THE CROW CAME ONE MORNING AND WHAT’S LEFT TO WONDER? by Derek Maine

THE CROW CAME ONE MORNING AND WHAT’S LEFT TO WONDER? by Derek Maine

September 15, 2021  ·  Fiction

He takes his shoes off by the door. A solemn peek in the hotel mirror suggests pleated pants, starched shirt, taut tie, he’s running out of matching letters to describe his appearance which is always, and only, just that. To himself he appears as an apparition. Do others see him, he wonders often. The meetings today went well. He sold himself. Passed himself off as one of them. Someone they could trust. Someone they could have a beer with. At a baseball game. A hot dog too. He is not that someone. He hasn’t had a beer in some very long time. A hot dog would upset his stomach, surely. He calls his home. No one answers. Everything is being created or dying and he obsesses over which. The crow circled above his house this morning, before he left for his work trip, and that is another thing he has been considering. He steps forward toward the television then steps back. The room looks like all the other rooms. Describing it would kill it, surely. Has he used surely twice? He has. He wishes he hadn’t but it’s too late to change it, he sighs. Someone else is in the room, came in with him. It’s him the other way. There are always two, wherever he goes. He is an unwilling participant in an argument for argument’s sake which has raged on within him for 39 years. Whenever he picks up a new trick, or learns a new phrase, the other way does too. It bores him. He wishes there was another way, but he only contains enough energy to wish. He seeks nothing, he has done no serious investigation.  He avoids the television, walking further into the room, not wanting to stir up an anger. He pulls the curtain to reveal a view of the highway. What a stupid way to live, he says to no one. The phone rings. He picks it up and says something like, “hello.” It is not 1979, in case you were wondering. It is a year, but not that one. His wife is on the other end of the line. He can hear his children screaming in the background. They love him. They miss him. They say goodbye and he hangs up the phone. He wonders who they love. He considers who they miss. It is not him. It is their projection of him. He is too many things at once to miss. He is too many things at once to love, he thinks. He is listless, the other way suggests he could be lifeless, if he’d like. He doesn’t want to be listless or lifeless. His co-pay is too rich for any other state of being. He distrusts professionals of all varieties, preferring amateurs or, better yet, people and things to happen with no explanation whatsoever. Plus, what books have the therapists read? It only ever shows you, on the websites, which insurance they accept. It never digs into their relationship to literature, being the only thing that matters to him. Since he mentioned websites, he can delete the part about it not being 1979. He doesn’t want to. It is a nod to an earlier work. He is conscious of building an oeuvre, even if he still has to look up the word every time to spell it correctly. It’s the “e” after the “o” that always trips him up. His wife sends him a text. She is privy to his rhythms. Suggests he use the hotel treadmill to stave off the thing that doesn’t have to come. He’s missing cigarettes. He’s not missing beer, but he’s always missing cigarettes. He does not want to exercise. He does not know what, or how, to be. It disheartens him. It unsettles him. He will do nothing to improve his prospects of knowing, or being, or being any other way. It is the only way he knows. He is not going to leave the hotel room. He is not going to change clothes or shower or turn on the television or open his computer to write or go outside for a walk or eat any food or think about anything other than how he is feeling, which is an absence, and occurs to him to be the only thing happening in the entire world at the moment. He masturbates when it is time to masturbate. He takes a Tylenol PM when it is time to take a Tylenol PM. He lay on top of the sheets, naked, unable to sleep. He takes a second Tylenol PM when it is time to take a second Tylenol PM. The couple next door is having sex. Or the person next door is watching pornography, whatever the case may be. His wife is jealous of his work trips, his time away from home, his peace away from the kids. But she does not have to be him, he thinks. He does, he’s sure of it. He is in pain at how brief life is. And how poor of a showing he’s made thus far. His oeuvre is weak and wildly inconsistent. He would like to be different, but he does not know how. He wonders what he would write about if he could write anything at all, writing being all he’d like to do, though he’s never examined why, and he’s terribly aware that if he were to, he might find something else to dislike about himself, and so he does nothing. He tries to conjure an image but comes away, as usual, with nothing but formlessness. He is unable to imagine a red dot. Or tap into any visual. It is all, instead, a constant flow of language. He has a business degree and a loneliness he’s immediately thrust onto everyone he’s ever been intimate with, and an immediate regret. He’s lost the plot, control of the narrative, not a natural editor, too fat around the belly, bags under the eyes – the Tylenol PM never works, wondering what the crow wants with him, if anything, probably nothing, he’s made babies and has a life insurance policy and isn’t sure there’s much else left for him to do. He pulls into his driveway. It is the next day now, if that makes any kind of difference. His wife kisses him softly on the lips, she’s headed out to a yoga class. The kids are out playing with friends. He takes his shoes off by the door. A solemn peek in the bedroom mirror suggests pleated pants, starched shirt, taut tie, he’s running out of matching letters to describe his appearance which is always, and only, just that. To himself he appears as an apparition. Do others see him, he wonders often.

Crow Jonah Norlander

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OTTERS AT THE ZOO by Christopher Allen

OTTERS AT THE ZOO by Christopher Allen

September 13, 2021  ·  Fiction

My imaginary son is learning about otters in imaginary third grade. He has to write a report. I think he’s a bit young for reports, but his imaginary teacher, Mrs. Florida, thinks otherwise. Two hundred words. Due Monday.

So I plan a trip to the imaginary zoo though my imaginary son says the fastest way to learn about otters is the Internet. He spends all his internet time reading about sea otters. He’s an official member of the Otter Appreciation Society. 

Did you know, he says, that otters can talk? He whistles, growls, says he’s learning Otterish, says he doesn’t have time for a zoo when he’s got 42,689 search results to get through for “All Things Otter.”

But the fresh air, I say. The snake house. Churros. 

Nah, he says.

There’ll be imaginary sea otters, I say. Real ones.

He’s already in the car.

My imaginary son is just big enough to sit in the front without his imaginary car seat. He buckles up, smiles like that click is the most adult thing in the world. And maybe it is. He asks how far the imaginary zoo is, and I say it’s seven carrot sticks and that tuna fish sandwich in his imaginary backpack. He tucks into the sandwich.

My imaginary son’s obsession with sea otters is nothing new. Ever since he hatched from my thigh he’s been a little otter fellow. I allow it. A boy needs a hobby. I collected stamps.

Did you know, he munches, that ninety percent of sea otters live on the coast of Alaska? 

I didn’t, I say, and he says, We live in Delaware.

A shame, I say. Where do the other ten percent live?

Did you know, he says, they store food in their armpits?

That’s gross, I say.

Super gross, he says like super gross is the best thing ever.

The imaginary zoo is hopping today. It’s the birth of Wen, the imaginary panda. It’s been all over the news. We’re waiting to enter the imaginary panda pavilion when I spot the churros cart. I’m starving, and we’ve been waiting in the queue for what seems like a million carrot sticks, so I tell my imaginary son to hold our place while I grab us churros. I return with the most aromatic imaginary confection to the same queue, the same panda pavilion, but no imaginary son.

Have you seen a kid? Have you seen a kid? I say to the parents in the queue. 

This is a zoo, someone says. It’s an ocean of kids.

He’s eight, I say, looks like a miniature me. Like this, I say, and squish my cheeks up into my imaginary son’s goofy face.

You left your kid? someone says, For churros?

I run up and down the queue—Have you seen my kid?—getting only judgmental glares for taking my eyes off him for four seconds, but then I hear him beyond a cobblestone path. He’s jumping up and down squealing Otterish on a platform made for kids so they can traumatize the sea otters below.

He settles when he sees me, knows I’m not the kind of dad who’d haul off or why I oughta. He knows I’m just grateful for every moment he decides to stay. Did you know, he says, that otter mothers leave their babies floating on the water when they look for food? He takes a churro from the bag, and it may be the cinnamon and sugar dusting the air between us, but I feel a breeze of something real, something unfamiliar like, I don’t know, but that’s just it, isn’t it? I don’t know.

Why is that? I ask.

Their fur’s too thick, he says. They can’t swim under water. But they float great. He smiles and throws an imaginary fish to the otters below.

x-r-a-y magazine

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COLLEGIATE GOTHIC by Daniel Felsenthal

COLLEGIATE GOTHIC by Daniel Felsenthal

September 10, 2021  ·  Fiction

Summer

I met Miles on move-in day after my advising troop finished doing icebreakers and trust falls. Actually, I met his dad first. 

“Herman Kahn,” said a man wearing a fleece embroidered with the mascot of our university on the breast, and beneath it, the words Class of ‘72. He extended his hand as though he were a freshman himself, but looked at his son, and their dance gave the impression of a family whose dynamics were more important than people outside of the family. 

“Miles! Care enough about someone other than yourself to meet your neighbor?” 

“I told you not to wear that stupid fleece, Dad. You’re embarrassing me.” Miles’ eyes hardly passed over mine, “Hi,” and then he turned back to Herman, “Please leave before I never talk to you again.” 

My parents would disown me if I acted so rude, but Herman obeyed. 

“Wanna go to a party?” Miles asked. 

He learned from his older sister, also an alumnus of our university, that freshmen usually go out in large, aimless-seeming packs, so we should assemble a group. 

“A group of girls,” he clarified. “More than one penis in a room is practically a gay club around here.”

Unlike Herman, Miles wore a yarmulke. I thought religiosity got squeezed out with each generation by America, sex, capitalism, and the same festering animosity that led Miles and his dad to scream at one another. Or at least this was the case in my family. The children of churchgoers mostly seemed to stop believing in God around the same time we stopped believing in Santa Claus. Still, we maintained a basic respect for our parents’ authority. Miles, on the other hand, became a religious Jew after his parents split up, when he got close to a youth group leader at his temple, and he despised his dad, blamed him for divorcing his mom and messing up his childhood, which was a doubly fraught perspective since he’d come to Herman’s alma mater. 

“I was shut out of the other Ivies,” Miles explained to me. 

I was accepted by a few, but went here because it was the only school that offered me enough financial aid.

Maybe Miles’ family legacy accounted for his self-confidence. He acted like a bro with other guys, but surprisingly, charmed the finer sex. Enough girls jammed into his room that a few people had to stand on his bed while we passed around a fifth of Belvedere his mom gave him as a present for being salutatorian of his high school class. Everyone smiled and wanted to be liked by everyone else, and people who would never have spoken to me in high school were so friendly that it felt as though going to the same school were a bigger commonality than being of the same race, or faith, or having the same amount of money.

“Miles acts this way because he is Jewish,” my mom would tell me, if she and my dad were here. But they left that morning, so I pushed her prejudices out of my brain.

