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Plumb or Plum? There, just outside my living room window, are six standard issue, old school mailboxes fixed on top of six wooden posts and a street sign at an intersection that says HWY 23 and N. Plumb, each one leaning at just a slightly different angle, each one pointing to a wildly diver- gent set of coordinates up there, in the night sky, looking down on us, all the time, that are, in turn, separated themselves, by millions of lightyears, and each one of them with a planet that’s almost like ours, maybe… But, for some reason, the one thing I keep coming back to is why would these folks name their street Plumb instead of Plum? Kansas Clouds They look like Kansas clouds, she said, raising a postcard up for my inspection as she emerged, suddenly (smiling somewhat triumphantly), from a forest of t-shirts, cap-guns, trinkets and toy tomahawks: a strip of Arizona highway, 1953, under a towering cathedral sky crowded with cumulus clouds like arctic caps that someone (mischievous) had set adrift to wander with the weather, their shadows slowly flowing over the arid landscape below, most likely unnoticed by the hitchhiker and gas attendant. Staring at the Ceiling Woke up to what I thought was the sizzle and tang of bacon cooking and a wandering piano solo, coming from somewhere, that seemed vaguely familiar to me though I just couldn’t identify it, no matter how long I laid there, staring at the ceiling, but instead it was just a soft summer rain falling on the steaming grease trap down in the alley that the Thai place next door kept right below my open bedroom window, and I guess the piano must have been just a dream. Jason Ryberg is the author of eighteen books of poetry, six screenplays, a few short stories, a box full of folders, notebooks and scraps of paper that could one day be (loosely) construed as a novel, and, a couple of angry letters to various magazine and newspaper editors. He is currently an artist-in-residence at both The Prospero Institute of Disquieted P/o/e/t/i/c/s and the Osage Arts Community, and is an editor and designer at Spartan Books. His latest collection of poems is Fence Post Blues (River Dog Press, 2023). He lives part-time in Kansas City, MO with a rooster named Little Red and a Billy-goat named Giuseppe and part-time somewhere in the Ozarks, near the Gasconade River, where there are also many strange and wonderful woodland critters.

Susan wakes up in a sweat. A suffocating feeling of doom pins her to the bed. For a moment she panics and thinks she is back to those months of sticky sleeplessness when she thought she was losing her mind. She’d been terrified to find out what might be wrong with her but had no option but to go to the doctor when she forgot the PIN for her bank card, her password at work, and came within inches of crashing into a car she hadn’t even seen, all in the same week. It was a relief to discover that it was the menopause and not a brain tumour or dementia or something awful like that. She was too relieved about her diagnosis to spend any time mourning what it meant the end of. She’d never been one of those women who spent their lives dreaming about having children. She wasn’t really sure if she wanted them. Being on her own, it wasn’t a question she’d had to realistically face. You’d need to be with a man for a few years to get the measure of him, to know if he’d be the sort you could trust if he’d be someone you could build a future and family with and that’s not something she’d ever managed. There’d been a few boyfriends when she was younger but they’d never lasted more than a few months before she grew sick of the sight and sound of them, or they of her.  There weren’t exactly suitors queuing up at the door these days and she’d given up on internet dating ages ago after a long string of encounters with desperate divorcees, married men and headcases. She didn’t have to work hard to spot the red flags with any of them. They were practically waving them at her from the moment she met them. Now that the HRT had kicked in she’d been flying the past few months but maybe she’d gotten used to it and needed a higher dose patch. The doctor said it might need some adjusting over time. She never wants to go back to that useless brain fog stage again. It was terrifying, and mortifying. Susan turns over, pulls the duvet up tight to her chin and tries to go back to sleep. An image of a boy sitting alone in a dark room pops into her mind and she realises that’s what had woken her up in such a state. She’d had a horrible dream about that poor, sad hungry boy in the dirty nappy from the Barnados ad, the one she has to change the channel every time it comes on. They shouldn’t be allowed to manipulate people’s heartstrings like that for money, it’s not right. Seeing it always makes Susan think of that book of her mother’s from years ago about a woman who’d been neglected as a child. She’d read bits of it when she was in second or third class. It made her feel sick but there was something fascinatingly compelling to learn of the horror people were capable of inflicting on a child, their own child. She’d been too young to read such awful things and it had never left her. Some people don’t deserve to have children. The boy in her dream had been crying. He wanted Susan to help him, to rescue him, and though he was right in front of her, for some reason that only makes sense in the world of dreams, she couldn’t get to him. The feeling of helpless panic is still palpable and she doesn’t want to drift back into the dream so she drags herself out of bed to go pee and splash some cold water on her face. She should write to the advertising standards people, or whoever it is that governs those sorts of things. As she climbs back into bed she is grateful that at least it means it’s not the menopause that is haunting her tonight. Susan sleeps poorly for the rest of the night and is a wreck at work the next day. She does her best not to show it and to plaster a smile on her face. They all, well most of them, gave her a lot of lee-way when she went a bit loopy. She thinks they were as relieved as her that there was a reasonable explanation for her brain and personality malfunctions. They’re not a bad gang. They make an effort to go out for dinner and drinks every few months and though she invariably gets stuck with Ciara, whose sole topic of conversation is her never-ending divorce, or Keith who can only talk football, it’s the only chance she has to go out these days so she tries to make the best of it. All of her friends have teenage children now and are too busy driving them from soccer to music lessons to friend’s houses and back again so they don’t have time to go out anymore. Her sisters are much younger than them and they have their hands full with a bunch of pre-schoolers. She meets them now and then for coffee on Saturdays but she never gets the chance to finish a sentence without the young ones needing attention, food, entertainment, or refereeing. Going out and meeting people without having an actual conversation leaves Susan feeling lonelier than ever afterward. The girls have provided the grandchildren for their parents to obsess over so that leapfrogged them both past her into favourite daughters positions. Any time Susan calls her mother, the conversation always ends up on the children and which of them drew an amazing picture, scored a goal in their soccer match, or said something so cutesy and funny it has to be repeated for weeks. Still, things are good with Susan. Work’s going well, another year or two and she should be promoted to Team Lead. She has her Spanish classes on Tuesdays, her books, and goes to the theatre every week or two, the cinema the rare time there’s anything decent on, and her trips to The Shelbourne in Dublin or The G in Galway on her own for a treat every couple of months. She can’t complain. A couple of weeks later Susan calls into the supermarket on her way home on Friday evening to pick up a few bits. As she walks along the fridge section towards the milk, she passes a toddler sitting at the front of a trolley. His father is berating the little boy for reaching around to grab a packet of mini Babybel cheeses he’s just put in. As she opens the door of the fridge, Susan hears a child start to cry. “I want it,” she hears the wailing voice say. She instinctively turns to look back at the little boy in the trolley but it’s not him who is crying, though it sounds like it’s coming from that direction. There’s a high wall of special-offer toilet paper stacked next to them and she reckons there must be a child crying someone behind it and that the tower of toilet paper is throwing the sound around in some weird way. She carries on towards the freezer section to get some ice cream, glad to be escaping the grating noise. There is a work night out planned for the following night. There are just five of them meeting up to go to the new Thai place on O’Connell Street. Between weddings, no babysitters, secondary school graduations and other plans, most people couldn’t come this time. Susan thought about making up an excuse to cancel. That small of a group could end up being awkward. There’d be no escaping someone if they got too intense or boring but it’d been ages since she’d been out with anyone other than herself so she decided to take her chances. She could always leave early and get the last bus home if she wasn’t enjoying it. It’s quiet at the bus stop when Susan arrives a few minutes before six. There’s just a baby in a buggy there with what must be his Granny. She thinks it’s a boy. It’s hard to tell when they’re only a few months old, though its so chubby that it must be a boy. She’s checking the messages on her phone to see what pub they’re meeting in when she hears a whimper. It slowly builds and builds until it turns into the distressed cry of an upset baby that desperately needs something – food, a nappy change, burping, something. Susan looks up. The boy in the buggy is not smiling or talking but he’s not crying either. He’s just sitting there looking back at Susan. The noise doesn’t seem to be registering with his Granny at all. She’s watching for the bus while keeping an eye on the electronic notice board. “I want to go home,” Susan hears a child scream through tears yet the boy’s face is motionless. She looks around but there is no one else here, no other babies. She doesn’t know what to think but something very strange is happening and it’s starting to freak her out. She turns and begins walking back towards home. As she does, the crying fades. She looks back over her shoulder. The little boy is watching her, his face motionless, yet she can still hear a baby crying. Susan thinks about the crying in the supermarket the evening before. But that was different, she reasons to herself, there probably was a baby crying there that she just couldn’t see. She half runs, half walks back home so quickly that she gives herself a stitch in her side. When she gets there, she pours herself a double vodka with a splash of coke and texts Paul from work to say she missed the bus but that she’ll get a taxi in and will meet them at the restaurant. There must be a logical explanation for what happened but none come to mind no matter how she turns it over in