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you are entitled to one carry-on My heart swells in a way I can’t pin down–and Don’t care to–when I watch ferries pass in the Sound, Crane my neck backwards, Delayed because I am no longer there, And you, no longer here. When I bit into the jacked-up frozen  QFC chocolate buttercream chocolate whateveritwas, I'll treasure it because of the way it Shattered in my mouth, because you were there, Because we all were, in your apartment, Crisscross sprawl on your floor,  Shirley Temples at Cuff later–we never did want To blend in– Because you only have one chair, and you don't Know what you want out of such a big city, but you Looked at me when I came out of the bathroom, When we played the Dreamcast on the Air mattress, all shifting our bodies to Replicate a coveted double bounce,  Alchemize a drop in the stomach,  The most innocent high we could Conjure, and the soft glow of the TV was A temporary limelight, and I guess I took  The idea of myself for granted, or at least The very physical way I thought we could All look past if I never stopped being funny, But I guess I went quiet for a few seconds Longer than I'd intended, and don't look at me In that way that I can't let you take with you,  And I told you you could Borrow the shoes, the eyeliner, The dozen things I didn't think I'd need for The trip, but they might do something for you, As I wear the heaviest things on my body, Because I hold love in the potential, Because my suitcase was swollen with it. everyone loves catgirls!! When I saw the tenderness was still Stuck in your throat–a blaze more than a thaw– I wanted to claw it out, the way cats nuzzle and purr But you can't breed out the evisceration, the way kids can't  Share, the way I still remember your family landline, The way you let me. i don't care if you took too much, come look at the snow Fragments of angels in hail, The best we can do, squinting Until we see Orion, forgoing stasis For ecstasy–for chattering teeth that Speak glimpses of intimacy, when the Real deal is on omnipresent, enough For us to reach out and hold like moths in The cup of a palm, enough to swallow us  Whole, flapping our wings  As youth flickers, then glows. Romy Rhoads Ewing is a writer and photographer from Sacramento, California. Her work has appeared in HAD, Bullshit Lit, fifth wheel press, BRAWL, Querencia Press, Nowhere Girl Collective, Major 7th Magazine, Y2K Quarterly, and more. Her debut chapbook, please stay, was published by Bottlecap Press in 2024. She is a poetry and nonfiction editor for JAKE and also runs the archival site SACRAMENTO DIRTBAG ARCHIVES. Romy and her work can be found at romyrhoadsewing.xyz

He sat next to the elderly pilot’s hospital bed, hand raised in absolution as he read from the approved script: “Benevolent spirit, please understand, the Captain was only following orders.” A little girl materialized at the foot of the hospital bed and threw her hands in the air. “Well, why didn’t you just say so? We were dancing at a wedding when we burned alive, but I guess that basically makes him innocent, right?” He nodded solemnly as she gathered up her loose skin and jumped into the puddle of piss and tears that had accumulated in the pilot’s bedpan. H. A. Eugene is an O. Henry-nominated writer of strange stories about food, work, and death. His work has appeared in X-R-A-Y Lit, Radon Journal, HAD, and Flash Fiction Online, among others. Witness him talking to himself on Bluesky @autobono.bsky.social  and Threads @h_a_eugene.

The naked woman in the glass stall slathers on liquid soap, a bridal train of foam swirling at her feet. At the adjacent sink, I swipe my pits and crotch with a washcloth. A bird bath , we called it when I was little. I’m grateful for my friend at the front desk who sneaks me into the Malibu Equinox twice a week. A lady behind me sucks in her breath and steps gingerly onto a scale. Amid the mirror’s reflections’ reflections’ reflections, I realize I am staring at the naked woman. She catches my eye, and I look away. I hate getting caught. I can feel her staring at me as I towel off. It’s a soft stare, not threatening like the ones I sometimes get when people suspect I don’t belong wherever I am.  Pipes groan as she shuts off the water. “I’ve seen you here before.” Her silky voice echoes against the tiled walls and floor. “Are you homeless?”  I pretend not to hear. Coil my braids atop my head like a crown and dress quickly. Drag denim across my damp skin, wrestle with a thermal shirt, fold into an oversized Army jacket, slap on a watch cap.  “I don’t mean to pry. I asked if you’re homeless.” She emerges from the shower in snowy towels that she’s wrapped and tucked into a toga and turban. Her eyes are clear, with light purple shadows beneath. Chiseled cheeks, like most club members. From the rich diet or the skinny pills or some plastic surgeon’s signature slice. “Oh, I thought you said ‘Are you hungry? ’” I crouch down, lace my boots. There’s a discarded scrunchie on a bench. I don’t like it, so I leave it. I stash a handful of soaps, then another, into my duffel. This gym goes all-out on soap. Robust foam, mild scent. There are also soft-bristled toothbrushes, mint ribbon floss, designer hand lotion. The lighting in this place is to die for. Not like the fluorescents in the Hollywood gyms, which flicker and buzz. Everyone there is cranky, and they don’t realize it’s because the illumination is in-fucking-humane. The woman, now dressed in a blouse, slacks, and flats, stops on her way out, combing her hair. “ Are  you hungry?”  I tighten drawstrings, buckle straps. Try to assess if she’s a turn-the-outsider-in type. My intuition says she’s not. I get cocky. “No, honestly, I had a big lunch.” She hands me a folded bill. “Here’s a little something.” Her smile is like a frosted strawberry Pop-Tart: overly processed and sweet yet comforting, nonetheless. I unfold the bill. A twenty. “Oh. Wow. Thank you. I’m really OK, though.”  “You’re welcome. I’m glad to help.” She’s walking again. “I didn’t ask.” I have certain rules.  “My pleasure.” I treat myself to fish tacos and beer at a cantina with twinkle lights, then head to the shore. The song of the waves is primal. Like my own blood, cresting and surging. There’s a teenage couple ahead of me. She holds a fistful of daisies and wears a long dress, its open-weave fabric like a fishnet. His jacket is silkscreened with waves. They laugh, tear apart, then come back together to kiss every now and again. I wouldn’t mind something like that. It’s been a while since I’ve auditioned a new sidekick. A while since I’ve wanted to. I ramble the length of the beach and back, cross the Pacific Coast Highway, and return to Spindrift Lane. That’s what I call the spot where my #vanlife van resides in the parking lot of the Smile Center mall. I strip to my undies, smoke half a joint and mess around on my phone. Thank you, Smile Center Wi-Fi password “BrightWhite123.” The sunset is reasonably spectacular, so I throw open the back doors for a portrait sesh. My selfies are amazing. My single goal in their composition: surrender no personal details.  No brown eyes like my dad’s, wherever he is or isn’t. No “flaxen” hair like my mom’s; her word, not mine. No beauty spot in the crook of my left nostril, like my aunt’s. I am a stark silhouette against slate ocean and tangerine sky, a dark shadow of my physical self. I download a fresh dating app and create a new profile. I like this part best: creating a new character for the next entertainment. I imagine actors feel like this when they research a new role.  On the first app, I was Sandy Johanson. Sandy was finishing her dental assistant certification (that part was true) when she met Riverside Danny, who taught her a few things about credit cards and kissed like he meant it. Shortly after she completed her cert, Danny was convicted of fraud (dull story). Selena Johnson used the card tricks to make her way to Los Angeles, where, after a few days on a new app, she moved in with Brentwood Bart, a nepo baby with a healthy habit. Selena became his live-in housekeeper slash personal assistant slash drug caddie slash mixologist. When that blew up, luckily without jail time, Sylvette Jonas dropped her savings on a pre-loved #vanlife van, whipped out her dental assistant credentials, and signed on at the Smile Center. It’s a fine job as bullshit jobs go. Handing sterile instruments to Dr. Fish, soothing youngsters afraid of the drill, preaching the floss manifesto. I’ll do anything as long as I’m near the ocean.  Cut to six months later, to now.  I wave my fingers over the phone’s tiny keyboard, conjuring my next incarnation. I look for a signal, a sign. The sky is just dim enough for the tritest of lucky things to appear. Starlight Jackson . SWF, doing fine . Don’t want much, just a good time. Walks on the beach, Coca-Cola on ice. Daisy bouquet and tuna sandwich nice.  The rhymes are pure Seuss but that’s the point. They’re meant to attract the kind of guy who doesn’t realize Starlight is the hook, not the worm. I change Coca-Cola  to Champagne  and hit Send. Stoned and satisfied, I lock up, draw the blackout curtains, and turn down the futon. The waves sing me to sleep. I am quasi-ocean adjacent, quasi-living my dream.   * * * Two weeks later, on a Storm Watch Wednesday, Crash makes his entrance from a matte black Charger in ironic seventies prom: velvet suit with a ruffled shirt and flared slacks. Shoulder-length dirty blond hair combed back. He is blandly handsome. Like Val Kilmer’s before days.  “Nice look,” I say. Riverside and Brentwood had muscle cars, too. “Not bad yourself.”  I’d purchased one of those fishnet dresses at the surf shop and tucked in the tag to return later, then artfully posed near the Smile Center door. His sky-blue eyes caress my body in a way that suggests an internal licking of chops. “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a white girl in cornrows, but on you they look good.” I laugh at the sideways compliment. The gym shower was closed for re-grouting, so I’d plaited my salt-air hair and smoked my scalp with incense to mask the funk.  We head north toward the gathering clouds. He parks at the far end of Paradise Cove, near the bluffs. From the Charger’s trunk emerges a small bistro table and folding chairs, a fringed umbrella, tuna sandwiches and chips, plus a silver stand and bucket filled with Champagne on ice. “A glass of champs, a tuna sam and thou,” he says, bowing with a flourish. He thrusts a daisy bouquet in my direction. “That’s the closest I get to Shakespeare.” Crash is no William S. but he gets points for reading comprehension. He makes no fatal errors while we dine. Nothing spills, no food collects at the corners of his lips, he doesn’t laugh or talk too loudly, which isn’t easy surrounded by bombastic waves and scavenging seagulls. Afterward, he wraps a wool blanket around our shoulders and, champagne in hand, we stroll along the surging tide. Decorum quickly disappears as our limbs wheel and wing in the sucking sand, champagne splashing, the blanket cast aside. Soon we’re laughing and panting like kids. “Up for a swim?” He lifts me under my arms and swings me around as if to toss me in. “Don’t!” I scream. Too shrieky. Too panicked. Too loud. Too much. “Sorry, I’m sorry.” His tone shifts and he plants me on the ground. “I was just fooling around. I would never do anything you didn’t want me to. I promise.” I wrest away, shaking my head. How did I lose my composure so quickly?  The clouds have swirled into dramatic pillars rising from a threatening gloom. Suddenly serious, he grabs my shoulders and turns me to face him. His sky-blues are dark gray. “I swear to God. You’re safe with me.” “You can die at the beach, too, you know,” I blurt, breaking another of my rules: Never show your fear. “The beach is the best place to talk about your dreams.” “Maybe some other time.” My teeth are chattering. The rope dress hangs heavy. “Listen.” He puts his arm around me and reels me in. “The sound of the waves makes you have to yell, and by yelling, you’re closer to making them come true. I’ll go first.” He squeezes me tighter. “I dream of making money by managing talent and content and manifesting other people’s dreams,” he yells.  A guy jogs past. “Good luck with that.”  Crash gives a goofy grin. “See? Easy!” “Take me home!” I dramatically twist away and plunk into a knee-high wave. I lose my balance for a long second, teetering on the edge of a face-plant, until he stabilizes me. “You really don’t like the ocean, do you? And yet you love the beach.” I realize my fingers are clamped on his biceps, and quickly let go. “Starlight Jackson, you are beautiful and strange.” He turns my head left to right, kissing the corner of each eye where my signature liner wings up. My knees buckle. “Whoa!” He catches and holds me. “Now you. Yell it out. You’ll feel better.”  “Raincheck.” I stumble away.  And then the stupidest thing happens. Rain splatters our faces and hands, the flutes, the already wet blanket. “Ha!” he shouts. “Nature has spoken.” He kisses me on the mouth this time and I break another rule: I kiss back. “Now you.” I imagine yelling about how I’d do anything to have my own place on any beach. The thought of it leaves me terrified, breathless. The rain stops. The clouds part. The sun is low, and the sky is crazy spectacular, deep purples and reds, like bruises and blood. “That’s not how rainchecks work,” my strangled voice says.    * * * Sobs resound from the waiting room, where my next patient—hysterically uninterested in Highlights  or comic books or crayon drawings of smiles and teeth done by other girls and boys who are quiet and don’t cry—waits with her mother.  I straighten the Sylvette Jonas nametag and smooth my hands on my dancing teddy bear smock. My head pounds. Aftereffects of last night. I chug water, then open the door to the waiting room. “Hi, honey,” I say to the still-crying girl, “How are we today?” She continues to cry down the corridor, then in the padded chair. When I snap the paper bib’s chain around her neck. When I ask if she likes her teacher at school. When I flick on the overhead lamp and swing it close to her face. “Yell it out,” I say. “You’ll feel better.” I flush when I realize I’m parroting Crash. She whimpers, as though tears-time might be ending, then howls with renewed energy. I leave the big light shining in her eyes and straighten the instruments on the tray. I absentmindedly reach for my phone to see if he’s texted, then jam it back into my pocket.   I’d invited Crash into the van last night. For that, I blame my dead mother.  The rain was slanting sideways as we drove south on the P.C.H. Visibility was crap. I told Crash he was driving like an old lady, and he agreed, said he wanted to be safe. Said to do that, we needed old lady music. Real golden oldies. “The Great Pretender” came on. The first “oh-OH-oh, yeh-hes” opened the floodgates. Mom nursing morning coffee in a yellow kitchen. Reading me fairy tales at night in her bed. Planting kisses on my fingertips.  