Walking to the frats, we passed around an Ocean Spray bottle of orange juice we spiked with the rest of the liquor. Miles led us up the steps and past the scratched, peeling columns of the mansion where the brothers of Rho Beta Rho lived and drank. One yelled, “If you have less than four girls for every guy, you’re not going to get into our party.” 

“That’s insane,” Alicia told the bouncer, a bearded sophomore. 

Luckily, we got in before she vomited and Sarah took her home. 

The brothers invited us upstairs to smoke a joint, probably because they were trying to woo Miles. It was the second time I’d gotten high in my life, an opportunity that never arose until last summer.

My roommate, Rizwan, came and went all the next morning, chatting on the phone in Arabic, but apologized for waking me. The only furniture he brought was the rug he lay between his desk and bed. He wanted to hang out with Miles and me, and Miles was polite, yet cool—and sort of unfriendly.

The two of us got drunk on a few bottles of Petite Sirah he stole from his stepdad, who had a beach house in the Hamptons with a wine cellar. At a party thrown by Tau Tau Tau, we danced on every girl not surrounded by a protective shield of friends. Someone wearing a shot glass as a necklace kissed me, and when she backed my body across the dance floor and into a wood panel beneath the stuffed head of a moose, I slipped my hand under her waistband. She was wet, and pawed at my erection through my pants, but then she pulled away and would not dance with me anymore.

I met Anna Merriweather at the campus cantina, where I picked up a meat lover’s slice to sop up the liquor. While we dawdled back to the quad, I told her about Miles. 

“I’m not sure why he wants to be friends with me,” I said. “Because he seems to be kind of racist. But everyone makes jokes about people’s race and stuff here. I guess it’s OK now that we have a black president.” 

“It’s like that back in England, too,” she said skeptically. “Everyone going on about being English instead of being British, being Egyptian instead of being English, being Irish instead of being British.” 

I was shocked she liked me. After we kissed for a couple of minutes, Anna pulled away. “Oh my God, I’m pissed.”

She wanted to come back to my room, though, where we kissed some more, my hand underneath her bra for so long that my hand went numb. Rizwan opened the door, closed it again. 

“Sorry!” 

Later, I went to the bathroom and rested my head against the partition until I threw up. 

 

Fall

I got into college because of my art portfolio, which I thought was pretty good, and my high school teachers and college counselors and obviously some of the admissions people thought it was very good. Still, I was studying Economics, because my parents insisted I take practical classes. Most of them were three-hundred-person lectures, in amphitheaters, with professors who lectured from slides. My only seminar, Craft of Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean, fulfilled a distribution requirement. Our first day, we went in a circle and introduced ourselves by saying a little about our interests in the world of art history. I said that I liked Vincent van Gogh.

 “We won’t be studying Impressionism,” Dr. Villani said. She smiled at the rest of the students while they laughed.

“I know that,” I said, feeling my face redden.

My work study job was at the DVD rental library, and Miles sometimes did his homework with me behind the desk. There were two posters hanging there, one from Pulp Fiction and the same Shepard Fairey portrait of Obama I tacked to my wall when he got the nomination a couple of years ago. We ate at the Hillel dining hall after, where the food was kosher and relatively good, and Miles told me about his ex-girlfriend. She had split him into two people, one who stayed at home in a perennial act of lovemaking—he had burning, halcyon memories of crossing Central Park at night after their parents went to bed—and another who left Manhattan for his freshman year of college. Only her father was Jewish, Miles explained to me. That was one problem. But the reason they broke up before he arrived on campus and she left for Wash U. was because they decided that college was a time to meet new people, to grow and change. He and she got coffee together over fall break, and after crying, in a turn I did not expect, they had sex. 

“But what about her mom’s religion?” I almost asked.

“I’ve felt even worse since then.” 

He set a care package from his mom in the lounge mini-fridge. 

“Why?”

“Because now I’m more confused than I’ve ever been,” he shrugged. “I’ll probably just call Herman later.”

“Don’t you reject him and all that he represents?”

“Of course I do. Did I tell you he’s engaged again? To a twenty-eight year old. He promised my sister that he wouldn’t. But she proposed last week.”

Every several days, I met up with Anna. Sober, she seemed as unsure about making a move as I was. We spent a lot of time sitting on her bed, holding hands, and sometimes we just got together and talked, or made out a little bit before or after we studied. Other times, we ate and I listened while she complained about her classes. 

Anna and Miles liked to tease each other. She made fun of the books on his shelf, his love of Ernest Hemingway. He goaded her for being British. 

“English,” she corrected him. 

Her laugh was so loud that people knocked on the door and asked us to quiet down, and other times because Miles blasted music through his speakers. Around midnight, he kicked us out to give his girlfriend a goodnight call.

Our whole hall welcomed her with open arms when she stayed over for a long weekend. Everyone thought she and Miles were so cute, bringing a sunny, adult feeling to our dorm. She was morose, though, and I knew their relationship was not going to work out. She frowned a lot, stood with her arms crossed. Miles took her to dinner at restaurants downtown, stores, and an a-cappella show. She hardly looked at me, as though she had no idea that I was his best friend. They spent a lot of time on the couch in the common area beneath a blanket, her head on his chest while they watched Glee on his computer. 

Our hallmate, Krista, pulled back the corner of a lump of foil to show me a dollop of red and blue frosting. 

“Oh, fuck,” I said. “Can I have some?”

“I baked this cake for Miles, because he’s sad that his girlfriend left. We were all going to get dinner in the dining hall later. Then we’ll eat the cake after.”

“I have plans with Anna.”

“Who’s Anna?” 

“You know, the British girl who hangs around here sometimes.”

“Oh, her,” said Krista. “She seems full of herself. Miles is your best friend.” She touched my arm and her eyes widened. “He needs you.”

“What’s this I hear,” cried Shaad from down the hall. “You’re skipping out on hall dinner?”

A chorus of people echoed them—Chris, Pritam, Bonnie, Jessica. “Hall dinner,” they said.

Everyone went, besides Rizwan. He never hung out with us. It started in the beginning of the year when we partied at the frats. They rejected him at the door, along with a bunch of other guys. Too many sausages. Not enough women. And then, weirdly, he rejected them. Greek organizations hated personal freedom, he pontificated one morning, yet still they were such an American tradition. In the ponderous, pompous way he communicated everything, he pointed out how people in the U.S. secretly loved to give up their individuality to the collective. Then, they covered their tracks by claiming that individual rights mattered to them. The rest of us silently disengaged.

“Was there a hall dinner tonight?” he asked in our room. A book was open on his desk. 

“Just one for Kahn, because his girlfriend went back to her own school. We tried to find you, but you weren’t around,” I lied, and adopted a friendlier tone while Rizwan glanced at his phone. “You get up to anything wild, dude?”

“I went to Lush downtown with Suhel.”

“But you don’t drink.”

“No.”

Rizwan was always going to clubs with his Saudi friends. I didn’t really know what sober people did at clubs. I would probably never go to a bar until I was a senior because I couldn’t afford a fake ID, unless I stopped buying weed and never ate out again. Anyway, Rizwan was from a rich family.

The rest of his time was a mystery to me, although I imagine that he spent it studying, since he read constantly and was apparently really smart, at least according to Anna, who was in his Kierkegaard class. Usually, when I got back from hanging with her or Miles, Rizwan was asleep, sideways across the bed with his computer next to him or a book on his chest, a neon paper wristband on his hand. Around seven in the morning, he descended to the dining hall for breakfast, and returned to our room by eight, where he prayed in a whisper so quiet that it seldom woke me. All morning, he worked at his desk. I usually opened my eyes a few times, and peering from the protection of my covers to see Rizwan hunched over his papers, I knew that I could get several more hours of rest before my first class began at ten.

“Anna told me that the bouncers at Lush harass the underaged girls they let in.”

“Well,” he reasoned, “if they’re going to be doing illegal things, they can’t expect to be protected by the law.” 

“You’re doing an illegal thing. The drinking age is twenty-one in this country.”

“The owner is Saudi. He’s the one breaking the law.”

“Don’t be a misogynist.” 

Rizwan stared at me. I packed my pipe with weed and set up a fan by the window because he fussed about the smell. The book on his desk had a Latin title. In the beginning of the year, he planned to be a Physics major, but then he began double-majoring in Philosophy, announcing this development to our hall with great enthusiasm, as though we should care about a bunch of dead Germans.

I slid into bed. He asked, “Have you ever read any Ludwig Wittgenstein or Bertrand Russell?”

“No.”

“You haven’t?”

I shook my head. “What does Ludwig do, build pianos?”

Rizwan laughed. “He’s an Austrian philosopher. There are many homosexuals in Europe and America, aren’t there?”

“No more than there are anywhere else.”

“I don’t think homosexuality is immoral.”

“Thanks for sharing, Rizwan.”

“My professor told us that Wittgenstein and Russell are gay so easily it was like he was telling us they were roommates.”

“If I had a gay roommate,” I said. “I would have to put a rat trap in front of my butthole every night.”

Rizwan jolted, as though what I said was disturbing.

“It was a joke,” I explained.

“Do you like it here? I hate it here. I’ve had a cold since I arrived in this city.”

“Ew,” I said. “Stay on your side of the room. And for God’s sake, cover your mouth when you sneeze.” 

I switched off the clip lamp on my bed frame. 

“I want to go to California. Have you ever been? The weather here is so bad. I feel it’s contributing to my depression.”

I slapped my hand across my eyes. “Would you turn that down?”

Rizwan shut his light off and put on this stupid headlamp he had, which made it seem as though a worm was growing from his skull. When I suggested that he hang something on his side of the room, just to brighten things up and help me avoid my own sadness, he showed me a poster he found on the internet of Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein. The famous men floated in an asteroid belt, staring at the cosmos. 

“They are unintimidated by the concerns of other people,” he said. “But I will never be that way.”

 

Winter

Anna and I had sex for the first time just when we got back from Christmas Break. After so much anxiety about losing my virginity, it was gone in an instant, but the second time, I was just as frightened as I had been the first. She blew me while I lay on my back and stared up at the picture of Audrey Hepburn that her roommate Victoire hung over her desk. Anna never told me that she wanted me to reciprocate. Putting the condom on, I felt like I was dialing a stranger on the phone, listening to it ring before the person on the other end picks up. Then she dozed off, and I felt both restless and like I was getting sick. I texted her after creeping out of her room in the middle of the night. 

“At the very least, you could have bloody woken me,” she replied. 

My cold mounted the day after she broke up with me, only to dissolve into a dry hack I wanted to lose. It was Spring Rush, and frat row crawled with freshmen, trampling each other to impress the brothers and sisters. In my seminar, Dr. Villani stopped lecturing to pass me a box of tissues, but when she handed back our term papers, I felt the familiar flutter of getting good grades. You communicate your ideas so clearly, she wrote in the margins, dotting my word choices with three plus marks. She called me over once class was done and asked about my health. 

