X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine | Fiction

BUNNY: A TRIPTYCH by Yasmina Din Madden

February 23, 2022 · Fiction

The rabbits come in dozens it seems. Nothing one minute, invasion the next. They crouch in the grass like tiny statues, gray fur flecked with white. Cottontails. Leaf-ears at attention. Waiting. Kits, short for kittens, now called bunnies, as if kitten is not cute enough for the tiniest of these rabbits. Bunny, diminutive of the Scottish bun, a nickname for a pet rabbit. Also, slang for a young, attractive woman. She’s a real bunny. A male rabbit is a buck, a female a doe. Before mating, the buck chases the doe until she turns and boxes at him with her front paws. They crouch and stare at each other. Face off until one or the other leaps into the air. Leap, leap, leap, come together.

No matter how long I sit on the back porch watching, I’ve never seen any of the rabbits mate. Yet there are so many of them, dotting my yard like some kind of Disney movie. Bunnies hop through the grass, nibble and twitch, go still as stone when birds dive bomb the shrubs. My child, who is too sensitive, who moves worms off the sidewalk and carries stink bugs outside, tells me that a doe can produce up to ten litters a year, with up to twelve bunnies in each litter. Sometimes the mother eats her litter if she is too stressed and fearful of predators, or she just eats the runt because it’s going to die anyway. My daughter tells me all of this matter-of-factly, like a little old woman familiar with the cycle of life, rather than the ten-year-old that she is. A phantom elbow or foot punches me from within, the ghost of an ache low in my abdomen.

Giving birth can be painless and it can be full of pain. It can be easy or difficult or anywhere in between. You can give birth in a sterilized hospital room or in a kiddie pool in a living room to the dulcet voice of your doula or midwife. You can give birth in the back of a car, on a bathroom floor, in a field, in an elevator, on the side of the road, in a mall, a forest, a library, an airplane, at prom, or in a Walmart parking lot. The list goes on and on and on. While giving birth you may say or hear the following: birth plan, epidural, fuck, breech, Pitocin, I don’t want this, breathe, I’m sorry, push, no, in distress, crowning, don’t touch me. You may not hear or say any of these things. But at the end you will have a baby or you won’t, and what you feel will depend on which.

Crow Jonah Norlander

EVIDENCE IN SUPPORT OF MY CAPACITY by Barbara Lock

February 21, 2022 · Fiction

One time I punched a wall that I thought was made of plasterboard but was in fact concrete. Either way, I would have broken my hand. The side of my fist near my pinky crunched up and my girlfriend told me I was a lunatic. Stop it, stop it, she said. Then she covered her face with a shroud, which irritated me to no end.
I wore a white wool sweater in the style of Irish fishermen last year which placed me fifteen years too far in the past, or possibly the future. It’s hard to know. My appearance was very similar to what you see now, which is to say approximately young, though male. I kept my pace steady and would have gotten there in time if I hadn’t fished around in my bag for something to drop.
There are bridges being constructed and deconstructed all the time. I can tell you about Tappan Zee, Sakonnet, Charles, just off the top of my head. The things we think of as static are not just rarely so, but never so.
I am thinking now of a girl in a nightgown with a ruffled hem. She plays in a driveway next to a house lined by lilacs that make the house, for exactly nine days, the most sweet-smelling place in the universe. After that, it smells like Tang and kitty litter.
A woman I once knew used to dislocate her own shoulder to scam drugs from hospitals. One time she roared up to the ambulance bay in an old Town Car, popped her shoulder out, cursed and screamed until they came with a stretcher. What a story she spun for the doctors! Said that she served in the military in Spain, worked the pile after nine-eleven, took care of orphans, the like. The psychiatrist declared her incurable and she was discharged with a parking ticket.
Four bas-relief carved stone ropes flank the bay window of the brownstone where I used to live. The segmented ropes look like worms, or perhaps a certain type of plant, though I couldn’t tell you which one. I’ve had a difficult time recalling plants along with birds, brand names, varieties of cheese. The spiral of the detail runs clockwise up. At the top of the windows, the stone rope gathers into a swirl above a central rosette. The rosette is not a window, but it’s made of glass or some other translucent material and the morning sun lights the face of the rosette such that it radiates like a beacon into the park.
Sometimes I jump from one time and place to another with insufficient preparation. Indeed, this is the rule. The key to enjoying yourself in this situation is to avoid judgment. I can’t be all things to all people, I tell myself. There is a sadness that never goes away. The man knew this, and he followed me, sat beside me, put his arm around me. I’m not who you think I am, I said to the man.
A tree looks like a fistful of dripping wounds.
The flash from the man’s digital camera blew onto my face and collected my skin in a sort of vacuum. I wasn’t removed from the sidewalk. I was still there, and as I expanded and looked out at the little mirrored triangles spreading across the park, up over the moraine boulder and the sycamore trees, the man pulled his camera from his face so I could see his eyes. When he blinked, a thin translucent membrane spread across his corneas, making his irises appear briefly blue, though they were not.
I am remembering the time that my mother threw a party and afterwards I wondered who was in love with her. Someone was in love with her, one of the guests, or perhaps two or three. A situation of passion suspended in the air as a sort of mist, something I could see, but I didn’t know how to pin it down. Situations like this one are happening to me all the time, contemporaneously with each other. It is difficult to know where to land. I still must eat and drink. Basic bodily functions must be exercised.
In the park across the street, shards of a mirror arranged themselves into the shape of a flower, then a bell, then a fountain. The shapes hung over the sky above the playground where toddlers and 6 year-olds hid behind skinny metal poles, covered their eyes with their hands. You must be hungry, said the man. He rubbed his hands on my back. I could eat, I said. The man moved to grab my wrist, but then I was gone.

Crow Jonah Norlander

PORTRAIT OF A FLORIST IN THE DESERT IN PARTS by Dylan Smith

February 16, 2022 · Fiction

My van broke down on a mountain north of Marfa, so I had it towed back to Santa Fe where a mechanic named Ever repairs transmissions.

I talk to Ever every day. Every time Ever answers I have to explain to him it’s me—the kid with the tagged-up van.

My sister lives with an unemployed florist in this complex in the desert. The florist offered to pick me up from Ever’s; to drive me ever deeper into this desert to visit with my sister.

What a guy. In my portrait of the florist, he will be sitting at my sister’s table in Tucson listening, laughing whenever I call to talk to Ever.

I like this florist a lot.

And I like Ever, too.

Searching for meaning in emergency rooms, my sister holds strange hours.

So I wait for Ever with this florist, mostly, and with his troubled, golden dog called Glove.

The florist’s benefits are due to end soon and so, with discipline, he enters the desert every day at dawn in search of original arrangements.

Soon he will be just like everyone else, he says. Desperate for health care and for groceries, and for meaningful work.

While the florist is away I am to be ever mindful of Glove who—from trauma—is triggered by threats to resources, like water.

This afternoon the florist returned and set his hat sadly on its living room hook.

