Tag: prose

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Across the Wire Vol. 7

short prose 

by Naa Asheley Ashitey

I’m not giving up, but I won’t lie to you: I’m starting to get really tired 

It feels like we’re going backwards. No, I know we’re going backwards. Everyone believes we’re the generation that’s going to fix this, but I don’t think we will. I don’t think we ever will. 

My dad might still have his November 2008 copy of the Chicago Defender, and I am still able to walk freely in the halls of these ivory towers because Brown V Board passed barely a decade after my father was born, and yet every single day I wonder if all my fuck ups are going to be the reason why the next incoming class in my med school might have no Black students.

The bold, defiant tone I speak with is somehow more hated by third-term Obama liberals I know as my fellow peers than the white man that called me a nigger when I went to pick up my chipotle order the other day. How broken must we be that when I scroll my social media I see more people crying over the fact that we will likely never live under an institution ruled by another Black war criminal. How broken must I be that I, who openly calls that man a war criminal, am still willing to waste 270 characters defending said war criminal in a tweet, because that term has been reduced to another dog-whistle; another word and phrase that I’ve come to hate, alongside “well-spoken,” “educated,” “polished.”

“Akata.”

How broken must we be that we’re going backwards because my people have always moved forward; that we are capable of occupying the spaces built by our own blood, at the cost of the morals and sufferings of our past ancestors being used in speeches about inclusion and progress, as we are now able to participate in imperialistic bombing campaigns and rewriting laws that if we had not undone, we would not be able to be the ones undoing them because we’d still be blocked.

I still hold sympathy for my people who once believed we could change the evil of this world, only to find themselves complicit. Even as I watch families torn apart and children born beneath rubble, I’m still getting text messages from my classmates who are more concerned with the language I use to fight oppression than recognizing the privilege of never having to have fight for the basic civil liberty of sitting down and studying for fifteen hours straight to take a poorly written med school midterm. 

Hush little baby please don’t cry, I want you to dream of lights and stars tonight. 

When I was a child, I used to have this nightmare about a dinosaur chasing me. If my mother wasn’t shaking me awake, it would often be my sudden jolt and eruption of sobs that would cause her to wake up. My dad would rush in from the living room to help my mom calm down my non-stop babbling about how I don’t want the dinosaur to kill me. Eventually, I would fall back asleep, clutching my favorite brown teddy bear, hoping she would absorb the nightmares. 

When I’d wake up the next morning, I could feel how puffy my eyes were. Sometimes as an extra present, I’d have more snot than usual falling down my nose. Though most notably, once I truly was awake and aware of my surroundings, I could recognize physically and mentally that something had shifted; I felt this notable disorientated feeling. At age four I did not know nor use that word, so in four-year-old terms, I felt “crummy” and “bleh.”

Sometimes, my mom was still asleep in her bed or the couch (depending on where I was sleeping that night), or she was already in the kitchen cooking breakfast (or lunch if it was a really bad cry that tired me out). I slowly walked to the bathroom, aware that my vision was slightly worse than normal, especially when I’d bump into the corner of the brown dresser in the room. When I looked at myself in the mirror, it was more terrifying to see how a silly dream that I made up in my head could put me in such a state in which I looked so awful. I felt like I was looking at a shell of myself. I was one year shy of seeing Evanescence’s “Everybody’s Fool” music video but it’s almost uncanny how I created the mirror scene on my own—minus smashing my hand and cutting myself. I’d touch the bags under my eyes, thinking if I pushed down hard enough, the bags would deflate. I’d try to smile and bring back the image of myself that I was used to seeing; one that wasn’t this disheveled. It was futile. The smile would dissipate, and it felt like I was looking at a horror scene. I knew if my mom saw how I looked, she’d worry. So I’d splash cold water on my face (I didn’t know about the ice-cube/spoon-in-freezer trick yet) to reduce the puffiness. Once my mom was awake or done in the kitchen, I’d call her to help me brush my teeth and get ready for the day. She never really asked me more about the nightmares. In retrospect, I’m glad she never did; it almost felt quite nice to leave the nightmare behind and simply move on. She’d walk away to get an extra towel for my bath, but in the seven seconds she was gone, I’d look back in the mirror, touch those eyebags once more and turn away.

