By Levis Keltner

I want to kiss Sara or be her or die.

“Stein without Hemingway is still Stein.” Sara from Bulk is proving I’m not smart, convincing herself the invitation to chill in her car over lunchbreak was a bad idea—maybe?

The air isn’t hot or cold, yet my armpits are leaky, fingertips numb from the walk-in freezer. Without her noticing, I can’t check if grime or bugs muck my nails.

“That’s why she wins,” she concludes.

My crush makes second-guessing a state of being. When I offer a swig of carrot juice, she shakes her head. Sara crushes me.

I point at the stereo and lie, “This is good.”

“He’s really vegan,” she says as if she can hear it in the whiny vocals. The undertone is clear: Unlike you. I’m vegan for the health aspect. She donates to PETA.

I creep in glimpses: cat-eyed, pouty lipped.

“Your legs are so smooth,” she says.

My work apron is twisted. Through a hole in my khakis, bare thigh gleams. I shave them. Since adolescence, hair has made my body feel not mine.

She pokes a finger into the hole. The violation is casual. I straighten my apron, forgive her everything.

“Low testosterone,” I say. It’s a joke because I bench 300 and have to avoid my beefy face in mirrors.

Sara smiles conspiratorially, as if the truth will be as funny.

#

“Limp,” Boss says.

She plucks a flaccid celery from the ice water tub and flops the pale veggie onto the prep table. A nun-ish lesbian with a tiny hook nose and sleepless eyes, Boss orders me with a glance to pick up the knife.

I angle the blade into the root. She nods to commence surgery.

We’re due for a GM walk and need to look good. Her breakthrough was reviving wilted greens with a root shave and ice water bath. The third boss I’ve had at World Foods in a year, Produce is unforgiving between time and bugs.

Once, I plunged my hands into a box of dinosaur kale and they returned bejeweled with ladybugs. Last week, a squad of tarantulas hopped from a banana crate across the tile until Sara popped them with the bulk broom. They’re good insects, muncher munchers, nothing like Dermatophagoides gravis, called gray bugs, or just bugs.

If eyeballing, you’d mistake bugs for dirt unless a fool has allowed infestation. They chew into the skin until crumpled, too gross for sale. With no known organic pesticide, I wash bunches of celery in the stainless-steel trough for a second chance, trashing the forgone.

“Fuckers won’t stay hard,” Boss says.

“Sometimes it’s them, not you,” I say.

She smirks. “Glad my best ass-sociate is on the job.”

“All over it,” I say.

Laughter confirms it’s friendship, so I get busy for us both.

#

Half the time, the Senator goes soft.

“My big boy,” he breathes on my body. We’re in the parking lot in his Escalade. The backseat’s leather squeaks under my knees.

“Too risky,” he says about his place. I ask again to hear our shame echo.

A Chinese herbalist cured his stage four cancer with daikon radish. In his new life, the Senator fucks muscly young men while his wife jet sets. He squeezes my pecs like ripe grapefruit. I close my eyes, and I’m her. The calm is the scary part.

“So strong,” he says.

The first time, I thanked him.

#

I escort out a shoplifter, and the cashiers applaud. My muscles justify themselves.

“Orange food is like, your thing?” Sara accepts the pocketed peach.

I eat a ghost pepper to hear her laugh but vomit on her patent Doc Martens. I can’t catch my breath. The GM walks the store Sunday, yet Boss orders me home. I listen.

Defeated and desperate to smoke and edge my brain into goo, I notice my unwashed hands on my laptop. Their wide, veiny backs itch, spotted gray with bugs.

I scrub to take them off until a knuckle bleeds.

Where do bugs go under the skin? I google. Finding Eggs, I hurl toward empty.

#

Boss doesn’t have time for “OCD Senior.”

“You have fresh?” the customer asks Saturdays, noon to one, so they’re my Freshie.

Fluffy haired, ambiguously gendered, Freshie buys from unopened boxes I wheel from the freezer. They double-bag their hands and pick with a disposable bag to bag each veggie. Snap peas gobble half the hour.

Stoic and masked, I’ve learned their moods by their eyes. Today they squint, irritable, scrutinizing each pod. The cucumber was left out overnight, and half the wet rack is crawling.

I wonder if Freshie chooses ideal veggies or the best of a bunch. I wonder what’s the worst that can happen. I wonder what it takes to live without bugs.

Before I find strength to ask, time’s up.

#

Sara pokes my leg. “Who do you think is cute?”

She doesn’t hear me linger. We’re in her car, again. Puking has made me a sympathetic character? All I want to say is, “You.”

She suggests Ed from Meat and Seafood. I can’t words. “Your boss is attractive,” she says.

“All yours,” I mumble.

Her gaze is hopeful. “She say anything about me?”

Our gayness circles. I try to slow my breathing. I’m missing her.

“You shouldn’t sleep with managers.” I’m loud, a bad friend.

“You think I’m a slut?” Her laughter glistens.

#

The Escalade is man musky. Rain drumrolls the roof. Through a fogged window, I see the World, neon and distant. In a minute, I’ll suffocate.

The Senator doesn’t ask about the gray spots burning on my arms. He apologizes for the stain, talks scheduling. “You cutting weight?”

Two missed calls from Boss. I’m 23 minutes late for the GM walk.

I slosh across the lot until Sara’s car passes. She’s seen me and the Senator. I wave. Her hands don’t leave the wheel.

I shout to please turn around, how we make sense, until I’m shivering, me and me in the rain.

—

Levis Keltner is chapbooks editor at Newfound and author of the novel “Goodnight.” Their creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry has appeared in Hobart, Anomaly, Entropy Magazine, Be About It Zine, and elsewhere. They write role-playing mystery games at Feverdream Games. From Chicago, Levis lives in St. Louis and Instagram @leviskeltner.

By Shilo Niziolek

I was born with violence in my bones and my teeth were the first to know it. As soon as they started pushing through my gums I began biting. They called me Little Monster. I think I’ve always been sick. I look like something that could eat a man. Last night I couldn’t sleep. My roommate sat on the edge of my bed in her work dress, pastel pink and looking like someone from an old diner. She didn’t know how to devour a man; she’d never even tried. You’re either born with it or you’re not; her canines never grew in. “Sometimes it makes me angry that I fell in love with someone who is so much like me,” she said. “We’re tiny baby narcissists searching for mirrors,” I said, twisting the end of her long black braid around my pointer finger. I nodded to the mirror tilted on my nightstand, part way towards the bed, then got up and padded to the bathroom. Two black spiders ran in, one after the other, I tore up the tiles trying to find them. Squished them, one by one, with the imprint of my big toe. At night I check on my roommate, crack her door and watch her while she sleeps. She’ll never know what bad love can do to a woman. When wasps crawl up my arms, I think about eating them. Sometimes I dream that all my teeth fall out of my mouth at once. When I had braces, they would all be attached, little train tracks littering the ground.

-2-

I still want all your ghosts. When I think of rivers rising into the sky, ready to swallow us all, I imagine standing naked, arms held open. In the end my reflection’s not who I thought it was and crows follow me wherever I go. I can’t ask my mom if my biological father beat her while I was in the womb, even though I know he did during the short time she stayed with him after. You’d be surprised to know that the anger comes from my mom’s side of the family. It’s the intelligent madness. I’ve had enough of that. I like my body best when it is propelling through space, when I’m all bite and bark. I don’t want to be humble; I want to be ferocious. I’m watching leaves rustle in the wind and clouds drift across the sky. There’s so much peace inside the violence of a woman’s body. My dog once caught a mouse and killed it with one clamped motion. It was screeching and then it was dead. She shook her head violently from side to side, wringing it out.

-3-

There was a ghost story my mom used to tell. In an old house that didn’t yet have modern plumbing lived my mother’s family. Each September they heard the wailing of the parents whose eleven-year-old daughter had died while they lived there. All month long the parents cried, but they would never get their daughter back. She was bound to the land, where she died. When you’re a ghost, your body doesn’t need the things it did before. She only thought she wanted to be real, forgot she could move through walls. I forgot to think about all the things an eleven-year-old would never have. Every September my mom would find the ghost girl sitting in the outhouse, crying into her empty hands.

-4-

There’s damage in naming things. I don’t name the things I want for fear of getting them. I wander the lonely streets. In my dreams it’s a separate world and ghosts aren’t ghosts, they are only the people I keep locked in a box, and a box isn’t a box it’s my heart, and my heart isn’t my own after all. I stepped out in the woods behind my backyard and found a note waiting for me. I followed a trail that wasn’t where I left it and left a trail of teeth behind me, to guide me back home. My translucent feet left no marks on the ground, and each tooth I dropped began burrowing, stretching its roots down where I walked. There was a woman at the end of the trail where a waterfall met a river and I followed her body like water into the stream. We dove under, faced each other in the cool black rapids, eyes wide open, hair wrapped around my body a straitjacket. Her lips formed sounds that echoed through me, “You’re a ghost and you don’t even know it. You’re a hungry ghost, but a ghost all the same.” She swam closer, her body fit around me. Into my ear, she spoke, “I’ll pretend I never knew your name.”

-5-

The first man I pretended to love had long chocolate hair that fell down his face in ringlets. We were young and I didn’t have to try hard. I just swung my hips when I walked, sometimes hearing the click of my hip pop in and out. I felt satisfyingly sexual. I bought a pair of jeans that were laced up the sides with leather straps and when I danced in the dark of a school dance the boys stood in a row and watched me, mouths gaped. “Where’d you learn to move like that?” They asked. Do you know what it’s like, realizing you’ve been a spider all along? I see the ghost of my former self dancing all around. When the boys I pretended to love think of me, I hope they think of my body, a lithe animal, a body twisting, filled with the temptation of wild bones.

-6-

I was born with violence in my bones and it shakes like the hollow branches of the cherry tree.  A man once told me a ghost story. It went a little something like this: In the night I can still find you. I’ll follow you across the land. Do you think you can run from me? That you can hide? When you dive from this car and hide in a ditch, I’ll drive up the mountainside calling your name. I’m there watching. You may lay in bed beside another, but when you sleep, you’ll dream of me. He told me this ghost story so many times, that when I try to conjure up other men, their breath turns to ice, and their lips are always the same. “Do you understand? You can never truly leave me,” he said, the imprints of his fingers, pale ghosts under my skin.

-7-

I still want all your ghosts, and the sunflowers cast their petals as I walk by. I sneak into my roommates’ room as she sleeps. With a serrated kitchen knife, I cut off her long black braid. I twine it through the yellow rose bush in the backyard, waiting for her to say something. When she comes out of the bathroom in the morning the cut looks as if she had it professionally done. A cute bob that frames her delicate features perfectly. “Have you seen my mustard yellow sweater,” she asks, all rosy cheeks and eyelashes. I bite my tongue. I can’t tell if she is playing coy. “It’s hang-drying in my closet,” I say.  My teeth ache from the tight clench. A hornet comes in through the backdoor, drunk on weather. I shut it in the window and watch it, this way I can’t be ignored or forgotten.

-8-

There was a ghost story my mom used to tell. The ghost didn’t present herself to me, only to my mom and my sister. I’d lie if I said I wasn’t a bit resentful. She wore a blue dress and kept her hair in long blonde pigtails and lived in the yellow house next to the church. I never saw her, but I felt her all the same. If you were home alone sitting in the corner of the living room a chill would surround you, and the front door would wobble on its latch. On many occasions the cats would go into a frenzy in the middle of the night, as if they sensed something I couldn’t. One night, they launched themselves back and forth over my bed from one side to the other. I had nightmares about someone knocking at my window, and the desert winter wind howled its shrill cry. When I woke, I found three scratch marks on the outside of the glass. Fingernails. I can’t be sure that the ghost wasn’t me.

