Author: Post Road

from The Work

Christian Barter

            I had this clearish vision of what to write:
            a portrait of a year, a love affair
            caught pivoting towards serious, and right
            at mid-life’s pivot, that ten-mile stare,
            my own decline and fall co-terminant
            with country’s and, perhaps, us all,
            as though the universe had heard me bawl
            and said, “I’ll give you something to cry about!”
            No small pickins for a poem of complaint.
            And yet it never has come truly clear,
            the vision, muddy as the life which yet
            may grant me one more useful metaphor
            at the expense of that which could confer it:
            if all this goes unread, it will be perfect.

So if you’re somewhere out there, passed out on the floor:
Oh, Joey, I’m not angry any more.

—Concrete Blonde

1

I have no problem any more with this small town.
I’ve stopped worrying if my neighbors wave—
though sometimes they do—and at forty-eight
I figure the friendships that didn’t take
when we had time to waste on them won’t now
and don’t take too long at Hannaford’s getting the low-down
on which vanished mutual companion
is climbing in Utah or dating an old ex.
For we are all old exes here,
our pearls built on the grit of one another.
It’s easy now to pull the brie right under
the nose of some ex-buddy who came by early
every night one winter to throw darts
and drink, and build up nacre for the bars.

2

I’m telling you this, Mariah, because you may
at some point come up here to live with me.
I don’t care any more about misdirection,
or lit-theory breakdowns of the unintentional.
My last long work of fragmented voices
pollutes back shelves of independent bookstores
everywhere, unread as Dickinson.
I’ve made my peace with that small-town shoulder,
or just using others’ words if they work better.
Oh Joey, I’m not angry any more,
as Concrete Blond once belted in high style,
and we, as though we’d scored it, sang right with her.
For we are all old exes here, my love,
and, even in theory, have one life to live.

3

Though lately I can’t seem to see the sky—
the snow, the stream on Norway Drive, the tree
across the road, all thrust and knotty elbow
that once backgrounded all my verse like Fuji;
all I see are phone poles, the backyard trash
of distant interstates cutting the next ridge,
and the actual backyard trash—tipped car, old fridge,
bags piled for the truck like someone’s iPhone
ringing in the adagio, the mass,
the speech where Kennedy says we must go to the moon;
I keep seeing the charts, the line since carbon fuel
jumping up like a Superball that’s hit a stone—
always cut off at now like an intervention,
caesura, skyline, freak assassination. 

4

I’m going to try to write something anyway,
writing and inspiration often acting
as opposite strides, the light too bright
at the moment of seeing to see your way through
the dank passages—like love and passion,
which rarely operate in concert; or exertion
and strength, which every lifter knows go back
and forth, one laying track for the other
to glide on, as though under its own power,
days later.  Nothing is under its own power.
All that’s worth saying comes in a kind of dream:
a name coming after you’ve given up trying,
or you, when I’d become okay with being alone,
leaning forward, saying, “Mariah.”

---

Christian Barter works at Acadia National Park as a stone worker, rigger, arborist and trail crew supervisor. He has won a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton, and The Maine Literary Award. Recent poetry has appeared in Tin House, NewLetters and on poets.org. His latest book is Bye-bye Land from BOA Editions.

Uh-Oh, Love Comes to Town

by RJC Smith

We were on the roof, smoking pot.  Rena had a pair of binoculars.  It was the last summer, or any season for that matter, that I would spend with my father, the last before his unfortunate break.  Rena was only my friend, and possibly my only friend.  There wasn’t much else to do and we had no other means of emotional support save each other.  That and Rena was in love with me, and maybe I got off on it.

“Huh,” said Rena, and I suppressed the urge to roll my eyes at her coyness, which I found grating.  There was a lot about her that I found grating, yet she continued to spend time with me.  This was invaluable because I didn’t have a driver’s license.  

I had already hit the joint twice, but in light of her obliviousness, took one last extended toke, which sent me into a coughing fit.  My eyes reddened as I coughed and I pushed a wave of nausea back into my stomach.

“What,” I said, extending the joint towards her.  She didn’t notice me.  She was transfixed with whatever her binoculars were pointed at.  I looked down at the pool, visible along with a good portion of the wooden deck from where we sat on my house’s roof.  I watched its surface waver and reflect light.

My father had a routine for swimming in this pool.  It was the same every time, every day, every morning.  First, he’d walk, straight into the frigid shallow end, down the textured steps, into the water.  He’d rotate back and forth, the tips of his fingers gliding across the chlorinated blue.  Then he’d raise his arms up into a triangle and dive forward, transitioning into a measured butterfly stroke. 

“Where did you say your dad was,” Rena said, in a confused voice.

“Grocery shopping, I think,” I said. “Do you want any more of this joint or what?”

“Maybe you should take a look at this,” Rena said, motioning for me to come look through her binoculars, “Or maybe you shouldn’t.  I don’t know.”  

I swiped them from Rena’s hands.  I put them up to my eyes and moved back and forth, adding sarcastically, 

“What am I looking for?  What am I looking for?” before Rena guided me to the sweet spot with her right hand.  

“What is it,” I continued, “a blue-jay?  An ostrich?  Some kind of rare sparrow?”

Then I saw it.  It was a scene set inside my next-door neighbor’s, Richard Godsen’s, hot tub.  Inside were Richard and my father.  Richard was positioned over my father, hunched over somewhat, and my father, Pete, was leaning back, his eyes closed and his mouth hanging agape.  He was giving him a fucking handjob.  You could tell from the little splashes of water around my father’s crotch.

“Huh,” I said.