her head. The drink has taken the edge off her uneasiness by the time the taxi arrives and the small talk she is forced to engage in with the driver is a distraction. The night out is okay but not great. The food is right up her street but the conversation gets stuck in a loop about their boss and whether he’s over-stating the hours on his own time sheets, if he’s going to stay with their team or more to a rival company who’re setting up outside the city next year, whether he’s qualified enough to even be the manager, and on and on it goes. Saturday night TV would have been better than this, Susan thinks, not impressed that talk of work has invaded her weekend. She downs a few more vodkas than usual to take the edge off her irritation. Her hangover the next day means she can think of nothing but lazing on the sofa, watching rubbish TV. The next week at work is busy and Susan has to stay in late a couple of evenings to finish a report that’s due so all thoughts of strange crying babies go out of her head. It isn’t until the following Saturday, when she is out for a walk and turns into the park that it comes back to her. There are children everywhere, like there always are on weekends. A little girl of about two is coming towards her on a toy car, pushed along by her father. They pass by Susan with only the sound of their chatting hanging in the air. As she continues, she meets a mother and baby in a pram. Susan’s shoulders drop in relief when they walk by her without a sound. She tells herself off for being anxious over nothing and quickens her stride to get on with her walk, taking the path that follows the boundary of the park all the way around. She’ll get a couple of laps in before she heads back home again. As she rounds the next corner, Susan nearly runs into a woman who is walking with her head down, furiously typing on her phone with both thumbs. A little girl is waddling precariously behind her, trying to catch up with the woman. The toddler looks Susan straight in the eye and as she does, Susan hears it start to cry. The child looks upset but, like the boy at the bus stop, she doesn’t seem to be crying. There are no tears falling from her eyes, her mouth isn’t even open. But it has to be coming from her. There’s no one else near them and no big stack of toilet paper to form a semi-plausible explanation this time. “Mammy! Wait! I’m tired,” Susan hears the little girl call out but the sound isn’t coming from her mouth, it’s shut tight. Susan breaks into a jog and heads for the path that will bring her back to park gate. She has to get out of here. She passes more children on the way out, a bunch of young lads playing soccer, a baby in its mother’s arms being fed a bottle, a little boy on a practice bike with no peddles. None of them are crying, obviously or otherwise. But then she walks by a little girl of about two and a half or three whose father is trying to make her kick a ball to him and as soon as Susan lays eyes on her, she hears the girl start to cry. Like the other times, the girl’s face remains impassive while the sound of crying fills the air. “I hate football,” Susan hears her scream. “Why do you always make me play football?” Susan picks up the pace and doesn’t stop running until she’s through the gates and on the path home. She crosses the road to avoid a buggy coming towards her. What is going on? As she walks home, she thinks back over all the crying children, trying to make sense of it. Other people didn’t seem to hear them, or if they did, they pretended not to. But were the children even crying at all? To look at them you wouldn’t think so, their faces didn’t match the sounds she’d heard coming from them. It was like the sound was emanating from them but not from their mouths, as you’d expect, though that doesn’t make sense. As she thinks about it, she realises that the crying doesn’t usually start until she looks right at them, until their eyes meet. Are they trying to communicate with her? Are they looking for her attention or help?  Maybe she has a gift that allows only her to be aware or or to tune into their pain. She has a vague memory of a cousin on her mother’s side being the seventh-son of a seventh-son but he only ever had the cure for shingles and warts, and he wasn’t even that good at it, as far as she remembers. Susan thinks over it all afternoon as she tried to catch up on housework. Maybe she should stop running from whatever this is, stop getting so freaked out by these children. They’re only babies, she tries to convince herself. They aren’t trying to scare me. Could she be more open to them, to let in whatever they are trying to say to her? The prospect scares her but she has a niggling feeling that she’s been somehow called to do it, that they’ve chosen her for a reason. It would be cruel to ignore that. Susan can’t help but notice children and babies all the time now. Everywhere she goes she sees children being ignored, not listened to and not having their basic needs met. They are in McDonald’s and cafes at lunchtime, in the library, in the queue for the cinema, in shops, on the street, everywhere. Their lips don’t need to move. She can hear their endless cries in her head.  “I’m hungry.” “I have a pain in my tummy.” “I want Mommy.” “Let me down.” “Get me out.” “I don’t want to.” “Give me milk.” She tries to connect with those that signal they are in distress, to meet their gaze with concern, willing them to see in her eyes that she cares, that she understands, that she’s sorry they are hurting. Sometimes it works and the crying subsides. Sometimes it’s not enough. Susan stops being afraid of whatever this is that is happening to her, and takes comfort in the fact that she can soothe the pain of some of them. The cacophony of the troubled souls and the emotional energy she has to expend to reach them becomes exhausting. She doesn’t have the mental capacity for watching TV or reading when she gets home and usually falls asleep listening to Classic FM, contented by the work she has done. She stops caring about her actual job so much. She does what she has to and makes a point of leaving on time every day. If Paul wants to lick up to the boss by doing overtime and volunteering to take on new projects, he can have the Team Lead position when it comes up. Susan realises that she doesn’t care about it as much as she thought she did. She skips a work night out at the bowling alley, then a musical they all go to. She hasn’t seen any of them outside the office or her sisters in a while. It doesn’t bother her. She’s afraid they’d notice something is up with her and there’s no way she could explain any of this to anyone. Beside, it feels like it should be just their thing, hers and the children’s. There is a boy in a buggy in the riverside park Susan always passes through on her way from the cheap pay-per-week car park to the office.  It’s ridiculous to even call it a park since it’s mostly concrete and the few narrow strips of grass there are are covered in dog shit. At first, he is only there the odd time. Now he’s there every morning on her way to work and every evening on the way back. He must be a year, or a year and a half at most. His mother looks like she’s been pushed to her limits. The sagging black bags under her eyes make her face seem even paler than it probably is. Her hair is stuck to her head and looks like it hasn’t been washed in weeks, and her grey tracksuit is pock-marked with stains. The way the boy looks at Susan haunts her. His eyes tell of his pain, of long hours spent on the streets, of the bottles of milk that no longer fill his growing belly, of the shouting and fighting and drinking when they do go home. He never cries though, not like the others. He seems too defeated to, too tired to. She knows she should do something to help him. Who would she ring and what would she say? Without a name or address to visit nobody would do anything anyway. Social workers are all overworked. It’s always on the news. They can’t keep track of their enormous case loads as it is and hundreds of children stuck in horrendous situations are falling through the cracks every day. That night, she dreams about the boy. He is in her house, crying. The sound haunts her she runs from room to room trying to find him. His cries grows louder and louder, the intensity of it panicking her. When she reaches the kitchen she sees he is outside, sitting in the back yard in the cold with just a nappy on, a dirty nappy, like the boy from the Barnardos ad. She runs to the back door but it won’t open. He is hysterical now, crying for her but no matter how hard she tugs at the back door, it won’t budge. Tears are streaming down her face now too. She is letting him down. Susan wakes in a panic with the most awful feeling of guilt she can’t shake for the rest of the night and into the morning. She listens to podcasts until dawn sends a pale light through her curtains, then gets up and goes to work an hour earlier than usual. She avoids the park by the river on the way there, taking the longer route through the shopping streets, but the boy is on her mind all day. Autopilot brings her on her usual, well-worn route on the way home, though she hadn’t meant to come by the park. When she gets there, he is sitting on his own in his buggy his eyes pleading with her to help him. His mother is off over on the other side of the park, getting a light from some men drinking cans on a bench. The woman’s back is to the boy, oblivious to any danger he could be in. Without thinking, Susan grabs his buggy and runs as fast as she can back in the direction she’d come from. She doesn’t dare look back until they’re out the gate and hidden from view by the dense hedge that borders the park. She finds a gap she can peek through and is disgusted to see that his mother hasn’t even turned around yet and is oblivious to the fact that her son is missing. Susan bends down to look at the boy and make sure he is okay. “Take me out of here, leave the buggy,” he silently says to her. “I can’t stand another minute trapped in this thing.” She does as she is told. She has no car seat so she leaves her car where it is and runs to the bus stop two streets over instead, looking over her shoulder the whole way to make sure they aren’t being followed. There is a bus just about to pull off when they get there. “Thank you,” he says to her as the doors close behind them. Susan has no idea what she is going to do, how she will explain the fact that she suddenly has a child, where he will sleep, who will mind him while she goes to work but all worry about these practicalities disappear from her head when he says, “Let’s go home, Susan.” A quiet peacefulness floods through her. She will look after him. This is what all those other children were leading her towards. This is her purpose. It’s what she is supposed to do with her life. She has never felt so sure of anything before. Margaret Cahill is a short story writer from Limerick, Ireland. Her fiction has been featured in The Milk House, époque press é-zine, Ogham Stone, Honest Ulsterman, HeadStuff, Silver Apples, Autonomy anthology, Incubator, Crannog, Galway Review, Limerick Magazine, Boyne Berries and The Linnet’s Wings. She also dabbles in writing about music and art, with publications on HeadStuff.org and in Circa Arts Magazine.

