X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine | Fiction

HORSESHOES by Mary Alice Stewart

September 8, 2020 · Fiction

She says it big and like a threat and smiling, horseshoe in hand, “I don’t like losing,” and she swings, lets go, and hits the stake head on. A ringer—iron rings against iron and I hold my drink up and shout for her. The game is alive again. Kayla plays inconsistent. It’s sometimes hard to watch, some bad throws, can’t even get one close, then she gets pissed off and you can see in her face that she’s decided it’s over for her and she’s just going through the motions. It’s awful playing her when she gets all fixed like that. But other times, she’s full of fight, and makes these huge comebacks, and turns nights into something full of suspense. Tonight, she’s playing against Friend and is wearing his Sublime t-shirt, which hangs past her shorts so it looks like she’s wearing nothing else. She’s behind a little but she’s got that sharp look in her eye and it suits her. Her nose and cheeks are pink from the sun and her freckles are at their deepest across her knees. Her hair is wispy from sweat, and her curls flicker red when she moves. Friend and her are together again, the same way me and Lee are together again. Our rhythm of returning, constantly returning, like a tennis ball against a wall and back again.

Next, Friend gets his first one pretty close and as he sets up for his second, right before the horseshoe leaves his hand, Kayla lifts up her shirt and flashes him. Her tits stun. One of her nipples is pierced. I was there and held her hand when it happened. It bled, stained the shirt she wore that day. I look at Lee and see where his eyes are at and of course they are on her and he catches me in the corner of his eye watching him stare so he looks up at the sky and studies it as though he is innocently and curiously bird watching. I think about how he looks at me topless—plainly, like familiar architecture. Friend misses bad and curses, spits into the dirt, but not seriously. “You play dirty,” he says, and she shrugs, her eyes ablaze. She grabs the horseshoes from the grass and moves herself into position. Her face turns serious, dark even. Her light brows scrunch up, and she sucks air in and brings her lips together like she’s about to jump deep underwater. The shoe turns in the air and hits the stake straight—dead on. Nobody talks because she would have our ass about it. She picks up her second shoe, no ounce of celebration in her body. I am breathless despite it being common, days like this. Something about seeing her get close to winning gets me tense and emotional. And I always feel proud to know that I knew it was in her this whole time. Kayla brings the horseshoe up to her chest, large against her small frame, pulls her arm back, and lets go. It turns in the air; and though this one looks like it was thrown with a little too much arm, looks like it’s about to fly right over the stake, the shoe turns again just so and it hits, and spins all the way down. Kayla throws her fists up and punches the air and we all cheer. She comes over to me, and I get up off the cooler, and she pulls herself out a tall Twisted Tea, cracks it and gulps. “I like that feeling of coming back. I wish you could feel some of that every day,” she says and Friend comes up behind her and spanks her. Kayla has always lived in the trailer beside mine. Our windows look into each other’s. Sometimes when I turn my head to the side when Lee is fucking me, I can see Friend fucking Kayla. Sometimes on accident we make eye contact and it makes us laugh.

A winter came once when the snow fell hard at an angle for days and days and we were too young to be wary of our roofs being warped under too much weight. Kayla was sick from withdrawals. A peace came after weeks of it, and we were tear stung, and she said, “We need each other,” and I knew that was true, and always had been. Before we met each other even, something further back. I said back to her, “Thank God."Kayla and I are outside sprawled out on the couch facing the woods. We watch Friend and Lee walk off, thick clouds trailing behind them from their vapes, so much it makes a new weather. They are taking their guns to go shoot at cans. Kayla is rolling her face with a glittering rock. “It’s a rose quartz roller. It makes your under-eye circles go away and rose quartz corresponds to your heart chakra…” she trails off, leaving me to assume I knew what that meant. She shoplifted it yesterday and didn’t have to. She is searching for new ways to feel good again. She brings my head into her lap and rolls my face all over. Muscles in my jaw—I had never noticed before—were tight as a drum, and the rock over my cheek felt like the first careful steps onto a recently frozen over lake. Kayla is on again about the duplexes they are putting in across town. How nice they seem, how big and new. How they are set back from the road so you wouldn’t hear cars pass. Her hope is to move in one with me right there on the other side of the wall. I like when Kayla talks like this, accelerated and dreaming. And I like the idea of life, right beside her. But on my side of the wall?—I am not sure Lee loves me or has ever loved me or will someday love me. I can’t count on it. I’m surprised I don’t care. I imagine a large, blue rug, thick and plush, that I can lay on like a cat. I imagine Kayla coming over for dinner. There are things I can see perfectly.

