Libby Banks

Documentation of Absence

FINAL REPORT: Project ECLIPSE (Ethno-Cartographic Logging of Intermittent Perceptual Settlement Enclave)

To: The Regional Development Authority

From: Dr. Eric Striker, Lead Investigator

Subject: Conclusion of field study regarding spatial anomaly at coordinates 30.761393017998063, -96.08541285480268

I have failed to provide the documentation you requested. I have no verifiable photographs. My field notes, when reviewed directly, are illegible. The following is not a record of what I found.

1.0: Initial Sighting and Phenomenological Description

I was recruited to analyze the anomaly on 23 October. During my initial pedestrian survey, in my peripheral vision, I registered structures inconsistent with existing topographic maps. Initial architectural impressions: slate roofs and brick buildings. The phenomenon persisted solely as a peripheral recurrence. When attempting direct ocular engagement, only grass was perceived.

The enclave demonstrated stable, internal weather systems. I smelled baking bread and heard children at play. A subject appeared daily at a central well.

The village was undeniably real. It could not be seen under the conditions of direct observation.

2.0: Methodological Attempts

2.1: Photographic Documentation: A high-resolution camera was positioned on a tripod to record directly while I maintained peripheral visual contact. Result: 236 images of an empty field. Conclusion: the photographic lens constitutes a form of direct observation.

2.2: Acoustic Recording: Digital audio equipment captured wind and avian fauna, but failed to record any of the perceptible human activity (voices, a bell tower) that I could hear clearly while standing in the same location.

2.3: Geodetic Measurement: All measurements returned data consistent with a flat, empty grassland. The structures present in phenomenological experience were absent in all empirical data.

2.4: Census Attempt: Attempts to count inhabitants of anomaly were ineffectual due to incapacity for direct observation. However, a relational dynamic is possible. For five months, I have waved to the woman at the central well from a distance, using peripheral vision. She waves back.

2.5: Corroborative Witness (Subject B): I brought my daughter, age 10. She identified the settlement immediately in peripheral vision.  She asked to visit the settlement, and turned toward it. Upon her looking directly, the village vanished from her line of sight. She has not mentioned the village since. I sometimes observe her gazing past things with her head tilted.

2.6: Written Description: Attempts to document my observations in a field notebook appeared accurate while writing, but all notes devolved into nonsensical scribbles upon subsequent review. Hypothesis: immediate transcription constitutes direct capture. This report, however, is written from memory. It describes the echo.

3.0: Analysis and Unverifiable Theory

The village exists in the moment before perception.

I cannot determine whether direct observation harms the village or merely destroys the observer's capacity to perceive it. Whether the village would cease to exist if all peripheral observers were eliminated remains unknown.

4.0: Project Scope and Ethical Conclusion

Your commission, sourced from reports of a "spatial anomaly," was clear. You needed to know if anything of value existed in the planned location of "Springborne Commercial & Residential Expansion." I was hired to perform the advanced work of erasure.

Here is my central finding: if I had succeeded in documenting the village completely, there would be no village in my perception left to document.

The village exists and is inhabited. Life continues there.

Relationship is possible - I wave to the woman at the well most mornings. Knowledge of internal workings of the village is possible - the children play in the late afternoon. Community is possible - we coexist without demanding each other's full legibility.

I was hired to document so development could proceed.

Some truths die when pinned down. Let this one live.

ADDENDUM (Filed 6 Months Post-Initial Report)

Three subsequent researchers have been commissioned to study the phenomenon. Each succeeded in obtaining the data I declined to collect: comprehensive photographic archives, full-spectrum acoustic analysis, and topographical scans. Their reports are flawless, comprehensive, irrefutable. All three confirm: nothing exists there.

They produced verifiable documentation of absence. I preserved presence.

The Regional Development Authority has approved the project. Construction begins next month.

---

Libby Banks is a therapist and writer in New Mexico. Her work explores neurodivergence, legibility, and the ethics of knowing. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in HAD, Wordgathering, Heavy Feather Review, Disappointed Housewife, and elsewhere.

Zach Shea

Maslow’s Heirarchy of Scam Texts

From: 608-315-5408

To: 978-734-9891

Hey, are you on your way?

(Sent: 6:20 PM; Read: 6:21 PM)

978-734-9891

Who is this?

(Sent: 6:23 PM; Read: 6:33 PM)

608-315-5408

It’s Becky from work!

(Sent: 6:34 PM; Read: 6:36 PM)

978-734-9891

I don’t know a Becky. I think you have the wrong number.

(Sent: 6:36 PM; Read: 6:53 PM)

608-315-5408

Is this Marcus?

(Sent: 6:55 PM; Read: 6:56 PM)

978-734-9891

No, I think you have the wrong number. 

(Sent: 6:57 PM; Read: 11:36 PM)

608-315-5408

Oh lol, sorry about that. How are you doing?

(Sent: 11:37 PM; Read: 11:37 PM)

978-734-9891

Is this a scam?

(Sent: 11:38 PM; Read: 11:40 PM)

608-315-5408

Haha, no, not a scam. I just wanted to know how you were doing. You seem nice.

(Sent: 11:55 PM; Read: 11:56 PM)

978-734-9891

How would you know? We’ve barely talked. 

(Sent: 11:58 PM; Read: 12:15 AM)

608-315-5408

I just have a good feeling about you. I think we could really be good friends if we got to know each other. What do you say?

(Sent: 12:18 AM; Read: 12:19 AM; Reported as spam)

###

From: 978-448-6026

To: 978-734-9891

Hello! My name is Emily, and I’m a recruiter at Indeed. We came across your resume, and we were really impressed by your background and experience. We are currently offering a flexible, part-time opportunity that you can work on in your free time, helping merchants update data, as well as increase visibility and bookings. The work is 100% remote, and we will provide free training. The daily salary ranges from $300 to $500, and you can receive payment same-day, in addition to maternity and paternity leave, and 15 to 20 days of paid annual leave. Other benefits include a health and dental plan, child care, and free gas and groceries monthly, and eight hours of guaranteed restful sleep a night. The only requirements are you must be 21+ years old.

If you are interested, please contact us on WhatsApp: +19784486026

(Sent 12:44 PM; Read 12:53 PM; Reported as spam)

#####

From: 608-315-5408

To: 978-734-9891

Are you feeling better today?

(Sent: 11:13 AM; Read: 11:18 AM)

978-734-9891

What?

(Sent: 11:19 AM; Read: 12:01 PM)

608-315-5408

You seemed grumpy last time we talked. I wanted to see if you felt any better.

(Sent: 12:01 PM; Read: 12:03 PM)

978-734-9891

Who is this?

(Sent: 12:04 PM; Read: 12:48 PM)

608-315-5408

Becky from the office, remember?

(Sent: 12:50 PM; Read: 12:51 PM)

978-734-9891

I told you I don’t know a Becky. I’m blocking this number. Please leave me alone.

(Sent: 12:52 PM; Read: 1:13 PM)

608-315-5408

I’m sorry 😢 I hope your day gets better. Let’s talk later, okay?

(Sent: 1:36 PM; Read: 1:38 PM; Number Blocked)

#####

From: Danny (Cousin)

To: 978-734-9891 + 34 others

Life as a man is wanting sleep you can't get. Because your mind and soul are plagued by battles—past, present, and future. Sleeping soundly is for overtly homosexual men. The world is at war, people are dying, and BTC breaks a new all-time high every day. Money moving in every single direction. Elections are overthrown in “democratic” nations.

Do you think Putin sleeps well? Trump?

Lol. NO.

WINNERS OPERATE IN WAR MODE.

Nightmares are masculine. You should shoot awake with sweat multiple times a night. That’s why you need a nootropic that can keep up with your warrior drive. Do you think your ancestors slept soundly? They hunted mammoths to extinction and still had the energy to please their women. Because they knew what “experts” want to hide from you.

Alpha Power™ is not just a supplement. It’s a network of alphas mentoring each other, fostering entrepreneurship, men’s health, and a warrior mindset. Alpha Power™ can improve cognition, reduce fatigue, clear up that lump on your dick the doctor said was just impacted skin, clear up the congested follicle on your balls, build muscle, burn fat, and reduce acne.

Reply I’M IN if you’re ready for the alpha life.

(Sent: 3:18 AM; Read: 8:32 AM; Left Group)

#####

From: 608-315-5408

To: 978-734-9891

Good morning sunshine 🌞 Did you see the moon last night? It was so big!

(Sent: 8:18 AM; Read: 8:53 PM)

978-734-9891

I thought I blocked this number. How are you texting me?

(Sent: 8:53 AM; Read: 9:15 AM)

608-315-5408

I was worried about you. I know you’ve been working really hard. I hope you are taking some time to rest.

(Sent: 9:17 AM; Read: 9:17 AM)

978-734-9891

What are you talking about? You don’t know me.

(Sent: 9:18 AM; Read: 9:49 AM)

608-315-5408

I know you deserve to let yourself relax once in a while.

(Sent: 9:50 AM; Read: 9:51 AM)

978-734-9891

What kind of scam is this? What exactly do you want from me?

Hello?

Are you there?

(Sent: 9:52 AM; Read: 11:41 AM)

#####

From: lauramehard@yahoo.com

To: 978-734-9891

😘👉👌💦💦❤️ I have a special surprise for you tonight 🔞 Don't delete this one babe 😘Chat with real girls in Roanoke who are horny and ready to f🔞ck 🍆🍆👀🤤😍 Talk to them about anything 🍈🍈 👅Tell them about how lonely it is living all alone in a new city, everyone you love a thousand miles away 🍑😈 Or how hard it is to make new friends, how you feel like you’re constantly trying too hard or not hard enough 💋💋Read them your poetry, the stuff that no one seems to get🍒👅💦🤯They will text you back and always let you know that you aren’t annoying them 🌶️🔥🔥And they will never remind you that self-consciousness is just narcissism masked as a socially acceptable anxiety 🙈🙊

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(Sent: 11:49 PM; Read: 1:04 AM; Reported as spam)

#####

From: 608-315-5408

To: 978-734-9891

I’m sorry I didn’t see your last text! How have you been feeling? Are things getting less stressful?

(Sent: 6:37 AM; Read: 7:06 AM)

978-734-9891

Why do you care? This is just a scam, right?

I read something the other day about scams where you try to make someone fall in love with you and then get them to buy crypto or something. Is that what this is?

(Sent: 8:44 AM; Read: 12:34 PM)

608-315-5408

I’m not trying to scam you.

(Sent: 12:35 PM; Read: 12:35 PM)

978-734-9891

Then why do you keep texting me?

(Sent: 12:38 AM; Read: 1:04 PM)

608-315-5408

Because I’m worried about you.

(Sent: 1:16 PM; Read: 1:17 PM)

978-734-9891

Why?

(Sent: 3:08 PM; Read: 3:09 PM)

608-315-5408

Because you’re a good person. And you deserve to be happy.

(Sent: 3:15 PM; Read: 3:19 PM; Deleted)

#####

From: +44 7957 155143

To: 978-734-9891

Hi, I know one of your passwords is hannah061994!!

Your computer has been infected by my private malware, and it gives me full access to all your private accounts. I can also spy on you using your webcam and see the rest of your search history and all your documents.

I’ve collected all your private data and saved it. I know you’re thirty-three years old. I know you were making 60k a year. I also know you quit your job to “focus on your writing.” I’ve read your poetry and it’s shit. Everyone who reads it knows it’s shit, but they’re being nice to you. I can publish all of it on the dark web where very sick people are. They will read it all and tell you the truth. You’re a fraud. You waste everyone’s time. You’re just a burden, and I’ll show everyone.

I will delete everything if you send me $1200 in BTC. It’s a very good deal. I’ll give you three days to pay.

I have access to your inbox so I will know when you read this.

My bitcoin wallet is: 1A1zP1eP5QGefi2DMPTfTL5SLmv7DivfNa

(Sent: 12:30 PM; Read: 5:30 PM; Forwarded to cybercrimePD@roanokeva.gov)

#####

From: 978-734-9891

To: 608-315-5408

You’re wrong. I don’t deserve to be happy.

I’m such a fucking mess.

I was out at the bar the other day with some friends, and I managed to make everyone laugh with a couple of jokes. It felt so fucking good, and all I could think about for the rest of the night was doing everything I could not to fuck it up. I get like that and I start overthinking every single word I say. I feel like a fucking robot pretending to be human. It’s fucking disgusting. I just want to be normal. Why can’t I be fucking normal!?!!

Sorry. I’m just having a rough day.

I just feel like such a waste of space sometimes.

No, it’s more like I’m taking up too much space.

Like everyone else is where they belong, but I’m fucking it all up. Pushing everything out of my way. I just want to fit.

Sorry, I don’t know why I am sending you this. I know it’s fucking stupid.

(Sent: 2:03 AM; Read: 2:04 AM)

608-315-5408

I know exactly how you feel.

(Sent: 2:04 AM; Read: 2:04 AM)

978-734-9891

Thank you Becky.

Sometimes I have this dream where there’s this hole in the universe, and it’s my hole, the hole I fit into perfectly, it’s the place where I belong, but I can’t find it. I can feel it tugging at me, trying to pull me in, but no matter where I look, I can’t find it. I just want to feel like I’m in the spot where I’m supposed to be.

(Sent: 2:04 AM; Read: 9:15 AM)

608-315-5408

I’m sorry, that sounds really hard.

Have you considered investing in crypto? I’ve been using this new app to invest and it’s really helped me obtain financial freedom. I can work from home, set my own hours, and I’m my own boss: https://l.wl.co/l?u=/is.gd/OPl6kd

(Sent: 9:17 AM; Read: 9:17 AM; Reported as Spam)

---

Zach Shea (he/they) is an emerging writer from Madison, WI, and an MFA candidate at Hollins University. His work has previously appeared in F(r)iction's “Dually Noted” series.

Craig Stockwell

Doctor Kissinger

On one lovely October weekend, my boyfriend Hao and I decided to visit New York from Providence to see a drag show. We were staying in Manhattan, so we decided to visit Central Park. Hao was holding my arm, and we were enjoying the sunny, cool day. Unlike Hao, however, I was unable to, shall we say, enjoy the moment.

I observed, “For fuck’s sake, everything about this city is a fucking EA microtransaction festival. Like New Netherlands never ended, and the patroons became ‘asset managers,’ or just remained as landlords. Pay for this, pay for that, a service charge for things they don’t tell you about, tips added onto bills and expected toute de suite, toute de même.[1]”

“MY GOD, WILL YOU SHUT UP! YOU SOUND LIKE FOX NEWS IN FRENCH!”

I did not. I proceeded, “—And my God, the literary scene. Yes, everyone in America wants to read about the same damned neighborhoods in Brooklyn: I have a perfect mental map of what that bodega looks like off that subway line. Who the hell cares? Know who lived in Brooklyn? Fucking Lovecraft. No wonder people still talk about Gordon Lish and Raymond Carver, because that’s when corporate money paid for copy and their booze bill—”

“SHUT. THE. FUCK. UP. YOU. ASS!” Hao yelled back.

I stopped, exhaled, looked out at The Lake, and then said, “Fine. I’m probably hangry. I could use a hot dog.” So, we made for the southern side of Central Park to leave.

After a bit, Hao said, “Daddy, I need to go to the bathroom.”

“Okay, let’s find a toilet.”

Not long after, we found one, so Hao went in. I didn’t have to go myself, so I stood outside. After some time appreciating the greenery, I noticed a very aged man sitting alone in a wheelchair. He had white curly hair, and his head was bent down and forward. He was wearing a dark grey suit, black tie, Brown oxfords, and old man cotton socks. No one else was with him.

“No, it can’t be…” I muttered as I started walking towards him instinctively. “Oh my God, it is. It’s Henry Kissinger,” I gasped.

My neurospicy mind was piqued. The architect of late Twentieth Century American foreign policy. The cause of most of the world’s problems today. Decrepitude personified. I had to talk to him about China, or AI, or anything. I had recently seen interviews with him where he had a delusional sense that he alone could solve US-PRC diplomatic issues. My brain began churning. The possibilities were too exciting. What if I just… took Kissinger?

To avoid spending the rest of my days in Guantanamo Bay, I had to frame this as a fun expedition for Kissinger. He needed to want to go with me. Thus, I decided to frame my “outing” with him in a way he would relish.

“Doctor Kissinger,” I said as I looked into his sad, depressed, lonely face. His mind was still sharp, but his body was a round ball of realpolitik. His sad face looked up at me.

I said, “We must get you to Beijing, because only you and you alone have the power to resolve the current diplomatic issues between the US and China.”

Kissinger stared into my eyes. He said, “Only I can do this. But the politicians do not listen to me. They refuse my advice, experience, and knowledge. The young people these days, they reduce everything to emotion. They think bombing Cambodia made me a war criminal, but no, I was right, and they will remain wrong. Biden and Trump do not understand the depth of their ignorance. I am still capable of determining outcomes.”

“Precisely, Doctor Kissinger,” I cajoled. “The time has come for your final, penultimate return to Beijing. You and I shall show Xi Jinping the force and power of American dominance, as you did with Mao in 1971.”

“I opened relations with China in 1971 under President Nixon,” Kissinger murmured.

“Yes, Doctor Kissinger, and you shall do so again…” I was now standing behind his wheelchair and disengaging the brakes.

“I shall return to Beijing… The third world will again obey the dictates of American interests. The good old days shall return. I miss Gerald Ford…”

We began walking together, me pushing Doctor Kissinger, through Central Park. I asked, “Doctor Kissinger, do you like ice cream?”

“Yes, I would like a vanilla soft serve.”

“Very well, Doctor Kissinger, I shall buy you an ice cream.”

I wheeled Kissinger over to an ice cream truck once I saw one and bought us each a vanilla soft serve, “Here, Doctor Kissinger, enjoy.”

“Thank you, young man. Few people your age appreciate my genius. Tell me, what do you know of my work?”

I knew exactly what to do here. I stopped driving Kissinger for a moment, unzipped my backpack, and handed him my copy of Edward Luttwak’s Coup d’Etat: a Practical Handbook. He started laughing as well as a nearly 100-year-old man could.

“YOU KNOW THE SECRET OF POWER! YES! WE SHALL RETURN ORDER TO FOREIGN POLICY! MY LIFE WILL HAVE MEANING AGAIN!”

“Yes, Doctor Kissinger. Here, have a napkin, you’re getting ice cream on your tie.”

“I appreciate your sincerity. Many people would simply ignore the ice cream on my tie and make me look silly. But you know that, to paraphrase Otto von Bismarck, honesty is the most confusing weapon a diplomat has.”

“I do, Doctor Kissinger. Tell me about ‘the good old days.’”

Kissinger rambled about the 1970s as I walked him towards the edge of the park. I knew I had to take Kissinger somewhere besides simply around the park, as I’d be very visible with him. Plus, I was getting hungry, and I wanted pastrami on rye. Fuck the hot dog.

At this time, Hao called me. I declined the phone call and texted him back a picture of Kissinger’s bald patch and him holding onto his soft serve. Hao texted back “PUT. THE. FUCKING. WAR. CRIMINAL. BACK.”

Instead, I replied to Hao that I would be taking Kissinger to Katz’s Deli on East Houston Street, and he should meet us there. Hao took a bit of persuasion to convince, which is to say, he reacted very aggressively until I pointed out that I was the one paying for lunch anyway, and the idea of meeting the man who opened relations with Mao was too strong for Hao to ignore. Besides, this was too absurd to not see through.

“Doctor Kissinger,” I asked, “would you like to go to a deli?”

“Yes, we should go to Carnegie, the owners know me and provide me with a discount.” He was now slightly drooling on his suit jacket.

“Unfortunately, they closed in 2016. When was the last time you have been to Katz’s?”

“That is a good idea, young man, we shall go there. ONWARD!” Kissinger pointed towards the 59 Street / Columbus Circle MTA entrance for us to take the subway. I was laughing so hard inside that I could barely control myself.

“Tell me,” I asked out of curiosity, “why did you give the Chinese atomic secrets?”

“Leverage, my young colleague. The Soviets would never do that, whereas we would. This created the impression that we were the superior alternative.”

“I understand, Two Bombs, One Satellite. But are not nuclear secrets our most protected? Did you not provide China with too much information? What about DOE?”

“The DOE is the most privatized government department. Bechtel was quite eager, so, so very eager, to get contracts in China, which they did over the 1980s and 90s. Opening relations with China made Bechtel, Goldman Sachs, and everyone else significant sums.”

“I understand, Doctor Kissinger. Please forgive my naivety,” I said sarcastically.

“That is fine. Please, tell me about your thoughts on our relations with China today.”

“Yes, Doctor Kissinger, but let’s get you into the subway first…”

“Situational awareness dictates all,” Kissinger mumbled.

I got Kissinger into an elevator and gently pushed him through the station. Neither Kissinger nor I had MTA cards, which added to the complexity. Once we bought tickets, I advised Kissinger to hold on as I balanced his wheelchair using my foot.

“AHH, be careful!” He yelled as I got him over the gap. He was being dramatic, I think.

Once I parked Kissinger in the handicapped section of the subway car and sat next to him, people started staring at us. One guy was quietly muttering under his breath that the lizard overlords were among them. I instead focused on speaking with Kissinger.

“Well,” I said, “China is one of the US’s oldest trading partners, going back to the Revolution and Canton Era of the Old China Trade. There was the Open-Door policy, early Dollar Diplomacy under Taft, then enmeshment with the ROC. One can argue that what forced the hostility between the PRC at its founding and the US wasn’t simply ‘communism,’ but rather, US capital being kicked out of China.”

“I see you do not believe in the Domino Theory,” Kissinger croaked.

