(10) Lucy Zhang: Hope
Before riding the Ferris wheel, the child waits for Mother to return from the restroom. The sky darkens and people are leaving in groups of two or more–a sister holding a stick of apple-flavored cotton candy, a brother blowing on a pinwheel, and a parent holding the red balloon. Mother doesn’t return and the child winds up in foster care with a new brother and sister who steal ice cream from the fridge when New Mother isn’t watching. The child excels in school, gets accepted on a full scholarship to fancy boarding school, never sees the new family again aside from the occasional email confirmation that they’ve received their monthly deposit generated from the scholarship stipend. The exceptionally bright child realizes scholarship money can only get one so far and summer is the season of displacement–when dorms close and any square of pavement free of gum suffices as bed. The child grows into an unexceptional adult who washes dishes in the back of a pub and occasionally looks out the window to count the number of pedestrians.
Before riding the Ferris wheel, the child watches motorcycles zoom past mammoth delivery trucks on the highway and imagines the wind pushing against the motorcyclist’s body like they alone withstand the raw force of nature.
Before commencing mass destruction, the terrorist tugs a helmet over greasy, unwashed hair and rolls on the throttle, motorcycle and person a faint blur to the lone couple walking alongside the river, accelerating and accelerating and accelerating without a care in the world for the speed limit, maybe yesterday but not today–today, unyielding against the wind chill, back wheel propelling it all forward until forward ends at the Ferris wheel, empty but running, spokes flashing indigo, red and green, beckoning the terrorist into a passenger car held upright by electric motors and gravity and as the wheel makes its way around, pausing at the top with a view of all the illuminated skyscrapers and hotels and banks and apartment complexes–flickering, not all at once and not rapidly, but if you look long enough they’ll turn on and off in staggered intervals, like fireflies plugged into outlets powered by stars that once were but no more.
Before commencing mass destruction, the terrorist thinks about the children sleeping in their bedrooms with their night lights still on, about the children sleeping in an alley between a Seven-Eleven and brothel decorated by vibrant argon gas signs, fantasizing about next meals and a steady supply of shampoo. The children without parents to teach you that boring SUVs drive safer and faster than motorcycles before someone gets hit. So the terrorist tries to get as close to the sky as possible, not to release toxic gas or signal a suicide plane or jump from fatal heights, but to imagine a world in darkness.
Lucy Zhang is a writer, software engineer, and anime fan. Her work has appeared in Maudlin House, Gone Lawn, Jellyfish Review, and elsewhere. She can be found at https://kowaretasekai.wordpress.com/ or on Twitter @Dango_Ramen
(9) Abigail Swoboda: The Parade to the Grave
They found the body on a Wednesday. Nothing happens on Wednesdays, except for maybe math quizzes and the slow creep of an opaque, overcast sky. And this is where death found its opportunity, in the dreary crease of the midweek day. They found him in his closet in his own room, hanging there next to his formal shirts and third grade dioramas. His note was sealed in a plastic bag that was shoved into his pants against his cold, dead ass. The police took the note and put it into a different plastic bag.
The town whispered his name: Elliot. He was in my third period trig class. They dared not say his name as loudly as they cried out sine! cosine! tangent! He would never know that he had received a B+ on the last quiz he took. This was better than I had done, but I was still breathing.
On Thursday, school was still in session, but normal classes were cancelled, and everyone was assigned to a classroom to talk about what had happened. If you didn’t want to talk, you still had to go to the room so that you could listen. If you didn’t want to listen, then you had to throw up so that you wouldn’t be allowed to go to school for twenty-four hours, but only several people elected this last option.
I was assigned to room 215, which was Mr. J’s room. Mr. J was my English teacher. His full last name was not “J,” but it was so long that most people either could not pronounce it or did not care to put their time into doing so, so everyone just called him Mr. J.
He had set up the room so that all the desks formed a large, angular pseudo-circle. As everyone came into the room and sat down, no one said anything and found their place around the circle in silence. Mr. J began writing on the chalk board and it came out jagged and doubled, as the nub of yellow chalk he was using had split in the middle. We stayed silent as the chalk screeched out Mr. J’s message.
In Mr. J’s scrawling cursive, the class mouthed in unison:
Elliot—
I’m sorry.
Only Mr. J had forgotten to cross the “t” in “Elliot” so that it looked like Elliol, so I started laughing—hysterically, louder and louder and louder, until, in between my guffaws, Mr. J pulled a pistol from out of his pants and placed it in between his teeth and tensed his finger around the trigger and the whole class watched as Mr. J’s head exploded in shades of red across his misspelled apology. The silence was shattered by the shot, and several people started to sob, others kicked away from their desks and ran from the room, and the girl next to me started furiously pushing her fingers through the pages of the English textbook she had open in front of her, working her way through centuries of literature in quick flicks of her fingers. I wondered which stories she touched, which phrases, which words, and I wondered which words, which phrases, which stories touched her back. I kept staring at the board, looking intensely at the uncrossed “t” in Elliot that looked like an “l.” An “l” didn’t make sense there, but there it was, nonetheless: an “l.” I watched the “l” carefully, just in case it was suddenly crossed by some invisible hand, but it was not.
I started to laugh again at the absurdity of it all.
I laughed and laughed and laughed my way on top of my desk, where I stood above the hysteria and gore and shouted his name for those who were too afraid to do so themselves. Elliot! Elliot! Elliot! Elliot. I screamed it like I had during the night we shared together, the night where we lay tangled in each other’s mess, relishing in each other’s sadness and displaced pleasure. I had stripped my top off carefully in front of him, my fingers shaky and warm. And he had looked down at my breasts. “Oh,” he had said, without inflection, and I wondered if he had ever seen breasts so white. “I only like the ones like this,” he had said, tracing the shape of a woman with his fingers in the air. He had said it like a person might say “I only like the green ones” to someone offering them a handful of Skittles.
I laughed and laughed until the world faded around me, and I fell back down into the chaos of the world below.
