Issue 01

Ideation

by Elle Nash

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some Manors

by Tom Laplaige

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Out beyond our ideas of wrongdoing

And rightdoing there is a field.

I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass

The world is too full to talk about.

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

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

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

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

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

And then a dawning splatter.

And the door creaked open.

And the stink of life slank through the jamb.

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

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

Broodish little dishrags three.

Say hello to your daddy, she said.

Down there, it’s your daddy.

And I burst.

And the full world swam in a warm fountain.

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

In a Sentimental Mood

By Vanessa Stone

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

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

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

“I understand,” Maev said.

“Really?”

“Of course I do.”

“I don’t think you do.”

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

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

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

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

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

I do not think Maev has ever owned a home.

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

She did not answer.

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

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

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

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

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

“Why would you think that?” I asked.

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

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

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

“I see.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

The Girl I Hate

by Mona Awad

So I’m eating scones with the girl I hate. The scones are her idea. She says eating one of them is like getting fucked. Not vanilla-style either, the kind with whips. She’s eating the scones and I’m watching, sipping black tea with milk but no sugar. Actually, she hasn’t quite started yet. She’s still spreading clotted cream on each half of the split scone, then homemade jam on top of that. As she does this, she warns me she might make groaning noises. Just so, you know, I know. That’s fine, I shrug, feeling little bits of me catch fire. I’ve got the teacup in my hand, my finger crooked in the little handle that’s too small for it so the circulation’s getting cut off. I watch her bite into the scone with her little bunny teeth. I watch gobs of clotted cream catch in either corner of her lip. She tilts her head back, closes her eyes, starts to make what must be the groaning noises. I pour myself more tea and cup it in both hands like it’s warming them, even though it’s gone cold. Then I pretend to look out the window at the dismal view of the Grassmarket. I say, “Busy in the office this morning,” and try not to think Cunt.

She is after all, a friend and colleague.

“What?” She says, her mouth full of scone. She hasn’t heard me because of her groans.

I repeat that it was busy in the office this morning, loudly, over-enunciating, then I do think Cunt.

“Mm,” she says. But she’s too high on scone to really carry on a conversation. She’s so high, she’s swinging her little stick legs back and forth underneath her seat like a child and doing this side-to-side dance with her head like the one she did when she ate the fried porkchop in front of me at Typhoon a few weeks ago.

There’s her groaning and there’s her stick legs and there’s her aggressively jutting out clavicle. There’s the Cookie Monster impression she does after she describes food she loves (Om-Nom-Nom!). There’s how the largeness of the scone seems only to emphasize her impossible smallness. Mainly, there’s the fact that she exists at all.

There’s also her outfits, which she buys from vintage shops, and which are usually a cross between quirky and whorish. Today, she’s wearing this spandex playsuit like something out of a Goldfrapp video, which she’s paired with sheer tights that have a backseam of little black hearts. Over that she’s wearing a red bell coat like the ones little girls wear when they ice skate in picture books. I had a coat like this when I was five but in pink. There’s a picture of me in the coat, holding my father’s hand in a frozen over parking lot somewhere in Michigan. In the picture, my dad’s got an Afro and he’s looking down at this small thing holding his hand as if he can’t believe how small this thing—me—is. In the picture, I’m about the same size as the girl I hate is now, except that I’m a child and she’s a full grown woman, and I guess I’m looking at her now with my father’s same unbelief, except without love.

She catches me looking at her and she says, “What?” and I say, “Nothing.”

She looks at my cup of cold tea and at my lack of scone. “How come you didn’t get one? Aren’t you hungry?”

“I’m going to have a salad later,” I tell her. “On the afternoon fifteen.”

I’m already picturing it: me in the blissfully empty break room, my M&S lettuce, the dated copy of Hello! I’ll pretend to read if anyone comes in. I won’t turn on the lights.

She shrugs, eats more scone. Then she sort of squints at me like a pirate attempting to gauge the whole of someone’s soul with one eye.

“You’re very salad-y,” she says.

“Am I?”

After she’s done, she sinks back in her chair, pats her non-existent stomach through her playsuit, and says she’s feeling sleepy. She sighs, faux pouts.

