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Excerpted from One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow with permission of
Lake Union Publishing. Copyright © 2019 by Olivia Hawker. All rights reserved.

AFTER HE TOOK HIMSELF OFF TO JAIL

I was leading the cows to the milking shed when my pa shot Mr. Webber. It was the end of the season for blackberries, and the fence beside the shed was thick with vines my ma had planted years before. The evening air smelled of berries, rich and sweet in the way that makes you close your eyes when you breathe in the scent. You can’t help but do it; the smell takes ahold of you and calls to your heart, and it makes you think of all the good things that have passed and all the good things yet to come, so you close your eyes and shut out everything else that’s real, everything that’s drab or sorrowful, all the things that hurt you like the thorns. That’s what I was doing when I heard the shot—standing with one hand on the gate and my eyes closed, thinking about those berries and how, after milking was done, I’d pick a whole basketful and share them with my brothers and baby sister, sweet and good with cream on top, the cream still warm from the cows.

But the moment the shot cracked the air, I opened my eyes and my hand. The pail of grain fell, and the cows pushed me aside to lip up what was spilled. I knew right then that something terrible had happened, something that would change us all forever. And I knew it was my fault—at least some—for I’d be the one who told me pa that the calf was missing, and he’d gone off to search for it. If I’d never told him, if I’d gone to find that calf myself, it would have been me who seen what no one else should have seen, and I would have left it all alone. Never said a word, just drifted off like a ghost through the dusk, with no one any wiser.

But instead, it was Pa who found them, under the poplars by the river, and now Substance Webber is dead.

I can’t say just how I knew it was trouble when I heard that shot. Pa fired his Henry rifle all the time, at coyotes and eagles who came for our stock, and at bears to shoo them away from the places where my brothers and sisters played. Maybe I heard a sound in the rifle’s voice. Maybe it was like a shout of pain torn from my father’s throat, worse than the time his horse slipped and fell on him, and his leg was broken in two places. Maybe it was just because my ma had been missing all evening, and I finally wised up enough to think it strange. She slipped off toward the river once she saw that all her children were fed and the shores were underway. It was a think she’d done for days now, but until the rifle sounded, I’d never thought twice about it. I was big enough to care for the little ones without being told.

As soon as I knew deep down in my heart that something had gone awry, I slapped the cows on their backsides to hurry them into the pen, and then I ran to the house, where the little ones were putting on their nightdresses. I said, everybody into the bedroom, and don’t coe out till I say so. They complained, because they always do, but they did as I told them. They always do that, too. I wanted them shut safely away when the trouble came up from the riverside to our little gray house. I didn’t want them to see the look on our pa’s face when he returned.

When Pa came back through the twilight, he was paler than a bad-omen moon. He walked with a stagger, like he was struck by some illness, and his eyes seemed to see nothing that lay before him—only what lay behind, what had caused him to raise his rifle and pull the trigger before he could think any better. He held the gun as if it was a foreign thing, and too distasteful to bear, one-handed by its stick with the muzzle dragging through the tall grass. Behind him came my mother, hair unbound and weeping into her hands.

I went outside to meet them both. I was scared all at once for them—afraid one of them should fall, like they were fragile, breakable things. The sight of me brought Pa from his daze. He stared at my face for a long time, and it was hard not to look away, for I’d never seen such agony in him before, and I knew right then that he was only a man, and mortal. No girl likes to realize that her father will die someday. Much less does she like to know that grief could be enough to kill him.

Beulah, he said, I done something wrong. I said, I know it, Pa.

He nodded. Pa never questioned this way I have—the knowing that comes to me from the movement of the wind or the scent of blackberries, or the sound of a gunshot by the river. 

He said, I got to go now, over to the Webber’s place, and tell that what all happened. And then I got to ride to town and turn myself over to the sheriff. It’s the only righteous thing to be done.

My mother wailed at that and staggered toward him, but Pa stepped back. He held up his free hand, a wall between them. It only made Ma weep more piteously.

I said, I’ll saddle Tiger for you, and he answered, No not Tiger. He’s a fast horse. I can’t say how long I’ll be gone, Little Mite, and you may have need of a fast horse, by and by. You’ll need the saddle, too. I don’t know if the sheriff will return my horse to my farm and my family. I’ve never done this before. Could be a man forfeits his right to his horse when he…when he does what I just done. Put a bridle on Meg; I’ll take her to town bareback.

I still liked to hear him call me Little Mite, even though I was thirteen and not little anymore. And I had never felt older or steadier that I did in that moment, when I stepped away from my parents to pull the old, slow mare from her paddock and ready her so she could carry off Pa to his fate. My mother was still weeping, her cries loud and long like the peal of a bell.

The pain in her voice was heavy to bear. I would have cried, too, if I’d had the lee, for I already felt the badness of it all, the distance between my mother and father opening wider like a crack in the earth. You’ll fall into that cold, damp darkness if you aren’t careful where to set your feet. 

But there was work to be done, and no time for crying. Not if we hoped to get by without Pa.

In time, my mother stopped weeping and huddled on the doorstep. In the first silver creeping of moonlight, she looked smaller and frailer than she ever had before. She hugged her body and rocked as if it was a baby she held in her arms, not herself—and she stared at my father, hungry, desperate for one look from him, one word. He gave neither.

I handed Meg’s reins to my pa, and he passed the gun to me. You how to use the rifle, he said.

I nodded. I wasn’t handy with a gun—I never had needed to be—but it was simple enough.

That much I knew. 

He said, I’ll send word, soon as I’m able. It’s up to you to think of something to tell the little ones, something they’ll understand.

I said, Is there anything you want me to tell Ma?

He stood listening to the crickets in the long grass. He wrapped Meg’s reins around his fist and tightened it till his knuckles blanched white. Then he took a deep breath, savoring the smell of his homestead and the coolness of a soft Wyoming night. He closed his eyes and stood like that for a long while. When he opened his eyes again, Pa said, In time, I’ll want you to tell your ma how sorry I am, and that I love her still. But that time ain’t come yet. Not yet.

I watched him ride away down the rutted path through our pasture, east toward the Webber farm. When night’s gray shadows hid him from view, I turned my back on Pa and face the house, and my mother wilting on the steps.

I went to her and unwrapped her hands from around her thin body, and pulled her to her feet, where she swayed. We didn’t speak, for I knew she had no words yet, and wouldn’t for days to come. That’s the way with Ma. Whenever a sorrow or a fear comes along to put a crack in her heart, she goes quiet—the only time she ever does. I knew she would say nothing while she was shrouded in grief and remorse, just as I knew that after he took himself to jail, my pa would send word and forgive her.

But until forgiveness came, I had to run the farm on my own. There was no one else who could do it. I wasn’t afraid. I haven’t found anything yet in this life that’s worth being afraid of.

**

Through unexpected characters and vivid prose, Olivia Hawker explores the varied
landscape of the human spirit. Olivia’s interest in geneal­ogy often informs her writing:
her two novels, The Ragged Edge of Night and One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow,
are based on true stories found within her own family tree. She lives in the San Juan
Islands of Washington State, where she homesteads at Longlight, a one-acre microfarm
dedicated to sustainable permaculture practices. For more information, visit
www.hawkerbooks.com/olivia.

The following excerpt from PIGS was reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Red Hen Press:

Excerpt from PIGS

The pigs ate everything. Kitchen scraps. Bitter lettuce from the garden. The stale and sticky contents of lunch boxes kids brought home from school. Toe nail clippings. Hair balls pulled up from the drain. After the pigs were done, there weren’t even any teeth left over, not even any metal from cavities filled long ago. 

They lived in a pen out back. The land was rocky but spacious, and the pen had been tucked in a corner out of sight for more years than any of the children could remember. It was made out of wood, gray, splintered boards nailed together in a haphazard way. Every five feet, the wood was anchored by posts. When you stood by the fence the pigs lumbered over grunting and stuck their snouts out between the rickety slats. It wasn’t always that they expected food. Sometimes they just wanted their snouts scratched. Sometimes they just grunted happily and settled back down in the shade. There were six of them. They never fought. They seemed to smile when you approached. But you had to be quick. If you brought a bucket of slop and poured it out too slowly without moving your hand away, you never knew what could happen.

Luisa was missing a finger. Not an important one. Just her left hand pinky, where she hadn’t moved away quickly enough one hot summer afternoon when she was feeding them shoes. It was summer every afternoon there. Soft and lazy and slow. The pinky came off in one clean bite before she even realized what was happening. She left with a feeling of shame, like it had been her fault the pig grabbed her finger. She wrapped her hand in her skirt and kept her mouth shut, and the stub didn’t start hurting until she lay down for the night. 

The land was actually an island. The island was surrounded by water that glinted green in the sun and clouded to gray in the shade. Some might have let the pigs run free, feral among the scrubby bushes. The pigs could have rooted happily for mushrooms or truffles, found entire brambles of berries to eat and maybe left the children alone. They could have gobbled up the entire world’s detritus without anyone’s help. But the grownups preferred the pigs confined. They preferred the relative safety of the fence. 

Luisa had lived on the island forever, or for as long as she could remember, which was the same as forever. There were other children too, three of them. Andrew, who sang in his sleep and had straw colored hair. Mimi, who was older, or at least taller, than the rest, and who liked to pretend she knew much more about the world than anyone else, and who couldn’t grow her hair long no matter how hard she tried. There was even a toddler. They called her Natasha. Her head was covered with loose blonde curls. She couldn’t have been more than three, and she giggled every time she heard the grunting of the pigs.

They were all afraid of the gray water, of the sea in a mood of despair. It wrapped the island like a scarf made of grief. It made you choke with tears to touch it.

The children slept together in the same room. It was a whitewashed room in a one-room hut, and they each had a space on the floor. It was comfortable and clean, and they were so used to each other that they never felt crowded. Mimi sometimes said she was getting older and needed more space, but the rest of them were happy to shove over and let her have it. They didn’t have beds, but they’d never heard of beds, and who needed beds anyway? They had blankets. They had pillows. They had mice that skittered along the edges of the room and ate breadcrumbs from the tips of their fingers.

The children ate fish for dinner every night. They picked berries and searched for bird eggs and kept watch from high rocks for sails and garbage on the horizon. Except for Luisa. The distance always blurred for her. Sometimes she wished she could get out on the water, get up close to those ships and find out where they came from. There was no way to tell from far away. But it was just a dream, and she never mentioned it to any of the others. Even in her head, she couldn’t figure out how to make a seaworthy craft.

