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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).

This Sentence is False, Whether You Like It or Not   This  (1) Sentence (2)  is  (3) False (4)  ,Whether  (5) You  (6) Like (7)  It (8)  or (9)  Not (10) (1) The designation of the term “This” implies a latitude of other possible narratives that may or may not be true, something that given the context of the lack of space contained herein would be difficult, nay, impossible to promise the delivery thereof with anything approaching emotional heft, let alone meaning. (2) Sentences, being comprised of words, which are not but mere black squiggles on white space (or any other combination of contrasting colors), are implied to be impactful upon their reading by an outside observer, but not to the extent where they must be so, pursuant to personal preference. (3)   By the invocation of an existential qualifier as is used above, one must first, as the saying goes, invent the universe, a practice which can be neither celebrated nor condemned, as there is no possible frame of reference for non-existence, at least to those who hold consciousness in the manner which it is currently conceived. (4) The designation of a set of words as containing a metaphysical truth value such as false requires subjugation to a form of logical positivism that would otherwise render the above statement as a paradox, which is not the intent of those who uttered it. (5)   The introduction of a disjunction, while admirable for its opening of the possibility space of the situation to a larger context, is thusly determined to be not worth the effort, as the range of possibilities is too much for one to bear without falling victim to analysis paralysis. (6) The subjectivity implied by use of the second person implies the context of a first person, I, or a third person, they, such that the second person at the center of this “narrative” will likely be grievously offended by the nature of this long winded joke, else seeking the moment when it shall end. (7) Matters of personal opinion, given the context in which the above one is placed, are chiefly the realm of the weak-willed and illogical, and as such are best left to the experts in speaking upon matters in which they are grossly underqualified and uneducated, teenagers. (8) Again, the indefinite qualifier used as a pronoun is subject to a matter of confusion by a reader, who is likely not sure what the point of such an indulgence is, even if the answer is as simple as “Because it’s so much fun, Jan,” with little else to back it up required. (9) However, the inclusion of a self-reflective narrator at this juncture, as well as the acerbic comments left above, could imply a set of consciousnesses behind each statement, possibly the same one, who may feel some sense of guilt at attempting to cobble together meaning out of language not built to the task. (10) But again, it could all be for naught, as the original sentence contains a typo that renders the entirety of analysis that follows it moot as a result of addressing issues which were never present to begin with, as well as serving to puff up the ego of writer and reader. The Story of the Last Thing... The Story of the Last Thing I Thought Upon Waking Up this Morning and Wondering What it Was I Did that Caused Everyone I’ve Ever Loved to Suddenly Decide They Hate Me, and Moving Through the Stages of Grief in Such a Rapid Succession to Come to the True Realization That in the End They Probably Did What was Right for Them, and Only through That Recognition Coming to Realize It’s About Time to Look at Myself and Fix that Which is Broken in Me Fuck Ben Shahon is the author of the chapbooks  A Collection for No One to Read  and Short Relief . His work has appeared or is forthcoming from such magazines as Ghost Parachute, BULL, and Flash Boulevard , and he's the founding EIC of JAKE . Ben currently pushes pencils at a corpo day job on the border of LA and Orange Counties, where he lives.

Updated explainer: Composting during the zombie apocalypse It’s not just food scraps and garden waste that can be integrated into home-made compost. In this updated explainer, we detail how to incorporate zombie corpses into your compost heap, ways to keep your compost heap healthy, and get the most out of these free-to-use resources. Increasing your compost helps now that most of us have acquired our neighbours’ gardens and are reliant on home-grown produce. Quick facts Invest in a larger bin for increased organic matter. Add extra cardboard and woody prunings to soak up the increased liquid. Brains should be separated and incinerated to prevent accidental cross-contamination. There is no need to invite a religious person, it’s not a cemetery! Why incorporate zombies into your compost? Since the tinned goods many people relied on have more or less run out, it’s time to dig in and get growing! It is now well-understood that the Pandoravirus pathogen  does not spread via contact with organic matter, so we wanted to make sure that home composters feel able to incorporate the bodies of the fallen into their homemade compost. For one thing, allowing corpses to rot in situ  can attract scavenging pests – wolves, large cats, and other zombies may be drawn to them. For another, it can help you to consider them as harbingers of life rather than reminders of death.  Think of this as apocalypse-era recycling. Previously human, zombies are full of vital micronutrients for plant growth. Once destroyed, zombie corpses can easily be composted and, if done right, you’ll find you have a light, loamy soil additive ready to use in your allotment or back garden in 6-12 months, depending on your localised climate. Need heavy-duty garden equipment? Quick and efficient drone delivery, negotiable trade. Using zombies in your home compost doesn’t just bulk it up. It adds chemicals like manganese that can be absorbed by your garden produce to make great flavonoids. This extra flavour will give your home-grown produce deeper meaning and can help you connect to those you might have lost. And remember, you’re not constructing a cemetery. The souls of the zombies were lost when they turned. It would be a shame to lose their physical resources, especially after the heartache of having to dispose of their walking corpses.  Looking for a nearby morgue? Click here for the closest fully automated interments. Weekly memorial video visits. Setting up your compost bin Just as in our basic compost explainer , we suggest using two compost bins, side by side, one for fresh waste and one for current use. Wooden pallets are a great way to create larger composting spaces. You can get them from any delivery lorry after they’ve dropped off sandbags and armaments at the roadblocks. We recommend a lid with a lock for the fresh waste bin to keep out scavengers. Bodies can be heavy, so you might consider putting in a ramp to make it easier to deposit your zombie bodies in the compost bin. If you’re limited for space or struggling with the weight, you can reduce the size of the bodies before depositing them into your bins. Chainsaws: cheap, cheerful colours. Be sure to cover fresh corpses with a layer of dry material. This helps keep the pests out, reduces the amount of runoff from the compost bins, and helps to mitigate the likelihood of traumatic flashbacks. Remember to remove and incinerate the brains before composting. While there’s no evidence  this is strictly necessary, it’s a good precaution.  Regardless of how you dispose of your zombie corpses, we recommend always wearing heavy-duty leather gloves to prevent accidental transmission. Though rare, accidental bites can happen, and might wind you up in Agnes from Number 12’s compost heap.   Turning the compost This may be off-putting at first, but you’ll soon get used to it. Industrial corpse heaps have to be mechanically turned, of course, but your home compost can be managed with just a garden fork, some elbow grease, and time.  If you are unsettled by the occasional finger or humerus, you may want to ask a friend or neighbour to help with turning the compost. This can play the dual role of freshening up your compost heap and encouraging nervous gardeners to reach out and make contact with others.     Buy Pandoravirus home test kits here. Quick, easy, and practically painless to use. Alternatively, you could invest in these human-sized paper sacks  that you can place the zombie corpses in before adding them to the compost heap. If there are a lot of zombies in your neighbourhood, these can quickly become expensive, but they are effective at containing errant limbs. Turning your compost is also the perfect time to reflect on feeling connected to your lost ones. Prayer, song, quiet contemplation, rage digging. This is a good time to acknowledge your loss. We are all familiar with that feeling. Whatever you need, allow yourself this time. Download a free copy of the Guide to Meditation during the Zombie Apocalypse.   A final thought This may not be the way you saw your future playing out: a compulsory gardener locked behind fences and barricades, having to work alongside your nosy neighbour just to keep invaders at bay, and feeling like the world is always on the verge of ending. However, it’s long been acknowledged that a connection to the soil can help mental health , as well as gut health  and physical wellbeing . We recommend using this time to not just refine your composting practices, but to reconnect with the bodies of those lost, who will, in turn, nurture the food that helps both your body and mind. Roof-mounted submachine guns. 2-for-1 plus cheap frangible ammo. Guaranteed to explode on impact. Lamia Scourge  writes to process. They enjoy solitude and gardening, and are finding the new world order surprisingly palatable.

Congratulations on the purchase of your Red Shooz! In your email, you said you’d been seeking a socioeconomic boost from lack to luxury, forgettable to fameworthy, rough to royal. Fairy-tale dreams? Hardly. Your Red Shooz have already begun to liberate the beguiling, audacious   nine-year-old you truly are.  You say some downer-scolds objected to you dancing around town in your Red Shooz with a white dress, white tights, and a glossy, carmined pout. Oh they of veiled slutspeak! Blind to your blend of oozy eroticism with unspoiled innocence, they know not how they bore.  When you first approached us, you were still frumping around in high-tops and collecting isopods in the park. You gorged on robot stories and breakfast spaghetti, and chalked earnest messages onto sidewalks. You bounced obsessively on your pogo stick and recited poems to your beagle. You made origami cranes.  Now, however, no matter the moment—mid-math test at school, mid-eulogy at your uncle’s funeral, mid-meteor shower on a crisp, starlit night—you’re thinking about your Red Shooz. With this admirable focus, you join an elite few: Note the ancient Cinderella who snagged the King of Egypt with her rose-red slippers; braided Dorothy’s ascent from bumpkin to big shot in her ruby reds; Norma Jean’s apotheosis in crystal-crusted stilettos. With care and polishing, you too can become legendary—which brings us to the grievance in your support request, Case No 9814475.  We’re terribly sorry to hear of the sudden loss of your feet. While we cannot grant the refund you requested or accept liability for shoe-removal issues or any other occupational inconvenience of celebrity (Term 29f.4 on your receipt), we suggest you disable that frown muscle between your eyebrows and embrace the fabulousness of your bloody stumps. Remember, they, too, are a kind of red shoe.  Lisa K. Buchanan is still working on a charming, crassly humorous bio, but in the meantime, she lives in San Francisco and her writings can be found in CRAFT, The Citron Review, and at www.lisakbuchanan.com . Foes: people on the bus whose shoulder bags are close to my ear. Friends: people not ahead of me in line for chocolate sorbet. Heroes: public librarians. Current favorite novellas: The Employees  by Olga Ravn; Address Unknown  by Kathrine Kressmann Taylor.

