Author: anmly_mpusod

What Was and What Will

We are falling apart. Right this moment. In a cheap diner with sticky red booths. Up until now, I thought I understood what’s important. A part of me still thinks that it is the things I can see; a firsthand knowing of the unimaginable. Living in a world as perplexing and fantastic as a story. But now you are telling me that it is not enough, and I must ask, what could be more important than a miracle?

 

The first one I remember happened when I was 6 years old. I saw a flock of birds heading towards the river at sunset. Ravens or crows, I couldn’t tell the difference. They coalesced. A pulsing beat of wings and caws that echoed off each other. The shriek of their voices thrust–knives cutting the air–and I was forced to stop and look up. The longer I watched, the thicker they grew. Birds came from every way to join the black mass. The street was empty and I was alone as it happened. It felt like watching an eclipse that only I could see. They grew thicker and thicker, growing so strong that the lines between the birds vanished. It was just the shapes of feathers, wings, talons, and soon those were gone as well. They became undulating darkness, indistinct from one another, a blemish on the dusk horizon. Yet still they moved. It moved? And as the blob travelled through the sky, I started to recognize it as a cloud. A dark cloud. A cloud for rain. The kind you see and feel must bode misfortune. 

 

I will only recognize that this moment was not an ill omen when I am 60. Then, I will see a cloud break apart into swans, their limber necks untangling like a ball of rubber bands being fretted at. It will be a day of burning blue sky and the lake will be dappled by small froths as wind scours the surface. Once the swans are all free, I will hear the clarion of their call. As a cloud they are mute, either oppressed or simply content in singularity. However, once individual, apart, alone, the geese will need to cry out and hear some return. I won’t fully understand what it means–for birds to be clouds and clouds to be birds–but I will know that it is a fact of the world and not some portent of terrible years to come.

 

As a child though, I began to dread birds. I lived on the border of the city. Sidewalks yielded to gravel and grass, and all the houses were low and needed new paint. We had chickens and I was afraid of our backyard. The flap of their wings made me jump and the small ruts in the dirt left by talons seemed like promises to violence. Most of all, I was scared that they might mush together into a storm cloud that rained eggs. I didn’t know if bird-clouds could rain, but I was 9 years old, so I imagined it had to be eggs. Only from the safety of the sliding glass door would I watch them. That summer I saw a hawk kill one of the smaller hens. At first, it was lightning, a blur of speckled brown and white that crashed out of the sky. And then it was horribly slow. The talons wrapped around the hen and they rolled across the lawn, thrashing and squeezing and twisting and ripping and wrenching and killing. After the hen fell limp, the hawk fluttered to the other side of our wire fence that kept coyotes out, and there it began to peck. I stayed behind the glass.

 

My father will die when he is 82. There are 25 years that separate our age, but as he dies it will feel like centuries stand between us. It won’t be at home. It won’t be peaceful. It will be like a hawk, and he will fight in its grip desperately, gasping as if something was stuck behind his lungs. I won’t be ready for that loss. I won’t be able to fill myself with platitudes. I will remain in awe of death and its ignoble swiftness.

 

The first time I left the city, I was 16. It wasn’t with my parents, even though my father always promised he’d take me fishing on some weekend. Instead, a friend let me in on his family camping trip. We went to an unnamed clearing somewhere in the woods near the coast. The tent was just canvas and poles. After a while we managed the canvas into a misshapen hut, barely strong enough to last the night, but that was as sturdy as it needed to be. In the morning when I wandered out to stretch my legs, I found the forest was overwhelmed by blue. Never had I experienced such a light. Everything was submerged, as if the ocean had come to reclaim the world.

I floated between fir and fern, glancing springs of wild huckleberry and trillium, turned coral in this new light. Dew filled the air and the ground was soft to my steps, yielding an aimless path I was happy to be on. For hours I went, letting my trepidation of the unfamiliar melt. Something filled in my chest, the tinted air sponging through my lungs and seeping into the fibers of my body. I did not feel the terror that had shadowed my childhood encounters with the uncanny, yet I cannot say that I felt safe. If I had been a spectator, watching myself wander off into the blue forest, it might have been different. I might have been afraid. As it was, all I could do was be within it, slaking an unknown thirst, the kind you only feel once it’s been sated and rapidly begins to dry.

Eventually the blue forest dissolved and the light returned to one I could recognize. The air breathed familiar and plants became uninspired, a predictable outcome of nature. That was my first great loss. My only desire in that moment was to return; regardless of if it was a trick of the dawning light as it cracked through needle boughs, or a phantasm of the otherworldly; regardless of if there was a danger so overwhelming that I just did not notice it; regardless of if I really did want to return. All I felt was an immense desire to reclaim that tenuous feeling I had no name for.

