Prose

Mea Cohen

Teeth

If there is gravel on the street, you are in it. When I think of your grin, I kick at small rocks and watch them scatter like loose molars.

I met you the way all young girls met young men back then: in the parking lot of the reservation smoke shop. I let you buy me a pack, even though the counter-guy never gave me any trouble about looking as fourteen as I was. You came out of the store with your small victory, red carton waving in your hand, gaps of deep black in your smile, your nose leaning heavily to the right, dirt smeared so deep in the blue of your jeans, I wondered if you’d ever washed them. 

You thought charming was getting to know someone too fast. You asked me too many questions and I ran out of one-word answers, gave in, and revealed what you were after. How your eyes lit up when I told you why I’d moved in with my aunt, lifted my t-shirt to show you the bruises yellowing on my rib cage. 

It was always me, you said, like there were never any other children being beaten. But this whole time it was you too. I think you meant to sound profound. 

You said you barely remembered your father’s fists. That’s how hard he hit you. You said you watched him beat your mother too. Can you wash out that stain?

I should have walked away when I saw that you didn’t have all your teeth, but I never went back to my aunt’s house. You’d made us out to seem so the same, our broken histories a romantic binding tie. Everything after that happened the way it happens to all young girls who meet young men in parking lots. 

There was a trailer, of course. There was never going to be a house. You drank more than me, kept drinking long after I’d stopped. Made your liver out to look like the color of your dirty jeans. I worked in the library, and the dollar store, and stayed with you because who else was there to love? Who else was there to get love from?

You woke up one night, from where you’d passed out in a lawn chair. I heard you moaning like a dog begging to be let in. You’d thrown up all over yourself, vomit the color of rust. 

In the county hospital, the doctor said it wasn’t likely you’d get a transplant. It could take months for you to die. 

I took you home. Laid you down in our bed. You looked at me and said, Not like this.

Once, when we were still young, you ran over a dumpster cat. A scrawny, starved little thing. You called it lucky. It was writhing a bit, not quite dead. A bigger man would’ve finished it off. 

That night after the hospital, with even fewer teeth than when we first met, you were asking me for that dignity. 

Drink this, I said. It’s not going to hurt. At least you won’t remember.

Born and raised in the Hudson Valley, Mea Cohen is a writer now based in New York City. She has an MFA in creative writing and literature from Stony Brook University. Instagram: @meacohen | Email: mgncohen@gmail.com

Orlantae Duncan

The Forgotten Fruit

The sun is a runny yolk, dripping heavy globes of yellow that stain the living room. The furniture, the little not dressed in plastic, is old and frayed at the arms with Papa Foster, dead three years, still present in the form of an ass-print here, a cigar burn there. I stand and count my breaths, a shin resting against a sharp corner of the coffee table, wondering how Alice slaved away in this stuffy, tiny house after seven children and a husband who, upon return from service in Korea, was almost no better than an eighth. Alice, small brown face the color of baked pie crust, with dark Cherokee hair the length of her entire back, streaked with starlight. Alice, the mother of my mother’s mother. Dying in the room next door. 

Everyone behaves today like actors in a play, breaking into choruses throughout the house, jostling from room to room at the rush of an invisible stagehand passing them at the end of a scene or act: aunts and uncles with Alice in her closed room, older cousins whispering in the kitchen over steaming teacups taken from Alice’s locked cabinet, their younger siblings out by Papa’s work shed grieving through red eyes and charred lungs, and me, alone in this sun-soaked room.  

 The lace curtains flutter from the start of the air conditioner, tattooing shadows in the shapes of petals and stems across my arms, and I turn away from the window. Being the smallest room in the house, the living room is made larger through Alice’s domestic witchcraft. The armchairs and couches pushed to the outer boundaries of the room, the center feels larger and open, sunlight resting in a pool like a big sleeping cat. The wood-paneled walls, smooth and sleek, all barren, save for one off-colored panel three shades darker than the rest, and the only space decorated with photos. It was an anomaly of the house before they bought it, and the single peculiarity that sold Alice on committing to the property. 

Superstitious, Alice claimed the off-colored panel as a sign, something holy. The one sliver in a house occupied by seven kids and a military veteran that she could call her own. And so, as years stacked like plates and grandchildren bloomed like fruit, she made that sacred space into a shrine of the Foster legacy. I begin to hear movement and what sounds like the murmured endings of a prayer next door, and I move closer to the wall with the rogue panel in anticipation of the stagehand. 

“…and Father,” Uncle Jay or Grant continues, the voice echoed by a choir of “mmhmm” and “Yes, Lord” gathering like smoke behind the door while I pretend to study the photos on the wall, “we pray that you prepare us, Lord…” 

A picture of the twins, waiting in line at the community pool concession stand, arms linked, the white of the sun hitting the water at such an angle as to obliterate all other color, save for the black of their small bodies. 

 “Use your servants, Lord. Guide our hearts with strength, Lord. With wisdom…” 

Aunt Beth, the runt of Alice’s litter, in her cap and gown, beaming at the head of the table in a dimly lit restaurant, only the whites of her eyes and the deep purple wine stain on her lips illuminated by a cupcake with a candle. 

“We question not your purpose, Lord. You made Mumma from the dust, Lord, and shall take…” 

Tiffany, months before the accident, seventeen and doe-eyed behind the wheel, her hair a halo of gold curls, her mouth a clean oval in imitation of the song on the radio, or a statement made to the body behind the camera of her excitement to start college. 

“This we ask, Father. Reunite Mumma with Daddy in your arms ‘til our time comes to heed your call, Lord. And the church said Amen.” 

Peter, eyes sunken and glassy, smiling over a plate of catfish in New Orleans. 

“Amen.” 

Aunt Theresa and her second ex-husband with Cousin Lee, huddled in the parking lot of Disney World, the ears from their Mickey Mouse hats casting large, planetary shadows on the cars behind them. 

“Amen.” 

None of me. 

“Amen.” 

There is a shuffling of bodies followed by a chain of weak coughs, but I pretend to continue analyzing the panel, solving an equation with an unsatisfied lack of shown work. I focus on the space between the frames, believing what lacks can be of equal value to what is taken up. That emptiness is not criminal, but instead something overlooked. One of the forgotten fruits of the spirit, Alice called it, as she did of all personal preferences that were not exactly biblical (i.e. table etiquette, polite laughter, silence during storms). 

“Love. Joy. Peace. Patience. Kindness. Goodness. Faithfulness. Gentleness. Self-Control—God told Paul to share these fruits with men, Lonnie,” she told me years ago, my small mouth full of sandwich at the kitchen table, “but men forget things all the time, even God’s chosen, but ain’t no way the Lord stopped at nine…now boy, finish your plate; Paul forgot to include wastelessness!” 

I laugh recalling this memory, and as the door opens and people begin to leave Alice’s room for the next act, I tell myself, “Yes. Even emptiness can be holy.”

Orlantae Duncan is a writer based in Richmond, Virginia with a BA in English Literature from the University of Mary Washington. His work has previously appeared in Homology Lit, Cartridge Lit, Wig-Wag Mag, and Allegory Ridge’s poetry anthology Aurora Vol. 1. He has also served on the editorial staff of The Rappahannock Review. He can be contacted via email at: orlantaeduncan@gmail.com

Mackenzie Sanders

The Girl in the Well

She still wanders the Modern Languages building. She has dark hair that she pins up, and she wears a long flowing shawl with a floor length, high collar dress. If you’re standing outside the building, you can see her staring out the windows at the palm trees and the statue of the naked woman outside the library. We don’t think she knows how to get out. But when we try to talk to her, she turns and runs away. 

They killed her right where the Modern Languages building is now. It happened in the early 1900s. It’s never been confirmed by the university, but we know it's true. They assaulted her, then killed her and threw her in the open water well that the Spanish left when they colonized the state in the 1700s. Her body was floating in the well when the groundskeepers found her in the morning. They just left her there. 

The school filled in the well and constructed the Modern Languages building on top of it in 1965. Rumor has it the construction workers found her bones and gave them to a fraternity on campus. None of the construction workers lived past fifty, and most of them died in unfavorable circumstances. It’s never been confirmed by the university, but we know it’s true. We don’t know what the fraternity did with her bones for those two years. They probably kept them as a souvenir, they were probably the ones who raped her, but after mysterious things kept happening to the fraternity, they reburied her one night in 1967. That didn’t seem to help. By 1974 the fraternity had its charter revoked and its building seized. Every year since then, a small group of alumni meet at midnight, right where they reburied her, and ask for forgiveness for what their brothers did. But we think the only reason they do so is because they’ve all had bad luck since. They’re welcome to keep trying.

I didn’t believe in ghosts, which was a weird thought to have when being sexually assaulted. But that’s what I was thinking about when it happened. I was thinking about the girl in the Modern Languages building and how I had thought that the whole thing was just a myth until right then. But then he flipped me over and I knew, with absolute certainty, that everything I’d heard was true. And the next day I saw her. 

I had a late class on Wednesday, and then I stayed after to ask my advisor about an elective requirement. And by then the building was nearly empty, and the sky outside was faded pink, and there she was. It’s messed up now that I think about it, that I didn’t believe she was real until it happened. “Believe survivors” and all that jazz. But you should believe the dead ones too, maybe even more so. And her being left at the bottom of a colonial well in what’s now the second largest university in the state of Arizona shouldn’t be brushed aside simply because the idea of ghosts being real is still up for debate.

So I believe in her. And after I saw her, it didn’t feel right having my classes in that building anymore. Studying Moby Dick while there’s an undead woman who was gang-raped waltzing around must carry some kind of irony. And studying Nathanial Hawthorne seemed too on the nose. My professor was infatuated with Hester Prynne. He thought she was the pinnacle of rebellion, and he would always talk about how she was “thumbing her nose at all of the Puritans” because she was unashamed of her child and her long black hair and her beautiful dresses. But there is a difference between being unashamed and having no other choice but to accept one’s lot in life, and I wondered if he was aware of her, if he’d seen her in the hallways himself, and what kind of connotation that carried for him.

But I learned from the rest of us that he hadn’t seen her, he couldn’t see her. You could only see her if it happened to you. 

I should have tried to talk to her. But when I saw her all I could think about was the previous night in his tiny frat room with the awful fluorescent lights and the “Don’t Tread On Me” poster. I think he was worried I would tell, but nothing would happen if I did. They only shut down the fraternities if one of us is roofied and taken to the hospital, or if one of the brothers tries to jump from the roof during a party and dies. And I was just drunk. And I’m not dead. So I’m fresh out of luck. 

What’s weird is that I didn’t feel that different after it happened, which made me feel guilty. They painted this big image in our heads about it, about how awful it is and how it ruins people’s lives, but I just felt a little bit unclean, which made me feel like I was betraying her. How fucked up is that? 

My friend Jane came in and stopped it before things got to the worst part. She and Eva pounded on the door and screamed until he opened it, and then they carried me to the car. But we went back to the same fraternity the next weekend to tailgate like nothing happened. It wasn’t just any game day, it was part of the Territorial Cup, which was a big deal. We were tied with ASU and football was an iffy sport for both of us, so this game would determine who got the cup that season. Some people called it the “Duel in the Desert” series, but I always thought that was stupid. Sometimes it felt like we overemphasized the fact that we were a cowboy state so that we could get away with being rougher with each other.

So after it happened, nothing really changed, except for her. After it happened, I saw her everyday. It was like an initiation, but I couldn’t tell you what for. If it happened to you, you could see her. And we all see her. It happened to Jane her second year at the university. It happened to Eva when she was twelve, so she’s seen her since she started here. It happened to our Caribbean literature professor (we know because of the way she hurries through the Modern Languages hallways, and the way she pauses and turns around when she reaches the end). And it happened to Hailee from Delta Gamma and Annabeth from Spanish class. 

We have club meetings, mostly where we sit around outside the cafeteria and pretend we don’t know each other. Sometimes Hailee laughs to break the silence, but then Jane tells her to shut up and Annabeth starts crying. Sometimes we talk about the alumni meetings and see if we can catch them chanting over her burial site, but we know we’ll never have it in us to go that far. 

It all seems so backwards. We have laws that protect the native plants here, mostly the cacti. If you’re caught digging one up, you get fined. Saguaros carry the worst punishment. They take a century to grow, and they hardly grow anywhere else, so people face jail time. But they covered her up, then dug her out so many times and nobody said a word.

By senior year, almost every girl in our program could see her, and she gained traction with the university. People thought it was some sort of game. Hailee told some of her sisters about her, and the girls started drugging themselves and then walking into bars and frat houses to initiate themselves. Some girls woke up the next day and couldn’t remember a thing, others couldn’t walk, one girl dropped out afterwards. You don’t know what hand you’re going to get dealt. She is the only constant. 

