Category: AP39

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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territory

Mud feeds on fears.

The terrain around the small wooden house was dry and solid only for around one third of the year. The rest of the time, and especially in the smoke-veiled months at the end and beginning of the year, the earth would fiddle its swampy fingers voraciously at anything or anyone trying to make their passage in either of two possible directions: towards and away from the premises. Any false move could cost one a leg or a cussword. Sludge was greedy and appropriated whatever it got a grip on. It was a limbo no one had asked for, no one had designed nor engineered. Perhaps one glorious day in the Future all the long forgotten creations—unpaired earrings, unspent coins, unsent letters, unsung birdsong, unsaid whys and wherefores—would get excavated by a group of archeologists or march out of their own accord into the daylight to set the record straight, and chant their hymn of solace. But what if, after some delirious and dizzy moments of ecstasy, they would realise there was nothing for them there—on the surface—and they would want back? This question seemed to be mostly overlooked.

Sludge just wants to grow. It has no other purpose or goal.

The house—inhabited by ghosts, mice, and ants—was haunted by a human. For some reason the person wouldn’t leave the premises, even though he was not welcome there and if not met with hostility, at least unfriendly mistrust. This type of flatshare can be taxing to anyone, and especially to mature ghosts, because by the end of the day, all they really need is peace and quiet from the living, and not engaging with another sweaty confused mumbler.

It’s not that they were impatient or easily irritable, no. But the drifts of smelly socks laying around, the mountains of undone dishes attracting flies, the kilometres of muddy footsteps leading nowhere, the unwavering egotism, incoherence and irrationality—had been taking their toll, bit by bit, year after year, until it couldn’t be ignored anymore, the water in the pot about to boil over.

‘There’s not enough room for all of us here,’ the ghosts and animals agreed one day. ‘He needs to leave.’ And so they came up with a plan to make the human go. 

Marsh has no mercy.

In theory, getting rid of a human should not pose much difficulty, as it is well known to be a lame species, used to living in comfort, embarrassingly incapable of surviving in the wild. First thing to try out was as simple as changing the locks. Why overcomplicate things, the planning committee decided, and one autumn afternoon, when the unwanted tenant went on a weekly excursion to supply himself with mass-produced food to keep up his life functions, they replaced all latches and boarded up all windows and doors (as those were yet another useless facility only humans need.) But keeping him away from the house only worked for a few days, until he broke down the front door with a massive hammer. The mice hid in the walls, ashamed, the ghosts turned inwards and were nowhere to be seen for the following week, the ants entrenched themselves in a dusty pyramid and held trials to make responsible those who had put forward that disgraceful project.

When things got quiet again, they all reassembled and turned to the Internet for advice. It turned out humans themselves had the most efficient methods of getting rid of other humans, and the World Wide Web offered innumerable ideas to achieve that. They created a ring of salt around the house and set howlite and tourmaline here and there. They lit white candles in all the spots where the human liked to spend time. They installed sound repellers blasting reggae all day long. They set up traps with banknotes and bling-bling knick-knacks.  All to no avail. It was almost as if the human had known about their plan and outsmarted it, even though he had shown no previous signs of acuity.

Slime has no limits.

There is a certain point beyond which non-violent methods need to be considered insufficient. That was the common conclusion they had arrived at when all previous attempts to evict the human had failed. They wanted to do it properly at last—so they awaited the right moment.

For long weeks there had been a period of drought and it seemed that the natural equilibrium had been forever disrupted. The muddy fosse around the house had solidified and sometimes you could even hear some knocks on the door and receding footsteps. The human started to go out more, first somewhat cautiously, later with an increasing confidence—storming out the front door whistling and waltzing. The life at home got more pleasant for everyone, and the initial plan of separation became less urgent. Weeks of seeming tranquility had passed and something started to be discernible in the air, for whomever had their eyes and nostrils open wide enough. The dryness was sending signals and requests, not capable of maintaining itself anymore. There could be only one way out of that situation and it was hanging above the burned out land like an overripe fruit, that would splash out its entrails when falling down. And so it did, and everyone would say they had been waiting for it, but truth be told, they had feared it as much as they’d desired it and felt its inevitability. 

There had been many testimonies as to when and where the first drop had fallen, but one thing could be certain—it had soon been followed by an endless stream of lookalike droplets, hitting like aimless bullets. And it hadn’t stopped for weeks.

Mud never leaves, it only awaits.

The situation at home got tense once more, as the human was grounded, his presence mercilessly increased. The ghosts, mice and ants reconvened again. It was time. 

It happened at three in the morning, because three in the morning is the hour when ghosts and mice feel the fittest. It’s also the hour when humans are usually at their lowest levels of vital forces. Not everything went according to the plan, but they managed to chloroform the body into a deeper sleep and then carry it outside. They didn’t have to do much more than that, because this is when the mud took over—spread its sleazy arms in an almost affectionate gesture and gently caressed the human, dragging him inside, making him its own, one with itself. Reunited.

And the ghosts, mice and ants lived happily ever after, in a peaceful communion.