#

I’d rather not go into the scene where my father hit my mother repeatedly with a wooden spoon from 7:23 PM to 7:24 PM (I was looking away through most of it and staring at the stove’s LED clock), because I’m saving that for the therapist my mother will force me to see once they’re legally divorced and she has money.

“Why didn’t you do anything to stop him,” Rena asked, behind the wheel with red puffy eyes, turning a corner into the parking lot of a local playground and baseball diamond.  We were both high and would be getting higher in a minute.

“I guess at the time I wasn’t sure it was really happening,” I said, answering without thinking, a direct line between my mouth and my brain.  I felt a bit queasy because I knew a more honest answer might be something like, ‘I didn’t want to be hit with the spoon either’. 

“Yeah,” Rena said. “I guess I can sort of understand that.”  She enunciated each little word like they all had lives of their own.

We got out of the car and walked up past the playground and towards the baseball diamond, its outfield meshing indiscriminately with the larger grassy area.  We walked out and stopped ten or so yards from an ongoing little league game. I sat down on the grass cross-legged and Rena did the same.  Sometimes I wanted life to be something bigger than smoking pot in a field, but my life was often little more than that.  Five yards away an outfielder stood, his body twisted to eye us with suspicion. 

#

When we drove back, all I could imagine were buildings, warehouses let’s say, filled with little stationary cars where moving roads were projected onto windshield shaped screens.  Rena’s ever-present shoegaze played on the car stereo, somehow sending me farther into myself.

The only thing that separated my house from Richard Godsen’s was a few yards’ strip of dirt and pre-autumnal leaves.  I wanted it to be the last summer I spent there, smoking pot atop the pool diving-board or throwing a ball at the half-tennis court wall.

“I think I’m getting headaches,” Rena said, “headaches unlike those felt by other people.”

“Hmm,” I responded, “Interesting,” while continuing to stare alternatingly out the side window and windshield.

The headlights on passing cars shone through the windshield and I winced.  Rena glanced over at me and I continued looking forward.  This was the little thing we did, the talking without saying, avoiding the tension of her want.  No emotion resonated out from me.

“Maybe it’s a satellite,” she went on.

“Or maybe your rising planet,” I said.

“Rising sign,” she said.  “I think you mean rising sign.”

“Or ruling planet, maybe,” I said, as we curved onto my house’s road.  Rena snorted through her nose.

We pulled into my driveway and sat there in the parked car, outside of my garage.  A jetliner passed above, close enough for us to hear the sound, or me at least, as Rena’s ethereal music was blasting from the speakers, bouncing around the inside of the SUV.  Rena opened up the glove box to pull out her little acrylic pipe and proceeded to fill it with marijuana from a small glass box.  The windows of her car were open and I wondered if my father could hear us from inside over cable news squall.  Then we smoked more, back and forth, the rotating act of it almost better than the high.

“Can we put on something with, like, a beat,” I asked.  “I feel like I’m about to drift off into nothingness.”

“Like what,” she said, “what would you have me put on?”

“Something more pop/rock, I guess.”

“You take it, just put something on,” she said, throwing her iPod into my lap.

I scrolled through it.  She wasn’t the type of person that listened to music for a hook. I persevered and found something because I was high and didn’t want to agitate her further. 

We sat there quiet with just the music for a while.  It was fine.  I had become adept at thinking it was fine.

“You don’t have any cigarettes do you?” I said, finally.

She pulled a pack out from her cup holder and held it in the dark in front of her torso.  Rena looked up at me with a blank face and was silent, then smiled.

“Just the one,” she said,  “wanna split it?”

We passed it back and forth for a few minutes.

“Do you want the last drag?” Rena asked, displaying a cigarette that was little more than a cotton filter.

“Sure,” I said.

Rena pulled on it and grabbed my head with her free hand.  She moved closer and pulled me in, we met midway.  Though she was attempting to kiss me while blowing smoke into my mouth, the sensation I most remember is our teeth hitting.

“No,” I said, “no.”  I hadn’t wanted it.  Perhaps I pushed back a bit too hard.  She was looking at me with a face.  I was trying not to look at her.

#

I walked in the front door and closed it quiet enough so you couldn’t hear it click.  My father was passed out on the recliner with a can of coke held limply, resting on his stomach, the blue light from the TV coating him.  I wondered if he had slipped some whiskey into the can, but decided it wasn’t worth the risk of checking.

Then the TV started emitting a horrible beeping noise, and a gray box appeared over a pundit’s face.  ‘FLASH FLOOD WARNING: 1AM-9AM’ it said in bold lettering.  My father jolted awake and spilt some of his drink on himself.  He looked up at me, failing to recognize my presence for a good half-a-minute.  Behind us the television set continued to blare warning noises.

“I’m going to bed now,” I said to him.  I said it, loud, as if shouting over some swell.

“Did you remember to close the door and take your medication?” he asked.  It was nonsense.  I couldn’t fault him as he was only half awake.

#

I was lying down in my room, listening to the sound of the intermittent but heavy rainfall.  If you stare at a white plaster ceiling for long enough all of its little imperfections will become known to you.  Through my laptop speakers black metal was playing, which meant I was not quite ready for sleep.  It was close to two in the morning.  I’d always had trouble sleeping.

I got up from bed to turn the lights off, then I lay back down, switched my gaze from the ceiling to the standing, oscillating fan in the corner.  The rain picked up again, pattering against the window.  Outside, I could hear a car door open and close.  Its engine started.  I heard the sound of tires moving over gravel and onto dirt.  

I had thoughts of Richard until my thoughts were submerged.