On Friday, school was cancelled. It was revealed that Elliot’s note had been addressed to Mr. J, and that it was a love note, suffocated within the plastic bag shoved into his pants.
At Mr. J’s house, investigators uncovered an unpublished manuscript entitled The Parade to the Grave. In the margins of every page, he had drawn pictures of Elliot naked in colored pencils all in shades of red. This manuscript was eventually published without the pictures of Elliot, under Mr. J’s full name, which no one had cared to learn when he was alive, so it was as if no one at all had written the book. Like it had just started existing. The book said things like: “Your body is just a host for a brain; that’s all you are,” which six people used as their senior quote that year, attributing it to “anonymous.”
The exact details of the tragedy faded with time, but the whispers continued, and I took every opportunity to shout his name back to those cowards who so badly did not want to hear it, to hear me. But you cannot growl at chaos, and I was left alone to laugh and to wonder if it was Mr. J’s unrequited love that had led Elliot’s parade to his grave or my pale, pale, anything-but-green Skittle breasts.
Abigail Swoboda is a queer writer based in Philly, where they can be found in dark rooms, embroidering until their fingers are raw, or on their website abigailswoboda.com.
(8) Kelly Webber: Paved with Good Intentions
You’ve likely heard my story before – the tragedy of Orpheus and Eurydice, a husband who rescued his wife from hell. But I suppose you’re more familiar with Orpheus and how his tale moved the Furies to tears. Meanwhile, I’m primarily known for falling into the abyss. Today, I’ll share with you what Ovid failed to tell, or perhaps didn’t know.
While Orpheus and Hades discussed my fate a few doors down, I waited in the foyer of the House of Hades with Persephone. I can only describe Persephone in contradictions. Being in a room with her felt like watching a solar eclipse, witnessing the sun and moon collide. She was beautiful, with dark locks and a comely face as delicate as a flower. At the same time, her golden eyes flickered with the ferocity of fire. She was the Goddess of Springtime and Queen of Hell, both beautiful and terrible.
“Care for some fruit?” she asked, presenting a tray of passionfruit, fig, and pomegranate.
I hadn’t eaten since entering the Underworld. “No thank you.” I silently chided myself for refusing the hospitality of a goddess. I prayed she wouldn’t take offense.
She shrugged. “Suit yourself.”
Surely, she knew my reason for declining, but I attempted to justify my lack of manners as a guest. “I don’t want to get stuck here.”
I remembered the many winters Demeter spent lamenting her daughter’s annual voyage to the Underworld. She must understand that I needed to be with Orpheus.
She chuckled. “Darling, you are stuck here.”
“Orpheus is negotiating with Hades now,” I argued. “He’ll rescue me, and we can return home together.”
She gazed into the distance pensively. “Ah, yes. I remember waiting in this very room as my mother negotiated with Hades. And yet, here I am.”
My stomach began to rumble, and my mouth watered at the sight of fruit on the plate before me. Perhaps I could get used to this place. After all, I wasn’t burning in some pit of fire. If hell was feasting on pomegranate in the House of Hades with Persephone, did I even want to return to my old life?
“Do you ever wish you didn’t eat the fruit?” I asked. “That you didn’t have to come back here every winter?”
She took a bite of fig. “I’m not the first girl to be ripped from her garden after tasting the fruit of temptation, and I won’t be the last.”
Her nonchalance caught me off guard. I tried rephrasing my question. “Are you happy here?”
“My mother’s emotions wax and wane with the seasons. Mine are far more consistent. If I feel joy, I feel it equally in Earth’s summers and hell’s winters. A wise man once said that the mind itself can make a heaven of hell, or a hell of heaven,” she replied.
“Pardon me for my questioning. I mean no disrespect, but it sounds as if you’re speaking in riddles.”
She tossed the fig back on the platter. “Little girl, I can tell you’re hungry. Now, are you going to eat? Or do you plan on letting the men down the hall decide your fate for you?”
I plucked a pomegranate from the platter. I examined the fruit meticulously, tracing my fingers from the sarcotesta to the seeds. I lifted it up to my lips but took a sniff rather than a bite. Its aroma was subtle but sweet and soothing as freesia. The blood-red juice taunted me, and my stomach growled ravenously.
I snapped out of my reverie at the sight of Orpheus sauntering down the hall. He made his way to the door, exiting without so much as looking back at me.
“You’re meant to follow him,” Persephone explained.
I leapt out of my seat. “I’m free to leave?”
“He is free to leave,” the goddess specified. “You may follow him, and if the two of you can reach the upper world, you may both return home safely. The one condition is that you must follow behind Orpheus, and he must not look back.”
Without so much as bidding my hostess goodbye, I ran out the door, pursuing the music of Orpheus’s lyre. Once I caught up to him, following his steps diligently, I realized I was still clutching the pomegranate.
Kelly Webber is a writer and graduate student from New Jersey. After graduating with a Bachelor's degree in English literature, she's pursuing a Master's degree in library science. She loves to read, and especially enjoys creative retellings of mythology.
(7) Bruce Meyer: Rats with Wings
Charles was told yoga would be good for his nerves but most of the poses made his heart race.
What if he tore his yoga pants?
What if he farted. Should he look around and blame it on someone else?
What if his back seized, as it often did, and he could not exit from a Downward Dog and he’d have to walk around the rest of the day explaining he was not doing the pose for his health or looking for change that had fallen out of someone’s pocket but that he was in pain?
Why didn’t his chiropractor have no appointments available until late next week? He decided he would not attempt the pose, especially the Downward Dog. He had more respect for dogs than to claim he understood what they were all about.
A mystical sitar played in the background of the studio as the teacher spoke.
Why did the teacher not know that parts of Charles were ripping? How could the teacher know his pupil was failing?
Failure, Charles asserted, is personal. It is not what one shares. And why should he? No one wants that kind of lousy truth to get out. No one wants to know that his body could not pose like a dog. What would he say if he met a friend in the street on his way home?
“Hello Charles, what’s new with you today?”