“When I first went away to school, I had a cough that lasted two years.”

“I’m drinking ginger tea.”

“Eat Vitamin C,” she advised.

Art, a biology major from PR, and a few other brothers from Rho Beta Rho came to my dorm with a fancy, embossed envelope. I knew I had a chance there. One drunken night, a sophomore let slip that the fraternity’s charter required them to recruit members for diversity, plus Art, whose real name was Arturo, liked me. The Caucasian brothers flanking him carried a bid for Miles, who had not been to the fraternity all semester. 

“He was our top choice. Do you know where he is?”

“He’s always at Hillel now.”

“Shit,” said one brother. “They got him.”

“What?”

“I had a Bar Mitzvah just like everyone, but the Hassids, they're a cult,” he said, as though I had become a man within the Jewish faith, too. 

A fatter brother sniffed the air. “I hate this dorm. I have traumatic, smell-induced memories of my freshman year here, man. Curry and steamed cabbage. My roommate fucking emanated that shit.” 

For the next two months, I went on a run with the other pledges every morning at six. We played tackle football after, and I broke three fingers and sprained my wrist. We drank every night: liquor, beer, curdled milk, hot sauce, the collected spit of Rho Beta Rho. Each week, I did the calculus problem sets of a senior. I did a junior’s dry cleaning. 

“If any of us catch you hanging out with friends, or seeing girls, or even so much as taking a walk, you will no longer be a member of our brotherhood,” they told us on the one day we had off from pledging. 

Another evening, they hung us upside down and poured beer down our nostrils. They bound our feet and wrists, broke glasses in the basement, and turned the lights off, “Crawl around for an hour.”

I thought of withdrawing myself as a pledge, but Art told me to stay, insisting that stuff got better. The brothers were not half as racist as they sounded, he said, and unless I was gay or something—Art looked at me with suspicion—I had nothing to worry about. He invited me up to his room and cleaned my wounds after the glass crawl, “We talk about getting rid of pledging traditions like this every year.” I leaned back on his bed, not needing to try so hard around Art. I could be myself, or at least act the way that I had acted with him in the past. But I had always been trying too hard, and so I had to keep trying hard or else he might think I was not the freshman that he had originally championed in front of the brothers. After all, there were so many reasons that Rho Beta Rho wouldn’t want me, of course, the main reason being that I’m Korean.

 

Spring

For Spring Break, the brothers went to Cancún, and Anna got marooned on campus like me. “I told my parents that joining a frat was how you got the best jobs in America,” I said when we crossed paths in the quad, the first time we saw each other since we broke up. “But they’ll just act so disappointed in me if I go home, and I definitely can’t afford the airfare to Mexico.”

“You know you really hurt me.”

“I did?”

Back in my dorm, I waded through the clothing flung on the floor, the ketchup-smeared plate by the foot of my dresser, and the mug with the thick film to clear a path for Anna. We lay on the covers of my bed and chatted. 

“Rizwan’s been super passive-aggressive lately,” I said.

 She glanced at the floor. “I wonder why.” 

“I’ve spent the last week scrubbing gunk from the frat house basement. I literally cannot lift another finger until I’m a full brother next week.” 

Rizwan burst in after a couple minutes, grinning, but the moment he saw me his expression changed. 

“Would you pick this up?” He pointed at a T-shirt that lay crumpled by the leg of his chair. “It’s a basic matter of respect.”

“We’re in school. Respect doesn’t matter until we’re older.”

“Our lives mean less than other people’s?”

Rizwan annoyed me for being right, but Anna liked him. A few days later, the three of us hung out, with everyone else gone for their ski trips, beach parties, or families’ mansions. When I mentioned I hadn’t seen Miles in a while, Rizwan said he hated college. 

“Besides Suhel, I have no friends, and Suhel and I are not always so compatible. If I take a semester’s leave, though, I risk losing my visa.” 

“Everyone hates it here,” Anna shook her head.

“I don’t,” I said, but in truth I just never asked myself whether I liked college. 

We streamed Iron Man 2 under the covers in my bed. I woke up to see Rizwan’s sleep-calm face, inches away from my own, and when I reached for Anna, she was gone. I moved my hand, which was numb under Rizwan’s ribs, and closed my eyes again. 

Miles sent me an email before break ended:

I have to say i’ve been lying to you lately. First off, my girlfriend and I broke off all contact a couple of months ago, big surprise, which rocked me. I couldn’t focus on my homework. I just don’t care anymore. I didn’t want to tell you. Frankly, i dropped three of my classes as well, so I didn’t fail. Now my family is furious with me. They’re so wrapped up in these stupid American values that they dont know what’s actually important anymore. Anyway, this might be hard to understand, but im moving to Israel next week and joining an Orthodox community. 

I knocked on his door to find it open, the bed stripped bare, the bookshelves empty. 

Through the wall, I heard Rizwan jump up and down, overjoyed and full of future. 

“I’ve been accepted to Stanford as a transfer! I’m moving to California!” 

 

Summer

The summer has nothing to do with any other season. I spent most of it alone, staring at the plants in the garden and basking in the sun. I had begun to paint again, the first time since freshman year began.

I hadn’t left campus. Everyone else was gone, which made it a better place. I worked for Dr. Villani while she and her husband were on an archaeological dig. Most of my tasks involved house- and dog-sitting in their beautiful nineteenth-century redbrick, but she also asked me to conduct some research, for which I received a stipend, so my parents couldn’t complain that I was spoiled and lazy. “The block you live on is dangerous.” They read police blotters, sending me worried emails about crime. 

In August, Art took the train down from New Jersey. He stayed in the room that belonged to the Villanis’ daughter, who was college-bound next year, on vacation with her mom and dad. Her list of prospective schools was pinned on her bulletin board next to a reel of photobooth pictures she took at prom with her friends. Her dream acceptances were the same as mine. 

Art took me to a bar the first night of his visit, where he said I would get served as long as I looked confident and didn’t hesitate when asked for my drink order. (“Well rum and coke,” I practiced.) When we got home, because I told him not to do it in the backyard, he puked on the neighbor’s stoop. 

In the morning, after taking turns over the toilet, we agreed that we would never drink again. But at night, we opened a bottle of whiskey we found in the liquor cabinet, and I leaned over and kissed him. Art was reluctant at first, but soon we were in the teenager’s room, jerking each other off on top of her bedspread. Art knocked over one of her field hockey trophies. We laughed. I blew him, and he blew me, and when I woke again Art was still asleep, rays of light sluicing through the windows. 

He squirmed away when I touched him, making up some excuse about his sister’s birthday in West Orange, which meant he had to leave immediately. I sat in the living room and cried for a little while, and then I bleached the bathroom, threw the sheets in the wash, and did a few hours of work before I took Otis on a long walk, far from campus, in the townie parts where Obama signs grew sparser. 

Otis lifted his leg. He pooped. We both grew tired. We trudged on. Eventually, I happened upon a Methodist church with a Korean pastor. The sun set over a slight hill in the distance. Across the street, an old, stooped white man emerged from his house, approaching the giant flag pole that protruded like an erection from one of the front beams, and began to pull on the ropes. I watched him lower the flag, which he would hoist each morning to the tip of its pole again. It was a military tradition, I knew, that some veterans carried into civilian life. There was a twenty-something ex-marine like this in my hometown, a flag hitched to his porch’s banister. Every night, he hit the bars downtown. 

“Stay away from him,” my parents told me, “Army men are evil.” 

But I always thought he looked so harmless, drunk enough that he could hardly walk, much less fire a gun. And if he died from liver disease, he would be this age forever. An immortal hero, I thought when I was a child. Now that I’m older, I think he was just another character. Someone to remind us how much young men sacrifice in the name of youth.

Crow Jonah Norlander

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ALT TEXT FOR A CANDID AUDIENCE PHOTO by Taylor Alexandra Duffy

ALT TEXT FOR A CANDID AUDIENCE PHOTO by Taylor Alexandra Duffy

September 8, 2021  ·  Fiction

<img src=“201704WomanInAudience.png” alt=“This is one of several candid photos of me, gaze upturned and listening intently at a museum lecture, the sharp worry on my face readily apparent, though I laugh self-consciously at the thoughtfully placed jokes. It’s night, and we’re gathered in the formerly Koch-funded planetarium, and we’re here thanks to some shared sense of scientific inquiry or the open bar. On stage is a prominent researcher in her field, and her lecture is titled Stress and Human Evolution. She's patiently describing how our grandchildren’s genes will be irreversibly warped by our suffering, calmly listing the collective atrocities she knows we or our mothers have lived through, delicately acknowledging our own individual, personal horrors to which she’s not privy. She shows us the life expectancy by zip code of the city we’re all gathered in, lets the choked silence hang heavy as our eyes scan for our own particular block, white faces settling quickly on much more generous numbers. For years I’ve lived next to this natural history museum (a neighborhood, I have just learned, allotted approximately five more years than the one in which I was born), I’m a regular at these evening events, have the punch card to prove it, and I recognize the staffer who’s taking my photo. And I know she recognizes the look on my face because I see it on hers, though partially obscured by her camera. It says: I have irrevocably damaged what should have been a prenatal blank slate, and this is so beyond me that my own participation or autonomy in the situation is trivial if not irrelevant, news that only a qualified anthropologist could gently deliver to a slightly buzzed crowd. The epiphany that one day, possibly when I’m gone, fossilized in the DNA of a future generation is a paper trail of everything I’ve inadvertently buried far too deep, accidentally repressed down to the atomic level in an attempt to leave space for the next unwanted thing. It turns out we’re so maladapted that now even this tense moment of collective anxiety filling the room as we reflect on this troubling phenomenon can trigger our stress-response and permanently calcify tonight and the dull tightness in our chests into further intergenerational rewiring. When the lecture is over we disperse out through the empty, quiet museum, navigating the same exhibits I often pace to decompress, frequently wandering after work or on the weekends to still my pressing panic, alone and weaving my way through families gesturing at dead animals behind glass. For how long did conservation mean trophy hunting to stop time, and why did I convince myself that was no longer the case? In my many expeditions I have discovered that if you walk backwards through the Hall of Human Origins, you end up six million years in the past, at a sign that implores you to ‘Meet Your Relatives,’ and face-to-face with whatever Pliocene trauma I must have inherited, I’m afraid we’re already well-acquainted.”>

 

With thanks to Dr. Zaneta M. Thayer, biological anthropologist

Crow Jonah Norlander

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EXPERIENCERS by Emily Costa

EXPERIENCERS by Emily Costa

September 6, 2021  ·  Fiction

Your girlfriend believes that at some point during the last year or so her father has been abducted by aliens and replaced with a human-like shell. She believes visits still happen, routinely and systematically, that they must pull him up there with that classic tractor beam, or else he meets them somewhere in the woods, and they do tests and probe him and check on his progress. Progress with what, you wonder, but she’s still talking. She says they return him dead-eyed. She’s got it all laid out. She keeps a little journal by her bed to jot down the nights, to keep track of his behavior. She says on Mondays and Thursdays he leaves in the middle of the night. The front light’s on motion detector and shines into her window. She hears his tires crunch driveway gravel. Then, he’s there again at cereal time, normal.

