HOME SOON FOR A HOME COOKED MEAL by Paul Rousseau

Dad is not here, but he should be, soon, from work. He doesn’t drink and he’s not having an affair. He is a big man, I know. He likes red meat and horseradish. My sister’s boyfriend works, too, at the train depot, but him and my sister are both upstairs already. 

Mom puts butter rolls in the oven at 425 degrees. Lying on my back in the family room, I have my feet on the grille of our gas fireplace. I test myself to see how long I can rest my feet on the glass part where it’s hot. I’ve seen mom try it. Ten seconds, fifteen. My feet are like tiny sock puppets. I know it’s time to remove them from the charred surface when they curl up. I grit my teeth at twenty seconds.

My feet shrivel like burning plastic melting over a lighter. Over a match. Over a box of matches. Over a bonfire. The protective screen is plagued with black singe marks from the loose threads that burn off and stick. 

I switch from the glass to the grille again and the heat follows. I rub my toes from top to bottom between the gold looking bars. A tone sounds as I strum across them like a xylophone from the blue-hot place at the center of the fake logs. From Hell. The notes are too close together. Too similar in pitch. I test the dissonance, louder each time, blaming it on a goblin who strikes the bars using a tiny foot mallet. He crawls in and out with a finger over his mouth, hushing me. I test mom’s patience. She doesn’t want him in our home. 

Next, my heels are treated, hitting the hot pressure points and nerve endings. I lie there with my mouth open like a doll’s, arms out, very limp. My cheeks’ spider-leg veins are reflected in the gold paint, flushed and prickly. Mom had to come get me from school early today. But it’s late now, or just dark. I check the clock on the VCR. It is 5:30 PM, in January, in Minnesota. It is dark. Dad should be home soon for a home cooked meal. 

KC the Cat misleads me behind my back, going one way, a pirouette, then the other. 

“You tricked me,” I say. “Your loss. I was going to pet you.” 

KC the Cat is five years old. I am thirteen, but mom says I have an old soul. 

Dad walks in and trips on my boots in the mudroom. 

“What did I say this morning? What did I tell you to do?” he asks, out of breath from almost falling to the floor on the wet dirt-rug. 

“You were supposed to move these! There needs to be an unobstructed walking path!” He doesn’t drink, he’s not having an affair. He is just angry. I think work makes him angry. Mom says that’s just the way he is. 

“We have a shoe bin!” He yells. 

Dad holds his knee while coming at me, through the kitchen, down the single step into the living room where I continue to stir, slowly. I picture him clumsily dashing on all fours like an injured farm animal. 

He slaps the back of my head. I feel my hair get matted up. He orders me to spit on my palm, I do, and then he presses the damp side against the hot glass of the fireplace where I just had my feet. It hisses. Mom screams. Dad is trying to catch his breath. He grabs at his chest. He falls to the floor. All the noise makes my sister and her boyfriend come downstairs. My sister covers her mouth with her hand. 

“Jesus Christ,” her boyfriend says. 

The fire alarm goes off. The butter rolls are burning in the oven. My hand is burning. My sister’s ears are burning. Her boyfriend goes to fan the smoke detector with a blanket. He is used to furnaces and steam engines and heat. Dad is seizing on the carpet. I get up and open a door. KC the Cat runs out into the snow. I look at the neighbor’s chimney, and the chimney next to theirs. I look at the exhausting smoke and wonder if it’s from the combustion of wood or gas.

Continue Reading...