The third person to walk by outside yells, “It’s the bird’s garden!” before turning away. While it may be the bird’s garden, the baby is in my belly, pressing up on my liver, which is sliding into my ribs. On a video call with my mother-in-law, I pronounce the word “Chiropraktiker” correctly in German – I just don’t say it loud enough. My chiropractor says everything far too loudly. I guess it’s because she rattles backs with a tiny “jackhammer.” I slide downward on the table, so my belly properly fits into the pillow’s belly cutout. I swear I feel him wiggle, but he’s as soft as good poetry. All good poetry starts with a time and a place, so I set a timer at my desk for 25 minutes. I am told to refrain from reading the book now as it will evoke too much nostalgia and I agree. I continue to read about cults. How many 25-minute timers must one start in a day? Please don’t answer that or I’ll have a nervous breakdown. I look at the picture of me and my sister in LA, a cactus behind our heads. I think, “Wow, I used to be so fit” before remembering I’m pregnant – this isn’t a matter of weight, goddammit. It’s a matter of one body growing a baby while the other was not. I will call you when it makes sense, somewhere deep in Prenzlauer Berg where it starts to look like Friedrichshain and there are no longer any cobblestones. Some days, I cry about things that never actually existed. Like, hypothetical nostalgia – like, this could have existed, but it did not and never will. And this person could have been this way, but they never were. We may be in the bird’s garden, but the baby is in my belly, pressing up on my liver, which is sliding into my ribs. Taylor Miles-Behrens is a writer and adjunct English and creative writing instructor living in Boulder, Colorado. Her work has recently appeared in Fjords Review, MORIA, and [sub]liminal. She studied North American literature and culture at Freie University (Berlin) and creative writing at Kingston University (London).

Novel in the Making The story is short, and not very novel. A man and a woman, both brisk as cloud breaks: The woman is not bad, but sometimes sloppy. The man is not bad, but sometimes sloppy. The man constantly reminds the woman of what she lacks, which is the same thing that he lacks, and they are constant in constantly doing this. Till one day the woman just tires out, the way a clock stops ticking after a spring has rusted. And the woman stops listening, and the man stops talking. The space they share is silence. No tick, no tock, And they learn how to feel lonely, Together. Triste There’s something sad about a daffodil on a windowsill in February. The miracle of the blossom against grey panes, the brazen orange mouth that speaks in wide O’s, when I am still living in backdrop of winter sounds, uncertain what each patter and rasp might be. The roll of wind against shutters. Glasses shifting in a rack. The dog scratching at its chain. Not yet ready for this bulbous shout of color on a sill, or the comfort of my own loneliness yawning wide and loud. One Night a Bear pawed through our garbage tins, jostled our refuse, it stuck a dank tongue into an empty pint of cherry vanilla, knowing what brought it to that moment of sweetness— a watermelon rind, cobs of corn, the crusts of bread obsessively carved from squared edges. All that could have sustained us, was but a flicker in the unburdened appetite of a bear. The bear could see our faces pressed in awe against the pane, eyeing a still life of trash strewn over the lawn revealed in crescent moonlight. The next morning we packed, traced veins on maps, budgeted our solitary destinations for places other than the unchartered terrain of heart. Memories of that night, summers and summers ago, are fettered to a moment in a rented cabin. The only thing not muted to our past is a bear--come one night when we were hungry, but could only watch it feed on all we had tossed away. Smiling Fish My son at the age of three asked: Do fish smile? Where does the blue go when the sky turns grey? Why do I have to sleep alone if you don’t? He never turned from my exasperations, muted answers, or the continuous folding of whatever it was in my hands, keeping them from being empty. Now, grown and the product of unanswerable queries, he says that I am the one with too many questions, demanding details, the fine tuning of sound bytes, wanting, in every minutia, the story without any revision, becoming the constant north in memory’s daily compass. All of our rejoins are just remakes of questions he stopped asking, now that I have all the answers. Laurie Kuntz’s books are: That Infinite Roar, Gyroscope Press, Talking Me Off The Roof, Kelsay Books, The Moon Over My Mother’s House, Finishing Line Press, Simple Gestures, Texas Review Press, Women at the Onsen, Blue Light Press, and Somewhere in the Telling, Mellen Press. Simple Gestures won Texas Review’s Chapbook Contest, and Women at the Onsen won Blue Light Press’s Chapbook Contest. She’s been nominated for four Pushcart Prizes and two Best of the Net Prizes. Her work has been published in Gyroscope Review, Roanoke Review, Third Wednesday, One Art, Sheila Na Gig, and other journals.  More at: https://lauriekuntz.myportfolio.com/home-1

Blasted by winds of silent rage, this would be nothing less than a tsunami. No trees left standing. The Northeastern constricted surrounding villages. Long as I could remember, this violent turbulence touched down and tore up the same fragmented single-wide body I cowered within. Never thought to move. Kept rebuilding the same ravaged landscape into something salvageable until the next cyclone hit. Flies never gave notice before skies darkened and vagrant clouds compressed into thin lips of the horizon. Stood ground as the torsion of organs wrenched themselves into opposing forces of cell migration between malignant or benign, dwelling or scrap metal. *** “Got no gust, girl. You’re nothing but a sprinkler of Moms, squalling and nipping. Got no misgivings about a downpour when I can cover myself with the windbreaker of you. Rambling your skinny ass around my boys with some kind of buoyancy. What the hell is that shitstorm called? Dad’s wheezing under Mom’s endless torrent of shackles. You trying to swallow me up? Don’t get all drizzly on me now. I got lightning beating thunder under this skin.” *** My mouth wrenched open the same shoddy door that stuck. Air was thick and sinister quiet. Why don’t assholes get out of hurricane alley? We got no time for that shit. Each damn year everything bleeds over this skeletal territory, only to become obliterated, as if we don’t know what’s downwind. We stay, we go. More threatening to settle over a stretch of open terrain with no history, no decay. Smack of waves on boulders one listens to day after day without registering, and yet without it there would be an absence of potency. The man traced the lines of my face with a gun. My neck wedded itself to the contours of his guillotine archway of compressed fingers. He bulged from his recliner while groundswells sprayed from his pores. My fists were two restraining orders as I sunk to my knees. Fingers slid along the sides of my twitching cheeks. I dropped my head in his lap. The neighborhood was roiling. “How could I ever live without you?” I asked.

Both a cartoonist and writer, Berin Aptoula holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Adelphi University, where she also teaches. If you’re ever looking for her or find yourself in need of miscellaneous new wave facts, check your local discotheque for an androgyne grooving under the alias BALKAN VILLAIN.

In my dream, I pick up my cell phone and hear my mother’s voice. She sounds sleepy and far away. “I’ve been trying to call you,” she says. I tell her I will visit tomorrow. “They are starving me. They lock us in our rooms. And they beat us. It’s cold. So cold.” Her small hand reaches for mine through my iPhone. Her fingertips have turned white and feel like ice. There is a large cut on her hand; blood is seeping through a dirty bandage. “I’m coming to check on you.” *** My mother’s nose bleeds heavily. I’ve thrown several of her sweaters away, the blood had caked in large droplets, working its intractable way around each fiber of the wool. I can see traces of it on her face, a light dusting around the delicate skin on her nose and cheeks. When I give her a manicure, there is dried blood under her nails. I gently pick out the brown crust with the nail clipper file. *** The hospice nurse calls to tell me a story she knows I’ll get a “kick” out of. “Your mother told me that she still gets her period! My medical director and I had a good laugh about that.” “That is funny!” My face is getting hot. My mother has dementia. She did have heavy periods and cervical cancer; she thinks she is young, that the diaper she wears is a sanitary pad. “Did the medical director have any idea why she’s having nosebleeds?” “Oh, I forgot to ask about that.” *** I walk into my mother’s room at Menorah Village Memory Care Center. I hear her weakly yelling, “Help!” I find her in the bathroom. She is holding onto the metal bar they’ve installed between the toilet and shower. Her pants are down to her ankles. She has shit herself. She was trying to get to the toilet but became disoriented. I roll the wheelchair that she forgets to use into the bathroom. I put a towel on the seat and guide her to it. “Stay right here!” I run into the hall to find a health aide. I have my period and am wearing a pad, tampons are too painful now. I feel thick blood pouring out of me as I scream for help. When we get back, my mother is on the bathroom floor. The aide and I lift her; I see a smear of red where her small head met the tiled surface. *** My gynecologist orders an ultrasound. She wants a better look at the fibroids she feels with her hand. She describes her approach as “aggressive” and recommends a hysterectomy. It will help with the pain and bloating, she says. I have a dream that the surgery leaves me permanently weakened, that my body never recovers. My Greek friend Eleni tells me about her surgery that an American doctor botched so badly, she was shitting through her vagina. Four operations in Athens corrected it. “Don’t risk it,” she warns. I won’t. *** “Where’s Charlie?” I ask Jeanine, the facility director. I haven’t seen him for a few weeks. Charlie had started sitting with me and my mother in Menorah Village’s Cafe Bistro. Recently, he had a deep wet cut on his forehead, bruising on his cheeks. His head kept drooping but periodically popped up. He looked at my mother and said, “You’re so pretty.” “What’s he saying?” My mother asked. “Oh, he died,” Jeanine tells me. “And just in time! He was such a horn dog. There was a catfight brewing among his ladies.” “My mom would never fight over a man.” I take a cup of coffee to my mother. “I heard about Charlie,” I say. “Who?” She asks. *** In my dream, my mother is cooking dinner for me and my dead father. She is holding a knife, preparing a tray of cheese and crackers. “Can I help?” I ask. I get up from the table and walk over to the counter. I grab the knife from her. The cheese becomes my finger as I slice through. I can feel the throbbing pain, a greasy liquid spreading on the butcher block. “I’ve cut myself.” I hold my hand up, blood is dripping from the missing fingertip. My mother is not surprised. “I knew you would, Rebecca. We all end up in the same place eventually.” I shake my head, no, no. “Are you prepared?” Rebecca Tiger teaches sociology at a college and in jails in Vermont. She's written a book and articles about drug policy, addiction and celebrity. Her stories have appeared in Bending Genres, BULL, Dorothy Parker's Ashes, Tiny Molecules and Zig Zag Lit.