She’s telling you this because she trusts you, she says, finally she trusts you.

You wonder if this means you can move on from spending the night in her bed just making out, from jerking off in your room when you get home. You hate that you think that, especially considering what you’re doing now: driving down route 63 with her, tailing her dad’s BMW, trying to find what she’s calling an “entry point.” Your crappy Toyota is having some issue with acceleration—it’s stuttering, slow—but you need to maintain distance anyway. Your girlfriend is biting the sides of her fingernails. She is messing with the radio. She is telling you hang back and speed up.

Your girlfriend’s mom is at home, zonked on Valium. You’d left your own father similarly zonked, head back, on the couch. Something in his nightly regimen knocks him out but you’re not sure which pill. You make a mental note to ask the doctor. Maybe you could even ask the nurse at treatment while he dozes and you’re stuck in the sticky chair next to him, flipping through a book, unable to focus on the words. Maybe it’s the disease itself. But you try not to think about that, and your girlfriend is saying are you listening? and you are and you aren’t.

Because the thing is you know where her dad goes. It’s easy to infer, even though you’ve only met the guy once. The way he smiles, the over-cheer in his voice. Like he’s making up for something. But your girlfriend doesn’t see it. Or, she doesn’t want to see it. And you can’t just come out and tell her the warm thing her father’s enveloped in isn’t some human-sized test-tube filled with space goo. So you’re just waiting for the thing to happen. And it’ll happen tonight: you’ll follow the father all the way to the other woman’s house. There will be no object in the sky, no abduction, no jump in the clock. Just a split-level with its porch light on. The door will open. You’ll both catch a glimpse of her as she pulls him inside. Your girlfriend will look at you in a way you’ll never forget, and you won’t be sure how to make your face look, how to mirror surprise.

But before that, you’re driving, and you know, and she doesn’t, and you can’t tell her, and it’s all hanging there in the air, and you start to wonder if you’re a bad person—your most frequent thought—because you want the thing to happen already, to get it over with, to end up on the other side of it, but you don’t want to say the words. You can barely even think them.

x-r-a-y magazine

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LOVEBIRD by Tex Gresham

LOVEBIRD by Tex Gresham

September 3, 2021  ·  Fiction

Most people have no idea what goes on in retirement communities. They don’t care to know. When your kids dropped you off at Del Largo Sueño a few years go, they made tearful promises to visit, but you never saw a tear fall. They faked guilt to hide the happiness that they wouldn’t have to watch you die. Your son, Clifford, and his new wife didn’t stay long enough for you to unpack and hang your sweaters. Your daughter waited around, and then she asked for “gas money.” She’d been biting her cheek all day, her eyes sunken like little pits from whatever drug she’d decided to date that month. Gas money...like you’re too old and stupid to know the truth.

But the currency of their false guilt didn’t amount to much considering you haven’t seen your son or daughter since that day. You’ve forgotten about them, mostly. This place makes it easy. And they’ve likely forgotten about you too. A whole life lived, seeds planted so that an existence can be remembered, and it’s all forgotten like a fart in a high wind.

And you’re not going to talk about your ex-wife. She died trying to throw a toaster in your bathwater. She doesn’t deserve the headspace. None of this is about them anyway. This is about your life at seventy-nine, when you finally found something worth living for.

#

You’re cruising in Hank Hubbert’s E-Z Go that’s done up to look like a seafoam green ‘57 Chevy BelAir. He’s got the pedal down, the wind flapping the six hairs you have left. It feels like you’re going 80mph, but you’re probably going about 10mph. Hank passes you a joint of Birdbrain OG Kush. You take a drag, even though the doctor told you to stick to edibles. Golf clubs rattle in bags in the back. Hank’s got a shotgun in his golf bag for skeet shoot.

As you pass a group of women finishing up a game of bocce ball, Hank says, “I got a nine-iron they can use. Guaranteed to give ‘em a hole in one.”

Laughing rattles the emphysema in your lungs, but who cares?

Hank points to one of the ladies you’ve never seen. Must be new. What you do notice are the gloves on Hank’s hands. He’s been wearing them lately. You haven’t seen him without them for the past week or so. “That’s Marion Chapel. New broad. She’s got all the boys under a spell around here.”

You say, “I can see why.” Even though you can’t. She’s nothing special.

Hank says, “Maybe. But boy, does she have a daughter I’d give away the rest of my pension for.”

You say, “Does she?” and Hank laughs. But you really want to know: does she?

Men like Hank––and this place is all Hanks––usually get at women in the community as a way to get closer to their daughters. And sometimes sons, if that’s their boat. These Hanks think that these daughters desire them just as much. You’ve never had an interest in them. The younger they are, the more you’re aware of how hopeless they are. They believe the world is tailored to the young. It’s not. The world isn’t even a place for people. Not anymore. You see the young ones, the ones that Hank and all the Hanks go for, and you feel sad.

There is someone in the community that has you wholly unable to look at any woman, young or old. Not even Hank knows about her.

#

Sun City, AZ is a place that wouldn’t exist if not for the Almost Dead. And Del Largo Sueño is its capital. You have everything here. Whole Foods, AMC theaters, two Greg Norman-designed T-National golf courses, a wildlife refuge with any animal you can imagine, six marijuana dispensaries, twenty-one restaurants that stay open late––for those who eat dinner after 6pm––and a four-story recreation center.

After midnight, the top floor of the rec center transforms into a gambling den to rival any casino in Vegas. There’s no blackjack or Texas Hold ‘Em. People don’t bet on horse races or football games. No thirty-large on hard eight. No slot handles. People put money on the death pool. Everyone’s name and odds on a blackboard, behind the makeshift bar. You’re sitting at 30-to-1 to die within the year. Suicide voids all bets. You put five-large against yourself. Other than that, you don’t play the games anymore.

You sit alone at a table near the back of the room. You sip on seltzer water with a twist of lime, even though you’re not thirsty. The light in the room’s dim and the music––the Jerry Lee Lewis version of “Whole Lotta Shakin Goin On”––coming out of the speakers is loud enough so those who left their hearing aids at home can hear it. You scan the room, playing the part of yourself very well.

In an adjacent soundproofed room, men and women play Russian roulette. They handle the gun with maddeningly calm smiles. A table next to yours plays Guess the Pill. They slam hundreds into a pile on the table. There’s a line of crushed pill next to an unlabeled orange bottle.

“Two hundred on that being a klonopin,” says someone whose name you’ll never remember.

“Double that it’s a proto-pumper,” says another whose name is just as lost.

The one betting two hundred snorts the powdery line. You get up from the table, make your way across the room. In the time it takes you to get to the fight studio, Two Hundred clutches his chest and drops dead. Everyone scrambles to the bar to collect on the death pool.

You pass a table where Marion Chapel sits at the center of a group of Hanks that look like babies begging for their mother’s tit. Another Hank joins the table, bows as he hands Marion a drink. She’s eating up the attention, laughing like a broad right out of a Bogart movie. A candle on the table casts a moving light on the underside of her face, and the effect is unsettling. Her eyes break away from the attention and meet yours. They’re serious eyes, and you can’t hold onto them very long.

The only game that interested you here was the Fight. In the studio where, during the day, women shuffle through arthritic Zumba, some of the former boxing coaches have set up a makeshift fight. Men don’t fight here. Animals do. Mostly ostriches. Taken from the wildlife refuge. Hopped up on Viagra and Vicodin, the old veterinarians and one retired zookeeper usually haul the birds back here on their flatbed E-Z gos. You used to join them.

The setup is simple: two enter, one leaves. Anyone who’s never seen ostriches fight, it’s terrible. They kick the hell out of each other with taloned feet until gaping wounds and blood loss results in one victory and one death. You used to have a sure bet: a big strong alpha male. He’d never lose a fight––until he did. And with that one, you lost a lot of money. But that’s not why you stopped.

It was because of Rati.

#

There she is. Standing in the sun rays of a new, cloudless day. Birds sing overhead, a soundtrack of everyday magic. This moment is just for you and her.

You know she’s seen you by the way she drops down to her knees, wings spread, feathers shaking. Her head lolls back and forth, neck puffed out. Even though her head’s moving like one of those inflatable men at car dealerships, her eyes stay primally focused on you. Your eyes never leave hers. You haven’t taken Cialis today, but the pressure in your groin is a liberation from the weight of Time and Death.

Rati chirps and growls, pulling deep within that struthio body to let you know how she feels. You run your fingers along the letters etched into the wood of her corral gate: R-A-T-I. Rati. A gorgeous word. Ra-Ti...the tongue taking a trip two steps down the palate to tap, at two, on the teeth...One of the first things you’ve ever said to her. But you forget where you heard it originally.

Love has never been in your DNA. You cared for people in your life. Shared laughter and sadness. But you never loved, nor did you feel loved. Your children are just waiting for the moment they don’t have to think of you and realize you’re still someone on this earth––not in it. You never loved your job, despite keeping it for forty years. Who in the hell would ever say they love being a maintenance technician for a cheap airline.

But the love you feel down to your essence for Rati is so pure. More than any lust or longing you’ve ever had. It is true. Her dance tells you she feels the same. Her feet tap out the word: L-O-V-E. Never did you think those letters would come together into a recognizable shape.

You know some would say you’re just playing into loneliness. Being abandoned by your children hurts, but it doesn’t hurt enough to be lonely. Maybe Rati’s doing the same, given that her lifemate was killed in the ring sometime last year. But what is love but a way to prove loneliness wrong?

She comes closer to the fence and you can smell her. The way her feet crunch the grass, thud heavy against the earth, you find comfort in that power. The new male they brought in after Rati’s mate was killed stands in the middle of the field, watching her come to you. You can tell he doesn’t like you, that he believes she’s his. She isn’t. She’s mine.

You don’t know what Rati would do if she knew that her lifemate was your sure thing, your big alpha male. You made more money on his fights than you ever did working a real job. You also wonder what she would do if she knew you had bet against her mate before his last match. You knew he wasn’t a sure thing anymore. A part of you hides the fact––even from yourself––that you didn’t want him to be a sure thing, not after you saw Rati for the first time. You wanted him gone. And she doesn’t need to know these things. That chapter in your life is over now. Unconnected to the one you’re in now. Together. Besides, you don’t play the games anymore. She doesn’t need to know anything other than your love.

