George is the man Lee and I made up, to keep from hating Dad. If we’re out of bed when he comes home late and wasted and mean, if we’re messing in the wrong drawers, if we’re asking the wrong questions, we can afford to hate George. Nobody in our family is named after him, no George shares our blood, so there’s no chance we’re anything like him, no chance at all.
But there’s someone in the house, Lee whines. A robber, murderer, child molester. It’s late, and she’s extra awake, her body next to mine beneath the sheets, humming, sugar rushing. George doesn’t let us have it after seven pm but tonight he’s out and we ate Lucky Charms in the bathroom, in case we heard the truck pull in. We watched X-Files too, and now it’s coming back to bite us.
I say shut your mouth to Lee, but soft in case she’s right and we really are endangered. The trailer ticks and groans, as it always ticks and groans on summer nights, the plastic walls expanding like a hot and bothered body. What’s that? Lee whisper-hisses and I shhhh her, hard. Don’t get riled up, I say, which is what our dead mother used to say–don’t get riled up before bed, girls–and why George still doesn’t sanction sugar after seven, though we know he doesn’t really care what we do. He hates us, Lee says every time we hide out and huddle together in George’s aftermath, red and stinging. Every time, I tell her not to get riled up about it. But since mom passed, Lee keeps riling. It’s like she wants to be riled, then punished. Like she hopes to scare herself to tears. She’s always been the fraidy cat twin, a true tick in her fight or flight mechanism. I have the streak of mean, inherited from George, most likely.
Wait, Lee whispers, though I haven’t said anything. Did you hear that? I roll away, tune her out, think of the stories our mom told before bed. The boy who cried wolf. The little girl with the dead mom and magic doll that helped her out of trouble because her mom could not. For a while after our mom got sick, I waited for her to give me something to help me and Lee. It didn’t have to be a doll. Now I feel ashamed for not understanding. True life is not a fairy tale.
Lee waits, listening. Then she says, I really mean it this time. She’s up against my cold shoulder, puffing breath on my skin. There’s someone in the house, a creeper. I listen for a long moment, hear nothing. I consider our options anyway. Worst case, a serial killer. Best case, George, who will no question beat my ass for getting out of bed. How bad depends on what he’s swallowed, but there’s no drug that makes him nice. I hear it, Lee whispers. It’s nothing, I say. Quiet, she says, and I roll over fast and face her. I want, with a sudden, surprising force, to shut her up, stifle her, stop her imagining what’s not there, stop asking me to fix what’s not there. She shrinks like I might strike and maybe I mean to, holding one arm up, listening to the walls around us, trying to hear what she hears.
But then I do hear. Careful footsteps through the kitchen, which in a double-wide like ours is twenty feet from where we sleep, maximum. If we get hacked up it’ll be your fault for not believing, Lee says. I lower my arm, softly. Why am I always the brave one, I say and then, sorry, and then, don’t get riled. I’m not, she says, her voice high like she’s acting. We can go together. Two against one. Hell, I say and throw off the covers, ease out of bed. Lee gets up too, slower, slow enough for me to see the bunch of her nightgown before it falls and how the moonlight, coming through the blinds, chops her body into bars.
Allie Rowbottom is the author of the memoir JELL-O GIRLS, a New York Times Editor’s Choice selection. Her essays and short fiction can be found in Vanity Fair, Salon, Best American Essays, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of fellowships and awards from Disquiet, Summer Literary Seminars, Inprint and Tin House. Allie holds a PhD from the University of Houston and an MFA from CalArts and lives in LA.
Display
Nathan Dragon
When she gets home he’ll have already done it.
It’ll all be set up.
A feast for the week, a fucking tableau.
He’ll have something going on the stove too, for tonight.
He was quite proud of what he’d accomplished so far today. And the day’s not over.
He talks to himself while pushing the cart about what it’s like to be a proud hunter, or better, more like a predator—what a predator would do with its prey and lay it out like an offering to a mate. To be the type of provider he is. Just look-it.
He brings it home from the store, arranges it out all on the counter and kitchen table. All nice and very careful.
Look-it this, he thinks, a well-stocked pile of spoils. He sets up the display of what he managed to get. What he managed to bring back to the den.
A hunt’s bounty.
All the gatherings, and trappings, caught in the chrome basket of the cart.
He’d even go as far as to think of himself and refers to himself as an Apex Pred. The way he moved around in the store. The way he procured a profusion of sustenance.
To think the most natural way. Impulse and instinct, the most biologically-evolved for efficiency. But he doesn’t know what that could mean to him—beyond some primordial tickling in his ears and hope for salvation from starvation for just one more day, and maybe even getting a nice tugging reward.
He’ll get another list tomorrow morning when she leaves for work and the amount to cover it.
Another chance.
It’s what he can do for her, however well, and however simple it looks. He doesn’t think of it as less. He thinks: It’s dangerous out there.
He hopes he can make the display tonight look appetizing, or at least okay, even seductive. He didn’t want to push it too much. Subtly is sexy. That’s why he went to the grocery store by himself in the mornings. He could spend the rest of the day laying it out, adjusting everything to make it look right because as he rearranges it all he’d eat from the pile, a snack here and there—just a couple of bites—pieces of fruit and lunch—some bread and some cheese. He has to try to make sure it doesn’t look like he’s eaten anything from it. Like he was patient and waited for her to get home from work and didn’t cheat and he had control. Like as long as he wraps everything back up as it was, lock-baggy lock tracks lined up right with the deli sticker, bread bag twisted back up and tied up the way a machine would do it.
As long as the work he put into it is acknowledged.
Nathan Dragon has been published in Noon Annual,Fence and New York Tyrant. Dragon is from Salem, MA., and is working on a book of fictions.
