Tag: short story

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Across the Wire Vol. 7

Alternatives

By Jenn Salcido 

The DJ has just started a new job on a new radio station that plays Tori Amos and makes people in the small town very angry. 

The reporter lives in the small town and has noticed that the radio is playing Tori Amos instead of oldies. 

One of the things the DJ likes about the radio station is how he simply projects into cars and rooms he will never see if he doesn’t want to, which mostly he does not. 

The reporter clandestinely listens to him in one of these rooms. It is the Computer Room. The reporter is 14. 

#

The DJ lives in one of those townhome developments off the highway. He doesn’t yet know anybody in town, and his life is a vector between his townhome and the station. He is a little lonely but mostly fine. 

The reporter lives in a different development on the other side of town, one that is lush with sodded bluegrass carpets and Bartlett pear trees that shower rubbery leaves all over the damp sidewalk on days like today. 

The reporter’s parents have taken the modem from the Computer Room. I hate them, she thinks. 

Across town the DJ is cozy at work in the studio, sipping herbal tea between the different little on-air bits he does. “Hey, I’m The Oracle and that was Tori Amos, of course, with ‘Crucify.’” 

The DJ likes that record but honestly he’s a little pissed off about the new mandate he’s gotten from the media conglomerate who bought the station. He looks with disdain at the printout that lists the mandatory top 25 rotation, all of which he must fit in “organically” during his slot. “And next up? We’ve got Suzanne Vega with ‘Tom’s Diner.’” 

The reporter comes home and stomps up to her room and turns on her radio and she is SO HAPPY when she hears “Tom’s Diner.”

The DJ looks at his watch and is worried that if he doesn’t have enough time left to get through the mandatory top 25 rotation, he’ll get put on DJ probation. This would not be good; it has happened to him once before. In that case he was simply reading a public service announcement and made some unfortunate flourishes with language that were not appropriate for the time of day. 

The reporter is pacing around her room, thinking about all the instant messaging she could be doing were the modem not in modem jail. Recently, she has obtained an internet boyfriend and is now more eager even than usual to hear that clickity clack static and the “YOU’VE GOT MAIL!” 

Sometimes when her father wants to make her angry he teases her by announcing “YOU’VE GOT MAIL!” whenever he enters a room.

#

After school the next day the reporter comes home to find that her parents have relented and the modem is plugged back in. No one is home to tell her otherwise so she logs in, finds no mail, clicks around a bit. 

Inspired by her growing stack of SPIN magazines, she has started to make her own website, accessible via the World Wide Web. She has figured out that she can make Word documents and save them as .html files. She likes trying out different backgrounds. She has learned how to loop an image over and over and over. She can, for example, make a page with a background that looks like stars in an infinitely scrolling sky. It’s hard to read the writing on that particular background, though. 

Once she has her home page arranged enough, she opens her email and writes the DJ. He is going to be the first interview for her new online magazine on the World Wide Web.

#

The DJ wakes up to start his Saturday, and feels the paunch of middle age sliding down his hips when he gets up from the couch. He thinks he should start exercising soon, probably. He lights a cigarette and gets coffee going. 

He goes over to the computer and logs in. “WELCOME! YOU’VE GOT MAIL!” 

TheOracle107@aol.com clicks on his inbox. He skims the subject lines, deletes some scams. There is a note from an address he hasn’t seen before. He opens the email. 

Dear Mr. The Oracle, I am looking to interview respected figures in music culture for my magazine. I really enjoy listening to your show and have found a lot of my favorite artists because of you. Do you think I can interview you? We can do this over IM. Respectfully, Laurel M.” 

He cackles. Dear Mr. The Oracle! 

“Sure,” he writes the reporter. “Call me Dave, though. IM is fine. I’m around today.”

Sent. Whoosh. 

“YOU’VE GOT MAIL!” comes the call to the reporter’s post in the computer room. After she opens her mailbox and reads the note, she checks and sees that TheOracle107 is online! 

“Hey,” she types into the void. 

“Hi,” the DJ answers back. 

They get to talking. The morning zips by. The reporter’s questions are a bit timid. The DJ imagines she’s maybe just out of college, doing her first internship at a radio station somewhere. 

The reporter cannot believe her luck. What a coup for the first issue. 

They chat for a while, mostly about the music itself but a little about themselves, what they like, what movies they’re watching lately. The flow of their rapport makes the DJ relax a little bit too much and he catches himself complaining about work, about how that’s changed. He realizes he’s holding his breath when he thinks about that. 

After the conversation winds down, the reporter copies and pastes the chat transcript into a Word doc, which she plans to edit later. 

The reporter asks the DJ if he has a bio. 

“Sure,” he types. “All celebrity DJs do.” 

#

Later that night, the reporter is still situated in the Computer Room when she hears the shrill demand for her to appear at the dinner table “right this minute.” She complies.

“I will take this to go,” she says, grabbing the Schwann’s breaded chicken patty with rice pilaf accoutrement. “I am working.”

Back in the Computer Room, enraptured by the sallow light of the cathode ray tube, the reporter can feel a piece of herself float up from the top of her head and dissipate into a realm that knows neither time nor space. This piece bears little relation to the crepuscular creature in the chair. 

She opens the 30 second sample clip of “I’ll Be There For You” by the Rembrandts that she downloaded and plays it a few times in a row.

The DJ is alone again in his apartment. I should try harder to make friends, he thinks. Instead, he makes his way to his desktop and clicks the icon. 

“WELCOME!”

There is always a little pause between the welcome and the announcement of mail. In this pause, hopes and dreams are made and crushed; the reporter knows this as well, if not better, than the DJ. The reporter is in the throes of a full-blown internet addiction, whereas the DJ is just a bit bored. 

The DJ has no mail, but  sees the reporter’s handle in the chat box. 

The reporter is busily typing a very long-winded fiction to her internet boyfriend about her daily activities. In the fiction, she has been invited to a party, and she’s going to the mall with some friends to pick out an outfit. It’s hard sometimes to keep the reality from straining into the fiction, especially when she’s nearing the time of day when she has to shut everything down and prepare for the next morning. The mornings are firmly grounded in a horrible reality, with no room for the fiction. 

Because she is no dummy, she also includes a critique of a long, old book she has not read. 

Satisfied and clicking “send,” she is surprised when she sees a new window, an invitation to converse with Mr. The Oracle. 

“Hey!” she writes. 

“Sorry to bug.”

“Not bugging.” 

“Wondering if you needed anything else. For the magazine.” 

“Hmmm I haven’t really finished the article just yet. Been really busy at work.” 

The reporter re-enters her body. Her eyes flash around the room, as if some source of information could possibly leak details of her appearance or her life through IM.

“Oh yeah cool cool,” he says. 

The DJ thinks he sounds dull. Why does he care? 

“I’m really close though, like going to finish it soon. It’ll be great.” 

“Yeah.” 

“How are you? Are you doing well, or are you also staring directly into the meaningless nothing?” 

He laughs, out loud, at that, and starts typing again. 

#

For a few days in a row now, the reporter has been corresponding with the DJ in short bursts on instant message. They haven’t gone too deep on any one thing; mostly she talks to him about music she likes. She gets some recommendations from him and tells him a few lies to make her reading life sound smart. 

