Issue 9

Art | Fiction | Poetry| Plays| Screenplays | Films | Interviews

Find works from 23 different creatives from around the world ranging from art, fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and plays.

Issue 9 Chaotic Merge | 1

© 2025 by Chaotic Merge Magazine. All Rights Reserved. All rights to all original artwork, photography, and written works belongs to the respective owners as stated in the attributions. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system or transmitted in any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and publisher.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS FICTION

POETRY diapause

by Rowan Tate

10

Flower Power

by Terri Mullholland

1

47

Here for You

by Georgia-May Stone

2

52

The Secret

by Adrianna Kaminska

4

Sediment

by Rowan Tate

71

We Don't Need No Water

by David Serafino

7

limerence.

by Arlo Arctia

12

The Best Dick I Ever Got

by Wyatt Mischler

NONFICTION 15

Pernod: A Love Story

by Sarah Harley

34

My Naked Mother

by Robin Jones

41

Running Gag Climax

by Riley Ferver *CW: Contains Implications of Sexual Assault

76

Eighty-Three Reasons I Write About Death

by Blair Kinsey

PLAWRITING 22

Dream Meaning

by Rebecca Kane

39

Varkala Beach, South India

by Tara Menon

A USER MANUAL FOR THIS BODY, IF IT EVER BREAKS AGAIN

by Tanisha Bose

67 Floppy Disks

by Katie Beswick

THE PARTY

68 by Stephen Joffe 69

Angel of She Finally Leaves Him

by Yoda Olinyk

ART 5

Goat Without A Mountain

by Yazmin Munoz

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Here For Now

11 by Jennifer Weigel 31

New York

by Kateryna Bortsova

Kaleidoscope 33

by Jacelyn Yap

46

Grim

by Abby Behrens

51

an·tith·e·sis

by Abby Behrens

65

Running Free

by Sarah Kohrs

70 What Do People Say In The Next Village

by Mike Callaghan

OUR EDITORS EDITOR IN CHIEF Jasmine Ferrufino FICTION MANAGING EDITOR Lassiter Jamison NONFICTION MANAGING EDITOR Emily Townsend POETRY MANAGING EDITOR Britt Trachtenberg FICTION EDITORS Isha Jain Kylie Yockey NONFICTION EDITORS Tabatha Miller Christopher Barton

COVER ART Give It One More Day

by Abby Behrens

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POETRY EDITORS Ali Van Glad Basil Gills Ayla Marsden

LETTER FROM THE EDITORS

FOLLOW US ON OUR SOCIALS

Hi Readers, It's nice to present you all with another issue of Chaotic Merge and share all the creatives within this issue! I recently received a notification from LinkedIn (Oh yes, LinkedIn loves to send me spam too), but this time, it was a friendly reminder about how Chaotic Merge has made five years. To think we have been able to share numerous talented people and impactful pieces with you is indescribable. I want to give a BIG thank you to my wonderful editors who are stuck by every evolution and all the wonderful editors who dedicated a time of their lives sharing our common love of words and art with the world! This time around, I once again share with all of you an issue we poured our lives into and pieces that our contributors hold dear. We give a piece of us to you! Happy Reading!

Best, Jasmine Ferrufino Editor in Chief

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diapause

by Rowan Tate i wanted to be the kind of twelve year old that ran away, but instead i am the kind that squats in a rental home scrubbing scuff marks off the wall with a rag that used to be a blue Cisco t-shirt. my mother is making omusoba and talking to Lee Jung-jae, she doesn’t know how the smell of anchovies and kimchi sits on you in a school cafeteria, the way foreignness slumps in a pile on the kitchen floor, chewed and spit out. i am drinking Bacchus-D and yakult instead of CapriSun, i am buying noodles in bags and saving jars for pickling, i am swatting bugs off the door while my mother wears her childhood like an apron. brown marmorated stink bugs don’t have the ability to bite people nor can they sting. they have very few predators; conveniently, no one wants to eat them—there’s no one to run from, there’s no one to bite. stink bugs are an “invasive species.” this is because they are native to asia and were introduced accidentally. in this way, we are the same. here is this 2,600 square foot american home, both of us don’t belong here. i wanted to be the kind of child that eats peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and drinks a glass of milk, but instead i’m learning how to wash rice and making badly sealed dumplings. i walk around the ESL in me as if it is an ugly-folded bulge of dirty-washings, the trans-2-decenal and trans-2-octenal chemical compounds released from pores in the abdomen. stink bugs communicate using vibrations. i, through the trimmed fingernails of my grief. i am a younger version of my mother muscling a knife through the thick end of the carrot,넘사벽. once upon a time we painted the kitchen table eggshell blue but now it has faded dully into grey.

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Varkala Beach, South India

by Tara Menon

The British are back, the British are back.

We need an Indian Paul Revere to ride the South Indian shores.

The Indian lifeguard wouldn’t let my nephew swim, telling him the area was reserved for the English, but more than seventy years had passed from the time the country won independence.

Since my nephew was born and brought up in England by his Indian parents, he told the lifeguard he was half English.

The lifeguard stared at his black skin rippling with muscles.

My nephew cracked a joke: I’m like a coonut, dark on the outside, white inside.

He forced his lips not to twitch.

Stunned, the lifeguard continued to scrutinize him.

My nephew pelted him with questions.

The lifeguard’s answers relieved him -- the discrimination wasn’t a reinstituting of apartheid on this beach.

It was his method to keep Indians safe.

The lifeguard thought the English were better swimmers than Indians who struggled to stay afloat in the current.

My nephew plunged into the blue waters.

His dark velvety skin stood out among the white tourists.

The life guard, his hands a visor, wondered what to make of the young man, the coconut bobbing in the ocean.

My nephew’s humor had washed over him.

I’m like a coconut, dark on the outside, white inside.

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The lifeguard, finally, believed he was half-English, dark on the outside, white on the inside.

He didn’t realize his perception that Indians were poor swimmers was based on prejudice, a different kind than what was practiced by the English.

Perhaps, at night he heard waves lapping, rhythmically repeating: I’m like a coconut, dark on the outside, white inside.

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Sediment

by Rowan Tate I didn’t mean to remember the shoes lined along the riverbank like a child’s teeth, the stench of rolled fruit rotting on the slope sweet and stinging. We were running past, late to the wedding as they sank into the loam like bruises that couldn’t heal.

Other days we’d cut our way home through the orchards fatted with pears, a bag swinging between us like a pendulum.

That day, someone left a šajkača on a sign for a village that doesn’t exist anymore. We didn’t know then how the sky could open.

We still don’t speak of the sound that came hours later.

It’s the silence before it we are thinking of.

The ceremony was beautiful. I don’t remember the vows.

The smoke from the north hasn’t cleared in days.

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limerence.

by Arlo Arctia

awakening from my rest, i feel a presence beside me. a body as warm as freshly molded clay, tangled between my arms quite peacefully, at ease, like they are silently meditating. their breath like water, each exhale streams through the air as softly as a breeze, and i soon, find myself mimicking, their quiet elegance. i wonder how long they’ve been there, and how long it’s been since i left the conscious plane. how’d i even get here? i begin to think. before a slight movement rustles the sheets, gliding their curly hair across my skin with a silkiness so familiar, it recalls me. i lift my ahead above my chest to see their face, lit up with warm features, full lips, and a beauty that unnerves me. asleep, but radiating. a person, i remember as vividly as the day we first met, coincidentally, at a campus event, two years ago, on a hot summer day, sweat on our faces with the sheen of a mod podge glaze.

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i got their number that day, but it was only for a brief moment, before we drifted away. just as coincidentally, we met again, four months ago in an elevator to our rooms, same building, nearby floors, on a ride that was awkward, yet somehow comforting enough for a rekindling. but like before, it was brief, and since then, they’ve been living in my dreams, as a phantom of withheld affection, haunting me in my waking hours, across the street, in the arms of another. how’d i get here? from a bar to these sheets. i ponder, but i release the thought to savor the memory. i used to imagine their affection, now i feel it pressed beside me— a manifestation of bliss, in the shape, of a person. with lavender lush in my veins, i burrow my head into their neck, rather slowly, becoming one with them. so, i let the light of my eyes dwindle into night, relaxing my heartbeat into a rhythmic metronome sewn from a ballad of romance, before lucidity catches me again.

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clasping my hands with theirs, the sky, gradually brightens, into a toothy smile, windows, collections of morning dews, ushering the sun to creek its way into our rooma golden stencil on their face as they awake. i watch their eyes flutter into a crease, and so does mine, as the sun lifts its chin, to perch into place. dusk now replaced, the skies revive oceanic tints, and i get caught in the distance— so overwhelmed with affection, i curl back into themreaching across the sheets, but i feel a coldness that alerts me. it’s empty, and likewise, their print. i search the room for remnants, but the phantom has left no plasma from it, only the moonlight limerence, our connection resides within.

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Flower Power

by Terri Mullholland

Here, have a flower. The woman hands him a daffodil, spring yellow, smiles. He smiles back; holds the flower awkwardly in one hand while the other hand clutches his briefcase. He hopes she doesn’t want money because he doesn’t have any on him, no loose change anyway. And how much did you give someone for a single daffodil? What is a flower worth?

Thank you, he steps back. The woman has bare feet encrusted with dirt, her toenails are yellow to match the flowers, but the polish is chipped and dulled by city grime. He has an overwhelming urge to wash her feet, in a small basin, with a jug of warm water. The fantasy feels rather bold for eight-thirty on a Tuesday morning outside a crowded train station. The woman is wearing a long loose chiffon dress in bright green; she dances as she approaches commuters. He starts to walk away; finds himself stopping a short distance down the road to watch. Even though she keeps giving away flowers, the giant bunch in her arms is not getting any smaller. From where is she replenishing it? Maybe it’s magic. He thinks about going back, asking her: Why are you doing this? One of his colleagues comes out of the train station carrying a daffodil, waves it at him, smiles. He smiles back. It’s the first time he’s seen his colleague smile.

It’s probably the first time she has seen him smile. All morning in the office he thinks about the flower woman whenever his eye catches a glimpse of yellow. How many flowers does she have left? At lunchtime, he can wait no longer. He fills a flask with warm water, borrows the washing-up bowl and a spare tea towel from the staff kitchen. He tries to look normal as he heads out of the office and back to the train station.

He stops by the chemist and picks up a bar of soap: Lily of the Valley. He hasn’t thought this through at all – how is he going to approach her? Will she think he’s a weirdo or some kind of religious nut? Will she understand? There she is, still dancing, the never-ending bunch of daffodils still in her hand. He puts the bowl on the ground, kneels as he fills it with warm water from the flask, and unwraps the soap. When he looks up, a small crowd has gathered around them, watching. I wondered if..., he doesn’t know what else to say. She is smiling at him. The flowers give her face a golden aura. She puts the bunch of daffodils to one side, reaches for his hand, and steps into the water.

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The Best Dick I Ever Got

by Wyatt Mischler was from a hoarder. his place was crammed to the ceiling with junk. you couldn’t see the walls the windows anything. the whole house was a box about to burst. when I first saw it and he locked the door behind me for privacy I thought I was screwed. but I was twenty and stupid and he was forty five and gorgeous

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so I let him take both my hands in his and lead me down the thin path he’d dug like a garden path through everything he’d stuck himself with years and years of stuff into the one uncovered place in the house: the bed. that summer I visited him once a week. two or three times if I could manage it. he never brought up the mess and I never asked. in exchange he didn’t ask why I had to sneak out to see him.

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or why my mom would call suddenly in the middle of it and I would have to leave promising to be back tomorrow.

I guess he thought that was the path I’d dug through my own mess and could sympathize with someone unwilling to just throw the whole thing out.

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Pernod: A Love Story

by Sarah Harley

I drank to stay numb, and I drank because I was afraid. I drank to blur the edges of the day, and I drank to fall asleep. – Joan Didion The Pernod bottle holds memories from childhood—vivid and visceral.

Star anise and fennel; liquorice, lemon, marzipan, and salt. Fragments of life are set adrift without context. A ghost lingers at the edge of my vision—swirling the bitter with the sweet; she haunts my memory of love. In a green silk dress, she is elegant and dangerous, misunderstood.

The first sip always evokes something half-remembered, bitter herbs and damp earth, the memory of a garden after rain—as if the past was dissolved into a single glass.

If you are reading this, tell someone I was here. * We go to Concarneau every summer, a small, walled port town on the southern coast of Brittany.

At the first light of dawn, the fishermen ready their nets. The sea is still blue black. They cast the nets like wings opening out into the water. One boat drags one net. Gulls circle and swoop overhead, restless and elegant, their white wings like flashes of silver. The first threads of light form along the horizon.

In the afternoon, by the harbour, my mother drinks aniseed aperitifs, to blur the edges of the day. For the time being, things will remain unsaid.

Moments around her will carry on: the clink of a glass, the flick of a match. This is the version of her I can never reach.

Inside, the hotel dining room smells of bouillabaisse, a rich fish broth.