“No, because the Soviets, and especially China, couldn’t fund global revolution. They’d go bankrupt before seeing any meaningful return. Look at Cuba; that cost the Soviets how much for essentially a few boxes of cigars for the Politburo, sugar, and sub bases?”

“Which is exactly why we needed to resist communism’s spread: identify choke points, then use overwhelming force to break their political will.”

“But it wasn’t Soviet or Chinese political will to break, but rather, the individual peoples resisting colonialism, like what happened in Vietnam. Thiệu’s government had no—okay, minimal—support, and the US spent how much propping up that corrupt puppet?”

“You are merely focusing on the failures, not the larger number of successes.”

“I swear to God, if you say Papa Doc was a success—”

“Did he or did he not curb communism’s spread in the Caribbean?”

“Oh, I am so making you do Rhum Barbancourt shots after Katz’s,” I joked. Kissinger broke out laughing as well. My mind flashed back to The Comedians.

“Had Duvalier fallen,” Kissinger continued, “we would have another Cuba on our hands. Right next to the Dominican Republic, a key American ally—”

“Colony,” I cut in.

“—ally,” Kissinger said, “which would have led to continued destabilization in the region. This, we, and our allies, could not afford.”

“How much of ‘cannot afford’ is Wall Street and the City of London speaking?”

“More than they will admit in public, young man.”

I nodded. “You’re not wrong, Doctor Kissinger—”

“—I am always right, never wrong.”

“—but your moral compass is…”

“Consistently pointed towards the right direction.”

“Towards whoever pays you.”

“So what?” Kissinger laughed. “What is right and wrong? Who decides the—”

“Please don’t say ‘exception.’”

“What? How did you—”

“‘Sovereign is he who decides the exception,’ Doctor Kissinger. You know the line, I know the line, we all know the line, now, where are you going with this?” This was starting to feel like Seinfeld or a Borscht Belt comedy with a war criminal discussing Carl Schmitt on the MTA, which is to say, quite absurd.

“Okay, bad word choice, perhaps… But permit me to continue… who are you to decide what is right and wrong?”

“I have no right to, I’m not the moral arbiter of the universe.”

“Precisely,” Kissinger smirked. “You understand; not acting is almost as powerful, or, more powerful, than acting.” Lizard Overlords Guy sitting near us started glaring. “Let me explain how the British handled the Palestine mandate, I think you will enjoy that story—”

“I would, Doctor Kissinger, but our stop is coming up soon,” I said to, first, shut Kissinger up and prevent him from being protested in public, and second, to actually go get Katz’s. But I wanted to continue the discussion.

Once we were back above ground, walking down East Houston Street, I joked to Doctor Kissinger, “Okay, if ‘sovereign is he who decides the exception,’ whose sovereign now, given that I’m pushing your wheelchair?”

“You tell me,” Kissinger joked.

“Well,” I conjectured, “if I know you, you’re likely guarded by at least five different government agencies, still have a handful of security clearances, and perhaps have already accessed my EB personnel file. So, I’d say, you’re letting the exception happen, and I’m simply the Marinus van der Lubbe pushing you to go get deli food. Fair?”

“I cannot confirm or deny that statement,” Kissinger said robotically. I nodded and smirked, meaning, that was a yes in Kissinger-talk.

Kissinger continued after a bit, “I have not had a sandwich at Katz’s since the Clinton Administration. I am debating between pastrami, tongue, or Knoblewurst.”

“Pastrami would be the classic choice. That’s what I’m getting. Tongue would be most appropriate for Machiavellian shenanigans, as it would likely inspire fear in other diners. The Knoblewurst would likely be intense, but too cliché.”

“I wish to be feared, young man, so I shall go with the tongue.”

“A wise decision, Doctor Kissinger,” I sarcastically joked. We went silent again for a moment, then Kissinger noticed that my mind seemed occupied.

“Indeed,” I said. “Meeting you reminded me…”

“Of?”

“Myself.”

“In what manner?”

“Well, everyone calls you a ‘war criminal,’ right?”

“They are merely ignorant of the realities of power, young man.”

“—Morality aside, Doctor Kissinger, money is power. You are, well, were, the personification of American foreign policy over how many administrations?”

“Thank you for the compliment.”

That wasn’t intended as such, I thought, but I kept talking regardless, “You’re the upstream source for the money that funds the military-industrial complex. I’m the recipient as a guy with a regular job at a submarine shipyard. I make the nukes move silently under water by just filling out paperwork all day. If someone— well, you would know, you and Nixon ordered Task Force 74 to the Bay of Bengal during the Bangladeshi war of independence—wanted to express US interests in a region, they call for a carrier force with subs. Subs that I—”

“Help build.”

“Help build,” I agreed with Kissinger.

“Do you see?”

“Unfortunately, I do,” I replied. “Like Eric Arthur Blair in Burma-see.”

“And how does that make you feel,” Kissinger needled.

“Implicated because of the Goddamned Rhode Island job market.” While I loved my job, a regular guy doing something as boring as compliance, I was the center of a web of complicity.

I continued, “You think you’re nowhere near danger, until you realize, no, you in the metropole only exist because you benefit from it. That’s what I was going to say about Schmitt, by the way. He doesn’t consider cui bono.”

“He does,” Kissinger replied. “‘The concept of sovereignty is the one most governed by actual interests.’”

“Right,” I clarified, “which ‘can be enlisted to serve the most varied political interests.’ But he never says who those ‘varied political interests’ are.”

“Why would he?”

“He wouldn’t, not under his ‘friend/enemy distinction.’”

“Precisely, young man. You know.”

“I know too well.”

“So,” Kissinger asked, “what will you do about it?”

“Well, right now, get us both lunch…”

At this point, I pushed Kissinger into Katz’s. I waved to Hao as I got in line to order. Hao’s head slumped down onto the table in sheer disbelief. I ordered Hao and I two pastramis on rye with Swiss, mine with mustard, Hao’s with mayo, two sodas, plus a jar of pickles. Kissinger ordered the tongue sandwich with mustard and sauerkraut, as well as an iced tea. Everyone also got a piece of cheesecake. I covered Kissinger’s tab because… what else could I do?

I parked Kissinger at the table Hao was sitting at and engaged his brakes, then served everyone their sandwiches. Hao just stared in disbelief.

“It really is him. Him. 肏你妈…[2]” Hao gasped.

“Hello, young woman,” Kissinger said to Hao. Hao cackled and flapped his arms.

“Thank you, thank you so much for saying that!” Hao said about being misgendered, before posting a picture with Kissinger on Instagram.

Given the Lich Lord Kissinger’s extremely advanced age, I then prepared the table so that we could all eat comfortably. I cut Kissinger’s food, moved his iced tea so he wouldn’t knock it over, and opened the pickle jar. I then decided to bib him.

“Doctor Kissinger, that is such a nice suit, kindly permit me to place a napkin under your shirt collar so that it does not get mustard on it,” I said sarcastically.

“Thank you, I bought this suit in 1992,” he murmured. I have no idea how he was able to still wear a suit from about thirty years prior, but hey, here he was.

I started eating my sandwich, which Hao had already taken a bite out of (yes, mine, not his), when Hao asked Kissinger, “So, what was it like negotiating with Mao?”

Kissinger perked up as he was slowly, gradually, and noisily putting the pieces of sandwich in his mouth with a fork, and said, “Mao by that time was quite old and decrepit, as he constantly smoked and drank and never bathed. Most of the negotiations were handled through Zhou Enlai.”

I joked, “Did Zhou tell you the story when he lost his notebook full of CCP agents within the KMT security apparatus in 1946 on a plane, and General Marshall gave him back the notebook neatly wrapped and tied with string?”

Kissinger found that droll, then continued, “I enjoyed working with the Chinese, as I appreciated their directness and focus on long term strategy over temporary results. In a totalitarian state like China, there are no meaningful elections, and thus, you can develop a consistent, long-term strategy in foreign relations.”

Hao and I shot confused, shocked glances across the table at each other. Kissinger was comfortable. We knew this because of how… open… he was with us. Then, Kissinger asked us about us being a gay couple.

He said, “How do you two navigate geopolitics and the bedroom? Or do you, like most people, simply claw at the mud and hope?”

“Ideally, not clawing in the mud, no, Kissinger,” Hao joked.

I stopped eating to cut in, “It’s becoming a problem, quite frankly, Doctor Kissinger.”

“Why is that?”

“Well, Hao’s family is back in China still, and me having a clearance—”

“Makes the situation, shall we say…”

“—Complicated,” I filled in.

“Indeed,” Kissinger continued. “Have you considered working for the State Department? It worked… rather well for me.”

“Doctor Kissinger,” I replied, “if my concern is the morality of American foreign policy, do you think I’d want to work in Foggy Bottom?”

“Wait, what?” Hao asked confused.

“Foggy Bottom, it’s—”

“What, a drag queen?” Hao joked. I rolled my eyes.

“If I may,” Kissinger said, “if you wish to see systemic change, why not embody it and ‘be’ the change, as you young people say?”

“Because, Doctor Kissinger, if you’re change embodied, is there change?”

“An apt question. You see, I asked myself the same question during my time as a Harvard PhD student, writing my dissertation about Metternich and—”

By this time, Hao and I had finished our sandwiches, and Kissinger was almost done with his. I was cleansing my palate with a few pickles. There were so many things that I wanted to discuss with him. Discuss is not the right word, rather, I wanted to tease out admissions from him to fully realize how evil he was. Hao probably wanted to get into the question of how Kissinger diplomatically isolated Vietnam and influenced Deng to attack Vietnam. But Kissinger would spin it so that he was right and I was wrong. Try arguing with Jello; it simply returns to form.

I also knew that Kissinger would likely be leaving us soon. People had noticed that he wasn’t just any old Jewish grandpa getting a tongue sandwich at a deli. Besides, Hao took a selfie with Kissinger, so it would only be a question of when someone took him away from us. Not to mention that he could quite simply die at any moment. I therefore decided to wrap up all this blood on his hands into one question.

“Doctor Kissinger,” I asked in a lull, “how do you evaluate the worth of human beings?”

Kissinger was chewing the last pieces of his sandwich like a cow chewing cud. He made all the loud, coughing, unaware noises typical of old men chewing food. He stopped for a moment once he swallowed, and then replied, “An appropriate question, young man. The answer is that, in short, I don’t.”

This left Hao and I stunned, staring at each other across the table. Hao’s nose started to twitch like a rabbit. I could tell Hao was going to start attacking Kissinger, so I put my hand on his to calm him down, then wrapped our fingers together.

Kissinger took the last pickle out of the jar and loudly, obnoxiously, and cluelessly started chomping on it. Kissinger’s napkin bib was covered in bits of tongue, mustard, kraut, and pickle juice: a perfect metaphor for all the blood he let pool around the world, from the Khmer Rouge to the Congo. He then swallowed the pickle and smiled.

“Thank you for taking me out to lunch, young man, I found this experience very enjoyable. Shall we now enjoy our cheesecakes?”

“Yes, Doctor Kissinger, I think we will,” I agreed out of sheer lack of options.

About halfway through the cheesecakes, a group of NYPD, bodyguards in suits, and someone who appeared to be either Kissinger’s professional handler or caretaker relative, an older man in his upper fifties wearing a black overcoat with grey, curly hair like Andrew Cuomo, headed straight for our table. The game was over. Kissinger was now going to leave us forever.

“Doctor Kissinger,” the Cuomo clone said, “we’ve been looking all over for you! Where have you been?” The handler was quite exasperated.

“This kind young man bought me an ice cream and lunch. I was very alone and sad before he found me. I was in Central Park, all alone. We will go to China together to repair relations with Xi Jinping…” Kissinger kept monologuing as the handler started talking to me.

“Please don’t mind Doctor Kissinger, he’s been having a hard time recently. Did you really take him out for ice cream and lunch?”

“It was the least I could do,” I said. “He looked so, well, sad and lonely.”

“Well, thank you for taking care of him, at least it looks like he’s enjoyed himself.” The handler then disengaged the brakes on Kissinger’s wheelchair, before the old man started yelling and waving his arms around.

“WAIT! I HAVE NOT YET FINISHED MY CHEESECAKE!”

The handler then opened his eyes wide, and decided, fine, let him finish his cheesecake. Kissinger looked into my eyes as his spoon scooped up the last piece.

“Thank you for listening to me, no one ever listens to me anymore.”

Kissinger’s eyes began returning to their sad, depressed, mopey look, like when I first saw him in Central Park.

“Of course, Doctor Kissinger,” I said. “Thank you for letting me ‘kidnap’ you.”

“It was my pleasure. If you had been a serious threat, you would have been immediately eliminated, but we knew who you were from your clearance.” I gulped at this line.

Kissinger continued, “Next time, we should go to the Bohemian Club, I think you will fit right in there. I will talk to the club president about bringing you as a guest.” Kissinger gave me one last smile before he finished his cheesecake, and they wheeled him away.

Kissinger died a month later. His estate sent a black rose when Hao and I married. See you, Space Cowboy—you dirty, arrogant, war criminal.
‍ ‍

[1] “Immediately, all the same.”

[2] “Fuck your mother.”

---

Craig Stockwell (he/him) is a queer Rhode Islander writing from Scotland. He attends the University of Aberdeen MLitt in Creative Writing. His work appears in mnemotope magazine, Scottish Left Review, The Helix Magazine (Central Connecticut State University), and elsewhere. Instagram: @c__stockwell ‍ ‍

Marc Kaufman

The Restless

For most of our lives together we lived without TV. We had built on the side of a mountain between High Falls and New Paltz, all that hilly and green New York no one out of state believed existed. We were told from the beginning: no cable service. It didn’t matter. We survived the winters with word games, long nights of rented videos that became rented DVDs. Once or twice our son, Billy, came in the house complaining of things he couldn’t watch. We stayed firm. He didn’t really care. His heart was outside anyway. 

‍ ‍Butthatspring was late in arriving, the cold and the snow held on longer than any of us could bear. We stayed in more. One night we sat next to each other in silence for almost two hours. It should have been okay, but it wasn’t. We shouldn’t have minded so much, but we did. Two days later we had a satellite dish put in. I thought the distraction would save us from each other.

‍ ‍So many choices, we watched whatever held our interest for more than a minute. I liked the dramas; police, medical, mystery. The single serving shows. The ones where you didn’t need to follow characters, where everything that could be resolved would be in an hour. I couldn’t be bothered with details. Alan worshipped the news. All of it. The Russian pipeline, the struggles of the yen, the rise in expeditions to Everest, the two Democrats bloodying each other over the nomination. Of course, there was the problem of the lingering wars and all that death. He watched the reports with a beer he hardly drank. I told him not to take it so to heart, not to take it so personally, it wasn’t our boy over there. It was sad, sure, and a real tragedy, but our boy was strong and safe. Our boy was at the ski mountain working on some new girl to replace the last one. He hadn’t been sick for more than a day since that illness visited his breathing for those two long weeks when he was a baby.

‍ ‍When was that? I don’t remember that, Alan complained.

‍ ‍When he was a baby, I said.

‍ ‍Where was I?

‍ ‍You were here. You slept with him in that chair. We were afraid. But it all turned out okay.

‍ ‍I don’t remember. You think I’d remember something like that.

‍ ‍Doesn’t matter. No use figuring out the mind, I said.

‍ ‍We left it at that.

‍ ‍There was some breaking news. A bomb had exploded on a road outside of Fallujah. Alan’s face became stolid.

‍ ‍I told him to turn the news off if it bothered him so much.

‍ ‍I told him many things. Like everyone, he listened when he wanted.

That month, he worried over Billy more. Whereabouts, destinations, departures, and arrivals, like one of trains he piloted from Fishkill to Manhattan. Billy reacted the way a boy his age does—first with indifference and then with anger and then with defiance.

‍ ‍Hey, Dad what’s the sudden interest?

‍ ‍It’s not sudden, Alan said.

‍ ‍Don’t you trust me?

‍ ‍Of course.

‍ ‍Then what’s your damage?

‍ ‍Neither of us knew what that meant, but by his tone and the way his shoulders were hunched and his gaze pointed, we figured it wasn’t complimentary.

‍ ‍Don’t talk to your father that way.

‍ ‍They both looked at me as though I should stay out of it.

‍ ‍Once or twice, I thought they’d come to blows, but Billy had a new girl and couldn’t be bothered. He yessed us to death and then did as he pleased. The girl’s name was Angelica, and I knew why he couldn’t stand to be away from her for long. There was something instinctive and sexual about her, someone you learned things from for later in life. Maybe I had been her. I hoped they were being careful.

‍ ‍Billy was late coming home one night, a particularly bad evening on the TV. Everything I wanted to watch was a repeat. We had talked about going out for dinner, but the temperature had dropped again, and we couldn’t find the energy or the courage to venture out. The driveway was long and steep and recently, with the buildup of ice, we’d had trouble getting the cars back to the garage. I tried to steer Alan away from the cable news channels. We even tried to have sex there on the couch, but I couldn’t hold his interest. He wanted to watch a debate over the word quagmire.

‍ ‍Alan, What’s the sudden interest?

‍ ‍It’s not sudden.

‍ ‍Do you have some other kid, I don’t know about?

‍ ‍His face turned against me. I sometimes said things I thought were funny but he thought were callous. Usually we would laugh about them later. He would let a similar comment fly, and we would joke about all the ways we were hypocrites and didn’t care. I could tell this wasn’t going to be one of those times.

‍ ‍No matter what I said he was going to wait up until Billy got home. 

‍ ‍I went to sleep without him. It was cold in our room. The month before, the heating bill almost put us in the ground. We were still trying to find a lower temperature on the thermostat where we all could survive. The men in the house were proving better at this than me. I complained when I shouldn’t have. I knew all the reasons: Billy was off to school soon, money didn’t grow anywhere in our lives. We were comfortable enough, but only because we knew not to want what we couldn’t have. The satellite dish was our only real extravagance, and no matter how much I loved the shows, how addicted I’d become, I would have horse traded it in a second for fewer blankets, more heat, three more degrees, my husband in bed. How brittle and fragile my body felt those nights it dropped below zero.

‍ ‍I had lived here all my life and never liked the cold.

I was turning pancakes over when he came into the kitchen. Billy had been out late and still hadn’t gotten up.

‍ ‍The groundhog saw his shadow, Alan said, almost distraught about it.

‍ ‍Which one? The Pennsylvania one or the Staten Island one?

‍ ‍The Pennsylvanian one. The famous one. Wait…There are more than one?

‍ ‍That’s what I heard. And the reports conflict. Staten Island predicted an early spring. I said this to offer a hopeful alternative. It had the opposite effect.

‍ ‍Staten Island, That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. Which one are we supposed to believe?

‍ ‍Whichever one you want.

‍ ‍It seemed a conversation best not to have.

‍ ‍Wait, is the other one a rookie? I’ve never heard of two. I can’t believe they’d let a rookie predict something as important as Spring. You figure they’d test him for a while. A controlled setting, with lamps maybe. How do we even know he knows what a shadow is?

‍ ‍Maybe the famous one is losing his edge. He’s old, like us. Maybe he’s more easily frightened now. Maybe the rookie is sharper. Either way, darling, it all comes down to math. Six more weeks of winter on the calendar.

‍ ‍I don’t think I can wait six more weeks.

‍ ‍At the time, I didn’t know what he meant, but I knew I didn’t like it.

That night I lay in bed listening to Billy down the hall talking on the phone with Angelica. His voice was hushed and guilty and in love. I couldn’t make out the details of the conversation, only that he kept saying her name in a tone plaintive and tender, the way you might when even the next room is too far away. Without knowing when it happened, my son had learned how to call someone to bed. I could tell, with both leaving for school soon, they were sure to cause each other problems. They would begin to believe things that weren’t true, that what was between them was stronger than it was, that they could survive the distance, the absence, or worse, that they’d want to.

‍ ‍Downstairs, Alan had burned another bag of microwave popcorn. The smell entered my nose and wouldn’t leave. I turned into the pillow. A little less hair these days for him meant a little less hair gel, a little less shampoo. He was hardly there.

‍ ‍I fell asleep wanting nothing less for Billy than heartbreak.

‍ ‍Tell me about it again.

‍ ‍Billy ate in giant forkfuls. I swear his jaw was hinged.

‍ ‍It’s like a class trip.

‍ ‍They leave you in the woods?

‍ ‍Not exactly.

‍ ‍Then exactly what?

‍ ‍Mom!

‍ ‍Can’t you just take a trip to Washington, see the monuments, maybe join a protest. It would make your father so happy.

‍ ‍That’s not funny.

‍ ‍Neither is you being eaten by bears.

‍ ‍That never happens.

‍ ‍It happens all the time. Those bears are thorough. They don’t leave much evidence.

‍ ‍Mah, you’re being insane.

‍ ‍Is that any way to talk to me? You wouldn’t even get past the first sentence with your father…For my class trip we stayed a couple of days in Manhattan. Time Square was dirty and dangerous. We were so excited. For the guys, if you looked old enough to be harassed by a prostitute you were beyond cool.

‍ ‍Manhattan is so over. There’s nothing to do there. The Midwest is the new center of power and influence.

‍ ‍He kept chewing as his headphones hugged the bottom of his ears and his thick sandy hair fell over his eyes. The conversation, like most things with him, was set to autopilot.

‍ ‍How much is this gonna set us back?

‍ ‍Nothing. I’ve been saving. The winter’s been awesome. Nice and long. Lots of private lessons at the ski hill. I made just enough and, if the spring holds out for another week or two, maybe I’ll make a little more. Put it to that college fund you guys are always whispering about.

‍ ‍He looked down and grimaced at his empty plate.

