miscellany
Copyright © 2025 Loyola Marymount University.
Cover: Bioluminescence by Julia Jaffe
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Christianne Tubola
SENIOR EDITORS
Taylor Crowell
Thomas Farmer
Louis Yanucci
EDITORIAL TEAM
Abby Alexander
Sofia Baer
Bradley Duggan
Ian Piexoto
Molly Talbot
Emma Wakefield
ADVISING PROFESSOR
Michelle Bitting
DESIGN & TYPESETTING
ash good
BINARY STARS
LOUIS YANUCCI
Goodbyes are always awkward, I envy cats and quiet suicide. You can play in fountains, pick at bookshelves, a proxy for breaking walls after poetry readings. Tell me something like that woman we’d never met, smeared shit between her lips, naked body in a stranger’s bath. Why’d you love that French girl? I hope you gave her more than a dead opossum on a piece of paper. In the hostel bathroom she flips your tarots and it’s all theoreticals: AIDS in Paris, kegs in Honolulu (was she so far off), fine arts in Greenwich Village. How will I say goodbye when I have to give back your Q-ball and cancer? Think, Think, Think! A man named Ali left me in the elevator. I hope you don’t dwell too much he said, echoing off the reflective cage. I thought of you, in the empty pulse, biking horizontally home, sitting on that thin quiet, peddling, what do you dwell on in those moments? What satiates a starlit appetite? Some solace? Something more than a woman,
a jukebox, a Japanese novel? When we’re done groping for the fumbled grace of goodbye, when night’s black belly’s been gutted, the freedom of loneliness released, I just want to know enough to love you.
MAN ON THE MOON • FREYA PATEL
NOT YOUR ROOM
BRADLEY DUGGAN
You are out driving. Midnight is a blurred memory hours past. Twinkling stars, maybe millions of light years away—maybe billions— are scattered across the cloudless, inky-black sky above. Where are you going? You are going home. Back to your home. Away from their home. A home consumed by red hats and tense conversations. Home from Thanksgiving, not for. Not your home. Not anymore.
The window is down so you can feel the crisp desert air blowing your messy hair like so many autumn leaves. The two-lane, rugged blacktop highway is empty. The last car you saw passed fifteen minutes ago; a rumbling eighteenwheeler moving in the opposite direction. Your headlights illuminate nothing but “the road” — a seemingly endless, seldom-traveled path cutting through myriad miles of unmolested Mojave wilderness. You think about the time you did mushrooms with your high school friends somewhere around here—friends you haven’t talked to in years—and smile at the fond memory.
Under the faint moonlight, you see a barren expanse of sandy earth, craggy peaks, and hardy plants. Saguaros, creosotes, chollas, yuccas, and, of course, Joshua trees. You try to remember what that tour guide on that class trip you took said about Joshua trees. You think it had something to do with the Bible guy who got eaten by a whale. There was a VeggieTales movie about that. You checked it out on VHS from the library when you were eight, but never returned it. The library
shut down a year later. You thought it was your fault; that if you had just returned the silly movie and gone to church like you were supposed to, it would’ve stayed open. You liked the library.
Your iPhone SE is plugged into your 2007 Chevy Malibu’s sound system. The phone is five years old, with a cracked screen and a battery that never exceeds eighty percent. The car is twelve years old. The ugly beige paint has started to peel, and looks uglier than ever. The odometer stopped working at two hundred thousand miles. You bought it used before you left for college for five thousand four hundred and ninety-nine dollars, ninety-nine cents, using the money you earned working at Sal’s Pizzeria on Maple Street.
You drum your fingers on the steering wheel to the tune of a David Bowie song. On the dash, the dim, neon green clock reads 2:37 AM.
The headlights dim . The headlights flicker Your headlights die.
You try to turn them back on, but to no avail. You wish you’d gone to AutoZone.
The instruments on the dash go haywire, the neurotic needles in the many meters spinning in crazed circles.
The clunky, choked roar of your oil-infested engine softens to a morose chugga-chugga-chugga
The song fades.
He’d like to come and greet us, but he thinks he’d blow our minds
The song quiets entirely.
Your 2007 Chevy Malibu, a valiant and reliable steed these past six years, stutters, rolls to a stop, and dies a pitiful death. You swear under your breath. You put the car in neutral and step out into the cool arid night to push the car off the road. You take out your phone to call AAA. It won’t turn on.
The air feels strange. Charged with ominous suspense. Electric. Your hair stands on end. A chill runs up your spine. The most primal of fears floods your nervous system. From above, you hear a whirring hum, like the muffled droning of a million metallic bees. You look toward the skies, rapt with terrible awe. The stars are gone, replaced by a singular, viciously luminescent beacon that shines down upon you. You try to run, preferring an agonizing death in the desert wasteland—your desiccated corpse picked clean of flesh by carrion-hungry vultures, leaving only bones to be gnawed on by scavenging coyotes—to whatever unfathomable fate looms above, but your body does not respond. You do not move. You can not move. The burning light floods your vision, rendering you blind. Helpless. You feel yourself become weightless, your feet leaving the ground. You begin to — Scream.
You emerge from the infinite void of sleep, bursting through the veil between worlds like a misfired cannonball. Covered in a film of glacial sweat, you sit up in bed, sucking in lungfuls of air in harsh gasps. With wild eyes, you look around your room. It is as you left it. Your roommate used to make fun of you for still using a night-
light, but the comforting glow soothes your panicked mind, a blissful salve for mental distress. But wait. Your Revenge of the Sith poster is hanging askew. The plants you so carefully tended to are lifeless and withered. The fishbowl is on your desk, but Mr. Pebbles is nowhere to be found. Shimmering, ethereal light seeps through the frame of the closed bedroom door. Something… something is not right. Your pulse spikes, your heart pistoning against the walls of your chest like an insistent visitor’s violent fist. Your rational mind attempts to make sense of an irrational situation. Maybe Mr. Pebbles is sleeping. On unsteady legs, you go to look out the bedroom window, to seek out the reassuring radiance of city light pollution, but the window is missing. You place trembling fingers on the wall where the window should be. Over the crazed beating of your heart, you hear heavy footsteps outside, growing closer… closer… and then stopping. The realization comes with a choked cry. This is not your room.
S TAR S EE D
BENNETT MEYER
I
We, sixteen billion souls slowly suffocating on a scorch-scarred stone, orbiting a fading ball of flame flickering flickering flickering, send a seed skyward for a single soul to steer across the stars so something may survive when we are gone. Soon to be snuffed out by our own hand, we can do nothing but wait and Hope.
II
Day 1 As the Pod rises into the stratosphere and out of orbit, I stare down at my world and wave goodbye. No one waves back. Billions watch from far away, nestled deep in the relative safety of their own homes: fortresses of solitude deep beneath the Earth, shielding their masters from the smog-stifled surface. Some cheer me on, some can’t bring themselves to watch, and others curse my name— unable to see beyond their suffering. I can’t blame them. I don’t know why I, only one of so many, was chosen, but there is no turning back now. So I set a centuries-long course for the planet—a barren rock with no moon, third from its sun, not too hot and not too cold—and enter my slumber.
III
All twelve of us gather round and watch the live feed of the launch on the holocaster with bated breath. Drones fly by the launch site as the Steward—I never cared for that title—enters the Starseed Pod and blasts off, leaving the rest of us behind. Everyone cheers except for Pops, who says he is too old to care about such things, but there is an air of melancholy behind it all. My wife and I have made peace with it. We brought this on ourselves, after all. Sucked our oceans dry, polluted the heavens, and harvested the very heart of our star. And for what? A fleeting hit? But then I look at our children, newly hatched innocents. They don’t deserve to suffer for our mistakes. Maybe it’s all for nothing, this stupid Starseed Initiative. But if it gives them something to hope for, then damn it, maybe that’s enough. I cheer, too.
IV
I’m lyin in the alley, out stone cold, when a big ole kaboom makes me jump awake and hit my noggin on the wall. Takes me a jiffy to remember where I am and what’s goin on, but then I remember it’s launch day. Who gives a flying fuck? Those shit-for-brains Starseeders are out there acting like they’re saving the world and for what? I still gotta go to work tomorrow. Give me a fucking break. And that self-righteous Steward is worst of all. Course they pick some goody two-shoes rich boy to save while the rest of us are down here dying. If they really wanted to save us, they’d build bigger ships and give everyone a chance to make it on, but nah, that ain’t what they’re all about. I raise my middle fingers to the sky. Fuck the Steward. Fuck Starseed. Fuck the Weaver. They’ll call me a heretic for that one but I don’t give a damn Fuck ‘em all.
V
Day 50,000 I wake from cold sleep and check the systems. Over a hundred years have passed, but everything is functional. Signals from home remain steady, thank the Weaver. I’ve never been so alone, but knowing that my people endure brings me solace. Of course, I’m not really alone—I have the Starseed library to keep me company. With the collective knowledge of my species at my fingertips—every book, movie, and song ever produced—it’s hard to get bored. Most important of all is the genetic vault safeguarding a copy of the blueprints for every species on Earth, ready to seed our destination with new life. A blank slate— a second chance—the true purpose of my mission.
VI
MY LOYAL PATRIOTS! WE ARE ABOUT TO GO OUT IN A BLAZE OF GLORY! Food, water, and air supplies are running low. I know you are dying, humiliated, and hopeless. TRAITORS will call us COWARDS, but THEY aren’t the ones with the NUCLEAR CODES! Quite frankly, THEY ARE THE COWARDS! I can hear gunshots coming from outside the office. My ARMY OF PATRIOTS has fought BRAVELY, but we are outnumbered. Better to go out with a BANG than a whimper. I hear pounding on the doors. Time’s up. I’M PULLING THE TRIGGER!
VII
Day 80,314 I knew something was amiss when the Starseed Pod awoke me at an irregular interval, and I was right. All signals from home have vanished. I don’t know what has become of my planet, but I fear the worst. May the Weaver bring them peace everlasting. Is it possible, nay probable, that I am now the only conscious being left alive in the cosmos? I have never known such a silence. I scream at the stars, but they cannot hear me. I must complete my mission.
VIII
My name’s Andy, and I’m a... well, I don’t know what I am! But I’m small and round and ever so lonely! I’ve been wandering through this blank void for as long as I can remember! I see teeny tiny lights in the distance, but no matter how far I go, they never seem to get closer! Maybe one of them will notice me and come and be my friend and everything will be perfect and wonderful! Woah, what’s that? I can feel something, sort of like a pull! It sure is making me feel funny! Wait a moment, I can see something coming over there! It’s a creature with flames coming out of its backside! How strange! Boy, it’ll sure be great to have a friend! Hey there pal, my name’s Andy, what’s your na...a..a.a.....
IX
Day 101,267 I have finally entered the star system of my destination, but something has gone horribly wrong. A small asteroid has somehow become lodged in one of the Pod’s exhaust vents, and it caused massive damage to the engine. I have retained some ability to steer the Pod manually, but I have no way of slowing down. I am still on target, but if I crash land on the planet’s surface, nothing aboard will survive. My only hope is to land in the ocean. I have done the calculations. The ocean will slow the Pod’s descent just enough that some genetic material—only the smallest microorganisms—will survive the crash, but everything else will be destroyed, including me. This is not what we wanted, but with enough time, whatever survives in the ocean may evolve complexity, crawl out onto land, and look to the stars. Its eyes will be unfamiliar—changed utterly by millions of years of mutations—but through it, something of us will live on. On the positive side, the impact of the crash will send debris into the atmosphere, giving the planet rings for a time and, one day, a moon. I wish I could live to see it.
XDay ??? I can see the planet now with my own eyes. It grows larger and larger until it consumes all. Thank the Weaver, we’re going to land in the ocean! I feel the shift in pressure as the Pod enters the atmosphere. I struggle to stand, but I drag myself to the porthole and stare down at the planet, our legacy. Everything is so hot and so bright, but it’s beautiful. I hold two of my hands up to my face and clench the others as the warmth overtakes me.
Flickering Flickering Flickering
SOLILOQUY OF AN UNRULY STORM
NARE TENDJOUKIAN
They whisper awful untold lies. They mourn three deaths foreseen by the sky.
Do you see the black clouds who cry ?
Lo and behold, the hevovetaso Come to restore balance
Once and for all. A voice of fire
Speaks to us, And warns us: Violence is on the prowl.
I come from the festering wounds of the sky
And my only purpose is to cause destruction. I loom behind black clouds who cry And cloak myself with their sharpest tears. My coming foretold by seven trumpets
By downcast Sirens atop a lone summit. My children run amok and free
On the darkest day there is to see.
To the dismay of Earth Mother
A vile scar I left on her.
I, El Reno, king of kings may not have caused alarm at first, but in the midst of this false peace I took the lives of noble men. I want to yell I want to lust I want to kill to thirst to crush.
ETHEREAL INSANITY • MELANY GAMBINO
AN ANGEL CRASHED INTO MY BACKYARD LAST NIGHT.
MATTHEW SADLER
I saw her through the window first. A crater bleeding light. I couldn’t see her well from my room, but I could see the way her body parted the unkempt grass. I could see the way pink and blue flowers bloomed around her.
When I made it to the kitchen, I saw the black rose pinned in her translucent hair. I saw the way her skin looked like the surface of a star. I hid behind a succulent on the windowsill. An opened bottle of honey shaped like a teddy bear stared into the bottom of my soul. I couldn’t shake its plastic gaze while I hid from the angel.