“The dog just wasn’t in me.” Would that be a suitable reply? Would the friend think he’d lost his mind? The idea of the Downward Dog made Charles anxious that there was a dog inside him, that it would be healthy to find it. He closed his eyes and saw trees and fire hydrants and wanted to go to the change room as soon as the lesson ended.
“Practice this at home,” the yoga master told him.
Each day, Charles began his yoga by opening the balcony door. His yogi had told him that he should feel the animal he was assuming, embrace the pose, feel the limits of his human form, and press against them, exceed himself in both mind and body. Only then would grow. Only then would he feel the benefits of his lessons and the three hundred dollars he paid to sign up for ten sessions where he was surrounded by lithe young women whose bodies could contort and alter as if they were shape shifters.
If Charles was self-conscious among a room of fellow practitioners of the twisted art, he felt more uncomfortable every morning as he practiced his poses. He didn’t want his neighbours or the people in the opposite block of apartments to see him struggle to bend over his belly. Even with the door open, people would talk. They’d say, “There’s that man contorting himself again.”
But he had to have the door open. Yoga works up a sweat.
That’s why he hated the seagull. The seagull watched. It not only watched, it was there every morning and tilted its head almost upside down not just to look Charles directly in the eye but to express an inquisitiveness, to express the thought non-verbally, “I have no idea what you are doing and you look really stupid doing it.”
The bird perched on the railing and looked as if it was going to share Charles’ secret with the world.
The first day, Charles threw a slipper at it. That was stupid. The slipper fell five floors from his apartment balcony and was run over by a lawnmower.
The second day, Charles tried to wave his arms. The bird mocked him, waving its wings back. Charles felt like an idiot.
On the third day, Charles held out a crust of bread. When the bird reached to take it, Charles pushed the gull off the railing, thinking “That’ll fix him.” That didn’t work. The bird fell a few stories then flew back with the crust in its mouth.
Charles decided to switch to hatha yoga.
He closed the balcony door. He turned on the hot water taps in the kitchen and bathroom. He turned up the heat, turned on the open oven full blast. Sweat poured down his face. The balcony door fogged. He fainted.
The apartment might have gone up in flames.
What saved Charles was the sound of the seagull slamming into the door again and again. The bird didn’t want him to die. The creature wanted Charles to stay alive and be amusing.
When Charles got up the strength to open the door the next day and let the summer breeze come in and cool him as he stretched and posed, a dozen gulls gathered round to watch.
Charles knew exactly which one the ring leader was. He had gathered an audience, and the longer Charles posed and bent, the more the other birds tilted their heads and began to caw to each other. Charles motioned the bird with his index finger in the universal ‘come here and say that’ gesture. The bird obeyed. It was going to get a closer look and hopped over the threshold into the apartment. Charles lunged at it and grabbed it, shaking it in fury as he throttled the bird by the neck.
This, it crossed his mind, was how the Ancient Mariner screwed up. What was he doing? Had he lost in senses? He stared at the bird. It was too late. The body was limp in Charles’ hands.
The other gulls set on him, pecking him, and covering him in their pin feathers until he was certain he was choking on one.
He held the limp bird and stood up, amazed.
A gracefulness flowed into every sinew of his muscles. He closed his eyes and saw a dumpster behind a supermarket, and an empty parking lot where he felt he had to fight for a piece of pizza crust someone had tossed from a car window the night before. And it tasted so good, and he would fight so he didn’t have to share it with the others. It was his. His pizza crust.
He realized he could balance on one foot while holding the dead gull’s body aloft with one hand. The other gulls looked on. They were impressed. He lifted his leg in the Bird of Paradise pose and felt his inner light shining inside him the way a lighthouse passes its arm through an dense grey fogbank and the fish follow it thinking it must be the sun and the gulls chase the fish for a feeding frenzy and the world is in balance, mind, body, and soul.
Bruce Meyer is author of 64 books of poetry, short stories, flash fiction, and non-fiction. He has won the Anton Chekhov Prize for Very Short Fiction and been a finalist in the Bath Short Story Award, the Fish Fiction Prize, and other competitions. His next book, Down in the Ground, will be published in October. He lives in Barrie, Ontario.
(6) Bethany Bruno: Mr. Sandman, Please Bring Me a Xanax
As the small wind up clock ticks along with the slow decline of the afternoon sun, small bursts of anxiety begin to rise within me. Nighttime, three years after acquiring PTSD, bring only those aching realities of a life lost forever. I genuinely miss my daily Xanax, who was my call me no matter what time, day or night, and I’ll be there best friend. The tiny oblong shaped pill, once placed ever so gently under my tongue, would melt into a chalky paste before I swallowed. Within minutes, every tense muscle and feeling of unease would release from within the fibers of my being. Every thought, every unpleasant image of his jugular slowly coming to a complete stop. Every ounce of despair, vanished. It wouldn’t allow me to ponder the harsh reality of being denied a relationship with my father. Xanax would assure me that my mother’s cancer diagnosis, mere weeks after the death of my father, was of no importance. It would shut down that logical part of my brain that beckoned me to explore the cruel future that awaits me. It’s my responsibility to bear witness to the deaths of the two people who would love me unconditionally. But like a good friend, Xanax would have said come on now, forget about that and let’s watch some Netflix while eating an entire bag of Cool Ranch Doritos. You’ve earned it!
Now, three years later, and clean from Xanax for two of those years, I can’t help but plead with some higher being to please bestow upon me a few tablets. Just enough to get me through this new life change and to wash away the sleepless nights filled with irrational questions. My new normal, post-death of my father and near-miss of my mother to the same cancer, was changing once more. No matter how hard I try to regain somewhat of a normal life, those plans get ripped to shreds and tossed page by page into the dumpster fire which is now feeding the flames of this global pandemic. I hear on the news the various interviews with random people, terrified of how to move forward or even if they could ever recover from this event. I laugh and think to myself, “welcome to the club.” It will never be the same, and to think that it will is pure ignorance. There is no going back, only walking forward within the darkened room of insecurity. Finding your “normal” after a traumatic event is like having to crawl on the floor, which is covered in shards of glass from the broken ceiling. You try to stand but get pushed down every time you hear any resemblance of another possible collapse. You extend your hands, right then left, as you brace yourself for the pain of gaining distance yet adding a new wound each time. Placing your hand on top of the slivers, as they pierce your skin, is a necessary agony. Once you find yourself in a room free of dangerous debris, you’re still left with the wounds that can only be healed with time.
