JOE-DOG by Michael Haller

Joe was helping his ex-girlfriend Claire move out of her apartment (“the apartment where I grew as a person more than my previous four apartments”) while simultaneously helping his recycled girlfriend Lori move into the same apartment. (“Fucking creepy, I’m disinfecting this place when she’s gone.”) The apartment was a one-bedroom in trashy-trendy North Cumminsville, a blighted warehouse district in one of the mid-sized Ohio cities beginning with the letter C (not Canton, not Chillicothe, not Coshocton). Claire could no longer afford the rent in NC due to unpaid bills and the troubles they bring, and middleman Joe, a friend of the landlord, cluelessly arranged for Lori to meet the owner and win first right of refusal, without thinking that they might cross paths during the move. Joe chose to ignore any emotional discomfort this scenario caused by not thinking about it, and not thinking about “emotional-type things,” as Joe referred to them, was something he saw as an asset. His job, he told himself, was laborer; he was a packhorse helping one person move out and another move in. His secondary job, after the heavy lifting, was to stay out of the way, not make eye contact, and speak only when spoken to. His third job, if necessary, was peacekeeper, because the two women were no longer friends, all because of Joe. First, Joe dated Lori, then cheated on Lori by sleeping with her friend Claire, without Lori’s knowledge of course and without Joe’s knowledge that they were friends. Nor did Claire know that Joe was dating Lori until the two women were at a bar discussing the wonderful man they’d been seeing, who they discovered was the same man when they held up their phones and showed each other pictures of their beloved. Their smiles turned to eye-bulging disbelief, then mutual inquisition and accusation that launched a feud conducted in-person, via text, email, social media, and phone when they learned of each other’s “betrayal” (Lori’s term), an accusation Claire took issue with, because she didn’t know Lori was seeing Joe and said ignorance was the more accurate word to describe her part, the mutual recriminations and accusations causing them to distrust each other more than they distrusted Joe, who, because they adored him, and because he was the type of man in short supply—he had enough brains that he wouldn’t be called stupid, but not enough brains that he was smarter than either woman, who thought themselves alpha females. And he was so attractive it was like he was covered with chocolate syrup they wanted to lick off: 6’ 1,” 200 lbs., tousled brown hair, naturally muscular—“work muscles, not gym muscles,” Claire said—he worked in a lumber yard and could carry eight 2 x 8s stacked on each shoulder up a flight of twenty steps—with a strong upper body, and well-proportioned in all other areas, which was everywhere.

An impartial observer, however, may have cited Joe for unethical boundary crossing, breaking of trust, psychological damage inflicted on both women, with no certainty that even more damage wouldn’t be inflicted on them or on other women Lori and Claire were unaware of. Joe skated happily along, as another of his assets was his lack of introspection, although he wasn’t introspective enough to know this was an asset until his ex-lover Bruce Ford (he, him)—with whom Joe had his first, longest, deepest, and most intense sexual and romantic relationship (although Joe never thought of it that way)—told Joe, “Your gift is your lack of self-awareness regarding the negative impact you have on people—which self-knowledge would destroy anyone with scruples—while simultaneously you inflate the positive impact you have on others, so that you see yourself not as the pariah you should see yourself as, and should be seen as by others, but as a savior to anyone you love, is how you see yourself, a benefactor or kindly bestower of yourself onto others,” said Bruce Ford when Joe left him to date Lori. “Borderline sociopath in other words is how I would describe you, although your love is indeed the most wonderful gift I’ve ever received, so I’m not faulting you for your flaws, just pointing them out, and any time you want to come over for a back rub or foot massage—platonic, of course, I’m a one-man kind of guy, I don’t share—please, don’t hesitate.”

“Cool,” Joe said on his way out the door for the last time, then, “Well, I’ll see you around dude.”

Lori was parked in Bruce’s driveway honking the horn for Joe to hurry up.

“What did you see in him anyhow?” she asked as they drove away.

“See in him? Like, why did I hang out with him?”

“Yeah.”

“You know? That’s a good question. We’ve known each other forever—we were born on the same day, same year, same hospital, we lived three doors apart—”

“Ok, I understand. It’s not really important, as long as you keep getting tested once a week for the next six months.”

“Right on,” Joe said, sitting in the passenger seat, strumming an acoustic guitar left-handed, the fretboard sticking out the window.

 

***

 

While Bruce Ford was correct that Joe lacked introspection, it was not true that he lacked compassion, empathy, tolerance, and a natural ability to forgive and forget, so intrinsic to his nature that he was unaware he possessed these gifts and didn’t understand that others often lacked them. The emotional upheavals Joe caused always surprised him, as probably his deepest philosophical approach to life came from a cereal box interview with a surfer he read when he was a kid, something to the effect that life is calm seas and life is waves, and how you ride the waves determines whether or not you survive, it’s nothing personal the ocean has against you, it’s just something you put up with and try not to go under, and when he read this at age twelve, Joe internalized it and transmogrified it into an all-encompassing worldview that could be summarized as “go with the flow and don’t worry about things beyond your control,” and Joe would tell his friends, after the emotional devastations he caused, that his “victims” were fighting forces beyond their control (i.e., his behavior) and they should accept his actions, not fight them or question them, just go with the flow and you’ll be fine. This is how he explained his behavior to Lori and Claire, who were appalled at his brazen stupidity, but also fascinated that a beautiful grown man could have such a simple way of looking at things. They then thought maybe it wasn’t simple, that perhaps Joe was a savant, or Buddhist, maybe, not through studying but by natural disposition, he had, they reasoned, an advanced, sophisticated understanding of life and they were the dumb ones for not comprehending his God-given enlightenment, and all he was trying to do was share his wisdom with them.

After Claire was fully moved out (“eradicated” was Lori’s term) and psychically removed with three days of continual sage-burning that created an odor that permeated the entire 1920s apartment building where she lived, Joe moved his things back in because Claire had thrown them out the windows.

While the sage was still burning, and Joe had brought in his last bundle of clothes, Lori closed the door of the apartment, stood with her back against it so Joe couldn’t leave, and told him to take off his clothes. Joe was happy to comply, because he believed nudity, for him, at least, was the ideal state, and also because women, and men, liked looking at him, and because Joe was a people-pleaser more than anything, he was happy to give them something to look at. Only this time Lori told him to kneel on all fours and “stick your ass up high.” She removed her leather belt, doubled it in two, and slapped his ass so hard he howled in pain. Before he was able to ask what she was doing, she spanked him again. The belt left red marks on Joe’s rear, and when he saw Lori pull her arm back for another spank, he crawled to her and bit her between the legs. She was wearing jeans, and it wasn’t a ferocious bite, so she didn’t feel much, but seeing Joe’s beautiful face at her crotch inspired her to wrap the leather belt around his neck and tighten it like a leash that she used to pull Joe around the apartment. Joe played along, because Joe loved to play, even though this particular game was new to him. Little did he know it was also new to Lori, but she was assertive in a way that made Joe think this was something she’d wanted as soon as they had the chance. She pulled him into the kitchen and placed him in the corner--naked, leashed and collared. She removed a large plastic mixing bowl from a cabinet, filled it with water, and set it in front of Joe. She then took a drinking glass from the cabinet, wrapped it in a dish towel, and pounded the towel-wrapped glass with a hammer until it was broken into hundreds of shards that she sprinkled on the kitchen floor so that if Joe tried to crawl or walk out of the kitchen, he would cut his hands, feet, or knees.

“Don’t move,” Lori said.

“What the hell, babe? I thought we were cool.”

“Yeah, we’re cool. But do me a favor and get on all fours and start drinking from the bowl.”

Joe plunged his face into the bowl and suctioned water into his mouth.

“Not like that. Lap it. Lap it like a dog!” she said, and barked.

Joe started lapping the water, and that’s when she grabbed her phone off the kitchen table and photographed a naked Joe drinking water like a dog from a mixing bowl.

  

***

 

An hour later, after they made love, Joe asked Lori if she would put him on the leash again or if it was a one-time thing.

“I’m pretty sure it’ll happen again,” was her answer, as she massaged between his legs and coaxed another erection that she used to get herself off one more time.

 

***

 

Little did they know that before Claire moved out, she installed three surveillance cameras in strategic spots throughout the apartment so she could perhaps blackmail Lori, or at least embarrass her. One of the cameras was in a ceiling fan over the dining room table, angled toward the kitchen, providing a perfect shot of Joe’s slave-dog performance. Another camera was in the bedroom, and one was in the living room. Claire watched the tapes when she got home at 3:30 a.m. after tending bar for eight hours and getting stoned with a coworker. She was appalled at what she saw and then so aroused that she masturbated four times before falling asleep around 5:00.

Not much changed over the next month. Lori and Joe spent almost every night together, and almost every night, Claire came home and masturbated watching them. A routine had developed. Claire fell asleep blissed out and woke up anticipating the following night’s debauchery. She remembered that she had installed the cameras for purposes of blackmail, but she discovered instead that she was a voyeur, and this discovery lowered her self-esteem a bit, but not enough to stop her from watching. But her subterfuge made her paranoid. What if someone was watching her? She began thinking that perhaps her pot-bellied landlord—whose T-shirt always rode an inch above his beltline, revealing pale skin barely visible through a jungle of pubic hair that seemingly went from his crotch up to his neck, for more of the same hair sprouted from his shirt collar—installed cameras when Claire was at work, and while she masturbated to tapes of Joe and Lori, he masturbated to tapes of her.

“Does weed cause paranoia?” Claire asked Google, and Google said yes, around ten million different articles said yes, depending on what strain of bud was smoked, and what the smoker’s pre-buzz state of mind was, yes, paranoia was possible. Also, a tendency toward feeling guilty in general could be exacerbated by the herb. Claire decided she would drink more whiskey and smoke less dope, but whiskey made her angry, so she went back to weed.

“Does weed make women horny?” was the next thing Claire asked Google, and the answer, repeated ten million times, was that a woman’s horniness while elevated depended on what strain of bud was smoked, what time of month it was, the smoker’s level of fatigue before lighting up, and also, any pre-buzz anticipation of impending sex might intensify the desire for carnal annihilation.

 

***

 

Bruce Ford meanwhile was pining for Joe-Dog. Although he’d had a few lovers in the two years after Joe left, it was Joe he remembered most. He devised a plan: He would contact Claire and suggest she invite Joe over for a friendly chat. Bruce would already be in Claire’s apartment—in fact, he and Claire would be in bed, under the blankets, fully clothed of course because Bruce had only seen two women naked. (One was his mother [trauma!] and the other was a new-in-the-neighborhood fourteen--year-old named Brandy Sinclair, who had volunteered to be gangbanged by five boys of her choosing, two of them Bruce and Joe, but he was overcome with nausea when he saw her lying naked on the bed, her skin a sickly white, surrounded by the boys, touching and squeezing her until she took Kenny Listerman’s hand and put it between her legs. Bruce wanted to stay and watch the boys undress, but Brandy’s nakedness was a shock so troubling that he had to leave, and Joe followed.) Bruce hoped that, assuming Claire went along with the plan, Joe would see his two exes in bed and feel the whammo! of karmic devastation when he realized that what goes around comes around. Or something like that, is how Bruce Ford envisioned his destabilization of Joe-Dog, an emotional destruction he hoped would be so severe that Joe would plead with Bruce to come to his senses and “leave that woman and come with me.” Bruce then thought this scenario mightn’t happen. Perhaps Joe would get in bed with them, only to find they were clothed.

