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“Disappearing Act” by David Galef was first published in F(r)iction #9

Disappearing Act

One day, Steven woke up to find that everything he disliked on the planet had disappeared. Traffic jams, well-done steak, hour-long meetings. Tangerines, heavy metal, overpriced coffee bars. The list was long, and he discovered new items daily. Creamy coleslaw, pickup trucks. Often it was hard to tell whether it was a shortage or a genuine gap, but when he asked others about certain objects—grape Kool-Aid, Kawasaki motorcycles—he found they had no clue what he was talking about. The color chartreuse, toy dogs who yipped rather than barked. But no people disappeared because, odd to say, Steven found some good in everyone, even Brendan, his irritating boss at GraphicArts.

On the other hand, when he found any new items to dislike—hard-shell luggage—they usually disappeared. On the third hand, wishing away war or hunger didn’t work.

For a while, the disappearances pleased a certain part of him. What’s not to like? he told himself, walking down a street that contained no potholes or flattened patches of chewing gum. But gradually he began feeling guilty over his power, first over the disappearance of strawberry yogurt, just because he’d grown tired of it last year. Then discount coupons and traffic circles.

Soon enough, he realized what he was: a slayer of a lot that was good and decent, a murderer of the past. Why make old Volkswagen Beetles disappear? The world reflected his preconceptions, and that was wrong. When he walked around town, no longer did he think of himself as a decent guy with grievances but as a menace. He’d killed food stamps, though he couldn’t recall why. He’d winkled out emojis. It had been months since he acquired his power, and he couldn’t recall the last time he’d been happy with the world—or himself. When he looked in the mirror, he saw a petty, dislikeable man. So Steven disappeared.

**

David Galef is a shameless eclectic, with over a dozen books in two dozen directions, including the novels Flesh, Turning Japanese, and How to Cope with Suburban Stress (a Book Sense choice, listed by Kirkus as one of the Best 30 Books of 2006); the short-story collections Laugh Track and My Date with Neanderthal Woman (winner of Dzanc Books’ Short Story Collection Award); and the co-edited anthology of fiction 20 over 40. His latest volume is Brevity: A Flash Fiction Handbook, from Columbia University Press. A co-founder of the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Mississippi, he is now a professor of English and creative writing program director at Montclair State University.

 

The Tattoo Artist and the Barefoot Bandit

The wind was whipping empty black plastic bags above the sands like airborne jellyfish. Cameron stopped and looked around her for landmarks, but everything looked the same white-grey—the wooden slats beneath her feet, the buildings, the water—all bleached by the end-of-season steel sky. The smell of fried foods still crept out of the few open boardwalk stands, but at this time of year the paying customers were fewer than the seagulls that ate gratis.

There were a few bubbles of color imprisoned behind fences: kids rides covered over and locked down, bright outdoor benches pulled behind gates to collect dirt for the winter. The grey of the chains and fences seemed sharper than any of the blurbs of color, like the foreground in an amateur photograph.

The tattoo studio wasn’t near the boardwalk, that much Cameron knew for sure. It was down some sidestreet with crumbling asphalt, past a trailer selling deep fried foods on sticks, near a Giant Amazonian Sewer Rat or an Amazing Headless Lady. She could remember bits and pieces of descriptions woven through Sasha’s long narratives. Sasha’s voice in her mind was still clearer than the directions, though—quick, confident, laced with slang that would’ve been inappropriate coming out of Cameron’s mouth, but which Sasha managed to get away with. Like when Sasha described her boyfriend’s eyes as “chinky.” Cameron had nudged her then, but no one else in the room said anything. Sasha turned her own large black eyes on Cameron with unfeigned innocence and said, “What, Big Sis?” She was only nineteen.

She’s still a child, Cameron thought. She has time. But what am I still doing in places like this?

Now, under the flat grey sky and above the bleached boardwalk planks, Cameron turned in a slow revolution. The artist that tattooed for free had to be here somewhere.

*

They had been sitting in the dayroom when Sasha first mentioned the tattoo artist. Cameron had been there for over a week, and Sasha for three days. The bruises that had marked the younger girl’s arm and the side of her face had begun to fade into purplish pools that looked like stains from spilled wine that lingered after a desperate scrubbing. The Barefoot Bandit was on TV and Cameron kept telling Sasha to shut up, to watch the news, to stop acting like a child—this was what was happening in the world. But really, Cameron couldn’t stomach the news that was happening world-wide—children with limbs blown off, unmanned planes dropping bombs, towering walls built on borders and M-16s guarding them—she could only stomach the Barefoot Bandit, and ate up stories of him like a bloated pigeon gorging on after-wedding rice.

“Diabla,” Sasha was saying, and in the meantime little bare feet trekked across a map on the TV screen showing the summer houses the Barefoot Bandit had broken into, robbed, and left notes in declaring war on the police, and (even though he was still a teenager and had no formal lessons) the place he had stolen and flown a small plane from.

“Shut up, Little Sis,” Cameron said. “Watch this.”

Sasha looked around to make sure no one was watching and then quickly pulled her sky-blue elastic-banded pants down to reveal the top right of her bottom. “Diabla” was tattooed there in English Calligraphy font.

“Badass, right?” she said with her challenging half-smirk. “He tattoos for free if it’s on your ass.”

*

There was a man slamming a booth closed—one of two open in a row of steel gates surrounded by wooden window frames covered in once-bright red and yellow and blue paint. What had been inside the booth—a ring toss, a distorted basketball hoop, a row of clown heads with open mouths lined up across from water pistols like comic suicides—Cameron could not say. The man slamming the booth shut had a short salt-and-pepper beard, yellow from cigarette smoke.

“Where’s the World’s Smallest Woman?” she asked. She moved her hand into her purse by instinct, feeling all the things there: a wallet, her make-up bag, her tampon case, her cigarettes, her mace.

The man looked at her and he looked at her hand in her bag.

“She’s around here somewhere,” he said, and went back to closing the stand.

*

Another night, in the day room, they were showing a picture of the Barefoot Bandit in a Mercedes Benz shirt, reclining like a millionaire. He had taken the picture after joyriding in someone’s car, and left the picture behind. Cameron didn’t think he sounded like the best criminal, but she respected his verve. Everyone was there. Constance the long-haired schizophrenic, Daniel the inmate, Rudy the drunk. They were all watching the news.

“Big Sis,” Sasha said, “a few weeks before I got here, me and my boyfriend and our friends were drinking outside an abandoned building. We set that shit on fire. We sat there watching it burn.”

“You should have made sure nobody was squatting it, Little Sis,” Cameron said, watching the TV. She had taken to dispensing questionable advice to the younger girl in this offhanded manner. Though more sedate advice about taking meds and formatting her life around a structured schedule was something Sasha refused to accept, she seemed willing to listen to Cameron’s brand. It had even caused her to bestow Cameron with a nickname–“Big Sis.” Cameron had reciprocated with the diminutive version, and the two had persisted in the nicknames even as the other patients rolled their eyes and the nurses looked concerned. On the TV, the bare feet were back again, walking all over the state the Barefoot Bandit came from, then trekking off to  all the subsequent places he had been.

The next day in arts and crafts group, Sasha started talking about arson.

“But I have to make sure I don’t hurt anyone, first,” Sasha said. “My Big Sis taught me that.”

Sasha smiled. Cameron laughed. The therapists did neither.

*

Now, away from the boardwalk, down a crumbled asphalt street, Cameron paid a dollar to stare into what appeared to be a dumpster at something that resembled a coiled rope more than a Giant Bloodthirsty Python. She looked away from the dark green metal container and saw, down the road, a blinking neon yellow sign. Sasha had never said the name of the studio, but the name of this studio was unreadable anyway: a victim of broken neon.

“Do you know anything about that tattoo studio?” she asked the man she had given the dollar to. He was piled with muscles. He had more of them than bottom teeth. He lowered his brows over his already dark eyes and looked to where she pointed, then back to her. Cameron felt conscious of the dark roots of her hair, her Salvation Army clothes, and the fading atrophic scars on her left arm.

The man shrugged. “Ask for Ratchet,” he said.

“Rat Shit?” she asked.

The eyebrows lowered again. “Ratch-et,” he enunciated. Spit flew between the gaps in his teeth.

*

Cameron was sitting on the off-white ledge of the big window, crying. Sasha strutted—Sasha always strutted, swinging her longs limbs lithely, her shoulders rolling like wavelets at low tide—over and said quietly, “What’s wrong, Big Sis?”

Cameron cried and cried. She had no power in her to stop. “I’m never going to get out of here,” she said.

Sasha could not possibly understand all the reasons–the medications that never seemed to change anything, the ones that made her body bloated and her hips and stomach squeeze like dough over the low-slung pants she still wanted to be able to wear; the therapists who nodded at everything she said, or the ones who asked, at every turn, in their infuriatingly calm voices,  “How does that make you feel?” The two week mandatory stays that had happened at least once a year for so many years she had lost count, how they had taken the place of the vacations she’d worked so hard to go on in her early twenties; how she struggled, after these two week stays, to keep the jobs she had abruptly stopped coming in to, how she struggled to pay her rent after she got out; the good days when she was sure, absolutely sure, that it was all over, that things would stay good, that words like “learning to cope” and “managing your disease” were the bullshit she’d always taken them for and she had her life back as quickly as it seemed to have slipped out of her grasp—and the crashes that always brought her back, each time lower than she’d been before them.  Sasha was still a child, Cameron knew she could not understand this all, and yet she put her arm around her anyway in a gesture strictly forbidden between patients.

“Yes, you will, Big Sis,” she said. “They can’t keep you here forever.”

Eventually the tears stopped. They hit a tall beige wall beyond which there was simply no more room for them, jagged breaths or hitching shoulders. Cameron steadied herself, hating that the blotched pink of her face would fade so much less quickly.

“You’re right, Little Sis,” she said. “The Barefoot Bandit is going to break in here and bust me out.”

*

Ratchet was short and stocky. His long brown hair was tied back at the nape of his neck with a plain rubber band, but the sea air had frizzed the short hairs near the front. They stood in a humidity induced halo around his face. He stood near the posters of flash art with his muscular, tattooed arms crossed over his chest. There was a hard half-smile on his face.

“You’re Ratchet?” Cameron asked.

He nodded once, his expression unchanging.

She knew, from friends who had been tattooed, that she should ask to see his portfolio. She could see several books sitting on a ludicrously red table next to a decrepit wooden chair the grey of the boardwalk planks. But she felt she shouldn’t ask. She looked at one of the tattoos on his forearm: a pinup girl with an exposed, cherry red nipple. The girl was winking lasciviously, as she would do every day until the skin of his forearm was no more.

“I want bare feet,” she said. “A trail of them.”

“Where?”

“On my ass.”

Ratchet smirked and looked directly at her ass. His eyes then moved up to her breasts. After pausing on these two spots, he took in the rest of her body with a slow, intentional gaze. She knew he saw the old scars running up her arm, remnants from the days when she had been Sasha’s age, and her troubles had seemed to everyone around her like things that would even out with time. Her used jeans that squeezed the fat around her hips so that it came up and out, as if her torso were something balanced atop their waistband. Cameron realized then that she hadn’t yet taken off the wrist band the nurses had scanned every time they gave her a pill: a white one for anxiety, a red one for ups; a blue one of downs, a green one for thoughts that moved like a new, shining orange roller coaster on a more fashionable beach. There hadn’t been time. She’d just been let out this morning, handed her wallet, her shoelaces, her belt. She had walked out the door into a day that was too sharply in focus after the soft edges of the hospital. Things would change. She would start doing Pilates. She would stop draining her bank account before she wrote her rent check. She would get a new boyfriend, one that wasn’t a drunk or a drug addict or played in a cover band. She would start waking up before noon. She would start styling her hair. But first a symbol. A sign that she was new. She tried not to move under Ratchet’s discomfiting gaze. She needed this.

As he continued to review her in silence, Cameron thought of how Sasha must have looked when she came here. From the story she’d heard in bits and pieces, it had been about an hour before she threatened to jump in front of the train, screaming and leaning her body out over the edge of the platform until her friends called the police, who wrestled her back and handcuffed her and called an ambulance. A time when she’d drank just enough alcohol that it wasn’t yet another oppressing force, a time when she felt, for a moment, free from the two bedroom apartment she shared with her six person family, the second senior year of high school that didn’t look like it would be the last, and the boyfriend who’s fear, jealousy, hate, anxiety and pleasure all reached her thorough his fists and left little spilled wine stains of bruises on the side of her face. But perhaps even in those relatively free moments, her looming gesture had already been showing on her face.

“Why bare feet?” he asked finally. The smirk was gone.

Cameron opened her mouth to tell him the story from the news. But the bravado of the stolen plane seemed false. She thought to tell him of Sasha in the dayroom, or by the windowsill. But she had left quickly, without even saying goodbye to the younger girl. And the Barefoot Bandit had never come to bust her out. Instead, he’d flown to the Bahamas where he’d been apprehended and taken off by men with shining silver badges.

“A child,” she said, finally. “A thief.”

Ratchet said nothing. He turned his eyes away from her body and to the flash art. This lack of look, she had seen it before–in bartenders as they served her the last drink they both knew she shouldn’t have, in therapists who suddenly stopped their incessant nodding and fixed their gazes just over her shoulder. Cameron was unsure of whether she heard a sigh come from him or from the fading scene beyond his neon window sign.

“Go in the first door on your right,” he commanded, not looking at her. “Lie on your stomach and take your pants off.”