Until.

They always come back.

Klau Stępień comes from Warsaw and from the Polish language, but resides in Brussels, where she works as a linguist, and in English, which she chose as her foster parent tongue. She is currently at work on her debut novel. Come say hi at klaustepien.com.

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Mother Is Dead

My mother stopped screaming at my sister, who was, by now, thirty feet out in the water, and jumped into the ocean after her. I was twelve; she was seven. How she got so far out, I have no idea. Maybe because we never went to the beach, my sister barely knew how to swim. We only took the trip on that occasion because my mother was trying to cheer us up after our father’s death. It was my fault: I was the one who’d asked to go to the beach. But the heat that day was oppressive, and everything had gone wrong from the start: my mom forgot to pack an umbrella, and my sister got sand in the peanut butter jar, so we sat in the midday sun and ate jam on untoasted bread. To escape the heat, my sister had jumped in the water, without any regard for the tide. I stood and watched as my mother carried her back to shore. When they made it to me, I grabbed my sister’s hand as my mother ran to get a towel. We went home from the beach early that day, and my sister took a hot bath, and I sat in my room alone, staring at the ceiling. My sister was always getting into trouble, and my mother coddled her. That day, she could have died trying to save her. She was the little one. She couldn’t take care of herself. I tried so hard to be good, and what did I get for it? 

*

Julia and I lie on our mom’s sectional in black dresses. I have one leg off the couch and the other propped up on a pillow. I am just beginning to feel the effects of the day’s heat: slowed movement, a stillness in my mind. Anything that catches my attention becomes a rabbit hole to wander down. I glance at my sister, who stares absently at the ceiling, biting her nails. In my mourning clothes, the memory of our father’s funeral looms closer. It took six months for leukemia to take him. We weren’t prepared for his death. Mom lived much longer. Until last week, that is, when she fell down the stairs. We weren’t prepared for that one, either.

“Do you remember when we were at the beach after Dad died?” I ask my sister.

“I remember,” she says.

“And you almost drowned when Mom went to get ice cream?” I ask.

“That’s not what happened,” she says, drawing out the vowels. “Mom went to get us popsicles. And I wasn’t drowning. She was just upset that I went in the water when she wasn’t looking. She always overreacted.”

“I remember you coughing up water when you got out. Mom put you in swim lessons after.”

“She put you in swim when you were seven, too. Look, I don’t want to argue about it. I didn’t drown, and Mom wasn’t getting ice cream.”

“How do you remember it, then?”

She takes a moment to consider.

“We barely spoke that day. Mom read and we built a sandcastle. No one had anything to say to each other. It was terribly hot and everyone was depressed.”

“See,” I say, smiling. “And that’s why you went in the water. You couldn’t stand it anymore. Dad’s death weighed on you.”

“It weighed on you, too. You took almost a month off school. You fainted at the hospital and had a string of fevers. Mom made chicken stock for weeks, even though it was an unusually hot September. We’d all sit in the kitchen eating soup, waiting for your fever to break. You were the one who needed caring for.”

“That’s not true. It was because of my period that Mom made the soup. I had bad cramps.”

She absently opens and closes the blinds next to her, pulling on the string. “That’s just not right,” she mutters. Then, more loudly, “Do you really not remember why I went in the water?”

I roll my eyes.

“No, really,” she continues. “Do you not remember what you said about dead people in the water?”

My sister’s memory of the past is usually entirely different from my own recollection, but she supports her claims with tiny details no one else could verify. Her memory gave her stories credence and lent her an air of authority that was hard to refute. It was also why everyone, ever since we were kids, liked her so much: she made them feel special by recalling their birthday after meeting them once, or the name of their pet, or exactly what they said to her on the beach twenty-five years ago. When Mom and Aunt Louisa argued about which Christmas dinner Uncle Eric had shown up drunk and crashed the car into Grandpa’s living room, she spoke up, pointing out that it had to have been when she was nine. If it had been any later than that, Eric would have hit Sam’s RV, which was parked out front after he moved in to take care of Grandpa. If it had been any earlier, Grandpa wouldn’t have stood outside screaming about how he’d just had the shingles redone after thirty years. Not only did she remember this: she also cited the temperature outside when we opened the front door. She knew that Mom had been wearing her red velvet shirt, and that Grandpa’s breath made a large cloud in front of him as he screamed at Eric, who just stood there and took it, holding a palm to his bloody forehead. 

And they looked at her and smiled, like what she said settled the matter. Like just because she knew these details, she had access to some secret knowledge they didn’t. She always needs to be the favorite, the helpful child, the forgiving daughter. She’s terrified of making people upset. She’s so easygoing, but she’s never been able to hold down a job: she works part-time because she got fired from the only full-time job she ever had, and decided she’d never give so much to one employer again. She’d called me crying for months, each time her bosses were upset, unable to stand up for herself at her job. I gave advice she never took, and knew it was a matter of time before they let her go. She never asserts herself, even when she wants to, because she’s so afraid of confrontation, and can’t stand the thought that another person might not like her.