SELF-MAINTENANCE by John Chrostek

I live at the bottom of an old apartment tower and my tub won’t stop filling up with water. The building, weary from a century of American life, funnels its sewage down through my unit’s pipes until it all gets stuck up tight and rises with a fury, bubbling and nasty from the drain. For days, my every waking moment has been spent dumping bucket after bucket of the hot, dim water down the toilet and calling out for help. The calling out is pointless, of course, for what raw marrow remains of my voice gets trapped in my apartment, chipping at the paint on the walls, reaching no one. I know I would be furious—a half-starved monkey abandoned in a foreclosed amusement park—if I wasn’t sure deep down that I deserved this.Outside my bedroom window (left open day and night to minimize the build-up of moisture,) my unremarkable residential street has been overrun with a parade of screamers, all guttural grunts and challenges to fight discomforted passersby. At first the chaos left me unsettled, but as time passed and I dumped the water time and again, as I slept in fitful shifts on the cold linoleum tiling. Their thick-tongued cries sounded less like invading hellspawn and more like troubled family. I now love my feral kin as they howl, piss and rummage through the waste of the decadent, as they rage against society and the water rising quickly from the tub. I sing their praises as they set about their holy work and I mine, drawing strength from solidarity.One downside: there has been little time to eat. If I leave the tub unattended for an hour, the water recognizes my absence and rises twice as quickly. Fine, I think, for what is the body but water? I remind myself of the religious function of fasting; how it forges impeccable resolve within a human soul committed to its lessons. I admit, I am unsure which god can be accredited for flushing my cell phone with the bath water, for the dogged persistence of the cup to runneth over, but there is meaning in this for me, a message I must decode. Everything is water. Life is a cycle. A buried sin grows toxic flowers. I assure you, gods, I am listening!At night, I see-dream a polar bear squatting on a Caribbean coastline. His fur is matted with oily refuse and he is singing in a language I do not know. I am holding two halves of a coconut filled with milky juice topped with cherry blossoms. I hand the bear a juice and motion for him to drink it. His eyes sparkle with bright pain. The world may be shrinking, but all the good is gathering, I offer. No, he replies, there are just less good things. We drink our coconuts in brotherhood as the black tide comes rolling in.This juice tastes like shit, I think to myself, until I wake up and realize that the tub is flooding again. I rise, my pajama onesie soaked with backwash, and get to work. My back is sore and my senses are foggy and muted, but my muscles have learned their labor well these past few days. Twenty-seven flushes and at last the water is back below the rim, but the floor is drenched and so am I. This calls for towels.The door to the bathroom will not open. It has no lock, nothing to block it shut. It must be swollen from the water, I realize, and start to laugh. I tug and jiggle the doorknob, but the door will not open and I laugh a little harder. I slam my hands into the door, loose palm, closed fist, elbows and shin and forehead but the damn thing doesn’t budge. I’m not laughing but I hear my body laughing wild and loud, laughing like blood and I couldn’t stop it if I tried.Faintly from the other side I hear the glimmering jingle of keys and a shiver plays on my neck. A loud knock on the hallway door, footsteps and a voice, “Hello? Is anyone in here?” Another knock. “There’ve been several noise complaints, reports of howling?” I cry out for help, slamming myself into the bathroom door.“Alright, I’m coming in.” The sound of the keys again. The front door opens. “Oh, my goodness there’s water everywhere!”“Hello! I’m in here! Get me out!” I beg, weeping from relief. I explain the situation with the bathroom door and the tub and the days of interminable hardship and panic through the wood of the door.“I see. We should be able to help you out shortly. Have you filled out a work order yet by any chance?”I explain the fate of my phone, the days of panicked cries for help with colorful yet restrained poetic language.“Uh-huh. Well, I’ll place a call with our plumber, we should have someone out here in a day or two. Until then, do you have a hairdryer or space heater you could use to dry out the space a bit?”No.“Okay. Well stay put, help is on the way. We can discuss the cost of damages once this has all gotten settled, all right?”Outside, the screamers scream in concentrated numbers. The property manager stomps over to the open window facing out into the street. There seems to be a disagreement between the screamers growing in intensity.“Get a job, filthy ingrates!” He yells as he struggles to close the windowpane. He calls back to me, his voice raised, “Next time you get locked in the bathroom, be sure to keep these closed. Don’t want a security issue!”A shout. Glass breaking in the other room. I hear the manager stagger back from the window towards my bathroom door. I ask what happened, what that noise was, why the screamers now laugh with joy. “Help is coming! Stay put!” The front door opens and shuts with alarming speed. I press my hands to the door and feel heat from the other side. I am numb.Outside, the screamers cheer, “Shows that asshole! Throw another one!”A pause. Glass, heat, a sound like a thunderbolt five miles away, the piercing ring of the fire alarm from the kitchen. Above me, the frantic footsteps of evacuation. I take a step back from the door and slip, falling backwards onto the tile, by sheer luck avoiding hitting my head on the edge of the toilet. Thud. Terrible pain in my lower back as it strikes the floor, spasming from repetition, neglect and repetition.I lie there, unable to move. The screamers sing a drinking song as tenants flood into the street. Babies cry, dogs yelp and bark, frantic from the cacophony. I listen for the sounds of footsteps coming my way, for signs of help, but every human sound seems distant. The bathroom window! With great effort, I pull myself up off the floor. If I can get myself up on the rim of the tub, I can climb through the slim bathroom window, I can—The bars. The bars on the bathroom window.“Sure,” I nod and reply. I lie back down on the tile. It hurt to sit up anyway. I take stock of the situation, trying my best to think things through. Everything is water. My clothes are drenched. If the smoke starts entering the room, it’s best to be down on the floor with the oxygen. I should be safe until the firefighters arrive. The property manager will tell them just where to find me. Life is a cycle. The fire’s heat will dry out the bathroom door, enough to get it open. If I conserve my strength, I might be able to make it out. Is this the lesson I’m meant to learn, that a bad situation always leads to good in time? I think of my hard-earned wisdom, the bliss of a potential escape, the new life awaiting me on the other side of cleansing fire. After all, how did I end up here? A buried sin grows toxic flowers. You tricky gods. What sick root compelled me, hardship after hardship, to stay? All your dramatics, all your chaos, your unending parade of thwarted joys and heartbreaks, the whole blue pitter bill of the earth just to show me how powerful I really am! I am in your debt; I am your thankful servant and faithful pupil till the end! There is nothing to fear anymore. Nothing to fight. This is the ultimate freedom, the total liberation of the spirit!I hear a noise like copper groaning from below, a churn and bubbles, and all at once black water starts flowing from the tub, pooling over the porcelain canyon and flooding all around me as the crystal bathroom doorknob shines with the light of the fire. Distantly, my body again begins to laugh.