**

Alex DiFrancesco is a writer of fiction, creative nonfiction, and journalism who has published work in Tin House, The Washington Post, Pacific Standard, and more. Their essay collection Psychopomps (Civil Coping Mechanisms Press) and their second novel All City (Seven Stories Press) are forthcoming in Spring of 2019. Their storytelling has been featured at The Fringe Festival, Life of the Law, The Queens Book Festival, and The Heart podcast. DiFrancesco is currently an MFA candidate at Cleveland State University. They can be found on Twitter, or, more often, snuggling their cat, Sylvia

**

Flickr / State Library Victoria Collections

The Devil’s Hands

A monster lived in Cocoa’s bathroom. It emerged when the sun went down, and she couldn’t sleep for the deep, rattled heave of its breathing. In the night she heard the heavy clomp of its pacing, and if she watched closely she saw its curved claws wrap around the edge of the half-closed bathroom door. With her eyes clamped shut she saw in her mind those same claws creep toward her body. She could never help but look, even though she knew that looking meant not sleeping for another night. In the morning, once light brought with it the courage to peep behind the door, the creature was gone.

Maybe that was why she let her rancid friend Vincent sleep on her couch in the living room; his snores distracted her, made the thing in the bathroom less troubling. It wouldn’t hurt her if someone else were there. Or maybe she really did like him, even though he repulsed her. Or maybe she wanted someone there who loved her like she had always thought Anne had loved her.

After long nights of shaking in bed, Cocoa tried not to call her ex. But some mornings she couldn’t help but dial Anne’s number. Anne rarely answered, and when she did it made Cocoa feel worse. Cocoa would ask how she was, and Anne would say she was great, which made Cocoa feel like shit. Then Anne would ask how Cocoa was doing, and Cocoa would try not to let her voice shake when she said she was great too, real happy with her job still — she baked the bread at a sandwich shop — and she had a lot of new friends now that they weren’t always together. They would say more bullshit about their lives, about how easy everything was in the other’s absence, and then Anne would have to go. She always had somewhere to go.

Cocoa didn’t tell Anne that she missed her, that she wished she’d gone with her to Denver rather than staying in Riddle, the Texas town she’d never left. Cocoa didn’t tell Anne she wished she’d followed her like a fucking dog. She didn’t tell her that sometimes she let Vincent touch her tits for twenty dollars, when he asked. She didn’t tell Anne about the thing in her bathroom she suspected was waiting for her to come to it and let herself be devoured.

The morning of her twenty-fourth birthday, Cocoa woke to Vincent standing before his easel in the living room, shirtless, facing her bedroom. While she fixed them two bowls of granola and almond milk, he talked about his painting, an abstract collage of drug-induced stupor, the canvas cluttered with cut-outs of women’s faces from fashion magazines.

“Listen,” he said, “to the brushstrokes.” He painted a red line down the canvas, then another next to it. He dipped one of his unkempt dreadlocks in the paint and laughed. Cocoa hated his goofy laugh. It made him look like he was just about to drool. But his paintings were cool. “Nature’s own paintbrush,” he said.

Cocoa asked about his plans for the day. She hoped they included anyone but her. In the daylight she usually wanted to be alone. She slept most of the days away, curled into a ball on her couch.

“I figured we’d, you know, have some birthday shenanigans.” He painted another line with his hair.

“I don’t want to,” she said, mouth full.

“Why not?” He cupped his hand on her shoulder. “Because you’re depressed? Everyone’s depressed. You know what depression is, Cocoa? I’ll tell you what depression is.”

“I’m not depressed,” she said. Depression was fantasizing about jumping off buildings. Depression was crying all the time. Depression was a pile of pills in your palm.

“Depression is drinking from the devil’s hands,” he said, moving his cupped palm beneath his mouth. “It’s that rock bottom urge to so what you know you shouldn’t. You know what you do with that? You fucking drink. You drink from the motherfucking devil’s hands.”

While he talked, she stared at the phone. She’d told herself she wouldn’t call Anne, wouldn’t bring herself down on a day when she was supposed to be up. Picking up the phone, she excused herself to her room, but when she got there she called her mom instead. As soon as the phone started ringing, she regretted the call.

Her mom picked up, singing. Cocoa tried to smile, but really she wished she could hang up and pretend she’d dialed the number by mistake. At the end of the birthday song, her mom hounded her. What were her plans for the day? When was she going to come for lunch? Did she have any party plans with her friends tonight? It was Saturday, after all, and she shouldn’t be alone on her birthday.

“I won’t be alone,” Cocoa said. “Vincent’s here.”

“Will he be joining us for lunch?

Cocoa didn’t answer. Cocoa’s mom thought Vincent was her secret boyfriend, even though Cocoa had been truthful about her relationship with Anne. And after all, Anne had only left a couple of months ago. She couldn’t be expected to move on already.

“But, Anne wasn’t really your girlfriend, was she, dear? I mean, you never even brought her home to meet us,” her mom said.

It was true. She had asked Anne to come to her parents’ for dinner, but Anne had never wanted to. And no, they were never officially “together” together, but shit, they’d only spent every night together for a year and a half. And Cocoa cared about Anne. When they’d first met, Anne had given her so much: books on baking cookies with messages of encouragement inside, an ear — Anne always listened to her, handed her the hard truth when no one else would — and orgasms, of course, the first she’d ever had from another’s hand. Cocoa had never thought herself beautiful until she saw her reflection in Anne’s eyes, and Anne had somehow known from the start that when Cocoa cried all she wanted was to be touched. Anne had given her everything she had ever wanted. It wasn’t until right before Cocoa’s last birthday, when Anne became distant, that Anne stopped giving her anything.

Back in the living room Vincent sat on the couch with that fucking silly grin, in his hands a bag of something that resembled dirt. Mushrooms.

“Happy birthday, girl,” he said. He handed her a cap and a couple stems. She didn’t think before popping the cap in her mouth. The raw earthy grit was like sand between her teeth.

Vincent swallowed his whole. “Ready for lunch?”

It wasn’t worth it to argue; she didn’t want to start her trip with confrontation, and so Cocoa put on her fake leather jacket and prepared to face her parents’ place.

#

Cocoa’s mom had set the table for five, and at each chair set a handmade name tag. Three red balloons tied to Cocoa’s chair bobbed under the ceiling fan’s wind. Her mom brought out the dishes and set them in the middle of the table. Everyone took their assigned seat.

Cocoa and her family all shared the same lackluster brown hair cut near to their shoulders, even her father, and the same lackluster brown eyes. Their bodies all mostly thin, with the exception of Cocoa’s sister, whose adolescent pudge had still not disappeared. The only way anyone could tell them apart was by the way they dressed. Cocoa’s parents were still stuck in their hippy days, though they had always been the watered-down Texas kind, their cowboy boots concealed beneath their bellbottoms, and Cocoa’s sister hid under baggy jeans and oversized shirts. Cocoa rebelled against them as best she could. She tried to look professional in pinstripe pants, collared shirts and suspenders. Sweater vests and cardigans. She wanted to look like she knew what she wanted with her life. She didn’t.

Cocoa stared at the feast her mom had prepared: mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, cinnamon apples, sesame green beans, vegetarian pizza and a loaf of walnut bread. All Cocoa’s favorites, she’d prepared them all. Damn, Cocoa thought. She tries too hard.

Everyone passed the dishes around, but no one said grace before digging in, not in this family. Cocoa and Vincent both spooned heaping piles of food onto their plates, but as Cocoa picked up her fork and the shrooms started to kick in, she realized she was far from hungry, and the fork seemed too silly an instrument to use, with its four-pronged silver hair. Vincent didn’t seem to have trouble. He daintily forked green beans into his mouth, pausing to glance from Cocoa’s mom to her dad and smile when spoken to.

“Aren’t you hungry, dear?” her mom asked. “You’ve hardly touched anything. Is something wrong?”

“I…I can’t figure out how to use my fork.”  Once Cocoa started laughing she couldn’t stop. The rest of the family stared. Cocoa looked down into the sopping pile of cinnamon apples. The cinnamon danced under the light. “The apples are beautiful, mom. Everything’s so beautiful.”

Vincent placed a hand on her mom’s shoulder. “We did some mushrooms this morning, Jill.”

“Oh, dear,” her mom said. “Does that mean you won’t be staying for dessert?”

“May we be excused? I think it’s time for a little walksie.” Vincent took Cocoa’s hand and helped her stand. They walked, still laughing, through the hallway and ran their hands along the textured wall, cool and strange beneath Cocoa’s fingers. In her childhood room, leftover totems from her teenage years littered the shelves: rubber ducks of varying shapes and sizes, a Beanie Baby Dalmatian, and a music box that sang Swan Lake. A plastic Halloween skull glared at them. Cocoa slid to the floor.

Posters obscured the walls as though she had wanted to hide the blank white: a Sandman poster, a poster of a cheesy werewolf film she’d found ironic, and a psychedelic Jim Morrison print. Now it all seemed morbid, and the faces leered down at her but weren’t laughing. The Sandman wore a permanent grimace, and Jim’s frown made him look like a weeping clown. The skull was eerie, too detached, and for a moment reminded Cocoa of the thing in the bathroom. She imagined its face as bony as the skeleton’s, unmarred by skin, and she felt an incredible desire to know what it looked like. For a moment she nearly up and ran all the way back to her apartment, but she shook the urge away; it would only bring her down, and she wasn’t sure she could find the way.

They didn’t speak for what seemed like a lot of time but was only thirty minutes. Cocoa wasn’t sure about time. All she knew was, this should only last about four hours, and she didn’t know how long ago they’d taken them. Vincent pulled a packed pipe from his pocket and held the lighter over the weed. He inhaled, held it in, exhaled, held the pipe out to her. Cocoa looked at the bright green and shook her head.

“I don’t think we should, not inside–“

“It’s your birthday. You can do whatever you want. You need this,” he said. He pried her fist open and forced the pipe into her grip.

Cocoa tried to spark the lighter but couldn’t. She glanced at Vincent’s bizarre dreads, the layers of tangles he’d let tangle on purpose. Maybe Vincent did it right. She let things tangle in secret, brushed her hair three times a day at least. Kept her house obscenely clean. Tried to make her life seem as put-together as possible, but under the surface she was even more fucked up than Vincent’s hair. She felt numb and scared and pointless.

“I can’t. I just don’t think I can,” she said.

He lit the bowl for her, holding it to her lips. She breathed the smoke in and let it out, and she realized their knees were touching. His free hand had climbed to her thigh. The air crackled with his attraction for her, and once the charge was there Cocoa knew there was nowhere to go but down, and she didn’t think she could handle the bottom right then. It was imperative that she leave the room before their bodies came closer. She threw the pipe onto the carpet; the charred weed spilt out and into the crevices.

“I have to go,” she said. “I have to go home.”

She rushed alone down the hallway, and when she reached the table she saw her family still seated, eating their lunch like nothing was happening. She wished her family could be the normal kind of normal.

“Are you getting the wiggins, girl?” her dad asked.

Cocoa shook her head. “I’m not going to do drugs anymore. I don’t want to feel like shit anymore.”

Her mom nodded, and the look of strained relief in her eyes brought a wave of guilt into Cocoa’s gut. She was sorry she ruined the feast.

“Okay. That’s fine. Would you like to eat now?” her mom said.

“No, I think I’m going to take off.”

She heard her father on the way out. “Looks like she’s got the wiggins.”

#

Cocoa walked the long way home, and every truck that passed pounded the hum of its engine into her body, and the sidewalk beneath her shifted with each step. She hoped Vincent wouldn’t follow. She wished she could shower the shrooms away, but she couldn’t go home yet. She knew the walls would close in. Instead she went to the playground three blocks away.

Parents surrounded her, mothers in their matching sweat suits, fathers staring down into the faces of their iPhones, and the children who didn’t need drugs to see birds soar circles in the clouds. Cocoa sat in the grass. The kids’ shrill laughter would be too much of a reminder that she had passed the stage of such mindless amusement, that now she felt like she could only laugh to keep her thoughts from overwhelming. Cocoa’s mind, even though she tried to keep it from serious thoughts, went right to her own family, how they hadn’t batted an eye when she was tripping balls. That it was all a joke. Not even her little sister, a sophomore in high school. Cocoa’s mother and father had done drugs, back in their youth, and even now they smoked pot every day. They let her sister smoke on weekends when she didn’t have homework, and they had let Cocoa do the same. Back then she thought herself lucky, but now she wanted her mother to slap some sense into her. Tell her she was shitting on her life.

It wasn’t even really about drugs. Cocoa didn’t have a drug problem. Vincent was the one who did drugs, and Cocoa just took what he gave her. What she had was a numb problem. The kind of problem she couldn’t even describe. She could chalk it up to Anne, and she did, but this nagging voice told her Anne wasn’t the half of it.

What bugged her, what really bugged her, was that she let herself fall for Anne. Cocoa knew that Anne was all kinds of wrong, that she partied too hard, lacked ambition. Cocoa knew every word from Anne’s mouth was a lie; the love Anne claimed for her was false, as false as friendship. Anne moved to Denver so she could live with her parents again, so she wouldn’t have to work. So she could go out every night and sleep in every day. But Cocoa still wanted Anne beside her, just so she could feel her skin again.

Her thoughts circled around, folded in on themselves, intensified the empty ache in her stomach that she knew could only be filled by someone’s arms wrapped so tight around her she had to give in.