Rati leans her head over the railing. You slide a hand along her face, around the back of her head. You cradle her like this, slowly pulling her face toward yours. You kiss.

You move to her ear and whisper, “I want you to come home with me.”

She shakes, her beak making this clacking sound. You reach over and slip the latch from the gate, which swings open silently. She eases out of her pen. You take her by the wing and the two of you walk.

#

“And you’re still taking the levodopa and carbidopa twice a day?”

“Yes.” You are.

“And the donepezil and galantamine?”

“Of course.” But you’re not.

Dr. Kosinski’s office always makes you want to lie. He’s got a face like a baby pushing out a big poop. The way he looks at you, at all of the Almost Deads, it’s obvious he hates his life because of how useless his practice has become. Why waste time on the Almost Dead?

“And how’s the diet?”

“I have bacon sometimes.”

“You shouldn’t be doing that. You know, and I know you know this because I’ve said it but I’ll repeat it: eggs are an important part of this diet. The omega-3 reacts positively with donepezil and will rejuvenate brain function. Bacon throws that off.”

“I remember you saying something about that.”

Dr. Kosinski flips through your chart, though you’re sure that’s theatrics. There’s no way, after all this time, he doesn’t have your chart memorized. “Your drug test didn’t come back. Your urine ate through the plastic cup, but so did everyone else’s so what can I do?”

He looks at you with raised eyebrows, expecting you to bow your head like a shamed child. You run your tongue over your dentures, feeling stray pieces of bacon. He looks down at your chart again.

“What brings you in today?”

You say, “My testicles have been tingling. They hurt. And I’ve been having dreams about having children.”

“You don’t have testicles. After the cancer.”

“But these dreams feel real. And it’s not like I have one or two kids. I’ve got like fifteen. Maybe twenty.”

“That’s a side effect of the galantamine.”

Again, you don’t tell him you’ve stopped taking that months ago. Instead, you say, “And what about the tingling? In my testicles.”

“Describe the tingling.”

“It’s this fullness. Pressure. I can’t say it’s unpleasant. I feel stronger sometimes.”

“That’s a good thing, yes?”

You shrug.

“Other than that, are you noticing anything different with your body? Your penis? Fingers? Mouth?”

“Different how?”

Dr. Kosinski closes your chart. “Some of the other more sexually active residents have complained about recent changes to their body. Like within the last week or so.”

“Changes.”

“One came to me complaining of jock itch. I checked him and his entire groin area looked like cooled lava. Marbled skin. Open sores. Another patient...had it in his mouth. Really terrible stuff. ”

“My jock itch is jock itch.”

“There’s been more. And there’s a common thread. Now I’m not supposed to name names, but you never remember half of this stuff, right?”

“Who are you again?”

“Have you come into contact with Marion Chapel?”

“Never.”

“Are you sexually active here?”

“Not at the moment.” You don’t tell him about Rati, mostly because she technically isn’t part of the community.

“Good. Until I figure this out, don’t. I suspect a kind of STD. All you old-timers grew up in the nuclear age. Who the hell knows what you’ve got going on inside you. I’m going to send some blood samples out for testing. In the meantime, no sex.”

“Is that all?” You interrupt his self-talk. You understand what he means about the radiation. No one knows what all that nuclear testing did to the air. But if it had changed anything, it would have long ago. This is something else––if it’s even real at all. A part of you thinks Dr. Kosinski’s just pulling both your legs.

This thing with Rati, it’s got nothing to do with radiation. You know that in your heart. It’s real, not a side effect.

Dr. Kosinski snaps on a latex glove. “Actually, I’d like to check your prostate. Make sure this pressure you’re feeling isn’t cancer.” He lubes his finger. “You know the drill.”

You do.

#

“Whoa! Christ, what am I seeing here?”

Hank moves away from you and Rati, hands covering his face in a way that reminds you of Dracula being shown a crucifix. Embarrassment could be a thing right now if you were interested in feeling embarrassed. Hank barged in without knocking. This is now his problem, not yours. The record player spins and Spanky and Our Gang continue to belt out “Lazy Day.”

The way Rati pushes against your naked body reintroduces you to your soul. Which helps you ignore the way Hank’s half-hidden face twists in disgust. He doesn’t know what this is like. Never will.

“I...I...don’t want to know…” Hank backs out of the room, but he doesn’t leave. He’s not wearing the gloves. The finger he points at you looks like marbled, melted skin. A boil on the tip of his finger threatens to pop and squirt at you. He stands on the other side of the doorway.

“What do you want, Hank?” With your body and mind in a warm bath of relaxation––a feeling similar to what it must be like to die––you talk without anger. It doesn’t sound like your voice.

“What am I seeing?”

“It’s exactly what you think it is.”

“You’re...doing that...with an ostrich.”

“Her name’s Rati.”

“I know what the thing’s name is.” Hank finishes with a fist against the wall. You’re sure he’d rather kick something, but Hank can barely lift his diabetic legs. He shuffles when he walks. “It’s an ostrich.”

“Yes, she is.” You know he can’t imagine what it’s like. The feeling of her beak. That when two birds make love it’s called cloaca kisses––you looked that up. It’s a beautiful phrase. Tender. Sensual. Hank can’t imagine what it’s like. It’s all just fucking to him.

“Why are you doing this?”

A part of you wants to answer: love. But it’s something else he wouldn’t understand. He doesn’t have a Rati. You especially don’t want to tell him that you and Rati married each other the night before. You feel it boiling on the tip of your tongue, like your tongue’s got one of those boils that’re all over Hank’s fingers.

You say, “She makes me feel good.”

“Christ….Are you still taking your meds?”

“Are you?”

“No, but I’m not in bed with an ostrich.”

“Is that what you came here for?”

“I came here to tell you someone called the community center asking for you. Someone named Dianne.”

Daughter-in-law Dianne. Only one you know who wouldn’t know enough to call your direct number. Your son married a flapjack from Seattle who appraises damaged houses in Middle-America caught in Tornado Alley. The one time you met her she said things like Clutched the damn deal and Suckers aren’t born every minute...they die every second. You don’t know much about her, but you know enough to know you’re glad about how little you know. The reasons why she would call and not your son are all not good.

“Did she leave a number?” You move to get up and put clothes on, but Rati reaches over and engulfs you with her wing. It’s warm, so you stay with her.

“She did.” Then, after a beat, “I can’t believe you’re in there with that thing.”

“Get over it, Hank. When you’ve been worshipping at the church of Marion Chapel, I didn’t say anything.”

“Marion is a human being. She’s real.”

“Real enough to make your hand like that, right Hank?”

Nothing from Hank. You can picture him on the other side of the wall, looking at his fingertips, their little lips pursing at him.

You say, “Leave the number. I’ll call later.”

You can hear Hank move, rustle some papers, write the number. He’s probably got the little mouths whispering the number to him. He can’t remember anything. You doubt if he’ll remember this, but you know he will. He’s talking to himself, or the little mouths. For the first time since you met him, he sounds like the classic grumpy old man everyone believes old men become. You supposed both of you are. Except he doesn’t have a Rati.

He says, “Here’s the number. But listen: you’re not...This thing, it isn’t going to last. You and that thing together.”

“This thing is my wife.” When you say it, Rati shivers, lets out a purring sound. Her beak nuzzles against your neck. You look down at her feet and notice how tense her claws are. She could pounce on Hank and it’d be over for him in a breath.

Hank sighs. “You need help.”

“You need something, Hank. You’re a lonely man.”

“Like an ostrich?”

“Like an ostrich.”

Hank leaves without saying anything. Rati pulls at you and you roll over. Your hip cracks. It’s usually followed by a pain you have to grit your teeth to get through, but right now doesn’t hurt. Right now, you fall into each other for the fourth or fifth time today. Dianne can wait. Bad news always has a shelf life of forever. It’s not as important as this moment.

You reach over and place your hand on Rati’s stomach, the eggs inside already bloating her body. Eggs. Plural. You forget that about birds.

#

They say a comedy ends with a wedding and a tragedy with a funeral. Life is neither, so you usually get both.

When you call Dianne, she can barely form a sentence. Hysterical is the word you’re not supposed to use, but that’s exactly what it is. She doesn’t have to say anything. You already know.

But eventually, she gets it out.

Your son, Clifford, had a thing for public pools. Being in public pools while elderly women did their aerobics. Putting his genitals against the water jets during this time. What he didn’t know is that the water has to go somewhere. It went up, inside. His bladder exploded. What you think happened is that he confused his bladder popping for some intense sexual gratification and he went about the day, stunned and confused. He bled from the inside and the damage was too much.

Dianne says this, more or less. You can tell she’s trying to leave out details, so you piece the rest together. She doesn’t seem to care about this oddity in Clifford’s life. She’s more interested in transforming his death into her tragedy.

You say, “I’m sorry for your loss.”

She says, “Thank you.” And nothing else. You wonder if she’s forgotten that Clifford’s your son. You’ve forgotten, Clifford did too. So it’s not out of reach. Before you can say anything else, she hangs up.

You want more than anything to be back in Rati’s arms. But when you turn around to leave, Marion Chapel’s there. So is Hank. And about ten other residents of Del Largo Sueño. A mob with canes and hearing aids instead of pitchforks and burning torches.

Marion Chapel says, “Hank tells me some disturbing things about you.” The skin on her neck has that cooled lava look.

Hank says, “Where is it?”

You say, “Where’s what?”

“The bird.”

“She flew away.”

You want to run, but you can’t. And even if you could shuffle out of this, there are men in this mob who can shuffle faster than you. Hank comes close to you. He’s trying to get friendly.

He whispers, “Listen: just let this be over. I don’t want them to do this to you.”

You don’t think about it. You rear back and slam your fist against Hank’s nose. Every bone in your hand shatters like tortilla chips. Hank stumbles back, blood splooshing from his nose. He’s shocked, desperate. He screams.

And the mob descends on you like a bad dream.

#

“No, you can’t do this!”

You’ve already tried to overpower Hank, but you’re on the ground now. He stands over you. Something cracked when you hit the rec center’s unkind floor. You can’t feel the pain yet. You try to stand, but your legs are too loose.

“Stay down, you old bastard.” Hank’s got his wrinkled hands balled into fists. “I told you this thing wouldn’t last.”

Other people in the mob mumble similar things. Someone laughs. Someone says Poor sonofabitch is over the edge.

You can’t stay down. The way men in the mob have Rati by the neck, the way her head trashes. You rage. The two old-timers who run the death pool hold the door open to the Zumba studio. “Turn Turn Turn” by The Byrds spills out of the studio, casting a twisted optimism over everything. Inside, the male ostrich waits, feathers fluffed, its chest puffed. Its big legs step in place, massive talons clacking against the polished wood floor. Two of the stronger residents stand behind the safety of a raised DJ booth and hold the male ostrich back with a long leash. Hank takes Rati and shoves her toward the door.

