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By the time Marian reaches the exclamation point, the felt cone rubs only a dry, stuttery line across the paper. Irritation grinds up her spine. Ruined. All ruined . Pulling up a gob of spit, she runs the marker tip along the crease of her tongue to juice it back up. Bitterness bleeds, tingling, toward the edges and into her tonsils. She scrubs the itch of her tongue against the roof of her mouth, the backs of her teeth, then folds herself back over the paper. At first, the ink runs thin and too watery, but soon enough it flows into the gaps, and discouragement seeps away as, letter by letter, she retraces her work.  “What do you think?” she asks, holding up the sign.  Sophie looks up from rummaging through the tub of dress-up clothes. “You look like an okapi,” she murmurs, voice warm with admiration.  Marian sticks out her tongue, looking cross-eyed to see where the streak of black down the center fades to blue in an inky gradient. She rolls her eyes at her sister and sticks her tongue out further. “Okay, but what do you think?” she asks again, shaking the paper.  LIMMITED RUN! ONE NIGHT ONLY! While she waits for Sophie’s response, Marian plays it all out in her mind: they’ll stage the performance in the living room, the coffee table shoved to one side. Their parents, captivated by the drama, will forget the icy edges of their distance and be drawn together, their shoulders kissing.  “You misspelled ‘limited,’” says Sophie. “There’s only supposed to be one ‘m’.” Marian’s mirage evaporates. “Oh, how do you know?”  “It’s the wrong shape.” Sophie shrugs and scoops up an armful of costumes, letting them waterfall over her wrists and back into the tub. “What play are we doing? Robin Hood?”  Ever since Marian discovered her name twin in the pages, it’s been her favorite form of pretend. She’s made Sophie spend hours dashing through their backyard Sherwood Forest with an imaginary bow and arrow, saving Maid Marian. “Not this time. We need something original for this occasion.”  Sophie nods. She doesn’t ask what the occasion is. Instead, she asks what costumes she should be looking for, anyway.  “I’ll need something elegant. Oh, and I think we should have a bear.” “A bear?” “Miss Meadows says that the most compelling stage direction of all time is exit, pursued by bear .” “But what does that mean?” Sophie asks.  “Stage directions tell the actors where to move and how to deliver their lines.” “Yeah, but–” “It means the actor has to leave the stage, chased by a bear. It’s dramatic .” Marian rolls her eyes. Her little sister might be a genius speller, but she has no grasp of the theatrical. A bear, properly placed, will heighten the emotional stakes of the play. She reaches past Sophie and digs through the box, pulling a fur pillbox hat from the depths. “Voila,” she declares, setting it on her sister’s head and tugging it down over her ears. “Grrr.” Sophie swipes a flat-fisted paw across the air and twists her mouth into a snarl, but her growl disintegrates instantly to giggles. From downstairs, a cupboard door hits its frame with a sharp report and double-bang aftershock. The laughter slips off Sophie’s face. Marian rubs the soles of her feet against her shins, right and then left and right again, scraping off the prickle from the vibrating floorboards. “I think we should perform tomorrow,” says Marian over their parents’ raised voices. “We’ll have to rehearse hard, but we can be ready.” And then, low enough that she can imagine Sophie won’t hear: “We’re running out of time.” # By dinner, their parents have yelled themselves out and retreated to opposite sides of the table. They shoot glances, furtive and furious and calculating and despairing, across four feet of shellacked wood, toward anything but each other. Sophie and Marian trade okapi facts and acting tips, pretending their way toward normalcy. Reminding their parents they’re still there.  “Did you ever notice that in a play, characters never face each other directly? They tilt themselves out a bit so the audience can see their expressions,” says Marian, a strand of spaghetti trailing from her fork.  “Speaking of plays, I see that we’re in for a performance tomorrow night,” says their dad, focusing on her for the first time.  Marian blushes and nods, clamping down her smile at the corners.  “Well, what’s it called?” “Exit–” “Yes, Exit ,” Marian says, cutting Sophie off with a glare. For maximum dramatic impact, the bear needs to be a surprise.  “Intriguing,” says their father, looking between them before fixing his gaze back on the salt shaker.  “Yes.” Their mom’s voice sounds clogged and higher-pitched than normal. “Is it a comedy or a tragedy?” “Tragedy,” Marian says. She imagines her own body sprawled across the stage, dead or dying or grievously injured, transmitting the pain directly into her parents. Into her mother, who would be forced to look, finally, at the stage. And at her.  “Comedy,” says Sophie at the same time, looking at their dad.  Marian sees the look. She, too, has noticed how even her dad’s laugh lines look forlorn, drooping down, fleeing the concentration groove deepening between his eyebrows.  “Well, whatever it ends up being, we can’t wait,” says their mom, marching a smile onto her face.  Finally, they’ll understand the pain they’re causing,  thinks Marian.  A wooly-thick silence settles between them, different somehow from the old ones when they chewed bites of food and mined their days for stories. “So where are we going?” asks Sophie, just when the humming tension builds up so high that Marian is afraid her bones might rattle apart with the force of it.  “Going?” The pressure ratchets higher. Marian thinks her sister looks stricken, like a deer caught in headlights. Or an okapi.  “Earlier. You said something about a hotel.” Sophie mumbles into the tangled nest of noodles on her plate.  So it’s Marian who sees what Sophie does not: their mom’s white-knuckled grip on her fork, the flush of mottled red across their dad’s neck.  “No one’s going anywhere,” their mom says evenly.   “Actually,” says their dad, his words smothered under the scrape of chair legs as he drags himself back from the table, “I’m going out to the garage.” # “Stage right. You have to enter from stage right!” says Marian, gesturing to the other side of the room. All morning, she’s been trying to get Sophie to remember the blocking. Her scattered sister keeps making it through a scene only to go for a costume change and miss her cue entirely, staring blankly at the closed door of Marian’s bedroom. “I thought I did.” She scowls.  A hot prickle of shame washed over Marian. All morning, she’s been barking commands. Sophie’s playing a wicked witch, a guard, a daring prince (and a bear, of course) opposite Marian’s damsel in distress in a play that’s something like Robin Hood meets Snow White meets whatever Shakespeare play has the bear. Sophie can’t remember who she’s supposed to be next, never mind what side of the room she’s supposed to enter from. And while she can remember that she’s not supposed to laugh when Marian collapses in a faint, fends off an attack, and dies a flailing, gruesome death, giggles keep sneaking out anyway. Marian’s temper has worn thin, and they aren’t any more ready than they were yesterday.  Sophie tugs the fur hat lower and drops her lip into a pout. “I’m never going to get this in time.” “Well, that scary bear face is on point.” Marian sighs. “Think of it this way–you have to sneak up behind me. If you enter from stage left, I would be able to see you coming and run away. It would ruin the effect entirely.” Flopping her head back, Sophie trudges across the room and takes her position on the stage right side of the rug.  Maybe it doesn’t matter, anyway, Marian tells herself: she could try  to run away if she saw a bear coming, but bears are fast. Besides, the scariest things are the ones you can see coming. The ones you still can’t escape.  # When their mom walks in for the performance, she takes one look at the empty chair beside their dad and tugs the ottoman out from the corner for herself. Peering out from the hall closet-turned-dressing-room, Marian watches her perch on the edge, angled forward and tensed like she’s about to take a test. Or take off.  The jolt in Marian’s ribs catches her off guard; she looks down, ready to chew out Sophie for running into her, but there’s nothing there. Nothing but dismay that her plan is already failing.  “Mom, could you . . .?” Marian gestures toward the chairs, but lets her sentence fizzle into nothing at the sight of her mom’s glazed face.  “Hmm? Oh, of course, honey,” says her mom vaguely, getting up and opening the door.  The breeze, cool in the wake of the June afternoon, sweeps the skin on Marian’s forearms into goosebumps. Her mom settles back on her cushion, even further from their father than before. Marian clenches her molars, clamping down on the rising despair.  Their parents laugh just like Sophie when Marian faints at the sight of the wicked witch, although they hide it better. Sophie, clearly elated by their amusement, lets loose her wickedest cackle and takes a second lap around Marian’s slumped form before flying off the stage and behind the couch for a costume change.  When Sophie, dressed as the guard, patrols the perimeter, Marian chances a glance up and sees her mom’s glassy-eyed stare somewhere left of the action.  It’s hopeless. This time, when Marian feels the grip on her chest, she recognizes it. But the show must go on , she thinks, and she channels her anguish into her next line: “I will not be so easily pushed aside. I will never lose hope with so worthy a task.” In her bear costume, standing on a chair with tree branches threaded through the rungs, Sophie cups her hand over her eyes like a visor and sweeps her gaze back and forth across the stage. Their dad’s face is still stiff, but with a half smile that pushes his laugh lines closer to where they belong. Sophie’s growl is ferocious.  The gasp is almost inaudible.  Marian, seeing her mom’s genuine, unforced surprise, feels a thrill shiver up her backbone. It’s working , she thinks.  Sophie turns at the half-sound, just in time to see the shadow flap wildly through the door, cartwheeling haphazardly before crash landing downstage from her tree-chair. She jumps down to get a closer look at the bat. Like the okapi with its horse face and zebra-striped butt, the bat is a mishmash of parts: the soft-furred torso and sleek-rubbery wings like a tiny teddy bear in a leather jacket. She drops to a crouch beside it and breathes in rapid time with its crumpled, heaving body.  “Don’t touch it. It’s probably ill.” Their father’s voice is a wire strung tight.  “I won’t,” their mom replies. Her sleeve brushes up against Sophie’s arm as she reaches toward it anyway. “But we can’t leave it here. We have to get it outside. Get me something to scoop it up.” Marian darts into the kitchen. She slides back into the room with a Tupperware in one hand and the lid in the other, presenting them like an offering.  Their mom tips the bowl over the bat.  “Now what?” asks Sophie, resting her chin on the floor. The scuffed plastic blurs the body, turning the creature into a warped illustration of itself.  “I don’t know. Let me think.”  The wings whisper and rap against the sides. Marian jumps back.   “Can you slide something underneath to scoop it up?” asks their dad.  The lid only shoves the bat to one side, smooshing it against the far wall of its suffocating cage.  “I need something thinner,” says their mom.  Marian runs out to the stoop and pulls a circular from the newspaper.  “Perfect.” Their dad lifts his laugh lines, but there’s no smile underneath. “Okay, hold it steady . . .” As their mom lifts the edge of the Tupperware, he slides the tagboard underneath.  The flapping inside turns to thrashing, and a wing slips out, protruding from the gap. “Careful!” Sophie gasps.  Crepey, leathery skin stretches over impossibly delicate bones. Marian can see the unnatural angle of the wing, hear the bat’s ultrasonic cries as the plastic scrapes its tissue.  Their mom lifts the bowl and recaptures the wing. Their dad slips his hand under the campaign flier, and together they lift it off the floor, a captive in flight.  Together, their parents walk the creature outside. Marian gulps air into suddenly clotted lungs and follows, her skirt trailing in the grass, her hands clenched in desperate fists. She blinks back tears, watching them cradle between them a thing already half dead.  Sophie trails behind. Nudging up against Marian’s side, she grips her hand. Marian squeezes back. Together, they watch their parents work shoulder to shoulder, voices gentled, as they slide the injured animal into the shade of the hydrangea, looking for signs of life.  A native of the Pacific Northwest and a recovering English teacher, Lindsey James draws inspiration for her writing from the people and landscapes of eastern Washington State. Her previous work appears or is forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, Necessary Fiction, Heavy Feather Review, Vast Chasm, Brilliant Flash Fiction , and elsewhere.

