FICTION Archives

FILLING THE GOYA ROOM by Beth Gilstrap

January 30, 2020 · Fiction

One wouldn’t think my hands would sweat the way they do walking adjacent to you, with your khakis, too short and wrinkled, but here we are. Since day two of the retreat, your various states of beard have complicated my hair and makeup routine, my mind equally untidy. By day eight, we wander through the Carnegie Museum. Stand for photos under moose. Stare at fossils. Lives preserved in amber. Hooves dug from ice. Hulking jawbones. Wings cast in plaster and reassembled with unknowable screws and fishing line, hanging above our heads. We are long married to other people. My elbow grazes yours. I move toward the Goya room filled with his later drawings. The syphilis drawings. Where his smudgy grays mash the faces of those he loved. Where bodies are distorted and grotesque. Where she props him up, mouth agape, and the sword lay below, having killed her own bright star.

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HAPPINESS by Matthew Licht

January 29, 2020 · Fiction

My father wasn’t a traveling salesman, just a guy who never seemed to be where he was.

A look crossed his face if someone came into the room where he was thinking or dreaming or scheming or whatever he was pretending to do, or spoke to him directly when he was present but lost. The look said who are you, what are you doing here, what do you want from me?Everything was fine. We lived in an acceptable house where hot meals were a regular feature. Then one day Pop came home with a monkey.The baby hadn’t begun to walk or talk yet.The monkey could walk erect. He had no tail, therefore was an ape, a primate, a chimpanzee. The chimp and Pop held hands like they’d known each other a while. Pop was in one of his gray suits, the chimp had on short pants. I watched them come up the block and then the driveway. Pop fumbled the keys and held the door.He never shouted, Honey I’m home from the factory, lab or air base or wherever I pretend to work. But then, we never dropped what we’d been doing to greet him.Pop and chimp headed for the kitchen. The chimp got a banana. Pop, a beer. The rest of us stood in the doorway.Mama unfroze first. She put the baby in his high chair and made dinner. Pop was a better cook, but he usually eschewed domestic chores.Pop crunched the can and saw us staring. At him, not the chimp. He might’ve brought the beast home to distract our attention. The plan hadn’t worked. It dawned that some explanation was called for.We settled for an introduction. “This is Happy. He will uh, live with us now.”Mama broke the silence. “Is he OK with another banana for dinner, or should I have the kids set another place at table?”Pop had to think. “Set another place, I guess.”Dinner was awkward, but Happy liked tuna noodle casserole. He ate with a spoon, without much mess or fuss.When my sister reached for the fruit salad—didn’t make sense to ask an ape to pass it along—Happy snapped at her hand with unbelievable speed and viciousness. A smell spread, like she’d wet herself.“Better watch out,” Pop said. “Happy’s not like the monkeys on TV or at the circus.”

There was an extra room for when Mama and Pop’s friends came. Visits called for wild parties. How all those people knew each other, where they’d met and what they had in common remained a mystery. Mama and Pop were awfully quiet after a party, and avoided each other even more than usual.Happy didn’t move into the guest room. Instead, Pop rigged a pen in the garage, with a mound of old clothes for him to sleep on, including Mama’s collection of past-date panties.The chimp went to bed and woke up when we did. I thought he’d eventually come to school with us. My sister and I invented stories to explain our brother, the chimp. Pop worked at the circus, or the zoo. He was an African explorer. The ape’s parents died in a Big Top fire, or were crushed by elephants. So we had to take him in.Pop said Happy would not attend school. “He already knows everything he needs to know.”Once I stared, to learn what went on inside the head of a creature who knew everything he needed to know. Happy’s eyes were deep pupils without centers that said, maybe I look slightly like you but we’re not the same. I know things about life and nature that you’ll never understand. Maybe I can’t express myself with words, but if I grabbed you by the ankles I could rip you in half.The hairy mirror-image dissolved and charged. Pop restrained Happy, barely. “Uh, better not stare at him like that, it’s a sign of aggression.”The only other time I’d seen animal aggression was out on the playground. Big Mary held me down and said she was going to suck out my eyeballs. But she didn’t. She kissed me on the mouth like grown-ups in movies and said, “Oh yeah baby now we’re boyfriend and girlfriend forever.”One day Mama needed help to carry a couple of sacks up to the attic. “What does Pop do for a living?” I asked.She was caught off guard. “Well, you know, he works in an office.”“Yeah but what kind of office?”“One that’s full of desks and chairs and telephones.” She didn’t know what Pop did all day either, or didn’t want to tell.“So where’s this office where he works?”“Oh, you know, downtown. Where all the other offices and skyscrapers are.”“Do I have to work in an office too when I grow up?” In a gray suit, I’d bring home a crow or a goat to meet Big Mary and our kids.