Poker
by Trevor Creighton
Three aces.
He should hold them but Carl hesitated. I always get three aces, he thought. This machine can’t be real. It must be rigged somehow.
But he kept on playing.
Queen, king.
He’d thrown away a jack and a ten to follow the aces.
Of course, he thought, as he lost the hand.
Carl put more quarters in the poker machine and listened as they made their way into its machinery. They were gone now. Irretrievable. The radio announced a cool evening, two suicides, a boy hospitalized by bee stings, and half price printer ink. Carl’s ink had turned to dust long ago and his printer sat unplugged under magazines kept for their unread sweet dessert recipes.
§
When Paula and Jen had first moved to Hendercove, they had opened a pool hall with cash. They never said where they made their money and they never mentioned no family but they arrived and redid an old building on Main Street and opened their hall. Over the years, the pool gave way to video games and now the main room was a sort of tabletop gaming community bar. The girls had died over ten years ago but they’d left everything to Henrietta, a part-time employee at the time, who had stood up and kept the place running when Jen got sick, four months after Paula had left them. Whatever the rumors, and they were plenty, Henrietta now owned the joint, and if there had been any questions still lingering about the money it was washed in Jen’s death.
§
Carl was in the back room where the last arcade machines lingered. He played the poker machine. For hours. It passed the time. Passed his life. Passed, allowing him to pass also. No one noticed him. No one came in. Not regularly anyways. Not for long. No one played fifteen-year-old arcade machines anymore but the lights still flashed and Henrietta hadn’t decided what to do with that room yet. The tabletop gamers were pleasant enough, sipping their craft beers and rolling their dice, shuffling all kinds of creatures over imagined worlds to their deaths and glory. Now and then a few would wander back to the room Carl was in, bartering quarters for poker hands and sometimes needing to cash in before going home. They never stayed long but seemed to really enjoy what they called old school for the few minutes they spent back there. It reminded Carl of when folks would play for hours at a time. They’d practiced of course. Spent their lives in the arcade. But boy could they play.
His poker machine was one of the almost extinct versions that allowed a player to win money. He went up and down and played for long times out of the tray where the payouts fell but mostly he paid the entertainment fees and went home, happy some time had passed. Happy he too was passing. Life is a membership and all memberships expire but if Carl had been on a subscription plan it’s unlikely he would have renewed.
§
The building, The Fun House, had been part of a nunnery a long time ago that had been closed for medical malpractice. In the eighteen-hundreds they had experimented with limb transplants but their subjects had been alive and left in their care by families unable to support children with severe mental challenges. Limbs had been taken and explored and this had been developed into attempting to figure out how to reattach them and have them heal with the goal of eventually switching the children’s heads. The writings and log books explained the thought behind Sister Julienne’s vision. If the mind could filter its thoughts and blood supply through a different body, perhaps the mind would operate differently, and in the case of the insane, perhaps become sane. There had been nothing but carnage in the end. No medical breakthroughs and no protection from the church when their experiments were uncovered. We were doing God’s work they had said before becoming the charges of facilities similar to what they had been trusted with providing. More secure, more regulated, and more isolated facilities.
§
The machine Carl frequented was painted green over yellow. You could see the yellow leaking through where the metal was scratched showing the age of the game. The moves it had made. The history it contained. Carl had found one online once. He’d considered picking it up. Having it at home but somehow he needed to be out. He couldn’t exist all day, all at home, all alone. This place was solitary but he saw people. Walked past the stores. Got some air. And there was Hen.
§
He’d stopped by the dog shelter on the way there three days ago and had a look around. Back in the far corner, a mutt shivered in the corner of a cage.
“What’s that one?” he asked.
“Dunno,” the attendant replied. “You want him… or her?”
Carl lowered himself outside the fencing and beckoned the dog but it wouldn’t come. It pushed backwards against the opposite corner, risking pain and Carl didn’t want to terrify it.
“Is it alright?”
The attendant didn’t know. Carl wasn’t impressed. The attendant set down the paper he had been reading.
“Bob will be back later,” the attendant explained. “He knows the dogs. I just muck ’em out. Feed ‘em. Pet ‘em sometimes but this one don’t go near anyone. It’s been hurt maybe. Beat perhaps. They say a dog remembers that kind of thing.”
The other dogs yelped and yipped and climbed and jumped, trying anything to get Carl’s attention. Looking for the attendant’s hand. Anything at all to be touched. To be seen. To be loved. But Carl only had eyes for this shaggy, shivering thing that backed itself into a corner.
“When does Bob get here?” he asked.
“Later. All’s I know. After lunch, likely. He usually brings some leftovers. You hear about that boy getting hospitalized? They say he was stung more than a hundred times. A hundred. How does one survive that?”
Carl didn’t know. He sat by the cage ten minutes after the attendant had busied himself with other tasks and once, during his time there, the dog ventured a single paw toward him. Just a step but Carl’s facial movement must’ve scared it back. In time perhaps, it would come and sniff. Come and say hi. Come and discover all was safe but not today and he couldn’t drag it out of there. He’d talk to Bob. Bob would know what to do.
§
Henrietta had nightmares since Jen’s death. She’d wake in the night, around three, and go for a glass of water, sweating from the fear. As she filled the glass a spider raced up her arm and she felt every footstep it made. All eight of them, furiously moving toward her armpit. She dropped the glass and heard it smash as she brushed at her arm with her right hand. She was dancing backward, away from the faucet when she stabbed her soles on the freshly broken glass. She jumped involuntarily and slipped on the water, falling as the spider burrowed into her armpit. The blood spread quickly through the water and her legs found more of the glass. When she next woke, the spider was gone and she had a strange tickle in her throat. She didn’t remember all of her nightmares. Just that she’d had them and she seldom felt rested in the mornings as a result.
