FICTION Archives

GIVING SPEECHES IN YOUR UNDERWEAR by Roslyn James

January 12, 2020 · Fiction

You are stirring onions, slowly caramelizing them. You can't believe you’re married again. He’s in the other room, well not the other room. The long galley kitchen you’re standing in is attached to the living room. You can see him, sitting on the couch with his football game on, the volume turned way up, waiting for his dinner. He will not appreciate these onions you are laboring so long over. His favorite meals are ground beef tacos or chili. Two dishes you’ve grown to despise.

Later that week, you come home for lunch because he asked you to. He's not ready to go when you arrive. Maybe his part-time teaching job at the university down the road allows him to get high and nap all day, but you only have an hour for lunch. There are endless convenient restaurant options nearby, but he hasn’t given a thought to where he wants to eat. Your only request is, "no Vietnamese today." You had it yesterday for lunch. He can’t seem to come up with any place he wants to go to aside from the pho place down the street. You give in, besides half your lunch break is over, you don’t have time to argue about pho.

He wants you to have sex with his friends. He thinks you're kinky because when you first started hooking up with him, you were also dating a woman, and seeing another guy on and off who would visit but still lived in your hometown.

Your husband has swinger friends, they are a very nice couple and you like them, but you don’t like-like them. Before you came along, he used to be their third and they’d often add in another female friend or sometimes two. They all have great hopes for you. You’ve only had a threesome with two guys before, and only once, when you were in college. You were drunk and high on hash in Germany, and you knew that if you wanted to you could never see those two guys again, but you enjoyed yourself. Well, there was that one other time, in high school when you and your girlfriend did it with your boyfriends next to each other in the same bed. The guys were buddies and, of course, had thought up the whole idea. It seemed silly to you. It didn’t leave you feeling bad but it wasn’t at all interesting or sexy. You kind of blocked it out, except for that moment when you and your girlfriend gave each other a goofy look for one second in the beginning as if to say, what the hell were we thinking? You don’t even remember if you all were completely undressed or not. You were young then, maybe it could be fun now that you are grown up and with a man who loves you.

You give it a try with your husband and his friends. It isn’t fun. It reminds you of giving a speech, except the audience wants to spend the night and you have to have breakfast with them the next morning. You hate public speaking. You try to give your best performance, memorize your lines, get up behind the podium, and then you look down at all those expectant faces waiting for you to impress them. You rush through it all, fumbling your index cards—you could swear some of them are out of order—you resort to ad-libbing. When it’s finally over you can’t remember much of it, but everyone seems satisfied and praises you, then they start making plans for the next time. Maybe a little weekend getaway, they say. Perhaps a cabin somewhere with a hot tub and a fireplace.

He'd also really like it if you would bring your best friend over to have sex with him. You can join in, of course. In fact, he'd like it better that way. He doesn't seem to understand your friend isn't interested in him, not that you've asked her. Nor are you interested in sleeping with her, she's not your type, and even if she was, you wouldn't share her with him.

An old friend from high school calls you at work out of the blue. A mutual friend told him you both live in the same new city now. He asks you to go out for an after-work beer. You agree and soon you find yourself sitting across from him at the pub, feeling a little tipsy and immensely enjoying his company, something you didn't expect. Before you walked into the bar, you took off your wedding ring and slipped it into your pants pocket. You weren’t sure why you did it at the time, but when your hometown friend grabs your gesticulating hands midair, holds them in his, and looks deep into your eyes, you understand. He asks if you want to go back to his place and you do.

In his bedroom, he puts on 80s music, turns the lights down low, and asks you to dance. You let him wrap his arms around your waist and you rest your cheek against his chest. He smells of some familiar cologne. It feels like old times like you’re back in seventh grade again at a school dance, except this time the boy is taller than you. He asks if he can kiss you and when you say yes, he bends down to press his soft lips to yours and sparks fly. You want him. You almost forgot what it’s like to feel that kind of deep-down desire.

You don’t tell the husband when you get home, except to say that you ran into an old friend and had a couple of beers. To lie well, it’s always best to stick close to the truth. You suggest that your old friend might be down for a threesome though you admit it’s hard to say at this point. It will require further investigation on your part. Your husband seems excited about this news like maybe he’s finally got you on board, but you don’t plan to include him. Your friend has no idea you even have a husband. It just didn’t come up.

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THE DUMPSTER GAME by Rachel Mans McKenny

January 11, 2020 · Fiction

The Hu Palace had a classy buffet, with slippery chopsticks that went into the dishwasher not the break-apart kind. Baxter raised himself on the lid of Hu’s dumpster, hanging off it with forearms and elbows as anchor. The graying cabbage landscape and jagged Styrofoam iceberg looked the same as yesterday. Then a faint scratching. Something was alive, a small something.

His foot found a cardboard box island in the sea of decomposing food. The box took his weight, so he swung the other leg inside, pushing the trash aside with a sneaker.

A chick, brown wings folded under its body.