Our mom was not like that. Our mom was loud and brash and struggled to keep abreast of everything that life threw at her. And I’m like Mom. That’s why no one likes me.

“Whatever,” she says, shaking her head. “Let’s just grab some photos and get out of here.”

We’re supposed to be going through photos. That’s why we came. Right. 

*

We get off the couch and walk down the hall. I open the door to my mother’s bedroom. The blinds are down and it is musty and I walk to her closet and open the door. It’s stuffed with boxes. Mom was organized enough, but she had too much shit to take care of. She often called the house an overflowing ship, as though, living in this apartment, we were lost at sea. I grab the stepstool under her bed and stand on it to push aside boxes stuffed on the uppermost shelf. 

I pull down a box filled with unsorted Kodak photos of the family, mostly from the vacations we took as children. I pass it to Julia. Sitting on the ground, I shuffle through a handful and find photos of old trips to Sequoia, Zion, Arcadia. There are some of our parents standing outside the apartment when they first moved west, and others of me and my sister playing in the park down the street. There are several of me climbing trees, scrambling over rocks, or standing with my arms out in front of vast desert landscapes. Two in particular stand out: one in which I climb a tree wearing a dress covered in sunflowers, my mother below me and facing the camera, her mouth open wide as she yells at me to come down—as she so often did if I climbed anything taller than her hips. In the other, I stand with my mother in front of the Grand Canyon, her hand on my shoulder, both of us looking off to our left, laughing, as though something just outside of the frame has stolen our attention right as the photo was taken. 

I bring this photo close to my face, so that my breath fogs it up, and I have to pull it back again. In this photo, we look exactly the same, my mother and me. We have the same button nose: wide at the tip with an upwards curve. The small dimple on our chins stands out in the light, my hair cut exactly like hers, just above the shoulders. I put the photo aside and find dozens more that capture our similarities. Back then, I hadn’t recognized that I was her spitting image. Over time, I have come to accept it, reluctantly, angrily. But I’d never been confronted with such an onslaught of evidence of our physical parallels: the dimpled chin, the unruly hair, wide shoulders, small hips. I even have her unnervingly large and flat upper lip. I panic. Perhaps it means that our brains, too, are shaped in a similar way, and if you cut us open, you would see that we are the same person, inhabiting the same mind.

I have the impression that I can erase our similarities if I dispose of these photos, which serve as evidence that I am descended from this woman who, in many of the years these photos were taken, was mad. She was incapable of raising two daughters alone, barely keeping herself and her home together after her husband’s death. 

Like, for instance, after my mother had gotten me used to walking home from the bus stop for years, forever forgetting to pick me up, she showed up at school one day to grab me because she’d had a doctor’s appointment nearby. She wandered the halls asking teachers and students where I was, so by the time I got out of class everyone had already seen her: hair matted from not having showered in days, a rotting odor of eggs on her breath, her lips pale and cracked. She wore these ill-fitting, capri-length, too-tight yoga pants, and her calves weren’t shaved. She even had on the Pacsun hoodie a boy I no longer spoke to had given me the year before, when I’d needed to walk home late from his house. I had put it in the Goodwill pile in our garage, and my mom had apparently plucked it out without saying anything. I couldn’t process this image: her standing in my school’s halls, her insanity on display for anyone to see. In the car home, I screamed at her for embarrassing me in front of my friends. I told her she was an idiot. I believe I told her, in my outsized feelings, that I hoped she would die, too. Of course, I didn’t consider what I was saying. But I said it and then she called me a bitch, and for the rest of the car ride we were silent.

I’m not mad. Or, I can’t be, because I don’t have the time or the resources. And if I never gave my sister the chance to display these photographs at the funeral, no one would know how mad I might possibly be. No one would be able to look at these photos, as I am now, and think: I never realized quite how much Lily looks like her mother, which explains why she inherited her tumultuous, impetuous, cold, demanding disposition.

I put the photo down. My sister is looking at her own pile.

“Fine. What did I say about the water?” I ask.

“That the entrance to the underworld was in it, and if I went and got Dad, he’d come back.”

I don’t remember this.

“So you thought you could bring him back?”

“Yes.”

“And what was your plan?”

“To find him and help you feel better.”

“Why did you think he was there?”

“There was a man out in the water, swimming. He looked like Dad.”

“Did you tell Mom?”

“No. When we came back, you were crying.”

“I never cry.”

“Well, that’s why we went home.”

*

I ignore her version of events. I’m too tired to argue, and besides, I’d never win.

“I look exactly like Mom in these photos,” I say, holding them up. “Why do I have to look exactly like her in every photo?”

If my sister had brought these photos out for the funeral, I would have been mortified. I may have even killed her, right there at the funeral, for exposing me like that. I would have rushed at her over the coffin and strangled her above Mom’s dead body. It would be a closed casket, of course. We remember our grandmother’s death: how the coroner had botched her makeup, so when we looked at her face we knew she wasn’t there anymore—her cheeks too pink, her lips too red. The color was all wrong. Seeing her face shook my dad so thoroughly that, on our way home, he’d told us we were all going to have closed caskets, or get cremated. And my sister said she liked the idea of an open casket because then the dead person could watch over us at the funeral, and my dad said that wasn’t how it worked, and my mom said how would you know, and the two of them continued bickering so that when I asked what cremated meant no one heard me. 