It was down to me to make the announcement. I took a deep breath and then cleared my throat to get the attention of the office. Heads popped out from behind pod screens like comical gophers.      “Daryl is really sick guys, I think we should arrange to send him something, a card or flowers maybe?”   There was a stony silence. A chat notification pinged on my phone. ‘You have been added to a new chat’.   Re: Daryl Sick Lol - send flowers Jenna: Do you send flowers to a guy when they are sick?  There were numerous head shakes and shrug emojis. What happened to conversation?  Donny: Not sure of the protocol. Don’t want to send him anything that would compound the issues, or embarrass him. Zara (HR): Also we don’t want him to feel that he has been less favourably treated than someone of a different gender in the same position.  Jenna: Perhaps we should send him a cactus then, it’s a more masculine flower isn’t it?  Donny: Yes (Cactus emoji) (Donny deleted this message) replace message with a simple ‘Yes’ IT Tony: And it has longevity. They can survive without water for many months at a time. Marcia (Finance): Venmo below - I will collect - who wants to take it round IRL? Gwen (currently on mat leave) Who is Daryl please? Donny: Can’t tonight, got a thing Jenna: Nursery pick up Zara (HR): It was Jess’ idea, nominate Jess Numerous thumbs up emojis. Not from me I might add.   I returned to my desk. I don’t know why people can’t talk to each other properly anymore, they just don’t. It had been months since I actually had a real conversation with these people. I replied in the chat to say I would go. I knew this would happen. In fact, I relied on it. Perhaps they were all just as frightened of him as I was. Especially after that night with the broken spoke umbrella. It was raining hard. His words slurred over me, stinging my eyes.       “I will make it good for you at work if you want," he said. “All you have to do is step into my apartment for a while”. The office party seemed a thousand miles from this place. This moment seemed thousands of miles from anywhere. I tightened my grip on the umbrella. It was beginning to tear. There was a storm coming in. I could feel it in the cold tips of my fingers, the dark space behind my eyes. Daryl’s hair was plastering against his face. His yellowing teeth flashed a grin under the streetlight. Just for a moment, I saw the ugliness beneath his ugliness. “That’s all I have to do is it?” I replied. We both knew that was not the end of the conversation or the request, and that further requests would almost certainly follow, once inside, then demands. This was how Daryl was at work so why would he be any different now. The unnecessary lingering gazes, accidental, implied words. I wondered why he had chosen this moment. Perhaps he thought I was a little drunk on this particular evening. I guess he had thought about me more than was healthy. Maybe that was how he spent his time when he wasn’t merging, or acquiring? It hurt that the only reason he could see for promoting me was the notion of some fumbling fringe benefits he might get from it, a sordid acquisition, perhaps a merger. I was good at my job, and Daryl was sick, for sure. Just not in the way Jenna and the rest of them thought he was. The storm was really raging now, boiling down from the skies as we stepped through the doorway. I thought about crossing that threshold a lot. Was this me? If I crossed this line, this marker in the sand, what other lines was I prepared to cross? That was a week ago. I don’t want to talk about what happened that night. I am not proud of myself. Actually, I am a bit. Not for what I did, but for getting what I want for once. It’s funny. That mention of a cactus having longevity, being able to survive without sustenance for such a long time, no water, little nutrition. If they were people, it would surely drive them insane before they eventually withered and shrank back to dust. Perhaps masculinity really is toxic, a poison in the blood that chokes the good out of a person.       It was just turning dark when I took the cactus round to his apartment. The florist had insisted on wrapping it in cellophane and practically forced me to complete the ‘Get well soon’ card.   I wrote: Dear Daryl, Hopefully, you get better Sincerely - All at the office   The assistant at the shop gave me a funny look. I didn’t care. No one reads the card anyway. I let myself into Daryl’s apartment with his key. The curtains let in a little of the streetlight, the same streetlight. I switched on the table lamp and placed the stupid cactus on the dining table, disturbing a thin layer of dust. In retrospect it may have been better to have bought flowers. Something pungent, like lilies or gardenia. It was my responsibility, my duty, especially as I was now covering for his absence. I am still ambitious, and I don’t mind getting my hands dirty. That was the advantage I had over the others. I could see the opportunity, the potential.  I don’t suppose they would be able to see past the broken umbrella, the overbearing silence or the stink of the corpse in the bedroom. It was a nice apartment, nicer than mine. I poured a glass of champagne from the fridge and celebrated my temporary promotion, soon to become permanent. Daryl was sick, I saw it underneath his fake charm and his good suit. But I suppose I was pretty sick too. When I look in the mirror, when the lighting is right, I can see that dark space, just behind my eyes. I can feel the edge of the storm. Turns out Daryl was right though; he did make it good for me at work. All I had to do was step into that apartment. Gavin Turner is a writer from the UK. He has published two poetry collections and is working on a novella. His short fiction has been published with Dark Horses, Punk Noir, Voidspace and Roi Fainéant Press.

Billy stands lost in the doorway, much smaller than I remember. Bruno barks, unsure of who he is, but eventually picks up Billy’s scent and lies back down. Billy has lost more weight and his cheeks sink in like tiny potholes, reminding me of one of those stray dogs we saw in Mexico last year rather than the thirty-two-year-old man I dreamed he’d grow up to be while carrying him in my stomach those long nine months.  My same brown eyes reflect back at me as my son gazes at me through long, fringy, matted hair. He holds out a tiny box-shaped gift wrapped in newspaper when a sudden breeze comes through the door, chilling me straight to my bones. Billy steps into the hallway, and I close the door, shuddering subtly as I take the present from my son’s weathered hands and wish he won’t stay too long this time. "Happy birthday, Mama!"  Billy hugs me, but I barely hug back, afraid he’ll snap in half, like one of those reused birthday-candles whose wax melted one too many times I keep in the pantry drawer.  My husband Will places my cake on the table and swings his arm around his namesake’s shoulders while they sing  Happy Birthday . Billy insists I make a birthday wish, so his father shuts off the lights and I close my eyes tight before blowing out the candles.  What could it hurt, I think, ashamed of my impulsive wish. My wishes never come true anyway, like my wish for a baby boy who'd have eyes the same shade of green as his daddy, a little boy who'd make friends easily in school, a teenager who'd return money he'd stolen from his aunt's purse or an addict who'd finally get sober. My husband never loses faith, but he always ends up heartsick and disappointed, and it makes me so mad. I've lost my son a dozen times over the years, and I'm tired of grieving.  Later that night in bed in the dark, Will asks, "What did you wish for?" I lie there quietly in my shame, pretending to be asleep.  ~~~~~~~~~~~ We last saw Billy ten months, three weeks, and two days ago–my birthday. Like most weekends, Will and I keep busy, leaving us less time for wondering. Will’s hands work a jigsaw puzzle while my hands work the needles in the yarn and the radio plays softly in the background.  Bruno growls strangely, even before the knock at the door.  Will fits one more piece in place and says, "I should go check."  My husband opens the door and takes two steps back. A man in uniform, hat in hand, steps inside and asks, "Are you the family of William Ward, Jr.?"  My husband turns toward me, eyes ablaze with what seems more like an accusation than grief, melting me until I snap in half like a used-up birthday candle and wish.  Margo has worked in public education for over thirty years and is the mother of two daughters and the best rescue dog ever, Harley. Her work has appeared in places such as Bending Genres, Maudlin House, The Dillydoun Review, MER, HAD, and Roi Fainéant Press. You can find her on Twitter @67MGriffin .

Reviews are actual. Story is fictitious.  * 1 star we all basically had to get drunk so we could make it through the night  When the five-star reviews slipped, George’s family gossiped: He was never equipped . He lacked the ambition   of his father (rest his soul). Relatives shook their heads knowingly from a comfortable distance, free from the burden of offering help.  Without his father to guide him, George wondered what to do each day. Initially, he wandered through the hotel, recreating scenes from The Shining  in the vast corridors with children-guests (“free tricycle rides!”). Yet he struggled to maintain the business while preserving his freedom to watch M*A*S*H reruns.  Every morning for as long as he could remember, his father Andreas had swiped the top of the marble reception desk, holding his dusty finger accusingly toward the clerks or commending its spotlessness when no soot took hold. George was jealous of the desk. He smiled wickedly to himself when someone insisted it was not marble, but dyed alabaster. The gorgeous twenty-foot limestone slab was shipped at great expense by George’s grandfather, Panagiotis, when he opened Hotel Poseidon on the boardwalk in the 1950s, funded by his wife’s seamstress income and investor friends with gambling spirits.  During the golden era of Hotel Poseidon, guests swarmed the hotel to be noticed, lounging by the Mediterranean-inspired poolside. They dined at its Michelin-starred restaurant, choosing the correct forks. Billowy beds comforted tired guests in luxurious, expansive suites, with private views of the Atlantic unfurling from ornate balconies. The hotel was the gem of the boardwalk. Some speculated a mob connection, but Andreas insisted the Greek mob was inactive, and the Italians had other priorities.  While Andreas surveilled the counter like a drill sergeant (“First impressions are everything!”) he failed to inspect one of the most troublesome places. George trailed after his father at the hotel, hoping to be fed. Andreas mistook George’s quiet disinterest as filial devotion. He crammed hospitality advice and cookies into his son’s head, dragging him to conventions and business meetings.  “Your boy is spoiled,” warned Panagiotis from his deathbed.  George watched his father’s hands as he waved at staff or helped the maids sweep the hallways. He envied his diamond-studded rings and gold chain bracelet. When Andreas waved at him to grab the broom, George pretended he saw something on the wall. Rather than work, he preferred offering small bursts of wisdom to improve the hotel. Andreas failed to recognize his son’s insights, dismissing remote-controlled vacuums, snack-delivering robots, and Ataris in every room.  George’s usual dark mood dispersed once when his father praised him for convincing a guest to upgrade their room. My son , Andreas gushed, unaware George had fabricated a bedbug infestation in their original suite. George’s beady eyes beamed up at his dad, his sallow cheeks coloring. Yet accolades were as rare as the steaks that sealed Andreas’ fate. Mostly, Andreas found fault. He nagged George about his shoes (“Put them on!”) and attire (“I said business suit, not sweatsuit!”) Privately, he worried his son might be dim-witted like a faltering light bulb. George overheard this concern and something inside him sank. He thought of his sister in college. Though he had no inclination toward learning or books, he aspired to appear bright. Finally, the opportunity to shine materialized. An urgent business matter summoned Andreas to Los Angeles. He patted his son’s back. “I need you to respond to ALL reviews while I’m away.”  