The diners taste it at tables, tearing pieces of bread. You can hear the sound of a spoon dragging across a shallow bowl. People move around the room, taking away plates, returning with others. Plates of fish, with silver iridescent skin, are balanced on trays, arranged with slices of lemon 15 | Issue 9

and fresh green herbs.

Sitting there, I feel unseen and adrift. I want to be seen but I am afraid of being seen. I am seven.

The rest of the family are quietly focusing on the task of eating in silence—my father, my sisters, and my brother. I am learning how to read the room, how you can cut the air with a knife. The room hums with the vibration of abandonment.

In silence, I watch my mother outside on the harbour. She’s sitting alone at a small table, angled towards the water. She has just learned about the affair. It’s not the first of my father’s infidelities, but the weight still presses against her as if it was. Instead of naming the pain, she folds inward; I wonder if she is thinking of sailing away into the sea.

Later on, she will pack her suitcase and tell us she is leaving. I know she won’t go; she will create an even deeper kind of distance by staying. In six years, she will pass away, which will strangely create an even deeper kind of closeness.

The window is streaked with sea mist, forming a frame around my mother sipping her drink and smoking a cigarette. A waiter sets down another glass in front of her, filled with an inch or so of a golden liquid, tinted with a green hue, along with a carafe of still water. For a moment, the liquid catches all the light. This is the glittering light. My mother slowly adds water to the glass, which quickly turns the liquid cloudy. I watch as she holds the glass into the light coming off the blue sea. All sparkling is gone, all the light scattered. * Pernod, my mother’s summer drink, comes in a tall and slender bottle, made of green glass. A label displays the name in bold white letters, set against a strip of bright red. It is the oldest anise liqueur in France, infused from distillates of star anise and fennel, and other botanicals like angelica root, mint, and hyssop. The original Pernod Fils contained absinthe—derived from a holy trinity of wormwood (artemisia absinthium)—a silvery-green plant—macerated in alcohol then blended with green anise and Florence fennel.

The liquor was believed to induce hallucinations and convulsions, trigChaotic Merge | 16

gering mental illness and provoking violent behavior. People believed its high alcohol content unlocked doors in the mind, doors that could never be fully closed once opened. Its pale green colour led to its nickname— the green fairy, a seductive, otherworldly figure, a glowing apparition who beckons you from the bottom of a glass. She drew those who drank it into a trance-like state, a world of fleeting and intoxicating visions. * Green inside a bottle, almost luminescent. When poured into my glass, the liquid moves smoothly, capturing glints of golden light. When water is added, the glass turns opaque yellow, a milky swirling yellow. This is the diffused light.

I’ve always been drawn to things that change their appearance, elusive and shifting, depending on lighting and angle, governed by properties of iridescence and translucence. Dragonfly wings and silk, the surface of water. Opalescent glass appears blue from the side, but glows from within when you turn it towards the light.

In a heavy glass tumbler, I swirl the liquid, faint and shimmering. I am drinking to become numb. I’ve just lost my mother and my brother. I don’t know why, but we don’t speak about it. I am fifteen.

The silence creates a distance, an absence layered invisibly over the others.

It forms a dead weight I have to carry inside me. This is the shaping of my life, in which I learn to stay quiet and invisible. I learn to disconnect, feeling a drifting sense of self, as though my control over who I am is already slipping.

Close to me, a man is leaning up against the bar.

“I mean, the more water you drink after drinking Pernod, the drunker you’ll get,” he says, flashing a smile.

I take a sip. My mouth fills with sweetness and memory.

There are lights behind him, framing his silhouette. His eyes inch over my body. Unlike me, he’s old enough to be there, perhaps in his mid-twenties. I look down at the floor, at his scuffed work boots, then glance up at his eyes, still on me. A wave of fear goes through me. I look out into the crowd for my friend Emma—my first drinking friend.

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Sometimes we pour blackcurrant juice into the glass, turning its color a deep, verdant green, almost black. It takes on a dimensionality beyond itself. We like to drink it neat, without ice or water. With the blackcurrant juice added, we can knock it back quickly, shaking our heads as a sharp shudder rushes through our bodies.

The men watch us, leaned against the bar, their shirt sleeves rolled up.

They are drinking tall shiny cans of lager. It is, after all, a working man’s club. On Friday nights, we are torn about which lies to tell and whether or not to go there but the place has a bar and a dance floor and that’s all we need. Its official name is the Teignbridge 76 Social Club, on Marsh Road.

To get there, we walk through town, along the River Lemon, minding our make-up in the rain. We walk past Victorian terraces and old railway tracks. Because we look older, in our short skirts and black boots, no one bothers to ask for our ID. After a few drinks, the night becomes a liquid version of itself.

The music sounds as if it’s coming from faraway—synthing, and repeating, but unable to fully travel through the soft haze of Pernod enclosing my mind. Even though the sound is trapped on the outside, I can still feel the muffled noise as if through a closed door or a ceiling. Inside there’s only silence, expanding like a fog.

The intoxication creates a quiet space; this is the place I learn to love without knowing it. * Pernod is rooted in the south of France, especially Provence. I imagine plane trees forming canopies, filtering sunlight into dappled patterns. At dusk, a soft and golden light falls across a shaded terrace. Lovers hold hands.

In a bar, I tell a story to a man. He leans in with fascination. I see it forming in his eyes, like kaleidoscope flakes, catching both light and shadow, darting this way and that, one way and another. I wonder whether I will fall in love with him. I am twenty-five.

“We went to France every summer when I was a kid,” I began.

He interrupts, leaning in further, asking questions.

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“What was the closest city? Do you remember the name of the hotel?”

The bar has become a liminal space, existing at the threshold of states of being, suspended between one version of me and another. I feel anxious, as if I am under interrogation. His questions cause my mind to fray at its edges, then begin to unravel. Strands of memory unwind like twine.

“I remember the hotel room. High windows, closed shut at night with white wooden shutters. There were bolster pillows on the bed, and green glass bottles on a dressing table, reflected in a mirror.”

I can hear the sound of my parents fighting, their voices rising and falling.

He nods, listening intently; I begin to feel hypnotized, and drunk. Time collapses; I find a passageway through it.

“You enter the hotel through a tall door, topped with a glass transom window, painted glossy black. There’s a black and white tile floor.”

I remember the small squares, small bare feet, still covered in sand from the beach across the road.

I feel far away.

“So what happened to you?” he finally asked.

I feel myself landing, finding my way back to a narrative, to the threading of time. * In Concarneau, we go to a place called The Fisherman’s Café, at the edge of the harbor—its interior is etched in my memory like a miniature room in a doll’s house, every detail fixed and strange. Small tables tucked against the walls, covered with red and white tablecloths; old rattan chairs, with woven seats and backrests. On the walls are faded black and white photographs of the past: fisherman hauling in their nets, their wool caps pulled low over dark eyes; Breton women dressed in long dark skirts and heavy wool shawls, white aprons and lace headdresses. No one in the pictures smiles for the camera. Behind them is the silhouette of La Ville Close—the old walled city.

The back of the restaurant opens to an area near the harbor, where wood19 | Issue 9

en boats bob on the water. There’s a weather-worn rope, looped around iron mooring rings, embedded into the harbor's quay walls.

I am six.

We sit at one of the tables. The waiter refills my mother’s wine glass.

Another bottle is left. She lights a cigarette. My father attempts to appear calm.

Suddenly, there’s a noisy clattering sound followed by hushed grownup voices. A man has fallen backwards in his chair. He hits the floor with a loud thud. A glass shatters. Everyone turns to stare as he thrashes from side to side. Left to right, left to right. He kicks his legs as if he is swimming. The memory is stored in my nerves forever.

I stare at the man’s face, deeply lined, drawn and contorted. His mouth is apart, as if he is trying to shout only no sound comes out. I wonder what he is trying to say. His eyes are wide, almost all pupils in dark black. Then the eyes roll upwards and disappear. Grown-ups rush over, kneeling next to him. A woman cradles his head.

My mother stands up quickly, pushing her chair back, and grabs me by the wrist, and my sister too because we are the smallest. We are dragged outside into the bright light of the harbour. I clutch onto the rope because I feel afraid. But still we look into the darkness of the restaurant. Everyone is still staring, others are standing in quiet groups, with glazed expressions.

Then the memory breaks up; there’s an interruption, a rupture—a break in the scene that I won’t remember. Was there an ambulance? A death in the afternoon?

I spend years trying to reassemble the scene, putting one person here and another there. I find myself remembering incidental details: the tablecloths, green glass bottles, bread baskets. Then I reach the hush that fell over the room, the silence laced with shame. * A man in a bar reads to me from his phone: Pour one jigger absinthe into a Champagne glass. Add iced Champagne until it attains the proper opalescent milkiness. Drink three to five slowly.

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It’s a drink called Death in the Afternoon, invented by Ernest Hemingway.

A memory breaks loose; a door opens in my mind. I am thirty-three.

Ordering more drinks, the man explains that Hemingway drank absinthe regularly in Paris in the 1920s—just after World War I, during an era of disillusion and exhaustion. He speaks about the emotional numbness that runs through his fiction and his characters, how alcohol often fills the space carved out by aimlessness and longing. It's a world I recognize, where everyone is in love with someone they can’t have, drinking the day down to nothing.

No one ever says how they really feel.

I think about my mother, sipping her aperitifs in the silent afternoon, turning inward before vanishing completely. My mother isn’t celebrating, she is withdrawing into lost time. She is crossing a bridge to elsewhere, drinking to her own exile. This is her ritual of survival: pour, sip, disappear.

The Pernod bottle is the marker to my mother’s inner world, the place she loves, where she is locked inside herself, where there’s no longing, nothing to feel.

The bottle shapes the passage of time, measured out in jiggers and shot glasses—moments of tension, absence and longing. Each sip leaves a trace of what was deeply hidden, residues of shame—guilt and silence, the abdication of emotion.

It is the keeper of stories never told, all things unspoken, everything that was hidden beneath the surface. It holds the moments when the world silently shifted, nights when the fights started with no end.

I wonder what has been passed down?

I drink because I have inherited something from my mother—a desire to blur the edges of the day, to lighten the weight of what is missing. This is the truth of the message in the bottle: the green glass holds the smallest, most watchful version of me, sweet and luminous.

If you are reading this, tell her I was here.

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DREAM MEANING

by Rebecca Kane

Cast of Characters MINNIE: A teenager with a spooky sensibility. Woman, any race.

CHARLOTTE: A woman, age flexible, put-together, Minnie’s older sister.

Woman, any race.

Setting: A pleasant enough apartment in Washington D.C. Modern day, fall.

Time:

CONTENT WARNING: This play contains mentions of addiction and death.

[Lights up on MINNIE, wandering around her room, maybe dancing a bit, but doing nothing in particular, to the tune of some weird lo-fi music channel playing from her computer or phone. Something should indicate from her environment that we are in the fandom-specific, maximalist world of an older teenage girl’s bedroom.

Just as she’s relaxing and really vibing, CHARLOTTE bursts into her room unannounced. Charlotte is an extremely put-together looking lady, tight bun, pristine designer clothes, the opposite of Minnie and her room.]

MINNIE: Gawd, Charlotte! You scared me. Don’t you knock?

CHARLOTTE: I stopped knocking a long time ago. [off Minnie’s face] You know why. I’m not getting into it right now. I need that dream book from your bookshelf.

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MINNIE: Why are you so sure I have a book on dreams?

[Charlotte looks pointedly around the room.]

I just like the smell of incense.

MINNIE:

CHARLOTTE: And that little tattoo I never told Mom and Dad about. You’re welcome.

MINNIE: Wait, which one? Oh, right, the constellation.

The second constellation.

CHARLOTTE:

[Charlotte has returned to looking for the book.]

I can bring it to you next time.

MINNIE:

CHARLOTTE: I’m in a rush. I have to get to work. But I keep having this one same thing pop up in my dreams.

[Charlotte ignores her, already looking in a book she found. Minnie probably tries to get up and look over her shoulder, but is pushed away.]

What did you dream about?

MINNIE:

CHARLOTTE: Bla bla… specific symbols… bla bla… weather… here we go. Ah. “As a symbol of protection”… “We view it as one of the most basic items of protection, one of the first ones we learn about as a child.”

Well, that makes sense for you.

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MINNIE:

CHARLOTTE: What’s that supposed to mean?

MINNIE: Remember that time Jesse Miller pushed me on the playground and you came over and pushed him back?

Sounds fair to me.

CHARLOTTE:

MINNIE: I barely fell. I got like this little scrape on my hand. He went to the hospital and got three stitches in his head. I think he got a concussion.

CHARLOTTE: Please. He joined varsity football later on. He was fine.

Still. Protective A.F.

MINNIE:

CHARLOTTE: I don’t need protecting. It has to be something else.

MINNIE: Wait, I wanna know more about your dream. Like, what are you even looking for?

