By Nikki Bausch

The deceased stand ready by their open tombs, like salespeople at mall kiosks. They’re misunderstanding the point of my visit to their old cemetery in the southern part of Munich, as the dead tend to do, as I’m walking through rows of tombs. The ornate 19^th century tombs have been thrown open, empty and pristine, as if the last two centuries had never passed. Their lush, spotless interiors are an illusion—a clever sales gimmick. I have so many questions about how the dead could clean up after themselves. Technically, they’re decaying, and wouldn’t that add to the mess? Well, I can only speculate. Maybe it was magic spells uttered for hours in a haunting chorus that removed the stains, candles burning to the ground until the wind snuffs the flames out like a timer. Maybe the ghosts can possess the strongest bodied of the living to scrub their tombs with lye until the job is done.

In the caskets, there are only damp, golden leaves, which are falling from the trees. A storm shakes the flora around us. My camera with its expensive lens is still around my neck. I know I’m dreaming, because I would never be so careless about my camera in real life. I’m restless, my body lying in Vienna, but my soul has been transported back to this old cemetery I visited months ago.

I know I shouldn’t be walking around in pursuit of photos all night in Bavaria. I need to be well-rested so in the morning I can get up and go to my classes. Despite this awareness, I’m stuck in my shooting mindset. I’m trying to keep an eye out for the gate to leave, but this situation gushes with “spooky aesthetic”, so I am stuck in a loop of “Carpe Diem.” The owners of the tombs step in front of me trying to mingle, as if we’re at a cocktail party with no cocktails. We don’t speak the same German anymore due to major linguistic changes, so the dead must rely on grand gestures to communicate with me.

I’m approached by a man in an elaborate three-corner hat complete with ostrich feather. I yell over the wind, which is picking up, “Ich schaue nur.” I’m just looking. The raindrops plopping on my head are also disorienting. He shrugs and looks down at his silk stockings. I realize he’s shy. He must not believe in the product he’s selling, or this is only a summer job for him.

An elderly woman nearby stops me. She wears a too-white coif with wiry, gray curls visible beneath. This disheveled hairstyle clashes with her floral-print, lavender Rococo gown and its wide pannier accentuating her hips. It seems as if in the hundreds of years that have passed, she has lost the elaborate wig intended to complete her very trendy look. Her grip, as she grabs my arm is ice-cold and it startles me. She leads me to a tomb along the wall marked by two cherubs, who may have lost their heads but at least nobody had clipped their wings. Her movements are like a court dance, as she attempts to call to my attention the burgundy velvet interior—like the padded chairs in a palace—and the dainty, peach silk pillow.  She smiles and nudges me toward her tomb. She’s charismatic, even without a voice. Yet, there is a darkness about her, something not quite right. I realize, studying her for a while longer, that she has no eyes. I glance around and see the others also only have dark pits where their eyes should be. This sight is not disgusting, over-the-top gory. It’s unsettling though, like staring down a well.

I move on to the next tomb, hoping the gates will come into view soon. The residents along the walls plead for my attention. I know they want me to lay down, test the firmness of each coffin, roll around to see if it’s to my liking, and I don’t want to. I don’t trust the sales-ghosts. I bet they would even bamboozle me into buying the extra warranty too. Is this my punishment for all the years I wasted in retail, selling cheap junk at a mark-up to the unwitting, future stars of TV docuseries about American hoarding? There are plenty of other tourists of the macabre, some with cameras hanging off straps around their necks like me. The dead peddle their burial plots to these other wanderers too. I think, I would have sold my soul to Mephistopheles for this kind of foot traffic in my salesgirl days, if only to get the district managers off my back.

“Look, I just want to make it to the Naschmarkt in Vienna and eat my weight in falafel for dinner time tomorrow,” I hear a 50-something-year-old man say, “Plus, I still gotta visit Falco.” I turn in the direction of the New Jersey-accented voice. The man’s jorts and green-stained, lawn-mowing sneakers seem out of place in this setting.

I agree with this man. I wouldn’t want to be riding the train to Vienna with my mortality on my mind either. I’d rather be dreaming of apple strudel and Wiener Melanges in the morning, and Schnitzel with liters of beer in the evening. If there were a comment box for suggestions for the sales-ghosts, I would have told them they’d have better luck selling postcards or magnets, things that would fit in hand luggage. A tomb is a bit too much of a long-term commitment for someone on holiday.

            The world spins around me like I’m on a cobblestone carousel. Instead of mirrors around the ring gear, the platform circles around the red brick lapidarium and its arched entrances. The busts of historical figures within stare out at me with countenances of stoic indifference, as the platform turns. The platform stops and another resident of the cemetery ushers me away to look at his used eternal bed. He is confident like he thinks I have his name on my dance card . . .or even a dance card. I’m drowsy and my body is heavy. I’m quickly losing control over the situation.  

This man has dark hair pulled back in a tiny ponytail with a satin ribbon. He wears tight, knee-length breeches, a double-breasted blue velvet jacket with tails. There are buckles on his pointed-toe shoes like the pilgrims of my Pocahontas nightmares. He leads me to his double tomb, the lid vaulted with pulleys like door knockers, which hang inverted like nipple rings, as the lid rests, thrown open. A lion statue stands on a pillar, frozen yet forever pacing, and there to guard the occupants like the family dog. Suddenly, I’m being laid to rest, staring up at the sky as it turns violet, like we’ve skipped over a scene. I don’t remember lying down. Raindrops continue to fall on me, and they should be blurring my vision. I can still see as the residents gather around the tomb, as I sink lower. Their motions are celebratory. Some partner up and waltz. Others leap up and down, in giddy silence, their silk stockings falling around their ankles. We’ve made another sale, I imagine them cheering. Hades can’t deny us our bonuses again this month.

This isn’t a fate or plot I would have chosen for myself. If I could have chosen, I would go for a tomb with a giant, feminine angel sitting atop it like it’s her throne, wings outstretched and dripping with mildew, her expression as fierce and confident as I have wished I could be over the years—and most important, something ground level. I’m so annoyed because this dream experience doesn’t help with my fear of being buried alive. Still, I don’t want to be a Karen and make a scene.

—

Nikki Bausch is from St. Louis, Missouri and has been pursuing her masters degree in Vienna, Austria. She is a visual artist currently working on a cemetery documentation project for temporary graves, and has written work forthcoming in Cauldron Anthology, Burnt Breakfast, Bandit Fiction, and Peculiars. She also writes in German and translates from Czech to English.  

By Lynsey May

The first time I let Eva go to the beach alone I stood at the window, then the door, for the entire hour she was gone. I’d sent her with her pink watch carefully tucked into the buttoned top pocket of her denim shirt. We confirmed the position the hands would be in when it was time for her to return. She wouldn’t talk to strangers, she knew to dip no more than her toes, and yet I couldn’t settle.

She was barely two minutes late. I smiled widely and wiped the sweat from my palms.

‘Did you have fun?’

She nodded. I was pleased and uncomfortable, also. Now she’d proved she could entertain herself at the beach, I’d let her go again and again. And I did, guilty and grateful for the solitude. Over the next few days, she followed instructions perfectly and came back at the appointed hours for her slick of suncream and handful of carrot sticks.

I was working my way through the boxes we’d packed together, trying to decide what I’d relinquish to John, now that he’d abandoned our new life together for one of his own. It was a relief to have the place to myself as I pulled apart our memories but the relief at hearing the sandy thud of Eva’s small, Velcro sandals being hit against the doorframe was greater.

On Thursday, I sliced vegetables for a lasagne. My soft-hearted daughter had violently taken against meat a few years ago.  Even Quorn was a stretch for her, we had to spell out the words on the box until she was convinced it really was made out of fungus or whatever the hell it actually is. I snuck mouthfuls of chorizo or pate whenever I had the chance.

Dinner was in the oven and I was wiping at the counter when I noticed the heaviness of the salt in the air. The windows were open and the sun high. I pictured banks of seaweed, drying on the sand and wondered if Eva would enjoy popping and crunching the pods with her soft heels. I would go down to the water with her again soon. Not that afternoon though, nor the next, because I was busy claiming our home. It was a flat that felt like a house. Built into a steep hill, we had two floors and our own front door – you could almost forget about the families that lived below us. John said he wanted Eva to grow up by the sea. I agreed, imagining us playing together in the sand. Maybe, when we’d signed the deed, he’d already known he wouldn’t be joining us.

There were several piles in the living room. One, I intended to pack up in the van John would send for it. Another would go to a charity shop in one of the bigger towns nearby. The last held the things that he’d requested but that I would keep. This was the smallest but also the most shameful of the piles.

I was deliberating over a book when I heard small feet pattering above me and a strange, shuffling noise. I shouted up and she replied. The words were indistinct, her tone un-panicked. I ran my finger over the soft ruffles of the paperback. It still had a faint tang of smoke, left over from John’s younger years. I heard Eva retrace her steps and the delayed whack of sandals against wood.

She came to me and I didn’t tell her off for the sand she’d have tracked into the house. I kissed the hot parting of her hair and gave her a packet of raisins. How she absorbed sunlight, my dark, darling child. She took her snack and pattered back out the door without glancing at the possessions littering the floor before me.

That night, she didn’t want a story. I blinked, agreed and shut her door behind me quickly. Downstairs, I read a few pages of John’s old paperback and barely took in a word. I was remembering where it’d once sat with several others, on his mantelpiece for visitors like me to admire.

The more time I spent trying to excise John, the harder I found it to imagine opening the front door and following Eva to the beach. I ordered our shopping from the big supermarket two towns over and sat by the hearth in the evening, although it was too warm still to think of lighting a fire.

John called and left a message, wondering how I was getting on and whether I’d be sending the things soon and if I’d thought about when he might get to see our daughter again. I drank a glass of wine that night. The kind of glass that never quite empties, because the bottle is sitting on the floor beside it. John had to be good about the time I was taking because he was in the wrong, leaving us the way he had. Leaving us just when we were on our way to reinvent ourselves at the seaside. But no matter how bad his behaviour, it wouldn’t buy me infinite patience. His insistences would soon become firmer.

The piles were not the real problem. There was something much more precious at stake than a bunch of tat. What I couldn’t do was work out what was best for Eva and whether it was fair to keep a cheater in her life. Another cheater.

I took another mouthful and went to tuck her in although I knew I shouldn’t. She’d been sleeping more lightly recently and though I’d learned already where all of the creaking boards lay, I wasn’t convinced I could avoid them with the cheap red thinning my blood.

The warm sugar smell of her breath was drowned by something darker, deeper. I peeked into the yellow bucket sitting on her desk, braced for the chitter of small, shelled legs I’d grown used to coming home with her and John when they’d been exploring. It was empty.

