Mark Fellin

The J Line

Becca steps to the edge of the platform for the fifth time in the past four minutes and bends in half to look into the tunnel. The late-night J train to Brooklyn is the goddamn worst. Followed closely by every other line on the colorful subway map sprawl. All aboard a crumbling relic built in 1904. Congestion ahead, track issues, sick passengers, we appreciate your patience. Don’t worry, the latest fare hike will fix it all. Becca steps back and scans the empty platform before leaning against a rusting girder. She adjusts the backpack hanging over her shoulder and pulls her coat tight against the icy December air.      

It’s three in the morning and Becca’s on her way home after eight hours of proofreading. Reviewing forms and fine print is mind-numbing work, but identifying other people’s errors feels a lot better than dwelling on her own. It’s therapy in paragraph form. She scored the overnight gig a few months ago after acing the copy editing exam; maybe those AP English classes actually paid off. But today, just before punching out, the shift manager tells her the position is being eliminated. AI is cheaper and faster with less sass and fewer coffee spills. Thank you, good luck, fuck you.       

She pushes her giant headphones over the top of her tight black wool hat, maxes the volume and is assaulted by the new Deathalon album, Somnolent Scream, the band’s loudest yet. Her frozen breath billows around her head.

When the J eventually limps into the Essex Street station she doesn’t hear it. Deathalon rages through her brain at one hundred twenty decibels. The doors slide open. Becca enters and falls into a seat. It’s three fifteen. She assesses her four fellow travelers as the doors close.

The girl directly across the way is crashing hard. She looks a little younger than Becca, maybe twenty-two. It’s hard to say with pretty little party girls. Across and to the left, a small stiff man studies the bible, his mahogany hand glides down each sacred page, CVS readers grip the tip of his nose, a gold bookmark ribbon extends down between his knees. He’s wrapped in a long black coat, a burgundy scarf twirls around his neck, a green Yankees cap is pulled down tight. To Becca’s right, one bench over, a teenager is sprawled out on his back. His head is shrouded in a grimy gray hoody. His left arm is extended, palm up, panhandling even in his dreams. The kid will freeze when he gets outside, if he goes outside. They say lots of the homeless winter in the subway; it certainly smells like it.

And at the far end, in the corner, a long narrow figure sits up straight, legs crossed at the ankles, hands jammed deep in the pockets of a silver Canada Goose down jacket. He reads the ads that ring the car, lips moving slightly. He smiles at Becca. She looks through him subway-style and shuts her eyes.

The next stop is on the other side of the East River. The Manhattan-to-Brooklyn crossing is a six-minute, slow-motion rumble over the Williamsburg Bridge. Becca taps her phone and “Möbius Man” slices through her soul. Nodding in time with the gouging base, Becca’s upcoming weekend flashes by like a bad poker hand: shopping for the ancient aunt she lives with, six hours of court-ordered community service, getting high with Paul, dodging sex with Paul. She knows he’s boning her friend, but Paul has the best weed in Ocean Hill. The best bone too. She’ll break up with him soon. Or move in with him.  

The J pitches forward with a spasm, reconsiders with a jolt and starts its eastward crawl. Becca watches the young girl stretch like a kitten before slinking along and disappearing into the next car. The train emerges from the depths and begins its slow ascent over the bridge. The tall guy is looking at Becca again, or still, so she looks out the window. Through the dirty glass, the city spreads out northward, a dash of glitter tossed on a black cat. Becca pats the Marlboros in her coat pocket. She quit five days ago. She’ll quit again.

Becca replays yesterday’s conversation with her father. It’s the standard artificially flavored peppermint Christmas call from Indiana, with the merry-merry morphing seamlessly into The Checklist: work, boyfriend, come home and give college one more try. Becca’s clipped answers chill the holiday cheer, so they mumble through their I-love-yous and hang up. Her father means well but in the decade since her mother died he hasn’t upped his parenting game.     

Another drum avalanche slams through Becca’s skull and her eyes crack open. The tall guy is standing now, looking down the length of the car. He’s trim but sturdy. His face is straight lines and clean edges, more efficient than handsome, like an IKEA bookcase. His eruption of thick, black hair sways with each dip in the tracks, a smirk slides across his lips. Becca’s eyes close again.

Without a job she’ll be out of her windowless one-room basement apartment soon. Her aunt is not unkind, but she’s a bottom-line lady on a fixed income. A guitar solo plows down Becca’s spine and makes her knees ache. Her eyes twitch open long enough to see the tall guy standing in front of the man reading the bible, who’s looking up and shaking his head. The J train’s jangle pushes her heavy lids down.

Is it bad breaks or bad decisions that have her slouching home to a secondhand futon in the pre-dawn frost? A bad attitude, she’s been told more than once, coupled with a toxic ego and sprinkled with stubbornness. She came to New York two years ago. It has wrestled her to the ground and tapping out may be her only option. She’s heard that Portland is a great place for exiles and castaways, with plenty of rain to keep expectations sufficiently low.

Becca absently fingers her lip rings. When she opens her eyes again the bible reader is lying on the floor, face down, mouth slack with death. His hands are tucked under his body, against his belly, failing to hold in his life, which zig-zags down the black rubber floor of the subway car, thick and red. The bible is nowhere in sight.

The tall guy sits directly across from her now. He’s leaning forward, elbows resting on his knees, a long silver blade hangs down from his clasped hands. He’s looking to his left at a second motionless pile on the floor, the kid in the now very bloody hoody. The tall guy looks at Becca and yawns, wide and long.

“That’s rude,” Becca says. She can barely hear herself so she slips off her headphones, drops them in her lap. The savage beat thumps across her thighs. “You should cover your mouth,” she adds flatly, the words thick, heavy.

He responds with a toothy weatherman’s smile, his head bobs along with the train.

Becca glances to the left at the dead man, at the dead boy to the right. “Did you do this?”

“Do what?” He waits a beat. “Oh, yeah. They don’t matter.”

“According to you?” Becca is not surprised that she’s not afraid. Being gutted on the subway by a psychopath will not be the worst part of her week.

“They didn’t know my name when I asked them so they don’t matter. According to me.”

“I don’t know your name, either.” Becca’s eyes are stapled to his. She knows somehow that this is essential, vital.   

“That’s too bad,” he says, still grinning.

“You know what’s too bad?” Becca shakes her head. “These people were killed by a joke. A sad, tragic joke.” She wants to look down at the victims again, for emphasis, for confirmation, but she will not break her focus on him. It’s all she has, all she can control.

“I’ve lived here my whole life and these people don’t care.” He taps the bloody knife against his chest a few times, spreading a bright, crimson constellation across the metallic sheen of his coat. “Nobody shows me any respect.”

“Why would they?”

“I take this train every goddamn day and nobody cares, nobody knows,” he says, pointing the weapon toward Becca. “I have to show them.”

“This is your big reveal?” Becca leans forward for emphasis, her face now only a few feet from his. “If you’re going to kill everyone who doesn’t care, you’ll be on this train a long time.”

“I know that.” His smile thins.

“This is a big city little boy.”

“I said I know.” He stands, unfolding in sections, one fist wrapped around the overhead handrail, the other clutching the knife, tapping it against his thigh. His stare circles Becca’s body. He is a nightmare, an absurd baneful giant in a narrow metal tube tumbling through the night.

Becca realizes she has stopped breathing and gasps. “You need to sit down so I can tell you what I know.”

The J groans as it reaches the apex above the river. The lights flicker then go out. In the darkness Becca imagines crushing his windpipe with her fist, smashing his Roman nose flat, ripping his tongue out. The lights flutter back to life. He’s still standing there, looking at her, expressionless.

“You don’t know anything.” He peers at the bodies again and drops back onto his seat.

“What I know is that you can’t figure things out so you’re angry,” she says.

“Shut up,” he shouts. “I will carve that dirty mouth off your ugly face.”

“What I know is that you’re not a coward. You just have it all twisted around.”

His gaze passes through her now, through the window behind her, through the frigid night and across the river. He shifts back against the pale blue plastic bench. The knife dangles loosely between his fingers

“If you want respect give them something to remember, something only you can do. This here,” Becca nods toward the lifeless passengers, “anyone can do this. It’s gutless, it’s ordinary.”

He toys with the knife, tests the point against his thumb.

“You think I should do it?” he asks, lifting it to his throat. His smile is back.

“I don’t know that you have a choice. If you want to control your own story.”

“You might be the only person who gets me,” he says, tilting his head back against the window, holding the blade just below his jaw.

“I don’t give a fuck about you.” She doesn’t recognize her voice. “But you should.”

Becca sees her reflection in the window behind him. It’s the best she’s looked in a long time.

The steely scent of blood hovers between them, sharp and urgent. The J train slows.

The recorded MTA announcement barks. “This stop is Marcy Avenue, Brooklyn. Thank you for riding with us.” The J grinds to a stop. It’s three twenty-one.

Becca stands, slides her headphones on, winces as the singer shrieks through a chorus. She turns to face the exit and waits.

The doors stutter and split apart. Becca steps into the cold, blue-black opening and onto the empty concrete platform. She looks back into the train, at the knife lying on the floor, until the doors slide shut.

---

Mark Fellin lives in New York City, always has. His stories have appeared in Berkeley Fiction Review, Criminal Class Review, Daikaijuzine, Literally Stories, Rock and A Hard Place Magazine, and The Realm Beyond.

KM Baysal

Pink Camellias (Longing)

It was the line of pink camellias trailing along my husband’s spine that finally convinced him to go to the doctor. They had been popping up here and there—bright pink blooms springing from his armpit, his shoulder, tucked behind a knee— for about a week before he said anything. When they sprang up along his spine and in that unreachable spot between his shoulder blades, he had to tell me.

The doctor said he had been seeing a lot of this lately. People of all ages and ethnicities were spontaneously growing flowers. It wasn’t as alarming as it seemed; no injury or disease was associated with their existence. Preliminary studies suggested the blooms were manifestations of unprocessed or unspoken emotions. Just a theory, he said, as my husband frowned and crossed his arms over his chest. The doctor recommended we keep plucking the flowers until someone developed an inhibitor cream.

A stoic man, my husband dismissed the doctor’s theory and continued to grow flowers. He didn’t only grow camellias. He’d wake to find daffodils, or geraniums, or camellias in every shade imaginable growing in patches all over his body, embarrassed but forced to ask for my help in their removal. As long as I’d known him, he was shy about being naked. Even when we were first dating, our mid-twenties bodies in their most attractive state, he’d only shed his clothing for as long as it took to have sex, donning a tee shirt and boxers as soon as he could afterward. Meanwhile, I’d prance around the apartment with abandon, exhilarated by the kiss of the cool or warm air on parts generally kept covered, reveling in the effect my nakedness had on him. Over the years as age and familiarity set in, we revealed less and less of ourselves. There was comfort and ease to be found in the dark.

I suggested we make a game out of his condition to lighten the mood. Together, we’d pick the morning’s offering, attempting to identify each flower as we went. It was awkward at first, this reacquaintance with his body in daylight. I traced the half-moon of freckles behind his left ear with my fingers. Gasped at the tuft of hair on his chest that had turned salt-and-pepper without my notice. Marveled that the scar on his knee from a bike accident once red and angry had faded to a ghostly white. All the while, plucking gorgeous blooms of sapphire, violet, and gold from his olive skin and arranging them in vases throughout the house. Our lives were suddenly full of vibrant rainbows and intoxicating perfumes.

As I arranged a vase full of purple forget-me-nots and pink morning glories, I recalled Ophelia distributing flowers and how each had a special meaning. It didn’t take long to find an internet guide on the symbolism. Forget-me-nots meant just that, and morning glories represented affection. I researched other blooms we had picked: light pink and peach peonies (bashfulness or shame) and violets (watchfulness and modesty) the day after the doctor’s appointment; red geraniums (folly) and yellow chrysanthemums (slighted love) the morning after an argument; pink and white hollyhocks (ambition) cropped up all over the day he planned to ask for a promotion to regional manager.

I waited a bit before sharing my discovery. I liked having such a visceral guide to his emotions every day, and I loved the closeness our morning ritual had reignited. He started to insist on checking my body for flowers, too, even though we both knew there weren’t any. A soft touch on my hip, a brush of my thigh, a light kiss on the back of my neck inevitably led us to more intimate pursuits when we had time, lingering over and delighting in each other’s bodies like we did when we first fell in love. I didn’t want that to end, but I began to feel guilty, as if I were sneaking peeks at his journal.

One night after we searched for errant blooms on each other, my head resting on his chest, his arm circling my waist, I told him. That morning’s blooms were red roses, white heliotrope, and honeysuckle (all representing love)— an auspicious sign. He smiled and told me he already knew. He had looked them up as well. I reluctantly offered to stop checking the meanings to give him some privacy, but he shook his head, pulled me closer and asked now why would he want that. The next morning, every inch of him was covered in purple and blue hydrangeas (gratitude for being understood), and red tulips (passion), an entire field of flowers waiting to be picked.

Aftermath

It wasn’t until much later, after our parents rushed to our high school and all us kids in our sequined prom dresses and cheap polyester suits were accounted for; after we found Coach’s wife, Mrs. Owens, calling his name as she ran in and out of the gym, saying Coach was chaperoning the prom, but only Billy recalled seeing him there early in the evening, chatting with Ms. Green, the school secretary, as they manned the beverage table, and Caroline said the table was empty when she arrived an hour late claiming she had a hair mishap, but we all knew it was really because she was making out with Mark in his dad’s old Mercedes in the parking lot; after the mayor and the volunteer EMTs and firemen and police followed the route the tornado took to barrel through town like a bulldozer, proclaiming it a miracle that the there was so little damage, that the funnel mercifully picked a mostly clear path, lifting a shingled roof here, an old rusty car there; after they found Coach’s body in his red Toyota by the river crushed under a massive oak tree that was rotted inside, and people wondered what he was doing down there, in the backseat no less, when he was supposed to be chaperoning the prom; after our mothers circled together and spoke in whispers at the funeral, none daring to say how grateful they were that it wasn’t their husband but each of them thinking it, and all the while keeping a close eye on our fathers standing a few feet away; after they dropped off pierogies and casseroles and chocolate cakes to comfort Mrs. Owens and people talked about what a good man Coach was, recalled how he announced the raffle drawings at the school carnival each summer with gusto, how he always had a smile and a word of encouragement for even the worst basketball player on the team, voices trailing off into the distance as they imagined their own lives being cut short in such a sudden way; long after our classmates mowed Mrs. Owens’ lawn, shoveled her driveway, paused to chat when she sat on her porch drinking her morning coffee and rocking in Coach’s favorite chair with a sad, lost look on her face that never went away, a look of grief and heartbreak and something that we couldn’t quite name; years after we graduated and some of us moved, some of us stayed, some married our high school sweethearts, some divorced those sweethearts and married others, some had kids, some adopted pets, all found and lost jobs, gained and lost weight, acquired wrinkles and a few gray hairs; after a group of us met at the rec center for our twentieth reunion, sitting at folding tables with purple plastic tablecloths, drinking cold Miller Lite from red plastic cups and laughing about the time that Billy lit a stack of papers on fire in the restroom trashcan so our trigonometry final would be postponed; it was after all that reminiscing when Billy somberly recalled the night of the tornado and Coach’s untimely death, and Caroline remembered seeing Ms. Green huddled by the ambulance down by the river wearing Coach’s prized varsity jacket, the one he wore on all but the hottest summer days, and after Mark recounted finding Ms. Green a week later in Coach’s office cradling his favorite basketball—signed by the 1995 state championship team—and watching the principal, Mr. Long, escort her out while she clutched the ball to her chest and fought back tears, that we finally realized Ms. Green’s grief was not the same as ours, and what we thought we understood about the lives of the adults in our little town was not as simple as it had seemed.

---

KM Baysal lives, works, and writes in NYC. She can often be found haunting the New York Public Library or cozy coffee shops, tapping away on her keyboard. She is currently working on a fantasy novel.

Stuart Watson

Unfurnished

Avocado-green shag carpet lay between my sleeping bag and the one wrapped like a tortilla around Ellise. I felt like throwing up, not from the carpet, although it didn’t help, but from the too-much-of-everything the night before. We struggled, trying to find the zipper pulls.

Ellise wore a T-shirt, sexy as day-old mashers. Neither of us offered an invitation to romance, no surprise, since neither of us ever did, much, anymore. Like marriage for her was a place she could hide from all that. After six months, I had given up. Ellise had declared victory.

In the front room, we scanned our new space in the light of day. Rented the night before. Floor-flopped shortly thereafter, without the walk-around. Avocado shag in the living area, decorated with the red velour overstuffed chair we had hauled south from Redding. I wondered a lot during the drive, what other motorists thought of this relic hanging from the Cortina’s trunk beneath the tied-down lid. Did they steal it? Are they destitute? Do they have a bed?

It was our only piece of furniture. After we signed the lease the night before, I sat on one arm while she occupied the seat. She flipped through an old Sunset magazine we found in the laundry room of the apartment villa.

“Look at this,” she said, and held the magazine up. “Polka dot.”

“Dining table?”

“Sure. Festive. Better than what we got.”

We had no table. We needed jobs, but Ellise was all about getting a table and chairs to clash with the floral-print linoleum in the part of the living room we called our kitchen. All electric.

“But … jobs?” I said. We had spent all but a hundred bucks on first, last and security, for two bedrooms up across an alley from the fenced yards of one-level ranchers. No gunshots yet.