Through more “ooh-wee” tunes and “la-la-la” melodies, the memory tsunami continued. Holding my hand as we galloped through waves at the beach. Crying to old movies in the blue TV glow, an empty bottle of wine at her feet. Smoking on the front stoop. I thought of the last time I saw her, that day at the ocean. The Charger roared into the Smile Center lot. I pointed to Spindrift. His eyebrows lifted as he parked alongside my van. “You got so quiet,” he said. “Is everything okay?”  The only way I knew to shut down the memory channel was to disengage my brain and disappear my body into someone else’s. Once our clothes were off, Crash was animal, vegetable, and mineral. An all-you-can-fuck buffet of sexual comfort in one unironic bikini brief. He kept asking what I wanted, so I kept demanding. Here, not there. Softer. Faster. Harder. Tongue . He earned additional points for following instructions. Dr. Fish enters the exam room, bringing his signature wave of cologne, mouthwash, and antiseptic. This is my favorite part of the appointment: right before the grand oral opening. What bizarre grind patterns, chips, and anomalies had DNA, night terrors, and sports wrought since the last check-up? Most of Fish’s patients subscribe to the family package. The father who refuses to let Fish touch his baby teeth. The mother who whitens diabolically. Fish tells her again and again her enamel will be destroyed. But it looks so good , she says, returning monthly on the day he plays golf. The son whose teeth slant top-left/bottom-right, the mirror opposite of his sister’s—today’s crying girl—whose teeth slant top-right/bottom-left. Her crying has become soft whining. I give in and check my phone. Nada. I pat the girl’s hand. “There, there, honey. Everything will be fine.” Sometimes this bullshit job makes me a liar. Three cavities, big and deep. Oh well. As I’m locking the deadbolt on the Smile Center, my phone rings. It’s Crash. “What?”  “Hi! I waited until you were done with work so I wouldn’t interrupt. Am I bothering you?”  Bothering me? The very silence of him listening makes me wet.  This is not protocol. Not okay. I don’t entertain memories of my mother. I don’t allow sidekicks in the van. I don’t fuck on first nights. Feelings are verboten. “You could have texted like a normal person. In like a week.” “Fuck normal.” He laughs. “I can’t stop thinking of you. Can we get together?” I blink hard. The beach is there, across the highway. The sky, the waves. Nothing and everything has changed. “I’m busy.” “Tomorrow?” The hope in his voice is total torture. “Ditto.” “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you don’t want to see me.” “Maybe you don’t know better.” I lock myself in the van. I want to drive, to find another dental office, another parking lot. Instead, I light a joint and hit my tunes. Give myself the talk, review the rules. Tell myself to play him like Riverside and Brentwood. Stay cool, keep him hanging, remain focused. Find his weak point and yank off the scab. For some reason, when Crash swung me around, I panicked. And he called me out. And he stayed. Spent the night. Honest truth, I am wet again.   I remove my ear buds so I can hear the song of the waves and put one hand on the traitor between the V of my legs.   * * * One thing I love about #vanlife is living my #life #outdoors. Early weekend mornings at Spindrift, beach world is my oyster. I feel like “Little House on the Prairie” as I rinse my braids with lavender oil and water straight from a bucket. Seabirds cackle and scream while I scour my teeth. So, I’m caught off-guard when the Charger roars up and Crash climbs out rocking sweats and a T with a spectacular fit. “Good morning, Starlight,” he says.   I suddenly feel naked in my oversized T. Idiotically, I try to wriggle into sweatpants and brush my teeth at the same time. He reaches toward my face. I pull back and spit into a hedge. “Chill out.” He touches a finger to a blob of paste on my upper lip and puts it in his mouth. “Peppermint. How are you?”  I grab my phone and start making up shit. I don’t talk before coffee, I text. He sets a white bakery bag and a tray of to-go cups on the roof of the car and texts back. Chocolate croissants and double-shot lattes, no talk.  Dammit.  The beach is empty save a few joggers with their dogs. I’ve never eaten a croissant so slowly or let a latte go cold, but he says nothing, shows no signs of impatience, seems to actually savor the slow-mo show. After an hour of convincing myself I know what I’m doing, I slap flaky crumbs from my hands, drain the dregs of my cup, and stand. My phone dings.  He’s texted. Talk now?   It’s only fair. “Okay. That was delicious, thanks.” “You’re welcome.” He extracts an oblong leather box from the paper bag. Inside is a gold necklace with “Starlight” spelled in rhinestones. “Just like mine,” he says, hooking his thumb on a chain that spells his  name in rhinestones.  He doesn’t know Starlight’s not my real name. Like his mother named him Crash. “That’s so Pretty Woman  of you,” I say, hooking it around my neck. “I knew you’d get it.” He tosses our trash into a nearby can and takes my hand.  When we reach the water, my shoulders relax. The lines in my forehead erase themselves. The chilly salt air makes me feel alive in a way that’s better than almost all other ways of feeling alive. My wet braids slap at my cheeks. He laughs and sweeps my hair from my face “Do you want to be happy?”  It smells like a trick. “Doesn’t everyone?” “What does happy mean to you?” “You’re being a dick.” “I’m not. I sincerely want to know. Why can’t you answer?” “I am  happy,” I insist. My shoulders hike up. “No judgement, but living in a van makes you happy?” I stare hard into his eyes and notice spots dotting his cheekbones that could be freckles, could be sun exposure. Maybe he knows more about #vanlife than he’s letting on. “Living in a van makes me ecstatic. In Mali-freaking-bu Beach . I come and go as I please. I meet interesting people on my own terms.” “Is that your dream come true?” This dream bullshit again. “My dream is to live near the ocean. I’m living it.” “What if there were a better option? Also, near the ocean. With an easy way to earn income, lots of fun people around, plenty of freedom. Plus, me.” The damp has made his hair stick out in crazy angles and he’s so effing cute, his marketing tagline almost sounds like an earnest invitation.  I manufacture my best unimpressed face. B.F.D. Still, I wonder who I might meet. The potential is exponential. “We have indoor plumbing. And outdoor, if you prefer.” I’ll let the beach decide. If the next three waves in a row reach my feet, then with Crash I will go.                       * * * We drive deep into the Santa Monica mountains to a gated promontory, then to a modern bunker, all concrete and glass. There’s a DJ playing music and people my age milling on the front lawn and around the pool. As though they’ve been placed there by an art director. You, tall boy with no shirt and white jeans, lean against the wicker chair and suck on that straw from a fruity cocktail while you gaze out at the blue horizon. Tall girl in floral gown with cleavage to your navel, yes, you! put your finger in your mouth and twirl your hair. Look at me! Now look away! Look back! Crash detours down a side yard to a place he calls the chalet. It’s filled with clothes, racks and racks. Tops, jeans, dresses. Swimsuits. Shoes. Sunhats and visors. “Pick something. Anything,” he says. “Do I have to?” Defiant in my T and sweats. He points to toothpaste stains on my T and wet sand on the ass of my sweats. I find a simple silk dress with ties at the top and slits on the skirt to the tops of my thighs. I bun my braids at the back of my neck. This and flip flops feel right. I do look kind of amazing. We enter the big house together, and the atmosphere palpably shifts. “Why do I feel like fresh meat?” I ask without moving my lips. “Because you’re paranoid,” he whispers into my neck. “We’re all friends.” To the room at large he says, “Everyone, meet Starlight. Starlight, meet everyone. Mingle, eat, drink.” I am quickly corralled toward the bar by a group of smiling women with fluorescent teeth. My expert guess is Crest 3D White Strips. An older man turns his face away from me and leans into Crash’s ear. “Back in fifteen,” Crash mouths to me, and follows the man up a clear plexiglass staircase.  I make small talk while I study the hell out of the place. Everyone wears those rhinestone necklaces. With names like Butterfly, Kitten, and Sparkle. The men, too: Maverick, Bronco, Malibu. So original. The talk is loud because the music is loud. Everyone is chill and smiling, laughing, draping themselves nonchalantly across the furniture and each other, taking photos. Sometimes dancing or lounging but always drinking. And eating. The buffet is constantly refilled. I dance. I drink. Visit the buffet a few times. Snort a short line or two. Turns out everyone at the party lives in the house to save rent while they work on the business. “What business?” I ask. “Rhinestone necklaces?” They all laugh again with their white teeth. That’s just a side-hustle, an inside joke. Their main income comes from commissions for leasing the extravagant house for extravagant events at extravagant prices for the owner, the older man. Everyone who lives here works the events: music, food, light displays, fireworks, talent, team building. Today’s party is just for them. Everyone is so happy I’m here. What do I do? How did I meet Crash? I excuse myself to look for a restroom. What I thought could be a viable con sounds more like an opportunistic game plan for ambitious dreamers. Not my style. I’m disappointed but not dissatisfied. You don’t know until you know. The restroom has a line, and someone mentions there’s another upstairs. I ascend the invisible staircase, hoping it doesn’t shatter. There’s a long corridor on the second floor, doors on both sides. I flash on a story called The Lady or The Tiger  but can’t recall how it goes.  Behind the first door on my right is the bathroom, as promised. The walls are stripped to the studs, mid-reno. Thankfully, the plumbing plumbs. Back in the corridor, I peer over the plexiglass banister to scan the big room. Still no Crash. I’m starting to come down. I need a place to be alone. Behind door number two I find glossy black furniture. Mirrors veined with gold. A white leather dish with five rings bearing one flashy initial each: H.R.A.S.C. The guy gets props for commitment. Without a twinge of guilt, I survey inside dresser drawers, rifle the closet. Athleisure, jeans, neutral basics, white athletic socks. I stretch across the bed, punching the pillows beneath me for support. Someone turns up the music downstairs, and I move to the muffled beat, snapping pics of myself lounging in that silly dress on black satin. Maybe I’ll use it for my next profile. Drop a sunset background behind me so it looks like I’m at the beach... “Hey, there you are.” Crash leans against the doorway. His hand is tucked under his rolled T-shirt the way guys do accidentally on purpose to show off their abs.   “Hey you.” I stand and move toward him. “I was looking for the toilet.” “You picked the wrong door.” “Actually, I picked the right door and then I felt like I needed some quiet, so I picked the other door. But now that you’re here, maybe this door is the right door.”  He kisses me backwards onto the bed. His lips brush my ear. His breath is the roar of waves. “Right, left, right, wrong. Age-old questions too boring for a Saturday afternoon on my bed.” His hands slip inside my skirt.  My nerve endings spark and snap as the full length of him presses against me, his weight a delicious blanket. I wrap my legs around his back. “Do you know the story about the lady or the tiger?” “ The Lady or The Tiger ?” he muses. “If I remember eighth-grade English, I think that’s a question of reward and punishment marked by chance.” He lifts my hips. “Not destiny?” I giggle at the sound of my voice, all breath and no tone. “Destiny, schmestiny.” The smallest of grinds. “Can we stop talking now?” “I thought you’d never shut up.” Another grind. Then another, then the sensation like cresting waves. “ Oh-OH-oh, yeh-hes, I’m the great pretender . Oo-WOO.”  Crash likes to sing in the shower. I wrap myself in the duvet; I’ll have a bird bath when he’s done. I smile at my mom’s turn of phrase. I’ve been allowing memories of her more often now. Back to when we two pulled off what she called “petty flimflams.” Shoplifting, but only things we needed. Nail polish, jewelry. A 100% real human hair postiche à cheveux chignon, couleur marron.  I’d wait at the motel and promise not to unlock the door for anyone. She’d slink across the parking lot like a movie star, that bird’s nest of cinnamon hair tumbling down her back, in a black sequined sheath and high-heeled sandals, red nails flashing. She’d return late at night, tipsy and giggling. She’d tuck some cash into my pajama sleeve. I pretended to be asleep.  “ Pretending that I’m doing well .” Malibu Crash has a nice singing voice. There. He has a nickname now. Does that make him part of my history or my future? I touch the handle on the nightstand drawer with my toe. It glides open.  Passport. Score. Charles Rayhill Ash. Brown military crewcut. The exact opposite of the way he looks now. From Orange, California. Tablet. Score again. I type “lady or tiger” into the search. Apparently, that’s too much for Safari to handle. The crashed browser disappears into the lower right corner of the device. An open email remains. To: Mr. Charles R. Ash, Esquire Thank you for your kind note. I have been searching for my niece for the past five years in hopes of enticing her to reunite with the family. I appreciate your understanding regarding the delicacy of the situation and agree to pay the amount of $25,000.00 for you to escort her to the location below at the proposed date and time, after which I will arrange for the release of funds to your banking account.  Sincerely,  Miss Lucinda Traveler-Jones There’s an address for the Travel Inn Motel at Traveler Beach in Laguna above a high-school yearbook photo of a beach girl. Tank top. Tanned skin. Long hair with blond streaks. Fairy-dust freckles, mascara-tipped lashes, and liner that wings up from her eyes like punctuation. Beneath the photo is her name: Samaritan Jones.  That girl is me. “Well.” Crash stands nude in the doorway, dripping onto the shag, rubbing a towel over his head, looking at me looking at what I’m looking at. “This is awkward.”  Dots connect like mad in my head. “Is twenty-five grand, like, a lot or a little?” “Ask me, it’s a bargain.” He dresses efficiently. “Walk on the beach? “I think not.” I stab at my phone for an Uber. Crash sits on the bed. Wraps his hand around my dagger finger. “Don’t bother. They never find this place. No service.” I jerk my hand away. “Fuck!” We sit for what might a long time or a moment. The atmosphere in the room shifts, as though the lights have dimmed, or a cloud passed under the sun. My feet are suddenly freezing, and I feel the way I did on our first date, like I’m about to face plant in a cold wave. I can’t stop the idiotic question that’s coming out of my mouth. “Did you know who I was when you tagged me on the dating app?”  “Of course not. How could I? Your photo was a shadow.” “If my photo was a shadow, then why did you pick me?” “I picked you because your photo was a shadow. I love a good mystery.” “When did you know she was me? Or I was her. Whatever.” “The day we met. The first second I saw you.” He snaps his fingers. Off my look of disbelief, he says, “Your wings,” tucking his fingers under my chin and kissing the corners of my eyelids.  I pull my head away. “So, you were already looking for that girl when you accidentally found me?” “Guilty as charged.” “You’ve done this before? Found people?” He nods. “I have.” “Why?” He shrugs. “It’s just something I do. There’s a Facebook page. You can help if you want. I think you’d be good at it.” I’m shivering now, as though frigid water is rising up my legs to my thighs.  “It doesn’t have to be like...” “Like what? Like you’re a fucking bounty hunter?” I’m shrieking and I don’t give a shit. The light in the room darkens more. The sound of the undertow swirls in my ears. He presses a warm hand on my back. “I was going to say, it doesn’t have to be like Brentwood or Riverside.” Shit. He’s done his homework. “Meaning?” “ Meaning  we can arrange this so both—so all —of us benefit. Profit. Thrive.” His lips are on my neck. The light fades a few more degrees.                       * * * The hardened cracked vinyl in the booth jabs my legs through my jeans, and there are dead flies on the windowsill. The diner at the Traveler Inn hasn’t changed a jot from the way it was when I was a kid, down to the pink and blue neon wall clock stuck at a quarter after one. In true SoCal spirit, Crash and I drove separately. We’re an hour early. He rubs his hands together briskly. “Lunch?” One of the flies is not completely dead. It buzzes wildly in fits and starts, trapped in a frantic bardo. I know how it feels. I never had any desire to reunite with Lucinda, but now that doing so is my destiny, I’m having so many emotions that I’m entirely numb. “I should probably have something to eat.”  He scans the menu. “What would you like?”  I cannot tear my eyes away from the break-dancing fly. “You pick.” Crash claps his hands on the Formica top to get the attention of the teenager behind the counter. “What’s your specialty?”  “Kobe tomahawk and caviar,” she says, not looking up from her phone. Beachy, blond, tan. Me 2.0. My yearbook photo updated with eyebrow piercings and neck ink. I wonder what she knows about life, loss, leaving home. “Two tuna sandwiches...” Crash says. I interrupt, suddenly ravished. “Melts. Rye bread...” “Melts with rye bread, side of fries. No, side of chips. And do you have any champagne? We’re celebrating.” She gives him a dead-eye deadpan. “Let me run right down to the wine cellar.”  I’m starting to like her. “Two Cokes.” Crash slaps his hand on the table again. She tacks our order to the spinner, brings our sodas, and returns to her phone. I clear my throat. “Anything I should read into that food order, Charles ?” He reaches inside his fleece jacket and presents me with a handful of bedraggled daisies. “Nothing in particular. Samaritan .” I slit a flower stem with my fingernail and insert the stem of another, then repeat. Our plan, such as it is, consists of him presenting me to Lucinda, at which time she calls her bank to release funds into his account. Fuzzy family reunion ensues. Auntie and I make nice, Crash and prodigal niece return to Malibu, split the cash. Horizon T.B.D. Beach girl brings our tuna melts and fries. “I ordered chips.” Crash says. “Oopsie.” She turns and leaves. “Oopsie.” I loop the daisy chain around my neck.  “Oopsie.” He dips a fry in ketchup.  We eat in anxiously agreeable silence. “How’d you get named Samaritan anyway?” he asks. “It’s kind of unusual.” “It’s ridiculous! The story I was told, and I don’t know if it’s true...” “Her parents named her that to piss off their parents and it worked,” says a familiar voice at my back. Miss Lucinda Traveler-Jones herself whirls a chair from one of the tables and sits at ours. She wears a burgundy crocheted hat, burgundy puffer. “Hello, Samaritan dear.” She extends a burgundy-veined hand. “Hello, Aunt Lucinda.” I put my greasy tuna-melted hand in her cool one. She looks the same, only older. An alternate version of my mother, an alternate-universe version of me. Something about the line of her jaw. That beauty mark larger now, faded.  About a year after that high school photo was taken—the one she shared on Facebook, the one Crash recognized after meeting me—Lucinda and I were with my mom at the beach. I always picture that day with capital letters, like an episode of “Friends:” The One with the Last Day . Or: The One Where Evelyn Says Glug. The One Where I Never See My Mother Again. The One Where I Leave Childhood In The Sand. “Classic denial,” my ex-therapist said. We both knew I was deep into obfuscation, but she also said you can’t get past it until you get into it. Years of ramshackle detours later, there are still unanswered questions. Did she willingly disappear into the sea? Or was there an accident, a struggle, the water won? Was there something Lucinda knew that I didn’t? I’d often imagine she might have had a fling with my good-for-nothing father. Or maybe my mother was pregnant and didn’t know what to do. Maybe she just couldn’t swim. Maybe she didn’t want... “Earth to Samaritan.” Crash stares with his concerned Botox brow.  “There’s no need to worry. She’s just in shock, Mr. Ash,” says Lucinda, her eyes locked on mine. Eyes so very much like my mothers’, maybe like my own. Her eyes make me feel suddenly, totally me. As I was before Sandy, Selena, Sylvette and Starlight.  She keeps staring, and I realize she’s seeing her sister, just I see my mother. “I saw you both here earlier. I’ve arranged for the transfer. You should be receiving a...” Crash’s phone pings. He reads the text and smiles. “Thank you.” He pockets his phone and leans his arms on the table. As if he’s actually excited for us, proud of consummating our family reunion, anticipating reconciliation or redemption. Or maybe it’s just the money. How am I going to get rid of him? Lucinda lays her hand on his arm. “Mind giving us some privacy, Mr. Ash?” “Oh! I’m sorry! Of course.” He pats Lucinda’s hand, swipes his napkin across his face, and stands. Tucks in his shirt and kisses the top of my head. Runs his finger along my daisy chain. Leaves some cash on the counter. He stands in the parking lot and stares at the ocean for a long time before the Charger screeches away. She stands up from the table. “Come on, honey. Let’s get some air.” The shoulder across the P.C.H. above Traveler Beach is rocky, the hillside steep. Rusted metal rope lines the path. We hold hands as we make our way down the crooked steps. Trash litters the spiky brush. It’s the kind of beach where, once you risk your life to reach the shore, danger only increases. There’s hardly any sand, just piles of kelp under buzzing flies. Rocks occasionally leer up from haphazard waves, the coastline too treacherous for tidepools. I imagine the drop-off to the Mariana Trench begins right here. One step too far, and down you go, straight to the fishes that have no bones or color, no need for eyes.  “Did you really just shell out $25,000 to find me?”  “I did and I didn’t,” she laughs. The corners of her blue eyes branch into beautiful wrinkles. “I got a guy at the bank. We have an agreement.”                        * * * Most days I wake early enough to watch the sun rise. Lucinda likes me to move the van across the highway on days the motel is full up but lets me park in the lot at night. I get along fine with Darcy, the teenager at the diner, and on my days off, I take coffee and my phone to the water. To that rocky beach with its fly swarms and glass shards and one-legged seagulls. I swear, it’s like they reach a certain bird-age, and one leg just falls off. Every now and then, I think about Crash. Was he back on Facebook looking for another post like the one Lucinda deleted while we ate our tuna melts? Does he wonder where I am? Will he show up someday? I haven’t heard a peep since I blocked him. One exceptionally cold afternoon, Lucinda and I cross the P.C.H. and pick our way down the death stairs. We huddle behind a dune and tear into sack lunches. She pulls a flask from her pocket. We both take sips, and whatever it is burns like hell. We cough until we laugh.  She offers to read my hand. “What with the glaucoma, it’s mostly by touch anyway.” She traces a bony finger inside my palm along the half-moon curve that grows straight up like a tree from the middle of my wrist then forks near my thumb pad and splits into two, three, no, four lines. “This is your past and this is your future,” she says. “I don’t know about the other two. Your Mount of Mercury indicates you are quite eloquent, but your Mount of Venus, that’s your love life, is flabby. In general, your palm is schizophrenic.” She looks out at the waves. “Long ago, you were a beloved oracle on the island of Atlantis. You were half god and half human, and the island people brought you gifts and sang your praises. They asked you for advice: when to plant their crops, whom to marry.”  “Great. The last thing I need in my karmic backstory is to be blamed for a lost civilization. What did I tell them?” “I don’t know. You’re the oracle.” I snort.  “This other line is your future. Do you want to know what I see?” “Not really.” I’ve gotten used to this life for now, but it won’t last forever. Something will fall apart. It always does.  “Fine, then. I won’t tell you.” She tightens the puffer around her.  “Fine.”  We empty the flask and watch the reflection of sky in the vast bowl of sea. “Crash said the beach is the best place to talk about your dreams, because the sounds of the waves make you have to yell them and by yelling them, you’re closer to making them come true.”  “He’s cute but that’s hogwash,” she says. “Shall we give it a go?” We fall back onto the sand. On the count of three, we open our mouths as if to yell, but neither of us says anything. Which makes us laugh and then cry. The waves sing their song and inch closer to our feet. We hold hands as we hike the steep trail to the highway, lifting each other up and up, crooked stair by crooked stair.  Tracy DeBrincat’s short stories and poetry have appeared in a variety of literary journals from Another Chicago Magazine  to Zyzzyva . Her most recent short story, Rise , was published in Lit Angels #15  in December 2023. Her first work of non-fiction, Letters to Myself the Younger , appeared in Vol. VIII of The New Guard  and received a Pushcart nomination. Her first novel, Hollywood Buckaroo , received the 2011 Big Moose Fiction Prize and was published by Black Lawrence Press. Her award-winning short story collections, Troglodyte  and Moon Is Cotton & She Laugh All Night , were published by Elixir Press and Subito Press, respectively. Tracy lives in Los Angeles where she is working on a new novel, Once Upon a Coyote .

If only you could pretend you don’t care about the superficially courteous relationship with your in-laws who also pretend to have risen above the meddling games yet manage to shove their friendly opinions right back in your face— you ought to teach them better , they didn’t say thank you again …what does it even mean sufficiently polite, how many times is ample amount of time— you keep asking yourself , and as your head spins with the criticism how it’s unreasonable to allow them to explore their limits , be their own people  as if giving them a voice at such a young age would turn them into less-er (people)—being blunt is a luxury they didn’t have in their childhood, everything seems to come down to— what will the neighbours say .  If only you could pretend that being Daughter-In-Law is something more—the name says it yet it’s the in-law part that they focus on when they use you as a vessel for all the grievances they’re uncomfortable airing to their own children. Still, you can’t bring yourself to blame them (no matter how appealing that sounds) because you understand the need to vent and be heard even when methods used are not endorsed, you can certainly relate—having a distant relationship with your own family. At least, hers are close enough so you experience in-flesh disapprovals (thinking how refreshing that is) as opposed to FaceTime/ Zoom/ Skype ones. At least hers don’t invoke the Bible every time she mentions her wife, and it makes you wonder how in hell you survived your zealot family. If only you could pretend this doesn’t affect your mental health—all the spurious findings your family throws at you (despite being ten thousand miles away) as you catch yourself – again and again - in trying to be perfect, so bloody perfect that no one can utter a word against your spouse and the way you raise your children. And you know, deep down you know it’s unrealistic - an erroneous fallacy because no one is THAT perfect, and this is what you keep drilling into your children’s heads. You truly believe that imperfections make us perfect(ly) unique, and if others don’t like it… well… they can get fu…. The word gets out to everyone’s shock. The silence fills the room, almost palpable, and with the speed of light, the atmosphere transforms into giggles as Mum has said the F word (what a relief you think to yourself as you look at your wife apologetically knowing you broke the rule though deep down you profess the happiness you feel—there’s something elating about swear words).  If only you could pretend you are one of those families without complex relationships (how hard can it be) so you allow yourself these little fabrications. It seems as easy as pulling the blinds down, just like Wile E. Coyote, over and over again when you were a kid, sitting on the soft woolly rug in the middle of the living room, squared eyes intently glued to the big screen, mouth half gaping, posture tense, completely and utterly in awe of Coyote’s stupidity. Now, decades later, you understand the blissful allure of oblivion. As you snap back to reality, you avow that you are not the worst Daughter-In-Law, certainly not the worst Daughter, or even a human for that matter, and with this in mind, you continue with courteous smiles and polite nods, you embrace the conduit role bestowed upon your persona, not as a sign of weakness, quite the opposite. At this age, you know the strength required not to burst into pieces. You are knowledgeable enough to recognise the forest from the trees. As for the what will the neighbours say — who the fuck cares ! Andrea Damic, born in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, lives and works in Sydney, Australia. She wears many hats as her daughter likes to remind her. Aside from being a mum, Andrea is also an artist and a writer. Her education is opposite to artistic expression—she's an accountant with a master's degree in Economics. Being a non-native English speaker makes every publication worth the struggle. She believes there's something cathartic about seeing your words and art out in the world. Andrea is also a contributing editor of a newly founded Pictura Journal. Her literary art appears or is forthcoming in Bending Genres, Does It Have Pockets, JMWW, Ghost Parachute, Roi Fainéant Press, Alien Buddha Press, and elsewhere. During her imaginary free time, you can find her fiddling with her website https://damicandrea.wordpress.com/ .