He found no new flowers, he said, then he revealed the vertebrae of something large and grave as a gift for Glove.

Ever called today to ease me.

My transmission is in honest hands, he said.

I ought to trust him and his team, and his archive of parts.

In my portrait of the florist, Glove will press against the apartment walls, lean and lithe while my sister sleeps.

This complex is nestled in the shadows of isolate mountains of rock.

It’s got a saltwater pool and tennis courts; rock gardens and a dog park.

To express his sympathies on my very first night, the florist exposed the engine of his used Toyota Sequoia.

Inside was the starter he recently replaced, and new ignition coils enveloped new spark plugs someplace deeply within.

Despite its notable name, though, I found the Toyota to be plainly—even dispiritingly–shaped.

We’d been drinking green-bottled beers as my sister slept, and everything in the lot was bluely-lit and glistening from lights embedded in the saltwater pool.

I chose to confess how careless I am about cars.

Which is why my van is always breaking down; why I’m so often islanded like this in the desert.

As if to agree, the florist gestured into his engine’s function with a flashlight in his teeth.

In my portrait of the florist, the wide brim of his gardening hat will wave like water in the pool light.

A Georgia O’Keefe print hangs beside the florist’s hat hook in the living room.

He rolls an evening cigarette, then lights it beneath a mesquite tree in the dog park.

Mesquite trees exude a black sap that sticks and stinks, he says.

Through the branches, the florist points toward storm clouds forming on the mountain.

The storm’s shadows gather and purple like wet stains in the cliffs. This happens every evening here.

We rely on monsoon season moisture to fight summer fires, the florist explains. After a rain, though, dips in the desert render most roads impassable.

Glove digs for bones about the mesquite tree roots in the dog park. Holes the florist calls his fountains, they fill with flood waters in the rock gardens too.

The florist says his favorite O’Keefe motif is quickly becoming bones, not flowers.

In my portrait of the florist, a blue landscape of holes in bones will hold him like water in the blue desert distance.

While playing a little tennis, the florist and I swap stories about my sister.

The florist’s first story is about how, last Ash Wednesday, my sister had come home with a cross thumbed to her chest.

She scrubbed at the cross with a soapy sponge usually used for vases, the florist says.

Nurses and surgeons can’t remove their scrub caps, she explained. Still, though, she fasted; and she requested a makeshift sermon from the emergency room priest.

Glove has gnawed little tooth-holes into the taped-up handles of our racquets.

According to the florist, the sea-glass colored tennis courts are to glow in the dark if ever our evening matches go uninterrupted by rain.

I tell him about the sculptural stillness with which my sister used to sit for portraits.

About how, as children, we lived for a while with Norm, our uncle, who was both a painter and a priest.

In my portrait of the florist, he will have knelt tenderly before an altar of mirrors and bones and flowers; but the temple pews will be otherwise empty, and there will be no priest.

The florist pays for equine therapy on Sundays, which is therapy in a barn with a horse.

His therapist’s horse is a white Paint named Paul.

Like a kind of language, Paul presses his neck brand against the florist’s chest.

In the florist’s portrayal of Paul, the horse is rendered faintly red in the barn’s reflected light.

Don’t look back, the therapist suggests. Gather yourself center, then press forward—press against whatever is forming next.

Ever called today, but I missed it.

The voicemail he left is very muffled.

Mysterious faults in the fittings, he said. The worst trouble he’s had with a transmission ever.

In my portrait of the florist, his hands will be gloved on Sundays to protect his dog bite scars from the sun.

Emergencies flood the desert floor like water.

My sister is rarely home and when she is, she sleeps.

Ever is never in either. Whenever I call to check, someone new answers.

The florist is sitting poolside with his breakfast.

We take our meals outside so as not to trigger Glove.

I tell the florist about how my van was pure white once; about how, in New York, artists took to tagging it.

How the first tag read H O L Y in thick black paint. Or how the second was smears of something permanent and red, or how the third read W A S T E in thick black paint and how the fourth read S E R V I C E U R G E N T in blue—which remains my favorite of the tags.

The florist had lived in the city too.

He remembers an old man named Leonard who had lived, then died inside his building.

The florist had loved to watch Leonard paint.

His paintings were like music, the florist says. Or like horses. Or mountains.

Leonard’s death taught the florist that words are only elegy to what they signify.

Flowers, he says, are more direct than words.

And bones are ever more direct than flowers.

In my portrait of the florist, he will find meaning as night watchman of a botanical garden in the desert and, rooted and mirrored in the arrangements there—which is all an arrangement ever is, he has said, is a mirroring and rooting—these words will flower with meaning within him forever.

Crow Jonah Norlander

CAROUSEL BAR / DOWN IN HOLY CROSS by Autumn Holladay

February 14, 2022 · Fiction

Carousel Bar

I miss 99-cent margaritas served at the old strip from 6:00 a.m. to noon. I’d sit and sip and watch the sex workers rest on slot machine stools after their shift. Most tourists weren’t around at that hour—just the cleaners and the junkies and the loners, and I thought they were my kind of people. The bartender invited me to shower with her after her shift. I believed there was no better way to spend my last day in Vegas.

Her name was Holly. She wore a leather corset and when she took it off, tattoos took its place. I wore a pencil skirt and a silky blouse and when she took them off, my skin was bare. I was 21. I think she was 40. All we did was bathe. She told me she missed her daughter. I asked what happened to her. She pretended not to hear and washed my hair.

Dear guy from Boston, remember when you took me to dinner at the Bellagio because you wanted to fuck me at the Circus Circus? You said Hunter S. Thompson was your favorite writer. But the room was mine and I didn’t invite you in.

I was more interested in the old people blowing their retirement and the people getting married upstairs and the whole place reeking of cigarettes and Lysol and where the fuck was the carousel bar?

I saw you on the news. I thought being an anchorman suited you: you loved to talk and I loved to turn you off. Click. What was your line then? I have a girlfriend but don’t worry, you leaned in, I’m a bad boyfriend. It seemed like a line a boy inherits from his father.

I have a friend who worked at the Circus Circus. Her name is Megan. She was there when I was there, but I didn’t know her then. Megan has stories about dusty brothels and sandstorms and pole dancers and 3:00 a.m. cigarettes and missing her dad. She can’t tell them anymore though. Megan lost her head. She was hit by a car walking home one day. The car didn’t stop.

Megan isn’t dead. I am with her now as she looks out the hospital window.

“Megan,” I say, “do you remember the carousel bar? How people came from all over to see it and sometimes it was there and sometimes it was gone and sometimes they swore they sat at it even when it was closed?”

She smiles and her head doesn't nod and her head doesn't shake and today we can pretend.

Down in Holy Cross

There is only one sunset in New Orleans. To get to it, you drive down Robertson to cross over the canal by Poland. And maybe you laugh because the street before the bridge is Kentucky and the one after is Tennessee. But before you discover this, you’re stuck on the ramp, waiting for the bridge to come down.