In fresh light, Ellise put on her fake-leather fur-lined-collar coat and we went to the thrift store.

A woman behind the counter brought to mind a polyester eclair. Ellise went one way, I went another, in search.

“Paul!” Ellise’s voice, but I couldn’t see where. Half yell, half squeal. Like a 12-year-old. Oh, lord, what have I done. “Come look. It’s magic.”

I followed the sound until I saw her, decked out for a faux winter.

That is where we made the acquaintance of an actual polka-dot dining room table, formica top and four chairs with matching print Nauga crap upholstery, ripped from the pages of Sunset. I imagined us dining there in silence, jaws masticating pasta and ground cattle with a flavor packet.

We were verbally ejaculating all over it. “Look at the chairs,” I said, not really sure what I wanted her to see.

“I know,” she said. “Chairs. It’s got a leaf.”

“Don’t buy anything here,” snarled a guy with a beard to his waist and black-on-black attire. “They’ll rip your ass so bad it’ll feel like you were fucked with a vacuum cleaner.”

He kept moving toward the exit, while I mentally parsed his advisory. Vacuum cleaner? Upright or canister? What about …?

Ellise tugged at my hoodie. “Let’s go,” she said. “I’d hate to get fucked like that.”

I wanted to ask her how she would prefer to get fucked, since she hadn’t shown much interest in that aspect of our married life, and she had few other aspects to counterbalance that  void. We had a list of thrift stores. The next one featured furnishings salvaged from roadside “free” disposal. A big maple monster with a ruined finish could be ours for a fourth as much as the polka dot model.

I looked down at its top. Somebody’s family had etched it with history. Initials carved into the surface. Simple excavations that looked like things. Cars. Dogs. A baseball and its stitches. Two of the initials matched mine. I felt a sudden craving for a table just like this, minus the other family. Blank. Ready for my own.

“You can’t have it.”

I turned. Red lipstick spilled a bit beyond the natural edges of her lips. A woman maybe a couple of years older than me, in tight jeans with big frizzy hair and a sleeveless blouse.

“It’s mine,” she said. “My dumbass boyfriend left it at the curb and it was gone in the morning. Him too. Asshole.”

“Didn’t you try to stop him?”

“I was out. Late.”

She pulled cash out of her pocket and paid the cashier.

“You’re paying? It’s yours.”

She looked at the cashier, then me.

“Not when it’s in here,” she said. “These doofs don’t know, don’t care.”

 Ellise slipped her arm around my waist. “I liked the polka dot model better,” she said.

The other woman smelled nice, not perfumey. Like shampoo. I wanted more.

“Can I help you load it?”

She smiled, turned toward the door.

I turned back toward Ellise. “Would you grab the other end?”

“Shouldn’t the store people load it? They sold it.”

The woman behind the counter lifted a smoldering cigarette to her lips and ignored us. She opened her mouth to talk and the cigarette stuck to her lipstick, flapping as she said “I’m sales, not warehouse.” I looked at Ellise. She didn’t know what to say. I waited for her to lift her end, then led the table toward the double glass door.

The other woman had a pickup. She helped us hoist the maple monster into the bed.

“You got a way to unload it?” I asked.

She looked at the table, then me, then Ellise, then the table.

“We’ll follow you,” I said.

“Really?” Ellise said. “What about our table?”

“Won’t take long,” I said.

It didn’t. After we set it back in her dining room, she brushed her hair back, smiled my way, extended her hand with a limp wrist. “Donna,” she said. “Can I … pay you?”

I shook my head, her words clacking around like billiard balls inside. Ellise and I drove back to the first store, bought the polka dot number. It seemed OK. I looked underneath, to see if there was any clue about how it might fuck me in the ass.

We strapped it to the top of the Cortina, stuffed the chairs inside, went back to the apartment. I still have nightmares about that rental, the sliding glass door off the main bedroom, onto a cheesy deck that sloped away from the building, like it wanted to fall off the minute somebody stupid stepped onto it.

Once we set it up in the kitchenette, where the carpet ended at a tack strip and the fleur-de-lis linoleum began, I thought it would benefit from decor. I went to our bedroom and brought back my box of used Playboys. I set them in the center of the table, then pondered how we could get phone service if we didn’t already have a phone. I told Ellise I would take the car to the Bayside Bell store and order a hookup.

I did, but when I emerged from the store, I thought about Ellise. Why had I married her? I was twenty-one. She was two years younger, a kid with memories of things her dad did to her. She didn’t want me doing anything.

Instead of turning toward the apartment when I pulled out of the lot, I aimed our car toward the house with the maple table. The sun had set by the time I pulled up in front. The engine purred as I sat there, thinking. I turned it off. Stared at the lights inside the other woman’s house. Ellise and I hadn’t done anything in awhile. Sex with a beautiful woman was all I could think of. I started getting hard.

Is this the day?

I thought of Ellise. She was a sweet person. She didn’t deserve me, cheating on her with the table woman.

I’ve come this far. What am I going to do about it? I want it. I know she wants it. She’s probably inside, looking out, waiting for me to get out and knock on the door.

I sat there into the night, frozen, on the cusp of betrayal. Wanting. Fearing what that last step would bring. My addled brain ran through an endless list of what ifs.

What if I went inside and did the thing? Then I would have to lie?

What if I didn’t lie? What would Ellise do?

What if I did lie? What would the rest of my life look like, staring back at me from my morning mirror?

What if I didn’t go inside, and thought of my big fail every night, before falling into tortured sleep?

What if the table woman got tired of waiting for me to get out of the car and come up the walk and knock on her door, and she came outside and walked down to my car and got inside and fucked me silly? That would be hot, but what if it didn’t happen that way?

What if she called the cops, scared shitless that I was some sort of psycho stalker about to …?

It was brutally dark, no traffic on the road, when I heard the tap on the window beside my head. It was her. I rolled the window down.

“What are you waiting for?”

I stared at her. Luscious. Inviting. Off-limits. Just like my wife. I smiled weakly, rolled the window back up. She stood there a second, then turned away. Dragged her index finger through the dirt on the window and disappeared. Eventually, I fell asleep.

The glare off the rearview mirror of a garbage truck woke me. I started my car and made a U-turn and drove back to the apartment.

The phone guy was fiddling with wires when I got there. The manager stood there, watching the phone guy to make sure he didn’t steal our sleeping bags or rape Ellise. Without a word, I stood next to Ellise and watched him work. I wondered how he knew which wires to connect when he removed the thingy from the wall and all the wires suddenly looked like hairs on an old man’s ear.

I picked up Miss March 1963. The lass had pigtails and a perky bust. Like Donna, back at the house. Probably. I wondered what she looked like, without clothes. Napping after sex. Slightly sweaty. Maybe I would feel surprise, to see a mole beneath her arm, faint blonde hairs.

I looked up to see my wife in her faux coat, looking around, at the walls, the floor, the sink. Wanting to say something. Not knowing where to start, so not starting. Likely, her thoughts went like this: So this is it. Home. For a month, at least.

Then looking around, to see if something anywhere in that apartment offered her a reason to be there, with me, with the phone man. With a polka dot dinette.

When the phone guy left, we looked in the directory for employment agencies. She got a job taking calls from home buyers.

I got a job ringing up sales of munchies to graveyard ghouls. Every night, I waited out the wee hours, hoping nobody high on dexy came in waving a gun without a clue how to keep it from going off accidentally, the terms of what would be this numbskull’s defense at trial for manslaughter. Then I went home and slept while Ellise was at work. We rarely saw each other until we decided to move back to Seattle.

I never went back to Donna’s. I had the spine of a banana slug. Twenty years, four jobs and five relocations later, I rose one night in the dark, packed a bag and walked out and downtown to the bus station.

I didn’t leave a note. What could I say that had gone unsaid every day since my night outside Donna’s house and her table full of family history?

Before I left, I set the car keys on the polka dot table, so Ellise could go somewhere of just her choosing.

---

Stuart Watson has been honored for his work at newspapers in Anchorage, Seattle and Portland. He has fiction in Bull, Yolk, Barzakh, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Bending Genres (Best Microfictions nominee), Erozine, The Writing Disorder, The Rush, Reckon Review, Sensitive Skin, The Muleskinner Journal and others. Poems appear in The Muleskinner Journal and The Broadkill Review. He lives in Oregon with his wife and their current “best” dog.

Susan Emshwiller

Welcome, C’mon In 

The beginning can be pointedly precise or obliquely obtuse. After all, it’s hardly more than a greeting.

Dangle the bait. Hook. Reel in slow. So slow you don’t even feel the pull.

I’m no expert but I’ve caught a few. Would have mounted trophies if that were possible.

Wording is the thing. Easy going. Easy flowing. Friendly-like. Adding a smidge of slang to put folks at ease.

Most don’t even notice the words I sprinkle for the subconscious. Red is common but I like to thresh it up with surprises. Like thresh. Gives a sense of danger. Danger draws you in. Gives zest to cozy lives. Makes you wonder—What is going on?!

Sometimes I set out pedestrian things. Everyday items.

Spoons.

Or a cheese grater.

The captive mind leaps into action. What will be done with these!? A cheese grater?

Basement. Sounds of something dripping. Flies circle under the glaring bare bulb. A cheese grater is removed from a worn leather satchel. The cheese grater inches closer. Near a most tender part. It hovers over bare skin and then —

Can you see it? 

Where does it gravitate to? What can it toy with? Images fly. The forbidden. The unthinkable becomes visible behind the eyes.

 Can you see it?

The swinging bulb seems brighter. Muffled voices echo. What’s being done with this cheese grater? You know. Something disturbing.

There’s a terror there. Down in your gut it rumbles, in that hidden place. It isn’t me. It’s you.

Every time you see a cheese grater, remember what you imagined.

I offered the seed. You did the rest.

I’m not a bad sort. I don’t make you feel anything I haven’t felt. I’ve done it all to myself. Everything.

I know if I push too hard I lose you. I’ve lost a few by going too far. So let’s stop now and move on. To spoons perhaps?

I call forth great geese to fly you on their smooth muscular backs feathered in brown and cream. A wide V formation of determined companions all heading —somewhere. They fly, calling out over the green and gold patchwork below. You’re with them, surrounded by them. 

Listen to that honking!

Listen to the great wings thresh the air.

Listen to the chimes.

Chimes?

There, behind,—

—tied to the black webbed feet with red ribbons

—dangling in the wind

—spoons.

The spoons chime together as bells, ringing out to churches underwing. Bidding the church-bells join the joyous cacophony.

And? What next?

Well—if the satin ribbons are frayed or brittle with age, they might break. They might break and release the spoons and there is no telling where those might land.

Perhaps the spoons plummet, tarnished bowl-head first, and splash in that pond below, zig-zagging past algae and green bubbles to silently stop on the silty bottom.

Can you see them?

Down there, nibbled on by curious tadpoles.

This might not go further.

Let’s rewind.

Perhaps the ribbon breaks and the spoons drop in a slow arc to the landfill. They land in the landfill and they plop atop the favorite photograph. Why is this favorite photograph in the landfill? A photograph that didn’t mean to be discarded but got mixed up with the junk mail when—when what?—when the grandchildren knocked everything off the mantle.

Can you hear the crash? The anxious cries?

The spoons frame the precious discarded black and white picture of—

You can almost see it.

Of—

—the departed father.

A derby-hatted man—who’s almost smiling. A man who almost never smiled is almost smiling—and amidst the cawing gulls, we’re at a landfill remember, amidst the cawing gulls—only you see—the spoons and cherished photo become covered by the last truckload of trash, not to be seen again for one hundred years.

Not long enough?

Not to be seen again for a millennium!

And in a millennium they are uncovered by—let’s say by future archeologists! Discovered, and methodically uncovered by future archeologists trying to get a clue as to what went wrong. What went wrong with—

No. Let’s rewind.

The ribbons break. The spoons tumble through clouds down to that suburban home, there—the last one at the edge of the development. And as the sun heads for its bed, the spoons hit the roof, clatter and clang on the tiles, bouncing like goats down a hillside, skipping off to land noisily on the front step—just as the teenage boy, his courage finally summoned, taps on the door.

And so?

The two ribbon-tied spoons glisten at his feet.

And so?

This is not the greeting he expected.

And so?

This is not the greeting he expected but he picks up these spoons, these gifts, and when the teenage girl opens the door, he presents them. The two watch the flock honk overhead, and because they both are aware that her parents have left for the evening, she accepts the spoons and, barefoot, leads him to the kitchen when—

When what?

—when all across the county the power goes out.

Perhaps a goose landed on the lines.

And in the surprise darkness of the kitchen, the girl pauses her walk but the boy doesn’t, and the accidental bumping becomes a fumbling which becomes a quickening of hearts and unseen reddening and neither knows what to do but they make it up as they go along.

And maybe the naked boy licks one of the spoons and slides it over the naked girl. And maybe she guides him and they do things with the spoon because they’re artists at that moment and in a state of grace, without shame to halt their inspiration.

And only you know what they do with those spoons.

And the next morning their respective Moms and Dads talk about the power outage. As Dad grates cheese into threshed eggs they talk about emergency kits and flashlight batteries. And in their respective homes the boy and girl lift sacred spoons with cereal or yogurt and smile at their secret.

And you know their secret. You made it.

It could end there. Or there could be a coda of sorts.

Perhaps—no one understands why they give spoons to each other on every anniversary. Or why their wind chimes are made of spoons hung from red satin ribbons. Or why they always look up at the honking V of geese and touch fingers. Or why, well into their eighties, the wrinkled hand of one slides a cool spoon gently over the blue veins of the other.

But you know why.

If a spoon falls from a goose or a cheese grater shines in a basement and no one’s there to read it, did it happen? Does it mean anything?

Without you, these are just squiggles of ink on a page. 

---

Susan Emshwiller is a produced screenwriter (including co-writer of the film Pollock), a filmmaker, a published playwright, novelist, teacher, artist, and short story writer. Her novel Thar She Blows debuted in 2023 and All My Ancestors Had Sex came out this year. Other writing can be found in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Dramatists Play Service, Playscripts, Independent Ink Magazine, Black Heart Magazine, Gone Lawn, and Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine. Ms. Emshwiller was a set decorator for many years in Hollywood and a featured actress in Robert Altman's The Player. Her feature film, In the Land of Milk and Money, a wild social satire, garnered awards and rave reviews at festivals in the US and internationally. Susan has taught screenwriting at North Carolina State University, OLLI at Duke, the Met Theatre in Los Angeles, and in conferences and festivals around the country. She lives with her husband and dogs in Santa Fe, NM where she enjoys inventing stories and backyard contraptions. Find out more about Susan in a DIHP interview: https://www.doesithavepockets.com/features/susan-emshwiller and her website https://www.susanemshwiller.com/. Follow her on Facebook.

Heather Pegas

The Mermaid Has Finally Had It 

The mermaid surfaces, and for once, just this once, there is nothing about or below. No ships, no dolphins, no noisy gulls, just quiet. How can she process this blessing?

The mermaid is alone, but she doesn’t feel great. She’s too hot. Her skin and scales feel dry in the air.

It is the mermaid’s birthday, and she’s feeling her age. Sailors still like the shape of her tail, it gets their attention, but they turn away at the missing breast, the scarred floor of her chest. They see her hair has turned grey-green, call her a merma’am, and laugh.

The mermaid’s daughter and her friends need constant reassurance and talking down from erotic encounters with fickle seamen. They are forever falling in, and painfully out of, “love” but they reject her hard-won wisdom.

How could she understand?

Most mermen are not around much, cannot be counted on in any meaningful way. Loud, voracious, eating almost all the catch as soon as it’s caught. Then swimming, swimming away, their asses as prominent as cats’. And so aggressive in their swimming (unlike the maids, careful and controlled—no splashes, no tipoffs, so as not to be snatched out of the sea). The mermaid’s former stepson, for instance, is unspeakable. Seriously, don’t speak of him.

The mermaid’s mother is elderly now and needs a lot of attention. The mermaid must swim a hundred miles each week capturing and transporting oysters, anemones and squid for her. She rubs her mother’s sore fin, and sits many hours listening to old stories, of how much better things were when the sea was old and cool.

Mermaids! They always give too much.

The mermaid had entered the fray once. She’d sung her own ocean songs in a voice that felt, to her, clear and important. But the others turned cold, wet shoulders, and drowned her out. She lost the will to sing and now prefers to be by herself. In caves, in trenches, on rocks…

Or sometimes with other creatures of the sea. The otters show her how to crack clams on her still firm stomach, and many early mornings, she confabs with the albatross. She remembers. There are a million dying jellyfish, but their stingers don’t sting her. They glow, even at the darkest depths. The mermaid feels lightest with them.

The mermaid has taken to eating sea bream, maybe too much, but it heightens her mood, relieves her stress. She is not proud of this, says she’ll quit later. Her shoulders grow ever more round.

The mermaid’s fears are myriad. What if her illness returns? Will her child be safe? What of her mother when she can no longer swim? Why is she always so hot, and why is there never anyone, anyone, to lend a webbed hand?

Has all this irritation and pressure made her a pearl? It certainly seems not. This birthday, in particular, she feels forgotten and alone. Awash in the past, and desire. Time was, she lived in a creature-teeming sea. And planned to swim around the world! She thought one day she would color her hair some un(sea)mly color. Pink. And oh, how she wanted to be heard—or at the very least, held.

