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When we took the Uber home from the cemetery this afternoon, I thought of that holiday we had in Lisbon with you and Mum. We were sitting in some terrible pretend Scandinavian coffee place, it was the hottest day of the year, no air conditioning, and Zoe was acting up. You and Mum wanted to go back to the Airbnb for one of your Little Rests, and I offered to get you an Uber – we’d been getting a lot of Ubers for you two, I hadn’t realised Lisbon was so sodding hilly – but you wanted to do it yourself. Clive must have installed the app for you, but now you couldn’t figure out how to use it. I tried to help but that only made you more confused, and Zoe kept prodding my arm because she needed to ask me something RIGHT THAT SECOND, and you just sort of froze. Your stubby finger trembled as it hovered above the screen. There was a drop of moisture on your cheek which I assumed was sweat, but looking back I’m not so sure. In retrospect, that should have been the moment when I realised something was up with your health, but I didn’t because all I wanted was to get you and Mum out of there so I could deal with Zoe and maybe even have a moment to drink my overpriced latte in peace, so I grabbed your phone, saying give me the bloody thing, I’ll do it , and your face fell so hard that I immediately regretted it, but it was already too late. Sitting in the Uber this afternoon, I wished I could do it again. Wished I could explain patiently how to order the ride, watch as you pressed each button in turn. See the satisfaction in your face as the message appeared, saying the car was on its way. Daniel Addercouth grew up on a remote farm in the north of Scotland but now lives in Berlin, Germany. His stories have appeared in New Flash Fiction Review, Trampset and Vestal Review, among other places. You can find him on Twitter/X at @RuralUnease .

“How did you come to know Catherine Cormier?” “Kitty? We both lived at The Harris.” “The Hotel Harris, downtown?” “Yes, that’s right.” “And what brought you to the Hotel Harris? ” “The same thing that brings anyone there. Bad luck.” “You think it was luck?” “Call it what you want.” “But you  call it bad luck?” “A lifetime of it. Yuh.” “What was the bad luck, exactly, that led you to live there?” “I moved in there after I got out of prison. You pay by the week. You know, a flop house. It was cheap.” “And Catherine. Or Kitty. She lived there?” “Yeah, she had been there for years.” “So you two, you became friends?” “Sure.” “You seem an odd pair.” “How’s that?” “Well you're, what, 35? An ex-con? And she’s in her 70s, little old French lady.” “Ex-con? Man, you got a lot to learn about this place. I did time for writing bad checks, stealing chainsaws, and possession. Lots of people round here end up in jail.” “It was prison, Cato, wasn’t it? What about the assaults? The armed robbery?” “Sure.” “So regardless. You became friends?” “I told you that.” “What kind of friends?” “What the fuck are you asking?” “I just mean. Can you tell me about your friendship? I’m having a hard time…understanding it.” “There’s nothing to understand. We drank. Whiskey will make you a fast friend. If you’re down on your luck, and you’re at The Harris, you got nothing but time on your hands. You find ways to get through it. To hang your days on something.” “I see. So you drank together?” “We were known to have a few drinks at her kitchen table. Sometimes down at Peppermints.” “And sometimes other people drank with you?” “Sure.” “Who would that have been?” “I don’t know. Whoever.” “Like Timothy Richmond?” “Timmy? Sure I guess.” “How about Jason Davis?” “Who?” “Jason Davis. Worked at the mill.” “Everybody worked at the mill.” “Jason had a dog. A rottweiler I believe.” “Oh. The big guy.” “Yes. Did he drink with you?” “Probably. I mean sure. He was around. He was at Peppermints a lot. For awhile. What’s he got to do with anything?” “Well that’s what I’m trying to figure out. I’m trying to understand who all was involved.” “Involved in what?” “Well, Catherine Cormier went missing more than 6 months ago. No one has seen her, nor has she touched any of her assets. Her family believes she’s dead.” “Family? Who is that?” “Her brother’s daughter. Her niece.” “Never heard nothing about her.” “Well, we are trying to find out what happened.” “Ok.” “Do you know what happened, Mr. Bond? To Kitty?” Cato Bond Some people inherit money. Or a perfect face. But in my family you inherit bad luck. More like a curse, to be honest. A life of hard work, pain, loss. My old man died in the military, and not in an honorable way. I’ll just leave it at that. My mother had me at 19, and she bounced around from one bad boyfriend to the next. I stayed with her sometimes, but mostly with my Grammie. She was nearly blind, and she took in piece work to make money. Grammie sat on an old brown stinking sofa, chain smoking, and sewing leather together for shoes. Her hands were so calloused and worn she could jab a needle into her palm and not feel a thing. She used to throw glass ashtrays at me when she was pissed. She drank sherry.  Everybody works at the paper mill around here. And when I was 13 I got my first job there. Sorting rags. Then I moved up to Hole Watch. The mill is a beast. Big like a mountain. You can’t ever really see the whole of it, unless you’re way up, like a bird. Inside it’s loud, and dark, and filled with heat, reek, and men who have worked themselves into their own damnation. It was my lot in life to work there, and the weight of that lay heavy on me, even before I could buy a drink. I hated that place. The smell of it. The way it never slept, never rested. It ate men. Chewed them in it’s metal maw. Gummed them down into the pulp they made the paper from. It sits in the center of town like a monster, clearly sentient, clearly malicious. It eats the poor and spits out money, money for someone else. It’s a filthy system. So I got into the pills. I won’t bore you with the details, but by the late 90s I’d been in the game long enough to ride the Oxycontin wave to something that felt like freedom. Higher than fuck all the time, dealing, flush with cash. I got a new truck. Claudia and I had a place, a little trailer. Quiet little spot. She used to hang the laundry out in the yard. But the good times dried up quick. As they always do when you’re playing that game. I don’t know. But, I lost all of it. Her, the truck, the little trailer with the bed of daffodils in the front. In and out of jail, sure. Sleeping on people’s couches. I ended up in prison on a aggravated narcotics charge. They got me coming back from Lynne, Mass. with 100 grams of H. I was already on probation. There was stolen shit in the truck, the tags were expired. There’s more to the story. But, you get the idea. I was fucked. When I got out of prison I had nothing. I didn’t even have clothes to wear as they’d “lost” the shit I came in with. I left in sweatpants and a sweatshirt. It was January. I would have liked to have left town. Left Rumford. But I had probation. I didn’t have a job, or a dime, or a car. Nowhere to go. So ended up downtown at The Harris. It’s a boarding house. You rent a room. Each floor has a shared bathroom. Laundry in the basement. Payphone in the lobby. People from away might think it’s fancy. The exterior is. Grand and imposing, with a sign on the roof that lights up at night spelling out Hotel Harris. But they probably haven’t been inside. It smells like piss and is full of broken, sick folks. Sometimes they’re dangerous, because sometimes when you push someone against a wall, they attack. It’s just nature. Human. Dog. Nothing likes being cornered like that. The Harris was, at one time, a grand hotel. Built during the boom time, when Rumford was alive with industry, and families were coming in for jobs at a mill that couldn’t make the paper fast enough. Well, those days are long gone. And if you’ve driven through Rumford of late you’ll see that she has lost her shine. Not just the Hotel Harris but the whole damn city. The Harris still stands, a beautiful building if you see it from a distance. The entire top floor was shut down when I was there. But it had two floors of rooms, and a grand lobby downstairs. The rest of the downstairs was a restaurant, which was permanently closed, and a department store, also permanently closed. My favorite thing was the front desk, a big wooden thing with a series of cubbies behind it. Covered in dust and deserted. But I could picture a well-dressed person waiting there, a shiny bell, a brass trolley for bags. Some nights I swear I saw the shadow of those things. But then someone upstairs would holler, or some pile of rags would shuffle in, use the pay phone, and ruin it. You could sense something below the surface there. Something that glowed kind of golden and soft. But then the shabbiness was back; the stink, the fluorescent lights buzzing. Time as thin as the carpet. Kitty lived on the second floor. She had a corner room. Bigger than mine. And she had a window. Big nice window looking over the street. My room had no window.  A dark shitty room, with a moldy carpet, a single bed, a sink, and no fucking window. My cell in Windhoek was bigger. But having a key to get out is nice. She had her kitchen table there by the window, and one day I helped her get her laundry cart up the stairs. Cause the elevator was out. Again. I helped her and she made some coffee, and we sat and smoked at that table. And when I left she said she had a drink from time to time. She pointed to her mini fridge, atop which sat a bottle of whiskey. Expensive. The big bottle. Well I nodded, and I took note. And I guess you could say we became friends that day. I’d walk out to the side alley and smoke, as I couldn’t stand to do it in my windowless room. But if it was poor weather I didn’t want to stand out there, so I’d knock on Kitty’s door. She was always up. And we’d sit at her table, have a few drinks, and smoke. She had that window. So there was that. She told me about how she’d pick blueberries with her whole family in the summer when she was just a kid. How they’d stay in a cabin, sleep on the floor, no running water, and spend all day in the baking sun raking blueberries, covered in bug bites, poison ivy, and filth. How she hated blueberries. Thought they tasted like pain. I told her how I once saw a baby fawn get swept down the Androscoggin, when the river was roaring after a rain, and how the doe dove in and rescued her baby. Swam the rapids and got the tiny fawn onto the other shore, the little thing bleating like a screaming child. “Well there,” Kitty said, her eyes shining, “I like that story.”  