She tells him about how, at Circuit City, she sometimes hides CDs in the wrong alphabetical order so that they will be there the next time she comes, and that is when he asks her: “Do you want to grab a drink?” 

She blinks. 

Her cheeks redden. Even though she knows the doors are closed, she looks over her shoulder. She is smart! She is desirable! She is, as her internet boyfriend told her while they were having “cyber” yesterday, “so sexy.” The DJ wants to go get a drink with her. 

Don’t worry. This is not that kind of story. 

Her mind doesn’t go to the after school special place where older men take advantage of girls, kidnapping them from sleepy midwestern towns and making them their slaves in some creepy cabin in the woods. She’s not even thinking about age at all, or questioning the DJ’s motives, or remembering that she’s been frequently told she comes off as older and more mature in her writing. 

Instead, her thoughts go to a different place, a softer place. There is heat there, and she feels some possibilities opening up to her that she’d never before considered. In her life, there is an unbreakable wall that separates her from the notions of desire, and from being desired. In her internet life, she is the recipient of genuine feelings from her internet boyfriend, and also she begins to inhabit the life that she projects to him. When she wakes up in the morning, there is a small, clouded window of time when she is no longer inhabiting her life, but her other life, and her other life is exactly how she wants it. 

When her internet boyfriend ::leans in and plays gently with hair::, she feels the flutters in her heart that all the adult contemporary radio programming has promised there would be. 

She feels that finally, here in the other space, she has become desired, desirable. 

“Soooo ummmm” she types, and adds a smiley face with a nose, which seems less flirtatious than the smiley face without the nose. “I have a boyfriend actually, sorry.” 

Across town, the DJ is listening to the new Soundgarden record and flipping between windows of his web browser when he registers the sound of her response. He had gotten deep into a Usenet forum rabbit hole and had totally forgotten he had offered the reporter a date. 

It bloops again. “Sorry, r u mad?” 

“Oh no haha all good,” he assures her, then closes the window. 

Jenn Salcido is a writer from Los Angeles. Her short fiction has appeared in Vlad Mag, Zac Smith’s Chrismzine, X-R-A-Y, JAKE, and Back Patio Press. You can read her work at www.jennsalcido.com. 

X: @jenneralist

Categories
Across the Wire Vol. 7

Two Stories

by Kent Kosack

Zuidema

When I was a kid, David Zuidema would pump our septic tank. Each lawn in our neighborhood had a container full of sewage buried in it. He told my mother to get my sisters to stop taking such long showers. Said they were making him rich. But they never stopped. Teenage girls have needs that younger brothers and the septic tank man can’t fathom. I took normal-length showers. I liked to stand under the red heat bulb recessed into the ceiling. It felt like a second sun up there. Maybe that’s how God feels to His faithful. I don’t know. I’m not religious. But it’s cold where I’m standing now, and I want to believe in something.

Quantum Leap

My sister is visiting for Thanksgiving. My girlfriend C. is drunk but managing. I put in the Quantum Leap DVD I borrowed from the library. Sam leaps through time, righting historical wrongs. My sister and I watched it as kids. The house has all the right smells. Turkey. Stuffing. Various casseroles. C. is drunker. Rambling and scattered. She thinks she’s charming. My sister eyes C., me, asking a question too complicated to answer. We watch one episode, another. We think about leaping through time. Think about fixing our lives. We’re on the edge of our seats. A crashing sound from the kitchen. C. swears. Fumbles with something. We miss the parade. The dog show. The football games. Miss all that might have been. I put in the next DVD.

Kent Kosack is a writer with work forthcoming in Subtle Body Press, the Heavy Feather Review, Magazine1, L’Esprit Literary Review, and 3:AM Magazine. You can find some of his essays, reviews, and short fiction at kentkosack.net

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Across the Wire Vol. 7

Archie Cruz and the Bridge to the End of the World

By Albert Rodríguez

Archie Cruz moved from Greenwich Village to Williamsburg, then from Williamsburg to Bushwick, and eventually to Fort Lee.  Each relocation felt less like a move than a gradual subsiding, a slow fizzing-out, like champagne left open overnight.

The retreat hadn’t been entirely voluntary. Archie had worked in finance, living by the old grammar of ratios and balance sheets, the faith that hid in the small, haunted pauses between trend lines. He’d built his career the traditional way—patiently, with a restraint that now seemed almost anachronistic. In the altered order of things, this steadiness passed for a defect.

Artificial intelligence arrived with a different tempo. It came into the world like a polished guest at an overcrowded party, fluent and ingratiating. It charmed executives, soothed analysts, and slipped into Archie’s chair without ever needing to announce itself. What others welcomed as innovation looked like a form of extinction—a quiet undoing of human sovereignty.

Archie was replaced suddenly and with a kind of surgical neatness, the way a tiger removes the throat from its prey. The machines hadn’t seized the world; they’d been invited in, settled at our desks as if we’d always suspected we were an interim species and deserved to be replaced.

For a time, Archie’s unimpeachable reputation kept him afloat. The company offered a new title, a new set of responsibilities—a gesture of continuity more than anything else. He was to “oversee” the machines, a phrase that carried its own quiet joke. Human oversight, they called it, though the term made him wince. What he actually did was stand guard over the forces responsible for his disappearance. The euphemism of the day was that he provided a human touch, though everyone knew that the only thing a person could reliably add was delay and the occasional mistake.

His presence functioned less as labor than as sentiment, a ceremonial remnant of the old order.

The demotions came for others with the steady rhythm of tides. Titles dissolved, duties floated away, offices migrated without explanation. The structure of his career thinned out, until finally he resembled a forgotten filing cabinet someone had neglected to push to the curb.

Then came the call. A short meeting. Polite regret. No hard feelings. And with that, he was dismissed—sent out to pasture with the gentleness reserved for things no longer needed.

After that, Archie drifted—lightly, almost politely—toward the edge of his own life. Later he would say it was the closest he’d ever come to despair. For most of his adulthood he had moved through the world in a confident stupor, buoyed by the unexamined belief that things, in the broad run of time, would work out. He had been, in the plainest sense, a cheerful man.

The collapse of his career stripped his defenses. He lost his footing in stages. The absence of steady income, the fading prospect of marriage, the quiet death of the family he once imagined—all of it pressed on him in ways he couldn’t articulate, a set of blurred weights that made each day feel slightly narrower. The future no longer seemed indifferent; it felt adversarial.

His finances were pitiful. He had six, maybe eight months of rent in a savings account. After that, New York—his city, his arena—would cast him out. The odd jobs kept him afloat only in the way aspirin steadies a fever: briefly, symbolically. A delivery route for a week. A stint as a nightclub bouncer. Painting work in Kips Bay. None of it added up.

If he couldn’t find something that restored both solvency and a sense of self, he would be pushed to the perimeter of the map: Newark, Trenton, Bridgeport—places that felt less like destinations than sentences.

Now and then Archie caught himself making peace with his status as an exile—not only geographic, but existential. He wandered through ideological cul-de-sacs, dipped into digital subcultures devoted to grievance and squandered promise. At one point he even considered whether “incel” might be his new station in life, though the forums rejected him outright.

He was, they insisted, too fit, too credentialed, too conventionally presentable. Someone accused him of “aesthetic fraudulence.” He decided to take it as a compliment.

