X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine | Fiction

SHAGGING FLIES IN BALLARD by Alexandrine Ogundimu

August 5, 2021 · Fiction

I resolve to confess my feelings on Saturday. You take me to the batting cage up in Mountlake Terrace but the machines are so awful they eat our tokens and give us nothing back, no high-arching softballs or baseball bullets. I would never say anything because I am meek and unmasculine but you get a refund because you are handsome and friendly and always get what you want and I am jealous—of your confidence and looks and talents and physicality and how much sex you have.

There’s a bucket of baseballs in your trunk so we drive to a park in Ballard and grab the bats and bucket and I’m way out of shape and can’t pitch for shit. You whack more than a few out into the home run range and we shag them together and take turns, pitcher and hitter, the innuendo not lost on me though you are oblivious to it, as I admire your form and feel a certain kind of carefree peace and joy, just two guys hitting baseballs, and it makes me wish you were my boyfriend in a way I find embarrassing, and I will tell you, hyper-straight you, college-baseball-player you, writer you, talented-in-more-than-every-way you.

This isn’t the right moment to say anything because it’s too perfect, as if I have already gotten exactly what I want, and having had it, there is no reason for me to seek it.

We catch the Mariners game at a pizza place and you drink a beer while I drink a Diet Coke because I’m scared of what comes out of me while I’m drunk. You ask me how the date with that guy went and I say Fine when it wasn’t fine because he wasn’t you, and I don’t care unless I care and you make me care in spite of myself.

We lock eyes as you say Yeah, just fine? And your voice is so warm and your eyes are crystal, your Henley revealing just a bit of your chest and I am an animal, my higher functions suspended even as I can feel your thoughts move, and I realize that this is my moment, my time to confess, and as I prepare the words Zunino blasts one and the bar goes wild and we high-five and really is it worth it to complicate a friendship when it’s so much easier to let your heart break.

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EVERY DAY IMAGINE DROWNING by Melanie Carlstad

August 4, 2021 · Fiction

I was at work holding onto a trowel and my father wasn’t dead. I argued this point to my colleague, Mary Anne, who was afraid of worms.

Here’s the gist, Mary Anne, I said. We are at work. We are gardening. You are afraid of the worms writhing between your fingers, and on top of that, my dad isn’t dead.

Mary Anne screamed. There was nothing else to do but scream about the ringed pink flesh of the worms.

Everything was drippy from yesterday’s rain. The juniper bush and the ivy leaves strangling it dripped on us. Our feet sank in the wet dirt. We had long hours, so we filled them with talk.

My parents are in an unhappy marriage, but they’re alive and well, Mary Anne said.

Mine aren’t like that, I said. They’re in a happy marriage and ailing slowly.Your dad is all done ailing, said Mary Anne. He’s dead.

I laughed and laughed. The juniper bush dripped, and I deadheaded the agapanthus. We talked about parking lots, hungry children with shiny eyes, and how the sun drowned every evening when it set over the bay. We could see it gasping above the waterline from the hill where we gardened.

Imagine drowning every day! Mary Anne said. We were crouched around the birdbath, hunting for crabgrass. With the rain, it had inched its way through networks of other plants, infiltrating their systems. I had to extract the crabgrass but not the poppies. I didn’t like poppies very much, but we had to preserve them. Our supervisor came out to check on us sometimes.

There’s a dead possum in the green bin, she said when she came out. Please take care of it.

I went to the green bin and kicked it onto its side. Dirty water dribbled out of the corner, wadded-up bundles of weeds slumped at the mouth of the bin, and underneath them I saw a beady eyeball surrounded by fur. I retreated, walking backwards while staring at the eye.

Mary Anne was still under the bird bath. I was starting to resent her for moving so slowly. She picked at crabgrass with a sense of leisure and twirled ivy like long hair when she ripped it out of the juniper.

There’s no dead possum in the green bin, I told her. There’s a possum in there alright, but it’s alive and well, just playing dead until it can make its getaway.

It had better go quick, Mary Anne said. She wrapped her hand around the neck of an invasive plant and yanked it out of the ground. She saw the worms intertwined with the torn roots and flung them away, sending specks of dirt onto my eyelids and cheeks. The sun was getting ready to drown, which meant we had to fill the green bin and clean up. The juniper still dripped on us while we tossed piles of weeds into the bin, which had no possum anymore but was full of new dead things.

This story was published in print only with the title “Worms” in Pratt’s literary magazine, Ubiquitous, in 2018.

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THE OPENER by Marissa Higgins

August 3, 2021 · Fiction

Bobby tossed the stuffed chihuahua between his bare hands, Suboxone in his right coat pocket and a picture of Alyssa at two months in his left. Should have worn gloves, he knew. Cape Cod winters tug the cold out of bones. The bus depot, of course, wasn’t heated. What if I can’t find you in the parking lot, he said over the phone when they arranged the meeting. Just stay in one place, Alyssa’s grandmother said, and then she named it. Sharon added: You’ll recognize your blood.