I left her sleeping, resolving to clean the next day, and retreated to my chair. I was late to bed and woke with a headache. Eva hurried her cornflakes and, noticing her squint out the window, I asked if she’d made many friends.

‘They’re all weird here.’

‘To them, you’re a little different too, but you’ll get used to each other. You’ll acclimatise. We both will.’

She shrugged her tiny shoulder, had a last spoonful of smooshy cornflakes and left. I riffled through John’s things, thinking about asking Eva if she wanted to bake biscuits with me after lunch. There were no eggs in the fridge and, feeling parched despite several glasses of water, I decided to forget baking and take a bath instead. There was sand on the bottom of the tub and it rasped against by back like a big cat’s tongue. My head lolled against the edge and I created my own waves in the still water. Twunk went Eva’s sandals. I reached up to grip the side of the tub, my hand steaming against the porcelain.

‘Everything alright?’ As always, my clothes were laid out on the floor in order, I could be dressed in under a minute.

‘Yeah,’ she said. I could hear her sweaty feet stick-peeling to the floorboards as she passed. She was still in her room when I finally heaved myself from the cooling water. I was drying myself when her door snicked again. She was waiting for me in the hall.

‘You didn’t have fun at the beach?’ She shrugged. ‘Shall we have some lunch then?’

We sat among the boxes and Eva peeled open her peanut butter sandwich and frowned at what she saw.

‘Not to madam’s satisfaction?’

‘Can we have ham tomorrow?’

‘Ham? Real ham?’ To my surprise she nodded. ‘The kind that comes from a pig?’ This nod was shorter and sharper. ‘If you’re sure.’

Ten minutes later, she was back out with a smear of Factor 40 on her nose but I’d barely picked up the first photo album when I heard her open the front door again. I climbed the stairs in time to see her emerging from her room, closing the door firmly behind her.

‘Forget something?’ I asked and she nodded and sidled past me, her hands empty.

When bedtime approached, she asked me if I would read her a story on the sofa. Comfortable in my seat by the fireplace, I let her snuggle in beside me. It was the same the next night. And the next.

I’d bought a case of wine, there was no point placing an order at the supermarket unless it was a big one, and I drank and stared into the place a fire would later burn. I woke parched, despite the glasses of water I took to bed with me, and although hours were lost, it felt as though I was barely sleeping. I often stirred in the night to feel Eva’s arms round my neck and the smell of fish in her hair.

‘Bathtime for you tomorrow, missy.’ I whispered through my salt-stung lips.

Over the next few days I noticed her pottering back and forth constantly, always running home not long after she left. I hoped she wasn’t being teased, down at the water’s edge, then worried she might be checking up on me. I would go with her. Tomorrow, the day after. We’d paddle together. We’d build a village and smash it. I’d clear the floor and clean the flat and start getting out of the house.

The summer holidays scuttled onwards and I should’ve been making the most of every moment but my head ached and when she left for the beach, I waved and said nothing. Eva was in a contrary mood and I didn’t blame her. Still, it was infuriating to watch the way she picked at her food. The ham ended up in the bin. So did the chicken breast and meatballs she’d insisted she wanted. Even the turkey dinosaurs were consigned to the black pit.

‘That’s it,’ I said. ‘We’re back to meat-free tomorrow.’

Her eyes glossed and in another second or two I would’ve reached out and hugged her but the phone rang and my hand reflexively reached for it instead. It was John. His voice was a cold wave against my belly and he wondered how I was doing and whether I remembered that the van would be coming the next day. He didn’t have to cancel and rebook it again, did he? I’d had such a lot of time.

‘It’s not one person job really, though, is it?’

‘I thought you’d prefer it that way. When can I see Eva? I miss her.’

‘We’re not ready.’

I held in me the opportunity to cast him off or keep him tied to us. Eva held it. I could take the gamble, let them swab her cheek and do the same to him and rank their slugs, snails, puppy dog’s tails and love of crustaceans side by side to see how they measured up. That several-month-long slip up I’d almost forgotten about might be the answer to this riddle. We might never have to see him again, if I was willing to reveal something of myself.

She was back in her room by the time I hung up the phone and it was almost bedtime. An urge to break the rules surged and I decided we’d go for a paddle and see if the chip shop had ice cream to sell us. I stood and plucked the empty wine bottle from the table. The bin lid was already on its descent when the incongruity registered. The turkey dinosaurs weren’t there. I lifted the lid again. Gone. All that remained was a scattering of breadcrumbs over the rubbish.

I climbed the stairs to Eva’s room with my fingers clenching remorsefully. I remembered a day from my own childhood, when I was left at the table with a plate of stew until the fat congealed and the gravy grew a thick skin.

I pushed her door fiercely, ignoring the rules I’d set about knocking, with an apology rising in my throat. She was crouched on the floor by her bed, the turkey dinosaurs in her hand. Leaning out from under the overhang of her pink duvet was a creature half as big as my daughter, with bone-white cheeks and needle sharp teeth. Its scales shimmered in the evening sun and the spine of fine bones rose when it saw me. I screamed and Eva fell backwards so that she sat firmly on the floor. Her expression was petulant but the gesture one of pure relief.

I reached out and pulled her to me, away from the monster under her bed. The duvet blew up on the current of air and I saw the fragments of crab shells and a smear of the rich tomato sauce from yesterday’s meatballs. The creature glared.

I’d glimpsed something cold blooded and hollow boned, now I saw arms and soft hair like the smoothest of sea ferns and I smelled the stink of the ocean. I felt the wrap of dreams and terrors and was glad that sometimes this mixture of skin and scale spent the night with me, that it curled itself round my neck and not Eva’s. I was shaking. The creature’s thin teeth grew more prominent. It looked as though it was grinning.

‘She’s lost, ‘ Eva said.

I dragged my gaze from the creature to my daughter, my baby girl who’d grown old enough to lie.

‘If she’s lost, she needs to go home.’ The thing was listening hard, tail twitching and sharp fingers scratching the floorboards. ‘Shall we take her? Can we do that Eva, can we take her home safe?’

My daughter stared at me so intently I blushed, every doubt and glass of wine and untruth burning on my cheeks.

‘It’s good of you to look after her,’ I said. ‘But she should be with her family, shouldn’t she? With her mummy?’

The silence that followed was dark and fathomless. Then, like a shaft of sun penetrating the ocean depths, Eva nodded and stood.

The creature quivered and I, horror prickling my stomach, looked for something to put it in. My daughter grabbed the bucket John bought her and I shook my head, tipping the soft toys out of a red crate without taking my eyes from the boney bundle. Eva dropped her bucket and spade, scooped the creature up with both hands and plonked it in the crate. It twitched and curled against the plastic.

‘Your mummy misses you,’ she placated. I said nothing.

Eva carried the crate in a hug and I rested my hand on her back as we walked carefully down the stairs and into the warm evening sun. Resilient, duplicitous and kind hearted as only a child can be, this girl was all mine. There was no need to lie.

—

Lynsey May lives, writes and loves in Edinburgh. She received a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award in 2013, a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship in 2015 and a spot as Cove Park’s Emerging Scottish Writer in 2016. Her short fiction has been published in various journals and anthologies, including The Stinging Fly, Gutter and New Writing Scotland.

By Debra Jo Immergut

Poinsettias, jonquils, and gladioli are flowers that would never, in real life, bloom in the same place at the same time. But here at the carnage they do. In blaring color without rot or wilt. And this is also real life.

The carnage was, for the 104 years before now, just another bend in the state highway, echoing the course of a nearby brook. The garden of impossible flowers, the bed of plastic mistakes and little American flags, sprouted a few years ago in July. It occupies 20 yards of shoulder just across the road from the shut motel. The Tip Top, the motel was called, and still is, because its splintered sign is still there, nailed on a cross by the side of the road.

Crosses dot the carnage too, by the way. Smallish ones made by hand, from strips of white plastic lattice.

The only other item of interest on this bend in Route 10 is a farmhouse, plain-faced, almost shame-faced, with its stingy windows and blank concrete stoop. No porch for sitting, a front door missing its knob. But whoever troubles with a front door in New England? Nobody. The only door you’d use is in back, and you’d never use it at this particular house, because Jorman Majewski, its owner, is an old man seldom seen in town, and when he is seen, no one is particularly pleased about it.

So it’s just a bend in a state road between towns. Tourists drive there, heading from the Notch into the Whisper Mountains, those tourists who are looking for that sort of thing.

The last few summers, it was mostly touring bikers, rolling through in clusters, their combusted thunder causing our windows’ caulk to craze, and now the bikers seem to have disappeared as well. After the carnage.

But this story begins only three nights after. Too soon then to tell. And Evie Jannings pointed out that night that fewer road-trippers is better for the planet, burning their fossil fuels as they powered up the mountains.  She said this while sipping a grape slurry purchased at the slurry booth. The carnival was in town, same as every summer, and we all of us in the age group 15 to 21 or so were spending every night wandering around in the blinking yellow and red glow of the bulbs, buying a bottomless bucket of kettle corn, a cherry-ade, a canoe of nachos with cheese elastic. If you are over 21 in this town, you are either at Mooney’s Tavern drinking or you’re home married with a baby and maybe some internet porn. Or, if you’re Evie Janning’s sister Emily, you’re doing summer term at Dartmouth but she was always annoying that way, humblebragging with her free hoodies sent from all the schools chasing her because she won some big science prize and played a horn even though she was born with half an arm. A cornet.

Lucas Dobuck doesn’t even know what a cornet is. To be fair, most of us don’t. Most of us if they hear the word might guess it’s a type of donut. But Lucas Dobuck says to Evie Jannings, climate warming is a libtard hoax. And Evie flung what was left of her slurry at him, but missed, and the splash pattern hit the foot of a carny guy, the one from the balloon darts, who was having a smoke, just a skinny outline and a tiny dot of cool blue e-cig light. In the past two nights we’ve learned that his name is Johnny V. That V is not a Roman numeral by the way, it’s just a V.  We all are well-educated in Roman numerals in this town because the sixth-grade teacher, Mr. Horgan, is a history buff.

Johnny V turned to Evie and said he ought to wail on her ass. We all stared at him, not sure what this meant, and fascinated by his spiral face tattoos and the way his beard twisted into a point that ended in a little wooden bead. Evie, usually over-confident, said nothing and just kind of shrank toward the other kids sitting beside her on a trailer hitch, letting her massive empty cup hide her face.

Lucas Dobuck, maybe as kind of a peace offering, says hey man If you want to score I know where you can. Johnny V laughed. Just because I work the fair you think I’m a drug abuser. I could be an undercover cop, asshole.

So could I, said Lucas. We were impressed by this comeback.

The blue dot wiggled in the dark as Johnny V dragged. His exhaled smoke floated slowly toward the moon, a slice to the northwest.

