Author: Post Road

Ideation

by Elle Nash

It began when she moved in below their apartment, or maybe it began a week after when the boyfriend came downstairs to ask for a cup of sugar for a cake, or maybe it began a week after that when the girlfriend knocked on the door and asked for a cigarette and she didn’t have any, so she said, “I’ll go get some,” when what she meant was: “Please come with me,” because the town was new and she liked the girlfriend’s long, dirt-colored hair. 

      The girlfriend twisted the ends of that hair, patchy like sod in a hot yard that didn’t take, the ends brittle from chlorine pools and heat straightening, bleached and ratty but silky at the roots where the natural color was a deeper, more luxurious dirt color. “I hope you like Kools,” she said to the girlfriend, and she walked with her up the street, past the drainage ditch wet with grass, the night empty, the way small towns desert themselves after dinner, not a bright, living city, but potholed and sanctioned nonetheless, not a place where marijuana was legal. She touched the girlfriend’s hand, the skin soft and young. “I meant Benson and Hedges,” she said, remembering herself at the girlfriend’s age. “I used to listen to punk music all the time.” 

       “Punk music?” the girlfriend said. She clutched her hand as they rounded the last corner to the liquor store, a cement-brick building with a neon American flag in the window. “You know, anarchy? Fuck the USA?” she said. The girlfriend remained quiet, pulling the ends of her twill jacket over her free hand, and glanced across an abandoned lot, where a strip mall used to be. Then she touched her thumb and index finger together and brought them to her mouth: “Why would you leave the place you came from?” 

“So, your secrets then,” the girlfriend said. She didn’t care if the girlfriend wanted her company for the free liquor or cigarettes since she wanted something from her, too. This was how friendship worked as an adult: an exchange of goods or services for other goods or services. “I don’t mind keeping secrets with you,” she said, deploying the same line she used three dates a week while unbuttoning the jeans of incompetent clients, most of them older, grainy-skinned and bitter, losing their wives to indifference. She was happy to share them so long as the girlfriend was interested. “But what about him?” she asked, itching for a cigarette now.

      The boyfriend was soft-faced and had long lashes and small, cherubic hands she’d noticed when she gave him the sugar. When he talked his voice cracked. There was the girlfriend’s mother, too, living with them—forty years old, curling tawny hair, drinking Natty Lights and always asking if she could take her top off at the parties. There were so many parties.

The girlfriend said he’d chased her once, the boyfriend stumbling through the apartment and then on to the balcony with a small frosting knife, and the girlfriend had yelled for someone to call the cops. “He’d taken my phone,” the girlfriend said. “My mom didn’t do anything.”

      “Have you called the cops before?” she asked.

      “Yeah, but he becomes docile and they leave.”

      “Why would you stay?” she asked, but the wind had picked up by then, and she saw the liquor store’s cashier stare at them from the window, his nose trimmed with the hard, buzzing red of the neon flag. She left the girlfriend at the side of the building and came back out with another handle of gin and another pack of smokes. A stiff, old lemon in her jacket pocket. 

“Tell me about your clients,” the girlfriend said. She told the girl about a man and woman who were in love with each other. They liked for her to teach them how to touch. Their touching was not clumsy or new but fearful, and she told the girl about the bright splotches of pink on the woman’s body, across her cheeks and nose and down her breast. “She had ulcers in her mouth,” she said. “Some chronic disease.” 

      Another couple, another town—she used to let them tie her up and feed her GHB from a trinket-like vial. “I wanted to obliterate,” she said, “They liked to pretend I was their daughter. I was sadder then, a lot like you,” then she said, “I’m sorry.”

At the girlfriend’s apartment, they were free to drink again and warming up. The girlfriend removed her jacket. The girlfriend’s mother asked, “Are you a Hot Topic girl?” She shook her head and flicked a clear blue lighter beneath a cigarette, and the girlfriend’s mother asked, “Are you a witch?” The girlfriend’s mother took off her blouse, danced some, and opened the closet looking at her daughter’s clothes. The girlfriend’s mother tried them on, one at a time, each shirt smaller than the next. 

      “There was a baby once,” she whispered to the girlfriend. Before the misoprostol, she could only think about death or some form of it in her life. The girlfriend leaned into her on the couch and checked the time on her phone. “I don’t want you go to work tonight,” the girlfriend said. 