Now the Modern Languages hallways are filled with hollowed out women sitting on the grimy linoleum, pretending to study, waiting for her to show up. She appears at the end of the hallway and turns to look at us before she walks up the stairs. I’m not sure how receptive she is to our presence, but then again, if we wanted an involved figurehead we would have picked a live one. 

We like to think her name was Maria, and she rode horses and wrote poetry, and she had three sisters who missed her very much, but we’re romanticizing. Damn you Melville and Hawthorne. What we do know is that she’s trapped in an old brick building with ugly yellow tiles in the bathrooms, where the lights flicker around five p.m. for no reason, and she can never leave. We want to help her leave. 

We’re standing outside the Modern Languages building at sunset and the sky is faded pink, like when I first saw her, only this time it's been raining, so the concrete is slick and the sky is reflecting off of it and making everything look like sherbert. It's the best thing about this place. 

And there she is, on the fourth floor in the stairwell, staring at the sculpture of the naked lady in front of the library. The naked lady is releasing birds into the sky. I’m sure it's supposed to symbolize freedom or peace or something else shallow like that. 

We look at her. She unpins her hair and presses a hand, fingers outstretched, to the glass. We put our hands, fingers outstretched, into the air so she knows we’re there with her. We want to go in, but we’re worried we’ll lose her. Her hair is long and dark, and glows a soft purple against the sunset like the Santa Catalina mountains behind her. 

Maybe she doesn’t want to leave. Maybe she prefers to stay.

I use my books to prop the door open, just in case she changes her mind. 

Mackenzie Sanders is a writer from Arizona who currently resides in New York. She received her bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Arizona in 2020 and is currently a creative writing MFA candidate at Sarah Lawrence College. Email her at mack.sanderst@gmail.com

Ralph Pennel

Lightning Strike Survivor Club

We meet in the basement of the UCC church, before women’s fellowship and after boy scouts. This week was the pinewood derby. They were just starting the final race of the night when the first of us trickled in. The boys had divided themselves, half behind one racer, half behind the other, shouting encouragement. They ran with the cars as they raced down the tracks. All of them cheered at the end, all of them now winners. The boy who lost included. 

Some of the boys glimpsed us standing in the wings and viewed us cautiously as they helped with clean-up. This isn’t Jonah’s job, the scout master repeated over and over, instructing, lending a hand, as he reaffirmed. Jonah, the janitor of the church, leaned on the handle of his broom, nodding and winking at the boys who held up a piece of track here or a paper plate there to show their respect. 

Jonah is a member, too. The etching of his strike still marks his body—Lichtenberg figures, a condition that usually lasts a few days, though his marks have stayed since his strike over three years ago. They start at a single point at his left temple and make their way, like a root system, down his neck, under his collar, and reappear at his wrists and ankles. Jonah used to teach elementary school and knew some of the scouts by name. He was asked to step down from his position because, on several occasions, he frightened the students with sudden, and sometimes long-lasting bouts of weeping, which he could not control, which his doctor could not find a reason for.

It will stop his doctor would tell him, the tone of his voice as much a mystery as the marks on Jonah’s body. After a year of visits, the doctor quit telling him the bouts would stop and, instead, gave him a business card, suggested he give Guy a call.

Guy is the head of our chapter. Some members in the group doubt Guy’s strike, say he has no tells. No nervous twitches. No memory loss. No outbursts. His story checks out though. I read about it at the library. Found the news clip on micro-fiche. The same strike that split the oldest known tree in town. 

Guy is who I contacted first when my feelings of isolation became unbearable. Katy and John all but stopped hanging out with me by then. Katy said she never knew what to talk about anymore because it always felt like we weren’t talking about what happened and she resented that. And that is how it felt. With everyone. Tom was at least polite and said he and his girlfriend were getting real close and they were spending all their free time together now. 

I found the support group on Facebook and sent a short, cautious DM via messenger. Guy’s response came later in the night. 

We’ve been expecting you, Jenny! was all it said, and beneath that was a link to the page on the club’s website which listed times and dates of meetings.

*

I was indoors when it happened, watching TV. I felt the hair on the back of my neck rise just before it happened. I had my arm extended, remote pointed at the wide-screen TV in my parents’ house when it hit. Guess my underwire acted as a conductor. The strike was so hot and so bright, it burnt my shadow onto the wall behind the chair where I was sitting.

All next day my ears rang, and it hurt to talk. Everything sounded like it was under water. My skin was hot to the touch. My mom said over and over that I smelled like a roast, and I should go to the emergency room. They admitted me immediately. In the ambulance on the way over, the EMTs kept wiping their hand on their pants after touching me.

*

At my first club meeting, I learned indoor strikes happen a third of the time. Two other members in the group had also been indoors. One in the shower. One at her computer. They sat next to each other. Those who sat next to them gave them just a little more room, the space between their chairs further than between any of the others. The group is mostly men, as men are five times more likely than women to be struck, which is about right, as there’re only two of us here. They eye me strangely. Like they’re having flashbacks just by my being there somehow.

*

We usually chat and drink coffee. Eat coffeecake or donut holes, depending on whose turn it is to bring snacks. Once, I made brownies that went nearly untouched. Only Guy and Jonah ate any. They taste . . . tinny, one guy said, making a face. My mom said oh, they taste just fine, and fed the rest to my father, who took them in his lunch to work. I couldn’t tell if she was only being nice. Nothing tasted right anymore. Except for some foods. Some fruits, some vegetables. Bread was fine, so I had taken to eating plain toasted bagels with slices of fruit layered on top for half my meals. 

Tonight, though, I’m giving a presentation on Roy Sullivan. Roy Sullivan’s in the Guinness Book for surviving being hit by lighting more times than anyone—seven times. The first two strikes were the most interesting. In the first, he lost a toenail. In the second, he lost his eyebrows. I lost all the nails on the hand I had held the remote with. They turned black, then slid out once the nail behind them had grown in. They shed like hardened chocolate slides off a Dilly Bar once the ice cream starts to melt. 

Roy was a park ranger. That always seemed important to me, though I could never say why. Until today, watching the scouts, their constant readiness. Any one of them could be struck, too. I felt relieved by this and jotted this down in my notes as Jonah assisted Guy with the audio visual set up. 

Tom, the man who thought my brownies were tinny, asked me if I felt ready, but not in a creepy way. He had lost his family in the strike. He survived, something about the soles of his boots grounding him when it hit. Always found that odd. Who wears boots in the middle of summer? 

They were out in the rain, playing, his kids running like kids, barefoot. And then they weren’t. They were playing the lightning game. Where, after lighting strikes, you run to a tree or picnic table, or some agreed upon spot, and try to make it back to base before the thunder. Only this time there was no thunder, just more lightning. 

Jonah shoots me a thumbs up. I squeeze past Tom and take my place next to the Mac resting on the table set up behind the chairs, now in rows instead of a circle, like usual. Guy hits the lights.

Always be prepared, I say as Roy’s face pops up on the screen. He’s dressed in his ranger uniform, smiling at the camera. And before I can hit the next slide, someone is sobbing. Guy turns on the lights. It’s Tom, which none of us expected, and we’re looking at Jonah, whose looking at Tom. 

What the next slide reads is, Roy “died at his own hand.” But I don’t share it. None of us questions why.

Ralph Pennel is the author of A World Less Perfect for Dying In, published by Cervena Barva Press. Ralph’s writing has appeared in The Ocean State Review, The Iowa Review, Literary Orphans, F(r)iction, Thrice Fiction, Tarpaulin Sky, Reality Beach, Elm Leaves Journal, Rain Taxi Review of Books and various other publications. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart, a Best of the Net Award, the Best Small Fictions Anthology, and he was twice a finalist for Somerville Poet Laureate. Ralph is a founding editor and the fiction editor for the online literary journal, Midway Journal. He can be found on IG at @ralph.l.pennel, TW at @PennelRalph, and he can be reached at y.ralph@gmail.com.

Anne Freier

Gris Gris

The year the floods chased the snakes into our house on the hill and the hill sank, and the house sank, and the snakes all drowned, we ran out of stories to tell before bed, and then Prival returned from the dead. 

“Ain’t gonna believe what happened.” The long gash on his forehead gaped, imitating his speech. 

“Gonna cut your tail!” ma croaked. “I’m calling the station.”

“And what you wanna tell them? You opened the door.” 

“Son of a bitch!” 

I handed ma the phone thinking I saw something departed in his face. His skin looked peaked and the cheeks sprawled into plump jowls like someone had hung him in the sun to dry. Half-grey hair all confused, he must not have used grease for a while – for as long as he’d been buried.

*

There’d been an inquiry down the courthouse two summers ago when the heat killed all of the sugarcane and the smell of torched blisters choked the air. The grand hall was quiet as sin while Judge Morgan shuffled the papers, grunting, and peering up at a small crowd of spectators who’d come to hear a good story, though this wasn’t it. Ma stated her case: the husband hadn’t answered the phone, not shown up for work; they’d been searching all the way up to Erwinville, on foot – sure leaving them dogs tired – but without a lick of evidence that he’d crossed parish line. The judge asked to see his final message. 

“Sent me three of them kisses right here,” she said, wiped a tear and pointed to a string of x’s on her cell; evidence that men didn’t desert her. Judge Morgan shrugged and stamped the death certificate with such a passion that the sugary powder leapt from his beignet. She folded the sticky paper into a cardboard roll she’d found in the lavatory. Next thing, she’d hung it above her bed to catch bad dreams. 

*

“Don’t you wanna hear where I been?” he asked. His eyes rolled plumb crazy, as though he saw something beyond the caramel cabinets and washed, flocked wallpapers. Then his gaze froze on mine. I quickly grabbed a handful of red Lego.

“Once upon a time–“ she sang and twirled her arms overhead in a fantastical gesture.

“Shut it!” 

“Ain’t got time for your tales!” 

“You oughta know,” he said and snatched one of the red bricks from the pile without asking. I rested my hands in my lap and telepathically willed him to drop it. He traced its edges and poked his fingernails between the knobs, dirt lining the part of the nails that was supposed to be white like he’d been digging his way up from below. Finally, he lost interest and put it back. I buffed the brick against my pants when he wasn’t looking and then shuffled my chair to the left. 

“You know, I’s thinkin you’d be doin just fine. Never needed no one, not even your kid. But I was born immature and mamma always said I shoulda stopped breathin after ten minutes. Instead, I was made an example of life. So I thought I gotta speak up.” 

She pushed the buttons until a dial tone trilled faintly. 

“Put that down!” he yelled.

“Go suck on a rusty coin!” 

The pitch-black pupils swamped all of his eyes – death dilating. A man with no light left in his sight. Ma dropped the phone and went out to the hall leaving me all alone with him. I tried to inch further away, but the chair leg got caught on the plastic floor – wrinkled after the water. Some of the bloated lumps were beginning to crumble and rupture, exposing the stony bones of the house beneath.

“Where y’at?” he whispered. I stretched out my arm. Under the chick-yellow light the bites didn’t seem as much of a mess. I pointed to the biggest one that had erupted in a mushy crater hoping his kind preferred healthy flesh for a snack.

“Been stung all over. There’s no dragonflies this year,” I said. 

“That right?” 

I was chasing my mind for things to say when ma returned spinning her cardboard roll. She smoothed the certificate across the table and poured herself a glass of grown-up juice. Officially deceased. 

“It wouldn’t matter to me if them copperheads had gotten into your coffin,” she hissed. “Ain’t giving back any social security! Now, let’s hear your fairytale.” 

He glanced at the paper and gawped at her drink. 

“I’ll take one of those.”

“Whiskey’s for the living!” She flipped her head at me and raised her thumb and index finger to indicate the measure. I jumped up and dripped golden liquid into the littlest tumbler, holding my breath because of the stench; some splashed on the counter. Prival gulped it all down in one and curled his tongue across the cracked lips. 

“Ain’t gonna believe it, but it’s the truth,” he said. Ma’s eyes went higher than the ceiling.

“I was kidnapped.” 

A hollow thud. I crawled under the table to fetch the brick. It had rolled to the edge of his sandals that squashed the dirty toes. The waxy nails crowded into thick stacks of double layers, nails like those of the ancient folk down the hospital where ma worked. 

“Got no money. Who’d want you?” Her laughter was colder than pity. 

“Don’t know who they was and ain’t ever saw their faces, but I’ll get to that.”

“How convenient.”