I was told to walk deliberately, rehearsed. One careful step at a time, so the click of my stilettos wouldn’t pollute the silence or intrude on anyone’s thoughts. Not to turn my head, show a grimace, or even shift the curve of my lips or brows when commented on. Not to flinch or stir, not even at an obvious brush, a shove, or under the weight of a fixed gaze. That’s how you avoid a dog. You can’t outrun a dog. He’ll chase you down and tear you apart. You can’t ask for help. Who are you? A girl with no mother? Or a weak, pathetic girl whose mother taught her nothing? That was my mother’s advice. I get it. She’s met many dogs in her life, and she survived. Thrived, some would say. Our rented apartment, filled with beautiful things that carry no story; my private college degree, debt-free; and the respectful nods from conservative neighbors are proof enough. But today, I have no patience. I wanted to arrive early. I couldn’t risk missing it. It has finally called for me. It wants me. Me. Imagine. So I run. Not like a lady, like something uncultured. Like a fugitive. I spit in the direction of the barks, no longer pretending they were mere comments. The strap of my dress slips. I crash through puddles and potholes, leaving the heels of my expensive shoes behind, broken in the hole-filled tiles of the footpath. I am disheveled, impure. Feeling my heartbeat in my mouth and ears, I rejoice in her, this wild version of me, drunk on want. It’s intoxicating. I don’t stop at any horns, whistles, or warning signs. I nearly trip when some letters are hurled at me along with suffocating smoke breath and wet-mouthed laughter. Ae, sun . Listen. One particularly sharp sound— chee or a whistled kiss—hits my bare shoulder, and I fall. My scraped ankle stings with grit, tobacco spit, and blood. I resist the urge to scrape off the skin that was touched. My head swims. But I continue to run. And I make it. I stop and stare. It’s just the bridge: the crossing between who I am, who I want to be, and who I must be. It’s brighter than I imagined. Its scent is loamy and spicy, like irresistible quicksand pulling me in. They promised me this: the mud, its hold, and the vast expanse would wash away my sins and imperfections. Then, the stars, the moon, and all that was meant for the pure could be mine. Me: the maiden of grace and perfection. I only have to let it consume me. It might hurt, but it’ll be worth it. At first, it narrows at my stillness. But when I don’t move, it opens wider, deeper. It’s unfathomable to me. Is it… Waiting for me? I’m a tease. Aren’t I? It exhales my name, a soft whisper against the back of my ear. Maybe it’s trying to tempt me. But what I once mistook for affection is only hunger—lonely, needy, and ugly. I wince at the memory of the years I spent trying to be called, trying to be accepted by it, the years when the hope of one day belonging to something vast and boundaryless wrapped itself around every inch of my life. It covered everything: the cramped space I lived in, the certainty I clung to, the parts of me I didn’t dare dissolve: my wildest dreams, my unspeakable desires. I sit, spread my limbs, wheel-wing the space, muddying it with my selfishness. The flying dirt stings in its eyes. It mumbles curses. “I am tainted,” it announces. But it still needs me, like a wild creature settling for a corpse. When I look the other way, it roars an unkind wind at me. As time passes and I still don’t budge, it says it’s ready to worship me. It begs me to come in. Now, that’s tempting. I need to think. But then I hear them again, the stray, filthy ones I’d left behind. Cockroaches follow. Cockroaches will survive the end of the world. They’ll feed on your fossils. And some dogs are cockroaches. What were once just Ae, tch tch  sounds have formed language. “ Sun, item, ” it barks. Listen, you object. It wants my attention. So does this thing in front of me. “Get in line,” I say. This thing in front of me is slowly taking shape. It has boundaries, after all. And the shape isn’t much different from the ones behind me. “Oh, hello, item, are you deaf?” “You think you’re such an item?” Item. Item. Item. I sigh. At last, something I can agree with. I am an object—but not a thing to possess. I am a vision: untouchable, like a flame too dangerous to play with. I turn and blink. I make it all true, wearing their words like a crown. My eyes, a dark sea—not of longing or hunger, but of an abyss it dare not enter. They huff, mouths opening and closing in disbelief. Then they leave. Weeks later, when the story is told, parts are left out. Because who talks in depth about failed pursuits? Or rather, unworthy pursuits? It ends with a declaration: The shrew, the asking-for-it item, was a witch all along. They fiddle with their lockets meant to ward off evil, the evil being me. The one who didn’t break. The one who threw back their nasties, spell for spit. And I don’t deny it. I never do. Garima Chhikara is a writer from Bangalore, India. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Forge Literary Magazine, Hobart, Lost Balloon, Sky Island Journal, La Piccioletta Barca, Sheila-Na-Gig, and Halfway Down the Stairs. Find her at garimachhikara.com .

Jolowat dug through the box of half-priced items, pulling out a glass-fronted rectangular object.  “What’s this?” she asked the Elder running the sale. “It’s called a cell phone,” he replied. “They were used for communication—I found loads of them when I arrived here with the first settlement group. It hasn’t worked in ages, but would make an interesting conversation piece.” Jolowat nodded and walked over to pay him, reaching down to pat the tiny-headed human lying at the Elder’s feet. It was hard to believe that these dimwitted animals had once been intelligent enough to use such a device. Maria Carvalho’s multi-genre work has appeared in a variety of literary magazines, including  Roi Fainéant Press, MetaStellar, Free Flash Fiction, Twin Pies Literary, 101 Words, Literary Revelations , and  All Your Stories . Her short stories have been published in a smorgasbord of anthologies, including several titles in the Owl Hollow Press Anthology Series, and her poetry appears in several best-selling books from Literary Revelations. Her popular children's book  Hamster in Space!  was praised by Kirkus Indie Reviews for its "sharp understanding of kids' wacky sense of humor." Find her on Bluesky: @ immcarvalho.bsky.social  and Twitter: @ImMCarvalho .