On this day, basking by herself on the warm water, the mermaid remembers her fond father, her first sailor, many heart-held mermaids who have gone below, true friends. Nothing is as it was, and she’s not sure how much longer she can float on.

But her kind, they’ve always had an out, a way to escape. For those who think deeply, for those who dare, and when it gets bad enough, she will follow those who chose that way. If it ever gets so bad she can go, she thinks, and is it now time to go, she wonders, down into the deep…

into the deep…

into the deep.

---

Heather Pegas lives in Los Angeles where she writes grant proposals, essays, stories and flash. Her work is featured in publications such as Tahoma Literary Review, Tiny Molecules, Fatal Flaw Literary Magazine, Roi Fainéant and Weird Lit Magazine.

Cheryl Snell

Samsara

Homing Strategy

The man approaches the woman slowly as a cat stalking a mouse. Motion camouflage helps dragonflies catch prey, so why not? The man smiles and tongues his teeth to dislodge a bit of muffin, inching closer to the window that frames his target. The man wonders if the woman could pick him out of a lineup in his loud Hawaiian shirt. Moving objects with disruptive camouflage are harder to identify than plain ones. Leopards. Jumping spiders. Hey! she yelps when she feels his breath on her neck. Don’t sneak up on me like that! She slaps his arm with her black-and-white dish towel. He stares at the confusion of stripes in the air and says, Dazzling. She thinks he means her. In a sense, he does. He resumes his approach. He knows where home is.

Artificial Intelligence

The moon, lit with anxiety, is afraid of shifting; it never takes its own view for granted. Lint in the night sky is one thing; a parade of planets lolling as if on a piano lid is quite another. It complicates the blackness. But when the galaxy shakes itself like a wet dog, and clouds glower with thunder, she wonders what it will take─ considering she’s not a magician─ to promote the illusion that the moon is moving. Because isn’t that how it works these days? Appearances are deceiving; the way a thing looks is as real as the thing itself.

Vacation with Quid Pro Quo

He grabs her shoulder and points to the crocodile just now closing its mouth over the plover cleaning its teeth. It’s their pact, he says. This way they both get what they want. His hand, wrapped tight as a bandage around her arm, squeezes tighter. It feels like a threat.

Wings

Fluttering kites rained down on roof shingles. Windshields. Asphalt. They left to find his lost kite. Looked everywhere. Windows. Basements. Behind shelves in the public library. Found someone else’s kite instead. There would be no coming home without his personal kite. She needed air. Had to fly, no strings attached.

Buddy

Before he decides how to take the hint, before she reminds him not to lose the plot, before she teases him that he’s in the friend zone that has no benefits, before explaining, “When I love someone, I want to crawl right under his skin,” before he sees she isn’t joking, before she tells him that if she met Mick Jagger she’d make him do bloodwork, before she makes him jealous when she admits she still gets crushes on old rockers, before she reaches for his dangling hand, before she tells him how long it’s been since a man touched her.

Marco Polo

Then she wanted him back, but not like this─ locked between worlds─ so she canvassed the sky for the whereabouts of his broken promise; and while a twist of bats rose like smoke to spell a reply across the orange sky, their entangled bodies practiced the false starts and furious back-pedaling that had her chasing after them, her black silk robe flying, putting the man’s allegations of abandonment to rest─ although she would have rather have been the one to slice open the sky like a peach from a bowl, if only the bats had shown her how.

---

Cheryl Snell’s books include several poetry collections and novels. Her most recent writing has appeared in Eunoia Review, BULL, Ink Sweat &Tears, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Book of Matches, and other journals. She has work in several anthologies including Best of the Net and has been nominated ten times for Best Small Fictions, the Pushcart, and BOTN.

Susan Israel

Everything Is Going to Be All Right, Honest

Honey, what did you do in school today, oh, you’re going to be so happy to hear this, I hope you’re happy to hear this, but what would you say if I told you I was going to be here with you to drive you to school every day so you don’t have to take the bus any more, and pick you up after school too, you told me you don’t like the bus, kids pick on you, well, now you won’t have to deal with that any more, and if you have to stay after school for play dates or detention, I’ll pick you up afterwards too, all you have to do is call, no, my boss won’t mind because, well, frankly, I don’t have a boss any more, I was ‘let go’, let’s just call it laid off, yes, of course we’ll still be able to live here, I’ll make sure of that, I’ll tell you what, I’ll make cakes and cookies, I’ll open a home bakery business and while you’re in school, I’ll bake like mad and bring you cookies when I come pick you up, what do you think, you love cookies, everyone loves cookies and cakes and we’ll do fine, honey, why are you crying?

---

Susan Israel’s work has recently been published in MacQueen’s Quinterly, JAKE, 50 Word Stories, Flash Boulevard, and is forthcoming in The Dribble Drabble Review, Okay Donkey, & Blink-Ink. She lives in Connecticut.

Linda M. Bayley

The Cure for Sleep

My best friend Sidney is a narcoleptic: ever since I’ve known her she’s gone to sleep in the strangest places, not just on the bus or in algebra class but I mean like leaning up against her locker or on the street in the middle of a pro-choice rally, or there was that one time she fell asleep in our garden shed while we were playing hide and seek and we didn’t find her until long after it got dark out, and that’s when her parents freaked out and wouldn’t let her play outside anymore.

We used to call her Sleeping Beauty but now we understand it’s a medical condition, not some fairy-tale curse, and we’re not allowed to make fun of her anymore since that day Mrs. Rowe sent Sidney out of the classroom and then yelled at us, but I was never really making fun of her because I thought she really was beautiful when she was asleep.

She was most beautiful that day she pricked her thumb with a needle in Home Ec, which I only took because Sidney made me, because it’s not just girls who need to learn how to run a household, and before we knew it she was down on the floor on a pile of throw pillows the class had made that week, golden hair spread out in a fan around her face like it was the movies.

Well, what would you have done?

So I knelt down and kissed her, real slow and soft, and her eyes fluttered open like a Disney princess, and I never knew what a collective gasp meant but now I’ve heard a whole class sucking in wind all at the same time, and her eyelids stopped fluttering and she stared up at me and said, Did you just kiss me, Jason? and I nodded, still breathless, and she sat up, suddenly all pissed off, and said, Well, if that’s not just one more example of the rape culture that permeates our society and works to keep women down.

There were mutters all around us like Yeah, not cool, dude, and Dude, that’s just cringe, and Sidney pushed me away like a plate of cold, half-cooked Brussels sprouts, and now she’s still sort of my best friend but not really, and we still hang out sometimes, but now, whenever we’re together, she always stays awake.

A Car, A Bank, A Bowling Alley 

You are parked outside a bank / a bowling alley.

Your daughter is with you. She is 16 / 23 / 50. You are discussing the weather / the tournament / her painful, poisonous attitude.

When you get out of the car you crack the window so she won’t stifle / turn on the heat so she won’t freeze / let her decide for herself whether she wants to stay in the car. You’d rather she stayed in the car to watch it because you are idling in a handicap space / in a fire lane. You’d rather she got out of the car to go into the bowling alley and roll strikes like you taught her.

But nobody with a wheelchair / fire truck is going to need this space in the next sixty seconds. But the tournament won’t start for another hour. It’ll be fine.

She doesn’t want to get out to go bowling / stay to watch the car. She’s not in the mood / doesn’t drive. Sometimes she argues.

What a loser / nobody / bitch. Fuck it. You leave her in the car.

You could argue that spending your tenth birthday in the hospital with the polio that left you with a bad hip is a good enough reason to park in a handicap zone. You could argue that you didn’t know this was a fire lane. You could argue that your daughter was just about to move the car, officer. See her there, sitting in the driver’s seat?

You leave the bank / the bowling alley without a parking ticket / trophy. You are elated that you foiled the cops. You are furious that your daughter embarrassed you in front of the other parents.

At the yellow light you slow down / gun the engine / honk at the car in front of you. You are laughing / fuming / lecturing your daughter on the importance of being a champion.

She says, Don’t do that to me again.

You apologize / acknowledge her / have no clue what she means.

---

Linda M. Bayley is a writer living on the Canadian Shield. Her work has recently appeared in voidspace zine, Five Minutes, BULL, Short Circuit, FlashFlood Journal, Underbelly Press, Stanchion, and Tiny Sparks Everywhere, the National Flash Fiction Day 2024 Anthology. Find her on Twitter @lmbayley.

Michael Costaris

The Rub

 I

The video is horrifying. Take morality out of it, simply view it as an objective document and it is impossible to come away with anything other than a visceral, unshakeable feeling of disgust. I’m not one of the legions who succumbed immediately to the animal instinct to destroy Mr. Grayson, but I felt its pull; it was something I had to actively resist. Even now, years later, I still have to fight it.

II

“Hello Rebecca.” His voice is pained and small. I offer my hand (instinct) and realize upon touching the clammy cold of his palm that he has given me his right one. I either give off a reaction or he too forgot its significance until we made contact, but he dashes it back and shoves it into his pocket.

“I’m so happy to see you,” I say (lying) as I guide him to the conference table. He sits and I say (a bigger lie), “Mr. Devlin will be joining us shortly.”

Sitting across from him, this shell of an already unimpressive man, I am struck by how durable the authority of a teacher is: I cannot stop myself from calling him Mr. Grayson.

“Would you like some coffee, Mr. Grayson?”

I am standing before he responds. Devlin is never earlier than thirty-minutes late (“It sets the precedent Rebecca.”) and I cannot take another moment of this torture: the video fills every silence.

“Thank you,” he says. “I would love one.”

I set to give Mr. Grayson the works: I boil the water, grind the beans, warm the milk (in two separate frothers) and am, for once, grateful at the needless complexity of this espresso machine.

It is Devlin’s idea to have me on this case. The thought process being that I, both a woman and former student, am the perfect prop to establish Mr. Grayson as respectable. Devlin can only think in optics and neglects how incredibly awkward this is for me. But I accept anyways because I have no other choice.

“I’m here.” Devlin arrives early (20 minutes late) and grabs Mr. Grayson’s coffee from my hands, sipping it on his way to the conference table. I recede comfortably into the wallpaper and watch the magic. Devlin does not stop talking. I hear the words hero and martyr and millionaire. Mr. Grayson grows perceptibly stronger during this spiel: his back straightens, the pallor fades and he looks at least three years younger when Devlin slides the contract over. He is so buoyed at this point, he signs happily despite our horrendous terms.

III

Mr. Grayson was my teacher but he was not my teacher. I mean this in the sense that every student has a teacher, who, through passion or apathy, irrevocably alters the course of their life. Mr. Elmore was my teacher. He wore a bandana to class. He had a tattoo. He smoked during lunch and if you asked, he would share. He taught core English and ignited my love of reading and writing. He deliberately spurned the classics in favor of his own, insane curriculum. We read (and love) Naked Lunch even though (because) it made no sense to us. We analyzed music videos from the nineties and read excerpts of his novels filled with swear words, sex scenes and characters taking drugs. He was a rock star and we idolized him.

He changed my life when he told me, after reading my first ever short story, “Do not be a writer.” He says this in my twelfth Grade Writer’s Craft class, after telling me the story is brilliant. “Be a lawyer Rebecca.” His eyes were bloodshot and he reeked of three-day-old marijuana smoke. “It’s all making up stories anyways. All bullshit.” He continued in this vein for twenty-minutes and when he started to compare jurors —  “undiscerning retirees allergic to truth; hack fiction loving boomers needing to be told exactly what to do, and buy and think.” — to the audience that spurned his fiction, I decided to pursue law. Mr. Elmore, by simply existing, could not have made a better case against writing.

I recall this seemingly random anecdote now for two reasons.

One, Mr. Elmore is right. The law satisfies my creative urge. The truth arrives in an amorphous blob of data —thousands of call logs, interview transcripts, therapist notes and text messages— and it is my job to bend it into shape. I am the truth’s narrator. I become omniscient.

And two, the chaos that engulfed Mr. Grayson could not have happened to Mr. Elmore, or any of the other, less professional teachers. Mr. Elmore’s inner life blared right through the opaque facade of school. Nothing about Mr. Elmore could surprise. But Mr. Grayson is the opposite. He is indiscernible from the beige, cracking walls of the school. Watching him in the video is akin to watching a math textbook come to life. It’s unnatural; it feels wrong.

IV

Fuck, spoken with a trepidatious confidence, is the first audible noise. The screen is completely black and a long silence follows. They are testing the water. When it becomes clear there are no repercussions, no adults to quiet them, a horde of cackling pubescent voices join. The word is repeated. It grows louder with each successive utterance —(FuckFuckFuckFuckFuck)—  until it becomes indiscernible from their high-pitched squeals of unhinged delight.

“Yo.” The voice of Mark Smelt, age 12. He owns the phone. The camera shows his shoe: a red and white, high-topped Nike Air-Max. “We’re about to fuck things up.”

The camera lifts. 292 Newton Road, the home of Richard Grayson, becomes visible. A light is on in the upstairs window. A 2006 Hyundai Sonata sits in the driveway.

“He’s home.” William Thacker —age 11; off-camera— finds this fact hilarious.

It is 7:03 pm on a Wednesday.

A middle finger enters the frame. Mark Smelt. He whispers, but with the intonation of a scream. “Mr. Grayson. We’re here.”

William Thacker also whisper-screams. “Bitch.”

Ethan Yau, 11, leaps into frame. He gives seven crotch chops to the house and then says, “Mr. Grayson’s such a lesbian.”

William Thacker joins the frame, twirling chaotically with both middle fingers out. Ethan Yau exits and reemerges in the background during this scene. Behind William Thacker’s hypnotically flailing limbs he is visible approaching the basement window of the home. He squats beside it, stares, transfixed, and then waves frantically beckoning everyone over.

The next moments show rapid, nauseating images of Mark Smelt’s thigh and then, eventually the ground.

The boys whisper.

“Can you see?” Ethan Yau.

Chamber music plays. Faint but audible. A woman’s voice can be heard. She appears to be in pain.

“Look.” Ethan Yau again.

Mark smelt leans forward. The camera tilts and shows his shoe once more.

“Oh.” It’s Mark Smelt. The voice of a child now, the bravado gone. “Oh no.”

The camera is lifted with purpose by Ethan Yau and pressed against the basement window. The music grows louder. The screams grow louder. The image is fuzzy and then everything crystallizes in a moment of adjustment.

Richard Grayson lays on a bed. His knees bent. He is nude from the belly-button to the quadriceps. A cellular phone rests against his right thigh, illuminating his genitals. His penis is erect. His right hand mechanically strokes it and his left hovers above, holding a sock. His mouth is half open and his tongue darts in and out.

His eyes appear lifeless.

He completes after a minute: shuddering joylessly and clasping the sock over his penis. He lays still, eyes shut and chest rising and falling.

The phone still plays.

He abruptly stands and then shuts the phone off using his right hand. He slides off the bed. His limp penis rests atop a prodigious bush and he waddles, pants around his ankles, out of frame.

The video ends.

V

The video is shot at 7:08 PM on Wednesday, November 9th, 2018.

At 7:13 PM the video is sent to BOYzzzzz an iMessage group with thirty-three members. The video is accompanied by the message: NSFL.

By 8:00 PM the video is on three-hundred-and-eighty-five unique devices.

At 8:04 PM University of Michigan Student Arnold Jennings, the older brother of Tyler Jennings a student of Richard Grayson at Humbermede Collegiate Institute, sends the video to a WhatsApp chat with 29 members, including Rebecca Cauldry a pre-law student with no prior affiliation to Humbermede.

Transcript, ‘Mocha French’ November 9th, 2018 -- 8:04 PM

Arnold: check this out lol ✓✓ 8:04 PM

Rebecca: wut is that ✓✓ 8:04 PM

Unknown University of Michigan Student 1: wut the fuck am i watching??? ✓✓ 8:06 PM

Unknown University of Michigan Student 2: who is that ✓✓ 8:08 PM

Unknown University of Michigan Student 3: wut???? ✓✓ 8:08 PM

Unknown University of Michigan Student 4: yuck. ✓✓ 8:08 PM

Unknown University of Michigan Student 1: look at that bush ✓✓ 8:09 PM

Unknown University of Michigan Student 3: who is that ✓✓ 8:10 PM

Unknown University of Michigan Student 4: y am i watching this ✓✓ 8:11 PM

Arnold: its my bros math teacher rubbin one out  lollollol ✓✓ 8:12 PM

Unknown University of Michigan Student 5: ewwww ✓✓ 8:12 PM

Rebecca: im like legitimately concerned ✓✓ 8:13 PM

Unknown University of Michigan Student 1: lol the bush ✓✓ 8:13 PM

Unknown University of Michigan Student 6: sock technique on point hahahaha ✓✓ 8:13 PM

Unknown University of Michigan Student 6: like a fuckin ninja with that sock ✓✓ 8:13 PM

Rebecca: y do u hav this? ✓✓ 8:13 PM

Unknown University of Michigan Student 4: ur fuckin nuts ✓✓ 8:14 PM

Rebecca: how did u get this Arnold? ✓✓ 8:14 PM

Arnold: he sent it to my bro! ✓✓ 8:15 PM

Arnold: hes making the whole class watch it and calling it extra credit ✓✓ 8:15 PM

Rebecca: that is fucked ✓✓ 8:16 PM

Unknown University of Michigan Student 4: ya wut the fuk? ✓✓ 8:16 PM

Rebecca: that is assault ✓✓ 8:16 PM

Unknown University of Michigan Student 7: absolutley ✓✓ 8:16 PM

Unknown University of Michigan Student 5: tnot funny arnold ✓✓ 8:17 PM

Unknown University of Michigan Student 8: isnt ur bro like 12? ✓✓ 8:18 PM

Unknown University of Michigan Student 6: jesus arnold wuts wrong with u ✓✓ 8:18 PM

Rebecca: thats assault arnold its not funny ✓✓ 8:18 PM

Arnold: i no its y i sent it so fucked ✓✓ 8:19 PM

Unknown University of Michigan Student 8: why did u think this was funny ✓✓ 8:19 PM

Arnold: i didnt say it was funny ✓✓ 8:19 PM

Unknown University of Michigan Student 6: u totally said it was funny ✓✓ 8:19 PM

Arnold: i didnt think its funny ✓✓ 8:19 PM

Unknown University of Michigan Student 5: u said lololol dude ✓✓ 8:19 PM

Arnold: it wus autocorrect ✓✓ 8:19 PM

Unknown University of Michigan Student 9: wuts wrong with u ✓✓ 8:20 PM

Arnold: im tramatized ✓✓ 8:21 PM

Arnold: im not thinking straight ✓✓ 8:21PM

Arnold: its tramatic ✓✓ 8:21 PM

Arnold: wut should i do ✓✓ 8:21 PM

Rebecca: u call the police? ✓✓ 8:22 PM

Arnold: obv ✓✓ 8:23 PM

Arnold Jennings does not call the police but forwards the video to his mother.