§
Two tens, two sixes and a seven. Carl considered the flush but held the tens. An eight, a five, and a four. All diamonds. Damn it, he thought and drew again. He’d been wondering about the rising sea levels. He’d been wondering why with all the technology in the world we couldn’t have some sort of device that could make water evaporate. It, or they… he imagined an army of them, all smart enough to not get too close to each other so fish and the like could still surface. They would need engines to reposition and GPS to know where they were but they would all take in a little water through holes and as it passed through it would turn turbines, charging the machine. It would close the doors once charged and heat the water till it became vapor, pressured enough to rise to the skies, forming clouds above. Carl figured this might, with enough of them, keep the sea levels under control and also create cloud cover to stop a lot of the sun’s rays making it through to the lower levels. He wasn’t a scientist of course, nor an environmentalist, not even an engineer, but this was what he was wondering about as his stack of quarters grew smaller.
I’m due a win, he told himself. I’m due a win, but he knew the machines always made money in the end and he was the only one that played it in any real sense. He trusted Henrietta not to be fixing things too much in favor of the house but he knew it was designed to only pay out a percentage of what it took in. Still, I’m due a win, he told himself and held two twos in hopes of four of a kind.
§
Carl lost forty dollars that day and considered it an alright day. He was sober. He hadn’t done any harm. No harm had come to him. He had food at home but how he dreaded that empty, quiet hole. He couldn’t understand why the dog hadn’t come to him. He was drawn to it for the dog was him only without the education. With different limbs. More fur. Just shivering in his corner and hoping no one would notice. Hoping no one would hurt him yet every now and then stretching out his paw. Thinking, maybe, he had found something different. Something more. It never lasted of course but why wouldn’t the dog come to him? They could take care of each other. He wouldn’t ever hurt it or let hurt come to it. The game room had plenty of room for them both and they could be happy moving between his one room at home and his other one room, taking care of each other. He might even venture into a park now and then. He paused by the gate to the shelter and tried to be there for the dog. His dog. If only it’d come to him. Bob would know what to do. A half hour he stood there, displaying his dedication the only way he knew how. His commitment. He felt crazy, then dumb, then determined, then proud. He was hungry. Then he left.
His one room was a fifteen-minute walk from the gaming rooms. The streets were lit but not bright and there was enough foot traffic to feel safe. It had been a snobbish, under the cap kind of neighborhood many years ago before becoming more affordable as people sprawled on but now it had passed through disrepair and danger to become hip again, reviving, hopeful, with young folk and more money than it’d seen in a long while.
§
One of Carl’s friends, John, lived a block off his route between the two rooms. The route had a single turn to make and sometimes he missed it, which was ridiculous of course but he hadn’t missed it in months. He got so wound up in his thoughts sometimes, walking past these homes in the evening, the golden warmth of their hidden insides leaking through the curtains, staining the twilight, and threatening to scar the dusk. He took a side street to the next block, three roads down from John’s and made his way to his house. He wanted to ask about the dog. How to coach it. He wanted to share a meal. He wanted to say hi but when his fingers could sense the cool of the buttons he paused long enough to feel awkward and then casually leaned by the entrance instead. He pulled out his phone and flipped it open. Phone. J. John. Call. He paused again. What would he say? How would he begin? So many times he had hovered over the call function. The one button he regularly stared at that didn’t cost him much money. I’ll text tonight, he thought. He’s probably busy. Besides, Bob’ll know what to do about the dog. I should get home.
§
Henrietta thought about Carl sometimes. Times like tonight when the gamers were busy. They were so involved in their worlds and rules and routines. Beers and drawings and paint and strategies. She had always liked table top games but had never been able to afford the different components. Then, when she could, she’d never really had the time. When she’d been part-time for the sisters, she’d had a full-time overnight gig, just to make rent. She could paint the basic troops and enjoyed making scenery and the like but who had the time with a business to run? Suppliers and repairs and customers and Carl. She’d often thought about how many Carls might have been devastated when the pool hall was converted to a gaming place. She’d kept a few tables of course but they weren’t in a hall anymore. More a room. A bright room, with a bar, and overpriced snacks she’d never known growing up, all neatly displayed on racks made from repurposed barn doors, old farmstead fencing, and abandoned beehive boards. The greasy spoon next door sold individual pizzas now, for three times the cost of a family sized pie, baked potatoes stuffed with avocado butter on sticks, and celery frames filled with fruit. She remembered the streets Carl had known with her. Before the business did better. Before the poker machine had been moved to the storage room. Before he’d asked about it. Before she’d opened the room. Let him in. Turned it back on and let him treat the space as his own. It was only a bunch of relics now. Two of them still with life.
Henrietta had seen a horse the day before she dreamed of one. It was out in a meadow, steam coming from its nostrils as its muscular body tensed against the morning chill. The sun was coming up and its glow became centered around a single flickering flame. A candle that dripped wax onto rat dung covered stonework. Forgotten, it had burned in the same window for three days now as the corpse that had lit it decayed below the window it sat in, covered with coal sacks from the abandoned warehouse adjacent. The horse was just outside now, in the street, laying on its side. Blood kept the children warm as they sliced palm-sized chunks of flesh to gnaw on, wrapped snugly in the hairy skin they had just removed and taken as clothing. The neck had a hundred stab wounds from them bringing it down and the steam rose from the blood keeping everything cozy.
She was thinking of this horse when Carl had asked her for change. She was trying to remember what color it had been in the meadow. What color it had been before the city. Before the dream. She supposed it didn’t matter much but she so desperately wanted to see it as it had been. As it was. Before. Before becoming what she knew and saw now.