My present empty room, which appears safe and sturdy, can collapse at any time. I’m disfigured, and still weak from the years of the slow escape from my previous life’s collapse. But I’m still waiting and watching for what’s to come next. Will this virus cause a second wave? Will I somehow catch it, and bring it home to my highly receptible mother, and therefore be the cause of her death? All this time, I surely thought cancer would be her killer, but maybe she’ll be taken out by some unpredictable illness? It’s questions like these that make me dread the night. Maybe because my physical body is at rest that my mind decides to run marathons around life’s deepest and most philosophical questions. I can’t stand all of the excessive and unnecessary visiting hours between myself and my resentful brain. And with no real escape, I’m trapped inside my own personal abyss.
This current world state, in all its chaos and fear, feels familiar right now. Every time I read the random news sites, complete with personal essays about people’s struggle with acceptance within this social distancing world, I feel a sense of relief. For once, in three years, I don’t feel so alone with my grief. If anything, I feel vindication for those who are suffering. For I’m no longer suffering alone, as now the whole world is lost and unsure of what the next step is. At night, along with my usual hours spent distracting myself with some form of entertainment, I also search the internet for stories of suffering. I think to myself maybe now there can exist a world where grief is shared and not neatly tucked away in the closet like a thermal quilt used for those cold nights in need of warmth. It’s the ultimate “told you so” moment for me. I don’t want to be right, or wrong, I just want someone to look at the scar tissue that aligns my hands, extend their arms, and show me their own battle scars. Maybe later at night, as I sit upon my bed and flick through the que of videos ready to distract my noisy brain, I can instead sit there in silence. I won’t need any distractions or even my little miracle pill. Alone with only myself, my fears, and my freshly mended disfigurements. My brain will remain silent as its now content with whatever may come.
Bethany Bruno is a born and raised Florida Writer. She attended Flagler College, where she received a B.A in English. She later attended the University of North Florida, where she received her Master's. She has worked as a Ghost Tour Guide, Library Specialist, English Teacher, and a Park Ranger with the National Park Service. Her work has been previously published in Lunch Ticket Magazine, Dash Literary Journal, Adelaide Literary Magazine, Still Point Arts Quarterly, Nabu Review, and Metafore Magazine. She's currently working on her first novel.
(5) Sophie Peters: Wanda’s Room
At approximately 9:15, Wanda opened her bedroom door, expecting, as was usual, to find her bedroom on the other side. Instead, she found Hell. Every child opens this door once in their lives and for Wanda, it was on her 7th birthday.
The sponge-like absorbency of her imagination had not yet been wrung out by the insecurities of adults, and so Wanda accepted what she saw the same way she accepted the violence of her father. It was just like Grandma had described. Snakes slithered in cylindrical masses, glistening, as though their albino scales were formed from frozen dew drops. They squeezed together and made up an almighty archway. Beyond this, the little girl saw a landscape of sorrow and fire. The sky was empty, no color or blackness filled it, and the ground lay fifty feet below where she stood. Wanda heard the incomprehensible pain of sinners floating up to her in yelps. She heard the screams of profanity and the blood-curdling cries of raped women. Wanda had not known rape before this moment, but a child is quick to comprehend. Hell, she saw, was white. Color was stripped and ruined and stolen from all who entered that place. White bodies writhed and burned on hot white coals, and the smoke that rose was filled with the curly cinders of afros on fire. The life and warmth of their souls were stripped and dissipated. Ashen bodies oozed blood like it was horse glue, from their molested and disfigured forms, reeking of chlorine.
Wanda saw something in the centre. A woman on a couch, besides a man. These two were in color, they were not yet in hell. Their warm brown skin was untouched. The man on the couch had eyes that were violet, and his pupils burned the crimson of hateful desire. He asked the woman “You wanna pay me another way, Sugar?” The woman was smiling, she replied: “Yes, ok”. Wanda watched as the man mounted the woman on the couch, his horns grew as he did so, larger, and harder and crueler with every second. “No! Don’t do it!” She cried, but Wanda’s voice was lost in the windy roar of white flame. She found that she could not move. As the devil pushed, his victim began to turn icy like the rest. The deathly whiteness spread from her lower abdomen outwards to her chest, her legs, and then the tips of her fingers and finally her deep chocolate eyes as they stared skywards in hopeless resignation. With every pulse, the hairs on her body detached and fell from her, in large sickly clumps. The snakes coiled, the bodies burned and melted, the stench of corrosion surrounded them. Satan looked into Wanda’s eyes and he pushed himself into his ghostly prey. Wanda saw that she recognized the couch on which they lay. The devil spoke.
“I am giving her a curse. I will give it to you too, one day.”
Wanda blinked and Hell was gone. Her hand gripped the door handle to her bedroom, and the smell of the burning flesh was replaced by that of her mother cooking in the kitchen. There was the faint sound of arguing in the distance.
***
Several years later, and a hundred thousand hairs had grown and been cut, Wanda replied to Jerard, “Yes, ok…but wear this. I know what you got”.
Sophie Peters is a self-taught multimedia artist born in Minnesota, USA and raised in England. They specialize in painting and also work with text, fiction, and digital media. As a queer, female-bodied person, they take interest in power dynamics and storytelling for marginalised or unusual voices. They have a first-class bachelor of science from the University of Birmingham, UK, and currently live in New Orleans, USA.
(4) Shannon Frost Greenstein: Rejoice!