My friend reminded me of a house fallen in disrepair. The slanting roof, the peeling paint, the gutters hanging loose. It can take ten years for a house to get this way. It took Ben less than one. Some of our friends might pretend they saw it coming. Ben always drank and smoked too much. There was a shrillness in his laughter, a forced joy, a suspicious recklessness. He drove too fast and partied too hard. I didn’t see any of the symptoms, I just loved the guy. That my parents warned me against him only added to the attraction. Of course, I can’t remember a single one of the conversations that kept us up for the better part of many nights. We lost touch after college when he moved out of state for a job. I had my own issues, being on unemployment for a while, before things got better and I was on my feet again, with a bank account that stopped flirting with zero. With my finances fixed, I called Ben and told him I’d like to see him. I could afford a plane ticket. He was reticent. That should have told me something. “I don’t know, Harry,” he said. “It’s a long trip.” “I miss you, man.” He relented. I would go over for Thanksgiving. The moment I emerged from the subway and saw what Ben’s neighborhood looked like, I knew things weren’t going well. It was gray and drizzling, and whatever was supposed to be green was either brown or bald. The rows of brick houses and the graffiti-stamped storefronts and blind walls might have a quirky dystopian appeal at night, but on this miserable day there was none of that. I crossed a litter-strewn square to find Ben’s street. He rented an apartment on the ground floor of an old three-story soot-encrusted house. A minuscule garden was in front, grimy broken flagstones over dirt. A discarded rusty tricycle lay on its side in a corner. Garbage bins were jammed in the other. I rang the bottom bell. There were no names on any of the labels. I feared the worst and saw it standing stooped in front of me. Ben was unkempt, unshaven, skin tinted gray, dark mop of hair greasy. He was too thin, the sharp angles of his face so prominent they hurt. He looked sick. After a hesitation, like he needed the time to get me in focus, he hugged me. I felt his fingers dig deep in my shoulders. He stank of cigarette smoke and liquor. My throat locked. “It’s good to see you, bud,” I mumbled. We followed a gloomy hallway. The staircase leading to the upper apartments was in darkness. I heard a door slam shut somewhere. A lingering smell of stale fried food and bleach reminded me of a school cafeteria. Ben’s rental unit was messy. Like his college lodgings used to be. In a twisted way, that was reassuring. “Sorry, it’s a dump,” Ben said. A narrow kitchen was fitted with a two-burner stove and a fridge that belonged in an RV, uneven shelves instead of kitchen cabinets, mismatched crockery, grubby pans. The main space was sitting room, dining room, and bedroom, all in one. The bathroom was next to the kitchen. It needed industrial strength scrubbing. “The plumbing is from before they invented plumbing,” he said. “I’ll take the couch, you can have the futon.” I wasn’t eager to slip between Ben’s sheets. The couch it would be. He didn’t insist. After peering into the fridge, I offered to cook dinner. I had only seen dodgy bars and fast food joints on the way over. Ben gave me directions to the nearest grocery store and said he would clean up while I was away. The expression on my face must have told him all he needed to know. I fixed us an approximation of a Thanksgiving dinner, as best I could with two burners and a microwave. A feast it wasn’t. Then we sat down for one of our long conversations. “You never told me about that job of yours,” I said. “I’m not sure what you do either.” “I work for a small construction firm. I do a bit of everything, checking the books, following up with contractors, placing ads. It was fun at first, finding out how these places function, but I’m looking for something else. I’ve seen all there is to see. I was bored out of my mind after six months. What about your gig?” Ben lit a cigarette with an unsteady hand. He’d been drinking heavily through dinner, and had now switched from wine to the whisky I brought. “Mother did the introduction,” he said. “It wasn’t what I expected.” I cringed. He was too old to have mom go job hunting for him. It reeked of Halloween trick-or-treat supervision. “What do you mean, not what you expected?” “She said it was office work.” He laughed. I didn’t like the sound of it. “It’s accurate, so fucking accurate, I can’t help cackling like a mad duck. She set me up, Harry, and I fell for it. I should have asked for details, contact the manager, anything but trust her.” I’d met his mother a few times. She was the kind of woman made for glossy magazines. Strikingly beautiful, a perfect haughty face with a cruel mouth and a hard disposition. A Spartan mother that told her son to come back a winner or not at all. She’d have done wonders in a dungeon. I never believed in the whip as a motivational instrument, but I could shrug it off, I wasn’t the one getting lashed. I thought Ben was strong enough to ignore her mean taunts. He graduated college in the middle of the pack, not a stellar result, but he finished when many didn’t. “What did she get you into?” He knocked back his drink and immediately refilled it. “I told you. Office work. She got me a job as a janitor.” “You gotta be kidding.” It had to be a joke. “You took it?” I couldn’t believe he was that desperate for money. I made do with my unemployment stipend, moved back home for a while, tutored kids on the side. Ben could have done the same. He sniggered. “I agreed to mop floors. It was that or flipping burgers. I thought it would be for a few weeks until I found another job somewhere. There wasn’t any. Now I’m here, stuck, in this lousy crib that costs too much, because I’m too proud to go home, bow to the queen, and watch her laugh at me in front of her snooty friends.” He leaned back on the couch, stared at the cracked ceiling. “My mother is a monster, Harry. If I go back home, I’ll die.” I wasn’t sure he would make it very long in this town either. How often did he go to work hungover? His boss was bound to kick him out, he would miss paying the rent and end on the street, or he would add dope to his liquid regimen, and then what? It didn’t take superhuman foresight to see disaster looming. “Do you have friends around here, a girl?” He let out that rankling laughter again. Ben was a gregarious animal, at his best in a group, borderline needy, eager for the attention of others. Unlike me, he wasn’t the kind that relished solitude. We were four kids at home. I couldn’t wait to be alone. Ben was an only child. “You have to get out of here,” I said. “There’s other options than your mother.” “At least, here, nobody knows me,” he said. “Nobody cares that my life is a shit show.” I told him about meeting a high school friend at the temp agency. After the initial flush of humiliation, we had a cup of coffee together. She had a degree in chemistry and was as stranded as I was. There wasn’t anything at the temp agency for either of us. She said she was up for a bartender gig, putting her mixing dexterity to good use. We ended up having a good time. “That’s okay for you, I suppose,” Ben said. “It’s late. I’m wiped.” I wouldn’t get anything more from him that night. # When I woke up, Ben was gone. He’d left me a key for the apartment with a terse note: Back at 5. After another peek at the bathroom, I knew what to do. Cleaning supplies were scarce, and I made another trip to the store. After a couple of hours of strenuous work, the place was still ugly but livable. I’d earned my shower. Like the day before, I cooked dinner. I could see the irony. Ben was running from his mother and I was becoming mine. When things turned dire, she baked. All the domestic activity had given me time to think about Ben’s predicament. He showed up around seven. He had been drinking already. He gave a cursory look at the apartment, at the table that was set for dinner. “We should swap jobs,” he said, “you’re better at cleaning than I am.” I let the jibe slide. We ate in silence. He finished his plate. “You’re coming home with me,” I said, after I cleared the table. “You’re falling to pieces and I won’t have it.” He munched on that for a while. “What was the point of putting the apartment in order if I’m leaving?” “You’ll get your deposit back.” “Won’t pay for the plane ticket.” “We’ll take the bus.” We didn’t have to. The return part of Ben’s original plane ticket was valid for another week. I had no idea how the living arrangements would work, or if I was setting myself up for an abysmal failure. We had traveled extensively together in the past. Rough backpacking and some crazy stuff. This had to be smoother. Our friendship was still there, if slightly bruised. # The first weeks were tough on both of us. Ben saw me leave for work every morning and instead of motivating him to get off his ass, it depressed him. He was cutting down on the booze and that didn’t improve his mood. Then he landed a job doing deliveries for a florist. On a whim, during college, he’d gotten a commercial driving license and it came in handy. Drinking was now out of the question. Soon after, a limo company hired him. They paid a lot better and he bought a secondhand car. “I found an apartment,” he said, one evening. “It isn’t much but it’s in a decent part of town. It’ll do until I get more rides. The boss promised to move me to full-time.” I didn’t remind him that he had a BA in Marketing and could do better than shuttling people to the airport. I kept my mouth shut, it would have made me sound like his mother. Besides, I wasn’t doing that well myself, still at the construction firm, lining up interviews that so far hadn’t panned out. “I know what you think,” Ben said. “The limo service is just a pit stop, I’m well aware. Thanks for pulling my head out of the muck. I’m taking you out to dinner tonight.” We settled into a loose routine. Lunch or dinner once a week, when our schedules matched. Ben was his old self again. We even double-dated a few times. I was more serious about my girl than he was about his, as had been the case in college. We were reverting to old habits and that was good. Five months later, he called me at the office—I was working for an ad agency then, finally getting where I wanted to be—and said we needed to talk. We met at my place. I couldn’t read Ben. He was in a state of extreme agitation, talking a wild streak, his hands flying every which way. Something about the airport, a limo, an elderly lady. Emotions collided on his face. I couldn’t tell if he was in a panic, overjoyed, or high on something. “Slow down. Take a breath.” He threw his hands in the