It began with the smallest itch, almost able to be ignored, but I know that’s impossible. I reached up and drew my well-manicured fingernails across the skin on the back of my neck. The tickle passed immediately, but deeper down, I knew the feeling would only continue to build. Flattening my hand, I massaged the area, feeling the muscle yield under the pressure.  Was the skin already thicker? So soon? No, it doesn’t happen that quickly. I still had time. The days carried on, and I made arrangements to be away from work and the few acquaintances I maintained, mostly neighbors who would notice my absence. It never hurt to have a consistent story among those who I had to interact with. Beyond that, I wouldn’t be missed. The rest of the world rushed by around me, and no one noticed. I went to great lengths to make sure that was the case, it just made life that much simpler. The itch, of course, had returned and was no longer chased away with any amount of scratching. A harbinger of my immediate future, it rippled and crawled along my body, foretelling the biology that forged ahead just under the surface. I sought respite with long soaks in the bathtub, the water as cold as possible, submerged with only my mouth and nose cresting the surface, but there was no stopping my march toward the inevitable.  I awoke on the day of my scheduled departure, and the transformation was almost complete. I had timed it well as it was becoming nearly impossible to hold myself back from the compulsion. I loaded my small bag of belongings into my car, mostly for show, I would have no need for any of it once I reached my destination. Heading out of the city, I followed the route I had taken hundreds of times before when the calling had set upon me.   The cities and towns passed by and grew less and less frequent. My task was best accomplished in a place as isolated from people as possible. This had become harder and harder to do each time, but with a little forethought and planning it could still be done. Pulling over at one of the rare stops I made on my trip, I was inside of the gas station paying for a final fill up of fuel when I sensed another. They must have had similar plans to myself and saw this station as conveniently placed along their path. Stepping outside, I was drawn immediately to the dark gray vehicle that had taken a position one row over from mine. As I approached the car, the other pumping gas turned in my direction and our eyes locked. They appeared as a slim, athletic female of approximately thirty years of age. She had light brown hair laced into a tight braid that trailed down her neck and rested on the shoulder of what appeared to be a rain jacket. Jeans and light boots finished the outfit and matched her intention to play the part of a hiker heading into the wilds. Nondescript and average, like any of us, she would pass without notice, fading from memory as quickly as any stranger on the street.       I continued to approach her, never breaking the connection with her eyes. Reaching out, our fingertips met and the link was made. In an instant, our lives flooded each other’s bodies, and our hierarchy was established. I was the elder, thus she would accompany me to my chosen site, and we would complete our task together. This was the way it had always been done. Breaking the connection, I turned away, walked to my car, got in and pulled away from the station. She still had to refuel and pay, but our link would carry across long distances and she would find her way to me wherever I went.   Having left the last piece of civilization back at the station, I drove deeper and deeper into the forest. I turned off the paved road and bounced along a rough access road that I knew would get little to no activity this late in the season. Another hour on this trail, and I reached the spot where the path widened and a makeshift clearing served as a place for a handful of cars to be left near a trailhead leading into the mountains.   Rather than carry on ahead, I stayed in the car, hands on the steering wheel, slowly clenching and relaxing. Closing my eyes, I felt the tension in my hands spread up my arms, then across my torso and finally down my legs. My muscles rippled under the now thickened skin - the itch had been replaced with a buzzing anxiety, a physical manifestation of the transformation and the anticipation of what came next. It roared in my ears like a storm raging outside of the car,  lashing across the trees, tearing off limbs and slamming them onto the ground. As the tempest raged toward its crescendo, my eyes shot open, my hands flew up off the wheel and everything was dead calm. The surrounding trees were still and intact, the bright sun trickled through the leaves and painted the forest floor with shining gems. Turning to the right, I saw her pull up next to my car and park. Stepping out, I walked to the back of my car, opened the hatch and removed a small bundle, then strode toward the markers designating the beginning of the mountain trail.   She caught up quickly, and soon we both walked side-by-side along the well-maintained trail. We neither looked at each other nor spoke, for the most part ignoring each other, caught up in our own internal worlds. Once I heard her begin to breathe heavier and I could feel the tension building in her much like it had for me in the car. It continued to build, her exhalations verging on barking growls. She made to surge forward, to break into a run, but my hand on her shoulder pulled her back. I kept the grip firm until I could feel her come down from the burgeoning impulse that was just beneath the surface.           An hour in,we had made good progress. We left behind the main trail with its scattered markers posting the location of views or attractions that held no interest for us. The trail was now much narrower, and we trekked single-file, hearing no sounds from the road or any other human activities. The way soon rose quickly and we scrambled up steep sections interrupted by large rocks and tangled roots. Cresting a small hill, we eventually arrived at my intended destination. At the top of the hill, a massive oak tree towered over the landscape. Its heavy canopy shaded the floor beneath it. The light had been fading quickly for the last part of our trek, and now the darkness deepened in the shelter of the tree. Our eyes easily adjusted, the transformation having provided us with the enhanced night vision we would need. As we approached the trunk, we easily avoided the few random plants and scattered piles of bone that dotted the area.   At the base of the tree, I swept the leaves out of a deep section where the roots met the trunk. Unraveling the bundle I had carried with me from the car, I set the dry bag on the roots, laid my coat on the bag and began to unbutton my shirt. My companion did the same, shedding her clothes until she stood naked under the tree. I carefully folded and stowed my clothing in the dry bag, took the other bag of clothing that she handed me and tucked it far back in the recesses of the tree. Our belongings would remain safe here until tomorrow. Standing up, I closed my eyes and breathed deeply, taking in the smells carried along by the light breeze. Life was dense here, plenty for us to harvest and ensure that our task was accomplished.   A sound broke through my thoughts, I recognized it as the grunting the other had made earlier, but this time I did nothing to stop her. The sound progressed to a harsh, keening whine that triggered a wave of sensation across my skin. I gave in myself and soon sang along with her as the final stage of the transformation took hold. Clenching my hands into fists, I felt the claws poised on the ends of my fingers. I dragged them across more forearm, leaving furrows in their wake. The pain was sharp and stimulating, but no blood welled forth as the skin responded to the injury and quickly tightened, weaving back together stronger and tougher than before. I hissed loudly as fiery pain traced across my back. She had swiped her own claws from my shoulders to the small of my back, accelerating the hardening process. I spun around and swiftly intercepted her wrist as she came in for another strike. Pulling her arm up, I lashed out across her stomach, and she cried out sharply from the pain, then bared her teeth in a cruel smile. The bright white points, adapted like her fingernails, glistened in the moonlight that now filtered into the clearing. She twisted her hand free and thrust both hands forward, connecting with my chest. The blow was immense and would have crushed any other creature, but we were complete now, toughened and stronger. I flipped backwards, landing on all fours and then rushed forward, throwing my arms around her hips and lifting her onto my shoulders. I raced forward out of the clearing carrying her along as she pounded mercilessly on my back. Reaching up, I threw her off and she sailed through the air twisting cat-like to land gracefully on the trunk of a fallen tree. We were ready.   We slid through the forest like wraiths, faster than any other animal could manage. Our senses bathed in the overload – the hunt, the chase, the swift death, the rending of flesh and bone, the return. Nothing escaped our fury - large, small, clawed, horned - it all was our prey. Again and again we repeated the cycle, ranging out from the oak tree further and further, but always returning with the spoils of our conquest. At times we hunted alone, so overtaken by the lust that we completely ignored the other, but mostly we stalked together and revelled as one in the thrill of the moment. The emotion and feelings that we push down and control in that other part of our lives was now released and free to do what it will. It poured out of us in a frenzy, and we did nothing to stem the flow.   The sun rose, and our efforts slowed. At the height of the day, we returned to the oak tree. We tended to the steadily growing pile of torn bodies that had accumulated there. Rending apart larger pieces and arranging them neatly across the forest floor. As we finished, a light rain began to fall. It grew heavier and soon made it past the umbrella of leaves held by the branches above. The water beaded up, our skin shed it easily and as the storm outside the shelter of the oak continued to grow, so did our lust to return to the hunt. Slowly, we ranged out among the trees unfocussed, lightly sparring and swiping at each other. Suddenly, a rabbit shot out from under a pile of brush and the chase was irresistible. Pushing the last bit of sleep from our bodies, we loped gracefully behind as the small creature ran for its life. My companion keened loudly, spurring the prey and its predators onward. Now fully heated and once again surging with the power of our kind, we ended the chase and rent the body in half. Blood splashed across our arms, painting our bodies until the rain washed it thinner and thinner. I screamed to the sky, a long and powerful wail, we were once again our true selves. The storm intensified as night fell, but that only drove us further into our violent catharsis. Prey fell before us just as it had the previous night, nothing escaped. We lashed through the trees like the lightning in the sky above and struck anything that moved. Our spree was relentless, the cycle repeated over and over - hunt, kill, return. The storm peaked along with our frenzy, thunder pounding, trees thrashing in the wind, breaking branches echoing the snapping of joints and bone. We dragged our final kill back to the tree and threw the remains onto our horde. Dragging ourselves back toward the base of the tree, we finally gave in and collapsed in a tangle of red-stained limbs. The cold rain poured down on us, but we slept like the dead, unmoving and silent.          I woke on the morning of that second day to bright light filtering through the branches of the oak tree towering above. Sitting up I looked around and saw no sign of the other in the immediate vicinity. Perhaps she had wandered off into a denser part of the forest. As I scanned further about the clearing, I looked over at the piles of flesh and limbs we had carefully arranged and saw her final contribution to our purpose. Having completed her function, I guess she felt there was little reason to remain and thus had returned to her car and her alternate life. The parting was inevitable, and I felt neither gain nor loss from the interaction we had shared. We simply did what we had been compelled to do.   After standing up, I felt the familiar loosening of my skin that signaled the final part of my task. I stretched and pulled, feeling the interface between the layers shifting, letting go. Once I had sufficiently worked free the connections across my entire body, I reached up, grabbing the protruding folds on the back of my neck and pulled. The skin split easily and smoothly parted from the layer underneath. It slid readily down my body, and as it pooled down onto the ground, I stepped out of it, reborn into the form I would remain in until the next transformation took hold. I gathered the slippery skin in my hands and carried it over to the collection we had made. Laying it gently on the largest pile next to my companion’s similarly shed covering, I now completed the reason for coming here. The mass of flesh, organs and bones would nourish our offspring as they grew from our skins and carried on the next generation. Perhaps someday they too would return to this very place and perform the same ritual we had just completed.  I turned to make my way back toward the tree and noticed an object reflecting the morning sunlight. Bending down, I wiped the blood and muck away to reveal a watch still strapped in place around a wrist. Tracing my fingers along the hand, I noted the feminine shape and painted nails. Further discovery revealed a lower leg, clearly a man’s this time, given the muscle structure and abundant hair. Apparently our hunt ranged far enough to encounter a couple getting in a final, late-season hike. As much as I made efforts to avoid this, it made little difference. The bodies would never be found and the disappearance would be blamed on any number of rational explanations. I wiped my hands on the wet leaves surrounding my feet and thought nothing more of them.          Returning to the base of the tree, I reached into the recess between the roots and pulled out my dry bag. I reached in to pull out my belongings, and I felt something hard among the clothes. Extracting the item, I saw that it was a small bone stripped clean of flesh. On one end, a thin vine with bright green leaves had been woven tightly in place. I looked at it curiously for a moment, knowing it could only have been my companion who had crafted it and left it where she knew I would find it. It was strange to think of her again, but not uncomfortably so. I set it on the nearby roots as I dressed and stashed it in my coat pocket as I walked from the clearing. The day was clear and bright, and would make the trip back an easy hike.                As I walked to my car, I held the small token in my hand, absently rubbing against the smooth bone. It was cold and damp, still fresh from the harvest. I arrived back at the trailhead in good time. As expected, mine was the only car there. I stowed my bag in the trunk and took a long drink from a water jug I had placed on the back seat. As I pulled away, I looked at the token that I had left on a nearby fencepost. Would it still be there next time I returned? It didn’t really matter to me, I was now just biding time. This task was over, and the next would come again, and the cycle would repeat. My kind would live on to hunt, to kill, to return again and again.     Jack Madsen is a variety fiction writer for genres including science fiction, fantasy, horror and even children’s stories.

Whenever I think of Appalachian fiction, I think of Sheldon Lee Compton. Not just because I consider him a friend or a mentor. Nor is it because I have read his stuff fairly religiously for years now. It's because I can only think of very few writers who truly write about the Appalachia I know. The Appalachia that I've lived. Yes, there's poverty and crime and addiction and violence. But there are also times of true beauty and heart. Lewis Nordan wrote once that, “there were happy days, with watermelon, and sad days, of whiskey”.  Sheldon is the only author I've read who captures that dichotomy in these mountains.  His latest, Oblivion Angels, is a tragedy. It's an exploration of small wounds and large holes and the hurt that times just won't heal or stop. It spans time and people, but I feel like that's true to life. That there are small tragedies that hit some families harder than most, and those hits linger for years.  While this story is a tragedy and contains all of the things that come with such tales, there's also an overarching thread of grace. Hope. Not sentimental and not easy won. It's the hope of making it one more day. Of finding a shred of yourself wanting the day to go by so that you can see tomorrow. It's the hope of fighting the dark one more time.  JUSTIN: In 2022, I stumbled across a list of Appalachian authors that had your name on it. I hadn't read a word of yours yet back then, but I knew you had a reputation as a big deal for the region. David Joy, Donald Ray Pollock, Steph Post, the list goes long with supporters of yours. Do you feel like it is a blessing or a curse to be considered a regional writer? SHELDON: I’m sure glad we got connected up and you were able to read some of my writing, because you’ve been a big supporter of mine ever since. I’m really grateful for that, and thank you for those kind words now. I’m also glad we connected because I’ve had the pleasure of reading your work, which is just outstanding, Justin.  I surely don’t find it to be a curse or anything at all negative. More of a blessing, for sure. I’ve come to understand that whether I consider myself a regional writer or not – meaning whether or not I think about it when writing –  people will tend to see me as one, and that’s fine by me. It’s the same with folks seeing me as a writer of noir or crime fiction and so on. I don’t mind it a bit. As far as that kind of thing, I figure readers and other writers are better judges of that than I am. I do refer to myself as an Appalachian novelist and short story writer and I didn’t always do that. I’m fairly certain I’m never going to write a book set anywhere except in Kentucky, so I figure that’s a fair categorization. JUSTIN: How did Oblivion Angels come about? I believe I read somewhere that it sprouted from your memoir, The Orchard Is Full Of Sound. Is that accurate, or am I crazy? SHELDON: Not a bit crazy…I have mentioned something about that at some point. It might have been a form thing instead of an idea thing, like that Orchard Is Full of Sound helped me get more comfortable with longform fiction, the novel essentially, which made Oblivion Angels more manageable and, honestly, more enjoyable. Novels before this one were a struggle for me and left me really questioning if I’d done as well as I could. But after Orchard, longform was less daunting.  The key moment that Oblivion Angels came to mind for me happened while driving on Mud Creek in Floyd County.  I passed a house of one of my high school friends, Dee. The place was run down and looked, well, exactly as I described Teddy’s house in the opening of the novel. There was Dee, his sister, Tamala, and his parents, Danny Ray and Denise. These four people, this family, fell into tragedy in a short time. Dee died drunk in the back of a truck that wrecked into a guardrail, Tamala overdosed on pain killers shortly after, Denise died of cancer some time later, and that left Danny Ray, one piece of a family that used to go to softball games with my family. I imagined Danny Ray. That was it, just imagining Danny Ray after all that hurt and loss on that broken porch. I thought I’d like to write about him and change a few things and see if I could get to the living, eternal heart of that family. Maybe it’s melodramatic. But I’m with Jim Harrison on that point. He said and said beautifully: “I like grit, I like love and death, I'm tired of irony. A lot of good fiction is sentimental. I would rather give full vent to all human loves and disappointments, and take a chance on being corny, than die a smartass.”  My goodness, Jim Harrison was unbelievable. JUSTIN: I'm going to be totally honest here: I feel like this is your masterpiece. It is a prime example of Appalachian literature, but I would categorize it as more of a treatise on compassion and grace and forgiveness. It's a tragedy, and we see the ramifications of it reverberate over a long stretch of time through various characters. However, no matter the grimness, there's a glimmer of hope for some form of redemption, or at the very least some resolution. Was that a theme you were hoping to tackle, or am I reading into it a little too much? SHELDON: Wow I greatly appreciate you considering Oblivion Angels my masterpiece. To even be included in a statement alongside that word feels good. And with the glimmer of hope, you’re right on the mark there, man. I’ve had a lot of other writers and a few readers offer similar insights about my books. I believe it’s categorically a way of thinking for my people in my part of Appalachia. We’ve always had to hang onto some hope through pure grit and determination to survive. With life for centuries that consistently hard, hope and the idea of some redemption or success gives us the motivation to keep going. So that is to say even without trying to infuse my characters with that mindset, the underlying compassion, grace and forgiveness will always exist within the grimmest of circumstances in my books. JUSTIN: This story is not only told through multiple POVs, but the timeline is non-chronological. How did you decide to go that route? SHELDON: I had to think about this one for a bit. And I’m just going to be straight about it: I don’t have an idea how I’m going to go with any of that. With this novel, I sat in the recliner in the living room where I write 90 percent of my books and thought about Teddy on the porch at this broken family’s broken house and opened a Google Drive document and starting writing. I don’t consciously make craft decisions. If it feels right while I’m doing it then I keep going. But if I’m rolling along and suddenly find I’m not having fun, I know something’s off. I will say that I do a ton ton ton of thinking about what the story is before I start writing anything, a book, a short story, an email, letter of recommendation, doesn’t matter. JUSTIN: What would you like to see more of in the Grit-Lit genre?  SHELDON: What a fantastic question, bub. Calling back to an earlier answer of mine, I’d like to see more unabashed sentiment, more real explorations of love and honor and loyalty that haven’t been filtered through irony or genre consideration.  I’d also love to see – and am always looking for this regardless – gorgeous language in grit lit books. Just hellfire gorgeous writing. We don’t have to write the way many of our grit characters see the world, this stripped down, muscular prose. I’m not saying this ain’t being done, I’m just saying it’d be interesting to see more of it. JUSTIN: Who have you been reading lately? Any recommendations?  SHELDON: Shoot this is my favorite question you’ve asked. I love talking about reading. I’m a reader first and an author second, seriously. I’ve started reading a guy named Michael Wehunt who is an exceptional writer. Beautiful style and language and creepy stories and novels. Man, I mean creepy as dark places in a windstorm. Check him out if you don’t any of the others. And these are just new writers I came across this past year. Another is Hob Broun. This guy who wrote a fine novel and then became paralyzed and had to write by blowing air through a special watchamagig. The books are solid and well written. And a third I came across is David Nickles, another horror writer. Amazing stuff. Instead of linking to these I’m just going to link to my reading log on my blog Bent Country I’ve kept for 11 years. Reading Log at Bent Country. JUSTIN: Is there anything I missed here?  SHELDON: You’ve not missed it at all but just that I would be stunned from gratitude if folks would get a hold of Oblivion Angels and let me know what you think. Truly, let me know. If you think it’s overhyped or badly written, I want to know and thanks in advance for that. So what are you writing on these days? Got into a novel yet?  Thanks, man. You’re a shining champion knight of all tables. JUSTIN: I've been working on a novella titled, Out There In The Dark. I've completed rough drafts, deleted every word, and wrote it again about three times total now. I feel like I have a handle on it this time though. Hopefully it will be ready soon! Oblivion Angels is available now. Just click right here ! Sheldon Lee Compton is the author of a dozen books, including the novel Alice, named one of the 25 best books of 2023 by the Independent Fiction Alliance, along with four other novels, four short story collections, a memoir, and a two collections of poetry. His work has been a finalist for the Chaffin Award, the Gertrude Stein Fiction Award, the Still Fiction Award, and the Pushcart Prize. He lives in Pike County, Eastern Kentucky with his wife and the literary requisite four cats. He believes baseball to be our purest form of truth. Justin Lee’s work has appeared in Punk Noir Magazine, The Airgonaut, Reckon Review, Poverty House, and Cowboy Jamboree among others. His story, Underneath The Same Skies, was nominated for a Pushcart Award. He is currently at work on a novella titled, Out There In The Dark.