      The girlfriend’s mother put a heavy arm around her and breathed into her ear. “I’m so glad my girl is here now, and not at the old house,” the girlfriend’s mother said, the old house with no plumbing or heating. “They kept shitting on the back deck, it just wasn’t right.” Torn linoleum, candled light. Shaking her head, she placed the shot glass over the top of the gin bottle.

The girlfriend’s phone thumped twice in her hands. “Don’t answer it,” the girlfriend’s mother said. “He’ll show up,” the girlfriend said. The mother changed her outfit again, putting on a pair of her daughter’s leggings and a crop top, the mother’s bra peeking from the hem. Then the mother picked up a box of remaining beer and the bottle of gin and looked at her. “Shall we?” the mother asked, and they went downstairs. 

In the apartment below, she locked the door and drew the blinds. She had no furniture, a blanket laid out on the floor, and a cardboard box for a table. She sat on the kitchen counter swinging her legs like a child. The girlfriend slipped off her moccasins and opened the kitchen window at the back, blowing pale clouds of cigarette smoke into the night. 

The mother unclasped her orthopedic bra. Bulbous, full breasts, which hung to the sides, areola as wide as her fist. She wanted to look; the girlfriend caught her trailing eye. “She is so fucking easy,” the girlfriend said. 

      She liked the girlfriend’s breasts, too. Her skinny ribcage, the way her sports bra compressed them close to her chest. Girls like that—their sharp chins pressing into her neck, the spidery way their fingers searched her body—it was how she wanted to be touched. Now she wasn’t afraid of death so much as she was scared of running out of time. She worried about giving birth to an already dead child, or one who was alive and going to die. What would it mean to spend so much time obsessing over resources? 

      The girlfriend looked bored, so she joked, “Sometimes the only thing in my stomach is cum, scrambled eggs, and coffee.” She said, “Blow jobs are Ambien for bad boys.” The girlfriend laughed, bright and soapy, and she liked the way her eyes ticked, gave way to surprise.

      They took shots and she asked about the boyfriend, asking again: why do you stay? Asking more, imagining the girlfriend plodding through the apartment, the boy with his weak chin and a dull kitchen knife. Why couldn’t the girlfriend leave? The girlfriend pressed a thumb into the skin stretched on her jaw. She was embarrassed by how beautiful the girlfriend was. Pink paint peeled from her fingernails. 

“One time, in another city,” she said, slowly caressing the metal lip of the vial in her pocket, “I might’ve gotten away with murder.” It’d been the last time, with a man that looked like her father, the filmy gray of his eyes. His beleaguered breath, erratic and wheezing as he lay on the creamy foreign sheets in a room that overlooked an entire skyline. She was tired of taking tiny capfuls of the drug to cope; it’s salty aftertaste like magnesium in her mouth. The man had downed his rum and Coke in a single sweep before collapsing. He convulsed once, then twice, rattling his teeth together, and then he threw up a rusty sludge. A wet, throttling sound came from his throat like he was choking. She’d panicked, pressing her hands into his doughy shoulders to roll him on his side. The girlfriend’s eyes grew curious and a question seemed to hover inside her mouth before a heavy rap came from the door, breaking through the pop music. All three of the women turned their heads, the flirty dream dissipating. It was the first time anyone had knocked on her door since she’d moved in. 

      An older man with slicked-back hair and straight teeth loomed through the crack at her. Behind him, the soft-faced boyfriend. “Leah needs to come home,” said the older man. “So what?” she said, but the mother had already slipped on her top and had taken the girlfriend by the hand, coaxing her back up the stairs before the girlfriend even had time to slip on her moccasins.

      The door shut, both the mother and girlfriend gone. She pulled the vial out of her pocket. It was enough to put a man in the dirt, but not a man and a boy. She didn’t feel like running again, couldn’t think of another town to move to. It wasn’t enough to change things, she thought. She wedged the murky vial inside the toe of one of the girlfriend’s moccasins, anyway. Death was a reminder that choice was a luxury. She tucked the shoes in her arms and opened the front door, into the cool night.