A moth landed on the window, and I felt something flutter in my stomach. I ran my fingers through my hair and stretched my shirt out. I peeked around the backdoor and I saw her massaging the crown of her skull, tracing gentle circles, soothing the area of most impact. I grabbed Advil from the cabinet.
I saw how even the moon watched her. I saw her long flowing locks of star-strung hair fall past her shoulders when she pulled the black rose out. I watched her twiddle with the rose before putting it back over her ear, as if it reminded her of someone. I put the Advil back.
I watched her knees bend before plunging into the earth further. The way she stared at the diamonds in the sky overhead. I saw her roll over onto her back, so she could stare more comfortably. She was very much like the diamonds— not like the dirt.
I felt my hand moving without my permission, each digit extending one by one, reaching for the brass doorknob separating me from the angel. While I twisted the screaming cold knob, I couldn’t help but think about how stupid moths must be. How hopelessly pathetic to chase that which kills you. I tried to imagine the audacity it must require to be so small yet too big, breathing yet barely living, a clump of dirt with limbs, and still chasing marriage with the flames it so desires. Like Icarus, I thought, as the naked moonlight pierced my skin, and my calloused feet soaked into the dirt.
She didn’t look at me, but the way her shoulders swung, I knew that I had startled her.
She didn’t look at me, but the way she stood and tied her hair up while facing the opposite direction, I knew she was looking at the absence of me, rather than not seeing me at all.
She didn’t look at me, but the way her shoulder blades sprouted wings of aurorae, I thought they looked like arms warmly waving—hello or goodbye, I wasn’t sure.
She didn’t look at me, but when she pulled the black rose out of her ear, I thought that would’ve meant something.
She didn’t look at me, but when she ascended into the ocean of diamonds, I felt my own sea strobing in my stomach, red fish slamming against the walls of my abdomen, the dam threatening to burst with each erosive crash.
She didn’t look at me.
And she was gone.
I tried tracing words and faces in the trail of her burning wings, hoping to carve something out of the nothing I had. Nothing, but the glimpse of her, burnt into my retinas. When I closed my eyes, I could only see the violet-green burn marks when I looked away from them. Like drinking water by spitting it out. Hunting deer by leaving them free. Escaping hell by accepting you can’t.
They still haven’t gone away. I curled up in the crater left behind. I stared at the absence of her, because it was all I had, and I wondered where the moth had flown off to now. I wanted the dirt to nestle me, and I’m not sure why. I stared at the diamonds and I felt my chest rumble. She didn’t look at me.
Serenity suffocated me as I thought a single, silent thought.
Moths die screaming.
NATURAL AMERICAN SPIRIT
THOMAS FARMER
The Nabokov summer was the summer I couldn’t quit the making lists and towers of old shit summer the Elvis cassette summer when the prepositions between joys between cigarettes between withdrawals between new lists and old shit fell through the Elvis cassette falling through my glass desk falls into a song a song about blueness and Hawaii how I croak and sweat in bed with no new ideas thinking of ultramarine like it’s an ending like an end the millionth story coursing down my impotent fingers curling around a cancer cue I can’t kick the thick smoke suddenly airy and blue and pale fire overwhelms the Nabokov summer this endless thing sprawling and fogging up with phosphorescent maladies cuts a night so dark and a night so clear I can see you my nauseous star your quiet light rewards me like a rat who has chosen A and not B not B A Nabokov summer not caught in the crosshairs cross-eyed lost and flowing to the left a falling state I’m chasing o how I miss the seasons and their borders how I hate my American spirit and its pale way of mocking the breath that breathes
HELEN OF TROY: GERMANY, 1960
TAYLOR CROWELL
Vous étudiez et la porte ouvre.
Garrison Ansbach
Ringing in my ears is my father’s voice in the harsh dialect of the ash covered town— asking me, begging me to come home.
What kind of ungrateful daughter leaves a place like America, New Troy?
I answer in my head:
you study and the door opens
I tell my students war can start over anything: intolerance, borders, beauty
I am the American with the boy hair and a father who glues shoes and cuts black fabric.
Paris, France
I met him on the train back to the base. He asks, qu’est-ce que tu lis : I tell him it’s a chemistry book he probably wouldn’t understand. That spring, he visits me every weekend—
we speak only in French. We talk of Bach, of Elvis leaving Germany; of poets like Dylan Thomas, and others I cannot remember and did not know then. We talk of the A Bomb, and were my parents Fascists in the war? We watch a French film, Breathless, and we kiss in the dark of the theater. I did not know men like him existed He asks me charming questions like what does a Philly cheesesteak taste like? And how does the electoral college work, and what is the appeal of Agatha Christie? He tells me I should go to graduate school; I laugh. He tells I am beautiful; I laugh.
In the summer, I go back to the suit makers. He gives me a red clothbound book of American History. He kisses me on the cheek at the airport, says he hopes our lives cross paths again and that I never grow out my hair.
West Los Angeles, California:
In three years, I will meet the man who will kill me.
I will have a backyard wedding in a dress my father made, white flowers that float in the pool.
I will give him three children: two sons and a daughter.
My eldest will be born in Santa Monica, he will have two girls and hang a Trojans flag outside his home.
Germantown, Tennessee
I am buried alone.
You study and the door opens.
DUTCH WINDMILLS • PAIGE CARTER
ZEALOTS OF AN ARANEAE ORDER • IAN PIEXOTO
ZEALOTS OF AN ARANEAE ORDER
The Stone came from the heavens.
IAN PIEXOTO
Great Hands From Above placed The Stone three stones away from the spider’s nest. The Hands’ reach pierced the veil between the dirtrooted creatures and their world above. Their intervention marked a change, as it always does. Yet, The Hands rarely knew of what change their otherworldly intervention brought to the root world below.
Upon the dirt, the arachnid zealots watched in awe.
Their legs scampered away as it was placed, but reapproached as soon as it had settled. Many eyes watched, blinked, and stared at The Stone. The scampering stilled, tiny hearts beating fast to a song with no melody, just rhythm. A pulsing rhythm rippled through the arachnid gathering in anticipation for the history yet to unravel.
Many stones had been placed in their territory, great boulders and mountains protruding from the ruddy soil. The spiders’ routine was never shattered by the placement of any of those dull, gray, stones. They felt lifeless, simply an obstruction to the horizon and nothing more than a backdrop to the arachnid routine. Those stones did not stand out, they did not shine, they did not bring with it that pulsing rhythm of heartbeat anticipation.
But this rock—The Stone—there was something to its silence that felt different.
The Stone extended from the ground only an inch or so, set snuggly into the rust-colored
dirt. It beckoned the zealots forward with its color: a green-blue speckle that danced across the stone’s surface in a great swamp of hues. It’s as if it’d been splattered in paints made of seafoam and undergrowth.
Then, the spiders noticed something beneath its surface.
In the light, the stone sparkled; there was a crystalline glint hiding amongst the verdant blue. It glowed. An opulent curtain appeared to drape across its surface, and its luminescence reflected in the eyes of the zealots. What became a cautious watch became a reverent stare. They were entranced, drawn in closer and closer to the stone until they were at its side, close enough to reach out and touch it.
Moving around the stone, they discovered its last secret: a creme-colored marking fused to its underside. Turquoise splotches on the markings evoked runes or etchings, perhaps from the creatures who had found the stone long ago. It seemed to hold the life essence of the seafoam and undergrowth paints that had first drawn them in.
The arachnids would always weave meaning into their webs and nests, each one sewn with unique patterns and designs. Meaning is always woven with intention. The Stone’s arrival would be no different. It must have an intention. It must have a meaning.
What crystalline thoughts did the stone possess?
As their gaze remained fixed upon the
stone, they expected it to shift as they did. Its color was one of life. Yet, it remained still. It did not move, it did not speak. The stillness was as entrancing as its glint. The zealots waited for it to make its declaration, hanging upon its every potential word.
Nothing came. No sound. No movement.
So, the arachnids moved instead.
They danced around The Stone, creating entrancing patterns with their many appendages. They circled it, spiraled around it in an endless, Araneae order. The spiders’ silence mixed with The Stone’s own humble quietude. The sunlight on its surface turned to moonlight. Its glint brightened as night allowed it to contrast the dark.
As the night came, the threads came with it. Spidery silk draped over the stone, offerings of service and art. The milky white strings wrapped around in the same circles and spirals as their dance. They weaved to the stone’s heartbeat song, hymns to an unmoving god. The cloth of their organs draped over their new savior from above.
The Stone became their idol.
When the weaving was done, the spiders retreated for a moment. The clamor on the stone’s sparkling surface slowed, and they took a moment to admire their offerings. Dewdrops formed on their silk, adding another layer to The Stone’s sparkle.
They felt the stone was pleased.
Its arrival to their soil no longer felt like a chance encounter. It was now a blessing of purpose. They placed this intention and meaning upon The Stone, sacrificed along with their silk and song. The Stone’s presence had brought the arachnids together. No longer a loose coalition of solitary hunters and web-weavers, they were now a community.
And it all centered around The Stone.
The next days were a race of rituals. Offerings of more than silk were given to The Stone as leaves and smaller pebbles were brought before
their idol. Yet, these worldly gifts paled in comparison to their idol’s majesty.
Several spiders banded together to carry a great twig, nearly a hundred times their own weight, to the glistening stone as a sign of their undying protection to its majesty. The twig was wrapped in threads and heaved onto their back by the strongest eight-legged warriors they could find. They leaned it against the stone as its final resting place, a bridge allowing for all arachnids to make pilgrimage to its peaks. The spiders became known as the Twigbringers, a title alluding to their feat of strength. The Stone, it seemed, brought them power.
A queen arose amidst the web-weaving worship. The greatest artisan of them all, secreting silk more beautiful and pure than moonlight itself. She took her place on the top of The Stone. The Twigbringers became her loyal guard, protecting the stone and her rule with honor and loyalty. The queen cast judgment upon her subjects, citing The Stone as her divine source of wisdom and sagacity.
The spiders respected her rule, but the stone’s silence grew colder. Some of the priests who had arisen from the new queenship felt this shift, yet they didn’t dare disseminate this knowledge to their people. The Stone had made them strong. There was no reason to doubt its rule. By extension, the queen was the hand of The Stone; everything she did was at its silent request.
Nearby dirt-dwellers began to hear word of this Stone. Some made their own pilgrimage to the arachnids’ nest to behold its glory for themselves. Others turned away from it, fearing its influence and judgement.
Could wisdom really be born from silence?
Was the queen the voice of the stone or was the stone the voice of the queen?
To what greater power does her judgment answer to?
Doubters received quick retribution. The queen’s rule expanded and those who did not obey the silent word were forced to offer their lives to it. Lives were snuffed upon The Stone, spineless and yellow blood staining its bluegreen surface. Its color of life was now tainted by the paints of death.
Priests, at the behest of the queen, began to interpret the turquoise markings upon The Stone’s pure, white splotch. They interpreted the stone’s silence, and meaning was given to the meaningless. The markings became runes through this silent association. Laws and decrees woven from nothing. Thus, the queen’s power grew. Interpretation was at her whims.
Intention was a weapon she could harness, deriving it from the meaning she’d place upon The Stone herself. Her word became The Word, her rule would become The Rule, and The Stone would become her stone.
The Twigbringers sensed the queen’s true motive. She did not embrace their idol, she saw herself above it. By interpreting the runes, she placed her own word above The Stone’s. She did not seek faith, nor did she seek enlightenment— she only sought power. The Twigbringers would not bow to a faithless queen. They began their campaign against the queenship.
War erupted in the Araneae order. The Twigbringers launched an attack against the queen and her remaining zealots. The kingdom’s great webs of defense crumbled as the eight-legged warriors tore through their weavings. The Stone watched as its zealots battled across its surface, millions of legs crawling and clawing for dominance.
The Stone began to crumble with the webs.
Appendages and hubris deteriorated The Stone. What was once the foundation for an entire kingdom began to erode. The spiders’ legs scraped at its surface: coxa, trochanter, femur, patella, tibia, metatarsus, tarsus… an endless
clamor to reach its peak. It wasn’t until the glint dimmed, its green faded, and its runes disappeared that they sensed this shift.
The Stone was angry, and so began Its retribution.
Drums from the clouds thundered in a storm’s swift arrival. The heartbeat rhythm turned into a march of desolation. The skies darkened and winds whistled through the stalks of grass. Lightning flashed in The Stone’s remaining glint, an anger stretching across its surface in a faceless fury. Water poured from the skies, each droplet smelling of lightning and vengeance. The rust-colored soil succumbed to the rainfall, now a churning muck sent to cast away those who had wronged the stone. There was no questioning the storm’s meaning.
The zealots cowered, trembled, and prayed in fear. The storm was their predator now, and they were caught in its thundering web. A single drop was enough to crush the strongest warrior, breaking its back with the sheer force of its fall and washing away its mangled corpse.
While The Stone was once their protection, the war had chipped away at its outcroppings of safety. There was no more cover, no more safety from their idol. Their stone and silk fell victim to the forces of their ambitions, and now they faced the consequences.
Like their idol, retribution came from the heavens.