Continue Reading...

A LOST AND WORDLESS FEELING by Becca Yenser

for Abby Vasquez

 

All of our friends are dying but they are the ones to blame, so we shut up about it and sit outside at their old favorite bars, drinking set-ups until we puke. The bars are named after animals or phrases: Red Fox, Crow Bar, Haymaker, Lost and Found.

Our friends shot themselves in one-room apartments, jumped from bridges, hung themselves from garage ropes. They had dark hair, shiny hair, green eyes, red beards, brown eyes, dimples, scars, cellulite. They stooped when they walked, or danced on bikes, or wore layered sweatshirts instead of coats. They played drums, drank beer, bagged groceries, sat houses, or watched other people’s children.

Our friends killed themselves but told us about it first, for too long, first in the winters, then in the summers. Winter: bleak but soon over. Summer: swimming and cheap beer and too many Fourth of July parties. We listened, didn’t listen, stopped calling, called all the time.

Our friends had ideas. They liked Marx, they liked Beauvoir, they hated Ayn Rand or loved her. They liked Beavis and Butt-head and Cake and were in love with sad, sexy singers like Karen O. They spit when they talked, they had bad breath, they wore Gold Toe socks from Sears and Roebuck, or maybe just Sears.

One of our friends stepped off the St. Johns bridge but wore her red cape so that she looked like a capital A going down. Everyone tried to rescue her, or no one did, and we kept swimming, or stopped, or held our breaths, or breathed too much, or went silent, or said, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus when we heard the news, that all of our friends were dead.

Continue Reading...

DUCK, DUCK, OWL by Michelle Ross

The ducks are a pair—Mallards from the pond in the nearby park. Every evening, they claim the shallow end of the swimming pool, float in languid circles. They’re not threatened by the woman watching them from the canvas chair. They don’t even startle when she goes inside the house to pour more prosecco. 

The woman is a divorcée—she’s lived alone in this house twelve years. Her grown daughters transplanted thousands of miles away. Boyfriends have spent the night from time to time, but there’s no boyfriend now.  