“Wish we didn’t have to go back to work.”

“Yeah,” I say, signaling for the check and grabbing my purse from the back of the chair. She reaches over and pats the fuzzy leopard print like it’s a pet of hers.

“Pretty,” she says.

On the walk back to the office, we discuss our worst temp jobs. Hers was the one before this one. The boss kept trying to fuck her. Also they had this photocopier she’s pretty sure was possessed by Satan. Also it wasn’t near any good lunch places.

“What about you?”

“The one before this one.” Actually, it’s this one.

“Satanic photocopier?” she offers.

“Fax,” I say, looking at how the long white line of her neck is offset by a cheap black choker.

“Ooh,” she says. “Worse.”

When we reach the office, before we head to our respective cubicles, she turns to me, her lips and her cheeks still flushed from scone, and says, “text me later okay?”

“Okay,” I say. Then she trots off a little ahead of me, and I see how her little heart back seams are perfectly aligned down both calves.

All afternoon, I have the waking dream where she gets so fat on scone, she explodes.

At home, I eat the other half of my M&S salad with the other half of the honey Dijon dressing it came with. I make sure to draw the curtains first. I didn’t used to, but then I caught the owner of the Turkish restaurant next door staring at me from his upstairs window, smoking, just as I had finished my post-salad ritual of dragging all my finger pads over and over again across the empty plate and sucking them one by one. It used to be he would say hello when I walked past him in the street. Now he looks at me like he’s familiar with the details of my most unfortunate pair of underwear. Has fingered the fraying, scalloped edge. Waggled the limp pink bow. Held the Made in Cambodia tag between his teeth.

Post-salad, I try on the French Connection bodycon, followed by the Bettie Page pencil skirt and the Stop Staring! halter. In all cases, I’m no closer but I’m also no further, which is not news at all. Then I just sort of stand in front of the mirror in my bra and my French cuts and attempt to come to grips with certain irrevocable truths. Then I eat several handfuls of flax cereal and 15 raw, unsalted almonds.

Later, while I lie awake in bed, I think of the perfect come back to the salad-y remark. I put us both back in the teashop and I make her say that I’m salad-y with clotted cream in each corner of her lip. But instead of replying, Am I?, I lean in and in a low voice I say Listen, you little skank! Not all of us can eat scones and have it turn into more taut littleness! Some of us are forced to eat spring mix in the half-dark of our bachelors and still expand inexplicably. Some of us expand at the mere contemplation of what you shovel so carelessly so dancingly into your smug little mouth. And the way I say it, leaning in like that, with all this edge and darkness in my voice garnered from years of precipice-induced restraint, makes her bow her head in genuine remorse.

On my way to work the next day, I make a promise to myself. I promise that when the girl I hate asks me out to lunch I’ll say No, I’ll say No, I’ll say No. Then, at around 11, when she sends me a text that says, Weird Swedish Pizza!! Omnomnom!, I text back ☺. We go to the Scandinavian café she loves. She orders a sausage-lavender-thyme pizza square the size of her head plus a Kardemummabullar for later, for what she calls Secret Eating. I get the fennel-pomegranate-dill salad, which comes undressed in a diamond-shaped bowl. While she’s eating the pizza, she watches me forage through limp dill fronds for fennel quarter moons. I try to distract her by making a comment about the weather, how I thought it was supposed to rain today, something to make her look skywards, but her eyes are on me, my fork, the bowl.

“That salad’s small,” she says.

“Not really,” I say, bringing the bowl closer to me. “It only looks small.”

But she won’t let it be. She lifts her heart-shaped sunglasses, leans forward and peers down into the bowl and sort of wrinkles her nose like she’s just smelled something awful.

“It looks small because it is small,” she says, sitting back. She cocks her head to one side, like I’m curious. “How come you got that?”

I say something about how I just like pomegranate seeds, how they’re pretty like rubies.

She stares at me until I feel heat creep up the back of my neck. Then she shrugs. She’s wearing this strappy tank that exposes how her shoulders are all bone. She opens her mouth wide and takes a pointedly large bite of pizza then leans back, chewing, and tilts her tiny face towards the sun.

“I love shun,” she says.