Mama settled the sack she’d dragged up in a corner attic where, strangely, there were no spiderwebs. She didn’t hear, or had no answer.“Did you ever work in an office, Mama?”She took my sack and settled it against the other one. They sat there, tied up at the top like hobo sausages passed out in a drunk tank. The sunset reflected on her face as she considered their placement.“Before I met your father,” she said, “I went to college to learn architecture. I wanted to build houses, you know, for people to live in.” She made it sound like an impossible dream. “Then I met your father at a cocktail party and then we had you.”Babies were born from cocktails when the party was over and foiled career dreams. Mama labored in a house she hadn’t built. Pop worked in an office no one had ever seen, and then a chimpanzee appeared.The neighbors were curious that an anthropoid ape dwelt in our garage. It was odd enough Mama and Pop didn’t own an automobile. Pop rode his bicycle to the train station and back. Occasionally he brought Happy with him to work. The chimp sat on the handlebars, but never did handstands or juggled bananas or anything circus-worthy. His muzzle was a headlight, his teeth chattered for unlucky flying insects.Maybe Happy worked in the city too. He shook a cup for a mustachioed organ-grinder, or did pin-up pictures for banana company calendars, or was the “before” model in ads for depilatory creams. Pop was the chimp’s handler/agent.Mr. Munger, our next-door neighbor, asked me to help rake leaves. He’d just lit the dead foliage pyre when Pop pedaled back from the station with the chimp. “Your father does things his own way, that’s for sure,” he said.My sister and I spied on the Mungers through their living room window that night. We were supposed to be at the McLaughlin sisters’ Halloween party, but Mama had made our costumes. My sister was a gypsy-ish witch. I was the devil in a cut-off, cast-off business suit. We didn’t want to mingle with kids in store-bought disguises.We figured the Mungers must have their own version of Happy. This turned out not to be the case. The Mungers consumed uncomplicated cocktails. They spoke to each other while they ate their non-human flesh stew. They cleaned up in the she washes, he dries manner and retired to their living room to read. She cracked a novel. He rattled the newspaper, then dropped it for Life magazine.

Neither of us knew that observation of events possibly influences them. Spooked, we thought everyone else in the world was normal and we were freaks.We ran wild-eyed to the McLaughlin sisters’ Day of the Dead shindig. Rhythm n’ blues blew from the parental hi-fi. Low lights shone on adolescent gropes in progress.“Boo!”“Yah!”The devil and one of his faithful witches burst in as though possessed, and scared the crap out of everyone. But we were only dancing. We shooped and shimmied, then suggested that the Munger Mansion was ripe for a toilet-papering, the Munger chariot for a windshield-egging. We whooshed out into the night like a swarm of rabid bats and laid waste. The Mungers never knew why.Being normal has a price.Happy developed gray fur on his back around the same time I needed a first shave. Pop presented me with the instruments and a deodorant stick. “You already know what happens between men and women, right? Must’ve heard talk in the gym, or on the corner, seen some magazines.”“Get a boner and stick it where she pees?"“OK you already know more about it than I do.”“But where did Happy come from, Pop? Did you and Mama...”“Everyone’s responsible for their own happiness,” he said. “You have to make your own decisions and take your lumps, if lumps are in order. But the rewards can be great, if you guess right, and...that’s all I’m going to say.”He was as good as his word.Pop took Happy to the city with him the next day.That evening, the chimp was dressed in cotton pyjamas silk-screened to look like a tuxedo. “Ooooh,” my sister said. “Happy’s gonna get married.”Pop said, quietly, “Happy grows old faster than we do. We should be ready for when his time comes. Mentally, I mean.”My sister looked my way. Our thought-balloons merged. Oh we’re ready. Any old time. It was hard to tell what our human baby brother thought.Any attempt to delve into Happy’s mental state was met with snarls. Pop, if he was around, would yell, “Leave him alone.”

Happy stared at flies, and at mosquitoes after sundown. He picked insects out of his airspace with blinding speed, deadly accuracy.When approached slowly, hindquarters foremost, Happy gave great neck-rubs and back-scratches. He tolerated grooming sessions with me, relished them with my sister. He’d give her the sniff test first.You probably shouldn’t do that, Pop said.Happy drew a rare paternal reproach when the ape approached my sister with a hot pink banana- shaped love-offering. Pop grabbed him by the waistband and collar, brought him to the garage. No one said, bad. No one said, wrong.Mama said, well he never tried to get fresh with me. It was hard to tell if she was surprised or miffed. Or if she was talking about Happy or Pop.Aunt Floydine phoned the week before school let out to see if my sister and could spend the summer with her in Las Vegas. Mama thought it was a good idea. “But no casinos, please,” she said. “They’re both still children, really.”Casinos were the last thing on Aunt Floydine’s mind. Games of chance, or any other kind of fun and games, weren’t her idea of a productive vacation. Gardening was more like it.Dressed like a movie star, Aunt Floydine dealt us a spade, a hoe and a rake. She swept a satin-gloved hand across the swath of desert that stretched to the horizon and was her backyard. She asked how long we thought it’d take to turn that scrubby desolation into a cactus garden.“Gonna take a long time,” I said, and my sister nodded.Aunt Floydine was an imaginative cook. She knocked up sundown cocktails with adolescent- appropriate doses of rum. She subscribed to magazines devoted to how gardens, houses and people ought to look. She wanted to create paradise on the outskirts of a cowtown that had become an amusement park.As our departure date loomed, Aunt Floydine inspected her new garden and was pleased. She drove us to the Strip in her convertible Cadillac and bought us new clothes. We knew they’d be ludicrous back home, but we got to be movie star ranch-hands for an afternoon.At the airport, she handed over the big bills.“Cash stays out of sight,” she said. “Keep it stashed it for a rainy day.”Rainy days seemed impossible around Aunt Floydine. We wanted to stay in the desert and be her garden-slaves forever, but such indentured happiness wasn’t in the cards.