The woman notes the elegant (pompous?) curve of the ducks’ breasts and necks. The male duck, with his gaudy, iridescent green head that seems snatched from another body, looks like an Egyptian god. The female, with that snippet of blue sash peeking from her wing: a beauty contestant. 

The woman imagines the ducks are her daughters. Some instinct they don’t understand draws them home each evening. 

Of course, even if this were true, as ducks, they wouldn’t recognize this as home; they wouldn’t recognize the woman as their mother. Ducks know nothing of filial obligations, and this is to be expected. This is an acceptable trait for a duck.

But: duck shit. In the water. On the cement around the pool. The woman worries about diseases. 

Also, on the phone, when her younger daughter calls to say she can’t visit that summer (she offers up excuses like items she’s trying to pawn to pay off an overdue bill—How much for this? How much for that?), she tells stories of duck multiplication. Two becomes fifteen then fifty. When the woman’s older daughter calls to reprimand her for the candy the woman sends her grandchildren in the mail, she says of the ducks, “You’re not doing them any favors, you know. The chlorine is bad for their skin. They’d be better off if you scared them away.”

The owl is plastic—made in China. It doesn’t even weigh a pound. But when the woman walks out the sliding glass door, the owl in her outstretched arms, the ducks fly away before she is even certain she wants them to. 

That night, and for many days and nights after, the woman’s only company is the plastic owl. Even after she hides the owl in the cabinet with the fire extinguisher, she feels its eyes always. They never leave her.

Continue Reading...

AND WHAT’S MORE IMPORTANT by Francine Witte

First time I met my brother, he was a hum in my mother’s swelling belly. 

***

When he was 10 and me 14, we’d mock our parents’ arguments. We’d sneak up to the attic. He’d put on Dad’s soggy fedora and kick my bottom hard. When I flinched, he’d say, “hey, that’s how Dad does it.”

***

I remember the first dead rabbit. It was the winter it wouldn’t stop raining. Always on the edge of snow, but not. My father scowled at my brother, who was something like 11. “What’d you go and do that for?” He shook the dead fluffy thing at my brother over the dinner plates. “If you wanted to be useful, you could have killed a chicken.” 

My mother tried to explain we could eat a rabbit. She said she’d put it right into a pot of water that very minute. The rain, a rattle at the window, and Dad throwing the rabbit straight through it, the sudden hole, the shattered glass, and puddle on my mother’s clean linoleum. 

***

When my brother was old enough, first thing he did was join the army. He expected Dad would be pissed and was ready for it. Oddly, Dad just sank back into his armchair and fluffed up the newspaper. “It’s good,” Dad said, “you’re good at killing shit.”

My mother said, “There’s plenty to do in the army besides all that. There’s learning responsibility and how to be a good husband.” She stroked my brother’s shoulder. “And what’s more important than that?”

***

My brother didn’t get a military funeral. Deserter, or something. They cremated him, and my mother scattered most of his ashes into an aimless wind. “Now it’s like he’s everywhere,” she said. Dad, on the other hand, couldn’t even say my brother’s name without a snarl. “Best to forget a mess like that,” Dad said and never mentioned him again. 

After that, my mother would sit up nightly, quietly, in Dad’s armchair. Dad would be upstairs snoring the whole house into a tremble. My mother would take out a tiny jar where she kept a handful of ashes she’d sneaked home with her. Some nights, I’d find her there, slumped into sleep, one hand on her belly, one hand on the jar, as if there were some way or other she could connect the two. 

Continue Reading...

THAT GIRL by Sarah Freligh

we used to laugh at, the girl who walked the hallways head-down, cold-shouldered by lockers, who blistered her fingers twisting Kleenex into flowers for homecoming floats the cool girls would ride on, yeah, that girl

was nobody we knew until she went missing and then we remembered how in first grade she peed a puddle that spread and smelled of cheese and fish and scattered the class until the janitor showed up with a broom and a pail of red dust, remembered the Show and Tell in fifth grade when she shared the broken glass she’d found on the street and swore it was amber, remembered how some guys at our high school spray-painted her name across the stadium bleachers where they used to fuck her and how they laughed at her afterward

that girl

who will be winched-up blue and broken from a lake and live on forever as a yearbook picture on a TV screen, dust of blush, lipstick pinking her mouth, nobody we remember, that girl was nobody we knew. 