Elle Nash is the author of Animals Eat Each Other and Nudes, forthcoming from SF/LD Books in 2021. Her short stories and essays appear in Guernica, The Nervous Breakdown, Literary Hub, New York Tyrant and elsewhere. She is a founding editor of Witch Craft Magazine and teaches a fiction workshop called Textures. You can find her on Twitter @saderotica. 

Some Manors

by Tom Laplaige

Our doormat used to be a dentist. That was before, in a country we’d never heard of. Our riches, invasive as ivy, needed little encouragement to keep prospering, but in the midst of all of this effortless accumulation, our souls ached with emptiness. When we married, Victoria was still writing checks to faraway causes, feeling distant from her impact, and deflated by extension. 

Some manors clamor through archness. Some manors roil with legacy’s intuited terminus. Ours was thick with my wife’s longing to be celebrated for her munificence. Longing is a thing that rots without containers and lids. Even the cats are driven mad by its presence.

Our new doormat turned Victoria’s days towards cheer. Finding an excuse to tromp through the mud, she would alight to the garden to whisper sweetly to a box hedge, or bring a horse a purple carrot. And when she’d return, he’d be splayn waiting. Those first weeks her wipes were gingerly ones—and gingerly was a manner I’d never seen from her velvet arsenal of airs.

With much of her generous carriage diverted to a back haunch, Victoria would softly skim her toe on his surface, and sensing her apprehension, the doormat might purr or go mmmm as though making effort to appreciate a meager stew. 

Blush returned to her cheeks. Before long she was tap dancing on his surface, digging in, thrashing her heels while he begged for more, more, more. And my darling, plump Victoria would actually giggle. 

A motherly wind swept my baroness, and for a sweet moment, there was nurture where mean nature had reigned. My agonizing efforts to climb the stairs were met with tenderness and encouragement, not goading and derision. Once, she even threw me over her shoulder and hoisted me up the marble ascension before my pride could protest. 

I’d awake from screamy guillotine dreams to find myself suckling at her wooly, mammoth teet. Eye contact, and a stroke of the cheek. Monday, Tuesday, happy days. 

But alas, finitude is the cruel melody of our time.

One dismal night, fecund with foreboding, the dinner gong screamed and then screamed again but Victoria did not appear. I dined alone, picking over every bone twice, rolling gelatin with my tongue until every nook of my mouth was coated, but still no wife for company.

I broadened the dinner gong’s protocols to include carrying, and bade her to ferry me around the manor. Past the suits of armor painted neons, and the alabaster busts of my forebears with prominent foreheads, through the hall of cloudy concave mirrors, under the clinking crystal of our rusting chandeliers. My heart knew where we were headed, but I stretched the search circuitous until finally I directed her to our front door.

There, like a poached egg strangling a toast point, was Victoria, nude and breathing heavy on the doormat. Her jaw jelly-rolled slowly through her chins to meet my distress, two soft blinks with batty lashes, then she began to snore. I looked down and the doormat smiled, mustache dripping into his lips, without a lick of penance. 

Shame! I screeched at them and whipped at the gong’s bottom to whisk me away, bawling into her apron like a Mewbury newling. 

Months passed and our gilded bed remained unshared. I powdered and painted my face with her makeup, buried myself under her dresses, and sniffled in her mattress imprint. I waxed murmurous in the loss cocoon, betrayed, pinken.  

Eventually, I moved into the dining room where my daily observations lingered without parry. Stoic tick of the grandfather clock. Impassive oblivion. My straw-sucking echoed off the ceiling and the slapback was sickening. Downward-facing dregs. 

Her overripe perfume haunted the habitat. I called her name with no answer. Victoria? Buttercup? So this is my private Pompeii, I thought.

I tried to recall everything I had learned about our doormat in his short tenure with us. He used to be a dentist. Ok. Never disagreed about the weather. Fine. Always faced east. Never talked to the doorbell. In his room I found few personal items. A frame with a creased picture of a young doormat and a sharp-nosed bride. A champagne cork. Some coins. A tattered book of poems by that simple sandsnake Rumi laying open on the nightstand. I picked it up and read: 

            Out beyond our ideas of wrongdoing

            And rightdoing there is a field.

            I’ll meet you there.

            When the soul lies down in that grass

            The world is too full to talk about.

