X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine | Fiction

CHASE by Frankie McMillan

October 25, 2021 · Fiction

Mr Whippy here and there, up the street, down the street, swerving his pink and cream van to avoid a dog, Mr Whippy his face emperor white, hunched over the wheel wondering what dogs want with Mr Whippy.

Mr Whippy glancing in the rear vision mirror, kids still chasing him on bikes, their heads ducked under the handlebars, a mother jogging with a baby on her hip, ice cream, ice cream but Mr Whippy is wrecked, days leaning out his window, handing out cones with the perfect pointy top, pulling on levers, eyes squinting in the bright sun. his ears ringing.

Mr Whippy turning off his ice cream shaped speakers because Green Sleeves isn’t what he wants to hear right now. He turns into a leafy suburb, checks in the mirror again, sighs with relief. Mr Whippy parks under a tree, eases himself into the back of the van, pours sacks of skim milk into the machine, fondly pats the metal side, re stocks cones, wipes the sticky window sill, tugs on his ear again.

Mrs Whippy shining a torch down his ear canal, slush in his ear she laughs, a cul de sac of sprinkles and Mr Whippy, tired though he is clamps a pale hand on her thigh. Mrs Whippy wriggles loose. Mr Whippy rises.

Out the bedroom door, down the hall, out into the night. Mrs Whippy runs smooth and light as a girl and Mr Whippy follows, his legs pumping, dogs barking, the whole street cheering him on.

x-r-a-y magazine

MR. DUBECKI’S SECRET MENU by Kyle Seibel

October 22, 2021 · Fiction

Mr. Dubecki is the first person I tell about the people humping in the men’s restroom because he is the franchise owner slash store manager for one thing, but also because he’s the only other person here after Greg went home sick and Rocky’s brother picked him up early and the new girl who’s training on the window would only get in the way, so she got cut and Mr. Dubecki said he’d come by to help me close.

Near the end of the shift I go to clean the facilities and what I find is that it’s a four-legs-under-the-stall kind of situation, which I relay back to Mr. Dubecki, who rubs his face like this is the last thing he needs, people humping in the bathroom, oh perfect. I don’t think this is the only Taco Bell he owns, but I can see from his face that this was the Taco Bell Mr. Dubecki had hoped people would never hump in.

I follow him into the bathroom and you can basically tell from the noises that it’s two guys and they’re not hiding it, not even close. We’re both standing outside the stall and I’m waiting for Mr. Dubecki to lay down the law but he doesn’t. The panting and grunting is coming from the stall but when I look at Mr. Dubecki his face is far away. I nudge him and he clears his throat real loud but that does not stop the humping. Mr. Dubecki knocks on the stall door. Hello, Mr. Dubecki says. The humping stops.

What do you want, a voice says.

Mr. Dubecki sputters without sound, like his mind is grasping for a response that makes sense and cannot find one. I jump in and say, We want you to stop humping in this Taco Bell.

This seems to put the world back together for Mr. Dubecki. He follows up by saying, Yes, please leave this Taco Bell. We allow them a moment of silence to consider our demands.

Fine, okay, whatever, says the voice.

We wait outside while they reorder themselves and Mr. Dubecki holds the door open for them. They’re two pretty regular looking guys. Mr. Dubecki asks them to please not come back to this Taco Bell.

After we close up, when Mr. Dubecki is locking the doors, he says, Thank you for that back there, and nods in the direction of the bathrooms and I tell him, No problem. He says, You’re okay, you know that? When you started, I was eh, not so sure about you. Thought you’d be here through the summer and then go back to school. But hey, you stuck around and I’m happy, really. You’re one of the good ones. He says it like I’ve cleared some bar with him on a personal level and what comes next is going to be a whole new thing between us.

He says, I have two questions for you. I say, Okay. And he says my first question is this: how would you like to make five hundred dollars and my second question is this: do you believe that stealing something back that was yours first, yours to begin with, that someone stole from you, do you believe that has both a legal and moral justification?

I think about it for a second and then say yes to both.

There are some things, Mr. Dubecki explains, some things in the basement of his house that belonged to him and there had been a situation where now he wasn’t allowed back there so much on the order of the future ex-Mrs. Dubecki who was being pretty unreasonable, truth be told. And what he needed, what he really needed, was someone who could keep their cool, just like I did back in the bathroom, just a guy who calls a ball a ball and a strike a strike. Someone who can find a few boxes of stuff the future ex-Mrs. Dubecki would never miss. He says that she hasn’t even been in the basement for a year. Do it during the daytime when she’d be at work and the kid would be at school. There’s a fake rock with a key in it and he says he can draw me a map, so easy. Five hundred bucks. Mr. Dubecki says that he sure could use five hundred bucks, the divorce and all, but this stuff I’m going to get, it means that much to him.

I think about it for a second and then say, Okay, Mr. Dubecki, and he smiles and says, Please call me George, and I say, Okay, George, and we make a plan for the coming Tuesday.

On Tuesday I find the key in the fake stone just like Mr. Dubecki said and when I open the door into the house everything is covered with buttery light from the big windows and it’s all over the white carpet and all over the white furniture.

I find the basement no problem, find the shelves no problem, find the three boxes no problem. They’re pretty heavy so I’m taking them one at a time. I’m on my first trip to the car when I hear a small voice from above say, Hello?

It’s the kid. Mr. Dubecki’s son. He’s standing at the top of the stairs. I say, Hello, and he says, Hello, and I say, I’m one of your dad’s special friends. He says, Okay, and I say, I came to get some of his things, and he says, My mom will be back later, and I say, Okay, and he says, Okay.

He looks like a little Mr. Dubecki. Same moon face and turned-up nose. He sits on the top of the stairs and watches me go back and forth. Supervising.

This is my last one, I say, nodding at the box I’m holding, and the kid says, Okay.

I ask him what grade he’s in and he says third. He asks me what grade I’m in and I say I’m sort of in college. He asks me what that means and I say, Well, I’m supposed to be in college.

Kind of like how you’re supposed to be in school, I say, and he says, Yeah but I got sent home. My mom had to come get me.

Some kind of fight, I say and he shakes his head.

