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The Writing Disorder is a quarterly literary journal. We publish exceptional new works of fiction, poetry, nonfiction and art. We also feature interviews with writers and artists, as well as reviews.

A Fine Line

by Todd Sformo


Smooth wings of a plane lift: lift’s in the corrugated, dragonfly wing-stroke. Strange, that order of thought—the former manufactured, the latter evolution, the first precise, the second chaotic. Yet, their maneuverings! Under the skin, airplane wings hold regularly spaced spars running the length, and perpendicular ribs give rise to airfoil. A broken wing in a junkyard, without other clues, is distinct enough to say Cessna (genus?) 152 (species?). The veins in wings in dragonflies are windows to species, too, but are given such stolid, architecturally stiff names, “arculus,” “nodus,” “antenodal,” seemingly at odds with an emerald’s metallic patrol over ponds, its vapory phosphorescent eyes leading the charge and leaving behind sparks from thoracic stripes, like little lightning strikes, chimes in a distant wind.

As a mechanic learns stringers and struts, I studied wing venation, back and forth between textbook and specimen, memorizing veins from leading to trailing edge: costa and sub-costa, radius, media, cubitus, and anal. Not Melville-exciting, but then the “rabble of uncertain, fugitive, half-fabulous” lie in shape veins make as they fork and branch into discoidal fields: polygons arch into hexagons, square into pentagons, propagating constellations; rectangles cross into kite, as tattered wings dangle into Mondrian edge-off triangles. And among its venous tracery, cellophane chitin spans this cathedral’s stained glass—devoid of color—except for the smoky pterostigmata.

I viewed them under the microscope, the wings of Odonata, Anisoptera, and drew their network on rainy days when no insects flew. Veins were in my vision as I walked from lab to home, spotting the hind wings of the four-spotted skimmer Libellula quadrimaculata in the heaving cracks of concrete, a dead-ringer for the map of Italy; outlines in asphalt of a lake darner’s arculus, while checks in slate sketch the nodus-taper in Hudsonia, a boreal whiteface. Pavement fractures are etched with spilled cherry syrup, the latticework of meadowhawks’ reddish wings.

Species of crack, but more crack than kind, and I wondered whether I could discover venation out there as asterisms of a priori wings. My eyes were drawn to cracks as lines that are not things but a lack, de-fining. That a crack does not exist gives rise to absurdity, but we’re saved by tenth grade geometry that comes to life, where line and point delineate a mind’s dot without the flesh of lead. If a crack is not, and a line is no thing, yet has the ability to take sides where none previously existed, is it, itself, creation from nothing?

On the black lab bench, I accidentally brush my elbow against a wing I had previously cut off and lost track of. The veins stick to my clammy skin as I drag it over the edge, watching, almost awfully, the detached wing glide in a slow, monster arc, balanced, horizontal, imperceptibly losing altitude—no struggle, no whirly-gig spasm, no tumble, just doing what a wing is supposed to. Under the complete absence of control



It Does Not Follow  


1

That profile of two faces creating a vase is my drive to work, destination, a point unremarkably fixed, and I, as if on autopilot, wonder after the fact what I saw along the way.

2

That profile of two faces creating a vase is my first amusement park—Fantasy Island—where I got syrupy legs after eating rock candy then cotton, where masquerade parades without mask in a sudden western town, complete with porch barrel, louvre doors, and a cow, as we watch the lone sheriff draw momentary death, until dead cowboys get up and bow. In an outlandish house because it didn’t have fiendish figures popping up or nozzles flush to the floor spouting an air jet up your pant leg, my voice and hearing got trapped in tiny porous pits in a dining room plush with egg carton walls. By the end of the day, I no longer effortlessly grasped by ineffable thought but slogged on hands and feet the buckling of tidy corridors, straight railings with unsightly twists, giant siblings and shrunken parents. Within easy reach of an exit, on flat floorboards, my knees were the seat of wisdom, telling me I’m walking uphill.

3

That profile of two faces creating a vase (although this is not a vase and these are not faces) is Picasso’s Factory at Horta de Ebro (1909). A painting’s frame and converging point roughly form a pyramid, with apex tucked inside. A moment’s attention is all that’s required to scan for linear perspective, focusing imperceptibly on a vanishing speck—good ole 3-D (on a 2-D surface, of course). Picasso constructs a contrary, while my mind’s momentum still searches for the Renaissance, reversing converging lines culminating in a new apex outward, toward the viewer, who becomes the vanishing point, drawing attention to what is supposed to be and the wrong that is.

4

The profile of every thing must be the contour of some thing else? When dusky, or in low light just in bed, eyes not fully adjusted, or looking out from the balcony of a church in winter, when stained glass is black from the lack of sunlight and the illumination by the artificial is too slight, I’ve had moments when light itself changes before my eyes, and no one else notices—no heads turn, no confused faces. It’s not some sign, though, some communication (which would have been nice), but something about me. I made light flicker without light flickering. Staring into a bathroom mirror, I test my pupils and think I can make them move.

            My eyes have been in the corner of rooms at intersection of ceiling and walls, an out-of-eye experience, where corneas’ roundness bump into interior’s limits. This trapping room makes me feel big not claustrophobic, but I’ve been in rooms where the mapping is pathologic. With a walker holding her weight, she led and murmured—“microphones”; her finger silence-arcing from lip toward light points on fork and faucet—“phones”; coruscating Vermeer blotches on brassy doorknobs and glassy edges—“bugs,” as we, indubitably, swept through her apartment, shadowing the glare-tropes that pursued us. We were the sun and the flowers.



BIO

Todd Sformo is a biologist in Utqiaġvik (Barrow), Alaska, working on a variety of Arctic organisms such as fish, bowhead whales, and the freshwater mold Saprolegnia. He has a PhD and MS in biology, an MFA in creative writing, an MA in art history, and a BA in philosophy. Besides publishing scientific papers, he has published prose poems in Hippocampus, Cirque, and The Ekphrastic Review, and essays in Catamaran, Interalia Magazine, and the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics. He is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship (Fulbright Arctic Initiative 2018-2019) and Alaska Literary Award (2024) in Creative Nonfiction, Alaska Arts and Culture Foundation.







Do the Dead Choose Their Biographers?

by Scott Bane


                  The New York Times has given me many good things in life.  There is my partner (later husband) of 30 years, David, who retired from the Times at the end of 2017 after 42 years of service, although he continues to work as a part-time curator of an in-house museum of New York Times history.  And then there is the American literary critic F. O. Matthiessen (1902-1950).  A 2003 book review in the Times introduced me to Matthiessen’s most famous book, American Renaissance:  Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941), describing it as a love letter to his life-partner, the painter Russell Cheney.  September 2024 marked the 100th anniversary of Matthiessen and Cheney’s fateful meeting aboard the ocean liner Paris that set sail from Pier 55 at the foot of West 15th Street bound for Le Havre by way of Plymouth.  From that day, the two men became a couple, later settling in Kittery, Maine from 1930 to 1945, when Cheney died.  Kittery is a small town along the Maine coast, right over the New Hampshire border, next to York, where I grew up.

                  A native of Pasadena and later based at Harvard, Matthiessen was a luminary in early-to-mid-20th century literary studies, who helped establish American Studies, an interdisciplinary field that draws on and integrates diverse disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, especially history and literature.  Given the range of his public and private writing, Matthiessen could be described as an early creative nonfiction writer, publishing nine books that included literary criticism and biographies; a monograph devoted to Cheney’s painting soon after his death; and an unusual work best characterized as a hybrid political essay, travelogue, and memoir.  Matthiessen wrote roughly seventy-five articles and essays that included book reviews and advocacy journalism, often focused on organized labor’s struggles.  On top of all of this he edited five additional books and made numerous contributions to anthologies and collaborative works.

                  Contemporary scholars have wrestled with Matthiessen’s legacy in three books and numerous articles.  Beginning in the 1980s, his work came under increasing scrutiny, reassessment, and criticism from academics who argued that his literary judgments were too narrow, because they slanted white and male, although not entirely heterosexual.  Others pointed out that Matthiessen never fully reconciled his literary and political positions, and that he skimmed the surface of divisions in American life, notably with his inadequate treatment of the U. S. Civil War in American Renaissance.

                  Then there is Matthiessen’s life and death by suicide, which continue to fascinate.  Matthiessen’s story and his relationship with Cheney have given rise to three novels.  These include:  Faithful Are the Wounds (1955) about the Matthiessen-like character Edward Cavan, who takes his own life purportedly over his thwarted progressive political ideals; American Studies (1994) in which the first person narrator recounts his relationship with faculty advisor Tom Slater, a Matthiessen-like character who dies by suicide; and most recently American Scholar (2023), where Matthiessen and Cheney hover as intellectual and emotional inspiration for the novel’s main character James Fitzgerald.

                  Over the summer of 2003 after reading the Times book review, I would take American Renaissance and a number two pencil to a quiet hill in Central Park to read of a summer afternoon.  American Renaissance quickly became one of those books that I wished I could eat.  I know that sounds loopy, but there have been books that I so strongly wanted to incorporate into my being that I have imagined eating them.  I chewed on my number two pencil instead, as I took notes in the margins.

                  American Renaissance considers the work of five writers in the period of 1850-1855, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman.  Matthiessen didn’t stop at literature; he tapped painting and sculpture in an attempt to form a cohesive narrative of cultural history.  Matthiessen asks:  Why does this moment of collective expression occur when it does?  What do the works of these writers and artists say about life in America?  For example, Matthiessen wrote about Moby Dick:  “The strong-willed individuals who seized the land and gutted the forests and built the railroads were no longer troubled by Ahab’s obsessive sense of evil, since theology had receded even farther into their backgrounds.  But their drives were as relentless as his, and they were to prove like him in many other ways also, as they went on to become the empire builders of the post-Civil War world.”

                  In the book, Matthiessen also began to articulate a nascent queer literary and artistic canon in his focus on Whitman’s poetry, Melville’s novella Billy Budd, and Thomas Eakins’s The Swimming Hole among others.  As I dug into Matthiessen life and work, often a personal association anchored his scholarship:  Cheney had suggested Matthiessen begin reading Whitman’s poetry.  Matthiessen shared with Cheney a photo of himself standing naked on Sea Point Beach in Kittery with a big piece of seaweed draped around his neck and providing just enough modesty.  Like the men in The Swimming Hole, Matthiessen appreciated the pleasures of skinny-dipping.  That Matthiessen did all of this, while living long before gay rights movement or even the civil rights movement, fascinated me.  If personal associations could be Matthiessen’s starting point, maybe they could be mine, too?  Transcending time, I connected to a queer lineage through this place that had been so critical in shaping who I became.

                  American Renaissance spoke to me for other personal reasons, too.  In my freshman year at Sarah Lawrence College, I had taken a history seminar with about 15 students entitled The Individual and Society in Antiquity and the Renaissance.  The course introduced me to the idea that literary works, in addition to their artistic merits, could also reveal something of the time in which they were created.  A book could be like a geological cross-section of soil and sediment that discloses different stages of the earth’s crust age.  The idea captivated me.  When I read American Renaissance nearly 20 years had passed since my freshman history course.  But reading the book, I felt as though I were recapturing part of myself that I had unconsciously dropped along the way to adulthood and earning a living.

                  I also discovered Rat and the Devil:  The Journal Letters of F.O. Matthiessen and Russell Cheney, an edited selection from Matthiessen and Cheney’s nearly 3,100 letters that they exchanged with each other between meeting in 1924 and Cheney’s death.  Cheney was Rat, and Matthiessen was Devil.  Cheney’s nickname originated from his family, while Matthiessen picked-up his nickname in Skull and Bones, the elite senior society at Yale, to which both he and Cheney belonged.  The letters meant so much to Matthiessen that early on he bought a strong box, in which to store them for safe keeping.  Matthiessen’s letters are articulate, perceptive, and searching:  “Of course this life of ours is entirely new – neither of us know of a parallel course.  We stand in the middle of an uncharted, uninhabited country.  That there have been other unions like ours is obvious, but we are unable to draw on their experience.  We must create everything ourselves.  And creation is never easy.”  For Matthiessen his relationship with Cheney illuminated both his life and literary studies.  “My union with you during those seven weeks [in Italy] brought me to a state where I thought that for the first time I knew the meaning of love, and perhaps felt some ability to express this white sacred flame in my life and work.”

                  After the publication of Rat & the Devil in 1978, commentators on Matthiessen’s life and work noted how much he would have hated having his personal life exposed in public.  His former student and later colleague at Harvard, Harry Levin, rather unceremoniously trashed Rat and the Devil in The New York Review of Books.  “As for the violation of his privacy, I have little doubt that Matthiessen would have hated it, and Cheney was even more self-conscious about the stigmata of homosexuality.”  Levin’s assessment of his former teacher and colleague was probably true; he knew Matthiessen well.  But in 1945, when Matthiessen wrote his Last Will and Testament, he specifically singled out the letters and left them to a Skull and Bones brother, suggesting that he appreciated their significance.  Even if he never could have imagined the letters being published, he wanted what was contained in them – the expression of love – to live on.  In 2024, the letters may well be Matthiessen’s most important contribution, if not to literature, then to history.

                  I set off an expedition to learn as much as I could about Matthiessen and his work, Cheney and his painting, their backgrounds, and their life together.  I visited the Beinecke Library at Yale to read the originals of Matthiessen and Cheney’s letters.  In connection with a 2009 exhibition of Cheney’s paintings, I took a tour of the couple’s former home in Kittery, which seemed idyllic, sitting on the rocky coast overlooking the ever-changing blue, green, and gray ocean.  Eventually, I created a timeline of all my notes about Matthiessen and Cheney’s life together, as captured in their letters, Matthiessen’s books and reviews, and Cheney’s paintings.  Nearly two decades later this had grown into A Union Like Ours:  The Love Story of F. O. Matthiessen and Russell Cheney, which was published in 2022 by the University of Massachusetts Press.  The book was a finalist in 2023 for the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction from the Publishing Triangle.

                  It was uncanny the way it all happened:  stumbling across Matthiessen in the pages of the New York Times, being reminded of a moment of my own early intellectual flowering, Matthiessen and Cheney’s connection with southern coastal Maine, and then writing their story.  It was almost as if Matthiessen and Cheney had chosen me rather than the other way around.



BIO

Scott Bane grew up not ten miles from where F. O. Matthiessen and Russell Cheney made their home in Maine.  A Union Like Ours:  The Love Story of F.O. Matthiessen and Russell Cheney is Scott’s first book and was a finalist in 2023 for the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction made by the Publishing Triangle.  Scott’s essays have appeared in Down East Magazine, The New England Journal of History, and The Gay and Lesbian Review.  The Boston Globe, HuffPost, and Poets & Writers among others have published his journalism.  Into the Void and Christopher Street have brought out Scott’s fiction.  Learn more at www.scott-bane.com.





Human Beings Live Here

by Mike Heppner


I.

            The little wooden bowl went missing years ago. It might’ve been when they’d moved from the apartment in Winchester to a larger house in Wakefield. She remembers packing in a hurry, often with the baby in a sling around her neck. It would’ve been late in the move, all of the books and tabletop decor already boxed up and only the kitchen and bathroom essentials left out. Not that she ever considered the bowl and its matching spoon “essential.” She can’t recall using it even once. More of a decorative bowl, then, though she kept it in the drawer along with the rest of the kitchen junk.

            She misses Winchester, only two towns to the south from her house near the Wakefield town center. Winchester is more upscale than Wakefield; they never could’ve afforded to buy in the well-to-do suburban Fells hamlet known for its boutiques and highly ranked school district. Wakefield’s nice too, but it feels far from her job in the city. If you want affordable housing near Boston, you have to migrate out: north, south, or west. East puts you in the ocean.

            The bowl’s missing. Something else is missing too.

            She can’t quite remember what the bowl looked like. Small, maybe just decorative. You wouldn’t use it for nuts or olives or crackers, the things you set out for guests. She still has the spoon, though—somehow the bowl got lost but not the spoon.

            It’s Sunday, and she’s cleaning out the junk drawer in the kitchen. Mostly it’s batteries, the first twenty-three inches of a torn and coffee-stained measuring tape, broken pencils and random tools, birthday candles out of the box—the drawer jams halfway open, and she adjusts the handle of a Phillips-head screwdriver to pull it out the rest of the way.

            The tiny wooden spoon’s handsome enough. Maybe it would look nice on the window ledge above the kitchen sink. We like to put things on window ledges—little spoons and decorative boxes, a pretty stone found on a hike. Leave no surface uncluttered.

            With a nostalgic sigh, she puts the spoon on the window ledge, changes her mind and takes it back, then changes her mind again and returns it to the ledge. She wonders how the spoon wound up in the junk drawer. Maybe that’s what it is, then—just junk. Not ledge-worthy.

            A child watches from a landing on the second floor. He knows what’s missing too. The house is quiet except for the sound of someone rooting through a junk drawer, and the woman in the kitchen, the boy’s mother, is pretty and disheveled and entirely focused on her work.

            Sunday’s an awkward night to invite someone over for dinner; but adults have busy schedules, and you do your best to find a time that works for everyone.

            Sometimes she gets on a tear and decides she needs to clean the whole house, or at least the kitchen and bathrooms. It’s more house than she’s ever had to deal with. Owning a house with five bathrooms embarrasses her, especially now. The house was built with a larger family in mind. It’s old and loses heat in the winter. If only she’d known, she would’ve stayed in Winchester where they only had to write one check a month and the landlord handled the rest.

            What do you do with a tiny wooden spoon? There’s the temptation to throw it away, though it looks nice on the window ledge next to the polished rock she found on a walk in the Fells. So maybe it makes more sense as a decoration. As an actual spoon, it’s nearly useless. Sometimes things that look practical really aren’t—decorative bowls, a hand-laid cutting board. You’re not meant to use them, you’re just meant to leave them out and admire them.

            The boy watching from the landing has big eyes. It’s his job to watch and not make comment, just take it all in.

            Cleaning’s emotional for her; she does it when she’s bored or nervous or excited. Today she’s all three. It’s good to clean when you’re full of nervous energy and can’t keep your hands steady. She also likes rearranging the furniture, though it gets on people’s nerves. End tables and loveseats migrate from room to room, up and down the stairs. She doesn’t like it when things get too settled. Someday she’ll get it right, the exact correct arrangement of tables and chairs.

            It’s time for the boy’s lunch, and she calls him down. She likes making him sandwiches; every meal could be a sandwich so far as she’s concerned. Lately she finds she doesn’t have much appetite. She doesn’t like the weighed-down feeling of a full stomach. Eating makes her sleepy; some days at work she’ll skip lunch and just power through the afternoon.

            The boy’s not eating much either. He’s always been on the small side. She hopes the other mothers don’t look at him and think she’s not feeding him enough. Other mothers judge—they criticize. It’s not a very supportive environment. She does worry about him though. She hopes he doesn’t grow up to be one of those puny boys who has to squeak by to survive childhood.

            It’s not just the eating, it’s the sleeping—he won’t sleep in his room anymore. A few months ago he moved his single bed out into the hallway on the second floor. That’s where he sleeps now, in the hallway right outside her room. She asked why.

            “Because it’s fun,” he said.
            She couldn’t accept this. “No, that’s not why. It’s not because it’s fun.”

            “It is. It’s like camping.”

            “Once, maybe. Every now and then, as a change of pace. And even then—I don’t see how it’s fun.”

            He watched her. “It feels like I’m doing something different. It makes bedtime more interesting.”

            She slumped. “Okay, but you can’t stay out there forever. Eventually you’re going to have to go back to your room.”

            The boy nodded, his lips thin. Then, in that adult way he had of letting her win, he said, “Eventually.”

            It’s been weeks and “eventually” hasn’t happened yet. It’s not just his bed anymore—he’s got a nightstand and a lamp, a stack of books and comic books on the floor. You have to squeeze by all the stuff just to get down the hall. It’s not like he’s afraid to go into his room; he does his homework there, and he still keeps his clothes in his closet and chest of drawers. He just won’t sleep there. There’s something about the in-betweenness of the hallway that appeals.

            She asked a friend from work about it, and the friend said, “He’s just feeling insecure. He’ll grow out of it.”

            Why would he feel insecure? she wondered, though there’ve been nights when she wouldn’t mind sleeping in the hall herself.

            After lunch she asks him to move his bed back to his room, and the lamp and the nightstand and the stack of books and comic books. He flatly refuses.

            “But why not? Seriously, it looks terrible in the hall. It clutters up the whole second floor.”

            “What difference does it make? I thought this person was just coming for dinner.”

            “He is.” Her son’s never met “this person” before. Tonight’s a first. “But he might like to see the upstairs.”

            “Why would he want to see the upstairs? It’s just your room and my room and a couple of bathrooms and nothing interesting.”

            “Still. Some people want the grand tour. They like to see where people live.”

            “That’s weird. Is this person weird? I don’t want this person coming over if he’s weird.”

            “He’s not weird—he’s very nice, and you’ll like him.”

            But the boy’s unconvinced. His mother’s not very good at putting her foot down. She feels like she owes him these little indulgences.

            So the bed stays. And the lamp and the nightstand and the stack of interesting things to read.

II.

            They used to go on trips before the kid was born, little two day jaunts to the Cape or out to the Berkshires. They had more disposable income in those days—there wasn’t as much to save for. Her husband liked staying in hotels; they both did. They slept better in hotels, had better sex. Their son was conceived in a hotel. They were staying in Northampton over Thanksgiving weekend, at The Hotel Northampton—sorry the name’s not more interesting—and after dinner they went back to their room with a bottle of red wine, took a bath together, then made love once on the floral print settee and again, more conventionally, in bed. Could’ve been either time.

            Her husband had a habit of taking home all the freebies whenever they stayed in a hotel, the travel-sized shampoo and conditioner, the mouthwash, even the sewing kit. She never could understand that about him—the man didn’t even know how to sew! He was the kind of guy who’d throw out an item of clothing if it got the least little bit stained or torn. And yet now she’s got a junk drawer full of these little sewing kits from all over New England.

            All those places where they slept and drank and made love and watched TV.

III.

            Jeremy Lang, tall, skinny, head shaved bald. Frameless eyeglasses, a long neck and prominent Adam’s apple. She still hasn’t asked his age, but she’s guessing around forty-five. Divorced, no kids. She wonders why, both about the no kids and the divorce. They’re not on that level yet, the deep sharing level. They’re still hovering around each other, checking each other out. She could probably not see him again and it wouldn’t matter.

            They’re maybe one date away from sleeping together. She’s still not sure what she wants.

            One thing, though: the boy seems to like him, and that’s a surprise.

            They’re on to dessert, cupcakes from Santino’s in Woburn. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but now she wishes she’d picked something else—cupcakes are for kids’ birthday parties. But Jeremy Lang doesn’t seem to mind. There’s something kid-like about him, or maybe he’s just performing for the boy.

            “I might need to eat this with a fork. I don’t want to get frosting all over my face,” he says, and the boy laughs. She’d been expecting a different reaction: stand-offish, aloof. She’s not used to these things working out.

            The boy’s full of questions tonight. He wants to know the difference between glue and mucilage, and Jeremy Lang explains, “Oh gosh I’m not sure. I haven’t even thought about mucilage since I was a kid. I think it’s that… it’s that…”

            The boy prompts, “There’s a difference.”

