two camps, and only Christ knows the difference, and  Charles Lee of course was made of Christ as we all are. The Brother is at rest now. He has found his heavenly home. He is in the sky of diamonds. He is in the teal pull of the universe. For us, here on earth, there are only the two commandments to remember and  practice daily. There is no truth outside of those truths.”  

James looked over at Beau where he stood, arms crossed, at the corner of the grave plot, under one of the sickly cedars.  

“Amen?” 

“Amen,” the small gathering said in broken pieces.  

On the car ride home, her sister asked her to come and live with her after the funeral and she was struck by the clarity in which she felt the conviction to agree. She hugged her and flew back. She sold most of her things, swept the floor and bought a car to drive down to Fairhope. She went to the mission and served a meal and thanked the staff there. She visited the grave of the steelhaired woman who helped her and left a gold coin on her headstone. 

Her windshield and rear window were clean and clear as she headed south out of the Midwest. A twenty year career in the Fairhope public schools, a turn of the century cottage in a quiet neighborhood drowned in green oaks, a life in the church, her sister’s eventual release in the arms of cancer in hospice care—this was much of all which stood between her and that long drive she made out of Chicago. 

The cardinal hopped down from the feeder into the grass. It was preening itself. It twitched its head. It reminded Chastity of a smile. It spread its wings and paused. It flew blackeyed across the yard and into the sky. She touched the coffee. It had gone cold. The birds in the trees had gone quiet. There was no sound but the wind. It was 1976, no 1978. It was her, it was Rebecca Barnfire, it was her sister. All of them in the car. All of them turning the radio up to the right level. The trees burning way to give rise to the rest of the country. She coughed her wet cough and lit her last Kamel. She took three drags and a smile crossed her face in the reverie of the morning. She coughed and she  coughed and she laughed as she fell from the chair—arms wide open to all the women of the universe. To Alabama herself. 

Dan Duffy is a writer from Gautier, Mississippi. A graduate of Ole Miss and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he lives in Gautier. 

Red Danielson, a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, is a poet, screenwriter, and painter. His work has appeared in The Iowa Review, Haiku Journal, CERASUS, Three Lines Poetry, and Subterranean Quarterly, among other publications. This piece, an earlier version of which appeared in Little Village magazine, was adapted from an ongoing project pairing his prose with portraits of poets, writers, and artists.

Categories
Across The Wire Vol. 6

Pure Life Journey

by Tom Ianelli

AJ looked at the pile of soiled food and felt bad for it. The bread had worked okay. Microwaved bologna too. But the mayo was a mess, and he had cut his penis on the rotisserie chicken.

He crossed off “food play” from the list in his journal and thought of his failed attempts. Feet, tickling, blood, hot wax, ASMR, men. None of them turned him on. But there was hope. Group play, findom, claustrophilia, clowns. One of those had to get him going. 

He dialed Genevieve. “Humiliation” was next. He shared his thoughts with her and she said she would google some stuff and come over the next night. 

AJ was thankful for Genevieve. She worked at his gym and was as naïve about kinks as he was. He could tell she didn’t like him much as a person, but she agreed to help him because he paid her a couple hundred dollars per session, which he could more than afford. 

“But, like, I only do stuff to you, okay?” she had said when they first started. 

Since then she had choked him and pegged him. She had popped a balloon on his balls and sat on a cake in front of him. 

When she came over the next night there was no preamble. She slapped him in the face and made him put on women’s lingerie. She wore a leather jumpsuit and as she swatted him with what looked like a small leather fly swatter, he felt the first inklings of pleasure come over him. She pushed him onto the couch and he laughed.

“No laughing,” she said.

She grabbed on to the front of his hair and yanked so hard some came out.

“Ow, don’t do that!” He had told her that losing his hair was his biggest fear. 

“Oh, poor baby,” she said and yanked out some more.

“Genevieve, stop, please.”

“Say anything other than ‘yes ma’am’ and I’ll rip every hair out of your head.” She took a water bottle, pulled his head back and sprayed it in his mouth. He coughed and spit it out. 

“What is that?”

“My piss.”

“Oh my god.”

“You love it.” She grabbed the front of his hair. 

“Yes ma’am!”  

“Get up!” 

He did as he was told.

She made him try to twerk. She made him do the worm and laughed at his flailing. She made him smoosh his privates against the glass so the whole city could, as she put it, “see how weird it looked.”

While he obliged her, he tried to understand how anyone could find this sexy or enjoyable. Still, he didn’t use the safe word. Perhaps the pleasure came later.  

She made him bend over and be her furniture. 

“Where do you work again?” she asked, sitting on him, cleaning her nails. 

He didn’t respond.

“Answer me.” She slapped him.

“I’m a project manager at Chewy,” he said.

She laughed for a full minute. “AJ, do you realize how pathetic your life is?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“And now you think that if you can find some kink it will make you interesting?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You think a sexual depravity will shield you from the fact of your complete uselessness?” 

“Yes ma’am.”

She got up. “Lay down,” she commanded.

“Yes ma’am.”

She tied his hands behind his back and then tied his feet to them. “Even your parents hate you,” she said. 

“Genevieve—”

“Shut up.” She pulled out a gag. “I’m sick of your whining.” She shoved the ball into his mouth and strapped it tight. “Now you’re in time out.”

He realized he didn’t know how he would say the safe word with a gag in his mouth. His eyes bugged.

Just then, Genevieve’s phone buzzed on the counter. She glanced at the screen, frowned, and snatched it up.

“Hello? What? Wait, what happened?” She began pacing, ropes creaking as AJ strained to follow her with his eyes. “No, no, no, don’t hang up. Fuck. Okay. I’m coming.”

She swept her things into her bag with shaking hands, yanked on her coat.

“Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god,” she kept muttering as she bolted for the door, never once looking back at AJ.

The door slammed. The latch clicked. Then silence.

–

Three years later, AJ was standing behind the podium at the Pure Life Journey meeting with 100 expectant faces staring up at him. 

“Genevieve forgot about me there,” he said. “I laid on the floor of my apartment, bound and gagged in women’s underwear for 72 hours, soiling myself over and over. If I hadn’t hired my cleaner that week, I might have died. But in the end, it was the best thing that ever happened to me.”

The crowd looked up at him proudly.

“The day after being freed, I was driving to the doctor and I saw a billboard that read:

I’M COMING—JESUS

and I realized that the answer had been there all along. I went online, found Pure Life Journey, and once I reclaimed my virginity, all my anxieties floated away.”

His own words made him blush. He felt their truth, their purity. 

“Celibacy became my purpose,” he went on. “I dedicated myself to it, and after a year, I was leading the program.”

When AJ finished speaking, he shook hands and smiled at the followers. 

“I’ll be having office hours until 6,” he said, and went to his office. He shut the door behind him and went behind his standing desk. The desk was customized, four and a half feet tall with walls that went to the floor so that visitors could only see the top half of his torso.

He stood there for a moment, sighed and then pulled down his pants and underwear in a practiced motion, letting the cool air hit him. This was his favorite part of the day. He cupped his bare ass, fingers spreading, and closed his eyes. 

There was a knock at the door. 

“One minute,” he called. 

He opened the laptop on his desk and there was a still image of a porn video there, a woman hunched over, aggressively climaxing. He pulled his shoulders back, straightened his shirt and, pants still down, he called, “come in.”

A young man entered. Early thirties, nervous red face. AJ welcomed him warmly and gestured to the chair on the other side of the desk. The man sat and divulged his problems. 

He had a porn addiction and his wife recently found his browser history. “I can’t help it,” he said. “The more I hate myself, the more I turn to these sites, to these women.” 

It was the same shame and panic AJ had seen countless times.

“You’re in the right place, my friend,” he said with a smile. “Porn addiction is simple. Once you can understand, really understand, that it takes so much more than it could ever give, you’ll find that you’ll want to give it up.”

The man smiled, flushed and grateful, and said he would come back next week. When he left, AJ shook his hand, and then used the hand that had touched the man’s to cup his balls. 

The secret nudity had started by accident, a year earlier. It was ten minutes before his office hours started. His fly was unbuttoned and he was checking a mole on the top part of his thigh, when a new member burst in without knocking. AJ was so caught off guard he dropped his pants and stammered a greeting to the new member. Mortified, he didn’t know how to pick up his trousers without getting caught, but after a minute, he saw that the member had no idea that his pants were down. His bare legs were a total secret. Something about this excited him, so he stood like that for the entire meeting. The member never caught him, so he left his pants down for the next meeting, and the one after that, and then the rest of his meetings that day, and soon he was doing it every day. 

After a few months, however, AJ found the thrill of his secret was wearing off. He wanted higher stakes. AJ didn’t use porn. He didn’t masturbate. He was as sexually pure as he purported himself to be. But he reasoned that to use porn for this purpose wasn’t related to his own sexual gratification, and that made it okay. So, he began to have images and videos of various sex acts on his laptop, their depravity projecting secretly out to him as he nodded along to what his visitors divulged.

There was another knock.

“Come in.”

This time a woman in her late fifties. She wore a modest blouse and she kept laughing uncomfortably, her hands trembling. 

“I just want to feel clean. To feel innocent. I call sex hotlines in the middle of the night and talk for hours, I don’t even know why.”

He gave her his whole speech. Recovery, devotion, realignment. He used the words she wanted. Words he knew were helpful and true. She left with tears in her eyes.

AJ exhaled and looked down at his naked lower half. There was no arousal. It didn’t turn him on in the moment or later. It wasn’t about that. He hardly knew why he was doing it, other than that it was a secret. That it was something no one could know he was doing. 

He often felt bad about it later in the evening. He knew it was a sin. He wrote about it in his diary, repented in his prayers and vowed to stop. But the next day, when he got back to his office, his pants came off, the porn came on, and he took in his visitors. 

A third knock. 

“Come in.”

It was Katherine Meyer, his biggest fan. An avid soul saver, she showed up to every meeting.

“Mr. Donald, my nephew is addicted to video games and needs your help,” she said. She stayed standing. 

“Please call me AJ,” he said for the 100th time. “Tell me about your nephew.”

She did. She went on about his sinful teenage behavior. AJ’s eyes glossed over and dropped to the porn on his screen. He angled the laptop towards him and Mrs. Meyer didn’t seem to notice, so he scrolled and clicked some other videos, pressing play, checking first to make sure the volume was off. 

“These video games, they’re soiling our youth,” Mrs. Meyer was saying. 

“Mhmm,” AJ said. 

“I saw a music video my nephew was watching and it was just butts. Not a single face.”

“It’s terrible,” AJ said. He pulled his shirt up around his waist and stroked his hips. 

He glanced up and saw Mrs. Meyer looking at the framed poster behind him. It showed Jesus dunking a basketball and said, “HE IS RIZZIN,” underneath.

“What do you think? I just hung it up.” he said, smiling.

She looked closer and her face contorted. She looked confused.

“Rizzin’ is a slang term, Mrs. Meyer,” he said.

“Dear Lord,” she said.

He laughed, “What, you don’t like it?” He turned around and he saw what she had seen. The way the poster hung from the nail the angle of the glass reflected back a perfect frame of his naked ass, the porn. The others hadn’t seen it because they had been sitting.

“Dear Lord Jesus.” Mrs. Meyer approached the desk.

“Mrs. Meyer, it’s not what it seems,” he said, shutting the laptop quickly.

“Pervert!” She screamed.

He tried to reach down and pull up his pants but she was quickly around to his side of the desk.

“Pervert!” she screamed again. 

She pulled out her phone. The first flash of the camera came and he reached up to try and stop it but this made him stumble and he fell over as the flash went off. As he lay there, pants at his knees, she took another one and then she opened his laptop and took a picture of that too.

–

AJ’s parent’s house upstate had a massive lawn in the back that spread beautifully down to the lake. There was a boat house for their power boat, pontoon, schooner, and the various small sailboats and skiffs. 

At the top of the lawn, Mr. Donald was sitting on a cushioned lawn chair reading. He was tanned and healthy, with a nicely graying head of quaffed hair. He wore tortoiseshell sunglasses and his white linen shirt was opened a few buttons. He reclined with such a simple, elegant calm it was almost impressive.

Mrs. Donald came out with an equivalent air of tranquility. She wore white linen pants and a loose blue blouse and carried two drinks in cut crystal glasses. The ice in the glasses caught the sun as it shone through the brown liquid of the Arnold Palmers, each with the red dot of a cherry floating on top. 

“Here you go,” she said, handing him the drink.

“Thank you, my dear,” he said, smiling up at her.

“Who was that on the phone?” Mr. Donald asked. 

“AJ.”

“Mm,” Mr. Donald let out and kept reading.

“The team pulled the story from our outlets. It’s on some smaller channels but it won’t matter,” Mrs. Donald said. “The Chewy people said they will take him back.”

“Mm,” Mr. Donald said again, then laughed at something he read and turned the page. 

She sat down in the lawn chair next to him. They were silent together for a moment. Dense trees hemmed in the lawn. The grass was all one length, nature’s immaculately manicured carpet. The late afternoon sun was creeping down slowly, still warm and radiant. It was a gorgeous day. Mrs. Donald took a sip of her drink, the ice tinkling, and Mr. Donald looked over at her, smiled and took a sip of his. 

They basked in the sun, enjoying the day, until Mr. Donald sighed. “The fuck do you think is wrong with him?” he asked, his voice lilting and disinterested. 

Mrs. Donald sighed, also disinterested, “Who knows,” she said. She opened a magazine and scanned it. 

After a while Mr. Donald lowered his book. He turned to his wife and looked at her over the top of his sun glasses. 

“Hey,” he said. 

She lowered her magazine. He stared at her for a moment and then smiled. “Do you have any of those edibles?” 

She laughed like a schoolgirl. “Yes, of course.”

He laughed too. 

“You know you could just buy some for yourself,” she said.

”I know. But I like pretending you’re my drug dealer.”

She giggled again. “I like it too.”

“You want to take them and watch Love on the Spectrum?”

“It’ll just make me cry,” she said. 

“Come on.” 

“Fine.”

They clinked their glasses, took big sips, and turned down to the lawn in front of them. The sun was soft and gold and bathed everything in warmth. It seemed to enter and emanate both Mr. and Mrs. Donald, who were both in their 50’s but looked decades younger. 

“Look,” Mr. Donald said, nodding his head down the lawn. 

Mrs. Donald followed his gaze and gasped, “They’re back!” she said. 

Three deer, a mommy, daddy and baby, walked through their yard. The baby was still small and stumbled awkwardly. 

“Oh, isn’t it lovely?” she asked.

Mr. Donald looked out at the sun setting on his beautiful property. He saw in his mind the house in Aspen, the apartment in Chelsea, the Hamptons house, the house in Hawaii that his wife knew nothing about. He thought of Chewy and the various other subsidiaries he owned through RH investments.

He laughed to himself. “It’s fuckin’ beautiful all right. Fuckin’ goddamn beautiful.”

Tom Ianelli is a fiction writer and street bookseller in Brooklyn. He asks the questions for the Lit Chat series at @peterbooksnyc. He has written for The Panacea Review, Quartersnacks and Bruiser Mag. 

Categories
Across The Wire Vol. 6

Dear LORD

by Colin Gee

Pester’s lawn was overgrown with chest-high grasses and vines and scrubby little trees, except you could sometimes make out the little nests in there where he would roll with his bottles of Schnapps. The sharp grasses were punctuated like Moby Dick every hundred pages with what you suspect is a joke with a hideous towering thorned weed like a praying mantis, with veined and baubled pods and gooey leering fissures, that hung in the grasses.

The barf-green carpets in Pester’s house, long flattened by his hairy flat feet, his bigfoot feet, reeked sourly of Vacation Bible School in the 1970s: frantic onanism, candy corn, and TV dinner. Pea/carrot medley with beef stroganoff, turkey with cornbread stuffing, buttered sweet potatoes and gravy, tender fried chicken pieces with butter-basted veggie platters, Yukon gold potatoes mashed with real milk by real milkmaids, thought Pester, in virginal Swiss hose and bonnets that they always take off. Now for a limited time only with mom’s blueberry muffin or apple pie, jammed into the top of the tin. But Pester’s mom had been dead for thirty years, gone dead.

