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“Cracked Hands and Frost Heaves” Cracked hands and frost heaves, bookends to the winter season. Snow etching its way onto the map means the wood stove, if it wasn’t popping and glowing already. The cold weather and the heat play tricks on skin, it’s a size smaller than it was a few months ago and wearing through here and there like old jeans. The roads are slick, spinouts on morning commutes and snowbanks burying stop signs at times, but those get chased away by warming spring temps– sometimes false hope in the form of dripping icicles and receding snowbanks. Ground water loosens, but winter sometimes has a different plan and brings another hard freeze forming wrinkles and fissures in the once perfect pavement. The maintenance continues with fresh asphalt and Working Man’s Hands well into spring. “The Wood Stack” The temperature is dropping to the 30s tonight and there’s wood to be collected from the neat piles, all stacked in sections, cords upon cords seasoned grey like stone or still holding their reddish or blondish hue, clinging to a youth of sorts. The basement is dark, dusty and dry, but the outside air etches speech bubbles as I exit the house. I stare at the wood stack, it’s menacing for some reason, not because there’s some animal behind it breathing white puffs into the night or because I’m afraid of diving splinters, but I read somewhere black widows like seasoned wood-- the kind we have and the kind I need to warm the house on nights like these. I’ve heard they’re the most venomous spider with that blood filled hourglass to signal their poison, a shout of warning even into a night this dark. The eight legs working between splintered rings of wood or carving out a home in a missing knot. I know we need the wood, but in a way I’m wondering if the oil will hold out or if I can go buzz down that ash tree in the middle of the night. I’m sure the neighbors wouldn’t mind a roaring chainsaw in the dead black of winter. I settle on burning a few pallets in the basement and figure I’ll deal with the problem tomorrow when the blushing light has kissed the stack and chased off any spiders. "Frozen But Still Thawing" I reached down and swept off a thin layer of snow, just a dusting from the night before. The ice showed thinner than it would in January’s deep freeze, more mirror and less opaque fog. The sheen of the sun hadn’t come from behind the clouds, but it reflected me, at least as I know me at this moment in time. There’s small fissures in the layer of ice, something that’s there, cracked but just a little. Something that will harden over once January hits and the temperatures don’t rise above freezing, there’s something to consistency even in the harshest of times. Those cracks are something that might be remembered, but could easily pass when the ice refortifies, gathering strength. After the hard freezes cover the cracks, there’s a sense of safety, stability, a sense of ease that you’ve made it through the dangerous times. How long before the ice thins again, forming little cracks along the surface, weakening what was once strong? How long before treading on this ice in early spring becomes a thing of danger as it was the previous one? How many times can you make the same mistake? “Stored Memories” The house was clean, staged and ready to go. It was the kid in me or maybe the historian that wanted to see the attic before waving goodbye to the realtor and placing our offer at 15% above listing. The stairs creaked, as old stairs do; cobwebs and dust collected in a film as is the case with forgotten spaces; light hid from darkness and sounds always struck wrong chords with bad acoustics. It was all boxes, were they always there, stuffed with things from lives forgotten or misremembered? Photo albums in this one, childrens’ toys in that one, old china sets from when china sets were a thing and family dinners were a thing. All captured in those cardboard boxes or stuffed in corners. Who knew decades could fit in 12’’x18’’ spaces? “Lyrics Lost In Time” The backseat of a car is good for a lot of things, but commutes are long, even for processing the day. Flicks of my mind to normal backseat actions from days old pulling at clothes that fit a little tight, eager for something not yet experienced. Songs drown out silence, like rain quiets traffic when you’re stuck on some interstate. I’d never song heard the first, echoing through, something about the sea. My mind runs in waves to footsteps in hot sand, asking to run down to the arcade on the pier because it really isn’t that far. Name scrawled across the back of my shirt causing a couple quick words from someone in French and a confused conversation to follow. “Turn the stations, please.” A rap song about drinking and instantly I’m in a smoke-filled basement of a frat house, somewhere in my late teens or early 20s, before bars were legal and when freedom was the most important thing. “Next, please.” My mind cycling with Beck, the number of friends I had back then, relationships withering like petals from a flower. Where’d they all go…are we all outsiders like him? “Can you cut the radio?” I knew that sometimes silence is better, a little time to lose myself in the moments of the day and not for lyrics to lose me in time. Matt McGuirk teaches and lives with his family in New Hampshire. BOTN 2021 nominee with words in various lit mags and a debut collection with Alien Buddha Press called Daydreams, Obsessions, Realities available on Amazon and linked on his website. Website: http://linktr.ee/McGuirkMatthew Twitter: @McguirkMatthew Instagram: @mcguirk_matthew.

They get drenched between the cab and the front door. Quick Daddy! The twins laugh-scream, wetter by the second as he fumbles for his keys in the darkness. Sorry guys, the porch light is off, it doesn’t help. They burst in and immediately peel off their coats and remove their shoes and he turns on the heater and the lights and she wraps the kids in a large towel and dries their hair, changes them into warm pyjamas. She lets them not brush their teeth, reads them stories and kisses them a hundred times and they fall asleep in a minute, they’re so tired. She’s tired too, and squiffy. She looks at their chubby cheeks and soft skin under the dimmed light, she wonders what they dream about after falling asleep so quickly, she envies their carelessness, their joy at the downpour when all she can think of is mudslides and flooding, and what future for them? She envies their obliviousness of their aunt’s wig, of the new vacant look in their grandmother’s eyes, of the mutism of their increasingly gaunt cousin. She strokes their blonde curls, stays one more minute, whispers I love you, I love you, I love you and walks out quietly, leaving the door ajar. They sit in the kitchen, he hands her a beer, and she takes long sips straight from the can, she’s thirsty, the gravy was quite salty she says, she’s matter-of-fact but can see in his eyes he finds her judgemental. Difficult. Lovely afternoon she adds, resting her hand on his for a moment. 50 years. Great gathering. I can’t believe they’ve been together 50 years. That’s quite something. And they talk about all the weddings they’ve been to through the years, that one year in particular where everyone got married which was unfortunate because it was also the year she had her “Joan of Arc” haircut and they have a little laugh. They reminisce about theirs, that bright rainy day a decade ago; they leave out the painful bits, how long it’s been since they’ve seen all those friends they used to meet every Thursday for drinks back then, and how some they will never see again, and she doesn’t want to cry right now so she says she feels cold from getting soaked and she’s going to get a sweater and why don’t they have a drop of Grand Marnier to warm themselves up. He pours them a shot glass each and they turn on the speaker, play some tunes and the evening lightens up as the liquor warms them up and they talk about their kids, who they look like, what they reckon they will grow up to be; she wonders how she’ll sleep at night when they’re grown up and leaving the nest and living their own lives, not sound asleep dribbling on pillows, she wonders if they will miss her after she’s gone and she doesn’t know when that will be it could be tomorrow it could be in 53 years but one day they won’t be together and she feels like she’s been punched in the stomach and he looks at her, you okay? Yeah, yeah I’m fine, and she refills the glasses and takes a large sip swallowing her anguish and tears with the syrupy liquid that’s not bitter enough, but they all come back up after the third drink and she clings to him like a drowning swimmer cradling a buoy in shallow waters and she wonders at what stage she became so needy, how long ago she lost her strength, her footing, her desire to swim further just to feel the depth of the unknown behind. She used to swim far, too far, relish at all the water around her, all the depth beneath. She would plug her nose and torpedo her body down, as low as possible to see if her feet would touch the ground but they never did. Too deep. She’d take her swimming costume off and enjoy the cold water lapping her naked body and she’d swim back slowly, coming back to the beach drained and happy and rosy-cheeked and the world was this wonderful place. Now she never goes too far out, she swims alongside the shore so that she can always feel the sand under her feet. The water isn’t as clear as it used to be, or as cold, it doesn’t take her breath away when she goes in, she can just walk in until it reaches her chest and start swimming without her heart doing that stop-start thing and her making that loud joyous exhaling sound. She never swims as long, and she never takes her swimming costume off anymore. B F Jones is French and lives in the UK. She writes poetry and flash fiction. Her poetry collections Five Years and The Only Sounds Left as well as her flash fiction collection, Artifice, were all released in 2021 and published by the Alien Buddha. This piece is a part of her upcoming collection of Interconnected stories, Something Happened at 2am, out 2/18/22!