What’s on offer, he said.

Pretty much whatever, said Riley Ware, who is the drug dealer’s little brother, and should know.

The carnival started to shut down at around 10:45 and by 11 it was deserted. The pack of us, four girls, six boys, and the carny Johnny V, walked down through the wavering dark to where Prospect turns into Depot Street. In towns like ours, streets just change names without warning, have you noticed? Halfway down Depot, set back behind a half-ruined garage, there’s a little shack of a house, the porch floor smashed in the middle like God punched it with his giant fist. We stood in the front yard, moonbeams catching on chrome bits littering the weeds. Riley and Lucas and Johnny V. went inside. The rest of us passed around a vape pen that belonged to Evie, she had driven down with some older kids to Mass and spent some of her Burger King pay on it.

We were standing out there for a long time. Down the black street we saw a clump of something moving, a dark cloud billowing toward us, in and out of the scraps of leafy shadows. As the cloud got closer, we saw it was a group of people. The bikers, we counted seven, which is exactly how many there were, in the carnage. 

Their leather pants squeaked.

They didn’t look at us but we gaped at them. Beards, black eye sockets, thick slow-moving limbs. They dissolved into the murk at the street’s end.

Did you see that, we said to each other. What the hell?

Johnny V came out first and Evie said, we just saw seven bikers go by.

He was shaking a fistfull of pills in his hand like dice he was about to roll. I didn’t hear bikes, he said.

They were walking, she said.

It was messed up, we all agreed, and then Lucas and Riley came out, and we told them, and then Johnny V said, they were zombies, maybe. Looking for young flesh to eat.

Lucas said, you guys are so high.

Not zombies, said Evie. Uneasy spirits. Out for payback.

You guys, Riley said. My brother doesn’t want us hanging in his yard.

Lucas said, let’s go see Bonbon. Past midnight, if you waited for the last drunk drivers to weave out of Mooney’s, you can catch Bonbon taking out the recyclables and she will sell you a bottle of something out the back door. She is the bartender, French Canadian, hence her name, which is really Candi, but some local joker started calling her Bonbon. Her nose is shaped like a butternut squash, her smile is glassy and broken as windows on an empty old mill. When drunk, she’ll tell you about her hooker days in Quebec City, working the convention center for thousands of dollars (Canadian) per week. She bought the bar from cancer-cursed Bill Mooney with her hooker savings to be near her sister, who married a man from the Notch.

On this night we walked Elm where it turns to Bridge, dead quiet and weird in the speckled darkness, down to Mooney’s. Johnny V peels off without saying goodbye. We got the sense that he was just sick of hanging out with ten teenagers as we watched him stroll down the center of the street, then leap out of the way as one of the drunk drivers, exiting the bar, squealed past him. It looked to be Mayor Scott Priddy, swerving his way back to his townhouse behind the supermarket. Wouldn’t that be everything if the mayor flattened a carny, said Evie. Just for a little extra carnage on top of the carnage.

Carny carnage, I said.

This might be a good moment to explain that Evie is hot and has been since we were in third grade. She outlines her pine-green eyes with black eyeliner. She wears lip gloss that smells like raspberries. Top that with dark bangs and ice-white skin, and she looks like a person from another place. She is even smarter than her one-armed sister at Dartmouth. Her online following is big for a girl from a small-ass town in the New England nowhere.

Also when we were in eight grade she told the school cop that Lucas Dobuck had raped her in the parking lot. Then she changed her mind and said what she meant was that he was staring at her.

So Bonbon came out with a trash bag bulging, kicking it ahead of herself with each step. She saw us there, six boys, four girls, and she said, You monsters hoist this bag up and then we’ll talk. A few of us stepped forward and sent the bag tumbling up into the dumpster, spewing dirty liquid all over us. We were way beyond caring. The church tower just chimed the half hour, so it was 12:30 am. It was almost August. The air stuck to you like soggy tissue paper.  And now we all smelled like a stew of sweat, cigarette ash, fry grease and booze. Yeah, disgusting.

Bonbon ended up selling us three dusty bottles of bottom-shelf tequila. This is a town that hasn’t adopted Mexican things. We might be the last place in the USA where ketchup still outsells salsa.

Evie said we should find somewhere special to drink it.

Riley said I know where.

And that is how we ended up among the flowers. They stabbed our butts when we sprawled out on top of them, passing the bottles around. I feel violated by this gladiola, says Evie. She yanked it out of its little plastic ring holder and threw it into the dark woods.

Did your brother really sell that shit to the flatbed guy? Lucas asked Riley.

The flatbed guy lived in Darlington, two towns over. He was high on oxy driving a flatbed truck, empty after delivering a backhoe to a quarry. Why did he happen to swerve, just as a pack of thirteen bikers where headed toward him, southbound? How did the flatbed jack-knife, swiping seven of them off the road like mowerblade cutting grass? Like the side of a hand swiping flies?

Two of the bikers were cut in two. The rest, just fatally tossed or squished.

The carnage. We talked about it as we let the tequila burn our gullets and make our stomachs churn. Ellis Bottenham puked quietly behind several flags.

Maddy Arnold’s father was a state trooper and saw it all. He said there was a severed head on Jorman Majewski’s lawn. He said that Jorman yelled at the cops to get the head off his lawn, but they had to photograph it, staring up at the sky with its eyes open, glaring at the sun unblinking for an entire afternoon. We could all just imagine it.

The carnage happened at 11 in the morning. The bikers had been headed for a picnic site at the Basin, a dingle of puny waterfalls that’s part of the state park. We used to go there for outings toward the end of the school year when kids could no longer sit still and the teachers had to get us out of dodge.

Maddy’s father told her there were intestines on the road, and feet, and just a human ooze that looked like butterscotch pudding.

When she said this, the puking became a bit of an epidemic. Five or six of us combat-crawled through the plastic undergrowth to find a private place to lose our lunches.

Riley never did say if his brother sold the shit to the loser trucker from Darlington. The guy was 22, the papers said, and he had a ridiculous lopsided fuckboy haircut that might have been cool like eight years ago.

The bikers were vets, the paper said, it was a reunion trip of some kind and they had all fought together in Iraq. They survived Iraq but not the flatbed on their vacation in the Whisper Mountains.

Lucas said let’s book. It stinks like vomit here and I have an idea.

The carnival at 2 am was still half-lit, like someone forgot to finish the job. Yellow bulbs, in strings, floated like electric bees over the grass field. The snack bars were locked tight, which was a shame because after all the puking and another vape pass-around, we would’ve eaten anything, even those candy apples that are like biting into a sugar-coated ball of wet sand.

Evie said I’m gonna go sleep in the ferris wheel and it sounded like an idea of pure genius. The wheel loomed over the east end of the field, where the grass petered away, and beyond it the ridge rose, the ridge that borders the east edge of the town like a wall, preventing us from seeing the sunrise, keeping our town in shadow until noon. That wall is one reason the town has never grown, and instead stayed nowhere. Shut off to the east, we face backwards, that’s what Mr. Horgan said once, that we face backwards across America, and it sticks with you, when you hear something like that.

The ferris wheel was called the Wagon Wheel and each carriage was painted with a pioneer person and a gold number.

Evie climbed into carriage number 19 and lay on the dirty floor. Lucas climbed up after her. After the rape accusation they seemed to have an on-again off-again thing but who the hell knows. It was probably love. The other carriages were too high up for any of us to reach. Maddy and Ellis made a half hearted attempt to climb into one, her on his shoulders, waggling her arms toward it, but she only caught air and then toppled to the ground and started to cry.  We ran to her, are you ok, as she wailed that she thought her wrist might be broken and Jesse Coffey had taken a junior EMT course so he started trying to tend to her but she was screaming DON”T TOUCH ME and while we were all gathered around this, we hardly noticed that above us the wheel jerked back, the clank of gears grinding.

HEY, cried Evie, what the fuck, as she and Lucas looked down, sailing up into the inky black sky where so many stars watched frigidly. The wheel’s workings screeched, and maybe in the hazy night of summer some trick was being played by the air, but we all swore later that this sound of the rusty gears was drowned out by another enormous one, a great ear-punishing roar echoing off the ridge, like many Harleys being gunned.

Evie and Lucas and the wheel were all moving too fast, and then they were way up at the top. Then a metallic scream cut the night and the wheel jolted to a sudden stop. The cars swung wildly, hinges grating. A few of them turned full circle, upside down, including carriage number 19. It flipped right over.

Evie dangled. Lucas dropped. His shape slipped through the stars. Then his head whacked against one of the wheel’s struts and then he landed at our feet. Yellow and red light reflected in the wetness at his neck, where the broken end of his spine stuck out, pale and jagged as a splintered branch.

We stared at this. Later Maddy said that under the quiet she heard certain soft squeakings. Could have been rats in the carnival trash, could have been the uneasy dressed in their leathers. Jesse swore he saw shadows drifting away through the field, dark smudges against the ridge. We don’t know.

Because for the rest of us there was nothing but Lucas. A sight we will never forget no matter how long we live or how the world changes, if we end up living Mad Max style in a wasteland or being controlled by Russians. If there is a mind-erasing technology I’m sure we will all try to use it to erase that mangled pile of Lucas.

You guys are so fucked, someone said, and then we turned to see Johnny V. crashing out of a nearby Winnebago in boxer shorts and bare feet, his entire chest covered by a tattooed picture of the Madonna.

He looked up at Evie as he stumbled toward the wheel. He reached his hands toward the big rusted levers. He yanked one and the giant wheel began to putter and slowly turn.

He looked at Riley. You do this?

Riley held up his hands. I didn’t touch a thing. He looked scared.

Four kids back in Bangor and this is my job lost right here, you little shits. Johnny V. shook his head, turned his face away from all of us and didn’t say another word.

Evie was sobbing and moaning, clinging to a rail in the upturned car as it wafted down. When it was about eight feet off the ground she let go and dropped into the grass, rolled up in a ball, like a little caterpillar just dropped from a leaf.

And he was right. That carnival has never come to town since. The bikers steer to the far side of the ridge or just stay south. Where Elm changes to Main, the town set up a bench named for Lucas Dobuck, and it’s the only Dobuck around now, because the rest of them moved away. Evie went to Dartmouth, full ride. She is a junior this year and never comes back, not even for Thanksgiving. Riley’s brother still sells out of the shack behind the old garage and we go there a lot, because how else do you expect us to deal. We don’t know anything. Except that the garden lives and lives, rain, shine, and all winter long, blooming stupidly under however many feet of snow.

