SToRK Spring 2015
Volume 19
STORK
SPRING 2015 VOLUME 19
Stork Magazine is a fiction journal published by undergraduate students at Emerson College. Initial submissions are workshopped and discussed with the authors, and stories are accepted based on the quality of the author’s revisions. The process is designed to guide writers through rewriting and provide authors and staff members editorial support and an understanding of the editorial and publishing process. Stork is founded on the idea of communication between writers and editors— not a simple letter of rejection or acceptance. We accept submissions from undergraduate and graduate Emerson students in any department. Work may be submitted at stork.submittable.com during specified submission periods. Stories should be in 12-point type, double-spaced, and must not exceed 4 pages for the “short shorts” issue or 30 pages for the longer issue. Authors retain all rights upon publication. For questions about submissions, email storkstory@gmail.com Stork accepts staff applications at the beginning of each fall semester. We are looking for undergraduate students who are well-read in contemporary fiction and have a good understanding of the short story form. Copyright © 2015 Stork Magazine Cover photograph by Allison Singer Cover model: Rachel McKeen Clip art courtesy of Dover Publications Printed and bound by Shawmut Printing, Danvers, MA
MASTHEAD Editor-in-Chief Allison Singer
Faculty Adviser John Skoyles
Managing Editors Sarina Clement Maria DiPasquale
Head Designer Emily Pfaff
Readers Prose Editors Kelsey Aijala Gabby Balza Kayla Cottingham Christopher Calhoun Nikki LaSalla Kaylee Mizell-Anzick Mary Kate McGrath Richie Wheelock Michael Moccio Kelly Nolte Head Copy Editor Faith Ryan Kelly Nolte Sarah Samel Copy Editors Kaylan Scott Kayla Cottingham Tricia Sullivan Michael Moccio Kyla Taub Faith Ryan
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR You hold in your hands the culmination of one hell of a semester. Though it’s technically spring, as I write this it’s still snowing, and snow has no business being here now that 2014–2015 has broken the record for snowiest Boston winter ever. The city shut down, Emerson canceled classes, and Stork didn’t hold a workshop for four weeks in a row. On top of that, we recieved nearly as many stories in the last week (23) as we did in the entire rest of the submission period (25). For a while, it seemed like we weren’t going to have a lit mag. I am honored and privileged to have spent my last semester at Emerson working with 19 passionate, hard-working, and frankly brilliant staff members, including Stork’s unstoppable managing editors Sarina Clement and Maria DiPasquale and endlessly creative head designer Emily Pfaff; with our invaluable faculty adviser John Skoyles; our flawless design consultant Tanya Wlodarczyk; and, of course, the 10 exceptional writers whose “short shorts” are featured in this issue. Their stories are gorgeous, moving, and thematically and technically diverse examples of flash fiction. They are best enjoyed while stretched out on a blanket in the grass, shoes off, legs bare to the sun—because this is our “short shorts” issue and, technically, it’s spring.
CON T E N T S 1 7 9 13 15 19 23 29 31 35
Barefoot Mile Rachel Cantor
Favors Holly Kirkman
Ninety-Three Pencils Julia Domenicucci
Mother Lion Flees the War Richie Wheelock The Place Where I Start Jess Waters
Wiscasset, Maine, Aug. 24 Emily Anderson Cut & Fade Oscar Mancinas
Trading Secrets Holly Kirkman
Undertow Kaylee Mizell-Anzick Soften Danny LeMar
RACHEL CANTOR
BAREFOOT MILE On Monday, your friends dare you to run the Barefoot Mile. You’re hesitant, because you think you might be a little old for this by now, but they yell “Go, Eva,” and so you do. You’ve never run the Mile before, because you were always the chubby younger sibling, but your sister has graduated and your legs have grown long and slender this year. You shed your backpack, your cell phone. You kick off your too-small sneakers and grin, even though you know this is stupid and will make you late for school. It’s almost summer and it doesn’t really matter anyway. The Barefoot Mile is an old tradition. Maybe your parents did this once too. You’re supposed to run until you touch the sign that says you’re Now Leaving the City of Detroit: Come Back Soon. The first quarter mile isn’t too hard. It’s morning; the sky is pink as the sun rises. You turn past the only bend in the road, and when you’re sure your friends can’t see you anymore you slow down a bit and catch your breath. Nobody’s 1
driving out here. This route was closed off years ago due to disrepair, though drivers sometimes steer past the crumbling barricades and use it as a shortcut. You know this place almost as well as your own neighborhood. These empty streets are part of your walk to school each day. Two blocks over from the highway is Ford Street, with the abandoned warehouse that you know to avoid— people shoot up in there. You and your friends have spent summers sneaking under the old bridge, and your sister ran the Barefoot Mile here. Back then, you waited at the barricades with the other kids and watched her sprint back to you, her face flushed and triumphant. Now it’s your Mile, and you run with the unkempt grass beneath your bare feet, on the edge of the closed highway. The lanes are painted on one thick strip of asphalt and separated by rusted steel rails. You feel a little sting every time you step on something, but you don’t look down at your feet, just in case there’s blood. Just before the Detroit sign is the bridge. There’s something of a superstition about crossing it, or maybe it’s just a plain old safety risk. You don’t cross it; instead, you take a deep breath and carefully jog down the ravine to the riverbanks below. The river has dried up; it’s been that way for as long as you can remember. Under the overpass, the old banks burst with tall grass and wild flowers—Queen Anne’s lace. White, delicate, regal; still a weed. The tall black pillars that hold up the bridge are sprayed with hasty graffiti, layers thick. The paint is thickest near the base of the pillars, thinning out into multicolored dashes as the concrete stretches up beyond arms’ reach. This is one of your favorite places. A boy kissed you here when you were both ten. It was as sweet and as 2
