Category: Fiction

Like Communion

.Reading time 48 minutes.

By Ellen Skirvin 

My dad warned us that aliens were watching him before he disappeared. He also had checked himself into a psychiatric hospital five times throughout my sixteen-year lifetime. During his last visit to the hospital, the doctors said he vanished in the night. His clothes were left in his dresser. The framed photo of my sister and me left on his bedside table. None of the night nurses saw him leave. There were no tied up sheets found dangling outside his open window. The doctors reminded our family that my dad had admitted himself voluntarily and was free to leave at any time. There was nothing they could do. My mom didn’t seem worried at first. He’d left and come back before. One time he left for almost a week and returned with a pet frog that died the next day. Another time he traveled halfway across the country to tour a NASA museum. He needed space; he’d tell us later. Most of the time he checked himself into the hospital for a long weekend, casually packing his car as if he were leaving for a fishing trip.  

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Tilting

.Reading time 17 minutes.

By Matt Cantor

It’s been a full year, now.  

It’s October 7th. 

I stand at the platform at Kenmore, waiting for a D-train so I can get home to have dinner with my parents. I’m not waiting very hard. They’re going to ask all sorts of questions about what I’ve been working on.  

“Don Quixote,”  I’ll tell them.  

“Hasn’t somebody already written that?”  they’ll ask me.  

“Lots of people have already written lots of things.”—like it means anything, or makes any sort of difference in the direction that I want it to.  

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Ground Control

.Reading time 50 minutes.

By Lesa Hastings

Everyone has to start somewhere. I began as a child stalker, or rather an accomplice to my mom’s propensity for stalking.

We first saw the man we called “Tony 86” parked in the dirt lot rest stop adjacent to the motel my dad would go to after fighting with my mom. After he left us, it became the meeting point for my parents to exchange me and my brother for the occasional weekend. Mom called it a fleabag motel for lowlifes.

“Late as usual,” Mom said. Dad was late enough I wondered if he was actually coming. He was late a lot, but this time he was really late. I’d never stayed in a motel before and made up stories about the people we’d see coming and going while waiting for Dad. Minutes passed as I watched a couple argue on the second-floor balcony, then embrace in a farewell, the woman walking away with the man holding her hand as long as her arm would stretch, until she moved out of reach. Mom had stopped nagging about Dad being late, distracted by something.

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Echo-Delta

.Reading time 16 minutes.

By Teresa Burns Gunther

“Echo-Delta,” his wife shouted from the dining room. “Can you order Chinese?” 

Ed sighed and checked his watch. He’d given up begging Tanya not to speak this way. Tango, as she’d taken to calling herself, spoke in the NATO phonetic alphabet now: a side-effect of her new life mission, to change the medical-insurance-industrial complex one military letter at a time. Ed waited the last seconds until his office clock read 5:00 before leaning his hands into his desktop, where a client’s financial records were arrayed, and pushing himself up. 

He grabbed his cane and made his slow way to the kitchen, wincing at the jolt of pain in his left leg, pain that poked a shaming finger. Since the pandemic, his accounting firm had allowed him to work from home, which was convenient given how the accident had left him.  

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The Windowless Room of Wisdom

.Reading time 62 minutes.

By Drew Calvert

Featured Art: Coastal View by Madelyn Bartolone

Jim Dahlberg was eating a bran muffin and reading The New York Times when he saw that Lucas Bloy had won the Joslyn P. Fish Award for New Conceptual Art. Jim put his muffin down. He wondered if there had been some mistake—not that he was an expert in the field necessarily. He wasn’t an artist, or a critic, or a scholar. He didn’t know the first thing about the Josyln P. Fish Award. He did, however, know a thing or two about the recipient. Lucas had been his nemesis.

Years earlier, Jim had entered a sandwich shop in Madison, Wisconsin. He was in his third year of law school at the time and had just completed a lengthy exam on copyright litigation. Whenever he finished a big exam he liked to eat a roast beef sandwich slathered in tangy hot sauce. It was, for him, a kind of joy. And so he was deeply touched when he saw that Joanne Neier—by far the prettiest girl he’d ever seen at Ralph’s—chose the same condiment. On the basis of this connection, he was able to score an impromptu date.