I couldn’t swear away nightmares, but I certainly wanted to do whatever I could to avoid them. So, my bright idea: constantly do things that made me happy in the day. I would beg my mom to let us go on a walk in the park across the street or head to the playground two blocks away from the Jewel-Osco we bought groceries at. It was the distraction I needed. If we couldn’t get time to go out, I’d reread some of my favorite books (while complaining to my mom we needed another dollar tree or library run) to my teddy bears and barbies till it was TV time and I could watch Cyberchase. Ultimately, I was distracted, and it felt freeing. I felt so sure that as long I kept this routine up, the nightmares would cease.

And then I joined the gifted program in kindergarten and learned that nightmares could happen in the day and come in the form of other kids. In 1st grade, the arguments turned into yelling, and I started to fall in love with silence. In 2nd grade, I looked for new coping mechanisms and found sharpening a pencil and digging it into my right arm gave me the relief I needed. In 5th grade, I started hoping and begging my mind to give me the dinosaur nightmares in place of watching my home fall apart, and the fast-growing apathy and hate I felt towards myself.

I don’t remember when I stopped being afraid to see what I looked like in the mirror. All I know is that I started to become grateful to wake up and see my disheveled state.

It meant that I was still alive.

I want to be a mother

I want to be a mother. I want to be a good mother. I want to be a better mother than my mother was, not that she wasn’t good or that she didn’t love me, but that I don’t want my daughter to end up like me. I want my daughter to never think about the number of calories in a frappe. I want her to never fear telling me how she feels. She should be able to complete her sentences and not just fall into silence, keeping her true feelings to herself. I want her to always believe in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, maybe not forever, but longer than age 6. Maybe till she’s 10. That might be too old. I don’t know what age you’re supposed to stop believing in those things, but I know I didn’t believe long enough. I want her to walk in sneakers and heels, or whichever one she likes more, I’ll get her as many as possible in all her favorite colors. I want her to never wake up with the walls of her bedroom rumbling from audio vibrations, if so, it must only come from the TV, never from my voice or her dad’s. I want to nurse all her tummy aches, sing her songs even after she’s fallen into REM, and dance with her even when I don’t want to get up from the ground. I hope she never finds my pill bottles. I hope she never asks about the girls in old photos of mine that I don’t know anymore, and I can spare her from learning the complicated dynamics of friendships and the heartbreak that it can come with. Maybe she’ll know how to make friends better than me, so she’ll never have to learn how to heal from losing what you thought would be life long-friendships. Maybe she won’t have to learn that it will take about a year before you can talk about those people and recall memories without feeling that ache in your stomach and tears welling up in your eyes. Frankly, I hope she wakes up from nightmares about dinosaurs and unintelligible objects, and never from the things I said to her, or the things she says to herself in her head. I want to be a mother. I want to be a good mother. I want to be a better mother than my mother was, not that she wasn’t good or that she didn’t love me. I just don’t want my daughter to wish that her mother would’ve taken SSRIs and believed in therapists as much as she believed in the Lord. I don’t want my daughter to end up writing stupid prose poems at 11:28pm on a Saturday about how she hopes she doesn’t fuck up as a mother, not because I think my mother fucked up. But because I am fucked up, for a lot of reasons. Some of those reasons just happen to include my mother.

Dread without the Jenga Pieces 

1:23am:

I can sometimes be a scaredy-cat. Isn’t everyone? No, well, okay then. No, it’s fine, I might as well just be honest here. Yes, I am a scaredy-cat. Anytime I play Mario Kart with my cousins, I request levels that don’t have any of the chain-champers or whatever those fucking creepy blocks are called that fall on your head. Thwomps? Thwamps? Whatever. It is not even fear in a jumpscare manner. It’s just, like, seeing a face turn angry and move quickly to attack that freaks me out. I’m not explaining this right but whatever. Overall, I’m not into scary games or scary movies, though I know a lot about the Five Nights at Freddy’s games from watching all my favorite YouTubers play it. Their reactions to the jump scares are funny so it seems weird that I can handle that type of content, but I can never play any of the complicated Mario Kart levels with the things that scare me or I’ll cry.This is a really stupid confession. I don’t know, I have so many other things that I’m scared of, but I feel like they are things I bring up that inevitably separates myself from people. I’d rather confess about Mario Kart than all the intrusive thoughts I’m fighting back acting on every single moment. But it’s so hard, you know?