Continue Reading...

SEXY REXY’S HOMECOMING FEAST by Steve Gergley

For his fortieth birthday, Lance bought himself a red-tailed boa and named it Sexy Rexy. When he returned to his empty apartment, he masturbated to a video on Pornhub called “MASSIVELY JACKED STUD ANNIHILATES SUBMISSIVE TWINK.” Then he turned off his phone and set up Sexy Rexy’s living enclosure, feeding tank, and hide box. For dinner Lance ate an entire chocolate cake and washed it down with half a bottle of champagne. Then he smoked a pack of Marlboro Lights and threw up in the bathroom for half an hour. After a long, hot shower in which he threw up one more time and sobbed for ten straight minutes, Lance fed three mice to Sexy Rexy. The salesman at the exotic pet store had warned Lance not to feed Sexy Rexy more than two mice per week. But this was a special occasion. And besides, Lance thought to himself, rules are made to be broken. Before dropping the first pre-killed mouse into Sexy Rexy’s feeding tank, Lance held it by the tail and looked at its tiny legs dangling in the air. Then he named the mouse after a man he had known in the past.

He named the first mouse after the priest who got him drunk off sacramental wine at age eleven.

He named the second mouse after his father, who pushed his head through a window after walking in on him making out with the running back from the JV football team.

He named the third mouse after his college suitemate who od’d on xannys and vodka, the only man he had ever loved.

Continue Reading...

CONSIDER YOURSELF HOME by Aimée Keeble

You and I at the window with our bandit teeth all exposed. Mine tallow, yours anodizing with the stale gold of nicotine, crap coffee that lives petrified in a jar. I’m your artful baby and I slip into shops first and blast back my chest. Hiya! And you coyote low behind me scoping with your dull sly eyes. Side by side at a counter and you’re velvet and torn at the creases but I’m no better (no worse) and my shirt is soppy and sags, better to stuff the gaps with. We’re proud as we unwrap our sandwiches in front of the clean people behind the counter in their maroon uniforms, blameless and blood dark as cardinals. Why thank you, you pass me bread royally and your beard is tangerine with soap splatter. Have a sip of this fruity soda! And we crack aluminum and toast ourselves, tangling our wrists so we may drink from each other’s cup. 

We hip-bump all the little cafes in Piccadilly, vulnerable as soft bovine things all white in the neck. Who would suspect us! As I pass you a chocolate bar right off the counter where the cash is moved around. We steal not because we are poor, or because we are hungry, we need to, as an act of frenzied paddling above this capitalistic floatsum, this accepted inhalation of the little and wild self. How are we to traverse the choke of a system which finger-flicks each vertebra as it commands: work and earn and the toil scrubs itself anew- an ouroboros exfoliation of fat cat/have-not SLAVE TO THE RYTHM (system). 

I pop a chocolate-covered peanut into your moving lips and lean into your ear that I’ve got more sugar below my waistband. I re-cross my legs and the hidden jiggles. 

When discovered: 

Oh! But I thought you

No, no I’m so sorry, I thought you had

Our harmonizing laughter, we point at each other and yip. I eye your eye as our throats arch back. 

And then we wait to see which weaker one of us today will cough up the money. More often times you, your back half crooked in a Fagan arch turning coins on the counter counting and I against your leg with all the nonchalance of a tiger. 

Later, sated on salt and side by side in the cobbled streets, hands in our long coats. We with our swinging heads, sniffing the windows of Berwick Street, Frith Street, past the dancing girls on Great Windmill. 

You knick me a novelty pepper shaker from a sex shop, half of the set, a pig on its hind legs reachingcaught mid-coitus now humping empty air. Its hard-pink body in my fist as we prowl on to Seven Dials. I scream at you darling, wait! And move into an astrology shop, coming back to you minutes later (just minutes!) and ask you what part of your kangaroo get-up can hold a star, what folds of you can I squeeze a bit of heaven into? Just a tarot card my love, the sun one. They were loose and I was quick. 