Mr. Rufus lived on the same block with his partner Timothy in the immaculate three-story Queen Anne Victorian mansion with the Rapunzel tower on the corner. Leaded glass windows, parquet floors, and the gorgeously sculpted, meticulously trimmed lawn with tidy paired flower and vegetable gardens and the famous twin oaks. One time Pester puked all over their topiary and it was chunky mushroom tomato sauce and green beans, we speculated. Everyone saw it happen and went to look at the mess. Timothy came out on the porch, made it to the planters, and rushed back inside.

Later on I hooked up their hose and sprayed the chunks off the bush, across the sidewalk and into the gutter, but that was not enough. I had to get a pushbroom and nudge the chunks down the gutter to the drain, and run a lot of water until everything was shipshape.

How did Pester get into heaven? Who let him in here? And how can we get rid of him?

Colin Gee (@ColinMGee on X) is founder and editor of The Gorko Gazette. 

Categories
Issue 5 Issue 5 Fiction

THE FIREMAN

By Walker Rutter-Bowman

My wife has become a more suspicious person. I tell her we can trust the babysitter. Her references check out, she’s first-aid certified. She’s a nice young woman, but my wife thinks she’s in it for the wrong reasons. It’s all right to have an agenda, which is hard for my wife to accept. My wife’s success as a painter didn’t come from plotting and scheming, only because she’s not good at those things. The thing she’s good at is painting. The thing she leans on is her talent. I point out that she admires some artists of known agendas. When my wife and I wed under the dying elm next to the reservoir, her brother said we had to reason with each other, and we agreed. But she won’t let me be the devil’s advocate, let alone the babysitter’s. The babysitter’s not in it for the baby, though she likes the baby well enough. She’s in it for the money, because that’s our transactional society, simple economics. She stands at the door, slipping her feet into her shoes, arms into coat, and we hand her cash. Cash, the king. The baby sleeps. My wife says the babysitter is an art student looking for a recommendation, which is true. My wife hasn’t uncovered some great secret. My wife found her in one of the studio classes she teaches. The babysitter’s been honest with us since the beginning. She represents the frankness of a generation. My wife is eating dozens of daily grams of protein but her blood sugar seems low, her energy has cratered, she looks in the freezer for frozen meatballs and reasons to distrust her fellow woman and man. I make sure to be present when she interacts with the babysitter. My wife says I always take the side of the less fortunate. “The babysitter comes from wealth,” I say. “Where?” she asks. Wealth, I say, like it’s a place I know.

My wife wants an old woman to babysit. She thinks the lack of old women in our lives is a failure of character. And the old women we do have in our lives are not the right kind of old women. They say the wrong things. They make me carry their carts. When the baby was just born, they said it looked unwell. The baby’s eyes were different sizes, and she hadn’t grown into her skin. When I hurt my knee, one of the old women said, I guess your running days are over. We don’t believe in hitting old women, though sometimes a neighbor shakes our faith. When my wife married me under the dying elm by the reservoir, my brother said I would take care of her when she was old because I loved my elders. Maybe I did, once, but it’s hard to remember. When I help the old women in our building, a mutual feeling of animus lingers. Our eyes lock and narrow. When we wed under the dying elm on the shore of the recreational reservoir, we agreed to celebrate one another’s known associations, but perhaps we didn’t use those exact terms. My wife doesn’t approve of several old men in my life. She says I want to be like them, the old and lonely men, a sour smell clinging to my clothes and neck. She says they are the kind of old men who don’t listen to women, as if there are many kinds. But I keep my neck clean. When I hold the baby, she puts her face right into my neck, and she enjoys it. She loves my neck. She puts her mouth on it. I don’t want to be lonely, but there’s nothing wrong with a little time alone. No one wants an old man to babysit. Only an old woman. I’m not sure why, but this is how it’s done. We won’t be making any changes. Everyone’s a pioneer before the baby comes along, then they remember that convention has its merits.

The day before the opening the babysitter calls to cancel. She ate a bad salad. No one is thoroughly washing their vegetables and greens. My wife, for instance. It could have been you, I do not say. You could have killed the babysitter by accidentally feeding her the feces of livestock. Wash your stuff, I do not say. Restraint in such situations is even more valuable and punishing. I hold myself back with an outmoded form of tolerance. This infuriates my wife, who has read much about the lives of saints but has the wrong temperament to follow in their footsteps. She knew what the silence said. It drives her to wash a carrot with such uncommon vigor that it slips from her grasp and shoots out of her hands and into her eye, the orange point striking the white ball. “Are you happy now?” she screams. When we wed under the dying elm on the shore of the polluted reservoir, her aunt had told us to laugh at one another, and we agreed, so I am laughing. But of course I’m not happy, not even glad.

We get her squared away with a nice eyepatch. She lets me put it on for her, kiss her hair. It looks good on her because that’s the kind of person she is. Turning her head slightly to let me know she is being regal in her pain and humility, and that the kissing, if it continues, will not be on the lips. She is still trying to be a saint. I kiss her hair again. She doesn’t need an apology, just my sadness. Like a sexy saint she walks through the house, floating, touching things gently, with only her fingertips. She’s at her best in the aftermath of conflict. I knew my wife would secretly enjoy wearing the eyepatch. We decide to bring the baby to the opening. It’ll be easy. She is a good baby and well liked. She has never attended an opening, and maybe it’s about time we bring her along as a part of the family. My wife believes in one integrated life, not an artistic practice siloed from the rest of it, and I agree, I guess. The baby is a part of our lives.

When my wife was awarded a prestigious and lucrative prize that made us temporarily rich, we lost our minds a little. We got into wine. We did some research and bought a wine fridge. Anyone can win a prize just as anyone can have a baby. It was a lot of remunerative validation, but not enough. It went away quickly, and as it did, she asked herself, Why me?, which seemed like a natural question after the windfall of validation. Why me and not the others? But she asked it with such regularity, such force, that it began to drive me insane. Why me, why me, why me? I started hearing it in the squeal of breaks, the tinkle of a windchime, the creak of a rusted gate. Why me? Why me? When we wed under the dying orange elm we agreed to be as one, the reservoir was crowded with birds and the civic dreams of park architects and the promises we made to one another. My father told us to be grateful, and we tried. When we wed by a dead tree, we did so to condone one another’s worth through words of repetition, though perhaps not in those exact terms, and I’d like the option to veto a few repeated phrases. Why me, why me, why me? When we wed a tree was falling and a manmade lake was rotting and her mother told me she had never really considered her daughter the artistic type. When we wed, the wind ruffled the water on the reservoir, blowing the stagnant both toward and away, representing the chafing of nature against man, or vice versa. The wind is bad, the wind is good. At no point did the wind sound like Why me, why me, why me? There are questions I don’t ask myself, and in this way I hope to be a model for those I have agreed to share a life with.

I believe in my wife’s paintings. I believe in the baby. And yet, one of my goals in fatherhood has been to avoid comparing our daughter to my wife’s paintings. I have failed at many things but at this I have mainly succeeded. 

There is wine at the opening, the paintings hang on the walls. The wine comes out of glass bottles and goes into plastic cups, it comes out of the cups and goes into mouths, onto tongues and lips, onto shirts and the concrete floor, onto pants and shoes. The beautiful people are wearing beautiful clothes, except for those who are trying something else. The people move in a circle around the room and then clump in the middle, their hands touch and then peel apart. I can tell my wife is disappointed, doing her fake smile. She pulls back her upper lip to show her pink gums. She is doing everything right, and she will have to keep doing it. We have not been temporarily rich for a long time. She wants to scream but the longer you go without screaming, the harder it becomes. Our friends have a wine fridge I find very sleek and unassuming. I am trying to drink less, sleep better, dream more. I can tell from her one eye that she’s tired. She’s not used to the eyepatch, and she keeps peeling it up and wedging her fingers under it to rub her socket with a back-and-forth squeak like a cloth or squeegee on a pane. Her paintings are excellent, and it’s unclear if they mean anything to anyone. It’s likely her eye is infected or getting there. The baby is being shy with her head on my shoulder, and then the baby stops being shy and wants to walk. The baby starts to cry, and my wife comes over to comfort her. The baby is not really a baby. Please understand that when I say baby I mean philosophically. She knows the difference between her mother coming over to comfort her and her mother coming over to shut her up. She can say a few words like hop and bob and money. I go outside to get some air. A fire truck crawls down the next street over and sirens drown out the sound of the baby screaming at the paintings. Someone is burning tonight. I hate to think of babies stuck in buildings, but I love the thought of firefighters carrying babies in their arms. They deserve a lot of credit for being so gentle in their huge fireproof suits, and I think the babies like to look into those firm faces under black and yellow helmets. From where I’m standing, I can see the baby facing the canvases and opening her mouth as wide as she can, as if to devour each work of art. I had the same instinct when I saw my wife’s paintings for the first time—the urge to engulf them, wrap them up, take them inside myself. Something about them makes you want to open yourself up, which not a single critic has noted. The baby is screaming, and people are looking at her with sympathy, but also moving away from her, putting some distance between them. From a young man I acquire a cigarette, which I begin to smoke. The baby screams with all her might and I use my whole chest to tug in every bit of smoke from this cigarette, a scream in reverse, as if I can flip it inside out with the force of my inhalations. 

“What do you think?” says the man who gave me the cigarette. “She’s too young for an opening,” I say. “I mean the paintings,” he says. I mention that not a single critic has noted the thing about opening yourself up to a work of art. He writes it down on a little notepad.

The sirens keep pealing. The lights from the fire truck dance across the buildings, smudge across the windows. A few improbable stars poke out, and a plane rises or falls across the purple-black sky. The sky is like a reservoir. I am like a dying elm. My wife picks up the baby, and the baby kicks her as hard as she can in the stomach. But then she decides the violence must end. She gets snuggly. She securely clutches a clump of my wife’s hair, which means peace. My wife sees me and waves and tells the baby to look outside, pointing, and the baby doesn’t see me, but she waves all the same. She will be lucky if she grows up to have hair as beautiful and strong as her mother’s, able to withstand all this tugging. The baby is muscular, in her way. She wears tunics. She lifts objects above her head like boulders and then releases them. The paintings are mostly of trees that look terrified to be so well-lit and stuck, as the artist has stuck them, in the middle of grim fields. My wife likes the work of a group of French artists who called themselves prophets. They painted bright but soft interiors and trees that look terrified. One of them died in a river, one of them died of disease, and one of them—I don’t know, I don’t know. They were artists of a known agenda, and they said so. Usually in my wife’s paintings there are two trees but sometimes there are three. The trees don’t look like people, despite what some critics have said. Some critics have said that the trees are people, or the absence of people, the hatred of people. They have not said that the trees are trees, or the absence of trees, the hatred of trees. My wife believes her critics are trying to work their way into her. They bite her, they chew a hole, they burrow in, and from that vantage hope to see and say something of worth. The baby did the opposite: she was too close to the paintings. She had no perspective. She had to get out of there, look around, get her footing. She is my wife’s greatest critic because she gave up the privilege of proximity. She exited the body of the artist and, with a few exceptions, never looked back. My wife is like anyone else, hating people, loving trees, and vice versa. When we wed under the approximation of wood and by the facsimile of water we held hands and said we would share it all, but it turns out we could have been more specific. 

The baby runs at the paintings and, whereas I would’ve stopped the baby before she reached them, something holds my wife back. The baby reaches the paintings and clutches at them with her small, strong hands. In some spots she pulls off the paint. If she puts it in her mouth there might be an issue. My wife holds her by the wrist to prevent it. The baby trembles with effort, and so does my wife. I think of a movie where a man tries to stab another man with a knife. One lies on top of the other, they tremble with effort, and the knife descends. The knife goes into one man’s heart, but the paint doesn’t go into the baby’s mouth. A clump falls to the floor, smacking softly. The good thing about paintings as creations is that they never destroy each other. They can glare at each other from across a room for years without ever rising to violence. Of course, the baby’s actions ultimately unlocked a new phase of my wife’s artistic career. She would never display paintings so wet and fresh again. In this way one creation can improve another. But I decided I couldn’t watch the epiphany happen. Or wonder how my wife would balance the discovery of a new direction with the need to discipline the baby. We don’t touch paintings. We don’t hurt art. So I walked around the block because, as a father, there’s nothing like it for the mind and spirit.

Before we ever had a child, we wondered what we would do when it misbehaved. Our first thought was to improve upon the past. We believed we’d turned out well, but was it because or in spite of the methods of our mothers and fathers? For a number of reasons, we didn’t want to strike the child. For one, we could still recall feeling so small and helpless before the power of our parents, who struggled in their positions of authority. My wife’s father was an alcoholic whose work significantly contributed to the microchip industry. He spanked her only once, under orders from her mother, and when his daughter started crying, so did he, and she was so shocked to see him crying she stopped, wiped her eyes. But he went on sobbing because self-pity was how he expressed himself. It came over him like a storm. They could speak to each other if they were watching a game. Televised grass made them feel calm. When I misbehaved, my mother, a classicist who won some acclaim from her book on plumbing in the ancient world, shook me by the shoulders and said, Why, why? and my father walked out to the backyard to check on his birdfeeders. He won very little acclaim for checking on his birdfeeders, despite his great passion and skill for it. Our goal was to be better, more logical. We wanted consequence for all parties involved, especially the child. It should make sense. Now we had to wonder what to do when a child unlocks a new phase of an artistic career by breaking the rules. And good art is all about breaking rules. It’s tricky. I buy and eat a hot dog. With caution the vendor watches me eat it as if expecting some complaint. No complaints. It’s a delicious hot dog.

Back at the gallery the lights are stronger and more colorful. The blues and reds and their whirling strobe belong to a firetruck. The sidewalk is full of the people who were once inside and are now confused. They had not planned to be huddled together on a sidewalk. They had not dressed for this. They are impressed by the truck but don’t want to show it. Now I hear the gallery alarm, a bell hitting itself like a penitent. I search the crowd outside for my wife and the baby until two figures catch my eye: my wife and the baby, alone in the gallery. Not alone for long, though, as the firemen march in. My wife speaks with one of them, and I can read confusion in her gestures as she struggles to process what the baby has unlocked in her artistic practice. We know there is no real danger of fire. I think we’re all feeling sheepish about our involvement in the art world when there are firemen about—even though firemen can be artists, and artists firemen. It’s easiest to be neither, and I recommend it. Some people are looking at me, wondering if I’ll run in, wondering if I’ll just stand there. I just stand there, and that earns some approval. It allows them to judge me, and once that is complete—it only takes a moment—to extend their tendrils of sympathy. I can tell the fireman is being kind to my wife. I can tell my wife is thinking about him in an intimate sense. I can tell my wife would like to take one painting off the wall and bring it outside with her. She hands the baby to the fireman. The fireman has never been in this situation. We see him through the windows of the gallery. The baby nestles into his arms. She is too old to be held like that, but the fireman is so big. He could hold anyone like that. He looks down at her. She will never remember this, the lights splashing across the buildings and streets and faces, her mother carefully unhanging from the huge wall a painting with a fresh divot. We will hold the memory for her, forever. The fireman cradling her with a gentleness he won not by training or study. He is special. The baby reaches up and touches his helmet. Her hand unlocked a new phase of a major painter’s career, and who knows what it could do for him. Her hand tells him, You’re doing good work, you bring something natural to all of this. The fireman touches her cheek with his large and gloved hand. That hand saves lives. It’s a moment I’ll never forget. She won’t remember it, but we’ll remind her for the rest of her life, the rest of our lives. Was I in danger? she’ll ask, trying to understand, and we’ll have to answer, No, not really. It wasn’t about that. It will be tricky for the fireman too. So you saved the baby, his family says, from fire, from death? No, he says, not exactly. It wasn’t about that. But for a moment, we were two people who understood one another. She unlocked a new phase of my firefighting career. But everyone has left the room. They miss his stories of melting metal, of noise and smoke. They don’t care what he found in the face of a child. So the fireman sits alone with his thoughts.

Walker Rutter-Bowman is a writer and editor living in Brooklyn.

Categories
Issue 5 Issue 5 Fiction

MOST OF THE WORDS WE USE ARE WASTED

By Alex Rost

Chuck misses three days of work then comes in with swollen eyes and through choked words tells me his wife is gone, that after seven years of marriage and two daughters, he found pictures on her phone, iPhone live photos with devastatingly fellatious clarity.

“Two guys,” he says. “Same time.”