The soft wind tangles our hair together. Here—the smell of the air is two different things, coming at each other from different sides when the breeze lifts lightly across the yard. From one side, it is ocean, from the other, it is the smell of cow shit coming from Thibodeau’s. The way it can hit you can feel strange—no cows in sight, no waves, no immediate sounds to match the smell of things—and it can make this place feel like a mirage, a place that can ripple and disappear like one of those holographic school folders that change animals depending on how you hold it.

Once, Kayla and I decided we wanted to die together and we set a date. We walked to the edge of a cliff and we leaned over. We decided against it. We decided on going somewhere else.

x-r-a-y magazine

THE MILK BOTTLE LEGS OF THE HIGH WIRE WOMAN by Frankie McMillan

September 7, 2020 · Fiction

When I look at her legs I see upturned milk bottles, and I’m talking here of the glass bottles that milk used to come in and I love the shape of those legs, I could stay out all night on the frosty grass looking up at the wire and Miss Tatyana walking the wire in silence, only the guy ropes creaking and the twang of the metal pulley, and you know, those legs get my score, those legs belonging to Miss Tatyana all the way from Russia where they didn’t have glass milk bottles, only Mr Stalin, his mouth a hard line, his eyebrows a nest of ideologies that to tell you the truth wouldn’t suit a man like myself, a man who needs the freedom to pour his love into a vessel of his own choosing.

They say anything you love, anything of value is bound to make a break for freedom.

Some nights I’m afraid I will lose Miss Tatyana. She’ll move on from the wire. Trapeze, maybe. Or maybe it’ll be the persuasion of a baby. In my dreams I throw her over my shoulder, gallop away with her on a horse. We get married in Porto, at night she wraps her milk bottle legs around my throat. When I wake she’s gone. My breath curdles into silence.

I wait for Miss Tatyana by her caravan. Under a cool mackerel sky, only the fin of a moon peeking out. She moves between the tents and down the alleyway. I catch a glimpse of her legs as she walks past. And here’s the thing. She knows I’m there waiting for her and she knows that I know she knows this and that’s why I remain hidden in the grass. And she sits, smoking on the steps and I’m lying spreadeagled on my back, useless like something poured out. Smoke drifts over me, I close my eyes and I swallow and I swallow.

x-r-a-y magazine

AFTER SHRINKING by Hannah Cajandig-Taylor

September 6, 2020 · Fiction

We lived in a pale blue dollhouse with three stories & a basement. Obsessed over hot air balloons & weather blimps. Collected snowglobes & birdcages & convinced our giant neighbors to order countless pizzas by jumping on the remote buttons until a commercial with extra-large pepperoni flashed across their TV screen. Until we snuck enough triangular pizza box tables to furnish the place. Grew make-believe green beans & perennials on the roof. Protected our cardboard porch with Venus flytraps. A drawbridge. Toothpick mailbox. The works. Repainted our plastic appliances with glittering silver nail polish. Sharpie’d our heights on the wall, our grip clenched tight as we struggled to lift the permanent marker, shoes digging into the ground. Took three of us just to carry the marker back to the attic. Summer came. We were placed in the untamed backyard. When the crows moved in, our sky tarred & feathered, all we could think was to close our lopsided windows & send hope to our neighbors with chocolate coins in gold foil & tooth fairy kisses & after the birds abandoned our balcony view, the blue became a smiling child in a turquoise t-shirt, cutting little blankets from a washcloth to leave beside our front door.

x-r-a-y magazine

EXCERPTS FROM THE NOVEL VENICE by T.J. Larkey

September 4, 2020 · Fiction

Tough

I’m lying on my floor, next to my bed.

My bed is this big padded mat that rolls up and can be moved very easily.

It’s comfortable, but I like the floor better.

I believe that lying on the floor for a few hours a day will toughen me up.

I was a spoiled kid, very soft, so I’m always looking for things to toughen me up.

That’s how I got here.

I got it in my head that moving to a big city I’d seen in movies and television, where I didn’t know anybody, would somehow make me a tougher and overall better human. I was coasting around, not sure about anything other than wanting to live somewhere like that, when I lucked out and found the apartment online. It was cheap for being so close to the ocean and, even though I don't care about things such as close proximity to bodies of water or the correlating price of living in such places, I put down a deposit without even looking inside first.

I was on my way to becoming a tough guy.

It felt so badass.

For about a minute.

Then it transformed into panic.

A panic that remained all the way up until moving day.

I walked in to my new place with a laptop in one hand, a trash bag full of clothes in the other, and my bed/mat rolled up and tucked under my arm, hoping for the best. Hoping for a little more luck. Hoping for a place that would help me become… (something).

First, I looked at the kitchen/living room.

It had a microwave, a mini fridge, a sink, and a small couch that took up about thirty percent of the room. It was beautiful. I realized very quickly there was no bathroom (which I couldn’t remember being mentioned online) and that was beautiful too. I felt stupid for panicking. I thought to myself, this is the essentials, this is beautiful.