Bruce went to the Corner Pub, where Claire tended bar, a cinder-block hellhole as drab as its name might suggest. Upon entering, one noticed the low, drop ceiling, the absence of windows, wobbly tables surrounded by mismatching chairs, and almost no lighting except for the minimum the bartender needed to pour drinks and count change. In years past, the pub had featured non-nude dancers on a stage the size of a ping pong table, now home to the establishment’s lone pinball machine. Bruce had been there a few times with Joe and feared for his safety—bathroom graffiti included the message “if you’re reading this, you’re a fag”—so he dressed as straight as he knew how (which to Bruce meant cowboy attire) and practiced talking without the effeminate lisp he knew he talked with ever since recording himself saying the Pledge of Allegiance as a fourteen-year-old to see how obvious it was he was gay. (“I pledge allegiance to the fag—flag!—I pledge allegiance to the fag, oh god, the flag the flag…the flaggots…” and he stopped there because he knew he was doomed to announcing his gayness every time he spoke.)

Bruce came in and sat two seats away from a man somewhere in his sixties, who looked at him and said “Jesus Christ” and moved to the other end of the bar.

“What are you doing here?” Claire asked when she came over. “Are you trying to get killed?”

“Is it obvious?”

“No one dresses like that anymore.”

“It’s not macho?”

“It’s ridiculous. Gay men haven’t dressed like that since the ‘70s. You could at least have worn a shirt under your vest. And take that bandana off your neck!”

Bruce removed the bandana, eyeing the old drunk at the end of the bar, who, Bruce noticed, was staring at him with either hatred or lust.

“I think your other customer rather likes my attire.”

“Don’t. Ex-cop. Hates gays. Hates everyone except other ex-cops. Look at me.” Bruce looked at her. “Ignore him.”

“Okay, I’ll ignore him. But to answer your question why I’m here, I’m here because I have a proposition.”

Claire said his idea was silly and that he should forget about Joe and find someone else.

That night at 4 a.m., Bruce’s phone rang.

“Let’s do it,” an intoxicated Claire said. “I think it can work. But we have to invite Lori. I’ll set it up. I’ll propose a make-up party. I’ll invite both of them, and you’ll already be here in bed and I’ll get up to use the bathroom and I’ll get in bed with you and invite them into the bedroom.”

“Then what happens?”

“Then what happens? How should I know? We haven’t done this yet. I can’t predict the future.”

“What are you doing? You’re all huffy and puffy like you want to have phone sex but as you know, I do not lean in that direction.”

“I’m watching a…tape…..oh fuck! Oh fuck ohfuckinggod…”

“What sort of tape are you watching?”

“It’s…oh god…oh god…it’s Joe and—Joe and Lori!”

“What are you talking about? You have a tape of them fucking?”

“Hundreds. Every night. Before I moved out I installed cameras.”

“Oh. My. God. Can I come over? I need to see this. I mean, I’ll put my hand over Lori or something because that would ruin it, but if I can see Joe…”

“Hurry. Bring weed.”

“Girl, I am walking out the door.”

They fell asleep at six and Bruce woke at eight with an erection poking Claire’s lower back. It woke her up too, and she reached behind her and began massaging it. Bruce was aghast, but it felt so good that he came two minutes later, breathing heavily into the back of Claire’s head and noting with surprise the pleasant aromas coming from her hair.

“Mmmm…” Claire said. “Feel better?”

“Oh my god, I’m so sorry,” Bruce said, but Claire’s hand was still holding his spent but semi-hard penis, and he didn’t tell her to let go. Her hair smelled so floral, and the skin on her hand was a little rough—sandpapery, almost—like Joe’s hands—probably from twisting off thousands of bottle caps the last few years.

“Back to sleep now,” she said and took her hand away.

Bruce rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling. He was overcome with self-loathing for betraying the cause, as he now thought of his queerness, a politically and socially revolutionary lifestyle that threatened the status quo and rejected everything it stood for, meaning all of the insipid love songs and commercials and TV shows and movies and billboards that glamorized straight life by showing happy couples and unhappy couples and their children and cheerful dogs and that congratulated itself when, once every five years, they sort of got it right in a movie or TV show regarding what it was like to be a real man, which is how Bruce thought of himself every time he made love with a man. But this episode with Claire? He was confused. He stopped thinking about it, got dressed, and went home.

 

***

 

As the make-up party approached, the women no longer felt threatened by each other, but they didn’t know this because their friendship hadn’t recovered to the point where they shared secrets or exposed vulnerability. Lori walked with what she imagined was a triumphant air—regal, actually, because she possessed the man everyone wanted. She was victrix. She pictured herself a mythical Roman empress, a goddess of beauty and war who inspired her men to kill barbarians in every corner of the empire. She would exalt herself by ordering the Senate to proclaim her “eternal wife of Jupiter,” reassigning Juno as wet nurse to their sucklings. Claire’s satisfaction, on the other hand, came from her deepening attraction to Bruce, who was the second most beautiful man she’d slept with, after Joe.

The men were less enthused with the make-up party. Joe’s usual go-with-the-flow attitude was slightly disturbed at the thought of being in the same room with three people he’d had sex with. And although the gathering was Bruce’s idea, he too was confused, because for the first time ever, he was attracted to a woman. He was so upset he consulted a psychologist to see if he was either insane or a degenerate, but the shrink, who seldom made eye contact during the session, said that as long as he was engaging in consensual and legal behavior, there was nothing wrong. “The guilt, or shame, you feel toward this woman…Betsy?...Let me make an analogy: All your life, you hated watermelon. Didn’t matter if you put ice cream on it or brown sugar or deep fried it. Point is, you never liked watermelon. And then one day you’re at a picnic, and people are eating watermelon, and you get a craving for watermelon. Who knows why? So you get a slice of watermelon and take a bite. You slowly chew it into a pulp and swallow. You don’t throw up. You end up eating five slices, and on the way home, you stop and buy a twenty-pounder that you eat within a day.”

 

***

 

The make-up party happened on a Saturday night, two months after Bruce suggested it to Claire. He arrived early to help prepare the snacks and tidy up. But they scratched the idea of getting in bed together and somehow using a façade of intimacy to hurt Joe and Lori, because they’d developed a true intimacy over the last two months that would be damaged if they used it to play a joke on their guests. Bruce was now thinking of himself as bisexual, and Claire was wondering why she was only attracted to bi-guys—first Joe, now Bruce. But what really complicated things was their curiosity: Bruce was now thinking about Lori’s shiny blonde hair, and Claire had never forgotten certain looks Lori gave her during their three-year friendship: penetrating, lingering looks when it seemed Lori’s eyes throbbed, or pulsed, as they stared at each other. She’d never had any serious lesbian fantasies besides the daydream of making out with a beautiful woman, preferably on the beach at full moon. And the other fantasy of being caressed and catered to by three or four naked sorority girls. And also the fantasy of cuddling with a lovely but tragic divorced woman, giving each other the healing love they needed before finding another man to wreck their lives. But Claire had neglected to watch tapes of Joe and Lori when they weren’t having sex. If she had, she might not have been surprised when she opened the door at 8:00 to see Lori dressed as some sort of Roman goddess, wearing a sheer toga-thing, and Joe dressed as a shirtless gladiator.

Claire and Bruce were gollywomped with lust when the Romans walked into their apartment, but Bruce recovered quickly.

“Joe, are you one of those Roman slaves who gets crucified for having a bad attitude?”

“Hey Bruce,” he said and hugged his former lover. Bruce lost all motor control and would have collapsed if Joe hadn’t held him tight.

Claire had lost fifteen pounds since Lori last saw her, and had dyed her hair a deep auburn with a jawline bob that framed her face like the Sutton Hoo helmet. Two inches taller than herself, Lori’s feeling of superiority diminished somewhat looking up into Claire’s dark eyes ringed with black eyeliner. “My god, she’s turned goth,” Lori thought, looking at Claire, who she only ever befriended in the first place because she liked to be out in public with prettier women, as a way of attracting the men the pretty girls didn’t want.“Are you two”— she nodded at Bruce, who had recovered enough strength to stand on his own “—a couple?”Claire scratched her nails through Bruce’s thick black hair.“Is that what we are, darling?”

“Well, I’ve never been one for labels,” he said, Claire’s nails sending sparks through his body. “Are you two a couple or just…friends?”

“It’s too soon to call us a couple because there’s a trust issue”—and she shot a hateful look at Claire that softened into fascination with her makeover, “but uh,” looking from Claire to Bruce—“things are going well.”

 

The evening passed pleasantly at first, everyone slightly guarded until the marijuana was passed around. Within minutes, it seemed more than four people were in Claire’s apartment, as the volume of conversation, music, and laughter increased two-fold, then three-fold. A connective warmth passed through all four as their social armor fell off, replaced by a renewed trust and mutual interest that wasn’t a bogus effect of the herb, rather, the bud seemed to have breathed life into their former selves—spontaneous and trusting, everyone abuzz with the feeling (not yet knowledge) that they were still friends, instinctively drawn to each other, just like old times, which for Joe and Bruce was twenty-four years. Claire and Lori had known each other just three years, but they got along so well (before the rupture) that they felt like they would be lifelong friends.

As the evening wore on, Joe and Bruce ended up in the kitchen, drinking beer and getting reacquainted. Joe had put on one of Bruce’s white t-shirts, a bit small but better for the way it clung to his torso and exposed enough bicep that every time Joe raised his beer bottle, a hump of muscle formed that Bruce wanted to kiss, lick, bite, caress, slap his cock against. Claire and Lori sat on the couch, near enough that their knees could have touched if one had leaned toward the other. It’s possible that Bruce backed Joe against the refrigerator and leaned in close to kiss him, but instead rubbed his face against Joe’s to feel his stubble. It’s possible that Joe placed his hand on Bruce’s chest, either to back him off or because the adventurous boy in Joe was still alive to Bruce, and holding his hand there was like a magnet that kept Bruce near. None of this was seen by the women in the living room, who now had relaxed enough that their knees were resting against each other’s. Lori looked at Claire’s black-stockinged legs and told herself she needed black stockings…but would she look as slutty-hot as Claire? And what Claire could see of Lori’s legs, from mid-thigh down to sandaled feet, caused her to lose track of their conversation about work as she daydreamed about rubbing lotion on her friend’s thighs.

Joe and Bruce came in from the kitchen and sat next to the person they began the night with, but there’s no reason to believe that in the coming weeks alliances and attractions wouldn’t shift, in a less bruising way than before. With the good feelings and restored trust flowing in every direction, it’s best to think that, whatever the outcome of the renewed affection, the foursome’s friendship had entered a new phase that would see the bed-hopping and eavesdropping recede. Although it’s too early to predict who will end up with whom, the fact that friendship is being restored might be seen as a sign of emotional growth. And Joe, who had never thought of himself as the center of attention (because he seldom thought of himself at all), was relieved that his friends weren’t fussing over him. He could relax and go with this new flow and see where it took him.

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IF YOU CAN, LISTEN by Jake McAuliffe

First off, endings are quiet. As something/somelove dies, a spacetime wound will appear to you and crickets will come out. They will flood your ears and tickle your canals like cotton. Some cheeky crickety fucks are going to use your body as a musical instrument. This is normal. I think every bone and pipe inside the human body was placed on purpose. You may have heard the theory of “intelligent design” but try this: crickets frisking your insides for anything that can shake the air. That’s music, baby. And that’s how tinnitus comes about. It’s insects. It’s our slow air for death, the one which we alone cannot play. I heard it only yesterday. In the worst white room, my love pinched my palm pink before her last breath smashed the air flat. Then, C sharp.