There was a surprise at the airport on the other side. Pop was wearing an unusual hat. Unusual for him, I mean. Mama had on gangster-lady sunglasses. Our brother had evolved to the point where he could toddle around in his Oshkosh overalls.

No chimp.

Neither of us asked, "Where’s Happy?"

On the train home, Pop said Happy had had an accident when he chased one of the McLaughlin sisters. It was unclear whether Happy met his doom on a passing auto’s grille, or at the hands of shotgun- toting Papa McLaughlin. Didn’t matter. We’d missed Happy’s burial in a corner of the backyard.

Pop never brought home a replacement ape.

When I was left for college, he accompanied me to the bus depot. The others stayed home to watch a Tarzan movie on TV.

Pop shook my hand on the platform. “Be your own man,” he said. “Be strong. Be happy.”

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GOD AT 60 by Bill Merklee

January 27, 2020 · Fiction

We started as marginal Catholics, going though the motions. Now I was having dinner with Kenny, the only one of us who’d stuck with it. Father Postlewaite to his parish. It’d been too long.

“Andre still an atheist?” he said.

“Yup. In Oregon. Found himself a nice godless girl.”

“And Coyne?”

“Still waiting for Armageddon.” Kenny grinned without looking at me, eased back in his chair.

“Remember that comparative religion class? All those speakers trying to explain their faith before the bell rang?”

“The Baptist preacher in the powder blue suit? Right out of central casting.”

“They’d never get away with that now.”

“And Malathi the exchange student telling us about Hinduism. She planted a seed,” I said.

“Ah, the corrupting influence of public education.”

“Well, she was cute. Even so, back then I thought the rabbi and the priest made the most sense.”

“Thank you for that. So why Zen then?”

“No dogma. Only took me thirty years to find it.” I held my cup with both hands, elbows on the table. “Listen, I’m sorry about all the Jesus jokes. Most of them, anyway.”

“You’re forgiven, my son. I’m sorry I didn't come to your jukai ceremony.”

“No worries. You know, with these knees I meditate in a chair now. Most times I nod off.”

“It was important to you.”

“You thought I was going to Hell.”

“Oh, you’re still going to Hell. But I should have been there.”

The server who’d come to top off our coffees eyed us like she expected a brawl. Kenny and I burst out laughing. Back in the day he’d passed silent judgement when I told him about the abortion I’d paid for. And again about my vasectomy. It had gotten between us. What a relief to finally just say what we’re thinking.

By the time we got our coats I’d forgotten how I got there. It was dark and misting in the parking lot.

“So how do I get back to the highway?”

“No GPS on your phone?”

“I don’t even text. Phones are for talking. And calling 911.”

“Follow me then, old man.”

The wipers beat a slow rhythm like a grandfather clock. I followed Kenny until the blurred halos of his tail lights blended with so many others, all of us going home.

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LAST WORDS by Jayne Martin

January 25, 2020 · Fiction

There’s usually two of us, but it’s Christmas Eve and I got nowhere to be. Anyway, she’s just a little bit of a thing, barely 90 pounds from the looks of her. I can roll her onto the gurney.

The Super found her after complaints about the smell. I don’t smell nothing no more. Fucking freezing in here.

“No rent. No heat,” he said.

Asshole should be charged with murder. But who’s gonna complain?

Place is neat as a pin. Something my mom used to always say. Neat as a pin. Still don’t know what that means. Mom would have been about her age if the cancer hadn’t gotten her.

Not much in the fridge. Lettuce, brown and wilting. One of those single-serve cups of ice cream in the freezer. Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia. I find a spoon.

“I was a Deadhead,” she says. “Followed them everywhere.”

I dip the spoon into the ice cream, raise it to my lips. “You don’t mind, do you?”

“Oh heaven’s no. No reason for it to go to waste,” she says. “Sorry to inconvenience you on Christmas Eve. I thought I’d be found before this.”

People who say those that have passed are “dead and gone” don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about.

“Where’s your family?” I ask.

“Why, they’re all around. Just waiting. Don’t you see them?”

The room swells with Christmas music as children sing “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” and dance around a brightly-lit tree. Grownups sip eggnog by a mantel hung with stockings with the names Charlie, Susie, and Mary.

And there in the middle of the room, she stands, looking vibrantly alive, her arms outstretched toward me. “You’re welcome to join us.”

It's not the first time I was made such an offer, and I can’t say I'm not tempted. I toss the empty ice cream container into the garbage and walk over to the lifeless form on the floor.

“I’ll take good care of you,” I say and gently place the sheet over her unseeing clear blue eyes.