-9-

I only want what I can’t have, that’s why I stole my roommates’ new boyfriend. I guess you could say, I borrowed him. It’s not stealing if you give it back, used and unwashed. She doesn’t know, but each time I watch him lean over to kiss her, I imagine his thin lips on my neck. When his hand is in hers, I feel the movement of his dry hands slip up my skirt. It was an accident, honest, but sometimes I turn into other people in the dark. At the bonfire she went off to go find somewhere to pee in the woods. She wanted me to go with her. “No, I’m too cold,” I said, and wrapped her yellow scarf tighter around her neck, exposed to the cold without her plaited hair. But then I found myself being led to the opposite side of the fire, behind a tree. I listen to her go on and on about how great he is, what a good man, how he takes care of her, never pressures her, is delicate in bed. But let her think what she wants. His lips tasted like her watermelon chapstick. Even good men are not good men.

-10-

I know how to pretend to love a man.

1. Convince yourself you want out of whatever life you’re living.
2. Kiss him slow and sweet.
3. Convince yourself that you could love him.
4. Pretend the ghost of the man you love isn’t there beside you when you sleep.
5. Let the man think that you love him.
6. When he says I love you first, don’t say it back immediately, but, eventually, say it back.
7. When he says, “move in with me,” say, “okay.”
8. Imagine that the man you love is outside your window.
9. Fuck him the way he asks to be fucked.
10. When you start crying roll over and tell him nothing.
11. Think only, one foot out the door.
12. Pack up most of your belongings and begin to move out while he’s out of town.
13. Don’t be surprised when he keeps the boxes you didn’t get to and lights them on fire, the tiny bones of porcelain dolls, ghosts evaporating into the cold December air.

-11-

I was born with violence in my bones and when I lop the yellow rose bushes down, I cut the thorns from the stems and sew them into a necklace. Rose teeth, I think as they bite into my skin. I still want all your ghosts, so I go to the graveyard during a crescent moon and I collect the memorials left behind. My closet is filled with them, wilting flowers, vases and vases of them, love letters, stuffed and soaking teddy bears, each night I open the closet door and the stench of old haunts wafts out at me. Ghost babies, I think. There was a ghost story my mom used to tell. “There once was a blonde girl with lashes like caterpillars who carved out her own heart, the end.” I know how to pretend to love a man, you just turn your body inside out. Bite down, bone on bone, when he undresses you. Nothing but a ghost.

—

Shilo Niziolek is an Oregon based writer who believes in ghosts. Her work has appeared in Porter House Review, Broad River Review, SLAB, and Parhelion, among others, and is forthcoming in HerStry. You can find her on Instagram and Twitter @shiloniziolek 

By Virginia Lee Wood

Today, I am disappearing. When I look out of the window, the low buildings below are gray and there is a dusky light. I go out like vapor.

            Yesterday, a man came to the apartment and looked at the liquid on the floor. There she is, with her fingernails and her musky hair. Her body. He breathed through his mask and said, “I can clean the apartment but you’ll have to find someone else to sell it.”

            Today, outside, it is not like winter at all. A pigeon sits on the lip of the building next door, the bottoms of her feathers touched with green. I am not a ghost, just a memory, freed from the geology of the mind by a ceasing.

            When she left her body, she left some of herself with me. But memory does not belong without her.

            All the hands I held inside of her touched me as I went out. The hands of other memories I held. The image of her as a girl with the flu held by her mother, rocked to sleep, sweating. The time she vowed to love herself, and left the boyfriend who said she deserved to be hit. The time she fell on the sidewalk and walked home, both knees bleeding, and felt more alone than she ever had in her life. Touching me with their hands. Good-bye, friend. We were always shivering together, when she walked out into the world.

            Now I am alone. In my fabric, there are many things.

            A moment in her life, but also all of the moments she wrote into me, whenever she remembered. Rewriting and re-clothing me and whispering my name. “Mother. I miss you.” The time that Mom left her. That’s me. Red and painful. I grew sharper with time, and developed many hands, and legs, and organs. I wore many faces.

            When she bruised me, she felt it in her whole body. When she lost so many other memories, growing older and forgetful, I stayed, un-refracted.

            Disappearing.

            Out here, I see things we saw. A sign her mom would have thought funny. A subway stop where she cried quietly when she remembered it was her mother’s birthday. The mailbox where she learned the scholarship in her mother’s name had helped someone. The corner where she resisted a man on a bicycle trying to grab her purse. His velocity had pulled her into the drainage ditch. She lay there among the leaves thinking that maybe now, after everything, she might be as strong as her mother was.

            I lay there wet and wondering, inside her, holding the new hand of what it felt like to break her arm on the curb. Whenever it rained, and the bone ached, she thought of me.

            When she got sick, we all clutched each other inside, and she understood that she had come a long way, and that she was contained of much that was hurting, but also that brought her joy, and from then on, she tried like hell to remember that. Trying to grow wings upon us so that we would sit lighter, with colorful eyes between the many veins. We fluttered, and her heart beat crazily.

            The man who came to assess the apartment yesterday wore white and spoke loudly. We shook but could not raise her. Her touch, folding us, unfolding, rewriting, re-arranging, warming us like sulfur light was not there. Look, he is your boyfriends, your landlord, the girlfriend who was so afraid of men she could not go to the movies, your father’s hard hand that your mother could not take anymore, that dog you wanted to adopt even though he was snapping and slavering at you through the bars. Your anger. Losses. Tenderness. Fear. Doubt. Needfulness deeper than you could understand. We realized how loose in you we were then, crouching in a cold place together and singing to ears that didn’t know anymore.

I am not sharp. I have no curve, no lip.

I lick the air. I am bigger than the world. Her whisper, “I’m sorry I wasn’t there, Mom. I’m sorry that I was so angry you left me behind, that I could not be there for you.” It was the last name she gave me, when I was there always in the front of her mind, while she lay on the kitchen floor waiting for someone to come.

Go like vapor. Like hot breath. A world of dew in the air.

—

Virginia Lee Wood is a Korean American writer who holds a Doctorate in Creative Writing from the University of North Texas, as well as an MFA from Hollins University. Her work appears or is forthcoming in The Southern Review, Cutbank, Pleiades, LIT Magazine, The Minnesota Review, and elsewhere. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Austin College in Sherman, TX. 

By Marissa Castrigno

There once lived a woman whose tabby cat died in winter. The ground was frozen solid and covered in a thick snow, so that the woman could not dig a grave in her yard. She went into town and asked anyone she met what she should do, fretful that her other cats would become cannibalistic before too long. They hunted mice and birds and even chipmunks, but were often hungry in winter.

“Build a very big fire,” said one man, “and turn the cat to ash.”

“Was he sick?” asked another. The woman didn’t think so. “Turn him into stew and have him for yourself!”

“If you store him in the packed snow he’ll keep until spring,” said the grocer. “Then you can dig a grave in your yard.”

The woman thought that was a genius idea and rushed home to begin.

Wrapped in a heavy coat and scarf and wearing thick gloves, she went out behind her house into a deep snow bank. The bare trees rattled all around her, swaying like giant skeletons against a very gray sky. Knelt down, the woman pressed and pressed until she made a small catacomb in the snow bank.

“This won’t do,” she said. “As soon as I go to bed, any old fox could steal him away.”

She tried to fashion a door out of snow and ice.

“This won’t do, either,” she said. “He’ll be so well hidden that I won’t find him again.”

The woman took her dead cat into the cellar, where she put him in the ice box beside her sausages and steaks and some sweet pastries. 

“Now he’ll be safe,” she said, satisfied.

The next day, like every day, the woman bundled herself in coats and hats and strode into town. She was a bit lonely in her house, which is why she kept five cats (now four). She liked to talk to the grocer or the postman or the shop clerk. She drank coffee and read the news. She sent postcards to friends in far off places. She bought balls of colorful yarn, which she let her little cats play with as she knitted, even though it was very inconvenient to her crafting.

When she returned home, she found her gray cat tucked under the sideboard, dead. This one was much younger than the first, and the woman was quite shocked to find him stiff as a plank. She cried out and ran to the vet, who could find nothing wrong with her cats, living or dead. No mites or bites, no runny noses or drippy eyes, no huffing or puffing of any kind.

“I’ll have to do an autopsy,” he said.

“No, no. I can’t bear the thought of it.”

The woman thanked the vet and sent him away with some coins. She put the dead cat in the ice box in the cellar alongside his dead friend. She went to sleep, bereft.

On the third day, in the morning, the woman came in from brushing away snow off her front step and opened the closet door to hang her coat. There on the shelf was her black cat, stretched out atop a pile of scarves, dead as a door nail. The woman cried and cried and asked God, what she had done to deserve this?

“I’m cursed!” she sobbed, as she trudged down to the ice box.

She called her daughter, who lived in the country.

“You won’t believe what’s happened,” she began. She recounted the story over the crackling line. “No mites or bites, no runny noses or drippy eyes, no huffing or puffing of any kind,” said the woman. Her daughter, too, was at a loss.

“I wish you lived closer so I could come, but also the children have fevers,” said the woman’s daughter. “Get some rest, Mama, and perhaps tomorrow will be better.”

The woman made a cup of tea and thought fondly of her three dead cats, departed souls, whose bodies endured in the cellar. She fell into a deep sleep at that lasted all through the night and most of the next day. It was nearly supper time when she rose and saw fresh snow and icicles at her window. Beside the radiator in his favorite spot was her ginger cat, dead and gone. It was too late in the day to call anyone, and after the woman put this fourth cat in the freezer, she began to search the house for signs of evil spirits or witches, though she had no idea what she should be looking for.

She scoured every inch of every surface, looking for clues. Every jar was turned, every rug lifted, until the woman was inspecting a bent fork, wondering what it might mean. It was after the clock struck midnight that she finally sat to rest. At the foot of the sofa, she found the lifeless body of her fifth and final cat. Delirious with grief and her suspicions reignited, she set out to scour the house a second time.

On the morning of the sixth day, the vet offered to conduct an autopsy, but what was the point? Now all five of her cats were stacked in the ice box in the cellar, next to the sausages and steaks and some sweet pastries. A phone call from her daughter bade the woman to travel into the country. She took steaming pots of soup with fresh vegetables and chicken and dill, and went off to tend to her family. She stayed there several days, bathing the children in cool water to help their fevers and making kettle after kettle of tea. Her daughter felt very sorry for her, and felt sorry for calling her away to help them when she had suffered so much. But the woman insisted it was a relief to be with them, to have so many tasks to busy herself. She felt useful. While her patients slept, the woman knit five little matching blankets.

 On the tenth day, when her daughter and her grandchildren were all up from bed, without fevers, freshly washed and in clean clothes, the woman knew her work there was done. Winter, too, had broken, and the sky had grown bluer and the air more mild. The woman hugged and kissed her family and went home.

 Everything was just as she’d left it, though a few plants needed watering. In the yard, the snow had begun to thaw and the woman saw that soon she would be able to dig her graves. Her sadness returned, and she longed to hear their mews and purrs once again. She cried through the evening and then went to bed.

            When spring came, the woman readied five little coffins with five matching blankets, knitted with the same yarn the cats had once batted here and there. She descended the stairs into the cellar, and stood before the ice box. When she lifted the lid, she saw her stacks of sausages and steaks and sweet pies sitting neatly to one side. The cats were gone.