It was in this suspension between former usefulness and looming irrelevance that Archie met a new kind of sadness. And with that sadness came the bridge.

Late spring. The sunlight felt provisional, the air unsure of its own warmth. Archie left his apartment in Fort Lee and went for a run. It wasn’t fitness he was chasing but escape, the hope that motion might quiet the mind.

He usually avoided the George Washington Bridge. The vast steel colossus had a way of amplifying his darker thoughts. But on this afternoon he made an exception. The views, he told himself, were worth the risk.

Halfway across the bridge, shirt damp, breath thinning, he saw her—a woman gripping the rail, disheveled and trembling. For a moment he couldn’t tell whether she was resisting the drop or reaching for it.

His body acted before thought arrived. He pulled her back. They went down hard on the walkway.

The wind tangled her hair like ivy across her cheeks. She was beautiful. Her name was Mendi, an Ivy League graduate.

Later, over dinner, she tried to explain.

“I wasn’t trying to die. Not exactly. It felt like… something inside me stepped forward, and I couldn’t step with it.”

“Like you wanted to be near the edge, not past it.”

“Yes. Yes. God. Exactly. I wasn’t jumping—I was leaning. I just didn’t know how to step down.”

“Most people don’t.”

She watched him then, her eyes glassy yet alert.

“So what are you? A guardian angel in gym shorts?”

“No. Just unemployed.”

Her laugh burst out of her, small and sudden, like a hiccup of joy after a long illness.

In the weeks that followed she brought him fruit baskets, as though the debt of being pulled from the brink could be settled in kiwis and candied pecans. The deliveries grew increasingly ornate. 

One came with a note: Thank you for standing between me and the wind.

Archie Cruz began returning to the bridge. Not every day, not even with intention, but often enough that a ritual took shape. He stood there in the evenings, collar raised, keeping watch.

It surprised him how many others came. People approached the bridge the way some approach confession: not always to jump, but to take stock. Many resembled him—tired, decent-looking, strangely invisible. Former executives, displaced engineers, solitary figures with shoes too polished for the lives they were living. They weren’t there to die, not exactly. They were there to test the drop. To confirm its existence.

Archie spoke with them, first with clumsy concern, then with something steadier. He grew familiar with the signals: the twitching hands, the gaze slipping past the skyline, the unnerving quiet that seemed to detach from the person producing it. Listening became its own discipline.

In time he constructed an education for himself. He read late into the night, studied case files, took online courses in crisis intervention. Slowly, almost accidentally, he became a presence on the bridge—a secular priest tending to the threshold. He talked to people on the verge of their own disappearance, coaxing them back toward the ordinary daylight of their lives.

He never accepted a payment. The work was compensated in another currency, one that renewed something in him that the world had written down to zero.

Inadvertently, Archie Cruz had stumbled into a vocation. He grew so skilled at talking people back from the edge that a magazine sent a reporter to profile him. Soon he was a local hero. A television crew followed, filming him in winter light as he walked the length of the bridge.

The story kept expanding. The mayor presented him with a ceremonial key. A billionaire, stirred by his improbable compassion, offered several million dollars to help Archie establish an institute to study and counter the social fallout of the AI revolution.

The institute evolved into a foundation. Then came a Time Magazine profile. After that, the opportunities  multiplied. Through it all, Archie carried himself as though he were only incidentally involved in his own success, standing a little offstage, bemused by the spectacle. He considered himself fortunate, knowing that others had not been so lucky.

Archie and Mendi married in a small ceremony overlooking the Hudson, their vows composed not of promises but of recognition. In the farmhouse they bought upriver, they grew tomatoes and raised daughters. This, he felt, was the one certainty he could hold without reservation: his loyalty to his family. Everything beyond that—the weather of the future—remained unstable, a rumor of a world still waiting for its proper name.

He never entered politics, though overtures came. The notion of campaigning struck him as faintly indecent. Instead, he finished his PhD and began teaching at NYU, offering courses on social entrepreneurship and the ethics of intervention. For him these subjects were not abstractions but continuations of the work that had reshaped his life.

Students adored him. In their online reviews they mentioned his quiet voice, his understated humor, and the sense that he was a modern prophet pointing the way forward.

Once, a perceptive student asked him what had saved him at the bridge. Archie paused, as if testing the question for sincerity.

“Nothing saved me,” he said. “I just kept showing up.”

Albert Rodríguez is a Brooklyn-based emerging writer whose fiction has appeared in Litro Magazine USA, Five on the Fifth, White Wall Review, Platform Review, Across the Margin, Mr. BULL BULL, Modern Literature, INK Pantry, Literally Stories, and other outlets. A graduate of Borough of Manhattan Community College, he draws on his years working as a handyman in Manhattan’s historic buildings, a vantage that continues to shape the texture and temperament of his work.

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Across the Wire Vol. 7

Significance

by Frank Carellini

He was sure the banging outside his door was one of those dreams within a dream. He had planned too diligently to get a full night’s sleep: the last coffee of the day before two PM, a six PM dinner with low acids, an eight PM wine, a double dose of the sleeping medication at ten and, an hour before swallowing little pill after little pill, abstaining from any screens, even for telling time, which he substituted by getting up from bed to squint at the little green numbers ticking away on the microwave until it was ten-thirty, by which time the medication would move everything into a slow motion frame and put him to rest. 

He resisted the urge to lay down at eight-thirty after the tipsiness of the large glass of barolo began to lull the room around him into one giant warm velvet curtain by reading a light novel that required little work and was in the category he regarded as entertaining but not informative. His eyes burned when they closed and opened in slower and slower intervals, but he resisted until he urinated at least twice more, not wanting to be woken up by the urge to pee until at least five AM, from which he could slowly start the day in the bronze, purple dawn of the morning and set the coffee maker to brew a bold, rich, perfectly opaque cup. 

He settled under the covers, with the automatic temperature controls set to a perfect sixty-eight degrees of a hotel room. The coolness of the linen envelope him. He put on the satin eye mask from the luxury airline he used to fly back and forth to Paris, where in his second home, he drew the curtains at six AM with a strong dark tea, and would run along the Seine until the museums opened and he could be first in line to say hello to Monet in the l’Orangerie, accompanied, of course, with the complete Das wohltemperierte Klavier through his noise canceling headphones. Would listen to completion day after day, until his stomach called for a meal, until autumn called him back to New York, where by five PM or so the sun already set. 