You wait, your car slanted up on the ramp as you watch the bridge rise up and up and hear the ship’s horn calling below. If this was your first time, maybe you’d feel impatient. Sometimes it takes twenty minutes for that bridge to come down. But you’re thankful you have a car. You think of all the people who died trying to cross here, either on foot or bike. Then you laugh because the people in the van in front of you get out and start dancing, their music blasting, and it all seems so ridiculous. The horn blows again. The ship makes it through. The bridge lowers. The people rush back into their car. You go up and up then down, but not too fast because you have to make a right at the first light. And you do.

You drive slowly. There are a lot of potholes and kids running around. When you reach the motherload of potholes, the one larger than the street itself, you let the car sink in and out and make another right. It’s funny driving in New Orleans. All of the bumps and stops make it feel like you're riding in a carriage. You go on and on down the road, all slow and careful, until you see a big green hill that leads to the levee.

You continue down Sister Street and you see the ramp for the St. Claude Bridge, but you are crossing underneath it. The road narrows quite a bit and you go real slow this time because it's dark under there and you never know who’s waiting.

Maybe you think of the time last May when you rushed to roll up your windows. A swarm of termites waited for you. There are no termites now. You make it through and up ahead is a big yellow school bus that has sat there since you moved down and probably will always be there. You laugh about the first time you saw it. You were supposed to meet her here and thought her friends were living in it, but really she wanted you to meet her at the house just behind it.

A turn on Burgundy and you’re almost there. You drive up to the gravel patch, by the old baseball field, and think of the time it was just a hole, spitting out water until it flooded the entire street. The Great Burgundy River you waded through. Broken branches and garbage rubbed against your thighs as you waded to the gray double shotgun on your right. You park your car on the sidewalk because it is the safest place to park, but you don’t get out just yet. You sit and stare at the house.

Its ugly gray steps that lead to the torn-up, mustard chair on the porch. And you just stare at it. This is where it all started and ended. You don’t think that, but feel it. You try not to think about it at all. But it comes anyway. Her body. The couch. Cold. Alone. Gone. Never again.

You get out of the car, but you don’t go to the door. You don’t know the people who live there anymore.

Instead, you turn back down the street and walk slowly by the house on the corner because you’ve always admired their garden and today their amaryllis is in bloom. It is a delight to see the bright orange flower pop out from the evergreens. Then you're at the wooden fence and the German Shepherd that always barks, barks, and you go on and cross the street to the parking lot.

Needles and weeds are scattered along the pavement. You follow the little pathway under the live oak tree and you’re in front of the old Holy Cross School. You don’t go inside. You've been inside before. Instead you walk around it through the field along Deslonde Street. The grass is tall, but not too tall, yet. And you go on, slowly, because there are holes mixed in and then you are at the bottom of the levee and you walk up it amongst the yellow flowers and then when you look up again, there is the Mississippi.

There is a swing set on the tower of the levee marker now. Two boys stand there with a long walking stick and point out across the water. They drop their stick and start swinging and you walk past them to the purple rock and sit.

Seagulls fly across the gray and violet sky and ducks swim below. You watch the seagulls land on the water, chasing the ducks out of their fishing spot. You see the boats go by, creating waves across the water, and wonder how the birds manage to fight the current. Then you watch the sun sink below the towers of the CBD where it glows an orange halo around the old Naval base at the End of the World. It is hard to see with the light glittering across the waves, but you keep your eyes open and wonder about the gray sky with the big orange crack running through it.

This is the only sunset in New Orleans.

Before it gets too dark, you get up to walk along the levee. You walk because you know it is there and right now you want to see it, and there it is— the little rock with the words “Be Brave” spray painted black across it. And when you look up again, all that is left are the city lights.

Crow Jonah Norlander

VIRGINS by K-Ming Chang

February 9, 2022 · Fiction

Sixth grade was the year I met Melanie. She’d transferred from private school, Catholic, and around her neck was a copper locket with the Virgin Mary’s portrait inside it. It was the first white person I’d ever seen, minus the wasian in our class who had freckles even in the crack of her ass. The first time Melanie showed me what was inside her locket, we were changing together in the concrete-walled locker room, right in front of the window spattered with flies that spanned the gym teacher’s office. Everyone knew those were the worst lockers to get, the ones in front of the window, because inside the office was our lesbian gym teacher with breath like bug spray and gray pubic hair at her temples. She never wore a bra under her gray T-shirt, and so her nipples pecked out at us like twin beaks, twitching as she chased us on the blacktop, blowing the whistle that meant run, bitch. While the lesbian gym teacher paced the length of the window, looking out at us, I was bent over, trying to cross my arms over my chest while simultaneously bucking off my teal terrycloth T-shirt. When I glanced beside me at Melanie, I saw that she could change from her pink baby-doll T-shirt into her gym shirt without undressing at all, and that she could do it with her shorts too, some kind of magic, the uniform descending over her like an eyelid, clean as the sky when it swaps its skin from morning to evening. Melanie saw me looking and said she’d teach me. It involved acrobatic choreography, yanking my original shirt out of the sleeve of my substitute, threading my head precisely. She was fleshy like a chicken breast, so I was impressed by the elegance of her undressing, and it was satisfying to be naked next to someone who wasn’t yet whittled into any shape. In comparison, I was a silver skewer, I was a preened wing, I had a few bones showing. Beside her, I glittered like the locket that swung from her neck when she bent, scabbing over her chest. When I asked her why Mary’s first name was Virgin, she said because Mary gave birth as one. That doesn’t make sense, I said, did they check to see it was really a baby and not just a really big shit? Melanie turned away from me, but I could still see the puckered purple line at the back of her neck where she carried the weight of that face.