Andrew Martin looked out at the post-New Year’s snow and thought of all the New Year’s he had passed happily: first with family, then friends, then girlfriends, then a wife (who had just died five years or so back of unalarming natural causes), then friends again at his local bar. A woman or two had indicated interest after his wife had passed, but as he was already sixty-five when she went unexpectedly in her sleep, and they had been a congenial couple, if not a passionate one (since their children had reached ages of discretion a little late—the girl at twenty-five and the boy at twenty-eight)—he didn’t really warm up to their courtships. Those were things he didn’t expect the young of this age to understand: first of all why he wasn’t haring off after another fast lay the minute the previous one was cold in the ground (and to give her her due, his wife had never been a “fast” lay, always requiring his utmost attention); secondly, what “the age of discretion” was supposed to be about. He had once heard a minister from a church he had attended when young insist that the true age of discretion was at twelve or 1 thirteen, the age of baptism in his previous faith. But that didn’t hold water when he looked at the droopy pants and the chains and dog collars and earrings everywhere in every blessed place, and the ear buds always in so that no one of them could hear a thing you said to them, as if they had somehow aged with him. Now, his own children had been comfortably placed growing up, since he had been a copy editor for a national newspaper until he retired, and they well-provided for. He and his wife Becca had kept the strange manifestations of adolescence and struggling independence to a minimum. He thought now that perhaps it only stood to reason that their offspring had to do their rebelling against someone at some time, and roughly ten years ago, as if they were acting on cue, they did so. The girl, Tabitha, had gone to live in something called a yurt and grow cabbages and mung beans, among other things. It lasted for two years before she’d sensibly married and settled down with an academic woman who, though Becca and Andrew were a bit taken aback at the abrupt change of sexual preference—which their daughter denied was 2 abrupt—was a matter-of-fact teacher of writers and editors, and gave Andrew someone in his own area of expertise to “chew the fat with,” as she didn’t seem to mind hearing him put it. Andrew’s and Becca’s son, David, had at twenty-eight started investing all the money he had made in sensible real estate deals in bitcoin and video game developments which, always puzzling to him, never worked out. Whether it was because it was “the nature of the beast,” Andrew told himself and Becca, or whether it was just that his son had no talent in those fields (if one could call them that), it was sad and a little touching to notice his hurt face at his own failure. Nothing had prepared him to fail, and he seemed a little aggrieved with persons unspecified, since he never seemed to blame the “crooks and vagabonds,” as Becca put it, who led him into these ventures. When Andrew finally put it to him once that he credited his own parents with his bad luck (which was all he outwardly called it), he protested that that wasn’t the case, but he avoided them for a year and a half, only to return with a woman and two tiny kids in tow, whom he’d taken on as a “partner in crime” (an expression which raised anxiety in his parents 3 until it was explained to them that there was no actual crime being committed, and that while the woman and Andrew were consorting as an ordinary married couple “without the benefit of wedlock, the way they do these days,” as Becca put it, they were also business partners in a bed-and-breakfast chain which Andrew had actually heard of before he knew his son was involved). Becca and Andrew had both breathed more easily and felt that they’d gotten off lightly: no suicides, no murders, no drugs or rehabs, no obvious mental illness, no prison sentences, barely even a speeding ticket, though Shirles, Tabitha’s wife, had complained that Tabitha kept getting cautions for bad parking maneuvers. And so, ages of discretion duly reached, even if late, Andrew and Becca relaxed with each other, only to find that they now preferred discussing things to fucking, though neither of them wanted to cheat or split up, and both felt that they had a good thing in the other. Still, Andrew had definitely gotten the sense that the two kids expected him to cut loose after a certain interval for grieving Becca. David had even patiently shown a patiently unwilling Andrew how to use a dating site, but it hadn’t taken. The only 4 two responses he’d gotten had been from a female truck driver and a potter, and he had his reasons (a prejudice against long-distance relationships, and a desire not to have the house bunged up with clay and mess). Now, though, Andrew’s children were turning their sights on him in ways that made him mostly uncomfortable. On the one hand, he felt it was a tribute to their upbringing that they had ready empathy with him, which he’d earlier doubted. On the other, it was a considerable nuisance, at the mere age of seventy, to be considered senile, or at the very least in need of being checked upon, as if having declined to participate in the human search for a partner, he’d also somehow forfeited his chance to be considered independently strong. He didn’t quite know how it had happened, actually, but he found himself attending a day program for seniors in the Good Days Weekly Meeting Program. His surly rejoinder to one of the attendants when she addressed him in a condescending fashion was “Look here, missy, this may be a place for good days, but I don’t have good days and bad days, right now all my days are good days, and I don’t need you talking down 5 to me to make that happen.” It had shocked her out of her momentary stupidity, but the next second, while she was still staring at him, undecided how to respond, she was summoned by a woman who flirted with the men in an imprecise fashion, and fawned on the attendants in a way the characters on the show “Golden Girls” would only have done as a ploy. Andrew tried to believe the attendees were capable of this, but saw no real evidence of it. The platinum blonde waggled a wrist at her to summon her over. The attendant, Jo Ellen, as her name tag stated in sprightly dark, large italics, gave him a magnificent, totally insincere smile and said, “Now, Mr. Martin, let’s not be rude. I was just trying to make sure you were comfortably seated. When we get old, sometimes we don’t seat ourselves properly, and we fall. I know you don’t want that to happen, do you, sweetie?” Before he could reproach her for her too-familiar form of address, she called to the beckoning diva across the sitting room, “Right there, Mrs. Cavenish!” and whisked off. The thing is, it didn’t sort well with him, as he didn’t feel in hindsight that he had come off looking down on her, too. To have 6 remained sitting instead of facing her eye-to-eye was weak, though standing would have been taken as a sign of senile aggression and grounds for further interference. It wasn’t entirely unaccountable, but he felt depressed as he first thought of the long, hard road of somewhat unacknowledged grief he’d traveled since Becca’s death; then, this led to an unwelcome reminder of the other long, hard thing he’d once been able to count on in his person that people now would probably find laughable. He caught himself looking at his reflection in the mirror more often: had he really aged so much that women, except for ones his own age who were only looking for less than what he and Becca had had, didn’t find him the least bit threatening in an attractive way? An even more offensive thought to him, though he felt it was unfair to consider it so, but couldn’t help it, was the thought that one of those ominously haggard older women did desire him as a man. That, to a man who’d had a beautiful wife like Becca, with her long, curly brown hair and green eyes, her winsome figure, oh, he just couldn’t bear the thought! 