“You’re nothing like Mom,” my sister says. “That’s what you’re afraid of, isn’t it? But you’re not soft enough. And you’re so obsessed with differentiating yourself, you never saw what was good about her. She took care of us. She looked out for us. That counted for nothing to you, though. You took her for granted. Am I right?”

This was something else Mom had liked to say: family isn’t something you can take for granted. It’s a relationship you work on, and those relationships can be ruined, too. It’s why she stopped talking to her sister. She’d told me she’d rather die alone than have a conversation with her. She didn’t worry much about unfinished business or dying. It was Dad who’d been afraid of death, since the men in his family all died young. Mom’s family lived forever, or died of a horrible accident: mountaineering, a car crash. She was convinced for many years that if she could just make it to seventy, she’d be ok. But she didn’t make it. In the end, both of them were right, no matter how much we’d told them they were crazy, or melodramatic.

Julia picks up the pile I’d put to the side.

“We’re not bringing those,” I tell her, taking them out of her hand.

*

I stand up and start pacing the room.

“You were always the favorite,” I tell her, ripping the photos in half. “You’re right, okay? I’m afraid of growing old and being just like Mom: struggling to keep my life afloat, a distracted control freak, alone forever, my whole body aching by the time I’m forty, where simple colds wipe me out for days. I am afraid of looking out only for myself, of stepping in only at the last minute: when it’s too late, when my daughter’s already drowning—because you were drowning. You say I’m nothing like her, but it’s certainly not you who has her disease—you even followed dad’s career. And you look like him.” I rip the photos again and pace the room. “You have his skin, his blood. Don’t you get that? After you married so young, she treated me like a spinster. She’d suggest I ask out some guy on the street, or set me up with her friend’s son, and then act like I was unhappy and my being single was the root of all my problems. I never wanted this. But she picked on me. She never worried about me, or how I was doing. Only if I was dating. She spoke about my life with a tone like I had done something wrong. Like it was my fault. Like my career counted for nothing. God, if we ever had dinner together, Mom found a way to turn the conversation to how I’d never find a husband. I just wanted to spend time with her. You don’t know what it was like.”

I grab fistfuls of the loose photos scattered across the floor and stuff them back in the box. Still holding the scraps I’d ripped—the ones that had to go—I stumble into the kitchen. I need to keep everything in order so that no one will know about the photos, or how much they had unsettled me, pushing me into this abyss. I tear them into smaller pieces and toss them in the trash.

“Take it easy,” my sister says, standing behind me.

“How is it you remember everything different from me?” I ask.

I turn around, and for a moment, I have that image of me strangling her above the coffin, and think I could do it now. I take a step towards her. She looks out the window lazily.

“It’s so sunny,” she says. “I bet we have time to go to the beach.”

*

She asks me if I still think the underworld could be out there, past where the waves break.

“Mom might be there now, and if we could only save her, we could bring her back,” she says. 

Then she runs in, without taking off her black dress, and I watch as she wades out in the water. When she starts swimming, I can’t take it anymore. I go in after her. The ocean is colder than I expect—it always is—but I push forward, wanting to stay with her, to see where she is leading me. Maybe, if I could keep up for once, Mom really would come back and tell me I had done a good job with my life. Even if she’d sometimes hated me, or hit me. My feet stop touching sand, and I begin treading water. A wave crashes over my head, and I hold my breath and duck under. I am sucked back to the surface, and another wave comes, and I am swept up by its force. I swim further out, my sister’s head poking in and out of view. Then I am past the wave break. My sister floats on her back, waiting for me, always one step ahead. I do the same as her. I look at the clouds in the sky.

I might have a tendency to overdo things. The one thing I never had done was “take it easy.” I struggled with moderation. Even that little girl in the photographs: she had no idea how to live in moderation. That was something we had in common. We only knew how to do things all or nothing. Like in the photo where I climbed the tree, and my mother stood below me. When I was young, I could climb all day, and I looked forward to those brief moments above the park, which I associated with freedom. I never slipped or fell or got stuck, even though my mom told me I would, and threatened to climb up to get me. But I knew she never would. I knew she couldn’t. The body has a way of becoming clumsy with age.

One of the few things that marked me as separate from my mother had been that fearlessness, that absolute control over my body, the willingness to keep going on my little adventures. As I grew older, my excess found an outlet elsewhere: in drinking, in speaking, in going long stints without a shower. I am bad at being quiet and docile and subdued in the world. Throughout all my reading in college, I came across passage after passage waxing poetic about the essential passivity of women. But in my real life, I never found this to be true. Not of the women I knew, especially not the woman who raised me. Even if she could get beaten up by the world around her, there was a resilience that I did not associate with apathy, and a fierce determination that I did not associate with a single sex. My mother—even in that photo of me, with her hands thrown up and her mouth open, yelling at me to come down—was always angry and yearning. She did not struggle with asserting herself in the world.