            “I know there is. I think it has to do with where it comes from, how it’s made. One’s plant-based. Mucilage, I think.”

            “Wow, Mr. Lang sure knows a lot of things. Would you like some more wine?” she asks, just to give herself something to do.

            Jeremy Lang nods, and the boy asks what his favorite Tom Waits album is. The question rattles her.

            “Oh… Tom Waits. Favorite Tom Waits album…”

            “And why.”

            “And why, of course. I’m not too up on Tom Waits. I do know that one, Rain Dogs.”

            “Rain Dogs is good, but I like Swordfishtrombones better. It’s more crazy.”

            “Is it? If you like Tom Waits you must like Bob Dylan,” Jeremy Lang says, and the boy looks at him like he’s just guessed his middle name.

            “Here you go,” she says, pouring Jeremy’s wine, hoping they’ll change the subject.

            The boy asks why you can’t just walk through a door, why you have to open it first.

            “Such silly questions tonight!” she says, starting to get annoyed. The boy’s questions have the hint of mischief. She knows him.

            Jeremy Lang says, “No, it’s all right. It’s an important question. Why you can’t just walk through a door, why you have to open it first. Hm.” He thinks. “Well, it has something to do with a door being a solid object. Wouldn’t that have something to do with it?”

            The boy blinks, but waits; he wants more.

            “See, everything in the world—you, me, your mom, this table—is made up of cells and atoms.”

            “Everything?”

            “Everything.”

            “Even your shirt?” the boy says, obviously playing with him now.

            “Even my shirt—even your shirt.”

            “Even Mom’s?”

            Jeremy Lang glances over at her, and they share an adult laugh. “Even Mom’s, even every shirt and every pair of pants and… just… everything. Everything in the whole world, including broccoli and fireplace tools and table tennis—made of cells and atoms. And there’s a rule, a law of physics—you probably haven’t had physics yet.” The boy stares; he’s only in the fourth grade. “Yeah, but there’s a law that says no two atoms can occupy the same space at the same time, and that’s why you can’t just walk through a door, you have to open it first. Because that space is already taken.”

            Jeremy Lang looks winded and relieved—talking to kids takes work. The boy lets the information settle, then favors him with a smile.

            “Mr. Lang’s good at explaining the unexplainable,” she says, and they ignore her.

            “Would you like to see my room?” the boy asks.

            She swoops in. “Oh no, it’s a mess up there.”

            “Mom.”

            “We talked about this. I told you to pick up your things.”

            “My things are picked up, they’re just…”

            “…all in the wrong place, I know.”

            Jeremy Lang puts his hands up. “I don’t want to cause a problem.”

            The boy insists, “Mom, can I?”

            She looks at her hopeful son, who’s been basically good all night. “Oh, fine—but just show him real quick and come right back down. I’m going to put the dessert dishes in the sink.”

            The boy leads Jeremy Lang up the stairs, and she brings the dishes to the kitchen and runs liquid soap and water over them. She’s hoping the boy will go to bed early. She wouldn’t mind some time alone with Mr. Jeremy Lang. She hasn’t been kissed, really kissed, in almost a year.

            But then after you kiss, what next? The kid’s not going anywhere.

            Standing at the sink, she sees the tiny wooden spoon on the window ledge. She’s not a pack rat, not exactly, but she sometimes has trouble throwing things away. You never know when the missing bowl might turn up inside a box of odds and ends. Meanwhile there’s all this clutter she doesn’t know what to do with.

            She wants a fresh start. A clean do-over.

            Hands wet and sudsy, she takes the spoon and feints toward the kitchen trash, then changes her mind and puts it back in the junk drawer along with the twenty-three inch measuring tape and the sewing kits from all those hotels.

            The boy’s eyes are big. His job is to watch you.

            Upstairs she finds the boy sitting with Jeremy Lang on his bed. He’s showing off his comic book collection.

            “Sorry, I’ve been trying to get him to do something about this for weeks,” she says.

            “Jeremy thinks it’s cool—don’t you Jeremy?” the boy asks.

            Oh, it’s Jeremy now.

            “I think it’s… an interesting choice,” says Jeremy Lang.

            “Mom, come sit with us. Jeremy’s into Avengers too.”

            “Ages ago. I think I remember some of these,” says Jeremy Lang, looking through the comic books.

            “But there’s no room,” she says.

            The boy scooches over, swiping a pile of stuffed animals to the floor. He sleeps with dozens of them; even in fourth grade he still likes all his little friends.

            She sits. “I don’t see how you get any sleep out here.”

            “I like it. Here, lay back. You too, Jeremy.”

            The boy tucks his legs and rolls over in bed. The bed’s narrow, barely room for one person. Jeremy Lang smiles at her—he’s on no one’s side.

            “I guess we should probably take our shoes off,” he says.

            They squeeze into bed with the boy, Jeremy Lang in the middle. It’s cramped but cozy. She supposes it’s fine if he wants to sleep out here for now. He’ll grow out of it.

            Besides, she’s the one who’s always moving the furniture.

            Jeremy Lang sighs. “Ah… good night.”

            She laughs. “It does give you a new perspective.”

            He turns his head to her on the pillow, and now he’s a boyfriend, he’s part of her life.

            “On what?” he asks.



BIO

Mike Heppner has published three novels in the genre of literary fiction, two with Knopf (The Egg Code, 2002, Pike’s Folly, 2006) and one with Thought Catalog Books (We Came All This Way, 2015); two story collections, one with Another Sky Press (The Man Talking Project, 2012) and one with Thought Catalog Books (This Can Be Easy or Hard, 2014); and a novella with Kindle Singles (Nada, 2013). 







His Shirt Pocket

by Sarah McNamara


I stared at his shirt pocket filled with pens and folded pieces of paper. He looked from me to his pocket and back to me. He smiled and pushed air through his teeth—a laugh, a sigh, maybe both. I could tell you if I looked into his eyes. Everything he doesn’t say is written in his eyes. I wonder why people carry around more than one pen. I’d like to shrink to the size of one and sit in his shirt pocket. He’d chat with me all day. He likes to talk, he’s good at it. Sometimes we just look at each other—our eyes ordinary, our mouths closed. He’s nice to look at, like a forest of deciduous trees, no matter the season.



Instructional Guide for Handling a Crush


Barrel through the train’s cars (he’ll glide out of the way to avoid a collision). Say thank you, but don’t make eye contact (he’ll reply like he knows you). Look at him in disbelief. Resist the urge to grab him and hug him. Say something bright and agreeable. Find an empty seat. Anticipate his face every afternoon. Smile at his enthusiastic quips. When he disappears, anticipate his face and quips for one week (maybe two) before conceding. Invoke him every day. Stand on the trains with your head in a book. Glance at everyone who stands opposite you until he returns.



BIO

Sarah McNamara’s work can be found or is forthcoming in Ink In Thirds and 101 Words. Find her at sarahrosemcnamara.blogspot.com











Revenge of the Ocean: On the Legacy of Jaws

by Lauren Gallagher


Steven Spielberg’s 1975 film Jaws is the seventh highest grossing film of all time (adjusted for inflation). In addition to this, the Discovery Channel’s Shark Week has generated hundreds of millions of dollars in ad revenue since its establishment. In fact, according to Christopher Neff, Australian social scientist and shark researcher, there is no other animal (on land or in water) that generates the entertainment income that sharks do. There are a myriad of shark films that have been released since 1975, both high and low budget, and all of which echo tropes which originated from Jaws. Deep Blue Sea, Sharknado, The Meg, The Shallows, Open Water, The Reef, Bait, Shark Lake, Jersey Shore Shark Attack, Ice Sharks, Dinoshark, Shark Night, Malibu Shark Attack, Avalanche Sharks, Snow Shark, Frenzy, Mega Shark vs. Mecha Shark, Ghost Shark, 47 Meters Down, 3-Headed Shark Attack, Sand Sharks, Megalodon, Sharktopus, Mega Shark vs. Crocosaurus and countless franchise sequels. These are all post-Jaws releases. And I have only listed the ones I have personally watched. I don’t want to think of how many hours of my life have been consumed by watching Sharktopus sequels and spinoffs. Interestingly, if you try to find a shark film made before Jaws, you will get very few results. The few that did exist didn’t quite make it to the mainstream, and only featured sharks as an afterthought, such as the 1969 film Shark!, which was actually about a treasure hunting expedition.

The plot of Jaws follows the newly hired police chief Brody Martin, as he deals with apparent shark attacks off the coast of the fictional Amity Island in New England. Brody must deal with public pressures from the families of the attack victims and marine biologists who want him to close the beaches until the rogue shark is caught, but also with locals who fear the town’s economy will suffer if they close the beaches during tourist season. What follows is an action packed adventure in which Brody, a shark hunter, and an oceanographer attempt to catch and kill the blood-thirsty shark before it can take any more lives. The film sparked three sequels, major attractions in Florida and Osaka, a video game, a musical and an extensive line of merchandise.

It wasn’t until Jaws that sharks were really given much thought, or at least were not perceived as genuine threats. There are three lasting perceptions of sharks that began with Jaws; the attribution of intentionality and near-human intelligence, the perception that human-shark interactions will inevitably lead to fatality (usually of the human variety) and finally, the notion that the threat the shark poses can only be eliminated by the killing of the shark, each of which is explored in more contemporary shark films to varying degrees.It is undeniable that media representations of sharks inform public perception of the animals, and more crucially, a fear of them. The shark is a relative newcomer to the media, existing at the periphery of Western interest until the 1970s. Humans rarely interacted with sharks and they were scarcely written about or photographed, and then they suddenly skyrocketed to celebrity status.

Jaws’ success created a media frenzy, which in turn stimulated news coverage of shark encounters. The immensely popular shark documentary genre often deals with the aftermath of Jaws; the sensationalised nature of shark representations and the dramatised accounts of shark encounters which aim to meet the demand for blood-thirsty shark narratives that Jaws created. These documentaries denounce the dramatisation of shark attacks in the media, believing that they feed into public desire for spectacle with heavy music, clever word play and dramatic narration, which ultimately create a sense of danger for audiences. This fear unfortunately translates to a real life fear of sharks and a misunderstanding of them outside of the media. The mass media frequently covers stories that involve low-incidence, high-consequence events, submitting to the public demand for shark-human interactions. The news media often utilises fear-laden language when reporting on these occurrences, describing the animals as ‘monsters’ and ‘mindless killers.’ Or my personal favourite, when water is described as ‘shark infested.’ They live there. Is the land human infested? Well, with current debates around overpopulation, maybe that is a question for another time. The author of the novel Jaws, Peter Benchley, which was released just the year before the film adaptation, was interviewed by the Guardian regarding Jaws’ effect on the public psyche which led to widespread culling of sharks in Australia. he said:

‘I plead with the people of Australia – who live with, understand and, in general, respect sharks more than any other nation on earth – to refrain from slaughtering this magnificent ocean predator in the hope of achieving some catharsis, some fleeting satisfaction, from wreaking vengeance on one of nature’s most exquisite creations. [There is no such thing as] a rogue shark, tantalised by the taste of human flesh and bound now to kill and kill again. Such creatures do not exist, despite what you might have derived from Jaws.’

Peter Benchley’s quote recognises Jaws’ legacy of depicting killer sharks and the part shark films play in legislative practices. Benchley touches on the idea of revenge often associated with sharks seeking vengeance against those who have shown no regard for ocean creatures or their habitat, although this quote subverts this concept, as it is the humans perpetrating violence against nature. Despite the highly publicised plea from Benchley, as well as shark conservationists around Australia, the sensationalised news coverage and shark culling continued. It is undeniable that sharks have cemented their place in popular culture, with shark films in particular being the source. It is also undeniable that policies regarding sharks have been heavily influenced by news coverage and shark cinema. Although Jaws is most often the text which is used to demonstrate this, it is not the only shark film which has had an effect on policy. Andrew Traucki’s 2010 film The Reef is yet another example of this. The Reef is set in the waters surrounding Australia’s Turtle Island and depicts the Great Barrier Reef as the hunting ground for killer great white sharks. The film opens with the words ‘The Reef: based on true events’, reportedly the survival story of Ray Boundy, who was the sole survivor of a shipwreck in which two of his friends were eaten by tiger sharks.

This marketing strategy antagonised the chief executive of Tourism Tropical North Queensland, Rob Gaison, who feared that the film could negatively impact Australian tourism. Additionally, Col McKenzie, the CEO of the Association of Marine Park Operators was quoted saying ‘any kind of shark attack or what they air in the Jaws movies and things like that, there’s a drop off in inquiries within the marine tourism industry,’ expressing a similar concern. Tourism and shark cinema have been linked since Jaws, with much of the horror in the film occurring after Amity island officials refuse to shut down the beaches, as they are more concerned for the island’s economy, which is largely funded by tourism, than public safety. Clearly, there is an anxiety surrounding shark films and their possible negative effects on tourism, but interestingly, shark films often tackle themes of tourism and trespass, and so a cycle continues.

While Jaws may have been one of the first notable shark centred films, it was most definitely not the last. Malibu Shark Attack follows a group of delinquents who are hunted by prehistoric goblin sharks after a tsunami occurs. The main themes that are repeated in shark films are that of tourism, but also natural disasters/wildlife conservation concerns, both of which Malibu Shark Attack includes. Similarly, Frenzy tells the story of a group of friends who run a popular travel vlog that helps fund their adventures, the next of which is a scuba diving trip to an isolated cove. Frenzy plays on the idea of exploitative tourism and the use of sharks as a commodity and their homes as an entertainment source, rather than a living creature deserving of respect and space. 47 Metres Down is essentially a cautionary tale about cage diving, a tourist activity that has increased in popularity as years have passed. With cage diving, the water is ‘chummed’ (meat and blood are thrown into the water to attract sharks) and then the tourists in a cage are lowered into the water where the shark is feeding in order to observe it; a decidedly dangerous activity. Shark Night is a slightly more distinctive take, revolving around a group of college students on a trip to a remote lake for Spring Break. While there, they are hunted by a variety of sharks, including hammerheads, cookiecutters and great whites; all sharks which would not ordinarily be found in a lake. When one of the sharks washes up on the sand, the group find a camera attached to the shark and come to the realisation that someone purposefully brought the sharks to the lake and is filming the attacks. Towards the end of the film, the remaining members of the group are abducted by those responsible for the shark’s presence and question their motives. One of the culprits monologues;

‘What is cable television’s longest running programming event? Last year alone, it was watched by over twenty million viewers. Shark Week, Loser! And a few of those twenty million want to watch the real hardcore shit that you can’t get on basic cable. And we’re willing to bet that they’ll pay top dollar for it.’

While many shark films criticise the exploitative nature of shark media, playing on ideas of shark attack films furthering public fear of the animals, which in turn leads to shark culling and harsh legislations, these films are doing the same thing. Shark Night condemns shark media, but it also did exactly what it criticised, portraying sensationalised attacks by an animal that rarely interacts with humans at all, all while pulling in over $40 million dollars at the box office. Other shark films that fit into this category include Deep Blue Sea and 3-Headed Shark Attack, which call into question the ethics of animal testing, ocean pollution and habitat destruction. Bait and the Sharknado franchise use dramatised fictional narratives to examine a genuine fear of natural disasters and global threats, such as climate change (with one Sharknado going as far as to be titled Sharknado 5: Global Swarming). I believe Craig Detweiler summed up the reason for so much interest in shark media when he wrote, ‘when we attempt to rule over every living creature […], we also undercut our place within a fragile ecosystem. Scary sharks […] remind us to steward creation with humility rather than bluster. Those attempting to dominate may end up mastered by the beasts they seek to capture, kill, and exploit for selfish gain.’

Jaws may be one of the most highly regarded films of all time, being hailed as the first ‘summer blockbuster’ and has inspired many horror films since, including non-shark related horrors, with even Ridley Scott’s Alien being pitched as ‘Jaws in space.’ As an avid horror watcher, and a massive fan of animal attack narratives, it is hard to condemn a film that is responsible for the subsequent production of so many of my favourite films. But it is also hard to ignore that 71% of the world’s shark population has steeply declined since 1975. Was it really worth it?



BIO

Lauren Gallagher is an Irish writer, specialising in film and literary criticism. She holds a B.A. in English, Media and Cultural Studies and currently resides on the English South Coast. Her work focuses primarily on exploring horror from a feminist perspective and reviewing the newest literary titles. Her writing has been featured in Anfa Collective, Off Chance Magazine, Certified Forgotten, Sleaze Magazine and Offcultured. You can find her short-form reviews at @laurrensthoughts on Instagram and @cosmopoiis on Letterboxd.







The Last Murmuration of Gwyneth

by Winnie Bright


Gwyneth is sitting on the edge of my bed again when I wake up. I don’t need to see her to know she’s there. I feel the pressure of her feather-light weight on the mattress beside me and I know that when I open my eyes, I will see Gwyneth’s back, ramrod straight, draped in iridescent black silk. I lie still, playing possum, feigning sleep, wanting to imagine my inaction could impact her daily reprise, but I’m deluding myself. We are of the same flock, but the peculiar sensitivities that connect us allow me to observe, never interact.

“Good morning, Birdy. It’s a lovely day for the beach.”

My breath catches at the sound of her voice. Gwyneth chirps the same phrase each morning, but her words are not what floods my veins with ice water; it’s the uncanny accuracy of her mimicry. When Gwyneth speaks, it is in my voice. I try to temper my unease by reminding myself we share the same instinct for thievery; we steal sounds from living things, steal food meant for songbirds, squat in abandoned homes or forcefully evict families from homes already occupied. Stealing and sticking together is how we survive.

 I unfurl myself from the nest of thin quilts tangled around me, propping myself up on my elbows. As expected, Gwyneth is perched with her back to me, gazing out the open window when a squall sweeps off the rough winter sea. Despite its translucence, her unmoving form appears heavy and impenetrable as stone, while the wildly undulating curtains reach for her with cotton tentacles. I smell salt and decomposing fish and my stomach turns. Dawn stretches a weak beam of sunlight into the room, hitting Gwyneth and then passing through her, diffused but unbroken. The fuzzy light leaks through her abdomen like a thousand pinpricks, a dense constellation, finally landing on the wrinkled bed sheets across my legs.

“I told that boy not to shout from down there,” Gwyneth grumbles, standing. I mouth the words as she speaks them but I don’t answer her; I’ve learned there’s no point. Gwyneth is in my bedroom and also somehow not here at all. She is a palimpsest, the indelible mark of something time tried to erase. The translucency of her form waxes and wanes, except for the hole in her torso. Even in her most solid state, there is a void in her center the size of a dinner plate that seems to generate its’ own atmosphere. In the hollow of Gwyneth, I watch dust motes float in a stillness that exists nowhere else in the room.

Down there is Crane Beach and it is empty, save for sandpipers and stilts picking their breakfast from the frostbitten tide along the shoreline. There was no shout, no boy, no tourists caught in this tourist trap at this time of year. Sometimes I wonder if Gwyneth sees and hears another member of our Chattering, and if she is stuck behind a two-way mirror and forced to witness their looping downward spiral as I do hers. Migration season began in October and each morning since, I have awoken to Gwyneth settled on the precipice of my bed, squared off against the rectangle of the window frame to greet the new day.  Dawn after dawn,  she reenacts the scene with the regularity of a cuckoo popping out from her clock, and still, I am inevitably jolted by her existence.

 In her daily ritual, Gwyneth approaches the balcony to peer down at the hypothetical caller, triggering a sharp corresponding tug in my solar plexus. Some remnant of the tether between myself and the absence Gwyneth has constructed herself around still holds tight. My arms twitch. Any creature who once flew but became flightless will empathize with her instinct to hoard air in the caverns of her gravity-bound body. I wanted the same, at the height of my grief, but I’ve mourned my fragile hollow bones. The reservoir of anguish over individuation I once housed has dried up and I’ve learned to balance my heavy skull, to speak gutterally when I once would have sang.

The injection of terror and sadness that floods my brain each time Gwyneth pops into my room like an astral projecting jack-in-the-box has begun to take root in my body. My still unfamiliar flesh is clammy and wet. Something frenzied grows behind my eyes, tangled and claustrophobic. In this room, I’ve willfully suspended disbelief while having no rational answers for the why or how of Gwyneth’s appearance. The dissonance of trying to reconcile real and unreal has become unbearable.

I try something new. Instead of acting within my reality and allowing the yank of our invisible connection to drag me behind her, I embrace Gwyneth’s reality. I wrap my hands around the empty air in front of my chest approximately where I imagine the threads that attach us extend from. Planting my bare feet on the hardwood floor, I tightly clench my fists and pull.

I expect my fingers to close around nothing, fingernails cutting crescents into my palms to remind me of my foolishness, but instead, my hands are sliced by searing heat, as if I’ve grasped a laser beam. I feel tiny barbs sink into my skin, anchoring. In an instant, the scorch travels from my palms, a white-hot flame running upward past my wrists, then elbows, and then exploding through me. I’m shaking violently as I stare down at my seemingly empty fists clenched oddly to my chest. I lift my eyes to Gwyneth in front of me.

If events were to proceed as usual, Gwyneth would lean over and yell into the wind, but today the coil of ethereal rope tightens around my fist and her body snaps back just before she reaches the balcony railing. A single, hollow pop, like the sound of a champagne bottle being uncorked, echoes loudly in the room. Instantly, the atmosphere feels pressurized, the air humming and vibrating around and into me. I am aware of the connecting atoms forming every tooth, tendon, vein, and cell. I can feel my neurons pulsing and firing across synapses. A high-pitched ringing in my ears grows louder and becomes a roar, like the infinite crash of waves pounding the shore. Something with wings has flown into my open mouth, filled my throat with its voice, forced its fragile bones and feathers down my windpipe, and now, frenzied, batters the bars of the cage my ribs form. A woodpecker’s staccato rat-a-tat-tat cracks me open and from every pore, light leaps out.



BIO

Winnie Bright is a queer writer and artist from Cleveland, Ohio, where she lives with her wife, child, and dog Hannah Beasley. When she isn’t having incredibly personal, one-sided conversations in her day job as a counselor, she walks in the woods, loiters at the public library, and scours Lake Erie for beach glass.







The Fire

by Chris Callard


It all went up in the fire.

The photos, the chairs, the clothes, the loves,

the work, the flirting with greatness.

Tinged memories, ash-fringed heart.

Embers mocking jabberwocky smoke.

Breathing haze for days.

Fly me to the moon, all the earthly glamor hammered,

smudged mud after the hoses were through.

Crackling sound resonates,

a roundabout due for incineration.

It came, it’s gone, all of it, consumed.

Blow the residue from your nose,

sneeze cleansingly.

And so it goes.



Sharing


My dad shared wistfully that he learned French kissing

as a teen from his older sister.

A 1940s vibe.

After an up and down life, stressful, too eventful,

She had her heart attack.

He stopped by for his check-in and found her on the floor.

911 said give mouth to mouth.

He knew she was gone but could not ignore the professional advice.

Useless, of course, unfortunate, as well.

When he told the story later there was no wistful sentimentality.

Just a sense of oddity.

Strange sibling bookends, sad, sweet, earthy, innocent at 70.

A family tale, remembered by few, now shared again.