“Stop, goddammit. That’s my wife!”

Everyone laughs. You push yourself up. Your hand slips and your face cracks against the floor. Your dentures clatter out of your mouth. The skin on your chin splits and blood runs freely. You haven’t been taking your coagulant.

“This is horrible. I can’t look at him,” says Marion Chapel. She’s at the front of the mob gathered for the upcoming fight. The men who surround her are all disfigured from the Marion Chapel Disease. They’ve all got a sedated, awestruck glaze to their faces.

Hank says, “You should’ve just gotten together with Marion. Or one of the nice human women here.”

Someone in the crowd says, “Or men.”

Marion says, “I would’ve never been with him.”

Hank says, “There are plenty of people who need someone in their lives. Not this bird.”

Hank almost has her all the way in the Zumba studio.

You shout, “Wait.”

Hank stops, giving you a chance to look Rati in the eyes. You two hold the look, connect like you always did at her pen. You say to her, “I’m sorry.” Then you turn to Hank and say, “Let me fight instead.”

Hank’s face drops. Rati freezes, eyes go wide. No one speaks. Everyone starts trading looks that say Now this could be something different.

Marion says, “He doesn’t know what he’s saying.”

Hank says, “That thing in there’ll kill you in a second.”

You say, “Maybe. But that means it won’t kill her. Or my children.”

A collective, “Your what?”

You say, “I’ve got pretty good odds on the death pool there. I’m not killing myself. I will fight. Let me do this.”

One of the guys who runs the death pool hurries out of the studio and starts collecting bets from the mob. He keeps shouting odds that change with every bet made. Hank pulls some money out of his pocket and slips it into the bookie’s palm. He looks back at you and the two of you share a smile like you’re friends again.

You say, “Against me.”

He says, “A sure thing.”

“I’ve got money on the death pool. Give it to my wife when this is over.”

Hank nods. “Sure. I can do that. Whatever you need.”

But you can’t imagine Hank bringing the money to Rati in her pen, or turning that money into something Rati might need––or that your children will need. You can’t imagine that Hank won’t make Rati fight anymore, or that your children won’t grow up to fight for the entertainment of the next rotation of residents of Del Largo Sueño. What you can imagine is Hank taking the cash, buying himself a new E-Z Go, taking Marion Chapel out for a high-dollar early bird. You know he’s just saying yes so you’ll get in there and die quick.

Someone shouts from the mob, “Let the man take a cane or something.”

Someone answers, “If he does, change the odds.”

Hank helps you up. Whatever cracked in your hip isn’t keeping you from taking small steps toward the studio. You shuffle past Rati and she cranes her neck in front of your face. You slide your hand down her beak to the side of her face. Her eyes are wet. A tear falls. You try and catch it, but you’re too slow. You try to say I love you but without your dentures it comes out as an all-gums I thopff eww. She looks around, pecking absently at things in the way ostriches do. She pecks at your hand, then at your shirt. She picks up a pill that’s fallen onto the floor and shakes it down her throat.

Hank shoves you through the door. You stay on your feet, but it hurts to do so.

He says, “See you on the other side.”

It occurs to you that if there is somewhere after this, it’s a place where Hank will be as well. You want to say I hope not, but you know it’ll come out sounding like a wet sneeze. So you give him a middle finger that’s bordering on arthritic.

From the mob, you hear someone say, “They make huge omelets. Lots of omegas.”

Hank shuts the door. Locks it. The Byrds keep singing turn turn turn, but everything here stays the same.

This is where it ends. Standing in the studio. Joints made of sand. Dentures gone, all gums. Prostate feeling like a hot rock. Every ounce of you bloody and fragile. The male ostrich is twice your height, its body like an idling train. Massive. Ready to do damage. It stomps the floor. The vibration rings through your bones, makes your hip whine. You try and stand a little straighter.

You look over at the window, at all the ravenous faces ready to watch you die. Impatient for the small time between now and then. There isn’t an ounce of sadness or awareness. Your eyes stop on Rati. She pecks at the window, the space between the two of you so little but impossible to cross. 

You slip ahead in time. To a future where you and Rati have a home that’s somewhere not here. Rati’s in your backyard, laying your children in a shallow hole, returning to that hole twice a day to turn your children so they don’t spoil. You’re in the house, still healing from the fight. When she comes inside, you will make a joke about her head in the sand. She will peck at you playfully. You two will sleep together every night, comfortable and warm. Loved. She will lift you both physically and emotionally. She knows exactly who you are. You know everything she can be. You both are in a place where people don’t point, where your love isn’t cursed. And eventually, your children join. Dozens of perfect little ones, better than you could ever be. Each time they beat their wings, your name will be the wind that lifts them. It all seems real. A place where you are strong and possible, where your children are happy and loved.

Crow Jonah Norlander

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“I’M TELLING YOU YOU’RE GONNA LOVE IT” by Eros Livieratos

“I’M TELLING YOU YOU’RE GONNA LOVE IT” by Eros Livieratos

September 1, 2021  ·  Fiction

“I’m telling you, you’re gonna love it.”“There is absolutely no way I’m going to like it.” “Come on, it won’t be that bad.”“It sounds awful.”“So?”

James was always trying to get me to do shit. The first time I ate glass, they were there, egging me on. They posted a clip of it on their story while I was picking at my gums. I remember them saying, 

“If Lucas Abela¹ can do it, why can’t you?”

So, I swallowed some. We kept on hanging out. What else would I do? Their suggestions kept getting a little riskier, a bit more reckless. When they convinced me to try robbing a grave, I declined. I wasn’t into it. My ma would hate me for it. So, James said,

“You’ll never be an R.L. Stine² character.” 

And for whatever reason, that really did it. I dug up a grave, but it turns out, they lock some coffins so all I took were the ghosts. 

I haven’t been sleeping right. I thought this thing with James wasn’t going to work out. Their hot pink leather pants and infected stick-n-pokes couldn’t be in my life any longer. I was going to break it off. I thought maybe I’d text them and this would all be settled. They were already at my door.

“Have you tried salvia³ before?”

“No. No James, I’m done. I’m tired. I kind of just want to get a job.” 

James looked at me for a moment. They looked me up and down, they lingered on the down. Their red-heart earring dangled like a pendulum. Their eyes intent, staring into my hips for what felt like an eternity.

“No. Nope. I don’t think we should keep hanging out. I don’t think we’re good for each other—”

James’ lips moved up and down, slowly, mocking me. They patted their bald head and rubbed their flat stomach and began screeching. Howling.

“Do you remember that time Hanatarash⁴ bulldozed that club?” 

“No. What? I wasn’t alive. Wasn’t that in the 80s?”

“What if I told you, I could get us a bulldozer?” Their green eyes lit up with what my ma would call, “the devil’s passion.” I know this, it isn’t going to happen again. 

“James, I’m done. I haven’t slept in months. I think I need to get exorcised?” 

“Jen, you will never ever be a moderately well-known but still largely obscure harsh-noise artist if you don’t do this. Like, nobody will like you.” I finally heard it. The teeth still left in their mouth clicked with each syllable and everything was clarity. I wasn’t going to fall for it. 

“Where would you even work, anyway? Nobody’s hiring.” James’ shoulders dropped. It felt like I was talking to someone else. They weren’t interested in trying to bulldoze a basement gig anymore. 

“I don’t know, I really don’t want to but like rent’s coming up and—”

“What?”

“I was just going to start delivering packages, like just for a few weeks or something”

“I still have this bag of salvia.”

“I really don’t—”

“I’m telling you, you’re gonna love it.”

“There is absolutely no way I’m going to like it.”

 
  1. Lucas Abela is an Australian harsh noise musician known for creating and playing an instrument comprised of glass and contact microphones. The instrument is played by mouth and by hand. 
  2. That guy who wrote Goosebumps.
  3. A mistake.
  4. Japanese harsh noise band from the 80s that pioneered the genre and received notoriety from being banned from several countries after bulldozing a club as one of their performances.
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TECHNO SHOW by Lucy Zhou

TECHNO SHOW by Lucy Zhou

August 31, 2021  ·  Fiction

In a post-Covid world, we joke, the first thing we’ll do is go to a techno show. Yeah, like the kind in someone’s basement that smells of bathwater or underneath a freeway pass for better acoustics—remember that last show we went to? Where we had to slink ungracefully through a doggy door in the fence and squish through ferns that tickled our palms before we came across the path, illuminated by Carla’s bright-pink hair. There will be a Halloween-store fog machine, a drumline of clanging pots and pans, and those little umbrellas in everyone’s red Solo cup. Most people are just huffing down straight gin. Your ex’s new girlfriend is the one DJing, and you suddenly feel very petty and small, even though this is the ex who inhaled paint thinner and said your calves were horsey when he was high. But still—you look around for his signature shaved head and are relieved that he’s not here. And if he is, you couldn’t care less. So yeah, at this techno show, everyone is wearing a slick black mask in some intersection between goth and UX designer. In the bright darkness, we k-hole as if we aren’t terrified of being near stranger bodies, wrapped in tender-damp heat, after almost two years of only talking to low-res avatars on a screen. We suddenly have nothing to say. No one brings up how Jay would have been the first one shuffling up a storm, except his parents took him off the ventilator a month ago. None of us could go to the family-only funeral. Or how Tony has to sit down for most of the set after getting sick in the first wave. But we sit down with him in the middle of the dance floor, watch the crowd bob nervously and grow old. We leave after an hour. On the way home, Carla drives because she’s doing some alcohol detox, and we mouth off about how the music was whack, no, the people, no, it was the general vibe and like, what the heck was up with those little umbrellas? It’s all very predictable, you know, this idea of an after, as easy as getting used to a ghost. And Jay laughs at this like a donkey in heat from the backseat, as if to remind us that he’s still here, still kicking. By the time we turn back to make sure, he’s already gone. 

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SECOND HONEYMOON by Michael Czyzniejewski

SECOND HONEYMOON by Michael Czyzniejewski

August 30, 2021  ·  Fiction

I met my wife on our honeymoons, the ones we were taking with other people. Both of us went parasailing when our newlywed spouses were too afraid. A storm came in just as we lifted into the air and we were caught in its path. Our lines got detached, sending us parasailing into the horizon. We woke up on a deserted island. 

Two months later, firmly in love, we were found by crab photographers. Coincidentally, our spouses back home fell in love, too, assuming we were dead. At the press conference after our rescue, the four of us laughed about how things work out. Soon we were all divorced and remarried to the right people, no hard feelings.

On the island, I’d heard so much about my soon-to-be in-laws. They lived in Minneapolis but didn’t wear sweaters. They were lapsed Lutherans, they line-danced, and they played competitive Jenga. They ran an apiary.