He asks if I’ve ever heard of a game called Charlie Charlie and I say no and he asks me if I want to play, and I say, Does it take very long, and he smiles and runs off and comes back with two pencils and a piece of paper.

We go to the kitchen and he draws a cross in the center of the paper, making four boxes. In the top two boxes he writes YES and then NO and then on the bottom two boxes he writes NO and then YES so that each quadrant contains a word and is reflected diagonally across from the other. He lays one pencil down along the horizontal line and the other one he balances on top except this one is along the vertical line and he asks me what I want to know.

What do you mean, I say.

You ask Charlie what you want to know, he says. Any question, yes or no.

Who’s Charlie, I ask and he says that Charlie is a demon or something and so I think about it for a second and then say, Will I be rich one day?

The kid nods and grabs my hands to make a circle around the piece of paper. He closes his eyes and says, Charlie Charlie, come out to play. We’ve asked our question, now what do you say? We wait a few seconds and sure enough the pencil on top, the one balancing, starts to wobble and then swivels to point at both NOs.

Well shit, I say to the kid, and he asks me if I want to know the trick.

He says you do it with your nose. Just blow with your nose really lightly and it’s enough to move the pencil but not enough for anyone to notice.

Not bad, I tell him. Why’d you get sent home?

The kid looks away. He says, I asked Charlie if everyone was going to die and then I made Charlie say yes we all would. He looks back at me. Some kids started crying, he says.

Jesus, I say.

But it’s true, he says.

I guess, I say. And then, Don’t tell your mom I was here.

Don’t tell my dad I got in trouble.

We shake on it and I give him a little punch on the shoulder. I tell him, You’re okay, you know that, and he shrugs like he doesn’t really believe me and it’s at that moment when the future ex-Mrs. Dubecki walks in the front door with a few bags of groceries to see a strange man in her kitchen who is touching her son.

Hello, I say, and she says, What the fuck is happening, who the fuck are you, get the fuck away from him, what the fuck, what the fuck, I’m calling the police right now, you sick bastard.

The kid says, Mom, stop, he’s one of dad’s special friends, and I say whoa a whole bunch of times in a row while I try to think of what to tell her.

George, I say, stepping back from the kid. George sent me to get some of his things. The basement, the boxes in the basement. The key in the rock. Then I saw the kid. Jesus, please don’t call the police.

The future ex-Mrs. Dubecki looks at me, looks at her phone, looks at the oranges that rolled out of the grocery bag she dropped when she saw me, bends down to pick them up, starts crying, slumps over, and then kind of rolls to prop herself up against the white couch. The kid goes over to her and says I’m sorry and then I say I’m sorry. And because it would be weird if she didn’t, the future ex-Mrs. Dubecki says, I’m sorry. Then we all do it again. Each one of us says sorry again and then I decide to pick up the oranges which breaks the spell.

I put the groceries on the kitchen counter. Mrs. Dubecki watches me. She’s standing up now, assessing me. You’re pretty young, she says, and I say, I guess so, and she suppresses a sob while saying, Are you happy. I don’t know what to say, so I say, I guess so, and she blubbers, Together, with George, you’re happy together at least?

Well, I think he’s doing okay. It’s not like we work together all that much, I say. The future ex-Mrs. Dubecki’s face changes. She puts her hands on her hips and she asks me how I know George and I tell her Taco Bell, and she says, Oh, Jesus, I thought you were his—I don’t know what they call it—boyfriend, I guess.

Oh, I say.

You didn’t know, she says.

No, I say.

Well, she says. Neither did I for a long time.

The kid runs off upstairs. We put the groceries away together, she and I. After, she walks me to the door. I’m not evil, she says. I’m getting my mind around it. Good days and bad days. I mean, there’s a version of myself that’s happy for him and I’m going to be that woman. Really.

I tell her I think that’s a good way to think about it and she asks me if he’s doing okay and I think of Mr. Dubecki’s face in the bathroom, far away.

Ask Charlie, I say.

I’m closing that night at Taco Bell and Mr. Dubecki comes by to get the boxes from me. He counts out five one-hundred-dollar bills. He asks me if I had any issues and I say, Not really.

Mr. Dubecki is putting the last box in his car when he stops and asks me if I want to see inside the boxes and I say, Okay. We’re standing around the trunk of his Camry in the Taco Bell parking and what’s inside the boxes is yearbooks and photos and letters and book reports and birthday cards and school newspaper articles and Christmas lists and dental x-rays and baseball cards and bronze baby shoes and souvenir mugs and swim meet ribbons and playbills and bible camp postcards and wrestling trophies and license plates and standardized test scores and watercolor paintings and Mr. Dubecki takes out each item, gives a one-word description, then passes it to me and I look at it and then put it back in the box. It feels like church. We do it for all three boxes and when we’re done, Mr. Dubecki steps back to take it all in.

Well, he says finally and grabs a box and starts walking toward the dumpster. C’mon, he says to me, and I grab a box and follow him. I ask him if he wants to maybe just keep the photos and he stares at me. Especially not the photos, he says. We throw it all away.

The purge fills Mr. Dubecki with nervous energy and he bounces alongside me as I walk back towards the Taco Bell to finish my shift. He puts his hand on the door before I can open it.

I’m going to let you in on a little secret, he tells me, and I say, Okay.

His mouth is pressed into a hard line and his eyes are narrowed to make two deep creases in his forehead. There’s something called the enchirito, he says. It’s not on any menu, but I can teach you how to make one for your shift meal, if you want. It’s basically a smothered burrito if you’ve ever had one of those, but it’s really, really good. I keep asking corporate to put it on the menu, but they always ignore me. Truth is, they’re not ready for everyone to experience the enchirito.

Mr. Dubecki’s face goes far away. Maybe they’re right, he says. He opens the door for me and we go back to the kitchen and he starts gathering the ingredients. Mr. Dubecki’s skin is shiny under the fluorescent lights. He looks brand new, fresh out of the packaging.

Okay, he says, tying an apron on. What I’m about to show you is extremely sensitive information.

I watch him run around and I write down the recipe. I tell him his secrets are safe with me.