—

Marissa Castrigno is an MFA student at UNC Wilmington, where she’s been the nonfiction reader for Ecotone Magazine. Her work has appeared in Memoir Mixtapes and Lavender Review, both prose and poetry.

By Aisling Walsh

A spiral of vultures, a gyre of mourning, descended from the sky, flew through the undergrowth, alighted on a flattened shack and began its festival of flesh…

The Vultures, Luis de Lión, Guatemala, 1966

A man with blazing white eyes makes his way down the stairs. His gaze penetrates, not just through the wall of my bedroom, but through the walls of my soul. I feel a thump on my chest and I wake gasping. My nightshirt is soaked through.

It’s dark in the room, nothing moves, there’s only the sound of my breath, short and shallow. There’s no one here, I tell myself, but I don’t really believe it. I can feel eyes fixed on me, more than one pair. Not the ones that seared through my dream only moments ago, these eyes belong to others. They are watching, waiting, expecting.

I slide my arm across to the other side of the bed, groping, hoping, for the warm body that can sometimes be found there. Tonight it’s cold and empty, no one there to curl into, to expel the demons conjured in my sleep. I think about turning on the light but I’m afraid the demons have slipped from my dream world into the real world, and it’s them lurking at the foot of my bed. I squeeze my eyes shut and think about sleeping again but those blazing white eyes await in my unconsciousness. I lie paralysed as my mind flips back and forth between these two possibilities, each one equally terrifying.  

Three bells echo from the cathedral across the street, marking the hour. Shadows shift in the darkness skulking at the edges of my bed. The blankets stir as if under clutching fingers. A face begins to take shape through the and I recognise the stricken eyes of the boy I saw gunned down a week before. The spray hit him while he waited at a bus stop. I lay on the floor of a taxi fretting about stray bullets and wishing I had a God I could pray to for deliverance. I remember his cheeks streaked with tears, his look of terror. The same look he wears now.

I throw the covers off, push my way through the cloying air and grope behind the curtains to release window latch. The room fills with the city’s damp and fetid breath. My stomach lurches as I gasp through air thick with rot and methane, freshly released after a recent downpour. The sepia arches of the Cathedral, framing rows of dark, empty windows, rise from across the street. I usually keep the curtains closed against the real, or imagined, insomniac, black-robed, voyeurs skulking back and forth across its corridors hoping for a glimpse of flesh, or hint of sin, from their godless neighbours across the street. I imagine their morbid feasting on the joys, lusts and sorrows that they have willingly forbid themselves.

Shadows follow me to the window and press behind me. I feel an icy breath on my neck. I turn around but keep my eyes to the floor as I pull a hoodie over my pyjamas and slip on my boots. I grab my keys, run to the door and down two flights of stairs. I pause on the front step looking left and right. The cobblestones glisten vermilion under street lamps, throwing light out for no one, the street is empty. I’m not supposed to be out this late. No one is. The city’s nocturnal avenues belong to the dead and those chasing death, either for themselves or others. The living who venture out at this hour risk meeting death around every corner. I should turn round and go back upstairs but the shadows that filled my apartment have followed me down and are pushing against my back, urging me out the door. Retreat is futile, they have decided not to let me rest tonight.

They surge behind me and around me as my feet take me north, skirting around the back of the Cathedral. I hold my breath against the acrid stench of fresh urine. Junction after junction of traffic lights flick from green to orange to red and back again, maintaining their sequence despite the absence of traffic. The cackles of ladies loitering, waiting for clients, echo from distant corners. In another couple hours buses will begin to thunder into the city, chugging clouds of black smoke, herding human fodder from the plebeian fringes into the city centre for their allotted time in the metropolis to fill the street corners while flogging their cacophony of wares. They are the beating heart of a city that should have long since been condemned to ruin.

Three dry pops shatter the silence. I throw myself into the shadow of the nearest doorway, cover my head with my arms and wait for more. I hear a screech of tires followed by silence and then a wail of sirens. I keep going but pick up my pace.

A chorus of deep moans and low keening creeps along the street as I reach a white building emblazoned with red crosses. The weeping of live patients drifts over the walls, mingling with the laments of long dead inmates. The fragmented souls of the tortured and murdered, less than memories, forever trapped in clandestine graves behind the whitewashed walls. The procession of shadows behind me swells in number, throbbing with its own low lament. Out of the corner of my eye I sense a shimmer and curling of the air, like coal dust, but don’t dare turn round. I shiver and pull my hood tighter.

I’m almost running. I turn westwards, circling back to the main square. The Palace stands to the right, its three stories of ornate columns and balustrades draped in black, a dark shroud at the heart of power dissolving into the mist that has settled over the city. I’m drawn by a flicker of light from the middle of the empty square. A solitary candle glows at the centre of a ring of knee high iron crosses. Flecks of white paint resist the rust and each cross bears a tattered and sun-bleached crochet square. A handmade shroud, stitched with the name of a girl. 41 in total. No need to count them, I already know the number and their names by heart.

A red carnation has been threaded through the lattice work of each cross. Their heads are bowed and the wilted petals are already crisping from days under the unforgiving tropical sun. I feel ashamed of my own hands, empty of offerings. I bow my head and think of Achley, Griselda, Joseline, Myra and the others, wishing, once again, that I had a God I could pray to. Wishing that I could make the sign of the cross and mean it. Wishing that I had some words of comfort, the familiar and reassuring cadence of a Hail Mary, to offer up. Instead, I whisper some half-hearted intentions out to the universe, wondering, as always, if she, it, they, can hear me. But it’s not enough, it’s never enough.  

One of the carnations reblooms crimson and I hear an anguished scream just as it bursts into flame. Fire engulfs the wool square and sparks catch from one carnation to the next. Within seconds the whole circle of 41 crosses is ablaze. My face burns red and my skin pricks as flames dance around me. I cough against the smoke that fills my lungs and hold my ears against the screams that fill the air, piercing my soul. I lurch backwards only to feel the wall of coal dusty shadows pressing me forward. My eyes sting and my cheeks are wet. “I’m sorry!” I whisper. The screams get louder. I scream harder, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” but words are lost in the mist. Their inadequacy mocks me, it mocks them. I turn and claw my way through the wall of shadows.

My feet pound over cracked cement, taking me down routes already well worn. The procession follows close behind, nipping at my ankles. I race past block after block of black and white papers peeling off the smooth colonial masonry. The impassive stares of the of the 45,000 follow my flight. Grainy headshots gleaned from moth eaten photos, found in rusting filing cabinets, turned into posters and pasted across the city resisting sun, rain, municipal cleaning squads and entrenched denial. Proof that they were people, who existed outside of the fading memories of their loved ones whose pleas for information were so long ignored. I keep my eyes to the ground, avoiding the gaze of the missing and the dead.

¿Donde están?

How should I know? I’m not even from here. There’s nothing I can do. I can only look away.

Three blocks down I stop to catch my breath on the corner of the park where they murdered the priest. Bludgeoned to death with a brick held aloft by a homeless man. Who put the brick in his hand? The soldier or the mayor? Doesn’t matter, they’re all dead now. Or at least that’s what the papers say. Another peacemaker turned martyr, turned poster-child of the righteous left.

This city is a monument to death. Every building and every block seeps human blood. Villages, no one even remembers the name of, crushed under the edifice of so-called civilisation. The ghosts of massacres past mingle with those of the present, while the living mingle with none, afraid they will be next. And as for the crimes, either past or present, there are too many to report, too many to document, too many to remember. Even I, a stranger, a blow-in, little better than a tourist, can construct a bloody inventory of the incidents that have grazed the edges of my own sphere of quiet caution: the homeless men cleansed off the streets, the girls taken out on their way to school, the migrants gunned down at a bus stop, the woman who sacrificed her life for the sake of her car.

This city is a graveyard. I feel like La Llorona wandering the streets, collecting lost children. Except that I have no children and I don’t belong here. I’m an outsider, a mere spectator of other peoples’ pain and other peoples’ tragedies. I can detach myself, pack up and leave whenever I want. Full suitcases sit at the foot of my bed, awaiting departure. It won’t be long now until I am safe in the comfort of another land, where I will write and wring my hands over the tragedies of this land, where I was never anything more than a glorified tourist.

I turn left onto 1^st Street, my feet guiding me home. Not to my apartment, but to my real home, the one I should never have left. I walk head down, shoulders hunched, until I reach the park. I trail my hands along the iron bars that are meant to keep out the young lovers who, driven from their homes and without the price of pay-by-the-hour motel, come here to do their cositas. Tonight the benches are empty.

As I round the corner I see him standing under the jacaranda tree, the man with the face of a pig. His black trench coat is zipped from knees to chin and he holds a small leather suitcase in one hand. I bound across the road and finally come to halt a two inches from his snout. A slight twitch of his head is the only sign that he has registered my arrival and I resist the urge to throw my arms around him.

“What on earth are you doing out here at this hour?” The words come in short starts between breaths.

“I knew you were coming.” He shrugs.

A soft gloved hand slips into mine. I squeeze the black leather and lean in for a kiss. His lips soft and warm and familiar. The bristles of his snout brush my nose. I can taste stale beer and a hint of yerba.

He breaks contact and pulls me away from the house. “Come on, we haven’t got long.”

We’re home, I want to protest, hold him back. My plan had been to hide in his bed, under the covers, wrapped in his arms and wait for the shadows to get tired and move on.

Instead, I follow, “Where are we going?”

“I’ve something to show you.”

He leads me up 1^st Avenue. I wonder if he too can see the multitudinous procession of coal dust shadows that have followed me here. He makes no comment, either unaware or unperturbed by their presence. I know better than to ask questions. Silence weaves a cocoon around us and I feel protected against the city that he knows better than anyone. He is the city.

I realise that I hadn’t been running home, I had been running to him. That house is not my home, it never was. He is my home. 

We climb steadily up the avenue, block after block, past the flashing fairy lights of canteens where the last punter is slumped over a warm beer, the fluorescence of late-night pharmacies, the farcical grandeur of Guadalupe’s church, meeting no one until we reach 11^th Street. The grey bars of the hospital’s perimeter fence emerge to our right and a bare bulb glows yellow from the window of one of the funeral parlours to our left. Capitalinos like to joke that this hospital takes you alive but spits you back out in a body bag, minus a few vital organs. Figures hang from the railings, more solid than shadows but fading to grey under the hospital’s flood lights. I can’t tell if they are queuing to get in or waiting for loved ones to come out. I pull a little closer to him but they take one look at the man with the face of a pig and hunch deeper into their hoods or hurry away down a side street.

Passing the hospital, the procession swells to fill the road. His pace quickens and we’re almost running as he leads us through alleys and side streets to the west. I see the yellow walls of the cemetery in the distance. He stops outside the main gate, the guard post appears to be empty, and lets go of my hand for the first time since we left the house. I consider bolting, but I’m more scared of negotiating my way back through the deserted streets alone, than going wherever he intends to take us. Pushing his suitcase in between the iron bars, he climbs up and over, landing softly on the other side and beckons me to follow. It looks impossibly tall and I’ve never been a good climber. He helps me get a foothold and catches me in his arms on the other side. We linger like this for a moment. I search for his eyes but the dark glasses reflect nothing except my own anxious gaze.