It pecked Baxter’s hand until it bled. At the bottom of the fire escape, he tucked the chick between shirt and chest, tying the fabric at the bottom so it couldn’t fall out. The bird rattled around against skin, unable to find purchase while he climbed. At the window ledge, Baxter untied his shirt and the chick flopped onto the carpet, stretched his legs, and cheeped in protest.

Baxter’s brother wasn’t home yet. Boy, when he came home! Baxter let the chicken stand on the counter while he wet a dishrag. He knew that cats cleaned themselves and dogs hated baths, but didn’t know the protocol for chickens.

Eddy slammed the door. Baxter tried to scoop the chicken in his hands, but Eddy intercepted it. The chick tried to stand on Eddy’s fleshy palm but tumbled backwards on spindly legs.

“Careful,” Baxter said.

“It smells.”

“I found it in Hu’s dumpster.”

Eddy pondered this, holding the chick up for closer inspection.

“I win? You find anything?”

Eddy shook his head. “You win. Yeah. You win.”

Paul lived in an underwear drawer, its original contents relocated with the pajamas. Baxter poured Paul a shot glass of water. The shot glass said “Margarita Mondays.” He hoped there wasn’t any alcohol left in it, poor bird, but then he remembered the chick lived in a dark drawer for twenty hours a day and hoped maybe there was. Maybe to the chick, the dumpster had been the whole world.

Was that life? Baxter wondered.

The other four hours of the day, Paul wandered the apartment. Between school and dinner and whenever Mom was occupied—he had free range. A chicken ranger. A vigilante, not a chicken at all.

Baxter didn’t play the game anymore. Baxter had Paul. Baxter won, and for once, Eddy had lost.

Until Eddy found the cat.

The creature had half a tail and nicks in its ears like hole punches. “This is Big Paul,” he told Baxter. He set the animal on the bottom bunk, and it hopped off, disappearing under the bed.

“The game was over. And we weren’t looking for animals anyway.”

Eddy just hummed, hand groping under the bed. “I didn’t say it was over.”

Years later, Baxter sat in the car outside his brother’s house, breathing hard. He couldn’t believe that every picture with his brother didn’t have hidden feathers and blood in it like an ISpy. Like Where’s Waldo.

“Where’s Paul?”

Blood, feathers. “Well, don’t blame the cat.”

Baxter didn’t.

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DROSOPHILA MELANOGASTER by Hannah Storm

January 10, 2020 · Fiction

The fruit fly shares the same genes as a human. Its Latin name is "Drosophila Melanogaster," which sounds awfully fancy for something attracted to rotten fruit and vegetable. I think about the time you told me I smelt ripe when you forced me onto my back in that room with the torn sheets. Fruit flies breed in drains, empty bottles and waste disposals, relying on a moist layer of material that ferments to grow their families. The adults have brown trunks, black bottoms and crimson eyes and are so small they can creep through windows and doors that aren’t properly covered. I think about the time we met, how I was bruised and broken, how you flew to my side, hovered around me, your tanned arms winged in a false promise. The reproductive potential of a fruit fly is enormous, and given the chance they can lay five hundred eggs. Your first girlfriend had an abortion, you left your second after you boasted how easy it would be for you to get her pregnant. You tell me this as you lie, limp and damp, and I see your eyes turn red with tears. Soon you’re snoring. You don’t hear me creep away to mop up the smell of me, or move to the window above the bins, where I watch their bags spilling into the car park. Your snores sound like the buzz of five hundred flies surfacing from the fetid food when I leave you in your waste.

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MY TORNADO by Joshua Bohnsack

January 9, 2020 · Fiction

While I could reach outside my tornado, it was still difficult to hug my date at the end of the night. He never asked me specifically about the tornado, but he did keep asking if I was okay.

I said, “Yeah. Sure. Thanks for asking,” and knocked the saltshaker over.

He took a pinch of salt and threw it over his left shoulder. “For good luck. It fixes it.”

“Ah.” I tried to do the same, but the salt grains got stuck in my tornado and I became reminded of my failure every few seconds, when the salt would wrap around the cyclone into my field of vision.

When I back away at the end-of-date hug, he says, “I had a nice time, at least.”

“Me too,” I tell him. “Right now is just a weird time for me.”

He crosses his arms. “I get it. I’m just a stock character who you’ll remember as ‘The Salt Guy.’ I’ve been on dates before. I know how this goes.”

The salt guy walks away from my front door and calls me a tease. I watch as he disappears off set.

My roommate asks me how the date went, without turning from the reality show she’s watching. She gathers a handful of popcorn from the bowl in her lap.

“He called me a tease before he walked off set.”

On the TV, restaurant employees look for love, mainly among the rest of the staff. I take off my shoes and they start to circulate around my shins until I kick them out of my tornado’s pull.

Through a mouthful of popcorn, my roommate says, “It’s tough out there.”

I don’t say, ‘You wouldn’t know, you’ve been in here for months,’ but I do tell her it was okay. “It’s the same as the last one. He’s fine, but I’m not. Or at least not right now.”