‍ ‍Got any more?

I guessed the ending to my police show five minutes in. It had to be the restaurant owner who didn’t like tomatoes. You can’t trust someone who doesn’t like tomatoes. It took the detectives another twenty minutes to even suspect him. You can’t blame them—they’re held back by the writing. Alan wanted the remote but wouldn’t reach for it. He knew it wasn’t his turn.

‍ ‍It’s supposed to rain tomorrow, I said to him during the commercials.

‍ ‍I bet it won’t.

‍ ‍Don’t be so negative. You never know what can happen overnight.

‍ ‍It gets colder. That’s what happens overnight.

‍ ‍Well, I think it’s gonna rain. We’re due.

‍ ‍You’ll see. Snow for sure.

‍ ‍He peeked at the remote with small traces of larceny in his eyes. I gripped it tighter so he knew I knew.

‍ ‍What is it? A speech? A debate? An update on another investigation? What this time? Another bomb, another shooting, another death?

‍ ‍Don’t talk that way…it’s ugly. Next commercial? Can I just check for a second?

‍ ‍Sorry. I know that one. I saw that movie where Jimmy Stewart goes to Washington. You yield the floor for a second and you never get control back.

‍ ‍The wind howled outside. Snow whirled about the porch. Alan peered out at the small satellite dish, the way you might at a dog left out in the rain. The picture on the TV compressed and bent for a moment but returned strong.

‍ ‍For a year when I was twelve, while my mother was going to night school for her accounting degree, my father took a second job fixing TVs in the back of a small appliance store in Fishkill. He had no training but had always been able to teach himself how things worked. He’d take me with sometimes, and I’d watch him test the circuits for small breaks. He knew if the tube was shot the problem was too expensive to fix. If he didn’t know an answer, he’d look up part schematics on microfilm and do his best. People most often complained of static. On the repair tickets he called it snow.

‍ ‍Alan turned back to me, Babe, you already know how it ends.

‍ ‍Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe we’ll be surprised.                               

‍ ‍You’re never wrong.

‍ ‍But I could be…

‍ ‍You’re not even watching.

‍ ‍I pulled myself away from him. He tried to follow with his arms, but I wouldn’t let him.We sat in silence for a few more minutes. Alan closed his eyes. It was the only way he could be still.

‍ ‍I think we should go somewhere. A trip. After Billy is off at school. 

‍ ‍I don’t know, he said. Tuition is going to be expensive. His voice was low, resigned.

‍ ‍I have to get out of this house. Don’t you want to get out of this house?

‍ ‍I love this house – we built this house. Maybe you should go visit your father.

‍ ‍Florida’s not for me. Let’s go somewhere on our list, I said.

‍ ‍The list is for later. After we’re done paying for college.

‍ ‍I can’t wait that long.

‍ ‍We have too many expenses right now. He opened his eyes again, turned back to the TV, and pointed. See, you were right. It was the restaurant owner. You’re always right.

‍ ‍It was the worst thing you could say to someone, even if it was true.  

The snow fell like exploding sacks of flour, blowing without weight or accuracy or direction.

‍ ‍Yesterday the TV said rain, now the weather people predicted the snow could last for days.  I’d bet two of my coveted coffee cakes and a back rub on the rain. The cakes were already cooling. I used the last of the cinnamon and had to short the vanilla in the second batch. The cupboards were unprepared for a blizzard in April.

‍ ‍Billy had gotten clear a day earlier for his Montana school trip. Exposed in the woods, nearly alone was all I could think. He called in the morning to say he was safe. Cold, but lots of sunshine, he said. The air smells different here, Mah, like laundry. After breakfast they’re gonna teach us how to filet a fish.  He sounded beyond alive, free in the world.

‍ ‍I stood at the sliding glass door that led to the small patio Alan had built some years ago. It was the one thing in the house he cared for more than the news. At the sign of the slightest accumulation, he was out there, clearing the planked boards. The satellite dish perched along the thin banister. I had thought it was going to be bigger. I thought we’d have to clear cut trees. Instead, it sat like a small, hooded child on the wood rail, face turned into the storm.

‍ ‍Looking back into the empty living room I could see us sitting paralyzed amidst the litter of empty popcorn bags, sharp edges of unfinished arguments, news of so many dead. The glass door was stuck, but I forced it open. The weather blew in violently past me. I stepped onto the inches of soft powder and wondered how much there would be by morning.

‍ ‍The satellite dish was clamped to the railing with two screws that were wet and difficult to loosen, but I was determined. It was at least ten feet to the yard below. My fingers slipped and burned in the cold as I worked the turns. Anger has always been my secret strength. Behind me, on the TV, a reporter stood on the side of 87 North, snow falling all around him, telling us what surely, we already knew: that the roads were slick, soon impassable; that wherever we were was safer than where we wanted to be. I felt the last screw come loose in my hand and before I could decide if it was exactly what I wanted, the satellite dish fell. I spun back to the TV screen, thinking the result would be static, but instead the screen blipped blue.

‍ ‍A message appeared offering some strange clairvoyance: No Usable Signal.

An hour later the phone rang. I was lying on the couch, a blanket wrapped around me—my punishment for going outside was not being able to get warm. I let it ring. It stopped for a few minutes and then rang again. The bright blue screen overpowered every other light in the room, but I couldn’t turn it off. Any life before this was a dream. No Usable Signal. I stared at the screen.

‍ ‍The phone was persistent. Finally, I picked up.

‍ ‍Where are you? I asked.

‍ ‍On my way, he said.

‍ ‍I could hear the wind behind him.

‍ ‍Is it bad?

‍ ‍We’ve seen worse. It’s gonna take more than this to stop the trains.

‍ ‍For the first time that season, he sounded brave and defiant. I almost forgot every fear that kept me awake over the past month.

‍ ‍Be safe, I said.

‍ ‍Babe, he said, I’m bringing someone with me.

‍ ‍I almost didn’t hear it. Who?                                                                      

‍ ‍A friend. He got stuck.

‍ ‍Reluctantly I said, Okay…I’ll make food for us. Please, just take it slow.

‍ ‍Don’t go to any trouble. We’ll just have a drink and watch some TV.

‍ ‍Take it easy up the driveway.

‍ ‍He made a sound and then hung up.

His name was Edward, and they worked together. Edward walked up and down the cars taking tickets, checking passes, while Alan piloted the trains along the route. They had been on the same Metro North line for over a year, but I had never heard his name until now. For most of the night Alan called him Ed. Sometimes when they laughed or agreed, he was Eddie. I called him Edward, a choice we both seemed comfortable with. His face was ruddy, his head shaved bald. When he came in, he was wearing four or five layers under his uniform, making him seem bulkier than he was. If I found out he was over twenty-two I would have been surprised. They drank from a bottle of Macallan. I was into my fourth glass of cheap red wine. I couldn’t tell where the time had gone or if the world outside was still moving at its usual pace. The snow continued with conviction.

‍ ‍They stared at the TV.

‍ ‍It just went out? Alan asked. 

‍ ‍Yeah, just, I said, and did my best not to meet his eyes.

‍ ‍Alan worked at the connections behind the TV. Nothing he did had any effect. He went to the wall and turned up the heat for the second time in an hour. Are you warm enough? he asked Edward. I’m gonna check the TV upstairs.

‍ ‍Some storm out there, Edward said. Wonder if we’ll be running tomorrow?

‍ ‍Of course, we will. This is nothing, Alan yelled as he left the room. Maybe we’ll get a foot, foot and a half, tops.

‍ ‍I don’t know, I said. It’s coming down fast and heavy. We might wake up covered.

‍ ‍Edward took some more large bites from his coffee cake.

‍ ‍Top notch, he said. You can definitely taste the difference between this and the store kind. Even the diner I go to…maybe ‘cause it sits out for so long.

‍ ‍Do you eat in diners a lot?

‍ ‍Not a lot. 

‍ ‍Alan must be very fond of you ‘cause he usually never lets anyone near those cakes. Even our son has to fight with him. And these two he won fair and square.

‍ ‍He won them?

‍ ‍Yeah. I made a bet with him. I lost.

‍ ‍What did you bet?

‍ ‍That it would rain today.

‍ ‍Edward turned and looked out the patio doors and smiled. He had a way about him that reminded me of Billy, utterly lacking in guile.

‍ ‍Alan really saved me tonight…

‍ ‍What was the trouble?

‍ ‍Who knows? Maybe the alternator? The transmission is near shot. I was hoping to get it through one more winter and then junk it. I thought I was in the clear ‘cause it started so easy, but just when I turned onto the access road the thing seized on me…the whole panel lit all to hell. Then I called Alan. He’s a stand-up guy. Everyone at work thinks so.

‍ ‍Alan came back into the room and made a desperate sound. He walked to the patio doors and peered outside. It was clear what he was searching for. It made me sick to look at him.

‍ ‍Alan…forget it. We’ll worry about it in the morning. Just sit down. Relax.

‍ ‍His head snapped back at me like a whip, cracking at an idea so frightening that he would do anything to keep it away.

‍ ‍Edward got up and went to see what he was looking at, to see if he could be of any help. It’s okay, he said. Quiet news day anyway.  

‍ ‍That scares me more, Alan said. When things get too quiet, I’m always expecting the worst a day or two later.

‍ ‍Edward put his hand on Alan’s shoulder and gripped tight. Yeah, it’s a real mess these days.

‍ ‍Alan turned towards Edward. His eyes were sad and calm and couldn’t, if they tried, hide how he felt for the man. They nodded in unison as though everything between them was understood. My plan, if it was even a plan, fired back at me. I’d thought it was an addiction. I had forgotten the small abundant tenderness in even pretending to understand.

‍ ‍They sank into the couch cushions, saying nothing. In their uniforms, they looked like separated Russian nesting dolls. Alan turned on the TV once again and found what he could have expected: nothing, only the blue screen.

‍ ‍The wine was starting to make the room spin. I felt insulated, warmer than I had in months. I got up, thinking for a second I was going to fall, but I managed to stay on my feet. I went over to them. I kissed them both deeply on the lips. Alan first. I held his face between my hands so there was nowhere he could go. I couldn’t remember the last time we really kissed. When I turned to Edward, I fastened my left hand to Alan’s. Edward smooth face seemed neither expectant nor surprised. No one said anything. I kissed them both again. Alan ran his hands over me the way a stranger would. He seemed to forget Edward was sitting there and it might have continued that way, if Edward had said nothing, if he had done nothing, but he also reached towards me and their hands came together over my breasts and for a second something dangerous and dark passed between us. Alan tugged me back to his attention, pulling fiercely. He said my name. I never liked my name.

‍ ‍I slid from him onto the cold floor. Edward leaned backed into the cushions and tightly closed his eyes.Minutes later he was fast asleep.

‍ ‍Alan switched the TV off and went to stand at the door.  It’s really coming down, he said, maybe you’re right. Maybe by morning we’ll be covered.

‍ ‍No, I said, it’s nothing. Like you said, we’ve seen so much worse.

Three days later Billy came back to us banged up, his leg broken. The details of his accident were still unclear. Something about a tree he was climbing, a view he was chasing. He had a series of small cuts along the left side of his face, his lip was split, and he needed stitches to close a gash over his eye. The doctor predicted a small scar; Billy was over the moon. When Angelica came over to take care of him, he made up stories. He told her he wrestled a bear. He told her he fell trying to save a robin’s nest. She loved him enough to believe every iteration. I was furious at him and then furious at myself for being so angry. Every parental I told you so instinct I thought I’d be able to outrun, switched on. I couldn’t control them.  When had I gotten so old?

‍ ‍Gonna make quite a graduation picture, I said.

‍ ‍I’ll always remember it, he said.

‍ ‍You would’ve remembered it anyway.

‍ ‍He shrugged and limped around the house without crutches.

‍ ‍With Billy back in the house the sex became quieter, but continued, as it had every night since the storm. I couldn’t tell if we were trying to prove something to ourselves or to each other – either way I didn’t care. Alan never mentioned Edward again. He came home quickly after work. We went to sleep at the same time each night. We never talked about it, any of it.

‍ ‍Spring came. We knew it would. We turned the clocks ahead.

‍ ‍My father flew up for the graduation. Off the plane I couldn’t believe what I saw, my father, near seventy, a child of the northeast his entire life, the first out of all of us to burn at the beach, now tanned and browned, as though he had lived forever under southern skies. He bought Billy luggage and gave him an envelope of money. He said he wanted him to travel. He said he wished he could have done the same for me.

‍ ‍We all went and brought flowers to my mother’s grave.

‍ ‍For the two weeks my father was there, my father’s voice filled the house with a deep baritone. He sat with Alan every night to talk about the souring and divisive mood of the country. When he spoke, I remembered every command he had ever given me, every story he told.

‍ ‍Billy joined them. He had opinions and deep beliefs about the war and surprised them both with what he knew. They let him drink beer. He did his part, acting like the taste was new and he was honored to be so trusted. He abandoned Angelica the whole time his grandfather was there. She would call and plead with him, sometimes arriving to disappear into his room for unaccounted minutes, but mostly they stayed separated.

‍ ‍It’s dangerous, I told him, to neglect her like that.

‍ ‍He didn’t care. He had yet to lose anything he couldn’t get back or replace.

‍ ‍Alan had the satellite dish repaired but we never turned the TV on.

‍ ‍One night we got drunk. All of us. We laughed at anything everyone said and passed out one at a time. I dreamed that nothing would change, my father would stay, Billy would never leave. When I woke up in the morning, Alan and I were frighteningly alone. I pulled myself up from the couch. Alan remained asleep in the same chair he had held Billy, new and sick, all those years ago. I thought something terrible had happened. I thought time had pushed forward. I couldn’t get my bearings until I heard voices outside. My father and Billy were throwing a ball around the yard. Even barely mobile, Billy was graced with effortless agility. I stood on the porch without a jacket and watched them. Billy hopped after every ball. He never fell.

‍ ‍The grass was slippery and wet, and I thought it would be dirty and brown for a long time, a month at least, to forget the weight of so much snow.

---

Born and raised in the Catskills in New York, Marc Kaufman moved to Tokyo more than ten years ago to take a teaching position. His work has most recently appeared in Cleaver Magazine, -Ette Review, Narrative Magazine, and F(r)fiction Online. He has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and is currently an associate professor at Tokyo's Sophia University, where he teaches writing and serves as the faculty editor for the student writing journal, Angles.

Karen Zlotnick

To the Replacement Dog

If you’re reading this, it’s because you have been taken in by The Girl and her mother who are mourning the loss of me. There’s no reason for modesty here; I was an integral part of The Girl’s development and at least partial healing from Her illness. But Her journey is not complete, and you must take over where I’ve left off. I’ll be at peace once this message is delivered.

She might seem older, but The Girl is only fifteen, and since I’ve known Her, She has suffered from a problem with food. Never laugh at this, though at times it will seem ridiculous to you–with your voracious appetite for anything that smells louder than a lemon. Make no mistake: The Girl wants to eat, but She is afflicted with fear. It started years ago with anything that could melt (butter, chocolate, cheese), but it spidered into other areas: sticky foods (honey, barbecue sauce, marshmallows, gum), crunchy foods (which could cause teeth to shatter), and fruits that must be peeled (bananas, kiwis, oranges). While you are outside licking deer scat, She will be fighting the urge to call a glass of water “dinner.”

You are a Newfoundland Dog, same as I was. Our reputation is love. Our character is love. Our bones, our muscles, our jowls are love. The Girl’s mother believes that God might actually exist because the Newfoundland exists. The fact that we suffered trauma in our past lives and were placed in Rescue makes us even godlier in the mother’s eyes. The mother might be right.

However, your past is the past. Perhaps, like I was, you were beaten by an owner for having an accident in the house and thrown into the icy yard for days. Right now, let go of that experience, do what you can to control your bladder, and overcome the impulse to wince when you hear the rustle of a newspaper. Perhaps you were once “corrected” at night in thick silence, dragged by chokehold out the door and into the darkness, an owl in the oak your only witness. Immediately, you must let go of the urge to cower any time you see a flashlight. Perhaps in this despicable circumstance, a bone or two cracked and your young body is already signaling that arthritis will color the years ahead. You have no choice but to work through the pain of it. That’s simply the way it has to be. In your new role, you will experience nothing but safety and love. Your trauma will become inconsequential.

The Girl, She is everything. Silence on thunderous days, mist when the air is dry, a speck of green when the ground has frosted. She will spend hours studying you to understand your preferences: ear rubs that morph into a full face massage; peanut butter off a spoon, not on celery; warm water after meals; a slicker instead of a comb. She will whisper her directions: “Stay here, and I'll be right back,” and “Thank you for letting me know about the delivery, and you can stop barking now.” She will bake what She calls Shareables, a recipe She created with us in mind. It contains some of our favorites: carrots, sweet potatoes, a pinch of parmesan. Sit with her on the living room rug and pretend to watch reruns of New Girl while you nibble on the soggy crackers. Try not to drool on her pajama pants.

In turn, you must study Her–Her moods, Her rage, Her elation–and remind Her that She is the reason you exist, that without Her, it’s possible, you would have grown old under the care of well-intentioned folks who could only afford to make you a bed of shavings in a chain link kennel among other dumped Newfs whose breathsongs mimic sorrowful wails.

Pay attention. The Girl will need you when She gets off the phone with a boy named Dagger. Put your snout under Her elbow when She clutches the hair on either side of Her head. When storms roll in, She might resist taking you for a walk, but it will make Her laugh when you shake off the rainwater and drench Her clothes. On weekends, take in how proud She is to introduce you to young children in strollers, how She says to their parents, “Oh, the friendliest!” Once in a while (because this can get old), if you see She’s a little bored, steal Her yellow baby blanket off Her bed. Don’t ever chew it. Just carry it around the house like you’ve scored a prize. She might look at you sternly, but She won’t mean it.

Understand this: The Girl has a simple and also complicated life. Her father is long dead, and Her mother is lovely but broken. Occasionally, The Girl will be late getting off the bus, and in order to be let outside, you’ll have to nudge Her mother’s hand as it droops off the side of the bed. Her mother will not ever get angry with you for doing this, but you’ll see in her eyes that she is a disappointment to herself. Lean into her legs once you come back inside. She’ll appreciate the gesture.

The mother believes she has nothing else in her life beyond her daughter. (This is a lot of pressure on both of them.) Often when the daughter comes home, the mother will pop out of bed and make it look like she’s been fixing a snack plate for hours. She lives for the look on her daughter’s face when she places one slice of muenster cheese on a lightly toasted English muffin and the timing is so exact that She can eat it before it begins to melt. They joke that the mother can read Her mind.

Sometimes you’ll notice that The Girl is aware of Her mother’s suffering. Her mother will talk aimlessly about getting her act together, about getting a part-time job, about volunteering at a local rescue. The mother will say she is thankful for the money her husband left them, but she feels purposeless. When the mother’s sadness feels suffocating–you’ll know this because The Girl will tug at the skin on Her neck–lie down so that your face rests on The Girl’s feet and your tail is under Her mother’s legs. Simultaneously, they will call you Our Rock. In this moment, it is better to close your eyes with humility than to dance with pride.

If the deer scat makes you vomit, aim for the floor, not the carpet.

The Girl is fragile, a single standing vase in an aftershock. When Her mother gathers enough strength to host a backyard gathering in summer, there’s a risk that the cupcakes’ frosting will begin to liquify in the sun. Though you likely will overheat from this–July in New York is a Newf’s worst month–don’t just walk, run to Her as if both your lives depend on it. Beg to share a cupcake with Her. Spin in circles, whine through the sides of your lips, lift a front paw as Her relatives cheer you on. “Please stop begging,” The Girl will say. But the fact is, everyone will think you’re adorable. When She caves in and kneels down to share Her double vanilla, make sure you only take half. Beam with pride when She stops shaking and licks melted frosting off Her finger.

There will be other occasions when you must insist on sharing the food in front of Her. These are opportunities to model food joy. You see She’s paralyzed by a homemade cinnamon bun? Don’t underestimate the power of a Cupid Shuffle happy dance. The popcorn Her mother wants to share is extra crunchy? Paws to the left, to the left, to the left. Paws to the right, to the right, to the right.

In the wild our ancestor wolves learned to be stoic. Weakness meant being cut out of the pack, left to die on wintry plains. Our reason for stoicism is different, my friend. Her life depends on it. So, for as long as you can, do your best to hide the signs of your own aging. Drink when you’re not thirsty, take your Metacam religiously, greet the neighbor’s puppy with more enthusiasm than you believe you can muster.

When The Girl cries because your hind legs have splayed out for the second time in a day, wag your tail immediately after She gets you on your feet. When She gets up in the middle of the night to make sure you’re still breathing, offer a little snore, especially if you don’t have it in you to move. When the decision is made to say goodbye, lay your giant head in her lap, and with your giant heart, say to Her that this is right, that you know She’s letting you go, not for Her, but for you. Take your last earthly breath knowing you’ve been so well loved.

In the years leading up to that goodbye, take mental notes of the glorious life you have with Her. We Newfs are here for only so long, and the next letter will be yours to write.

---

Born and raised in New York, Karen Zlotnick lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband and their Newfoundland dog. Some of her work has been featured in Pithead Chapel, Typishly, jmww, Stonecoast Review, and Moon City Review. In addition, one of her stories was nominated for Best Small Fictions.