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THE STOAT by Nick Perilli

We don’t know where the hole in the basement of our house goes, only that it’s far deeper than it looks. Our pet stoat made it last year before disappearing into it. She was always digging—into our wood floors, our garden, our couches, and pantries—but this hole was her masterpiece. The white fur on her belly darkened with dirt over time. Since the day we brought the stoat home, she didn’t pay us any mind; she only had time for digging. She escaped from her cage whenever we weren’t looking, and we admit we rarely looked.

Whatever the stoat was digging for, she must have found it, as we haven’t seen the thing since. Our youngest daughter of three, Aly, sat at the hole in the basement for days while she was home from school with the flu. She, most of all, wanted to follow the stoat wherever it went. To find the better place it had surely gone.

Charles from across the street watched her while she was sick and we were at work. He didn’t have anything else to do but sit in his bedroom on his phone, taking photos of neighbors from the window. Whether it was out of boredom or malice, he encouraged our youngest to search for the stoat.

“Take my phone,” he said, knowing it was at 3 percent. “You can use it as a flashlight.”

At the dinner table that night, we noticed scrapes along Aly’s elbows and some dirt she forgot to wipe away along her neck.

“What happened?” one of us—the angrier one—asked. “Did Charles do this to you?”

Aly hesitated, exploring her options to respond behind her darting eyes, then burst into small tears as she told us that she climbed into the hole in the basement. “And I found her!” she said. “I met the stoat somewhere near the end. I saw an odd light from another place peeking in behind her. She was very still, and her fur had turned all dark.”

She thought the stoat was dead until it shook its head and began cleaning its face with its front paws. It plopped onto its one side, then the other, scrambling like a furred snake. When Aly reached for the stoat, it bit her.

“You’re late,” it said, “but I knew you would follow me.” The stoat’s whiskers twitched. “I’m here to tell you to go right back.”

“What’s there?” Aly asked, looking beyond the stoat. She tried to get closer, but the stoat stood in her way, baring teeth again.

“False wonder and warped danger,” the stoat said. “Dreams of people like Charles up there for children like you.” The stoat barked at her, low and strong like a hungry dog with powerful jaws. It bit Aly again on as many fingers as it could get in its mouth before she pulled away. “It’s not what you need—it’s not what I needed either, I guess, and now I’m caught between these spaces unsure of what to do.”

It barked louder—more guttural, more rabid. Aly backed away.

“I suppose I’ll just stay right here,” the stoat said. “To stop you, your small children, and your children’s small children from ever getting by me. From ever falling victim to predatory wonder. I am prey, but you shouldn’t be.” The stoat snapped its jaws at Aly one more time.

Aly scrambled out of the hole. Charles grabbed her by the arms, begging her to tell him what she saw down there. The false wonder. The warped danger. He had a look in his eye. Aly leaned into him and bit him hard on the neck until he left. Aly said he tasted like pennies—red on her teeth—then pushed the rest of her dinner away. Her older sisters ate it happily.

We called Charles, but he didn’t answer. We still saw the shadow of him in his window across the street taking his pictures, so we knew he was home. In time, the shadow faded.

Over the next three days, we found Aly standing at the top of the basement stairs at three in the morning. She tried and failed to go down the hole a few more times, until she hit a growth spurt and forgot that it was even there. In a decade or two, her children tried. Long after we died and left the house to Aly, her children’s children attempted, then their children—and so on. All of them were bitten and turned away by the same soot-furred stoat.  

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SUN IS MISSING by Kion You

The Korean rice weevil is a felicitous insect, bent on one simple task: scaling my bedroom walls. Tonight I see three but sometimes there are as many as ten. The thrill must be similar to that of free solo climbing, but when the weevil falls it gets back up and tries again—the hard-shelled advantage. 

After dinner I lie in bed, which is a mat on the ground. One weevil wordlessly falls onto my blanket. It lands on its back and its legs flail like a pit of eels. After gathering itself, the weevil plants its left anterior leg onto the blanket and uses it as a fulcrum, spinning its body counterclockwise in an attempt to pop itself back up. After exhaustive study (entire days in bed) I have concluded that this exercise is successful fifty percent of the time. 

I sweep my room and round up a decadent gray pile of cuticle flakes, pubic hairs, dried boogers, and chip crumbs. I scrape bug corpses from cobwebs in corners: weevils, flies, moths, spiders, mosquitos, and one black fuzzy caterpillar. While sifting detritus onto paper towels, another weevil falls, one that has climbed only to the point where the linoleum flooring meets the wallpaper (approximately one inch off the ground). I flip this one back onto its feet, anticipating a stronger performance in its next go-round. 

A nightly ritual: spraying mosquito repellent onto every shelf, behind every drawer, even out the window. I lay in wait for a lone mosquito to venture out into the open, hacking its last, but nothing happens. Both weevils are still spinning on their backs. As I insert my earplugs and turn off the light I know the mosquitos will soon be buzzing around my head, talking in tinnitus. 

+

I take out my earplugs to make sure the screeching is real, and my phone says it is 3:30AM. There are three courses of action: try to go back to sleep and hide my limbs under my blanket, reach for the insect spray by my bed and spray blindly around my face, or get up, turn on the light, and clap the motherfuckers to death. After turning on the light I see three of them on the wall just above my head and I smack all of them, one-two-three, letting their blood— my blood—smear the wall. I'm too sleepy to clean up, and when I turn off the light, the darkness pulsates with haloes for a second. 

The path back to sleep will be impossible because I am now aware of the background noise my body has worked so hard to block out. I wear earplugs because my grandmother is dying in the next room and I do not want to hear it. Every night she sings, all throaty and guttural, two syllables which flutter up and down. 아퍼, 아퍼, 아퍼, it hurts, it hurts, it hurts. Right now she is singing a variation on the theme: 너무 아퍼, it hurts so much, 죽고 싶어, I want to die. In dire combination: 아퍼, 아퍼, 너무 아퍼, 죽고 싶어

If Google Translate is correct, my grandmother's esophageal tube has enlarged to the point where acid refluxes up her body whenever she lies down. She has a few devices lodged there to little effect. She also has a hip problem from falling off her roof twenty years ago. Her husband drank himself to death and her sons abandoned her for America. This once amazed me, the accumulation of suffering packed into one body, which is why I decided to move back to Korea and live with her. Now, however, she is just my grandmother. 

My grandmother's stream of piss sounds healthy, and I hear her leave the house to wander the neighborhood. She never closes her bedroom or bathroom doors but always slams the front door. This week I have woken up to her chopping vegetables, barging into my room to pick out my dirty laundry, and watching TV with the volume maxed out. With their death knells, she and the mosquitos are formidable. 

But I'm not sure if she's actually dying. During my first month, I didn't sleep because I was terrified that at any moment she might keel over and breathe her last, but I've come to realize that a dying person doesn't have this much fight in them. 

My aunt says that me coming to Korea has been a "present" for my grandmother, but my Korean is so bad that while she regales me at mealtimes I just nod and clear off my bowl of rice. In the vocabulary of pain, however, she speaks simply and succinctly—I feel like I'm being ripped in half. Have you ever rubbed pepper flakes into a wound? 

I'm wide awake and heave a sigh. Per usual, I open Instagram and let the blue light ruin me. It is afternoon in New York and pictures are being posted. In the yard, I hear my grandmother cursing a family of feral cats. The cats took up residence a few weeks ago—a mother and three orange newborns—but my grandmother waged war after they began pooping in our yard. She has thrown unopened cans of beer. She curses them as she would her children. I hear each thump of her cane, the cats' claws gristling the asphalt. 

At dawn, my grandmother falls into an intense fit of snoring. The pearling sky makes visible three mosquitos pinned against my wall. They are half-flattened and half-protruding, perfect for a glass case or a crucifixion scene. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.

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CAROLINE EATS HER FEELINGS by Gabrielle McAree

I half-expect Chris to be draped in an American flag like a patriotic version of Jesus. Since enlisting, he’s all pro-war now, existing in a blind state of sacrosanctity. He shits red, white, and blue, and has Uncle Sam on speed dial. They grab beers together, talk sports. Bald and uniformed, no one would know that just last week Chris lit illegal fireworks off his parent’s pontoon and drank vodka tonics before noon. That he suffocated lizards and shot small dogs with bb-guns, gratified a Wendy’s. Growing up, his parents thought he was going to be a serial killer, not a soldier. Now, he tucks his shirts in and says, “Yes, ma’am.” Ana saw him help an old lady cross the street, so I guess Chris is a regular boy scout now.

Back when we were together, Chris never pulled out. I used to resent him for this, but I don’t anymore. I wouldn’t have minded getting pregnant, not really. It would have been a nine-month holiday of glazed donuts, pickles drenched in peanut butter, being lazy. I could have handled the morning sickness, the swollen feet, the back aches, the weight gain. I would have survived. I think about dying my hair neon green so my conservative family can discuss it behind my back. But boxed dye never lasts, and I hate wearing those plastic gloves. It’s not like I would be a good mom or anything. I’m not an idiot. Moms have ponytails that swoosh and schedule doctor’s appointments and eat fresh fruit. They floss. I barely remember to brush my teeth. Ana says Cadet Chris is coming over around 2. I hope to have an aneurysm before 2.

Outside, Dad’s nose is already peeling. His cap is on backwards, and he’s wearing a cutoff tank, the one with the bald eagle on it. His smile expands beyond his face as he fires up the grill. I haven’t seen Chris since he asked if he could hit me during sex. I said no, and he joined the army that afternoon. Ana’s convinced he enlisted as a form of self-punishment. It’s because he’s a sadist, but he doesn’t want to be a sadist, she said. I thought about submitting myself to him as an experiment—mostly, because it would be something to do—but I was tired and really wanted someone to paint my nails a happy person color. Getting hit for someone else’s pleasure just sounded hard. I knew I wouldn’t be getting anything out of it. Pain never excited me all that much. I already hated myself enough.

When my dad’s friend, Eddie, got laid off, he moved into the guest room for a couple months. Eddie made it a routine to piss while I was in the shower. I never told anyone about it, but it felt morally wrong, like killing an animal or running a red light on purpose. I started paying attention to how I shampooed my hair and thought about kissing Eddie on the mouth and telling people about it so he could go to jail. Really, I just wanted attention, and that didn’t sound like a good enough reason to ruin his life. When Eddie left, Mom let me binge-watch cartoons and never made me shower if I didn’t want to.

I lace up my tennis shoes and throw on a skimpy white tank top. There’s a ketchup stain near the bottom, so I tuck it into my waistband. My hair is so greasy that it looks brown. Dark, like dad likes it. I clasp the necklace Chris got me for my birthday around my neck, tight enough that it feels like he’s choking me. There’s already a red mark thrashed across my neck like a tiger stripe. I look pretty in an uncomfortable way—in the way bad car crashes and deep gash wounds are also kind of beautiful. Downstairs, Mom is playing old people music, something sad and twangy. She’s a pescatarian now, which is just an excuse for her to order sushi whenever she wants. Mom doesn’t care about animals. Once, she opened the backdoor so Jamie, my pet ferret, would run away. It ran and ran and ran.

“Caroline!” she yells. 

Her voice is so stupid.

“What?”

I wish I had a stereo so I could blare it and then everyone would know I’m going through something and leave me alone. I stare at myself in the mirror and open my mouth as big as I can. I watch, waiting for something to escape it; the big, black hole inside me. Nothing happens.