In the reality show a bartender named Harper tells the camera, “I can have any woman I want, but I want Jessica.” It’s romantic, in a way.

Jessica asks the camera, “Why would Harper want me? He can have any woman he wants.” A customer in the background asks for the check and Jessica continues to talk about Harper and his ability to have women.

“He didn’t say anything about my tornado.”

“Oh honey, you can hardly notice it.” She ingests a handful of popcorn. “That’s good though.”

“He did keep asking if I was okay.”

“That’s bad.”

I reach into her bowl and watch Harper pour a martini for a bar patron who says, “I didn’t order this. I ordered a Hamm’s. It’s a beer. They’re different drinks.” Harper winks at Jessica and my roommate says, “Aw. That’s what you need: someone who feels about you the way Harper feels about Jessica.”

I swallow the popcorn. It’s bland and dry, missing something.

“How can I find someone to feel that way about me if I can’t feel that way about myself?”

She shrugs and eats some popcorn. Jessica tells the camera about Harper’s hair and the general manager says, “You have drinks up at the bar.”

Jessica turns to the camera and says, “Harper is always leaving me gifts like this.”

“The customers are angry,” the manager says. “Our Yelp reviews have been plummeting since you all started doing this.”

Jessica picks up the drinks and Harper leans over the service station. He starts to tell her something, but pulls back and looks to the boom operator. “What’s my next line?” he asks.

The camera pans to the boom operator, who shrugs. There’s a silence between the scene and the commercial break. All I can hear is the crunching of my roommate’s popcorn and the whoosh of my tornado.

“This is bland,” I tell her, meaning the popcorn. I put my hand up and grab a handful of air and salt that had been spinning around my head. I throw the salt over the bowl of popcorn and eat some more.

“Better?” my roommate asks.

“Better, but it’ll never be good enough.”

My roommate looks at me for the first time since I came home from my date. In an ad for a nationwide neighborhood grill, the spokesperson asks why millennials don’t love them.

“Our apps are so cheap. We thought you loved apps. Please come back.”

“This is bland, too,” I say. “Everything about this world is bland.” I stand up and my tornado whooshes. “I don’t need love, and I don’t need any of these things the TV is pushing at me.”

“Don’t bring the TV into this. You’re being salty about your date.”

“It’s not just the date.” My tornado roars around me and my roommate’s popcorn gets sucked in the cyclone. “They’re selling us love while they sell us apps.” The remote whirls around my waist like a hula-hoop. “They sell us love while they’re selling us ad space and air time.” My roommate holds onto the couch to avoid getting sucked in while the furniture skids across the floor into my vortex. “I’m salty, but only because I need something of substance. I’m salty because I’ve been out there trying to find a connection like these two,” I say, thrusting my finger towards the encroaching TV screen, “when all I need is myself.”

The winds around me die down and the furniture lands with a thud. “It’s not even Harper or Jessica’s fault. I mean, he can’t even remember his lines.”

We’re quiet in the wreckage around us.

“I’ll grab a broom. Then I’m going for a walk.”

As I leave the living room, I hear Harper say, “Well, yeah, but I usually know my lines.

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I KNOW ALL ABOUT COMBUSTION by Allie Marini

January 3, 2020 · Fiction

On the night of your funeral, I stand in front of a raging bonfire licking its way up to the blacked-out stars hidden in the sky above & let the snowstorm the radio says is on its way whip oily lashes of my hair across my cheeks. Drag them like a dirty razor kisses the skin to let something bleed out—you know all about the bleeding. How quietly it leaches into pine straw. How pine straw crackles when you throw it into a bonfire burning in rusted-out washing machine drum in the backwoods of Alachua county. You know all about how something damp & damaged sizzles once it surrenders to ignition.

I know all about combustion, the bonfire whispers. I want to burn, I answer, with my lips twisted into a line so thin it becomes a razor. Taste the smoke & blood of you on my tongue. Decide I’ll tell every single one of your secrets tonight & feed you to the fire. They say a snowstorm is coming in Florida & these things are not supposed to happen. I have buried you, am burying you, will bury you every day for the rest of my life. I am buried alive with you & in this moment I don’t yet know that I’m as dead as you are. I will never be the person I was again & neither will you. The difference is that I will haunt the corners of my own life, sleepwalk through everything, seek out danger & violence & misery because they’re the only things that remind me of you. I will seek out poison & drink it down like I’m dying of thirst & really, who’s to say I’m not?

I know the difference between a casket & a coffin—mainly it’s the shape—so in this distinction, you become a coffin & I am the casket. Because at a funeral service what the mourners see is a casket—what the world sees is me—but you’re the coffin. This unbearable grief is the sepulcher & here, we are ghosts, you & I. This night is an exercise in the improbability of weather, the perils of unmanageable fire & unpredictable cold winds skittering soundless & razor sharp across a sky where the stars are blotted out. How with the proper tools a coffin can become a casket—but never in reverse—without adding two sides & wrecking the beauty of geometry, telemetry, function.

