IMAGINE US, THE SWARM, by Muriel Leung

Laura Villareal

During my teen years and early twenties, I was a total poser. I’d emulate my friends and the media I consumed without much thought while feeling a low-frequency grief, which I now recognize as rooted in my lack of authenticity. I tried too hard to be different—to stand out—to be someone cool and likeable. What I became was a fragment of myself lost in the amalgam created by pieces of everyone I wanted to impress. There’s something about writing poetry that feels authentically mine. I don’t feel inclined to imitate, only to write the truth of the poem and myself. The poets I admire often lean into their style, syntax, verbal landscapes, and experiment. Muriel Leung is one of those writers. 

            After finishing Leung’s debut book, Bone Confetti (Noemi Press, 2016), I couldn’t wait for her second book to come out. Her writing leaves me with a renewed sense of curiosity about what poetry can do and an excitement to continue pushing on the boundaries of the page as she so often does. I’m in awe of the tenderness and rigor of her poetry, especially in her new book Imagine Us, The Swarm (Nightboat Books, 2021) which, as Kazim Ali describes so aptly in his blurb, as a collection of “seven powerful texts that form a constellation of voices, forms, and approaches to confront loneliness, silence, and death.” Each one of the seven sections feels expansive and distinct in their formal variety and subject matter. From footnotes, to ekphrasis, to essays in verse, to the way poems are situated on the page and expand across pages, I find something new to sit and think about each time. Leung covers a number of topics such as gendered violence, Asian American identity, death, queerness, and labor. 

            In Leung’s essay-in-verse “This Is to Live Several Lives,” she writes, “A bee learns to become a Müllerian mimic, dressed as some other creature with a deadlier poison.” Mimicry happens in nature as a tool of survival. For marginalized communities, especially immigrants, the act of assimilation is how to dress as a “creature with a deadlier poison.” In the poem, Leung speaks of its lasting generational impact, particularly in the speaker’s relationship to work learned from their father’s tireless work ethic. In a conversation with T.K. Lê on Nightboat’s website, she says:

“We are comprised of not just our singular knowledge of the world but the experiences of those who came before us, and we inherit their histories too. Even if we did not grow up with it, I do believe that we carry these histories in our bodies, and they become part of our cellular memory. So, yes, not just a singular once but many.” 

            In “A Careful List of All My Failures,” Leung writes: 

            Claire Jean Kim calls it the “field of racial positions,” the arrangement of different bodies along a dying field, vying for the one blade of fresh cut grass. As if none of us are fit for water.

            What the theory of racial triangulation tells us is the distribution of inequities rooted in white dominance. That I could look to you and feel that I am at once lesser and perhaps fortuitous for having earned that small morsel of god.

            To bend so far back, my spine becomes another flag. Of assimilable colors. 

            And I am not even legible to myself. Cannot not even English my way out.

            This passage has been radiating through me since I first read Imagine Us, The Swarm. I continue thinking about “to bend so far back, my spine becomes another flag. Of assimilable colors,” and “and I am not even legible to myself.” Leung weaves in the voices of theorists and academics with such skill. It adds another layer of nuance and complexity to her poems that are already buzzing with emotional texture and intellectual richness.

            Muriel Leung writes with such intentionality, tenderness, and style that it feels like a masterclass. Leung imagines the future possibilities of her communities and encourages them to imagine better together. I’ll leave you with her final words: “We can write out origins / sacred here and renounce the country of our fear. / There is only our singular pulse when we fill the sky.”


Laura Villareal is the author of Girl’s Guide to Leaving (University of Wisconsin Press, 2022). She has received fellowships from Stadler Center for Poetry & Literary Arts and National Book Critics Circle. Her writing has appeared in GuernicaWaxwing, AGNI, and elsewhere.

Daring to Be Different: The Merits of Narrative Ingenuity

David Philip Mullins

My love for fiction has its origins in the fundamentals: voice, characterization, and plot. I don’t expect anything revolutionary or pyrotechnic, only that a narrative has been fashioned with expert skill. Precise, elegant prose; a convincing, engaging protagonist; a compelling, unpredictable storyline—these are more than enough to hold my interest and impress me.

            As a writer, I came of age in the United States during the 1990s, the tail end of minimalism’s reign. Raymond Carver was still in vogue, as were Ann Beattie, Bobbie Ann Mason, Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff. Consequently, the literary style with which I tend to identify, and to which my attention is typically drawn, is realism, without frills. Call me boring, out of touch, but I’ve never been keen on experimental writing, on self-conscious innovation—metafiction, for instance. As Samuel Johnson wrote (albeit wrongly) of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, “Nothing odd will do long.” So-called “genre fiction,” too, no matter how “literary,” normally turns me off.

            It was unexpected, then, that when I read Glossary for the End of Days, Ian Stansel’s second short-story collection, I was struck by the inventiveness and eccentricity of its premises and frameworks. Stansel’s first collection, Everybody’s Irish, and his novel, The Last Cowboys of San Geronimo, both display his exceptional talent as a storyteller. Glossary for the End of Days does more. Surprising and boldly unconventional, it is a departure from his usual, realist approach.