London shakes herself and the rain sparks down. A green window, the one we love. The one our eyes pour light into. You hold the door for me and sudden sanctificationmy avenging waist, the villain of me clatters as a broken blade. The bookstore, chapel in which we lower our heads. We keep our hands to ourselves here. With reverence, we pet the fatty spines, near exhausted from so many temporary thumbs. Like the rind of something reptilian, red, green, yellowall unalloyed in their shelves. Lightly we sneak open their pages, careful of their columns. You are hunting but now you are an angel all in metal. I know you are looking for poems to read, aloud, quietly, the words will climax in my hair.

In the middle of the unboastful floor flayed bare by old sunlight I spin slowly. You, older than me by thirteen years, I wait to watch you (as you always do,) pull your own book from some obscure place into a more friendly view. Here, beside the great shuddering monster gullet of Soho, there is no trouble and I wait for you to show me. 

Continue Reading...

BIRDS AREN’T REAL by D.T. ROBBINS

My girlfriend tells me something’s off in our relationship. Says we’re missing a spark or magic or whatever she calls it. 

I go, Oh, you wanna see magic?

She goes, Yeah, idiot, I just said that. 

So, I wrap an old t-shirt around her eyes and lead her out into the field behind our apartment. It’s all a big surprise. The ice chest is full of beers and pastrami sandwiches and the chocolate cookies she baked last month. I put a slice of bread in a Ziplock bag with the cookies to keep them fresh. The cookies stay moist and soft, and the bread gets dry and ugly. Success!  

We’re walking for a while when she says her feet hurt. There’s always something to complain about, isn’t there? A little foot pain never killed anyone. Sometimes you’ve gotta pay the price. Magic ain’t free, you know. The hum of electricity gets louder, ricocheting off the clouds the closer we get. 

I tell her we’re here and take the shirt off her eyes. See? There they are, I say, pointing. Just look at those things—all perched up on the powerlines without a goddamn care in the world. Dozens of them in rows, twisting their necks and heads, fluttering their wings, cooing, cooing and cawing, cawing. 

She goes, The fuck is this? 

I go, It’s magic!

Those are just birds. 

I drop the ice chest, hear one of the cans spray open inside. Just birds? There’s no way you’re serious. If you’re being serious, you’re out of your mind. 

She stares at me, then the birds, then me. 

I put my hands on her shoulders, look at her real seriously, and drop the motherfucking truth bomb: Birds aren’t real. 

A hawk circles above us. It swoops down, grabs a rat or snake or something, flies off with it into the blue picture screen above us. 

Wait, she says. You mean, like, we’re living in a simulation—the Matrix or something?

I shake my head no, gulping one of the beers that busted open in the ice chest. Not at all, I tell her. People who think shit like that are just weird. I mean the birds aren’t real. 

She reaches in the ice chest, grabs the Ziplock bag of cookies, and walks back toward our apartment. So much for magic, I yell. 

I’m six or seven beers deep, watching the birds chill on the powerlines, watching the clouds pass, listening to the wind and the electricity intertwine and envelop me in my own little cocoon. 

One of the birds asks, What’s your problem, dude?

I sit up, swig my beer. I don’t have a problem, I say. 

Thirty or so of them all turn their heads to me like the ticking of the long hand on a clock.

The powerlines stop humming. 

They go, Oh yeah? Then why’d you tell her we’re not real? All their beaks move, one voice, stereo, super cool. What’s your angle, friend? We’re as real as you. 

Horse shit! I’m flesh and blood. My heart beats like a steady drum. There’s poison in my veins. When I sleep, I dream, I nightmare. You, you’re a fraud. And you know it. You’re an illusion of the mind. And you can’t convince me otherwise. 