 

On my 52^nd birthday, there will be an incredible moon. It will come so close that people step out into the streets, convinced they might be able to reach out and scoop at its cheesy face. I’ll wonder at it. I’ll wonder what makes it so yellow, what makes it so big, what keeps it from crashing, why has it never felt so close before? By then, I will know that the moon is married to the tide and I’ll wonder how the ocean feels with such proximity. What turmoil will it feel upon the leaving? Needing no answers, I’ll wander out into the street, joining hundreds who have gathered. The question of whether they understand what is happening won’t even cross my mind. And suddenly, someone will start playing the trumpet. At first it will feel like a joke, but more and more the crowd will move with the insistent brass, thrumming in staccato pulses: forward then stop, then forward again, questioning the moment and answering with their feet. All of this until a tuba joins in, strong enough to add real momentum and officially begin the parade.

We will march through the streets under the swollen moon, happy for our feet and each other’s company. Some dance. Some skip. I will find someone’s hand to hold for the first time in ages, and be glad to be with them, remembering how tenderness feels.

 

When I turned 21, we drank. It wasn’t my first drink, but we pretended like it was. We hadn’t been drunk together, this was new for us. Later, at the apartment, we opened a pomegranate, in part wanting the taste, in part wanting something to do together. We needed a task to sidestep the anxiety of tenderness. The knife went to the work as if it were an apple, cutting too deep in a full orbit when skin deep was all we needed. We were drunk, remember? The seeds split apart, tumbling in a burst like fireworks and leaving two halves. Missing pieces, leaking red.

Our surprise was paralyzing. Only in part because of what we saw, but the greater shock was having someone to see it with. A witness to our witnessing; which to that point had been utter isolation. There, below our unsettled eyes, the broken pomegranate pulsed. Like hundreds of little hearts, the seeds thrummed in the honeycomb flesh. And you saw it too.

 

I’ll see you again, though I thought I never would. It will be spring. The best weeks for eating sugar snaps. That year my garden will fail wonderfully. The peas come up empty and all I can manage is a laugh. The crisp pods will have nothing but the space where life could have blossomed, and I’ll taste one to learn that all the sugar is in the peas. I’ll enjoy the crunch well enough though, and harvest them anyways. Still craving real sugar snaps, I’ll go to the grocery store and see you there. Before you see me, I will ask myself: would you want me in your life again?

Eventually, I’ll decide you would not and leave. The only food I take home that day is flour, coffee, and saffron. All found in the aisles on the opposite side of the store from you, and then I will say that I got what I came for and serendipity decided not to act. I’ll wonder if that is wrong. If it isn’t my decision to keep us apart after you broke us apart. And I’ll wonder if you remember the January when it rained.

 

It was every day. 31 days of rain. Each day you took me outside to look into puddles. You said that if we looked just right, we could see where the rain has been. And it was true. Some puddles offered themselves up, becoming looking glasses into a history of evaporation and condensation. In one, we saw the broad deserts of northern China. A cloud that carried itself over sand and crackled ground, holding out until the Pacific for its next cycle. Through the puddle we could see that vastness pass below and you told me it was named Gobi. Certainty was always your strength, even in the face of the unknowable. Regardless of which desert it truly was, we were captivated. Only in this moment could we experience such a place in such a way. Our eyes weren’t meant for the sky, and even more so, they were never meant for the frightened way a raindrop looks down on barren deserts, grasping desperately at its gaseous state for fear of being swallowed by so much sand. It was the kind of feeling that swells in your chest, back behind the lungs so they are squeezed flat and breathing is a battle. Breathless, we watched the telescopic puddles, unaware of the rain that fell on our necks.

 

The first oddity that I come across without you will make me cry. Not from magnificence or awe, it won’t even be that wonderful. Mundane would be the appropriate word if it wasn’t an impossibility. Just some ice floating in a half-finished soda. I’ll notice the perspiration first, wet greeting my fingers as the summer heat pulls through the glass. Then in the next moment, the sun will be caught by the glass’s glisten and lure my gaze so that I see all the drifting bits of ice are shaped like lotuses. As soon as I realize what I’m seeing, I’ll leave, not able to stand crying in a diner booth without you.

 

I proposed in a diner booth. You laughed and made me cry. You loved me, but 25 was way too young to consider such a thing. The math you laid out confused me. 

“Marriage is a half for half exchange, and I plan to live for one whole century, and I can’t spend three quarters of my life with only half of my life which means that most of my life won’t have most of me and then is it even a full century?”

“Don’t you want to be together?” I asked.

“Yes, but only if there’s the chance that we will be apart.”