The storm slowed. The rain’s rhythm steadied from a march to a meandering waltz. The remaining raindrops settled on leaves and grass, a speckling of dew spreading across the territory. The sun parted the curtains of clouds, its face looking down upon the destruction with a bright smile. Its light refracted in the dewy remnants of rain, glinting almost as bright as The Stone.
And upon the stone laid the many bodies of the spiders. Their eight legs bent in every which way, their eyes glazed over into a lifeless stare.
Hundreds of the arachnid warriors laid washed and wasted, their corpses crisping in the poststorm sunlight.
The remaining zealots kept hidden, watching the carcasses dry up upon the stone. Yellow ichor and brown chitin splattered across its surface. Not even the rain could wash away its stains.
It was a considerable amount of time before the arachnids began to scuttle out from their shelter. They didn’t move towards the stone. Perhaps they feared it or perhaps they had learned their lesson. Its power and allure was tainted by the dead. Their delusions had diluted. Their community had washed away.
It was time to start anew.
So, beyond The Stone they would settle. Silk stretched between the low-growing flora, nests tucked into the smaller pebbles and the bases of nearby tree roots. They refused to climb any higher. The spiders no longer looked above their soil. It was a time of grounded rebirth, a period of peace.
Despite the stone’s abandonment, something from their idol still stuck to them, like its crumbling cobwebs. Its contemplative silence was woven tightly amongst the threads of their own webs. There was no doubt now
that wisdom came from this silence, that the power hungry squabbles upon the stone had disrupted its slumber and released all of the fury it contained. Some things were best left undisturbed.
The spiders worked with their silk through endless cycles of day and night. Their idol became legend and their wars became history. Their order entered a new era.
Peace reigned for a short while. The slumbering silence defined a new age of reflection. For a great time, the arachnid’s wove webs of history, passing on the lessons The Stone and their own hubris had taught them generations ago.
Over time, the collective memory of those pastime wars faded. They eroded, like their Stone idol. War was a whisper in the wind. There was no need to search for meaning. They had forgotten why they might do such a thing.
So, the false repentance allowed for history’s spiral to twist itself back.
Hands From Above pierced the veil once again, their strange limbs reaching towards the dirt-root to place down another Stone. Their eight-eyes stared. Weaving legs moved to The Stone’s entrancing silence, their heartbeat rhythm returned, and the zealot’s cycle began anew.
ON THE 12TH NIGHTS
• FREYA PATEL
MY TEETH FALL OUT EVERY NIGHT.
ISABELLA BERRY-HERNANDEZ
Well, not every night, maybe two times out of nine. My Doctor (Google) says that it’s normal, something about processing stress. Or was it [insert disease]?
Most of the time it’s when I’m wrapped around you and the inner lining starts to peel. It’s the kind of peeling you’d imagine as a kid when you fantasize for the first time what really happens to you when you’re ill and the skin just starts sliding off.
The same kind of premature fantasy (fear) that you would, for whatever reason, realize a little too late— that you’ve been bathing in acid, or whatever that thing is that serial killers use to leave you as bones.
I usually just hope you don’t notice, and truthfully, by the end of it I wonder how you didn’t. Didn’t it feel gross to have a mouth rot while you’re in it?
A BODY IN THE ROAD
MOLLY TALBOT
Dull eyes stare toward oncoming traffic.
A car with a driver and a passenger bends around a blind curve. The deer’s face and neck are well preserved, but its body is mutilated. Its limp right shoulder and limb support a bust that’s been bluntly truncated from absent hindquarters. The head rests on a sweeping smear of blood sucked dry by the sun that is now a dusty red verging on purple.
Entrails spill forth like souls surging up to heaven who lost their momentum as swiftly as that first burst of will. They lay haphazardly on the pavement, crowded around the body that housed them, suspended between release and return.
The passenger’s gaze stretches open and fastens to the instant of recognition.
Most paralyzing is the face. A coat of dust set upon the eyes as a veil against trespasses from useless witnesses. Drivers kick up powdered pavement as shock and pity tighten their grip on the wheel. The tongue hangs dumbly from the doe’s mouth. Draped over the bottom lip, it holds a final call halted by death’s breathlessness—an urge that must have jerked and eased through its body hours before.
Deflated panic leaves a comical expression of stupidity on its face, as if death was a clever joke that may as well have not been told. Yet here lay the body, its head weighing on the false earth, confronting the sights of forgetful mortals.
“Fuck!” the driver swerves. They pass it without further mutilation.
The sight of rolling pavement quickly replaces the body as a slate of gray disappearing behind the dashboard. A hidden will in her holds her gaze to the same spot. She suspends the image in her mind, kneeling in its grip.
“Thank god we didn’t hit oncoming traffic, I had to go all the way into the other lane,” he says. She blinks to recover her depth perception and returns to herself sitting in the car. A canvas tote bag of old clothes rests on her lap. The thick, bitter scent of dark roast coffee emanates from a silver thermos in the cupholder. She adjusts her focus to a crack at the top of the windshield that stretches from the driver to the passenger seat.
“You need to get your windshield fixed,” she says.
“I know. I just don’t know when I can get the car into the shop,” he says. “Someone needs to know about the deer before an accident happens.”
“I can take it in tomorrow when you’re at work. I’ll drop you off then run it by the mechanic.”
“And what are you gonna do there? You’ll be stranded at the shop.”
“I have a few calls to catch up on. My mom, my sister. I need to check on my sister’s living situation, make sure she’s doing okay.”
“Yeah, fine. We’re expecting a shipment tomorrow so it’d be nice to have something to look forward to after.”
That morning, she entered the living room with a pile of clothes and tossed the lump of
them on the couch where he was sending emails from his phone. A few sweaters tumbled from the pile onto him.
“Right! Finally,” she pivoted back into the bedroom and quickly emerged with a white button up. “I’ve been meaning to get rid of this.”
“What is it?” He looked up from his screen. “I doubt they’ll take that.”
“Maybe not, we’ll see.”
The coffee pot sputtered the last of its drip. She walked over to the kitchen counter, pulled a stout mug from the cabinet, and filled it one inch shy of the brim. She forgot to call her sister when she said she would. Earlier in the week she talked with her mom and they caught up on the usual stuff. She listened to fragments of her sister’s life tumble from her mom’s loose mouth. This is the only time she hears news about her.
“She’s looking at apartments now,” mom told her.
Her mom said things between her and her girlfriend were falling apart and her sister needed space. A hairline fracture inside her split a splinter more. She imagines their interactions slowly revealing the fall. The closeness of the approaching ground and the distance between them. The vertigo from looking up at where they began as they reflexively measure the distance of the fall.
“It is what it is,” mom sighed. “These things happen more frequently than they don’t. She’ll get through, it’s not life or death.”
She texted her sister later that day, saying she’d have time for a call soon. That was six days ago. She poured the rest of the coffee into his thermos then added a two-second pour of creamer to hers.
“It was worth trying,” she says.
The secondhand store employee pushes the white button up across the counter to them. She picks it up and inspects the stain herself. There’s a splotch of red wine on the front near the bottom hem. She had worn the shirt countless times after the stain refused to come out in the wash no matter how much bleach she used. It still suited her to wear it under sweaters and cardigans, carefully yet comfortably concealed by a thicker fabric. She thought someone else might have been okay doing the same. She folds it loosely before tucking it into her tote bag.
The employee’s mixed metal rings clatter as they finger through faded denim, pilly sweaters, and a satin top riddled with small runs scarring its mirrored fabric. The checkout counter they stand at doubles as a glass jewelry display case. The employee tosses each article of clothing to the side then jerks it in order, obscuring and revealing precious pieces resting on the black velvet shelves underneath.
Glimmers of scarlet flash under her reflection in the case and pull her attention to a golden band with a singular ruby stone. Red in the ring calls to mind red in the road. A desire sparks within her to memorialize the dead deer with the ring. A ruby stone on her finger endlessly glinting in opposition to the dullness that struck her in the passenger seat. It could be romantic, even dignifying to adorn such a sentimental purchase. She traces her desire to see if it’s wrong, but she fails. The coherency of her feelings unravel the moment she tugs at them and clearer thoughts drag her attention away.
“I told you they wouldn’t accept it with the stain,” he says.
She always drew a particular gratification from small tokens of remembrance. She ached for a symbol tethered to her life that reminded her of her thoughts. Thoughts as important to her as she is prone to forgetting them. The urge to have the precious stone hums in her finger.
Frantic deliberation fidgets with her hands and twists them into awkward positions.
The employee offers them store credit or cash at a reduced rate.
“We should probably just get cash. I think that’s a fair price, don’t you?” She asks, eyes on the ring.
“Better than nothing,” he says.
He watches the employee count out twenty dollars from the register. Her nose curves delicately, a pleasurable slope even more amusing to trace with her head tilted down. Admirations like these are only afforded in fleeting instants concealed in the creases of the day. The employee hands him the money.
“Did you see the deer on the highway?” he addresses the employee. “Spread out in the middle of the road. I couldn’t even see where most of the body was. I hope somebody called the police or something, I nearly wiped out a car in the other lane avoiding it.” The employee feigns a conciliatory smile.
He stuffs the money into his wallet and punctuates the exchange with a restless rap of his knuckles on the display case. She looks up from the jewelry and they leave. They walk across the faded pavement to their car and the impulse to turn around and buy the ring buzzes in the back of her head. He would think it’s too foolish of a purchase, especially after already leaving the store. She spares them both by continuing forward.
One sleeve of the white button up limply swings outside her tote bag and catches her attention. She peers into the bag to look at the piece, crumpled and cast in shadow, checking for the stain to identify it as the same one rejected by the employee. The one she was relieved to remember this morning, and the one she is keeping.
The night the stain happened, she was working late and had to cancel their dinner plans. When she left her office building, he was standing outside with a bottle of merlot and a smile.
They walked through back streets and the park. They took the long way home, wordlessly guiding the other through pointless paths and trading the wine bottle for turns in conversation.
Candles and a few warm-toned lamps illuminated her apartment. This is how she kept it when it was only her living there. They laughed on the sofa. Her legs rested across his lap and his hands across her legs, stacked comfortably as they luxuriated in each other as their only amusements. In contented lulls, they admired the other with quiet attention.
In one of his turns of admiration, he watched her slip off a ring from her middle finger and play with it. She bought the ring in a boutique when she visited her sister where she lived at the time, a place where neither of them grew up. The ring was a polished gold with tendrilous engravings and accompanied by a note claiming “handmade, hand engraved, one of a kind.” It suited her taste perfectly. Her sister wanted a matching one, or as close as two unique rings made by the same maker can match, so they each got their own. In the warm lamp light, she occupied herself with the ring so he could enjoy her without the pressure of a returned gaze. By accident, the ring slipped out of her fingers and rolled under the coffee table. She moved to get it but he was already on his hands and knees searching for it.
“You’re too much,” She laughed. “Get up here.”
He grabbed the ring. As he came up his head bumped against the underside of the coffee table and toppled the wineglass sitting above him. She grabbed the stem and reflexively pulled the glass to herself, splashing wine on her shirt. They watched the deep red liquid swell through the fabric.
“Let me,” he said. He was already gazing up at her when she looked down at him. The fullness of his eyes from this angle unnerved and excited her. Slowly, he crawled toward her. The soft light casted sideways shadows across his body.
He used the edge of the couch to lift himself up and press into the space between her legs. His breath spread around her waist as he glanced at the stain then back up at her. Wordlessly, he took the fabric into his mouth and sucked at the dark red spot. She watched him tenderly take up the excess liquid. With the same ease and attention, his mouth hovered up the length of her torso before pressing the taste of merlot and cotton onto her lips. It was a dry sweetness.
She closes her tote bag. She’ll scarcely use the button up, and only out of obligation, but she’ll return it to the same spot in her drawer she pulled it from this morning. It wasn’t uncommon for her to hold onto things in spite of not having a reason to keep them.
They drive home. They pass by the usual landmarks on their everyday route: a local coffee shop they stop at every time they leave town; a laundromat that only takes quarters; a market they made fun of at first but now splurge weekly on their brie; a storage facility with bright orange sliding doors marking each unit. Office buildings and strip malls fill the spaces in between, most of them occupied but some invariably vacant. The former Protestant congregational church triggers a realization in both of them.
“I forgot it was this soon,” he says. She asks him to drive another way though she knows he can’t. He says it’s too late for them to go another way. He slows down more than he needs to. They avert their eyes. Thankfully, the body was on the driver’s side this time.
It takes her a minute to find the non-emergency emergency hotline, 411, but this could be a matter of animal services instead. She visits their website and clicks on “Deceased Animals” under Animal Care. The page outlines different options for pet owners once their pet dies, including cremation, burial, private memorial services, and pet cemeteries. The sympathetic tone of the writing confirms that this is not the information she needs. She dials 411. Their automated response lists seven options. After one listen all the way through, she listens through again before choosing option six. A robotic voice asks her to state the subject of inquiry, then connects her to an actual person who transfers her to the local animal services hotline.
“Yes, we have that on file. Someone reported it to the local police in the early hours this morning,” the representative says. A civil tone overlays his terse response, making her feel stupid. She thanks him and they tell each other to have a nice day.