Crow Jonah Norlander

THE WEIGHT OF LIGHT by David Luntz

October 20, 2021 · Fiction

The weight of light can be measured by my Uncle Kev’s death. But before that, some memories: it’s family dinner and Uncle Kev’s explaining how the bread mashed in his ex-boxer’s sixty-year-old fist represents Pangea and the glass of red wine in his fingers the Tethys Sea. He’s telling us about the earth’s history, Wegener’s theory of continental drift, orogeny, extinct volcanoes, dragonflies in amber, and trilobites. Mom and dad tune him out. So do I. I get enough of that kind of shit at school. But Uncle Kev doesn’t care. He’s relentless, a natural fighter, and won’t stop until he’s educated me properly. Most of his instructing takes place in his car when he’s driving me somewhere. There’s no escaping him there.

When he talks about light, his eyes gleam like wet pebbles. He always smells nice, like Old Spice aftershave. He waves his hands a lot. They’re hairy and tufted, like a coconut. His polished nails blur cyan in the air. One time, he tells me about how light actually dies as it hits our eyes, and says, “Isn’t that beautiful, I mean that light must die so we can see?” I wish I’d really been listening to him, at what he was really trying to tell me, but I thought then that he was just plugging some lame religious metaphor: light is just like Jesus, always sacrificing and always giving, existing in some sublime state of eternal crucifixion and resurrection. And I reply: Maybe light would rather not die. Maybe light doesn’t give a shit about our sight.

It’s the only time I remember him giving me a grieved look. But this was before, and now we’re driving down Route One and Uncle Kev blurts out, “Kinch,” which is what he calls me after reading Ulysses, “Answer me this: How’s the spirit supposed to fecking survive when it’s got to look at this shite every fooking day?” nodding at the strip malls and billboards, a question whose unanswered weight each passing season presses down on me like ten thousand leaves, maybe more, because soon afterward come his limp wrists floating like pale petals in a pink scurf that won't come out of the tiles. And because he still burns and reaches me like light from a dead star, it makes no sense to say he no longer exists, especially when I see him as a child, basking on kilned rocks after swimming in the cold water of Keeley Bay, telling me how much he loves it there, the sunbaked scent of stranded kelp, the wisps of tickling seaweed, and the way light rushes into spaces he never knew about inside him, promising that it will always be there and never leave him. And I wonder too, sometimes, if what he did was his way of giving back the gift, so light could see things it couldn’t otherwise see, and whether somewhere, perhaps not so far off, he still skips up to some sunny attic where he unpacks his sewing machine and stitches a dress from old curtains, hoping that when he hits the streets that night with his new lipstick and pumps, he might get lucky.

(For my uncle who took my education upon himself, since he trusted no school to do it.)

Crow Jonah Norlander

ON BUILDING A NEST by Stella Lei

October 16, 2021 · Fiction

My mother’s house always looked halfway to collapse. She had paid copious amounts of money to build it this way—its perpetually slouching walls, its staircases that jerked into corners before snarling to the next floor. This was because she preferred things that existed between one state and another. Her philosophy was as follows: you cannot determine something’s worth before it is finished, and most everything finished is bad—corrupted by greed, or rust, or the general incompetence of its maker. And so the house lurched across a river like a lopsided Fallingwater, its unending rush lulling her to the edge of sleep. When she awoke, she stood in the middle of one of her precarious staircases, fingers to her lips, surveying the distance between her body and the floor.

As a child, I bumped into buckled walls and tripped over uneven floorboards. Cuts rusted down my legs in slashes of bronze, and my mother wiped them clean, warning me to be careful with the currency of my blood.

“You see this?” She held up the towel, stained through and sour with disinfectant, “You let all this go. Gone. Wasted.” She believed blood was metal metabolized. Gold lining our veins. “That’s why it tastes like pennies,” she said, and I swiped my finger across the wound, bringing it to my lips to check.

Our ancestors thought drinking gold—untarnishable light—could instill them with youth. Their organs would never rust into disuse, polished instead with health. What they didn’t know, my mother said, was that we were born with gold bottled in our veins. She smoothed a Band-Aid across my knee. “So the real secret to youth is to avoid bleeding. To seam your skin and keep the gold inside.”

For years, I was careful not to bleed. I tiptoed around corners and walls. Climbed the stairs while gripping the banister, unpainted wood strangled in my fist. I weaned my legs off running, teaching them to slide slowly across the floor’s hardwood swells.

My mother said the world was a pipe bomb, people just fuses ready to light. When she was young, her father exploded in her face—fists clenched to grenades—and left her blue as the sea. That was why I was forbidden from going out alone, my flash-paper bones too easily expended into smoke. And so I stayed home, insulated from flames and men, replacing school with the encyclopedias lining the office shelves.

I worked my way through the books in alphabetical order, repeating each word to myself, sculpting my breath against the sound. A for aviation. B for beak. C for critical period: the period of time in which young animals are most likely to acquire learned behavior; when imprinting occurs.

The period of time in which a baby bird’s song crystallizes like rust on steel, its voice molding to that of its parents. The period beyond which the bird can no longer learn to sing, its notes fracturing like a face in warped glass.

I was twelve when the bleeding started. It woke me in a pool of sour warmth, wet against my legs, sticky in my joints. I shouted for my mother, certain my tissues were dissolving, my organs churning to pulp. She scowled as she changed the sheets and soaked them in cold water, but told me I wasn’t dying. What had happened, she said, was I became too close to fully formed—transitioning into a woman who could eventually smoke, and drink, and leave her behind. The solution was to regress to my halfway point. To freeze my body in time so gold would lie snugly in my veins, youth unable to escape.

That evening, when I asked about dinner, she told me if I went long enough without food, I could shrink my stomach into a fist. Exorcise the years from my body, leave only purity. Bone. Calcium scaffolding my shins like pillars of salt. How I could reverse my flesh within myself, surviving off nothing but smooth planes of skin.

From then on, she fed me only feathers so my years could take flight and leave me clean. She boiled them soft and piled them on my plate in quivering puffs of down.

“The body follows a clock of its own,” she said, “You just have to wind it in reverse. Close the hourglass’s waist. Look at each bird through its mouth.”

When I told her I didn’t know what she meant, that all the birds I’d seen were mouthless, roasted in the oven or strewn across my plate in ragged plumes, she pointed out the window and said “Those birds, there. See how each note matures in their throat before they sing it? That’s where it all starts. The throat.”