Ma says I was a picky eater from birth. Wouldn’t drink the expensive formula she bought with clenched teeth. Ahma came, mixed porridge water with sugar, forced it down like medicine. Wouldn’t eat rice cereal. When they went to work in the orchard, they set me in a big bathtub with a bowl of plain porridge, my sister ordered to watch. Porridge smeared my face, neck, collar, sticky on my skin. Vegetables? Refused. Only rice with soy sauce. Not far from the mud house was a dump. Dead livestock, buzzing flies. When Ma stoked the fire, steam rose; flies dropped into the soup, black specks floating. Lychees? Rarely touched. Our orchard had plenty, but the fresh ones were for sale. Didn’t like the browned, slightly sour shells. Candy Ma bought? Maybe. But I longed for the White Rabbit brought by my uncle, who slipped into Hong Kong. One day, I dragged a stool, stretched for it. Ma beat me with a broom until bruises bloomed. Fish? Rejected. Sometimes she cut into the bitter gall. Pork? No. Hated the shriek when Ba slaughtered pigs, feared the bristling stubble on their skins. Snake? Never. Green ones slithered behind the mud house. At night, lamp in hand, I dreaded the thud in the woodshed. Something hitting the ground. But I liked bitter melon. Stir-fried, braised, no matter how sharp. So bitter my parents winced, but I savored it. Enjoyed green plums. My sister climbed the tree, I caught them below, dodging caterpillars dropping from branches. Loved watermelon. Once or twice a summer. Juice on my face, sticky fingers, licking them clean. Ate fried freshwater snails. Sucked hard; if they wouldn’t budge, I dug them out with a toothpick. Tongue numb from spice, couldn’t stop. Once loved chicken, especially drumsticks. Until we killed Redcomb. Redcomb, who crowed every dawn, fought rats, guarded chicks, strutted around the yard, head high, proud. Ma raised the cleaver. I stood nearby. Saw tears bead and fall from his eyes. Trust breaks. It shatters. Like Ba’s fist rising and falling on Ma. Huina Zheng holds an M.A. with Distinction in English Studies and works as a college essay coach. Her stories have been published in  Baltimore Review, Variant Literature, Midway Journal , and other reputed publications. Her work has been nominated thrice for both the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net. She resides in Guangzhou, China with her family.

Engagement, April 2010 after Egg Toss, August 1989 In my memory the engagement happened to two adults, though we were anything but, with me fumbling my way through grad school, trying to act as an authority figure as a TA to students older than me, him working the front desk of a hotel so he always had a free place to stay when he traveled. We stay up late every night, drinking beer at a new- to-us bar or downing six-packs at home. We play Guitar Hero and watch episodes of Friends—even though I prefer Seinfeld—or anything on the Food Network. We pretend our opinions matter, pontificating about meat and cheese and toppings on our Burger Blog. It’s just an excuse to go out, take pictures of our food, and eat something greasy to soak up the beer. We don’t realize other people take it more seriously than us until a cattle ranch sends a cooler of ground meat to our apartment door and Sonic reaches out with a sponsorship, but by then, we hate burgers and can hardly stand each other. And it would be a lie to say the relationship was anything more than “just cuz.” We met because, in a city of transients, we were two people far from the same home. I avoided his type in high school but ignored the red flags in a new location. I wanted someone who didn’t spend sixty hours a week on campus, someone who didn’t need me to review their essay, someone who didn’t think I drank too much. In the house with four other TAs, I hide vodka in my room. With him, I’m free to drink beer and inhale burgers and pretend I’m going to drop out of school to become a comedian. And I can see how that felt like enough. When you have nothing going for you but this person who doesn’t expect anything from you. I understand why I said yes when he got down on one knee, surrounded by candles like Chandler, or was it Monica? And I knelt too, and it felt like this was ours, though it obviously wasn’t. In another moment the candles’ heat becomes too much and I’m sweating, and we blow them out one by one, and there are tears in my eyes but I wave off the smoke as an excuse while he looks at me with love because he thinks those tears are me, overcome with my love for him, but it’s not that at all. For that moment though, in my memory, my lying, longing memory, there’s only that room, our bodies, the heat, nowhere to go. I hear my housemates in the kitchen, see the stack of readings on my desk, imagine the bottle of vodka hidden in the drawer below. I look at the ring on my finger, the thin silver band, the diamond chips catching the last flame, the sparkling amethyst, something I would have chosen myself but didn’t, and he says, “Let’s celebrate,” but we don’t drink beer and we don’t eat burgers. We go to a diner and I order cereal because I can and I never have before, and I take the last soggy bite, thinking, “This isn’t like Seinfeld at all.” Allison Renner’s fiction has appeared in SoFloPoJo, Ink in Thirds, Atlas and Alice, Gooseberry Pie , and others. Her chapbooks include Green Light: The Gatsby Cycle  and Won’t Be By Your Side . She can be found at allisonrennerwrites.com  and on Bluesky @AllisonWrites .

Ignore my screams of pain because in contemporary  Society mortals scream not in pain but for love,  And what are mortals if not for a loveless world? so rip My lungs out, but hold my corpse because Eurydice  Had everything she ever asked for when Orpheus looked Back if only to check whether she was okay as they  Walked to the second chance they never got. Sometimes I look at my dog, and I want to cry Because what are lives if not temporary, What is a mortal if not hereditary? because I am My mother’s heart and her melatonin habits but my Father’s rage and his overtly fast metabolism so I grind my teeth in my sleep so that my nose doesn’t Grow any longer with the lies it is taught to tell Because what am I if not fake? I talk pretty so they don’t see the rapacious desires That lie under my bones like carnal nothings, and  Sometimes late at night I look at myself in the Mirror and see myself through Aphrodite’s eyes As she looked at Psyche and wonder where is my Eros? But what is a mortal if not a heart beating For no one? so hold my hand as I go to church. Jiwon Huh is a junior attending Korea International School. She is an avid poet and attended the Sewanee Young Writers’ Conference, as well as the online Kenyon Young Writers’ Workshop. She has been previously published in Johns Hopkins CTY Lexophilia and Apotheca Journal.

Why Sex Therapists Hate The Simpsons                                                                         You’d think being a sex therapist would be stimulating. (Pun intended. I long to be a writer.) But it’s soooo boring. Same old, same old. Infidelity. Fear of sexual intimacy—yes, ex-husband #1, that’s you with your computer and spreadsheets after making love—difficulties achieving orgasm, mismatched libidos; now you’re up, ex-husband # 2. As a Scorpio you should have been in heat 24/7 but noooo by our second year of marriage it was excuse after excuse, but you showed your Scorpio colors when you hired that detective to spy on me and my horse ranch lover which I discovered only because the detective got gouged on the barbed wire fence and his howls disturbed us in our nest of fresh laundry. WAY more interesting than anything that goes on in my office, where another wife whines about her husband’s porn addiction. You’d think I’d hear mesmerizing stories from clients discussing compulsive sexual behaviors, but THEY’RE ALL SO PREDICTABLE!!!  Not like you, ex-husband # 3; when you taught The Tempest,  we had to role play every combination of characters fucking: Caliban and Ariel, Stephano and Trinculo, Prospero and Antonio. And when you were obsessed with The Simpsons , you could only come when I was Marge Simpson wearing that godawful blue wig moaning, “Homer, Homer.” And omg, that time you decided my orgasms should peak at 11 seconds. If I was still climaxing, you’d shout, Alexa, play “Disco Duck.” Oh, how I wish you’d been my client.   Sweet Stuff                                                                                                                                                                                                                        Jason loved whipped cream and sex. He licked it off Maureen’s breasts, had her lick it off his balls. Maureen was a librarian. She wanted to prove she wasn’t a prude. But the whole thing made her gag. And everything got so sticky. “Hey, the end is always sticky. Right?” her husband said. “You know I love you, sweetie.” He slapped her ass playfully, turning to the T.V. to watch The Dallas Cowboys. *** Maureen loved whipped cream and sex. But Jason hated it—it was downright weird. Especially since she was a kindergarten teacher! But he loved Maureen so he put up with it once a month. Now, however, Maureen wouldn’t make love—actually she used the “F” word, which made Jason cringe—unless whipped cream was involved. Then she insisted they go to Good Vibrations and browse. She wanted to buy a vibrator and other things Jason couldn’t even say out loud. He shuddered.  *** Maureen and Jason loved whipped cream and sex. They were both artists and what was more artful than sex? They experimented with whipped cream bikinis topped with cherries, nipple strawberries. She had multiple orgasms when he licked chocolate sauce off her upper thighs. *** Jason loved whipped cream and sex. Maureen hated it, especially since he decided whipped cream was getting boring and now wanted her to lick maple syrup off his body. Honey. Warm pudding. She could say no. She was a VP in tech, in charge of hundreds. One day she did say no. “You fat bitch,” said Jason. He unzipped his pants and smeared his cock with caramel sauce. “Suck it,” he commanded. She did. On his birthday, she surprised him. New negligee. A gift box with delectable treats. Seductive smile. She tied his hands with silk scarves. She painted him with honey, molasses, sugar. He moaned more intensely than she’d ever heard. “The pièce de   resistance,” she purred, opening a jar, pouring. The fire ants spilled out. Rocket Mom                                                                                                                    After Mom leaves and Dad grows more obsessed with model rockets, Elle and I are no longer content to play our five senses games, like tasting rain and smelling stones. Instead, we write Mom into Elton John’s song “Rocket Man.” In “Rocket Mom,” we make her destruct for all kinds of reasons.  Her launch lugs bleed into her body tube. Her thrust and burn rate increase too quickly. She slashes her parachute line. In other versions of “Rocket Mom,” her launch is seamless, and she shoots all the way to the exosphere, mingling with aurora borealis, those green swirling ribbons of light.         I could go on and on and on, rewriting our song. But my sister grows bored. She goes with Dad to a model rocket exhibition one day. Dad helps her start a model rocket club in her fourth-grade class.         I start middle school. I watch Elle and Dad build and launch their first rocket with a plastic body tube and a bright red nose cone. They name it Rudolph. I watch them build and launch Skywalker, Falcon, Phoenix, Starfire. I start high school.         A boy. Older than me. Drawn by the rockets my father is small-time famous for now, but soon drawing me in charcoal. My hands, my face. He explains that drawing charcoal is made of willow branches or grape vines. I tell Dad and Elle this, but they are deep in a discussion about fiberglass vs. quantum tubing.         The boy draws my breasts in watercolor pencils. He teaches me about tones and shades, smudge factors. For my birthday, he paints me in a forest of rockets, flowers growing from their nose cones. He calls me beloved.          Mom fires back into our lives. Words explode between her and dad, tangled rebar and pulverized concrete. Debris pelts us.         I tell no one about the baby growing inside my 15-year-old body. Only the boy. Who is tender and lullabies me with his plans of flight for us. I lie in bed, stroking my belly. Elle’s steady breathing, rain tinkling against the window. I think of how we used to tilt our heads up to the sky and name the flavors of rain.  Claudia Monpere’s flash appears in Split Lip, SmokeLong Quarterly, Craft, Flash Frog, Trampset, The Forge,  and elsewhere. She won the 2024 New Flash Fiction Prize from New Flash Fiction Review , the Genre Flash Fiction Prize from Uncharted Magazine , and the 2023 Smokelong Workshop Prize. She has stories in Best Small Fictions 2024 and 2025 and Best Microfiction 2025.