And Vincent. Cocoa didn’t know why she kept him around. He was lame, almost as lame as Anne, but he loved her in his way. She could tell that he loved her, and it made her sick to her stomach. When she saw the hungry look in his eyes it made her want to puke. She knew she’d had the same stupid eyes for Anne, and now she couldn’t even talk to Anne for more than a goddamn couple of minutes without feeling like shit. All she really wanted was to be rid of the feeling that she was falling, always falling, and that thing in the bathroom wanted to catch her. She looked at the sky, where the sun was falling. She knew it was time to go home and see the thing that had been at the edge of her skin every night, trying to break its way through, and she wanted to go. She felt like she could wait no longer to see it.

#

Back at the apartment she went straight to the bathroom, but it was empty. She sat on the edge of the tub. The water dripped. She leaned her head against the wall and reached into her pocket for her phone. Even in the darkness she knew where her fingers should press.

When Anne answered she sounded irritated, like she’d just been woken from a good dream.

“Anne, how long has it been?” Cocoa said.

“What? What do you mean?”

“Since we broke up? How long has it been?”

Anne sighed. “What’s up, Cocoa? You know exactly how long it’s been.”

“I don’t.” She was on the verge of tears. “I don’t know. How long? I keep thinking we’re still together.”

“Seriously, what’s up? I’m kind of busy. I have a friend over.”

“Where are you? I forget. I don’t know what time it is.”

Anne whispered something away from the mouthpiece.

“I took shrooms. I think I’m having a bad trip.”

“Ugh, is that it? You’re just on drugs. It’ll go away. You just have to remember, it’s not going to last. Listen, I can’t talk right now,” Anne said.

“Hey,” Cocoa whispered. Anne asked her to speak up. “I, uh, I wish I were there with you. I wish I’d gone with you.”

“Well, you should have come then. Listen–“

But no, Cocoa thought. She couldn’t have come, couldn’t have just trailed alongside Anne for the rest of her life.

“You should have fucking asked,” Cocoa said.

Cocoa hung up before Anne could say anything more. She remembered time. She remembered that it had been eight months, and that Anne had never seemed interested in bringing Cocoa with her. If she was honest, she had to admit that she hadn’t been serious about it either. She was clinging to Anne so she wouldn’t have to let go, of fear, of the numb, of blame.

But she was peaking too hard to hold her fist tight around the realization then. She fell to her knees and let herself wish that Anne were there to pick her up; she was too weak to do it herself. She needed time to do it herself. Pressing her open palms into the cold white tile, she saw the creature. Standing before her, his body cracked like dry soil. A man-shape, with slits for eyes. Bulky arms and legs, like the muscles were too big for the body. A mess of serpent hair wriggling around his head, and he lowered his hands to her face and cupped them before her mouth. She peered into his open hands and saw that inside the cracks there was nothing but water which began to bubble up and collect in his palms.

“Are you rock bottom?” she asked it. “Is it time for me to climb out?”

“Drink,” he said, and it was the wheezing voice that kept her awake.

She glanced into the empty sockets, and her lips fell to his hands without her willing them to. She gripped his wrists. Even though they burned her hands, she could not let go. She wanted to feel something, anything, and the burn was better than numb. She wanted to bottom out so she could come up again for air.

She drank like she was thirsty. She drank until there was nothing left.

#

A hot hand on her forehead woke her from her first sleep in two months. She opened her eyes to Vincent’s face. He looked stoned, his eyes thin slits, but the hungry look was there, as if he had never eaten in his life. Cocoa started to say something, but he reached down and slipped a bill into her hand. She started to pull her top up, but he shook his dreaded head, gave her a thin smile. She looked down at the bill, the crisp 100 in the corner. He slid under the blankets. She looked at the cracked skin of his hands as they groped at her clothes, into his devil red eyes.

She crumpled the bill in her hands and shoved it into his open mouth. “I won’t.”

He spit the bill out onto the bed and let his hands fall from her.

“What’s wrong?” Vincent said. “No one loves you like I love you, girl.”

“Get out,” she said.

He tried to kiss her. She pushed him. He toppled onto the floor with a thud. For a moment, he looked as though he might protest, might crawl back into the bed and try to make her love him, but then he shoved the bill into his pocket and rose from the floor. “You’ll love me eventually,” he said.

“Out,” she said.

Silence stretched between them like a long trail of spit. He nodded and backed out the door. Minutes later she heard her front door slam. It sounded like an ending. She smiled into the dark. In the bathroom, all was quiet as beautiful death.

**

Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam’s fiction and poetry has appeared in over fifty magazines and anthologies both literary and speculative including Clarkesworld, The Toast, Lightspeed, and numerous times in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. She recently released an audio fiction-jazz collaborative album, Strange Monsters, with her partner Peter Brewer, centered around the theme of women’s voices. She’s been reprinted in French and Polish, for numerous podcasts, and on io9. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast Program and created and curates the annual Art & Words Collaborative Show in Fort Worth, Texas. Find her on Twitter and at her website.

**

Image: Flickr / James Gaither

Excerpt from Disco Sour

The Bavarian market was full of visitors. Wooden decorations and Swiss flags for sale. Small Santa Clauses riding reindeers with little elves, strictly made in Australia. The scent of sauerkraut was all over the place, but during the Revelation Festival, no traditional würsts were allowed, in order to observe the traditional forty days’ vegan detox before Christmas. I started sneezing, which was the first warning sign of a peculiar allergic reaction I’d developed to the song El Cóndor Pasa.

A generic Indios band was playing an awful flutes version of that famous Simon and Garfunkel tune. Whenever I heard that song, my white blood cells started producing a certain type of antibodies that sent histamine into the cells of my nose, throat, lungs, stomach, intestines, and skin. Usually the reaction was mild, but sometimes it went so far as to seriously itch around my ears and down my neck.

While digging through the rabbit hole of Disney® archives, I had discovered the song was not Simon and Garfunkel’s but an orchestral musical piece by a certain Daniel Alomía Robles from Peru, who was inspired by traditional Andean folk tunes to write it in nineteen thirteen. Simon and Garfunkel covered it on their Bridge over Troubled Water ℗1970 album, for the joy of global listeners, but didn’t mention Robles at all in the credits. The story became more intriguing when the composer’s son filed a copyright lawsuit against Simon and Garfunkel. I didn’t imagine such kinds of lawsuits were even possible before the Privatisation Concordat, when trademarks became a compulsory part of our common language.

To get back to the song, though, it was only when Peru declared it part of its national cultural heritage fifty or sixty years ago that cover Indios bands became an invasive pandemic in public spaces around the world, from the Gallery Mall on Baltimore’s Waterfront to the MAC®, the Munich Airport Centre®, where I was waiting to catch my connecting flight to the P.A.R.I.S.

Now, I wondered, why not some Schläger?

I entered the nearest original equipment manufacturers’ showroom to look up at the Nokia® stand. By then I had already made up my mind that there were only two possibilities to explain my loss. Either I dropped my phone somewhere in between the bar and the hotel while drunk, or Janine’s doppelgänger took it. As I had no way to find that out, and the insurance option had failed, I’d better get a new one.

“Good afternoon, mister,” said a middle-aged clerk standing behind a sensorial screen. The showroom was white and spacious, with dozens of manufacturers’ stands. Above my head, a series of holograms displayed products that were not in stock but could have been purchased by travellers on connecting flights, and delivered immediately outside the cabin at the landing destination. I was optimistic.

“We have very special Revelation Festival offers. Check out our waterproof Christmas tree,” she said.

The clerk’s fluorescent green onesie hurt my eyes, along with the golden dragon and the little bird of the Sinhang® logo embroidered on his hat. On his yellow name tag, TERRY REINTKE was marked in violet capital fonts. Sinhang® used to be the biggest Chinese original equipment manufacturers’ retailer group. They had gradually taken over airport shopping malls by twenty thirty-two, though they went bankrupt two years later.

“Very special tree, recharges aquarium fish drones with a timer,” she continued, showing me a plastic tree with coloured LED lights under a pod of water, where three red fish drones swam.

“I need a Nokia® Morph®, Ms. Reintke,” I replied.

“I can give you a very good price for the tree,” she answered.

“I like the tree a lot, but I need a Morph®. Do you have one?” I asked, trying to be nice.

I missed my transparent Morph® so much, with its flexible, anti-scratch, bendable surface; its changing color, which adapted to my clothes and moods; and its micro-solar cells, charging even with the slightest solar power on a rainy day. But above all, I missed MySpacing, Instagramming, Grindring, Tindering, and Snapping.

“The trade quota applies for Morph®. Very, very expensive, so very few here,” she explained, pointing at the Nokia® stand. It was indeed one of the smallest in the showroom, displaying a couple of old Symbian™ and one Morph®, which I hoped to make mine.

“You can also buy a Galaxy™, or we even have the iPhone®,” she offered.

A Galaxy™ was out of the question, while the iPhone® sounded dubious. The truth is that I didn’t have a choice. After buying my first Morph®, I found it difficult to move on to products made by someone else without losing everything I had already paid for. They had designed the device to have desirable offers and features, not to mention switching costs that created consumer lock-in, but this hadn’t been due to a master plan. It wasn’t like when Nokia® rolled out a calculated product roadmap over a decade or two. Rather, they set a strategic target to be the digital hub for consumers. The rest came from a long series of experiments that had created the ecosystem I was trapped in.

“How much for that Morph®?” I asked.

“Twelve hundred Swiss Francs,” she replied. That was around fifteen hundred xEUs at the current exchange rate, which was a ridiculously high price. But still, I would have paid it.

“Are you Swiss?” she asked.

“No, I have a European passport,” I replied.

“Ah, then it will be very, very complicated to make a Swiss Morph® work for you. You need a Swiss passport for subscription. I can’t sell foreigners a subscription. Swiss Morphs® only work with a subscription,” she said. Terry Reintke seemed obsessed with the words ‘very’ and ‘subscription.’

“You can also buy a waterproof Christmas tree, no subscription. Very cheap,” she persisted. In the meantime, a micro-pump started to feed the fish from the top of the tree. The dried plankton made a snow-like effect against the vast panorama of the Swiss Alps painted on the background. I thanked him and left the showroom, subtly scratching my neck. I was done with Christmas trees, fish pods, Chinese retailers, traditional Bavarian style, Peruvian flutes, and airport malls.

***

I bought a beer and a Pretzel®, plugged my headphones into my PonoPlayer™, and went back to the terminal. The departure hall minimalism stood in stark contrast with the postmodern pastiche of the earlier Munich Airport Centre® mall. It was a stunning example of geometric purity, its freshness reminding me of a Bauhaus villa from ninety twenty-four. Every architectural detail was conceived to look banal at first glance, but a closer look revealed specific functions you wouldn’t have thought to look for. A black square in the wall was a free coffee machine; a seemingly normal travellator calibrated its speed according to the weight and the amount of people on it; the gates looked like a series of white, metallic cubes, but their walls were entirely covered in OLED™ displays.

I pressed play, and the full-length digital master of Ladies and Gentlemen We are Floating in Space ℗1997 Spiritualized® was diffused in surround sound. It was all incredibly fine, light, and real. Everything seemed to be in the right place, and even if something was wrong, all I had to do was just let go.

Real travel like this, as opposed to commuting, reminded me of when I first started taking long-distance trips alone on trains. I was fifteen or sixteen years old. Mobile phones were not a big thing yet. To call home during trips I would buy prepaid phone cards or coins. I even had a collection of used prepaid phone cards from all over the world because it was such a trendy thing to collect.

Trains had separate compartments back then, with a maximum of six people in each. And that was fun, because it was a point of examining the carriages to choose the kind of people I wanted to travel with. I especially liked foreign tourists; I could listen to them talk about faraway cities for hours. They would ask me questions, and I would give them tips on what to see during their trip.

The whole idea of traveling was tangible and physical. There even used to be night trains, a smart, simple concept: you jumped on a train in the evening only to wake up in a city on the other side of the continent the next morning. There were borders but no security scans at the stations. I felt it was the vanguard of the continent’s future: peaceful and united. On the top of this, it was just so practical, even more than planes, because you didn’t have to waste time during the day. If the trip was too long, there was a bed and even a restaurant car. For me, that was real traveling, and I loved it.

There was a specific smell, especially in the summer, oxidized iron mixed with dust and old wood. That was the smell of the rails, which pervaded the corridors and the toilets, in the rare case they were clean. The toilets’ flush was activated by a pedal, mechanically sliding open a lid and revealing a hole in the floor of train. I remember staring at the stones below, hypnotised, after taking a leak. It was kind of scary, too, like, a hole in the train, what could have jumped from it? Think about the remote chance you would be sitting there, while the train passes through a tunnel. I heard all sorts of crazy stories about strange creatures living in the cracks of the rails in the dark, ready to enter through the hole.

Once, my parents sent me with my little sister to spend a month with our grandmother in the South of France. School was out, my mum was busy with exams at university, and my father was traveling, as usual. It was hot as hell, there was no air conditioning in those old carriages, and the oxidized iron smell pierced the nose. To keep my sister calm, I told her about the scary creatures of the flush-hole before we made the trip. She was seven or eight years old, and she was excited to be on a train without our parents for the first time.

My mum was stressed out. On the platform she spoke to me, as she never did before, about my duty to bring my sister safe and sound to our destination. It was probably the first time I’d been assigned such a big responsibility, and I felt a huge pressure, the same kind that was slowly but constantly mounting to deliver that speech in Chile. But on the train with my sister, all I had to do was to keep watching her sitting beside me in the same train compartment.