I write a secret with a hollow shaft onto the calamus of a starling feather, add every detail I can remember onto its barbs until the vane sparkles against the glow of the fire. I hold it to the flame & watch as the afterfeather goes up in smoke. Honor the connection that signifies Creator. Destroyer of Worlds, you are free to explore a starless night. Well of starling, feathered breath. The feather becomes a coffin, an inferno, a wisp of hot ash, then nothing at all. I whisper your next secret into the bracts & seed scales of a pinecone. Wonder if the whispering is generative, whether anything will take root & grow. What is the purpose of a pinecone? In this moment I’m as dead as you are. Time just hasn’t caught up to me yet. Dream about a pinecone & instead wake up a terebinth tree—good for nothing except a fool’s errand fueled by misguided strength. I feel my teeth sharpen when I pitch it into the burning drum. I taste our death on my blood-whetted tongue.

I know the difference between a casket & a coffin. You are six-sided & ornate. I am rectangular & serviceable. This unbearable grief is our mausoleum & I have become a ghost to chase you deeper into the starless night. Into a forest of trees that wave as though they’re burning in the rusted-out drum of a washing machine. The telemetry of radio waves. Static & wind turn the weather report into a tinny ghost, calling out over the tops of scrub pines, A snowstorm is coming in Florida, these things should not happen. These things should not happen. Drag lashes of dirty hair like rusty razors down my cheeks & let the bonfire warm away the chill of cadaver. Let it smolder like a secret & unfurl into a thread of ash, a column of smoke. Let the residue of the burning blot out every star in the sky & leach into moonlight obscured. Consider the way scrub pine needles soak up the aftermath of a bloodletting. Have a steady hand before the cut.

Another secret, this time written on the edge of a razor blade & meant to bury you so deep even the cicadas can’t dig you back out. I am not a thing made for feathers. You were not a thing meant for wings. Warp like the rusted-out drum of an old washing machine bending under the weight of a funeral fire burning in a haunted canopy. Send a column of smoke straight up into the starless sky & invert it, call it hell & learn to love perdition. I know all about combustion, the bending drum groans against each thrush of the fire.

Every snowflake, like a coffin, is a six-sided thing. Each point indebted to the way in which it crystallizes, so bend the light around me, hide me in a hexagon until I disappear. In the skies high above, a solitary snowflake is forming. These things should not happen. I have found a dram of poison here & have drunk it down. The funeral tastes of campfire & cadaver. Bract by barb, I construct you like a secret & lay us to rest in this coffin. On the night of our funeral, I stand in front of a raging bonfire stoked on secrets, feathers, pinecones. I dream of a scrub pine & awaken as a terebinth tree. Steady my hand before the cut, lick myself into a ghost.

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NEGOTIATIONS by Adrienne Marie Barrios

January 2, 2020 · Fiction

Mar∙riage, /merij/, noun: a series of negotiations.

At least, inside her head, it was. She had these little rhythmic mantras to keep from fucking it up, like my plate is on the left, or the left tray goes on top. She’d repeat it to herself, over and over again, like someone with OCD stuck in a tick—Left tray goes on the top. Left tray goes on the top. It wouldn’t do to burn one half of the muesli. My plate is on the left. My plate is on the left. It wouldn’t do to give him her sandwich; he hated mayonnaise.

These negotiations, these little balancing acts, like bargaining chips between her stomach and her mind, her feelings and her general day-to-day life. Everything she ever did came down to one of these negotiations. These haggling sessions.

I’ll just take one more scoop of veggies. My plate is on the left.

But then I’ll have more veggies than he does.

I didn’t eat lunch, and he ate his sandwich and apples, like he does every day. My plate is on the left.

But he might notice that my burrito is bigger than his.

Well, I’ll keep my veggies, but he can have the extra piece of bacon. I did make five, after all. My plate is on the left.

Yeah…

Better put a couple bell peppers in his. My plate is on the left.

That’s better.

My plate is on the left.

Always, these negotiations. Always weighing the potential outcomes, sussing out what might happen if she did this or that. If she chose what she wanted. If she put herself first. If, for once, she defied his unspoken demands.

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FOREVER by Jennifer London

December 30, 2019 · Fiction

Clara sat on the edge of the tub, smoothing the hem of her dress compulsively. Forever was an awfully long time, she thought. Forever was endless, sprawling, impossible. It was unnatural and unlikely.

But maybe. Perhaps. Forever could be parties and dinners and clinking wine glasses. It could be laughter and snuggles and warm touches in the dark.

For a moment the murmur of voices outside the bathroom door didn’t sound quite so ominous.

But a memory came to her, as sudden and sharp as a slap in the face: her mother and father shouting at each other, a spray of blood on the linoleum floor, the underside of the kitchen table as she shrank into herself to try to disappear.

No. She knew what forever really was. It was bonnets, bassinets, bibs. It was secrets festering in the empty spaces. It was the best years of her life wrapped up in glittering white fabric for other people to write on, twisting and distorting her scenes into acts of look-how-happy-we-are, a parade of we and us and ours.