Then I looked at the bedroom. It had old brick walls, little bits of it breaking off on to the creaking wood floors, and in the corner of the room the ceiling slanted down because it was right under the stairs. I could hear people’s footsteps all day and night.

Then I noticed something very unusual.

The floor was wrong. It was crooked. If you put a pencil down it would roll to the other side of the room and disappear into the cracks between the brick wall. If I put myself down on the floor, however, no such luck.

At first, I thought the building was poorly constructed on uneven ground-- the first floor is street-level on one side of the building but not the other side. But later one of my neighbors told me that because of the age of the building, and the number of earthquakes it had endured, parts of the foundation had shifted over the years.

A building that could collapse at any moment.

My new home.

I threw my bed/mat onto the crooked floor and laid down next to it, like I’m lying down now, and thought, am I tough yet?

Mouse

I’m in my kitchen.

It’s very dark.

The rest of the city is asleep and all I can hear is my own footsteps.

It’s usually my favorite.

The best time to be alive.

But tonight it reminds me of when I was kid.

I was afraid of the dark.

I remember looking into the darkest part of my room, restless and almost paralyzed, and picturing the worst things possible. I remember knowing that it was all in my head and nothing was happening other than my inability to stop imagining my own demise, but still I’d look in to those dark crevices and think, okay, just, kill me quickly please.

Then remembering that reminds me I’m still afraid of the dark.

I open the mini fridge.

What seems like blinding light pours into the room and I see something small move quickly away from it. Then I hear little scratching noises. It’s coming from behind the fridge and then it’s coming from behind the sink.

I make myself completely still. I tell myself it’s in my head. But the sound gets louder and I move closer, silently, tip-toeing, so quiet that I start to scare myself, always scared, so scared that whatever is making the sound will pop out and systematically list all of my worst moments in chronological order, starting from age five, then murder me.

I open the cabinets below my sink and find the source.

A little family of mice looking up at me, terrified.

“Hello,” I say.

“Don’t be afraid,” I say.

“Let’s be friends,” I say.

Then I reach over in to the fridge.

There’s beer, eggs, a plastic bottle of vodka, and processed cheese I get from the convenience store across the street. I pinch off a piece of the cheese and set it down in front of the mice family, then I eat the rest of it in front of them so they know it can be trusted.

“My cheese is your cheese,” I tell them. “Go on.”

But they seem skeptical.

I leave it and walk back to bed.

I open my laptop, put in a DVD, and hit play.

As the intro credits start, I’m distracted by another creature darting away from the light coming from the screen.

I look over and see the little guy hiding in the corner of the room, between the cracks of the brick wall and partially hidden by my bed.

“Hello,” I say, “You with them?”

I point to the sink.

The mouse looks at me for a moment, then runs away, up the crooked floor and back to the rest of his family.

“Nice to meet you,” I say, and lie back down.

I watch the movie without any further interruptions.

I close my laptop.

I pull my blanket up to my nose.

I shut my eyes.

I whisper good night to my new roommates.

Then after imagining myself dying horrifically in an earthquake for an indeterminable amount of time, I force myself to fall asleep.

***

In the morning I wake up to something tickling my leg.

It’s terrifying.

But it’s nice to have things going on.

Distractions.

I lift the blanket over my head and see my new roommate burrowed under my knee. The same little guy that was near my bed the night before. He looks identical to the rest of his family, but I can tell it’s him. Something about his movements.

“Hello,” I say. “Good morning.”

I want him to tell me everything is going to be okay.

Everything is fine, now that he’s here.

But he doesn’t respond.

Just runs out from under the blanket and back into the kitchen and behind the fridge.

Still friendless.

I sit up.

I get this cold sensation through my body and my left hand is asleep.

Then as I roll of the bed I feel something small like crumbs underneath me and it’s terrifying.

Always terrified.

I yank the blankets completely off, wiggling like a little child, and see a dozen hard little brown pellets, about the size of a mouse’s asshole.

It’s right there.

Wasn’t there last night.

But now it’s there.

A declaration.

A black flag.

War.

I get up and check behind the sink cabinets but all I see are pipes, more mouse shit, and the cheese I left last night, untouched.

It’s too much.

Shit on my bed all you want, but refusing my hospitality is a capital offense.

As I get dressed angrily, punching my arms through the holes of my shirt and kicking wildly into my jeans, I decide that’s the rule, my one and only rule. I repeat it over and over in my head like a mantra, then walk out the door and into the convenience store across the street.

“Mouse traps?” I say. “They broke the one rule.”

The clerk points me in the right direction.

I march down the aisle until I find what I’m looking for.

They have the non-lethal, sticky trap device, but I don’t see the good stuff.

Give me the big bad lethal stuff baby.

I see the tag—Tomcat Metal Mousetrap—and the space where it should be.