We’d walk down to the store to get another bottle. Or some beer. Or some smokes. The town would be nearly deserted in the night. And come winter, with the snow sifting down and the streets void of tracks of any kind, the whole place looked like a sound stage. An empty set. The Harris was one of many impressive buildings downtown. And though it was desolate, those structures still communicated grandeur. Walking around out there you’d feel like you’d slipped right out of time. And we’d talk about albino moose, and men who killed their whole families, and her Grampy kicking a bear in the head one night when he was blind drunk and the little bear attacked their dog. Or all the weird ways people have died in the mill. Back in Kitty’s room, she’d put on a kettle for hot toddies and we’d find a movie on TV. She liked Bruce Willis and I liked watching her work her knitting. What can I say? We were comfortable with one another. She never asked about prison, I never asked her about her marriage of 40 years to a man I knew to be a wicked little piss-ant. With a temper. We just kept time together. It seemed natural. I had gotten work at The Mill . Back in the beast. Hating every moment of it. I had a checkered past at the mill and I was a felon, so they let me know that I would need to prove myself. Well, that didn’t sit right with me. And about 3 months later I was laid off for being late and missing work. Cause of the drink. Cause I didn’t give a shit. Cause I hated that place. Cause it’s what I do. And once I was out of work I guess I started drinking more. Long days. Longer nights. By that second winter at the Harris Kitty and I drank together most every night. And it wasn’t uncommon for us to take a walk, like I said, to get something more to drink. Jeannie’s store on the corner across the bridge, off the island, was open all night. It was a bit of a walk. But it was one we took many times. Peppermints, the local bar, saw our asses from time to time, but if you’re on a budget you go wholesale. You go for a bottle. Sometimes we’d open the bottle on the walk back. Not at first, I don’t think, but at some point, it happened, and then it became more common. Then we’d sometimes meander back down to the end of the main street. The Mill would be running. Always. Day and night. Every year it’s a smaller and smaller crew, but it’s running, those machines never stop. There’s a little car bridge down at the end of Main. It kind of runs through a little patch of woods back there, so if you’re walking you suddenly turn into a dark tunnel and it’s dark for a bit before some lights from The Mill hit the road. Off the bridge, you see the slurry pits, and they are all lit up. They have sort of fountains spinning round down there, stirring up the mix. It stinks, but it’s pretty. In the winter the steam rises up over there so you’re in a putrid fairy land. We’d stand there watching the slurry and sipping our drink and not saying much. The sky some nights was inky and purple and odd, other nights it was dark and awash in a billion sharp little stars. Those were nice nights. Those were nice walks. Kitty Cormier They say drink will make fast friends. I don’t know that it’s true. I’ve seen drink make much faster fights than anything. But I do think when you are a real drinker, a professional drinker, you find those like you. You can find them fast. I’ve had many, many drinking buddies over the years. More than I can count, more than I can remember. I’ve probably forgotten the names and faces of people I spent hundreds of hours with. That might make some people sad, but I count forgetting as a gift too. I’ve been around seven decades now, and the drink has touched six of them.  I met Cato on the stairs in the Hotel Harris. I was hauling my laundry cart up, cause the elevator was broken again. He spotted me. jogged across the lobby, and hoisted that cart like it weighed nothing. He was a tough, sinewy guy with a little weasel face. I’ve seen many like him. No chin, tiny eyes, all angles. This town manufactures them it seems. Muscle, grime, greasy hair, thick work clothes, and nowhere to go. Caged. Pent up. With a shadow of fear sketched on his face. He brought my cart into my room. He commented on my windows. He had one of the small rooms in the back hall. No windows. He told me he was just out of prison and the room he’d come from wasn’t too much different. Only he could walk out his door. Which is a difference. It is. Well, I poured him a cup of coffee, watered my geraniums, and asked him about his plans. He had just started back up at the mill, of course. But I sensed it wouldn’t last long. They’d put him on hole watch. Which is a sorry position for a grown man. His skin bristled like an animal’s when he spoke of it. His eyes went to a bottle I had atop my mini fridge. Makers Mark. A gift. When he left I invited him by for a drink sometime. He nodded like he wouldn’t come, like it wasn’t going to happen. But I knew he would. And he did. Well, we met in the summer, but by the following spring, an ugly one, as always, he was out of work. And he did what most men round here do with time on their hands, he set into the drink for real. Like it was his job. He lost weight, which did not suit him, and he slept in ‘till late afternoon. I had things to do. Errands, people to stop in and see, laundry, cleaning. But by the evening I’d be free to have a few drinks. And that started to be a regular routine. Now I’m an old, old lady, and I have more ailments than I could list here. Bad hip, knee, eyes, stomach. The whole works is going down. But the thing about old ladies like me is that despite the body failing, I am resilient. I don’t stop. And with fresh whiskey in my veins, I can find my energies again. We’d go out to smoke, we’d go down to Peppermints if we happened to have a twenty in our pockets, and we’d walk off the island (as they call the area round the mill) and into town to buy a bottle or some smokes. Long night walks. It was soothing and quiet. Just keeping time with one another. I never thought too much about it. I try to not look too deep into much of anything anymore. That’s a young man’s game. Life happens and you just go along to get along. Friendship is probably the sweetest gift the world might give you. Take your bits of sweetness and hold them close, cause most of the time it’s hardship and pain that will be walking your road with you. Cato Bond I can’t say I trust my memory. But I can tell you how I remember it starting. I’m not sure when, exactly, but Kitty and I had come into the lobby after walking to the store for smokes and some beer. Chasers for the bottle upstairs. It was late, dark, but it’s winter so it’s dark all the time. It was late though. There hadn’t been anyone out. We started up the stairs to the second floor when Kitty stopped. She was looking up to the second-floor landing, where a balcony overlooks   the lobby downstairs. There was a little common area there, some tables, and a few upholstered wingback chairs. I stared at her a minute, then I looked up to where she was looking. There was someone sitting in one of the wing-backed chairs. Which was odd but not unheard of. It was late, but it’s the Harris, you’ll see any manner of folks wandering the halls at any hour of the night. Like us for instance. I was about to turn back to Kitty and ask her who it was when my eyes blurred a bit, then refocused. Or maybe the woman blurred and then refocused. I don’t know. My eyes are good. Always have been. Never had glasses, still don’t. I used to spot deer out in the field better than anyone in my family. My Mother told me I had eagle eyes. Seemed to please her. But I had been drinking, it was late, I can’t say for sure. The person in the chair was clearly a woman. Long dark hair, light clothing, pale face. But the whole thing was blurry. I don’t know how else to state it. Also this woman; I didn’t recognize her. It’s mostly men at the Harris. I felt something shimmy along my skin, down my spine. My stomach did a slow slide. “Who is that?” I murmured, not even meaning to speak. Suddenly Kitty started moving up the stairs at a rapid clip, and I followed her. She turned hard at the top of the stairs towards her door, away from the chairs. I didn’t turn and look. I wanted to. I felt a strong need to. But Kitty was pointedly not looking, and walking fast, so I did the same. I felt something back there. Kitty unlocked her door.  