It didn’t take long for Luisa’s finger to heal into a nice, neat stump. She rubbed it sometimes, and whispered to herself that it was time to grow up and stop being clumsy. She tripped over things easily. She didn’t notice roots or loose rocks or places where the earth buckled. She’d kick the ground in frustration and end up hurting her own foot. It was her fault she’d lost a finger. The pigs were fast, but if she’d been a little more agile they’d have snapped at air. She wondered what she’d tasted like. She hoped she’d tasted good, but not so good that the pig would want more. She tried to remember which one it was that had snapped at her, but even though she was pretty sure it was the one with black spots, she wasn’t sure enough to say.

Sometimes the children tested what the pigs would eat. The leather flaps of shoe tongues. The bent frames of glasses. Mardi Gras beads. Tin cans. Pistols. Cap guns. There seemed to be no limit to their appetite. The children would stand a few feet away from the fence and toss whatever they were testing high into the air. The pigs moved with an unexpected grace, opening their long mouths and catching whatever came sailing down directly between their teeth. The pigs were remarkable. The children watched them with amazement, their own mouths open, their hands, now empty, coming together of their own will to clap. Hub caps. The tassels off bicycle handlebars. Empty jars of mayonnaise. Gone, all gone in seconds.

The grownups on the island frowned at the children and never even pretended to help them with their chores. They drank espresso and smoked cigarettes and plugged their noses dramatically whenever the children got too close. As far as the children could tell, the grownups never cooked. 

“It’s not that they don’t know how,” Mimi said. She grabbed every opportunity to be the expert. “It’s that they don’t need to. Food appears. Why should they slave over a hot stove?”

“But what do they do?” Luisa said. “What do they talk about all day long?”

“Do they ever watch the pigs?” Andrew asked. 

Natasha gulped and puffed out her toddler’s cheeks.

Nobody had the courage to ask. When Natasha fell into the gray water and came out covered in spots and filled with an unquenchable thirst for a parent that even Mimi couldn’t solve, the grownups flinched at the sight of her. 

“What are they here for?” Luisa said. Sometimes she thought, “Maybe we should just feed them to the pigs.”

**

Johanna Stoberock is the author of the novel City of Ghosts and, most recently, PIGS (Red Hen Press). Her honors include the James W. Hall Prize for Fiction, an Artist Trust GAP award, and a Jack Straw Fellowship. In 2016 she was named Runner Up for the Italo Calvino Prize for Fiction. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, the Best of the Net Anthology, and Catamaran, among others. She lives in Walla Walla, Washington, where she teaches at Whitman College.  

Excerpted from The Future of Another Timeline copyright © 2019 by Annalee Newitz.

Irvine, Alta California (1992 C. E.)

Drums beat in the distance like an amplified pulse. People streamed over the dirt road, leather boots laced to their knees, eyes ringed in kohl, ears and lips studded with precious metals. Some gathered in an open square below the steep path to the amphitheater, making a bonfire out of objects stolen from their enemies. The smoke reeked of something ancient and horrific; materials far older than humanity were burning. A rusty sunset painted everyone in blood, and shrieks around the flames mixed with faraway chanting.

It could have been Rome under Nero. It could have been Samarkand when the Sogdians fled. It could have been Ataturk’s new Istanbul, or a feast day in Chaco Canyon. The technologies were industrial, Neolithic, and medieval. The screams were geochronologically neutral.

I paused, smelling the toxins, watching a woman with jet-black lips and blue hair pretend to eat a spider. One of her companions laughed. “Michelle, you are so gross! This isn’t an Ozzy concert!” They paused at the ticket booths to flip off the Vice Fighters, a gang of conservative protesters waving signs covered in Bible quotes. Some of them were burning CDs in a garbage can, and the stench of melting plastic formed a noxious bubble around their demonstration.

The Machine had not delivered me to an ancient war, nor to an anti-imperialist celebration. I was at Irvine Meadows Amphitheater in 1992, deep in the heart of Orange County, Alta California. Soon I’d be seeing one of the greatest punk bands of the decade. But I wasn’t here for history tourism. Somewhere in this rowdy concert crowd, a dangerous conspiracy was unfolding. I needed to find out who was behind it. If these bastards succeeded, they would destroy time travel, locking us into one version of history forever.

I bought a lawn seat and raced up the winding pedestrian walkway to the seating area, lurid with stadium lights. The theater was relatively small and open to the sky, with a steep grade of loge seats above the prized orchestra section next to the stage. The lawn formed a green semicircle above it all, pocked with mud puddles and beer cans. Still, even up here, the air vibrated with anticipation for the headliner. Spotlights sent a cluster of beams racing around the stage.

Grape Ape’s lead singer Glorious Garcia strutted out alone, sequins on her tattered skirt shimmering in the glare. She let out a furious howl. “HOLA, BITCHES! IF ANYONE CALLED YOU A SLUT TODAY, SAY IT WITH ME! SLUT SLUT SLUT!” All around me, women joined the chant. They wore battered combat boots, shredded jeans, and wrecked dresses. They had tattoos and black nail polish and looked like warrior queens from another planet. Tangled hair flashed in every possible artificial color. “YOU SLUTS ARE BEAUTIFUL!” Glorious fisted the air and aimed her mic at the crowd, still chanting, “SLUT SLUT SLUT!” Back when I went to this concert for the first time, I was an angry sixteen-year-old with too many piercings for suburbia, wearing a military jacket over a 1950s dress.

Now I was forty-seven on the books, fifty-five with travel time.

My eyes flicked to the things I never would have seen back then. Everyone looked so scrubbed and affluent. Our rebel fashions were cobbled together from the expensive stuff we’d seen in some New York Times story about grunge. But what really jolted me was the way people occupied themselves as they waited for the music to start. Nobody was texting or taking selfies. And without phones, people didn’t know what to do with their eyes. I didn’t either. I watched a guy in a Dead Kennedys shirt urging a hip flask on a woman who was already so drunk she could barely stand in her platform creepers. She stumbled against him, swigging, and he gave a thumbs-up sign to his pal. The punk scene, once my inspiration, now looked like a bunch of future bankers and tech executives learning how to harass women.

The rest of the band charged on stage, Maricela Hernandez’s guitar squealing over the clatter of drums and bass fuzz. Cigarette smoke and sound merged into a throbbing haze around us. From my distant perch, Glorious was a tiny figure with the biggest voice in the world.

“THIS IS A SONG ABOUT THE GIRLS FROM MEXICO WHO ARE PICKING FRUIT IN YOUR IRVINE COMPANY FARMS! LET’S RIP DOWN THE FUCKING BORDER NET AND STOP THE KILLING!”

That took me back. In 1991, a huge group of refugees fleeing Mexico had drowned in the Gulf of California, just as they’d almost reached the safety of U.S. soil in Baja. They’d gotten tangled in offshore nets the border patrol set up to stop illegal immigrants.

The music tore through me until it merged with muscle and bone. I had a job to do, but I couldn’t move. Grape Ape was the only thing here that hadn’t been warped by my disillusionment. They still had the power to replace my cynicism with a feeling that careened between hope and outrage. Strobe lights churned the darkness, and the audience frenzy reached beyond fandom, struggling toward something else. Something revolutionary.

Then I felt a broad hand on my upper arm, squeezing a little too hard, and a large male body pressed against my back. I tried to elbow him and wriggle away, but the still-invisible stranger held me in place. He leaned down to whisper-yell in my ear, blotting out the music. “I know you must have many daughters at your age, and you are worried about their future.” His voice was smooth, and his warm breath smelled like lavender and mint. With his free hand, he started massaging my neck as he continued to grip my arm. “That’s why you come to places like this. To find a better way for women. We want that too. Maybe you’ll look past your prejudice against men and read our zine.”

At last he released me and I whirled to face him. He pulled his zine from a rumpled Kinko’s bag. Grainy Xeroxed images of women in chains adorned the cover, and letters torn from magazines spelled out the title: COLLEGE IS A LIE. Flipping through the pages of ten-point Courier font and smeary cartoons, I scanned a few typical punk rants against suburban brainwashing: college teaches conformity, turns you into a corporate drone, destroys true art, blah blah blah. But there was a weird strand of gender politics in it. Over and over, the anonymous authors preached that college “destroys feminine freedoms inherited from our ancestors on the plains of Africa” and “is anti-uterus.” I scanned a paragraph:

Women are naturally empathic, and college tortures them with artificial rationality. Millions of years of evolution have led men to thrive in the toolmaking worlds of science and politics, and women to become queens of emotional expression and the nurturing arts. College denies this biological reality, which is why so many women feel bad about themselves. But it doesn’t have to be that way! Fuck college! It’s time for liberation!

The entire zine was about why women should drop out of college. I looked sharply at the man, a nasty retort on my tongue, but his face stole my words. It couldn’t be. I would never forget those features, so perfectly formed it was as if he’d been grown in a vat full of men’s magazines. I’d last seen him in 1880, at a lecture on suppressing vice in New York City. He was one of the young men clustered around Anthony Comstock, lapping up the famous moral crusader’s invective about the evils of birth control and abortion. Later, at the protest, he’d given me a beautiful smile before punching me in the chest. Gasping for air, I’d dismissed him as one of the many YMCA boys under Comstock’s spell. Now it appeared he was something more—a traveler. I feigned interest in the zine and shot another glance at him. The man might be a few years younger than he’d been in 1880, so maybe this was his first time meeting me. His blond hair was currently spiked in an embarrassing imitation of Billy Idol.

He took my silence as an opening, and leaned closer again, touching my shoulder. “I can tell you don’t quite understand, but you’re intrigued. My friends and I are here to help if you need us.” He gestured to a few other men, all wearing black armbands around their biceps, handing out zines to other women in the crowd. Despite the distraction of Grape Ape onstage, they’d managed to get quite a few people to take one. Fear filled my guts with ice. This guy and his buddies were planting ideas, playing a long game. Trying to eliminate choices for these women in the future. It was a textbook example of a forbidden traveler’s art: editing the timeline.

I was looking for anti-travel activists, people who wanted to shut down the Machines. It was hardly the kind of political stance a traveler would take. But everything about this guy was off. So I followed at a safe distance, watching him whisper in women’s ears, pointing them away from one of their few pathways to power. Eventually, at the very edge of the loge section, the black armband men came together. I stood nearby and bummed a cigarette from an old crusty punk, catching snatches of the traveler’s conversation.

“I think we converted a few today. Good work.” That was the Billy Idol guy, the one I’d seen over a century ago in Comstock’s orbit.

“Do you think we’ll be able to make the edit before time stops?” another man asked.

“We may need to go back a century.”

“How long until we have our rights back? This is taking too long. I think we should hit the Machines now.”

The crowd began to roar, burying their voices.

A terrifying hypothesis coalesced in my mind. There’s only one reason why a traveler might want to lock the timeline, and that’s if he planned to make a final, lasting edit that could not be undone. I looked at the zine again. It was exactly the kind of propaganda that Comstockers would use to revert the secret edits made by people like me and my colleagues in the Daughters of Harriet.