I didn’t master Melanie’s undressing method for another three weeks, but our skin solidarity strengthened—sometimes she’d hold up her baby-doll shirt as a curtain so that the lesbian gym teacher wouldn’t see me through the window while I fumbled with my sleeves—and I discovered several things about Melanie: first, that she wore that mare-haired woman around her neck by choice, which confused me because the woman wasn’t even pretty or a celebrity; second, that she lived two streets away from me, in an apartment building where a husband-wife murder-suicide had occurred in the past year; and third, that she didn’t know we had three holes. This was evident one day in the locker room when I chose to change in a bathroom stall—I made fun of the girls who did that, the ones who still looked like wishbones, who had no fat buttered to their chests at all—because my tampon leaked and I didn’t want to flash the stain at our lesbian gym teacher, who might interpret it as a mating call, the way birds grow bright feathers on their breasts to attract females. When I left the bathroom and joined Melanie at the exit of the locker room, she asked why I’d changed on my own, and I said I’d gotten it, and Melanie said, oh, I haven’t gotten mine yet, I thought I did last year, but actually I just peed blood because my brother threw me at the TV, he was playing Call of Duty, so how do you know if it’s blood you’re peeing or the actual thing, and I said, you idiot, it doesn’t come out of that hole, and she said what hole, and I had to explain there were three—I held my fingers up to her nose and furled them down one at a time—the pee one, the poop one, and the period one. Melanie said oh, like the five holes, the five wounds Jesus bore, and I said no, three. Three holes. And only one of them likes to bleed, Melanie said, I wonder why. She said she thought everything came out of one hole, kind of like the spout of a soft serve machine, where sometimes it’s a vanilla swirl, sometimes it comes out chocolate, and sometime it’s a chocolate-and-vanilla braided swirl, and I said what the hell are you talking about. Melanie didn’t like when I said hell, and always chained her voice to mine: O, she added abruptly. You can’t say what the hello, I told her, because no one says that. Then we were separated on the blacktop, split up and lined up along rows of spray-painted numbers, 1-60—Melanie was in the tens because her last name was An, and I was in the thirties because my last name was Hsiao. I watched her as we did our stretches, our gym teacher up in front, fiddling with the whistle in her mouth like a nipple, strands of her spit suspended in the air when she pulled it away from her lips, a cobweb that stickied all our hands. I watched the fabric of Melanie’s black jersey shorts strain itself sheer as she bent over to touch her left toe, her underwear showing through—My Melody print—and I was embarrassed that for all her sorcery with sleeves in the locker room, I could see the dark sweat stain rivering the crack of her ass, flooding its bed. She bent over further, her fingertips skimming the blacktop, and for a second before she yanked it back up, the hem of her skirt scrolled all the way down to her chin and I saw that she wasn’t wearing a bra, that she had nipples small and pink, like the ceiling of pimples I plucked off my buttocks, flicking the skin into the toilet, her belly button an outie, its shadow hanging like a berry, and I reached forward to pluck it with my tongue before looking away, looking somewhere that could not implicate me or my teeth. Something wet released between my legs, hot as a finger seaming my skin, and I thought I’d pissed myself before remembering it was my week. I ran from my number thirty-one into the locker room bathroom, looking down at the jellied blood, so much of it. Then it was Melanie standing outside the stall and knocking with her knees, asking what had happened, and I told her to go into the teacher’s office and look in the lost-and-found for some shorts. I turned away from her voice and looked down into the toilet, dropping my underwear into it, the water turning that color of beef blood in the trenches of a Styrofoam tray. Melanie paused outside the door, and I said hurry, hurry, and she said, did you know this is punishment for Eve’s sin? And I said, oh my god, now is not the time for you to be a Christian. Get pants. But Melanie lingered outside the door, and finally I sighed and said come in, look at what you’ve done to me, look at what I’ll have to live with if you don’t help me. In the stall, she bent over the toilet and stared at the wad of my underwear, rafting up like an organ, pulsing and winged, and said I bet this is what an abortion looks like, don’t you think it’s sad, and I said no, just help me flush it. I pressed on the handle with my toe and watched as it slithered down before getting snagged, the toilet hacking it back up, butchered water splashing our ankles and veining the floor. Shit, I said, shit, and reached in to tug it out. No, don’t get rid of it, she said, catching my wrist. We panted, flinching at the water that would ring our socks with permanent stains, and she moved my wrist up to her lips, latched her mouth to the center of my palm, the tip of her tongue plunging a hole there, circling its rim before threading through me, and between my legs was the wet again, bloodless and bearing her face.

Crow Jonah Norlander

Y by Thomas Thatcher

February 7, 2022 · Fiction

I picked up the BB gun. I carried it to the road over my shoulder. Then eventually I pointed it at an oncoming car. The driver didn’t see me. He was driving slowly and he didn’t see me with the BB gun. He was about to hear Tsshh Krr. Copper-coated premium BB’s. I thought it might have cracked the windshield but it hit and skipped off the windshield. Boom and the smoke of the incense, which came with the prayers of the saints, ascended up before God out of the angel's hand (Rev.8:4)

We needed bread and I didn’t have any bread. When I get some I’ll get us our own apartment. I went to the road because I was having trouble telling Yardane all of the truth. I was saying some of it but not all. So I pulled the trigger. The driver slammed his brakes. I jumped and made off like a coyote. Yardane closed the screen door, reluctantly. The driver and the car kept going. I stepped over branches and made my way back up the driveway. Dogs are barking. We all felt better. Love made perfect.

Yardane walks into Penn Station. She passes by a guy in uniform with his buddies in uniforms and they all have guns. Yardane doesn’t care. She just doesn’t want me to have a gun. She calls me when she finds her seat and talks delicately. I’m excited and I’m sitting on the front steps zooming in and out of the line that means “train tracks” on the maps application.

They have now compassed us in our steps: they have set their eyes bowing down to the earth; (Psalm17:11) So I looked down the driveway and saw all of its dirt and rocks. I ate the blackberries I had in my hand. I think, fuck I’m doing better. She sounds like herself. She sounds sweet. What an awesome combination; Yardane and blackberries.

I’ll cook lentil soup for us tonight. She will put her arms around me, then her leg around my leg, when I’m washing the bowls and spoons. We are so good. I went into the bathroom, put my head under the faucet, and swallowed an oxy. I went into my grandmother's guest room and looked around for a place to crawl into. I’ll leave in a couple of hours and pick up Yardane at the Providence Amtrak Station.

I’m curled up. I think about her and I in a city. I’ll buy a dirt-bike and we’ll fuck the city up. I saw the city and I saw no temple therein: for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it. And the city had no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it: for the glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof. (Rev.21:22-23) We are in the black Ford pick-up truck and we’re leaving the Providence Amtrak Station.

I say, “We’re going to Cape Cod. D’you want watch me hit 90,”

She is holding my leg. She is sitting in the middle seat next to me. I tell her to take the wheel and she says she hates taking the wheel. I kiss her forehead and she takes the wheel.

Vincent called me 2 times so I called him back. We made a plan to go to an NA meeting and then get food at Friendly’s. I tell him Yardane and I will pick him and his girlfriend up in an hour. The dog is barking. I thought about yelling but quietly said her name to myself.

Watermelons and kiwi’s are the same, possibly. I’m holding a small watermelon-kiwi. I bite into it and I feel the skin get stuck in between my teeth and I don’t care that much. This one is nice, it's sweet and drips on my shirt. Walking with Yardane up the handicap ramp is tiring. I think about her and I both looking at the handicap ramp when we got here and feeling retarded.

I found two seats in the back and pulled her wrist so we looked attached at the hip. We entered and exited the room 2 times before I found our spots. She said very softly, “Remedial NA” and I knew she meant her and I needed extra help. She made me laugh over the moment of silence for those still suffering. We are suffering. We are suffering and playing with debris. I stop thinking about where I’ll be when everyone who has not received the mark goes high, higher and I listen. Someone is sharing. I’m giving them my attention but Yardane is sitting next to me. I’m ready, I think. It might happen soon. Are you ready. Is Yardane ready. Yes, yes.