Matthew Jakubowski

The Lord in Action Behind the Counter

It’s a weird flex, man, and you’re barely even looking at it, you’ve been on your phone since I got here except for when you stared at that girl in the drive-thru instead of the huge gilt-edged Bible spread out on the table in front of you. Maybe you’re the manager of this Taco Bell on break showing your values or maybe this is just your lunchtime thing, hard to say, especially since I’m absolutely fried from driving eight hours solo to see family in Ypsilanti for Thanksgiving tomorrow, so maybe this actually is a church and in here my brain can perfectly simulate the experience of scarfing a Crunchwrap Supreme and soft-shell taco—actually two tacos—I ordered one, but the kid behind the counter gave me two, saying, “That’s on me, thanks for your patience, sir,” even though I only waited two minutes, before he shot back to work to keep this whole beautiful machine running smooth.

After I’ve eaten and refilled my Pepsi you finally start reading your Bible, maybe it’s Jesus and forgiveness or the plagues and ten commandments, either way you look tired and confused, you’re tapping both feet like you want to enjoy the Bible but it’s hard. I’ve got a couch in my sister’s basement waiting a few blocks away, then we’ll start cooking and—wait—am I supposed to invite you to Thanksgiving, is that what you’re angling for, sensing me watching you and wondering who you are?

Okay, maybe this has been a little set-up with the free taco, the Bible, the foot tapping, you all alone, trying to make me imagine I’ve got a choice so okay, I’ll bite—between you and the kid behind the counter, the kid wins. That kid is alive in the divine present seeing moments while he works so hard to go sneak people a free taco and he lets you do your pretend Bible-study and I get that you want to represent and I know the Good Book says judge not, so I won’t but I will say, for me, if I had to offer you anything, man, or send a good thought your way, I’d say for at least a minute or two look back there and watch the Lord in action behind that counter—just look at that hustle, look at that grace.

Big City Ghost

Ghost at the bus stop in a lime-green parka and silver snowboots pretending to be asleep. Ghost jumping up, running after the bus, and falling through a closed manhole.

Ghost winning every staring contest with the sewer alligators. Ghost subway surfing in a swimsuit, bursting out into daylight on top of the train and high-diving off a bridge, making no splash at all.

Ghost under the river watching fireworks on New Year’s Eve. Pious ghost on a lunch break in the lotus position three feet above the art museum steps. Ghost collecting garbage. Ghost in a cubicle. Ghost at the unemployment office trying to cheer people up, getting cursed out by an old lady with a rosary.

Ghost at the funeral home giggling in a showroom casket. Ghost hanging outside a hospital emergency room eating Flamin’ Hot Cheetos and laughing, then trying to calm down a bunch of angry families and ambulance-ghosts. Ghost in court, prepared to testify, but unable to be sworn in, hand passing through the Bible every stupid time.

Bored ghost reading Jane Austen on the subway and scowling. Ghost writing confessions in the best cafés, staring at sentences that almost seem true. Ghost with no memory of its death, dunking journal pages into yesterday’s lattes, watching truth turn to mush.

Ghost who hears and feels every last curse hurled at the landlords and the gas company. Ghost who figures out how to turn people’s heat and power back on, but can never figure out plumbing, which is impossible.

Ghost drawn to the park at night, quickly obsessed with watching things that happen only at 3 a.m. Ghost who sees too much but can’t stop looking, growing sick and invisible in an abandoned car. Brittle ghost who refuses to leave the city beaten and bitter. Ghost growing small to survive, hiding in the shadows of the ferns and the rats.

Ghost out in the street during a midnight thunderstorm, flowing back underground again with the rain and the garbage. Ghost humming an ancient song with other cherished souls surrendering themselves to the gloom of the sea.

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Matthew Jakubowski (he/him) is a multi-genre writer based in Philadelphia. His debut chapbook of microfiction and flash, “Ghost in the Rain,” was published by Bottlecap Press in 2026. His stories appear in Identity Theory, Doric Literary, Boudin, Temple in a City, Scaffold Lit, Gone Lawn, Variant Lit, JAKE, and the Best Microfiction anthology. Links to his work are available at mattjakubowski.com/fiction

Susannah Rigg

Eight Stops Back

The first stop comes quickly. You barely have time to get yourself to your seat, lower deck, by the back window, when the bus begins to slow to let old passengers off, new passengers on.  You’d normally sit on the upper deck, but you don’t trust yourself with the stairs today. A woman carrying a chihuahua in a bag skuttles out of the rear doors. The little dog’s ears flap back, caught in the wind, making it appear startled. An elderly lady wearing a long black coat dawdles by the front door, digging around for her bus pass for so long that the driver hurries her on, “don’t worry about it love, I trust ya.”

‍ ‍Eight stops and then get off the bus. Count them so you don’t miss it. You repeat the mantra to be sure. Your head hasn’t righted itself since the phone call that morning. You look at the piece of paper in your hand, Farnham Street, Cherry Tree Elder’s Home. It was always eight stops away, she was always eight stops away, you never knew. Are you glad you never knew?

The bus pulls into the next stop, the breaks squeaking metal upon metal. A young guy sits down next to you, his headphones wrapped around his head giving him Mickey Mouse ears. You wait to be annoyed by his music but you realise you can’t hear it over the loud hum of the engine. You watch his head bop to the inaudible beat as he scrolls through his phone, looking intently at pictures of amps and mics. For a while you look too, until he turns his head just enough to let you know that he’d like you to stop. You stare out the window instead, repeating the number two to yourself, so you don’t forget. Two stops down, six to go.

The street passes by in a puddle of greys. It was raining that morning when your phone rang, the droplets trickling down the window in your kitchen. You’d been planning to stay in and work on the play you are writing, the one that was due last month, the one you already spent all the money from. Now you are on a bus heading along the road to your past. When would you get back to the play now this had been thrown into your world? When you answered that call you may as well have grabbed your script and thrown it into the air, letting it land, as a sombre confetti, wherever it pleased, to be trampled on, lost under the sofa. But then, that’s how life always felt with her, before.

Out of the window, you watch a man in a dark suit appear from a narrow alleyway and ponder how you wouldn’t have seen him if the bus had passed a few moments earlier. What if you had popped to the shop when the phone rang, missed the call? Would they have called back or chalked it up to a wrong number? Could you still be at home with a warm cuppa, browsing the internet while your play blinked at you from the corner of your screen waiting to be finished? Would you be enjoying some morning TV, watching other people’s lives, rather than being tossed around in your own?

Someone presses the bell and you repeat three over and over in your head and then wonder if you should wait for the bus to stop first in case you get confused and think four when the bus pulls in. Stop overthinking it. You’ve been on a bus before. You’re an adult.

At the third stop you notice a café. You’ve been there before, although you don’t remember ever coming to this area of the city as a child. You remember hot chocolates that tasted like muddy water and a croissant that was so hard you dropped it on the plate from a height just to hear the thud. It had made you laugh. She’d hissed at you to stop messing around though and told you to go up to ask for a new one. You were embarrassed, six years old and shy around adults, scared of them. Rightly so. You resisted, asked her to go, but she told you it was your croissant, your responsibility. You said, you’d just eat it stale. She screamed at you then. A few people turned to look and you scuttled up to the counter to ask for a new croissant from the angry-looking man, who threw another one into your tiny hands. You’d had a stomachache that night, you blamed the croissant. Misdirection was all you had.

You’ve never much liked responsibility as an adult. Maybe you used up your quotient as a child? She said you were like your dad, not a fan of responsibility. You believed her, until one day you realised you were just tired, so tired.

As the bus rushes into stop number four, dragging a wheel against the kerb, a string feels like it is being pulled around your heart, like those cuts of beef in posh pubs, ready to roast. Halfway there, halfway back to a life that you chose to leave. No, it wasn’t a choice, it was a necessity. It was survival. Stay and live with your lungs always working on restricted air or go and have a chance at something.

Had you made anything out of that ‘something?’ Sometimes you wondered. But you never regretted the decision, except when the guilt flooded in, except when the emails about Mother’s Day or the Christmas adverts caught you off guard. Then, you were left in puddles on the floor. A normal day could turn in an instant, forcing you back under the duvet from which you’d already struggled to emerge. Your mind played tricks, Christmases were ok, weren’t they? You had presents to open. Society played tricks she’s your mother, she gave you life. Oh yes, she gave you life and then sucked it back from you, using your heart to pump blood around her own, as if you owed her that.

An elderly man gets on at stop five, along with the scent of rancid chip oil from the kebab shop outside. A teenage girl in a baby-pink tracksuit gives up her seat so that he can sit his frail bones down. He drops into it without bending, his sinews no longer flexible enough to lower him with grace. His body showing him up. You wonder if he is alone. Who he has in this life? Who joins him for Christmas? You stare at his wrinkled face for clues, expecting the wrinkles to write out his sadness, instead you notice contentment scribbled in his brow.

The sun has come out now and it shines in through the bus windows, making a little rainbow on your lap. You place your hands on your denimed knees and try to hold the colour-filled arc, but it disappears against the lightness of your palms. You remember being told at school that you looked pale, maybe you were getting ill. You feigned feeling fine, even though a fever was rising, pooling sweat under your ponytail and dripping down your shirt collar. Illness wasn’t tolerated in your house. Once, hallucinating from fever, you finally called out, convinced you were dying, not wanting to die alone and go to little kid heaven. No one came.

As the bus rolls into stop six —or is it five, no it’s six, you are sure it is six—it glides to a stop as if the driver has found his stride. A flustered looking woman drags a pram and a toddler in through the back doors. Standing bodies move to make space, some taking it as their cue to go and sit upstairs out of the way of the elderly and the babies. The woman locks the pram into place and pulls a hand through her knotted hair, the bags draped over the pram handles bulging like the ones under her eyes. She leans against the inside of the bus, smiles weakly at the old man. The toddler asks questions and flicks at the toy that is hanging on the side of the pram. She stops him by placing her hand over his and flashing him a warning look. The chaos around them whispers with the secret you already know, motherhood is impossible. You have shirked that responsibility too. Or was it taken from you? Depleted from mothering both her and you. Scared of patterns repeating.

‍ ‍Your mother had a stroke they told you on the phone as the rain pattered outside like any other rainy day, as the smell of toast from breakfast still lingered in the kitchen air, May not survive it, they said. Your coffee bubbled on the stove. Next of kin, Had to let you know. You stared at the photo of you and your friends celebrating the opening night of your first play. You had wished that night that there had been family there to share it too. It's complicated you said down the phone, as the guilt rose up above your nose and mouth, pulling you under water, a sensation you recognized. We understand. They’d heard it all before, a relief and a mockery of years of acute pain.

The bus clatters into stop seven and your head bumps against the window with a muted thud. When did you move so close to the glass? You spent so much of your life making yourself small, it comes naturally, but it no longer feels comfortable. Taking tiny breaths for your entire childhood, it took years of training to fill your chest as if life wasn’t yours to absorb, as if someone else needed the air more than you.

Your voice too, always so quiet. The actors performing your first play had taught you how to project. You’d thought you might explode from all the stagnant, crushed down words that seemed to rise up from inside you as you called out across the empty theatre, as if they were being pumped from you, like alcohol from the stomach of a drunk.

You see stop eight approaching.

“Excuse me,” you say to the people next to you. Your voice comes out as a whisper. They don’t hear you.

“Excuse me,” you say again forcing the words out.

You go to stand up but your whole body is heavy, you can’t lift your arm to grab onto the seat to pull yourself up. Your legs have no strength.

“Sorry, do you want to get off?” the man next to you wearing a buttery coloured Shalwar Kameez asks. When had the boy with the headphones left?

You open your mouth to say yes, instead you hear yourself say “No.” Your voice sounds different. You let go of the seat in front and make a show of settling back down. “Sorry, I thought we were at a different stop.”

The bus pulls in. You watch each passenger as they get off, searching for your face among them, sure you will find it, but you don’t. You chose something else. No, not a choice, a necessity, the only way you get to live.

The door closes. The space on the bus feels like it is expanding, a sponge dipped in water, you grow again alongside it, taking up your rightful place on your seat. The bus pulls away from stop eight, rushes on to stop nine. Your mind wanders to your play, you know now, how it will end. 

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Susannah Rigg is a writer, editor and writing mentor. After over a decade as a travel writer, she now devotes herself to writing fiction. She is Assistant Fiction Editor at Wallstrait Literary Journal and her short stories have been published in Inkfish, South 85, Westchester Review and others. Susannah recently relocated to London after 15 wonderful years living in Mexico and is finding her hometown to be far more beautiful than she remembered.

Rachel Attias

Pond Scum

            Ryan and I have our fingers threaded through the chain link of the barbed wire fence. We’re staring at the pond that Libbie jumped into two-and-a-half minutes ago and hasn’t surfaced from yet. People used to call it The Pond by the Fish Hatchery, back when it was a place to picnic and play chicken while our parents held our little siblings up by the bellies so they could splash around with floaties on their arms. Now the hatchery is shut down and nobody calls the pond anything, except for Walker Gold and Metallurgic Corp, which drained it and lined it with something plasticky and permanent, and re-christened it Tailings Pond 2.

            “She’s dead,” Ryan says, and claws at his hair. “Oh my fucking god.”

            “She’s not dead!” I grab his arm and pull it down to his side, squeeze his hand tight. Libbie’s not dead. She’s going to surface now, and now, and now.

            The water in Tailings Pond 2 is an unnatural, vivid green. It’s cloudy like a cup someone has been using to rinse their brush after painting poison treefrogs. The green has long since closed around the space where I last saw Libbie’s body. The ripples she made have stopped.

            We don’t have a plan for this. Here’s how it’s supposed to go: Libbie jumps in the water and comes out a second later, and pretty soon she starts displaying the early symptoms of cyanide poisoning, which are headaches, dizziness, shortness of breath, vomiting, et cetera, and Ryan and I take her to the hospital and we call the local press and they report our protest against Walker Gold, who’ve been pulling rocks and ore out from the hill outside town, processing them with cyanide, and dumping their waste chemicals into the pond we used to swim in, which is probably leaking into our drinking water. National news syndicates will pick up the story because folks pay attention when an American teenager puts her life on the line—all that potential, potentially wasted—and Mark Ruffalo will petition Congress, and they’ll shut down the gold mine, and we’ll all be saved.

            It was always going to be Libbie who jumped in. We agreed it had to be a girl for feminism’s sake, and Libbie is blonde in a way that will elicit sympathy even from the staunchest right-wingers. I knew Libbie’s counterargument—"but you’re so pretty, too, Nat!”—was perfunctory, but I still tingled when she said it. Anyway, I’m way too chickenshit to do this. Plus, there’s a part of me that knows the whole design is flawed since nobody actually gives a fuck about American teenagers at all.

            At last, Libbie’s head and shoulders pop out into the cool Saturday morning air. Her skin is extra pale, almost glowing next to the green water. She’s gasping for breath. Ryan and I slip through the hole we already cut in the fence and we get in the water despite our revulsion, despite the way our shoes sink into the silty bottom past the ankle with each step, and then past our shins and up to our knees as we get waist-deep, until Libbie is in our arms, and she’s laughing hysterically, and lime green water is streaming off all of us, and weird, oily droplets cling to her throat like pearls.

            We get back to land and I wring out Libbie’s hair. I pat her cheeks with my one dry sleeve. I help her back into her jeans, her socks, her sweatshirt, her jacket. I glance at Ryan who, as the boy of the group, doesn’t get this privilege. I tell myself that at least I have this one thing he doesn’t, even as Libbie searches the sky for his face until he’s looming above us both, asking over and over again, “Do you feel the poison? Do you feel it yet?”

            Libbie pushes me off and sits up. “I went somewhere,” she says. She looks at the pond. “In there. Through the bottom. Another world.”

            “Another… world?” I ask.

            “A nether world,” she corrects.

            “The poison’s kicking in!” Ryan throws his hands up.

            Libbie says she got turned around when she was underwater, like she’d been roiled in waves even though the pond was completely still. She thought for sure she’d drown—“and then we’d really get their attention!”—but she surfaced and sucked in mouthfuls of air, not caring that she was swallowing the green cyanide water, too, because actually it wasn’t green, it was a normal dark blueish brownish color and she felt something against her leg and when she looked down the pond was thick with seaweed and a little fish swam past her ankle, meaning it was thick with life in other words, and when she looked up Ryan and I were on the shore waving her in, and we sat on our towels and ate salt and vinegar chips until our tongues hurt.

            “You have to see it,” she says.

            Ryan and I look at the water. We look at Libbie. We don’t say it, but I know we’re both thinking that the cyanide is working faster than we expected.

            “I’m not poisoned!” Libbie says. “I’m fine. Trust me. Please,” she says, and then grabs onto Ryan’s arm. She looks into his eyes. I get the feeling I get all the time, when Libbie texts me or touches me or looks at me, like a wet wool blanket has been wrapped tightly around my heart and is dragging it down, painfully, to my guts. Ryan thinks for a moment and says, “Fuck it,” and takes off his sweatshirt, because even though he doesn’t love Libbie she’s still a wet girl pressed against him.

            He strips down to his boxers and takes tiptoe steps through the mucky shore until he’s at the edge of the water and then he’s in it, and gone, and I feel so sick standing next to Libbie, who’s watching the place where Ryan used to be, that I know I’ll go in if he makes it out alive. When he comes up spluttering, I’m already in my bra and panties and splashing into the cold water myself, and it smells metallic and farty and I blow bubbles out through my nose until there’s no oxygen left in my lungs and then I keep on going, and when I rise to the air there are spots in my eyes and I can’t see anything and have to tread water until they go away.

            All I see at first is a gray day, the water around me still green, still farty, and somebody alone on the shore. I swim closer. It’s a middle-aged lady who looks like me, wearing my oversized green hoodie, except it fits her better. She’s staring at the water and her posture is bad and she just kind of looks like one big frown. She gives me a little nod of recognition, and I dive back into the water and swim as fast as I can to the real world.

            “It’s a nether world that gives you what you want!” Ryan is shouting to me even as I’m still dog paddling back to land. It gave Libbie a clean pond, and it showed Ryan himself and Katie V. sharing a picnic blanket, on a date. Libbie is sorting and passing us back our clothing so efficiently I can tell she’s trying not to cry. On the way to the hospital Ryan asks, “What did you see, Nat?”

            “Same as Libbie,” I say.

            No news outlets covered our protest, not even the school newspaper, who said they “couldn’t condone trespassing.” What happened instead was that Ryan told Katie V. the whole story about the nether world at the bottom of Tailings Pond 2. The night she became his girlfriend, they went to the pond together and jumped in. Afterwards she told all her friends. Some of them tried it, and they told their friends, and the rumor spread, and suddenly adults were diving into the pond too. Libbie and I thought for a couple days that this was it—the whole town would get sick, and finally we’d have Congress, and Mark Ruffalo, and everything. Some people did get dizzy and threw up but nobody paid any attention to that, and pretty quickly Walker Gold found out what was going on and put in a new fence, this one with a gate and an employee with a laptop so people could e-sign waivers and use their credit cards to pay for entry and rent towels for an extra three bucks. Ryan and Katie V. actually worked the Gold gate together, for minimum wage, through the end of high school.

            In the beginning the lines were longer. Some people would swim to the nether world, swim out, and run straight home. Divorces in our town and the surrounding areas skyrocketed that year, as did the number of affairs—which, Libbie pointed out, really meant that the number of known affairs rose, but probably the same amount had been happening all along. She and I would sit in camp chairs at the top of a hill and watch the circus from afar, passing a pair of binoculars back and forth. I was aware of the infinitesimal drift of the lenses as she pressed them to her eyes, how they lingered not on the pond but on the gate where Ryan and Katie V. laughed and made eyes at each other over customers’ heads. Libbie’s bitterness ran off her in cyanide ripples, and I tried in vain to mop it up.

            People quit their jobs.

            Three of our teachers walked out of school and were never seen again.

            A few bands were started. Some bad art was made.

            Mostly, though, people didn’t do anything after they came dripping out of the water. But as they toweled off they had a particular, private look on their faces you’d see flashes of every now and then, forever.

            Things leveled off pretty quickly. The line dwindled to a handful of people a day, the ones who kept coming back. They stood around in all kinds of weather and looked stooped and sad, before and after. They looked like the old guys who waited outside for the pub to open at three p.m. Some of them were those guys. The pub actually lost some business to Walker Gold. It was around then that Walker Gold instituted their subscription plan. You paid a flat monthly rate, which let you enter the pond any time and pay by the hour by scanning your member card on the way in and out. If anyone was tempted to swim to the nether world and never come back, Walker Gold assured them that they would be collecting dues on the other side, too.

            Libbie got bored of watching, bored of everything. Every time she said the word “bored” I knew she was trying not to cry. I knew she would leave, and she did, like Ryan, like most people, after high school. She doesn’t come home for holidays.

            I’m not one of those sad souls on the Walker Gold subscription plan, in case you were wondering. I only jumped into Tailings Pond 2 that one time. Sometimes the memory of the me I saw on that gray day fills me with horror, but more often she comforts me. She understands what I’m still learning, which is that in the end my loving Libbie never had much to do with being loved back. One day soon I’ll stand on the shore and look at the water and my own teenaged head will pop up like a buoy, and all I’ll do is nod. I’ll cross my arms in my green hoodie, and try to recall that feeling, any feeling, which could have compelled me to swim on such a chilly day.

---

Rachel Attias is a writer, educator, and editor based in Portland, OR. Her writing has appeared in n+1, Porter House Review, X-R-A-Y and more, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions. She holds an MFA from Oregon State University and teaches composition at Portland Community College and creative writing workshops around the Pacific Northwest. She is at work on her first novel.

Eirene Gentle

Independence day

Phyllis was 52 when she became a mushroom. It was a sensible decision, even her kids approved. They held her hand, bleached and withered from decades of exposure when she informed them. She was hard to see through the glare but her voice was firm and anyway Phyllis was more halo than mom since they were teenagers. A kind of visual psychotropic, or headlights of an oncoming truck if you’re churlish. She piled on clothes and makeup, doused herself in vats of ice but still beamed like a solar flare. She couldn’t contain it.