The call went clipped like that: Yeah, he was still at the halfway house, working, wanting to see Alyssa. No, he wasn’t paid on the books or sure about child support. He didn’t have any other kids. Yeah, he was sure.

Sharon and his kid pulled up and Bobby tightened his stomach lips colon toes fingers throat knees jaw. He put the stuffed animal behind his back. He watched Sharon get out and fiddle with the backseat. When Alyssa dropped her feet into the snow, Bobby dropped the chihuahua. He said, Oh, shit. Then Alyssa was upon him.

She said, Hey. They did not hug. As he shook the snow from the toy, he watched her watch him.

This is for you, Bobby said. And hey, yourself.

I’m not allowed to have a dog, she said, brown eyes a story in themselves. Bobby knew better than to point it out, but the kid really looked nothing like him. Carved from clouds, not smoke.

This one is good, he said all slow. Because it’s not real, you know?

Yeah, she said, solemn. I know.

Father and daughter didn’t talk again until the three of them were seated in a booth. The place was packed for lunch hour, all pop radio and pitchy kids. Sharon chatted for them; she caught Bobby up on Alyssa’s flute lessons, three times a week, which Bobby thought sounded like a lot, but shit if he knew.

Bobby nodded nodded nodded and sat straight straight straight. His posture was a knot, he admitted it, but he wanted Sharon to see him as different than the last time. He had been fucked up, yeah. He and Alyssa’s mom were screaming pretty bad. Some shit got broken. Neighbors were pissed about the noise and all, and Bobby couldn’t even tell them to fuck off, on account of them being right. Spine straight, Bobby housed his pizza and was glad to see Alyssa ate like him, big bites, teeth worked as weapons, oil all over the damn place. And why not, he thought, watching his kid suck grease from each of her ten fingers. Why not.

She’s a busy girl, Sharon said. Almost a young lady.

Bobby got her point. He crumpled a napkin, cleared his diet Pepsi, asked if they wanted refills. Sharon said no thank you and Alyssa eyed her cup, almost drained. At the drink fountain, he was small, cramped. He knew, but did he? Last he’d seen Alyssa, she was in diapers, drinking milk. He gambled. He filled hers to the top with cherry Coke and plenty of ice.

Under Sharon’s gaze, Alyssa mumbled thanks and gulped gulped gulped. Soda drizzled down her chin and onto her lap napkins. She and Bobby shared a look. Happy, happy.

Back in the parking lot, Bobby considered what they hadn’t talked about. Visitation, supervised or not. Alyssa’s mom—if she was dating anybody or if she was still working at the diner by the bay. If Alyssa was gonna be allowed to come over his apartment, once he got one, once he finished up the program. Holiday photos would be cool, he’d been thinking. Family portraits, the kind they take at the mall. Corny, he thought, but shit. Why not.

To Sharon, he said, Thank you. She didn’t ask him what for, which he appreciated. Later, in his bunk, Bobby would think about what he owed her, and how the debt made him feel weak and also relieved. Ever since Sharon became Alyssa’s guardian, he knew his daughter was good. He trusted she went to school and had enough to eat. That her hair was clean. That she wore socks under her boots. That she didn’t miss him much, because why would she? He only recently started to miss himself.

With Alyssa, he held out the chihuahua, mostly dry from sitting on a heater in the back of the restaurant. Its glass eyes were warmer than he expected when he rooted through the discount bin at the outlet across town. That’s special, he thought.

Alyssa said, Thank you, and took the dog. Against her pink puffer, the chihuahua looked cozy. She asked if Bobby would bring her a real dog next time.

That’s up to your grandma, he said. Around them, crows convened low, indifferent. If Sharon said sure, bring the girl a dog? Bobby would steal one, he guessed. He’d make it work.

Alyssa rolled her eyes, letting Bobby know grandma was the big no in the game. She asked if he wanted a hug goodbye.

When he stooped to her level, Bobby thought his back would splinter. Hamstrings were fists. Knees shuddered. His case worker told him he had to let go of his rage, that he couldn’t carry stress around the way he did. Bobby wanted to put his fear into a box or a closet or a bag. Wouldn’t the sadness open in another place, he wondered? Waiting for him, waiting to find fresh light. Still: He wanted, he wanted.

While they hugged, Bobby noticed a lot. Alyssa’s hair smelled like fruit. Her face was soft, not like skin, but pillows; the nice ones, the department store kind. When she coughed into his shoulder, unabashed, he smelled her breath: all hot cheese and pepperoncini. My kid, he thought. My kid. In his throat, a hummingbird.

"The Opener" previously appeared in Popshot Quarterly Magazine.