CHARLOTTE: Min, I’m in a rush. I have to finish getting ready for work. “Instead of protection, it could mean—”… Defensiveness?? What the hell. “Could signify that you are seeking cover from something that you’re not ready to confront.”

They’re roasting you.

MINNIE [laughing]:

CHARLOTTE: It’s just a book, Minnie. A book written for mass consumption. [flipping around it, eventually to the cover:] It’s impossible for a book that went on clearance at the E Street Barnes and Noble this soon after it’s publishing Chaotic Merge | 24

date to be roasting me.

MINNIE: See? Exactly. I was kidding and you start whipping out publishing industry know-how.

CHARLOTTE: I was hardly dispensing “know-how.”

MINNIE: Dude, this is what they mean. Like I can’t even joke with you anymore these days.

CHARLOTTE: I don’t find a lot of what you say funny anymore these days.

MINNIE: These days. How many times have you heard me try to joke with you these days? How many times have you listened to me at all?

CHARLOTTE: I haven’t heard you say anything for—I don’t have time for this.

Let me see the book.

I don’t have time!

MINNIE: CHARLOTTE: [A small, very sisterly fight ensues, tugging on the book, including maybe little slaps and gasps of disbelief, etc. Eventually Minnie takes the book and reads as Charlotte fixes her outfit and hair, then resumes a light search around the room.]

MINNIE: Could signify emotional difficulties.

CHARLOTTE: That’s stupid. How could something like…

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MINNIE: It says you could be seeking a tool for upcoming emotional difficulties, or using this item as a tool to get through emotionally trying times from the past-CHARLOTTE: I don’t need to seek tools. I did my time in therapy. Twice a week for three months, once a week for five, once every other week ever since. Group therapy on top of it. Even tried hypnosis, which was a waste of time.

MINNIE: You’re too much of a Scorpio to be hypnotized. Let me guess – you also journal? In a little designer notebook?

CHARLOTTE: As a matter of fact, I already had Poppin office supplies in matching colors already. The notebook was the natural next addition.

MINNIE: Mom and Dad used to say therapy was useless. Didn’t want people talking.

I do my own thing now.

CHARLOTTE:

MINNIE: I wish I could. What are you looking for?

CHARLOTTE: I don’t have time for this right now.

MINNIE: There’s a fourth meaning to your dream. Don’t you want to hear it?

CHARLOTTE: Not now, I’m going to be late. Maybe after work, okay?

MINNIE: Emotional support. Not just difficulties, but the support to get through it.

CHARLOTTE: Chaotic Merge | 26

Are we still talking about the dream? Let’s sit down and talk about this for real later, okay?

MINNIE:

I’m here now.

Minnie, I tried to give you—

CHARLOTTE:

MINNIE: You moved away as soon as you got this job. Hours away.

CHARLOTTE: I can’t force our parents to do anything for you.

You didn’t try.

MINNIE:

CHARLOTTE: And you didn’t have to deal with it by turning to substance abuse.

MINNIE: “Substance abuse!” Is that the term your therapist has you use? Or, wait, let me guess – you haven’t talked to her about it? Is that why you keep dreaming about it?

CHARLOTTE: It doesn’t start with me dreaming about it! It just APPEARS. I could be dreaming about anything else. Car crashes, visiting the zoo, being naked at work, sex. Anything. It appears somehow, like someone’s carrying it, or it just pops up in the corner of the room, or on my desk – [Minnie produces, seemingly from out of nowhere, an umbrella.]

MINNIE: Always this one, right? This size? This color?

CHARLOTTE: 27 | Issue 9

How did you get that?

MINNIE:

You gave it to me.

And you never lost it?

CHARLOTTE:

MINNIE: I know, crazy, right? The one thing I never misplaced. Never sold it, either.

But it’s just an umbrella.

CHARLOTTE:

MINNIE: But it was the last thing you ever gave me.

[The lights have shifted into something more menacing, colder than the soft amber lights of a girl’s bedroom. The lofi music stopped becoming relaxing, and has started entering some sort of eerie loop of the same section of one song.]

MINNIE: It was the last possession I ever had.

I have to go to work.

CHARLOTTE: [But the door is locked, or stuck, or broken. Minnie reads from the book.]

MINNIE: “The dreamer may use the umbrella as their own emotional support system, keeping themselves dry.”

CHARLOTTE: They said that if I gave you money, that was enabling! You would only spend it on drugs!

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MINNIE: I didn’t ask for money that night.

CHARLOTTE: If I let you in to our parents’ house, I know what you’d do!

MINNIE:

You’ll never know.

CHARLOTTE: Oh, so you can tell me honestly you wouldn’t have stolen from us? Right?

MINNIE:

I didn’t steal this.

CHARLOTTE: Shut UP— I already KNOW— I have to GO TO WORK— MINNIE: You turned me away from your doorstep, in the pouring, freezing rain, in the middle of the night in November— CHARLOTTE:

YOU WERE HIGH!

MINNIE: But hey, you said -- At least I could take this.

[She opens the umbrella. The lofi music morphs to the sound of rain.]

And they found me in Fort Dupont Park the next day, clutching this umbrella.

Is this another dream?

CHARLOTTE:

MINNIE: If it was real life, you wouldn’t have stopped to look up the meaning of this dream.

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[Charlotte grabs the book, then drops it, revealing that all the pages are blank.]

I can’t wake up.

CHARLOTTE:

MINNIE: All that therapy, all those years, and you’ve never told them what what you dream about, or how I keep appearing, and what I’m holding every time.

[Charlotte can’t open the door.]

Let me out!

CHARLOTTE:

You don’t tell them about me.

MINNIE:

CHARLOTTE: I will! I promise! Just let me out, please.

MINNIE: You sure you want to leave? It’s pretty nasty out there.

Yes. I’m sorry.

CHARLOTTE:

MINNIE: I don’t need you to be sorry. I just needed you to see me.

[She looks at Minnie. Really looks at her. She reaches out for the umbrella.

Minnie gives it to her. The door now opens with ease.

Charlotte goes out into the pouring rain with the umbrella. The rain morphs back to include the soothing lofi music. Minnie dances around to it, maybe looks out the window, maybe just listens to the rain.

Lights fade out. End of play.]

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33 | Issue 9

My Naked Mother

by Robin Jones

I once saw a photo of her, she was twenty-three, her hand was raised above her head like our lady liberty and held a round boar-bristle brush with a thin veil of hair still falling from it. Her dark mane flowed around her shoulders, recently styled, french curls at the end and the abundant volume of a nineteen seventies Pam Am stewardess. Her belly was round, full, taut, newly stretched but pristine porcelain. Below it sat a shambolic nest of deep auburn coarse-wool like Brillow, raising the pregnant belly up like the throne of a Faberge egg. Her breasts were round, full teardrops, defying gravity, reaching for the sky, her nipples darker than I had ever seen them before, nearly brown instead of the peach complexion of her lips. I never managed to achieve her breasts despite all the hoping, carrots, countless chants and worthless exercises, back-sleeping and promises made to God. They were perfect, her breasts, and would remain so long after three babies were fattened by them, after many men pawed at them, after they were strapped down, pushed up, harnessed in, left to hang. I was always jealous of those breasts; my sister and I both were. I am not sure whose tits we inherited but it was clear they were not hers.

Hers were iconic like Jamie Lee Curtis or Ann Margret’s. Her captured face held an expression of almost-surprise. She hadn’t yet registered the photo being taken but it was clear that when she tossed her body back, flinging her freshly brushed locks behind her, she spotted something or someone that shouldn’t have been, and you knew that the expression to come next would be either one of delight or frustration but there was never any telling which would emerge until it did. Not with my mother.

Her moods were dynamic like the Kansas City weather she had grown up resenting. The person who took it loved her. This photo was a commemoration of their impending parenthood. It was black and white, the photo, but I knew the color of my mother’s hair because when she was young it was the same shade that mine is now, a few years later she would use henna to color it a deeper auburn and then Clairesse box dye to bring it to a golden flame which would become her signature look.

She modeled for Macy’s catalogues in the late nineteen-seventies. Lingerie mostly. Her hair now short, red and feathered, her hips hugged french-cut teddies of silk in soft pastel hues, accented with white lace. She would go on to later tell my older sister that she modeled with Renee Russo, “she Chaotic Merge | 34

became famous, and I had you.” This is where mother met father. His wife working in advertising, my mother a model, my father a writer and photographer in need of a model. He was making a photo novel in an attempt to break into Tinsletown. She was writing a spec screenplay in order to do the same and they bonded over their mutual love for the 1955 dramatic romance feature film PICNIC starring William Holden and Kim Novak. My mother became his muse, a job she came to view with disfavor after a time. They each left their spouses and my four-year-old sister and fled to California where they were sure, like many midwesterners with a proclivity toward creativity in the early nineteen-eighties, that they belonged. They stopped in Vegas on the way for a quickie wedding at The Little White Chapel. There was one witness, an old comic book friend and the only photos they have from that day were shot on a 3D camera. My mother a holographic vision in a black cocktail dress.

I grew up thumbing through graphic novels and comic books bursting with big, busted heroines that were, not just in likeness, but actually were, my mother. I watched her flounce about in skimpy, astronaut suits that casually lacked bottoms, fighting aliens, discovering new planetary territories. I watched her fend off monsters, be monsters, create monsters.

I saw her 50 feet tall sitting cross-legged in some future city scape with life going on about her as if the world could ignore her. As if anyone could ignore her. She had amnesia and was left for dead and went on a hunt to find her identity. She landed in a time warp where dinosaurs reigned, and a hillbilly wanted to take her for his wife. She had trysts with prostitutes, was raped by convicts, brutalized by unfamiliar creatures. I’ve met men whose sexuality were awakened by my mother’s illustrated nudity, men who looked at her like she was their very own wet dream. I still meet men who knew her or knew of her and who will look at me when I tell them that I belonged to her, they look at me and I can see their eyes wondering if what’s underneath my clothes resemble the images of her nakedness burned into their mind. I could paint my mothers naked form from memory and so could they. They’re mostly older now but when they’d think of her, I’d see their eyes alight with youth and wonder and awakening sex.

I am small and sitting on the toilet watching my mother as she lay languidly in the bathtub. Her eyes are closed. Her pubic hair cresting the surface of the water occasionally, like seaweed in low tide. Her breasts flesh islands floating, and she is a mystery to me, I now know a mystery to herself. Will I look like this someday, I think as I glance down at my 35 | Issue 9

pudgy child tummy and hairless mound.

She’s in an emerald satin bathrobe that glistens where the light from the kitchen window hits it. Her hair a chaotic sienna halo of day-old waves and she smells like musty Charlie perfume and saliva from the night before. There’s a brown smudge of a hicky on her neck. She’s already wearing lipstick. She’s making her first of many cups of coffee and her tit has slipped from its silk enclosure.

“Mom. Your boob’s out.”

She doesn’t blush but she smiles knowingly and feigns modesty while re-wrapping herself. You could always tell when my parents had had sex, not just because of the raucous nature of it or the fact that it occurred regularly but because she would be awake the next morning making her best attempt to parent us in her post-coital stupor. The sex made her want to look like a mother to him. It was a reminder that they were still playing house and that this was all part of the game.

Her cleavage billowed out of ill-fitting attempts to look youthful at comic book conventions and art gallery events. She had impeccable bone structure that moved down from her angular jaw to her delicate décolletage, her petite rib cage and waist and she had a full bottom on top of sinewy legs. “It’s the one part of a woman’s body she can keep even in her old age, her legs,” said my father. Other women envied her, but they were never intimidated. She had a nurturing tone to her voice, and she greeted everyone generously. They loved her, they wanted to be saved by her, mothered by her, given the answers. It wasn’t exactly a regal quality she possessed but a graceful one. The way her bones lay gave her the overall resemblance and demeanor of a retired prima ballerina so long as she didn’t move too much. She wasn’t boisterous. There was no need to create space because space created itself around her and that space was inviting.

She was approachable. In public. In private, she was accident-prone, a lummocks and terrible dancer.

My father continued to photograph her into her late fifties. While visiting their Kansas City home, I stumbled across photos of my mother in full Polynesian style garb. A synthetic hibiscus in her hair. A red sarong gilding her waist and of course, her bare breasts still standing upright and symmetrical. She sat on a stool in our basement which had recently become a tiki lounge, surrounded by motion lamps, a giant swordfish, tiki Chaotic Merge | 36

mugs, and exotica record albums.

“Your mother.” He said stolidly.

“She stopped showering three months ago and has taken to roaming around nude in her own filth.”

I’ve heard this before.

“She’s gotten very fat. You need to come home.”

I’ve heard this as well.

I didn’t go home. The Overland Park police department was called to do a “wellness check”.

They did and what they found was my nude mother in nothing but bright red slay-back Manolo Blahnik knockoffs sitting at her desktop computer in that dark red womb of a room that she insisted on painting to match her mood, wild eyed, typing gibberish on friends facebook pages, reeking of sour milk. This was not the first time she was committed and wouldn’t be the last, but it was the first time she was committed in Kansas City and those poor police officers had come to a beautiful suburban home on the top of a hill in a good school district and low crime rate to my mother’s one woman bare all and she did not plan to go quietly.