#

Rena and I began to kiss.  She wrapped her hand around the back of my head and I pulled her pelvis into mine. Then she let go and pushed my hands away, falling back onto the bed.  She pulled off her sweatshirt and when that was off, her t-shirt.

I should have felt something different, I know.  Instead I felt coldness welling inside of me, enough that it scared me.  I slunk back like I was being rewound.  I crouched fetally on the floor for a minute.  From outside came the sounds of drunkenness and car doors.  Rena sat upright, took her head in her hands and began moaning like a deer whose back has been broken through car collision.  Her head began warping, though I couldn’t tell if it was just my vision failing me, if I was too high or something.  Little slits opened up in a ring around the top, columns formed along her forehead and across her temples.

I got up and walked out of my room, down the stairs and to the ground floor, where the garage and laundry room were.  I slid the glass door open and stepped out onto the gravel.  Richard and my father were leaning against the family sedan.  Richard was gripping a bottle of whiskey with a hand connected to an arm wrapped around my father’s neck.

“Pete?” My father whimpered.  “Is that you?”

It was raining and very dark out.  There were rumblings of thunder in the sky.  When I’m lit up and remembering being there, this is what I think it was: simply lightning.  But then there was the moaning and thumping I heard coming from up and behind me.  Looking back I saw Rena at my bedroom window.  Light was pouring from the northern hemisphere of her head as she banged it against the glass.  Her moaning was loud enough to make out from the gravel lot.  The light was bluish-white and almost blinding.  It was illuminating the three of us, the parked car, and the edges of the nearby woods.

---

RJC Smith lives in New York.  He has work published in X-Ray Lit Mag.

Fever on Good Friday

Sean Williamson

Theodor’s fever broke on Good Friday. We had fallen asleep on the couch. Theodor was sweating under a blanket. I was twisted up in a hot afternoon dream: standing on the empty patio at Jess and Oscar’s house in Milwaukee, on an overcast day. We are laughing belly-straining laughter. What else about the dream I can’t recall.

            On that same patio, a few years ago in real life, I stood up as a witness in their tiny wedding and read a quote from Bob Marley. They didn’t have a baby boy then, but he’s big now, Jess sent me a video of him running down the hall in his diaper, dragging a handful of balloon strings, balloons bouncing against each other in the air.

            When I woke, Theodor was soaked with sweat next to me, eyeballs flitting under closed lids. Just a couple days before this, I read an essay about a man who lost his tiny daughter because a brick fell off a building in Manhattan. There is so much dread in parenthood. It is easy to amplify. Just go ahead and tell us what happened, a thing we all know could happen. And we’ll weep at the devastation of a house fire. Forever keep our eyes up, for falling bricks, for grills and satellite dishes, for air conditioning units, raining from the sky. Watch our baby’s fever’s rise and fall.

            We are the hot engines that run our lives. Sometimes we are maintained and fueled. Sometimes punished for nothing. My family is in Wisconsin, living their good lives. They must be in pain, too, but so far away. Is anything worth not being there? Theodor’s eyebrows shine with sweat. Damp ringlets of hair stick to his forehead. He was just a baby once.

            When should I call the doctor? Is this serious enough?

            Washing the dishes and preparing dinner keeps the nervous barf from my mouth.

            One time, at the Walgreens on Metropolitan, Theodor ran away from me across a busy parking lot. I chased him down and twisted his shirt in my fist. Sawyer, the smaller one, was confused and tucked under my other arm. Theodor struggled to free himself, from me, from my fist pushing him against the car.

            “You can’t do that!” I screamed looming over him.

            “Why?” he cried.

            “Because I need you. That’s why!”

            Fruit flies tumble in the air above the sink. My neck and head sting and are sore.

            Sawyer, who was napping in his bedroom stumbles out and cries for want of everything, but will settle for frozen berries. I sit him at the table and before long he looks like a wild baby, just done gorging on road kill. Then he goes naked into the bath.

            Heather will be home soon, and traffic brushes down the street below the apartment. It’s loud like it’s always loud. My mother and father are putting new carpet in our childhood home, they told me. The old carpet still holding hairs from a family dog, dead ten years now.

            If a bubble were to pop in my brain, what would happen to my boys? To the chicken cooking on the stove? To Sawyer in the filling bath? Could they make it another forty minutes until Heather unlocked the door? Don’t we know all the horrible things? Haven’t we listed them in our minds? Christ, how can I make this life go? How can I keep this engine running?

            “Dad?” Theodor says, groggy. “What are you making?”

            “Hi, baby. I made chicken and broccoli and applesauce.”

            “I’m hungry,” he says, then slides off the edge of the couch, then waddles to the kitchen.

            I touch his head. It’s still wet but much cooler. I bend down and put a thermometer in his armpit and it reads 99 degrees, which we can all live with. “Sawyer, are you OK?” I ask.

            Sawyer squeals from the bathtub. There’s better music now.

            Theodor bobs his head back and forth and sits sleepy in the dining room nook, hair drying in a hilarious shape. I fill his construction-themed plate with chicken and broccoli and applesauce, some in each section. He is so hungry and eats everything. His plate fills again. I lean in the doorway between the bathroom and kitchen and assign each one of them an eye. They are happy. More applesauce and all his broccoli without asking. My eyes are hot with tears because he is hungry and smiling and eating, because it’s not for me. Because he doesn’t remember how much I need him, does he?