You’re supposed to be able to talk to your friends about how you’re doing. I want to tell people that I’m not doing okay. I want to tell people that I’m not really suicidal. I’m not suicidal, like, I’m not. I guess there are times that I just want everything to stop and be silent, but not in a dead kind of way. Or sort of in a dead kind of way. I know they say to reach out to your friends and be honest, but I think I share too much that it scares people or stresses them out. I become the stressful friend, instead of the strong friend confessing I’m having a rough time and I just want someone to know I’m working on it but I’m struggling. I don’t want to push people away, but I also don’t want to keep being open and honest with people about how I’m doing, just to wake up the next morning to discover I’m blocked. It’s a double-edged sword. When I keep everything in, I get hurt. When I decide that I need to free up some gigabytes of storage, I let the choir sing, echoing in a long, empty hall. I share, I laugh, I sob, and end up alone. I get even more hurt waking up to find out that the people I thought I could trust decided I was too much and completely deleted a relationship like it was nothing. Like those years of laughs and hugs was all for nothing. Like my honesty was some kind of contagious disease people needed to protect themselves from.


I just want to be like everyone else who has these struggles but can maintain friendships. What is wrong with me? Was there just some unspoken guideline everyone else got at the beginning of adulthood that never got updated for me? I really want to tell others how I’m doing but it’s nice having people to text and I don’t want my phone to go dry again. Please, I just need someone to tell me what the fuck I should do so this doesn’t dissolve once more.

“…… [chat gpt generating a response].”

Naa Asheley Ashitey is a Chicago-born writer and MD–PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. A first-generation, low-income Ghanaian-American and University of Chicago alumna, she writes at the intersection of race, medicine, and belonging.

Her creative and editorial writing examines how policy, media, and academia reproduce structural violence—and what it means to resist with truth.

Her creative work appears or is forthcoming in Eunoia Review, BULL, Hobart, Michigan City Review of Books, and editorials for The Xylom, MedPage Today and KevinMD. She has been nominated for multiple awards, including Best Small Fiction. More at NaaAshitey.com.


Twitter/Instagram: @foreverasheley
Bluesky: @foreverasheley.bsky.social

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Across the Wire Vol. 4

My Heart Belongs in an Empty Big Mac Container Buried Beneath the Ocean Floor

By Homeless

After Laura, the days were long and filled with even more sad-looking blue whales than usual. The rooms of Daniel’s house became packed like subway cars during rush hour, often leaving him warm, uncomfortable and unable to move, not to mention so crowded with sadness he could barely even lift his hand up high enough to scratch his nose. And every time Daniel looked out a window, regardless of the time of day, the sky was always wet-looking and gray and, or so Daniel thought at least, seemed gradually approaching, like it was calculatedly moving in on him—an insanely focused assassin coming to smother him with its grayness until he suffocated. And rather than do anything about all this (What is there to do? was the question Daniel’s brain kept rhetorically asking), Daniel just accepted his current situation. He knew he could only wait it out and hope for the assassin-sky to either change its mind or grow lazy and apathetic over killing him because, seeing him helplessly pinned down by sad-looking blue whales, there would be no sport or challenge in removing the speck that was Daniel from this world, and so, instead, it would just leave him be. Then Daniel, with nothing else to do, would do all he could do—wait for some of the sad-looking blue whales to eventually wander out of his house on their own, as if bored or suddenly remembering they wanted to watch Titanic again.


And so the days passed like gravestones made of mud slowly toppling into each other, forcing Daniel to eventually call out of work one morning about three and a half months after he and Laura had broken up. Even though they were no longer together, Daniel could still hear Laura getting mad at him. “You really think you can afford to call out of work? What? You want to be homeless someday?” Which always left Daniel feeling guilty (although over what exactly he didn’t know), as well as incapable of taking care of himself, of being an adult and forcing himself to do things he didn’t want to do.


Daniel did what he always did whenever he had a day off—he drove to his Graceland, his fast-food office, his Golden Arched home away from home.


Daniel drove to McDonald’s.


Or his McDonald’s, as he often referred to it.