            In the opening story, “John Is Alive,” it’s 1985 and fifteen-year-old Cal and his cousin Natasha are waiting in line at Tower Records for the midnight release of the new Beatles album. As the story’s title suggests, John Lennon has survived the four bullet wounds from Mark David Chapman’s .38 caliber revolver. (That isn’t a spoiler, though some of what follows in this piece may diminish suspense for a first-time reader of the book.) The narrative’s beating heart is the relationship between Cal and Natasha, and the plot consists of the scenes that unfold during and after their lengthy wait for the album. But the alternate history proves significant. In a poignant twist, Natasha accidentally falls to her death during a rooftop gathering later that night, and in the wake of the tragedy, Cal—the story’s narrator—muses on “other versions of reality.” In the version he gives thought to for many years afterward, Natasha is still dead, “but here John Lennon is also dead because in this one Chapman’s bullets did their job, killed him. Here Natasha and John Lennon meet—after all, if there are other dimensions, who’s to say there isn’t an afterlife too?”

            The story “Someone Interesting I Know: An Interview with My Uncle Chris by Sadie Fenton” takes an intriguing form. It is a transcript of a homework-assignment interview, during which the interviewee, Uncle Chris, reveals and deconstructs the recent rock-climbing death of his grown son’s boyfriend. Though the assignment is Sadie’s, her mother is the one who has transcribed the recorded conversation, and woven into the narrative are the mother’s bracketed comments to Sadie’s teacher, Mrs. Perez. In one such aside—the story’s final, moving lines, a passage charged with subtext—Sadie’s mother wonders whether Sadie should start over and interview someone else, worried that the conversation with Uncle Chris falls short of what was assigned. “But I’m not sure,” she writes. “What do you think? Should we keep plugging away and see what we can make of it? Do we even have a choice at this point?”

            The book’s unconventionality is pleasingly variegated: there is a second-person story; there are two half-page vignettes—“interludes”; there is a short novella. The contents are divided into three sections (the novella occupies all of section two), concluding with the title story, a master stroke. Like “Someone Interesting I Know,” “Glossary for the End of Days” experiments with form. Using an alphabetical list of terms and explanations, the narrator, Abe, chronicles his involvement with a doomsday cult and its murderous, suicidal leader. For example: “G. Guilt. That’s what they say I’m suffering: a type of survivor’s guilt. Like it’s so simple. Like I’m some line in a big shrink’s book.” It is an eerie account, made all the more chilling by the A-through-Z march of it structure.

            If Glossary for the End of Days were nothing more than an assemblage of quirks and contrivances, the stories would be mere gimmickry. Rather, it is a collection long on the expert skill I mentioned earlier—its prose precise and elegant, its protagonists convincing and engaging, its storylines compelling and unpredictable.

            It will not only hold your interest; it will impress you as well.


David Philip Mullins is the author of Greetings from Below, a collection of stories, and The Brightest Place in the World, a novel, which won the Nebraska Book Award. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and his work has appeared in The Yale Review, The Massachusetts Review, New England Review, Cimarron Review, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Yaddo, the Nebraska Arts Council, and the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame. He teaches at Creighton University. 

On 17776, A Not-Book by Jon Bois

Leah Hampton

Books, especially novels, are magic rectangles, tidy story boxes we can open and fall safely into at any time. Ain’t it cozy here? Either in hardcopy or as mobile downloads, the relatively firm structure(s) of the novel remind us of a story’s separateness from daily life, and thus of its power. Self-contained, predictable, yet containing multitudes. One volume, or one file, of adventure. Regardless of how strange or experimental they can sometimes be, novels are reliable and trustworthy, even the ones that don’t employ traditional elements. A book is an infinite box, but still a box; even if it hits us hard in the feels, or even if it’s disorganized or poorly written, it’s not going to fuck with us too much. 

            Exceptions prove rules, however, and every now and then a unique book breaks this cozy reading relationship. On these rare occasions, a novel can fuck with you very much indeed. In my experiences such books are hard to find, and sometimes they are not books, but a true and total surprise that breaks my brain and challenges me to reexamine my relationship with the very concept of storytelling. 

            My favorite not-book is Jon Bois’s online speculative novella 17776, otherwise known as “What Football Will Look Like in the Future,” hosted on the website SBNation. (Just Google “football in the future” and it’s always the first hit.) Describing this piece is genuinely difficult: 17776 is absolutely not a novel, and yet somehow it is. It does not have a plot, or traditional characters, nor is it composed, at least not entirely, of text. There are also no panels or other graphic novel components. 17776 does not, if I really think about it, even technically exist. You cannot buy it—access is free. You can’t hold it as you would a book, or give it a form in your mind. The best identifier for this work is, I suppose, to call it an “experience.” 

            What happens with 17776 is this: Someone—let’s say an acquaintance, perhaps a small, odd-looking woman whom you sometimes see at the bakery, for this was my experience—sends you a link. Her email says simply, “You should read this; very cool!” You click the link, and it takes you to a seemingly standard-issue online news article about football. Football? You think, my small, odd friend knows I hate sports; what on earth am I looking at?

            Just as you are about to shrug and click away, your laptop melts. 

            By which I mean the screen. . .sort of. . .dissolves, in a way you’ve never seen before. Everything goes black. You’re certain it’s malware, or maybe a brain aneurysm. 

            And then you meet Nine. 

            Nine is a satellite. A robot of sorts, but not a very good one, because Nine has a lot of feelings and can’t do anything robotic. Nine lives in deep space and has been floating alone out there for thousands of years. You sit with Nine for a very long time, and nothing happens. Truly, sincerely, nothing happens.