“You won’t be laughin when I’m done tellin.” An eyelash snapped off and landed on his shriveled nose clinging to his crusty skin – translucent layers peeling off in all directions. I slid to the edge of my seat wanting to catch every word the dead had to say. 

“We was meant to go swimming,” he began. 

*

It had been a hot day for November. Prival promised to get us after school and walk us to the Pool Palace where the season tickets were still on offer but nobody ever bought them on account of the warm spells barely lasting this long, and outdoor swimming in winter was a hobby only weird old folk took up, like school janitor Klein or down-the-road Miss Crofton who passed of a stroke when no one was looking.

“Never seen him swim,” I told my best friend Wolfie. And it was just as well that he didn’t show because it gave me the creeps when strangers’ hair got tangled in my toes, like possessed wire fishing for new origins. We played on the Dell back at Wolfie’s, the one his brother Stookie bought down the market in Judas Rouge – really more of a sandy clearing for anyone with a thing or two to sell, and a voice to project across the echoless land.

Warm slices of apple pie in our mouths, we leapt into Azeroth. Later, we hid behind the cars out front, fired water from our pistols, and pretended to be casualties. 

Ma was still on the night shift by the time I got home. I put on the TV to stun the silence and made a pirate ship with the red bricks, leaving the blues, greens, and yellows in the box where they belonged. 

“Musta been 90 in the shade and the humidity! Them swimmin pools was probably boilin. We was done for the day, dust stuck in our throats, and we was all thirsty. Merv suggested a beer at Nola’s and, lord, I said yes.” He dropped his head into his hands like he was about to tune up, but he was just having a bad thought or something. 

 “I swear meant to be just the one, but Merv, that boy, was feelin generous, passed them round, one after another. And it ain’t every day you get a free one. I left soon as my tummy ached.” 

Ma tapped the fingers on the wooden table that it sounded like a galloping horse. The gap in his forehead danced along and I wondered what else it could do.

“Keep thinkin, mighta gone different if I was in the car, but mamma always said: ‘don’t drink and drive’. Old man crashed that way. Them houses all looked the same, but different in the dark, with them funny spiked roofs. You think you know a place, think you know what you’re in for. A devil’s sorta magic them eyes in the dark. I stopped under a blue light and felt for the phone in my pocket. Bham!” He hammered his fist down that the glasses jangled and one of the red bricks skipped into the box. I shuddered and quickly put it back with the others.  

“Suddenly a hand’s on my shoulder, one on my head, another snatchin the phone. Thought I been screamin but maybe I wasn’t. Them hands are multiplyin – neck, hands, legs. I’m on the floor, scraped my knees. But it didn’t hurt no nothin. The body was numb. They picked me up with them enormous hands. Nobody spoke anythin. And then it went black.”

*

At St Claire’s ma looked after the old folk. There sure were a lot of them coming with their broken bones and battered bladders, steely people who took pain for granted until finally their beds be made underground; only the floods dug them up from time to time. She lend an ear to their drama and then emptied the bed pans. Prival had come to pull up walls for more rooms. They met every day for lunch and it shortened their days. He moved in three weeks later. 

“Not going to stay for long,” ma said. “Got no place else to go.” 

He brought me bars of milk chocolate and pop in cans. So I didn’t say a word when, one night, he stood in the hallway holding a suitcase in one hand and silver-foiled kisses in the other. I wanted to carry his bag to her room, but it was full of stone bricks. Prival laughed and lifted it with three fingers, flexing the Anduin arms. 

“You can be useful,” ma joked and pointed to the dishes piling up in the sink. Always too beat after work, she left the washing for weekends. I wasn’t to go near the basin because I liked to drink the water straight from the tap which caused a belly ache on account of the rusty pipes. I helped by licking the sauce from my bowl, fixing it for another meal.  

He got her joke and before long the piles of encrusted ceramic and silverware were gone. Ma kissed his forehead and winked at me, drawing the lips into a fat grin until the gap in her front teeth whistled. 

Next, she showed him how to boil crawfish and fry up the rice balls. I hated the dirty texture, the taste of the swamp, but he let me eat cereal whenever I wanted, so I kept on chewing. 

“If I was on a desert island, I’d take ten boxes,” I said and poured a bowl of rice puffs. 

 “Them things look like droppings from them white rats.”

“Albinos?”

“That’s it!” He splashed milk over the sweet dust while ma snagged a bowl from the cabinet and inspected it with her fingernails. She shot a chunk of crusty grease across the table and set the bowl next to the dirty pile; then she reached for a fresh one. He jumped to rinse the dishes, leaving his droppings to turn into a soggy paste.

Soon Prival was dusting and wiping the floors, fetching the groceries, and swapping the lightbulbs. 

*

A prison of candy floss, walls all in pink, squishier than bubble wrap.

“Only, it wasn’t bubble wrap or sugar floss. Could lose your keys in there, that’s how soft them room was. But the really strange part’s, I was naked.” He stroked along the ridge of his empty glass, staring at ma’s tumbler still half full. I hovered, ready to bounce, but she shook her head and let out a sigh that could wake a gator. Worried her loathing might drive him out the door, I threw her raised eyebrows. The dead didn’t come for dinner every day.

“I been callin for help, shouting til my voice gone all weary. Wasn’t a door anywhere, not below nor above. Been trying to burst them pink bubbles, but the material ain’t wanna give. Musta been rubber. You ever felt that?” 

She stripped her phone and threw me the red cover. I squeezed the spongy rectangle and licked it. 

“Good lord! Get it away from your mouth, Luis!” She snatched for the case, then rummaged in the kitchen drawer and lit a glow stick on the stove. 

“What next?” Gray air seeped from her nose and blurred the light. I held my breath, but the soup of smoke kept scratching my throat until I burst into a violent cough.

“Sorry,” she said and cracked the window where she finished exhaling clouds. Prival sank deep into his chair, peering through the haze as though he saw someone at the other end of the table. 

“No way out. I was stuck. And I’m not proud to say, but I cried, sobbed like the littlest, stupidest baby.” 

I nudged a red brick towards him. Prival picked it up and twirled it between his fingers, shuffling it under and over the milky knuckles – a train running the ridges of his skeleton hand. I tried to copy him but the piece clung to my clammy skin. I locked it on top of the others.

“I was face-down on the floor when there’s a noise. Looked up and saw’s a box been shoved through. One of them yellow cartons. Guess what’s inside!”

I stopped my fiddling and tried to think of all the things that could fit inside a yellow box but there was no time before he blurted:

“One of them fat pieces of almond and pineapple cake, icin and all, sugared walnuts on top, real neat. And a good thing too cause I was starvin. Ate the whole thing. And–“

“Could’ve been poisoned,” ma said and smudged ash flakes down the front of her blouse until they merged with the fibers.

“What do we always say, Luis?”

“Never take sweets from a stranger!” 

“Good boy!” 

I didn’t know why anyone would want to wrap a man in balloons and feed him cake but grown-ups did strange things sometimes. Like when ma ripped letters from the energy people into pieces and later taped them back together; or the way she scratched her arms after Clifford called to collect the rent, until the skin glowed like boiled lobster and she needed to stick plasters on top.

“Sure musta been some sorta voodoo cause them desserts made me realize things.” His chin slumped to his chest as though the weight of the head was too much to bear for one man. That’s how he spoke for a while, addressing the jagged collar bones.

“They kept comin – two, three times a day. A different one each time. Jam and carrot, hummin bird, pound, and an apple stack. And well, I hate sayin it, but them were the finest cakes I ever tasted! Better than them chocolate thingies my mamma used to make. Not like those pies you get at church either. Nah, this was real cake.”

“What’d you doin back here if you fancied them cakes so damn much?” 

“Have I eaten an apple stack before?” I asked.

“Always got food in the oven warmin!” 

“Ain’t really bout them cakes.” He crossed the arms, covered in withering stubbles where once a fat, coal fleece had sprouted. 

“Point is: ain’t ever saw the fella who sent them, not even the hand that fed me. Soon, I was so bored, I shouted for them to give me one of them laptop computer thingies or a magazine, or even a book. Got a short attention span and ain’t ever taken to readin, but thought to hell with it. Let’s see what all the fuss is about. Yelled ‘Why’d you want me for?’ a heap a times. And maybe I wasn’t expectin an answer, but one mornin – at least I think it was mornin, sure felt like a mornin – someone heard me.”

*

The smell of liquor clung to him like a fruit fly nesting on a peach and ma wanted to crush it. She didn’t care for excess. That’s what happened to pa. He made too many excuses and she sent him away the day I was born.

“A thirsty liver will kill you,” she said. “Be useful and help the kid do his homework.” 

“Ain’t no cleaner nor caretaker,” Prival mumbled, but she was already out the door. We sat down with a math paper. 

“Is 13 a prime number or a composite?” I smoothed the crinkles from the paper.

“Crapola! Is that what them folks are wantin to know?” 

“They already have the answer.”

“So what does it matter for?”

“I suppose it doesn’t?”

“So why ask?” Crack, his knuckles went. Crack, crack, he squeezed his fists.

“Suppose it’s useful.”

“For whom?”

I shrugged because I’d gotten used to answering questions I’d not seen the sense in. 

“Oh lord, am dumber than a fifth grader!” he mumbled and poured two glasses of pop. 

“What’s a quarter of four?” I read. 

“Don’t look at me son. Ain’t no Einstein! But let me tell you ‘bout a guy who was real good at them calculatin things, real gifted. Always gettin them questions on them shows right, the ones where they walk away with a bundle. I said: ‘Benny, you oughta sign up for one of those cause even if you only do them numbers, that’s a whole lotta cash for doing somethin your good at’.” Prival emptied his glass in one long sip; he flinched and jumped up to drink water straight from tap.

“Not supposed to do that,” I said.

“Just flushin them teeth. They’re real sore.” His burps were cinnamon and lime.

“Did Benny win?” I asked. 

“Sure did. Won big! He’s a rich man now. Bought himself a piece of land on Mars for when them geniuses start movin on up there.” 

“Why’s anyone wanna live on Mars for?”

“Somethin different, I guess, like a holiday, far away from them chores and stuff. Ain’t no one tellin you what to do on Mars.”

I wondered if they had Lego on Mars. 

“Frank wants to paint his room red. He has ten and three quarters cans of paint. He uses eight and a quarter for his room. How much paint is left?”

“Is it a storytellin class or somethin?” He scratched the back of his head. 

“I’ll draw it,” I said and reached for a color. 

“What paint is Frank usin?”

“Red.”

“And all of them cans are…?” 

“Red.” 

“Ten cans sure is a lot of cans for one room.”

“Ten and three quarter.”

“I’ll do it for Frank usin four.” He answered the phone and left to speak out in the hall. When he returned, he’d fastened his boots, and said he needed to go to the library to check something in some book.

*

The fog flowed in and out of her now. She apologized whenever I wheezed, but apologies never stopped her from doing whatever she wanted. I didn’t care to make a fuss. An itchy throat was worth hearing the rest of it. 

“I opened my eyes and there’s a cage.”

“A cage?” she croaked from the window. 

“Jeez, I’m gettin to it. Got an attention coilin like hot spring, woman!” He squiggled in his chair and I prayed he wasn’t to get up and leave. 

“Now, when I was a boy, there’s a kid two streets over. His name’s Cody. Cody got a snake in a cage. Biggest thing you ever seen – the snake, not the cage. Forgot what them kind was called. They brought it down for pet day. I didn’t have one cause mamma’s allergic. But I was fond of Cody’s snake wigglin about behind them metal bars. And well, was that sorta cage.”

“Snakes are stupid,” I whispered into a brick. Their sneaky bodies twisted wherever they fit and when it rained they fit everywhere. Only, they were too dumb to find their way back out. Months after the cleanup we were still finding the shells of the ones that had gotten lost in the nooks. Shriveled pipes in green, blue, yellow – they slipped from the cracks, releasing their stink into the scent of the sewer that clung to the house since the bathing.  

“When I inspected them cage, I saw’s a little, grey mouse inside. Ain’t ever been a fan of small things, don’t get the appeal of them innocent ones, but dang it, I was so bored I coulda kissed the darn thing.”

“Was it called Mickey?” I asked.

“Didn’t leave a note nor nothin. It just sat there, blinkin at me with them button eyes and I thought’s kinda cute, so I named it Lulu. Was just somethin to look at, you see. Didn’t bite nor nothin. I was gonna teach it stuff, but I was too stupid to think of a thing. What can a guy teach a small thing like that? But see, now I realized someone’s listenin and so I called again. And they wasn’t entirely unreasonable. Gave me some milk, a plastic wheel for Lulu to run in, pants, and a shirt. Felt good to be wearin clothes again, real neat. That’s how we was – eatin cake and watchin each other spin circles.”

