THE PAIN WE DON’T TALK ABOUT by Amina Frances

June 13, 2020 · Fiction

I was six years old when my mother strapped me into the buggy of her bicycle and steered us both into oncoming traffic on the stretch of road behind the Mulberry Street house. A teen driver swerved and clipped us at fifteen miles an hour. I’ve had a raging pain at the center of my back ever since.

My father wrote off the accident as another one of my mother’s spells—silly little things—as if they were nothing more than temporary lapses in judgement. Maybe they were. Then again, maybe they weren’t. My Aunt May always said the woman had a death wish. Maybe she did. Then again, maybe she didn’t.

Other than a hairline fracture on my thoracic vertebra—twelfth from the top—I walked away with a clean bill of health.

“Your mother is staying with a friend,” my father assured me on our drive home from the hospital. “She’ll come home soon. Don’t worry.” I didn’t.

I dream of my mother often. She’s wearing a wilted linen dress, traipsing barefoot through an enchanted forest. Her wild black hair is cropped at her shoulders. She still wears her wedding ring. Aunt May’s gold chain clings to her neck.

She never did come home. I was glad. I didn’t miss her. My father still goes looking for her in nearby towns on the weekends. I don’t miss him either.

I spent most of middle school flat on my back, my eyes glued to a popcorn ceiling, Nick at Nite and Growing Pains reruns blaring in the background. By thirteen, I was convinced that there was a village of Keebler elves tinkering away inside of me. Every now and again, they’d lose a hammer between my eyes or drop a nail in my rib cage. Clumsy little things.

Sometimes at night, I still hear the clanking in my ears. It’s been twenty-two years since the accident. The sound of tiny feet shuffling across my bones still comforts me.

I told my husband about the elves. He says that’s why I never sleep. He works at the hospital as an ultrasound technician. That’s how we met. That’s how I meet most people.

It’s just us two, for the most part, my husband and I. And the elves. And my college roommate, Maeve, on occasion. We live a thirty-minute drive from JFK. She says we keep her plane tickets cheap.

“It takes the same jaw force to bite through your pinkie finger as it does a medium sized carrot,” Maeve mentioned on her most recent pass through.

Later, I told my husband as much.

“That isn’t true,” he said.

“How would you know?”

“Because Maeve’s not a doctor.”

“Neither are you.”

I have trinkets from Maeve’s travels sprinkled throughout the house. They gather dust on bookshelves and mantles where pictures of small children should be, but aren’t. Rose quartz from Brazil, porcelain from France, a capsule of water from the Dead Sea.

Maeve grew up with an agoraphobe mother. Her father died when she was fifteen. Scars line the insides of her wrists—fleshy, pink orbs that look like stars when I squint. I study them when she sleeps.

I spotted the Big Dipper once, two inches shy of her elbow crease. I thought about asking if she’d done it on purpose. Imaginative little thing. But Maeve’s pain isn’t up for discussion. We talked about elves and loneliness and broken spines instead.

“I bet you could do it if you wanted to,” Maeve said the morning after our conversation about carrots and cannibalistic jaws.

“Bite through my pinkie?” I asked.

“Anything,” she sighed.

Maeve tucked a stray hair behind her ear. The rest of her flyaways were secured by a bandanna she’d swindled off of a market vendor in Morocco. She sat next to the window in her Carhart jeans and an open back sweater. The light struck her like a Renaissance painting—all bright whites and shadows. My eyes grazed over her ski-jump nose and her winding, elf-less spine. It was then that I decided I would bottle her up and absorb her, one flesh orb at a time.

Two months after Maeve left for a yoga retreat in Tibet, the elves worked up a storm. I was forced to quit my gig at the call center. My husband cut his shifts at the hospital. He says getting better is a full-time job.

At night, I hold on to Maeve’s rose quartz in one hand. I put my other hand in my mouth. My pinkie finger feels at home between my molars. Sometimes I stand there, staring at myself in the bathroom mirror for hours, waiting for the elves to stop working or my jaw to go slack. Whichever comes first.