The St Augustine Diet Osceola, Billy P, starved himself just so, slipped like soap through the window and the grasp, chiefly on his own, and away yet again. The air as thick as he was now thin; hot as he was cunning, tenacious, so full of mosquitoes. The hope wafted around, flitted everywhere, little helicopters  looking for a purchase that matters. R James Sennett Jr lives, works, breathes and chases his muse in Louisville, Kentucky. His poetry has appeared in numerous publications for which he is grateful.

What Doesn’t Kill You The mulberry leaves have faded to a papery yellow, again. We’ve almost lost this plant twice—rescuing it from dehydration ( Have you watered it? No, I thought you had?),  only to see it washed out in the Summer storms. I’ve been feeding it diluted nutrients slowly, slowly, until its pale veins coursed with green, and its foliage softened and flushed with colour. Looking closer, I see tiny buds sprouting from the stalks. I rub a leaf between my fingers—glossier than last week at least. I breathe, for the first time in months.  # The day our eldest dog died, the snapdragon plant near her kennel produced one perfect flower—pink and red, vivid with grief. It took weeks for the flower to fall off, but once it did, the plant began to wither, and a brown death crept over it. One by one, its leaves turned to gold, until only a stump remained. Each time we tell that story, it blooms all over again. # Survive, from Latin supervivere “to live beyond,” to get through, to make it past, hold on, keep upright, Sanskrit jīvati “to live,” to keep moving, Old English lifian “to remain, continue,” to comprehend, to hurt, to heal.  # Our youngest dog lies in his dead sister’s kennel, paws curled. He yips softly, eyes dull and dark. At ten-to-six, the motorway traffic crescendos up the mountain. I open the door and he trots inside, pressing his full weight against me. I know, I know. # My husband and I are standing outside, barefoot in early Autumn. The dog’s head is under the couch, fishing for a ball. We survey the patio, catalogue each herb and flower.  I moved the lemon balm into a new corner. The rosemary is doing well. So is the fern, shooting lettuce-like leaves from its roots. A bright fan of rescued lilies has also bloomed overnight in shocking orange. I slip my hand into his and point to the mulberry. Look, new growth. Polyphony All I can hear is everything. Baked-on rice scraped off the pan with a fingernail, the water running, next door’s car pulling into the driveway, one car door closes, then another, slick tyres on the road, the stickiness of wet paws on the floor, the lap of water against snout, hair creeping out of its black band, settling around my ears. I think about what I can reach for faster, my loops or my earphones, wanting to suction something into my canals to muffle the sharp edges of every sound, but I also don’t want to be dramatic. Instead I am rooted to the kitchen floor. I want to say something but I can’t hear myself through the cacophony and so I wait for the car to be exited, for the water to be lapped, the tap stilled. He touches my arm and I watch it jolt, his lips are against my cheek and I flinch, then feel bad, say, its not you . He nods, withdraws. Cold air slices through the crack in the door and I can feel damp cotton sweat against my ribs. The tap is running again, he is washing out the debris in the sink. I start to speak then stop. What , he says. I shake my head, over and over again.  I can’t stop listening. The watch haptic buzzes against my wrist bone. Breathe, says the pulsing quiet. Erica Wheadon is an Australian writer and photographer. She holds an M.A. in Writing & Literature from Deakin University and her work has appeared in Island and StylusLit. She lives in the Sunshine Coast Hinterland with her husband, dog, and about 300 rainforest birds.

“Because it’s life-changing!” a middle-aged woman in a woven poncho joyfully screamed when asked why she was competing for the $50,000 prize. Maire Cletz, the region’s most popular news personality, slowly continued down the line recording everyone’s answer. “It will be so much fun! Wooooo,” a thirtysomething skater dude shouted, his face painted red, a pair of plastic devil horns atop his head. Finally, she reached me.  “I’m an artist. I’m doing it for my art,” I said loudly. Joylessly. Hoping everyone in line overheard. The contest, a promotion for the once-popular mountaintop theme park Ghost Town in the Sky, would award the person who could complete the most laps on the park’s premier attraction, the Red Devil roller coaster. It’s not overly thrilling, just a loop followed by a couple of drawn-out helices, but it’s intimidating for most because of its unique location on the side of the mountain. Instead of beginning with a traditional lift hill followed by a drop, it leaves the station, rounds a corner, and immediately dives off the cliff and into the loop.  A local radio station sponsored the event, blasting well-curated songs such as “Rollercoaster of Love” and “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.” A popular restaurant catered it with complimentary drinks and snacks, including devil’s blood cocktails, red velvet cake, and deviled eggs. Entertainers in western wear performed choreographed battles against entertainers in Native American headdresses.  Documenting the event: local news crews, the Discovery Channel, and several roller coaster enthusiast clubs, all of whom captured the still circulating video footage and photographs. And then of course myself, as this was my thesis for an MFA in Performance Art. Using a disposable kodak, I’d snap photos of myself throughout the contest, accurately capturing the stress winning the grand prize caused my body and mind - the prize symbolizing the American dream, and the contest, the price to achieve it in the contemporary capitalist system of the 1990s. I’d pair the photos with an essay, throwing in quotes from buzz names like Marx, and Barthes, and Butler. For sure I’d win the award for distinguished thesis. And the $50,000, which I didn’t care about aside from it strengthening my statement. As the 28 of us competitors took our seats, the park president explained the rules: 20hours and 40minutes of riding daily; food, drink, restroom visits and the like reserved for our two 10-minute and two 30-minute breaks; sleeping permitted only in our assigned coaster seats during our nightly two-hour break. Sounded intense, but I had little concern. By the looks of my competitors, all older, I didn’t expect they could outlast me. My goal was to win with as little time as needed to generate compelling material for my piece. I estimated it should take about five to six hours. Following the recitation of the rules, the DJ led the crowd in a 30 second countdown as station attendants lowered our restraints. Seated next to me in the front row, a freckled woman in hazardous headwear - a sun bonnet, tied tightly under her chin, with feathers clipped to the sides.  She grabbed my hand with a smile and pointed at herself while shouting out of the right corner of her mouth, “Lisa! Lisa!”   The countdown reached one. Before I could introduce myself, the crowd cheered in a swarm of glittery red confetti, the train exited the station, turned the corner, and dropped us into the loop. Lisa threw her arms in the air shouting, “Whoomp there it is!” The ride, a bit shakier than I remembered, wasn’t intense, but I needed to brace during the transition into the first helix to avoid slamming against the side of the cart. Lisa stopped shouting when we reached the lift hill to the station. As we made the ascent, riders behind us laughed and buzzed about building pools, starting their children’s college funds, and paying off credit card debt. Upon our return, the crowd of spectators chanted “Number two, number two.” We exited the station again. Lisa repeatedly shouted, “Whoomp there it is,” I assumed with the intent of annoying me out of the competition. After the loop, I braced for the transition into the first helix. Moments later, we reached the lift hill. This time, I introduced myself to Lisa. “How many times have you ridden, Ryan?” she asked, still speaking out of the corner of her mouth. “Oh. At least 15 times,” I said, despite only having ridden it twice a few years back. “Wow, just 15? You didn’t train?” she asked as we reached the station.  The crowd chanted, “number three! number three!” “Train?” I asked with a laugh. She looked at me with pity as we dove off the cliff. Now preoccupied with my lack of training and Lisa’s superior skills, I forgot to brace for the helix. My ribs slammed into the side of the cart. I screamed, grabbing hold of my right side. I was in pain, but at least the likely bruise would make a good photograph. Lisa took notice of my injury but continued shouting, “Whoomp there it is.” When we reached the lift hill, she said, “That’s why we train.” “So, you’ve done this before?” I asked, already knowing the answer. She nodded with a quiet laugh and began counting on her fingers, “Belmont Park, Coney Island, Magic Mountain, Great Adventure, Kennywood, Knoebel’s, Bush Gardens – The Dark Continent and  The Old Country – Kings Dominion, Astroworld, Kings Island, and Cedar Point. I’m forgetting – Oh! Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, Opryland, and Dollywood. You could say I’m on the circuit.” “The circuit?” “Oh yeah,” Lisa said, nodding. Her tone serious. “It’s how I make a living.” At the station, Lisa waved to a group of women all in bonnets with feathers attached just like hers. The chanting was losing steam, and the crowd at the station had thinned a bit, but the festivities continued.  The DJ announced, “Number two on the Billboard Hot 100 for its sixth week, this goes out to a special lady vying for her fifteenth win. Let’s give it up for the queen herself, Looping Lisa!”  The crowd screamed as Lisa blew kisses. “Whoomp There it Is,” blasted from the speakers. After lap five, a man sitting six rows behind us shouted, “I’m out!”  