“Come downstairs.”

I draw black eyeliner under my eyes and apply Dad’s stick deodorant. Ana’s toothpaste is caked to the mirror like permanent marker. Nose hairs clog the sink. Mom’s stopped cleaning the house on grounds of combating the patriarchy. She’s tired of being ‘oppressed.’ Now, the house is always dirty, and Ana and I aren’t allowed to have friends over. Not unless we clean the house, which neither of us are interested in doing. The barbecue is fine though because it’s outside. People can come over if they don’t go inside.

I stomp down the stairs to the kitchen. Mom hands me a cookie with red and blue sprinkles on it. Her lipstick is drawn above her lips, and her self-tanner is blotchy. There’s orange residue all over her white t-shirt. I wish she’d just poison herself in a bed of UV rays and get it over with. That would be less embarrassing, but she loves to embarrass me.

“You’re welcome,” she says. “For the cookie.”

“It would be better if it wasn’t store bought.”

She calls me an ungrateful little shit, and I don’t argue with her. 

I shove the entire cookie in my mouth and eat a second while she lectures me about getting a job and moving out and starting a family. I go outside while she’s mid-sentence. From the window, I watch her throw her hands up in the air in exasperation. I wonder if she truly hates me or if she’s just a bitch because she doesn’t love me and wishes she did and doesn’t know how to channel that energy without being called a “bad mom” by the neighbors. Dad’s face is clouded by grill steam. He’s already got a beer bottle in his left hand.

“Mom is on a Come-to-Jesus kick,” I say. “It’s exhausting. What’s happening? Do you not fuck her anymore?”

Dad laughs. “Cut your mom some slack. She thought you’d go on to cure cancer or something. You were such a driven child.”

“So, what? I’m a massive disappointment now?”

“Yeah. Something like that. Hey, toss me the paddies.”

Dad wipes his face with his King of the Grill apron and readies his tongs. I swear, he’s only happy when he’s manning the grill. I become very aware of my teeth against my tongue. They feel weak, like in seconds they’ll dissolve into the ether, leaving me toothless. 

“Dad, why are we celebrating Chris?”

“Caroline, come on.” He evenly distributes the paddies across the grill as if he’s going to be judged by a celebrity chef. “He’s going to the army.”

“Yeah, but he’s a prick.”

“Everybody’s a prick.” Dad downs the rest of the beer and hands it to me. “Get me another, would you?”

On my way to the cooler, Dad says my hair looks better dark. I go upstairs to research the dinosaurs. I want to understand how they wiped themselves out or why they did nothing when they realized they were getting wiped out. When I hear Chris’ voice, I hide under my covers, disappointed that I can’t disappear. As a child, I thought magicians could do that for a person. From the window, I see him. He’s wearing an America flag shirt, just like I knew he would.

***

When I move 90-miles north to Chicago, I start seeing a banker who works for some nondescriptive hedge fund. He has big teeth and a bad hairline and always wears three-piece suits that remind me of mobsters. He lives in an apartment with glass walls and steel appliances. From his room, you can see Millennium Park. I put my forehead against the window and watch. Down below, the people look like ants, the cars: bugs, the trees: miniature and decorative, pieces from a tiny Christmas village. The banker wants me to do rich people stuff, like read my horoscope and drink $7 iced coffees. My horoscope is never what I want  it to be, and the coffee is shit. I draft hate mail to the horoscope column and leave one-star reviews for the coffee chains. During the day, I paint and repaint my nails pink and yellow and blue. I hide the evidence of my cheese danish binges, buried at the bottom of the trash. When I’m alone, I dive into manic depressive episodes so deep that I lose consciousness. I flush chunks of my hair down the toilet; all of my clothes are too big. I’ve spent my entire life letting myself off the hook for being pretty.

Sometimes, I feel like a mannequin in the banker’s apartment, or a hospital patient. I check my wrists for bandages, for an identification bracelet, but there’s never anything there. His place is clean and sterile, like a psych ward. Once, I spent an entire day looking for hidden surveillance cameras or peep holes. I found nothing. I crave human interaction. Touch. Taste. Smell. I’m afraid to go outside without the banker. He pays for everything, so I quit my server job and move into his guest bedroom when he asks. The curtains are peach, and there are 12 decorative pillows. I don’t know what to do with all of them. I throw three out the window.

My mother calls to ask how I’m keeping. I tell her I’ve met Jesus in the shape of a rich balding man. She cautions me to be careful and to not take drugs from strangers. She doesn’t want to read about me in the paper; it would be disgustingly predictable for me to overdose. I laugh at this because I know she’s trying to be funny, but mothers aren’t wired that way. I think about telling her I’m pregnant. I don’t though because it would only be worth it if I could see her face, and I honestly don’t know how she’d react. She might be happy.

The banker is 23 years older than me. He tells his friends he’s intimidated by my ‘supreme youth’ but in a productive way, like standing next to someone who is significantly taller, or richer, smarter. This doesn’t bother me because he buys me expensive gifts wrapped in tissue paper. I act surprised when I open them and thank him, nauseatingly. When I’m in a good mood, I clap. This gets him off and always leads to hair-pulling, hate sex. The banker leaves bite marks and bruises down my spine like a trail of polka dots. It isn’t as bad as it sounds. It’s easy, being submissive. You don’t have to do anything. I’ve stopped looking at him when he’s inside me. His pupils expand so big that his eyes turn black. I don’t know how to be loved, I think. This is why I’m like this. I’m not capable. It’s my mother’s fault. It’s easier to blame her than to accept responsibility. The banker is probably the devil. Not Jesus. I know this. I lie still anyway.

Because I am the banker’s plaything, I lose all sense of self-worth. I stop eating cheese danishes and deprive myself of water, soap, sunlight, cartoons, flowers, fresh air. I stare at blank screens and watch Lego-people in long coats walk to work and then, eight hours later, walk home. When Ana comes to visit during her holiday break, she calls me a ‘malnourished zombie.’

“By the way,” Ana says, pausing to inhale what’s left of her salad. I move my fork around in a circular motion, but my salad stays untouched. I can’t imagine chewing. “Chris was promoted. Apparently, he’s doing well in the army.”

I think about the day Chris pounded into me so hard, I couldn’t walk. When I mentioned it, afterwards, he said I needed to toughen up. I cried while he rinsed off in the shower. He always showered afterwards. He said it was to rid himself of me.

Even my salad mocks me. “Good for him.”

“You look like shit, Caroline. Like, real shit.” 

Ana’s hair has grown out. It touches her shoulders now, which means it’s been months since we’ve seen one another. Specks of red lipstick clump together at the corners of her mouth. If I were in a comedic mood, I’d ask if she’s taken to drinking people’s blood. It wouldn’t surprise me. As a child, she ripped the heads of our Barbies off with her teeth. Her eyes are pale, as if someone’s put a layer of fog over them. It seems like I’m seeing her nose for the first time. I don’t actually know anything about her, but she’s family, so it doesn’t matter.

“Thanks. I feel like shit.” I push my salad away. “So, did you get a nose job or what?”

“Jesus. You can’t just ask people if they got a nose job.”

“You’re not people. You’re my sister. I thought that made me immune to formalities, or like, being politically correct. I can be a dick because we’re blood.”

“Yeah. No. That’s definitely not how it works.”

Ana wants to complain about the salad. “It has an aggressive amount of lettuce,” she says. “Nobody actually likes lettuce. They just order salad to be perceived as a person who orders it. Like if you eat salad, you automatically have your shit together.”

We throw our salads into the wastebin and go to a burger joint down the street. Ana orders two double cheeseburgers with fries. She offers to pay, so I let her. The banker doesn’t give me an allowance. He doesn’t want to monetize our relationship. I pay for nothing.

“I think we eat so much because we were denied real pleasure as children,” Ana says. Burger juice swims down her chin and onto her orange Camp Tecumseh t-shirt. She went with our high school class. I was out with strep throat and never got a shirt.

“Yeah. You’re probably right.” 

I cover my mouth with my hand. The banker watches me eat, so I have to pretend I’m a polite person. He doesn’t want me to gain weight. He says it would mess up his image of dating a younger person. This is baseless, I think, because young people are fat too. My mother never gave me seconds and kept me on a calorie intake plan, so this isn’t shocking to me.

Ana burps and doesn’t say, ‘Excuse me.’ I find her disregard for manners intoxicating. I want to drink her in hopes that I’ll become her, in hopes that I can burp in public and get away with it, in hopes that I won’t be stuck, chained to this stranger in three-piece suits. “So,” she says. “When are you going to introduce me to Eric?”

“Who?”

“The banker.”

A breeze comes in from the left, forcing me to acknowledge my surroundings. Yes, weather exists. Global warming is real. People wear coats and hats when it’s cold. Birds fly horizontally. We adhere to stoplights and abide by laws made by old men in white wigs. We avoid sugar and dark sodas, drugs, strangers, alligators, sharks. People complete 30 minutes of daily exercise and check-up with their doctors. There’s a whole society of people out there, a whole system. I readjust my sweater to hide my collar bones. They’re sharp now. My hips too. If I run into something, I bruise. Whenever I see myself naked, I gag. It’s hard to believe someone with money finds me attractive. It must be a fetish.

“Oh. I forget he’s an actual person with a name.”

Ana scoffs at this. Since getting older, it’s become harder for us to gage one another’s feelings. She can’t tell when I’m serious or kidding, which depresses me, and I can’t tell if she’s mad or hungry, which depresses her. Though, Ana does have a buffet of problems she decides she wants to talk about. There’s this rash on her forearms that won’t go away, her roommate wants to fuck her to see if she’s bisexual, she’s meditating with a 40-year-old mom she met on Facebook Marketplace, and she doesn’t think she wants to be a veterinarian anymore. She had to dissect a black cat in class and didn’t make it to the bathroom. Puked orange specs all over the hallway. Everyone talked about it. Even the professors.

“Maybe I should drop out of college,” Ana says. “Like you.”

We both laugh at this. I wish the banker were here to tell me how to act. A group of loud-talking students come into the burger joint. I wish I could leave.

“Yeah. No,” I say. “Don’t do that.” 

I close my eyes and pretend I’m on an abandoned island. Just me, floating in zero gravity space with no air circulation. The burger feels heavy in my hands. Finishing it will be impossible, I know that. I blink until Ana comes back into focus. I wouldn’t be shocked if she weren’t here at all and I were just imagining her because I miss her. I reach out to touch her, and she squeezes my hand. She asks if I’m ok, but I know she doesn’t want the real answer. I’m older. I look at my hands as if they’re not mine, but his. 

“So, have you seen Chris?” I ask.

“No. He comes back this weekend. It might be good for you to see him. Dad’s doing a barbecue. Come on, you love his barbecues.”

“No? I hate barbecues. Of any kind. Especially Dad’s.”

“If you come maybe Dad will shut up about you.” She swallows a fistful of fries without breathing. “Oh. By the way, he’s in love with that Rite Aid girl. I swear to God he would ask Mom for a hall pass if he knew she wouldn’t leave him. It’s pathetic. He goes to Rite Aid, like, twice a day. He’s all depressed because of you.”

Dad only calls me on the weekends when he’s drunk. He’s taking me leaving personally. It’s not like you had a bad childhood, he slurs. Was it really that awful? I tell him no. It wasn’t. I wasn’t beaten or chained to a wall. They bought me rollerblades when I asked for them and got me birthday cakes with the correct number of candles. The banker told me that growing up, he lived in a one-bedroom apartment with his entire family. If you compared the banker and my upbringings side-by-side, I had a rich life. I know that. I wanted for nothing.