“Well, they showed up.”

“Yes.” He sighed heavily.

“You know your mother.”

“Yes.” I did.

“She just kept fighting them. Then more of them arrived.”

He started to laugh a little.

“Bless their hearts. They tried to get clothes on her, but she’s gotten so 37 | Issue 9

damn big, and she’s got the strength of a retarded person, I swear to Christ. It took six of them to drag her out and all the while she’s shouting.”

“What was she saying?”

“Oh, how the hell should I know? She was speaking in tongues. They tackled her down onto the oriental rug and got handcuffs on her and dragged her out of the house.”

“Oh.” He laughed a little again.

“I don’t believe the neighbors are our biggest fans right now.”

“I can’t imagine why.” I could.

“One of the officers managed to get an afghan around her so she wasn’t in the buff but as soon as she was outside, and I’m telling ya it was brisk, she just threw the damn thing off. They kept trying to get the blanket back on her, but she just kept flinging it off and finally they gave up and put her in the car in her birthday suit.”

“Oh” – “No, Dad.” – “I’m getting married in two weeks.”

– “It’s okay.”

We both listened to each other’s breathing for a few moments and then he said, “I think sometimes she does this to get away from me. She likes it in there. Only place she can go where there are people crazier than her.” He’s quiet for a moment. “What am I supposed to do?”

“I don’t know.”

– “Love you too.”

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A USER MANUAL FOR THIS BODY, IF IT EVER BREAKS AGAIN

by Tanisha Bose Trigger warning: memory.

Trigger warning: this skin.

Trigger warning: there is no off-switch.

Page one: the body was not made for stillness. it twitches when told to sleep, and screams when you whisper calm. the blood in here is a revolver, each beat a loaded chamber. don’t say my name— say static. say crash site. say fusebox that caught fire in the middle of a poem. my mouth forgets its language halfway through a sentence & still keeps trying to tell the truth. this is what survival looks like: gasping in a bathroom stall with fists full of your own hair like pulling out the roots will stop the tremor. some days i wear my thoughts like wet cloth— clingy, choking, undone in public. i am not looking for peace. i am looking for a room with no mirrors, no questions, no one who tells me to breathe when the air already hates me.

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flip to the appendix: you’ll find a checklist of all the ways i pretended to be fine. every smile a small betrayal. every silence a held scream. every heartbeat another failed exit. i do not want to be whole. i want to be real in the way pain is real— unapologetic, cruel, and screaming back

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Running Gag Climax

(After Amelia K, Without a Listener: A Comedy)

by Riley Ferver CHARACTERS: - Main character: Girl. Girl says:

I am going to stop writing essays about It. I am going to be easy to love. I am going to stop smoking and hoping my friends text me, taking pills before bed that could knock out farm animals, waking up here, being fine.

Girl walks to room. Messy room. Why does Girl not clean her room?

Girl lays down and dreams about something happening to her. Girl lays down and dreams about something else not happening to her.

- Supporting characters: friends.

- Antagonist: Them.

EXPOSITION: This is not a story about It. It happened to me the last week of freshman year.

I do not remember all of It, but still It plays through my mind like a VHS tape: skipping, repeating, repeating. I close my eyes each night and the piss-stench of his apartment hits me.

Girl asks one of her friends: Do you ever think about that day?

Friend responds: All the time.

Girl doesn’t know if she believes her friend. Or if she wants to. She doesn’t know why it matters. And she doesn’t want to try to ask the others.

CONFLICT: For a while, I believed that the best lesson I ever learned was that there is nothing I can not do alone. I didn’t have a lot of friends growing up, a fact I only privately lamented. I made up for this to myself by learning to leave–just pack up and go wherever. It was a medicine I could take no matter how sick 41 | Issue 9

I was: reading maps and directions, haggling, doing all things by myself and recognizing danger when it came. I knew, I told myself I knew how to do it all until it took up scriptural residence in me. Keys between my hands. Look down when I walk in the city. Don’t drink with strangers.

And yet I am stupid. And yet I have done all of those things, and look at where it got me.When I came to college, all I wanted was friends. More than good grades, more than internships, jobs, more than anything. I adopted a personality I figured people would like and went out and did it. I did it all myself. I did it like it was easy.

In reality, I saw making friends (having them, keeping them) as a balance beam: I wanted to be liked, but not reliant. I could still do everything myself. I could still go anywhere. These people were fun and I could always save myself. These things–these different lives, or facets of the one, were separate entities.

I was argumentative and bitchy. I was loving. I wanted to be loved back, and sometimes, secretly, I wanted some sort of pushback to all my solitary schemes. This is the moral of the story: you can’t always be alone if you’re going to need saved.

(MORAL) You can’t always be alone if you’re going to need to be saved.

They are sitting on a blanket, peeling down the straps of Girl’s dress. People walk by and avert their eyes. Ten minutes ago, Girl’s friends left her here. Girl was not not invited. Girl was not invited. It wasn’t an invitational leaving, yet she’s still here, drinking with strangers.

Girl is drunk. Girl is peeled back fully on the school lawn, being dipped into and painted with, flesh and bone spilling out of her, and she begins to realize what is happening.

You can’t always be alone if you’re going to need to be saved.

RISING ACTION Friend walks by and says: This is a public space. You all can’t be doing this.

Friend says: Riley, put your clothes on.

Days later, Friend will say: I’m so sorry.

Will say: I didn’t know what I was seeing.

Will say: It was just so shocking.

Will say: I should have known. You were crying.

Will say: I’m so sorry.

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Girl: I don’t remember crying.

Friend will say: You were crying. I’m so sorry.

I always told my friends that I forgave them for that day, or that any forgiveness that needed to happen had happened long ago, or there was nothing to forgive in the first place. I don’t know which of those things is the truth, if any of them or all of them hold even an excerpt of my feelings on It. The reality was, I never considered forgiveness, but not because it wasn’t something I thought needed to happen. I was never mad at my friends. I didn’t ever think I should have been. The situation played out as It did, we did as we did, as we do, as we had always done. I wasn’t going to leave my friends, but my friends had left me and were content not remembering It. We would spool on as we were, knotted in the center, a distinct before and after in our respective friendships that only I could see.

I have, at points, been slapped with the realization that it has affected them too, and I do not know how to rectify that. I can’t tell if this is mine to fix.

Girl is walking with Them from the art room to one of their apartments. Five or six people. Girl won’t remember. Isn’t she silly?

Girl sees the boyfriend of one of her friends. She mouths “help me,” tries over and over, but he just stares, puzzled. Why is Girl with these people?

Girl is suddenly in the apartment, clothes off. But she was trying to beg for help. Why did he not help her? Why did Girl not run? She certainly could have.

Isn’t she silly?

CLIMAX I play around with this in my mind almost daily, many times–the double feature to the VHS, the haunting endings the writers decided not to go with.

I think, if I had went with my friends: we would have ended up in our rooms.

Respectively. I am annoying when I am drunk. I would have sat and gabbed to my roommate about how I wished I were drunker. It would have been mixed up in the insubstantial days of freshman year, the days of starvation and substance abuse.

I would not remember it today.

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I think, if my friends had made me go with them: I would have been angry. I would have bitched for the five minute walk back to our building, said things like “I can take care of myself.” Lied. We would have ended up in our rooms.

Respectively. I am annoying when I am drunk. I would have sat and gabbed to my roommate about how I wished I were drunker. The next day, clear headed, I’d hear about It through the rumor mill and thank my friends for making me leave. It would have been mixed up in the insubstantial days of freshman year, the days of starvation and substance abuse.

I would hardly remember it today. Infrequently, I’d think of that spring, that unknown proclamation of ultimate caring and give it the sad smile reserved for bad news and memories of ASPCA commercials.

I think, if my friends would have realized: Sometimes I wonder if they did, if they had any suspicion. I’d like to imagine they had no idea. I like to imagine if they’d realized, someone would have come back for me. I would have gone back for any of them. I don’t know how they would have known or found me, but I like to imagine anyway. We wouldn’t talk about that day just like we don’t talk about It now, but I’d remember because I couldn’t save myself.

Girl walks back into her building, down the hallway to her room. She has not seen herself yet, not yet seen the bruises she’ll fail at covering while she watches Them graduate in a few days. She walks by one of her friends, who gapes at her, wide-eyed. Friend looks like she’s seen a ghost!

Friend says: Are you ok? Girl nods.

Friend says: You don’t look it.

FALLING ACTION Girl runs. See Girl run! Run, Girl, run!

She is putting on her shoes in Their living room. They are not going to let her walk back alone. She almost cackles at the irony until Their reasoning hits her.

Most people, I’ve learned, get rid of the clothes from their Its–burn or shred them. I kept the button up shirt I had been wearing on for three days after– slept in it, wrapped my hair in it after showering and then slid it back over my chest until I was forced to cover myself further.

To me, the shirt was an embodiment: I looked at it and saw it personified, thrown as I had been, crumpled on the floor with Them standing over me on all corners. I still pull that shirt out on days where the sun hangs crisp Chaotic Merge | 44

overhead. Sometimes I still wear it for days on end. I wonder if this is because I am poor and it’s a good shirt, or if I am lazy, or if it shields some other aspect of me, some fear, some knowledge that now I cannot fully see myself without It cloaking me.

I wonder, sometimes, if I just like the stripes.

Very close to It’s one year anniversary, I boarded a bus to New York and told no one. I packed the shirt. I thought, “if something happens, this coming day will not be as hard.” I figured I could save myself. Nothing happened, but the bus crashed in Jersey. I spent the weekend with the first friend I’d told at her new school where nobody knew anything that had ever happened to me. I put on my old self as a costume and laughed. On the train into the city as I left, I tried to catch my reflection in the window of the dark terminal. Girl is bleeding out.

Girl bled for three days after.

RESOLUTION The first time I saw any of Them back on campus was just barely into the fall semester of my sophomore year, walking up behind me grinning cheek to cheek as I brushed my teeth. Almost midnight. Did not stop his stride. I watched my reflection make eye contact with him in the mirror and gagged on my toothpaste. My friend made a bed for me underneath hers in the building next door, a proclamation of ultimate caring. In another world, I never questioned her foreknowledge of It. I never watched her face or anyone’s numb at the sight of my upper body, never had to say “something happened.”

Rewind the tape. Rewind it. Play it back.

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Here for You

by Georgia-May Stone There’s this guy, right? He’s just moved in downstairs andThe apartment where the old man died?

Yeah, that one. Anyway, so he’s downstairs right? Tell me why I keep finding him hanging around on my floor andHow long did they say the old man had been dead? Before they found him?

She takes a bite from her sandwich.

Like two weeks or something, I dunno.

I sip my coke.

Anyway, I was telling you about this new guy.

Yeah, yeah, sorry. Go ahead.

So he’s got no real reason to be on my floor but I’d been running into him there. Which is weird, right?

Mhmm.

The first time, he introduced himself. “Robert, but you can call me Rob.” Okay, fine. Second time, he asked me something about the parking situation. I tell him to speak to management.

The third time I see him, he’s asking “any chance I could borrow an egg?” I know he has neighbors, like direct neighbors on both sides. Why is he coming upstairs to ask me? I lie and tell him I don’t eat eggs and he apologizes and goes back downstairs. I wait in the hallway and listen. He doesn’t knock on any other doors.

I take a bite of my sandwich.

Weeeird. What does he look like?

Like a forty-year-old. Boring. He’s kinda tall I guess.

Oooh?

She raises her eyebrows.

No. He’s creepy, I’m trying to tell you more.

Continue.

So after the egg incident, I’m like, if I see this guy on my floor again I’m calling him out. A few days go by. Then one day, I get home from the gym and he’s hanging around again! I’m sweaty and tired and immediately pissed off. I’m like “you know you don’t live on this floor right? You know you live on the one below?” And he starts to reply and I’m like “you have no reason to be up here, it’s fucking weird” and he’s like “woah, calm down” which is 47 | Issue 9

obviouslyWrong.

Exactly. So I’m unlocking my door and literally shaking with anger and endorphins from the gym and I’m like “don't tell me to calm down on my floor. Go downstairs.” I really command him like he’s a dog, and he hates it, I can tell he hates everything about me going off on him.

Was anyone else around?

She briefly glances at her phone. I look too.

No. No one comes out, which isn’t exactly comforting because I’m yelling and like, no one’s even nosy? Anyway, he changes tactics. He hides his ‘I hate women’ glare and he’s like “I’m sorry, I don’t know anyone in this area, I saw you around and thought you looked cool, beautiful, you’re beautiful and I thought maybe we could get to know each other. I’m recently divorced and-” Oh Jesus, he did not.