She decides to go for a walk. She likes herself better when her body is moving. The steel bars of the apartment gate clamor behind her as they lock into place. The road leads her into a residential area of one-story houses that look like they were all built in the 1960s. Oak trees line front yards and block the sky with layers of dark green that merge into an infinity mirror pattern. A boy is in one of the yards, counting fallen acorns. She gives a passing smile to the mom sitting on a wooden bench on their front porch. The mom smiles back briefly. She should call her sister.
“It’s delayed?” She asks.
It’s a Sunday, so he drops her off at the apartment before continuing with his own errands for the work week. She wants to call someone about the deer but doesn’t know who. The road is within the city’s jurisdiction, but she can’t call 911.
“Mhm. I guess so, I mean. It hasn’t arrived,” her sister says.
“Do you think it’s lost?”
“Do you think it’s lost? It was supposed to be here like four days ago, and I can’t leave without it.”
She apologizes. “I should’ve waited to send it to your new address. I didn’t know you’d be leaving. Will you be okay there for a few more days?”
“I’ll be fine. A few more days will be fine.”
“Are you sure? I know things are hard for you right now but you’re so strong.” She struggles to say something worthwhile. “I admire you for that. Even if it’s the hardest thing you do, try to tell yourself it’s not life or death. You’ll be there on the other side.” Her words hang in the air, clumsily searching and gripping onto nothing.
“It’s okay, really. How are things at your apartment?”
She hesitates for no longer than what could be assumed as delayed audio. They talk about him through surface observations and mild admissions. She doesn’t tell her about the deer. She doesn’t think she could refrain from calling up too many details so she doesn’t mention it at all. They talk for another half hour. She’s almost back at her apartment gate when they hang up.
An acorn falls at her feet. When she looks up, there are no branches above her.
A quarter rolled by them. She hesitated because of the grime on the linoleum floor, but he picked it up immediately.
“Aha! Can’t let this little guy escape. Every bit counts,” he grinned and slotted the quarter into the washing machine. She smiled at him with full eyes as he started her load of laundry on the delicate cycle.
“Alpine fresh scent.” He read the detergent label.
“It smells like home.”
“But you didn’t grow up in the mountains.”
“No, it’s just the scent my mom uses. We’ve used it so much that now I think of her, not mountain air.” She lifted herself onto a table meant for folding clothes. “I talked with her on the phone yesterday. She’s doing good. She just looks so small sometimes. I wish I could make
her bigger somehow.” She sank down. “Thank you for making up for my broken washer, I appreciate you,” she said.
He walked to her with soft steps and kissed her. Their lips separated and his gaze matched hers. “You’re so…”
“So what?” She asked.
“Good.”
The days are getting shorter so it’s almost dusk when he returns.
“The deer wasn’t there on my way home,” he says without greeting.
“Oh, good. I called them after you dropped me off but someone had reported it six hours before.”
“Six hours? Jesus,” He pulls his shoes off. “What were they doing taking that long.”
She leans forward to get up but he waves a waiting motion at her. She sits back down and waits for him to hastily walk over to her as he pulls something out from his pocket.
“I got you something.” He extends a small cardboard jewelry box toward her. She stares at it. She didn’t think she’d been too obvious about it in the store. The thought of him recognizing the wish her gaze pointed towards, a wish she hadn’t fully admitted to, strains her with nervous expectation.
“Open it.” She gently rattles the small piece in its cardboard chest. “Come on, open it.”
She hesitantly heeds his instructions. Slowly, she pulls the fitted lid away and reveals the ring. It’s a silver band with a spiral design in the middle. She pauses for a brief moment, first in disbelief, then to sweep aside her deflated hope and gather her performance.
“Wow,” she says, “it’s beautiful.”
“I saw you looking at the top shelf of jewelry and the girl helped me pick it out.”
She turns the ring over in her hand. “That same girl who was there when we went in?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Oh. Wow. She has good taste.”
“I knew you’d like it.”
She holds her hand out and judges it under the guise of admiration. “You knew I’d like it.” It’s silver, not gold. It doesn’t glimmer or shine, it only reflects dull amorphous shadows. The whole thing is colorless and flat. Its only visual interest is the odd depth between the spirals, as though someone traced it with sharpie. It fits her snugly, just tight enough that she’ll have to twist and pull at it to take it off.
“You knew,” she mumbles.
“What?”
Sweaty bodies ricocheted discordantly with the music. They had spots near the front, the part of the crowd where everyone pressed on each other to get a fraction closer to the stage. They were thrilled at where the night had taken them. A stranger at a bar, a flier, a below ground club, and a five-dollar entrance fee. They felt lucky and alive and glad to be there, together.
They sang and yelled and laughed through noise so loud it was impossible for them to hear themselves. Purple, green, orange, and pink stage lights flashed over their faces. They glanced at each other, catching and holding moments between them that felt like private glimpses into rapture. Either one of them could provide or withhold these glimpses from the other, unevenly sharing each meeting between bold seekings and careful allowances. Shared satisfaction stayed out of reach, cut short by one of them turning back to the stage, then both of them dancing and screaming with the band and the crowd. Everyone cloaked themselves in that room, that heat, that sound.
When the music was done and their thirst drove them home, the night met them with a cooling tide of reality. They withdrew from conversation and allowed the quiet to speak better than they could. Only their heavy breathing and footsteps extended from them into the dark.
He broke the silence a block later. “That felt so good, I haven’t seen you like that in forever it seems.”
She laughed. A lingering high from the atmosphere carried her mood. “Like what?”
“So full of life.”
“What do you mean?”
“I just mean that I haven’t seen you get so excited or energetic. It feels like, I don’t know. Like you haven’t been passionate for a while.”
She looked passively at the road, emotion flaring inside her. Enough time passed to make response feel impossible.
“I think we missed the street our car is on. You might need a few more tries to get the hang of dropping a pin,” he said. He laughed at the end to soften a joke he should have said flatly or not at all.
She paced ahead. She was half a block in front of him when she arrived at the car. She had to wait for him to unlock it. They climbed in without a word.
He didn’t start the car. They sat in silence and his eyes fixed to the wheel, wavering between resolution and resignation. “Are you happy?”
It took her a minute to respond. Several minutes for a coherent reply. Slowly, painfully, they talked about everything. He left it up to her to decide.
“I know I could only want you in the way someone wants to spend their entire life with another person,” he said.
She memorized those words over the next three weeks. She wrote them in the margins of her notebook. Traced them on her hand. Repeated them in the mirror as she brushed her teeth. Murmured them to herself in the car.
Today makes three weeks and one day.
“What? I mean I hoped I knew,” he says.
“You didn’t get this for me.” She twists and tugs the ring off.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean it’s not mine. It’s not mine to wear, you didn’t get it for me.”
“How can you say that? I got it for you because it reminded me of you. I’m trying to give it to you but you’re not letting me”
“How does it remind you of me?”
“That time I came over after you got off work late? You dropped your ring under the table? I chose the spiral because it made me think of us, that’s why—because of everything with us.” He repeats these five words softly, as if he’s trying them on. Then again, holding them up for both of them to see.
She tilts the ring on her finger, judging it in this new light. “I don’t believe you,” she says. He opens his mouth and looks at her. His eyes retreat, and he relinquishes his response with a secure yet detached look of internal resignation.
This look is all she needs. She’s seen it in the more tense conversations punctuating their time together. The convoluted layers of expression and absence always left her wondering if he felt tenderness or disdain toward her. She makes a final attempt to interpret his silence, checking each moment for some secret demonstration of hope.
“Good.” She grabs his car keys.
Night overtakes dusk and obscured stars begin to focus.
She drives by the former Protestant church. She passes the storage units. She drives past the local market. Without thinking, she pulls into a parking lot to release her grip on the wheel. She parks the car and bows her head to the steering wheel. She takes the keys out of the
ignition. Blinks and breaths later, she raises her head and realizes where she is. A panel of floor to ceiling windows display the inside of the laundromat. Faltering fluorescent lights scatter spotlights on people around the room. A tired dad folds his toddler’s onesies. A college student throws an oversized blazer and slacks into the washer. A woman with ornate nails and a teased updo plays sudoku as she waits for her dryer to finish.
The floor is smudged with the same grime as before. She remembers what he told her then. Something she hadn’t believed, and she loved him for it. The good inside her now is not the same good inside her then. It is turning these keys, steering this wheel, flexing this brake. Neither resentment nor loyalty will bend her toward the cheek of avoidance. She slots her keys in and ignites the engine.
Two beams of light shoot into the darkness. She passes the local market, then the storage facility. She reaches for cruise control but decides not to flip the lever. Pavement runs under her wheels and disappears behind her. She passes the Protestant church.
A four-legged figure emerges from the right side of the road and she presses on her brakes. She squints at the animal as her approach slows. It’s a doe. The animal walks toward the other lane, utterly unfazed by the approaching car. She stops the car ten feet away and watches her lethargically step across the double yellow line. The doe lowers her head as she enters the other lane and reveals the muted smear of blood. She touches her muzzle to the road and licks at the dark red spot. She licks incessantly, as if she can turn the stain back into liquid and drink it. There’s a tenderness behind her motion that’s devoid of haste, a promise of her saliva to draw out the dry, sweet blood from the pavement and fill her stomach with iron.
She honks her horn but the deer doesn’t flinch. She tries three more times with the same result then parks her car and gets out. It isn’t until she’s facing the deer, on the far side of the road, when the doe looks up.
A hint of reflection sparks depth in her eyes like two dark globes. A twinge of dusty maroon saturates the curve of her bottom lip. Her snout is wet. A triangular marking expands upward from her nose, like a road broadening over the hill of her forehead and cascading down the length of her spine. A distant light softly illuminates the right side of her face. Balanced between her eyes is devotion and betrayal, grief and resentment, loyalty and self-preservation. Rumblings in the pavement scare neither of them.
They turn their heads toward the oncoming headlights. Beams gleam in their eyes, absorbing the world in front of them in a flood of brightness.
She moves out of the road.
She landed on the other side from where she came. The morning sun berates her half-open eyes with its spectral illumination. The liquid dried and left a residual stain seeping into cracks seen and unseen. The body splays across the lane, limbs displaced from their usual attachments and head tilted expectantly toward oncoming traffic.
A car carrying a driver and passenger bends around a blind curve.
CAMERAS
THOMAS FARMER
The girls bring a bowl like their mothers and then they ask for the bowl back, and we give the bowl back we rinse it out and we give the bowl back. Westward, the course of empire takes it way, the big snakes live in the tropics and the small snakes die like dogs in airport contraband rooms while the fission reactors are coughing up and down the continent, what continent, no one asks anymore, things are going well, the girls are still carrying bowls like their mothers the boys are hooligans, glowing lovers, and together we holocaust along, toward destiny, blue and new, built on neologisms, lost etiquettes and happy towns, we bullet-people, we transients, we boys and girls… All I want now is a camera, to take a picture of a jet engulfed in flames on the runway.
WEDDING CHINA
TAYLOR CROWELL
Yes, the death of everything good and decent. Yes, the death of love, of manners, of beautiful, thin women, of fine china, wedding china: God, why doesn’t anyone get wedding china anymore? Because no one gets married properly anymore: I’m talking ivory-ball gowndress, man-waiting-at-the-altar: I-do, bird-seedthrown-into-the-air, till-death-do-us-part, cardragging-cans: JUST GOT MARRIED! No, now it’s have-baby-with-baby-daddy-then-moveinto-apartment-downtown-then-we’ll-get-married-maybe, we’ll-see-where-life-takes-us! Ah, yes. There goes wedding china. The beauty of youth, of young love, of chivalry, the sanctity of the home. What to do, what to do.
These are all things my grandmother is saying to me at our monthly, deeply-dreaded lunches when I say for the thousandth time that no, I do not have a boyfriend. I’ll have a college degree, but no china. As if my not having a boyfriend contributes to larger sociological problems such as low birth rates and the decline of decent society. God, did you hear about that stabbing on the Metro yesterday? Good Lord, how horrible, all these aimless young men, no girlfriends, practically destitute, all they have to fill their time with is to go around stabbing innocent people. All these young people, alone, no, can’t be good for them.
Me, a destitute young person, picking at the last of my salad.
Grandmother, saying: “Did you see what Marie wore to the wedding?”
Inappropriate, I can already tell. “Yeah, I thought it suited her really well. Satin is timeless, you know, I thought she looked elegant.”
“You did, did you? Well, really I thought it kind of just dragged her down. All that fabric— you know Marie’s so short—just not a good idea, really. But, I guess, for a second wedding, it’s really not a big deal. Not as important as the first, not as many eyes, you know.”
Right. Continue looking down at salad. “Well she looked really happy. She deserves it, I’m glad.”
“Yes, yes of course she does. I’m happy for her too, you know, mothers just want their daughters to be happy, of course.”
“Of course.”
More silence. God, she’s staring. Hope I didn’t forget to put the bomb under the table when I sat down. Excruciating. What else can I even say? I thumb through the typical topics of discussion in which I make polite conversation while simultaneously avoid disclosing any specific information that would be too personally revealing, and dodging topics like shit-talking my aunt’s wedding: school, my future, grad school, my mom, my dad, my sister, her boyfriend, my lack thereof, summer job, the dogs, her Bible group, is her computer working ok, does she know how to charge her apple watch, Iowa weather, snow, California weather, fire, young people and their failure to live like the people before us. Did we talk about Lawrence’s dementia?