Heather and I kiss at the top of the stairs and I rush out to my night restaurant job. A crowd walks slowly down the middle of Woodward. Voices chuck a song into the air, cop cars lead the way, bleeping and blipping. Drummers bang out a march. From the back, they chant some Catholic song in Italian. At least I guess it’s Italian. Thousand-year-old women walk with black shawls around their heads. Men push a glass case down the middle of the street. Inside, Jesus lies in a bed of flowers. Following, men in tan suits push the statue of a woman, a pale specter, head bent to the side, in a black hooded robe. They chant and the pale woman looks down at me, my headphones around my neck, dirty high top sneakers, wearing shorts for the first time of the year. I turn my back and outpace them down Woodward. But they follow, Jesus and the specter, the police and the Italian vampires, chanting, “What do you think you’re getting away with?”

---

Sean Williamson’s feature film debut, Heavy Hands, was an official selection for the 2013 Raindance Film Festival (London). In 2018 he released the audio storytelling series, BLIGHT: Stories in the Key of Decay and Repair. Sean is a Wisconsin native living in Queens with his partner and two sons. His work has appeared at The Millions, Juked, and Maudlin House.

T’pree

Greg Hrbek

1.

A coincidental analog: when a planetary culture creates something out of its own imagination which also turns out to exist elsewhere in the universe. The idea pretty much blew the global mind. What were the chances of this? Turned out: surprisingly high. To quote directly from the UN speech delivered by S2M (as he was dubbed at light-speed on social media), “The multiverse has as many instances of coincidental analog as life-sustaining worlds.” Relevant example: in the Andromeda Galaxy, on a planet of bodiless beings who have evolved over time to form a collective consciousness via ethereal “root systems” of thought, there is a million-year-old legend about honesty in which, once upon a time, a strange creature, a young humanoid, used a weapon (known to us as a hatchet) to chop down a tree bearing a small red fruit (known to us as an apple), and subsequently told the truth about his action. The name of that humanoid was Georg Vashingtone.

2.

Hansen was working that night, monitoring the astro-communicational intake computer. Fresh out of an astronomy PhD program at the University of Toronto, there he was—paying his dues, listening to the Static of the Spheres in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere (Mount Kobau, Saskatchewan, to be exact)—when the message came through on sub-space radio. In English. It began: “People of Canada . . . ” Had to be a prank, though on a scale almost impossible to engineer. Though maybe not impossible. Because the hackers, the cyberterrorists, in those early days of the new millenium, were becoming both bolder in their anarchic hijinks and increasingly expert at the manipulation of systems once the exclusive ground of trained professionals (in this case, astral communications)—and the next part of the message was so absurd, it had to be a hoax.   

            Calling the rest of the duty team into the room (there were three of them that November night), Hansen showed them the message. Couldn’t be authentic. And yet the computer insisted that the signal’s point of origin was approximately three hundred million miles away, somewhere between Mars and Jupiter, and was moving closer with each repetition. What else could the staff of Mount Kobau National Observatory do? They had to call the Director of the Agency, Heironymous LeClerc, a man no less ridiculous in physical appearance than the claim of the communication which was causing Hansen and the others to awaken the Director in the wee hours of the morning, Quebec Time.

            “Who is this?” demanded LeClerc, after he’d come on the video line.

            “Name’s Hansen, sir.”

            “It’s three in the morning, Hansen,” he said, in his Quebecois accent. “This had better be a matter of national destiny.”

            “It is, sir. I’m calling regarding a transmission we began receiving at approximately 11:30 CST from somewhere between Mars and Jupiter.”

            “You’ve decoded it already?” he said.

            “We didn’t have to.  It’s in English.”

            “English.”

            “Yes, sir.  I know it sounds bizarre— ”

            “Read it, Hansen.”

            Hansen picked up the printout and cleared his throat. When he was finished reading, LeClerc stared into the camera eye. His hair, red and Einsteinian, was even crazier than usual after a night of being alternately flattened and kinked. For long seconds, he stared at Hansen from behind the thick lenses of his oversized and outdated eyeglasses, before finally saying:  “Hansen, you’re fired.”

3.

Guy Hansen was, of course, not fired. On the contrary, he was destined to go down in history as the first person to encounter the message that would change the fate of a planet. A few days later, the news leaked: SOURCES SAY ALIENS ARE HERE. Sounded like an American Presidential Tweet. But the reporters and the panelists were totally serious—and the longer the coverage went on, the more a feeling formed on billions and billions of screens all around the globe, radiating outward . . . a feeling that something of epic proportions was unfolding. Pretty soon, a news conference was announced. And the Canadian Prime Minister went on TV. To inform the world that alien visitors had come to Canada.  From a planet long-believed to exist only in the realm of science-fiction—but which, incredibly and unbelievably, we now knew to exist in fact. The Planet Vulcan.

4.

Next day, a Vulcan was standing in the General Assembly Hall of the United Nations. Ambassador Senses Two Moons. The name struck Guy Hansen, as it did pretty much everyone on Earth (even those poorly versed in what we now refer to as “The Mythology”), as a strange one for a Vulcan. There was not, however, time to do anything more than mentally note the error, because the drama was playing out right before the eyes of the entire planet on its phones and tablets and TVs. 

            There he was.   

            At the podium. Pointy ears, upswept eyebrows, dark hair combed down onto the forehead. Before he said a word, it was clear to Guy Hansen. This is not an actor in makeup.  This is an Actual Vulcan.