That night, while I’m having dinner with Mel at the bistro with the fun salads, I bitch to her about Itsy Bitsy, which is what I call the girl I hate when I’m being funny about how I hate her. I don’t even wait until we’ve gotten our drinks, I just start in while we still have the oversized menus in front of us. I tell Mel about the scones and the Swedish pizza. I tell her about the salad-y remark. I tell her what I wished I could have told Itsy Bitsy, about scones turning into more taut littleness for some, while others are forced to grow fat on salad. I figure Mel, who’s fat, fatter even than I am, will appreciate how hate-worthy she is. It’s what I love most about Mel.

Mel says, “Itsy Bitsy. Is this the girl who kept eating the lemon slices off your vodka sevens?”

“That was Soy Foam. The anorexic from my old work. This is another one, from my new work. And I don’t hate her so much anymore.”

“Itsy Bitsy?”

“Soy Foam.”

Soy Foam was annoying, really annoying, but at least I got her. I didn’t at first. At first all I saw was this terribly small woman from accounts who, whenever we’d go to lunch, would order an Americano with steamed soy milk on the side, then eat the foam with a spoon, like soup. Then one night, during Happy Hour, after devouring all my cocktail garnish, she drunkenly confessed she hadn’t had her period in two years and that, as a result of premature menopause, she’d had to start shaving her face. After that, I hated her less. But it’s different with Itsy Bitsy.

“Sorry. So who’s Itsy Bitsy then?”

“The super thin one? With the bunny teeth? Who makes the Cookie Monster noises?”

“Oh,” she said. “Right. Why do you go to lunch with her if you hate her so much?”

“We’re friends. She’s actually nice aside from this.”

She is nice, sort of. My first week, she sort of took me under her wing. Showed me how to use the photocopier. Got me out of a printing jam by banging her little fist repeatedly on the lid until it belched out the other half of my report. Once, when I had a tension headache, she pinched my palm between her thumb and forefinger super hard for five minutes because she’d read online that sometimes that helped. Also, she was the only one at the office who bothered to talk to me. We even have a girl we hate together: Probiotic Yoga Evangelist, this whore from HR. After we caught each other making gag-me faces at her Bikram-Changed-My-Life speech, which she made between spoonfuls of Oikos, we sort of bonded.

“Yeah,” Mel agrees. “I guess that makes it awkward.”

The waitress comes and I order my heart salad with the poppy seed dressing on the side.

“Heart salad?” Mel asks.

“This salad that has heart everything,” I say. “Artichoke hearts. Romaine hearts. Hearts of palm. I love it.”

Mel orders the roast beef and havarti scroll with the sweet potato fries. She suggests sharing the baked camembert appetizer but when I refuse, she doesn’t push like she used to. Maybe she’s starting to understand how I can’t afford to lose what is at best a tenuous, hard won momentum. I tell her she should get it though. For herself. It sounds good.

“I can’t get it for just me. I’m not that much of a pig. I hope.”

“I’ll have a bite,” I offer.

Mel says she shouldn’t get it anyway. She should, you know, be good. “Like you,” she gives me a half smile.

I tell her I’m honestly not that good. Really, I’m—

“You are,” she says. “I wish I had your discipline.”

“You did for a while.” I say looking away.

For a while Mel was pretty committed. Using her mother’s old exercycle, living on Diet Coke and Michelina’s Light. In fact, for a while there, Mel began to look very much the unstoppable force of nature she was when she was seventeen, the girl who wore black bras you could see through her white Catholic school blouse and who blew all the boys I ever professed to love in her bedroom, while I played solitaire in the downstairs den with her mother.

When Mel started losing weight, I tried to be supportive. I kept telling her things like, “You look great, but you don’t want to go too far.” You know, things a friend would say to a friend. But Mel would just sip her Diet Coke sort of smug like she had a secret, leaving half her salad for the waitress to clear away. She lost steam after a few months, though. Couldn’t keep it up. Gained it back plus plus. It was really really sad.

“I guess I kind of went too far,” Mel says now.

“I did tell you not to go too far,” I remind her. Then I realize that’s kind of harsh. Surely she’s suffered enough?