Susan Jennings is the first parent to access the video. At 8:32 PM she forwards it via email to forty-four other parents with the subject line: Mr. Grayson (Math Teacher) of Humbermede Disturbing Video. She includes a trigger warning for sexual abuse in the text of the email.

At 9:03 PM the answering machine of Humbermede Collegiate Institute reaches capacity.

At 9:14 PM the personal voicemail of Veronica Melon (Principal of Humbermede Collegiate Institute) is at capacity.

At 9:18 PM the police are called for the first of eighteen times.

At 9:20 PM the video is messaged to local news station CJOH-TV-8.

At 9:46 PM Veronica Melon messages Richard Grayson.

Transcript, ‘Richard Grayson’ November 9th, 2018 — 9:46 PM

Veronica Melon: Do not come in tomorrow. ✓✓ 9:46 PM

Richard Grayson: Is something wrong?  ✓✓ 9:52 PM

The message is never answered.

At 10:05 PM Mr. Grayson is taken into custody by local police.

VI

I receive an email on my work account from Mr. Grayson. I ignore it. I have become the de facto lawyer of the entire small town I escaped and about once a month, a message comes in requesting my legal expertise: 'My neighbor is burning logs when I hang out my laundry and I know it’s on purpose; A garbage truck clipped my side-mirror; I’ve been arrested for shoplifting from the Wal-Mart.' I typically answer, in some cases even send a typed letter on Devlin, Carlaw, and Burke stationary because I like this invented, superstar version of myself better than the real, glorified waitress to rich lawyer assholes version of myself and am desperate to keep her alive in the minds of my former acquaintances. But today, I am busy with Devlin, who has me spell-checking his briefs (he does not trust computers) and it is only when I get home at midnight and see Mr. Grayson's face on every news channel, learn that he is apparently a rampant pedophile who has defiled thousands of students, that I respond. This seems like a Devlin, Carlaw and Burke case.

VII

November 11th, 2018

Three social workers hijack the Rememberance Day assembly and deliver a four-hour presentation on sexual assault. By the end of this presentation, it is likely that any student who had not yet watched the video of Mr. Grayson masturbating has done so.

November 12th, 2018

Mr. Grayson is released from detention following a message from the law firm Devlin, Carlaw and Burke.

November 13th, 2018

Mr. Grayson is officially suspended by Humbermede Collegiate Institute.

November 14th, 2018

Aspiring social media influencer Sandra Tenor-Sherbrooke, and Humbermede student, posts a video on Tik-Tok calling for the abolition of all male teachers. The video, a thirty-second clip of her speaking over the score from the 2003 film Seabiscuit, cites an unverified statistic that 89% of all sexual misconduct cases in education involve males.

The video is shared two-hundred-and-eighty-thousand times.

November 15th, 2018

Mr. Grayson travels to Toronto and meets with Devlin, Carlaw and Burke. He officially signs a contract to be represented.

November 18th, 2018

Sandra Tenor-Sherbrooke appears on the local news as an expert in a panel discussing pedophilia in the public school system. During the panel she stands, stares directly into the camera and states: “100% of men are not pedophiles but 100% of pedophiles are men.” She clips this moment and posts it on her Tik-Tok.

It is shared three-hundred-and-thirty-seven-thousand times within two days.

November 19th, 2018

Sandra Tenor-Sherbrooke changes the name of her social media accounts to onehundredpercent.

November 21st, 2018

During another panel on a syndicated news network, Sandra Tenor-Sherbrooke is asked whether she is really advocating for the abolition of all male teachers. She responds, “You will find out.”

November 23rd, 2018

Sandra Tenor-Sherbrooke announces a protest scheduled for the following Friday.

November 27th, 2018

Students at Humbermede arrive at school with pieces of duct tape across their mouths. The symbolism behind this gesture is debated greatly, but the image, all agree, is undeniably powerful.

November 28th, 2018

Mr. Grayson is officially terminated.

November 29th, 2018

Students across Ontario arrive at school with pieces of duct tape across their mouths. The new protest slogan, “We are the voice of the voiceless!” further obfuscates the symbolism of the duct tape.

November 30th, 2018

Ethan Yau initiates a conversation with Mark Smelt and William Thacker on iMessage.

Transcript ‘Astro Boyz’ (Ethan Yau, Mark Smelt, William Thacker)

Ethan Yau: guys ✓✓ 3:12 PM

Ethan Yau: u see the duck tape everywhere? ✓✓ 3:12 PM

Ethan Yau: wuts happening? ✓✓ 3:13 PM

Mark Smelt: I have hired council and suggest you do the same. Please refrain from contacting me further at this time. Thank you for respecting my wishes,  Mark. ✓✓ 3:18 PM

Mark Smelt exits the chat.

Ethan Yau: the fuk? ✓✓ 3:19 PM

            William Thacker: i did nothing ✓✓ 3:19 PM

            William Thacker: u cant even see me in the video✓✓ 3:19 PM

            Ethan Yau: whatd i do ✓✓ 3:19 PM

            William Thacker: u filmed it bro ur fukked ✓✓ 3:20 PM

William Thacker exits the chat.

At 3:39 PM Ethan Yau makes four phone calls to his parents.

At 3:43 PM the video is deleted from Ethan Yau’s phone.

At 3:50 PM Ethan Yau retains council.

At 3:52 PM Ethan Yau’s lawyer sends a message to Mark Smelt’s lawyer (the contents of which are privileged.)

At 4:58 PM William Thacker retains council.

November 31st, 2018

Devlin, Carlaw and Burke file a lawsuit against Ethan Yau and the Chester Region District School Board.

VII 

The presence of lawyers, as they always do, frighten everyone into silence. Mr. Grayson is not teaching. December is a quiet month. Ethan Yau, Mark Smelt and William Thacker are suspended. Sandra-Tenor Sherbrooke is purported to have signed a six-figure deal with a Chinese Tea Company and no longer posts about Mr. Grayson. Her brand —posting teacher misconduct stories, bizarrely unrelated memes and the occasional gluten-free recipe— thrives across all major platforms. A future presents itself in this quiet: the boys returning in time for second semester, graduating on pace; this episode a blip in their otherwise unblemished lives. Mr. Grayson returning too; bent, twisted and severely battered but not quite broken and still living a life in approximation of normal. Perhaps, in this future, Cheryl Darning would have made good on her ninth-grade aspirations and become the third Canadian female astronaut. We will never know. Callum Sanderson kills this future on the evening of January 22nd, 2019.

VIII

Callum Sanderson: Aspiring DJ, aspiring influencer, D-student, ex-boyfriend to Sandra-Tenor Sherbrooke and host of the twitter account PervertedMaleTeachers. Callum takes credit for the duct tape idea. He maintains he is the first to call Mr. Grayson a pervert. He maintains Sandra-Tenor Sherbrooke stole this idea and every other idea related to the ‘onehundredpercent’ movement and that he should be the face of a Chinese Tea Company. His rage manifests in a maniacal desire to break news on the Mr. Grayson story and right these perceived wrongs. He does this by comparing the pixelated, barely visible phone screen at 2:32 of the Ethan Yau video to, what one must assume is a lifetime’s worth of pornography, until he finds a video titled BBW NERD TAKES MONSTER WHITE COCK. It is, incontrovertibly, what Mr. Grayson watched the night of November 9th, 2018.

Cheryl Darning: Aspiring astronaut, chair of the ‘Women in STEAM’ committee and one of 150 students to record a perfect score in the Tenth Grade Euclid Math Contest, Cheryl Darning, by most accounts, is on track for big things. She credits this to her ninth-grade mathematics teacher. Though he is universally despised by for the fact that he grades homework (thus forcing students to actually do it), Cheryl finds herself thriving with this consistent practice. For the first time in her life, she succeeds in math. This scholastic confidence seeps into all of her other courses and she finishes the year on the honor roll. That summer she begins to formulate her plan to become Canada’s first female astronaut (after a google search she revises this to third). The following year, she musters up the courage to ask her former ninth grade math teacher to supervise a ‘Women in STEAM’ club. He agrees. The club proves incredibly unpopular (never surpassing one member) but these weekly meetings are the highlight of her week. She begins, at the urging of her teacher, to enter Math Contests on weekends. Cheryl’s parents, Lydia and Kevin Darning, call this teacher a ‘miracle worker’ and on three instances he is permitted to drive her to Waterloo for their Gauss Contest. This is done above board. Both teacher and parents file the appropriate paperwork. There is nothing factual to suggest anything inappropriate in this relationship, except for her uncanny resemblance to Zenya Frost.

Zenya Frost: Age 23, successful entrepreneur, and self-described performance artist, Zenya Frost is the star of three-hundred-and-ninety-four films including BBW NERD TAKES MONSTER WHITE COCK.

January 22nd, 2019

At 8:02 PM Callum Sanderson posts a side-by-side image of Cheryl Darning and Zenya frost with the caption ‘twinsies’ on the PervertedMaleTeachers twitter account. He continues, posting more than forty images of Mr. Grayson and Cheryl Darning taken from the 2016 and 2017 Humbermede Yearbook. At 8:56 PM Sandra Tenor-Sherbrooke tweets: Developing story at Humbermede.

At 9:02 PM she messages Callum Sanderson.

Transcript of messages Sandra Tenor-Sherbrooke and Callum Sanderson

Sandra S-W: r those pics real ✓✓9:02 PM

Sandra S-W: on twitter ✓✓ 9:02 PM

Callum: ya ✓✓ 9:03  PM     

Sandra S-W: thats fucked ✓✓9:03 PM

Callum: i no ✓✓ 9:04  PM   

Sandra S-W: hes actually a perv cant believe it ✓✓9:04 PM

Sandra S-W: so fuked ✓✓9:04 PM

Sandra S-W: can i post on 100p?? ✓✓9:04 PM

Callum: let me have half the account and deals and stuff u got ✓✓ 9:05  PM

Sandra S-W: huh ✓✓ 9:06  PM

Callum: partners we can work together and share money and stuff ✓✓ 9:05  PM

Callum: u can hav my stuff too that i got from pervteachers ✓✓ 9:05  PM

Sandra S-W: no ducking way ✓✓ 9:06  PM

Sandra S-W: duckin ✓✓ 9:06  PM

Sandra S-W: ducking ✓✓ 9:06  PM

Sandra S-W: fuk i meant fuck ✓✓ 9:06  PM

Sandra S-W: and also u hav nothing on perv teachers u got like 8 followers ✓✓ 9:06  PM

Callum: it was my idea neways ✓✓ 9:06  PM

Callum: u sole it ✓✓ 9:06  PM

Callum: stole ✓✓ 9:06  PM

Sandra S-W: how was it ur idea ✓✓ 9:07  PM

Callum: i wus the one who said mr grayson was pervy ✓✓ 9:08  PM

Callum: and the duck tape me i always talk about duck tape protests ✓✓ 9:08  PM

Callum: it wuz all me ✓✓ 9:08  PM

Sandra S-W: fuck off im gnna post neways ✓✓  9:08  PM

Sandra S-W: was just being nice asking  ✓✓ 9:08  PM

Callum: re-tweet mine from mine at least ✓✓ 9:08  PM     

Sandra S-W: no ✓✓ 9:08  PM

Sandra S-W: ur names 2 dumb ✓✓ 9:08  PM

Callum: ill change it ✓✓ 9:10 PM   

Sandra S-W: kk ✓✓ 9:10 PM

Sandra S-W: to wut??? ✓✓ 9:10 PM

Callum: idk ✓✓ 9:10 PM     

Callum: 100% but like no letters just nums??✓✓ 9:10 PM

Sandra S-W: stop tryin to steal my shit ✓✓ 9:10 PM

Sandra S-W: make it like maleteacherssuck or sumthing ✓✓ 9:10 PM

Sandra S-W: but not as dumb as that ✓✓ 9:10 PM

Callum: kk ✓✓ 9:10 PM

At 9:15 PM Callum Sanderson renames his account to Maleteacherssuck. At 9:19 PM onehundredpercent begins to retweet all fifty-two images of Cheryl Darning, Mr. Grayson and Zenya Frost. At 9:45 PM the story is reported on in the Guardian. At 11:54 PM onehundredpercent crosses one million followers.

XVIII 

The perception among most, is that Mr. Grayson is a pervert: the similarities between Cheryl Darning and Zenya Frost are too potent a coincidence to ignore. Even I, upon witnessing this, feel my pity calcify into judgment. Luckily for the sake of me and his other lawyers, the law does not deal in perception but facts; and the facts of this case are unalienable.

Fact 1: it is illegal to film a man masturbating in his own home without consent.

Fact 2: the illegality of filming a man masturbating in his own home without consent is compounded by the act of sending it to thousands upon thousands of people.

Fact 3: Ethan Yau has (had) an incredibly wealthy family.

Fact 4: One can quite easily manipulate two lawyers to turn on a third when it benefits the interest of their clients.

Fact 5: The Chester Region District School Board is also incredibly wealthy.

Fact 6: The money, when it comes, is obscene.

XIX

This is how it ends:

Mr. Grayson moves to Portugal. He does not teach. He does not need to. He sends me postcards every year at Christmas. He seems to be happy.

Ethan Yau, Mark Smelt and William Thacker are expelled. This delays their graduation by one year. The three boys end up in University. The delay means they are old enough to drink in Freshman year. They appear, from what I can see on their Instagram, happy.

Norman Yau delays his retirement as a consequence of the settlement. By my most recent calculations, he should be able to comfortably retire at the age of ninety-seven. He is, I imagine, profoundly unhappy.

Sandra Tenor-Sherbrooke has more than ten-million subscribers across all of social media accounts. She no longer posts about teacher misconduct and instead chronicles her ongoing difficulties living with celiac disease. Her sister account, ‘onehundredpercentglutenfree,’ has spawned three cookbooks. She is currently working on a podcast which she describes as Call Her Daddy meets Red Scare. She, according to her twitter bio, is ‘gr8ful.’

Callum Sanderson studies business at Canada’s thirty-third worst University. He never pushes Maleteacherssuck past thirty-nine followers. His Instagram suggests he has not abandoned his dreams of DJing. I don’t really care if he is happy.

Cheryl Darning jumps from her bedroom window and breaks her right femur, left ankle and right wrist. This jump is attributed to acute stressors and after a three-month period of observation at CAMH she is released back into the care of her parents, where she remains today. She does not currently attend University. There were inquiries from her parents about a lawsuit but Devlin, Carlaw and Burke declined. I explained that in cases like Cheryl’s, where no single entity can be deemed wholly responsible, it is incredibly difficult to extract money. When I explained this, they did not appear happy.

And me. I’ve done well since bringing this case to the firm. I am now the specialist in cases of this type. Whenever a man is (wrongfully, I am legally obligated to say) labeled as perverted, abusive, deranged, predatory or generally disgusting, I am lucky enough to represent them. I work a lot but I’m pretty rich. I think I’m happy.

---

Michael is a writer and screenwriter living in Toronto, Canada. His fiction can be found in The Baffler and BULL.

Soramimi Hanarejima

Second Chances for First Times

When we finally manage to meet for weekend brunch, you tell me there are two things in particular that you’re excited to do during your second childhood: climb trees and swim in lakes—activities that weren’t possible in the cityscape of your first childhood.

“I made sure my second childhood would start in July so I can do these things,” you say from across plates of pancakes and fruit.

“That’s practically around the corner now,” I reply, a little jealous. “My second childhood isn’t until next October.”

“Too bad our second childhoods won’t overlap. It would be fun to play together.”

“Yeah, but we can still play together. Come over during your second childhood, and we’ll play a board game or hide and seek or whatever you want.”

“OK. But wouldn’t it be fun if we were children again at the same time? Maybe we could play together during our third childhoods.”

“I’m sure we can get those to coincide. We’ve got a whole decade to figure out the dates. We should be able to arrange at least a week of overlap.”

“Definitely.”

With work being what it is, I don’t see you again until you’re well into your second childhood, when you come over to play. I almost expect you to be a little kid when I open the door, but aside from the cargo shorts and baggy t-shirt, it’s of course you as usual. Childhood is at its core a psychological state.