“Well, son of a biscuit! Sounds like the coward had himself a holiday!” ma crowed. 

*

The map said FLORIDA in thick, gold print. We’d never been out of state before. But Prival insisted, calling it the last time before marriage and work would gobble us up, before I’d be all grown and I wouldn’t want to see Mickey and Goofy. And I didn’t believe it, not a blotch of doubt in my mind that I’d want to see Mickey and Goofy for the rest of my life. I didn’t sleep for a week after Wolfie told me about the rollercoasters. 

But in the morning, ma’s Ford spat oil and everyone got scared it was going to get hot, and burst into flames, and explode like the cars on TV. Ma said that was that. We put up a tent in the garden and poked pierced potatoes into a pit filled with fire. I got to eat a whole pack of gummy worms and Prival gave a speech.

“To love! Ain’t ever thought the greatest girl catch herself a couillon like me!” 

She laughed, flashing her teeth and locked him in a kiss. I pretended to retch and imagined the Rougarou came to swallow them both.

*

His neck creaked like a rusty cattle gate and I thought he’d go mad from shaking his head back and forth. Then it snowed down his shoulders and flakes sprinkled everywhere, sledding through the wasted hair. 

“All them cakes sure did something, put a gris gris on me. Ain’t ever been that sleepy in my life. As though I was already in a grave of my own.” He fussed over the hem of his shirt and pulled at a string so hard it snapped and his hand bolted forward knocking a red piece from the table. It jumped four times. I left it on the floor to pick up later.

“Lulu was real loud in them wheels, spinnin all night, keepin me up. So I took it away. Someone once said them rodents are hardy like grab grass, but Lulu sat in a corner, not even touchin them cakes no more. Just ogled them wheels. And swear, I’s meant to put them back. Give the little shitter somethin to play with, but when I turned the darn thing’s gone. Got real cold then, like someone’s in the room with me. I looked under the bed. Ain’t got no place else to hide. But was no one in that room…unless they was invisible.” 

All of the sudden my ears burned and the eyes tuned up.

“You’re frightening Luis!” ma hushed. 

“Just something in my eye,” I said and rubbed them.

“Sorry Luis, ain’t a scary story. I promise.” He put his frozen hand to my ear and I tried not to flinch at the odor of his skin – pungent like sweetened kitty litter.

“Been sick of them cakes and my teeth was hurtin. Lulu ain’t movin. Them invisibles wantin me to eat their pies; Lulu wantin the lord knows what. So one day I let it out. Stumbled round like it’s blind, sniffed at them pink walls. And I musta fell asleep or somethin. When I woke there wasn’t no Lulu no more, not between them bubbles nor under the mattress. No mouse anywhere.

Truth is, I lost faith I was ever gonna get out. So I been cryin most days. And I ain’t proud of it, but was just somethin to do. Cry. I heard of them folks havin dark thoughts, who take a pistol to their head. And mine was real dark and I been thinkin: if I ain’t even carin for a damn mouse, what good must I be?” 

Prival stumbled through breaths, sucking the air in fast and pumping it out through his nose like a broken motorboat on the bayou that I thought he may choke. Ma puffed smoke into his dilemma. When he’d finally captured his rhythm and cleared his throat, he continued as though nothing had happened.

“You see, I was born on a night, but not last night.” 

That’s when the crickets went crazy outside. Ma checked her watch and mimed brushing her teeth. I put my hands in a prayer and mouthed a ‘please’. She puckered her lips and rolled up her nostrils, and I nestled back in my seat relieved I got to stay up a while longer.

“First, I was sorta glad Lulu was gone cause I ain’t a caretaker. Most of them days I stayed in bed. Tried to run at them walls, but they bounced me right back. I been screamin until I got so weak I wasn’t screamin no more. And lord, the boredom! Thought may’s well stop eatin altogether. A free man ain’t a cake eater! And I tell you what…” 

The cut on his forehead oozed a thick, yellow liquid like it was drained from all the telling, and gloomy beams carved hollows into the spaces below his eyes where the skin seemed barely thick enough to cover the skull bones. I thought I’d have to call over Wolfie because he was obsessed with zombies.

“Tell us what?” 

“Why must you be so gosh darn impatient?” he barked and shot up. My eyelids twitched and my palms got so wet I could have put out a fire. Don’t go, the Jedi voice chanted in my head. He bent down and flattened the legs of his trousers that had moved beyond his scrawny knees.

“Ain’t believin any of your nonsense!” she hissed.

“Hush! I got proof.” 

“Show it!”

I imagined her lips had a zipper. 

“You wait! Ain’t finished tellin my story.” He dropped to his seat that the wood whimpered. 

“I shut my eyes for good.” His voice sounded hushed as though he spoke to us from the other side of our late hill. 

“And…” He drew a long breath, perhaps to test ma’s patience. “I thought: ain’t the world a nasty place when a guy ain’t got no one around to watch him die.” 

He rubbed his nose, flinging the loose eyelash up in the air. It twirled and landed on a pile of his snow.

“When I came to, the bones ached all over, the knee’s twisted. And god almighty had mercy! I been reborn under them blue lights. And I was sure it’s them same ones, cause a thing like that you ain’t ever forgettin it. That stuff stays with you.”

 The chair screeched as he pushed back, severing the linoleum. His scraggy frame rose slowly and inched forward until he towered over her like a ghost. She didn’t shrink; ma had never been scared of a man. His face almost touched hers and he opened his mouth so wide that I could have put my whole fist in it. 

“Oh lord!” ma squealed when she saw what was inside and turned away. She gagged and pressed a hand on top of her mouth. 

“There’s your proof!” he said and wiped his chin. “All rotten and black.”

“Can I see?” I yelled and shot up that the bricks jiggled in their box. 

“Sit!” ma commanded. Prival leant against the door frame as though he needed to steady himself, give it a rest. 

“You, too!” she told him.

No one spoke. We stared at the square structure I’d made with the red bricks. It wasn’t anything special. I could build entire spaceships if I put my mind to it. I guess if you imagined, it could be a room or a house, or a cage or something. 

Then ma reached for her bottle, the lid screwed on tight, and whistling her teeth, pretended to pour him a drink. 

Anne is a writer, poet, and medical editor. She studied literature and writing with the Writers Studio and the Poetry School London. She is currently working on a debut collection of short stories and chapbooks of poetry. Her first creative non-fiction book was commissioned by indie press Beshu. Instagram: @annefreier_

Suzanne Richardson

All The Things My Boyfriend Calls to Tell me When on a Bender

I need one more drink, just one more drink.

He’s in a bodega buying more beer even though he is already shit-wasted and been kicked out of one of the Irish pubs in Inwood. The bottles clank together sounding through the phone. He always buys the 40s or 22s, sometimes Presidente, or Old English. Sometimes he drops them on the pavement outside the shop, because he’s too drunk to hold them, the sound like a blunt, wet, jewel shattering on the ground. Whenever this happens, he buys another and tries again. 

I’m worthless. 

He sobs this, his voice cracking, slamming, through the phone like a snake through a rabbit hole. 

Help me. 

This abducts me. Alien blood-thumping. Hours after we hang up I sit up in bed, concrete in my lungs. Maybe I don’t know how to help, maybe I am always trying to help, maybe I know, he knows, no matter how much he asks for it, I can’t help him though I want to. 

I’m so sad.

When your lover tells you they feel alone all the time, even when they’re in bed with you, even when they’re fucking you, you’re dating a grenade. I list all the things he has to be happy about; I always list myself as one of these things. Later in our relationship, I know the circular darkness he speaks of, the tunnel without light, watching the sun come up, and feeling like you’re being buried alive. The strange phantom hand that appears around your throat for days, while you’re riding the subway, typing at work, drinking a Coke on a stool in a sandwich shop, the one that threatens to squeeze if you admit your life is a lie, possibly a series of motions that don’t mean very much.  

I’m at the hospital.

I answer the phone at my desk. I try to keep my voice low in the secretarial bullpen. So drunk he ends up face-down on Dykman Street, put in an ambulance, and brought to the hospital where they put him in diapers as he sobers up. I am in a suit, clicking my high heels under my desk. The room drains into technicolor. I think about Dorothy her quest for Kansas. Home is where the addict and the codependent are. Click-click-click. I try to switch my brain off, but I keep imagining. I wonder if the symbolism of the diaper is real? If he is actually becoming a child again then I am becoming so old-sad and bitter-tired and shriveled up at twenty-two a house might just fall on me.

I’m not coming home.

He says before ending up in a hospital or going missing. Sometimes he wakes up in other people’s apartments. He comes home with other people’s coats on. With my fat round face I, am a lonely cherub in the window, on the stairs, at the corner of Isham, looking, for him, never seeing myself, the way I wait, the way I give him permission to be absent because I am so very careful to be present. The way I wrap each story, each phrase in a deadly web to protect myself and catch everyone else before they suspect something isn’t right, that this isn’t true love. I make myself into a spider, closed, solitary, efficient, so good at weaving and lying and secrets and poisoning, it scares you, you just want to reach down and squash it. 

Suzanne Richardson earned her M.F.A. in Albuquerque, New Mexico at the University of New Mexico. She currently lives in Binghamton, New York where she's a Ph.D. student in creative writing at SUNY Binghamton. She is working on a memoir, Throw it Up, and a full poetry collection, The Want Monster. She is the writer of Three Things @nocontactmag, and more about Suzanne and her writing can be found here: https://www-suzannerichardsonwrites.tumblr.com/ and @oozannsay on Twitter and @oozansay on Instagram.

CB Anderson

Between

Outside at 3 a.m. and five degrees. That’s what grief does— pushes you into the places, the dark places, the unpeopled, uninhabited places where others don’t care to go. Or they don’t go. 

And now—  something here on the edge of the woods, a large crunching over frozen twigs and crust. Whatever it is moves with deliberation. 

Overhead a half moon wanes, and nearby the van you drove last year across the country waits to get back on the road. You came outside to check on it. The keys jangle, and the presence in the snow pauses but then keeps walking, either toward you or away.  That’s what grief does; it makes you unafraid.

Whatever it is, is also unafraid, and alone with a musky warm and sanguine scent, something like how the earth may smell if it thaws again in spring. Deer, coyote, fox? In the morning when a friend looks, the crust will be broken yet printless.

The van was because you no longer felt like living. It was supposed to help return you to the world, but it hasn’t really, has it? Although— America was beautiful.

There is no return. After he died, you didn’t care about much for years though now you care about things, the world, in a different way. Less, but occasionally more. 

You have sensed him many times and have often seen the seven-legged spider. That’s what grief does; it leaves you in between, crossing over and back and over and back until—   

When something large and living comes into frozen space, you feel it, sense it taking on the night. 

You lost your fear! 

The van waits. The cities were not beautiful but the mountains and the rivers were, the sky and big lakes, the moonlit desert, though you would assume the mantle of love and worry and the daytime world again if you could. 

The rocks you collected on the trip sit in piles outdoors and in the house. Like cairns, although that wasn’t the intention. He, too, crosses over and back. Over and back. From childhood, he did that.

The animal isn’t him, but it’s part of something that is. You care about what’s here in the snow, you weep. But you don’t cling to it. 

On the edge of the woods the large animal stops, and the night air is between you. Breathe it.  That’s what grief does— it sets you free. The animal in the snow astounds you, outside like this, having a whole life alone in the dark.

CB Anderson's work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Iowa Review, Tupelo Quarterly, the Ocotillo Review, Pleiades, Flash Fiction Forward, Fourth Genre, SmokeLong Quarterly, and The Masters Review, among others. Awards include the Crazyhorse Fiction Prize and runner-up for the Zoetrope: All-Story Short Fiction Prize.

Agnes Goldfinch

In My Dreams

It’s been three years and neither of my languages have yet managed to describe this. Grief. Zármutek. Mourning. Oplakávání. The words are detached, cold. I try to borrow from the realities harbored by different parts of the world, I try to take timid bites of other languages, tentatively rolling them over my tongue, getting a taste.

Le chagrin. El luto. Il dolore.

No. Nothing does this stinging rawness justice.

I wonder if there’s a language in which people are able to express what now connects most of us much earlier than we had anticipated, what we understand without speaking, anyway. I wonder if there’s a language that people can pour themselves into to fill the hollow spaces loss excavates. If there is, I’ve yet to unearth it. And so, I feel the absence of your presence in my dreams, and so I circle the throbbing wound frantically, and so I grow around the hurt.