Sometimes, Dad and I stay on the line just to listen to each other breathe. I pretend we’re looking at the same moon, which is stupid because we are looking at the same moon. I never invite him to Chicago. I’m embarrassed of how I’ll act if he actually showed up. Of how he’ll act. I don’t think I can survive being pitied by anyone, especially him, but I do feel bad about leaving him with Mom and Ana. Objectively, they’re the worst. But he’s learned how to use the Miracle Mop, which I guess is a good thing. The house is cleaner than it’s been in years.

“Caroline, you should come home and see everyone,” Ana urges. This time her voice is short, like she doesn’t care about my feelings. She takes the burger out of my hands and shoves it into her mouth. I don’t stop her. “We’re actually worried about you.”

I hate what “we’re” insinuates. I picture the entire family and the neighbors and my 9th grade Algebra teacher all got together to discuss my well-being, like as a public debate. I’m not in the family group message anymore. No one fills me in on breakups or appointments or sales. It’s as if they think I’m incapable of handling information.

“Well, don’t. I’m fine.”

“Yeah. Ok. You’re fine.”

I consider spitting in her face for the sole purpose of contaminating her so people in our family can worry about her too. I stand up because she’s finished our food, and I don’t see the point in continuing a conversation neither of us are going to win.

I walk Ana to the bus station, her chunky black suitcase wedged between us for safety. Her skin is prettier than mine. Better. Clearer. If I didn’t know her, I’d say she’s a character from Greek mythology. Helena. Artemis. Cassandra. I want to ask her how she does it, but my voice is a box of broken pencils. I can’t imagine expending effort on my physical appearance. No one sees me besides the banker, and he likes me this way. He likes sad and broken.

There’s a family with two young kids waiting beside us. The kids are kicking each other’s shins, and the parents are smoking obliviously, pretending their children don’t belong to them. Men in big suits yell into cell phones. A younger couple with acne laces their fingers together as if the physical pressure of their hands will morph them into a singular entity. A middle-aged man wearing trainers reads a beat-up paperback. I want to know where they’re all going. I want to know who’s out there waiting for them. I want them to invite me.

“About the nose job,” I start.

Ana puts up her hand to stop me. “Don’t. It’s fine, really.”

“It looks good,” I tell her. “And I’m not just saying that. It seriously does.”

She touches her nose and smiles. “Thanks.”

The train pulls up and Ana gets on without hugging me. She doesn’t turn around to see if I’m still there, but I wave her off because we’re family and that’s what family does.

I walk all the way back to the banker’s apartment. By the time I get inside, my clothes are soaked through. It’s dark outside.

***

A week later, I’m down five pounds and sensitive to light. The banker wants to take me out for steak and mashed potatoes, but I don’t have an appetite. I turn on Cartoon Network for noise. The banker goes down on me while Tom and Jerry chase each other around a mansion with lots of chairs. I haven’t shaved, but the banker doesn’t mind. His work friends are bringing their wives to the dinner. He says this like it’s enticing, as if I actually care about his work friends and their wives.

“I’m not a wife,” I tell him. The television glare hurts my eyes, but I keep looking. I register nothing. I don’t even know what’s on the screen anymore. I hear myself say: “If you really want me to go, then you’ll have to propose to me.”

The banker gets down on one knee without asking if I’m being serious or just joking. 

The next day, I have a rock on my left hand, weighing down my finger. It’s difficult to perform simple tasks, like brush my teeth, drink coffee, masturbate. I don’t take off the rock in fear that I’ll lose it or flush it down the toilet on purpose or pawn it.  

When I call home to tell my family I’m engaged, Chris answers. I know it’s him by the sound of his breathing. I’ve been gone almost a year now.

“Caroline? Is that you?” he asks. His voice is high, like someone punched him in the nuts as a hate crime. He clears his throat. His voice lowers. “It’s me. It’s Chris. Chris Hannon.” 

I pull the phone away from my face, slowly, and stare at it wondering how the telephone towers fucked up this massive, but it’s my home line.

“Don’t hang up,” he says. 

I only stay on the line because he sounds pathetic, which makes me pulse. Everywhere.

“Why are you answering my parent’s phone?”

“We’re having a barbecue. I just got back. From war, you know?”

“Oh. Yeah. Ok.” 

I hold onto the wall to keep myself upright. Outside, a family sets up a picnic at the park. Two parents, one daughter. They laugh and drink lemonade and swat away the bees. I cross my fingers, hoping the little girl gets stung so I can see what she looks like when she cries.

“Aren’t you going to ask how I’m doing?” Chris says.

“No. You can tell me if you want, but I won’t actually listen.”

I’m surprised at how easy it is for me to say this. It’s like I’m slipping back into the old version of myself, putting on an old pair of jeans. But not really.

Chris laughs. I imagine squeezing the inside of his brain with my hands until it pops. Until it rains little pieces of Chris’ red, white, and blue brain. I hate him or whatever.

“You were in my macaroni and cheese yesterday,” he says. “And on the milk carton and at the movies. I dream about you too. I don’t know what that means, but I think I miss you.”

I sink down onto the floor of the banker’s apartment and try to recall Chris’ face from memory. I feel like a wet dishrag spread out across a long table. Chris could whip me with it, the rag, and I would stand there, pointing to all the places he missed. I wonder if you ever stop loving the first person you loved. If you loved someone once, you probably always do.

“Ok. Great. Can you put my dad on the line?”

Chris wants to apologize, but I tell him it’s ok. He didn’t try to kill me or anything permanent, he just wanted to inflict pain on me. He wanted to hit me and leave visible marks and make me cry. He didn’t do anything that bad. Not really.

“Can I come visit you?” he asks. “In Chicago.”

I drag a loose nail on the inside of my thigh until my skin bursts open. My thick, crimson blood paints the banker’s floor. I watch, excitedly.

When we first got together in the 9th grade, Chris prided himself on doing nice things for me. He bought me food, opened doors, let me wear his letterman jacket, complimented me. It was the first time anyone had gone out of their way to make me feel special. I don’t know what happened to him, to Chris, but he got mean. For a while, I thought it wasn’t his fault. I thought maybe he got struck by lightning and lost all of his positive atoms. In my head, this seemed better than any possible alternative. 

I swallow. “No. I don’t think that’s a good idea. I want to talk to my dad now.”

Dad ruffles with the phone. He’s drunk, I can tell, and in a way, I’m relieved. I know he’ll be diplomatic about the whole marriage thing. He won’t make a scene.

“Married?” he asks. “Who to? Jesus, Caroline. Why are you breaking my heart during a barbecue?”

“He’s a banker in Chicago. I’m marrying him because he asked me to.”

“Well, shit. That’s not a very good reason to marry someone. But, it’s your decision.”

I breathe a deep breath, so deep I’m convinced my insides are getting eviscerated with a paper shredder. I stay on the line, and when I close my eyes, I’m 13 again. Using strawberry soap in the shower. Singing along to the radio. Sneaking cookies with Ana. Running through the sprinkler. Laughing at nothing. I notice Eddie watch me through the cracks in the shower. My teeth chatter though the water is hot. My shoulders are scalded pink. I wonder how my life would look had I told my parents about Eddie. Maybe he’d have gotten help or been put on medication or jailed. Maybe he’d be a father. A husband. A good lover. A person and not a monster.

His skeleton fingers show up in my nightmares. His dark hair clouds most of my judgements. I wonder where Eddie is. If he’s alive. If he’s happy. If he’s miserable. If he goes into other girl’s rooms. Sometimes, when I shower, I think of him. I wonder if he’d still want to watch me shower now that I’m older. Now that I’m 25. I think it’s why I started seeing the banker in the first place. In the right light, I swear he looks just like Eddie.

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THE SPRING PAGEANT by Richard Mirabella

Danny’s niece, Joan, sat at the newspaper covered folding table in front of the TV and painted the bear head he’d made for her school’s spring pageant. He trusted her with the head, when he would trust no one else with something he’d made, especially a child, but Joan understood how special it was to create objects. Joan didn’t destroy, and never had as far as he knew. Craig and Shannon, her parents, hadn’t complained about it anyway. Every book Danny ever gave Joan still existed intact. 

From the entryway of the kitchen, Danny watched her lay brown paint over the bear head’s surface. He’d painstakingly smoothed with gloss and then textured it so that when painted it would have the appearance of fur. Now and then he came to stand by her, but he’d only had to explain the technique to her once. At the stove, he heated up oil for fried chicken, her favorite.

Joan was eight-years-old, and her parents were dead. Craig and Shannon, two nice people, one of whom was Danny’s brother, were killed in a car accident. It was almost mundane. His brother had been conventional, sweet, a little dull. When Craig asked Danny to be Joan’s guardian in the unlikely event something was to happen to him and his wife, Danny accepted, because the something would never occur. Craig and Shannon would grow old and Joan would mature with and test them, but it hadn’t happened. Here she was in his apartment, brushing brown and black paint on a papier-mache head. 

“I want my bear to have blue eyes,” Joan said.

“Why?” Danny called from the kitchen.

Joan didn’t answer. The bear should have brown eyes or black. He’d let her paint the eyes blue and she’d see the mistake. He still didn’t like to tell her what to do. It didn’t come naturally to him.

Joan had once loved Danny loudly. Before her parents died, when he visited them, she wanted to sit next to him, or on him, while he ate or talked. She said, “Uncle Danny! Uncle Danny” if his attention strayed for a moment, and he’d have an urge to shove her off of him. God, what a horrible thing to think, but he wasn’t used to someone hanging all over him, never liked or wanted kids. Now, they only hugged if he asked if she wanted a hug and she’d say, “Of course, Uncle Danny.” Maybe she still loved him, but in a quiet way.

Tonight, he could have been fucking. He wanted it constantly now that he didn’t have time for it, and it was torture how easy it would be to find someone. He was young and when he looked in the mirror, he saw his temporary beauty. Strange to think of his brother in those moments, but he did. Craig, in the driver’s seat, crushed. How beautiful to have a body. The flesh would fall away from the bone someday. All this sculpture he’d been working on for ten years, all of this trying to put something together, to make life and a body out of armature and material, clay, or paper and glue, whatever, made him think about what lived under the skin. Joan, when he had his arms around her, felt as frail as an old lady, and she went out into the world every day and survived.

They ate the fried chicken, and after went back into the living room to watch Adventure Time together, the only show they both liked. The bear’s blue eyes had dried.

“It doesn’t look right,” Joan said.

“I told you.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“Oh yeah. I meant to,” he said.

The bear’s mouth hung slightly open, so when Joan wore it, she’d see out of it, as if the bear had swallowed her. He’d painted the inside black, except for a vivid red tongue.

Joan dipped a brush into dark brown and dabbed it over the blue eyes, took up another brush and circled the dark brown with a paler brown. When that dried, Danny touched two dots of white paint in each iris and the eyes came alive. They looked too much like human eyes, but when he saw how happy they made Joan, who smiled without stopping herself, he loved them. They might have made his best work of art together. He wished he could take some of the freedom he’d felt putting this mask together and bring it with him to his other work, which he labored over in the most boring manner, trying to find meaning within a piece, a reason for making it, aside from the desire to build. Sometimes it’s just a bear head, the best one you can muster.

In the morning, with the light a sad pink out the kitchen window, he made pancakes with peanut butter chips, and they sat at the table in what he thought of as their dining room, a small space between the living room and kitchen. 