awkward as you all were then—and still are now, a little bit, even though you desperately laugh that those days are over. You do see memories, as you stand under the bridge in the phantom stream—but you see something else too. It’s lying on the ground by the opposite side of the overpass. A car wreck. You hesitate, but it pulls you to it with that rubberneck spell of the grotesque. You slow to a cautious walk, crossing through the broken bottles that sparkle dangerously in the grass. The car clearly drove off the bridge and landed here. It is a small silver car, upside down. In the movies you’ve seen, accidents are always on fire, with sirens screaming. In this reality, there’s only sunlight glinting off battered metal; only the quiet rush of blood and adrenaline through your head. An overturned bug, squashed. Maybe it’s something like a shipwreck, a relic of the old river. No—you’ve never seen it here before. You move closer to the car, and then you see the people inside. There are three. They are all very pale, their skin blending into the white airbags that surround them. They must still be wearing their seat belts, because they’re suspended upside down against the crushed roof. Their arms dangle both down and up—their up, your down—in unconscious surrender. You hold the father’s hand first. It’s warm, and you’re glad; had it been cold, you might have screamed. Instead, the warmth of his skin calms you, even though you can smell alcohol from his body. He’s in the passenger seat. His head is bent at an odd angle, like it got shoved up into the roof and snapped. There isn’t a pulse. You feel numb, nauseous. The baby in the backseat doesn’t have a pulse either, even though 3
you check the tiny wrists and both sides of the soft, broken neck in case the veins are too small for your trembling fingers to feel life. No, they’re both dead. The people. The bodies. The corpses. You try to swallow, but your throat’s dried up, like the river. You’ve never seen death before, and you’re afraid of being afraid. The mother takes quick, shallow breaths. She smells like alcohol, too. You’ve only ever smelled that on your mother’s lips when she kissed you goodnight the night she lost her own mother. You were only five, and you barely remember Grandma, but you remember the way drunk smelled. It makes you think of your mother crying. The mother’s eyes are shut and her fair hair hangs off her scalp, straight and weightless, away from the steering wheel in front of her. The windshield has shattered inwards. A blade of glass has sliced her throat open, and you feel the wound bleeding fast. Your own pulse races. It’s too much. Your whole body is shaking. You see a cell phone in the mother’s jeans pocket. You take it—still warm from her body—and the screen springs to life. To bypass the lock code, you press “EMERGENCY.” A streak of blood lingers where your fingers touched. Then you stop. You put the phone back in the mother’s pocket. You’re only 15, but you have a terrifying vision that 15 years from now, you would want and deserve this too. You’re not sure if what you’re doing is cruelty or mercy or both. You force yourself to stop shaking and stand up tall. The idea of prayer occurs to you, but so do curse words that you could scream. You won’t cry. 4
You look back through the dead stream’s wildflowers to the place where you were standing before. You close your eyes and open them again, as if you could force everything to be a dream, to make sense. It doesn’t work; you can’t wake up from this, and neither can they. You don’t turn back to the path of the Barefoot Mile. Instead, you climb the side of the ravine up to the bridge. You look down at your feet; they are sliced open with long scratches, as though claws have clutched at them from beneath the ground. You start to run again, not back to your friends, but on into the red sunrise. Your breath is ragged, and you don’t want to think. You cross the bridge and pass the sign without touching it, even as it scolds and pleads with you to see reason and come back soon. You ignore the pain—at least, you try to. You’ve left the Barefoot Mile somewhere in your immediate yet unreachable past, and you’ve left Detroit. All you want is to keep running away and never stop. Your hands are wet with blood.
5
HOLLY KIRKMAN
FA VO R S At the information desk, they ask if she is the girlfriend or the wife. She worries that they won’t let her in if the answer is “Neither,” so she says “Girlfriend,” because it seems the less committal of the two; because it is a bit more concise an answer than “Really, we don’t even know each other—he’s just a friend of a friend who moved my couch up a couple flights of stairs. He probably just sent me this text by accident.” As the desk attendant makes a phone call, she re-reads his message: Please come to the ER, I’m alone and I need you. Though she’s been told numerous times that she’s awful at lying, worthless at sympathy, his words echo through her, I’m alone, I need you, and when she hears the attendant say, “Oh, it’s that poor guy whose bike got hit by a cab,” she wonders who she would call if she’d been in an accident, if she was mugged, if she was hurt and alone—would anyone come? Now the automatic doors buzz open and she hurries through the examination wing but isn’t sure what the rush is—it’s not 7
like he’s dying—until she pulls back a curtain and finds him, gone on too much Percocet and hyperventilating, his arm in a cast. Here is her last chance to turn around, to catch a taxi and go home, but when he sees her his expression melts into tearful relief, and all that is left for her to do is take his unbroken left hand with her right and stroke his grubby sweater as he buries his face in her shoulder, whispering Thank you, thank you, I’m sorry.
