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Winterlines

 

L. was a human palimpsest. He sat with his cane in the front room of the pub, near the bay window, at a wooden built-in made for two. He nursed a half-empty pint of amber with his crooked hands. Tiny broken blood vessels framed his mouth. He still had the mien of a larger man but his carriage was wrong. The lapels of his anorak sagged where they should have extended, and where there should have been some sort of trapezius, there was a hollow. The metamorphosis was clear: L. had been rewritten.

“Put your money away,” she said. 

“Nora—I pay as I always paid,” he said.

“Your money’s no good here, it’s just nice to see you out.”

“I’ve enjoyed my night immensely.”

“Don’t pick up any girls on the way out, mind.” 

L. managed a smile. “Night, Nora. Thank you for everything.” 

Once home he climbed, slow as a clock’s hand, to the second floor. Upstairs he removed and carefully folded his clothes, found his hot water bottle and went to the toilet. He had not flushed from the time before and everything had congealed.

L. stayed sitting up in bed to support his withered neck. He recited a poem by Ovid. When finished, he tucked the hot water bottle between the frayed grey blanket and flat sheet and folded his wrinkled hands one over the other. A few flies rapped against the dark bedroom window; the new moon wasn’t visible. He stroked his translucent skin, the islands of spots that merged into one continental mass, the knotty tributaries of veins, the craggy peaks of knuckles. L.’s hands had been replaced. 

 

He heard her old Astra slow down outside, its door open and close, and the click of footsteps coming up the walkway.

“Morning, Dad. Alright?” she said.

“I’m in the sitting room, Fiadh,” L. said.

Fiadh peeked around the corner. “Why are all the blinds down?”

“I was dancing naked.” He frowned. “You look like Maggie Thatcher.”

“Oh, wonderful. Hopefully when she was alive? I’ve had my hair done. Mrs. Denison says that she saw you yesterday, quite late, on the way back from the pub.”

“I will have to remember to change my route. And you wonder why the blinds are down. It was March 20, so I stayed and had an extra pint for Saint Cuthbert’s Day.”

“Finally, spring. Are we still on for the cathedral procession day after tomorrow?” Fiadh removed her fox-brown overcoat and yellow and white silk scarf, and hung them on the single hook in the dim hallway. “She thought you seemed shakier last night. With a bag—was it from the grocer?”

“I was so tight I don’t remember, maybe you should ask her.”

“I said ‘you should see him, he still does his own washing up’.” 

“Don’t make it sound like I’ve just done the splits. I thought we could sit in here, for a change.” 

“She was only looking out for you. It’s chilly in here. Did you see the eclipse yesterday morning? The path of the shadow went around Greenland and crossed the North Sea. Oh, Maeve’s going to call you.”

“You’ve been talking to Maeve? It’s not her birthday until June.”

Fiadh sighed. It took her only one step to cross the parlour. She bent down to adjust the knob on the small ceramic gas heater bordered in sea-green tile, and sat down beside him on the abraded settee, playing with the threadbare end of a tissue stuffed into the cuff of her blouse. “Yesterday. Everyone’s fine. She’s going to try you today. ‘Not too late in the afternoon,’ I said, so morning her time. So as I said on the phone, I’ve just come round to chat a bit.”

“I assume about Sherburn House, since that’s all anyone speaks to me about anymore. I expect you’ve decided it’s time.”

“Billy says when he came round yesterday you wouldn’t speak to him.”

“Why do you all have keys to my house?”

“Ignoring him or chaining the door isn’t helping.”

“He put his foot down, there’s nothing more to say. I’m not entertaining it. He said he would not come back and plead with an old queer.”

“Well, seeing you’ve just told us about yourself, it’s been a shock for him.”

He swatted the air. “And he finds any excuse to punish me. Seems I raised quite the Calvinist. And now I can’t have an untied shoelace without him scheming to get me into that place.”

“We only want what’s best for you. You can’t manage alone.”

“I manage fine.”

“Dad, you can’t live here by yourself anymore. Look at your hands, they’re seizing up. I’ll go make some tea. We can’t be on-call day and night in case something happens—” 

“In case, in case; nothing has happened,” he said. Fiadh got up and moved down the narrow hall toward the tiny kitchen. The walls were bare save for a small, round clock that had stopped just past 3. L. struggled to get up, but quickened his pace and followed closely behind. “Don’t go back there, I’ve been busy scrubbing and I’m not done—and the back is off-limits, something died in the shed over the winter and it’s rotting now.”

“This teapot is chipped,” she said. “I’ll get you a new one. And you haven’t replaced the sponge in months, it’s black.”

“It’s black from washing out the teapot, which pours fine. I’ve had it for thirty years and it’s been chipped for twenty. Or haven’t you noticed until now.”

Fiadh rummaged through the cupboard and pulled out a pan. “What’s this doing tucked back here? It’s charred. Dad, the handle. What’s burnt on the bottom—it’s rock-hard?”

“Creamed corn. So I forgot to clean it, don’t make it into something.” 

“You left the cooker on. Was it when you went out? Or when you went to bed.” 

“I’m not going to that Victorian dungeon.”

“It’s completely remodeled.” Fiadh tossed the pan on the laminate counter, walked over to L. and patted the back of his shoulder. “We’re seeing it at lunch, after the cathedral. They are happy to have us for the day. Both of us can come with you, I’ll talk to him, or it can be just you and me. It’s time, Dad. I’m sorry.” 

“What do you know about time?” He shook her off. “You were smaller than I had imagined,” he said to her, the corners of his mouth drawn down. “Not quite human.”

“What?”

“When we met after the war.”

“Oh, yes. I’m sure.”

“And look at you now, giving the orders. You think I go to the cathedral to listen to those zealots? They’re all teched. I saw plenty of graves—and more than enough clergymen—as a young stonemason. Even more in Italy, in the war.” L. searched the floor, bewildered.

“I understand it’s difficult, Dad.”

He turned to her, clutching the apron of the wooden table. “I go to remember Patrick Alington.”

“Was he a special friend?”

“Are you unhinged? He was my commanding officer, captain in the 6th Grenadier Guards.”

“I assume there were some,” she sighed. “You haven’t told us about any of those yet—”

L. slumped down at the table, cleared except for a neatly folded pile of used wrapping paper. “Before you leave, I want to tell you something. Stack and seal slab stone; you think it’s impervious, Fiadh, but the shit’s still underneath.” He glared at the flies knocking against the back door window. “After the landing at Salerno, I saw something I have never forgotten. Working men were used as scouts, cannon fodder. German defensive lines stretched across the Apennines, meant to stop our advance over the mountains. Patrick and I became separated from our division north of Naples at the first line—the Volturno Line—with an entire panzer division holding the hills. He died right beside me, September 24, 1943. The back of his head was blown apart by a mortar, but if you laid him down, you’d never know. You would have been two at the time.”

L. knitted his brow and eyed the burnt pan. “I buried his body on a sweltering day under brush, then fled into the mountains to find cover; as high as I could climb. Forty-six days I was stranded between enemy stations, foraging—forty-six nightfalls in the mountains, starving. My division found me in November, crouched in a crevice outside an abandoned village, well behind the second Barbara Line. We then had to break through the final Gustav Line; we dug in at that line for the winter. It was the most impenetrable.” He rubbed his hands. “But first we went back, removed the debris, exhumed his body. He was there, just as he’d been the day I left him, but his limbs were still flexible. His flesh had not decomposed. He looked asleep. They assumed delirium, combat stress; that I had the date of death wrong.”

“I don’t know, Dad, it was seventy years ago,” she said. “I know how important friends are to you. Especially, I mean, for men like you.”

“I was still a journeyman when I left,” he said. “Then after, when I became a master, I was approached to rebuild the nave of the cathedral, including Saint Cuthbert’s shrine. I offered my services for three years. It was there that I learned about incorruptibility, the translation of relics. Eleven years after Saint Cuthbert’s death, when they first moved the body in 698 through the snows of Northumberland, they discovered it hadn’t decayed. Whenever they moved it over the centuries, they always found the same thing: an intact corpse.” L. shook his head. “I know what I saw under that debris, Fiadh. When I go to the processions I remember him—unscathed—being pulled out from under the mound of dead thicket.”

L. tried to right himself. Fiadh moved closer, but he held his gnarled hand up to stop her. “About the century that has passed, Fiadh, I don’t have much else to say or care. I’m sorry if that hurts you. I remember long ago and I remember this morning. In between, there is absence. Every night waking up in the dark, immured. The fear hovering just above. The shame I built around me, with my own hands.” 

He met her gaze head-on. “You think you know everything, what’s best and worst, what’s bearable and unbearable. There are many lines in life you can’t find a way to cross. Impassable, unnavigable. So here at the end, I wanted to cross one, and tell you who I really was, without shame. And all I get is more from you.”

She lowered her head. L. stroked his temples squeezed his eyes. “If I could do it all again. Rewrite my beginning and middle, but I can’t.” He turned back to an empty window—the flies had gone.

“I can, though, write my end. I had no ‘special friends’ as you call them. Assure your brother. I may as well have been invisible.” He looked down at his legs. “And now, I almost am. I can barely hold a glass. I am drifting into decline, Fiadh—my time’s run out. I won’t see another winter. I walk like a penguin, my hair is almost gone and my legs don’t carry me. I’ve never had much. But I get up. I feed and clean myself even if it takes me all day because that’s what I’ve always done. I can’t hold a book anymore but I can recite all the poems that I studied as a young man.” 

“Dad, I know you’ve always been independent. I know you don’t want to go.”

“So don’t speak to me of that place! Not today. Come back the day after tomorrow. I promise we’ll go on the way back from the cathedral. Just no more now, alright?”