Later on we drove past a gate. It looked old. 4 of us sat in the big pick-up truck and it was quiet. Vincent’s girl needed a ride home so she was with us too. Vincent made some light-hearted jokes about her in front of her and then they kissed and she got out of the backseat and disappeared. I knew what was going on when we passed the gate and parked in this abandoned parking lot in a weird part of town. She had told us on the ride there that her new tent was nice and, if her stuff wasn’t all around, sleeps 4 people.

Vincent asked me if I was serious about getting into bull-riding. I told him yes I was. I asked him if he wanted a small tin of chewing tobacco I bought. I said the taste isn’t all bad. I said, “it’s actually minty,” I was staring at the woods in the headlights. And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea. And I … saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband (Rev.21:1-2).

Tornado warning. The truck will be gone. Tornado. It’ll get shot up to a black storm in the sky. My dirt bike will be gone too. The tornado is moving north-west, south-west, west, south, and north. Not the usual winds but powerful winds. It’s the end of Eastern Massachusetts. But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only (Matt.24:36). I called my mom to tell her.

It’s finally going to be real. The life after this life. The life with Yardane after this life with Yardane. She will feel my emotions really hard in the after-life. For the first time she will have no doubts at all about how real everything is. I’ll be found, my body devastated and not resembling me, against a rock, maintaining the stoic face that I was never able to make in my time alive. For wheresoever the carcase is, there will the eagles be gathered together (Matt.24:28) Darkness, clouds, and more wind.

That night Yardane stepped over me and I grabbed her leg. I love her legs. I called her a doll and kissed her thigh. I lit another cigarette and handed it to her. Sitting on the front steps with Yardane makes my faith stronger. Everything is going to be alright in a couple of seconds. I heard it too. She heard a bang. You possibly heard it. And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind (Rev.6:13).

And she picked up pieces of space and pieces of the moon. We picked up metal sharp objects and pointed them at each other, giggling. A meteor hit an airplane above us. We smile together. The town is going to be under water, maybe. There’s a small barn made for chickens that we crawl into and there she kissed my arm. She’s almost asleep. Her small body made a Z shape and then it made a G shape.

I can reach and touch her toes. I can touch her knees underneath white cloth. A frock that we agreed on was modest. I clad myself in XL black gym shorts and an XXL green T-shirt. She likes when my clothes are sometimes falling off like a shepherd who holds his robe up while herding. The pebbles on our driveway. Her leather shoes on the pebbles. There was something (Maybe a ribbon tied on her ponytail, or the pattern of her stockings) that reminded me of Sunday school.

Crow Jonah Norlander

FIFTY-FIVE AND OLDER by Christopher Notarnicola

February 4, 2022 · Fiction

I’m about to be sick on the front porch. Granddad is at the back, beating his cane against the screen door to scare the Muscovy ducks. The neighbors understand—nobody wants duck mess on the walkway. We’ve split a buttered bagel and yesterday’s half pot. He’s probably finishing breakfast while my first bite slips from my tongue in a string of saliva, landing like egg yolk in the flowerbed. I gag. The neighbors have a hard time with my prolonged presence, though no one seems to have heard my heaving. Drum and bass in the front drive after midnight, and in come the questions via landline. Granddad could tell them nothing they would readily understand—the loss of a wife can only excuse so much noise. Two ducks have made their way around front, three puffy ducklings in tow. The adults are black and white with red growths around the eyes and bills. The little ones are yellow with brown over top, stumbling along, chittering through their perfect beaks. I find it hard to understand how a creature can bear such mutation. Granddad has stopped with his cane. And I am surprised to see that a butterfly casts a shadow. The coffee has gone lukewarm again, which seems to be better, and the sip goes down. More ducklings round the flowerbed, intrigued by my aborted breakfast. A gag sends them off. The older ducks are past the mailbox, crossing the neighbor’s front walk, leading the brood. The neighbor’s door opens a crack, and slivers of gold reach for the lawn. My stomach flips, pulling me to the mulch. The coffee comes up with a burn. Bile sinks in the shade of a peace lily. Out back, Granddad has started with his cane again.

Crow Jonah Norlander

ALERT by Caelyn Cobb

February 2, 2022 · Fiction

We all regret downloading that crime reporting app. “I’ve learned that I’m always a few blocks from some guy swinging a chain,” our friend says at dinner. For us, it’s gunshots or fires. Gunshots reported, four hundred feet. One mile. Six hundred yards. People on the app give these alerts thousands of likes. That’s what you get, someone comments. “Probably just fireworks,” I say. Those distances don’t feel that close. One mile might as well be a different universe. They have a different congresswoman and everything.

When we’re getting ready for bed the app says there’s a fire at Food Universe. Their lemons are always moldy and they don’t even have goat cheese. Burn, motherfucker! the commenters cheer. A few weeks ago the worst pizzeria in the neighborhood burned down at three in the morning. That time everyone on the app was devastated. Where will I get my pizza now? Literally anywhere else, we both agreed. Now the pizzeria is almost done rebuilding. We walked by and the door was open: white tiles accented with green, all the chrome new and shining.

“You know what my father would have called that?” you asked. I did, but I didn’t say it. Some things shouldn’t be said, even if it was someone else who said them.

A siren wails. A woman who lives across from the grocery store posts a video. We expect smoke, black and billowing, red-orange lights flashing, but it’s nothing. Y’all are fuckin dumbasses, a commenter says. Fuck you, someone else replies. Laugh emoji. Thumbs up. Some people aren’t laughing. Some people have darker things to say. The siren is still going, farther away—who knows to where. Someone on the app will figure it out. Someone on the app is probably there already.

The local paper tweets that a woman set herself on fire. She was trying to get bedbugs out of her car. “Can you even get bedbugs in your car?” you want to know. They could be anywhere, I remind you. When we had them in that first apartment I would see them in the hallway. If only someone would set fire to that place. Sometimes fire is the only option. Your grandma told us that’s what they did back in the forties: big bonfires of their beds and chairs and clothes, right on the sidewalk. Someone on the app is probably filming that burning car right now, getting thousands of fire emoji reactions. 366 yards away, the woman is probably already in the ambulance, a paramedic rubbing silver into her wounds, pushing medication to keep her calm.

Another siren. My phone buzzes. I turn it to silent and roll onto my side to sleep. You’re still sitting up, awake, the bright white square of your phone lighting up the hollows of your face, vigilant.

Crow Jonah Norlander

PLEASE CONSIDER by Jeannetta Craigwell-Graham

January 31, 2022 · Fiction

There is a new woman in your apartment. What happened to the other woman? Tall like you. Blonde like you. I hope you haven’t broken up.

But if you have: please consider, for a split second– Me.

Me and you began the day you moved in. From the balcony of my illegal sixth floor walkup, I peered into your curtainless life. I was tired of onion peeler ads and videos of black men poked into hermit crab positions, playing Jesus in my daughter’s Mary Magdalene roleplay (her chest packed with hormonal mandarins) and my boyfriend’s “Aren’t you concerned about the pimple on the back of your neck?”