            Until Nine meets another abandoned satellite. Then another. Soon the satellites, all these little floating space machines who are very funny and sad and full of some remarkable force other than life, begin to talk about life, about love, and about the strange question of how humans in the year 17776 keep themselves occupied way down there on Earth. 

            The answer is football. In the distant future, when author Jon Bois says we humans will become immortal, invincible, and extremely bored, we will play football. 

            Forever. 

            That’s it. That’s the book. Or, rather, not the book. Through a series of “chapters” that employ embedded YouTube videos, fake Google Earth maps, amateurish illustrations, and also fart jokes, color-coded space squabbles, and mass-delusion love affairs with a twelve-thousand-year-old lightbulb, Jon Bois reimagines the very idea of the novel, and of life itself. The magic box is busted wide open, and this destruction makes you laugh, then weep, with wonder. Bois also recently released a sequel, 20020, which takes the non-story of his non-novel even further. 

            Perhaps I’ve told you too much, ruined the surprise. But, no; that’s not possible. The premise of 17776 is nothing special, really, and knowing its format ahead of time doesn’t make it any easier for you to anticipate or comprehend. It’s dumb and simple and wildly brilliant, and it doesn’t have a beginning or end, so there are no spoilers. It’s a wasted afternoon, with no grand design or fancy literary ambitions. Bois himself claims he created 17776 merely “for fun.” 

            But I promise, it changes you, this experience. Remember, I hate football, and I’m not a huge sci-fi buff, either. Yet here I am, recommending a sci-fi football non-boxed non-book thing, as if my own life, my own love of story, depended on it. However hip or old-school you may be in your reading choices, whatever your fiction wheelhouse is, 17776 takes you out of it in a way you never knew you needed. If you’re a writer, it will help you see new possibilities for genre- and form-busting in your own work. I’ve recommended this not-book to many people, and their reactions have ranged from annoyance to childlike rapture. No matter how the experience strikes them, everyone admits they have never “read” anything like 17776 before, which to my mind can only be a good thing. They also say it rejiggers their understanding of what novels can do and be.   

            And of course everybody falls in love with the lightbulb. Because no matter who you are, if you look closely enough at it, a weird, delicate thing will always break your heart. 


Leah Hampton is the author of F*ckface and Other Stories (Henry Holt). Her work has appeared in Guernica, McSweeneys Quarterly Concern, Electric Literature, Ecotone, and elsewhere. She currently serves as creative writing fellow in residence at the University of Idaho.

Northeast Regional

Allison Titus

The train makes a grammar / of our distance / as it glides
up and down / the East Coast. / It’s sunrise. / We’re in the future
of our hearts now. / Out the window: Fever of marsh; /
two deer; / shopping cart toppled / in a ditch beside the tracks.


Allison Titus is the author most recently of Sob Story (Barrelhouse Press) and The True Book of Animal Homes (Saturnalia Press) and has received fellowships from Yaddo and the National Endowment for the Arts. Along with the poet Ashley Capps, she is co-editor of The New Sent(i)ence, an anthology-in-progress of poems that meaningfully engage animality. She works at an ad agency and teaches in the low-residency MFA program at New England College.     

Lights Will Not Illuminate the Exits

Greg Tebbano

You’ve never driven drunk. Sure. And you’ve never texted. And you’ve never fumbled with the touch screen to skip “Changes” on Sabbath IV. And you’ve never nearly dozed off into a guardrail or missed a bend in the road indicated by a thousand yellow arrows. You’ve never crunched up a rabbit real good or swerved to miss a woman fishing the Star Gazette out of her newspaper box for so long you’d have thought she was birthing a calf. You’ve never masturbated behind the wheel, which—actually—you haven’t. This becomes a strange point of pride. Your wife has a funny story about how someone in her high school flipped a van while getting a blow job. It’s only funny because no one died and because she describes this particular blow job as “getting a frosty” since it took place in a cold van with a broken heater. You expect the phrase “getting a frosty” will become less hilarious as you get older. It doesn’t. 


You are a commuter. Each day you drive fifty-four miles round trip. As the calendar and odometer tally it up, this seems to you a slow form of suicide. Slowicide. Although you do not utter this word to others, your inner monologue likes to bandy it about. You commute to earn a living, though life seems quite removed from what you do, which is to buy and resell goods for a national chain grocery store. You live in the middle of a county whose population hasn’t changed in the last couple hundred years. There are no jobs for which you are qualified that match your salary. So you must venture to the city where there is money and take it back to the country, which, when described this way, makes it sound like you rob stagecoaches. 

            When you were a kid and kind strangers asked what you wanted to be when you grew up, you said, a bandit! as if this were a legitimate career. According to your father you began to plan quite seriously for it. First, you’d have to learn how to ride anxious horses and shoot a gun, but most importantly, you’d need to come up with some witty last words for lawmen and filthy rich bankers to mull over as they died in a puddle of blood and bourbon. 


In a winter storm the roads you drive are quick to become impassible. Everyone has four-wheel drive or a good brain in their skull except you. You have front wheel drive and all-weather tires, a term designed to bump the price and inject a little false confidence. Sometimes the road is whittled down to two little horse-and-carriage tracks and finally nothing, snowpack over which you must drive twenty miles per hour, endearing yourself to no one. 