She’d been coming home later than usual from her bartending job and Chuck found a sandwich bag in her purse an inch deep with Adderall she claimed the cook gave her.

“Yeah, she said she didn’t pay or nothin. He just gave it to her.”

She’d said the cook was ‘really cool.’

“I should’ve known then,” he says, then sulks back to his car and drives away.

***

Chuck finds out his wife has been coaching his kids to say, “Daddy’s a piece of shit.” They were reluctant at first but came around when she cheered, like they’d scored a goal in a game they didn’t know they were playing.

***

Numbers he doesn’t recognize keep sending Chuck photos of naked men. He blocks the first few but eventually engages.

“The guy tells me he got my number online, sends me this.” He hands me his phone.

It’s a picture of his face on Grindr, his number spelled out. It describes him as a power bottom. Ready now, is the tagline. Bigger IS better, written underneath.

No,” he says when I point out his wife might’ve made it. “She wouldn’t do that.”

***

Which of course, he finds out she did. Her and the cook. Who ends up, she’s been fucking regularly.

***

There’s pep in Chuck’s step, and he’s all smiles while telling me that he and his wife are going to try to work things out, that she came over while the kids were at his mom’s and cried while he held her.

Using words like— 

“Miss you,” 

and 

“Just need time,”

and 

“Of course I still love you.” 

He’s so full of hope that I don’t have the heart to tell him that I’d just now seen her on a dating website wearing a tiny skirt and low-cut shirt.

Using words like—

“Divorced,” 

and 

“Single mom,”

and 

“Looking for love.”

***

Chuck isn’t doing too well. He’s blasting screamcore again.

The boss comes out of his office and says, “I don’t know about you, but this music makes me want to murder a baby.”

I start to agree with him, then I’m like, “Wait. Murder a baby?”

***

Chuck explains his hazy state of mind through an episode where he started to cut a zucchini only to realize he meant to buy a cucumber.

I try to relate, say about my ex—

“There’s still cans she bought in the cupboard—artichoke hearts, black beans—and sometimes I pick one up, think about the food inside sitting in its juices. The dates on the cans, they’ll last longer than our relationship did. I’d eat it, but I don’t like artichokes, the black beans were for a recipe she made. I thought about tossing them, but when I look at them, there’s like, this moment. I don’t know. I figure when the cans are about to go bad I’ll say fuck it, make a casserole or some shit.” 

I look at Chuck’s glossed over expression and think about how most of the words we use are wasted.

And just like him, I long to be more than a memory.

***

Chuck’s press is already running when I come in through the back and give him a passing, “What’s up, Chuck?”

“Living the dream,” he says.

And what he really means is—

This is just another day. Today is yesterday, yesterday is tomorrow, and I regret nearly every choice I’ve made.

“Living a dream,” I say back, smiling.

And what I really mean is—

I feel exactly the same way.

***

I go to leave at the end of the day and see Chuck sitting at the picnic table despite the muddy cold, staring off across the lawn at nothing.

I sit next to him, neither of us speaking for like three, four minutes, until I finally ask how he’s doing.

And in this long winded way, he explains how there is nothing left to say when the words from our hearts have lost their meaning.

“She told me that she’d tried to make me happy when I was unhappy,” he says. “But when I finally wanted to make her happy, she was done trying to be happy with me.”

And I think of my ex, telling me she just wanted to be happy without shedding all her pride.

After a moment, Chuck smiles, says, “Ahh, who cares about women anyway?”

“We do,” I say. “We don’t have anything else to care about.”

Alex Rost runs a commercial printing press outside of Buffalo, NY.

Categories
Issue 5 Issue 5 Fiction

BEEFS

By Sal Difalco

1

“Empty your pockets,” the officer says. His thick black moustache distracts me. Stalinesque, in a word. I could never grow such a moustache. He repeats his command. I empty my pockets. What do I have in those pockets? Forty dollars—one twenty, one ten, two fives—in a silver billfold I received as a groom’s gift for Sam Perri’s wedding. That was twenty years ago. I still see Sam on occasion, but everything else has changed since then. It’s a different world, I’m a different man. Some loose silver: quarters, dimes, nickels. We got rid of pennies long ago. A red lighter. The red leans toward orange and yet is not orange. What is that colour precisely? I don’t know. A receipt from Shoppers Drug Mart for toiletries and a bag of russet potato chips. Another receipt from Phipp’s Bakery for a blueberry scone. A ginger lozenge free from its wrapper and collecting a beard of lint. A small steel cylinder containing one gram of Afghani-adjacent hashish. “What’s this?” the officer asks, holding the cylinder up to the caged lightbulb of the interrogation room. “Hashish,” I say. “You know,” he says, “just a few years ago I could have busted your ass for this.” I want to say, “The law is a bitch, my friend,” but think better of it. Legalizing cannabis may have been the greatest thing my country has ever done. “You think you’re smart, eh?” the officer says. “No smarter than average,” I reply, speaking the truth as I know it. “Well, you’re in big trouble now,” he says. “How so?” I ask. “I think you know,” he says. But I have no clue.

2

As a matter of fact, I’m held overnight without explanation. I share a cell with two interchangeable long-haired thugs who boast of robbing a convenience store. “Ever robbed a convenience store, bro?” one asks. I don’t answer him. Not to be rude, but to show how honestly indifferent I am to his reality. “What are you in for, bro?” he asks. I look at him and look at my hands. “He’s a mute,” says his cohort, reclining on the dented aluminum bench. Both chuckle. The yellow cinderblocks of the cell anger me for some reason. Is yellow a triggering color? I thought red was the winner of that contest. Show a bull a red cape and what happens? But I’m not a bull. The first fellow eyeballs me. “You look like you want to beef,” he says. “He looks like he wants to beef,” he repeats to his friend. I don’t quite know what he means. I don’t have a beef with him, if that’s what he’s implying, at least not for the time being, though I suspect that within a minute or two I will have a beef with both him and his amigo. “He has mean eyes,” says the amigo, sitting up. I know I have mean eyes. I’ve been told that many times during the course of my life. Even as a young lad I was told I had an unfriendly look about me. This often led to fisticuffs or beatings from older people. But I am mean. I am a mean man, and I own that shit. And I like myself just fine. You want me to list a few real monsters? No need, huh. We all know who they are and how we compare to them. “Hey,” I say, “you want me to show you how mean I really am?” Both say nothing. Good for them. A little dust up would have been gratifying, but they saved me the clean-up and potential further charges. “You guys are lucky,” I say.

3

Luck has nothing to do with it, some might argue. Who the some are remains unknown. If we maintain the thread and not break from the dream, perhaps we will end on a satisfying note. Otherwise, preserve the wanking for the lads at the pub over pints of flat Guinness. The pending charges fell away after further investigation. Without looking back at parts one and two, and with a memory scored by pinholes caused by drug abuse and congenital cognitive issues, I suspect the officers were lovers mid-spat who decided to make sport with me for a while as a diversion from their own supper of eels. Later they stripped nude and wrestled on a mat they kept for such moments. I state that with no judgment save an aesthetic one. I have no beef with cops. It is impossible to know what goes on in the minds of others, what gears and wheels crank and spin in their braincases. My friend Malvolio, who recently self-published a collection of poetry, tells me that the key to life is not trying to figure out what everyone is thinking, or attempting to determine the motivations of people. “People are idiots,” Malvolio says. “We have barely evolved, emotionally speaking, since the cave man.” Malvolio’s poetry leaves me cold, I must say, as does most poetry written these days. This is not the fault of the poets. It is the fault of social media and politicians and systemic bias. I had to pause for a moment to wipe a speck from my eye. I’m sorry. It’s easy to blame the world for our mediocrity. As mentioned earlier, I am a mean man. I feel mean and say mean things. I’ve been told that enough times and am self-aware enough to realize the validity of this assessment. I’m not violent, just mean. But if there is room in this world for mediocre poets is there not room in it for a mean man? As a matter of fact, most people get away with meanness every day—look around you—but none would admit to being mean. I admit it. Why should I be shunned by the world for being true to myself when everyone else thinks they merit a parade just for being?

Sal Difalco writes from Toronto, Canada.

Categories
Issue 5 Issue 5 Fiction

THE QUEST

By Jimmy Cajoleas

I needed to talk to the redhead at the bar. The signs were clear. She had a nose ring and a tattoo of California. A roach perched on a bottle stared directly at her. I dropped some change on the counter, and it was a nickel and two pennies. That equals seven, the number of completion. I shredded a napkin and it spelled out my name. You ignore the natural world at your peril.

I came to Dutch Bar every night at exactly the same time in hopes of getting served. Otherwise I didn’t have a chance. When I was twelve I was hexed by my neighbor after I squished his pet bullfrog who had wandered into the street. I was on my bike. It was an accident, but the frog didn’t care. He said “Ribbet!” three times and no one has noticed me since. 

I tapped Greg the bartender on the shoulder. 

“Sorry, didn’t see you there.”

I’d heard that signs might lead somewhere terrible but you should follow them anyway. But tonight didn’t feel right. Maybe it was because I hadn’t had a successful conversation with anyone but my mother in nearly a month. Or maybe it was the mild and constant nausea I felt since my father disappeared. 

At that moment the jukebox played the song “Turning Japanese” by the Vapors, a song of great spiritual power, so I decided to follow the signs. 

I said hello to the redhead but of course she didn’t notice. Finally I tapped her on the shoulder. 

“I’m sorry,” she said, “ are you talking to me?”

Her name was Jo Anna. She smoked Kools and offered me one, said she liked my hairdo. 

“My mother curls my hair once a month.”      

“You shouldn’t tell people things like that.” Jo Anna pulled out a picture of a smiling woman in a short yellow dress. “Have you seen this girl?” 

“Are you a bounty hunter or something?”

“No. This is my sister Marilyn. She ran away two years ago and I’ve been searching for her ever since. Got a lead she was down this way. Think you could help me find her?”

That felt like a quest. Quests are how curses are broken. I was getting pretty desperate out here.

“Well? Can you help me?” Her eyes were soft brown, the color of a newborn deer.

“I think I know a place where we could look.”

Jo Anna called a cab and I took her to the Slops.

The Slops were an old neighborhood where millionaires lived in the forties. A development company bought the Slops a decade ago and gutted all the buildings and then went bankrupt. Cops didn’t come to the Slops, but broke and lonely people did. Late at night, the Slops were overflowing with them. 

A woman in a leopard-print leotard set up a snare drum on a street corner. A man beside her played the saxophone. I hate the saxophone.

I tapped Byron Knight on the shoulder. Byron ran the cee-lo game. He was a popular guy, knew everybody in the Slops, even the ones with the knives and missing fingers. 

“What are you doing down here?” He slapped me on the back because I’d saved his pet albino rat from a dog once. 

“We’re looking for this girl. Her name’s Marilyn.”

I handed him the picture of Jo Anna’s sister. 

“It’s a couple of years old,” Jo Anna said. “I doubt she’s changed much.”

He took the photo and studied it. 

“I know her. That’s Lord Chaney’s girl. Works at the Double Time.”

Jo Anna hugged me. She said to take her to Lord Chaney right now. 

I told her it wasn’t that simple.

Lord Chaney was a wrathful man. He owned a bar called the Double Time near the outskirts of the Slops. They said he could read crow bones and lit black candles at midnight. They said he had concubines. They said he had killed so many men their ghosts lined up outside his door, weeping and wailing and waiting on their turn to haunt him. 

I was scared, but this was a quest. You have to be scared for a quest, otherwise it’s impossible to be brave. 

The Double Time was the last bar in the farthest reaches of the Slops, where men with guns rode slow down neighborhood streets and everyone was afraid. It was housed in an old clothing shop from the thirties. Half the mannequins were still there, defaced and painted up. Some looked like clowns and some looked like little girls. 

There was a pool table with a blood spot in the middle of it. One guy didn’t have any hands. He held the cue between two nubs. A girl with a scar on her lip winked at Jo Anna. She had a tattoo on her shoulder of a broken heart. The mannequins stood among the people like quiet angels.

“This place doesn’t feel right,” said Jo Anna.

“That’s because it isn’t.” 

Jo Anna spotted her sister first. She had long pigtails down to her waist. Her arms were covered in illustrations, redbirds and stars and a dead tree with roots that spread down into her shirt. She had a hunting knife in her back pocket and was pregnant, a tray of beers balanced on the top of her belly.  

“Marilyn?” said Jo Anna. 

Her sister’s eyes squinted then got real big. She dropped her tray and drinks went everywhere and I tried to clean up the mess. The sisters embraced. 

Marilyn bent down, her face crinkled up all angry and whispered at me, “Get her out of here!”

“We’re not leaving without you. We’re on a quest.”

“Meet me out back,” said Marilyn, and ran behind a curtain to the back of the bar.

I took Jo Anna by the arm. She was trembling.

  “We got to save her.”

Jo Anna and I went outside and waited. I thought Marilyn wasn’t going to come. I thought she’d bring Lord Chaney and bad men with guns. I thought we’d get carved up and dragged a mile down the blacktop.

But when Marilyn came out the back of the Double Time, she came alone. Marilyn and Jo Anna hugged each other. They cried. There was good in the world and I was a part of it.  

I grabbed Jo Anna by the hand. 

“Let’s hustle.” 

It was slow-going with Marilyn’s belly and all. I kept looking around for Lord Chaney. A crow flew right by my head, perhaps a sign. Everywhere was a dark alley for someone to jump out of. All the lonesome people with their blankets watched us from behind dark windows. But we got back among the people. I thought we’d be safe there. I listened to Jo Anna and Marilyn become sisters again. I bought us corn dogs from 7-11. 

Then I felt a pair of eyes on me. My left elbow hurt. 

Up walked a stray orange cat. I knew what that meant. The music quieted down and everyone perked their ears. A man stepped into the light. He had long curly hair down to his shoulders. He had an earring made out of a finger. It was Lord Chaney. He grinned, four teeth left in his mouth. 

“Marilyn, honey? I think you better be coming back with me.”

“She ain’t yours,” I said. 

“That a fact?” Lord Chaney said to her. “You ain’t happy with me, here in the Slops? Living like a queen?” 

“Feel more like a slave,” said Marilyn. 

Lord Chaney doubled over laughing. “Oh Lord, she feels like a slave. I could’ve made her my slave but I didn’t. Hell no. I made her my wife. And she can’t leave me. You hear that?” He grabbed Marilyn by a pigtail. “You can’t leave me.” He bit her on the ear.

“It’s true.” Marilyn pulled up her pants leg and showed us the tattoo. It was a fishhook with a circle around it and an Egyptian eye in the middle. Done with a knife. It meant she was his. Those were the rules.

“Plus you got our son in your belly there. You got a piece of me living inside you for always. Only thing that can set you free is death,” said Lord Chaney. “I know you’re brave, but you ain’t brave enough for that.”

I wasn’t afraid of dying, only worried about my mother and her fish back in our apartment. I felt my pocketknife. It was green. I won it by throwing rings around a bottle at the fair. 

“Fuck it,” I said. 

I jumped at Lord Chaney. But Lord Chaney had the Twitchy Eye, and he noticed everything. Also he was quick, and his knife was bigger. He stuck it right in my belly.

“Too slow,” said Lord Chaney, while I bled on his shoes. It was like we had signed a contract. Byron Knight and an old man were watching us. They were witnesses. Byron bowed his head. Lord Chaney walked away, jingling the change in his pocket. Jo Anna cried. 

“I’m sorry,” she said. 

“Am I going to die?”

“I didn’t mean for you to.”

“When I’m gone, take me home to my mother.”

The band struck up a song. An old woman prayed to Jesus. I thought of my mom making grilled tilapia and talking to my dad’s empty chair. People gathered around me, shaking tambourines, singing. Looking right at me. The curse was broken. I was so happy. The blood was all over the pavement. Jo Anna cried and her tears fell in my mouth. 

It was all for me.

Jimmy Cajoleas is from Jackson, Mississippi. He lives in New York.

Categories
Issue 5 Issue 5 Fiction

OLD FRIENDS

By Craig Rodgers

The postcard comes first. Basic cardstock, a tourist find. Photo of a beach somewhere. Old, coverall swimsuits decades out of fashion. A single boat sails in the distance.

Bertrum holds it up. He holds it out. Maybe the image will bring a memory but it does not. He turns the card over. Writing. A neat, precise hand.