I flipped through the T encyclopedia until I got to throat. Esophagus. Trachea. Larynx. I traced my finger down the diagrams and taught the page to swallow. Air digested into air.

In the bathroom, I opened my mouth in the mirror and peered inside. My throat was a cavern of darkness rippled with heat—something pulsing and alive. I clawed my fingers in to see if I could retrieve the half-formed notes in my vocal cords, cup their soft vibration in my palms. I retched into the sink, but my stomach had hardened to a pit, too empty to expel anything but breath. Feathers clotted against my teeth.

The bleeding eventually stopped, my uterus rewound into a state that didn’t know time, years resorbed into my body. When I looked in the mirror, my collarbones were arrowheads grafted to skin.

In place of blood, cold permeated through me like a haunting on loop. I wrapped myself in sweaters and coats—molted in reverse—and stood with my mother at the staircase’s head. We held hands and peered down the house’s narrow throat, too scared to fly.

My mother’s New Year’s gift to me was a music box, gilded gold, a lark perched on its crown. An heirloom passed down by her mother by her mother by hers, carried through generations like our coarse hair and heat-shriveled eyes. She wrapped my hands in her own and showed me how to wind it up. How to coax a bird to sing. We cranked the key as far as it would go, the lark shuddering in the anticipation of dance. I tightened my fingers around the knob as it pushed against my palm, fighting to unspool its song—to fly free. The notes stuttered out, slow, splintered into shards.

Crow Jonah Norlander

FULL OF HOLES by Luz Rosales

October 15, 2021 · Fiction

Kylie fingers Martina under the bleachers after school. Martina is warm, and moist, and slippery, and when she cums against Kylie’s palm, she moans so loudly that Kylie thinks everyone on campus must have heard. She hopes this is true.

“I’m so proud of myself,” she says, and Martina laughs her scratchy laugh.

Martina doesn’t come to school the next day, doesn’t answer Kylie’s texts. The day after that, she’s found floating down a river in pieces.

***

Several of their classmates attend her funeral. They crowd together in the church, sniffling, and holding each other, and pretending to cry. None of them were friends with Martina. Some had been the very ones who bullied her and Kylie. They stalked them in the halls, pelted them with water balloons and milk cartons, hurled insults such as “dykes” and “lesbos.”

Kylie hates them all.

She sits near the back, sandwiched between her parents. Her father keeps his hand on her shoulder, though the effect is more suffocating than comforting. She feels like she’s breaking, splintering. The casket is closed. She can’t comprehend that her best friend’s body is in there, wants to demand that they open it so that everyone can see it isn’t Martina, it’s a doll, it’s an impostor.

They had been friends since the first grade, back when they were shy little girls who felt comfortable only around each other, and they grew into awkward teenagers together. They’d known each other for so long their identities had become intertwined. Kylie can’t imagine a Martina-less world, nor can she imagine a Martina-less Kylie. Who is she now? What is she supposed to do?

Martina’s mother, Ms. Aguilar, finds her after the service. She’s scowling, and Kylie is reminded of the last time she stayed at Martina’s house, how they hid under the blankets and tried to block out the sounds of her parents fighting.

“This is your fault,” her mother spits. “I wanted her to stop hanging out with you.”

“How is it my fault?” Kylie demands. It’s the fault of whoever killed her, they deserve to rot in Hell, except no one knows who did it. The medical examiner said it didn’t look like the work of a human, nor that of an animal.There were no wounds at all, no blood, it was as if her body unraveled spontaneously, as if she simply couldn’t stay in one piece anymore.

Within a few weeks Ms. Aguilar will be gone, moved to another city.

***

At night Kylie tries to hold onto everything she can remember about Martina: her voice, the smoothness of her skin, the texture of the scar on her arm, the way her tongue felt between her legs. She sucks on her fingers and pretends she can still taste Martina’s wetness, then rubs the part of her shoulder where Martina had given her a hickey once.

In the morning she finds a tiny, pinprick-sized hole on her shoulder. Her mother doesn’t see any hole, says she must be imagining it, but Kylie knows it’s real. She can’t stop thinking about the hole, can’t stop touching it, rubbing and rubbing until it’s wide enough for her to insert the tip of her finger. When she does the pain is so intense she almost screams, but there’s something satisfying about it.

Eventually a gray fluid starts leaking from the hole.

Eventually, other holes appear.

***

Kylie comes to school covered in seeping black holes. Everyone stares at her. They’re shocked, disgusted, even enraged that she showed up like this and is forcing them all to see it.

In class, she does nothing but touch her holes. She leaves stains on the floor and on her desk.

The teacher asks her to leave. “You’re distracting the other students,” he says. He looks at her the way you’d look at a bug. She definitely feels less than human as she plods out of the room. Why is she so heavy all of a sudden? She can barely keep herself upright.

During nutrition she’s accosted by a group of girls who say they want to know more about her. They’ve never seen anything like that, they say, meaning her holes. She tells them to fuck off, but they grab her arms, and the next thing she knows they’re shoving their fingers into her, prying her open further. It hurts so bad. She screams and screams and thrashes and suddenly they let her go. Their mouths are wide open, they’re backing away from her.

Kylie doesn’t know what they’re reacting to. She doesn’t care.

She turns around and runs.

***

She heads to Martina’s house, climbs in through the window. It’s not Martina’s house anymore, she knows, though a part of her still expects that she’ll come if she cries loud enough.

The walls are bare. There is no furniture, no remnants of the people who used to live here. Still she goes to what used to be Martina’s room and collapses.

Time goes by. It could be minutes, it could be hours. She spends it all on her side, lying in a puddle of her own filth. She’s mostly hole now. It’s almost peaceful. She could live like this, she thinks, as a giant hole, no longer a girl.

Right after she has this thought, her hand moves on its own, forming a fist. A few seconds later she’s clawing herself violently, she’s shaking, and crying, and bleeding, and she keeps saying, “Martina,” saying it like a prayer.

Then.

It stops.

Everything stops.

There is darkness and silence, a black void. This lasts only an instant.

Once it’s over, she’s back in Martina’s bedroom. She feels different now, stronger but heavier. Slowly she stands and realizes something is attached to her shin.