But no mousetraps.

“Where’s the good stuff!?”

“Huh?” the clerk says.

“The Tomcat?”

“Oh. We’re out. But the Glue Traps work just as good.”

“Hah!” I say. “If you knew the kind of mice I was dealing with, you would be singing a very different tune my friend!”

“Kay.”

I buy the glue traps and head home.

I stick one behind the fridge, and one under the sink and wait, checking every half-hour while sipping beer and watching old Humphrey Bogart movies (a 4-in-1 DVD collection, to toughen myself up) that I’d bought a few days before.

But nothing happens.

***

A few days go by before I see him again.

He’s back in the corner where I had first found him.

“You!” I snarl. “Where’s the rest of them?”

He crawls up on my bed, staring.

There hadn’t been any more shit in the sink cabinet and the traps remained empty.

He seems lonely.

I look into his sinister little eyes, his little whiskers twitching, and I can’t help it.

“You may stay,” I declare. “But if you poop my bed again, I’ll buy the good stuff. Tomcat. Metal. Very Lethal.”

Get your copy here.

Art by Zoe Blair Schlagenhauf @tndrnss_vrywh

x-r-a-y magazine

WELCOME TO THE RECKONING by Omar Hussain

September 3, 2020 · Fiction

Your family’s old brown and blue station wagon pulls up to the house. It’s not your house. It’s never yours. At three-years-old, you’ve already lived in four dodgy houses, a mobile home, month-to-month condos and rent-controlled apartments. This is your grandfather’s house. He tells you and your parents that you’re welcome to stay for as long as you’d like, but you’ve heard that one before.

The wagon comes to a stop. The gears slam into park. Your dad is screaming about something—the latest rage attack. He gets out of the car, paces around the hood. To the passenger side door. Your way too pregnant mom is half-way out the car when your dad—still barking and hissing with venom in a way that makes his black mustache transform into the devil’s handlebars—grabs the door and slams it on her. She falls in the space between the car and the curb, sobbing out of fright, but mainly out of shame because you saw it.

Welcome to keeping a secret.

It’s five years later now and you’re all grown up because you are eight years old. It’s Friday night, which means your mom took you and your little brother to Blockbuster after school. You rented Beethoven—the dumb movie about a slobbering Saint Bernard. Your dad doesn’t get home until after ten because he works the late shift and you’re the only one who is a night owl like him so you stay up and start the movie together. He’s cold and short because he probably had a shitty day. At some point, the bad guys steal Beethoven and you begin to tear up. Start to sob. Your dad mocks you for it and in a split-second of dumbass kid compulsion, you turn and swat at his leg.

That was the mistake. That simple.

He lurches at you—grabs the hair on the back of your head, pulling and pushing you until he’s taken the reins. He shoves you to the ground, your palms and kneecaps your supports. His hand slaps your face west, then east, but you just count. One. Two. Three strikes. You count because it stunts the fear. It displaces the pain. Five. Six. A closed fist this time. He sends you to your room. Pulls the mattress off the bed and tells you to lay on the bed boards. You do as you’re told. Your body radiates from its wounds. You think it’s over.

But it’s not.

Twenty minutes later, he’s back. Seven. Eight. He drags you by the arm, burning carpet against your back, into the living room hazed with cigarette smoke. He tells you you’re a lowlife. That you have no respect. He repeats these statements several times and you start to believe them. You melt. He hits you so hard with an open palm between the shoulder blades that you hear it before you feel it. You don’t stop counting until the sun comes up and he falls asleep.

Welcome to waiting for your turn.

Twenty years have passed. He’s long dead. Cancer the ever-avenging disease. Sometimes if you slick your black hair back, let your stubble become more of a beard, you can see him.

You move the cursor on Google street-level view further down your block. You stop at a navy house with white trim. Freshly built porch. In the image, there is a red pickup truck in the driveway. You’ve done this with every house leading to this one—because you’re looking for something.

Kali Linux, the hacker’s utility belt, fires up on your computer, its twisting dragon icon filling the screen. You’ve found an exploit within that house. A way in through the beautiful world of internet insecurity. The world that lets you peek into any window or room you want. You remotely access the father’s PC and activate the microphone on his computer to listen in. This digital stakeout lasts days. And then, on a Friday, you hear it. The unmistakable sounds of a child screaming. A man stomping around wooden floors, a belt crackling with glee. A woman pleads until a loud thud against a wall or fireplace silences her. The child never stops screaming.

Welcome to the reckoning.

It’s two, maybe three in the morning. The night, your friend. The darkness, your armor. You circle the side of the house. The sliding glass door to the back is left open. The ski mask gets pulled down, the condensation against your mouth instant. Everyone is asleep or faking it. The lights are off but for one room alive with blue and white hues—ghosts from the television dancing on the walls.