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PATTY by Hugh Behm-Steinberg

August 2, 2021 · Fiction

The problem with dolls who can do things is that they get bored, you have to keep them busy. If you don’t they get clingy, and it’s so easy to forget to keep the little gold chain on around their neck. They say if you forget about the little gold chain the dolls will chase you everywhere, and then it’s stab, stab, stab.

But mostly they’re just you, only smaller, which is gross in its own way. As you get older, they become more childish, until finally you have to put them in a shoebox and bury them in the yard. You tell yourself you’re growing up and this is what grownups always eventually do. Look carefully in the backyard of your grandparents’ house if you don’t believe.

But your little brother, when you’re over at your best friend Cindy’s house, he digs your doll up, he throws it like a stick to the dog, he plays fetch with your doll, and when it’s all chewed up and slobbered on, he hides it in your room, where it moans in a voice only you can hear. There’s going to be some curses: on you, your brother, that dog. You buried your doll where he could find it, you didn’t bury your doll deep enough, you didn’t do right by your doll. You’re going to have to rescue what you abandoned, that’s a curse in itself you don’t know just yet.

But you don’t have to be that sort of person, you don’t have to be a jerk. You clean the doll up, you make invisible tea, you bring together all your other dolls, the ones who can’t do things, and you pour out all your apologies. It’s going to take a while to work everything out, so you keep your door locked. “Why should I trust you?” the doll says. “Look me in the eye,” she says, when you promise to be nicer. “Take this gold chain off me,” she says.

You take a big breath and you do it.

“When I go to sleep,” you say, “you’re not going to stab me, right?”

“Why do you think I would ever want to hurt you?” If she could cry she would, but she’s not that kind of doll.

You and your doll are practically vibrating—this is something raw and new. It feels like you’ve been sobbing for hours, as you tell her everything in your heart and she tells you everything back. You feel a light inside you, a secret light you can’t tell anyone because they won’t know what it’s like and they’ll just laugh and say you’re a kid, what do you know?

She promises to lift all of her curses. To mark this new turn, you give your doll a new name, Patty.

“I like that name,” Patty says.

You and Patty track down your brother. He looks at Patty and notices she’s not wearing her necklace. “That’s right,” you say, as you knock him over and climb on top of him. “Someone owes Patty an apology, or someone is going to get stabbed in the eye.”

He apologizes and apologizes and apologizes. You tell him you don’t believe him and it’s only a matter of time until Patty sneaks into his room with a kitchen knife. “If you mean it,” you say, “You’ll eat dirt. You’ll eat worms.”

You put your knee on one of his arms. You point to the hole he dug Patty out of.

“I’m sorry,” he wails.

“Shake hands with Patty and tell her you’ll never do it again.”

When it’s dinnertime, you bring Patty down with you, and when your mom looks at you with that aren’t you too old to play with dolls look, you put Patty right in the middle of the table, where everyone can see who’s no longer wearing their golden necklace. Patty cuts loose, leaping from the table to do cartwheels around on the floor. Your dad gives your mom the let’s just put up with it for now look, and while the dog is keeping her distance, everyone else goes back to chatting about their day and eating.

The problem with dolls who can do things is that they hate doing chores, just like you, but it’s your turn to wash the dishes, so you grab Patty. You put on your dishwashing gloves, then carefully slip a pair of dolly gloves on Patty’s little hands.

“We’re friends, right?”

The dishes, glasses and pans, it’s all so disgusting. “It has everybody’s spit on it,” Patty says, shakily.

“If we both do it,” you say, “then it’ll be over with quicker and it’ll be alright.”

“But I’m going to get spit all over me! It’s going to leak through these gloves and then it’s going to get on my skin and it will be like I was back inside your dog’s mouth!”

Patty’s holding her knees with her little dolly gloves and rocking back and forth.

“I was wearing my necklace and I couldn’t do anything to make it stop.”

“It’s ok, you don’t have to do the dishes,” you say.

You put Patty on the windowsill and do all the dishes yourself. You sing her a couple of Taylor Swift songs and soon the two of you are singing together. Together, you and Patty ease.

You make a note to remember this—that it’s ok just to sing, that this is something you know how to do, when someone is frightened so badly they don’t even know how scared they are.

The kitchen knives sit on the drying rack, all in a row, sharp and clean.

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CRISP EDGES by Helena Pantsis

July 30, 2021 · Fiction

Bud reached into the chip bag. It crinkled, loud and coarse by the cheap, jagged foil. He dug his hand around the salt-covered potatoes, angling for the perfect one. You never want to start too big. You have to aim for those mid-range chips, the ones the size of a beer bottle’s bottom. He pulled one out, smacked his lips around it, and sucked on the tips of his fingers before going in for another. He couldn’t stop. That’s how they get you, the chip companies, the corporate potato pigs, by drowning their spuds in moreish delicacies that rot your teeth and erode your stomach lining. Bud was a sucker for anything with vinegar on it, anything that made his teeth vibrate, thin and on the verge of shattering. Pulling out another chip, he paused to look at it. It was familiar. He spun it around, tilted it forward, and Jesus Christ, there he was.