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EVERYTHING I’VE LEARNT FROM THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND by Rick White

June 12, 2020 · Fiction

The vicar is an old friend of your mother. You don’t like him. When I ask why you say, “He didn’t give me an orange when I was little.” The orange represents the world; the candle is Jesus, “The Light of the World.” The toothpicks with sweets on them are the four seasons (of course). I have so many questions but I don’t ask, lest I burst into flames. “I like the liquorice all-sorts,” you say, as you pop one in your mouth.

I’ve always had a stutter, though I’ve learnt to control it over time. Whenever I got stuck on a word as a kid I would pretend I’d forgotten what I was about to say. Then later, as an adult, I discovered that shouting FUCK! mid-sentence actually helped. Now as I stand, waiting to say my wedding vows, I’m painfully aware those strategies aren’t going to work. Then you walk into the church, and when you reach me you hold my hand. I’m not sure this is allowed—if it’s somehow not showing the appropriate amount of reverence—but we stay this way throughout the service, and when the time comes, I speak.

The day of your grandmother’s funeral, we meet at her house. A glass of water still sits on the nightstand in her bedroom and it makes you cry. I think of her placing the glass there, as I think of the words we’ll hear today: in sure and certain hope of the resurrection. I guess we all need a little faith, otherwise how would we ever do anything as terrifying as speaking to a pretty girl, or lying down to sleep every night?

I help carry your grandmother’s coffin. It’s trickier than it looks, especially as your uncle is six inches taller than I am on the opposite side. When we set her down, I notice my suit jacket is covered in sawdust from the bottom of the box. I try to brush it off without being too obvious. You can’t stop giggling, because you know I had my suit dry-cleaned yesterday. It’s the first time I’ve seen you laugh in weeks, and I laugh with you, quietly. I tried my best to look smart for Granny, and now I can’t get rid of the damn coffin dust.

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THE FIRST TIME I WATCHED PORN by Tyler Dempsey

June 11, 2020 · Fiction

In sixth grade (1997), my friend Tom invited me to church because I was a heathen and poor. (We drifted when he got really into drugs later, but from ages 11 to 14, we were close.)

Because my mom worked—Dad vanished in 1990, returned for three days in 2014, and then vanished again—and I lived too far from school to ride the bus, what started as walking with Tom to church together on Wednesdays after school grew into going to Tom’s house weekdays until my mom got off work.

Tom and I practiced kickflips in the driveway for an hour, then listened to CKY or stared at the neighbor’s caged raccoon until I had to go. The rural Midwest hadn’t caught up with the rest of America yet.

Tom’s dad was unemployed but had money: Cool Dad. He sat around smoking cigarettes, and once a month got excited (stoned) and made toast, holing-out a “nest” in the crispy bread before frying an egg inside. His dad also slyly placed Playboys in plain sight. We managed to get a centerfold unglued long enough to look at it. Seventies-era. I was afraid and jealous of the body hair.

Most times, Tom’s dad was nowhere around.

During alternating weeks we went to Tom’s mom and stepdad’s. They had lives, so it sucked there more than at his dad’s. The two houses were night and day. No dirt-road skating there. No psychotic caged animals next door. But the similarity was the smell: like you ate an ashtray, vomited, and left a wet tea bag on top.

The only entertainment was the family’s Great Pyrenees repeatedly getting run over by cars. Every day we’d hunt for new skid marks in his rotten fur. And sometimes we found cool stuff in the woods, like antique Coca-Cola signs, or a rifle suspected in a murder. We were all alone.

Tom was normal. By living vicariously through him and his family’s resources, I convinced myself, against all evidence, that I was too.

I was shy concerning sex—both from church vitriol and rural existence best described as macabre. Forty-six kids in my graduating class, same since first grade. Meaning, classmates knew more about you than your parents, and there was no “other crowd” in which to hide. Hell for a sensitive introvert. Hate, judgement, bullying were amplified a million-fold. I wasn’t bisexual, so I only had a shot at half of them and still had to out-cool all the other boys.

At his mom’s, Tom was crushingly depressed and, without warning me, flipped to The Adult Channels. I was used to TV with around six channels at home, and these channels were in the 800s, like Tom had black market access. It took a minute for me to absorb what was happening, not only because I’d never seen porn, but because his parents didn’t officially “get” these channels.