“Just twenty, Carl?”
“Yeah, Hen. Feeling lucky today. I’ll have winnings to play with.”
“Want a Diet Coke? They’re expired. The rep said to toss them or take them home.”
“Yeah, that’d be great. Thanks, Hen.”
“Plenty more. Just ask.”
“Hen?” Carl accepted the bottle and stared at it for a moment.
“What’s up, Carl?”
“I was just wondering…” He turned the bottle over in his hands before looking at her eye to eye. He paused, then “Would you ever consider…it’s silly really.”
“Go on.” She didn’t care about anything else in that moment and he could tell. She wanted him to ask her. She cared about him and knew he was weighing his words carefully.
“Could I, I mean would you…it’s just…there’s a dog. I’d like to maybe bring a dog here with me. In the future. Not right away. But soon.”
“A dog.” Henrietta broke the eye contact and shuffled some flyers on the countertop. “Of course, Carl. So long as it’s trained. Got enough to clean up.”
“I’ll be sure. Thanks, Hen. You’re the best.”
She smiled at him and he nodded slightly before heading to the back room. She really did like him. He was somewhat from before. She couldn’t quite sense it right but every now and then she’d feel a connection. Like everything was fine so long as Carl was there. Bearable maybe. Fine. Another smile came. She’d wanted to bring him a Christmas plate the previous year. And she had. Made plates for all the customers but sent all the leftovers home with Carl. I’ve no room, she said. I do this for everyone, she said. I had a little extra time, she said. She’d wanted to invite him to a meal. She hadn’t wanted to push the issue. Hadn’t wanted to make it awkward. Draw attention to him sitting alone. Her rooms closed. Her alone too. She just wanted the holiday to end so they could get back to their routines again. And he seemed happy enough. Maybe he had plans. They never really talked about holiday plans. She could invite him for a meal some other time. It seemed silly for them both to eat alone.
Carl had never been a part of the evening crowd back when Paula and Jen had run the pool hall. He would stop by for a snack every now and then but he was always headed off to work. Sometimes he worked noon to midnight, sometimes eight to four in the morning, and every now and then, midnight till eight. Always at night though and so morning had become his evening. He prefered the eight till four as it gave him plenty of time to take care of some stuff and enjoy the morning as it arrived. He liked to watch as its sweet amber shards tore through what remained of the night’s decaying flesh. He could roam the stores or take care of business without long lines and stopped often, by the pool hall for a drink and a few shots or played some video games for a while. He’d started playing poker the last two years of his working, the sixth year Henrietta had been there. The machine was by the counter so they got to know each other over time. Slowly, with a counter between them, safely, till they were familiar and looked for each other when they were there.
§
Bob was busy mucking out a cage. Rooms they called them but it was just some fencing and straw with a small wooden shelter in a corner. Bob knew the mutt Carl was asking after.
“Doesn’t go to no one. I won’t be able to keep it much longer. Taking a place of one that might have a home. I can’t help those that won’t be helped.”
“I’ll take it.” Carl didn’t ask what would happen if Bob couldn’t keep it. He didn’t ask how much money might be involved. He didn’t ask how many separate cans of food that one shivering lump might be found in the following month.
“Why not take one that wants the company, Carl? Every dog in here would love to get taken home but that one. Every one of them. They’d do you well. Pleased to see you. Happy and playful. Some dogs just aren’t right. They don’t work. It’s no one’s fault, Carl.”
“I’ll take it Bob, but can it stay a while? I don’t want to force it. I’ll stop by and get it familiar. I think it’ll warm up. I can bring things. Maybe feed it.”
“You’ll have to pay lodging. We can’t keep a non lodged dog if it’s not up for taking.”
“I understand. How much is lodging?”
“Just twenty a night. It’s hows we feed them, mostly. Just about keep the lights on but that’s the game, I suppose.” He didn’t mention the other income. The cents per pound for those that wouldn’t get taken. That was how the bedding got bought. So much wrong to build such good. The angels that help often dirty their gowns and singe their wings, one of his buyers had said. Those that do great good could pass through hell looking native, she had went on, but Bob didn’t hold with that. He figured by then the works were good but they were side products of devilry. Devils can do as much good as angels can do harm. Good people were always bringing evil to the world so he figured if he was bad for what he did, it didn’t mean he wasn’t a force for good.
Bob swiped at a bee. “Damn things have been everywhere recently. I’ve never known there to be so many bees.”
“Just leave them be,” Carl said. “If you don’t annoy them, they won’t annoy you. When does he eat? Is it a he?”
“She. Already fixed and all her shots. Why not take another? One that wants?”
“I think they all want. Just some don’t show it as much.”
“You might be right. I started here as a volunteer, you know. Just walking and playing with them. Especially with ones like her. I’d lay in their rooms with them till they got to being playful but we had time back then. No one volunteers no more and it’s all I can do to keep them fed and to their appointments and clean enough for visitors.”
“You do great Bob. Maybe after, I can still stop by. Sit awhile with the shyer ones.”
“That’d be good Carl and if you took her in the end and needed to be off someplace we could keep her for free, if you’re helping out and all.”
“All right. Here’s a hundred.” Carl held out some notes.
“Just pay when you take her. Or weekly. Starting Monday let’s say.”
Carl nodded and noticed a bee crawling by the dog. “You see, Bob. See the bee. Just leave them be and you’ll be fine.”
Trixie, what Carl thought the dog might be called, just shivered in her shelter. Carl knelt in her room and put food by her door. She would sniff at him if he didn’t move for a while but she wasn’t going to be won over in a single feeding.
“Trauma,” Bob said as Carl left the room.