Spectators covered their mouths and pointed. Some cried in disappointment. The sound of the man’s heaving wrestled with the bass of “Devil Inside.” Lisa and I turned around just as he jumped from the train, splattering cocktail-colored vomit across the station floor. Crowd members closed their eyes. Some made noises of disgust. A station attendant approached the rider with a bottle of water, sitting him down in the corner. Another grabbed a mop. With hope of gaining intel about what it might take to win, after the next lap, I asked Lisa, “What’s the longest you’ve been on one of these?” She immediately replied, “70 days. Belmont Park. Five years ago.” “Days?” I asked. “Dayyyys.” She repeated. “They stopped the contest early because of wear and tear on the track and split the winnings between the last five of us. They threw in a trip to Hawaii for each of us, too. I would have outlasted everyone. It’s still a win in my book.” She shrugged her shoulders. After hour one, Lisa finally stopped shouting, “Whoomp there it is.” I stopped counting laps and talking to Lisa around hour two. I needed to save my energy. I wanted to live in the moment. I took in the view of the Smoky Mountains and the turning leaves. I caught snippets of birds feeding their young and squirrels filling their cheeks.  Not long after sundown, the celebration ceased, the park shuttered, and the catering crew taunted us by moving small tables of leftover cocktails and snacks to the station. The void left by the exodus of the parkgoers and the DJ, the closed games and rides, stripped us of welcome distractions. The sound of the wheels slamming into the helix became louder and now included a dull scratching. Having a suitable number of bruises by this point, I braced tighter in my attempts to remain injury-free.  During hour seven, several more people dropped out. The last one, a heavyset bald man in a Cedar Point shirt who Lisa knew from the circuit, cried. “It’s time to put that one out to pasture,” she said. “Never lasts an entire day and cries every time. As if he ever has a chance.”  A few others huddled in the corner, eating leftover finger foods off Chinet plates. I felt bad for the losers and their crushed dreams, looking so pathetic under their blankets, so I made eye contact and smiled at one as she bit into a deviled egg. She quickly looked away and nudged the man next to her, shaking her head vigorously as she spoke to him. They both scowled at me as the train departed the station.  While upside down, I fantasized about red velvet cake and vodka. I hoped there was cake left when it was time for our next 10-minute break. To take my mind off the things I couldn’t have, I thought about what I would do with the “life-changing” sum of $50,000 if I actually cared about it: buy a brand-new Suzuki Samurai, get stoned in the recently unified Germany, create a cold-war-themed performance piece on a frozen canal in the former East Berlin. We hit the helix before I could think of more and my neck jerked. I thought I heard a pop. I felt pain all the way to my right fingertips. The train stopped and three more riders exited. Two of them hugged, sobbing and mumbling, their long hair tangling with their embrace. The only thing I could make out through the cries was “for my daughter.” It hurt to turn my neck left or right, but I didn’t want my competitors to see my weakness. I smiled through the pain, unintentionally making eye contact with the deviled egg woman. She took a bite of red velvet cake, licked her fingers, sipped a devil’s blood cocktail. I quickly turned my head, shooting pain down my neck and arm. It was dawn and a few hours after our sleepless two-hour sleep break when I first questioned my ability to continue. There were eight of us left. No more deviled eggs. No more red velvet cake. The station empty, except for a documentary crew, a couple of recent dropouts, and the third-shift ride operators. They tried to lift our spirits by counting down the laps until our 30-minute break. We coasted into the loop. The sun rose over the mountains like that Hudson River School painting at my university. The cool air felt fresh against my face. The helix added grinding to its cacophonous catalogue of sounds. My upper, middle, and lower back hurt. The bruises on my torso and legs and the puffy dark circles under my eyes were proof of what I had endured. Maybe failing to achieve the American dream would make a more powerful statement? But now I felt I deserved the $50,000. During the 30-minute break, I ran to the vending machine for Diet Cokes and Kit Kat bars. At the station, I saw Lisa stretching and rubbing Tiger Balm on her bruised thighs. “Ya drink any water?” she asked, taking notice of my sodas.  “Not yet,” I said. She looked at her watch and shoved her tub of Tiger Balm into my hand. “Need some?” “Could you take photos of my bruises first?” I asked, handing her my camera. “My puffy eyes, too.”  I lifted my shirt to expose the large bruise that covered part of my ribcage and leaned against the red station wall. “A full body shot and some closeups.” “That’s a goodie,” she said. I sat on the cold floor and massaged my neck with the cream as Lisa left the station. I mixed diet Coke with the Polish potato vodka hidden in my knapsack and finished a Kit Kat within seconds, doing my best to take photos of myself while doing so. The operators announced 15 minutes left of the break. I inhaled the scent of Tiger Balm before rubbing some into my lower back. Lisa returned with two bottles of Evian. “Need some?” she asked while slamming both down in front of me. “I’m your competition,” I said. “I know, but I don’t want you to be in pain. And I know I can beat you,” she laughed, punching my right arm, sending a jolt down my neck. 30 seconds left as I returned from the last-minute restroom visit Lisa “suggested.” I doubled the pace of my steps even though my enthusiasm had now dipped to half empty. At this point I’d rather keep eating Kit Kats and drinking Polish potato vodka. I’d rather watch the morning light turn to afternoon. I’d rather cheer for Looping Lisa or the woman competing for her daughter’s college fund than I would myself. What I didn’t want was my competitors thinking me pathetic while I chewed Kit Kats underneath a blanket. The attendants slammed down our restraints. The operator punched the green button. The rattling of wheels on metal became white noise. The tinges of pain with each shake became bearable. My desire to continue returned. At 11 a.m., the park opened for business. The losers’ vacant seats now filled by the paying public, free to come and go as they pleased. They objectified us with their glances, patronized us with words of encouragement. I scowled at them like the deviled egg woman did me. After seven days, only three of us remained: Lisa, a guy in the back of the train named Jeff, who Lisa knew from the circuit, and me. Lisa estimated, based on Jeff’s past performances, that he had about forty days left in him. “He needs an attitude adjustment,” she said. “So entitled every time.” Lisa wasn’t so far off. On day 44, Jeff dropped out, kicking the side of the train. He fell to the floor with his head in his hands. Forty-four days of his life wasted. I thought about the deviled egg woman, sad after only five or six hours of wasted time. She was at least able to eat leftover finger foods before returning to her regular life the next day. What would Jeff be returning to? What would I be returning to? An MFA in Performance Art and a beat-up body? Even though I believed I couldn’t beat Lisa, I felt I had reached the point of no return. I deserved the $50,000. I wanted the $50,000. On day 52,   an hour before park closing, the few public riders behind us shouted in fear when the train jackhammered in the helix. I was numb to most sensations at this point, but I felt the jolt and recognized it as more severe than it had been just 10 or 15 laps earlier. “Not good,” Lisa shouted out of the corner of her mouth.  After their ride, the non-competitors braced their necks and backs as they alerted the attendants of the issue. “It’s just not right,” a woman with two children said.  The attendants, shrugging their shoulders and rolling their eyes, filled seats with new riders.  “But she’s right,” Lisa said in anger, “it isn’t right!”  Before the attendant lowered our restraints, Lisa jumped from the train and tiptoed to the operators’ booth. “Need to call your supervisor?” she said sternly from the corner of her mouth, pointing to the phone. The operator shook his head in silence as the attendant lowered my restraint and signaled all clear. As the train began moving, Lisa held her arms out, mouth agape. The contest was officially over. On my victory lap I caught the sunset from the Red Devil for the 52nd time. I thought about my new Suzuki Samurai as I hung upside down in the loop and shouted, “Whoomp there it is.” I braced for the helix like a pro. Wheels screeched. The train violently shook side to side. Sparks flew up beside me like the Fourth of July, engulfing me in that smell that never signals something good. We lost speed, but not fast enough to keep the cart from disengaging from the track. My stomach slammed against the restraint as the car, still tethered to the rest of the train, halted midair, its nose pointing south. I dangled alone, staring at the steep mountain grade below. It was peacefully quiet until a rider in the second car, just barely off the track, began praying loudly. Assorted shrieks and cries followed. Someone farther back shouted, “Call EMS! Please.”  Now I could hear the buzz of terror from parkgoers on top of the mountain and Lisa screaming, “Ryan. Ryan. Are you ok?” from the corner of her mouth.  I was scared to breathe or speak. The restraint, uncomfortably pressing into my abdomen, still held me, but how long would the car remain attached to the train.  It wasn’t long before the news crews were on site. Emergency vehicles trailed behind.   In   the early morning of day 53, they removed us one-by-one from the derailed Red Devil roller coaster. News crews followed as paramedics wrapped me in a blanket and wheeled me from the cherry picker to the ambulance.  “Was the win worth it?” a reporter shouted as she and her crew shoved a microphone and camera close to my face. I didn’t know what to say. “Are roller coasters safe? Is the park at fault?” She asked. I didn’t know what to say. “Sir. Do you have anything to share about your terrifying experience?” “Whoomp there it is,” I managed to shout before passing out. Joseph A. Gross is a queer writer and performer. His writing has most recently appeared in Maudlin House. In his spare time, he enjoys hiking, riding roller coasters, and watching rodents eat.

