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The Last Shift

 

I feel as if the best stories start in the depths of hell, so let’s begin here: the night I’m fired from Denny’s. It’s an early Saturday morning, specifically 3:04 a.m., when I get fired by the one and only Big Chris.

I’ve been working here for quite a while, or at least what feels like awhile. Over the past four years I’ve served during the night shifts. I usually come in around ten or eleven and work ’til God knows when; by that point I’ve reached zombie mode and not even coffee can do enough to save me. I’m stuck working with these guys each night, along with the various characters of customers finding their way in and out.

One of the guys I work with is Manny, our dishwasher. He’s not too old, in about his mid-thirties, unusually short with a thick, murky mustache that covers his upper lip. Manny’s the type of guy who distracts you from every waking task you have but never lets you realize this. I’ll come in to drop off some plates and before I know it, I’m telling him stories about how a sea turtle attacked me on my last family vacation or how my girlfriend once sold a taxidermy chicken for a thousand dollars. In two minutes, he knows everything from my second cousin’s birthday to my little sister’s favorite cereal.

Because of this, our manager lets him play music on a speaker in the back, but this almost makes things worse. Now when I walk in, Manny’s there singing into the bottom of a glass cup, serenading me with either Tupac or Eminem. We’ve had more dinnerware break in the last month than in the past two years. I love the guy, but it’s starting to become a bit much at times.

The next guy I work with is Craig, our cook. Craig is the cool grandpa everybody wishes they had, even if you don’t want to admit it. And even if you have a cool grandpa, you still want Craig to be yours. His puppy-brown eyes and wrinkled skin just add to his whole persona. He’s always greeting me with “huns” and “sweeties” which I normally vomit at the sound of, but because it was Craig, they were always accepted. He is the sweetest guy anyone could ever meet, it’s just too bad he can’t work for shit.

Craig is one of those horrifyingly terrible workers but has been around far too long to fire. Instead you keep them on the job hoping one day they’ll improve, but never do and somehow, they even manage to get worse. Now don’t get me wrong, Craig is an amazing chef, but he messes up nearly every single order, every single night. Which wouldn’t be that big of a deal, but I’m the one losing tips because of it. For example, one day I had an order for eggs over easy, lightly crisp bacon, and some buttered toast. I got scrambled eggs, burnt bacon, and the poor man didn’t even remember the toast. The bacon was so burnt it looked like the bottom of a fire pit after the fire. It’s not like he can’t hear me right, because he repeats each order back to me perfectly correct. At this point I’ve started telling him the opposite of what I need with the hopes that I’ll get lucky and get exactly what I need. 

The next is our other waiter, Eric. Now there’s nothing too wrong with Eric; he’s a great worker, gets his shit done. But at the same time everything is wrong with Eric. He’s your basic wannabe frat boy. The kind of guy that wears khaki shorts in negative degree winters. The kind of guy that still talks about whatever sport he was semi okay at in high school (it’s lacrosse, in case you were wondering). The kind of guy that still feels the need to show off every single one of his Fortnite wins in order to proclaim his masculinity to others. 

The first time I met the guy was the time I caught him stealing tips from one of my tables. I marched right over to him and this is how the conversation went down:

“Oh hey, you must be that new girl, yeah? Lacey?” He licked his thin, colorless lips while looking me up and down as if I wasn’t just standing there. 

“And you must be the one that steals everyone’s tips, yeah? Shithead?”

“Only the cute ones.” He winked and I felt myself about to vomit.

“All right, well, hand them over.” I motioned with my hands for him to cough up the couple of dollars.

“Only if you hang out with me on Saturday.”

“As much as I would love that, I actually have a girlfriend.”

“Oh, well, that’s perfect for me actually. I’ll come hang out with you both and then return the money.” He shoved the bills deep into his pockets. 

“Rigghht.” I looked around for customers before kneeing him in the stomach. He fell over much faster and much more dramatically than I presumed he would. I bent down next to him and retrieved not only my dollars, but probably some of his as well.

That’s basically how it went and not much has changed. Most of our current conversations still include him trying to “hang out” or begging me to bring my girlfriend to work sometime. He still tries to steal my tips. After each table leaves I run back before the little shit beats me to it.

But now we’re definitely at the last and least of them all, my manager, Big Chris. Everyone always wants to know why “big”? Sure, it’s kind of a weight thing. He looks like the blueberry girl in the Willy Wonka Chocolate Factory, but that isn’t exactly why we call him that. It’s probably because he’s the man in charge and while he is supposed to be helping us through the night, instead he does a big nothing.

Before I get into it, before I talk about the countless scenarios and stories about him, I would like you to imagine every single bad boss or manager you’ve ever had to deal with. Now, I would like you to imagine all of those people as one. That¾that is who Big Chris is.

He’s the type of manager to sit in his office watching Netflix, which is bullshit because we’re all out here busting our butts to get everything done and he has the audacity to occupy himself with nothing. At the same time though, when he does come out to “help,” all it really is, is him yelling and complaining to us about stuff we are already working on. He ruins our whole system by bossing us around with stuff he’s just too lazy to do himself.

The beginning of the most terrible shift of my life starts out pretty normal, maybe even good. We are all in back, in the dish room with Manny jamming out to “Lose Yourself,” singing about Mom’s spaghetti. Whenever we aren’t busy, we always find time like this to slack off. It’s this harmless fun that keeps most of us from hating our jobs. Manny is standing on a bus tub in front of the dish line. Craig and I are his two background singers on his sides. Eric throws dollar bills at us while cheering and whistling.

Not even a minute later Big Chris stomps into the dish room. We all stop immediately as if we are playing a scary game of freeze dance. Manny drops yet another glass right before Big Chris starts his terror. 

“This isn’t some fun house we’re running here, get back to work or I’ll find ya more to do!” 

Everyone rushes out like sheep scattering from a wolf. I see Manny behind me picking up pieces of glass while getting the same lecture he has gotten so many times before. I make my way around taking orders and cleaning tables. I begin cleaning sections and Big Chris yells at me for doing that wrong. He’d probably yell at me for walking wrong if he really wanted to. That’s when I can feel it. That’s how I know it’s going to be the worst and my last night at this Denny’s.

 

An older couple walks in and I quickly make my way to greet them before Big Chris has one more thing to yell at me about. The couple looks like the trucker type, probably here on their lunch break. They both wear black leather vests with baseball caps.

“Hey folks, how are you doing tonight?” I put on the fakest Disneyland smile I can manage.

“Oh, you know,” the woman with long, noodle hair sighs. I nod sympathetically before turning my back to lead them to their table. Now before I can explain this next monstrosity, I must provide context of what this specific Denny’s looks like. The layout is almost like a perfect rectangular “H.” The middle cross is where the kitchen is located and below that is the host stand and entrance (where we are currently). In the two bottom legs and the top right leg is where all the seating areas exist. The top left, the bathrooms. Now, I seat them at a table over in the lower left part of the “H” and as soon as I start to walk away, I hear the woman yell, “Um, miss?” I turn back around flashing them a smile.

“Yes?”

“Can we please have a booth, they’re better for my back.”

“Of course.” I move them two tables down in a booth. I proceed back to the kitchen when I hear her again.

“Oh, miss?”

“Yes?” My smile is fading.

“This is too close to other people. I want to be able to hear what I’m saying if you don’t mind.” I glance around the restaurant to see only three other vacant tables. I almost roll my eyes, but instead nod and lead us all over to the bottom right of the “H.” Once I select a booth and place both plastic menus on the table the woman wags her finger at me and points to the upper back part of the restaurant, usually reserved for parties. I dread bringing them over there, but I do.

“All right, it’ll be right here for ya. It might be a moment until I get over here for you just because my other tables are on the other side.” I explain politely.

“Oh my gosh, that’s so stupid.” The woman moans and the man with her clenches his teeth at me in a way that says he’s sorry. Big Chris eyes me to get back to my other tables and I scurry over to them like a little mouse.

And that’s when I see her seated in my section.

Pickle Lady.

Now this lady is the kind that servers will sit in any section but their own, and because Eric is the only other server on, of course I get stuck with her. Basically, this woman is never satisfied with any amount of pickles we give her and yet here she is, back again.

“Hi ma’am, how are you tonight?” I click my pen. She smells like hot dog water and the smell already starts to seep into the rest of the restaurant. Customers look around in question of what and where the odor is coming from.

“Just great.” She flips through the menu, even though she gets the same thing every time.

“Just the cheeseburger for ya?” 

“And extra pickles,” she smiles extra bright so I can see the yellow of her teeth.

“Of course.”

When I ring in the order to Craig, I look him dead in the eyes and say, “Craig, I love you, but I swear to God if you fuck up this order, I will have to murder you.” He laughs at me, but for a moment I don’t feel like I’m joking with him. In fact, I feel as if my whole life depends on if this man puts twenty-seven pickles on this damn burger. 

“I’m serious, Craig,” I place my finger down on our small expo line to show I mean business. It’s messy and full of crumbs, the man can never keep a clean area in that kitchen.

I then head over to my third and only other table (thank God) and for a change they are actually really sweet. It’s an adorable young couple with their daughter that looks about six or seven years old. Why are they here so late? Maybe they’re on vacation or something. All that matters to me is the fact that they are the only table that doesn’t make me want to kill myself. I’ve already gotten their food out, easy orders, nothing complicated like fucking Pickle Lady over here. Serving them is the most therapeutic and simple task of my shift.

In my spare second, I check my phone to see cute little texts from Lillian. She knows my job is shit and does so much to at least put me in a better mood. Already picked up your faves for tonight. Don’t worry about the rest of rent, I got us covered. Just don’t die at work, I need your warm cuddles :). I smile at the thought of getting home to her. It makes getting through shifts a lot easier knowing I have the most amazing person to see afterward. 

I pass Eric and he nods toward the kitchen to let me know my food is up. I pass one of his tables which is occupied by two girls that are so drunk I wouldn’t be surprised if they stood up on the table and started singing “A Thousand Miles” by Vanessa Carlton.

“Hey girl!” The one with pink glitter eyeshadow shouts to me. They both wave me over and I cautiously make my way to them, afraid they might smother me with hugs. The girl without makeup has teal-blue hair and begins touching my straight blonde hair, saying how she wished they had some like it. 

“Your skin is just so clear!” Pink Glitter nearly yells.

“And her green eyes are so radiant!” Blue Hair joins in.

“Also, we just see how hard you’re working,” she slurs on every single word. “And we wanted to give you something special.” She hands me something like one does in order to get into a fancy restaurant even though they don’t have a reservation. Pink Glitter nods and mouths what I think is the word “enjoy.” I thank them and continue my way to the kitchen. I look down into my hand to see a Starbucks gift card, but it’s so faded I can barely make out it’s prominent logo. Love that. 

Eric runs up to me as if he has something important to say, but I should have known it was just going to be some Eric bullshit.

“So, you like my table twenty-eight?” He winks at both girls and they giggle in enjoyment.

“Maybe, if that means you’ll find someone and finally leave me alone.” I sigh.

“Never, you always come first, Lace.” He smirks. We’ve been working for so long I can’t tell if he’s serious anymore or just likes fucking with me. Probably both.

“Craig says your food is up for Crazy Pickle. I yelled at him to make sure it’s the exact amount because even I don’t wish that woman upon anyone.”

“Thanks.” I nod. Once I arrive at the kitchen Craig is already waiting for me.

“Hey hun, I fixed those orders for ya, sorry about that.” He smiles his sweet and adoring smile. I almost melt, but then remember I have tables to get to. I bring the trucker couple their food and they seem surprisingly okay, maybe even happy. I head over to Pickle Lady in hopes for the same. Her burger is so covered in pickles that I can’t even see the patty. It’s just bread, pickles, and more bread. I cross my fingers, hoping it’s enough to please her.

“Here ya go, ma’am.” I set the plate on the table and clench my teeth waiting for her approval. I watch as she pulls off the top bun and inspects the sandwich like a detective on the scene of a crime. She rolls her eyes as far back into her head as she can and lets out a long, dramatic sigh.

That’s when it begins.

“I am a good Christian woman. I don’t deserve this. All I ask for is a burger with exactly twenty-seven pickles and you idiots can’t even do that. Do you see my issue?”

Big Chris hears the yelling and immediately comes out to the incident. If only it were him coming to save me. He pushes me to the side and puts his hand over his chest to show he sympathizes with the customer. They both look over and start bitching me out as if I’m the crazy one that asked for twenty-seven pickles on a fucking burger. Big Chris fixes the burger and brings me to the back to have a “talk.” He sprays me with saliva while repeating the “customer is always right” phrase. I honestly never understood that bullshit quote because, like, if the customer punched me in the face, would they really still be right? Well according to Big Chris they probably would be. He begins threatening to fire me, which he does often, but never actually does. He’s always bluffing just to seem like he has power, saying stuff like “one more thing and it’s over.”