Martin Short.

“Jesus Christ, look at this,” Bud spat the crumbs of the half-chewed potato chip from his mouth.

Sitting across the sofa, Denise leaned towards Bud with her eyes half-lidded. She’d had enough of his bullshit.

“What?” she said.

Bud flung the chip closer to her, tilting it upwards so she could see it in better light.

“It’s a potato chip,” she said. “And?”

“That’s Martin Fucking Short.”

“Who?”

Sometimes the age gap between Bud and Denise wasn’t so bad. As long as you didn’t think about the fact that when she was born, he was graduating high school, and when she was applying to universities, he was in the middle of his first divorce. And as long as you didn’t think about the fact she didn’t know who Martin Fucking Short was.

“Martin Short!” he spoke louder, as if the volume would awaken something in her.

“Three Amigos? Father of the Bride? Legend of Saturday Night Live?”

Her face remained blank, unfazed by his manic spiraling into filmography recitation. Bud scoffed, gently placed his chip on the coffee table, and pulled up a photo on his phone.

“Oh!” Denise chimed with recognition. “He was Jack Frost! In the third Santa Clause.”

Bud didn’t have a clue what she was talking about.

“Okay,” he picked up the chip again, holding it alongside his phone. “See?”

Denise stopped for a moment to consider. The salt built up triangular in the middle, emulating what could be a nose, and the chip had burn lines resembling what could be eyes along its top. She supposed it could be him.

“I guess,” she said. “It just looks like a random face.”

Bud was flabbergasted.

“You’re kidding!” he said. “It’s a spitting image.”

“I don’t really see what the big deal is,” Denise went to grab for it, intent on eating it.

“Woah! No way,” Bud placed the chip on the far side of the table, away from her.

“What are you gonna do with it?” she asked, confounded.

“This has gotta be worth something,” Bud spoke confidently, picking the chip up and waving it in the air as he made to leave the room. “Just you see.”

Bud set his chip up in the study. Laying down a crisp, white page of A4 paper where the sun shone. He placed his chip in the middle, positioning it to the ideal angle, and opened the camera on his phone. Bud took a series of photos, all those which best captured the Martin Short of the chip. Bud uploaded the pictures to eBay, setting a starting price for auction at $50.

“You’re fucking kidding,” Denise said upon finding the stagnant bidding war on Bud’s computer. “No one’s gonna pay fifty bucks for a chip.”

“Not just a chip,” Bud said. “An exact fried potato replica of beloved actor Martin Short.” He pointed to the description he’d keyed into the item information.

“I think those are baked,” Denise said.

Bud kept the chip in a ziplock bag tucked in the back of the ice cube drawer in the freezer. They never went in there. The pair of them were accustomed to the summer heat and dealt with it better by removing layers. He’d looked up the best way to preserve a chip—he didn’t want Martin to go stale.

When Marl and Sue came over for drinks and a chat Bud told them about Martin the chip. About how he had put the chip on eBay, and about how you wouldn’t believe the likeness! And here’s the photos to prove it.

“I guess I see it,” Marl said, even though they couldn’t really. “So people actually buy that type of thing?”

“All the time!” Bud’s voice rose in excitement. “It’s practically memorabilia!”

Bud had spent hours staring at the glowing screen of his phone in their bed at night, his back turned to Denise. People were inclined to buy all kinds of things if they were attached to a celebrity. A piece of lint from Lindsay Lohan’s sweater from the 2005 Teen Choice Awards. A leaf in the shape of Javier Bardem’s head. Hair from David Schwimmer found on the set of ER circa 1996. A tile in the shape of an airborne Christina Applegate, if you squinted your eyes hard enough. And here he had Martin Fucking Short. A legend. A comedic genius. A star of stage and screen. Of course it was going to sell.

“Enough about that stupid chip,” Denise groaned, standing up abruptly to refill her guests’ coffee cups.

Sue sat awkwardly between them, gazing back and forth between the pair and then to Marl with her eyebrows raised.

“It’s really okay,” She said. “Um, maybe we could see it.”

“Oh no,” Bud shook his head, ignoring Denise, “I don’t want anything to happen to it.”

“Oh my God, Bud. Give it a rest, it’s a potato.” Denise rolled her eyes, dropping back down into her seat. “You haven’t even got a single bid on it.”

In the weeks after, Bud joined multiple online forums and Facebook groups, and signed up for innumerable newsletters on celebrities and Martin Short and selling memorabilia. He watched auctions on eBay, noting the number of watchers and bidders and starting and selling prices. Bud also stopped making love to Denise entirely.