Life is astonishing, he thought. One minute you’re biking through town with a roast beef sandwich on the brain, and the next minute you’re sitting across from a beautiful stranger with hazel eyes, convinced that all your days on Earth were prelude to this fluke encounter. There had, of course, been one or two highlights. Kissing Natalie Finchbaum at the Cineplex was a clear triumph. Receiving his law school acceptance letter—and the scholarship it came with— had opened his life to dewy pastures previously unfathomed. And there had been that interesting brush with nature during a baseball game when he was sixteen. He’d been grazing in a trickle of meadow along the left-field foul line—his team, the Borlyn Reds, were playing in Ripon, Wisconsin, home of the Tigers— sniffing his glove and watching Trent McGinnis mow down batter after batter, when all of a sudden the wind picked up and sent the trees into a frenzy, and he was able to recognize—though he couldn’t say exactly how—that trees are in a struggle against the heavens, just like the rest of us. But between that night on the baseball field and the moment he and Joanne Neier shared the corner booth at Ralph’s, it seemed that very little had happened.

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La Malinche, La Llorona, and Cristine Ortiz

.Reading time 47 minutes.

By Michael Leal García

On that nightmare afternoon at Plaza Mexico, Aaron never saw the gunman open fire. He just heard a series of pops—something he would only later recognize as gunfire—before Cristine knocked him over, their four-month-old son in his arms. After checking that Lil Aaron was fine—the boy still fast asleep—he felt a weight roll off his legs. There, Cristine lay motionless. Read More

Donna Was Not a Cat Person

.Reading time 40 minutes.

By Halle Ruth

Featured Art: Chowder by Troy Goins

Donna forgot about the cat. She had promised to take care of it when her sister went on another one of her vacations. But the cat slipped to the bottom of Donna’s to-do list until he was barely hanging on, his presence barely noticed and left to his own devices, roaming her sister’s home on his lonesome. Donna did not want the cat staying in her own home, choosing to sacrifice the time it would take to drive to her sister’s to feed it every other day rather than let its fur coat her hardwood floors.  

She woke early that morning and decided to take advantage of the rare combination of a day off and unusually warm October weather to tackle the overgrown landscaping surrounding the house. At the beginning of summer, she paid a neighborhood kid to pull weeds and lay mulch, but the upkeep fell to her, and she hadn’t been particularly diligent about keeping the crab grass at bay. Her husband suggested hiring the kid again, but Donna refused. Everyone else in the neighborhood either cared for their yards themselves or hired professionals who drove around in logo-covered trucks that hauled riding lawnmowers, hedge trimmers, and leaf blowers. None of them cheaped out and hired a teenager to do a half-assed job to save a few dollars. It was embarrassing that they even hired him in the first place, like they couldn’t afford to do any better than that. Ella, who lived across the street, would have never done such a thing. Donna was sure of it.

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Melbourne Beach

.Reading time 49 minutes.

By Bo Lewis

Featured Art: Second Beach, Newport, c. 1878-80 by Worthington Whittredge 

Coach West had just finished grilling the dogs and we were all standing in line, going crazy with hunger. We’d had nothing but concession stand sno-cones after the doubleheader, and we were ready to eat our weight in barbecue. Rudy and I were going to do an experiment to see which tasted better on dogs—onions or relish. I was going to blindfold myself with my ballcap and Rudy was going to feed me one bite of each until I discovered the answer.

But Dad’s hatchback came skidding across the gravel toward the pavilion, a long dust cloud rising up behind it like the tail of a dragon, and I knew something was about to happen. The door popped open and his hand shot down to the gravel like a kickstand as he got out of the car. He left it running and didn’t shut the door behind him.

Coach West set down his tongs and gave Rudy’s father a look. They hopped off the pavilion deck and went to greet Dad. Marcellus’s mother, our Team Mom, took over at the grill, speaking loudly and brightly, asking what everybody was doing for summer now that we were done with the third grade.

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Subject Matter Experts

.Reading time 55 minutes.

By Laura Jok

Featured Art: “Untitled” by Elizabeth Boch

You are twenty-six. Donald Trump is running for president. The company that you consider your current employer sees you as more of a friend. The insurance plan that you bought for yourself is hilarious. There is a hole in your back molar about which you are not thinking, which is growing, about which you are not thinking, and you are in love with a stranger who can always be replaced, should he turn out to be a disappointment. You teach other people how to do their jobs like you are some kind of expert.

A lowly contractor, you design employee training programs for companies too apathetic to do it themselves. You produce modules: scripted lesson plans, slides. You shoot instructional videos, for which you lure desperate actors. When resources are scarce, you narrate the training, play it back and edit. It does not sound like you: more like someone who knows what to do. You fall into this habit of talking to yourself.