After a little while most things have calmed down, and the only table I have left to cash out is that sweet little family. The wife has gone to the bathroom and I go to pick up the check from the husband. I bring it to the register and cash it out, but on the tip line where an amount of money should be listed is “call me baby” with a number attached to the end of it. I stare at it in disbelief. I’ve had guys write some pretty nasty things on my checks before, but never a guy with a wife anddaughter, let alone while they are both here with him.

“Eric,” I shout across the entire restaurant not caring, just wanting to know how to handle this. He jumps up from stacking glassware and comes over to me.

“What the fuck am I supposed to do with this?” I shove over the check. He lets out a laugh that sounds like a chainsaw. I give him my best angry mom look and the laughing stops.

“Okay, okay, sorry. I would maybe go to the wife because, like, she deserves to know her husband is a piece of shit.” I nod and go back over to the table before my doubts stop me from confronting the situation.

“Excuse me miss, I think there might be a problem with the tip.” I reach down to show her the bill. Her eyes grow wide in disgust as she turns to her husband who seems to have no idea what she would be upset about. That’s when she turns back to me.

“Why are you making moves on my husband?” She raises an eyebrow. I can actually feel the muscles in my jaw drop.

“He wrote that to me,” I point out.

“Well maybe if you weren’t so flirtatious during dinner, he wouldn’t be giving his number to you.”

“I wasn’t flirting and even if I was, it wouldn’t be to him because I have a girlfriend.”  I feel my voice rising. I’m so fucking confused. She stands to size me up and I can’t even believe what she says next.

“Ohhh, so you’re trying to make moves on me then?”

“What?! No?” I see Eric in the corner of my eye, bent down and laughing at the whole situation and maybe if I weren’t directly in it, I would be laughing too. Because seriously, how does this shit always happen to me? The daughter looks totally unfazed, as if this kind of thing happens often. The wife then puts both of her scrawny arms up as if she’s ready to box me, but I’m positive this woman has never fought anyone in her life. Like the Hot Cheeto with fake nails type. All talk, no walk. Big Chris is already booming his way over to intervene. He puts on his fakest nice voice and addresses the wife.

“Hello miss, what seems to be the situation here?” 

“Your server here keeps trying to put moves on my husband and me. And then, she threatened to fight me.” She sounds like she genuinely believes what she’s saying. He turns to me, hands on his hips, and this time I can’t help but slip.

“Oh my fucking God. I did not. I promise.” I feel tears filling my eyes, but I’m not sad.

“Lacey, you already know what we talked about earlier, the customer is always right.”

“But I really didn’t do anything like that I swear,” I try.

“That’s it. I told you one more time and it’s over. Lacey, you’re fired. Get your stuff and get out.”

This time he isn’t bluffing. 

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Victoria Barney is a Creative Writing Student at Columbia College Chicago. She has been an editor for Hair Trigger and is always looking for new experiences within the writing world. Additional information can be found at https://nerdfightertori.wixsite.com/mysite.

David Friedman Award Recipient

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Bones of Before

AMAN SINGH WAS MADE OF GOLD.

The nurse said he was an angel, with ten little toes and ten little fingers. He was a beautiful baby boy, skin a golden mixture of heritage and pride. His ancestors were strewn on battlefields and brought up in a world of death and enslavement; crimson blood spilled onto earthy battlefields for him to be raised in a world of white. The shackles of before are removed from his name as the nurse wipes him down and wraps him up in a white blanket, cloaking him in what is right, before handing him to his mother. Her weary brown eyes wash over his caramel skin, his button nose, and closed lips with adoration. She brushes her lips against the skin of his forehead when his father arrives.

His father is a man of his word. He is a man of six foot three, who bears the beatings of prejudice and racism with his head held high and his turban held higher. His beard is combed and neatly set as he strides in, his footsteps commanding and strong for someone who works three jobs to support his family. He settles at his wife’s side, the nurses clearing out as the couple looks down at the young boy. As the door clicks shut, silence coats them as they take in the miracle before them. The miracle of life.

In their hands, they hold more than a single life. He is an amalgamation of warriors, saviors, and fighters, sealed and branded with the name of Aman.

His father raises his tiny fist in his own, brushing the fingers that will write their way to a higher class of life. Pulling the Karo out of his pocket, he slips it onto Aman’s wrist, pressing a kiss to the blood that rushes under the skin, beneath the circular steel band of metal. Raising his gaze to his wife, he takes in the tiredness and the fear.

The fear of another soul that must bear the brunt of the words of the ignorant; one who must face the world with its whitewashed masses and its God-fearing leaders. And so she whispers into the cool air,

“Ek Onkar.”

Not the word printed onto the notes that run the world.

Not the one that commands the country and its every move.

There is only one God, the one who is above and loves unconditionally, no matter what creed, caste, or religion.

 

AMAN SINGH WAS MADE OF QUESTIONS.

He pants as he hides behind the school. His back meets the brick wall and the grooves dig into his spine, but he doesn’t bother to move. He has run too long from his past and future to bother about his well-being in the present.

He feels sick as he sees his rumaal in tatters in his hands. His mother warned him as she tied the cloth over his head, covering his braided long locks with the fabric of his religion. She told him of the boys with knives for words, that they would dig a groove into his faith, trying to dislodge it from the firm place within his heart. She told him, “Ek Onkar, and he will protect you,” that God could heal the wounds of the bravest soldiers and that Aman was the bravest of them all. Aman was a fighter, and his battle was every day; breathing and living with his golden skin and covered hair was his eternal war.

But she didn’t tell him of the hands that would grab and pull. That would rip and tear at the fabric on his head. That would yank the neatly combed hair down to his back and laugh at his demise. How they would jeer and taunt him for his “girl” length hair, for his strange head attire and jewelry that adorned his right wrist.

They weren’t taught from their fathers about the everlasting love the steel band signified, or how the cloth on his head was worn by his ancestors who fought for everything that his family believed in, for the air he breathes and the food he eats. They were taught of those who are great and those who are different, fear instilled into their hearts from the day they were born, just like Aman.

They don’t know a thing.

And neither does Aman.

With his back pressed against the brick wall and his pride in tatters in his hands, he doesn’t know anything anymore.

When he gets home, he stays silent as his mother curses the boys who harmed him. He doesn’t understand why she would say such words when she stays up late tailoring their mothers’ country-club clothes, her fingers calloused from the pricks of the needle.

He doesn’t know why his father seethes silently at the table when he presents his ripped rumaal. He doesn’t understand why he would leave the table and lock himself in his study, his mother tongue igniting the air as he shouts at them. Because he knows that on parents’ night, they will all whisper about his strong Eastern accent, laughing at the way he lingers on his “r” and skips over the “v.”

Aman doesn’t know anything as he stands in front of his bathroom mirror. His eyes meet the ones in the reflection, full of eight years of fire. He only knows that in this world, to stay alive he must appease the others. So, he lifts the scissors he stole from the drawer and raises them to his hair.

And when the first lock falls to the floor, the others soon follow, and he doesn’t know if there is only one God.

Or if there is a God at all.

 

AMAN SINGH WAS MADE OF BEAUTY.

The girls flock around him, sinking their claws into his tanned arms, smearing their fake tan on his caramel complexion. The boys envy him; with his broad shoulders and lean figure, he cuts a sharp form as he races down the field, skin glowing under the heat as he tucks the ball into his side, thick muscles straining with tension. He ditches three letters for the ease of others, his new identity represented by an “A,” the beginning of his new life.

“Ugh, A, I wish I had hair as thick as yours. It’s gorgeous!” Natalie mutters, her fingers combing through his shoulder-length hair. It’s longer now, grown out to a state where it’s longer than others but not too long as to be strange. Because being different is the worst fate in this God-forsaken world. His head lies in the girl’s lap, her long fingers playing with the hair. He rolls his eyes at the comment, setting down the book he was reading. He chooses to close his eyes, the gentle stroking and massaging of his head reminding him of when he was younger. It reminds him of the way his mother would set him down before her, oil in one hand and a fine-toothed comb in the other. Tenderly, she would brush out the knots, her talented fingers wrapping the hair into a plait, an art that has been passed down through many generations.

A smile teases his lips as he remembers. Natalie’s actions cause him to relax further into her lap. She moves her hand from his head to his face, the aqua on the back of her nail standing out against her pale skin. Lifting it up, she presses her rose-stained lips to his. He allows his eyelids to flutter open; he sees a halo of blonde framing her heart-shaped, pale face. He lifts off of her, cupping her jaw as he strokes her cheek tenderly.

“I can’t come ‘round tonight,” he says, watching carefully as her lips begin to turn down at the edges, “family arrangement.”

She sighs heavily, moving out of his grasp, “Why don’t you invite me ‘ro—”

“Natalie . . .” he says, wrapping a hand around her wrist and pulling her back towards him.   

“I know, you can’t. I just wish that we could . . . ugh your family is so backward!” she cries out and he tenses around her.

“Shit, I’m sorry. A, I’m sorry,” she apologizes, hands going to his neck to pull him back and closer. Their foreheads press against each other, and she lifts up onto her tiptoes to kiss him.

Soft lips slide against the chapped edges of his, the warmth of her tongue poking out to slip into his mouth. He breathes her in, the warmth she provides making him respond to her. There are no butterflies, no fireworks igniting in the pit of his stomach. Instead, he is content with the situation and the girl in his arms. Her arms slide down his front, playing with his belt as she presses closer to his front.

He pulls away, chest heaving with ragged breath. Emotionally and physically, he is far from her as he steps away. His hand drags through his roots, and he pulls on the ends before turning away, his words carried away by the wind.

“I have to go,” he mutters, and then leaves without a goodbye.

 

AMAN SINGH WAS MADE OF FIRE.

His hand cracks down on his desk, his head shaking as he opens his mouth. “Segregation isn’t the way to move forward, it’s moving backward at least a century,” he cries out loud, now rising to his feet. The lecture hall seems dwarfed by his stature; his tweed jacket and tortoise shell glasses age him beyond his twenty-five years.

“Well obviously something must be done for our own safety, otherwise they are free to kill civilians,” the boy opposite him scoffs. Aman feels his lip curl into a sneer, fists clenching by his side. He is about to respond when someone else cuts in beforehand.

“It’s perception; you perceive the situation to be one of aggression, that they are against you. They believe it is one of oppression. The root of the problem isn’t nuclear warfare concentrated on a place that holds more innocent civilians than criminals. The root of the problem is our own society.”

The class ends, and Aman finds himself approaching the voice. He wears a black denim jacket, and his hair sticks up as he drags his hand wearily through it. By the time Aman catches up, he has a cigarette firmly in the corner of his lips and his head bowed down to his phone. When he sees Aman, he breaks out into a grin, throwing his cigarette onto the ground and stubbing it out with his shoe. Sliding his palm against his thigh, he stretches it out toward him and smiles sheepishly.

“That guy was an absolute dickhead.” His introductory statement takes Aman by surprise, but as he slips his hand into the strangers, he finds the strength and warmth it emanates more surprising. He laughs as they shake hands before returning them to the safety of their respective jean pockets.

“Nick.” He grins as he slides his phone into his pocket and gives his undivided attention to Aman. The boy falters—in university he didn’t need to reinvent himself; people took the time to learn the soft “A” at the beginning of his name.

“Aman.” He settles, and he watches as Nick tests his name by breathing it out. It sounds wonderful falling from his lips, the soft hum of the “N” at the end of his naming vibrating through him.

Nick gestures to the side, and they begin walking through the campus side by side.

Slowly their friendship evolves, their seats in World Relations became closer and closer, until Nick and Aman sat beside one another. They’d debate together, voices united as they speak, points trailing and linking to one another until the pair overruled the discussion. Notes are traded (with Nick’s particularly detailed drawing of a penis sketched into the corner whenever the “dickhead” from the first lecture spoke).
 

It’s a Friday in the autumn term; orange stains the leaves and drags them to the ground around them. Aman wraps up a scarf around his neck tightly, longing for the warm chai that his mother would make for him. Nick fumbles with his hat and pulls it down to cover his ears. 

“It must be hard for you, listening to all that bull,” Nick suddenly says as they cross the road to a coffee shop, but Aman simply furrows his brows.

“Why would it be particularly hard for me?” He asks, the double meaning not missed by Nick who snorts before reverting back to seriousness.

“You know because you’re . . .” he trails off, and Aman’s lips form an “O” in realization.

“I’m not Muslim, Nick, but my stance isn’t because of religion. It’s because of my humanity.”

 

NICK ROSTER WAS MADE OF ICE.