            Your wife berates you for going out in storms, you who must get to your job of national importance at a chain grocery store. 

            In one such storm you are almost killed by a Logicorps truck, a company which, according to your ex-trucker sister-in-law, trains their operators to drive predatorily. Your cabin fills with this truck’s flashing brights, its maddening horn. There is nowhere to go, no shoulder, no plowed pull-offs. You pray for a subterranean ramp to open on the road before you, an emergency exit straight to hell sparing you crushed bones and likely paralysis. So far are you into a death fantasy, you hardly notice the truck is trying to pass. You brace yourself, squint until the road turns dreamy, imagined, as if the world can be fictionalized at your moment of contact with it. 

            When the collision never comes you are both relieved and yet, strangely depressed—how the closest you’ve ever come to death is repairing shingles or driving to work and for the rest of the trip you listen to your heart trying very loudly to communicate something to you without the convenience of a mouth. 


Sometimes you entertain yourself on the road with sexual fantasies, coming out of them abruptly for red lights or deer in the road. You don’t go there explicitly but sort of wander in, like a door in your brain has been left open by mistake and, well, there’s obviously some interesting stuff going on in there. 

            The fantasies are always populated by faceless women—their faces obscured by steamy showers or behind sock and buskin masks, or the women are bent in front of you with no urge to look back. Sometimes your hands are being tied together by stretchy exercise bands given to you by your chiropractor. Sometimes you are blindfolded but watching from a third omnipotent vantage. You realize with a tinge of regret that some of the positions in your fantasies have been appropriated from porn. Now it’s in there, you guess, like an invasive, and there’s not much to be done. You watch porn rarely, but when you do, you find yourself feeling penitent afterwards and end up cleaning the baseboards in the living room or scrubbing away the thin film of black mold that forms over time on the thin ledges around each window. 

            Sometimes your wife is in the fantasies, though she too is faceless. You recognize her by her body. These are the most thrilling, though they seem in and of themselves a reason to go to therapy. At times, the fantasies kick up a level and you find yourself analyzing them as they are happening. Sometimes your lovers are the ones explaining you to yourself: 

            You are not alone in the compartmentalizing of your sexuality. 

            You watch porn but can’t admit you are the kind of person who watches porn.

            It’s not your fault that you’re a man. 

            You conclude your sex drive was probably more important when humanity was barely sentient, trying not to die off as a species. Now it’s more like your appendix—a curiosity from another time that might accidentally destroy you. As much as you hate yourself, at least you’re aware of what you are. Most animals don’t know even that. 


Your commute takes you through several small upstate villages and even a few hamlets. Susan B. Anthony was born in one of them, her house marked with a patinaed placard and candles in all the windows. For no clear reason, you imagine there is a room in said house with a cradle containing her baby bones, which makes no sense as she did not die as a child. You pass this house on Election Day. You pass it every day.

            The largest village you drive through has car dealerships and a national chain grocery store, though not the one which employs you. There are residents of this village you see almost every morning. One is Shorts Guy. Every zip code in America must have one of these. The requirement for becoming your locality’s Shorts Guy is pretty simple: you just have to wear shorts every day including during the winter—through weather statement-worthy wind chills and cold November rains, all while Jack Frost is tip tip tapping at your balls. Often you think about what Shorts Guy’s life is like and try to dissuade yourself from assuming various stereotypes, like he lives with his mom and is really good at chess. Shorts Guy is living a life like you, and it is no better, or less worthy, or anything. Sometimes you see him at the Tractor Supply where he also works for a national chain and his face is round and not unsweet as he listens to some skinny guy crowing on about how his chicken waterer keeps freezing up. It’s December then, and sure enough, there are the shorts. Below the knees he has procured a very thick skin. That, at least, will serve him well. 


You are extra cautious around crosswalks. Your barbaric state does not require you to yield to pedestrians, though it would seem this legislation is forthcoming. In your sunniest mood you will stop at a crosswalk until a car opposite mirrors your deference and an adult minding a stroller may pass. On darker days, you do not stop. You hate this behavior and the hating feeds it, begets it. Your skull becomes one of those wooden puzzle mazes one must tilt this way and that to liberate a steel marble. On such days pedestrians had best stay up on the sidewalks. 

            One morning you encounter a car left awkwardly—half parked, half crashed—off the shoulder of a county highway. A woman appears to be slumped inside, her head hanging limply off the seat rest—how the deceased are depicted on haunted hayrides. You feel a sickness stirring in your belly. This is what is called “obligation.” You park a ways down and walk back to the economy car caked in salty white like a stale pastry. Her coat is unzipped, scrubs underneath, and she hasn’t puked herself or bled out from anywhere so you knock ever so gently on the window. As the woman comes to, her eyes roll hither and yon in their sockets trying to figure out who you are. Apparently, she was on her way home from a double at the hospital and kept nodding off. She thinks, though is not completely certain, that she pulled over. You praise her decision. You find this woman to be at once more rational than you and also more comfortably aloof, the second trait being maybe something you should try. 

            She fishes around in her coat for a cigarette, starts to laugh as it dangles off her lower lip. 

            You probably thought I was dead, she says.


