X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine | Fiction

COURT MANDATED THERAPY by Sage Tyrtle

January 19, 2022 · Fiction

Bill is not having flashbacks to Vietnam. Even though the shiny-haired psychiatrist says there's no doubt at all, even though the list of symptoms looks like his autobiography. Bill sits on the burnt orange couch. He looks at the palm frond wallpaper. He says in his most even tone, "No, I believe you're mistaken," and he's being careful because if the psychiatrist decides that he's a danger to himself or others then he could end up a Thorazine zombie like Harry Alessi up at the sanitarium. Bill clears his throat and makes himself look into the psychiatrist's eyes. Makes himself say, "But let's explore it further."

Bill is not having flashbacks to Vietnam. Yesterday, when Bill was kneeling on the floor at the local Goodwill, keening, he wasn't hearing gunfire. He couldn't feel socks that had been wet for so long they were disintegrating. His hands weren't dripping in blood. Bill didn't feel the horror the psychiatrist is telling him he felt, and avoiding places that remind him of the war won't help. When Bill was on the floor, shaking his head in response to the Goodwill manager who was pleading with him to leave, he was holding a Holly Hobby doll.

Bill is not having flashbacks to Vietnam. Yesterday, curled into a ball on the floor in the Goodwill, he was also in 1971, he was also back at the house in Munroe Falls. He was ripping his draft notice into a hundred pieces and flushing those pieces down the toilet. He was stuffing clothes into a duffel bag. He was emptying the Green Giant Frozen Peas box of his mother's pin money with a muttered apology. He was walking backwards on the highway, sticking out his thumb, muttering, "North, just north," to the drivers. He was thinking of his Canadian wife who bounced out of bed at 5 AM, who made up silly songs whenever she saw a bumblebee, who never existed. The tiny apartment they never shared in Montreal and their imaginary little girl named Judy. Who pointed at the picture in the book he was reading and said, "I am Sylvester and you are the Magic Pebble, okay?" He is mourning his nineteen-year-old self, his gentleness in the years before he reported for duty, Sir.

Bill is not having flashbacks to Vietnam. But he nods and nods and tries to remember how to grin in a way that is convincing. He shakes the psychiatrist's hand and promises to fill that prescription, doctor, and when he makes it outside he sits on a park bench where a pigeon flies over and looks up at him with bright eyes. He rips the prescription into a hundred pieces. He lets the wind take them.

Crow Jonah Norlander

‘BLUE BANJO: THE HIRAM SADLER STORY’ DELETED INTERVIEWS by Bodie Fox

January 17, 2022 · Fiction

HAZEL COX (Hiram’s first wife): I was pregnant with our first the night he played the Russian Roulette. We was in a dive bar after a show in Lubbock, Texas—I’ll never forget the place, neither, ’cause it had a sawdust floor and the piano played itself. He was drunk, of course. Except for that first year we knew each other—from the day he walked into my music store to the night of our wedding—he always had something to sip on, whether it was a bottle of rye or a bit of sippin’ cream.

He lost. But, in a way, he won. He survived. The bullet was only a .22. It went under his skin, ricocheted off his temple, bounced up and around his skull, and tore out behind his right ear.

HANK SADLER (Hiram’s oldest son): Yeah, Pa fought in the World War, the second one, even survived the Battle of the Bulge with nothing more than frostbite in his picking hand, which the docs had to cut out. They took his pointer and bird fingers. Still got em, though. Shoot, ask him about it next time y’all bunch head out to his house. Keeps ‘em up there on the mantle in a TOPS Sweet Snuff tin, all blackened and wrapped in frayed tissue. Likes to take ‘em down anytime he got company over.

“SWEET TOOTH” (convenience store clerk in town where Hiram resides): I coulda done told youins how the ole boy got the Cancer in his throat. After all the business up at the Ryman, after they’d done blackballed him over the lawnmower, he stayed in town more and he drove down here every day for two packs of Winstons. Rain, snow, sleet, hail, he’s here. About twice a week, when I’m just about to leave for home to take my supper, he comes back in, stands on them tiles—those two sticky ones there—and gets him anotheren.

PARSON LYMON (preacher at Hiram’s church home): It’s always a good Sunday to see Hiram strut through those back doors, under the brick arch. Although, he’s late every single Sunday. I can’t recall a time he ever arrived before the hymn that leads into my sermon. We tried to work it out to where he could play backup banjo to the piano sometimes, something to encourage him to come early, but it never worked out.

HARRIET SADLER (Hiram’s eighth daughter): It’s not like he was around anyways, but, yeah, Mom—that’s Erin Massey, his third, dead now—left him. He came in roaring drunk one night and threw turtle stew at me for smarting off, something about how fat he’d got. Luckily he missed, and it splattered on the dresser that Mom kept in the dining room. What they had left, which isn’t much, was over after that.

PARSON LYMON: Rambling man as he was, he always seemed to stay married. I officiated all seven of his weddings, but I think Hiram only counted six. He had one annulled on the grounds of incapacity. However, that argument could probably be made for all his marriages, except the one with Hazel; I know without a doubt that he was sober for the year before they tied the knot.

HUNTER SADLER (Hiram’s fifth son): If I ever wanted to see him, had to go to his shows.

LEE SHARR (former friend of Hiram’s) After that whole mess with the lawnmower on the Ryman stage, he was bored and sitting around with me in the carport most days, chain smoking Winstons, taking pulls off my rye. That’s when I suggested we should make Brunswick stew, give us something to keep busy. That’s the shit that he later jarred, labeled and sold as “Brunswick Blue.” Stole my recipe, the bastard.

HAZEL COX: He won’t admit it to you, but there wouldn’t be no Hiram Sadler without me. Sure, he was good, but he was in a bad place when we met. After they cut off his picking fingers, he about drank himself to death and it didn’t stop until the day he came into my music store, where I showed him a left-handed banjo, the one he bought, the one that made him who he was, the one with the blued head on it. He won’t tell you that I was the one who taught him to play again, play left-handed. He never even told them kids how it happened. Told ‘em that he taught himself to play over again. Bet he said the same thing to y’all folks.

CLAIRE SADLER (Hiram’s second daughter): All of us kids seemed to get different Hirams. A few, like Hank and maybe Steff, say that he was good to them, and I think he tried with me, at least when I was young, but I wish he hadn’t.

There was this one time: my school had a Career Day and I’d begged and begged him to come. I mean, what kid wouldn’t? He was Hiram Sadler, the living Bluegrass legend. When it was my turn, he wasn’t there and I did all I could to not cry in front of everyone.

He was two hours late, but he came, smelling like rye. Mrs. Dubbie only let him talk because she felt bad for me. Didn’t bring no banjo. Didn’t bring no finger picks. Came dressed in his old fatigues and passed around his TOPS Sweet Snuff tin for all the kids to see.

Crow Jonah Norlander

MOVEMENT STUDY by Amelia C. Winter

January 14, 2022 · Fiction

The only way they had was their nakedness. This and this alone delivered them through the many corridors of their pursuit: their innumerable stations of falling over and springing upright.

Their eyes, their pupils, were open, bright, darting: brilliantly black-on-white. They were silent—mutists—but too antic for the soliloquy over the straitjacket. They were turned out of the asylums as quick as they were caught, hopped then over hedges and fences, scattering the hills.

The realm of objects at all times tried to court them; its advances went unrequited. (That is what a prop is, said Marx: a thing that tries to dominate you and fails.) They were slippery as fish, and in time they were common as pigeons, though they never scavenged or roosted or even seemed to perch, and certainly they did not breed.

Some were captured on motion picture cameras—but very few, and only by desperate pursuit. Stories were fitted to this footage at great cost. The dramatic scenes were done by costumed doppelgangers, all of whom later sat abed and drank, copiously—copiously.

When I say that they were naked, I mean that they were clothed, relentlessly and essentially clothed, even the tops of their heads covered with an inalienable hat.

When I say that they were naked, I mean that some of those who saw them also studied them, wrote of them, but one would then be found giving suck to a piglet or taking a wife in legal ceremony and the arguments would fall apart. Even the poems of praise were outdated in weeks.

When I do say that they were naked, I mean that they lacked the impression of weight and volume; one could chase them up, reach out and palpate their necks and yet feel no surer of them as things of real duration.

But their real duration was discovered at last when they vanished. They came all at once, and they went all at once. It seemed they were to be nobody’s sport.

And then:

A man ran for a train and caught it.

A man came into a secret and never told it.

A man kissed another man on the mouth and got the hell slapped out of him. (He never lost his hat.)

A man drove to the detention centre and detonated his bomb, then fled across a heat camera that tracked him. The heat camera tracked him live to a bog into which he waded out, in which he submerged himself, until his signature died. He was never caught. On the shore, by a tree, he left a ratty tramp’s coat.

These were tributes.

Myself: I have spoken to nobody friendly in months. I eat tuna-on-toast in my little brown garret and attempt to write. I spend my evenings laid up in bed, cold-calling people by voice-over-IP, trying to sell them insurance.

When I go running—always by night—I imagine that I’m Eadweard Muybridge, of chronophotography fame, having just killed my wife’s lover. Muybridge was acquitted for that in 1875, but I live in a different time.

When I think, as I run, of my wife’s dead lover—of my finger depressing the gun’s trigger, the bullet piercing his heart, of how he staggered backward into his bookshelf and conducted all his books, knick-knacks, and tchotchkes down onto the floor, on top of him—I know I’ll need to spend my life on the run—running in place against a black background—each minute movement an exquisitely-lit anatomy—a stationary plate of black-and-white impressions.

This, too, I tell myself, is a variety of escape. Just narrowly.

Crow Jonah Norlander

GREAT BLOOD by Zee Carlstrom

January 12, 2022 · Fiction

Every day, during his half-hour lunch break, Horace Median Dahl strolls along the ornamental concrete pathway that cuts through the center of Grace Hill Cemetery. During this restive walk, he eats his usual brown-bag lunch: a snack-sized sack of Doritos and a chicken and cheddar sandwich with BBQ sauce, the way his mama always makes it.

Today, however, Horace strays from the ornamental concrete path and tosses his mama’s lunch into the garbage. Unencumbered by tradition, he strides down a weedy gravel walkway that takes him into a dark corner of the cemetery, devouring a tilapia salad sandwich and a can of ranch-flavored Pringles he purchased from a deli.

He does this, makes these changes, because other things in his life need to change—bigger things than chips or lunchtime walking routes—and Horace believes he can start small and work his way large, hoping decisions are like atomic particles, minuscule molecules that, when combined, create universal shifts. The kinds of shifts that move a thirty-seven-year-old warehouse manager out of his mama’s spare bedroom and into the warm embraces of greater hopes and truer lovers, lovers of a sexual variety, with fascinating private organs and lips that taste, he imagines, nothing like BBQ sauce.

The gravel path crunches beneath his Asics, a comforting sound as he meanders past the crumbling graves, far older and poorer than the grand monuments lining the central pathway. Beneath the yellowing oaks and orangish maples, he pops his Pringles’ top and inhales the new-can smell. Intoxicating and vaguely alluring.

High on ranch-flavored dust and the potentiality of his future, Horace strolls toward a statue—a fat angel with a wreath of dead flowers on its head. Chuckling, he stops and observes the angel, which seems to stare into the place where Horace keeps his secrets. Then, he hears a lustful voice behind him.