Hi Bert. It’s been too long.

– Perry

He turns it back again. The swimmers scattered there. Girls in their wraps. Some vague familiarity, like a still from a movie. The fog memory of a dream. 

He lays the card down on the counter. He thinks back, back. Reaching. Perry. Perry?

***

It’s an outdoor place. Tables strewn in the road. Wait staff prowl among, pouring drinks, bringing sides. A hundred kinds of salad.

His drink comes, her drink comes. A local beer for him, a milky booze for her. They each take sips and nod. Small talk now, the bullshit of friends. More sipping, more talking. Then.

“Something weird came. Can I show you?”

“I love weird.”

He lays the card between them on the table. She puts out a hand and nudges. The beach girls tolerate. Then she turns it over and reads. She looks up.

“Okay.”

“Okay what?”
“Okay what’s weird?”

“What do you mean?”

“What do YOU mean?”

“Perry. Who is Perry?”

She snorts and sits back.

“What? Perry. From school.”

“What school?”

“High school. All school. Perry.”

“Jen, I don’t remember any Perry. I mean. Ever.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I’m not kidding.”

“Bert, come on. Perry.”

“I don’t remember.”

“Well clearly he remembers you.”

She taps the card with a finger.

“You really don’t remember?”

He shakes his head no. She slides the card away.

***

He looks it up everywhere. Social media. High school pages. There’s no Perry. The reunion, those attending. Invites. Nothing. He pours himself a drink. He goes to the local paper. Searching, scrolling. There is no Perry. He pours himself a drink. He searches births, he searches deaths. There is no Perry. He pours himself a drink.

***

The committee meets each Wednesday in the weeks leading up. Planning and the like. Catering, decorations. What kind of banner will go where. They’re renting a ferry out on the lake. One of those big numbers. The whole class will fit. Room for more still.

Bertrum sits in the back. Just like the old days. Spacing out, nodding when he must. Their talk circles and some accord is reached and people begin standing and he stands too. He shakes hands, he smiles. Small talk. We’re all well. Then the crowd filters out, then only stragglers remain. 

The committee chair is there at the table. She flips through pages in a phone. Leslie something. Bertrum steps near.

“Oh. Oh hello.”

Her face is blank and then a glow. Filled again with spirit. She puts out a hand and he shakes it and she pats his. Then.

“I’m sorry to bother you. I have a question about the reunion.”

“That’s fine.”

“It’s an odd one.”

“Okay.”

“Was there someone named Perry who got invited?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Anyone. Anyone named Perry.”

She touches the papers in front of her but her eyes never leave Bertrum.

“Hey. Don’t you worry. Of course Perry will be there.”

***

The lot is vast and full. Stars shine above like a mirror shattered in the black. Bertrum sits parked and watching. The boat tied bobbing to the pier. Faces come and go. He tugs at a flask and still watches.

The passenger door pops open. A bell is pinging. She slides in beside.

“Is there more of that?”

“Whole bottle behind the seat.”

She laughs in great whooping sounds. He reaches back, he hands the bottle over. She unscrews the top and sniffs and wrinkles her nose. She gives him a look and she takes a drink. Cheap but smooth. She takes another.

“You gonna go in?”

“It feels like another life.”

“Yeah,” she says. “It is.”

“What about you?”

“What about me?”

“Are you going in?”

“Bert. I’m here now. What choice do I have?”

***

The line trails. Down the ramp and around. How could there ever have been so many. They make their slow way up. 

Music thumps ahead. A song familiar. Something old now, something from all the way back. People chat in line. This way, that way. The vaguest familiarities from another life. Inching on. Up. The song ends, another starts. Louder now. A memory of a song. He turns in place. The noise everywhere. The line moves on. Nearing. Another song now. He knows this one too but it’s wrong somehow. Off key maybe. Jarring. Louder still. The line moves. The door is close. A foyer, tables. The ballroom beyond. The line moves. 

“Hi.”

He says hi too. She asks for his name and he says Bertrum and she scans a table of names. She looks up again as if he might be mistaken.

“Bert.”

She nods and looks again. She looks for so long. He puts a hand down and he says okay but still she looks. He says it’s okay but she goes on looking.

***

At the edge of the pier the land drops. Stairs lead down carved into the cliff. He swings the bottle as he walks. One hand pressed against wet rock. Ground now. Each step sinks into soft beach sand. He walks along and he stops to push off shoes one and then the other and he moves on. Soon he finds himself sitting. Drinking pulls from the bottle. The water right there. Shore’s gentle lapping. The ferry’s lights trail off as the long distance swallows the boat away. He goes on drinking. Toes squeeze the wet sand. Hot night air runs along skin. He drinks again. Somewhere laughter comes. Gentle tittering. He turns and watches. Friends in the sand down the way. Just in the reach of lake’s wash. They play. A few and a few more. Pushing, running around. The sound of their laughter carries. Bertrum watches. He admires. He takes a drink and remembers. What it was like. He smiles and they play in the sand, their swimsuits of a sort decades out of fashion.

Craig Rodgers is the author of several books, dozens of stories, countless notes, and one convoluted plan to fake his own death.

Categories
Issue 5 Issue 5 Fiction

BIG DEAL

By Claire Hopple

Brandy is a fine girl. She does not, however, make a good wife.

And then she dies. She suffers. She doesn’t go quickly. It cannot be helped. 

She’d been married to a drug lord for a number of years, which everybody made a big deal out of. But it was same-as-usual for Brandy. 

She divorced him until he agreed to host a pool party, remarried him at the pool party, and then divorced him again that afternoon when he acted like a hotshot with a pool noodle.

There were times when they only lived on the moonlight and their mutual determination to build the perfect sandwich. They were responsible for the highly regarded sandwich determination quotient, or SDQ.

The drug lord––we’ll call him Rob now––hosted a metal plate in his head. Some claimed he was torpedoed. Others insisted it was due to a hunting accident. And then there were a select handful who stated he had the plate for no reason other than he wanted one. Regardless, Brandy was once entranced by it. This was back when they were inventing aliases for themselves in the wilderness. And it was truly all it was cracked up to be. Until it wasn’t.

Rob started saying things Brandy thought he really meant, being fully honest with her, and it seemed uncalled for, unsavory even. She set his glockenspiel on fire in response. It had the desired dramatic effect.

Oh. Now everyone is staring at him. The town is holding an assembly. There’s a projector and everything, just like grade school.

Rob wedges into the crowd until it froths up, spilling over into an outcry. Then he distances himself, holds a rolled-up flyer to his ear to check whether he can hear the ocean. Echoes of the pool noodle return, so he stops.

Crying doesn’t matter at an assembly. Who’s he kidding? He’s pure embarrassment smashed into the earth by gravity.

Rob scans the room to decipher which one of these citizens he’s so cleverly avoided up until this moment deserves to be bribed. Perhaps any citizen will do.

There’s a college kid draping himself over a chair just to get noticed. Rob approaches, but the kid speaks first.

“What brings you here?”

“Business transactions,” Rob says.

“I will tell you everything I told––” the kid starts.

“Nah. Whatever you’re about to say isn’t what I’m after. I’m trying to find myself,” Rob says.

“That’s nice.”

“I mean I made a voodoo doll of myself. And I lost it. Now I’m trying to find it.”

Rob had already faked his own death before. If the worst happens he’s already warmed up. 

“Why, uh, why…I’ll keep my eye out for it, chief,” the kid says, saluting him.

He tries his luck with the snack vendor. But they fall into an argument surrounding mathematics. Rob doesn’t believe her when she says she can do her times tables. Rob briefly considers assigning her a times test so he can observe her claims. She falls asleep at the snack table while he’s deciding. What can he do but dwell on all her unguessable thoughts. This is what happens when you talk to people at regular intervals, expelling the determination typically reserved for sandwiches.

He leans over and whispers to the sleeping vendor, “Brandy always listened to me.”

He washes his hands of the search. Someone will find the doll version of him under a rose bush, and she’ll have the privilege of deciding which version is the dummy. 

There’s nothing wrong with vanishing from society, even if it doesn’t amount to much. Which is exactly what Rob does, never to be seen again and feeling the same way he always had, now and forever. At least his metal plate is there for him. The metal plate has been there all along.

Claire Hopple is the author of six books. Her stories have appeared in Southwest Review, Forever Mag, Wigleaf, Cleveland Review of Books, and others. More at clairehopple.com.

Categories
Issue 4 Issue 4 Fiction

THE SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS OF GAY DATING WHEN YOU’RE NOT EVEN GAY: A FRAGMENT

By Jesse Hilson

Women are enemies, and men are enemies in a different shape, but the same distasteful antagonism. You see them in public where you rarely go, in excursions out of your mousehole. You do go out sometimes, to Tony Larry’s hangouts, the farm stand he maintains with his boyfriend Brian, the farmers’ markets you go out of your way to visit. Otherwise you stay away. Everybody is an opponent to be melted down with contemptuous eyes. Does it disguise desire, does it hide a potential love-charge? Those false dates with Tony Larry, he never suspected were dates, but you half-feared them to be before they happened, wondered at while they were happening, and drove away from them afterwards in confusion.

What do you know about that? You know nothing about that. You were thinking just this morning, about how you were that gay kid, that kid with the gay vibe in high school who nonetheless escaped all the allegations and went on to fuck women, double digit body count, never touching male ass or having your own ass be taken by sodomites, but still the contradictions remain, potent after many decades of a benighted lifetime. The womanly compartments within you resonated nevertheless, the “feminine side” others may detect but they were cruelly (perhaps mercifully) disguised from you, like many other things. Until you crossed paths with Tony Larry.

At lunch with Tony Larry’s boyfriend Brian, eating tomato sandwiches at the café, glasses glowing with sparkling water in the sun. Brian’s clothes were dirty from the farm, as if by self-conscious design, to be seen as a “farmer.” Brian was going on and on: “I wouldn’t actually want my AI to have the voice of an upwardly mobile Black man. I just wouldn’t. Call me a reactionary backwards bigot, or whatever. It’s truer to say if AIs must have Black voices they should sound more like stand-up comics on Def Comedy Jam, or rappers. That’s the history I want evoked when I interact with the tech regimes of the future, if I must do so. The whole question of deciding your AI’s voice ahead of time is crazy to begin with. I’m not sure why exactly but it feels wrong in the same way tailoring your Zoom background with bookcases and designer lamps feels wrong with a capital ‘R.’ Be natural, be true. Be racist if need be. Be authentic. Don’t kowtow to the neoliberal agenda.”

You filed all this commentary away in your internal dossier on Brian. He was too trusting, too open with his opinions over lunch. You were surprised he was telling you all this, with no monitor, no checking of your signals, none of the paranoia another person might have shown. Tony Larry’s affections had made him too secure, too complacent. They gave Brian a protective shield you scan for cracks, even though you are not in competition with him. You notice whenever they say goodbye to each other they exchange “I love yous” in a quick, monotone voice, identical to each other from long repetition, like androids running through a tired subroutine. This privately infuriates you. It feels dead. It doesn’t seem organic enough for Tony Larry, to your mind. Then, also privately, you whip yourself for thinking so as you drive alone around the countryside.

Who was Brian to you, and you to Brian? Was he trying to gag you and shock you with extreme politics, was it a defensive maneuver somehow, to protect his relationship? Tony Larry told you about Brian’s hobby as a writer. It seemed like a false, dangerous surface just like the farmer persona. He wrote stories about BDSM. It was beyond him, though, to seek a truly Dostoevskian moral confrontation, you sensed. Besides, you don’t wear BDSM like an accessory, an outward fashion statement. At least you thought so. Later you worried that you didn’t know the correct thing to do either, you didn’t have the savoir faire, either. Brian was an idiot, but what were you going to do, tell Tony Larry that his boyfriend was a corny faker, with falsely acquired attitudes and that you were realer than he was, because you were older? You had allowed these attitudes to come to you more naturally over time, and it was a generation gap. Tony Larry being a millennial should have been able to see that. But you could barely see that, or see anything, you know that now. You tend to see more, as time goes by. You have more info to add to the hopper and you can judge from a place of higher visibility.

“Not necessarily true,” Tony Larry told you when you shared just a fragment of this with him, editing out all explicit reference to Brian and hoping he’d gather from your half-hearted hints that older was superior. “Not if you’re shoving it all down over time, Noah. People sometimes get more blind as time goes by.” You thought you were suggesting you were smarter about life, the soul, whatever, than Brian was. To displace Brian from his position even though they ostensibly loved each other. What room for displacement was there, though, what foothold for jealousy existed that would avoid being spotted on its face? Like did you think Tony Larry wouldn’t see the emotional angle? Were they laughing at your attempts? Tony Larry seemed to humor you, to your face: millennials were wise that way, you discovered to your envy and disgust. Somehow these counseling sessions were conducted in a gel-like environment created by Aubrey’s wake after she left. She was a millennial too. You’d told Tony Larry about the spanking and rough sex Aubrey had goaded you into. You call it goading, you suspect you aren’t truly curious enough to take possession of the actions in the bedroom, ownership of the pain you caused Aubrey’s body to make her cum. You wanted to distance yourself from that, even as you told Tony Larry with hetero pride how you’d made Aubrey have an orgasm without ever taking your clothes off. This dom role felt aligned with the fact that you were eight years older than Aubrey and Tony Larry, you were Gen X. You were on the demographic outskirts of a sexual territory only the young, the queer could occupy safely, solidly. You were not a member of the group somehow, even though Aubrey used you to perform those rituals with her, rituals that extended beyond sex and into conversations, sour niceties, pain silently inflicted. 

What were you doing telling Tony Larry any of this? You couldn’t say, especially since, as the visibility and awareness of your age grew, you developed unbidden feelings for Tony Larry, dreamt about him. Dreams that seemed non-sexual in nature, or you hoped so, after awakening and taking your first thoughts of the day, the way ignorant people hoped for certain outcomes in the news, political developments, tragedies scrolled over on the iPhone with a vague prayer for forgetfulness. Feelings had a surface area laser-mapped onto an unseen plane, a zone of men when the beams had heretofore only fallen on women’s physical bodies. And the male surfaces were not embodied, it wasn’t carnal with men, in a way you could point to or perhaps admit in your imperfect epistemic understanding of yourself and your own desires. Maybe you were a sexual cripple because you could only lust after women as you had seen them for decades, and never conceptualize anything else, any other tools ill-fitted for the hand. Some bisexual conscience hectored you, teased at you, from dream-angles, dream-ventriloquisms your waking mind couldn’t own up to puppeteering. A disillusionment never acquired such profundity that it would shake the faggot machinery within into awful automaton life, sending down cascades of magnetic dust and debris, the golem in motion. The inner android drew on a lifetime of observations that the straight, hetero self made, the storage of data for mysterious usage. This scientific knowledge might have positive value to the android’s purposes, if they could even be isolated themselves. To think of yourself as a machine made it all seem like something dark and less than human even though it was the automatized search for love and meaning. How could that ever be inhumanly colored. Why dust, falling, why not the ice that seizes life, breaking off in a shower of tinkling fragments and freeing an imprisoned organic being? You do not want to be the robot, do not want the machine-model of mind to apply, whether in disability or sexual confusion. You would rather this inner self be an isotope or inherent version of your mentally ill outer self, a hidden iteration from whom all consequence has been removed. You no more want to own an unconscious that produces dreams of Tony Larry than you would want to own a weapon that, by its very existence, potentially threatens the peaceful life of the household.

Jesse Hilson lives in the Catskills in New York State. His work as a writer and cartoonist has appeared in X-R-A-Y, Hobart Pulp, Expat Press, Maudlin House, Exacting Clam, and other venues. He has written two novels, Blood Trip and The Tattletales; a poetry collection Handcuffing the Venus De Milo; and a short story collection The Calendar Factory.

Categories
Issue 4 Issue 4 Fiction

AFTER PASSAIC

By Bud Smith

Last night I broke a rib kicking a balloon. I went flying like Home Alone, Marv and Harry, landed on my side and damn it hurt.

Sometime around sunset the following day I was at Miriam’s 80th birthday party, sat mostly alone at an oblong table, lacking the power to laugh. 

The backroom of the restaurant overlooked the turnpike. Half her family stared out an endless window at an endless peel of traffic. The other half took turns briefly holding whoever’s baby.

The sprite-like server asked if I was all right.  