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ABOUT DINNER by Veronica Klash

January 24, 2020 · Fiction

You know what it means to have dinner. The meal that satiates before slumber. After the sky is drained of fire and flooded with ink. But what does it mean to have dinner with a man? To sit across from each other at that Thai place that just opened. To look at the menu and not see the words because his hand grazed yours and euphoria dripped from the base of your neck down your spine and he smells like mint and spice and something else that you can’t describe and you rush your inhale so you can breathe him again. If he was on the menu, you’d order him twice, one to eat now and the second to take home to be consumed by the glow of the naked bulb that lights your kitchen. But what does it mean to have dinner with a man and his parents? To fold and refold the napkin on your lap as his mother examines you with narrowed eyes from across the table. You’re smiling and talking about the roses in your garden, but you swear she can see the time you cheated on the spelling quiz in third grade. And if his mother advances an inch forward in her chair she’ll spot the time you let your friend shoplift the Popsicle Pink lipstick even though you knew it was wrong but they were going through something and you wanted to see them smile. Then he squeezes your hand. Your heart remembers its purpose and oxygen reaches your limbs again. But what does it mean to have dinner with a man in silence? To watch as the butter sauce on the fish turns from creamy to congealed. To listen as the clock you picked out during the honeymoon you planned for months chimes undisturbed from the next room. The song is a call and you answer. You push your chair back, stride over to him, hold his face in your hands, whisper I’m sorry, and crush your lips onto his. He pulls you to his lap, folds your bodies into one, and answers I’m sorry too. The boulder in your stomach is reduced to flint, igniting a shivering spark. But what does it mean to have dinner with a man after the kids are gone? To sit around a table too big, in a room too full of emptiness, alone together. To laugh at how silly you both feel now that there’s less laundry to do, less food to cook, and more time. More time than you ever expected. He says he knows how you can spend that time and winks. Euphoria drips from the base of your neck down your spine. You say you’re sure you have no idea what he means, and you smile. But what does it mean to have dinner with a man who’s not there? To look down at your plate and not recognize what you see. To look up and pretend he’s still there. Holding on to memories like they’re the last gasp for air before drowning. Dinner is your favorite, because it satiates before slumber, and when you close your eyes you’re back at that Thai place. It just opened. You know what it means to have dinner.

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ENERGY FROM LIVING THINGS by Laura Eppinger

January 17, 2020 · Fiction

I examine the head of lettuce because he tells me to, but I don’t know what he wants me to see. Broad romaine leaves the color of spring rest outside his canvas shopping bag, sure. Just a few minutes ago, John shouted at me for putting my slicker on the wrong hanger in his coat closet, or through the wrong loop inside the jacket. It’s hard to keep track, since I needed to kick my muddy boots off before stepping through the front door. I thought I was following all the rules, but I missed another one, and this time instead of lecturing, John shouted. Hard to let that go and focus on unpacking groceries now.

He pouts his thin lips at me, pale eyes seeking confirmation.

“The roots,” he says, and then I recognize a clump of brown beneath the while neck of the bunch.

“That’s sad,” I say. I’m sad, still waiting for an apology I know won’t come.

“Do you think it’s alive?” John asks, running one long finger over a single hair of root. “Should we plant it in the alley?”

Just behind his left shoulder, the blades of his knife collection catch a rare ray of sunlight. John has sensitive eyes so the apartment windows are smothered by blackout curtains, though sometimes a spear of light pokes through. I’ve been scolded for slicing back and forth with a paring knife, or using a ribbed one to make smooth drops with the blade.

Serrated, this task. I pick a knife and sever the roots from the leaves in a few jabs more than necessary. Have to justify my knife selection after all.

“Thank you,” John says. “I still hate that we need to take energy from living things to survive.”

He cradles the leaves in his bluish-white hands and nurses them all the way to the fridge, where they will live in the crisp-keeping box, which is always positioned on the second shelf, no exceptions. I tuck the clump of roots into the composter under the sink, using my left hand as a bib to catch any microbe of dirt that might try to fight free. Nothing will fight free, not in this apartment.

The loose oat (reusable) bag is stuffed into the grain tin and the agave syrup is tucked into the shelf, exactly where its predecessor sat.

John will now decompress from errands with episodes of anime I never get to pick but always have to watch, because being apart from him makes him worried I’m angry at him. My body sits in its usual spot in the knobby couch but my brain doesn’t come along this time.

If I could see my sister, privately, I’d crow to her that John treats the fucking lettuce gentler than he treats me. What’d you expect, she’d say, dating a lifelong vegan. We’d freeze our tits off under puffy down jackets—yeah, it’s mean to the ducks to use their body parts, but I like being warm too sometimes—and will each cigarette to last just another drag longer. We’d be in the mall parking lot, wasting the few minutes between our appointments for pedis.

There’s no good reason I can’t see her. It’s just that John will never entertain, it’s too overwhelming to have invaders over the apartment who don’t understand his systems. It takes too long to explain up-front; I’ve been here six months and I still make mistakes every day. He’s not too keen on me leaving all that much either. Of course I’m allowed to leave, but what if I wake up before his alarm goes off and my stirring interrupts his sleep cycle? What if our appetites or meal schedules get out of synch? No way could two separate dishes get cooked out of this kitchen too close to one another—it takes too long to clear the clean dishes from the drying rack, first inspecting them for any food or soap remnants, scrub the counters to disinfect them, select the proper utensils, gather the ingredients, explain the plan of attack to each other, and then get started on the actual cooking. Then cleaning before eating. Then the eating and the cleaning up after eating.