“Did you climb some nice trees and swim in a lake or two?” I ask once you’re inside.

“Not yet,” you answer.

“So what have you been doing?”

“Playing video games.”

“Isn’t that what you did during your first childhood?”

“Yeah, but these new holographic games are so amazing.”

“Well, we could go swimming now,” I offer, hoping you won’t suggest we climb trees instead.

“Nah, let’s play house.”

For the rest of the afternoon, we pretend that my apartment is a suburban home we live in with our three children. One of them is having a birthday party, so you tell me to bake a cake while you decorate.

The next time you come over, you still haven’t climbed a single tree or gone swimming once.

“Why don’t I take you swimming then,” I offer.

“But I brought over this new video game.”

You hold up a game cartridge, the kind that will stream data our smartglasses.

“You can play that any time. Let’s go to Sunset Lake while the weather’s nice,” I say.

“But the two-player mode is supposed to be really good.”

“OK, then we’ll play it after we get back.”

That settles the matter, and we’re off.

The drive passes quickly as we tell each other jokes and riddles.

At the lake, we put on our bathing suits in the changing area then cross the sandy shore and wade into the water. When we’re knee deep, you complain about it being too cold.

“You’ll get used to it,” I assure you. “Just start swimming.”

Before you can object, I take my own advice to show you how it’s done. I plunge myself below the surface then launch into a vigorous sidestroke. Once I’ve gotten a fair ways out, I look back, hoping you’ve followed my lead. But there’s no sign of you in the water or on the shore. I assume that you’ve gone back to the car to get the game cartridge and your smartglasses.

Then I notice tree branches shaking over by where the lakeshore meets the woods, and there you are among all the leaves, working your way up. At least you’re doing one of the two things you wanted to—and one of us gets to do some swimming. Which I might as well enjoy. So I get back to it, taking my time to sidestroke further into the calm expanse of water.

When I look back at the shore from the middle of the lake, there’s an ambulance parked by the roadside and a small crowd gathered by the tree you were climbing. I swim furiously back to the shore.

“So much for swimming in lakes this summer,” you say as we leave the emergency room.

You’re in an oddly good mood considering your left arm will be in a cast for the rest of the season. Maybe you’re grateful that you weren’t more seriously injured.

“You can be the first to sign my cast,” you say cheerily.

“Oh, I’d be glad to,” I answer, my tone far from matching your enthusiasm.

“Just don’t write too big. I’m going to ask everyone I know to sign this. But you can draw a little picture with your name, if you want.”

“OK, got it. Small signature with a little picture.”

I’ve never seen anyone so happy about having a cast. Then I remember that you’ve never broken a single bone, until now.

“We can still play that game,” you say. “Even with the cast, I can do all the gestures.”

“OK,” I agree, even though it’s gotten late after all the waiting and x-rays and bone setting and plaster wrapping.

The sky is purple with twilight, and the parking lot lights are on, but how can I say no after what you’ve been through? If you asked me to, I’d join you in playing video games every day for the rest of your second childhood. And now you have an excuse to do just that.

But there are still some outdoorsy summer things we can do in what’s left of your second childhood, like go to the sunflower maze. And there will be other chances to go swimming. Maybe you can go skinny-dipping one night during your second adolescence—and I’ll go with you. I never got to do that during my first adolescence or since.

---

Ever yearning to be spellbound by ideas of a certain fanciful persuasion, Soramimi Hanarejima often meanders into the euphoric trance of lyrical daydreams, some of which are chronicled in Soramimi’s neuropunk story collection, Literary Devices for Coping.

Benjamin Drevlow

Editor’s Note: This story mentions suicidal ideation. Please read with care.

livin that trash life

I’m working on this new Sims rip-off game, except keeping it real, where you have to navigate the challenges of getting out of bed, getting off the couch, sitting upright anywhere at any time, standing up, putting on clothes that aren’t your jogging pants and hoodie, walking one foot in front of the other, leaving the house, eating food that isn’t Oreos or Cheetos, taking all ten of your random assortment of pills to keep you from going crazy, killing yourself, dying of a heart attack, or getting heart burn, maybe help you talk to another human, talking to any living thing besides your trash dogs, letting your trash dogs out to go to the bathroom, walking the trash dogs, feeding the trash dogs when you haven’t eaten yourself, talking to the trash dogs to maintain their spirits when they look at you broken hearted that you haven’t been able to bring yourself to walk them for the last three mornings, turning on the computer to return emails to people who feel like you owe them emails in response or they will take your money away, take your water away, take your power away, take your apartment away, ditto text messages on your phone, don’t even try returning voice mails, going to the bathroom instead of holding it in and trying to fart it away, getting on the toilet, off the toilet, crying, not crying, blowing snot, not blowing snot, trying to fall asleep, trying to wake up, trying to masturbate, failing to masturbate, trying not to cry about your impotence, trying to stop crying, trying to care about any TV show enough to finish them, finish movies, watching anything except rewatching reruns of the nine seasons of the original Law & Order you can stream, binging all the staged-suicide episodes of Dateline, and eventually, God-willing, you make it to final round–bum-bu-bu-bum!! The big baddie! Taking a shower! While washing your hair! With actual shampoo! While brushing your teeth! With toothpaste! Maybe even special medicated mouthwash! For the bleeding gums and so many open sores on the top of your mouth from eating all the Oreos and Cheetos! Not getting dizzy and losing all stability in your legs and coordination and equilibrium and will to live! Not collapsing in the bathtub in a puddle of toothpaste spittle, dirty luke-warm shower water, laced with your own urine! 

Or maybe the final challenge is not to avoid all this, but to take it head on, and not to crack your skull open on the side of the tub on your way down, not drown in the two inches of standing water-filth of your own making, not slit your wrists with the rusty razor you haven’t used in months. Or maybe it is to crack your skull open, drown in your own filth, slit your wrists. 

I’m still not done with the coding. Still deciding what the cheat code will get you.

It’s called Taking Out the Trash.

---

Benjamin Drevlow is EIC of BULL and writes a bunch of bull stuff. He lives in Statesboro, GA with his nonfiction wife and three trash dogs. You can stalk him online at thedrevlow-olsonshow.com or on twitter, insta, face, bsky, & threads @thedrevlow.

Timothy C. Goodwin

Heatwave

The humidity sloshes in over the sills of our southeast-facing windows and the air conditioner’s lone working mode—FAN ONLY—churns the heat into a thick cream, so you lead me by the hand from our convection oven studio apartment and out into the streets where I pull like a powerless puppy towards someplace with some permanency: a coffee shop for an iced anything, maybe, or a diner to run our hands over the cool plastic menus, but you like aiming us towards high-end apartment buildings to fake out the sleepier doormen bent over their phones who then—caught!—snap their heads up and their phones down to quickly open the door in their strictly-choreographed dance step, letting a pane of ice-cold air smash over us as we are invited home to a life of full-lunged square footage, of cold-floored bathrooms that you can hold your arms out in and not touch any walls, of high-end digital thermometers that tune perfect frostiness like favorite radio stations, only to break our trajectory at the last minute with a faux-startled face/faux-embarrassed giggle that says Oh we don’t live here—LOL—we live somewhere much nicer.

---

Timothy C. Goodwin graduated in writing from the University of New Orleans and has had work included in JAKE, Maudlin House, Roi Fainéant, The Centifictionist, BULLSHIT, and elsewhere. Timothy is the host of the Tiffin Inn Writing Workshop podcast and lives in NYC.

Calla Gold

Editor’s Note: This story deals with domestic violence. Please read with care.

The Troll and the Lump

It was after midnight when I saw the troll. I heard a thump and crack in the hall, and it wasn’t the galumphing pads of Snooper the overweight basset on the carpet runner. Nor was it the clicking of his oversized claws on the bordering hardwood floor. I crept out of my warm bed, the sliver-moon showing me the way to the door. 

I eased the door open by an inch, knowing it squeaked at two inches. My ten-year-old heart was beating fast. The next sound was a cat-like mewling—but our cat had disappeared weeks ago. The hallway was dark, and it took me a minute to see a lump lying horizontal and curled in on itself in the hall. I couldn’t breathe. Towering over the lump was the troll. His barely visible face had fangs, deep wrinkles, and eyes that stared at the lump on the ground while his chest expanded with noisy, gasping breaths. 

“I didn’t mean it that way,” the lump whispered. 

“You’re an ignorant, revolting creature,” the troll hissed.

The troll’s hooves thumped away on the carpet runner, his hairy back bowed. I felt the indistinct vibration of his passage into the kitchen. A distant whine and wood-scratching told me my protector was locked away in the back porch. 

Snooper could not nudge and lick the lump’s wounds. He couldn’t sneak into my room and huddle, shivering against me and leaving his canine slobber on my flannel pajamas. I watched, eyes burning, as the lump sat up, head sagging to its chest. A mermaid out of water, a fairy with a broken wing, a rider bereft of her steed. 

The sucking sound of the refrigerator door opening made the lump’s head jerk up. Food was power in this house. Food could appease the troll or be used to punish with deliciousness. The troll would say, “I’m a gourmet.” But if he made a mistake in the measurements, someone else would fall into the soup, be pitched off a bridge, or be assigned the role of the stupid one, the one who ruins all that is good in the world. 

I felt the roll of cool air from the open fridge crawl down the hall, and my clasped arms goose-bumped. Then the troll’s high-up wooden cupboard door opened—the one that went errrrrt whenever it moved. That was the alarm that told the troll his secret cabinet had been breached. His treasure was colorful, beautifully shaped glass bottles with dark amber fluid inside—the liquid that had made my nose run the time I climbed up and sniffed it. 

“Just for parties,” he’d said to the lump. But we didn’t have parties. No one visited except my friends, and that was rare. 

The thump of a glass bottle hitting the wooden cutting board made the lump jerk. The amber liquid made the troll stronger, taller, and heavier-handed. The refrigerator door boomed shut. There would be no mood-sweetening food for the troll. Only angry water.

The lump crawled into the troll’s lair, the door closing with a quiet, hopeful click, as if the closed door could protect the lump from paying the toll to live in the pretty Victorian home. I knew that door would be safe, but the lump inside would not. The troll loved pretty things. He had removed the ugly white paint, painstakingly sanded the door’s beautiful molded details, and stained and varnished it to capture and ensnare the wood’s luminous grain.

No one dared run or play in the troll’s house. If the varnish chipped or a mark showed up on the paintwork, the troll would take note and extract his price when those he shared his sanctuary with least expected it. 

~

The troll, who rarely let the sun touch his skin, only left the house when he had a mission. Once he returned, usually flourishing an artistic marvel, we were required to expend a Miss-America-Pageant level of enthusiasm. Interwoven with his conquering tale of the acquisition, were sword slashes smiting the ignoramus fools who had failed to recognize the beauty and thus lost forever the chance to own the objects of his desire. 

One day, the troll made noisy preparations to go forth into the sunlight. He made me promise not to leave the house and let no one over the threshold. An hour later, I heard a ball bouncing with the echo of proximity. I leaned out my window and called my neighbor friend to come up. She ran up the steps two at a time. Her father smoked and had a hurt back and watched a lot of sports. Her dress was too tight and had a musty smell, like Gramma’s old sheets. The troll had forbidden me from playing with her because “She’s dirty.”

She smelled better than Snooper. We played hide-and-seek, then bounced the ball back and forth in the hall until one of the pictures crashed to the hardwood floor. She left. I picked up glass and bled on the carpet runner. I hoped the troll wouldn’t be the first to come home. But he was. I sat on the carpet, bleeding on my dress, crying. 

Being bloody and crying had worked in the past to get me out of trouble with my mother. But that was before she became the lump, before we lived in the house of perfection.

The troll’s face seemed to swell, redden, and his shadow grew longer. The room darkened as if a frightened sun hid behind a cloud.

The front door opened with its arrrt sound. “I’m home,” the lump said.

The troll stomped back to the kitchen. Minutes later, a wooden spoon scraped the side of a pot, and tiny bubble sounds accompanied the scent of tomato. A metal spoon tinged into the porcelain spoon rest. 

The lump crouched by my side. “What happened, Lili?”

Heavy tread pressed depressions into the carpet runner. Leather shoe tips prodded my thigh bone. “Your daughter had a friend over.”

“No, I didn’t,” I whined.

“And she lies,” he said.

“Why would you say that?” the lump said.

“I can smell the foul pong of her lazy, good-for-nothing father. That girl will come to no good end.”

The lump looked at me. I looked at my lap.

~

A year earlier, just after their wedding, the lump and I had packed boxes and bags of our belongings so we could move in with the troll. Boxes that the troll opened, discarding most of the objects we’d packed. “This is tired-looking, isn’t it?” And, “I don’t think that suits you.” And, “This is too babyish.” His stiff chest and upright neck told me I didn’t have the power to save my plastic Breyer horses, my Barbie, and my new-to-me baby-doll pajamas. 

I wailed, sitting in the front seat of our VW Bug while the lump drove the two of us to the Salvation Army collection box. 

“Why can’t I keep my Barbie?” I meant the one whose hair I’d chopped when I’d cut my own hair. Badly. She was ugly and dirty, but we’d had a lot of adventures together, and she was my Brave Barbie. 

“We’re going to our wonderful new life with Darrell. You’ll get new toys.”

The lump heaved liquor store cartons and plastic bags filled with pieces of our old life into the dark cavity of the donation box. “It’s for the less fortunate.” 

“I don’t want to go,” I said.

“It’ll be so much better for us, sweetie.”

The VW sagged when the lump turned the key off in the troll’s driveway. I looked up at the tall Victorian house. My new home. I’d never been in the troll’s house, but it looked nicer than our apartment. Five minutes later, my arms ached from holding two bulging plastic bags. I knew not to set them down on his soft carpet without being told. My feet ached in the nice shoes my mother made me wear. The shiny patent leather ones I’d begged for back before they pinched my toes. 

The troll pointed to the windows he’d stripped and repainted, the crown molding he’d restored, and told the long story of how he’d saved this once mistreated home from “Neglect and filth.” He paused after explaining that he’d replaced the bathroom sink fixtures. His eyes unfocused, his cheeks reddened, and his too-loud voice boomed, “Because some moron thought it was a good idea to install a modern travesty of a faucet.” He waited for the gasps of pleasure and amazement at this latest heroic reveal. The lump oohed and ahhed, but the skin tightened around her eyes. 

I’d begged the lump not to marry the troll when she’d sent me to my grandparents for the summer. I’d come home just in time to be her flower girl. I hadn’t wanted to do it. I was afraid that holding flowers in church while they kissed meant I was okay with being near him.

~

At first, my favorite thing was Snooper, the troll’s basset hound. Then I started noticing the nice smells in the kitchen. Even though the eggs and bacon were tasty, there would be no more Captain Crunch or Fruit Loops for me. I missed watching our portable black-and-white TV while eating Swanson’s frozen dinners with the different compartments separating the different-colored foods. I missed frozen pizza. My mother would read a book in a metal stand in the next room while eating a salad. 

“This is how dancers eat,” she’d told me. I’d eat nothing before I’d eat like a dancer.

That first night in the troll’s house, he’d set down a nice-smelling plate of food in front of me. He enjoyed talking about food. “This dish is Italian; I’ve bloomed some oregano and thyme to deepen the sauce's flavor.”

The lump nodded and picked at her food. “I love what a wonderful cook you are, Darrell,” she’d said. “But with my performance coming up, I need to eat sparingly.” She wiggled in her chair, cocked her head, and smiled up at him.

“Of course,” the troll said. “You need to preserve your beauty.”

#

The night after I broke the picture in the hall and lied to him, the troll began his campaign to kill me.

First, he decreed that I was only to read books from the library's adult section because I was “smart.” After he tossed my dog-eared copy of Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIHM, I pulled it out of the trash can and brushed off the coffee grounds and lemon seeds. I loved to read, but someone telling me what I could and couldn’t read crossed a line. 

Then he laid a plate with more food than usual on it, and decreed that skinny, picky-eater me was to “clean my plate” nightly. The troll’s food smelled good, and it tasted good. But it was too much. It didn’t look like torture to the lump. But it was. Her ears couldn’t hear my pleas. Even Snooper, fearful, quivering, and watchful when the night noises came, was braver than the lump who should be my mother. But she was bewitched by the troll.

~

I’d drop bits of food to Snooper, wrap food in a napkin, smoosh it into a pocket, and go to the bathroom and ask the antique plumbing to accept the chunky offerings.

I embarked on a quest to free the lump from the clutches of the troll who collected pretty things. My first gambit — to ask her if we could be just us without the troll — didn’t work.

I vowed to make him hit me in front of her. 

I smeared dirt on my clothes, quit using soap in the shower, and pretended I felt sick a few times to avoid eating more than a few bites of dinner. Within days, the troll lost his self-control and struck me with the back of his large hairy hand, cracking my head noisily against the lovely Victorian hallway wainscotting. He spewed spit and growled swear words I’d never heard before. He did this in front of the lump. And bonus points, in front of my new nice-smelling friend, who was spending the night at our house. 

With blood in my hair and a blackening eye, we escaped to my new friend’s house. My friend’s mother made tea, wrapped the sobbing lump in a blanket, and gave me ice in a baggie wrapped in a facecloth. I devoured an entire box of Captain Crunch with my friend. 