“Hey there, big fella.”

Startled, Horace wheels toward the voice. There, on the other side of the path, he finds a middle-aged woman wearing a red-white-and-blue bikini. She’s seated on a gravestone with her arms resting on her knees, her head cocked, and her lips set with a curious smile.

“I assume you’re here cuz of my Craigslist advertisement,” the woman continues. “And if not, then I’m wonderin’ if you’d like to be my baby’s daddy.”

Horace nearly drops his chips but holds fast to the can. He studies the woman. She is not particularly attractive, but still out of the league he has come to accept as his own. Flesh bunches around the edges of her patriotic bikini, and her nose is the size and shape of a parrot’s. And yet, regardless of these and other shortcomings, Horace is drawn to the woman’s countless folds and ripples, and the question of fatherhood echoes in the meager vaults of his masculine mind.

The woman sighs. “Judgin’ by your obvious surprise, I’m gonna take it you haven’t read my Craigslist post. If that’s the deal, please lemme explain—”

She does explain, and Horace listens, nodding and smiling while the woman makes jokes about her father’s death, his kooky last request, his alarming insistence that she preserve their ancient bloodline, their ancestral greatness, the Knights Templar and the Freemasons, Benjamin Franklin and Joan of Arc. She says her first name is Guinevere, her last name is Magdalene, and her father specifically requested she breed a heroic descendant on his grave, taking as her mate an average stranger with poor eyesight and questionable prospects.

“I know it all sounds a little nutty,” Guinevere continues. “But your glasses are pretty thick, and your shirt’s too large, so I’m assumin’ you meet my daddy’s requirements.”

Horace stress-chews a mouthful of Pringles and swallows with difficulty. “I do.”

“Super.” Guinevere smiles—warm yellow teeth—and unties the strings binding her bikini bottom. With a flick of her wrist, she exposes herself.

Mortified, Horace averts his gaze, turning back to the fat angel with the dead flowers on its head.

“Oh my God,” he mutters. “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.”

“Relax.” The woman lays back on the grave and stares at the sky. “You got this.”

Horace shifts on his feet. He looks up and down the gravel path. Surely, there are hidden cameras in the bushes. Surely, this is not happening to him in real life. But then, it must be. He’s never had a dream before, not even during the day, and this is all too imperfect for fantasy. Too impossible.

“What are you waitin’ for?” murmurs Guinevere. “I’m offerin’ you everything.”

“I’m coming,” Horace whispers, stumbling forward, unzipping his khakis with his non-Pringles hand and wondering what mama would think if she knew he threw away her sandwich, her chips, her kindness.

“There ya go,” Guinevere coos as Horace climbs onto her body. “It’s only weird if we think about it.”

Horace clears his throat and avoids his thoughts. He drops the Pringles can into the grass. He does his best. Long seconds pass, and he tries to breathe through his nose, sparing Guinevere his fish-tinged breath. He moves like the men he’s seen in the videos. He moves like a man worthy of responsibility. He moves like a hero with a future, a house of his own, a life worth living. He grunts and struggles, and Guinevere sniffs and coughs.

“This don’t mean nothin’,” she mutters. “This ain’t for you or me.”

“I know,” Horace gasps, willing his body to cooperate, envisioning his eventual child. A genius, perhaps. A titan of industry. An eminent world leader who will forget his father entirely the way Horace has long tried to forget his own.

“Oh God,” Horace hisses. “Oh God, help us all.”

“Why you cryin’?” Guinevere asks, tenderly, but it’s too late. Lunch break is over. The Pringles are finished. Horace can already feel himself deflating, the great urge dying, the chance passing like time.

Crow Jonah Norlander

THE SHAPELESS by Gregory T. Janetka

January 10, 2022 · Fiction

When they told her how the body had been found thirty feet from the road by prisoners who were scouring the gutter for trash, the only thing she could think to ask was if there was any way to save his sperm. The police did their best to express their regret in broken English but she didn't hear a word, lost as she was in the minute details of DNA harvesting. Months had passed since then, or was it years? Maybe it was yesterday, who could tell? His body's blueprint might be gone from this earth but in its absence came flashes of body parts throughout the apartment: a forearm in the refrigerator, a jaw bone on the nightstand, a left leg—no longer able to support its own weight—crumpled up on the closet floor.

Neither had wanted a baby but the dream of reanimation, of scraping blood from the overgrown grass where he fell, only grew stronger. This life—escaping their country, building something new, traveling unsettled and joyful, burning bright and leaving their bloodlines to die—it was all they ever wanted. Their plans, never codified beyond such romantic ideals, were filled in as the need arose. When there was nowhere to live they bartered for an apartment, when they ran out of money they took the first jobs they were qualified for—he as a courier, her an English teacher. He enjoyed learning the city and surrounding towns on his bike, but hers was a hollow means to a paycheck. None of her coworkers had any higher ambition, any dream, any reason to live here other than survival. But to be fair, inspiration was a useless quality when students wanted nothing beyond a basic proficiency in the language that had come to dominate their own.

“Donorcycle.”

That's what the nurses called it, at least until they learned she was an American. After that, they didn't speak at all.

"Another donorcycle accident..."

She looked up the phrase. It wasn't a mistranslation but slang, a term to denote the propensity of healthy young men with healthy young organs to die riding motorcycles. It was a phrase accompanied by an eye roll that easily wrote off his entire life.

News of his death brought no word from home.

Home.

It was as silly a term as donorcycle. Home was where she came from, where she'd been stuck, like a bus terminal. With nowhere else to go she remained in the one-bedroom apartment, unsure where she'd find the next index finger, shoulder, or vertebrae, while his scent grew weaker and weaker.

Drowning out the silent apartment with an indecipherable TV soap opera, she lit the stove, put oil in the pan, and dropped in a dozen shishito peppers. It was the last thing she expected to find in a market in the Madrid countryside. One in ten was hot, they said, like Russian roulette.

Tossing the plastic bag into the trash she watched it fall on a fresh, pink human kidney that sat precariously atop a pile of torn junk mail and broken egg shells. Thinking nothing of it, she closed the lid as the doorbell rang. Every knock, every noise might be him—they never did let her see the body—but would he appear standing tall, his 6′ 3″ frame looming over her with the comfort and safety it brought? Or would it be the pile of mannequin parts that were left by the roadside?

At the door was neither, but rather a perfect circle that looked as if it were cut out of wax paper, hovering in midair. It moved forward with no deliberate speed, disappearing when it came into contact with her chest. As it hit, she felt the coarse sand of the Jersey shore beneath her toes, smelled the nitrite-rich, overcooked hot dogs of the boardwalk. Nothing else appeared and she closed the door.

The peppers popped and screamed, filling the place with choking black smoke. She removed the pan, turned off the gas, and threw open the small window high above the couch. Despite being hundreds of miles inland, salt air roared into the room. The sand beneath her feet shuddered at the taste and turned to mud, bringing with it the smell of fresh tar baking in suburban sunlight. She fell to the ground and rolled in the substance like a happy baby pig, unaware of its future. As the brown-black mess seeped into her skin she thrashed about, searching the muck for hidden body parts as if on a game show. Finding none, she fell onto her back, exhausted, and listened as the sound of crashing waves filled her ears. A rectangular column of water squeezed through the window like Playdoh, hung suspended for a moment, then rained down. It stank of dead fish and tasted like iced tea. Her belly full, she extracted herself and closed the window.

She stirred the peppers and watched the legs of oil skirt the edges of the pan. Grabbing one by the stem she bit down and her mouth swelled with heat and spice. When her throat hollered for relief she grabbed a second pepper. One by one she made quick work of the dozen, every one hotter than the last. Sweat poured from her forehead, armpits, and under her breasts.

The heat subsided, the smoke dissipated, and the water dried. Seated at the desk she stared past the blank computer screen to the space where a nothingness planted and grew fruit, colorless, tasteless and unsatisfying. She took out her phone and dialed his number—still disconnected. It would be reassigned one day. Feeling her belly, she dialed another number and walked outside. The stars, filled with lightning, pulsed as if in a power surge.

"Hello?"

"Hi mom."

"Dena. What is it?"

"Mom...I'm pregnant."

"Pregnant? What do you mean pregnant? Who could possibly be the father?"

"Everyone. Everyone in the whole world. Everyone who ever was and ever will be. Isn't it grand?"

Before her mother could answer she threw the phone to the sky. As it climbed and climbed she felt her belly again and watched as the phone joined the stars.

Crow Jonah Norlander

CALCULUS by Calvin Westra

January 5, 2022 · Fiction

Last to first, his girlfriend dumped him, he did not get the job, his accent sailed out the window of my car, and he sneezed harder than I’d ever seen before.

It was an incredible sneeze, the kind that has you spitting and slobbering over the windshield, catching your breath, feeling like something knocked the wind out of you.

We watched as the accent flapped over the median, through oncoming traffic, and off among the tumbleweeds.

I said, “Is that what I think it is?”

And he said, “Yeah, that’s right. My accent.”

It was a horrible accent and I’d never before heard him speak without it. It was like he was trying to imitate some British politician or celebrity or it was like he was trying to imitate someone who imitated a British politician or celebrity.

If he got too excited it went all over the place. He’d be telling a joke and out of nowhere he was John Cleese on research chemicals.

But I had never heard him speak without it so I had kind of thought it was real.

We pulled to the shoulder and searched for the accent but it was a windy day and it was clearly not coming back.

“That accent is long gone, bro,” I said and he told me he couldn’t do the job interview without it.

I told him the airport Starbucks probably would not care if he didn’t have an accent. I told him he might even be better off without it.

I didn’t have to tell him how important getting this job was because, like me, he had been wiping his ass with old magazine pages for weeks. But I told him anyway and I reminded him that earning a paycheck would mean returning to the world of luxury, of on-demand toilet paper.

He had gotten up early that morning, before the sun had dragged itself out, and he had been slamming all of our vodka and referring to it as “morning vodka.”

He had also smoked the last of our weed, taking massive hits out of the ice cream maker he had fashioned into a bong.

On top of that, we had pooled all of our change and used it to buy almost a gallon of gas.

And here we were, on the side of the highway, considering turning back.

He somehow knew he wouldn’t get the job but I didn’t believe him so I drove him to the interview anyway.

He was right, he didn’t get the job. He swore to me his whole life was over now, without the accent.

Next his girlfriend dumped him.

She called him mid afternoon the next day and told him she wanted to take a break. The last few times she had been at our apartment she had complained about things like how we didn’t have toilet paper or that he smelled pretty bad and wouldn’t ever shower, even when she hinted at it politely. He smelled like old socks (her words), ground beef (my words), and weed (objective).

“It’s the accent,” he told me. His eyes were huge and wet and red. He stared a thousand miles into the future and explained to me that without the accent all he would ever be to people was his stutter, his GED, his greasy hair, his inability to read social nuances, and so on.

He told me that I could not fathom all the things he knew about Calculus, while I sat at the desk we shared, trying to fill out my own job applications.

Hand to God, brother, I know unfa-fa-fathomable things, is exactly what he said and how he said it.

He had this job application on the desk and it had little boxes for your education: where you went, the years you went there, your graduation date, and your major. In hard to read cursive he had written his high school major as Calculus.