8
JULIA DOMENICUCCI
N I N E T Y- T H R E E PENCILS She had the type of hair things got stuck in. Pens and pencils, mostly, but also thumbtacks, leaves and twigs, hair elastics, gum wrappers, gum. Most of it appeared in her dense, auburn curls from the hands of teasing classmates. In elementary school, she cried; in middle school, she laughed; in high school, she made it a challenge. How many pencils will fit today? Both classmates and teachers loved the distraction. Usually the items in question were quickly removed, but—too often—she would end the days perched on the edge of her bed, finger-combing out small burrs and pen caps or—on bad days—cutting herself free from carefully directed gum wads she hadn’t found until then. Her hair was so long and thick and it felt like hours each time. Comb, remove, comb, remove. Sigh. Sleep. Later—after she mastered the art of copious handfuls of gel and those around her realized spitting into people’s hair was, at best, rude—her hair attracted something different. 9
Some men would run cigarette-scented fingers through it at bars; others would pointedly ask her why she didn’t straighten it and try to tug a strand into submission. The best men were the ones who let themselves be drawn in but then ignored the obvious, acknowledging her waist-length curls only in comfortable, intimate moments. The best man was the worst, she knew that now. He had close-shaven hair and they met in her first management class, where he offered to coach her and help give her presence more gravity. Where his lessons failed to stick she let his soft compliments burrow. Each holiday he brought her a single rose, tucking it carefully behind her left ear so she could carry it around all day. He learned to braid so he could help perfect her Pippi Longstocking Halloween costume. When he chewed gum, which was often, he transformed the wrappers into flowers, cranes, and stars. She took those from home and scattered them around her cubicle—little glints of him everywhere. When he asked to move in with her, she said yes without thinking about it. One day, as he slumped on their couch taking notes for his thesis, he reached over, shoved his pencil into a tight curl by her ear. He asked how many pencils she could fit in those curls, and they learned the answer was ninety-three. A week later, exhausted from work, she declined to edit his latest pages. He twisted metallic gum wrappers into an elaborate rose, secured it behind her left ear and asked her to wear it all day. The wrapper edges dug into the skin behind her ear like thorns. Yet he still carefully extracted the elastics that snarled in her hair after hours at work. He began to buy common bouquets on special occasions, a dozen roses he 10
then dumped into a water bottle. For Christmas, he gifted a hair straightener, one of the cheap ones that seem likely to light hair on fire. He’d always wondered, he said, and she tried it that night as he watched. It took four hours and still her hair curled. He yelled if she spoke impatiently. She was impatient more often. She had been impatient with him that evening, and he replaced curses and volume with an open palm. Jumping away had been a mistake: anger turned the slap into a grab. She touches the sore spot on her head. It is just shredded scalp above her temple. She feels the pulse, which until recently was forcing quite a lot of blood from the wound. She remembers seeing him throw the fistful of hair, with bloody roots, onto the carpet outside their apartment door as he stormed off. Picking up his razor, she turns it on. The whir is not comforting. She grabs a fistful, a smaller fistful than he could, and positions the electric blades at the base. Slice, remove, slice, remove. Sigh. Sleep.
11
RICHIE WHEELOCK
MOTHER LION FLEES THE WAR She sees one of the fighting men appear on the horizon. Booms in the distance send tremors like currents through the steppe. She blinks. Although the man has his back to the river, her whole body stays bristled and coiled. More fighting men soon arrive. Their battling clogs the breeze with sweat, with the chatter of dust, with running under the sun. Another blood-fire boom makes her flinch and turn away. Her four cubs are pressing their bellies into the ground near her haunch. They have pelts the color of the riverbed. Her youngest cub is licking blood from his paw. She stares at him, a snarl rolling across her snout, until another boom pulls her gaze back to the rise. Men are now streaming towards the river, some with fire on their skin, some clawing at sunset-colored wounds. She sees the hill has been reduced to chunks of charred earth. Land and sky are indistinguishable in such heavy smoke. The men and their booms rip through every line. 13
She stands with a warning growl. The cubs spring up after her, sandy bodies unbound, but the youngest cub is dragging his paw. In one swift motion, she scoops him into her jaws and drops him in the river—he sinks, weeping. She lingers for only a moment, watching as the three remaining cubs make circles between her and the water. Then they all slip invisible into the grass.