The detainees in the large holding cell appear rather harmless, probably students, laborers, middle-aged professionals. If anything, I must look like the only bum, with my cutoff jeans, torn t-shirt and unshaven face.  Three cops appear on the happy side of the bars; one of them unfolds a list. He yells, “Broady!”  Broady seems to be dressed for the office or theatre, definitely not for revolution. The cops take him away. “They’re going in the interrogation room,” whispers an older man. “Heard about it? No desk, no chairs, walls made of concrete blocks. The works!” Ten minutes later Broady is out, accompanied by the chief of police. The latter could not be more apologetic. “Sorry about the misunderstanding, Mr. Broady. It’s all good. Here’s a note to your supervisor. It says the reason for being late today, you had to attend an urgent community related meeting. Other than that, please don’t mention any of this to anyone. It’s in your best interest, sir, believe me.” Broady looks at the paper, grimaces and hands it back to the chief. Then without saying a word, he walks out of the building. The next guy taken to interrogation doesn’t return. Neither does the third one.  The cop sitting at the desk across from the cell has a familiar face. He notices me. “What are you staring at?!” I step to the bars. “We know each other, don’t we? Unless I’m mistaken, last year we met at a birthday party or Thanksgiving. I believe you are my second cousin on my father’s side. My name is Kende, and I bet yours too.” He gets up from his chair and walks closer to me. “So what? It’s a common name.” “Well, not in these parts.” He whispers, “Enough bullshitting. If you get through the day in one piece, we can talk. Till then, let’s remain strangers, okay? Believe me, it’s in your best interest, and also in mine.” Johannes Springenseiss is a world citizen and raconteur. He mostly writes speculative fiction and creative essays that he has published in various literary magazines.

After “The Five Stages of Grief” by Linda Pastan It’s easy, like learning to climb the stairs after the amputation. Five stages of grief, ten circles of Hell, How Would You Rate your Pain, but no one believes you when you say it is unbearable. Virginia Woolfe went to the river laden with stones, but hands in my pockets, all my fingers find is a hundred fine hairs plucked from your head. On my walk to Denial, I enter an elevator that only goes up, each identical floor it opens to gleaming fluorescent as yearning and populated by the nightstands of everyone I’ve ever known, pill bottles rattling with blue capsules of sleep, or aspirin, it’s hard to say—water glasses and reading glasses and wilting flowers, all things The Living acquire. No one is here, in Denial, except all of us, rummaging through drawers of darkness for some kind of cure. I find a sachet of want, tied tight in two knots at the top, filled with the pressed purple blossoms of breath.  I call out every name I can think of, but no one comes near me until I reach the entrance to Anger, down a spiral staircase made of hair and bone, into our old apartment, every surface covered in pictures of you, and me, and me and you. You are watching me through the window. I call out to you over and over, but you appear not to hear me, not even when I scream and thrash and look for something to break the glass with. You look right through me, waving my arms and sobbing and pressing my face against the cool glass. I wonder if the moment will come when you walk through the door, carrying my sorrow limp in your arms like a cat, self-domesticated. Rattling the doorknob, I know that living or dead, even if I see you again, I will never see you again.  I pace the floor of Anger until a trap door opens underneath my scuffed shoes and I collapse into Bargaining, a circular room without windows or a roof, just high red walls. What could I exchange for you? The back garden of the house I grew up in, all four lobes of my liver, every single summer day? Before I decide the lump in my throat flies out through my teeth and snatches all I can offer with its talons. I try to follow its migration wave, but I end up back where I began, an empty building, neither warehouse nor factory nor hospital nor hotel nor home.  Depression doesn’t have its own place, just newspapers piling up in the foyer. I flip through them, every headline detailing your doom, every page dated the same day. Every day since you left is the same day.  Your face is a color I have forgotten. Hope was my mother’s maiden name. She kept it out of everyone’s reach, on top of the China cabinet. I saw her wear it maybe once, Hope, a tight string of pearls glinting around her neck like two hands, white-knuckled, choking her. When she dies, it will continue to gather dust where she left it. Her Hope does not belong to me; rather, my grandmother’s name is my name. You were the only thing that has ever been my own, and I have lost you.  I feel my way through the sudden pitch dark as an invisible clock chimes an unknown hour to an iron-wrought balcony, overlooking every landscape of my life, a meadow brown and brittle from first frost, fallen leaves forming a footpath and I see it now, the sign I have searched for, its defective neon flickering, Acceptance, hand-lettered like a vacancy marquee outside of a run-down roadside motel with bedbugs and hard water and little porcelain lambs in the lobby. I watch the bright word falter, come to terms with the irrefutable fact that anything that matters is a little tacky. Love is kitsch. The iron railings I am clinging to dissolve into dampness, and I tumble down into the cold ground of memory. I weep, finally, gather my skirt and come closer, no, closer, to Acceptance. There is no lock on the door—I always could have come in—just a circle of empty, mismatched armchairs like a waiting room. I sink into the chintz. Behind me, another steep staircase rises up out of the air. Grief is a circular staircase. No matter how high I climb, I have lost you. I begin again.  Laura Ingram is a poet and author who lives and writes in rural Virginia. Her poetry and prose have published in over one-hundred literary magazines and journals, among them Juked and Five on the Fifth. Laura is the author of six collections; Animal Sentinel, The Solitude of the Female Preying Mantis, Mirabilis, The Taffeta Parable, Junior Citizen's Discount, and The Ghost Gospels.

Rivers scrawl the history of the lands they mark up and divide. For thousands of years the Danube bent humanity over its will, vectored empires this way instead of that way, determined settlement patterns and invasion routes, gave life and took lives. People in their folly were certain it was they who had tamed the river as farmers and conquerors adorned the banks with irrigated, lush fields and imposing fortresses that rose high above the river in order to be visible for miles by any visitors who might be unclear about who had mastered the waters. Periodically, humanity was reminded that the indifferent river had no human master, as their crops, animals and even family members were swept away and made part of the river’s indifferent agenda, an agenda that at once involved but was not at all concerned with humanity. Churches have long dotted the banks, as if to make clear that locally at least it was still understood who the boss was.  Then history ended. The application of lock technology, to connect and manage the water levels of rivers at different elevations, effectively made one big river from one end of Europe to the other. We cheated. Erased and then used this new river to scrawl a new history. The conquest of the waters meant that humans briefly believed themselves to be gods, serviced by rivers that were created and destroyed at will all day and night as locks opened and closed their gates and delivered cradled ships safely between realities. When the world ends, when everything else made by human hands leaves the stage, save for radioactive waste, it will be the locks of the world that remain for centuries after the last human traverses one.  For all it’s marvel and the impact it’s had on human history, lock function is fairly simple. Especially if you’re me, working for a river cruise company doing the unskilled work, the odd jobs including tying the boat to the posts as the lock chambers fill or drain. I am left with a lot of fucking free time. Meaning free time used in the service of fucking. On this job the river is like Las Vegas. What happens never leaves, mostly because no one cares about what happens as long as nothing explodes or impedes the progress of the tourists. Wherever we are, this is the right spot for me.  This boat originates in the more tolerant sections of Western Europe but proceeds rightward and down into the more sexually-certain Eastern European countries. Really it’s the boat that is the Las Vegas, a citadel of carnal immunity regardless of the prevailing political and cultural sentiments that may be temporarily surrounding it, depending on what country’s Danube you are fucking atop of.  I am of the Netherlands, and so for the most part where I put my dick is of no concern to those who know me there, save for my grandmother who just can’t understand why some pretty girl hasn’t snatched me up yet. I lie for her, and it creates a wall between us that she doesn’t know exists. But on the boat I meet many Eastern Europeans, from countries where some people see gays and the Danube as going together perfectly, provided the gays are weighed-down well enough that they don’t pop-up. When I work with a man from east of Czechia or south of Austria I need to proceed carefully, especially if he is fuckable, which they all seem to be. Those guys don’t file grievances with the union when there is a sexual miscommunication, they report you as missing and presumed drowned which is a safe presumption on their part since they are the ones that will drown you.  Even when they are gay, men from the East are more likely to be closeted or in denial. The knowledge you share with these types can cut your throat, or get you crushed against the side of the lock, constricted between the boat and wall, as your ribs race to mercifully crush your lungs before you die the long way from drowning. Why so specific? Because last year an apparently self-hating queen of Serbia murdered his lock partner this way, after  they had sex. All caught on cameras, both the boat’s and the ones mounted at the top of lock. So on this boat as you leave Austria for lands east, there is no such thing as truly safe sex unless you are alone.  Hands (grunt boat workers) get on and off all over the river, so if you see something you like time is of the essence. I am very much a top, and very much more a control freak. Say I see someone, and I know that our next port, where he might be disembarking, is eighteen hours away, I will create a customized timetable to manage the seduction. An early “no” is better than the opportunity cost of not pursuing a second choice while awaiting a later “no.”  So my timetable, tried and tested by two years of river sex, and failure to obtain river sex, might look like this (and yes I actually write it out each time):  First hour – Go to their cabin for introduction, say “Hi.” If he’s gay, one way to determine that is to see the room, even if over the shoulder. Nothing is ever 100%, but if the space is very neat, that’s a good sign. Or at least not a negative. You want multiple indicators, to increase the probability of guessing correctly. So next…. Second hour - Get a “friendly” (familiar female crew member who knows you are gay) to arrange to run into him in your presence. Straight men change how they speak and act when women are present. Gay men do not.  These two tests above are not a lot to go on I admit, but the ass clock is ticking so the 80/20 rule applies. In this case if the above two conditions are met I am eighty percent sure I will be fucking a new guy in his twenties.  Now to tell you that the latest vessel for my affections failed both these tests. He was a big, rugged man who I did not peg correctly at all, until I did so repeatedly. He said less than nothing in a dark night of echoing silence when we first worked the front together and it was unbearable. I imagined that he thought about nothing as he stared straight ahead into the dark void as we lazied on the river. Me, the void terrifies.  “In the silence is where Satan slips in,” my grandmother said to me, and I guess that’s where I get my fear of darkness and silence.  It’s like I know it’s coming for me and for all of us, but I think there’s still time to outrun it.  With his eyes he said enough. Eventually. I wish there were a dictionary or some kind of translation tool for the rich lexicon of expression that pass between gay men’s eyes. We have had to develop a mature and secretive wordless vocabulary as a means for survival, and as from all necessities, art is eventually born from it. No different than food, shelter, and the intimacies of every other kind. Deck sex was made possible by the disabled camera that I disabled earlier in the year. Proof that no one watches the tapes unless there is a specific reason to do so. I have the timing down in this most active part of the river, so I can tell if we are a blowjob, handjob, or full-on fuck away from the next lock, at which point we must go temporarily back to work. Anyway, we were late at the front of the boat, 2:30 AM and moving through a series of locks in the rain, all fucked out, when I finally got some words out of him. A little Sativa in gum form helped with that. They test us for alcohol but not weed for some reason. God bless our union for helping us to have at least a little fun on the long, agonizing trip through the German and Austrian locks, one after another. I have a problem with tangents as you have probably realized, but that only means that I eventually get back to my main point. I’ll worry when the tangents become the main points.  So that night I learned from him that he was raised in Srebrenica, a Bosnian Muslim (his family would love me), and most of the men in his family were killed in the 1995 massacre that took place there. He was just five, and does not remember much besides the smell and suffocating heat of the dark root cellar where he hid for days with his mother and grandmother while the death squads searched for ethnics to cleanse. He said he was raised inhaling the trauma, post-trauma. No one is normal in his family, the remainders of a forgotten footnote of a holocaust as he tells it. He questions whether they might secretly envy the dead, those of his blood old enough to have lived through it and remember, who didn’t or couldn’t part with this version of the world. I can feel his isolation. Even when I am inside him he is the loneliest place on Earth. Not lonely like abandoned, but lonely like never occupied in the first place. A void. The holes change but the vacuumed vacancy does not.  “We are like the Danube locks,” I told him one dead and silent night redeemed only by the stars. “Always chasing after the opposite, and equilibrium forever out of reach. An empty chamber, like you, needs to be filled, and a filled chamber, like me, must be regularly emptied.”  He laughed at what he thought was another wonderful joke from the enlightened Netherlands, a land of gays, locks, dikes and dykes.  “One needs but does not fully exist for themselves without the promised eventual arrival of its compliment,” I thought, but didn’t say to him. I was being philosophical but was afraid it might sound like I wanted something of the more that he could never provide. I was thinking about gays in general, he and I specifically, and the locks of the Danube eternally. Locks were needed when people realized nature’s creations, at first a wonderful gift, were wanting. River good, rivers better. Connect them, regulate the water levels and even use the water run through the locks to generate electricity.  He is forever forgetting the duty rosters, always asking me when the shift ends. I think he is pretending actually; he seems to laugh without fail when I answer: “The shift ends at six (for example) but there is a slow patch of river ahead so I have a feeling we will be getting off around three…and then a couple more times after that.”  I don’t think he has been with a Western homosexual, someone comfortable in their gay skin, who can make jokes and talk about the life out in the open air. I am a novelty for him, so he smiles. But also a beacon that signals a world somewhere outside the limits of where he can exist. His extended family needs him and the money, so he is trapped behind enemy lines with no honorable way to leave. He showed me a picture of his wife. Literally a beard with what appears to be an actual beard. No children yet. She suspects, but in a world that denies homosexuality, men like him are not unknown to women like her. They attend the mosque daily together and all they share are straight faces. Lies are only bad when the truth isn’t worse.  I lied about being able to swim. The cruise line asked but I didn’t tell. Now I am part of eternity. Down here beneath the current, timelines merge as they all must and leave only refuse in their wake. Bones of an ancient sort dot the riverbed floor, like paver stones but in the pattern of an unfinished question mark. Old boats sunk by misfortune or design here and there like boundary markers for each era that failed to outlive the Danube. Markings on some of the hulls indicate they’d last seen the surface of the river when it was still a possession of the long-expired Habsburg Empire. And me. Did not get the relief of having my ribs crushed, but I did get some extra minutes to contemplate my place in the grand order of things as revealed by my aged but ageless river bottom companions. One day maybe my husk will be discovered by future archaeologists or divers, and they will wonder how I died, and then if they figure that out, get to work on the why .  The “friendly” I mentioned earlier is responsible for a lot of things on-board, including the ship’s social media, tour coordination, and my death. She mentioned to my secret partner that she wanted to get up to the front of the boat to get some pictures of the “bow crew” for the next post.  “It’s funny how you work the front of the boat, since I heard how much you like it in the back,” she said to him.  Subtle breach of etiquette there. Being tolerant and in the know doesn’t clear you to make gay jokes, most especially with a man not fully at peace with his true nature. Her comment panicked my partner, who imagined it was the first step toward an eventual careless exposure of his secret life to his family in Bosnia. They all use social media and follow the progress of his boat as a means of staying connected during his months away from home. In the early morning hours, after one last fuck in which I was for the first and last time in my life a bottom, he leaned me over the rail, finished himself, finished me, and then finished me. He pushed me right over into the still deep of the Danube.  “Why not kill her?” I asked from the water.  Wordless, his eyes told me “Because I knew you’d understand.”  When people like her go missing there is a big investigation, and a crime is assumed to have taken place. People like me go missing, they look a little, but then misadventure by lifestyle is assumed to be in some way related to the cause and they stop looking. Now I merge with history and am finally part of the river’s indifferent agenda. Indifference is not a bad thing after a lifetime of people feeling strongly about me for being gay. Indifference means I am no better or worse, no more or less regarded, than any of the other former lives forever transitioning down here. I finally fit.  Thomas is a writer from Northern Virginia USA who’s work has been or will soon be published in many literary journals including  Isele Magazine, Radon Journal, Cinnabar Moth Literary Collections, The Brussels Review , as well as The George Washington University Press. Thomas’s literary fiction short story “Symbiosis” was published in Secant Publishing's anthology "Best Stories on the Human Impact of Climate Change" and that story is nominated for the Secant Publishing Prize. His collection of short stories, “Life in the Demilitarized Zone,” has been published by Alien Buddha Press. While he tend to avoid literary contests because of the large fees, I was in the running as a finalist in last year’s Tennessee Williams and New Orleans Literary Festival, for which I submitted work. This month, his story “The Whole Truth” also won an honorable mention for placing in the top 1% in the Killer Shorts Screenplay Contest, in which he finished eleventh out of twelve-hundred entries.