            Guy Hansen was also in New York.  He was scheduled to be a guest on The Late Night Show, the first of what would be many television appearances for the young astronomer whom everyone wanted to ask: how does it feel to receive the most important communication of all time?  But the taping was not until two o’clock.  Now he was in his hotel room high above the city, watching on television the Vulcan ambassador addressing the world. Telling of the ten year journey via wormhole from a solar system in the Sagittarius arm of the galaxy. Explaining the strange name—Senses Two Moons. Yes, he said, there are many things the Creators got right in their imaginations.  The ears and the hand signal.  (He did the hand signal and a ripple of laughter turned into applause and then, as he continued to hold the pose, a standing ovation.)  However, he continued, the average “degree of correlation” in cases like this is about fifty percent. 

            Like all the other eyes from hemisphere to hemisphere, Guy Hansen’s were glued to the screen.  He was perched on the edge of his seat.

            The nerve-pinching. The mind-melding. Can Actual Vulcans make you faint by squeezing your shoulder with their fingers? If Actual Vulcans touch your face and stare into your eyes, can they put you in a trance and know everything you’re thinking? The answer to both of these questions was: yes.  But, are Actual Vulcans incapable of lying? Is Actual Vulcan blood really green?  Negative.  And negative. 

            “As for certain other traits,” the Ambassador said, pausing at length—giving every Earthling sufficient time to get the gist—“the Secretary General and I feel that perhaps such subject matter does not befit this hallowed hall.”

            And so did the momentous first step in the rest of Earth history end. In a state of suspense. With Guy Hansen and every other human left wondering: does an Actual Vulcan really do it only once every seven years?

5.

That afternoon, Guy Hansen taped The Late Night Show. He told the Host his story, which personally he thought to be on the boring side, of how he’d been sitting at the astro-communicational intake computer, when the message came through from somewhere beyond Mars . . .

            About halfway through the interview, the Host—a sketch comedian who had made himself a household name by impersonating a wide range of fools and criminals from the previous Presidential Administration—said: “Gotta take a commercial break but we’ll be right back with Canadian Astrologer, Guy Hansen, and a Special Surprise Guest, so don’t go anywhere.” Guy continued to sit on his seat. He was wearing a new Brooks Brothers suit tailored especially for the occasion and was sweating bullets. In fact, he was extremely concerned that there might be sweat stains coming through the jacket. That’s when the Host leaned closer to Guy and said, with a sort of wink, that it looked like he could use a handkerchief (or maybe a car wash sponge), and Guy said that no one had mentioned to him anything about a Special Surprise Guest. “Right, that, well, look— ” But the Director was already shouting, yelling, starting a countdown, and the Host was giving Guy some helpful claps on the shoulder while Guy endeavored to strike a pose that would conceal from the cameras and the studio audience (now applauding on command) the perspiration stains at his armpits. 

            A few moments later, she was emerging from backstage. The most beautiful humanoid Guy Hansen had ever seen. Long dark hair pinned back and cascading over her shoulders. Form-fitting silver dress hemmed above the knee. Ears curving to exquisite points.

6.

Her name was T’Pree. When she left the Planet Vulcan, she had been thirteen Terran years old.  Making her now twenty-three. Guy Hansen was twenty-six. He sat there, in his armchair on the sound stage of The Late Night Show, staring at her profile and listening to her talk, low soprano and slow, though Guy hardly knew what she was talking about because of a high-pitched whine in his ear comparable to the feedback caused by a looped signal between microphone and amplifier—caused, in this case, by the signal looping between her voice and his heart.

7.

The taping was over by four o’clock and Guy Hansen emerged from the network building in midtown Manhattan into a brilliant peaceful snowfall. Snow in New York City, snow this far south, snow anywhere, had become less and less common in recent years; and Guy Hansen couldn’t help but draw a connection between the rarity of these tender crystalline flakes of frozen water vapor and the woman from another planet who, backstage, after the interview, had made a request of him so extraordinary that he stopped now, as if the cold air had slapped some sense into him, and asked himself if this was all a dream he was having at the astro-communicational station back in Saskatchewan . . .

            The taping had ended and he was trying to figure out how to say goodbye to her. What else was there to do? But how should he do it? Shake her hand? Bow? Simply say, “See you later”? Should he try to get his fingers into the configuration of the Vulcan salute (the emoji of which he jokingly texted from time to time)? For some reason, everything, not just his personal fate, but the course of galactic history, seemed to hinge on how he said goodbye to her forever—except, as we know, that isn’t what happened at all, because she was the one who approached him, and said:  

            “Dr. Hansen, I pride myself on my knowledge of Earth cuisine.  I have been studying your cookbooks and restaurant menus for ten years.”

            “Wow.”

            “How do you like French-Vietnamese Fusion?”

            “It’s my favorite,” replied Guy Hansen.  “After pizza.”

            She lifted an eyebrow, said, “Ah, a joke, quite clever,” and asked him to meet her in three hours at a place on 22^nd Street. 

8.

After walking for a good hour in a daze through the fine snowfall, reminiscent of the aftereffects of nuclear detonation, he found himself in a bar with a sign on the wall that said: IN COMPLIANCE WITH THE 18^th AMENDMENT, NO INTOXICATING LIQUOR ALLOWED ON THE PREMISES. Guy Hansen ordered an 8.5% beer; and after he’d gotten half of it in him, he felt tipsy enough to believe the situation. In two more hours, he would be eating French-Vietnamese with an Actual Vulcan. 

            The television was on above the bar. A commercial spot came on.  For The Late Night Show. “Tonight,” the announcer declared, “Dewey welcomes Best Actor Nominee Balso Snell, Canadian Astrologer Guy Hansen, and a Special Surprise Guest from the Actual Planet Vulcan!” The bartender, a twenty-something in a tank top shirt whose right arm, shoulder to wrist, was tattooed with the circuitry of an android, said: 

            “Can you believe this shit?”

            “What.”