—

Debra Jo Immergut is the author of the novel You Again, published by Ecco/HarperCollins in July 2020, and The Captives, a 2019 Edgar Award finalist for Best Debut Novel by an American Author, published in the US by Ecco and in over a dozen other countries. She has also published a collection of short fiction, Private Property (Random House). Her essays and stories have appeared in American Short Fiction, Narrative, and The New York Times, among others. She is a recipient of Michener and MacDowell fellowships and lives in western Massachusetts. debrajoimmergut.com

By Daniel Beauregard

We’d just see him occasionally in the kitchen or the common areas every once in a while, at least the first two weeks. He’d be just sort of putzing around like he didn’t realize we were there at all. The sightings were often brief. You’d turn your back to pour a cup of coffee and he’d already have disappeared. It wasn’t until several weeks into his stay that they became more frequent, unexpected. One of us would be brushing our teeth in front of the bathroom mirror and bend down to spit, then suddenly, there he was standing behind us; or, we’d be fucking and go to change positions and he’d be sitting on the corner of the bed, staring. It was kind of bothersome but also kept things interesting—sort of spooky—never knowing when he’d just materialize out of thin air; like having your own little voyeur in the house. We made a game of it, trying to see if we could eat before he floated into the kitchen or finish and throw our clothes back on before he hovered through the door. As he began to materialize more frequently, even that novelty wore off. We soon found ourselves, like it or not, with a permanent house guest. We’d walk in the door, home from work, and there he’d be, in the kitchen sitting at the table or in the living room stretched out with his feet upon the sofa. For no apparent reason at all, he’d taken a liking to me. So it soon went from finding him in the common areas at all times of the day to having him attached at my hip.

 Sera of course found it hilarious. Who wouldn’t, really? After all, seeing the psychic was my idea; clearly, it’d blown up in my face. But at the time, it seemed like fun; something different for us to try, spontaneous. There was a flyer tacked onto some old announcement board in one of the town’s many coffee shops. We found ourselves in front of the place a few days later, ringing the bell and waiting for the door to open. We stood there a minute or two and were just turning to leave when it swung inwards. A soft voice, hidden by shadows, asked us what it was we wanted. I held up the flyer and she stepped aside and waved us in. There was a small table with an ancient, moth-eaten table runner, atop which sat a cloudy crystal ball, a plate with some dying candle nubs and a bowl of what looked like herbs, bones, and other odds and ends.

As we sat, the woman cleared her throat. She had this sort of imperceptible quality about her, which made it difficult to determine what age she might have been. But when she folded her hands onto the table as she sat down, they looked ancient. She motioned us to take a seat and make ourselves comfortable and reached beneath the table, pulling out a cheap cigar box and placing it next to the crystal ball. She opened the box slowly, her gnarled hands pulling out a stack of dog-eared polaroid photos and spreading them out upon the table. Each one had a name and age pasted upon them with a white label. Go ahead and take a look, she said, then choose one that calls you, she said in a soft voice. We looked at each of the photos. They were men, mostly—middle-aged—a few women and children mixed in. Sera touched each one and settled upon an ordinary looking guy with brown hair and plain features, like one would imagine Biff Loman from Miller’s Death of a Salesman.

I nodded and Sera slid the picture forward.

So what’s the deal with this anyways? I asked skeptically. The psychic thought for a moment before answering. Think of it as sort of an Air BnB for wandering spirits, she replied. Sera scoffed and said under her breath: do ghosts even take vacations? I squeezed her hand under the table. The woman didn’t seem to notice. Alright you two, she said. Hold hands and clear your mind of negative thoughts. Be at ease and breathe deeply. You’re inviting a wandering spirit into your home, so it’s important to make them feel as comfortable as you would any other house guest.

We both did as we were told. 

Before I closed my eyes, I saw the woman caress the photo and reach behind her, pulling out a mason jar from a nearby shelf and unscrewing the lid. There was a sort of greenish blue goop inside and she scooped out a generous portion with two fingers—it had the consistency of Vaseline or hair gel—then slopped it onto the candle in front of her. For a second or two, the flame grew, changing from black, to blue, to green, then returning to the soft yellow glow it had been when we’d come into the place. A few minutes later she said some words in a language neither Sera nor I could understand and the whole thing was over. We paid and left and that was that. On the way out, she called after us, Now if you have any issues with your house guest—any issues at all—don’t hesitate to get in touch.

*

Weeks went by without any sort of apparition. We’d forgotten about the whole thing until one day we came home from shopping. The alarm system was going off, which wasn’t unusual—we had frequent false alarms back then—but when we opened the door and came into the kitchen Sera and I dropped our grocery bags, stunned. Floating naked before us was the man from the photo, semi-translucent—we could see through him to the wall behind—the resemblance was unmistakable. Without acknowledging us, he floated toward us quickly. Both Sera and I sidestepped before he could pass through us and he turned the corner and floated down the hallway into the living room. By the time we’d gathered our wits to follow him he’d already dematerialized, leaving us both to wonder if what we’d seen was real or not.

Soon the sightings became more frequent. After the first few apparitions, we spent the coming weeks on edge, nerves frazzled until we grew used to them. We’d installed an EMF meter next to the thermostat in the hallway that led to the kitchen. It beeped infrequently and didn’t seem to work most of the time, even when he was hovering right next to it. Once we’d gotten used to sightings, we were thrilled; it was exhilarating. Neither Sera nor I could help mentioning it to several of our closest friends. But the ghost was never around when we wanted him to be; it’s like he knew he’d been scheduled to perform. Every time we had a dinner party, the EMF meter would beep and we’d run into the hallway with our guests, explaining what the EMF meter did, how it indicated the presence of a spiritual phenomenon. All we received were rolled eyes or feigned attempts at politeness, likely leaving them wondering about our sanity. No one ever believed us. The dinner parties soon stopped, along with much of our social exploits. We felt like outcasts, like the ghost had made fools of us, which enraged me.

Things went rapidly downhill from there.

Each morning, Sera got ready for work and left the house as quickly as she could. I took my time. There was never any reason to rush. Those days, our house guest never left my side. He followed me everywhere I went, floating alongside me at work through the low row of cubicles, passing through them as if they were nothing as I made my way to my desk. He’d hover there beside me all day, bobbing up and down. If I left to take a piss, he’d follow. When I went to lunch with coworkers, he’d follow. I began unraveling at a rapid pace, constantly talking to myself, or the ghost rather. People at the office took notice. Before too long I had a breakdown, I won’t go into details now. Let’s just say it was a shameful loss of control. My boss suggested I take an extended leave of absence until I had a chance to get “the help I needed,” whatever that was. By this time, Sera had become noticeably disgusted by the whole matter. Soon thereafter, I was relegated to the guest room to spend my nights, with him always watching over me, floating there or sitting solemnly on the edge of the bed. As my relationship with Sera frayed even more, I noticed something rather odd. The more time I spent with him, the less translucent he became, like he was slowing gaining his old form, turning into a real person again. Every time I tried to light the burner on the stove he’d appear instantaneously to blow the match out; this put me further over the edge. I broke down one morning trying to scramble some eggs, screaming at him as he floated there, a strange sort of look on his face. Sera rushed down the stairs, thinking all hell had broken loose. When she saw me on the floor in such a pathetic state, she drew a long deep sigh and said, Don’t you think you ought to go back to that psychic and tell her we have a problem here? She took pity on me, helping me off the floor. For the first time in what seemed like months, we embraced. Go see her today, Sera said, and tell her he’s not welcome anymore.

I nodded, then she snatched her keys off the table and headed out the door to work.

*

It took me some time to find the place again, as it was hidden in an alleyway off the main drag. When I finally did, the door was locked. I knocked softly, no response. I waited around a minute or so and knocked more forcefully, not stopping until I heard a voice scream from inside. A moment later she appeared and said, Oh, it’s you, come in, and I followed her into the dingy little room. She bade me sit down in the seat opposite her at the small table and without waiting for an explanation said, Problems with your house guest, eh? I nodded. We want him out, I said. He’s no longer welcome. Without going into too much detail, I told her how he seemed to have grown attached to me and never left my side. How it was ruining my relationship with my wife and I was at my wits end. How every time I lit a match to light the stove he appeared and blew it out instantly. She nodded. He died in a fire, she said, then continued, if you want him gone, I can do something to help, but it’s a little out of the ordinary. I’m willing to do anything, I replied, I’ve lost my job, I’m sleeping in the spare room…

She held her hand up as if she understood, then said, stand up and take down your pants. Excuse me? I asked, confused. Listen, this spirit has attached itself to you and I need something from you—your essence—in order to perform a ritual and rid you of him. I rose to leave, thinking she was nuts. Then she reached over and grabbed my hand. You want him gone don’t you? she asked. I nodded desperately. This will only take a minute. I promise, no one will ever know. It’s the only way.

I don’t know why I believed her. Part of me wanted to run, but the other part of me needed my old life back. So I stood and pulled my pants and underwear down to my knees. I watched as the psychic reached over and grabbed a pair of rubber gloves from a nearby shelf and a mason jar. She put the gloves on, then held my semi-flaccid cock in her hand, pumping until it became hard. A minute later, I shot off into the jar she was holding. Despite the strangeness of it all, I have to admit, it felt good, it being the first sexual encounter I’d had since I began sleeping in the spare room. She pulled the gloves off and tossed them in the trash like a practiced nurse, then plucked a few Kleenex from a box on the shelf and handed them to me. I wiped myself down and that was that.

He should begin disappearing, she said. It may take some time but it’ll work. Thanks, I guess, I replied, not really knowing what else to say after getting a hand job from a psychic who kept my sperm in a mason jar. I got up and she walked me to the door and opened it. Just a minute, she said, and ran behind to a shelf, pulling out an old Polaroid camera. Before I realized what she was doing, she snapped a photo. Satisfied customer, she said and laughed, shaking the picture back and forth to let it develop. Outside, the bright sunlight shined in my eyes and I staggered down the alleyway, trying to get my bearings after the odd experience. She shouted after me, Don’t worry, sooner or later you’ll give up the ghost. Her shout terminated in a loud laugh that followed me down the alleyway into the open air of main street. The whole experience left me far too baffled to read too much more into it at the time.

*

After several weeks, Biff (that’s what we’d started calling him) became more translucent, like the psychic said, although he was still as present as ever. One day, Sera and I found ourselves together in the kitchen, an unusual occurrence, as she’d often be up and out the door before I’d woken up. She was washing the dishes from the night before and broke a glass, slicing open her hand. Blood dripped onto the floor off her palm. Before she had time to grab a towel, Biff materialized and began licking her wound, then crouched down to lick up the drops of blood that’d fallen onto the floor. Sera shrieked and ran upstairs. I left Biff in the kitchen, finishing his meal and followed Sera into our room. She’d already dragged a suitcase out of the closet and was frantically stuffing clothes into it as I pleaded with her not to leave. I kept stammering, but the psychic said…the psychic said he’d leave…but she ignored me. I kept pleading with her and she turned at one point and said, I don’t give a fuck what the psychic said, I’ve had it. With that she zipped up the suitcase, carried it downstairs. As she made her way out the door I noticed Biff had dematerialized. I’ll send someone to pick up the rest of my things, she said, slamming the door behind her.