air. “Okay, okay. I need a drink.” “You working tomorrow?” “Yeah, but it’s fine, just one.” He ran a hand through his hair. “Please, Harry.” I poured him a whisky, watered it down. He knocked it back like a tequila shot. “Better. Okay. So I go to the airport to pick up this lady. Very nice. White hair, like a grandma in a Christmas movie. I put the address in the nav and my heart stopped. I swear, Harry. The worst. She lived right next to my mother. I thought I would faint. Anxiety attack. Big time.” He had avoided going near the place since I brought him back. We had excised her from our conversations, from his life, and he was so much the better for it. “I couldn’t leave the lady at the airport, so I buckled up and went. I mean, it’s not like the houses are close. You know how much property she owns, all that open land she bought to make sure nobody could block her view, ever. I figured, no sweat, I’ll stay clear.” He sighed and handed me his glass. What I gave him was so weak, I didn’t see the harm in pouring him another one of the same vintage. “So, I get there, and it’s safe. The lady gives me a big tip. She doesn’t have to do that, it’s all prepaid. It’s my last ride for the day, I can go back to the garage, no hurry, right?” I caught myself holding my breath. What happened next? Did Ben run into his mother jogging, walking the dog, whatever? “I drove a little ways, then I saw the path that leads behind the house. You remember? We called it the escape route.” I remembered. A gravel track snaked through the trees and a fallow field, before offering a stunning view of the back of the house and the long span of tall glass windows that turned the inside into either an aquarium or a museum display case. “I couldn’t help it,” Ben said. “I parked the limo. I had to go.” He took a measured sip of the drink. “You’re a lousy bartender, Harry.” He took a deep breath. “Mother was having a party. Twenty people or so. Cocktail dresses, dark suits. The usual. I watched. It was like a movie I’d seen too many times.” I was helpless to stop the feeling of dread that made me shiver. “What did you do?” Ben shrugged as if it was of no importance whatsoever. “I waited till the guests were gone.” I grabbed a glass and poured myself a drink. I didn’t waterlog that one. I pictured Ben loping toward the house, his long legs covering the distance in no time at all, sliding one of the doors—I knew they opened smoothly—and confronting his mother. Any of the modern art sculptures on display would make a suitable weapon. The shiver was now a whole-body freeze. “She wore a dress I’d never seen before. Purple. The imperial color. It’s so appropriate, don’t you think?” Ben took another sip of the pale whisky. “Tastes like piss, Harry.” He stood up and went to the bar. He added a slosh of alcohol and gave the fresh drink a taste. “That’s better. A manly drink.” He laughed. “What did you do?” I muttered. The words were sticking to my tongue. “I watched her walk the entire length of the house, behind these glass walls, like a specimen under the microscope. She went back and forth for the longest time.” Ben fell silent. I couldn’t say another word. I had no breath left. He drank his whisky slowly, taking the time to taste it. “She turned off the lights, one by one. End of the show, goodbye. The light went on in the bedroom at the end of the glass wall, and then it went off, like the others, after what felt like forever.” It felt like forever in my apartment too. Ben hiked his shoulders. “I left.” “What?” I was so prepped for a scene of carnage that the sudden drop in tension made me woozy. “I left. That’s why I needed to share with you tonight, Harry. It was so clear to me. How weak she is, how useless and irrelevant, how fake and lonely.” He stood up and leaned on the back of the couch. “I’ve been blind for so long. Not seeing how small she really is. I let her beat me into the ground, pick me apart. I was like the gravel of our escape route, Harry. Broken pieces, rubble. She’s my mother but that doesn’t mean anything. Biology is mechanical. A stupid soulless contraption.” He paused to catch his breath. “I’m free.” He straightened up and raised an arm like Caesar on the rostra delivering a speech. “I disown her. I cast her off. May she rot in hell.” It was the closest I ever got to an exorcism and I wanted to applaud. ### M.E. Proctor was born in Brussels and lives in Texas. Her short story collection Family and Other Ailments (from Wordwooze Publishing) is available in all the usual places. She’s currently working on a contemporary PI series. Her short fiction has appeared in Vautrin, Bristol Noir, Pulp Modern, Mystery Tribune, Reckon Review, Shotgun Honey, and Thriller Magazine among others. She’s a Derringer nominee. Website: www.shawmystery.com

Her Name is Grace She sits on top of a mountain, crosses her legs and bounces a free foot in the air, fields are barren in the valley below, skin cracked and broken pot-bellied kids wail, a ferociousness not even a mother can stem. She blows hot air to the heavens, tossing the clouds drags painted fingernails across the scorched earth, gauging it like a checkerboard. Fat drops fall from the sky torrents of rain, rivers flow down the mountain, filling the cracks and crevices. She bangs her cymbals, cries through the night and when dawn breaks, the sun’s blushing rays bounce off newborn ponds and lakes, streams meander, smiling at the running children, their laughter separating and connecting life, mercy to the earth yet again. Ready, now It’s Friday night, late I boot up a DVD, so last century the screen flickers, a flash, memories caught in time me, draped in white silk, toes squished into Jimmy Cho’s. You, that smile, a penguin, hands reaching out to mine. To love and cherish forever. When did the trouble begin? Not during takeoff, the airport, a honeymoon of white sand and whispered promises. Our first apartment? New jobs, my dream of promotion, never satisfied crusty dishes and dirty laundry left unattended no space for feelings better off held inside. The bigger place, then? We gave it our best shot back porch sunsets, fancy drinks, birds wheeling overhead, ice cream at the kitchen table, a sugar explosion Was that us? Me? The laughter? I sniff, turn down the volume Maybe another version of myself. I slipped the ring off my finger in the driveway seconds after you left but I’ve worn it ever since lost in a fog, all work, in search of more success, burnt out it hurts, my faults, money big and real, drunk in emptiness. I pick up the phone stumble, apologize fresher, a newer me hoping time can give us another chance. Karen is a writer from Ontario, Canada, who splits her time living in the solitude of Buckhorn and bustling downtown Toronto. She has three published poems by Roi Faineant Press, one by Paddler Press, and one mystery novel, The Dime Box. A new writer with an insatiable curiosity to learn, she can be found on social at T: @kgrose2 or www.karengrose.ca

On the days when I have miscalculated our groceries and we are unable to run to the closest store, my partner and I often decide to buy a meal at a nearby Nepalese Indian restaurant. I always order the same items: paneer tikka masala, mittelscharf, and a butter naan. The restaurant is not easily accessible by train. Before my partner purchased an e-bike, we used to walk fifteen minutes to the stop, where the wait for the train is longer than the actual trip to the restaurant, a special place for us. We might begrudgingly leave our apartment, but the destination gives us a reprieve from the problems that await us during the incoming work week, especially for my partner, a professor who holds the unwanted distinction of being a state employee. Universities in Germany are nefarious emanations of the disorganized and inhospitable state. On Sundays, grocery stores, shops, and general office businesses are closed, a cultural trait that makes Germans proudly boast of their work-life balance. Sundays, they will say, are a quiet day for rest—ruhezeit they call it. Yet such proclamations only describe a particular type of expectant Germans and assume a homogenized work culture, especially in hospitality. While stores are indeed closed on Sundays, there are many restaurants that remain open. Are they not allowed to rest? I ask myself when I’m on a walk nearby and see these restaurants on those purported quiet Sundays. Writing against Kant’s uncritical universal hospitality, Jacques Derrida observed that all forms of hospitality are based upon an assumed condition of perpetual peace, that even the idea of universal hospitality can only be guaranteed and expected under certain conditions.(1) Roles of the visitor, the host, the guest, the foreigner, the citizen, the transient, and the undocumented are classified under the cold, surveilling eyes of nation-states and countries. -------------- 1. Of Hospitality. Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida To Respond. Translated by Rachel Bowlby. (Stanford University Press, 2000). The banal rights discourse, then, becomes convoluted under these state-sanctioned regulations of who is allowed to stay, who can only visit, and even who cannot enter at all. Within these ethical concerns of hospitality and its roles, we can also ask, who is allowed to rest on Sunday? ~ We haven’t dined inside of a restaurant since the pandemic. In the winter, we pick up our takeaway order on my partner’s e-bike, designed for two people. Those bike rides during the early evenings can be quite chilly, but I try to keep warm by placing my hands in my partner’s coat pockets. Despite the design of the bike, car drivers and passengers must think we are a laughable sight. I see a lot of their peculiar and amused looks. I usually wave at them, unsmiling. They never wave back. Once, on a different route, we passed the police station, where a cop walking toward his car said something loudly. His tone was not kind, but he didn’t appear to ask us to halt. So my partner rode away from the ominous building. At a traffic light, we heard his voice heckle us again. We turned to our left and saw a cop car on the street. He continued to raise his voice at us. His colleague, a woman, was the driver and wore the same stern expression. When he realized we were unable to respond in German, he switched to fragmented English. One person on a bike, he said. I just stared at him, confused at what he was trying to communicate. My partner, who doesn’t fare so well during confrontations, finally spoke. When he did, it was utterly so banal and so obvious that I almost scoffed. The bike seats two people. The cop observed the bike with a critical eye again before they drove off. I have never seen a cop chase electric scooters that held two, even three, people. Those scooters, I know, are not designed for multiple person use. I went inside, leaving my partner to stand out in the cold. He didn’t want to spend all of the extra effort locking up his bike when I was picking up an order. Inside, there were a few occupied tables since opening half an hour ago.  