She reaches down and touches it: there’s hair, and … is that a nose? Are those eyes?

“I…”

That voice. It can’t be.

“Martina?”

It is.

Martina is back, and she’s alive, and her head is a part of Kylie now, fused to her leg.

“Kylie,” Martina whispers.

Hearing her say her name brings tears to Kylie’s eyes. “What is it?”

“I feel fantastic.”

Crow Jonah Norlander

SPEECH CAPABLE by Elias Chen

October 14, 2021 · Fiction

Changliu and her sister were huddled over the kitchen counter. Between them lay an unopened bowl of instant ramen, shrink wrap intact, the container propped upright on a folded kitchen towel. Changliu and her sister looked directly into the smiling face of the man printed on the lid. The image was animate, blinking, shifting his shoulders, his lips parting now and again like he was about to speak but waiting for a cue. It was their idol, Xiao Tan.

What was supposed to happen? After they opened the package, Xiao Tan was supposed to launch into a ninety-second monologue from the lid of the ramen bowl. Something along these generic cadences: thanks for buying, felicitations, please enjoy your meal. But most importantly, after that, you could talk to him freeform during the final thirty seconds. You’d ask questions and the tiny, animate Xiao Tan would respond, provided the answer wasn’t explicitly NSFW. In order to do this, to answer your questions, the print Xiao Tan was imbued with a bare-bones version of the living Xiao Tan’s personality. Even more crucial, this simulated personality held a selection of the person’s real memories. It knew what Xiao Tan knew.

Changliu held her phone over the packaged ramen. Several pop-up windows flashed on the screen, glowing windows superimposed over the live camera image of Xiao Tan on the lid. There were rapidly changing rows of letters, numbers, lines, and numerals. Changliu’s first task was to override Xiao Tan’s initial ninety-second dialogue, and then she’d ease the parameters of his Q&A script. All this made it possible for her sister to spend two entire minutes just asking him questions.

Now here was a specific endeavor. Changliu, her sister, and hundreds of other sisters all around the country had bought every single ramen bowl in this particular batch just to do this exact procedure with every one of them. Citing production errors, the manufacturer had issued a recall, but between when the announcement was made and when supermarkets had begun to pull stock from the shelves, someone had figured out this hack. It was a miracle. In less than twelve hours, the sisters had mobilized, and they’d bought almost every unit of the defective batch before they were confiscated.

After consulting the experts among themselves, the sisters had collectively engineered the most straightforward way to jailbreak the ramen bowls in order to ask Xiao Tan their questions. The questioning would be done in pairs or in groups, with one sister responsible for jailbreaking the bowls and another sister responsible for asking the questions. The entire session would be recorded for later transcription and analysis.

The questions had been workshopped. Each group of sisters was responsible for asking a specific set of questions, so none of their efforts were redundant. The goal of this vast endeavor was a common, vital, sisterly interest. Changliu and her sisters were going to figure out whether their ship, a pairing of the male idol actors Xiao Tan / Gang Yinbo—They were going to figure out whether it was real.

“Are you ready?” her sister asked.

“Thirty seconds,” replied Changliu.

Changliu tapped the screen of her phone. The shifting rows of letters and numbers began to cohere into legible sequences. They flickered once and then they stopped. On the lid of the bowl, Xiao Tan’s pupils froze in their sockets.

“Five seconds,” said Changliu. She, her sister, and Xiao Tan all blinked in unison, and then her sister tore the shrink wrap away from the bowl. She started asking their questions.

Were you in X place at Y time? Were all the actors housed on the same floor of the hotel when you shot Z drama? How often would you eat dinner with your co-star, Gang Yinbo? Did you become familiar with your co-star’s eating habits? How familiar were you with your co-star’s personal behaviors? Were you generally aware of how much he slept? When he went to bed? Did he prefer the room bright or dark? What was the first thing he did upon waking up?

Xiao Tan answered with the direct concision of a student getting quizzed out loud. But as he spoke, Changliu felt cold dismay settle in her stomach. His replies were single words or phrases, and while knowing the answers was good, the constellation of information they formed seemed almost incoherent. There were any number of reasons why Xiao Tan might know that Gang Yinbo ate one slice of whole grain toast and a hard-boiled egg every morning. When Xiao Tan professed not to know his co-star’s sleeping habits, Changliu remembered an interview where Xiao Tan had said their chaotic filming schedule meant that almost no one slept regular hours. It’d be incredible, delicious, and incendiary if he did know when, where, and how Gang Yinbo slept, but that he didn’t know meant very little. There was no conclusion to draw.

Changliu tried to imagine. Summer in Hengdian, where the drama was filmed, the air stifling and close, the heat of the season undissipated even long after midnight. The hotel’s air conditioning would stick clothes to damp skin, the sharp chill only getting worse between the lobby and the elevator.

“Comrade Gang,” Xiao Tan might say, slouching against the elevator’s chrome handrail, staring at Gang Yinbo with vaguely bloodshot eyes. “I know it’s already two, but we’re not filming until later tomorrow. You only have that interview around lunch, so how about coming to my room to look over the script now? We could practice our lines before bed.”

Changliu imagined Gang Yinbo leaning back, one hand raised to push the hair out of his eyes. She imagined him asking, brows lifted: “Are you sure?”

He’d rake his fingers through his hair. Xiao Tan would grin, and then—

Changliu realized the kitchen was silent. Her sister was looking at her, tense and slightly lost. She was done asking their assigned questions. Changliu glanced at the timer. There were twenty seconds left.

The animate Xiao Tan looked at them with pleasant expectation. Acutely aware of the effort they’d gone through, of the moments sliding past, a single question rushed out of Changliu’s mouth: “You—Do you love Gang Yinbo?”

For the first time, Xiao Tan smiled. Changliu’s scalp went numb, and sweat broke out on her temples.

“Of course I do,” Xiao Tan replied. “I also love Rei-brand Ramen! Remember, just add water, wait two minutes, and it’s ready to enjoy. Thanks for buying! I look forward to seeing you soon~”

With that, Xiao Tan settled back into print, the fine-grain twitches of his animation slowing down until he was an image on the lid. His mouth still curved with the trace of a smile.