            “All this Vulcan shit.”

            Guy looked at him for a long moment. Drank some of his beer. While drinking, he took a very close look at the man’s arm. “What do you mean?”

            “What do I mean?  What do you think I mean, man? Remember the old ‘military-industrial complex’? Well, this is the totalitarian-intellectual property complex. Did you see the speech this morning? That dude isn’t real. He’s an actor. Go back, watch it again. Slow the audio down, slow it to half speed, and then put it through this algorithmic program that analyzes the accent in somebody’s voice, and guess what . . . The guy is Turkish-American. Yeah. And you can tell the ears are prosthetic. Just blow the video up and you can see the glue. It’s all BS, it’s all fake, the media knows it but they want you to think it’s legit. And don’t tell me ‘we’ve seen it all before.’ This is a whole new level. This isn’t just domestic, this is international.”

            The commentary didn’t shock Guy. Why should it? Practically everything that happened these days was claimed by someone to be nothing but a fabrication. Still, he was confused about the theory implicit in the speech. Say the whole thing is a government conspiracy, an international conspiracy (which Guy knew—better, perhaps, than anyone else—it wasn’t): What would a country, or a bloc of countries, stand to gain from staging the arrival of extraterrestrial life based on a TV show? Guy Hansen finished his beer, laid a ten on the bar, and left. There was no point in explaining, I’m the one who received the signal. People like that, you can’t get through to them.

9.

As we know, that bartender’s particular rant (that the Vulcans were not Vulcans at all but human people playing Vulcans) had been trending on social media for hours, since the minutes after the UN speech—and was soon joined, as we also know, by a competing theory: 

            That the Vulcans were real, and they had been here before. To be specific, they had first come to Earth in the year 1963, when they assisted in the construction of a supposedly fictional character from a planet called Vulcan. Now they had returned, claiming that the situation was “coincidental,” when in fact it had been deliberately planned to create an illusion of coincidence. 

            What could be the endgame of such a scheme? That part was murky. But those who subscribed to this interpretation were not so concerned with the logistics of motivation. It was the premise that hooked them.

10

At five minutes to seven, Guy Hansen arrived at a restaurant in the Chelsea District of Manhattan called Franco-Siam. It was Zagat-rated and had been given a grade of A by the city inspectors. Just inside the door stood a hostess of Vietnamese descent. For all Guy knew, she might also have some French in her from way back—and it struck him that, if she had pointed ears, she could also pass for Vulcan. “Good evening,” she said. “You’re Guy Hansen, yes, the astronomer? Your companion is waiting for you. She is seated by the jade Buddha.” Yes, she was. Sitting alone. Looking down at something in her hands, which appeared to be a smartphone, while the Buddha looked over her shoulder.  And another thing. A kind of scarf wrapped around her head that covered the tips of her ears.

            “Dr. Hansen,” she said. “How pleasing to see you.”

            “Miss—  Um . . . ”

            She set the phone down. So magnetic was her stare, his eyes seemed to throb. She said:  “I trust you’ll sit while we eat.”

            He sat.

            “You really must call me T’Pree, Dr. Hansen. My surname you could not pronounce. As for my head covering by which you are so preoccupied, it is a trope of your culture’s portrayal of us, is it not? Every time they go back in time, the Vulcans must cover their ears. Is that not a principle of the storytelling?  Also, I thought you might find it alluring.”

            His heart backflipped.

            “I am being facetious, Dr. Hansen. The purpose of the scarf is entirely practical.”

            “Oh.”

            “Can you imagine if I walked about with my ears showing . . . ” She indicated the phone she’d set down on the table. “A time will come when people will hardly notice us. We will be like anyone else. For now, however, camouflage is the wisest course. Nonetheless,” she went on, “it would be inaccurate to assert that, in wearing the scarf, I did not have the ulterior motive of inspiring in you a desire to remove it. Shall we order?”

11.

Guy was surprised when T’Pree ordered the Phô with beef. He was not an expert in the Mythology, but he thought he remembered that Vulcans were vegetarians. Well, they weren’t.  Some are, she said, and some are not. “Personally,” she said, “it is my intention to eat Terran cuisine of a different national or ethnic variety every day with the full spectrum of indigenous ingredients. Tomorrow, I intend to consume a pork enchilada.”

12.

Not all vegetarians. In fact, the most popular food on Vulcan was a patty made from the meat of a creature that bore a striking resemblance to the giant chickens of Earth prehistory; and the tentacles of a certain cephalopod found in the northern ocean were considered a delicacy in some regions (though too sacred to be eaten in others). Still, culinary habits were insignificant examples of “analog gap.” The imagining culture always made much larger errors. For instance, psychology. In the specific case of Vulcans: feelings—or the lack thereof. Did Vulcans purge themselves of all emotion in a ritual on an altar at the foot of a smoking volcano? No. To the contrary. They felt all kinds of emotions. By comparison, the human range of feeling was sadly limited. Vulcans, fluent in not one but two emotional “languages,” simply did a very good job of what human psychoanalysts would call “repression.” And yet even such psychological issues were of relatively minor importance compared to those of biology.

            “You know of what I speak,” T’Pree asked.

            “I think so.”

            “Do you find it probable, Dr. Hansen, that my species mates once in a lunar alignment?”

            “Well, it does seem kind of silly.”

            “Silly. No wonder your planet suffers from such racial and religious strife. To devalue the meaning of another being’s sexuality with such a word.”

            “Forgive me,” he said, earnestly.