The dinner crowd hadn’t yet appeared. At the bar, our young friend was speaking German on the phone. To me, he spoke English. We had been customers at his restaurant for a year now, yet we didn’t know each other’s names. Formal introductions never came up. I assumed it was a family-run restaurant but didn’t know his relationships with the other workers. Months ago, by chance I found out the older, stylish woman who almost always wears bright reddish pink lipstick was his mother. While he was busy transferring orders into the POS system, I stood silently waiting to make a payment. He looked up, startled, exclaiming that he thought I was his mother based on the silhouette from the corner of his eye. Your order isn’t ready, he apologized. After our usual quick chatter of how we were doing, I asked our friend if he eats butter. “Noooo,” he said, drawing out the negative word quizzically. I laughed at my imprecision. “I mean, if I baked a cake for you and the others here,” I waved a hand around the bar, “will you be able to eat something with butter and sugar?” “Oh!” our friend responded in relief, smiling. “I thought you meant, if I eat butter. I can eat butter and sugar in cakes.” I told him the next time we swing by, I’ll bring them something. I hadn’t yet decided what to bake for them, but I gave a list of the conventional baking ingredients. Flour, eggs, sugar, butter, milk, vanilla extract. “If you decide to bring us something, we’ll be happy,” our friend said. I heard a bell ring. The chef had finished my partner’s chicken momos and had placed the container at the window. I waved at him. ~ A few weeks later, I baked a lemon ricotta cake for the restaurant crew. It was simple and not too sweet. There was no icing, just a generous sprinkle of powdered sugar on the top surface. Using the sifter, I focused on trying to cover the slight crack in the center of the cake without clumping that area with too much sugar. When my partner returned from another workday at the university, I placed the cooled cake in the front basket of his bike. He fastened cords around the pie container, firmly tying it down. And we set off to the restaurant, this time bearing a gift. It was dinner time again. I rarely make it out of the apartment earlier than dinner time. I don’t have anywhere to be, no friends to meet. I spend a lot of time with my cat indoors. Our friend and his mother were standing at the bar, smiling at us walking toward them with the pie carrier. “You really brought us cake,” our friend said, amazed. “I said I would,” I reminded him. I took the cake out and gave the list of ingredients. His mother stood close to her son, looking at the cake appreciatively and softly murmuring wow. I watched her gently slide the cake off of the container and onto one of their restaurant’s white plates, the parchment paper intact. Her short, cropped hair was newly permed. Her red lipstick and beautiful gold jewelry stood out despite the dimmed lights in her restaurant. Both she and her son seemed unwilling to step away from the cake, continually speaking softly to each other in Nepalese. She looked up at me, remarking on its wonderful scent. Her son waved his hands in the air to catch more of the fragrance of the lemon. Out of habit, I turned to the dining area and was unsurprised to see the diners looking at us. Their expressions didn’t share the exuberance and joy our restaurant friends were displaying. A woman’s fork was in the air as she surveyed the scene unfolding. It was dark inside, but I didn’t think her eyes were narrowed because of the lack of lights. Months before, I had brought the same cake to a different family who operates a Thai restaurant downtown. When I came back to the outdoor table, my partner leaned across the table conspiratorially. “They,” he began, tilting his head, “watched you go inside and give chú the cake.” I only ever call our older friends uncles and aunts, and he had adopted the Vietnamese terms. “They narrated the entire scene to each other. They said, ‘She gave them a cake. That’s nice.’” “You understood their conversation in German? Is your German comprehension better today?” I glanced over his shoulder and assessed the two eating their rice dishes. “They spoke in English. One of them speaks German. Could be visitors.” He shrugged. “Was there judgment in their observation?” I was trying to make a comparison. “No. They seemed surprised because they probably don’t see customers bringing food to restaurant workers.” Before we left the Nepalese Indian restaurant, our friend said he wanted to give us a gift in return. He opened the refrigerator and handed me a container of mango juice. Out of habit, my first inclination was to decline the gift, but I wanted to avoid the performance of the back-and-forth gift wars. I needed to get away from the spectators, so I thanked him for the juice. As we walked toward the door, I noticed the woman continued to stare at our every movement. She leaned over to her companion and whispered something as I stared back at her with an arch of my left eyebrow. ~ My enjoyment of cooking in the apartment comes and goes in unexpected waves. Some days, I cook dinner consecutively for three days, making good use of our groceries. There are many other days I force myself to get up to prepare something for us. There are times when my partner returns home from the university and he winds up cooking something in haste. I once remarked that we should buy frozen food in case of emergencies when neither of us have the energy to rise from the bed or the couch. There’s a discount store right down the street from us, barely three minutes away. He responded rather tersely, that the refrigerator space is much too small. The freezer is even smaller and can barely store one box of frozen pizza. On another Sunday, we returned to the Nepalese Indian restaurant. For a time, my partner tried to avoid the police station, but he no longer cared. We haven’t had another encounter with another upset cop over the seating arrangements of an e-bike. Before I could return his greeting, our friend announced the cake was delicious. They’d eaten it all. “Did you eat some, too?” I asked his girlfriend, who was drying glasses. She smiled and nodded, never pausing as she continued with her task. She rarely spoke more than a few words to us, but I always tried to include her in the conversation even if I may be the only one talking. While I paid for our usual order, our friend quietly asked if I could make a cake without sugar for his father. “Your father can’t eat sugar?” He pointed to the kitchen window. I could see chú busy preparing multiple dishes. “My father ate a very small piece.” His thumb and index finger almost touched as he illustrated the size of the sample. “And he spent the night watching us eat.” All of my assumptions about the possible family tree in the restaurant were slowly crystallizing. “Sure, sure, I can try to make an apple pie without sugar for him. I’ve never made a sugarless pie before.” I looked at my partner. “Maybe I can just make the cake or pie as I would, except I wouldn’t add sugar.” Even though he wore a mask, I could tell my partner was making a face at my instant recipe consideration. “That sounds terrible,” my partner exclaimed in distaste. “Maybe you could try to use a sugar substitute?” Our friend said any fruit could be sweet enough, that I didn’t need to add an alternative. I remembered that there was leftover mixture of pecan pie in the refrigerator. I asked if he could eat pecans. I had to look up the word “nut” in German to describe it. “I am allergic,” he said, placing a hand on his throat. “But I can try to eat it.” Horrified by his extreme politeness, I decided that an apple pie would be the safest bet. I’d return with a pie baked specifically for his father, I promised before leaving. ~ My partner didn’t want to eat another pecan pie, so I decided to make one for our friends at the Thai restaurant. I prepped a pie dough on Saturday to bake the next day. We rarely take the train downtown on Sunday, unless we intentionally plan to see our friend P at the restaurant. She used to work on weekdays, but she was transitioning to another job as a nurse technician and would only be at the restaurant on Sundays. She shared this update with us when we were eating outside, after finishing her own meal indoors with the staff. The outdoor tables are arranged next to the shop’s large windows, and we can hear their cheerful Thai banter. I rarely see the chef-owner eat, but he always sits with the younger staff members when there are no orders to fulfill. As I typically do, I wonder how they all ended up in Germany, and when. The staff at the Thai restaurant had eaten one of my pies before. On Lunar New Year, a Sunday, I gave them a festive apple pie. Instead of a top crust, I had used the cookie cutter shaped as a cat to arrange five large cats on top. It was the year of the cat after all. We almost didn’t make it out. News about the mass shooting in Monterey Park, California, the day before had finally circulated on my news feed. The communities there had been celebrating an all-day Lunar New Year Festival. The apple pie had been cooling on the wire for some time. I didn’t want to leave the apartment, the space that I hesitated to call safe but which distanced me from the rest of the world, including our German neighbors. “Maybe we can give them the pie tomorrow,” I said to my partner. He was already dressed. I hadn’t even taken a shower after our run. I forgot the restaurant was closed on Mondays. And we barely had enough ingredients for sandwiches. I finally did get dressed, deliberately choosing a red jumpsuit and wore gold bangles and gold earrings. My color choices resembled a lì xí, the customary red envelope with money I used to receive from my parents. I hadn’t received a red envelope for years. My father used to mail me one, a ritual that lasted for six years until he passed away. I received his last lì xí when I lived in Boston for two years during my master’s program. The sun had gone down hours ago. At the train stop, my partner called in our order. I think he was slightly cross with me, at my indecision. And his blood sugar was low. The restaurant was packed. P was standing at the cash register when I presented the pie to her. It seemed that the entire staff had stopped working. The dishwasher peeked out from his small workspace and I waved at him. “Apple pie,” I announced. “Apple…pie,” she repeated. She looked up at me with her