On a similar winter day, you come upon a girl walking along this same highway. She is wrapped in a bright blue blanket, her eyes red, and she is clutching a phone desperately to her mouth like the silicone of an oxygen mask. The blanket is not the sort one would keep in the trunk of a car for emergencies or impromptu picnics. It has come, you are sure, straight off the girl’s bed. As you’ve gotten older, you’ve become less adept at gauging the ages of people younger than yourself. She could be sixteen. You think of your wife, who hitchhiked and hopped trains at that age for a chance to visit her divorced father. 

            You think of stopping. 

            Then you consider how this will look—your dark sedan slowing, the window coming down to reveal an interior reeking of venison jerky. What will you say to her, you with your army surplus jacket and your hair wet from a shower, slicked straight back in the style of a comic book villain. 

            Will you ask if everything is okay here? Will you ask if she needs a ride? 

            You cannot stop. You know how your offered hand will be received: as a claw, its talons sharpened, practiced. And so you drive on. In the rearview mirror, you notice the tail of her blanket—still warm, perhaps, from a sleep of dreams—dragging along the dirty ground. 


Lately you’ve been seeing a lot of flags at half-staff. 

            It’s not every flag pole, though enough to make you wonder—which tragedy is being marked by the gesture? You are living in a time when disasters are not separated by weeks or days or even news cycles. Are the lowered flags for those who died at the synagogue, at the nightclub? The razing of Mexico Beach? The California fires? 

            Some of those people died in their cars. They died commuting. 

            You’ve scrolled through pictures of this former place called Paradise, color photos that look black and white from all the ash. Here is the dust you’ve so often heard about, to which you will return. You see a photograph of a torched car leaking something silver and molten, like the blood of a superhero. 

            On one trip home you hear an audio recording made by a family fleeing the wildfire by automobile, presumably on a voice memos app. The father is playing it straight, not a quiver in his delivery as he reassures his son that they will make it out. What choice does he have but to bury his heart as deep as he can dig, lest it rise up into his throat. The mother seconds his confidence, though is audibly less certain, especially when the son reveals that a tree by the roadside is on fire. 

            Oh my god, the son says. Should we pray?  

            You wonder if Moses too said this, in an outtake from Exodus.

            Later you rummage around the internet to find out what happened to the family on the recording. Instead, you find an article about how the wildfire spared an antique car, a model T, though the surrounding property is nothing but a chimney and smoldering detritus. You examine the many photos of this classic vehicle—showroom ready, its glimmering chrome grill—and think to yourself that god is a sick fuck.


If you want to check hockey scores and not risk hip checking a telephone pole, you flip the radio up to ESPN which barely comes in these days. A Christian station nearby on the dial has upped the wattage on their transmitter. You imagine a preacher somewhere asking the parishioners to take a minute each evening and pray for the vitality of the antenna tower. You’d like to be a believer but don’t feel you need more guidance on how to be self-critical. There was a time when you said you were “spiritual,” in circles where this word meant “not an asshole.” You no longer say you are spiritual. 

            Often passengers in your car will inquire about your belief system because of the Lucite Buddha cement-glued to the dash. They are awed by how light is able to shine right through his body. Sometimes at night the Buddha seems to glow inexplicably, though it’s probably only from passing headlights. When things go right, you develop the habit of bumping his little fist, folded as it is over his knee in supreme peace.

            You inherit the Buddha from your friend one summer at the river. As you’re getting out of your car he asks, Hey, do you want this? like it might be a disco compilation CD or mirror dice. Turns out you’re not supposed to throw away a likeness of the Buddha. Somebody at work told him. You could give it to another person or you could put it in a river. He pries it off the dash.

            You aren’t a Buddhist, nor are you religious, but you take the Buddha anyway. Your luck, you think, would take a hard hit from letting a godhead end up in a river.


A few times a year, you commute to work by bicycle. When you show up on the bike twenty minutes late people act like you’re some kind of superhuman. 

            Oh my god, someone will say. How long did that take?

            Yes, it requires will and ambition to bike fifty miles in a day, but it’s not as complicated as performing a tracheotomy, as your co-workers seem to believe. The days you bike in will, hands down, be the best you spend at work that year. You don’t do drugs, so you never go in high. This is the next best thing. You smile and take it as a customer berates you for not having her favorite fat free cake mix in stock. Little does she know, your central nervous system is bathing in a Jacuzzi of dopamine.  

            Halfway to work you usually take a piss break at what is referred to locally as “the Monument.” It marks a turning point in the American Revolution, and one would assume a positive one, for the Continental Army. On one of your rides, you are taken aback—one might even say “accosted”—by an insanely beautiful woman who has jogged up the steep hill to the Monument. You are a little out of sorts, unsettled both by her presence and the fact that you’ve just been relieving yourself on the far side of this national marker. She bends forward out of breath with her hands on her legs. She is embalmed in sweat, and this is how your mind’s eye will record her: as a woman made of glass. 

            She smiles at you and says, Hey. She has a lot to tell you about the sunrise and some questions about your bike. Her enthusiasm is such that you think she must know you. But no, you would not have forgotten her. Probably it’s just the hormone-induced high of exertion—how the two of you are both travelers of your own volition, your legs worn down from their intended purpose, which is not to depress a gas pedal. She is asking about your bike because she wants to get into triathlons but gave birth only a couple months ago and is easing into things. You surprise yourself by saying, Congratulations!

            Afterwards, as you watch her descend the hill, you realize you meant it. In the distance the sun is cresting the far off mountains. You want to preserve this moment in a locket and carry it around with you through the dark days of winter, to open it from time to time as one does the door of a wood stove when the fire has dwindled.