Imagine. Muzak, halfhearted moans. Static. White noise. Like a movie theater ravaged by a magnitude 7.0 earthquake. Images frozen between frames. A black bar split the screen. Set it all in motion. Sliding up, diagonally, left. Sometimes a breast (?) or asscheek (?) scuttled past.

Horrified. On the edge of my seat. Was this normal? Is Tom “gay,” whatever that was? Was I gay? My pants grew uncomfortable in the low light.

And Tom just sipped his Dr. Pepper.

On the porch, I sat, holding my head. Stared intently at the oak trees out front, dog bounding toward me as if hit by a landmine.

I was scared, alone, slightly aroused. I needed help. I was stuck in America’s Middling West, my mind craving answers that were just out of reach to questions unidentifiable.

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THE WITCH IS DEAD by Katherine Gleason

June 11, 2020 · Fiction

Jamey sprawls across the sofa. I place the box of Ding Dongs on the coffee table, and she laughs.

“You remember,” I say.

“Of course,” she says. “Mom loved those.”

“And pretended she didn’t. We need coffee.” I slip into my galley kitchen and mix a few grams of a fruity Ethiopian with the usual beans. The blueberry overtones will blunt the waxiness of the chocolate.

Cups in one hand, French press in the other, I trip over the cat, fall to one knee and, fists closed tight, stop myself with elbows planted on the back of the couch.

Jamey springs up and rushes over. “Great save,” she says, settling the mugs on the table.

My cheeks burn. Jamey would never trip over her cat. If she did, she’d land like a swan, a swoop of wing and slender leg.

I plop myself down on the couch. “Hey, look,” I say, holding the press aloft. “I didn’t spill a drop.”

“Brava,” she says and perches on my desk.

Now I’m supposed to ask, How was your trip? Then I’m to whine the required ooo and sigh the desired ahhh. I feel my knee, exaggerate my wince, and that’s when I notice.

“Maybe ice it,” she says.

“You moved the lamp,” I say.

“It looks so nice on the cabinet.”

“I like it on my desk.”

“You have to admit you can see it better.” She sweeps her arm in an arc, displaying her superior design sensibility.

“It’s my lamp.” I press the sore spot on my knee, hard.

“It’s Mummy’s lamp, Mummy’s favorite.”

“It was Mummy’s lamp.”

She purses her lips.

“Where’s Kitty?” I ask.

“Sulking in the bedroom.” Jamey peers through the doorway. “She’s fine.”

“I don’t come to your house and rearrange your furniture.”

“Oh, please,” she says.

The cat glides back into the room. I pour the coffee.

“I almost forgot.” Jamey digs in her purse and produces a small paper bag. “From the organic pet place.”

“The one on Ninth.”

She shakes the bag, tears it open. Kitty jogs to her, rubs against her leg, snaps up the treat, meows for more.

“One more?” Jamey asks.

I nod.

Jamey doles out another crispy bit, stows the bag in my desk drawer, drops herself beside me on the couch. “We’re opening these, right?” She grabs the box of Ding Dongs.

“You do the honors.” We each unwrap a cake. “Do we dare?” I ask.

We giggle and bite into our boxed chocolate confections.

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THE CORRECT HANGING OF GAME BIRDS by Rosie Garland

June 10, 2020 · Fiction

Rostrum

Select old, wild birds. Beware harsh beaks, horned spurs, claws toughened by years of defiance. Pierce the beak. Hang by the neck, the feet. Each man has his taste. Hook and hang them long enough to conquer disobedience.

Pectoral girdle

Keep them in the dark. Convert the cellar into a hanging room: a stamped dirt floor to absorb the moisture they shrug off, dense walls to absorb sound. Keep your birds separate. Even when dead, their warmth communicates from breast to breast, stirring discord.

Syrinx

Permit yourself the luxury of appreciation. This bird is yours, now. Dawdle on the ruffled collar, handsome as a rope of pearls around the throat; eye ringed with the purple-blue of bruising; jewel plumage so thick it weighs down the wings. You can’t imagine how she flapped or flew.