“It’s for the best.” Fiadh put her coat and scarf on, sorted the lapels and checked the back of her hair. She glanced back at the pan on the counter. “You rest. Remember Maeve’s going to call. We’ll go over the details on the way. I’ll pick you up. Is ten alright?” 

“Of course, my little one.”     

 

When night fell, L. latched the door. The blinds remained down. He fixed himself some instant porridge so his stomach wouldn’t be empty and made his way up the stairs. The thin edge of the moon shone low in the sky. He removed a pen and a piece of worn, almost transparent, paper with some faint handwriting on it from the drawer. With his crooked hand he carefully wrote one sentence in dark ink over the faded script: I will neither change, nor move, nor cross over.

L. took the empty glass from the table and filled it in the washroom sink. He found the bottle, but struggled with the cap. He managed to pry it open, swallowed several pills, and tucked himself into bed.

 

He dreamt of headland streams that tumbled over burnished stones, streams that transformed into tufa-lined rivers, carving ever deepening fissures into the rock face. Deep pockets of woodland dotted the mountains—their highest peaks still ringed with fir trees—and descended into forests of beech; the smell of chestnut, birch and juniper wafted up to where he squatted alone by the steep pass. Hectares of scorched holm oak had been razed in the southern valley. He dreamt of shale and sandstone; metamorphic, calcareous outcrops of white marble formed from limestone that stretched in a band from the Campanian volcanic arc behind him all the way northwest to Rome. He saw stars in the east glinting over cliff sides; charcoal silhouettes transmuted into pale basalt and silvery splinters of granite. The weak light gained momentum. It seeped up from a hidden point below, broke through the thick mortar smoke and formed a winterline, concealing the horizon yet haloing the camber of the hills in lilac. L.’s breathing was laboured, his cheeks were sunken, but he watched that strip of light between the darkness above and below, and believed that against every odd, by luck or by a miracle, he would not die.

 

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Ellis Scott is a new writer, and an old man. His first story “Levies” was published by Into The Void magazine in 2019 and his second story “House For A Young Man” will be published by Yolk in 2020. His work has also appeared in Blank Spaces, Meat For Tea and High Shelf magazines. He is nominated for the 2020 Pushcart Prize. 

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The Pisces

 

Review by Kala Wahl

Melissa Broder’s debut novel, The Pisces, answers the question of exactly what you should do to fill the void after going ‘on break’ with your partner of eight years. The answer? You date a merman. You date a merman and have really erotic sex with him to fill that void.

 The Pisces follows 38 year-old Lucy as she struggles to deal with her post-kinda-breakup-but-not-really-breakup depression. These struggles include punching her boyfriend’s nose and sending him to the hospital, as well as blacking out on Ambien and crashing her car on the highway—covered in the doughnuts she had just purchased in her stupor, of course. Lucy tries therapy, and then Lucy tries Tinder. Because hey, who knows how long this break is going to last, and Lucy isn’t getting any less depressed. Or younger. But it isn’t until an encounter with a certain scaly hunk on a beach in Venice that she finds the ultimate escape from her worries. That’s right; I said scaly. And he’s like, covered in barnacles too.

 This realistic tale (get it, kinda like fish tail) of a woman trying to cope after finding herself stuck in an unsatisfying relationship takes a surreal turn with the introduction of Theo the merman. His character is absurd because he’s a merman and he’s enticing a broken-hearted Lucy. This is, in fact, a woman who—on the very first page—proclaimed her love for cleaning up dog shit because it’s so intimate: “It felt so intimate scooping his gigantic shits, big hot bags of them.” She’s moved on from the dog shit—as well as the kind-of-boyfriend—and now she’s screwing around with a mythical creature. Theo is a great lay and he says he loves Lucy. Receiving oral sex from a merman on ocean rocks almost sounds straight out of a romance novel. He is all the makings of a pure fantasy, and he is seemingly the antidote for her heartbreak. He is absolutely real, and in Lucy’s eyes, he is more than a fantasy. At least for a little bit.

 What can you do? That’s how men tend to be; I guess mermen are no exception.

 Despite how far-fetched this story may seem, Broder manages to ground us through a very relatable Lucy and her very relatable quest towards both moving on and trying to stay sane in the process. Lucy’s fling with Theo is representative of much more than meets the eye, and it’s not too dissimilar from a fling that you, or perhaps even me, might have gone through following a breakup or “break.” Broder nails the natural desperation for distraction that comes post-relationship, and also the intense desire to feel wanted and loved. It’s just in this case, that source of affection happens to be coming from a merman. And Lucy does technically still have a boyfriend—we all just see where that’s going.

 Nowhere. It’s going nowhere. You don’t even need to read the book to know that.

 Other reviews have labeled Lucy as an insufferable character because of her inability to find satisfaction within her seemingly decent boyfriend (I say seemingly because Lucy is very clearly losing interest in him, and a man probably wrote that review) and her whininess in not being able to find satisfaction in other men, as well. She’s deemed shell-fish. (Get it?) Lazy for approaching middle-age without a solid game plan or relationship. However, it is all these traits that make her human. These traits make her relatable. Perhaps these reviewers got too swept up in the fantasy of Theo and wet hot merman sex, but Lucy is a very real character who struggles with very real issues. Sometimes to be human isn’t to be likeable. But I like Lucy; I actually love Lucy.

 Lucy’s perspective is a vivid one that doesn’t shy away from offending. She’s what old people might call crass. But in this day and age, she’s a female voice that we need. Whether she’s discussing her wishes to have a man covered entirely in dildos, or describing getting period blood on her sister’s couch during merman sex, she offers a unique perspective on things that simply can’t be replicated. I high-key think most people have trouble stomaching Lucy because of her openness to share, and that’s more reflective of society’s issue with upfront women than any actual issue with Lucy. She’s honest. It’s refreshing to hear a woman speak so boldly (because god forbid we hear from anymore bold men) and without filter. Filters are boring. And so are men. The Pisces is definitely not boring.

 Hello, do I need to mention merman sex again?

  

Review by Kala Wahl

 

Publisher: Penguin Random House
Publication Year: 2018
ISBN-10: 1524761559
Number of Pages: 288

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Memory Witch

 

“My brother says your mama’s a witch.”

            I jerked my face out of my backpack. “Why would he say that?”

            Lucy Brown shrugged, a smug grin tucked into her cheeks. “Maybe because she is? My brother says that she sneaks into little girls’ rooms at nights and steals away their brains and their parents.”

            “You shut your mouth, Lucy.”

            “It’s true, ain’t it? That’s how come you don’t have no daddy. Did she eat your brain too, Morgan? Is that how come you’re so stupid?” 

            “If my mama did do all those things then you could bet that she’d be coming for you next, Lucy,” I said softly, bit my lip, and walked away.

* * * 

We lived, Mama and I, in a tiny shack near the ocean, washing into the sea. When a hurricane passed, the waves licked right up to our kitchen window, and when a storm blew, we could see the water come peeking in at us over the dunes. 

            I spent the salty nights on the beach alone. I took a headlamp down the water’s edge, searched through the sand for seashells with a hole in the center, gathering pockets full to make myself a necklace of them. I would watch the dunes dance, reedy greens peeking out of the blowing sand, hear the wind whistling through the porous rocks of the jetty. I would gather lumps of jellyfish, careful to check for stingers, and lay them flat on rocks for the morning sun to come and dry them into discs, flat cellophane peeling off the rocks like sunburned skin. 

* * *

“The kids at school think you’re a witch, Mama,” I said to her door that night, sitting in the hall leaning back against her bedroom door, the knots of my neck flesh on the wood panel.

            Most nights Mama didn’t come out of her room, but I liked to sit by her door and talk to her anyway. No noise came from inside, but I knew she was there, in bed, and I knew she could hear me.

            Mama’s door was always shut to me. Even at night, me still just a child, I knocked quietly after a nightmare or else stayed frozen on my bed. Mama stayed inside most of the time, quiet like she’d disappeared, like the house was empty to everyone but me, and I crept around like a mouse or a ghost.

            In the morning I got ready for school by myself and snuck off to the bus with whatever I could find packed for lunch. I wrote notes to myself on my brown paper lunch bag, Have a wonderful day, Mo! I love you! 

* * *

The night Lucy’s mother came over, the sea was flat like a lake and so placid I thought Poseidon had fallen asleep. 

            The ocean stood still and the wind so feeble that humidity hung in the air. I walked through the cloud with my headlamp, unable to look for shells or jellyfish, no wind to whistle, no dunes to dance. The fog frightened me, and I stayed by the picture window, ducked under the glow in the sand hoping the crest of my head didn’t poke into Mama’s view through our window.

            Mama slid her fingers into Mrs. Brown’s hair and held her head steady in her grip. With a jar tucked into her palm she stroked Mrs. Brown on the small crescent of skin tucked behind her ear. She felt all the crevasses of Mrs. Brown’s skull, skimmed over her skin until she found it, hairline maybe smaller and slowly wedged it open.  

            I could not see inside of Mrs. Brown from where I spied. I couldn’t see what Mama was looking at, where her fingers had disappeared, just Mrs. Brown’s dreamy, stoic face and the thing that Mama took out.

            I only caught a glimpse of it. It was dark as night and wiggling in Mama’s fingers. It looked like a worm, only darker, only airier, and it was stretching for escape. Mama snapped it into the jar, pinched the lid closed with a whack so fast I only caught a glimpse. But a glimpse was enough to know that that thing was evil, that the darkness Mama held was sickening.

            I leaned over and retched into the sand beside the window. My eyes watered, and I wiped at my lips, spilling over and over again until my stomach was empty and I was vomiting chalky, orange phlegm. 