The Daughters often debated whether we were working directly against another group. Even when it seemed like we made significant progress in the past, the present remained stubbornly unchanged. But we had no evidence of oppositional reverts, other than our constant frustration. It was like we were fighting with ghosts.

Now the ghosts had become men.

The Comstocker was delivering a final rallying speech. He gestured at the loge section. “This is what happens when men become victims. But once we take control of the Machine, nobody will remember this world.”

At that moment he looked over and saw me listening. His face went ugly and asymmetrical: he’d recognized me, and realized I wasn’t a temporal local.

“Get her! She’s one of them!” He pointed. Suddenly, four men with black armbands and pale skin had eyes on me.

I took off running, edging my way past the security guards, aiming for the mosh pit. Grape Ape roared through a song I couldn’t hear over the thump of blood in my ears. My momentum was swallowed by a swell of bodies, diverting our chase into a chaotic circle of flailing limbs. Women who smelled like cloves and disintegrating nylon rammed into us. The Billy Idol guy was so close that I could see the acid-wash streaks in his jeans when he grabbed me by the collar. “Get your hands off me!” I shouted. “I have friends at the Chronology Academy, and I guarantee they won’t like the way you’re trying to change the timeline with your shitty Comstocker zine. They’ll send you back to your home time and you’ll never travel again.” Onstage, Maricela shredded a solo. I glared and hoped he believed me, because there was no guarantee the Chronology Academy would agree that he’d violated regulations. Or that they wouldn’t catch me doing the same thing. But the threat worked. He released me with a sneer.

“You misandrist bitch!” He was close enough that I could smell his strangely sweet breath again. “You and your sisters are a genetic dead end. Next time I see you downstream, I’ll make sure you’re punished for spreading lewdness and vice.” Then he shoved me into a young woman who bounced away and smashed back into him with a maniacal cackle. Screeching and spinning with her arms out, she battered the Comstocker over and over until he fought his way out of the mosh pit and disappeared into the crowd. Good riddance—at least for now. I moved with the circle, bumped and bruised and safe inside its performative violence. Bursts of light from the stage illuminated the Comstocker rounding up his black armband pals and heading for the exit. Hopefully I’d scared them a little, though it had been stupid to reveal myself like that.

At least I’d confirmed Berenice’s report at the last Daughters of Harriet meeting. She’d traveled to early 1992 in Los Angeles, gathering data at ground zero for the anti-travel movement. One of her sources said he’d met some extremists hanging around in the alternative music scene. I suggested this concert would be a good place to look for them. This particular Grape Ape show had been famously controversial, called out by the Vice Fighters as a gateway to hell and by Rolling Stone as the most anticipated show of spring. Everyone would be here, especially if they considered themselves radicals.

Of course, I neglected to tell the Daughters that my younger self had been at the concert too. They never would have agreed to send me if I’d mentioned that little detail. Nobody knew what happened to travelers who met their younger selves; it was both illegal and so morally offensive that most scholars avoided the topic. The only detailed description came from a medieval manuscript about the life of an old, impoverished traveler who took the Machine back thirty years to advise himself to save money. When he returned to his present, the traveler found that his house had become a beautiful mansion. But then his bones began to break themselves, and he was plagued by attacks from a cloud of tiny demons that flew around his head unceasingly.

I wasn’t worried about demonic fantasies. They were a staple of medieval manuscripts, along with women giving birth to monsters. I was thinking about evidence-based threats to the timeline, our only timeline, whose natural stability emerged from perpetual revision.

The woman who’d harried the Comstocker earlier was spinning back toward me, and my stomach dropped. I’d been too rattled to recognize her before. Now I could clearly recognize Heather, one of my friends from high school. She barked her crazy laugh again, and I could see the Wonder Woman Returns T-shirt clearly under the lacy bodice of her dress. We’d all been obsessed with the Tim Burton Wonder Woman movies in high school, with their badass heroine in fishnets and leather.

I looked around in a panic. Was I here too? I thought I’d been in the loge section during the concert, which was why I’d avoided that area. But my recollections of tonight were murky. Maybe that was the problem. My younger self seemed so distant that I’d figured— stupidly—it would be easy to avoid her. I kept searching for my lost self until the spotlights poured illumination across the steeply angled seats and I caught a brief glimpse of her—me—with my two best friends at the time. Soojin was on my right, frowning with concentration as she studied Maricela’s fingering technique. And there, on my left, was the person who had been my best friend since we were little kids. The two of us were scream-singing along with Glorious Garcia, fists in the air. Seeing us from a distance, I realized how our closeness had even manifested in dressing like each other. We wore the same trashed vintage dresses and combat boots. People were always mistaking us for sisters back then, which wasn’t far from the truth. We were angry riot grrl clones, except for the hair.

A pasty white boy grabbed Heather roughly and she stumbled toward him, a red lipstick smile bright in her brown face. The boy’s right ear was crusted with safety pins and dried blood. Piercing injury. Very punk rock.

What was his name? A jagged shard of imagery was lodged in my mind, painful and opaque. Oh fuck. The slurry of psychological muck that usually buried my high school memories was gone, leaving behind a crisp picture of what that kid’s face would look like in three hours, when it was covered in blood. I stared at him as he twitched to the music, angry and alive. I had to intervene. If I didn’t, something horrific was going to happen. Many horrific things. And they would all lead, in the end, to a broken and beloved body, robbed of the consciousness that hurled it off a bridge.

Now that I was here, maybe I could undo that whole narrative and make everything right. I muscled my way out of the orchestra section, away from Heather’s laugh and my own age-reversed face, back down the path to the parking lot. Passing the merch table, I felt a painful twist of nostalgia as I read Grape Ape’s once-familiar slogans: MAKE BAJA MEXICAN AGAIN! SUCK MY PLASTIC DICK! SLUTS OF THE WORLD UNITE! At last I reached my rental car. I’d made it out before the encore, which should give me enough time to make an edit. As I turned the key in the ignition, recklessness oozed into me. Had I really come back because of Berenice’s report, or had I been hoping subconsciously for something like this to happen? Some excuse to intervene in my own past?

I wished I could remember my favorite shortcut from thirty-eight years ago, through Irvine’s palimpsest of malls, churches, and walled subdivisions. I’d have to brave traffic. Merging on the 405 freeway, I slowed down and considered what the hell I was doing. The Daughters of Harriet were waiting for me back in 2022, and I needed to tell them about the Comstockers. I should be headed back to the Machine. But this was an emergency. I had to save that boy’s life.

**

Annalee Newitz is an American journalist, editor, and author of fiction and nonfiction. They are the recipient of a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship from MIT, and have written for Popular Science, The New Yorker, and the Washington Post. They founded the science fiction website io9 and served as Editor-in-Chief from 2008–2015, and then became Editor-in-Chief at Gizmodo and Tech Culture Editor at Ars Technica. Their bookScatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction was nominated for the LA Times Book Prize in science. Their first novel, Autonomous, won a Lambda award.

Excerpted from Rebel Girls by Elizabeth Keenan. Copyright © 2019 by Elizabeth Keenan. Published by Inkyard Press.

5

There was a goth girl in front of my locker. Or, more accurately, she was by her locker and trying to get it open, but completely blocking access to mine. She wrestled with the combination a few more times before banging on her locker, as though that would help open it up, her teased-out dyed-black hair moving stiffly in time with each loud thump of fist-to-locker. Under her white pancake makeup, her cheeks were red from the struggle.

“Excuse me,” I said politely, trying to maneuver around her so I could open my own locker and grab my stuff for physics. Mrs. Breaux didn’t accept late work. Last week, she’d even assigned us extra work to keep us occupied while school was canceled for three days during Hurricane Andrew. Thankfully, the storm didn’t damage Baton Rouge too much—not like Florida, and some of the parishes closer to the coast—but I still had to finish my homework by the light of a battery-operated hurricane lamp. Mrs. Breaux told us that it was light enough during the day, and daylight hours provided more than enough time to get homework done. She didn’t care that most of us had to help our parents clear up yard debris during the day.

So if Mrs. Breaux didn’t give us extra time due to a hurricane, she wasn’t going to care that I couldn’t find my homework folder on a random Friday when the weather was sunny and clear.

“Oh, hey, Red!” The girl turned to me with a bright smile that clashed with her almost-black lipstick and crinkled the corners of her eyes, where eyeliner swooped out like the Death character from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. Her full-on goth look was a little outside what anyone could normally get away with in terms of hair or makeup, but the girl’s perkiness overrode any sense of the supposed darkness within.

“Hey…?” I didn’t know how to finish the sentence. Karen? Kandace? Kelly? What was her name? I vaguely remembered her from last year, pre-goth, but the transformation had overridden most of her identifying characteristics.

“Wisteria,” she answered, rocking back on her heels with a nod of finality.

That one was definitely made-up. Like all the goths’ names.

“I’m Athena.” You would have thought my name was made-up, too. But, no, my mom had definitely embraced her love of the classics when she named Helen and me.

“Oh, I know,” she said brightly. “I just like your hair.” At least someone besides Melissa did. Helen said it looked like I’d been assaulted by the Kool-Aid Man, and my dad had just shaken his head when he saw me get off the plane from Eugene with it freshly dyed red.

Wisteria looked back at her locker. “D’you have any idea what’s wrong with this thing? I never had any trouble last year?”

She said everything like a question, a trait I didn’t normally associate with goths. Then again, I hadn’t spoken to most of them. They tended to hang out behind the school smoking clove cigarettes and practicing sullen ennui.

I suspected Wisteria’s lack of trouble last year came from not actually locking her locker, as most people didn’t. I also suspected her current troubles came from Melissa, who liked to mess with people by casually twisting locks as she walked by. Wisteria’s proximity to my locker was a dead giveaway.

“Do you know your combination?” I felt obligated to help, since Wisteria’s struggle was most likely my best friend’s fault. We didn’t have much time between classes, but I couldn’t just bounce off to next period and leave her to suffer.

She nodded. “Yeah, but it just doesn’t work.”

I was going to have to get back at Melissa for this one. Messing with people’s lockers seemed a lot less funny when it was causing stress to someone who seemed like she didn’t deserve it. Not that anyone did, really.

“You need to twist right twice before your first number,” I told her, “then twist left past zero to your next number, and then right again to the last number.”

Wisteria tried again after watching me open mine. “It worked!” She jumped up and down enthusiastically. “Thanks!”

“No problem.” I grabbed my stuff for physics and shoved my religion notebook and calc binder into my locker.

Wisteria paused for a second and squinted at me curiously. “Uh, Red?”

“Mmm-hmm?” I half listened to Wisteria as I continued to search through my locker for my physics homework, which seemed to have gone missing among the chaos of my possessions.