You find him passed out in his recliner. Rotund, balding piece of shit. Crushed beer can by his feet. Wife beater, blue boxer shorts, socks still on. Your hand grips the brass knuckles so tight it squeaks. He wakes up with a pathetic expression of shock. His eyes beg, motion for mercy.

Motion denied.

You strike him in the forehead—his skull bouncing off the recliner like a basketball. You dribble it some more. A left hook across the cheekbone. A straight right to the nose. He grunts and rolls off the chair, crawling into the kitchen, dripping blood along the way. One soccer punt to his ribs and he collapses. You grab his throat. Lift his head.

“Do you understand why this happened?” you hiss.

He doesn’t respond. You grab a framed family photo off the breakfast nook and wave it in front of him.

“This is why.”

He chokes and pinches his eyes shut. Turns his head away.

“Nod if you understand. Nod if you understand what will happen if you do it again.”

Tears crawl out of his eyes. He nods. You watch droplets of his blood fall from his face, listen as they pitter-patter against the wooden floor. A surge of energy ignites a growing inferno within your chest—your lungs and heart the kindle.

You leave him there.

You head back home.

Drink some coffee.

Get back on the computer.

Move the cursor to the next house on the block.

x-r-a-y magazine

THE LIFE CYCLE OF TEMPORAL BIOMATTER ATTACHMENTS by Jemimah Wei

September 1, 2020 · Fiction

This is completely unsexual, but ever since the ex left, Jennie has gotten into the habit of sticking her hand down her pajama pants and cupping herself to sleep. It started in week five or six of the lockdown. One day, she woke up and her hands were in her pants. Both hands, under her pants, resting on top of her underwear. This happened occasionally, even before the ex moved out. Usually around the middle of the month, when she could feel her body beginning to slush. Whenever it happened, Jennie would periodically stick her finger into the folds of her vagina, to check if her period had come early. This time, too, she brought her hand to her nose and sniffed, expecting the scraping smell of pre-blood. But, nothing. If anything, her fingers smelled a bit like Cheetos.

The next day, she woke up in the same position. And the day after that. After four successive days of waking like this, she started sliding one hand into her underwear before falling asleep, letting it rest there all night. Jennie did wonder if her body was trying to tell her something, and once or twice, pushed her fingers further in, to see if her body would respond. It didn’t. Jennie’s sex drive had evaporated in the last year, and the ex leaving hadn’t changed anything. After awhile, she stopped thinking about it, and it has since become a nightly routine for her to cup her vagina to sleep with her right hand, like a baby with a blanket.

It feels like a betrayal, then, when she wakes one day to find it sore. There is a mild but insistent throbbing, and when Jennie runs her fingers over the surface of her skin, she finds a slightly inflamed bump on the inner folds of her labia. Jennie prods it tenderly, then gets out of bed and tries to get a look at it by sitting pantless with her legs wide open, in front of her mirror. But the bump is too far back and she goes cross-eyed trying to twist herself into a proper viewing position. She uses her phone’s front camera to take a picture, so she can see what she’s dealing with, but even with the flash on, the picture comes out a blur of skin and hair.

Jennie goes online and orders a handheld mirror for two dollars, then wonders if this is the ex’s doing, if he’s left her some kind of venereal disease as a parting gift. She wants to ask, but he hasn’t called in days, and won’t pick up when she does. The last they’d spoken was the last time he’d called, a week prior. The ex rang often, to work through the break up. He was almost done processing it. “The important thing is not to focus on the six years we had together,” he had said, “but to be thankful it didn’t turn into sixty.” Jennie thinks about this as she turns on her computer and fiddles with the settings on her Netflix account. Half an hour later, the phone rings.

“Did you put an age lock on my profile?”

“What? Let me see,” She taps at her computer keys randomly, the phone pressed to her face, his breathing in her ear. “Oh, sorry. Must have been an accident.”

She can almost hear him rolling his eyes. “Jen,” he says. He hangs up.

The mirror arrives three days later. Jennie can’t stop touching the bump, even though it hurts. She’s completely given up on wearing pants at home, and there is very little stopping her from fingering it, when she’s working, watching TV, or stalking the ex. It’s gotten a little swollen and the pain hasn’t let up.

Jennie sits cross legged on her bed and angles the mirror under her bum. It's the first time she’s seen her lower landscape in such clear detail: the darkened inner thighs, the hairs on her butt, the wrinkled frown of her vagina. And the bump. She takes it between her thumb and forefinger, and squeezes lightly, wincing despite having expected the pain. A sharp white blot strains against the surface of her skin, and she increases the pressure, watching her skin stretch and threaten to split. Ah, a pimple. Jennie burns in shame as she puts the mirror away. She cannot help but feel like this is a personal failing, of sorts.

The phone rings again. She knows what it’s about even before she picks up.