It would’ve hardly been possible that anything outside of an earthquake, which didn’t occur here, would wake him up. The noise continued for a few moments. Was that the trash compactor? What, he thought, could possibly be the significance of the trash compactor activating in his dream. A trash-like smell of leftover meals floated into his room. Dr. Stevenson had warned that vivid lucid dreams could be a side effect of the medication, which he welcomed as they occasionally inspired a small painting he could make while sitting on his window ledge, using the period of uninterrupted natural light between one and three PM in the afternoon, and kept him busy even if they would never be seen in a gallery, but could be given as unsolicited gifts to the doormen or the women he encountered in cafes who had not heard of his writing. The trash compactor continued to chew, now accompanied by the opening and closing of an apartment door, letting out a whirl of clanking champagne glasses and boisterous, inaudible bursts of conversations. A party? Which hardly would occur without him having known about it or at least being alerted to it on courtesy. Usually, he’d find a cream-colored envelope regrettably, but kindly, informing him of a soiree with a live musician from the Juilliard school hosted to play Chopin’s Nocturnes, all of them, on the baby grand piano that occupied its very own room in the four-bedroom penthouse that sat across from his studio. He was welcomed if he wanted, but they knew he preferred Schubert to Chopin when it came to nocturnes, an irreconcilable difference that had caused him to clamor with zest at the first party such that he spilled red wine onto the white coat of the mr. host, and since had received the cream-colored envelopes informing him of the parties, rather than the ultramarine ones inviting him. It continued to clap, the trash compactor, for what must have been half an hour, which of course in the dream could have been only a few minutes or several hours, he forgets which way it goes, and of course may not have been the trash compactor at all, but some nightmare of Chopin being chopped into clunks by a Juilliard student, which was a possible side effect of the double dose of medication.

In this part of the dream, he rose from the bed naked and watched his shadow splay on the ochre floor, fast like a demon, as he drifted across the room to get his computer, which according to Dr. Stevenson should sit on the opposite end of the room when it was time to sleep as the new studies showed that a ten foot radius from anything electronic was best for full REM recovery, a discovery by one of the billionaires investing in living forever. The night mode of his screen shed a mild yellow light around him in an abbreviated aura that lit the upper half of his body. He searched for a while about the significance of trash in dreams, coming to some conclusion or the other that it had to do with cleaning up, cleansing, resetting, a perfect premise for a perfect night’ sleep. Reassured, he went back to sleep in his dream, watching the shadows of fanciful animals cast by the WiFi router sprint across the ceiling, counting them one by one. 

In the next dream, he woke around midnight.This time it was his door. What is the significance of that, he wondered. Squinting through the eyehole, a man in a short beanie cap and round glasses peered inward. He had seen this man before, a patient of Dr. Stevenson’s, buzzing into the apartment directly next to his. The man must have been having another late-night episode. Wrong door, he whispered from inside, as the door began to visibly shake with each knock, as if it was going to shatter. Hadn’t the resident manager received his note about Dr. Stevenson’s patients visiting outside business hours? It hardly felt appropriate. This was a home, after all. Perhaps in the dream, he hadn’t yet written the request to the resident manager. He found his phone, buried in the drawer and unlocked it through one squinting eye and a hand partially shading himself from the brightly lit background of his self-portrait on top of the white snowy mountain, a photo chock-full of symbolism. He drafted the email, sent around one AM, and received an immediate automatic reply that the request would be addressed within business hours starting Monday at nine AM, and if it was an emergency to please dial 9-1-1.

He laid back in bed, squarely into the four plump pillows, which again surrounded him in coolness. This was refreshing. Hadn’t Dr. Stevenson told him no scrolling? Oops, didn’t even realize he took his phone to bed. The medication had worn off, and a warm sweat began to displace the coolness around his body, which we refreshed in intervals by rolling side to side. Scrolled through the new videos that had been posted since yesterday evening. Oh wow, hadn’t seen that comedian in a long time, thought he was a goner. He propped the computer up on his knees and watched the old comedian’s new routine, letting out little laughs in bubble-like exhales. Through one of the three tall windows, a bright white light blared. That goddamn neighbor again, doing whatever he does on that big computer all hours of the night. Doesn’t this guy ever stop? Hardly a neighbor, as he didn’t live in this building, but the newer apartment one building over. It was one of those modern ones like a sideways shipping container. He stepped onto the window ledge, like a model in some sort of display window and banged against the glass naked, his body swinging in motion to get the attention of the neighbor who sat in a headset back in a chair with a video game controller. A woman in a bra and underwear came and went in the background, making eye contact with his fully naked body, dodging away and yelling to the man from behind the wall, directing his eye contact upward towards the window. Dr. Stevenson knocked at the door. He just got a call from the resident manager. You promised me no more nude flashes if I prescribed the sleeping meds, he called from right outside the room. His shadow dissipated as he walked away. He let out a little laugh. Dr. Stevenson said sometimes he would make an appearance in these dreams, but not to take it at face-value. Don’t forget to have some fun, it’s just a dream, right? A thump thundered from under him. What, had the floor below him been turned into a nightclub? It blurted out in bursts of bass-heavy thumping. He hadn’t danced in a while. Have some fun, he thought, feeling the house music thud on his spine. Dr. Stevenson had reminded him to now and again throw in a boogie or twist. Ah, that’s right, he mouthed, wiggling his body in bed to the ambiguous thump that seemed to shake the walls into a rhythm. This vibrated his body and its associated shadows against the wall cast by the WiFi router, and then subsided. The sheets became cool again. That was refreshing. A cream-colored envelope slid beneath the door. Tonight, he was informed, regrettably but kindly, of a reading by Flaubert. Well, that didn’t make any sense, he thought. He wasn’t in Paris until spring.

Frank Carellini was born in Connecticut in 1993.

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Across the Wire Vol. 7

Holy Oral History

By Brooks Egerton

Last time I heard from God, he started reminiscing about the kinks of the early Franciscans. Hang tight, buddy, I said, hang tight, let me grab my recorder. By the time I got back to the phone with it, he was chuckling about a couple of characters named Hansel and Gertrud. Here’s the transcript of his monologue:

This was in January of 1299, or maybe 1300, in Vienna. A medieval backwater then. He was a monk — cute boy, wise beyond his years, but hormonally still very much a teenager. She lived near his church with other beguines — a supposedly celibate community of women, bundled up in ridiculous habits like nuns, but with no permanent vows, no obedience to anyone up the Catholic food chain. A pope soon tried to squash them, of course. She was in her mid-fifties. Gaunt and feisty. Old enough to be his grandmother.

Hansel wasn’t a priest yet, so he couldn’t hear confessions. Not that Gertrud was seeking to confess. What burdened her mind were visions, not sins. The older monks had grown awfully weary of her. Some questioned her sanity, especially when she reported seeing licentious clerics shrieking in a pit of brimstone. That sort of thing. Hansel, however, was intrigued. And an excellent listener. We should all be so fortunate as to know a Hansel.

Now, Gertrud didn’t just want a sympathetic ear. She wanted to leave a record of her sojourn upon the earth. But she couldn’t write. Most people couldn’t, women especially. So he became her scribe. They’d made significant progress toward completing a manuscript when her nerve seemed to fail. Then she sent word that she was ready to try again, which led to this scene:

Hansel is reaching into the embers of a fireplace, clutching a thick beeswax candle like his most beloved body part. He lights the wick, impales that meager cure for darkness on a pricket, puts it on the dank room’s one table. Now he adjusts his mud-brown robe and sinks to his knees. Dear Lord, he tells me, gazing at the crucifix on the wall as if it were more than an object, I know I am unworthy even to speak your name, but nonetheless I beg you, please, extend your mercy to the virgin Gertrud, give her strength to endure her weakness, weakness to temper her strength. And dear Lord, guide my hand today so that what I set down will be pleasing to you, and true to what the sister at last may tell me of your son. Amen. 

He’s crossing himself when there comes a rapping on the door. Who is it? he asks, although he knows. Without answering she glides in. And they carry on like this:

O Sister.