* * *

School was a stucco monstrosity, boxy with a red roof like a giant Pizza Hut, nothing like the secret passageways and stone staircases I’d read about in books. My shoes were too small, my uniform missing a button or two, and the zipper on my skirt jammed, but I could still wiggle into it after a couple hops around my bedroom. 

            I found the word WITCH scratched into my locker during lunch time, my peanut butter sandwich missing, my brown lunch bag in tatters—You mean the world to me, Mo! I didn’t mind. I liked the other girls thinking I was a witch, liked them thinking I was powerful.

* * *

“I know you saw what I did to Mrs. Brown,” Mama said. “I ain’t stupid, Mo.”

            Mama moved silently through our house. She could slink up on me, slide her body into bed beside me, and wrap her arms around me before I’d even noticed that she’d left her room. She tucked her cheeks into my neck, her breath warm fog on my skin, sweating under the rotating blades of my ceiling fan whipping the thick air around the room like a hurricane.

            “I’m sorry, Mama,” I whispered into her hair. 

            The room was silent, just the gentle thrum of my clock, the whistle of the sea breeze on our clotted roof. I had only a few stuffed animals, threadbare and pulled from Goodwill. My sheets were musty and beading with Snoopy dancing all over them. 

            “You’re not sleeping, Mo,” Mama said, her voice muffled by her lips on my shoulder.

            I shrugged and the gesture lifted her head with it.

            “They’re not all so bad, Mo. Watch,” she said, holding up a finger to me then pressing it behind her ear, to the same little moon she’d stroked on Mrs. Brown, then—pop—it was open and she dangled from her fingers a light, a star in her bony hands. It was gorgeous and searing, and it whizzed, pulling, stretching, flowing like water, then—clunk—it was in the jar and Mama was screwing on the lid. 

            “Sometimes they’re beautiful. Just depends on the memory, Mo.”

            The light in the jar lit her face from beneath her chin, made her pale skin glow fiery orange. 

            “Why do you take them out?” I asked.

            “When a snake bites you, Mo,” she said as she turned the glass in her hands, watching the light drip through the jar, “you suck out the poison.” 

* * *

Mama was always tired, half-dreaming even when she came out of her room, and she needed time to be alone—that’s what she always said. “I’m just tired, Mo. I just need some time. I’ll feel better soon, I promise.” And sometimes she would feel better, would come out of her room delirious with joy—giggling and silly; she’d go swimming at midnight and come pull me out of school in the middle of the day. On those days she was magic, and we would laugh until our ribs burned.

             The rest of the time I left her peanut butter sandwiches by her door at night before I went to bed and watched the door’s cracks to see if she’d turn on the lights or not. Sometimes I’d stay up late, listening for her door latch telling me she’d taken the sandwich. Sometimes I dreamed she was watching me sleep, just her face hovering over my dreams like a sun. 

* * *

“They put honey in my library book today. All the pages are stuck together now, Mama,” I told her bedroom door, “and I’ll have to renew it until I find some money to pay the fine, so I won’t be getting any new books any time soon. Miss Patterson said I could make my own books instead, write my own stories. She took paper from the teacher’s lounge and stapled together a notebook for me, but someone stole it out of my desk while we were at recess.

            “I wish I were a witch too, Mama, just like you.”

* * *

“I pawned her ring this morning, Mo,” Mama said appearing in our kitchen. “Mrs. Brown’s payment.”

            “Oh.” I watched her, startled by her sudden presence, with my fork hanging over my breakfast. 

            She handed me a napkin. “I was thinking maybe you and I could go shopping. You’re getting too big for your uniform. I could pick you up after school?” Mama suggested, too bright for the morning light of our kitchen. “And Mo? Get yourself a new library book.” She handed me a wad of money—sticky and crumpled. “This should cover the honey.”

* * *

I locked my fingers between Mama’s. The shopping center was crowded. We wove between the bodies of other shoppers, Mama’s arm slack. She trailed a step behind me, her arm loose like a noodle dangling between us, but I squeezed her fingers, prodded her along.

            Nothing had happened. One moment we were shopping for a new skirt and then she’d dimmed. Her body wound away from me.

            “I’m just tired, Mo,” she said through foggy eyes.

            Mama was a husk, all empty inside—her eyes too far away, her skin like cellophane and peeling.

            “Mama, can you drive?”  I asked as we reached our car.

            Mama was flat against the car’s seat. “No, Mo,” she said. “I’m tired, Mo. Just tired.”

            Mama lifted her hand like she was trying to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear, but her fingers fumbled, started scratching at her half-moon of skin. She pulled out a memory, thick and gooey. I was close to her, could see that little hole, the soft black place where the memory was coming out, out, trailing like a slug from its shell. 

            “Get them outta me, Mo.”

            Mama’s memory was lumpy and spoiled, was sour and smelled so rotten it stung my tongue. 

            Mama yanked, tugged the memory out of her then held it out waiting for somewhere to put it, like she was trying to hand it to me. It oozed through her fingers spilled onto the broiling cement and sizzled there like an egg. Before it settled Mama had her fingers behind her ear again, pulling out another—liquid starch in iridescent, then creamy like toothpaste, one chalky and grey, another shimmering water and they all fell through her hands, puddled on the blacktop. “I can’t. I’m so tired. You’re so good, Mo—you’re my best thing—but you look just like him.”

            Mama kept pulling—gray clouds, silver steam, a writhing black snake. There were too many, dripping through her, slipping from her fingers. The asphalt was splattered with Mama’s memories.

            “I can’t get ‘em outta me, Mo. The memories just keep coming back.”

* * *

I kept the memory Mama gave me in the baby food jar on my bedside table—let it glow in my bedroom late at night, frozen on my bed. It became my nightlight and I watched it flow through the jar, dripping or dissolving, the light inside pulsing and dancing for me through the night.

            I looked into that white, bright light until my eyes grew fuzzy and the room became shapeless.

* * *        

“Hey.”

            I stole my eyes off the school parking lot, watery from their stare. A shadow slipped over me then settled beside me on the curb, sharp knees jutting at a right angle. Lucy Brown tucked her long limbs beneath her, placed her Lisa Frank lunch box between us on the curb.

            “Hi,” I said, with a shrug.

             Lucy’s hair was sloppy, her uniform a button out of alignment. When she lifted her knees I saw a purple circle on her thigh, dark blue blood just beneath her skin. “Did you miss the bus?”

             “No.”

             “So you just… Why are you sitting out here?”

             “My mama’s supposed to pick me up.”

             “Oh.” Lucy looked down, traced her eyes along the curb, down the yellow line to the empty carpool. “Mine too.”

             I looked at her. She had another bruise on her wrist, a strange line down her forearm. “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

             Lucy Brown shrugged, her shoulders lifting up to her chin, dropping slowly. “Is your mama really a witch, Morgan?”

             “No,” I said. 

             “Didn’t think so.”

 

 

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Casey Mancino is currently traveling the world for free, writing odd stories from the comfort of hotel rooms. She is a recent graduate of California College of the Arts’s MFA Writing program and not quite sure what happens after that. Her work has appeared in Gingerbread House, NOLAvie.com, Where Y’At Magazine, and Eleven Eleven Literary Journal.

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Misfits

 

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Danny Ruhland grew up in an area that there wasn’t much to do, so at a very young age Ruhland picked up a camera and started taking pictures of abandoned places and nature. As time went on, Ruhland’s style changed drastically: from taking pictures with fairy lights to taking pictures of models with cigarettes. Ruhland uses personal pain and trauma to create stories. Many people think the style is weird and unique and Ruhland is totally okay with that. 

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girl next door

 

Cybil skitters through the long grass, stalking the jumping bugs and waving blades in a reflection to the cat, Boss. Boss’ tail is a sinuous curve above his back, lashing back and forth as he picks out his prey. Cybil watches him crouch, eyes narrowed, ready for the pounce.

            A thud.

            Girl and cat both perk up at once, gazes drawn to the backyard next door hidden behind the fence. All the sounds of the outside world seem to quiet down as the two wait to figure out what made the noise.

Another thud, this time followed by a soft hiss.

Cybil crawls on her hands and knees over to the fence, determined to learn the source of the noise. She knows the place low near the ground where the slats were installed sloppily and gape open enough to see through. She crouches down and presses her face against the rough wood, scans the neighbor’s backyard while ignoring the prickly grass scratching at her face.

The old lady who lives next door is standing in the middle of the yard, dressed the way she always is; pink pantsuit from the 70s, greying hair up in curlers, fuzzy slippers on her feet. She’s got a shovel clutched in both hands. She thrusts it into the ground and it makes the same dull thudas before. 

As Cybil watches, the old lady presses one slipper-clad foot against the lip of the shovel and presses it in further. She lifts a large clump of dirt up which she deposits next to the hole, the loose, rain-parched soil hissing as it slides off metal and onto the growing pile.

Cybil sits back and looks over at Boss. He’s sitting a foot away from her, licking one big orange paw. His ear flicks when another thudof the shovel sounds out, but he doesn’t look perturbed. Cybil takes it as a sign to keep watching so she can report her findings to him later.

The old lady is still digging when Cybil presses her face to the fence to watch again. It’s weird—her mom always makes her dad walk over to offer to mow the lawn or do any household chores she might need. Cybil once had to feed her old mop looking dog when she was away, but it’d died earlier in the year. If the lady needed a hole dug, why do it on her own? Especially in the late afternoon when it was obvious there were people home to help her.

But the old lady doesn’t seem inconvenienced at having to dig her own hole at all. She just keeps pulling up shovelfuls of dirt one after the other. Soon, the soil she pulls up is dark and Cybil can smell it all the way from her hiding place. Damp and like living things, growing things. The darker dirt falls off the shovel in clumps, landing with loud thumps.