14
JESS WATERS
THE PLACE WHERE I S TA R T I . JU DG M EN T We crossed the town line into Judgment, Illinois a few hours after dark. I was on the passenger’s side with my boots on the dashboard, listening to the acoustic guitar rattle in its case while the car bumped and groaned against the cracked pavement. I’d tuned out John’s talking a while ago. “This is the place where philosophy starts,” he was saying. “In the front seat of your Honda CR-V?” I asked, eyes focused on the dead trees rolling by on each side of the highway. In Judgment, Illinois? “No,” he said, like I hadn’t spoken at all. “In aporia. It’s Greek. It means ‘to know that one does not know.’ To question all of your assumptions.” I wished, not for the first time, that I was anywhere but here. “I assumed we’d be in Springfield by now,” I said, watching a truck pass us on the left, its lonely taillights glowing in the dark of Friday night–turned–Saturday morning. The 15
dashboard clock was broken, so I didn’t know how many hours it had been since we left Chicago after John played a gig in some bar that hadn’t even bothered to card me. He’d brought me along like I was his kid sister, and just like a kid sister he didn’t speak to or smile at me where others might see him. But in the car it was just us. He smiled, never taking his eyes off the road. “See, that’s what I’m talking about. You assume that Springfield’s ahead of us, but on what proof ? You can’t see the city, or hear it, or smell it,” he said. “You assume that this car runs on gasoline, rather than fairy dust, and that gasoline and fairy dust are different things. You assume I’m not a robot. That you’re not dreaming. That this isn’t some big computer simulation you only think is reality.” I thought about that for a minute. “It’d have to be a pretty big computer.” “That’s another assumption.” “You’re a better guitar player than you are philosopher,” I said, and then we both were quiet until we passed out of Judgment again. I I . T E M P E R AN C E “They call it a shot because in the Old West cowboys could trade a bullet for a little glass of whiskey,” John said, holding his own little glass up to the light. “Trade and barter system.” He drank what was in the glass and didn’t make a face. John was the only one who bothered with a real glass— Zach, Peter, and I all used plastic. John had said drinking with his roommates would be better than drinking alone. But
16
we wouldn’t be alone, I’d said, but the look he gave me made me wish I hadn’t said anything at all. “I didn’t know that,” I said, slow and stupid. My head swam and my cheeks were warm and numb. I wore John’s faded University of Illinois Springfield sweatshirt, the one he’d given me the first night we’d spent together. I knew he’d been a student here once, but it was hard to imagine him sitting next to Peter or me in the lecture hall, or going to one of Zach’s lacrosse games. Hard to imagine him doing homework. To know that one does not know. “Man, things must have been so much better back then,” said Zach, from the couch. “Cowboys got laid, like, all the time.” He was looking at me. “All you care about is fucking,” Peter moped. The barter system didn’t work for Peter, so he’d paid for all his shots in cash. He swayed a little where he sat. “All anyone at this whole goddamn school cares about is fucking.” John laughed—a good laugh—and clapped Peter on the shoulder. “It’s evolution, my friend. We take every chance we get to eject one hundred million copies of our DNA hoping one of them makes it on to eject itself all over again.” Zach was still looking at me, but John didn’t seem to notice. “The drive to reproduce is what makes us alive.” I stood up, knocking my empty cup to the floor. “If you ask me,” I said, “I’d rather have the bullet.” I I I . JU S T I C E I couldn’t see him in the dark, but I could feel John’s warm breath on the back of my neck. He was curled around me like
17
a child even though I was younger than him. Neither of us was asleep. “It wasn’t fair,” I whispered. “It wasn’t fair what you did.” “What did I do?” I thought of the gig, the bar in Chicago, and how he’d let another woman buy him a $6 whiskey and how he’d traded her a smile for it. I thought about cracking under the weight of a billion years of evolution and about Peter, sick to death of fucking. I thought of Zach insisting things must have been better once. This isn’t the Old West, I wanted to say. I wanted to say a lot of things. “That doesn’t mean anything,” he said before I could say anything at all. I jerked away from him, propping myself up on one elbow. “Yes it does,” I hissed. “You can’t just say it doesn’t.” He didn’t say anything to that. “I could leave you,” I choked out, my hands balling into fists. “I could.” “Would that be fair?” I hit him once. The palm of my hand slapped against his bare skin. In the dark, I couldn’t see if it left a mark. I was crying. I beat my hands against his chest while he wrapped his arms around me and pulled me close. I could, I could, I could.