delicate features. Her long, silky black hair was brushed into a ponytail and she wore a black top and light blue jeans, her usual restaurant work uniform. “Like apfelkuchen, but it’s American apple pie,” I tried to explain. There is no word for pie in German, and the best word to replace it was kuchen, the German word for cake. “It’s for all of you.” I pointed to the slightly too golden brown cats. “These are supposed to be cats, for Year of the Cat.” “Year of cats?” “Do you celebrate the Lunar New Year?” “Oh! No, we don’t. But that’s okay. We will enjoy the pie.” P brought pie to the kitchen prep area and gracefully popped the pie out of its dish. “This is so nice,” I could hear her say in the kitchen. She handed the now empty dish to the dishwasher, who caught my eye and pointed his thumb upward. I nodded. I tried to pay for my tofu massaman curry and his tofu pad Thai, but P said chú wouldn’t allow the transaction. I insisted so much that chú stopped his cooking and came over and said in English, “no pay. Next time.” I heard his wife say something from behind me. I turned to her direction. She was sitting by herself at the table directly across from the bar. As always, she was immaculately dressed in designer clothes and heels, and her hair was pulled back into a bun. Not a strand of hair was out of place. “Pay next time. But don’t bring another kuchen, then we let you pay,” she said, laughter in her tone. I grumbled my acquiescence and placed my debit card back into my wallet. As we waited for the order to be packed, I saw a man with grey hair move his eyes from the aunty and to me, back and forth. He wasn’t even trying to be discreet. He mumbled something to himself, shook his head, and drained his beer. His entire expression was neither curious nor happy, but one of ambivalence that bordered in disgust. All of their clients were white Germans, seeking hospitality in a Thai-owned restaurant on the designated day of rest. They were allowed to be raucous and loud. I wasn’t. They made the rules. I had to follow them. The invasion of whiteness in non-white designated spaces makes the space even more unbearable. I felt suffocated by them, in this space that I appreciated and adored. I needed to leave, to grieve. When we returned to the apartment, I spooned some rice into a bowl and some of the massaman curry onto a plate. The food had cooled significantly, a usual trait of our takeaway orders. On another plate, I cut a small slice of apple pie. I chose only my bright red melamine plateware, hoping to add some festive spirit onto the black cooking range, my makeshift altar table. I placed three pairs of off-white melamine chopsticks at the center of the food and clasped my hands in prayer. I had remembered to include the spirits of my elder sister and brother. Ba, chị hai, anh ba, the year started badly, but I still wish for a better year. I hope you enjoy the food. The curry was a gift from a restaurant. I usually kept my prayers short. I never knew what to ask for and how much from my family, especially from my sister and brother. We were strangers, having never been fortunate enough to meet in this lifetime. We didn’t see P for many months since that Sunday in January, until we arrived with the pecan pie. It was lunchtime, and the restaurant was packed, indoors and out. Chú enthusiastically greeted me without stopping his cooking. “Pecan pie.” I thought better of it. “Kuchen mit…nuss,” I tried to translate. “I’ve never had anything like this,” P said gazing at the smaller pie. The crust was misshapen, some of its sides were more prominent than others. “It’s one of my favorites,” my partner endorsed. He seems to only ever call pies I make during the winter holidays as favorites. P dropped off the pie at the kitchen prep and I saw one of the dishwashers taking it out of the pan. I knew he’d wash the glass dish, so I waited. His peer stepped out and we communicated with our usual gestures. He gave me his approval, holding up a piece of the pie. “Do you want to eat here?” P asked. She surveyed the outdoor seating, and I followed her gaze. All three of the outdoor tables were occupied. “Not today,” I responded. “Next time.” P nodded her understanding. “See you next time!” I haven’t seen P since that busy Sunday. ~ The night before I left for London, I baked both a sugarless apple pie and a pan of spinach lasagna. A few months ago, I had agreed to be a panelist on a writing workshop aimed at Ph.D. students writing their doctoral theses. At the time, I had officially left my Ph.D. program in Germany and, with the support of my mentors, was looking into other options. I tried to keep my CV active. The pan of lasagna should last him for a couple of days if he didn’t want to leave the apartment or even cook for himself. He came home upset, after enduring yet another infuriating meeting. The pie was done. I hadn’t researched any sugar alternatives and had decided to keep it simple. I had omitted all sugar and prepared the pie as I would. The top crust was a lovely golden color from the egg wash, but it lacked its usual sparkles from the sugar and cinnamon mix. But dinner wasn’t finished. The lasagna had only been in the oven for about fifteen minutes when he came home and recounted the meeting. He spoke louder than usual. I have heard it all before. Cruel professors. Unsupported students. A messy bureaucratic system that enabled administrators to treat their work casually while harming students desperately waiting to hear back. The students were on a tight schedule. The university workers were not. Both sides were buried in paperwork, but only one category of people did not have to worry about days and months. And so I listened as we stood in the kitchen, leaning on the counters. When there was nothing left to say, he stopped talking and stared into the oven. Apologetically, I asked if he could bike to the restaurant and give them the pie. I had miscalculated the time, and I had to watch the lasagna. And perhaps the trip would cool him off. “How’d you make the pie?” “No sugar.” Before he could protest, I quickly added, “The apples were very sweet. I sampled a slice from every apple.” He left. Fifteen minutes later, I received a text message. “I think we were just invited to their wedding.” I responded with a row of question marks. He came home with a Styrofoam container of chicken momos. The chef had boxed up a dozen dumplings that he deemed as unpresentable to paying guests. In between bites of the dumplings, my partner recapped what had happened. He found out our friend’s name was B, that his wedding was soon and was planned spontaneously. “When he took the pie to his father, he said he considered us his family.” Barely half an hour had passed, and my partner’s cadence changed. He seemed happier. “Pies make us part of their family?” I laughed at the oddly framed gesture to kinship. “That’s nice.” “The wedding will be at their restaurant, later this month.” Their celebration coincided on Pfingstmontag, the seventh Monday after Easter. Germans celebrate many religious observances. We know a holiday is the only possible answer to explain a seemingly random closure of a store’s usual operating day. There are no signs on the windows or doors, but the knowledge is assumed. My partner once came home after a quick walk to the discount store empty-handed on a Saturday. It was another holiday. “I was standing outside with some of the Turkish families who live across the street. We just stood in front of the door staring at each other. Only Germans would know that stores would be closed,” he unnecessarily commented. I wondered if our friends picked May 29 for their wedding because their friends would be off of work. Monday, too, was the day their restaurant closed. I assumed they would be open on Sunday as usual, another workday for our friends. ~ I returned to Germany from London on a Sunday. Ruhezeit must not be observed on the Hauptbahnhof. Noise traveled with me, beginning from the bustling London Underground to the airports to the Hauptbahnhof in downtown. Excited travelers, or excited Germans returning to their homes. Something changed when I finally sat on the train toward Lahe, my stop. As we crept closer to my stop, the noise ordinance seemed to be put in place. The few passengers in my cabin grew silent, even those who came in chattering. It was a couple of hours before midnight when I entered the eerily noiseless apartment building. I pushed the button and grimaced when I heard the elevator come to life loudly. As I unpacked, my partner told me about a procession that took place earlier that day, in the afternoon. Across the street, a Turkish family celebrated very loudly, very joyfully, and very colorfully. Musicians were banging on drums and playing traditional instruments as they walked to the wedding ceremony. He described the array of bright colors the wedding party adorned, in contrast to the usual neutral palette we tend to see on the streets. “Everyone in this complex was looking outside, to see what the commotion was,” he said, almost gleefully. “Some of the neighbors opened their blinds to poke their heads out. They didn’t look happy. Even the cars on the street were driving slowly, trying to make sense of what was happening.” “No one shouted at them, did they?” Germans expect others to follow the rules while they themselves are exempted. There have been many Sunday nights when we hear tenants on the first-floor party for hours into the morning. They had loudly blasted AC/DC on repeat. “I didn’t see anyone do anything. But you know what they were thinking.” “If B’s wedding is at the restaurant, it shouldn’t be a problem,” I said thoughtfully. Our cat had decided to sleep in the now empty, unzipped suitcase. “The location is in a business outlet.” “You know people here are unreasonable.” I had walked by the apartment building before crossing the street to my complex. Even in the dark, I didn’t see the remains of a wedding celebration from residents in Germany. No flower petals, no confetti, nor no signs of the color my partner had witnessed. Everything had looked the same as when I left the neighborhood and the country a few days ago. There’s a common misreading of Derrida. Readers cling to his aspiration of a universal hospitality, a traveler’s world, that hospitality is borderless. But they ignore his underlying complaint, about the state-enforced asymmetry faced by those who are not welcomed. Anna Nguyen abandoned her Ph.D. studies and is now an MFA student in Creative Nonfiction at the Stonecoast Program at the University of Southern Maine. She likes to blend theoretical creative non-fiction while thinking about food, science, and the mundane without enforcing academic conventions. She hosts a podcast, Critical Literary Consumption.