“And so how’s Lawrence getting along, Aunt Jill said he’s gotten pretty violent from the dementia?”
—————
Walk back to the apartment in relief I get another whole month. Kick shoes off at the door. Flop on the couch and send obligatory text to my sister and cousin about how horrible and awkward and inappropriate Grandmother was, just like how I know Grandmother is talking with her sisters about how inadequate and unpleasant and probably ugly I am: one of those angry feminists who hate men, doesn’t even have a boyfriend. Both texting behind our backs immediately. So why does she force these horrendous lunches if we both know they’re torturous and neither of us particularly like each other.
To get intel? Gossip? Of course, how much do people really like their extended family, often tolerable at best. But grandmothers are supposed to like their grandchildren and grandchildren are supposed to like their grandmother. It’s the natural order. Love is different, though, I know that. But still. She should be knitting me a fucking scarf or something, and I should be inviting her to my graduation, sincerely wanting her to come, see me walk, get my diploma. Where’s her cardigan, candy in a bowl? Where’s my respect for the Elder? It’s just not like that, we don’t like each other, don’t really even know each other.
Sometimes I feel bad: she’s widowed, ok I get it. She lives alone, only hobby is reading. And honestly I try my best, really I do. Old people being lonely makes me sad. Loneliness in general is sad enough. I’ve noticed there’s this pattern, with people who aren’t really generous or kind their whole lives: don’t do much for their children, pit people against each other, etc. So then they’re alone. They’ve pushed people away their whole lives, usually without realizing it. Think-
ing they’ve done their best, loved their hardest. I don’t know, maybe they have. But then they get to this old age, maybe they’ve broken an arm, a hip, whatever, and they want people around. They don’t want to be alone, die alone. They want the love and connection they’ve held out on their entire life. But how can you even try making amends without apologizing, recognizing your wrongs, and instead forcing social interaction with the people you should have been loving all along over salads? Sure, we owe our parents and our grandparents comfort and love in death, old age. But what did they owe us? Lost love in childhood isn’t something so easily made up: there’s no return desk, no time machine, Hallmark doesn’t make a card for this kind of situation.
I used to work at this old folk’s home in Ojai on Sunday afternoons, and on Sundays I’d make all the residents sundaes. Literally. Sundaes on Sundays. It sounds cute, but really it was creepy. Older guys would come up to me and say weird cat-call-like compliments with dessert themes. Like, hey you’re my cherry on top! And, this is just as sweet as you, give me a little extra sugar! Harmless, I know, they were 90, but still, I was fourteen, and it was weird, honestly. But usually on Sundays there’d be a lot of visitors, their children and grandchildren taking walks, playing board games, getting dessert. You could always tell which children were there out of familial obligation and which were there out of pure love, like genuinely they admired their parents and they loved them, and wanted to spend as much time with them as they could before they were gone.
The obligated ones, yeah, it was awkward, but they were both trying their best, you could tell. As any self-respecting Sundaes on Sunday girl would, I would eavesdrop. Their conversations were sparse, usually they were silent. But they were there, physically they showed up. I don’t know, it was sad, kind of heartwarming,
that people come together like that in a kind of secret agreement that your parents shouldn’t be old, alone. That someone should sit with you, silently, watching reruns of Leave it Beaver or M*A*S*H, even when they know they won’t hear an apology, there won’t even be a conversation, that talks of a shared past will only be nostalgia and not how bout when you weren’t at my 8th birthday party, how bout when you never said you were proud.
It’s just something you do I guess, go to monthly lunch, go to Sundaes on Sundays. Suffer through wedding china and can-you-evenmake-money-off-of-poetry, and wow, it looks like you lost weight! Saying yes, ok fine, the death of everything good and decent. Yes, ok fine, the death of decency, good taste and good music:
classical jazz, classical rock n’ roll, etc. Yes, ok fine, the death of past wrongs for the sake of this lunch and watching The Bob Newhart Show in silence on a pleather couch while we eat this shitty sundae made by a fourteen-year-old girl who wants to go home. Yes, ok, for the span of this lunch I will be an angry feminist singleton who lives in a cardbox on the street and eats poetry because I’m jobless. And also, yes, ok, fine death. Death itself you’ve acknowledged, so have I. So that you might not be alone, so that I might not be alone. Ok, we live and then we die. Say that again: we live and then we die. We are born from a body and maybe we want to die next to one. I owe you this. Yes, death. Yes, I’ll eat this salad, yes we can be with each other, yes, I’ll be here. Yes. Ok fine, yes.
MRI • FREYA PATEL
AFTERLIFE LLC
BRENDAN ROSENGREN
Ethan was pretty annoyed that she still hadn’t died. His schedule said the woman was supposed to croak at 10:24 following a nasty coughing fit, yet here he was at 10:33, still sitting in a damp-smelling dimly-lit assisted care room in Hartford, Connecticut. The old woman was still watching Jeopardy, and still very much alive. Ethan groaned. He had heard of this happening from time to time. Somehow, something gets mixed up somewhere along the line of communication and the wrong person or the wrong time gets put on the schedule. This was the first time it happened on one of his assignments. He tried to remember if there was anything in the onboarding videos about what to do in a situation like this. His mind drew a blank.
It seemed like it was getting warmer and warmer as the minutes passed and as the woman’s death became more and more overdue. Ethan tugged at his starch shirt collar. It bothered him that he had to dress the same for this job as he did for his previous desk job. Nobody was ever going to see him, but for some reason he was still required to dress business casual, complete with dress shoes and a tie. Every now and then, Ethan would wear fun socks, just to express himself. Polka dots, patterns, sometimes even a pair that had little cats playing various instruments. Ethan checked his business casual watch: 10:37. He had a little over half an hour to complete this assignment. He began to worry that if this woman didn’t die soon he might al-
ready lose his job, and then he began to panic, wondering what could possibly happen to him if he were to get fired.
And then, finally, the wonderful sound of a painful and labored cough began to fill the room. Ethan let out a sigh of relief. He straightened his tie, picked up his briefcase, and walked over to the woman’s bedside. He liked to think that he was desensitized to the whole death thing at this point, and he told himself he was comfortable in this line of work—just like his peers seemed to be—but more often than not, Ethan found himself unable to muster the courage to actually watch the final moments of the people he was transporting. Sometimes, when he was assigned a gruesome or violent death, the curiosity coaxed him. Just last week Ethan couldn’t look away from the limb-severing freak accident he was assigned.
It was the peaceful deaths that were hardest to witness. They brought back an unpleasant childhood memory of his grandpa in the hospital: one moment he was asleep with a slight frown on his face, his soft breaths audible over the monitor’s beeps, then the next moment he was dead; both the sound of his breath and the frown on his face, lost forever. Ethan hadn’t thought about that memory much at all before he got hired for his current job.
Ethan’s eyes wandered the hospice room while he waited for the sound of the woman’s coughs to fade. His gaze stopped on a painting in
a thin wooden frame depicting a boating disaster. A huge whale seen destroying a fishing boat, most of the tiny fishermen standing on the hull in a paralyzing fear. Ethan stepped closer to the small painting and stared at the lone fisherman at the bow of the boat, whose arms were outstretched as he dove overboard. It was too small for Ethan to make out the expression on the fisherman’s face, but he seemed happy; grateful to be deciding his own fate, unlike his crewmates.
The woman’s coughing stopped and she gasped for her final breaths of air. There was a serene moment of silence, then the ding of a Jeopardy question getting answered correctly and the crowd on the tv clapping. Ethan turned away from the painting and centered himself in front of the now deceased old woman. He reached out his hand and placed the knuckle of his index finger on the woman’s forehead then twisted his wrist. The woman’s forehead began to flicker and distort. Ethan checked his watch again as a black smoke billowed from the woman’s forehead. 10:42, Ethan would have to be efficient to finish this assignment on time. He again straightened his tie, and stepped into the cloud of black smoke.
she’d perceived the whale painting, too, but the room had no walls, just a black void, common in the subconscious of less creative types. Ethan was nearly certain that a few months ago, when he had died, he perceived the same black void.
Ethan set his briefcase down on the coffee table and unfastened the clasps, then took out a tacky, company issued pamphlet and set it gently next to the woman. In bold, red letters across the top an advertisement read: “You may qualify for an Elysian beach timeshare! Call now!” Underneath was a list of job opportunities, provided by the Postmortem Employment Agency.
Ethan rummaged through his briefcase until he found a VHS tape with the woman’s first name written on the side. He slid it into the top pocket of his briefcase and pushed the play button. Ethan walked over to the woman and snapped his fingers in front of her face to wake her up. She opened her eyes to the memories of her life being projected in front of her.
While Ethan hadn’t gotten used to the moments around his assignment’s deaths, he had gotten used to being in the space one’s mind conjures when they die. This inbetween limbo realm served as a place for the dead to recap their lives, and be swiftly transported to the afterlife. The coughed-out Jeopardy woman’s subconscious had perceived the very barebones of a room: just a coffee table and the same drab lounge chair from her hospice room. She’d also perceived a slightly younger version of herself, which sat upright in the chair, eyes still closed. Ethan scanned the room once more, hoping
Ethan felt like he was starting to get the hang of being a grim reaper. He felt familiar with the routine of attending someone’s death, guiding their consciousness to a place deep within their subconscious, and playing the tape of their life for them before escorting them to the great beyond. He was grateful too, it was definitely one of the more sought after posthumous jobs. Almost everyone applied for the position, though not everyone got accepted; others worked at haunted houses or the DMV. Aside from the dress code, Ethan thought it was a pretty decent gig. Lots more traveling than the dead end accounting job he’d had before he died, too.
Ethan checked his watch again. The woman’s life review was only about halfway over, the projection currently showing her midlife crisis, an affair with her dentist. That one’s not gonna
look great on her resume, Ethan noted. The review wrapped up with her Jeopardy obsession, the final development of her life, and Ethan rewound the VHS in case they needed to rewatch anything during her job interview. The woman was still unaware of Ethan’s presence, and the fact that she was dead, but nonetheless she picked up the pamphlet in her lap and began to read through it. From his briefcase Ethan pulled out a GPS and routed from the mortal plane to the employment agency in the great beyond. He snapped his briefcase shut, walked over to the woman and placed his hand on her shoulder. With a click of a button on his GPS, an elevator appeared and they were both on their way back to the office.
from the office his apartment was, but he knew he’d hear the loop two and a half times each day on his way to work, and two and a half more times on the way back. With each assignment, he’d get in the elevator and punch in the coordinates of the to-be-deceased and then hear the loop anywhere from one to four times. Sometimes the elevator rides were long, and sometimes the ride back was shorter. He wasn’t sure how any of it worked, or where his office was, or what was outside the windowless elevator, office, or apartment. He wasn’t sure it mattered. He never overheard any of his coworkers conspiring about the intricacies of this afterlife corporate business, and Ethan figured it was best to just go with the flow anyway.
Ethan had never been very religious when he was alive. He’d always just assumed death would be equivalent to the tv turning off, and he was entirely comfortable with that idea. He remembered being a little shocked when he gained postmortem consciousness in the lobby of a sterile office building, but had quickly come to terms with it, and realized his afterlife could be worse. He was sure that the existence of a somewhat boring corporate afterlife meant there was an afterlife better and more desirable than one he had (though perhaps if he worked hard enough he’d get promoted), and he was sure that this also meant there was some afterlife that was much more hellish, with pain and suffering and unpaid overtime and fire and brimstone and annoying coworkers and torture. The works.
Ethan wished he could send whoever composed the shitty five minute loop of lifeless jazz that plagued the elevator to the works. He’d spent an awful lot of time riding the elevator to and from his assignments, and from the office to his apartment. He didn’t know exactly how far
Ethan heard the ding, cutting short the most horrendous sax solo of all time, and he stepped off the elevator. His now-completed assignment, the old woman, was still right there with him, still reading over the pamphlet and subconsciously following Ethan as they walked to the check-in desk. Ethan scribbled his signature, checked a couple boxes and circled a few questions, placed the VHS on the desk, phoned a smile in the direction of the receptionist, and then walked down the hall to his cubicle.
He found his next assignment on his desk, with the timestamp at the top reading 12:30. He quickly scanned its details: middle aged man, singular death automobile crash, rural North Dakota. Ethan had been assigned a car accident before, one with two casualties. It was one of the only multi-death assignments he’d worked. He was assigned one of the to-be-deceased and a coworker he’d never met was assigned the other. They’d had an awkward elevator ride, then gotten out at different stops and never saw each other again. Ethan was grateful that this assignment was another solo mission. The only thing worse than that cacophonous elevator ride was that cacophonous elevator ride plus an awkward lack of small talk.
Ethan was sure to include in his report on the old lady from Connecticut that the time on his assignment had been slightly off. He hoped he wasn’t too passive aggressive in his tone.