George vowed to impress his father.    *** 3 stars: Buddha, A voice of acceptance  Rounded down from 3.5 stars. Great view. Hated the carpet, but what can you do. George flinched when Andreas shook his shoulders. “ ’If you don’t like it, leave the country ?’ George, your grandparents were immigrants!” Having failed again, George stared at his bare feet, eager to return to the pool. “You said to respond to all reviews,” he mumbled. The next summer, Andreas fell backward into this same pool while chatting with soon-to-be-alarmed guests. Speculations followed his heart stoppage: Too much lobster and steak. Grief due to his louse of a son. George was like Queen Elizabeth, some hyperbolized, taking the throne at 25, such a tender age. How will he find his shoes, let alone manage his family legacy?  ** 2 stars: Nice view The view of the ocean was nice...the elevator wasn't working sometimes. Staff were nice. George made immediate preparations to manage the hotel successfully. He wore his late father’s rings, but they slipped off his thin fingers and he lost them. He also spoke to staff using his father’s casual tone. “Howya doin’, Gail?” he said, winking at Gail, or maybe Gertrude. Complaints were tiresome, so he forbade anyone to share them once he took over. He instructed his special assistant, Sammy, to print only positive reviews and, after showing him, to deliver them to the Boardwalk Bulletin.  Maybe they would write a story about his hotel and drum up business.     With dwindling guests, George dismissed several staff, including the chambermaid Betty. He was pleased at this money-saving opportunity since she was hired by his grandfather and was the highest paid. Sammy pled with his boss to give staff notice. George scoffed. “I’m a businessman, not in social services.”  When a positive review appeared again, George rejoiced. He would continue his family legacy and please his father, beaming down at him from his heavenly suite. ***** 5 stars: A nice stay Hello Betty This is Will from Room 250 . You were so awesome and nice to us. Sorry we didn't see you when we left last Saturday. Had a blast. We will have to book again soon. Have a grest day. Hope you get to see this Given so few positive reviews, Sammy began compiling neutral ones. After congratulating himself, George asked, “Who’s Betty?”, only half interested. He grabbed a handful of veggie straws from his desk and re-read the review, wondering why he was not mentioned. He sighed then headed to the tiki bar, where he went every morning since his father died.  “Hola! The usual, jefe?” Jorge greeted him under the thatched roof of the cantina, partly shading him from the morning sun. George covered his eyes from the blinding reflection of the beer taps and nodded. He liked Jorge, whose name he knew because of the “Jorge” plaque on the bar and since they shared a name, even though Jorge’s was spelled wrong. (He assumed “Hore-hay” was a Spanish nickname for “bartender.”) “Turn off that tropical music crap, George!” he complained, running his finger along the bar to check for dust like his father, but doing nothing if it appeared. “I can’t hear myself think.”  He walked to the pool loungers with his Long Shore Iced Tea. He smiled to himself, remembering his father’s advice: Stay close to the guests. Sometimes, he even lay on a lounger next to guests, which increased turnover. An opportunity, George knew, to entertain more guests.  ** 2 stars: Great bartender  The so-called restaurant was not staffed. Ice Machine is broken. Ice cost .50. Even Motel 6 has free ice. Two stars for the tiki bartender who was nice. Tiki bar could have used some outdoor background music.     George, a man of routine, read the morning paper after his drink. He continued receiving his father’s hard copy since he did not know how to cancel the subscription. Andreas’ office had been behind reception to monitor the front desk. George felt this proximity a violation of privacy, namely his own. Nosy staff could misconstrue his inactivity as an invitation for theirs. He opted to relocate his idleness to the finest penthouse (suite 500). He enjoyed the room service, the 360 degree views, and many long naps.  One morning, George gasped. Jorge was not at the tiki bar. He tramped to the front desk: empty. Had he fired everyone? He stormed back toward the lobby elevators to return to his room but slammed his fist on the wall when the elevator never arrived. He kicked the luggage left carelessly by the stairwell. His mood improved when Sammy brought him a positive review.  ***** 5 stars: Ocean view Oh my God beautiful view. Simply gorgeous and even though the elevators were broke we still had help getting all of our luggage up there. George asked Sammy to organize a mandatory staff party both to locate staff and thank everyone who remained. Only Jorge and Sammy showed. Sammy assured him it was not personal. After twelve-hour shifts, climbing five flights of stairs might prove difficult. George cursed the no-shows, but not by name since he didn’t know them.  Undeterred, he decided to throw more parties and invite key business people. “It’s a numbers game,” he confided to Sammy. Soon, a tall flaxen-headed maiden emerged from the stairwell, out of breath from traipsing up five flights. “Good God. Why isn’t the AC working?” She swiped pooling sweat from her peachy forehead. If it weren’t for her beauty and three Long Shores, George may have ignored her since she mostly complained. Vivian Ann hated parties; she came for the networking. Yet he stood transfixed as she told him about her degree in hospitality management from the esteemed University of Phoenicia (slogan: You’re going U.P.! ). Her knowledge could right Hotel Poseidon’s rough ship, so George somehow persuaded her to nuptials.  Vivian--the next Steve Wynn?--began her tenure during a challenging period for the hotel catalyzed by Jorge’s unsolicited feedback. “Jefe, a guest jumped from their suite into the bushes rather than take the stairs.”  George, showing off for his new wife, did not hesitate. “Remove the bushes.”  * 1 star: Stuck We CARRIED our stuff up because we got STUCK in the hot elevator. Thank God I tried opening the door because it worked and we got out. Today when we checked out someone was stuck in there for 10 minutes and counting. Two small children tumbled forth from the newlyweds, playing with outlets in their grandfather’s abandoned office in soiled diapers. They squealed and toddled by the feet of desk clerks to keep them company. The clerks embraced the responsibility, missing their own offspring while working double shifts.  In addition to facilitating unpaid daycare, Vivian increased the cost of ice to $1 (inflation) and made an “out of order” sign so weary guests no longer frantically poked the elevator button before returning exasperated to the empty lobby. She retrieved fallen bricks from the building and placed them into a bucket near the shaft gap of the fourth floor elevator (where it remained stuck). She duct taped yellow crime scene tape (found by the former bushes) from the bucket across the opening. Staff dropped their cigarette butts into the bucket or down the shaft, depending on their mood. ***** 5 stars: Beautiful location Don’t let all the bad reviews scare you from the Poseidon! I still booked it for the ocean view. Would recommend! Our front door didn’t close very well, but it locked at night. Staff smoked in the lobby, but that was fine with me. Oh, and the elevator was working while I was there! Once a week, Sammy lumbered up five flights of stairs to his two bosses since positive reviews had trended up from one per fiscal quarter. Sammy was hesitant to share the latest review, not entirely sure if it was positive, negative, or a mix. Seeing the five stars, he warily showed George the paper.  George leaned back in his chair and smiled up at Vivian. “My Viv. You are unstoppable.”  Vivian lifted her chin and handed the review back to Sammy. “I couldn’t do it without you, dear.” Sammy, relieved, drove to the Boardwalk Bulletin .   * 1 star: Payola They have an offer. If you give them a good review, you get money off for your next stay.  As an independent thinker, Vivian took the opposite course suggested by so-called experts. Case studies her professors shared as cautionary tales piqued her sense of creative empowerment as she ran experiments to prove them wrong.  ***** 5 stars: Will stay again! Such a great stay !!!! The rooms were clean. and the staff so accommidating. I will stay again!! Guests returned regardless of their ability to spell or form complete sentences. Each exclamation mark, an exponential success! Yet one day George gasped at the spreadsheet Vivian gave him with their latest financials. Profits had decreased exponentially. This would dip into his fun fund. Vivian wiped her forehead and snatched the report back, inspecting it closely.  “It has a few misprints, I see,” she sighed. “I’ll get you a corrected version, dear.” She blamed the secretary fired months ago. Fortunately, George’s memory for staff or numbers disintegrated like sand castles at high tide.  George encouraged Vivian to fire the operations manager he supervised, what’s-his-name, so she could oversee staff directly and he could finish season six of Little House on the Prairie . He kissed her grateful face. “Your degree and interpersonal skills are a gift.” Thereafter, the buck stopped with her, especially when she pocketed crumpled cash tendered for room payments by older guests and conspiracy theorists not wanting to be “tracked.” She fielded complaints and problem-solved with front desk clerks. Some enjoyed her help so much they left the desk to her for hours. * 1 star: The customer is wrong I can’t believe how unprofessional "Viv", the owner's (George’s) wife is. She’s the most rude, inconsiderate, and threatening business owner I have ever met. She yells and uses profanity when speaking with her staff and customers (that’s me). Every morning after guzzling his Long Shores (garnished with fresh mint because Vivian complained about his breath) George ambled by reception, standing tall. He and Viv exchanged loving smiles even when she patted his hand to stop it from swiping the desk.  One morning, Reception was empty, so George shrugged and walked toward the elevator. A wildly gesticulating guest blocked his path to the stairwell. “Where is everyone?”  George detested arguments, which always led to work. He thought about his father and gathered courage, holding his hands behind his back, standing tall.    “Sir, I can … help here … you?” He sounded flat, contrived. Sweat gathered between his toes.  George did not understand most of the customer’s words, but felt a flash of insight. He handled the matter with the authority of his father and grace of his wife. The front desk clerk returned from wherever they were with the maid and glared at him. George felt their admiration as the customer marched off. Inspired, he took a washcloth and bar of soap to clean a sink in one of the rooms.  * 1 star: Nogo I didn’t stay!! Elevator broken so my 80 year old parents had to walk 6 flights to see a disgusting and dirty, bug ridden set of rooms. Tried to get them to refund us immediately. The owner George told us we were never getting our money back bc his hotel was beautiful and he’s never had a complaint. Meanwhile the maid told us not to stay there and another family was leaving too. We had to press criminal charges with the police on advice from Mayor Asimnos. Reported to Chamber of Commerce, Board of Health, and BBB.  Though George never read negative reviews, Vivian had no such policy. She prided herself on her professionalism no matter how poor an impression their hotel left on nine out of ten guests. She felt a sudden urge to pivot.      “George, we need to talk.”  He leaned back in his father’s old chair, his bare feet crossed on the desk. He set aside the cartoon section and gazed up languidly, puzzled by her serious tone. He wiggled his toes to entertain her. She ignored his feet and put her hands on her hips.  “I’ve made an executive decision.”  George shrunk before Vivian’s towering body. His feet fell to the floor like twin soldiers and he sat at attention. He tried to follow her voice but the words clattered around aimlessly in his head. Shrieks from the balcony distracted him. Sammy had begun storing the children out on the “play porch” while he worked nearby, afraid to report they had pulled out several electrical outlets in other rooms.  “Usually Sammy takes the children away.” He gestured toward the noise, hoping to distract her, too. Yet in contrast to George’s deficit, Vivian’s attention was pure surplus.  “I want to change our name.” She lifted her hands to indicate each word as if on a marquee: “‘The Poseidon Oceanfront Resort.’” George flinched. An unexpected pang of loyalty to his family’s legacy overcame him. “What’s wrong with Hotel Poseidon?”  “Oh, honey,” she said, tussling his hair. “Leave the business decisions to me.”  George frowned. He rarely challenged her, more out of apathy than fear. Her education also intimidated him, and he stared down at his toes. Vivian smiled. “Cute toes!” He tucked them in and remained silent.  Vivian knew perception was key. As she learned in marketing, words were at least as important as actual services in the customer’s experience. The results were immediate. Sammy printed the first almost-good review in months. Still, sweat trickled down his temple since it was not altogether positive.  ** 2 stars: Bar tender was incredible ELECTRICAL OUTLETS WERE FALLING OUT OF THE WALL. No point in complaining tho. Two good things about this hotel, 1. The bar tender WENT TO THREE different stores to find mint to make us mojitos, and the walk to the beach was great. George glowed, but Vivian shook her head. Why didn’t Jorge ever stock enough mint? He knew those drinks were popular. She highlighted “mint” in green then scribbled on the review: inventory mgmt! Sammy, feeling slightly nauseous, beckoned the shrieking children down the corridor. They giggled and toddled after him to the vending machines, selecting their favorite chips and cookies by banging on the glass. He lugged the tots and treats to the swimming pool, where they fed stray cats and seagulls, throwing crumbs around the ledge and into the water, laughing. Sammy had let them adopt the cats after they dragged them into the hotel one day. He added “feed the cats” to his list of ever-increasing chores, hoping the children’s happiness would correlate positively to his continued employment.     The name refresh garnered a few new bookings, but to Sammy’s dismay, the reviews for their “resort” began a familiar pattern.  *  1 star: A pool for everyone The first room we were put in was like the maids quarters. The top lock didn’t even lock. The second room they upgraded us to had a kitchen but also a lot of rust and a moldy cat piss smell. A used washcloth and an open bar of soap were on the sink. 90% of the vending machine was sold out and the ice machine was also broken. The air conditioner in the building barely worked the rooms were humid and smelled. The pool walls and floor were slimy and has seagulls swimming in it!  Vivian stood next to the ice machine, her brows furrowed intently as she tightly grasped a wrench and glanced from her phone to the machine. She scribbled something on a piece of paper. Sammy saw her  and rushed to tell Jorge the machine was being repaired. He slumped against the wall and crossed himself. He would no longer need to fetch ice from the store. He walked up three flights of stairs with a cooler, but was stopped cold by the sign: WANT ICE? GO TO ANTARCTICA . Jorge rushed back past the tiki bar to grab his car keys, waving at Vivian and George who lounged by the pool. They pointed at their empty glasses. The children floated in colorful tubes, chasing the gulls.  *  1 star THIS PLACE IS BY FAR THE WORSE YET, YOU WILL NOT SLEEP TIGHT BECAUSE THE BED BUGS WILL BITE Vivian implemented another concept from her university education: cross-training. She decided all staff should perform more than one job. Though her motivation arose from staff shortages rather than staff development, she presented the change as an “opportunity for growth.” She proposed the barkeep maintain the grounds and gardens, the front desk staff assist the maids, and the valets double as repair persons. She awarded one valet “Employee of the Month” after she fixed the ice machine, placing her framed photo by the scoop.   George cursed when Jorge called him to settle a dispute. He reluctantly approached the front desk manager slash maid Jennifer as she stood restrained by Jorge, the barkeep slash landscaper and security guard.  George no longer needed to ask “Where is Vivian?” since staff now intercepted him preemptively. “Vivian is shopping for air fresheners and new bedding,” Jorge said, struggling to capture Jennifer’s wayward arm.  George stomped his bare foot. “Crap always happens when she’s gone!”  “I just can’t take it anymore!” Jennifer yelled to no one in particular. She tried to slam her fist for emphasis but Jorge caught it.   “What’s happening?” George asked, without wanting to know.  “That jerk stole our microwave!”  “What jerk?”  “The guest jerk! All they do is complain. Then they take the microwave! Hey, let me go!” Jorge loosened his grip. “I’m sorry,” he apologized, “But you tried to hit him….” “I’ll bring this matter to Vivian, post-haste!” George said pre-haste, in a confused yet authoritative tone, then trudged off to his suite before more could be asked of him.  George sank into his couch and watched Oprah and ate popcorn. Upon Vivian’s return, he had all but forgotten the incident. She dumped piles of evergreen-shaped “new car” and “fresh beach” fresheners on his desk then sorted them. She paged Sammy. “Hang these in every bathroom,” she said, handing him the “new car” bag. “And these,” she handed him the second bag, “Near each entrance. When a guest enters the room, the first sensation they encounter will be….” she inhaled deeply and closed her eyes. “The beach,” she sighed.   George dropped a kernel on the floor and one of the toddlers stuffed it into her mouth. The phone rang and he glanced toward Vivian. Her nose was buried in the bag of “new car” Sammy held awkwardly for her while he answered the phone. “Ma’am, it’s Jennifer.”  Vivian cradled the phone with her neck. “It’s simple,” she rolled her eyes. “Charge them for the microwave.”  Sammy broke away then paused at the door. “Uh, one thing…”  “What?” Her crimson lips tightened into chili peppers. The brand refresh failed to conjure the glut of positive reviews she expected, and her mood had soured. Sammy regretted speaking.  “ I…it’s just that…there are no microwaves in the rooms. We never…” The girl toddler began choking. “Are you contradicting me?” Vivian turned to look at her child curiously. Her face had turned blue-green. She rushed to her side. Sammy dropped the bags and, in a single swipe, extracted the kernel.  Vivian grabbed him by his shoulders. She shook him. “You saved her life, Samuel!” He dropped his head, which wobbled as she continued to shake him. “You will be rewarded.”  * 1/5 stars:  Microwaves Disgusting. I wish i didn't have to give any stars. The dirtiest hotel I have ever stayed in. The vents look like they haven't been cleaned in years. Everything has rust and grime on it. There were fruit flys everywhere! Whenever we needed something the front desk/maid had the worst attitude. We had a kitchen, and the smoke detector was removed. We had to switch rooms because the ac didn't work in the first one, and then the desk/maid accused us of stealing the microwave from the first room, that was never even there. A microwave!!!!!!! DO NOT STAY HERE!  Sammy noticed flies swarming around half-full energy drink cans and a sticky substance along the baseboard. He approached Jennifer about missing this grime during the maid portion of her shift.  “First I’m in trouble for taking naps. Now I solve the problem, and still get heat?” She swung her arm back from the desk as if to pummel him. Sammy quickly ducked, but she just pulled a key from a hook without looking and handed it to the younger of two men checking in.  Now slightly afraid, Sammy told Vivian how well Jennifer managed the desk. She could almost do the job in her sleep, he added. Vivian replaced Samuel’s photo with Jennifer’s on the template George mistakenly printed, crossing out “Wanted” in Sharpie and writing “Employee of the Month.” She treated her to a manicure. Viv loved an entourage, but also knew staff, like customers, must be kept happy. Besides, Jennifer’s nails were the first thing guests saw. They should make an impression.  Things would turn around, Sammy reasoned, if he could help his bosses manage the small details. He decided to clean up after the front desk/maids to ensure smooth operations, and check the fly traps. When an older guest collapsed following a five-story climb, Sammy felt grateful he had learned first aid as part of Vivian’s cross-training program. George, passing by, bent over to invite him for a drink. Sammy made an unintelligible noise due to his CPR administration. George paused momentarily, shrugged, then walked away.  Afterward, Sammy slumped against the wall, exhausted. He began smoking just to get breaks, hiding in vacant rooms and staring out at the ocean. He vowed to get his life in order as soon as he had a moment to think. When he heard beeping in his head, he knew he must lie down, if only for five minutes.  * 1/5 stars: Don’t fall off little alarm They gave us our keys and there was someone already in that room, the customer service was garbage, they were never at desk or they where nodding off at the counter. The elevator very rarely worked, making it difficult for my older father going up the stairs to 5th floor along with another guest who literally looked like he needed an ambulance after doing all those stairs. Our room smelled like mold and mildew and we had to leave balcony door open in order not to feel sick from the smell, the fire alarm was beeping and falling off the wall. Paint on walls were chipped and crumbling off.    After his nap, Sammy stopped by the tiki bar to find George. He feared he took his lack of response personally. George, sipping a minty Long Shore, seemed unperturbed. He patted Sammy on the back.   “Samuel!”  Sammy cringed when Vivian’s menacing tone surged across the pool. She rushed toward him. He would tell her he revived an AC unit and a guest earlier to show his break was well deserved. He felt less like a special assistant and more like a servant.  “Can you paint?” Vivian panted, sweat beading up by her hairline from the quick sprint.   Though Sammy only painted once (in fact, the room instigating Vivian’s request) he replied, “Yes, ma’am.”  George, disliking work chatter, took a drink to Jennifer to help her relax. Not finding her at the desk, he gave it to the other front desk/maid, who downed it like a shot.  * 1 star The room had a stench of cigarettes. You can almost taste it. There was mold around the AC. The bed was uncomfortable and there was trash from a previous tenant. I went down the next day to complain and was met by an employee who said the staff went to get their nails done, and she didn't look/talk quite sober. We stood on the 5th floor and the elevator was broken. Location to the beach is great.  Vivian sensed George distancing himself from resort operations. Combined with her aversion to accounting and desire to pursue the “big picture” (rewarding clerks with manicures) she assigned him the bi-weekly payroll.  In a rare moment of alacrity and innovation, he discovered a way to automate the task so he would not have to do it. Simply enter the information into a free program he found online, and magic: Everyone gets paid.   ** 2/5 stars The Elevator didn’t work when we arrived so we had to carry all our luggage up to the 5th floor luckily they had it running by the end of the day but it didn’t feel safe. Our door barely shut properly if we didn’t slam it, it could be simply pushed open. Sadly we over heard the maids saying they didn’t get paid and that the owner “forgot” to do the payroll for them and it isn’t the first time it’s happened.  Vivian noticed a surplus of funds in their account and decided to repair the elevator. She asked Sammy for quotes, then found George at the front desk since the front desk/maid had passed out. She told him she read how wearing shoes indoors generated more moisture, leading to dirt and toxic residue in carpets. George, a long-time proponent of walking barefoot (putting on socks was tiresome) nodded his approval vigorously.  