            She touched her wine glass to her lips. “Oh, I’m being quite cruel. Of course it’s silly, Dr. Hansen. We, to utilize your Earth vernacular, ‘do it’ at any time we wish and with whomever we wish. Admittedly, on a certain southern island, there is a very peculiar lottery system, but that is an exception.  Overall, in this regard, Actual Vulcans are very much like Actual Humans, with one caveat: As a rule, Actual Vulcans are pansexual.”

13

A few minutes later, they were in a taxi on the way to her hotel, the Ritz, where she had a room overlooking Central Park. On the car’s television screen, one of the new 3D holographic types, a US senator and a terrorism expert (a man with hair balding in the pattern of a crop circle) were decrying the shortsightedness of allowing aliens to simply land and start walking among us without any system of background checks in place.   

            Of what they were saying, Guy Hansen could be only half aware. Because the hand of the most fascinating female ever to walk the face of the Earth was resting just above his knee, on his inner thigh, kneading gently.

14.

Before disappearing into what she called the salle de bain, T’Pree requested that Guy do the following: light the candles that were positioned on various surfaces in the room; disrobe; wait for her on the bed.  

            “Also,” she said, “select some Terran music which best represents your personal definition of romantic.”   

            Guy was compiling a playlist (hands shaking) when the news alert popped up: an Actual Vulcan had been killed at Universal Studios Theme Park in Hollywood while waiting in the line for The Wizarding World of Harry Potter. As we now know, that young male’s name was Touch the Stars. Two Caucasian men had approached him, wanting to know where he got off, him and all the other green-blooded freaks, just landing on our planet and walking around like it was going to be theirs, when it wasn’t theirs, it was ours. 

            Touch the Stars responded: “You are a life form sustained by the planet. A planet cannot be ‘possessed’ by a life form which it sustains. As for my blood, it isn’t green. It’s the same color as yours.” 

            They shot him in the head. 

15.

On the edge of a king-size bed in the Ritz-Carlton, naked in flickering candlelight, holding a smartphone, weighing his options, sat Canadian Astronomer, Guy Hansen.  He could tell the news to T’Pree the moment she emerged from the salle de bain (in which case, the night of a lifetime would be tragically ruined); or he could make believe he hadn’t seen the story. It was, he determined, no time for self-centeredness and opportunism. Whoever had been murdered, it was someone T’Pree had been traveling the stars with for ten years. To withhold such information while going to bed with her would be almost immoral. Of course, he was going to tell her. Then the door across the room opened and she stepped out of it and into the tongues of flame which could not stop licking her bare flesh while a girl-boy indie rock duo sang a cover of “Leather and Lace.”

16.

He said: “T’Pree, there’s something I have to tell you.” (She was already kneeling over his lap.)  She responded: “Your relationship status, Dr. Hansen, is of no importance.” He shook his head and told her that wasn’t it, it was something else. He shifted her off of himself and took her hand, glimpsing in her dark hair the white curve of an ear . . . She listened to the report, drawing her legs up against her chest, clasping her hands around her knees. Teardrop: inner canthus of right eye. Reflection of candle flame sparking within it. Twinkling starlike. And when, with an acrophobic vertigo, Guy leaned forward and kissed it away, he discovered that the sadness of an Actual Vulcan tasted exactly like the sadness of an Actual Human.

            He said:  “I’m sorry.”

            “Don’t apologize, Dr. Hansen. It’s not logical.” 

            T’Pree closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and held it. It seemed she might never let it go, until she did, and said: 

            “I knew him since childhood. We grew up in the same village—and when the time came to leave, we left for the same reason. It’s true, we came to Earth because of the analog. But the analog is not the reason we left.”

            “I don’t understand.”

            Pressing the palm of her hand to his cheek, she said she could answer all of his questions.  He could know the whole truth. Who they really were and why they’d really come from across the galaxy and how his fate was entwined with hers. 

            “Allow me,” she said. “To join your mind.”

17.

More than once had he seen it, in storylines spread across the breadth of the Mythology. But watching it on a screen was no preparation for the real thing. ‘She’s going to touch my face,’ he thought. ‘Then our thoughts will blend.’

            But there were two things Guy could not know.   

            Number one: how it would feel for him, the meldee. How he would come, in the first instant of mental connection, to comprehend the truth of the human mind: solitary confinement, living burial, a hostage of its own privacy. Now, all at once, he was going to realize the meaning of freedom. Actual Freedom. 

18.

The other thing Guy Hansen couldn’t know is that Actual Vulcans can mind-meld and have sexual intercourse at the same time.

            So, while Guy was reaching epiphanies about consciousness, T’Pree was also kneeling over him, right hand on his face, left guiding that other part of him inside her as a mellow voice crooned: “It’s a fantabulous night for a moondance . . . ”

19.

Must have passed out during the climax. Because all of a sudden the room is still, the candles are nearly burned down, and the music isn’t playing anymore. Though she is still there. Asleep. It all comes back to him. They did it in every position (and she never broke hand-face contact!)—and she shared her backstory . . .

            Their society. How far from the Utopia of human imagination! Logic? A façade!  Emotional control? Hypocrisy! It was all an act. Underneath, tortured by feelings just like ours.  Infected with the same troubles. Violence, poverty, prejudice, addiction. A drug called Kallokáay. Used by everyone. And while the people who make it profit from its use, the users can’t stop using it, and killing in its name. A troubled world, an unsafe world. 

            Those who left, who came here through the wormhole, T’Pree and Touch the Stars and the others, were children when they left—and they left their parents behind; for, above all else, the parents valued the futures of the children. Now here they are, two hundred of them, interstellar journey scarcely over, and what happens? 

            Hate lessens their number by one. 