He sits in Aman’s two-bedroom apartment, grumbling at the “crappy New York City weather.” Aman laughs from the kitchen, while he overlooks the bubbling pot on the stove. It’s second nature for him as he places cardamom and clove into the pot, the water sizzling and spitting as he pours in milk.

He returns to his best friend, placing the mug into his hands, before collapsing heavily onto the sofa.

“Ew, I’ll pass,” Nick states, wrinkling his nose at the foreign smell. Aman rolls his eyes as he grabs the remote and flicks through the channels.

“Shut up, you pussy, and drink it.” Aman turns to see Nick yanking his beanie over his head before taking a tentative sip. His initial distaste was replaced by a small smile. 

Nick is cut from shards of ice, freezing to touch as Aman brushes against his skin. He is stubborn as he attempts to leave the apartment, but Aman stops him and reminds him that he’ll just get more ill. He is the opposite of the warmth that Aman provides with his hospitality and the blankets.

“Cheers,” he manages to call out from the cocoon of blankets and pillows, as Aman straightens up from the electric heater he had just put on.

“Get some sleep, you idiot,” Aman says affectionately. He heads towards the door, stopping briefly to send a soft look toward his best friend, before returning to his own room.

Their lives become more entwined, paths crossing and meeting until they practically walk side by side. Nick lies on his sofa, ginger hair messy on his freckled forehead as he frowns. He faces the window where snow falls thickly outside. The first term of their third year is nearly over, and the campus is full of mistletoe and Christmas trees, the seasonal glow casting a warmth within the students.

“I hate winter,” Nick grumbles, his feet resting on the portable heater that he has come to love so dearly.

“You hate the cold,” Aman says, his glasses fogging up as he eats his noodles from their plastic container.

“Same thing, ain’t it?” Aman simply rolls his eyes, pulling the corner of the blanket from Nick’s grasp and curling into it. They huddle together as the small TV on the coffee table begins the show. As one episode turns to two and two turns to six, Nick eventually has his head resting against Aman’s shoulder, and their thighs press against each other.

Nick Roster may be made of ice, but his skin is warm to the touch. Aman frowns as he tries to concentrate on the show, but his focus reverts back to the redhead beside him.

The way Nick’s soft hair tickles the crook of his neck.

The way his body curves into his side.

The way his soft sighs brush against his skin, raising the fine hairs on the back of his arms.

The episode ends, and Aman couldn’t be happier. Because he doesn’t understand why the mere feel of Nick’s body against his awakens more feelings within him than all the girls that he’d ever been with, their bodies under his control. He thinks of the coil in his stomach, rusting due to its lack of use, and how right now it’s pulled tighter than ever before.

Aman shrugs his shoulder, gently trying to pry himself away. But he doesn’t realize just how close they are.

Or that when Nick would look up, his green-flecked eyes would flicker from his screen, the emeralds glowing brighter than any jewel. His light breaths would hit his chin, fanning over his bronze complexion and flushing his cheeks the same rosy color of his lips.

Their eyes are on one another, running over the slopes of the other’s nose and the lines of their jaws. That’s until Nick stretches out to put a tentative hand to his jaw. Then he presses his lips to Aman’s.

 

AMAN SINGH WAS MADE OF MISTAKES.

Nick’s lips are warm, unlike his fingertips that slide into his hair. Each caress sends a shiver down his body, until his knuckles are white as he clenches his fist.

He doesn’t want to react.

He doesn’t want to give into the way Nick’s nose brushes and eyelashes flutter against his skin. He doesn’t want to melt under the gentle caress that he feels at his waist, as he is readjusted to face Nick fully.

But he can’t help it. He can’t help the way his lips part to let Nick into his mouth; his tongue languidly strokes his own. Somehow his hand has settled on Nick’s waist, fingers splayed out on the small of his back whilst his thumb strokes the front of his stomach. Another hand rises to his hair, the ginger locks so soft, and he almost moans at the feel. The strands are like silk beneath his fingers, engulfing them as they trail up the back of his head.

All too soon, they are parting and Aman wants to reach out and pull him back, but realizes he is the one who is retreating.

“W—we shouldn’t have . . . Fuck—I shouldn’t have—” Aman rambles, his hand flying to his hair that had been previously doted on by the boy before him, but right now, they were being tugged, hard enough to rip it out of his skull. He is scrambling to his feet, the blanket they were sharing flying to the floor.

Nick says his name, and Aman feels his heart rip, the tendons snapping at the despair in his voice. “Aman, stop,” he whispers as Aman tugs at his hair and scrubs his lips with the back of his hand. The light bruising left by Nick is replaced by a self-inflicted darker shade, the hue likening to the one formed when knuckles bury deep into skin.

“Aman, please,” Nick pleads, standing up as well, one hand placed onto Aman’s shoulder and the other on his neck. Nick’s forehead rests against his, and he inhales deeply. When he opens his eyes, Nick sees Aman’s wide eyes before him.

Wide with fear.

So, he brushes their lips against each other once more, before heading out of the door.

And that was when Aman Singh understood the pain of love. 

He visits home, and his parents gush over his grades, worry over his weight and love his soul. But he feels like an outcast because the same lips that brushed against his mother’s cheeks were pressed against his best friend’s. Yet to Aman, both seem right. So he ignores it, reverting his concentration to the tiles in the bathroom that his father was too frail to fix. He helps his mother wash the dishes, and when he heads into a supermarket to grab some milk, he ignores the look a woman gives as they both pause under the mistletoe. 

Aman thinks he made a mistake, and that it could be rectified with redemption and praying for forgiveness. 

His hands are clasped together as he bows down, his head covered, and his fingers slide the notes down into a tray. His head presses against the carpet, and under his breath he mutters the prayer his mother repeated night after night when he was younger.

Then he prays for forgiveness.

I’m sorry that I kissed a boy, and that it felt so right.

There are no lies with God, no aversion to the truth when faced with an Almighty Deity, so he is truthful. He asks to stop remembering the smooth planes of the boy’s body, with his freckles lining his cheeks and unruly ginger hair. He asks to forget his best friend.

When he returns home, the air has shifted, and there is a girl in his front room. Their horoscopes are matched, and his parents hold hands, hearts filled with hope as they watch the duo.

Her eyes are wide, and her smile is fake; he notes this down in his mind. A glass is thrust into his hand, and he drinks to sedate the drought his throat has subjected itself to.

When the adults leave and the girl is left with him, he finds himself looking away. His eyes are trained on the clock to her right when he speaks, his voice low and cold.

“I can’t marry you.” He doesn’t want to see the disappointment in the young girl’s eyes, a feeling that will be amplified in both his parents’ hearts and eyes.

She gasps, the first tear falling from her eyes, and he looks up to see tears rolling fast down her round cheeks.

“Thank you,” she whispers. “Thank you,” she repeats, again and again, her hands shaking and her chest heaving as she sobs. His humanity is what drives him to help her, an arm wrapped around her petite frame. When she calms down, she unlocks her phone and shows him a picture.

She is standing on a beach in her high-waisted shorts, a bikini top slipping off her shoulder slightly as she leans into the frame of the man next to her. His ebony arm is wrapped around her waist, and they are smiling so wide that the sun is thrown onto the back burner whilst they take the spotlight. His lips are pressed against her cheek as she beams into the camera, wrapped in love and lust. 

And life.

Aman sees how lively they look, living and breathing the very essence of life.

“I love him,” she whispers, and he holds her close as she sobs into his chest because Aman isn’t the first and won’t be the last, and neither will she. The door will be held wide open for a wife, even though Aman tries hard to deadbolt it every day.

“Promise me,” she whispers, her eyes flickering to the door before training onto his, “promise me, that when you fall in love, you won’t let any ties hold you back, even if you think it’s your parachute.” The hold that she has on his hand is tight and the intensity of her gaze makes Aman stumble to his feet, leaving the room with the stranger. He brushes past his mother, heading straight for the deadbolted door. 

“I can’t marry her, Ma, I can’t marry any of them.”

 

AMAN SINGH IS ONLY HUMAN.

He rushes down the road, his foot firmly on the acceleration as he grips the steering wheel. Snow hits the windscreen repeatedly, his wipers working overtime to clear his vision. He flies down the freeway and grits his teeth as he approaches his destination.

Feet thunder on the stairs as he takes the steps two at a time. His knuckles wrap into a fist as he bangs on the door, and then it is swinging open.

Nick stands in a baggy Christmas jumper that has a crude joke about “ornaments” on the front. His hair sticks up on his head, late night on Christmas Eve taking its toll on the boy. Aman breathes heavily, his eyes flickering up toward the mistletoe above them before settling on Nick.

They are toe to toe. Centuries ago, their ancestors had stood in the same position, eyes trained on each other, ready to destroy one another. Their swords sought blood and flesh; their minds sought revenge.

As Nick Roster and Aman Singh face each other, they prepare for another battle.

With one last breath, Aman launches himself at the boy. Their actions are carnal, hands gripping the other’s back, pulling at clothes to bring the other closer. Their lips collide, teeth clinking against each other as they let their tongues tangle messily. His blood-stained fingers are marred red with the color of Nick’s hair, clutching it desperately as Nick holds him just as close by his waist. He is free-falling without a parachute, and he has never felt more alive. Blood rushes around his body, and his heart beats twice as fast due to the boy his lips are greeting.

Aman Singh isn’t gold. He isn’t a question nor a puzzle. Neither is he an object to admire for only it’s beauty.

Aman Singh isn’t fire. Nick Roster isn’t ice.

Aman Singh isn’t a mistake.

AMAN SINGH IS A HUMAN BOY IN LOVE WITH A HUMAN BOY NAMED NICK ROSTER.

 

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Nia Tipton is a fiction major at Columbia College Chicago now in her senior year. She hopes to publish her own magazine/zine one day. You can find her work in the 2018 edition of Stories Through the Ages: College Edition. 

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The Extraordinary Journey of the Fakir Who Got Trapped in an IKEA Wardrobe

 

By Emma LaSaine

Romain Puértolas’s debut novel, much like its name, spans a great breadth. Geographically, the story carries readers, along with the titular fakir, from Paris to England, Barcelona to Rome, all the way to Libya, then back to France. At the start of this journey, Ajatashatru Oghash Rathod (Aja for short) is a self-interested swindler on a quest to buy a fakir-style bed of nails from Ikea, which he plans to resell for a profit upon his return to India. When Aja, spending the night in Ikea because he cannot afford a hotel, finds himself trapped inside a wardrobe that is shipped to England, he unintentionally becomes an “illegal alien.” Along the way, Aja suffers several “electric shocks” to the heart—epiphanies that broaden his world view, redirect his moral compass, and give him a newfound sense of purpose through his love for Marie, a beautiful French woman he meets along the way, and his desire to be worthy of her affections.

From the start, Puétorlas plays with perception, a key technique throughout the novel. We first see Aja through the eyes of Gustave Palourde, a Gypsy Cab driver who Aja cheats out of his fare by means of a counterfeit 100-euro bill (printed only on one side) and some invisible thread. Gustave, who turns out to be a violent and slightly dishonest member of the Romani community, recognizes Aja as a foreigner, and views his request to go straight from the airport to Ikea as bizarre. However, when Puétorlas backtracks and immediately retells the encounter, this time listening in to Aja’s thoughts, we discover that he has made an express effort to blend in with the Western locals and that this entire journey, while not a normal activity for the fakir, is perfectly reasonable (if morally dubious, considering that it has been financed through a series of dishonesties) in his mind.

Puétorlas uses this shifting third person to accomplish a sweeping array of tones and play with the reader’s perception of events. To Aja, the different display rooms constructed in the Ikea reveal real human lives—futures of young couples considering kids, evenings spent on the couch watching TV—despite the fact that these rooms are all false. To him, the automated doors on the front of the store are a technological miracle worthy of appreciation, to the French customers, they are only an aspect of everyday life. Aja’s outsider perspective makes readers question their own perceptions of Western culture and behavior. As Aja’s voyage ensues, the audience quickly discovers that they are merely along for the ride in this rapid-paced adventure where the ridiculous becomes rational and the accepted is revealed to be absurd.

Puétorlas manages to construct a largely farcical (and at times whimsical) journey that recalls such immersive adventures as Around the World in 80 Days and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, all the while establishing the fact that Aja’s journey takes place within our hardly fictional modern global reality. The novel handles humorous intricacies of pronunciation that come with transcultural encounters—Ajatshatru’s name alone is interpreted as “A-cat-in-a-bat-suit,” “A-jackal-that-ate-you” and “A-jar-of-rat-stew-oh-gosh!”—along with solomn geopolitical tensions and practices surrounding immigration and the divide between developing nations and what Assefa (“I-suffer”), a Sudanese migrant Aja encounters, calls “the good countries.”