Jasmine spends an extra ten minutes in the hostel shower trying to scratch the black sand out from under her toenails, in haphazard pursuit of exorcizing this island from her body. She had left her shoes on at the beach, but this land is forward and unrelenting, and it always found a way to come home to her, an unwelcome lover gone sour in the fridge. Grotesque and divine, she hunches her spine against the walls, lifting each foot painstakingly to hip-level and dragging her ragged fingernails under her toes. From two stalls away, an obnoxious adolescent sound of lips and tongue, soft moans and bare feet sliding against cheap tile floor. She wants nothing more than to be them both.  She admits defeat on clawing all of the earth out of her and steps out of the now-lukewarm spray of water. Two unread messages on her phone, both from Dana: “everett in the cafe looking for you today” and “at least tell him you’re okay.” Jasmine wraps her phone in her towel, leaving the message unopened. He can look for her again tomorrow. She is otherworldly today.  It is her coldest day since arriving in Seydisfjordur, and she cocoons herself in three layers of wool and cotton before stepping foot outside. She has selected the reverent in-between of midsummer and the heart of winter where no one really bothers to go to Iceland except for true believers like her: the adventurers have left their four-wheel-drives and hiking poles behind, the lovers have yet to arrive to see the northern lights, and she can almost convince herself that she finally has a place that belongs to her.   Jasmine needs a drink, and she needs to be convinced of her own insignificance again (she is feeling too arrogant and god-like tonight, like all the men she tried to leave), and so she wraps a wool scarf around her neck and cocoons herself up to to her chin, just to feel the cacophonic scratch of it against her skin. How wonderful it is to feel pain rather than silence.  — The bar is empty and delightful. In it Jasmine is a deity, her hands and her limbs barely visible even to herself in the low light. Her drink tastes ambrosia and her phone is beckoning, cruel and pitiful like the boy she left behind.  “Mind if I sit here?” She looks up from her texts, now opened but left unanswered and accusing,  to see a scattered blonde woman, no more than a few years older than her, towering over her seat. She has the features of neither a girl nor a grasshopper, the sort that men would find plain or frightening, and wears the standard young backpacker uniform of expensive hiking cargos and a fleece. Predictable and vain - this is delightful.  “Yeah, of course.”  The stranger takes a seat next to her, leaping lithely onto the bar stool, harelike and alert. She raises a spindly finger to wave over the bartender and order him in a soft, vaguely accented lilt, in a way that she clearly thinks is alluring.  The bartender takes his time making the stranger’s gin and tonic, like you are supposed to do when the tourists steal away your homeland; the stranger watches his every move, and Jasmine watches her watch him. The stranger isn’t annoyed by his familiar form of rebellion, but she watches him with the darting eyes of a child at the zoo, staring nose to glass into the zebra pen. Jasmine doesn’t like travelers unaware of their own exploitation, but she resists the urge to dismiss her and waits for the woman to say something, expecting her to use one of the usual budget traveler lines of interrogation: how many countries you have been to, how long you have been in Iceland, if you are still holding onto any taboo remainders of the person you were before you started traveling. Jasmine likes the last one the least, because everyone always is but no one - least of all her - wants to admit it.  The gin and tonic is completed, passed careless across the bar, and the stranger begins her consumption carefully, eyeing Jasmine as she slips her chapped lips around the straw. It is the usual solo traveler foreplay, that disregards gender or sexuality and relies solely on unknowingness. Jasmine feels less than she usually does, or maybe attraction has changed since Everett has started looking for her. She likes him better now than she ever did so small and like a goldfish in his downtown apartment, when he is looking blindly for her, lost sheep boy that he is. She is the shepherd here, and he is so meaningless that the world’s best scientists and historians could study him for centuries and never find a thing. That’s the best verdict for someone that you once loved and stopped loving.  “You seem like you’re running away from something.” The stranger is already tipsy, perhaps from a shot of cheap liquorice liquor in her backpack or a beer slipped from the hotel minifridge. “I just got back from this yoga retreat which of course turned out to be a cult down on Lake Atitlan, you know, in Guatemala, and you give off the same energy, I dunno. Like I don’t mean it in a bad way, it’s just an observation, and it’s why I came over to you, actually, because I really get it and I’ve felt that way a lot, less so lately, but still a lot.” Jasmine makes her best attempt to contain her own shock at her new line of psychiatric analysis, an unfamiliar one to her, by bringing the cold rim of her glass to her own lips. She is an American too, and, like Jasmine, good at hiding it with a faint curtness that sounds a bit Scandinavian and a tight frown, but it shoves through in her own emotional untetheredness. The foreplay continues, but the moment is broken, because she can guess that she is failing in hiding her surprise. “I dunno, I feel like travel is always about running away from something.”  “Yeah, I guess it is, isn’t it. I’m Jeanne, by the way.” The name doesn’t fit her: it is too French, or too clean and corporate, or too interesting, for the copycat hippie look she embodies. Still, Jeanne is suddenly fascinating and deeply despicable, if for nothing else than her reckless interrogation. Brazenness is the enemy of oblivion, to her at least. What an American thing to think.  “I’m Jasmine.” “Isn’t that funny. Jeanne and Jasmine. Cute.” Flatlining voice, dead eye stare as her wavering pupils continue to trace after the bartender. Jasmine doesn’t get the feeling that she finds him handsome (though he is, in a hearty, wartorn way), but that she is still observing at the zebra pen. She doesn’t like safarigoers.  “How do you like Iceland?” “Oh, I love it, I mean, it’s beautiful everywhere you look, but it’s also so quiet, you know, I just feel like I’m going crazy when I’m driving out there alone.”  Jasmine resisted the urge to tell Jeanne that this was all part of the point. Her own first trip had been especially brutal: she was constantly falling ill with unexplained sicknesses that lasted only for a couple hours, she felt especially prone to near-hallucinations, and she was haunted by the constant fear that the whole island was trying to swallow her and no one would know. That was why she had come back - to be swallowed whole by this place.  “Yeah, sure, I get that.”  The stranger never paused or even seemed to take the time to breathe. Jasmine finished her drink in one long sip, just to hide the distaste that had to be playing her face. “Where are you from?” “Virginia, but I’ve been living out in California for a few years.” “Oh, God, lucky, I love LA. And the Bay Area.” Jasmine didn’t bother to tell her that she had been out in the Central Valley, and that, much as she hated its arid violence, she detested the state’s cities even more. Hollywood’s vapid magnetism had never appealed to her, and San Francisco had lost its magic when the tech bros doggy-paddled across the bay. Instead, she asked the only thing that could save her: “So what are you running away from?” Jeanne’s cotton-candy face exploded in a delighted grin, and, though Jasmine got the sense that this was the question the stranger had come to this bar to answer, she took her time to reply, picking the somewhat shriveled lime from the rim of her glass and squeezing it between her fingers. The sour juice dripped slow from her hand, trickling a faint stream down her wrist and into her shirt sleeve. . When she did bother to answer, she dropped her fireworks smile and replaced it with a careful, thoughtful line suited for a movie star much prettier than her: “A boyfriend, actually. Or maybe an ex, depending on how you want to play things.”  Jeanne looked expectantly at her, and Jasmine couldn’t bring herself to give the stranger what she wanted, though it was blissfully clear: oh, really? me too. They could cross the coldest nether regions of the Atlantic and the sub-Arctic and still, all that really mattered was men and God. All of the great explorer places she could go and there was still no respite.  “You too?” “No. Running away from a lot of things, I guess, but sure, a boyfriend, maybe, is one of them.” She found herself drumming her ragged fingertips over the wood of the bartop. Everett had managed to fluster her, even here, where she was supposed to be godly and out of reach.  “So, has it worked?” “Not yet. Or maybe a little.” It didn’t work in this bar, where Jasmine was suddenly so acutely aware of the eyes on them both and the wrong language on their tongues, but it worked on the beaches, where the chest he used to touch was curled inward to weather the screech of wind, and it worked on the glaciers, where she was small and insignificant amidst this retreating brave new world. Here it woefully failed, like all travel does.  Just out of earshot, the bartender muttered something to a mountainside of a fisherman in Danish. He was talking about them, or maybe she was growing into the type of American she most hated - narcissistic and paranoid, all white teeth and dirty manners. Jasmine hid her interest by swallowing hard the last sips of her drink. “Yeah, that’s how it goes everywhere.” Jeanne tapped her fingernails - just as rugged but slightly sharper and longer than Jasmine’s - intently against the bartop. The bartender tilted his head slow towards her, eyes low and hardened cold, and Jasmine fought the inherent urge to move away from Jeanne. What frail and abject American cruelty this was. Despite his resistance, though, he inevitably gave into her silent demand: how small all were against the vicious tide of visitation and its hearty, hearty  appetite for consumption. “Another one of these, please.”  He followed her order and savored his time slightly more this round, pouring the gin meticulously and slow, sexual and taunting. Wanting to be wanted. Uncaring and loathing, desperate. Jasmine wondered if she, too, was a zebra in a pen now. She had taken on enough of this island’s weight now - how it made her sorrowful and sallow, how she drove for so long on roads to nowhere that she started seeing phantoms in the clouds where earth met sea, how people in the streets tried to talk to her in a tongue that still didn’t fit right on her,. She had tried, really tried, and in her mouth her gums and her crooked teeth twisted together and tangled up all the words, until it sounded less like a mother tongue and more like witchcraft that didn’t belong to her anymore.  The second gin and tonic was passed across the bar. Jeanne locked her blue eyes forcefully with the bartender’s and lifted the glass to her mouth, tilting her skull backwards and backwards until the liquid swept so swift into her open lips and spilled down her chin as seafoam. There was still sand under Jasmine’s toenails, even though she couldn’t feel it in the moment: it sunk into her, dragging her down with the tide of hatred and desire. She drank the rest of her drink in one bitter lame breath, eager to escape her own zebra status and become a safarigoer, scamper from the lower to the upper echelons of “tourist.” Everett would hate how easily she had given up her scruples for this strange girl who wasn’t even very pretty. She had never hated herself so much alone.  Her glass clattered to the wood of the bar with less grace than she had intended. The bartender turned his head - he hadn’t been looking at her, she realized - and sunk the crevasses of his mouth into an even deeper frown. The stranger looked on with childlike, sickening pride: “good job, you bitch, you’ve sold your soul, too.” Jasmine’s phone vibrated in her pocket and she knew it was Everett without even looking at it. The glaring, gnawing text was simple and without his usual poetry: actually, don’t bother. Jasmine clumsily fiddled a stack of small bills out of her pocket, rapidly feeling the euphor effect of the drinks in her body: how the gin twisted down her gut and into her thighs, leaving her fragile and hound-like, helpless sheep dog against the wrath of her observers. No one was on her side, she was on no one’s. The bartender took them wordlessly; Jeanne only watched her with carnivorous eyes, sharp fangs and curled smile. He savored his time returning her the change, but she was tired of the sex games. “Keep it, it’s fine.” Everett’s words, telepathic and nauseating: actually, don’t bother. Her feet carried her flightlessly over the wooden planks and out the door of the bar, without a goodbye to the gawking stranger and the young god bartender, scarf tightening her neck raw for the taking and hands shaking in the sudden biting wind. The town was almost deserted this time of night, her only companions in the beginning of night two lovestruck teenagers, curled around each other on a park bench across the street. Jasmine looked away quickly, her appetite for judgement absent and fleeting. The end of the world in the distance - where black fjord met black sea. Her first trip here, just twenty and overwhelmed by all the safarigoers she could be and all the zebras, foolishly driving down muddy, weatherworn ditches and pushing her car out, all sinewy limbs and survival spirit. No one here to save her (what a lovely, erotic fantasy, when they were all here to save her). Everett in her phone, frostbite and pretty words. The sting of salt against her torn cuticles, the tsunamic, welcome heat that followed amidst all the cold dark nothingness.  All Jasmine could bring herself to do was remake her body as a traffic hazard: limbs snow-angelling against the fresh asphalt, turning her insides into an icebox. She allowed herself the euphor just for a moment, then rose to her feet before the lovebirds or the old man stumbling back from another bar could notice her. So she started to put one callused foot in front of the other callused foot, all regret and perilous hope, towards the hostel, the ocean, or the edge of the world, zebra girl that she was.  Jessie’s writing - across novels-in-progress, short stories, and essays -  is united by an interest in exploring the ideas of apocalypse, travel, and the flawed and sometimes strange ways in which we interact with each other. Jessie grew up in Kailua, Hawai’i, and currently lives on a very different coast in Chicago, her work is ever-influenced by the intensity and natural chaos of the islands that raised her. Jessie’s creative nonfiction and essays can be found on Substack, at “apocalypse rejection therapy.”