I wanted to file myself thick somewhere in the W’s, X’s or Y’s of your life, uncertain if I would fit amongst the eggshell chairs and paper lanterns. I am darker and shorter than the blonde. Think Snow White with doe-colored skin, cornrows and a stopwatch frame. You would need to bend down to kiss me. It might be inconvenient. I winked at Orion’s belt and blew out birthday candles wishing this new brown-haired girl away until I decided love is diligence.

Your self-care routines are just right. The blonde was naturally beautiful like a baby goat. I see the brown-haired girl is more camouflaged. She hides fatigue with incandescent eyeshadows. I have an appropriate pop-level shame about my appearance, an Umbrella-remix you can dance to. Yesterday, I waited at a perfume counter with a steady fever tremble for the long-lashed attendant. Last time I visited the department store a cashier had a stroke. When I explained the incident to the EMT he stared at me and my pile of sixty-four pairs of control briefs and wrote in caps as the cause of incident: “UNIDENTIFIED AND UNREASONABLE EXERTION.” I will try my best not to startle if you come into the bathroom unannounced.

“Boo! It’s just me,” I will say, “no need to be scared.”

You rarely ate dinner together. The blonde ate spelt and weeds from bowls standing up. The brown-haired one is less digestively coy – she nibbles on kitchen paper. I can last on bitter coffee and water spoon-fed from my hand in the bathroom sink. In university there was another brown girl who Zumba’ed the same time I did, the meat of her upper arms picked clean by Cosmo and Vogue. I saw a dog let go of a mournful howl as it went past her photo on the university’s welcome banner and I got the program. I made friends with the salad bar staff who had tattoos in unemployable places. They would ask me “More chicken shug?”

“No,” I said, “on a program.” For which I would receive eyelids engraved with Fuck-blink-That.

You were often headed somewhere. The blonde liked the tease of a black A-line skirt and turtleneck. I can see the brown-haired one prefers garments that resemble fitted sheets before you tuck them into bed corners. I like a bit of theater in my closet. I once skidded across shifty ice clad in intense reflective footwear to go to a melanoma fundraiser at the zoo. The bouncer glanced me over with a no on his tongue but a greeting from my Indian friend changed the equation in his head and we were in. I am like a zero: when added with a larger, or small number, I make no difference.

You were not big cleaners. The blonde protected wasp nests as if they were Charlotte’s Web. The brown-haired one is very sustainable - she reuses any butts or Hostess wrappers she sees on her way home. I view each spill as a new opportunity. I learned cleaning protocols from my grandmother who might have cleaned your mother’s-mother’s house or bagged your grandpa’s adult diapers without a flinch or peep. The Department of Homeland Security once held her for possession of solvents and flammables in her suitcase and for not obeying the flight attendants’ instructions to remain seated during takeoff and landing because she had been cleaning the toilet with abovementioned solvents and flammables. Sometimes you must clean as if a knife could appear at your throat. My heart would wallop against my breast but I would leave no trace and have a steady dusting hand.

You used to kiss, neck each other. The blonde was full of barnyard romance – nudges like a colt and slicks against your cheeks. I can see the brown-haired woman seems satisfied if she brushes past you in the hallway. I believe that affection, love and even sex are very good for a relationship, but not an excessive afternoon’s worth. I have read enough Victorian romance novels pocketed in the brim of my jeans at Walgreens checkout lines to know how things are done. Each time I expected the The Duke Who Loved Me or some other title would bring forth the sharp rap of an alarm or a heavy frisk but no one suspected me of romance. Don’t worry, I’ve worried the buttons on my button-ups so they are easier to rip and can be wanton with just a raise of my eyebrows.

Wait. My boyfriend just told me you are not you. Another couple moved in, quickly, in the twilight of afternoon. The brown-haired one is not a replacement but the original of someone else. But who I wait for. But who am I waiting for? No matter. Leave the window cracked. I will go via balcony.

Crow Jonah Norlander

NAKED by Tim Lane

January 28, 2022 · Fiction

My boys are naked every chance they get and this morning is perfect for it. The light is clear and hot, unmuddled by rain or fog. And they have an excuse — they’ve just eaten ice cream and so made a mess of their clothes. I am here, but I am not seeing them, stupefied by the warmth that comes so rarely this far north. My mind wanders and trips down alleyways of my past, looking for trouble or regret. When my wife left for work this morning, she gave me a look. Truth be told, she’s getting a little tired of me.

By the time I notice what they are doing, the older one, who is four, is already stripped. The younger one is only two and still unable to get his shirt over a head that is much larger than his body would seem to be able to support. He shrieks like he does any time he is met by a problem–from skinned knee to stubborn pistachio nut. The older one comes to help, a good big brother or a torturer, or both, pulling the shirt up in ruthless heave-hos. The younger one is lost inside it, crying all the harder, from pain or darkness, who can tell. Only he stops the very instant he is free.

This did not used to be a problem, the nudity. In fact most of any day that was hot enough, and plenty that weren’t, my boys spent naked. However, the old backyard fence that was there when we moved in had come down in the winter months. Eight feet high at least, gray, rain-loved, and blooming moss and lichen. I noticed it listing to the side one morning as I brought out a bag of trash. I pressed upon it with my palms and it kissed off from the side of the garage, rusted nails letting go, and stooped over the yard. Then I kicked it, partly because I had a vision, sudden and clear, of what we might do with a more open space, and partly because I wanted to see what violence from the end of my foot might look like. The fence fell down and immediately our yard opened up like lungs which had been waiting to take a full breath.

The line of where the fence had stood remained for a few weeks. A strip of thin, pale grass like the first skin after a wound. Soon, though, weeds took over. The thin, leggy kind with delicate, pink flowers.

Having no fence created a problem I hadn’t, in my rush, considered. Our yard, which abutted a narrow lane that led to the back parkinglot of an apartment complex, was now exposed to anyone from that building walking by. Dog walkers, couples, kids on bikes, a pale, young smoker with a collection of animal onesies she wore baggy and ironically. My wife was concerned that without the fence, thieves would relieve us of our tricycles and tomato starts. Perverts would haunt our back windows.

“The fence was rotten,” I told her. “If the perverts wanted to get in, it wasn’t stopping them.”

“The fence did more than we probably know,” she said. “Just the idea of it.”

“OK, but it came down,” I said. “So, what was I supposed to do?”

“Listen,” I told my boys now. “Those bodies aren’t for everyone.”

Their bowed little legs, plump bellies, uncircumsized penises with the tiny, fleshy bit at the end.

“It’s only OK for our family, so let's put on our undies at least.”

“Every day, all the time?” the older one said. “We used to be naked in our yard. It’s our bodies! It’s our choice if we want to be naked!”

“Yeah,” the younger one chimed, the sycophant, the pugilist. “If you don’t let us be naked, you’re outta here!”