            Well, what did they expect? Didn’t they know the sociopolitics of this world had been slipping for decades into the dark ancient isms? Yes. But the analog! Underlying all of it, at the heart of things. The ideal of the analog, which is called coincidental, but is really something closer to magic or destiny. Name it what you will, it brought her to him, brought them to this place, together . . .

            Moving closer, he touches his lips to her cheek.   

            “Dr. Hansen,” she murmurs.

            “You look beautiful when you’re sleeping.”

            “In that case,” she says, eyes still closed, “why wake me up?”

            “Is it true?” he asks.

            “Is what true?”

            “What you said, well, not said, but, when our minds were joined—what was in your mind. What you told me. About us . . . ”

20.

Once upon a time, a highly advanced civilization sent forth into the cosmos a fabulous time-traveling probe bearing in its memory banks the record of every coincidental analog that has been, currently is, and ever will be. Through the multiverse it travels, transmitting from its matrix the histories, past and future, of kindred worlds—and by chance or design, these tales are sometimes heard, and sometimes heeded.

            So did the Vulcans know of Earth.

            Faraway planet that had already dreamed of them. Thus did a woman with pointed ears, a refugee, a seeker of asylum, journey through spacetime to find a man who studied the stars. As it was archived, let it now be. To them may a child be born. And the tide begin to turn. Toward a more perfect version of us. An image to be remade in.

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Greg Hrbek‘s novel, Not on Fire, but Burning, was an NPR Best Book of the Year and a New York Times Book Review Editors Choice.  His stories have appeared in Harper’s, Tin House, and The Best American Short Stories anthology.

Big Mouth

Rachel Aydt

There’s a woman in my neighborhood named Big Mouth. That’s what I call her, anyway. I see her walking down the street, talking to everyone like she owns the joint. It’s deeply annoying, because of course she doesn’t. It’s not like she’s the freakin’ mayor of the East Village. You’d think she was in charge of the whole show. When I see her leaning on her walker, against the wall, I wonder if she’s a drug spotter. When she sees the cops, she runs her hands through her hair or makes a loud noise, Hey, Papa, she yells to the window with the lovebirds sitting in their cage on the balcony. Hey! And the drugs get flushed down the toilet or stowed on the roof from the back fire escape or maybe even under the oven. Or some other place I wouldn’t think about— certainly not the toilet, because they do that so much in the movies.

            She’s not the only big mouth. Big Mouth number two walks with a limp (what is it with all of these limps and walkers anyway?). She wears big glasses and has frizzy hair that goes on forever. She tries to be cool, like when she wants to say something took a long time, she’ll say it took her a minute. Which is confusing to me, but then I realize she must have heard it on a sitcom and it must make her feel better for her pathetic existence which involves some fat cats, and one of them has diabetes and the medicine is expensive, and I wonder what kind of miserable life is that cat living anyway, holed up in a tiny apartment with horrible tasting vet-prescribed food, a litter box, and Big Mouth as a minder, one who has to give you shots?

            And there’s a woman who I used to call the crack whore. She wears tattered clothes and hangs around the non-working phone booths that remain, and she’s kind of dirty and has a bad dye job—brassy and tangled and fighting with extensions so none of it looks real. She walks fast and has an edge to her. Her hands are dirty and she talks to herself. I started saying hi to her and she would smile and stop and say hi, and then move along on her merry way. Over the years, her face began to look older, her smiles tighter and radiating with lines. She didn’t bother to put on makeup anymore. Her clothes went from tacky to dirty. Our conversations got longer. She knew me and would ask how my family was, and I’d say Fine, thank you. And a year later, she would ask me the same thing, but she would hold out her arms and embrace me. Except, it was really me holding out my arms to embrace her, but she was a willing recipient. And her hugs felt so good! She was strong, and she hugged me like she meant it with an intensity in her eyes that proved too much for me to bear. I would look back at her, and ask her with my voice dropped a half an octave, How are you? Like I understood her plight. And she would start telling me how there was some bitch down the street who she didn’t want stepping to her anymore, and she knew the way some people were, and didn’t I know, too, and I agreed, like I knew what she was talking about. In the moments when she went on and on, her stories grew more and more paranoid but I felt honored that she was sharing these paranoias with me. I almost asked her over for dinner. But I don’t even know her name, and I can’t believe in these years and years I’ve never bothered to ask her. Is it Natalie? It’s not Crack Whore. At least it’s not anymore.

            What’s upsetting is that sometimes I think I might be turning into one of them. By them, I mean, someone who uncontrollably talks to strangers. Who can’t stop talking to babies, like every one who’s pushed by in a stroller. Ooh, she’s so cute, I’ll say, without knowing whether it’s a he or a she, and I’ll make the snap judgment based upon their outfit, which is ridiculous, though eight times out of ten I’m right. Or, I’ll be on a train and I’ll sit next to an old woman with fancy, red, sparkly shoes and I’ll tell her how much I love her sneakers, and she’ll smile and thank me, and I won’t stop. I’ll say, They’re like Dorothy’s! Which is so annoying and obvious. But before I know it, she’s telling me about her life and how her son was shot and I touch her arm and ask her if she’s okay and she says Oh yes, it was years ago, but of course I still miss him, and I start weeping and tell her my stop is coming up, and then I tell her to have a good day before getting off at 42nd Street, which is actually one step beyond where I had intended to get off.

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Rachel Aydt (rhymes with light) teaches writing at the New School University and The Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College. Her published essays and fiction can be found online at The White Review, HCE Review, and more. She lives in New York City. Twitter: @Rachelrooo / Website: rachelaydt.com.