By Henrick Karoliszyn
Featured Art: “Friends” by Mia Broecke

Janice tells me about the bearded dragon. She explains that Melvin, wheat-yellow with the face of a perpetual grump, stopped eating crickets. As he’s lazing about under his heat lamp, she swears his outer layer is transforming into a shade of brown right before her eyes. She calls it “emotional molting,” though I don’t think that’s a thing, and I didn’t know what feelings would cause the reptile to change colors. 

Janice is my sister, but she doesn’t feel like my sister. She feels like a stranger in a train car issuing favored life updates (her pet changing skin tone). She talks about the weather in Chicago (“shrinkage-level-emergency” cold) and the weather in her apartment (“boiling toad in pot” hot), and a trip she planned for Saint Kitts (“Henry Cavill” degrees in December). She talks about disappointing politicians in clipped, bumper sticker fashion. She talks about the disappointing Cubs in long-winded run-on sentences. She talks about the disappointing Netflix series based on a book she loved like it was a false prophet.  

She doesn’t talk about Mom anymore. 

After twenty minutes, we hang up. The call ends with the same stale cheerfulness—“talk soon”—as it always does. As if we were not family but coworkers in an office leaving a corporate lunch with promise of a new deal ahead. Not two people who once tucked into the same bunk bed whispering ghost stories to each other, but casual friends who spoke every few months. 

I hadn’t been to Chicago since our mother’s funeral in Edison Park. The funeral lasted less than two hours and its attendees included aunt Joyce, uncle Tom and a priest named Father Lee. Our mother, ever averse to intimacy, seemed to vanish the way she lived in quiet seclusion. 

A recluse by design, she never had friends and proudly called herself a lone wolf. Even when the arthritis in her hips left her bedridden, and she needed help shopping for groceries, it took her three days to call Aunt Joyce, and admit defeat. 

Our father left us all for a pre-K teacher when Janice was three and I was six. He was a mechanic with a bushy mustache who smelled like Big Red gum and Old Spice. He always wore aviators, tight blue denim, and white tees. Before he left, I barely remember the fights, just the shift that took place afterwards. The way Mom would slice into avocados with a strange severity or how she would take long walks by herself. The cabinets he slammed shut too loudly downstairs.  

I moved to New York for college soon after the funeral and stayed in Astoria ever since. 

At first, we made a point to speak weekly. Then we spoke monthly. Now the calls come irregularly, like weather patterns that can’t be predicted by radar or instinct. When Janice does call, she tells me the same things over and over: Melvin is eating weird stuff. Chicago is freezing. How she can’t wait to take off for her trip. Sometimes she’ll add in something new. This time her neighbor upstairs is learning the cello. 

“I swear, he only knows one song,” she tells me. “And it’s not even a song. It’s more like a bad feeling coming out of an instrument.” 

I laugh when I’m supposed to but something in me stays sealed. 

                       * 

I don’t think Janice cried at the funeral. I didn’t either, but for different reasons. She stood stiff in her black dress, arms crossed, her eyes fixed on a jagged patch of dirt near the casket. She’d brought a small thermos with her. I remember because she kept unscrewing the lid and screwing it back on. The click of it competed with the priest’s voice and the occasional howls of wind. That was how she grieved.  

My grief is like a hoodie that’s never been mine. I keep meaning to return it to a friend but still wear it when no one’s around and find it comforting but temporary. I’ve tried to explain this in therapy, but it never comes out right. It’s not that I didn’t love our mother. I did. But our mother built walls to protect herself so thoroughly that it was hard to know how my love would get through. Was it love if it never made it past those protective barriers? If you held onto it? 

Janice had been the one to clean out the house after the last heart attack. She didn’t ask me to help clear the boxes or whether I wanted anything from the home. She knew I was studying for midterms. She texted a photo of our old lava lamp and a box of VHS tapes labeled Halloween 1997, Janice, 3rd grade talent show, Backyard Wrestling Antics. I didn’t ask her to send me any of them. She didn’t offer to. 

I open the window to let in the late March air which in New York City is perfect. It smells like a bouquet of urban perfume – cigarettes, lilac, red wine, car exhaust. I sit on the fire escape and peer out across the alley. I see a woman in a red sweater shouting into her phone, pacing with a towel covering her hair. She looks like Janice if I squint. But Janice doesn’t shout, she lets her frustration stew. 

The woman’s voice escalates, shrill and angry. I catch her say, “You never listen” before she leaves the frame of her window. The fire escape creaks as I stand up. I crawl back into my apartment, close the window, and for a long time, I hear the woman’s voice in my head. 