We went in and Kitty slammed it behind her, locked it, and engaged the chain, which she never used. Or not when I was there. I went and sat on the couch, dropping the beer onto the floor. My knees felt loose. I was trembling a bit and I rubbed my hands together. I waited for Kitty to say something. She stood with her back to me, facing the closed door. Listening maybe? Or just regrouping. She then went and got two juice glasses. She poured out some whisky and I pulled two cans off the sixer and cracked them, sitting them on her coffee table. We sipped the warm booze and the cold fizz. She sat at the table. I sat on the couch. We didn’t speak of it. And as I sat there I talked myself out of it. Someone was in the chair but not a long dark-haired lady. Just some old bum. Or maybe no one was in the chair. Perhaps someone left a sweatshirt hanging on it. It was dimly lit in the hallway, and the common area was in even deeper shadow. So we didn’t speak of it that night. Besides drinking with Kitty I was spending time drinking alone in my room. And I found myself pacing and thinking about the past. Imagining different outcomes. Imagining running into some people from back then and having them admire or desire me. I put music on and ran over these “stories” again and again, circling the tight edges of my room, stopping to take another sip as I passed the nightstand where my bottle of old granddad sat, and imagining my ex leaning in, asking how I was, looking me up and down, liking what she saw. In these scenarios, I wasn’t unemployed and living at the Harris. I wasn’t scrawny and dirty and drunk at 10 in the morning. I felt the warmth of being wanted, of being strong, of having all those fuckers who walked away from me (bosses, stepfathers, girls, so-called friends) want me, or better yet be jealous of me. I could feel it. Even though the reality was that I wasn’t admired or desired, no one was jealous. I was alone in a room, pacing and drinking like a crazy person. I felt weird about the ritual, but I also looked forward to those sessions. It was a secret. Along with how much I was drinking in a day. Kitty Cormier People talk about belief. If they believe in ghosts or the afterlife. But I don’t think belief has much to do with it. I’ve seen things I can’t explain my whole life. I sat bedside with my Grammie, my Mother, my Father, and my brother, all who died in our home. All of them saw people in the room at the end, right before they went. With Grammie it was her mother and sister. She named them, seemed happy to see them. Patted my hand and said she knew she’d be ok. My Father was scared. Said a man was standing in the corner. In a suit. Didn’t seem to know him and felt afraid of him. And my Mother saw all kinds of people in the room, and a few cats. Angels, she called them. My brother saw our Mother, as she had passed years before. He was dying of cancer. Only 44 years old. Many of the men who worked at the mill died of cancer.  When I was 15 or so I saw lights in the sky. Orbs, two or three. Not just once but several nights in a row. Cold, cold nights. They slid around the sky moving every which way. Playful, fast, you couldn’t predict it. I don’t know what they were and I never saw anything like thatagain, but one of those nights my brother was with me and he saw them too. They were there, I just don’t know what they were. And that’s it right, an unidentified flying object? I’m not saying it was an alien, I don’t know.  I saw things at the Harris. Someone slipping around the corner of the hall on the third floor, up towards the stairs. I would hear someone walk up to my door and stop, and thinking it might be Cato, I’d pop the door open. No one. And in the common area. Yes, many times I saw someone up there, usually from the lobby down below. A woman. I was with Cato when I saw her. I didn’t bring it up and thought I’d wait for him to bring it up, if he did notice. Or not. Like I said, I’m not one to make a big deal out of these things. They are. We are. What’s the fuss? And we’d always all been drinking. The woman though. She was specific. I kept seeing her in that common area.  And one night, when Cato and I were coming up the stairs something different happened. I saw her, and when I looked at her she turned her face and looked at me. At us, in fact. Right at us. It was the first time this had happened and it changed the whole thing. I felt her see me. I felt her look at me, as I had looked at her many times. We saw  each other.   Cato Bond I started having nightmares. The content of these dreams is bleary, but the terror I remember vividly. I would wake up from them screaming, or making moaning sounds that sounded like they were coming from an animal.But that animal was me. I was in the Harris in these dreams. I was walking the halls. Moving up and down stairs, and up and down the corridors. But always converging, or being pulled, to that second-story landing. I would fall through the dream in layers, awakening in my room, and suddenly realizing it was still a dream when I saw a stranger standing near the door, or a strange cat with limbs bent the wrong way. It would happen over and over, each layer I fell into more bizarre and twisted than the last. A few times I had sleep paralysis, waking up and being completely immobilized. Just awash in terror. But that’s the DTs I guess. Or he Harris. Or both monsters, dancing in the dark of the night. It is hard for me to separate the nightmares from the reality. My dreams were always in the Harris. There aren’t clear lines of demarcation. My days were often spent in a trance in my room. There but not there, pacing the floor. It all becomes very blurry. We went to Peppermints the night of the incident. Kitty and I. A little hole-in-the-wall bar about 100 feet from the Harris. It was owned by a guy named Randy. He’d lost an eye at the mill. He’d been a teenager when it happened, 35 years ago or so. A machine busted and a long, thin piece of metal went into his eye. Famously, it was sticking out several inches, buthe said it didn’t really hurt initially. And he could still see out of the eye, even with this metal rod in there. But the eye was ruined, and he quickly lost all the vision. The eyeball itself was so damaged they had to remove it. He tried to wear a fake eye for a while but gave it up. Said it was damn uncomfortable. So the socket collapsed a bit over time, and then his entire face on that side collapsed a bit over time. He doesn’t wear a patch either. Now at 50, he is some kind of goblin. Rough looking hole in his face, everything sliding to the right. You get used to it. Randy is a friendly son of a bitch and he was in a good mood that night. Kitty and I had several rounds up at the bar, and the place filled up. And then, at some point, she was there. This girl. She wore her long hair in a braid, had a dark hoodie on, and jeans. She said she was passing through. She said she was a hiker. She drank some whisky with us. Bought us a round I think. She was sitting next to me, on my side, and told me about her hike. Up White Cap. I didn’t listen. I was drunk. And not in a good way. Sometimes I’d go a stretch where the booze just hit me bad. I’d feel sick off just a drink or two, but I needed more to not get shaky and terrified, so I’d have to power through, and it just made me feel worse and worse, even as it kept the real DT’s from setting in. It was ugly. But then, a few days or weeks later I’d seemingly snap out of it, and I could drink again, normally. Or not normally, not to any normal person, but normal for me. I could get drunk. I could enjoy it a bit before the greasy slide. But that night it was all greasy. I felt like trash. I couldn’t even pretend to give a shit about the girl. Things like getting laid had fallen away. I was in the shit with the drink. We went outside to smoke. We went back in. We probably did that a few times. There were other people there and Kitty was chatting with a few. She knew everyone in town. I guess I do too, I just don’t get friendly with no one. But everyone loves Kitty. Eventually, we were back outside and Kitty and I decided to head back. We were out of cash and had been bought all the drinks we’d likely get that night. We walked up the street. It was freakishly warm. Almost misty. We rounded the corner and went into the Harris. It felt ice cold inside. One of those weird things where it gets oddly humid in the winter, a warm snap, and then inside feels cold. There was condensation forming on the big windows that looked out the lobby. Drips had run down the glass here and there making it streaky. I was so drunk I couldn’t look at the windows without the whole scene starting to spin. I felt pretty low. I was in my room. Alone. In bed. And then someone knocked on my door. I thought it was Kitty. I wanted to ignore it but thought maybe she needed something. I’d be useless to her, was feeling worse and worse, but got up to check. She was old after all. It could be something serious. When I stood to walk to the door, it felt like my foot sank into the floor. Fuck. This wasn’t good. I was all fucked up. Normally I could drink and drink without losing my balance. It tightened up my balance if anything. But tonight everything was sideways. I was low. It had turned on me. When I opened the door it wasn’t Kitty. It was that girl. From the bar. Dark hoodie up, shadowing her face, hands jammed in pockets of jeans. And then she was in my room. We were sitting on the bed. She had taken the hood off but it was dim and I couldn’t see her very well. She was talking. I think. But I couldn’t really hear her. There was a weird humming sound. But it was just in my head. I was sick. I felt hot and then cold. The room was swaying. I could hear this mumbling, which I think was her. But I couldn’t make out any words. I tried to focus, but it was no use. It was like another language. I think I apologized. I think I tried to tell her I was sick. But I don’t remember what I said, or what she said. And then she was touching me. I’d feel…something along my arm. I sort of looked but she wasn’t there, but then she’d be right in front of me somehow. Movement. I felt her hair on my face. I felt her breath. But I couldn’t track where she was. Shadows moved around me. I tried to reach out, touch her, to push her away, to be honest. I felt so sick, and whatever she was doing, this weird vague touching, I couldn’t handle it. I felt my hand brush something, but I couldn’t find her really. I slid off the bed onto the floor, but she was still there. Sort of flowing around me. I saw her face, for a moment. Her sharp nose. Her long hair. My eyes hurt. My head hurt. I was covered in cold sweat. And then my door was wide open. I looked up and saw a big black hole where my white door normally was. Kitty was in the room. There was a commotion. I crawled to the sink. It felt like my hands and knees were sinking into something thick and dense, sinking down below the level of the floor. I curled up under the sink. I might have been out for a minute or two. Suddenly I was back, staring at a pipe. It was very close to my face. I looked around. Kitty was fixing my bed. She turned and saw me. She had turned on my bedside lamp. The room looked normal. White walls, brown carpet. My bed looked so appealing. But hadn’t I just been over there? Hadn’t something terrible been happening? Kitty patted my pillow. “Get in here, Cato.” I crawled to the bed and pulled myself into it. Kitty tucked me in. Like a mother. She smoothed a hand over my forehead. I felt the tension ease out of me. I felt myself sink down, down, down. Kitty Cormier That night at the bar Cato had seemed off. He sat by himself, staring