Breast

Pluck right away and you experience the thrill of naked flesh, but the body will dry out. Your bird is ruined. Wait three days, maybe seven. Then and only then, strip off the feathers. Patience. Flesh and innards need time to ripen. Sublime flavour is attained when skin loosens its grasp on muscle. She oozes oil and perfume.

Rump

A gentle incision. Slice skin, not meat. Slide in up to the wrist and spread your fingers. Unpeel her body like wet fruit. Relish satin texture, the greenish shimmer of perfect ripeness. Keep going. Fillet scraps from bone, a job less bloody than you expect. Persistence rewarded with flesh that yields to your authority.

Lesser coverts

Lock the dog in the yard, to stop it lapping up the puddles that collect under the carcasses. Ignore the neighbours complaining they can’t sleep. The smile that shuts them up faster than any bellowed argument. The way they shrink away.

Cloaca

Time passes without needing to pay it much attention. Nights in the cellar, waiting for your birds. Their toes dripping, their eyes glazed. All resistance drained from them. The silence is balm, the scent delectable and rare. If only the dog would stop barking.

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BABY DINGO by Emily Harrison

June 7, 2020 · Fiction

Boy finds Baby Dingo in the swell of the high noon heat. He waits for any signs of Adult Dingo, adjusting the too-big-for-his-head trucker cap. At home, Grandad is snoring heavy on the sofa.

Boy likes to wander off on weekends.

He wants to be a great adventurer.

Maybe today he is.

He checks his watch, surveys the dust bowl surroundings. The nowhere town below. Baby Dingo clambers across Boy’s lap and pushes its nose into the sweaty creases of his knees and armpits, licking the salt. There is no sign of Adult Dingo.

Boy pulls Baby Dingo up and holds it like he used to hold the stray cat that occasionally came by the house for food: face perched over the back of his shoulder, torso and hind legs buoyed in his arms. He twists himself over the wire mesh fence and ambles back to the house.

***

He keeps Baby Dingo in his room. It’s too hot for bed sheets so he sits Baby Dingo on the bare patterned mattress and strokes its soft tail.

Despite waking as Boy returned, Grandad is none the wiser. It might be on account of the fact that Grandad is old. Older than Boy. Boy had only learnt to count as high as Grandad’s age in winter. Even now, Boy has to concentrate to make it to such a number.

When Grandad calls for him through the walls to go and fetch some milk and bread from the store, Boy asks Baby Dingo to stay put. He whispers it right into Baby Dingo’s ear and presses a kiss to the top of its head. Baby Dingo tastes of sand and sun.

***

On the way back from the store, Boy spots dead Adult Dingo by the side of the road. He runs home so fast that his knees shake and his feet stumble.

He decides not to tell Baby Dingo. He thinks Baby Dingo might already know.

***

Boy introduces Grandad to Baby Dingo by accident. Boy is in the bath. A cold bath. A bath to keep the heat at bay.

Grandad disappears outside to talk to the stones, so Boy sneaks Baby Dingo into the bathroom. Baby Dingo sits on the toilet seat and laps up the bath water. Boy doesn’t hear Grandad return, not until Grandad has opened the bathroom door to tell him not to be long because food will be ready soon. Baby Dingo jumps from the toilet seat and scuttles back to Boy’s bedroom. “Was that a dingo?” Grandad asks. Boy confirms that it was Baby Dingo, his new friend. Boy asks Grandad if Baby Dingo can stay. He tells Grandad Baby Dingo has already been here for a week. After a long pause and a chin scratch Grandad says yes. “As long as Baby Dingo doesn’t chew the sofa.”

***

Baby Dingo sleeps next to Boy. It wraps its tail around Boy’s forearm and nuzzles into Boy’s neck. Boy reads his favorite books to Baby Dingo, and Baby Dingo eats with them both. Baby Dingo sits up at the table and chews meat from a purple plastic plate, like a child. Since finding out about Baby Dingo, Grandad has made gentle adjustments. Grandad tells Boy that Baby Dingo shouldn’t eat chocolate or candy because it might be bad for its stomach. Grandad tells Boy that, really, Baby Dingo shouldn’t be with them at all. Human interaction can cause damage.