That’s not even to mention the orienting of the dining room before the meal is served. The place-mats must be aligned optimally, and the cushions! The cushions on the wooden chairs could leave behind their filmy glue, so they are removed when no one is sitting upon them but laid out over the chairs before either of us could sit down to dine.

It’s really only logical that I don’t see anyone but John and John doesn’t see anyone but me.

John yells at me now, all the time. Sometimes it’s a short snap he claims he can’t remember an hour later. Sometimes it’s over the phone, involving three breaks to suck up new breath, when I text him that I researched talk therapy and found my work insurance will cover it. He screams to me that he doesn’t need counseling. He screams that I exaggerate, he never yells.

He screams and then he begs me not to leave, because he has trust issues from that messy childhood. All that grief from watching his mother die. He’s trying to be a good person, he’s trying to eat in a way that causes no harm, he needs me to see how good he is being. Routine soothes him. Routine is good. I eat so healthy since I moved in, cut out drinking and ciggs—much to be grateful for.

So I feed the compost under the sink, all our little veggie scraps. The stems from bell peppers, banana peels, used tea bags—it’s a joy to squish up and squeal a little as I stuff them down with my open palm. I try to choke the life out of them, to hasten their ecstatic decomposition. Free up their nutrients so they can nourish something else. Isn’t that the noblest course? Releasing all the best parts from inside us, to be a feast for others instead.

I turn the black humus we’ve saved from this waste-free kitchen. I tell John I leave out the scraps for the cooperative compost pickup service, and that’s not a lie. I just don’t donate all of it, just yet. Ever since I found the hunk of roots sprouting new lettuce leaves on top, I felt hope for the first time in a long time. I didn’t let my mind wander like when John plants me in my spot so he can watch his favorite childhood cartoons again; my face points at the screen but none of the colors or shapes sink in. No, my mind was turned on this time, and even in the dim light enforced by the curtains, my eyes registered a tiny little life. All those saved scraps made it happen. Sacrifice does pay off.

That weak sprout could use the carbon dioxide, I reasoned, so I whispered to it that day.

Hi.

It was hard to think of what to say to a being that wasn’t John; I’m always trying to think of the right thing to say to John, though sometimes it makes him mad at me anyway. I like that this little bud can’t talk back.

It’s nice you’re here.

And now I linger in the kitchen after every meal, saying nice things to the lettuce.

I like you a lot.

You look great.

And today, No one should ever yell at you.

I’m flushing under my cardigan, checking one more time that I have the red-handled kitchen scissors in my hand and not the black-handled office scissors. Sure you can wash them with soap and water, but John does not want them mixed up.

It’s my turn to show him roots under lettuce, my turn to say Look, Look.

“It grew under the sink, in the compost bin,” I say, tripping over some of the words because I am talking too fast. “Let’s mix it in the salad too.”

John turns his head toward the leaves pulled from the composter and then tilts back to the scissors in my hand. I shake as much dark not-quite-soil back into the bin, making sure not one single speck hits the floor or the countertop. I selected the smallest cutting board to work over, which must be the right choice.

I want to meet John’s aquamarine eyes but he’s stepped out of the kitchen; he doesn’t like when I leave a room without warning, so it’s odd he’d do this now. In a flash I feel him behind me, tall and reedy. A jolt strikes me as John pulls my hair over my head as if making a high ponytail. A kiss? We haven’t touched in weeks. I close my eyes to savor this surprise.

A hear a whine of scissors opening their legs—did I have the desk scissors after all? A cold peck at my neck tells me a breakdown is coming.

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THE YEAR I WAS MOST HUNGRY by Shane Cashman

January 16, 2020 · Fiction

When I wear my long, dark peacoat, I look like I’m about to betray my country; I instigate assassinations; I have affairs in 1964; I fly first class.

When ex-presidents die, the whole nation wears peacoats and flags at half-mast. We all of a sudden show a strange love for someone we used to curse––it’s that kind of love people only show once someone’s gone. We only truly love you once we’ve thrown you in your casket––we’re a culture of goddamned necrophiliacs.

The length of my coat reminds me I’m just over six feet tall; my height equals the common depth of a grave. If you plant me down there feet first, I’ll be eye level with the feet of those who come to visit.

When I wear my long, dark peacoat I tell myself I could murder without consequence over anything––even five dollars. My boss steals a five-dollar tip that was meant for me. A customer gave it to him to give to me––for loading couches in his van. My boss folds the cash in half and slips it into his back pocket. A few months later, my boss goes bankrupt and has to sell the business. I lose my job of eight years. I apply to be a potato sorter, a truck driver, a background actor, a webcam guy, a cemetery manager, an assassin, and a professor.