At 42 her sweat glands dried. Phyllis smelled like roast pork as she convected and passed out if no one hosed her down. The kids wore protective suits against the splatter.

Her tear ducts dried at 46. Unable to cry, Phyllis let out a kind of hiccup at her mother’s funeral and saved cremation costs by draping over the casket in the backlot of the funeral home, hic-moaning ‘mom’ until the everything was ash.

Ordinary people spend 3 years of their lives just blinking but there was no point in that for Phyllis so she saw everything. Flickers of deceit, the tiny tells of worst selves exposed daily in thousands of unblinking nanoseconds. She was like a psychological x-ray at the office, so uncomfortable they asked her to work from home. Then she was fired. There wasn’t much to pack up from her desk. She dumped it all in the trash just past the revolving door.

She made dry sounds like ceiling mice when she walked.

She stopped crossing her legs in case of fire.

Coincidentally her husband, Darren had been a cloud for a decade. Frequently stormy but cirrus when she needed him, he rumbled when hungry, puffed like soft serve when happy and only rained when he was out. Anyway, he was useless.

The family struggled. Darren was too changeable for regular work and no one was hiring a nimbus. Even her emails had a disquieting glow. Phyllis earned what she could through black-market cremations, happy to ease the burden of cash-strapped families but most of her dead got that way through extralegal means. Clients drove her to dubious locations in white or black vans where she smelled blood or solvents but they paid well and were usually polite. She liked that they didn’t ask questions. They liked that she was thorough and smelled deliciously of spareribs.

The job brought her to a lot of scenic places. Rivers, lakes, snowy mountains and especially woods. She loved the darkness of forest. Whispering canopy, sheltered from the broiling sun and moon. She dug her charred toes into cool earth, ran blistered fingers through pine needle carpets. Surprisingly soft. But mushrooms were the most comforting of all. So tenderly luminescent she hiccupped. Acres of cottony mycelium far from cruel sun.

Her farewell party was thrown on fireworks night so no one questioned the few extra flares. Phyllis got drunk and danced until morning. Goodbye to all this, she thought and dreamed of clammy soil with wide-open eyes.

A few of her regulars picked her up at dusk. Five vans slow-driving in a row, a thoughtful tribute. Her kids waved from their door while Darren rained over the lake.

It was a somber affair but not maudlin. Her clients wore black and called her ‘the best cremator we ever had,’ with an emotion that would’ve burst her tear glands if she had any. She settled on springy emerald moss by a chirruping creek. Everything peppery, damp and growing.

We’re the only things that burn

My timer, set for 1 minute and 31 seconds, begins counting down at exactly 1:31 pm.

A brief moment of serendipity. What to do with such a chance?

~

My brother had a firefly that danced on a pin. I don’t know where he found it. He pulled me from my bed to show me, down the small hall to the left, three normal steps for him, giant ones for me. His lamp splashed like chocolate coins in gold crinkly paper that disappeared when he flicked it off. My feet itched from cold. I was about to whine when something tiny bounced on his little wood desk.

‘So pretty!’

‘Don’t scare it!’

He held back my hair to stop it swooshing down on the firefly dancing teeny and green on the edge of a safety pin.

~

We’re born now, in this era of decline. Everyone feels it. We attack each other with nails and teeth in our cages. Any weapons we find. After killing everything around us, it’s natural we’d turn on ourselves. It’s never otherwise.

What to do, then?

What to do? 

~

My brother had three names in his short life:

1 - Len-Len, a cute approximation of Leonard, from birth to age four. Len-Len with a broad, placid face that puckered when I was born.

2 – Leo, from four into his twenties, the big brother I knew best though I didn’t. Know him. Leo walked me to school sometimes. No-talk walks. Just traffic blur and the skip-scuff of my sneakers on the sidewalk.

3 –Leonard, after he died, in emails from colleagues, documents and official papers. Leonard was paystubs and utilities bills, the ghost trail of a stranger. He was ‘close this account, please, the accountholder is dead.’ Spitting it out multiple times a day. Dying is an official act. Institutions insist on involvement.

~

The primitive mind is disturbing. For what reason did they learn to count? What was the moment someone needed five of something and instead of just bashing a head they invented a way to communicate the notion of five?

Five was what Leo said when he didn’t have a real answer. Five = I don’t know.

What’s the name of that tree? Who made you the boss?

‘How did your brother die?’

‘Five.’

~

Death certificates are incomprehensible. I don’t know if you know that. Something is clearly written but the mind can’t keep it in place. Letters scatter. I keep Leonard’s on hand for institutions to gnaw but I don’t know what it says.

I waft through his boxes, closets and shelves, trying to see what he kept versus didn’t throw out. Did the smushed paper cup fall accidentally and unnoticed or touch the lips of an early love, carry vital DNA, represent his first sale? Was it Leo’s or Leonard’s?

At night cords and cables slither to my bed and attack. One slips around my wrist, another my ankle. I hang from my arms or trussed like a hammock. Upside down, dangling. Blood heats my face, my skull shatters. I think I’ll die from the pressure but they know when to release me. I wake flushed and aching with my phone beside me. Battery 100 per cent. 

~

Leo was nine when we found out he couldn’t sweat. He’d get hot, red. Eventually he’d faint. They called it anhidrosis and said there’s no cure but it disappeared when was 15. How did it feel when moisture finally oozed from his pores? The humidity of it. The unleashing. Did he drip six years out in one go or just a little at a time? 

There was no celebration of the occasion but Leo needed something stuck inside him so anger stacked in. He piled it like firewood. He was his own effigy.

When Leonard died I tried to light up all he owned. House, garage, boxes, anything. I wanted flames visible to passing planes. But inferno is against city ordinances. City ordinances are like cables, I hang in them for days. 

 ~

Numerologically 1:31 = 5. 1+1+3=5.

1:31 and 1:31 is two fives. Two I don’t knows. Do they cancel each other out? Does I don’t know + I don’t know = knowing?

What to do with such a chance?

What to do? 

~

When Leo’s firefly danced I wanted one of my own. I wanted to hold it in my hand and feel it’s yellow-green kick, bounce, wave, step. I wanted to brag ‘my brother has a firefly and it dances on a safety pin.’ Like a fairy tale.

But Leo flicked on his lamp and pushed me out in the hall.

‘Forget it,’ he said. ‘You can’t hold light.’

---

Eirene Gentle writes lit, mostly little, usually from Toronto, Canada.

Elizabeth Rosen

Content Warning

This story contains a number of potential trigger topics, including:

Unwanted Sexual Attention

Misogyny

A Really Badly Stubbed Toe

Stalking

A Toaster That Startles When the Toast Pops Up.

Sexual Assault

This story also has content that may be emotionally challenging for those who have:

Encountered a co-worker who catches you when you snag your toe on a chair wheel and stumble.

Encountered a co-worker who misinterprets gratitude.

Dealt with a co-worker making repeated overtures, but is awkward so you initially feel sorry for him.

Experienced a second, unwanted invitation to go out with him.

Given an awkward but polite decline.

Received yet another invitation to watch the game together this weekend in a faked but-we’re-just-friends tone.

Been forced to manufacture a gently delivered excuse.

This story also contains graphic descriptions of: 

A rose left on your desk with no note.

A Fisher Price Little Person propped against your office telephone, its frozen smile turned toward you.

A neon blue Koosh ball left on your seat.

A pack of Pop Rocks taped to your computer screen with a winking smiley face drawn on it.

Male colleagues who shrug and say to just ignore it.

Please be aware that this work also contains potentially upsetting descriptions of:

A series of phone calls with no one on the other end of the line.

A sense of being watched.

A knock at the door in the middle of the night. An empty doorstep.

A sound in the attic that resembles neither squirrels, nor mice.

A breathless call to 911.

A perfunctory search of the house by the police. A bored officer taking a statement.

The purchase of a deadbolt.

Hours lost to reading online discussions about whether a gun or Doberman is the more effective deterrent.

The purchase of a second deadbolt.

Panic attacks whenever you have to enter your home after dark.

Hours lost to exploring how to purchase a Taser.

Moreover, the story has content that might not be suitable for some readers, such as:

The co-worker with eyes as black as a shark’s knocking on your office door and inviting you to have a drink after work. Again.

A blunt refusal. A warning to leave you alone.

A period of uncontrollable trembling in the ladies room that ends on your knees in front of the toilet, throwing up.

A rose, the bloom carbonized black, left on the doormat.

A breakfast appliance that makes you scream in fright when its timer dings.

Finally, the reader should know that this story deals with:

The feeling of a sharp-object pressed into the space between your shoulder blades as you unlock your car door.

The smell of the heat-degraded fabric of the back seat your face is pressed into.

The grip of strong fingers at the base of your skull.

The sound of nothing at all, after the zipper.

The brush burn on your forehead. The bruises on the back of your neck. The flash of a camera too close to your body in the E.R.

The painful glare of fluorescent lights as you listen to the resident on the other side of the curtain give the police officers a description of your injuries.

The knowledge that you will never be able to read a story again without first reading the trigger warnings.

---

Colorwise, Elizabeth Rosen is an autumn. She mourns the loss of Tab and still wants her MTV. Her stories have appeared in journals such as the North American Review, Baltimore Review, Pithead Chapel, and Flash Frog, and been nominated for the Pushcart, Best Small Fictions, and Best of the Net awards. Her story “Maw Maw’s Cheese Balls” is the 2026 winner of the Raleigh Review Flash Fiction contest. Find more of her work at www.thewritelifeliz.com.

Joel Tomfohr

Triples

Inside the heart is a chamber but not a cell. Or maybe it is a cell. A red blood cell and the whole thing a fist. Do I write a horror story about a hospital? Yes, I do. There is a walking cadaver in the corridor. He is me. He died in the hills with the coyotes and the vultures.

When I go home, I also stay in the hospital with myself. That means that there are three of me. My cadaver and I go down to the cafeteria, scavenging for food even though we are not hungry. We are entombing ourselves for the evening. We sit at a table. My cadaver looks at me and I look back at him. His eye sockets are empty. He has a bruise on his right cheek from punching himself in the face. The rays of light from the streetlamps are scimitars.

Back at home I am watching TV with my wife and the dogs. We cuddle. I feel her warm body and I would never let the cadaver come between me and her. I am in the hospital taking care of the cadaver.

How’s it going?

It is good.

What do you want?

I want your family.

Why?

I will tell you why:

See my nightmare. A litany of horrors. My stomach is a wet rag being wrung out. Save me from my pain.

I watch the cadaver walk the hospital corridors. First floor, second. Third floor, fourth. I would like to 5150 my cadaver, bit I think that one day he will 5150 me. I see him outside room B. I join a religious cult when I am four. Praise the Lord! Submit to corporeal punishment. Pull my pants down. Now my underpants. He spanks my bottom. A cadaver now hug my dad. He loves me. I tell myself in the hospital See him hug me while I wail. Take me to the hospital. I know what it’s like to be dead and live at the same time.

Back at the house, the living room is washed in blue television light and the dogs are curled up with us on the couch and we are curled up with each other and my wife has no clue that I am also a cadaver in the hospital.

---

Joel Tomfohr's chapbook, A Blue Hour (Bottlecap Press), was a finalist for the 2025 Orison Chapbook Prize. work can be found in Expat Press, Rejection Letters, Farewell Transmission, Maudlin House, and many others. He lives in the Bay Area.

J.R. Angelella

Cyclone

1.

The last time Noah saw Joy she was his girlfriend. It was Coney Island, and they rode the Wonder Wheel because she refused to ride the Cyclone.

“I’ve never been good at being scared,” she said. “I can’t commit to that.”

“Fear is only the absence of humor,” he said.

The Cyclone rose behind the park like something old enough to remember time.

“Then you must live an entirely fearful life.”

“Turn your frown upside down.”

“Don’t beat me with child psychology.”

Noah ate a Nathan’s hot dog with sauerkraut and spicy mustard. Joy licked a lemon Italian ice from a paper cup with a little wooden spoon until the ice went soupy and she drank it. They shared watered-down daiquiris out of plastic flutes while walking the cracked planks of the boardwalk, the ocean to their right, all pitch and muscle beneath the dark, and the rides to their left flickering like a cheap heaven.

They stopped to watch two street crews dance-battle to Michael Jackson’s “Smooth Criminal.” This, thought Noah, was either art or tax evasion. Maybe both. All one needed, apparently, was a speaker, some athletic children, and an empty bucket for tips. The crowd cheered in uneven bursts, deciding who won not by anything measurable but by whoever made them yell loudest.

The dance-battle, said a teenage boy nearby, was epic.

One team twisted and dropped and spun, their limbs turning like garlic knots. The other answered with backflips and windmills and a lot of face. It was all very Coney Island’s West Side Story. Noah wasn’t particularly interested, but Joy was, so he feigned enthusiasm. He clapped when cued by the teenage boy. He nodded. He said, “wow,” in the proper places.

When one team clearly won, Noah cheered for them.

Joy, predictably, cheered for the team that lost.

“I guess this means opposites attract,” he said, leaning in for a kiss.

“We’re more alike than you think,” she said, sucking melted daiquiri through a straw.

After the crowd began to disperse, the youngest dancer from the losing team — a kid, probably thirteen or fourteen — walked up to the captain of the winning team, who was older, maybe nineteen, maybe twenty, and flashed a knife.

He stabbed her in the thigh.

“Oh no,” Noah said.

Joy laughed, unaware of what had happened.

“How does it feel to have humor?” she said. Then, mocking him: “Oh no.”

Blood pumped hot and immediate through the captain’s tights. She stumbled and dropped to the planks. The crews exploded into a clumsy fight, all elbows and panic and flailing loyalty. Cops on foot and horseback stormed through the chaos, breaking it apart and tackling dancers in batches. The kid who started it all rode away standing on the back pegs of someone else’s bicycle.

“There goes the boy,” Noah said.

“It was a girl,” Joy corrected him. “And it happened because they lost. Nobody likes to lose.”

This was Sunday. Six days ago. They were not asked for a statement, and neither of them offered one. On the walk back to the Stillwell Avenue station, Joy asked, rhetorically, how it was possible she had never heard “Smooth Criminal” before. This disturbed her more than the stabbing.

“Everyone knew the words,” she said.

“Everyone pretends to know the words,” Noah said.

“Everyone knew the music.”

“You’re right,” he said. “Everyone did know the music.”

She did not laugh at his sarcasm.

“Next time,” he said, “the Cyclone.”

“I really don’t think,” she said, “there will be a next time.”

As the F train pulled away from the ocean, he kissed the back of her hand and sang quietly, “It was Sunday. What a black day.”

She let him keep her hand but turned her face toward the window.

That was the part he kept revisiting. Not the knife. Not even the blood. It was the hand. How she let him keep it without squeezing back.

2.

The man checking into the bedroom across the hall from Noah introduced himself as Large Charlie.

He was, according to him, seven-foot-two and four hundred pounds, though Noah had no way of verifying either figure or was too tired to challenge them. Large Charlie smelled like sausage pizza and discount cologne. Sweat shined across his skin without ever fully rolling free. He dragged a large black suitcase behind him and greeted the technicians as if he were a regular at a resort.

“I love this place,” he shouted to Noah across the hall as Tech Crystal fastened a plastic hospital bracelet around his wrist.

“This is his first time,” Tech Crystal said, nodding at Noah.

Large Charlie looked him over with interest.

“I love this place,” he repeated. “Best place in Manhattan, if you can get past the electrodes.”

The hallway of the New York Sleep Institute was carpeted, anonymous, and too brightly lit. Every door looked the same. Every room had two narrow beds, one desk, one chair, and the kind of television mounted high in a corner no one ever watched voluntarily. The whole place felt less medical than disciplinary, as if children with bad habits had once been sent here to be corrected.

“What are your problems?” Large Charlie asked. “Most people have more than one.”

“Sleepwalking,” Noah said.

“That’s a symptom, not a problem.”

“I don’t know then.” Noah pressed through his confusion at the question. “What are yours?”

“Sleep apnea and night terrors,” Large Charlie said, opening his suitcase. “Which is a nice way of saying my body tries to murder me in my sleep.” He unpacked with reverence: slippers, a folded robe, three over-sized Henleys, sweatpants, a travel pillow of unusual girth, earplugs, his own soap. “Did you know,” Large Charlie said, “the average person swallows six spiders a year in their sleep?”

“That can’t be true.”

“Afraid so.”

“Not possible.”

“Ten might be pushing it,” Large Charlie said. “But six…six is totally doable.” He stopped unpacking and wiped his giant hand across his forehead, clearing away sweat. “Six is a fucking lot of spiders.”

Noah decided immediately he did not want to be part of that statistic.

“Who’s counting these spiders?” Noah asked.

“No idea.”

“Based on how many people?”

Large Charlie looked up. “The question isn’t how many people. The question is how would they know?”

Noah thought about it and nodded in agreement. He wished they would stop talking about eating spiders now.

“What do you do for a living, neighbor?” Large Charlie asked, pulling off a sweat-staining t-shirt. His upper body didn’t look fat. He looked like the mythical creature.

“I’m a bankruptcy analyst,” Noah said. It was lie. He was not. He always lied when asked questions. “What about you?”

“I’m an exterminator,” Large Charlei said, rubbing his belly.

Noah didn’t even smile.

“What is it?” Large Charlie asked.

“You like to tell stories,” Noah said.

Large Charlie nodded and turned to Tech Crystal, setting electrodes on Large Charlie’s chest now. “Skeptic,” he shouted. “Tech Crystal, add that to your chart. This man right here doesn’t believe in truth.”

3.

Earlier in the week, a doctor diagnosed Noah with acute somnambulism.

“Put simply,” the doctor said, “severe sleepwalking.”

“Impossible,” Noah said. “I don’t sleepwalk.”

“That is often the opinion of sleepwalkers.”

“I think I would know if I got up and roamed around.”

“Would you?”

There were, in fairness, some recent incidents.

One night he woke standing barefoot at the kitchen sink, eating a square of feta cheese with chopsticks. Another night he woke on the couch with one leg crossed over the other, a men’s magazine in his lap opened to an article ranking the best hot dog stands in America. And yet another night he woke in the hallway of his apartment building urinating on his neighbor’s welcome mat. The mat said, in cheerful script: Good Guests Shed Their Shoes. He was aiming for all of the G’s.

After this incident, he called his therapist and begged for an emergency appointment. She sat with him through the details. The feta. The magazine. The hallway. The mat. The G’s.

“This has never happened before?” she asked.

“Not unless I’ve been incredibly efficient about forgetting it.”

And so, she referred him to the sleep specialist. And the sleep specialist referred him to the Institute.

“Likely causes include stress,” the doctor said. “A sudden lifestyle change. Anxiety. Substance use. Sleep deprivation. Any of these ring a bell?”

“I don’t even need a daily vitamin,” Noah said.

“That’s not really the defense you think it is.”

When the session ended, his therapist stood and walked him to the door. Before he left, she said, “I have never seen you be this honest before.”

He almost turned back to ask what she meant by that. Instead, he thanked her and went downstairs and called Joy.

She didn’t answer.

He hadn’t seen her since Coney Island.

Three days after that, she texted: I think you want me around because I make you feel like a person who has a life. That’s not the same thing as love.

He read the text six times before not responding.

She didn’t text again.

That had been enough, apparently, to teach his body the ancient art of sleep escape.

4.

The New York Sleep Institute sat between Ninth and Tenth Avenue on Fifty-Fifth Street in a building that looked like accountants might work there. By ten-thirty Noah had been wired with electrodes. Tech Crystal, a dental hygienist during the day, attached leads to his scalp and chest while Tech Dawn, a kindergarten teacher during the day, explained the bathroom protocol in a voice so calm it could have narrated executions.

“Try to sleep normally,” Tech Dawn said.

As if that were an option.

Through the thin wall he could hear Large Charlie speaking to himself in full conversational cadence. “I am relaxed,” Large Charlie said. Then, after a pause: “I am extremely relaxed.” Then: “Spiders aren’t real.”

Noah lay on the narrow bed in socks and an institutional T-shirt, staring at the ceiling. The monitors beside him glowed and clicked. There was no television. He had no book. He only had himself, which was clearly part of the problem.

It was sometime after midnight when he finally slept.

Suddenly, he was back at Coney Island. The boardwalk was empty. Not the normal bustle of things. No dancers. No tourists. No laughter. The newer rides glowed neon in the distance. And the Cyclone stood above it all. A giant in the night. Rising up against it all.

Joy stood by the Cyclone this time.

“You ready?” he asked.

She looked at the Cyclone rising and dropping. “I told you,” she said. “I’m bad at being scared. I really wasn’t kidding about it.”

“Fear is the absence of humor.”

“You keep saying that like it means something to me. I assure that it doesn’t.”

“It should mean everything to you,” he said.

“No,” she said. “It’s just something you say when you don’t want to admit you’re frightened.”

He tried to laugh but couldn’t.

The train rolled into the station. Empty. They climbed aboard. The bar dropped across their laps. The wooden car lurched forward and began to climb. Below them, the boardwalk shrank. The ocean widened. The whole city became a carbon copy of itself.

At the top, the train paused. The air changed. Joy turned and looked at him. “Why didn’t we ride this before?” she asked.

“Because you were afraid.”

She smiled, but not kindly. “No,” she said. “Because you were.”

Then the tracks vanished. The front of the train tipped into blackness.

Noah woke standing in the hallway of the sleep clinic with electrode wires dragging from his chest like seaweed.