“Uh, this is super awkward, but, I wanted to thank you and Melissa for all your pro-choice activism this summer?” Wisteria said, leaning in so that her voice dropped to an enthusiastic whisper. “It’s a really big deal? Because no one in this school gets it?”

I stopped my search for my physics folder and turned to give Wisteria my full attention. Two things confused me about this conversation: first, I’d had no idea that Wisteria was pro-choice. In theory, I knew there might be other prochoice people at our school, but that theory was, until now, unproven. The second puzzling thing was that she had no real reason to thank me.

Everybody knew about Melissa’s work on the front lines, but I couldn’t take credit for being a badass when my contributions to the pro-choice cause had maxed out at writing an essay for the zine Melissa handed out at the protests and buying a Rock for Choice T-shirt via mail order. Oh, and I also considered keeping Helen away from the protests as part of my civic duty.

I shook my head. “You’ve got it wrong. I totally support Melissa, but I was in Eugene at my mom’s all summer.”

“But your sister?” Wisteria looked at me with a face that mirrored my own confusion, tilting her head to one side and scrunching up her face so much that the curlicue eyeliner crinkled in on itself at the corners of her eyes.

“Helen was in Eugene with me all summer?” Now I was doing the question-voice thing, too, and tilted my head to mirror hers.

“Oh. Oh.” Wisteria’s eyes widened with an epiphany that I clearly wasn’t in on. “Never mind? I think I was given some bad intel?”

Okay, now that my sister was in the mix of a sentence involving “bad intel,” I needed to know what it was. I suspected it had something to do with that weird interaction between Leah and Helen almost two weeks ago, but since then, Helen had clammed up whenever I asked her about it, saying it was no big deal. She eventually resorted to putting on headphones and playing CDs on her Discman during Hurricane Andrew’s landfall so she wouldn’t have to talk to me. Then she’d ignored me all weekend, saying my cello practice was annoying her, and wound up going to her friend Sara’s house. Whatever was going on, she didn’t want my help.

“Wisteria, can you please tell me what you heard?” I pleaded. I wanted to be patient, but it felt like Wisteria had an aversion to being direct. And while it wasn’t Wisteria’s fault that I felt so in the dark, I’d had enough of being the only one who didn’t know what was going on.

“Really, Red, I think I just got confused,” she said with a hesitant smile. “I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you!” She paused again, and her smile faded. “It’s just—I heard that you and your sister were more, like, involved with the protests than that. Like, you may want to talk with your sister.” She widened her eyes with emphasis, like I was supposed to understand.

“Oooh-kaay.” I shrugged my backpack up on my shoulder. I usually let Helen fight her own battles, but this seemed serious. After school, I’d check in with her to see if she was all right.

But right now, physics—and the Cute Boy—called.

**

Elizabeth Keenan lives in New York City with her husband and small colony of well-behaved cats. She has a PhD in punk rock, which is as good/bad/cool as it sounds and resulted in lots of academic publications on punk and indie rock, third wave feminism, and gender and sexuality, including the most-downloaded article of all time at the journal Women and Music (which is both impressive and brought her zero dollars). She has been interviewed as an expert about grunge for CBS, about Riot Grrrl for NPR and Vice, and about third wave feminism for The Establishment. Her first novel, Rebel Girls, will be published in 2019 on Inkyard Press. When she’s not writing, she generally spends her time running along the Hudson and helping people navigate the terrifying waters of NYC real estate, because real artists have day jobs. You can follow her @badcoverversion. 

Old Blue

Contrary to what you might think, Old Blue was not my dog. Blue was the lawn mower that led to the salvation of my dog, who was also named Blue. Together, these two formed the strongest, inextricably entwined cords of my youth. The one: a black lab puppy. Four and a half pounds of love, joy and energy that filled my waking hours and slept by my side. The other: a two stroke, four horsepower gas lawn mower. Rusty red, stained grass green and spotted with black soot. When first fired up, Blue blew blasts of blue smoke so thick you would close your eyes and cover your face. Canine Blue would bark at it before high-tailing it to the safety of the porch.

We weren’t a wealthy family by any stretch. A younger sister and baby brother, a surly father and mother who tried her best to feed us on his itinerant pay. We never went without a meal but we’d have to fend for ourselves when Mom took on work as a baby sitter or part time secretary. As Blue got bigger, his food bill grew and loud arguments would revolve around “the damn dog”, escalating to threats of leaving him at my Uncle’s farm. I’d cover Blue’s ears in my bedroom above the garage.

My father left for good when I was eight. Even then I knew it was for the best and I didn’t grieve. Instead I tried to comfort my mother as best I could. Someone had to. The first few months seemed alright. Better even, without the shouting and random quick clips across the ear. Blue and I would sit on the front porch, in my father’s old spot and watch the tumble and grind of our dusty street. Sitting there I would recall his gruff  “Papers here!” when my bundle of fifty plus newspapers were dropped off at the foot of the drive. With him gone, I felt it was up to me to wave at the truck driver before setting off on the two mile paper route with close to thirty pounds of newspapers over my shoulders; Blue bouncing along beside me, stopping to sniff at every leaf. In winter, there was often a foot or more of snow but in the summer time, it was bliss. September brought the treat of an apple from the McKlintoch’s tree about half up the windy hill. We’d sit up in the fork of the tree, Blue and me, and watch the freight trains rumbling across the bridge out over the bay.    

One Saturday morning I got home to find Mom in the kitchen looking over some loose change. She had been crying. I knew it was about money. “You want me to pour you some coffee Mom?” I asked. 

“There’s none left. We haven’t got enough,” she replied. Blue could sense distress in people and tried unsuccessfully to tuck his nose up under her arm.  

I knew the value of a dollar. I knew that those who worked hard for it did not give it up lightly. Mr. Barrington once tore a strip off me for accidentally charging him twice in a month for the newspaper subscription. It was $1.65 but he screamed bloody murder and threatened to call the police. I was so humbled by the experience, I wanted to quit the paper route that day, but I knew I couldn’t. Every bit helped. My sister and I knew that and we would never complain. “We just all got to pitch in a bit”, I would tell her. 

But I knew it was coming. I knew Blue was a burden. I was prepared but still, I did not want to give up my dog. I would not give up Blue. I’d have to find another job.

Mr. Barrington lived by himself in a large house that looked out over the bay. It had a huge front lawn and an even bigger back yard that swept down a hill. He limped from an injury of some kind and the grass on the lawn was always a little too long. I was afraid of him. I thought of him as some kind of ogre. Blue felt the same way, cowering behind me until I mustered up the courage to knock on the door. “You want me to mow yer lawn?” I asked. He assessed me, my dog and the manual push mower I had pulled from our house a quarter mile away. 

“How much?” he replied. 

I didn’t know. I thought about it for a moment then asked, “You know how much a bag of dog food costs?”

Barrington watched me for an hour, struggling in the deep grass with the woefully inadequate mower until he couldn’t bear it any more. “Lookit. There’s a gas mower over there in the shed. If you can start it, you can use it. Make yer job easier and I don’t have to watch this crap.”

Perhaps my father’s saving grace was that he was a good mechanic. “If you got gas, compression and spark, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t run.” I looked at the dust covered mower in Barrington’s shed and cleared away the pile of junk around it. There was another mower buried deeper in the rubble. Both red, rusted and covered in bat shit. But there was gas in the first one and the motor spun freely when I yanked on the cord. After the fourth or fifth pull, it sputtered briefly sending out a cloud of blue smoke before stopping. “That means there’s spark.” I could hear my father’s voice again. But something’s not right, my young mind rationalized. I examined the spark plug and spun the engine again. Within the shadowy darkness of the shed, I could see the little jolt of electricity meant to fire the piston and that didn’t make any sense. The spark is inside the engine, not out and I shouldn’t be able to see it at all! Looking around the clutter of the shed, I found the necessary tools and, with the plug in hand, I discovered a thin crack in the ceramic insulation surrounded by black burn marks. A cracked plug. “Look at that, Blue! Cracked plug!”

I had to negotiate with Barrington in order to get a new plug which was $1.35 and posed a serious dilemma for a 10-year-old. On one hand, there was my anticipated pay of $3.00 which would cover the cost of Blue’s dog food. On the other, there was the price of the new plug which would bite into my profits but allow me to finish the job and get paid. He could tell I was torn. “Tell you what. Finish the lawn with the gas mower and if you can get that other mower working, you can have it. How about that?” I nodded. The dog food would have to wait.

I purchased the new plug with “an advance on payment” as Mr. B. called it. I installed it and moved Blue up to the porch where they could both watch from a safe distance. I primed the carb, set my foot on the mower and yanked at the pull cord with all my might. The mower roared into life, barking and belching a thick, stinking cloud of blue smoke. But it was running, and settled into a satisfying idle once I backed off on the throttle. I could see Blue peeking out from behind Mr. Barrington, happy to see that I was still alive amidst the cacophony and chaos.

Barrington ended up paying me the full three dollars for mowing both lawns and gave me a two dollar tip for getting the mower started. But even more thrilling was the prospect of owning the second mower. Blue and I ran the quarter mile home to tell Mom the news. 

“I got us a mower!” I shouted when I could finally breathe. My sister and brother shared in the good news even though they didn’t know what I was talking about.

I wheeled the second mower home on the weekend and found the problem immediately; the throttle cable had come loose from the carburetor. I fixed it with a kitchen knife. I also cleaned it, oiled it and asked our neighbour Mr. Phillips if he could sharpen the blades for me. He went one better and showed me how to do it myself. I cut his lawn free of charge that day while at the same time, tested out my new mower. It worked perfectly. The rightness I felt for this tattered mower that I now pushed ahead seemed to parallel the pride and joy I had for the young pup following along behind.  As such, I named it Old Blue.

There were plenty of lawns that needed to get cut in my neighbourhood and the Blues and I were known by all. With the paper round in the morning and lawns to cut on the weekends, we made enough cash to buy my sister some new school clothes and Mom a new pair of shoes. My friend Finny was always on at me to play baseball on Saturdays but I would say, with significant pride and confidence “I gotta work.” They’d tease, and it grated on me to see my pals having such fun. But when I showed up on my new Raleigh ten speed racing bike, they soon changed their tune. Finny asked if he could help.

We’d throw a ball around, Finny and me, when Blue was getting too tired to fetch. I liked him. I think he was my only true friend. But his parents didn’t like me and I never could understand that. After the fifth summer of mowing lawns and paper rounds, I had a crew of four helping me and in the winter months we expanded into clearing driveways. It was a contract of sorts with the neighbours bidding ever higher to get their lawns or driveways done first. I could do three lawns in a day on account of my strength and experience whereas the others could only manage one before they lost interest or got too tired. Generally, we’d end the day in good spirits sipping Mom’s lemonade on my front porch or tossing a baseball around. Mr. Phillips, who was the high school gym teacher, was watching us one day and asked me to throw him my best pitch. “Damn boy! That’s a fine arm you got there!” He told me I had to try out for the high school baseball team but I didn’t think I had time.