In my own way I signaled, Not at all. 

He brought more table wine. 

I sipped non-dominant, explaining how I’d been wounded in battle the previous midnight, but neglecting to mention my opponent: a rubber bladder full of breath, color of bubble-gum, hovering low along the hardwood floor of the upstairs guest room. 

How the house had shook and woken two sisters, two nieces, all the tetra, even the cherry barb. 

The server left. The baby echoed all around.

Unable to dance or mingle, I watched Giada loom over an elderly man at table five. I saw how she was disguising her hatred, making what appeared to be pleasant small talk, though he was a known-enemy, a pink-faced gentleman-fuck in a baby blue suit and teal tie. She was nodding. Was smiling cool even. 

We’d been married eleven-and-a-quarter years. I’d studied and was fluent in her many gifts. 

I, in fact, was one of her gifts. 

Another of her gifts was ‘forever-patience.’ 

Another was ‘resting angel face.’ 

Then there was her ability to conceal absolute repulsion. 

Who could ever guess, during the car ride over, Giada had instructed me to slowly choke the life from this bloviating man.

His exact relation was unclear. 

Her father’s first cousin? Second cousin? Third cousin? Forth cousin? No cousin at all? Luca. Former dean of colleges, retired fifteen years but the way he bragged about campus, you’d never know.

Maybe she would snap, fetch up the potted tiger lily centerpiece, and brain him. 

A silver mylar balloon struck the ceiling fan but my table mate bopped it away with an unconcerned backhand. 

Gold foil on the balloon read “80?!” 

And Miriam? Perhaps Miriam was a great aunt? 

I had no clue, except I loved Miriam, wanted her cloned two thousand times. A moment before I had seen the bartender letting the baby pull ice cubes from the bucket. But Miriam had objected. Now Miriam was rocking the mystery baby. Giada’s family had conquered this backroom with toasts, and gossip, and four courses of food already. Espresso was brewing. I limped to the remainder cocktail shrimp. 

Not two minutes later, someone tapped my shoulder. I turned, expecting to be offered a pig in a blanket—not so—another server bestowed upon me the baby. 

“I’m hurt,” I said, indicating my side. 

Big Nico saved me, took the young one and spoke in his low baritone, “Who’s your daddy? Who’s your daddy?” Our world was built of questions, posed to those who lacked the ability to speak. “No, really. Who’s your daddy?” He gently shook this baby over his head. “Is there a daddy in the house?” Big Nico asked like someone might say, ‘Is there a doctor in the house,’ just a moment before an emergency tracheotomy.

I studied a poster board full of photos of Miriam as a child in Passaic and Miriam as a teenager in Passaic and then Miriam as an adult after she’d gotten herself waylaid in Salt Lake City.

The photos on the poster board I liked best, twenty or so, captured a gnawed-away time when she was young, in New Jersey, just after WWII, when everything was sepia dew and sepia roses.

One of those sepia photos on that pasteboard was of this building I stood in now, which Giada’s family used to own. For six years they’d owned it, I think. 

First the building contained a hat store that also sold shoes. Then it was a shoe store that had some hats. Then they sold no hats. Briefly after the family lost the building, imitation diamonds were sold here. After that, it became a pawn shop. Then there was white flight and nearly it was demolished. Yet here we all were, knee-deep in bruschetta, faux bouquets, and Dean Martin—the place now called Friar Anthony’s.

Two of the other twenty photos were especially striking, bloomed with life, belonged on a gallery wall.

One of these special photos was labeled “1964 M” She was twenty-four and wearing a white dress, stood in front of a plaster wall painted evergreen. She was wearing a halo. Either it was Halloween or Noel. 

In the other photo, everything had an orange tint and she was getting a haircut from a much older man with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. The collar on his flannel shirt popped. She had on a tight sweater, navy blue, with gold zigzags.

“That’s me,” Miriam said over my shoulder. I turned and introduced myself. Said ‘Happy Birthday’ again. She reached for my hand. I gave her a shake against my better judgement and nearly cried. She’d come all the way from the other side of America—Utah—to be exact, as if on a farewell tour. 

“These two photos are really good.”  

She didn’t get me. “A swell camera.”

“Who is the man?”

“My father, Little Nico. He used to hide money all over the house. When he died, my brother Nico—Big Nico—got the house. When he finally sold, well you know, they tore down that house.” 

“No I didn’t know.” I was upset to hear this but not surprised. I’d loved that house.

“They tear down everything. They’ve got to keep the bulldozers busy. But with all that junk Nico had put in there, I can understand. We had to clean it out in a hurry just so they could level it.”

“That was some good junk though.” 

“Sure it was. We’d be giving away an old dresser and hoping it didn’t have money hidden in it.”

“I lived in that house for a month.” 

“When was this?”

“Ten years ago.”

“I loved that house. You lived there? I’d say a hundred people lived there. Open door policy. At one point the mailman lived there.” 

“I’m Giada’s husband,” I said. I pointed to one of the photos of the house, trashed to the max. “Is that 2012?” 

“Maybe I met you. You were thinner?”

“For sure.” 

“What a lightning rod for garbage. And we’d have to worry there is money hidden in everything. That’s how our dad was. There were all these pill bottles. The other day I opened a bottle of nickels.” 

“When did he die?”

“1992. No. 1993.”

I glanced down at Miriam’s feet. She had on neon running shoes under, maybe, her fanciest dress.

“1994. June the ninth. Dad played the lottery every day. When he died we filled up the coffin with empty cigarette packs and losing lottery tickets. Everyone saw that and smiled. Buried him with two Marlboros, a red, and a lite, one in each corner of his mouth.” 

I gave Giada a wave she didn’t see. 

The servers in their purple vests and purple shoes, handsome parts in slicked hair, wheeled out dessert. The sun was at the perfect angle to blind us all.

Some hero shut the curtain. The room dimmed into comfortable shadow. There wasn’t a single light on. I leaned in closer to the poster board, looking again at those two, specifically striking photos. I realized all my pain had gone poof.

I pointed to the angel and the haircut. 

“Who snapped these?”

“Oh, that would have had to be our older brother. Luca.” She pointed out the man my wife wanted me to strangle. The man Giada was still talking to, still being civil to.  

“He carried that Nikon everywhere.” 

“I really love those two photos of you,” I said. 

Miriam hugged me and gave my neck a little peck.

I went back to my table and sat down with espresso and tiramisu. Giada had floated over to her mother and father and now, to the baby’s delight, her father sang a novelty folk song urging Christopher Columbus to turn the boat around.

The Marine across from me consumed candy crush. His red-headed daughter poked him in the gut, spoke more about a carnival soon happening on the cliffs. The seat where the mother had been was vacant.

I looked back at Luca sat all alone. I thought again about his photos. He looked so lonely. Where was his camera now? I didn’t want to kill him anymore.  

If his sister was 80 and he was the older brother, that would have made him at least 82. I’d met him fifteen years earlier. At a  different reunion barbecue. 

He was always saying evil things at barbecues. At one legendary bicentennial barbecue, he may have told Giada’s mother she needed plastic surgery.

The barbecue I’d been to, he said something nasty to Giada even, but what?

Oh I couldn’t recall even that. 

Can you be irrationally mad at something not worth remembering? Let’s see. I picked up my plate and cup and sat down at the table across from Luca. 

“Hello,” he said. 

“Luca, you don’t know me.” 

He was barely looking. “I know all about you.”

“I just wanted to tell you—”

“Save your breath. I used to believe in radical honesty at your age. It’s a waste.” 

He ate some of his cake. I ate some of mine.

“What should I apologize for?” he asked.  

I looked across the restaurant, Giada was talking to a woman in a skyblue gown. The missing mother? 

“You’re right, forget it. I heard you took those two photos that I like over there. So I forgive you, as an artist.” 

He smiled. “Good. You’ve seen the light. And so have I. Isn’t that photo of Miriam and my father so funny? Who ever saw a father cut his daughter’s hair? But that’s the kind of man he was. He would take apart the TV set just to see how it worked and he would put it back together. No formal training. No education. But he’d wear a tie, hovering over the open hood of a car, changing spark plugs, pulling on wires. He’d guess and he’d be right. Me, and you, we’d be hopeless.” 

“Your father had innate talent.” 

“When the priest would drop by he would be lying on the couch reading the paper and Miriam would let him in the house but Dad wouldn’t even get up. He didn’t make a big deal of ceremony and he thought a lot of people were terrible kissasses. Anyway, I was a nerd. I had a camera. That priest gave it to me. I took lots of photos.” 

The restaurant was louder now. The drunks had had their rocket fuel. Voices swelled. Faces grew younger. And there was Miriam sat under her throne of balloons, shoulder-to-shoulder with Nico. He was red-faced and blockheaded, and whispering something that doubled Miriam over in laughter. I guessed, at this pace, she’d live another eighty years. 

One thing I remembered about Nico was that he put newspaper down and let his three-year-old-totally-healthy dog, shit in his house. Never once did I see or hear him yell at that dog. Though there was a doggie door, the dog preferred to shit in the house. And in the mornings before work, I’d step out of that dog-shit-reeking house, to my car and see Nico had hundreds of pounds of bulk garbage tied with twine to the roof of his Ford Taurus, which he’d gathered in the dark. So I’d untie it all and put it there amongst all his other nightly winnings. Every year he used to have a yard sale in the summer and sell the town back its trash. 

But as you already know, the house is gone, and so is the dog, not to mention, nearly everything else. 

I heard a balloon pop under the table. 

I bent down in terrible agony.

The baby was crying but nobody else noticed. He’d curled up in a little ball, his mouth full of silver mylar. 

I reached out my good arm but the baby scurried away. Now was sucking his thumb amid all this clatter and chatter. He pulled his thumb out and the string of the popped balloon was wrapped around his thumb. 

The baby drooled loose the rest of the choking hazard and smiled.

“Whose kid is this under the table?”

Up above, Luca was summarizing an important commencement speech he’d heard given every Spring for the entirety of his adult life. 

I called for help again. 

Nobody seemed to hear. 

I held out my plate. The baby crawled over and began to scoop handfuls of cake into his brand new mouth. 

Bud Smith is the author of the novel, Teenager, among others. He lives in Jersey City.

Categories
Issue 4 Issue 4 Fiction

GEORGE’S FIRST DAY

By Craig Rodgers

The ladies of the nineteenth floor love George right away. 

“Oh my God, he’s precious.”

“Look at him, that sweet boy.”

It’s his birthday today. Number fifteen. They tease at first, poking and laughing. Pinching cheeks. He laughs and shakes his head. He says thank you ma’am, he says aw jeez. Rose laughs too, and she pinches his cheeks again.

The men from accounts are having a meeting. A few from upstairs too. Some standing, some sitting. The blinds are up and they look over at times, to watch the ladies ribbing George, to laugh along between bouts of their talk.

George tries to work. He scrapes the top layer off worksheet errors and he notes their corrections. The women watch him go. They woo and he blushes. Mary waves and he blushes more.

The men in their meeting huddle. More are sitting now. Spells of quiet congeal. Figures are thrown out and booed. The day exists beyond the window over the city roofs below. 

The ladies crowd his station. They ask about his day. How he likes the office, how he likes the work. He goes on with his tasks as they talk and he talks and then he wipes his brow and he puts the eraser in his breast pocket and he tells the ladies I don’t know, I don’t know. They laugh still, they pinch his cheeks still. Ruth says she’s going to give him a kiss, and Mary says she is too, and he laughs, and he huffs, and now they’re all laughing, and he’s running, around tables, past desks, and the ladies are running too, laughing and running, and his feet twist and he falls forward, and now there is a gasp. 

The men stand at the table where some accord is found. Some stare down at pages of numbers while others reach and stretch. One by one they turn as the screams begin to sound, where Ruth weeps and Mary sits blank faced on the floor alongside where George’s body is flopped. The eraser thumps with a slowing pulse, protruding from his heart, and the ladies nudge him with hands that shake but he is already gone. The office stills with but little movements continuing on. Hands over mouths, whispers of woe. Somewhere outside wide windows the sun moves, stretching between the bones of a rising tower. A man turns away and then another, their gaze drawn from this tragedy and on to the day’s minute onward tick as knockers and climbers rivet into place blocks of long steel that in their slow way shut out the sun’s insistent presence. 

Craig Rodgers is the name stamped on ten books, a number of letters, and one day a grave.

Categories
Issue 4 Issue 4 Fiction

HANDBOOK FOR THE RECENTLY DECEASED

By Mallory Smart

(You were alive. Now you’re not. Make peace with it or don’t. It won’t change anything.)

NAVIGATING THE AFTERLIFE

You exist, but only as an inconvenience. Being a ghost isn’t hard. You just have to stop pretending you matter.

You are neither here nor there. You will get used to it, but not in a way that feels good.

DEALING WITH THE LIVING

They refuse to acknowledge you. Not because they don’t believe in ghosts but because they believe in themselves too much. They are the center of their own story. You are background noise.

It’s not that different from being ignored when you were alive, except now it’s not personal.

UNDERSTANDING YOUR NEW FORM

If you weren’t weird before, you are now. Accept it and move on. Or don’t. Either way, you’re stuck with it.

You always felt a little disconnected from reality. Now it is just official.

AVOIDING BUREAUCRATIC NIGHTMARES

Nobody tells you that the afterlife has paperwork. Probably because if they did, no one would die voluntarily.

Bureaucracy doesn’t die with you. It just gets less comprehensible and more passive-aggressive.

HANDLING HAUNTINGS

You are a problem now. Embrace it. It’s not like you have anywhere else to be.

You wanted to leave a lasting impression. You got your wish.

FINAL NOTES

There is no next step. No light. No revelation.

You will wander. You will watch. You will wait.

Eventually, you’ll stop expecting something to happen. That is when you realize the afterlife isn’t a punishment. It is just more of the same…

Mallory Smart is a neurotic Chicago-based writer and editor-in-chief of Maudlin House. She hosts the literary/music podcast Textual Healing and the horror podcast That Horrorcast. Her new book, I Keep My Visions to Myself, is available now through With an X Books.

Categories
Issue 4 Issue 4 Fiction

AS I LIVE AND BREATHE

By Reilly Tuesday

Sometimes Tara feels like she’s the only girl in this city who grew up eating Lucky Charms every morning. Her friends in Montreal didn’t grow up with sugary cereals in the house and probably seldom slurped the blue milk output of 8 distinct marshmallows. One humid evening the self-declared almond-mom offspring, all grown up, come over for a barbecue. They gather to grill the 12 frozen Compliments-brand beef patties, on sale for $19.99. Together they joyfully slurp dripping grease and mustard and golden beer. 

Once every last drop is lapped up, they go home. Tara then realizes she forgot to buy a barbecue brush with those wiry bristles to thoroughly clean the portable grill. She tries her best to clean the waxy grease with bunched-up paper towels, tries to limit the black gunk that gathers under her fingernails, and tries even harder to ignore that weird tight feeling in her chest. 

Her father, Darren, won the barbecue in a charity golf tournament for hurricane cleanup in her coastal Canadian hometown. Darren works for a company that specializes in making cardboard boxes for seafood companies, which are waxed on the inside to help better ship the oysters and mussels and lobster and haddock and so on. They cannot be recycled. 

The town of Summerville’s harbour is Lucky-Charms-milk blue on calm days but pink on stormy days, when the churning sea rustles up the red sand on the ocean floor. Tara returns from the big city and goes jogging on the boardwalk, following the piles of seaweed along the Atlantic shoreline, just like she always does and just like she always has. She knows that the town’s sewage was formerly dumped into the water, that the shit then became fertilizer and the black seaweed then multiplied and multiplied. She learned this in the Nitrogen Unit of Grade 6 Science. 

For the Water Unit, the teacher brought in plastic tubes and big Rubbermaid containers full of water and taught Tara and her classmates how to siphon. She remembers practicing with plastic straws in plastic cups of Nestea in the Wendy’s sunroom with her brother, Blaze. Sometimes Darren took them to McDonald’s, but less so Burger King and Dairy Queen after they got shut down and sat deserted in the sea of plazas. She remembers proudly showing off her skills but Blaze was only in Grade 3 or 4 and could only blow bubbles because he hadn’t learned to siphon yet. 