You shouldn’t go, I said. It’s not safe out there, I said. We’ll make do, and when we can’t, we’ll build a fire and drink the wine we’ve been saving and lay in bed spooning, you curled around me like a puzzle piece, and we’ll take the pills, I said. Don’t leave me, I said.
Through the window, I could hear their melodic chanting on the street below as I begged him to stay.
They were everywhere by then, an ever-growing mass of Bedouins lost in religious ecstasy, flagellates attempting to beat an absent God into their already bloody flesh, like the motley crews that wandered Europe during the Black Death.
“Rejoice!” all the graffiti says now. “Rejoice! The End is Near!”
We need the food, he said. I’ll be right back with anything I can find. I promise. I promise, he said.
Back then, back in the beginning, we didn’t understand what we had done to deserve this limbo, a schizophrenic state of being, neither alive nor dead, Schrodinger’s cats in a thought experiment designed by Mother Nature; designed by God.
I could hear them through the window, and I was afraid; afraid of their manic bloodletting, their euphoric states of rapture, their single-mindedness and obsession with the bliss of agony. I was afraid for him to go. I was afraid to be alone.
###
Before the televisions stopped playing, before the internet fell, when there were still newspapers and blogs and lead stories on the six o’clock news, we saw what was starting to happen. It wasn’t something isolated only to the United States, or the North American continent, or even Western society in general.
Just as God punishes His children indiscriminately, so, too, do the laws of science.
We didn’t run out of water because we used the wrong lightbulbs; it wasn’t that we didn’t recycle enough aluminum cans or buy enough energy efficient appliances or invest enough money for alternative sources of fuel. It dates further back than our enlightenment a la Al Gore, further back than our collective awakening to the inconvenient truth of our adverse effects upon our environment, the Principle of Unintended Consequences made incarnate.
We ran out of water because we overpopulated our very finite living space; because, over the course of a few short centuries, we burned through all the natural resources intended to sustain life for the next several millennia. It is not wholly our fault, we who were once sadly addicted to electricity and plastic bags and the various trappings of the technological revolution; it is also the fault of the previous generation, and the one before that, and the one before that, dating all the way back to the onslaught of human consciousness.
Simply put, human beings have overtaxed the Earth since the first piece of coal was burned in the Industrial Revolution, since the first river was diverted for the purpose of irrigation, since the first vaccine interrupted the natural evolutionary order and survival became an entitlement rather than a fight amongst the fittest. Biological life existed on this planet for millions of years, but it was only since humans started manipulating nature for personal gain that biological life became a threat to the planet.
And, just like anything else, the planet will protect herself when threatened.
###
After society fell, those with a friend in Jesus called it Armageddon. Those with a belief in science called it inevitable. Those who warned us about the deteriorating state of the environment called it our just reward. The rest of us just called it Hell.
###
Let me go with you, I said. I can’t stay here by myself. Let me come, and maybe I can help, and even if I can’t, I won’t let you die out there alone, I said. Let’s go together, I said.
But he left.
I’ll see you soon, he said.
###
They came to the door one day, after he was gone, after I was alone.
You just need to put your faith in Christ, they said. You just need to believe that we will be saved, that we can compensate for the sin that brought on this apocalypse, they said. It hardly hurts at all, they said.
They were backlit by the sun, and they looked angelic and beatific, and they were smiling, and it had been so long since someone had smiled at me.
And I found myself smiling back.
Welcome, they said. Welcome to salvation. We alone know the true path, they said. We will find God in this desolate wasteland and we will find water when we do, if we are pious, if we are unerringly devout, and here’s your whip, they said. Purge yourself of sin, they said.
And that’s how it happened. That’s how I got here, wherever here is now.
That’s how I joined this wandering group of religious gypsies, my new family, trudging through mud and undergrowth and existential dread, beating away the threat of death and damnation, expunging our greed and lust and gluttony through the cat o’nine tails and the birch rod, raising ourselves to the level of the venerated and esteemed. Raising ourselves up to God.
We wander this New World, soaked in entropy, soaked in self-interest. Soaked in blood. We attract wild animals, running amok without the confines of cages. We avoid the gangs, hellbent on saving the few remaining resources for their leaders. We have mastered dowsing rods, rain dances, meteorological superstitions; anything for rain. Anything for water.
It is a purpose; it is a reason to move forward. It feels productive; it feels like doing something. Life no longer feels like a vacuum, sitting alone, simply waiting to die.
###
I really only think about him at night.
Shannon Frost Greenstein resides in Philadelphia with her children, soulmate, and cats. She is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, a Contributing Editor for Barren Magazine, and a former Ph.D. candidate in Continental Philosophy. Shannon served as writer-in-residence for the Sundress Academy for the Arts and was selected as a NASA social media intern for an official launch from Cape Canaveral. Her work has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, X-R-A-Y Lit Mag, Cabinet of Heed, Spelk Fiction, Scary Mommy, and elsewhere. Follow her on Twitter @mrsgreenstein or her website: shannonfrostgreenstein.com. She comes up when you Google her.
(3) Olivia Braley: Broken Land Parkway
We are driving down Broken Land Parkway in silence because things have gone sour and nothing we say can help this. We’re going 47 miles per hour but there are brake lights ahead so this number is shrinking. I’m nervous so I pick at my cuticles, the dirt under my nails, a scab on my knee. Your right hand is at 2 o’clock on the steering wheel, left arm resting against your window. In driving school my instructor told me to always keep my hands at 4 and 7 so that if the driver’s seat airbag deploys in an accident, it won’t break both your arms. On a different, less sour day, I’d tell you this. Today, I stare hard out the window, as if the blur of trees beyond the shoulder were meaningful.