I right myself and look at my sister. I watch water droplets fall across her cheeks. For a moment, looking at her—just her face, disembodied—I see my dad again.

“I guess she isn’t here,” I tell her.

“No,” she says, righting herself, and the image of my sister is returned to me. “What did we expect?”

Brianna Di Monda edits for the Cleveland Review of Books. Her fiction has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Oyster River Pages, Taco Bell Quarterly, and Worms Magazine, among others. She’s a recipient of the Glenna Luschei Award for Fiction, a semifinalist in the American Short(er) Fiction Contest, and a nominee for the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize.

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A Bad Dog, a Good Dog, a [Dog]

Lily-of-the-valley looks like it was made for a dollhouse, or for illustrations of fairies. Among the stinky onion grass and weeds and dirt, the perfect white bell flowers seemed man-made. The air was tense like rain coming, like hands reaching up to catch. As the sun disappeared behind clouds, the heat and humidity cooled to a stuffy lukewarm. When the wind blew, the lilies-of-the-valley whispered urgently to each other. The grasses bent, and if they had not been cut short they would have shined like glossy hair. The thousands of maple leaves on the old tree rustled, a sound like thunder. Insects were swept away by the breeze. Forty gnats and forty mosquitoes danced in the air like pixies, like insects who wished to bite. On the railing of the porch, a shiny black ant marched, and behind it another, and his cousins, and their nephews, and their friends. Some carried crumbs, but many carried nothing at all. Everyone bent their faces up to the sky, hoping for rain to fall. 

Spring air is sweet and suffocating. So many lilacs, so much honeysuckle. Their scent is syrupy, perfumed, heavy–like a memory of being pulled into a hug against fine fabrics, inhaling Chanel No.5 and expensive creams. Like many teeth, artificially straightened and whitened, smiling around in circles. Congratulations, the memory says, for graduation and preceding reputations and vacations, publications, ovulations, gratification. It is good that all of that is in the past. Those people in the memory would not approve of the neighbors’ tense voices from across the yard, angry with each other and shouting at Dubie to get the fuck off the flower beds. There aren’t any flowers in the beds anyway, just a few cigarette butts embedded into the dirt like scattered seeds. But one day there might be flowers, the neighbor’s wife thinks. 

There is another dog (other than Dubie who stands in the flowerbeds), the white one that can be seen every day laying out in his owner’s yard. Everyone says, oh he is such a good boy for staying on his lawn even though there is no fence. And the dog is good, he finds various ways to be comfortable, lying flat in the grass or curled up on the cement walkway or sniffing at the open window, listening to the voices of his owners inside. Despite his goodness, he does not wish to be left outside all day. The sun is hot. The yard is lonely. 

A voice that previously could not be heard becomes audible as the screen door squeaks open and closed. An apology from a brother over the phone, and news about Mother. She will be re-writing the will. She’s met with the lawyer. She feels rejected, and she feels it is only fair to exclude others in response. The ‘She’ like a god that says over and over ‘I AM ALL POWERFUL. I AM ALL KNOWING.’ Gods that say those things are rarely anything at all. A gust of wind blows, and the head nods to the voice in the phone. The hair falls down in the face and is swept away in the wind. The phone is adjusted against the ear. The news he called about is not news at all. Brothers cannot fathom the lives of their siblings, no matter how much love they give, no matter how much conversation is had. A child who is belittled will grow to be a teenager who is quiet, who will become an adult you no longer know. Brothers do not understand this. Mothers always prefer boys. 

Darkness grew in the shadows of the maple tree. The shadows shifted as the branches bent. The air was filled with the rumblings of a giant who had thrown his sweater over the sky. Light poked dimly through the clouds, but the sky was suffocated, grey, and heavy. The mosquitoes were constant. The traffic was constant. Rustling of a thousand wings and a thousand tires on the pavement and a thousand maple leaves, all sounding like shhhhhh  shhhhhhh  shhhhhhh. The shushing of a parent to a distressed child was softer and slower than this; this was the shh!ing of danger you have not yet escaped. Yellow-green pollen made eyes water like suddenly breaking down into tears, but the sky was unaffected. Its steely silver back was turned and did not promise rain. The bright blossoming of daffodils and dandelions was joyful, a release from the oppression of winter, but not a release. The air had warmed after months of freezings, but it was not the respite that had been hoped for. Released but not released. Dubie pisses on the flower beds and is whacked on the rump. He barks and barks but no one can understand what he says. His whines start to sound like please, please. Your need cannot be satisfied if we do not understand what you are asking for. 