For the rest of the day, Biff remained out of sight; perhaps he knew he’d done something wrong; more likely though, he’d gotten what he’d needed. In a frenzy, not knowing what else to do, I stormed out of the house into the street, walking through town in a half daze until I found the alleyway. I began frantically banging on the door of the psychic’s place, but no matter how loud or how long I hammered there was no reply. At one point, an old woman who lived in the apartment above the place stuck her head outside and asked me who I was and what I was doing there. I told her and she replied, no one’s occupied that place for years. Before slamming her window shut I heard her mumble, fucking nutbag.

I waited a few more minutes, uselessly hoping she’d been wrong and that the psychic would open the door. The place, I then noticed, did seem unoccupied: the hand-painted sign on the glass door chipped away into imperceptibility; the curtains moth-eaten, faded a light pink from decades of unfiltered sunlight. Defeated, I gave up and staggered home. Biff was in the kitchen. He hovered around me all day and gave me no peace until finally, exasperated, I took a knife from the drawer and drew a small slit across my palm, letting the blood drip down onto the floor. He crouched down on all fours and began lapping up the drops of blood then rose and began sucking the blood from my wound, holding my hand with both of his diaphanous arms. I couldn’t feel his touch, but I could feel the blood being drawn out of my body. I realized that if I wanted any respite at all he needed blood, so I began feeding him. But soon it seemed as if I was always feeding him. One look in the mirror and I could tell something would have to give. I spent the days wandering the house, trailed by two ghosts; one Biff, the other, Sera’s spare belongings which she’d never sent for, bits and pieces of our life together. One day it simply became too much. I couldn’t go back to work, I knew that. They’d called and told me, as nicely as they could, that they’d had to fill my position with a temp who’d worked out so well they’d hired him on full time. I did the only thing I could think of: I opened the bottom of the stove—Biff blew out the pilot light—then I cranked the gas and laid there with my head in it, breathing in the rotten egg smell as deeply as I could. I’m not sure how long I drifted in and out, staring through Biff’s ugly, stained translucent feet down onto the dirty kitchen floor. After what seemed like hours, there was an overwhelming darkness one could easily describe as death; of course, it wasn’t.

—

Daniel Beauregard lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in a number of places including Surfaces.cx, Youngmag.io, Harshlit, Ligeia Magazine, Misery Tourism, The Nervous Breakdown, New South, Burning House Press, tragickal, Heavy Feather Review, Always Crashing, sleepingfish, The Fanzine and elsewhere. His chapbook Total Darkness Means No Notifications is forthcoming from Anstruther Press in 2021 and he has previously published two chapbooks of poetry, HELLO MY MEAT and Before You Were Born. Daniel is also a co-founder of OOMPH!, a small press devoted to the publication of poetry and prose in translation. He recently finished a collection of short stories titled Funeralopolis and a novel titled Lord of Chaos and can be reached online @666ICECREAM or www.danieljohnbeauregard.com.

By Haley Swanson

My first memory of Florence is twisted ankles. I’d packed just one pair of boots: light faux leather, popular at the time, but with no tread, causing me to perpetually slip into the generous gaps between cobblestones slick with gutter runoff. The rain’s gloss resembled skin stretched tight over the city’s streets.

+

When the top button of my coat came loose, the pensione owner sewed it back on. I thought Massimo was her husband, but by the end of my semester abroad learned they weren’t married and simply lived together with their daughter Martina. When I didn’t wake to the noise of you clacking through the kitchen, arriving for the morning receptionist shift, it was the sound of Martina’s small feet running around in her room above mine.

+

Massimo served pasta in yellow plastic bowls, the kind my mother used to toss salad in back home. I’d eat with my fellow American students, those steaming heaps of primi piatti between us and a bottle of Chianti Joey brought. We’d dole out generous pours into squat wine glasses cloudy with last night’s fingerprints. Luke would then go around to each table—Are you going to eat that?—polishing off lingering pieces of rigatoni, orecchiette and ravioli.

+

There was a mattress showroom next door, its green neon sign bathing my narrow twin bed in an unsettling nightly glow. Perhaps you wouldn’t remember which room was mine; I had to remind you when I was locked out, key stuck and unwilling to turn even under the force of your pocketknife. We stood next to each other in that hallway, at a loss, as the motion sensor lights flicked off one by one.

+

Would you instead remember my first night in the pensione, how you were hanging sheets of paper listing meal times, quiet hours, Massimo’s cell number? You accidently banged your tape gun against my door. I thought someone was knocking and flung it open. You stood there, flyers in one hand, gun in the other, and said: Sorry, just hanging these up.

+

There were tourists everywhere. I was one of them. The Duomo’s lines were long only in spring; in the winter, I’d walk right in and stand in the cathedral’s dark, gaping maw, waiting for the rain to stop.  When the weather turned warm, I’d cover my elbows and knees, answer Yes when asked if I was there to pray.

+

One afternoon I went to what I believed was the Bargello Museum, instead stumbling into a Franciscan service. They didn’t notice me at the back, pressing myself to the oak paneling and listening to their Italian hymns ping pong between walls.

+

When I did find the Bargello, I spent hours this way: nearly toe to toe with Michelangelo’s Bacchus, staring into his unseeing eyes, his slightly parted mouth, grapes tumbling from his hair.

+

We studied the sculpture in philosophy class. My teacher asked us: Do you think you are free in your decisions?

+

Then there was the Bacchus at Pitti Palace, nestled deep in Boboli Garden. There are so many versions of him, so many versions of you—but enough of you for now.

+

Chiesa di Santa Margherita de’ Cerchi: a boom box on the alter playing Gregorian chants on repeat, a basket of notes left by people who feel themselves to be in unrequited love reminiscent of Beatrice and Dante. Who knows if this chapel was actually the site of their meeting; I was always skeptical of the nearby boulder where it was said Dante sat and sketched.

+

Caffè Cavour: the tin bar, same men lined up along it each morning, papers tucked under their arms, tipping espresso shots down their open throats. I couldn’t talk myself out of the caffè latte I ordered daily before lunch, though the thought of milk at that hour truly disgusted Italians. The barman tolerated my e una pasticceria per favore, eventually bringing both the coffee and croissant without asking.

+

Piazza San Marco: pigeons on the benches next to Molly and me as we breathlessly reach into a white wax bag stained at the bottom from two warm muffins with Nutella at their centers. The number seven bus pulls up, and then back out again. I can still hear it: La prossima fermata é Fiesole.

+

I would buy a chocolate bar after class, eat the whole thing while walking to the Ponte Santa Trinita—my favorite of the bridges. I used to number them in my head when I couldn’t sleep at night, beginning with yours: Ponte Amerigo Vespucci, Ponte Alla Carraia, Ponte Santa Trinita, Ponte Vecchio, Ponte alle Grazie.

+

Grazie is tattooed on my wrist. What am I grateful for? I’ve forgotten, along with the order of

the bridges. To name them just now was difficult.

+

Once you stopped me on Ponte Amerigo Vespucci, cupped my face between your hands under a streetlamp and said: Do you know how happy I am right now? How rare that is?

+

You took the plastic bottle of your friend’s homemade grappa from the fridge and pointed to the post-it stuck where a label used to be: Non è acqua it said. You made me read it aloud, over and over, until my pronunciation satisfied you—or maybe it never did, knocking back shot after shot before excusing yourself to the bathroom. I pet your cats until you returned, wrapping your arms around my front, chest pressed flat against my back. I turned around to kiss you. You moved us in the direction of your bedroom. We tripped over a loose tile and laughed.

+

I went to your cats on purpose: I knew my shoulder blades, the blank terrain between that you loved so much, would be on display this way.

+

I’m torn by memories like this, between recalling the story and how I built its scaffolding. Were you free in your decisions or did I plot them for you?

+

For years people have told me they don’t understand who you were, why I ruminate on you this way.Apparently when I write you, I strip you of all physical descriptors and personality traits. Oneinstructor asked if I wanted my book to be about our story, or the ideas. Since she’s best knownas a cultural polemic, I paused and said, Ideas. She, predictably, agreed.

+

Ideas I’ve turned you into: sex traveling as a problematic American trope; women conflating sense of self with sex; fetishizing foreign men; excusing men from misogyny due to this fetishization.

+

You also have dark, curly hair; lips that aren’t big, but have a clear outline and are held in place by your patchy chin-and-cheek stubble, fine lines—perhaps wrinkles now—running beneath. Unlike your accent, your sloped nose doesn’t seem German (your father was the Italian, I know). I think there’s a barbed wire hoop in your left ear, but frankly it could be your right. I miss your yellow-tinted nails left perpetually stubby from the cigarettes you compulsively roll, a packet of tobacco always sticking out of your back pocket. Black is expectedly your color. You tended to wear the same sweater two days in a row. I remember you most in a leather jacket. I also remember your harsh voice, sharp laugh, the animosity you had for strangers on the street. When I asked where the scar taking up most of your thigh came from, you told me about cutting it open in a childhood skiing accident, your grandmother pouring vodka from the bottle on to the open wound.

+

Just recently did I go looking for pictures of you. How else am I to write about you when I haven’t seen you in five years, this fact still cleaving me in two: who I was before you, who I am after you.

+

I wonder what you think of the earthquakes in Tuscany, of Trump, the dumpster bomb in my city that went off a couple blocks from where I was at the time and made international news. I think of you during my fourth cervical biopsy, again when a needle punctures the lump in my right breast. It used to send an ice bath through my veins thinking about how I wouldn’t know when you died.

+

Last fall, I went back to Florence but didn’t tell you. Instead I went to your bridge, stopped under our streetlamp.

+

Am I free in my decisions or does your memory—how impossibly large he’s grown, inevitably outscaling any real version of you that still walks the earth—plot them for me?

—

Haley Swanson is a writer and editor based in New York. Her essays have appeared in The Rumpus, Glamour, Electric Literature, Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, and elsewhere. With Eliza M. Smith, she’s co-editor of the anthology Sex and the Single Girl: Reinventing Helen Gurley Brown’s Cult Classic (Harper Perennial, 2022). She’s also working on a memoir about female obsession and women who travel alone as told through her time abroad. 