He picks up the suitcase, grabs my hand and heads towards the heart of the cemetery. The procession moves as we move, shimmering shadows gliding seamlessly through the gates, swarming across the paths and over the lawns and mausoleums. We pass pyramids flanked by sphinxes, the Doric columns of miniature acropolises and other monuments to the vanities of the nouveau riche, whose pretensions of grandeur have reached a tawdry absurdity in death. Just as in Egypt, these graves now lie empty. Robbed by their own descendants, who prefer to house their dead in more exclusive and salubrious surroundings, far removed from the invasion of plebeian niches, homes for the bones of the unwashed masses, left to crumble into the abyss along the cemetery’s edges.

The vultures perched atop the monkey puzzles begin to stir. Squawks pass from tree to tree, alerting their masses to our intrusion. They swoop down like black spectres over our heads. I cry out and shield myself with my arm to avoid their claws and the brush of their putrid wings. The man with the face of a pig remains upright, unfazed, and pulls me ever onwards. The vultures hop from roof to roof across the mausoleums along our route, a macabre guard of honour for our procession of death. I imagine their mouths watering as they follow our scent of carrion.

The further we penetrate into the cemetery, the closer we get to the gully where the city’s discarded trash and scrap is thrown out of sight and out of mind, to be sorted, reused and recycled by the city’s discarded people. The stench of rot and toxic gasses that has accompanied me since I left my apartment becomes almost unbearable. My eyes are streaming and my throat and nostrils sting. Bile rises to my throat. I cling tighter to his hand, but he betrays no hint of unease.

He comes to a halt at a point where the crumbling cement road disappears under a cascade of plastic. We survey the canyon of waste below us. Rivers of sewage wind their course around mountains of plastic, glass and metal, glinting under the light of the half moon. Hordes of rats scurry below. A an ever more frenzied cloud of vultures circles above. The multitudinous procession presses behind us, pushing us ever closer to the edge.

“This is the end,” he turns to me. “The edge of the world.”

He leans down for a kiss. It lasts two heartbeats. I feel my arm jerk as he pulls away and jumps off. Instead of letting him go, I hold on tighter. I don’t want to be left behind. I follow him, letting myself fall towards the abyss, his hand pulling me down. A silent wave of shadows flows over the and around us. His suitcase snaps open and white pages full of black scribbles flutter through the air like doves, cushioning our descent into Xibalbá. The last thing I hear are screeches, as the gyre of vultures descends. Their patience will be rewarded, they will have their pound of flesh tonight.

—

Aisling Walsh is a freelance writer and translator based between Ireland and Guatemala. She writes reports, features and essays on human rights and social justice for a variety of publications with recent bylines including: Entropy Mag, Pendemic.ie, The Irish Times, The Sunday Business Post, Open Democracy, The Establishment and Dismantle Magazine. She is currently a doctoral candidate in sociology at the National University of Ireland Galway, where she is researching healing justice processes in Guatemala.

By Liz Breazeale

1. The day they labeled her case cold, the three of us slumped, staring at our friend in the photos on Katie’s wall and fridge and in frames on the bookshelf, and her face buried among all those novels made it too easy to categorize what happened to her as fiction, a plot in a mystery.

2. Katie said, voice cracking, we have to do something. She’s already been forgotten.

3. She, she, always, to us, we couldn’t say her name after, remembered her in pictures instead of syllables.

4. We thought of our friend all the time, with every bending tree backlit against the moon—the night we didn’t know was the last, the party that went so late she left before us. When she told us she’d walk home, it was only a few blocks, Steph said something we wished we could preserve because our friend laughed at it, whole body laughed, but the memory hazed, bent around the edges.

5. After Katie spoke, Molly downed a shot from the bottle of wine between us. She had tears in her eyes always those days, must’ve seen through them like glasses, prisming the world with grief.

6. Katie grabbed the one thing we’d been given from our friend’s apartment, the one object not boxed up—her binder of ghost towns.

7. She’d wanted to study them in grad school, those boom-and-bust gnats on a map and the women who lived and died there, flashed in and out of the world like lightning bugs. She was a historian through her whole body, turned the pages of the world back and back, tried so desperately to know them, the sex workers and wives and madams and cooks and children nobody thought about. She pilgrimaged there, to all of them, mostly nameless hillocks, ruts in the soil; she scraped clear the gravestones at her favorite site, chiseled the moss and the mud away without thinking, the way you help a loved one do the dishes or put away clothes without their asking.

8. After Katie picked up the binder, she walked out of the room, down the stairs, and into the night. We followed, struggling to jam on our shoes.

9. We remembered the only pieces of her they found: the flattened shoe, black with red insole, a mosquito smashed mid-feed. The water bottle, fuchsia lipstick marks chewing at the rim. The  Dooney & Burke crossbody her mother gave her a decade ago, limp and draggled across the road. The only witness: a boy from CU who saw nothing, just heard a strangled scream, a door slam, tires.

10. We were silent the whole drive through the canyon, up into the bends and hefts of the foothills, the reels of the highway casting around slopes. We knew where we were going, car punching through the pupil-dark, all those animal eyes reflecting from the woods.

11. Our friend had stood at the edge of her favorite ghost town, the winking gazes of the stumbling, ruined buildings on her, the tiny haunted graveyard, and said, can you stand the idea of dying and no one alive knowing where you are or why, doesn’t it break your heart?

12. What a thing to fathom, blinking in and out of existence so quickly no one can find you after you’re gone.

13. When we pulled onto the dirt road, bumped and juttered and were thrown against the windows, leaving souls of greasy smudges on the glass, Katie was steady at the wheel, never slowed. We knew this was right, the blinding bumps like vertebrae under the thinnest of skin.

14. We parked and the car headlights made a halo of the trees, trees our friend had felt so safe in, the way they closed off the sky. Katie slung a shovel over her shoulder.

15. We wandered, air fresh and unfamiliar, smelling of coniferous and pinecones and desiccated needles, shadows shifting, crafting themselves around trees older than the world we lived in, and we were sure the dancing spaces absent of light were our friend waiting for us, wondering why we took so long. We hoped if she chose someone to haunt it would be us.

16. Katie couldn’t read the map, thought we’d pulled up next to the graveyard but they were only stumps from some long-ago devastation, and we stumbled, snapping branches and pausing when we heard an owl and feeling far far down that this was her world, not ours, that our friend would know exactly where to go, how to navigate this place by the lonely stars hole-punched between branches.

17. We found it almost at the edge of the headlights’ reach, the best-preserved headstones still so broken like fallen horses, like horses near to death.

18. Our friend had made lists of their names and dates of birth and death, traced their inscriptions with charcoal, all dark space, brutally blank except for one or two words. She tried to fill in the gaps, caulk their emptiness with details but how do you summarize a life, how do you insert everything that matters, the way they wore their hair most days, the way they opened jars with a swift small suction-pop, the way they laughed with all their body, the way they bruised easy like fruit spoiling too soon, the way they the way they the way they.

19. Katie paused at a headstone broken in two, a chipped-off tooth, checked the name. Mabel, she said, and Molly skimmed through the binder. Here, she whispered, pointing to an etching locked in a plastic sheet.

20. Katie started digging and we followed, clawed the dirt away with our nails, and when we came away our hands didn’t look like hands.

21. Sometimes the exhaustion would strike us at odd moments of the day, walking to work or sitting at a stoplight or shelving a book, anytime our minds could wander—the pull toward remembering, the feeling that our friend was close enough to touch, that there was something deep and urgent we needed to tell her but we couldn’t, never again, and there must’ve been a way to cut through whatever was between us and her, the immovable partition keeping us apart.

22. We struck something wooden, dragged out the bones, and cradled them.

23. We took only a few. We took only what we needed.

24. We don’t know why but it made sense in our own bodies that wanted to be close to her again, that still wanted to snap pictures of weird birds we saw and send them to her and say something dumb like sweet bird action or wanted to tell her our successes because she was the best person to tell good news or wanted to remind her of when we finished our last semester, did she remember how she bought four mini bottles of champagne and we took edibles and sat on her roof and watched the sun skirt the mountains like a hand over a thigh and what if we forgot that she was fun, how she made us laugh, how she could distract us from anything.

25. Molly cried over the bundle in the car but we didn’t blame her.

26. Our friend had wept for them, the girls so young and just spit out, the leather-tough women lost forever.

27. We washed the bones first, anointed them with water from the sink, light and grainy and hollow, colored as though with tea like things dyed to look old, like projects from elementary school our friend had confessed she kept, fake ancient maps leading nowhere.

28. Her parents wanted to take her back to Missoula if they found her corpse and of course they did, how could we fault them? But oh her body in a cemetery there, probably small, she hated that, how everything was small against the massive sky, how she never felt significant, and she’d be so alone out there, next to everyone who was a stranger to her.

29. We laid the bones on the floor, one rocking on its bulbed ends.

30. Steph gentled them into the right order, forming an arm, chanting: carpal, metacarpal, humerus, scapula.

31. The sky was scabbing with light around the edges. The wetness from our jeans pressed through us, gripping beyond our skin.

32. The last night of her life, our friend said she’d walk home and we told her we’ll see you tomorrow and it was the only time, we swear, the only time we didn’t pair off, and she was looking how she always looked, her mouth like the plains, the haystack of her messy bun. In our minds, after she was gone, she was beautiful, luminous and haunting, but in the moment we knew she looked only fine, just tired, eyeliner doing that thing where it clumped in the corners, whatever, we’d see her for brunch the next day.

33. Everything smelled unfixably of earth in Katie’s room, of must and dirt and wet, of the world in all its mourning.

34. Every weekend after, we brought back toes, we brought back fingers, we brought back tibias and fibulas and ribs. We molded her into herself bone by bone, learned the words for all the parts of her that lived so deep we never saw them. We would wash them, lay them out over a streak of butcher paper, slide them under Katie’s bed when we were done for the night. It was like our friend was sleeping under there, like maybe she would wake up.

35. I see them when I dream, she’d told us, I feel their ghosts behind me in the mirror.

36. Every time, before we went back to our lives, we touched the bones for one long second, saying goodbye finally to something real, the way you linger your hand on someone’s shoulder as you leave a room. We pressed them, felt a pulse narrowing, and for a moment we could imagine it was her, our beautiful brilliant human friend, whole and uncut and new, could imagine she was here and we didn’t have to think about our bodies or what would happen if they were broken because we would be remembered and we would live forever and we would never be buried in places where no one would find us, where we would always be lost.

—

Liz Breazeale is the recipient of an NEA 2020 Creative Writing Fellowship, and her first book, Extinction Events, won the 2018 Prairie Schooner Book Prize for Fiction. She holds an MFA from Bowling Green State University and lives in Denver. Her work is forthcoming or has appeared in Best Small Fictions 2020, Kenyon Review Online, Best of the Net 2014 & 2019, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Rupture, Pleiades, Fence, Fugue, Sycamore Review, Passages North, Monkeybicycle, and others

By Athena Nassar

It is the night of my consumption. I look at myself in the mirror and weep, not because I am scared, but because I wish my face could always look like this— stripped of its features. My supple cheeks slowly withering into their organic shape like fingered heirloom tomatoes after a harvest. My body slowly withering, but then I remember: snap, digest, breathe, and I have forgotten the mechanics of lungs. I am breathing like a newborn child that has just been thrown into a swimming pool by a neglectful father, and suddenly I am swimming in my own asexual reflection. Vegetation leaks in from the bathroom window as a sort of witness, so I shut the window. Lock the door to my lover who waits outside in the dining room with cold food on the table. I unscrew the flap on the back of my neck and remove my memory card, caked with dust. Do I wish to continue?