We used to grow around each other, sharing dreams, repeating the word as many times as possible to render it as hazy and flickering as the magically shimmering future then was. Sny, sny, sny. They crawled over our lips out into the open world, dispersing into the trees, floating up to the sky.

“I may not make it – probably won’t – but I’ve made my peace with it,” you said the last time I saw you, because I was terrified. Everything happened so fast. Your voice was calm, level, unruffled, and so was mine when I replied. How young we were. Twenty. You still had so many dreams then, and now they are left in the shaky palms of my hands, glimmering, flickering, stirring around vividly, mingling with those of my own.

“Maybe I can help someone else stay alive,” you smiled. We never addressed the multiplicity of meanings hidden behind the sentence.

Well. All those nights spent looking for you, and I haven’t told you the one thing you need to know: you did it. I’m alive, even if it took me some time. The last text you sent me was when I asked when I could come see you and you said, “I’ll let you know, okay?” and, for a while, I kept waiting even after you were gone. You died on a Saturday, and I didn’t pick up the phone, because I already knew, and I didn’t want to know yet. On Monday, I went to work. I numbed my cells, closed off my senses.

But, at last, spring is coming after this long, cruel winter. Buds are sprouting from my tongue, leaves are poking from my eyes, flowers are blooming in my ears. In my dreams, I look for you in vain; in my dreams, I repeat myself, running in circles; in my dreams, I keep missing you. But when I’m awake, you are everywhere. You’re in the coffee I’m learning to take my time to drink in the morning, you’re in the moments of tingly excitement I now savor, you’re in that robin redbreast that’s taken to visiting the fir in front of my living room window, making me stand as still as possible for ten minutes at a time, merely watching.

You’re in everything I hear as though it were for the first time, the chickadees and finches flitting through the bare branches of old apple trees, the vivid waves persistently beating in my red-wine blood, the wind stroking the velvet skin of green valleys. I listen, I watch my pupils dilate in the mirror, I wander through the meandering journeys of my mind. I eat tiramisu without regret, licking mascarpone off my fingers. I take slow bites and uncover previously neglected tastes. I sing even when the window’s open, and I play the piano again without worrying about the neighbors. I say no, and I don’t check myself when I want to dance. I only read what I want to read, I laugh out loud, and I don’t seal my lips together when something needs to be said. I take pictures of sunsets. I sleep in on Sundays with the cats curled warm and soft u nder the sheets. Sometimes, I step outside solely to take a few deep breaths.

Tulips shine white as snow and my finger traces the gentle edges of the petals; my hands dig into the soil I stem from. I reach out and embrace the hearts of strangers, I wear my own on my sleeve. I know sometimes the dream is the hope of being alive. 

At night, I wave at the stars when they pop out of the blackness of the night, I smile at the moon, I go to the movies and cry despite people seeing my smudged mascara afterwards. I buy concert tickets because that’s where I feel the happiest. I no longer shrink myself to coddle someone else’s ego, I eat blueberries even if they color my lips, and I hug everyone – my mum, my friends, hell, I even hugged a tree the other day. I talk kindly to myself; I rest when I need to. I give thanks for the sky, and I relish in joy without feeling stings of guilt. I explore the miracles of mundanity, of slow mornings and of conversations about the weather; I discover the wonders of the extraordinary, of traveling beyond the bounds of my comfort, and I swear to you, I live with my every cell.

In my dreams, I look for you. I roam the places we used to know, like the castle garden, the playground, or the labyrinth of the train station, and those we didn’t, like the Chinese restaurant my head decided to make up. In my dreams, I look for you, and when I do manage to find you, you’re calm and I grow agitated, aching. In my dreams, you slip away smoothly, abruptly.

In my dreams, I still look for you. But when I’m awake I have already found you. You’re everywhere, in every dream that comes true, in everything that’s making me feel alive.

Alive. Naživu. Viva.

Turns out some words do have a meaning, after all.

Agnes Goldfinch is an MA student of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures in Prague. Her poetry and prose has recently appeared, or is forthcoming in, Humans of the World and The Artful. You can also find her on instagram: @AgnesGoldfinch.

Angie Kang

Scenes from the Rhine

After Robert and Clara Schumann

My wife says she’s giving me a trim today, no more excuses, and I know she means it because her tapping left foot is a metronome on the floor, counting each second it takes me to get in the chair, Robert. I heave myself out of my static state and toward her, my bent head a fishing hook bobbing in resignment. We agreed it saves money, but I hate it when Claire cuts my hair and she knows it. Of course, that makes it that much worse: afraid of fumbling, she whittles my head down with hesitant snips and too much concern for each individual strand. After a prolonged drizzle of my own prickly hair, I can’t tell if I’m more irritated about the shape of my skull or the itching. 

On the piano, though, my wife’s fingers are unrecognizable. Slow and clumsy with clippers, they strike the keys with casual precision, and her crooked toes sew together solid slabs of phrase with the lightest touch of pedal. The first time I heard her fingers climbing staves with ease, her iridescent playing stretching over a clear hierarchy of chords, one pinky finger carrying the entire weight of melody, my heart was butter in a pan. After she finished, I wrapped those hands in mine and, with my lips, thanked them for their still-echoing creation. 

Now, the same fingers doughy with time reach toward me in welcome, folding down my ear as Claire examines my greying scalp. My bare torso folds forward in submission, and as a last ditch effort I say what if Ginger eats the hair?and she says she would never, even though she has before, and I say okay so Claire can’t accuse me of making more excuses. But together, we turn to Ginger’s lolling tongue with soft wariness. She hobbles over to investigate the setup with surprising speed. She was Claire’s first dog, and before I met her, I didn’t know she only had three legs. We have the tendency to imagine things in their ideal form, the way cereal looks on boxes, a uniform perfection we’d like to consume. Plato’s theory—the way the words golden retriever fetch stock images of smiling creatures of sun, happy and intact and whole—idealized impressions all dashed through a moment of sensory experience. When I propped up an enthusiastic Ginger for the first time, Claire’s face fell when I grasped for a paw that wasn’t there.  

I oil my stiff fingers by extending them idly. I certainly couldn’t judge Ginger for frailty. When I was still in high school and just good enough at piano to start thinking maybe I could become someone, the ring fingernail on my left hand began to loosen and eventually fell out sometime one night. My mom, who knew nothing about anatomy and less about music, insisted it was fine, so I wrapped up the top phalange and kept playing until the rawness gave into a bone-deep infection and my finger gave out entirely. The doctor said I needed a splint, and though he also said I could still play slowly, I quit. Whoever heard of a world-class pianist who couldn’t play fast. I remember that spring through insulting platitudes — life works in mysterious ways, everything happens for a reason, I’m sure something better will come. 

Frustrated, my hours sitting at a bench became unstructured moping in the garage, where I spent an inordinate amount of time watching my father build shelves and chairs and tables to sell. He didn’t mind my presence, and while usually we had nothing to say to each other, sometimes he broke that companiable silence to offer a quick explanation on what he was doing and why. Eventually, my father started asking, in his mild way, for help holding things in place and sanding surfaces and cutting wood. 

 With this broken hand? I remember protesting. 

Finger, he corrected. Besides, he brushed sawdust off my cast, broken things can be fixed. He handed me a tattered piece of sandpaper wrapped around a block of wood, and I acquiesced, secretly grateful. I didn’t mind the ache in my arm after a particularly vigorous burnishing, or even the noise, which left a different sort of ringing after a day of work. After a few months of this unintentional apprenticeship, I think it was that, the making something out of nothing that kept me going. 

Claire’s only ever known me as a carpenter. She says she’s glad I found purpose after my injury, and anyway now we never have to buy furniture. Once, lying in bed, she mused aloud: Imagine if you’d ended up going to conservatory instead of trade school. We probably wouldn’t be together. 

Wait. I sat up. You wouldn’t have married me if I were a pianist? 

I just meant it would have been strange. 

Claire kissed my knobby hands in apology and turned away, pulling covers up to her neck. I knew her enough by then to know she had no desire to argue hypotheticals, and she knew me enough to know that a night would cut the tension and she should wait out the gloom. In moments like those, I resented this understanding borne from our intimacy; the anger would fade by the morning, but the hurt wouldn’t. 

Sometimes when she takes breaks from practicing, Claire, still in slippers, walks across our yard to my shed and sits on the stoop to watch me work. I insisted on setting up this far away from the apartment so my machinery didn’t bother her, but really, her pilgrimages lent me a sense of importance, as if by crossing the grass boundary she entered a holy space, my own wooden concert hall. 

When Claire comes over she will sometimes complain about how tired she is or how difficult this piece, and in those times, I drown her out with the power sander, the distant whining and electric hum creating a duet of discord. But when she just sits there marveling at what my hands can do, I switch over to my quieter tools. My favorite is the block-plane, a back-and-forth rhythm upon which I can dream of compositions, let the blustery day push wood into my lungs, bask in Claire’s reveling. Occasionally I offer basic facts about carpentry and take great pleasure when her eyes widen in appropriate reverence.

Did you know that Western saws cut when you push and Japanese saws cut when you pull, I told her once. I motioned with my saw. What do you think that means?

I don’t know. She was still for a moment, and, as I waited for her admiration to flow, she turned the wondering on its head: What does it mean? 

Then, after a few minutes scrabbling for something smart to say, I admitted to my wife that my father shared the fact with me once, and I had never been able to make a head or tails of the implied metaphor. After my confession, she went back inside to keep practicing and I looked down at my hands in shame.

*

The back of my neck tingles to signal that Claire has begun. Her clippers’ humming blades make a continuous A tone. I look up at her, an unusual sight from this angle. From here, she is fleshier and fuller than I remember. There is a familiar pleat between her brows and an unfamiliar rash on the bottom of her clenched jaw and for a moment I wonder if I should tell her but end up deciding she already knows.

Claire has always been hyper-aware of herself—appearance, desires, needs. She understands the space she occupies. In department stores, she whisks through the aisles with an uncanny knack for grabbing the right sizes without needing to confirm their fit. Even after she hit thirty and her body became loath to lose any more of itself to diets and exercise, Claire’s sensibilities didn’t falter. But directed elsewhere, that same awareness wavers. Sometimes she cooks me meals with foods that turn my skin angry and corrugated. Sometimes she buys me socks that don’t wrap over my entire heel; sometimes, ones that swallow my feet in wool. Sometimes she starts practicing when I’m still in bed. She’s always embarrassed when I point out these lapses, but never enough to correct them.  

Claire hadn’t wanted to move in together before we got married, though she never verbalized why. She just knew what she needed, and I admired that certainty. So, because half my stuff was at her place anyway, I proposed on our second anniversary. Of course, I loved her, too. And truly, I thought long and hard about all the things we would gain in marriage, although after the wedding, I had to admit I never considered what we might be giving up. I began drawing up plans for various cribs while we were dating, but they disappeared somewhere under a stack of her programs. Even if she stopped touring entirely, I always knew that music was the only conception Claire craved. 

It took about a week for the bedsheets to learn my shape, and soon after, I set up my tools in the lot outside our apartment to build a shelf for all Claire’s music scores. I dragged an extension cord out past the screen to charge the drill as I was cutting wood, and as I was there, sawing quietly, sounds of Claire’s practicing floated out the crack in the door.  

I had never heard her at such a fledgling stage. I was used to listening to nearly-polished repertoire, or effortlessly-fingered etudes, but never sight-reading. She had always told me it wasn’t her strong suit but I had dismissed that as false humility. It was alarming to hear Claire crawling through the piece, stuttering over the same phrases and stumbling over others. She repeated one section of A notes so many times that those As hammered themselves into my head. As she plunked through the rest of the measures, I could only hear those A notes off-beat and misplaced and hurting. When I walked back into our apartment that evening and saw her hunched over the bench, for the first time I saw the folds in her forehead and the way her mouth pinched when she was upset. Claire looked up from her seat at me and smiled, but as her lips opened and closed, all I could hear were those A notes ringing in my head and into the night, long after she had already folded up her hands and closed the lid.

*

It was just us and Ginger in this studio apartment. There was a tiny bathroom off on the corner that was walled-off by a screen that didn’t quite reach the ceiling, so anything in there could be heard and smelled from the rest of the room. That first year when we were still getting used to each other’s oppressive daily presence, Claire made me go outside when she used the bathroom, even if it was raining, which it often was, or I was asleep. I always grumbled about it, but for all my complaints, I didn’t want to hear her steady streams of urine or smell our dinners drowning in the toilet. It would mean reconciling my wife with the din of a body emptying itself of waste. Still, waking me up was excessive. She stopped making me leave once I joked that I should take up smoking to justify the hours I spent huddled outside my own home. 