The birds levitate from the wires, fly in a furious circle. Their feathers fling from their bodies, become liquid, like hot magma, forming an ooey-gooey black blanket, snuffing out the sun. They cover me, a big bubble of darkness and energy. It sort of reminds me of that Pauly Shore movie, Bio-Dome, but better. A hologram of my girlfriend rises beneath me. She looks super pissed. Very realistic. Her hips start shaking and her eyes roll into the back of her head, shine bright neon pink. I’m into it. 

Dance with me, she says. 

I throw my hands in the air, I don’t even care. My legs move this way and that, shaking my shit like I know what to do with it. 

She smiles wide, wide, wider. Birds with wings of fire fly out from behind her teeth, straight at me like bullets. I duck and cover. The echo of their screeching—radio static. I look up at my hologram girlfriend. She flaps her arms, flies away. 

I stand there, not knowing who I like better: my hologram girlfriend or my real girlfriend. My feet are warm. I look down, I’m standing on a powerline. It sizzles like a plate of fajitas. My tennis shoes are melting. The skin around my toes goes drip, drip, drip. I watch it fall into the abyss below. A tornado of birds surrounds me, screaming: It’s not real. You’re not real. They’re not real. It’s so not, not! We’re not real. What is real? Are you really surely real? Who, then? For reals? 

One of the birds comes and sits on my shoulder. It’s heavy. Like, weighs-as-much-as-I-weigh kind of heavy. I can’t hold my balance, slip, and fall into the abyss. I land on a giant slice of white bread, sink inside. A giant hand reaches for me, grabs a giant cookie, retracts. I’m in the Ziplock bag. Light expands and I see my real girlfriend sitting at our white IKEA kitchen table, crying, with chocolate smeared at the corners of her mouth. I never noticed how messy of an eater she is. I shout her name. She doesn’t hear me. My insides shrivel, dry out. My tongue turns to crust. I am dry, dead bread. Her hand reaches in, grabs me. Our kitchen walls scroll by like a movie in fast-forward, then I’m falling down, down, down. I reach the bottom of the trashcan. The lid closes and it’s back to black. 

I can’t open my eyes because one of the birds crapped on my face. It smells like a nursing home or a bar right after closing. I wipe it away with the shirt my girlfriend left before she went back to the apartment. The ice chest is upside down, ice spilled over and melted. Empty beer cans everywhere, suds on the lips. Sandwiches gone. The powerlines hum quietly. Stars shine down on the wet grass. And those fucking birds? They’re still there. I pick up my things, head home. 

There’s a note on the counter. It says, I can’t do this anymore. I’m sorry. There’s leftovers in the fridge. Take care of yourself. 

I crumple the note, throw it in the trash, next to the rotten piece of bread. And there I am.

Continue Reading...

WE THOUGHT YOU MIGHT LIKE TO KNOW by Jamy Bond

That your mother is dying alone in a room at St. Francis. The stale sighs of a ventilator echo through the hallways, pumping one last moment of life into her over and over and over. There’s a sad sliver of hope in the sound of it, and in the silence that follows.  

She forgives the insolence, the years you spent overseas and never called, the sporadic letters full of vacancy, even your cold indifference to her cancer diagnosis. She has mostly forgotten your teenage shenanigans: the time you snuck bourbon into your lunch box and drank it at school, nights you slipped from your window to smoke joints in the woods with your fast friends, the sign you nailed to her door that said 10 Bucks a Blowjob Here. 

She understands your abortion at 19. And again at 22. 

Do you forgive the way she pushed you into that closet and locked the door, left you whimpering in the darkness, touched you in a place that makes you shiver still? Have you mostly forgotten her unhinged delight at your discomfort: describing what your father liked to do to her in bed, seducing your boyfriends, raging that you weren’t good enough for them?  

Do you understand why she intercepted the letters your father wrote to you after he’d left, and burned the t-shirts you slept in because they smelled of him?

She wants to see you.  She wants you to take her vein-roped hand in your own, stare down at her cratered face, the fading blue of her eyes, and listen as air snakes its way into the hollow blackness of her mouth.  

You are not supposed to feel this way; to long for the rattle of death. A leaf unfurling in your open palm, the rise of a spring sun and the green earth blooming beneath it.   

Continue Reading...