His scrunched up face, eyelids half-closed, voice pitched downward but unable to hang onto lower registers — it was all, I knew, an imitation of me. And I found it incredibly endearing, fucking cute to be clear, though a little frightening, to think that my face screwed up like an ogre’s in moments of anger. In any event, I relented. One, because they were playing with each other without needing a thing from me, and so giving me a little peace; two because my wife had pointed out recently that I had become stricter the longer I stayed home with the boys; and three, because my mind had turned a corner in its wanderings and met with a thing from my past, fully formed and wriggle-wet. A memory I felt compelled to tangle with.

I had studied abroad in Chile the first half of my senior year of college. I wasn’t a leader, never in my life, but somehow, when I got there, the others looked to me. It was probably because I was the oldest one in the program. I felt the responsibility of it like balancing a broom upright on the tip of my finger. If I put in enough legwork, I could keep it afloat. I practiced the clench of appearing, always, to not care. I didn’t linger, I affected independence, I floated ideas about which bars to go to next, I sang karaoke. It was exhilarating, exhausting. I got better at it.

In any case, two weeks after arriving, my school went on a break. I was going to use the time to head up north, see the Atacama Desert, check off the first item on a list I planned to complete in my time there. My big study abroad. To my surprise, a small group of who I considered to be the coolest in the program rallied around my plan and came with me. Quite by accident, it took on the aura of exclusivity, with me at the center. One guy, Tom, even asked my permission, as if I had it to give, to invite along another student, Howard. Howard lived with a host family next to Tom’s and was brash and often ridiculous. Meaning drunk. Howard had already managed to turn off many in the program with his antics. Only Tom, universally liked, who attended his same college in Washington, still stood with him. I said of course Howard could come along, struck to be considered an authority, and I came off as being quite magnanimous. “You’re a good guy,” Tom said and I said nothing, only nodding, thrilled and protective over what I felt he’d given me.

We spent a night in an apartment in a town I can’t remember now. Only that it looked more beautiful in the guide book than by our eyes. At Howard’s suggestion, we played something called the Elephant Game. Tom knew it. It involved clapping in a rhythm, each assigned an animal, and when your turn came, you had to make the sign of the animal in the space of a clap, and then the sign for someone else’s animal within the next. The lowest animal in the game was the naked mole rat. The sign you did as the mole rat was to grip yourself and shiver. I got to know the action very well as I was constantly stuck in the role. It seemed like a wire sparked and lost the information it carried whenever I tried to remember an animal other than the mole rat. So there I was, shivering the whole night through.

But the game succeeded in getting us all very drunk; and in endearing Howard, to some extent, into the group, which seemed to thrill Tom.

A night later and we were staying in an apartment in a beautiful city by the sea. It had poems graffitied on the walls. If you knew where to look, you could eat a good meal for a few dollars and drink for a few more. We played the Elephant Game until the owner of the apartment pounded on the door and told us to stop; the clapping was too loud.

So we went for a walk. Through streets romantically lit, alongside a marina with boats we had seen earlier, each of us taking pictures in front of their colorful hulls. Now everything was gray and wet. But it was thrilling to be kicked out, to be drunk, to be so far away from our normal lives. This feeling, I believe, led Charlie, a woman with a narrow face and sleepy eyes, to decide that we should all strip down and swim in the water. The idea caught, and first Howard, with his goose-honk laugh, stripped down, and then everyone but me joined in. The group picked their way over large, angular boulders and down to the oily, black water. They screamed; they laughed. I stayed behind, and Charlie, covering her small breasts with her arm, asked me why.

The truth was that I didn’t want to be naked. I was too skinny, I had a scar by my belly button, and moles, like they were an infestation of the animal, dug up all across my chest. And also, I was ashamed of how my penis would look. Uncircumsized, canted-to-the-left. Would it shrink in the cold?

“I just don’t feel comfortable,” I said.

“Oh,” she said, and in her eyes I saw the broom tumble, smack the floor. So I sat on the rocks for a while, uncomfortable with watching the others, a barrier between clothed and not. I walked home alone, counting how many of the streetlights were broken, bulbs gaping mouths with uneven fangs.

Still later and we were in the desert and I had nosebleeds most nights. Howard was desperate to pick up a girl and somehow the entire group, even Charlie, became invested in his quest. But none of the local women were interested in him and finally he insisted that he didn’t care.

“It’s their faces,” he said. “Being in the sun so much kind of fucks up their faces.”

“Jesus, are you an asshole,” Charlie said.

I didn’t agree with Howard. Or, probably, the me at that time knew enough not to admit that I agreed with Howard, but I could see what he was saying. It was an intense, constant glare in the Atacama and I was young. Too young to read codes.

“Maybe he’s just saying what other people really think, deep down,” I said. “But he just doesn’t have a filter. Doesn’t dress it up in what he’s supposed to say.”

Charlie looked at me and shook her head. “It’s racist to say a whole group of people aren’t attractive.”

I stayed quiet, as did everyone else, even Howard, which was so rare as to be eerie. Tom clapped his hands and said we should all check out the Cueca; they were performing soon.

We went to the town square and bought beers. Dancers shuffled around in a big tent waving handkerchiefs in the air. It was admirable and disciplined. My nose began bleeding and I raided the napkin dispenser to staunch the flow, trying to laugh it off, but nobody else seemed to be able to look at me and the mess of my face. It just kept coming. Howard plucked a fresh napkin and tried to join the dance. His arm in the air, fluttering the paper up and down, he approached the dancers who all stayed, tight-lipped, on their steps. My group laughed, even as they ignored me, even as they traded knowing looks of what a dumbass Howard was. Tom yelled in a hoarse voice for him to get the fuck back to the table.

Howard is a kindergarten teacher now, I think. Tom might do something with insurance. Charlie writes for a magazine and lives in Denver.

The older son wants to know if I think it is hot enough for them to fill up the pool and I tell them, yes, sure, nodding my head, reminding myself to be present. Be present — too much is spent outside of this. When I got laid off, I decided to see it as a blessing, as a time to be present with my kids when they are so young. And yet, it’s a constant struggle. So much easier to slide backward into myself, looking for something, I don’t know what. A path out? A choice to a different future?

I go inside and I start to make lunch. Macaroni and cheese. Cut up apples. Peanut butter and celery sticks. My second cup of coffee, what I cling to for the later half of the day, instant. Cherish this, my wife often tells me. What you’re feeling is society’s pressure on you as a male. A breadwinner. You are doing the most important work. The. Most. I have made a mistake, I sometimes find myself thinking when my guard is down. I am stuck in a muddy mistake.

Then I hear the younger one talking in that adorable way he has. Half in this world, half in the other, imagining as he goes, sputtering sound effects, little clippings of phrases, sayings. He is happiest when he is inside his imagination. They are constantly demanding I join in, and I do, sometimes, when I can’t find a way out of it. To me, the practice is exhausting. Pretending to be a raccoon or a T-Rex. I joke with my wife about it. I call it my beautiful sacrifice. If it were up to my boys, we’d never stop pretending we were something else.