There was a couple from New Zealand sitting in front of us, and in the middle of a conversation I don’t really remember, we passed through a tunnel. I turned my head to check on my sister, but she wasn’t there. In the same moment, I heard her screaming from down the corridor.

I ran towards her voice. She was locked in the restroom and couldn’t get out. When we were in the tunnel, she panicked over the creatures that might have been jumping from the flush-hole and tried to go out, but something was wrong with the lock. She kept on screaming, and I could not calm her down. After all, it was my fault she feared imaginary creatures from the flush-hole. Finally, a train attendant came to unlock the door, and she was released. She was pale, but she started to punch my legs and chest with all her strength.  

When we arrived in Aix-en-Provence, she told my grandmother everything, and I was blamed for the rest of the summer for having told her the story of the flush-hole creatures. I was never allowed to take care of her alone again. It was useless to explain that I had told the story to keep her calm and quiet. It was the first, but not the last, time I was blamed for trying to get it right. Since then, failing to get something right became one of my biggest fears.

That was also the last time I spoke to tourists on a train at any given moment, and since then, traveling lost its mystical and sacred aura for me. It transformed into banal commuting. A large-scale, stressful, uncomfortable, and wearing commute.

**

As a political geographer, Giuseppe Porcaro has been interested in how the intersection between technology and politics is moving towards uncharted territories in the future. He has recently published a series of scientific articles about how the internet of things and algorithms will change policymaking. Disco Sour is his first experiment with fiction and was inspired by a mission to Chile he had in 2013. Back then, he was Secretary General of the European Youth Forum, the platform for youth organisations advocating for youth rights. And on his way to Santiago, he missed three connecting flights across two continents within the span of 72 hours. Giuseppe now works as the head of communications for Bruegel, an international think tank specialising in economic policy. During the rest of the time, he DJs, reads, dreams, writes. Find him on Twitter and Instagram.  

“The Ascent” by Harold Taw first appeared in Raven Chronicles.

The Ascent

Parvathi dropped her backpack onto the trail with a thud. “Let’s take a break,” she said. “My blisters are killing me.”

Her twin brother Vikas nodded and leaned, pack and all, against a boulder. They’d been on the mountain for six days and had finally begun their ascent up the eastern slope.

“We could camp here for the night,” Parvathi said. “At least until your fever breaks.”

Vikas shook his head. “Be my sister, not my mother.”

Why were twelve-year old boys so infuriating? He’d spent two days vomiting, barely able to keep down water. But Vikas was convinced that with the warmer temperatures, every minute lost imperiled the reason they’d come. If the ice walls of the crevasse melted too much, the corpse would drop, disappearing forever into the abyss.

Let it fall, Parvathi thought. Why did it matter? Why did anything matter after what had happened. They were twelve years old and had nothing to look forward to. There was no time to waste on the dead.

Parvathi was in Ms. Aronson’s math class when it happened. One second, Ms. Aronson was telling them to pull out their workbooks. The next, it seemed she’d suddenly dropped to her knees. Except she didn’t get back up again. She couldn’t because Ms. Aronson wasn’t there anymore. In her place was a wild pig tangled in Ms. Aronson’s dress and undergarments, squealing and colliding with desks in a desperate attempt to escape.

It was the day the adults disappeared. But it wasn’t just the adults, and it wasn’t just a single day. Anyone over fifteen was gone. And as they aged, teenagers vanished, replaced by pigs that ran biting and spitting into the woods. Parentless children rode bicycles through empty streets. Naked toddlers scavenged for candy in looted supermarkets. What was the use of growing up if, in the end, everyone became a pig?

Vikas raided their parents’ convenience store for food, flashlights, and batteries. Parvathi broke into a sporting goods store for handguns, rifles, and ammunition. If the new normal meant packs of wild children urinating in the streets and taking whatever they wanted, she meant to be on the right side of all arguments.

Though twins, they’d always been different. Parvathi trusted only her family and a good book. Vikas founded their middle school chess and cross-country clubs. He was known by and knew everyone. After “the day,” he kept it up—doing house checks to make sure the littlest ones were being taken care of, digging graves, establishing a neighborhood vegetable garden. Parvathi tolerated Vikas’s do-gooding, so long as he did it outside. That’s why she was so peeved when he brought what was clearly a dying boy into their home.

The boy was about their age but seemed a ghost already. Fingernails were peeled away from hands black with frostbite and he reeked of phlegm and flesh rot. While Parvathi disinfected everything and everywhere the boy touched, Vikas was at his bedside, spoon feeding him soup as if he was a baby robin fallen from the nest. And like a “rescued” baby bird, the boy died two days later.

That should have been the end of it. But after he’d buried the boy in the backyard, Vikas hatched his plan to take a dirt motorbike into the national park and climb to a glacier on the eastern slope.

According to the boy, on “the day,” he, his father, and a mountain guide had been on a three-person rope team ascending toward the mountain summit. At the moment of the transformation, the pig that was his father fell squealing into a crevasse. But the mountain guide had remained a man. The guide first pulled the creature up, then hastily cut it loose, in the process losing his footing and impaling his head on an ice axe. He crumpled into the crevasse, but his prostrate body got caught between the wall and an outcropping of ice.

“It’s a lie,” Parvathi said. “Or the dead boy was so scared he saw only what he wanted to see. When you ask the little kids what happened, some of them swear their parents grew wings and flew to Heaven.”

“He had no reason to invent a story like that,” Vikas said.

“He got a meal and a warm bed out of it, didn’t he? Maybe he was scared of dying alone.”

“There’s only one way to find out.”

“Why does it matter?” Parvathi asked. “Dead human. Dead pig. Dead is dead. We have enough dead right where we are.”

“What if we’re not as alone as we thought?” Vikas said. “What if somewhere else, or for someone else, life is going on the way it did before?”

Parvathi couldn’t let her twin brother go by himself. She had visions of Vikas offering food to ghoul-like children in a rural town and being beaten to a pulp. What if he broke his leg and never made it back? So she went with him, though both knew they’d probably find nothing. “The day” happened mid-winter. Now it was mid-summer. A little snow melt and the guide’s body would slide into oblivion.

Parvathi and Vikas made base camp at sunset, but both were too exhausted to pitch their own tent. Instead, they occupied the small dome tent that must have belonged to the dead boy and his father. The tent was well-staked out and a boulder protected it from the wind sweeping across the rock plateau.

Vikas was delirious with fever and he couldn’t stop shivering. Parvathi zipped their sleeping bags together and cradled him like the child she knew she could never have. She wondered if this was what it was to share their mother’s womb, pressed together, feeling each other’s every twitch, two heartbeats instead of one. How lonely and liberating it had been to be separated.

The next morning broke bright, clear, and warm. But Vikas’s fever hadn’t abated. The only way Parvathi could keep him inside the tent was to promise to make a solo ascent.

The way up had become slushy and treacherous. The snow creeped into Parvathi’s boots and melted, leaving her feet cold and soggy. It took her two hours to reach the place the boy had described with eerie accuracy.

The rope was still threaded in a straight line through anchors. But she discovered that they needn’t have worried about the ice melting and the body falling. The boy had tied off his end of the rope to a metal anchor. The line that fell down into the crevasse was taut but secure.

Parvathi lay face down on the glacier so she could take a good long look at the body dangling by the rope ten feet below. It had four legs and a snout. It was a pig corpse. Parvathi unsheathed her knife and sliced through the line.

Parvathi worried about Vikas’s health throughout her descent to base camp. If his fever broke today, would he be strong enough to begin the long trek down tomorrow? And then there was getting back to the city. They had a motorbike but had used all their gas.

Parvathi unzipped the tent door. Vikas sat up immediately.

“What did you see?” he said.

“The boy was right,” Parvathi said. “A dead man. Unmistakably human. But my footsteps made the ice crack. The shelf gave way and he disappeared.”

“I told you!” he said. “Didn’t I tell you?” Vikas lay back in his sleeping bag with a wan smile of satisfaction on his face.

“You did,” Parvathi said. “Now rest. I’ll fetch snow to cool you down. If we stay here longer than a night or two, we’ll run out of food.”

**

Harold Taw is a novelist, playwright, and layabout multi-form writer. His debut novel was Adventures of the Karaoke King (Lake Union Publishing, 2011). His writing has been featured on NPR, in a New York Times bestselling anthology, and in The Seattle Times; his screenplay Dog Park garnered recognition in numerous domestic and international film festivals and competitions. Harold co-wrote a musical adaptation of Jane Austen’s final novel, Persuasion: A New Musical, which premiered in 2017 at Seattle’s Taproot Theatre Company and became the highest grossing show in the theater’s 41-year history. Harold is currently completing a novel about a turbulent adolescence in Southeast Asia, collaborating on a musical about parallel universes, and co-curating WordsWest Literary Series. A Yale Law School graduate and a Fulbright Scholar, Harold’s research and writing have been supported by, among others, 4Culture, Artist Trust, Centrum, Bureau of Fearless Ideas, Hugo House, Helen Riaboff Whiteley Center, Humanities Washington, Jack Straw Productions, and Wing Luke Museum.

**

Image: Flickr / Dave Hilditch

A Theory of Love

Chapter One

Bermeja

Twice the pilot dipped low and waved a wing to a fisherman who waved back. Christopher shifted his surfboard and stood it beside him. He watched the small plane disappear down the coast. He looked back at the fishing boats and sea that glistened as if cut from translucent stone. He remembered a retired sea captain telling him that he would always know where he was by the color of the sea. He said he could be blindfolded and dropped in any body of water and the moment he took off his blindfold, he would know where he was. The idea of color as a type of compass—a form of geography—had enthralled Christopher. The captain had been the caretaker of the land that now surrounded him.

He heard the hum of tires on the river-stone road before he saw them—the hotel manager with a young woman in the passenger seat. They stopped to see if he wanted a ride. He had noticed her yesterday getting out of a taxi at the entrance to the small hotel. She was dressed in an ankle-length skirt and wore a fedora. Since his arrival in Bermeja two weeks ago, Christopher had watched crews from L.A. come and go—one for a photoshoot for an expensive brand of suntan oils, another for a bathing suit ad. There was something about her that made him know she was not from the West Coast.

He angled his surfboard into the back and got in. “You look as if you’re going to give a lecture,” he said, leaning forward, looking at her blazer and the satchel she held on her lap.

She shook her head and smiled. “I’m going to interview Paolo Pavesi.” Helen referred to the eccentric Italian financier who had spent the last two decades transforming Bermeja into a glamorous bohemian refuge.

He nodded and asked her how long she was staying. “I’m leaving day after tomorrow.”

Christopher asked the hotel manager to drop him off at Playa Azul, the small beach cupped between high cliffs a quarter of a mile south of the hotel. Helen watched as he took his surfboard from the back of the jeep. She could tell by the way he handled it, it was a familiar object. But if he had once been a surfer, he didn’t appear to be one now. He was lean and tanned, but his skin had not been punished by years and years in the sun.

He noticed her watching him. As he thanked the hotel manager, he hung his free hand on the roll bar and leaned in toward her. “So, should we have dinner tonight at eight or nine?”

She laughed and brushed the hair from her face.

___

Helen had not shown up for dinner, but the following morning Christopher walked down to the hotel and caught her getting coffee. “You didn’t show up last night. I waited at the bar for hours.”

“I’m not so sure you did.”

He mimed being stabbed in the chest.

“I didn’t think it was a real invitation. I don’t even know your name.”

“Christopher Delavaux. And it was. How about tonight?”

“I can’t. I’ve been invited to a dinner party at Mr. Pavesi’s. At Casa de Mi Corazón.”

He raised his eyebrows. “You might want to be careful.”

“Why?”

“Well, it can get pretty decadent around here.” He paused. “Or so I’m told.”

“Really?” She waited for an explanation.

“When you met with Paolo, how many young women were sunbathing nude? I’m guessing three or four.”

“Four.”

“Did he give you a tour of his house?”

“He did.”

“Did he show you his studio?”

“You mean the room with the mats on the floor and the slits and small round openings in the domed ceiling?”

He tilted his head. “Well then, I rest my case. So if you bring me along, I’ll look after you.”

She bit her lower lip and thought for a minute. “Okay. Yeah, okay.” “Meet you here at nine.”

“How do you know the time?”

“I was invited, too.”

He started to leave but hesitated. “I can count on you to show up this time?”

“Don’t you need to know my name?” He smiled and shook his head.

**

From A Theory of Love by Margaret Bradham Thornton. Copyright 2018 Margaret Bradham Thornton. Excerpted with permission of Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

**

Margaret Bradham Thornton is the author of Charleston and the editor of Tennessee Williams’s Notebooks, for which she received the Bronze ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award in the Autobiography/Memoir Category and the C. Hugh Holman Prize for the best volume of southern literary scholarship published in 2006, given by the Society for the Study of Southern Literature. She is a graduate of Princeton University and lives in Florida.

How to Set Yourself on Fire

TWENTY-FIVE

Torrey and Vinnie are still outside when I get home. I wonder if they sit outside all afternoon and evening because there’s a deconstructed mountain lion or something hogging the living room floor.

Torrey is reading some sort of Penguin Classic. Vinnie is playing Tetris on his phone. He isn’t smoking.

“Come sit with us for a little while,” Torrey says.

“Okay,” I say. I look at Vinnie. I haven’t looked at him since we slept together. “Give me a minute.”