18
EMILY ANDERSON
WISCASSET MAINE AUG. 24 He slaps the fish down on the flat jetty rock where we sit, cold splatter coming off its body and spraying my bent knees. It snaps back and forth, writhing and twitching and muddying the smooth brown stone. “What kind?” he asks. “Trout?” A guess. I’ve only ever seen ones like this at the fish market, ones with the whole body intact. Even at the regular grocer’s they cut them up into fillets, make you—let you— forget about the scales and the bones and the eyes. “Trout!” He laughs with his throat and shakes his head, pleased, I think. “Trout’s a freshwater fish. This is a mackerel—a fat one.” Its gills expand wide, exposing a deep pink gash before quickly collapsing back against the seashell-underside body. Scared. I know the popular image—fish gape—but looking at its angular frown and eyes staring at nothing, I can’t 19
attribute its expression to mere blankness. His hands come down against the length of its body and it furiously struggles against his grip, against the rocks, leaning as far as it can toward the sea. And about his hands—they suddenly look small. Before, they were unfathomable, immeasurable against the fishing pole, against the brim of his hat as he adjusted it, against my own, but they shrunk somewhere before pinning down the mackerel. Veins pop out on the backs of them as he restrains the fish and they’re more realistic, far less impressive. “Look away. Look behind you.” I don’t question it. He will undoubtedly make me watch at least some of it, the part he considers most important, most suitable for someone of my sensibility. Inexplicably, this is how he figures we ought to spend our brief reunion: knees smeared with dirt, and sand, and rocks covered in blood, with the sun beating down on our pale, bare backs. “Paid enough for all your school bills and I still have to teach you something when you’re grown—can you believe that?” A small beachgoer darts behind us, pat pat pat pat, thick and quiet on the rocks. I meet her eyes only to acknowledge and affirm her instinct to keep space. Tiny brown legs, tiny orange swimsuit flits by. Fingers spread to keep her balance as she leaps from boulder to boulder. Two more—pat pat— and she passes. “Okay,” he says. I look back to see him holding his knife. The head is gone. Two gulls dip their heads in and out of the water down below.
20
A blade that I have only ever seen used to peel potatoes and cut twine disappears into soft white underbelly. I hear a sound like a boot pulling from mud, then a deep pop from somewhere inside. The midday sun that burns my neck lights up the stomach as it’s cracked open, split wide, a gash trailing from headless end to fanned tail. I watch as he rakes his fingers down the crack, piling them up with the red and the blue and the black. His hands go back to striking me as godlike. “I thought fish were white.” He breathes fast through his nose. “At the store, sure.” He flicks the guts down the side of the jetty, slapping them onto the sides of the stone. They slide back into the sea, where a trail of mackerels mindlessly shoots by just underneath the surface. “They don’t got beaches where you went to, huh?” he asks. “No.” Tiny spleen and liver and gut, each the size of a thumbnail, are plucked out and tossed mindlessly over his shoulder. The gulls carry on flapping, squawking. “Doesn’t do a person any good to be that far from water. Hand me the canteen.” I pass over an oversized plastic bottle wrapped in canvas— the “canteen”—and he dumps salt water over the sinew and rough skin, sliding it off to reveal a shimmering inside. Pristine. Layers of off-white flesh bloom from the spine, overlapping into lines like pinnate veins. He makes no effort to wash the blood from his hands. It thinly veils his splotches and marks, damage sustained from
21
years of mistreatment, sun exposure on days like this. I worry, being his spitting image, that mine will wither in such a way. “My head is getting hot. I’m going in the water.” “Come back in time for dinner,” he says, not looking up, his face hidden underneath the brim of his hat as he holds the cadaver open, gazing down. “What are we eating?” Another quick exhale. “Mackerel.”
22
OSCAR MANCINAS
C U T & FA D E It was 110 degrees outside, but I was barely sweating by the time I got to Alex’s. He answered the door in a pair of baggy basketball shorts and nothing else. It was about 2 p.m. I’d moved away for school and stayed away for work—and for my girlfriend—but I always ended up coming back to Phoenix at least once a year, almost always in the summer. It’d been a good while, though, and once I knew I was coming to visit I held off on getting a haircut, because no one knows how to cut my hair the way my cousin does. “All right, dogg,” Alex said, wiping sleep from his eyes. “How do you want it?” “Same as always, cuz.” I took off my shirt and sat down on his toilet. “Two on the sides and fade it in with the scissors up top.” Alex started with the left side of my head, the clippers struggling to get through the thick hair I’d cultivated over the past months. Actually, I’d fought with Sara on whether 23
I should cut it once I was home. I told her it was a tradition and that Alex, even though he’s only three years older than I am, had given me haircuts since I was seven. She didn’t get it, though; to her, me with a fade wasn’t me—at least not the me she knew. “So how you been, man?” The left side of my head felt cooler already. I could feel it breathe, and part of me wanted to stop right then and go outside to feel the hot breeze roll across my head. “I’ve been all right.” His words were muffled and distorted by the buzz-humming so close to my ear. “Work at the hotel is slow right now, but that’s always how it is. No one’s stupid enough to visit AZ in the summer, you know?” I wanted to say something. I didn’t. I paused and let the moment swell until Alex moved to the right side of my head and had been working at it for a bit. “Except me, though, right?” I forced a laugh, lobbed it into the air. Alex, thankfully, caught it. “True,” he chuckled. “But that’s different, you know?” He motioned for me to turn so he could move to the back of my head. “You come back from time to time for the fam. You come back ’cause this is your home. These tourist-ass people, you know? The old farts: they don’t come for anything, really. They don’t come from anywhere, either, you know?” My chin was pressed to my chest, but I mustered an “uh huh.” “Like,” he went on, “I’ve been workin’ at the hotel since I was fifteen, right? And I’ve been seeing the same fuckin’ people come through every year.” He turned off the machine, and I felt he wanted me to face him, but I couldn’t face him and pretended to have hair in my eye. “C’mon, AZ ain’t even 24