Like walking out of cold water into a sun-warmed towel, I grinned on the inside. I’d broken the spell. Wielding my invisible dragon claw, I’d slashed through the troll’s veil of glamour, revealing his fangs and putrid center. I’d spirited the lump away from the troll’s lair and looked into the eyes of my mother. Even when the bubbly, sharp liquid dribbled over the bloody gash on my head, I didn’t cry. I was victorious. But not for long. 

The next morning, sunlight sparkled dewdrops on bright pink fuchsias outside my friend’s family room window. The pretty three-tone song of the doorbell interrupted our blissful morning - curled up under a quilt, watching cartoons. We ran to the front window and peeked out to see the troll, arm resting on the outside wall, leaning in toward the lump. A dark curl had fallen over his eye, and a wheedling smile belied the venom circulating in his veins.

~

Monday reared, sweeping my dreams up like cigarette butts into a street cleaner’s maw. I sat in the high-backed wooden chair with the hand-turned spindles, bumpy details a pain to any spine. The arty chair, smooth undulations bumping into my butt crack, was carved for a larger body. It held my sternum captive to the kitchen table, masticating my dinner at the speed of a sloth. The troll sat sour-faced, tapping his large leather-shoe-clad foot, knife and fork neatly crossed on the cleaned plate in front of him. Since my recent beating had occurred when I refused to clean my plate, the lump sat in mute witness to our silent skirmish: the troll’s compulsion to force-feed me versus my need to eat less. 

In the days following, the troll lurked like a temple guard dog, managing to insert himself between the lump and me whenever I tried to talk to her. The food agitated like sour milk in my stomach at dinner times, and still, there was more to shovel down. I couldn’t survive like this.

My scabbed head ached for days, and I lied at school about my shiner. I hated lying for the troll. It was time for me to leave the troll’s hideout and make the lump miss me enough to turn back into my mother. Leaving a note that I was running away, I hid in a charmed and concealed hollow I created in our garage. I nested in the damp among neat, labeled boxes, antique furnishings, and purloined blankets. 

When I grew bored and hungry, I snuck up the back steps, toes tentative, seeking to avoid the high-pitched complaints of sun-blasted wood. My heart lurching in my chest, I listened for stirrings from the house. Even the noisy refrigerator door eased open in silence to offer me cheese. 

The library was my day haven, offering bathrooms whose flush a troll was powerless to hear and a generous bounty of forbidden children’s books whose pictures gave off the warmth of a fireplace. Those books let me soar to places where kids were heard, and dreams came true. 

On the fourth day of my disappearance, a black and white patrol car purred into our driveway. The dank chill of the garage, which no amount of fetal-position leg hugging could overcome, had worn my lips blue. After the policeman left, I rang the bell and stepped into the entryway. I leaned back, fingers chilled, pressing against the cold glass inset in our heavy front door. I looked up the carpeted stairs into the gloom above. Snooper galumphed down the steps, bursting past the descending troll and lump, and hurled his solid, basset-hound body at my legs. I crouched down and let him lick me, whimpering, with kibble-crumb slobber. 

The troll towered over me, a bulk with the shadow of claws. The lump’s eyes were wide, hands gripping each other, knuckles white. I tried to parse that sign language and failed. Rage rolled off the troll in waves of icy fog. Snooper steamed with love and protection, heating my chilled heart and radiating fog-melting magic. The troll shook his shaggy head. I clung to Snooper’s warm, wriggling, over-long body, eyes closed against the bumps of his loving, wet nose. Then I stood. Behind concealing lips, I bared my teeth. “I want to live with my dad.” 

I didn’t know my father. He’d either never visited me, or if he had, I’d forgotten. I stared at the lump and felt the cold nip from the troll’s barely banked ice fever. I waited for the lump to speak. She angled her face up to the troll. 

I didn’t want to live with my dad. I wanted to live with my mother. My plan had failed. The lump didn’t dispute my words. The thin wall of ten-year-old bravery cracked. I cried; that out-of-control, shaking, spit gets tacky, face gets blotchy crying. I thought I could win. I’d lain down my hand of love Queens and was trumped by the troll’s strategic Aces. I slunk to my room. 

I could hear the lump on the phone telling the police I was home and everything was fine. It wasn’t fine. That black and white should have squealed a U-turn, sirens breaking the sound of normal, and used a magical rope to still the troll's heavy, hairy hands.

At school, the day after my runaway return, my hand clutched too tight by the lump’s, I took short stopping steps toward the principal’s office. Her finger bones’ pressure said, “Do not speak.” I heard, “Your opinion is irrelevant.” 

In his stuffy office, words flew like newly hatched termites: “Unfortunate situation,” “Setting a bad example,” and “Needs more discipline.” 

The principal, fingers caressing papers, never met my blazing eyes. He didn’t ask me if I thought I needed more discipline. My little body barely held space in his overheated office. Not that the principal asked, but I hid the words of the troll’s deeds behind my teeth. I feared that speaking the true words would conjure his handsome surface, hiding his foul soul stench. I feared his fangs at my throat if my teeth opened. 

~

That night, the troll announced that my grandparents would be the best option for dealing with my wickedness. The lump stood silent and diminished by his side. The next morning, I stuffed my belongings into two plastic bags atop the naked mattress. As if his cloven hooves were wrapped in burlap and sinew, the troll crossed the threshold without sound. The bedroom itself mourned, bereft of a ten-year-old’s dreams, a sacred place profaned by the troll’s dripping rain of hate. 

“She’s not coming with you. And from what I’ve heard, your father isn’t any more interested in your appalling behavior than I am.” The troll sneered, his sharp teeth gleaming with the joy of a mad bear holding his lifeless prey aloft.

I refused to speak, to acknowledge his twisting of the truth. The troll wished me to bow, to moan, to beg for his forgiveness. I straightened and looked past his arm at my drawing of a horse. I’d taped it to the wall against his rules. Having no wish to rip the surface of the cocoon that’d welcomed my daydreams, I’d used masking tape.

He’d no doubt peel the tape off with care, crumpling the picture to specks between his bristly knuckles, a substitute for my blood. The troll couldn’t mar the warm, perfect, peach tone of the paint he’d so carefully lain upon the bones of the Victorian wall. The spell would break if he breached the meticulous beauty he’d wrought on the house. The beleaguered shelter would hurl him down the stairs to sink beneath the entry rug, his glamour fading into the gorge's mist from whence he came.

From the corner of my eye, the troll’s surface wavered, his desiccated heart thumping visible and too slow. I heard, “If you tell anyone about what I do to the lump, she’ll stop getting up, and you’ll be alone forever.” 

~

Hours later, on the slippery bench seat of my grandpa’s shiny green Impala, I tried to be jolly. My jokey grampa’s sad eyes looked straight ahead; his fingers clenched at the wheel. Back at their trailer, my gramma’s knowing eye and gentle touch loosed my clenched teeth. I started with a whisper, but my white-hot truth was a hydrogen-sulfide gas flare billowing bright from atop an oil rig at midnight. I was heard. 

~

Three years later, my mother came for me. At last, the troll slept alone. My wall of resentment, pain, and bewilderment was stacked like sedimentary rock, a boundary between her and me. In a tiny apartment furnished at the Goodwill, sitting on the couch of someone else’s broken dreams, we rescued an abandoned kitten. No pets were allowed in our new lodgings.

We named her Shadow. We lavished her with the love and gentle care we couldn’t give each other.

---

Calla Gold owned a jewelry design business for thirty-eight years. Her Indie non-fiction book: Design Your Dream Wedding Rings, From Engagement to Eternity, was released on Valentine’s Day 2019. Her recent short stories and novelette have been published in Mobius Blvd, Killer Nashville Magazine, and Confetti Magazine. Calla resides in southern California with her husband and an assortment of mountain bikes.

Lorraine Collins

A Body of Work    

I sit on the chair in your bedroom, the one we used to have goodnight cuddles on at story-time. Your favourite was Guess How Much I Love You. You kept it for years.

You drink your protein shake; a daily dose of one gram for every pound of your target weight.

You point to the colour coded exercise tracker you’ve pinned on the wall. The chart has replaced the personalised wall art I bought you for your twelfth birthday, three long years ago. Your name was printed in the centre in a big loopy font and circled around it the words I had chosen - beautiful, smart, funny, cheeky. And your favourite things - hot chocolate with marshmallows, horse riding, Taylor Swift, bubble tea. I can still see remnants of the Blu-tack, faded like the remnants of your younger self.

I wonder what you did with the poster.

“Today is an upper body day,” you explain, as you unroll your gym mat onto the carpet. You fill your lungs then slowly exhale. You do this several times. I realise that as I count your breaths, I am holding mine.

I make myself still and unimposing, a neutral observer, no judgement.

You start the routine.

• 10 diamond push ups, 3 reps

Your shoulder muscles ripple, your body skims the ground. The nape of your bare neck glistens with effort.

• 10 bicep curls, 3 reps

The veins in your forearms bulge, taut with protest. The dumbbells look too heavy, I worry you’ll hurt yourself.

• 10 tricep dips, 3 reps

You push yourself up and down against the side of your empty bookshelf, the fiction of your childhood now displaced by the vision of your future.

• 10 lat pull downs, 3 reps

You grab the bar attached to the door frame, your underarm hair glistening with sweat. You grimace with determination.

You pause, your breathing laboured, your flattened chest rising and falling.

You go to the wall chart, tick the boxes.

“I’m going from pear to square,” you explain, “and see...” you flex your broadening shoulders and pose in front of the mirror “...how much smaller my hips look now!”

It’s a whole new language for me, I have come to terms with it, with everything. No longer Molly, now Olly, but still my smart, funny child.

The weight lifts from me as I transition from denial to acceptance.

---

Lorraine Collins won the Anansi Archive and has been short or longlisted in Flash 500, Retreat West, Walk Talk Create, Wildfire Words, Writetime and various English literary festival competitions.

Travis Flatt

Almanac

It’s dark. The wind’s roaring. Mom and I argue at the threshold of the basement.

“Levi, you march yourself down here right now,” Mom says.

I resent the way her rhetoric devolves when we argue.

I would tell her so if she wasn’t crying.

But I’m crying, too, so, admittedly, I’ve got little ground to stand on. Not to mention having to shout. This debate’s becoming silly, yelling over the stupid dang tornado sirens and wind.

Mom’s teary face is a pale, moonlike blob from the dark of the basement stairs.

I hid all the flashlights when I saw the storm warning on the Weather Channel, flipping channels up for the Discovery Channel, eating my afterschool oatmeal and relaxing my brain from the barrage of cretins who crowd fourth block gym—all that sneaker squeaking on waxed wood and metallic basketball dinging echoes around in my cranium.

From further down the basement stairs, Becca’s shouting, “Jesus, Levi, what’s wrong with you?” And she follows this up with her usual juvenile name-calling, which Mom ignores, of course.

I shout back, “Shut up, Becca, stay out of it. Airhead.”

I won’t give ground.

Dad promised to call an exterminator for the wasp nest. It’s been growing exponentially in the basement all spring. Nobody listens to me. 

When I was ten, I stepped on a yellow jacket nest hiking.

The scientific name is spheksophobia.

Mom takes the last step up into the doorway and leans close to say, “Levi, please.”

“The fact remains,” I say, “More people are killed every year by wasp stings than tornados.”

It’s obvious from my mother’s exasperated scowl she doesn’t believe me.

Hoping I’m right, I run for the almanac on my bedside table. The trees are whipping back and forth outside, the sky is black, and the rain is puddling against the windows in fat splashes.

I’m wrong. The almanac says slightly more people die from tornadoes.

Mom’s out in the hall, “Levi, what the hell are you doing?”

As she rushes into my room, we accidentally collide, and I drop the almanac. She grabs my arm and tugs me for the hall, but I wrench free and retrieve the almanac.

“The almanac says a thousand more people die from wasp stings,” I lie.  

“Levi, baby, we have to go down there,” she says.

I despise this patronizing tone, and I’m about to tell her when she slaps me—she slaps me—and the almanac tumbles to the carpet, tearing the front cover. We stand and stare at each other.

“You slapped me,” I say.

 She’s grabbing me, hard, by the wrist and pulling me—my mother is stronger than me, I admit—hard enough to lift me off my feet.

I stomp her foot. I stomp my mother’s foot.

“I’d rather be blown away,” I scream, rushing back to barricade myself in my closet “–then get stung by a God-dang polistes dominula.”

My mother’s after me. I can hear her panting as she runs. Thunder rattles the window frames. I dive for cover beneath my bed, brave as I pretend to be, but fall short and scrabble. Mom pounces and lands on my back, us gasping on the carpet. We huddle up together, thunder and wind shivering the house, and I rub her hair like sometimes Dad does. But, not really that way. More like, “I’m sorry.”

I say, “I don’t want to go down there, Mom.”

A window breaks somewhere—the kitchen, I think. Becca pops into my doorway, screaming. Now the wind’s roaring so loud she’s just silent lips and braces. It’d be funny if the ceiling wasn’t groaning at the crown molding.

Mom and I try to stand, but we’re tangled together. Becca’s pulling us along as we limp to the basement. Becca goes down into the dark first, then Mom. I clutch the doorway and wait and take a deep breath and think, “There’s enough time for my almanac.” I got it for Christmas and read it every night until I fall asleep. 

And Mom turns back to yell something up at me, but her eyes shoot open. She teeters and throws her arms out sideways. I dive forward and grab her by her shirt, her blouse, and pull her upright, grab onto the railing so hard it cracks away from the wall from our weight.

Mom almost fell down the dang stairs.

Almost.

Thousands of people die that way every year. That one I’m sure about. 

You’re Going to Jail or the Hospital

4:45PM: My fiancée wakes me up and shows me my phone lit up with “Knox County Police Department” calling. I sit up in bed. An annoyed sounding woman says that earlier the police officer forgot to take my driver’s license before I got in the ambulance. I need to mail the license to this address in Nashville. I get out of bed for a pen and piece of paper. I’m still a little wobbly from the diazepam injection. She adds that I’ll get a letter to this effect sometime in the next several days. And that’s it. I’m a Sick Person now. I’m a person who walks. A person who rides the bus.

1:15PM: I see gray but hear the cop pounding his palm on my windshield. He shouts through the glass. My vision flirts and plays coy. There’s a big, white car blocking me in. I’m crying, explaining I don’t need an ambulance, my apartment’s a mile away. All they’ll do is pump an IV of the same medication sitting on my nightstand. Ambulance rides are thousand-dollar taxis.

“You hit an ambulance,” he’s saying. “You’re going to jail or to the hospital.”

1:10PM: I’m running. I must have seized on my feet, if only for seconds. I search the parking lot, head pounding, spinning. Ambulances, cop cars, pour in from the street. Did I park alongside the building or in back? My apartment should be on the other side of those woods. At the end of the row’s my red Nissan. 

1:05PM: I burst awake, fighting off the stretcher. The EMT’s caught unawares. I yank the IV out and dash from the foyer and into the sunlight. The gray blind place sucks at me. Stay on your feet; find your car; don’t pass out.

12:50PM: I fill out an application in the foyer, skim past “server” and “bartender” and write in “dishwasher.” Something easy. I want the money, not the job. I turn the thing in to wait for my interview. It’s a few blocks from my apartment. I could walk here on a nice day. The manager leads me back for the interview. She’s younger than me. She sits and offers me a cold smile. The floor falls away as my aura pops like an epiphany. All the colors grow brighter. The rectangles of sunlight on the table from the slats of the window look like I could push them around with my fingertips. I’m trapped. I must tell her not to call an ambulance, ask for a moment to concentrate, to breathe, to fight off the gray blind place.

12:00PM: Mom says, “You could get a part time job?” She means I’d cope with my diagnosis better not sitting around my apartment all day. Adult-onset epilepsy. I just woke up–or, woke my fiancée up, more accurately—in the middle of the night seizing in our bed, suddenly, like food-poisoning. We still don’t know why. The doctors say I need to keep my life low stress to minimize the seizure activity. I’m thinking about what my mom said. There’s an Olive Garden about fifteen miles down the highway from my apartment, like a ten-minute drive.

---

Travis Flatt (he/him) is an epileptic teacher and actor living in Cookeville, Tennessee. His stories appear in Fractured Lit, Bending Genres, JMWW, HAD, Maudlin House, and other places. He is a Best Small Fictions nominee. He enjoys theater, dogs, and theatrical dogs, often with his wife and son.

Jeff Harvey

It’s the Heplingers and We Are Buying Your House

Dear Mrs. Meriton,

My current husband Tom and I are searching for a home in your pristine neighborhood that is near our work and to our son Ryder’s school. Every time we drive by your craftsman with its canary-yellow paint trimmed in ocean-blue, it reminds us of our time in Sweden when I interned for the president of IKEA, who is now a close friend and likes all my Instagram posts.

We are buying your house and to facilitate the process, I’ve opened an account at Palo Alto Title and Escrow. They’ve prepared a title report for us indicating you’re behind over twenty thousand in property taxes, and your lot is only zoned for one unit. Yet from the drone our son Ryder used to photograph the property, you’ve converted the garage into an additional unit. That’s not a problem for us at all because we plan to transform it into a lab for Ryder. He’s in a pre-k program developed by Elon Musk, who’s personally assured us Ryder will be on the first human mission to Mars.

My contractor pulled the existing plans from the county records office. He’s informed us your property extends over your neighbor’s lot by three feet. This hasn’t been made public so I’m sure it’s an issue we can resolve during contract negotiations. 