Snap.

He picks on me because he likes me— bends me over a toilet bowl with his hands pressed to my mouth or maybe he folds me like a dish towel and folds me again. Fills me with “I love yous” just to wring me out in the kitchen sink (after dinner of course). I call it a date, because Frank Sinatra is playing in the moonlit dining room, and his “fuck yous” are muffled with the voice on the radio. The forecast seems to be the same old shit tomorrow, so I grab my rain boots and step out into the same old shit, because he speaks a language that nobody understands except for me. Every “fuck you” was a joke lost in translation, but I laughed anyways, because guess what! I am fluent in fuck you. When my mother said “boys will be boys,” I laughed, even though the joke slipped right through me. Through him, I see the heart of a boy pumping with blood gone sour.

We sit at the dining table chewing overcooked beef over the sound of Frank Sinatra. Chrysanthemums sit like a cinder block in the center of the table. I stare at them blankly and imagine him walking down the grocery aisle, picking the bouquet that stood out to him the most.

Do you like them?The chrysanthemums? I ask, knowing that he was talking about the chrysanthemums.

They’re lovely. There’s a pause.?The landline rings, but neither of us move to pick it up.?Ungrateful bitch.

His words taste expired. I slosh them around in my mouth to make up for the silence. The cicadas mating outside our window. The garbage disposal gurgling, but never spitting. The washing machine churning. The heel of his tapered dress shoe tapping the tile, and I wonder what the leather would sound like in the garbage disposal. I hate chrysanthemums, especially the ones whose ovaries have already been pollinated by some foreign body. I imagine a man with yellow gloves plucking them from the earth, shaving them of their character. Rolling their extremities in sheets of plastic and packaging them with automated love letters.

In Botticelli’s painting, The Birth of Venus,Aphrodite stands erect in her most natural form: deep within the bowels of an abnormally large scallop shell. A handmaiden attempts to cover her with a fuchsia tapestry. She emerges as the fruitful result of bloodshed like many other gods and goddesses. The story is this: Cronus barbarically overthrows his father, Uranus, subsequently throwing his genitals into the ocean. The water is fertilized by the organs of Uranus, and Aphrodite then rises from sea foam with no maternal figure involved. She is carried to the island of Cyprus by the breath of Zephyrus, god of the west wind. Men are meant to dissect this painting, to inspect Aphrodite in her outright nakedness, and acquire some ethereal intellect about the female body. They cradle this painting in their breast as if it is the meat of the stars.

Aphrodite is beauty, and I am her mother. Dionaea Muscipula. The Venus fly trap earned its name from its flesh like leaves that possess a pinkish center almost like a yawning vagina. I open my jaw wide, secrete a nectar so sweet that insects claw at the window screen, begging to be swallowed in my scent.

Digest.

My purpose is to attract, so I attract. A simple machine, I only have one function. I release a fluorescent blue glow from my eyes. Open my jaw wider and wider until sap drips down onto the table cloth. The silverware is saturated in my own mucus. I wet him before the consumption. Strip myself of my clothes and stand, held captive by the death grip of the chrysanthemums. They bundle me tight in rubber bands, leaving purple marks on my swollen hips. Still, I open wider— grow fresh skin over my cuts and scrapes. I grow and grow larger. My legs shoot up through the floorboards, and I wear the house as underwear. Wear his organs as an old dish towel. He is quiet now, because I have just swallowed his tongue.

My roots curl and twist and bind him to the chair, and for once, he is the one that is bound. A prisoner to my botanical whims. He tries to scream ‘fuck you,’ but he struggles to pronounce the vowels. His words crawl out of his lips in a tangled slur. The hard slap of the ‘k’ never surfaces. He tries to scream ‘I always knew you were crazy!’ He tries to scream ‘please.’ Tries to scream ‘I love you.’ His tongue will never regenerate, and he will never taste strawberry preserves on french bread, a poached egg with runny yolk, buttermilk pancakes. My diet consists of crickets, millipedes, measly men. I break him down until a chitin shell is the only artifact that remains.

In M ortal Kombat,there are eighteen realms that exist in a fictional universe, and we float in the blank space in between. The space that video game developers forgot to fill. Our house is surrounded by miles and miles of pixelated vegetation. Trees that will never collapse from strong winds and bodies of

water that will never be tapped dry, because we live on a fabricated plot of land ruled by gods whom we will never see. I curse the video game developers. Too busy to create another arena, so they left us here to rot in the acid of our own self loathing. We don’t have the luxury of power ups or armor, but in Mortal Kombat 3, new finishing moves were introduced. Animalities. The victor is transformed into a savage beast to defeat the opponent. Soaked in chlorophyll, I have mutated into our surroundings. My lover’s pixelated blood drips from my teeth, and I see our makeshift world for what it really is: a hologram. My hands slip right through his carved out exoskeleton. I see our house in blots of color. Two dimensional shapes. I see the chrysanthemums scattered on the dining table, red with animation. I look out the window to see the sky, a gradient blue with perfectly crafted clouds. Prehistoric creatures with dragging tails shuffle across our lawn. Woolly rhinoceros. Arthopleura. Abnormally large snake skins. Terror birds with hooked beaks pick at a dead boar. The video game developers left them here, because they didn’t fit into the aesthetic of any of the realms, much like us.

The jungle is alive, and I fear it will swallow me whole. It is just me now, only sheltered by the thin walls of my house. The jungle breathes, and I breathe with it to avoid the breath of a million pigs.

Breathe.

There is nothing left of him to bury, so I bury the radio. Unplugged, Frank Sinatra still sings “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.” Itrytochangethestation,trytoswitchtheoffbutton,butthemusicgoesonas we get deeper and deeper into the thick of the forest. His voice bounces off the cartoonish trees, increasing in volume. The only sounds are his singing, my breathing, and of course, the static oozing from the cassette. Finally, I find a flat space in the forest where there is no growth. This is where the burial will take place.

In the realm of Greek mythology, the deceased pays a boatman to carry them across the river Styx and to the underworld safely. A coin is given in exchange for protection against whatever may lurk in the depths of the river. I place a penny in the mouth of the radio and make sure its lips are sealed shut, so that no soul can escape. The radio consumes the copper like good food— whirs and sputters and licks its chops. With this, the singing comes to a halt, but there is still a faint static somewhere in the distance. A warning cry.

The static gets significantly louder, and the ground shakes. A terror bird comes running in full force. The screeching wakes a nest of infants, and they follow their mother. They all come running. Their tongues hang out of their mouths, and I spot the tiniest red dot at the back of their throats. A camera?

I begin to claw at the dirt— begin to root us deeper into the earth. Our little sketched world. I dig us deeper and deeper, clawing at the speakers of the radio. My leaves are turning a sick black, curling upwards into a cynical grin. Still, I dig us deeper until all I can see is a sliver of the outside. I figure: how

will I be eaten if I am not seen? How will I be consumed if I am already so lathered in pig scum? I figure they will not want to get their hands dirty with my decay.

Somewhere, the video game developers sit in a room with a wall full of screens and laugh.

—

Athena Nassar is an Egyptian-American poet and essayist from Atlanta, Georgia. She is an undergraduate student at Emerson College and Interlochen Arts Academy alum. She is the recipient of the 2019 Scholastic National Gold Medal Portfolio Award, an honorable mention in the New York Times Student Review Contest, Lake Effect National Poetry Competition finalist, and Tom Samet High School Fiction Competition winner. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Best Teen Writing of 2019, DIALOGIST, Riggwelter, The Bitchin’ Kitsch, and elsewhere. Currently, she is a feature writer for Five Cent Sound and Atlas Magazine at Emerson College.

By Craig Bernardini

He awoke and, gazing around the room in the morning light, noticed things had moved. The chair was angled a little more toward the window. The desk was pulled slightly away from the wall, as if to retrieve a pencil fallen behind it. The picture, of a ship cocked and foundering in heavy swells, a little crooked the previous evening, hung straight. The bottom drawer of the dresser was open a hair.

Rising, he carefully restored the things to their original places.

The next morning, they were disturbed again, though not in exactly the same way.

Perhaps because nothing went missing, he thought little of it. He could have simply misremembered where things were. But eventually the feeling caught up with him: he wondered why he thought so little of it. Because they were not his things? He hardly used the chair, with its moldy cushions and worn-out springs. Or the desk, except to pile his few books. He didn’t even look at the picture very often.

His things—the books, change of clothes, coat, shoes (two pairs) and overshoes, framed photo of himself as a boy, marbled pebbles, sea-shell bits, Navy figurine (admiral), tea cups (two), wooden trunk with frayed handles—did not move, except insofar as they found themselves upon things that did.

 It would have been one thing had the things been disturbed in the daytime. The charwoman had a key. He tried to be in when she cleaned, irregular though she was. He would help her slide the trunk, and the iron frame of the bed; the charwoman, unlike the landlady, was petite. She would tease him about not trusting her with his things, saying, Do you think I don’t have a man to buy me all the things I want? You silly goose. But if the day was sufficiently overcast he would go to the park, to feed the pigeons the breadcrusts he had gathered off the other boarders’ plates before the cook could turn them into pudding; or to the library (but never to read).

The charwoman was much too diligent for the dust to accumulate to a degree that the disturbed things would leave a trace. He might pay her not to clean. But he was afraid of calling attention to himself. Instead, he bought a yardstick. Each morning, before going down to breakfast, he took measurements: from the top corners of the picture to the ceiling; from the front leg of the chair to a pencil mark on the baseboard, along a line parallel to the adjacent wall; and so on. Logging each day’s figures, perusing them while pigeons gamboled over him and vagrants snored in nearby chairs, he was able to verify that the disturbances were real—though so subtle, and so irregular (no direction; no determinable pattern, though he subjected the figures to endless mental algorithms) that he was unable to entirely remove the suspicion that his measurements had been taken in such a way as to validate his impressions.

What if the charwoman, or the landlady, or another boarder who had somehow gotten hold of his key, was creeping into his room to disturb things while he slept? Sitting down to breakfast one morning, in one of the slatted chairs that made his hips ache—there was not a comfortable chair in the whole place, he said to himself, though never aloud—while the cook was rattling the cutlery in the kitchen, he inquired, as discreetly as he could, of his fellow boarders. It’s funny, he began—and for one who was hardly known to speak at all, there was something momentous in so inauspicious a beginning—it’s funny, but some days I forget where things are. Stuff is just … out of place. Not quite where I thought it was. And then he scanned the other faces at the table for a meaningful look, a signal to arrange a clandestine meeting. Circumambulating the pond in the hollow at the park’s center, the one with all the toy sailboats, a secret would be divulged: about another boarder, or the charwoman (she occasionally smelled), or the landlady, or the landlady’s deceased husband, whose picture sat on the mantle beneath his ludicrously small rapier.

No one took his bait. Not Ong, mostly blind, who continued to squint at him expectantly through his thick glasses. Not Fitzgerald, who seemed to nourish himself entirely on his own fingernails. Not Czerny, “the Pole,” a philosopher, retired from the University of Sczrenzk (or so it was rumored), who spent all day on the bench in the corner of the foyer, where the light was poorest, reading; he even had a book open beside his plate. And not any of the salesmen stopping through, with their suitcases full of Bibles or brassieres or whatnot, whose names he never quite learned, or as quickly forgot, one of whom (that particular morning) had the most perfect teeth. Like him, they did not want to call attention to themselves. And so no one spoke at all, until one of the salesmen (the other one) began his pitch for the boarders, opening his briefcase on the table. The Pole did not even look up.