When his auction ended, unsold, Bud re-uploaded his chip with the tips and tricks he’d learned from his research. He shared the link to his auction across Martin Short fan blogs and Facebook pages on celebrity collectables and subreddits on potatoes with faces. Slowly, starting his Martin chip at a price of $10, severely below retail value, Bud began to get some interest. One bid, then two, then the two going back and forth, then a third, and a forth, and suddenly, over twenty bids. With four days still left on the chip’s sale, the bidding price had skyrocketed to over $400.

Bud considered all the things he’d do with the money. He’d get a full back tattoo. He’d take all his friends out for a meal. He’d drink ’til his skin turned yellow. He’d fix the radio in his car. No, he thought, he’d save it, put it towards moving out of this dump.

Bud approached Denise returning home from work, ecstatic by the new interest in his Martin chip and his newfound wealth. She looked tired, moody, unapproachable. Bud considered for a moment not telling her. She’d probably use it to fix the heater or retile the bathroom. Besides, she’d never believed in him to begin with.

“What?” she spoke roughly in response to his vague stare, dropping her bag onto the counter.

“Four-hundred dollars,” he blurted out.

“You’re not buying any more blow right now, we can’t afford it.”

Bud hadn’t thought about that in weeks. He shook his head.

“No, I don’t need it. That’s how much the chip’s at. The auction.”

Denise furrowed her brows, sliding her jacket off and removing her shoes.

“What?” she asked, half paying attention.

Bud took his phone out, opening eBay and seeing the bid had risen to $530. He thrust the phone towards Denise. Her mouth fell open and she dropped her shoes so she could hold the phone closer.

“What the fuck?” she gasped, then began laughing. She stomped her feet like a child and threw her arms around Bud. “Five hundred fucking dollars!”

Things were really looking up. Denise let Bud choose the movie at night, and the pair of them would sit laughing at whatever crazy antic Martin Short got himself into. Bud dyed his hair a dusty brown, fixed his front teeth, and began putting on a wonky American accent at times to rise a laugh from Denise. The pair of them had never gotten along so well. Denise kept an eye on Bud’s eBay like it was the stock market, and boy were her shares climbing.

It was nice at first, then she began to speak about it as if the chip was theirs, as if Martin was their inside joke, their little secret. Denise was so happy about it, it made Bud’s skin crawl. She hadn’t even heard of Martin Short, yet now she was beyond ecstatic that this man’s face was making them money in leaps and bounds. She started to shop with less regard for home brand and sale items and began leaving late for work and arriving home before her shift ended. She was the breadwinner of the pair, or at least she was before Martin chip started pitching in.

The price rose: $900, $1000, $1100, $2000. It gave Bud goosebumps mainly, before anything else, because he was right. He knew it and Denise knew it, but the anticipation in her eyes was delight not reluctant resignation. God, why did he want it so bad?

The chip bag crinkled as Bud's hand swan dove to the bottom, him slouching on the living room sofa and gorging on salt as he did routinely. He filled his mouth with palmful after palmful of chips while glued to eBay on his phone. He emitted an auction-and-potato-chip-induced sweat. He stank of salt and chin fat. The price soared beyond anything the pair of them had ever imagined: $3000, $3500, $3900, $4300. He put the phone down, his heartbeat quickening. Denise came rushing in, her own phone glowing.

“Four fucking thousand!” she yelled.

Martin Short was his celebrity, his chip, but the reward was theirs together. He considered the money. It’d be nice to have. He could settle debts. He could pay for the veneers and hair job he’d gotten. He could get that back tat. Sure, the money would be nice. Bud put his phone down and watched the price rise and the countdown drop. He drifted backward towards the refrigerator. Denise called from the other room, relaying information he could see for himself.

Bud bent down, opened the freezer drawer, and pulled the little ice tray drawer where Martin chip lay. He grabbed the ziplock bag, slid the chip out, and stared at it. Martin’s eyes were screaming.

“Five-thousand dollars!” Denise yelled.

Bud held the chip gently. It was cold and crisp as the day he’d found it. Then he laid the chip on his tongue. He felt a chill run through him. The countdown on the auction ended. The price read $5200. Denise came rushing in, eyes wide and smile cracking. Bud closed his mouth and swallowed the chip swiftly without chewing. He felt the potato’s edges scratch the inside of his throat. Denise looked confused, then horrified.

“What the fuck did you do?” she said.

And Bud didn’t know. But he wanted to say, “I told you so.”

Crow Jonah Norlander

THE FUNHOUSE by Matt Lee

July 28, 2021 · Fiction

My first and only job during a disastrous year in New York was at the DVD Funhouse. Little storefront on 6th avenue between 21st and 22nd street. Flatiron District.

The place sold bootleg DVDs, Canadian imports mostly, with the ISBN barcodes scratched off. The first floor was for walk-in customers, people coming off the street to peruse the racks.