And as far as furniture went, we only had enough space for a queen-sized bed, a scratched round table from Claire’s dad, a shelf I made, a tall lamp, and the grand concert piano. Other than the glossy instrument, everything was muted green and generic, and sometimes I felt like I was living in a waiting room, expecting my name to be called to go somewhere else. But still, the place was cheap and bright: four large windows letting in the world.

Right now, I search for my reflection in the glass, blinking at the growing night on the other side. I can see enough of myself to know we are now mid-haircut, the worst stage. Claire can never make up her mind about how short to go at this point. 

Things have to get worse before they get better, she always insists, but I tell her that isn’t always true. Sometimes things just get worse. 

Claire applies a little pressure to both sides of my scalp for a better angle, and I feel helpless between her palms. As she moves around me to trim the top, she nearly hip-checks the glossy Steinway beside her. The movement shakes the buzzing of the clippers, and the A tone trembles for a moment before stabilizing into its monotonous vibration. 

Your piano takes up the entire room, I laugh. She frowns.

Our piano. 

Right. Her soft spot. When we first moved in, I joked that we could sleep under it like Richter in World War II, or install a bed that we could fold up and hang in the air like Gene Kelly in American in Paris, but Claire didn’t think either option was particularly funny. The clippers’ A note drones on. 

Our piano, I mused. Well, it wasn’t like I didn’t ever play it — but Claire didn’t know that. Sometimes, when she was on tour or it was her turn to buy the groceries, I opened the piano cover all the way and placed my fingers over the keys. I would play the one song I still had memorized: Träumerei. Soft, and slow enough for my left hand. Short, too, so if Claire was expected home any minute, I could wrap up a phrase. Otherwise, I’d be itching to finish it all day. It wasn’t that I thought Claire might look down on my wobbly melodies, though I feared that too, but that she’d find the wrong kind of joy in it, the kind she’d have watching Ginger stay upright while paddling in the lake or balancing on her hind legs. So those rushed sessions at the bench, while my fingers met the glossy enamel of the instrument, I’d always keep one eye on the window to anticipate Claire’s return.  

Now, I watch myself blinking away hair in the glass pane. My eyes are dry, and I wonder if I should change my contacts. Claire and I share our poor eyesight and disposable, monthly lenses. But while she is religious about changing hers on time, I keep mine in circulation far longer than their lifespan, sometimes even sleeping in them and waking to the plastic husks stuck to the inside of my eyelids. When I finally do replace those with fresh ones, I am overcome with the overwhelming lack of scratches and dirt that have silently accumulated on the prior ones. Through new lenses, everything looks pliable.

 I glance up at Claire, working above me. How haggard she is when she’s nervous, lips gnawed white and sunken eyes darting quickly, something anxious working behind those dark pupils. Sometimes I wonder how much of our lives we keep to ourselves in a marriage. Claire has always loved to ask questions, which at the beginning was enticing. We met at the doctor’s, both to remedy our casualties of piano; mine, acupressure as physical therapy, and hers, acupuncture for her posture. I’d been going there since my high school injury and liked the old doctor, an expert at soothing tight joints. Her weathered skin lent her hands well-placed credibility: Dr. Zhao knew exactly where I was aching without my having to point her there, but in her massages, she often targeted points around the area that hurt. She told me that sometimes accessing the pain sideways was how you solved the problem. For years after, whenever my hands were even a little sore, I searched for the pressure points she was talking about, but all my flesh felt equal under untrained touch. But under hers, my bones seemed to hinge and crack and reform themselves. It was as if the doctor was fixing a plasticine sculpture that never hardened. By and by, this doctor realigned my fingers by rolling the skin above, and as the structure underneath morphed, my flesh let go of the trauma and gave into healing. 

If it any of it was bullshit, I ate it up. Claire, too—evidently even more than I did, because although she hated needles, she braved them every week for her back. I remember seeing her for the first time in the waiting room on Wednesdays, soft and small, fingers flipping through a magazine she wasn’t really reading and shaking her leg. I recognized Claire Wieck right away, of course, but I didn’t let on my awe all at once. I only snuck glances at her apple cheeks and flat eyebrows and curiously square earlobes. I had always told myself I wouldn’t date a pianist—too raw, too close—and Claire seemed to be the one the rule was meant for. But upon feeling the heat of my attention, Claire eventually started looking up at me too, and when those gazes finally met, I gave in entirely to my attraction. Claire, amused and flattered, began to sit closer and closer to me, one chair at a time, until one day, she dropped herself right into the seat next to mine, despite the otherwise entirely empty waiting room.

Claire spoke first: What’s your damage?  

Sorry?

She pointed to her spine. I’m here because my back is fucked, she said, I have a terrible hunch. She exaggerated her pose to demonstrate, but then, all I saw was a bare slope of shoulder. You? 

I lifted my left hand. I’m here for my finger.

What happened? she asked, her own finger rushing forward to brush mine.

Those fingers. There I was, telling weak jokes and caught in her dark-eyed mesmerized gaze, painfully aware of those fingers—now smoothing over her lap, now draping her hair behind her ears, now picking lint from her jacket. 

After a while, Claire seemed to tire of the expected inquiry and moved on: What’s your middle name? What did you have for breakfast? Thoughts on dogs? Do city lights keep you up at night? Are you close with mother? How do you feel about baroque piano music?  Every subsequent week became something of the same unexpected, exhilarating sort of examination where I felt heard.

One Wednesday, the one we both consider the official beginning, I brought a floor lamp inside with me, its long cord dragging behind me like a wedding veil. It was a nice, tall light, and I hadn’t wanted to leave it in the car, especially in that part of town. Claire took one look at me and said They make smaller flashlights, you know, and laughed in a way that made my ears prickle. By the end of that conversation, I had her number. 

Her interrogation eventually got old. While it’s flattering for a stranger to want to know all your secrets, the same intensity of questioning from a wife starts feeling insulting —don’t you remember?— else, intrusive. I started to hold things back, keep the minor moments throughout my day to myself—the rubbery smell of hot afternoon pavement, four winter gloves found on the side of the road, a squirrel gnawing at a discarded makeup wipe—events of little significance that I coveted and were mine alone, slipped away in the basin of my mind. Back when Claire still used go on tour every month, I had more time to collect these inconsequential secrets accordingly. 

At first I joined her abroad. It sounded so wonderful to be in France, or Germany, or Russia, with free dinners and first-rate hotel suites and people in suits who wanted you to be there — rare, for Americans in Europe — but soon it become tiring to clarify in every language: yes, I was Claire Wieck’s husband, and no, I didn’t play piano, too, although if Claire was ever there, she would sometimes interject and graciously add he used to, which somehow felt worse. I started making excuses: I’m not in the mood for Europe. It’s cheaper to stay back with Ginger, I can’t work on my projects when I didn’t have my tools, the plane rides are hellish.

Years ago in Austria, when we were still a couple new enough to hold hands wherever we went, Claire and I had dinner with my old piano professor, Mr. Corsantia. He was a withered, balding Georgian man with square fingers and an office filled with knickknacks. Although a frail-looking figure, his playing was full of energy; he could coax the loudest sounds out of keys that had even the hardest action. He was also a purist, a stickler for following the score, every single goddamn annotation, the emotions will follow, Robert. He could be loud and harsh and mean, but he was a good teacher. I had found Mr. Corsantia through the state competition results. All the pianists who had placed had his name in their bios — the best kind of free advertisement — and it had taken me a year of emails to get him to even hear me once. The man liked me, though, and when I quit piano, I could have sworn the hard-ass cried. But I couldn’t be sure — tears feel conspicuous traveling down your own face, but they are often much harder to discern on others. Maybe it’s a matter of paying closer attention; maybe one of empathy. I hadn’t spoken to Mr. Corsantia in many years, despite promising him I’d stay in touch. 

Somehow, Mr. Corsantia had heard that Claire and I were together and reached out under the guise of reconnecting with me. Dinner had gone pleasantly enough, with the old professor peppering Claire with questions and her responding and laughing sweetly and the professor beaming like he approved of her, of us, of me. But when she left to use the bathroom, I didn’t know how to fill her absence. As he sipped his wine, I fumbled to say something. I meant to tell him more about what I was doing now but I somehow choked on I’m a carpenter and the words I’m afraid I disappointed you fell out of my mouth in their place, and instead of waving it away like I hoped he might and almost expected he would—it had been twenty years by now—Mr. Corsantia spread his fingers and said Well, how is a professor to feel when a student who has so much promise retires so young? And I knew he thought he was being kind but I felt the weight of blame anyway and when Claire waltzed back from the restroom, I excused myself to stand in a stall and try to calm my trembling hands.

Ginger whines, bringing me out of my reverie. She noses around my lap, dusty with hair, and I push her muzzle away gently, fearing she might have lapped up a few strands when I was lost in thought. Either way, there wasn’t much I could do now, trying to remain still. 

Almost done, Claire says, sounding relieved. She pops the blade guard off the clippers and begins trimming the hair around my ears. The A note buzzing gets louder as the naked blades move around the conch of flesh, and Claire starts edging them closer and closer, trying to get an even line, steady, steady — but as she’s almost past the crest of cartilage, I feel her fingers twitch and a sharp sting and my hands instinctively jump to my open skin.

Fuck! Claire drops the clippers and, still buzzing A tones, they writhe on the floor. My fingers are wet with red. I wince. It’s only a nick, but the ear is a dramatic thing, generous with blood. 

I’m sorry! Claire says. I’m sorry! Does it hurt? 

I shake my head. She rushes to the sink and presses a sopping wad of paper towels to my face, and a stream of water slides down my bare chest into my pants. I shift, trying to direct the stream away from my crotch, and Ginger yelps, sensing distress. 

Fuck! Claire repeats, now trying to wipe away the water while nursing my ear. Robert, I’m sorry, I’m so stupid—

No you’re not —it’s fine —

Here, I’m going to grab a dry paper towel —

Claire, stop, it’s fine —                                  

And it is, mostly. I don’t actually mind the injury, which is too small to necessitate a band-aid, or the blood, which is of negligible amount — I’ve accidentally sliced myself innumerable times in much worse ways and in much worse places when I was learning to operate power tools —but a small bit of me, the bit that keeps me across the yard when she’s practicing or keeps me home from Europe when she’s performing or in the bathroom shaking while she and Mr. Corsantia commiserate last year’s Tchaikovsky Competition results—that bit of me wonders why those fingers which can hit black and white keys so boldly, so quickly, and with so much precision—why those same fingers falter so often and so much around me.   

*

When Claire stops crying and finally, finally settles down to finish the cut, she turns off the clippers and picks up her silver scissors to heather out her handiwork. But even though the blades have stopped vibrating, their A tone continues to reverberate in my head. The sound pounds wrongness in my ears, all those A notes relentless and unceasing and now — in the reflection of the mirror she slides in front of my face, I see the both of us, two shapes in this bright apartment, my lanky torso and her heavy, nervous frame. I barely notice my hair; I can’t stop thinking about how odd we look together, unbalanced like this. 

Done. Claire bites her lip and steps back as if to distance herself from disappointment. But all I say —

Thank you, dear.          

Yeah? she says, voice high with incredulity. You like it?

Thank you, really, I say again. She looks relieved. 

I squeeze her hand once before ducking into the bathroom that is not really a bathroom, pulling the screen door shut but still hearing the vacuum start and whirr, filling the air with static. Ginger is whining, howling, more lines of song under the still-echoing A notes of the long-since-unplugged clipper blades and the current of Claire’s frenetic practicing long ago. Under the water, all I feel is the rhythm of that rehearsal, the plunk plunk plunk of becoming. I rinse off all of the hair, brushing through tiny uneven patches absentmindedly. 

Stepping out, I wipe aside steam to appraise my softened, now-unfamiliar reflection. The mirror is still blurry and, blinking roughly, I am again aware of my muddled, dirtied vision. I decide I am long overdue for a change. 

As I peel the contacts off my eyes, the plastic discs cave easily between my fingers. Funny how we flatten things. Now, I stare at these remnants of sight, turning them around once and then again, rolling them between my grooved fingertips, pinching them until they give in entirely — again and again and again, until the moisture is gone, until I am nearly dry, too, until finally I show mercy and flick the mutilated lenses and everything I’ve ever seen through them into our trashcan tucked behind the toilet. There, they cling limply to the side of the bag, refusing to fall and already beginning to harden.

Angie Kang is a Chinese-American illustrator and writer living in San Francisco, CA. Her writing has been published in The Believer, Narrative, The Offing, The Rumpus, Porter House Review, Hobart, and others. Find more of her work at www.angiekang.net, or on instagram @anqiekanq.