Had he considered the possibility that the boarding-house was haunted? The lodgings were suspiciously cheap. The house was two centuries old. The history of the neighborhood was sanguinary (a suppressed meatpackers’ strike; potter’s field by the river). Perhaps he was sensitive to such things, and had never been in a situation to know. At first he thought it must be the spirit of some boarder who had died in the room; but eventually he settled on the deceased husband of the landlady as the most likely candidate. For a military man, he was quite frail-looking, at least at the time the picture had been taken. The landlady said so little about him, and her answers to the salesmen’s periodic questions were so equivocal, that one was left to invent what was likely a much more colorful character than had actually lived, and certainly than appeared in the picture. His death was a source of endless speculation—though all agreed that foul play was involved, and that the landlady was involved (inheritance, mistress, spite). Regardless, he never got the sense, from the subtle movements of the furniture, that a spirit was trying to communicate anything. Nor did he feel in any way threatened, as though the widowers and retirees who now occupied the house were suitors encroaching on the deceased husband’s one-time property. It hardly squared with the picture, or with the nutcracker-sized weapon hanging over the mantle. He himself had never imagined the landlady in this way. The charwoman was more his type. She would bend over to help him move his trunk; she would get down on her hands and knees to fish things out from behind the desk.

In the end, he could only conclude that the spirit spent its nights going in and out of rooms like his, looking for things that belonged to it. Perhaps, by moving things, it was simply acting on the memory of how they had used to be arranged. In fact, his very room might have belonged—might belong to the spirit; the room was no more his than the furniture. And he might have grown comfortable with this, except that the spirit, whose sympathy and companionship he sought, could never make up its mind from one night to the next. Over time, this indecision began to weigh on him. He grew impatient, and then contemptuous, leaping out of bed to slide the chair (for example) further than the spirit could have moved it in a month, and then sneering at it from his pillow.

Until the night came that he announced to the room that he did not believe in ghosts.

The very next morning, the things were more disturbed than ever.

Which is to say, hardly at all.

He began a series of experiments to try to discover the motive force behind the disturbed things. He still had not discarded the possibility of an intruding boarder, perhaps in cahoots with the thuggish landlady, or the lascivious charwoman, whom he imagined watching him sleep from the sagging chair with a calf on either armrest. First he had to rule himself out—the possibility, that is, that he was the spirit in question: the one rising in the middle of the night to disturb the things. Him, or some heretofore hidden part of him, buried so deep that it did not even surface in his dreams. It was for this reason he had never measured the bed: if he jerked or tossed, the bed might shift slightly—unlikely, given its mass, but not impossible—and then the only thing he would be measuring was the force of his own (involuntary) night-movements. But this was precisely what he set out to capture now. He filled his bedpan with cold water from the bathroom at the end of the hall, and, on successive nights, set it before the chair, the desk, the dresser, and the picture. On each following morning, he awoke to find the floor dry, the bedpan still full—and the things disturbed. He tried again, this time stringing wire around the room through eyehooks he screwed into the baseboard, in a criss-crossing spiderweb he unwove on each of three consecutive mornings. And then again with carpet tacks, distributed in a checkerboard pattern around the floor, and with identical results—which is to say, none—the only difference being that, the next morning, he managed to step on a tack.

He began sitting up after the lamp was out to peer around the room, his eyes slowly adjusting to the dark, listening, motionless, silent. To see the chair or the picture spin, the desk slide; to hear the groan of old legs against the floorboards, the cry of inertia violated …. The close attention soon exhausted him, and he nodded off to the too-familiar sounds of the other boarders going about their nightly business (Fitzgerald playing the piano in the parlor two floors below, sometimes accompanying the landlady; Ong’s tinny radio; the salesmen practicing their pitches, like preachers in their closets; the radiators; the bathroom pipes, running, always running; inebriates’ laughter; mattress springs), as well as some less-familiar noises, perhaps half-dreamed, and magnified by his awareness, until they almost seemed to be in the room with him. Some nights, he blew out the lamp and then re-lit it right away, murmuring an excuse to himself, as though to trick an invisible presence. But the changes never came so quickly. The things might have taken the whole night to accomplish their modest peregrinations; if so, they would have gone about their business slowly indeed—more slowly than he could hope to observe. Like the hour hand of a clock, process was a cipher; he could only tell difference, or believe he could tell the difference, between what was and what had been.

And yet, there were nights when he would rise and, groping his way around, become absolutely certain that things were in wildly different places than they had been when he had gone to sleep. Lighting the lamp (if he could find it; for how could he be certain the lamp would still be on the dresser, the dresser by the bed?), he would find everything just as it had been—or that things had suddenly returned to their places with the influx of light, like naughty children pretending to be asleep. As though the light itself had stitched the room back together. But then how to account for the difference, mornings, when the light, forgetful, did not always put things back just the way they had been? Was it the senility of the light he was witnessing? Perhaps the room in darkness was simply not the same room as the room in light. Each night, he passed over a gulf that could not be bridged; and each day, despite the apparent persistence of things, was entirely discontinuous from the one before.

It came to him at last: the room. There was no other possible remaining explanation. He would take advantage of the next vacancy to request a move. When it came, the landlady was immediately suspicious. Was there a problem with his room? Oh, no, it was fine, he assured her. He just wanted a change. She said nothing for a time, though from the way she looked at him he began to wish he had invented a problem, or at least a preference: the view, say—this though the newly-vacated room was on the floor below, and he was not much for looking out of windows anyway. The landlady rose and began to attend to random business around her office. It was as if she were awaiting a confession. And he was just beginning to wonder if the interview was over when she lifted the keyring big as a jailer’s from the nail under the mailboxes and said, without looking at him, Well, come along, then. Rather than leading him to the vacancy, she took him back to his own room, which she opened with her own key; and she proceeded to carry out an inspection more meticulous than ever the charwoman had, while he stood nakedly at the door. With her there, lifting up the corner of the mattress, opening the dresser drawers, peering under the furniture and the window curtain, even nudging the trunk with her foot—with her there, everything seemed out of place. The inspection, which might have lasted five minutes, seemed to take much longer; the charwoman even poked her head in at one point, and he had to suffer hearing his request relayed to her in the most ridiculous and unfavorable terms. If she noticed either the eyeholes or the pencil marks, she gave no indication. In the end, she withdrew without a word, and he followed her back to her office, where she handed him a new key, reminding him to return the old one as soon as he was finished transferring his things.

An indescribable sadness came over him when he beheld his new lodgings. The chair was the same—mold-blossom on the cushions, exhausted springs—just upholstered in a different pattern. The desk was identical. Even the picture had a maritime theme, one similarly ominous. As for the view: it was true he could no longer look out (as he seldom did) over tarred beaches, with their broken chimneys and steaming vents and hanging wash. The sawtooth roofs of the row-houses across the street did present a physically different scene. But it was identical, he thought, in character. And here the landlady had led him to believe that the rooms for transients were somehow more attractive than those for so-called residents, and as such that she was potentially sacrificing business to a whim of his. Drawing the curtain and sitting down on the edge of the bed, he could only wonder if she hadn’t been right.

It took him less time to carry down most of his things than it had taken the landlady to perform her inspection. His books made up the first load; the second, a single dresser drawer’s worth of clothes, shoes, and overshoes (the other was empty); then his toilet items and knick-knacks, arranged in the desk drawer (the picture of himself as a boy, dwarfed by its pewter frame; the admiral, tall as a salt-shaker, the paint chipping from his cap; pebbles and sea shells and tea cups). That left only the trunk. It was heavier than he remembered. He went for the Pole. His reasons were several: he knew exactly where to find him; he distrusted him less than anyone else in the house; and (this related to the second reason) he sensed a total indifference to anything outside the world of his books. About the last, however, he proved to be mistaken. “Vhat inside?” the Pole asked, after they had slid the trunk under the nearly-identical bed of the nearly-identical room. He confessed he did not know, or perhaps did not remember. (It amounted to the same thing.) He could not know, he explained, because the trunk was locked, and he did not have the key. In fact, he could not even remember how he had acquired the trunk in the first place. The Pole seemed incredulous, or perhaps only confused; it was possible he had not understood. Then he asked, sensibly enough, “Vhere is key?” Again, he confessed not to know. The Pole pondered this for a time, gnawing on his white mustache with his lower teeth, as he often did over his books. He seemed on the point of saying something. Then he shrugged and, measuring the room with one quick glance, departed.

Before returning the key, he went back and took a last look at his old room, at the old things that seemed newly lifeless, before locking the door.

The new bed received him just as the old one had: with the embrace of a corpse.

The next morning, he awoke to find the new things disturbed: chair pulled out a little from the wall, desk at an angle, picture crooked (the ship was almost vertical now; the sea, crooked), top dresser drawer open a hair. At first he blamed the unfamiliarity of the space—or rather, its strange mixture of familiarity and unfamiliarity. Disoriented, he had simply tried to map the arrangement of the new things onto the old—a natural enough response to his long tenancy in the other room. It was nothing of the sort. Rather, it was as though the old things had followed him here, clamoring, and us? Or as though he had only imagined he had moved. He was afraid to look out the window and see the tarred beaches again.

At breakfast he scanned the faces of his fellow boarders with a silent intensity that had been absent from the innocent query of a few weeks before. He watched the cook, and the charwoman as she bustled through, and the landlady when she entered to bid her boarders good-morning, as she occasionally did—and then to ask him, oh! most insidiously, how he found his new lodgings! His eyes dropped to his plate; he felt all the other eyes at the table upon him. She left before he could think how to answer. Then the prattle of the salesmen began again, and the clink of silverware, and he slowly resumed eating.

He spent the remainder of the morning sitting on his trunk, staring at his big toe through a hole in his sock. Not the room, then: the things themselves. The things themselves were disturbed. Not an action; a condition. This did not bother him. What bothered him was that they would target him in this way. Could they sense he did not love them? He had never abused them—carved his initials into a desk, say, or spilled hot tea on the upholstery, or worn the springs of the saddled mattresses yet further. But he supposed he had neglected them. The god of things had grown offended by his lack of attention. And yet, they were not his things; he felt the need to stress this again, hoping the god was listening. They did not share his past; they were as alien to him as the other boarders. It was not his fault that the chair was broken, the desk useless, the picture depressing, the mattress saddled. In fact, he was the one who had to deal with the ache in his hips and back, who had to stare at that image of imminent maritime doom every day. If anyone had the right to be aggrieved, it was him.

“If you have a problem,” he said to the chair, “I suggest you take it up with the landlady. You are not my responsibility.”

The chair did not reply, just sat there at its harumphing angle to the wall, conspiring, in its silent way, with the rest of the furniture about where to go next.

And yet, he was on the most intimate terms with them—wasn’t he? They were the last things he saw before he blew out the lamp each night, the first things to greet him when he opened his eyes each morning. He might spurn them, curse them inwardly, but that did not alter the fact of their marriage. The thought troubled him. For his few things—the things he liked to think of as his; the things he had carried from one room to another—had never participated in these nightly revolutions, except unwittingly. What little he did have was nothing if not well-loved (he wriggled his toe at this thought). Or would the true lover of things have mended the sock? Perhaps the time was coming when they would join the mutiny, like conflicted crewmembers who at last decide to risk the yardarm.