Next Thursday works best for us to meet and review our resumes and DNA reports with you, which should give you ample time to get your paperwork in order. Tom works as a chef at the Airport Hyatt and will bring his famous avocado oil-infused donuts. His cookbook comes out soon with his favorite recipes paired with their companion country singer. We’re certain Tanya Tucker will grace the cover along with Tom’s chili recipe. I attended Stanford and work for a start-up developing online medical procedures. Because we already know we’re going to love you, I’ve spoken with our technician in Albania, and he will walk you through a virtual and complimentary gall bladder removal. There has been great success with no deaths. I feel so much better after removing mine.

Our appraiser has put together an estimate of nine-hundred thousand. This is slightly out of line with the Zillow estimate of three million, but with the potential legal issues with the neighbors and the county you’re facing, you will want to accept our offer. And after you finance fifty percent of our purchase at one percent interest, you’ll have a bundle left over for a roomy studio in a retirement village in Palm Springs that I can refer you to. You’ll just love it. They even have pickleball.

We had tea with your neighbor, Miss Tillson, and she was kind enough to tell us that she’s noticed extensive water damage to your hardwood floors. As you can see, we are easy to work with and our only request is that you vacate the property upon executing a sales contract so we can replace your existing flooring with faux-cedar planks, the trendiest and most eco-friendly available according to GOOP.

Excited!

The Heplingers

Rogér, Tom and Ryder

@HappyHeplingerClan

---

Jeff Harvey lives in San Diego. His work has appeared in or is forthcoming in Five South, Ghost Parachute, Bending Genres, FlashFlood Journal, and other places. He tweets @Jeff__Harvey.

Richard Holinger

Copperheads and Cucumbers 

Brent lines up his two blue garbage bins next to mine because the sanitation trucks pick up on my side first and there is strength in numbers that helps prevent his bins from being stolen by the assholes up the street who do construction and bring their shit home in dump trailers when he says he just returned from Kentucky where his son has a horse farm and copperheads roost on roads and trails but sometimes you can sniff them out before you ride over them because copperheads smell like cucumbers and it’s good if you can because they wait for a horse’s forelegs to go by before striking a hind leg so the snake won’t get trampled to death by biting the foreleg first, a lesson inculcated over the eons, way before the fifteen hundreds when cucumbers came to America, before his son’s horses crossed paths with copperheads coiled beneath maple, oak, beech, and paper birch tree leaves crisp and dry as overtoasted bread, only the scent of salad giving rider and horse a hint there might be more than what a morning breeze or hoof fall might stir up beneath.

Leaving a Doctor’s Appointment after Getting Bad News

You are in a parking lot with several levels, each open to a view of the city: buildings made of glass, steel, and brick. You hunt for your car, somewhere on Level 3, you know, because you wrote it down on the back of a Target receipt when leaving your car. Walking up and down the dark interior, you realize you won’t be able to pay for the time you spent here because you forgot your wallet. You go to a window where someone looks officious, so you tell her your predicament. She gives you a promissory note to sign. She guides you to an outdoor parking lot you didn’t know existed where you see your decades-old standard shift yellow Volvo. From far away, you think the shiny yellow car next to it with a spoiler and racing wheels might be yours, but when you get there, you find no driver’s side keyhole as there is on your car. You get in and drive carefully because you don’t have your license and if you get stopped it could be a problem. The paved road through the city eventually turns bumpy, but you know you can get where you’re going if you stay on this route. On a steep incline down, you slide along the sandy rock road past impoverished houses and unpainted farm outbuildings. At the bottom, a turnaround has you driving back uphill, but the car cannot make it back up the steep grade, and as the earth closes in around the car, it stalls. You get out and begin to climb, bringing the car with you. At the top you get back in and drive through pleasant green lawns and two-story white houses. You park outside the largest home and ring the doorbell. “I’m lost, and I need directions,” you say to the person who comes to the door. She invites you in and guides you through a maze to a sliding glass back door. As she opens it, you say, “I forgot my car,” and start back for it, wondering if you can navigate the maze on your own but are willing to try. It is, after all, what brought you here and is all you have. How can you leave it for this woman’s spacious backyard, pool, and deck chairs? It may not be perfect, far from it, it’s home, and it’s all you have.

---

Rick Holinger has taught English and creative writing on the college and secondary school levels. A multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, his writing appears in Chicago Quarterly Review, Chautauqua, Boulevard, Witness and elsewhere. His book of poetry, North of Crivitz, and collection of essays, Kangaroo Rabbits and Galvanized Fences, are available at local bookstores, Amazon, or richardholinger.net. Contact him at editorial@kcchronicle.com.

Ani King

Summerland®

Let's say we haven’t hung out since middle school, but we run into each other on an app and swipe right.  And let’s say instead of a quick hook up, we decide to go on a real date. Let's say that for our date we take the bus to the strip mall Summerland® Beach Rooms just outside the city, the one with the long lines but the good beach rooms, let’s say we always wanted to go back in the day, but our moms said it was too expensive, a waste of money, an experience no better than seagull shit on your face, they misremembered summers from when they were young, saying anyone back then could walk into a lake or splash into a pond or dive into an ocean without coming out oil-sheened or covered in rashes; let’s say when we begged to go on the middle school field trip to Summerland® they said no, and swore it wasn’t because of the money, but because we had the inlet, but let’s say the inlet is smells like piss and rotting fish, let’s say no one would ever risk swimming in the water and the sand is planted with torn shopping bags and fast food wrappers. Let's say for our date at Summerland® you bring a beach bag that says Fun! on the front and let’s say it’s stuffed with three big towels and a bottle of the same cheap sunblock we’ve used our whole lives, and let’s say we smear it on our arms and faces despite the UV filters in the beach room, and we keep inhaling the chemical-coconut smell of it, and let’s say I bring enough money to pay for a couple bottles of water and a couple of soy burgers with soy fries that will come to us on a plastic tray that we can eat at the real wood composite picnic table, because let’s say that we rent out one of the nice big rooms, with real sand and enough space for the dyed blue water to build into meager waves, like a real beach day, and let’s say after we eat we try to build a sandcastle with the vintage red plastic pail and two yellow plastic shovels that I found on eBay, but we’ve never done this without soda cans as bases for the towers, or waterlogged plastic candy wrappers for decoration or plastic straws to stick in the top, imaginary flags rippling out in an imaginary breeze, so they look like shit and they fall apart as soon as we take our hands away. Let’s say instead of a sandcastle, we build a ring of lumpy drip castles, the sand slurry plopping from shoddy anuses made by our loose fists, and let’s say we laugh for a long time at our shit castles, and the let’s say it feels stupid at first, but we play at being monsters, like when we were kids, but let’s say we wade out into the water even though neither of us can swim, but let’s say it doesn’t get more than waist high in any of these rooms; let’s say we splash until the water is frothing on top and then we come out roaring and stomping, we smash our ugly, SoftServe shit castles, and let’s say we don’t stop there, let’s say we dig furrows in the weirdly clean, weirdly pale sand so deep that we find the building flooring beneath and let’s say it’s just cold cement, coated in pockmarked brown plastic,  and let’s say we dig a person sized hole that goes all the way down the Summerland® floor and we climb in together, let’s say we melt into each other like our drip castles and we bury ourselves up to the neck like we always wanted to when we were little, but can you even imagine if we’d covered ourselves in inlet sand so the fleas made homes of our bodies, so our moms shouted us home the whole way? But let’s say when we close our eyes we can’t help but imagine the swelling whine of traffic whipping along the freeway that loops over our neighborhood, we imagine waves trembling onto the Summerland® imitation shore and carrying the cellophane remains of someone’s last microwave burrito, waterlogged maxi pads and tampons, Band-Aids and wrist braces, weed tangled wristbands from a night at the club, disposable razors and disposable needles and disposable lighters and disposable diapers, and let’s say we don’t go home to tell our moms we came here and they were right: it’s expensive and we missed being young and playing at the inlet, let’s say instead we pool the remains of our money and take a couple forties to drink while we hold hands under the overpass; let’s say we watch sunset smoking red-orange over the inlet, and the water twitching, and the children down there squatting over the treasures of the day, and the last of daylight pouring sticky and slow over them, let’s say we listen to them shrieking with the sea gulls, playing monsters, obliterating their own sandcastles in the elongating shadow of the Summerland® billboard.

Mermaid Park

Wade into the Mermaid Park swimming area up to your shoulders, shiver along with the buoys until your lips turn blue. Do this all evening when you arrive, and the next day, as soon as the sun rises, dart across the damp sand down to the shore. Turn pink, then red, skin bubbling up and sloughing away, pray for scales to reveal themselves beneath the tender flesh. An old wound breaks open with your skin: if you are really your mother’s child, when will it show? A pair of middle school aged girls are there with their dad for a custody exchange. It’s not like she’s gonna be here on time if she even comes, one of them says and flips her hair, rolls her eyes, plays with her phone. The younger girl complains, she always makes us wait for her. The whole place smells disappointing, like burnt popcorn and old fish.

Fidget over an extra cheese pizza in the motel room, because that’s what your dad used to order when he brought you here, and tell your girlfriend about the two girls, tell her again about how you feel like too much of your life has been the tedium of waiting for your mother. When she offers you aloe gel with a fragile smile, one that says she hopes you will sleep tonight instead of staying up drinking and complaining, lie and say you will wear sunblock tomorrow. I’m sure you’ll get to see her this time, your girlfriend says. She is only trying to help, but her parents are reliable. Fight over your impending wedding: the location is too far away from the ocean, can your mother attend if you do get to invite her? Cry (again) in the bathroom. Sleep fitfully under the weight of your lover’s arm, then rise at dawn and leave the room like you are escaping, go back to the swimming area to watch for the arc of tail fins slicing through the water and slashing at the sky. When you were little there were a couple of summers here that were just you and your mother. You remember her taking you in the water, you remember clutching her tight, flat against her back with your little legs wrapped around her waist while she swam so fast that the water tried to separate you. Back then she held you close with one arm and wouldn’t let it. Back then her tail seemed endless, rippling and rolling behind you.

On the last day before you go back to your apartment, your job, your life, wait with the others--children and adults, all of you scanning for tails and fins, all of you listening to the gulls shriek overhead, trembling in the cold water and salt-brining from the knees, the shoulders, the neck down. Watch as the two middle school girls hug and say goodbye to a mermaid who must have given them her eyes, her small hands, they wear her appearance in miniature. Watch them return to tapping on their phones, watch their mother be taken back into the sea. Pretend not to hear your girlfriend calling from the motel door; it’s time to pack and go home she shouts. Wait by the water and watch the sun bend light across the day, a gleaming white streak burning into your eyes, like a familiar long-flung tail.

The Sounds of Summer Camp

Wunderkind has to pee, but instead they get in line to take the next swimming level test. Wunderkind hears birdsong and shouting. A camp counselor reminding everyone to line up nicely. Someone playing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” on a ukulele badly, someone singing along with it in a different key. Swimmers splashing in the lake, contained by a half circle of buoys and two lifeguards. Short, sharp whistles preceding orders to dog paddle, to back-float, to stop splashing or pushing, to start getting out of the water. A line of kids chattering while they wait to use the outhouse bathrooms. The wooden outhouse doors creaking open, and slamming shut, percussive. 

Wunderkind hears counselors saying no one gets to cut in line, but not stopping it from happening. Charlene calling everyone from Walnut cabin over to wait with her, halfway up the line. Charlene saying no way to Wunderkind, like they would even ask. Charlene and three girls in stylish monokinis tittering at Wunderkind’s size-too-small, shoplifted snakeskin print bikini, the breasts Wunderkind love-hates spilling over the top and sides, hips in abundance. Charlene saying Wunderkind is a slut as loud as she please while the smell of Hawaiian Tropic and cucumber-melon body spray creates a full circle barrier around her. The violent smack of two older boys landing cannonballs. More whistling, more shouting. Wunderkind still has to pee, they focus on clenching around the fullness, the ripening ache. 

This is how it sounds when it happens: the whisper of Wunderkind’s feet shuffling in the hot sand, the squelch of Wunderkind’s thighs rubbing together, flung-water sputtering, splashing, sloshing as everyone else swims, and another girl saying oh my god thanks bitch as Charlene lets her cut in front of Wunderkind. Water pouring over and over again from bright plastic pails to cool, damp sand. This is Wunderkind squirming and dancing in line, and this is Wunderkind saying no when the same junior counselor asks if they need to use the bathroom, and this is Wunderkind refusing to leave the line and this is Charlene refusing the junior counselor’s request to save Wunderkind’s place so they can run to the outhouse, and now this is everyone growing quiet as urine runs down Wunderkind’s leg, dribbles on the ground, soaking into the sand when Wunderkind can’t hold it back, and now this is the sound of Wunderkind being told you can’t go swimming like this, you have to go clean up and the sound of Wunderkind’s refusal is nonononononono, shrill as a whistle, frantic like birdsong, and this is Wunderkind leaving the line and running past Charlene, straight into the water, diving under the first row, then the second row of buoys, and swimming out until their arms hurt, finally this is the sound of lake water slapping against itself, Wunderkind lifting their face and breathing deep, all the rest of the sounds of summer camp muted and far away.  

---

Ani King (they/them) is a queer, gender non-compliant writer, artist, and activist from Michigan. Ani is the first-place winner of the 2024 Blue Frog Annual Flash Fiction Contest, a SmokeLong Grand Micro Competition 2023 Finalist, and has had work featured in Split Lip Magazine. They can be found at aniking.net, or trying to find somewhere to quietly finish a book without any more interruptions.

Jessica Klimesh

Lessons

The older girls clothe the younger girls in their hand-me-downs. They say this was my favorite T-shirt, too bad it doesn’t fit me anymore. Or they say I wore this dress to my First Communion. Or these Keds were my first Velcro shoes.

The older girls sigh at the memories.

The older girls fix the younger girls’ hair, then apply makeup to the younger girls’ faces—concealer, blush, mascara, eye shadow, lipstick. They bedeck the younger girls as though they were playthings, dolls, fashioning them into unrecognizable silhouettes of their former selves.

The older girls say to each other remember when? And they all nod, say yes, uh-huh. Of course the older girls remember when they were the younger girls.

~

The older girls say here, wear these earrings and put on these bracelets, this necklace. And they tell the younger girls that they should always wear a ring on their ring fingers.

The older girls smile and say to the younger girls: Look how beautiful you are! Don’t you feel special?

The older girls tell the younger girls what to expect when they grow older. They explain how to flirt, how to wiggle their hips when they move, and how to walk in heels. They say when you smile, you don’t want to show too many teeth but just enough. And they say speak loud enough to be heard but not too loud, except when you scream. Your screams should always be loud.

The older girls take a step back and view their young protégés.

~

The older girls prepare the younger girls for first dates, proms, and weddings. They dress the younger girls in their old prom dresses, their old wedding dresses. The younger girls are stiff and hard to dress in such delicate material. The older girls bend the younger girls’ arms and legs, whichever way they will contort, and try to keep the younger girls from falling over. They lay them on the bed, hold them upside down.

The older girls say that tight dresses are always the hardest. But they tell the younger girls that it’s worth all the fuss.

~

The older girls tell the younger girls not to move too much. They spray their hair into place and tell them not to cry because they’ll smudge their mascara and not to drink anything or wipe their mouths because their lipstick will smear. And they say don’t play too hard or you’ll rip your dress or get a run in your stocking or turn your ankles in those shoes. Then the older girls confer with each other, turn back to the younger girls and say no no no no, you mustn’t move at all.

The older girls lift the younger girls up and set them on a shelf, each one in her own individual pose.

There, that’s good, that’s better, the older girls tell the younger girls. You will be safe there.

---

Jessica Klimesh (she/her) is a US-based writer and editor whose creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in Flash Frog, Cleaver, Atticus Review, trampset, Bending Genres, and Funicular, among others. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions, and Best of the Net. Learn more at jessicaklimesh.com or jekwrites.substack.com

Mark Schimmoeller

Postcards

The writing professor wanted us to finish our winter-term course assignments, remarkable given that we’d recently discovered humanity had only one year of existence left. She did tweak the last story assignment, asking us to write about someone we knew who had a project that should have been started earlier. I’m decades older than the other students, and her words made my skin itch. I feared that one of my classmates would want to interview me.

The students, however, ignored the request, leaving the university to take care of more urgent matters. I drew a blank on what to do in the coming weeks and months, so I remained in the class. Just me and the professor, every Tuesday and Thursday, while the world went berserk around us.

She didn’t act like I was the only student in the class; I didn’t act like she was the only professor on campus.

I’m not sure why I didn’t have anything more pressing. I’m a bit embarrassed by that.

The assignment gave me an excuse to visit a friend. Jeremy Orr would be doing something, everything else be damned, what little I knew about him. I hadn’t seen him since middle school, but I heard he was a hermit, living off tree nuts and fruits. We had corresponded sporadically in the last few years. His postcards were made of pressed shagbark from a hickory tree, and I brought them into my suburban home and displayed them on the mantle above the fireplace. I have six of them. Of all my things—the lamps with their embroidered shades, the white oak floors, the glass and walnut dining room table—they are what attract the eye. My wife, who died of Covid five years ago, didn’t like them. Or didn’t like the way I stared at them. “They make you sad,” she said.

I disagree. I look at them as one would look at a souvenir. People often have souvenirs from places they haven’t been, sent to them by friends or family who have, and one can feel a pleasure like the travelers must have experienced.