“Deserving,” Carl replied. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Henrietta dreamt of Carl taking Trixie home. He stopped by the register and got some change. He had a dog in his arms with a bright red leash. The dog licked him and struggled to greet her when she spoke to her. Then Carl was in the poker room. She could see the cards on the screen but knew she was still outside by the register. She was inside Carl and he was winning. She remembered three threes and then Trixie ran out of the room and there was a loud explosion. The lights went out and buzzing filled the air. Bees swarmed in, coming and coming and Carl backed against the wall. They were crushing against him. Thousands. Millions perhaps. He couldn’t move. He was waiting to be stung. Then she was herself again and Trixie had come to her. The dog set down a cookie and nudged it toward her before the bees came back from the storage room and forced her against the wall too. She couldn’t breath and they were entering her through her nostrils. Down the throat, flying around her stomach. They were up her skirt and filling every hole. Then they were gone and she sat against the wall in the dark. A hand reached out, luminous but she dared not take it. Dared not touch. It just hovered there. Waiting.
Henrietta wondered about the light in the dream. How she’d been able to see the dog if the lights had gone out. She hadn’t been concerned about Carl in the dream but when she woke, she wondered if he’d died or if he’d survived like she had. She’d heard that if you die in your dreams you don’t wake in this world again so maybe that was the hand. An offer of help. A way to stay there. Or this world inviting her back. She’d never know now. She watched the gamers rolling their dice, moving figurines across a board. Controlling their movements with carefully calculated chance. Some were painting in a corner. Creating colorful armies for future battles.
“Hey, Hen.”
“Carl, sorry, I was miles away.”
“No worries.”
“How’s that dog Carl?”
“Think I’ll bring her home soon. She’s been coming up and letting me stroke her. Climbing on me. Lets me walk her around the cage. Her room, I mean.”
“Great. You’ll have to bring her by.”
“Everyday if she likes it.”
“All right. Good luck today.”
He took a soda and left the dollar. He didn’t pay three dollars like the new ones did. There was something to be said for being where you belong.
§
Two queens and a king. Throw the three and four. Hope for something more. Two threes and another loss to the dealer. He’d played those machines that pay on your hand but this one played against an AI. Fancy term for the dealer. You had to beat the dealer was all cause there was only ever two hands in the game and Carl never dealt. Never chose the cards he would get and always played them as best he could but the dealer always won, eventually. The game, this game, his game, was rigged that way. Carl had been dealt great cards and felt confident, and he’d held poor cards and made the best of them but no matter what he tried the dealer was always there, waiting, lingering, daring him to settle. Just settle and walk away. Give it up. Stop playing. There’s no way to win in the end and eventually even the screen would go dark. Carl knew this but on he went, never seeing the dealer, always believing it was there, though his rational mind spoke of algorithms and percentages, chance, and logic. He knew the dealer was there. He was playing with a dealer and that’s the only way the game would ever make sense. The only way to continue with any sense of hope.
§
A poster had been hung between the bathrooms where a gritty cork slab was cut into the shape of a tree for public notices to be hung. Nothing obscene but generally anything went. The gents was to the left and the ladies to the right but above the corkboard a new sign encouraged folks to make use of whichever room they most identified with that day. The new patrons felt this was proper. The older ones didn’t understand. Carl used the room on the left but when it was busier he found himself wanting to use a cubicle. To not be seen. He felt like a Dodo bird when it was busy and he was using the left room. In line for extinction, following in the ways those before him had gone. Getting closer to the cliff. They observed him as a cashier observes a person buying condoms for the first time and he knew he was only a momentary distraction from their strategies and chatter of other worlds and the mythologies they existed within.
The poster board had a sign from the corner church, inviting all to a dinner, for friendship and connection. You could bring something if you wished but nothing was needed. Hen asked if he’d seen it.
“Yeah. Do you know anyone that goes there?”
“No, but the guy that hung the poster seemed nice enough. Probably a local. I never see anyone going in or out of that place.”
“It used to be full every week. I went to a few services, years ago.”
“So what do you think?”
“About the dinner?”
“Yeah.” She waited as his face muscled through different responses.
“Could be good. Aren’t you open?”
“It’s never busy, Friday nights. I’ll get the shift covered. Plenty of people looking for shifts.”
“Dinner then. Pick up here?”
She answered immediately as her body relaxed. “I’ll be here.”
§
Carl was hoping the dog, Mav he thought he might call her now, might enjoy a soft toy to snuggle with when he wasn’t there. It wouldn’t be long now till he brought her home. He arrived around four forty-five, a good forty-five minutes before Bob locked up for the evening. There was a police car by the entrance and Bob was talking with an officer and priest when he entered the office that separated the street from the lot. Another officer stopped Carl.
“I’m sorry. There’s been an accident. You won’t be able to come in right now.”
“What’s happened?” Carl asked, looking at Bob.
“Carl,” Bob replied. “I don’t know what happened. I don’t know what it is.”
Carl moved toward him but the officer stopped him again. “Sorry sir, we really can’t let you in just yet.”
“No he’s good. He’s the… It’s his dog.”
“My dog?” Carl asked. “Mav?” The teddy bear dangled from his right hand.
The officer nodded. “You’d best come with me then. We’re not entirely sure what’s happened. There’s a response team on their way. You can’t go into the cage but you’d best come and see. We’ll want to know everything the dog, Mav was it, has been fed and a record of your activities. Bob told us you’ve been with her everyday. Just him and you. No one else.”
Mav was lying near the gate, her body split in half from her neck to the anus, like a hotdog bun laid flat. One of her legs had been removed and sat, like a baseball bat, leaning against the fencing. Her insides were honeycomb and bees crawled all over her, going about their business, unaware their rebuilding work would not be left alone for long. Her head sat alone, detached, beside the body, liquid oozing over honey dipped tendrils.