My high school years were as awkward for me as for many. I didn’t get bullied much because I was stronger than most and I had my own car which made me popular with the girls. I was still mowing lawns but I passed the paper route on to my younger brother who was also helping out with the yard care work. By the 12th grade, I’d opened a small engine repair business out of the garage while the other kids my age were still taking auto shop classes at school. Me and You and a Dog named Blue, I’d sing to my girl when the three of us took drives in the truck on the back country roads. Sometimes Blue would try to harmonize. He was a funny old boy: slightly blind by that point. But he loved those rides on sweet summer nights.

On the last weekend of my twenty-first summer I was mowing Mr. Barrington’s lawn when he came out to the porch to shout at me: “Where’s yer dog at?” I stopped the mower and thought hard for a moment, about where I was, how I got there and how I should answer his question. “Blue died this morning Mr. Barrington. He died in my arms. I held him. I told him not to worry. He took a deep breath and died right there in my arms.”

You couldn’t call either of us affectionate men but he hugged me then and there. And I cried. I cried for the first time in my adult life. I cried and I thanked him and I finished the lawn.

**

Bryn Chamberlain is a writer and filmmaker working out of Toronto, Canada.  He is currently working on a compilation of short stories and various screenplay projects. Bryn’s short term plans include spending more time on boats.

**

Image: Flickr / Brian Boucheron

The following story appears in Masterworks by Simon Jacobs (instar books, 2019) and is reprinted here with permission of the author.

Let Me Take You to Olive Garden

I.

The year is 2004. I just got my ears pierced! Reese is wearing eight million bracelets and boots that come up past her knees, so in order to sit in the booth she has to lower herself onto the seat first and then swing her legs rigid under the table. I think that if I ask about each of these bracelets in turn, I will be able to carry our conversation at least through this dinner and possibly into infinity, that we could be talking forever. Instead, because I’ve been thinking about it, I ask if she thinks the guitar sound in Rise Against’s latest album makes them sound too much like a stadium rock band.

Reese juts her head forward and says “What?” And in the tone I detect that it’s less a “What?” of indignation at my bold claim and more of a “What?” like she did not take meaning from any of my words. Fortunately, the waiter arrives, and I make it about the breadsticks. 

“That’s the reason to come to an Olive Garden,” I say, looking conspiratorially from the waiter to my date. “Unlimited breadsticks.”

Yet when she sits back in the booth, Diet Coke ordered, I decide that Reese is a half-breadstick girl at most, and bizarrely, it still seems to be my turn to ask a question. That said, my capacity is honestly endless; between us, I picture a giant grid, like a mega-calendar, the building blocks of our Great Love, and each blank box comprises a question, and the boxes are filled with bracelets. I imagine checking one off as I open my yap yet again: “Where did you get those bracelets?”

The grid falls to pieces. I’ve made a terrible mistake, delivered the question totally wrong, in plural—like trying to fan a candle flame by setting the room on fire—and I know the answer before it’s delivered: vague, all-encompassing, unparseable, probably two words at most, hacking off the conversation as if with a machete, and now—

Our waiter puts a wire and paper basket of seasoned breadsticks on the table. He drifts off into the restaurant. I should never have mentioned them. The sound outside of our table seems to fade. Reese looks shyly down and begins sliding the bracelets up and down on her wrist, smiling to herself, as if each one is a distinct sensory memory too private to share. “Well, this one comes from Forever 21, this one comes from Claire’s, this one comes from JC Penney…”

Her word choice is strangely passive, and as she moves obsessively down her forearm cataloguing every shitty clothing and accessory chain in southern Ohio, I am of two minds. The jangling overcomes everything; her Diet Coke hisses across the table. Motion, thought slows to a crawl. Either she is victim to the most boring and compulsive gifter known to man, or she is a taker.

“Did you steal all of those?”

She looks up at me from across the table, her fingers playing with the chain between two sprigs of a charm bracelet. Her eyes look out in a sly drawl, and the breadsticks rise between us like a yeasty monument from before time. Their seasonal glaze dissipates into the heavy air.

But before she can confirm or deny, the ground breaks open to the right of our table, and in the next second the restaurant seems to have doubled its proportions, the kitchen is now a football field away from us, and everything between it and our table has been consumed. The high- and low-calorie vessels move trancelike down our table, and Reese and I reach across and fasten arms in a power grip, like we’re bracing for the first drop on a rollercoaster. We jump from the booth at the same time, but Reese’s legs are still locked in their great boots beneath the table, so instead of clearing the area she wrenches from my sweaty hands and snaps cleanly mid-thigh, and I watch her tumble along with the entire booth—still positioned as if she’s sitting within it, freeze-framed in profile—into the widening chasm now bearing up at me: a gaping, wet cave winding down and out of sight, its walls the same texture and color as the roof of a burned mouth. Everything in the restaurant ricochets into its depths, the patrons breaking apart on the rocks and gradually slopping down the tunnel to join the mound of bodies and wreckage at the juncture where the cave wraps out of sight, like waterlogged meat in a kitchen drain awaiting disposal. I see smaller passages branching out from the tunnel, and some kind of lithe and speckled creatures flit in and out, their skin like leopard print, always just momentarily visible, snatching at the falling humans as they roll past, dragging them whole or piecemeal into their caves. A faint light flickers out as if from a campfire, deep below and out of sight. Screams waft up from beneath me like a song on the wind, and with them, swarming my nostrils, the exact smell of my hands after I’ve masturbated at the end of an active day, earthy shame and empty potential. And across the gulf now eating into the kitchen on the opposite side, crumbling at my feet on this one, as my heart leaps into my throat with the sudden plunge, I find another: a woman hangs there, her arms planted on the stainless steel counter behind her, legs dangling into the crevasse, emitting the same scream over and over, like a car alarm.

II.

Molly has been upset since her dad died six years ago, fundamentally upset, but tonight she is going to turn it all around. When she enters the LaRosa’s Pizzeria ten minutes early and sees Megan already at a booth in the far corner, her hands wrapped entirely around a frosty water glass and peeking nervously out at the restaurant, Molly knows that the date is going to be an incredible success, that it is the beginning of what is called a love connection. She has already determined their couple name: it is Molmeg.

Megan throws herself out of her seat when she sees Molly coming, like a seaman flailing for rescue, and her reaction is so sudden that she bangs her knees on the underside of the table and briefly doubles over with a mysterious squeak of the booth, clattering her elbows on the varnished pseudo-wood. The violence of the attempted greeting is both endearing and terrifying, and Molly feels a surge of guilt (she ought to have announced herself!) and also the frightening desire to laugh. She races forward to the table. “Megan! Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” she says, unsticking her arms from the table. “I’m so excited to see you!” She launches into a hug with the same frantic energy, and she holds onto Molly as if for dear life, rocking slightly back and forth. “Your hair! I love it!” 

“Thank you!” Molly replies, unintentionally matching her enthusiasm. (She’s been slowly growing it out since the school year ended, because adolescence is a time of changes large and small.)

They huddle up on one tangent of the circular booth-table, and Molly thinks that there is hardly any point to this date at all, that they are already as intimate as they will ever be, as if they’ve been dating for months, as if they walked in on this story midway through. After dinner, at 6:20, they are going to Cross Pointe to see Cinderella Man, starring Russell Crowe, because there is literally nothing else. It is the tail end of June, and the great plains of summer opportunity still stretch endlessly into the horizon.

They both order Diet Cokes and a large pizza to share. The restaurant is still fairly unpopulated because it’s not yet truly dinnertime. There is a ridiculous amount of light outside, and Molly occasionally has to shield her eyes from the glare cast by the wall of windows perpendicular to their corner booth. Her double glasses—the soda one steadily emptying, the water one untouched—sweat feverishly. It feels inappropriate for a date. There’s another showing at 8:05, but the movie is over two hours long and they both have curfews to keep, Molly’s mom is only willing to come out so late to pick them up.

And it is going so well. By Molly’s first refill, their hands are already knotted together beneath the table. Megan gets up to pee, and upon her return when she rounds the partition into view, Molly feels herself rise spontaneously in greeting and likewise bangs her knees on the underside of the table, a matching gesture, and she goes down clattering the same way, like they are programmed the same.

When the pizza is delivered, Megan studies it for a while, looking from the pepperoni up to their retreating waiter and back again. 

“Which do you think looks more like a ladybug,” she asks. “The pizza, or our waiter?”

As Molly ponders this suddenly perfect image—the round, shiny red face of the waiter and his sparkling silver stud earrings, the glistening pizza—realizing this uncanny ability that Megan possesses, that of magical association, she simultaneously witnesses an anomaly: the partition that separates one row of booths from the other blurs in the air and then vanishes like a bad hologram. An ear-splitting roar—like being strapped to the undercarriage of a monster truck while it revs, a monster truck that is also engulfed in explosive fire—erupts around them, vibrating the narrow passages inside her head with a crawling pain, blasting her face with heat. A fiery crater rips wide in the center of the restaurant, expanding like a hole in an old t-shirt when you work your thumbs in and tear it open, splitting the earth along a million tiny seams, devouring everything around their booth. Below the opening stretches an enormous, roaring lake the shade of cooking oil, churning and boiling, frothing with movement. Their corner booth is uniquely positioned at an architectural key point in the restaurant’s foundation, meaning that for a second after they leap up, they’re just standing there perched on a Tetris-corner span of tile as the upholstered seat back and table slide as one into the abyss, and squinting down at it through the veil of heat, Molly makes out a dense conglomerate of squirming, naked bodies beneath the lake’s shimmering surface, filling its every inch, while around the perimeter, soot-black figures scamper head-over-heels, shouldering human skewers that they deposit into the lake with their feet, hands, and teeth, like clearing speared cubes of chicken off a kebab. Steam bursts as each new body hits the surface, a fizzing effect, and the mass has to shift to accommodate it before the body is fully submerged. And still the roar overcomes everything, becomes the only sound she’s ever heard, what she was born hearing. Flecks of the lake’s evil substance spatter her face, splash burning up onto her jeans, her contacts melt out of her eyes, and as their stubborn patch of the floor dissolves beneath them (Megan’s final gesture is that of a mime’s scream), Molly realizes that maybe what is scariest of all is how appetizing it smells, how much like pepperoni.

III.