They no longer dump Summerville’s sewage into the harbour but every once in a while the tangled lumps of seaweed are shoveled into dump trucks and taken to an unknown location. Now there is a water filtration plant right next to the shore but not next to the part where tourists go in the summer. It created 25 new jobs. Tara jogs past the plant and practices holding her breath so as not to breathe in the smell. A little further ahead she reaches the wet seaweed lying in the sun. She doesn’t hold her breath but inhales deeply because the smell reminds her of home. She stops when she feels a dull pain in her chest expanding.

Tara forgets the Deep Woods 30% Deet Bug Spray in the garage and gets 25 new mosquito bites. On the drive back to her parents’ house she gets stuck in farm equipment traffic. The tractors aren’t so bad, but the sprayers are unbearable, too big to drive around until they eventually turn off onto a red dirt road to spray the Cavendish Farms potato crops with herbicide. Tammy, Tara’s mother, calls them cancer trucks. She tells anyone who will listen that the constant fumes in the air gave Blaze autism as a child. She will tell anyone who will listen anything so Tara doesn’t mention how when she sleeps on her side she’s awoken by a sharp pain over her breastbone. 

When Tara finally gets home, Tammy is cutting potatoes and watching the news. The anchor says that Cavendish Farms has donated 1 million dollars to Queen Elizabeth Hospital and a unit will thus be renamed Cavendish Farms Same Day Surgery. It instills hope across the province that keeps hearing about patients dying in emergency waiting rooms because it takes 17 hours to be seen by doctors that keep leaving like Burger King and Dairy Queen. Tara places her hand over her chest. Darren comes home and cooks fish that someone at work gave him in a waxed box. Blaze comes down from smoking weed and eating Lucky Charms in his room and the four enjoy a dinner of haddock and potatoes and it smells like home. 

Tara goes back to Montreal and writes headlines for rain jackets and backpacking tents made with special waterproofing chemicals that cost more than her monthly rent. She works for 20 minutes at a time then opens Instagram reels to see vintage resellers testing their retro dishware for lead paint. She brews filter coffee with tap water and cooks breakfast with non-stick cookware from Amazon that leaves flecks in her eggs. The sink is full of dishes that look just like those on Instagram reels. When she washes the plastic cutting board she bought at Dollarama, the dark-green plastic fibers of the dish sponge get stuck in its grooves. 

She contemplates a garden of microplastics then contemplates synonyms for fresh air then contemplates if she should see a doctor. Her heart aches for something she can’t quite figure out. The weird pain in the left side of her chest keeps getting worse and she doesn’t know why. Tara goes online and finds one available appointment with a medical professional in a far-away neighborhood. She feels grateful that she didn’t have to wait 17 hours in a windowless room named after a J.D. Irving company. The doctor gets her to inhale deeply and performs run-of-the-mill tests then orders her to get her chest X-rayed for possible tumors in her ribs and lungs. 

Tara spirals and thinks about all the homemade-bong particles, vessels crafted with water bottles and hollowed out pens, among everything else. She goes to a different clinic in a different neighborhood to watch dust particles dance under the fluorescent lights as an X-ray technician tells her when to breathe. She doesn’t smoke weed for a week as she waits for the results. She doesn’t do much at all. 

The sky is Lucky-Charms-milk blue on calm days and pink on days when the smoke arrives from the forest fires in northern Quebec. The X-rays come back normal but the pain comes back once 10 days of prescribed painkillers run out. Tara feels very grateful that the health insurance from her underpaid outdoor sports equipment copywriting job partially covers physiotherapy. The physiotherapist asks Tara if she works from home and she says yes. She sits on a cold massage table and slowly twists her body from side to side. Yes, she feels it there, and yes there, and yes, there. 

Alas, there! Yes! It’s not poisons or pesticides or poor decisions but rather propelled inflammation, from where rib #6 or #7 meets the spine. Her back has become too immobile from not doing much at all, which in turn has been putting pressure on her ribs, and then her sternum. She goes back to working from home. She gets assigned exercises to do from home, too. She buys a foam roller at 30% off with her employee discount. 

Tara goes to more barbecues and more parties and eats her hotdog anyway when it falls on the ground. She jokes about gut health with new friends and old friends and almond-mom offspring. When she’s drunk she sometimes brings up the fucked-up week of waiting for X-ray results and thinking she had lung cancer. She will tell anyone who will listen anything. She asks if she can bum a cigarette. She wonders if she should give more of a shit about microplastics. She insists that even the siphoning classes and Cavendish Farms Same Day Surgery unit are real. She wonders if truth or fiction is more powerful. She can’t get into it right now, the Greenwashing Lunch & Learn is starting.

Reilly Tuesday is a writer from Prince Edward Island, Canada. Her work has appeared in Expat Press, Hobart Pulp, The Car Crash Collective Anthology, Dream Boy Book Club and elsewhere, including The Page, which she created and edits. Find her meandering around Montreal or as @reilliz on Instagram.

Categories
Issue 4 Issue 4 Fiction

YOU ARE MISALIGNED

By Kia Guindon

Terry is in a mood. Eyes drippy with resolve. He looks like he’s one long glance away from trouble. “We’re gonna get out of this place,” he says, “Thelma and Louise style.” I want to tell him we are here voluntarily, that we can leave whenever we want. 

“Don’t they die?” 

He tells me he doesn’t have all the details sorted yet.  

*

I’m in the garden watching the sky leak by. Terry is beside me, combing through the Times. He likes to read the headlines out loud. Something to do with feeling more attuned to the communal suffering of the world.

“Alphabetical or random,” he asks.

“Dealer’s choice.” 

He begins, “Killer asteroids are hiding in plain sight—a new tool helps spot them. New Mexico wildfires map an early, record-breaking season. Liviah’s new liver: a family grapples with the girl’s puzzling hepatitis—a doctor prescribed an obesity drug, her insurer called it vanity.”

“What else?” 

“There’s one about coral reefs. But I know anything to do with the ocean breaks your heart.” 

*

It was my mother who insisted on my stay. Un petit rest, she called it. Chicken soup for the troubled soul. 

“You must know what this looks like,” she said in the hospital. 

I wagged a finger. “You are misaligned,” I said when what I meant was misinformed. 

What happened was this. I was found floating tummy up, far out in the Pacific Ocean. Coast guard pulled up beside my limp, star-fished body and asked, “Miss, are you in need of saving?” 

I couldn’t talk but flashed a thumbs up to indicate yes, that would be nice. As my consciousness turned spongy and edgeless, I brushed my tongue along my palate and was comforted by the taste of salt.

*

Terry ate oatmeal with water. That’s what I first noticed. That, and he took long, drawn out spoonfuls. Like he wanted to remember each oat. 

“He sure likes to suck out the marrow,” one of the cafeteria ladies said. 

I sat down close. His balmy breath was palpable. He kept eating, paying me no mind. We sat like that till his plate was cleared and it was time for group.

I was fed up after a week of smeary oats and silence. 

“Good luck Hon,” cafeteria lady said to me.

I followed Terry to the common area. Tracked him through the TV room and rec center. When he settled in the garden I stood in front of him, arms crossed.

“What are you here for?” I said.

“Did you know almost everything on earth, including you and me, was formed from the heart of a star.”

“I thought we consisted mostly of water,” I said.

“That’s what they want you to think.”

“Who’s they?”

“You know.”

“I don’t. That’s why I’m asking.”

The sun thrummed down. Terry picked at his skin. I stood staring, resolute. 

“What’re you here for?” I repeated.

“DNA, honey,” he said. “What’s your excuse?”

*

Truth be told, I wasn’t trying to do what they thought. Problem is my story sounds fake. Even to me. When I think back to that day my brain feels like a vat of air. I remember the ride to the beach. Talking Heads on the radio. Stale stench of summer. Pulling from a bottle of clear liquor. Then the tape zips forward to the bit where I’m saved. Sure, I felt some misery. But it was my baseline. Nothing that would tip the scales. 

*

The Chosen Ones join group today. “One, two, God is coming,” they sing, “Fighting for us, pushing back the darkness.”

We are sitting in a circle on plastic chairs. Most of us are wearing what we came in with, minus any shoelaces, necklaces, drawstrings, belts. Terry is beside me, rambling on about time.    

“Funny thing is,” he says, “no one knows why we only experience it in one direction.” 

A nurse paces, clipboard to her hip. The chalkboard reads: Falling is not collapsing, falling is extending. “Know the signs,” she says, and we all nod along.

“Three dimensions for space,” Terry says, “And only one for time.” 

*

This month makes three. Terry and I have a motto now: Maybe they’re born with it; maybe it’s clinical. Talking is prohibited after lights out so we sneak into the TV room with flashlights and blink morse code to each other. We are still learning so most of our words are simple: throat, wave, white. 

No one knows Terry’s exact age. But gossip is stock here. Some say he burnt his birth certificate a long time ago on account of the government tracking him. I asked him about it once, but he just said space and time are the framework within which the mind is constrained to construct its experience of reality. 

Others tell tales of Terry selling fake never-before-seen pictures of Elvis. Or harvesting kidneys for the black market. One story lands him in Italy, married briefly to a countess. Whatever the truth, I can tell from his large pores and yellowed fingers that he’s experienced in life. More so than I am anyways.

*

Mother calls. Her voice sounds springy. 

“So,” she says, “what’s the cup at today, baby?” 

“Quarter empty,” I say. 

“Don’t be like that.”

She tells me about Walmart Guy. He has a bump nose and large skull. They go to dive bars and peel off labels of Michelob and play rock paper scissors. Loser eats the label. They are to be married. City hall style. Very little shebang. Next to no rah-rah. It isn’t appropriate to celebrate with extravagance, she says, for a woman of her age.

“And you?” she asks. 

I remind her that my environment is not exactly ripe for love.

“Not a single prospect?”

I tell her I have Terry and that he’s like a husband in that we don’t have sex and sling our irritabilities at one another to relieve the pressure in our hearts. 

“Oh yes,” she says, “I understand.” 

*

We are guests. But that feels like the wrong word. We were not invited nor do we wish to stay. What got us here was a need for a blip of rest. Nothing permanent. Most of us here are happiest when life is like a film. We have an affinity for illusions. 

*

Chef makes a thousand eggs a week. Divided by seven, that’s one hundred and forty-two eggs a day. Numbers help. No ambiguity.

“Incoming news,” Terry says between forkfuls of wet yolk.

“Sock it to me.”

“At a dangerous 125 mph, the well-known Britney Spears eludes the police,” he says, his voice all Southern lilt. If I close my eyes, he could be Harry Connick Jr. or maybe Dennis Quaid. 

I pencil a three into a Sudoku row. Terry is naming billboard hits from 1959 alphabetically. 

“I don’t know why you bother with that crap,” he says.

“Think good, look good,” I say. 

 He blinks ‘okay’ then ‘yeah right’ at me.

I don’t tell him about my tricks. Memorizing sonnets. Sudoku. Omega 3s. I don’t tell him the average brain’s weight and volume shrinks about 5% per decade after 40 and that I’m halfway there and my odds don’t look great. I don’t tell him about losing the word vacuum. “What’s the name of that machine?” I asked one of the others, “That sucky device that gets all of the dust.” Other things too. Important things. Like the brand of my mother’s perfume. Or the name of my hymen-taker.

What stays, stays. Survival of the fittest. That’s Darwin. What else do I remember? Not much. Was it me or Dostoevsky that said it’s very pleasant to break something from time to time? Terry says memories exist outside of time and space, but I think only the strongest memories endure. No one tells you though if it’s the right things you’re remembering.

*

“I thought of something,” Terry says. “We have to try to imbue our lives with ambition.” 

“Do or do not,” I say, “there is a lot of try.”

“Listen, listen, listen,” he says, “ambition gets a bad rap, but channel it correctly and boom.” 

“Boom what?”

“Boom, life.” 

*

Terry had no moral compass. That was his problem. This was when he lived at the Western tip of the I-90. Tough is what he calls that time. At night he’d tread out into the dark on sodden patches of grass and fix his eyes on the dimmest part of the sky. He wanted to return to dust. Unburdened by time. Be up there, just another star.

That’s all in the past though. Acceptance is his mantra now.

*

“I’m not myself,” I tell Terry before group.

“Who here is?” he says.

Group is a time where the past gets a good going-over. The Chosen One’s have access to the past. Bonafide memory savants, the lot of them. They remember every infraction of morality, small or large.

Terry too. He can rattle off names and dates of birth from his high school rock band. 

I want to know if it’s wrong to only recall the shape of a day. Light flaying the sky. Muted pinks and purples out a window. When I watch films I’m left with feelings. No facts. I do not know if the lady was in red or blue or white or green. But I can remember her forlorn face in a mirror. The way she twirls a spoon in a cup of coffee. Even my mother. I have been here long enough to not know if she stands at 5’4 or 5’6. Or if her eyes are flecked with yellow. But I have tucked away moments of her mouth laughing. That I do have.

*

I come clean. 

“You just ended up out there?” Terry says.

“Yeah.”

“And you don’t know why?” 

“No.”

“There’s gotta be something.” He makes a list. Probable causes. He wants to get to the source. 

“Parents?” he says.

“Alive.”

“Boyfriend?”

“Negative.”

“Friends?”

I move my head from side to side. “A few.”

“Hard drugs?”

“Too young.”

He blinks ‘shit’ at me. “Maybe that’s your problem—no fun.”

*

Terry has a plan. We’re going to the beach. Exposure therapy. To confront the scene of the crime.

“Better than any of the cockamamie you’ll get in here,” he says.

The Chosen Ones remind us to be wary of the impurities of the outside world. There is filth everywhere. Terry tells them he’s beyond corruptibility. He was born with sin in his blood. 

“Do you really think that’s a good idea?” my mother says. 

“Better than any of the cockamamie in here.”

“I trust your judgement.”

“I don’t,” I say. “That’s what got me here in the first place.”

*

We arrive midday. It’s still there in all its aqua wonder. Unchanged. We stand gazing out. Undulating waves of blue and green. Miles and miles of water.

“Anything?” Terry says. 

I tell him I feel like a croissant. Flakey, layered, a little wet. We are encouraged to use metaphorical language to describe our feelings. Looking at things head on, we are told, can be overwhelming.

“Sometimes a leaf is just a leaf,” he says.

“Sometimes a leaf is just a leaf,” I mimic, an octave higher.

“What I’m getting at, kid, is maybe you’re just sad. And it is not like anything else.”

So I tell him. From the top. The parts I remember. My mother and her men. And then the town. Its people. Sagging faces. About all the ordinary ways life stacks up. 

*

I was there all of six months. We didn’t escape. But we didn’t die either. 

On my last day Terry blinked the word moist at me. 

I thought, I’ll never see him again. 

I thought, there’s two ways to deal with the cards you get dealt. Mete life out into measurable acts of compliance. Or use whatever you must to escape the oblong shaped, far away threat that is as real to you as your ten fingers and toes. Be it God or the space-time continuum. To the former, the latter are deranged, wrong, mad.

Pick a word.

Kia Guindon is a Canadian writer based in New York.@km_guindonn

Categories
Issue 4 Issue 4 Fiction

CHILDREN’S CRUSADE

By Avee Chaudhuri

Whenever our father Martin wanted to go on a bender he said he had to take an urgent letter to the offices of the North Eastern Atlantic Railing Corporation in Portsmouth, three days away, for the chairman’s eyes only, and that he would leave as soon as he could find the keys to the Buick. He preferred traveling at night, he told us, because the roads were clear. Thirty minutes later he would be down at the bar getting silly on scotch with a public-facing hand up the proprietor’s skirt, who poured scotch gratis. We told ourselves Mrs. Brenda had been widowed. Our father was many things but he wouldn’t with a married woman. No, it couldn’t be. Mrs. Brenda’s husband surely had been shot out of a cannon at too high an angle during his time as a prisoner of war, and he had not survived the impact of his collision with the warbling pines of the Black Forest. Our own mother had actually died giving birth to the twins. 

Martin, our father, liked to go on a bender every week. He loved drinking. “It feels good,” he said. 

One time we ventured, the twins hiding behind us older children, “Would it not feel good to make a real home for your children. Would this not feel as good as, if not better, than drinking scotch?” 

Our father was an attorney, who handled the affairs of many North Eastern concerns and he hated vagueness as a point of professional pride. “Well, how much scotch are we talking? What do you mean a real home? Bedtime stories and so forth.”

“Presence, just presence, consistency, tact.” 