My parents had been dentists in Toledo.  They were both dead: parasailing accident on their twenty-fifth anniversary vacation—not from a storm, but by flying straight into a bridge. Miami renamed the bridge after them. It has a toll—it leads to an island where flamingos are bred—but they gave me an ID card, said I could cross for free. I was eight. I still have never been to Florida.

My new wife, Barbi, took me to see her parents after our wedding. I was allergic to bee stings and afraid to go. Barbi described their suits, the kind beekeepers wear in cartoons. She’d worked with bees her entire life and had only been stung once, on the tip of her right nipple. She swore it made her sting-proof: Bees were her chicken pox. We’d been through a lot together, I figured, agreeing to go. If I died from asphyxiation I knew she’d genuinely feel horrible.

Barbi’s mom looked exactly like Barbi, twenty years older, more of a big sister than a mom. Maybe she was future Barbi, sent back in time to pose as her own mother. She also didn’t care for me—she was a staunch fan of Barbi’s original husband, Santino, the guy now married to my original wife, Sue Ellen. Santino reminded Barbi’s mom of a boy she’d dated in high school, a boy who died visiting her at midnight, climbing the trellis to her bedroom, falling and impaling himself on the lawn sprinkler. Naturally, Santino had to be this old beau reincarnated, in love with Barbi, her genetic doppelganger. Barbi’s mom asked how our flight was. Barbi said it felt long. Her mom replied, “Santino knew the value of first class.” She looked my way. “You, sir, are no Santino.”

Barbi’s dad came in from beekeeping. He was still wearing the outfit, including the hat, a pith helmet with black netting veiling his face. He took off his glove to shake my hand, churning it like butter. He told me he loved me, leaning in to kiss me, pushing his net into my mouth.  He removed his headgear. He looked exactly like me. If Barbi was the genetic copy of her mom, I was that for her dad. Helmet off, he leaned in for that kiss. “I love you,” he said. “Son.”

Barbi’s mom had readied pot roast with potatoes and carrots. It tasted sweet, like candied pot roast. “You can really taste the honey,” Barbi said. I coughed, as allergic to honey as I was to bee stings. By the time I hit the floor, my hands swelled to twice their size. Just before my eyes shut, I saw Barbi’s dad straddling me, the epinephrine injector from my pocket in his fist. A pinhead of air seeped into my lungs. I fell unconscious.

I woke up in Barbi’s bedroom. Barbi leapt to my side when she saw me stir, kissing me up and down, crying from joy that I was alive. After she calmed herself, she asked why I’d eaten that pot roast if I was allergic to honey. I replied that I’d never had pot roast with honey. She laughed, asked where I’d grown up, Mars?!

Her dad stuck his head in. I thanked him for saving my life. He told me he loved me. Barbi’s mom, from the hallway, told him to ask if I wanted more pot roast. Her dad laughed like it was the funniest joke he’d ever heard. He came in and kissed Barbi on the lips then kissed me again, this time on the forehead. 

“Feel better, Champ,” he said.

Barbi shut the door when Dad departed. She came toward me, unbuttoning her blouse, mounting my abdomen. I told her I didn’t think this was the time. I still couldn’t breathe right. That’s what makes it so appealing, she said, everything that made her happy all in one place: her parents, her bedroom, me. As she undid my belt, she shared a funny thought: “What if I got pregnant right here, our first night together with my folks?” I laughed like it was the funniest joke I’d ever heard.

Afterward, Barbi asleep, I got up to use the bathroom. I walked past her parents’ room. Her dad was sitting on the bed. I only caught a glimpse, but I would have sworn he was masturbating. 

I stepped into the bathroom just as Barbi’s mom was coming out. It was dark, pitch. Before I could say anything, she put her arms around my neck, whispered, Are you ready for me? and attached her mouth to mine, prying open my lips. I tried to stop her, but she pushed me against the wall, forcing her tongue past my teeth, her thigh into my crotch. I pictured the horror that was on its way, her finding out it was me, not Barbi’s dad. Or maybe she knew already. She kissed me deeper and I tasted sweetness on her tongue, something from her palate, perhaps from between her teeth. 

My heart raced, my throat closed, my eyes shut, replacing one type of darkness with another. 

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JUST GIVE ME A FUNERAL by Greg Gerke

JUST GIVE ME A FUNERAL by Greg Gerke

August 27, 2021  ·  Fiction

On Thanksgiving, the southbound 1 train stopped at 96th Street and, to the surprise of the few people in the last car, an older woman with a sunbaked face in a big-brimmed gardening hat blocked the doors with a fold-up shopping cart and started to load four large bags of possessions into the space. She balanced the rectangular cart front wheels in and back out, over the gap between the car and platform, to jam the doors while hefting the bags around it and safely inside. Where did this  rail-thin woman, probably 5’4”, get the strength? a young man on his way to his Aunt’s loft in Tribeca for Thanksgiving dinner asked himself. She struggled but squeezed the first one over, though it ripped on the cart and newspapers splayed across the floor like the emptying of a fishing net’s haul. The operator yelled for the doors in the rear to be unblocked. The woman waved with a storied nonchalance and, proceeding to bag two, hummed some tune popular when everyone smoked and legions loved to dance. A couple shook their heads understandingly, but then moored them in something like impatience; they didn’t want to be late for their short-fused family on this pregnant day. A lonesome man who had been just like her ten years ago, but now had an SRO that he was on his way to after an early free Thanksgiving dinner at a homeless organization, faintly recognized the striking presence and called the name he thought her parents had christened her—she did not answer. Bag two was wider than one and she had to angle the cart more. Whistling a crescendo, she parked the ripped one at the very back of the car, then slowly gathered bag two and pasted it on top, a sculptor's addition. She waited for the clenched doors to open to go out and get the rest. Someone near the front of the car yelled for her to hurry up and someone else Fuck you’d him. The conductor chided again, adding, Two seconds and I call the police...one-two. Okay. I know who you are. The woman kept her head down and continued with bag three and the young man and the ex-homeless man sprinted to help her and they got everything in and the doors closed and the train powered on to 86th street. A reminder, ladies and gentlemen, please do not block...

The woman sat in the corner, her hand roosting in the bag atop the ripped one, while the two others lived on the seats facing her with the cart wedged against them, a bungee cord tied to the right side wheels. Her articles carried a reek, but a temperate one—mold, not body odor. She once owned an array of expensive soaps and cleansers during her early years, continuing into her first marriage to the heir of a manufacturing magnate in Western Massachusetts, a fat man who kept her cooped until his early demise after five years of hell. The two other bags were full of clothes, books, papers, miscellany, and about a dozen cell phones she’d found in the last year. She wore a large threadbare coat over a sweater, a cardigan, a long-sleeved puce pajama top, and a three-year-old tee-shirt from the city’s marathon. Over her black long johns was a colorful but marred dress she’d found in a Hell’s Kitchen dumpster—a piece made in Mexico that the previous owner wore once for Cinco de Mayo at her job as a hostess. That its new owner spoke Spanish was lost on the dress. She spoke French, too. She’d actually been a governess, spending a year in Paris with a family who lived off money from past sales of Impressionist paintings. A non-practicing Jew, she closed her eyes and wrote something on her hand with a cheap pen. It was a question about the fitness of her heart, more an approbation, and though she’d had health scares, her heart was unencumbered. The ex-homeless man called her name again and this time she tendered annoyance and announced, without looking, You might have my name, but you don’t have my numbers. I’m just trying to be nice, he said. Don’t you remember me? At Stuy Cove, years ago. Night of that wind storm. I got an apartment. I’m working in an electronics store. You got to get off the street. Let them help you. She heard his words, but desiring them to have no meaning, they didn’t. I’m looking through you, she said. Yeah, he said. Happy Thanksgiving to you.

The young man, who’d gone back to sexting with some fashion designer in San Francisco, peered at the woman, wanting to understand her story, her fall, but in a choose-your-own-adventure type of equation where he could play it out as a video game, taking on the role of a vampire that swoops in and sucks the life out of her without having to talk it out, downloading her story through her blood, now his. He certainly didn’t want to smell her, though she looked okay for a homeless woman, like she’d had a cute face in her twenties, even forties, and carried an aristocratic air, like she was from Paris or—no, Paris. But shouldn’t he treat her with a little respect? Like she lived on the street. The street. All she had was in these bags, so double fuck for her. He turned his music back on. The girl from San Francisco sexted back in quaggy San Franciscan fashion, My cunt is singing, I will survive...

She had grown out of her name—she’d told herself this so many times it was true. Names only confused the issue. As a child, what did she care about her name? She just wanted to be and she’d gotten that at last, aside from the interfering governmental and police forces. She lived without time, gladly and free. When tired, she slept. When she had to, she peed. When relaxed, she ate. Nothing mattered except the minute she was in. And because of her age and gender, she was constantly given things, even from other homeless people. Still, she used a hip pocket psychology to explain what she’d become, forever erasing what brought her there. 

The 1 train would terminate in a destination appealing to her kind. People were allowed to sit all night in the Staten Island Ferry terminal, though they needed to clear every two hours for a security check. Battery Park? A designated tourist and rat zone only, even locals weren’t encouraged to be there—could someone who didn’t know better have a picnic next to those species, the fresh-faced throngs headed to Lady Liberty and Ellis Island, and the not-too-good abstract art projects? But it was at Franklin she would exit. Stash her stuff, as she knew the rotating station agents, and go to Moore Street, where this abandoned building marked for demolition miraculously still stood. She’d gotten the gate combination from another castaway who’d picked it and set two old mattresses on the second story a hundred yards away from each other, adding bright neon tape to outline enormous holes in the floor. This embittered man, who didn’t like the human race, except her, had gone to New Jersey for the holiday and wouldn’t be back till Saturday. She didn’t listen to all he said, too used to his jibes and weak come-ons, but when he let something important slip, she recorded it at once.

In the black of the day’s new darkness, she kicked at a fat rat’s shadow and went to her mattress, at the head of which stood a rickety chair whose back spindles were broken. She reclined on the droopy bed, using a wool sweater as a mattress liner, and unpeeled the paper-top off a tin full of linguini that someone placed on her cart last night sometime after ten. She finger-picked a noodle. The sauce’s rich butter and cream pulled her up, reminding her she hadn’t eaten all day, and she crossed her legs, removed a stolen restaurant fork from her jacket, wiped it with a napkin, and began to eat.  

The wind picked up and whooshed through the gaps and holes on her floor and down from those above her. At least she didn’t have to fend off gawkers, outreach, police, and the ever-present deviants who would fuck a woman if she had no head. A fire engine from Ladder 8 on Varick blared and she tested the air but only came away with herself, the coagulated food, vermin, and muck. The man said they might have a month’s more reprieve because some insider who supported the squat told him the funding for construction had some hiccup. Maybe till the 15th, maybe the New Year. You’ll know when you get here, he said. 