O Brother.

Thank you for returning.

Thank the Lord for giving me another hour of life.

My God and my all, Hansel says. He lays a log on the fire, motions to a chair, takes the one opposite. Their dark eyes meet. He opens an enormous book with his left hand, and with his right dips a goose feather into an inkwell. Silently she begins to weep. He offers no consolation, as he did at their last meeting. That had driven her away. Now he just starts writing about the tears.

Fear not! Gertrud almost shouts, raising her bony hands from beneath the table, squeezing them together and then wiping her cheeks. Fear not! That is what the Lord our God told me.

He spoke to you? the monk asks, looking up wide-eyed, even as his right hand races on across the page.

Yesterday, as I prayed. But he did not speak in words.

Is there some other way?

In love, she says, flashing a smile of pity that the kid doesn’t see. She waits for more questions, feeling freer to answer than to offer. He also waits, quill still moving. He already understands the power of silence, of discomfort.

A great rushing love, Gertrud says, the words fast and fierce and whispery. Rushing through every part of my body. Flooding me with heat and light, making me shudder. 

[Not transcribed here are a tasteless crack I made about the Big O, and God’s rather stern request not to be interrupted again.]

It is this love that frees me to speak to you, the sister says.

Again she halts, again he waits.

No, it doesn’t free me, she says. It compels me.

And Hansel asks, Have you experienced this rushing before?

No, she says, then takes a vast breath before continuing. But ever since I was a young girl, a lowly peasant’s daughter in a world of reeking muck, I have cried joyously and inconsolably as the feast of the circumcision approaches. I cannot eat, I cannot sleep. All these years. It never changes.

Another burst of weeping and wiping ensues. 

I’ve always pictured the blood, she says upon resuming, the blood our blessed savior spilled for us not during the Passion but on his eighth day outside the blessed womb. The blood, the blade, the screaming baby. A scarlet prophecy. Last week, though, when I went to mass on the feast day — here she closes her eyes and opens her mouth wide, as if to reenact the ritual. Then her hands cover her face.

Hansel catches up on his writing, taking his time. Finishes, fidgets, eventually feels unable to outwait her again. What happened, Sister? 

Gertrud drops her hands back to her lap and says, As I knelt before the priest and he brought the host toward my face, my mind’s eye beheld nothing but Christ’s severed flesh. Washed clean now. Anointed with oil. I closed my mouth and walked away, without receiving the bread. Questions fell upon me like hailstones. What did Mary do with that tiny hood? Did it ascend alone to wait for her son, or did it go with him thirty-three years later? Could it properly join with the fully grown member? Will our Jesus be whole when he returns?

Did any answers come to you? 

Not in words. Nor in thoughts.

In love, then?

This is what I was most afraid to tell you. 

Fear not, Sister!

Fear not, Brother! The answer that came to me, as soon as I reached my room, was the holy foreskin itself.

You think you saw the true relic? Not just the image?

I felt it. Here, she says, touching her pale lips.

Oh my.

[another tasteless crack from me, another stern request from God]

And I knew I had to taste it. So sweet! Sweetness that could turn honey bitter with envy. Sweetness that could tame a forest full of wolves.

Now she leans her head back and howls. Isn’t the human imagination glorious? One of my greatest creations? Ah, but I digress. Hansel steals a glance at Gertrud, goes right on writing. His hand begins to tremble a touch.

Then I swallowed it, she says.

O my my my.

But soon it came back into my mouth, as sweet as before.

[another tasteless crack, another stern request]

O heavenly angels, he says, and right then a big log collapses in the fireplace. Sparks shower the hearth. Both of them look over, diverted only briefly.

So I swallowed again, she says. 

He stifles another exclamation, struggles just to keep his shaky right hand moving. His left hand, which has been on the table, slips below. For hopeless suppression purposes of its own.  Poor boy.

It went on and on like that, she says, growing moist herself — but accepting it, even enjoying it. On and on and on, she says.

How many times, do you think?

A hundred? she replies. A thousand? A hundred thousand?

Holy Virgin. Holy Virgin.

And gradually it grew. So it could join properly, I feel sure.

[tasteless crack, stern request]

Yet you still could swallow?

With no trouble. When I tried to touch it, alas, I could not. It always moved down my throat, out of reach.

O Sister, where is it now?

O Brother, I do not know. But by the following morning, it had left me. I fell into the deepest emptiness I’ve ever known. I lay on the floor for days, denied myself the bed. Finally I rose and reached for my cherished tool.

Here she does exactly that: pulls a leather sheath from a hidden pocket, slides out a knife. Caresses the edge. Slides it across the palm of her other hand, drawing several drops of blood. The monk stops writing, transfixed. If I were anyone other than God, I might well have held my breath.

I began to clean my teeth with this, Gertrud says, beholding the implement. I scraped out all manner of dead insects — flies, locusts, moths — and an angel’s voice said, Just as they sicken you, so your sadness sickens the savior.

  Yes! Hansel cries, grateful for the erection-melting effect of her story’s twist. Yes!

That revelation is what inspired my last visit to you, she says, when I couldn’t quite find my voice. So yesterday I prayed some more, prayed for the foreskin’s return, and lo, there it was, for one perfect moment, on my tongue. And with it came a message, Brother: that the Lord will grant you special blessings for your service to me, as well as the power to vanquish the darkest temptations. 

Amen, they say in unison. He puts down the quill. She puts down the knife. They join hands, her blood smearing his skin.

Jesus H. Christ, I said. And right then my recorder ran out of juice. Gotta go buy some batteries now, I told the big guy. Call me back whenever. He let out another of his divine chuckles and said something like, Let’s talk about the Jesuits next time, OK?

Brooks Egerton is the organizer of Sewanee Spoken Word.

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Across the Wire Vol. 7

Blue Shines Through

By Sophia Krich-Brinton

I noticed it the night my first child was born. I was nursing her, in awe of her tiny hands, my stomach rumbling but no food in reach, when I realized I could see the blue hospital blanket right through my fingers. 

Turning my hand forward and back I could see bones, muscles, tendons, and beyond, the blue patterned blanket. 

It wasn’t clear like glass. More like an early morning mist, so thick you can only see rooftops, the hint of a window, but you know there’s a building there.

It got worse as my child grew. By the time she was six months old, both my hands were transparent. On her first birthday, my arms were completely see-through. I could still hold her, which was the oddest thing. I kept expecting her to fall through my embrace, but she didn’t. She gripped my arms with her tiny hands, chewing and sucking on my invisible fingers as if nothing was wrong. 

And maybe nothing was. Nobody else seemed to notice. When I held up my arms for my partner, he shrugged and said, “Everyone gets that way with the first kid.” No panic. Just a smile as he turned back to his computer. “Give it a few more months and you’ll feel better. Everyone says this part’s the hardest.” 

Maybe they did. I didn’t know a lot of people with kids. 

We had another soon after that. We’d always wanted two, as close in age as possible, and though I had second thoughts when the time came to push, it was too late to back out. Soon we had a son, a tiny, mewling creature as different from our first as he could be. She’d been quiet, an easy sleeper, but he came into this world screaming as if he knew his mother’s see-through arms weren’t right and he wanted everyone else to know it too.