In reality, he never finished high school. He had dropped out because “it was just fights and bullshit.” If you didn’t want to eat shit every day you got your GED and that’s what he did.

Since I had first moved in with him, he had spent every afternoon scaring up weed at the park.

It took him all day but he could show up with whatever change he found in the couch cushions and hustle people for stems and seeds, for residue, for whatever. He would huddle over park benches and playground equipment waiting for people to pass him by. As soon as someone neared him a disconnected sentence would shoot from his mouth and straight into the mind of the person.

He could say anything he wanted. He didn’t even know what he was saying. But words slipped past his crooked and broken teeth and fluttered on the breeze, gently rocking and waving through the air until they found the right angle to slip into some bystander’s brain.

And what do you know, sure enough, that person had come to the park specifically to buy whatever stems and bullshit he was trying to sell for ten dollars or they had crossed town specifically to sell him whatever random shit weed excess they might have in a baggy somewhere on their person, for whatever change he was offering.

People served him for whatever pennies and nickels he was holding in his outstretched hand. People bought whatever weed-adjacent garbage he was offering at whatever price he named. He could talk the sun into orbiting the earth, so long as he didn’t think about it too much.

Back at the apartment, we smoked whatever he had scavenged. His fingers always spilling out of his hoodie holding “one last roach” that formed from the dust in his pockets.

“You can’t even fathom all the things I know about Calculus,” he says. He holds accumulated quantities. We smoke the weed his patience buys.

First to last, he explains to me he needs to get his accent back and then he’ll get a job and then he’ll win over his now ex-girlfriend.

He calls her, briefly manic, to tell her how he is going to track the accent down, somehow inhale it back into his being. But she never returns the calls.

He turns depressive, withdraws, sits quietly with the ice cream maker in his lap, inhaling forever and then trying to talk to me about the accent with a lung and a half of smoke tumbling out as he does.

He draws imperceptible lines between how hard he sneezed and the way the hiring manager fixated on his GED. He stuttered too much, he admits, but only because he was nervous, only because he couldn’t stop thinking about his accent jerking around in the breeze like an abandoned bag, like a helium balloon wrestled free of a toddler’s grip.

He explains scientifically how all this bullshit is because of the accent or its absence and if I have questions, he says he isn’t explaining it well, the words just aren’t there. But there is truth, he promises me, to what he is saying.

It’s the accent’s fault or the mad winds that propelled its send off.

Those mad winds or the gods who sent them.

Those gods or maybe us, the bastards who named the gods. If he doesn’t think too hard while he explains, it makes a sense too perfect for me to even write.

Crow Jonah Norlander

STORYTIME by Robyn Blocker

December 31, 2021 · Fiction

What’s up, beautiful people?

So y’all know how when you type the first couple letters of an email address and a list of contacts pops up—all the ones that start with that letter?

Like, imagine it’s “D” for Dave, the guy you’re hooking up with. Not Hot Dave with the boat or Quik Lube Dave with the ink, but the Dave whose brother OD’d back in ’99 at the rock pit behind the Big House. Right, Sad Dave. The Dave you send naked pictures to as an inside-joke cue that you want to buy from him. (Rumor alert! It was Pollie Carsen that gave Sad Dave’s brother that heroin!)

Tonight you’re on the edge. You’ve deprived yourself of spontaneous self-destruction for eighty-nine days and can’t take another minute of good choices that only feel good because they’re hard. You ache to raise hell you’re too old for: to bust windows and noses, floor pedals, run reds, blaze bowls, break hearts, tag bridges and burn them and screw in the ashes.

You’re gonna send Sad Dave some spank bank selfies, so you type “D,” but here’s what happens: since you’re always trying to do ten tasks at once to keep your mind off wonderful things that’ll kill you, you somehow get the cursor positioned one contact name below Dave’s, on the email of your daughter, the YouTube influencer who’s gotten big telling stories about her life, her day, her peeps, her fam, her world, and the social injustices in it. People love her for her self-awareness, her willingness to own her flaws, her unending desire to do the painful dirty work of fixing them.

Like Dave, her name starts with D. You were seventeen, still a silly romantic, when you had D’Laynie, and you wanted all your future kids to be D’s just like their daddy. He was not named Dave, but you’ve forbidden yourself from speaking his name ‘cause it’ll make you think of him, and that’ll make you cry. (Rumor alert! Pollie Carsen gave D-Boy herpes and smoked his first two child support checks before he died in a 4-car pileup on I-35!)

You think, Hoooo girl, do NOT send those pics to D’Laynie. Think she hates you now? Just wait. You start to fix your error, to click UP back to Dave’s name. But of all the bad choices you could make right now, he’s the familiar one. What you want is to shut your eyes, squeeze your nose, and cannonball down into a moment whose depth you cannot gauge from this height.

You close your eyes and click a name. Open eyes, but don’t look at who’s getting the pictures. Just SEND.

You’ve maybe just bashed your life out on a new kind of rock bottom, and you feel more alive than you have in months. You sit back, take a selfie, delete it. Habit. (Your grandma Belle-Ruth always asks, “Who you trying to erase, girl?”) Finish your Diet Coke, gargle, go to bed. And before sleep comes, think, There’s 90 days clean again, Pollie Carsen. Aren’t you getting tired of starting over?

Late morning. Wake up. Shit’s hit the fan. Four missed calls from Belle-Ruth. One voicemail. She says, “Pollie, honey, did you… say… something to D’Laynie? She’s gone and made a…You know what? Just come over.”

Heart pounding, you check your inbox. Nothing. For one moment, you think the pics went to Sad Dave after all. You check your Sent mail. Wrong. She got them.

You go to D’Laynie’s YouTube page. She has 100K subscribers and a new profile pic, a dramatic ¾ silhouette of herself on the balcony of the Austin apartment she shares with two friends. Looking good: sunlight glowing on honey-golden skin. Tall and twiggy. Red lips, teeth perfect. Cold-shoulder white blouse and huge, yellow-mirrored shades. Great hair. His hair, his general look. No shit. As if your radioactive redheadedness could have elbowed its way past D-Boy’s black curls. Recessive genes, you think. Recessive. Recede. Back away. Back away from your baby in every way and stay far, far away.

What happened was this: you fucked up bigly. Hid meth in her diapers, left her alone while you partied. Shit like that.

When your mom adopted her and kicked you out, you went on a grand couch-surfing tour of all the drug dens in the county. At some point, you realized, Shit, this is bad! Got clean. Moved in with your grandma Belle-Ruth out in the sticks. Realized, Shit, I’m a mother! Presented sober self to mom and begged to see D’Laynie. Got permission. Freaked out. Showed up high to special arranged lunch. Permission revoked. Got clean again. Finally got lunch with D’Laynie, but by this time she was old enough to give you THE most devastating burns to grace the air this side of the former Mason Dixon Line. (Girl already had a way with words!) Got unclean, the dirtiest of uncleans. Belle-Ruth said, Get clean, darling. You said, Not this time, B.R. Went to your mom’s house, pointed a gun at her in the kitchen and strongly suggested she give you money, not realizing D’Laynie was hiding in the bathroom with the house phone, adding a real doozy to the list of bad moments involving her mess of a mama.

There’s more, but it’s a rinse-and-repeat-for-fifteen-years kind of thing, if you get me?

So look. Here’s where we stand now: When anyone asks, you say you’ve seen, like, three of D’Laynie’s videos. Hey, you’re not some estranged-daughter-stalker weirdo! And hey, who’s got that kind of free time, right? Hah hah!

Straight talk, though? You are that stalker weirdo, you do have that kind of free time, and you’ve watched every woke public service announcement, storytime, and social commentary D’Laynie ever made until you could imagine how it’d be to chill with her on a couch in an alternate reality where you never screwed up: girl-talk, green smoothies, yoga, and a general veneer of intimacy so foreign to you that you can only insert it in your fantasies through symbols: y’all get the same color nail polish by accident; you know when she’s due for a period, an oil change, a new boyfriend, a new girlfriend, another round of under-eye filler (“Storytime: Yes I’m Vain, Yes I’m Working On It, Until Then I No Longer Look Exhausted.”)

Two weeks ago, upon discovering just how much time you spend watching D’Laynie’s videos, Belle-Ruth suggested you take a two-week break from online stalking (“Not healthy, honey.”) Now it occurs to you that the beginning of your D’Laynie withdrawal coincided with the beginning of a steep increase in reckless behavior: skipping brushing. Not checking if you got your house keys before you go out to your car. Unprotected sex with Sad Dave. Sending nudes to your daughter.

D’Laynie’s posted four new videos since the last time you lurked: “I’m a Feminist but I’m Trying to Get Thicc;” “Storytime: My Indian Trip Showed Me I Was a Materialistic Brat”; “Storytime: I Adopted a Rescue Dog!;” and “Storytime: My Mother.”

Your heart: one half plummets with shame, the other soars with unexpected hope. You’ve thrown an explosive at your daughter, and if nothing else, it’s blasted a hole in your irrelevance to her.

Pace. Breathe. Push play on “Storytime: My Mother,” and there’s your girl frowning at her lap in devastating silence, face scrubbed, eyelids naked and pallid, hair wrapped in a green silk scarf. Night face. Vulnerability face. God, you’ve missed her face. Voice husky with feeling, she goes: “Yeah, I…don’t even know how to start this one…” and cuts and tries again.

It’s 22.36 minutes long. You watch it all. Belle-Ruth calls you twice. Decline. Decline. All your attention is balanced on this moment. You’re absorbed in the words D’Laynie is choosing for your story: “Small town, infamous juvenile delinquent, teen mother, high school dropout, substance abuse, constantly in jail or rehab, self-destructive, scary, broken promises, a parasite, a liar, a leech on my great-grandmother, pathetic…”

Her anger sings from the screen. She holds nothing back: all your antics and trespasses. But for whatever reason, she’s chosen not to mention the most recent terrible thing you’ve done: your body: her inbox. And she finishes the story with this: I want to forgive her, and I will one day, but not yet. And when I do, it will be for me, not for her.

You try to remind yourself that this is not good. This is a screwup. This is endgame kind of shit, and yet you still have the perverse sense that it’s a beginning. D’Laynie’s either thinking about you right now or trying hard to push you out of her mind. This is more than you’ve had with her since the long-ago days when you could have had everything. Fuck, man, this is something.

Three minutes later, you’re rounding off onto the gravel drive of the Big House, a red brick testament to old money that finds its way to you only in the conditional drops and driblets that Belle-Ruth’s good sense allows. With more money, you’d be dead. With less, panhandling up in town at the V.A. hospital, the Baptist Church, the Quik Lube, Buck’s BBQ.

A portion of these Carsen driblets finances your pick-up, another portion the single-wide trailer you live in a quarter mile behind the Big House. Your trailer’s next to a cluster of sun-bleached rocks and the lake where, twenty years ago, thirty teenagers drank and smoked and swam for your eighteenth birthday while Sad Dave’s brother laid down in the bed of his F-150 and never woke up.

Belle-Ruth’s sitting up on the balcony that runs the length of the second floor, hand shading eyes, batwing sleeve hanging down to her hips. She’s as skinny as you yet favors voluminous, gauzy tunics that billow, float, and alight on her bones with the deliberation of a butterfly landing on a barbed wire fence. “It’s the Pisces in me,” she always says of her fluttering clothes. To this, you always reply, “You old ho! How’d you fit a Pisces in there?” Gets her every time.