“Fuck that noise,” Martin said as resigned as ever. “And wait a minute. You know I’m doing you children a favor doing my drinking out in the world. Not corrupting the family hearth with the sound and odors of profuse wretching. Scotch is a poison after all.” 

“No, you wait a minute. Don’t frame that as a virtue. There’s your fingering of Mrs. Brenda, a proud business owner.” 

“I don’t know what you’ve heard or seen. You kids don’t understand. I was concealing some documents on her body, important tax documents.”

“Sure, Martin. Sure.”

“Martin?! Goddammit, you treat me with respect. I am your father!” And he stormed off for his most serious bender yet, reaching as far south as Savannah, Georgia. He stayed there for three weeks until Mrs. Brenda summoned him back posthaste. 

During this absence we had a frank discussion among ourselves and decided we ought to go out in a blaze. We were burdens to Martin. Maybe he could find love again with Mrs. Brenda, if only he had the temerity to move beyond hand stuff, to take her wholly in his arms and do her. We decided to fight for the Holy Land. 

But the twins, who were rather precocious, pointed out: “That place, ought we to project our rather meager version of faith onto it?” It’s true, I think we had only been to church the one time, at our maternal aunt’s insistence. She had to watch us because Martin got into a brawl with a bunch of Machine Democrats at a bar in Yonkers. 

“We are only really culturally Catholic,” the twins said in unison. 

But we wanted to do something useful with our sacrifice. There was a bookmaker in town Martin had run afoul of. In addition to being a drinker, he liked to let it all ride on the ponies. Our mother was a very beautiful and kind and understanding woman, and I think this explains our father’s obvious misery with the prospect of living, the horror of it, the vanishing likelihood that he would take Mrs. Brenda into his arms and do her. I mean, every time he saw us peering at him from around a corner, curious as to his movements, equally curious and concerned about the type of man we would grow to resemble or eventually be drawn to marry, he must have seen in our faces an apparition of our dear dead mother. What greater prophylactic can there be than children underfoot. We were going to detonate in the presence of the malicious bookmaker. The twins had cultivated an interest in applied chemistry and fitted us all with bombs. It was Monday, nine in the morning when they went off in the bookmaker’s shop and we were blown upward. And now we are jumping nearer to seraphim, trying to feel at the firmament of their jaundiced wings, but they simply float higher than we can reach in a conscious denial. Even in heaven on high we children remain objects of pity and scorn. 

END 

Avee Chaudhuri teaches Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is the chef/owner of The Sepoy’s Revenge, a restaurant he runs out of his office on campus (Andrews 320).

Categories
Issue 4 Issue 4 Fiction

MIDLIFE HARD-ON

By Jon Doughboy

I did four pull-ups in the park and my arms are about to fall off. I’m in decent shape, or so I thought. Three days a week I do a little exercise routine in my basement. Body weight stuff like push-ups and squats. A few dumbbell exercises. I jog when the mood and motivation strike. But pull-ups are another story. Hefting the big hunk of aging meat that is me—my shoulders feel swollen. Like I’ve just been inoculated. But against what? 

I jog to my girlfriend’s parents’ house in the less affluent part of an affluent New Jersey suburb, wheezing past lush, diligently-watered yards and professional-trimmed hedges. The odd raised ranch. My triceps are burning. Cape Cods. My shins are aching too. Stone Victorians. Even my forearms are tight. New bright white farmhouse McMansions with mass-produced timber—ooh, look at the grain! Feels like we’re in Jackson Hole, honey! My girlfriend and company are travelling as a family to the Canary Islands. I declined their invitation. The bill was a bit steep for me, the itinerary a bit tedious, the concept of family a bit strained, so I’m here housesitting. A neighbor walks up with two red mums. “For Nicole. I know she loves mums. I had a funeral last week. A wedding tomorrow. That’s life, right? But they’re with us, aren’t they?” she says, pointing to the sky and then resting her hand on her heart. “My grandfather fell off his motorcycle at 80. Then he developed kidney issues. But he fought, you know? Just like my uncle. We took him off dialysis and he lasted weeks like that. We thought he’d die in days. But life, you know? It wants what it wants.” She goes on like this for a while. Life and death. Funerals and weddings. I get an erection but lean against the door in such a way that she doesn’t notice. This is my midlife crisis, I guess. I can’t afford a Porsche or hair transplants or a mistress so I’m not complaining. Though they happen sometimes at random, without a stimulus. I’ll be cooking oatmeal or aerating the lawn or sitting in traffic listening to a podcast about the Hanseatic League and boing—my cock is practically erupting through my pants. The neighbor leaves eventually. I masturbate quickly in the bathroom. I have to remember to water the mums. 

I meet my childhood friend later for beers. I tell him about my aching shoulders, my midlife erections. He’s married now. Has one kid with a second on the way. They’d been trying for almost two years with joyless, scheduled intercourse. He’d go out to Long Island for work—he’s an electrician in a tiny union and is sometimes the only guy on-site, wiring new supermarkets or big-box stores—and he used FetLife to find all these kinky women. One could only get off when he fisted her while wearing his wedding ring. He said, “I tried to take my ring off once because I felt guilty, you know. I’m not a monster. I felt terrible. But she froze up when I tried to. Stiff as a corpse. So I left it on. But I always wondered what would happen if my ring got lost in there. If I’d need to take her to the hospital. Or rent a metal detector or tie a magnet to a dildo or something.”

“My girlfriend has been very horny lately,” I say. “Some hormonal change. Perimenopause maybe. Not that she didn’t have a sex drive before but now every time we have sex, she wants to have more sex right after. And I tell her I’m old. That she needs to think about the refractory period. Then she takes my soft cock in her mouth just licking it, playing around, and I’m sort of embarrassed it’s soft but also flattered that she wants me or it or us so much and like fifteen minutes later we’re fucking again. I came three times in an hour. I haven’t done that since I was a teenager in heat.”

“Well, I say enjoy it while you can, man. Because we don’t really have sex anymore. It’s just work and parenting and on Sundays I watch football and fuck around on the guitar all day. Lots of Black Sabbath. The riff master.”

He shows me some videos of guitar prodigies on YouTube. Loads of fancy finger work. But the music sounds busy to me. Like they’re playing way too many notes.  

The next day I meet my mom and my sister at a Chinese place for lunch. Mom points to the kitchen and says, “Look, they’ve got actual Chinese people cooking. That’s a good sign. On Queens Boulevard we used to get all-you-can-eat Chinese food for two dollars. Piles of egg rolls. Buckets of lo mein. Now dumplings cost ten bucks. Ten bucks! What happened to this country, huh?”

My sister is telling me war stories from the psyche ward where she works. “The schizophrenic patients aren’t that bad. It’s the bipolar ones you have to watch out for because they get manic. And the drug addicts. They’re disgusting. They’re all criminals with bedbugs and scabies. And so entitled. One of them refused to eat the food in the cafeteria and was screaming ‘my insurance pays for this shit’ meanwhile their insurance is Medicaid so actually my tax dollars pay for it, bitch.”

“Did you say that?” I ask. I admire my sister. She’s very strong. Until she isn’t. Then she’s staying in another psyche ward in another county for a week or two. Meds. Sleep. Repeat.

“No.”

“Ten bucks for dumplings! Dumplings!” My mother says.

My sister goes on: “But one time we had this real piece of shit patient who had cancer and he beat cancer but was back in the ward for something else, it’s a revolving door of nutjobs, and he was screaming, calling all the nurses cunts and saying he had AIDS and trying to spit on us and when we finally restrained him I whispered into his ear, ‘I hope your cancer comes back and kills you’ and you can bet your ass we were cackling about that on our smoke break.”

My mother calls the waiter over. She doesn’t have time for menus and likes the—any—attention. “Do you have a shrimp dish?”

The waiter, a young Asian kid, says, “Yes, many shrimp dishes.”

“With garlic?”

“We have shrimp with garlic sauce.”

And I get an erection. In this dumpy Chinese place while my sister is telling me psyche ward drama and my mother is nagging the waiter about the size of shrimp. Are they big shrimp? Are they prawns? How many shrimp come with the dish?

We order. I excuse myself to masturbate in the filthy bathroom by the fire exit at the end of the hall. There’s no soap so I use the hand sanitizer on the sink. There are dark fingerprints smudged on the wall. When I return to the table, the food is already there. 

“These aren’t prawns,” my mother says, examining a shrimp she’s skewered with a chopstick.

“Did I tell you about the Bulimic girl who was really sweet and read my tarot but had the bones of an old lady because of her eating disorder? She was like sixteen or something but with 80-year-old bones.”

“Ten bucks for dumplings. Unbelievable,” my mother says.

I sit down and take a sip of Coke. My chicken smells like rancid fry oil. My shoulders still hurt.

The next morning the landscapers wake me up. Watering, mowing, seeding. Mornings in the suburbs are noisy with hired labor keeping yards tidy and clean. I lie in my girlfriend’s childhood bed wondering if she lost her virginity in it. If she had her first orgasm in it. Wondering how close the Canary Islands are to Africa. Wondering, remembering. Annalise. A Peruvian pre-law student who was volunteering at the library with me to teach new immigrants how to read. I was there for court-mandated community service. She was there to pad her resume. Afterwards, we’d fuck in my Ford Explorer under a huge, half-dead Catalpa tree at the back of the parking lot. She’s a lawyer now in North Carolina. Practicing law. What am I practicing now? Life? Except you don’t get a free trial. Or maybe you do. I should listen to the podcast I downloaded about karma. I go to the bathroom. I jerk off. I hope the landscapers watered the mums.

Two days later my shoulders and back are less tight. I jog to the park again. Step past the mums, across the tended yard and past the various architectural styles of the affluent houses. I do three pull-ups, four, five. I’m hanging from the bar. I have an erection. My abs are tight, my shoulders. I want to be young again, fucking in the back of a beat-up SUV and thinking about my future. I want dumplings that don’t cost ten bucks. I want money. I want to be on a Spanish beach with my horny girlfriend. I want to have a kid, to teach my kid how to master riffs. I want to be twenty pounds lighter, twenty years younger, twenty times stronger, smarter, better. I want. I don’t want to want. 

But life, you know?

Jon Doughboy is a recovering “literary fiction” writer who now produces “prose entertainments” to pass the time, available for the amusement of none and all @doughboywrites

Categories
Issue 4 Issue 4 Fiction

LEMONADE STAND

By David Luntz

Sprouting like weeds all over the hood. Lemonade stands. Suburban cliché. A cliché of cliché. I loathe them. Which I suppose reflects badly on my character. But I don’t blame the kids. They’re being forced into it. Every time I see one, though, I can’t help but wonder about those children’s hygienic practices, how many flies dipped their feet in those tepid brews, and the quantity of lead in the water that had been used to make them. 

But one day I was thirsty, ragingly thirsty. I approached the nearest lemonade stand. Three pleasant blond-haired children manned it. They were clad in the latest designer brand clothing popular with a certain income-level of suburban households. I drank five cups of lemonade without paying. To be honest I had no intention of paying. But I promised those children I would go home and return with their payment. 

I placed my empty plastic cups gingerly on their stand. I took a step back. I thought some sort of apology was needed since I wasn’t going to pay. I waved my right hand before them and explained since they were in a business, albeit a small one, and given it was unregulated and they did not pay taxes and that my hand was clearly visible when it had helped itself to their lemonade (in contradistinction to Mr. Smith’s teachings), they should therefore take my drinking of their produce without recompense as an opportunity to learn the difference between extending credit and giving a loan—which, perhaps in the grand scheme of things, like war and politics, as von Clausewitz taught us, may be a meaningless distinction, but, I added, with a disarming smile, that was another discussion for another day. 

Yet, for sake of clarity, I told them I was drinking their lemonade on credit, not as a loan. Yes, I know, I know, I said, my “credit” here amounted to my word. But if it’s good enough for the U.S. government, then it should be good enough for you. Trust me children, it’s not lost on me that the mere promise of a few pieces of that specially-inked paper no longer backed by gold, with its all-seeing eye of providence inside of a creepy bisected levitating pyramid, got me those cups of lemonade. And yes, I get I’ve just compounded my legal woes by inadvertently entering into a binding contract with you, for I am painfully aware much to my prior detriment promises are considered ‘consideration’ in contract law and oral contracts are binding and enforceable in courts of law. 

Oh sorry, child, did I spill on your precious Brandy Melville dress? No, no don’t fret. Don’t cry. I’m sure the stain will come out. No? …What? No, you cheeky little fucks, I’m not going to leave my two-hundred-year anniversary special edition Phillipe Patek timepiece with you while I go home to fetch your little bit of sweet extortion, nor am I getting skinned for the cost of a whole pitcher of lemonade—you should learn to place it better on your stand!

Look, shit happens, accidents happen, deal with it. But putting all that aside, children, I know what troubles you. I know. I know. So, let’s mix metaphors and talk turkey and get down to brass tacks and address the elephant in the room: you don’t know me from Adam. You fear I will run off and never return with your precious payment. I get it. I get it. I’ve lived it, too, in my own professional life. You fear all your labor, hard work, your investment will have gone to waste, been all for naught. But look! I come with good news! Here’s another chance to learn something very important—what’s known in the parlance of the industry as a “transferrable technology” that you can acquire without any startup costs and sweat equity. 

Imagine that! See, now you can learn in real time about write-offs and the cost of doing business, which had you known before, you would have priced into your cups of lemonade without having to learn about Bayesian priors, sunk cost fallacies, double entry book keeping, the utility theory of value and law of diminishing returns. Which you will thank me for later when you don’t end up like King Tarquin who, you might recall, tried to buy all nine of the sybil’s oracles but wouldn’t accept her price, so the sybil kept burning her oracles until King Tarquin caved and ended up purchasing only three oracles for the same price as he could have purchased the set of nine. The point being here to understand the value of what you’re purchasing, because one day you’ll find yourselves on the other side of the lemonade stand, so to speak, and realize that sellers sometimes like markets can afford to remain irrational much longer than you can afford to remain solvent, to paraphrase Mr. Keynes. 