I worked in the basement. The place stretched on forever. Pallets and pallets of junk. Crates of old Blockbuster rentals. Books on tape. Useless novelties galore.

I was in charge of online sales. I turned the place around. When Victor hired me, there were two sales a week. By the time I finished, we were selling hundreds of units daily.

Every day I took the J train from Bed-Stuy into Manhattan. I’d buy a coffee at a corner stall for a dollar. I’d get to the Funhouse, print packing slips, pull the orders, stuff them into envelopes, and cart everything to the post office around the corner.

I got pretty friendly with the old guy who worked the dock at the post office. Thirty years with USPS, he told me. A few more years and he could retire. Wonder if he made good on his word.

I had a few guys working for me. Eli was a wannabe stand-up comedian. He’d practice his routine. “My buddy’s wife had a miscarriage after they baby-proofed the house. It worked. A baby didn’t get in.” I started wearing headphones.

Then there was Eric. He had a beard. He was a die hard Giants fan. All I remember.

A kid named Jose ran the register upstairs. “New York City is the greatest place on earth,” he’d say. “Cleanest tap water in America.”

Victor’s older brother Mike was the manager. He never did much besides sit in the bathroom playing games on his BlackBerry.

I worked with another guy named Mark Kamins. His apartment had been leveled during 9/11. He got a big settlement check from the government. The money ran out. So he worked for me at the DVD Funhouse.

Victor told me Mark used to be a bigshot in the music industry. I didn’t buy it until I googled his name. Turned out Mark produced Madonna’s first single, “Everybody.” Launched her to fame. The two even used to be a couple.

I asked Mark about Madonna while we were shelving DVDs one day. I wanted to know what she was like in bed. He thought about it for a minute. “Her pussy hairs were like a brillo pad.”

Mark was a terrible employee. Couldn’t do anything right. Didn’t know how to work a computer. He kept fucking up so much I demanded Victor fire him or I’d quit.

I got what I wanted.

I never knew what happened to Mark until I started writing this. He moved to Guadalajara, Mexico. Started teaching. Died 2013. Heart attack. Fifty-seven years old.

In Mark’s obituary, Madonna says, “If it weren't for him, I might not have had a singing career. He was the first DJ to play my demos before I had a record deal. He believed in me before anyone else did. I owe him a lot.”

The Funhouse was full of rats and roaches. Biggest roaches I’ve ever seen. We’d set glue traps and sprinkle green poison pellets along holes in the walls. It got to be like a game, killing roaches. We’d fling discs that were too scratched for sale trying to slice the pests in two. I got pretty good after a while. Joey was the best.

Joey was the only guy I worked with who I had any respect for. He used to make fun of my shoes, a pair of boots that clacked when I walked. He’d laugh and say, “You sound like a chick.”

Joey and I were the same age, about twenty. That’s where the similarities ended. He was an ex-con who’d served time for dealing coke. Nearly died after some punks he’d robbed decided to get even. They jumped him, bashed Joey’s head in with an aluminum baseball bat. He showed me the dent in his shaved head.

He lived in Queens with his father, who was a bus driver. Joey had to share a room with his sister. I always thought that was weird, but Joey didn’t mind. When he wasn’t at the Funhouse, Joey was at the gym. He was always giving me tips about weight lifting. I never listened.

Joey’s dream was to join the Navy. We both knew with his criminal record there was no chance in hell of Joey becoming a sailor. The dream kept him going.

On our lunch break, Joey and I would go to McDonald’s across the street. He loved putting BBQ sauce on his McChicken. “I’m a fast food connoisseur,” he’d say, lips smeared deep red.

Joey was so strong. He’d move whole pallets single-handedly, carry hundred-pound boxes on his shoulders like it was nothing. Sometimes we’d take our rolly chairs from the desks and send each other rocketing down the endless concrete floor. If Joey was the one pushing, you’d always win the race.

I remember his biceps bulging with veins. I remember him chugging protein shakes and energy drinks. I remember him encouraging me to quit smoking. I remember him breaking wooden boards with his bare hands.

I don’t remember Joey’s last name. I can’t look him up, see what he’s done with himself this past decade. I like to imagine he’s on an aircraft carrier somewhere in the Pacific, off the coast of Polynesia maybe, or the Port of Siam. He’s got a chest full of medals and a girl waiting for him back home. He’s asleep in his bunk, dreaming about a ten-story funhouse mirror. He smashes the massive glass monolith with his fist. He laughs, cracks his knuckles, and says, “Punk ass bitch.”

Crow Jonah Norlander

YOUR HOUSE ON ZILLOW by Stephanie King

July 26, 2021 · Fiction

You died on a Wednesday. In the years since, when the anniversary falls on a different day of the week, everything feels off somehow. That dreamy, floaty feeling of a day, like trying to describe what it is to have loved – but not like that – a man who is gone. They say men and women can’t be friends, but it was never a problem.