Drawing, no doubt, on his time working as a French boarder guard, Puétorlas writes with remarkable intimacy about the way immigrants are transformed by the hardships they face, describing how “even the sturdiest men become vulnerable: beaten animals with lifeless expressions, their eyes full of extinguished stars,” when he lives with the eternal fear of being caught and sent back to the country and the situation he has worked so hard to escape. In our modern world wracked by war and the politics of refugee crises, Puétorlas aptly notes the absurdities and tragedies surrounding immigration restriction.

It is important not to be fooled by the humor of Aja’s occasionally slapstick encounters. Although the fakir makes his living by performing petty magic tricks, a master of perception in a sense, this mastery has its roots in a dark brush with the abuse and power dynamics that rule our postcolonial world. Aja may be a loveable fool, the good-natured cheat, but he also provides a window into the disparity in access to modernity, technology and basic quality of life that exists between “have” and “have-not” nations. As Aja travels throughout Europe and beyond, the reader also travels, learning to question their perceptions of what is “banal” and what is “magical,” while reshaping their sense of personal identity within the larger framework of global events, getting in a few good laughs along the way.

Emma LaSaine is a recent graduate of Columbia College Chicago, with a BA in Creative Writing. She is an award-winning nonfiction writer, Managing Editor of Habitat Magazine, and Production Editor of Hair Trigger 38. Emma is also the 2013-2014 Honors Research Award recipient. Her writing appears in BORGEN Magazine, Slacktivist, The Lab Review, and on her website, emmalasaine.com.

November 07, 2016

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Poetry-Prose Writer

 

She’s a novelist among poets and a poet amongst novelists: Jac Jemc is an author whose prose elegantly delivers both story and lyricism. A Chicago-based writer, Jemc has authored a chapbook, a collection of short stories, a novel, and numerous poems and nonfiction works.

Jemc’s first novel, My Only Wife (Dzanc Books), was named a finalist for the 2013 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction and won the Paula Anderson Book Award. In addition to penning her prose, Jemc spends her time as Writer-in-Residence at the University of Notre Dame, editor to a handful of presses and journals, and an avid blogger about writing and rejection.

Hair Trigger Online had the chance to talk to Jemc about My Only Wife, her process, and what’s coming next.

Jennifer Bostrom: When did you first begin writing?

Jac Jemc: I’d always written a little. As a kid, I loved writing scary stories. I wrote a handful of E.E. Cummings knock-off poems in high school. I also had an obsession with copying out passages of books, catalogue copy and lists of names longhand from childhood on. I see that now as some sort of apprenticeship I was doing—immersing myself in language without actually producing it myself—though I couldn’t have identified it as such back then. I started writing fiction in college and wrote the first draft of My Only Wife as an independent study during undergrad.

JB: My Only Wife was your first novel. How long did it take you to complete?

JJ: I spent about three months on the first draft, which is mind-bogglingly fast compared to my pace now. I shuttled it through workshops and advising sessions irregularly for another two years of grad school and then spent another year editing it on my own afterward. It was accepted for publication in 2009, but wasn’t published until 2012. So there were about seven years between starting work and the book meeting readers.

JB: What is you writing process like? How does it differ when approaching a poem versus a short story or novel?

JJ: It used to be nearly identical between all three forms. I’d start with language and start piecing together fragments. With poems, I was satisfied to leave space between the gluts of language and allow the force to be more intuitive. With stories, I’d try to fill in the gaps a bit more. With a novel, I strung together more of these narratives and tried to identify pattern and shape in a way that only the mass of 40,000+ words can allow you to do. Lately, I’ve been going into fiction with a little more of an idea of what I want to aim for than I used to. I might have an idea or a voice or a particular image that I start shaping action around. It’s still very exploratory, but now I might choose a ideological location to set off from, whereas before, I’d close my eyes and drop a finger onto the map.

JB: My Only Wife shows elements of poetry in the prose. Would you say that you identify more as a poet than fiction writer, or rather that one discipline influences the other?

JJ: I’d say I’m definitely more a fiction writer these days, but the poetic roots still live in me, and I hope and expect that I’ll return my focus to poetry again someday. I think a lot has been determined by where I’ve found my community. Though I’ve published a fair amount of poetry, I always felt a bit adrift in that world, like I never got a firm handle on what my place was in relation to other poets. With fiction, I felt like I found my way a little easier, and have a clearer idea of how my position shifts depending on the work I make. That said, I enjoy feeling a bit lost, so I’m happy the world of poetry is always there to revisit.

JB: Having completed This Stranger She’d Invited In, a chapbook of short stories, were there challenges that arose with writing a novel that you weren’t expecting?

JJ: I actually wrote My Only Wife before the chapbook of stories, though TSSII came out first. The stories that make up the chapbook are almost more biographical character sketches, but they all live in the same world. In some ways, I saw those stories as a novella – something akin to Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood — defining a community.

JB: Your short stories were published first and in your third book you’ve returned to short stories after My Only Wife, a full-length novel. Is that out of a preference for short stories or just where inspiration took you?

JJ: The stories in A Different Bed Every Time were written over the course of the last 10 years, so there’s at least one in there that was drafted even before My Only Wife and many that were written during the drafts of My Only Wife and other longer projects, too. I can’t imagine ever ceasing to write short stories. I’ll keep writing them as breaks from longer projects and ways to work out ideas are more suited to the shorter form, but because the stories are generally so short, it will take a while to amass enough for a collection.

JB: What lead to the decision to leave the husband and wife unnamed in My Only Wife?

JJ: My Only Wife is built on the repetition of “my wife.” To keep up that voice, I opted not to add names into the mix. Possession and ambiguity were ideas I was interested in exploring, and that phrase sticks close to those themes.

JB: You keep busy. How do you find time to set aside for your projects? Are you particularly rigorous about setting aside time each day, or specific goals you have to meet?

JJ: I try to spend my entire morning on personal projects: reading and writing and editing. Afternoons and evenings are for class prep and reading/responding to student work, reading submissions, blog posting, submitting my own work and applying for residencies or teaching gigs. It’s definitely busy, but I feel very grateful to get to focus on what I love.

JB: As previously mentioned you post, most, if not all of your rejection letters on your website. Rejection isn’t something most want to face but you do so very personally and publicly. Can you elaborate on why?

JJ: I’m very invested in transparency in the writing life. I believe there’s value in seeing rejection as a regular part of the writing life and admitting to the quantity of no’s you hear in relation to the yesses. I don’t really care to pretend to be some hero who’s succeeding at everything I attempt. Failure is core to the creative process.

JB: What’s the next big project for you?

JJ: I have two novel-length projects in the works right now: One is a haunted house story based in the present. The other, which is much younger draft-wise, is a historical fiction novel set in late 1800s Bavaria.

To find out more about Jac Jemc, visit her website. 

Interview by Jennifer Bostrom

Jennifer Bostrom is a BA Honors Fiction Graduate from Columbia College Chicago, Academic Excellence scholarship recipient (2013-2016), Production Editor of CCC’s award-winning Hair Trigger anthology, and intern for HYPERtext Magazine. Jennifer’s fiction can be found at The Copperfield Review and Habitat Magazine or on her website jcbostrom.com.

September 29, 2016

Tags: Jac Jemc, Jennifer Bostrom, My Only Wife, Poetry, Fiction, Interview

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Manhunt

She said she was going on a manhunt, sir. Charla Alexander, hometown bombshell and resident hog callin’ champion, was plannin’ on settlin’ down and raisin’ a family with the next good fella without enough good sense to keep passin’ through this town and not get hung up on her. But she said that before she did that, she was goin’ on a manhunt. You don’t know this, because you’re the new kid, but she had always had a way with the menfolk of this town, and she sure wasn’t shy about it, so it was more of a shock about the settlin’ down part than the whole manhunt thing. What kind of manhunt, you ask? Well, ain’t it obvious? She was goin’ on a manhunt for, well, men. 

I was in the town bar when she announced it. There’s only one bar in Warwick, Tennessee, and it’s called Sleazer Sal’s. Not because Sal is a sleaze, but because if Sal caught ya creepin’ on one of his lady customers, there was a glass with your name on it comin’ for yer head, and if the first shot didn’t take you out, there was a beer stein to finish the job. Sal must have killed a dozen guys, or at the very least left a bunch of ‘em with mental problems, but this ain’t no snitchin’ town, so I didn’t say any of that. It ain’t that Sal’s a vicious guy, he jus’ hates menfolk creepin’ on innocent ladyfolk, no matter how pretty they are. He don’ creep on the customers and ‘spects us all to do the same. Anyways, I was sittin’ at the bar, nursin’ a whiskey like I do after work nearly every day, while Sal polished a glass for the next pedo’s head when the door banged open in its usual fashion. The early afternoon light flashed in through the dust that had been startled off the usual drunks. The shafts separated when she swaggered in donning an outfit that left nothing to the imagination, her MO. I watched as that big-blonde-haired, Big-Red-gum-chewin’, denim-scantily-clad woman practically pranced her way up to the bar.

Now, I know you’re new here and you don’t really know who Charla is, so I gotta tell you a few things. First you gotta understand, Charla ain’t no salad eatin’ chick. She was a big-boned girl, like she had always been. She had so many love-handles her boyfriends called her “The Dresser Drawer.” She didn’t just have a muffin top; she had the whole bakery. But that’s why we all loved her. We all wanted the good big parts, if you catch my drift, and we were all grown enough to handle her. Now, I tell ya this because it’s important for this next part. You see, she didn’t just wanna make no silly-ass announcement. No, she wanted everybody in the bar to know what it was she was gonna do, and she was gonna make sure we all heard it. So she gets up on the bar.

Sal don’t normally take kindly to folks who wanna get intimate with the only barrier between him and the rest of the world, but like the rest of us, he had a sweet spot for Ms. Alexander. He treats her like the li’l’ sister he never got, dotin’ on her an’ coverin’ her tabs an’  whatnot. So she gets up on the bar, with help from Mike and Jess, the two oldest drunks to survive their nights at Sleazer Sal’s just enough to come back the next noontime for their gins. So they help her up like they knew she was about to do this, even though at two o’clock in the afternoon, they were too drunk to give a damn about anything goin’ on. Anyways, she gets a foot on a barstool and I keep sippin’, not givin’ one shit about this woman’s shenanigans. Then, she gets a pudgy knee on the bar and I glance over. Finally, when I heard a cowboy boot heel clack against the polished wood, I looked all the way over as she pushed off Mike’s gnarled hand and stood all on her own, the top of her beehive dustin’ parts of the ceiling that ain’t seen daylight since the place opened. I set my drink down and sighed, wonderin’ why in the hell she had to interrupt my Thursday afternoon whiskey.

“Attention, y’all, attention!” Charla chimed in a high toned and overly pronunciated sort of way. She scanned the bar, taking in the dark-green vinyled booths that held mostly graying men, but a few graying women, as well as the sticky orange wood high tops, covered with truckers on break. They all stared back at Charla, wonderin’ how in the hell she had gotten this drunk already. She settled her hands on her hips that were strugglin’ to stay in her Daisy Dukes while she waited for the last of the chatter to settle. She cleared her throat and began again.

“It’s time I found me a good man who wants me, God, and a family, just like I always wan’ed. But before I do all that, I’m gonna go out with a bang, or sev’ral,” The crowd chuckled a bit and Charla smiled, revealing that little gap between her front teeth that always drove me a bit crazy, in a good way. 

“That’s right, y’all,” she continued. “I’m goin’ out on a manhunt. And not jus’ any manhunt. Oh naw, folks, this’ll be the manhunt to end all manhunts. There will be bucks,” she said, winking at the truckers, “and maybe even some does.”

One of the old crones in the booths cried out and the men all started riotin’. Johnny, one of my best truckin’ friends, started chokin’ on the piece of fish he had, unfortunately for him, been tryin’ to eat when Charla let that lil’ bit of information drop. I laughed to myself and I thought, No wonder she wanted to announce this in Sal’s. Warwick’s is one religious town, but there ain’t no God in Sal’s to judge her for anything that comes outta her mouth.

“Settle down,” Charla whined in a way that suggested she was thoroughly enjoyin’ every bit of this. “Settle down now, y’all!” The crowd’s volume went low, except for Johnny, who was still recoverin’ from Truckin’ Taylor doin’ that whole Heimlich procedure on ‘im. Charla clasped her hands together and continued, saying, “I am goin’ on this final manhunt with two goals in mind: firstly, that I shoot as many targets as they come across my path, and secondly,” she paused, and I swear she gazed straight at me when she finished with, “that I find the husband God always meant for me to have.