A little white sign at the edge of the road says that this section of highway is sponsored by IHOP. The last time we were at an IHOP together, it was the morning after a Halloween party a few years back. We decided to go at the last minute. We made makeshift vampire costumes using the fake blood that had been in the top drawer of my bedside table, next to condoms and unfinished crochet projects, since we started dating. You, digging around in the drawer, pants half-off, panting, would always joke about this while looking for a Trojan. Each time I reminded you it would come in handy one day. See? I told you that evening, dabbing that syrupy red substance from the tube on the corners of your mouth, I told you this would come in handy someday. Then you laughed and said, What would I do without you? and I smiled and said, I dunno, probably die and you kissed me and got fake blood on my mouth. We still had the fake blood dried and smeared on our faces as we walked into the IHOP and asked for a table for two, turning heads as we were guided through the restaurant to our seats, past families still dressed up from Sunday morning mass. On another day I would point out the sign and ask you if you remember that night and that morning in IHOP but I don’t, I just look over to you briefly and then away again, turning up the volume on the radio so I can’t talk over it.
I’m playing my Spotify over the Bluetooth and singing along under my breath, acting casual because I am trying to keep myself from all this talking but I can’t help making noise when I’m nervous. The song is “Aphasia” by Pinegrove. When the lyrics go one day I won’t need your love, I stop singing because I can’t say that part. I hit next before the singer can repeat the line. You probably notice this but you don’t react, just keep driving. We are driving down Broken Land Parkway like we have done a million times before: going to your parents’ house, to parties, to the climbing gym, to pick up Thai Paradise. But this time it feels like the GPS is taking us this way just to spite us, to remind us of our own brokenness, of the rift widening between us. This time it feels like the pavement will buckle and the trees lining the parkway will start to fall, one by one and then more rapidly, thudding as they drop like bodies, trembling the ground with each hit until the broken land fractures right in front of us and the whole world crumples and swallows us with it and this image is so sad and dramatic I almost tell you about it but I stop, choke down my sentences.
We are still driving down this suburban road in your mid-priced, messy Jeep, when you break, yell God, this fucking sucks and bang both hands on the top of the steering wheel— still at 10 and 2— which pulls me out of my musing and plants me back in the passenger seat.
I don’t want to be planted here, in this car, in this life I’ve built myself around. It’s rained every day for two weeks, so long that there was nothing to write about except the rain, and this too feels like the universe conspiring just to spite me. All the bugs crawled inside my apartment so that they wouldn’t drown, but the plants couldn’t move so they just drooped and their leaves yellowed. Are you a bug or a plant? I wonder, but don’t ask, plus that question is so stupid and you wouldn’t understand it without the context. I think I’m a plant, I decide, so I just have to hope it stops raining before it kills me. I consider that perhaps this is the wrong approach, but a plant can’t help its nature.
It’s 8:17 PM and the sun is setting and this part of the Parkway must face due West or close to it because the waning light is blinding. I squint out the windshield. This is the sunset we’ve been waiting for for two weeks. This is the first beautiful, midsummer swathe of color we’ve seen in a while, flush with pink and a roaring hellish orange, like if we kept driving we’d hit the end of all this and be incinerated with the day.
Olivia Braley is a mostly-poetry writer living in Annapolis, Maryland. She is a co-founder and Editor in Chief of Stone of Madness Press, and a Reader at Longleaf Review. She is pursuing her Master’s of Liberal Arts at St. John’s College, holds a B.A. in English Literature and Spanish from the University of Maryland, College Park, and is an alumni of the Jiménez-Porter Writers' House. Keep up with her work on Twitter @OliviaBraley
(2) Joseph Sigurdson: Messages
The rent was due and the notes left by the landlord were piling up. He taped them all over so I’d have no way of claiming I hadn’t seen one. I saw them all, in truth. They were scattered throughout the apartment with varying language. The man was stern and determined. He even put one in the freezer, which I had to admit, was quite funny. Although I wasn’t sure he felt the same. He was ex-CIA. Or was it ATF? IRS? I can’t remember. One of the federal organizations who made their men and women weapon-sharp during the Cold War. I had told him many many times that I wasn’t Russian, or of Russian ancestry, though this always seemed to confuse him.
Anyway, the rent. Incomprehensible fate led me to miss my payments. I went into finance, figuring: go where the money goes. I didn’t realize it’d be full of so much criticism. Gina, for one, the bitch in the accounting cubicles, was always telling me to comb my hair. Every day she reminded me that my hair was a mess. It was as if she thought I couldn’t see the devil through her smile. I knew what she was really saying. And it didn’t end there. My boss, for two, never appreciated the work I did for him. The man was stern and determined. I had so much respect for him. But it wasn't mutual. Everything I achieved by myself got praised as a “group effort” or “teamwork”. The entire staff minus my idiot boss knew it was me—I was the one who caused the sales. They just weren’t man enough to tell him. I didn't tell him either. What did they take me for? A narcissist? You can’t expect a person to go through that day in and day out. So I quit. Then the bills started piling up.
I was a hard-working man. A man who earned what he had and was never given anything. Though my neighbor, that lazy fuck, lived solely and luxuriously off a welfare check. I think he was an aspiring musician. One of those worthless artsy types who’d never worked a day in their life. The instrument he always played, which had a weird ring to it, would radiate through my walls. All day and night I dealt with this. I’d have to pound on the walls for five minutes straight to get him to stop. The cops came once and tried to blame the whole thing on me, like I was being the inconsiderate neighbor. Like I said: never given anything.
Why didn’t I deserve a welfare check? I’d been working since I was fifteen and hadn’t seen a dime from the government. It was in fact, my money. That dirty hippy with a weird instrument that sounded like coyotes got to live for free and what did I get? Where was the love for poor old Rodney? So I went into town to get welfare. You can probably guess how it went. The lady at the counter, Gina-like, had her mind made up before she even heard my piece. I said, Look, I’m a hard-working man. I have been all my life. My neighbor, who’s not a hard-working man, a worthless sack of noise actually, has been living off welfare for years now. All I’m asking is for just enough to get by, just enough to make these payments so my ex-CIA landlord will stop leaving me messages. I’ve earned it. Help me out.
She said, You’ll have to come back at a different time.