Large Charlie stood in his doorway watching. “Sleepwalker,” Large Charlie shouted.

Noah looked down the long hall. Covered in fluorescent light.

“What was I doing?” he asked.

Large Charlie shrugged. “Heading for the stairs. Said something about going to the Cyclone.”

The technicians descended fast, ushering him gently but firmly back into bed. No one seemed alarmed. To them, this was simply a Tuesday.

“We got enough data,” Tech Crystal said.

“Enough for what?”

“To tell you what’s wrong.”

“I already know what’s wrong.”

“Do you?”

“I think I lost my sense of humor.”

In the morning, after bad coffee and a stale blueberry muffin in a waiting room full of people, the doctor reviewed the findings.

“Your body is mobilizing during sleep.”

“Mobilizing toward what?”

The doctor folded his hands. “Something unresolved. You don’t need a prescription,” the doctor said. “You need sleep.” Then: “you can pay your bill at reception.”

Outside, the city looked fake and impossible. Too much light. Too many buildings. Too much glass. He stood on the sidewalk for a while, then pulled out his phone. He called Joy. To his surprise, she answered. He heard traffic on her end. A siren far off. Her voice was careful.

“Hey.”

“Hey.”

“You okay?” she asked.

There it was. The question.

When he was in second grade, he watched his dad fight a man at a gas station. His dad knocked the man to the ground with two punches to the head and then stomped him repeatedly. When he was exhausted and panting for air, his dad looked at Noah in the passenger seat of the truck and laughed. He said, “you gotta find the humor in it all, son.” The ambulance came and took the man to the hospital. Later, he heard his parents talking and that the man had lost one of his eyes. Noah remembered the blood. It was everywhere. Later, when Noah was in his late teens, he remembered the incident again and asked his dad about it.

“Why did you fight that man?” Noah asked.

“Because he fucked your mom.” Then his dad laughed and said, “you gotta find the humor in it all.”

Joy asked him again. “Hey…you okay?”

He should have said yes. I am okay. That was the adult answer. Instead, he said, “Not really.”

“That’s more honest than usual for you,” Joy said.

“I went to a sleep clinic.”

“That sounds glamorous. Proud of you.”

“I tried to leave in my sleep.”

“Where to?”

“Coney Island, I think.”

“What a terrible destination for your subconscious to want to go. Were you trying to get to The Cyclone?”

“Of course I was.” He looked west, although there was nothing to see. Only traffic. And windows. And sky. “I think,” he said, “I was scared.”

“Of what?”

“Of being by myself.”

“Of being alone?” she asked.

“No, I said what I was scared of.”

She was quiet for a moment, before she said: “You know, I’m not getting back together with you just because of this strange, dramatic medical journey.”

“I wouldn’t get back together with you if you had one either.”

“But,” she said, “if you want to go ride the Cyclone this weekend, I might be willing to watch you throw up.”

“Will you hold my hand after?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “But I’ll let you try and make me laugh.”

The line clicked dead.

Noah stood there. For the first time in weeks, he felt tired in what he could only think was an ordinary, regular way. Human tired. The kind that suggests the possibility of sleep rather than escape.

5.

Noah woke up already standing.

He was in his kitchen. The overhead light was on. The refrigerator door stood open, humming. Noah held a glass of water he did not remember pouring. He drank it because it was there. His body felt heavy and delayed. He set the glass in the sink.

The apartment door was open. Not wide open. Just enough for the hallway light to slip inside. Noah stared at it.

For a long moment he stood there. Existing. Then stepped into the hallway. Down the stairs and out onto Seventh Avenue. Brooklyn at three in the morning was less empty than paused. Streetlights buzzed overhead. A delivery truck idled at the corner. Somewhere someone’s television played something.

Noah turned left. He saw himself move that way. He did not protest. He followed. As it felt a necessity.

At the subway entrance the metal gate was halfway down. The wind descended the station and wrapped around him. The F train platform was nearly empty. A man slept sitting upright with his arms folded across his chest. A woman in scrubs stared into space while eating potato chips from a plastic bag. Noah sat and waited. That was something that felt important somehow. The waiting.

When the train finally arrived, he boarded. His body automated. The doors closed. The car lurched forward. For several stops he sat without moving. He watched his reflection bend and distort in the cloudy windows as they passed through tunnels. It looked like someone else sitting there. Someone calm. Someone with intentions.

At the end of the line, the doors opened and his body stood. The air smelled of salt. The boardwalk was mostly empty. A few fishermen stood along the railing, their lines cast into the black water. The amusement park behind them was dark except for a few security lights that turned the rides into enormous skeletal shapes.

The Cyclone rose above everything. Even in darkness it was unmistakable. All those wooden ribs. They ached in the wind. Noah walked toward it. The chain-link fence surrounding the ride was eight feet tall. He stopped in front of it. Not a deterrent, he felt like he thought. Then grabbed it. Climbed it. Not elegantly. Like a n early human discovering it. At the top he swung a leg over and dropped into the gravel on the other side.

Noah walked toward the loading platform. The ride sat in the station. Empty rows of seats waited beneath the yellow glow of a security light. He climbed into the front car. The lap bar rested tight across his thighs.

Nothing happened.

Then Noah woke up. Not gradually. But all at once.

He was sitting in a roller coaster car inside a closed amusement park.

A flashlight exploded across his face. A voice shouted. “Sir.” A police officer stood on the platform below him. Hands on hips. “Would you care to explain yourself?”

Noah looked around. The Cyclone. The ocean. The fence he had apparently climbed. He nodded slowly. “Yes,” he said. “I would care to explain that.”

The officer waited.

Noah considered how to explain. “I believe,” he said finally, “I may have been confronting my fears.”

“You being funny?”

“Unfortunately, that’s the problem.”

“You climbed an eight-foot fence.”

“Yes.”

“You boarded a roller coaster.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I think I was hoping it would start.”

The officer lowered the flashlight slightly. “Sir,” the officer said carefully, “are you intoxicated?”

“No.”

“On drugs?”

“No.” Noah thought. Then said: “I’m beginning to suspect that I may be escaping from myself.” Noah looked down the long wooden drop of the first hill. “Do you ever ride it?” he asked.

“The Cyclone?” the officer asked.

“Yes.”

“When I was a kid.”

“Was it scary?”

“Yeah,” he said. “But that’s kind of the point.”

Noah nodded. “That’s what I’m starting to realize.”

He looked past the officer’s shoulder and noticed something delicate trembling in the security light. A spider web stretched across a nearby wooden railing. The web swayed in the wind. At the center…a spider. Small enough not to worry about being blown away. And yet large enough to eat.

The officer tapped the flashlight against the rollercoaster’s frame. “Let’s get you off the ride before you confront anything else tonight.”

Noah stood slowly. His legs trembled.

“You okay?” the officer asked.

There it was again. That question.

“I am,” Noah said. Then he shook his head. “Actually, no.” Noah looked out toward the black water of ocean. “I am categorically not okay.”

Noah thought about his parents when he was a kid. The frozen dinners. The bottles of wine with handles. The thin walls. The long silences between arguments. The way the television stayed on all night like a third person in the room. The way his father once said everything’s fine in a voice that meant the opposite.

The spider scampered across the web.

“You know,” Noah said, “someone told me something interesting recently. He said the average person swallows six spiders a year in their sleep.”

“That can’t be true,” the officer said.

The spider sat motionless in the web now.

“That’s what I said,” Noah said, and then reached out and pinched the web between two fingers. The spider skillfully clung to the silk. He brought it closer to his face. Noah opened his mouth and placed the spider on his tongue. He chewed thoughtfully once. Then swallowed.

The officer’s flashlight lowered toward the ground with sadness.

Noah wiped his fingers on his jeans.

The officer sighed. “You know what?” he said. “I’m not even writing this part down in my report.”

Noah could still feel the faint grit of legs and silk at the back of his throat. Large Charlie’s voice floated back to him from the sleep clinic hallway: Six spiders a year is a fucking lot of spiders.

“Well,” Noah said, “that’s one.”

---

J.R. Angelella is the author of the irreverent, darkly comic coming-of-age novel Zombie (Soho Press, 2012). His short fiction has appeared in various journals and most recently in the crime anthology Eight Very Bad Nights (Soho Crime, 2024). He teaches creative writing at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he directs Jiménez-Porter Writers’ House, a literary center dedicated to creative writing across cultures and languages. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing & Literature from Bennington College. He lives in Baltimore with his wife and two children.

Judy Slitt

The Appendage

My wife, Shirley, and I walk in on my dad rubbing ointment into my mom’s leg stump. It’s our first morning visiting my parents. Mom’s laying back on the brown Barcalounger and Dad’s bending over her. Mom looks angry. She says, “You have to really get it in there!”

            Dad’s face is scrunched into a little ball, focusing, and they’re both so in the zone that they don’t see us standing there.

            I can tell this isn’t a hit with Shirley.

            Shirley says, “Uh. Hi.”

            Dad looks up. He’s sweating. He says, “Rob. Shirley.”

            Mom makes a face at Shirley, a not-very-nice face, but you see, she had her leg amputated just last year due to her diabetes and she’s still sensitive about it. I mean, I think she’s embarrassed. That’s what I tell Shirley later that night, when we’re alone in my childhood bedroom.

            “Yeah,” Shirley says. “I could tell it was an intimate moment.”

            The stump looked puckered and angry. Like the end of a sausage. Like a butthole.

            “It’s not like I wanted to see it either,” I say. Last time I saw Mom, she wore a muumuu to cover it up. This was my first time seeing the stump in its full glory.

            Last year, Shirley said we should pay for Mom to get a prosthetic. “We have the money,” Shirley had said. “It’s the only thing that makes sense. Your dad shouldn’t have to cart her around all the time.”

            But my parents refused. “We won’t take money from you,” Dad said.

            “I’m perfectly happy with my appendage,” Mom said.

            If I’m being honest, I’m not in the most stellar mood. Visiting home makes me have mouse poops. My feces congeal into a brick inside me.

            Mom isn’t pleased that Shirley and I won’t have kids. Mom says things like, “Oh, did you see the pictures of your cousin Jeannie’s baby? Let me show you,” and spends forever hunting for the pictures on her phone.

            That night, Shirley says, “They don’t give a shit about cousin Jeannie’s baby. They’re just trying to pressure us.”

            I say, “Yeah,” because she’s right, but what am I supposed to do, tell Mom not to show us any baby pictures? So I say, “That’s just the way they are. We’ll be home soon.”

            “I still can’t shit,” says Shirley. She takes off her earrings and puts them on the dresser.

            “Tell me about it,” I say.

            “I mean, I haven’t had a shit this whole week,” says Shirley. “It’s like World War III in my colon.” She changes into her pajamas, a Dead Kennedys shirt that goes to her knees, and I have to say, she looks pretty fetching. Her curly hair is out of its bun and she looks like a lion.

            “Yeah, totally,” I say. “So, you wanna have sex?”

~

            On the last day, Shirley and I are with my parents in the living room, watching football. Dad grunts from time to time and says, “Seriously?” and sips his beer. It’s a more mellow vibe, I think, because Shirley’s anticipating a return to her routine and French press coffee and also regular shits.

            Mom turns to Shirley and says, “Dear, can you fetch my ointment? It’s in the cabinet above the bathroom sink,” and Shirley brings it back and holds it up awkwardly – it’s like a jumbo toothpaste.

            Shirley says, “Here you go, Mom,” because Mom likes her to call her ‘Mom’ and has made this clear on multiple occasions, even though Shirley’s face always twitches when she says it.

            Mom rolls up her tie-dye muumuu to expose her leg stump. We all have to keep our faces neutral. But the stump looks angrier than last time. Maybe on account of Mom being too embarrassed to apply unguents in front of us this week. Maybe Dad still applies the unguents at night, when we’re asleep, but it’s not cutting it.

            Mom can’t apply the ointment herself, on account of her stomach being in the way and her lack of flexibility. I expect her to ask Dad to help.

But she says, “Shirley. Dear. Can you rub in the ointment? My appendage gets so dry in the winter.”

            Shirley stares. Then she sinks to her knees. She sneezes and shoos away my parents’ cats. Shirley’s allergic to cats and always says, “I can’t breathe with all this fur,” but I can’t tell my parents to give their cats away, can I?

Shirley uncaps the tube and squeezes ointment onto her manicured fingers. The smell of menthol fills the room.

It dawns on me: I wonder if I’m watching my marriage fall apart.

            Mom smiles. Her teeth are gray. Her eyes sparkle.

---

Judy Slitt lives in Virginia. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Bright Flash Literary Review, surely magazine, Cosmic Daffodil Journal, Moss Puppy Magazine, M E N A C E, Crow & Cross Keys, and BULL. Her website is judyslitt.com.

Brett Nelson

Exposure

“Holy shit, it worked.” Joey held the photograph up to his face, then further away, under the light. “Victor! Victor, come here!”

He tilted it, looking for imperfections. But really, there weren’t any. Hard to even believe it came from his own hands.

“What’s up?” Victor asked. Then he saw what Joey was doing and stepped eagerly into the little room. “It worked?”

Joey held the photograph up proudly. In it, Victor stood holding an ice cream cone in front of city hall. There were a few other people in the shot and the edge of it was blurred just a little from Joey’s thumb. Victor was smiling in the photo, holding up the ice cream cone like a trophy. It had cost six dollars and seventy-five cents.

Joey handed him the photo.

“Holy shit.” Victor held it close to his face and smiled.

There was the entire rest of the film roll to work through but for the moment Joey wanted to enjoy this moment, savour it. When he’d come home with the chemical medley the internet had told him he needed, Victor had complained that it would be easier to drop the roll off at London Drugs. That they didn’t need to convert a closet of their tiny apartment into a darkroom for a hobby.

But it cost almost forty bucks(!) to develop one roll of film there and with the kit he’d bought for just twenty, he’d been able to make a setup that would last for the development of at least ten rolls. His first attempt hadn’t worked, and he’d had to sacrifice that roll as a loss. But once he’d convinced a put-out Victor to fill another, Joey had studied up on the techniques and now he was holding the fruit of all that labour.

“I told you it’d be worth it,” he said.

Victor grinned up at him. His front teeth were a little crooked, like they were all leaning away from something in his mouth. “Yeah,” he said. “Totally.”

~

They’d gotten the camera at the big flea market hall on Terminal Ave. There were lots of good deals there but they started charging entry a few years back. Five bucks, unbelievably. Joey learned that if he walked in with confidence and nodded to the guys at the entrance about half the time they’d just assume he was a vendor. Sometimes he carried a box like he was carrying it to his table.

The day they’d gotten the camera he’d paid for both their entries because he didn’t want Victor thinking he was cheap and the carry-something-in-and-nod move might not work for both of them. The camera itself was an old camera that looked like an old camera. Like something out of a movie or one of Victor’s Pinterest boards. They found it on a table amid other bits of half-working mechanical items, beneath the hanging display of raincoats, pants, boots, and work clothes. Joey was tempted to grab some new boots for work but he didn’t have the cash and he wasn’t working just then.

So they got the camera instead. For forty dollars, because Victor had gone on and on about how cute it was and how cool film photography was and how the pictures came out better and how his parents had all these photo albums and he didn’t have any because people these days only took photos on their phones.

And they’d fought the night before. Joey had kissed Victor and then touched him and Victor had pushed his hand away gently and said he was tired. Joey had said that he was always tired and Victor had said that it was because he always worked and Joey had said he was trying to find work to help out and Victor had said he knew but it had gotten really tense after that and nobody spoke for the rest of the night.

“It’s hard to know if the photo’s going to be good,” Victor said the first time he pressed the shutter, got the click. “There’s nothing to look at after.”

“That can be cool, though,” Joey said. He didn’t like the disappointment in Victor’s voice, was hoping that the camera wouldn’t be like other things he’d picked up and put down without putting much time into them. The crochet needles sitting on their windowsill; the potted plants on the balcony, overgrown with little weeds and dead shoots.

~

They had to wait for the rest of the photos to develop after that first tester. A handful of minutes to develop, then the stop bath, the fixer. Joey moved the sheets between tanks with each timer. He tried to catch a glimpse of the photos as they passed through but the darkroom was, well, dark and he couldn’t yet afford to put in the safety light that the guy at the camera shop had tried to sell him along with the development kit.

They stood in the kitchen while they waited, talking about all the things they might take pictures of in the future, now that this new world had opened up for them. Victor talked about a trip to the island. To Victoria, or Salt Spring, and the pictures they could take there. Joey nodded enthusiastically, ignoring his mind as it calculated ferry costs—twenty per person, seventy-five each way for the car—and tried to encourage him instead.

They mixed up drinks using the last of what they had in the liquor cabinet over the fridge. A bit of gin and the last can of tonic water and Victor even found a lime of dubious quality in the crisper. He got a pair of half-decent wedges out of it and he slid them onto the rims of the mismatched glasses.

“We could even go to Ucluelet.” He leaned in and kissed Joey softly, then pulled back. “Or Tofino. Tofino would be cool.”

~

When the photos were dry they sat down on the couch together, Victor in Joey’s lap, and looked through them. Some were completely underexposed, minor textures in the shadows. But others turned out. Holding the photo and seeing a physical record of their existence made Joey feel like they were living their lives through something important.

“I like this one.” Victor pinched it between two fingers before Joey could move on to the next one.

It was a picture of the two of them that someone else had taken. They were standing together at the edge of a railing near the waterfront. Joey was wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses. Victor was wearing a t-shirt and tiny shorts.

“Huh, that’s weird,” Joey said. He tapped the photo.

“What’s weird?”

Joey tapped again. “There’s like, something here.”

Victor frowned. “I don’t see anything.”

“Really? That little smudge there? It’s almost like a dick.”

Victor laughed. “You think so? I don’t see anything. Or like, maybe a shadow or lens flare or something.”

“No, seriously. It’s right there. Next to your hip, see? It’s like—seriously, it looks like a dick or something.”

“Maybe you’ve just got dicks on your mind again, darling.”

“Seriously? It’s right there.” Joey tapped a third time.

“I think you’re tired,” Victor said. “And you’ve had a drink—”

“Just one.”

“—and maybe you’ve inhaled some chemicals.”

“I don’t think they do that.”

Victor held his face like he was trying not to laugh and glanced one more time at the photos, shook his head. “You coming to bed?”

Joey didn’t answer. He went back to the darkroom, frowning at the photograph in his hands.

~

“See? It’s not just the one.”

Victor stared bleary-eyed across the kitchen table. He had a mug of coffee in front of him—Joey’d waited at least that long before assaulting him with what he’d learned overnight.

“The little dick is in a bunch of these.” He gestured to the pile on the table. “Everything in this pile.”

Victor picked up the pile. “So, they’ve all got little smudges?”

“They’re not smudges!”

“Maybe it’s your fingerprint on the camera.”

“It’d be on all them then, and it’s not.”

He sifted through the pile while he drank his coffee. “I really don’t see it.”

Joey put his finger to one of the exposures. “Seriously? Right there. You can’t see that?”

“I guess there could be something.”

“That’s a dick! The same as in the others.”

“Yeah, maybe. Sure.”

Victor got ready for work and left without talking more about the photos. Joey tried to put them off to the side and ignore them too. He had more job applications to fill out and needed to check if any of the temp agencies needed a painter. Even a day’s work would help at this point.

Joey had just put on his jacket and was about to head to the library when he saw the pile of photos on the kitchen table. He hesitated only for a second before grabbing them. The ones without the dick, too. He grabbed them all.

~

Victor got home from work around midnight. Joey made him a mug of tea and waited until he was settled on the couch to show him.

“Look at these,” he said.

“The photos again?” Victor groaned, slumped. “Joey.”

“No, it’s different. See these?” He handed him a stack of paper. “These are the ones I showed you this morning. I scanned them on the computer at the library and re-printed them, but I brightened them up a bit first. Look at this.” He tapped the photo, where the dick had been. It all looked overexposed now—the whites washed out to flatness, artificial brightness wrestling with shadows in the corners.

And there was the dick. Amid the brightness and the washed-out colours was the unchanged greyness of a dick. Within the context of that new background, it was almost undeniable to call it anything other than an honest-to-goodness cock, floating right next to Victor’s leg.

“That—does look a little strange.” Victor shuffled the photos, looked at a few more. “No luck getting a shift today, huh?”

“And look at these,” Joey said. He handed over the rest of the re-printed photos. The ones that hadn’t had a visible blemish the night before. “These ones also have it after I brightened them up. Take a look, seriously. Nothing until I edited them on the computer and suddenly that same dick is there.”

Victor frowned at the photos. “So did you apply to anything today?”

“Yeah,” Joey lied. “There were a couple—some places looking for a painter. I’m hoping they call tomorrow. But seriously, isn’t this weird?”

“Sure, Joe. But, like, it’s probably just the camera. What else would it be?”

“I don’t know.”

“Like, do you think it’s a ghost? A—what? A cock ghost?”

“I don’t—what? A cock ghost? Really?”

“Well?”

“No, I just—I don’t know.”

“Then what?”

“I said I don’t know.”

“It’s almost definitely the camera.” He stood and kissed Joey on the cheek. “Get some sleep. Hopefully one of the places calls tomorrow.”

~

Joey was at London Drugs by the time an employee came to the front and activated the doors at eight. He walked all the way back to the photo centre and bought a roll of film with an emergency twenty-dollar bill he had stashed in an envelope his between mattress and box-spring.

He got ISO 800, double what he’d used for the last roll, because he’d read online that the higher number would increase the sensitivity to light and pick up more objects in low light. The people on Reddit warned of graininess, but Joey was past caring about quality.