Vinnie looks up, nods, and goes back to Tetris. This is relieving.

I go inside, where Harold C. Carr’s letters lie scattered across my entire floor. I don’t remember doing this, leaving them like this. I panic a little, considering the likelihood that I scattered the letters without noticing versus the likelihood of a break-in while Torrey and Vinnie watched my front door. Still, I check them all. I count them, paranoid. Three hundred and eighty-one. There’s one missing so I count again. I must have miscounted them because now there are three hundred and eighty-two and I realize I am sweating. My knee itches to the point of insanity. I look at it and see a pale, crusty patch of eczema that wasn’t there yesterday. It’s the size of a quarter, and as I stare at it and my vision blurs and warps, I can make it grow until it covers my entire knee, the floor, the walls, the sky outside.

It’s been an hour since Torrey asked me to come sit with them. Counting letters takes time. The sun has long gone down and they’re inside their own house now.

Is Vinnie panicking about our supposed no-strings arrangement? That because I didn’t come outside, maybe I’m feeling awkward? I’m not awkward. At least, not about sex. Not about Vinnie. I partly want to spend the rest of the evening talking to Torrey, because she makes me feel something like hope. And I partly wish Torrey wasn’t there because then I could have sex with Vinnie again.

Frontline’s on. It’s about drug-resistant bacteria. I’m fascinated and appalled. I wash my hands in the kitchen sink eighteen times in the first half hour of the segment, eyes glued to the screen. The eczema on my knee is getting worse. I turn up the volume while I rifle through the medicine cabinet. I check the kitchenette. On the counter is oil and vinegar and my skin’s so irritated right now that I opt for vinegar. It burns. I wash my hands again, first with vinegar. Then with soap. They’re red and flaky.

“…She was a skin picker,” the doctor on Frontline says. “She, as do many kids, picked at her little scabs. And that was likely what introduced the staph infection.”

I want to look up eczema blogs, but I don’t. I leave the television on but go outside. Vinnie’s finishing up a cigarette.

“Hey,” I say.

He nods.

“Is Torrey asleep?”

“I think so. She was up early today to get an assignment done.”

“Oh. Sorry I didn’t come out earlier. I got held up,” I say.

“It’s okay,” he says. He presses his finished cigarette into the ashtray and gives it a slight twist.

Frontline says through the open window, “So you’re telling me that he had these bugs and you had nothing left to treat him with?”

“God, what are you watching in there?” Vinnie asks.

I shrug. I sit on my front step and scratch my knee, and bits of my skin drift to the concrete. I want to throw up.

“You okay?” he asks, his voice quiet for Vinnie. If Torrey were awake, there’d be a good chance she actually didn’t hear that.

“Yeah,” I say.

“Your knee?”

“Oh, it’s eczema. I think.”

“Is that why you’re watching some horrible germ show?”

“I don’t know,” I say. I don’t know.

“Well, I have some stuff you can put on it, if you want. Taxidermy is a rough business. I keep lots of salves around,” he says.

I laugh.

“I’ll go get something and bring it over,” he says.

I wait for a minute. Then two. Then I go back inside.

A nurse is saying, “You go into a room, and maybe there’s a hole in your glove.”

The letters are lined up on my bed, spread out. I never cleaned them up when I counted them earlier.

“It’s a very complex environment,” says the nurse. “Alarms are ringing.”

Vinnie walks in.

The nurse says, “Did I forget to wash my hands between Mr. X and Mrs. Y?”

“Here,” he says. “Let me.”

And then he’s touching my knee, and it’s weirdly intimate and disgusting at the same time. I want to know when he washed his hands last, but he smells clean, and he’s a professional, and I’m watching PBS, so surely he knew to wash his hands.

“Is Torrey asleep?” I ask, again.

“Yeah.”

Vinnie undresses me. This arrangement is going well. I reach for the remote, but there’s a Pfizer VP on talking about cutting research, and he’s a bit handsome. He’s an asshole, and he’s smug, but I hesitate to turn the TV off.

“Leave it on,” Vinnie says in a low, dark voice. I look at him and wonder if I misheard him. “For the noise,” he clarifies. “You know. Torrey.”

My hands are still raw and peeling. There are probably a thousand tiny points of entry for bacteria to get under my skin, right into my bloodstream. I look at Vinnie’s hands. I look at his skin. I consider Vinnie’s hygiene.

When he climbs on top of me on my small couch, his leg brushes the eczema spot on my knee. I brace myself by grabbing his shoulders and my fingernails scratch his skin. He makes a noise—a moan, a gasp, something in between—and I think about his skin cells beneath my fingertips. I think of him liking this feeling. I think of my fingers, raw and peeling, covered in a thousand micro-tears and vinegar. I wonder if Vinnie’s shoulders sting.

I scratch harder, just a little drag. The idea of Vinnie’s blood and toxins on my skin is unsettling but it makes me lift my hips off the couch.

Vinnie pushes into me. There’s a pause, there’s heavy breathing. I feel intense and powerful.

Frontline says, “It’s been two years since his last operation. It had taken three surgeries and another round of highly toxic antibiotics before doctors believed they had removed all the NDM-1 from his leg.”

“Fuck,” Vinnie says. “I’m a little bit out of my mind right now.”

I don’t answer. I don’t disagree.

“Those letters,” he says, breathless, a little distracted, nodding toward my bed. His movements slow but he doesn’t stop. “What are they?”

I prop myself up, awkward.

“Shut up, Vinnie.”

I scratch at my knee in rhythm to his movements. I feel outside of my body and oppressed by it at the same time. There’s ointment mixed with blood on my fingertips. The TV is talking about the Centers for Disease Control and I reach up to Vinnie’s shoulders and pull my bloodied, oozing fingers across his skin, into the scratches I made.

TWENTY-SIX

When Vinnie leaves, I drive back to Jesse’s. The house is completely dark. I sleep in my car that night, parked across the street. I fling the driver’s seat back and slump into the gap between the top of the seat and the bottom of the head rest, stretching my feet out on either side of the pedals. It’s almost as good as lying down.

When I wake up in the morning, the sun is bright and high in the sky. Jesse must have long since left for work. I try to remember if I’ve ever seen him leave for work. I wait to feel sadness or disappointment for missing him, but nothing comes.

At home, Vinnie is in the courtyard. He’s doing something to a pair of glass eyeballs.

“Were you keeping your business a secret from me, or something?” I say.

“What?” he asks.

“I mean, I’ve lived here for two years and didn’t know you were a taxidermist. And then just days after you tell me, all of a sudden you’re painting eyeballs out in the light of day?”

He laughs. “Well, I suppose it looks that way, doesn’t it?”

“It’s a shameful profession,” I say with a smile. “You should be ashamed of yourself.”

“Are you just now getting home?” he asks.

I don’t have to answer to him, I remind myself. I never had to.

“Nah, I just had to run some stuff over to my mom’s.” The lie feels good.

“Hey,” Vinnie says. “Don’t worry about explaining anything to me.” He’s smiling.

I smile back. “Okay.”

“And,” he hesitates. He picks up the eyeball and twirls it a little, squinting to see whatever it was he was doing. The edges of his skin around his fingernails are almost all split. “Thank you.”

“Hm?”

“For last night.”

“Oh.”

“And the other night.”

“Yes. Well,” I say. I want to be inside. “Thank you.”

“Well, okay, yeah, you’re welcome,” he says.

“Please don’t ever thank me again.”

“Right.”

“Is it a real eyeball?” I ask.

“No, Sheila.”

Inside, I lock the door, but then I open the windows. It still smells like sex in here.

#

Dear Rosamond,

I am pleased that you are finding the time to reply to me so frequently. Your letters bring me such joy. Unfortunately, I will not be able to respond for the next eight days. I was unable to tell you sooner because my travel plans have been up in the air, but I am going on a trip to visit my brother. He and I are quite close, and his wife just this morning gave birth to their first child. Despite having lots of young nieces and nephews, it still feels strange to be an uncle, but I am looking forward to seeing my brother and his new family.

However, I daresay I will miss you. I’m afraid that come eight days from now, you’ll have a hefty stack of letters pushed through your fence, letters I wrote you while I was away.

I saw you and your daughter playing in the backyard yesterday. Do you think of me when you’re in the backyard, as I think of you when I am in mine?

Harold rambles the most in this letter. It’s one of his longest. I try to imagine him in this space between meeting her and professing his love, between the beginning and the middle. He tests the waters with affection. He tests the waters with familiarity, with anecdotes, revealing things about himself.

I want more.

I’m asleep when Torrey comes home. She knocks on my door, which is unusual for any of the now three residents of this tiny courtyard. There’s not supposed to be any sort of inquiring. We just wait in the courtyard, and someone will come out soon enough.

When I open the door, she steps forward, like she’s coming in. I remember that she is twelve. I remember that my house smells like sex with her dad. I step toward her too, so that the both of us are more outside than inside. I win.

“I want to read the letters again,” she says.

“No,” I say.

“Oh, come on.”

“No.”

“Well, just one? Please?” She looks so expectant, so pitiful, that I almost consider it.

“Maybe another day.”

“Now?”

“Torrey.”

“Okay, okay.”

“Come and sit,” I say. I feel motivated almost (almost) entirely by a desire to make this other person feel good about herself. I wonder if this is what it’s like to have a sibling. Then I wonder if this is what it’s like to have a child. Then I wonder what it means that I considered someone twenty-three years younger than me more viable as a sibling than as a child.

“How’s school?” I ask.

Torrey laughs. “Really?”

“Really what?”

“You’re doing the ‘how’s school’ thing?” she asks. She uses air quotes.

“Yes, I’m doing it. Since when do you use air quotes? Is this a new thing?”

“Nobody else I know does air quotes. It’s not a thing. I probably saw them when I was little, watching old nineties movies or something.”

“So you’re, like, retro,” I say.

“I guess I am,” Torrey says. She kicks her feet up and she’s wearing the exact same shoes I wore at her age, navy blue Converse low tops, faded enough to be mistaken for grey, and the black line along the toe is rubbed thin, some plastic shoelace aglets missing.

“You totally are retro.”

“I’ve been thinking about that one letter,” she says. She’s not even cautious. She doesn’t feel like she needs some sort of preamble. I love that about her. I love that about children.

“Oh, that one?” I poke her arm. “There are three hundred and eighty-two of them. Narrow it down a bit for me.”

“The one where he is upset.”

“He’s upset from like, number twenty onwards,” I say.

“The first one where he, you know. Where he goes a little crazy?”

#

Dear Rosamond,

It’s been ten days. You’ve never gone this long without writing to me. Even a few months ago, when I visited my brother, I was so pleased to come home to eight little oilcloth packages, each containing an individually wrapped letter for each day I was gone. I was filled with joy! Despite the fact that we have no expectations between us, no commitment, no rules, I am finding myself afraid as each day passes. When I am the most selfish and the least paranoid, I worry that you have tired of me. When I am the least selfish and the most paranoid, I worry that something terrible has gone wrong, that you are ill or hurt. And when I’m somewhere in the middle, both selfish and paranoid, I worry that Mr. Baker has found my letters.

I’ve taken to sitting on the grass in the backyard, near my vegetable garden. I watch as best I can through the cracks in the fence but I can’t see much. I know I’d be better off indoors, where I can at least see that people are in the backyard. Sometimes I can see the top of your head, the sun shining on your hair. I feel like a Peeping Tom. I feel like a scoundrel. I don’t care.

My dear Rosamond, I just want to be closer to you. And that is why I sit near the fence in the afternoons after work and first thing in the morning. I feel slightly batty. I’ve considered moving my bedroom to the spare room, just so that when I sleep, I sleep one room closer to you.

Oh, my Rosamond. It would behoove me not to send this letter through the fence. I’m glad you are receiving my other ones. I worry that a growing stack would be too conspicuous. But this one in particular, well, it is not in my best interests that you be made aware that I am losing my mind over you.

Alas, sweet Rosamond, I will surely send this anyway. I seem to have a misplaced all sense of restraint when it comes to you.

Sincerely,

Harold

#

“So, you know, the first one where he goes mental?” Torrey asks.

I do know. “Do you have a photographic memory?”

“Not really,” she says.

“Well, there’s no not really about it. You either do or you don’t. You seemed like the type to have a photographic memory, that’s all.”

“There’s a type?” she asks. She kicks back her chair so it balances on the back two legs.

“Yes. You. You’re the type.”

Vinnie’s patio furniture is so old that I worry for her safety. The chair’s back legs bulge a little as she slowly rocks, but they don’t give.

She rocks for a while, minuscule movements on the chair. I’m suddenly desperate to try it, too, like a contagion, like a yawn. But I don’t.

“What’s the deal with your family?” she asks.

I kick back on my chair after all.

“What do you mean?” My chair falls forward and crunches back down on all fours. I suck at doing the artful idle thing.

“I mean, where are they? Why do you have the letters? Why not her own children? Why was this a secret? I need answers! Or whatever.”

“Goddamn you.”

Torrey laughs. Vinnie comes out. He sits on my step because he only has two chairs in the courtyard, the ones Torrey and I are in. He nods at us and lights up to smoke. Torrey hands him the ashtray.

“I can’t believe you endorse his nasty habit,” I say.

Vinnie grins.

“What are you ladies doing?” Vinnie asks.

“Talking,” Torrey says. I’m not looking at her to see if she rolls her eyes but the nostalgia I feel for my own adolescence is heavy.