Boy argues that he saved Baby Dingo. Grandad agrees.

***

Boy takes Baby Dingo to school. There are questions. The teacher asks Boy to bring Baby Dingo only on Fridays. Show-and-Tell day. Baby Dingo can wait at home otherwise.

A few of the Children ask why Boy has Baby Dingo. One of the Children, The Bully, says that Boy shouldn’t be allowed Baby Dingo, because everything he’s looked after so far has died. He says Boy isn’t very good at it. “Your crazy-brain Mum is dead, and now she’s just stones in your back garden. Just stones your Grandad talks to.”

Boy holds Baby Dingo close on the way home. Boy tells Baby Dingo not to worry or to listen. He tells Baby Dingo that it’s different this time. Because Baby Dingo isn’t sick like Mum. So that makes everything easier.

***

They should be sleeping, but the night is too sticky. Boy rolls over to Baby Dingo and stares deep into its open glassy eyes. He whispers, “Baby Dingo, I love you.”

Baby Dingo might whisper it back.

***

Grandad asks if it’s time Boy spoke to the stones. It’s been seven months since Mum died. Boy has never talked to the stones. Boy is scared because he knows there’s nothing they can say. Boy is young and naïve and innocent, but Boy is aware. The stones are Mum’s resting place. He knows the only words they’ll ever have are the ones she has already spoken.

Baby Dingo goes with him. Grandad too. They sit, and Grandad starts talking. Boy is mute, at first. Grandad says that maybe he should tell the stones about Baby Dingo. Boy talks so much his mouth dries to a desert.

***

The Earth navigates its path around the Sun and Baby Dingo gets bigger—tail longer and teeth sharper, though Boy has never seen Baby Dingo bite.

Baby Dingo wanders without Boy outside of the nowhere town, carving a path Boy doesn’t know. Boy asks Grandad why. Grandad is making lemonade. He has juice all over his hands. “Maybe Baby Dingo wants to be a great adventurer like you,” Grandad replies, wiping the residue across his jeans. “Maybe Baby Dingo wants to explore.”

Boy says that Baby Dingo can do that with him, can’t he?

***

Baby Dingo has been gone for three days. Baby Dingo isn’t a baby anymore. Boy cries in bed and then into Grandad’s chest as he holds him in his arms. Grandad says Baby Dingo will come back. He says he’s as sure about that as he’s ever been about anything. Then Grandad takes a breath and pulls Boy up so they can see into each other’s eyes.

He speaks slow and says that sometimes, even when it’s the hardest thing to do, “Sometimes you gotta let the things you love roam wild. Not because they don’t love you, or they don’t want to stay, but because they need to see something of their own.”

Boy blinks back a tear.

“Baby Dingo needs to live where Baby Dingo belongs."

Boy thinks of the stones. “Like Mum?” he asks. Grandad says, “No,” then, “maybe.” Boy says it might be true.

***

On the ridge of nowhere town, there’s a spot that only Boy—now Man—knows. There’s no marker in the ground. No definitive coordinates to frame it. There’s no need.

At dawn, Man adjusts the too-small-for-his-head trucker cap and smiles as he passes the two sets of stones. The sun is ripe to stifle. A little further, and Man twists himself over the wire fencing, careful not to snag his skin on the metal. He strolls across the sand and up the esker. He checks his watch as he reaches the spot. The view from the ridge spans wide and long, a chasm of red dust an open road.

“Hello, friend,” Man says, watching the semi-circle top of the sun shuffle onto the horizon. Adult Dingo might say it back.

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SPAWN by Isabelle Correa

June 6, 2020 · Fiction

I was a thing among other things in the hazy scene of his bedroom after shotgunning a beer for the first time. I remember the red pocket knife and the aluminum bending into itself to make room for the blade so that the hole I pressed my mouth to was an inverted flower. I remember finishing first. I remember finding his room and collapsing on the bed in the wrong direction, my legs where his head would go, my bare feet propped against the wall on the bottom of a poster for an alien movie I’d never seen, my toes covering the names of producers and directors. I thought of the game we had played earlier that night of Never Have I Ever. Never have I ever sucked someone off. Never have I ever seen this alien movie. Never have I ever been so dizzy. I closed my eyes and went elsewhere, to the last time it felt good to be wild.