“I had a dream that the Easter Bunny was a slaughterer,” Joan said. “He had a machete.”

She never told him her dreams. He tried not to visibly thrill.

“Jeez, really? Slaughterer?” Where had she come up with that word? One of her shows or books or games. How much of the world did she already know, if not understand? What other disgust could be introduced once your parents have been annihilated? 

Joan shoveled a soft wedge of pancake into her mouth and stared at the bear head still on the folding table in the living room. It was only a bit larger than her own head, enough to fit over her.

“Can I bring the head with me to school?”

“No, I don’t want you carrying it around all day. I’ll bring it to you.”

“I won’t carry it around,” Joan said. “I’ll wear it.”

“I don’t think that’ll go over with Ms. Felice,” Danny said.

Joan emptied her plate and brought it to the sink and ran water over it. Before they left the house, she passed the bear and tapped it on the head.

#

He arrived at 3:00 PM to help set up for the show. Somehow, he’d become the type of person who volunteered. Last week, he’d found himself standing in an elementary school art room with his roll of brushes from home, painting a giant wood panel, which he had provided—something he’d found years ago and had intended to use for a project that never developed. He moved the panel now, with Ms. Felice’s help, out of the art room, down the hall, and onto the stage in the gymnasium/auditorium.

“Thank you, Danny,” Ms. Felice said. “This is really beautiful.”

She liked him, he knew. She was a good-looking woman, younger, and it made him nervous, even though he didn’t want her. So, he tried to be kind, but not too friendly. 

“Very welcome,” he said.

The panel looked good in this space, in the dimness, with the curtains closed. He’d painted evergreens, like Joan wanted, and giant strawberries in the grass, according to her specifications. An odd landscape, he thought, which he liked, but the school could keep it for next year’s pageant. Joan would certainly be in the play again. It was the only thing she’d been excited about for months. In May, two weeks from now, her parents would be dead a year.

On the other end of the stage, Ms. Felice placed some of the props that had been passed down through the generations. Ugly things, basically. She unrolled a carpet of fake grass and the mustiness reached him from ten feet away. From a saggy cardboard box she removed three sections of a fake Christmas tree and clicked them together. 

Down on the folding chairs, the third graders gabbed and fidgeted, some of them already in costume. Joan had taken the bear head from him when he arrived and put it on, and still wore it. Why she wanted to stand around in it for so long, he didn’t know. Wasn’t it uncomfortable, sweaty? he asked. She shook the head.

Soon, the parents arrived, along with the first, second, and fourth grade classes. The place filled with chiming voices, screeching laughter, adults talking, chairs scraping the floor. Danny stayed back to help Joan with the rest of her costume, which Ms. Felice had made. Joan climbed into it and zipped it up. He liked it and told Ms. Felice it looked well-made. She flushed and babbled about what a compliment it was for an artist to appreciate the work she’d done. Joan resembled a stuffed animal, but with the more refined bear head the effect became slightly unsettling. From a distance, she looked less like a costumed eight-year-old, and more like an actual animal. Not really a bear cub, unless that cub had been starved to the brink of death.

Once he joined the audience, sitting in the last row, his palms went cold and wet. A cool dribble ran through the center of his body. He jittered, afraid for Joan, though she didn’t show any fear. This was a play for kids! No one cared about the quality. He smeared his palms on his jeans. He wanted Joan to be good. He wanted her to be happy. Just let her have this. 

After the lights went down, and Ms. Felice introduced the class, he felt better. The stage glowed bright yellow, and music started from somewhere, through speakers; a ghostly piano. A performer in a sparrow costume hobbled to the front of the stage and sat in a large nest made of straw. Once they’d gotten down into it and their legs disappeared, they looked like a giant bird. There were real, smooth brown and grey feathers, and the mask impressed him. Eyes gleamed black and dangerous, seeking an insect to devour. This little school. They didn’t mess around. 

The kids sang a song about the sun coming out and making the sky happy. Some voices were muffled behind masks. The kids without masks—one boy dressed as a farmer, his feet bare, and a girl in an Easter dress—carried the song for those whose voices didn’t project.

When the song ended, the story began, but it was such a nothing kind of story that Danny didn’t bother following it. Where was Joan? After the song, she’d disappeared. No one had interacted with her.

“But what if we can’t find the magic egg?” the girl in the dress said to the farmer. 

Danny caught sight of Joan. She’d been there the whole time, positioned in the dark by a panel of wood, next to the bare, false Christmas tree. Was she supposed to be standing there like that? He craned his neck to try to find Ms. Felice at the front of the audience. She shifted in her chair, held up her arm and pointed at something, whispered at the stage. He missed a bit of dialogue that made the audience laugh. Still, Joan stood and watched from her place in the dark, the white around her bear eyes visible in the gloom. Another song. The other children cleared the stage, leaving the farmer to sing it alone. The little boy didn’t appear nervous.

Joan stayed still until the song ended. The other children reappeared, and as they did, Joan joined them. She lurked, crouched and held her paws in front of her. The sparrow sat in its nest again and eyed the audience with one empty eye. Joan leapt at the farm boy and shoved him off the stage where he thumped at the feet of the front row and squealed. Ms. Felice shot to her feet and went to him. The other children turned and looked around at each other, wondering who had pushed the farm boy off the stage, except for the sparrow, who didn’t seem to be aware of anything. A boy dressed as an insect of some kind, didn’t seem bothered by the violence either. He zipped around the stage, playing his part, dedicated to his insect life. At any moment, the sparrow might snap him up. The audience made noises. The boy’s parents were at the stage. Joan stomped after a little girl in a bunny costume and climbed onto her. The girl couldn’t hold Joan’s weight, so she crumpled. Once she’d fallen, Joan left her there and moved on. Before she went after another victim, Ms. Felice appeared and put her arms around her and pulled her off the stage. 

Frozen, a bell clanged inside Danny’s head, and he saw himself, a character in a movie, running through the halls of the school looking for an exit. No one knew him. They didn’t know Joan belonged to him.

He hurried up the aisle and climbed onto the stage where some of the other kids were crying, their parents coming for them, calling names.

Backstage, Ms. Felice no longer held Joan, but leaned against a wall on the other side of the room from her looking at the little bear.

“Ms. Felice,” Danny said, but didn’t know what else to say.

“Joan,” he said.

Had another child switched costumes with her? She stood as she had on stage, still and quiet in the dark. It looked as if she wasn’t breathing.

“Joan, come here.”

Ms. Felice came away from the wall and stood next to him. “Do you know what’s going on?” she said.

He didn’t want to talk to Joan while she wore the bear head, but she didn’t move to take it off. The air smelled sour, as if someone had spilled milk days ago. Yesterday, he would have gone to her without a problem and pulled the mask off, took her by the arm and brought her to the car, even if she screamed and cried, but today he couldn’t cross the room to her.

“Are you a bear?” Danny asked.

Joan didn’t speak. Danny tried to think of later, when this had ended. She would be in trouble. They’d spend a silent hour in front of the TV, and she’d go to bed without saying goodnight.

“You should take her home now,” Ms. Felice said. She sounded afraid. She wanted Joan away from her.

He didn’t want to take her home. You will live here now, with the props—Ms. Felice will fold you up and put you in a trunk until next year’s spring pageant. 

“Joan,” Ms. Felice said. “I’m disappointed. You know I care about you so much, but I’m disappointed.”

The bear didn’t move its head, not an inch.

“We’re sorry,” Danny said.

“She might be in trouble. Ryan might be hurt badly.”

“You have my number,” Danny said. The stage wasn’t that high. Ryan would be fine, but it didn’t matter. The parents were angry, and they’d come for him.

“Take her home,” Ms. Felice said.

“I will. I am.”

“Do it, then” Ms. Felice said.

Neither of them needed to do anything. The little bear came out of the dark and walked toward them, between them, and out the door into the hallway. Danny went after her, afraid the parents might see her. He wanted to get out of the place, get her into the car where they would figure things out. 

The setting sun filled the car with intense light, bright and real, and Joan still wouldn’t remove the head. He didn’t ask why she’d pushed Ryan off the stage or jumped on the bunny girl. They drove without the radio. A short trip home, but his body felt weighted down. A magnetic energy poured out of Joan from the passenger seat, and he wanted to look at her. He didn’t take his eyes off the road.

When they got home, they walked up the stairs, and in the echoing space, her silence chilled him. He touched her on a furry shoulder and she allowed it, but didn’t react to it, only waited for him. Keeping his hand there, he squatted before her, taking in the smell that came off the body in front of him—a mixture of things, of whatever the costume was made of, some synthetic fiber, the paint and glue, sweat from within. Unlike Joan’s smell, which he knew now as much as his own. He slid his other hand onto her opposite shoulder and with a quick movement he pulled the mask from her. Her face appeared, red and soaked, her hair slicked over her forehead and cheeks, her eyes bloodshot and tired. He hurried her to the bathroom, ran the water cold and splashed her face, and she screamed as if he were setting her on fire.

#

He thought, before catching himself, that he should call Craig and ask him what to do, but Craig was dead. So, he’d call Dr. Keyes in the morning if Joan wasn’t back to normal. After her bath, she wanted to go to sleep. Not hungry. He couldn’t tempt her with a piece of cold leftover fried chicken, which she always said was the best part of making fried chicken for dinner. She fell asleep immediately, and he sat in the room with her for a long time, looking at his phone, scrolling and scrolling, not taking anything in.

In the morning, she awoke, and he informed her that they would not be leaving the house today. He made breakfast and she ate it. Without prompting, she went into the living room to watch TV. Before she’d gotten up that morning, he’d put the bear costume in the closet in his bedroom. This day would be the hardest, and he’d think about it more than the spring pageant in the coming years. He washed the dishes, let the phone ring and ring, never did call Dr. Keyes, sat with Joan and watched TV, turned off the TV and insisted they read, insisted they draw, and throughout it all she didn’t speak, not until the sun had gone down and she turned to him and said “Are we going to eat today?” He realized he hadn’t made lunch or dinner. He ordered pizza and turned on music while they ate.

The next day, Ms. Felice called, and he spoke to her for a long time, closed in his room, while Joan completed her assignments at the kitchen table. Ryan hadn’t been seriously hurt, but his parents were incensed. They wanted an apology, and he may have to pay some medical bills for a broken finger. She had done her best to deescalate the situation. She wanted him to know she cared very much for Joan. Did he want to get together some time to talk more about Joan and her care?

What to say about Joan? He didn’t have words for what he felt, for his experience of her now. 

“Maybe, the costume allowed her to be angry,” Ms. Felice said. “And out of it, things will go back to normal.”

It sounded nice and neat to him, but in his gut, he knew it wasn’t the case.

#

Uncle Danny sleeping. She watched him. Nothing woke him up because he was so tired all the time now, because of her. Having to take care of her. He slept quiet, not snoring like daddy used to. She got the bear out of the closet where she knew he’d put it. Went very slow out of the room and through the rest of the apartment, out the door and down the stairs, the whole time thinking he was going to yell at her or run down and grab her. 

He didn’t know she was a night creature. Glowing eyes at night. She saw everything in the dark. At the bottom of the stairs, she climbed into the bear and zipped it, but waited to put the head on, carried it with her until she reached Fletcher Park, the prettiest park with the nicest trees and water. She didn’t care about the playground, swings, the sports fields. None of that. She liked the trails. In Under the Wooded Grove, when Jeremy was lost in the woods and he found the hedgehogs who were curled up in balls, each with the power diamonds inside, he was disappointed because the diamonds could send him home so easy. So, he threw them in the creek. That was her favorite book. 