Now your wife has put the house up for sale. I guess the mortgage was too much to handle on her own. I scroll through the real estate listing like playing the world’s worst first-person shooter game. Click. There’s the accent wall I helped you paint, back before accent walls were passé, the rich maroon color reminds me of your mother’s homemade cranberry sauce on all those Thanksgivings, or Manischewitz at the seders I spent with your family after mine moved away. Click. The nursery I helped fill with absurd baby gifts, retro toys that you already had tattoos of. Click. The rose trellis in the backyard where we snuck out to smoke weed and your wife pretended not to notice, because she didn’t allow smoking in the house, but when we came back in, she had put out a cheese tray or just-microwaved popcorn.

We’d been a pair since you moved down the street from me in the summer of our twelfth year. Our hijinks progressed from slipping salami through the locker slats of our enemies in middle school to the fall break when we were both home from college and took your grandma’s mobility scooter “mountain biking” up on the trails up behind your house. We took nips from a pint of Wild Turkey you’d stolen because we weren’t old enough to buy one. We had to push the scooter home after the battery died, laughing so hard we almost pissed our pants. Your grown-up house is all the way on the other side of town. Someday, whoever buys it might discover the Halloween plastic severed foot we hid between studs when we replaced the drywall after a leak in the upstairs bathroom.

The house pictures don’t capture the sound of your laughter, bouncing off the walls. The living room looks staged, not like the place where I spent the night on the sofa whenever I got too drunk or it snowed too much to go home. The guest room doesn’t mention that it’s the room you died in, downstairs because you got too weak to make it up to your own room, the hospice nurses discussing your care in hushed voices in the hallway while we sat around the kitchen table poking at sandwich trays we were too disheartened to eat. I see you everywhere in the house, looking for your shadow lurking behind the ornate standing lamp in the living room or in ceiling corners like a spirit in a horror movie. Now I am your haunted house, everywhere I go.

Crow Jonah Norlander

DIVORCED by Amy Barnes

July 21, 2021 · Fiction

A car the size of a house rams our house that’s the size of a house. Thunder from a 1986 Thunderbird shakes me out of my canopy bed to the window to the street. It’s the moment I know my mother is a liar, a big one. She lays there lazy for too long or maybe not long enough, in her satin-sheeted bed and satin-matching lingerie with a man who isn’t her husband or my father. Her lipstick is smeared and our house is too, a brick mouth opened up on one side. When the red lights encircle our house with the car-shaped hole in it, Mama staggers out wearing this not-father-man as a blanket. It’s not enough to hide him or her. The neighborhood sees extra glimpses that should have been kept secret -- breast tops, upper thigh thunder, rumpled bedroom hair. My brother and sister and I all stand in the cul-de-sac all in our night clothes, clothed by midnight, staring at the full moon-shaped hole that has appeared in our house galaxy, stars guiding insurance adjusters and curious neighbors who watch papers float out, folded blowing into the sky. My mother and father’s signatures land in front of our house when the papers settle. We argue over who gets what name or what parent but it’s late and we have school and cold feet so everyone goes back to sleep, except me. I follow the policemen until they find my father a sidewalk away drunk on moon and moonshine next to the battering ram car that we used to take together to the beach and back. The muscle car isn’t parked next to oceanside muscle men anymore, just idling on the curb by a curbed man sobbing into his I went to Virginia Beach and all I got was this t-shirt t-shirt. There are hangers full of my father piled in the back seat next to fast food robe wrappers and receipt pillows and balled-up Kleenex and lawyer lists of divisions of property and parents. I stand by him in bare feet and bare anger, pat his bent shoulders and ask if he needs directions home.