that cool of a place, really. Plus. if you’ve got money to blow, you’ve got free time to just go anywhere for a month. You wanna leave that shitty place you call home, why don’t you just move to a place you’ll never wanna leave? That makes sense, no?” He banged his clippers against the wall, but he did so in rhythm: da-da da-da da-da! It’d jammed from all my hair. Did what he was saying make sense? I’d never liked the tourists who came to Arizona in the winter, either, but were their lives so empty? He blew into his machine and hair sprayed out like black dust. I thought about Sara and me, and how we’d been planning to leave Maine for most, if not all, of next January. She really wanted to go to Mexico and I really wanted her to be happy, but I was uneasy about going to Mexico—where my grandmother lived for all of her ninety years, where both my parents dreamed they too would die—as a tourist. “All right, lemme fade you in.” Alex didn’t notice, or he noticed but didn’t mind, that I wasn’t saying much. He faded in both sides and the back and touched it all up with a straight razor. Neither of us spoke. Once he sprayed the rest of my head with water and started trimming the top with scissors, the absence of the machine was too much for me and I had to interrupt it. “So you think you’ll stay in Arizona your whole life, then?” “Nah.” He didn’t flinch, didn’t pause. He’d lived here his whole life; he’d never finished high school and he’d shown about as much ambition as a fly drowning in syrup. Where the hell did he think he could go? 25
He snipped with subtle rhythm, not at all interested in elaborating. I felt like he’d come at me, though, so I went at him: “But, like, where would you even go? Have you thought about it?” This would make him think, make him realize, that not all of us had the luxury of being dreamless. Some of us were compelled to get the hell out of our crappy, dead-end hometowns. I knew early on that I didn’t want to die here. I was aware that could happen, if I let my guard down, at any moment. The snipping stopped. Over my right shoulder, I thought I could feel Alex stunned, paralyzed. He was searching, for the first time ever, I was sure, for the words. Words to explain away his lack of action, his lack of thought. He’d search for an eternal minute before realizing that they weren’t there. They weren’t there and they never would be. “You wanna go to a show tonight?” “What?” I turned, sure I’d misheard. Alex was looking at his phone. He’d stopped cutting to attend to his social life? “One of my homies from work has a brother who runs this underground open mic battle. I’ve been goin’ for a while now, and I’m on the shortlist to rap tonight.” I’d been slapped with friendliness, and I woulda felt guilty if I wasn’t so enraptured by what Alex was saying. “Uh…” The sweat on my face dragged pieces of hair down my cheek. Alex looked at me with promise. “I know rap ain’t really your thing, but if you’re around tonight you should check it out. I go by The Aztech.” He pounded his bare chest and laughed. 26
“Ye—yeah, I’ll come. Just let me know what time and where, I guess.” He smiled. “Word! Now lemme finish trimming you up so you can look right. You know there’s always lotsa cute ladies at these shows, huh?” I shook my head and laughed a little. He laughed, too, and said, “I’m just playin’. I know you have a girlfriend. How’s she been, by the way? Man, how have you been?” I looked down and saw months of growth scattered over the already dirty bathroom floor. I tried to take a deep breath, but my chest wouldn’t let me take in any more air, so I let it out. “I’ve been all right. Sara’s good too. Wanna hear something funny? She didn’t want me to cut my hair.” Alex tapped the scissors against his plastic comb. One, two, three. “Say what? That’s no good, dogg. People gotta let people be them, no?” I was back: me and my cousin just talking like family. It was enough to make me cry, but I didn’t. “You’ve always been the smart one, though, so I bet you got a view of everything, you know? Me? I just need to keep hustlin’. A ver que pasa, you know?” And I did.
27
28
HOLLY KIRKMAN
TRADING SECRETS He puts his pint glass down on my linoleum counter and pulls me to him by the belt loops of my ripped jeans and kisses my throat, my collarbone, my earlobe, murmuring drunkenly about wanting to know all my secrets, so I wrap my arms around his shoulders and admit I sometimes have sex with my roommate, but this is a trading game and it is his turn, so he traces the seams of my back pockets and says he got thrown out of high school for selling drugs, and I run my fingers over his spine and explain how I get sad and steal makeup and vitamins from drugstores, and he slips his hands underneath the lace waistband of my underwear and tells me he has a son, a toddler he’s never met, and with his erection pressing through his Levi’s against my belly I imagine a child in elastic-waist pants and Velcro boots jumping into puddles of melted snow while a tired young redhead trudges behind, and it isn’t right, it can’t be right because I am too young to be a mother and he is too drunk to be a father, but I look up 29
into those eyes that say Betcha can’t top that one and know that after another few drinks it won’t matter anymore. When he is on top of me, I close my eyes so I won’t wonder if his son has his face.