7 He looked first to make sure that Jo Ellen was employed with his fellow attendees, and that no other attendants were close at hand or watching. Then, he stood up and walked over closer to the picture window, and found himself a chair there, just by the drapes and in that manner half-hidden from the rest of the room, as well as above the baseboard heating that ran at the bottom of the huge pane of glass to keep things from freezing. An antiquated setup in some respects, but still in good repair. That made him smile: that’s what he was, an antiquated setup sometimes, but still in good repair. He’d show them. They weren’t going to load him down with some old biddy ready for the grave. Andrew sat and grew dreamy and peaceful, watching the snow fall on all things, like a forgiveness, like a thought of love, like a long time coming for every person on the earth, sooner or later. The flakes were the kinds he’d always preferred, the big, fluffy, heavy ones, full of water and melting on your cheek when they landed there, almost as if you could hear a tiny voice sizzling into nothingness, but not really, he knew. Not like the small, tiny frozen pelts of half-ice there’d been around 8 Christmas time. Those were for misers and people who hoarded their love and contentment and didn’t share feelings. He and Becca, of course, hadn’t talked much of feelings past the first few years, they’d been too busy with raising their kids, and they hadn’t married early, so they were both a bit settled down. Their marriage was based more on resemblances than it was on passion, he told himself half-regretfully now. The snow, drifting in the softly whirling breeze to and from the window at several different moments, seemed to agree with him, to induce a slight feeling of melancholy. Why hadn’t he been better loved? He tried to think if anyone had ever loved him to distraction, had ever wanted to die for the threat of the lack of him. It wasn’t an entirely pleasant topic, as it didn’t present him in the best light, the “leaver” in the equation of leaving or being left, but just as if on cue, the watered down version of the song playing over the sitting room speakers, overcoming the droning and blaring of the two side-by-side TVs at the wall farthest away, caught his attention. One of the TVs was tuned to a game and the other to a game show, and the two circles of chairs seemed from a distance to interlock the men and women in a sort of Venn 9 diagram, with a few from each group staring at the opposite tv. But even over that distraction, his hearing was still good enough to catch the melody that seemed to have come along just in time to his thoughts: who was the artist now? Paul somebody. It was Paul Simon, wasn’t it? Something about whether it was better to be a hammer or a nail. Was it that he had decided to be the hammer and not the nail? Was it that simple? Was he that callous and calculating? He felt the memories come up to him unbidden, flooding him, filling his stolid, sensible, comfortable old heart with an unfamiliar and now nearly forgotten pounding, a swift tango-beat, a mournful, wingeing, wincing, cry on the air that the next second caused him to clap a hand to his mouth and hold it for fear of what was coming out of it! He looked around. No one was looking at him. The three male attendants were at the TVs with the circle of men watching the game, and the few circling female attendants were still helping to clean up the remains of the lunch trays from the tables so that in a half hour or so, bingo could go on. He hated it here, but he had bigger problems now. 10 He didn’t want to remember the girl, the girl, the girl, no, she had been a woman, a young woman, he now admitted to himself, fully cognizant of what he was to her and what she had been to him. She had been a lover, a lover he had deserted who said she loved him truly, couldn’t get on without him, who had braved the fact that he was only two years married himself, and to Becca, of all people, who’d never had an idea. And that long, wailing cry—that cry that he had once thought might have been like the Romantic idea of a demon lover driven to hunt at night, but always in deep despair for the lost love— that had come from her lips; he had heard her crying out for him as he had rushed out the door that last night in a frenzy of nervous cowardice, and it had just now burst from his memory and threatened, still threatened, to come in echo from his own lips. And he had heard through the newsman’s grapevine that she, a talented photojournalist, had after that traveled madly across Eastern Europe, going wherever, it seemed, there was risk, and had died there in an attack on her hotel one summer night while he was peacefully reading a scary ghost story to his two young children, who 11 had begged for the treat. It after all hadn’t been that scary, had just been the latest kitschy thing for kids, but he had chilled to the core when his friend Sam Dreyfus had called to tell him the news, just as he had bid his children a final goodnight. Becca had taken one look at his pale face, and said “What’s wrong? What in the whole world is the matter with you?” “The whole world is it,” he responded, “the whole world.” He had put a hand through what had been at the time a full head of hair, and had sat on his bed, saying nothing. So marked was his silence that Becca had sat in the rocker opposite and just waited patiently for him to say more, but he couldn’t summon up the words for what he knew he should have told her long before. Or should he? he had thought. Was it really his responsibility to set all right that was wrong this far after the fact, when he was well-embarked on being indispensable to another woman? He had just muttered under his breath, “Some journalists and photographers killed again, another time, in the Caucasus or somewhere near there. Some people we all sort of knew.” Unbidden at that time, a story he had then recently read popped into his head. It was Joyce’s story, “The 12 Dead,” about a man who’d been to a winter party with his wife, had been in the midst of a snow fall and found it emotionally provocative, and who had planned to make passionate love to her until he discovered by accident that she’d been deeply and seriously in love with a man when she was young; a man who had died of love for her, she thought. A sad, morose story at the end, though the Christmas party had seemed like a fair amount of early 20th century sentimentality and nonsense, to Andrew’s mind. But now, it seemed as grotesque a long preface to the short ending as his reading of the ghost story to his children also seemed, homeopathic magic, a calling up of a thing by a similar thing. Ghosts. A ghost. He had been more silent than not for a few days after that, but no one among his friends had known of the affair, and so he was allowed by circumstances and his own circumspection to forget it himself, and the years passed peacefully and uneventfully. Now he was old, and his wife was dead, and he was being visited by a ghost in this totally unlikely setting, where he could already hear people getting ready for the bingo, in the back of his awareness. 