My hole roared. Ever-glistening dewy field of fuckery. 

I remembered myself as a child, the gimp on the sidelines watching sisters canter their thoroughbreds. The sadness in father’s eyes as he assessed me, his runtish heir. My cleverness with calculus, my war with our rutting poodle, and my great plans to leave and see the burning world. 

All of my self-pity suddenly peeled, and I laughed at my life that had eaten me, imagining its indigestion. My revenge on its bowels. Freedom, at last.

Then one night, I heard sounds like I had never heard before. Like giant gears wrenching to wake some awful machine. The walls shook as though they were gagging on the sword of Damocles. I became nauseous with a sense of shifting gravity.

Dizzy, I clawed my way down the hallway to the source. Banged my head bloody on the door that withheld the circumstance. Let me in! Let me in! I cried. Please dear god, let me in!

And then a dawning splatter. 

And the door creaked open.

And the stink of life slank through the jamb. 

And the doormat bent down, kissed me on the forehead, and departed for who knows where with a knapsack full of silverware.

And there against the tufted headboard was Victoria, arms wet with the squirm of wriggly pups.

Broodish little dishrags three.

Say hello to your daddy, she said. 

Down there, it’s your daddy.

And I burst.

And the full world swam in a warm fountain.

Tom Laplaige writes from the basement of a house with blue shutters. He is at work on his debut collection of short fiction.

In a Sentimental Mood

By Vanessa Stone

There is a need to be of use. To be of service. To be of help. Otherwise, how would anything get fixed? This is what I told Maev. And while we are on the topic of fixing things, could you give me a hand here? Maev slid her chair next to me and organized my pills. Calcium, riluzole, vitamins A, B, C––I’ve been taking so many pills lately that I’ve begun to wonder if I will ever, ever properly shit again. Maev said she sees why not. I’m not particularly fond of Maev, but I find it much more manageable to say her name than the others. A year ago Care for Life assigned her to my case and so for a couple of hours, several days a week, she is of help to me. 

Maev is of greater use to me particularly in the mornings when I spend an hour or two searching on the internet. Last month I thought I could learn to knit. After several hours of watching YouTube videos I attempted to make a yellow knitted blanket. It wasn’t long though before my fingers started feeling aggravated and so I settled for a knitted coaster instead. Maev pointed out I should try MasterClass instead, but I’m a socialist at heart and really enjoy public goods like clean air, literacy, lighthouses and free YouTube courses. 

Despite her poor advice, Maev is a good listener. No one listens to anybody these days. We all just talk at each other. I suppose though listening skills come in handy if you are mothering six children. How Maev does it remains a mystery to me, of course. I have no children myself. Never had time. I posed this to Maev––why any woman in her right mind would allow a man to control her like that is beyond me. I do not think Maev understands the import of this statement because a) English is not her first language, and b) she never had a father nor a husband. Men, for all she’s concerned, are of no use to her.

“I understand,” Maev said.

“Really?”

“Of course I do.”

“I don’t think you do.”

Maev gave me the eye. The type of eye I imagined she must have used on her children perhaps when they were misbehaving. But I recognized it immediately as the type of eye I gave to my sister when she would call me about her divorce. An exhausted eye. 

“You don’t need a man. Like me! Men, tsk, useless,” she unlocked the breaks on my wheelchair.

She wheeled me to the door where a full-length mirror rested against a wall. We both glanced at ourselves. In a month or two Maev would need to take me to the salon to get my hair colored back to brown. She took out two hats from her tote bag that she had placed rather sloppily near a glass vase earlier that morning. I wondered if she knew how much I hated that. She could have easily broken the vase by accident. At noon, as usual, the sun cast its sharp light against my home. On the south side, English Ivy was spreading its tendrils on the walls. 

“Could you help me take this down please?” I asked Maev. 

“But why? They’re very charming,” she said.  

I do not think Maev has ever owned a home. 

“Behind the beauty lies insidious problems,” I explained. 

She did not answer. 

“Do you see these tendrils? They might look harmless but they can do serious damage to the wrong type of structure. Listen, Maev. My home was built in the 1930s so it has significantly weaker mortar.” Maev remained circumspect so I stopped explaining it further at which point we resumed our daily walk. 