“Is there something wrong with your Netflix?”

“No, why?”

“Now I’m logged out. Can’t seem to sign in. Can you check?”

“Alright, hold on.” Jennie puts him on loudspeaker and googles “vagina bumps.” It’s apparently super common. She makes it through two pages of search results before the line cuts.

The best thing to do would be to leave the spot alone. All the websites—be they dermatologist sites, online magazines, or beauty blogs—concur that no matter what, one mustn't pop it. If it really bothers you, Women’s Health Online says, you can visit a trusted dermatologist and have it safely lanced. Teenage Magazine is more assertive. Under NO circumstances should you deal with it on your own. You will make it WORSE. Jennie reads this with one hand on the bump, rolling the little spot of pain between her fingers, squeezing occasionally but never pressing down firmly.

The next time he calls, she starts talking first. “Sorry babe,” she says, trying to sound as perplexed as possible, “it looks fine on my end.”

“I still can’t get in. Jesus. Jen. If this is some passive aggressive bullshit you’re pulling—”

It is, of course. “It’s not.”

“It’s not like I can’t pay for my own. You know that. It’s just that the algorithm is already stored in that account. Six years of preferences. I’d have to start all over again.”

“I know.”

He exhales violently against the mouthpiece. “Okay, can you please just look into it, please.”

Jennie sends him a text after, saying that she’s reset the password, can he try it again and let her know? He never replies to her texts, something to do with drawing boundaries. He doesn’t reply now either. But she can see that he’s posted a new status on Facebook. Takes a special kind of crazy to withhold netflix from a person during a GLOBAL QUARANTINE. There’s a comment under that, from a new Facebook friend Jennie doesn’t recognize, a Chelsea. Ugh, the new Chelsea says, what a MONSTER. She looks at the comment for a long time, hovers over the like button but doesn’t click.

In her email inbox, there is a reply from a dermatologist she’s written to. Look, the dermatologist says, you can come in after the lockdown lifts, if you want. But I’ll be honest with you. If you leave it alone, it’s likely to go away on its own. She looks for a second opinion, but they’re all the same. A skincare blogger attempts to analogize: Haven’t you had a pimple before? Think of the pimple as your skin trying to heal. You might feel like you’re getting the gunk out, but what you’re really doing is interfering with the healing process!

The phone is ringing again. She counts the rings—one, two. The most she’s let it get to is eight. She watches his name vibrate aggressively before her, then flips her gaze down to the bump. She’s given up on wearing underwear too. She applies a little bit of pressure, watches the white tip reappear. What would it be like, she thinks, to be the sort of person who could press down? Three, four. She squeezes and watches the skin redden, then blanch, the white becoming ever more insistent. Five, six. The pain makes her gasp, she’s never come this close to breaking before. There are tears in her eyes. Seven. Come on, she thinks. Come on. Eight.

x-r-a-y magazine

NICE AND NORMAL by Diane D. Gillette

August 31, 2020 · Fiction

Janice stopped at the back door when she heard footsteps behind her. She turned to see her husband in the kitchen doorway.

"Where are you sneaking off to?" Rob asked, one corner of his mouth upturned.

"Just getting a little fresh air.”

"Nope," he protested. "This is your family. If I have to stay for Sober Thanksgiving, so do you."

Janice sighed. “I wish everyone would stop calling it that. Like this is all a big joke.”

Rob slid onto a stool and plucked a leftover dinner roll from the plate that sat between the platter with the remains of the turkey carcass and the bowl that held her aunt’s not-so-famous sweet potatoes, only two polite scoops missing from it.

“You’re right. I’m sorry,” Rob popped a hunk of the roll into his mouth.

“You don’t believe it’s real,” she said.

Rob chewed the roll for a moment before reaching out his hand. When she slid her gloved hand into his, he pulled her close. “I believe she’s really trying,” he said.

Janice pulled back and looked him in the eye. “Didn’t you see her at dinner? How happy she looked? I thought she’d just float away; she looked so unburdened.”

Rob smoothed back the frizzies that had sprung loose from the twist Janice wore her hair in. “Your mother has never seemed all that burdened to me.”

Janice bit her bottom lip and looked out the kitchen window. The snow was coming down harder. "I saw a light in the treehouse," she said. "I think Doug’s hiding out there."

Rob frowned. “I thought he just left without saying goodbye again. He barely said two words at dinner.”

“Probably for the best,” Janice sighed.

"Go on. I'll save you the last piece of the apple cherry pie.”

Janice kissed her husband’s cheek and squeezed his hand once more.

Outside she turned her face upward to feel the snowflakes gather on her cheeks and eyelids. The chill soothed her. She made tracks to the big old oak that held the treehouse Steve had built for them the summer before he married their mother. Throughout their childhood, it had been a pirate ship, a castle, and a clubhouse. They’d read comic books up there and hid their most treasured possessions within its four walls.