13 He was also suddenly aware of someone approaching, so he turned more firmly to the window, but there the snow was now accusing him again, as the memory of “The Dead” and a winter scene had long years ago, that heart-frozen day in summer, and in his frustration and double grief, for his love, his long ago love whom he had so cavalierly deserted and for his placid, undemanding wife, he threw a hand up and away, only to strike against something warm and soft. In confusion, he made an attempt to move his hand away without turning around, but as he was forced to turn anyway, he saw that his hand was making contact with the crotch and flowery pastel scrubs of his old enemy, Jo Ellen, whose shocked “Eep! What the hell! What do you think you’re doing?” “Oh, I, what are you doing over here?” He felt helpless, as she had possessed herself of his wrist, and was still holding it accusingly. He saw now that one of the male attendants had heard her loud, brassy exclamation, so overdone for what had actually happened, and was on his way over in a meaningful manner. “Is this old bastard bothering you, Jo Ellen?” He didn’t mince words. Andrew now saw that it was Larry, who had a thing for Jo Ellen in 14 particular, according to all the gossips, which Andrew had in the short time he’d been coming here already heard, but affected not to hear or be interested in. “No!” Andrew protested. “Yes, he did!” Jo Ellen insisted. “Always giving me grief, and then the first time he has me off by himself in a corner, he grabs my hoohah. And he took a swipe at my boobs, too!” The only thing that Andrew could be thankful for was that in this modern ridiculousness and trial by combat with Jo Ellen, his ghosts had quickly turned and taken their leave, back out into the snow, and he had a momentary thought that maybe he was better off with a few bad memories back in his own home during the days than he was allowing his children to bully him into this gross day school playpen for the elderly. Jo Ellen said to Larry, thrusting Andrew’s wrist back at him in a violent way that made his now thinner arm bruise itself painfully against his chair, “Here I noticed him sitting sadly all alone over here by himself, and then I saw him cover his mouth like he had to vomit, and so 15 I came over to see how he was, regardless of how hateful he always is to me. And now this!” “You just sit tight there, you,” Larry was threatening him. “I’ll go get the book, and we’ll write him up. He won’t watch tv, he won’t play bingo, he complains about the food, he’s rude to everybody who tries to be nice to him, it’s high time he got written up.” With a sudden spurt of energy, Andrew stood up erect and said quite loudly for him, “Nobody does try to be nice to me, everybody’s just always talking down to me the same way they do to these old fools here, and I don’t want to watch these stupid shows, and I don’t play bingo, and the food here is awful, sheerly awful, I don’t eat white bread, for one thing. And I wasn’t trying to grab your twat, you foolish, rude, abrasive young bitch, I was distracted by some old thoughts and memories, and thinking of a story I once read. I don’t suppose either of you even know how to read stories properly, do you? Well, if you ever learn, sometime read James Joyce’s story ‘The Dead,’ it’s in a book of his stories called Dubliners. As in, the capital city in Ireland. As in, a major Irish writer who was also a world literary figure. You need to be exposed to 16 something beyond your own limited little corner of the world where everybody has your same motives.” “My motives? What were you doing over here in the corner all by yourself? And why were you throwing your arm right around at me like that when I approached? You must’ve seen me coming. Were you trying to hit me, or what?” “No, I didn’t see you! I sort of heard someone coming, but my mind was taken up with old things and I was watching the snow, if you must know. Far more pleasant than sitting around with all these old farts.” “You’re an old fart too, buddy, and you shouldn’t be so high and mighty,” said Larry. “Jo Ellen, I’m going to go get the book. He shouldn’t be sitting around brooding to himself all the time, anyway. This is just what happens when people stay to themselves too much, they start to get weird. Grabbing for a feel is only the half of it. I’ll be back.” But Andrew knew he had to stand up for the young woman’s ghost now: for his remembered young love, and even for the calm platitudinous waters of his marriage, he had to defend his right to be with his ghosts, however they might tear and rend him. “Don’t bother!” 17 he said. “I’m leaving. You can’t stop me, I don’t come with the bus crew, and I’m not under the protection of my children. You can write your life story in that damned book if you want, but be sure you charge me off it; there’s no point in my children paying for this kindergarten for the senile anymore. I’m not crazy or demented or crippled, whatever the proper words are that we’re all supposed to use now, and I’m getting the hell out of here.” He was quite definite, and he left the area before they could recover from his having taken them off their guard with his tirade. As a proper newspaperman, he actually knew what the correct words to use were, but his ire had rescued him from his terror at the approach of his shades from the past, and even a little from the fear of his own death to come. He had some trouble making the cloakroom woman understand that he was leaving, but at fifty-five herself, she had been the nicest person there to him. When he gave her a brief explanation, equal to equal, and she was reassured that he wasn’t under care of any kind, she delivered up his things to him: his coat and gloves, his toboggan and 18 scarf, and he strode with re-assumed vigor out the front door, where the snow greeted him. The snow blew with the wind, and the wind blew with the course of the world, on and on, the shadows and thicknesses of flurries and even the patches of light through some strange heavenly break of cloud from time to time as Andrew walked home, eschewing a bus or a taxi, thanking his own form of gods that he was possessed of a comfortable income and apartment, and that he was on good terms with humanity, except for his one faulted lapse. He felt even a little fond, now, now that the ghost had reminded him, after this time, of her reality. For she was very, very real to him now, he knew, and he felt warmed by that knowledge, by not having to repress the memory of their love anymore, though his own last role had been so ignominious. He even thought, crazily, as he went along the way so familiar to him from other walks, that she must have forgiven him, still loved him, because she had come today, when he just couldn’t take that hellhole anymore. He said to her, “Amie, you’re welcome,” and with this, he accepted her again, and felt that she must’ve accepted him. He couldn’t bear it, otherwise. Victoria Leigh Bennett. Born W.Va. B.A. Cornell University, M.A. & Ph.D. University of Toronto. Degrees: English & Theater. Since 2012 website at creative-shadows.com, mostly literary articles/reviews. August 2021 first print book pub'd., Poems from the Northeast, 334 pp. Poem from book repub'd. September 2021 Winning Writers newsletter. January 2022, CNF pub'd. Roi Faineant Press. Acc'd for pub. January/February 2022 poem, Cult of Clio. Has written 8 novels & 1 collection short stories, all in search of publisher. Current WIP 9th novel, new poems, new CNF. Regularly on Twitter @vicklbennett, occasionally on Facebook at Victoria Leigh Bennett. Victoria is a member of the disabled community. (She/her).