“Clara?” her grandmother called. “Clara, sweetheart, is everything all right? The ceremony’s about to begin.”

She suddenly couldn’t remember the name of the man perched alongside her on the tiered cake. She remembered his smile, a tender hand running through her hair. But then her father's face swam before her, his lips drawn back in a snarl. You think he'll still want you when he finds out what you really are?

Her breath came in short, quick bursts; her hands shook. Her dress was stifling. With a sharp tug she undid the satin ties going down her back, slipped out of her sparkling straitjacket, and crawled into the empty tub.

Her heels clanked against the porcelain. The tub was icy on her back, a sharp reminder that this was not a nightmare she could wake up from. She hugged her knees to her chest and admired her perfectly manicured toes in their strappy white prisons.

“Clara.” This time it was her father, his voice tight and menacing. “Clara, if you’re not out here in five minutes, so help me, I’ll drag you out myself.” He didn’t need to say and make you regret it.

The only response that came from her mouth was a kind of wail, a sound at once foreign and honest. A tear slid down her face, dragging a clump of mascara with it.

The voices outside seemed to be getting louder, a cacophony of hellos and how-do-you-dos and long-time-no-sees.

You'll screw this up, just like you screw up everything else.

She tried to force herself to get dressed and go back out there to play her part. Her makeup was already on, her costume was waiting for her on the floor, the audience outside was clamoring for the show to start. She mustn’t let them down. So what if some vacuous great aunt had congratulated her on finding "a man just like your father"?

She licked her lips. The tang of salt on her tongue was comforting, its bitterness a truth to hold onto.

Nobody wants damaged goods.

She watched the shadows moving under the door and felt like she might burst with her hatred, her anger at their inconstancy, the way the light played with the dark as if they were lovers, brazen and unafraid. She leaned her head back against the tile wall, and a ripple of cold raced down her neck and her shoulders until it reached her fingertips.

“Clara.” Her father again. Shadows filled the line under the door, driving away the light, and she could almost feel her father’s hot breath on her face, his hands moving between her legs. “Are you coming?”

The roar in her ears was deafening.

She plugged the drain, turned the faucet on, and watched the tub fill with hot water around her. Forever didn't have to be frightening. She closed her eyes. Forever could be the warmth that suffused her limbs as the water rose, the sudden hush as she slid down to plunge her head under the surface. Forever could be quiet and peaceful. Safe.

Forever could be her escape.

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SOMEPLACE ELSE by Emma Stough

December 28, 2019 · Fiction

I am here now. Wide unexplained sky. How did I get here? Wait. Let’s stop. No, let’s start.

We are here now. Again, I think.

Purple wallpaper. My family huddled around the TV watching Seinfeld re-runs. I am squeezed between Aggressive Older Brother and Sensitive Younger Brother—I am boiling with discontent.

My family huddles like this for decades. The living room stays the same: plush green sofa (embedded with chips and cat hairs, is the cat still alive?) and purple wallpaper. Purple like the dregs of the bitter plum tea. Purple like the dying breath of stormy sunset. Purple like purple knows best.

Dark walls shelter my family forever. Safe.

I go to school because someone has to learn something. My best subject is shapes. I fall in love with shapes and refuse to let them out of my sight. I am put into an independent study because that’s how good I am. My mentor is a bristly old man called Stanley. Our relationship is loving because he trusts me and I am eager to be trusted. When I struggle or get angry he tells me to close my eyes and picture the most comforting thing I can imagine:

Purple wallpaper: Mom, Dad, Aggressive Older Brother, Sensitive Younger Brother, cat. Popcorn and silly TV glow splashed over our faces. We are full of understanding and empathy. We’ve been watching people playact for years. We pretend.

I get so good at shapes that they recommend me for a special program upstate. I pack all my belongings: secondhand copy of The Road, silverware, patchwork quilt that someone else’s grandmother made. When I am ready to leave, I find my family where I left them. Wrapped so lovingly in purple wallpaper. Safe together.

Goodbye, I tell them. I love you very much.

On the TV someone says, I didn’t think this was a serious relationship, you know. I didn’t think this would last.

What amount of distance is too much between who you used to be and who you will become?

In my special shapes program, I meet people that have never seen purple wallpaper. They are from faraway states and countries with long histories. They have beautiful faces and stories filled with grief. I want to hold them and listen to their breathing. They politely laugh at how serious I am.

I enter a strange shape of my own: lonely, discontent. I take up water aerobics and befriend women that have lost husbands and brothers to wars. I float in the water on my back, tracing the shape of the white-rafted ceiling, static rows of rectangular light. It makes me feel better to think the ceiling is likely never to fall into the water.

I call my family and Sensitive Younger Brother talks to me for hours and hours about the shows I’ve missed. He says, We noticed you left because your shape is missing from between our bodies. Where did you go?

I trace the cord of the phone between my fingers. It spirals boldly. This is a message.