Socked feet accumulate static electricity against the weatherproof paint on the porch. The cellphone grows hot, unaccustomed to long phone calls. Brothers apologizing for the acts of their mothers. Cursing at the bugs that land on flesh, and the ones that learned to needle their noses through fabric. Swatting, swatting, and even if the rain came it would not deter the mosquitoes that had grown to look a turkey in the eye flat-footed. The neighbors shout at each other. The skin was supposed to heal. The dermatologists always say to get a little bit of sunlight and it will do wonders, but the skin is still raised. Now, sweat burns against the cracks in the elbows. Sunscreen cannot be applied to broken skin, so the skin sees mostly overcast days. There will be relief. There will not be relief. Brother laughs and tells an old joke, and it is better for a moment. The air is so humid it feels heavy, like the world is already underwater.

In the summertime, evening seems like it will never arrive. The winter was so dark, pitch black before anyone returned from work, and black still in the morning. Now, it’s well past dinner time and the sky is a comatose sort of grey. Undying, unsetting, the sun grasps onto the world, afraid. God created Light and Dark, Heaven and Hell, Man and Woman, Good and Bad. The world is now without God.

The phone beeps three times when the call is ended. 

The brother does not know about the neighbor’s wife who is so glad to have gotten divorced from the man who yelled at her for every thing she did, to be freed from that anger and that callousness, to have found her current husband who she knows does not yell at her for everything, he yells at her when Dubie pisses on the flower beds and he might yell at her that she will never plant flowers in the beds because she has not so far and they have lived there for several years, but he does not yell at her for every thing she does. And she knows Dubie is so happy to have them, to be patted and fed, but also that Dubie thinks his kibble is bland and he does beg for scraps of bacon and pulled pork and even the voting registration letter he saw her opening because the tearing of the paper sounded delicious like there could be a treat inside. Dubie looks jealously over at the white dog across the street who must be so peaceful all the time because his owners never yell at him, they never bang pots together to scare him or run him off of the flowerbeds or shout, though maybe sometimes that dog wishes his owners would say something to him, or to yell, because nothing ever happens at all. The white dog had been listening to the call on the porch with the screen door and he huffed his doggy breath thinking that person is talking to no one at all. People are silly to think they can bark and snarl into their little bright rectangles, as if anyone hears. As if anyone is listening. 

Squirrels hide in their homes. Chipmunks disappear between garden stones. The bees have left, and only the mosquitos remain. The air becomes very still and suddenly not humid at all, but not dry; a sort of nothing temperature, a nothing wetness. The huge maple tree held its breath like a child poised at the end of the diving board. Some mothers have children when they do not want to, and they try to love them, they try harder than is comfortable to imagine. She wishes for relief from a child she did not love, or relief from not loving the child, or something. And for now, it is ended. Sometimes when crying is very well-deserved it comes out like throwing up, like a heaving that starts in the stomach. Instead of one polite drop, the rain starts with one thousand raindrops drenching the world. The lilies-of-the-valley bow their heads, weighed heavy by water they would have died without. 

KP is an Armenian-American currently working in the medical field. An inhabitant of both Philadelphia and Southern New Hampshire, KP is stranded somewhere between wild green mountains and the parking lot of a Wawa. A weekly newsletter called Fever, written by KP, can be found on Substack.

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The Anemic Songstress

Harvesting can’t begin till the song is sung, since the gods can’t go to sleep without hearing their song and crops cleaved from the nurturing embrace of the earth can’t be left lying around at the mercy of sleep-deprived gods. If they spit out even a raindrop in anger, it will birth fungus that will eat through the grains and shove the farmers deep into pits of debt. But Usha, the only one blessed with notes high enough to reach the gods, is nowhere to be found. The burden of searching her out, as usual, falls to me—her best friend. Hesitant at first, two painful kicks to my bum have me trotting off on my quest.

I track her down to the abandoned pump house—sitting on the floor, her kurta tucked above her exposed tummy, and in her lap a pot to catch the blood trickling down from her navel. We lock eyes through a crack in the wall. I could only practice till the third verse before the bleeding started and made me lose my melody. Do something, dear calf. I push my way in and go lie down, nudging up against her. She wraps my tail around her arm. I have eaten every red food to compensate for the loss of blood. I have spent hours beating granules out of pomegranates. I have chewed through muddy chunk after chunk of beetroot. Still, I can’t hold a note once I start bleeding. And this has worsened since I turned twenty last year. I want to give her a reassuring lick, but she hates wetness of any sort.

Her fevered stomach pulsing against my ear sets my mind racing. Once her bleeding stops, I nudge her up, forward, and toward the priest’s house on the village outskirts to meet his son, who I have heard has just returned from the city hoping to establish a big residential school. We find him sipping tea outside, a curved hat on his head making it look like he has grown horns. He hears Usha out and scoffs at her for believing old wizards’ tales. He says she’s anemic and simply consuming foods the color of blood is not going to help her; to gain the strength to sing unrestrained, she needs more iron to produce more blood, and the best sources of iron are black foods like liver. He then invites her in, but she excuses herself and we trundle off. Ignoring questions from passing farmers, we make it to the butcher’s. She instructs him to set aside fifty grams of liver for her every morning. He refuses to take any money.