I haven’t been able to masturbate My kids sleep with me in the tent There’s no room that’s mine with a door Even when the kids are out playin It’s still a tent with just a flap A heavy canvas labia Between my vagina and the wide world Too thin to quell my sounds My desire and my passion My orgasm Spasm Frenzy Peak My fantasies are blowin away With the dust as the tent shakes

I. Sunday morning, my elderly father murmuring into a bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon, a brand of beer he especially hated, though he wasn’t keen on alcohol of any kind and hadn’t taken a sip in decades—this was what I walked in on. I had just finished carving our front hedge into the armadillo shape Laura had asked for (or my best approximation, based on the photo she had texted to me), and found him alone, head slung over our kitchen table. He didn’t acknowledge the ruckus I made wiping my shoes on the mat or swinging the back door closed behind me. As I washed my hands at the sink, I ran through appointment dates and anniversaries, but there was nothing I could think of that might have laid him low. I kept my voice jovial when I finally called behind me, “Something happen to make you get into my beer, Dad?” “I’m not drinking it,” he said softly, “only holding onto the bottle.” I forced a convivial laugh. “Well, if you didn’t want it, couldn’t you have left the cap on?” “Aromatics,” he said. “I craved this miserable smell. Did you know, Sam, that Pabst won their blue ribbon in 1893? That’s an awfully long time to dine out on one award, don’t you think? Not that I blame them. I suppose if we live long enough, we all end up coasting on our former glory.” I turned to regard him, drying my hands on my shirt. “What’s this about, Dad?” He took a two-handed grip on the bottle but didn’t lift it. “Nothing my pungent friend here can’t fix.” A bubble had risen to the lip of the bottle. He extended his tongue and popped it. Noticing my look of concern, he smiled like I was a well-meaning simpleton who would never understand his despair. “You have a nice home here, Sam. And you took me in when I was in need. You’re the only one who hasn’t abandoned me—I lost my wife, my job, my truck, even my dog. I’m a husk. A broken-down, red-neck husk of a man.” He rested his forehead on the bottle mouth, revealing his neck to be porcelain white.  “Hey, Dad?” “Hmm?” “You were an attorney. You’ve never done one hour of physical labor in your life, and you’ve got, like, hundreds of thousands of dollars in the bank. You came to live with us because we wanted to be close to you, not because you were destitute. And Mom left you in 1989 when you admitted to banging Ms. Kranitz next door. You’ve always said it was the best thing that ever happened to you. We never had a dog or a truck. You drive a Lexus. It’s in the garage. The keys are right there on the peg.” I pointed to the little armadillo-shaped keyholder by the kitchen door. “Is this some kind of low-key medical emergency I should be concerned about?” My father snickered. “No, son, health is the one thing I’ve got. The better to prolong my suffering, I suppose.” He turned the bottle, grinding its glass bottom against the tabletop. It spluttered a trace of its contents onto his hand. “I don’t know what’s come over me today, but I feel so lonesome I could cry.” When I didn’t respond, he stood and came beside me at the sink, where he proceeded to dump the PBR down the drain. “What the hell?” I asked. “It went warm on me, boy. It’s a cold beer that a troubled man needs; that’s what soothes him.” He rinsed the bottle thoroughly and, after placing it inside the recycling bin, went to the refrigerator for another.  “You better drink that,” I said. “Sure thing, my boy. Sure thing.” When I left him, he was searching his pockets for a pack of cigarettes he couldn’t find because he had never been a smoker.  I went upstairs to find Laura. I needed her to experience this for herself, my father mistaking his real life for some country music cliché. What if this was the beginning of something serious? I pictured him devolving into an adult child in boots with plastic spurs and six shooters, a tragedy in a toy store Stetson who called all his nurses ‘pardner.’ I stopped at the open door of our daughter, Stacy’s, bedroom and observed her crouching at her window, her face pressed against the glass. “Doing some spying?” I asked.  “God, Daddy!” she squealed, whipping around and holding her chest. “You almost gave me a heart attack.” “Someone after you, dear?” She giggled, a girl with a secret. “No, Daddy. I was just admiring the scenery.” A blush bloomed across her cheeks. She stepped away from the window when I approached to look. I saw nothing unusual other than the scrawny neighbor kid, pale and shirtless, edging the perimeter of their yard with a weed eater. I pulled my head out of the curtains and asked, “Really? That kid?” “The boy next door,” she moaned, sounding like a smitten bobbysoxer from a black and white sitcom. The effect was completed when she raised all ten of her fingernails to her mouth and made like she was going to bite them to steady herself. “He’s so gorgeous.” “Different strokes, I guess. He has back acne. Look.” I held the curtain open, but she put out a hand as if to say she dared not take another bite.   “He’s a god.” “Fair enough,” I relented, rationalizing that at least she hadn’t developed a crush on some toxic shithead. “Have you seen your mother?” “Your guys’ bedroom, maybe? I don’t know.” “Well, if you see her,” I said as I headed out, “do me a favor and tell her I’m looking for her.” “Sorry, Daddy, but I am absolutely incapable of being trusted with this. There’s only one man I could possibly do favors for now.” She smooshed her cheek against the window glass, causing her lips to part. A torrent of fog blew across the pane. I shuddered and closed the door, leaving her alone with her longings. When I found Laura, she was lying in our bed, still in her nightgown. “There you are,” I said. “What the hell is going on around here?” “Quick!” she said, breathless. “Come make love to me, Beloved!” I stayed put. “You too, huh?” “Me too, what? I’m only longing to feel the passions of my soulmate’s loins pressed into mine. Come lie down. Hurry!” She rose onto her knees and reached for me. I was well out of her grasp. “Nah,” I said, taking a step backward just in case, “I need to run downtown for a minute. I’ll be back in a few.” “Downtown? No! For what?” She slumped on the bed, crestfallen. “Carbon monoxide detectors. There’s something screwy around here. I think the responsible thing is for me to make sure the house isn’t poisoning us all.” She tilted her head and got a far-off look in her eye. “But what if something happens to you? A car accident or some violent encounter with a stranger?” Here, she turned her wild eyes on me. “I want you to know, Sam, that if you don’t make it back, you’ll forever remain my twin flame. I’ll celebrate our bond through all the love I make with other men.” “Super,” I said, “thanks.” She was lost in her own thoughts, though, apparently imagining my fatal trek to the hardware store. “Are you humming?” “Hmm? Oh, yes,” she said absently. “Turn it up on your way out, would you?” “Turn what up?” “This song, my poor departed darling.” Her eyes were brimming with tears, but her smile was stoic. I listened but heard nothing. “Right,” I said. “Well…I’m going to skedaddle.” She didn’t move to stop me, apparently having come to terms with my imminent death. On my way out, I knocked on Stacy’s door before cracking it open. She was sitting in her windowsill, staring out and hugging her childhood stuffed rabbit to her chest, whispering confessions into its ear. “Hey,” I called, “do you hear that music?” She cocked her head, engaging with the silence in her room. Soon, her body was rocking to some elaborate rhythm. “Of course, Daddy. It’s hot.” “This is very strange,” I said. “What is?” I closed her door and went downstairs.  There was no way for me to ask the same thing of my father. He’d made it through three quarters of his beer and was now passed out at the kitchen table, his upper body curled around the bottle. I left him as he was, snoring and with that troubled look on his face. II. On the drive, I looked out for any strange goings-on, curious whether everyone in town had lost their minds or if it was only my family. Nothing seemed awry other than Wayne, my neighbor from the end of the block, standing in his yard, saluting the American flag that waved from the pole beside his driveway. He was wearing cargo shorts and sandals. His expression was one of intense anger, like he was disgusted none of the rest of us were sufficiently patriotic to join him.  Lowe’s, though, was uncanny. The store was largely devoid of other shoppers, and there was no music playing from the overhead speakers. When I arrived at the aisle where the carbon monoxide detectors should be, I found only an empty shelf. I walked up and down the row, searching, but ultimately had to call out to the kid in the vest who was decamped at the end of the aisle, sitting precariously on an upturned plastic bucket. He had a choppy haircut and black painted fingernails. There was jewelry poking out of his face. He stared at the floor tiles as if he hadn’t noticed me at all. “Excuse me,” I said. “Carbon monoxide detectors?” “Gone. Sold out. They bought them all.” “Who did?” “The sheep.” He bleated in imitation of the animal. I backed a few steps away from him. “Those who look to the outside world to heal the pain they feel inside themselves. Those who don’t realize there’s no relief for our suffering, that joy and happiness are a scam invented by greeting card companies and the deep state to control us, to make us blind to hardship, which is the only certain thing this world can offer any of us.” “The greeting card companies?” “Among others.” Here, he finally looked up at me. “You’re one of them, the sheep. I can see it on your stupid face.”  “Hey, now—”  “But you’re too late. We’re sold out.” “Could there be more in the back?” He did a deep, ugly sniffle before saying, “Could be.” “Well, can you check?” “No, man. What’s the point? What’s the point of this?” I was on the verge of asking to see his manager when a teenage girl, also an employee, came to the end of the aisle and stopped. To the boy, she said, “You look very handsome today, Arnie.” Her eyes were moony and earnest. “I guess I’d never noticed it before. Isn’t that crazy?” she giggled. “To not see something so obvious?” He hung his head again. “You won’t love me when I’m old. You won’t love me when I’m incontinent and my mind devolves to the point where I think it’s still this year and I’m still a gorgeous stock boy at the Lowe’s in Murrysville. You won’t think I’m so hot when I need you to rub cream into my elderly feet to keep them from cracking, and I get Staph infections on my old, hunched back, and it’s up to you to lance the boils because there’s some other shit wrong with my arms that keeps me from being able to reach.”  I decided to just leave. Before I did, though, curiosity made me ask, “Hey, kids, what’s this music that’s playing?” “Emo,” the boy said, “something good for a change.” Simultaneously, the girl answered, “A piano ballad. Isn’t it beautiful?” III. When I arrived at the coffee shop, Will Sheck was already there waiting for me with his young son, Siggy. Will was an old friend of mine from college who now ran a private psychology practice in the next town over. He was the only person I knew who might be able to shed some light on this thing, so I had texted him from the Lowe’s parking lot, asking him to meet. “It’s more than just your family,” Will told me, gravely. We were sitting across from one another at a table by the big front window. Siggy was seated beside his father, staring into his chilled, besprinkled desert beverage. There were a few other patrons, but the shop was mostly empty. “I’m interested to see, in the coming days, just how far-reaching this is. On our way here, I had to navigate through a mob of fervent youngsters twerking in the street.” I knew by then it was bigger than just my family. Honestly, though, they were my only concern. I didn’t say so only because Will was now making a clandestine nod toward little Siggy, suggesting that he, too, was afflicted. “What do you think is happening?” I asked instead. “Heck if I know,” Will shrugged. “Some sort of mass hysteria by the look of it—like Strasbourg in the fifteen hundreds when all those villagers danced themselves to death.” Noticing my sour expression, he continued, “I strongly doubt it’s as serious as that. It could just be an innocent response to collective stress—pandemics, war, political upheaval. Some kind of socially transmitted release that will peter out once the stress gets back down to tolerable levels.” Here, he mouthed the words, watch this  before asking, “What are you thinking about, Siggy?” “Oh…the good old days,” the boy said. “Good old days?” I said. “You’re, like, six.” “I’m nine. Back when I was six, though…” He trailed off, leaving a nostalgic smile on his lips, the kind you might see from a broken man at a bar as he recalls his high school glory days. Will raised his eyebrows at me, and I returned the gesture. “Hey,” called a voice from behind me. Collectively, we looked to see a bearded man in a black t-shirt waiting in line to order. As soon as we acknowledged him, he walked over and joined at the side of our table. “Are you guys talking about the thing? The thing that happened today?” He appeared to be in his late twenties. He wore leather wrist cuffs. His beard came to his nipples, and he had a receding hairline. I imagined him working at a head shop or a vintage music store, the kind of hipster amateur pop-cultural critic whom I had always found insufferable. He didn’t give his name, so I instantly came to think of him as The Beardsman.  “We were just now discussing that, yes,” Will said with a grace I wouldn’t have extended to him. “It’s the pop songs,” The Beardsman said. “That’s the key.” He tapped his short index finger on our tabletop. “Let me ask you this: what day is it?” “Sunday,” Siggy said, then to his father, “Remember Friday, Dad? Gosh, Friday was a good day.” “Right,” The Beardsman agreed, importantly, “Sunday. And what day of the week has pop music beaten to death for decades? Sunday. Think about it—‘Easy Like Sunday Morning,’ ‘Pleasant Valley Sunday,’ ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday,’ ‘Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down,’ ‘Sunday Kind of Love,’ ‘Every Day is Like Sunday,’ on and on. See what I’m saying?” “No,” I told him. Turning back to Will, I said, “He’s right that it has something to do with music, though. Laura and Stacy each told me they could hear music when no music was playing. The kids at Lowe’s, too. And my dad, I think.” “How interesting,” Will said.  “It’s bananas,” The Beardsman agreed. “Look, pop songs in general—not counting much of Dylan’s work, of course, and the myriad bands he influences—can be broken into a few main themes: puppy love, sex, heartbreak, discontentment, friendship, coming of age and death. And how are people acting today? Lovesick, horny, despairing, overly friendly, or reflective, right? It’s the pop songs. They took us over, man.” He took a deep breath, staring at us like he was waiting to be praised for cracking it.  