That bitch. I knew what she thought of me. In America, you’ll have to come back at a different time means go fuck yourself. I stood there locking eyes with her until she couldn’t take it anymore. What did she think? I was going to lie down softly? I knew when I was being cheated. In hindsight though, it was a lost cause. They pegged me as a poor man they could take advantage of and there was nothing I could do about it. I knew the force of the government, what went on behind closed doors, so I left.
It was the dire circumstances that made me do what I did next. I wasn’t proud of it, but the feds had given me no choice. I went to the Internet, the social media sites, and asked my friends for help. I said, Hi everyone, this isn’t something I’d do often (you know this), but I need some financial assistance. I’m a hard-working man (you know this too) and I don’t ask for much, but my boss was taking me for granted and my coworkers were verbally assaulting me for reasons I’d rather not say on here. I’m in a tight spot and I just need to get through these few payments. My landlord (ex-IRS) is coming into my apartment regularly leaving messages.
I sat there in front of the computer screen refreshing the page. I knew some people were slow readers but I started to worry. Fifteen minutes went by and not a single person responded. My stomach hurt when I realized what was actually going on. My brother, that evil fuck, was behind it all. He spent his life on those social media sites, so I knew for sure he read it. He was put into this world to defile me. He went through all my friends, each and every one, and made this whole thing up that I was lazy and a freeloader and it was for my own good to not help me. They must’ve trusted him, and I couldn’t even blame them. His face was extremely trustworthy. We were twins after all. But he was the devil and had been since we were boys.
I was a strong-willed man, as I’m sure you’ve gathered at this point. I wasn’t going to casually let him get away with it. I wasn’t going to just lie down softly. So I started messaging my friends, just like he did, saying, DO NOT LISTEN TO ANYTHING MY BROTHER TELLS YOU. HE IS THE DEVIL AND WAS PUT INTO THIS WORLD BY OUR BITCH MOTHER AND BLACK-HEARTED FATHER TO BEFOUL ME. HE’LL HAVE YOU THINK THAT I AM A FREELOADER (which I am not), SOLELY BECAUSE HE’S ENVIOUS OF WHAT I’VE ACCOMPLISHED, WHAT I KNOW.
I again sat staring at the computer screen waiting for responses. They had no excuse this time. The message was direct, specifically for them. You couldn’t just ignore that. Within short time I got a call from a number I didn’t recognize. I answered without saying a word, then I heard the dumb voice of my brother saying, Hello? Hello? The bastard changed his number, as if in some way that exerted power over me.
I wasn’t an idiot. I knew this little game he was playing. So I acted like absolutely nothing was awry. I said, Hey! How’s it going?
And he said, I heard about the messages.
I almost dropped my phone. The messages left by my landlord? How did he….I hung up. I guess I should have seen it from the beginning. My brother had been whispering into the ear of my ex-FBI landlord, polluting his mind, making him think I was the enemy.
Clearly though, this landlord was easily manipulated. I figured I had to get to him before my brother could do any more damage. So I went down to his room at the other end of the hall and lightly knocked on the door. There was no response. I waited a bit then knocked again. Still, no response. It was only until I pounded that his shadow appeared over the slit of light beneath the door. He stood there for a moment, looking through the peephole I’m sure, then walked away. The cowardice on that man. There was nothing brave or weapon-sharp about him. I screamed, I know you’re in there! I know what game you’re playing!
The circumstances were getting worse. Though this man was a weakling, my brother was not. I hated to admit that I wasn’t sure what he was capable of. Who knew what he’d have this malleable landlord do next.
So I did what any man would do. I armed myself. In that state you could buy a gun with no questions asked. They chose intuitive people to sell them. I went to the counter and looked the man straight in the eyes and said, I need to protect myself. He analyzed me and knew I was a man of integrity.
The messages had grown in my apartment. The coward must’ve came while I was gone getting the gun. They were everywhere, almost entirely blocking the paint on the walls. Some of these new ones were written in extinct languages. Pictographs invented by prehistoric scribes to record crops and taxes. They tattooed my walls and informed me of what was to come. My brother and the landlord did this as a means to belittle me, a means to make me crawl into a ball and surrender. They didn’t know what was coming when they returned. They didn’t know how long I was willing to wait.
Joseph Sigurdson’s work has appeared in Jelly Bucket, Allegheny Review, Gandy Dancer, Great Lake Review, and elsewhere. He won a College Prize from The Academy of American Poets in 2018. His debut chapbook, No Sand, was published by Thirty West Publishing in 2019. He’s from Buffalo, New York and is currently a graduate student in Mississippi.
(1) Lynne Schmidt: Letting Babcia Go
I remember my mother telling me as a child is that I would have survived the holocaust, but my sisters would have died.
“Why?” I asked.
She would stroke my hair gently with a cigarette pressed between her lips. “Because you have the blond hair and blue eyes the Germans looked for,” she’d say. “Your sisters...they have dark hair. They would have been taken.”
The second thing I remember, is that my mother spoke Polish and English fluently but my sisters and I only spoke English.
And so, when at the age of thirty one, I’m standing in line at Starbucks waiting to place my order before heading to the mountain with my partner, Brandon, to go snowboarding, like we do almost every weekend, and my phone rings, I see it’s my mother calling. I answer and say, “Hey, can I call you right back?””
“No,” my mother says. “Babcia is dying.”
The person two people ahead of me places their order, pays, the line shifts slightly. “She’s been dying for years,” I say, rummaging through my wallet for my frequent buyer
card.
“This is different. She’s in a coma.”
My head jerks up fast enough that Brandon gives me a questioning look. “How long?” I ask.
My mother sighs on the other end. She is over a thousand miles away in Michigan.
“I’m not sure,” she says. “It won’t be long.”
After placing our orders and sitting at a table, I tell Brandon the news. “What do we do?” he asks.
I shrug. “Snowboard today, I guess? I can see if I can rearrange my schedule at work so we can go down at the end of the week.”