In the car, you endure radio programming. You listen to pop music and DJs with too much reverb on the talk mix, the endless IV of classic rock and if you ever hear Steely Dan again you are going to maybe impale your eardrums with the pressure gauge. You stomach politics, the slow passage of news into history. The real estate bubble. The election of a game show host. You drive your way through a Senate confirmation hearing for a Supreme Court justice, surprisingly rapt. The nominee has been accused of sexual improprieties in his youth, crimes even. You listen to this person defend himself. He sounds like a cook you once worked under, how he would thrash around the kitchen when he couldn’t find his favorite knife. As he rants, you feel he has likely done the things of which he’s been accused because at the heart of every man is a dark seed that contains enough poison to bring down an elephant. You know about the seed because you are a man and you have it. You have rolled it around in the back of your mouth and known from the acrid trail it leaves on your tongue that it is no thing to bite into.

            His accuser has already testified. According to the record, this estimable gentleman sexually assaulted her at a party as a teenager. You are struck by the word “pinballing” which she uses to describe her escape down the unfamiliar staircase to the only known exit.

            As this woman’s life progresses, she does not reveal the details of the assault to anyone, even her husband. The topic is finally broached when, in the process of renovating their home, she refuses to compromise on a single, aesthetically questionable design point: the house must have two front doors. 

            Something about the idea sends a spear all the way through you. Because subconsciously, you too have wished for this: a different door to leave by. One that doesn’t open into a pitfall or a den of lions: a door that is an exit, and not just an entrance into another emergency.


After the incident with the Logicorps truck, you devise a new strategy for winter travel. The plan is not very complicated: go to a bar and wait until the storm’s over. It turns out a couple of colleagues from work think this is a great idea. The older of the two colleagues has had a drinking problem and the younger will likely have one, though who are you to judge? You sit around the oval bar in the lobby of a hotel, a bar you frequent for its proximity to your workplace and the twenty-two ounce mugs they serve at happy hour. 

            The waitresses are young and lovely and couldn’t give a shit about you but smile like they might. You recognize the smile because you wear it every day for nine hours. Despite the heavy lifting you do, these are the muscles that hurt the most—the two that flank the corners of your mouth. 

            You drink as snow continues to fall and watch sports television about teams you don’t care about like the Clemson Tigers. The soft-hearted bartender tells you about what’s in tonight’s sangria. (Cranberries! It’s almost Thanksgiving.) You are consistently the youngest people at this bar, which serves things like sangria and port. You and your colleagues argue about what the hell port is, except maybe stale wine. One rule you have about the hotel bar is you are not allowed to look things up on the internet, but must instead, as in the 1980s, fight about them until someone throws in.

            The older colleague’s keys are on the table. One of the keys, you notice, is in fact half a key. Where’s the other half? you ask him. It broke off in his front door, is the answer. For over a year he has relied on the two disparate halves to marry in the lock and trigger the bolt. You create a scenario for the older colleague, a hypothetical in which he must escape a danger via the compromised front door—muggers or a pack of coydogs. He concedes his front door situation seems risky, but then again, it is just another calculation. It will work until it doesn’t. 


Your drive home confirms you are a genius. The roads have been marginally plowed, but, better still, no one else is driving on them. Yes, you’ve had a couple beers—four beers volume wise—but that was over the course of many hours, not to mention the shrimp cocktail you ordered, having discussed at length how ordering a shrimp cocktail off a restaurant menu as a teen is one of the first great forays into adulthood. Now that the novelty of seafood has worn off, you realize the only reason to order this bawdy and slightly unfulfilling item is to re-live that virgin experience. The over-spilling cup of it. 

            This is what you are thinking about when the creature ambles out into the path of your car. It is not a deer or a bear, but some form of hulking Rodentia, black and thick. You hit it and it seems to hit back, a fanfare of crunching which may be bones or fiberglass or both. It’s a raccoon, you decide, a prehistoric one by the looks of it. You do not stop, though now hear a significant portion of the sedan’s body dragging along the snowpack, punctuated by a clawing sound when the snow yields to pavement and the plastic is free to connect with the concrete. You only have a few miles to go. You will not stop now. You will not put on your flashers and fumble with bungee cords in the cold and dark, though this is one of your defining traits as an American: a false confidence about how to use bungee cords. 

            When you get pulled over you are hardly surprised. The cruiser passes you in the opposite direction and in the rearview you witness a nice piece of stunt driving on the part of the officer—a three point turn without any of the points. 

            You park the car, dig around for your documentation. Your wife has little faith in the law and even less in its just interpretation. You feel lucky she is not sitting to your right, putting you in the position of referee. A female officer approaches along the shoulder. You don’t think you are drunk, though does anyone ever think that? This makes you more nervous

            You greet her as though you might be meeting at a community barbeque. The introduction is too pleasant for this bleak evening. She is not amused. You wait for the question you know is on the way—where are you coming from? You are well-practiced at lying to yourself, but to others, not so much. You prepare to tell her you were at a restaurant. Strangely, it does not come up. Not how much you’ve had, nor where you’ve been—only the fact that when she passed you it looked like the Fourth of July was being observed under the chassis of your car.

            I hit a giant raccoon, you say. 