***

In creek water up to our knees, she lifted a two and a half foot carp with her hands. She scooped it into the bed of her forearms, held it like a baby in a tantrum, then tossed it onto land where it flopped convulsively to death. Usually, every spawning season, we killed them with pitchforks our dad provided (invasive mud-suckers, he muttered), but that year there were so many of them you could practically cross from one side to the next walking on the slimy brown backs of them, so we rested our bloodied tools on the rocky bank and went straight in. I tried to follow her lead, as little sisters often do, but I kept lunging at the water and coming up holding air. She mocked me, as big sisters often do, saying I looked like I was trying to make out with myself. She turned her back to me, wrapped her wet arms all the way around her torso, becoming two people suddenly instead of one, moaning, mmmm, yes, mmm. She grabbed a fistful of her own hair, the other hand reaching hopefully for the pocket of her jeans.

Disgusting, I told her.

Like you would know, she said.

Like I’d want to, I shot back, as again I thrust myself into the water and came up with nothing.

Then we went back to spearing them. You had to get one at an angle in the gut, and when you did, they lashed out in every direction. The wooden handle became alive with the fight of them. It was a deep vibration, like the time the boy down the road dared me to touch the electric fence, but a reversed feeling, like this time I was the fence.

Then we sat on the rocks taking count. Eight mud-suckers scattered about us.

I asked her, what was it like?

She said, kissing is like swimming forever but never getting tired.

I said, gross. I meant how did it feel to catch one like that? To hold it?

She shrugged. I guess it felt good? Or whatever? And why do you care? She cupped her face in her hands with one scale the size of a penny stuck fluttering on a knuckle, a translucent white flag.

Looking dreamily across the creek to the pasture of dairy cows she said, last night, Jeremy kissed me with tongue. It was weird and wet but good, like the movies.

I rolled my eyes then watched one carp still gasping at my feet, the circle of its mouth shrinking and growing and shrinking and growing.

I told her, I can imagine.

***

Years after the creek day, weeks after the shotgun night, our dad kicked me out at the age of not even old enough to drive for the crime of useless slut what were you thinking. My sister stopped me mid-manic-bag-packing as I was wondering what does a girl even need, really need, to leave and keep going (a jacket, a bus ticket, a reason), held my bruised cheek in her palm and said, he’s dead to us, then followed me down the long dirt driveway.

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YOUR ATTENTION PLEASE by J. Bradley

June 5, 2020 · Fiction

You never listen ~~to what I say when it matters. You’re treating this as a ticket to~~ be with other people. I should have seen ~~the symptoms when you stayed on your side of the bed, your body sleeping on~~ the edge, ~~rather than close to me, our feet touching.~~ The last straw ~~was when you came home, your body reeking of musk, the way it used to when we made every space we touched burn. You were never mine and I was never yours.~~

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EXPANSE by Tyler Dillow

June 4, 2020 · Fiction

She talks to me at the bar. She talks about him. Him, the fucking bastard. How could you not fall in love with him and how could you not hate him? She talks back at me.

On the front patio of the bar, she lies next to me and the inner mass of a star collapses inside her. The star collapses inside her earthly body. The star collapses the lives of crumpled people—people shrinking, people expanding.

Have you seen that Lars Von Trier film—fuck—what’s it called? You know the one where the leading actress is blonde and white and she lays in the river or whatever in her wedding dress. You know like Ophelia.

I don’t know her name.

I say to her, Do you remember when this state was asleep? Heavy air surrounds us, but we are just sitting. Am I him? Am I the him she talks about, that fucking bastard. I hope not, but I hope. She says, We were always asleep, we were aware of what surrounds us.

Maybe, I’m this man. Do you believe in heaven?

You’re talking about Melancholia. What about it? That Ophelia metaphor was always a little too much for me, I say.

She’s always collapsing, always frantic, always calm—these are the signs of my favorite people. The kind of people I fall in love with, the kind of people dipping spoons into the universe.