I live in an apartment on the top floor, the fifth floor. It is small but sufficient, teeming with ferns and ill-matched patterns. Sometimes when the elevator is broken, I pause in the stairwell to think about what kinds of shapes might be waiting for me elsewhere. I start wearing mostly black and grey because I think that is the person I want to be.

There is a girl in my classes with lilac hair. Hints of purple wallpaper. She shows me new shapes; Honeysuckle-filled vase on bedside table, imprint of each head on each pillow, what saddened pit my heart becomes when I cry. Hold me carefully, she warns. I’m about to fall apart.

You have to be romantic to think that here will lead to anywhere else.

One day I graduate with accolades and handshakes from those who taught me. I feel incredibly brave. My family sends a card and apologizes that they couldn’t make it: The new season of their favorite cooking competition show aired, and they didn’t want to miss it. I write back a long letter full of new shapes and include a purple leaf I saved especially for them.

My lavender girl takes me to a fancy restaurant and asks if I plan to stay or go. I ask her if she would pose the same question to a river. She says if you feel like water then let me drink you in so you can hold up the shape of me. I ask her how she feels about cooking competition shows.

When I return to the purple wallpaper not much has changed—is there one less brother? The TV light has aged my parents beyond their years. They held me as a child and reach their hands out to me, draw me back into the glow. This is my heart, I say, and they look up at my purple-haired heart. They think she is another TV she is so beautiful. They are confused; is she pretending? They begin to feel unsafe. They begin to question. I try to reassure them. I point to all the reassuring, familiar shapes around us: circle lightbulb, rectangle picture frame, diamond clock, star lampshade, zigzag carpet, octagonal shelf, square TV. Square TV. Square TV.

It’s okay to look at something else, I tell them. I am whispering from my throat. It burns, suddenly raw. My family is scared of me. The purple wallpaper dims. Who is retreating from whom?

We leave that place. I find the shape of the sky—wide, changing, indefinable—reassuring. Like a warm wool coat. Wrap it around me.

My lover calls to me and says some things are mean to be held at a distance. Keep the purple, leave the rest. I guess that’s where we started. And where are we now?

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GIRLS OF THE ARBORETUM by Brianne M. Kohl

December 27, 2019 · Fiction

The girls of the arboretum are just girls. Nothing more, nothing less. They do not speak to one another. Why would they? The wind blows through their branches. Everything that must be said has already been said. The world is over four billion years old.

When no one is watching, the girls pluck spider webs from each other’s hair and stretch the silk across the grass, blade to blade. They spend hours measuring the spiral burrs of a pine cone. In moonlight, they find constellations within the veins of Maple leaves. The girls of the arboretum have not yet discovered the stars.

The horticulturalist is a kind old man with creaky knees and eyes that water. At night he needs an oxygen mask to sleep. The girls would be baffled by the need if they could see. Sometimes, he leaves the girls presents of honey and bread, fruit and soda pop. He snips their branches, kisses their knuckles with his shears. The girls of the arboretum would forgive him anything.

His apprentice, a handsome young man, does the heavy lifting. He plants, prunes, sprays, waters and weeds. He digs holes and forces roots down. He sees the apprentice trying to root a branch and places a hand on the apprentice’s shoulder.

Not like that, the horticulturalist says, like this, and splits the band of bark between two girdling cuts on the branch. Never cut into the wood. They feel it.

The apprentice takes a deep breath in through his nose. He’s sick of the horticulturalist warning him to stay away from the girls.

They are beautiful, the old man says. But consider the Foxglove. Lily of the Valley. Consider Delphiniums. All lovely, all deadly.

The apprentice complains to coworkers that the horticulturalist must go. He is too old. He speaks of plants like a lover. He loves the trees too much.

Trees are just trees, he says. Even when they are clothed as girls. Nothing more. Nothing less.

The apprentice thinks the girls are wild like a rabbit is wild, like a heartbeat or a sagging Willow. He is right. The horticulturalist thinks the girls are wild like a storm is wild, like a cancer or a redwood. He is right.

The girls of the arboretum make a game out of everything. They stand at pond’s edge, peek over hedgerows, run through open woodland. Tools go missing only to be found hidden deep in the briars or in the hollows of dead trees.

The girls braid their hair beneath the honey locusts and eat ripe watermelon, seeds, rinds and all. They kiss one another with mouths full of melon. They know the apprentice watches them.

The girls feel his gaze like the silk of the webworm. He defoliates them with his eyes. When he approaches, the girls become deer, tip top white tails, thin legs. They fall to all fours and scatter. The apprentice laughs and a dozen black eyes turn to stare at him.

The apprentice is not afraid. After all, what is frightening about a tree or a deer or a girl? But the horticulturalist is aghast. Never laugh at the girls. Offer them sweets if you have wronged them. Leave them be.

But, as he works, the apprentice imagines tying the girls of the arboretum down, forcing their roots into place. When they steal his trench spade, he spends the afternoon hunting it and pictures burning the girls, blighting them, cutting them down. If they were gone, the horticulturalist would go too. It’s all he thinks about anymore. It spurs him to action.