Cybil’s knees start to ache from her crouch, so she gets on her belly to watch, neck craning up to keep her eyes in the right place on the fence.

The old woman steps into the hole and it’s so deep that the earth seems to eat her up to the knees. She continues to throw dark clods of dirt over her shoulder as she digs. Maybe she’s gone mad, madder than Cybil has always thought the old lady to be, and she’s digging her way to the other side of the world. Or maybe she’s digging a grave. Cybil has no clue what she thinks she’s doing.

She leans away and rolls over onto her back, looking up at the orange sky. It’s quickly darkening at the edges of the horizon, purple bleeding into the orange like an old bruise. Soon, the lightning bugs will be out, their bodies turning on and off like Christmas lights. That’s what Cybil had been out for in the first place, to watch the lightning bugs with Boss. He never chased them. Just watched them drift by and flick on and off.

Boss buts his head against Cybil’s face, getting his fur all in her nose and mouth. He tastes like pollen and grass but she doesn’t mind.

“Good man,” she says, voice muffled. She runs her fingers over the hard ridge of his back. His rusty purr weaves in and out of the thuds still floating over the fence. “What do youthink she’s digging for?” Cybil asks him.

Boss kneads his feet against the dirt, claws digging into and out of the same places. He looks up at her, then back to his own little holes. The cat doesn’t answer.

Cybil takes that as the answer it is and moves back to the fence. It’s dark enough that her mother is going to start calling for her any time now. She hopes the old lady finishes up whatever she’s doing before then, or she’ll miss it. Boss won’t catch her up, either. He never does when she misses out on interesting things.

It’s also dark enough that the lights attached to the back of the neighbor’s house automatically flicker on, illuminating small pools of the yard. A spotlight circles the hole in the ground and the shovel swinging in an arc above the old lady’s head. She’s humming now, a tuneless thing that makes the hairs at the back of Cybil’s neck stand up. Something about the humming isn’t right.

“Ah, there you are,” the old woman says. It’s quiet out, no summer bugs screaming the way they always do, so her voice carries out of the hole and through the yard. All Cybil can see of her now are the hair curlers moving up and down.

Cybil presses her face harder against the fence, eager to know what the woman found. 

The old woman tosses the shovel out of the hole and then reaches up and grasps onto the sides of it. With surprising strength, she heaves herself up and over the edge. She leans down and holds out a hand.

“Easy there,” she says. “I know it’s been a while.”

Cybil quivers in her spot at the fence, whole body on edge and waiting. She barely notices Boss brushing up against her, pressing in close the way he never does when she wants him to. His fur is standing up on end, too, like he’s just as anxious as she is to know what’s going to come out.

A pale, slim hand reaches out of the hole and takes hold of the old woman’s. The nails are shiny and long, fingers thin and almost spidery. The old woman’s hands are even more wrinkly and spotted compared to this new one.

“There we go, atta girl,” the old woman says happily. She leans back and hauls up the person on the other end of the arm with that surprising strength. 

What comes out of the hole is a young woman, maybe in her late teens. She’s nude, hairless body shining in the artificial light. Cybil’s eyes go wide as she takes the woman in. She’s so tall and lean, beautiful, with flowing locks of blonde hair that fall down her back and over her perky pink-tipped breasts. There’s no dirt clinging to her somehow, like even the earth knows it has no place on her body.

“Everything you need to know is written down in the usual place. There’s a DVD in the player waiting for you—don’t worry, you’ll know what that means after you’ve read the brief,” the old woman says as she starts to disrobe. More of her wrinkled, spotted flesh is put on display with each article of clothing she takes off. “I let you stay down longer than usual, so don’t bother me until you’re desperate, okay?”

Cybil should feel ashamed of looking at their nudity, should look away as the old woman’s sagging breasts are revealed, but she can’t take her eyes off what’s happening. The old woman toes off her slippers as she reaches up to uncurl her hair, throwing the curlers to the ground. It leaves her brittle, grey and white hair to spill across her discolored skin. Even her nails look old as they rake through her hair, trying to untangle the snarls. They’re brittle and cracked.

“I won’t bother you, I promise,” the glowing woman says. Even her voice is beautiful, light and lilting. “Have a good sleep, my love. I’ll see you when the time comes.”

The old woman makes a twisting face at the younger. “Yes, that’s what you always say, and somehow I’m never as refreshed as you when I wake up.”

The young woman hums, the same song the older had sung earlier. It still somehow makes Cybil’s skin crawl, even though it sounds so nice sliding out between her lips.

With one last wave of a gnarled hand, the old woman hops, naked, into the hole. The young woman picks up the fallen shovel and starts to spill dirt back into the gaping opening. Her shovelfuls are smaller, her movements more delicate. Her body flows through the air like she’s dancing. She smiles as she buries the old woman.

The back-door clatters open and both Cybil and Boss jump at the sudden noise. She twists around to see her mom leaning out the door, waving at her. She calls out, “Cybil! Time to come in!” before sliding the door shut again. She flicks on the light as a gentle reminder.

Cybil’s heart pounds hard from the small fright. She knew her mom was going to call for her, but she’d somehow managed to forget. The two women made her forget.

She turns back to look through the fence, just to get one last glimpse.

The young woman is frozen, eyes fixed on the spot where Cybil is hiding.

__________________________________________________

A. Poythress is a second year MFA fiction student at Columbia College Chicago.  They’ve been published in Thresholds UK, Best Flash Fiction, Asymmetry, and Write City Magazine,among others.  They primarily write horror and surreal stories about women and queer folk.

---

Definitely Not Kansas

 

Look at all these clothes! There’s stacks of them, of every size, in a rainbow of colors. There are tops, bottoms, shirts, skirts, pants, dresses – all very neatly stacked. How do they keep them so neatly stacked? 

 

It’s a warehouse of clothes. I’m surrounded by a vista of clothes. I could choose any of them. Don’t I just feel so free? Don’t, I. 

 

I feel overwhelmed.

 

My mother is there. I haven’t seen her since, well, since our last one ever, fight happened. She has a very serious look on her face. She tells me she wants to apologize to me and I inwardly groan. Here comes another “very Constance” moment. But, I will listen to her words and her fears and her self-obsession cloaked in concern for others when it’s really about her image of self. And I will accept her apology, bolster her heart-felt opinions, allay her fears, and praise her profound sensitivity. 

 

My grandma walks by. I haven’t seen her in years – well, obviously. She looks young, still, or youngish, comparatively. She sees us and hesitates, but chooses to simply smile and move on.

 

“There’s Grama,” I say to my mother.

 

The spontaneous joy on her face fades almost instantly to a rejected pout. 

 

“Why didn’t she stop and talk to us?” she asks.

 

Calm her, support her, solve her problem. “Maybe she wants to give us a private moment to finish our talk.”

 

My mother is appeased and we begin to walk through the stacks of clothes. I see a dress that rises out of the confusion of options. 

 

“I love this dress. I think I’ll try it on,” I say. But as I turn to my mother for approval, she shakes her head sadly. Ah, my fashion sense is all wrong again.

 

Nonetheless, I am determined. It’s perfect for me, I think. It’s sleeveless with a deep v-cut neckline, open shoulders, a form-fitting bodice that releases into a flaring skirt. It broadcasts free and flirty. There is a bold floral pattern on the top that blends downward into subdued hues towards the hem. It will move with me, with the wind, with the mood of whatever event.

 

I take it to the dressing room and suddenly the saleswoman is in the room with me. Two of them, in fact. 

 

“We will help you get into the dress. It’s complicated” they tell me.

 

I don’t resist. I’m strangely unbothered by these two women undressing and re-dressing me. It must be the freedom of the dress, I think. It will be a new beginning. I won’t be afraid or ashamed or burdened anymore.

 

The dress is around my shoulders now, and I see that they were right about its complications. There is so much to do to get the dress aligned on my torso. They work hard to make one arm fit, then the other, and I wonder to myself why an open V-neck with no sleeves should be so difficult to don. I realize it’s not at all what I expected. It doesn’t look at all like the dress I chose.

 

“How different things look off the hanger,” I think. 

 

My mother’s voice is in my head. “I cannot stress enough the importance of trying things on.”

 

The salesladies are gone now, and I know the dress is not the answer. My mother was right. I want to take it off and leave, but I find I can’t figure out how to untangle my shoulders from its fabric. I try to find the secret of dress, but I am trapped, bound up in fabric that shouldn’t be there. Or is it my body that is trapping the dress? Or am I trapped in a body that is trapped in a dress?

 

The confidence I felt with the saleswomen is gone. My mother is gone, forever gone. There are only the stacks of clothes. So neatly piled.

__________________________________________________

Susie Griffith is an actor and writer living in Chicago with her wonderful husband, a timid border collie and a mostly blind cat. In addition to short story and novella creative writing, she continues to perform in the vital Chicago theater scene, and uses her writing passion to create elaborate back-stories for her characters.

---

Four

 

Death gave me his jacket today, the all black one with the stylish leather body and cotton hood. “Times are changing,” he says, “and I am anything but outdated.” Death goes by Maurice–Maury if you’re cool–and Maury defines fun as screeching tires marking up curbs. Light speed, Godspeed, he drives like he’s racing both.

The downpour slams against windshield like a tsunami, and Maury kicks at the gas hard enough to make water spur up from the tires, throwing the car into neutral as we dip down a hill. He switches back to drive and swerves us into a vacant parking lot, and I can make out a playground distorted by the night rain. He lets the engine run. He lets the rain punch down on us.

“Bright Eyes or Bob Dylan?” He scrolls through his phone with a slender finger, screen glaring in the dark. He looks naked without his jacket, tee and jeans combo looking incomplete, a bare arm thrown over the console. He’s not tan anymore, he hasn’t been since summer, two months ago.