When I speak with my mother later that night, she says that Babcia hasn’t had any food or liquid in 48 hours. It’s been years since I obtained my medical biology degree, but I remember that a human body can only go 72 hours without liquid. If I wait for the end of the week, she will already be gone.
I contact my job and my internship, and the schedule is rearranged. We will drive the three and a half hours to Massachusetts as soon as Brandon is out of work in the morning.
* * *
Though I’ve had a lot of friends die and attended far too many funerals, I’ve never watched someone die – so other than the expectations that television shows have given me, I have no idea what to expect when I round the corner into Babcia’s room in the nursing home.
She has lived in various rooms here for easily the last ten years, maybe longer. During undergraduate, I took over her bedroom at my aunt’s house when I couldn’t travel back to Michigan for the holidays. Plus my dog, Baxter, stayed with my aunt and uncle during the four years it took to graduate.
Though the room had been completely changed after the nursing home placement, made more welcoming for me, each night I went to sleep, I always felt like I was a ghost haunting someone else’s territory.
After confirming her name on the placard, Brandon and I round the corner to her door, and first I see my aunt, sitting in a chair - it is the only way I know I’m in the correct room, because the woman in the bed looks nothing like my babcia. Her hair is more grayed. Her mouth is wide open and her dentures are not in place. There are no glasses resting on her skeletal face. I’ve sat beside her while she’s slept during various visits but it is clear upon arrival, this isn’t a visit.
This is goodbye.
The finality hits me at once and knocks the wind out of me.
Television shows tell me there should be monitors, maybe an IV drip, maybe something here, but it is just my babcia, small, pale, and fragile in bed. Nothing telling us she has a heartbeat, nothing telling us when it will be time to go.
My body freezes just long enough for my aunt to acknowledge our presence. She, assisted with a walker, which is also jarring, greets me quickly. My aunt and I have barely spoken since nearly eight years ago when I kidnapped Baxter shortly after Thanksgiving in the middle of the night and left an apology letter that said, “I promise I am not my mother, but he will be happier with me. I love you and I am sorry and please forgive me for this…someday.”
Baxter has been dead for a year and a half. The last time I saw my aunt was after she had had a stroke shortly after Baxy’s passing. The time before that was at my cousin’s funeral. I find myself trying to apologize to her face but when I try to say the words, it is as though there are knitting needles in my throat. It is easier to swallow down than spit out.
“I have to go see your uncle,” she says in a rush, or as much of a rush as a woman in a walker can. It takes me a second to register this fact as well. Though she’s had multiple surgeries on her body and been a chain smoker since I’ve known her, she’s walked slow but never needed assistance. Every time I see her it’s more obvious that I am running out of time to apologize, to make amends, to fix all these pieces I’ve broken.
The only experience I’ve had with people using a walker was my babcia when we would go outside to the garden during spring and summer visits. It is almost like the aging process has shifted from my babcia to my aunt and I am not ready for this. Any of this.
She makes eye contact with me. “I don’t want her to die alone.”
This isn’t a request, this is a command and my chest hardens, trying to stop the tears that threaten me. Her voice still carries the No Nonsense tone it always has, and it has always put me in my place. She is the parent I always wanted but never had.
I put my hand over my mouth and blink several times.
“When it happens, you let it happen,” she says. “You don’t do CPR, you don’t page for help. You let it happen, you let her go.”
I nod again, the needles swelling in my throat. “So what--?”
“You sit there,” she says. “Can you handle this?”
No, but offer another nod. I robotically move to a chair near babcia’s bedside and sit. “I won’t leave.”
She rushes out to see my uncle before saying something in Polish.
Brandon takes a seat beside me as I inspect the quilt my babcia is wrapped in, almost like a caterpillar in its chrysalis. In the movies, people always hold the loved one’s hand. But babcia has suffered from massive strokes throughout the last few years which curled her left hand into itself so viciously she had to wear a plastic divider so she didn’t cut herself with her own nails. She hasn’t been able to walk for years, transitioning from walking independently to a walker, to a wheelchair. Slowly, she lost the ability to speak English, too.
The words bubble inside me like a boiling pot waiting to pour over. “Can you go let the girls out?” I ask, an attempt to get him out of the room. The girls are my pit bulls that are in the car. “I just….I need a minute with her.”
“Text me if you need anything.”
I wait several minutes after he’s gone before I speak. “I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner.”
The last time I’d come, I was with my mother. Babcia’d screamed in Polish and wouldn’t stop screaming. I never came back, convincing myself that it was too hard. That the three to four hour drive was too far and I was too busy.
I should have come.
I cover my mouth again. “Remember how you used to sing?” I try to replicate the songs memory can hear her voice singing, but they’re in Polish and I never took the time to learn them. Without her leading, I am lost.
The social worker in me reminds me that it’s the effort that matters, that she can still hear me as she goes. This is okay, I’m doing the best I can.
I say the handful of phrases I did learn, “kocham Cię,” or, I love you. If she were still present, I’d know how to ask how she is, too. But right now, that’d just be filler. She’s dying.
I allow four tears to fall before I wipe them from my face, rub her shoulder, and listen to her ragged breaths.
Movies make you believe that dying is beautiful. Obituaries claim that loved ones passed peacefully in their sleep. And while, yes, Babcia is asleep, this is anything but beautiful and there are a million other places I would rather be.
But, as the last of my sisters to be remembered as dementia ate away her memories, I feel it’s my duty to bear witness today.
Lynne Schmidt is the author of Gravity (Nightingale and Sparrow, 2019) , On Becoming a Role Model (Thirty West Publishing, 2020) and a mental health activist who resides in Maine. She writes memoir, poetry, and young adult fiction. Her work has received the Maine Nonfiction Award, Editor's Choice Award, was a 2018 and 2019 PNWA finalist for memoir and poetry respectively, and a five-time 2019 Best of the Net Nominee. In 2012, she started the project, AbortionChat, which aims to lessen the stigma surrounding abortion and mental health. When given the choice, Lynne prefers the company of her three dogs and one cat to humans.