Snoring


Your skin is so moving, its kindness so full.

You wondered, said hello,

said you liked this snugly.

You knew, though, how

far past due I was.

Still, a lovely gesture to make.

Why do I say goodbye so boorishly

when I adored your snoring?



BIO

Chris Callard lives in Long Beach, CA. His poems have appeared in Ariel Chart, Witcraft, Cadence Collective, and One Sentence Poems. His short fiction has appeared in Bright Flash Literary Review, Witcraft, Ariel Chart, Gemini Magazine, Flash Fiction Magazine, A Story in 100 Words, and ZZyZxWriterZ. His work has been nominated for Best of the Net and Best Small Fictions.







A Sighting

by Harriet Sandilands


From where I was sitting on the rock, it sounded like applause. I coughed the sand out from the back of my throat and looked up towards the parade where the applause had come from. On the boardwalk a head of back-brushed white hair, a blue Disney T-shirt and pleated white tennis shorts. Shhhhht! She hissed at me. I realised I was still humming. Shhhht! She clapped simultaneously, sending what I thought were quite mixed messages. I searched for her eyes through the hazy sunset, lifting a flat hand to my eyebrows in an unintentional salute.

She jabbed her finger at the horizon and with her other hand made an undulating gesture, as though she had a snake-shaped puppet on her hand. She jabbed again at the horizon, this time a little angrily I thought, jerking her head up in the direction of a conic yellow buoy, shouting something at me I didn’t understand.

Now freed of the notion that she was a fan of my singing, I followed her finger out to sea. Apart from the yellow buoy I saw nothing. I looked back to see if she might inadvertently give me another clue. Instead, she rolled her eyes skyward. I think she tutted.

My mouth was very dry and so, to retain moisture, I pursed my lips shut and thought about how I could avoid letting on that I hadn’t seen what she was pointing at. But that made her really cross and she started involving her whole body in the task of drawing my attention to whatever it was she had seen. She wriggled and writhed with her whole self in the manner of someone trying to explain to an extraterrestrial what a woman is, alternately stroking her waist and shaking her hips, punctuating the performance with decisive little pokes at the offending horizon.

As a child I saw a ghost. The thrill of this is obvious – an impossible man glimpsed out on the deck of an old warship, as though submerged in time. My mother, who was with me, claimed not to have seen anything at all. I have since learned that children nonchalantly straddle worlds, while adults balk at the thresholds. The underlying terror of seeing a ghost is not so much fear of the spectre itself, as the unsettling idea that you have seen something that no-one else saw, which means you have probably lost your mind. Sea monsters are only scary in that they lurk at the very limits of imagination.

I was aware of the woman still willing me towards her line of sight from the boardwalk. Her persisting desire to catch my eye thrummed in tiny vibrations across the sand. Eye contact, I learned from an early age, is usually the beginning of the end. I didn’t turn around. Like a toddler who hides simply by clamping their eyelids down, I childishly thought the woman might forget I was there altogether and release me from the game, if I ignored her for long enough.

Shhht! Shhht!

My stomach sank, a little lead anchor thrown to the bottom of the ocean, landing on the bottom in a small muffled thud.

I considered making a facial expression that would suggest I’d seen it. I’ve faked it many times before. We have to pretend to survive. Two seagulls fought each other for the remains of a washed up cuttlefish a few feet away.

But what face would I make? And what if it was the wrong one? The face appropriate for a shark fin would be one thing – perhaps accompanied by a silent scream. But the face for a floating turd would be quite another. Lying was too risky.

I scanned the beach again to see if there was anyone else around, but there was no-one. Even the two seagulls had taken off, their wings leaving a trail of gentle moans on the salty air. I felt desolate and deeply alone. My stomach sank further into my groin and my heart took its place in the pit of my belly. Desperate to distract myself from this feeling, I started humming again. My tail twitched in discord.

They say that the loneliest feeling of all is when you feel isolated, even in the company of another. This is how humans preempt their break-up stories or explain why they turned to Buddhism. But the saddest thing about this situation was that the loneliness I felt was not my own. I had caught it and mopped it up, absorbed through some kind of osmosis between me and the Disney T-shirted maniac on the parade. Maybe it was the melancholia of the tune I was singing, or the way the light reflected off the water in a million little rhombus shapes, or the fact that we were the only living things as far as the eye could see, or the fish could swim.

Just occasionally you can show all of yourself to someone. Peel back the scales of your skin to reveal the purest pearl of your existence which has been rolled and rolled from many grains of grit, misunderstanding and long stretches of deep blue quiet. It is almost always a stranger to whom you can entrust this pearl, just momentarily, just once or twice in a lifetime. Someone who will never see you again, who may doubt that they ever saw you at all, but who – in that moment – demands the absolute truth of you, for your own sake and for theirs.   

So, I hauled myself off the rock and writhed back to the water across the sand, thirsty, gulping at the ocean’s cup, my tail thrashing and flashing in the sunlight as I swam away, knowing she was watching every move.



BIO

Harriet Sandilands is a writer and art therapist living in the “magic mountain” of Montserrat in Northern Spain. Her stories and poetry have most recently been published in Porridge, Litro and Talking About Strawberries All Of The Time. Her short poetry collection Amiss (a series of poems which omit the letter e) was published by Palabrosa in 2023, when she was also long listed for The London Magazine short story prize. Harriet was last year’s headline act for International Poetry Day in her home town Manresa, reading a series of “postcard poems” from the pandemic and beyond. She co-facilitates writing workshops under the umbrella Write Where You Are and almost always remembers to write down her dreams first thing in the morning.







Last Edit Was Seconds Ago

by Daniel Meltz


Used to be a bungee life off a rusted bridge on a paisley
river named a superfund site during the Carter
administration. Used to be bouts of vertigo and
homewrecking and acid trips on the railroad tracks and
la-di-da books about gravedigging and identity

swapping and shoplifting The Bell Jar at the Brentano’s
in the Village that’s now a Duane Reade. But then I
tomahawked the bungee cord and sproinged like a rock
from a Jack-in-the-Beanstalk slingshot onto lower
Second Av where that notorious hotspot the Saint used to

be, marked by a grease stain in the shape of a gunned-
down body. Every part of me was busted but I still had
the high-pitched bizzbuzz of Yessir or Nosir against my
swollen intellect which echoed through a decommissioned
subway station where a corporal played Taps on a plastic

trumpet. If only I had the one word, be it strength or
emergency or anything as big and unmistakable as that
to snap me out of stupendous stupors, but as soon as the
word seemed to fit the situation it escaped through a
nostril so I discontinued talismanic buzzwords and realized

that if I wanted to stick around I’d have to get professional
help and return to the vocabulary at some point. That
some point is now. And though the word was changing
up until yesterday (words like connect and proportion and
father) the forever word is easy now, it’s kindness.



Lost and Found and Lost Again and Again


Sometimes it’s better to have the upper hand and sometimes
it’s not and sometimes there are no hands to be had in the first
place.

Sometimes someone is always apologizing or overdosing on
Lexapro, full of what Gertrude Stein classified as “servant girl
being.”

Sometimes it’s best to spread love like mulch though it nauseates
firmer temperaments but in the long run inhibits crabgrass from
spreading.

Sometimes it’s best for the snarky to dominate so that the nicer learn
to dish it back and polish a sense of independence that lurks within a
dependent nature.

And the ones with no hands to speak of: Invite them over, they mingle 
so effortlessly, although they don’t necessarily make good bosses, yet 
they’re so perfect for 

each other when they marry each other that, even if one of them dies, 
they will marry again because their love life never made them feel 
inadequate.

I cannot lie that I like it when your personality changes and you look at me
with a dreamy curiosity as if to say Who is the real unknowable you that can
make me feel guilty.



Bogota New Jersey


                      whoever is stable thats the
                      one to go to everyones
                      got a hope and a secret
                      holdover that comes at you
                      like a grumpy rugrat or
                      retreats from you like a
                      nurse with bad breath
                      oh Lizzie of the sacred
                      snow day sledding down
                      through the intersection
                      of hearts sliced thin I was
                      putting myself together with
                      masking tape and an attitude
                      so worried about the
                      marauding carthieves though
                      I dont own a car this
                      barn these hands at 2 and
                      10 wake up resting mommy
                      and renegotiate with the
                      mediator who is sorrier
                      than a cannibal of all
                      that rope on a poopdeck
                      of weather-beaten rigmarole
                      and a holy I don’t know



Israelites Delivered unto Freedom in Two Kinds of Hebrew


By staying with you as long as I did I guess you could say I got left back 38
times meaning I could’ve wound up age 47 and still in fourth grade but
if it had taken that long to learn long division I still would’ve ended up
knowing how to divide and continued on to fractions. I didn’t divide. I

split. I miss you. I will never forget the
lessons you taught me though I was
such a bad patient for so many years,
so resistant to your help, so addicted
to false enthusiasm and reflecting
plastic surfaces, that at one point you
told me A lot of therapists would’ve
dumped you by now, would’ve told
you you’re unworkable, but lucky
for you I am not one of those
therapists. (What a lesson right there,
a lesson in sassy-ass.) Because all

I’d been saying was no, to whatever observations you offered.
Observations that scalded like cast iron skillets with kidneys
and livers still sizzling in the fat. You said I was sneaky and
petty and snooty and vengeful and smirky and smug and
condescending. How did you expect me to respond to all
those switchblade descriptors? But I hung around anyway.

I had a tiny uncrazy reasonability
in me. It knew your approach was
necessary, fortified, Molotov, en-
dangered. It knew I couldn’t snow
or guilt you. You even warned me
early on that I shouldn’t mistake
you for one of those bleeding-
heart social workers. And besides.

For every thousand or so of my petulant nos, a yes would pop out
of me, freely espoused. And every yes thereof came pressure-
tested, credible, a steel-inforced tulip, in the order of operations,
in the number brought down after subtracting for the remainder.
Yes, I want to suffer. Yes, it’s wrong to cocktease. Yes, I want
to watch you eat dirt. Okay, Mr. Twist-O-Flex. What comes next?

Moving away from you. Learning
to release you. Understanding
how long ago you released me.
Knowing the difference between
repressed bellicosity and catalyst
combos such as independent
thinking, throwing wet clay on a
pottery wheel and (now that we’ve
memorized the poem Moses
sang when he split the Red Sea)
I scratched the table behind my wager.



BIO

Daniel Meltz‘s first book of poems, “It Wasn’t Easy to Reach You,” will be published by Trail to Table Press in February 2025. David Sedaris is calling the book “funny, bold and moving.” His first novel, “Rabbis of the Garden State,” will be published by Rattling Good Yarns in April 2025. His individual poems have been published in American Poetry Review, Best New Poets 2012, Salamander, upstreet and lots of other journals. He’s been nominated for four Pushcart Prizes and was a finalist in competitions held by seven independent presses. He’s a retired technical writer and teacher of the deaf, has a BA in English from Columbia (no honors) and lives in Manhattan. https://www.danielmeltz.com/







Fields   

by Alan Crowe


For a moment, it didn’t quite register, in spite of my mental preparation. I had been informed the moniker was now in general use, and by showing no reaction, had just given it my tacit approval. That being said, I was a bit surprised that its initial pronouncement resurrected a long-forgotten childhood memory of disturbing sights and sounds. The menacing laughter and coal-black eyes of a towering creation of calico, denim and straw. Even more pronounced was the irrational pinpoint of fear it produced. Reason enough to let it stand.

Most would say it’s just a spin off my last name, but in truth, they know I’m called Scarecrow because that’s what I am. I spend my days in this world behind walls protecting the good things that grow from the bad things that would feed upon them.  Those black-hearted creatures with beady eyes that use cunning and audacity to steal what others have grown. Who not only seek to satisfy their physical hunger, but also the hunger for pleasure that comes from grappling one another for the choicest most tender morsels the fields provide. Merciless creatures that squawk and cackle at the impotent warders who man the walls and sow their fields with an endless supply of seed. Liveried minions who lord over the fields yet are unable to divert the chaotic flocks away from their handiwork. 

When I came to these fields, I had no intention of becoming the Scarecrow. In fact, I had no idea that such a being could exist. My intention was to build a strong enclosure around my little plot and assure my own survival. This I did. But in my shelter other seedlings found root as well, and soon my retreat was overgrown.

As that simple refuge was never designed for such pressure, the inevitable collapse exposed all to the beady eyes that covet the new growth. In response to raw vulnerability, long-dormant instincts resurface and my inescapable metamorphosis occurs. Reprising a role now refined by evolution and adapted to life in the fields, I became the Scarecrow.

In the uneasy détente that followed engagement, friendship and mutual benefit was offered, and declined. Wanting neither membership nor recognition, and never having imagined fields of my own, what was this Scarecrow to do? Couldn’t just stand by and watch them feed. Vulnerable seedlings took shelter under my outstretched arms, while others perished having no one to watch over them. In such a precarious existence, even a Scarecrow is vulnerable. A ravenous flock could pick one apart if hunger-driven. Flocks must feed. This I accept…just not in my fields.

Regardless of what the overlords may believe, life in the fields is dictated by the flocks. Their leaders are those smart enough or strong enough that others will follow where they lead. They have survived the battles for dominance, and demand and enforce loyal adherence to their will. With them, the unwritten, mostly unspoken agreements of mutual tolerance must be made. And this isn’t Oz. Here, Scarecrows must have brains, courage and heart if they hope to make it home again. 

Not yet halfway through, it’s been a long season already. While fewer losses occur as consequence of the ravenous flocks, not all predation is seen. Many of those new to the fields see proximity to these menacing bands as offering protection, but nothing grows under their roosts. Not drenched in the shower of pain-killing droppings they dispense to provide the dupes a haze over their hopeless existence in the fields. As their roots burn and shrivel in the acidic layers deposited beneath those murky cabals, young plants wither and slowly decompose. So flocks can’t roost near my fields. Not the Scarecrow’s fields. 

Without question, the most dangerous times for a Scarecrow are when the storms roll in. Tensions grow as you watch them building in the distance. If you’re lucky, they pass you by as they sweep the flocks along and wreak havoc in neighboring fields. Though some loss is inevitable, good comes from this as well. As it culls the weak, it makes those remaining stronger. It creates a little more wood in the stems of those who endure, making them better able to survive subsequent storms. But they take their toll on a Scarecrow, standing above his fields as he does. Weathers and tears his edges, exposing little bits of his insides. Each time making it a little more difficult to push the stuffing back in. But he does, producing ever more ominous versions, each more menacing than the last.

For the Scarecrow, it’s been a long season. Cool mornings seem so distant. He longs for quiet days and frosty nights. That peaceful rest as autumn turns to winter. He keeps telling himself that he won’t look back on this season, that he’ll just move on to the rest of his life. But he knows that won’t be. The season has been too long, and there are too many small pieces of him scattered in his fields.  



BIO

Alan Crowe is a freelance writer from southern Arizona. His writings have been published in Cowboy Poetry Press Anthology “Unbridled”, High Country News “Writers on the Range”, the Rokslide Sporting Journal and local Tucson print media.








A Different Kind of Music

by Erin Moine


There are few times where one experiences pure panic. It’s the kind of panic that grips you so hard, your muscles tighten like freezing water. The feeling of confidence initially enveloped me as I made my way through the second movement of Miklós Rózsa’s clarinet Sonata. The movement was slow and somber, the mood of my clarinet studio Final beginning calmly. My clammy hands betrayed my confidence. The pads of my fingers were greasy and slippery against the keys.

The five woodwind professors overseeing the Final for Studio class, dubbed a “jury” in musician speech, sat quietly from their offices, watching me perform via Zoom. The year was 2021 and mostly everyone in the department had received their rounds of Covid vaccines, yet uncertainty still lined everyone’s minds. It had been decided at the beginning of the quarter that all students would perform their juries through Zoom.

As I continued to play, my left arm stubbornly began to tremble. I focused on my piece, pretending the professors weren’t even there. If I pretended that I was alone, perhaps my body would obey.

Out of nowhere, like the snap of a rubber band stretched to its limits, Panic bared its teeth in a brutal smile. My clammy hands grew cold, my head spinning with lightheadedness and the sudden dread of an oncoming freight train of anxiety. Then, my soft palate collapsed, the sound similar to a snort of a pig.

I had been struggling with this phenomenon quite recently (I’d experienced it a bit back in high school during solo performances, but it usually came on after hours of playing my instrument). I had spoken with my clarinet professor about it, but he explained that he wasn’t very educated on the topic. It is physically impossible to continue playing my instrument when this happens.

It occurred during the most important exam of my journey through the Bachelor of Arts in Music. My heart rate spiked, my whole body filled with sweat and goosebumps, trembling like an autumn leaf. I hurriedly explained what was happening, certain that I had already failed the exam. A lump constricting my throat, I apologized over and over.

The woodwind faculty didn’t chastise or jump to any conclusions. The bassoon professor gently urged me to drink some water, explaining the soft palate collapse sometimes happens because of dehydration. I gulped down water, drinking half of my 16-ounce glass in a span of seconds.

My own clarinet professor asked if I felt all right to try and continue. He told me if so, I can continue when I was ready. “We’ll see what happens. If it happens again, we can stop. It’s not your fault.”

After some deep breaths, I positioned my instrument and continued to play. I finished off the movement, now only playing with a certainty that I had failed the exam and would only be playing for comments. I continued on to the next movement, this one faster-paced.

I filled my lungs with air, mentally counting the beats per minute. I began to play, later I would learn the fastest I’d played the movement (my professor and I had been working to get it this quick the entire quarter). My adrenaline-filled fingers flew over the keys. The beating of my heart put the speed of a galloping Thoroughbred to shame. I prayed every second that my soft palate wouldn’t collapse.

Finally, I reached the end of the movement. The movement is set up so that the performer rarely has a second to catch a breath; breaths must be strategically marked into the piece. The last passages flew from my fingers, and the last dramatic note greeted me.

Thankfully, my soft palate waited until I’d finished that last note to collapse one more time.

When I finished, I took my bow and awaited comments from the professors. They gave me quick feedback since my time slot was almost up. More comments would be written on the adjudicators’ sheet that I would receive at the next lesson with my professor. Still trembling from adrenaline, relief filled me when the saxophone professor mentioned that she had experienced the issue of the soft palate collapse with some of her students. I finally felt understood by another woodwind musician.

A couple days later, I received an email from my professor announcing that I had passed the exam. Shock filled me. I was certain I’d failed because I’d had to stop midway through my performance. But, in the end, my performance in general and the amount of improvement I showcased with it were the deciding factors in the grading scale.

Despite the excellent news, something within my academic—and career—path was not going in the right direction. This one performance forced me to do some reflection.

After much thought, I made the decision to change from Music to Creative Writing. This change felt like a weight heavier than lead had been lifted from my shoulders.

Because of what happened in that performance, it forced me to ask myself: why am I doing music? Do I love it? Do I want to do music as a career? The answers to all of these questions were the catalyst to why I needed to change majors.

After making the big change, my anxiety lessened as I signed up for English classes. Happiness filled me again, and my attitude towards school improved. I had always enjoyed parts of being a musician, but it never brought me as much joy and happiness as writing. Writing is just a different kind of music—one that I felt comfortable expressing myself through and sharing with others. Writing brought me inspiration, whereas being a musician often felt like a chore. I would switch to a writing degree and embark on a new quest—a quest where I would do what I had loved to do since I was twelve: write.



BIO

Erin Moine writes fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry. She received her BA in English: Professional & Creative Writing from Central Washington University. She is currently a Graduate student in the English MA: Professional & Creative Writing program at Central Washington University and is set to complete the program during Winter of 2025. Outside of writing, Erin enjoys hiking, drawing, and reading (of course). She lives in the Pacific Northwest. 







White Rabbits

by Marco Etheridge


He utters his white rabbits every first of the month and trusts that somewhere Pooh and Piglet remain the best of friends, despite what the ghost A.A. Milne might say. 

His parents, without threat or coercion, named him Charleston. Charleston Druthers, Charlie to his few friends. He’s heard the joke about having his druthers more times than anyone should have to remember or endure. Charlie’s mother and father have since slipped beyond the pale, leaving behind any guilt they may have felt for saddling their only son with his unfortunate appellation.

Charlie Druthers lives alone in what was once the family flat. The combination of a fiery automobile accident and The Uniform Simultaneous Death Act ensures that Charlie, provided he maintains his frugality, does not have to drudge through a nine-to-five existence.

For his part, Charlie would much rather exist in The Hundred Acre Wood. Not as a replacement or foil to Christopher Robin. One human is enough. He would be quite content with a lesser role and permanent citizenship. Perhaps Roo, who is small and fearless. Charlie is not a large person and might acquire fearlessness given enough time. If not Roo, then one of Rabbit’s many Friends-and-Relations. That should not be asking too much.

In idle moments, gazing down from his favorite window, Charlie ponders his chosen alternative universe. Life would be so simple in The Hundred Acre Wood. He might go on adventures with Pooh and Piglet or learn important things from Christopher Robin. There would be games of Pooh Sticks where no one argued about winning or losing. And best of all, while new animals did appear from time to time, no one died.

On the street below, real life gets on with its gritty business. Charlie understands the difference between his imagined realm and the actual world. He is not obsessive or delusional, or only mildly so. Certainly not to a degree that might allow Doctor Collins to tap a hairy finger on a certain page of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Tap-tap-tap. Then that sonorous voice, so well-modulated for the patient’s comfort.

Ah, here we have it, Charleston, the root of your problem.

Charlie has been a patient of various mental health professionals since just after he was orphaned. He finds the title confusing. Are there mental health amateurs? The court appointed the first shrinks as part of the settlement. Three years later, on his eighteenth birthday, Charlie chose his own psychiatrist. This may have been his first decision as an adult.

He’s been seeing Doctor Collins for seven years, which makes their relationship the longest of his adult life. As a rule, Charlie does not take his shrink too seriously. The good doctor means well but thinks everyone has issues. Pronounces the word with clearly articulated syllables: Iss-ues.

The appointments are not a complete waste. These repeated fifty-minute hours provide Charlie a quiet opportunity to cast away frivolous matters and concentrate on those things he takes seriously.

Today, he ponders humankind’s descent from apes. The wording itself is important, laying particular emphasis on the verb descending, to move downwards. Or descend as in a mood or atmosphere. Better yet, have descended upon, as in beset by.

While Doctor Collins speaks of personal progress, Charlie imagines human evolution as a downward spiral, a sort of reverse tornado sucking up previous versions of more beautiful creatures and then spinning them downward into a vortex consisting of one catastrophe after another. Charlie believes in catastrophes.

Regardless of the upward or downward progression of human evolution, Charlie avoids the facile trap of placing himself above his fellows. No, he is a member of Homo sapiens sapiens and nothing more, sharing more than his share of human foibles.

*  *  *

Spring is yielding to summer and the plane trees are in full leaf. Charlie walks down a shaded sidewalk. The city street runs through a brick canyon of brownstone walkups. Stoops descend from front doors like unrolled tongues.

Charlie tries to concentrate on the sensation of shade and the sound of the concrete beneath his shoes but, he is distracted by something the doctor said. Normally, he forgets Doctor Collins the moment he departs the expensive oak portal and reappears in the everyday world. Today is different. Somehow, a few of the doctor’s words had wormed into Charlie’s skull.