By Ellee Achten

It’s important to me. It is. That’s why I’m telling you about it now. Just listen. I didn’t know I was falling until I had already hit the ground. I didn’t know why I had the sensation of feeling yanked up even as the porch railing and then the siding and then the window below went rushing above me until I felt that crack reverberate through my whole body. But, before that, my eyes said going down while that soft core in my gut said going up. And maybe both sensations were true. Maybe I was feeling that separation; my soul knew it was over and began leaving my body. I don’t know. All I know is I need you to get a message to my momma, even though I don’t know you and you don’t know me and you certainly don’t know my momma. But, like I said, it’s important to me. I can’t move on until you do. 

I saw you in the window the other day, your hands cupped around your eyes as you peered in. I saw you stand in the tiny square of green I call the front lawn and write down the phone number on the realtor’s sign, your car idling nearby with the baby seat in the back. I know that look you had in your eyes: you want my place. I get it, I felt the same way when I saw it too. It’s a sweet little house that gave me a sweet little home, one I sorely needed when I left Rick. I’m the one who painted it pale pink as an homage to all things girl since Rick was the reason I lost mine before she could enter this world. But you don’t need to know that. All you need to know is that I’m still here and I can’t leave until someone gets a message to my momma.

Oh, and you aren’t the first face pressed against the darkened windows since the house went up for sale. You’re the seventh, I think? But I know you’re the one, I know you’ll be back because I know your face: broken, desperate, and yet full of dreaming. It’s all about how long someone stands at a window and looks in. You looked for a long time. I know you’re planning that space as if you were mapping out your own heart. And, I’ll admit, I was waiting for you.

So please just tell my momma I’m sorry, that I didn’t mean to jump, that the text I sent had nothing to do with it, that I was sitting on the roofline to feel my feet dangle and nothing more, that I just wanted a moment to believe in freedom but not dive after it, that I was looking out on the horizon and watching a handful of turkey vultures circle some unseen prey and thinking about what’s coming next for me. Tell her I was thinking about death, but not like this. This was a mistake, a slip, and when I saw her going through my things, sorting and mourning over my sweatshirt from high school and the old stuffed elephant I still had from my childhood, I tried to comfort her. Tell her that I heard her say “I love you darling,” and that I tried to say it back. Tell her I was that sensation she must’ve felt around her shoulders that made her drop my nightstand lamp and cut her hand and go running from the house, tell her I was trying to comfort her. Tell my momma I’m not trying to haunt her still. I know I did that enough when I was still alive. For some reason, I feel sure you understand what I mean. I’ve seen your eyes looking in this house. I’ve seen the ghost in you, too.

______

Ellee Achten is a freelance writer, editor, and photographer living in Southeast Ohio. She is a graduate from the New York Institute of Photography, and holds a bachelor’s degree in magazine journalism and a master’s degree in creative nonfiction from Ohio University. She has been a regular contributor to Rewire.News, and has worked as the assistant editor at the New Ohio Review literary journal, and assistant editor for Proximity Magazine’s BORDERS and WILDERNESS issues. Exploring issues of home, health, and connection, her written work has appeared in Brevity, Proximity, Entropy, Alimentum, Ohio Today, and elsewhere. She writes news and features, cultural criticism, book reviews, essays, poetry, and fiction, and is currently working on a collection of essays about the connection of the body and mind during trauma as well as a memoir chronicling her 24+ childhood homes across the country.

By Gwen Goodkin

The notice was blunt, straightforward and, as far as Gwen was concerned, had a lot of nerve. A lot of damn nerve.

We are holding a meeting at your house. Tomorrow night at 7.

– The Neighborhood

“Did you see this?” Gwen asked Jose.

“See what?”

“This note on our door.” She read it to him, then: “The Neighborhood? Who the fuck is that?”

“The neighbors on the street?”

“We don’t have a neighborhood association,” she said. “Is that what they’re meeting about? Forming an association? To talk about safety issues? There have been a lot of break-ins lately.”

“Did you tell them they could meet here?” he asked.

“Absolutely not! And – they put a huge gaping hole in our door. With a spike! That door is solid wood. It cost thousands of dollars. Can you imagine if we did that to Jeff and Cynthia’s house?”

Jose was distracted with work – ‘putting out fires’ and dealing with emergencies. Gwen had often complained about this, his level of distraction, always putting work first in his mind (“If everything’s an emergency, nothing’s an emergency” she said, or “Is anyone dying? No? Then it’s not an emergency.”)

“Just text Cynthia and see what’s going on,” he said.

“I wonder if she even knows!” But Gwen texted her and, even though she saw the flashing dots of a reply, the dots stopped and she never heard back from Cynthia.

            Exactly as the notice said, at seven the next evening, there was a loud bang on the door and a shouted, “Time for the meeting, José Nuñez.” The Colonel made a show of pronouncing Jose’s name in Spanish, with an emphasis on the é, rather than in the slow American way – Ho-say.

            Jose and Gwen were cleaning up the kitchen after dinner. The girls were playing Fair with their stuffed animals. They’d brought the various building sets up from their bedrooms to the family room. They made a barn area with magnetic tiles and their animals were competing for gold medals in races. The girls had eased into a world of imagination and were thoroughly enjoying themselves. So much so that they forgot to bicker and argue.

            The bang on the door stopped everything. Gwen and Jose turned to look at each other.

            “I’ll tell them if they want a meeting, they’ll need to go somewhere else.” Jose went down the stairs and opened the front door. Gwen moved from the kitchen to the family room next to the girls.

            Jose opened the door and started to say, “Hey, guys?” but was suddenly knocked to the ground, shouting, “Gwen, call the police!”

            Gwen ran to the kitchen to get her phone, but the men were already up the stairs blocking her way.

            “José,” said the Colonel, emphasizing the é. “We are the police.”

            Things had been strained between the neighbors after the country’s new leader came to power. Half sent him money to help ensure he came to power, others just voiced their agreement with him, and then there were those who didn’t support him. Some had learned early to stay quiet about it, so as not to get in arguments. They were busy putting out their own fires and didn’t have time to devote to verbal spats. Then there were people like Gwen and Jose. People who openly despised the new leader, his proud displays of corruption, his insecurity wrapped in bravado.

If Gwen and Jose hadn’t been so busy, so focused on themselves and the tasks of the day, they would have seen their neighbors glancing at them, speaking in hushed voices. The neighbors still waved and smiled – big smiles, too big – but they’d stopped having conversations with them, even to discuss the annoying neighbor kid who raced his loud truck down the street in the middle of the night. Gwen had said to Cynthia: “Okay, we get it. You’re angry at the world. Can you quit yelling it at us every night with your piece of shit truck?” Cynthia laughed, but that had been months earlier and they hadn’t spoken since.

            In the week before the notice mauled their door, Gwen’s attention had been drawn to an orange stencil spray-painted on the utility poles:

            She had asked the mother of her daughter’s friend, Kyla Blake, about it at a moms’ night out. Kyla stammered through her discomfort, left for the restroom, then sat in a chair on the opposite side of the table for the rest of the night.

A few days later, Gwen found the stencil painted in front of their house on the street, but with an X above it.

            “Are they paving the road soon?” she asked Jose.

            “Either that or it could be the utility company,” he said. “They mark up the street sometimes.”

            The next day – the day of the notice – as Gwen was driving her daughters home from school, she saw it painted in front of another house and stopped the van.

            “Isn’t that Mia’s house?” she asked her daughter.

            “Yes, I’m pretty sure it is.”

            Mia’s parents weren’t American. Her father was Swedish, her mother Nigerian. Gwen’s logic wanted to make a connection, but her heart convinced her it was just coincidence. Then she saw another stencil in front of Colton’s house. His mothers had just gone through a divorce. That raised the hairs on Gwen’s neck. She made a mental note to talk to Jose about it, but she found the notice and that became her focus.

            The men who dragged the Nuñez family outside wore full desert camo, flak jackets emblazoned with AIM – the acronym for the national immigration agency – and a beltful of weapons. Gwen was confused when she saw who was gathered in front of their house. Some were families from their daughters’ school, families who didn’t live in their neighborhood.

            “Why are the Lindens here?” Gwen asked Jose in a quiet voice. “And the Blakes.”

            “I have no idea.”

            “There’s an armored vehicle? A goddamn humvee with a machine gun?” said Gwen.

            Jose didn’t answer because the Colonel began to speak.

            “We are here in this neighborhood – this neighborhood many of us want to live in, but have been denied a place in due to social forces aligned against us – to reclaim our space from those less deserving.”

            It was nearing dusk. More people were arriving, some were using their phone lights to see. Some to record what was happening. Jose was bleeding from his nose, pinned between two men. The two older girls were holding onto Gwen’s side as she held the youngest in her arms. She saw her friends in the neighborhood wearing concerned looks, and yet, not offering any sign of help.

            “What we want to know, José, is how you were able to afford this house.”

            “None of your fucking business, you fucking asshole.”

A man punched Jose in the jaw. “No one disrespects the Colonel.”

“It’s not just my business,” said the Colonel. “It’s everyone’s business.”

“I earned every single penny I have. Every single one.”

            “By selling drugs? Are you the son of a Mexican drug cartel?”

Jose laughed. “You would think that.”

“And, Mrs. Nuñez. You’re Jewish, is that correct?”

“Like, one eighth.”

“So, yes. You are.”

“What does that – ”

“Never mind. Where were you born, José?”

“On the far side of a high, metal fence.”

“And where exactly is that?”

“Inside your skull where your brain should be.”

The Colonel held up a hand to stop one of his men from beating up Jose. “Tell me, José. How could you build a house in the nicest part of town and I, a man who served his country for thirty years, can’t buy a house in this very town?”

            “It’s called Capitalism, Einstein. Go read a book. Or, better yet, buy some stock.”

            “Okay. Party’s over.” The Colonel turned to the crowd. “You are all here because you’ve answered the call for Reclamation. It begins now.”

            The Colonel approached the middle daughter, the darkest of the three. Gwen pulled her daughter in closer.

“Come on, little one,” said the Colonel. He led her away, holding her hand. Gwen didn’t understand why, but, as an American, of course she assumed the best. She thought he was moving the children away from the stares of the crowd and shielding them from further stress.

Instead the Colonel pulled out a pistol and shot her in the head. She collapsed on the grass, blood pulsing out of her wound with each slowing heartbeat. He murdered her in front of her screaming parents to torture them, force them to watch her die so they would understand what would happen to them – to all of them – by the meeting’s end. 

Gwen’s friend in the neighborhood shouted, “No! Oh my god, why?”

The Colonel’s men shot her. Her husband yelled and rushed the Colonel. He was killed, too. Anyone who screamed was shot. There were snipers on the roofs of the neighbors – the houses of those who supported the new leader. Gwen noticed suddenly Cynthia and Jeff weren’t there. In fact none of her immediate neighbors were.

            The chaos that had bubbled up after the first shooting became an unsettling calm.