Ethan then found himself en route to somewhere in North Dakota, trying his best to let his thoughts drown out elevator music. He thought about how thankful he was that the old lady did finally start coughing, realizing he would have had absolutely no idea what to do if she didn’t. He also didn’t think he’d have any way back to the office if not through her subconscious. He wondered if he would’ve had to kill her. He wondered if he’d have been able to. He shook the thought away. He thought about his own death. He had spent months on his deathbed reflecting his boring life and regretting the things he’d left undone. He remembered when the doctor told him something overly optimistic, basically telling him “yup, it’s terminal, but there’s still hope!” Ethan remembered being annoyed, why couldn’t the doctor just be honest with him? But he also remembered feeling somewhat relieved. Dying meant no more hospital bills, no more painful visits from his parents, no more regretting his life, no more forced sympathy from his coworkers. He knew his time had come. He knew, more importantly, that he didn’t have a say in the matter either. Ethan was never one to swim against the current of life, always just accepting the things that happened to him and those around him. He didn’t ever feel helpless. Rather he found it somewhat empowering to be free from considering himself responsible for the course of his life. His path, he felt, was set in stone from the day he was born, and there was no reason to wish it was any different. —————
Ethan stepped off the elevator and found himself in the passenger seat of an eighteen wheel-
er semi-truck. At his feet were balled up wrappers and fast food bags. Out the window was nothing but the desolate interstate, flat ground, and wheat fields. The man driving the truck, who Ethan assumed could only be Dave, was drumming on the steering wheel and singing along to a folk song, more offkey than Ethan knew possible.
Ethan checked his watch. 12:28. He wondered if the time on this assignment was going to be off, too. He had no idea what kind of car crash this Dave guy was going to get into within the next minute. There wasn’t a single car in sight, let alone anything else to crash into. He wondered if maybe his watch was broken. Ethan looked to his left again at Dave, and an unfamiliar pair of startled brown eyes looked right back.
“Oh geez, ya startled me,” Dave said.
Ethan froze. The man was looking right at him. He looked to his right, maybe someone was clinging on to the door handle of the semitruck, flapping in the wind. Maybe that’s who Dave was talking to. But there was nothing, just North Dakota. He turned back to Dave, who was still looking directly at him.
Ethan sheepishly brought his hand to his chest and pointed at himself. “Me?” He asked.
“No, the other uptight looking fucker who just popped up out of thin air.” Dave said.
Ethan sat there mouth open and stunned. Sometimes it seemed like people could sense his presence, especially the elderly on their last legs, but nobody was ever actually able to see him. And surely he didn’t seem that uptight. He’s just hallucinating, Ethan tried to reassure himself. That would explain it. He’s hallucinating, driving down the freeway on psychedelics. That would also explain the poor singing. But Ethan didn’t buy his own theory one bit. He nervously adjusted his tie.
“You can see me?” Ethan asked.
“Yup,” Dave said. “Hey, sorry for the mess down there. Wasn’t expecting company.”
“You know who I am? What I am?”
“Oh, you betcha. ‘Bout the dozenth time Sheryl’s decided it’s time for me to die.”
“Sheryl?”
Dave laughed. “Sheryl. Your boss. You must be new. She’s the one who oversees this whole shindig. Me and her, we used to date way back when. She passed away young and tried to convince me to go with her. She keeps sending her little workers my way, but I dunno. Death? The corporate life? Yeah, no thanks.”
Ethan was appalled. “So you just choose not to die?”
“Well, can’t decide to just not die. Found that out the hard way. I bet she wrote some kinda car crash for me today, huh. That’s gonna suck. Even if I were to pull over to the side of the road, start running out into the field, I’d get hit with ol’ reliable.”
“Old reliable?”
“A stroke. You showin’ up means you got a job to do and that means I’m gonna die again real soon, don’tcha worry.”
“So then how do you…”
“Ha. Here’s the thing,” Dave began to explain. He was very proud of himself. “I’ve found out how to manipulate that little waiting room limbo you all send the dead to. You know, you can really put whatever you want up there. First time I was sent there, I tried real hard and willed myself to regain consciousness. I focussed on my free will and was able to take control over that realm, through sheer determination. I had a good chat with the grim reaper who was assigned my death. Boy, was he spooked—spookeder than you are. He told me he had to play back a recap of my life, project my memories and shit. I asked him if I could jump back into those memories. He said he didn’t know. I tried it. Turns out you can.”
“Wouldn’t you just get stuck there, in your memories?” Ethan asked. He remembered the hallucinogenic half-conscious, fugue state he
was in when he died; watching the recap of his memories play in front of him. Was it really possible to just will yourself to move in that space? Was it possible to get up and somehow jump right back into those memories? To somehow bring yourself back to life?
“Well, I thought I might get stuck,” Dave said. “Thought my memories might play on a loop. Wouldn’t even be that bad. But I found out that once I reach this here moment in my memories, the memory of me dying, I’ll wake up again, only in just a bit of a coma. Pretty sure it’s you, the grim reaper, who gets stuck there in limbo.”
Ethan wondered how you could be in only just a bit of a coma. He also wondered how any of this was possible, but Dave didn’t seem to be bluffing. “Oh, don’t worry. I lived a good enough life. My memories shouldn’t be a bad resting place for you,” Dave said. He floored the gas pedal and the eighteen wheeler started moving at a speed that Ethan didn’t realize an eighteen wheeler could move at.
“Welp,” Dave said, unfastening his seatbelt. “See you on the other side.”
Ethan watched as Dave opened up the driver’s side door. He looked back at Ethan, gave him a sarcastic salute, then dove headfirst out of the truck. The folk song on the radio kept playing as Ethan sat there stunned and confused. The truck slowed to an eventual halt on the shoulder of the road. Dave’s body had ragdolled its way to the opposite side of the highway a ways away. Ethan got out of the truck’s open door. He grabbed his briefcase and collected himself. He looked at his watch and saw the time change from 12:29 to 12:30. Still not a single car in sight as he walked over to Dave’s body.
Dave was lying on his back with his mangled face (unfortunately) pointed at the sky. It was bloody and torn; certainly the face of a dead man. What was left of his smile was still twisted in a smirk. Ethan crouched down and put the
knuckle of his index finger on Dave’s forehead then twisted his wrist. Dave’s forehead began to flicker and distort. The same black smoke that Ethan had become accustomed to seeped through Dave’s forehead. Ethan felt a new sense of uneasiness as he stepped through it and into Dave’s subconscious.
“How’s it going,” Dave said, waving at Ethan. He had gone all out: Ethan stood under the fluorescent lights of a truck stop, the rural night sky above him more starlit than any sky he’d seen before. A modest road ran past the truck stop, stretching all the way as far as Ethan could see. Encompassing the truck stop was a thick rung of tall, calmly swaying pine trees. Further in the distance, tall mountains served as the barrier to this limbo. Ethan could even hear the hallmark sounds of a summer night: crickets and a peaceful buzz in the air.
Dave was sitting on top of the only truck in the lot. On the pavement adjacent to the truck was a cooler. Dave motioned to it. “Go ahead and project the tape onto the truck from there. Don’t bother with the pamphlet.”
Ethan felt obligated to do as Dave said. He was skeptical, but he wasn’t sure he had any other choice. As far as he knew, the elevator back to the office wouldn’t show up until the assignment’s memories were done playing. If Dave was telling the truth, and if he was able to come back to life before the tape was over, the elevator would never show up. Ethan never thought he’d long for that shitty jazz music.
Ethan positioned the projector in front of the truck and pressed play. Dave’s memories booted up. Without a word, Dave swung his legs off the side of the truck and slipped away into the projection. Ethan stared into the memory Dave just disappeared into, a foggy image of toys on a
carpet—likely Dave’s first memory. He’d never wondered if it was possible to go into someone’s memories, or what the projection of memories even were. It was all briefly explained to him in his onboarding: when you enter your assignment’s post-mortem subconscious you’ll find a VHS tape inside your briefcase, and you’re to play that tape of memories so that your assignment has their life flash before their eyes. Ethan had never questioned this. He tried to remember which of his memories had played when he died. It felt like forever ago at this point, but really not much time had passed since he was on the other side of this grim reaper-dying person operation. If he had to guess, his VHS tape would have lots of monotonous, boring days, both before he got sick and after. At the start of his life, there’d probably be memories with his grandfather. Those were the happiest memories. But then he got sick, too. There wasn’t much happiness after that for Ethan.
The scene in front of Ethan on the projector shifted slightly to a new set of toys, big building blocks on the same carpet. Ethan remembered why he was there, and he reached a hand into the memory. His fingers felt fuzzy. Ethan braced for the worst and set out through Dave’s memories.
Ethan imagined this was what lucid dreaming felt like. He floated around a scene in front of him, somewhat in control of his body’s movements. Some objects or people in the memories were blurry—parts Dave couldn’t fully remember, perhaps—and a young version of Dave was always present in the middle of the scene. Everything happening in front of Ethan sounded very distant. Even more distant, in the back of Ethan’s mind Dave’s warning echoed: “If my memories catch up to real time, you’re the one stuck in them forever.” Ethan knew he had to hurry, but he wasn’t sure how. He’d drift to one corner of a room only to turn around into a completely new room, a completely new
memory. After the early memory of Dave playing with his toys, Ethan found himself in what must’ve been Dave’s first day of kindergarten. Then little Dave was rounding the bases in a tee-ball game. Then it began to rain, and Ethan saw younger Dave walking with his dad under an umbrella, holding his hand. “She’s going to be okay,” Dave’s dad told him. They walked towards a big brick building.
The towering masonry reminded Ethan of the hospital his grandfather passed away in. It reminded him a lot of that hospital. Ethan rubbed his eyes and realized it was that hospital. His mind began to race. The chances were slim, Ethan knew that, but he also knew that Dave had seemed around the same age as him, and this younger version of Dave seemed to be the age Ethan was when his grandfather passed. Ethan’s heart pounded at the possibility of his grandfather being inside that hospital building. Younger Dave and his dad were directed down a sterile hallway. Ethan floated right behind them, a passenger in their tow. Ethan figured if could find a way to unhitch himself, he may be able to change his course, and search for his grandfather. Younger Dave was crying now. Ethan blocked out the noise and with a strained effort he peered into a couple hospital rooms as he drifted past. Both were empty. But Ethan started to feel more confident that his grandfather was somewhere in this hospital, even somewhere in this wing. Ethan kept straining away. Younger Dave entered a room with a bedridden woman. Dave’s cries got louder. Ethan felt himself being tugged back towards Dave’s memory. Ethan tried to resist it, trying for maybe the very first time in his life to act against a supernatural force and take hold of the reins of his life for himself. He tried to keep moving towards the end of the hallway, but the force pulling him back towards Dave’s memories was too strong. Ethan let himself get pulled back down the hallway towards Dave’s cries.
Present day Dave appeared in the doorway. “Looks like you’ve found out you can move around in here, too,” he said. Ethan opened his mouth to speak, but before he could get a word in, Dave winked and continued. “Feels nice to have a say in where you’re going, no? Don’t forget, you’ve gotta get me that pamphlet before it’s too late. Be smart to take it out of your briefcase.”
Ethan looked down and found his briefcase in hand. He looked back up, but Dave was already gone, and the scene in front of him had shifted again. He was at Dave’s high school graduation. Names of new graduates were monotonously rattled off. Ethan fumbled with the clasps on his briefcase to dig the pamphlet out. He’d be ready next time he saw Dave. Ethan had found within himself a new determination to make it back to the office.
He heard them announce a “David Svensson,” but Ethan was busy scanning the crowd, looking for the current-day Dave. Before he could spot him, the scene shifted again. A drive-in movie park this time. Ethan watched Dave, about a decade older now, share a bucket of popcorn with his date. The scene changed again. Young adult Dave and the same woman at a restaurant. Ethan overheard a bit of the conversation: a snippet of Dave saying, “Sheryl, you oughta get it looked at again. This could be serious.”
The scene shifted again and back to a hospital room. Young adult Dave stood solemnly next to Sheryl, who was in a hospital bed, with an IV helping her stay afloat.
“I saw my dad last night,” she said.
“In a dream?” Dave asked.
“No. I wasn’t dreaming. I’m sure of it. Felt too real. I was healthy again, so was he. He was showing me around this office building. Told me this is the next step for me. Said he wants to retire. He wants me to take his job. I think I’m gonna do it.”
Dave stood in silence. The memory faded in and out of focus. —————
“I want you to come with me,” Sheryl said. “I’ll pull the plug tonight. Take your life and meet me there. We’ll get to be together this way. We’ll run the company together.”
Dave stayed quiet a bit longer. “I want to stay with you,” he said. “But I don’t know. It all feels so out of my control. I want a say in how I spend my days,”
“Choosing when to die is the ultimate expression of free will. I’m making that choice tonight. Join me, Dave. Please.”
“Okay.”
“You promise?”
“I promise.” —————
A distraught Dave yelled and flung a bottle at the wall of his living room. Ethan flinched as it exploded into shards. Pills were scattered on the coffee table. A shotgun lay upright next to the couch. Dave looked at the ceiling and shouted, “I can’t do it. I won’t do it. Stop sending them after me, Sheryl. I can’t do it.”
Dave began to sob. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he said, his face buried in his hands.
The scene shifted again. A sea of black suits and dresses hinted that this was Sheryl’s funeral. So did the walnut casket and headshot portrait. The amount of people mingling and
mourning hinted that she must have been rather popular. Ethan wondered how many people showed up to his own funeral. He shook that thought. Surely present day Dave was somewhere on site.
Ethan drifted around. In the rafters overlooking the funeral was present day Dave, weeping. Ethan stood there silently for a moment. It felt like Dave had seen this memory plenty of times. Ethan wondered if Dave’s life-projection memory-flashbacks always showed him this funeral scene. He wondered if Dave was able to will his way to forgetting this moment, or it was a conscious choice to come back here. He wondered if Dave was revisiting the hardships of his life, or if they were simply unavoidable.