Love, or something that sits warm. Casting chromatic shadows. Cools to harden, to still. Dark room. Fire higher to melt. Breath to stoke. Quiet crackle. Solid becomes liquid. Molten plastic gelatinous Love. You can not discern its edges. Love in this state is burning hot. Love in this state is reflective. Flickering between multiplicity and duality. Two becomes three becomes a kaleidoscope of microscopic Loves until it’s just one big Love. After all, it really was all along. One big Love isn’t heavy. Love permeates the cell wall through osmosis. Love has no constant density. Love, the idea… It’s a lot of little small Loves weaving their fibres together to make a gleaming, glistening net or web in that liquid state. And there are these tense spots where your feet weigh on the net and in pressing a bit harder, you can see these Loves. You might see a few small ones in the fridge at times, or burning out in ashtrays. Cooling to solid in lost-and-found’s or hanging over fences. Like last night's snow laying on the ground. Sometimes the Love will be clean and fresh. Contained. Other times, the Love is messy, dripping down your chin or spilling out of your pockets. Some Loves may be afraid to step out. They linger quietly like untethered shadows caught in the second dimension. Try feeding them in a safe space. Feed them bright colors and frangible ideas and feed them quiet and still places where (not a word needs uttering to explain). Love, the memory. Or Love, the present and future which became indiscernible from each other. Or Love distinctly atemporal. Love which is finite. Love on conditions. These Loves are the thread of myth and mundanity. They can sometimes be spotted in the sky near dusk. You may look up and spot a great billowing textile filling the sky. One big Love comprised of innumerably smaller Loves unraveling and unraveling and unraveling. Trailing behind itself in the wind. Subjective Love. Romanticized Love. Love as a synonym for ‘unexplainable’. Love to create. Love to destroy. Love which remains intact after complete deconstruction. Dissection as a matter of detangling. Love as the fibre which held the body intact. Love as the heat lingering in the sheets when sleepers wake. Love as the held breath. Love the peripheral sensation. The Queer element. Love incalculable. Electromagnetic Love in the fifth dimension. Love shifting, enlacing. A word from the author: It's quite fun to try and quantify intangible things or identify the seams and structures of the organic. I am a transgender multimedia artist, a story-teller, a believer in magic, and a baby of the sea.

Angie has a small part in my unpublished novel. Her daughter, Mindy, is the catalyst in the novel and the second protagonist as it were. Mindy is a college student and part-time stripper. She meets Jordan, the protagonist and college professor, walking home from the club at 2 am in a short skirt. Jordan and Mindy start a friendship but Angie has reservations about Jordan. Both newly vaccinated, Angie and I had lunch in person last week and I was able to ask her questions I’d been pondering for some time. She was resplendent in a lime-colored blouse, sky blue skirt, silver hoop earrings, and a turquoise necklace. I dressed in my drab usual: Old Navy button-down shirt and khakis. What’s your earliest memory? Shit, I don’t know. I didn’t have a great childhood so I’ve blocked most of them. I remember going to church in a very itchy dress and my mother telling me to stop scratching and listen to the preacher. I couldn’t have been more than four or five. What was the last thing that made you laugh? My husband, Jack – he’s a sweet man – but a bit too capable, you know the type, overbearing. He backed into a fire hydrant last week and put a nice dent into his new Camry. I peed my pants. Literal description. What’s your guilty pleasure? I like to eat Oreos in bed and fall asleep without brushing my teeth. What’s your greatest shame or secret? Like I said, my childhood sucked and I never wanted any child of mine to have the same. I can’t say for sure that Mindy’s was all that much better. That kills me. What do you think happens when we die? Geez, this is getting philosophical. You’re the college professor, remember? I’m an office manager. You rot in the ground and become earthworm food. Or whatever. Look, I know I could die tomorrow, but I’m only 46, why are you bringing up death? I could take Mindy to the pyramids or the Great Wall. I could be a grandma or own my own business. I got unfinished business here. Forget about what comes after. Is your marriage to Jack a mistake? Fuck you. How do you feel about being a minor character in a novel which will likely never be published? How do you feel about being its author? Ouch. Your daughter earns money thrusting herself at old men. How do you feel about that? You may be a writer, but, if you think that defines Mindy, you’re a bad reader. Humans are complex. Did you forget the ending of the novel? And, seriously, what’s with all these questions? I’m your character, remember. Fair enough, I’ll wrap up. Do you think you’ll appear in another novel? Definitely not, but a short story isn’t out of the question. You’re more of a short story writer. How would your short story go? Damned if I know. Probably some political angle: gentrification of the neighborhood, homeless guy living on my porch, working-class woman makes good. You know, that type of thing. I think you write in lieu of real activism. You sound bitter. Probably just horny. Jack doesn’t do it in that department. Ah. Can I ask you a question? Sure. In the novel, your novel, I have lunch with Jordan. Of course, it’s from his point of view and the readers learn that he feels desire for me. Now, I’m sitting across from you and I see the same thing in your eyes. Are you lusting after your own character? Um, that’s awkward. It sure is. Maybe we should go. Split the check? Fuck no. It’s on you.

My grandmother never said the words I love you, speaking instead in Blackjack for taffy on the flowered davenport in a living room free from pictures of my grandpa green Tupperware Oreos in the icebox, extra blankets in the clothes press sleepovers on school nights, the perfectly toasted waffle and knowing what she must about dreams the way she looked outside, beyond her window, saying only oh David, Grandma won’t be around to see that.