It’s so simple, the apprentice rationalizes. You cannot allow disease to take hold in the forest. It will spread, root to root. The girls are a disease. Nothing more, nothing less.

The horticulturalist watches his apprentice walk down the path to the tree line, ax in hand. The old man rushes to his office and grabs a basket. He fills it with whatever he can find in the kitchen: apples, green grapes, a half-eaten chocolate bar. As he runs down the path, he scoops up acorns and adds them to the basket.

It is too late. The girls are naked, their skin full of splinters and barbs. They have hearts of ash, black poplar and oak. The apprentice stands before them, jaw tight. He grips the ax with a righteous fist.

The horticulturalist loves the girls of the arboretum, he would do anything for them. He always keeps his tools sharp; he never prunes in the fall. He watches carefully for pests. But the girls are wild like a rain drop is wild. Rain drops build and build. They become a swollen river. Water will not be denied.

When the screaming starts, the horticulturalist drops the basket, spilling his offerings across the bed of pine needles and crisp leaves. He walks away slowly. He does not to worry for the girls. They have called the apprentice to them. The girls of the arboretum never summon what they cannot banish.

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THE SWADDLE by Janelle Bassett

December 26, 2019 · Fiction

I am at the sink, rinsing a food processor blade, when I hear the cry of a tiny baby. Carrot bits go down the drain, easy, but the insistent wailing isn’t going anywhere. I assume the sound is some sort of inner-ear repercussion from the electronic-tornado buzzing of the food processor, yet the sound continues even after I open my mouth wide to pop my ears. A baby is definitely crying and it’s an I’ve-been-left-alone-which-I-am-not-built-for cry.

I look up and think back, “Didn’t my babies grow past the baby stage?”

I consult the refrigerator where, sure enough, their recent school pictures confirm that my children are old enough to wear collars, sit upright, have teeth growing from their gums, and act natural when exposed to sudden flashes of unnatural light.

Have the neighbors left their baby outside? I don’t judge other parents (except constantly, inside my head) but I might have to call someone if the Rheingold’s have forced that baby to do yard work.

I walk to the other side of the kitchen to get a clear view of their backyard. No baby. Just an upside-down bucket. I don’t think the Rheingolds would leave their baby outside under a bucket—they put an awful lot of effort into their Christmas decorations.

I swear the crying must be coming from my own yard. It’s that close—I feel a certain duty. I dry my hands and head out the back door.

The baby isn’t even hiding, it’s on top of the picnic table. The baby would make a terrible picnic host— swaddled arms cannot scoop, serve, fetch or pour. All those tears would water down the potato salad. I say “shhh” to my incessant inner chatter and to the swaddled baby crying atop my backyard picnic table.

I realize the baby is translucent and that this means that I am having some sort of breakdown. An auditory hallucination led me toward a visual hallucination. I don’t like where this is heading. If this baby has a smell I am really in some trouble, mentally. I bend down and sniff. When my face is so-close the crying stops, or the hallucination mutes. The scent: a mix of blood, leather, and that smell the furnace makes the first time it kicks on for the season.

The baby and I stare at each other. It looks up at me with such love and acceptance that I feel rather guilty for looking back down with eyes that make accusations like, “You are not real. This is not happening. You are alarming evidence of my deteriorating mental health. You look a great deal like my father-in-law.”

The crying resumes. I’ve broken whatever promises I made with the earlier proximity of my face. I pick up the baby because it seems healthy to follow your instincts even as you’re falling apart. As soon as my hands touch the baby its skin and blanket become as solid and opaque as everything else in my backyard. Now the table-baby and the heartleaf brunnera are on an equal footing.

It stops screaming and I know it is my baby because I hear a voice in my head saying, “I am your baby.”

“You can talk? That doesn’t make any sense!” We both laugh at that, my laugh emitting out into the grass, the baby’s giggling between my ears.

“If we are touching you will know what I’m saying. I am the baby you are too selfish to have.”

I turn the baby over to see if it has a tag or a tether and also to punish it for calling me selfish.

I use my maternal-wisdom voice to say, “It’s not selfish to know your limits.”

“Okay Mommy, I am the baby you are too limited to have.”

My other children are also smart asses. My other children have also had my number from day one. I kiss the baby’s forehead and ask how it ended up on the picnic table even though I’d diligently prevented its existence.

“The short answer is that I wanted you that badly. I wanted you enough to manifest on my own, all while knowing you don’t want me.”

Look baby, this is exactly the kind of hungry need I was avoiding when I decided not to have you. “Do you have a name?”

“Lou.”

“Do you have a gender?”

“Why? Would you have me if I came with a certain gender?”

“No.”

“If you want to know my gender you’ll have to birth me and then keep me alive me long enough for me to know myself.”

“That’s a lot to ask.”

“Admit it, you think of me just as much as I think of you.”

I stick my face into Lou’s neck. “Of course I do. I am a walking hormone swamp. But it would be irresponsible to bring you here now. The planet is dying.”