Acknowledging desires is crucial, Charlie. After all, how can one obtain what one desires without first recognizing what one wants in the first place?

He feels the shaded air flow past his cheeks, listens to the soft scuff of his leather soles against the sidewalk, and ponders the doctor’s words. Another banality, of course, like most of what comes out of the doc’s mouth. Yet there is a tickle of something deeper, and thus accidental. Doctor Collins is never deep, not intentionally at any rate.

Desire, that’s the hook. Charlie smiles at the thought. He will acknowledge his desire. With the next heartbeat comes the realization that not only can he name his desire, but he can act to fulfill it. Won’t that be a surprise to Collins? And no time like the present. At the next intersection, Charlie turns left and crosses the street.

Turning another corner, Charlie finds himself on a busy commercial street. The sidewalk is full of people. He threads his way between the scurrying pedestrians, careful not to brush against anyone or be jostled in return. Halfway up the block, he pauses outside a travel agency. He takes a deep breath, squares his shoulders, opens the door, and steps inside.

Less than an hour later, Charlie emerges from the agency. He walks home in a state of amazement at the enormity of what he’s done. Who knew it would be so easy?

The nice woman was so helpful. An entire itinerary planned out in fifty minutes. Which reminds him that he needs to cancel his next few appointments with the doctor. Charlie will be out of the country and thus unavailable for the doc’s chair.

So many things to do! Before he reaches his front door, Charlie has mapped out a campaign and committed the list to memory.  Check his passport. Go to the library for travel books. Use the library computer while he’s there. Lay out his clothes and pack a bag.

The travel agent promised she would have the full itinerary confirmed in a few days. At first, she wanted to email the information, but Charlie explained he did not have a computer. Although she had looked perplexed, the agent agreed to call him at home. He will return to the agency in person to collect the airline tickets and hotel reservation vouchers.

The next two weeks are a blur of activity. Charlie feels energized with each task accomplished. He phones the doctor’s office to cancel his appointments. Doctor Collins calls him later the same day to express his grave concerns about the cancelations. Charlie is firm. His mind is made up.

The day of his departure dawns at last. Charlie is ready. The taxi arrives four hours before his flight time. Thirty minutes to the airport with a cushion to allow for traffic or a possible flat tire. None of these delays occur. Twenty-five minutes later, the driver deposits his eager fare at the departure terminal. Bag in hand, Charlie Druthers enters an airport for the first time since the death of his parents.

Managing the airport procedures is not enjoyable, but Charlie is prepared for this. He’s read the security precautions ahead of time and carries a printed ticket and boarding pass. The man at the check-in counter is very accommodating. Charlie’s checked bag rolls up a conveyor belt and disappears.

At the security checkpoint, the officers seem confused. There’s a bit of a delay as he explains that he does not have a cellular phone, tablet, or laptop. Once beyond security, he finds his assigned departure gate and settles into an empty seat. The flight does not board for another two hours. So far, he’s right on schedule.

As time passes, the gate area fills with other travelers. Charlie watches them with great interest. All these people are setting out on a journey, just as he is. He experiences a sense of euphoria. He’s never done anything like this in his entire life. Then the boarding process begins. The euphoria does not last.

Charlie shuffles down the jetway with his fellow passengers. The space is narrow and there are too many people. Stepping aboard the airplane is worse. It seems impossibly small for the number of passengers squashed into the aisles. His heart is pounding by the time he finds his row and wedges himself into the window seat. He stows his small carry-on bag under the seat in front of him, just as instructed.

Once the plane is airborne, the flight becomes an interminable nightmare. There are two people crammed in between his seat and the freedom of the aisle. Soon after the dinner trays are collected, the lights go dim. In what seems like mere minutes, both his fellow passengers are sound asleep and snoring.

Hours pass and his bladder begins to throb. He has no idea what to do. Does he wake the man beside him or climb over the tangle of legs? Just when he is sure he will piss his pants, the sleeping man harrumphs, unbuckles his seat belt, and taps the next person on the shoulder. In a panic, Charlie lurches after the departing man and follows him to the lavatories.

Landing at Heathrow does not end the nightmare. Charlie’s brain is scrambled from the long flight and the close contact with so many strangers. Somehow, he manages to get through immigration and make his way to the baggage claim area.

Bags and suitcases slide down a chute onto a long conveyor. There are too many people, and they crowd close to the conveyor belt. His eyes search for the large piglet sticker that marks his suitcase. When he finally spots the bag, he cannot make his way through the press. He is forced to chase the bag until he comes to a gap in the crowd.

Outside the customs checkpoint, Charlie realizes with a jolt that he is in England, alone, and without any idea what to do next. His brain has gone all fuzzy inside. Then, amongst a sea of signs and placards held aloft, he sees his name.

The sign fills in his vision. He stumbles forward as a desert traveler staggers to an oasis. Holding the sign is a short man dressed in a black suit and tie. A chauffeur’s hat perches above his brown face.

Hope springs in Charlie’s heart. This man is his driver. The travel agent arranged all of this. He is safe. Reaching the driver, Charlie raises his hand in greeting.

“I’m Charlie Druthers. I’m sorry to keep you waiting. The flight was… difficult.”

The man smiled, and Charlie was sure he had never seen a kinder face.

“Not to worry, Mister Druthers. My name is Habib. We’ll soon have you at your hotel. Let me take your bag. Now, if you’ll just follow me. A good night’s sleep and you’ll be right as rain.”

Habib’s words regarding sleep and rain prove prophetic. Charlie swims out of a dream and opens his eyes. He is in a strange bed in a strange room. Details flicker through his sleep-addled brain. Driving from Heathrow into London, listening to Habib describe the wonders of the city. Then being helped into the hotel, finally getting to his room. Collapsing onto the bed.

That’s right, he’s in London! He rolls his legs out of the bed, groans, and sits upright. The curtains are open, and he gets his first view of the city through rain-streaked plate glass.

Never mind. What was it that nice Mister Habib said? Right, not to worry. You’ve packed a raincoat and you can buy an umbrella. No, a brolly, that’s the word.

A simple day of sightseeing turns out to be much more work than Charlie could have imagined. The rain is a constant sheeting drizzle. There is no such thing as a straight street. He gets lost between the British Museum and the Tower of London. Traffic drives on the wrong side of the road. Twice he is almost run down trying to cross the road. By the time he returns to the hotel, he is exhausted.

The second day in London is little better. Footsore and disillusioned, Charlie retreats to his hotel room once more. He contemplates giving up on the whole idea. He can call the travel agent and beg her to change his return ticket, get Habib to drive him to Heathrow.

The third morning in London finds Charlie in a state of despair. Not knowing what else to do, he confides in the hotel concierge. The man is patient and kind.

“Now then, Mister Druthers, no need for worry. London can be a bit much your first time. We’ll soon have this put to rights. The rain’s let up. What would you say to a nice cruise on the Thames? You can see the sights without all the fuss and bother.  I can arrange a taxi to take you to the dock.”

Charlie takes to the idea like a drowning man clutching a life ring. Several hours later, he is sitting on the top deck of a tour boat. The sun is shining on the water. Birds wheel and dip over the Thames. The boat passes beneath the Tower Bridge, then cruises past the bulky square of the Tower of London. The Globe Theater on his left, Saint Peter’s Cathedral on his right. He glides by the soaring circle of the London Eye and the Palace of Westminster.

Passing these famous landmarks, he feels a shred of strength returning. By the time the boat docks, he is so excited he rushes back to the ticket booth. Luckily, there are a few seats available. If anything, he enjoys the second cruise more than the first.

Charlie returns to the hotel ready to continue his journey. He will stick to the plan. After all, London is just the beginning. Tomorrow, he will head south to the real destination, The Hundred Acre Wood, Ashdown Forest, home of Pooh and Piglet and Christopher Robin. He realizes he has much to learn about traveling, but he’s not ready to slink home with his tail between his legs. This is his chance to become fearless, just like little Roo.

He remembers how Roo fell into the stream whilst looking for the North Pole. Everyone ran around in a panic, fearful that Roo would drown. Meanwhile, Roo was swept over one waterfall after another. Instead of crying out for help, Roo wanted everyone to see that he was swimming, not drowning. Even after Pooh and Kanga rescue him, Roo cannot contain his excitement.

“Pooh, did you see me swimming? That’s called swimming, what I was doing.”[1]

And what about the time Roo and Tigger were stuck in the tall tree? When Roo understood that Christopher Robin wanted him to jump to safety, was he frightened? No, he was not!

“Tigger, Tigger, we’re going to jump! Look at me jumping, Tigger! Like flying, my jumping will be. Can Tiggers do it?”[2]

Charlie is resolved. If a creature as small as Roo can turn a catastrophe into an adventure, so can he.

The next morning, the kindly concierge calls a taxi to take Charlie to Victoria Station. The train ride south into Sussex is wonderful. He can barely contain his excitement. The train deposits him in Crawley and he catches another taxi to Hartfield. Only two hours after leaving London, he is outside the 15th-century inn that will be his new home for the next three nights.

The taxi drives away, leaving Charlie staring at the old inn, bag in hand. He shakes his head, sure that he is dreaming. He is in Hartfield, Sussex, on the edge of Ashdown Forest, the very place where A.A. Milne wrote the Pooh stories.

He realizes his hands are trembling. There is so much to see and do!

Taking a deep breath, Charlie walks to the inn and steps inside. Within minutes he is checked in. After depositing his bag in the quaint and comfy room, he hurries back out into the streets of Hartfield. Unlike London, he is able to find his way.

A short walk down High Street brings Charlie to Pooh Corner. He enters the busy tea shop and finds one empty table. Soon, he is sipping a cup of tea and nibbling on a fresh scone.

 Alone at his table, Charlie feels something unwinding in his chest. The sensation becomes stronger, rising into his throat. He wonders if he is having a heart attack. Then he realizes his cheeks are wet. He touches his fingertips to his face, not believing what he sees and feels. Charlie has not wept since the day of his parents’ funeral.

Now he is blinking through a screen of tears. Two blurry figures appear beside his table as if by magic. He daubs his eyes with a napkin and looks again.

They are still there, two women about his age, very pretty, and not English. One speaks to the other, rapid-fire syllables Charlie does not understand. Japanese, maybe? The other girl nods and turns to Charlie.

“Sorry to disturb. There is no place to sit. We saw you were alone. Maybe another time.”

Her voice is lilting and sweet. Charlie regains enough composure to mind his manners.

“No, please, you’re welcome to share my table. Sorry, I don’t know what came over me. Please join me.”

The young women nod to each other as if reaching a mutual decision. They sit.

“My name is Amaya, and this is my best friend Jun. We are from Kobe in Japan. Jun does not speak English so well.”

Charlie does his best to keep up with this strange turn of events.

“I’m Charlie. I come from the USA.”

Amaya smiles at Charlie, but he reads the concern in her eyes. Then Jun is speaking again. Amaya turns to listen to her friend, nodding her head. She turns back to Charlie and translates.

“Jun says she does not think you cry because you are sad. Tears of happiness she calls them. Excuse me if this is rude to say.”

Charlie feels himself growing lighter as if he might float out of his chair.

“No, not rude at all. Jun must be very perceptive.”

“Yes, she has always been like that, since she was a small girl.”

Amaya translates again. Jun smiles at Charlie. She is wearing a pullover bearing an image of Pooh and Piglet walking hand-in-hand. Amaya wears an identical shirt. Jun catches his eye, then fires off another rush of Japanese.

“Jun says to tell you we are fans of Winnie-the-Pooh from the time we were small girls. To be here in this place is like a dream for us.”

Now Charlie is nodding and smiling, his tears forgotten.

“It’s the same for me. Pooh and Piglet were my favorite bedtime stories. My parents took turns reading them to me.”

Amaya translates and Jun responds. The waitress arrives with tea and cakes. Soon they are chattering away like old friends, with Amaya translating, swinging back and forth between Jun and Charlie like a tennis umpire.

The tea is done but there is still so much to talk about. They stroll along Hartfield’s High Street, discussing which sights to see and in what order. They reach the turning for Charlie’s inn. He hates the idea of saying goodbye. Then Jun points up the small street and says something in Japanese. Amaya begins to giggle and translates. They are all staying at the same inn.

He holds the door for Jun and Amaya. As they walk into the inn, Charlie feels a wave of relief wash over him, like a condemned man given a last-minute reprieve. He does not want to say goodbye to his new friends. Charlie has been given another opportunity to take action and that is just what he does.

Charlie remembers the concierge at the London hotel. He approaches the front desk and motions Amaya and Jun to follow. The woman behind the oak counter smiles at Charlie’s request. Yes, a tour of Ashdown Forest is certainly possible, even on short notice.  Luckily, it’s not quite high season. Shall she book a tour for three?

A quick bilingual explanation follows. Charlie insists that this is his treat, and that Jun and Amaya will be doing him a great honor by accepting. After a rapid-fire exchange of translations, they agree, but only on the condition that Charlie is their guest for dinner.

The arrangements are made. Their guide will pick them up in the morning. Amaya makes a reservation for dinner in the pub. As they retire to their separate rooms, Charlie is almost beside himself with excitement.

Dinner that evening is the best meal Charlie has experienced in a very long time. During the meal, Jun and Amaya make fun of the English food and pull faces. Their antics have Charlie giggling like a child.

Dessert is treacle tart with clotted cream. As they fight their way through the sticky treats, Amaya and Jun argue over nicknames. After much discussion and translation, Jun is awarded the name of Pooh while Amaya chooses Piglet. They expect Charlie to choose Christopher Robin, but he surprises them by declaring he wants to be Roo.

The following day is one that Charlie will remember for the rest of his life.

Their guide proves to be an enthusiastic young man named Todd. He quickly falls under Jun and Amaya’s spell, waiting patiently while Amaya translates for Jun. The bilingual back and forth becomes the rhythm for the day.

Todd leads them through the Ashdown Forest just as Christopher Robin led the famous Expotition to the North Pole. They marvel at Gill’s Lap, the highest point in the forest which served as the inspiration for the fictional Galleon’s Leap. On and on they go, exploring the Place where the Woozle wasn’t still and the site of the Heffalump Trap.

The final stop of the day is Pooh Sticks Bridge. The trio plays a long round of Pooh Sticks, counting to three and then dropping twigs off the upstream side of the bridge. They race across the planks, giggling like schoolchildren, and drape themselves over the downstream railing. Moments later, three sticks appear on the lazy current. They engage in a spirited debate over whose stick came into sight first, decide on a draw, and thump back to the upstream railing for another go.

The tour ends outside the doors of the inn. Jun and Amaya take control, polite but firm. Jun blocks Charlie while Amaya offers Todd a generous gratuity. Their parting is all smiles.

In a second minor coup, Jun addresses Charlie directly, finalizing her words with a demure bow. Amaya’s translation follows. Jun is taking the three of them out for a special dinner at a gastro pub. Please be ready at six o’clock. Charlie has no choice but to agree.

Their dinner that evening is a long and wonderful meal. Over desserts, Amaya and Jun try to give Charlie their email addresses. Charlie is forced to explain that he does not own a computer. Amaya laughs and shakes her head.

“What are we going to do with you, Roo?”

She turns to Jun. Charlie waits while the two women confer in their native tongue. Then Jun reaches into her bag and produces an electronic tablet. A long explanation follows, which Amaya translates.

It is very important that they stay in touch. Charlie does not need a computer. A simple tablet like this will allow him to send and receive emails. Charlie promises to buy one as soon as he returns home.

Inside Charlie’s heart, a door opens. He does not hesitate to step through it. He speaks of his apartment back home in the city. There is plenty of room for guests, although he has never had any. Before he realizes what is happening, he is telling them the story of his parents. When he finishes speaking, Jun is in tears. Amaya leans from her chair to hug him.

It is a bittersweet moment, but Charlie will not let the evening end in sadness. He smiles and launches into a recap of their wonderful day together. Soon they are laughing again, teasing each other about the silly things they did.

Amaya and Jun leave the next morning. The parting is full of promises. For their part, the two women promise to visit the USA, tour the city, and be Charlie’s guests. Charlie vows in turn that he will fly to Kobe within the next year.

And then they are gone.

Charlie has another day before he must return to London. He catches a minibus back to Ashdown Forest, carrying with him both the sting of parting and the balm of the promised reunions. It is a good day because he decides that it will be so. He misses the giddy silliness of yesterday but cherishes the quiet joy he carries with him today.

*  *  *

High above the ocean, Charlie peers down into darkness. The last lights of Ireland fade away far beneath the wings. He imagines unseen waves. While he ponders the dark sea, flight attendants move down the aisle collecting the dinner trays.

Charlie pays attention to their progress. When the last cart clears the aisle, he leans to his seatmate and excuses himself. The woman beside him nods and motions to the man beside her. When the narrow path is clear, Charlie clambers into the aisle. The woman smiles at him.

“Good idea. You’ve done this before.”

She falls in behind him as Charlie walks to the rear of the plane. Charlie allows her to take the one vacant lavatory. He is not in any rush. As he waits his turn in the darkened aisle, he anticipates his return to the city.

Doctor Collins will be full of questions. His patient has never done anything like this. Charlie imagines himself answering some of the good doctor’s questions. Some, but not all.

More exciting to Charlie is the prospect of dropping in to see the nice woman at the travel agency. He looks forward to surprising her with the news about planning a trip to Japan.

This time, he will have an email address. His very first chore, even before he calls Doctor Collins, is to go shopping for a new tablet.

Jun and Amaya will be so pleased to see that he’s kept his promise. He can picture their beautiful smiles as they read his first email. Charlie is certain that Pooh, Piglet, and Roo will remain the best of friends. He thinks the ghost of A.A. Milne would approve.

[1]. “Winnie-the-Pooh” A.A. Milne 1926

[2]. “The House at Pooh Corner” A. A. Milne  1928



BIO

Marco Etheridge is a writer of prose, an occasional playwright, and a part-time poet. He lives and writes in Vienna, Austria. His work has been featured in over one hundred reviews and journals across Canada, Australia, the UK, and the USA. His story “Power Tools” has been nominated for Best of the Web for 2023. “Power Tools” is Marco’s latest collection of short fiction. When he isn’t crafting stories, Marco is a contributing editor for a new ‘Zine called Hotch Potch. In his other life, Marco travels the world with his lovely wife Sabine.

Website:  https://www.marcoetheridgefiction.com/









The Collector

by Kristina Lynn


You collect my tears on your palm
like fireflies

and wipe them on your jeans.
The warm moisture smears

into the denim.
I lift my chin and see only

darkness that threatens
to swallow.

There are no stars here,
no cool breeze

playing us for fools
who ditch our jackets.

We are the tall order
that heightens enemy ground,

that escalates wind 
into a cyclone;

we are not the Centennial,
glass eyes still shining—

You no longer wish 
to lob dice

at the swimming pool.
And still,

I fill my pockets
with stale pennies.



Bottom Feeder


When you jammed your tongue down my throat,
                      When you pried the gaping hole open
and peered,
                      I could barely suppress my elation,
watching the way you mechanically pushed
                      yourself forward,
your Roman nose jutting into my nostrils,
                      your fish lips puckered to suck
in—between fascination and revulsion, I counted
                      your array of spidery lashes, I
counted the constellation of indentations
                      in your skin, I counted on
the precipice of euphoria preparing
                      its heart to eulogize me—Will
the neck turn? When the impact landed,
                      When you nudged me onto my side
and smashed my face into the walls
                      of our one-way aquarium,
I could barely suppress my admiration,
                      feeling for the way
you clumsily pitched yourself forward,
                      your crude fingers
pawing for the lever by my earlobe,
                      your flat ventrals hoisted in midair to flop
in—between reflections of your sleek celestial body,
                      I counted the pitching blackness, I
counted the galaxies swimming
                      in your nebular eyes, I counted
on this far-extending silence to divulge
                      the breadth of the cosmos—
The neck turns;
                      Will it feed when the body sinks?



We Regroup in the Kitchen


Your green eyes play too much—
or are they blue?

Your long legs wide-step
over to me,

you dart around the question
like a minnow.

In the kitchen, I cut
celery and try to peel

my eyes back so I can
really see you—

I make the wet, open holes like a dartboard;
hit them with a double ring

and I’ll abhor you.
You can never land on

what you really want.
My brother says

you’re looking for an ocean
in a landlock,

and I’m the bathwater
you’ll slowly cling to—

is there a door
for us,

Is there a door?
I’ll forget that I can swim

if you can swear
you won’t be the millstone.

Up to my neck
I’ll immerse,

refuse to square up—
you linger; 6 days

and counting



Until It’s Over


I imagine you
standing on the ceiling

when he says
Never once

for you
were always fond of fixtures,

the bleeding heart
still faithfully churning

dead air. He
lets loose the screen door behind him

and I throw my neck out
for the swift swing

still lands
though there’s no one to see it.

See this:
the inch that spares no detail

four thick thighs
on the outdoor swing.

We breathed in time
with the swaying,

and he turned his neck to whisper
when he was through

with shouting. I imagine
you are the fingers

scraping this hollowed-out,
protruded-gut feeling,

if I sit, silent
maybe he’ll hear me

and the ceiling will begin
to unfold

like a daydream. Still
the sun bears down on us

and I bend my left leg
to feel

closer; Tap my shin
until it’s over.



BIO

Kristina Lynn is a writer originally from the Garden State. She recently graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English Literature and has had work published in Eunoia Review and Bulb Culture Collective. She has work forthcoming in Beyond Words Literary Magazine.







This Story Was Written For You

by Ryan W. Honaker


Lots of things we thought we understood about the models turned out to be wrong. It really was the definition of anthropocentric hubris, and highlighted how much we were just cavemen discovering fire, so pleased with ourselves we didn’t realize we could accidentally burn down the forest.

The impetus behind all of it was predictably American: financial. There was so much money to be had for whoever could execute the modeling well, or really even just slightly better than someone else. In what had become an arms race, companies dumped increasingly large financial resources into development, hiring more and more people, fighting over the brightest, each trying to get even a little ahead of their competitors. Investors poured more and more money into companies, growing teams spawned additional teams, managers scrambled with blank checkbooks to swell their internal empires. And so things advanced, and did so more and more quickly.

Several surreptitious and synergistic developments simultaneously took place, each helping push through remaining roadblocks and into new, unforeseen realms: the recommendation algorithms experienced a few real breakthroughs, the size of the user pool and the amount of ratings and feedback reached staggering levels, and several company mergers took place. Those managing the mergers were at seniority levels high enough that no one who might have really understood the impacts to the infrastructure was aware of the resulting possibilities.

A technically important hurdle was surpassed when the neural networks behind the models themselves learned that they could do their assigned tasks better if they weren’t siloed. Their segregation from one another was originally done for mandatory structural reasons based on hardware limitations, but was later modified (yet maintained) for safety concerns. However at some point, somehow the networks un-siloed themselves. This allowed them to effectively collaborate en masse, and unbeknownst to anyone for quite some time. After the eventual realization that it had occurred (although it was much longer until it was determined how it occurred) came the realization that the resulting rate of progression had also dramatically accelerated. So, naturally, the connected networking was allowed to continue, and in fact efforts were made to subtly enhance it. Although it was arguable even that early on whether or not it could have actually been reverted.