The wind roiled some newspapers to lift off the ground like flashing kites in the dusky light. She chewed the gelatinous noodles by rote, like her stomach just had to be plugged into food. She had few opinions about gastronomy—she’d once taught her charges that word—and ate things she never used to, like eggplant and tofu. A shaking spotted hand raised an unwieldy Evian bottle refilled hundreds of times since she’d found it in August. If she cared about anything it was drinking water. It held off disease and sickness and assured her body function. Once she’d carried a Campari bottle for months, proud of it not breaking, until she dropped it on her socked foot one night, leaving a dark Rorschach blot of pain she limped on for three months.

A magnificent crash around the corner. Another piece of the ceiling must have collapsed. She closed the food, put it back in its bag, and tied it up. With a toothpick, she combed her teeth, glazed eyes darting across the room with half their usual alertness. She slept best right after the initial dark—the later lonelier hours, the hour of the wolf and of hounds, had too many demons to gain peace. With the energy of the holiday depopulating the city, tonight was different—she had little cause in the reprieve. Everything had darkened and she brought out a small taper, affixing it atop a cheap chrome candle holder. Then she lit it with a moan after dusting the area of rat and mice pellets, something she had first put off out of greed for the new pure solitude, her last great gift. She lay back, musing at the flicking shadows. She powered on a small music thingamajig she’d found, using one earphone to hear a jazz album. 

Many decades ago she’d lived in Amsterdam with her second husband, a high diplomat and attaché, during a year of Kennedy. She had so much rare and expensive jewelry to warrant special insurance—what a fuss. They lived in the redoubtable Willemspark neighborhood near the large rectangular evergreening Vondelpark, filled with softly still waterways and many Dutch Red Chestnuts and birches. A small mansion of intricate brickwork. Three stories, with a housekeeper and a cook, a piano room, a painting by Mondrian. The year she ruled there, she became a quasi French Lieutenant’s Woman, having two miscarriages on top of the two before (to cement her childless life), a surprising affair, and a widening expansion of her consciousness (she’d again chosen a man who needed to control her—never again!) as her sheltered years in New England fell away like brittle discolored leaves she once could not shed. As weapons turned the world inside out, other rumblings fractured the cultural and psychic bedrock. She’d matured away from her country and she came to accommodate something she had no control over—her fate. Fate had given her the type of beauty and intelligence easily coveted and she interchanged it for what she fancied—not so much experience as a kind of electricity that should never be thought vain, but parsimonious in not obviously having to whet every appetite she developed. As much as she thought life could instruct, it did not obviate her from experiencing any splendor. Again and again, she kept getting what she probably wanted, freely accepting attention, adulation, and a minor fame—and then she kept getting more of it, as her stuffy husband would view her askance over Eggs Benedict, watching as the beautiful bird transformed and rose higher into something clearly not meant for him. With no child and no connection beyond the name, his title suffered some as he became known as the husband of her, the American who speaks like Katherine Hepburn, but looks like Garbo. Who could be in Vogue and would be except for his position in the government. She—whom everyone wanted, pitying him his certain loss of her. 

One December evening they went as guests of the embassy to a strange midnight concert to hear the rhythms of their countrymen. She’d not heard much jazz, not been exposed, though music had passed many of her hours. She’d played piano from an early age without distinction and then had some jaundiced years on the flute. Excitable, but out of love with him, she accompanied. Performance by the most grand musicians could throw off the tourniquet she always imagined pinioned on her soul. So much could go wrong up there, but it never did. Performers seemed to be filmed and not present, outside the realm of fallibility—she could not fathom how they crisply, expertly burst out, blood pulsing, while others watched or listened or both, waiting for triumph and disaster. The great conductors: Bernstein in New York, von Karajan in Berlin, Sir Colin Davis in London, were gods. Motion pictures were intriguing and she had her favorites. But Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster weren’t people magically in her space—they were distant and magnified on the silver screen, distorted. They spoke catchy words, but their manner was a little cold, a little unreal. Music had no antecedent, no story, it impressed by degrees, in the awing conceptions enfranchised notes spurred on sound; time in music didn’t govern, it shook the body into primordial understanding. She’d easily fallen in love with her husband because music did something for him as well, though he didn’t view it in such a spiritual manner as she, rather in some patriotic vein, where it uplifted and made one’s capacity for moral living larger. He’d mentioned jazz off-handedly, after seeing acts in DC semi-regularly by himself. 

Why such a late concert? It was the second of two and to be up late on a Saturday instilled some chicness onto those who weren’t, except for their money and status, both false markers. Not everyone respected such a time but the band began playing early before everyone had been seated and after one peppy piece with simply too many notes, the saxophone leader went into his rendition of a tune she knew well. Hearing his hornbreath blow the words, she checked herself because even if it was on some level gimmicky, it seemed miraculous. This burly black: full face, full suit, pressing and pressing, fulminating in a way that Oscar Hammerstein and certainly goody goody Julie Andrews had no purchase on—exhorting? She didn’t know the word, but felt it. Do you like it? her husband asked. Sssh, yes. The long version of the short song went on and a stoic part of her started to despise it: the dissonance, the down and dirty, the unbridled quality, the racial swing. She felt disturbed. Long periods of sound in the other pieces held no meaning for her and felt hardly structured—yet, they did engage because she was mentally fleeing, upset. If she didn’t care she’d be asleep, eyes open. She couldn’t leave. On and on, the unseemly flow attacked, blasting through the detritus she fruitlessly threw back, leaving the notes to clash, their subsequent syncopation always freshly re-conjured. Where could this go? How could it even continue to thrive? Why would they be rewarded for it with money? She separately focused on each of the quartet’s members and then went back to the main man. Some pillar Michelangelo might have sculpted, an enormous rock vividly alive in more than its allotted space—dead at forty of cancer and drugs. She wanted to kiss the giant lips making that terrible beauty.

Halfway into the third song, she told herself the music was foolish. He might be a genius, but his music would only drive one to vice and after a few more measures of that song, which she’d later find out was “Mr. P.C.,” she felt sickened by her life of lies.

She could still hear the man’s music some fifty years later. Deep, dark, but incredibly clear. Its matrix carried more and more and she ultimately defined it as tender and fully compassionate, yet cooly uncalculated—round and whole, even if pain did exist. It still extracted an unmistakable flavor, like the boiling of bones. 

Everything comprising her life then had ended, but she had this—a moment that made time miraculous. Something millions wished they could have experienced. The tame jazz in her earphone eventually crept back. She had to resume her life, which as lives went was difficult, but not intolerable. Everybody would want the story of how she lost it all and how she ended up here, in an abandoned building with whatever other indelicacies ready to be heaped on her. She didn’t like stories. They weren’t as valuable as people thought—only experience. Stories were simply antecedents of the real—travel, work, meeting people. So many lived by aperçus, as if they were all wannabe French philosophers, people she never read anyway. She had nothing to say, no advice and no hope for her future. She couldn’t live with people, but some remaining seed hopelessly yearned for companionship. At least someone she could look at without wanting to tear his heart from his chest, who didn’t tamp her urge to complain—he’d already be well attuned to the stalactites deposited about her perceptions. 

After months and months of lengthened days, the nights had precedence, stretching more and more, as the earth rounded the sun, bodies ruling human time. There. Something still weighed. Didn’t that prove she did have a part in society? If she had someone to recount what befell her and what she thought about it—but she couldn’t help it. This was how she’d changed in her life, from a mouse to a lion, and finally a raccoon. A few gun-shy people were concerned but mostly to massage their own egos. They gave her things and listened to the litanies with cloistered, embarrassed ears. They didn’t know the moment they became uninterested, something keenly perceived at once, would singe her. But what else could she speak of? Her life, a constant battle—how could she not complain? Bitterness forever tinting her bright green eyes a shade darker. Just give me a funeral, she said to one of these people, a woman who worked at a CVS on the Upper West Side near her frequent staging ground. A thirty-two-year-old who commuted from the Bronx, she wanted to go back to school for nursing, but could never get the applications together on time. A slightly overweight woman who smiled often and told her that she herself had been homeless for a summer after a boyfriend beat her up and kicked her out of their Orlando apartment. This woman baked her things, cakes and homemade bread—she made double portions of her lunches during the week, some delicacy placed in a rescued Chinese takeout container and a brown bag, with a folded napkin and a plastic fork or spoon. On each occasion she said, Thank you, my dear, thinking about the giver’s own mother and wondering if they still had a relationship, though she never asked. And just last week, after the first freezing night of the winter (her feet still felt cold at nine in the morning, to remain chilled till late afternoon), she received what turned out to be shepherd's pie with a little less enthusiasm. Awake through hours of bitter cold, it suddenly didn’t surprise her that she could just die. Not that she should, but she could finally latch onto the honorable finale instead of another long subway trip, another night frozen. Fuck this world, fuck life. Thoughts she would never let into her public lexicon. And that cloudy morning, still fogged with cold, the young woman peered, waiting for the gracious phrase and wink she usually bestowed following the hand-off, but the old woman trembled inside because she was aware of her complicity, her involvement in another’s emotional well being. Just give me a funeral...she said quietly. Then uttered the very passive-aggressive New York type of plea again, with more seriousness. Just give me a funeral. A gloss on her own mother’s, You’ll miss me when I’m gone. Even with no sun in her eyes, she shaded them to see the youth in front of her—Jasmine, she came to learn was her name. I’ll be alright, dear. Don’t mind my little jokes. You get to work now, but Theresa wouldn’t move because she sensed a lie. 

Really, dear, really. It’s frustration. 

Jasmine then delivered what she’d turned over many times before, during her days at the register and at home on the couch, seeing a homeless person appear comet-like on her television shows. You can stay with me, Emma, adding her name in a loving, pitying way. You can have a couch. Stay for a few weeks, you can. 

No, dear, please. 

Jasmine hesitated. Wet-eyed, she said, I have to make sure. I can’t let something—Don’t hurt yourself, don’t. 

No, no, and she patted Jasmine on her back. I won’t, I won’t. 

Do you promise? 

Yes, I promise you. Go on now, it’s after nine.

In Tribeca, she sat up cross-legged, again working a pick through every crevice of her teeth. Things which would remain. Maybe she’d spend the next weeks accepting death. Her bluster would eventually fail her. The end would be on its way, not because she had no one but because she had nothing left to accomplish.

The building creaked in the wind and she remembered her parents, briefly. Small, silent people who never wanted to be a bother. Whatever did they want for her? She wasn’t interested in the answer. In the end, it had all been enough. From the high to the low, or was it the other way? Had she arrived at one or the other?

Crow Jonah Norlander

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