It was too strong a word, mutiny. It was not as though, awaking, he found these unloved things encroaching upon him, like malevolent figures in wax. He did not have nightmares about the chair swinging down and cracking open his skull, or the bed overturning like a swamped dory. But he did, in the coming days, begin to dream their movements more grand and ludic: cloistering together at the center of the room, or amassing in a single corner, the desk pushed up behind the chair, the latter’s legs in the air, revealing, perhaps, engraved initials (his?), or a wad of dried chewing gum (his?); the picture hanging sideways, or upside-down, the troubled ocean a sky, the ailing ship a crooked chandelier—and, in the grub-white rectangle where it had hung, a hole, with a rolled-up letter stuffed inside (his?), or a tooth swaddled in fabric (his?)—or nothing, except a tunnel-view into another’s room (his?), someone he did not know, or did not recognize—someone, anyway, who did not belong there. In his dreams even his own things joined the melee, if more sheepishly than the rest: his shoes chose a partner from the other pair, and of the same foot; his slacks, which he habitually hung with the cuffs toward him, turned so that he could see the waist instead; his pebbles and shells arranged themselves into scant constellations; the admiral comandeered one or another of the tea cups. But the dreams faded as soon as he opened his eyes, and saw the things again in their slightly-out-of-place places. It was a mutiny of sorts: this is what the dreams were trying to tell him. They whittled dully at him, bored holes in him so small he did not bleed, peeled away the rind that was, finally, all of him.

He gathered his own things to him before they could go the way of his dreams: his change of clothes, which he wore along with his coat, and a hostage shoe from either pair, together with his overshoes. He filled his pockets with the pebbles and shells, admiring their ballast; the admiral he held before him like a crucifix. And he watched, from his trunk, the desk and chair and dresser and bed—the bed!—as they floated a hair’s-breadth above the floor. Unmoored, yes. But it was more than that. They had become weirdly … fungible. He could not think of a better word. They were not altogether there.

They said the same about him: the other boarders; the charwoman; the salesmen; the landlady, eventually. He had not been to the park or library in weeks, despite the pleasant overcast of days. He had stopped coming down to breakfast. They said he had lost weight, that he looked pale, unkempt. The cook even prepared a draught for him. He told them he was not sleeping well. It was true. How could he sleep, curled up on a trunk half as long as he was and hardly wider than his shoulders, on uneven wood slats, nail-heads, and metal braces?

The charwoman brought him soup and crustless bread to sop it with. He slurped quietly, hardly daring to steal a glance at her. He understood he might be evicted for illness; to have a boarder die here would cast a pall over the whole establishment. It was a terrible place to think of haunting. Frowning at his pallor, the charwoman told him he looked a mite better. She took the half-empty bowl with her, while he settled in to await the landlady’s heavy knock, her knuckles like brass couplings. She would come, he was sure, with the evidence of breadcrusts stolen, a murdered pigeon, a befouled yardstick and drowned book of figures, and a toy sailboat with its pencil-thin mast snapped off, a mouse’s nest on its deck.

He awoke and, gazing around the room in the morning light, realized things were just where they were supposed to be: the desk pushed up firmly against the wall, the chair at its proper angle, the drawers of the dresser firmly shut, the picture nearly straight.

And so was he: in bed, although he could not recollect moving. He sat up weakly, stared at his stocking feet—he could not recollect removing his shoes, either. None of his toes were visible, for none of the holes between the two pairs of socks he wore were aligned. Holding to the nearest bedpost, he slowly pulled himself erect, the mattress-springs groaning with him. He felt, he thought, what an animal must feel emerging from hibernation.

He removed the coat, and then the rest of the change of clothes, smoothing them as best he could, folding the slacks over his chair, waist toward him, and the shirt and socks into his dresser drawer, which he did not close entirely.

There: he could see the toe again. It did not wriggle.

From the coat pockets he took the picture and the cups, and then the admiral, lay them on his desk one piece at a time, and then emptied the pebbles and shells by the handful onto the trunk. They made an unfamiliar sound. He leaned in close and knocked on the lid, making the pebbles and shells jump; he pulled up on one of the frayed handles, so that the pebbles and shells skittered to the other end. Even in his wasted condition, the trunk lifted easily.

It was empty. He would not need the Pole to help him move it now.

Someone had removed the mirror from the bathroom. It wasn’t the first time; it was small enough to conceal. The salesmen, he thought.

He splashed the face he could not see, expectorated into the sink. Then he went down to breakfast.

They all noticed him, of course. Even the Pole looked up. He looked at each of them in turn. He would make sure to look the landlady in the eye, too, when she poked in her head to sing good-morning. He would stare boldly at the charwoman’s bosom and legs as she flitted through, though she would pretend not to notice. And as he went to take his customary place at the table, he paused, and then—moved his chair ever so slightly to the left. Or was it the right? Theirs, his, it hardly mattered. He looked up to see if anyone had noticed. Surely they would notice once he was sitting? The daring new angle at which his chair stood to the table, at which he stood to them? He was like the admiral in his teacup, braving the swells.

  The problem was that no one looked directly at him. Oh, they spoke to him, they addressed their words to him, wished him well, told him they were glad to see he was feeling better, that he was looking like his old self again. They even toasted his health with their tea or juice. But whenever they looked in his direction, he got the sense they were looking somewhere else: at some entity standing directly behind him, say, and ever so slightly to one side.

When the cook put the soft-boiled egg in front of him, it was shifted to one side, as if for some other boarder; as if, should he attempt to eat it, his knife would slide down the shell, again and again, like a pigeon skittering off a cupola.

He dropped his knife, threw his napkin down, and rose so quickly his knees banged the underside of the table. The others clearly noticed, because they all looked at one another, and then interrupted their own breakfasts as well. Even the salesmen came along; and when the charwoman appeared, they silently but emphatically motioned for her to join them. As a group they pursued him into the foyer, first watching as he tottered up to the landing to wrestle with the grandfather clock, grunting; and then as he tottered back down to the foyer, to the bench where the Pole would sit to read, and the sewing chest with its vase of dying flowers. They stood in the door of the parlor, watching him rearrange the furniture—or at least seeming to; for each time he stepped away from something—the settee, the piano and bench, the coffee table, the tassle-shaded lamp—and despite his obvious efforts, they could not quite detect any difference. He paused before the picture of the landlady’s deceased husband, holding the edges of the frame; but when he stepped away, it was no less crooked.

When the landlady arrived, calling his name from the parlor door, he had taken her dead husband’s rapier down from the mantle and was leaping back and forth with it, thrusting and parrying with an invisible enemy; and all the other boarders had begun to applaud.

—

Craig Bernardini’s fiction has appeared most recently in Conjunctions, Craft, and Puerto del Sol. He teaches English at Hostos Community College, a City University of New York school in the Bronx, and blogs about music at Helldriver’s Pit Stop, on the CUNY Academic Commons. He lives in the beautiful mid-Hudson valley with partner, dogs, cats, and chickens, some of whom occasionally try to eat each other. 

By Logan Noble

7:23 P.M.

          It takes you a minute to find your Freddy Kruger shirt, but it’s important you wear it. It’s the first Thursday of the month, which means, as it always does, that The EFC is having their meeting tonight. Your apartment is dirty. Jenn was usually the one that cleaned it, but, since she isn’t around anymore, it’s not getting done. That’s the way these things work. But you already know that.

            You find ole’ Freddy stuffed beneath some khakis that don’t fit you anymore. You pull it out, grimacing at how wrinkled it looks. You put it on anyway, cursing yourself for being so careless. Your fellow club members care about this sort of thing. The alarm on your phone goes off. 7:25! It’s time to get moving. You hurry through your dirty apartment, flicking off the lights and checking the windows. You don’t live in the best neighborhood. And, though you don’t have a ton of valuables (unless your future burglar has a love of 1970 era giallo VHSs), you wouldn’t want anything to get stolen.

7:28 P.M

          By the time you trample down the stairs and hit the street, you’re winded. And, even worse, a little sweaty. You could stand to lose a few pounds. Ole’ Freddy is a Large that is starting to get a bit tight about your mid-section and armpits, which, as any chubby guy can tell you, makes you feel about as attractive as Hellraiser’s Butterball.

            The street is packed. The summer heat has finally laid off, following the sun back over the horizon. As you walk to the bus stop, you think about your weekend to come. Stuck up in your apartment, your window AC unit struggling to keep the place livable. Re-watching some old horror classics. Maybe polishing off some Ramen noodles. Or, in concordance with your almost too tight tee-shirt, a salad or something. You cast your eyes across the street, taking in the slums that comprise your neighborhood. A group of teenagers hanging on their stoop, getting high. Overgrown grass pushing at the foundations of the buildings. The air reeks of industrial fumes and exhaust.

            The bus roars to a stop ahead of you, a big graffiti tagged monster. You join the line to file on, a little impatient to get across town. You don’t need to check your phone to know that you’re running behind. But you do it anyway.

7:35 P.M.

            You cram yourself into a seat and dive into social media. The news stories that you find on Facebook and Twitter all look the same. Genocides in Africa. Political unrest in Europe. The United States government, in all their grand stupidity, are pushing the nation ever closer to a war that we could never possibly win. The man beside you is breathing heavily. His breathe is hot and rancid. It stinks of storm drains and maggoty meat. You want to punch him in the face. Break his nose. Pull his teeth from his jaw with pliers. His fat knee is pressed into yours. The bus rocks and screeches. The man’s breath is getting louder beside you. His heaving gasps seem vaguely familiar. Have you met this disgusting freak before? You resist the urge to look at him. To see his face. You scroll and scroll, passing pictures of celebrities and your old high school crushes. Scrolling. Scrolling…

7:48 PM

          You get off one stop to early. The walk is going to take you a few minutes, but that’s okay. Anything is better than being crammed into that bus. You feel hot and harried. Your shirt is sticking to your gut, sticking to your chest. You tear at it, keeping your pace brisk. This neighborhood, north of Bellamy Street, is much nicer than the one you live in. Houses with lawns mowed. Trees blowing lightly in the summer wind. Lights on every front porch. You follow them, your eyes drawn upwards. There, splitting the sky, is The Province.

            The Province is a tower of luxury apartments, catering to the rich and even richer. The president of The Eldritch Film Club, Gregory Patrick, has a place on the 23^rd floor. You have no idea how much he pays for it, but you have to imagine it’s ungodly. The breeze picks up. Clouds creep into the darkening sky, threatening rain and fury. From behind you, far off, a car alarm sounds. You quicken your pace.

7:54 P.M.

          By the time you reach the front doors of The Province, you are soaked with sweat. You hate yourself and everyone you’ve ever met. Your mind drifts 23 floors up. You can imagine it all now. All of Gregory’s rich friends, laughing at the fat guy that’s stretching out his sweaty tee-shirt. You lean into the lobby doors when a doorman suddenly swings them open. You nearly fall, catching yourself on the slick obsidian wall beside you. The doorman takes you in with one sweep of his dark eyes.

            “Welcome to The Province, sir.”

            You mumble a reply and stroll past him, embarrassment coloring your cheeks. You hazard a look around the lobby. Red carpets. Great pillars, branded with The Province logo. A roaring fireplace and a tall, slender figure in front it. He turns slowly, turning his gaze to you just as you reach the elevator. You reach out and mash the up button repeatedly. That same uneasy feeling of familiarity hits you again. Something about the way the man is standing. His suit. His hair. If only you’d seen his face…

            The elevator door opens with a pleasant ding. You step inside, not turning around until the doors close. You resist the urge to sigh in relief. You’re here. You might be a second late, but at least you made it. You watch the analog display above the doors as it rapidly ticks through the numbers before settling on 23. You snap your fingers impatiently while you wait for the doors to open. When they do, you practically sprint out.