In November of last year, I was bubbly with excitement about my life. By December, I was a weepy, barely functional mess. Nothing changed over that month. The excitement was over my recent move from Berlin to Lisbon to take up a six-year research fellowship. It came after fifteen years of zipping around between different countries for much shorter postdoctoral gigs and, most recently, a year of nerve-wracking unemployment in which my academic career looked to be over. I’d been so relieved to stay in academia – to experience it in Lisbon no less, a city everyone had nice things to say about. I would have all the freedom I longed for and more job security than I’d ever enjoyed. I could barely believe my luck. Until, virtually from one day to the next, it felt meaningless.  Is there a non-cringe way to broach a midlife crisis? The term smacks of frivolity and self-indulgence, all divorced dad trading off family for sports car and stripper, or alcoholic housewife no longer needed by her children. I balked at the stereotypes, but the symptoms – boredom with things that once absorbed you, nostalgia for feelings long gone, wondering why you’re doing the things you do, what the point of them even is,    and how much longer you can keep doing them, hankering after a different life – were undeniable.  It took me a while to utter the words “midlife crisis” but, as soon as I did, the floodgates opened. My friends – not even some of them, most of my friends – responded with versions of “welcome to the club.” One took quiet quitting to extremes: hiding behind the locked door of her campus office to read romance novels all day. Another lamented his dullness: in his twenties, he wrote poetry and made art and composed music and now all he did was work. Another, still, said her job felt pointless and her marriage beyond repair. She’d consulted a divorce lawyer and wished to take her kids and run, spending her days in political activism.  “But you have everything you wanted,” said my mother quite reasonably over the phone. She’d prayed for me to get the fellowship and was almost as happy as I was when I did. She asked what a midlife crisis meant. “ I  never had a midlife crisis,” she said when I explained it, then she called out: “Moti! Have you ever had a midlife crisis?” muffled sounds and then: “Your father never had one either.” I somehow made it to middle age without a marriage to wreck or children to abandon but there was the job. Research had long lost its luster for me, though I appreciated the lifestyle. Research was the game I had to play to maintain this lifestyle. Exciting, it was not, but sometimes I’d enjoyed aspects of it. Now it felt insufferable. Six years, a godsend when I was awarded the fellowship, loomed ahead like a prison sentence. But like some lifers behind bars for their entire adulthood, I didn’t know what to do with myself if released. A memoir I finished writing shortly after my move to Portugal represented my only escape route, but its failure to win over agents rendered this route delusional.  I cut more and more corners at work. Experience taught me how to get decent mileage out of scant fieldwork data, so I assembled the bare minimum. Instead of aiming for high-quality publications, I churned out inferior, low-effort ones. Even so, I was unable to carry out the most routine tasks without staring into space or dissolving into tears. I tried consulting the scholarship on midlife crisis but there wasn’t much to go by. Academics didn’t take it seriously. It is difficult to pin down. The age boundaries keep shifting and the symptoms are far from distinct. I found surveys indicating a U-shape in wellbeing across the lifespan, with middle age as its low point. Studies of great apes exhibiting the same nadir hinted at biological causes. Among humans, though, the low appeared more common in high-income countries, indicating a wholly different (dare I repeat self-indulgent) set of triggers. Shit does tend to happen in midlife, though: marriages sour, careers stagnate, loved ones die or fall off. Calling it a midlife crisis lends it a certain gravitas. And I never could resist sensationalizing my life. Much of it homebound, I still romanticized the diminutive stirrings of my even-keeled disposition. Now that the stirrings have grown tempestuous, I needed them to mean something. I would stop worrying about the reality of the crisis, then, and mine it for insight as a trope.  My first attempts were discouraging. Literature has typically glamorized a trite version (described by Mark Jackson in Intimate History of the Midlife Crisis )   whereby  middle-aged men break free of the stranglehold of occupational and marital conformity   in a heroic reassertion of their individuality. Unable to flatter myself that much, I gravitated to the social sciences, my natural terrain. In The Normal Chaos of Love ,  Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck- Gernsheim identify the midlife crisis as a sociological rather than a psychological event. In pre-industrial times, there was little room for self-discovery but now, you were encouraged to test out motley identities and take responsibility for whatever meaning they helped you wrest out of an insecure existence. Realizing you probably had many years to live after establishing a home and career made you dream up a better life through personal reinvention.  MIT philosopher Kieran Setiya opens  Midlife: A Philosophical Guide  with his own midlife crisis which – relatable to me – involved academic work wearing thin. Setiya deals with his by doing what he knows best, namely delving into philosophy. It makes for an inspiring read, but I wasn’t swayed by the conclusion. Tracing the midlife crisis to the tyranny of projects that tend to plateau around midlife, Setiya espoused finding joy in action: not the completed book but the writing itself and so forth.  I’d have taken kindlier to it had the book included a how-to component. My life, too, revolved around projects. I wrote for the sake of publishing. Read for edification. Watched shows to improve my Portuguese. And those were the enjoyable activities! I also worked out daily to keep my weight and mood in check, but it was distinctly unfun. Academic work, I was either bored by or actively hated. My self-care consisted of piercing my face back and forth with a needle roller because I associated beauty with pain. In fact, any accomplishment not associated with pain was suspect to me. Few things I did were genuinely pleasurable and next to none were pleasurable in their own right.  It hadn’t bothered me before, but it did now. I learned that the midlife crisis afflicted people once their lives stabilized. Struggles behind, they took stock of gratifications delayed and responsibilities shouldered. Small wonder they’d want to let loose and prioritize pleasure. I wanted that too. Or rather, that’s what I thought I wanted. Maybe it’s what I thought I should want. I felt so discombobulated that I was never quite sure. I feared having become so repressed I’d lost sight of my true desires.  The confusion led me to Michel Onfray’s A Hedonist Manifesto, advocating through thinkers ancient and modern for a life of pleasure. “Pleasure scares people,” Onfray writes, and I felt a pang of recognition. Pleasure certainly scared me, with its threat of derailing my Projects and Routines. Still, Onfray’s version was one I could live with. It was a carefully plotted out pleasure under tight rein. “We make a list of what delightful things could happen, what distresses could occur, what will be pleasant or disagreeable, and then we judge, doubt, and calculate before acting.”  Onfray bunches under “hedonistic morality” attributes like thoughtfulness, commitment, generosity, and effort. Arguing against those who associate hedonism with egoism, he insists that “any kind of pleasure-arithmetic entails a concern for others… Others’ joy leads to my own joy; others’ discomfort produces my own discomfort.” I didn’t buy it as a philosophy. Onfray’s hedonism evoked the generalized good will of a gated community – conditions unattainable for most of mankind. Still, I was captivated by his notion of pleasure for its own sake, especially when shared. It sounded like a nice way to live life. Even this tamed pleasure felt out of reach, though. Perhaps for that reason, I recognized it as a possible escape route from the rut I was in. This, too, was no how-to book, so I had to work out for myself how to put hedonism into practice. Doing what, though? I contemplated the rejuvenating power of nature OKAY NO I thought about sex. Lest I stand accused of having contrived a convoluted path to the most clichéd of midlife-crisis excesses, allow me to clarify that this was not the place to which my mind would normally wander. At this point in my life, I had not had sex – not so much as kissed or even lusted after a man – in about ten years, for reasons. Nothing could be farther from my lackluster, passionless life. My libido, if it still existed, was dormant. Having sex again would be a sea change. Feeling insecure about the next step, I asked my friend John, who dated frequently, for advice. He told me not to worry. At least in the first encounters, the men would do everything. “You could be completely passive and nonverbal,” he said: “honestly, you could be a corpse. But you do have to set boundaries. Girls these days like it rough and guys kind of expect that.” This was news to me. My usual porn search term was “tender” to which I defaulted after “sex with a man who cares deeply about his friends and family” yielded no result. I took the leap and opened a profile on a dating app, opting for minimalism. Later, a man told me that what he liked about it was that it seemed to be saying “I don’t give a fuck.” One of my photos was posted sideways and I never bothered to rotate it. The entirety of the text read “New to Lisbon and to online dating. Looking only for something casual.” It turned out to be enough. In hindsight, I benefited from Portuguese women being on the conservative side, or so I’ve been told repeatedly by sexually frustrated Portuguese men.  I was overwhelmed by the attention I received. Shocked, really. I knew in theory that this was how dating apps worked but I never expected it to apply to women of, ahem, a certain age. “I can’t believe how easy this is,” I told friends. The men among them set me straight. “Congratulations on being a woman” said one. The following weeks were revelatory. Take the men. All of them younger, sometimes scandalously younger. Nice, too: they paid me compliments and I ate it up. Contrary to John’s warnings, they were not at all rough (one asked politely if he could pull on my hair and then gave it a gentle little tug).  