“Now,” she swiveled her gaze back to the rest of the dull bar, “which one of y’all fine lookin’ men wanna be my first prize of huntin’ season?” The truckers started wolf whistlin’ and howlin’, causing Sal to jerk forward with a pint glass in each hand. I just shook my head. Since yer new, you don’t know that it was just like Charla to do somethin’ like this. Even when we were datin’, she always was doin’ the most to be the center of everyone’s attention. She belted karaoke out of key, chugged every keg, and flirted with every man at every party she ever went to. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard her say she was gonna settle, and I was sure it wouldn’t be the last. This wasn’t her changin’ her ways, but more of an excuse to keep on keepin’ on. I shot down the last of my brown and got up to leave when Charla hopped down from her self-made podium and shook the whole joint when she landed.

“Evan, sweetie, don’t you want one bite of this apple pie?” she asked as she stuck out her spray-tanned chest.

“Maybe another time, doll,” I answered, intent on gettin’ past her and out the door. She stepped in front of me, her head tiltin’ to her left either from confusion or from the weight of the hairspray monstrosity on her head.

“What? You ain’t hardly said a word to me since we split, and now yer tryin’ to get away from me? What is your problem with me, Evan Singer?”

I sniffed and sneered, lookin’ away from her baby blue gaze. She knew just how to get my goat, and always did. It was one of our many problems. She crossed her arms, pushin’ up what was strugglin’ to get out of that busted biscuit can of a top, waitin’ for a proper response from me. Finally, I surrendered, showin’ my calloused hands in confession.

“I didn’t wanna say nothin’, but you leave me no choice,” I answered. “Charla, I got me a new girl.”

She stared for a minute, and then tossed her fake blonde, fake tanned head back and laughed. And not just one lil’ chuckle, but a deep, long belly laugh. She was thoroughly entertained by the idea that sweet lil’ Evan Singer could have moved on before her. My face flushed redder than the alcohol had already made it, and spit out, “I mean it, Charla; I’ve moved on.”

“Oh, honey, I know you mean it,” she replied once her laughter had died down to a wheeze. “I just think it’s cute that yer tryin’ to make me jealous.”

Now I was taken aback. Charla had said some outrageous things in her time. Good lord, she had just announced she was goin’ on a manhunt, for Chrissakes. But this took the goddamn cake. Me? Tryin’ to make her jealous? No way.

“I ain’t doin’ nothin’ of the kind, woman,” I shot back.

“Okay,” she called back, inspectin’ her American flag nails. “So yer not tryin’ to make me jealous. Either way, I don’t care.”

“You. . .you don’t care?” Was I hearing things? Did Sal slip me somethin’ stronger? Charla didn’t care about somethin’? I thought for sure God was sending his son down right then to take us all up to heaven because Charla admittin’ to not carin’ ‘bout somethin’ surely meant it was the end of the world. She cared ‘bout everythin’ from baby birds in the road to John McCain dyin’ of cancer, and she let everyone know it. You couldn’t get too far with her without her startin’ to gab just about everythin’ and anythin’. Most folks’ social media feeds were jus’ Charla, ranting and raving about one thing after the next.  Her sayin’ she don’t care ‘bout something was like the sky not bein’ blue.

“Lord, no, I don’t care,” she smirked, settlin’ onto one hip. “I’m about to be gettin’ tons of men, one taken one won’t hurt the numbers too much.”

“I’m sorry, but you don’t care?”

“No, hun, I don’t,” she said, sweetly shakin’ her head with a sympathetic smile on her plump, red lips.

“Well, why in the hell not?”

I should say right about now that Charla and I didn’t have her usual run ‘round her merry-go-round. In fact, there was a time I was the town envy, because just about everyone thought I was gonna be the one to finally get her into a church with a white dress on. Charla was one of my first sweethearts, and I was just about the only guy she considered herself gettin’ serious with. It all started a couple years back, and of course, we were at Sal’s. Now, I’m rather a quiet guy, prefer to keep to myself, and well, girls like Charla intimidated the hell out of me when they didn’t straight up scare me. So I figger I was about the only man beside Sal that would never have his night with Charla.

But then, one night, just as Sal was closing up shop, we was the only ones left. She had been settin’ at the other end of the bar, and I was finishin’ up my last whiskey. She was tryin’ and beggin’ and pleadin’ for Sal to give her the keys to her truck, but her head kept lollin’ with each word that came outta her mouth, so she wasn’t havin’ much luck. Finally, I shot down my last sip, stood up, and strode over to the damsel in distress. I didn’t say nothin’; I jus’ grabbed her hand and lead her to my car. Lookin’ back, she may have thought I was kidnappin’ her, but all I did was drive to her trailer, walk her up the rickety steps, and lead her to her bed. The next mornin’, she came ‘round to my place with a pot of coffee and a plate of pancakes that surely came from Margie’s Diner, because no other place in town woulda let Charla take their kitchenware ‘cept Margie’s. After that, Charla was sweet on me and I on her, so we started goin’ steady.

We were one of those sickly sweet couples, hangin’ on each other at the county fair, lovin’ on each other in the back booth at Margie’s Diner, spendin’ every spare second together. There was even a second when I thought she might actually love me. But then, one night, everythin’ felt different. I couldn’t tell if it had been another man, or if we just plain gave up on each other. All I know is I went to bed with her one night, and then she woke up the next morning, walked out my door, and never looked back. I never asked her ‘bout it, probably because I’m not much for talkin’. I jus’ excepted it. I always knew it was too good to be true. But that was months ago, and about three weeks before this, the receptionist at the Belle Tire one town over was lookin’ mighty fine, so I asked her out. I was all moved on, and so was Charla, so don’t you go thinkin’ I was one of them sickos whose goes around stalking their ex girl months and months later.

I watched as she picked a flake of red nail polish off her pinky nail. She huffed, and looked back at me, lettin’ her head flop a lil’ as she did. “’Fore I answer ya, let me ask you somethin’.”

I waved a hand with a shake of my head, rolling my eyes at her. She stepped closer to me, and I was sure she could smell the Pine-sol I had spilled on this flannel yesterday. She was a few inches shorter than me, so she had to look up to lock my gaze as she asked, “Why do you care?”

“Why do I care ‘bout what?” I crossed my arms again.

“Why do you care so much ‘bout me not carin’ ‘bout you havin’ a new girlfriend?”

I scoffed. “I don’t.”

She cocked her head back in fake confusion and raised her overly done eyebrows. “Really? ‘Cause the way you told me ‘bout it sounded like you were tryin’ to make me jealous.”

I spit out a laugh at that. “Why on earth would I want you to be jealous, Char?”

“Ain’t it obvious? Yer still in love with me.”

“Am not!”

“Are so!”

“AM—look, Charla, I’m not playin’ no games, okay? I’ve moved on.”

She plopped her round behind in the nearest barstool and went back to inspectin’ her nails. She rapped her knuckles on the bar for Sal’s attention and said, “Sure you have.”

“I have.”

“Mhm.”

“She’s prettier than you.”

“Doubt it.”            “She has much more in common with me than you ever did.”

She rolled her baby blues and looked up at me in disdain. “Now it just sounds like y’all are tryin’ to convince yerself.”

“I don’t need to convince myself of nothin’!” I said, my hands grippin’ my cropped hair in frustration. “I like her, okay? Not you.”

Charla ignored me and told Sal to pour her whatever beer was on tap. He nodded and walked away, leaving the two of us be again. Her tongue fussed with the inside of her cheek while I huffed from a few feet away. Our fights had always been like this: childish banter that ended in silence because we both thought we were right. That’s what happens when you stick two thick-skulled stubborn jackasses together. I shook my head and grabbed my wallet. I pulled a few bills from the leather folds and slapped them down on the bar when Sal returned with Charla’s beer.

“I’m leavin’, see ya Sal,” I nodded toward him, and he replied in the same way. I started to walk out, cursin’ that woman this way and back from Sunday, but I only made it to the end of the oak bar before she called out in her best seductress siren voice, “Don’t you want me to answer your question?”

I stopped, sighed, and let my head roll back slightly. I knew I shouldn’t respond, but it wasn’t up to me. That woman could do things to me that I could never understand, and I gave up tryin’ to understand them years ago. With regret yellin’ in my head, I slowly spun ‘round.

“What’d you say?”

“You heard me,” she said, eyes wide with pretend innocence. “You asked a question, don’t ya want an answer?”            “You know, Charla,” I said as I walked back toward her, getting right up in her face, “I don’t give a rat’s ass what your answer is.”

“Oh, but you do,” she replied, letting her gapped teeth snag on her cherry red lower lip.

“Oh yeah? And why’s that?” I retorted, boiling to the brim with all sorts of emotions that made me see red.

She took my chin, forcin’ me to look her in the eyes as she spoke, and, I swear to God, this is exactly what she said. She said, “I don’t care that you’ve got a girlfriend, because I know in the end it’s gonna be you an’ me.”

She pushed into me as she slid off the stool. I felt her ass as she turned and grabbed her beer. While I stood, astonished, she pushed past me and looked at me. She concluded the encounter with this line: “Yer my sixteen-point buck, honey, and ain’t nobody shoot one of those dead on Openin’ Day. I’ll see you at the end of huntin’ season.”

Charla winked and walked away, making her buttcheeks and thighs wiggle in the charmin’ way that only she could do. She greeted the remaining table of truckers with a cheer and I stood shocked. Sal had to throw a shot glass at me to knock some sense back into my head. I shook the look off my face, nodded to Sal who nodded back, and grabbed my hat off the coatrack as I walked out the door and into my car. I sat down, fumblin’ with my keys, noticin’ that the door of Sal’s hadn’t shut all the way yet, and I could see Charla, leanin’ on a trucker table, her full silhouette pronounced greatly. I kept watching her until the door finally cut her from view, and then I shook my head, jammed the keys into the ignition, and drove away.

To be fair, I probably already knew I was still in love with her at that moment, but I didn’t want that to be true. It’s scary thinking either you might spend your whole life with someone or get burnt again, especially when it’s a fierce gal like Charla on yer mind. Course, I was a bit irritated in the moment, but I would never thought of harming a hair on her head fer sayin’ that. She was jus’ being honest.

I will always remember that day when Charla announced her last manhunt. Although, I don’t think anyone in town could forget it, because it was the last time anyone seen Charla ‘fore she went missing. Of course, we all know it wasn’t someone from the bar that night that took her, but Sal still blames himself. Can you write that down, that Sal couldn’t be a suspect? I thank you kindly for that, sir. Me? I went home, had a beer, called up the girl from Belle Tire and ended things. Y’all can check my phone records. If that’s all y’all will be needin’, Officer, I have to be goin’. There’s a manhunt for Charla goin’ on tonight, and I can’t miss it.

Danielle Upplegeris a senior at Columbia College Chicago, where she is an English and Creative Writing student. This is her first published work.

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Priest of the Winter Wind

 

It’s too quiet out on this tundra, no sound but the screaming Wind and the now-constant clack of my chattering teeth. I’m surprised my jaw can still move in such rapid succession in this cold. Yet, every few minutes my teeth bang together, that clack-clack-clackreverberating off the rough stone of the mountains to join the Wind’s funeral dirge. I pull my knees closer to my chest, wrap the blue cape even tighter around my huddled body, trying to retain some amount of warmth as the frigid Wind rushes towards the mountains, carrying flecks of ice in its crescendo.

I was a fool to come out here in the dead of night, onto this frozen plain with a battle hymn on my lips and slaughter in my heart. A bloated sense of my own ego caused me to leave camp, accept Brachyurus’ challenge early this morning. He may lay slain at my feet, but I’m freezing to death, huddled and bleeding and shaking as the snow whips around me.

The only warm part of my body is my head, covered as it is in mane-like, black hair. Thick, knot-like braids protect my scalp and neck from the ice and Wind. My war-braids, sixty-two in total, are probably keeping me alive. Brachyurus was going to be my sixty-third, but my fingers can barely grip a weapon let alone twist hair together. I’ll die without my sixty-third honorable kill being recorded.

Sixty-two vanquished enemies, run through by my blade after being defeated in one-on-one combat, are recorded in my ebony hair. My battle history is chronicled in those braids, on display for any and all to see. I only needed three more—two counting Brachyurus—to challenge our sitting Warchief. I was so close to taking my rightful place at the head of our clan. Now the cold and the dead bastard’s spear have stopped me.

“Nothing was ever going to stop me,” I exhale, my words a puff of smoke in the frigid air. “Not a single enemy was going to get in my way.”

Brachyurus chooses not to answer me, allowing his biting Wind to respond for him. That Wind, and the ice and snow and cold it carries with it, has begun to encroach into my head, to seep deep into my scalp. My hard-earned war-braids mean nothing out here in the frozen waste. Even in death, he was still victorious, no doubt laughing from the other side that his trap had worked.