“What is it?” Carl asked.
“We don’t know. There’s a team on it’s way.”
“But that’s a bee hive. And her leg. It can’t have just got there. Someone must have done this. She was walking. She was eating. There’s no lungs. No stomach. No blood.” He moved closer to the gate.
“Try not to touch it. The whole cage needs to be kept as it is.”
Carl looked at the soft toy. Its fur covering everything imagined inside. Mav’s head stared to the left. A bee came out of her nostril.
“It’s a room,” he said. “They’re rooms not cages.”
“We should go back to the office now.”
“Yes, ok.” but he just stood there, staring at the honey. The sweetness inside of his dog finally on display for all to see. Available for all to taste. Four numbers and a face card. Nothing to hold but fluff.
Trevor Creighton is a recent graduate of Sarah Lawrence College’s M.F.A. program in Speculative Fiction. He received a B.A. in Creative Writing from Columbia University and an Ed.M. from Harvard University. He is working on a collection of short stories and is super excited the first to leave his nest will be dwelling at Post Road Magazine. Trevor currently teaches at Mercy College and you can find him in the twinkle of campfires, painting in the woods, or savoring bizarre conversations.
French Antarctica
JoAnna Novak
I do not need much, so I have brought very little. I am on the open water yet snug in the cell of my vessel. Two openings. One for me, one for my valise. My antiscurbatics, my earthly affects.
Thus:
Sack of apricots, navel oranges.
One loose kumquat, size of eyeball of dissection corpse.
Two flesh-toned-nylon-hued empty sleeves of Ritz Crackers. (Let these stand in for my sons.)
Sheaf of wartime letters. Husband’s Palmerian script buttressing each consonant. Each vowel a suspension.
Upon the faces of the waves are expressions of fear and dispassion. The sun, round and runted, behind the clouds: gray nut. And nature’s accomplice––time is assaultive and present-tense.
I do not need much on this narrow boat––the Soviet handle is baidarka. I am poor, especially poor with denominations. As such, I have long fetishized them, believing proper terms might prevent me from descending into madness. Utter madness is the accepted phrase––I prefer commonplace commands. Sit down. Stay put. Put up. Speak up.
Utter madness.
Madness, I say to the stiff sealskin covering the canoe.
*
The first thing my husband noticed was my tendency to make a morning of blueberry biscuits. Creamed butter. Paddled butter. Melted butter. Buttermilk. Grossness of butter.
This was obvious and knuckled, a pastry blender sharding frozen butter when the boys should be getting off to school. And we were living in a house with proper walls, posts behind bricks, and glass blocks even in our shower, melting the outdoors inside. It was 1956, not 1842––we had no need to collect fats and butcher paper our windows.
One tallows a boat, one talks to a mirror, one recognizes oneself in a photograph of a mother with unsteady eyes, the same eyes one sees in her compact. Almost violent, these affinities. And the year, the home, the predictability of it all. Doorways. Area rugs. In our yard there grew a rose-apple tree.
I did enjoy that. A grandmother had taught me to talk to plants. Pitch your voice like you’d swaddle a newborn, sure and tight.
Of course, you needn’t speak sunshine. Try Czech.
My grandmother would splutter shit-something-shit.
Utter madness.
A pervasive chaos written into the bones. It runs for you. It runs deep. It does not matter if can give it a name, assign it a number. Call it Patient. If it has been rightly tied to a bed, sentenced three weeks in solitary, loud, soloing its chorus of mania in a downstate Illinois reformatory. Emaciating on cereal grains the color of colostrum.
(The milk of the sealion is fat-dense, I learned when last I took the boys to Brookfield Zoo.)
*
The sea chops the boat’s forked bow. Underneath the tough, stretched pelts are bones and pieces of driftwood. This is a frame light enough for one boy to carry with the help of his brother.
The second thing my husband noticed was how I napped in the garage, near bags of sandbox sand.
Third: I went to the butcher and brought home Polynesian shish kabobs. Ate them over the sink, pineapple and green peppers and pork belly, raw.
Fourth: Riotous laughter in church.
Fifth: A preliminary experiment with vanishing: We had a sitter on a Saturday, and we had gone out for humdrum errandry: A shirt to the tailor, Breen’s. Gravel from DeWitt’s on 31st Street. Afterwards, we got lunch.
The chop suey shop sat across from a cemetery. We were marooned in a booth, with a teapot adjudicating our silence. We were the only patrons.
When the egg rolls arrived, I excused myself. I pushed through a curtain of grenade beads depicting an emerald dragon surrounded by tiger lilies. In the restroom, there were things on the wall: a cigarette machine, a wet, waffle-weave towel that fed through a metal box with sharp, sharp corners. I pulled the towel, yanked it, heard the chuck of whatever gear inside needed oiling. I remember I was wearing a favorite dress of mine: wool, long-sleeved, navy blue with a jewel neckline. A pair of gold, low-heeled pumps that matched my clutch. I looked vaguely like Deanna Durbin, but more villainous: Deanna Durbin pulling her wrist across the corner of the towel dispenser until it bled. Deanna Durbin lighting a cigarette and watching it burn sour down to her fingertips.
A short woman in a charmeuse pantsuit, the owner, came and found me.
Do you want your supper? she asked.
Do you want your suffer? I repeated.
The moo shu had arrived and the pancakes were no good cold.
*
It is quite cold on the water, but I stay warm. Crossing my legs and thinking up little orgasms. Fisting my hand inside the camel sleeves of my one nice coat.