“Torrey asked me about my family,” I say vaguely.

Vinnie laughs.

“What?”

“I hear your phone calls with your mother. Well, I think it’s your mother,” he says.

“Yes. That’d be her.”

“Is she all you have?” Torrey asks.

“Jesus, where do you get lines like that?” I ask.

“Sorry,” she says. “But is she?”

“Yes,” I say. “She’s pretty much all I have now that my grandmother died. I don’t have any siblings. Neither did my mom.”

“So is your dad dead?” she asks. “I can ask because I have a dead mom.”

“Torrey,” Vinnie says.

“I’m ready to joke about it like that,” she says. “She’s my mom. I decide.”

“I thought it was awesome,” I say.

“Well?” she says.

“No, my dad isn’t dead,” is all I say.

Nobody speaks. Vinnie extinguishes his cigarette.

“Have you heard about Sheila’s grandma and her crazy affair?” Torrey says to her dad.

“Torrey!” I say.

“No,” Vinnie says. He watches me carefully. I watch him back. “I don’t need to hear about your girl stuff,” he says. He gets up, messes up Torrey’s hair as he walks by, and goes back in the house.

Vinnie is a good man.

The moon is high in the bright sky. “My mother always used to call it a Children’s Moon,” I say, nodding upward. “When it’s out in the afternoon.”

“So did mine,” Torrey says, and her voice is quiet and small.

It takes a minute for me to muster up the courage. I don’t even know what I’m feeling. Friendship? Maternal instinct? Sisterhood? It’s something and it’s strong and I just want Torrey to feel like she’s not alone.

I reach over between the two faded green plastic lawn chairs and pick up her hand. She flinches at first, but quickly relaxes and lets me hold her hand. She’s stubborn, and she’s tough, but the first time I squeeze her hand, she begins to cry. She’s a quiet crier. It’s so tidy and gentle.

I can’t remember the last time I cried. But I can remember the first time I definitely didn’t.

**

Julia Dixon Evans lives in San Diego. How to Set Yourself on Fire is her first novel. Her fiction has appeared in Monkeybicycle, The Fanzine, Hobart, Paper Darts, and elsewhere. Her nonfiction work has appeared in Like The Wind Magazine and Barrelhouse. She is an editor and program director for the literary nonprofit and small press So Say We All.

Hard Candy

Honey Shifflett made a mean hard candy.

From her tiny kitchen emerged fat lidded tins, long foil trays, and clear crinkled bags of rock candy and nut brittles, lollipops and peppermint sticks. Inside the town limits of Pleasant Groves, Honey’s confectionary fame was firmly fixed. Still, each season, her reputation swelled like caramel spilling from a chocolate shell. Her recipes were always delicious and, her fans were discovering, often confounding. When Honey cheerfully refused to divulge her recipe for Butter Maple Nut Crunch to the Trumpeter Baptist Church Ladies Auxiliary, the group gathered in secret at Clarissa Bedford’s house just before Thanksgiving, intent on dismantling and then recreating the folds of its savory-sweet mystery in time for their annual fundraiser.

All afternoon, they measured and re-measured, stirred, taste-tested, and penciled careful notations in the margins of their wild guesses. At the finale of their collective project, they gathered around as Clarissa took a delicate bite and then another, chewed and rolled the sample around her tongue thoughtfully, then swallowed. The inner circle leaned in, awaiting verdict. Clarissa screwed up her mouth with dismay and shook her head no.

In the coming days, a small group split off and staged culinary vigils in the parish kitchen. A clique formed, headed by a woman whose husband worked for the Farm Bureau testing soil samples. Unlikely unions sprang in fertile loam that would only be salted later by failure and finger pointing. Finally, Patsy Lambert loaded a crew in her catering van and drove over to Honey’s house. They marched up the walk, climbed Honey’s steps, and knocked at her door. When the young woman answered, Patsy pronounced with authority, “Now, Honey, you know your grandma was the finest candy-maker on Sand Mountain. A handsome woman, both in profile and character.”

“Yes, ma’am, I know,” Honey answered modestly. She did not invite the cadre in. She had just set a pot to boiling.

“She was as generous as she was devout,” Patsy added. A single hair sprouting from her chin came visible in the late morning light as she set her mouth and raised her head, remembering the old woman’s battle to ensure Pleasant Groves remained dry when an Episcopal mayor tried to weaken its foundations with wine.

“Yes, indeed, Mrs. Lambert.” Honey closed her eyes and nodded solemnly.

Honey knew her grandma could have sold that patch story quilt for hundreds of dollars anytime, but the woman had stored it away in Honey’s hope chest because the girl loved it so. “Grandma was a giving soul.”

Patsy’s forehead gathered. If Honey was going to be so agreeable, she was at a loss as to how to negotiate. She blurted, “How do you make your Butter Maple Nut Crunch?”

Honey pretended to be shocked. Finally, she said, “Honestly, you just need patience. You have to be able to wait for the sugar to reach the right temperature.”

The group barely exhaled. There were only the chickadees calling, hey sweetie and dee dee dee dee. Honey shrugged. “If the temperature is just right, the candy sings when it cools.”

To Honey, the sound of hot sugar as it cooled into hard candy was not unlike icicles melting, falling from the barn eaves to splinter against troughs warmed by the breath of horses, or ice in a glass when she poured just-brewed tea. Each crackle was rhythmic; together, they were a melody too. Honey found great dignity in this symmetry. She was reveling in its mystery when Patsy May sunk back on her heels and croaked, “It – sings?”

Honey raised her palm to stop Patsy May right there and said, “Yes, but you’re getting ahead of yourself.”

How could she translate her inimitable artistry behind candy chemistry to this group gathered before her? The magic was in the watchful wait, the postponement of pleasure that sent others biting their nails and peering tensely into the sweet rolling steam. It was the agonizing ache for fulfillment, she knew this. The wait was the final test of a recipe’s exactitude. Its arrival, coda for a job well done. Between the two – well, that was art. “It’s the temperature you need to be concerned about first,” Honey said, her eyes widening at you. She surveyed the posse standing on her front step.

Without a word, she looked over at Shirlene Jones. Under Honey’s placid gaze, Shirlene blinked nervously. Honey knew that Shirlene played cornet and once admitted her dream of leading a Dixieland jazz band. Honey considered that to Shirlene, she might describe the wait as standing in the ditch by the high school in the dazzling glint of the horns, awaiting the bray of a marching song and the disciplined formation of the band in the July 4th parade. Perhaps.

Honey uprooted her gaze and settled on Viola Mize, who coughed and picked at her earlobe. To Viola, whom Honey knew was running around with her shift manager at Pizza Hut, it was the low ache of longing for the caress of her lover as she took and he baked pizza orders for a line five people deep, too many hours away from stripping naked in their nest by the creek. Maybe. Honey touched Viola’s arm with sympathy and turned to study Jean Petty.

Jean had been in Alcoholics Anonymous now for going on six years. Honey never took a toke of smoke, had swallowed nary a drop of champagne. Honey considered that she might describe this integral part of the candy making process to Jean as the first tavern along Route 131 out of their dry county when Jean was on her way to Birmingham and shouldn’t couldn’t won’t stop in for a cold taste of just one glass.

Honey bristled with frustration. It really shouldn’t be so complicated, so psychological. Honey viewed the wait – obedience to the whim and lark of sugar – as a simple and necessary step in careful confectionary procedure. Even the sublime, Honey believed, could be reduced to a clean equation.

The ratio of Karo syrup and Dixie crystals to Honey’s will of steel was incalculable, since Honey herself was inscrutable. When she finally took pity on her visitors, she announced cryptically, “Equivalence entails migration of time.” Each woman in the foursome exchanged looks, suspicious that the others understood what she did not. Honey put her hands on either side of the door and began to turn away to indicate she had to go. Viola pictured her lover’s smile as she brought him a platter of maple candy. She asked, “Is there anything you can tell us about this – singing? Some advice?”

Honey turned. “When the candy cools, if the temperature has been perfect, it makes the most -” She closed her eyes and seemed to shiver. “- enticing music.” For a moment, she stretched her arms out like a conductor. She stopped suddenly: “But if it’s too hot or too cold…” Without finishing, she folded her arms beneath her breasts. “And you just won’t know until you’re listening for that sound,” She shook her head ominously, “when it’s too late to go back.”

As a consolation prize of sorts, Honey recommended that they use a certain brand of candy thermometer, even though she never did. Hers was a singular endurance. With understated imperiousness, she admitted, “It ain’t easy, I know.” She shut the door on their inquiry.

In measured tones, Honey had skirted the fact that she now pronounced rich-voiced to the gingham curtain as the women disappeared down her steps: “Y’all just don’t have self-restraint.”
Honey liked to think it was a mélange of blessing and birthright, inherited from her grandmother. During the big war, grandma had set aside her sugar rations each month so that by December, Trumpeter Baptist would have enough to make Christmas candy for the boys. Honey smiled at the woman’s photo framed by the coffee hutch. Reminded of her unique and unqualified calling, Honey returned to her stove and said to the spoon: “Patience.”

**

Cesca Janece Waterfield is the author of Bartab: An Afterhours Ballad (Two-Handed Engine Press). She graduated from McNeese State University with an MFA in Creative Writing and is at work on a nonfiction collection about the connection between domestic and institutionalized violence, how art and literature offer solace in such cycles, and the rich tidings that can arrive from surviving pain. She received the 2017 Editor’s Prize in Fiction from MARY: A Journal of New Writing, judged by Natalie Baszile, and her work has been nominated for the Best of the Net. She teaches composition at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where she is studying for a PhD. A musician, Cesca once met Willie Nelson in a restaurant named ‘Cesca. Follow Cesca on Twitter!

**

Image: Flickr / Pierce Place

Hollywood, MN

West of Frogtown where Saint Anthony Main meets I-94 on the Midway, there’s a boulevard where the famous people stand around all day and greet their fans. They smile and wave at all the cars pulling onto the highway. Sometimes the cars stop and give them money. My dad was the most famous of all of them, Captain Tony. Lots of the guys on the boulevard were preachers, but my dad was a sports fan. He was too thin for Minnesota, so he wore a Vikings sweatshirt under his Twins jacket and his face looked long and wind worn, except on gameday. That’s when he was happy. That’s when he’d turn red.

The Dinkytown college kids, the Seward hippies and Riverside hipsters, West Saint Paul yuppies and the Powderhorn Park lefties, they all knew him. You’d run into him around town and he’d hand you a sharpie and ask you to sign his bike, a three speed rust machine with no handlebars. He’d tell you what he knew like, “Indian is the rich man’s Chinese food,” and, “Pizza is in three different food groups.” Everybody was impressed.

I wasn’t famous yet, so my dad did what he could to keep me out of the public eye. He didn’t want my life to get wrecked by the paparazzi, the countless cars lining up on the ramp to 94 just to give a buck to their favorite celebrities. I’ll always love him for that. Not wanting to get me caught up in the fast life too young like all those other kids of Hollywood types.

I didn’t go to school because the other kids would’ve been jealous that I had a famous dad, so I spent most days at the park ten blocks up north of the boulevard, a big place, all full up with picnic benches, giant oak trees, tennis courts, and basketball hoops. The trees were old and hung over the park like a roof, so even in the middle of the afternoon it always looked like it was just before sunset. The echoes from the trucks engine braking on 94 made you feel far away, and it didn’t even smell like bus stops or bars like the Midway usually did—just summertime, wet and earthy. I’d hang out there with the other kids when they got home from the fifth grade. Their parents had normal jobs, working down at a school or making loans.  I’d never heard of any of their dads, except Aaron Gilbert’s.

Sometimes we’d play normal tag, but we’d usually play Trash Tag. Trash Tag is that game where all the kids bring the plastic bags their gas station doughnuts and Mountain Dew summer flavors came in then go around the park digging through the waste baskets looking for whatever you can fling the best. Once everybody’s got a bag full up of really good stuff, like half full pop cans or bags of dog poop, you have to figure out who’s It. When you’re It in Trash Tag,  everybody is trying to tag you and not the other way around. The dirtiest kid is It when the game starts. It was usually me, but sometimes it would be somebody else.

We’d play other games too, basketball, touch football, or Smear the Queer, depending on who was playing. Aaron Gilbert always picked the game. He was long and scrawny and looked like the noodles we’d get sometimes when the church on Charles and Fry threw spaghetti dinners, but he swore a lot and was mean and in junior high so we’d listen to him. Once he brought a computer printout to the park and made us all look at it. It was folded in the middle because he was hiding it in a book, but it was in color.

It was a picture of a girl, naked except for pink socks. She was kneeling on a bed with white sheets that had blue stars on them. It looked like she was stretching before bed, leaning back with her hands on her ankles and toothpaste on her lips. There was a flesh colored shadow on the inside of her hips.  When I looked at it my ears started burning up and my lungs felt like they were going to fall out. Like I must have been doing something wrong, but wasn’t sure what yet.

I always felt that way with Aaron. His dad knew my dad, even though his dad wasn’t the same kind of famous. My dad said Mr. Gilbert was the kind of guy who would look down on you just for knowing twice as much as him. The kind of guy who thought being King Liquor actually made you somebody. Aaron was always telling lies about my dad. Saying he was a nobody and a drunk, like you could be that and famous at the same time. Saying he tried to steal from Gilbert’s Liquor, the store his dad ran up on Sherburne. I knew none of it was true. We had McDonald’s or Culver’s or Little Ceaser’s for dinner every night, not just on special occasions or after soccer games like the other kids talked about. It didn’t make sense to me that anybody could say we were too broke for anything.