His challenge had come late last night or early this morning. My men were all asleep, not that being awake would have allowed them to intercept Brachyurus’ message. He had prompted the wolf to infiltrate, to skulk right up to my tent, where he knew I would be busy preparing for the coming battle. The low growl of the beast outside my tent had roused me from my planning, and I had strode out into the cold night with sword in hand. Waiting for me was the messenger-wolf, white fur gleaming under the light of the full moon. There had been no clouds—or snow—when I stepped out of my tent.

“Warmaiden Zhana,” the wolf spoke when it saw me, its voice that of my enemy, “face me and me alone in battle. Spare the men and women we both lead from senseless death.”

“Brachyurus, Priest of the Winter Wind, do you challenge me to honorable combat?”

“Yes,” the wolf spoke, the single word sounding dejected.

“I accept,” I replied before plunging my straight sword into the neck of the wolf. It made no sound as it hit the ground, jerking only once as its blood spilled out onto the frost-tipped grass. That blood snaked around, slithering out of the beast to pool and congeal into rudimentary shapes, before settling into the form the Priest had bestowed upon it: a map. The indicated path led several miles north of my camp, up through a mountain pass and onto a wide swath of flat land. That was the battlefield Brachyurus had chosen, the same tundra that will no doubt be my grave.

It took mere minutes to don my rough, leather armor and depart from my camp. In my arrogance I hadn’t alerted my second-in-command to my exodus. My mind was only on my enemy, and the sixty-third war-braid he would represent once my blade was slick with his blood. A warrior’s smile was the only other thing I chose to take with me. Brachyurus would be dead by the time I made it back to camp, and this bitter campaign would be over.

“Your soldiers ambushed mine, didn’t they?” I ask again of the Priest’s body. His trap surely couldn’t have been only intended for me.

I arrived at Brachyurus’ chosen field of battle some two hours after leaving camp to find the Priest of the Winter Wind waiting for me, bracing himself against the shaft of his great spear. His armor was the same interlocking plates that his soldiers wore, though his had a collar of white wolf fur attached to a deep blue cape. His white beard seemed to merge with that collar, making the two almost indistinguishable. The Wind ripped his cape about in a frenzied dance.

“To the death and the end of your Warchief’s aggression?” he called, his voice a clap of thunder at the onset of a storm.

“My Chief’s aggression did not start this war, Priest,” I replied as I stalked closer to him, my sword brandished in my left hand. “But your death will mark the end of it!”

I charged forward, not giving the old man time to respond with his words or his weapon or his magics, swinging my blade in a wide arc that he parried without so much as moving. I was close enough to see his blue eyes with that first exchange, eyes full of sadness and what can only be described as resignation. If only I had given that stare heed.

The fight was on in full then, each of us thrusting or slashing or dodging or parrying. Nothing else existed: no mountains behind me or tundra behind him; no Wind or clouds; no full moon in the sky. The only entities in all of creation were Brachyurus and me, our weapons’ sharp retorts the only bridge between the mortal world and the realm of battle we found ourselves in. Combat was a transcendental experience.

The Priest was holding back, I knew. I had watched him in battle before, wielding that awesome spear with the precision of the most advanced surgeons and the artistry of the finest painters. While still a capable warrior, it did not feel like I was facing off against a true master of warfare. It had irked me, until that frustration became a distraction.

Brachyurus drew first blood, stabbing the spear deep into my right shoulder while I philosophized about his prowess in battle.

This was not my first injury, was far from it, but he only landed the blow because of my own preoccupations. Surprisingly, he let me stagger backward without advancing. He should have surged forward, killing me then and there. Instead, he allowed me to regroup, assess the damage, and counterattack.

The Priest of the Winter Wind allowed me to cut him down after wounding me, not even bothering to defend himself. I ran my sword through his abdomen, gripping the hilt in one hand and his shoulder with the other as I pulled him to me and pushed the blade into him. He made no sound as I yanked the sword free, just smiled as he grasped the mortal wound, blood oozing down his chin.

“You lose, Warmaiden Zhana,” he gasped before falling backward, his back hitting the tundra ground with a boom. The storm erupted from his torn stomach then, ice and snow and Wind exploding from the wound. “You lose!”

That look of resignation, the calm contempt of his voice as he spoke through the wolf, made sickening sense in that moment. I had turned to run back through the mountain pass, but it was too late. The pass was already frozen shut.

“Do you feel the Wind, Warmaiden?” he wheezed, flecks of blood flying past his teeth on his words, winter itself pouring from his ruined gut.

His trap had been perfect, the Wind upholding its end of whatever dark pact it had made with the Priest. The deal had required Brachyurus’ life, that much was clear, but it probably also needed my blood. That’s the only explanation my near-frozen mind has come up with in the last four hours.

As the Wind rips about me, as the frost bites into my fingers and toes, I know that I am going to die. Not in battle, the way I always envisioned my death, but frozen, victim to the foul Wind the Priest had worshipped. Brachyurus didn’t just trap me on this tundra, didn’t just tear my hopes of glory from my soon-to-be dead hands, but kept me from the death I so rightly deserve.

There is nothing more to do than pull the Priest’s damned cape as tight as I can around me and wait for the end.

__________________________________________________

Jay C. Mims is a writer from Denton, Texas currently displaced in Chicago while he pursues an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia College Chicago.  He writes book reviews for Into the Void Magazine,and his first novel, Skin Eater, is available on Amazon.

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Freewrite after Breathing, Last Class, 12/11/18

 

Breathe in the smell of cookies.  (I got my pink star.)  Breathe through the two women talking in the hall.  I heard one say “suffered a lot” and later “stay home with the dog.”  I wonder what’s going to happen on Ray Donovan tonight.  Last night, right before going to bed, he shot a Russian in the head.  What an image to fall asleep to.  Dreamt Ted Hughes told me that my writing about Plath was “sensitive and engaging.”  “Yours, too,” I said.  We were in a talk show-like setting.  Someone just coughed.  I’ve taken a few bites of the pink star.  It’s now half a star.  Now it’s a fourth.  It has peppermint sprinkles on it.

 

Anita

My paternal grandmother was a difficult woman: vain, selfish, opinionated, a spendthrift.  At least that’s how my mother characterized her; her mother-in-law worked her nerves.  Luckily there was some distance between them: We lived in Southern California; my grandparents, in the Bay Area.  Certain facts about my grandmother I learned much later, and many years after her death.  She was born on the island of Maui in 1906, to Portuguese parents, Francisco and Julia Gonsalves.  One of thirteen children, Anna Mary would eventually change her name to Anita.  Ludvinia, the sister she was closest to, also changed hers, to Lavyne.  I like to think they decided to change their names together, after the family had moved stateside, to Oakland, when they were old enough to wear baubles and bob their hair.  Where and how she met my grandfather, Rupert Manuel Trinidad, is a mystery.  In the sixties, after their three sons were grown, my grandfather’s job as an engineer took them to London, where he was involved in the design of the Akosombo Dam in Ghana, and then to Brasília.  Though they lived well enough for Anita to afford a housekeeper, she always wanted more than they had.  She liked to entertain, look big.  After they returned to the States, they bought a house in a city with a pretty name, Orinda, just east of Berkeley.  We visited them there one Christmas.  I have a photograph of our family sitting on the mauve silk couch in my grandparents’ living room, under a painting of Venice.  The couch is long enough to accommodate the six of us: my parents in the middle, flanked on either side by two of their children.  My father sports a flattop; my mother, a shocking pink dress.  All of us, even my father, are smiling.  I was fascinated by the little cloth cocktail napkins my grandmother had brought back from Brazil.  Cross-stitched around the edges (with red and green thread), each napkin featured a small embroidered figure: men wearing ponchos and bolero hats, women carrying baskets of fruit over their heads.  Stitched underneath each figure, the name of a different South American country: Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, Brazil.  (The napkins are now in my possession: My sisters, who between them had a set of twelve, sent them to me when I said I wanted to write about them.)  When I was in high school, we visited my grandparents in Lake Tahoe, where they and Lavyne and her husband owned side-by-side cabins.  I remember Anita sitting at a card table, playing solitaire.  Her hair dyed red.  On a finger, as she turned over the cards: the big oval amethyst she’d bought in Brazil.  Cigarettes and highball (bourbon) nearby.  Also: Look magazine with Greta Garbo on the cover.  Garbo is 65.  (My age now.)  I never heard my grandmother speak Portuguese.  The only part of her heritage she shared with us was food: linguiça (a spicy sausage) and a braided Christmas bread with bits of colorful dried fruit in it.  She outlived my grandfather by sixteen years.  When she was dying, at age eighty-six, I went to see her at a nursing home in Hayward, California.  “I’ve had a good life,” she said.  The nurses didn’t like her, my mother told me, because she treated them like the help.

 

Memoir

Another Friday night at Beyond Baroque, circa 1982.  Anne Waldman is at the worn black podium, reciting a poem.  Her reading style is incantatory, but forced.  An unseen heckler begins to goad her, from the back of the room.  Lewis MacAdams jumps to Anne’s defense, threatening violence.  An intense moment, then the poem continues.  Afterwards there’s a party, as there usually is, at Sheree’s house on Thurston Avenue in Brentwood—hers after her divorce—where she lives with her two teenaged children and her poet-performer boyfriend, Bob Flanagan.  Bob has drawn Sheree into the world of S & M.  From well-to-do Jewish housewife to dominatrix.  From cystic fibrosis to supermasochist.  That story.  I smoke in the yellow kitchen, wait for provisions (beer and potato chips) to arrive.  Bob puts Wall of Voodoo on the stereo in the living room: “I fell into a burning ring of fire.”  Kate Braverman (all in black) makes a rare appearance, to chat up Anne Waldman, and is flabbergasted that Waldman has never heard of her.  “Why, I’m the grande dame of the Los Angeles poetry scene!”  The best kind of fodder for the gossip mill: poets blind to the size of their own ego.  Because we often run out of alcohol by the time the liquor stores are closed (2:00 a.m.), I hide, while there’s still plenty, a six-pack under the sink in the back bathroom; that way I always have a beer in hand, which I pretend to nurse, lest someone become suspicious of my stash.  (Years later I’ll learn that Ed Smith had his own hiding place for same.)  Those parties sometimes lasted all weekend.  I’d stay on, till Saturday, till Sunday afternoon, afraid to drive drunk (post-accident).  Afraid of sitting alone in my Hollywood hovel, too depressed to write the new poems I desperately wanted to write.  Distressed about returning, Monday morning, to the Housing Authority, a job I was ill-suited for.  It felt safe at Sheree’s.  Bob would walk around naked, on acid, weights hanging from his balls.  Sheree would brag about the size of her son’s cock.  I’d lay in their bed, head aching, watching the colorized version of It’s a Wonderful Life on TV.  Wondering if the world would be any different without me.

One Sunday morning (January 16, 1983, to be exact), I sat with Celia Pearce in the breakfast nook and typed the collaboration we’d just written, “Ed Smith Slept Here.”  Which we dedicated to our host; Sheree was a den mother of sorts.  Then Celia and I read it out loud, alternating lines: “How can we even think of breakfast / When we haven’t even begun to live.”  If Gail Kaszynski hadn’t filmed us reading and talking (and uploaded it, thirty-three years later, on YouTube), I’d never have remembered that when I visited Alice Notley on St. Mark’s Place the previous October (my first trip to New York), I brought her a bouquet of pink and white carnations.  And a six-pack.  One sunny, hungover morning, I sat on Sheree’s front lawn and talked with Lynne Tillman (the reader at Beyond Baroque that week; I loved her short story about Marilyn Monroe).  We both wore sunglasses.  I asked her about New York—where I desperately wanted to live, to live the writer’s life.  (I would one day, but not until after I got sober.  Lynne would be a friend, in the years I lived there.)  Another morning, I sat on the lawn with Jane DeLynn.  Her cutting wit intimidated me.  But Tim Dlugos (whom I adored) adored her.  And we had the same sign (Cancer).  When I asked her to inscribe In Thrall, her second novel, she wrote, “To David and his beautiful hair.”