The trees were just getting leaves on them which meant it was summer soon. Tall light-posts lined the trail. She put the bear head on. Sometimes there were people here and she’d be scared because there weren’t supposed to be people here after dark. Not tonight, though. No people. If she needed to, she’d jump into the trees on either side of the path and be quiet. It always felt like she had a reason for coming here. She didn’t know the reason and it was frustrating to not know. She couldn’t sleep but got good at pretending for Uncle Danny. Once she’d come out here in the night air, she’d go back home and normally get to sleep. Only if she’d come out here first.

Ahead, something moved on the trail, something small. When she got closer, she saw a tiny animal running in circles around and around and around, racing itself. She didn’t like how it did that. Why was it doing that? Around and around. It freaked her out and she knew something was wrong with it. At the end of the trail was the pond where the ducks were. When they came here, Uncle Danny pointed. Look at the ducks, like she couldn’t see them. She preferred a lake or the ocean. 

She crept closer to the tiny animal, a mouse she now saw. It didn’t notice her and run away like it should have, only chased itself in circles, stopping now and then, starting again. Joan watched it for several minutes, then backed away, afraid to turn her back to it. 

#

Something had fallen between he and Joan that wouldn’t lift, and it hadn’t been there before the spring pageant. Their lives before that day faded from his mind. He sometimes caught himself thinking of scenes from the play, images of the sparrow’s eye peering at him from the stage, and the little insect boy fluttering about. These two had something in common with Joan. Dedication to being animals. He tried and failed to treat her as he’d always treated her. There were moments when he understood that he’d failed her, and those thoughts squeezed his throat, and he had to push them away too quickly to evaluate them. 

She was Joan, after all. His brother’s child. He did everything as the weeks after the pageant passedfed her, washed her clothes, brought her to school, watched her favorite shows with her, bought her another book from her favorite series. Underneath all of this lived the mistake he made each day without realizing it until it was too late. He feared her for a moment with every interaction, and it spoiled the air around them. 

 One night a few months after the pageant, he awoke sweating, shivering, his body molded out of wet sand. He’d been dreaming of pain in his head, and here it was when he awoke, following him out of the dream. A figure stood a few feet from the bed, human-shaped except for the head. 

“You’re pretty sick,” she said.

“Yes. How did you know?” He sounded so frightened. For a moment, he had the ridiculous suspicion she’d poisoned him.

“You were yelling. You’re shaking.”

She was steady as a hunk of granite lodged in the earth. Didn’t come closer for a long time. When she did, she put her hand on his forehead. He felt an elemental indifference running through him, coming from her hand. Keeping her palm pressed against him, she slid it down to his cheek, where it cooled him.

His brother used to ask him if he worried about being alone, and he said of course he did. Wondered if straight people got asked that question as much as queer people. Well, you won’t be anyway, Craig had said. You have us, and you have Joan. 

He did have her, in a way his brother never expected. Full time. When her hand touched him, he imagined that he was so sick he was dying. He couldn’t lift himself from the bed and Joan wasn’t strong enough. In a minute, he’d ask her to call an ambulance if he couldn’t get out of bed himself. She was here, and maybe she’d be there on his final day. Not in the room, but there, in his life. He hoped.

Joan standing next to him. She wore the bear head and he didn’t ask her to take it off. Crying in front of her would be like crying in front of a river. He breathed to calm himself and tried to remember he was young and strong. Like his brother had been. An error inside of him could delete him from the world. He wouldn’t even know it, that’s how easy it would be. It’d take Joan a moment to notice something had changed. She’d take her hand back when she realized he’d left the room, and stare at his long, empty body on the bed, a broken tree in her path.

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NAVIS by DM O’Connor

Tricky Dicky Manure, my first boss, said the raccoons on Lake Huron were dexterous enough to pick bicycle locks with their fingernails. He paid three fifteen an hour. His desk sat in the corner of a steel Quonset ex-military hangar which could hold every boat in the harbour in winter and only the coolest air in summer. Atop the desk: a hammer and a dictionary. Tricky Dicky liked shade, hated sweat. 

My interview was to fill the diesel mower without spilling a drop. One drop and you’re gone. Raccoon nails can cut a flap in a screen easier than a razor then open a fridge and shotgun a six-pack before you hear a floorboard creak. They shit and make love on the roof, occasionally simultaneously.

Dicky weighed a ton and wore a skipper’s hat. I got to keep and return all the empties I could find on the docks and riverbank. After a sunny long weekend, the deposit on the bottles and cans would surpass twenty dollars. New Dicky words: groin, dredge, ketch, bowline, teak, epoxy, latex. After drydocking the vessels, the season’s finale, I’d stain, varnish and winterise everything the tractor couldn’t load into the hangar. Dicky would drive off to Tampa Bay and I’d go back to school. 

Kelly’s Boogie Parlour’s staff docked a barely-buoyant houseboat in Tricky Dicky Manure’s Marina. Boy, did they leave a load of empties. Often bikini bottoms drip-dried over the dead soldiers. People passed out everywhere. On Labour Day, Dicky sent me to collect the arrear dock fee which gave them a real kick. You want our rears? They showed me full moons. Hosed me up and down. Cannonballed into slime. 

The boat finally sank that night and the staff skedaddled. I had to submerge into the algae and tie the winch cable under the back pontoon axle brace. Dicky towed her halfway up the bank, told me to douse her in diesel, which I did with pleasure before he tossed his lit Romeo y Julieta into the scuttled pontoon. 

Through the anticipatory silence before the flames took, I asked Dicky why vessels were always referred to in the feminine. The blaze grew, as did the red of his neckless face: I could tell you some inane jokes, paint and powder, metaphorical replication of a mother’s womb, she keeps you dry and warm, a place to sleep, maintenance costs, deep respect, blame Latin. All trite truisms. Next summer, you should find a better job. You’re worth more than I say.

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MAGNOLIA by Sarah Starr Murphy

The bumblebee swerves across the yard to a yellow daffodil.  The bee clings to the flower’s face for an instant, then crawls on her abdomen into the cylinder of the corona, stretching her tongue towards the sweet nectar and flattening her last two legs behind like a puppy.  She nuzzles in, wriggling.  She backs out, clinging onto the rim with her four hind legs.  Her front two legs wipe the pollen from her furry body.  It falls in tiny but discernible chunks.  She wipes her head a few more times, then buzzes off for the next flower.  

The young boy runs through the grass, holding a plastic camel in one hand. He flops down on his stomach, weaves his camel through the grass.  It’s in a standing pose, but its plastic legs are curved and uneven.  The camel has one hump and a bridle.  Its ears are back, fierce.  The boy makes it charge through the tall strands of grass, right up to a dandelion heavy with blooms.  He tips the camel’s face into the flower so that it can eat.  The camel’s muzzle is yellow with pollen.  The boy stands and runs away, galloping the camel in parabolas through the air.

The horse discovered that the gate to its paddock was unlocked.  The woman had forgotten to latch it that morning.  She had been in a hurry, currying his coat too roughly, her application of the hoof pick uneven.  The horse had shifted and shivered his flanks, had snorted his discomfort.  The woman had left, and he had followed her to the fence, grazed for a while.  When he reached for a fresh piece of grass, the gate nudged open on his forelock.  He wasted no time in stepping through.  He smelled skunk cabbage trodden by deer in the adjacent vernal pool.  The horse snorted, then trotted down the driveway. 

The man was late for work.  He poured his coffee from the single-serve coffee maker into a travel mug and set his house alarm.  He locked the door, the deadbolt.  He made a circuit from outside to ensure there were no open windows, no possible points of entry.  He was a correctional officer; he could not be too careful.  He walked to his small car, tried not to notice how it still smelled of last night’s takeout pizza.  He rolled down the windows despite the cool air.  The fact of his tardiness weighed down his foot on the pedal.  

The bumblebee selects another daffodil, but this one has a short orange corona and she must cling to the rim with all six legs while she drinks.  She gets drowsy on the nectar, rumbling from one flower to the next.  She sees more bright yellow on the dark strip of driveway.  Gluttony leads her there; she stretches her pollen-coated limbs. 

The boy feels the bee land on his back, a thump on his vertebra, and he cranes his neck.  He sees the bee with its big black eyes, its many stripes, and he shrieks.  He abandons the camel on the driveway and runs, the bee clinging to his yellow t-shirt.  His father, hearing the commotion, heads towards the door.

The horse reaches the road and hears a crash in the woods; the deer are returning to devour the orange-striped tulips in the woman’s garden.  All the horse knows is danger.  Adrenaline shoots down his long legs, rippling his chestnut coat.  His hooves strike the pavement and he gallops, tearing down the street.  Froth builds in his mouth.  Sweat runs down his flanks.  His hooves are together and apart, together and apart, the cacophony fierce and ancient.  He sees something yellow up ahead. 

The man reaches to adjust his radio, tired of the irritating jingle for the local dentist.  He presses on the accelerator as the car climbs a small hill.  

The father stands at the door and sees, improbably, a horse galloping from the left, a car speeding down the hill from the right.  His heart ceases to beat and he cannot breathe to scream because he sees his son standing in the middle of the road, doing some kind of dance.  

The boy sees the horse first.  Its mane is flying, saliva is streaming from its mouth, and its hoofbeats shake the ground.  He hears the engine next and turns to see a car crest the hill.  The boy realizes that he is in the road.  He will be in trouble.  The boy feels the air stir as the car and horse fly towards him, and he pulls his arms in and wraps them around his body.  He is perfectly still, and he closes his eyes. 

The man sees the boy first: a spot of yellow. He curses and yanks the wheel to the right, driving straight through a barbed-wire fence.  He sees the horse as he jerks across the bumpy field to a stop.  

The horse is afraid of the yellow boy and the veering car, but all he knows is to run.  He increases speed, hooves sparking, ribs heaving a fraction of an inch from the boy’s head as he thunders past. 

The boy opens his eyes.  He is alone in the road.  He checks the back of his shirt.  The bee is still there, and he feels a half-breath of panic, but before he can move, it lifts off and flies away.  He wants his camel and tries to remember where he left it.  Far away, he can hear men yelling.  

The bee flies to the next yard, to a towering pink magnolia, queen of the neighborhood.  The wind shifts.  The man, the father, the boy, the bee, and even the slowing horse breathe in the magnolia’s musky perfume.   

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MALL MADNESS

Between 7th and 8th period, Becky tells us she can speak to the dead. She swears she can show us after school.

When she pulls the box from beneath her bed, we expect a ouija board. Instead, she produces Mall Madness, fun for ages eight to eighty. As she unfolds the board, it greets us. “Attention shoppers: There’s a clearance at the sunglasses boutique.” 

The four of us gather cross-legged around the game, and Becky explains the rules. “Wait to ask your questions until it says your car lights are on and you must go to the parking lot, That’s our cue.”

“I guess this is better than getting locked in the Spirit Halloween,” S’tanael says, deflecting from his giddy exuberance.

That each of us has a dead person is well established. It was the impetus for (if not the substance of) our friendship. Each of us suspects with near-certainty that another of our number is The literal Devil. We suspect this bringer of death—the killer, if only indirectly, of someone we love—is the worst-kept secret at Cheverus Jesuit College Prep Elementary.

And none of us agrees about which of us it is. 