Christian rock was playing from the speakers hidden in the ceiling when Daniel walked inside (for whatever reason this was the radio station management had decided to tune into for the past month). The nice Spanish lady working the register who knew Daniel by name already had his order punched in before he reached the counter. Daniel smiled, said thank you, paid for his iced coffee with exact change, feeling embarrassed as he did so, feeling poor as he did so—even though Daniel was poor, more so just feeling ashamed of it, really—and then grabbed his usual seat in the far back corner of the restaurant as far away from the gossipy elder patrons who frequented the restaurant as well.


Daniel took his notebook out of his messenger bag and opened to a blank page. Daniel was a writer who did the vast majority of his writing in McDonald’s because McDonald’s was the one place in the entire world where sad-looking blue whales didn’t stalk him. Any McDonald’s. The location never mattered. For whatever reason, the sad-looking blue whales refused to follow him inside. Instead, they’d stand by the front door and patiently wait for Daniel to return. And when it was time for Daniel to leave, the sad-looking blue whales picked up where they left off. They’d trail Daniel back to his car, ride shotgun, or sometimes, and which Daniel found even more humiliating and degrading, the sad-looking blue whales would sit in the back and Daniel would chauffeur them around. They controlled Daniel, the sad-looking blue whales, and as much as it killed him to admit it, although over the years he had gotten used to doing so (not that that made it sting any less), the sad-looking blue whales dictated almost everything he did.


Sometimes it was simply their laid back yet imposing presence that made Daniel do certain things, or feel certain things, or think certain things. Other times just a meager look from their lifeless black eyes, eyes like pieces of coal dropped in a murky street puddle. But most of the time, and which Daniel found to be the absolute worst, the sad-looking blue whales controlled him by crying.


“Oooooh, oooh, ooh!”


Although Daniel had heard hundreds of thousands of sad-looking blue whale cries throughout his life, it was something he’d never gotten used to, and now, at this point—thirty-one-years-old and not getting any younger—he knew he never would. Daniel didn’t understand their crying, especially considering there never seemed to be any rhyme or reason to it. At least not that Daniel was ever able to figure out.


A lot of the time the crying felt random, but also directed at other sad-looking blue whales even if there weren’t any present. And during these frequent impromptu studio sessions of their own sad, sappy music, mainly consisting of just one sad-looking blue whale but it also not being impossible during the really bad days for there to be almost an entire choir of them, it became impossible for Daniel to feel content in his own skin. Something about their cries brought to the surface the quiet, subterranean knowledge of how innately alone Daniel was, of how alone all humans were, of the underlying facts that most people who weren’t stalked by sad-looking blue whales were usually able to forget about or just completely ignore—that each of us comes into this world alone and that each of us leaves it alone, that each of us is trapped inside one human body with one conscious mind that no other person will ever be able to physically step inside of and, therefore, fully understand. And that, Daniel understood, was true loneliness—your weak and lame human brain being unable to perfectly articulate what it thinks, your mind being unable to form something vague and sharp inside of you into words for the world to comprehend. But the sad-looking blue whales had found words for it. Or maybe not words, but sounds. Sounds that said more about sadness and loneliness than any human language ever would.


“Oooooh, ooooh, ooh!”


Daniel had no idea what the sad-looking blue whales were saying exactly when they cried to each other, but his mind always translated it into “I’m alone! I’m alone! I’m alone!” And when it was late at night and Daniel was lying in bed with his cats and listening to the sad-looking blue whales cry outside his window like lonely wolves howling at a moon that had forgotten all about them, Daniel would always call back to them in his head, softly, mournfully, Me too… Me too… Me too…

Daniel took his pen out of his pocket, his favorite pen—a Simpsons pen Laura had bought him, momentarily making him ache for her like his heart had blue balls. He stared down at the blank pages of his notebook, at the cruel, goring whiteness of them, but nothing remotely creative came to mind. Ever since Laura left, Daniel’s brain had become immobile, like a dead car with its license plates ripped off, left on the street for the city to tow. He couldn’t write, he couldn’t draw, and these two things he once looked forward to doing now just seemed to scare and intimidate him because, being unable to do both, these activities only made him feel worse about himself, which, therefore, only summoned even more sad-looking blue whales.
Daniel gave up on the idea of writing for the moment, took his headphones out of his messenger bag and plugged them into his iPhone. Daniel played the song “Careless Soul” by Daniel Johnston and put it on repeat. It was a live track and sounded like it was recorded in a coffee shop or bookstore. A girl could be heard coughing at one point and Daniel Johnston broke into tears twice during the track. There were no instruments. Just Daniel Johnston singing about being called to meet your God.