On my way out the door of my job for the last time, I wear my long, dark peacoat. The coworker I hated second-most stops me. I think she’s going to hug me. She pulls open her filing cabinet and finds a can of soup. “Here,” she says, “in case you get hungry.” Everyone at work thinks I’m going to live in a car.

When I wear my long, dark peacoat, no one knows that I don’t drive an Audi.

When I wear my long, dark peacoat I think maybe this should all be a novel––that this string of events sounds too ridiculous for one day: A horse I know died, and I hoped he left me his skeleton in his will; I lost my job; I get an email that says: How To Be Happier At Work, I barely had enough money to pay for gas to get home; I jumped on someone else’s trampoline.

When I wear my long dark peacoat, I appraise the sun moving through overcast skies like a rat down a python’s neck.

I wear my coat when I pretend to be a professor at a real college. Whenever a student calls me a professor I wonder if they’re mocking me, or if they’re mistaken, or if they just can’t tell the difference. One of my students left for a week to bury his father in Maine. When he returns we have class in the small chapel with the glass roof on the edge of campus. I ask the student how he’s holding up. He asks if I’d ever seen the catacombs beneath the chapel. I follow him outside. He lifts open the bilco doors that lead down damp steps, into damp earth, and there they are. Catacombs. Empty catacombs. But catacombs. We stare into each one. He sees an impression of his father. I see an impression of the future.

I wear my peacoat at the diner with Nancy in Rockland as Notre-Dame burns up in Paris, and we all feel the flames hot against our faces from the kitchen.

When I wear my long, dark peacoat it could be lined with pocket watches and bail bonds and mix-tapes and nuclear briefcases and doctor’s notes to get you out of class or work or birthday parties.

In my long, dark peacoat:

I chain-smoke.

I race cars.

I fight wars.

I pull teeth.

I decay.

I default.

I die on the hour.

I struggle with the truth.

I wear rejection with grace.

I’m your earthworm.

Your church bells.

Your sewers in drought.

Your head on a spike.

Your beloved cult leader.

When I wear my long, dark peacoat, I play like I don’t fear I will never be heard; I tell strangers on the street at night walking past me that there’s a big opossum foaming at the mouth just up ahead; I pretend the sunrise is a five-alarm fire no ladder can reach; I catch people leaping from the sky; I dream of my grandfather’s ghost, and we shake hands while everyone rushes to prepare a meal.

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STUMBLING ON CONCRETE by Mileva Anastasiadou

January 15, 2020 · Fiction

I was overweight when I started the diet, but eating less didn’t help much. I lost some weight, yet I still feel heavy. I told him last night. My husband eyed me up and down, checking for excess fat, then said I look fine, but I don’t feel fine at all. I should move to Mars, perhaps, where gravitational forces feel less powerful, I said jokingly, or turn into a bird, I thought, only I didn’t say that aloud. He suggested exercise and I shrugged. I’m not certain exercise will help take the burden off of me, but I could give it a try.

We climb and climb, and we’re now at the top of the hill when he says I look young while staring at me, and I nod for I was made for youth and daydreaming and future plans, only I’m violently present now, blissfully dizzy, feeling his hand, not a word or gesture goes unattended, and I don’t miss the young me, the dreamer, this time it’s now that I already miss, the excruciating bliss of present tense, for it’s all downhill from now on and he says that’s maturity, only I know it’s him, he’s the peak of the mountain I climb, my future happening now, the cliff I’ll stand on before the fall. And I can see me hitting the ground, gravity calling, again and again, like a repetitive stumble on concrete sound effect, like wood falling, hitting the floor, only woodcutters have been hiding in fairy tales, or movies, or songs, and I wish I could hide in a story as well and never be found and never fall.

The end of the world is near, says the man on the TV. My husband watches silently, eating a burger, while I only drink water to fool my empty stomach, for I want to lose more weight, to evaporate, to go back to the beginning. I was born light as a feather. A tabula rasa, a clean slate, empty of experience, ideas and emotions. I spent most of my younger years hungry. Hungry for food and knowledge and life. I’d eat more and more as I grew older, I thought, for I’d always grow bigger and wiser, and mom said I needed food to grow. So now, I’m heavy. Now, I’m full. Eternal growth is malignant, like cancer, says my husband, while watching the documentary on climate change, while I step on the scale, counting calories, for I want to go minimal, escape flesh and bone and feelings, stop growth and immobilize time, turn into an everlasting imaginary friend or ghost.

I thought I was born empty, crystal clear, but I’m not sure now. I was born a baby, the way people are born, yet I was not empty at all. I carried the world inside me, for I have lived before I was born. Half of me watched my mother’s life. I watched her first steps, her first kiss, her heartaches. Half the half of me watched my grandmother’s life, her struggles, her path. The pain inside isn’t just my pain. It’s the pain of the world. A piece of me has lived forever, I think, I tell him and he looks at me like I’m crazy and perhaps I am, yet all my pain cannot be justified by one life only. A tiny piece of me has been here since the beginning of time. People get strong with time, they say, only I get weak instead. The pain threshold falls. After a certain age, you’re either too cynical or too soft, he tells me. Only the cynical can move on like nothing happened. Happiness is obstructed by experience and fear, decluttering the mind becomes a necessity. I want to empty the disc, to be a dot in space, I tell him, like in The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the poem, the movie, only you can’t really erase anything. I drip seriousness and profanity and I dust tiny bits of sacredness still left upon me. I throw up all dirty knowledge, a futile attempt at unlearning the world, to clear my mind. Accumulated pain is the reason for aging and death, I tell him. You live on and on until your head bursts in pain and glory.