It was basically impossible to transition as a teenager in a place like Dayton, Ohio in 2006; Bennett knew this. Moreover, the name his friend had chosen—Margie—seemed squarely planted in 1940s Midwest farmland, which was a statement in the year of Borat and Clerks II. At times, Bennett selfishly and crudely thought that their situations should be reversed: it felt confusing that while he, cis, like studied Dead Kennedys lyrics and clung obsessively to every scrap of his barely experienced alt-communal West Coast origins, Margie, trans, pored unironically through the 1954 Centerville High School yearbook to find the black-and-white faces of relatives who’d grown up in the same house that she had. Bennett resents Ohio basically because he’s not a native, while Margie seems to have made it her own.

Even Flavors Eatery, where the two now sit, seems to exemplify this dynamic: Bennett likes it because the owners are from San Francisco, his homeland for his four initial years, and Margie likes it because the white sauce they drizzle over each dish makes everything taste like ranch dressing. They have wrested the front corner table that looks out at the parking lot and East Franklin Street, no mean feat during the second lunch period at Centerville (which is two blocks away); the fact that they’re here now means that they’ll have to wait thirty minutes for their food and will have to cram it in order to get back to school on time, but that is always part of the equation. Windchimes and sun-themed art dangle above them.

The husband-owner brings their two cans of Diet Coke to the table. They put orange slices on the glasses here. As always, Bennett and Margie chat vaguely with him; as always, Bennett asks for “news from the home front,” as if he’s a soldier away fighting an unjustified war, or as if it’s every transplant’s desire, not so secretly (just look at this place!) to return to their birthplace. “Did you hear? It’s finally sinking!” the co-owner quips. Margie smiles into her soda; Bennett’s nostalgia is kind of a joke to her.

The first time they’d come here after Margie started transitioning, sitting at this same table, the wiry wife-owner—who looked to Bennett like the physical manifestation of every ill-advised health craze rolled into one, meaning she did not partake in the house sauce—approached their table and began absently massaging Margie’s shoulders, and neither Bennett nor Margie knew her or her husband’s name and the owners didn’t know theirs, but generally it seemed like this was a safe place of sympathetically minded people. Lately, whether it was justified or not—whether Margie needed or wanted it or not—Bennett had been noting such places, had been compiling a list in his head. It will be another solid twenty minutes until their food arrives.

To fill this gap, Bennett shares a theory his mother related to him the day before: “My mom was telling me last night how much better she thought the world would be if every male between fifteen and twenty-five had to take a regular dose of estrogen.” He says this without knowing exactly how it will land, whether it’s more of a “mom’s-so-out-there” anecdote or a “mom’s-on-top-of-it” anecdote.

Margie’s response gives nothing away. “I love your mother. Do you want my orange?” She hands the slimy fruit slice across the table. “It contaminates the soda,” she says.

Bennett slurps the orange and then, over the next several minutes, painstakingly wraps the rind into a cocoon of napkin followed by straw wrapper. The table lays barren between them. After a while Margie asks, “What’s up?”

Bennett looks up from the tiny mummy. “Hmm? Nothing.”

“You’re barely speaking.”

“No, that’s—just.” He waves his hand. “Just empty head, that’s all.”

“As a matter of fact,” she says, “you’ve been barely speaking for like the last two months. Since I came out.”

The accusation buried in this hits Bennett like a bucket of cold water, and all he can respond with is abject denial, physically shaking it off: “No! That’s not it at all, I—” And shades of this. Bennett suddenly feels sick, as if the careful hut he’d been trying to build for them was actually made of glass, and now people are throwing rocks at it. Behind Margie, the husband-owner approaches, surprisingly early, wielding the characteristically cluttered-looking plates piled with innocuous greens, white sauce arrayed across them in cyclonic shapes. But the cyclone is within him!

“You only talk about trans stuff now!” Margie is shouting at him. “That’s not all there is! It’s not like this has evaporated all the rest of my personality! I’m not a ball bearing!”

As he contemplates this metaphor, struggling to find an appropriate response, one that will not wreck their glass hut but will hold up a shard of it and show that it is a mirror, as Bennett imagines saying this, out of the corner of his eye he sees the floor pop like a blister, and the husband-owner disappears into it. And as Bennett rises instinctively from the table to see what’s happened, his face becomes a shocked mask, and Margie’s falls in response to his, and he realizes that his every move is a disaster, his every word some poorly planned gamble. The restaurant turns freezing, and Bennett feels his lips crack, his hands seize and age forty years. Great chunks of the floor fall away (the counter and kitchen are already gone) and are whipped into oblivion by the winds that pour from the rending hole in the ground, revealing a furious whiteness underneath them, like a snowblind sky, and finally Margie turns around. The restaurant’s teenage diners slip on the icy tiles; they crackle to the floor and are sucked away. As their table begins to skid toward the breaching rift, Bennett reaches out and grabs Margie by the shoulder, pulling her from the chair, which glides on without her, and in the couple of seconds they’re successfully standing together at the edge of the void, his fingers on her elbow joint, the restaurant and its people bursting like fragile implements dipped in liquid nitrogen and then smashed with a hammer, Bennett glimpses, below them, through the whipping snow and scalding wind, a solitary, naked figure trudging across an endless plain, doubled over himself against the cold. The figure falls to his knees, the skin of his back breaks in a line down its center, and he blooms like a brilliant red flower on the white before his body is grayed out by the ice, buried under another strata of endless snow. And as his Converse inevitably give way on the frozen floor, Bennett formulates the answer to the question Margie is implicitly asking, that everyone is asking, that they’ve been asking for years, he shouts it to her through his bleeding lips in the blistering gale that obliterates everything around them, he shouts it so loud that his voice cracks, shatters like ice, and the words become instantly a part of the weather, are swallowed between them like a wave in the ocean, a turn in a wheel, between the girl and the pit at her feet, yawning, yes, with opportunity.

**

Simon Jacobs is the author of the novel Palaces (Two Dollar Radio), and of two collections of short fiction: Masterworks (instar books), and Saturn (Spork Press), a collection of David Bowie stories. He is from Dayton, Ohio, and currently lives in New York City.

The following excerpt from Chimerica by Anita Felicelli is reprinted here with permission of the author and the publisher, WTAW Press. 

Chimerica – Chapter 1

When I woke the morning after Ross moved out, the house was silent. No sounds of our kids getting ready for school and racing up the stairs, no sounds of Ross banging pots and pans around the kitchen, and no whir of the coffee grinder before he brewed me a pot. My skull was throbbing and my tweed skirt was cutting into my stomach. Two bottles of wine into the night before, I had forgotten to draw the crimson drapes or change out of my work clothes. My laptop rested next to me on the bed, still open to a website about Malagasy lemurs. From the bed, I could see the sunlit green hills of Oakland, irregularly studded with sprawling houses and eucalyptus trees and wood sorrel. It was the same panoramic view to which I always woke, the same splendor, but I was alone. Again. As a child I decided I would never let myself feel as lost as I felt after my mother killed herself, leaving me with a workaholic father and a younger sister to raise. And yet, here I was again, waking up alone in a large too-quiet house.

Eager to throw myself into trial preparation for an all-consuming copyright lawsuit Turner v. Eustachio, I showered and slipped into other clothes. I blow dried and flat ironed my unruly black curls. When I padded down the hall to the kitchen, I noticed that the painting my younger sister Julie had made for Ross was gone. No huge loss as far as I was concerned—it had been one of her weirder, more colorful canvases from a controversial graduate school exhibit entitled The Existential Crisis of Brown Folk that left me speechless and mildly irritated—but there now was a darker-colored square where the painting had hung, where sunlight hadn’t bleached the walls, a square that reminded me of a day more than ten years ago when the house painters had left and our young, excited family moved into a new home. 

In the kitchen, I started the coffee maker. Roasted coffee was slowly dripping into my ceramic cup when the phone began beeping and vibrating. I glanced at the text message. It was from Nick Evers, my lover and a named partner at the firm where I worked: We need to talk.

My palms started sweating with anticipation. I texted back: What’s going on? The last thing I wanted to do was talk, excavate what we meant to each other. Evers knew Ross had left—was he wanting to discuss moving forward? Part of me thought yes, he wants to move forward, I should move forward. This is new. This is someone who doesn’t already know how hard intimacy is for me—a chance for a fresh start. But the other part, the deeper part, suspected my kids blamed me for blowing up our lives together, and knowing they could be right, I wanted to burrow under the covers of my bed in shame. It was dangerous to speak out loud about this—about how I felt or how they felt. I was numb to being left, and I wanted to keep my emotions underground, wanted to avoid shining any sort of conversational spotlight on the subterranean things I knew were messy and irrational and overwhelming. Instead I told myself: nobody meets the right person at age nineteen, and at least you still have the comfort and thrill of work, and with Spencer’s support, the possibility of the biggest win of your career so far.

It was a minute before Evers replied to my text. I stared at the phone willing it to beep again. I had already poured a cup of coffee by the time it signaled a new text. I’ll tell you when you come over. Instead of answering right away, I took a swig of searing hot coffee, scalding my tongue, and waited another beat in order to seem as mysterious and aloof as him. I texted back: After work.

The phone beeped. We should talk now.

Mechanically, I laid out bowls for Tara and Mike and Ross. I was pouring my cereal when I realized with a start it was just one for breakfast. One is the loneliest and all that. I stared into my empty bowl. Its pale porcelain surface reflected my face, and with no work to focus me, the rage I’d been trying to suppress—at myself, at Ross, at how little I’d been able to accomplish in my life so far—flashed through me. I shoved the bowl off the table. It cracked on the floor. There was nobody for whom I was performing, so I left the pieces and the cereal where they had fallen to be swept up later. I grabbed a protein bar and my briefcase, and headed to the office, but in my rush to escape the gloomy, hollow silence of the home that had once meant so much, I forgot to text Evers back.

“Spencer wants to see you right away,” our brunette receptionist said as I strolled into the lobby. Usually I started working immediately, and met Spencer for lunch or an evening drink to talk strategy. Wondering what he could possibly want to discuss first thing in the morning, I hurried down the hall. Inside one of the offices, I overheard two junior associates speaking in hushed tones. The quietness of their voices, their smug, speculative cadences, caught my attention, and I paused to listen before passing the open door.

“Shocking that Evers got fired.”

“Can they do that to a partner?”

“It depends on what their agreement says …”

I continued toward Spencer’s spacious corner office at a slower clip. I should have called Evers back. I turned right into Spencer’s office. A short, broad-shouldered man in a crisp white dress shirt and pressed slacks, he was gazing out of the enormous plate-glass window that faced west onto the brick beacon of the Tribune Tower with its triangular cap, the pale mint-green of an oxidized penny. 