 

Eventually, I’ll get better at taking chances. I’ll return home when my parents leave to begin their road trip retirement. Only a few chickens have made it this far, and not the ones I grew up with. The backyard is free from fear now, and I can grow a garden. At first it is just sugar snaps, because I still have hope you might come back. Actually, at first they are just seeds. When I cover them with dirt, a feeling bubbles into my chest. Not behind my lungs, more beneath them. Akin to dread and hope, it will take some time for me to understand and name it. A powerful feeling: wonder.

 

Eric Oman Callahan is a writer from Portland, OR who explores themes of family, grief, and love through fabulist short stories.

 

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This is Where It Stops Making Sense

Brother called me leech, but the puppets call me lychee: bristled, sweet. In the attic, they give me pain killers and stroke my head. They cut me open just enough to see the creature trailing along the corners of my right lung, holding a flocked bear. Bald-bodied, keloid-crusted, it grazes on the vagus nerve. The puppets try to remove it, but it hides behind vital organs. There is a slight girlishness to the creature, its long lashes and nail-bitten hands. 

“There’s nothing we can do,” the puppets say. “Not without damage.” 

They sew me back up, the closing more painful than the opening. I pass out. In the dream, I can feel my brother watching my every move. The sky is white and the ground is white and the ocean too, which screams a prolonged, concentrated sound of glass breaking.

#

Let me explain. I am hiding from my brother, and I have no plans of returning. It is the only part of the game I have invented. He usually makes the rules, plays all the parts. He was Sam, my best friend, and he was also the man who shot him. He was the mad scientist who strapped me to a chair, and the agent who cut me loose. I was a good prop. And I played with him because who else did I have? He’d chased all my friends away.

Like all prey, I saw best through peripheral vision. I saw what he did to my journals, took them apart the way he peeled butterfly wings. Lavishly and with great care. When the pain began in my chest, I knew my brother had put it there. When he was near, it knocked me down on all fours. Like all prey, I had the instinct for flight. 

When no one was home, I snuck up to the attic, the place where my family would not think to look for me. I was afraid of the dark. But I was afraid of my brother more, so I closed the door behind me. This is where it stops making sense. 

#

During my recovery, the puppets introduce themselves. There is an old marionette, larger than the rest, which is to say, two watermelons tall, and the white string she stitched me up with falls out of her back in limitless supply. Her name is Olga, babushka eternal, and she is the puppets’ matriarch. There is the Rugged Princess, who spends her time in the shadows. A glove puppet that moves by bouncing. Hard to tell what she is made of. And Nima, a talking dog, a sock puppet. Three finger puppets who call themselves Ant and speak in unison. Though not a puppet, Pearlhead, the jack-in-the-box (“Our oracle,” Olga explains). 

They welcome me into their home. They sleep on old blankets around a broken piano. It occurs to me that the broken piano, however normal it seems, is another impossible thing. How could it have gotten here? There is only one way to the attic, through what I call the trapdoor: a little opening that becomes a ladder. There are two windows on either side of the attic, but they are about the same size as the trapdoor, approximately three watermelons wide. 

The puppets revere the house and try to protect it. “It is why we have a bad reputation,” Olga says of the stories my brother told me, of puppets creeping through closets and stalking children, winding around their parents’ hands and slitting throats. “We aren’t senseless. We only respond as the house asks us to.” 

The puppets, though kind hosts, are reluctant to reveal their secrets to me. They strike me as tricksters, carving labyrinths of traps and dead ends into the hollows of the house. I get the sense that they are powerful. Like the piano, like everything in this attic, they are impossible, driven to life by rough, bloody feelings. 

#

I try very hard to touch nothing and keep to myself, but there’s only so much you can do before you go stir-crazy and touching something, anything, becomes an act of grounding. I pick a corner of the attic as far as I can get from the broken piano, and I rummage through some packed boxes. Behind some of the boxes, there is a large brown trunk, and I decide to save this for last. 

Inside the boxes are photographs that I don’t recognize. A girl and her nanny lighting candles. A boy kneeling in the garden. A woman petting her cat. Our family moved here when I was five, when the only furniture in the house was a cream-colored couch and a sign above the kitchen window that said thankful. Appa had peeked into the attic, came crawling down and hacking up dust and saying, “There’s not a thing in there.” Then he closed it up for what he thought was for good. 

I work my way through the boxes, more photos of people I don’t know, cracked frames wrapped in tattered clothes, jars of screws and sewing thread, a candelabra, a quilt, eight spoons, newspapers that go back a hundred years, CDs, DVDs, records (classic pop, a compilation of surf rock), teacups, a rusty tea kettle, a globe that places Africa too close to South America, paper boats, clocks that tell different times, and a film camera without film. 

I make it to the trunk. I undo the buckle and open it. 