Vivian instituted a no-shoes while cleaning policy, which the desk clerks slash maids initially ignored. Eventually, they found it freeing to clean the rooms barefoot, carefully minding any needles or worms. (The latter staff wrapped in bedsheets, then flushed down the toilet. Some sheets were bloody anyway from cleaning their foot wounds.)   * 1/5 stars The rooms were super nasty, rooms smelt like dirty feet, mold in the bathroom. My sisters bathroom in her room, the paint was peeling and the toilet wouldn't stop running! Sheets are terribly stained, worms in rooms. Owner is a creep! The only exception Vivian made to the no-shoe policy was for the janitor/chefs in charge of cleaning the pool after they reported ruptured feet. A liability. As Vivian walked through the second-floor hallway she saw a guest stop and point at the maid’s bare feet, about to complain. She could sense a complaint forming like a wave cresting. Quickly, she redirected.  “Are you a Gemini?”   ** 2/5 stars My blanket had a blood stain on it, but the location is amazing. If you’re religious you wanna throw up a prayer before getting in the elevator and for the love of God bring sandals to wear around the pool. I think they used broken glass as a filler in the concrete. But again... amazing location. George bought an outdoor fireplace to install by the tiki bar. He noticed Jorge shivering during the colder months, and took pity on his inability to mix a good drink while shaking. Jorge thanked him profusely for the addition, though the warmth only reached George at his barstool. He then bought two dozen tiki torches and told Jorge to light them up around the entire hotel every night. “Since you’re still shaking,” he said generously.  Sammy emerged from the poolside showers with the children, dripping. “Thank you, boss,” Sammy said, rubbing his hands together, watching wearily as the children toddled too close to the flames. “Just a reminder to pay staff double this pay period.”  Though George accidentally sent the last batch of checks to Nigeria, he blamed no one except the Nigerians and his staff. “People and their money!”  * 1 star The awning above the entrance to the lobby caught fire while we were there. No alarms were sounded and no one came to the room or called the phone to advise us to evacuate until the fire department gave the all clear. I only knew because I heard the fire trucks. Sammy hauled the children downstairs when they demanded to see the fire engines. Before, he would have cringed in anticipation of a negative review. Yet each unfavorable review meant bookings somehow continued, and, he felt with gratitude, his job.     *  1 star Pros: Location Cons: It SMELLS, you have to go to the 3rd floor to PAY for ice. It looks like 1980 inside Despite the customer always being right, returning guests seemed to ignore the opinions of their brethren. Vivian’s initial enthusiasm for making improvements waned with each year as there did not seem to be a cause and effect. Despite her efforts, the complaints continued, but so did the bookings. She spent less time managing and more time reading mystery novels while Sammy homeschooled her children by the poolside.  The Poseidon Oceanfront Resort boldly continued crumbling over the imposing Atlantic. George and Vivian watched a tall wave break on the beach for the thousandth time under the dishwater sky of January, hungover after ringing in 2020. What else could go wrong, they laughed together from their balcony. We have dealt with everything. Eleni writes literary fiction exploring the interplay between compassion, civilization, and wildness. She likes to laugh at/with herself and others. She is writing her first novel and several short stories and creative non-fiction pieces. Her Op-Eds have been published in The New Republic and The Philadelphia Inquirer. She also creates comedy skits and drums for a diy indie rock band . Her favorite food group is vegan cupcakes. She was raised in Seattle and has grown older in Durham, NYC, Philly, and now Athens, Greece. Join her on Instagram @ elenibinge  & https://www.facebook.com/EleniDVlachos

It was David who brought it up. “So your boyfriend made a movie,” he hollered at me out the car window. David is my husband. Eighteen years. He’s funny, right? Because I don’t have a boyfriend.  This was in January: a Friday, still dark out at 7:20 in the morning, and fifteen below. David sat in the driver’s seat of his electric blue Nissan Leaf, reverse lights on, ready to back out of the driveway to deliver the three children to their three respective schools. My fingers were bare, dexterous so as to fasten Lennon, my youngest, into his car seat, which not-quite accommodates him in winter, cocooned from chin to toe in what looks like a tiny spacesuit. After kissing Lennon’s balaclava-clad forehead, I slammed the back door when David – fifteen below! – rolled down the passenger-side window and leaned across Paige, our 12-year-old daughter.  I was not quite sure how to respond, so I pretended to not hear him.   “Ew. Mom has a boyfriend?” Paige asked, disgusted.  I briefly covered my smile with my hands, exhaling a bit of warmth into them. Then I blew kisses and my fogged glasses obscured whether I received any in return. Paige’s window rose shut. I was taking a much-earned PTO day. I coordinate the performance art programming at the local modern art museum and while you don’t do that for the money, I’d amassed comp time amidst a tsunami of night-and-weekend holiday events we’d just wrapped up. The subzero temperatures limited my menu of day-off options, but I’d settled on two indulgences once I caught up on laundry: a hot yoga class at Inergy, and an entire glorious afternoon nestled on our sunroom couch with my down comforter and a book that had nothing whatsoever to do with parenting or performance art.  But David’s remark in the driveway rather disrupted my self-care extravaganza. David was referring, I could only imagine, to Metadata  – Blake Bentley’s first feature-length film. It had been on my radar since August, and Allie had confirmed its release via text a week before: OMG. Metadata!!! You will DIE. It’s on Netflix.  Allie is my former college roommate, a real live Hollywood actress who you probably don’t know by name but whose face you would certainly recognize, and also and more importantly she’s my very best friend, dubious career choice notwithstanding.  At any rate, I still don’t know how or when David heard about Blake’s film and I don’t think I’ll ask. Films aren’t really David’s thing. And good Lord neither is Blake Bentley. I don’t even keep up with Blake’s career. I mean, when I’m reminded it exists, I do feel vaguely happy for him. He’s arrived, hasn’t he? That’s nice.  But generally, Blake does not cross my mind.  I haven’t even seen him since 2005. He told me then that making movies was all he wanted in life, though on that particular occasion, he wasn’t optimistic. We were both twenty-six. Baby adults. Blake worked in advertising, self-loathing and sullen about selling out and resentful of the rare successes some of his film school classmates were seeing. Not long after, actually the same year I was promoted to Associate Performance Arts Curator at the museum, a position I hold to this day, Blake won a big award for a cell service commercial. It starred Bea Arthur and debuted during the 2008 Olympics. It was, I think quite objectively, hilarious – I always found Blake hilarious. But anyway, for him, that commercial was a game changer. In Blake’s final email to me, sent on Wednesday, September 26, 2009, right after my daughter Paige landed on earth and right before Blake’s (first) wedding, he mentioned that his sitcom pilot had been picked up. I read the email while pumping in a museum bathroom stall. Typing one-handedly on the laptop perched precariously on my thighs, I replied: “That’s amazing!!!” He never wrote back. I have never since included more than one exclamation point in an email. The show ended up being wildly popular, but for some time I avoided watching it. This was the long-nights-short-years stage: as soon as Paige hit thirteen months and started sleeping through the night, her brother Archer was conceived, and we barely weathered the two-under-two storm. Four years later, on the horizon a future where mortgage-sized daycare bills, febrile seizures, and BPA-free sippy cups were but distant memories, David was promoted to the chief suite and we overindulged in two celebratory bottles of Krug Vintage Brut. It was after Lennon was born nine months later when I finally did watch Blake’s show.  Allie had been in between projects and flew out to Minneapolis to lend a hand while David traveled to Dublin for a tech conference. Allie was useless where changing diapers or reading bedtime stories was concerned. But every night, once the kids were down, she made us each an Old Fashioned, I pumped and dumped, and we binge-watched all five seasons of “Choose A Life.” The show capitalized on late ‘90s L.A. nostalgia: the brooding disenchantment of not-quite-making-it in the entertainment industry. But it was glossy and cute for primetime, so no cocaine. Allie had slept with two of the supporting-role actors featured in Season 4.  “You gave me chlamydia, asshole!” she shouted at my 72” flatscreen. “Gross. I’m sorry.” “It’s treatable,” she shrugged. Allie can shrug off anything.  Hormonal, sleep-deprived, slightly drunk, and officially outnumbered by humans incapable of meaningfully contributing to their own daily survival, I could see through blurry eyes the show’s appeal. It evoked a pulse, or maybe a sense of place, that made me homesick. But Blake had not transcended the tortured artist trope. The main characters were three male roommates in their early thirties, all stuck on the artist’s pendulum, vacillating between grandiose and doubtful, as they tackled in every episode a different existential crisis, a different complication in their predictable romantic entanglements with girl in adjacent apartment / artsy barista girl / girl dating best friend. And these women were props. Conventions to propel the plot, centered on the real stars: the vortex that is Los Angeles and a trio of impossibly attractive, self-defeating men all clearly addicted to intensity. My therapist once theorized that Blake was addicted to intensity.  You know who is not addicted to intensity? David Rockwell, my husband. Eccentric first impression aside, he’s a very steady person. No swinging pendulum. An occasional bad day, sure, when he’s battling a cold or misplaced his keys or when Apple stock has plummeted or news of a thorny HR issue has just graced his inbox. But generally, he’s neither stuck nor self-defeating. To my knowledge, no femme-props thrust his narrative.  David runs the IT department of a medical device start-up. He emerged as a sort of software wunderkind during the tech boom of the early 2000s, and got his first six-figure job at seventeen. He has always preferred to be called David – not Dave, never Davey – because David afforded him a more authoritative air when, unable yet to grow facial hair, he had started out in his field. Now he has a generous beard, mostly silver, although the hair on his head is still dark. David regularly reads The Economist , bakes two loaves of 100% whole wheat sourdough every other Sunday, and meditates at the lakefront Zen Center on Friday mornings before the rest of us are even awake.  I met David on a Thursday night in March of 2002. Three months earlier, I’d packed up my entire life into a teal Honda Civic and driven from Santa Cruz to Minneapolis. The draw was an entry-level job in the Walker Art Center’s communications department.  David was a regular at the Walker’s “Next Gen Modern” events – booze-infused, invitation-only parties meant to secure the charitable dollar of young professionals in the Twin Cities before some other non-profit got it first. My colleagues and I were required to attend, supplying social lubrication on an as-needed basis. Everyone hangs out with their high school friends in the Twin Cities, so being fairly new to Minneapolis – and two thousand miles away from my own high school friends – I was happy to have something to do at night. Even if it was technically work and necessitated branching out of my own diminutive tax bracket.  