I go out on the back porch and see Cal, the man who lives in the apartment complex and survives on god knows what and also cans. He collects them, a huffing, rotund machine with thick eyeglasses and a rubber grin. When he remembers me, he likes to talk to me. He tells me his theories on why the conservatives are having a moment, or how the homeless are lazy and that’s why he gets most of what he wants. His competition, he sneers, would rather sleep. Other times I’ve said hello as we passed, asked him how it was going, and he has looked at me as if frightened, and hustled on.

Cal’s laughing now at something my older son is doing. I remember when they were even younger and we stripped them in parks, on benches, anywhere, to change their diapers. When you are so young, your body is public. It is unformed, unclaimed by even yourself, and so free. The child feels no shame. That changes somewhere along the way. My sons don’t have it yet. And I know I will have to give it to them. Which is also taking something away.

I rush out, my hands still wet, they smell of garlic, and find that my boy is juggling his penis. He finds it hilarious, we all do in my house. Hand over hand, it really does look like juggling. But it shouldn’t be here, it shouldn’t be now.

“Hey,” I say. “You need to get over here and get dressed, both of you.”

“I will throw you in a tree!” the younger one says.

“I don’t like your serious voice,” the older says.

I smile at Cal. I don’t want this to be weird even though I know that later on I’ll fantasize about the terrible things he was trying to elicit from my boys and scheme ways I’d hurt him. An ugly purpose, but a purpose all the same. It’s in line with how sometimes, I’ll read horrible news stories about a recent shooting and imagine myself into the scene, charging the shooter, taking him down, being lauded the hero. For now, though, I don’t want to be rude. Because we see each other all the time and I do believe, deep down, he’s harmless. Maybe he has some kind of condition. On the spectrum. His big, threadbare t-shirts are mostly clean. His glasses are constantly fogging up. My wife gave him my old winter gloves last December. He was just talking, after all, laughing, it was funny, and there is no fence there anymore. What was he supposed to do?

“You need clothes, I keep telling you,” I say once I get the boys inside.

“But we were in our own yard,” the older one says. “And you say it’s our body.”

“It is your body,” I say. “And it’s only for you.”

“But, Daddy.”

“No,” I say, definitely breaking through into Serious Voice territory, into something like yelling. “You put your clothes on or you don’t go outside, do you understand me? I’m trying to keep you safe.”

“You always ruin my day,” the older says.

“You’re being disresponsible!” The younger says.

Cal is striding off, his huge t-shirt tucked into basketball shorts, Ikea bags in each hand.

I have never been in a fight. Not a real one. But there was once, back in Chile, near the end of my time abroad, when I was leaving a bar and two men plucked my hat from off my head. I asked for it back and they laughed at me. One of them pretended like he had a gun, reaching into his coat, so I turned and walked the other way. But they followed me, kicking me and punching me as I went. I was much taller than them, and sloshing drunk, so I hardly felt the blows. Still, they kept adding up inside of me until finally, in an instinct that was quicker than any thought, I reached back, grabbed a foot as it kicked me and pulled up. The man lost his feet, fell onto the sidewalk, the back of his head into the cement like a watermelon dropped in the supermarket. I ran as fast as I could, turning at random streets to lose these men who may or may not have been about to shoot me. When I came across a phone booth, I called Howard, who was dating Charlie by then. He’d often told me of the fights he’d gotten into in the small, spread-wide desert town he’d grown up in, how he didn’t mind them, in fact liked them, was good at them. He answered on the third ring and I told him where I was, what had happened, how I needed his help. I wanted to find those men and fight them. Get my hat back. Beat the shit out of them. But he was sleepy, this was very late, and he asked me if I was alone now. If I was safe. I was, the men were nowhere in sight.

“Then just go to bed,” he told me.

When I got home, I undressed in my bedroom and looked at my body in the mirror. I had purple and green bruises up and down my legs. They would be worse in the morning.

Maybe I will tell my wife about this later, when she is home from the real world, and maybe it will hold her attention better than my stories about the boys refusing to put on their clothes, or making a mess of things, or the tiny, fierce joy of taking a nap, my arm under each of their necks, heavy and breathing in the same rhythm.

But when she gets home, I don’t tell her any of it because by then, the story seems meaningless, just like most of these days. Instead, she has her life to tell me about, the one she enters daily, leaving us behind. A world of real push and pull. Boss and coworkers. Drama. And I tell her my opinions, strategies, thoughts on what she should do out there.

A few weeks later, I go for a walk, leaving the boys practicing magic tricks with my wife. They are disappearing crayons, quarters, stuffed rabbits. They are pulling gauzy scarves from empty tubes, toothpicks from empty palms. I was having a hard time acting shocked by their antics. My wife said I should leave, take some time to myself.

It is a beautiful day again and I am trying to take my mind off the spinning, gentle haunt of a life lived any kind of way. I circle the block, and then the next. I know all of these places and yet, even after three years here, I notice new things just put up or invisible to me before. A slackline between two dying trees. A small fairy kingdom built in the hollow of an enormous oak that has released its pollen and bulged my eyes. A doll dressed half as a devil, half an angel, nailed onto the pillar of someone’s porch.

On my way home, I see a man in the courtyard of the apartments, lying with his shirt off and his pants down, close to his knees. He is having a hard time breathing. Each intake whistles and stuffs. I am afraid, seeing this, and I look around, but there is nobody else here. Then I recognize him. It’s Cal, having some kind of emergency.

“Cal?” I say.

“Are you OK?” I edge nearer.

“Can you hear me?”

I call 911. I hear ambulances far off. I’ve checked his pulse, I’ve elevated his head. And then, though it is hard and takes all the grip I can manage in my fingers, I push his shorts back up, over his pale, pocked, yogurt-pour flesh. His crisp, white underpants. The shy stub of his penis almost lost in a wiry nest of hair.

“Let me just get you situated, man,” I say.

Cal is breathing, and maybe he sees me, and maybe he’s already gone. Soon there is a collection of busy men and women applying devices and counts and hands to his failing body. But then I see from the way the activities of the workers, paramedics and firepeople suddenly slacken, that he is dead now, and his body doesn’t matter one bit to him anymore.

And I think, a small complete thing formed instantly in the front of my brain: I have a broken heart.

I go home and hold this all within until the boys are in bed. Then I tell my wife. She doesn’t remember, at first, who Cal is. But after I describe him, his trundling walk, his cans, his cold, naked hands in the winter, the gloves she gave him, she remembers and is sad in a new way. She is crying.

I tell her of the time I was walking and the boys were ahead of me, tiny blurs on those three-wheel scooters, and he came out from his apartment and told them to stop, to wait for me. When I got to him, I apologized.

“I have sons of my own,” he said. “The instinct never goes away, to protect them, just like the day they were born.”

Crow Jonah Norlander

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