A couple days after Aaron brought the picture, he told us he found a place with some more like it farther up the Midway. I wasn’t so sure about the first one, but there’s something about a thing like that that makes you want to feel that way again, burning inside and out and electric all through your neck, like you’re about to jump out of a tree or just snuck into the State Fair, but deeper than that. Something you don’t quite remember. Something that made you know you were alive without even having to think about it.

Aaron said the spot was up University, at an old closed down tire place. The other kids said some stuff about wanting to play basketball or having to get home in time for supper. I didn’t have anywhere to be, and my dad would probably be down at the boulevard for a couple more hours, so I told him I’d come with. He spit on the grass near me like he was pissed I was tagging along, but I think he was secretly glad to have somebody to go with.

By the time we got there, the sun was low and everything was golden. The sides of the building were all painted up with a mess of kids, all different colors and holding hands with a sign that said ‘Our Neighborhood’. It didn’t look much like our neighborhood to me, but we’d walked a ways since we left the park so I figured we must’ve hit Frogtown. I’d never been there before, but my dad talked about it sometimes. He said there were lots of Vietcong in Frogtown, which he didn’t like much. Sometimes he called it Ho Chi Minh City.  

I asked Aaron if I was right and we should be on the lookout for Vietcong, and he asked me if I was born stupid or if I’d learned it from my dad. I would have said something back but I didn’t want to push my luck, not when we were just becoming friends anyway.

Around the back of the building there was a big wooden board instead of a door. The bottom half had rotted out and you could fit through the hole and get inside that way. Once we got in there it smelled like fresh sidewalk and dog pee. The air was thick and the floor was all full up with broken glass and flat old cigarette boxes turned gummy from mildew and concrete sweat.

There was a counter along the back wall, and Aaron whispered that the pictures were just behind it, magazines full of them. Glossy too, not like that paper shit he’d brought to the park. All kinds he said. Black girls and Asian girls, even fat girls. He said there was some fag stuff I’d probably like too, but I decided not to ask him what he meant.  

There were a couple candles burned to hardly anything at all up in the corner next to a mess of blankets. A few odds and ends were laying around — a small plastic trumpet, some model airplane glue, a bike chain—and, right by the blankets, a pile of phonebooks and magazines. We crawled over and started leafing through them. Aaron was right. The magazines were smeared and warped from water so you could only make out about half of the pictures, but what you could make out was the kind of thing you knew nobody had ever seen before. Bodies pressing against each other and fitting together so many ways I forgot to breathe. I almost didn’t notice the foot. I must have seen it out of the corner of my eye, because I couldn’t hear anything except the blood in my ears. A foot in a beaten up work boot. A foot attached to a leg. A moving foot, attached to a leg, coming out from the pile of blankets. .

Aaron was looking through a magazine called Chocolate Mounds and didn’t have eyes for anything except what was right in front of him. I tapped him on the shoulder. He told me to fuck off. I told him about the foot. That’s when the Green Line Monster rose up. He had a greasy kind of mane on him and a big flannel shirt. Paul Bunyan from hell. Cigarette bone teeth, yellow and jagged and hollow in the middle so you could see inside of them when he opened his mouth to ask us what in the hell we thought we were doing. A voice like a blender full of rocks. Aaron dropped the magazine and we made tracks. A train was coming down University just then, and the signal from the light rail made me dizzy and drowned out everything as soon as we crawled out the rotten entrance we came in through. We couldn’t didn’t hear ourselves screaming until the train had passed us and we were halfway down the block.

The day my dad got kicked out of Gilbert’s Liquor once and for all, he took me to the McDonald’s out by the Spruce Tree Center, a monster of a building with walls that looked like they were made out of green bathroom tiles and a big old clock tower sticking out the top that was two times taller than anything else on the Midway. It wasn’t much to look at, but the clock tower was how I always found my way home, so it felt nice to be near it. He bought us a mess of cheeseburgers and fries and a couple of Filet O’ Fishes because, even though he figured that the food pyramid was probably a scam, there might be something to it. Besides, McDonald’s makes a pretty good fish. There was a bit of a to do about him getting charged extra for sauce packets, but eventually we got ourselves sat down and he started telling me what he knew.

He said to me son, it’s taxation without representation. It’s all about nickel and diming the little guy, you hear me? You think they charge Bill Clinton an extra thirty five cents for a packet of barbecue sauce? No son, there are two kinds of people in this world. The haves and the have nots, and not one bit of good comes from mixing between the two. You know why we celebrate the Fourth of July? No more taxation without representation. I heard you been hanging around with that Gilbert boy. All that sumbitch is trying to do is tax you son. I won’t have it, I won’t have the son of King Liquor poisoning my boy’s mind.

I didn’t have much to say to this because my dad never really had much of an inclination to listen to anybody else anyway, not unless they were giving him something new to know, so I just kept quiet and took a bite out of my cheeseburger. Now that I wasn’t supposed to be doing it, running around with Aaron felt even better. Like holding your breath until you can’t anymore, until you start to fade away then get dragged back sharp and sudden and clear and it’s right now, and you’re breathing. It’s right now and you’re breathing in and out.

The day we found the Haunted House the air was sweet with decaying leaves and you couldn’t see your breath yet, but you could feel it harsh down your throat. It was getting on towards Halloween and the dusk got longer as the days got shorter. Those evenings in the half light had a way of making you feel like an hour was plenty of time to do something that would change your life, you just had to find out what it was and get on with it quick, before the snow started sticking and the Cities got frozen solid.

Me and Aaron were walking along a set of railroad tracks out by Hamline trying to see what we could see, maybe a dead cat or a busted up printer or some girl’s underwear. Railroad track stuff. Everything was going along the way you might expect it to when we heard some glass breaking up through the treeline on the uphill side of the tracks. The embankment was covered in the ratty sort of forest you find stuck in the middle of the city sometimes between neighborhoods, like somebody forgot about it. I turned to look at Aaron, but he was already done looking at me and headed up towards the trees. I thought about not going up there with him, but staying on the tracks alone seemed scarier than going up into the woods together, so I ran after him.

The brush was already mostly dead from the pre-winter chill and you could feel it burn your skin when it scratched into your hands, waking up the numbness. The woods is always the loudest when it’s cold. Branches make high pitched zip sounds when they drag across your jacket and every step seems to shatter half the sticks in the forest, like you’re walking through a field of chicken bones. About 100 feet up the embankment we heard swearing and laughing and froze in our tracks, trying to stare our way through the brush. It was woven together on itself and full up with plastic bags and styrofoam cups and all kinds of other city things that would never rot away so there wasn’t much to see from where we were at.

We inched forward a few more yards. Up ahead the brush was crackling and shaking. Aaron knelt down and grabbed up an old chunk of cement from the dirt and flung it up ahead of us. A second later we heard a big thump like somebody stomped on a full milk carton, and then a shriek. Pretty soon the shriek turned into howling and more swearing and then we heard two more voices up ahead saying that they had to get Ben the hell out of there, that he was gonna need stitches if he didn’t stop bleeding right quick. We stayed frozen in the brush, neither one of us saying anything. Just breathing, in and out. Soon enough the shrieking and howling turned to whimpering, and then nothing. Aaron grabbed my shoulder and pulled me up and before I knew it he was dragging me through the brush towards where he’d thrown the cement.

We broke out into a clearing carpeted with empty bottles and old lawn chairs. There was a dead fire pit in the middle and another thirty or so feet back was the Haunted House. More a shack than a house really, left back in the woods from who knows how long ago and forgotten about. The windows had all been knocked out and the roof was a little crooked. It seemed like just what we’d been looking for. We’d both just about made up our minds to go over there and check the place out when we heard chicken bone cracks from across the clearing.

A hockey stick poked out of the bushes and there was a hand attached to it. Pretty soon the big fella behind it stumbled out into the clearing looking meaner than hell, and he wasn’t alone. A couple more guys, must have been three or four years older than us, trailed behind him, all geared up in hockey pads and carrying baseball bats and golf clubs and what have you. For a tick they just stood there looking at us, and we just stood there looking right back at them. About the same time we got to turning to run, the one with the hockey stick shouted that we must be the fuckers who threw that rock and they were after us.

We crashed on down the embankment getting whipped in the face and neck with stray branches, feeling the trees and bushes press against our coats, trying to pierce through but not quite making it, then cracking under our weight as we bowled forward. The shouting trailed behind us, but we could hardly hear it over the sound of the forest giving way. Once we got to the tracks we could still hear the other boys crashing down the hill behind us, so we kept on running.

By the time we hit a main road, about a mile up from the Midway, the back of my throat was thick with phlegm that tasted like blood. We were both coated in bits of wood and garbage and that cold fall sweat that sends a chill across your outsides to let you know where your insides are. We knelt down on the sidewalk to catch our breath and watched the rush hour traffic tear by. I looked at Aaron and he looked at me and there were streaks of all kinds of colors dancing around, like I’d been pressing my fists into my eyeballs. Just then, he started laughing. Not at me, but with me, at us. Like we were really in it together this time.

We only had one flashlight, so Aaron lit the way and I followed behind as close as I could. The air was cold and wet and the skeleton trees danced across the low flying Halloween clouds, undersides lit up by the Minneapolis skyline. At the top of the hill Aaron hissed and put out the light. I started to ask him what the big idea was, but he slapped me on the jaw so hard I could feel my teeth rattle and shushed me. He pointed at the Haunted House. There was a flickering light behind the broken windows. That’s when I heard it, an old swing set, rhythmic and shearing. There was groaning too. Somebody trying to wake up but not quite able to. We didn’t even have to look at each other to know that we had to see it, whatever it was.

Aaron led the way and we crept up to the Haunted House, crouched down low and moving slow. I couldn’t tell if we were getting closer or the sounds were getting louder, and then it didn’t matter because we were under the window, our backs pressed against the wall of the house. Vibrations came through the walls and our jackets and into our spines. My toes were cold. Aaron held up the flashlight and clicked it on.

We popped up to look into the window at the same time, Aaron dragging the flashlight across the window sill, clearing it of broken glass so we could lean in and have a look. And there it was. Money on a table and a candle in the corner. Six pack on the floor. My dad on his hands and knees on a rotten mattress with his pants around his ankles and another fella pressed up behind him. Bodies fitting together like a magazine. The look on my dad’s face when he saw mine, a look like I’d never seen even through all the Hollywood years. A look like an itch. Like it didn’t hurt yet, but he wanted it to.

**

Angus McLinn is a Brooklyn-based writer from the Upper Midwest who holds a MFA in fiction from LIU Brooklyn. He was a 2018 Pushcart Prize Nominee, and his award winning fiction has been anthologized in Writer’s Digest’s 17th Annual Short Short Fiction Competition Collection, Songs of my Selfie: An Anthology of Millennial Stories, and the 2013 Saint Paul Almanac. Other stories and poems of his have appeared in Blue Monday Review, Those That This, Tempered Magazine, Tiger Train Magazine, Marco Polo Arts Magazine, and elsewhere. He is the author of the fiction chapbook Your Heart Really Does Explode (Cloud City Press, 2012).

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Image: Flickr / Thomas Hawk

 

Family and Other Catastrophes – excerpt

David’s childhood home looked like a modern, more expensive version of a log cabin. In front there was a wraparound wooden deck, an expanse of freshly cut grass and a tire swing hanging from an old maple tree. A well-worn wooden playhouse, painted red like a miniature barn, still stood out on the lawn. David’s father had built it when he and his brother were little and later converted it into a shed for his tools. Nick was the type of manly-man father that Emily only saw on television. He had worked for years in risk arbitrage and was now retired. He was in his late fifties, and despite being able to afford to hire people to fix things around his home, he took pleasure in home improvement: building decks, fixing pipes, woodworking.

“Hello!” he called from the front door. Emily always marveled at how excited David seemed to see his father: no deep breathing to prepare, no nervous fidgeting, no anticipation of attacks, no deployment of prearranged conversational shutdowns. Nick gave David a long, effusive hug, as if it had been years since they last saw each other. Nick and his wife, Susan, had visited San Francisco just a few months earlier, and a similar hug had occurred then.

“Emily,” Nick said, reaching out to hug her. He had a strong jaw like David’s, the same blue eyes. He had a receding hairline, short brown hair sprinkled with gray, and freckles on his nose. Sometimes when Emily looked at Nick, she wondered if he was what David would grow up to be. She could do a lot worse.

“Emily, sweetheart!” David’s stepmother, Susan, bounced over and hugged her. She was barely five feet, so Emily had to bend down. Susan had met Nick on eHarmony two years earlier. She had been living in Idaho, so they had a long-distance relationship for a year before she moved to Connecticut to marry him. She was plump with dyed blonde hair and hazel eyes. She liked to wear festive earrings that matched the season. Today she was wearing tiny dangling watermelons.

“Susan!” Emily said, giving her a hug. “You smell awesome, what is that?”

“You’ll laugh,” said Susan. “I went shopping with Mad- dyson and bought the latest Britney Spears perfume. I was worried she’d laugh at me for trying too hard, but apparently ‘only older people like Britney Spears’ anyway.”

“That’s crazy. I still love Britney Spears!”

“Well, Maddyson is eighteen so she thinks everyone is old.

So how are things in San Francisco? See any great shows?”