Robbie Gamble

Five Minutes at the Beach

Just five clear minutes after I review my patient notes, drinking in the morning sun that sparkles low off tidal flats, the promontory head of Nahant lolling away to the right, curled into the elbow of the horizon; the ragged cries of breakfasting gulls, a lone kite-flier, the slack hiss of distant waves; five sublime minutes before I slide into my car, drive back into Lynn up Newhall Street; cruising past the peeling clapboard boardinghouse where, on a day like this in 1962, the Boston Strangler found his fourth victim, a nurse named Helen Blake, raped and strangled her with her own bra and stockings; on to the next block, the family shelter where the mothers are out on the stoop smoking distractedly, monitoring their kids as they wheel round the warm asphalt parking lot; and I sense something is wrong, they cluster up and tell me right away: it’s Gloria, her ex was stalking her again, broke in through a screen window last night after curfew, stabbed her in the butt, would’ve killed her, too, if they, the other mothers, hadn’t grabbed broomsticks and a mop and pummeled him out into the night.

Gloria’s been transported to get stitched up, then on to a safe house. He is still out there. The mothers are shaken, determined to look after their own. What did he care about the restraining order? What would they care now about the sun, the moon, the rhythms of the tides?

Robbie Gamble is the author of A Can of Pinto Beans, from Lily Poetry Review Press. His poems and essays have appeared in the Atlanta Review, Lunch Ticket, RHINO, Scoundrel Time, Tahoma Literary Review, and The Sun. His essay "Exit Wound" was cited as a Notable Essay in The Best American Essays 2020. Robbie worked for many years as a nurse practitioner caring for people caught in homelessness, and he now divides his time between Boston and Brattleboro, Vermont. www.robbiegamble.com

Elizabeth Svoboda

A Near Miss

On a former teacher accused of abuse—and the blinkered system that sent us all into his orbit.

At the height of the pandemic’s summer surge, a high school friend’s message roused me from sleep. In my dream-blurred state, I digested her texts in snippets. Disturbing article in the paper … aspiring writer … horrifying. 

What it boiled down to was this: A former student named Tara had accused the teacher who taught us to write—Dr. Wiener, who we all called Doc—of luring her into sex with him when she was a teen. He’d been a mentor to her since freshman year, she said. Told her she was talented, that she was a real writer. When she was a junior, she told the reporter, he’d kissed her, starting a predatory relationship that had lasted more than a year. Though widespread rumors flew at the school back then, those in charge kept Doc on, and he taught hundreds more students before he retired.

Tara said she’d cut Doc off after she graduated, nine years before us. But three decades on, she was still grappling with the emotional fallout. She was suing our old school district for damages under the state’s Child Victims Act, alleging that the district had failed in its duty to protect her from predation. School officials knew—or clearly should have known—what was happening to Tara, the lawsuit reported, and they had neglected to act. The suit also claimed that she hadn’t been the only victim. “Prior to the times mentioned herein,” the document read, “Mr. Wiener was a known sexual abuser of children.”

My inbox was already filling with other graduates’ memories of Doc, and social media posts spurred lengthening reels of comments. Someone said he was the best teacher they’d ever had. Others recalled him making asides about girls in short skirts, or mentioned how close Doc stood to Tara in class. Her “personal space seemed violated,” one classmate said. “He gave an air that came off to me as possessive of her in the sense of ownership.” 

Still others remembered how Doc liked to mentor his favorite students over the years—one of whom, in the late 1990s, was me. “I did think about you, frankly,” an old friend wrote me on one thread. “This one time we were at Syracuse University for some type of award ceremony and he put his hand on top of your head and like patted it. It was kind of a fatherly gesture, I guess, but kind of weird too.” Someone else put it more bluntly: that how Doc had encouraged me as a writer sounded like how he’d related to Tara all those years before. Had his praise been a bid to draw vulnerable students close?

Feels like a near miss tbh, I texted other friends. It felt as though a hummingbird had pierced through my sternum beak-first.

*

The glow of Doc’s aura reached me long before I was a student in his class. He taught junior-year AP English classes at our school and advised its literary magazine. He held a doctorate from a nearby university, and he’d co-founded a local lit mag called Desperate Act.

 Doc had no trouble living up to his reputation. He dressed professorially: sweater vests, oxfords, tweed jackets. He sipped from a “No Coffee No Workee” mug. He invited us to a Desperate Act coffeeshop reading, and when he noticed me there, he beckoned me over and gave me a free issue. He kvelled over his past students’ achievements—and indeed, one went on to become a National Book Award finalist. For many of us, Doc’s class represented our first access to a literary realm we’d thought beyond reach. 

From time to time, we might have wondered, What’s a guy with a doctorate in English lit doing teaching high school? But when the thought did occur to us, it seemed only to confirm that we were as special as we wanted to believe. 

 The first play we read in Doc’s class was Shakespeare’s The Tempest, starring Prospero, the toppled Duke of Milan, and his 15-year-old daughter Miranda. Exiled as Duke and banished to a remote island, Prospero manipulates and controls the island-dwellers as he plots to win back his old position. Miranda, innocent and fey, stays by his side through it all.

I’d turned 16 that year but looked 12, or so my friends told me. I weighed 95 pounds dripping wet. I’d swapped my coke-bottle glasses for contacts, was testing my new appearance like a fawn testing its legs. I was exquisitely vulnerable to the intoxication of praise. My family sensibly rationed it, which only made me crave the uncut form all the more.

At the end of the Tempest unit was a timed in-class essay test. Doc scored each essay on a scale of one to nine, but no one really expected to get a nine. A seven worked out to an A, so a nine was beyond the pale. Nines made you a unicorn.

Doc gave us the Tempest essay prompt in advance, and I was so anxious to get the essay right that I wrote the whole thing out beforehand, memorized it, and regurgitated it during class. I was pleasantly surprised when an eight later slid across my desk. Doc chided me for misusing a word or two—“purposed” in place of “proposed”—but praised my writing about the play’s insular island community. The verdict felt like a minor benediction.

For the next in-class essay, we had to respond to a passage about definition by the writer Thomas Szasz. It described two rivals who struggle over a dropped gun, scrambling to be first to pick it up. “Whoever reaches the weapon first shoots and lives; his adversary is shot and dies,” Szasz wrote. “In ordinary life… whoever first defines the situation is the victor; his adversary, the victim.” 

This struck me as a ridiculous claim. I no longer have my essay, but I remember that it began, “Definition is not a zero-sum game.” 

The one who defined first, I argued, was not automatically the victor. Definition was not a gun to be fired, but a means of expressing what was good and true. Defining allowed us to articulate our grandest visions about the world, which had far more to do with contribution than with opposition or destruction. Back then, definition signified nothing but growth and expansion, immersed as I was in the process of self-defining.

I can see nuances in the Szasz passage, now, that escaped me when I first read it. I could not see the prevailing definitions of success, of femininity, that were even then tightening around me. Nor could I see how a mentor’s attempts to define a student can as easily warp her potential as broaden it.

25 years on, I remember word-for-word what Doc wrote at the top of my paper: What a sophisticated argument to set up in such a short time. I received a nine, as far as I knew the only one in the class.

That fall and beyond, Doc kept scrawling praise on my papers, reading them out loud to other students. In midwinter, the school literary magazine had a party—a soiree, it was called, though it was held in the darkened basement cafeteria. Doc greeted me when I arrived, and I must have mentioned that I’d been ill. I still remember the way he looked at me with solicitous concern, as if I were one of his own.

There’s something so intoxicating about being set apart when you’re that age. High school is a feedlot, kids stacked in rows five deep. Keep your head down is the thrum beneath it all, keep to your allotted space. The monotony of the days—the metronomic tick of the clock’s hand as it jerks forward—teaches you not to expect much more. 

When someone grants you any kind of distinction in this setting, it feels like an improbable windfall. Bank error in your favor. Only repetition, you think, will lend this any solidity. You have to find ways to re-conjure the rush, and for me, that meant obsessing over every sentence until it sang the way I knew Doc wanted it to. Pressing the dispense approval lever until the sweet reward flowed through. 

Unbeknownst to me, my shyness served as a kind of safety valve. I toiled over every paragraph in class, but after the bell rang, I drifted out the door, my eyes fastened to the ground. But there were other, bolder students, before Tara as well as after, who lingered to chat with Doc–about the lit mag staff’s power dynamics, say, or the motivations of Henry David Thoreau.

I can’t stop imagining an alternate reality in which a more confident, assured version of me approaches Doc to talk about the book I read, the one that’s sliced through the frozen sea within me. In this alternate reality, he reaches forward to lift my face toward his. Would the girl I was at 16 have walked away—relinquishing, in the process, every mark of distinction I’d accumulated?

The answer I keep coming back to is no. The perfect scores, the words of praise, were sliding straight into my veins, and I understand now how much I might have done for a fix.

* 

I keep thinking of all the times the outcome—Tara’s outcome, and by extension so many others’—could have been altered. The times people joked awkwardly about Doc instead of reporting what they’d seen. The times teachers saw the same girl always lingering in Doc’s classroom and said nothing. The times staffers reportedly did speak to Doc about what was happening, but the relationship continued nonetheless.

Here is the thing about complicity: it seldom announces itself clearly to the one who is complicit. It’s so easy to give a colleague the benefit of the doubt, especially when this impulse coincides with your desire to safeguard your career, to fend off faculty-lounge stares. 

If that justification fails, the conceit of tomorrow is always close at hand. You will say something tomorrow, or the next time, or when some undefined threshold of brazenness is crossed. Opportunities to act scroll by like Lucy’s conveyor-belt chocolates, and you don’t choose one because you’re picturing the serpentine still to come.

In tenth grade, in that same building, our English class had a unit on dystopias. We read George Orwell’s 1984, featuring Winston Smith, a functionary bidden to do the will of the Party. When Smith meets others who hate the Party’s strictures, an impulse to revolt stirs in him. But when Party leader O’Brien threatens to sic a cage of rats on him, the creatures he fears most in the world, he capitulates.

In the real world, capitulation is rarely this dramatic. There is a distinction between a world in which people understand the moral choice, but remain silent out of fear—and a world so blinkered that the moral solution, the just remedy, does not even occur to those immersed in it. To assume that what happened was merely the former understates the magnitude of the rot. It also obscures the end result, which was that after Tara graduated, hundreds more students entered Doc’s orbit unawares. 

Many among those hundreds, assault survivors or not, now face a critical dislocation. Doc’s encouragement to us was woven into our self-conceptions, guiding the course of our lives. It’s impossible not to suspect that much of that was a farce—that the things he helped us believe about ourselves were empty promises, deployed to serve calculated ends. This is the collective fallout when a predator remains in place for decades, in a mentoring role, and abuse reports emerge a quarter-century on. 

*

One of the last big books we read in Doc’s class was The Great Gatsby. The snow piles were melting by then, and I was fed up with junior year. The busywork had become an incessant treadmill, as had the scheming about how to leverage all pursuits to best college-entrance effect. It was hard even to drag myself out of bed, much less immerse myself in the story of Gatsby and Daisy, who seemed dull and full of themselves.

So when Doc sat us down to take a Gatsby quiz, I drew a blank. I hadn’t yet bothered to finish the book. Running out of time, I scribbled down an answer about how Gatsby had killed himself, which felt like a decent guess based on what I’d read so far.

I was bemused when my quiz came back with an A at the top. A friend teased me about it in a yearbook note: “I’ve learned that you are a god in Doc’s eyes: ‘Class, we will now proceed to study Gatsby as if Gatsby committed suicide at the end of the novel.’”

But while I relished the grade in a pull-one-over sense, there was something disturbing about it. It was too easy. Another “Bank Error in Your Favor” card in a year when I seemed to keep pulling them.

I should have gotten marked down for blowing off the quiz. What happened instead was that I kept floating on the heady sense that I was set apart, invincible—a feeling I’d come to learn, decades later, revealed just the opposite. 

* 

The writer Patrick McManus talks about sequences—how certain events stack one atop the other, how one necessarily leads to the next. When I heard the news about Doc, I kept thinking about sequences. How so many cornerstones are laid before graduation and all else rises from that foundation. 

Doc was someone who hefted cornerstones into place. Not just for me, but for every student whose college recommendation he wrote. On recommendation forms, high school teachers check boxes for which category a student falls into, ranging from “below average” to “good (above average),” “excellent (top 10%),” “outstanding (top 5%),” and “one of the top few I’ve encountered.” 