I show up at the butcher’s the next day since Usha’s exhausted, and he ropes around my neck a pouch whose rusty smell immediately makes me dizzy. I somehow get it to her home and she fries up the liver in it with curry leaves and vinegar and wolfs everything down with stale rotis. Next day, the same. And the day after. On the fourth day, I can’t stand the stench and retch in the middle of the road. I still deliver the liver but leave before she starts cooking. I maintain this routine despite losing my appetite. After about two weeks, Usha shows me her palms, redder than before. Two days later, she doesn’t let me leave; bleeding from her navel, she leads me in, climbs onto her bed, and bursts into the most beatific paean I have ever heard. Minutes pass but the song doesn’t let up; rather, the crescendos keep rising and rising, with all the air inside wriggling out and the birds and dogs outside joining in. Usha gradually climbs down and hugs me breathless. Her tears of recovery nourish my gaunt frame.

The night before the rescheduled pre-harvest song, Usha visits me in my shed. If only maa hadn’t always been badgered with demands for a baby boy. If only she hadn’t feared losing me to girl disposers the moment she got some shut-eye. If only maa had been brave enough to let the umbilical cord be cut; she would have been here to watch me grow up normal. It was the leftover womb inside her that killed her and only then could mausis snip off our cord, calf, the delay leaving me with this chronically infected navel that bleeds whenever. I, who have never been allowed to suckle my mother, moo in commiseration. As long as my health improves and so does my singing, no one cares that I don’t stop bleeding. Why should I keep singing for those who only know how to use me? I will not sing tomorrow. I will not sing till these ungratefuls come up with a definitive cure. Anyway, the only one here with a scientific temper is the priest’s son. Maybe he can help me again. This time, she leads the way, and I blindly follow.

We again find the priest’s son outside his door, horned, sipping milk. He listens to Usha and replies that traditional knowledge can at times trump science. He points out that she has often offered songs to the gods above, but has never offered anything to the earth below, to the mother of all. And that every farmer, before ploughing, offers mother earth his favorite beer or wine to make up for the mutilation that is to follow. He suggests that, if she wants to stop bleeding, she should offer as compensation to mother earth a bucketful of blood of someone dear to her. She straightaway looks at me, while he slips her something shiny. She comes closer. I kneel down by the road. She caresses my forehead. I take the liberty of licking her wrist to assure her that I’m happy she will sing tomorrow. She breaks down on top of me, her curls a shroud. I lie on my side, accepting my fate, because harvesting can’t begin till the song is sung.

Subhravanu Das is an Indian writer living in Bhubaneswar. His work has been published in AAWW’s The Margins, Chestnut Review, Denver Quarterly, Vestal Review, among others, and included in Wigleaf’s Top 50 in 2022 and 2024 and in Best Small Fictions 2023.

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No Dinosaur

Baby had cousins who didn’t believe in dinosaurs. 

Carbon dating? They said, How can you trust it? There’s really not enough consensus, and we don’t talk about it enough, those outsider voices who disagree. Besides, you, yes you, yes everyone, all of us, what’s really going on down here is that we’re all just little copies of our parents, believing what we’re told to believe, falling into a world without confrontation, and no questions asked. Cozy little inherited realities that we are.

These same cousins were privy to crop circles, and Jesus. You couldn’t prove either wrong. And yes, there’d been hoaxes, but what do you have to say about the non-hoaxes? How can you explain away that? All those things that haven’t been explained away yet. 

Well, a cousin might say, you don’t and you live with our truth. 

Which was what Baby did for years. Imagining a world without dinosaurs. Which was a scary thing for her to imagine because what a delightful thing to believe in, dinosaurs were. Like actual magic. When she was a little kid, she thought dinosaurs were as big as mountains, and then sometime in her teens she realized they weren’t that big, still pretty big, but not magical big, at least relative to her toddler imagination. 

Her questions: what possible conspiracy could dinosaurs be behind? Why would the whole world have been brainwashed into believing dinosaurs existed? Who and what would that benefit? Power. Was power the answer? Some mysterious entity, pulling strings, Yes, I’ve tricked them. I’ve tricked them into believing dinosaurs were on planet Earth 45 million years ago. The answer, Baby supposed, was the devil was behind the dinosaur hoax. Because the devil wanted to wreak havoc on the Earth. Because the devil had a falling out with God. And could not worship God. And so the devil deployed dinosaurs on the good human beings of planet Earth so as to make them no longer believe in God. And those human beings who pushed the existence of dinosaurs only benefited from this dysfunction that a lack of God created in human beings. It opened up patches for exploitation. General nihilism. Drug usage. So many less tickets punched to heaven, instead, tickets were punched to the hell that is being under the control of other humans on planet Earth. 

Baby put down her copy of Vogue with a slim waifish actor on the cover and took a deep breath. Her eye caught the tabletop with the colorful wires and the wooden blocks that rang along its pathway like a roller coaster. There was something so satisfying about watching wood go from one curlicue end to the other. Why did she always think about these kinds of things—dinosaurs, the general populace’s disbelief in certain scientific facts and/or theories—while she waited in line at the dentist’s office? Was it something about the science that goes into maintaining the human body? The blood vessels. The calories. All of those invisible changes every day over time. Like hair!