At the kitchen table, you and Belle-Ruth break the silence at the same moment.

You: “So, I watched it.”

Belle-Ruth: “Did you see it?”

“Jinx!” you say.

Belle-Ruth waits for more. When nothing comes, she smacks her little pink lips and sets down her coffee cup. “Pollie, why’d D’Laynie just up and make that out of the blue? What put you on her mind?”

You meet Belle-Ruth’s eyes and shrug. “Beats me. Maybe she saw an Amtrak go off rail and hit a bus and was like, ‘Hey! Speaking of trainwrecks…’”

“Hey, now, none of that,” Belle Ruth says. She fixes her sleeve, which has flopped up inside-out over her elbow like the ear of a hound, and frowns. “You didn’t say anything to her?”

“In response?”

“Beforehand.”

“Nuh-uh.” You take a big sip of coffee to wash down this bullshit. “Maybe she just needed to vent. Maybe the pain was building up in her and went kaboom last night.”

Belle-Ruth’s pink lips pucker into an angry little bubblegum-like wad. “Hell, honey, that pain was at the bottom of her lake. She dredged it up herself for the Internet for some thumbs up.” She shakes her head. “I gotta say, I’m disappointed. First that stupid tattoo, now this.”

You fix breakfast while Belle-Ruth takes her shower. When the food’s on the table, you take out your phone and check the comments on “Storytime: My Mother.” The most recent are:

“Incredible how one of the kindest humans on earth came from a selfish bitch.”

“Your mother is a narcissist.”

“Hugs to you, D’L! You are SO strong! Anytime you forget just remember you ARE NOT LIKE HER.”

“Forget her. Some people are just toxic, and if healthy people try to love them, they get poisoned.”

D’Laynie’s pinned her own comment to the top of the scroll: gratitude for everyone’s kind words and a call on her fans to donate to a substance abuse research institute.

You close the app. Something’s trying to get your attention. It’s in your head, positioned right behind your conscious thoughts at pervy proximity. You know what it is, and that’s why you won’t turn your full attention to it. You take a selfie and delete it. Maybe Belle-Ruth’s right. Maybe your selfies are a thing, like you’re trying to delete more than pictures. Or maybe you’re just trying to see what the universe, your sole and constant audience, sees whenever you pretend to ignore the thing in your head that wants you to look directly at it. The wanting.

In her video “Storytime: How I Learned to Stop Feeling Superior for Being Agnostic,” D’Laynie concluded, “What I believe, and this is just my belief, okay? Is that the universe, God, or whatever you’re called upon to name it, is deaf. It doesn’t hear prayers, thoughts, hopes, or wishes. It only sees the effects of what we do and say to other people on Earth. Get it? Doing and saying are how we petition the universe. So please, leave a comment and tell me: what are you doing on Earth, and why are you doing this?”

What are you doing? You’re digging up the number for D’Laynie you’ve had buried deep in your phone for years—the number you filched once from Belle-Ruth’s handwritten contact book and never dialed.

You’re hitting Call on the number, and you’re waiting and shaking. The third ring gives way to an electronic screech and an out of service notice.

Now what are you doing? You’re starting an email to Sad Dave. (No texts on days he’s got his kid.) Lifting your shirt, unclasping your bra, taking a pic of your boobs.

Why are you doing this? Because the gravity is strong around the old rabbit hole.

You never send the email because a clatter of rolling thumps and a scream comes from the direction of the stairs. You run for the sound, and there’s poor little Belle-Ruth sprawled on the landing, groaning terribly, face twisted in pain, ankle fractured.

Standing outside the open door of Belle-Ruth’s hospital room, you overhear your mom advise her to recover in a nursing home, where she’ll be taken care of by “good, trained people who know what they’re doing.”

Belle-Ruth will have none of that. “Pollie will do just fine, thank you.”

“Pollie?” your mom’s voice brays in a tone suggesting they aren’t talking about the same person. “Pollie will cook? Clean?” She lowers her voice. “Not steal your painkillers?”

A blue-scrubbed nurse walks by in the corridor where you’re lurking. You recognize her from high school, and judging from her uh-oh look, she obviously recognizes you—the “most likely” for all unprintable yearbookisms.

“Hey, how you doing?” you say.

She shakes her head and keeps walking.

When Belle-Ruth gets discharged, you move into the Big House with her. Note to self, you think on your first night. Don’t steal painkillers.

You first shacked up here at seventeen, after your dad threw a suitcase at you while your mom swung a bawling D’Laynie up on her hip and screamed, “Go break your grandmother’s heart now that you’re done with ours!”

Back then, you chose the bedroom at the very end of the hall so that Belle-Ruth wouldn’t smell your cigarettes. And if she ever got the inclination to eavesdrop on your phone calls, it’d be a lonnnnng walk from her room to yours—plenty of time for her to rethink her lack of trust in you. But now, this room reminds you too much of things that’ll ruin your life since you spent so much time here thinking of them, and this reminding immediately leads to a reflexive wanting. So this time, you choose the room that was your mom’s when she was a kid. The one you never entered, since it made you think of her.

You’re lying in your bed in this clean, safe space one afternoon, taking and erasing selfies and debating whether or not to start re-stalking D’Laynie, when you hear the crunch of tires on gravel. You step out on the balcony and glimpse a blue hybrid wending through the tree-lined drive.

Outside, you start down the sidewalk, passing rose trellis, birdbath, pissing-boy fountain, and the rusted remains of your childhood swimming pool—a repurposed cattle trough.

One rear door of the visitor’s car is open. A shadow moves in the backseat. At your approach, the shadow backs out and becomes a leggy girl in mom jeans and a vintage college-logo sweatshirt. She bends to flick a grasshopper off her leg, and you see that one side of her head is shaved to display a tiny tattoo of the words “Nothing but the Truth” on the scalp above her ear.

“D’Laynie,” you say.

She turns to you, and your own reflection, fishbowl-distorted, peers out from the lenses of her yellow-mirrored sunglasses.

Right when normal people would hug, you and your daughter square off and face each other across seven feet of deaf, watchful universe, kicking the silence back and forth with stony game faces. The spring air is neither hot nor cold, the sun’s effect a treat for Texans: blinding bright but not hot. “Yankee Sunshine,” Belle-Ruth calls it. You never notice weather unless it’s extreme, but today, in this charged silence, the neutrality is screaming.

D’Laynie finally tilts her head back. “’Sup, Pollie?” she says with an ironic I-don’t-really-say-words like ‘sup’ intonation.

“Hey,” you croak. “Why aren’t you in school?”

D’Laynie winces and looks up at the sky, like Sky, can you believe this idiot? “Spring break?” she says. “Hello?”

“Ah, right. Well, what you doing way out here, girl?”

“I want to say hi to GG. Plus, Destiny needs to stretch her legs.”

Destiny needs to…Are you supposed to know what that means? Is it an allusion to your past, some poetic way to call a truce? You stare. D’Laynie gestures to the backseat. You look inside. Huddled on the floor as far from the open door as possible is a small white mop of a dog with an orange ribbon stuck to the front of its collar.

“Hi, fwuffbucket!” you coo. The dog raises sad, guilty eyes, trembles, whimpers, tries to turn and bops her head against the door. You step away, look at D’Laynie, twist your body into an apology.

D’Laynie takes off her sunglasses, rolls her eyes, and says, “Nah, it’s fine. Everything scares her. That’s her thing.”

It takes D’Laynie a while to coax Destiny from the car. The trick is accomplished with a strategic combination of treats and ignoring.

Entering the Big House is a blur in your memory. While D’Laynie and Belle-Ruth hug and greet, you step back and recede from the scene like a Victorian servant.

By the time D’Laynie is next to Belle-Ruth on the pull-out in the downstairs living room, telling her about the rescuing of dogs, you’re cross-legged on the floor getting sniffed up by Destiny.

“And like, obviously, my followers are super supportive and motivating,” D’Laynie says. She frowns and scratches her head. “Wow. Okay. So I’m suddenly hearing how creepy that sounds. ‘My followers.’”

“It sure does,” Belle-Ruth says, “but it’s not your fault that’s what they’re called, honey.”

D’Laynie takes out her phone and starts typing. “Sorry, gimme a sec. Want to make a note about that.”

“What’s the orange ribbon for on the collar?” asks Belle-Ruth.

D’Laynie glances from her screen over to Destiny. “Oh,” she says, still typing, “that’s for awareness of at-risk-animals. She’s had so much trauma. Her first owners were these assholes who would hit her and kick her and stuff.” She finishes typing and puts the phone down. “Sorry, rude,” she says. “Yeah, then she had puppies, and they separated her from them too soon, and she got super anxious and would pee everywhere. Then she went to this guy who’s, like, all about rehabbing traumatized dogs. She got comfortable with him, but his boyfriend moved in, and Destiny was like ‘yeah nah, you suck’ and bit him when he was giving her food.”

Destiny is sitting now, gazing up at you. You think to her, Is this true? Do you bite the hands of the people who feed you?

“Then she went to this lady who takes in lots of rescues,” D’Laynie goes on, “but they never accepted her in their pack for some reason, and she got really depressed and anxious and started nipping and destroying stuff, so back to the shelter. She got good again, but, you know, a lot of people aren’t comfortable adopting a dog with that kind of history. When I got her, she was on the Kill List.”

You cock your head at Destiny, think to her, Kill List sucks, don’t it, baby girl? She puts a paw on your knee, like Girl, don’t I know it?

“Is that how she got her name?” Belle-Ruth asks. “‘Destiny?’”

“Ugh. I know,” D’Laynie says. “It sounds like a stripper name. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But that’s the name she knows, so I kept it. Hah. Not that it’s getting me any points. She’s never even jumped in my lap, dude. Not once. And she’s a lap dog. Sometimes she won’t even eat when I’m in the same room as her.”

“Aw, give it more time,” Belle-Ruth says. “What’s it been? A month?”

D’Laynie nods and frowns. “Yeah. Whatever, you know? My friend’s dog didn’t warm up to him for like, a year.”

You pipe up from your corner: “I was this close to naming you ‘Destiny.’”

Everyone turns to you, even Destiny herself, who’d been engaged in a butt-scratch. You’re holding one hand up, index finger and thumb nearly touching. “Heads D’Laynie,” you say, “tails Destiny.”

Belle-Ruth squawks a laugh.

D’Laynie yells, “Dude, no! I would never forgive you!”

“It actually came up tails,” you add, “but I like to give fate a run for its money.”

D’Laynie pulls a pillow over her head, falls forward, face-plants into it charmingly, and gives a muffled scream. Destiny does not like that shit at all. She yelps and runs from the room like there’s a fire under her furry little ass.

Lemme just say: the Big House is not the kind of place where you want to lose a tiny, freaked-out dog. Lotsa ins. Lotsa unders.

Destiny’s not in the downstairs bathroom; not under the kitchen, dining room, or pool tables, in the music room under the piano, in your late grandpa’s old office, or the laundry room.

“Upstairs, then,” you say, and D’Laynie’s expression darkens.

“I forgot how huge this place is,” she says, following you up, adding in a softer voice, “You know, considering there are people in Hong Kong literally living in cages, it’s almost obscene.”