Girl, I know! He’s standing there, outside of my apartment, on my floor, in his fucking light wash jeans and his polo shirt, balding, telling me he’s recently divorced. Like, yeah, no shit. “I’m recently divorced and I feel like I’m out of touch, I can’t use these dating websites, they’re so sterile. Meeting people organically is just ideal, isn’t it?” And I’m standing there in my sweaty workout clothes, having an out-of-body experience. Like, what the fuck is this man talking about? Why am I listening? But I can’t help talking back so I’m like “no one uses dating websites anymore, it’s dating apps, and technically we haven’t met organically. If you were a normal person, organically would have been meeting in the parking garage or in the elevator but instead you’ve manufactured this weird scenario where you hover outside my apartment.

Fuck off.” And I go inside and slam the door in his face and lock it loud so he can hear.

I feel like all middle-aged men who live in apartments alone are weird. I don’t know why. I feel like it shouldn’t be allowed. I guess they have to live somewhere but it just feels wrong, like apartments are inherently female and for women only.

We cackle.

Anyway, the story’s not over, it gets worse.

She checks her phone again.

Shit, breaks over.

I get up and throw my coke in the trash. We tie our aprons back on and take our places behind the counter.

So guess who I run into in the parking garage? And he’s sooo fucking happy to have met me organically. He’s like “oh what are the chances, ha ha, it’s just like you said.” This couldn’t have happened on a worse day because I was ovulating. And through my ovulating eyes, he looked kind of…passable?

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It’s because he’s tall. I’ve had that happen before. Next please!

She places a croissant in a paper bag.

Exactly. I was like oh, maybe he isn’t so bad, and actually engaged in the conversation. Like, “ha ha, yep, just like I said. How are you?”

You asked him how he was?

She drops a plastic cup on the floor. I hand her another one.

I was ovulating. Let’s not forget when you told your brother's greasy guitar teacher you liked his hair.

Fuck, I forgot about that. Continue.

His eyes practically light up. He’s like, “Well I’m great thanks, how are you?” And next thing you know we’re down the street having a fucking coffee and I started having this spiritual experience where I could feel myself splitting into multiples. The current, ovulating me, was sipping a cappuccino and giggling, fucking giggling! While the luteal phase me was already scrubbing myself clean in the shower, box dying my hair black, and sobbing over my tarot cards after asking “why do I keep sleeping with shitty mediocre men who hate me?”

Did you sleep with him?

Yeah. This is why I’m going back on birth control because the ovulating version of me is a fucking traitor and she’s not a girl's girl.

I put a caramel macchiato on the counter.

Kate!

Because like, I agree to go back to his apartment, which, one, is insane to begin with but two, all it took was a cappuccino? A small one? No cookie or even a piece of cake?

Damn.

An online order buzzes through on the screen. She presses accept.

Can you make a large iced matcha?

Yeah.

I grab a large plastic cup and fill it with ice.

So he reluctantly wears a condom and it’s really bad. Like, awkward.

He doesn’t know where to put his hands and any time he does touch me it's clunky and it hurts and at one point he was like actually just pinching my boobs. Anyway, whatever. It’s so bad that I think I immediately stop ovulating.

And then I get this vision.

I put the iced matcha into a cup holder and place it on the counter.

I could see myself as I was; sitting naked on his scratchy sheets, listening to him pissing in the next room, and then there was this other me, in the same room, being murdered. Like, images layered on top of each other. I saw both things happening at once. Like I could feel the fabric of the universe peeling back from the seams and I was slipping in-between. And I can’t tell if 49 | Issue 9

it’s right then, like, if he’s going to finish in the bathroom and come straight back in and wrap his piss-covered hands around my throat and strangle me, or if it’s another time, another ovulation day, but I know, somehow, that it’s real and that it’s happening in the way that time is a flat circle and everything’s always happening, simultaneously. You know?

Oh my god! So what happened then?

I had to like, pull myself back into my body. Like really think about it. Then I got up and threw my clothes on as quickly as I could and ran to my apartment. I haven’t seen him since but I’m sure I will eventually. So what am I supposed to do? You can’t get a restraining order on the grounds of something you saw happen in a liminal state of being.

This is sadly true.

She’s wiping down the counter with a cloth.

But maybe it’s not going to happen now. Like now that you’ve witnessed it, the timeline’s shifted. What is it they say about atoms? They change if they’re observed or some shit?

I hand someone the key to the bathroom.

Yeah. The observer effect. That’s what I’ve been telling myself.

Well, if you ever need to stay at my place, just let me know. And call me straight away when you see him again.

Thank you. I appreciate it.

I reach for her hand and squeeze it. She squeezes back.

Here for you girl. Always.

You too.

She accepts another online order on the screen.

Can you make a chai latte?

Coming right up.

Chaotic Merge | 50

51 | Issue 9

The Secret

by Adrianna Kaminska

The last time Margo saw Chiara, they were both twelve years old. Margo was still adjusting to the fact that she had one less finger on her right hand. Goodbye, lucky pinky! Chiara spoke for the first time in weeks, her voice strange and raspy, making each word sound like it was made out of clay and could become any shape.

“I hate you,” said Chiara, pulling her into a quick hug. She had the full right to hate her. Margo hated herself as well.

It was the end of a wet spring, but there was a promise of a hot summer in the air. Lonely summer, under the strict supervision of adults, with no friends and weekly visits to the nearest city, where Margo was forced to sit on an ugly red sofa and keep repeating that no, she doesn’t remember what had happened when she, Chiara, and Andrea had disappeared into the woods.

And no, none of them knew where Andrea was.

Now Chiara’s dad beeped loudly at the klaxon. He gave Margo an annoyed look that was hard to avoid. His wife sat next to him, mouth moving nervously, as if in a prayer. Or in a litany of curses.

“I will miss you,” Margo said to Chiara, crying.

Chiara didn’t respond. She gave her one last, sad or maybe scared look, and then she was gone, back in the car along with her annoying brothers. On one side, the twins were screaming, fighting over toys, and one could see their heads moving around. On the other side, sat Pietro, wearing big earphones and a leather jacket. And finally, Chiara, with her eyes straight, to avoid taking in the last view of their little holiday town. The place looked like it was made to be on a postcard. A huge, shiny lake with mountains covered in a thick carpet of trees. *** Exactly four months ago, Chiara, Andrea, and Margo had gone on a trip to these mountains, pretending to be scouts. They got lost. It was only after three long nights, during which their parents, tourists, and all the neighbours had been searching for them, fearing they would find three little carcasses torn to pieces by wolves or bears, that they were found.

In the end, only Margo and Chiara were discovered, pale and shocked, waiting at the mouth of a cave.

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There was no sign of Andrea.

And that was it.

First, Margo had lost Andrea. And then Chiara.

After that, Margo spent years growing up lonely and weird, only to become an even weirder woman. And now, for the first time in fifteen years, she received a letter from the girl who hated her.

Please come. The same thing is happening in my town now. Another child is missing.

-Chiara. *** The journey to Italy was shorter than one might expect. Over a two-hourlong flight, then a bus from the airport to the nearest city, and then another from there to the town where Chiara told her to wait at a particular address. It was close to midnight when Margo finally arrived, and deep down, she felt a childish sense of awe. Barely a couple of hours ago, she’d had coffee for breakfast in her forever-cold flat, and now, she could feel the heat of a nearly ending summer, the heavy Italian air, and hundreds of stars above her head in a country whose language she barely even knew.

She waited for over an hour, sitting on a bench, impatiently checking her phone and exchanging glances with a big brown cat sitting nearby. She could see someone watching her from a window; a female silhouette with curly hair. There was a heavy silence typical of a place that barely had any visitors.

Margo felt a tweak of anxiety, thinking that maybe it wasn’t Chiara who had sent her this random letter, so old school, so bizarre. Maybe it was a bit rash, a bit desperate of Margo to pack herself onto a plane to the middle of nowhere and now wait for God knows what.

Or maybe not.

Just then, a beaten-up old blue car stopped in front of her, and from the inside, busted some Italian disco.

“Get in,” the voice was female, the face familiar, but different.

Chiara’s hair was still the colour of a carrot, but way longer than when she was a child. There was a well-known constellation of freckles on her face and thick black eyebrows, moving now and then, up and down, like two chrysalises.

“Chiara.”

There was a level of relief that surprised Margo when she said her name aloud. She went inside the car like an overly happy golden retriever, kissing Chiara’s cheek as if the last fifteen years hadn’t happened, as if they 53 | Issue 9

were still the same weird little girls from their small town, where Margo was a newcomer with parents on the verge of a divorce, and Chiara was a daughter of Italian immigrants who spoke with a heavy accent that locals loved to mock.

For the last fifteen years, Chiara had lived rent-free in Margo’s head. After Chiara’s family moved out, she tried to send her multiple postcards and letters. She added her on Facebook and followed her on Instagram. When one day Chiara finally approved her invitations, Margo was over the moon, imagining how they would see each other again, how this one person in the world would understand her the most, would not look at her like she was crazy or a total piece of shit, a criminal or a pathological liar. How Chiara will come back to her life, and Margo will stop feeling so much like a cursed outlier.

But none of this happened.

Chiara was somewhere out there, floating in the wide world and having a life that was in stark contrast to Margo’s.

“So you got married.” Margo started like she hadn’t stalked Chiara’s Facebook page.

“And you didn’t.”

It wasn’t a guess.

“Nope.”

The road ahead of them was illuminated only by Chiara’s car and kept growing more and more deserted, like one of those forgotten country roads travelled by a few.

“Do you have any kids?”

Chiara’s mouth became a thin line.

“No. We divorced before it happened.”

A divorce? Okay, that was new.

“Was it… a long time ago? The divorce.”

“Long enough.”

“Cool. Cool.”

They drove in silence. A sudden itch attacked Margo’s naked calves.

Then Chiara started talking.

“Pietro has a daughter. Alessia. She’s the one that disappeared.”

“Right.”

The car stopped abruptly. For a long moment, they were just silent, and Margo started picking her fingernails – short, thin with sharp edges and borders of exposed red meat. There were scabs on her ankles from the places that called for something sharper, something that could get rid of those nightmarish itches.

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It wasn’t as bad as it used to be. But now, in this thick stillness, she felt like she needed to move. Her body was getting out of control.

Margo bit her tongue until she felt blood, and this feeling gave her a release.

“Pietro doesn’t know what had happened to… us. To Andrea.”

Of course not, Margo thought. Sometimes she remembered the past against her own will. The images came back to her at night, waking her up soaked in sweat with a scream on her lips.

Chiara’s hand, smaller but thicker, a hand with callouses and strength that Margo’s pale hand was missing, touched her and the space where Margo’s pinky used to be.

For a moment, they just held each other's hands, and that was nice.

“You need to help me. Alessia needs to survive. Like me and you.”

Not like Andrea.

Her ghost hung between them. Forever twelve years old, one tooth chipped after a fight with local kids, mousy blond hair in a tight braid, skinny arms. It was weird, but sometimes Margo felt like she could almost remember her voice.

Years and years ago, in a different life, where the three of them stood at the mouth of a cave, unsure of their next step, Andrea had answered Margo’s pleads with, “Right girls, I am coming in, but I don’t want to fucking die, you get it? We go in and then we go back.”

Right before the darkness swallowed them and their cursed curiosity, they had shared a nervous, forbidden cigarette.

Even the memory of it was making Margo feel sick. It was she who had said, “Don’t be boring, let's see what is there! Maybe we can find the Mooooothmaaan.”

And then they laughed together.

Why were they so stupid?

Why was she so stupid?

“How do you know it's the same?” Margo asked now, her voice strange to her ears.

“Disappearing bears. We have a few of them here in Italy. And we are pretty protective over them. When they started disappearing, a whole drama unfolded on a nearly national scale. People blamed hunters or global warming, but… it wasn’t that. This was just happening here.”

Chiara opened up the box abruptly and picked up a pack of cigarettes. She started the car again and drove slowly.

“Later on, some kids said that they saw something chasing them in the woods. Taller than a man and with red eyes. Some even said that 55 | Issue 9

they saw it following them to the village, waiting outside their window at night.” Chiara took a deep drag.

“Yeah…” Margo said. “This does sound very… familiar.”

She nervously fixed her bangs.

“Did you…” Chiara started, but Margo quickly stopped her with a short and loud, “YES.” Margo took a deep breath in.

“I am completing a whole fucking PhD in archaeology to understand this.”

“I don’t think archaeology would be useful for that.”

Margo bit the inside of her cheek.

“I couldn’t get into physics. I’m not smart enough. But I tried to learn it. Understand it.”

A small, bitter voice inside Margo said, and that’s more than you ever did, Chiara.

Maybe something on her face made Chiara see this reproach because she asked, “And do you feel like this has somehow helped you? Do you feel better?”

“I’m okay,” Margo lied, as she always did. She had a whole collection of pills in her backpack, all nicely organised in a cute plastic holder.

“And are you…good?”