At first, the trunk seems empty. But no: it goes down through the floor, down to a dark place. I lower myself. 

“You found my secret spot.” 

The Rugged Princess lights a candle. I am in a little room. There is a blue cot, and a desk with mounds of wax—sad, finished candles—and something like a forest cropping up on all four walls, gray-brown mushrooms and colorful molds, polypore steps growing out of the wall. It is warm and damp.

“Oh. I’m sorry,” I say. 

In the candlelight, I can see the Rugged Princess more clearly. There is no mistake. Mixed in with patches of cloth, she has skin—real, human skin. And real eyes that blink, and yarn intermingled with black hair. A cloth chest. No legs—an opening. And I am not the only one in the attic with a heart that beats like. Ba dum, ba dum. 

“You seem afraid,” the Rugged Princess says. 

I reach for the hole, but the trunk slides shut. The candles go out. 

“No,” she says, “not yet. I’ll let you out, but not yet. First, I must tell you our story.” 

#

She doesn’t open her mouth, then, but I hear her speak. In my head, I see the story. 

What skin remembers. I had something like a brother once. He made me—attached my eyes first, so that I could see the rest and talk about it later. He went down skin with needle and thread, pinching blood into my frayed yarn-veins. The red fruit he placed in my chest, I called the Wound. And hair from his own head.

He put me on. He’d ride his hand up the pocket of skin in my back and my limbs would go limp. I’d feel an ache of fingers in my arms, crawling around cloth and bone, and I would take a step back from my body, into a room without light or sound, where I could watch the show he put on. Afterward, drained, I would curl up under his arm, full of his bitter smell, and fall asleep.

My inside scurries, foams at the mouth. 

What he called dreams, I called transportations. Take the night I first met you. Closed my eyes and entered the long, fast train that took me to the rice fields. There was a hessian sack in my lap. When the train stopped, I got off and walked to the center of the field, where I dug a hole. I opened the sack and turned it over, and your head fell to the bottom with a thud. Eyes closed, covered with hair. I buried it. The rain fell ash-soft, and I lay down beside the mound, and it could have been hours later when I heard another train shrieking in the distance, when you climbed out of the earth, head on body, body on crooked toes, wearing a gown that flowed like silk petals.

#

I am falling asleep with the Rugged Princess running her fingers through my hair. Far away, a piano sings. 

“Tomorrow,” she says, “I’ll walk you home.” 

“What for?” The trunk hollow is so warm, and the Rugged Princess has a voice that transports you, a low, lingering voice that cradles you. 

She tells me what we’re going to do, what the house asks of us. “We’re going to make something new with our hands,” she finishes. And she doesn’t say more, but I feel a shift in the smoke-haze, in my chest, blood spinning into fine threads. A desire to tunnel through marrow, haunt back what’s haunted you.

 

Anjali Ravi is a writer from Maryland and graduate of CU Boulder’s MFA program. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Liminal Stories, Necessary Fiction, and DREGINALD. Find them at anjaliravi.carrd.co.

 

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The Dinner Party

Things I’m not going to tell you about: her makeup, his hair, the cut of their clothes, her flickering glances, the unconscious movement of his hand and whether it aligns or contrasts with the cant of his shoulder and/or flexion of his jaw. Any music that might be playing. The lighting; the shadows. Anybody’s car. The living room wallpaper. The sofa, its pillows, upholstery. The way the bathroom faucet does or does not drip as a metaphor for something—class maybe, or emotions bursting or stuck. I’m not going to tell you any secrets regarding longings or histories or physical marks. But there is a dog snuffling around in the space between their feet; there is dust between the floorboards that is older than this town—this whole country, in the oh-say-can-you-see sense, anyway. Before they were felled, the trees that turned into the timbers that hold up the roof had roots as deep and wide as the canopies they cast into the sky. Did you know the forest is a mirror? Its duff an axis not unlike the line on the horizon where the sea and the sky collapse, indistinguishable. The dog once ate a mushroom from the duff in the place where the trees-turned-timbers were felled. It told her things far more valuable than whatever’s inside the room I’m not describing. The people in that room don’t gather mushrooms from the ground but from a paper box. The people and their paper-box mushrooms are surprisingly alike: purpose-grown in a sterile substrate to generate economic value in the marketplace. Isolated from the knowings in the dirt by design. Did you know that mushroom spores are one-tenth the width of a human hair, and that they seed not only the earth but the sky? At the heart of every raindrop: a spore. The dog marvels at the magic of it. The people eat their crab-stuffed creminis, oblivious to the missing taste of mycelial interconnection. Later the people will die an animal death. This, after a lifetime of trimming their whiskers and masking their scents, shuffling sheaves of paper made from toppled trees and eating lonely mushrooms born for boxes. No matter how their bodies are returned—buried, burned to ash—the earth will welcome them. Did you know that the end is a mirror of the beginning? The trees draw their nutrients from the rich soil. The network of fungi at their feet, pulsing with unknowable intelligence, calls down the rain under the gibbous moon. 