she said women aren’t allowed to need but we aren’t supposed to be strong either so we develop self-destructive rituals men call emotional problems the only problem i developed was from needing too much and packing in a buzz to blur my disappointment i touch my female lovers all the time when i hold their sobbing bodies and dry their tears shed because they’re disappointed from needing some man too much i hold her hand because i need to hold someone who understands me i think it might be impossible to shut off one emotion without shutting them all off it is too much to expect to be able to give without expecting anything in return maybe we aren’t allowed to need but Beth Mulcahy (she/her), a Gen X-er from Michigan, lives in Ohio with her husband, two kids and loyal Havanese dog sidekick. Beth works for a company that provides technology to people without natural speech. She writes poetry, fiction, memoir, and dreams about visiting Scotland. Her work has appeared in various journals and she has been nominated for a Pushcart prize. Check out her latest publications at https://linktr.ee/mulcahea

CW: Childhood sexual abuse, death Chasie wasn’t the only game you took fancy to, hidden away from grownups who partied in the dining room where my school bag laid near the breakfast bar. My childhood devoured by a monster with hands three times my size. Memories of your beanstalk figure breathing down my neck— my growing buds, your prey. You rejected my plea to stop and my mother’s fiery bellows to quit smothering my lungs but no didn’t feature in your vocabulary. I became a doll, lifeless in your arms. Juvenile adults still believed you were child friendly and the red flags didn’t bleed enough for anyone to lock you out of my house. I Googled your real name, searched for a jail term, a life sentence, for reams of young girls you lifted onto monkey bars, to leer at the skirts that fell past their barbie studded ears. Instead, the results showed your face that compared my pre-teen breasts to pincushions with a link to your live-streamed funeral. I took a pen and paper from the drawer in my desk that once sat a pink rock you told me to keep a secret. I began to write: Passed away painfully, suffering at the mercy of a miserable disease that began in the penis and ended in the lonely heart… Bianca Grace is a poet living in Australia. She is a reader for Sledgehammer Lit and Full House Lit. Her work has appeared in Anti-Heroin Chic, Selcouth Station, Capsule Stories, The Daily Drunk Mag, Postscript Magazine and elsewhere. Follow her on Twitter: @Biancagrace031

1. I think often about Beethoven, the 1992 children's movie; a John Hughes creation about a clumsy yet lovable St. Bernard. I remember sitting in the theatre at eight years old, attending a classmate's ninth birthday party, surrounded by my friends as they whispered and hissed and asked loudly if this movie was rated R (it wasn't). 2. A baby Beethoven invading a white home with white furniture and mauve carpet, so named because he barks stupidly whenever Emily, the youngest, taps out the opening strains of Fur Elise on the upright piano in the corner of the living room. He has terrorized the house with muddy footprints. stolen roast chicken legs. and has a tendency to disappear into pastel comforters. 3. The dog grows into a big and slobbery mess. He drools so much that he drools directly into the father's shoe, who drains the shoe with a yowl that reveals perfectly straight teeth. Beethoven's fur seems always to be damp, and I can smell the German shepherd who bit me in the stomach last fall, no blood but a bite of pain that lasted the rest of the day, a whole sunny Saturday gauzy with agony. 4. I was still dreaming about the German Shepherd, its snapped leash, its brown shoe-button eyes, by that spring. The theatre in April, the alien cold of air conditioning and the sun just beyond the red fire exit in the bottom corner of the screen. 5. Beethoven has made a chaos of the home, a home that looks like a dollhouse, a home where rainwater rushes down the front of the porch even though the sun is clearly shining in the background. I wonder about how movies are made, how the director directs it to rain. 6. I wonder harder when the father, lying in the giant bed in the dark, mistakes Beethoven's licks to his ear for the licks of his wife. "Oh Baby, it's not even Saturday night!" he says to a clueless Beethoven. "You drive me crazy. Has daddy's little girl been naughty?" "George!" his wife yells from the bathroom. My wondering kicks into overdrive. I will never really stop wondering about this scene. 7. Beethoven knocks more tables over. Beethoven saves Emily when she nearly drowns in the family's swimming pool. Of course a movie with a large, slobbery dog would include a drowning girl in need of a rescue. 8. The "of course" reverberates in my stomach--I nearly say it out loud in the theatre but don't. The "of course" ripples through me again when Beethoven's newly acquired army of dog friends ramble through the supermarket and knock over a perfectly placed pyramid of perfectly round cabbages. 9. "Of course," my heart whispers. Of course. The "of course" sounds as inevitable and resigned as my father after a 12-hour shift at the Goodyear plant. 10. Surely no other child can possibly believe this movie is funny or good or even acceptable. Surely every other child has realized we have been seated in this freezing theatre as some sort of colossal joke on the part of birthday boy Travis Kleinschmidt's mother. Travis Kleinschmidt's brother John is known for his jokes. My mother calls him a "class clown" and likes to use the phrase "boys will be boys" when referring to the Kleinschmidt brothers. 11. But I am wrong. There is no joke at this 1992 birthday screening of Beethoven. The movie is real, and a slow, clattering realization in the back of my brain makes me think this movie might not only be real but bad. Really bad. Alarmingly bad. 12. The kids are in a state of rapture around me. They whisper with glee whenever Beethoven shakes mud onto anything. The father screams, the kids laugh. There is a fart joke. The drool never ends and neither does the near-constant hiss of "groooooossss" through the theatre, followed by a cyclone of giggles. Beethoven topples another table. 13. Travis Kleinschmidt, wearing a Burger King crown and seated behind me, flanked by his two best friends Chase and Kyle, will not stop kicking the back of my seat. Beethoven merely has to glance at another cheap set with his big, world-weary eyes, and Travis is thrashing like a fish, the vinyl seat thudding and groaning at the impact of his Air Jordans. I turn to look at him but don't yell at him--he's the birthday boy, after all. My mother has taught me to be kind to those gracious enough to invite you to their birthday parties. 14. The villains in Beethoven consist of loud men in fancy suits hired by an evil veterinarian to kidnap Beethoven. Beethoven's army of dog friends chases them through an alley at one point, and the men slam a chain-link gate behind them. Believing their plan to be genius, the villains shake their asses and stick out their tongues at the dog army, chanting in singsong: "Stupid stupid doggy! Stupid stupid doggy!" 15. I've seen Travis Kleinschmidt do similar things at recess--the chants, the Bart Simpson-style butt shaking, the faces and tongues through the dome of the jungle gym. Would Travis Kleinschmidt grow up to be these men? Would I continue to encounter the taunts of men in expensive suits until I died? Would I have to attend their birthday parties, also until I died? 16. I had a flash of myself as a grown woman, doing an adult thing like strolling in a city park wearing a plaid scarf, and dogs, St. Bernards like Beethoven, German Shepherds like the dog who bit me, and every other type of dog, jumping on me, licking me, slobbering in happiness as my stomach tightened. The owner would approach me. "Oh, but he's friendly. He won't hurt you." "Of course," I would say. "Of course." 17. Of course Beethoven saves the day and of course the evil veterinarian pays. 18. Travis Kleinschmidt's mother asks us, as the lights slowly rise, if we liked the movie. The kids roar yes around me. I might have said yes as well, simply because they did. Or I might have looked at the floor, now flecked with popcorn and sticky with pop. I remember being worried for the future, maybe even a tiny bit afraid. 19. In 1992 Beethoven was the first in what would become an eight-movie franchise (two theatrical releases and six direct-to-video) that ended with Beethoven’s Treasure Trail in 2014, the year I would complete graduate school. 20. "Did you like the movie?" my mom asks in the parking lot as I open the door to our Mazda minivan that smells vaguely of baby wipes and leaking pouches of Capri Sun. The April around us is about to burst into summer. "Of course," I say, trying the phrase out for the first time. It's awkward and tastes almost bitter on my tongue ("groooooossss" " my classmates might say), but I learn to live with it. I learn to live with a lot of things. Katie Berger lives in Omaha, NE, where she works as an academic advisor. Her work has appeared in Pidgeonholes, Cherry Tree, and others, and she has published two chapbooks with Dancing Girl Press.