            “The only way we can carry out our mission is if everyone is of one mind. One mission, one mind,” he said.

            “One mission, one mind,” replied the crowd.

The Colonel pulled the next lightest daughter – brown-haired, brown-eyed, white-skinned – from her mother’s grip, hand from straining hand, and carried her kicking and wailing in one arm, then shot her as casually as he’d tuck a newspaper to his side. He dropped her severely quiet body on the grass and turned back to the three remaining members of the Nuñez family.

Jose was regaining consciousness on the ground. He had been knocked out by one of the Colonel’s henchman just after the first girl was shot. Gwen knew he would be next to die, after seeing two of his daughters now dead. He would attempt to tackle the Colonel and be shot dead. Gwen now focused all of her attention on her youngest daughter, touching her curls, rubbing her lips across her soft cheek, breathing in her baby smell. Gwen would kill her herself before she’d let him touch her.

Most of us imagine that in the final moments of life, a person reflects on those she loved most. Not the case. With Gwen at least. What she did was spend her final moments cursing herself for being so naïve in dangerous times, for not recognizing the world had changed and that women were no longer allowed to voice opinions, especially those that diverged from the majority of men. She cursed herself for standing up to the Colonel all those months before, at a neighborhood party, to tell him his leader was a traitor and a criminal. She should have recognized the Colonel’s blind loyalty to the leader. As the Colonel relayed conspiracy theories about the previous leader, a man completely opposite of the current one, Gwen laughed at how bizarre it all seemed. The Colonel wasn’t used to being laughed at. He wanted to be obeyed, addressed as “sir.”

But this was California, after all, and Gwen felt safe to voice divergent opinions. She had been educated in a time when women were encouraged to express themselves, loudly if necessary. But the rules had shifted, much like the fault line they lived on. And as with all fault line activity, little earthquakes went unnoticed. Until they added up to a big earthquake. So on a late summer evening, in what seemed like the most unlikely place – on a tucked-away street in a small California beach town – Reclamations began at the Nuñez house.

            Gwen was so consumed by her youngest, she didn’t see Jose get shot when he lunged at the Colonel. It was just Gwen and the baby now. The blondes. She kept the baby calm by shielding her view, pressing her temple into the crook of Gwen’s neck. She pinned the baby’s head lightly with her chin, as mothers do, and inhaled the pink shampoo smell of her hair. Gwen felt an odd sense of gratitude that it was an overcast day. Clouds moved through the neighborhood, between the houses, still at ocean level. If the sun had been full on her face, it would have been too much – the brightness. And yet, she could catch a glimpse of the ocean from where she stood just in front of her house. It was still her house. For a few more moments anyway.

            Years ago, Gwen had told Jose the house was a truth mirror. When a person stepped inside for the first time, it showed you their true self. She’d brought one of her friends to the site after the foundation had been laid. The friend walked around the dirt for the majority of the time with her mouth open and her nose wrinkled. She said obvious things like, “It’s – big,” and, “You have a view.” Other friends treated her exactly the same, just came inside and had the same conversation they’d always had – kids, other parents, school. Another friend walked around and shrugged. “Yeah, okay. It’s a bathroom.” Shrug. “Bedroom.” Shrug. Some friends invited themselves over often, yet never extended a return invitation. Gwen complained about this to her friend, who said, “Did you ever notice how everyone’s house is being remodeled? They can never invite anyone over.” Gwen and her friend laughed. It was the same friend who didn’t change when they built the house. In her case, the truth mirror was just a mirror. She was who she said she was, which was becoming a rarity in this town. Gwen thought about that friend, as she stood in front of her own house with most of her family dead, and wondered where she was, but couldn’t put energy into caring anymore.                                     

            She was no longer focused on the Colonel or the neighbors who’d gathered to watch. It was as if her mind had already transcended life and moved into a state somewhere between wakefulness and dreaming. No one existed outside of her daughter. Gwen couldn’t say if she even existed anymore. The fog snaked toward them. Gwen couldn’t be certain if she was standing anymore or floating. When the first child had been murdered, it was as if her bones had been pulled from her body, then with the second, her muscles.

The Colonel was bald and stocky. Exactly how anyone would expect him to look, like he’d seen a picture of a colonel and decided many years prior to mold himself into one. “But now, Mrs. Nuñez,” said the Colonel. “It’s time for you to choose. You or the little one.”

Gwen didn’t answer him. She wouldn’t play his game.

“If you choose the little one, you could save her.”

She knew this was a lie. The last bit of self he dangled in front of her like a strip of jerky. She began to hum a song she’d made up for her girls when they were babies. “Good morning to you, good morning to you. Have a happy, happy, happy, happy morning. Ya hoo.”

            The Colonel turned to the crowd. “Who will raise this child? The one with blonde hair and green eyes. Soon to be an orphan. Who?”

            Amanda Linden raised her hand.

            The Colonel made a motion at the neighboring rooftop. Amanda Linden was a heap on the ground before she knew what hit.

            “The correct answer is no one. Because this child is not pure. She is the worst one. She can pass for pure blood but isn’t. Do not be deceived! In this mission, trickery and deception are the true enemies. One mission, one mind.”

            “One mission, one mind,” said the crowd.

            Gwen was hyper focused on the trees, flowers, birdsong. She breathed in the saltwater air.

            “Now we come to who will earn this house and how.” The Colonel held up his gun and turned toward Gwen and the baby. “Who will finish the job we all began?” he asked. “Whoever completes the mission becomes the new owner.”  

            Gwen saw a few hands go up in the crowd. One belonged to Kyla Blake.

            “A woman! Commendable,” said the Colonel. He had his back to Gwen, holding his gun at his side. She looked into her baby’s eyes and said, “Let’s get this over with,” and the baby communicated to her without words, nose to nose, that it was okay. She forgave her.

All that time they’d spent after birth, rearranging themselves into two separate bodies, now undone. They were back together as one self, their existence distilled to the touch of their skin, the adoration in their eyes.

Gwen held the baby tight to her chest and ran full-speed into the Colonel’s back. They crashed into him, fell to the grass, cool and sharp – a strange comfort. Bullets punched through their ribs and exploded their heart, but they felt only the first shock of pain as they left the earth to join the fog.

—

Gwen Goodkin is the author of the short story collection, ‘A Place Remote,’ published by West Virginia University Press. She has won the Folio Editor’s Prize for Fiction as well as the John Steinbeck Award for Fiction. For more information, visit gwengoodkin.com

BY ANNA BAKER SMITH

“Only the lighthouse beam entered the rooms for a moment, sent its sudden stare over bed and wall in the darkness of winter, looked with equanimity at the thistle and the swallow, the rat and the straw.”

Jim is canning tomatoes again. He’s in a hurry because in a couple of hours he’s leaving to go to Canada for the week. I’m at my morning perch, drinking tea next to the laptop that doubles as a radio. The window AC is pumping cool air at my back, doing what it can to combat steam from vats of boiling tomatoes and the August humidity in the Connecticut River Valley.

On weekday mornings, I drink tea while listening to the public radio station out of Albany. Today a panel is talking about the Russia investigation and whether bots, fake news, and ads on social media could have actually swayed the 2016 election. For most of the panel, the answer is a careful, “We just can’t tell,” but they’re worried about the 2018 midterms.

I may be checking email, or staring into space, which means I’m doing at least three things: listening to the radio, skimming email, and thinking about work I should be doing—updating my fall course on the relationship between technology and humans. I tell myself that listening to the radio is research.

What I’m not doing is looking straight ahead, toward the butcher block where Jim is cutting tomatoes, when he sees something I don’t.

“Whoa! That was a rat!”

“What?”

“A rat just ran by.”

“Are you sure?”

“Oh, it was a rat. It was this big.” He holds up his hands, indicating a rat-sized space.

For the next hour, we scramble around, him apologizing for leaving me with “a” rat. (We still called it “the” rat then.) He tries to dial back his earlier assessment, “It could have been a really large mouse,” as if that would be way better.

I look at him.

“Okay, it was a rat.”

He’d seen rats in the garage a couple of weeks earlier where they were chatting up the garbage. We’d watched Sunny the Dog scratch the floor and bark at the laundry room door over the last month. We assumed he’d lost a few marbles but now realize he was onto something. A rat had found the birdseed in the laundry room, and Sunny was trying to warn us of the insurgency.

We guess it had gone under a gaping, wedge-shaped space beneath the basement door, where our slanting floors leave plenty of room for a rat to squish through. We stack boards, hand-weights, and something like an anvil in front of the gap.

I resolve to remain optimistic. That’s my job. Jim has a lot to think about: a twenty-four-year-old daughter, the farm where we live, a company that makes instruments that measure all sorts of climate-related mayhem, a close family member with chronic illness. It’s just a rat. I’ll handle it.

Jim leaves, and I go out back to talk to the farm manager, Dan. He owned the farm before Jim did; he raised his kids there. “I’m sorry you have to deal with this,” he says. We trade rumors about the growing rat population being linked to climate change.

We find the Have-a-Heart trap in the white barn, and he shows me how to work it. I load her up with peanut butter crackers, assuring him I’m fine, telling myself things could be worse.

I wonder if Dan is worried I’m rat phobic. I’m not (if I were I’d have been gone), so I add, “Rats aren’t one of my things”—meaning one of the things I’m afraid of. I have a list—rats aren’t on it.

*

The next morning I’m sitting in my usual spot by the laptop, drinking tea, again listening to the panel on the radio talk about the Russia investigation.

And I see a rat run across the floor.

Holy crap—that was no mouse. After grabbing a bucket and beach towel, I follow him. He must have skittered into the dining room, beyond my field of vision.

I search the obvious places, then see a tiny space beneath the door into the basement. It’s at the end of the gap where just yesterday we’d piled all the boards and weights. It looks too small for a rat to pass through, but then I see sawdust. I eye the old upright piano against the wall. It’s got to be here somewhere so I bang the keys, hoping to hear rat music from the strings inside. Nothing.

I spend the day trying to be optimistic, talking to Sunny the Dog. I call my friend, Nancy, who’s written about roaches, bats, and squirrels invading her home. I figure she’s an expert of sorts.

“Oh wow, I’m sorry. I never had rats.” For a moment I mishear—like she’s pondering this as a missed literary opportunity—then realize what she meant.

I go into reassurance mode: “Well, it wasn’t huge, not like a subway rat.” I should wonder why my knee-jerk reaction is to reassure the person I’m talking to that I’m fine, really—things could be worse.