Another memory: driving on 8 Mile with her brother Stephen when a man pulled up to the red light next to them and rolled his window down. The man was so happy. He said, “Look at my alligator! Isn’t she gorgeous!” The man held up a cardboard box and sure enough inside it was a beady-eyed little alligator with its long, snout mouth and little yellow upside-down triangles of teeth sticking out of it. It was a wonderful surprise, seeing this special animal in such a mundane moment. Stephen took a picture and posted it on Instagram. As they drove out to a Baby Shower in Rochester, they worried about what it meant to have celebrated this encounter so much. Should this animal be in a box like that? Was this in fact animal cruelty? And then they, together, had made a show out of it, posting this incidence of animal cruelty on Instagram, like it was a game, like life was a game. They deleted the picture. Hoped no one had seen it. It had received seven likes over the course of twenty-three minutes, but who could say how many people had seen the picture and not liked it, instead thinking about what poor taste it was, to post something like that, to perpetuate these kinds of deeds. 

The reason Baby was at the dentist was because she hadn’t had a teeth cleaning in several years. Over the last ten she had been a coffee addict, staying up all night, reading books about phenomenological theory (her major), drinking whiskey, playing chess, drinking red wine, the occasional Xanax. She didn’t always brush her teeth. And there were a few years there where she didn’t floss, period. There’d been some gum bleeding, for sure. But it wasn’t until two weeks ago when the rotted part of her bottom left-center tooth actually came out in a chunk. You couldn’t see from the front of her face that a considerable part of her tooth had rotten and fallen out of her mouth, but she scraped her tongue until it bled while feeling it out. It caused her to panic. There was no way she was going to tell her dentist about it, but it did push her to the point where she figured it was time to be more serious about her teeth, and to put real actual effort into their maintenance. She crossed her fingers and hoped that nothing more would happen, that her teeth weren’t at the point of some fucked-up no return. She also hoped, of course, that telling the dentist about the lost tooth chunk wouldn’t be the big X-factor in terms of if the rest of her teeth would or would not survive. Because she wasn’t going to tell the dentist. She supposed she would if she knew that telling the dentist would in fact be the major difference between more of her teeth rotting and falling out of her mouth or not, but, again, she was banking that it wouldn’t be. 

Many things were coming up in life: Thanksgivings, Christmases, birthdays, and then ultimately, elections. What did Baby hope for? Did she believe her cousins could one day come to her side of things and believe in dinosaurs? Were they worth her time? Did she at one point in her youth believe that she could convince people like her cousins? Had she given up? Did she even try hard enough to convince them throughout the years to have the right to give up? Or did she just let the stone-cold fact of their not believing sucker punch her, as she made her way through the years of her life, even though she could see it coming from a mile away. 

And life is that crazy—believe Baby!—because there was also her aunt on her other side. Who used to rave and who had the story of stealing her mom’s friend’s car with her friends and driving it off of a bridge into a river that wasn’t deep enough for anyone to die. 

That aunt had the story about being at the trap house on the east side and how when the cops showed up. Her aunt frantically looked for a place to hide, but every closet, every crevice of the basement was filled to the brim with people. She was slender so she opened up the washing machine. To her horror: there was an alligator inside. All grease and green and scaled. It rotated its shoulder, and then its head, to look at her, slowly, like it didn’t want to call the cops’ attention either. She slammed the washing machine shut. It’s fine, the aunt said. There was nowhere to hide. So the aunt just waited and hoped. Waited and hoped that no one would come down in the basement and see her seventeen-year-old self drunk and high and in the middle of something that didn’t feel right. And no one did come down. And the party got started up again. But the aunt left. And never partied there again. And developed a lifelong phobia of washing machines.

“Baby,” the receptionist said. “Baby Stills, you’re up.”

Baby got up and made her way to the door to the back of the office where a leather seat covered in paper awaited her and tools that buzzed and vibrated. On her way to the door she spun a yellow wooden ringer around a yellow metal wire on the children’s play table. A mother took her eyes off of Home and Cooking and gave Baby a dirty look. Her eyes were brown. Her nose small. Her fingernails pink. Her wrist covered in a silver watch with a cobalt leather strap. It was hard to say what the woman believed. Knowing people, it could be anything. Astrology? The sentience of rivers? The theory that human societies lived on planet Earth billions of years ago, only to go extinct and be erased by geological forces? Baby stopped looking at her. This brown-eyed, small-nosed woman who didn’t like the way she touched the children’s play table. At some point, we need to stop looking at everyone. At some point, what are you even really going to do with the memory of a person’s face?

Elijah Sparkman is a writer based in Detroit. His writing has appeared in Sleepingfish XX, X-R-A-Y, and Bending Genres. He is the Program and Volunteer Coordinator for 826michigan, a youth creative writing organization. He is a member-owner of the co-op bookstore Book Suey in Hamtramck, MI. He is a memoir reader for Split Lip Magazine. Website: elijahsparkman.com Instagram: @elijahsparkman20.

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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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