He turns off the TV and caresses my cheek. He then pulls me close, climbs onto me and his weight on my body is a comforting weight, accumulated joy is the reason for life, he claims, and I don’t mind heaviness now, heaviness keeps me grounded, here, alive. Heaviness gives a sense of belonging in exchange for freedom. Until you hear the chains and learn to carry them along. But I keep thinking how tiring life is. Almost like plate spinning. It’s only a matter of time before it all crashes down, before gravity calls, yet I keep at it, for there’s no choice. Until all motion seems overwhelming and the burden seems unbearable. And it’s all a simple equation; when pain exceeds joy life gives up in a reverse big bang, an implosion that ends the world, instead of starting it.

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CHAMP by Emma Hodson

January 14, 2020 · Fiction

The man smells like smoke. He is moving into a new apartment on a street that used to be a bustling thoroughfare, but now is just another grey road. That is, the apartment is new to him, but not to this world. It’s close to his old spot, just a few blocks, but it’s noticeably more decayed. A beige building shoved in between a Thai place and pay-per-hour motel, a single tarnished mini van parked in the driveway most days. The apartment was built in 1973 when mom-and-pop shops dotted the street, bubbly hand-painted signs, and women doing their grocery shopping with babies in tow. People walked more back then. Now there is a hardware store and a forsaken donut shop, glaze hardening and cracking untouched under glass while the owner watches the Mega Lotto with a toothpick hanging out of his sour mouth. After the move, the man’s hands are shaky and he reaches for the drawer.

A while later, months maybe, the drawer starts to fill up with empties again and the bills keep coming and the donut shop is gone and its owner and his Mega Lotto toothpicks are gone. In its place is a Juice Shoppe where everyone can go to feel better, thank fuckin’ God. The man laughs darkly to himself and honks his deluged nose into a tissue as he walks towards Ol’ Yeller Lounge.

He’s been going to Ol’ Yeller for 36 years. The outside is fashioned from large stones cobbled together, like a liquor castle, no windows so it can be properly dark inside. The sign is yellow neon and it flashes, beckoning, above the rounded doorway. Inside is what you’d rightly expect from a dive. The bar is long with peeling stools lining it all the way to the dimly lit back wall, illuminated mostly by a clutter of arcade games. A jukebox with a handwritten sign taped to it: QUARTERS ONLY! WE ARE SERIOUS!! There are a few booths with wooden tables to the right, but you can’t get a good look at the TVs from there, so the man avoids them.

He sits on his stool, the same one he always sits in, and nods to the bartender who adds a Jack n Coke to his tab on the regulars chalkboard that hangs behind the bar. Most of the regulars are gone nowadays. Big Jim disappeared after one too many visits to detox. They say Paula got sober, and maybe it’s finally true this time—he hasn’t seen her in months. Ralphie moved down South when the rent got too high, and his new neighbors started complaining about his cats and their cat smells. Bogus, he had said sipping on his G&T. Absolutely fuckin’ goddamned bogus. Roberta’s still around, and so is Doug, but they won’t come in for another hour or so. It’s just the man and a bunch of kids huddled in the corner booth.

The man watches them while he waits for his drink. The boys (and they are boys, really, hardly men) wear clear-framed glasses and ludicrous sock caps, tiny ones, that they tuck behind their ears with their cigarettes. They smile white smiles at the girls who wear pants that don’t flatter their pretty faces. The boys order beers, the expensive kind that Ol’ Yeller has only started offering in the past few years. They sip them and laugh and a girl reaches out and puts her hand on the skinny tattooed arm of the boy next to her. The man wonders if he was ever like them, once upon a time, but immediately scoffs at the thought. His laugh comes out in short gurgly croaks. He imagines himself, back on the docks, unloading heavy boxes of grapes from the ship's belly, his ears burning from the crisp morning air under his hardhat. He remembers standing, arms locked with his crew in the picket line, his sock cap, wool and itchy, covering his ears. No, he was never like them. Not even close.

Truthfully, he doesn’t mind the kids all too much. They come in and buy their expensive beers and the bar stays open, and the man can play his pinball game in the back. He’s had the highest score for as long as he can remember. Someone got close once, but it never happened. After his second Jack, he strolls over to the games, expertly flicks the dial to send the ball soaring into a land of flashing crystal balls and genies. The whiskey is warm in his throat and the heat flows through him, his hands finally steady, as he racks up dings and dongs and the points tally higher and higher.

When he finally heads back to the bar, Roberta is there, early today, and sitting next to his usual spot. Her hand covers his seat. Eighty-two years old, sharp as a needle, and tattoos covering every last square inch of her large, worn body. Roberta has been coming to Ol' Yeller ever since the last of the lesbian bars closed down—Sally's and The Fur Pelt, leather vests and cigarettes, tender kisses in the corner. Red lipstick permanently stains her glass.