Crow Jonah Norlander

THE LAST BOY SCOUT (1991) by Anthony Sabourin

July 19, 2021 · Fiction

1.There’s Navy SEAL training where they put a bag over your head and you are on the floor and when they take the bag off you need to react to whatever situation is in front of you, like the bag comes off and it’s 4 people kicking the shit out of you, or the bag comes off and it’s one guy kicking the shit out of you then you have to go into some room and find a gun and shoot at things. Or the bag comes off and you are shoved into a tank of water. If you don’t drown you get to keep on being a Navy SEAL.I think it’s supposed to be the culmination of all of your previous training. Complete improvisation under duress. Free-flowing and jazz-like violence.I can run 50 metres before I’m out of breath. I can take a shower without crying. I can wake up with the sun creeping through the slats in the blinds, tired of being alive, and I can slump down the stairs after three hours to eat microwaved oats and look at the grey and sunless sky floating past dead tree branches, and despite this I can still go on with the act of being alive.It’s night and I am lying down on a couch in a room where a box of pizza is pressing grease into the coffee table and I eat another slice not bothering to get up and I watch the TV as Bruce Willis and Damon Wayans do…something…and consciousness escapes me. 2.~~I’m straining against the inevitable. I’m going to great lengths to lose an argument. I have a bad haircut. I’m shirking responsibility. I am looking to find a one armed man.~~I’m a fugitive. 3.I’m on a garbage island with all these billionaires. They have white hair and unbothered faces. An auctioneer is calling out a number that only goes up.A worker from a sweatshop is combing the beach for rubber bullets.I’m here by accident. I’m just a millionaire. I yearn for the Tuscan countryside, where I can lay about striking poses with this really cool sword I bought. I miss getting drunk and playing the piano beautifully.I hear one billionaire asking another “How much would you pay for a pill that turned you into a dog?”“Like 12 dollars.”I interrupt their conversation to say,“How sweet to think that Nature is solvency,that something empirically truelies just under the dead leavesthat will make us anchorites in the dark.”Which is something I stole from a poem.They turn back to each other.“What if when you changed back from being a dog there was a 10% chance you were different?”“10 dollars.”I see the worker pluck a bullet from the sand and put it in his pocket. 4.There is no longer darkness. Harsh light off the snow outside makes the room look bright and cold. I see the same room as before. There are three foot-long cylinders of aluminum foil that I know to be deli submarines. One is on the floor, one is on the coffee table, one is in the hallway that leads to the door. I react fast. I unwrap the sandwich on the floor and start eating. Loose bits of lettuce fall to the floor. I’m done with the first sandwich. I unwrap the sandwich on the coffee table and I eat that one, chewing chewing chewing, swallowing in big gulps, etc. I have not moved from the couch. I am doing great at eating the sandwiches. I have been training my whole life for this. A good deli meat sandwich should have a cross section where you can see like three types of deli meat, and ideally one of those meats is cured, and you need some good mustard and mayonnaise, and shredded lettuce and tomato, and you want a bun that is soft sure, but with a good crust too, but also not too crusty. My brain is a fog of black plastic bags being picked at by gulls. I leap off the couch (I stand up fast and feel a rush of blood to my head and see spots) and I pounce on the hallway sandwich (walk over to it too quickly and almost stumble), and I eat the last sandwich (slowly I am not hungry anymore).I stand up in the hallway, still in my sleep clothes, and see the door to the outside. I open it and feel the invigorating shock of cold air, and I run outside in my slippers, and I keep running.I’m the best Navy SEAL there ever was.

Crow Jonah Norlander

BABY ON BOARD by Natalie Warther

July 16, 2021 · Fiction

It’s not a lie. It’s just a sticker. A sticker that says there’s a baby on board, when technically there is not. Can you blame me? You’ve seen how careful people are around a new mother. Otherwise, they are reckless. Besides, people lie about much worse. And there is no sticker that says “Be careful, please, I have a lot of student debt.”

Plus, it’s not like there aren’t important things in my backseat. The screenplay I’m writing about a boy who wants to play major league baseball, for example, and a pile of towels from my mother’s garage.

Why should I want a baby anyway? My sister and her husband had a baby. They sent me a picture in the mail. Everyone looked scared.

Last week there was a whole list of specials at Vons because the 4th of July was coming and people needed beef and various dips. I grabbed my coupons and my grocery bags. On the 1, an SUV to my left matched my speed. We traveled together for too many seconds. I accelerated, but so did the SUV. The driver was looking at me, I could feel it, he was burning holes into my profile. I wanted to tell him to keep his eyes on the road, but our windows were up, and I was trying to keep my eyes on the road.

I sneaked a glance. It was a woman. She was motioning at me to roll down my window, so I did. What else can one do? The freeway blew into our cars. She was shouting at me, we were both pushing 80, she was shouting, “WHERE’S YOUR CAR SEAT?” I got a better look at her. 40s. Three kids in the back. “YOU NEED A CARSEAT FOR YOUR BABY!” The kids were staring at me: their first criminal. This woman is crazy, I thought, and then I remembered the sticker.

“I DON’T HAVE A BABY!” I yelled, but she didn’t hear me over the traffic.

“I’VE GOT YOUR PLATES. I’M CALLING 911.” She passed her purse back to one of the children to get her phone. All of them looked in horror at the pile of towels in the back.

I panicked and shouted louder, “THERE’S NO BABY ON BOARD! I DON’T HAVE A BABY! I DON’T HAVE ANYONE!” She heard me this time.

The SUV accelerated and I switched lanes, tetrising myself deeper into the system of cars who handled me with care. I am a fake mother, and a bad writer, and a common liar, and maybe a fraud, but the freeway forgave me. They made room for me. They indicated before turning and allowed me to merge. The Volvos, the Mazdas, they flanked me, escorting me, and before I knew it, I was where I needed to be, parked in a good spot right by the doors.

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