“For half of my childhood, I was called a dyke by a bunch of assholes. My first female crush died. I needed multiple psychiatrist meetings to finally speak without stuttering. I lost my job and needed to move back to my family, and recently, my husband divorced me because I am a bi, and also infertile. Now my brother’s only daughter has disappeared, something wrong is happening again, but I’m not going to let this destroy my perfectly normal life. So yeah, I’m great, Margo, honestly. Cannot do any better. I’m not going to cry over myself and tell you that I’m scared for life, that I cannot sleep at night, and that everything is meaningless. I’ve got a great life, thank you very much. I have a normal life.”

Margo just nodded her head to this tirade.

“Good to know. I also broke up recently.”

“Oh yeah?” Chiara was not interested whatsoever.

“Yeah. He broke up with me.” Usually, Margo would have said it was a mutual decision. “He said that he feels like there is something broken inside of me and I don’t let him… fix it.”

Chiara scoffed loudly.

“Ha! You see, this is your fault, Margo. You need to keep this shit Chaotic Merge | 56

inside and not let it out. Once the others know about it, it’s over. There is nothing to fix if they don’t know about it.”

“So you lie to people?”

“Longer than I can remember.”

The village was small, cuddled up to a big body of water, and Margo could see a silver light bouncing off its tiny waves. Around there were tall mountains, almost protectively gathered around the village.

When they got out and Margo had a moment to take in the views, she couldn’t believe that Chiara had decided to live in a place like this and lie so effortlessly to everyone, including herself.

This area was literally a copy-paste of their town, of their childhood dream/nightmare town. The strong sense of déjà vu was making Margo twitch even more.

“My house is here,” Chiara pointed. “Try to sleep well. Tomorrow we are going to look for Alessia.” *** The forest around the village unfolded as usual, from a manageable number of trees and bushes to something out of a dark fairytale: a jungle of greenery, with plants fighting for light.

“Alessia!” Chiara’s brother screamed blaringly, with a sheer desperation straining his voice.

“Alessia!” Margo’s voice was close to breaking when she called the lost girl's name. Intuitively, she tried to copy the Italian accent.

They walked and walked, and the sweat started gathering on Margo’s back; her legs were hurting. At some point – and it felt like she had just closed her eyes, nothing more than an innocent blink – she realised she was alone. The voices, more distant now but still urgent, surrounded her but were no longer beside her.

Margo was lost.

Panic froze her in place. She had paroxetine for situations like this in her plastic case. A case that she had hidden under the mattress in Chiara’s house. What was her therapist always telling her? She needed to act like an anteater and eat these intrusive thoughts whose loud buzz was slowly rising inside her skull. What do you see, Margo? Green. What do you hear, Margo? Voices. Moving leaves.

Steps.

“Hey.” Chiara touched her back, ignoring how stiff and upright Margo stood in the middle of a field of ferns. “This way,” “Are we going to separate from the rest?”

Chiara gave her a clear look that she was annoyed with how naive 57 | Issue 9

this question was.

“Of course we are.”

“So you know where the girl is… Alessia…?”

Chiara’s lips became one thin line, and she nodded her head.

“And you didn’t go to get her yourself ?”

For a long moment, they were just looking at each other.

“No.” Chiara finally admitted.

“Are you… planning something?” Margo asked, and right after the question came out of her, she realised how stupid it was. Even if Chiara was planning something, something potentially bad and harmful, she wouldn’t have told Margo.

“I am… afraid. Okay?” Chiara took a deep, shaky breath. “I found the cave by accident. It was almost as if it called me. Somehow, I just knew how to find it. It terrified me. I… I cannot do this alone, and there is no one else but you who…”

She didn’t finish the sentence and left it hanging.

“I understand,” Margo said, but she really didn’t. She had studied for countless hours, trying to find more places similar to the one they had seen. She had learnt about ancient civilisations, the myths, the similarities, the differences. She could have literally written a book about all the Cryptozoics, their connection, and how all of this tied up to some theory about alternative universes, different timelines, evolution, and everything else that was out there.

She had applied for multiple research programmes, begging cold, old people to send her to Mexico, the USA, Peru, Oceania. She went to Greece, to Delfy, touching old stones, trying to understand and find a clue, that maybe, something, some time ago was here or there.

She had been able to travel the world in pursuit of her search, going everywhere, except to that town.

Nobody could ever make her do it.

“Can we just go, please?” Chiara sounded worn out, but she led the way.

The cave was a large crack in the mountain, a narrow mouth, half open with darkness lurking from the inside. One could easily miss it if they didn’t know what to look for.

Chiara took out a piece of red material from her pocket.

“Alessia had a red hoodie on when she’d disappeared. Red hoodie and blue shorts.”

A nasty thought bloomed in Margo’s mind. What will be left of little Alessia if they find her? Will she lose her arm or her leg? Her head or her heart? Or maybe a little pinky like Margo? Broken bones like Chiara?

Chaotic Merge | 58

“You got the flashlights?” Margo’s mouth was now dry.

“Yeah. Flashlights, rope, some yarn, and even climbing hooks.”

Margo nodded. Briefly, their eyes met.

“Let’s go.” Margo forced a smile. “We can do this.”

She now sounded way more cheerful than she should.

The sense of déjà vu was getting stronger, the memories buried down in her mind started overlapping with reality. But we are smarter this time, she tried to calm herself down. Chiara had a ball of red yarn, carefully letting it mark their way back. Last time, the cave trapped them inside a twisted labyrinth of tunnels that could drive someone to madness (and maybe it did).

It had been so bad that when the town was searching for Andrea, two of the spelunkers disappeared. After that, they stopped the search and the girl was announced dead.

Margo never even attended the funeral with Andrea’s empty coffin. She was too afraid of other people, of Andrea’s parents and their violent grief. They were hunting for her, willing to twist the truth out of her.

The last time she had seen them was in their local supermarket, the only one in their town. Their eager fingers dug deep down into her flesh, their hand wrapped around her arms, shaking her, screaming for her words to come out. Margo’s dad needed to punch Andrea’s dad in the face to finally let her go.

Back in the car, her mum started asking her the same question over and over again, louder and louder, until Margo said, “yes, yes, yes, she’s dead, she’s dead,” and the saliva spilled from the corners of her lips, until her whole body was shaking. Under her eyelids, she could just see blue.

“Earth to Margo,” Chiara’s voice broke the silence. “I’m shitting myself, honestly, this isn’t okay.”

Chiara’s face was shining wet under Margo’s light.

“You okay? Do you need water? A break?”

Think about the bats around, Margo told herself. Think about normal stuff that lives in the caves. You read the books. Think. The white means that there is a limestone line here. Do you hear the drops of water? What are the names of the big, massive caves?

Don’t think about the other stuff.

“I cannot breathe. It must be the pressure or something. We are descending, right?” Chiara was talking faster and faster.

“Does it feel like something sitting on your chest?”

“Kind of. I will be fine. Honestly.” And just to prove that, Chiara took a couple of big breaths.

59 | Issue 9

“Right… Focus on the world around you. What do you smell?”

“Something wet, not nice.”

“What do you see?”

“You. You look exactly like you did fifteen years ago. Still skinny.

Just… longer,” Chiara moved her hand to emphasise that.

“Okay, and what do you hear?”

They both went silent for a moment, and they both heard it.

Steps.

Chiara and Margo quickly exchanged glances, turned off the flashlights, and jumped to each other's sides.

“Tell me you have a weapon,” Margo whispered in Chiara’s ear.

Around them there was a primordial darkness.

“Yeah,” Chiara replied with an even heavier breath. “A knife in my right pocket. And… a flare gun.”

“A flare gun?”

“Shh…” The steps passed them, while their heads were touching each other so painfully close, as if they wanted to break their own skulls. Hand to hand, fingers twisted together and shallow, careful breaths. Did they really hear steps, or was it their imagination?

“Now,” Chiara was first to break the spell. She stood up, took out her knife and lit the surrounding space with her torch. “Get up.”

Contrary to the harshness in Chiara’s voice, their arms were still linked tightly, not ready to let go of each other.

With each step, it was as if they were walking back in time, their memories wild and free to roam after years of repression.

The last time, they didn’t have a yarn to mark their way.

The last time, they hadn’t even realized how far they’d ventured, deeper and deeper, until the air started tasting differently, until they saw the faint blue light dancing on the ceiling. Not like a police car’s light, no.

This was like nothing they had ever seen before.

The three of them had ended up so dehydrated, tired and terrified.

Still, because the guilt was already boring a hole inside Margo – she had been the one who insisted on exploring this place – she said, “We are saved! It's water! If there’s water, that means it has to be getting here somehow!”

But it hadn’t been water.

Now, there were only the two of them left. Margo could feel how the air had suddenly changed.

“I was right,” Chiara said quietly. She didn’t look happy. Her face Chaotic Merge | 60

now seemed older, with a grey tinge to her complexion.

“The gates,” Margo said quietly. It was the point from where things not of this world came and went. It felt almost like the first time they had seen it. Like the same place had shifted through time and space to be here now, for them to find it again.

Waiting.

It had already eaten one of their friends, and now, it was luring them back to take all of them this time.

No, Margo needed to stop herself from thinking that. As a reflex, she started chewing her nails again, or whatever was left of them. I cannot think of that. It’s nothing. It cannot think. It cannot entice people here.

But it could. It had done it before, and it had done it now.

Throughout history, there had been strange anomalies, missing people, changes in flora, and twisted animals. Repeating patterns, over and over again, always some people lost, and some never found again.

Like Andrea.

In front of them, there was a large opening, another cavern, brightly lit with faint blue light that danced between sharp white stalactites. Below, a bowl-shaped syncline filled with an impossible blue that hurt the eyes. A blue that was glowing from inside, black where it was touching the shore.

“Alessia!” Chiara’s voice made Margo jump. “Alessia, piccola, dove sei? Alessia, per favore, di' qualcosa!”

Chiara left Margo standing frozen while she ran around looking for her missing niece.

The niece who was nowhere to be found.

“Her hoodie is here!” Chiara shouted.

How convenient, Margo thought for a second, and this single thought made her even more terrified. Not convenient. Not at all. Chiara wouldn’t lure her here.

Or would she?

I should run, that was Margo’s other thought. I can run back, I still can find a way out, get a taxi to the nearest town and just fuck off. I still have my phone. I don’t need my passport and the rest. I could go to the embassy and tell them that I was kidnapped or…

“Margo!”

“I am so sorry,” Margo whispered with tears running down her cheeks. “Why did you bring me here?”

“What?!” Chiara looked at her, shocked.

“Do you… do you want to kill me? Why did you ask me to come here?”

61 | Issue 9

“Margo, this isn’t the time!”

“No! You shut me off for years and I tried to contact you, I missed you so badly. I know it’s all my fault, I asked you to join me in my search, I told you it would be cool to check the caves. I know it was all my fault. I know…”

“Margo, please shut up.”

“No, no! Why now? Just please tell me why now?”

Chiara stood there, breathing heavily. Finally, she replied, “Because there is no one else.”

“You hate me. Still.”

“No, I… I don’t know. It all comes back when I see you. And I don’t want to remember. I don’t want to search. I don’t want answers to my questions. I don’t want anything. I just want to erase all of this from my mind, otherwise, otherwise…”

She looked at Margo so pointedly that Margo knew the other option was getting haunted by this for the rest of her life, turning into a crazy, conspiracy freak, with a sad, broken, and lonely mind.

Exactly, how Margo had ended up.

Against her own will, she came closer to Chiara, fear shaking her whole body.

“Now,” Chiara continued. “Please, please help me find Alessia.”

The hoodie in her hands was red with dark marks.

The depth was calling to Margo.

Chiara walked around, searching for any other signs of her niece, but Margo could only stare at the liquid, hearing something like a scream inside her head. Slowly, as if someone else were doing it, and she was just standing beside them, she took off her shoes, and then her jacket. She carefully placed the flashlight to illuminate the slowly shifting surface. It shouldn’t have been moving, since there was no wind here to make it stir.

But maybe something was beneath it.

The other world.

“Margo, what are you doing?”

But it was too late. A sudden plunge swallowed Margo, pulling her into its depths farther than a cave like this should go.

And below… down there, deeper, deeper still … there was a light. Like a silver coin pushed to the bottom of a lake, its edges sharp, covered in seaweed hair, twisting under an invisible current that flowed from the other side.

It was so close.

Chaotic Merge | 62

Exactly like the last time.

“Oh my God, girls, there is a fucking opening down here!” Margo had screamed in the past, wet from weird water-not-water, a big smile brightening her face. Chiara and Andrea had waited for her on the shore, afraid, dirty, surprised.

“You are hallucinating,” Andrea had said.

“I am not! Come, honestly, come, come!”

And they did.

In the present, Margo swam towards the opening, her hands ready to close in on its edges, pushing through the barrier of liquid to get back to the other side.

But something stopped her. At first, she just kicked her legs hard, but it didn’t help, and to her horror, she managed to hit something. Something soft and hard at the same time. Margo twisted her body to see what was holding her back.

A hand.

Pale, greenish arms – small and childlike – jutted from the shadows, with skin mottled with spots like bruises on a rotten fruit.