We talk Have-a-Heart traps, sticky paper, and exterminators (including the one she dated back in Arkansas). We’ve entered sketchy territory for me, as I try not to kill things. On the other hand, I can’t just let the rats move in. It was probably time I had to deal with this particular problem. I grew up in North Carolina with copperheads, black widows, and wolf spiders. As a child, I would casually shake the mouse poop off the thinning chenille bedspread in our farmhouse in the mountains. I lived in Arkansas with cockroaches and even bigger spiders, Boston with huge rats between the rails of the T, and California with brown recluses, rattlesnakes, bears, and mountain lions. (I once saw two rattlers copulating beneath my cabin. My dog kept barking; I wondered why…) But I’ve never had rats in my home. To every thing, there is a season.

*

The basement door has been barricaded since the first sighting, but that night, before heading off to the second floor bedroom, I add more boards, more five-pound weights, and a cookie sheet in an attempt to block the wedge-shaped gap.

I try to sleep.

Visions of rats, robots, and Russians dance in my head, the words “Cozy Bear” and “Fancy Bear” on a repeating loop. I’ve been reading about social media algorithms and the election hacking. My fall class is called “Experiential Reflections of Our Technological World,” which before the 2016 election I playfully referred to as “Phones, Drones, and Sexbots.” I wish I could “clear history” on my mind.

Sunny the Dog is as unable to sleep as I am, scratching the floor, trying to burrow his way down to the basement where all the action is.

I can’t resist getting up to investigate. The laundry room and pantry doors are closed, but I stand outside the door to the basement stairs and hear the undeniable sound of munching. The little bastard is trying to eat through the door, eat his way into the main house again. I try to sound top-of-the-food-chain, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

I go over to the dishwasher. This is the place the rats appeared to come from, both times they were seen. Again, I hear a “munch, munch” from what seems like the floor below it, and bang on the dishwasher door, ordering, “Cut it out!”

The dog has followed me downstairs and is giving me the eye, saying, “Why the harsh tone? Is this about me?” I stick a metal scrubby into a big crack on the side of the dishwasher and go back to the basement door. The muncher is still there so I re-check the cookie sheet, boards, and weights. I try to guess whether a rat can push over the five-pound hand weights. How strong is a rat?  

Again I try to sleep. The house is alive with sound. From outside, I hear frogs, crickets, cicadas, the occasional owl. From inside, I hear Sunny pacing the wood floor—click, click, click, which makes me think of “Up on the Housetop,” and then a favorite Little Golden Book from my childhood, Christmas in the Country. The book takes you through a farmhouse, barn, and pasture; sheep, chickens, and a cat help decorate a Christmas tree. One picture includes a tiny mouse in a blue pullover—but no rats and no anxious dog using his vastly superior olfactory nerves to nark on upstart rodents. None of these stories or songs involve August humidity or use the refrain, “munch, munch, munch.” Rats just aren’t that cozy.

*

It’s 3:00 AM, and I’m wide awake.

I go to the top of the stairs with the dog and listen, even though it should be impossible to hear munching from the second floor, through two closed doors.

What I hear is appalling. That bugger is crunching somewhere below the top steps—seemingly right below my feet. How is this possible? I wonder if I’ve lost it, like the narrator in “The Tell-Tale Heart.”

I go downstairs and again hear the munching on the other side of the basement door.

At this point, I call Jim in Canada. He doesn’t answer.

I text him a single emoji: the rat. No reply.

I go back upstairs and contemplate the structural relationship between the stairs to the basement and the stairs going up to the second floor. The ceiling above the basement stairs is attached to the joists holding up the stairs to the second floor. I figure that means Rat Man is possibly still below the first floor, but the sound of his munching is being conducted through the ceiling to the stairs above—which is why it sounds like he’s eaten the first floor and is working on the second.

I go back downstairs and again hear munching from the dishwasher. I make a video of this for some reason.

*

The next day Jim calls and suggests an exterminator he found online. They’re in Northampton, just over the river. I look them up and approve of their non-phobia-triggering website: no photos except of three kind-looking men, one a UMass grad with a major in the much-touted field of “Integrative Pest Management.”

After dialing their number, I carefully clear history, cache, and cookies on the browser. I don’t want to be known to the Google algorithm (and the known universe) as “middle-aged woman with a rat problem.” I really don’t want to start seeing ads for exterminators.

But as psychologists say, “What you resist, persists.” Turns out the fancy liberal exterminators in Northampton are booked far into next week. No way will I wait that long, and Jim isn’t due back till Saturday.

I man up and Google “exterminators.”

The second one on the page (after the guys in Northampton) is nearby, in a town I remember had a lot of Trump/Pence yard signs in 2016. Their website has all manner of phobia-triggering photos that I won’t go into. Okay, maybe just one: a bunch of baby mice nestled into a loaf of bread—the side view. The photo’s composition was almost too perfect, as if it had been staged, though I can hardly see how that was possible.

But they can come the next day.

After I make the appointment with the second most popular exterminators in the Pioneer Valley, I try to work. I go to the café down the street, partly for lunch and partly to partake of their superior air conditioning.

I watch the usual summer crowd, in their shorts and flip flops, happily drinking iced tea and eating hamburgers with sides of micro-greens. After a day and a half of rat-induced anxiety, how pleasant it is to enter a rat-free zone. The young staff whirls past, delivering luscious plates of farm to table fare.

But again, I’m reading about the uses of social media—how a post could be used to increase voter turnout or not, how people devour the posts that are most disturbing to them (increasing what is cheerfully called “engagement”). Social media engineers exploit this hole in our psychology.

So basically, when we think we’re just looking at Facebook, we’re more like addicts who stay too long at the slot machine—except instead of losing money, we’re losing years of our lives and the ability to know when we’ve been lied to. We’re Skinner’s rats, pressing the bar, hoping for a pellet. (One kind of pellet are dopamine hits from “likes”—a technology that Justin Rosenstein, creator of the “like” button, now describes as delivering “bright dings of pseudo-pleasure.”) Meanwhile, our every trackable thought, word, and deed are offered up at the invisible altar of surveillance capitalism.

I leave the lights on in the kitchen and dining room that night again, but I sleep better, knowing the exterminator is coming the next day. I know the rats won’t be discouraged by the lights, since the only times we’ve seen them has been in the kitchen in broad daylight, but I remember my old apartment in Arkansas—how I would leave the lights on to avoid the shock of flipping the switch and seeing cockroaches scurry into hiding.

*

Finally the exterminator comes. He has a shaved head, bushy black beard, and is wearing a tee-shirt with a giant ant or spider on the back—I don’t know—I try not to look. The “treatment” will take place over three visits. He listens to me talk a mile a minute about our rat visitations, nodding calmly, having heard it all before.

We talk about the increasing rat population and climate change. He tells me he’s worked in Boston and Springfield. What they say is true.  

In the coming months, I’ll read articles on a coming climate change-related “Ratpocalypse.” Cities but also suburbs are seeing a rise in rat populations, and not the shy kind, either. They’ve become bolder, unafraid of humans, their oldest nemesis.

We find a hole in a screen in a basement window, at least one point of entry we can block. He leaves a few traps there and some evil-looking plastic boxes around the foundation outside.

The next day is Friday. Jim calls to tell me that he and the offspring will be home that night, a day early. When they finally arrive, we sit in the kitchen drinking bubble water and beer. They’ve never looked more beautiful—so happy and relaxed. I keep saying, “I’m so glad you’re here”—grateful not to face the Ratpocalypse alone.

                                                  *

Two years pass, and it’s now late September, 2020, one week after an early frost, five weeks before the presidential election. Pumpkins are scattered over the fields of Western Massachusetts, bright spots of orange in the mist.

The country has plenty to be anxious about—the election, the aftermath of the election, the pandemic, endless brutality.  

In the last two weeks, as the nights have been cooler, I’ve heard scuttling beneath the floorboards, but when I call Jim to listen, we hear nothing. Finally, he found a dead rat in the basement. I suppose if something’s gnawing away at the foundation, I want to know, especially if it’s invisible.

———-

Anna Baker Smith grew up in Greensboro, North Carolina, and now lives in Western Massachusetts. Her writing has appeared in The Massachusetts Review blog, After the Art, The Daily Hampshire Gazette, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. She teaches for UMass Amherst. Twitter: @innergothic. 

               My love of horror and my love of literature grew up together and fed on each other like monstrous parasites caught in an unholy symbiotic relationship. Reading horror kept me entertained and made me want to be a writer. I learned more English reading H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe than I did from my teachers at school. The genre taught me many lessons, but the first one ended up being something that applies to all genres: great writing makes us feel things. When I was asked to edit [PANK ] Hauntings, I immediately said yes, mostly because it meant reading a lot of stories and essays and sharing those that made me feel things.

While many readers think horror is about feeling fear or disgust, the best dark literature may include those, but it is never limited to that. Horror fiction, which we can also call creepy, eerie, dark, weird, gory, and scary fiction, makes us feel empathy, curiosity, sadness, and, occasionally, hope. It also borrows under our skin and makes us feel uncomfortable and unsettled. When that happens, reading becomes a magical experience. That’s what you can expect in the weeks to come.

We received 700+ plus submission for [PANK] Hauntings. I’m humbled and thankful. I’m also worried about the massive amount of reading ahead, which I’m already doing (I was sending out an acceptance for a superb essay two minutes before writing this). These 700+ submissions show that horror is alive and thriving. What I’ve read so far proves to me that many writers see the genre for what it is: a mirror we hold up to society as well as the best entertainment. In the coming weeks you will read tales and essays that range from smart to creepy, from scary to sad, from funny to surreal, and from dark to luminous…and often mix many of those in the same narrative.

Humanity has worked really hard at developing the brain (I know many individuals currently in the news make us think otherwise, but trust me on this). Despite this development, our brain hasn’t outgrown fear, and that means we still have a visceral reaction when reading things that affect us.

“Some psychological theories propose that fear is a biologically basic emotion of all humans and many other animals, a view in line with most lay opinions as well,” states Ralph Adolphs in The Biology of Fear. “But several proposals beg to differ, arguing that emotions like fear should be replaced by a distinction between a fear and a panic system, or “survival circuits” related more broadly to adaptive behavior, or dimensional accounts such as reward and punishment. A variety of evidence supports a view also in line with common usage: there are types fear.” My hope is that we tickle all of them in the weeks to come.

Yeah, science is still looking into fear, and so are writers. The difference is scientists look at the reactions we have to controlled stimuli and writers…well, we hear a noise in the basement and go check it out, and we take readers with us. There’s always something in the basement…and in the cellar, in the woods, in every old church, at the bottom of the lake, in the cemetery, in that abandoned house at the end of the block, under the skin of that weird person whose eyes make your skin crawl, and in every cheap motel in the world. Hauntings are everywhere, and now they’re here. Buckle up, friends, because darkness is coming your way, and you will love every minute of it.

– Gabino Iglesias, October 2020, as the world burns