I leave her. I go home.

She calls me. She is at some truck stop. Her car got a flat. She breathes through the phone. She breathes like the flints hills—this is the sound of her crashing. Can you come? Will you help me?

I do not care. I drive to get her. I breathe and she breathes. We are at a truck stop—inflating and deflating.

She holds my hand. She feels like every shock of wheat—dirty, holy, filthy.

She eats M&Ms, one at a time, and sips Coke in-between bites. She laughs. The creamy pastels from the sun in the skyline melt into her. When she looks at me, I see her. She looks at me as if she is alone. And she is.

When you hold my hand, I’m connected. I’m running through a wire and you’re the transmission signal, I say.

Water drops and fog stick to her apartment. I kiss her. She tastes like sweet grain.

Do you believe in heaven? Like a heaven you can touch?

I stretch across her. She talks about that man again. She talks about how he understands her. How he believes in her without a word. It all sounds made up. It’s all sounds made for hate. I hate him. She exhales and constellations beat my chest and he beats me. He beats my chest. I collapse. I collapse and come together through her body.

Thick grassland and hedgerows roll by the window as we drive. You shake just like the trees. The trees stop shaking and her hair is frizzy. Her hairy is frizzy and moves like the light of a star. I’m as real as everything. I breathe like she did. The car stops and I breathe like I did before.

She leans on my car. Smoke billows out of the hood. The wind picks up. She walks to the ditch and picks a wild flower. I used to put these in mason jars when I was little. My grandma and I would add food coloring to the water and in a few hours the petals wouldn’t be white anymore. I think about her as a child. I am convinced she is real.

She walks into the field. Grass and weeds up to her knees. She spins and spins. She spins, until I want to spin, but I don’t. I stay next to the car. A weight presses down on me, the soil quakes, I feel her breath. I take from the world. I take and I want to give, but I can’t. My feet drag forward.

She collapses.

I know the answer now. This is as close as I will get to believing.

She hasn’t gotten up yet.

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MEMORY PALACE AS MAZE by Kate Tooley

June 3, 2020 · Fiction

“Words fail…” No one says that anymore, but sometimes she still thinks it. She hears it in her mother’s squeaky, horsehair voice, the one that meant sarcasm: when her father put all the pots and pans in the oven to “clean them,” when the neighbor dressed her Persian cat in a tutu…But that’s not the only time words fail—quick footsteps behind her at two a.m., Ginny waving from airport pick-up after two months in Tucson, her dog’s muscles going slack before the vet has finished emptying the syringe—these are also things that cause a blank space, a lapse in words. And sometimes the words are simply too big. They’re too much the wrong shape, and she can see that trying to get them into someone’s ears will be a square-peg-round-hole kind of situation. She learned about that when she was nine years old.

Her memory also lapses, almost constantly. She pulls a photograph of her ten-year-old self from a disintegrating paper Eckerd’s photo bag. (Until that moment she thought it was “Eckerds” with a built in “s.” There are as many kinks in her memory as there are in her DNA.) She tries to make eye contact with the girl in the photo, thinks: “I don’t remember this day, don’t remember that shirt, or why I look like I’m being eaten alive by army ants.” She knows she should remember pain like that, but at first, she doesn’t.

Every place she lived is a part of her memory palace, each room a discrete snapshot, a roll of film exposed by dented drywall or juice-spill-stiff carpeting. In between rooms, though, her memory lapses: In the living room she remembers building forts out of sofa cushions or bringing someone home at two-fifteen a.m. and doing things you should never do on a couch you share with roommates. These do not happen in the same house, but both happen in living rooms. But between that room and the kitchen, she sometimes loses years, months. The time the chocolate cake exploded in the oven happened ten years after she last built a castle out of pillows. And in the other kitchen, they drank the cheap rum punch on her twenty-third birthday, a long time after she stained the couch.

She’s said careful goodbyes to all the rooms she’s ever lived in. She is haunted enough by people. Sometimes the goodbye was a hard look and a slamming door: Bette Davis in her head. “What a dump.” Sometimes it was fixing the protruding head of a nail in her memory, because she knew that if she remembered that nail, she would remember the moment before she learned what it was to feel irreparably helpless. Sometimes these were the same goodbyes.