 

Maria Robinson studied Creative Writing at The Johns Hopkins University and has done graduate work at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her work has appeared in Electric Literature, Wigleaf, Best Microfiction 2023, The Forge, Bellevue Literary Review, and Cream City Review, among others. Find her at mariarobinson.com.

 

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In the House of the Professor

In the house of the professor he can’t find the restroom. Moments before he’d excused himself from the table, the kindly professor pointing the way, but in the dark hallway there are many doors and none of them lead to what he is looking for. It is a big house, remarkably big for an academic, though the table’s muted din still reaches him in the hallway. He’d looked for a light switch but couldn’t find one. It is not dark enough to grope along the wall, but in the act of gently pushing open a half-closed door he feels like a subterranean explorer happening upon the wet mouth of a dank dripping cavern. Dank these rooms are not, for when he peeks inside he feels the metallic gust of central air conditioning meet his wine-warm face, and he can tell from their yawning expanse and the quiet that they exude that they are large and high-ceilinged. The hallway’s wooden floorboards do not creak beneath him and if his brother were here or if he’d simply been alone—and not attending the dinner party of this highly-esteemed queer theorist—he would take off his nice shoes and slide across the varnished surface on his socked feet: long socks, terminating mid-calf, patterned with cheeky reindeer heads. Nice socks, the professor had said when he arrived, and he’d immediately felt ashamed, standing there on the doorstep—he’d cuffed the bottom hems of his pants to make the socks visible and now regretted this decision. I like the holiday spirit. He’d been the first, too, at dinner, to ask where the restroom was, hesitant to interrupt the amiable flow of collegiate conversation, but he simply couldn’t wait any longer, as all the wine threatened to burst his bladder right there at the table. Even now, each lurch portends painful release. He will modulate his sigh, aim for inaudibility, even though the sound will certainly not carry to the dinner guests. Unbecoming—the sound of the pleasure of pissing—in this professor’s tasteful home. He had, however, seen this professor in the restroom on campus. At the urinal. Not two weeks ago. He’d seen the attentive downward cast of the professor’s head, no doubt dutifully watching the piss hit the porcelain bowl, and he had swiftly locked himself in a stall to avoid potentially awkward contact, waiting till the professor finished at the sink and left the restroom to emerge from his impromptu hiding. He had also, at the time, sifted through the various feelings that this encounter produced: this confused collision of the professional and the scatological—or was it the urological? In any case, the condoned and the condemned, though scatological is a word he enjoys very much and finds very precise and academic and frequently used in his graduate seminars. There are many facets of his life in which this word aptly applies. He continues down the hall, opening every door, fruitless. He is reminded of a recurring dream he had as a child, a dream in which he is lost in a discordantly bright house—discordant because the cheery brightness does not align with his dark panic—and he is looking for his mother, or maybe his teacher, who often reminds him of his mother, but usually he is looking for his mother. He is opening many doors and can’t find her and as he grows increasingly frantic he opens the final door and suddenly he is in a garden he doesn’t recognize and finds his mother sitting on a picnic blanket, smoking a cigarette. At the smoking he begins crying and finally wakes up, the vision of this betrayal still searing his relieved but foggy consciousness. As a child he did not like when people smoked, believing that it was bad and probably evil but also unhealthy, as his teacher taught him in school. Many assurances his mother made that she’d never smoked and never would, though some part of him did not believe her and this part of him manifested itself in his dreams. It’s funny, now: he is a contented social smoker, happy to light up on the balcony of some dizzy party if a cigarette or lighter is offered, and his present self can safely and fondly reflect on the imperious moral rectitude that guided much of his youth. Why this dream comes to him now is a question that does not occur to him, but perhaps it is the uncanny verisimilitude between his present disorientation and that dream’s visual geography—the immense pressure of its emotional world. We can only assume. For another dream he remembers as he shuffles down the hall bears some striking similarity to the discomfort that currently clinches his midsection. In this dream he is riding very slowly in an elevator up through an abandoned industrial building in New York City. Nothing about the building suggests that this is New York City (for he has never been outside the building to verify), and there are no windows which reveal any telling landmarks, but he knows in his gut that this is New York City and thinks he can hear the sirens and cars and general urban clamor beyond the elevator’s nondescript walls. The elevator stops at each floor and opens its doors to reveal a member or members of his family. On the first floors are his parents and brother, on the third and fourth are his grandparents, and up and up his cousins and aunts and uncles, floor number or rather altitude increasing commensurately with his level of anxiety upon seeing each respective member of the family, some of whom give him more anxiety than others, especially the cousins who always asked him to play sports in the street at Christmas or Thanksgiving, sports which were never his strong suit, a weakness that he believed they always judged him for, his inability to catch a falling football or dribble a basketball, to pass or receive a soccer ball, none of it he could do and all of it he feared doing because he couldn’t do it, and he feared what they would say about him and he feared their laughs and taunts and he felt always trapped by those who were supposed to love him most—Why do they make you feel anxious? his mother would ask him, they are your family and they love you unconditionally. This another kind of assurance that some part of him doubted—how do you know they love me unconditionally? What if I killed someone? What if I flushed a hamster down the toilet? What if I can’t kick a soccer ball? He had never experienced any sign of love or affection from them—he saw them only on holidays, when they kicked or tossed around a ball in the street, and then he didn’t see them again for another six months until it was someone’s birthday (and he always liked birthdays more because they took place at restaurants so he didn’t have to play sports in the street). Anyway, the elevator goes up and up and at each stop some member of his family waves to him and asks him to come join them and he says no. This, he always thought, was pretty easy to interpret. Then—and this is the weird part, the unexpected but undisputed part—one of his cousins, one of these male cousins with whom he dreaded playing sports, but we will not say who, gets in the elevator with him. Up they go to a top floor at which they finally disembark and enter a dimly lit apartment room with a dingy mattress on the floor and a pile of unwashed clothes in the corner. There is no window, or if there is a window it offers only a view of a brick wall. Into the attached bathroom his cousin leads him. The bathroom is just as squalid as the living room, the tub and sink and toilet all coated in grime and rust and a dripping sound is everywhere, and then his cousin starts taking off his own clothes, even his underwear, though he can’t see his cousin’s private parts, or at least these seem blurred and out of focus. The cousin gets in the bathtub and turns on the water. The cousin sits and begins talking to him, though he can’t remember or discern what they are talking about, but it is something friendly and sportive. He has to pee. Mind if I piss? he says to his cousin, though he never in real life says the word piss. The cousin doesn’t mind. So he starts pissing. He knows his cousin can see him as he pisses. The feeling is incredibly pleasurable, though slightly painful, even though no piss comes out. With great exertion he squeezes out a dribble. He arcs his head back. Yes. Now he’s at a urinal, the toilet has become a urinal—there’s an important difference here—but his cousin is still blurry and naked in the bathtub. At this point he always wakes up. He is usually panicked, terrified, heart pounding, thinking that he has wet the bed, and he is already devising explanations to his mother. He pats the sheets all around his groin, he pats the front of his boxers, but everything is dry, if not a little damp with night sweat. No urine. But he is always hard. Very hard. The precise details of this dream he can remember so well because he recorded it in the dream journal of his high school creative writing class. The teacher of this class assured him that by recording your dreams immediately after waking and by completing this task every morning you will not only be better at recalling your dreams but allow them to flavor your fiction with some necessary modicum of the absurd. Of course, he did not write this full story in his dream journal. He did not write about anything after his cousin gets in the elevator; or rather, he changed the ending: he and his cousin ride up to the rooftop, where they do indeed witness the daytime skyline of New York City, then his cousin decides to jump and he jumps with him. This ending perhaps just troubling enough to get his teacher’s worried attention, but not enough to arouse suspicion. In any case, he feels now in the hallway of the professor’s house a similar kind of ecstatic pressure, the immense pressure of needing to piss, that he felt in the filthy restroom of his dream, and as he reaches the end of the hallway he turns a corner to find a much shorter hallway with two doors. He opens one door and discovers what appears to be the garage, the faintest residue of light extending from the foyer down the dark hallway and around the narrow corner to alight in razored glint on the spotless windshield of two sleek sleeping cars. He closes the door and opens the other: the restroom, at last. He goes inside and shuts the door, pressing down the silvered lock button.