 

Ray Donovan

On a frigid night in late November, 2018, my coach house in Chicago surrounded by icy snow, I watch the first episode of Ray Donovan and am delighted to see, during the credits, that the series was created by Ann Biderman.  Her name a Proustian madeleine: Thirty years evaporate like so much wintry mist.  In 1988, on the verge of moving from Los Angeles to New York, I dog-sat for her in the house she shared with her partner, director Roger Vadim, in Santa Monica.  We’d met through Raymond Foye, who published me in his Hanuman series: colorful, pocket-sized books, inspired by Indian prayer books, that were printed in Madras.  An aspiring screenwriter, Ann was petite and pretty, with long black hair and an air of authority that comes, I imagined, from hobnobbing with celebrities.  She gave me a recipe that Jane Fonda had given her: a blended drink made from boiled greens that she subsisted on while filming movies, to keep her weight down.  Ann’s dog was named Genius, a sweet, long-legged mutt with grayish fur and a goofy face.  At night when I got into bed, Genius would set his head on the edge of the mattress and stare at me with soulful eyes.  I wrote a little poem about him that said just that.  Stacks of books everywhere; it felt like I was being embraced by my future life.  I sat at the dining table and typed letters to the poets I would hang out with in New York: Tim, Jimmy, Joe, Elaine, Eileen.  The cottage-like house was nestled in the hills overlooking the Pacific.  Steep concrete steps led up to it from the street.  Small yard.  Low chain-link fence.  I was instructed to keep the gate closed at all times, so Genius wouldn’t get out.  Donald Britton visited me while I was staying there.  I served him tea and cookies.  He had just moved from New York to Los Angeles.  We joked that we were poets passing in the night, so to speak; trading places; that by each of us moving across the country at the same time, in opposite directions, we were keeping the scales balanced.  But only for a moment.  Donald died of AIDS before finishing a second book.  While I’ve had time to write many.  I hadn’t been in New York long when Raymond told me that a subsequent dog-sitter left the gate open: Genius had made his way down to the street and was killed by a car.

After the reverie wears off, I send Ann a friend request on Facebook.  And learn, on Wikipedia, that the pages of Raymond’s Hanuman books were stitched by local fishermen in Madras.

 

Winona Ryder

I never understood everyone’s indignation when she was arrested for shoplifting.  The poor woman was obviously in crisis.  And besides, she’s a movie star, why shouldn’t she be allowed to shoplift?  She’d already given her soul to celluloid, so to speak.  The satisfaction of seeing a mighty one fall, I guess.  I’ve always thought her 480 hours of community service would have made a great reality TV show.  What a missed opportunity.  Winona helping blind children, caring for babies with AIDS.  Oscar worthy!  Or at least Emmy.  She was ordered to complete her hours of service at the City of Hope medical center.  City of Hope!

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David Trinidad’s most recent book of poems is Swinging on a Star (Turtle Point Press, 2017). He edited Punk Rock Is Cool for the End of the World: Poems and Notebooks of Ed Smith and an Emily Dickinson divination deck, Divining Poets: Dickinson, both out from Turtle Point in 2019.  He is currently completing a manuscript of prose poems.

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As Daughters, We Learn

 

The first color that I remember is gray. Not the sky, not the walls, not the ceiling or the floor, but a perpetual grayness that manifested from nothing at all. It was as stable as air, and just as abundant. I don’t know where it came from, exactly; one day I just looked over my shoulder and there it was—looming over me like a beam of crackling static. I looked closer when I first laid eyes on it; it was new then, and strangely comforting in a sleepy sort of way—as if I were about to drift into a comfortable coma that would leave me feeling refreshed and eager to live again. I remember . . . I was sitting in the kitchen cutting onions: a ten-year-old, already a little woman, with a butcher’s knife in my hand. There was a dark bruise on my cheek—a gift from a girl at school whose name I couldn’t remember. 

“Henrietta,” my mother said to me, and my focus withdrew from the corner where the grayness lurked. No one called me Henrietta except her; it was always Henri—as the French would say it. It was a nickname that my father had given me; he had always wanted a son. 

 She stopped sautéing the mushrooms for our traditional Monday stroganoff and walked over to where I was perched on the wobbly red barstool. She brushed her thumb lightly over the purple blister; I tried not to wince. “What happened here?” she asked. It was the first time she had noticed.

 I scooted a little closer to the counter. I wasn’t really crying; it was only the onions. “She didn’t like my dress.”

 My mother crossed her arms. “Who didn’t?” she demanded. “Your grandmother bought you that dress. It’s lovely enough.”

 “I don’t know her name.” I didn’t bother commenting that the dress was, in fact, one of the most hideous things that I had ever seen. But my Grandma Cain had given me that dress, and because I loved my Grandma Cain, I wore it proudly. 

 My mother’s face stiffened—still beautiful, even in her disgust. Her lips were the color of summer wine, and her eyes were the color of the sapphires that my science teacher wore around her neck. Her blouse was puffed at the sleeves, and her skirt, like all the skirts she owned, was nearly too short and too tight for comfort. She never wore the dresses that Grandma Cain bought her. “Well, I don’t know what to tell you,” she said, finally. “Did you say something to her? Were you talking too loud?”

 “No.” It was the routine response.

 She grimaced—a look of disbelief. “No more bruises, Henrietta. It’s unbecoming,” she said sternly, and I nodded. But there were other bruises there—I remember—ones that she didn’t see. She just went back to sautéing the mushrooms in her dainty leather skirt and I to the onions that stained my fingertips. 

 The gray haze didn’t leave after that. Maybe it was that girl’s fist when I told her that I loved my ugly purple dress with the disproportionate patterns of ‘70s funk; maybe her knuckles embedded something deep inside me that could never be shaken. A new possibility came over me that maybe, after all, my mother was right, and I was being too loud. Maybe all the teachers who lamented my shyness were wrong. Maybe I wasn’t quiet at all. Maybe I died screaming, and it was the monster who took my place who was silent. Nonetheless, the gray stayed, and as I swore to keep that silence, the gray grew. 

 When I was fourteen, the haze deepened from smokey embers to graphite shadows. I started looking in mirrors a lot—little fleeting glances that left me numb. I didn’t look like other people; maybe that’s obvious. But I didn’t look quite like myself either. At one point, I couldn’t even recognize my eyes—the deepest, darkest green that was my father’s. My blonde curls didn’t bounce like they used to; they laid limp and flat against the curve of my face, which I swore was only getting plumper with each passing day. My gaze kept resting on the little mole—scarcely bigger than a freckle—that sat just above the left side of my lip. 

 “I look like Marilyn Monroe,” I had joked a couple of days before, and my mother glared at me over the top of her Cosmopolitan magazine. “Why would you want to look like that trashy woman? Haven’t I raised you to keep your legs closed?” she scolded, while my little sister, Lucy, played with naked Barbies on the floor in front of her. 

 The memory haunted me for a long time after; I even thought about getting the mole removed. I came close to asking when my mother took me to the dermatologist for my acne. “Well, it’s getting worse,” she told them, as two latex-gloved hands gripped the bottom of my chin. “See it there—the red ones? Can’t you give her anything to take care of that?”

 I avoided mirrors after that. When I brushed my teeth, when I combed my hair, when I scrubbed my face raw with those foaming chemicals gifted to me by anonymous blue hands, I kept my eyes low, trained on the cracked white tile of the bathroom floor. I simply did not want to see. It was easier that way. I didn’t notice when my flat chest rose and my face narrowed and my towheaded locks straightened into distant waves. Nor did I notice the curve of my hips or the way my eyes looked under the fluorescent light—older, more solemn, and missing something that other girls at my school breathed like air. In my own mind, I remained small—a child with knobby knees and scraped elbows and dirt between my toes. I was a seedling in the permafrost, never destined to bloom, stunted while the world around me flourished.

 When I was sixteen, the gray became endless—the color of winter gates that never opened. It seeped beyond my vision into the halls of my high school. “Be gentle with yourselves,” my history teacher told us on the first day of finals. “You’re going to see parts of each other that you’ve never seen before.” But I had already seen it all, in desks and textbooks painted black; there was no war to be won.  

 “Mom?” I asked, peeking over my math book to where she sat across the room on the love seat. She still leaned to one side out of habit, leaving space for my father, though we both knew that he was never coming back. She was on the phone with a friend from work. “When you’re done, I really need help.”

 “Hold on, Karen,” she said with a sigh, covering the receiver with one hand, and shot me a look that was all too familiar. It made my blood run cold, and I immediately wished that I had never spoken at all. “I’m busy, Henrietta.”

 But I was desperate. And I knew for sure that I was, because I tried again. “Mom, please, the test is in two days,” I insisted. I remember hating how my voice sounded for hours, days after. “Just whenever you’re done—”

 “I have more important things to do than look at your math questions,” she shot back, and the room turned to stone. “You’re a big girl, Henrietta. You can figure it out . . . Now, what were you saying, Karen? I’m sorry. My daughter. . . .” 

 A couple of weeks later, long after the comfort of the holidays, I found myself grounded in my room. I had failed my geometry final.

 “You need to learn to ask for help if you need it,” my mother had scolded me as I made my way up the stairs. But asking her was like screaming into a void, into the empty walls of a home that taught me that I will hear nothing back. 

 Still, I heeded her words. As school dragged on and the tests came back, I began to realize that I had one chance of escape. My grades became everything as I poured over the computers in the library, searching for colleges—some far away, and some even farther. It was my ticket out, I knew, from the gray walls with the gray stairs and the graying loveseat. I would never again fail a final—or anything for that matter—and it would take me so far away that the gray would never touch me again. 

 I remember creeping down the stairs one night—a fool’s attempt to sneak into the kitchen and nab one of the peanut butter buckeyes that Grandma Cain had brought over for New Year’s Eve. Halfway down the stairs, I came to a dead halt with one foot still poised mid-step; I could hear my mother from her usual place on the loveseat, talking with someone. Her voice was thick and heavy; I heard it break at least twice in the rush of words that followed. It took me a moment to realize that she was crying. 

 “Mom, I just . . . I don’t know how. . . .”

 There was a Grandma Cain’s muffled voice on the other end, though I could scarcely hear it over the gut-wrenching sobs that built a wall in the pit of my stomach. My mother had seen me cry so many times I had lost count. But, my mom—my mom never cried.

 “Of course she doesn’t understand!” was the sudden outburst; I nearly jumped out of my own skin when the television remote went flying across the room. It clattered to the floor in another rush of bumbling words: “She’s a little girl—well, maybe not so little anymore, but it’s not like she would understand. She still thinks her father and I might get back together . . . No, she doesn’t know about the divorce. No . . . she has not talked to him since.”

 My heart was pounding in my chest. I had never felt more dead yet so alive¾I could feel my flesh crawling with every word that fell from her cherry lips. I took one step back up the stairs, where the safety of my bedroom beckoned me forth. 

 “Mom, no, that’s not what I’m trying to say here.” Her voice cracked again. “I’m just worried that I’m not doing it right, and it’s getting to that point . . . already looking at colleges and . . . Lucy is going to be in middle school next year, and I don’t even know where it went! It’s like I wasn’t even there!” Another sob; I could practically see the tears rolling down her cheeks. “There were so many things I wanted to do—I wanted to love someone, and travel, and have a career. Is that wrong? Am I not supposed to want those things, or regret not . . . Of course, I know I’m lucky! That’s not what . . . I . . . I just don’t think I was ready to be a mother.”

 The words hit me like a truck. I nearly tripped and tumbled back down the linoleum steps. My mother, who scoured romance novels and flipped through the Travel Channel, my mother whose eyes would light up at the possibilities of a night out or a chance for relaxation, my mother—a single mother—who got pregnant with me at the age of nineteen and worked behind a makeup counter at a local department store. My mother whose ex-husband had the luxury of freedom while she made dinner for two children and relied on Grandma Cain for rent. My mother who never finished college so she could take care of me, who sat on the phone each night, pretending to be far happier than she really was. 

 I didn’t know what that meant. I didn’t know what any of it meant. So I ran. 

 Back in my room, the gray darkened to a shade that was almost black—burnt charcoal and volcanic smoke. Laying there on the hardwood floor with my arms crossed over my belly, I found that I really did know what it meant. I found that I had known for a long time. My mother had been young when she had me—too young to know what having me really meant—and she missed out on a lot because of it. What those things were, I really didn’t know, but she talked about them often, with that same wistful look in her eyes that my father had worn before he left. I had always known it, I think, in the way that she said my name—so hard and so coarse, with no touch and no feeling. It was the same feeling, too, when my sister “Lucy” was never “Lucille”, and I was always “Henrietta” and never “Henri.” I had always been able to recognize it, in the way she tucked my sister into bed each night while forgetting to visit my room, where I sat upright in my bed, waiting. I could sense her distrust like a dog smells fear. Every time she looked at me, she remembered what I had taken from her, what she could have had if I had never been born. 

 “If I had never been born,” I echoed. I didn’t sleep that night. 

 I was seventeen, and my dad was truly gone; shadows took his place. The house grew quiet, empty but for a couple of fleshy shells that called themselves human. Lucy was still in ballet at the time; she danced around the kitchen in the dark, but all I can remember from when I was seventeen is lying flat on my back, staring up at the bathroom ceiling. I can still feel the way my fingernails dug into my palms as I curled my fists back and forth, back and forth. I wanted to feel alive. I wanted to feel something. 