Peeling off her gloves to get a better grip on the boards, Janice climbed up and poked her head through the opening in the treehouse floor. A light shone in her eyes.

"Jesus, Doug, are you trying to blind me?"

"Jan Jan," Doug said. "Didn't know who was invading my castle. Come to join the party?"

Janice pulled herself up through the opening and crawled on her hands and knees until she could sit leaning against the wall next to her big brother. "Are you drinking up here?"

“I never technically agreed to Sober Thanksgiving."

"I thought you'd be glad that Mom quit drinking."

Doug pulled a flask out of his coat pocket and took a swig. "I'm thrilled. But when I moved out, I swore I was done letting her ruin things."

He offered her the flask. Janice took it but didn't drink. "Com' on. I thought we agreed that it would be easier if no one drank on the holidays this year."

"Why should we make things easier for her?" He eyed the flask.

"She did give us life."

"And then proceeded to spend the next few decades trying to ruin it? Is the irony of this Thanksgiving so totally lost on you?"

"I was kind of looking forward to a nice, normal holiday for once," she admitted.

"Nice and normal. That's all you ever wanted."

"Is that so wrong?"

"It doesn't exist. Like Santa Claus. Or sobriety. You and Rob though, that's normal. That's nice."

"You could have that too. What happened with Lucy? She was sweet and smart. I liked her."

"None of your business.” Doug reached over and removed the flask from Janice's hand. “She was too pushy. Kind of like you actually. Couldn't date my sister."

"She was worried about you, you mean?" Janice watched him take another swig from the flask.

"She worried about everything."

"Did she ever worry about how much you drink?"

"Fuck you, sis."

Janice sighed. She looped her arm through his and rested her head on his shoulder. She thought of the times they’d sat just like that when they were kids, when Steve would send them out of the house for a while on their mother’s worst days.

"Just, why now?" Doug said after a quiet moment. "Why now, right before the holidays? After all this time? After all the Thanksgivings her drinking ruined, she's now ruining them by not drinking. Brilliant of her, really."

After a moment, Janice said, "Maybe she just looked around and saw how alone she was."

"Steve will never come back. He only stayed as long as he did for us."

Janice shook her head. "When you love someone, you have a lot of second chances in you."

“You believe she’s for real this time?” Doug asked.

She turned her head so she could see the snow falling. “If I don’t, who will?”.

The snow was accumulating, and the treehouse was getting colder. The moon shone down on the snow-covered yard, and she was just about to remark how pretty it was when the soft, secretive light of a candle began to glow in her mother’s room. She turned to see if Doug had noticed, but he’d closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the wall. She knew she should try to get him inside. Make him eat something. Make him some coffee. For the moment though, she sat next to him, and tried to put herself in his place, feel his pain, his compulsion to drown it, and asked herself what it would take.

x-r-a-y magazine

A WEB, A TREE by Eileen Tomarchio

August 30, 2020 · Fiction

Up close, they were groves, nebulae, Medusa’s head of snakes. Two ragged thatches, one on each of my mother’s outer thighs, a Rorschach pair. Seen in full only when I lifted her covers as she snored and lay beside her. By day, she had her ways of hiding them, fooling the eye. Let-out hems lengthened with ribbon, ricrac, lace. Concealer sticks and opaque hose in rainbows of flesh tones. Napkins over-draped on her lap at barbeques. Napkins that slid off after too many daiquiris like a magician’s reveal, my mother’s cue to rise by an invisible thread and tango with the breezes before my father dragged us home. As long as she slept, I could touch her at will. The thatches felt nubby, like the silk pillows she monogrammed for horse-farm wives. No name I could connect by penciled line to the hairless figures on my worksheets. Remnants, I guessed, from when humans still needed their appendix to digest apple seeds, their coccyx to keep from always falling to earth. They made me think of strange women in my dreams—ancient grandmothers, aunts and great-aunts who terrorized with hugs. They made me think of curses and bruises. I crayoned marks on my dolls’ legs and my own, certain I could draw out whatever buried shame my mother carried around and make it mine.

By my teens, they were everywhere. The backs of knees at checkouts, the flanks of ladies in visors at craft fairs. The noses and arches of my mother’s boyfriends who kept me company while she sewed sober enough at night to grow my college fund. Those days, she wore cut-offs and got tans and pined for old modesties. We’d knit legs on the couch and she’d trace them, my veinlets—scattered and ready to forest. In truth, I wanted a tally. I wanted to ask When? Since I couldn’t, I knocked her hand away, told her to keep it the fuck to herself. After the fourth in a six-pack, she was spouting, slurring: Never wait tables. Never cross your legs. Don’t sleep with your mouth open or they’ll crawl inside. Sometimes I volunteered to deliver Mom’s sewing jobs to the horse farm wives. Those women who never wore Sheer Elegance or knee-length anything or invited me inside as they wrote their checks against the posts of their porticos. At night, I dreamt of spiders spinning, seeding babies under my skin.