My mother blows smoke off the cast-iron comb she’s pulled from burning coals. She grabs the handle with a small raggedy hand towel already singed brown from previous sessions, then wipes the charcoal black clean with another, before sinking its warped teeth into my roots and through kinks. I wait for the sizzle, inhaling the burning stench of wild hair getting straightened into submission. I hold my breath, scrunching my shoulders high, and brace for the heat, inching closer. My fingertips pin down the rim of my ears greased with vaseline, as she warns for the fiftieth time, “don’t move”. I moved once. There’s a mark on my right wrist from flinching too soon, sending the comb flying out of her hands. I don’t remember the aftermath, only that my hair is soft and swishes from side to side. By seven, I’m a ways from West Africa, and I have a feeling that people measure beauty differently here. I want to flip my hair like other girls on the playground do. Theirs is long and fine and I study how they brush their hands behind their swan necks and send it back over their shoulders. That’s beauty to me. My hair’s buzzed low because nobody can dare tame it like my mother, and it feels like a sun-dried sponge. When the wind blows and teases their strands of silk across their faces, it passes mine by, like the boys’ gaze. My legal guardian asks every black woman we see how to tackle this hair. All I want it to do is behave, stay matted down with the cheap gel I pile on every morning that isn’t made for it, but I apply in globs every day, then step out in the mid-west winter that’ll freeze it. My mother’s letters from across the world are full of hair advice. I don’t understand. She’s obsessed with it; I’m not. Friends dare me to fro my hair. It’s middle school and we’re all looking for ways to stand out, embrace ourselves, and fit in. Students reach out to touch it in the hallways, running their fingers through. Teachers gawk at it from their whiteboards at the front of the room, and now I have the skater boys’ attention. “Dude, that’s awesome!” Everyone means well, but I’m more of a spectacle, not someone who’s desired. Their gaze still rests on the preppy girls who say they wish they had my hair, but I don’t believe them. My confidence retracts into puffy pigtails, then braids. At least hair extensions lay on my shoulders and across my back. I despise the dark hair on my arms, so I shave it off. Boys like smooth, unblemished skin. If I can’t change the color, I can alter how it feels. I take care of the sideburns too, along with the little hairs sprouting from under my chin. Mom writes that it runs in the family. All my aunties are hairy. Comforting, but this is high school. By college, I want everyone to think my wigs are real. Summer break brings many changes, but everyone wonders about my hair’s mysterious growth except my black resident advisor. I wait for roommates to go home on the weekends, then hang it on the bedpost to let my head breathe, cornrows exposed. When I meet my future husband four years later, I tell him the truth. “Whatever makes you feel free”, he says. That was beauty for him. I ask myself what those letters riddled with hair care meant. I think my mother knew how it began. If it didn’t start with the color of my skin, it would start with my hair. It’s all connected. The need to disappear and become someone else, shunning every option to love myself. I sit in my salon chair. I’ve settled on a new hair-do that’s shaved on my right side around the back, and full of my natural hair on the left, two extremes, my personal tug of war. My mother dislikes that it shows the scalp rolls at the base of my head. I did for some brief time, too. She combs through my wet and relaxed hair, then inquires before styling like she’s known my track record all these years, “Do you want it curled up or blow-dried white girl straight?” Wendy Newbury is a music teacher and writer living in Pasco, WA. She is currently writing a memoir. Her single work has been published in The New York Times Tiny Love Stories column.

Never wake your sleeping hero because he’s probably dream-drooling over the hottie he’s with in Gala, coconut oiling her bum cheeks, and judging by his twitches it’s the explicit bit, which makes you want to hammer the glass window because it’s not your arse. But there’s a £1000 fine for misuse and that’s money better spent on getting out of this hellhole. Now what would it feel like to sit next to him, inhale his Yves Saint Laurent, twist your head a touch closer and sense the tailwind of his breath on your cheek? Would your mam loathe you or love you for this? Would she listen when you tell her he’s more chiseled than on the album covers, that his eyelashes are bloody dashing, that there’s dandruff on his collar or maybe it’s eczema due to the strain of being on tour, signing autographs, plucking his Gibson Les Paul? And so you splay your fingers gently on his, nestle against his shoulder, pretend to drift off to the clickety-clacks. Were he to wake up from the click of your selfies, what would you utter, what question would you ask to stand out from the others who say so, where do you get your inspiration from? And when he says what the! you find his voice is nothing like his singing voice and he has enclaves of eye goop. Kik Lodge writes flash in France. Her work has featured in The Moth, Tiny Molecules, The Cabinet of Heed, Reflex Fiction, Sledgehammer Lit, Ellipsis Zine, Splonk, Bending Genres and Litro.