With newly renovated homes cropping up in my area, I wanted to get acquainted with some of the new faces in my neighborhood. A young couple lived on one end and from what I gathered they are the kind of people socially engaged. According to Maev, whom I might have sent over to get details for me, Frank and Rachel just received their Gold Creator Award for the one-millionth person interested in watching them whisper while they cook. If you ask me there’s nothing impressive about whispering while cooking at all; most people don’t talk while they cook. And if you are screaming while cooking, then you are Gordon Ramsay––in which case, could you please not? 

On the other end of my block lived a middle-aged man named Robert. I met him on one of my morning walks with Maev when I tried shoo-ing his fat white cat lying on the sidewalk. Out came Robert apologizing with his hands swishing in the air like one of those giant inflatable blow-up tubes you see at a car dealership except wearing a mask. 

“Oh, you don’t need to do that,” I told him. He had only known the cat for a week. He adopted the poor thing shortly after he left his partner of fifteen years. Apparently it makes him feel selfless. And he was just starting to bond with Toby (the cat) when it decided it preferred to be an outsider rather than an insider. 

“I’m afraid he might be harboring some sort of resentment towards me,” he explained. 

“Why would you think that?” I asked. 

“I started dating again,” Robert said as he winked at the cat. 

“How do you feel about dating during a pandemic?” 

“It can be scary, yes, I suppose. But you know, I’m really trying to be careful and only date those with potential antibodies.”

“I see.”

“In my opinion, it’s much better than waiting for a vaccine that may or may not come and may or may not do what it was supposed to do. It’s difficult to trust public health officials these days now that everything has become so politicized, you know what I mean?” 

I can tell he wanted a visual agreement from me but after swallowing twenty-odd pills with my orange juice this morning to manage my amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, I physically could not. After a mouse captured Toby’s interest, the sidewalk was free for human use again. Maev wheeled me back home. 

*

Maev was visiting her family in Cambodia for the first time in twenty years. She planned to rekindle what had been lost, she declared. Can you really do that in fourteen days? I asked her. She never got around to answering my questions before she left the spare keys on the table. I am still wondering. Personally, I think it is a blessing to have such a considerable distance from your family. Too much of anything is dreadful for you. Too much water intake can lead to low blood sodium, too much socializing can lead to social fatigue, too much talking is a symptom of logorrhoea, and so on. Take it from me, I have found plenty of freedom and solitude since my mother and sister passed away in a car accident nine years ago. I specifically told them to take a cab instead, but as I mentioned, nobody listens to anybody these days. Anyhow, since Maev was on a vacation, I once again found myself with plenty of freedom and solitude. As a result, I have begun a new routine––watching my neighbors across from me. Stuck on my second floor, I found that my guest bedroom afforded me a better viewpoint. From here, I discovered a few interesting facts about my neighbors:

1. The wife worked remotely, usually engaged in a video conference call, and always dressed professionally from the waist up.
2. The husband was a health worker, based, of course, on the scrubs he wore every day to go to work.
3. They had a child (children, maybe) who might be off to college judging from the multiple collegiate signages splattered on a bedroom window.
4. They were a bit delusional. They turned TWO whole walls on their third-floor bedroom into an eclectic collection of mementos. At a certain point, keepsakes no longer stood for anything other than a representation of junk. 
5. A strange man appeared at their door on a Tuesday afternoon. 
6. They ate dinner separately. Usually the husband in the living room watching TV and the wife in the kitchen on her phone. I couldn’t help but think of Jean Baudrillard, the French philosopher, when he said, “It is the saddest sight in the world,” upon seeing the vision of New Yorkers eating meals all by themselves. He continued to describe it as, “sadder than destitution.” He further went on to assert––and I love this––“He who eats alone is dead.” The French, as the old cliché suggests, approached the dining experience as something akin to the act of lovemaking. Baudrillard failed to realize two things: First, no one ever ate alone and thought, well this is the end of me. They just sat down, ate, and went on with their lives. Second, according to Robert, Americans do not love make, they fuck make. By this reasoning, my neighbors were certainly not French. 
7. I confirmed that they have not made fuck for the past week and that the only intimacy that had occurred between them was on Sunday when they brushed against each other in the staircase. 