You have no clue what to say to this. “Destiny!” you call out.

Destiny’s not under Belle-Ruth’s bed, the table with her sewing machine, or in the piles of wispy Piscean fabrics in the corner. Not in the attached bath, any of the bedrooms or closets on the back-facing side of the house, or the room that was yours twenty years ago, its carpet still littered with cigarette burns. You’re bending, stooping, crawling on all fours, craning neck. You’re invested. Not since hide-and-seek with your cousins have you searched so hard for something wholesome. An adventure—just you and D’Laynie! Today, you’re going to be by her side at the happy moment she finds her lost dog. From now on, every memory of the relief she’s about to feel will be associated with you. You’re shaking with giddiness, one dog away from bursting into laughter.

What’s weird is how D’Laynie talks nonstop as you search, remarking on even the unremarkable with the blasé fluency of a real estate agent high on cough syrup. “This room’s pretty except, ugh, drapes and ruffles everywhere, come on, GG, let’s exit the ‘80s, and ah, a bathroom that smells like Chanel No. 5 and ancient rolls of toilet paper. Leaving ruffles, we find ourselves in oh, look, it’s a Mad Men set.”

At one point, she stops and interrupts this syrupy tour with an exclamation: “Where is she? This is seriously annoying!” It becomes plain as day to you that you’re the sole explorer on this mommy/daughter quest—your companion was never feeling it.

As you and D’Laynie enter your bedroom, the final unturned stone, you see what has happened and what will happen: your distracted ass left the balcony door ajar earlier. D’Laynie will find Destiny out there, gather her up, and leave. And nothing will be changed. Something epic was supposed to happen on this dog search but didn’t. Maybe it needed more time. Maybe one of you missed a cue, dropped a line. Or maybe one of you, sensing a portal to connection, bricked it up with words.

Following D’Laynie out the balcony door, you think, Please, God, give me more time with her. The universe doesn’t hear prayers, though; it only sees what we do. What you do as you walk onto the balcony is turn the inside lock when pulling the door shut. You haven’t touched that lock in years. You don’t ask yourself which direction locks and which unlocks, don’t pause to test it. Maybe you’ll be lucky. Don’t pause to wonder whether locked or unlocked is lucky.

Destiny’s sitting on the far edge of the balcony, gazing at the pastures beyond like she’s considering buying the place. When D’Laynie approaches, she raises her hackles and growls.

“Whoa. Okay, baby girl,” D’Laynie says. But her eyes don’t say okay baby girl to you. They say, Well fuck you, too, dog. “Gonna get her treats,” she says, and heads for the door.

You put your hands on the rail, shut your eyes, flinch when you hear the clunk of the unyielding handle behind you. The sound reminds you of being handcuffed—not in the fun way. You wonder what is wrong with you, what possessed you, what did you expect?

“Uh. Pollie?” D’Laynie says.

You try the handle yourself as if there’s some trick to it, then try the doors of the other two front-facing bedrooms. All locked.

So we’re waiting, right? And D’Laynie’s pacing at wedding procession speed. Step . . . swing arms . . . step. This gives her plenty of time at non-talking-distance from you. Eventually, at the opposite end of the balcony, she starts her favorite yoga flow from that video she uploaded last winter with her fitness friend. You watch from the other end, mirror neurons firing hard. You’ve followed along to that workout a million times.

When her phone rings, D’Laynie leaps out of warrior pose and answers it.

“Billy Reese!” Belle-Ruth, breathless, triumphant, announces over speaker. “Just got to the feed store over in town but’ll swing by here on his way home. Hot damn, I’m good. Second person I called!”

“How long?” D’Laynie asks.

“Oh. An hour, maybe?”

D’Laynie raises her head to the balcony roof and groans. “Dude, there’s nobody close?”

A pause.

“You . . . are . . . welcome,” Belle-Ruth says, and oh shit, you hear it—tension, compaction, the mama-bear-in-the-box winding up.

D’Laynie laughs. “Sorry. Thank you! It’s just what are we supposed to do out here for an hour?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Belle-Ruth answers in a sarcastic little tune. “Maybe chat? It’s not like you and your mother don’t have anything to talk about.”

“That’s interesting,” D’Laynie says, examining her fingernails. “And just what are we supposed to talk about?”

“She saw the video, honey. Storytime. And believe me, I get it. She has not been an angel.”

“Oh my God,” D’Laynie mouths, rolling her eyes.

“But your mother’s trying to turn her life around, and putting the worst parts of her out there for the world like that so total strangers can kick her? Nuh-uh. Completely uncalled for.”

“GG, you ‘re cutting out,” says D’Laynie, her voice tight. “Can’t hear you. Call you back later.” She ends the call, tilts her head back, crosses her arms, and gives you a vinegary grin. “Uncalled for, huh?”

“I know,” you say. “I know.”

“For the record, I have nothing to say to you, there’s nothing I want to hear from you, and I’m not sorry for the video.”

“I know. You shouldn’t be. I deserved it.”

She makes an exasperated sound and flips her palm up. “It wasn’t for you. It wasn’t some punishment. It had nothing to do with you. It just happened to be about you.”

You nod. “I know.”

“Would you stop saying that?”

Destiny is zig-zagging across the balcony, button nose glued to the concrete. You sit in a deck chair and watch her stubby tail bloop back and forth in enjoyment of invisible ecstacies. “I just want you to know—” you begin.

D’Laynie claps loudly, and Destiny flinches. “Nope. Not happening,” she says. Her eyes are wide and locked to yours, mouth alternating between a grin and a grimace. The clap, you realize, was for you. You feel an anger you don’t have the right to feel, so you drop it and stomp it into ashes.

“What’s not happening?” you ask.

“You and I are not talking.”

“So why did you come today?” you ask. “You knew I was here, right?”

D’Laynie looks like she’s trying to keep the lid on a wild laugh. “Yesssss, Pollie, yesssss. And that is the point. You really think people can trust you? Like people can just believe you’re not, like, I don’t know, getting high and trashing the house and begging GG not to say anything about it?”

You’re offended, but you can’t be, so you’re not. You’re disappointed in your daughter’s meanness to you, but you can’t be, so you’re not. You’re sad that her on-screen persona is for everybody but you, sad you don’t count as an audience. Sad that the decisions you’ve made, even the ones you had no say in, have rendered you voiceless. You can be sad. Nobody minds you feeling sad. What you can’t do (because you did it too many times before, exploited it, manipulated and gaslit with it) is allow yourself the luxury of crying.

So you just nod and say, “Okay, well, that’s understandable. That’s fair.”

Then this happens: Destiny zips past D’Laynie, jumps into your lap, and starts spinning out a comfy spot on your thighs.

“Oh, come on!” D’Laynie says. “Seriously?” She puts her hands under Destiny’s belly and starts to lift (which you can tell right away is a big, big mistake, but you say nothing because your brain’s too busy learning what it feels like to be trusted this much). Destiny snarls and growls, flailing, enraged, squirming like she’s caught on a hook. D’Laynie, stunned by the reaction, holds her at arm’s length until Destiny manages one good twist that brings her jaws within snapping distance of D’Laynie’s skin.

D’Laynie screams, drops Destiny back into your lap, and slaps the dog’s rump hard. Destiny’s response is a cry so angry, offended, and disappointed that you can almost feel it resonating in your own throat, a proxy for your disallowed feelings.

Destiny scrambles up your body, climbing like you’re a cliff wall, claws scratching your chest. You don’t mind. You welcome it. This is the pain chain: You hurt D’Laynie, so D’Laynie hurt Destiny, so Destiny hurts you.

When Destiny’s muzzle is next to your ear, you stroke her fur and tell her it’s okay. Her orange ribbon is coming loose. Don’t fix it. Let D’Laynie notice it and see it as symbolic and feel punished by it.

D’Laynie has backed away. She breathes fast in choppy bursts. “I am so sorry,” she whispers. “I don’t know why I did that. I swear I have never, ever done that.”

You raise your eyebrows, and D’Laynie shakes her head as if the brows had spoken. She raises her arms up over her head, guilty hands open wide, eyes pouring. “How could I do that? What is wrong with me? Why did I do that?”

There I am in her, you think. You want to wound her, just a little.

“Because you’ve done everything right,” you say, “everything you were supposed to, but she still doesn’t like you, and that pisses you off.”

“No,” D’Laynie says. There’s more fight in this word than is warranted, and you know that you were right. She has been punished.

Speak her language, you think now. You can do it, you’ve seen every upload. You know exactly who she wants to be. “You’re not used to not being liked,” you say, “because you’re an honest-to-God amazing person who gets treated like one most of the time. But this dog’s giving you insane shade that probably feels pretty personal, so it’s screwing with your self-esteem and your mental health.”

For a second, she looks like she’s about to tell you you’re an idiot, but instead drops to the ground and buries her face in her hands. “Oh my God,” she says. She cries a little, then laughs a little about the crying. She raises her head, wipes her face, says, “You’re actually right, dude. How are you actually right? Like, how did you know that?”

You know how, but you don’t tell her—not then, at least. You know because Destiny’s a creature in stories, and so are you, and there’s nothing more enraging than a difficult character who doesn’t understand they burned out the audience long ago—that it’s time to end happy now so that everyone who rooted and fought for them through all that drama gets the warm fuzzies they deserve.

Instead of answering, you say, “You should give her to somebody else.”

“I can’t,” she answers into the back of her hand. “She’s been dicked around too much already.”

“Hey, if this is how it is between you two, keeping her may be dicking her around, too.”

“But I can’t just tell everybody, ‘Oh, I’m gonna adopt this dog. This is the right thing to do, and I’m gonna do it,’ and then say, ‘Oh, never mind! It sucked. It was too hard.’ Do you have any idea how that would look? Like, what kind of message would that send to everybody?” She rubs a hand through her hair slowly, thinking, and adds, “Plus, like, that poor dog.”

You’re about to ask, Who is ‘everybody?’ Who’s looking? but then remember there are thousands of everybodies for D’Laynie, countless souls who get off on watching her be an amazing human being.

Out on the road ahead, the red pick-up truck of Billy Reese, your rescuer, is moving toward the Big House turn-in.

“I’ll tell you what you do,” you say.

The sun just set. D’Laynie still has an hour-long drive ahead, but she had to charge her cell. Now she’s walking around Belle-Ruth’s kitchen positioning items, reconsidering, shifting them an inch to the left or right: Destiny’s leash and harness heaped nonchalantly on the kitchen table (but not so nonchalantly that you couldn’t recognize them for what they are in a single glance); bag of dog food in a corner of Belle-Ruth’s pantry, label conveniently smoothed out and readable; Destiny in her plush bed in the middle of the kitchen floor—obviously not the bed’s forever-space, but suitable for the opening montage of what needs to be D’Laynie’s most powerful, transcendent, realest storytime ever—the live-streamed tale of how two scared, struggling, at-risk souls found comfort and courage in each other, and how, without even trying to, they showed the world they belonged together.

You wheel Belle-Ruth over to a spot that will be off-camera. “Sure you wanna do this?” she asks. She’s looking at you, but it’s D’Laynie who answers:

“Oh, absolutely. It’s best when the feels are still steaming.” She unplugs her phone from the charger, licks her lips. “Ready, P?” she asks—voice encouraging, eyes a little worried. Maybe she knew Belle-Ruth was talking to you and didn’t want you to have time to consider take-backs.