 “Doesn’t matter. Neither can sing.” I sniff and check my reflection in the rearview.

Maury clicks his tongue. “Eloise, you’re without taste.”

I point the air vent toward him as Bob Dylan’s rattling croon starts up.  “And you’re without a sense of temperature.”

“That’s true, actually.” He shrugs and drops his phone into the coffee stained cup holder, at peace with the dried splotches.

Ever since I’d waited on him last month at the diner, this had become our Saturday cycle: bowling, a drive, coffee, and then we’d part ways. The storm threw us an offbeat, Maury claiming he couldn’t possibly drive in this weather, amping the car to sixty in a thirty-five. I start to slip Maury’s jacket off my shoulders when he shuts off the heat.

“It’ll be freezing soon.” He catches me in the crosshair of his stare, dark hair curling against his peanut butter skin. His lack of a hood unnerves me; seeing his full expressions falls unto uncanny valley—like a store mannequin has just blown me a kiss. He is scraps of emotions learned from people he never sees twice, but you would think he’d know how to smile by now. Maury switches the AC on. The jacket stays on my shoulders.

We stay at the park until the rain stops drowning Maury’s snot-green Chevy, Dylan on shuffle while Maury mouths lyrics. I try comb through my rain-soaked hair before it can make my blouse damp, but the rose fabric clings to my shoulders anyway. We get gas station coffee and donuts before he drops me off at my apartment. The expired icing is still stuck to the roof of my mouth when we arrive, and I almost wish I had Maury’s crappy black coffee to scald it off. We say our goodbyes, and Maury insists I keep his jacket. I tear it off the second his car is out of sight.

***

Over the weekend, I begin to live in Maury’s jacket, despite the urge to burn it. I wear it to the dinner over my uniform. I wear it when I chat with the busboy during my break, his overgrown buzz cut matted to his forehead from sweat and humidity. I wear it so much it garners comments from my roommate, Jamie, asking if it belongs to a “secret someone.” I tell her yes, except not how she thinks, and she wouldn’t want to know whom in the first place. Her voice drops from girlish to motherly, and she comments on my pallor. I say I’ve been forgetting to eat due to double shifts; I escape her and say that I’m going to the library to study. I don’t go back when I forget my wallet. Jamie has work in an hour; I only have to avoid her until then.

***

In truth, I worry.

Sunday I wake up to find myself paper white, but brush it off as needing more sun. It’s fall—everyone is losing any semblance of a tan. Monday finds me thinner, and I actually rejoice until my clothes begin to billow in places I once complained gave me muffin top. I consider going to the ER. When Wednesday hits and I see myself without any new changes, I take it at the universe letting me off the hook and forget the mess between work and school. I zip up Maury’s jacket and let the too-big sleeves shield my hands from the stinging cold, library books jabbing my ribs.

***

I’m flipping through a textbook when it happens. 

The library is a ghost town, the squeak of my sneakers pin balling off the walls and tacky skylight. Beads of black ooze from my finger onto the page, slow at first, then in a steady drip of what looks like murky in water. I rub my thumb against it; I smear black down my palm. Fat little drops splatter onto the page of my anatomy book. A papercut.

My hand shakes, so I jam it into the pocket of Maury’s jacket, snatching up my books, wondering if anyone saw. A balding old lady stares blankly at the pages of a crinkled paperback. The clerk has her nose in some trashy tabloid, and for once I’m relieved by the sight. I force myself to pass both in a collected manner, sprinting the moment my shoes smack the crooked sidewalk. 

***

            The inky liquid is dry when I get to the apartment. The cut is gone, and I wash my hands questioning whether it happened at all, but the stains in my textbook scream at me that this is all too real. I blink at my reflection. I get an idea.

            The knives in the kitchen are far from dull. I cycle this through my mind as I align the tip of a serrated blade with my mid-thigh, steady, steady, steady.I hold onto the mantra when I push down the edge, eyes cemented shut. When I peek, there’s black on my leg. No pain.

I poke at the ghostly skin around the wound, my heart stuttering at the lack of a sting. Or, I hoped it could still stutter. The knife shakes as I drive it deeper, begging a nerve to make me relent. I cut until bone stops me. 

            The flesh inside my leg is a sickly gray, shades of red bleached from the meat and replaced by the horrible, dirty blackness that’s making a puddle on the floor.  

I shudder and gasp when the flesh starts to move, let the knife clatter to the tile. It’s like watching a time-lapse of a plant grow, sinews threading themselves together and stitching the gash shut without scarring.

            I call Maury and leave him a voicemail, screaming at him to get his ass over here before Jamie comes home. It’s just past ten when I let him in, and I shove him against the wall so hard the picture frames rattle.

“What did you do to me?” I snap at his throat.

His eyes flit around the apartment. “Where’s my jacket?”

“Screw your jacket!”  I pull the collar of his shirt close enough that I sense panic and Chinese food on his breath. “What did you do?” I force him to meet my scowl.

Maury spots his jacket hung on a kitchen chair and wretches loose, retrieving it with far too much grace. He drapes it around my shoulders and tells me sit down. I drop beside the kitchen island while he sits in the black-stained chair.

Maury explains that when he was ‘inducted’, it was World War II, and he hadn’t had a choice either.

“You meet someone and you just know. That’s what the last Death told me.” 

He announces that once I’m done changing—once I stop leaking black and the need to breathe subsides—he’ll crumble to dust and I will be fully fledged as Death. 

“Reapers typically live a century or two, then they pass it on to someone else.”

            I ask, “There’s more of us?”

            “Yes,” he sighs, “but never at the same time. You and I, we’re between chapters. You’re not yet born, and I’m dying.”

 “Bullshit.” I throw his jacket at his face. “ Take it back. Death dying? Take it back!”

He clasps my hand and answers that he can’t, leads me out of the apartment to his Chevy while petting my sand colored hair. We get coffee, and its dishwater taste is the only thing normal about us sitting in his car at the park. Everything is all out of order.

“There are things you should know.” His eyes follow the drizzle down the windshield, “There are simple rules.”

1. Anyone I kiss will die. This is The Kiss of Death. This is how I will help people cross over. “We don’t guide souls,” he drums his fingers on the dash, “we just give them tickets to get where they’re going.”

2. I am omnipresent, and time will be strange for a while as I become used to being unrestricted by time. This is how I will be able to ‘ferry’ multiple souls simultaneously.

3. Anyone I allow to try on his jacket–now mine–will henceforth be ‘inducted’ as I am, and I will cease to exist after four days. I am otherwise deathless.

“Four for the horsemen,” he jokes, “and you can change the jacket at will, too. Forever fashionable. That’s a perk.” Maury lets me finish his coffee. It won’t help my exhaustion, but I pitch it back anyway. We lapse into silence and the steel colored sky hovers over us, lightening cracking the air. Maury hushes me each time I try to talk, saying he wants to be human for his last moments, saying I’ll ‘know’ all answers when the time comes. He hums along to the music, and when the clock glows 11:59pm, he tells me to get out of the car and come round to the driver’s side. Slow. His clothes are in a heap on the leather when I open the door. I toss them in the backseat and put the car in drive, glad no one can hear my sobs over the thunder.

***

I keep working at the diner.

Like Maury said, when the time comes, I know.

It’s like a bell: a soft ringing in my ears, and I close my eyes and I’m where I need to be with who I need to take, and once it’s done I’m back where I first was without a second skipped.

            I’ve yet to change Maury’s jacket. It’s my last trace of him, sans his ugly green Chevy.

Jamie comes home from Christmas at her parents with a new jacket, one with a leather body and cotton hood, one size too small so it’ll hug her curves—she hates the oversized look, says it swallows her figure. She models the jacket for me, exclaiming, “We’re twinsies!”

She invites me out for drinks so I strip off the diner stench with a shower, and shake the dust off my black dress. The snow’s solid enough to stick to the ground; Jamie passes me Maury’s jacket on the way to the car. I hang it over my arm, Jamie too excited to notice I don’t shiver. She slings on her jacket, then stops halfway down the stairs with a pinched expression. She turns to me.

From three steps above, I look down at her and ask, “What’s wrong?”

Jamie flaps her arms. The jacket sleeves dangle far past her pink nails.

____________________________________________________

Gabriela Everett is a creative writing undergraduate at Columbia College Chicago and presently lives in the South Loop.  Everett’s previous publications include prose and poetry in Santa Fe University of Art and Design’s lit mag, Glyph. 

---

Whole Milk

 

I had just given too much blood when I first met him, had to lie down on a stretcher and drink Martinelli’s apple juice until they asked me if what I saw was dark blue anymore. And he was next to me, his hair all tufted to one side as he lay there staring.

            “What’s your name, kid?” he asked me. And I went off about how we weren’t in some romantic comedy with some bullshit name like “The Sun’s Kisses” and were probably the same age. He looked younger than me, though-–his skin like whole milk–he introduced himself as Tommy. I reached my hand out toward his stretcher and he looked at it for a long while before receiving it. 

            “I’m Lucy,” I said. He had the saddest eyes I’d ever seen, and he pointed to a smaller, thinner version of himself sitting across the elementary school gymnasium. 

            “That’s my brother,” he said. And I knew he was sick, could tell by the grey-blue underneath his eyes, the lack of fullness in his cheeks. Tommy passed me his apple juice.

            “They won’t let me leave until I finish it,” he said. And so I drank and watched the nurses carefully walk around with bags of blood. 

            “That’s yours,” I said, pointing to one of the bags held underneath the arm of a nurse passing by. She stared at the apple juice in my hand. She was on to us.

            “How do you know?” he asked. 

            “It looks just like the others,” I said. 