I stop rowing, let the oar gag on the water. I am paddling toward Saint Joseph or French Antarctica. I have come to test my possessions. Do they float?
Of course, I am lazy and immoderate, and have eaten the frills off the Ritz crackers first. This taught me that often I had misused the word nibble.
Another oily word: Nicene. Another: nyctalopia. But what, was I to bring the lamb’s quarters?
I lean forward, squashing my waist. I grab an orange. Warm in my hand, the fruit is alive.
There. Like that. I let it go, in the water.
*
Still, I had flirted with hope on at least one other occasion.
It was an August Thursday. Thunderstorms aborted whatever daylight. I was looking out the window, paused as I often found myself, entranced with being the only adult in our house.
My husband? Call him John, call him Stephen, call him Timothy. He was at his desk in his office in a building behind the sanitary plant in Stickney. At lunch he would alley over to Mrs. Dolezal’s tavern, eat in the basement cafeteria, roast turkey on dry toast.
That place, he’d told me, was overrun by cats.
(There: I draw lines. I do not learn breeds.)
I had opened a sleeve of Ritz crackers when I heard the crack. A CRACK. The sound was enormous and biological, like someone breaking invisible bone breaking clean in two. I looked out the window, observing the clever silence. From where I was standing, inside, at the kitchen sink, I could see that a long precarious limb of our front elm had snapped off. It had plunged like a cock, striking the hood of my husband’s car.
This was my own adventure, the isolation interrupted, framed by curtains the color of mango fluff. I felt aware of my lungs, compressing. Numbness in my forearms. And like that, I realized I should not fear happiness.
The thought hounded me, a fly I couldn’t shoo. I had to distract myself somehow: I put five Ritz crackers on a plate. The butter was waiting on the kitchen table. It slumped under its milk glass cover like a cow in the distance. Rounded, humped. I attacked it horizontally, skimming the edge. Not a straight up and down slice.
I remember the pleasure of biting through that thick layer of butter, which was no biting at all, the way that clenching a feather pillow in one’s mouth is both taking it and being taken. The luxury, the glamour, a quarter-inch of butter on those small crackers shaped like the dials on our Zenith.
Tune in.
The boys were crying in their nursery. I let them. It is an art, knowing when a whimper is a nightmare or a prelude to a second sleep. I grew—had grown—comfortable—confident—in making this distinction.
I ate, looking at the tree limb, heavy on my husband’s car. He was in the habit of riding in with Richard down the block. And I was in the habit of admiring the buckskin frock of the Land O’ Lakes princess while the salt-sweet milk icing got me salivating all whorish, the opulence of excess. This is happiness, I realized, mundane, manageable, here it is.
Why did I feel so horrid?
Ornamental?
Appoggiaturic.
So leaned on.
So rested.
Fatly munched––
and watching the static aftermath of the storm, the mild destruction suffered by our stupid Buick. Car the color of a prairie dog.
What is so bad about this? I thought. I moved to the couch. I stretched my long calves, preening and admiring my taffeta house shoes. I winked my ankles, la-di-da. The sun would emerge. The boys would wake up. We’d walk. I could open my change purse, dime them, and like that they would have cake cones with squares scoops of mint chocolate chip and raspberry royale and New York cherry from Cock Robbin.
I held a Ritz cracker like a compass and went outside.
The sky was sfumato and the air on my bare legs was cool and delicious. A patter of raindrops pearled the car. The sky veined with waning electricity, gently illuminating the wrens feathering in the puddles on the street.
The branch was five feet long, thick as a can of Coca-Cola. At either end, it was jagged and snarly, toothed with thick splinters, like the clawish nails of the wood. The rain had come to a stop. The morning had come to a lull. I looked at the car, and I could feel a weird, distant expression screwing up my face, stiffening my mouth.
Across the street, the one-eyed standard poodle, Catie, began to bark. I petted her often, and the boys liked to scratch her ears, which her owner said were extra sensitive, but she was ruffing, worked up, like the king rooster of Sanborn Avenue. New day, she barked, new day, new day.
Yes. Panic drenched me.
I put the cracker in my mouth whole and struggled a little, chewing. The butter sat too much on the roof of my mouth.
The dog knew me, but she did not recognize me, I realized. I must have looked off, unusual, foreign, estranged from myself, split. I did not recognize the branch, entirely, amputated from the elm, and it was no surprise the dog did not recognize me. I had been staring, and it was very long, so long that I kept staring even as my body-self went into the backyard and stood at the base of the rose-apple tree.
It is not in my nature to know what I want, but at that moment I felt certain I had to unmake my world. I envied my grandmother––what must it feel like to have your capillaries buck with voltage? I must have looked as though I were recognizing this exact image from a dream.
I touched the trunk. It was damp, spongy.
In the family tree, I was fungible. One unsteady lady’s fingers become another.
Shit something something, shit, I whispered. I tasted cracker crumbs in my lipstick.
Because yes. I was the sort of woman who wore lipstick alone. Yes, I wanted to look nice for the milkman. The paper boy. The plumber. I combed my ravenette hair one hundred times a day so it would gleam when I yanked the boys through the turnstile at the zoo. I wanted the lions to slather me with their rough tongues and the lion trainers to cage me up. Madness. Utter madness.
This was when I knew I could leave. I couldn’t hear if the boys were crying.
*
It needn’t be such a mystery. A woman packs her valise with fruit and crackers. A woman sends her sons off to school. A woman picks out a tie and kisses her husband goodbye, telephones a taxi, stands on the curb, smiling and smiling her itchy smile. Her shoulders back and proud.
Now I read the waves like a worm reads the soil. Slashed with whitish foam. Choppy. Shoreless.