“I’d love to witness a thing like that. What a gift you could give me: consciousness with which to view the great collapse.”

I cup Lou’s cheek. “If I had you, there would be fewer resources for your siblings: parental attention, money, hot water. It wouldn’t be fair to them. They got here first.”

“I’ll have you know they pushed and shoved to get to the front of the line. They maimed and belittled!”

“I’m sorry, Lou. Are you cold? Do you want to go inside?”

“Inside your womb?”

“No, dear. Inside the house.”

Lou cries a bit, setback, and then says, “I will love you completely despite your many faults. I’ll never ask for anything. I’ll wear hand-me-downs and eat table scraps. If you don’t like the name Lou I’d happily be called after one of your great-grandparents or the offspring of a bottom-tier celebrity. You don’t even have to look me in the eye! I just want to hold a bug in my hand and taste vanilla bean.”

“Oh Lou,” I say. “If you promised to never come out—a permanent pregnancy, an ongoing residency—then I’d do it. I think I could carry you as long as you were forced to go where I wanted.”

“Is that your best offer?”

“Yes. I’m not proud of it.”

“That helps.”

Someone nearby starts a lawn mower and I instinctively pull Lou into my breasts. “How do I put you in there?”

“Wait! Are you sure this is your best offer? I will wear any Halloween costume you choose and let you take as many photos as you’d like. I’ll pose without any regard for my own self respect. I could even carry a small broom and dustpan and sweep up all my own footprints and crumbs. And… I don’t mean to brag, but I will be your favorite. Hands down, your favorite. A joy. A delight. A human stocking stuffer.”

“You sound like the perfect constant presence, Lou—a right-nice inborn companion.” I squeeze so tight and push so hard that if Lou’s body were real it would be in great pain. But instead of being injured, Lou is being absorbed.

Lou quickly says, “You could be more generous. You could challenge yourself and then grow from it” before being fully smooshed into my body.

Lou is gone from my arms. I remember the stew I was making before being summoned outside. Lou says, “Can I have stew?” from within and I sigh so heavily I wonder if Lou could’ve been dislodged.

Before going inside, I place my hand on my belly and we settle our terms. Lou will remain quiet inside me—observing, recording—until we are in bed, alone, the siblings asleep nearby. At that point of the day I’ll be available for questions—we will engage, we will process and if Lou wants to jump and flail I’ll put my hand on the site of that jumping.

I go in and Lou goes quiet. I finish stew preparations, wipe the counter, and send my closest friend a text that says, “I hope menopause comes for me soon because every month my PMS gets deeper and stranger.”

I walk to the bus stop and retrieve my children. I greet them and in response they hand me their belongings so they can run ahead, unburdened.

I can feel Lou wanting to ask for a backpack.

At dinner my partner asks, “Since when do you put ketchup on cornbread? Don’t you hate ketchup?” I couldn’t tell him, “Lou wants it. Lou needs it. Lou is ecstatic about experiencing ketchup.”

After reading my children a chapter from a book about a family of bickering yet relatable armadillos I say goodnight, kiss their necks and try not to picture them forcefully kicking, slapping, or shoving Lou away from the front of the line.

Downstairs, my partner and I read and hold each other’s feet. Then he’s shaking my foot, waking me, telling me to go to bed.

I’ve barely laid down before Lou asks, “What did that tweet mean… about how people who are reluctant to pee in the shower probably have sad inhibited sex?”

“You can see out of my eyes?”

“Of course.”

“This is not how a pregnancy works, Lou. You’re supposed to be captivated and fulfilled by the sound of my heartbeat.”

“We both know this is a special pregnancy. Get up. Let’s go outside and lick the grass! I want to taste grass immediately.”

“No, it’s time to go to sleep. These are the rhythms of a day. Let’s talk about the sunset.”

“What was that feeling we had when we closed the door to my siblings’ room? I didn’t like it.”

“That was relief and regret and longing and tenderness.”

“What was that sensation whipping us as we rolled in the trash bin?”

“That was wind.”

“Why did you scrape the dinner plates into the trash?”

“That was waste.”

“Can we lick the grass now? I’m awake to it all. I’m not a bit tired.”

“No, Lou. I am going to fall asleep.” I put my hand on my lower abdomen. “I can touch your dance first, if you’d like.”

“The grass the grass the grass.”

“I said no and I meant it.”

Lou adds movement to the chant—pendulum elbows poke and stretch my skin to the beat of “grass grass grass.”

I roll onto my stomach, pressing my weight into the bed, trying to end this day.

“You push me and yet I can… feel myself growing. My intestines just developed a new capacity. My forearm can nearly flex. I think the spurts come when you deny me the experiences I need, Mommy. If you don’t respond to my impulses I’ll become a head to push. Life is insistent, Mommy. I’m a steamroller, Mommy. It’s all chemical, Mommy. My growth is your growth is all toward the end, Mommy. The grass grass grass. My lightening could be your strike, mommy. I could. Let me! Let me. And when I’m all said and done we can call it your decision.”

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