straight ahead as all the people pressed in. He seemed absent. He’d been quiet lately. But it was late winter. Everyone gets blue round here at the end of winter. Time seems to grind to a halt in March. It might be a nice month in some places, but for my money, March is the ugliest, dirtiest of months in Maine. When we walked back it was warm out. Oddly so. Fog was oozing out of the snow banks, forming halos around the street lights. Back at the Harris, the big lobby windows were coated in condensation. Warm out and cold within. And something seemed off inside. I couldn’t track it and wrote it off as the weird little warm snap. But something wasn’tright. Cato stumbled up to his room and his door closed. That was unusual too. He was always steady on his feet, even on nights when we worked through a bottle, and tonight had not been that. But who knew what he’d gotten up to earlier in the day? Let him sleep it off. In my room I felt ill at ease. I put on my electric kettle for tea. It wasn’t unusual for me to have a hard time finding sleep. I’d spent many nights awake at my kitchen table. Working some puzzles. Listening to the radio on low. Just thinking. It looked like this would be one of those nights. I got my cup of tea and sat on my little couch. But I was nervous. I got up and sat at the table. Then I was just pacing around. I felt real nervous. My joints were hurting. This weird weather. And at some point, when I was standing quiet over by the window looking out at the strange misty alleyway down below, I heard someone walking out in the hall. I looked towards my door and I saw a bit of light slip by, on the bottom. It was her . I stood there listening. I could hear her walking down the hall. I heard her stop. A long, long pause. I thought that was it. But then I heard a knocking. Someone knocking on a door.  My mind did a lot of gymnastics right then. All in one moment: It wasn’t her . It was someone else going to visit someone. It sounded like it was down by Cato’s door. It was her . And she was knocking on Cato’s door. It was someone else knocking on Cato’s door. It was someone else knocking on another door. There were five or six doors down there, no reason to assume… I heard a door open, and then close. Silence...It’s none of your concern. It is your concern because it’s her , and she just went in Cato’s room. But how? Why? All of this crashing down in my head at once. But what floated to the top was: she is in his room. Go. Out in the hall that off feeling got much stronger. I looked to the left. The balcony sat in shadow. The air felt cold and damp. The fog from outside must have been oozing in. I looked to the right. The hall was empty. The red exit sign glowed from way down at the end. I looked down at the carpet, expecting to see little ghost footprints. But there was nothing. The carpet was threadbare up here. And dirty. I walked down. I was almost tiptoeing for some reason. I stopped in front of his door and leaned in. As soon as my face got close to the wood of the door I heard a hum. The hum grew louder. It felt like it was coming from in my head. I leaned back and the hum cut off. Stopped clean. I leaned forward again and it slowly started. Swelled. Got pretty loud. That’s when I reached out and opened the door. Cato Bond The next morning I awoke early and somehow walked down to the gas station. It was cold out. That warm weather had blown right past. I bought two sixers of cheep beer and a huge Styrofoam cup of coffee and brought them back to my room. I got back in bed and slowly sipped beer. I got a can and a half down, then added the coffee, alternating until I had two beers and half the coffee in me. One sip at a time, nice and slow, I started to feel better. Memories from the night floated up, and I pushed them back down. Wouldn’t even look at them. There was a gentle knock at my door. I got up and stood there, hand on knob, scared. “Cato, it’s me.” It was Kitty. I opened the door and she stood there in a nice woolen green suit, with a jacket and skirt. She had a little hat on her head. I’d never seen her so sharp. She had her purse on her arm and a pair of brown shoes on her feet. “I’m going to church. You want to come with me?” “Church?” I didn’t know she went to church. Was it Sunday? “Saint Athanasius. Mass.” “No.” I didn’t know what else to say. “Ok. I’ll be back in a few hours. Then we should talk.” And with that she turned and walked down the hall towards the stairs. I locked my door and got back in bed. Opened another beer. Took a sip of coffee. Lit a cigarette. Awhile later I was feeling like myself. I went and took a shower. When I was drying off in the bathroom a saw some scratches on my arms. I looked in the mirror and saw scratches up and down both arms, and along my sides, from armpit to hip, along my ribs. They were thin but deep. I looked at my back, expecting to see them there. That’s where scratches of this nature usually show up. But my back was unmarked. I dressed, and when I got back to my room put a flannel on. I looked in the little mirror above my sink. Nothing on my neck or face, my hands were clear too. I felt the need to hide the scratches. I just didn’t know what they were, what they were from. I must have blacked out last night. Memories started to rise but I pushed them down. Nope. I opened a fresh beer. Awhile later, another knock on the door. Kitty was back and had changed into her regular clothes. A plain shirt and a pair of slacks with pantyhose underneath. She always wore pantyhose underneath her slacks. It was something my own grandmother had done. “Let’s go to my room,” she said, “It smells like ass in here.” Kitty Cormier When I was a girl, we went to church twice a week. We were Catholic. I went to a Catholic school as well. God was central in my life; a giant beam running through everything. Everything you did or said was supposed to be about God, or for God, or in the service of God. At the top of each assignment, we were to write JMJ, an abbreviation for the holy family; Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Everything was in service to them, even our math homework. Or that’s what we were told. I noticed early on that what adults did and said seemed to have nothing to do with God. Including the nuns. And certainly my parents. When I heard them muttering, “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph” under their breath it was not in service to anything holy, if you catch my drift. But you weren’t allowed to ask questions about that. You weren’t allowed to ask questions about any of it, and I had a lot of questions. Had I had children I might have taken them to church, it might have brought me back. I was a lapsed Catholic, I guess you could say. But I didn’t have children. We never used birth control and I never got pregnant. We never talked about it. My husband and I, well we never talked about anything other than what was for dinner or why hadn't I done this or that. I never spoke to him at all if I could help it. I learned early on that staying out of his way was the safest bet. Even then I sometimes got a beating, but if I flew low it was better. The beatings were for various things I’d done wrong (or said wrong, which is why I just stopped talking round him). He told me I made him beat me, by the way I acted or the things I had or hadn’t done. I tried to figure it out at first, thought there was some kind of code I could crack to get him to stop. But the thing was it had nothing to do with me, or what I did. All that darkness came out of him, it was in  him. It had nothing to do with me at all. By the time I started to go through the change I realized we hadn’t had a baby, and that we wouldn’t now. And I was glad. He would have been a terrible father. He was a mean man. I was 58 when he dropped dead of a stroke in the middle of a shift down at the mill. I wasn’t sorry to see him go. I don’t think anyone was, to tell the truth. But being a lapsed Catholic doesn’t mean I don’t think about God. I do. And the older I get, the more I think about it. There’s more to this world than could ever fit into my head, or the head of people much smarter than me. There’s more that we don’t understand than do. Death is among the biggest. We are all headed there and yet not a one of us knows what it is. I think it used to scare me, just the unknown, but it don’t anymore. I don’t believe in heaven or hell. I think we create those things here on earth. For ourselves, for others. What was Auschwitz but hell on Earth? What is laughing with a friend so hard you can’t catch your breath but heaven? But death? That’s a whole other thing. I don’t know what will happen, if anything, but I’m not afraid of it. I’m curious. And to be truthful I won’t have to wait long. I’m old. I’m worn out. I can feel the edges of this thing fraying, and fraying fast. I won't be in this old body much longer. I went to mass that morning to ground myself in something. What I’d seen in that roomhad shaken me. I was baptized in that church, married in that church, and I had attended dozens of funerals there. It was  a holy place, and not because of the teachings but despite them. The church was barely a quarter full. When I was a girl it was packed every week. I let the words and the ceremony wash over me, hearing nothing, taking in nothing, just letting it flow past. It was a cold sunny day and light streamed in through the stained glass. It was so pretty. I walked back in the cold sharp air feeling better. Feeling ready. Cato was up and showered and clear-eyed. We went and sat in my room. “What do you remember about last night?” I asked him. He shrugged. Grimaced. Rubbed his face. Stood up from the couch and moved his body in a nervous way. I had brewed a pot of coffee and I poured out two mugs. He took his black. I dashed some half and half in mine. Cato took his cup and held it in his hands. “I don’t know. Not much I guess.” “Do you remember what happened in your room?” His body stiffened. I thought he might get up and leave. But he just stared down into his cup. Steam rose and danced in a ray of sun shooting in through the geranium leaves. He sighed. “I remember something. I remember…that girl from the bar.” This wasn’t what I expected him to say. What girl from the bar? But I waited, letting him sort it out, letting him tell it. “She came to my door, I guess. I don’t know how she knew where I lived. She followed us I guess?” He looked up at me. I said nothing.  “Well I was sick. I couldn’t... and then I don’t know. I was sick and then you were there. You put me to bed. Maybe. Did that happen?” he was staring into his mug. “This girl from the bar. What did she look like?” “Well you saw her. That hiker girl. She had on a dark hoodie sweatshirt. She was sitting with us up the bar. It was that girl.” “So that’s who was in the room with you? The girl in the hoodie?” “Well didn’t you see her when you came in? Did you come in?!”  He stood now, agitated. He ran one hand up and down the other arm, shoulder to wrist. “Let me see your arms.” He froze, like a deer in headlights. He looked at me. Slowly he unbuttoned his flannel. He carefully removed it and put it on the back of a chair. Both arms were covered in long thin lines, many of them, shoulder to wrist. He lifted up his T-shirt and showed me his sides. Also covered in thin red cuts. Like paper cuts. I sucked in my breath. He sat at the table with me. “What happened last night?” he asked. Now it was my turn to sigh. “I didn’t see any girl at the bar. Not one such as you described.” “She bought us a round of drinks. Didn’t she?” “No. I got a round. You got a round. Then Timmy Richmond got us a round. Right before we left Randy poured us two more.” He stared into space, chewing on his lip. “OK.”  I cleared my throat, clasped my hands on the table. “When I came in your room you were laying on the floor. It was dark, but not pitch dark; I could see you. And right above you, floating above you and kind of all around you, was her .” “The…hiker girl?” “No. Her . That one we’ve seen.” He stared at me.  “Her? You mean…” he rubbed his face, rubbed all over the top of his head, mussing his still damp hair, “Wait, what do you mean?” “I think you know. You’ve seen her.” “So it was…a ghost.” I nodded. Cato stared at me, blank faced. “A ghost did this to my arms?” he pointed to the thin red cuts. “She was…I don’t know how to say it exactly. She was cutting you. I don’t know if it was with her hands or her hair or her teeth. I thought I saw…” I shook my head, shaking the image from my mind, “I don’t know exactly how but she was cutting you. She had blood in her mouth.” Cato sat back from the table, both hands gripping the top. He stared straight ahead. I couldn’t blame him. The sight of her bloody mouth had been horrific. She had turned when I came in the room, looking at me. Looking right at me. Black eyes. Red mouth. I was pretty sure I had seen her teeth. Sharp. But also, as I had approached her, something like her hair had drifted over and touched my arm. It had burned. A cold burn. I had a little cut there. Just an inch long. Cato started shaking his head. Slowly. He stood and paced. Picked up his cup and set it back down. He went over to the the window and looked down into the alley. The sun shone on his face. He looked haggard. His pupils large even in the bright light. I sipped my coffee. Letting it sink in. Letting him absorb it. I wasn’t sure what he remembered. More than he’d said, but I didn’t think he’d seen any blood, or felt any pain. Not in the moment. He was too out of it. I couldn’t track this hiker girl story. There hadn’t been anyone like that at Peppermints. It was all locals. No hikers, no hoodies, no one we didn't know. But it didn’t matter. There had been no hiker girl in his room. When I’d stepped further into the room she  had flown straight up. Into the  ceiling above. The room had been dead silent then. I’d turned on the lamp and Cato crawled over to the sink, curled up like a dog under there, shaking, arms bloody. I had made his bed (the sheets and blankets were on the floor with him). I’d gotten a cold washcloth and wiped his arms. They didn’t look too  bad. I didn’t know about the cuts on his sides. Then I’d gotten him into bed, shut off the light and sat there. He seemed to fall right asleep. When dawn broke I went back to my room. “I need a drink,” Cato said from over by the window. I got out the bottle. Cato Bond I didn’t believe in ghosts. And I didn’t believe in vampires. And now it seemed that some combination of the two had left scratches all over me. How could a ghost scratch a person? Was that possible? Why would a ghost drink blood? Trying to find logic in any of it was…well, crazy. Because it was  crazy. That hiker girl had come into my room and scratched me up. That was all. But I knew that wasn’t true. And when I dug down on this hiker girl, I started to feel the ground beneath me crumble. It felt like the reveal in Fight Club. Me at the bar, the girl in the hoodie next to me, and then suddenly, not there. There was something not right about those memories of her. Something…tampered with. Even the memory of her in my doorway. I had looked at her, recognized her, sort of. But something was screwy about it. And once she was in my room...no. It hadn’t been some girl. Not at all. I was weary all day. Went back to bed and slept. I wasn’t afraid of her coming back. Not then. I just felt empty, and anxious, in a general way. But that might have been the booze. On top of all this was my drinking. I was in a bad place with it. I needed to pull up. But now everything felt…out of control. And I was so damn weary. How was I going to get myself out of this? I was not up for it, any of it. What would have happened if Kitty hadn’t come in? I couldn’t even follow that thread. Didn’t want to. Could a ghost kill you? Vampires could. But. Or. I didn’t fucking know. I slept. Kitty Cormier That night I sat awake at my table all night. There wasn’t that feel in the air. But I listened for her anyway. She’d left through the ceiling, but she’d gone in through the door. Perhaps that was the rule? Let’s hope so. But regardless, the energy felt different. I was pretty sure she wasn’t around. I sat sipping my drink and thinking it through. When I’d seen her on the balcony area I had thought she was a ghost. A spirit. An Imprint. Whatever you want to call it. But a person. Or linked to a person. But now I wasn’t so sure. What I’d seen in the room hadn’t felt human. And who ever heard of a ghost harming someone in that way? I’d never heard even the kookiest kooks claim a ghost had cut them up. Poltergeists could what, throw things, push you down stairs? And they were thought to be more demonic energies. But drinking blood? This wasn’t a ghost. I didn’t know what it was, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t a person. I wasn’t sure what was motivating it. Was it eating? That also felt unlikely. Was it just hurting people for the fun of it? I didn’t get that impression either. Maybe eating but in a different way. It didn’t need sustenance, but maybe it fed off some aspect of the act. I circled round and round it as I burned through the night. Trying to conjure up every story I’d ever heard about…well anything. But in the end I just didn’t know. Didn’t know what she was or what she wanted, if anything. Would she kill him? Could she? If she could slice him up, yeah, it seemed she could. What if I hadn’t walked in when I did? What would have happened? Cato seemed vulnerable to it somehow. How to protect him? Cato Bond I had to meet with my parole officer the next day. He was a real prick. Before I could even sit down he handed me a cup. Random drug test. He’d done it every time. He didn’t have to, but he did. The only saving grace was that he just did the 5 panel, which didn't include alcohol. I’d gone in on a narcotics charge, so he must have been hoping to catch me back on H. But I was off all that shit. For good. It was expensive, it was dangerous, and I’d had enough running around after it. I’d come out of prison clean, and I wasn’t going to let it get it’s hooks into me again. I pissed in the cup and left it on the little table in there. They did the test right then, and if you failed they could arrest you on a probation violation and that would be it. I sat in his office waiting. “You been looking for work?” he asked as he sat down. He didn’t say I’d passed the test. If I’d failed he arrest me, but he didn't acknowledge that I’d passed. It was like he was hoping for me to fail. I always felt that way with him. He wanted me back inside. Thought that’s where I belonged. “Not much around.” “Where have you looked?” “They won’t take me at the mill.” “Yeah I know, Cato. You’ve burned every bridge over there. How about a store? Clerk work? How about construction? You know how to change oil?” I said nothing. We’d had this talk every month. He yammered on. Telling me I had to try. I had to WORK. Telling me I wasn’t doing well. Telling me I wasn’t going to make it. I said nothing. I had nothing to say. Also I’d had a few drinks that morning to get myself in here. The smell might still linger. I left in a sour mood. My back hurt. My head hurt. My jaw ached. That fucking little prick had read me the riot for almost 25 minutes. He wasn’t there to help me, he was there to watch me till I fucked up and then put me back in the cage. Thinking about it made my blood boil. The police station, where we met, was almost across from The Harris but I decided to take a walk off the island. It was a cold, windy, gray day, but I needed some air. Needed to move. I felt like I could smash up some shit. I felt trapped. I ran into James walking his big dog Lady down by the Swift River behind the playing fields. I’d gone to school with him. I told him about Officer Shithead and he laughed, told me he knew all about it. Told me he had a bottle back at his place. Apple Jack. Off we went. James lived in a room above a garage in the town across the river, in the shadow of the mill. Literally. The long shadow cast by the mill fell over his place almost the entire day. We drank there for a while and then two of his brothers rolled in. Or cousins. Or friends. He called them brothers. They’d come all the way from Jackman. We drank together and then they wanted to go out. So we piled into their truck and headed to Gatch’s, a little sports bar in town. We were there awhile and then James had to go home, so he peeled off. I stayed with his brothers and we all decided to head to Peppermints. They were flush and buying rounds. We’d hooked up with an older guy and he went with us. In the truck he pulled out a flask and passed it to me. It was straight grain alcohol.  “GODDAMN!” screamed one of the brothers. Fucking right, I thought Kitty Cormier Cato’s room was quiet and I assumed he was sleeping, still worn out from the other night. I hauled my laundry down to the basement and did a wash. I went to the market and did a shop. Then I lay down on my little couch, and I guess I dozed a bit. I hadn’t slept at all the last two nights and it caught up to me. It was a restless sleep. I kept bobbing up to the surface and then back into scattered dreams. At one point I was on the coast, in a small chilly house by a restless sea. In one I was in my room here at The Harris and someone knocked on my door, and I knew something was wrong. Then I was in the house I grew up in. The little white saltbox on the edge of town. I sat at the kitchen table and the sun streamed in the little windows with the wobbly old glass. My brother was in a basket by the stove, just a baby. My mother was up at the sink, her back to me, humming. The clock ticked. It was just as it had been when I was a girl of five. But I was me. An old woman. On the table sat a white plate with a small pile of fat blackberries. We had a wild patch of bushes out back and we’d pick them for momma, and she’d make the sweetest jams. She turned and came to the table, smiling at me, drying her hands on her skirt. My breath caught in my throat. I’d forgotten her face. The little curls that came loose at her temple. The dimple on her chin. Her warm grey eyes. I came up out of the dream with tears on my cheeks. It was getting dark. I had napped too long, I felt off kilter. I washed my face with cool water. I drank my cold tea. I turned on a lamp. Something felt off. I opened my door and poked my head into the hall. No one had turned the lights on out here on the second floor yet. It was dark and dead quiet. I looked over at the common area on the landing. It was quiet, empty. The Harris seemed to be holding it’s breath. I walked to Cato’s door and knocked, the sound loud in the silent hallway. There was no sound from within. I knocked again. The stillness was complete. He wasn’t in there. I walked back to my room. I put on a pot of coffee and poured myself a few fingers of whiskey. The light was gone from the sky now, it was full dark. And there, hanging low and bloated in the sky was a big fat yellow moon. I could see it just beyond the roof of the building beside us, that formed the alley below. I sipped my drink and stared at it. No, this was not good. Cato Bond The place was packed. Wall to wall people. I could feel the waves of energy move through the crowd. Loud shotgun explosions of laughter. A woman shrieking. Undulations of conversation; rolling, rising, falling, bubbling, simmering, washing over me. I had a beer in my hand. No idea where I’d gotten it. Next to me an old timer, Dickey Damon, was telling me about a parrot he knew once. He told me the bird was 80 years old and rode around on the shoulder of a guy who’d hang out in the bars of Portsmouth. The parrot had a dirty mouth. Dickey’s eyes glowed as he recited some of the things the bird would say. Somewhere behind me the brothers were flirting with Lisa Ouellette. I was floating somewhere up near the ceiling, feeling safe and secure and content. There was nothing but this moment, this place, this room. I hoped it would never end. I went out to smoke a cigarette, I came back in. I went out to smoke a cigarette, I came back in. There was a whiskey & Coke in my hand. Then someone handed me a shot. Now I gripped a tallboy of Pabst. The room swirled, and stilled, tilted and righted itself. Harsh laughter smashed into me. A guy smashed into me. I found myself sitting at the bar. The brothers were there, telling me about their maple syrup operation. I wasn’t listening. Back outside the old guy with the flask came up to me and gave me another nip. Whatever he had in there was fire. It shot into me like paint thinner. I felt heat rising from my face. I sure was feeling fine. Up in the sky a beautiful golden moon looked down on us, bathing the street in soft, warm light. All felt right in the world. I walked to the store at some point. With the brothers and the guy with the flask, I think. I remember the fluorescent lights, and digging through my pockets for money for some smokes. On the walk back someone lit a joint and we passed it. The brothers had a sixer in a paper bag and they loaded up in their tiny Toyota and rattled off down the road, back to Jackman. It was late, and things were winding down. A feeling of unease rose in me at the thought of calling it a night. I wanted more. And I guess that’s how the guy with the flask and I ended up headed back to my room. I thought Kitty might be up, and we could all have a drink. I had a few beers at my place too. We were keeping it rolling. Thank God. We stood outside The Harris finishing our smokes. The old guy was talking, but I couldn’t focus on the words, they kept slipping away in a mumbled tumble. Like mice running every which way across the kitchen floor, slipping under furniture, disappearing underneath a door. Inside we climbed the steps up to the second floor. The place was empty, vacant feeling. I moved to knock on Kitty’s door but the guy said something, shook his head, motioned further down the hall to my door. I dropped my hand, poised to knock, and followed him to my room. We went in. Kitty Cormier I was down in the basement folding sheets and towels when I heard someone come in and go upstairs. I tried to hurry up and see if it was Cato, but when I got up there the lobby and balcony were empty. It was quiet. I went back down and loaded my clean laundry into my little hand cart, then hauled it all up to the lobby. I climbed the stairs feeling twinges in both knees, a twinge in my back. All the blessings of old age. I got the cart up to two and looked around. Quiet. Not a soul around. There was no light from the bottom of Cato’s door. I went into my place and began putting away my clean clothes. Cato Bond Have you ever had a dream in which you’re with someone you know, a friend or relative, and suddenly you look over and realize it isn’t  them? It looks like them, but it isn’t. And as you realize this you know somehow that you can’t let them know that you know. Inside my room it was dim, almost dark. No damn window to let in that nice moonlight. I was sitting on my bed and the old guy was in the chair a few feet away. But it was pretty dark and I couldn’t make him out that well. He was just a shape. I had an opened beer in my hand, the can warm. But I hardly wanted it. I felt sick to be honest. I was drunker than I’d known. Now sitting here I felt heavy, weary, and nauseous. There was a humming in my head. I wanted to say something to him, tell him I needed to get some rest, ask him to leave. But as I sat there looking over at his shape I realized it wasn’t  him. It wasn’t the guy from before. It was someone else. I wanted to turn on the light but I was frozen. I couldn’t move. Saliva filled my mouth. I should get up and go out to the bathroom. But I sat on. I even took a sip of the beer, just out of nervousness, unease, just for something to do. I needed to act normal, for some reason. I wasn’t sure why. Who was in here with me? I truly didn’t know. My eyes roved around. I could just make out my sink, and the opposite wall. The door. Then I was back to the chair, and it sat empty. He was gone. I opened my mouth to say something, when I felt movement behind me, and something touching the side of my face. He was behind me. On the bed. The humming got louder and the can slipped out of my hand, hitting the floor There was movement all around me, something touching me seemingly everywhere. I felt myself fall back, and somehow I just kept falling. Kitty Cormier This so called ghost, it was only bothering Cato.. Why was that? I knew all the folks that lived here. I’d have heard something if someone else was having encounters. And she wasn’t bothering me. She in fact fled from me. It seemed to me that she was connected not to this place, so much, as to Cato. Why? If she were to kill him, I wondered what an autopsy would show. The scratches would be peculiar, but I’d bet not enough to cause him to bleed out. What would it look like? Cato was drinking a lot. He was in the shit with it. All day, everyday, and it’d been that way for a long while now, ever since he lost his job. I wondered what his blood alcohol was most nights, by the time he passed out. People who drank like that, they built up huge tolerances. I’d bet he was approaching levels that would be fatal in other people. It would look like he’d died of alcohol toxicity, and his organs would have the wear and tear to prove it. It would be mostly true in fact. Was it her that was going to kill him, or the drink? Were they the same thing? It was then, as I sat there thinking this final thought, that there was a loud pop, and all the lights went out. I sat a beat in the dark, then I stepped into the hall. The red Exit sign was missing from down the hall, and the lights in the lobby below were off. Power was out in the whole building. That’s when I heard the humming. It was coming from my right. Under Cato’s door I saw a light. It was very bright. She was in there with him. I had to GO. Cato Bond It’s left to me to tell the last part it seems, and a worse narrator you’ll hardly ever find. The whole thing happened so fast. I was in my room, but I wasn’t in my room. The walls were there, but not there. I’ve no other way to put it. Above and around me, sort of everywhere, was her . I saw her hair, filling all the spaces, her white dress, or robes, billowing out big enough to cover a house. Everything was in motion. Waves of terror kept jolting me. I was going to pass out, and I felt myself turning towards it. Letting it happen. I wasn’t on the bed anymore, I was floating, within my small room, but also adrift in a vast space. Not toggling between the two but both, at once. And then Kitty was there. She was right next to me, but also across a distance. She was hollering to me, at me, but at first I couldn’t make it out. And the effort of trying to hear her words made my head ache. I closed my eyes, and turned back towards the darkness, towards slipping down underneath it all. But then I felt Kitty grab my arm. I opened my eyes and she was there, right there, face close to mine. Her face was covered in little slices, one of which had opened her cheek a bit. There was blood in her thin white hair, which was whipping around her head. It was like we were in the center of a storm. “Cato! It’s the drink! It’s the drink that’s killing you!” I nodded at her. She was right. It was obviously true. I’d known it for some time. But to hear it, to hear the words, here in this place. The words said aloud had power. “The drink is killing me. I want to stop.” My voice was barely a croak. But it came out. And Kitty heard me. She smiled.  