*

Maev left my medication organized which I was grateful for because today my symptoms included twitchy legs and stiff arms. More importantly, my tongue felt like a dying seal. I knew this because I called to make a socially distanced date with Robert and he kept asking me why I was moaning. He hung up and followed up with a text:

If I were into women, that
would turn me on,
winky emoji, enjoy your day, love! 

My doctor explained it to me. It is sporadic, he said. This means that while I am slowly deteriorating there will be days I can move without a problem. He advised that on those problematic days I should keep myself intellectually engaged. I took his advice and finally signed up for the MasterClass courses, which the Gold Creator Award winners swore by. Apparently, anyone can become an insider these days. And since I can’t be an outsider, I might as well be an insider. I scrolled through the different courses, all documenting the artistry of the world’s biggest and brightest celebrities. For ninety US dollars I, too, can have a perfect backhand like Serena Williams, the ability to scout a film location like Werner Herzog, or possibly win an Oscar like Natalie Portman. I clicked on Natalie’s impeccable cheekbones, which launched me into the “Lesson Plan.” 

It was a series of twenty videos of varying lengths. In her burgundy dress and beachy-wave hairstyle, Natalie looked directly at the camera. In an equally laid back and pleasant tone she outlined her expectations, namely what I should take from her class and the basic principles of acting. After two hours and thirty-seven minutes I completed the course. Like a great actress, Natalie gave a great performance as an instructor. Each lesson provided various modes of Natalie. There was a reminiscent Natalie, who tells you a story about her past. There was a reverent Natalie, who talks about the fine actors and performances she admired. Finally there was a spiritual Natalie, who claims empathy is the root of her artistry. This was important because we all know that empathy is free but acting lessons are not. I am wounded at this realization. I was made to feel like I gained something. Oh yes, Natalie. I, too, can act. But the moment I tried it, I realized I was completely inferior and that yes I can see that you can do it, but I know that I cannot. I spent the rest of the evening feeling betrayed. 

The next morning, despite trying positivity, a key scene in Natalie’s course lingered in my mind. It was when she staged a room and pointed at a spot and said, “Here I find out I am being cheated on.” The strange man appeared at my neighbor’s house again. The door opened. He entered. I pinched my phone screen, zooming in on the house. In the kitchen was where they spoke. The man’s arm around the wife’s waist. In the living room, he looked at her from under his lashes and there she laughed, throwing her head back as if riding a rollercoaster. In the dining room was where they kissed. Up they went into the master bedroom where she glared through the blinds, abruptly, before closing them. That was where she would cheat. I closed my eyes.  

She was in her red slip with her bare feet, hair tied back so as not to disturb the vision of him now in front of her. And there he was–––as beautiful as ever, as strong as ever. She ran to him, jumped on his thighs, and stuck on him like glue. Her hands grasped his. 

“Oh but you are in my blood you’re my holy wine,” Joni Mitchell sang.

She climbed down his lengthy pole of a body, twisted, and pushed him to the ground. She stared at him until he sprung up like spring flowers. She lifted her leg, pointed her feet, and twirled like a dress. 

“Oh and you taste so bitter, bitter and so sweet,” Joni sang again. 

She leaped into his arms, folded her legs around him. There was nothing to do but for him to carry her in circles until he was exhausted. Until she was exhausted. Until there was nothing left of them. Only breath.

“Oh I could drink a case of you darling,” Joni sang for final time. 

*

I felt it all. There I was, once upon a time, on that stage, where my body moved and lived. My numbness returned. I knew I was in the wheelchair again, bound to it like a genie to its lamp. The room was hotter too. I tried opening my eyes but could not. I could not open my eyes. I could not open my eyes. I tried to yell but my tongue was as dry as a riverbed. If I were a genie now, I would make a wish to be able to open my eyes or scream or throw that damn vase by the door. If I could just move, or perhaps if Maev was here, or anyone at all, my mother, my father, my sister, or even Robert, I could tell them there was a very, very serious problem that needs to be fixed.

Vanessa Stone is a creative freelancer based in Brooklyn, New York.  Her stories have appeared in The Coil Magazine and Lumina Journal. She holds a BA from the University of Washington and an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College.  She is at work on a forthcoming novel, The Things We Did to God.