Changliu and her sister looked at each other. Without speaking, her sister went over and turned on the kettle. She unsealed the ramen, and once the water was boiled, she poured it inside. They waited two minutes, just like Xiao Tan had said. Afterwards, sharing the same bowl, they ate together in deep, persistent silence.

Once they finished, Changliu indicated that if she wanted, her sister could drink the broth. Her sister raised the bowl to her lips. A trickle of soup leaked out of her mouth, dripping down to stain her collar with a vivid, orangey bloom.

Changliu’s sister slammed the bowl onto the table. She coughed twice, eyes watering, and yelled, “Surely this life is cursed! What the hell did he mean?”

“I know,” said Changliu. “I know.”

Crow Jonah Norlander

Monologue of a pirate ship that doesn’t have a figurehead, or maybe it did, long ago, but it’s hard to tell now because its bow is encrusted with these ossified clam shells and barnacles, which, during a storm, scuttle about and open up and scream, as though they had mouths. by Jiaqi Kang

October 13, 2021 · Fiction

I only ever wanted to know how it felt to have the wind beneath your feet, eager to hoist you up to where you needed to be, hands outstretched, palms faced upwards and fingers laced together, inviting. As a sapling I watched children do that, paid special attention to the one at the bottom who was always getting a faceful of leg, ass, and hand as his friends used him to clamber over the wall. I was friends with the wall. My roots were entwined with the bricks at its foundation. We’d come up around the same time, the wall erected where before there was only common. When the time came for me to leave, it was difficult for them to cut me down. Like the wall was holding on to me, trying to keep me there. They had to smash some of the stone to tear me out, and dig their heels into the mud and pull and pull.

Afterwards, they stripped my bark and made me smooth. Made me bend and curve the way they wanted. The wall stayed put and did its job, which was to enclose, and forgot me. Part of me became the holster for a sail, and when the wind blew across the water and filled my puffed-out cheeks I learned that nothing is as good as you think it’ll be when you’re lying on your back on a common that no longer exists while your mother rubs your belly in comforting circles. I learned that you can miss stomachaches, and the sky when it’s placid, and children who snap your branches and tuck their garbage into the crooks of your trunk. I learned that you can be seasick.

The sea was so wide, the first time. The sky was empty. I crossed them and crossed them and didn’t leave so much as a mark. The water held no imprint. It took me years to realise that the waves lapping against me wanted nothing from me, and had nothing to say to me either.

My captain sings to me when he thinks only I can hear. My captain shares his rum with me and sometimes falls out of his bed so I can feel his skin. My captain saw my run-down husk and replaced each and every one of my planks, some himself, some by others under his orders. When I first met my captain he was only a child. He reminded me of myself at that age: supple, wicked, with conniving thoughts. I watched him shed his skirts and cut his hair. I watched him kill his masters with a cleaver he pocketed from the kitchens. I was there when he lost his leg and I gave him a part of me to use as peg, and it was like how he used to run a finger across the coarse grain of my body to see if I’d splinter him; that hiss of pain and prick of blood always such a thrill, as though in that moment he understood me. The splinters always pushed themselves out some days later but when he received the peg, it was mine for him to keep. His.

My name is Shen. It means deep. It means God. It means aunt. It means that I live in the gap beneath your bed and only come out to call you down to mealtimes. No, it doesn’t. My kidnappers only thought it would be an easy name to use for when they needed me to wade into the water on their behalf. Sometimes, I drop my anchor into the sands in the dark and wonder if I’ll fall in love with whatever I find next. There was a particular ripple that passed through me once and made me wonder whether that’s what it feels like, when it happens—as though something has moved through you, has made use of you in that moment as some kind of transit or vessel, and now all you want to do is to follow it wherever it goes so that it may use you again. I think it was made of sound, the ripple, though I don’t know what it sounds like.

Here’s what I do know: I know that aunts are meant to look like dads, all square faces and round eyes, lips clicking around pistachio shells. I know the sound of my captain’s footsteps, the drag of him across the floor. I know that the color purple exists, though I have never seen it. I know that the common is gone. I know that my captain’s parrot did not die of an accident, that the first mate poisoned it, that he will use the same poison to kill my captain. I know that I will not let them throw my captain’s body into the ocean after they kill him. I will not even let them touch his body, which only I have felt, his breasts tucked between his chest and the straw mattress when he sleeps, his scarred and mottled arms, the snail that lives in his hair, he sound of his snoring. I would sooner sink myself and every soul that has carved a space for itself inside my brig than let my captain’s crew dispose of him like some aging widow too old to sweep an alehouse floor.

They think because I am an aged, creaking thing, because I am ugly and damp, that I cannot fight back. What they don’t know is that my captain loves me for what he sees of me. I’d always hoped I’d die by fire, but if I am to drown, for my captain, I’d be glad, I’d be honored, I wouldn’t cry. Let the breeze take the pieces of me to some faraway shore, with enough wood to start anew.

Crow Jonah Norlander

MISSIONS by Ali Raz

October 12, 2021 · Fiction

Mission 1

We weren’t in any particularly good place, just a parking lot without any cars. Part of the lot had been flooded and now resembled a pond. It was only a matter of time until A, high on soda, stripped out of his clothes and plunged in. The others encouraged him with maniacal hoots of laughter. I ducked over to untie my shoelaces, squeezed a tube of explosives from inside of one, and proceeded to attach it to the underside of A’s Toyota.

I waited for two hours to be out of sight before I dialed The Number from a phone booth. Two hours beforehand, A had started his car and burned to a crisp.

“It’s done,” I said into the payphone. This was difficult; the most difficult part of the whole operation. Each of us were questioned by the police, but nothing came of it. Of course it didn’t. They were incompetent fools.

***

Surveillance structures in Looptown (not a name; a homonym) are designed with sightlines in mind. This sounds obvious when thus stated, yet one would be surprised by how commonly it is overlooked—in other cities. The whole of Looptown is the work of a single architect. This has given the township a coherence of design rare in modern cities. Looptown is distinctive in other senses, too, being the brainchild of bureaucrats who gathered in parliament one afternoon and decided en masse that a new city was necessary. The king was pleased. Preparations began forthwith. An engineering competition was launched—anyway, not to go on. The point is, there was a point in Looptown’s emergence. Unlike the mass of historical cities, it was not formed through the step-wise action of historical time. It burst upon the planet all at once, complete and fully formed, much like Mr. Bean’s fall from the sky (for the careful observer, that show—and no other—has predicted the future in other ways, too).