“You still look beautiful though,” I add. I search for something about her to compliment. It isn’t easy. She’s still beautiful but since she gained all that weight back, she’s really let herself go grooming-wise. Usually she’ll wear at least lipstick for me because she knows it depresses me to see her without it, but today her lips are all bare and crackly.

“I love your top,” I say at last. It’s hideous. One of those tent-like horrors from the plus size store. There are some iridescent baubles along the neckline, some frothy bits of lace trailing from the cap-sleeves to lessen its resemblance to a shroud.

“I love the sleeve-detail.”

Mel looks down at the froth, frowning. “It’s okay, I guess.”

“I think it’s nice. They clearly have way nicer things at that store than they did back when I had to shop there.”

“It’s still the same crap,” she spits. “They just have more selection is all.”

We stab at our ice.

“I love your top, though,” she says, eyeing my bustier. “Siren?”

“Hell’s Belles.”

“I thought that place closed.”

“Nope. Still open. New owner though.”

“I used to love shopping there.”

“I remember.”

Waiting outside the change room while she tried on PVC corsets and velvet, empire- waisted dresses. The former owner, a corpse-like woman named Gruvella, regarding me with eyes the color of skim milk as though I were about to steal something, not that anything she had would’ve fit me then, not even the fingerless gloves. Mel finally coming out from behind the white and black striped curtain, twirling for me while I sat in the chair with the clawed armrests, saying “Great, that looks great.”

“I still remember that black bell-sleeved dress you got there. The one you wore to the prom with the spider tights.”

“The Bella. I forgot about that dress. God, good memory.”

The waitress brings our food. She’s forgotten to put my poppy seed dressing on the side which often happens with this waitress and sometimes, honestly, I think maybe she does it on purpose just to fuck with me. I tell her about it and she says oh, well, she could change it for me, and I say, could you? And I tell Mel, you go ahead and start without me.

“She sounds pretty annoying,” Mel says. “Sadistic even.”

“Itsy Bitsy? She is.” In fact, I tell Mel that I’m starting to think she befriended me to make herself feel good. To feel extra bitsy. That I think she actually gets off on it, eating copiously in front of me while I eat nothing, and pointing out how I’m eating nothing while she’s eating copiously.

“I guess that’s possible,” Mel says. She picks up her fork and knife, then lowers them. “I feel bad about starting without you. You sure you don’t want at least some fries while you wait?”

I tell her I better not. I’ve been on such a slippery slope lately.

Mel bites into her scroll. “You look the shame to me,” she says. “Shkinnier even.”

“Are you kidding? I’m huge.”

Mel gives me a look like if I’m huge, then what the hell is she?

It’s awkward for a bit.

“So, anyone you hate these days?” I ask.

Mel cuts a large piece of scroll. Then she says there are people who annoy her. Who seriously, seriously annoy her. But no, no one worthy of hate. Hating requires a lot of energy; she’s so tired these days.

“I know what you mean,” I say. “I’m tired, too.”

But I get her going. I can always get her going.

We talk about the girls we hate on television and in the movies. We talk about the one who started out almost fat but then got thin after she swore she’d never lose the weight, she’d stay sort of fat forever and fuck them, them being The Industry. We talk about how we hate her so much for that, for caving to Industry Standards. But we hated her when she was fat too, for her skin. For her defiance of norms which we guess we’re still slaves to. Also, because boys seemed to love her either way, which is rare for boys. We talk about how it is that the boys we love always seem to love the girl we hate most. It makes us want to know every detail about her. What her sign is, if she is a vegetarian, whether she ever did porn or at least posed topless. And if she did, we’ll hunt for it on the net. We’ll download it by whatever means necessary, and as we watch it our hatred will glow, intensify, become something like an emergency and we’ll have to call each other up just so it doesn’t sit there, this lump in our throats. We half-laugh about how we’re masochists.

Then Mel remembers she has an early day tomorrow.

I ask her if she’d like me to drive her home, but she says it’s fine. Really.

I tell her I’m happy to at least drive her to the bus station closer to her house, that I’d really hate for her to have to take two buses at night, both such long rides, and besides, I never see her anymore.

“Okay,” she says, and I try not to hear that it’s sort of half-hearted.