Years later, still single, I got tired of my concessions. The swim-skirts and sarongs packed for company retreats to beachfronts. A closet of midis, maxis, peasant frumpery from Dress Barn trying to pass as Free People. The procedure was out-of-pocket, a shallow priority of my pale-skinned cause. It was painless, surprisingly. Little needle pricks at splinter-depth. I imagined it as more a severing than a rooting out, soundless and slow-motioned as a felling before ground is struck. What I was left with seemed less like vanity than… what? Shamelessness? Whether one or the other, I didn’t know what to do with it, not at all. Will they come back? I asked the doctor. He said it’s always possible, that blood is stubborn. Sometimes in dreams, I’m with my mother in her last days when she couldn’t walk anymore, lifting her housedress to massage the pliant bark of her thighs, feeling a waft of cobwebs, the stone of her thatches’ gaze, my phantom daughter in the room somewhere, hating me.

Crow Jonah Norlander

THE MOON IS SAD by Kyra Baldwin

August 28, 2020 · Fiction

It’s raining in Seattle. I catch sight of my face in the drop-spattered glass of the bus stop. It’s lit by a phone-screen. The moon is out. It’s lit by a phone-screen. No one is texting either one of us.

See, the sun fucked the moon and the moon is sad now. The moon is already a depressive character because the moon is Vitamin-D deficient. The moon wanted to get a SAD lamp to remedy this, but the impassive physical laws of our universe said nuh-uh moon, because a SAD lamp in the sky would just look like another moon.

“There can’t be two moons,” they said.

“Why not? I’m loooonelyyyy,” replied the moon with comical sadness.

“Because we’ve already set the gravitational pull of Earth to just One Moon.”

“Mars has two moons.”

“Well, you’re not Mars.”

“Jupiter has sixty-seven.”

The laws shrugged.

“Does either Jupiter or Mars have life?”

“No.”

“Nobody gets everything, Moon.”

And the impassive laws of the universe walked away, except they also stayed exactly there and didn’t change at all.

“But I don’t even get to experience life. Earth gets all the life,” sighed the Moon into the black void. There was no one to talk to.

Moon would talk to the stars, but the stars are all friends with the Sun. And Moon fucked the Sun and now they ignore each other. It happened just last year, in that odd 4 a.m. hour where the Moon and the Sun are equals in the sky. After billions of years, Sun looked at Moon in its harvest gown and thought Moon looks pretty good right now. And so the Sun fucked the Moon and came shooting stars. Ew. Sun made Moon laugh by describing what earth is like during the day. “Sweaty.”

The next day at 4 a.m., Moon waited restlessly for Sun to come back. So many people had already loved Moon and left (Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Harrison Schmitt). Moon didn’t think it could take losing any more love. But when morning came up over Australia, Sun wouldn’t even look at Moon. Sun ignored Moon and just stared out at Sagittarius A. It wanted something bigger and sadder than Moon could ever be.

So that’s how the Moon and I got to talking. Moon said we look alike because my face is round and doleful too. I told Moon that it’d be really cool to control oceans and menstrual cycles. Moon shrugged and said it’d be cool to go in an ocean and have a menstrual cycle.

x-r-a-y magazine

HIGHWAY 25 by Lindsey Heatherly

August 26, 2020 · Fiction

I remember that night we parked at the drive-in on Highway 25 and steamed up the windows before static on the AM station switched over to previews. Previews came before a raunchy, college-age comedy, alternating between raindrop rivers and lip-locked intermissions that cut through windshield fog. Foggy windows were smeared by my gray cotton jacket through your steady hand. The hand that sat on my knee during a panic attack on the drive back. The drive through dark and rain and a flooded road too immersed for good traction on those too-old tires. Tires that skidded across water when you asked if I was okay and I just nodded my head. The head that bowed under the awning to get inside, when we stripped each other of soaked clothing, and I straddled your lap with my legs. We took laps around our troubles–the anniversary of your mom’s death passing quietly with brute force, the burdens of raising two boys alone, and my cycles of manic depression–and I told you I loved you and I was sorry it was a tough night, tough year. Tough tears you’d deny when your eyes welled up and so did mine, and we had the best sex we’d ever had on that couch while the rain just poured and poured. Words poured through your salt and pepper beard piercing my paper skin, leaving red welts I wish I could have peeled off and saved for now when I wonder if you still make the drive to work down Highway 25 or if you finally gave them the middle finger and found something better. Found someone better.

x-r-a-y magazine

« Previous 1…44 454647 48…102 Next »