The name of your company is an acronym that no longer stands for anything. In India, where the parent company is based, it is illegal to call anything unaffiliated with the government “national.” About this point in particular, the Indian government is exceptionally litigious. The closet between the green room and your cubicle is filled with worn-out fatigues left over from the last contract with the U.S. Army. When the bigwigs are on a call with Mumbai, you rub the fabric between your fingers. It is not synthetic. It is the real thing.

You used to be a promising costume designer: made it to Off-Broadway, became too disaffected to continue. It isn’t that you weren’t as good as you hoped. It is that no one is as good as you imagined.

The subject matter experts provided by the clients dodge your calls and lie to you. One is in the hospital recovering from a massive coronary and is under no circumstances to be disturbed. Another asks that you arrange your content acquisition calls around his daily psychotherapy sessions. A third prefers to communicate by copying and pasting chunks of text from Wikipedia into the bodies of emails. Every SME wants only one thing: to retire. To get rid of you, they need only pretend that what you are asking for does not exist.

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A Non-Orientable Surface

.Reading time 56 minutes.

By Mari Christmas

My husband manages a cheap hotel off the interstate five days a week, and every Wednesday night he visits the community center pool. Some days I meet him there. I like to watch him push the water around. It helps with the arthritis, he says, sculling the surface, making frog legs. He believes I deserve an office job, something that allows me to move between cities while wearing a thin blouse. We hardly speak. This is because of all the guilt. I look out across the pool. Children shiver in wrinkled suits, sucking their hair. Inside, it is airless, hazy, the windows fogged. The water a dark tangle of rope. Even though I cannot see him, I know he is there.

*

After swimming my husband will stay in his small room, equipped with a desk and a plastic lamp, and berate his romantic Romanian pen pal over the phone. He feels the need to give important looks, to demonstrate his rigor over a crowded table, and so forth, even internationally. “If you piss in the corner, I piss in the corner,” he tells her, speaking in English. For two bars of chocolate a month she puts up with all of that. He refuses to learn her language, as he cannot be bothered with the gender of specifics.

Tonight, he comes into the kitchen with the phone saying he wants a son, one he will name Atilla. Atilla? I think. Like Atilla the Hun? I marvel at my attraction to this bareheaded man, whose age has a secure density to it, like a landmark, and how this makes me feel intimately bound to him. “Something that does not weaken the spirit. Nothing that gives him an ironic existence,” he explains to his girlfriend, and then retreats down the hall, padding softly, his shirt untucked. Through the walls I hear him say the name ennobles mankind and something about plundering a northern province. He is never done. He talks and talks. Another blind Milton dictating to his poor daughter. The top of my head says, at least they’re not sleeping together, but I no longer believe in any of that.

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Special Days

.Reading time 15 minutes.

By Scott Koenig

It’s so bright even though the blinds are closed. Streaks of white light gash the wall. The wall Dad painted blue last month. Your favorite color is red but you like blue, too. There’s the humming of lawnmowers in the distance. Open those blinds.

Out there it’s green everywhere.  Up above, it’s blue. There’s a white car in your driveway, too. Not our car, you think. Whose car is that. Green grass down here, around the strange little white car, and blue sky up there. The colors are so pure it kind of hurts.  It’s nice, though. Do your eyes hurt? You could open the window to smell the grass but Dad got mad last time. Up on the hill where green turns into blue are big brown houses. If you squint they look like blobs of oatmeal raisin cookie dough when Mom lines them up on a baking sheet. And between the houses are thin lanes of grass where the older kids go sledding on snow days. The older kids with the colorful backpacks and the best Pokemon cards. Andy said one of the Meyer boys had three holographic Charizards. There’s no way. You aren’t allowed to go sledding on the hill yet. You just got allowed to ride your bike up to the black mailbox. The green mailbox after that is too high, too far up the hill, too dangerous, Mom always says. You know you can do it but you aren’t allowed.  But soon you’ll be allowed to go all the way up – to the top of the hill. Then back down super fast into the coldy sack. Like how the older kids do.

The man across the street is bent over by a bush, the man whose house is white and black and pointy and looks like a castle. He’s bent over by a bush using those big shiny scissors. The scary ones. The kind Dad uses a lot. Is Dad outside?  Look down into your part of the green.  Dad isn’t in your part of the green yet. Maybe later. There’s still the humming. Humming is an outside activity, Mom always says. Sometimes she hums but she does it quieter than you. And mostly outside. Her humming is nicer than lawnmower humming. Especially because when there’s a bunch of different lawnmowers all at once it sounds like buzzing. Like bugs, kind of.