            In response her mouth makes an unbelieving flat line. She runs your license, and when she returns, leans inside the open window, her eyes coming to rest on the dashboard Buddha who is joyfully pulsing from red to blue and back again in liminal ecstasy.

            So if I keep going that way, I can expect to find this raccoon? she says.

            You nod. You imagine the cop spotlighting the corpse in her brights, its midsection unzipped by your all-weather tires. How it appears to be baring its insides for all to see, throwing open its skin as a flasher would a raincoat. It is out of this corporeal passage, you hope, that a smaller, more vital portion of the raccoon has escaped. 

            She shakes her head at you, though it’s possible you imagine this. In the silence that passes, you sense the officer making a calculation of her own.

            Get home safely, she says at last. 

            You can’t remember who is supposed to leave first at traffic stops. Even though you are free to go, you feel leaden, as though to pull yourself forward against the vectors of gravity and drag will require too much of a currency you’ve already spent. You linger after the cruiser leaves, eyeing desolate snowfields as the wind cinches the skin of your face more tightly over your skull. Although you cannot say why, you are free. Perhaps she has decided that on this night, in this empty theater, there is no one else around for you to hurt besides yourself.


Greg Tebbano is employed as a grocery worker and, occasionally, as an artist. His fiction has appeared in Hobart, Contrary Magazine, Third Point Press, Jet Fuel Review and is forthcoming in Maudlin House and Meridian. He has been a resident at Vermont Studio Center and lives in upstate New York. 

Mine

Darina Sikmashvili

Everything in this house was first another’s. I am tired of our bedsheets, frayed from endless wash. I am tired of the green carpet crawling up the hallway, rubbed dull from stains never removed. The owner is a witch, her hair in thick black rubber coils around her eyes. Her crooked mouth, the blistered Romanian it spews. She is hiding the blood and the piss and the ash of this crippled boarding house in the carpet threads. I’ve never once, never once heard a vacuum go off in here.

                        So what is mine? My thoughts, my time to gorge on.

                        The kitchen is a slaughterhouse. The owner keeps the precious cleavers in her room, the blades wide as my thigh and sharp, you needn’t wonder. Always stewing flesh, coaxing the marrow to surface. The patience of a low, slow burn. Blood trapped and blinking beneath oil, blood in the air all afternoon. She spices by smell, by instinct; only a lesser woman would take notice. I ruin a runny egg, serve steak cool to the touch. Over-peppered, undercooked, else scalded to anonymity. My talents must lie elsewhere.

                        I seldom linger past the kettle’s boil and less if she should enter. You and I have so little, so yes, we steal, but what we steal is little. Careful as mice. Still, signs crop up, and endless warnings:

WRITE YOUR TEA AND DONT DRINK ANYONE TEA
KEEP SUGAR ON THE SHELF INSIDE. RATS!
NO GUESTS NO DIRTY PLATES NO TALKING LATE

            It is only a week, you say. Two at the most. Only a little longer, bunny. Trust, won’t you?

            Where do you live all day? In interrogation rooms and bars, in ashen women’s dressing rooms. The breast pockets of suits. The alleyway below a fire escape, leading to the detective’s dirty office. Murder, ache, revenge. The keys march on your typewriter, letters pounce on paper, and you live there.

            But I’m out here, pacing a dirty box with a mattress on the floor and a dresser missing the bottom drawer. I rattle in the smoky room while you whisk yourself away. Blinders are a writer’s luxury you have taught me.

            In bed at night, our routine: I listen as you recall the day’s pages. The fantastical detective struggles now with not just the object of his affection but with a brother who has cropped up from the past.

            There’s tension. You’re a marvel to yourself. There’s finally tension.

            All morning nausea threatens up my throat. Retreats. You are perfectly fine, you tell me, though what we have we share down to the crumb. In my illness I am alone. Out of our bedroom window, a plain white sheet of sky.

            A brittle little woman, the house’s only other tenant, has taken a liking to you. And you, you see material. Nothing more tempting than a ruined woman. Sherry in the evenings and late into the night. She is impressed as you predicted she might be:

            A writer! A writer in our little home! Who doesn’t love a mystery?

            You fetch me comfort we cannot afford: mineral water in tiny Italian bottles. Salts to settle the stomach, the brittle woman suggested. An Old-World trick, you’re told. Even the witch owner agrees. The bottles become vases for the daisies you dot our awful room with.

            Settle, bunny, settle. I brought you a book.

            Writer, you are the gestural equivalent of a whimper.

            Midnight I sit in the scalding shower until steam chokes the room. I won’t be doing that again: glancing in the mirror at a woman I want to hide from. Did you notice her? Me but not quite, come with the aching in my stomach, come with the scraping in my throat.

            The money won’t last. You coo—you say we’ll float right through to a parade made in our honor, but I know better. I was to myself before you came, hungry but free. Now, the sound of mice like paper crinkling in the walls. The echo of the telephone in the hallway. Never for you, but hope in the writer is unwavering. Soon they will call. You’ve sent your pages, left your name. Soon they’ll come begging for your book. The money, the fruit.

            Stay, bunny. You will see.

            The pink curtain blooms at night. This is our favorite time. We can see the big orange streetlamp like our very own woozy moon. We take turns keeping one leg on the other, we thank the fan. At night I have your minty mouth against my forehead, your hands, intent. The hammer of the typewriter rests. Cats screech beneath us in the garden, long abandoned. Heat in their bones, the sound of want.