No teacher checks that final box lightly. But when they do—and they know this better than anyone—it’s rocket fuel. The difference between “good” and “top few I’ve encountered” can be the difference between acceptance and deferral, between free ride and full tuition, between transformation and stagnation. I never got to read my recommendation from Doc, but it doubtless helped me secure a place in my college’s freshman class.

When your former teacher is accused of abuse, the question becomes: What do you do when you’re perched on all those stories, the ones you’ve so methodically laid down, and you learn that the cornerstone beneath them was never solid to begin with?

*

Whenever there’s a late narrative shift—a gut overhaul of a decades-old plot point—cascading effects follow. How does the rising action of age 16 look different in retrospect? How do we pivot in response to the pivoting of old assumptions?

 But in truth, a deeper story was always there beneath the surface one. There was a sinister foreshadowing, like the body of a dark fish under lake ice. Doc’s solicitous attentions. The rampant rumors. The unearned grades. We’d grown so used to stifling inner misgivings that when we saw the flick of the fish’s tail, we dismissed it as a trick of the mind. Some of us graduated to laughing at the absurdity of it all.

All along, we were the stooges in Thomas Szasz’s conception of social reality. Whoever first defines the situation is the victor, his adversary, the victim. Whoever dictates which adult behavior must go unchallenged—who minimizes or overlooks those who would question it—grabs the gun first, shoots, and lives.

Where Szasz errs, though, is in implying that no definition can be recast. In college, I became obsessed with Joyce Maynard’s memoir At Home in the World, in which Maynard, now a novelist herself, recounts her year living with J.D. Salinger at age 19. The author of The Catcher in the Rye, Maynard reveals, was also a predator who stoked romances with barely of-age mentees, ushered them into his cult-like orbit, then abandoned them without warning. 

Brilliant as she was, Maynard was suggestible enough at 19 to conform to the defining narrative Salinger had crafted. But Salinger also foresaw, eerily, the way she would later demolish it. Some day, he said, she would renounce this business of telling the stories someone else had scripted for her. “You’ll stop looking over your shoulder to make sure you’re keeping everybody happy,” he told her. “That’s when you’ll finally produce the work you’re capable of.” 

* 

It was Tara, in the end, who blasted the district narrative to smithereens. She attested not just Doc’s actions, but the complicity of the adults around him—and the way that complicity led a generation of students into his orbit. 

This radical act of demolition left space for something new to arise. In this spirit of emergence, a small band of alumni came together to demand the school district start an independent investigation into teacher sexual abuse past and present, including outreach to community members who might want to report such abuse. We modeled our proposed investigation on those other pioneering schools had done. When we circulated an open letter to the district—one that over a thousand people signed—other alumni commented and messaged us to report that district teachers had abused them or others they knew. A number of these incidents have never, as far as we know, been officially investigated.

When we approached the district with the letter, the comments, and the thousand-plus signatures, we were met with words more fireproof than silence. While the administration said it found allegations of teacher sexual abuse abhorrent, officials would not comment further on cases like Tara’s and did not commit to the complete investigation we asked for. They cited the fact that Tara’s lawsuit against the district was still underway, which may have been true in a strictly legal sense. Yet the subtext seemed unmistakable: Letting students and alumni redefine the district’s response to abuse would mean letting them be first to grab the gun. Whoever reaches the weapon first shoots and lives. 

I knew then that true healing would require the district to relinquish the gun. The AP English syllabus is shot through with concessions, moments of redefinition that clear the way to victory. In The Tempest, Prospero promises his servant Ariel freedom before reclaiming his own power, and in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie must leave her stifling marriage to pursue the life she wants. My 16-year-old self understood it better than I knew: You don’t have to grab the gun and hold on to win, to pursue the highest good. Definition is not a zero-sum game.

Elizabeth Svoboda is a writer and essayist in San Jose, California. She is the author of What Makes a Hero? The Surprising Science of Selflessness (Penguin Random House, 2013) and The Life Heroic, for kids (Zest Books/ Lerner, 2019). Her work appears in the Washington Post, Scientific American, Discover, Sapiens, Aeon, the Boston Globe and the New York Times, and she is winner of the Evert Clark/ Seth Payne Award for Young Science Journalists. Find her on Twitter @svobodster.

Molly Giles

SPOKES

Divorce Day

I left the courthouse wanting something. Something nice, for myself. A prize of some sort, who knows, a booby prize would be fitting, I’d take it. If only someone would offer me a rose as I hurried toward the car, or a piece of gum!  I hadn’t asked for alimony, to my lawyer’s disgust, and, knowing my husband, ex-husband now, the child support would be late, if it came at all, and anyway it wasn’t money I wanted. It was something else. There was an emptiness inside that was yammering to be filled, but by what?  New shoes? A dress? I wasn’t going anywhere. A box of chocolates, a gardenia corsage, a glass of champagne? Ugh. Maybe a tree, a pear tree to plant behind the house, but the house was rented, and the children and I might not be able to live there much longer. A lipstick? Red? Glossy? Ha ha I’m free come and get me boys? Don’t think so. But what?  And then it came to me. I knew just what I needed for the hard weeks, months, years to come. I went into the corner convenience store and came out satisfied, the cheapest umbrella they had tucked under my arm. I snapped it open and sashayed down the sunny streets just in time to pick the children up from school, even though they pretended, at first, not to know me.

Luck

It’s bad luck to open an umbrella inside; everyone knows that, though no one knows why, and that is why the homeless man with one arm steps off the curb outside his tent in a downpour so intent on his struggle to open the damn thing (plastic, bent, embossed with five Disney princesses, fished from a dumpster the night before) that he doesn’t see the drunk in the Tesla coming straight at him.  The drunk feels the thud, brakes, opens his own umbrella (Burberry, a gift from a client), steps out, peers down at the body, gets back in the car and drives away just as a young actress, trying to balance another umbrella (fabric, flowered, borrowed from a roommate) snaps a photo of his license plate but she jabs herself so badly on the umbrella’s tip that she misses her bus and has to arrive late for her only audition all year with a black eye.                                                            

Show Business

I’m five. Aimee’s forty, a French nurse married to the elderly physician she used to work for; he gives her everything, she tells my mother, her pretty voice breaking, but he cannot give her a child. May she borrow me? “Yes!” says my mother. “Take her!” Aimee takes me rowing on a lake on Tuesday. To the ballet on Wednesday. To dinner at the Yacht Club on Thursday. Friday she takes me to the movies. We sit side by side in the dark watching Gene Kelley glide and slide, twirl and whirl – I have never seen anything I’ve liked as much as “Singing in the Rain;” I could watch this movie forever.  When the lights go up and Aimee reaches for her coat, I touch her arm. “Can we see it again?” I have never asked for anything so outrageous and when Aimee smiles Yes I sink into my seat, wordless with gratitude, and as the lights dim and her perfume enfolds me I understand that the world is nothing but beautiful and my entire life will be nothing but perfect.

Perfect

It never rains on me, my father said, and for years it seemed it never did. He could stroll in from a winter storm as if from a summer picnic, the shoulders of his coat sprinkled with plum blossoms only, his thinning hair unmussed, his polished shoes unsmudged.  I would run to greet him at the door, eager to catch him out, to show him up, but every time he confounded me, every time he won. Graceful, quick, alert, untouched, he could hold his finger in a candle flame, could pick a snake up by its throat, emerged from wars and hurricanes and love affairs intact. He knew he shouldn’t smoke four packs a day, but then again, why not, his health was good, his doctors said his tests were fine --until one day his lungs filled up, his heart sank down and, gracefully he drowned.

At Sea

We swim every afternoon. I strike out for the reef while she stays behind, rocking in the gentle swells of the cove, a parasol held over her head. She watches the blues and pinks of the clouds and she smells the teriyaki from the hibachis on the beach. There are no sharks or jellyfish or poison eels in the water and most of the screaming children play close to shore. She tips her head back, closes her eyes, and lets herself be lifted and dropped, lifted and dropped. She is going through a hard time right now, and though I know the swimming helps, I can’t help wondering what she is thinking about: her divorce or her diabetes or her dead child or her debts…but then I see her reach up and re-adjust the parasol so it entirely shades her face, and I realize, with just a flash of irritation, that she is worrying about wrinkles.

Immigrant

I can feel myself age ten years when I look for my purse to pay the pub bill and see my purse is missing. It can’t be missing--it has everything in it, my passport, my wallet, my return ticket home! The waitress nods, sad for me. “Was your journal in it?” she asks. My journal? What kind of a country is this? No! my journal is back on the hotel room bed. “That’s a relief,” the waitress says. She waits for me to pay her while I stare down at the floor where my purse used to be. It was right beneath my seat, I explain, right under my chair! Who could have taken it?  “Immigrant,” the waitress explains. “Umbrella.” She leans down, demonstrates someone deftly hooking something up, and straightens. “We’re used to it.”

Used to It

I overpacked, as usual, for the trip to Ireland but I forgot to bring an umbrella. It was raining in Shannon when I arrived and I waited on the curb for the bus to Galway with all my luggage getting wetter and wetter. I was not alone. Everyone around me was hunched and hooded, but no one was complaining. Two men were even smoking. Well, I thought, raising my face to the downpour, this is a refreshing way of looking at things! Much more positive! Don’t fight the weather! Just go with it! I was prepared to love everything about Ireland, and I would have too, if the rain hadn’t continued to fall every single goddamned day I was there.

Did It Really Happen?

An arm reaches out as you stand in the torrent, encircles your waist, and draws you in. “See?” a warm voice says, “It’s big enough for two.”

Inheritance

We two were very good about dividing our mother’s jewelry. My sister took the gold, I took the silver; she took the emeralds, I took the jade. At the bottom of our mother’s old brocade treasure box were two small carved figures—ivory netsukes she must have brought back from Japan years ago. I reached for the thumb-sized peasant woman squatting under a parasol but my sister got there first and left me with the little fat man holding a hammer.  There was nothing about the fat man that reminded me of our mother, whereas the hunched woman with her defiant scowl and her clenched hands was Mom all over. My sister didn’t agree, and anyway, she said, her mother was different from my mother, nicer, even though, of course, it was the same dead woman. “Trade?” I suggested, but my sister just smirked, tucked the little woman with the parasol in her purse with the other loot and walked away. Ten years ago I would have tackled her from behind and brought her down hard but now all I did was make a face and shake the little man with the hammer after her retreating back.

Violence

You can kill with an umbrella, spies know that, they jab through each other’s boots with poisoned tips on busy city streets all the time. You can also protect yourself from spies by flipping your own umbrella open in their foreign faces before they stab you and you can also flip your umbrella open to deflect pepper spray from a cop, say, which is good to know if you are in a demonstration at the White House or live in Portland, Oregon. They have not yet invented an umbrella that protects against tear gas, or pops you up like Mary Poppins, nor have they perfected one that lets you float safely down off a cliff or rooftop when you are being pursued. The installation artist Christo didn’t mean to kill that woman in California or that park worker in Japan when a two of his giant umbrellas went renegade, but at least he had insurance. A sunbather was impaled by a beach umbrella in Florida and a flight attendant choked to death after swallowing a paper parasol off her MaiTai at a tiki bar. Okay I made that last one up but it could have happened. She was waiting an awfully long time for her date to come back from the men’s room.

Flight

Her date had actually left and flown to New Orleans, still dressed for a night out in his best tie and jacket, and as he had forgotten to pack a change of clothes, he was totally unprepared for the torrent that met him the minute he stepped into The French Quarter. He ducked into the first shop he came to, which was lit with red bulbs, lined with black velvet, and filled with stuffed bats and racks of vampire teeth. An ancient fortune teller called to him from a dark corner and asked what he was looking for. “Shelter,” the young man said, surprised, because he hadn’t meant to say that. “I mean,” he amended, “I want to buy an umbrella.” The fortune teller pressed her fingers to her forehead and in a dire voice said at last: “You are going to lose it.”

Abandoned

Okay, so where is it?  In the gutter, the classroom, the gym, the mess hall, the stadium, the dumpster, the airplane, the courtroom, the grocery cart, the children’s park, the library, the getaway car, the AA meeting, the mortuary, the hairdressers, the movie theater, the ashram?  It is certainly not in the hall closet nor anywhere near the front door. Not that it’s needed. We are going through climate change after all and when—if--it rains again all we will want to do is stand outside with our palms open and our bare faces lifted up in Hallelujah.

Molly Giles has published five short story collections and a novel. Her last collection, WIFE WITH KNIFE, won the Leapfrog Global Fiction Prize. New work is currently featured in the Passengers Journal Anthology (2020-2021) and 100 Word Stories and is forthcoming in Best Small Fictions.