Then the head emerged. Its skin sagging from its face, slack and overstretched as if it had been pulled too far over the bone. Sunken cheeks exposed a darkness, as its eyes dangled loose in their sockets.

There was something hiding inside that hollowed skull. Two pinpricks of red light gleamed from within, as if they belonged to an eel writhing in a cave made out of meat and bones. They watched her from behind the human mask – patient, alien, hiding and moving the child’s body like a marionette.

Margo’s first urge was to vomit, but she was holding her breath.

The bitterness in her mouth made her gasp for air. Suddenly, the cold slush of thick water-like substance filled her mouth, making her eyes tear up.

She was kicking, screaming, trying to get away from this monster, from this collapsing corpse and whatever else that was hiding inside of it.

Margo was now drowning.

I am going to die, she realised while the pain filled her with the creature holding her down.

Something else grasped her. It attacked the creature with a knife.

The long and sharp blade bit into the skull, and to Margo’s shock, it gave way almost too easily, like striking a ripe melon. The head split open along the temple with a wet crack, one half lolling to the side, still tethered to the neck by slick cords of tendon and ragged strands of flesh. Beneath the ruined face, something else twitched, something that had never 63 | Issue 9

belonged to a child at all.

The air filled up Margo’s mouth. She vomited everything that she had swallowed, feeling the sharp stones under her hands.

“Chiara,” she finally spit out the name.

“Here.”

Chiara patted her arm, but she wasn’t looking at Margo. She was looking forward, towards a great stone exit ahead, brimming with a blinding white light of an alien sun; a black star, swollen and hanging low on the horizon, too vast, too terrifying to be real. A star like this should not exist. A star like this should not burn so fiercely, almost making her eyes bleed.

Suns.

Not one, but many. Far off, flat discs of red smoldered, and pale white shadows stretched like scratches etched into the sky.

“No…” Margo whispered to herself, but it was too late.

They were here.

Inside the other world.

“No,” she repeated and looked back into the water-not-water.

“We are back,” Chiara said so quietly that Margo could’ve imagined that. The tears were streaming down her cheeks. “We made it back somehow.”

Margo hit the surface of the liquid, but Chiara grabbed her arm tight as if she was her lifeline. Something moved in the depths of the water-not-water. A pale shape like a face, that wasn’t Margo’s reflection, looked up at her, scaring her.

“We should move. We may still find Alessia.”

Still shocked, Chiara pulled her back, securing her in her arms.

They both shook from the sobs that they couldn’t let out, with reality hazy around them.

Or even find Andrea, Margo thought. Or whatever that was left of those little girls.

For a second, it felt as if they were back in the past, as if nothing had ever changed. As if none of them had their heart broken, secrets buried, lies told and swallowed like pills.

“We should move before the… the things... will find us,” Chiara said with the knife in her hand. With her other hand, she held Margo.

Both of them were too afraid of letting each other go.

There was nothing left behind them, only the blinding white light of those alien suns calling to them ahead.

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Floppy Disks

by Katie Beswick

They were flat plastic palm-sized squares in any colour, with a sliding steel shutter.

Inside, a round magnetic disk, a spring and protective paper, cut in two thin rings.

Stored within, were things you’d saved, the way you might save an idea in a brain, remember it later, or half remember it.

Prone to corruption, and after use, warm.

My first lover kept his on a shelf in his dorm, in a paisley cardboard box, above his desk.

He liked heights and cocaine, any thrill of a risk.

He slept with his hard hot legs tangled in mine.

He died too young. I liked to wake early, watch the sun hit his face in a flat, warm little square.

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THE PARTY

by Stephen Joffe or maybe it is like drifting off at your own birthday party, as a childjust a moment & then you are awake again listen

& you will hear everyone you loved so much just down the hall, their voices guiding you to the warmest table no one has left, no one is leaving so happy they are, to see you again there are gifts still to open stories to hear, to tellthe night is young, & joyful. death is only the strong, kind arms of your father who slipped you gently from the car, & into the house; kept everyone laughing while they waited for you to return, 'welcome back, sleepyhead.’

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Angel of She Finally Leaves Him after Richard Silken

by Yoda Olinyk

Angel of her car keys swimming delicate in her pocket, no fist around the sturdiest one. Angel of her hair in a ponytail— loose, high, long. Never something to yank, just admire, admire, admire. Angel of an eight-dollar latte. No secret savings account. No escape plan. Angel of staying. Staying put. No more staying small. Standing tall. Angel of booming voices in big crowds. Men throwing down instead of chanting, not all men from their keyboards. Angel of mercy.

Mercy. Mercy. Angel of only one cellphone and no, I don’t need to clear my browser history. Not now, not ever. Angel of not now, not ever. Angel of not now, not ever, never again.

Angel of never again. Angel of how did I get here and why did she stay? Angel of stay. Angel of stay right there, I’m coming. Angel of get in the car. Angel of no turning back.

Angel of leaving. Angel of leaving. Of leaving. Leaving.

Leave.

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We Don't Need No Water

by David Serafino The Jade Palace dumpster is warm. Is this some kindly innovation, a dine-in experience for the discerning unhoused? It is not. Beneath the ordeur of rot I smell smoke, and find it trickling up the brick wall, a waxy black wisp rising from a crack in the pavement under the dumpster. It stinks sulfuric, a spiteful, arrogant reek, but I'm so famished I sit on the heated pavement imagining I'm eating in a rich person's car with a hose run in from the exhaust pipe.

After lunch I go to report the smoke and find the fire station also smoking. It prefers cigars. Behind the hook-and-ladders the firemen are playing poker. They have a lovely table, a lush, hunter green baize, though they've stained it with ash and beer. They squint at me through the smoke, until one thinks to crack a window. “There's no work here,” another one says. “We're volunteers.”

I tell them about the crack and the smoke and they chuckle. No, I can't smoke crack here. This ain't my mama's house. When I clarify, they agree among themselves to let the Jade Palace burn. Their lo mein's good, but not worth the trots.

“The pavement is hot,” I tell them. One wit suggests I sleep there. He says there's no underground fire because there's no oxygen underground. I should leave firefighting to the pros and quit ruining their game.

I do neither, so they send me to the chief upstairs, along a dark hall smelling of dust and industrial toxins. It's a claustrophobic trip, but here we are: Fire Chief Donald O. Rutherford. I tap and am answered by a snore. I knock and the snore intensifies, defiantly so. The squeaky hinge doesn't wake the portly white with his stocking feet on the desk.

A vent shushes me, the lights wink conspiratorially, the dark hall guards my back. I step into the stuffy office. Nylon carpet, water-stained drywall and sock-scented ambiance all say there's nothing theft-worthy here. The filing cabinet is empty. A framed diploma certifies Donald in the detection and dismantling of clandestine methamphetamine facilities. The chief farts, I salute him, and leave the door ajar when I go.

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I don't often visit my local constabulary. Their lack of social grace demoralizes me, and today proceeds per protocol. The desk sergeant offers to arrest me for arson, assuming I'm here to confess. I try again to explain the concrete, crack and smoke, the subterranean nature of the phenomenon and obvious impossibility of my involvement. She recommends the fire department. Then, while I'm re-explaining the somnolent, flatulent, presumably incompetent chief, a door opens and a burly honky packed into a little blue uniform emerges to glare at me.

“He's not talking about you, chief,” the desk sergeant says. “He means Donny.”

The chief keeps glaring at me. “I know you,” he says. “Mrs. Chen's dumpster.” The desk officer says I'm here to report a fire, but the chief is unimpressed. Do I know how many times a week Mrs. Chen calls the station? I'm worse than the damn raccoons. He oughta arrest me right now – but the phone rings and he loses focus. I use the distraction to begin the long backwards shuffle to freedom.

“He's right here,” the desk sergeant says, then covers the receiver and hands the phone to the chief. “It's the mayor. There's a black cloud?”

“She want me to arrest it or what?” He takes the phone. “Yes, ma'am” says the chief several times, then switches to “I see.” Then he looks up and catches me creeping. “Where'd you see that smoke?” he grunts at me. Near Fieser and Sherman. It's hard to be more specific. He repeats this to the mayor. A thoughtful pause. “He'll show us, or I'll beat the piss out of him,” the chief says, then they share a chuckle and hang up.

At Fieser and Sherman, the Jade Palace is doing meager business.

Everyone's crossing the street to avoid the smog. Mayor Castro waits in her towncar. She's an ancient creature crackling with benevolent energy.

Her attorney, a blonde ghoul she calls Timmy, exits the car first, offers me his long fingers to shake, then politely requests that I remain ten feet from the mayor to avoid us being photographed together. The chief, who's finally realized I'm leading him to Mrs. Chen's dumpster, bottles his rage in front of the mayor. I expect retribution eventually, but the mayor calls the chief Toddy, which defuses the situation somewhat. I can't be intimidated by a Toddy.

The mayor is spry, but needs help over the curb. Her Timmy's a poor crutch, twice her height and liable to snap under her weight, but he shows passion for his work, getting her into the alley. I kneel and point to the crack. The mayor says somebody'd better wake up Donny. Then she takes my hand to help me up, a hindrance that I appreciate anyway.

A fire engine arrives, disgorging the portly white fire chief, who bullies aside the dumpster and stomps on the crack. The smoke dissipates.

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Donald O. Rutherford hitches his suspenders and puffs his chest, and when the smoke clears entirely, he lifts his foot. The smoke returns in a blacker, waxier plume.

“A major conflagration,” he quips to the mayor, who's on her phone. He stomps on the smoke again, folding his arms to denote manly resolve. I watch the chief 's eyes slowly widen as he starts to sweat, breathing through his teeth, avoiding the mayor's blank gaze. When he finally lifts his foot, Donny produces the most gratifying whimper. His rubber sole is strung like gum from the pavement.

Toddy replaces Donny. When the police chief 's boot begins to melt, he cunningly switches feet with a triumphant, scornful grin. This affront to his authority infuriates Donny. I'm enjoying my day at the circus.

There should be elephants and cotton candy. I shoot a bemused glance at the mayor, to convey my feeling that this clownish capering might merit our tepid applause, but my carefully calibrated look misses the mayor by six inches and hits her attorney right between his soulless eyes, and I wither into a spineless shudder.

The mayor orders Toddy to get some water, and the big fella comes back with a pitcher of ice water from the Jade Palace. He watches dejectedly as the ice melts into a simmering puddle. Donny is smug, but gracious. He'll call the boys, bust a hole in the asphalt, dump a thousand gallons down there, then they'll all go play some poker.

The mayor approves, but her attorney disapproves of her approval. It's an election year. She can't have her name associated with an underground fire, underground anything. The mayor nobly defers, ceding authority to Donny. She also authorizes Toddy to call for orange traffic cones. Lots of them. He can reroute traffic through the graveyard. Quite a few voters live there, but Mayor Castro can count on them to support her in these trying times.

I usually sleep near the Jade Palace, in the choicest of grottoes by the creek, but tonight the smoke's too thick so I move upstream and upwind to the bridge. It's a convenient site, but also a cliché. Sleeping here makes me feel like a troll, when I prefer to envision myself more as a gnome or wood sprite. Tonight, though, I feel like a troll in the mayor's confidence. I'm on a first-name basis with the fire and police chiefs. These eminent persons have seen me, spoken with me, acknowledged my presence. Even the attorney realized it looked bad having me there. Tonight, I shall dream of life as a civil servant, or as some type of authority figure, like a fire station janitor or police dog.

Instead, I dream of fire and wake up choking. My bed is on fire.

No, I'm sleeping in the creek's bed, and that's what's smoking. There's 73 | Issue 9

a glowing fissure in the bank, like the earth is hatching to birth the hell within. I go back to sleep happy. I must see the mayor first thing in the morning.

But Mayor Castro won't grant me audience. She's busy and will stay that way until the election. Her secretary says I can leave my number, but not in a cruel way, and when she realizes her mistake, she has the grace to blush. If I happen to get a phone, I should call and give her my number, and someone, not the mayor, will return my call. Also, if I come back, I really should wear a tie, and also shoes.

I feed my worries damp waffles behind the IHOP and, thus composed, meander to the fire station. No poker game today. They've left beer cans on the table, which I collect for the deposit. It's too late to save the felt. I feel an upswell of pity for the table. It was beautiful once, now scarred through carelessness. It's still got strong legs, though, its posture unbowed, even a touch haughty.

I belt out halloo, but nobody answers, so I climb the steps to Donny's office and knock loudly, but the chief is already awake, and grumpy about it, exuding skepticism as I explain the glowing fissure in the creek bank.

“So you're saying everywhere you camp, a fire gets out of control?

Look, pal, I don't mind you keeping warm. Putting out your campfires ain't my job. Let's keep it that way, okay buddy?” His mood improves and he even holds the door for me, smiling wearily, like someone who's put in a good day's work and deserves a nap.