***

Of all of Looptown’s many noteworthy architectural features, none is more immediately striking than the design of its surveillance structures: police station, prison, courthouse, post office, grocery store, and bank. Observed from aerial view, Looptown is a cube. Each structure is situated in a way that allows it complete and unobstructed sightlines over each of the cube’s six faces. The task was impossible—which is exactly why I had been given it; I, and not my dear eliminated A, had been the intended eliminee. In executing the mission, I had evaded my own death, switching it out with A’s. Would it matter? I hoped that it would not. Which is why, filled with hope, I made the circuitous trek out of the police station and walked with my back to their expanding glass wall, always aware of the 100 eyes upon my back, until the moment I occupied the vertex where the domain of the police station ends and the post office begins. It wasn’t a blind spot. It was an interference zone. Policemen and postal workers dried out their eyes in staring contests as I, meanwhile, picked up the receiver and dialed The Infernal Number.

Mission 2

Men have no regard for each other.

For example:

In Wes Craven’s B-movie extravaganza The Hills Have Eyes, two families have a stand-off. One is a normal family. One is a cannibal family. The Normals bust a tire and run out of gas in the middle of an endless desert. Soft sand and dry heat form mountains of grit that run a ring around the horizon. These hills have iron in them. The iron scuppers the radio reception, meaning they’re good and truly stuck. Really cooked—as both families know. Have known, each independent of the other, from the moment they stopped at a gas station and encountered a strange old man, saw a bloody handprint on a door, listened to warnings they’d no mind of heeding. Each of the six holds this knowledge within themselves while maintaining a false exterior for the others. They each of them front. Which is why, as families do, they will each of them rot, burn, and lose their minds, sustain bullet wounds and be stabbed to death, in a single night lose everything that they hold dear. The seventh, a baby named Catherine, meanwhile, had no idea any of this was happening, or that she lived with such utter fools.

***

The film doesn’t end. It only stops running. The last frame is of Doug Wood, the golden boy. Unable to pull the wool over his eyes any more, Doug plunges a knife into the cannibal father the way one plunges a clogged toilet bowl. Beneath him, out of frame, the father cannibal experiences ecstatic death. It’s hard growing up in a desert. It’s hard living with animals like an animal. It’s hard being ugly, maimed, malformed. It’s hard to be spurned, scorned, denied, expunged. It’s hard to eat baby Catherine, but it’s easier than the alternative, which is to starve.

Mission 3

Iron has magnetic properties.QQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQA3333 and it will, and it will lead me to the true North.

“Melissa,” I said to the spider, who turned in her web and wagged her face at me. “Do you think it would be wise or unwise for someone—not myself, of course—but someone else, to respond to radio messages not intended for them?”

The coffee pot pinged and I poured a large cup. I drank it in the living room with Melissa.

The telephone rang around noon: six hours too late. “You’re too late,” I intoned into the phone. Behind me, Melissa started up her mezzo-soprano scales and I cupped a hand over the mouthpiece to keep my interlocutor from overhearing. “It’s already over.”

Hardly had I said this when a fist pounded on the front door. Melissa’s voice broke on a note. I curled a hand over the pistol in my waistband and moved softly towards the door. The silhouette was a woman’s. I tucked myself flat against the wall and asked the stranger what she wanted.

She told me she needed to make a phone call. Her car had broken down—looking out the kitchen window later, I’d indeed see a Beetle with smoke rising from the hood—and she needed a mechanic. A breathless moment passed. Then I slipped the pistol back into my pants, yanked aside the chain, and welcomed the stranger into my house. Highly irregular behavior from a serviceman, but I had had queasy dreams the night before. Queasy dreams, whenever I have them, make me act queasy until the feeling goes away.

“Would you like some coffee?” I asked her when she had made the call. “Cereal? A sandwich?”

The woman politely declined each of these. She said I was very kind, but she had to be going. At the door she paused, perhaps pitied me, turned to kiss me a little on the lips. Her tongue had darted into my mouth before I had time to react, and then she was gone.

“Wow,” I said aloud, and spat out the pellet she had deposited against the inside of my cheek. When I’d unrolled the tight little paper tube and dried it out, I saw that there was an address on it. The address was my own.

***

“Melissa,” I asked Melissa. “Do you think I ought to take a shower or a bath?”

So I stood under warm flowing water and moved a loofah around me, trying to get clean. Melissa had picked my outfit for the day. She’d gone all out. Lime-green suit, bowler hat, stovepipe socks and brogues. The last time I’d worn all that I’d been getting married.

Which was fitting.

I hid the bomb in the cake. This was easy. A ten-layered wedding cake, to arrive intact at an event, has to be assembled on the premises. A team of bakers ferry the individual layers to the venue in a trademark iced truck and, when the time is right, carefully and with bated breath, stand each layer atop the other. Frosting and icing are added along with decorative bits and bobs.

I hung around the bakers and snatched a moment when their attention was diverted to slide the pipe bomb into the side of the vanilla cake. I covered the point of insertion with icing and, with my work having been accomplished, wandered further into the party. I was enjoying canapes and champagne in a far corner of the garden when the bride and groom cut into the wedding cake and sprayed blood and marzipan all over the place.

“It’s done,” I said into the payphone, and hung up. Then I was on the ground and vomiting, really heaving, my whole gut was in my mouth. The shadow of the man who had poisoned—of course, poisoned!—the precise canape that was served to me fell over the ground, and then I blacked out.

***

Phones were ringing off the hook. One phone would be answered, and another would start ringing and mixed up in it all were the murmurs of male voices. Low and officious—that is how the men sounded, as consciousness slowly returned to me. I couldn’t see the men, and this is how I knew there was a hood over my head. There was no feeling in my hands and feet. My butt was hurting on a hard metal chair. Leather straps kept me pressed to it.

“He’s awake.”

“Light him up.”