 After a while, I thought maybe she had changed. When she had cried on the phone with Grandma Cain, I thought a part of her softened, and she would try to see me as her daughter. Maybe she would be more accepting. Maybe she would love me like the mother she was trying so hard to be. Maybe she would be okay with seeing me cry. Maybe she would be okay with me.

 I didn’t know what I was getting into when I told her that I was gay. She stared at me with those beautiful cerulean eyes—straight into my soul—and said, “Tell me what it’s like to burn.”

 But it felt no different—not the confession, not the nonexistent feel of her arms. There was no breath of air, no quench of thirst, no sense of awakening. It was just me on the bathroom floor, like a mangy dog whose teeth had just been pulled out. The gray shadows loomed over me, whispering amongst themselves. My father was one of them, ever reluctant, always putting on his shoes and packing his bags. I remembered how he had frowned when my mother told us she was pregnant with Lucy; he always frowned that way in my dreams when the memory of him would project itself off the bathroom tile. Lucy was one of them, too, a perfect happy girl with rosy cheeks and a knack for performance, and so was Grandma Cain, who would cradle me like a child yet never raise a word against her own daughter. My mother’s shadow was the biggest of them all, squirming with taunts, empty words, a looped hiss of despair and biting snarls. 

            Stop that!
   Be quiet, Henrietta. 
            Go upstairs, Henrietta.
            You’re a sinner, Henrietta. 

From her, other shadows sprung, and with her, they grew. Louder and louder, they grew, until they towered over me, until I couldn’t see. 

 “Get out,” I told them, but they never listened. I wanted to make them suffer for all that they had done; I wanted to be cruel and mean and spiteful and cold. I wanted to march down the stairs with the Scripture in my hand and demand compensation for all the years that I had spent alone. I wanted to scream at her for all the times that she had screamed at me, and tell her that I was my own mother, forever without the need of her or anything that she could ever say to me. I wanted to make her cry again, and I wanted it to be my fault. 

 But I couldn’t. I was too weak, and I was too afraid; I had no idea who I was, or who I had become. So, I just laid there in that monochromatic sea, set aflame by all of the hands that never touched me.

 Why am I so loud? I often wondered, and I left those walls still wondering. When was I ever anything more than this?

 At some point that I still can’t quite remember, when I could see nearly nothing even when the lights were on, I began to understand. I grew older; I saw things—I met a girl who was even taller than me, who had sunlight in her hair and gold in her eyes. She breathed honey and traced it across my skin; the Muses could sing poetry about her hands alone. She picked me up from the underground, and the permafrost melted.

 “Nadia,” I called her. 

 “Henri,” she called me, and I felt liberation in her arms. It was love, I knew, and each time I laid eyes on her, it would spread throughout me in a great burst of flame—brighter and brighter, until the shadows began to fade. 

 “Look,” she told me one afternoon when I was helping her get ready for her interview. She pointed an olive-toned finger toward the bathroom mirror, and I had no choice but to follow. I expected the glass to break or the shards to rise in the air like knives. But instead I saw myself. I still didn’t look like everyone else—that hadn’t changed. My hair was darker, more bronze than blonde, and my eyes were, as always, my father’s. But I was older. I was stronger. I was no longer a child swaddled in gray, but a woman. And I was free and capable and deserving of love, of a mother, of being a daughter. I had been—after all those times I hid in the closet, all those hours I spent sprawled out on the bathroom floor. I never needed to.

 The shadows receded, little bit by little bit, until I was no longer laying down, but sitting up with my eyes locked on the bathtub. I crawled in and turned the gauge all the way to the left and let the scalding water burn me clean. Clarity rose with the steam, bubbles of misty lilac, and I could finally look at my mother face-to-face. I always thought her a cruel woman, wrought from trials that came before me, whose lips were painted permanently with wine and whose hair never fell loosely around her shoulders. She had her moments where she was cruel, just as I had, and just as my father had. It was no excuse to her, to have birthed her pain instead of a daughter, but I learned from her rage the value of freedom. Some are just not meant to be mothers, and though as daughters we suffer, we learn. No, my mother never hated me; she hated her lack of freedom, the loss of something she could have had. I used to think it was lost to us—lost to me, that I could never find myself holding a flower of my own and giving her the love she would need to bloom. That was wrong. We could have been something else, and when it was my turn, we would be.

The gray never truly faded, even after I forgave her and bathed in colors that I had never seen before. It trailed after me like a forgotten mist, licking at my elbows in a numb sheen of silver. It was cold still, with that same lulling buzz of the abyss—the canyon that I had yet to cross. But the gray chains had never jingled so softly as they did when I stepped out of that house, dripping with blistering dewdrops. I was twenty. 

 “Henri,” she said to me, her smile thin as I made my way to the train station. It was my second year away. Her wan lips twitched at the sight of my suitcase. That was all that I ever got from her, but it was all that I ever needed to know. 

 ____________________

Alexis Berry is an aspiring writer from Northwest Indiana with an ultimate goal to write something worth reading. Her work, Grandpa’s Chair, was recently published in Columbia College Chicago’s Punctuate. A Nonfiction Magazine. 

 

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The Binder

She is stretched out in the sun. I have always said that the sun was made for her. Right now I think it was made for the slope of her back, the bit of skin I can see where her tank top has ridden up. She glows for real. Not orange or yellow but that golden in-between, the color at the edge of Indian Blanket (her favorite flower, the one in ink on her shoulder) where the red bleeds into orange like a watercolor. 

I’m lying next to her. It’s early, only seven or so, and for some reason I’m wide awake. Blue morning light pours into our bedroom in shafts, makes her all that more golden. I sit up, swing my legs off the edge of the bed. I don’t know what I am going to do now that I am awake. Maybe I will try to piss. Maybe I will make her breakfast in bed. Maybe I will steal one of her cigarettes and sit on the front steps, and maybe this is the day I start smoking. 

I wiggle my toes where they dangle above the floor and pause. Put my plans on hold. No smoking today, I decide as my toes brush fabric.

Her binder. I reach down, careful not to jostle her on the mattress, and gather it in my fingers. I remember the first time she let me take it off of her. How the spandex felt like a swimsuit under my thumbs, how it left space for her shoulder blades to jut out like tectonic plates when she lifted her arms for me to wrestle it over her head. It wasn’t graceful, but it was sexy. I clutched it in my fist, balled it up behind her back while we kissed, ’til I finally had to drop it so she could slip my sweater off. 

I stand slowly, easing my grandmother’s wide, woman hips off the bed as gently as I can so as not to wake my girl. I pad over to the smudgy full-length mirror I’ve lugged from apartment to apartment since my freshman year of college and look at myself. 

When I was younger, I used to sneak into my dad’s closet after he’d gone to work and try on his shirts. They were huge and hung off my skinny girl-body like circus tents. I am bigger now. The shirt I am wearing now—the one I stole when I moved out of his house—doesn’t look as cartoonish anymore. I don’t look as much like a boy as I used to now that I’ve grown into my grandmother’s curves. Of course, I don’t blame my Nena for my body. In fact, sometimes I wish I could thank her. My girl loves my hips, likes to run her hands over them when we’re slow dancing to Dolly in the kitchen. That might be the issue though. Everybody else loves my body. Everybody else likes to touch my waist, to finger the curves that follow. Everybody else, everybody else. 

I slip out of my dad’s old shirt, binder still clenched in my fist. 

It’s harder to wiggle into than I thought it would be. I guess it is supposed to be stiff, otherwise it wouldn’t serve its purpose. To flatten, to constrict, to make whole by making less. I struggle into my girl’s binder one arm at a time, shove it over my tits ’til its snug around my chest. I let my arms fall. 

In the early morning quiet, I can hear her breathing behind me. I breathe in on her out breath and out on her in breath, my eyes closed like I’m still sleeping beside her. But I’m not asleep. I’m wide awake, and not a pussy, and I figure I better act like it, so I open my eyes and take myself in. 

Sometimes when she touches me, I can’t breathe. It has everything to do with her guitar-calloused fingers on my squishy belly, where my hair is light and soft no matter how long I go without shaving around my belly button. It has everything to do with how much she loves my tits, and how much she knows I hate them. But it also has to do with her hands in my hair and her mouth over my heart, and how I never thought I’d let anyone make me feel this good; so she touches me and I can’t breathe and she has to remind me every time, she says breathe, baby, breathe until she feels my chest swell again. 

This feels a little like that.

I look good. I look Ken doll good, flat chested and angular, twisting at the waist to see myself from all sides. And when I turn just right—call it 180 degrees—they’re gone. My tits are gone. It’s what I wanted, and it’s what I knew would happen, but I almost can’t believe it. 

I know I’m not a boy. That’s not what this is. But goddamn does it feel good to look like one. I run my palms over my chest, up and down 80% nylon, 20% spandex. The slightest curve, the slightest rise. I am not woman, not here, not now. Not man, not with these hips. I am that space in the middle, that sweet spot in the center. 

My girl rolls over in her sleep, right into a patch of sunrise. The blue morning light is warming. Through the mirror, I watch it wash over her, pooling around her sleep-loose body in our bed. I am struck dumb by how beautiful she is, how huge my heart feels.

I crawl in next to her, pull her tight against my stomach, and fall asleep with our binder still on. 

 

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Jerakah Greene is a genderqueer lesbian from Tulsa, Oklahoma, where they are currently riding out the pandemic. They graduated from Columbia College Chicago in May 2020 with a degree in Creative Writing, and a double minor in Literature, and Gender Studies. Their work has been featured in Crabfat Magazine, Impossible Archetype Issue 6, and the F(r)iction Log, and in the summer of 2019 they acted as an intern and junior editor at F(r)iction. 

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My Only Wife

 

By Jennifer Bostrom

It’s a quick read that demands patience and fond visits. It demands to be left within reach, to be randomly flipped through, and enjoyed for only a moment. It demands to be read in one stretch, pouring over quirks and secrets. My Only Wife (Dzanc Books, 2012) demands attention. Written by Jac Jemc (These Strangers She’d Invited In, 2010; A Different Bed Every Time, 2014), a Chicago-based writer, My Only Wife explores the pains, pitfalls, and pulchritude of a marriage from its beginnings to its damnation.

In postmortem of his marriage a husband falls in and out of love with his wife as her quirks shift into eccentricities. To quote Kundera, “Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory,” Jemc captures this notion to the very letter through the eyes of the husband; He is a man in love, a man infatuated, a man who understands his wife with perfect clarity and blinding befuddlement. “My wife was the start of me. If someone were to ask how I had changed since I met her I would be unable to find the words. It wasn’t that I changed because of knowing her. It’s more accurate to say that I began.” 

Though they are never named, the man and wife are outlined through a series of idiosyncratic vignettes, each one more lovely and disheartening than the next. While it could have been a hindrance, Jemc deftly handles the lack of titles by making tangible the severity of the husband’s loss through his repeated mantra, “my wife.” 

“My wife was a clumsy acquaintance who lumbered through days.”

“My wife wore trousers . . . She filled her clothes the way one fills one’s skin: exactly.”

“She was my only wife and I accepted her for all that she was, all quirks, all inconsistencies and unexpected preferences.”

The wife in question has one habit in particular that begins as endearing and quickly turns isolating. She records stories. After talking to strangers, she returns to her home every night and records stories that no one hears, stories that she hides way in her closet—a closet she keeps locked, only showing her husband once when they move in together.

“‘Can I see the closet again?’ I asked, at five years.

‘You know better,’ she said, locking it behind her and struggling to reattach the bracelet to her wrist, key dangling. 

‘Why not?’

‘That was a one-time thing. I told you that. You understood. That’s the end.’ She wasn’t amused. . . .

She was a bit bewildered by my stubbornness. ‘That closet is mine, and I get one thing that is only mine. No, you can’t look inside.’”

Her husband is tethered to her uniqueness from the very beginning, but the quirky woman who so hauntingly captures her husband’s heart is off-putting as much as she is beautiful, a train wreck demanding attention. His wife is an affable, irascible despot, moving from inclusivity and intimacy to independence and indifferent cynicism at the drop of a hat, leaving a sense of whiplash in her wake.

Jac Jemc wrestles the demons of love and loss in a sketch of two people fighting inevitability. Their “love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.”

Jennifer Bostrom is a BA Honors Fiction Graduate from Columbia College Chicago, Academic Excellence scholarship recipient (2013-2016), Production Editor of CCC’s award-winning Hair Trigger anthology, and former contributer for HYPERtext Magazine. Jennifer’s fiction can be found at The Copperfield Review and Habitat Magazine or on her website jcbostrom.com. 

September 29, 2016