David introduced himself while we both waited in the cash bar queue – Next Gen Modern’s hotbed of flirtatious possibility. He wore a dark gray Hugo Boss suit and I immediately wondered whether the number on its price tag had exceeded my monthly salary. He was cute, in a Scandinavian way, and tall, which I like, and he leaned down to hear me through the din. He laughed freely at my jokes and maintained eye contact throughout our conversation, not once scanning the room to evaluate preferable networking opportunities or blonder, leggier women. Maybe this was normal adult behavior, or Midwestern behavior, I didn’t know. But hitherto I had not experienced such undivided attention, while dressed anyway. Once we each held a stemmed plastic flute of sparkling wine, I touched his forearm as an experiment. He leaned in a bit closer and it was then that I noticed his lips: juicy delicious, I’d later tell Allie. David seemed to read my mind: “Do you like tacos?” We kissed in the Walker Sculpture Garden while waiting for a cab, and then again at Chino Latino in between margaritas, and then more vigorously in the back of the second cab we shared that night. As the driver idled outside my Loring Park apartment, David sucked on my bottom lip so hard that it evolved into a hickey by morning, which I didn’t know was possible.  The next day, slightly hungover and wearing maroon lipstick, I interviewed my work colleagues to discern the appropriate passage of time before I could call him. Was two days too eager? David texted at 11 a.m. Do you have lunch plans?  When I met him outside the Uptown Diner thirty minutes later, he placed his hands on my cheeks, bent down so that our faces were inches apart, and said, “I like you so much.”  Now, of course, our origin story is two decades stale and buried beneath the mundanities of family life: permission slips, mac and cheese, wrinkled math homework and stray Lego bricks; ripe, sweaty pajamas strewn on the living room rug; sock balls proliferating like dust bunnies beneath beds, couches, radiators. But then, I found David’s initial enthusiasm almost embarrassing. It dawned on me, though. David wasn’t amassing material or narrating a sexier version of his life as it unfolded. He would never write a book about meeting me, dwell on details like my margarita-sweet mouth or the fogged-up windshield of the cab. David never notices the details. I don’t know what he notices. I was Californian and artsy and I suppose I added texture to his already-clear track. Whenever our evening schedules kept us apart, he called. On week two, David was on the phone with his mother when I overheard him refer to me as his girlfriend. Blake Bentley, on the other hand, never called. I was never his girlfriend. We first crossed paths at a party in February of our junior year – I was at Cal Arts, Blake at USC. Allie and I hosted the party at Allie’s mysteriously rich Uncle Carl’s condo in Santa Monica, where we’d been enlisted to housesit for two weeks and feed three moody cats.  For years this party was legendary in the collective memory of those in attendance. Allie finally sealed the deal with Lance Olsen, who’d fancied her since welcome week at Cal Arts but only that night temporarily ditched his Mormon teetotalism and garnered enough liquid courage to make his move. Two seniors known fondly as the Gay Justins got so high off Lea Garcia’s boyfriend’s mushrooms that they jumped in tandem from Uncle Carl’s third story patio into the courtyard pool, which was hypothermic in temperature, but – thank heavens – neither covered nor drained for the winter. RFB – a nickname, short for Repressed Friend Brett (we had a lot of nicknames in the theater department) – spearheaded a slobbery spin-the-bottle tournament, later linked to a mono outbreak on campus. Also, we lost one of the cats. I always skewed more uptight than most drama majors, possibly more repressed even than RFB, but at parties I’d still end up smoking pot out of an apple under the deft tutelage of Korean Gay Justin or taking three shots of Goldschlager followed by a chaser of Catholic guilt. I liked inching towards out-of-control and then panicking my way back to my baseline prudishness.  At the party with which we are concerned, it was around 1 a.m. when my drink-induced elation waned. I surveyed the room: Sticky red Solo cups populated every horizontal surface – window sills and marble counters, Uncle Carl’s state-of-the-art stereo system; a stream of bong water dripped off the glass coffee table, pooling on a zebra-print rug that I hoped was not an actual dead animal hide. I figured we’d had a good run and were lucky nobody had gotten hurt and it was time to signal a winding-down trend. I collected as many partially-filled cups and beer bottles as I could carry and headed to the kitchen to exchange them for bleach and a sponge, when Allie grabbed my arm. “Relax,” Allie said. “Like, how fabulous is this party?” Allie was in my class but almost a year older and decades worldlier. She’d grown up in Burbank and her dad worked in film production, but wasn’t a big-name producer normal people hear about, and to this day I have no idea what exactly he, or any producer, does. At any rate, early exposure to the industry gave Allie an edge. Vidal Sassoon hair and legs for days didn’t hurt. She was the lead in every mainstage production that included a sexy female protagonist. And she grabbed on to every opportunity she could to “hone” her craft. On Tuesday afternoons, she worked as a standardized patient at UCLA’s med school, guiding America’s fumbling, future top doctors through their inaugural pap smears and breast exams. Allie’s giant emerald eyes were only half open as she grabbed the stack of cups from my hand, and I wished I could look as pretty sober as she looked stoned.   She took the topmost cup, poured in equal parts vodka and Fresca, and handed it to me. “It’s the conquests you’re going to remember, Claire, not the cleaning.” I had written off the prospect of conquests at that point, but I could at least revive my buzz. “Ben just got here, and he brought like really cute friends and there is one whose face you are totally going to want to eat,” Allie whispered in my ear. She gestured with a perfectly-shaped eyebrow towards the front door. And there was Blake Bentley, with two other presumably heterosexual males (worthy of note at a drama party) and Ben Sloane, Allie’s high school classmate, a film studies major at USC. Just that day we’d invited Ben when we ran into him at Trader Joe’s, Allie and I each pushing an unwieldy shopping cart full of cheap beer and rail-quality vodka, obviously prepping for a party.  I try not to overthink what this says about me as a wife and, you know, functional adult, but all these years later, I can still describe in considerable detail what Blake looked like that first time. He was about a foot taller than me and skinny, with short dark hair that formed a sharp widow’s peak on his high forehead. He wore loose but not baggy jeans and a tight-fitting baseball shirt with a heather gray torso and navy sleeves. I immediately noticed the rigidity in his posture, a restraint entirely inconsistent with the effusive, incestuous energy of the party, the energy of my college career.  Allie looped her arm through mine and escorted me to our newest arrivals. Ben’s face widened into a loopy grin as we approached, leaving me with no doubt whatsoever that he held romantic aspirations toward Allie. Who didn’t? He formally introduced us: “my film program buddies.” Blake’s eyes met mine and I knew right away he was going to be important for me. “Drinks are over here,” I said, lacing my fingers through his and directing him to the bar, the others following. Blake opted for Coors Lite over vodka. Close up, his eyes were starless-sky dark and he blinked – like he walked – deliberately, slowly. We must have engaged in some obligatory socializing initially, pretending to ignore winks of encouragement and RFB’s “hit that, C!” But before long, Beck’s Odelay  blaring on Uncle Carl’s built-in speakers, Blake leaned towards me: “It’s kind of loud and crowded in here, for talking.” We ended up in Uncle Carl’s office, upstairs, away from the actual party. There was a large empty desk and bookshelves full of records and a framed sketch that Allie swore was an original Picasso. Blake and I melted into a copper distressed-leather loveseat, my legs stretched over his lap, his beer-free hand resting on my thigh. Youth. Blake was from Missoula. He was obsessed with movies and baseball and had already decided that his senior project was going to be a parody of Pulp Fiction . He showed me his idea book: a tiny notebook with a built-in pen that he kept in his pocket. I flipped through the pages, laughing at the cryptic phrases scribbled throughout: “tuna pet” and “Sick Boy zombie?” and “Uma Thurman drag queen.” I found a blank page and, emboldened by liquor and the proximity of his mouth, wrote my phone number. “Just in case,” I said. “I was going to ask,” he said. I told him I wanted to live somewhere besides California, just for a bit, because I wanted to see what else was out there but knew that California would always be home. I didn’t think I’d act after college. I wasn’t as funny as the Gay Justins or as hot as Allie and the thought of spending my twenties being sad about not even getting quirky best friend parts made me want to vomit. Then, to lighten the mood, I did my own impression of Will Ferrell’s impression of Harry Caray, which I’m sure was absolutely terrible, but Blake laughed out loud, and his smile was gorgeous, and I’d trade big-audience applause for that laugh any day. Four hours in, I worried I’d misunderstood the situation. When were we going to make out already? Was there gum in Uncle Carl’s desk? My thighs tingled as I thought about Blake’s tongue in my mouth, but dawn was about a catnap away, and a mounting tiredness tempered the heat of the moment. Right as I thought maybe we were just going to doze off until morning, Blake eased my legs off his lap, and then his hips onto mine. He tasted like beer and spearmint, a combination that turns me on to this day, because of him? The couch didn’t fit us lengthwise, so after kissing for a while (that’s it, truly), we spooned on the floor and fell asleep.  In the morning, Blake borrowed my toothbrush – an intimacy I construed as true love indeed.  For the next several days, I indulged an insatiable desire to replay the best portions of our night together to anyone who would listen. The general consensus was that this was definitely going to be a thing. But when a week passed with no word, my friends’ once-fervent endorsements soured.  The odds of this being a forgettable one-off incident would have been greater had Blake not resurfaced just often enough to fuel my enduring infatuation. I forgot to mention – at that same party, while Blake and I christened Uncle Carl’s office, Ben and Allie got high together and a communal epiphany dawned: they should, like, totally hang out. I assume Ben’s epiphany included just him and Allie, no clothes. Allie’s epiphany, however, involved a massive overhaul of our social lives. And so commenced an era, during which we regularly hung out with Ben and his USC film friends, sometimes even Blake, mostly at parties, always varying degrees of inebriated. When Blake did show up, we invariably ended up flirting then making out – in Ben’s dorm room, on the beach, outside bars, at a Maroon 5 concert when they were still called Kara’s Flowers and the cost of admission was a one-drink minimum. I’d invariably wait for his call – this time – and it invariably never came.  