In the restroom all is soft and pastel-hued. The hand towels folded conch-like are strictly decorative. Not knowing where to dry his hands he will wipe them on the front of his black pants. His piss is long and indeed glorious. He is renewed upon finishing. In the mirror he takes a flirty photo and sends it to the person he calls his lover. This is a relatively new lover, who would not condone the use of the word lover. The lover responds to the photo almost immediately: HOT, he says. MORE? He sends another photo, in another pose, this time showing more of his jawline, which looks rather defined in the restroom’s generous lighting. He knows that he is drunk, but he will hide this when he goes back out to the table. He is about to do this when he receives another text: SHOW ME MORE, the lover says, with a winky face. He knows what this means. He hesitates, then thinks: okay. He unzips the front of his pants and lazily untucks the bottom hem of his shirt, so that a section of his underwear is showing. He sends the photo to his lover. The lover sends back a drooling face emoji. TAKE IT OUT, the lover says. He knows, or can intuit, what the lover is doing right now. The lover is probably in his bedroom, or in the bathroom attached to the bedroom, arranging his hair or his clothes in front of the mirror, freshly showered. The bouncy curls of his lover’s hair are therefore damp and probably fragrant. They are both, after this dinner is over, going out tonight. Also with the lover might be the lover’s best friend, another man their own age, whose insistent presence he has found to be an increasing nuisance. The lover and the lover’s best friend touch each other frequently—in a platonic way, the lover assures. They do this in front of him and every time they do he must smother his rage, his desire to grab the lover’s wrist and pull him close. But this kind of possessive affection he knows would turn the lover off, would push him further away. He thinks now that the lover and the lover’s best friend are together, getting ready, for the best friend is also going out with them tonight (of course). He did not want this but he had no choice in the matter and no power to change it, and besides he wonders what he and the lover would actually do together once they got to the club alone—the lover not inclined towards public displays of affection with the one with whom he is actually intimate, despite the fact that any club they’d go to would readily encourage any such sort of gaudy proud attraction. So the unwanted third party—the best friend—is actually a convenient distraction from what he and the lover would not be doing, which would only irritate him further, and besides, the idea now of sending a more explicit photo to the lover with the best friend in the room actually sounds pretty hot, and he feels himself growing slightly hard. Perfect, he thinks, and he suddenly wants the best friend to see—a likely possibility, for he imagines his lover and the best friend getting ready together and absently touching each other in the light of the mirror. He pulls out the shaft of his penis and drapes it artfully among the folds of his open trousers. Trousers? He thinks trousers now because the word in all its foreignness is also suddenly hot to him, and actually the best friend is a somewhat attractive English transplant to their very modern Southern California university, and he has heard the best friend say this word many times in his particular accent, the soft syllables of which now ricochet around his sloshed brain. He takes the picture, and he is happy that his cock looks sufficiently thick enough to be arousing but not thick enough to show that he is in fact hard and growing harder. YUM, the lover replies, in all caps. NOW YOU, he types, briefly cognizant of the fact that this language is the same language they used in the anonymous online dating app where they met and where they arranged their first date. A “date” being a strange thing to arrange in such a place, a place with no rules and no prohibitions, except perhaps a prohibition against or rather a disinclination towards scheduling a meeting in a place so public as a coffee shop. In any case, he does not have time to reflect on what this might mean about the possible trajectory or rut of their relationship—this he will think about later, maybe tomorrow morning—because the lover instantly replies: CAN’T RIGHT NOW. Of course he wants to reply, WHY NOT, but instead says, OKAY FINE. WHEN’S YOUR DINNER OVER? the lover says, I’M ALMOST READY, and he replies, WE’RE STARTING DESSERT. WE MIGHT MEET YOU AT THE CLUB THEN, the lover says, and though he feels slightly vexed that his lover would go without him, the we in his response suggests that the lover and the lover’s best friend are in fact together, and that the lover has been receiving his pictures while the best friend is in the room, and that perhaps the best friend is privy to these pictures or has glimpsed them over the shoulder of the lover, a thought that fills him with redly animal satiation. And what’s more, the lover cannot share his own explicit photo with him because the best friend is there, and despite all their cubbish touching the lover does not want to reveal himself to the best friend in such a way. This is a victory. He is still too hard to return to the dinner just yet, so he watches the wine’s bloom swell and subside across his face.