On the ride over, to make her laugh, I tell her all about Aggressively Naked, this woman who works out at my gym who does all of her post-workout grooming naked. She brushes her hair naked. She uses her straightening iron naked. Eyelash curler and mascara naked. Rings necklace and even bracelets naked. Trouser socks and even shoes naked. Only after she’s got herself totally primped will she put on her clothes.

“Isn’t that annoying?”

“It is,” Mel agrees.

“I can’t believe I forgot to tell you earlier. Also, she’s got this body you wouldn’t believe. Like I knew just by her body she didn’t speak English. I knew that when she opened her mouth, something like Danish would come out.”

“Oh my god, stop,” she says, mock-covering her ears. “Just stop.”

Once we get to the bus station, I insist on holding Mel in the car until the bus comes. She takes her bus pass out of her little change purse to be at the ready. I tell her I love her change purse, even though there is really nothing distinctive about it, it’s just a change purse. Black leather with a little zip.

I ask her if she’s sure she doesn’t want me to take her home, it’s a long ride. She says actually she doesn’t mind it, that ever since she started living with her mother, she uses the bus time for Me Time. Me Time for Mel has always been a dark fantasy novel and some Norwegian darkwave on her ipod. It comforts me so much that this has never changed.

I ask her what she’s been reading and listening to lately, but she’s spotted the bus in the distance, so I say okay, good-bye, and tell her I’ll text her later, but she’s already out of the car, running toward the stop.

I go home and do my assessment in front of the mirror. Tonight, it seems there are more truths to come to grips with. Sometimes this happens. How many there are often depends on lighting. Not on how much, but on how it’s hitting me, on how it’s hitting certain parts. I eat a 100 gram bar of 70% dark chocolate square by square. As I lie in bed, I picture Mel in her house, spiky with all of her mother’s strange breeds of plant. I picture her walking up the creaking steps toward her bedroom, surrounded by walls of obscure fantasy and even more obscure CDs. I think of her lying on her back in the too-small bed of her childhood, the twin mattress sagging beneath her, a moon through the window silhouetting her, the gentle rise and fall of her vast stomach, her slight snore, until my eyes close.

At work the next day, Itsy Bitsy is secret eating a Kardemummabullar at her desk. She’s pretending to secret eat for my sake, to make me laugh, like, at look what a pig she is, she can’t even wait until lunch. She over-crackles the paper bag, does shifty eyes before each super-bite. She’s wearing this sixties mini dress with matching white go-go boots like something stitched out of my nightmares. Seeing me watch her, she waves, her cheeks plump with Kardemummabullar. I wave back, and the hate I feel is bottomless. The hate could drown us both. She swallows and mouths Lunch at me like it’s a question and I nod in spite of myself.

Then she texts me:

Banana orgy at Kilimanjaro! Om-nom-nom-nom!!!! }8D

I’ve eaten there with her before. It’s this sandwich and cake shop that has nothing to do with Africa, despite its name and décor. Under a black and white still of Serengeti cranes, I’ll watch her eat a vast ham and gruyere Panini with apricot chutney, slurp down a peanut butter and banana smoothie, then scarf a slice of banana cake. By the time the waitress sets that slice in front of her, I’ll have done eating half of my veggie delite wrap, even though I will eat as slowly as possible. By the time she cuts into her cake, my hands will be empty. And with her mouth full of cake, she’ll say something about how I’ve only eaten half the wrap. She might even point. She might even reach across the table and point at it, my sad, uneaten other half. And I’ll have to say something awkward about wanting to save this other half for later, which we’ll both know is a lie. I might even ask the waitress for a to-go bag, but she won’t be fooled. She’ll look at me like, Huh, and take another bite of banana cake. And I’ll know that once again my bearing miserable witness will have increased the flavor of her food somehow, like salt. I text back ;D, and as I do this, the hate shifts, spreads its wings in me, becomes almost electric, like love.

Mona Awad‘s fiction has appeared in McSweeney’s, The Walrus, Joyland, St. Petersburg Review, and Two Serious Ladies. She holds an MScR in English literature from the University of Edinburgh and is currently pursuing an MFA in fiction at Brown University.