And they had something to teach me. After filtering for appearance on account of I am shallow, I selected men who described themselves as hedonists, bon vivants, free spirits, and living life to its fullest. It was a calculated departure. Past Me would have gone for smart, arguably at odds with “I wake up every day with a smile.” But if I was to turn pleasure into the pivot of my new life, I needed adept guides.  Adept they were, and I was a keen apprentice. Onfray’s principle of taking and giving pleasure became my moral compass. If it didn’t come naturally at first, I was getting better at it. My libido, too, had stirred back to life. A milestone was one Sunday early afternoon when I felt horny. It took me a minute to recognize it because horniness in the abstract was something I hadn’t felt in years. I wanted sex right away and the particulars hardly mattered. I opened the app and chatted with several men at once in search of the first available, cutting off those who mentioned “tonight” or “this week.” An Italian expat finally rose to the occasion, inviting me over to his place, in convenient walking distance from mine. I accepted and, not two hours later, I was back home with an afterglow. I also aspired to get out my head and give myself over fully to the experience. It wasn’t as easy as I’d hoped. “Have a glass of wine before” suggested my friend Pedro. “I usually do” I said. “Then have two.” But I didn’t want to be intoxicated on alcohol. I wanted to be intoxicated on life! What a delightful conclusion to my midlife crisis that would be. Alas, my pleasure was mediated by self-discovery and growth. Yet again, I had a project. The most pleasurable aspect of even the good sex was having it count towards the realization of this project. Seeing as my ultimate goal was pleasure for its own sake, it felt self-defeating in a way I couldn’t untangle.  Then came Rui. He wanted to meet on the same day we matched but I was on my period. He suggested we wait, then, as the things he was best at were incompatible. He went into titillating detail, intoning that his greatest pleasure was giving pleasure. We made plans for later that week and I wrote back “looking forward!!” which is the extent of my sexting capacity.  We met at the bar near my house. Rui oozed masculinity and not of the toxic, macho kind. Of the easily confident, greatest-pleasure-is-giving-pleasure kind. A private chef, he described an elaborate dish he cooked for his client, taking two hours to prepare. “What do you cook for yourself?” I asked. “The same,” he replied, “I also like to eat.”  I couldn’t wait to touch him and, as soon as we stepped into my apartment, I did. Specifically, I ran my fingers through his hair. He had an irresistible thicket of black curls, and I loved that I had to reach way up to touch them. He loved that I was “so small.” Rui was not lying about his skills: I came quick and hard. “What can I do for you?” I asked after catching my breath. “You can let me give you another orgasm,” he said as a chorus hummed and angels flapped their wings.  Rui would’ve been the lover to end all lovers, but he was noncommittal. I accepted it with magnanimity in the Onfray persuasion. Every woman – especially every middle-aged woman – could use a Rui in her life, and I was happy for my sisters to experience the pleasure I had. Finally feeling myself something of a hedonist, I turned to Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization. I read the book with skepticism back in graduate school, but now I was feeling more receptive. Its point is to challenge Sigmund Freud's proposition that the struggle for existence in the face of scarcity required the libido’s deflection towards socially useful activity like work and procreation. Freud held that you had to give up “destructive” pleasure for the more restrained, expedient sort. For Marcuse, this was nothing other than a symptom of domination. The very word “productivity” implied, to him, internalized repression or its philistine glorification (ouch, I thought as I read it: I evaluated most days by how productive I was). Obsessing over work was neurotic: an attempt to make yourself feel important, even when there was no particular need for your work (ouch again).  Marcuse envisioned a non-repressive society whose members would be re-sexualized away from “genital supremacy” and towards “polymorphous perversity” – deriving erotic pleasure out of every part of the body. Such pleasure would incessantly build up and intensify. To me, it sounded exhausting, and it only got worse: the pleasure orientation would doubtlessly engender fresh pains, frustrations and conflicts, even as these, too, would be infused with value. I still had a way to go. Even post-Rui, I related so much more to the productivity Marcuse mocked than to the pleasure he championed. Grad school muscle memory made me pick up the ultimate anti-Marcuse book next: Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality . I remembered the argument in broad strokes: don’t think that by saying yes to sex you’re saying no to power because nowhere are we more deeply controlled than through our sexuality itself. I was having laborious sex that night when it came to mind. Not the argument, just the fact that I could be at home making headway with the book. Preferring Foucault over sex cast a shadow over my personal reinvention.   A few days later, I hopped into bed with a charming artist – at least he charmed me by speaking intelligently about art – and then he couldn’t get an erection. He was flustered, I waved it off, but, after he left, I was crestfallen. He was in his thirties, a non-smoker, and we had not been drinking. I could think of no reason for why this should have happened other than that I was a decrepit old hag. I glared at my body in the mirror. My sex-appeal defunct, I would have to sublimate through strolls in the park.  It weighed on me heavily for most of the following day. Then, the Italian within walking distance asked if I felt like coming over again for a quicky. Giddy with relief, I texted back that I was busy. I wasn’t, but he had already granted me the validation I needed: sex was redundant.  So much for hedonism.  My Berlin friend Andreas was not surprised. All of his one-time acid dropping, gay sex-club patronizing friends were now walking their dogs, doing home repairs, and growing fat. What they realized was that hedonism distracted you from your goals. No, there was no balance to be had: you ended up on Grindr every half hour because it took over. “I know you, Hadas, you need security.” Hedonism was its opposite, it destabilized you. All of the hedonists Andreas knew proved the rule. You didn’t behave that way if you were happy.  Another Berlin friend, Alina, also saw it coming. Open the door to pleasure and the psychic tumult comes flooding along with it. You couldn’t pick and choose. But in contrast to Andreas, she was all for it. For years, she’d been claiming that I had too little pleasure in my (admittedly sedate) life and that, as a result, I was confusing contentment with happiness. I didn’t think I was, and now I missed the contentment, even if that’s all it was. I had already gotten my share of tumult with the midlife crisis. My feelings were swinging wild and loose for months now: pleasure was supposed to restabilize me.   But in pushing her agenda, Alina was conflating two things. What she was referring to – what I had precious little of before and what knocked me right off balance now – was not pleasure but desire. Pleasure was nothing: quick to satisfy, it was also easier to control. Desire, gushing out of darker reaches of the psyche, was more chaotic – hijacking your brain until you couldn’t think straight, keeping you up at night pining and plotting intrigue, making you do unwise and regrettable things.  Desire played no part in my hookups. With the men I met, sex was a foregone conclusion unless I pulled the stops. My pleasure in these encounters lasted for exactly as long as the sex had. As soon as it was over, I would leave or send them off. And since there was usually someone else lined up, I barely gave them a second thought. And yet I was consumed by desire throughout this time – a scorching, ravenous desire. It wasn’t about sex, but about my memoir. It was the first I’d written and I knew it to be flawed. I yearned pitifully for it to be chosen, taken up by an agent or an editor with a “hands on approach” (their webpages were more arousing to me than any dating profile).  The desire was infantile, as desires go: to be seen for the person I could be, the person I believed I inherently was, to be nurtured into becoming that person. Virtually begging for it left me more threadbare and exposed than sex ever had, like laying naked, my middle-aged limbs asplay, facing a flaccid penis.  Was I trying to use pleasure to distract myself from desire? If so, it was no match. I did enjoy the sex, but my attention wasn’t devoured by it, and it was a far cry from polymorphous perversity. Kissing, for example, did nothing for me, a mere prelude to sex, like a book’s preface I didn’t mind skimming but could do without. I recalled the weak-in-the-knees ecstasy the French Kiss used to unleash in me. Before I was 18, when it was as far as I got, I thought I might die every time I had one. I wanted to relive that feeling! But then, why should I? Do we get to relive any of our firsts? I certainly didn’t immerse myself in novels the way I used to, when the worlds they conjured up were more real to me than the one I lived in. But chemistry couldn’t fix that. Pleasure might be different.  “I’m going to say something very un-feminist,” said a friend. I knew where she was headed because I’d read about it on the Internet. A diminished sex-drive was a common enough symptom of perimenopause. This was the same friend whose marriage was dead and whose job felt pointless. A couple of months after that confession, she reported that she was putting minimal effort into her job. As for the marriage, the children were still young. You didn’t break up a family just like that. She was taking estrogen supplements, though, and they helped: sex was better and the moodiness was gone.  After I got off the phone with her, I searched online for a gynecologist and booked an appointment with a certain Dr. Costa. She was receiving patients at a nearby clinic called Hospital de Jesus, which I immediately took to calling The Jesus Hospital. Dr. Costa was in her sixties, and she insisted on running me through a series tests: a pap smear and referrals for a mammogram, an ultrasound and blood work.  