Ethan patted Dave on the back with the pamphlet in his palm. Dave turned around as the pamphlet fell to the floor. “You gotta move on at some point,” Ethan said.
—————
Finally, one not-so-bad elevator ride later, Ethan sat back down in his desk chair. He let out a big sigh of relief, and checked his computer for his next assignment. It was a very mundane, death by old age assignment out on the west coast. “Thank god,” Ethan said, quietly. Attached to the assignment was a small note, reading “Nice work, Ethan.” Maybe a promotion could be on the horizon, Ethan thought. He checked his watch. Ten minutes before his next assignment. He got up and went to the water cooler. What a hectic day at the office.
MOMENT IN TENERIFE • PAIGE CARTER
TEOTIHUACAN
JAZ GALVEZ
Do you think your favorite childhood tree misses you too?
Misses the feeling of your slim, calloused fingers around her trunk, and the secrets you used to whisper into her leaves?
I think about all the best friends who have turned into strangers too much. The girl I shared my first kiss with at age 11, lips damp with chlorine and fingers pruny from playing mermaids all afternoon.
I hope she is well.
I like to bike around my hometown and take in the changing storefronts, always cursing how fast my hair grows.
My university professors and father’s 11-hour menudo recipe alike are preparing me to raise up the next generation of pigtailed latinas with anger issues.
One day I will be a teacher.
One day I will be a mother.
I don’t know which I am more scared to be.
I can hear it now: an echo of “Life’s not fair, get used to it!” rolling off my aging tongue. It is backed by a thundering chorus of every seamstress and dishwasher and doctor and ballerina that Abuelito and Abuelita once were.
Their voices carry through the open window’s breeze as I tuck my firstborn son into bed, and seep out of his mouth as he recites through fluttering eyelids,
“Padre nuestro que estás en los cielos…”
DOGFISH
MILES MARTI
“Dogfish.”
That was the final word I ever said to you. I’d heard the word before in my life—fishing with cousins, the name of a local alehouse—but it was never anything more than a scrambling of letters, among millions. Even when I said it over your dusty, dying breaths, I couldn’t extract anything close to a meaning from it.
We were at a McDonald’s when we found out about you—my sister and I sitting at a pale, round coin of a table, our father across from us. Through the subtle salted steam of our food, I saw my father’s eyes redirect from his phone, sharp in his dried hand, to my sister, then to me. “Blue is taken,” he said, eyes shifting back down to his screen. “There’s a family with an Autistic child in North Carolina who wants him. The kid is begging. His family believes Blue will help him—a lot.” A few seconds passed without much movement or conversing, my father setting his screen-face up besides the ketchup. My sister thrusted herself on the tips of her plastic shoes, snaking herself over the table, grabbing my father’s device with both intent and urgency. Her eyes were both squinted and scanning; she was somewhat mechanical in that moment.
The ping-ponging of her pupils stopped. “How about that one?” she asked with a childlike simplicity. “He’s cute.” I remember craning myself to see, looking at you through the screen. Your head wasn’t facing the camera like the rest of them—something out-of-view capturing your
scattered attention, like a fish in chummed waters, scanning for meat. “He’s cute,” I echoed. “He’s cute.”
The three of us joined our eyes in a triangle of wordless, intense focus. The next words were spoken by my father through his food. “OK,” he said. “Let’s do it.”
About twelve-and-a-half years later we learned you were to die. It was New Year’s Eve. I had just returned back from Mexico with the family—I had sprawled in linen-lined Balinese beds, sand scattered underneath, as you contorted yourself, caged, a pen of straw-like hair, and the metal smell of both urine and dozens of empty cans of moist, unsalted meat. I mostly laid by the poolside, eating fruit—kiwi, strawberry, pineapple—by the pound. William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying was always with me; folded backward, avoiding the sun, or its brownyellow pages laying gently dead on my groin, liminal and unfinished as I rested between chapters. Despite having returned home, now, I still lounged through the days as if the Mexican sun was stillorange and hard. My phone pinged, and I saw I had been messaged by my father. He spoke jargoned and complex through little typed letters—‘laparoscopic splenectomy.’ ‘hemoperitoneum.’ ‘Euthanasia.’
If I were to write this all before you had turned to a dogfish, this would be different. But you are a dogfish, now, and forever will be—and I sit alone in this browned coffee shop, punching
with a sort of heated confusion at the keys of my Macbook. I look to my left; it is thirty-four degrees outside, and the sky’s tears are too thick to be rain but too soft to be hail.
You were sold to us for a few thousand dollars. My father took the day off from work, drove out through the wooded backlands of Pennsylvania to get to you—he cradled you up and dropped you in the front seat. Stepping off the school bus later that day, you looked a little bear when I first saw you—somewhat tubby, paws too big, weighted down as if ankle weights were implanted under your coat. You positioned yourself in something between sitting on the hairy forearms of my father, and standing— your hind legs oddly strong as you statured your little frame. I ran to you, dispersing from the sea of children behind me. My father lowered you to me, and we were the same height for the only time in our story. I looked at you. A horde of children, grubby and spiteful followed behind me, seemingly entranced. There was a sea of hands being thrown at you—waving and changing in the sign for affection, attention. A herd of little eyes looked at your little eyes. Your view darted up and down, round and round, again and again. You just looked at hands, not at people. You wouldn’t look at them, at me. I remember a subtle feeling of affliction—Who are these kids? What are they doing? But, I let it be. A minute more of this chaos, and my father hoisted you up over his shoulder, starting down the sidewalk, trekking downward to our brickred door.
When I received the message from my father about you, I sat still, just looking at the words. Words, devoid. I read them aloud—reciting, merely, not processing. In the other room, my stepfather peered his head around the wall, eyes a softer shade than normal. His strained shoulders were hugged by his military outfit, a battle of sandpaper and olive. His condolences he gave.
He’d met you just once, calling you too stubborn and repetitive in your whines for his affection. He told me of his own childhood pet—a browned mutt found on the soaked streets of The Bronx. He recalled his sister and him sitting with the doctor as it happened. “Feeling the heart slow in your arms is one of the oddest things I’ve ever experienced,” he said. “He died in my arms.” I looked up from my reading intently. We locked eyes. “It’s a little traumatic,” he said. His tongue was somehow softly different, though I didn’t see how.
Your impulsivity and chaos would scare us from time-to-time. We once took refuge in a West Virginia mountain house over Spring Break, bringing you along. We spent our time as by-the-textbook as possible—during the day we would hike the bouldered slopes and collect sticks, only to return just before nightfall, watching Shyamalan films and roasting s’mores. The first day or two was pleasant, yet our unconditioned selves grew irritable in a dash. My father and stepmother fought egregiously, and my brother had been throwing tantrums—the same boxed foods, canned foods could only keep a little one sane for so long. My sister found herself plagued with homesickness—the greens and the browns of the terrain, near-neverending, had grown nauseating; it was not at all like the suburbs. Thinking she couldn’t grow any more inhospitable, the discovery of lice by the dozens, secretly bedding in her hair, was inconvenient enough to send her into a nuclear fit of rage.
Back home, it took a minute for my father’s text to resonate. Within ten minutes, I was stepping out of the car—lolled awkwardly between two spots of the animal hospital parking lot. The building stood still and tall, a type of unbothered attitude in the brown bricks, the cyan sign. It was only as I pivoted myself to walk to the front door did I see, in the reflection of the pillowed glass, the mirrored painting of my favorite
childhood pizza parlor. I did not remember it was across the street—just a mere stone’s throw. The fact that a place of laughter paralleled a building so otherworldly held no place on my Earth. The hospital loomed over the eatery’s small, dingy walls. Fifteen years of frequent visits, there, and not a thing had changed. The place was stereotypically Italian—red, checkered tablecloths spread at every seat, the smell of the square-shaped, mozzarella-riddled slices always cutting through the air, even during the MidAtlantic winters. I paused to look across—just for a split-second—as I always did when passing through the town. It held countless memories: take-out and movies on a lukewarm Friday night, my cousin’s birthday party, when he ate twenty-two pieces, claiming victory through a squeamish pair of orange-red lips. In retrospect, I could write pages of these experiences both with vividity and ease. Yet, as I continued walking to the building of death, I couldn’t recall a damned thing.
On the day we were to leave West Virginia, you had slipped out through the flimsy, half-rotten front door—which held an undeniable difference from the images posted on the rentalwebsite. Leaves popped and pricked as you pranced through the yard with a clumsy grace, teeth flared, mouth agape. You circled around like a mad, mad thing. With a sudden and seemingly random jolt, you bolted for the old, dying shed, crouched in the corner of the yard. The thing was crooked, in all senses of the word—the wood panels were slanted and held on by a series of half-dead nails, unknown stains were splattered with an undertone of violence. The entire structure itself was somehow balanced on three pegs rather than four, a divot or slit in the corner of where the fourth leg should be. Beneath this impossibility was a hole, so brown it was black, thin and claustrophobic yet comically large. Young, it terrified
me. As you flew to the abyss with eagerness, your eyes opened wide with a strange, animal wonder. You ran into it, burying yourself tightly in the gap, like an aquatic thing tangled in a net, and I remember the thought being dropped on my scalp with a painful weight—You are not a dog. I don’t know what you are, but I know you’re not a dog.
Entering the hospital before your death, I met my family in the lobby. There we sat for a moment, and I couldn’t help but feel a writhing sense of stupidity come about me. Everything was smaller, softer, more comforting than I had imagined—the lights were bright and stagnant, and the floor was clean and acceptable. The joy and unity of Christmas decorations were inescapable—a wooden nativity scene sitting content on the reception desk, plastic candy canes, twilight in tango with the soft, silver ceiling ventilation. Peppermints swirled with an unmistakable sense of serenity in a glass jar tucked in the corner, and the scent of synthetic gingerbread sat stale in the spacey air.
The creature had buried itself instantly in the hole beneath the shed. It fluttered around with both anarchy and awkwardness, thick mud and cakey, fragrant dirt being tossed around effortlessly. With a sharp stop, movement seized. The creature tried to raise its legs but was stopped—stuck and static in the hole, panic and fear seizing the mountain air. There was a mix of a yelp and a cry and a call for help, staccato grief radiating across the yard with power. I remember it growing louder, louder, louder, and feeling myself take the form of one of the innumerable trees around us—still, waiting, watching. I questioned if I should call for you, or if this is just what things did—circle the planet, dig and become one with the dirt before anyone could intervene. Minutes past, each moment more intense than the last, until my father had gotten on his hands and knees with urgency,
wrangling the thing out from its captivity. You coughed once and ran for their door, your hot breeze passing along my leg, your eyes forever frozen only forward. Only then did I move, hoping you too hadn’t caught lice, hoping you too wouldn‘t spread the dirty little bugs to me in our next interactions. I hate dirty little bugs.
As I observed the sensory comforts lying around us, a nurse entered through the door. Leading us down a stubby hallway, she walked us to room twelve. We sat in four chairs as she stood above us. As she opened her mouth to speak, her eyes were pulled to the tissue box placed on the side table—as if by an invisible magnet, cruel, involuntary, ugly. “He’ll be in within a few minutes,” she said. I can recall her orange hair being faded and gentle, her smile withered and mangled by both age and air. “Would you like some treats?” I nodded—up, and then down—and she exited without a word.
You entered minutes later—you looked the exact same, save for the IV buried through your shaved, front left leg. You held yourself normally—jaw protruding, nose mushroomed and moist. Your ears stood erect and wispy in the room—the room which could best be described as “simply thin.” In an instant, you began to walk in circles—sniffing at nothing and swooping your neck to see all that you could, like a giraffe wrangled in infancy. You surely couldn’t tell, but, for just a moment, a vast and blanketing sense of something swallowed the room as the whale did Jonah, and I could swear we were transported to another place for a fraction of reality.
The nurse returned quickly, two canned chickens in each of her hands. “We’re out of treats,” she said—a tone in Limbo between remorse and genuine care. “We only have chicken.” She bent over ever-so-slightly, her dry fingers running across the metal cans, folding backwards and over themselves like self-destructive waves. “Is that OK?”
You tore through the meat, so floppy it looked raw, almost still alive. As you scarfed and spat like a child, the only words I could muster were some things never change. The two large cans were empty within thirty seconds—a gentle shock rang through our human bodies, surprised you kept your appetite, monstrously carnivorous and eager—in the face of death. The cans now hollow and dry on the floor, the nurse headed for the door, turning her saggy head right before she vanished. “I’ll leave you all to some alone time with him,” she said. “When you’re ready, there’s a phone over there.” Her veins looked oddly blue as she raised her hand to give directions. “Either dial one-zero-zero or one-zero-one,” and we’ll send in the Doctor.” I thanked her, and she left.
The time we all sat there was anticlimactic. You didn’t embrace us, you didn’t let us embrace you. You just trotted around the room in jumpy circles, like a playful pony. We would reach and twist ourselves over to you, joining our cheeks with yours, if only for a second. My father’s hands pressed down on the nape of your neck where your mother once held you. You seemed more interested in the blinded windows, though. This cycle repeated, the tears growing dryer, evaporating through the white, white ceiling. I looked to my father. “We should—do it.” His eyes met mine without words. Synchronized, the four of us helped ourselves to our feet. And everyone left the room but you and I.