To me, he sounded like a conspiracy theorist. Possibly, it blinded me to the point he was making. Will, too, seemed unimpressed. With the tact of a man who was accustomed to dealing with psychosis, he said, “Thank you, sir. That’s a useful theory. We appreciate you sharing it with us. Now, if you’ll excuse us…” “Nah, bro, don’t blow me off like that,” The Beardsman said. “I can see it in your eyes, you’re unaffected. You’re just about the first ones I’ve found all day. We need to stick together here.” To Will, he asked, “What music do you listen to?” “Opera.” “Not popular enough. It has no cultural power. And you?” he asked me. “Nothing,” I said. “I don’t care for music. I’m tone deaf.” “For real?” He clapped his hands, delighted. “Oh, my God, you’re like a superhero then. That’s awesome.” When he turned his eyes, finally, to Siggy, his face fell. “What about you, little man? What’s your favorite song?” There was a newfound delicacy in his voice.  Without hesitation, the boy said, “‘Nothing New’ by Taylor Swift.”  The Beardsman narrowed his eyes. “Taylor’s version? The one with Phoebe Bridgers?”     Siggy nodded and asked, “There a different one?” “Yes, from her debut album.” “Boy, that sounds great. She used to be so good.” To Will and me, our unwanted guest said, “That’s a coming-of-age song.” “So?” I asked. “So, it’s got our little buddy here all gauzy and nostalgic. He’s into a song about growing up, so that’s how it affected him. That’s how it works, I bet—your illness, or whatever, is tailored to your taste. God, that’s insidious. Mainstream pop is evil, man; I’ve been saying it for years.” He shook his head, apparently remembering every sad soul who had ever ignored his elitist chiding of their personal taste, a modern-day Cassandra. “What about you?” I asked him. “You seem to know everything. You know all this music too. Why aren’t you affected?” “Um,” The Beardsman said, clearly offended, “I hate-listen, actually. I’m like a scholar, bro. None of it gets in here.” He tapped his heart. “I’m only into pure shit. Shit that could never take over like this. Shit you’ve never even heard of.”  “Remember when grown-ups didn’t use to curse in front of little kids?” Siggy asked no one in particular. “Gosh, those seem like good days.”  “Sorry, kid.”  He caught me rolling my eyes at Will and opened his mouth to chide me, but then something seemed to occur to him. He looked from me to Will to Siggy, and then he lowered himself onto one knee, resting his arms on our tabletop and tilting his head to get eye level with the boy.  “What are you doing?” Will asked. “Not so close to my kid, please.” The Beardsman waggled his fingers without taking his eyes off Siggy, a gesture which told us to relax and let him try something. “Hey, little man, did you know the original version of that song came out way back in 2012? Were you even born then?” “No, I wasn’t born yet, but 2012 sounds wonderful.” “Yeah. The version you like came out in 2021.” Siggy nodded and started to speak, but The Beardsman continued, “It was produced by Aaron Dessner. He also played guitar, bass, keyboards, piano and synthesizers on the track. Isn’t that cool?” “Um, yeah,” Siggy said. I noticed a slight change in his expression. At first, I couldn’t place it. “Dressner, incidentally, was a founding member of The National—that’s an indie band that’s kind of cool, but a bit too mainstream IMO. He also has an even lesser-known band called Big Red Machine with Justin Vernon from Bon Iver.” “Uh-huh.” The boy’s little face was tightening, closing itself off. He’s getting annoyed   by this know-it-all , I realized.  He’s having the correct, rational reaction to this man’s unsolicited bullshit.  Will and I stole a glance at one another, before returning our attentions to The Beardsman. “The name Big Red Machine is probably a reference to the Cincinnati Reds—that’s a baseball team. Dressner is from Cincinnati. Anyway, Taylor first approached him to work on Folklore , during the pandemic. It went well, and so—”  “Can you stop talking, please?” Siggy asked, then to his father, “Dad, can he please stop talking. All his words make me feel mad. His words make me not even like that song anymore.” “Goddamn, Beardsman,” I said, “you did it! You’re a genius.” As further proof of this, Siggy didn’t balk at my cursing. In fact, it made him giggle. Our hero, though, looked at me, puzzled. “Beardsman?” he asked, self-consciously fingering the wiry ends of his facial hair. “My name is Jerry, yo.” “Well, Jerry,” Will told him, “you’re clearly onto something.” He riffled Siggy’s hair and said, “Welcome back, son.” “This is boring, Dad. Can we go?”  Upon hearing the boy whine these words, Jerry’s eyes darted all around him, a gesture of paranoia. “What?” I asked. He listened for a moment longer before saying, “Nothing. It’s just that if this were a sitcom, that would have been the perfect last line—the cute kid being scampish, letting the audience know all was well, the point where the episode would end, and we would all freeze in place to credits and applause. I just thought—if the pop songs have taken over…maybe the sitcoms had too.” He smiled at me, embarrassed but relieved. “I can’t believe you knew all those facts about a song you don’t even like,” Will said. “It’s a duty as much as a curse,” he shrugged. “Hey,” I asked him, “are you doing anything right now? I’d like to introduce you to my family.” IV We parted ways with Will and Siggy outside the coffee shop, and then I drove Jerry the Beardsman, our unlikely savior, to my home. He made me drive slow through my neighborhood with all the windows down while he blared unusual, growling music, which he programmed to my car radio from his phone. “Why are we doing this?” I had to yell for him to hear me over the din. “I want to see what happens when the afflicted are exposed to good music. This is Tuvan throat singing. It’s wild, but the singer actually produces two simultaneous tones—”  “I get it,” I said, cutting him off, “pop music makes zombies, so maybe this nonsense is a cure.” “Just a theory,” he said, clearly hurt by my characterization of the music.   As it turned out, his theory proved untrue. When I moved through the intersection leading to my block, Wayne was still in his yard, peering longingly up at his flag. He turned to the sound of the music and instantly rushed us. “Slow down,” Jerry said, “let’s see if this gets him out of his trance.” I did as he said, crawling to a stop at the end of Wayne’s driveway. “What in the ever-loving hell are you up to with this ethno-music?” he screamed into my open window, his spittle flying. “Maybe you can get away with playing this crap in the big city, but you’re crazy to try it in a small town.” He looked very much like he might hit me. “Drive,” Jerry said. I didn’t hesitate. He turned the music down and sighed, “Well, that was a bust. The guy’s clearly a modern Country fan, all that ‘virtue of small-town living stuff.’ He might be surprised to learn about where and how Jason Aldean really lives. I’ll get him on the way back, after we take care of your family.” When I pulled into my driveway, he saw my hedge and said, “Oh, cool. Is that a dog?” “It’s an armadillo. My wife has a thing for them.” “Ah,” he said, “yeah, okay. Sure.” I ignored his criticism, getting out of the car and leading him around the side of the house to the back door. I found I was hesitant to open it, anticipating the chaos inside. After a breath, I peeked my head into the kitchen and scoped it out. The room was dark and empty. The mostly empty PBR bottle remained, but my father was nowhere to be seen. Jerry stayed right on my heels as I started through the kitchen, and I had to turn and swat at him to get him to back off. “Sorry,” he whispered, “you’re walking so gingerly, I thought we were doing a Scooby-Doo kind of thing.” “I wasn’t walking gingerly,” I shot back. “Gingerly is not how I walk.” I was too loud. Stacy heard me and called out to me from the other room. I turned back to scowl at Jerry for causing me to give us away, and then the light came on, and I turned to see my daughter standing in the doorway. She was a cartoon image of fat hair curlers and a muddy facemask. In each hand, she pinched a single cucumber slice, having just removed them from her eyes. “Daddy, I—” She began, but then stopped when she noticed Jerry behind me. The mud mask kept me from seeing her blush, but there was a recalibration in her body, a visible shift from a daughter into something more worldly and disturbing. “Hello there,” she cooed, “and who are you?” “This is Jerry,” I told her in a tone I had often used with her when she was little, a tone of don’t touch that . “Mom,” Stacy called behind her, “come see. Daddy brought Jerry. He’s very dreamy.” Jerry stepped forward, grinning like a fool. He cleared his throat and used his fingers to do a quick comb through his beard. “She’s sixteen,” I told him. “Seriously?” he asked, deflated. “Fuck.” Laura appeared in the doorway. She was dressed in funeral black. She looked past me to Jerry, giving him a once-over. To Stacy, she sniffed, “He is dreamy, I suppose. Not as dreamy as your father was.” She crossed herself. “I’m not dead!” I yelled. “Dude?” Jerry asked me. I pulled him to a corner of the kitchen for a sidebar. “I have no idea,” I said. “She’s into old R&B, Barry White and that—” “Baby-making music,” he interrupted, “nice.” He presented me with his fist to bump.  I pushed it down. “When I first found her today, she seemed to be all, you know, hot and bothered.” “Horned up. Yeah, that would make sense.” “Right, well…then I mentioned I was heading out for a few minutes, and she got it in her head I was never coming back. And now here I am back, and she still seems to think I’m dead.” “Hmm.” Jerry scratched his eyebrow as he thought this through. “That doesn’t make sense for seventies R&B. Does she listen to anything else?” “Oldies?” I said.  He rolled his eyes. “Bro, can you be more specific? At this point in history, oldies can mean anything from the fifties through the early nineties. Granted some of the latter period is simultaneously categorized as classic rock, but I still—” “The really old stuff,” I said, cutting him off. “Fifties and Sixties, I guess.” He thought for a second and then began to nod. “Fifties and Sixties ballads about pining for dead lovers. Yeah man, that’s nearly a genre unto itself—tear jerkers, death discs, splatter platters. I got this.” He stepped forward, toward the women. Stacy tensed, looking like a tightly wound spring of unmentionable urges. Laura, lost in her grief, barely noticed him at all. To her, Jerry said, “Did you know that after Jan and Dean recorded ‘Dead Man’s Curve,’ Jan actually had a car accident on that very stretch of road? He lived but was never the same again.” “Yes,” she said, trying to recall it, “yes, I do think I’ve heard that before.” I kept a close eye on her expression. She looked only mildly irritated.  “Yeah, that’s a pretty famous story,” he agreed. “Some scholars think it was the death of James Dean in his Porsche Spyder that started the teen tragedy genre, but Leiber and Stoller actually began the trend a few months prior to his accident when they wrote, ‘Black Denim Trousers and Motorcycle Boots.’ Of course, that’s not the most popular tragic motorcycle song. That honor goes to ‘Leader of the Pack’ by The Shangri-Las.” “Mm-hmm.” She was shaking her head now, visibly annoyed. “If you ask me, though, the most notable of the genre is ‘Last Kiss.’” “Oh, I do like that one. It’s so sad.” “Isn’t it? You know, it was originally recorded by Wayne Cochran in 1961 – he wrote it too – but it flopped. He actually rerecorded it a couple years later, and it flopped too. The hit we all know – besides the more recent Pearl Jam cover – was recorded by J. Frank Wilson and the Cavaliers. It was a top 100 hit for them, and now, obviously, a classic. Interestingly, that group has a real-life automobile tragedy too – ”  “I’m so sorry,” Laura said to him, “can you please not tell me any more about this? I don’t mean to be rude, I just…well, I just really don’t care.” To me, she asked, “Why is he here, Sam? Is he a friend of yours? Is he staying?” Jerry slapped me on the back. His moustache tickled my ear when he whispered, “Nailed it.” We turned our attention to Stacy, but, unexpectedly, she was fixed too. I suppose it was enough of a lesson for her to learn not every boy is crush-worthy. Sometimes, even the dreamiest ones turn out to be pop culture weirdos. He fixed my father next with some facts about Hank Williams Sr. We found him sleeping off his drunk on the living room couch. He took a few minutes to rouse, but from there the process was the same.  Interestingly, once they were cured, none of them had any memory of being overcome by the pop songs. Stacy rushed off, horrified to be seen by a stranger, even one as uninteresting to her as Jerry, in her beauty mask. Laura appeared confused by her getup but took it in stride. My father stayed on the couch, smacking his lips and holding his head.   “Well,” Jerry said, beaming a smile at me, “I guess that just about does it.” “Not quite,” I said. “I think you have a bit more work to do.” I nodded to indicate the street outside our home. “The Beardsman,” I said with a certain reverence which made him sound like a superhero. I had no doubt he was into superheroes.  Pleased, he nodded and said, “I guess I ought to get on that. Here, give me your phone.” I did as he asked. He had earned my trust. When he gave it back to me, he said sheepishly, “I programmed my number in case you want to catch up when this is over or hang out or whatever.” “Oh,” I said, “thank you.” I think we both knew I would never call. “Do you need a ride or something?” “Nah, I’m good. I’ll Uber home after I’m done out there.” “Right.”  “Whelp,” he said with a final wave, “be seeing you.” Then he turned and walked out through the back kitchen door. Laura and I watched him until he disappeared down the sidewalk. “What a strange man,” she said to me. “How do you know him?” “I met him when I was out today.” She furrowed her brow. “Did you go out? I almost recall…” she began, trying to make sense of whatever she was remembering. After a moment, she said, “Sam?” “Hmm?” I was unsure how to answer whatever questions she would have, how I would explain any of this to her.  “What do you want for lunch? Somehow, the day has gotten away from me.” It was a moment that made me think of Jerry—the perfect place for the show to end, the characters freezing and the studio audience applauding. It made me glad, if only for an instant, that he had left me with a way to stay in touch. “Why are you laughing?” Laura asked. “No reason,” I said. “Make whatever. I’m going to have a beer, assuming Dad left me any.” She flattened her lips as she tied a half apron over her funeral gown. “Don’t blame your father if you’re low on beer, Sam. You know he doesn’t touch it. And only have one,” she said, eyeing the bottle on the tabletop. “It’s early. You’ll be a zombie all Sunday afternoon, and I have no interest in dealing with you when you’re like that.” I had been wrong, I realized— this  was the line that would lead to the freeze frame. I kissed her on the forehead, prompting her to smile. M.C. Schmidt's recent short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Forge, Gulf Stream, Mud Season Review, HAD, Southern Humanities Review, The Saturday Evening Post, EVENT , and elsewhere. He is the author of the novel, The Decadents  (Library Tales Publishing, 2022) and the short story collection, How to Steal a Train  (Anxiety Press, 2025).