            Tommy was allowed to leave before me and passed me his phone. 

            “Can I have your number?” he asked, and I put myself in his phone as a syringe emoji.

            “I’ll text you,” he said, and smiled before grabbing his brother and leaving.

            It was December in Detroit and the parking lot was iced over by the time I was allowed to leave.

            “Thank you for donating,” the man at the door said as I walked out the back of the school.

 

Tommy texted me, asking me to get dim sum the next week. I said yes, even though I had been taught by my mother to never say yes right away. He seemed perfect. 

            “You’ve never had dim sum before, have you?” Tommy asked when I missed my mouth with the chopsticks and the steamed shrimp dumpling. 

            I said, “Yeah, I’m usually better with my chopsticks.”

            I imagined what it would be like to hold him.

 

We were stuck in my car when Tommy and I first kissed. It was February and the snowstorm had us stuck on Jefferson for hours. He kept exhaling onto his hands and then rubbing mine up and down and we just sat there like that, the snow piling onto my windshield. 

            “I can’t see anything,” I told him. 

            “You can see me,” he said, and it was corny, but I could. 

            Tommy looked at me with the widest green eyes I had ever seen and I wanted to squeeze his cheeks, to tell him that I loved him even though I didn’t. I didn’t love him then.

            I wanted to say that I was sorry about his brother, that I wanted to mend something in him, but I didn’t know how. Instead I only said, “I do see you.” That was enough. Tommy pressed his thumb to my cheek and smiled without showing his teeth like he always did after that. And he kissed me. I remember feeling like that kiss was exactly how it was supposed to feel: like nearly drowning.

 

We were at the Saint Joan of Arc fair when Tommy got the call that Michael had passed. He had just won a person-sized stuffed whale and we had cumulatively eaten three elephant ears. He got the call and I watched him throw his phone off the carousel. We had to wait until the music stopped, until our pastel horses ceased their up and down motion. His phone hit a kid and he had to apologize between sobs saying, “I’m sorry… my brother.” The kid seemed fine, handed Tommy his cracked phone. 

 

The funeral was open casket and I remember us both looking at Michael for so long. Tommy was probably going through all of the memories in his head of growing up with this great little brother, of them riding bikes with no helmets to Jerry’s for red slushes, of getting into fights over girls on the block. I remember thinking about the logistics of emptying the dead body of its blood and filling it with saline. 

 

Later that evening after his mother had cried into my hair, Tommy told me that he didn’t have any good memories with Michael before he was sick, that he was a bad guy before.

            “You weren’t,” I said. “You weren’t bad.”

            “I need to tell you something,” he said.

            We lay down next to each other in Tommy’s bed and I held him.

            “Lucy,” he said. “When Michael got sick, I wanted to be a better person. It made me realize some shit. . . .”

            “Like?” I probed.

            “I couldn’t keep living the way that I was,” he said. “Let’s just say it was really bad.”

I said, “Let’s not just say that. Let’s say what we mean. . . .”

            “Okay,” he started, making eyes at the ceiling. “Let me just give it to you plain and simple. I have this ex-girlfriend. Megan. She got pregnant when we were nineteen, okay? And, I mean, I didn’t have a stable job. I was living in my parents’ basement so, like, I couldn’t have a baby.”

            I pressed my body tighter against Tommy’s. It was okay.

            “Okay,” I said. “You were nineteen. You couldn’t have a baby.”

            “Please just let me finish,” he said. “I didn’t just suggest that she get an abortion. She didn’t want to. I begged her. I pleaded. I fucking got on my knees one night and lied to her. I told her that it wasn’t our time to have babies yet, but in the future once we had our shit together we could try, like really try.”

            I stared into his eyes. I was looking for something. I needed him to look back at me, to make me feel like he was still there, the Tommy that I had met after Michael got sick.

            “I lied to her, though. And I brought her to the clinic and held her fucking hand and brought her home and when she called me that night I didn’t answer. And when I ended things a couple of days later, I told her the truth: the only thing that would make her hate me. I told her that I didn’t want children with her. Ever.”

            He was silent for some time and I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t imagine him acting this way. I couldn’t imagine him hurting someone. 

            “What changed?” I asked. “I don’t get it.”

            He finally looked at me, tears in his eyes, and said, “Michael got sick.”

            And it didn’t make much sense to me, but I held Tommy all night and hoped that he would never hurt me. I prayed for it to no god in particular. 

 

I was at the hospital when I found out that I was pregnant four months after Tommy had told me about Megan. I had sliced my finger pretty badly while dicing carrots for soup for his mother. She wasn’t feeling well. And the doctor came in and relayed to me the news. I guess I should have known, should have felt something growing in me somehow. I always thought I would. 

            “When can I get it taken care of?” I asked the doctor. His eyes narrowed. Why would a woman in her mid-twenties, fully capable of caring for another human want to get it taken care of? That’s what he thought. I knew it. 

            “Okay,” he said, putting his clipboard onto the bed near my feet. “I assume that you’re aware of your options?”

            “I’m aware.” 

            I always thought that I would want a baby more than I would want Tommy. But I wanted him. 

            Anyway, the doctor gave me my options. I remembered pulling at the paper sheet below me on the table at the hospital. I remembered hurting and wishing that Tommy was there holding my hand, but I didn’t want to be like Megan. I couldn’t be like Megan.  I felt the baby leave my body and sobbed into my arm.

 

“Move in with me?” Tommy asked before leaving my apartment the morning after our one-year anniversary dinner.

            “Me?” I asked, looking around my apartment, imagining whose bedspread we would keep, how I’d never have to use my body pillow in place of Tommy after a fight.

            “No,” he said, laughing. “My other girlfriend.”

            It had been five months since I got rid of our baby.

 

I moved in slowly. It took weeks. And we sold Tommy’s bed because mine was newer. The two men who came to pick it up wore hoodies and white-washed jeans. They smelled intensely of body odor and had a difficult time getting the bed down the stairs.

            “You guys really have a nice place,” the one with the bluer eyes said. He shifted his weight from one leg to the other, leaning against the bannister. 

            “Thanks,” I said. “I’m a fan.”

            “How long have you lived here?” he asked. 

            “Oh, I’ve been in Detroit my whole life,” I said. “But I’m just moving into this place now.”

            “It’s nice,” he said and walked out the front door.

            I wasn’t sure why I remembered that conversation so well. I didn’t tell Tommy about it. 

            The man’s eyes were so blue.

 

We were in our bed when Tommy told me during sex that he wanted to try.

            “Try, yeah,” he said. “I’m sick of waiting for the perfect time. Now is perfect.”

            And I let him cum inside of me that night and he propped my ass up onto a pillow.

            “That should help, I think,” he said. 

            And Tommy kissed me all over and prayed out loud to some god that I didn’t know he believed in. 

            We weren’t married, but that was something that we didn’t want. He didn’t want. I wanted him.

 

            It was four days before Christmas and I was almost three months pregnant when Tommy and I heard banging noises downstairs.

            “Here,” he whispered. “Stay here, I’ll be back.” He passed me my phone from the charging dock and closed the bedroom door after him.

            I sat up as he walked down the creaking stairs and then I stood up when I heard him scream. I opened the bedroom door and called to him, “Tommy!” I yelled. I kept yelling his name. 

            “Hello, what’s your emergency?” answered the dispatcher after two rings. 

            “There’s someone in my home!” I whispered. “Please send someone right now!”

            The dispatcher instructed me to get into a room and lock the door. We had no locks on our doors. I shut the bedroom door and climbed into the closet, but when I heard footsteps coming up the stairs I knew it wasn’t Tommy. 

            I remembered seeing his blue eyes first between the crack in the door and I knew him. He had been in our home before, leaning against the bannister. It wasn’t the bed that he wanted this time, and it was never just the house that he liked. 

            “I know you’re in there,” he said, and I held my stomach. He opened the closet door slowly. 

            “Hi,” he said. And I wanted to scream, to ask why he was in my home, to kick him in the groin and to tell him that the police were on the way. 

            Instead, I said nothing as he pushed me onto the bed. I said nothing as he hurt me. He kept hurting me. I didn’t cry. I just closed my eyes and hoped that the baby would make it. I prayed for it to any god. 

            When the front door opened again, he climbed off of me and tried escaping through the window, but was caught halfway down the drain pipe by the police. I wasn’t okay. Tommy had been hit so hard on the head that he was unconscious when they found him. I wish I had been unconscious, too.

 

Tommy spoon-fed me ginger tea after I got home from the hospital and I didn’t want to leave the couch. I didn’t want to see our bedroom. He understood, didn’t make me walk upstairs. I was thankful.

            I woke him up in the middle of the night. He looked happy to be there for me, his eyes hazy with sleep. They looked greener than usual, like lake water.

I said, “I’m really sad.”

            “Me too,” Tommy said. “But I’m here. We can be sad together.”

            He reached his arms across my body, landing his thumb on my cheek.

            “I’m in love with your cheeks,” he said, and I cried. 

            “Do you think this is punishment?” he asked. “For Megan?”

            Tommy hadn’t said her name since the night he told me, and I flinched.

            “No,” I said. “And this isn’t about you. This isn’t about your mistakes.”

            He couldn’t really understand what I had said. His eyes were huge and full of grief. 

            And I could tell that Tommy had wanted that baby.

 

We were yelling about the air conditioning when I almost told Tommy about what I had done. He wanted the goddamn thing off and I was sweating through my underwear. It had been fourteen months since I got rid of the baby. It had been six months since I lost the baby. 

            “We don’t need to spend more money!” he yelled. “We have a fan.”

            I shrieked, “I’m so sick of this. I’m so sick of fighting about this with you. I want it on.”