Within a day, it spread to my waist, then into my chest. I felt constantly chilled, as if the foggy autumn air had pierced my skin and settled in my bones. 

When my jaw went clear, I woke my partner up. He was asleep in the living room now, otherwise the kids kept him up. We’d agreed that since I was staying home and didn’t need to be alert, I could deal with them at night.

And during the day, too, apparently, since he left before breakfast and came home after they were asleep.

He woke when I shook him, sitting up with a frown. “Who’s there?”

“It’s me. I’m really worried.” I held my arms out. “It’s way worse. All the way to my chin.” 

“Hello?” He looked around, his eyes moving through me. Then he lay back down and rolled over, pulling the blankets up.

I glanced at the mirror over the couch. Fear shivered through me. 

I was completely gone.

I rushed back into the bedroom and over to my son’s crib. He looked up at me with those huge eyes, not blinking. 

“Can you hear me?” I whispered. 

He cheeped.

Relief barreled through me so hard I had to sit down on my bed to catch my breath. “I don’t know what’s happening to me. I don’t know how to make it stop.”

My daughter sat up in her crib. “Mama sad?”

“Love, can you hear me too?”

“Hear Mama,” she said, nodding.

My son cheeped again. He raised a tiny arm, reaching for me. I bent down to kiss him and he grabbed my invisible chin and squeezed. 

In the morning, my partner woke up, made coffee, and packed his bag for work. He kissed each kid and left the apartment without a word. He didn’t feed them, or call a sitter.

I chased him down the stairs, shouting his name. He brushed his hand across his face as if he’d walked into a spider web, but didn’t seem to feel me grabbing his arm or beating on his back.

Life wasn’t much different after he stopped seeing me. 

He left for work early, came back late. I spent my days with the kids, as always. We couldn’t go out in public, but I took them into the small green space out back and we sat in the sun together. The heat felt amazing on my invisible body. I took my shirt off and lay back. Why not?

I watched the kids enjoy the bright, quiet day, and smiled. “I love you both so much.” 

They looked up at me with their large eyes, so like my own, almost as if they could see me.

Sophia Krich-Brinton (she/they) lives in Colorado with her partner, kids, and cats. They write weird stories at dawn when the world sleeps and the cats try to sit on their keyboard. Her work has appeared or is upcoming in HAD, The Argyle, Moss Puppy Mag, and more. When not writing, she boxes, plays the banjo, and goes backpacking. Find them at sophiakbrinton.com or on Twitter/Instagram at @sophiakb_writes

Categories
Across the Wire Vol. 7

The Islands

by Walker Rutter-Bowman

At parties we stood around the newest statue. The host described intent, the extraction of stone, the weather of genesis. This time it was Charles. His pants were new and stiff. When he lost his train of thought, he defaulted to saying, “Galala marble.” Those were important words, and he clung to them. The statue was almost beautiful. We tried not to look at its bent genital, its implausible balls. Or we tried to look closer. When Charles lost the train again, he spoke, with feeling, of his adopted son’s agoraphobia. It had been diagnosed by a real doctor via a videoconferencing portal. The fear came to light as a nightmare: the boy pinned against a wall as people backed up, the backs of their heads growing as large as balloons, black hairs coming into focus. The reason the boy gave for not coming downstairs was the poor health of his lizard. The vet sipped champagne and said, “The lizard is fine.” He shook his head sadly. “The lizard has never been finer.”

These people wore watches and rings. Their shirts looked like normal shirts but more assured. To them and their methods, wealth meant island. My money was new, and so were these friends. I had never been an island man. I was from an interior state shaped like a muffin. Islands have sun and sand. They crawl with things that kill. They have grooves and protrusions, inlets and sides. They sneer.

One night, while everyone was discussing island life, some people pulled out their new passports to the islands they owned. These were official-looking documents with pictures and dates. While others looked and laughed at the photos, I shook my glass with a landlocked vigor, making the ice bang together. 

Why no island? they asked me. They knew my net worth. They had read the profile of me in the lifestyle magazine. You can still find the profile online. The writer called me a transit magnate, and it’s true I’m in bridges. That’s how I made my money. Why no island? they asked. They doubted my holdings. They lacked a fiscal literacy when it came to the great bridge. But I had funds. I’d adopted a daughter despite the towering cost. I could afford an estranged wife who sometimes sent me cards, and from the handwriting, by the angle of the stamp, I could tell she came by her loathing honestly, like a farmer. Adopting a daughter had to do with a single office where you went to fill out forms. And then the fenced-in area where you met your daughter. But having a daughter won’t protect you from island pressure. She’ll love it, they said. In good weather your adopted daughter will sail around the coast, they said. As the sun sets, you’ll sit on the terrace and watch her boat go by, and she’ll look up at you and wave, and the wave will mean something to both of you. She’ll sail all around and make you a worthless map, and you’ll attach it to the refrigerator with a magnet, and every time you go in for ice cubes, you’ll tap the map with your finger, and you’ll think, Here I am.

Sometimes this is your house, your new statue, your adopted daughter. Sometimes, despite what you’ve been told, Shauna is not agoraphobic, she just likes to read. Sometimes a lizard is not the perfect pet, and it ends up being you who feeds it and rubs its crested head. I liked the lizard but not my new statue, which had a small and sneaky face. He looks like you, the people said, and they mimed kissing it. That was their notion of a joke. I described to the guests how the artist was eager to disprove traditional metrics of abundance. The statue was small and ugly because the artist aimed to desexualize, or was it sexualize?, the height of men. Smoochie smoochie, the guests responded. I left doors open so they could poke around, find proof of my money, like pictures of Shauna in various stages of the latest orthodonture. They studied the photos to see if we had skipped steps. We had. But we had also doctored photos to hide the fact that we’d prioritized certain teeth over others. Half-satisfied, they put down the pictures and studied my clocks. I turned away to signal I didn’t care if they pocketed some of my clocks.

It’s not nothing, they said, roughly handling my timepieces, tossing them back and forth like baseballs. Meaning: a clock is not an island. Two clocks is not an island. Three? 

I knew it wasn’t. A clock is much more than nothing, but even the rarest clock in the world is no island. And if, one day, there’s an island that’s also a great big clock, it won’t come cheap. I was rich but I wasn’t clock-island rich.

But I could buy the average island if I wanted one, I said. But do I want one?

Their embarrassment rose up.

They looked deep into the faces of my very own clocks to hide how stupid they thought it was, a man holding himself apart from island desire. Money can buy a lot, but it can’t buy you the sense to keep things to yourself. It can buy you a clock that looks like a coconut with a hinge hidden by soft, brown fibers. It can even buy you the service of a man who stands in front of you to block your words with his broad body, a man named Jim who was a respected member of the team. For years my words struck him and fell to the ground, and for this he was, in my view, well compensated. But he couldn’t always be there. Jim needed a day off from time to time. Jim had a family.

So I bought the island. I had another party. I bought another sculpture. I was in the red. The bridge business was sputtering. Shauna wouldn’t come down because her book was getting good. The vet came in the door and said he heard the lizard was ill. I said the lizard was fine, and he said, That’s a relief, and helped himself to a flute of champagne and some canapes. He shook hands with the members of the group. His daughter’s teeth were straight but not as white as Shauna’s. His daughter had a lizard, but she would never have a lizard and an island, a lizard on an island. I helped him help himself to another flute or two.