And then it was quiet. We were still there, kind of floating, but the noise was gone and I guess she  was gone. Just all at once. I felt pain all over my body. Kitty’s face was right there next to mine. She was bleeding. “I can see my mother and brother in the room,” she whispered. I looked around. I could still see a vast space, and my room, existing together. I wasn’t sure where I fit into these spaces, where I actually was. I didn’t see anyone else, but there was a tremendous light off to the right. “I’m going to go. I’m ready now,” she said, not to me. I started to cry. I didn’t really know what she meant in the moment. But I also knew. I guess I just knew. And then she was gone. And I was on the bed. The room was just a room. Dark, quiet. And I was alone.  “Cato, when did you last see Kitty?” “We had drinks. I don’t know what night exactly. We had drinks at Peppermints, and a night cap in her room after that. The next day I went to parole, oh, so that would have been the 28th of March. I didn’t see her that day. Met up with some friends, got back late. And then I didn’t see her after that at all.” “So you last saw her the 27th then.” “I guess so.” “She was seen the 28th, but no one has seen her since then. Where do you think she is?” The question hung in the air. I slipped my hand in my pocket, felt the plastic six month chip in there. Ran my thumb along its edge. “I honestly have no idea.” “Well, if you think of anything you let us know.” He flipped the notebook shut. “You’re in Bangor now right?” He hands me his card. “Yes. I’m hanging sheet rock with a local operation. I’ve got a place downtown.” I stand, stretch, and walk out into a cold clear night, unencumbered, no longer haunted, free. The End

CW: Pregnancy loss, suicidal ideation I’ve never been in a waiting room this fancy before – I guess that’s what £100 an hour gets you. It’s bright and lovely, the muted yellow of the walls implying health and good cheer. The credentials on the wall tell me that this man is someone who thinks he should be trusted with people’s innermost thoughts. He has multiple certificates, all displayed in shiny oak frames. I wonder if they protect him from the stories he hears, if he uses them like a talisman in the night when he cannot sleep, if he still believes that objects can keep him safe. Like a child. Lucy, lovely to meet you. He takes me down a short, cheerful corridor and into his office, all unkillable plastic plants and unbreakable plastic coffee cups. I sit on the chair to his left, weaving my fingers through a thick blanket he has placed over the arm of it. False comfort. How are you today? What an unoriginal starting question. I take another look at him from beneath my eyelashes, having resolved to focus on the blanket and not much else. He’s frowning gently at me, concerned, and I realise that not making eye contact might be a bad idea, might paint me as someone who has things to hide. I raise my head and meet his gaze full-on. I’m not too bad, doctor. I know you might think that’s a strange answer, that I wouldn’t be here if I was okay, but today I’m honestly not too bad. He smiles warmly, but it doesn’t quite reach the depths of his muddy green eyes and I realise that I need to be a bit more careful, a bit more circumspect, if I want to leave this encounter unscathed. As if I ever really leave any encounter unscathed. I smile to myself, but he isn’t watching me now. He’s shuffling a stack of papers on top of a clipboard on his knee. He has a pen, and for a moment, I think he’s going to give it to me, but at the last second he seems to decide to keep the power of the written word to himself, to make me speak rather than write. That’s fine. I’m used to men holding onto the power they think they have over me. Before we begin today, there’s a questionnaire I want us to fill in together. It’s about different things that can affect your mood, and it’s called the Patient Health Questionnaire. I’m only asking about the last two weeks, so it’s a snapshot of how you’ve been feeling. I’m going to give you a statement, and you’ll give me a number between zero and three – zero being “not at all” and three being “nearly every day.” Is that okay? I suppose so. Nobody mentioned a questionnaire to me when my husband booked this appointment, but I suppose he wants as much information as possible to make an informed decision about whether I’m mad or not.  Yes, doctor. Please, it’s David. Call me David, I insist. Now – first question: over the last two weeks, how much have you been bothered by having little interest or pleasure in doing things? Define “doing things.” For that matter, define “little interest or pleasure.” If there’s a cup of tea involved (oat milk, no sugar) or a good book (not that trash that my sister reads), I’m fairly interested. I get pleasure from watching the birds feeding their young outside the kitchen window and probably get overly invested in the chicks surviving into the summer. But if you’re asking me about spending time with my friends or having sex with my husband – no interest, no pleasure. And that’s why we’re here, isn’t it?  Erm…probably a one. I hedge my bets. His face tells me I’ve given the right answer – a bit down, but not a completely hopeless case yet. Yet. Okay. How about feeling down, depressed, or hopeless? Well, over the last two weeks I’ve been increasingly down, depressed, and hopeless since my husband, who I always thought was a reasonable man, decided that I needed to see a psychiatrist for my “mental health.” Meaning, that he found out about my plan and exercised every last bit of his power over me to make me come to see a man who is going to make a judgement on whether I’m sane or not. So, I guess you could say so.  No, doctor – David. I’d say zero for that one. I have a good life, for the most part. Good. Trouble falling or staying asleep, or sleeping too much? Ah. Now that I do have difficulties with. Trouble falling asleep, when my husband comes home from the bar with his friends right at the time that I’m getting comfortable and ready to drop off. Trouble staying asleep when he gets into bed and paws at me after he’s had a few drinks. Falling asleep during the day due to my inability to get a decent night’s rest, between him and the crying babies, wailing for their mother – for me – every few minutes, especially when my back is turned, especially from a different room. And yes, I do know that they’re in my head now. I’ve figured that much out at least, but my husband’s behaviour towards me very much is not. Probably a two there, I do struggle with sleep. His face tells me that I’ve given the wrong answer this time, and I make a mental note to lie later that this is due to me staying up late cleaning or cooking and then collapsing due to exhaustion rather than any internal process. Okay, then I’m guessing this one might also apply – feeling tired, or having little energy? Damn it, now I’m going to have to say yes to this one and increase my score on his stupid questionnaire. I suppose it’s true – the babies do keep me awake, and then during the day I’m so tired I imagine that I can see them, always crawling around the next corner or running – some of the older ones – away from the windows when the sunlight catches them. I didn’t expect the miscarriages to have such a lasting effect on me, never really wanted children to start with, but my body is obviously aware of what I’ve lost, and the older ones call out to me in the night, asking me to come with them, wanting to take me away from where I am. The younger ones just scream, slowly eroding any last bit of resolve I might have had to deny them what they want. Yes, you’re right – but only a little. One for that question, I think. Great. How about poor appetite, or overeating? I don’t have any appetite these days. I know that if I want to grow a new life I need to eat well and often, but as I said, I’m not really interested in having children. I’ve already got four, the babies and the older ones, and as they’re aged between five and three months old, they do keep me busy. It’s my husband who tries to encourage me to eat, makes me whatever food I fancy every night and doesn’t even flinch as I pick listlessly at it. He can’t hear the babies, I know that now. I thought it was something we shared, but when I mentioned it to him it got me a one-way ticket into this office, so. Something to keep to myself in future, and definitely not something to tell David.  My appetite is fine. Zero for that one . He frowns, and I wonder what my husband told him when he booked this appointment. I’d probably better make my next answer more convincing. Okay. Feeling bad about yourself, or that you are a failure or have let yourself or your family down? Finally, one I can answer sincerely, as everyone knows about it anyway. Yes, I do feel bad about myself. As you’ll be aware, I’ve had four miscarriages, and at times I can’t help but feel that they were my fault. So, a three for that one. He smiles benevolently at me and I return his expression tentatively, trying to mask my relief. That was clearly the correct answer and fits with what he thinks he already knows about me. Oh Lucy, please don’t think that. None of that is your fault, at all. But let’s finish this questionnaire, and we can discuss it in more detail. I warm towards David slightly. He is trying, and he doesn’t blame me. But I need to make sure I get what I need from this, and that’s going to mean lying to him a bit. Listen, Lucy, he’s asking you the next question. Trouble concentrating on things, such as reading the newspaper or watching television? My concentration would be fine if the babies would stop crying, if the older ones would stop their whispering, but I decide that doesn’t count.  