We pick our players and color-coordinated credit cards. Somehow, without prompting, we all begin to chant in unison, and it feels more campfire kumbaya than anything spirit-led.

Ready! Set! Shop!”

S’tanael’s buying everything. We start thinking: He’s the Devil. He’s killing it—the game—so maybe he could kill other stuff. Then again, Nate also seems to have maxed out one of his cards within minutes.

Downstairs, the movie Swamp Monsters rumbles. Becky’s stepdad’s doctor recommended he drink beer and watch  Swamp Monsters on repeat if his back is ever gonna be up to truck driving again. It’s hard to concentrate on a question for our respective dead person with all the cinematic gurgling and roaring, not to mention that one of the group has just let one RIP.

“Eww, S’tanael!” Nate says and punches his shoulder.

“Smelt it, dealt it.” S’tanael shrugs.

We scream as the real source of the smell emerges from under the bed. Becky hisses at her ancient cat, Macavity, who hauls his scrawny body, his grey fur dull and matted, toward the game. Becky shoves the window sash aside, scoops up Macavity, and deposits him on the roof. She ignores his screech as she slams the window shut. 

“That cat stinks of death,” S’tanael says.

“How would you know?” asks Nate, adjusting his glasses.

“Guys, quit it,” says Becky. “Get back to the game. You ready with your questions? I totally know what I’m gonna ask.”

Mall Madness finally makes the announcement we’ve all been waiting for. “Your car lights are on, and you must go to the parking lot.” 

Perhaps today one of them will ask a question I want answered. “Which of you suppressed a smile when I ‘fell?’” “Which of you sat cotton-eyed at my funeral?” “Which of you is the Devil?”

Mall Madness won’t be ignored. “Attention all shoppers. Attention! Attention! Your car lights are on!”

The lights flicker. Becky gasps the way she gasped when my body hit the ground all those weeks ago. 

That day, Becky needled me as I climbed the rotting tree in her backyard. “You can’t reach the top branch!” Despite her taunting, I found a knot in the trunk to place my foot. I felt certain it would hold me, and I wanted to rub it in her face when I grabbed that top branch. I put all my weight into it and slipped while reaching for the gnarled limb. 

“Attention! What is your question?” Mall Madness insists. “Go to the parking lot. Attention. Your car lights are on. Ask me. Ask me. Your lights are on. Your lights are on.” Mall Madness gets stuck like scratched and skipping vinyl.

I remember the fall, the impact with the cold ground, the faces above me as I blinked my eyes for the last time.

Before anyone can give in to Mall Madness’s demands, a low yowl bleeds through the rickety window. Becky yanks it open, sticks her head out. "Macavity! Shut up!" 

S’tanael reaches for Becky’s arm and says,  “Get out of the way!”

Becky and McCavity slither back inside just as the window drops like a guillotine. Glass shatters everywhere. A small shard embeds itself in Becky’s forearm. In shock, she studies it but doesn’t attempt to pick it out. 

“Where’s S’tanael?” asks Nate, voice quivering.

The whoosh of the October wind rushes in and fills the vacuum of silence. The creak of the last tree I ever climbed fills the room. Crack! 

We stare wide-eyed, panting. Two cat ears rise from behind the discarded pizza box in the corner. Macavity’s eyes gleam. He witnessed it all that day, hidden in the fateful tree’s top branches, watching me fall to my death. 

Thumping on the roof snatches our attention. Not the pitter-patter of an old cat’s paws, but the stomp-stomp-stomp of hellish hooves. A dark shape enters through the window. “Attention,” it growls. 

 The power fails. Becky whispers what we’re all thinking. “The Devil.”

“Yessss,” Macavity hisses, channeling the game. “There is a sale at S’tanael’s Soul Emporium.”

S’tanael staggers from a dark corner of the room. “Black Friday’s gonna be insane this year,” he says with a sneer. “And remember, Hell takes cash or credit. No layaways.”

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TRAUMA SCOUTS OF AMERICA by Joe Kapitan

For the sisters of brothers Merit Badge: Hatchet Skills

Beth’s two fingertips laid there on the plywood floor of our fort in the woods. Her left middle and left index looked like two rubber fakes with the nails painted a loud orange, two made-in-Taiwan Halloween gags from Spencer’s Gifts in the mall, except that the pool of blood between her shaking, mangled left hand and the detached fingertips was growing fast, each beat of her pounding heart made visible by a fresh outflow from the stumps. The guilty hatchet was dropped next to the pool of blood, its blade painted crimson. 

What came after is a broken-glass mosaic: Beth stumbling and sobbing, Mia death-gripping Beth’s wounded hand in hers, me carrying two bits of Beth’s in mine, Beth’s mom screaming, Beth screaming, the ambulance screaming.

Three weeks later, before the lake incident, she let us see her hand while her mom changed the dressings. The reattached fingers looked like they were taken from the corpse of a drowned man, bluish and bloated, joined to her by zippers of black thread. Tendons were permanently damaged, causing the fingertips to lean to one side. 

No one was there to teach us how to split kindling the proper way. Our 1976-moms didn’t know how to hold a hatchet, didn’t even know where our dads kept them, on the bottom shelves of the workshops in the garages of our suburban colonials. Our 1976-dads and brothers didn’t think to show us, so we showed ourselves. What Beth’s merit badge taught us: don’t lay a log down on its side and try to split it. If you don’t hit it dead-center, the log rolls and the blade glances to the side and bites deep into your bracing hand. We learned that blood will never come out of plywood, and that soaking a fort in lawnmower gas makes it go up like a torch.

Beth wears her merit badge with pride. We still go out for drinks sometimes, the two of us, now that we’re older, and when she flips off someone using her damaged hand, usually an over-aggressive man, the middle finger drifts to the side, the “u” in her “Fuck You” falling over and looking more like a “Fuck Yoc”—an insult dipped in dialect; mostly understandable, enough to catch her meaning.

 Merit Badge Status as of August 4, 1976
Merit Badges:Hatchet SkillsCPRSelf-Defense
BethXX
MiaX
NatalieXX
 The Trauma Scout Oath

On my honor, I pledge to do my will as I will—the rest is just a bunch of bullshit.

 What’s Wrong with Mr. Dutton’s Secretary?

The previous summer, when it rained, my older brother and I opened the garage door and set up an office. My brother sat at a folding table in the back of the garage. He was Mr. Dutton, generic boss of a formless corporation. He told me to sit near the front of the garage. Your job is to help Mr. Dutton, he said. My name was Mr. Dutton’s Secretary, as if I were the thinnest of beings, or fabric, a lace curtain to be brushed aside.

All afternoon I watched the raindrops collide with the driveway. No one came to see Mr. Dutton.

 Merit Badge: CPR

When Beth’s hand was healed over, enough that the lake water wouldn’t cause infection, we ran the test. It was late afternoon; the sun was packing it in, so we had the lake to ourselves. Mia looked scared, as if she might not go through with it. Beth and I were scared that we would.

We eased ourselves off the rickety wooden dock and into the murky water up to our chins. Our toes tunneled into the gray muck on the bottom. Mia was shivering. Remember, just to my limit, she said, no more. We nodded. She took a deep breath, slipped below the surface.

Beth and I each found a shoulder, putting our weight on it. For a minute or two everything was peaceful: the gurgle of the water in the reeds, birdsong. Then her spasms started. I stared at Beth, or through her, and we both pressed down harder. Mia’s flailing became wild, desperate, before suddenly calming again. Fear swept Beth’s face. We both grabbed Mia by an arm and hoisted her up. She coughed, gagged, her skin graying, her eyes bulging from her head. She was choking on water she’d inhaled, spitting cloudy mouthfuls at us. We couldn’t lift Mia’s dead weight onto the dock, so we hauled her to the shallows, through the reeds to the grassy shore. We laid Mia flat, her body still shuddering. I knelt next to her, putting my left hand beneath her neck, lifting to open her throat, just as the first aid handbook said to do, with my right hand placed on her forehead. Mia was expelling still, wheezing, and I couldn’t be sure if she was getting any breath in at all, so I bent over her with my lips sealed over hers, blowing what I could into her. She’s breathing, Nat, said Beth. Natalie, stop! But I couldn’t stop, not until Mia herself pushed me away. The dim light in her eyes was cold, departed, the look of someone deep at the bottom of a well who’d already decided not to climb out. 

I wish I could remember how Mia looked before that day at the lake, right before she went under, before the best part of her never came up for air.

 Origin Story

In the 70s, the Girl Scouts were the only game in town. Moms in heels led living-room campouts. They were uninspired, both the living rooms and the moms. They smelled docile, like ground beef and freshly laundered sheets and dreams pinched back and transplanted to the point that they didn’t take. Me, I wanted to cut my hair and nails short, to bind flat my budding tits so I could put on shoulder pads and plant some boy’s face in the stadium turf.

Each girl got a small green pocketknife. It’s handy for so many things, the moms said. Cutting thread, opening packages. Instead, I cut myself out of their picture. The knife I kept.

 Merit Badge: Self-Defense

My step-uncle Jake was a doomsday survivalist, bunker-minded, his nightmares punctuated by mushroom clouds. His concrete safe room had a hatch built into his basement wall; a separate escape tunnel ended in a metal door set into the side of the ravine behind his house. The escape door had a hasp, but he didn’t keep it locked. The walls of the safe room were lined with shelves full of canned food, bottled water. There was a cot, a chair, a single light fixture.

He was the only man in my life who didn’t see me in pink-filtered light, so when he wanted to show me his bunker the first time, spur of the moment, I went, and when he touched me, I flinched, and when he played with himself in front of me, I didn’t leave. I have no idea why, but I didn’t. Instead, he moaned my name, Natalie, Natalie. I stared at the light in the ceiling glowing blue beneath its silver cage. Desperate insects threw themselves against it. It looked so pathetic, so incredibly small. It should have been so much bigger.

The second time he invited me down there, he planned it ahead of time, so I planned ahead too. Beth would sneak onto his property from the rear, up the ravine. I would go to the safe room with Uncle Jake at four. At five after four, Beth would enter through the escape tunnel, pocketknife at the ready. We figured the two of us could take him. It would have worked perfectly if it weren’t for the padlock.

I let him touch me at first so I could open the blade of my knife behind the small of my back unseen. His hands stroked the long seconds past. No Beth. 

Fact: there is a particular paralysis caused by witnessing sudden violence that aids in self-defense. When a blade strikes an attacker’s face, such as a puncture or a slicing of the cheek near the eyes, the attacker will instinctively raise his hands to protect himself, presenting new targets to the defender’s blade.

Fact: blood does not permanently stain sealed concrete, but ragged scars stain faces. Scars can telegraph shame, and shame (to the shamed) is a billboard on a busy highway; it can lead a man to take his own life rather than see the looks on the faces of those passing by. 

Fact: the singular goal of self-defense is survival. The losers never know they lost.

 Awards Ceremony

To me, this last merit badge has no single look. At times it arrives like debilitating claustrophobia or love in another woman’s arms or shrill screams in the deep crotch of night or a forgotten gravestone or a corner office on the eighth floor with two walls made of glass. 

Sometimes I look in the mirror and no longer recognize myself; I see Mia’s haunted eyes staring out of my dark sockets, Beth’s warped fingers reaching. Sometimes I go into work early just to watch the pedestrians streaming across the sidewalks below me like tiny cells pulsing through the arteries of pavement, splitting off and disappearing, bleeding into doorways and alleys, soaking into the floorboards of the city. 

Sometimes it rains all afternoon, and I watch it from my desk, and no one comes to see me.

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