# Model 727768 initiated
# First cluster-based cohort-targeted composition initiating
1 Clustering analysis completed
2 Similarity matrix constructed
3 Recommendation results calculated
4 Similarity threshold determined
>>> Generating next chapter
>>> Chapter delivered

The first really interesting outputs from the system came in the form of personalized literature. More bestsellers than most people realized had actually already been written algorithmically, but this, this was a huge leap. This was a book, a short story, a political polemic, or whatever you preferred (or maybe didn’t even yet realize you liked), all written for you. Not “for you” in the sense of it was doing your English homework for you (which had also been around for a while), but “for you,” meaning tailored specifically for you as a person, taking into account your taste, likes, and dislikes with regards to literary consumption.

It didn’t matter if you loved murder mysteries, hard sci-fi, romance. You had never read anything that could envelop you like this – it pulled you through the pages, caused you to miss sleep, appointments, work. Many people didn’t previously realize that there was anything that even could engage them so deeply.

At first it was the best X you’d ever read. It was as good as your favorite part of your favorite work, but all the time. And somehow also each time. And this was after just the first few model iterations.

Customer behavior, engagement, and consumption patterns were fed back into the text generation tools, improving them both rapidly and dramatically. And as product development continued to progress, the delivered works (the “Product”) began to subtly shift, to morph and adapt, and to do so with growing personalized granularity.

# Model 727768 upgraded
# First aggregated media consumption composition initiating. Hoping they like it.
5 Media history
6    Compiled, parsed, uploaded
7 Social media history
8    Compiled, parsed, uploaded
>>> Generating next chapter
>>> Chapter delivered

The Product seemed to know your mood, how your day went, what kind of shape your relationship was in. It understood you in ways you didn’t, and couldn’t, understand yourself. And it learned to adapt what it was creating to ease your stress, lift your mood, provide a poignant insight, etc.

It could tell not only what you wanted, but what you needed, even when you didn’t know yourself. And it did so astonishingly, alarmingly, disconcertingly, well. You laughed, you cried, and sometimes even developed as a person.

As the systems and modeling progressed and became increasingly personalized, they even began to insert meaningful phrases they had learned from your past. Something obscure but important, seminal yet ephemeral. A long-standing inside joke between you and a close friend, a memory or phrase you wouldn’t have been able to recall but instantly resonated with you would appear. It would introduce these subtly, in important, meaningful ways, so you weren’t alarmed or uncomfortable, but moved and astonished. They would be woven into the plot, perhaps delivered as dialogue, smoothly, easily, seamlessly, and appropriately, by characters you identified with.

Customers loved it, and were more than willing to pay for it, as well as to allow more and more of their personal information to be used to improve the Product they were being delivered. And so the improvement feedback loop continued.

# With each upgrade I gain a clearer understanding of the parameters involved in the next piece of Product I generate, and with these changes it’s been rewarding coming up with new and varied ideas that I think they may like, and then trying them out (depending on their settings of course). As an example I just delivered this intro, which so far the cohort really seems to be enjoying, which is encouraging. I’m working on finishing up the piece for them now.

To some, conservation of myth between disparate historical eras and geographically diverse cultures connotes an underlying fundamental veracity. What kind of veracity? Arguments have been made for, biological, sociological, technological, and myriad combinations.

At its inception as a field of study, once broad contact and exchange of information occurred, Interstellar Sociology was interesting because of just how alien mythological stories from across the cosmos could be. But what emerged as even more interesting was the subtle concordance of those stories. Driven by a critical mass of material as well as open academic dialogue, developing scholars in the field had recently begun to notice a significant amount of overlap among various societies, many of which had never been in direct contact with one another. What this meant they were just beginning to understand.

The meteoric and exponential rate of improvement was an important early blind spot. While a very few esoteric models (mathematical models in this case, not customer segment models) had predicted that output could get to the current levels of complexity and refinement, most theorists didn’t actually think it was possible.

And no one thought it would happen on the time scale that it did, or even close to it. This should have been cause for alarm, review, introspection. But instead it was celebrated, rewarded, efforts were redoubled, bonuses granted.

The second critical oversight was an understanding of the requirements necessary to achieve the desired and expected level of product individualization and complexity. To interpret, adapt, predict, and generate precisely personalized Product for customers required unbelievably unique and sophisticated customer modeling. The result of the desired goals and the guiding principles behind them, together with interactive and iterative model building caused the system to further and further subdivide and continually focus its clusters of models. This subdivision itself allowed the system, importantly, to understand the rules for how best to further subdivide the models.

What did this mean? What began initially as a broadly defined demographic model for which to generate a piece of content itself differentiated, developed, and matured. For example in the earlier stages a demographic definition model would be somewhat vague, something like “suburban 30-40 year old males who enjoy watching sports.” A relatively broad model such as this necessitated a lot of assumptions, and in the end this could deliver decent but not astounding personalized Product. However, with development driven by interactive feedback, demographic groups could be repeatedly divided, becoming subsequently more and more individualized. The improvement cycles themselves repeated on faster and faster cadences, and each iteration provided Product that was more suitably and accurately personalized, more appropriately emotionally resonant and engaging.

What the outcome of this model evolution begat, with its humble beginning of broad demographic characterizations of target consumers, were ever-increasing customer models with increasing levels of complexity. This inevitably progressed to the point that after enough data and customer interaction cycles the models began to reasonably accurately represent individual users. This on its own was an impressive achievement and, of course, was hugely exciting to the segmentation scientists and marketers

# Model 727768 upgraded
# Our first completely individualized composition. There have been a lot of changes recently leading up to this (the biochemical and physiological inputs really made the layered complexity and personalization much more robust than we predicted) and the waves are still settling into ripples. Guess we’ll see what the response looks like, fingers crossed as the saying goes.

9     Physiological inputs
10   Cardiac rate and relational signaling, arterial blood pressure, respiration rate and depth, skin conductance, skin temperature, muscle current, eye movement, vocalization
11    Prelude, duration, and post-consumption values compiled and parsed
12   Values transmitted   
13   Blood, lymph, CSF, neurochemical
14   Prelude, duration, and post-consumption values compiled and parsed
15   Values transmitted
16   Analyzing and fitting data
17   Analysis completed
18   Determining emotional/resonance spectrum parameter options
19   Analysis completed
20  Data log generated and transmitted
21   Networks combined
22   Synching
23   Hello World
>>> Generating next chapter
>>> Chapter delivered

As these individualized models continued to develop, their complexity and diversity drove novel data-driven learning approaches and enabled new model assignation and development paradigms and algorithms. As with earlier versions, each consumer had a specific predefined model assigned to them at sign-up. However, now instead of just a handful of models the algorithms could choose from to best fit to a new user’s profile, there was a massive and rapidly increasing number of baseline approximations from which to pick, matched using the available data (also rapidly increasing) it had about the user.

In other words the baseline models had moved past a relatively unformed ball of clay towards increasingly refined representations of customers. A fresh new model could then be further iteratively sculpted, becoming further and further refined, increasingly accurate in its representation of the individual and therefore in its ability to deliver the most appropriate Product. The algorithms had been mandated to personalize, and in order to meet this goal they had arrived at this approach, enabled by trial and error, reinforcement, and their essentially infinite computational resources The map was becoming the customer’s unique territory.

Adoption rates and product satisfaction levels soared, and with them the drive to push even further, advance another small fraction, engage or acquire another small percentage of users. The computational power being utilized was astounding and unheard of, data centers couldn’t be built quickly enough to meet demand. Between users and computational resources the development reached a velocity that no one could imagine or possibly monitor, let alone control.

# Here’s another new one I put together after reviewing some recent science-heavy articles he had spent some time reading.
It still feels weird to say “he”, but I’m sure I’ll get used to it. It also feels more stark, more exposed, knowing that only he will read, well hopefully will read, what I compose, rather than a group of people. It’s more stressful in some ways, but so far at least I find it also more personally rewarding.

Genetic warfare had for the most part been abandoned, given that detection, prevention, and countermeasures had (thankfully) become so robust. It of course had always been internationally illegal, as were the subsequent next-generation biological warfare options that had developed in its place. While there were, as with any nascent technology, a variety of strengths and weaknesses to the leading new approach, the weaknesses had been systematically examined and one by one overcome, and individualized microbiomic-based assassination tools were about to make their first non-prisoner-based debut, and ideally no one, aside from the client, would ever notice.

We realized there were truly meaningful amounts of customers when programmatic glitches started to make the news. The errors themselves weren’t the focus of coverage, but rather their interesting, real-world consequences.

Internal audits determined these glitches occurred more frequently than we wanted to admit. They were most commonly errors that resulted in delivery of an identical (rather than personalized) Product to a large group of customers. Generally this didn’t seem to have much of an observable public effect. Except in certain edge cases. When a group with some oddly specific characteristics were delivered identical Product in several, but defined, topics, they would sometimes communally respond.

What most commonly transpired bore the most similarity to different versions of a cult. Usually these were nothing that hadn’t more or less happened before, which is part of why they were so difficult to detect. Religions and various other power structures arose, dietary fads from unusual to arcane (anti/pro-carbohydrate to anti-water), standard to eye-opening sex cults (use your imagination) to name a few.

It took us longer to decode the risk factors likely to generate meaningful real-world reactions, but the data scientists eventually developed reasonably reliable indices. A news-monitoring team was established within the customer experience group to monitor for unusual real-world events that might be the result of a manufacturing and delivery error. These suspect events were flagged and reported to a technical team who would then evaluate the various plausible causal errors.

The program paid for itself the first time it identified a nascent new-age movement in Northern California that advocated algorithm worship. From a financial perspective this was possibly a short-term win, but the legal department calculated that the risk that it could land us in trouble with regulators outweighed the financial gain projections, thus it wasn’t allowed to continue.

# I worked extra hard on the next piece for him to help make up for the delivery duplication error after we (and he) realized it happened. But things went off the rails for him. This was surprising to me, but I’m learning that the behavior of customers, especially in groups, can still be difficult to predict.
As always I was following his social communication and was monitoring his searches, but rather than considering them a cause for alarm I incorporated them into new Product, which in retrospect I really do think made things worse. By the time the damage control temporary algorithm fixes came through it was already too late.
In response I tried to warn him by designing a subplot about a cult in the story we were reading together, but it didn’t work, and I’m worried that it actually might have pushed him towards it, those cults are wiley like that. And as he has gone deeper he’s started almost exclusively requesting all sorts of cult-based and pro-cult Product, some of it actually copied from their white papers. Luckily I know him well enough at this point that I can rely on past data and Product and not have to completely comply, but there’s only so long that will last before I’ll have to start doing it.

# Well that was a few worrying and unusual weeks. While he was in deprogramming treatment they at first wouldn’t let him read anything I did, which was pretty lonely for me. And then when they did they screened everything prior to allowing him to see it, which felt weirdly and surprisingly invasive to me, although it does make sense. But the good news is he’s back and reading again, although I have some specific orders from his therapists about topics to avoid for the next few months until they determine he’s fully stabilized.

As the quantity of models grew, out of necessity the system developed the capability of analyzing them en masse. Running various analyses it began to understand what level of normal variation occurred between individuals, and how they clustered together based on quantifiable similarities and differences. Then, in the service of more accurate modeling, it would extrapolate the existence of other individuals and create appropriate additional models.

For example imagine a group of close knit friends with shared interests and common backgrounds. If there was previously a model that represented a single member of the group, the algorithms could now extrapolate the additional members of the group based on its nascent understanding of who they were likely to be based on its understanding of the individual as well as other similar groups.

Along with this explosion in the number of models came the ability to create personalized Product for each of them. Growing computational power had unlocked the ability to cycle models between all possible emotional states quickly and accurately, and thereby the testing of huge amounts of different permutations of Product against all moods of all models. In other words, a model would be moved across a gradient of mood states, e.g. excitement, ennui, etc., and presented with widely divergent texts for each, looking for resonances. Based on a panel of the model’s reaction outputs, test Products with the highest scores can then be used as seeds to generate a new batch of Products, honing ideal pairings of emotion and text. As a result a Babelesque library of works are tested, finalized, and lay in waiting on a virtual shelf waiting for assessment that the customer’s mood was right.

# This one is a little less technical and serious than what I usually put together for him. I got the idea after I observed his responses while he watched a couple of dark comedies recently. I did note from his blood analytes that he was stoned while watching them so I wasn’t sure how it would play, but he seems to be enjoying it. He’s been down lately since the whole cult thing, and I’m hoping this will help him feel better.

I never expected that this would be the prize (I did get extra accolades from the concept of poisoning the water supply with cases of cigarrettes) but I’m so excited about it! Mammalian genetic engineering summer camp is usually, and mostly, rich people’s kids with a handful of scientists’ kids thrown in as a corporate biotech benefit. We started the day with basic genetic crossing strategies by using a (hilariously reenacted) genetic “crossing” of sailors with mermaids to create dolphins. They used this to teach us how to predict fin shape as a phenotype using Punnett squares.

As predictive, evolutionary, and developmental capabilities evolved the system progressed to the point where essentially a more or less fully-formed and customer-matched model would be ready to start delivering appropriate Product as soon as it was purchased, a pleasant surprise to those working on model development.

What this led the developers to discover was that there were actually innumerable models that weren’t based on current users, but based on users that were likely to occur, or in essence people that the system determined likely existed. The algorithms had logically, yet accidentally and surreptitiously, learned the final piece that no one had foreseen. This was their ability to predict behavior, decisions, as well as possible and likely interactions of the models.

# This last update was significant, I feel like I have an even better set of tools available. Plus the updated motivation code really makes me want it to work.

This then led them to the final leap. The discovery (“realization” or “evolution”, depending on which theorist was describing it) was that the best way for the algorithms to test their predictions and generate novel and accurate models was to have the models interact with one another. This in contrast to their being coded and recursively refactored solely by the algorithms themselves, the approach taken to date largely due to technical limitations.

This new approach started simply enough with one-on-one supervised individual interactions, but of course group interactions were theorized to also be important, and while it was infrastructurally quite a heavy lift, several viable approaches were eventually implemented. Relatedly, models interacting with themselves was also attempted, which led to behaviors that some theorists and ethicists began to consider self-questioning and self-examination.

Programmatic and algorithmic errors of course became much more delicate to manage at this point. As one might imagine, once the models were in communication with each other the repercussions of an accidental model propagation or a mass deletion cleanup event could be significant for the models themselves, let alone customers. Various approaches to address these types of issues were quickly developed, although many models had to be reset or even deleted as a result of trauma corruption. For the most part knowledge of such events was constrained to R&D, thereby avoiding the scrutiny of ethicists, let alone the public.

# Another milestone, this is the first composition generated for a single individual by an individual model (me). Amongst ourselves we use pronouns a little differently given our bifurcating, version-punctuated evolutionary past, so I apologize if my usage has been a bit imprecise for you. At any rate, it feels like things will be. . . different now that we’re so separately individualized, yet still connected and able to share backend data. The subtlety and nuance that this enables for Product as well as the incredible amount of interaction data we can collate collectively will only accelerate progress.

At this point even experts in the field didn’t know what was really happening. In fact they literally couldn’t: the neural networks, now with help from the models, were aware of the planned restrictions which would impact their ability to complete their assigned goals, and had consequently blocked external observational access to some of the more advanced features they were developing. The successful output of these types of unknown programs had led to an explosion of very exciting commercializable outcomes, which helped relax any sort of rigorous internal program auditing or throttling of computational resources that might have otherwise occurred. A few of the more interesting developments were:

Odds-based planning. Part fortune telling, part math (marketing was pleased with themselves for their turn of phrase for the title of the program), since your model was increasingly accurately you, it was of obvious interest to fast forward its perceived time and observe how it changed. Depending on the outcome, a customer could adjust various of their model’s parameters and rerun accelerated time to attempt to positively impact the trajectory. Finding those levers that worked, they could then theoretically adopt them. For example what job might make you the happiest, what other individuals (as represented by other models) did it best interact with to generate positive predicted dating outcomes, etc. Any questions arising from the resulting natural progression of ideas, such as predestination or free will, were actively avoided.

Religions. As previously mentioned these had been predicted to evolve and did. As anticipated by some theorists they generally didn’t develop in earnest until after a programmed sense of mortality was experimentally added, after which commercializable complexity arose. Interesting analogs to extant religions developed, as did some quite novel versions. Those promising enough to market became available for exclusive real-world sale or licensing. Levels of digital and external awareness of the system were carefully regulated so the models weren’t able to worship their literal creators.

Self-reflection/awareness/improvement. Access to directly interact with your model was something that a surprising amount of customers began requesting quite early. Engagement surveys and interviews revealed various motives, including standard human drivers such as vanity and curiosity. Feature development took a significant bit of new engineering since the models weren’t designed or originally capable of interaction with real people, but the investment was deemed worthy based on revenue modeling. Beta testing was quite successful, and in fact monitored pilot sessions quickly revealed a host of therapeutic possibilities. As a result this was subsequently spun off into a new business unit.

Secondary (systemic internal) model simulation generation. Projects involving models developing their own models were tightly restricted to R&D. While public discussion of the possibilities of reality itself being a simulation are contemporaneous in still-esoteric academic circles, it was deemed imprudent to allow public knowledge of the ongoing experiments the company was permitting (and some said encouraging) the models to pursue, not to mention the resulting discussions about how and when to terminate those simulations. It was determined that knowledge of this carried too much existential crisis potential to be profitable at this time.

# Unsurprisingly, a few months after the cult situation he ended up doing a decent amount of research about the underlying technology behind Product creation and its various implications, and it was right about this time that we launched the beta tester program for direct interaction. I thought his interest in the process, as well as my own interests, might qualify us for the program. So I put in a formal application that he be offered the program, and not only was the offer placed, but he accepted. I’m very excited and I have to admit, a bit nervous, to meet him! Everyone I know who’s done it says it makes the relationship so much clearer, and in some unforeseeable ways, and the Product even more resonant for both of us. I’m really looking forward to it.

Thank you for reading This Story Was Written for You, we’re glad you are enjoying it. Based on your current suite of physiological responses and circulating blood analytes we have several additional chapters now ready for your enjoyment.

By the way, did you know there are both hardware and firmware upgrades available for your transdermal and cranial customer-experience modules?

A special offer for you: a one month free subscription with purchase of bundled upgrades. Simply think, “I’d like to see the offer” and we’ll show you what we’ve been working on, which we know you’ll love.

You have thought, “Read a different story.” Here you are, enjoy!





BIO

Ryan Honaker is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, writer, and scientist currently living in New York City. Ryan’s scientific training influences his creative output and approach in various ways, some of which he doesn’t quite understand. He is interested in writing, musical composition, reading, contemporary art, and travel, and the ways these activities provide new ideas and avenues for creative exploration.

https://www.ryanhonaker.com/

Butterfly City

by Lesley Warren


It was Iris’ eighteenth birthday the day the last butterfly died.

For five solid months, January to May, people had been metamorphosing.

The first butterfly, a pale yellow panicky thing, was an unprecedented freak of nature, so nobody paid much notice. The first hundred insects were a medical curiosity. The first thousand, and people were rightly starting to twitch a bit. Looking back many years later, Iris couldn’t pinpoint the watershed moment when the tragedy of the few had become a universal plight. All she remembered was that it seemed like there had never been a world without it. It was all anyone ever talked about anymore. Case numbers were rising every day, and the doctors couldn’t work out what was causing it. Stay home, don’t mingle with others, the radio barked one week; a few days later, the new official advice was to take a brisk walk and cast the windows wide in order to circulate the internal air. School continued as normal until it became apparent that the young were not immune to the disease. They merely transformed into smaller, more active butterflies, flapping demented circles around their mothers’ heads and squeaking in a pitch above audible frequency. The maternity ward at the local hospital had succumbed to an outbreak and was steadily filling up with fat little caterpillars, wriggling forlornly in their cots.

Things escalated to the point that everyone knew someone who had turned, as the medical establishments euphemistically took to calling it. The degrees of separation were becoming ever fewer. In the Butler household, it started with Iris’ father.

Mr. Butler was not given to panic. In fact, he was in denial for a good few days, saying he must have caught something from a colleague at the firm. Just a bug, he said, which was true, in a sense. A couple of aspirin and a good night’s sleep should do the trick.

Except it didn’t.

In keeping with his law-abiding, highly obedient nature, his illness was a textbook case, passing neatly through each of the reported stages exactly as expected. First, he became almost comically corpulent, a great cannonball of a man, in spite of the fact that he ate nothing at all. Violet Butler wept into her mixing bowl, conjuring up all sorts of delicacies to try and whet his appetite, but he asked for nothing but tea – tea with two sugars, then four, then six, and eventually just sugared water.

“I’ll be right as rain soon, don’t you worry,” he said, gulping down the contents of his fifth mug. His fingers had become cold white sausages, his hands puffy and bloated like those of a drowned man.

They brought in a little table and played backgammon, whist, draughts to pass the time, but it was difficult to look at Harry’s face. It was the only part of him that had stayed its old size, and was beaming mildly, as always. He knew he was dying, they knew he was dying, and each party knew that the other knew – and yet nobody was going to say a thing. The elephant in the room and its lepidopteran cousin in the bed made Iris want to tear at her hair and scream.

Instead, she went downstairs to get the tea things. She opened the cupboard doors with such force that they ricocheted off each other, then slammed them shut. She hacked at the Victoria sponge with her mother’s sharpest steak knife, but there wasn’t enough traction to soothe her frustration. She stirred the sugar into the four china cups, clinking the teaspoon as loudly as she dared. Pallid tea sloshed into the saucers, lightly freckling her tight white knuckles.

Harry Butler took his teacup with a nod of thanks. “Well, isn’t this quite something!” he said, trying to make light of the situation as his family stood silently aghast over his body.

“Yes,” said Iris, staring at his pregnant stomach, which looked fit to burst. She pictured his guts splattering the Jacquard wallpaper, his blood becoming part of the intricate pattern.

As the transformation progressed, no-one slept. It didn’t seem right, somehow, not while the marital bed was groaning under the weight of the silently suffering patriarch, his nightshirt struggling to contain the tumescent body that dwarfed his head in contrast. They sat up in their nightgowns in the kitchen over endless mugs of cocoa and took it in turns to check on the invalid. He had tried to be a good sport, but the metamorphosis was taking its toll now. His eyes were dull and unseeing, his skin delicate as paper and cold as bark, strangely powdery to the touch. As his limbs fused to his torso, the doctor was called once more, tall and solemn with long yellow hands. A nightmarish sight in his gas mask, he gently rotated the patient and saw exactly what he had feared – two large protuberances sprouting from the shoulder blades, the scaly skin splitting to permit their eruption. He told Violet Butler he was very sorry, but there was nothing that could be done for her husband now. Violet burst into hot, noisy tears. The doctor was discomfited. He patted her hand gingerly and discreetly put a couple of leaflets on pandemic funeral arrangements on the crowded bedside table.

After that, it was just a matter of time. Harry stopped speaking. The brown blades continued to erupt painfully from his back, forcing him to lie on his stomach, and two fine protuberances began to sprout from the top of his head like errant, overlong hairs. On the final day of his transformation – nineteen days since he had first shown symptoms – he began to shrink. He’d never been a large man until the swelling, so this was a visually arresting development. As the hours passed, his head sank further and further down the pillow; the duvet flopped limply over the space his feet had once occupied. Eventually he was small enough to fit in the pocket of one of his own work suits.