Minutes later, a woman entered. Despite her youth to the previous nurse, she moved slow and heavy like a stout slug. I looked at her, she at me. “Hello, Doctor,” I said plainly. With not even a smile—just a redesign of her upper lip—colored a sandstone hue—she corrected me.
“I’m not the Doctor,” she replied. “I’m just a nurse. I just came to talk to you for a moment.” Your eyes met hers with a stillness, a static state that somehow held both a complex, fiery consciousness and a taxidermied stare.
She began to speak to me, and there was a sort of childish simplicity in the way her words landed. I felt like a child. “Have you ever… been present before?” she asked me. I declined. “I’m not sure if the Doctor will explain, but I’ll… tell you just in case. I replied OK, my hand on you. You just stared at her like you’ve never stared at anyone or anything before, I swear it. You were shockingly unmoving, eyes like daggers at rest—sharp, shiny, still. She looked at you, interrupting herself. “I love your face, I love your face” she told you. You shimmied a little bit in excitement, in love, and, within a moment, the scenario was as if it had never changed. You were still once more, me, too. Feeling as if there were only two souls in the room, I looked at you. You are not a dog. I don’t know what you are, but I know you’re not a dog. She explained that there would be two shots. “The first one,” she began, “is a sedative. This will calm and numb him. He’ll be still once the effect kicks in—around a minute after, the Doctor injects him.” She opened her mouth as if to speak, but quickly closed it once again. “He will feel no pain or discomfort—it’s just relaxation and tranquility.” The silence in the room was interrupted by her shoe, moving a half-inch, birthing an ugly screech in the tight room. Your ears didn’t hear it, and I thought of your mind for a moment, questioning what it was, if it was even there. You just stared like you had been. “And then, there’s the second shot.” “Once the first shot is in full effect, the Doctor will move to the second shot,” she said softly. “This will enter through his IV, and stop his heart and lungs.” At that exact moment, all I could think about were those words. The Nurse was careful and strategic—no “dead,” “kill,” not even a “pass away.” Her sentence simply stopped at “lungs.” It was dull. I confirmed my understanding, and thanked her for her routine spiel, which felt so absurd. She left the room with her head low and closed the door.
You began to move, now. You walked in circles, circles, circles. There was nop speed or pattern to it—the only certainty was that it was constant. Like a shark who couldn’t stop to sleep, it felt like you would go eternally. The room was a perfect square, you snaking around it, then through it, bouncing circularly, then diagonally from armchair to window, tissue box to door handle. I couldn’t touch you for more than a second on end—you just curled, bounced, ricocheted. Like a shark who couldn’t stop to sleep.
And then the door opened. In stepped the Doctor. His hair was light and curly and childish, but the rest of his face held low, like a sort of primate. His glasses were perched on his nose, and his white gown made everything feel a bit more real than it had been moments before. His right hand opened the door, his left hand cradling two syringes, capped with plastic, labeled with letters so little and words so complex I simply looked away instead of trying to decipher their symbols and meanings.
He greeted me with a “Hello,”—simple, plain, soft. He closed the door gently, and said something which I can’t recall precisely. He then ran through the explanation the nurse had just given, but, still close by the door, as if not fully immersing himself until after his words were spoken. The contents of his speech were the same, but he was more advanced in the words he chose: “ultra-concentrated dose of pentobarbital,” “moral and humane euthanisa,” were the only two I remember with perfection. Like the previous nurse, he avoided the “bad words,” despite their truth being now inescapable. As he described the process of the second shot, his gaped mouth just trailed off mid-sentence. “I’m sorry,” he said, though I don’t know to whom.
You were still circling and sniffing about. The Doctor bent his creaky knees with a sort of discomfort and waddled towards you awkwardly. I don’t know what I expected to happen be-
forehand, but it felt surreal as he transitioned so smoothly and almost gracefully from his words to his movements. I wanted him to wait. There was a sort of sting to the moment—like the constriction of cold skin in colder water—but, I, too, bent my knees, childish and capturinging, trying to corner you. Myself and The Doctor both knew we had to join our bodies to create a sort of barrier wall to entrap you, yet neither of us said a word. We failed in our first attempt to pin you to the creases between the two walls. As we closed in, The Doctor kneeling down, reaching for the IV, you phased through our pale, arachnid legs. One of the few real thoughts I had in that building, I couldn’t help but compare you to a ghost or ghoul, melting through doorways, appearing anew on the other side. You stopped in the middle of the room. Turning our efforts to the opposite corner, we approached you once more—this time my shin against the stiff and boney legs of The Doctor. You wobbled gently, and a purpled liquid spiraled through the tubes with impressive speed, disappearing at your paw. You kept wobbling. Eyes fixated on the IV, childhood, Seussian images and stories poured into my head. I thought back to my childhood—reading Green Eggs and Ham, One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish with a glass of chilled milk. I could hear the swooshing of the leathery pages as they turned, could smell the dush dancing in the air, could see the— —and then you fell—you, the creature. It wasn’t cruel to call you that, I swear it. It was simply safer, more true, more you. It’s left, front leg twitched for a moment of a moment, and, as it tried to stand, it simply didn’t. Its weighted coat fell it’s your left side, plopped and echoed to the ground. Watching you fall wasn’t tragic, nor even shocking. It was absurd and bliss. Body flopped like a sandbag dropped from highSitting in a chair next to it as this happened, I remember pulling my hand back, scared. My feet kicked
up, made room for the hard landing. My throat constricted. Posed awkwardly on one knee, a cruel marriage, The Doctor extended his crooked back and inched closer to a paralyzed thing. “Oh, Dakota,” I said. As it laid there, the triumphing thought in my mind was of a fish—static on its side, eyes balled wide-open, pointed, stiff, repulsive in suffering yet paradoxically innocent.
I began to breathe a little heavier. “OK,” The Doctor said, his eyes bouncing between the gently-laid blanket, dead-center in the middle of the room, and the still body, with an odd stiffening to it. “We can move him to the blanket. Do you want to move him to the blanket? Or we can leave him, here, in the corner. Or to the blanket.”
“We can leave him in the corner,” I said after a second, seeing his hands grab the second and final syringe. He took the cap off gently, putting it on the counter noiselessly. I readjusted my footing, the faded woolen sheet snatching my stare. I didn’t look at it, I blinked slowly and softly. “Actually, can we take him to the blanket?”
The Doctor swooped his forearms under it, like a sort of gull, and, grunting with its bloat and fat and fur, carried you to the blanket. He laid it down with a smooth motion, and it exhaled gently. I pulled myself in next to the Doctor as he searched for the end of the IV, tangled and messy. “Do you want to go over there?” he asked, his empty hand pointing to the other side of you. “There’s more room over there, and you’ll be closer to his head. You might want to go over there.” The word choice irked me violently— “head.” But I did as he suggested—I stepped over it, and sat back down, crunched and little as you laid large and hard in the room so small.
I glanced as he leaned in with the second syringe. The thing looked unmistakable the same— had not moved an inch, could not if it wished. It laid still like a fish, a fish, a fish. I looked at it, at the liquid, an eggshell-white now seeping in, and closed my eyes, hand on gentle Hair.
There were, perhaps, thirty seconds of the loudest silence I’ve ever heard, a tingling in my wrists I’ve never felt before—the most grudgingly absurd time of our beings. The Doctor left me with the creature, impossibly static, alien. We sat in frigidity for a few minutes, and I looked at it, toyed with the rubbered, targums of the thing and watched the teeth sit madly. A part of me expected a grumbled snarl, any spark of life. As I upped and left, the last thing I said—the only thing that could have
been said—slipped out through a puckered face and half-dead cheeks. As if a single world could capture it all, as if meaning mattered in the moment
“Dogfish.”
The word sat stale, a failed offering to a thing that’s nameless. I said it because there was nothing left to say—because it was funny, cruel, or perfect—or maybe because it was nothing. I said it because the absurdity of trying to make meaning was all that was left.
ILOILO, CHRISTIANNE TUBOLA
iloilo,
the sea does not ask why we left, or why we return. the air is thick with smoke and salt, where fish dry like prayers on clothesline streams. every house keeps its own version of God and grief, and every blessing is always said twice. every blessing is always said twice. the medieval mind believed tears cultivated holiness, that weeping watered the soul. sorrow makes saints out of salt pillars. you remind me there are ways to stay soft and remain whole. let this be a lesson to forgive without forgetting, as the shores whisper: kiss the cheeks of those who love you. let it be mango season once more. please forgive this eternally homesick daughter, self imposed hagiographer still aching for this city named again and again. i say your name like a balm, not a bruise — iloilo, i am soft.
palangga pa gihapon i love you more than you know.
DAY THIRTEEN • FREYA PATEL
SATURDAY NIGHT
LAUREN ACEVEDO
Did you listen to that new song?
I really liked it.
I won’t admit that it made me think of you. If you listened to it, would you think of me? I had dinner with my family and My dad said he misses you.
I do too.
He said we were a good couple. It makes me sad that he’s right. We were.
We weren’t.
I hope I won’t miss you forever.
MELANY GAMBINO
PLAYING AT LIVING TOGETHER FOREVER
LOUIS YANUCCI
We were nomads this summer, five cities, never more than a week or two, clumsy spreadeagle suitcases spilling intimacy in apartments and friend’s houses. There’s time to take in our finitude from May to June onwards to August, in Boston and San Francisco, pools and beaches, our tanned faces angry and orgasming quietly when we found a bed between afternoon alarms and dinner stars. We lived as fish and frogs, rustling kelp and lake weeds. Now we kiss and talk, quit and struggle from night to night like Parisian backpackers with no money in Hong Kong and soon we’ll be hermits or settlers of an undiscovered era of naked stomach creases and underwear sleep where summers are like Southern Europe, too hot to move to another place, so we’ll sip Austrian clear water with our bodies until the bubbles get boring and we disagree.
Then albatrosses or tigers, I’ve always loved African wild dogs. Life will wait until we’re done living a finite eternity, a new place for the penultimate adventure to begin again and again and again…
MORNING CRISP • MELANY GAMBINO
THOUGHTS AND VISTAS
PADEN IKEDA
When I look out upon colossal views—
The rolling tide or sights of city lights at night, I lay there with thoughts conjoined by sounds of blues, They wander on and on and out into the endless sight. They conjure many things, though usually tend to be the visions of my greatest self that only I can see. Though doubt, when she’s here with me, Loves to mar my heart and keep my soul unfree. But then I gaze into the world again, So vast, and bright, and dark, and deep. I want to hold it in my hands and grasp it then, my spirit, too big to stay a sheep. And doubt says I should play it safe, lest I face dismay. But I swing big and I miss big; I’ll take it all the way
THE MOUNTAIN AND FOG
PADEN IKEDA
Long and far away,
I see a mountaintop
That towers over endless seas of fog and smoke. I see myself, Emanating from the pinnacle, Enraptured in my deepest passionate desires. Yet, in between myself and I, A fog obscures my trail, And clouds my path that lies ahead.
I see what’s right in front of me, But in the distance, Only vague shapes and shifting figures Are visible when I squint my eyes.
But the soul is not disheartened. There was once a time
I could see nothing at all, The fog so thick and dense
Even the mountaintop hid behind The veil of dissonant ambiguity.
Though now I’ve come to know, The visions on the mountain Also shift and change.
Illusions whose true nature
I’ll only know when I arrive. The things behind me Are just as confusing. And whereas the front clears the closer I get, Behind me clears the farther I get.
When I’m high enough, I’ll look down with tears
When meaning comes
To what was seemingly vain.
Amidst all the fog, He’s bestowed me the sword of wisdom, That sharpens day by day.
Sometimes monsters appear from the fog, And sometimes I fall, But I rise every time. And fall and rise and fall and rise again, Until I’ve conquered it. My sword was once a poor knife, And now it’s grand and made of diamond. Pitch black is the night right now, And rain hails from the sky, Yet, my smile is unrestrained, Cause now I shine in the dark, And I dance in the thickest rain. In the Valley of Baca, I go from strength to strength. Time will expose the fog, But for now, it is good to my Shepard That I watch the grass grow. And when the time is right, I’ll arrive at the mountaintop.
RENUNCIATION
TAYLOR CROWELL
To be a hummingbird, to fly backwards, & whisper in the ear of past mistakes.
This is what I want.
To look in the mirror & see Catherine Denueve, to speak like water flows, to love & be loved— (real, this time) like the way a papercut slices: clean & quiet.
When you see me next, I will be a clouded leopard whose most dangerous blue is not in the ultramarine of the eyes, but a robin’s egg, violet nail beds, two oval pairs of cobalt.
When I am no longer a hummingbird, or a clouded leopard, I will be the last fig tree my grandfather planted in 1985, that perfect shade of red lipstick, an almost-purple flesh— the last unpaved, empty green field, a John Deere lawn mower, the kind you ride— that one spot of shade at the Iowa State Fair.
Cut a hole out of my chest: replace my lungs with two yellow roses & my heart with a handful of crushed petals or tiger teeth: do not stitch me up.
I will bury my belongings at Zuma Beach: all my silver rings, my mother’s loose amethyst & a pink elephant.
I don’t bend over anything anymore, but this will be my prayer.