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Bit

.Reading time 5 minutes.

By LaTanya McQueen

Because of her own curiosity she said yes when he asked her to put the bit on him. The bit, or gag, was an iron mask shaped like half a moon with a hook that went around the front of a person’s head. A spiked collar connected to the mask through a lock at the back of the neck.

He collected historical artifacts like these, the iron bit and scold’s bridle women were once punished with wearing, the shackles and chains forced upon slaves, items all from a not-too-distant era. When she asked him why, he told her he had a fascination for history long forgotten.

“Forgotten?” she asked and he shrugged in response.

She was used to men wanting things like this from her, to be blindfolded with her wrists cuffed and legs tied. She’d been expecting a day to come when he’d ask her if she would wear the bit, because hadn’t their relationship been leading up to this? Men, both white and black alike, were always asking in various ways to put her in this position, one of servitude, of serving. They wanted her on her back with her legs spread, body motionless, a mouth open only for moaning or what he’d force in. So many of them held this secret desire within themselves but eventually, with time, they always found a way to tell her.

She picked the bit up. As she felt its weight, she imagined what her fore-bearers must have experienced as the iron was fastened on. “Where did you get this?”

“eBay,” he said. The simplicity of his answer made her laugh. She asked him if it was real.

“I think so. Go ahead. Put it on,” he urged, and she did.

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Roses and Begonias; Or, Things That Can Crush You

.Reading time 40 minutes.

By J.H. Bond

We’re in a bathroom at McDonald’s and it smells like pee and I’m helping my dad put his makeup on. It’s his eyebrows that he struggles the most with. They’re supposed to arc like dark rainbows high up on his forehead. He can’t do them in the mirror—they look like mountains.

“Get ’em even, Mitchell,” Dad tells me, as he kneels down, eye-level.

I’m always drawing pictures. Now I’m drawing one on my dad. His real eyebrows are gone, lost under a mask of white. I give him some new ones with a makeup pencil, then paint the tip of his nose bright red.

He pulls on his stockings. Zips up his yellow-gold jumpsuit. I hand him his giant shoes and ask how come they’re so big. Goofy factor, he says.

He fits on his wig and it blazes like fire.

“How do I look?” he asks me.

“Like a clown,” I say.

*

Dad’s got three parties this afternoon. I count eight kids at the first and I don’t know any of them. Dad’s trying to make a wiener dog balloon and I’m at a table in the corner, drawing pictures of the motel I’ve been living in with my mom.

I sort of hate the kids Dad entertains. He gives this boy with braces the wiener dog balloon and a freckle-faced girl a turtle. They’re all cracking up and happy like Dad’s a good clown, but he’s not. Every time he tries to juggle he splatters an egg. Kids laugh, but still. He can’t do tricks. He doesn’t tell jokes. He just falls down and spills stuff, and slips in the stuff he spilled.

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Sidekicks

.Reading time 49 minutes.

By JP Gritton

I guess you’re wondering how I ended up with a woman like Syrena, in the first place. Truth is, it’s Mike’s fault. He’s the one to blame. Or to thank, I don’t know which. It was Mike Corliss who turned to me on this too-hot afternoon beginning of September. The four of us ought to go out sometime. Double Dutch, I mean. And I remember him smiling at me while my guts turned somersaults.  He was a different man those days, full of piss and vinegar. He had a smart mouth on him, and he wasn’t afraid to use it either, which is why Laughton Starbuck kind of had it out for Mike.

“Where’s your protective eyewear, Corliss?”

“My protective eyewear?”

“That’s what I asked you.”

“My protective eyewear’s protecting the dashboard of Sheldon Cooper’s truck. That’s where I left it this morning.”

Sheldon, he used to call me, ’cause he knew it got on my nerves. To everybody else I was Shelley.

I was just a journeyman carpenter back then. I drove Lij’s truck to work and home every day, give my best friend Mike Corliss a ride. Half the time, he’d forget something on the dash: that blue bandana, that pack of smokes, that pair of goggles.

I guess I looked up to Mike, who was a couple years older than me and besides that had a way about him. He told a story better than anybody I know, though you never knew how much was true and how much he’d half-made up. He told me how a honeybee flies through the rain, missing every drop. He told me nobody’d ever saw a giant squid, but even so scientists know they exist ’cause sometimes, he said, a whale or a shark will wash up on the beach, a great big bite took out of it.

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At Bay

.Reading time 42 minutes.