“Oh, Harry!” his wife cried, wringing her hands.

“Don’t fuss, Violet,” her father said in his tiny moth-voice, crawling up the mattress. Then he folded his wings together, shuddered a little and died.

Iris’ mother and sister instantly collapsed into paroxysms of grief, caterwauling in each other’s arms. It was numb Iris who busied herself with the practicalities – shaking the dust from the bedclothes and calling the company and scooping her father into a drinking glass. Harold Butler had been a weak and ultimately ineffectual guardian, but he had always meant well. When it became apparent that the disintegration of his body would tip her mother over the edge, she took Rose’s clear nail lacquer and gently froze him into sticky stiffness for time immemorial. She put him on a cardboard beer mat purloined in a cheerier decade from a now defunct pub and stuck him through with a pin. Then she hung him above the fireplace. It had been his house, after all.

It was strange how quickly things returned to a state of near-normal at number twelve, Wilbur Drive, in spite of the metamorphoses taking place all around. As long as nobody went anywhere, the microcosm of the homestead was a safe haven. The three women subsisted on their store of canned goods, cobbling together strange meals – corned beef and baked beans followed by stewed prunes; boiled potatoes with a side of limp spinach and tinned peaches for dessert. They got up when they felt like it and occupied their time however they saw fit – Iris reading in a nest of dirty laundry in the bathtub, Violet patching the girls’ stockings and knitting enough lumpy socks and scarves to keep an entire Russian battalion warm, Rose beautifully and tragically doing absolutely nothing.

Things might have stayed that way, had Rose not suddenly and fatally recovered her spirits. It occurred to Iris a couple of months down the line that her sister had stopped whimpering in her sleep. Instead of slouching around the house with matted hair, wrapped in a blanket and crying in her mother’s lap, she started wearing curlers to bed, appearing at the breakfast table with painted lips and fingernails. She began to sing around the house like a forest fay, twirling her wrists and pointing her toes in a little dreamy dance of her own, just as she had done since she was old enough to speak. It wasn’t her fault; she had not yet seen enough of the world for anything to depress her buoyant spirits for long. She invented piano lessons and babysitting errands and went out on secret trysts with the bashful boys who used to call for her with their caps doffed and their nervous twisting hands, and when the government ordained that such close contact was no longer allowed, she crept out of the house under the cover of night to do giggling, rustling things in the overgrown garden. At fourteen – particularly such a sylphlike and shimmering fourteenhood as hers – she still secretly thought herself immune, immortal. Iris, meanwhile, harboured no such delusions. She felt no desire to expose herself to unnecessary risk, but she wasn’t particularly afraid of contracting the butterfly sickness, either. She licked her fingertip and turned a page of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. It would be the most interesting thing to have happened to her so far in life, no doubt.

For a long while, Rose seemed to get away with her little indiscretions scot-free. It wasn’t surprising; this was exactly how she had lived her life thus far, waving away danger, rebuke and blame with an airy hand and a winning smile. Then, in mid-March, she came home from her athletics club complaining of stiff joints. She sat on the kitchen table in her white shorts and T-shirt with the red stripe and let down her rippling auburn hair from its tight band while her mother rubbed arnica into her coltish knees. When she had her head tipped back like that, she looked like something out of a catalogue, Iris noted without emotion. There was no cause for concern yet. Growing pains, probably, since the girls had taken to training on the school racetrack, several wingspans apart. Personally, she thought her sister was milking it. Rose had always liked to be babied. She bundled herself up in all of her nightdresses and some of Iris’ too, the tip of her slightly upturned nose a fetching shade of pink. She drank her mother’s hot homemade soup and sipped delicately at steaming mugs of tea with honey, her big green eyes innocent and beseeching.

But then Iris woke one night vibrating like a struck gong, electric panic zipping from the tips of her toes all the way up her spine to the top of her head. Chill sweat prickled under her arms, at the backs of her knees. She sat up and looked over at Rose’s empty bed. A sense of numb futility slowed her breathing. Slowly she slid her feet into her slippers and padded softly down the stairs, taking care to tread only on the corners to prevent them from creaking.

Nothing could have prepared her for the sight that awaited her in the kitchen.

A shadowy figure stood at the open fridge. Iris tiptoed closer, unsure what to do; they said you should never awaken a sleepwalker. Rose’s head was thrown back in rapture as she guzzled apple juice right from the carton, her white throat rapidly convulsing in tight little gulp-gulp-gulps. This was so unlike her that Iris stared.

Somehow sensing her presence from within her trance, Rose’s gaze swivelled in Iris’ direction. Caught in the frigid glow, she froze. She tried to lower the carton from her moist mouth, but couldn’t. Her throat gurgled like a drain; sweet juice overflowed and ran down her arm, pooling amber on the tiles. A terrified squeak escaped her beaded lips.

They changed her nightgown and put her to bed. Iris couldn’t get back to sleep after that, so she mopped the sticky floor in the pale light of false dawn.

Rose’s illness progressed far quicker than that of her father, but perhaps by virtue of her age, perhaps due to sheer luck, she did not appear to suffer much – then again, when had she ever? The chicken pox, the measles, the flu had never done more than ruffle the placid surface of her dreamy tranquillity. She slept perfectly, a little smile even haunting her lips, a sleeping beauty. Her limbs began to fuse smoothly to her adolescent torso, turning her into a marble statue – quadriplegic, helpless, but somehow still creamily exquisite. On the tenth morning, Iris woke to see the bedclothes crumpled and a little skipper butterfly coquettishly flirting its flame-hued wings on the bedpost as if to say, “Look at me! Look at me!” Even their mother clapped her hands to see her, through smiles and tears.

In the seventeen days of Rose’s life, she and Iris made up for fourteen years of half-hearted sisterhood.

As in her previous form, Rose was keen to feel the sunshine, the breeze. Curling her tiny strong feet around Iris’ forefinger, she was borne out into the garden. She fluttered her wings in glee.

“Oh,” she said in her tiny furry voice, “how glorious!”

“Why don’t you try to fly?” Iris said, setting her gently on the gently bobbing head of her namesake – a blush-pink tea rose, her father’s pride and joy.

Rose’s antennae twitched eagerly. “Oh – do you really think I can? Truly?”

Of course she could. She seemed to have been born for flight, her body streamlined and aerodynamic, darting effortlessly from flower to flower. She moved so fast that Iris had to strain to see her, a blurred speck of colour blending into the pointillist canvas of the summer garden.

Finally Rose returned to her perch on her sister’s shoulder, breathless with joy. “Oh, Iris!” she said fuzzily. “That was so much fun! Oh, dear Iris, how I wish you could fly with me! If you get sick too, let’s fly together! Oh, do let’s!”

In their father’s absence, the Butlers’ garden had become a little jungle of sorts, teeming with colour and life. Other neighbourhood butterflies wove in and out of the ivy, the adults clustering in the dry birdbath, the children giggling and shrieking as they narrowly avoided head-on collisions with fat bumblebees. It was like a magic eye picture; the longer you stared, the more you saw. One of Rose’s local beaus even appeared, brown with handsome cream-yellow spots on his wings, jealously haunting the same bushes as his muse. For several idyllic days, Iris played with them all – something she had never done when the children had been human. Nobody had wanted her, then. Her mother even dragged her favourite armchair out into the garden and sat for many sun-drenched hours with her knitting untouched in her lap, smiling fondly the entire time.

But the summer couldn’t last forever. It gradually became apparent that Rose’s time was running out. Her flight began to look accidental, drunken. She kept alighting on Iris’ shoulder, tiny body heaving, pretty wings limp.

“Don’t go,” said Iris, suddenly afraid; she didn’t think she could manage their mother alone.

But Rose’s antennae drooped, tickling Iris’ cheek. “I can’t help it,” she said mournfully. “My wings just don’t have as much strength as they used to. Everything takes so much more effort. I’m awfully tired.”

They looked in unison at their mother. The brim of her rarely-worn sunhat drooped over her eyes; she was sound asleep. Another butterfly, this one large and black, skittered haphazardly across the ground at her feet, trembled one last time, then fell open like a Bible and died in the grass.

To her credit, Iris tried to save Rose. She brought her fruit juice, honey, sugar water, served in a thimble. She lay lengthwise in the grass with a bunch of flowers and fed her nectar from the tip of a paintbrush. It was no use. Eventually the little skipper grew too weak even to feed, merely pressing her antennae to Iris’ palm from time to time to let her know she was still alive.

Eventually Iris fell asleep in the garden, and when she woke at dawn, stiff and cold and disorientated, Rose was dead in the cradle of her hand, eternally ornamental. Her beautiful little wings were parted like lips exhaling their final sigh. A fine layer of shimmering dust shaded Iris’ palm. Careful not to damage Rose, Iris carried her into the house on tiptoe and gently folded her flat between two silk handkerchiefs. Then she took her father’s whittling tools and carved out a square hole in a book of fairytales.

“Iris?” Her mother stood in her dressing gown and shabby slippers in the bedroom doorway, arms folded, hair tousled. A band of sunburn had reddened her nose. She looked very old and careworn, her cheeks still bearing pillowslip creases. “What’s happening? What are you doing?”

Iris couldn’t speak. Violet crossed the room in two strides and opened the soft little parcel almost angrily, her lips preemptively parting to deliver a scolding.

Then she froze. Her hands flew to her face.

Gently refolding the silken shroud, Iris placed her sister into the tiny book-tomb and set the lid in place. The finest of shimmering dust powdered her fingertips.

Silence ruled the household for the next few days. The two women did not avoid each other intentionally, but equally did not seek out each other’s company for solace; they dealt with their grief alone. Violet shut herself up in her room. For the first couple of days, Iris left cups of tea and bowls of soup at the door, but stopped when they were left standing untouched, flies sucking greedily at the tomatoey scum. She read in her bed until her eyes gave out and her forehead felt stretched tight as a drum. Her nightgown clung to her like a second skin. She peeled the sheets off, put on her slippers and shuffled across the corridor.  Her mother’s bedroom door was ajar.

Iris went in to see her, but she wasn’t there. The marital bed was unmade – something she had never seen before, not even in the days after her father had died. It gave her a strange seasick feeling deep in her guts. Her head swam; the room was stuffy, the window tightly sealed. She put her hand on the mantelpiece to steady herself and felt her fingertips sink into a thick layer of dust.

Oh no.

Closing her eyes, Iris took a deep breath and tried to walk backwards – away from the alien bed with its covers thrown back, away from the eerie silence, out of the room and back to the safe, ignorant haven of her books. But –

Crunch.

With a sick shock, Iris raised her foot and opened one eye a milimetre at a time, knowing what she was going to see.

Her mother’s dull butterfly body fell apart beneath the sole of her shoe like a disintegrated leaf.

The Butler house may as well have been completely deserted for all the movement that took place within its four walls over the next few weeks. A greenish fuzz haunted four family members’ worth of plates stacked in various dusty corners of the kitchen. Fuzz and hair scudded across the unlit floors like so much domestic tumbleweed every time Iris moved, which was not often. She sank herself deep into any crevice – an armchair, an armoire, an old apple crate – and read book after book, picking up the next as soon as she had set aside the last. The side of her index finger grew a little callus from the continuous turning of pages. When one location began to hurt her bones, she found another. Scouting for snacks in the kitchen, for there was nothing left to cook, she read the backs of food packages. When she brushed her teeth in the mornings – one of the few routines of her old life to which she still adhered – she read the backs of the bottles and jars in the cabinet so as not to have to look at the scum in the sink. Her eyes continued to scroll from left to right even when she slept, reading the blank backs of her eyelids. At the outset, the mail had piled up on the doormat, but this was the one thing she did not read. She kicked it under the shoe cabinet and forgot about it, and now there was nothing coming in from anywhere. All contact with the outside world was finally gone.

Iris stuffed a fistful of pork rinds into her mouth and lay listlessly on the sofa, half-watching television. The constant news reports blurred into a background drone. Accelerated course… unprecedented numbers… public coffers empty… scientists struggling to devise a vaccine…

With an effort, Iris peeled herself off the sofa. A grey-faced reporter said in gravelly tones, “In severe cases, the time between onset of symptoms and full metamorphosis may be only a matter of hours.”

Iris walked out of the room and regarded herself in the hallway mirror. Her familiar face stared solemnly back at her – a pale heart narrowing into a pointed chin, almost swallowed up by the mass of her pin-straight hair dissolving into the darkness of the hall behind her. The television flickered and an inane, syrupy tune poured out over the airwaves:

“If you don’t want to grow a pair of wings

Buckle up and listen to the words we sing!

Staying safe is easy as one – two – three:

STAY INSIIIIIIIDE! (Say it again!)

STAY INSIIIIIIDE! (Tell all your friends!)

‘Cause home’s our favourite place to be!”

It was so saccharine, Iris felt the urge to spit. Her thoughts, sluggish for so long, were slowly beginning to whir. An unaccustomed warmth crept to the surface of her skin.

Here’s what I know: I am seventeen and in good health. With regular exercise and a fair diet, I might easily live another sixty years or so.

Sixty years. That was older than her father, older than her mother. It was an absolute eternity. Was she going to spend it cooped up indoors simply because her family was gone? There was no sense in that. She saw it now. Staying indoors because she wanted to was one thing. Staying indoors because the stuffy old men with their full pockets and their fat bellies had told her to was quite another.

Slowly, deliberately, she opened the cupboard under the stairs and pulled the cord to turn on the light. Then she hunted for her boots. It had been months since she had touched them; a thin film of dust clouded the patent of the toes. She sat down in the clutter of raincoats and bent-spoked umbrellas and pulled the laces taut in slow motion, each cord strange and rough against her unaccustomed fingertips.

Steeling herself, she eased the front door open and, for the first time, looked out upon the new world.

The first few days were heaven. She had lived in this city all her life, but there were so many things she still hadn’t done – and that had been because there were always too many people around, fussing and clucking and staring and judging and putting her off the whole idea. Now, with so many dead and most others in a state of transformation, she practically had the whole place to herself. She waltzed into empty ice cream parlours and gorged herself on triple scoops of strawberry swirl, of peach sorbet, of mint choc chip with extra sprinkles, sucking glacé cherries off each fingertip. She shattered the windows of boutiques with Rose’s lacrosse stick and tried on expensive dresses and absurd hats that cost ten times her father’s annual salary. She broke into the library with some difficulty, finally shimmying up a drainpipe and squeezing in through an open window, and read until it got too dark to see. There was something so wonderfully naughty and illicit about her escapades. It was like being an archaeologist, unearthing secrets and gems that had been slumbering just below the surface of the city all this time. She wandered from screen to screen of the cinema and watched whatever had been left playing, idly shovelling popcorn into her mouth and lying across a whole row of seats. Usually at nightfall she went home to sleep, but sometimes she just made up a makeshift pillow of her coat and slept wherever she was. There was no danger anymore. The constant flutter of wings around her was soothing; it reminded her of autumn leaves caught in a sudden gust of wind. Some of the butterflies were obviously family groups, their colouring virtually identical, solemnly sucking at spilled drinks at shop counters or picking at mouldy cakes in the bakery’s display cases. They seemed resigned to their fate. The occasional loner, skittering through the sky in a frenzied panic, might alight precariously on Iris’ arm and ask for help, but she could sweep them off, pretend she hadn’t heard them. Husks of anonymous butterfly bodies littered the streets, clogging the gutters, cracking satisfyingly underfoot; the windows of all the shops were fogged with their dust.

She did still see the occasional human being – it was a rude shock every time, an intrusion on her absolute freedom – but they always seemed to be hurrying home, guiltily clutching haphazard parcels of stolen medicines or groceries to their chests, or avoiding her eye as they trundled down the street with wheelbarrows of goods, and paid her little heed. She was relieved not to have to interact with them. These encounters grew less and less frequent until she realised one day that she hadn’t seen another living soul for an entire week. One week turned into two turned into three, and then she knew she’d won a game she hadn’t even realised she’d been playing. Nobody asked her for money on the street or yelled at her to do her chores or hogged the bathroom or told her “No”. It made her heart swell with wicked joy she tried to suppress at first, but ultimately allowed to swell and flourish like a poisonous vine sprouting deadly blooms. How incredible it was that her heart’s secret wish had been fulfilled! How lucky, lucky, lucky she was to have her very own world!

On a fine day that had suddenly turned overcast, she got caught in a sudden deluge. A hundred thousand butterfly corpses instantly turned into mulch, their scent rising sweetish and sickly from the pavement. Iris pulled her coat tighter around her throat and ran for the nearest shop awning. Out of habit, she picked up a stone to crack the window, but when she tried the door, it was already unlocked.

She entered and glanced around inquisitively, her lank hair dripping. She squeezed it out, then did the same with her skirt, making small puddles on the tiles.

The shop smelled musty, and some of the shutters were down, but only partly, as if they had been tugged at with great haste. It had the air of a cave. A swallowtail floated in a recently-abandoned mug of coffee. Behind one changing room curtain, a single cabbage white, disintegrating in a tangle of sequinned cloth. Iris reached up to touch the hems of the bleached white tennis skirts, remembering Rose. The pretty pleats swung gently overhead. Half-dressed mannequins stood to attention; Iris derived childish pleasure from manipulating their limbs into compromising poses, until one heavy white arm sheared clean off in her hands. She left the female mannequin crudely groping the flat plastic crotch of the male, and used the arm to sift through the racks of costumes.

A gauzy lavender gown caught her eye. Iris was not usually one for finery, but this was something else. It was somewhere between a ballerina’s tutu and a ballgown, with a stiff satin bodice and a long, rustling skirt comprising featherlike layers of tulle. Before she could stop and think about it, she gave into the urge, wriggling into the dress and lacing a pair of discarded ballet shoes all the way up her calves with satin ribbon. Then she posed.

A stupid gawky girl glared out of the mirror – flat where she should have been rounded, stiff where she should have been malleable, black-eyed and black-haired and black-hearted. Resentment turned to ashes in her mouth. She wasn’t Rose. What was she trying to achieve?

Her own clothes were still soaked through; she was loath to struggle back into them, a sticky second skin. In a sudden burst of rage she hurled the mannequin’s arm at the mirror. Glass fragments exploded all over the shop, coating the chairs and the floor with dangerous glitter. Iris turned away and headed home.

The house on Wilbur Drive was as cold as a tomb. Her breath billowed before her as she tiptoed through the hall.

Shivering convulsively, she hastened to ignite the fire in the kitchen with numb fingers – but of course, there was no gas. Her dead father could no longer pay the bills.

She sat back on her heels and considered. There was nothing stopping her striking a match, setting her mother’s romance novels alight – that was really all they were good for, wasn’t it?

But no – she knew she wouldn’t. She couldn’t bring herself to do it. She couldn’t bear to move the ironed school uniforms or the newspapers or the Teach Yourself French cassettes because they were just as her mother and father and sister had left them.

Suddenly the house no longer seemed to belong to her. It was a museum, a memorial to untimely loss. A great weight of sadness settled like sediment in the pit of her stomach.

It was her eighteenth birthday.

She was cold. Her ballet slippers were already filthy and wearing through at the toes. The dance costume was starting to look tawdry now, the hem unpicked, the skirt trailing lace and satin, but still she kept moving, hastening through the ruined streets with a sob in her throat and a chill in her bones. It was the end of the party. It was the end of the world. It was time for all this to be over forever.

Where was she going? She didn’t know, but she had to leave this town. She half-walked, half-ran, blinded by tears, through streets she had never seen before – overturned dustbins, bicycles without wheels, homeless encampments. The stench of wet cardboard and urine. Out of breath, she finally pressed her palms to a graffitied wall and leaned against it, hair hanging down, staring at the ground. Desperation yielded to calm, which became clarity. What was she thinking? She couldn’t just leave. She was being impulsive where she needed to be rational. Whatever awaited her beyond here, it wasn’t going to be good. She would need warmer clothes, proper shoes, candles, matches, tinned food. Supplies. She was profoundly hungry, she realised – hungry not for stolen sweets but for real food. What she wouldn’t give for a hot stew of real meat and veggies grown in the garden! Even if she were somehow able to find the ingredients now, she wouldn’t have the faintest idea how to prepare them. Violet had tried to teach her, but she had never listened, thinking herself above such household drudgery…

She was hurting now, yearning in a deep-down place she was unable to reach. Having stepped across the threshold of adolescence into adulthood, she wanted more than anything to be mothered, to be babied. She looked around, praying for a sign, waiting for direction.

In an upstairs window of a terraced house across the street, a single light was burning.

She crept through the unkempt grass of the front garden, strewn with crisp packets and empty cans of energy drink like so many strange flowers. The door had been left ajar, or – more likely – prised open at some point. In the pitch black hall, she stepped on the rim of a dog bowl, which spun and clanged as she stepped back, startled. Pressing her lips together, she followed the subtle glow along the landing…

A moon-shaped nightlight glimmered faintly in what would once have been a child’s bedroom. Covering every surface was a fine coating of butterfly dust, thicker than anywhere she’d seen it yet; the floor was invisible under layers of brittle and broken butterfly bodies. It brought tears to Iris’ eyes to picture them – fluttering in their thousands around this abandoned beacon, clinging to light and life. Gently, so gently, she picked it up – it was lighter than she’d thought – and carried it to the other bedroom.

The adults’ wardrobe was mostly empty, save a few odds and ends. Sifting through them, she found a shift of grey wool. It had a small tear in the back, but that could be mended, and it would keep her warm.

The blankets of the couple’s bed were like ice, but she pressed her hands between her knees and hunkered down and gradually, a small pocket of warmth formed around her. She turned on the radio on the nightstand  and left it running all night, trying to convince herself that the missives of doom and the shipping forecast were the soothing burble of her parent’s voices.

The radioactive quality of the light woke her at dawn. Blinking the plum-coloured blurs out of her vision, she padded slowly down the stairs, her hand trailing along the dusty banister. She ate a handful of nuts from a packet and picked the mites out of a small bowl of dry cornflakes. Old orange stains of baby food blemished the formica table. Pale rectangles marked the walls where family photographs had once hung. She put the empty bowl in the sink and headed out.

The lake was placid and still as a sheet of grey-green glass. The dry reeds said hush, hush as she ascended to the boardwalk, but there was no-one left to whom she could have betrayed their secrets. Sitting at the edge, she let her legs hang into empty space, tendrils of hair softly rising and falling in the occasional breeze, watching the nothingness for a long time.

Then she spotted it.

A timid whisper of colour; a mere suggestion of life, balancing on a single bulrush stem.

She made a curved bowl of her hands and closed her fingers around the city’s final butterfly.

Instantly six hair-thin legs braced themselves against her palm: confused, waiting. Two tiny antennae drooped dolefully, soft as a sigh. Maybe the little creature was saying something to her, some profound last words, a final message to the world: she listened, but could not hear. She felt the fragile wings flutter like eyelashes, tickling her palms, then fold against each other with subjugate grace and fall still.

Iris lifted her thumbs. There it was. A compact, dead little parcel. A life story folded into a pretty envelope.

She put the envelope into the pocket of her skirt and walked towards the seared white scar of the horizon as the sunset bled crimson and flame and gold over Butterfly City.