A set of floodlights blazed on in my face and the hood was yanked off by a wire. I know that I screamed because there was the taste of blood in my throat; I’d bitten down on my tongue in the shock of the lights. There was a gibbering sound like turkeys at play.

“We have you. F__ Gott__, you are under arrest!” A voice spoke into a mic. I know that he was using a mic because there was a lot of feedback. Especially when he raised his voice and got all excited, and the mic exploded in a chainsaw of artifacts. Someone got him a new one.

He read me out my list of crimes. Everything I’d ever done, and some things that I hadn’t. While they had me, they must have thought, might as well pin some loose ends on me. It was policework, plain and simple. I didn’t hold any grudges on that account.

“Who sold me out?” I asked, when the recitation had ended and my cop captors asked if I’d any questions. A universal tittering went up.

“It was Melissa,” the man boomed into the mic.

Melissa, Melissa, Melissa, the others echoed.

Melissa

Melissa

Melissa

Someone threw the switch and the straps fell off from around me. Immediately, I teetered, lost balance, fell thirty feet into an ice bath of piranhas.

Melissa

Melissa

Melissa

Crow Jonah Norlander

NOSEBLEED WEATHER by Marilyn Hope

October 11, 2021 · Fiction

Twelve-year-old Tibby Wallace takes the winter with him when he dies, but it's an act of rage. Summer scrapes through the valley overnight. Pollens convulse, lakes flood. Hundreds of snowshoe hares wear their December-whites in the sudden verdure; easy prey for owls, foxes, Mazzie Mako's feral cats. Soft, torn bodies everywhere. Tibby evokes eight-foot-tall stalks of hogweed from every ribcage, furious and toxic to the touch. But it's the yarrow that spells murder to me and Cricket.

"Never seen anything natural grow in such straight lines," Cricket says, studying the row of rusty blossoms that slit across the town limits like papercuts. "Earth don't plant in processions."

"Speaking of processions," I say, nodding to the single-lane road. Mrs. Wallace is driving back from the cemetery in far-off Stanton in her battered station wagon, heading the autocade at a crawl. Everyone's still got their winter tires on. Wallace rolls down her window, melting snow clinging to the tulle veil of her fascinator: she must've stood graveside for a very long time.

"What's all this?" Wallace asks. "Hemlock?"

"Yarrows," says Cricket. "Also known as 'soldier's woundworts' or 'sanguinaries.'"

"All right, Policegirl Posy. What they mean?"

"Mean he's angry." Cricket's thick black hair hangs heavy with sweat and rain. Tibby has been tantruming short storms and grueling sun in turn across the 5.80 square miles of our town all day. "Mean there's something else he wants us to see."

"Always got to have the final word, my boy," says Wallace. She and Tibby lived in a small house full of fatigue. They were hard-eyed but shy, both of them better hiders than seekers. Mrs. Wallace's hands are all knuckle as she tightens them around the steering wheel, so hard that the old leather cracks. "We following through or not?"

Cricket and I get back into the squad car and hit the siren. We're in haphazard plainclothes for today's mercurial weather. I’m wearing a denim romper and snow boots. Cricket’s in a sage-colored button-down, men's trousers, and a disposable rain poncho. Badges on ball chains circle our necks.

"Seen this before," Cricket tells me, dodging hogweed as we drive. "My neighbor's daughter in Cheongsando went missing one spring. Found the body surrounded by endangered musk deer, the kind that live in the boreal forest, right there in the island green. They died so quickly. Fangs everywhere, like punctuation marks. But for a spell, they brought the taiga with them. Jezo spruce and bog rosemary and fireweed—"

"You know your plants," I say, startled.

"I know everything that's got a place," says Cricket. "And I know a pointed finger when I see one. That girl laid dahurian larch all around the house of the man who killed her. I didn't have the seniority to convict him then, but I've got the numbers and the shadows to back me here. Not that I think Tibby'll have left much for us to fingerprint. If this sun is any indication."

Sweat slips down our temples. Cricket pokes the AC vents open.

"Hell-hot," she says.

By the time we reach the house at the end of the yarrow, tiny red petals have swallowed the doctor entirely—a woman's silhouette tethered to the ground by a net of stems. Cricket and I draw closer on our tiptoes, seesawing as we try not to step on the flowers’ open faces. So many and so close, the copper clusters of florets smell full and peppery, like someone's cooking. Spindly white spider lilies canopy her expression, rising from her eyes and nostrils and mouth, as if in censorship.

Cricket presses one hand to the doctor's wrist for a pulse, then pulls it back with her middle finger raised toward the ceiling.

"Oh, boss, don't pout," I say. "Let the boy have his revenge."

"And what pretty revenge it is," says Cricket, sullen. "Just wish the achillea came with answers."

But it doesn't. Tibby had been back in the phlebotomy chair the last afternoon we spoke. I asked what they were testing for this time, and he replied in that voice of his, dry as dust: “Toxins. The really-hard-to-find ones.”

He liked us—Cricket's terse concern and thin mouth, my cheerful banter, the silly things I could do with my eyebrows. The way we believed him when he said someone was poisoning him. “I wanted to do what you two do”, he said, the doctor tapping gently at his inner elbow. “I wanted to keep listening after everyone else gives up.”

There was nothing we could say to that, his resignation, our failure. I watched the test tubes fill one after the other, his tiny veins bulging with blood. Almost beautiful.

“Like branches,” I said.

“Like roots,” Tibby replied.

Outside, Mrs. Wallace honks her horn twice. She and the funeral cortege are pulling up to see the damage. I can address the grief in her expression—there are enough ways to say "I'm sorry" and "I know you loved him"—but I can think of no acceptable reply to the fury and shame that twist her mouth when she sees where the flowers are leading her.

Cricket and I walk to the front porch and stand shoulder-to-shoulder, shivering. Now that we've found the body, Tibby has released the weather again, fast as a snap of the fingers. Not far beyond the final car, it's beginning to snow, winter creeping up on the mourners like a slow, slender needle.

Crow Jonah Norlander

YANG LIANTING REDUX by Celeste Sea

October 10, 2021 · Fiction

After the first time we fucked, she pissed on me. A whim. It had felt sacred, hot and vicious, and we’d laughed as the piss slid down onto my waiting tongue.

Crow Jonah Norlander

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