I walked the guests around the statue and pointed to the contours. You see them there, the contours? They looked, but they took them for granted.

But of course, this location is temporary, I yawned. I could see Jim scrambling towards me. Soon we’ll move the statue to the island.

You bought an island?

I didn’t mention it?

Which one? they asked. Their maps were open.

That one.

That’s the one Kurt wanted. 

They were impressed. I knew because they went quiet and still, like certain birds in the presence of larger birds. While Jim was in the cellar getting more champagne, I took advantage of his absence to quote a poet who loved to fish.

But now they wondered what was left of my holdings. Any liquid? Was I hurting? Island-rich is one thing. Island-poor is another. They said I had the stink of it on me, the smell of a man over-leveraged by his land. So I bought one more. Jim said I was only doing it to shut them up. He was grilling for us because I’d never mastered the art. From time to time he’d complain that grilling was not really his job. I said maybe he should shut up and focus on the burgers. But he burned them anyway. His mind was elsewhere. He had been playing piano at Petit Chapeau Rouge for ten nights in a row, and it was starting to take its toll. The subject was sensitive. I’d told him he could do both until one of the jobs suffered, and now they both suffered. He wasn’t blocking comments at a satisfying rate, or grilling with the precision of former days, and word from Petit Chapeau Rouge was his playing was plodding and lacked dynamism. He was overworked. Jazz piano was teaching him vindictiveness, and he was leaving me unprotected. This burger is burned, I said. It’s flame-broiled, he said, hanging his head.

If I bought the second island close to the first one, they would criticize me for making decisions based on convenience. Accuse me of intending to build bridges between the two islands. Say, Oh, he made his fortune from building little bridges, now watch him try to connect his islands with two or three little bridges. I fooled them all by buying a second island quite far from the first. No bridge in the world could connect them, and I should know. Part of working in bridges is knowing when you’re ahead and when you’re not, and another part of working in bridges is proving your point.

Jim, who was helping me with motive, said it’s all right to prove your point. He was proving one himself with his sad piano playing and his burned burgers. Now I’m in a position where I can comfortably say upon reflection that the second island didn’t measure up to the first. It was covered in ants—one kind of ant, special for its aggression and orange thorax. A man lived on the island, a scientist, who had stretched his research grant longer than anyone thought possible. He called them Hofmann ants. His name was Hofmann. Either it was a tremendous coincidence, or he had named them after himself. He was covered in bites, and when you thought of all the pieces of Hofmann the ants had bitten off, the name began to make sense. He lived in a brown, single-flap tent. His papers declared he was allowed to study the ants for two more years, but I think he had changed the dates. He held his papers up as if someone might read them. He clutched the documentation like someone might take it away. When he talked about the ants, Hofmann could really get going. His face would grow red, his newer bites would begin to glow. The bites looked like little islands themselves, volcanic chains of red craters surrounded by ashen crusts. He was very skinny. Jim and I wondered what he ate. There were no fruit trees. Very few fish in the surrounding waters. But there were ants. And his tongue, when it showed itself, was short, thick, and coated in an orange gel. Maybe it was love, maybe it was revenge, maybe it was as simple as a dependable source of protein.

Two islands impressed my new friends. They had to rethink the sources of my wealth. Little bridges, sure, but maybe little tolls, too? That’s right, that’s right, many streams. Bridges was big. The people who had once asked, Is bridges really a living, is bridges really wealth?—they were now rethinking what they knew about the revenue of the load-bearing causeway. Plus I had invented a dongle that changed people’s lives, turning one port into another. Because a dongle is a bridge, too. A dongle is a bridge, too.

I hated playing favorites, but one island had ants and the other didn’t. One island had an unwashed and righteous scientist and the other didn’t. I built an airfield and a road going all the way around the antless island. Jim said we could call it Island I—that’s the kind of creative thinker he was. I built a house on the cliff overlooking the bay where the sun set, splashing down into the ocean in a fine display of leaking reds and oranges, like it was the first or last day on earth. I pointed to the bay to show Shauna where she could sail her boat, but she wasn’t there, she was upstairs, reading her book and picking her blisters. But nothing could kill the mood. Jim popped a bottle, and our thoughts turned to God, the color and loneliness at the start of all things. 

We must have brought an ant or two over on the plane. Shauna showed up at breakfast covered in bites. Jim set out traps that might’ve worked on your ordinary ant. Instead, they began to chew on some foundational elements of the new house.

I was hurting a bit financially. People knew I was island-rich, and, like the Hofmann ant, sensed opportunity. The vet began to call and ask when was the best time to visit. He asked, How’s the lizard? and, Are you liquid? Then Jim realized he might be undervalued. He must have got to talking to the other men and women who stood in front of their employers, operating their grills, blocking their words. I think there’s a group. Maybe his long nights of stale smoke at Petit Chapeau Rouge gave him a taste of independence. He brought me some charts showing how much money he had saved me by blocking certain words. He handed me a pamphlet about the dangers of eating uncooked meats. It was hard to believe they were accurate, but they were compelling and certainly colorful. Under each bright bar was one of the stupid things I had tried to say, or a type of raw meat, and then the bar extended upward to a point of potential fiscal damage. And then the last bar, the total, extended off the page and he had to fold out some sections of the graph to show how far it went, and like a tongue of orange flame the bar unrolled and kept going: that bar was the financial damage I would’ve incurred from eating uncooked meat and then speaking about it in an honest but fiscally ruinous manner. Jim knows better than the average man that the meat lobby is a powerful force, and bridges must work with meat to reach the state of synergy we all crave in business and the American meal.

The bars had words on them. These words had hit Jim’s chest and fallen to the ground. We were safe, thanks to Jim. But now the words had returned, printed on a color-coded graph Jim used to shake me down. The words had come back, after all. I signed some papers, and Jim was rich. He had always been good to me, but now? With his bad attitude? What if all those stupid things I said didn’t actually hit Jim and clatter to the ground, but became embedded in his skull, his soul? I’m not saying he became dumber, in body, mind, or spirit. But uglier? I’m saying he remembered the words I thought we’d agreed to forget.

“Let’s say, for the sake of conversation, some of the ants made it off Island II and onto Island I. What would you do?” I cut Hofmann’s steak for him but encouraged him to hold the fork. We were broadening and deepening his diet via imported goods.

“I would worry about the survival of the habitat, as the Hofmann ant is one of the most destructive organisms in the world.”

I knew my builders would agree. My new house was sliding down the cliff before it could even be finished. I watched the workers move about, welts covering their bodies, and I thought, Is it too late to be someone else?

When asked about indigenous self-determination, I said I was all for it, on paper. A truly rich man? the advocates said, with two islands such as yours? One of which has had people living on it for centuries? Wouldn’t the truly rich man concede that the land was more theirs than his? and that they should be allowed to govern it as they see fit? Not only do you not have the right to own the island? but you don’t really have the right to be there at all? The fake passport you wave about raises a notion of nationhood? that is not yours to raise or really even listen in on? Before responding I locked eyes with Jim, who was not going to stop me, though it would pain him to see me step forward and shoot off my mouth, which is what I did, and I quoted a poet with a passion for fishing but also for fascism, and I regretted saying those words then and then regretted them even more once I saw them punctuated in the last surviving publications of print.