No, you didn’t wake me. Nobody here got any sleep last night. There’s a woman down the hall who spent most of the night screaming. She thinks she has hepatitis or something. You look dubious. Well, she’s obviously in some kind of pain, whether it’s in her liver or in her head. There. You hear her? Can’t you give her Fentanyl or something? You’ll make her happy, and you’ll give the rest of us some peace. It’s a win-win. Unethical? Isn’t it your job to alleviate suffering? We’re all suffering here. Yes, I’m in pain, too. No, I can’t rate it on a one-to-ten scale. I feel as though my head is caught in a trash compactor. They told me I have a mild concussion. I probably have a hangover, too. Also, I can’t breathe. Is my nose broken? Are my teeth all there? I did learn something last night: an airbag packs quite a punch. Rate my mood on a one-to-ten scale? That’s funny. A scream, you might say. No, I don’t feel suicidal, though if that screaming persists, I may before too long. To the extent that I can remember anything from last night, I don't think I felt suicidal then either. Admittedly, my actions may suggest otherwise. So, I take it from the tenor of your questions that I’m on a psych ward. How long can I expect to stay here? That’s pretty vague. I’d like to leave today. I didn’t think you would recommend it, but I can, right? Against medical advice? So be it. That screaming has me at the end of my rope. No, I don’t know how much I drank yesterday. A lot, I suppose. More than usual, even for me. I have been drinking quite a lot lately. Yes, there’s a family history. My father was a drunk. Probably drank himself to death. He died of liver cancer. He left when I was eight. I saw him sporadically after that. According to my mother, he paid his child support sporadically, too. No, not violent, but he was mean. My abiding memory of him is of the time he popped up at the door one Saturday in January when I was twelve—I hadn’t seen him by then for more than two years—saying he wanted to spend some time with his son. He took me back to the furnished room he was living in at the time—I was surprised Mom let me go with him—gave me my first beer, which I didn’t much care for, and told me in graphic detail about the seventy-nine other women he’d slept with before, during and after the marriage. He seemed pleased with himself. Maybe he hoped that I would take after him. In that respect, I didn’t. I never cheated on Peg. It was she who…But I don’t want to talk about that. When I talked about drinking a lot lately—well, maybe lately is a stretch. More like the last year or so. Since…Since I found out that Peg was sleeping with a colleague of hers, another House Ways and Means Committee staffer. Apparently, they began showing each other their ways and means while working together to craft a capital gains tax loophole—a piece of legislation rather disingenuously titled the Family First Support Act, or the FFS Act. I kid you not. Having met the bill’s primary sponsor once at a holiday party, I can say with confidence that he’s a moron and that it never would have occurred to him that the acronym might have a double meaning. Peg didn’t appreciate my joking about it. By that time, she had convinced herself that she was doing good. People can will themselves to believe anything, given the right set of incentives. A funny thing: the night Peg told me about the affair, she cried and cried, and begged me to forgive her. We even had sex—the kind we used to in the early days, when we could spend a whole weekend in bed. What I had found so striking about her then was her uncanny resemblance to the 1940s film star Veronica Lake—the same evanescent beauty, the same yellow hair curling over her right cheekbone, the same hint of sadness in her eyes. That night, I again thought myself a very fortunate man to be sharing a bed with her. Afterwards, when we lay spent, with her head resting on my arm and her left leg curling over mine, I kissed her forehead and whispered, “Where did we lose each other?” But there would be no reprise, and in retrospect, I would have done better to move out that very night. Instead, I stayed and drank, while unbeknownst to me, she continued the affair for some months more. Ultimately, her lover ended it. Family values and all that. Unlike her, he was not willing to destroy his. What do I think went wrong? With me? With Peg? With us? I don’t know. I don’t know whether we changed—whether people ever really do—or just revealed more and more of ourselves until we both became so hideous in each other’s sight that we had to turn away. Dueling pictures of Dorian Gray. We’d always had our differences—over religion, politics, and after the boys were born, childrearing. For a long time, though, until Mr. Ways and Means came along, we managed to compartmentalize our disagreements. Or I did. If she were here, she would probably tell you that for her the marriage died long before, that my thoughtless ways and relative lack of means drove her to seek comfort elsewhere. My God! That screaming! Not that I blame the poor woman. I have no doubt that the pain is real, whether it originates in her liver, as she seems to think, or in her head, as you apparently do. Either way, she’s in hell. What? No, I don’t believe in a literal hell. Peg does. She thinks I’m headed there—or hopes I am. She has said to me a thousand times, “May God forgive you,” meaning, of course, just the opposite. Do you suppose that hell is something that passes down from one generation to the next? I worry about the younger boy, Aaron. He’s a brooder, too much like me. He just turned eight. Same age as…Ah. Isn’t it strange how, despite your best intentions, you find yourself emulating someone you despise and recreating in your own life the misery visited upon you? I sometimes think that dogs have greater self-knowledge than we do. Their needs are simple and their actions, straightforward. They want something, and they go after it. We, on the other hand…But I should only speak for myself. Yes, I presume that some people can break such patterns. But me? I don’t know. I don’t see how I could ever face the boys again after yesterday. No, I’m not. It’s just something in my eye. Yesterday is all a blur, to tell you the truth. I was lying on the living room sofa, passed out drunk, and then a noise that sounded like a gunshot woke me up. It was a bottle crashing against the wall. The very bottle I’d been drinking from. The front door was wide open, and Peg and the boys were standing just inside. She was screaming, the boys were crying, and outside, the woman from next door was slinking down the path toward the sidewalk. I was shivering from the cold, and covered with glass shards. As best I can piece things together, the boys must have gotten tired of waiting for me to come get them from school—I work at home, so I usually drop them off in the morning and pick them up in the afternoon—and decided to walk. The school is over a mile from home, and the temperature was in the twenties at the time. They must have stood outside for a long time, ringing the bell, banging on the door, yelling, crying, and God-knows-what, but I was too far gone to hear them. The neighbor must have taken them in until Peg got home. I do not blame Peg for aiming a bottle at my head, only for missing. Do you have kids? I ask because, whether you’re aware of it or not, you let the mask slip for a second. The look you gave me—the incomprehension and disgust in your eyes—was that of a horrified parent, not a clinician. No, I’m not mistaken. When Peg told me to get out, I didn’t even bother to pack. I just drove and drove, halfway around the Beltway, into Northern Virginia. When I felt myself sobering up, I got off the Beltway and stopped at some dive bar for another drink or three or six. By the time I got back in my car, the snow had begun. The rest I remember in fragments, like one of those nightmares in which you never get to the one place you absolutely have to be. Seeing the sign for the Beltway but missing the entrance ramp. Turning around and driving past it again. Another U-turn, and then, the tree. Did I hit it intentionally? No. I can tell that you don’t believe me, but it’s the truth. Had I hit it directly at full speed, I wouldn’t be here. I skidded into it. Now, if I had given the matter any thought, it may have occurred to me that driving at high speed while blind drunk during a raging snowstorm would inevitably result in my hitting a tree or another car or a person. But I didn’t give the matter any thought. I did not want to think at all, just to stay in motion, to drive as fast as I could for as long as I could. Why? Because if I stopped, my thoughts would catch up with me. What thoughts? The kind that tear at your innards like that eagle forever gnawing on Prometheus’s liver. Like the poor woman down the hall, who can’t tell where her pain is coming from because it’s radiating through every cell of her body and every thought. Clinically speaking, would you say she’s lost her mind? Would you say I’ve lost mine? People talk so casually about losing their minds, but they have no idea. No idea. God! Couldn’t you do something for her? Please? All she wants is some peace. She’s suffering so. Can’t you hear? Edward Belfar is the author of a collection of short stories called Wanderers, which was published by Stephen F. Austin State University Press in 2012. His fiction and essays have also appeared in numerous literary journals, including Shenandoah, The Baltimore Review, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Potpourri, Confrontation, Natural Bridge, and Tampa Review. He lives in Maryland with his wife and works as a writer and editor.