            “Well,” he said. “I want it off.”

            “Fine,” I said. “I didn’t know you wanted babies.” It felt normal to me. It felt like what needed to be said.

            “What?” he seemed calmer now as he asked me. 

            “I didn’t know you wanted babies. Not with me.”

            “I told you I did. That night,” he said. “I told you that I wanted to try.”

            “But Megan,” I said.

            “Megan wasn’t the one,” he said, a certainty in his voice. “You are. You knowthat.” He stood closer to me and fingered my hair and his voice seemed sweet then. “What’s going on?”

            I said, “I just thought that since we never talked about it, and since you didn’t want children with her, that you wouldn’t want that with me.”

            “Doyouwant children?” Tommy asked, watching me with the sad eyes that I recognized from the blood drive.

            “I want you.”

            “That doesn’t answer it,” he said, and I wanted to tell him in that moment that I didn’t want to try again, that this whole thing, this relationship felt like we would be trying forever. I couldn’t try anymore. I couldn’t hold a life inside of me anymore.

            “I lost our baby,” I said, and hunched over, crying. 

            “It wasn’t your fault,” he said, holding onto me.

            “And what if it was?”

 

 

 

 

Laura Manardo is a current MFA candidate at Columbia College Chicago studying fiction. You can find her recent publications in the online lit magazines, Bone Parade and Cacti Fur. Earlier this year, she published a poetry chapbook titled “Lemon Water in Lake Michigan” through Grandma Moses Press which is available for purchase on their website.

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Diptychs

 

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In Medias Res

 

“I can’t believe there’s four years of Latin textbooks on the shelves,” she says.

            “And you shouldn’t,” I say. “Because there are way more than four years.”

            “I thought you did four years with Mrs. Johnson in high school,” she says.

            “I did. And then another three years with Professors Donovan and Ray in college.” 

            After selling the television, the faded armchair, and the clothes I shudder to see, let alone put near my body, I was able to move the shelves my old roommate abandoned into the apartment living room. I thought about the best way to arrange the hundreds of books I would put onto these shelves. These were anything from texts I’d gotten in middle school to recent releases I’d bought the previous month. They spanned genres, and more importantly, dimensions and colors whose contrast could overpower the eye, the mind, the aesthetic appreciation of the arrangement.

            I stroll to the shelf on the far left, where she stands. I stretch my hand to point at a series of glossy, hardcover texts when I realize I can’t contort far enough over her body. With a series of exaggerated moans and wails, I shove my body against hers. She mewls and whines, more feline than human, as she stomps to the side. 

            She pouts. She looks pretty when she does this: I’ve told her to do it in pictures. Then she bends over, boobs thrust forward, ass thrust backward. She looks pretty when she does this too, though I wouldn’t tell her that. I turn back to the books before me so that my eyes don’t linger.

            Although she’s reading the names on the spines, she’s also attending to me, because when I now reach toward a book, she flicks my right shoulder with her finger. I do the same to her left shoulder. She tugs at the hem of my dress; I do the same to hers. She recoils.

            “Hey now,” she says. “I didn’t get mine at H+M, like yours. I actually spent serious money on this one. Don’t go all Mr. Powell’s tenth grade biology class on me.”

            “You totally started it that day.”

            “I did not,” she says. “Because you definitely didn’t wear any dresses back then. Let alone fancy ones.”

            “But you were giving me shit for reading Latin in my free time. Which, incidentally, I still do.” Finally she turns to the book I’ve indicated. “Grad student friend didn’t want her workbooks on Catullus.”

            “And here I thought you spent all these years after high school getting away from what made you miserable. Should’ve considered dumping the declension charts.”

            “I should’ve considered starting this process before high school.”

            She strolls away from the foreign language shelf and onto the one for classical literature. She doesn’t get past the A section of last names before stopping.

            “This is new, though.” 

            “I had Mrs. Johnson for four years, after all,” I say. 

            She rolls her eyes. “And she was a caring mentor, who taught you about both Latin and life, and who listened to your problems whenever you both had free lunch periods.” She did, of course. She listened when I raved about some literary classic I’d just finished for the first time. She listened when I cried about my parents banning makeup. She listened when I swore about how I couldn’t share my feelings with the girl I fancied.

            “She also inspired me to broaden my horizons. Her giving me Murakami when I graduated is why I started reading the surrealists.”

            “The surrealists and Jane Austen?”

            “Bitch did love her some Jane Austen. And now so do I.”

            “You’re telling me,” she says. “Persuasion and Northanger Abbey. Wow. Many of her fans can’t even name those. I know you like cutesy shit, but this is excessive even for you.”

            “It’s not like this happened two weeks ago. It interested me back in high school, before I was okay with myself. But then again, imagine that version of me liking cutesy shit.”

            “Yeah,” she says, “people would’ve been shitty to you for liking that. Except for me.”

            “You’d be shitty to me for saying your dad’s taste in music was better than yours, right?” 

            She turns to me, makes an obscene gesture, and smiles. If I weren’t an unnaturally tall, unnaturally broad colossus, onlookers might’ve mistaken us for sisters. We share the dramatic facial expressions, the rich amber eyes, the comfortable combat that both of us knows the other can endure. Nonetheless, I try to think of us as sisters so I don’t think of us any other way. 

            She pauses, taps her foot, scratches her head. Some memory has wrenched her away from the next part of the bookshelf.

            “Jokes aside,” she says, “I’m still really glad you trusted me with that. Especially when I was the only one at the time.”

            “Shit,” I say, “you were the only one for a year.” 

            Nodding at my contentment, at my thanks, and at my lack of offense, she smiles. “Good,” she says, “my opinions are insightful enough you need to think about them for a year before chatting up the riffraff.”

            Now freed from this recollection, this concern, this sentiment, she pulls Persuasion from the shelf, looks through it, sees the pencil marking that the used book store put into the edition I purchased. 

            “Trust me,” I say, “it’s good.”

            “Captain of the cheerleading team good?”

            “She wasn’t that pretty.”

            “Then why’d you ask her to prom?” 

            I make the obscene gesture this time.

            “Because I was too scared to ask you. Was that what you wanted to hear?”

            “I mean, I wanted to hear that I was prettier than her. But she got super fat, so I guess I won that.” 

            She looks from the shelf, to me, to the book she’s extracted. It looks like evidence in a trial now, something a prosecutor has put before me, whose existence I must explain to avoid a conviction. “I guess I’ll read this. You were close enough.” 

            Rather than stay steady, her tone rises at the end, making this statement interrogative even without the question mark. She’s not asking me to confirm whether she’s read it, she’s asking me the question her statement implies. All the while, she leaves the text bent on the shelf, mostly freed from the aperture that its removal has created as if waiting for orders on what she should do with it.

            “You can borrow it,” I say. “Read it, and see for yourself. You don’t have to take my word for it.”

            “Are you sure?” she says. This time her question has the appropriate structure, bluntness, punctuation. “You go through years of trouble to get these books, and then more trouble to make your living room into this library that’s all neatly organized. I wouldn’t want to disrupt it.”

            Her heart-shaped face is serious now, as if this offense were graver than it was. She’s looked at me this way every breakup I described to her, every girl I dated but didn’t desire, every girl except the one I couldn’t find the courage to ask. 

            “Why do you think you were the first one I showed it to? I hoped you’d disrupt it.”

            “Really?”

            “I mean, I don’t want you to knock the shelves over, or throw all my mystery novels out the window. But I’m not going to refuse to lend you a book now that I’ve arranged it nicely.” 

            She looks at me with her eyes narrowed and head tilted. It’s the expression she’s given whenever I talked about my loathing and despair but before I could identify its cause, before I had the words to describe its cause.

            I need to explain more of my rationale before she thinks it disingenuous. “Books can say a lot about what people like and believe, even if they don’t know it. You would never have gotten near cyberpunk unless I’d bought you Snow Crash.”

            “Hacker swordsmen and girls on high-tech skateboards are an easier sell than Jane fucking Austen.”

            “And once you’ve read Persuasion and taken back all the things you said about Jane fucking Austen, you’ll agree with me that books are meant to be shared. They’re meant to be given.”

            Her sigh is as pronounced and protracted as when I’d mention my parents using words like “lifestyle”, “confusion”, and “choice” when describing what I did with my own body.

            “You’re going to talk about your Latin teacher again, aren’t you? How Johnson got you Murakami, and you’d never heard of Murakami, and that’s why you read all these incomprehensible books about disaffected Japanese men.”

            “For my graduation, I got some clothes I never wore, some money I blew on concerts for hacks I thought were good back then, and an e-reader, which clearly isn’t the way I enjoy reading books. But the only gift I kept, aside from the signed version of The Night Circus you got me that’s on one of these shelves, was the copy of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle that she got me.

            “She wrote this wonderful note on one of the cover pages, talking about how she loved having me as a student. It was the only message I got that wasn’t perfunctory, even the ones on cards that friends and family gave to me.”

            “So that’s why you wrote the note on the cover page of American Gods when you gave it to me.”

            “And Lolita.” 

            She tilts her head to the other side. This time, both eyes and mouth are open: her expression when I told her who I really was, revealed to her everything I had kept secret, illuminated a dark patch between us that looked irrevocably different. 

            “Shit, really?” she says. “I thought you just got that for me because I lost my copy.” She flares her nostrils and clenches her fists, seething at the recalled memory she will now describe.

            “I’d told that fucker I was dating that I lost it, and that it was my favorite book, and that I wanted a copy, and instead for Christmas he gets me The Alchemist.” She pulls her fists toward her body while stewing about her least favorite book and ex-boyfriend. 

            “So thank you,” she says, “for getting me an amazing gift, and then writing your own wonderful note on top of it.”