30
KAYLEE MIZELL-ANZICK
UNDERTOW “The thing you have to worry about most,” Eric’s mother told him before he swam out on his own, “is the undertow. You’ve got to keep looking back to the beach to make sure you can see us here. You have to keep moving back towards me and your father. Otherwise, the undertow will push you down along the coast.” As he waded out into the water, Eric imagined a great toe, gigantic and turning in the water beneath him. The water deepened around him, rising to his chest, so he began to swim. He imagined the toe created the currents, that it was the tip of the foot of some ancient sea god long buried under the waves and the sand. The toe’s nail was stained yellow, and between the nail and the rough skin was a caked-on layer of black dirt, a collection of all the forgotten things that had drifted down to the bottom of the ocean—chipping plastic necklaces, bottle caps, small yellow shovels, objects lost to the sea long ago. Embedded also in the dirt were fish skeletons, 31
old brittle seashells, ocean debris, the remnants of life. For a moment, Eric plunged his face under the water and opened his eyes despite the saltiness. He looked around, hoping to see the toe, but it must have been too far out or too far down in the blackness because all he saw were some passing fish. He pulled his face back out of the water and enjoyed the mixed feeling of damp and sun on his face. Swiping some water out of his eyes, he felt the brief sting of salt granules grating against his skin, and it was a pleasant sort of pain. A crab exoskeleton floating on the water nudged against Eric’s hand. For a moment, he studied it, thinking it might be a piece broken off from the toe, but he found it to be crinkly and fragile, just a shell of the creature it once had grown around. He swatted at it as he swam out further, and it drifted away from him, traveling towards the beach the way that he had come. It was Eric’s first time going out into the deeper waters on his own. Bitter ocean water scraped against his legs as he kicked his way through the little bobbing waves, his hands draped over the boogie board floating in front of him. The water seemed deeper than it truly was. At the same depth, a grown man would still have had at least his shoulders outside of the water. But Eric was not a grown man. He had just turned eight. And the water was deeper than any he had experienced before. Eric loved the ocean, but as he had grown, it had lost some of its mystery. He remembered the previous summer when his father and grandfather had swum out with him to a sandbar. It had been like a dream, and maybe it really was a dream remembered as reality. The water had seemed to rise 32
periodically in columns, and the surface was so calm, like you could walk on it for years. Out in the water, Eric floated and breathed and tried to pretend that he had once been a sea creature too. He imagined himself as a dolphin, diving to the ocean floor and then rushing up to the surface for quick breaths of air. The toe would push him then, he thought. It surely would push him into the water and out of the water, and he would swim circularly, compelled by its inevitable movements. A flash of memory struck Eric, and he recalled his mother’s warning. He looked back over the slowly shifting sea towards his mother and father on the shore and was comforted to see them exactly where he had left them. Then, sitting on the skin of the water, a shape came towards Eric. It was small, shriveled, bobbing. He kicked out to it, drew it towards him in the water. He slid his small hand into the water underneath it, controlling the way it moved. At first glance, it seemed a piece of driftwood, porous and rotting, but on second glance, it was not that at all. It was a toe, perfectly severed and somehow left alone by the sea birds. Eric had never seen something so wonderful in all his life. It was even more wonderful than the sandbar. It was, in miniature, just what he imagined the giant toe would look like—smeared with dirt and boasting one chipped, yellow nail. And Eric did not scream; he did not cry. He was confused, but this did not frighten him. Quiet, he watched the toe blip up and down in front of him, and, overcome by a wide and irresistible, toothy smile, he wondered what his mother would think of this treasure from the sea. 33
DANNY LEMAR
SOFTEN I’m beginning to grow restless with his arm wrapped around my neck. It’s not constricting or anything, not cutting off my breathing, not really imposing. It’s just heavy. It’s a thick slab of muscle, bone, and flesh, all weighing down on me. I can feel his pulse, pumping blood through a maze of veins, and my pulse is on a completely different rhythm. The beats grow louder and louder, echoing in my ear, and I know I’m far from falling asleep. It’s been almost two hours since I invited him to sleep over, a mere murmur in the midst of all of those moans, so quiet that I didn’t think he actually heard me. It was the polite thing to do, what you’re supposed to do when someone is on top of you—“protocol”—right? He had my bottom lip in his mouth and his hands on the back of my head, his curious fingers worming through my hair. They were soft, definitely moisturized after a shower, which I read in a magazine is healthy for the skin. I tried to copy what he was doing, my 35