Time does not respect pain. It tears months out of your memory and then subjects you to minute-by-minute replays. It does not wait for you to feel safe and happy to bring back days you’ve tried to banish.

Time and mothers. Her mother has sent this box of things: stuffed animals, mugs, photos, T-shirts. They are “downsizing.” She calls her parents dutifully but does not go home to visit. Her mother has resorted to the mail to bring up the past.

The package arrived on Tuesday, so today at six forty-five, four days after seeing the photo, after finding out there is no “s” in Eckerd, she drinks a sour beer and gets ready for a Halloween party. She shoves a pin in her hair and remembers, in color, about the army ants, the invisible ones that were biting her in the photo. She wishes she’d let the photo stick to the paper and fade in a back drawer, where someday some cousin’s child, after a funeral, would dump everything into a garbage bag because they have kids to pick up from school and only so much time to clear out drawers crammed with memories.

Just as she got the too-small pair of purple stockings above her knees, she remembered—in spite of herself—in spite of closing the door to that room firmly. It was the day they’d moved into the apartment, and the downstairs neighbor introduced himself, warned her parents about keeping the windows closed in the summer because of the smell from the dumpster. It was the first time she felt like a cat with its fur on end, immediately and irrationally afraid. She knew it was “irrational” because her mother said what a nice man he was, and her father invited the man over for dinner. Afterward, her mother made her pose in front of the building. She stood off balance in the itchy, pine straw-covered flower plantings and tried to make a place inside herself for a feeling no one wanted her to have.

He earned a standing invitation, so every Wednesday, she pretended to have a stomach ache. It was better not to eat than to sit by him through meatloaf or chicken n dumplings. Once her mom figured out the game, she got either switched or grounded; she preferred the switch. She never went into the downstairs neighbor’s apartment, no matter how many times he invited her to come play with his Pomeranian, Vlad, who carried a stuffed squeaker lamb everywhere. The kind of dream-fear that roots your feet to railroad tracks kept her on the other side of his sun-heated tin doorsill. She couldn’t remember when she learned that doors had sills. Had she known then what it was called, that thin strip of metal that marked the boundary between marginally safe and unsafe? She’d forgotten until now. Isn’t it funny that it sounds like dorsal? Like the back fin on a dolphin, which was her best friend Robyn’s favorite animal.

It was Robyn she was supposed to meet that day. Robyn walked Vlad as a summer job and insisted they meet in front of the downstairs neighbor’s apartment. They planned to stake out the pool and wait for the ice cream truck; Robyn owed her a rocket pop. It was Robyn’s voice, a voice she knew like music, that went off-pitch with fear, and made her hand shoot to the door that should have been locked. It was Robyn who she saw at his feet. She didn’t do anything. She didn't say anything. There weren’t words in her mouth.

She knew, without the downstairs neighbor saying, that no one would believe her. He grilled out with her dad, and her mom always said what nice manners he had. She did not have to be told: Iwillkillyou, Iwillkillyourparents, Iwillkillrobyn. She knew these things were true, and so she begged for a bunk bed that felt like a castle and told her parents that she and Robyn had a fight about school. Eventually her mom gave up on switching her, and she would hide in her bunk bed and listen to his voice rattling on and on about WWII history, big government, and “kids these days” from behind the closed door.

When she was sixteen, she slammed that front door for the last time and got caught inside the past for a full minute. The nail still sticks up from the handrail at a right angle, and she can still feel the thick laces of her light-up, princess sneakers. The nail is the last thing she remembers before she went to meet Robyn downstairs, will be the last thing she remembers about leaving home. She wonders if finding the picture is the end of the story, remembering she knew before she knew and making that somehow the moral of the story. She wonders if she could find Robyn on Facebook, if she wanted to, and what would be the point anyway. She wonders if she should tell her parents, crack open their memories like eggs and beat them to a froth.

She leaves the photo on top of her bedside table. Later, at the party, dressed as a fortune teller, she starts conversations by asking people if they know it’s called a “doorsill.”

Words fail.

x-r-a-y magazine

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