Daniel Johnston is Christian rock… Daniel’s brain said.


Daniel non-Johnson laughed at himself. He felt sick and hated himself. He still loved Daniel Johnston, though. Daniel Johnston was certifiable but brilliant. Daniel Johnston loved Mountain Dew and McDonald’s. Daniel Johnston even worked in a McDonald’s. Daniel non-Johnston never worked in a McDonald’s. He’d worked at a golf course, the video department of his college, a Michael’s Arts & Crafts, a Home Depot, two doggie daycares and three animal hospitals. Now, Daniel non-Johnston worked in the stock room of a PR agency that represented beauty products. The stock room was warm, cramped, had no windows and was filled with sad-looking blue whales that were extra sad-looking and invasive. But since only Daniel could see the sad-looking blue whales, it was as if they didn’t exist to the rest of the world. So, bitterly, as well as half-heartedly, Daniel was forced to go through day after day as if nothing were wrong, as if he were completely and totally healthy, all the while still being foolishly expected to travel the same speed as everyone else in the normal world even though he was carrying an extra couple hundred tons of sad-looking blue whale dead weight.


This is bullshit… Daniel’s mind would often complain to itself throughout the course of his day at his dead end job, and then allow itself to feel momentarily good, justified in its own righteousness, knowing that, yes, this indeed was bullshit, a mass amount of it, ripe, stinking and unfair, but then the same recollection would always inevitably creep back in shortly thereafter. That life wasn’t supposed to be fair, that everyone had their own metaphorical crosses to bear, and that this one, enormous and heavier than most with a sad-looking blue whale nailed to it who cried “Oooh, ooh, oooh!” was unwaveringly his. And there was no trading it for another. There was no putting this cross down and resting, and Daniel’s mind, happy just seconds ago in the brief victory of knowing that it was right, that this curse of his was, again, in fact, bullshit, Daniel’s mind would then return to its usual damp and sullen state. He would drag himself through the day as best he could, often too frustrated and tired to care how well he was doing, just wanting nothing more than to make it to the finish line where, at the very end of the day, a box of wine was chilling in the fridge at home, waiting for him. 


Knock, knock, knock…


Daniel took his headphones off and looked behind him. Uncharacteristically, a sad-looking blue whale was at the back door of McDonald’s, pointing down at the handle as if asking Daniel to open it even though the door wasn’t locked.


Daniel hesitated. Not because he was actually contemplating letting the sad-looking blue whale inside, but rather because he had never seen their kind exhibit this unusually nosy behavior outside of a McDonald’s before.

Daniel turned away. He picked up his Simpsons pen and stared down at his notebook, ready to work.


The sad-looking blue whale could go fuck itself.

Homeless often wonders whatever happened to predictability? The milkman, the paperboy, evening tv? He’s the author of four books, and his second novel, “My Heart Belongs in an Empty Big Mac Container Buried Beneath the Ocean Floor,” comes out November 19th, 2024, from Clash Books.

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Across The Wire Vol. 3

HI I REMEMBER YOU BUT YOU DON’T REMEMBER ME

By Alexandra Naughton

originally published by Cosmonauts Avenue, November 2017

I tell you it’s okay, and you won’t think it again, but I’ve already filed it away to torture myself with whenever I want to bring myself down a notch. Another little trophy to take home from a plot against myself.

I’ve wanted to disappear, just be nothing. It’s so alluring to feel like nothing and then actually be like nothing, but still be present. Like it’s an ideal, a fiction. It’s only something you can try to do. 

I’m writing out only the parts I like to remember.

I can be nothing, like how I feel at parties: you can see me but I’m not there. Colors and sounds wash over me like I’m miniature, standing inside of a pinball machine feeling lost and everything’s banging around and lighting up and making noise and I keep turning my head to try to keep up like a floating dust particle to focus on.