Sunlight glinted off the gold type on the dark red leather of the codebooks and the glass faces of framed lithographs of California farmworkers and antique local maps that adorned the walls. On the front lip of his desk were items of hockey and football memorabilia and trinkets from grateful clients. One row behind these knickknacks sat a photograph of Spencer on the ice in his skates, with an arm casually slung around the governor’s shoulder. Both wore protective hockey gear: they were an alliance of two of the most powerful men in California, still in some ways a Wild West of reinvention, the last frontier of genius hucksters and lone gunslingers. Pride swelled in me—I belonged to a premier firm run by someone powerful—this was a place where anyone could be the star she was meant to be, even if she didn’t fit the script of what power looked like. 

 Before I could say anything, Spencer spun around, and started speaking, “Maya, eight years ago your father convinced me to bring you on board, to give you a chance. You know how much I respect your father’s judgment—he’s a hell of a lawyer. I thought, no problem. You’d last a year, then scurry out of this business as fast as you could, the way most of our associates do. But instead, you proved yourself as an associate.” He sat down and smoothed back his silvery hair.

“Thank you.” 

Spencer crossed his arms and breathed deeply, as if he were holding back a violent barrage of words. His gentleness and restraint were entirely uncharacteristic and unsettled me—this type of care from him was far worse than a slap. “Let me finish. To no one’s surprise, you’ve proven to be a hard worker, one of our hardest workers. I was ready to recommend to the other partners we promote you after this case.” 

I was ready . . .  He had seen me as heir to his legacy, but why the past tense?

“Thank you. You’ve been more of a father to me than my own father has. I appreciate the confidence you’ve had in me and I know I would never have come so far without your mentorship.” Perhaps I hadn’t been effusive enough about how grateful I was; perhaps I hadn’t suggested what was true—that the work I did at his firm was necessary, that it was saving me, that it gave me a place to belong. Did he need to hear that? 

“Before your ethics were called into question, I thought this trial would be your last step toward making partner.” He rubbed his temples.

Ethics. A chill passed through me. They had never worried me because I saw Spencer had no qualms about them—he was sure of himself and I had trained myself to appear just as tough as he was. But I knew I’d committed any number of very minor ethical violations, so many morally ambiguous courses of conduct shading over into just plain wrong—all violations I could argue my way out of, of course—that I couldn’t really narrow down the possibilities enough to issue a plausible denial. 

The room darkened; it was only the sun slipping behind a cloud, but my vocabulary contracted as the light pulled away. I could tell from Spencer’s gentle demeanor, he was talking about something corrosive. The affair? Must be. He didn’t even think I was worth the harsh criticism; he didn’t even see me as his equal. In all the time I’d spent being mentored by him, I never realized he saw me as less than him. 

**

Anita Felicelli is the author of Chimerica (WTAW Press) and Love Songs for a Lost Continent (Stillhouse Press). Her essays and criticism have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Review of Books, Slate, Salon, the New York Times (Modern Love), and elsewhere. She was born in South India and grew up in the Bay Area, where she lives with her family.  

 The following excerpt from The Dragon Lady is reprinted by permission of Bloomsbury. Copyright 2019 Louisa Treger.

The Dragon Lady

1

Catherine, 1990s

I’ve spent a lifetime trying to forget, yet the smallest thing takes me back to the time the Dragon Lady was shot. I was thirteen years old and living on a forest reserve near the Mozambique border. My father, a naturalist and forestry consultant, visited her regularly, but it was the first time he had taken me.

Her house was long and low and painted white, with a turret on one side. It was like a castle in a storybook, unexpected and incongruous in a remote Rhodesian valley. The interior was all hushed, cool spaces and we had to wait a long time for the Dragon Lady to see us.

At one point her husband, Stephen, came to talk to us. He had a stern face, but there was a glint in his eyes while he spoke to Dad about the new trees he had planted. I had a boys’ comic tucked under my arm and he wanted to know why.

‘Cathy doesn’t like girls’ things,’ Dad told him. ‘She plays with tin soldiers and a train set.’

My father’s words caused a pang. I’d grown out of trains and soldiers a long time ago, but he hadn’t noticed. I was about to retort that I was too big for toys, but I saw Stephen was smiling; he found it funny. He left, saying that he had a meeting in town, but that his wife wouldn’t be much longer.

We sat in silence. It was hard not to fidget, and soon Dad suggested I go outside and have a look around. I walked onto the veranda and down a flight of steps, and found myself in a never-ending garden.

It was beautiful and eerie, not like a garden at all to me. My school friends had gardens with mowed lawns and tidy hedges. This was wilderness with paths and deep shade, dense with trees, ferns and flowering creepers. Under the spreading branches of an old cypress tree, I stumbled against a protruding object and nearly fell. Righting myself, I looked down and saw a moss-encrusted grave so small it could only have belonged to a young child. There was no headstone or inscription. The only decoration was a posy of white roses made out of porcelain.

A cloud slid across the sun, shrouding everything in a gloomy light. The wind came up, making the tree branches writhe back and forth. The dry rustling of their leaves was like a whispered warning and a chill snaked up my spine.Turning away, I hurried back to the house in time to see Dad and the Dragon Lady exiting the back door.

I stopped at the edge of the lawn to watch them. Her real name was Lady Virginia Courtauld – Dad called her Ginie. She was gesturing and calling to a gardener to show him something.Tall and thin, she wore a long- sleeved blue dress; her face was in shadow under a large hat.

Beneath the swish of her dress I could make out the infamous tattoo. It was this that had earned her the nickname Dragon Lady, though the creature on her ankle was in fact a snake: a savage thing, heavily inked in black, its head rearing up, jaws open, ready to strike. People whispered that it went from her ankle right the way up her thigh and no one but Stephen knew where it ended.

I had the vague impression that she was agitated or anxious, fidgeting and walking up and down; her voice was vivacious, fractured. I was used to observing my own mother’s unhappiness and I saw something there that reminded me of her.

The monkeys in the treetops started up a tremendous disturbance; shrieking and chattering, flinging down gourds from the oyster nut vines that split open as they smacked the ground, scattering seeds over the grass.

‘What’s bothering them?’ asked the Dragon Lady, shading her eyes with her hand as she looked towards the trees.

At that instant, a loud noise splintered the air. I only realised it was a gunshot when I saw the Dragon Lady’s body jolt violently and the garden boy screamed. She seemed to bow down and one hand went out as if she was reaching for something. She toppled over with a choked cry and I saw the wound in her side. Her body tensed and convulsed, her limbs sprawled gracelessly, blood spilled onto the ground.

For a few moments, there was an unearthly stillness. Then things moved quickly: my father was bending over her, his ear by her chest. He stripped his shirt off and pressed it to the wound, trying to staunch the bleeding. Blood poured out regardless, soaking through the fabric, a scarlet rosette blossoming grotesquely on khaki.

‘We must get her to the hospital – quickly!’

A servant came running with blankets and they lifted her, a limp shape wrapped in soiled blue wool, and hurried her away. Moments later, I heard the cough and rattle of our truck start up and speed off.

I leaned against the rough bark of a tree and watched a pair of red and green lizards darting through the grass. High above, a company of hawks circled in a flawless blue sky. With my teeth, I took hold of a ragged piece of skin at the edge of my thumbnail and pulled. It came away in a long strip. A drop of bright blood welled up in the cuticle and ran down my thumb, though I felt no pain.

I waited for my dad, but he did not come back.The light deepened and spread, staining the trees gold and casting stripes on the grass where it slipped between them. The glow lingered on the treetops, while the shadows of dusk began to creep over their lower branches. A bird called and crickets started up a low, persistent creaking. Two poodles appeared and made their way towards the house, agitated. They paused by the rust-coloured stain the Dragon Lady had left on the grass, sniffed at it and started to lick it. I realised that they were as forgotten as I was.

**

Louisa Treger, a classical violinist, studied at the Royal College of Music and the Guildhall School of Music and worked as a freelance orchestral player and teacher. She subsequently turned to literature, earning a Ph.D. in English at University College London, where she focused on early-twentieth-century women’s writing and was awarded the West Scholarship and the Rosa Morison Scholarship “for distinguished work in the study of English Language and Literature”. Louisa’s first novel, The Lodger, was published by Macmillan in 2014; her new novel, The Dragon Lady, is out now with Bloomsbury. She lives in London.

The following text is excerpted from First Cosmic Velocity by Zach Powers, published August 6th by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2019 by Zachary J. Powers

Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan–1964

Nadya had been the twin who was supposed to die. But she lived, and it was her sister, the other Nadya, who’d departed. The Chief Designer placed his hand on this Nadya’s shoulder and squeezed. He meant it to comfort her, but it had also become a superstition of sorts. The first time, at least, he had meant to comfort her. Since then, it was for his own comfort. No launch had ever failed following the gesture. This calmed him in a way the vodka never could.

The bunker walls were bare concrete. The control panel, a patchwork of different metals, unmatched switches, knobs and dials like a hundred varieties of flower, faced the wall opposite the door. A half-dozen engineers manned positions at the console, and as many as that stood behind them. The Chief Designer knew only a few by name.

Had Nadya lost weight? He remembered her being meatier, muscles sculpted. She still trained back then, he supposed. No need for that now. Perhaps he simply misremembered. This was only the fifth time his hand had so much as grazed Nadya over the years of the program, once for each launch. Hell, he even managed to touch his wife more often than that. His wife and son, how long since he had last seen them? He looked at the countdown clock.

Some of the engineers called the Chief Designer Medved because they did not know his name, but also because of his breadth. The large scar on his head, too, befitted an animal. The gouge ran from just above his right eyebrow deep into the territory of his balding pate. He would never discuss its origins. Half his teeth were artificial, the incisors grayed like an old cheap saucer.

He slid sideways through the narrow space at the end of the control console to the bunker’s periscope, a box of raw metal with goggles protruding from the side. The distance shrunk the R-7 rocket to toylike proportions. Only the top showed above the great tulip framework of the launchpad. The four metal buttresses, gripping the rocket like a vise, would not fall away until the thrust reached a certain level. The pad’s design had been Mishin’s. Or was it Bushuyev’s? The Chief Designer could never remember.

Beyond the pad spread sprawling flatness, The Kazakh steppe like something from a nightmare, one where he would run and run but never seem to make progress. Down range had become a graveyard for spent rocket parts, dropped early stages, shrapnel from the occasional explosion. Not as occasional as the Chief Designer would have liked. Some of the younger technicians took trucks, vintage from the war, and searched for souvenirs. Mars had returned once with a piece of metal sheeting, the skin from a failed rocket, with a red slash painted on it like a wound. It was the tip of the sickle. He had searched for the hammer, Mars said, but the steppe was a big place. Or a non-place. After a certain point, a thing’s vastness diminished its identity.

The Chief Designer did not look at the landscape, however. He scanned the sky, grimacing at the gray roiling over the horizon. He had received word of a storm surging across the steppe, the kind that would muddy the whole complex and postpone the mission.