Sometimes, I wonder which stories are really mine to tell. Take, for instance, the night Raul thought the devil had climbed inside his cross necklace. The two of us were at this abandoned church out on FM 134, on the outskirts of Newell, next to a creek that’s been dried up since before my grandparents were born, even though it still shows up as a faint blue line on all the topographical maps. The church didn’t even look that much like a church—from the outside, you’d think it was an abandoned barn instead, with mildewed wood on each side and corrugated metal covering what had once been windows. It was a tradition in our town—going back to at least the 80s—to drive out there, pry the metal out of the way, and crawl inside. The rumor was that little ghosts were floating through the place and if you took a picture, you’d see the proof in the little orbs dotting the photo. The illuminated eyes of the dead, a girl at school said once. I didn’t believe it—it was pretty clear to me those “orbs” were just specks of dust reacting to the camera flash—but Raul did. It had to be haunted, he said, and we had to go check it out, experience it for ourselves. That wasn’t the only rumor about the place, though. My friend Christine, her older brother had told her that satanists sacrifice goats inside the place, that it was some kind of portal to hell. Someone else said that the Klan met out there and used the ghost story as cover to keep people away. Still others said it was just a building. The truth’s probably in there somewhere. *** Months before that, I was with Raul and his family at Mardi Gras in Galveston. His parents had been collecting beads for seventeen years, since the first Fat Tuesday after he was born. Raul told me a lot of crazy stuff went down on the Strand, but they weren’t there for any of that. Ignore all the debauchery. We were there for beads, and we’d be crawling under parked cars and sticking our hands into storm drains to get as many as we could. “All we do is collect things,” Raul said. “We’ve got a whole cabinet full of those free AOL disks that used to come in the mail. Dad says one day they’ll be antiques and we can get rich selling them.” “Is that why y’all are getting all these beads? To sell?” “I don’t know. I think we’re going to put together a Mardi Gras tree. It’s like a Christmas tree, but you take all the ornaments off and throw a bunch of beads on. Mom keeps talking about putting it up one of these years.” “My dad used to collect baseball cards. We have like six years of full Topps sets in the closet. He says it's my inheritance.” “It runs in our blood. My nana collects crosses and rosaries. She took them all with her a few years back when she went to the Vatican. Stuffed her pockets full and went to the Pope’s daily address, so when he blessed everyone there, all of ‘em became sacred.” *** I drove that night. Raul was conflicted about going, even though it’d been his idea in the first place. I guess he was scared something would go wrong out there. I told him we needed to have this experience together, before we graduated and went our separate ways. When we got there, we pulled into the ditch, right outside the fence that surrounded the land, and sat in the car for fifteen minutes, trying to psych ourselves up to get out. I don’t know about Raul, but my mind was going every which way. I didn’t believe in ghosts, but I did believe in things, like, getting arrested for trespassing, or getting shot if there really were some redneck satanists inside. Finally, we exited the car. There was a cemetery beside the church, with broken headstones dotting the night. I didn’t know it then, but years later, visiting home for the holidays, I’d go back to that church and scoop up dirt from that graveyard to give to a friend I met in college who collected unique jars of dirt. It was daytime when I did that though—the whole place looked different, freed from the pall that night throws over everything. We barely took note of the cemetery that night, though. Instead, we walked over to the church itself and stared at the metal that covered the windows. I wanted to climb inside, get it all over with. I looked over at Raul and he was shaking a little. It wasn’t cold out. I couldn’t tell what that meant until he finally said something. “I think I’m doing it. I’m going in.” “Alright,” I said. “Let’s get this window open.” I grabbed a fallen tree limb and started to pry at the edge of the metal. It moved easily—we weren’t the first people to do this. Probably not even the first that week. Raul asked me if I had a flashlight. I didn’t, but I held my phone out to him, the blue screen glowed enough to give us at least a little bit of light. He put the phone through the hole in the window, lighting enough of a space to ensure we knew what we were crawling into. Once we both made it through the window, he turned to me. “I’m scared,” he whispered. “I’m fucking scared, bro.” We moved the metal slab mostly back into place, leaving just enough of an opening that some of the moon could shine through, giving us a little more light. Even though I’d seen some of the pictures people took, none of them had been expansive enough for me to get a real sense of that room. To even know if it was really an old church. But there were the pews, all hammered together out of wood that had long been rotting. “There’s an energy here,” Raul said. “I think Christine’s brother’s right about the satanists.” “Just kind of seems like an abandoned building,” I said. “I don’t see goat blood or anything.” “Bro, they probably cleaned it up after.” “My dad hunts. Blood ain’t easy to clean up.” “There’s some weird shit here.” He started to shake and it was clear something about that space was freaking him out and that we’d quickly reached a point where there was no use trying to reason with him. He turned toward me, then suddenly put both hands on his throat, the cross necklace held between his index finger and thumb. “It’s not strong enough.” “What are you talking about?” “My cross. It ain’t strong enough. I’m not blessed enough, man.” “Maybe we need to get out of here.” I stepped toward the window, but Raul wasn’t moving. His hands were still at his throat and he was looking up at the ceiling. I grabbed his arm and started trying to pull him. He was just dead weight. It took all the strength I had to shove him back out the window. He crashed to the dirt below, then sat up. “Take it off,” he said, pointing to the necklace, so I pulled it over his head and tossed it to the ground. Almost instantly, his body relaxed. “We’re leaving,” he said. “Right the fuck now.” He took off running toward the car, leaving the necklace there on the ground. *** I dropped Raul off at his parent’s house. He was silent the entire drive—didn’t even say bye when he got out of the car. It was weird. I knew he was pretty religious, but I didn’t know he was thought-the-devil-was-possessing-a-necklace religious. I hadn’t seen a thing inside that church, but he seemed to have felt something. I don’t know if he was just scaring himself or if there really was something else there, some kind of spirit. I was a couple blocks from home when I remembered we’d left his necklace back at the church. I figured that since it was one of the ones that his grandmother had gotten blessed, I should probably go get it back. Once he got over whatever had happened, he’d probably still want it, so I pulled a U-turn and headed back toward FM 134. When I got back to the church, it was just as quiet as it had been before. I pulled back into the same ditch and got out of the car. Went back over by the window where I’d thrown the necklace down. The only light I had was my cell phone screen and the moon but I was pretty sure I remembered exactly where I’d tossed it, so I thought it’d be easy to find. I was wrong. After ten minutes, I started to wonder if Raul’d been right. If it had been possessed and had just drifted away. The image of that was enough to make me laugh out loud, right there in front of this abandoned church. Then came five more minutes of fruitless searching before I gave up and left. *** Raul wasn’t at school Monday. Or Tuesday. When he finally showed back up Wednesday he acted like he didn’t want anything to do with me—he sat with a different friend group at lunch and when I asked if he wanted to head over to Nighthawks to grab a burger after school, he said he was busy. It wasn’t until Friday that he finally started to act like himself. “Everything good?” I asked him when he came up to my locker after history class. “Sorry about this last week, bro. I’ve just been out of it.” “Want to talk about it?” “Yeah. Can you give me a ride home?” I waited for him at my car after the final bell, and for a couple minutes, I started to think he wasn’t going to show until I saw him shuffling out of a side door. “I’m nervous ‘bout getting back in this car,” he said. He hesitated for a second, then finally pulled open the passenger door. “You got real spooked when we were out there.” “I never want to talk about this again after today, okay?” “No problem, man.” “I just knew as soon as we stepped inside that something was wrong. My necklace was getting real heavy. And then I looked over at you and I could just see it.” “See what?” “I don’t know. Some, like, dark red mist sneaking up behind you. I thought the devil fucking had you, man. Like you were a goner. I touched the cross and just thought about being strong and I guess whatever entity that was there heard me, because it went past you and came right for me. If you hadn’t been there to drag me out and cast that shit off, who fucking knows. I could be dead. Or possessed. It was scary.” I didn’t tell him I went back to find that necklace. I could tell then that he wouldn’t have taken it back anyways. We spent the rest of the ride back to his place talking about football. We never spoke of the night again—just moved forward like it never happened. I don’t want to say it was that night that made Raul and I lose touch. We hung out off and on for about a year after high school. But at some point, we just stopped meeting up. I’d come home from Austin and I’d forget to tell him I was in town, and then I’d do the same thing again, and again. He was working at his parent’s construction company then. He was going to run it one day. He used to tell me if I ever needed work, I could come drive a backhoe. I don’t know if that’s still the case. On my twenty-third birthday, I got a text from Raul, the first one in probably two years. All it said was “mom finally put up that Mardi Gras tree, happy birthday dog,” with a picture of a tree covered in beads. I texted back “haha, looks good, how you been,” and he didn’t respond. I was sitting in a bar that had a giant crucifix on the wall, but instead of Jesus’ hands being nailed to the cross, there were little Coors Light cans in each one, and that coupled with hearing from Raul took me back to that night. If his family was still collecting the beads, were they collecting the crosses too? And whatever happened to the one he lost—did he think about it still? I almost called him, but I didn’t know if there was anything else left for us to say.

ST. XAVIER’S ACADEMY The nun’s wooden ruler so big and white against my scrawny brown hands when my mind was enjoying the sleepy sky a free breeze ferried by boat-shaped clouds outside the school window And the paddle we got from Father Pinto for not sitting still was so giant that it could have steered that boat in the sky He had weary eyes All the brown bottoms he must have had to look at smiling smugly up at him DON’T MESS WITH TEXAS You shoulder these two red bars, head slumped. Your future plundered vilified because a pale seed has germinated wild in the lone-star’s property a week too many Sumit Parikh has been published in Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine. He has participated in a writing mentorship and workshops with Brian Evans-Jones, who is the Poet Laureate of Hampshire, UK, and winner of the Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award from Poets & Writers. Sumit is a pediatric neurologist and also graduated with honors in English from Case Western Reserve University.