By Tamar Jacobs

I was chopping peppers when Ronnie came home. I’d been thinking to go to Safeway to see if there were any open bags of candy I could take from, or maybe walk down to the water to feed my birds, but then I saw him and all those ideas went up like smoke from my head. I hadn’t seen him in two years. He got out of the car and stepped into the sun, one whole big part of his skin a new lake of blue. I saw later up close it was all made of little tattoos lifting and blending together, but from behind my side of the kitchen window that day, it looked like he’d been afflicted with some kind of blue sickness. Down his arm and up his neck and some up on his forehead right above his eyebrows and a little trickle from just one eye. He’d gone away, got dipped in color and come back. I found this extraordinary and mysterious, and it kept me up at night thinking about it, touching my own skin wondering what it might feel like to go blue.

After Ms. Eva got done bumping into everything around her with her car like always when she parks, and they slammed their doors closed and went inside her house, I squeezed my eyes shut and chopped as fast as I could, felt tiny sharp prickles of cold pepper water punching into my fingers. I could not look down, because if I did the pepper water became the licking tongues of snakes trying to kiss me away from my knife, trying to slither out from under the blade I was hacking on them with. But as hard as I could I refused to see and they gave up moving and I heard Ms. Rose roll over the loud spring on the couch and I tried even harder because I could not let her hear me chopping in a crazy-sounding way or she would know I’d been skipping pills again. I would not feel sorry about those snakes. Would not, would not, no, I told myself.

I would not then, but when I sleep, I can’t stay as careful about my thoughts as when I am awake. That night while I slept feelings began to creep in about those snakes I killed. They were just being themselves. Being snakes. And there I had been chopping them to pieces trying to pretend I thought they were peppers.

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マ I 克 (ma-i-ke)

.Reading time 9 minutes.

By Warren Decker

Mike came to Japan because he was tired of being Mike. He was the only guy in the dorm who would never take lime Jell-O vodka shots, and would get mad if his roommate woke him up— stumbling drunk through the door, and turning on the florescent light, before passing out snoring in the lower bunk, fully clothed, wearing shoes filthy with mud and wet grass clippings from the university lawns. Mike would climb down from his top bunk and turn off the light but he could never get back to sleep, and his morning study routine would be disrupted.

Mike preferred Chinese characters to people, specifically the kanji characters used in Japan. He had already worked his way through the bright red “First 500 Kanji Workbook,” and was halfway through the light blue “500-1000 Kanji Workbook,” while some of the other freshmen were still struggling with the phonetic hiragana characters. His teachers praised his diligence, but for Mike it was very simple: he preferred Chinese characters to his roommate but he also preferred Chinese characters to Mike. If he spent an hour carefully memorizing the stroke order of a kanji like 鬱, then Mike—with all his doubts, his unfounded sadnesses, and fears—would be somewhere far away.

In his junior year, he arrived at Kyoto University as マイク (ma-i-ku). When people spoke, he could quickly associate the syllables of sound with a specific kanji, and decipher the meaning within a few seconds. The other exchange students were still fumbling around with “ohayo gozaimasu.” Within a month マイク had lost his virginity in his single-occupancy dorm room with Reika, an English major, who wore huge sunglasses and had long hair that was dyed a dark shade of reddish-brown.

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At the Edge of Everything

.Reading time 47 minutes.

By Traci Skuce

For the past hour, Alli had been sitting against the small oak, her eighteen-month-old son latched to her breast. His molars had finally—thank God—broken through, and now he suckled, cheeks sticky and eyes lolling with pleasure. Alli had hoped another mom would show up. Jeannie was off visiting her parents in Vancouver and Clay, well he was just plain off, so she hadn’t had an adult conversation in days. She wanted someone, anyone, to gab with about the impossibility of lost sleep, errant husbands, and teething. But there were only the crows, waddling around the rim of a garbage can, diving in for pizza crusts then flying off across the playground to the giant cedar.

Alli’s daughter, Tavia, looked at the birds from under her floppy sunhat, and then dumped a handful of sand onto an accumulating pile, patted it down. Alli mimed eating, mumbled yum-yum as she had been since they’d arrived. “Do you like it Mommy?” Without waiting for an answer, Tavia ran back to the production center beneath the slide.

Jack continued suckling. Both breasts were drained and she’d become a giant pacifier. His eyelids fluttered and his blond feathery hair stuck to his forehead, ear crusted with milk and peanut butter. She picked at it, and he swatted her, still sucking hard. Enjoy them while they’re young, people said, but she couldn’t wait to toss these days onto the slag heap of motherhood.

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