                       * 

The last time Janice visited New York was six years ago. She spent a long weekend complaining about the noisy Subway outside my apartment and the coffee that tasted like “charred dreams of the damned.” She left behind a scarf she later claimed she didn’t want, but I know she forgot it. 

The scarf still resides in my closet. I’ve never worn it, but I still couldn’t throw it out. What I miss most is the version of us that existed in the backseat of our old Dodge Caravan. When she had her sticker books and I had my comics, Mom drove us to the laundromat with bags of clothes. I tore through Archie while Janice peeled the stickers too fast and ripped the corners of her books. She didn’t mind if they weren’t perfect, she had preferred the opposite. 

I remember one winter night. We were on the floor in the living room, watching Matilda on VHS. Janice was clutching a blanket with cartoon monkeys on it, her cheeks flushed from the radiator heat. We shared a bowl of buttery popcorn. When the VHS player stopped working halfway through the movie, we improvised. 

We turned off the TV and the lights and lay there in the dim orange light. We listened to the drone of Mom’s portable heater and shut our eyes. We pretended we were on a spaceship. I was the pilot, and Janice was tasked with shooting aliens out of the window with laser beams. 

We spoke to each other in walkie-talkie voices until we fell asleep in the living room. I don’t know why that night sticks with me. Maybe because nobody was shouting or throwing things at the walls. Maybe because it felt like the buzzing heater made the darkness feel less empty. Maybe it was because we made up a better story. 

                      * 

I check my phone but there were no new text messages. I scroll through my photos until I find the one Janice sent me of Melvin last month. He’s posed like a bumpy-skinned reptilian god under his UV bulb, eyes half-shut, chin resting on a rock. He looks peaceful. Maybe bored. Definitely brown. 

I start a message: Try giving him blueberries. I read somewhere they like the color…I don’t send the message. Instead, I put on my shoes and walk to the corner bodega. I buy blueberries and think of mailing them to her, but that feels like a joke that probably wouldn’t land. It feels like the kind of thing we used to do as kids like leaving cryptic notes on our bunks, sneaking strange candy into each other’s backpacks on special days. We had a secret language once.  

Back home, I wash the fruit and eat them one by one until they are done. Blueberries remind me of a conversation I had with Mom when she got sick. It was maybe six months before she died, and her voice had turned coarse after chemo and radiation. She called me at 2:15 a.m. I remember the exact time because I was still awake, watching reruns of Seinfeld on mute. 

She didn’t say hello. 

“Do you remember that stray cat we fed that summer?” she asked. Her voice was so feeble, I almost didn’t recognize it. 

“Which one?” I said, blinking into the mute television screen. 

“The orange one. Janice named him Spaghetti Sauce. You named him Gunther.” 

“Oh. Yeah,” I said, remembering. “He had that torn ear.” 

“Janice thought he died,” she said. “But I saw him again. That fall. He was fine. He was eating blueberries out of a plastic container.” 

We didn’t say much else after that. 

She hung up five minutes later after there had been quiet on the phone I didn’t know 

how to fill. Something about that call always remained with me. Not only the fact that she 

remembered the feline but that she wanted to share it with me. It was as if she wanted to go back 

in time, so she didn’t have to face what was in front of her. 

Janice never mentioned the call, and I didn’t bring it up. I didn’t know if Mom told her. 

The next day, I texted Mom a photo of an orange cat that resembled Gunther on a stoop in Queens. I never got a reply from her. 

I wonder sometimes what Janice and Mom talked about. Did they speak every day? Was Janice the one calling? Was Janice checking the fridge temperature, buying her Ensure and Metamucil, setting the thermostat? She never told me if she did all those things. I never asked because I didn’t want to feel what would come. Maybe that’s the worst part of grief. It was not the hole left by the deceased as much as the space it opened between the breathing. 

                       * 

That night, I dream of Melvin. 

He’s wearing a gold crown and sitting in a courtroom made of crystals held under a red-lit sun. Janice is there too, but her face is blurry. She’s speaking, but no sounds emerge. I’m in the back row of the court, holding a plastic container of blueberries in my palm. Melvin turns toward me, clicks his tongue, and says, “You’re late.” 

I wake up at 4:12 a.m. soaked in sweat. 

I sit in bed and stare at the corner of the room where a spider has assembled a near- flawless web between my bookshelf and curtain rod. I should clear the web, but it deserves to stay. At least for now. I imagine the steady patience it takes to see something like that all the way through. I open my notes app and type a message I won’t send: Hey. I think about you more than I say. I’m sorry we don’t talk like we used to. I don’t know how to fix that, but I’d like to try. 