In his last postcard—sent a year ago on January 19, 2025—Jeremy wrote directions to his place. Though I knew Harmony Road—it dead ended in the northern part of my county—the directions made no sense. They would have me cross the Elk River on foot. He said his earthen roof baffled GPS. I was not to use GPS. I needed to be baffled instead, apparently, by handwritten instructions.

The muscles in my neck and shoulders unexpectedly relaxed as my Tesla backed out of the garage on the morning I set out to find him. By the time I left Woodland Estates, I was listening to the Rocky soundtrack, music that hadn’t appealed to me since my first days in college. These songs had turned sour on me. But when? A decade into my corporate career? Two or three?

Wednesday morning and already a line coming out of First Federal, people standing deep into the parking lot, hunched against a chill in the air.

I made it out of town.

On one of my visits to Jeremy’s childhood house—we were in sixth grade—we decided to cross a barbed wire fence into someone else’s land. Jeremy lived then with his parents in a saltbox tenant farmhouse on a cow and tobacco farm, and we had always stayed within the boundaries. When Jeremy squeezed through the barbed wire that day, I followed, feeling free and reckless.

On the other side of the fence, we moved quietly forward, avoiding branches on the ground. He was more like me then—a shy, rule-abiding, good student. I never followed him after that day. I don’t know why. He kept going where he wasn’t supposed to go.

He whispered that we should try to step on rocks if we could, so they couldn’t find us. I’m not sure now who they was, but I think I knew then. If we stepped on the ground, we would have to brush leaves and sticks over our prints. We used cedar branches like brooms. For some of the way, we stepped from rock to rock along the creek bed.

After what seemed like a long trespass, we entered a cedar grove and stopped. I don’t think either of us had ever been so secreted from the world. How the topic came up, I’m not sure, all I remember is that in this cedar grove we talked about the Capron twins, Jasmine and Jessica, who were in our class. We felt safe talking about them here, nearly certain they couldn’t hear us.

Jeremy and I hadn’t mentioned them before, though I believe we knew of each other’s interest in them. They had freckles and long, auburn hair and maintained just enough distance from the popular girls for us to dream about them. Jessica was more of a tomboy, Jasmine more feminine. The revelation in the cedar grove was that we were attracted to the other girl, Jeremy to Jessica and I to Jasmine, a revelation that turned our friendship into a near blood bond. We loved each other for loving the other girl.

On the way back, we swung on a wild grapevine, a more dangerous activity than typical for us, imagining that the Capron girls were there to see us. We joked about how Jasmine would never swing on a grapevine.

~

I parked where Harmony Road ended, activated the Tesla’s global alarm, and set out on what looked like a deer trail. Jeremy wrote that I would be able to find my way once on the trail, yet after a while the trail forked. The clearest path headed away from the river through a sunlit field of yellow and brown grasses. The other way headed down an embankment toward the Elk River, cedar trees blocking the sun and casting a shade that seemed familiar. It had blue in it amidst the black.

~

A homeless encampment had sprung up on campus, and my schedule quickly became known. Getting to the Sylvia A. Bee Humanities Building required me having up to ten five-dollar bills. A member of the National Guard now let me in the building, after I presented my student identification.

The professor was always in the room, even if I was early, and always prepared, though once I saw her hastily put her long hair back in a bun. I guessed she was maybe ten years younger than I was. I admit that I often thought of Jasmine as I watched her lecture, the auburn hair a similarity.

One Tuesday she said it was time for our last story workshop. Because of the small class size, we would start with a story that a student had—hypothetically—submitted.

In this story, a young woman wanted to go out into the world and have adventures and write a novel, but she kept hearing her father’s voice in her head, urging her to be responsible, establish a career. The voice gave her headaches. In the end, she decided she would have no peace until she followed his wishes. She went to graduate school, received her doctorate, and by the time she was twenty-eight she was a tenured professor at a university. Then she began to hear another voice in her head, this one telling her to live her life. But by this time, she was a divorced mother of two, and she had no option but to continue bringing home a paycheck.

In a voice still calibrated for a room full of students, the professor went on to discuss the workshop etiquette, how we were to talk first about what we liked about the story. When we talked about what we would change, we would refer to the story as our own. We were not to bring attention to the author of the story.

 “James, would you like to start,” she asked.

I’d signed up for my first creative writing class on a complete whim—the same day I took an early retirement—and I’d been one of the quieter students. Not discontented. Just like in a daze. I listened to the discussions of the emotional states of fictional characters as I would, it seemed to me, stare at Jeremy’s postcards once I got home. Not a blank kind of daze. More like a soaking-in kind of daze. It blew my mind that someone could arrange words on paper and make someone else feel a character’s emotions.

I’d never been called on before. I suppose I should have anticipated the possibility, given the sparsely attended classroom.

“I like the story,” I said.

“What makes you like it?” the professor asked.

I saw that her eyes were red, like she hadn’t slept.

“I mean, I don’t like it for the character,” I said. “I wish she could have been in a different story.”

 “What kind of story would you like her to be in?”

For the first time, the professor moved from the back of her desk to the front of it. She leaned against it, her hands gripping its sides.

“She has tenure,” the professor continued. “She has two children, whom, presumably, she loves. Why would she want anything different?”

“To get away from the voices in her head,” I said.

“Ah, the bothersome voices,” she said. “The infernal voices. Is this a complete story, James?”

“It’s more like a summary.”

“Right. A statement about a life. Period at the end. That’s all she wrote. So, tell me how you would turn this from a statement of fact into a story?”

I couldn’t think of what to say, and in the silence, heat rushed to my face.

“Well,” the professor said, “I would describe the voices more. Maybe they crawl out of her eyes. Wouldn’t that be a different thing for voices to do? They’d crawl out of her eyes loud and irritating and gang up on the first thing they come to. Say a coffee mug. Say they get all over an innocent coffee mug, berating it for being in the service of grading papers instead of writing a novel. Then they go from the coffee cup to her children.”

Her fingers had turned white.

When she spoke next, she whispered, and I felt, for the first time, alone with her in the university.

“My story, you see, needs details if I want it to be alive. That’s a big if. And fewer periods. It has too many sentences. It has too many endings.”

~

I set off on the well-trod, sunlit path, but something stopped me. I turned around. On the faint path going the other way lay a cedar branch. It looked recently snapped from a tree.

I reversed direction, picked up the cedar branch and headed into the blue shade toward the river.

The path dropped, and I was inside a cleft in the hillside, stepping on rocks and roots. I’m not sure one could describe it as a path at this point. I had to lower my body to scoot down miniature cliffs. Shagbark hickories grew among the cedars on either side of me. When I rested, I stared at bark that curled like off ramps from trunks.

He sands the inner side of the bark, turning it to a light tan. Pencil marks show up clearly on this side. I like the contrast between the tan side and rough gray side. That’s why I always have a couple of the postcards on the mantle turned the other way. Each card has two Forever Amphibian stamps on it. That’s more than what is needed. But who would know for shagbark postcards. The stamps look old.

I’m not sure what I expected once I was on the riverbank. Though the Elk River is small, more like a large creek, one still couldn’t cross it without getting submerged.

~

 The professor is always asking me where the emotional center of a scene is. She directs me to pick an object or an action or a setting that can carry that emotion. She says this like I can accomplish the task. We both sit in desks now. She makes the desks look more comfortable than they are. Maybe if I were as slender as she is, they would feel comfortable to me too.

We’re spending far more time on my story than the hypothetical student’s. I’d likely feel insecure if we focused on an absent person’s work. As it is, I’m gradually gaining confidence in her presence. I even told her about staring at Jeremy’s postcards. That’s about all I do now since I’ve stopped watching television.

She didn’t seem surprised.

Sometimes I look at the postcards like they are hands. The sanded sides feel like skin.

~

 It took me a minute to see the rusted church bell hanging from driftwood. The driftwood was set vertically in a pile of rocks. A length of twine hung from the bell’s clapper.

I wasn’t surprised that he would have a nonstandard doorbell. I dropped my cedar branch and rang the bell three times; a minute later, Jeremy came bounding through the underbrush on the other side of the water. He wore buckskin and a fur cap, and he stopped when he saw me.

 “James Dunworth!” he yelled to me.

~ 

“Take me there,” the professor said.

 “What?” I said.

She got up and locked the door. I saw then, through the small door window, a couple of men in garbage bag ponchos drift by. It had started to rain and sleet. Maybe the National Guard was letting people shelter in the building.

“Transport me,” the professor said.

~ 

I’m a good traveler as I sit in my recliner. It’s an off-white leather with walnut trim. We chose it because it matched the dining room table. I should exercise, but my mind wanders more when I’m in my recliner. If they ever discover—within the next few months, I mean—that a wandering mind helps with the heart, I’d be pleased.

Each of Jeremy’s postcards is written with precise detail, the last one precise in the most practical way, the earlier ones more like poems, precise that way—the bluebirds coming out of the cedar tree, a moon shadow of smoke rising from the chimney, etc. I want to impress the professor with my last story, as I’m sure Jeremy could—yet I keep thinking I won’t be able to arrange the words right.

Also, I’ve not proven I can travel with someone else.

If I had liked my career at Kroger, I could have talked to my wife about it. If she liked my imaginings of an alternative life, we could have talked about that. As it turned out, we were a mostly quiet couple.

~

 I told the professor one Thursday about my trumpet, which had been buried under boxes in the walk-in closet. I loved that trumpet, but I bit my nails while playing it in middle school. I hadn’t wanted to see the blood stains on the keys. Until my wife died, that is. I took it out then and made it bleat. Now I blow on it once a day.

It always sounds like a distressed animal. I blow as loudly as I can, filling my house at 873 Ravenwood with noise.

~

 A man like Jeremy would use the junk that washed up on the riverbanks. Like bed springs. Once he found some bed springs that helped him complete a catapult made from cedar poles. And some baby carriage wheels, so he could roll this catapult from behind a bush.

He pulled back a long, spring-loaded pole and loosely wrapped what I thought was a grapevine around it.

 “Catch it,” he yelled.

The vine made a path in the sky coming toward me. I clutched it someplace in the middle. Once it was in my hands, I realized I held a rope.

He instructed me to hold where the knot was, back up to a rock on the bank of the hill.

~

“You can come if you like,” I said to the professor.

And she came through the blue shade toward me.

Sunlight blocked by cedar trees must make a blue shade. I’m seeing everything through a blue shade. The shade must also have green and black in it, but it’s the blue I keep seeing.

The professor has long, slender fingers. Mine are stunted in comparison. But now both of our hands are rocks stuck on the rope as we prepare to swing.

“What’s the strongest feeling right now,” the professor asks me.

She smells like burnt chamomile, like disaster and calmness together.

“That I’m only now doing this,” I say.

Then we are flying, our bodies hung together, the air pushing around us.

The professor shrieks. What comes out of my mouth is a cross between a grunt and a screech, coming from someplace I had thought lost inside me.

On the other side, we drop to the ground laughing. The professor’s hair drapes over a rock.

Jeremy is smiling at us. He’s in fine shape, lanky but muscular.

“Jeremy Orr,” I say. “I’d like you to meet my professor.”

“You bastard,” he says, still smiling. “You’ve found a beautiful woman.”

I’m embarrassed. We’ve moved our desks so they make a continuous surface between us.

Jeremy pulls the rope back, wraps it around a branch. Then he leads us up the embankment.

“Jasmine was always afraid of grapevines,” I say to no one in particular.

I’m panting by the time Jeremy stops, close to the top of the hill, where it has leveled off a bit. Jeremy and the professor are not out of breath.

In school I was interested in football. I have a stocky build that could have been developed into a football player’s physique. Yet I was too afraid to try out, afraid I wasn’t good enough. An old story of mine is that I did try out for the team and went on to become a good player. Jasmine notices me in this story.

“Welcome,” Jeremy says.

I see the house now, which is almost completely blended into the landscape, the roof covered with the same bottlebrush grass and wingstem and blackberry that grow on the ground, as if his place is only a trick of elevation. Its rounded walls are the same color as the subsoil. It has no windows. To get through the doorway, Jeremy would have to stoop. Wrapped around half of the house is a porch, cedar posts holding up a scaffolding of branches and thatch. On the porch is a pile of firewood. It is split into pieces smaller than my wrist. Next to the firewood, a clay oven sits on a rock base. Steam is seeping out from the oven’s wooden door.

“Oh,” the professor says.

I dump words on him—I’m nervous—thanking him for the invitation, apologizing for not getting out sooner, wondering if he had a project he wished he had started earlier, given that the end of the world approached.

“Whoa, buddy,” Jeremy says, “I’m trying to remember if you were always so inclined toward dystopia.”

We gape at him. A gust of wind tosses a few snowflakes around us.

“You haven’t heard?” the professor asks.

“Not bread or flowers or wine. No, my friends come bearing news of the end of the world,” Jeremy says.

We tell him that deep sea mining has released a chemical into the atmosphere that will kill us and most mammals within a year. I’d stopped watching television, sick of the continuous coverage of the first few people who had died.

I’m embarrassed that I don’t have a gift for him. I never thought I would make it this far.

“You truly don’t get out,” the professor says.

“Kinda gotten out of the habit,” Jeremy says.

“And I guess our news doesn’t help you get back into it,” the professor replies.

Her eyes, they are soft now. They’ve had a surface hardness to them. I’m remembering Jasmine in the hallway outside our classroom in sixth grade, when she tossed a glance in my direction, her eyes soft like that.

“Come,” Jeremy says. “Let’s get out of the cold.

He leads us to the doorway and stops.

“No need to take off your shoes, but I’d like you to close your eyes for a minute to help them adjust. I wouldn’t want my guests to think my house is completely black.”

He laughs. There it is—Jeremy as a kid. I hear him. He’s a kid again, that same laugh. A surprising burst, then a sound like someone sliding down a staircase.

I’m closing my eyes. A din that had been in the background is drawing nearer. It could be traffic from State Road 169. But it is distant enough for it to turn into anything.

Jeremy has us duck, and he guides us into his house. He asks us to feel for a cob bench on our left. We are to sit on the cob bench and then we can open our eyes. The professor and I are clutching each other. The air is velvety, like it’s another body.

Warmth comes up from the seat. The professor exhales. The din in my head fades.

When I open my eyes, they are not overwhelmed with darkness. I can see the blunt forms of things. Jeremy is across from us. His teeth show up. He’s smiling. He’s always had such white teeth. At one end of the bench there’s a barrel with a tea kettle on top.

Jeremy is handing us wooden mugs, asking if we want to try his sassafras tea.

We do.

The tea is made from boiling sassafras root, the mugs carved from a sassafras trunk. 

“The seat is warm,” I say.

My recliner is soft, but I’m more comfortable on this hand-made, warm earthen bench. Comfortable and sleepy.

“Y’all have impeccable timing,” Jeremy says. “The flue for my barrel stove runs through the cob bench. It’s most comfortable about three hours after I’ve had a fire. In fact, I was resting on it myself when I heard your bell.”

Both of my hands are holding the large wooden mug and now warmth from the steaming tea is spreading into them as well.

“You asked about a project,” Jeremy says. “I’m glad you asked about that instead of hoping for some school news.”

That laugh again.

I’m soaking in the warmth. It’s a warmth of embers.

I think they’ve stopped heating the Sylvia A. Bee Humanities building. Either that or dozens of cold bodies entering the building have lowered the temperature.

“Anyway,” Jeremy continues, “I had a window wash up. In one piece. I couldn’t believe it.”

I can move my body slightly toward the professor and avoid the direct stare of a gaunt face.

Jeremy tells us that in the spring he’s going to carve out a section of his earthen wall and build an alcove for the window. He says his walls are over a foot thick, made of clay and stray, so the sill will be deep, and the angled reveal will round the light. It will face east.

“What will you see?” asks the professor.

“I’ll see the red morning sun through the cedars,” he says.

“You’ll always look toward the coming day,” the professor says.

He laughs. “I’ll only have one window.”

He takes our mugs, tells us he will be back.

The din in my head returns. Jeremy leaves the house, and light bursts in. Its entrance sounds like a fist on a door.

Jeremy comes in carrying something. A rich, sweet, burnt aroma. He hands us each a wooden plate and a wooden fork. The thing on the plate is not visible. He tells us the sweet potatoes have been in the clay oven for three hours, that we should peel off the burnt. We do, and it’s like emerging out of blindness seeing the flesh of the sweet potatoes.

“They make their own sugar if you allow them time,” he says. “It’s about all I eat this time of year.”

He keeps talking, but the din in my head distracts me.

A boot is on the door window. Someone is using his hands to knock a boot against the door window.

“In my story,” the professor says, her voice loud, “that sweet potato looks like the morning sun.”

I concentrate on its deep, complexly sweet flavor.

“You’ll keep moving ahead, won’t you?” I ask Jeremy. I’ve drawn my breath, pursed my lips. “You’ll put that window in, right? And the days when the sun doesn’t come out? What will you see then? Tell us what you will see then.”

“There will be mist,” he says. “There will be rain and snow. I’ll see sleet and hail and slate skies.”

~

The professor moves her desk so it’s parallel with mine. We turn in our seats to face each other.

The battering on the door is awful.

She gives me her hand. Then we are holding each other. I’m trembling and happy.

---

Mark Schimmoeller is the author of SLOWSPOKE: A UNICYCLIST’S GUIDE TO AMERICA (Chelsea Green, 2013), which was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Creative Nonfiction. When not writing, Mark is often found cooking for his wife in a solar oven on their off-the-grid Kentucky homestead.