Back at the table he feels jolly enough to tell the dinner guests the dream of his mother. By the end of his story all of the gathered professors and graduate students are laughing, kind laughs, fond laughs, shared laughs, they say, how cute, how funny, and he knows with sudden horror that he has revealed some part of himself that is unready. A deep scarlet shame overcomes him, though he doesn’t let this show, and he is quiet for the rest of the dinner. But this does not stop a spontaneous revelation of favorite dreams from going round the table, and he is caught off-guard, stilled, amazed, by one woman’s recounting: I am in an elevator in a skyscraper, going up and up, so high up that I begin to feel the popping in my ears and a kind of dizziness that must have come from the knowledge that the ground was very far away, and I remember feeling that I must be going to outer space, that there was no other explanation—but then, when I get to the top, I’m in an abandoned alleyway with a payphone and I get on and call my mother and discover that—well, I don’t remember exactly what she told me, but I remember that it just terrified me and woke me up immediately, my heart pounding, and I felt also a mysterious pain in my ears, especially the ear to which I’d held the phone, and a fuzziness, like they’d been stuffed with gauze or like I’d just emerged from a very loud, sightless place. For a long time after hearing this he will think of nothing else. Later, at the club, when the best friend has gone off to the restroom and the music thuds around them, he will shout this into the ears of his lover—this woman I don’t know had almost the same dream that I did—but the lover will not hear him.