I can be invisible inside the chattering cacophony of a sweaty crowd, covered in so much, too much. I can block me out and lose me.

I can make my expressions invisible, like friends really don’t even get it, so I try to describe it calmly while getting brushed off and eventually overheating but frozen on the outside like a surprised animal about to get hit by a car that other people talk about and it sounds unbelievable until you see it yourself, until you are that animal in the crosswalk.

You, my new you of the moment, the you who finds me waiting for a friend at a coffee shop, the you who finds me online where I post my thoughts, you tend to like me better when I’m bendable, when I don’t voice preferences. You like me better when I open myself up for your inspection. All laid out on the asphalt, straddling me and wetting yourself in my cold sweat. Asking so many questions, wanting to know things that I don’t. You like poking at my soft parts. Pulling meat out and squishing it in your fingers like plastic wrapped factory bread. Examining me, taking me apart out of curiosity and discarding when it gets too messy and you’re just over it. Starting something you don’t want to finish or put back.

You can shrink me, make me feel small. You can empower yourself that way. Lean on me until you’ve sunken me into the mud and I’m stuck there for a while. Make me invisible that way, that ordinary way you do. That subtle way you do. Make me not know myself, make me lose myself so you can find yourself.

Make everything feel invisible like you’re not as nice as you think you are. So accustomed to taking up space, making yourself loudest. Make me invisible like I made a joke and only you heard me, so you said it louder and everyone laughed. Like this happens so often I wonder if I am even speaking out loud sometimes, start gaslighting myself, under some invisible control. Make me invisible for your satisfaction. It’s a secret, not something you would share.

Make all the efforts of others invisible because it isn’t cool to care but you are still the only one who matters and if you’re unhappy then we’re all unhappy. Waysided because even though I am neglecting what matters to me to better suit you it is still not enough. Getting projected onto. And at first I am happy to be whatever you want me to be. I offer myself up freely, willingly. You ask and I oblige. And I’m happy to, at first. Because I’m not sure what to do besides listen and trust you.

Why make invisible always my first choice, my go to? I guess I’ve always wanted to be a ghost. I guess I’ve always tried to make myself smaller. Make it harder for people to find me.

Make it easier, existing on an at-will basis. Silently watching, listening, wandering around aimlessly, and enjoying it unseen. Easier to slip away.

What am I saying here? Something about commodification of the flesh. Something about finding it customary. Something about being just another bitch who is feeling things.

Is there subtext here? Maybe we should workshop it. Let it become someone else’s text. Edit me out, flesh and all.

Invisible like something insidious. Invisible like destitute. Invisible like displacement. Invisible like disassociation and you think I’m just being dramatic. Invisible and there is no one who can help. Invisible and no one can hear you scream, or they hear but no one looks up. Invisible and you know they can see you, they’re just pretending they can’t.

Invisible and they’re laughing about it.

Alexandra Naughton is the author of ten poetry collections. Her first novel, American Mary, won the 2015 Mainline contest by Civil Coping Mechanisms and was published in 2016. Her work has been featured in Dusie, Sporklet, sin cesar, Maudlin House, carte blanche, and elsewhere. She writes Talk About It on Substack, and organizes the Bring A Blanket reading series in Philadelphia. Find her on instagram @alexandranaughton and twitter @alexandranaught

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Across The Wire Vol. 3

It Wouldn’t Hurt You

By Claire Hopple

They are burying him in a red nose and overlarge shoes and a rainbow wig, all of which they found inside the chest up in his attic. His mistress is the first to scream at the big reveal. Then some kids who look like they’ve been playing in the mud even though they’re wearing their dressy clothes reserved for special occasions. I consider joining them. Screaming has a certain allure to it, and nobody knows what to make of this configuration in front of us. A good release is in order.

He would’ve hated this final act. They did it because they all wholeheartedly agreed he deserved it. These are his children, mind you. Grown children. They felt Jackson deserved this treatment because he was not a very nice person. Joe, the firstborn, said it was okay. Joe gave them the all-clear, and that was all they needed. They thought he’d never looked more appropriate, more himself, in this getup. They had to tuck in the wig at the sides before they closed his cardboard coffin for good. 

Now here we are, incurably witnessing them hoist the coffin up, over, and down into a freshly dug hole for a somewhat un-fresh body.