            “Calling it ‘wonderful’ would be too kind. But you should read it. And then you should read Persuasion.” 

            She sighs. “Fine. I’ll take it.” She removes it, places it beneath one of her arms, and moves from the classics section to the science fiction one. I pause when she does. “This is almost like penance. Everything by Jane Austen, but nothing from that violent space marine series you raved about. The one where every man’s rifle and every woman’s breasts got a paragraph of description.” 

            I shake my head. “People have lots of delusions when they’re in high school,” I say. She nods to acknowledge the breadth of delusions to which I refer. 

            “Part of that delusion was thinking that stuff like weddings, social engagements, all that shit in Jane Austen novels, were frivolous. I didn’t think there was any literature worth reading that didn’t have plasma cannons and women in jumpsuits. If I didn’t get that copy of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, I’d probably only have trite macho shit on these shelves.”

            “Well, that explains why you’ve got this feminist sci-fi canon here. The Parable of the Sower, The Left Hand of Darkness–you’re failing at being a good postcolonial reader, though, because I’m not seeing The Fifth Season anywhere.”

            “You still have my copy.”

            “Allegedly.” The quick laugh that rises plummets into the silence. She tilts her head so that she doesn’t avoid me but refuses to make eye contact. This reaction I could never forget. I saw it when I explained my feelings for her, when I had the confidence to voice them, and when it was too late to do so.

            “But more importantly,” she says, “where did you put all those space marine books? Under your mattress?”

            “I burned them.”

            “Are you serious?”

            “No. But I gave them all to my cousin.”

            “I thought they didn’t talk to you anymore?”

            “None of the first cousins do. But one of my second cousins escaped their Florida conservatism after he ran the gamut of the queer community. Fell in love with a girl who was trans, then a girl who was bi, then–”

            “Let me guess,” she interrupts, “a girl who was gay.”

            “No,” I say, “a guy who was.” 

            She shakes her head, chuckles, turns back to the shelf.

            She fingers two thick volumes near the bottom of the shelf whose covers are worn enough they look perforated. These versions are next to replicas without the damage, pristine and immaculate, their pages unbent and unsullied because fingers have not yet opened them. I’ve considered sleeves for them, the kind I’ve wrapped around the Ms. Marvel and Spider-Gwen first editions she got me, if only there were sleeves that were large enough.

            “Oh god, Book of the New Sun?” she says, pointing at both the damaged and the clean copies. “That’s that tedium with all the obscure words and Latin terms. I’m sure that’s why you and your favorite professor both love it, but has anybody else in the world ever read it?”

            “I’ve heard it called the sci-fi Ulysses,” I say, “in that more people have it on their bookshelf than have read it.”

            “Is it even really sci-fi, though? I remember reading it, and it was all feudal. They have like guilds and shit. Swords and duels and horse travel. No blaster pistols.”

            “You didn’t get far enough into the story.” 

            “I couldn’t, not with that narrator. Look, I’m sorry if I’m a boring straight girl, but I don’t need to hear about a woman’s breasts every other page.”

            “I always interpreted that as the narrator being so warped that boobs were the primary way he could perceive other women. But I suppose you are right.”

            “Really?”

            “About you being boring at least.” 

            She makes a different obscene gesture this time.

            “All right, joking aside, I will go to bat for the series. But this one is actually really good. Once you get far enough, you realize it’s not the kind of story you think. The truth isn’t what you expect, but it makes sense once you learn it.” 

            Now she has the simpler smirk, the easier display of cheekiness. “I can understand why you like that kind of story.” 

            She continues to smirk as I roll my eyes. I put both of the books atop the copy of Persuasion she’s taken. She rises from the ground, turns her eyes, looks at the other shelves.

            She pushes her body to one side as she sashays past me. To counterbalance her antics, I shove in the opposite direction. We teeter a bit before she laughs, cheekily and quickly, and then crosses the room to where I’ve stored the modern fiction.

            I shouldn’t stare at her from behind, but my eyes linger for a moment. Although my mind knows that we cannot work out, a different organ, an unfortunate vestige I haven’t been able to remove, remembers about when we could have.

            That body I thought magnificent most of my classmates found adequate, attractive even, but not stunning. Hers was the figure I wanted but could never attain, much as I tried, much as I begged my female friends to experiment with my hair, makeup, and general style. Even now I’m not much like her. I’m too tall. My figure will always be too straight to have her expansive ass; my body will either be too pudgy, as then, or too toned, as it is now, to have her lithe softness. Though not large enough to turn heads at bars, her boobs are bigger than the ones I’ve managed to grow, which are small enough to elicit pity. 

            In contrast, hers was the most feminine figure I could imagine–in an archetypal and archaic sense of the word, more about petticoats than pink pastels. Her makeup was subtle and understated rather than extravagant and exaggerated. Pale and brunette, thin but not particularly toned, she looked more appropriate for a nineteenth century painting than a high school. I knew her form was slender, her hips wide, her breasts heavy, from the boudoir photos she’d gotten done and showed me. Hers were the wet lips I imagined kissing on late nights when we’d gotten close to each other while we chatted, teased, drank. 

            She ends this reverie with a question.

            “A Clockwork Orange is good, too, right?”

            I nod. She stares at it, expectant but hesitant, like a woman assessing whether the gift her husband gave her at a birthday party is too salacious for her to unwrap in public. I remove it from the shelf.

            “Another Johnson recommendation?”            

            “She thought it was excessive. We argued for a whole lunch period. She made some great points. It is, in fact, a pretty grim book that almost tries to be difficult to read. That’s why I don’t usually recommend it. That, and because too many people like it for creepy reasons. But I really like it, for whatever that’s worth.”

            “I’ll take it then.” 

            I reach forward, extract the sable slip, and deposit it on top of the three books she already has. As if to justify its addition, its physical presence before her, she says: 

            “I wouldn’t have thought you were creepy. Then again, I didn’t realize you were into me, so perhaps I’m not the best judge.”

            “Considering I didn’t realize you were into me, I wasn’t any better.”

            After craning her arm up and to the side to examine my copy of White Noise, she wobbles backward with the stack of books. I put my arm around her back to steady her. She puts the books on my couch.

            “Do you ever think about what would have happened,” I say, “if we had?”

            “I mean, I told you about the sex dreams about you. You back then, of course.”

            “Yeah,” I say, “that’s not how the sex would go now.”

            “Right,” she says. It’s an assessment and an admission, a partial answer, even if indirectly, to the previous question. It’s a fragment she doesn’t complete, a note she abandons after one paragraph. 

            As if taking all the focus of her conscious mind, her fingers drift in silence over to the Atwood collection. Her fingers stop on Oryx and Crake. We’ve debated whether it’s science fiction, and could renew that debate, but neither of us speaks. Neither of us can speak. She pulls out Cat’s Eye, stares at the cover, holds it over the books she’s stacked on the couch. 

            Unable to contemplate a segue, let alone an apropos response, I dash into the kitchen to retrieve a plastic container she can use to ferry her loot back home. When I bring it to her, I consider getting a second one, because she’s added The Blind Assassin, The Robber Bride, and Alias Grace to the pile. 

            She’s squatting in the corner, near the bottom shelf, looking at the row of books by Murakami. She tells me she read 1Q84 over the course of months. Liking it, but wanting something shorter, she grabs Kakfa on the Shore and throws it on the pile. She does the same with Norwegian Wood. Then she pulls my weather-beaten and dog-eared copy of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle from the shelf.

            “No,” I say. She shivers at my sudden loudness, forcefulness, restriction. “I mean, it’s a great book. But I can’t give you my copy.” 

            As if suspecting blood from a cultic ritual inside it, she begins to open it. “No,” I say again.

            “Okay, I get this might have sentimental value, but are you really not going to let me open it?” When I strain my hand toward it, she places it on the nearest shelf, leaning it against works by both Tana French and Gillian Flynn.

            “That was the one Mrs. Johnson gave to me,” I say. I see her questions I haven’t answered, the secrets she knows are buried but has yet to deracinate. “It was the one with the message about the years of Latin I took with her. How I was one of her favorite students that year, and that she’d miss having me the next year. Because I’d just graduated high school.” 

            Her face tilts far enough to the side that I fear her headband will fall to the floor.

            “I bet it’s very touching,” she says, “very personal, all that. But is this any more personal than the shit we told each other? The shit we were just talking about?”

            “It’s painful,” I say.

            “You don’t think it’s fucking painful for me to talk about that memory?”

            Shivering with anger, I open the page. With a single finger, I point to that first word, that solitary salutation, that painful memento. 

            “She addressed it to me. Before she knew who I really was.” 

            Her eyes, then her brow, then all the lines on her face retract. Then she marches into my kitchen. She extracts from my junk drawer a thick, black Sharpie. I let her open to the page bearing the secret that remains written there, the word she already knows but I wish she didn’t. She scribbles over not only the name but also the space to the left and right, blotting even the length. Someone would guess a longer name, or stranger name, a name not so painfully familiar to me. 

            It hurts me until I feel her embrace. It’s soothing rather than perfunctory: not the kind we give when greeting each other, but the kind she gave me when my last boyfriend dumped me, the kind I gave her when her grandfather passed away. 

            She presents the page to me. She’s written my current, legal, feminine name, the talisman against all creeping dysphoria. 

            “That’s what would’ve happened if we’d gotten together,” she says. “Because that’s who you are.”

            I speak through tears.

            “That’s a wonderful note.”

 

Stephanie Marklives in Denver, Colorado. Her work has been published in The Festival Reviewand will be published in Progenitor Art & Literary Journal,and a Thorntree Press anthology. She was also shortlisted for the Into the Void 2018 Fiction Prize. She hosts various creative projects at www.patreon.com/junesayers.