At the end of our senior year, we planned to meet Ben in Venice for a bonfire. He showed up with two of his friends, but no Blake. Ben’s face was solemn, ridden with regret as he divulged: Blake had a girlfriend. Her name was Beth and she was a drama major at USC and very loud. Ben always thought it was going to be me. I think he meant that to be comforting, but it just made me want to punch his face. After graduation, equipped with a BFA in Acting and no aspirations to act, I returned to Santa Cruz to live with my parents. I wrote press releases and program notes for the Shakespeare Festival at UCSC. I saved money and missed my friends and fantasized about Beth farting at an audition or breaking out with sudden-onset cystic acne the morning of her first screen test. I confessed these thoughts to Allie, who said I needed to figure out my life and overnighted me a batch of magic brownies. I applied to entry-level jobs in arts organizations all over the country. In August, evaluating offers for a program assistant position with South Coast Rep in Orange County, and in the communications department at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, I opted for the latter, figuring the farther away the better. A lot happened then, because that’s how it goes in your twenties, strings of impulsive decisions unwittingly made, defining the tight trajectory of your entire future. In Minneapolis, I fell in love with seasons, the Twin Cities arts scene, and David, of course. We were engaged within a year of that Next Gen Modern event. I heard from Allie, who had heard from Ben, that Blake and Beth got engaged at around the same time.  In July of 2004, exactly five days before my wedding, a note from Blake arrived quite unexpectedly in my email inbox: I hear you’re getting married. That makes one of us. Beth and I broke up. Congratulations. He’s a lucky guy. My sticky brain, evidently not fully relieved of its faulty Blake-hard-wiring, spun: was this a sign? Timing was uncanny. I logged into David’s and my Crate & Barrel registry and saw that nearly everything we’d selected had been purchased. Signs were not a thing. David and I got married the following Saturday, in the Walker Sculpture Garden. ***** Just before our first anniversary, David advanced to a director-level position at his company. This was major; he would oversee over a dozen developers and finally get a seat at the table. A sizable raise and massive stock option grant were also in order. His boss, Stan Schwartz, saw his younger self in David and had no small hand in facilitating David’s promotion. Stan was the most Minnesotan person I’ve ever known: he held season tickets for Gophers football and periodically invited us to tailgate along with his high school buddies; his four sons all played club hockey; and his wife, Kimber, taught scrapbooking classes from her art shed on their two-acre waterfront property in Deephaven. David didn’t have much in common with Stan, but he liked that Stan liked him and knew that his expedited rise within the company depended on Stan’s favor.  One unbearably humid evening in early August, Stan hosted a small congratulatory reception in David’s honor. It was casual, yet catered: pickles rolled in ham, Reuben sliders, a keg of Grain Belt. I nursed a glass of saccharine rosé, served to me on the rocks, and mingled with the wives, all of them a decade or two older than me, most advanced degree-holding stay-at-home moms. They found my job fascinating and raved about the Walker but, when pressed, conceded they’d never actually been. Once we ran out of things to talk about – this was before I had children – I excused myself and headed towards the chips-and-dip table, where Stan was bellowing jokes and David and a group of his colleagues responded with on-command laughter. As I approached, I heard David say: “Claire too! She puts a quarter of each paycheck into a little slush fund.” David avoided eye contact as he put his arm around my shoulders. All the men laughed, their brows sweaty and their armpit stains dark and moist. I laughed along with them. In the car, I confronted David. “You think my savings account is cute?” I asked.  “I was joking, Claire. Stan was talking about giving Kimber an allowance and then someone said their wife just got a part-time job and she called her money hers and his money theirs, and I was just trying to stay afloat in the conversation.”  “You called it a slush fund.” “Well,” David hesitated. One smart way to stay steady is to avoid conflict. “It was a joke. I’m sorry.” “It was demeaning. I’m sorry I don’t have stock options or an employer-matched retirement account. I just get a regular income, and I save some of it. Is that a problem for you?” “No, I’m not mad,” David said. NPR was on and he turned up the volume. “But it’s not like you use it to pay the bills.”  ***** The week after Stan’s reception, marital dynamics still fraught, I received a phone call from Myra Steinem, one of my former professors from Cal Arts. Myra had been hired as the Artistic Director for a small but well-respected theater company in Pasadena. She was the first woman to be offered this role. Her budget covered one full-time staff person and she wanted it to be me. I would be a Jill-of-all-trades: marketing, fundraising, casting, running lights in a pinch and probably bartending at opening nights. We would focus on amplifying female voices and revisiting the classics through a feminist lens. It was the opportunity I had dreamed of since I’d ditched acting but had never allowed myself to envision. I would get to be near Allie, all our college friends. David didn’t get how moving to a more expensive city to earn less money could be my dream or what a scrappy theater company with two underpaid staff could offer that an endowed modern arts museum could not? These were the wrong questions. I visualized a widening chasm between us, taking on the shape of South Dakota, Wyoming, then all the states separating California and Minnesota. I tapped into my “slush fund” and bought a plane ticket to LAX. I booked my Friday flight on Tuesday and told David on Thursday night. Before heading to MSP on Friday morning, I went through my email archives and clicked Reply: Blake! I’m so sorry to hear about Beth and hope you’ve recovered some. I’ll be in West Hollywood with Allie for the weekend. Want to meet for a drink? It would be fun to catch up.  I arrived in Los Angeles midday, to a high sun, dry hazy air, and the smell of hot pavement. Allie and I spent most of the weekend cuddled in her bed, under the same purple duvet she’d had in college. I helped pick the best ten of her recent headshots, all gorgeous; deep-cleaned her fridge while she slept in on Saturday morning; and skimmed through her stacks of US Weekly  and Back Stage West . On Sunday, my last night, she straightened my hair and lent me some strappy heels. “Have fun but please don’t fuck away your marriage,” she advised. “He’s just a dude, Claire.” We each did a shot of tequila.  Blake arrived in a red pickup truck. He looked good. Better than I’d remembered. More chiseled in the jaw but also older, maybe in a tired or sad way. He wore what Allie referred to as “everyman’s black going-out shirt” – fitted, long-sleeved, thin pale stripes. We faced each other awkwardly in Allie’s doorway and smiled, shy and amused and an inappropriate degree of excited. Blake opened the passenger door for me and we drove together to Dragonfly, a bar in Studio City, Blake’s choice. We sat on a burgundy velvet couch in the lounge, which was dimly lit by candles and warm gold lanterns hanging overhead.  I asked Blake how he was holding up in the aftermath of his botched engagement. He was grateful that Beth had cheated on him before they were married with two kids. He worried that he’d never trust a woman again. About his job, he said it was making him dumber but he didn’t want to be defined by how he paid the bills. I asked how the Pulp Fiction  parody went and Blake sat up a bit straighter and his smile widened. “I can’t believe you remember that,” he said. He had called it Pulp Future  and I could tell he was proud of it.  As our server delivered a second round of gin and tonics, I was overwhelmed by the actuality of Blake beside me. I felt more like myself. My phone lit up on the table. I flipped it open and read a text message from David: Thinking about you and the job. Has Myra offered it to someone else?   “Is that David?” Blake raised his fresh drink for a toast.  “Yeah. He just wants me to call him tomorrow.” We clinked our lowball glasses. I texted David: Still out at a bar tonight. I’ll call you in morning before my flight.  Then I put my phone in my purse.  “So, he’s like the world’s greatest programming prodigy, I hear,” Blake said. “Are you jealous?” This was better than winning an Oscar.  “Does he know about me?” Blake asked. David and I had, of course, early in our relationship, suffered the standard epic conversation about our respective pasts. He was aware of my Blake infatuation, but its profundity was lost on him. For David, meeting me eradicated any of his own lingering questions. I suspect he thought our relationship had resolved any past ambiguities I’d harbored as well. “He knows that once upon a time I liked you a lot more than you liked me, and from his vantage point, it all worked out for the best,” I said. “Oh that old story,” Blake shook his head slowly, a coy admonishment. “Our timing was the catastrophe, Claire. Not our feelings.” This was bullshit but I couldn’t help but love it. Star-crossed trumped spurned every time, and it gave some consequence to the unearned ease growing between us, aided by alcohol and nostalgia, intoxicating in equal measure.   We were the last ones in the bar and it was nearing 2 a.m. I tried not to stare at Blake’s lips, glossed with a shiny slick of gin. Our server had left for the night, leaving just the bartender to close. He blasted Coldplay and the AC in a passive-aggressive effort to galvanize our departure. I was wearing a spaghetti-strapped tank top, no bra. “You have goosebumps,” Blake’s gaze lingered at my shoulders.  “I’m fine.” “I just want to touch you.” Blake leaned away from me on the couch and clasped his hands together behind his head. “I can’t believe you’re someone’s wife.”  I couldn’t either. I didn’t feel like someone’s wife.  “It’s your fault,” I said, and I meant it. I’d lost count of my drinks and a subtle rage bubbled in my stomach.  “I didn’t see it,” Blake said. He took both my hands in his. “I didn’t see this. I am clearly the one who missed out here.” Later, we sat in his truck, our torsos twisted to face each other. I considered how the inevitable had blurred with the impossible, how alcohol had complicated things, because we wanted things complicated. Blake placed his hands on the sides of my face and when we kissed, it was familiar, and we did that cinematic thing where you start slow, then resist an inch and stare at one another before diving back in more deeply. But before the deep dive, my phone buzzed.  I pulled away and rifled through my bag. It was 4 a.m. and my flight was in four hours. I had missed three calls from David and seventeen texts from Allie. One, sent a couple hours before, said: Don’t hate me. David kept calling. I panicked. I told him where you are.  Her last message read: ARE YOU DEAD IN A FUCKING DITCH???   I imagined Blake and myself getting into a drunk-driving accident and dying. We’d crash on the 101 with the HOLLYWOOD sign illuminating our mangled bodies, my crimson blood mingling with Blake’s on the windshield. David would be embarrassed and he’d hate me forever and hating me would soften the blow of becoming a 26-year-old widower. His next wife would be a lawyer or maybe a dermatologist, with a 401k, immune to sinking ships of druthers, her only weakness the crispy edge piece of tater-tot hot dish.  “Allie can pick me up here,” I said to Blake. “You should take a cab home.” He nodded, expressionless. I kissed his cheek, grabbed my purse, and unsteadily made my way to a bus stop bench a few yards away, where I sat down and called Allie. Blake waited in his pickup until she showed up and then he sped away down an empty Ventura Boulevard. A week later I received a package at the Walker: a VHS recording of Pulp Future.  While Allie and I drove back to her apartment that morning, gathered my stuff, and rushed to the airport, I didn’t call David. At the Northwest Airlines gate, I scanned the waiting area for the seat most isolated and fit for wallowing. And there he was  – David, sitting in the row nearest the attendant counter, head hunched low, resting on his hands, folded in his lap. He’d taken that crack-of-dawn flight to LAX, on the plane that was about to turn around and return to MSP. He wore crumpled grey jeans and the blue “Bike to Work” t-shirt I’d bought him for his birthday in May. “David?” My head hurt from gin and grief. I had imagined Blake intercepting me at the airport. “Claire!” David stood up and practically sprinted the thirty feet between us, before wrapping his arms around me. He kissed my hair. “You should take that job. We can make it work here.” “Didn’t you talk to Allie?” I asked.  “I don’t even care. You had every right to be mad. I fucked up. Let’s just look forward. It doesn’t matter.” David’s hands cupped my face now, softer than Blake’s. His eyes were dilated and watery, dark circles swelled underneath and dried sleep had crusted across his left lower lashes. “Myra hired someone else.” That would be true soon enough. I put my arms around his waist and buried my face into his blue shirt.  Never during our flight back to Minneapolis, or that week, or in the seventeen years subsequent did David ask what happened between me and Blake. So you can see why his mentioning the film came as a bit of a shock. It was literally the first time David had said anything about Blake Bentley. Ever. In our whole marriage.  ***** I did not watch the film straightaway. Watching Blake Bentley’s first feature film all by myself sounded sort of dirty. I scoured some crusty dishes and started a load of towels. I missed Allie and texted her so. She was on location somewhere in Canada – something about studio tax credits and cheap grips. My phone vibrated on the kitchen counter:  Have you watched it? I have been waiting too fucking long to discuss! Three dots danced underneath the message, and then: Now we’re both almost famous. ;) I hauled my king-size down comforter to the basement, threw the towels into the dryer en route, settled into our faded microfiber couch. I unearthed the slender black remote buried between two couch cushions, scrolled through our various underused digital subscriptions until I got to Netflix, and started Metadata .  And… the film is about me. Me and Blake. Mostly Blake, actually, but there’s us, intense and aspiring and oblivious, overanalyzing the world and its discontents, dancing and drinking and swapping barbs then saliva. I mean, we – the real we – were different. But also the same? Two college dreamers drawn to one another, albeit unevenly? Embellished with all the cinematic trappings: first impressions and much-anticipated messing around and missed chances and almost-theres. Beck blaring loudly at a party; a scene filmed at the actual Dragonfly? And something I’d forgotten! But I’m certain it happened. They are outside the bar: the woman, married (alas), and the man, eyes opened. They each hold a cigarette, and the woman uses a match to light first his, then her own.   Him: I can’t believe we’re finally on a date, and you’re married. Her: It’s not a date. Him: What would you call it? Her: An investigation. I’m collecting data. Him: Ah. So it’s a meta date. Except in my memory, I had been the one to coin “metadate.” I remember thinking that was very funny of me. Of course the end is different. Not happily-ever-after different. The two succumb to a lippy embrace and then part ways, true enough to life. But it’s Blake’s story and so it’s about Blake and I’d never really thought about it before but I suppose Blake’s life did change after he drove away in his red pickup. The film sums it up in a very filmy way. Man is initially self-deprecating and forlorn, heart broken, dead-end job destroying his soul; then the woozy attraction, seeing himself through her eyes; the man sits up a bit straighter, yields more easily to laughter, his old lost self restored. A montage ensues: An airplane takes off in his rearview mirror. Closeup wistful grin. He types furiously on his MacBook and scribbles in his pocket-sized idea book; he pitches his idea, confident in the board room. Then contract signings, screenings, toasts. In the final scene, he places a framed award on his desk next to a smaller frame, containing what looks like a business card centered behind the glass. The camera pans in and we see: a matchbook from Dragonfly.   I couldn’t help but be flattered. Not every person is lifted out of life and put into a film, you know, enhanced with a fresh bob of curls, perky unbound breasts, and a gleaming set of pearly whites. Yet there I am: suspended in an enchanted series of frames or pixels or whatever magic it is that Blake toiled for two decades to perfect. And I don’t say “perfect” hyperbolically. Blake has perfected this story. Captured it wholly and lovingly. Layered on dimension and meaning that entirely eluded the version repressed in the recesses of my own memory. But then, it wasn’t such a turning point for me.  **** Later in the afternoon, I wondered if I should send Blake an email. The children came home on their respective buses and left their soggy snow layers heaped in the mudroom and I asked Paige to prepare a snack for her brothers. I withdrew back to the basement, to fold the towels and think about what I might say. Offer praise for a job well done? Say thank you? Or perhaps you’re welcome ? It would be very crisp and witty, of course. Unsentimental, but gracious. I’d write simply to convey my admiration, and, conceivably, also to confess how strange it is to see oneself onscreen. How strange it is to see that an experience, our shared experience, from essentially a lifetime ago – which for me was quite distressing and disorienting and sad, and for me anyway, highlighted how my options had narrowed before I realized I had any – was for him, evidently, valuable material. All those details I’d held close and to which, some years, I’d fallen asleep, were for Blake a commodity. **** David’s schedule doesn’t vary. At six o’clock, just before he was due to arrive, I heated up some leftovers for dinner and asked Archer to set the table. When David walked into the kitchen, he kissed my forehead and squeezed my ass. My therapist would call this a “bid” and on another day I might have welcomed the attention. As I ate my dinner and gulped down a hazy IPA, which David had poured into a pint glass for me, I looked across the dining room table and pondered my husband. I decided that, had I stayed in the red pickup and taken that theater job, my life really would have been no different. Frozen in time seems to be where I wield the most influence. I am no David or Blake. I don’t aspire or avail myself of the right things or wait for the right time. I don’t take or leave with much intention. And that knack for framing a loss as a gain – it has always been just out of reach. I don’t resent their successes. Systems are in place to ensure them.  It was my turn to put Lennon to bed. I sang him a showtune in lieu of lullaby, tucked him in, and kissed his salty forehead. David was standing in the hall outside Lennon’s door, evidently waiting for me.  “I saw Metadata ,” he said. “Oh,” it turns out I had not really expected that. “Did you like it?” I asked, suddenly aware of my hands, which I wanted to put in my back pockets but my yoga pants were pocketless. “It’s about you,” he said. I laughed a bit meanly, despite myself. “It’s about Blake Bentley,” I said. “But yes, some parts seemed to be inspired by real events.”  David opened his mouth to say something and then stopped. He closed his eyes, inhaled deeply, and on the exhale opened his eyes to meet mine. His shoulders – which I hadn’t realized were tensed – visibly relaxed. “Thank you for choosing me,” he said.  I was about to say “I didn’t have a choice,” because I really never felt like I did. But he seemed very earnest, so instead, I said, “Thank you for choosing me.”  On Friday evenings, we usually watch TV or play a board game or snuggle on the couch with a glass of wine and complain about coworkers or the weather or Republicans. If the indoor air temperature is suitable and we both happened to shower that day and no children loiter nearby, peppering us with a litany of made-up needs, we might end up messing around. But that night, I told David I was tired and wanted to go to bed. I had nothing more to say at that moment to him or to Blake Bentley.  Upstairs in my bedroom, I texted Allie: But what happens to the girl? She wrote back promptly: Right?? Well, what do you expect.   He’s just a dude, Claire.   Edith-Nicole Cameron (she/they) is a former lawyer who reads, writes, and mothers in Minneapolis. Her poetry and prose appears in Literary Mama, Brevity Blog, Last Stanza, MUTHA Magazine, and River Teeth Journal's Beautiful Things. For fifteen years, she’s spottily written about food at www.CakeandEdith.com . You can find her more recent ramblings at Writing it Out .

Early on, when food remains on ransacked shelves and you can find still-crisp apples rolled into dusty shadows and your mouth fills with saliva at the expectation of sweetness, you love a fighter called Medhi. He had a different life to you, up to this point, a brutal life that inadvertently makes him apocalypse-suited. You are soft when the world falls, softer than dust-matte apple skin, and he makes you feel safe for a while. In a looted sleeping bag you consume his affection like fresh fruit, somehow knowing it won’t last, can’t last. It’ll wrinkle and darken and blur with mould and you’ll slip from the crushed feathers, Medhi’s knives in your boots, and go looking for new sanctuary in other dusty shadows.  Later, when stores are trashed and full of stink and the last apple you eat is from a gnarled tree and so sour, your stomach burns for days, you love a follower called Nadine. She’s part of a group of shattered souls drifting from one broken place to another, certain a safe haven must be over the next hill. She tattoos brambles on your inner wrist. You are like them,  she says, lush, the perfect balance of sweet and sour . You mask your thorns and give in to a closeness with Nadine, who is warm and bright even in blackberry-dark basements and her passion makes you almost believe in havens right up until the screaming starts and she’s torn from you, and torn apart.  Much later, when food is snared and skinned or scavenged from the new dead, you trade cans for dried plums and love a preacher called Angel. His church is a motel off a lonely road and his flock are hollow-eyed women and manicured men made killers. Angel uses a crossbow, way back in the trees, so his hands are never blood-spattered when he pulls you onto the grubby mattress and his mouth tastes like crabapple memories. He accepts what you have become and you’re grateful. When the church falls, in a biblical battle of fire and blood, Angel is way back, hands clean, in a way. You leave him sermonising about God’s Will to the various dead. You think maybe it’s time for demons.  Too late, when you trade your own spoiled flesh for slivers of canned peach, your heart feels like the peach’s stone, devoid of flesh, yet you love a tyrant called Desmond. His leather-sweat body swallows your self-loathing, spits it out. Thrust down into blood-soaked earth, your breath falters. The thought you could die and be buried in one groaning moment is a kind of oblivion. Loving and fighting are dirty now; rage and passion mangled together. When Desmond bores of you, his eyes find a desperate girl, more bone than flesh, more child than girl. Shadow-hidden, you slide your knife into the base of his skull, not sure who you’re saving, then you creep into the woods with the dead and the night swallows you.  Just in time, when food is grown and reared, you stash your knives under a real bed, feel strawberries burst sun-sweet between your teeth and you love a healer called Sorrel. She uses rewilded nature to soothe and repair and in her gentle embrace, something crumbles inside you, and your heart rewilds too. This love cleanses; you struggle to deserve it, but Sorrel soothes. You speak of all the lovers, their sins and desires part of you like faded brambles. You love whenever you can, whoever you can , Sorrel says. Nothing lasts: not apples or lovers or the dead. So, eat now. Love now. Then autumn arrives, and you find hope, still-crisp, in mist-chilled fruit and in yourself at the start of the world.  JP Relph is a Cumbrian writer hindered by cats. Tea helps, milk first. She mooches around in charity shops looking for haunted objects. JP writes about apocalypses a lot (despite not having the knees for one) and her collection of post-apoc short fiction was published in 2023. She got a zombie story onto the 2024 Wigleaf longlist, which may be the best thing ever.