            At night I remember why I agreed to follow you. The way you looked tenderly at me those months ago and said, Don’t hide in these decaying bookstacks, don’t be your mother’s daughter. You are the only person I have ever met who is devoid of armor and I had then more than enough to spare.

            I found a book this afternoon. I sat in quiet and I read. That was your remedy, remember. I learned that Old World women would grind glass and mix it into salt to serve to their malicious husbands. Patience is a weapon. 

            What could have caused my illness? I hiss at the owner’s signs, I see the snake of her. What sense in keeping me around? Shards settle in my stomach, in my lungs. I know what I feel; this house is a crime scene, this woman is a murderer.

            When you return with bread and milk, your face flushed like a cherub’s, I drag you to the foot of our bed and whisper my discovery. But you laugh at me as if in the company of others. Your head turns from side to side, your eyebrows carve upwards in disbelief. I know that you are spineless like the weasels in your stories. I know you are afraid that she will kick you out and keep your money.

            Gin bottles grow like wildflowers every morning outside of the brittle woman’s door. You have seen her at night, you tell me, with her heels in her hands, fishing for the lock with her key. Guided her hand, guided her in. A sour room, big and fit for a wilted queen, your eyes took notes, always working:

            Slips, cherry and nude, hung from a dull brass bedpost like shriveled ornaments.

            You type and type, weave her into your pulp fiction. Everything is material, you tell me. I’d like to give you something.

            I take the bottles and a sharpening stone from the kitchen. The hallway closet is full of boxes, the foreign labels I strain all morning to decipher. The owner’s daughter’s baby clothes, her little life packed neatly here. I once belonged to someone in this way. Swaddled, my progress mattered. A doorframe to track the miracle of my bones stretching me upwards. Age four, age six, then nine, a burst. A girl.

            Nightly I crawl behind the boxes and bind my hands with kitchen rags to grind the glass down to a whisper, flakes trapped beneath my fingernails. The owner’s daughter, I know, comes rarely, to reach her mother’s ceiling fans with rags and send dust shrieking into the air. To bicker, to shove old clothes into the closet. When called, the daughter’s husband comes, a handyman. Silent and practiced like prized machinery.

            I watch him in the kitchen, I like to. To press my back against the doorframe, to push against the splitting wood with the heel of my foot until he senses me, and then to busy myself, make like I’m working. His hands are big. A comfort, the way they tug at valves beneath the ancient sink. Wrenches, smutted with his fingers smutted with the pipes’ insides. At the stove, I peek over my shoulder and catch him thinking: running his tongue along the wall of his mouth, see his cheek puff out as if a bug were scattering in there.

            I come with empty glasses and loiter, needy, tuck my hands in my sleeves. An excuse to watch the swell of his ribcage as he breathes the diver’s breath when he is on his back beneath the kitchen sink, squinting at rot.

            No water, he tells me. Wait.

            Yes, I linger. I like to. He lets me. Once, a tiny mouse—brazen, else foolish—had wandered into view and he slammed quick his boot down on the floor. Blood pooled beneath. He flushed an exhale, proud. And something hummed up past my thighs. A terrifying man, a trap built into him.

            He said then, before lifting his boot, look away, and I would not.

            We are both of us now deep in our work. I lace the owner’s salt. Her sugar too. The coffee she takes, ground to powder, the tea she gulps all afternoon. I lace it all and hide my ravaged hands beneath your maroon sweater. My clothes too light, too thin to mask the blood. In your novel you describe a woman, incriminate but irresistible. An implicating creature. What is the detective to do? She’s a poison, a fatal woman. That’s how you tell it and you are sure.

            The owner groans into the phone in feeble English. The weeping daughter stalks the halls and carries bowls of broth, the rank of boiled bone in the kitchen. Even you have grown uneasy, looking over your pages at the door, toward the endless noise. But I race the morning, I let the sun come hobbling up to me, I betray sleep and you don’t even notice. Grind glass inside the bathroom until the doorknob trembles and knocking starts. I work with meaning; I have that now.

            Where we first lived, do you remember? Somebody should have seen us. We were living in a shed in your brother’s backyard. He wouldn’t let us near the warmth. You’d gotten sick and he was scared of what you had, do you remember? The neighbors threw apple cores at us over the fence. You were sick to tears. Sweating and shivering, sweating and shivering. A fever punctured your thinking and you mistook me for another woman then, shouted another woman’s name in your sleep. I draped soaked towel after soaked towel across the rusted lawn chairs and felt my recklessness. Love looked like this: like quarantine I had to break. And still I held your frightened hands. But you won’t look at mine.

            Come night you’re drunk and stewing, a roadblock in the book, right at the curtain draw; an undefinable, mystical pause in your brilliant thinking, a curse on your good fortune. The owner screams like a split pig. Who is supposed to sleep like this? Soon she will cave and ambulances will howl through empty streets. You hover near the typewriter, circling it like a dumb dog on a short leash.

            I roam the house. It’s mine. I roam in night light. The husband comes and takes my hands; I terrify a terrifying man.


Darina Sikmashvili was born in Lubny, Ukraine and raised in Brooklyn, New York. As of fall 2020, Darina is pursuing her MFA in fiction at the University of Michigan. She’s writing a book. Contact her at darina@sikmashvili.com.