 

Dillon Sefic is a writer based in Los Angeles, CA. He holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of California, Irvine, and studied Romantic poetry and Gothic fiction at the University of Oxford. He is at work on a novel.

 

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It’s All Been Done Before

These were not the first lobsters ever to be in a movie. They’d been on the job for almost fourteen hours, starting with their triumphant, if hungover, acquisition from a Chinatown market that morning. Kiran and Ciera had co-written the film. I was cinematographer, camera op, and craft services, because I lived with them, so I was there. And since I hadn’t paid March or April rent, there was a vibe that I should help out with anything that came up. Alicia was there, too, and appointed herself the lobster wrangler, making sure they were well-hydrated, spoken to fairly, never left for too long under the hot lights. 

“If I have a beer, will anyone else have one?” Alicia asked, after we’d packed away the light and sound equipment, to be returned the next morning. I said I would. Everyone knew I liked Alicia, but no one, including me, acted on that information. The lobsters chilled in the tank habitat we’d set up for them. Consummate professionals, both declined a drink.

“Cooking lobsters is easy,” said Kiran. “You just boil them in a pot of water. And melt some butter.”

“We’re eating them?” Ciera could channel strong emotions easily.

“What else are we gonna do?” Kiran asked. “Throw them away? Live with them forever and ever?” I looked it up. Most lobsters lived between ten and forty years. We were not sure how old they were. They seemed older than us. 

“Do you think a lobster has ever touched a beer?” Alicia asked. I took one of them out of the tank and brought it over to her, gently touched its claw to her bottle.

“Now he can die happy,” she said. “At least he touched something no lobster has ever touched before.”

“No way,” said Kiran. “You don’t think a line cook has ever boiled up some lobsters with a bottle in one hand?” If I didn’t owe him and Ciera $850 plus another $425 due in a few days, I might have told him not to yuck someone else’s yum.

We were a little restless, having crossed the line from completely exhausted to loopy. So, we loaded the tank into this granny cart we used for laundry and took them out onto the street. We held the lobsters up to mailboxes. We lowered them down to the sidewalk to touch a discarded medical glove. We stopped to get pizza, almost certain no live lobster had ever touched pepperoni. None of us had to get up the next morning. I refused to move back in with my parents in Windsor, even though that was technically an option, but the job hunt was getting dire. I knew my friends wanted me to stay. That they liked living with me. But I guess they didn’t like it more than they liked $850.

In front of the old Unitarian church, Alicia sat on the curb and lit up a cigarette. I didn’t bum cigarettes anymore, because it was like adding insult to injury, but if someone offered, I always said yes. Alicia passed a lit one to me, then lit another for herself. I wondered if she thought about it as a kiss via the game of telephone. Just one carcinogenic middleman between her lips and mine, distorting, “It feels like I love you,” into, “I don’t know why things seem so hard for you.”

“Do you think the lobsters want to get married?” asked Ciera. We took them from their tank again. We held them above our heads like boom boxes. Ciera sang “Amazing Grace.” We held them nose-to-nose. They were private lobsters; their display of affection was almost imperceptible.

“If I have a Fourth of July party,” asked Alicia, “will you guys come?” I was midway through counting to five so as not to sound too eager when Kiran said, “Alex might not still be here in July, right?”

After a pause, Alicia asked, “Oh, where are you going?”

“Yeah… no, I’ll probably be here,” I said. Ciera and Kiran exchanged a look. They didn’t want to kick me out. I guess it was a dick move for me to put them in the position of having to. But I hated the idea that our friendship was really just an expression of convenience. They’d be rolling around town with two lobsters and whatever warm bodies they’d been drinking with that night.

When we got home, we ate the lobsters. Kiran boiled them up, Ciera cut lemons into little wedges, and Alicia and I brought plates out to the porch, where we could almost see the sun coming up. As I ate, I watched Alicia watch the horizon, melted butter smearing her skin like the sheen on a bubble. These weren’t the first lobsters to touch the inside of my throat, my esophagus, whatever else comprises the passageway from on-set talent to literal crap.  I hoped they died happy, though.

 

Julia Meinwald is a writer of fiction and musical theatre, and a gracious loser at a wide variety of boardgames. She has fiction published or forthcoming in After Dinner Conversation, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, X-R-A-Y, Bayou Magazine, and The Iowa Review, among others. Her work as a composer has been in productions across the US and Canada, and the cast album for her musical The Magnificent Seven streams on Spotify, Apple, and elsewhere. juliameinwaldwrites.com.

 

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