We don’t really concentrate on Mikey, the youngest son, drinking one of his kid’s unnaturally hued beverages from a plastic container in the shape of a barrel, strips of foil lingering around the top’s circumference. 

Their dad found himself at a safe distance from safety one too many times. Jackson was struck by lightning while opening the garage door of his mistress’s house, we’re told. Everybody tried not to read into it. You could say the man had a death wish long before that, but that’s the one that did the trick. 

I stare Mikey and his plastic barrel down a little too hard and he gives me this look like: What? It’s not as if I went looking for this drink. I don’t know about you, but it’s easy for me to picture Mikey rummaging through his father’s valuables. We met in front of the dunk tank at our town’s carnival. His wife had left years earlier. Our relationship is not of great importance to you, and I’d like to keep it that way. 

These exploits might sound rather morbid––maybe even cruel and unusual, to use the government’s phrasing––but I am accustomed to morbid. 

A teacher of mine once recited a famous quote that went something like: Every time an old person dies, it’s like a small library is burning down. And that quote really stuck with me. So I moved to an apartment beside a crematorium in case their ashes of wisdom would float over and stick with me too. Plus I’ve been waiting my whole life to become an old woman. Imagine living long enough that everything becomes nostalgia. Nostalgia is magic because we know we make it through what’s already happened. We’re safe. The phrase “your whole life is ahead of you” means you should be overwhelmed if not frightened, whereas “your whole life is behind you” means you’ve worked hard and you can rest now. You can be your best and worst self––sometimes simultaneously––without having to make excuses anymore. Every day, I’m one step closer. We all have our rituals. We’ve entangled ourselves with violent affection. And these rituals will lead to our downfall.

We live in a town that’s famous for its number of Arby’s restaurants per capita, if that tells you anything. 

Mikey says we’ll get an inheritance sometime in the near future. The overdue bills tell me it’s already the near future. Arguing with paper gets you nowhere. There is ample evidence. 

Tim, the middle brother, decides right then and there to interrupt the minister––who’s actually a friend of theirs that got some kind of religious certificate from the internet and won’t let anyone forget about it––to speak his peace.

“Our subject was loaded. And we were, we are, his blood relatives. That has to mean something,” Tim says.

“A shopping spree,” Mikey says.

“Something else,” I say.

Joe approaches the grave and throws his phone into the hole beside his father’s body. “There will be little to no consequences for these actions,” he says, inching back to his place in the crowd.

“I never put much stock in communication,” Mikey agrees.

“I’m sorry, I have to leave early. My cat is sick,” says a distant relative.

“But you don’t have a cat,” says another relative. 

“It wouldn’t hurt you to at least pretend,” says the first relative.

Jackson’s wife clears her throat. Here comes.

“He was a wonderful husband. I don’t care what anyone says,” she slurs.

We’re unsure whether she said too little or too much. Some of us were expecting a showdown, albeit a one-directional showdown.

A reporter peeks his head above the crowd for a few seconds, scribbling notes. 

“Get a good look,” she says. Then she whispers to the coffin, “I know you’re in there.” 

You will notice we’re all here for different reasons, and these reasons have shackled themselves to each of us. We’re losing patience with these very reasons as we speak.

“And that’s how you host a burial. Piece of cake,” says the fake minister. 

Jackson’s wife, Joe’s and Tim’s and Mikey’s mother––she was a person before any of them came along, and her name is Cassie––will disappear after this. What they’ll find is a used box of hair dye, some rusty scissors, and a pile of old clothes in the single-seater bathroom at one of the (almost) innumerable Arby’s locations.

You can call this guy, Terry, and he’ll make you a new life just like that. Or so Mikey will say to me after his mom’s gone missing. It will be too soon to tell whether she will ever come back. It will always be too soon to tell, just like it will always be the near future. 

In the meantime, Mikey will keep a copy of his father’s will and testament under his pillow right next to his high school soccer trophy. He will say sleeping atop these objects doesn’t hurt one bit.


Claire Hopple is the author of six books and the fiction editor at XRAY. Her stories have appeared in Wigleaf, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Forever Mag, and others. She grew up in the woods of Pennsylvania and currently lives in Asheville, NC. More at clairehopple.com.