You nod. “Ready.”

She counts down from three and hits Record. You and Belle-Ruth stay hidden as D’Laynie walks softly around the kitchen, silent, camera taking in everything dog-related. Good stuff. You can feel the mystery already.

When she’s got it all, D’Laynie sets the phone on top of a coffee can, sits at the kitchen table, smiles, waves with both hands, and says,

“What is up, my beautiful people? What you just saw is not my kitchen, but yes, that is my dog, Destiny. You guys will not believe what has happened! I . . . have got a story . . . for you. Where do I even start? Um, okay. First, you guys know it’s spring break . . .”

While D’Laynie goes on, you start thinking about stories, how people always fuss about finding the true one. As if every situation’s got one real version out there the universe accepts as gospel. As if there aren’t different interpretations, different storytellers, villains becoming heroes and funny parts becoming sad parts with a single switch of perspective.

As if the universe listens to stories at all and doesn’t just stare at our hands and hearts, like, Hey, creature, what are you doing, and why?

“ . . . and then I got locked on a balcony in the middle of nowhere for an hour and a half with Destiny and Pollie. Y’all already know Destiny. Well, this . . . is Pollie.”

On cue, you walk into the shot, sit down next to D’Laynie, and wave. But your heart sinks: you barely recognize yourself. You look no different than usual, yet you look so wrong on your daughter’s screen. Why are you next to her? What did you do? What the hell is this? Whatever it is, you can’t hold onto it. Too much. Too soon. Something in you will fuck this up or die trying. You need the familiar, a return to status quo, despite the horrors that live there.

In the last moments before your story begins, you know exactly what you’ll do when you finish telling it: text Dave some skin.

It’s okay. Maybe you won’t open the bag. Maybe you’ll just hold it.

You’d never just hold it.

Oh, no. Are you doing this again? You’re gonna do this again.

Please, please, please, universe, leave me a comment and tell me not to do this again.

“Pollie!” D’Laynie says, turning to you, sparkling with forgiveness. “What do you want to say to all the beautiful people out there?”

Crow Jonah Norlander

THE DOGS WENT BACK ON ALL FOURS by Evelyn Winters

December 29, 2021 · Fiction

The man went out to get the mail. He opened the mailbox and looked inside. There were envelopes and a magazine. The magazine was Gourmet. It was a monthly for his wife, but his wife was dead. The periodical people probably didn’t know she died. If they do find out will they cancel her subscription? he wondered.

The night’s air was brisk and clear. Walking weather. The street was quiet.

He was one of those sad men you see walking around with their eyes on the pavement. Trudged in the rain. Trudged under the sun. Dragging his feet. But now that his wife was dead he held his head high constantly alert, on the lookout for her whereabouts. There were times he swore he saw her sitting in a tree or hang-gliding above in the open sky, but it always turned out to be various breeds of birds: ravens, owls, songbirds, woodpeckers, vultures.

The man had an urge to bring the magazine to his wife, even if she turned out to be a bird. He crossed the street, straight ahead to the sidewalk. The street lamps gave intermittent light. Enough for him to read a few sentences. It was a cooking magazine. His wife used to cook the most amazing meals: Boeuf Bourguignon, Bouillabaisse, Crêpes Suzette, and always with gobbles of red wine.

The man imagined the writer of the articles to be his wife. Every published word was hers. He read as he walked, sometimes sticking his hand out to pull a leaf off a tree or pluck a rose from a rose bush.

Around midnight the neighborhood dogs began to follow him. They were nice, but had that look, as if they could turn into something completely different than Dog, perhaps another species altogether. The dogs spread out from sidewalk to sidewalk.

While walking (now in the middle of the street) he thought about his wife’s flat feet. She liked to put her big feet in the air when making love. He’d hitch her ankles over his shoulders and go to work.

“This is your job,” she’d say. “Fulltime.”

“Could use some benefits,” he’d say. “A 401k.”

“You can have it all!” she’d say, “Direct deposit.”

For mysterious reasons this sort of banter made them climax at the same time, every time.

As a kid the man was known for breaking things: lamps, windows, mirrors. But also other stuff like woodstove pipes, globes, doorknobs, and once he broke a piano key. He kept that key in his underwear drawer. He never got around to telling his wife why he kept it.

The man broke off a branch of a maple tree and busted a mailbox.

“I haven’t broken anything in so long,” said the man. “Feels good.”

Every time a mailbox fell the dogs would yelp.

The man decided to take the On Ramp to the highway. There wasn’t much traffic, but every so often a car would slowly swerve back and forth behind the dogs until ambling off the exit in defeat. The man didn’t care about drivers, he was on a mission to find his dead wife.

“She’s probably swimming in a clear blue ocean,” he said. “She loved to swim.” Then he closed his eyes and pictured her big flippers kicking the water behind her.

The man began walking on all fours.

“When you’re as broken as me you can walk on all fours,” he said. “Mind as well.”

He looked behind him and noticed the dogs up on their hind legs. When the man stood the dogs went back on all fours as if to rebalance the universe.

***

Around two in the morning a woman his height, his build, his exact gait, came beside and matched him stride for stride. Her hair was short like his. She was thin, but wore a yellow sun dress. Her breasts were on the smaller side.

“There you are,” he said. She looked like his cousin, Rosina. “I haven’t seen you since Christmas at Noni’s!”

“You used to look under my dress,” she said.

“It was the point of the game.”

“Those days are long gone,” she said, flicking his earlobe.

“God,” he said. “It’s like looking into the mirror.”

“Should we switch places?” she asked. “Just to see what would happen.”

“I’m in favor. Anyway, it seems like the right time to take a turn.”

The highway veered left. He looked behind him. The dogs’ tongues were out, panting.

At mile marker fifteen they traded clothes. He stepped into her dress and had her tie the string in the back.

“I’ve always wanted help getting in and out of my clothes.”

“It gets old,” said Rosina. “Believe me.”

He admitted (to himself) that the dress felt alright, kinda good at first, but then a little too free? Actually, he wasn’t sure how he felt about it.

After Rosina cinched up the leather belt and snapped the brass buckle she took EXIT 115 toward Lewisville.

“So long cuz,” she said. “Till next time.”

***

The man kept on, and at some point during the long journey became Female.

Also, and oddly, when she (the man) looked behind her the dogs had transformed into cats. Or perhaps the dogs gave up and some cats replaced the dogs? It’s impossible to know for sure, he thought.

The woman in the yellow sundress kept on, dead set on finding her wife.

She reached in her back pocket for the magazine but since she didn’t have a pocket she found only the soft curve of her ass. The magazine ended up being rolled up in her cleavage. She didn’t remember having breasts and certainly wouldn’t have thought to place a magazine there, but she pulled it out anyway wondering what else could be in this issue.

Music began to play upon opening the magazine. Big band music, Glen Miller style. When she closed the pages the music cut off.

When the music played the street lamps brightened and hummed as if they were getting turned on, sexually. When she closed it the street lamps grew dim and depressed as if they got their feelings hurt or their balls chopped off.

“Balls?” she said. “Penis and balls and all that man stuff. No thank you.”

She folded the magazine four ways and stuffed it in her panties.

She didn’t hate cats, but was surprised that cats were following her, since she always thought herself a dog person.

“My wife liked cats,” she said to the cats.

“Cats cats cats,” said the cats. But turns out they were little children in cat costumes.

***

Once they reached the end of the world the children giggled no more. She grabbed the chain link fence that served as the last obstacle and gazed out into the black abyss.

The children climbed the fence and leaped in shouting “Cats! Cats! Cats!”

Instead of falling they hovered over the darkness and began to shrink: children to toddlers, toddlers to babies, babies to fetuses, until there was nothing at all. She knew, she just knew, those kids were her unborn children. She began to weep with the realization of the unfair life. Some of her tears dropped and ran down the front of her dress.

After calming herself, she reached into her panties and pulled out the magazine. She read the first recipe: two parts radio, a pinch of Canada, a dash of moon, and a drizzle of lug nuts.

“Oh, I remember that one,” said a pretty voice coming from the abyss. “Delicious.”

“I found you,” said the woman in a yellow dress.

“Remember how I used to put my feet on your shoulders.”

“I miss your big feet.”

“I can see that.”

She looked down and saw her manhood restored and pitching a tent inside the yellow dress. And then from the abyss, a hand reached through the fence and up his dress, grabbing hold. She began to work it back and forth like she did when they were young.

“There it is!” he said. He stretched over the fence and took hold of her left breast.

“You always liked the left one best!” she said.

“I love it all,” but when he went to reach further toward her sweet center (where she liked him to rub just so), he felt her hand grab his wrist.

“If you go there,” she warned, “you’ll never be able to go back.”

He thought about all the things he broke when he was young: eight ball, lawn mower, sky light, hat rack, white chalk, sun flower, and the piano key still stuck in his underwear drawer.

“Where will I go?” he said.

“You’ll see,” she said, and giggled.

Crow Jonah Norlander

GONE BABY GONE by Patricia Q. Bidar

December 27, 2021 · Fiction

Arthur and I are lucky. A client of mine on 110^th and Broadway—I clean houses—had a family thing and needed to leave the country for a few months. Arthur and I could stay.

It’s late morning. The door buzzer sounds and Arthur springs up. His old friend, Joey Chestnut. What we know so far is that Joey’s gotten clean, or at least a lot cleaner than the last time we saw him. He has a lady now. Maybe she’s a calming influence. Now Arthur and Joey are going on a fishing weekend. They’re traveling light because just yesterday Arthur’s Pacer was towed.

Aw, Jesus.

Aw, Jeez.

This is their Staten Island greeting. Shoulders are smacked. I say hey. Joey’s put on weight. This is good.

You want coffee? I say, and Joey says yes.

Where’s this woman you made up? Arthur asks, and Joey says she’s downstairs with her friend.

From the kitchenette I can look down and see. Sure enough, there are two women on the sidewalk in front of the stoop on the basketball court side, smoking. They’re both wearing fur-collared coats and platform shoes. Okay, so she’s real.

If it weren’t for my client needing to leave the country, I don’t know where we’d be, because of all the mess Arthur caused at our old building. The thing is, my client said, we've got to keep our noses down, avoid the other neighbors, and above all do not call the super for any reason.

So far, it has gone great. My client’s not a Richie. Part of her disability payment provides house cleaning. I don’t know where she gets the rest of her money. I mind my business. I have friends who get high with their clients. Eat with them. Not me.

—the best thing that ever happened to me, Joey is saying. You know where I was at after high school.

Arthur murmurs something supportive. And then Joey is saying he’s really gotten his shit together and all’s he brought for the whole weekend is chicken tranquilizers and a handle of Wild Turkey. It’ll be like the old days.

Now Joey is laughing—he actually pronounces the words hee hee hee—about our heavy door and our various locks. I guess he thinks this is our apartment.

Oh, this place is a regular Fort Knox, Arthur says. Self-important with his thick mustache and mutton chops. The river and Colombia are easy walking distance, he adds. St. John's too.

A real lord of the manor, I think but do not say.

Joey steps back into the hall, where he’s left his bag and the fishing rods. The door closes behind him with its heavy click. I’m always worried about locking myself out. We only have one key.

So, what do you think? I ask Arthur, and he says he thinks it’ll be okay.