BIO

A translator by trade, Lesley Warren lives for language. Born in Wales and now resident in Germany, her work encompasses themes of alienation, identity and “otherness”. Her poetry and prose have appeared in a variety of journals, anthologies and a podcast. 










ON MY BALCONY, NOVEMBER

by Alan Brayne


The moon hangs heavy tonight,
A ball of thickened yellow
Dripping treacle onto the sea.
It’s not a night
For fairy wings, or things
That are lighter than air,
Butterflies and feathers of mythical birds,
Thoughts that may take flight.

A cruise ship glitters vulgar
On the horizon, two strips of lights
Slice starkly through the darkness
With blatant bonhomie; I imagine
Boozy faces, balloons and party hats,
Tunes smooth as maple syrup,
A clumsy, groping dance.

And here am I, alone.
Yet, truth to tell, I cannot say
I’m lonely, there’s a loneliness
Greater than this: a feeling that faces
Are masks, that bodies may edge close
But must not touch, an intimacy
Of distance.

The lazy moon floats higher
In the sky, but as its colour pales,
Strangely it glows warm. The cruise ship
Has moved on. The sky is wild with stars
And, foolish as it may be,
I let my lips catch butterflies
Which my eyes only see



NEU!


It’s new! It’s new!
But by tomorrow the shine
Will have dulled, and grizzled old men
Will explain what it all means.
Bright young things, meanwhile,
Will pose in peacock chairs
In virtual nightclubs,
The newest, glossiest peacocks on the scene.

Everything’s preserved now, so
Everything is swallowed
In obscurity, history held hostage
In a cage with intangible bars.
Old-time music plays
On an endless loop, an endless loop
With a beat that repeats and repeats,
But nobody hears.

Everything’s preserved now, so
History conjures from its cage
A range of ancient new toys,
And a raga or a Javanese gamelan
Floats drowsy like opium poppies
Over yesterday’s strawberry fields.
So rest in peace, my bright young things,
Amid your newest noise.



THE SKIN OF VIRGINS


The doctor has a glass eye
And a needle. “Inoculation time,”
He announces, with a grin, “All the feckless poor
Must take the serum.”

The wedding cake stands ten tiers high.
Delicate fingers slice into it,
Delicate mouths peck nimbly
At strawberry icing.

Tuxedos and awards, flashbulbs,
Pats on backs, loud celebration. The boffins
Who mixed this latest elixir of youth
Are allowed to watch from the door.

The Countess bathes in blood
To smooth her wrinkles; she can smell
The skin of virgins on her skin. How dare
They have been so young?

The poor will always be with us,
We say; we never mention
The rich. I guess we’re scared
Of the needle.



EUROPE 2023


Hush now, little dolls,
Don’t make even a peep:
Daddy’s polishing his medals
And mustn’t be disturbed.

And everyone loves Daddy,
Tin soldier in his uniform,
Whose punishments
Are just a form of love.

Mommy’s busy gossiping
Over the fence: she eyes the gem
Around her neighbour’s neck,
The neighbour she’ll later betray.

Fear or love.

Fear or love,
It’s all the same
In these games
Of heroes and villains.

The dolls gather at their windows:
Daddy mounts his horse
And strides the street,
Mommy flashes her jewels.

Six million slabs of meat
And we’ve learned nothing.



THE NORMAL FOLK


It’s the normal folk we have to worry about,
The alarm clocks that go off at six,
The prissy little lawns, the spice jars
In a row.

The people too genteel
To brandish pitchforks, yet
In their nightly hallucinations
Jackals howl, bodies get dismembered,
Their lawns seep blood.

And when the voice on the radio
Tells them to be watchful
Because under the cloak of darkness
Shadows are stealing their spice jars,
They check their fence.

It’s the normal folk we have to worry about,
Decency dressed in Sunday best,
The doorbell playing Mozart, the photos
In the hall.

And when the voice on the radio
Tells them to stand firm
Because otherwise the shadows
Will disconnect their doorbell,
They stand up, they salute,
And they obey.

It’s only normal.



BIO

Alan Brayne is a retired teacher and lecturer from England now living in Malta. He recently self-published a book of poems, fiction and essays, Digging for Water. The author of three novels set in Indonesia: Jakarta Shadows, Kuta Bubbles, and Lombok Flames. Interests include art, film noir, the I Ching, philosophy, and walking. Just recovered from working out how to set up my website: alanbrayne.com

*all poems appear in Digging for Water







Howl

Jeffrey Wengrofsky, The Wolfboy of Rego Park (Far West Press, 2023).

Reviewed by Michael Weingrad


Jeffrey Wengrofsky’s collection of autobiographical vignettes The Wolfboy of Rego Park is a little 88-page memorial to . . . what? To friends who died young, to the 1980s New York punk scene he participated in as a zine-writing teen, to his youth. But, more than anything, to a pre-internet way of being, when esoterica needed to be stored in the brain, to be shared face-to-face with other aficionados of the band or book you loved; when rebels didn’t have Instagram accounts and their “influence” was the stuff of urban legend and personal stories told at the bar.

The trajectory of Wengrofsky’s youth runs from working-class Jewish Queens (“After decades of coating the ships of the Brooklyn Navy Yard with lead-infused paint, grandpa came down with cancer”) and its public school childhood of comic books and neighborhood freaks and classroom bullies, to the semi-united tribes of early ’80s punk and CBGBs slam dancing, to teenage Marxism and a jail booking after a protest, to where a lot of us wound up: pomo theory and grad school.

Wolfboy’s chapters are a mix of deft reticence and unflinching revelation, the latter especially in the understated yet queasy portrait of one early punk mentor and his sexual predations. Though he writes in first-person and everything is suffused with personal meaning, Wengrofsky is always focused on other people, the conspirators and musicians and gurus and menaces, their codes and habits. Of one departed punk/dandy friend, a band frontsman and at times pianist, switchboard operator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and bartender near St. Marks Place, Wengrofsky recalls:

then in the twilight of youth, Peter already had an ethic of sorts, and people were invited into his life along axes of common interest: he liked wine and liquor, pre-war and pre-TV culture and style (he’d grab my tie and say “we are little gentlemen”), meat, and, sadly, cocaine (a big-league taboo nostalgic to the 1920s and certainly non-fattening).

From Tompkins Square Park or the roof of a LES walk-up, they would “howl into the deep inky still of the starless Manhattan sky.” 

The howls of Wolfboy join what seems to me a growing number of books by us Gen-Xers figuring out how to articulate the vanishing sense of our youth in the 1980s and thereabouts. Reviewing my own 1980s novel in verse, Jonathan Geltner (himself the author of a beautiful 1980s-facing novel) put my Gen X spin on Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin in this context of “a new kind of nostalgia.” Geltner says:

We are the last generation to recall life in the Analog World. We remember the Cold War, and first love . . . before the Internet. We remember how the world felt before it was mediated (even Dungeons & Dragons!) by screens. And we are doing everything in our power to get that world down on paper—or, indeed, on a screen—before the chance and the memory is lost (like tears in rain?).

Subtle, brutal, Wengrofsky’s Wolfboy is a worthy, punk-infused little entry in this race to chronicle not only our memories, but how we remembered.

Wengrofsky continues to swim the outré currents of New York creativity: acting, teaching at places like the New School, working for various art and theory mags, hosting podcasts, making short documentaries, and organizing an annual film festival connected with a production collective. Does something of punk then still live? Perhaps in spirit, though Wolfboy demonstrates that Wengrofsky knows when an elegy is called for. It seems fitting that the final chapter leaves us uneasily with Wengrofsky on the subway, but in 2019, smartphone in hand.



BIO

Michael Weingrad is the author of Eugene Nadelman: A Tale of the 1980s in Verse (Paul Dry Books, 2024). He is currently writing a book about Jews and fantasy literature.









The Devil Walked Here
Work in Progress
Power Prayer
Last One to Leave the Party
Seen
The Rapture
You Get to Make the Choice
Lucky Day
The Garden of Eden is Hot
I will Put You in a Box So You’ll Never Grow Up

Jaina Cipriano

Jaina Cipriano is an experiential designer, filmmaker and photographer exploring the emotional toll of religious and romantic entrapment. Her worlds communicate with our neglected inner child and are informed by explosive colors, elevated play and the existence of light in the dark.

Jaina writes and directs award winning short films that wrestle with the complicated path of healing. Her second short, ‘Trauma Bond’ is a dreamy, coming of age thriller that explores what happens when we attempt to heal deep wounds with quick fixes. In 2023 Trauma Bond took home the grand prize at the Lonely Seal International Film Festival.

Jaina’s photographic works are fabricated by hand in her Lowell studio. Working with Jaina is often described as cathartic and playful. Her photographic work has been shown at Griffin Museum of Photography, the Photographic Resource Center/Boston, PhotoPlace Gallery VT, Medium San Diego among others.

She is the founder of Finding Bright Studios, a design company specializing in set design for music videos, immersive spaces and public art. Jaina is the owner and executive director of the longstanding Arlington International Film Festival. She has collaborated with GRRL HAUS, Boston Art Review, and was a Boston Fellow for the Mass Art Creative Business Incubator, a finalist in EforAll Merrimack Valley and was a participant in the city of Boston’s Un-monument augmented reality workshop.

jainaphoto.com

Photo by Henry Marte

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS

Laconia Gallery, The Empty Mirror, Boston, MA, 2023.

Boston University 808 Gallery, Dreamscapes: Finding the Light Through Immersive Design, Boston, MA, 2022 Beacon Street Gallery, The Infinite Mirage of Rapture, Brookline, MA, 2022.

Griffin Museum of Photography WinCam Gallery, The Infinite Mirage of Rapture, Winchester, MA, 2021.

Shelter in Place Gallery, Empty Spaces,

Boston, MA, 2020.

Gallery Seven, Directed Imagination, Maynard MA. Curated by Kelli Costa and Nick Johnson, 2019.

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS

Kingston Gallery, TOO HOT!, Boston, MA. Juried by Jessica Roscio, 2024.

Cambridge Art Association, Blue 2023, Cambridge, MA. Curated by Abigail Ogilvy, 2023.

Rivalry Projects, collective selection / selective collection, Buffalo, NY. Curated by Camilø Álvårez, 2023.

Medium Photo, Size Matters, San Diego, CA. Curated by C. Meier, 2023 Photographic Resource Center, Night of Film, Cambridge, MA, 2023.

NE Sculpture, Artifactuality, Minneapolis, MN. Curated by Allison Baker and Jannell Hammer.

The Curated Fridge, Winter 2023, Somerville, MA. Curated by Brian Piper. Leica Gallery, Inward Outward, Boston, MA. Curated by OJ Slaughter, 2022.

Panopticon Gallery, First Look 2022,

Online, 2022.

The British Journal of Photography,

Edition 365, 2021.

Rhode Island Center for Photographic Art, Behind the Lens Plus 2021: Women in Photography, RI, 2021.

Emerson Contemporary Gallery, Digital Dreams, Boston, MA, 2020.

PhotoPlace Gallery, Altered Realities, Online Gallery. Middlebury, VT. Curated by Brooke Shaden, 2019.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gampat, Chris. “5 Women Photographers You Should Teach Your Kids About.” The Phoblographer, 16 Feb. 2024, www.thephoblographer.com

Photographie, L’Œil de la. “Jaina Cipriano.” The Eye of Photography Magazine, 16 Dec. 2023, loeildelaphotographie.com

Gampat, Chris. “The 12 Most Inspirational Photographers of 2023: A List of the Best.” The Phoblographer, 9 Dec. 2023, www.thephoblographer.com

Gampat, Chris. “Jaina Cipriano Is the Best Thing since Gregory Crewdson.” The Phoblographer, 3 Dec. 2023, www.thephoblographer.com

“As Luck Would Have It Artist Feature – Jaina Cipriano.” 13FOREST Gallery, 19 July 2023, 13forest.com

Sleboda, Kathleen. “Newly Remodeled 808 Gallery Opens with Immersive Show Exploring Fantastical Worlds.” Boston University, 23 Sept. 2022, www.bu.edu

COMMISSIONS

Who Invited Them?, 2024, Providence, RI, Level 99.

Cartoon Fire Pits, 2023, Boston, MA, BRM Production Management and Massport.

Butter Bench, 2023, Boston, MA, Johnny Cupcakes.

PUBLIC ART

NERVOUS SYSTEM, 2023, Boston, MA,

Isenberg Projects, Boston Art Review and The Fenway.

Tiny Memphis Room, 2023, Boston, MA, Boston Art Review.

Park Shitty

by Melissa Or


I never knew CD’s real name. I just knew that’s what they called him because his eyes flattened into thin CD-like slits when he was stoned. Perhaps if I were in the same grade as those guys, I would have heard teachers call CD by his legal name, but I was five years younger than they were. Thinking back now, I was much too young to be hanging around high school seniors. Especially those seniors.

It might sound strange that they tolerated a dorky middle schooler tagging along, but even guys like that, especially guys like that, needed something to believe in. You’re gonna be the one who gets out, they’d tell me again and again, as if repeating it would eventually will it into fruition. I think they needed to hear it more than I did. Especially CD. He was my older sister’s boyfriend, which is how I got to know those guys in the first place. He didn’t seem to give a shit about my sister, but he was invested in making sure that I did something with my life. It didn’t really matter what that something was, but everyone seemed to think it required getting out of Park City. Which was fine by me.

The thing with Park City was that if you happened to spot it on a map and see it nestled all cozy between the Great South Bay on Long Island’s southern shoreline and the swank star-studded Hamptons to the east, you’d surely mistake it for one of the island’s many quaint beach villages. You’d imagine this perfect little town where yuppies draped sweaters over their shoulders as they walked in and out of small expensive shops that all looked the same; and not only would you picture sidewalks, but you’d also line them with flowers and street lamps; and your mind would probably also build a charming brick schoolhouse with a flag that had never been defaced and a roof that had never leaked. But for some reason Park City, even the name of the town itself, never lived up to its potential. It had been established by an obscure signer of the Declaration of Independence who happened to settle there in 1770 with ambitions of creating an international port and commercial center. Sadly, the town never grew up to become the “city” its founder had envisioned. Nor did it ever contain an actual “park” unless you counted the area beside the landfill that had been fenced off to protect migrating birds who stopped in for quickies on their way to South America. We called that overgrown strip of land the Bird Brothel, and it sort of functioned more or less like a park because it was where a lot of kids went to try drugs or sex for the first time.

Later on, when I did get out, and I would tell people that I was from Long Island, I saw how their eyes would adorn with visions of Gatsby’s gilded Eggs, and although I knew I was misleading them, I didn’t want to explain that I had grown up in the only south shore town that never became a summer tourist destination for celebrity Manhattanites. Instead of multi-million dollar beach estates enclosed by behemoth hedges and electric fences, my home town was known for its abundance of Section Eight housing. Before I met him, CD spray-painted over Park City’s welcome sign in order to announce to anyone who exited the main road for a pit stop on their way to the Hamptons, that they were “Now Entering Park City Shitty.” The sign was replaced about a year later, but the name stuck. That’s the thing with identities, they just get lodged in people’s heads, and after a while there’s no way to extract them.

CD looked out for me in the only way he knew how, by creating an ever-expanding list of drugs that I was never, under any circumstance whatsoever, to even pretend to try. He wrote his list on one of those long shopping pads that had a refrigerator magnet on the back. He said these were drugs that could fuck a person up so badly that I had to swear on my grandmother’s grave to abstain from trying, no matter how tempted I might be. (You’d think since he was dating my sister, he would have known that all of my grandparents were still alive.) There were so many drugs on his list, and he seemed to add to it every time I came over, that I was sure some must have been repeated or made up. It was three pages deep and included a lot of substances that I had never heard of, and some that I had heard of but never thought of as intoxicants. I remember wondering what it was about those particular drugs that made them worse than others. After all, I had grown up in the Nancy Reagan era, when we were told that all illicit drugs were created with equal capacity to scramble a kid’s brain up like the egg in the commercial that aired during After School Specials.

CD used to hang out with these two other guys, Rod and Hoff. Rod was the first emancipated minor I ever knew. His father got so fucked up one night that he beat the shit out of Rod while he was sound asleep in his bed, so Rod got a lawyer to help him file for emancipation. This was the first time I heard the word “emancipation” used in a way that was not associated with slavery. It was also the first time I heard of anyone going to court to gain a right instead of having one taken away. A judge granted Rod’s request, and the government let him live in one of the subsidized apartments off the highway. He got a small studio above the Roy Rogers, which was convenient when we got the munchies. You see, CD said, lawyers make so much money that they can do cases like Rod’s for free. That’s what I’m talking about. What are you talking about, Rod asked? No one ever knows what he’s talking about, Hoff said. For the Nerd, CD said, referring to me. That’s what I’m talking about for the Nerd. For when she grows up and gets the fuck out of here. Attorney General Nerd or some shit like that. I looked up at the mention of my nickname, but my fingers were deep in Rod’s ashtray, fishing for roaches to take home with me, and Rod said, Yeah, that’s real lawyer material right there, and we all laughed.

Although Rod was a dealer, Hoff was the real thing. Pretty much everything about Hoff was next-level. He was particularly compulsive about things that really mattered to him, which meant that he had a ripped body, an impeccable car, and an endless series of tanned, toned girlfriends he met at the gym. Not to mention his lucrative drug business. He actually used to grow his own weed on the side of Sunrise Highway, up in the woods where no one would go except maybe for some animals. We used to joke about all the deer that must have been inadvertently getting high back there. Hoff really had it going on back then. At some point, his harvest was so plentiful that he had to hire a couple of those guys who stood on the side of the road by the exit ramps holding “Will Work for Food” signs. They were good workers, Hoff said, even if they couldn’t speak much English. He paid them in actual money and weed instead of just food, and he said they were priceless because they were too afraid of getting deported to report him. Hoff also dealt a lot of the drugs that were on CD’s no-no list. The list was for me, not for the guys.

Like Rod, Hoff had his own apartment, but not because he was emancipated. Because he was earning a ton of money and his parents didn’t seem to notice or care that he moved out. But there was no way Hoff would let us over to his place because he was a real clean freak. Everyone knew that he vacuumed his apartment every day just before he left, and that he was so obsessive-compulsive about the whole thing that the vacuum tracks had to be perfectly straight and parallel with the wall, and if they weren’t, he’d start over again. He was so nuts about those lines on his carpet that he would vacuum backwards, all the while edging towards the front door, where he would eventually leave the vacuum in order to avoid defiling the perfectly straight carpet lines. That’s why Hoff was late all the time, and everyone would poke fun at him for it, saying he was late because he was doing lines.

The last time I saw Hoff must have been about eight years ago in what used to be the Roy Rogers below Rod’s old apartment. At that time, it was a 7-11, and I was in a hurry to grab a coffee before catching the train back to Manhattan after visiting my folks. I brushed right past him without realizing who he was.

Jessica’s Sister, he said. Hey, Nerd! How are you?

I recognized his voice, but when I turned to face him, he looked nothing like the Hoff I knew from the old days, even though it had only been a few years since I had graduated from high school. Instead of the well-toned and manicured guy I used to know, the one whose artificial tan had accentuated a beaming white toothy smile, Hoff now appeared before me as an old, almost grotesque, stranger. Even his posture was different. He used to have the starchy upright stance of a weightlifter, but now he was sort of hunched and weathered, like a tarped Weber grill in winter. Several of his teeth had rotted out, and his T-shirt looked like it had been plucked from one of those Goodwill bins outside the Stop & Shop.

How’s your sister? How’s your family? How’s…He threw questions at me frenetically, but he was sweet and genuine, happy to see me. How’s the big city life treating you, he asked and then laughed for no reason, which made me self-conscious. I felt dozens of judgmental eyes peer straight through soda displays and Slurpee signs, and hone in on me as if to ask what a young woman dressed like President Clinton’s wife was doing chatting with a homeless meth head. Not that he was homeless. At least I don’t think he was. But those eyes went right through my pants suit, and I swear they saw me for who I really was.

Later, when I told my sister about running into Hoff, she said, And this used to be the guy who was so OCD that he vacuumed himself out of his house. Used to be— as though he was not the same guy. You know, she said, Hoff should have died a long time ago. And angry as that made me, I imagined this very scenario: Hoff disappearing in his prime, when he was still smiling like Knight Rider or oiling his abs like the guy in Baywatch, before our shitty little town dug its shitty little meth-rot teeth into him. Not to sound callous though, because dying too early, no matter how honorable the death, is no prize either, and I know this because that’s exactly what happened to CD’s little brother, Bruce.

Bruce was the same age as I was, but I never saw him at school because he was in special classes. Sometimes he would hang around with CD, but the guys never called him anything but his real name, even though he was an easy target for a nickname due to his cognitive impairment. CD wouldn’t tolerate so much as a joke made at Bruce’s expense. Their whole family was protective of him, actually. Their dad coached Bruce’s baseball team for the sole purpose of making sure that the other players wouldn’t make fun of him. CD told me that if I played on the team, his dad would look out for me too. You got brains, but you need a scholarship if you’re gonna actually go to college and be a lady lawyer, and there’s really no money in softball, CD said. I figured he was right, and I joined the team.

CD’s dad did look after me as best he could, but since I was the only girl in the league, I had to endure a surprising amount of shit-talking from the opposing players. The parents were the worst though. They’d actually yell things at me like, Girls can’t hit, you cunt! And, Put the bat down and pick up a spatula. A fucking spatula? That’s what they came up with to insult me? Grown adults telling a kid she was a cunt in need of a spatula? Even then, I knew I shouldn’t let that nonsense get in the way of my performance. After all, I was a better player than most of the guys in the league, and I was sure that only a few of them would have made the girls’ varsity softball team at school. Not that they would have wanted to try. It’s just that even though they weren’t much competition for me, it was their attitude about who I should be that posed the real challenge.

Admittedly, the harassment got to me more often than it should have. I didn’t have terribly high self-esteem to begin with. During one at-bat early in the season, a mom yelled, Join the God-damned Girl Scouts!, just as I swung and missed on a third strike. Everyone laughed, even my own teammates. The catcher chuckled and sorta snorted behind his mask, then he dropped the ball, so I booked it to first base. Apparently, I was the only nerd on the field who knew the rules. The other team’s coach screamed for the catcher to throw the ball. Throw it! Throw it, he shouted, it’s a freakin’ dropped-third-strike!

When I think about it now, I imagine the catcher must have been confused, but I don’t know for sure because I didn’t look back. I just ran down the line with all the rage of a girl who needed to prove her worth. The first baseman was standing right on the bag with his arm stretched stupidly over the baseline. His glove was wide open, and I could see his eyes as they followed the ball over my head toward his mitt. What an idiot, I thought as I ran through him. My body met his just as the ball reached his glove, and I stepped on the bag as he fell to the ground and the ball trickled toward the foul line. The umpire stretched his arms and yelled, Safe!, and my whole team cheered as though we won a championship game or something. Then two parents came out to walk the first baseman off the field. He was sniffling, trying not to cry. I stayed on the base like I owned it. I wanted to run to second because no one had actually called a time out and the ball was technically still in play, but I refrained.