Sometimes, island-rich means being able to give up Island I. Sometimes, island-rich is a feeling you once had, not a life you get to live. At least that’s how Jim put it. I saw the logic, but I didn’t like it. I agreed to meet with the indigenous, and I can’t say I liked them either. I didn’t dislike them because they were indigenous. I disliked them because they disliked me. And because they killed Jim. There was a misunderstanding with Jim and the manner in which he opened his arms in a gesture of welcome. I thought it was a nice gesture, but they shot him with a very long arrow. Jim’s wife and son said after all the shielding Jim had done for me through the years, that perhaps I, for once, could have shielded, etc. They said Jim’s threats of further litigation led to my hesitance to step in front of that arrow, but it had very little to do with that. It had much more to do with the arrow, and the fear that filled my heart when I saw it flying through the sky. Even if Jim had survived the puncture, the arrow was poisoned, and the fever brought out a burst of language I had never heard from the man who took great care with his words. With some gasping and an agitated frothing at the lips, Jim died. The last thing he said was, “Is it blue? Is the body really blue?” No one knows what he meant. But from time to time, I find it useful to ask myself the same thing.

After Jim, I stopped responding to others. I went a bit mute. If I had to say anything, I wrote it on a scrap of paper and kept it in my pocket until I could gather more information on what kind of thing it was. It slowed me down. Sometimes I dropped a scrap of paper, a thought, and it blew away, and after a few moments I didn’t miss it. 

Shauna says it’s interesting that islands are places of exile and objects of desire. Shauna says it’s interesting what wealth does to men of a certain susceptibility. Shauna says it’s interesting how expensive her school is, though not even she knows the real figure. She wants to want to help others, but she wants other things too.

We listen to old recordings of Jim from Petit Chapeau Rouge. I can detect things I said to him that influenced his playing, as though the words found their way into his fingers. The playing is plodding, it lacks dynamism—and that’s exactly how I want it. Sometimes the last thing you want is dynamism. His grave is on the island. The island has a bird with a very recognizable call. Somehow Hofmann never noticed it. The bird drowns out what I’m about to say. I want Jim to be that bird. Jim didn’t believe in bridges, and neither do birds. Shauna puts flowers on his grave, and I sprinkle it with scraps of paper. She questions if the scraps of paper are a good way to honor Jim. I believe he would’ve valued it for its human comedy: the scraps of paper carried away by the wind, the way I chase after them and trip over my own two feet, the way Shauna sighs, the way they blow into the water and drift into the distance, the way I wade into the shallows without even rolling my pantlegs. The papers soak up the sea, the ink bleeds into the water. Hofmann makes an orange stew. I open my mouth to speak, but the Jim of a bird screams again. A bird is a bridge, but to what? To more birds?

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

Categories
Across the Wire Vol. 7

Nights That Don’t End

by Huina Zheng

At eleven p.m., the baby is still awake, squirming in her mother’s arms. The mother rocks her, pats her back, hums lullabies, but she refuses to sleep. Her eyelids droop, yet she keeps fussing. The father has long since gone to bed, his snores rising and falling. At one-thirty a.m., the baby cries again. She wants her mother, not her father. The mother reaches for the bedside lamp. The father rolls over, muttering in his sleep. The mother carries the baby to the living room. Mixes formula, tests the temperature, feeds her. Still she won’t sleep. She wants to play. She wants books. The mother leans back on the sofa, the baby curled against her chest. Page by page, line by line, she reads. The little bear wet the bed. The little bear is hungry. The little bear has a fever. Two a.m., still reading. Two-thirty, they play peekaboo. The mother hides her face behind the book, then reveals it. The baby giggles. By three-thirty, the baby finally yawns. The mother paces, murmuring Tang poems, singing nursery rhymes, patting her back. Four a.m., at last she sleeps. The mother lays her in the crib. The father has sprawled into the middle of the bed; she nudges him back to his side. The mother lies down. Exhausted, she cannot fall asleep. Seven a.m., the alarm goes off. The mother wakes groggy. The father gets up, too. At seven-thirty, the mother kisses the baby’s forehead and closes the door. Grandma is already awake. The mother leaves, squeezing onto the subway before eight. The car is packed, shoulder to shoulder. She could fall asleep standing, but her heart stays home, with the baby still sleeping. The father, refreshed, boards another train.

Huina Zheng either writes as an admission coach at work or writes for fun after work.

Categories
Across the Wire Vol. 7

Frying Pan

By Erin Jamieson

Without asking, you dump confetti sprinkles in the pancake batter while I’m stirring. You smell like jasmine tea and anger, and we reach for the spatula at the same time. 

Your hand is smooth; mine is calloused. 

I just thought you could use some help, you say. 

I pull away, as I have been for over a year. Since the day you came home with a receipt for Starbucks: two vanilla chai lattes. The cheating bothered me less than you becoming the type of person who drank vanilla chai lattes, when, on our first date, you took me out to McDonald’s because you said all coffee tastes like dirt anyway. 

But today my stomach bubbles with the bubbles of the batter on the frying pan. The sprinkles fuse, as I knew they would. A rainbow pancake, a dream for our child. He’d be 5 years old today. 

Why don’t you get out some fruit, you say. Only I feel your words more than I hear them. I scrub the counters clean while you keep making more and more pancakes. Soon, your scent is overpowered by the saccharine batter. Soon, my scent is gone too, and it might be anyone’s home, a happy home, if one exists.

I set the table for one. I start back for my plate and fork and knife, but then I spot an open cabinet, just slightly ajar. The one where we keep the cookbooks we received as wedding gifts. The last time we used any, our son was still alive.

What are you doing? you ask. 

But before you can stop me, I swing open the cabinet, cookbooks, crammed haphazardly, spill out. I see the 100 Quick Meals cookbook my mother bought us, kick it aside. I reach for a slim paperback in the very back. Pale blue. 

Don’t, you say, and try to pull me away. 

The pancakes are going to burn.

Why are you looking at that?

But you know. We both know why. The reason this cabinet has been locked for a year is because I can’t look at the cookbook without seeing our son, milky blue skin and long eyelashes. Baby’s First Moments, crammed alongside recipes for gyros and baklava. 

Steam, then smoke. Our fire alarm sounds. 

Neither of us move.

You stand beside me, and for the first time in a year, I see it: the haunted, fearful look in your eyes. 

I don’t want to pretend like he didn’t exist. Like we didn’t exist.

I turn off the stove top. The pancakes are charred black. I pull up a seat- your seat- and eat one, chewing through the thickest parts, dousing it with syrup.

At least I can no longer see those damn sprinkles.

You’re still standing by the cookbooks. I’m sorry. 

It’s what I’ve been waiting for, since that day. Maybe for five years.

I stack the dishes in the sink, and walk out the front door, leaving you and the pancakes.

Erin Jamieson’s writing has been published in over 100 literary magazines and nominated twice for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of Net. She is the author of four poetry chapbooks, including Fairytales (Bottle Cap Press, 2023) and a forthcoming collection, and a historical novel, Sky of Ashes, Land of Dreams (Type Eighteen Books, 2023).