What? Why the look? Oh this. No, no, no it’s nothing to be worried about, just 17th century with an ivory handle made from…but this is not what you should be looking at. You need to see the bigger picture. So, pay attention! I’m trying to show you that your lemonade stand is but a tiny pucker on a tentacle of an enormous sprawling octopus of insurance companies, media conglomerates, investment banks, and law firms—no, what’s that, it’s not registering, fine, fine, if such abstraction eludes you, then picture some vast ancient army moving through the night, felling trees, making fortifications, their naphtha-fueled braziers burning along the western shores of the Danube and the Rhine, the tooth-chipped coins clinking in leather pouches strapped to the legs of the weary whores, the clanking pots of the cooks, the surgeons, barbers, and bloodletters with their cloudy jars of leeches and cedar boxes stacked with fleams and catheters, the learned-Greek doctors and stoics, bantam cock spleen readers, prestidigitators, prognosticators, students of the aleatory arts, dice men, procurers, devotees of Astarte, horned moons tattooed on their tongues, spies, interpreters, masseuses, forgers, rhetoricians, rumor-mongers, apiarists, bird catchers, butchers, dowsers, trappers, curers, washerwomen, the whole slow moving slug depositing its slick residue over a wasted land bathed in its own sebaceous glow, for your stand is part of a similar vast dark enterprise and nothing is really still, which is the first illusion you will have to learn to unsee, the illusion of stillness, but the point here is that you can never learn too early, for here, right here is where theory and practice both merge and come apart depending on which side of the cliché—stop screaming you little bitch, I’m not squeezing your arm that hard—depending on which side of the lemonade stand you stand on, for like that other cliché—or is it a trope, I can never get them straight—about the cat in the hat or in the box it all depends where your observation point is, for from where I am standing you’re all basically dead, or rather should I say, doomed, and from where you are standing no doubt you’re looking at some adult you wished had never passed into your perceptual field, but alas in life sometimes we can’t choose what not to see, can’t arrange to sweep these inconveniences under the proverbial rug, just as we never know the exact moment of our deaths, which is perhaps a good thing come to think of it, but let’s not be too maudlin, for when I spoke about death earlier, I meant it mostly in metaphorical terms, so let’s pretend you’re like Adam and you’re getting evicted out of paradise, not for paying your rent late, but because you did the one thing you were told you couldn’t do, and your maker sends down an angel who takes you up to the top of the highest mountain in paradise and from there you see the whole history (which is also your future) your one act caused, and in Adam’s case it was very bad, Hobbesian, chaotic, the general state of affairs that existed before the state contracted to monopolize violence from its subjects, I’m talking untrammeled murder, disease, war, theft, rapine, but in your case I’d say the future’s less gory, though, that said, I am not sanguine either about your prospects because this stand is a kind of gateway beverage to a life of office cubicles poring over grim actuarial statistics that had their origins in Graunt’s Mortality Tables, the sponsoring of derivative securities and other dubious negotiable instruments on the Amsterdam stock exchange that not coincidently came about with the science of probability in the seventeenth century, and the probability for you dear children is sharing cubicle space like penned cattle, of smelly refrigerators stuffed with moldering food cartons left by your coworkers some of whom you will no doubt develop unhealthy thoughts towards that may adversely affect your relationships with those whom you really care about, so you will find yourself coming back to your dingy rental you can barely afford in a packed subway car and wondering, “How did I get here, where did it start?” and then you’ll spit on the name of Mr. David Hume who told you it was impossible to find true effects from causes, you will curse yourself for taking him at his word, for here the effect can be traced down the chain directly to this instance with no other intervening causes—oh please, please don’t look at me like that, this blade hasn’t been sharpened in ages, it’s quite dull in fact, but admire if you will the ivory and jewel-crusted handle, genuine 17th century Ottoman smithing here, beautiful, no?—I mean it happened so quicky, he surprised me, yes, I hate to admit it, I liked it, I know, not nice, but you can trust what I’m saying because before that I shot the fucking albatross, well not the actual one in the poem, let’s say a metaphorical albatross, truly, the details are not important, but what matters is there is no coming back from it, you see, it’s a slippery slope, and nothing’s been the same since, sometimes I can’t help myself—now, now stop shaking dear children, stay calm, besides, we all have dead birds in our lives, so to speak, don’t we, even those we tried to save, so I suppose it doesn’t matter, it all balances out in the long run, but speaking of birds, take to heart and cling to it for all you are worth this sage advice of Mr. Russell’s who warned us that thinking the sun is going to rise tomorrow is like the chicken who thinks the approaching farmer is coming to give him his breakfast (because he’s done it every morning), when in fact the farmer is really coming to wring its neck, so yes, I think you know now what I’ve really been trying to tell you, and no, it’s not that you were never going to get your payment, I think that’s obvious now, sorry, not sorry, but this is where the nightmare begins, this is where it begins, so please children run, run for your fucking lives.  

David Luntz. Work is forthcoming in or has appeared in Post Road, Hobart Pulp, trampset, X-R-A-Y Lit, Rejection Letters, Maudlin House, HAD and other print and online journals. More at davidluntz.com Twitter: @luntz_david

Categories
Across The Wire

The Flood

  • Post author By
  • Post date

By Denise S. Robbins

“The Singularity will doom us all.” Samuel says this at a moment of conversational pause. The dinner party goes quiet, for swiveling heads make no sound. Everyone waits for Sam to explain himself. But he’ll wait. He’ll wait until someone asks. The windows are open and someone, somewhere, is drumming. Cars bring their own accompaniment in quick swells. 

Polite little Ariana, in a quiet voice: “What does that mean?” 

Sam takes a deep breath, making his mustache quiver. His eyes are still and serious, fixed on Ariana’s, who flinches slightly but keeps his gaze. “When AI intelligence surpasses our own,” says Sam, “there will be no hope for the human race. Unless we’re lucky enough for our superintelligent robo-overlords to be gentle. Perhaps they’ll let us, as slaves, have dinner parties, like we’ll let our future children play House, as long as they don’t get out of line.” He rubs his belly as if he were the pregnant one. The others glance at his wife Carmela, standing on the other side of the room, whose flowery wrap dress expertly hides any stomach bulge. 

“Hey man, you shouldn’t say that,” says blue-haired Lennie. “The word slaves.”

“This may be my last chance for anything I say to mean anything at all,” says Sam. 

Carmela shoots her husband an angry look. Earlier she had explicitly asked Sam not to talk about Doomsday during his birthday Shabbat. He ignores her gaze. 

“Let’s start eating,” says Carmela, trying to remind herself how nice she felt ten minutes ago, when pockets of conversation hummed around the room, an underlying current of sound, like when you realize the fridge is churning, but it’s the way voices converge into a low, cheerful drone. When her guests poured their second drink and became flushed with happiness as they hovered around the fresh baked challah like it was a newborn baby. When she lit the Shabbat candles and the fire reflected in Sam’s eyes before he moved to hug her from behind and rub her newly pregnant belly. 

“But Elias isn’t here yet,” says Sam.

“He’s never here yet,” says Carmela. “Food time. Plates on laps, I’ll bring it around.” A nice big dining table is something that can always be put off, the lack of it ignorable until you have a dinner party, so they are sitting on couches around a coffee table. Carmela removes the noodle casserole from the oven and scoops a hefty portion onto each plate, along with one ripped handful of challah. She worked hard on this dish, and expects praise in equal measure to the effort she put into it, but no one seems to notice as she hands them a plate, everyone now in rapt attention as Sam explains calmly why every argument against the Singularity is wrong. 

Lennie says, “We’ll create a kill switch.” 

Sam shakes his head. “You think they won’t foresee that and reprogram themselves for it not to matter?” 

“There are four different cheeses in this,” Carmela announces, taking a plate for herself. “Mozzarella, pepperjack, gorgonzola, and bleu.” 

“Isn’t gorgonzola a type of blue?” says Lennie. 

“Bleu,” says Carmela, nasally, “like bluh.” 

“So is it a type of bluh?” asks Lennie.

“I’m not sure,” says Carmela. “You could Google it later. Now for the Motzi.” She leads the blessing of the bread and everyone takes a perfunctory bite of challah. “Leave room for cake!” 

“Cake?” asks Sam. “What flavor?” 

“It’s a surprise.” 

The AI conversation continues as if it never stopped. Ariana is unconcerned about the internet advertisements: in fact, she likes how the internet seems to know exactly what she wants to purchase next, and gives her good deals, too. Lennie jokes about a robot accidentally setting off a nuclear apocalypse. Carmela sits back and disengages. She’s scarcely hungry, after hours of taste testing, and it seems the others share her lack of appetite, except for Sam, who eats his dish in big bites between words. He goes back for seconds, peeking in the fridge on the way back. He sits next to Carmela on the loveseat and kisses her on the cheek. 

“Chocolate cake! You know me so well, honey. Thanks for the party.”

“Why, because it might be your last before the Singularity?” Carmela says half-sarcastically. 

Sam’s smile disappears. 

There’s a knock at the door. 

“Elias!” Carmela checks her watch. “Who had eight o’clock?” 

“I said 8:05,” says Ariana. 

“Cheers to Ariana.” Carmela pours herself another glass of sparkling apple juice. “Door’s unlocked,” she calls out. The knocking continues. “Okay, I’m coming.” She opens the door to see Elias, in a pea coat and baseball cap, dripping wet.

“There was a storm,” says Elias with a grave countenance. 

“We didn’t see it,” says Carmela. 

“It unleashed itself on me during my walk over.” 

“It must have missed us. Can I get you a beer?” 

“The strongest you’ve got.” 

Lennie hands Elias his recently opened bottle of 9.5 percent IPA. “I took one sip but I hate this,” he says. 

Elias drinks deeply, then removes his coat and hat, putting them on the floor in a corner. “Sorry I’m late. I fell into a deep depression after reading this week’s parsha.”

“The Torah portion one about Noah’s flood?” says Carmela. “Why should that worry you? Hashem said explicitly it would never happen again. The rainbow covenant and all that.” 

“Just look at me,” says Elias. “I fell into a flood of emotions, then became wet to my core. The Great Flood is upon us once more.” 

“Yes. It’s called the Singularity,” says Sam. “You’re right about the parsha. Doesn’t bode well for us! Hashem decided humanity wasn’t good enough and flooded the Earth except Noah. But Noah was a nobody.” 

“He had faith,” says Elias. 

“Sure. That was his only quality. He believed what he was told. He built the ark. He was like a robot himself. Is that what’ll happen to us? The only survivors will be mindless slaves. He knew he had no personhood. That’s why, after the flood receded, he became an embarrassing, naked drunk.” 

“Or maybe it’s because everyone he knew was dead,” whispers Ariana. 

“Drunk and naked?” says Lennie. “Noah sounds fun.” 

“No more talk of floods or singularities!” Carmela stands up and claps her hands. “We’re here to celebrate Shabbat and Sam. That means relax. Everybody, why do you love Sam? Let’s talk in turns.” 

The room is quiet. 

“Don’t everyone talk all at once,” says Carmela. 

“Come on, Carmela,” says Sam, “let’s just get back to food. How about the cake?” 

“Yes! The cake.” Carmela cuts the cake but no one touches it except Sam, who stares with beautifully greedy eyes as she gives him a large piece. The conversation picks back up, the discussion flowing into divots and streams, veering around how to win the robot war and landing on they all plan to live their final day alive. 

When Ariana returns from the bathroom, Carmela rushes over to grab her before Ariana can re-immerse herself in AI talk. Carmela tries to think of any other other conversation topic, and finds herself telling Ariana about childhood home movies her mother recently sent her. “I haven’t seen myself with such clear eyes until this week,” she says. “I was deeply afraid of being left out. Yet I always seemed to be sitting on the sidelines by choice. The funny thing is I’ve watched these videos before. Years ago. I used to rewatch them all the time. But I never got that feeling out of them, the one I have right now, where I understand myself. How much of who I am was shaped by the way I interacted with my brothers as a kid? I wanted to be one of them but I was too small. Then I spent my whole life trying to fit in, without thinking about any sense of individuality. Only in recent years have I found that. I had to push back against my own nature. It’s just fascinating—and terrifying—to think about how much can shape a child’s life.” She rubs her stomach. “So much is out of our control. Some of it is in our control, or at least we think it is. Like, I get to decide how many years until our second child. But I have no idea how much that age gap will affect them. Sometimes siblings are better friends the further apart in age they are. Sorry, I’m going on and on.” 

“No, it’s interesting,” says Ariana. 

“So what traumatized you as a child?” 

Ariana thinks for a moment, then says, “A robot clown toy.” She shudders. “Horrifying.” 

“Here’s how we do it,” says Lennie on the other side of the room with an empty beer in his hand. “We convert everyone to Judaism. Even the robots. Then we require all technology to shut down once a week. Then we’ll have Saturdays to plan the rebellion.” 

“Not good enough,” says Sam. 

“And Friday nights, too,” says Lennie. 

“We’re not supposed to work on the Sabbath,” says Elias. “We’d lose our favor with Hashem.” 

“I think Hashem would understand in times of war,” says Lennie.

“Robots wouldn’t believe in Hashem,” says Sam. “They only believe in themselves.” 

“But we created them,” says Lennie. “What’s simpler than that? We are their creators. So they have to listen to what we say about Hashem. The idea of Hashem will be beyond AI comprehension. We know it doesn’t make logical sense. God. Robots are all ‘one plus one is two.’ That’s true when you’re talking about matter and particulars. But sometimes it’s more than that. We’ll know this. They won’t. Boom. We win.” 

“It’s time for the game!” calls out Carmela. “Who knows Sam best?” 

“Carmela,” pleads Sam, “can we play later? We’re kind of in the middle of something.” 

“I’d like to play,” Ariana says feebly. 

“What’s the point of playing when Carmela will automatically win?” says Lennie. “Obviously you know him best.” 

“I’m not playing,” she says. “I’m judging.” 

“Who died and made you judge?” says Lennie. 

“Just pick a side,” says Carmela. “Blue couch or green couch.” 

Lennie is sitting in the middle of the two couches, on the floor. Elias is on the blue, Ariana on the green. Lennie leans to the left towards the blue, collapsing on his elbow at Elias’s feet. “Dudes rock.” He holds up his hand for a fistbump with Elias. 

“Two groups fight for honor bestowed upon by the Birthday Boy,” says Sam in a booming voice, joining Carmela to stand by the door. “Which side will win? Which will fall into shameful decrepitude?” 

Elias’s phone rings. 

“Shame! Shame! Shame!” says Sam. “Your team loses one point for breaking the Sabbath.” 

“Oh, really?” says Elias. “Looks like your internet…box… thing is plugged in. Don’t you lose a point?”

“The Birthday Boy loses no points,” announces Sam. “He only grants them.” 

The storm comes suddenly. A burst of rain enters the open windows, splattering the plants in the windowsill. Carmela rushes over to close the windows. The rain leaves angry wet marks on the stomach of her dress.

“I told you it was storming,” says Elias. 

“No one doubted you,” says Carmela, flicking the water off her flowing dress, carefully, surrounding the spot where her future baby lives. 

“I should be going,” says Ariana. 

“What?” says Carmela. “The game hasn’t started yet. You’re going to walk in this?” 

“My Uber’s on its way. My dog is scared of storms.” 

“Okay, at least the teams will be even now. Elias versus Lennie.” 

“Right,” Lennie scoffs. “And we are absolutely excited about playing this dumb game.” 

“Hey, hey, HEY.” Sam stands up and puts his hands on his hips. “This is not a dumb game. This is the best game in the world. Once it gets going.” 

“Right,” says Lennie. “We’re definitely going to start playing it.” He gets up and slices a piece of cake. 

“We never sang the birthday song!” Carmela realizes with distress. “Don’t eat the cake! Don’t eat the cake! Turn out the lights!” Sam turns out the lights and hears drawers opening in the kitchen. “Sam, where are the candles? Turn the lights back on!” Carmela rummages through the kitchen drawers, then runs to the closet to search the boxes of knick-knacks. Old Halloween costumes and unused streamers fling to the ground, piling up at her feet. 

“How should I know?” 

Lennie’s already eating his cake. 

“Don’t eat the cake,” commands Sam. 

“Nothing in this house is organized!” Carmela cries, suddenly, bursting into tears. She’s never cried in front of anyone before, but now she can’t stop the angry sobs. She’ll blame the pregnancy hormones later. Hell, she’ll blame them now, and fight the urge to squeeze her stomach. The others grimace at one another, wondering if they should comfort her, leave, or pretend they don’t see what’s happening. They sit in silence as she continues to cry, turning boxes upside down, rifling through assortments of Tums and old journals. Sam directs his guests to their coats and offers his two spare umbrellas. Carmela hardly hears as the door opens and closes, wading deeply now into the suitcase closet. 

Sam walks calmly through the kitchen, peering into the top shelf of the pantry, the one too high for Carmela to reach. The box of birthday candles is hidden behind a bag of whole wheat flour. 

He brings it to his wife, now lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling with a blank look. Her cheeks are red and wet with tears. The windows in the bedroom are still open, bringing in small puddles from the storm. 

“Hey. Hey, hey.” Sam leans over her and strokes her hair back. “Look what I found.” He shows her the candles. 

“We need a real table,” Carmela says softly.

“We don’t need a real table.” 

“Yes, we do.” 

“Okay. We can buy one.” 

“Better plates, too, and wine glasses that match.” 

“Of course.” He begins massaging her temples.

She moans. “I’m sorry I ruined your birthday.” 

“I had a great time. And now I get to go to bed early, get a good night’s rest? Score!” 

Carmela moans again, but this time a smile emerges at the side of her lips. The modem beeps, complaining about a dying battery. “We’re terrible for not unplugging the modem,” says Carmela. “We’re the worst.” 

“So said the man who’s never earlier than two hours late.” Sam reaches down to Carmela’s dress, pulling it up over her belly, exposing old white underpants. 

“All my cute undies are in the hamper. I didn’t want to ask you to do laundry today.”

“These ones are adorable,” Sam says, and puts his ear on her stomach, as if listening to the ocean. 

“Our son’s in there,” he says. 

“Yeah.” Carmela picks up a strand of Sam’s black hair. 

“Hey Mel?” Sam says into her stomach.

“Yeah?” 

He squeezes her hand. “Let’s name him Noah.”

___
Denise S. Robbins is an author and teacher from Wisconsin. Her writing has appeared in Barcelona Review, Gulf Coast Journal, and more. She teaches a workshop about climate change fiction and has a novel and story collection in the works. Also a Substack. See more at www.denisesrobbins.com.