I leave it in my phone like that. Having it written on the screen feels like standing at the edge of a pool. 

                        * 

The next afternoon, I go to the pet store on Steinway. I move past aisles of kitty litter and fish flakes until I find a small, refrigerated section labeled “Exotic Reptile Nutrition.” I don’t see any blueberries. I do see vacuum-sealed containers of beetle larvae and something called “gut-loaded roaches.” 

I text Janice, this time for real: Hey what’s Melvin’s favorite treat these days? I might send him something. 

She replies two minutes later: 

He used to love hornworms but he’s picky now. I gave him mango last week. He licked it like a weirdo. 

I grin at the screen. 

Mango is high maintenance. 

Like all the best things, she writes back. 

I don’t say anything after that, and neither does she. But the exchange lingers—short-lived, earnest, pointless. I go home without buying anything. But that night, I look up, “how to tell if a bearded dragon is depressed.”  

There are whole forums dedicated to this topic. Photos of slumped lizards with captions like, “He won’t bask anymore” and “Stopped moving his arms” and one that read, “He looks dead but he’s not.” 

One comment thread suggests companionship is the largest determinant to whether or not these reptiles are sad. Another recommends a change of scenery, adding more shrubbery to the tank, and perhaps some alternate lighting. The general consensus is reptiles don’t show love the way mammals do, but they feel stress, and they know when they’re alone. 

                       * 

A week later, I get a package in the mail from Janice. There is no note inside, just a small Tupperware of dried mango slices and a keychain shaped like a bearded dragon with cartoonishly wide eyes and a massive head. The kind of gift shop impulse buy that says, I thought of you for a second while waiting to check out. 

I hold the keychain in my palm. It’s cheap and stupid. I tear up anyway.  

I text her of photo of her gift: Mango slices and a bearded dragon keychain. You’re making me think I should get a bearded dragon too 

She replies: 

It was a gift from Melvin. He’s trying to get more friends. He can’t talk right now tho. He’s at a modeling shoot. 

Something about the playfulness hits me harder than it should. 

                                                                 * 

That night, I sit on my fire escape and eat the mango slices, watching the windows across the alley fill with nocturnal illuminations. I wait for the woman to start shouting again but she doesn’t. I can hear jazz piano playing from a distant club. It’s out of tune and flawless. 

I think about all the things we’ve let fossilize between us. I think of all the missed birthday celebrations. The way I forgot to text Janice when she got her job promotion. The Christmas after Mom’s death where we both pretended to be “too busy to travel,” even though we both knew the real reason. Even after all this we are stuck with each other. We are still two squares on the same blanket, pulled in all directions, strained by life, but still stitched together. 

                       * 

In the morning, I do something I haven’t done in years: I book a flight to O’Hare. I don’t tell her I’m flying to Chicago. A part of me thinks I will cancel or fly back without seeing her. It’s always an option. I want it to be a surprise, though I’m not sure if it’s the good kind of surprise. I imagine showing up at her door with a bag of hornworms like a weird sibling bouquet, a prank that may not end well. I can see her laugh and then frown because she hates surprises. Perhaps, she’ll shut the door on me. 

But I want to see her. 

I want to see Melvin, too. I want to see if he’s really brown, or if he’s just molting, or if there’s a way to see if he’s depressed. I want to sit on her couch and hear her complain about her upstairs neighbor’s cello again. I want to drink overly milked coffee and say, out loud, “I miss you,” even if it scares us both.  

If it goes well, I’ll tell her about the call with Mom and about the cat with the torn ear. About how Mom remembered Gunther, even at the end, and decided it was worth calling me at 2 a.m. over. Maybe I’ll finally ask Janice what I’ve never had the guts to. Were you angry that I left? And if we’re really lucky, we’ll get to peel back a few layers, enough to say: Hey. You’re not a stranger anymore. You never were. 

---

Henrick Karoliszyn is a writer based in New Orleans. His fiction was published in the 2025 Hemingway Shorts literary anthology, shortlisted twice for The Letter Review Prize, named winner of the 2025 Breakwater Fiction Contest, and a finalist for the 2026 Ellis Prize for Fiction and the 2026 Kurt Vonnegut Speculative Fiction Prize. His work has also been featured in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Superlative literary journal, FOLIO literary journal, and The Swannanoa Review along with forthcoming editions of Modern Flash Fiction, The Threepenny Review, and The Write Launch. He’s working on a book of short stories and a novel.