Another orange. I toss it, underhanded, into the water. Another. Another. I think of the sea parting totally for the fruit, fruit down a chute, a tube, a gene through the ages.
The canoe stinks awful, the sealskin reeking like old pork, rank and blood-muted. Ritz wrappers, goodbye. Then, I rid myself of the kumquat. Now all that’s left are the letters.
Reburying my diary was one matter: erasing a diagnosis like writing a check in invisible ink and tucking it inside a grandfather clock. Dear sons––. Rereading my husband’s letters is another matter. He wrote from Burma. He wrote of the Hump. He wrote of knowing in his bicipital soul that he had the stamina for solo flights.
He is a good man.
Confronting these letters, I am sure that I should feel a deep love. I am sure that I should feel like a woman of value, steadfasted to an earnest man. Two boys that smell like chocolate and raisins, easy, sleeping side by side. When I let the past go, I suppose I should feel rebuked by god, or whatever force turned branches into oars. But I don’t.
JoAnna Novak’s debut memoir Contradiction Days will be published by Catapult in 2022. Her short story collection, Meaningful Work, won the 2020 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Contest and will be published by FC2 in 2021. Her third book of poetry, New Life, is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press. She is the author of the novel I Must Have You and two previous books of poetry: Noirmania and Abeyance, North America. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, The New York Times, the Washington Post, The Atlantic, and other publications. She is a co-founder of the literary journal and chapbook publisher, Tammy.
Two Poems
Lauren Hilger
State fair
I believe in the game and win the Tamagotchi. In my hand, it has a pulse or a beat, sort of alive. I feed it lollipops, jelly hearts. It moves like a diaphanous creature, like a complicated multicellular organism, an extension of me. Against the wall of the Gravitron, I keep one leg down, one leg held in a standing split. Mass up, Velocity down, relative rates at which the constant pressure holds me in place. It’s childish and deserves a blue ribbon. I am scared of the ones that spin, the rides that sling you inside yourself, the pirate ship held aloft by a cable that sifts in two directions so you’re falling both ways. The hammer, its required strength, that asks are you external? Do you really only exist here? Saved nowhere else. Sun sets. Look twice nothing’s there. I stand in line as if I were tall. Lick the side of a lemonade for water, to say I swallow nothing. But there it is, that hot metal horse under me, that ride I pay for, that circle I make heavy. In gymnastics, all kinetic potential, I run a full length of the floor and then stop right before, my body keeps going, my skin burns the mats from face to ankle, broken vessels. I ate dirt, we said. All that rugburn. I had stopped myself from being thrown across the room. It came out anyway.
“Diadems—drop—”
The place has carved out my sleep. I walk it every night.
When I moved here, there were old sounds, a sputtering meter at the end of a cab ride,
back of the ferry, its engine like the low-end keys of a baby grand,
like a whale, centuries away.
Then too I believed the beauty of things I didn’t have,
an evening shrug, light blue, dark red stained-glass windows, staged and elaborate.
the noun <<cicatrice>>, that sounds more like it,
the citron glow of a scar, still there, the sour of the word,
the softness of the word ruins, the softness of inward ruins,
my signature.
We still measure how long we will live.
A sweetened charge of color if you unfocus.
But I could lengthen always into this.
Lauren Hilger is the author of Lady Be Good (CCM, 2016.) Named a Nadya Aisenberg Fellow in poetry from MacDowell, she has also received fellowships from the Hambidge Center and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her work has appeared in BOMB, Harvard Review online, Kenyon Review online, Pleiades, The Threepenny Review, West Branch, and elsewhere. She serves as a poetry editor for No Tokens.
Two Poems
Elizabeth Senja Spackman
Unheimlich (Not at home)
Under your golden hair beneath the white you sleep stone eyed and twitching Live once and more Hold me if you must There’s nothing here not for the taking.
After the Sex, Simile or Something Like It
I. The beginning
Exactly like when you peel
back a price sticker and you
take some of the surface
of the book or the poster paper
with the adhesive
leaving that fuzzy rough spot
where you can trail your finger
from the gloss to the underneath
Had never loved
with such ferocity
unkempt and belly-deep
wanting nothing but
to be as tawny as
those flesh colored leotards
from modern dance
circa the sixties
smoothing the genitals, breasts
into sexless dolls
II. The fruit
Its translucent color
so alluring and taste and aroma
so gentle and mellow
after admiring feelings
of a graceful lady. Enjoy soft
and juicy Kasugai Muscat Gummy!
The cardboard sound
of pomegranate skin
as you scrape the ruby kernels
from their papery fascia,
eat them by the palmful
A man bites into his first papaw
catches her eye and
cannot continue
III. The revelations
She says to her
recently come-out daughter
that until Monica, she had no idea
that cunnilingus was something done
outside of pornographic videos.
A quiet moment that does not explain
the finer distinctions between
fellatio, general oral sex, cigars,
what she has been doing in her own apartment
to the sound of the refrigerator hum
these past four years.
She tells him
she told him
because she did not want him
to taste another’s latex
on her labia.
What to say?
IV. The response
When asked at the museum Q&A
for the scariest thing he’d ever done
Bill T looked the young co-ed
straight on
and said it would have to be
opening myself
the first time I let him
pull apart my cheeks
and fuck me in the ass.
or
you see the ballerina,
and all you can think
is How small her boobs!
V. The beginning
Bare-assed and crying
the first blow job between them,
whether beautiful or pathetic
Ten reasons it’s better:
—Don’t have to listen to you slurp your noodles with the same sibilance as your lattes
—There’s no reason to be nice to your father
—I no longer need stare at the ceiling, thinking of polite yet seductive ways to slow that
licking down
—The way you hold your fingers to your thumb and sniff