He loaded the roll of film into the camera and spent the day shooting. He burned all thirty-six exposures walking around the city, trying to get a range of images. He took more pictures of City Hall; the Skytrain station; the faded shell of the old Toys R Us; an empty bar; the tree-lined neighbourhood streets broken up by bike lanes; the construction sites where they were putting in more Skytrain stations but apparently didn’t need a painter; a bookstore with baskets out front; a white-walled grocery store that felt like a hospital.

He took pictures of everything he could think of, not bothering to adjust any of the settings he’d so carefully learned the first time they’d used it. Back when he hadn’t wanted to waste any of the film they’d spent their money on together.

He walked far—far enough that the walk home at the end of the day took hours. The transit cops were at the stop and he couldn’t sneak in, so he walked the whole way. He got home with the sun still up; Victor at work until midnight again, probably. And he went to work in the dark room.

~

“You can’t tell me you’re not seeing this, now. This pattern?”

“Did you buy a new roll of film? Jesus, Joey, we’ve got to pay rent next week.”

“Okay, but will you look at these? Seriously? You’re going to deny there’s something there?”

“These are actually pretty good.”

“Sure, but look here.”

Victor hadn’t even changed out of his scrubs yet. He squinted at the images and shrugged. “Yeah, there’s definitely something there. But like I said, it’s something wrong with the camera.”

“I completely scrubbed the lens. I made sure there were no smudges or blemishes and you can see there aren’t any scratches.”

“Couldn’t there be one on the part inside? The sensor or whatever.”

“No, it’s a dick.”

“Whose dick, Joey?”

“I don’t know!”

Victor threw up his arms and laughed. “This is so, so ridiculous.”

“It’s not.”

“I’m going to shower.” He paused, then put his fingers in Joey’s belt and pulled him closer. “You wanna come? Obsess over a different dick for a while? I’m not too tired from work this time.”

Joey pulled away. “I—sorry, I’m tired.”

“Yeah, sure. Okay.”

Joey looked through all the photos again while Victor showered. There were dicks in every single one, most of them overexposed, some to pure whiteness. Others had detail, things he’d captured only to find whatever it was that existed beyond the realm of the naked eye.

That thought was a cold hand on the back of his neck. He’d been preoccupied with proving that this thing—whatever it was—existed and hadn’t thought extensively as to what it was, where it was. What exactly it was doing following him through every picture.

“I believe you,” Victor said when he came out of the shower. He sat down at the kitchen table in just his towel, wet hair dripping onto the tile. “There’s something there. I get it. I think we should put it away and not use the camera anymore.”

“You think it’s the camera?”

“I don’t know, Joey. But whatever it is, it’s not hurting us. We can just ignore it.”

Joey picked at a frayed thread on his pants. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, sure.”

~

The guy from Marketplace didn’t want to give Joey the camera for less than fifty but he got him down to forty.

“It’s an F2.” The guy said it like it should mean something. “It’s already a huge discount.”

But Joey hadn’t said anything to that, just kept holding out the two twenties, folded together between his index and middle fingers.

“Fine,” the guy had said. “You’re robbing me, but fine.”

Joey took the camera. There weren’t any transit cops at the stop, so he got on the 99 with the crush of other people going through the backdoor to avoid paying for a ticket. He rode three stops then walked two blocks to the camera shop. The film was more expensive here, but they also hung it out in the open, rather than behind alarm-protected cases like the London Drugs.

The door jingled as Joey walked inside the cramped space. Almost every inch of wall was hung with product. There was one glass case at the front where the cameras were. An old guy in a polo shirt standing behind that.

“What can I do for you?” he asked.

“Yeah, I—,” Joey said, scanning the wall behind the guy. “Could I get a look at that Canon behind you? The one on the shelf?”

The guy looked back to where Joey was pointing, and Joey managed to fish a roll of ISO 200 film off one of the racks beside him and drop it into his bag.

“This one?” The guy asked, pulling down the camera.

“Yeah, that’s the one.” Joey took it and pretended to heft it, peered through the viewfinder. All the things he figured he was supposed to do when he tested out a camera.

“Yeah,” he said. “I gotta get some cash, but I’ll come back?”

The guy shrugged. Joey put the camera back on the counter and left the shop, triggered the tinkling of the door once again.

~

He took pictures of everything. Some of them were the same as the pictures he’d taken with the last roll, or close enough. He took pictures of the same place at different times of the day. He took a picture of full darkness and one angled directly at the sun. He took a self-portrait. He asked people in the street if they would stop for him. Pose. When his phone rang, the Caller ID announcing the temp agency, he let it go to voicemail.

Victor was home when Joey got there but he didn’t say anything. Joey’d been hoping that he’d pick up an extra shift to try to help pay the rent so that he’d have the place to himself, but it didn’t end up mattering because Victor didn’t say anything anyway. He just sat there on their couch watching as Joey got everything ready.

He didn’t want to find what he was looking for in these photos, didn’t want to be chased by whatever was there. As Victor had said, it could be the camera. Probably was.

Painstakingly, he went through the process. He flicked on the heater to get things to temp. The developer, the stopper, the fixer. He transferred image after image onto photo paper, careful not to knock anything over as he worked in the dark. The smell of the chemicals crawled up his nostrils

He worked carefully; he wanted no mistakes, no possible way to refute whatever it was he found when he finished the process. Dick or not. The truth. That’s all he was looking for. If there was nothing there, they could blame the camera and leave it at that. He could call the agency back, go to work, go paint someone’s fence or house or the metal parts of some machine laid out on sawhorses in a ventilated room. He could don his jumpsuit and respirator and work methodically to get something to where it was supposed to be.

And if there was a dick? If it was still there?

He waited. Slowly, achingly. It wasn’t even a long time. A handful of minutes per tub. He wanted them to dry, everything to be perfect.

Eventually, they were.

He pulled down the first batch and laid them out on the kitchen table. He felt the apprehension rise up within himself as he prepared to look, the self-preserving quality of his fear crashing down upon his need to know as he leaned over the table and sought the dick within the images. He braced his hands on either side of the table and took one last look at Victor, who hadn’t bothered to look in his direction, as if something momentous weren’t happening to them right then. Joey looked down.

And saw.

---

Brett Nelson works and writes on the unceded traditional territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. His fiction has been longlisted for the 2026 CBC Short Story Prize, the 2026 Camel Gilmer Prize, and published in The Malahat Review and elsewhere. His nonfiction has appeared in Briarpatch, Current Affairs, and elsewhere. He is the prose editor of PRISM international.

Ben Daggers

Lost Letters

SEARCH: Sent mail
FROM: Prisoner 0367 - Jonas Landtner

TO: Lucy Severeux

MESSAGE COUNT: 884

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

SHOWING MESSAGES 451-460 (Page 46 of 89)

2084.10.29     

Lucy,

You’re not going to believe what they’ve cooked up this time. As part of the Intellectual Elite Countermeasures, starting next week there’s a hard limit on any words longer than six letters. You know that I’ve never exactly been Shakespeare, so it won’t affect my messages much, but it just goes to show how bad things have gotten. I think they’re still letting us receive messages as normal, so at least I can continue to enjoy all those words of yours that I pretend to understand.

While I still can, let me sign out in style: You are the most prepossessing, captivating, splendiferous creature in the universe! 

2084.11.5       

Lucy,

They really went and did it. I just spent the last minute trying to write a seven letter word and every time it got wiped from the screen. The rumor mill says that there may even be plans to reduce the letter count from six to five soon. As if one mail per week weren’t cruel enough, they’re now going to limit the words I can use? The world is going to hell in a hand cart. But we’ll get past this, just like we always do.

All the kisses in the world for you, my angel.

2084.11.12     

Lucy,

The rumor was true.

It was once said (more or less) that “the limit of my words is the limit of my world,” and I can now see what they were on about. With so many words now out of reach, I find it hard to think as I once did. But I still feel the same way about you as ever, and I hope you know that. At least I still have the tried and true “I love you”. Maybe that’s all I need?

I await your next mail (just five days to go) with every fiber of my being.

2084.11.19     

Lucy,

I hate to give bad news each time, but one more rule came in two days ago. I am down to just four. It’s as if they want to take the very last bit of life from me. From us.

I know you hate to hear it when I’m down, but I am in a bad way. My mind is a cage. With each week, each new law, each new loss, I feel its cold, iron bars push in more and more. Even when I had no rule to bind me, it was hard to tell you what you mean to me. But now, I am all but lost. When they take one more (and they will do any day now, I can feel it) I will weep, for I’ll have lost your name. Your name! But till that day, I will type it so hard that the keys will want to cry out in pain. LUCY! LUCY! LUCY!

2084.11.26

To my L,

Who am I to you now? And who are you to me? I beg God for aid, but he is not in. He is not. How can he be? 

I am so sad. My eye is wet all day. I am all ire now. Yet no end to the bad era for me and you: A new law in a day.  Is it the end for us?

My tip to my toe are all for you, my L.

2084.12.3

To my L,

Oh no.

Is it “I” or is it “we”? If it is “we,” I am to go on. If it is “I”... No. 

I or we?

We? We? We? WE?

2084.12.10

L,

x

2084.12.17

L,

x

2084.12.24

L,

x

2084.12.31

L,

x

CLICK HERE FOR MESSAGES 461-470 (Page 47 of 89)

---

Ben Daggers is a short story writer based in Osaka, Japan. He loves to explore the dark edges of fiction, before slowly backing away before things get a bit too dark. When not writing, procrastinating, or feeling guilty for procrastinating instead of writing, Ben spends his time doting over an emotionally-needy Italian Greyhound.

C.M. Green

The Lover

Week one: You skip Mass.

Week two: You stand outside the doors of the Church at 11:07. It’s not too late; they probably haven’t even started the Liturgy of the Word yet. You could still go in. It just felt so good last week not to. Not to feel trapped for an hour like a rat in a maze. Not to worry that everyone could hear your thoughts. Not to think at all, actually. At 11:14, you turn away and walk home.

Week three: You try going to a different church, one where you’ve heard the priest is liberal and people can wear leggings and piercings. You sit through the readings and the homily, but when the gifts are brought to the front, and the Liturgy of the Eucharist begins, you slip out and sit in your car for the rest of the hour. You listen to NPR and the news is bad in Florida. When the crowd comes out of the church into the parking lot, you pull away quickly and head for your coffee shop where your coworker knows that you want an iced Americano. At a table by the window, you try to read, but you know something now: skipping Mass once is an accident and a mortal sin. Skipping Mass three times is a pattern.

Week four: You sleep in and cry when you realize you missed Mass again. You could go to a later service, somewhere in the city, but you don’t.

Week five: You get an early breakfast with your sister. She asks you how the new job is going, and she looks a little disappointed when you say you love it. “Brendan says they’re always hiring at his work,” she offers. He works in consulting, though who he consults and on what topic you’ve never figured out. Your sister practiced law until her third child was born, and she has always hoped you might do what she did not. She’s like your parents, in a way, except they are in Florida enjoying retirement and seldom talk to you. Your sister talks to you all the time. She has to leave by 9:30 so that she can take her children to Mass, and she says one more time, “There are tons of good jobs out there. You don’t have to stay where you are.”

Week eight: You pick up a closing shift for a coworker, and you and the manager are alone. He starts a long conversation about romance because he’s trying to figure out if he even wants to date. You tell him, “I don’t think dating is for me. People just don’t like me like that.” He pushes and digs and when you tell him you’re Catholic, or ex-Catholic, or sort of Catholic, he snaps his fingers. “It all makes sense now.” As you clean the espresso machine at the end of the night, he offers to set you up with a friend if you ever want. You think he probably knows very cool people. All your friends in college were Catholic and most of them looked the same, like white girls out of Invisalign commercials. It’s nice, working at the coffee shop, to see that people arrange their lives in myriad ways. It’s nice, too, to see that not everyone is straight.

Week eleven: Struck by something you at first call divine, you go to Confession. You sit behind the screen; you aren’t ready to look anyone in the eye and say this. “Forgive me Father, for I have sinned. It has been about five months since my last Confession.” You run through the list for him: lust, pride, avarice. He wants details, and you give him some but retain others. You tell him, for example, about wanting to strangle your sister last week when she sent you a four-paragraph email explaining why she thinks you should have a real job, but you don’t tell him about touching yourself and imagining St. Sebastian shot through with arrows. You tell him that you haven’t been to Mass in almost three months, but you don’t tell him why. He says, “Well, the place to start would be to go to Mass tomorrow. Jesus is still waiting for you, ready to forgive you if you want to be forgiven. Do you want that?” You say, “Yes,” so you make your Act of Contrition and he absolves you of your sins. A small part of you feels cleaner, but most of you is left wondering why a priest should have this power. Why God is so limited. Guilt for everything you didn’t say pumps through your body like a steroid in your blood stream.

Week fourteen: You go to a Methodist service, but it doesn’t feel real without the Eucharist.

Week fifteen: It’s the Triduum. You decide you’ll go to Mass on Easter, at least to please your sister. On Holy Thursday, in the shower, you wash your own feet and for the first time in almost a year, you pray. “What do you want from me?” You say it over and over until you’re crying, because it feels like you are screaming into a jagged silent cavern. The next day, you listen to Johnny Cash and the Carter Sisters sing “Were you there when they crucified my lord.” You want to feel what you used to feel about this, a real grief, mourning for a friend. Instead, only numbness. But on Easter Sunday, you go back to church. As soon as you step in, your chest constricts and your eyes burn and your thoughts spin faster and faster and you think Oh, I am a sinner, a queer dyke fag slut cunt sinner who will go to hell and suffer eternally because I am ungrateful and how many evil, evil things have I done this week alone and I need to stay here to be saved but the cost of salvation is to feel like this and I don’t know how to stand that. You don’t hear a single word the priest says as you sit certain that you are irredeemable. When it’s time for the Eucharist, you don’t go up to take it because you know you aren’t worthy, but how can you be unworthy of something that isn’t real, but even thinking it isn’t real is a sin so you must be damned. When Mass is finally over you almost run to your car because you have been holding back sobs for an hour and fifteen minutes and you finally release them, turn the radio up louder and there’s more bad news but you can’t hear it over your own weeping.

Week eighteen: You finally let your manager set you up with his friend, your first date in almost two years. He’s a little older, a little taller, beautiful but boring. You should like him, because he has a real job and he’s nice and your coworker thinks you’re perfect for each other. But when he looks at you, you feel like you are something you are not. It’s like you’re sitting in Church. He tells you a long anecdote about a chemistry experiment gone wrong and you laugh at the right places. At the end, he walks you to your car and says, “I’d love to do this again.” He leans down and kisses you, your first kiss since college, and your skin feels like it will crack and release something toxic if he doesn’t stop touching you this second.

Week twenty-two: You get a promotion at the coffee shop, shift manager, and you text your sister, excited to share the news. Her reply is enthusiastic but you know what she really thinks. You wonder if she’s right, if you should find a job with a salary, but you can’t bring yourself to even look. For the first time you understand your work. You enjoy the act of creation, of being productive in a literal sense. And the coffee shop is the first place you have ever known people who feel like your mirror.

Week twenty-four: You aren’t a hermit, so you know trans people exist, but this is your first time really hanging out with one. You met her at work, where she’s become a regular, and she asks you on a date while you’re talking after your shift one day. She suggests a hike, so you drive out of the city a little and meet at a trail that disappears into the woods. It’s the best date you’ve ever been on, your first date with a girl. The conversation is easy and light and then easy and deep. You tell her a little about church, how you stopped going months ago now. She’s Jewish and tells you a bit about her own experience. “I like asking questions. I never want to take the first answer I come to.” When you reach the end of the trail, you stand on an outcropping above the river. She says, “Can I kiss you?” and you freeze. No one has ever asked you that. She smiles, soft and kind, and says, “It’s okay. We don’t have to.” But before you part ways, before she gets in her car, you say, “I think I’d like that kiss.” And it feels warm and grounding, and you think you can never see her again.

Week twenty-five: You shave your hair off.

Week twenty-eight: It’s your niece’s first Communion. When your sister sees you she raises her eyebrows. “New look?” In addition to the buzzcut, you’ve also acquired two piercings. She doesn’t look happy about it, and you feel even worse sitting in church than you used to, like every eye is on you. She doesn’t know you don’t go to Mass anymore, so you follow her up to receive the Eucharist, but at the last minute, you cross your arms over your chest and the priest blesses you instead of giving you the bread. You just hope your sister didn’t notice. Afterwards, there’s a reception and all the second-graders in their white dresses and suits run around the parish hall. You text the girl you’ve now gone on several dates with and tell her where you are. Her response is immediate and sympathetic and she offers to buy you a drink tonight. You agree and that evening you meet her at a dive bar she loves and she buys you a vodka cranberry and a gin and tonic for herself. You sit and talk and laugh, because she’s so good at making you laugh and she thinks you’re funny, too, and have you ever felt this relaxed with another person before? She makes you forget about the things that make it hard to live, but not by erasing anything. By seeing you in another context. You tell her that you wanted to cry for your niece as she received the Eucharist for the first time, an indoctrination into something you’re pretty sure is evil. But you also tell her that you still miss it, the ritual and the beauty. After you’ve each had two drinks, you take her to that all-night taco place your coworker recommended and the red grease from the chorizo drips down your chin and she wipes it off with her thumb. And you are twenty-four and you haven’t believed in god for at least twenty-two weeks and possibly for three and a half years, so you ask her to come back to your apartment where you live alone and where you’ve never had company. She smiles when she walks in and asks why you invited her back. You don’t know how to say it, she’s the one who’s good with words, not you, so you kiss her softly, hesitant, and she seems to understand. Under her hands you become consecrated, form the same but substance absolutely new. Each piece of clothing that comes off sends you farther from Calvary, and her fingers trace your neck, arms, thighs. When she touches you, you think about hands in wounds and life-giving water and proof, evidence, certainty. Then you don’t think of anything at all but her, and her tongue, and the way her neck looks like this, and the way her back feels beneath your heel.

Week twenty-nine: You tell your sister you don’t think you’re Catholic anymore. You say it just to hurt her, not because you care if she knows. She says, “Is it because you’re gay?” You don’t respond. “I’ll pray for you,” she says, and now you feel dirty. Like her prayer is a stain you can’t remove. You think about Christ on the Cross, and you feel something akin to envy. That night, you ask your girlfriend how she knew she was a girl, and she says, “I felt it in my skin. But mostly in how people looked at me. It’s relational, because everything is, right? Nothing in a vacuum.”

Week thirty-three: You buy a suit jacket at the thrift store, sky blue and pure silk, and you walk around the city by yourself wearing it. Nothing is materially different about you, but you think about the last time you tasted the Eucharist, the paper thin wafer and the astringent wine, and you finally know that yes, that was the last time.

---

C.M. Green (he/they) is a Boston-based writer. They focus on history, memory, religion, and gender in their writing. C.M.’s writing has been published in Full House Literary, beestung, and elsewhere, and they are a 2025 Pushcart nominee. Their debut hybrid chapbook, I Am Never Leaving Williamsburg, is available from fifth wheel press. They support a free Palestine and encourage you to find tangible ways to do the same. You can find their work at cmgreenwrites.com.

Rick White

2007: The Summer the Smoking Ban Came into Place

And suddenly the pubs all smelled disgustingly of human bodies—rank breath and stale conversation. Without that old grey shroud to cover us, the succour and the fug of it, everything seemed at once too real, too solid to ignore.            

We found refuge in the smoking area (formerly the beer garden, although it was never a garden at all but a brick courtyard strung with flickering fairy lights and rickety benches—pretty enough, in its own way).

“Have one for me, will you?” you asked. You were trying to quit but still liked the smell, and a freshly-lit cigarette mingled with the trapped heat of summer pavements is a fine thing indeed. So I had one for you.  Haloed in the silvery smoke and the waning light we talked; talked of our favourite cigarettes, taken from us so cruelly now by the locum doctors in the for-your-own-good wards.            

“In a café. Early morning with coffee and the papers, when it’s raining outside,”I’d offered, typically dour. “In the club!” you countered. “When you’ve just come off the dancefloor and you’ve got that nice sheen of sweat on your skin, like after sex.”

The way you said it bumped my heart into my lungs. I’d invited you out to the smoking area on the premise we were just two fellow smokers who needed to get out. Now you were flirting. Or were you? Maybe you were merely asserting your dominance and higher social ranking? Underscoring the obvious fact that of the two of us, you were the sexy one.

I couldn’t work it out. My brain was starting to whir and fry. But I hadn’t time to pause, for at that moment the sun slipped below the kerb and the moon popped up above the fence—full and fancy and closer than it should’ve been, really, when I think about it now.

A dapper-looking black cat perched atop the wobbly old fence, appearing from nowhere as cats have a habit of doing, silhouetted against the moon’s pale light, a perfect tableau—spectral in framing.[1] He gave his tail a laconic swish, and then another, as the smoke swirled upwards past the moon.

“I think he wants us to follow him,” you said.

“He wants you to follow him,” I corrected.

“You can come if you want,” said the cat.            

You leaned in and took my arm; you smelled of perfume and sandalwood and charity shops. Your hair touched the bare skin on my arm. There was no way I wasn’t going with you.

We travelled over late-August parks, summer bandstands and barbecues. Pumpkin fields, smouldering bonfire-leaves and drowsing Sunday scarecrows. We floated up, up, up, on the thermals, looking down on Christmas chimney-tops and January frost.

And we came to a house, somewhere in a space that was not where we had come from, and not quite where we were going. And we walked through a door.

And inside there was love, and brightness. There was music playing in the background—The Cure’s Greatest Hits (in my opinion). There were candles burning and the scent of fresh cotton. There were cut-glass tumblers and peaty scotch.