I didn’t mind the tests so long as I left her office with a prescription. But she refused to give me one before receiving the results. Like everything else in Portugal, it would take time. Possibly a month. A month! “ Mas, mas,” I panted.   Dr. Costa spoke no English, and I had to convey the urgency in my halting Portuguese. “The sex is bad!” I cried: “One month is muito tempo  for bad sex!” Dr. Costa was not swayed. My pursuit of pleasure was in fact losing steam. Far from driving me to delirium, I engaged in it with the same no-nonsense sobriety I approached every project I’ve ever taken up. My phone now included contacts like “Hugo (the other one).” I’d meet them on a bad hair day with an air of “let’s get this over with.” Instead of putting out fresh sheets, I turned the pillow I drooled on to the other side. I scheduled hookups for 4pm specifically to pry myself away from my inbox. Some men, I felt no attraction to but told myself they might be otherwise useful. “Did this help you with your midlife crisis?” asked a 27-year-old after sex. “I’m not sure,” I said.  “It’s like the crisis I went through last year,” said my friend Dan. I remembered it well: a miserable episode that estranged him from his brother and lost him his house. “But it would be too presumptuous to call mine a midlife crisis.” Dan had terminal cancer, under control but doctors weren’t sanguine about the time he had left. Commenting on my sexcapades, Dan said that his own sex life was over: cancer was a turnoff to women. He wasn’t sad about it, not outwardly: just making the most of the time he had left. Our conversation gave me pause. Preoccupied with my crisis, I never questioned “midlife.” My reinvention took for granted a life long enough for New Me to unfurl. Even in my sorry state, I recoiled from the alternative. There would be no crisis if I didn’t fret so much about a vast, open-ended future. Bracketing it, though, would also dilute the fantasy, however vague, of the delights that lay ahead.  And I was addicted t0 fantasy. When not succumbing to panic attacks I was lost in reverie. On good days, it made writing and reading more fun than sex. It’s also what made Sex more fun than sex. Without fantasy, there’d be nothing to keep me going. Marcuse loved fantasy too. He considered it a refusal to accept any limitation on freedom. This refusal peeled away your skin, though. In projecting a future image of a yet unformed self, its realization magnified present deficiencies. I thought about it while heading back home from The Jesus Hospital, a month after my first visit. Going over my test results, Dr. Costa said that she would not prescribe me any hormones because no hormones were lacking. I’d admitted that I did find sex pleasurable, and she did not see the problem.  “Not pleasurable enough, though,” I could have told her. Not enough to reconcile me with the life I now disdained. Not enough to assuage my dread of a murky future. Not enough to resolve the mystery of how to inhabit it. Even in midlife, it impended with formidable immensity.  I didn’t argue with Dr. Costa this time because my mind was elsewhere. On the day before our appointment, I had a video call with an agent. She liked my memoir but asked for changes. Evasive about what would happen if I made them, she did dangle the possibility of matching me up with a publishing house whose editor would “share [my] vision.” My heart nearly leaped out of my chest. It was the first warm weekend after a month of incessant rain, and yet I never left my desk, not for a minute. Everyone was out and about, soaking up the sun: the sounds of merriment carried through my window. I also kept getting pesky texts from men I’d connected with, all the Hugos and Brunos and Alexandres asking if I was available. There were pleasures to be had, immediate and polymorphously perverse. But I was single minded. Old habits reasserting themselves, I knew exactly what I needed to do. Pleasure suspended, crisis deferred, I wrote and rewrote, my body contorted with desire, my mind abuzz with fear. Hadas Weiss is an anthropologist living in Lisbon. She is the author of We Have Never Been Middle Class (Verso) and of a still unpublished memoir of academic mishap.

Pledgemaster Brayden stood at the basement altar with his head hunched low to keep from hitting the pink insulation above. He was robed up in the chapter’s colors, red hood on and everything. We looked up at him from a circle of fold-out chairs. It was silent. This was a solemn occasion, after all. An emergency meeting.  “There is an issue with the pledges,” he said. We straightened in our seats. “A respect issue,” he said. We straightened ourselves even more. Then Brayden yelled. “They’re too laid back about initiation!” His voice echoed. He shook his head. The shadow from the overhead lights made his goatee look like a full-on beard. “There was an incident the other day: some of them were seen playing frisbee between classes.” He paused again. “Frisbee! At the start of I-Week! We earned our brotherhood. We suffered. And now it looks like we’re taking it easy on the pledges, like they’re better than us!” “Oh fuck no!” we yelled. We stomped.  “Do you remember what we went through?” continued Brayden. “They blindfolded my class and drove us into the woods. Someone went, ‘Campus is that way,’ and gestured toward some trees. Then they drove away. We had to walk for hours in the dark. I wasn’t sure we’d make it.” We cheered. Brayden went on. “And now our pledges are having a good time! Kyle, tell us what Pledge Russell said after his woods walk.” Brother Kyle scooched his chair back to stand. “Oh, uh, Russell thanked us for the workout. He said he'd skip cardio the next day. Dude gave me a high-five.” “A high-fucking-five!” yelled Brayden. “They need to learn respect! And they’ll learn best through hunger.” We roared. Brayden grinned. And it was decided: we would starve the pledges.  --- We confiscated their cafeteria cards and assigned brothers to mealtime supervisor shifts. The pledges were allowed half a chicken breast and a quarter cup of rice a day, no exceptions. The fat football pledge? Half a chicken breast. The hobbit pledge? Half a chicken breast. A day passed. Two. Three. There were reports of pledges playing pickup soccer. Rumors circulated that Russell had gotten laid. During I-Week! And so a second emergency meeting was called. Again, Brayden stooped beneath the pink insulation. “The fuckers must be sneaking snacks,” he said. “This is insult-to-injury territory now.” “Fuck those guys!” we yelled. “I have a new plan, though,” went Brayden. “Bring the pledges here tomorrow night.” --- The next night, we herded the ten pledges into the basement. We practically pushed them down the stairs, then actually pushed them onto the cracked concrete in the middle of the chairs. “Sit,” said Brayden. They sat on the floor. We stared down from our seats. They glanced at each other.  “You pledges think you’re so sneaky with your snacks,” said Brayden. “You couldn’t take a few days of being hungry.” His gaze settled on Russell in particular. Russell’s eyes were glazed over. Dude was wearing a striped bathrobe. “Well, we’ve heard you,” Brayden said. “And we’ve rethought our ways. In fact, we’re sorry. To apologize, we got you dinner.” Brayden raised a hand and snapped. The basement door opened and the smell of oil came in. Four brothers descended with a wooden board over their shoulders like pallbearers. There was a straight-up pyramid of McDonald’s Chicken McNugget boxes balanced on top. “We got you fifty boxes,” said Brayden. “Twenty nuggets in each. One thousand nuggets. A hundred for each pledge. It would be disrespectful to not eat all the food we bought you.”  The pledges glanced at each other. Their eyes darted. “Are you guys for real?” asked Russell. The other pledges looked his way. “Yes,” said Brayden, “You have one hour. And afterward, you’ll be cleaning your puke off the floor.” Then he laughed. We laughed. It echoed. The pallbearing brothers dropped the board in front of the pledges and the pyramid tumbled. Boxes scattered across the concrete. Nuggets spilled. The air was thick. There was a pause. Then Russell went, “Dude, I love McDonald’s.” “Yeah, dude, we got hella nugs,” said another pledge. They distributed boxes and ripped them open. They tore the cardboard. They forced nuggets into their mouths. Russell stuffed them in three-at-a-time.  “You’ll slow down,” went Brayden. “You’ll see.” The pledges didn’t respond. There were a lot of chewing noises. We sat. Were we really gonna watch these guys eat a bunch of nuggets? Were we supposed to like, enjoy this? Some live-action mukbang shit? One brother glanced at his phone. Another shifted in his seat. The pledges kept eating. At ten minutes, their pace was unchanged. Brayden paced around the room. “You’ll see,” he said.  Brayden scanned the room. There was no puke. There were no gagging pledges. There was a growing pile of empty boxes. His eyes flicked. The pledges had oil all over their chins, but they were smiling. Brayden’s grin vanished. “Wait,” he said, “Stop.” They did not stop. Maybe the appetite of starving eighteen-year-olds who hadn’t really been sneaking snacks was just too much to contain once unleashed. “Stop!” Brayden yelled. He squatted down to eye level with Russell. “If you don’t stop, you’ll be known as McPledge.” “Fucking tight,” went Russell, mid-chew, “That name is sick.” “You don’t want to be McPledge!” went Brayden. “Nah, dude, I kinda do,” said Russell. He grinned. Chicken showed between his teeth.  The pledges snickered. One raised a nugget into the dim basement light. “McPledge!” he yelled.  “McPledge!” went another. “McPledge!” They sounded off with mouths full, and hardly in unison, “McPledge! McPledge! McPledge!” Brayden clenched his fists. He stepped toward them. But then a voice came from the perimeter, “McPledge!” Brayden whirled and glared, but we had already started. It came from all sides now. “McPledge! McPledge! McPledge!” Brayden spun and spun, his eyes first piercing, then pleading, then down at the floor, and all of a sudden, we were laughing.  I was laughing. Jack Whaler is a writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. His stories have appeared in Berkeley Fiction Review, Johnny America,  and 100-Foot Crow,  among others. He can be found on Twitter/X or Instagram at: @jack_whaler.