Susan had very limited experience with big cities, other than the few times she and Nick had ventured into Manhattan to see the Rockettes or The Lion King. When they’d visited David in San Francisco, she had insisted on riding the cable cars everywhere.

“I don’t really go to live shows very much,” Emily said. “You mean music, right?”

“Any show!” Susan laughed. “You are so lucky. Young and in a big city!”

Steven and Marla approached. Emily tensed. Her parents had met Nick and Susan before, right after she and David got engaged. Emily had delayed that encounter as long as possible because she had a palpable fear that her parents would alien- ate Nick and Susan so much that they would advise David to break up with her. Once they got engaged, she felt a little more secure, and finally told her parents that David’s parents lived close enough for them to meet up. Luckily for her, Marla and Steven only saw Susan and Nick for lunch once at a Mexican place called Cha Cha Cha Sombrero. Marla and Steven didn’t make much of an effort to see them after that, despite Susan occasionally sending them invites to events they would obviously hate, like the Fairfield Pumpkin and Gourd Festival. Emily imagined the scene at the Mexican restaurant: Marla declining to order anything from the menu, instead producing a plum and a yogurt from her bag while regaling Nick and Susan with an exhaustive list of the anti-anxiety medications Emily was prescribed in high school. After the lunch, Marla called Emily to tell her that Nick and Susan were “nice people,” which Emily knew was the real kiss of death for Marla. Later, Marla complained over the phone to Emily about a mass e-card Susan had sent her for Easter, featuring pastel cartoon rabbits somehow hatching out of eggs, which she found offensive because “she should know we don’t celebrate that.”

“Well, if it isn’t the most brilliant woman in the tri-state area!” Susan said, giving Marla a hug. “You look lovely!”

“Thank you, Susan. Such unique earrings.” Marla hugged her, then gestured toward Susan’s earrings as if she had just received an underwhelming piece of noodle art from a seven- year-old.

“Aw, thanks. There’s this adorable little jewelry place I went to when Nick and I were visiting Beantown. I thought of you the whole time. What a kick it must have been to grow up there. All the shows!”

“It was nice.”

“Do you get back there often?”

“Not that much. The last time I was there— God, I don’t think I’ve been there since my last Harvard reunion.”

Never misses a chance, Emily thought. “Ooooh, Harvard! I forgot you went there!”

“Oh, let’s not get into Harvard,” Marla said, waving it off, a few bangles clinking against her narrow wrist.

“You know who you’re like? JFK! Funny factoid, but he went there, too.”

Marla smiled weakly, and Emily could already see beads of sweat forming on her mother’s freshly waxed upper lip. “Well, I don’t think I’m that much like JFK, but I’ll take the compliment.” Marla had a distaste for Catholics that made little sense. It was an attitude more typical of lapsed Catholics with nightmarish memories of parochial school. Marla said her anger came from perfectly justifiable outrage over anti-Semitism, but Emily thought it seemed odd to single out Catholics for that. She was fairly certain that Marla’s prejudice had more to do with a girl from her high school in Boston named Colleen Sweeney—a transfer from a Catholic girls’ school— who in 1973 had won both the Latin award and the science award, two awards Marla believed she deserved. The Colleen story had been told to Emily various times over the course of her childhood, with a different moral each time. Once, the takeaway was that even if you fail at something when you are younger, you can always grow up to prove your critics wrong. (At the end of the story, Marla gleefully revealed that Colleen later turned out to be a stay-at-home mom.) Another time, she ended the story with the assertion that even if you are brilliant, if you don’t work hard enough, some “idiot” with a better work ethic could beat you.

“So how is the psychiatry racket going?” Susan asked. “Psychology, actually.” It was a distinction that Marla wasn’t proud of, and Emily was surprised she even owned up to it.

Susan turned to Emily. “What a kick, growing up with a mom who’s a therapist! Did she ever diagnose you with anything?”

“Um, yes.” Emily dug her heel into the lawn. “I mean, she diagnosed me with an anxiety disorder. And some other stuff that she later revised.”

She regretted saying it as soon as the words left her mouth. Susan placed one hand over her freckled chest, another over her mouth, her eyes widening as if she’d just found out that Emily had a terminal illness.

“It’s not a big deal,” Emily said. “Honestly.”

“Marla,” Susan gasped. “I had no idea! I am so sorry.”

“It’s nothing to feel bad about,” Marla said. “Emily has had her fair share of challenges, but it’s very important to us that we strive to help her function as well as she possibly can.”

“Mom, I’m literally right here.”

“Well, this is nothing you don’t know. I never wanted you to be treated differently because you struggle with anxiety. It was hard enough that you were profoundly gifted. Trying to help you assimilate socially proved challenging for me.”

“Okay, I’m getting some food now.” Emily took David’s arm and waved goodbye to the four parents. She panicked for a moment, worrying that in her absence Marla would unleash embarrassing stories about her worst anxiety attacks—like the time when she was fourteen and she cried in a restaurant because she suspected a waiter had not washed his hands after using the bathroom and her parents made her eat her baked ziti anyway. But knowing Marla, she would try to keep her conversation with Susan as mercifully brief as possible.

“They’ll be fine,” David said, squeezing her hand.

Nick went to man the grill, donning an apron with a corny Mr. Good Lookin’ is Cookin’ slogan next to a cartoon of a goofy, big-eared and big-nosed barbecuing man with a head two times bigger than his body. Nick sometimes made Emily wistful; she couldn’t help comparing him to her own father, who spent family dinners deriding other faculty members he was convinced were trying to sabotage his chances at tenure. “My dad has already texted me since I’ve gotten here,” David said, looking at his phone. “Why does he do this? This one just says, Dave, so proud of you! You have really become a man!”

“It’s cute. He cares about you, and he still thinks texting is new and fun.”

“Yeah, but I’m like ten feet away from him.”

“I can’t really blame him. When you come home it…well, I think it reminds him of your mom.” Emily still felt uncomfortable approaching the topic of David’s mother. No matter how angry she got with Marla, she didn’t think she’d be able to go on if Marla died. She didn’t understand how David didn’t break down crying now and again. She liked to think he showed that people could bounce back from tragedy, but instead his calm attitude signified that she was just far too emotional compared to normal people, and that if and when her mother did die, she’d suddenly collapse and die too.

“I just don’t need to hear how proud he is of me every time I eat a Hot Pocket,” David said.

“At least he’s proud of you.”

“Yeah, well.” He took a swig of beer. “I guess when my brother is the only other child he has to compare me to, I seem like Richard Branson meets Nelson Mandela.”

She wondered if David ever felt that her praise and affection was too smothering. He never said so, but if he found it so irritating coming from Nick, he must occasionally feel the same way about her staring at him while he watched basketball, putting cute little notes on the bathroom mirror for him, and sending him heart emojis for no reason during the workday. She had tried to play hard-to-get when they were first dating, but it was so difficult not to fall off the wagon and start inundating him with kisses and compliments.

Emily looked over at the barbecue guests through the haze of smoke and f lies. There was Jason, T-shirt slightly too small and revealing his belly, raising his arms in the air in what appeared to be a low-effort version of the Macarena. He was drunk.

“We are going to have an epic wedding week!” he cheered, raising his Heineken. He had finally stopped sulking about Christina’s presence. It helped that she avoided him as much as possible. She had taken a liking to Joss, one of Susan’s fifty-something granola-ish friends from the cat shelter where she volunteered, and the two of them were huddled in the corner having girl talk.

“You do you,” Emily heard Christina say.

“Your brother is getting drunk,” David said.

“No shit,” Emily laughed. “Hey, where’s your brother?” “Hmm, I don’t know. I assumed he’d be out of his cave by

now.” He looked for Nathan, and finally spotted him at the back door, half-hidden by a wooden column. He called out to him. “Nathan! Aren’t you going to say hi?”

Nathan trudged over. He was only a few years younger than David, but Emily often thought of him as if he were a teenager because it was hard to remember he wasn’t. He lived at home with Nick and Susan, and although he was usually eager to boast about his superior intelligence, he didn’t have any work history or accomplishments to show for his self-evaluated IQ of 170. He was rotund, with flappy triangular man boobs out- lined in sweat on his black T-shirt. His shoulder-length brown hair was gathered into a greasy ponytail. Growing along the underside of his double chin was an untrimmed beard with the texture of pubic hair. He was wearing his uniform: a faux leather trench coat, cargo shorts, white Nike sneakers, and a gray tweed dollar-store fedora.

“Salutations, David,” he said. “Susan suggested I wear le hat for such a fancious occasion.”

“Fancious?”

“It means fancy. I believe that it’s a Middle English term but I could be wrong.”

“Well, I’m really excited to have you as a part of our wedding,” Emily said. She gave him an awkward hug, patting him on the back and trying to avoid the smell of his ponytail. She had met him once, last Thanksgiving—they had spent the holiday with David’s family because Emily’s parents were in the Vineyard—but hadn’t spoken to him very much. He had spent the vast majority of the weekend playing World of Warcraft in his room, and at one point he proudly announced at the dinner table that he had made a thirteen-year-old cry after debating him online about atheism.

“So, Emily, do you have any fair ladies-in-waiting who would be pleased to make my acquaintance?” he asked. “Anyone looking for a gentleman?”

“Ladies-in-waiting?” “Bridesmaids, as the plebeians ay.”

“Well, my friend Gabrielle is the maid of honor, but she’s pregnant and married…”

“You didn’t make your sister the maid of honor?” He looked horrified. Even someone as socially inept as Nathan knew how weird that was. Emily blushed.

“I just…it’s a long story. She’s kind of anti-wedding. I didn’t think she’d do a good job at it.”

“Cold, m’lady. But I remain intrigued. Prithee continue.” David frowned. Emily could tell it was taking all his restraint not to punch Nathan in the face.

“Oh, my other bridesmaids? Well, there’s my friend Jennifer but she’s…” She didn’t know how to finish the sentence without saying “out of your league,” so she just said, “a lot older than you.”

“How old?” “Twenty-nine.”

“Hmm. Five years older than myself. That’s pushing it, but I’ll consider her if she enchants me. Women that age sometimes have a certain…je ne sais quoi.”

David shook his head. “Nathan, don’t. Just trust me when I say no.”

“And well,” Emily said, “the only other bridesmaid is… Maddyson. But, ha-ha, since she’s your stepsister that pretty much…” She trailed off, unsure of how to finish the sentence.

“Don’t be so quick,” David said. “Nathan has been hung up on her ever since Susan married our dad.”

“What, really?”

“He’s being oversimplificated,” Nathan said. “I am not hung up on my stepsister. I merely admire a beauty such as she.”

Emily involuntarily cringed.

“Dude,” David said, “she’s way too young for you. I am not doing this with you again.”

“Eighteen is legal, for your information.” “Yeah, but it started when she was sixteen.”

Nathan put his hand over his chest in a bad imitation of a pearl-clutching old lady. “Dear Lord! Sixteen! Reproductive age, legal in almost all of Europe and fully able to make her own choices! Whatever must we do with this pedophile?”

“I don’t get why you can’t just date girls your own age,” David said.

“The older women get, the more demanding they become. If I were to approach a twenty-five-year-old, for example, she would be attractive but wouldn’t have Maddyson’s fertile, nubile looks. And to make matters more unsavory, she would look down on me for not having a so-called traditional job. Maddyson doesn’t have a job, ipso facto, we are actually a good match. Moreover, if we lived just a few hundred years ago I would be the natural first choice to take her maidenhood—intelligent, wise, generous, successful—and in the same family line.”

“How are you successful in any way?” David asked. “You just said you don’t have a job.”

“In days of yore, my good sir, I would have been successful. The trades in which I am highly skilled are not valued by our declining society. Sword fighting, for example.”

Emily looked over at Maddyson, leaning against a column. She had wavy brown hair cut to her shoulders with a streak of pink. (Emily had objected to the dye job because Maddyson would be in the wedding party, but she wound up allowing it for fear of looking like a bridezilla.) She wore a pair of frayed acid-washed shorts, Converse sneakers and a large white T- shirt that looked intentionally splattered with green paint. She was looking at her iPhone with her eyes glazed over, giving a surly, slightly openmouthed expression to the screen. Emily noticed that Nathan had seen her staring at Maddyson, so she quickly averted her gaze.

“She’s beautiful,” he said with a knowing smile. “No shame in looking.”

“I wasn’t…”

“It’s fine. All women are slightly bisexual.” “Nathan,” David said. “That’s enough.”

Nathan shrugged. He was relatively immune to criticism. Emily couldn’t tell if it came from abnormally low or abnormally high self-esteem. Either he was so used to negative feedback that it no longer affected him, or he was so delusional that he refused to believe that anything could be wrong with him. Perhaps she’d ask Marla to analyze him. She was sure there would be an interesting cavalcade of diagnoses on the ride home. All of Emily’s ex-boyfriends had earned their places in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, from histrionic personality disorder to borderline personality disorder to chronic depression. Marla followed up each assessment with, “not that I’ve personally examined him or anything” as if trying to avoid liability. She had diagnosed Christina with narcissism back when she and Jason were dating, and Matt with compliant codependency. David was the only one who had evaded a diagnosis so far, probably because Emily had rigorously prevented him from spending too much time with her mother.

**

(c) Alexandra Borowitz. excerpted from Family and Other Catastrophes, Published in 2018  with permission from Mira Books

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Alexandra Borowitz has been writing since she was six, and her family and friends provide endless inspiration. She was raised in New York, and spent her first years out of college in San Francisco working at advertising startups. Family and Other Catastrophes is her first novel.