What about those girls? They’d better not be coming with.

Nah, they’re just with Joey. They’re with Joey. Accompanied him here, is all. And I can hear now that the girls have come upstairs. Someone must’ve let them in. They’re talking fast and their voice bounce against the enameled walls. I can’t make anything out.

Arthur makes a big thing of taking my chin in his hand and tipping my face up to his for a kiss. He tries to hike my skirt up, but I’m wearing my quilted maxi and it’s a lot of fabric. I say Arthur’s gonna start pounding on the door and he says no he won’t. Arthur takes my chin and tips my face for a kiss. And then he’s hiking my skirt up. Oh, Arthur. The things he gets me to do. I step up onto the couch and sway strip-tease style, adding a dip to shuck my skirt and panties. Arthur throws them across the room. He’s kissing my tits and kissing my tits and it just lights me up; my whole body buzzes with want.

I say, Joey’s gonna start pounding and he says no he won’t and we’re kissing again. And I’m lying on the couch with my feet touching the floor when Arthur enters me with full urgency and oh. Oh. Then he’s finished, our bare chests, our rib cages, pressed together. I taste thesalt of his face. He pushes up, dips to kiss my neck saying thank you thank you thank you. I belong to this man. Oh, Arthur.

I wash the coffee cups and the pot, thinking about a job I have at three, a gay couple in the village. I switch on WNEW and it’s Patti Smith, a girl singer from New Jersey. If Arthur were here, he’d say turn that shit off.

That’s when I hear it: the next-door neighbor lady screaming: she’s been robbed. I run out to the hall and she’s there with her laundry from the basement machines, and she’s telling me she propped the door with a matchbook and down in the laundry all of ten minutes. And it hits me: I’m good and locked out barefoot in just my maxi skirt. Arthur’s gone baby gone, already hurtling on the sweltering A to Jesus knows where and the neighbor lady comes out with her baby which she left sleeping in his bassinet and she’s saying thank you thank you thank you.

Crow Jonah Norlander

THE GRANDE CALAMITY DIAMOND DESCENDS INTO THE MAELSTRÖM by Dolan Morgan

December 24, 2021 · Fiction

I needed a break. So when my brother gifted me the cruise ticket, it felt like he’d done something useful for once. But there was a catch.

“It sinks on purpose,” my brother said, laughing. “Like, while you’re on the thing. Straight into the ocean, down it goes. The whole big ship. And they don’t tell you when, it’s a surprise. One minute you’re over by the pool deck in margaritaville or whatever, and then—wham! The boat is sinking, just like that. You’re gonna love it.”

Byron worked in real estate and routinely ended up with promotional items that nobody could ever want outside the fever-dream of 30-year mortgages. Over the years, he’d given me a rubber ham you could heat in the oven to smell “authentic ham smells” and a golf club you can pee into discreetly, just like you’ve always wanted. Did I play golf? No. Did I love ham smell? No. But was I sure my brother loved me? Sort of. This season had been kind to him, which always meant his sort-of-love would be more pronounced, a trait he’d no doubt inherited from our father, another sleazeball if ever there was one, and he must have really fallen into some big commissions because he significantly upped his game and got me passage to this new cruise line experience where, apparently, the ship sinks while you’re on it and then you get heroically rescued.

A cruise is nice, but after the past shitty year—or decade if I’m being honest—what I really wanted was a whole new life. Sort of like the cowardly lion, tinman, and scarecrow all wrapped up into one: a new personality, a new body, and a new brain would be great, thank you very much. But for now, this ridiculous cruise would have to do. In some respects, the trip itself wasn’t such a terrible idea, I had to admit; by transporting everything about me into entirely new surroundings, perhaps I’d feel different by mere dint of the juxtaposition. That’s probably why people travel in general, I thought: not to see new places, but to fool themselves into thinking they’re new too. The artist Josef Albers could make the exact same blue look completely different just by putting it next to different shades of pink. I wanted that to happen to me. Maybe this insane cruise could be the shade that rendered my life anew. Like Dorothy, suddenly in technicolor.

“You’re gonna love it,” he said again, taking a bite of tortellini. “It’s pathartic.”

Pathartic? I didn’t ask Byron to clarify if he meant “cathartic” or “pathetic” because, while either option seemed plausible, my inability to discern the difference seemed especially apt. “Thank you,” I said. “I really appreciate this.” I might have meant it.

The trip commenced in two weeks. I needed to prepare.

I scheduled time off, packed “only the necessities,” a task that gave me no shortage of absurd anxiety—What are the necessities? What do I need? Do I really need a toothbrush? I think I do, but what does that say about me? Why can’t I rough-mouth it like a real man, like my ancestors?—and soon found myself standing on a crowded dock in a busy sunlit harbor, half-empty suitcase in hand, staring up at the gleaming white facade of the Grande Calamity Diamond, preparing to embark on “The Disaster of a Lifetime” and really wishing I had brought a goddamn toothbrush. What the hell. I’ll be the last person they rescue, I thought, if my screams emanate a week’s worth of theme-restaurant halitosis.

Maybe I could purchase one at some overpriced harbor store before departing? I scanned the seaport. Lines of people in cargo shorts, sandals, and floppy hats weaved around each other like thick ropes grinding into an ever-tightening knot of leisure and luggage. The glint of a newsstand kiosk reflected above the throng’s heads, but it might as well have been a hundred miles away. I’d have to get a toothbrush onboard at the Sink or Swim Souvenir Shop. Far out over the water, I saw clouds darkening the horizon, a storm headed north toward home. I was glad to be embarking on the cruise, headed south, away from all that grey into a bright new blue.

The embarking process was long, but soon I was settled on the ship and into my private cabin. I had a single bed, a desk, a chair, cubbies to stash my belongings, and a few feet to stretch myself out. A diminutive porthole afforded a view of sweaty tourists en route to their own ships, but soon it would cast about over endless ocean waves. I was genuinely looking forward to it. A horn sounded, announcing our departure.

Back at home, I’d watched orientation videos breaking down the cruise’s itinerary. With R having only just moved out, I welcomed any distraction from my thoughts. The basic parameters of the sinking were outlined by a man with a bright smile and light blazer. At a designated hour, he said, alarm bells would ring and the ship-wide intercom system would inform passengers of a critical hull breach. The catalysts differ each outing, but past causes included icebergs, coral reefs, and mythical creatures like kraken and kaiju.

In reality, a series of doors in the ship’s exterior are deliberately opened, allowing for the methodical intake of water followed by gradual descent into the ocean, a process monitored continuously by experts. Passengers can enjoy the excitement on deck, then gather on lifeboats, or float about with inflatable vests to watch the process unfold. VIP passengers can even stay aboard throughout, riding the boat deep beneath the surface in sealed rooms. A nearby contingent of medically-trained staff emerges on dinghies and helicopters after the spectacle is complete, ferrying passengers to a second luxury-class ship where the remainder of the itinerary can be enjoyed.

Unpacking my bags, I recalled the candid online reviews I’d read while trying to avoid the pile of things R left behind on the table. “It was amazing and life-altering,” wrote one woman in a 5-star review, “I honestly thought I was going to die.”

I tried to understand what could possibly motivate these people, myself among them now, to want this.

Tired from the sun, I dozed in and out of sleep as I recalled Edgar Allen Poe’s “A Descent into the Maelström,” wherein the characters feel drawn to a massive whirlpool near the edge of the world, desiring its depths despite the danger. Is this what I wanted? I recalled that as a child, I was obsessed by kidnappings. I thought about them often in grade school, their own maelstrom of strangers, hands, and cars. I carried impromptu weapons in my pocket: chains, pens, anything that could hurt someone if I was dragged into their vortex.

After what seemed like seconds, I woke suddenly, jerked by some force. Unsure of how much time had passed, I looked out the porthole and saw only ocean, the harbor long gone. A safety bell rang out, followed by static. Was this it? Were we about to sink? An announcement did not declare a hull breach; rather, the ship had diverted course to avoid choppy waters from the storm to our north. Was this part of the act? Still half in dreams, I stared at the waves. They looked motionless to me. “Be sure to try the salmon croquettes at the Reef Bar,” the announcement added. “Complimentary today only.”

The thought of eating reminded me: I needed that toothbrush.

I stepped out of my cabin and into the hall. Rubbing my eyes and making my way toward the main deck, I passed families encumbered by endless bags, elderly couples trundling bravely arm in arm, twenty-somethings well on their way to inebriation, dumbstruck kids covered in sunscreen and chocolate, giggling teenagers headed for the pool.

I didn’t realize kids were allowed on the cruise. I wondered if they’d appreciate the experience. Inspecting a “you are here” map, charting my route to the souvenir shop, I mulled the common conception that young people remain oblivious to existential concerns, a myth perpetuated by those who have forgotten the mystery and insanity of their own childhood. “Thin places” are locations where our world and other realms are supposedly closest together, where hauntings and strange traversals are most prevalent, and pretty much everything is a thin place to young people, I thought. I took a left at a large arcade, passed through an impressive casino, and ascended a chain of escalators. A frenzied crew member rushed past me as if pursued by an assailant, her blue polo shirt drenched in sweat. Two additional crew members, similarly harried, followed soon after, pushing me roughly aside as they passed.

My sleazeball father pushed Byron once when he robbed our house after my mother kicked him out. I must have been six or seven at the time. I arrived home on the bus to see my dad surrounded by police, blood dripping down his shirt. He claimed he was only there to take “what was his,” which apparently included my brother’s bike and my television. What if, rather than just random objects, I wondered, he’d thought of me and Byron as rightfully “his” as well?

For months I feared he would show up at school or while I was out playing. The fact that, at the time, I still loved him desperately—and could not comprehend his new absence—complicated these fears. Byron was home at the time of the robbery and absolutely terrified. He told the police he “couldn’t tell if it was really happening.” We never spoke of it. Afterward, he could only sleep with the closet door firmly closed. I think, more than anything, I was jealous of his proximity to that rip in reality, to that thin place. I wanted to be dragged through a hole in our universe, wanted the twister to pick me up and drop me in a new world, where I could become something else, too.

But become what? A shitty real estate agent?

I arrived at the souvenir shop and was shocked to find it much bigger than anticipated. Three stories tall at least and the width of a city block. Organization was chaotic, encouraging passengers to browse longer and purchase more, so I roamed the aisles haphazardly in search of a toothbrush. The items were the kind of crap that Byron would love. Stupid, corny, impractical. Yet, like Byron as well: clearly profitable. What would happen to all of these goods when the ship sank? Did they have some method for protecting it all? I did not understand the underlying economics of this cruise. Should I get something for Byron? I realized it was quite possible I had never given him anything other than a card, let alone authentic ham smells. The thought made me want to disappear. What would it be like to go missing here? I recalled a safety video I’d seen when I was six or so, a video that provided instruction regarding exactly what a child should do if they were lost.

I recalled, in fact, trying to orchestrate a scenario in which to enact those very instructions.