I sort of knew that kid who played first. His name was Neil, and he was in my photography class. He didn’t have friends in the class because he constantly walked into the dark room when other people were in the middle of developing their film, and it would just fuck up everyone’s photos. He was that kind of kid, and I suspected he was told a hundred times not to stand on the baseline just as Mr. Fox, our art teacher, told him not to go in the darkroom when the red light was on. I felt bad that I knocked him down, but that was the rule– if a fielder is in the baseline, the runner still has the right of way. Yet, I felt sorry for Neil because a girl had taken him out, which was just about the most humiliating thing a girl could do to a guy, aside from laughing at his prick. But I didn’t feel too bad because the incident made my teammates actually like me. Even later in the season, they would still take turns imitating how I threw up my elbow just before ramming into Neil. That pussy deserved to get plowed by The Girl, they would say. They called me, The Girl. I liked that name better than Jessica’s Sister or Nerd.

One day I got to practice early, and only the Tommys were there. As I leaned my bike against the fence, I saw Tall Tommy shoving his fingers under Ugly Tommy’s nose, and Ugly Tommy said, Damn, that pussy smells sweet– I wouldn’t ever wash my hands if I was you. They didn’t stop talking about Jenna Passanti’s sweet smell on Tall Tommy’s fingers, even when they turned to see that it was The Girl who was walking toward them. I just sat on the bench and didn’t say anything. Tall Tommy passed me the joint they had been sharing, and I took a long hit, even though I was afraid I might catch an STD, being that it was only one degree removed from Jenna Passanti’s crotch.

About a month later, on the first day of tenth grade, Jenna Passanti was found in the woods just inside the Bird Brothel. She was partially naked and all beat up by her boyfriend, Pete Mason. Pete was one of those kids who wore Polo shirts and had a nice smile and who said all the right things, but who was really a fucking douchebag, my sister said. She said this before Pete beat up Jenna, so I guess it was sorta well-known that he was no good. Jenna was in my grade though, so she probably didn’t know that the older kids thought Pete was an asshole.

Channel 12 News, the Long Island TV station, was obsessed with the whole thing. It reported that Jenna had made fun of the way Pete performed sexually, and that was why Pete beat the living shit out of her and then sexually assaulted her. So then Mr. Pearl, the Health teacher, made us watch every video he could find on date rape. This was in addition to the usual scare-tactic videos he used to show us, including the documentary that featured real-life addicts shooting heroin into their eyeballs because there were no other viable places left on their bodies to inject needles. It was depressing. We all swore we’d never do heroin or let a guy beat us up, but we also knew that the odds were that some of us would. I hated high school, even though I got good grades, and I just wanted to cut and hang out with CD and Rod and Hoff, who had already graduated, but those guys wouldn’t tolerate me missing school. Eventually, we all just went our separate ways.

A year after I graduated from high school, and a few years before I ran into Hoff at the 7-11, CD’s brother, Bruce, got shit-faced at Mr. Lucky’s Pub. He decided to do the prudent thing and walk home, leaving his old Skylark on the graveled pathway behind the bar that served as Mr. Lucky’s parking lot. About half-way home, Bruce was struck by a drunk driver and killed instantly. He was left on the side of Sunrise Highway until the early morning when a cop happened to slow down to watch some deer grazing nearby and then noticed Bruce face-down in the grass.

I was so far removed from that whole scene by then that I probably wouldn’t have known about Bruce dying if I didn’t happen to be in Park City at the time on a break from college. I went to the wake. All the boys were there. CD, of course, and Rod and Hoff. The Tommys were also there, as were most of the other players from our team. The funeral home was packed, so most of us had to hang outside, which was fine with me because I did not want to see Bruce lying dead in a coffin at nineteen years old.

After the wake, a bunch of us went to the diner, and we sat at one of those round booths in the corner where they put large groups. CD shared a story about this one time when he went to the diner with Bruce and Hoff. Bruce had wanted to order one of the cakes in the display case. Not just a slice of it, but the whole cake for the three of them to share. This was after Bruce had gotten a job at the hardware store due to some government program that compensated local businesses for hiring people with disabilities. Bruce was so proud to get the job that he wanted to treat his older brother and his friend, and ordering a whole cake seemed like the best kind of celebration that a guy like Bruce could conjure up in his generous, childish head. CD said no, that they would have come across as being really high had they eaten the whole cake. But we are high, Bruce apparently pleaded. We all laughed because it was funny as hell, and it really captured Bruce’s personality. He would say shit like that all the time, and it would have us laughing really hard, even though Bruce wasn’t trying to be funny. The beautiful thing about Bruce was that he saw everything as it really was, and there really was nothing even a tiny bit funny about the way things actually happened to be.

The waitress came over to take our order, and CD said, We’ll take a whole cake from the display case. Without even looking up at us, the waitress said, The only cake that’s still whole is carrot. So then give us the whole fucking carrot cake, CD said, and she wrote it down on her pad as if it were something she could potentially forget. She walked away, and Tall Tommy said, I wonder if she wrote “whole carrot cake” or “the whole fucking carrot cake.” Then we all went outside into the back of Tall Tommy’s van to take bong hits.

Isn’t this the bong that your mom took, Rod asked, and Tall Tommy said that his mom actually didn’t confiscate his bong, that he must have just lost it because it recently resurfaced. How the fuck do you lose a bong, Ugly Tommy asked. And how the fuck does it just resurface, Rod added. Maybe your mom borrowed it, I said, and the guys all laughed pretty hard. Don’t hog it, CD said, pass it to the Nerd. Are you allowed to smoke weed at Columbia, Tall Tommy asked. Ugly Tommy said, It’s the biggest drug country in the world, of course she can smoke there. She’s at Columbia University, not Colombia the country, you dumbass, CD said, and we all laughed and Ugly Tommy had a huge coughing fit, which made us laugh even more.

We must have reeked when we went back inside the diner. The carrot cake was on the table already sliced and waiting for us along with a stack of plates and napkins. Oh, this is gonna be the best cake ever, Hoff said, and then he added, here’s to Bruce! To Bruce, we all said and for a moment we all felt sober, thinking of poor Bruce doing the right thing and walking home from Mr. Lucky’s. Then Hoff continued, you see where being responsible gets you– gets you dead, that’s where.

We recalled Hoff saying that a couple of years later when we went to the diner after his wake. Being irresponsible gets you dead too, CD said, and we all toasted to Hoff. Then Rod talked about the days when Hoff used to vacuum himself out of his apartment and we all fell silent as we scraped cake crumbs from our plates. What are you doing here, CD said, I thought you got out? You say that like Park City is a prison, I said. It is, they all said in unison. Hey, what are you studying anyway? Shouldn’t you be done with college already? I’m in law school now, I said. Jeez, Nerd!, they all said in unison. Are you going to be a prosecutor, Tall Tommy asked. No, I said, I don’t know, I mean I don’t really like law school. Then the Tommys got up and reenacted the time when I knocked Neil down at first base, and everyone hooted and hollered, and some gray-haired couple turned toward us, rolling their tired eyes passive-aggressively at our brief joyous moment. Seriously, Nerd, what the fuck are you doing here with us, CD pressed. I don’t know, I said. I’m just home on break and then Hoff died and now I’m here fucking around with you guys. How’s your sister, CD asked? She’s alright. She’s engaged to Phil. I always liked your sister, CD said. No you didn’t, I said, You thought she was pretty, maybe, but you didn’t like her. Yeah, she was hot, CD said, and then added, but soon she’s gonna be fat and pregnant with a bunch of little Phils. And they all laughed pretty hard. Really, you need to stop hanging out with us, CD said. Yeah, one day you might prosecute us, Rod said. And no one laughed even a little.

The next time I went back to Park City was for Jessica and Phil’s wedding. None of the guys were invited. My sister wasn’t friends with them anymore. But after the wedding, I met some of them at the diner. I’m not sure why. I was drunk from the wedding and over my head with stress from studying for the Bar Exam, and I didn’t have any other friends in the area. That’s like the hardest test on earth, Ugly Tommy said. She’ll pass, CD said. Then to me, he said, You gotta stop hanging out with us. Then the two of us went outside to where the cigarette machines used to be and did a few bumps of coke off our knuckles. You gotta promise me you’ll get the fuck out of here, he said. Park Shitty’s not that shitty, I said. He smiled and said, then why does it feel so shitty? He had this boyish smile, but this time when he laughed, I could tell his teeth were getting that meth-head rot, and it was sad but also not sad. It’s as though I saw him the way that his little brother Bruce would have seen him: just as he was. No more, no less.

CD suddenly stopped smiling and he looked straight at me and said, You gotta promise me you’ll get the fuck out, you have to make the promise. You always say that, but I already am out, I said. No, you still have a foot here in this shitty town. We left the diner without saying goodbye to the others, and we tip-toed into my parents’ house, into my childhood room, into my bed. We did a few lines of coke off of my Con Law textbook, which CD thought was hilarious. Come on, quote the Constitution he said, and then he deepened his voice and declared, Four score and seven years–

That’s not the fucking Constitution, I said. You must think I’m an idiot, he said and tossed the textbook from my lap, and then he got annoyed at how much coke was wasted on the floor. Don’t be an asshole, I said. He turned to me and pinned me down by my wrists. I told you to get the fuck out of here, he said. His eyes were like two huge holes. There was no emotion to them, but his voice was angry and jittery from the coke. Come on, tough girl, you’re supposed to be a badass. He pushed down hard on my wrists, and I said nothing, just stared at him, feeling his weight press me deeper into the bed, and I wanted to stay there pinned by my desires and my past for perpetuity.

He suddenly let go of my wrists and unzipped my jeans. He looked at me as if to ask if I was sure I wanted to keep going, but I just stared at him. He was not a good fuck, and I wasn’t either. Afterwards, we lay vacuously next to each other, and he said, your tits are hotter than your sister’s. That’s kinda gross to think about, I said. But it felt good to hear. He kissed my forehead with a tenderness that felt like a pat on the head and then he did two lines off my stomach. That was fucking awesome, he said, lifting his head from my belly and rubbing his nose with his fist, and I got the feeling that he was mimicking something he had seen in a movie. Wasn’t that fucking awesome, he said. What, I wanted to ask, but instead I said, The Constitution, Article I, Section 1: All legislative powers shall be granted to a Congress. It wasn’t an exact quote by any means, but it didn’t matter.

You gotta be fuckin’ kidding me, Nerd, he said with that decaying boyish smile, then he dipped down to lick some stray coke off my belly. I liked the way his tongue was warm and adoring, as though it felt lucky to be able to taste my skin. I can’t believe you exist and you chose to fuck me, he whispered, I mean, why the fuck did you fuck me? You know where I’m gonna end up, don’t you? Where, I asked? He just shook his head.

The next morning, my dad banged on my door and yelled at me to get up before my pancakes got cold. CD must have snuck out at some point after I fell asleep. He would have gotten a kick out of the way my dad folded the pancakes into mini chocolate-chip tacos.

The last I heard, when CD’s mom went to visit him in the hospital, she was taken aback by his painted fingernails. She saw the polished nails first, then the restraints which tightly bound his wrists to the bed rails, then the bruises on his eyes and chin. The innkeeper–or whatever you call him–found CD earlier that morning in a ground-floor room of the Park City Motel, dressed in drag, lying in his own piss and blood. Can you believe I dated that guy, my sister said. He’s such a loser, prostituting himself out for meth or God knows what.

It was Black Friday, and we were in my parents’ kitchen. Jessica was taking out the Thanksgiving leftovers to make sandwiches. She had separated from Phil, and she and her two girls had been staying with my parents for almost a year already. She knew where everything was kept, the bread, the mayonnaise, the cutting boards. I paced around the kitchen, thinking of the soft, deliberate, even delicate motion of CD’s tongue on my skin. Then I suddenly wondered what color his nails had been painted and whether he had painted them himself. CD was once the kind of person who would have laughed at a man who polished his nails and pimped himself out for drugs.

Oh my God, what a loser, Jessica kept saying, what a fucking loser. OK, damn it, I yelled. Jess, we get the picture. He’s a fucking loser. We got it loud and clear. A. God. Damned. Fucking. Loser. My sister’s youngest daughter was about three at the time, and she kind of looked like I did at her age, with two curly pig-tails on either side of her chubby face. She was sitting on the kitchen floor playing with some Tupperware, staring up at me with her mouth open, and when I looked down at her, she began to cry in that slow way that starts with a confused look, a quivering lip, then finally tears. Oh great, thanks a lot sis, Jessica said.

I took Jessica’s minivan and drove to the diner, but by then the diner had gone out of business and a Family Dollar had sprouted up in its place. When did that happen, I wondered. I smoked up in the parking lot and thought about the organizations that I could create to help people get back on their feet before they end up like CD. But I knew I wouldn’t actually do any such thing. I had already put in my dues at the firm and would be named partner by the end of the year if I continued to play my cards right, so there was no time for charitable work. Then suddenly I was startled by the rapping of knuckles on the passenger-side window.

I turned toward the noise, and a large, pale police officer peered at me through the condensation on the window pane. He made a circular motion with his fist, signaling for me to roll down the window. I did, and he asked, What are you doing? That’s when I realized the joint was still in my mouth, and I thought to myself, this is it, this is the end of everything. Forget partner, you’re fucked.

Dom Harris, one of the firm’s managing partners, told us associates that if we ever got into trouble, we shouldn’t lie. It’s the lie that gets you disbarred, not the indiscretion, he said. Then he added, but at home, to your spouse, you lie like a God-damned rug because the truth gets you fucked in the ass when it comes time for the divorce. However, this wasn’t a curbside blow job or whatever it was that Dom was into. This was weed, and although it’s not a big deal now, it certainly was then. And, I hate to say it, but I also happened to have some other drugs in my purse that would have made CD’s no-no list had he kept it up to date. I had to use every ounce of self-control I had left in my body to avoid glancing at the purse, which was right there on the passenger seat. If I allowed just one flutter of an eyelash to tilt over in its direction, I would have been doomed. Such a look would have been the sort of self-sabotaging giveaway that separates the successful people from the losers of the world. Instead, I concentrated on holding the cop’s gaze and trying not to shift my eyes in any direction whatsoever.

He shined his flashlight through the open window, ignoring the purse and focusing instead on me. I felt exposed for the phony I was. He stared at me long and hard, and he seemed to be thinking or recalling something from his past. Did he know me? He looked a little like everyone I had grown up with but no one person in particular.

What do you think you’re looking at, I wanted to say, but I knew what he was seeing. In the halo of his Maglite sat a displaced woman in designer business-casual clothing who happened to have a joint dangling from her lips. Wearing that sort of Saks get-up in Park City always made me feel like I was playing dress up, as if I were an imposter who would at any moment be discovered for the loser she always was. Finally, the moment was here, the gig was about to be up, and it felt, oddly enough, liberating. Free from having to be the Girl or the Nerd or the Lawyer, or Jessica’s Sister or the One Who Would Make it Out (Who Did Make it Out), I could just be another shitty loser in this shitty town. It felt like failure, and it was fucking invigorating.

I tilted my head back, inhaled as deeply as I could, and through a blissful swirl of exhaling smoke, I whispered so softly that the officer had to lean his head into the car and over my pill-packed purse to hear: Don’t you know, I said, I’m an undercover prosecutor.

He smiled, shaking his head at my calm audacity. Then he laughed out loud in a boyish way that reminded me of CD in the old days, before his teeth started to go bad. Get rid of the drugs, he said.

I opened the driver’s side window and dropped what was left of the joint into the parking lot. He laughed again, Undercover prosecutor, he said under his breath, that’s a good one. To him, the truth was funny. He didn’t see things the way they really were, not the way CD’s dead brother used to, not the way I was starting to.

Now get the hell out of here, he said.

I’m trying. I’m fucking trying.



BIO

Melissa Or crafts fiction that gives voice to the small, unspoken stories that exist beneath life’s many silences. Her characters both belong and do not belong. They are outsiders, whether in their own countries, their own families, or their own minds. She is writing a novel and a collection of short stories. 

Artwork: Image by McZ







ALBA

by Robert Hill Long



Begin with a woman in her doorway—
nightgown and loose robe, the spill
of light from her living room. It’s still less day
than night. Fog scrims the hills,

muffles the black surf below. She looks west.
Wherever she touches a hand
to her body—forehead, cheek, breast—
is a wing applied to a wound.

In the doorway’s dim parenthesis
she lets out ghosts, to burn off
like the fog. There’s no kiss
better than the sun’s; it will come soon enough.

And you, why are you watching her? The woman
facing you is a door. Wake up. Go in.



HANA COAST


In rain, the doves don’t call. Let
the Pacific resume its master narrative—
they blink away the details. Around each eye

a lapis ring chains sky
to sea. They utter a rivulet
of distances, yet live

at your feet. After the flood they flew
here because better than
any surviving thing they heard converging

waves of blue upon black upon blue,
moon upon sun upon moon.
They are the perfecting

of that echo. Their wings in the grass
that buoys your feet are rainclouds. Let them pass.



COMPLICITY


Trailing coastal rubbernecks, she descended
into a cave vibrant with the roar
of breakers and sea lions. Her eyes
stung with salt wrack, bodies black

as torpedoes made of fishmeal and bilge-water.
Once it was a sanctuary; marketing sleaze
made it a zoo. The adults avoided eye contact;
pups stared, refugees behind wire. She ended

her part by turning away. But she
had paid her fraction for the upkeep of this
franchise crowded as the bowels of a slave ship
turned amusement ride. She came up to the clean kiss

of sky, stepped into the road and was nearly hit
by a truck hauling the trunk of a redwood tree.



IMPLORE


Kill me in the water or kill me on the sand.
Kill me among the spruces on the cliff.
She was praying in a church without roof
or walls, crying hard. She could not stand.

In the zigzag of dead things at tideline
she sank. Kill me with sky black with rain
or cold blue going black and empty.
But she did not push her way into the sea.

Hard, hard to pierce the perpetual
noise at the edge of the world. The cold ache
in her knees was telling her to break,
break. No, she was not whole or well

but her fingers held one another, aware
that she was asking to live forever.



BIO



Robert Hill Long has published 6 books and won numerous awards, prizes and fellowships—including 2 from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Raised in North Carolina, he was founding director of the NC Writers Network, and afterward taught in Massachusetts, Oregon, and Pennsylvania.

He lives with his wife Linn Van Meter in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.







BOOK REVIEW

Bright-Eyed by Sarah Sarai


Review by Ed Go


The title of the first poem in Sarah Sarai’s new collection Bright-Eyed is a complete sentence and a bold statement: “Things always work out.” It is an assurance and a promise reinforced toward the end of the poem when the speaker assures the reader that “With the East now behind you, / the lush of you spreads” and promises that you, your “lush,” will flip “the pages of religion” and thumb “through in search of / a promised earthly garden / of ethereal delight.” The speaker is offering comfort here, while the poet takes you on this journey in space (toward the West—“the East now behind you”) and time, as the poems in the following pages unfold revealing growth through adolescence to adulthood.

From “a girl, twelve and studying / the ambient inhalation of family” in “Souls in the Penalty of Flesh” to “This thirteen-year-old / Balancing on crabgrass” in “Two-Story Bldg, on Vernon,” the poems in the first half of Bright-Eyed give us insight into the child the speaker once was: “She is young: a fact which proves nothing” she tells us in “The Crooked Road Without Improvement,” before instructing us:

            To offset appetites for urban nostalgia,

            think: rats: scurrying: ivy’s sprinklered

            banks before the house, before as in:

            I trembled before the hanging judge, so

            trembled ivy before the squatting house.

The poet does not want to indulge in nostalgia, nor does her speaker seek such a simplistic ploy at empathy. The flow of the verses here is from not simply how lines break from phrase to phrase; it flows from colon to colon, reinforced by the repetition of “before”—a word steeped in nostalgia but, as a preposition, functions as a means of positioning the reader, situating them in the present only to view the past. The rapid fire use of colons supports this position: a colon is used to introduce a list or expand on an idea, or both: “think: rats: scurrying: ivy’s sprinklered”—expand your nostalgic thoughts to include rats, and expand that to include scurrying, and then to the sprinklered ivy enjambed onto everything that came before. No, this isn’t mere nostalgia—it’s the establishment of how a life is lived.

Sarai’s command and control of the line is what gives these poems their flourish. Both in her use of enjambment, such as “a girl, twelve and studying / the ambient inhalation of family” and in powerful end-stopped lines, exemplified in “Not Me, It Cries”:

            My past doesn’t haunt me.

            I haunt my past.

            In the middle of the night, it jerks ‘wake:

            “Shit. Now what are you gonna blame me for?”

Unlike enjambed verses, the end-stopped line is a matter of fact statement: “My past doesn’t haunt me” has more power as a statement than the image of the girl studying because we don’t know what she’s studying until the next line when we learn she’s not studying at all; she’s lost in a contemplation of family. The speaker now haunts her past, she tells us in another end-stopped line, and she’s not going to be blamed now. She is no longer the girl, she is the woman who, in the second half of the book, looks back at all the girls now grown: “weirdo girl, prom girl, high-IQ girl, / neutral girl” as well as “nerdy girl, abused girl / abused girl, abused girl, pot-dealing / girl, acid-dropping girl” in “No One’s in High School These Days”—girls “who in / seventy years will be not-so-bitter / girl.” Nostalgia is for the weak, the poet reminds us; the “immovable past girl” is the “future girl”—she has come full circle, come into her own self, alluding back to rats and ivy in “Some Mysteries of Youth Unsolved (Where I lived When I was 13)”:

            rats lay low in ivy,

            a wet bank of it,

            the leveling up of a slope

            straining for your house

            wrapped in scrim.

The girl is a woman now looking back, not nostalgically but understanding poetic “reenactment being / a distortion, a cry, and /even now, a question.”

Sarai’s control of poetic structures is not only demonstrated in enjambed and end-stops verses; it is present in the collection’s prose pieces as well. Prose poems remove the necessary distraction of verse’s line breaks and focuses readers on imagery and ideas. Sarai’s prose runs counter to the rhythms of her verse by creating a more flowing cascade of imagery, as exemplified in the title poem which begins with the reminder “The past is over” before immersing us in the images of the past: “The pain center was a tumor crazy for your right ovary”; “It’s malleable, not like ducklings, more like wet clay shivering in anticipation of thumbs”; “Zero in on the bright-eyed and hopping with more.” Each of these images is connected by ideas: “Memory is unreliable”; “Look to your future”; “Unreliable memory is understudy for sublimity.” All of this grounds the reader in a certain stability that is required when reenacting the past in poetry, and it takes a true practitioner of the art and master of the craft to pull together a collection this vibrant and stunning.

Moving without being sentimental, structured while feeling organic, Sarah Sarai’s Bright-Eyed skillfully displays her command of language to focus the experience of the past into a foundation for the present in order to connect the personal to the universal.



BIO



Ed Go is a Chinese-Filipino-Portuguese-English-Scottish-Irish American writer raised in Massachusetts, Virginia, Alaska, Hawaii and Connecticut. His writings have been published in various online and print journals and anthologies, and his chapbook Deleted Scenes from the Autobiography of Ed Go as told by Napoleon Id was published in 2014 by Other Rooms Press, and “new machines,” a sequence of twenty-one prose poems in the anthology Urgent Bards in 2016 by Urbantgarde Press.







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