At the police station, I'm taken aback by the desk officer's humane attitude. She whispers through the slot in the plexiglass that my town hall visit was ill-advised. The mayor's attorney wants me arrested for disturbing the peace. Do I still want her to get the chief? I do not, thank you kindly. ~ The creek basin has the worst air in town, so I move into a park gazebo near a delightful, wasteful little bakery. Like everybody else in town, I wear a scarf in case the shifting winds smoke out the neighborhood. My eyes itch even when I'm asleep, so I've cultivated the habit of keeping them closed whenever possible. But walking around town requires keen attention. Smoldering sinkholes open faster than the prison crews can fill them. The intersection of Fieser and Sherman is a flaming cavern, the Jade Palace boarded up, its parking lot occupied by an entrepreneurial youth smoking chicken and ribs on a rebar rotisserie over the Chaotic Merge | 74

pit. I've gnawed some bones there. His sauce is vinegary.

The fires are a nice addition come winter. Sleeping next to them gives me a headache, but they keep the snow off. The smoke also keeps the sensible citizenry indoors, leaving me free to stroll this wintry hellscape on my lonesome. The silence is immaculate apart from my coughing.

Because of the cough, I move into an adjoining valley when spring comes. One pities the suckers stuck in their homes, though there are downsides to my new digs, as well. Mostly the noise from the gas field. It takes several weeks to grow accustomed, but by the end of April, I've come to appreciate the layered, almost symphonic arrangement of rattling compressors, percussive blasts of water, the tanker truck leitmotif.

The civilized glow of halogen washes out the stars to calm me at night. I consider myself fortunate.

By June, I've expanded my camp to the extent my construction skill allows. My pride and joy is a network of tarps strung high in the trees, a vaulted ceiling allowing all-weather access to five principal salons, with long views over the pond, stream and gas field. Tending my cookfire in the largest of these, I see a black column rising from inside the fenced perimeter. Men in yellow hard hats with ties and rolled sleeves examine a smoking hole, then one closes a hatch and the smoke vanishes. I watch the hatch all day into the next, but nobody comes near it again. I should inform the mayor.

When I was told to wear a tie, I assumed the rest of the suit was implied, so my first stop is Goodwill. The only suit in my size was some fool's wedding getup, or it might've belonged to an undertaker. They don't have bow ties at Goodwill, so I get stuck with a wide floral print necktie entirely unsuited to the gravity of the situation. But I can put my dignity aside. I'm wearing a tie, as required. I pray it is enough.

I catch the mayor trying to climb the town hall steps. Luck is with me – there are a lot of steps. Even with her attorney lodged firmly in her armpit, she'll be here a while. But she's in no hurry. She remembers my name, shakes my hand and thanks me again for my good work in the bad days. Things have gotten so much better, don't I agree? I admit the fire has upsides, and wonder aloud whom we have to thank, segueing into my discovery at the gas field, which I propose as a likely source of the fire.

The lawyer mutters into Mayor Castro's ear and the mayor cheerfully remarks that the source is no longer relevant. The fire is a fait accompli. Quality of life is the hot button issue, elections are imminent, the gas company a major donor. They've offered her a gas mask for every resident and an air purifier for every home. It's the central pledge of her campaign.

Her attorney slithers between us, I recoil from the chill, and they resume 75 | Issue 9

their ascent without me.

~

The company keeps its promise. After her reelection, the mayor hands out gas masks to every adult resident. Child-sized masks are going to be rolled out with the air purifiers over the coming months. Since I'm a resident of nowhere, I don't get a mask. Life in town is untenable. I can only scavenge for an hour before my eyes start to water and my inflamed throat closes. Compounding this difficulty, recession has left potentially fruitful dumpsters in short supply, with a wider geographical distribution pattern.

So I mostly stick to my valley, which has gentrified since fire devoured the poor people's wooden homes near the creek. We have a dozen families under tarps now. They have Teflon cookware, waterproof tents, fine luggage full of clothes they wash in the pond on Sundays. I always sit nearby to hear them singing. At night I flutter between fires, listening to their worries and plans. For weeks there are rumors the child-sized masks have arrived. The schools will reopen, the adults can get back to work.

The important thing is to get the kids out of the camp before it shapes them, while there's still a chance they can forget.

Because of my connection with the mayor and status as shantytown founder, I become an authority figure, entrusted with shortages and squabbles, occasionally held up for emulation. As our shipwreck becomes a community, I start to wonder, am I betraying them by concealing my knowledge of the hatch, of a conspiracy at the gas field? I decide to embrace my role as disturber of the peace, but by then the child-sized masks have arrived. The schools reopen and people begin moving out of their tents, into the abandoned mansions near town.

I miss them and continue feeling beholden. I want to help them.

What if I could put out the fire? I have some relevant knowledge, like the locations of the hatch and fire engine keys. I've met the fire brigade and assume their equipment is simple as a garden hose. They said they're a volunteer outfit. What if I volunteer?

I find myself in the vicinity of the firehouse late one evening, the station locked up except for an obliging window, which opens without a peep. It even has the nerve to shush me a little. To get inside, I have to step on the poker table. I apologize while I do it, but the table must understand hypocrisy by now. The firemen have spilled something sticky on the felt. I feel I owe this poor table some explanation vis-a-vis the follies of man, but what can I say? I have also abused this noble creation.

Fate forgives me, and shows me the glass cabinet unlocked, the Chaotic Merge | 76

keys conveniently labeled. The firetruck features an automatic transmission, very user friendly. The garage door opens with the mere push of a button.

By the time the firemen hear the noise and come running in their pyjamas, I've taken out a hydrant and gotten the truck back on the road, aimed at the bridge. From there it's a left, then straight down the access road, over the chain link fence, to the hatch.

The gate guards are like dogs yipping in the distance. Let's pretend they're yipping encouragement. You can do it, Dante! You can save us! And I am trying, but the hose is more complicated than I thought. It takes a few tries to get connected. The hatch is warm, not hot. The hose bucks and stiffens in the hole and I listen for a hiss, some sign of satisfaction.

The security guards arrive, and while they're doubled over catching their breath, a golf cart pulls up. The man in the yellow helmet introduces himself as Clifford Redmont, Jr. He says water was the first thing they tried. They had the fire department pump five thousand gallons down there. Now I see Donny has deceived me. I have underestimated his cunning. Cliff says the company's tried foam, explosions, stacking caps and a snubbing unit. It's decent of me to want to help, but it's too late. It's been too late for a while.

Cliff is genteelly concerned about my lack of a gas mask. I am forced to admit that I am not a proper resident. Unforced, I tell him about medical bills, semi-related legal bills, my divorce, loss of home, paychecks more garnish than meal, a vagrancy conviction, stint in jail, working odd jobs and reducing expenses through simple living and a fat-o-the-land ethos.

The same sort of thing happened to Cliff 's cousin. Herb killed himself a couple years back, so Cliff is eager to help. He has a spare mask in his golf cart. Don't worry, he's got boxes of them at home. He also gives me a twenty, though he's still gotta call the fire chief to tell him where to pick up his truck. Cliff thinks I'd better disappear before Donny gets here, and I agree. ~ By virtue of a gas mask, I join the ranks of the upwardly mobile, finding entire neighborhoods comfortably within my price range. My neighbors all agree, nobody who got out of here is ever coming back. This is all ours.

After an itinerant period, I settle into a modest eight-bedroom 77 | Issue 9

on Old Mill Road, a short walk from my favorite dumpster. If not for the smog, my bedroom would boast a commanding view of the town. I moved in with seventeen shopping carts of possessions, mostly smokesoiled raiment, and inherited this house semi-furnished. There's an air purifier in every room, a small library, modern kitchen, garish bathrooms and a swimming pool, though it's no fun swimming in a gas mask.

Because I forage in formal wear, I again acquire some local celebrity. People mistake me for one of the town's leading citizens, saluting me with the double upward nod that's come to signify a smile. The Daily Picayune, our weekly paper, runs a story crediting me with undermining unhelpful taboos around dumpster diving. In time, my fame reaches the point that one of Mayor Castro's henchmen personally summons me for a casual dinner at the mayoral residence.

I dress with utmost decorum, no floral anything, black tie, crimson cummerbund. Imagine my chagrin when I arrive to find the mayoral residence sprayed with fireproof foam. It looks like a coconut cake. I feel overdressed. The butler receives me in a gas mask. “Only the principal salons are purified,” he shouts into his filter. “The air in the main hall is unfit for breathing.” What a dump. I should have invited the mayor to my place.

The butler shows me to the library, where it's safe to remove my mask. I browse while I wait for the mayor, finding titles I recognize from my own collection. Mayor Castro visibly recalibrates when she enters the room, noting my classical style and casual intimacy with literature. I'm not overdressed. She is underdressed. Her teal pantsuit seems déclassé.

The mayor struggles to conceal her degraded status with bluster as I convey her by the arm to the dining room. The table is laid with a selection of breads and a pitcher of ice water, which recalls our first meeting, and Toddy's capering. We briefly indulge in nostalgia. The mayor proposes a photograph. While we pose, the chef stands balancing a lidded silver platter. I know him – the entrepreneurial youth from the Jade Palace parking lot. When we're seated, he lifts the filigreed silver lid to reveal a pair of braised pigeons. I hope his marinade has mellowed.

After the meal, the mayor proposes a toast to me, who's been with her since the beginning. It was my timely intervention that allowed so many of her friends to sell before the crash. The mayor has me to thank for their continued support. Alas, it's all over now. Dear Timmy absconded with the relief fund. He and Toddy have purchased a hotel on a Caribbean island with no extradition. There will be an investigation, hearings, potential indictment. Already the Picayune is spreading rumors Chaotic Merge | 78

of financial mismanagement. The scandal could end her career, define her legacy. The mayor needs to forge new links to the community by promoting one of their own. Mayor Castro, Evangelina, Evie, wants me as the new fire chief.

“What happened to Donny?”

Evie ponders a dinner roll before answering. Don't repeat this, but when Donny was young, he and some school chums set fire to a homeless man. His friends suffered no ill effects, but Donny developed a fear and hatred of fire that became his vocation. In his early years, the hatred dominated, but now the fear has him. He's lived in horror these last years. Through his office door, his men hear him screaming in his sleep.

It's sad to see what's become of him. Evie hopes he will retire somewhere cold and rainy. But the people have lost faith in Donny, and the fire still polls as a key issue for voters. The mayor says I have experience, charisma, popular support. She calls me leadership material. Of course I don't have to answer now. Shall we adjourn to the terrace for the sunset? The fumes make for a wild show.

While the sunset shines like a great gas fire in the sky, I consider the mayor's proposal. Having seen the current fire chief in action, I feel I'm up to the job. But with all that equipment, and given my civic impulses, I might be tempted to fight the fire. I don't want to fight the fire. I owe everything to the fire. If it ever goes out, the property owners will be back to evict us. Then there are my creditors. Would a fire chief 's salary satisfy them? I doubt it. Would the headlines let them know where to find me?

Sure would.

Looking down on the town, swathed in clouds of magenta and fuchsia, I decide I'd earn little, risk much, and that life is so good I shouldn't push my luck. I tell her the truth. The firehouse and I are on good terms, friendly even, but we don't have much in common. What a pity, Evie says. She confesses that after sixty years, she's tiring of politics. It's time to move on from sniping and backbiting, scapegoating and sleaze. The gas company has offered her a cushy retirement package in Sumatra and she's seriously considering it. She can see I'm unenthusiastic about her fire chief proposal. I'm clearly an ambitious man. Would I consider standing for election, with her backing? I'd most likely run unopposed. The town is bankrupt. The garbage collectors are on strike, the teachers haven't been paid, the hospital is overrun with respiratory cases, mostly pediatric, and everybody will hate me for that, but otherwise the pay is reasonable, and kickbacks from the gas company are approximately three-and-a-half times more reasonable.

I humbly accept the nomination.

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~ My term in office is not marked by prosperity, with some exceptions. The children in the respiratory ward mostly die, relieving the burden on both hospital and school, though my attorney advises I not take credit for that. My approval ratings rise after I invoke eminent domain to turn the country club into a public dump and end garbage collection.

Everyone knows I stand for public access to trash. But most importantly, I am liberal in my dealings with the gas company. I appreciate the fire's benefits. I don't affect an anti-fire stance in public. As a token of their esteem, the gas company offers to repair the town's streets and plumbing, so I take credit for that, and the town council votes along party lines to name a street after me. Even being so honored, the crowning moment of my mayoralty is cutting the ribbon for the grand reopening of the Jade Palace.

One day the fire burns out and the day after, I become the most beloved mayor this town's ever had. Pundits at the Daily Picayune are flabbergasted when I choose not to seek reelection. But the company has paid my debts and the county register falsified the deed to my house, so I intend to live long and free, drawing a fat pension to the end of my days.

Upon my retirement, the town council votes along party lines to erect a statue in my likeness. I don't feel the artist properly captured my inner self, and in fact made me look like a two-ton bronze garden gnome, but time and custom turn it into an integral part of the town, and my hideous visage thrills the children with fear.

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