“Pinball again, you old bastard?” she says.

“Sure as eggs is eggs!”

The bartender nods his head to his stool. “Speaking of which, we figured it was about time we did something about those scores of yours,” he says.

The man approaches his seat, and sees that they’ve switched it out with a brand new stool, cherry red, upon which they’ve sewn large white letters, like a high school varsity jacket: CHAMP.

The snake tattoo that curls down Roberta’s wrinkled arm seems to slither as she laughs, one of the best laughs the man has ever heard. “Some things never change,” she says.

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WE COULD BE ANYONE by Alicia Bones

January 13, 2020 · Fiction

I knew I should feel sympathy for Laura, but her fire-bright face in the Abernathy-Smythe backyard unsettled me. She was telling me the details of her life, the really private, personal ones, though we’d only met a few times at parties hosted by shared acquaintances.

“My father is a drunk, and my mother is sociopath,” Laura said, staring off into the fire.

Jesus Christ, was all I could think as I twisted up my fingers. I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t even think of what I should say. I was well-adjusted, a truth about myself that had bothered me for years. My parents had always been appropriately-boundaried, so how could I relate?

“When my mother forgot my high school graduation, I cried for days,” Laura said with stage-direction movements: look left slim-lipped, look right.

I stopped myself from rolling my eyes. The confessions kept coming in cliched absurdity. They weren’t fireside dredging of deep-dark memories, either; Laura had told me the high school story twice before.

“I’ll never forget how our cat looked,” she went on, “after my sister ran over him with her car.”

I looked at her in alarm. I’d drifted for a second—and now a dead cat? Laura hadn’t asked me for my compassion. I’d planned for an easy night of talking about The Bachelor and Harold’s trip to Mexico. Instead, she’d foisted her dead cat onto me.

She was too much, no matter how polite and self-loathing I was, so I said, “I’ve got to pee.” I went inside and didn’t plan on coming back. Laura would forget I was gone; the night was chilly and someone else would sit next to her. That person would be as good a confessional as I had been.

I angrily poured myself another drink. Self-involvement was an epidemic.

Laura had exhausted me, but I had to make myself aggressively cheerful. This was a party, after all, a beginning-of-summer party thrown by Melinda and Janet Abernathy-Smythe. They were the first of my friends to buy a house with a backyard; most of us still rented. I wasn’t anywhere close to buying property, but I served my purpose at social functions anyway: providing amusing anecdotes about my hapless dating life.

Inside, party-goers held drinks and stood in corners. These were the friends I’d cobbled together in my childless, partner-free twenties for my childless, partner-free thirties. They weren’t the friends I’d wanted, but they were the friends I had. Here they were, speaking passionately about a television show, effusively commenting on the Abernathy-Smythes’ new cabinets, cooing over photos of Helen’s new dog. Without them, I would never receive compliments on my new haircuts or shoes; I would exclusively rely on my own judgment.

I glanced at the fire through the open door to the back patio. Laura was talking to someone else. I was sure she was telling them exactly what she’d told me. I hoped they could think of reasonable ways to respond to her.

I headed toward the ficus in the living room to chat with solitary Harold about Mexico. He’d liked the beaches and warm water and the food. Did he actually want to tell me, “The food was spicier than I thought it’d be!” or did he feel obligated to say it? I couldn’t tell. I asked him how much his trip to the Yucatan had cost, and he said, “Cheap!” I didn’t know how to make him tell the truth, but his daughter was starting college in the fall, so maybe he was mourning.

Sam joined us, and Harold asked her about her new house. I told her I was hoping to buy in her neighborhood. She looked with me with derision because she’d purchased the home with her husband, and I had no husband. She scoffed, “Good luck!” though she also smiled, like I was a pathetic child with an impossible wish. In fact, I had no strong feelings about her neighborhood and remained unsure if I had ever visited it.

Later, three drinks in and pouring myself a fourth, I talked to a new person in our group, a rare friend of a friend. For some reason, I told her about my nerves about commitment, about how I feared my life twenty years from now would look the same as it did now.

“Life always changes, whether you want it to or not,” Tammy said, making sincere eye contact. I felt real empathy from her and was surprised.

I was grateful that my sister had never killed our cat or that I’d never had the impulse to lie that she had. “If you say so,” I laughed.

Behind Tammy, I saw Laura through the kitchen window. She was talking to someone, maybe even a third person, though I could only see the back of their head. I should have been angry about the anonymous way Laura collected her self-aggrandizement, emptied her mind onto a held-captive acquaintance. Why could only some people have authentic exchanges; why did only some people want to?

I suddenly realized I had no idea which type of person I was.

In a moment of compassion, fueled by drink and goodwill towards Tammy, I felt sorry for Laura’s isolation, which was even more impenetrable than my own. Secrets were stand-ins for authenticity, but Laura didn’t understand that. She didn’t know why she failed to connect. My stomach lurched in customary empathy, but I suspected my feelings were only habitual, a knee-jerk reaction to a stimulus that could have come from anywhere.

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