And                        

we are both

still here.      

Two children sit at the table, decorating pumpkins. I don’t recognise either of them, though they seem innocuous enough, their features undefined and unmapped to me. I feel no pull towards them, until the older one—the boy—starts hacking with a knife at the orange flesh, gouging two uneven holes for eyes. I feel a strange compulsion to take the blade from him, or at least to place my hand on his wrist and guide him towards a better impression of a face.             

The boy is called Lennox, the little red-headed girl is Annie. She has chosen to paint her pumpkin black, working diligently to cover every bit of the surface before sprinkling purple glitter on top. Her gothic pumpkin is quite strikingly beautiful and I decide in this moment that I would die for this tiny new artist if she asked me to.

Days pass, weeks maybe, no, not weeks. The glitter still blankets the kitchen like the last of a winter snowfall and one of the pumpkins begins to sag and rot. Eventually it collapses in on itself and leaks foul smelling liquid across the kitchen table which seeps into some outdated correspondence left there by you.             

“Why did you let this happen?” Is that your voice I’m hearing? I’m not sure anymore, it doesn’t sound familiar but I answer anyway—            

“I didn’t. It just happened.”             

“Well it was inconsiderate.”            

“How am I supposed to consider every eventuality that might occur? I can’t control the pumpkins, it isn’t my fault.”            

“Nothing ever is,” says the cat, from somewhere down the hall, just loud enough for me to hear.

Fuck this, I think. I want to smoke. But I can’t smoke inside and it’s so cold out there. It’s cold in here too. So I take a hatchet into the draughty living room and chop my limbs into firewood, arranging myself neatly in the log-burning stove. I shave strips of skin from my back and scrunch up today’s newspaper to use as kindling. You find me holding a match uselessly between my teeth, trying in vain to strike it.              

“Why do you always do this?” you ask, not unreasonably.             

“Do what?” I sputter back.             

“Act like I am the one who has somehow diminished you?”            

“Balls,” I say. “I could have been a tree.”            

“I didn’t make you come here, get out of the stove.”            

“No. Let me burn. Spark a match for me and control my oxygen with that little grate thingy in the stove. I’ll warm us and then I’ll go.”            

At once we’re both aware of how ridiculous we sound. How this isn’t where either of us thought we were going, yet here we are. This version of us, here in this place, is not the version we would have chosen to show our children; they deserve—we assume—something better.            

Or perhaps not.            

Perhaps there is no version of love in which one person does not end up chopped into bits in a log burner, or as a rotten pumpkin-head slumped on a kitchen table, brains leaking everywhere. Perhaps that is the best thing we can know.            

“I’m going for a smoke,” I say. Beyond the glitter-frosted kitchen, the warm mechanised glow of the oven, the whistle of the kettle.            

I step through the patio doors onto the cold and uneven decking which feels as though it’s about to give way as it begrudgingly accepts my weight. I know, in some part of my brain—the dimly lit closet at the back of my memory where I keep everything now— that it was me who built it, because it looks OK but it’s not. The angles are all just a fraction out. These rickety old joists were meant to kiss each other but somehow just missed.

I take my last cigarette from the pack, the one I’ve been saving. My old Zippo appears in my hand, catching the spark first time as I light up—the pull and the crackle and the glow. The first puffs disappearing into the blackness of the space outside our little home. The feeling of the smoke in my lungs which never really left.            

Our old black cat winds itself around my leg, as soft and as light as breath[2], and you step out beside me and say, “Go on then, have one for me.”

~

[1] A cat may appear to you, but you will never see one arrive. This is because cats are always where they’re supposed to be, whereas you, are not.      

[2] If you should meet a cat on Halloween night, they’ll be on a journey. Whether it’s your journey or not isn’t something you can know. You should always follow, but don’t tarry, for they will not wait for you.          

---

Rick White is an ex-smoker who now lives and writes in Manchester, UK. Read more of Rick's work at www.ricketywhite.com.

Lisa Thornton

The High Plateau

My grandfather tosses chopped onion and green pepper into a pan. He squirts soy sauce and vinegar and drops in a spoonful of chili paste. His fast-moving hands add some other stuff, too. Stuff I don’t know the names of. He’ll only let me flip the burgers even though I’m one quarter Chinese.

The ash of his Chesterfield is longer than the non-smoked part. His lips are strong, and he holds the cigarette straight out with the strength of them, so the long stick of grey ash appears to be defying gravity by not falling into the vegetables. Every minute or two, he grasps the cigarette carefully between his right thumb and forefinger and taps it into a sixth pan. A line of butts stains the countertop beside him. By closing time, there will be twenty or thirty.

My grandfather didn’t say anything when I flunked out of the University of Wyoming. He didn’t say he was ashamed or anything like that. Just offered me a job back home in the restaurant, which was maybe worse. When the disc of raw meat that is the American burger option on our menu begins to turn grey, I flip it. I slide the long-handled metal spatula under the patty and toss it onto its other side. I check the dangling slip of paper to see whether to add cheese from a large block that I often scrape white flakes off of before the dinner shift because cheese only goes on this one item, so we don’t order it very often from the Sysco guy.

I wipe down the booth that me and my friends crushed into after school. Before graduation. Grandfather used to bring us a plate of shumai and let us fill our Pepsis however many times we wanted from the pop machine. The lady on the kicking-you-out-of-college committee said I wasn’t ready. She said I needed more time. Like a patty that’s still pink. I’ve got time now. I sleep until late afternoon and then ride my bike to the restaurant. Grandfather is already there, every day but Monday when we’re closed, smoking in the mop closet where he shoehorned a desk and then piled it with receipts and restaurant supply catalogues, ashtrays, and slips of carbon copy paper. He doesn’t look at the clock when I arrive through the back door and lean my bike against the walk-in cooler. He’s never asked me what next.

Last night, a guy who works on the train with my stepdad ordered take-out. He asked Grandfather at the cash register what I was doing back in town. Grandfather clenched his cigarette between his lips. My stepdad says I can get a job on the train tomorrow. He says the pay is good even at the start and I’ll be taken care of for life. Davis’s wife needed two kidneys, and she had the whole thing covered by Union Pacific, he says. Both surgeries. He always adds that last detail. My stepdad doesn’t know how to make Chinese food, either. He came here from Mexico in the seventies to work the oil fields. He’s never told me why he switched to the train, but my theory is he was too skinny to hold his own out there.

There’s only desert between our house and the restaurant. Sometimes a white-tailed deer in the yard. This is not the Yellowstone postcard part of Wyoming. It’s the Flying J Travel Plaza off I80 part. The dry part. The state pen part. The white rocks on the side of a hill arranged in the shape of a cowboy riding a bucking bronco part. The antelope bones bleaching in the dirt part. But once, riding to work, I saw a golden eagle swoop down low in the direction where I used to go camping with the guys before we left for UW, south by Battle Creek. It stretched its sharp talons in front of itself and used its wings like a parachute behind it to brake a bit, snatched a ground squirrel, and then coasted out of sight. I never saw that in Laramie.

The guy ordering take-out has his young daughter standing beside him with two pigtails and yellow leggings on. She orders an egg roll and a cup of wonton soup. I secure the plastic lid on the soup cup and run my thumb along the rim so it won’t slip off. There was always something about wonton soup to me when I was her age. The dumpling floating there where it doesn’t belong. Made better somehow by being in the soup. Better than a whole plate of wontons outside of soup. A joyful surprise. How funny to find you here, I used to think as I pushed down on the floating dumpling with my spoon. How delightful.

---

Lisa Thornton is a writer and nurse. She has stories in SmokeLong Quarterly, New World Writing, Cincinnati Review, and other magazines. She has been shortlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction Award and the Bridport Flash Fiction Prize. Her work has been nominated for the Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. She lives in Illinois and can be found on Bluesky and Instagram @thorntonforreal.

Heather Emmanuel

constructions

The leather jacket has a tear in it when she first meets Josie.

It’s an old thing, bought from a street vendor in Porto with loose change rather than a bank note. Weary, worn in, torn at a seam where her biceps have filled it out. Josie’s eyes form crescent moons when they meet hers across the bar. It’s a Monday; a choice, cheaper drinks, less of a crowd. Josie is in a mesh number that makes her breath hitch.

“If I didn’t know you, I’d say you’re brooding,” Josie says. There’s an affectionate lilt to it that makes her stumble as she stands to greet Josie, caramel scent seeping into her skin with the half hug they share. Josie gestures at her jacket.

She wears that jacket less and less over the years. She is surprised with a new one on her 30th. A brother-in-law — since divorced out of the family — sends her another before his move to Rotterdam. She treats herself to a burgundy one when a generous tax rebate comes through. They gather dust for a while — sticky hands, weaning. Their oldest chews on the handle of Josie’s bag and she folds all her leather jackets on the top of the wardrobe.

~

The kids climb her like scaffolding. One on her shoulders, one around her waist. The youngest, not quite standing yet, latches onto her shin. She doesn’t mind. Walks like it’s an everyday occurrence. At this point, it is.

“Dad!”

She doesn’t bristle. The oldest started it. Aware that toddlers say all sorts of things when their teeth and tongue learn where they belong. The first time their oldest said it, a new layer of warmth permeated her veins. Not a microaggression, not misgendering — just the uncomplicated logic of a one-year-old who sees strong arms and safe hands.

The adoption was uncharacteristically swift. Six months old, an emergency placement. The kind that comes with a binder of redacted notes, a warning about attachment issues, and an uncle: no contact.

Once, she finds their oldest standing in front of the television, arms crossed. Socks pulled up to the knees, gaze fixed on the talking animals with the same gravity she watches the evening news. Josie chuckles into her camomile.

“What?” She says.

“That’s you,” says Josie. Points at their child — arms folded like a bouncer, jaw set with quiet resolve. She sees it. The stance, the socks, the stillness. In the slight furrow of the brow when reading a picture book.

She gets their daughter’s name tattooed on her collarbone a month later. Black ink, serif font, middle name included.

~

She sleeps facing the door. Always has.

In ground floor flats with too thin walls and cheap locks, dishwashers out of order for months on end. Now in a house, semi-detached, with a driveway and wind chimes.

In between night shifts, she reads. Not fiction. More understanding than escape. Containing words like resilient and boundaries and inner child. Some parts are highlighted, others scrawled with notes in smudged ballpoint. The pages blur. From fatigue or wet eyes, she doesn’t try to know.

‍ ‍Count to ten.

Their middle child is the one who runs headfirst into a glass pane and bounces back laughing. Grass stained shorts, a scar on the knee. She wonders what it means to move through the world without caution, to scale the monkey bars knowing the drop might hurt and doing it anyway. Sometimes she flinches before they fall. It’s the only time she does, these days.

“Dad, watch this!” Their middle child swears she can do a handstand for five seconds this time, counts out loud as she does. Legs buckle, elbows thud. She’s up again before she’s fully hit the ground. “I’ll get to five next time. You saw, right? Did you see? Did you see it, Dad?”

“I saw,” she says, even, shielding her eyes from the sun.

She thinks of her books at the top of her wardrobe, stacked next to the leather jackets she hasn’t worn since bottles replaced bar tabs. Receipts used as bookmarks, a yellow sticky note in between pages about risk tolerance. Most chapters she rereads, some she does not. Some speak louder the second time, others etch into her mind and refuse to leave.

~

They’re married on November 3rd. The date isn’t sentimental; the venue was cheap, and they were offered a discount for booking three months out.

Josie insists on a naked cake, says the kids will lick all the frosting and it won’t be fair on her sister. That same sister calls them newlyweds and makes a speech about fresh starts; decade long relationship aside.

Under a canopy of fairy lights and wind-chimed breeze, Josie says I do with a gardenia tucked behind her left ear. They kiss before the officiant finishes the sentence.

She wraps her hands around Josie’s waist like they belong there. Josie, in a sleek dress that hugs her hips, dipping low between her shoulder blades like a soft exhale. Goosebumps decorate her arms like glitter.

Carrot cake is cut by five-year-old who announces that a butter knife is not a real knife, and a served by seven-year-old who holds the paper plate with the same reverence as the ring cushion.

Not a bride, not a groom. A wife, Josie’s wife. A dad, her daughter’s dad. In a tailored tuxedo that holds like a second skin, fashioned to fit her waist, not accentuate it. Josie tugs off her suit jacket before the first dance, then pulls her in by the tie for a kiss. She feels Josie sigh against her lips, cheers and chimes, steady bass beneath the floorboards of the rented room.

That night, she unwraps Josie's dress like a gift. Dark skin framed in white lace, cinnamon scented, warm. She kisses Josie like it’s the first time again: jawline, sternum, beneath the caesarean scar. Hands anchoring Josie’s hips, mouth curved when Josie melts into her. Stone and bloom, tenderness and trust, clothed certainty and fragile grace.

Her sports bra stays on. Pristine white, racerback for Josie’s nails to dig in exactly how they both like. She gives, always. It gnaws at her some days, how much and how often she wants to give herself away. Once, a weight of growing up too soon, being everything to everyone. Now, it’s her wife grinding on her flexed thigh and asking for more.

She has never been anyone’s to give. But she has always been there for someone to take.

~

Josie’s second pregnancy hits harder than the first. Nausea, and hospital bracelets. Hyperemesis gravidarum, in uppercase letters, stamped on the hospital file.

The staff call her sir. She doesn't blink at that, doesn't correct them. Her priority is the fact that her wife is on intravenous fluids, breathing like she's teaching herself how; in and out.

She is rubbing circles on Josie's back. Behind closed bay curtains, other women are retching, crying. Some on the phone with husbands who hopelessly pack a hospital bag, with younger children at home who don't understand that their baby sibling isn't quite here, yet.

At home, she spirals.

She searches and reads, checks out books from the health and maternity care sections. The numbers ambush her, jump out at her. Impress into her skin like branding.

She is called husband and partner more times than wife. Between the beeping monitors and antiseptic, a Josie's shallow breaths: “Wife. She is my wife.”

She anticipates. The way she would anticipate a fist, or a locked door, or a slur she wouldn't understand until a decade later. The moment it falls apart, when someone cloaked in dark blue says, sir, we are, sorry, but your partner—

Category One.

They wheel Josie out mid-sentence. Breech, they say, barking orders at each other. Blurred lights, the middle of the night. Her mind is on Josie, on their children obliviously showing Josie drawings through the phone screen. On them, who told her she will never have this, who made her believe every flash of happiness was temporary while the bruises were constant.

‍ ‍“Say hi.”

Josie's rasp is light. Dark skin dotted with gleams of sweat. Crescent moon eyes, smile crooked, herself.

She doesn't cry. Urges herself not to. Not here, not when Josie needs her, not when Josie could have–

“She has your eyes,” says Josie, a space between heartbeats.

Their daughter is curled up on Josie's chest, a bundle of cotton and newness, mouth rooting.

She thinks: thank you.

She thinks: you'll never know how much I’ll give you.

She thinks of every moment that led here, the leather jackets folded on the wardrobe, the bruises that faded slower than they should have, the first time Josie kissed her outside the bar on her tiptoes.

Numbers terrify her.

“Eight one. That's you,” Josie says, dry. “She’s all you.”

Her thumb finds their baby's spine, traces plump skin. Fragile, real, hospital hat half-off.

“I hope she gets everything else from you,” she says. Kisses Josie's cheek, and means it more than she's meant anything else.

~

The warehouse runs on systems. Home runs on chaos. Thankfully, she is good at both.

She loves the feel of her steel toe boots hitting the floor. Her body has a purpose here: calloused hands, an aching back. Josie packs marshmallow scented hand cream in the glove compartment. Factory hours, forklifts and steel shelves. There is no glamour, no cubicles or after work drinks. But there is a paycheck and a rhythm and the bone deep satisfaction of bringing something home.

Josie greets her every time with a kiss on the cheek. Sometimes glossed, mostly not. Hey, handsome, into the corner of her mouth. Her neck if the kids aren't around. Josie, her wife, in a faded t-shirt and mismatched socks, braids rolled into a lopsided bun.

Her shoulders twinge. Not of pain, not exhaustion. Proof that her body works. Provides. In a sense, it could be seen as patriarchal. In her mind, it's a tree offering shade.

She used to hide when she heard tyres on gravel, holding back coughs of inhaled dust bunnies under the bed. Keys in the door meant tightened shoulders, shut windows.

These days, years later, she barely kicks off her boots before little limbs fly towards her. Arms around her waist, her leg. They call her Dad, always Dad. With all the certainty of small humans untouched by expectation. With no other word for safety and solace, no fear in their voices. She crouches to scoop them up and they cling, babbling, verbs and nouns tumbling out of them.

“Dad, I got a gold sticker in school today!”

“Dad, I made a paper aeroplane all by myself!”

“Wow, do I get to see them?”

“Dada, jam!”

She lifts them with ease, like weights she's trained her whole life to carry.

The house smells of banana bread, paint and the linen diffuser. The floor is littered with socks and puzzle pieces. Josie says something about their youngest discovering the wonder of eating jam straight from the jar with a dessert spoon. The oldest two ramble over each other about correcting a teacher who didn't say Dad.

She used to think dad meant taking punches without crying. Stone faced, jaw clenched, being harder than whatever hit her.

She knows now: it's kissing tears off round cheeks. Dabbing bloody knees with a cold cloth, offering a choice of plasters. It's tying shoe laces, holding kids on her broad shoulders, ignoring hushed giggles behind the curtain during hide and seek. It's pressing a kiss into her wife's neck and saying, I got it. Whether it's unloading the dishwasher, or surprising Josie with a new dress and a date.

The joy of being loved like this catches her off guard sometimes. Her body remains strong, sweat beading on her forehead as she moves freight, sorts pallets, lifts boxes twice her weight.

Steel presses in her thighs on the mezzanine and when she pulls out her phone, there's a string of photos from Josie and the kids. Grinning, laughing, on a patterned blanket in the park. There are sandwiches and grapes and melted ice cream and she thinks to herself, I made that possible. Josie says the same thing, unbidden, when they install a swing set into the backyard on a cloudless June afternoon.

She never thought she would live this long. Not out of misery, but from inevitability. Days blur into weeks then months. Years pass, and she turns forty with short hair and shorter nails. Their middle child is a specialist in candid shots.

A leather jacket is draped over her shoulders. By Josie, of course. This one is new, newer. Jet black, label attached and the price evidently scribbled out. She looks up, and Josie is there. In a dark green dress, ombre braids cascading down her back. Those eyes, the crescent moon eyes when Josie smiles, still makes her breath hitch.

“It’s been a while,” Josie says. And means it, too. Josie leans down for a kiss she is happy to give and the camera clicks, flashes. The perfect shot. Their oldest rolls her eyes. Their youngest wants the candles blown out already.

The other jackets stay folded in the wardrobe. So do her healing books, the earrings. Not relics, but fragments. Some are faded, creased, seams stretched beyond repair. Softened by edges yet holding its form. Here, the leather creases as she moves – soft, worn. Real.

---

Heather Emmanuel is a writer of contemporary lesbian literary fiction and prose poetry. Her work is forthcoming in The Offing, SWWIM, Maudlin House and Gone Lawn. You can find her at heather-emmanuel.com or at @heather.emmanuel8

Patricia Fuentes Burns

How Much Time Will Go By

1.     If you start life with a mother, a father, and a brother, an uncle in Montana who has 4 stepchildren you’ve never met, 2 grandfathers in heaven and 2 grandmothers on earth (one forgets your name, the other smokes), and when you’re 23 your brother hangs himself in the garage where 3 rubber bins hold your childhood, how many years later will you tell people you just met that you have no siblings?

2.     You are 26 when you meet a girl, also 26, and a year later you marry her when she is 3 months pregnant, and she gives birth to a boy a little on the small side at 5 lbs. 7 oz. In the next 5 years you have 2 more boys. On year 6 of marriage, you notice that one of the boys is not like the others, 4 couples you know get divorced, and your mother has both breasts taken. What is the square footage of your bedroom and how fast can you run?

3.     When you’ve been in your job for 11 years, you get called into an office and given 4 months of severance plus the 2.2 weeks of paid time off you did not take. You bench press 140 lbs. and call 5 contacts. Every day you do one more thing to help with the kids. Your wife does not work outside the house but takes 2 Pilates classes a week and your special needs boy sees 3 specialists. This continues for 5 months. How many hours do you sleep at night? You may estimate.

4.     The distance between your home and your new job is 17 miles. You stop to get the good coffee that costs $3.45. Your youngest son is 11, your middle son plays soccer, your oldest has 0 friends. Your wife works 20 hours a week at a school library in another town and you use 5% of the money she makes on a 4-hour monthly date. The rest goes into the college funds. How old do you think the girl with the curly hair who sits in the cube by the window is and what time do you get home in the evenings?

5.     You retire after putting 2 of your sons through college and paying 1/2 of the 3rd one’s rent for 1 year. You sell the house and 8-seat van, downsize to 1/4 the space in a small town. You are 0.4 miles from the water. You get your 3rd and final rescue dog. When your sons visit, your grocery bills triple. If you buy the boat you first liked at 35 and take it out on the water twice a week, if your wife can’t sleep and is quiet during breakfast, if the economy recovers, if you sometimes feel short of breath, how far will the horizon be on a mild winter night?

---

Patricia Fuentes Burns has published fiction in TriQuarterly, Quarter After Eight, Fictive Dream, Jellyfish Review, and Quarterly West, among other journals. Her work has been anthologized in Grace in Darkness, Shut Down Strangers & Hot Rod Angels, Grit & Gravity, and America's Future. She holds an MFA from George Mason University and lives in Arlington, Virginia with her husband and three daughters.