8:02 P.M.

            Thankfully, Gregory’s apartment is right beside the elevator. From the second you step out into the hallway, you can hear the murmur of conversation through the walls. You walk over to the door and attempt to smooth out your shirt. A light behind you flickers. As you raise your hand to knock on the door, it suddenly swings open. Standing in the doorframe is Robert Fines. He grins wildly and snatches up your hand in a vigorous shake.

            “Hey! You’re here!”

            He pulls you inside. Gregory’s apartment is packed. Every inch of the living room is overcrowded with people of all different ages, some you recognize, some you don’t. Some techno-trash music thumps through the crowd, pumping out the open door behind you. Robert, who is probably 20 years older than anyone else in the room, takes a swing out of an oversized martini glass. His eyes are glossy and his teeth are red.

            “You’re looking for Gregory right?”

            Robert scans over the crowd. You do the same, gaping at all the people. The Eldritch Film Club was usually five or six people gathered around Gregory’s massive TV, watching Dagon or Into the Mouth of Madness for the thousandth time. This is a party.

            “There he is! There he is!”

            Robert shoves you, hard, and you bump into a gaggle of teenagers crowded in front of you. You apologize as you right yourself, looking to see where Robert had pointed. Gregory, tall, blonde and well-dressed, has already spotted you. The teenagers’ part for him and your old friend suddenly has his arm around your shoulder.

            “Good! You made it!”

            You shrug him off. You can’t help but feel pissed off. The EFC was for serious horror fans. Not for all these strangers.

            “What’s with all these people, Gregory?”

            Gregory laughs.

            His enormous television set blinks to life, bathing the orgy of people on the floor in blue light. They cheer and raise their beers.

            “Robert brought them!”

            “Yeah. Fine. But who are they?”

            “Who?”

            “All these kids! The ones smoking pot on your living room floor!”

            Gregory is grinning, though his eyes are heavy. Something is wrong. You know that now.

            “Most of them are Robert’s students. I think.”

            That answer checks out. Robert was a professor at some local university, though you can’t remember which one.

            “What happened to keeping the Club small? To avoid letting douchebag fanboys in?”

            Gregory is nodding but you can tell he isn’t listening.

            “Yeah. Yeah! I get ya’. I do. But this is good! Robert has a special movie tonight.”

            “Special?”

            Gregory opens his mouth to respond but the crowd behind you is screaming again. You spin, ready to scream right back at them. Robert is in front of the crowd, by the TV, grinning. His lips are stained. His hands raise up toward the ceiling, fingers spread wide.

            The movie has begun.

8:08 P.M.

          There is no menu. No titles. Only images. They flash on the massive screen. You think, as the screen changes, that this must be some kind of experimental thing. Shot on the cheap by one of Robert’s film students, real avant-garde. The lights have dimmed around you. The rowdy crowd has gone funeral silent. You try and make sense of the imagery. You try and attach meaning to it all. A woman in a white room, her skin pale. The corners of the room go taunt. She turns and blinks at you, her eyes speeding up, faster and faster. A cleaver lurches into a skull, the victim’s head jolting with the force. A man behind a mirror, a man that looks like you, reaches through the silvery surface, his fingers dripping obsidian. Winds howl past a dead tree. The man on the bus, beside you, licks at your throat. A blackened ocean writhes. Writhes. Words are being chanted through the swollen air, hanging to the sharp sky. The nonsense syllables rise in volume, guttural spits of an alien language that descends from stars far beyond these. Something is breaking the water’s surface. Something massive. A shape. Rising. Folds upon folds rise toward a moonless night, spreading wide.

            The crowd is pressing in around you. Every person is as still as the stars. You hear screams, but they’re coming from within, from the part of your soul that is still hanging on. The film cuts to the lobby of The Province, to that same fireplace. A girl with too many heads crawls out of the flames, howling. The audio is deafening. The carpet pulls itself from the floor, designs morphing into nightmarish visages before your very eyes. The lights of beyond flicker. The man in the suit turns his head. Music is playing somewhere. Flutes. The sound is maddening. The film has become your life. It’s being dissected, one cut at a time.  This time, when the man turns to look at you, you see his face.

8:41 P.M.

8:42 P.M.

8:57 P.M.

11: 59 P.M.

          The film doesn’t end. Not in any real sense. The seconds roll into eons. You feel yourself change with the scenes, flickering further and further away from where you’d stood all that time ago.

            When the screen does cut to black and that maddening flute music ends, everyone in the room is different. Except for you. You’re not different. But, none of this surprises you.

            After all. You’ve seen all of this before.   

            Welcome to The Eldritch Film Club.

—

Logan Noble is a horror and science fiction writer who lives in England with his wife and his two dogs. His short stories have appeared in a number of anthologies and magazines, including Pickman’s Gallery, Miskatonic Dreams, Déraciné Magazine, and Sanitarium Magazine. He can be found on Twitter @logan_noble, or at his website logannobleauthor.com.

• 

• 

Coup de Grace by Ilyn Welch

Robby Cordy was a murderer—of animals so far. One method he used was putting a dead kitten in a capped soda-fountain cup—Styrofoam or coated paper, no matter. He’d leave the “prank” on the unsuspecting owner’s stoop. Robby would hide and watch for their reaction upon discovery of their murdered loved one.

This behavior did not come from out of the blue. Teenage Robby Cordy’s home life involved neglectful parents who argued about things tangential to his dad’s Hep C, caused by the stereotypical decades of substance abuse. He had other siblings: one flailing but trying to find the road to personal improvement; one older than Robby who was depressed and damaged;
one who was always in a wheelchair, left to sit alone in his room for hours. Robby was a bully at school and lonely at home.

Vieja lived not quite directly across from the Cordys in a white wooden house, with a simple, pillared porch, set back far from the street, ignored by neighbors.

Ghost was Vieja’s gray cat, a powerful, savvy old soul who evaded Robby’s attempts at capture. Ghost liked curling up on the porch, monitoring movement on the street.

With the bad energy swirling in the neighborhood, Vieja was compelled to control it. On a fluffy decoy feline identical to Ghost, she applied a powdery toxin and strategic gobs of oleander honey, then placed it on her porch under the cloak of dusk, the real Ghost secure inside.

Vieja did not have to wait long.

Emulating the moves of a running back, Robby grasped and tucked the fake cat like an ol’ pigskin, but fumbled when dust puffed into his nose and eyes. Robby slammed the sham cat to the ground and licked his treacly hands.

Days later, Ghost was gobbling his kibble mixed with wet food on the porch. Standing there alongside her cat, Vieja watched the scene unfolding at the Cordy house. Paramedics screeched to a halt, hustling inside. Robby did not exit with them to a hospital, nor did they leave after a “false alarm.” In due time, the coroner showed up. Vieja rocked in her porch chair, stroking Ghost’s fur as he relaxed on her lap, watching the death attendants eventually wheel out the bagged and zipped corpse of Robby Cordy.

—

Ilyn Welch writes horror and mystery. She shares a computer with her family in the currently smoky Inland Empire of Southern California.

Theo by Nikki Ervice

The way my mom told it, Mira and her horse slid apart from each other like an egg yolk from its white. My sister, the yolk, bobbing and intact. Theo, the white, breaking around rocks, falling apart in the churn of the river, coming together again where it spread out into gentle fingers that reached for the bay. It was too late when they reached him, my mother said. She had swooped Mira onto the back of her mare behind her, balanced on the great swell of her rump, and they had chanted “come on, come on” together while they traced the bank. But their prayer did nothing and crows were already gathering hopefully around the black mass of the horse in the sand. Mom jumped on his stomach to expel the water from his lungs while my sister watched and shivered but he didn’t move, except for his tail which snaked lazily in the stream.

“I have some bad news, Sweetie.” This is how she prefaced the telling, after they rode home that night, defeated in the dark. This is what she said before she relayed anything painful. She was the veil between worlds. The vestiges of death passed through her first. She made sure of this because I was the youngest girl, dressed in the softest linens. She fashioned braided rugs and decorative pillows of death: He was a beautiful horse. He was not old, but he was getting old. He would have been old sooner than we thought, and age is more cruel than a swift river. There was nothing we could have done. He must have died quickly, without fear. His eyes were quiet. There was a gumminess to her words, so thick and sludgy with sugar that they stuck in her throat. But all the sweetness made the idea of Theo, sprawled out on the flats alone as night descended, that much worse. I pressed the meat of my palms into my eye sockets as dams. 

That night after the fat-bellied wood stove began to cool and we had eaten all the corn cakes with honey, my sister rolled over in her twin bed, and into the two-foot gap between us said that there was something they could have done. They could have crossed the river further down, where the current was weaker, where he wouldn’t have faltered on the hidden boulders. She said that as they were riding away from him, she had seen the bellow of Theo’s ribs moving up and down. As the sun split the clouds and great piles of steam rose up all around his body, she could have sworn she saw his ear twitch.

Mom said that she would ask Philip, our neighbor, if we could use his landing craft to get Theo tomorrow when it was light, as long as the tide hadn’t carried him off in the night. The river was three miles from our cabin, which to my seven-year-old self was a span that fluctuated wildly. Sometimes it was a thousand miles and sometimes it was right next door. That night, with moonlight painted milky-thin over the bay, me and Mira took our mother’s mare, who, in the dark of her stall, was mostly shadow but for the tiny galaxies of her eyes. She let us slip the bridle over her ears and came willingly. Mira sat in front and I latched my arms around her middle. Only once did we become frightened, when a rock on the slope of the beach turned into a hulking bear, then back into a boulder. I had a carrot in one pocket for Theo, if he was well, and a knife in the other, if he was not. I had never had to put anything out of its misery, though I knew in the abstract that you were supposed to slice something vital in the throat. I had never fed a once-dead horse a carrot, but in the moonlight it seemed possible, and a kernel of hope sat beneath my sternum.

We rode for what felt like a very long time along the berm where the sedge grasses tickled our knees. We were a beast with three heads that bobbed in tandem. In that grainy midnight half-world, in which we were normally not allowed, we finally came upon the rise of Theo on the flats. He seemed peaceful and somehow exactly how he should be: sleek and wet like a seal. I held my hand in front of his nostril but there was no warmth. Without speaking we gathered the poison flowers of beach peas, blue and purple, and wove them into his mane and tail. He smelled clean and briny. I left the carrot by his nose and kissed the cold slab of his neck which crawled with sand-fleas, already undertaking the massive work of breaking him down.

 In the morning, Mom collected Theo’s body before we were even awake. She did not comment on his adornment. Perhaps the long tentacles of daybreak had picked the flowers from him as delicately as we had placed them. Philip strung him up by his hind legs and butchered him over a tarp on his lawn. Mom wouldn’t let us watch, but later braised his rump and back muscles into a thick stew with carrots and potatoes. She ladled it nervously into bowls and told me that I didn’t need to eat any if I didn’t want to. “Sweetie, it’s not right or wrong, either way. But remember, it’s only food.” He tasted sweet, almost gamey, and wild. The lump in my throat made it hard to swallow his meat, but I knew it was penance for the good, harrowing story he would become: a story that would be told over and over, across meals and around campfires to impress our friends, as if we had a duty to its keeping. As if he would never be safe, even in death.

—

Nikki Ervice is a writer and professional dancer from Alaska who lives in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in New Limestone Review, New World Writing, Salon and elsewhere.