“There’s only so much of nature I can conquer at once,” he said, speaking the words as if through the periscope. No one in the control room heard him.

The mission had already been delayed once after a single centimeter-long wire shorted out. Of the kilometers of wires, hundreds of vacuum tubes, and thousands of other little electronic devices, all it took was the tiniest glitch to ground the whole thing. The Chief Designer hated that faulty wire, sometimes he even hated the engineers who had installed it. In his more generous moods, he would congratulate the engineers on the foresight of the indicator light. Left unrepaired, even that forgettable span of wire could have destroyed the whole rocket. The fuse was always tiny compared to the explosion.

The Chief Designer squeezed back around the console. Mishin, or was it Bushuyev, handed him the bottle of vodka. No glasses this time. For the first two launches there had been glasses, so that a successful launch might be toasted. By the time those launches actually occurred, however, there was no vodka left. They had drunk it all in the waiting.

The Chief Designer gripped the bottle with both hands and gulped down a mouthful, like a man emerging from the desert, scared that the substance might turn to illusion if he did not down it fast enough. He passed the bottle to Mars at the communications terminal quickly, so that the liquid’s rippling would not reveal the tremors shooting through his body. Mars took a sip and passed the bottle along.

The radio crackled with static. An exhaled breath. The Chief Designer shoved himself next to Mars and took the microphone.

“T plus one hundred,” he said. “How do you feel?”

“I feel fine.” The voice came small and tinny from the speaker. “How about you?”

A round of subdued laughter crested through the bunker.

The voice belonged to Leonid, crammed inside the little globe of the Vostok capsule perched atop the R-7. It was the first joke the Chief Designer ever remembered him making. At least this Leonid. The other one had been trained to tell jokes, to be normal. More than normal. He was the socialist ideal incarnate. As if an ideal was something that could be trained into you. Sometimes the Chief Designer thought of them, the two Leonids, as the same person, but then that was the whole point.

Nadya slipped around the console to the periscope. She didn’t press her face against it, but stood back, observing the small image of the rocket, fish-eyed by the lens. Speaking of ideals, thought the Chief Designer. How old was she now? Twenty-five? The original cosmonauts, the Vanguard Five, were all the same age, give or take a year. Nadya was the only one among them to achieve grace in a jumpsuit. Her blond hair so fine. He wondered what the other Nadya’s hair had looked like in weightlessness. The first human in space, and no one had thought to take a picture. No one had thought to ask.

The only time Nadya’s grace had failed her was the day before she was scheduled to launch. The little white dog Kasha, herself trained as a cosmonaut, had darted under Nadya’s feet in the hallway. The Chief Designer had been there, along with Mishin and Bushuyev, walking from the training center toward the mess, discussing the logistics of launch day, though all of them knew the procedures so well by then that any recapitulation was pointless beyond even the usual levels of redundancy the engineers favored. Nadya seemed to rise up, over the top of Kasha, and then toppled to the beige-tiled floor. She looked down, her face seemingly stretched by surprise, not pain. Kasha sat beside Nadya, as if protecting her. Nadya hovered her hand above her knee and said simply, tragically, “It’s broken.” The Chief Designer remembered the electric shock those words had caused to pulse below his skin. That was his last clear memory of the first launch.

Now he stood, looming over the control panel like the rocket over the pad, both figures, to look at them, unlikely to ever leave the ground. His finger floated above the ignition button. Could he press it again? After the first launch, he had always pressed it himself. Whoever’s finger did the work, though, the ultimate responsibility was his. It was his button, his rocket, his cosmonaut. No, he would not press it again. He would remove his hand, scrub the mission. He would stand on the scaffold of the launchpad as Leonid emerged from Vostok. He would welcome Leonid home like a son, though Leonid had never actually left the ground. Like Nadya. Like the Nadya who survived. What had her sister’s hair looked like in space?

“We never think to ask the right questions,” he said.

The Chief Designer mouthed the final numbers of the countdown: pyat, chetirii, trii, dva, odin.

He pushed the button, and the engines, all twenty of them, lit as one.

**

Zach Powers is the author of First Cosmic Velocity and Gravity Changes, which won the BOA Short Fiction Prize, and his work has appeared in such places as American Short Fiction, Black Warrior Review, The Conium Review, and the Tin House blog. He co-founded the literary arts nonprofit Seersucker Live, led the writers’ workshop at the Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home for eight years, and spent a decade in television with the Savannah Morning News, winning four regional Emmy awards. He is Director of Communications for The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, MD, and lives in Arlington, VA.

The following story by Esperanza Cintrón is reprinted from Shades: Detroit Love Stories, published by Wayne State University Press.

The Crossroad

The church is full of Grandma; her long white box sits on a pedestal in the front. I can see her dark-brown face peeking out, the tip of her nose and a shiny chocolate cheek. There are lots

of flowers, carnations with stiff pink bow ribbons. She liked carnations cause they last a long time. Roses, white and red, and loose-petaled yellow flowers are spread all around the box and across the stage circling the preacher’s place. They smell pretty, sweet and fresh; I don’t know where Momma is. I can’t see her nowhere.

Wide, round, purple, blue, and black Sunday best hats nod, making soft waves that wash over rows of ladies in navy and black dresses. Every once in a while, there’s a splash of green or deep purple or a man pressed tight in a dark suit and tie with a high-buttoned white shirt and brushed-back hair. An old, old lady with balled-up, brown-paper-bag skin is sitting across the aisle from us. She is wearing a wide navy hat with a big puffy, organdy flower pasted right on the front. She is humming a slow song that I can’t make out. Her voice is rusty and wet.

I’m sitting on a bench scrunched between two church ladies wearing white uniforms. Crocheted doilies are pinned to the breast pockets of their crispy dresses. Pearl-like buttons go all the way down the front; only ankles in white stockings and thick-heeled shoes peek out. One of them keeps pressing my face against the crocheted doily on her pocket. It’s stiff, not soft like it look. I try to wiggle my face away so I can breathe better, but the other church lady’s bosom is guarding the other side. I stare down at the tiny white pearl-colored buttons on her wide white lap.

I have on new black patent leather T-strap shoes and my turquoise-blue dress with the long waist. Grandma called it my jazzy dress, said it looked like one she used to have when she was a girl. She showed me how to wear the long beads that came with it. When I tried the dress on in the store, Grandma took the necklace and put it around her neck. She wrapped it so that one part was close around her throat and the other hung down to her waist. Then she put one hand on her hip and pretended like she was chewing gum while she took the long part of the necklace in her other hand and twirled it around. She winked at me and said that’s the way the fast girls did it. I laughed, and then she twirled the beads around again and made a cockeyed face. I laughed harder because she looked so funny. Then she picked me up and twirled me around. The beads feel smooth and bumpy. I smile.

I hear Momma somewhere crying. I turn to look for her, and she’s there in the aisle held up by two ladies in white. Momma’s face is red and crumbly, her mouth open wide, crying. Her friend Belle is coming up the aisle behind them. “Diane,” she call out to Momma. Momma shake loose of the church ladies so she can hug Belle. Momma crying on Belle’s shoulder. Belle hug her back. Old sloe-eyed Deacon Harris—that’s what Grandma used to call him cause he was always trying to get with Momma—come up behind them and hand Momma his handkerchief. She take it and blow her nose. “Diane. I got her,” he say and try to take Momma from Belle, but Momma won’t go.

“I want my momma.” I start crying. “I want my momma.” I’m standing on the wooden seat trying to climb over these church ladies, but they won’t let me get to my momma. One of them is holding me by my waist, making me even more hot and sweaty, and this other lady is blocking my way. They won’t let me get to my momma!

This lady saying, “Baby come on sit down here with me. You can’t have your momma right now.” So I scream and cry and scream louder because I want my momma, and she right there and they won’t let me have her. Shh, the lady in white croon in my ear. She try to rock me against the bumpy smoothness of her dress pocket as she wipe my nose with a handkerchief.

“Don’t Sister Greene look good,” my other keeper say. “Swanson did a good job. Sister Greene would be real proud.” I peek out at Grandma, who is looking pretty and peaceful, and I quiet down because I know she would want me to.

“A good woman,” say one of the church ladies, “tithed ’til it hurt, and all those kids. She deserve a nice send-off.”

A crew of church lady nurses stand along the back wall, hands behind their backs, a line of straight white posts holding the church up. I’m wondering where they keep the cold rags and smelling salts they give the people who faint when they get the Holy Ghost. 

Grandma would be standing there with them if she wasn’t resting in her pretty box bed. Her hair is all shiny and curled like when she get it done on Saturdays. I smile and remember how Grandma used to say getting her hair done once a week was her one indulgence. A treat, she said it meant, like the little brown bag of penny Squirrels and Banana Splits she used to give me when she came home from the beauty parlor. Grandma was always teaching me new words and other things, like the capital of Colombia is Bogota. Colombia is a country way down south. She liked to read and tell me about other places. Bogota. I like the way the word sounds in my mouth.

Uncle Jeff is sitting up straight and crisp in his white Navy uniform. His face is quiet and serious; his mouth a straight line. He nod his head up and down every time Aunt Jamie whisper something in his ear, but he won’t turn to look at her. Aunt Jamie look nice in the dark-blue suit she borrowed from Momma. Uncle Ronald is sitting next to her with some lady I don’t know. Momma say every time she turn around Ronald got a new girlfriend. Uncle Ronald paint crazy pictures with weird mismatched colors. Momma say he can’t see straight cause he always high on that reefer, but Grandma say he just trying to make sense out of this crazy world.

The organ music start, Bringing in the sheaves, bringing in the sheaves. We shall come rejoicing, bringing in the sheaves. The people in the choir stand up. One of my keepers take my hand, and we stand as we sing along with the choir. It sound good, full and loud, and I smile because Grandma is smiling. The preacher’s black-and- purple robes swirl around him as he take his place in front of the tall stand that look like the thick trunk of a tree growing out of Grandma’s box. “We have come together this day to celebrate the life of this good woman, to rejoice in the fact that we were fortunate enough to have this gracious woman touch our lives. Let us begin with a prayer of benediction, a pronouncement of His divine blessing.” His words sound like a song as he bow his head and stretch his palm out to us.

We bow our heads too. I can feel Grandma’s warm palm squeezing my hand, reminding me to be quiet, to bow my head and let the gentle beauty of prayer wash over me.

**

Esperanza Cintrón is the author of three books of poetry that include Chocolate City Latina, the 2013 Naomi Long Madgett Award winner What Keeps Me Sane, and Visions of a Post-Apocalyptic Sunrise. She is a native Detroiter of Puerto Rican descent who holds a doctorate in English literature and teaches at a local college. Shades: Detroit Love Stories is her debut short story collection.