Browsing in a department store with my dad, who I did not yet understand to be a sleazeball, I waited for the right moment—and then fell quietly behind his stride. I slipped down an aisle when he wasn’t looking. Soon I could hear him calling for me through the shelves but did not answer. When I felt I was sufficiently “missing,” when I knew I had crossed over into that other realm, my own land of Oz where rules faded away, I took off as fast as possible toward the store’s information desk, where I could, as the safety video suggested, drag myself back to reality by requesting the woman behind the counter page my dad over the intercom. I recalled the thrill of that experience, of being gone from this world, and of the anguish in my father’s face—and my confusion at having caused it; I thought of R, too, and how I had fallen quietly out of step with her as well. How I wasn’t there when she looked for me. I thought of the anguish in her face, and my confusion at having caused it, as I pondered the cruise and its promise of disaster.

Still no toothbrush.

Rack after spinning rack of postcards, keychains, shot glasses, snow globes, and pewter dolphins called out to me, but there were no personal hygiene stands. Nor did there seem to be anyone working here. Or even shopping for that matter. I was essentially alone in this knickknack wasteland. An old fear gripped me in that isolation, but only gently. For the first time, I noticed that seat belts were built at regular intervals into the floor. They looked surreal and out of place. Like an ear growing from a back. Maelstrom of people, cars, and hands. Maneuvering myself around one of the spinning racks of trinkets, my body rotated like the hand of a clock as I tried to get a better look at a pair of sunglasses, and I recalled the only time I probably could have been abducted—were it not for my use of a similar rotating maneuver.

Eight or nine at the time, I wandered our quiet neighborhood alone, deep in summer, when a small red car began tailing me. Within, I could make out the face of a middle-aged man with greying hair. His car slowed to my walking pace. Anxious, I turned around and headed the other way, just in case. Moments later, I heard tires twisting in the loose gravel on the country road behind me. He had also turned around; I was the cause, or perhaps the prey. My suspicions affirmed, I ran ahead, around a corner, and into a tall stand of bushes near a field, slipping behind the leaves, only seconds before the car rounded the corner into view, trailing after me. The driver pulled up next to the bushes and drove forward to peer around them. I rotated along the tall shrub, staying just out of sight. He reversed to check the other side. I slid again in the opposite direction, always keeping the bush between us. We repeated this dance until he either came to the conclusion that I wasn’t there or tired of the steps. I ran home, terrified. The police confirmed that a man in a car of similar description had been beckoning young boys to ride away with him. What world awaited within the red car? Regardless of my fascinations, I cowered when faced with the actual prospect of abduction. I didn’t feel new. I didn’t feel changed. I felt awful.

I consulted a confusing store map, travelled up and down the floors, and eventually found the check-out register. The cashier, a small, bemused man of indeterminate age wearing sunglasses, was sorry to inform me that the Sink or Swim Souvenir Shop did not sell toothbrushes; however, he was delighted to share that a complimentary brush in the shape of a shark could be delivered to my cabin, free of charge. Armed with this assurance, I exited the knickknack wasteland. I emerged empty handed, yes, but also with relief, vowing never to return, and stepped into the late afternoon sun.

Except it wasn’t the sun boring down on me now—no, it was rain.

Heavy, hammering the deck in torrents.

I took shelter under an awning, but cold gusts of wind sent sheets of water horizontal, pelting my legs, soaking my shorts. Across an expanse of chaise lounges, wooden tables, and poolside chairs, half-naked passengers ran for cover, holding pool floaties and towels over their heads, signalling that rain had only just arrived. Clearly, the distant storm I’d seen earlier had veered off course and intersected the Grande Calamity Diamond’s route. Feelings of futility washed over me, a sense of inescapable greyness. There was no outrunning the clouds I thought I’d left at home, no land of Oz, only a farm covered in dust. R was right about me. No wonder she left. The same with my father. Of course he didn’t kidnap me. Who would? Lightning shot down from the sky into the water and a clap of thunder rose up over the roar of rain. I cringed at the cliche of my own mind. I still didn’t even have a toothbrush.

A brief sprint delivered me to the warmth and dryness of the Deep Dive Bar, a large room decorated in the style of an old dockworker’s pub, where I found a coterie of stunned passengers huddling in wet clothes. I leaned on a knotted table to catch my breath and turned back toward the open door, out of which we all could observe the downpour—in addition to a new phenomenon made plain in our stomachs: the tilting of the ship, its slow rise and lurching descent. I found the feeling worse when looking at the sea and so turned toward the bar’s interior. Heavy ropes, wooden barrels, and wide nets completed the ambience. Amid the small crowd, I spotted the same sweaty crew member who had hurried past me earlier. She looked terrified.

Over the intercom, a voice burst through static: “This is the ship’s captain. You may have noticed the inclement weather. Please avoid open-air common spaces until it passes. As well, out of an abundance of caution, we regret to inform you that this outing of the Grande Calamity Diamond will be unable to sink as planned, because the ship’s systems will require thorough post-storm maintenance before attempting any dive.” A wave of groans resounded among the sopping passengers. “Your safety is our first priority. Complimentary tote bags will be delivered to your cabin. Game rooms will be free for the remainder of the trip. Open-bar hours are hereby extended indefinitely.”

Above the din of bitter murmurs, the bartender called out, “Well, anybody want a drink?”

With nowhere to go, we all got to know each other over beers, but it was the frenzied crew member, Julie, clearly at the end of her rope and ready to share company secrets, who set the tone for the evening. She divulged the real reason our sinking had been cancelled—not merely “out of an abundance of caution,” but something much worse: our sister ship had capsized in the storm.

The one carrying our rescue team.

A ship just like ours, caught off guard in the same rough waters, now wrecked in the sea.

Luckily, they were able to rescue themselves, but would be unable to do the same for us.

That’s why she and her colleagues were running around so frantically earlier in the day—because they didn’t know what the hell was happening. And now look where we are, she said, waving toward the door.

Her transparency, along with a little alcohol and shock, loosened everyone up, and soon folks were describing why they had hoped to sink into the ocean. I mean, these things weren’t shared directly, but were shared nonetheless.

For example, one woman, empathizing with Julie, vented at length about her job, about the incompetent assholes that lorded over her, and the need to let off some steam; only as an aside did she mention her mother’s recent passing, the painful year that had preceded it, and the sense of mystery that still hovered over mundane tasks, the ethereal veil draped across her days and through which she could only barely seem to reach, and the distance that stretched between her and her children, her husband, her siblings. In the book, The City and The City, two different metropolises occupy the same exact space, each folded into the other. The woman's story felt much the same.

Or there was the young couple who cited a love of adventure, listing off various daring climbs, jumps, and glides they’d undertaken together. One might easily have missed the jokes the man made throughout, gags about the adorability of not understanding one another, the amusement of never seeing each other completely, with punchlines that felt innocuous on their own but which, in their steady accumulation, betrayed a kind of shadow mirroring how the couple’s hands never touched. As the storm bellowed onward, I had the feeling that the only true “thin places” were other people. Apparitions and strange traversals.

Even the older man who blathered on about his joyful desire to submit himself to the vast beauty of the natural world could not avoid referencing a quiet feeling of dissociation barely kept at bay by chasing some novel experience.

I tried to imagine what I betrayed about myself, other than my terrible breath, when I asserted to everyone that I was really only here because the ticket was free, mostly to appease my brother, and that I just needed a break after a hard year, and that I hoped to feel different, or at least to not feel like this anymore. I mean, could they see my fear, could they see my father standing behind me, always reaching his sleazeball hand around my face in the dark to pull me backward through myself and away from my life, from R, from Byron, from anything I tried to love? Or, rather, could they see that my father had nothing to do with it and that it was always my own hands that wrestled me from what I wanted? Was this pathartic? There was no telling—because in a moment we learned the sinking was back on, but not for a reason any of us could have wanted.

The frenzied crew member’s walkie-talkie foreshadowed the news. It beeped three times before an authoritative voice on the other end inquired if she was with passengers, then stated flatly, “Julie, we need you to usher everyone to the VIP hold—now.” Julie’s eyes widened and everything about her demeanor changed. In seconds, she was out of her chair, back straight, keys in hand. The intercom clicked on and the captain informed us that circumstances had deteriorated, the surface conditions in the water had become life-threatening, and we would shortly attempt an emergency dive in the hopes of waiting out the storm below.

Someone asked if this was really happening. Was it part of the cruise?

Julie assured us it was really happening. Then, after consulting her walkie, she outlined our emergency route to the VIP hold, a sealed space where we could ride safely into the deep. This VIP hold was apparently the one and only Sink or Swim Souvenir Shop, and reaching it involved a short sprint across the deck. The rain-soaked dash afforded a quick glance into the storm. Its scale resisted comprehension.

Under a green sky, strong currents dragged our ship horizontally, amid a procession of smaller boats and debris, hundreds upon hundreds, some tipped or sinking, in what looked like an enormous gyre, spiraling all in a great arc.

Despite there being over a thousand passengers, the Souvenir Shop easily accommodated everyone. Once within, Julie directed us to an aisle where we could lie on our backs and make an L shape with our bodies, our feet propped in the air against a shelf of dumb t-shirts. The shelving unit would act as our seat, she said, once the ship tilted vertical for its descent.

The ship will soon tilt vertically, she repeated.

The aft deck would be in the air above us, with the foredeck leading the way into the depths below. Sink or Swim Souvenirs is pretty close to the back of the ship, she added, so we’ll end up pretty high in the air. You’re going to feel it. The floor, which would soon become a wall, contained those same surreal seat belts I’d spotted earlier, safety features intended to prevent passengers from tumbling down to the store’s distant edge—soon to be fifty feet below us. The sound of a motor echoed through the space, and thick metal doors descended along the perimeter, sealing us in with a vacuum hiss.

The ship shuddered, and the shelves rattled flimsily. Staring straight at the ceiling, I fastened my seat belt and heard it click. My mouth tasted terrible. The seat belt was too tight. I felt for a moment like I was finally getting into that red car.

Then the ship began to lift.

It happened quickly, much faster than I thought it would. We arced forward into the air, as if catapulted in slow motion, reaching a zenith and hovering there only for a moment. Dangling. Silence. Like the top of a rollercoaster. Then, with a lurch, the descent commenced. People screamed.

Seated to my left, the man from the couple at the bar turned to me and said, “I think this is all just part of the act. This is what we paid for.” He was crying and looked as if he wanted me to answer a question that went unasked. I didn’t know what to say and certainly didn’t mention what I’d seen of the storm as we ran across the deck—the long, dark arc of some enormous gyre in which we currently spun, headed who knows where.

The image immediately brought to mind again Poe’s “Descent Into the Maelström.” How did that story end? Curiously, I recalled that the plot revolved around two brothers, and that both of them ended up in the maelstrom, slowly dragged toward its center on a small, powerless boat. I couldn’t help but picture the two as Byron and me. Trying to escape the spinning waves, one of the brothers figures out that the maelstrom functions like a sorting machine, dragging heavier objects inward and spitting lighter objects back out, returning them to the world. They would need to abandon the safety of their heavy boat and take hold of something lighter to escape. One brother stubbornly rejects this theory and hangs tight to the security and familiarity of the vessel. The other escapes by letting go—but helplessly watches as their sibling, gripping tightly, falls into the dark center of the world.

But which brother was I? Was I holding on or letting go?

I thought of my empty apartment, Byron’s dumb job and big smile, and I could feel my stomach rising upward as the descent quickened.

The man next to me grabbed my hand. I closed my eyes and squeezed back.

Five stars.

Crow Jonah Norlander

« Previous 1…22 232425 26…102 Next »