uncoordinated, mummy-dry hands cupping the hard back of his head. I worried that I was holding him too hard. (Is it even possible to hold someone too hard?) I worried that my lips tasted sour with saliva, that my armpits reeked of sweat, that it looked like I didn’t know what I was doing. Worry after worry after worry ran through my head, and he kept moving, kept feeling, kept exploring. His hands inched south like there was something to be discovered down there, something to be had. He located spots that made me arch, spine curving and head rolling, jaw unbolting and mouth shuddering into a wide O. It scared me, the involuntary reactions he provoked, the kinds of images you see in porn, things I never thought my body was capable of. I suddenly imagined my parents standing over us, jaws dropped and mouths O-ed wide from a different shock than what I was feeling, from seeing their only son pinned down and felt up and moaning from pleasure and humiliation, wanting more. It scared me to think how desperate, how vulnerable, how pathetic I might look. So as quickly as I arched and curved and rolled and unbolted and shuddered, I quickly snapped my body back into one tight, in-control piece. I must have let my guard down for a small second, my back to him and my senses dulled, giving him the opportunity to slither his arm around my neck. Now I’m stuck. My alarm clock glows exit-sign red: 4:14 a.m. I’m not sure if he’s actually asleep. He’s not snoring, just breathing humid puffs of air on the back of my bare neck. His body spoons mine from behind, which must look nice from a bird’s-eye view. But down here, between my flannel sheets, I feel anxiety creeping beneath my skin like a spider. I can’t 36
stop thinking that he could kill me if he presses a little bit harder, if he’s actually awake, if he’s a psychopath. He could be. I really don’t know anything about him. I don’t even know his name. I listen carefully, the silence of my bedroom growing louder in my burning ears, trying to hear the flicker of his eyelashes on the pillowcase. Instead, I hear his pulse, a muffled thump-thump thump-thump, still resting on my neck. His neck was the first thing I noticed about him when I saw him, standing at the back of the dimly lit dive bar full of slouched bodies and thick smoke. He has one of those classic guy-necks, angular and defined, line warped around his Adam’s apple and leading up to a boxy jaw. He had been standing with a group of people, taller than the others and nodding at the conversation. I knew that I would always be looking up at him, always be standing on the tips of my toes to kiss him. I couldn’t stop looking at his neck or imagining my tongue all over it, feeling his jugular pump under my mouth. His neck reminded me of the inside of a tree, split down the center, handsome contours following the same curves around the faults in the wood. Solid. Smooth. Almost sensual. Then I started thinking about wood and with the four beers my friends had bought me filtering through my bloodstream, that made me think about what his cock would look like. I don’t have many experiences to compare it to, so I was trying to remember the last time I had seen one—in real life, in the flesh—when he walked over and said, “Hi there.” Now, the corners of my lips tug upwards and I am surprised to find that I am smiling as I replay it all in my mind. I stood there, bracing myself for him to ask me to move out of the way, to say that I was sitting on his jacket, 37
to see if I had a dollar for his second beer. But he didn’t. It felt like I’d been listening to the same song over and over, but this time it sounded different. Hi there. Just like that. No strings. No agenda. No excuse. Just a small smile and wide eyes, friendly and hopeful like a puppy. It was sweet, an easiness that I wasn’t expecting. Most guys dance around it, literally—bouncing from one foot to the other when there’s no music, trying to catch my eye so it will look like I saw them first, going out of their way to make sure I notice them ignoring me, like it’s some kind of turn-on. Not him, though. Hi there. Simple. Cool. No assembly required, no instruction manual, no hoops. Hi there. He sighs softly next to my ear, which makes my heart jump. I decide that he is asleep, that if he were awake, he would be under the blanket, tenting the soft fabric, the blanket bobbing up and down, making sure I was also awake, making sure I was crying out for him to keep going, for him to please never stop, his head beneath the blanket that my mom stitched. I decide that the sigh was a sleep sound, a dream sound. I wonder what he’s dreaming about. I wonder if it’s me. Then the ancient springs of my bed creak as he begins to roll off of me. It feels like I can breathe for the first time in hours. I follow him, his movement onto his other side, looking over my shoulder at him as I do: eyes closed, neck strong, chest rising up, down, up, down, hands folded over his stomach. I lift my own hand, not as dry as I thought it was, and bravely slip it around his chest, resting first my forearm down on him, then my elbow, then the rest of my arm. If he 38
were to wake up right now, initially confused as to where he was—his first sight being my ceiling, with the spider web that has been hanging down for months and the long crack in white paint, the ceiling that I stare at every night, praying for sleep and trying to convince myself that I am fine sleeping alone, that I’m just alone and it’s different from being lonely, that there is nothing wrong with me, that other guys are the problem, that I am enough—I would clamp my eyes together so tightly and pretend to be so asleep that it would look like I had died. But I would leave my hand where it is, on his bare chest, his skin like tight elastic from our sweat. I would wait, counting seconds—one two three fourfivesixseveneight—waiting for him to lift my hand off of him and toss it away, as easy as picking a stray piece of hair off his clothes. I would wait and hope that he still wanted to be in a bed with me, still remembered why he chose me, still liked me. But he doesn’t move. His chest rises and falls, warm air comes out of his nose, tickling my arm. I edge my face closer to his and then nuzzle my nose into his neck’s soft skin, smelling his soapy scent and closing my eyes. Hi there. I’m not immediately comfortable, but I’m getting there.
39
ABOUT THE TYPE The running text for this issue is set in Adobe Caslon Pro, designed for Adobe by Carol Twombly based on specimen pages by William Caslon between 1734 and 1770. The display types for this book are Futura LT Condensed, first designed by Paul Renner and the Bauer Type Foundry in 1928, and Uni Sans, designed by Svet Simov, Ani Petrova, and Vasil Stanev for Fontfabric.
issuu.com/storkstory facebook.com/storkmagazine twitter.com/storkmagec storkstory @ gmail.com
Cantor Kirkman Domenicucci Wheelock Waters Anderson Mancinas Mizell-Anzick LeMar