One. My concentration is fine, but obviously I’m tired sometimes and that can affect it. A call back to earlier questions – risky, but I think I’ve pulled it off. Good. How about this one – moving or speaking so slowly that other people could have noticed? Or the opposite – being so fidgety or restless that you have been moving around more than usual? I have absolutely no idea what he’s getting at here. Some days my whole body is slowed down, and it’s like moving through treacle just to answer my husband’s questions when he gets home from work. Sometimes I’m a ball of energy, designing new curtains for the nursery room and alarming my friends and family with my assertions about what we’ll call the new baby when he arrives. Knowing all the while, though, that he’s never going to arrive. That my hopes for children are all buried with my mother in the graveyard, and that it’s so stupid because I was on the fence about them to start with, but now I can’t get away from them and their crying and their whispering about how the soft earth is so comfortable and quiet. I have to admit, it sounds inviting.  No, I don’t think I’m like that. Maybe a one, I’m sometimes a bit slow. And the last question – thoughts that you would be better off dead or of hurting yourself in some way? Every single second.  No, not at all. Zero. He smiles again, prejudicing a process that I’m sure he thinks is neutral, and I know this was definitely the right answer. Okay, so you’ve scored nine out of twenty-seven on that questionnaire. That indicates mild depressive symptoms, which is good. That means I don’t have to be too worried about you. So, tell me what’s brought you to me today. My husband found out that I was planning to join my dead children and I can’t stop hearing their cries.  Well, my husband thought that it would be good to get my mental health checked after the miscarriages, which I completely understand. I don’t feel that I need any therapy, but I do feel a bit down and bad about myself at times. David smiles and writes this down on his notepad, and I start to feel another plan forming as the words pour out of me, unbidden. This is clearly a man who likes to know, who likes to diagnose and pin and treat, a lepidopterist of the human variety, a feelings collector. I can use that to my advantage. *** I leave David’s office an hour later, £100 lighter and with a prescription for antidepressants in my pocket. I have just enough time to go and pick them up from the pharmacy before my husband arrives to take me home. I won’t tell him that I have them, of course, but I will claim that the meeting was helpful, and to show my appreciation I’ll make us a lovely meal tonight, so stunning that I’ll surprise him by eating most of my portion too, so richly spiced and flavoured that he won’t taste anything bitter or wrong. And then we’ll go to see the children.   Together. Sarah Blackshaw is a psychologist and writer who lives in the north of England. She can be found as @academiablues on most things, and also at www.clinpsychsarah.com .

Tim Thiện Nguyễn (he/him) is a Vietnamese American scientist whose Ph.D. research interrogates how genes shape our face in the womb. He has published through Diode, bath magg,  and the Iowa Chapbook Prize ; additional work is forthcoming in Defunkt Magazine's Surreal Confessional Anthology.  You may find him doom-scrolling on Twitter/X as @7imng or Bluesky as @ 7imnguyen.bsky.social .

on what a negroni could taste like i think a negroni tastes like sweat / i think a negroni tastes like blood i mean come on it looks like blood watered down & poured over ice with an orange peel on the rim / i think a negroni tastes like tears / i think a negroni tastes like nyx liquid suede lipstick in the shade kitten heels / i think a negroni tastes like regret / i think a negroni tastes like i need to switch to water tonight / i think a negroni tastes like vomit / i think a negroni tastes like a gay bar & i mean gay not lesbian because i imagine that they would taste different / i think a negroni tastes like forgetting / i think a negroni tastes like the phone camera flash going off in a warm dark nightclub / i think a negroni tastes like pain / i think a negroni tastes like tucking a dollar bill into a man’s jockstrap & catching a glimpse of his cock / i think a negroni tastes like real love / i think a negroni tastes like a bar where the lights are all red on the inside / i think a negroni tastes like pee / i think a negroni tastes like forgetting that i peed but knowing that i did pee because i don’t have to pee anymore / i think a negroni tastes like hope / i think a negroni tastes like my friends groping each other behind my back on the dance floor / i think a negroni tastes like jealousy / i think a negroni tastes like sending a text to my lover that says i love you / i think a negroni tastes like water. it’s a terrible life! Dean Winchester is driving a Toyota Prius. Dean Winchester is listening to NPR Morning Edition. Dean Winchester is wearing a Bluetooth headset. Dean Winchester is eating salad. Dean Winchester is talking about spreadsheets. it’s okay, though, because by the end of the 40 minutes Dean Winchester will be Dean Winchester again. it’s all a joke played by an angel after all. no one really drives a Toyota Prius and listens to NPR Morning Edition and wears a Bluetooth headset and eats salad and talks about spreadsheets. no one really lives a life so empty of purpose, so devoid of monsters. such lives are jokes played by angels, jokes i try to find the humor in it as i drive to work in the morning. when the 40 minutes are up it will be over and i too will get to commune with angels and send demons back to Hell. when the 40 minutes are up it will be over and i too will be Dean Winchester. Michael, I— Michael, I saw you around the pooldeck before but I never noticed much until you set your towel down next to mine at the last home swimmeet of the summer. Michael, I think it’s a horrible miracle that we never talked before now cause we’ve got the same sense of humor when it comes to pranking our teammates. Michael, I want to watch the freestyle relays later if you’ll save me a spot on the steps to the brown waterslide. Michael, I wonder if you’re flirting with me when you offer me some veggiestraws from the bag you bought at the snackbar. Michael, I might be flirting with you too. Michael, I think I am. ​​Erica Leslie Weidner is based, in New Jersey, and based in New Jersey. She is the founder and editor-in-chief of underscore_magazine . When she's not writing, she's at her day job doing badass librarian stuff.

To the immersive theater experience you wear a slinky black dress, a hat with a tiny birdcage veil, fishnet stockings, T-strap heels. You curl your hair and color your lips scarlet. Your husband got snippy with you one night on the subway when he thought the neckline on your sheer turquoise t-shirt was too low, but you get a semi-enthusiastic You look nice  out of him tonight. And you feel like a Hitchcock dame stepping outside, even if you’re stepping out of your apartment in a long row of dumpy ticky-tacky duplexes in Queens.  You travel to the immersive theater experience on the subway in a snowstorm. People will talk about it for years, that freak Halloween Eve snowstorm. You have a coat, but your legs in their fishnet stockings are still cold, your T-strap heels wobble. Still, you don’t consider going home to change. It’s Mischief Night at the immersive theater experience, and guests have been asked to dress for a certain naughtiness. You’re surprised that your husband consented to go. You think he must have some desire, still, even if he hasn’t acted on it in almost a year. He used to like the sheer low-cut t-shirts and the T-strap heels. You used to go to shows of bands you barely liked and plan insightful observations to share on the way home. You saw foul-mouthed comics in basements at Edinburgh Fringe together. Tonight would be a return to form were it not for whatever darkness opened in him and occasionally roars out of him threatening to swallow you down with it.  You have to—everyone has to—wear a black mask at the immersive theater experience, masquerade ball-style. Lace for the women, velvet for the men. The gender-expansive have to pick a side. So do you, as it will turn out. But to begin, you accept your husband’s offer to help tie the mask on. You should feel something—there should be some kind of frisson as he does so. You can imagine it: a lover pulling the grosgrain ribbon snug around your head, tying a firm knot, caressing your jaw or kissing your neck as they do so. (Lace or velvet mask for the lover? Who knows?) You could conjure a scenario, a roleplay. A stranger in a mask at a ball. And you should feel something, but you don’t. His own mask has an elastic band and he puts it on himself. The immersive theater experience is situated in an old warehouse, and you move through it Choose Your Own Adventure style. It is dark, occasionally lit dimly in a perverse primary palette: ember red, dusty gold, cobalt blue. There are notes on smoky yellow paper to be unfolded or slipped out of old manual typewriters, messages scrawled on cracked walls in lipstick or kohl, telegrams and ticker tapes, heavy rotary phones that don’t stop ringing. Everything is fascinating and full of potential, but your husband wants it to be linear, wants to figure out the right way to pass through each room and hallway to see if the show lines up with the old stories on which it is based. You don’t know or care if you’re going the right way. You just want to read the old notes and read the desperate scrawls and see how, or if, they converge. In this way you keep losing each other in the immersive theater experience. The disheveled rooms speak of violence that tore through moments before, though you never see it. All the actors are instead walking with light heads, looking through their masks at dark corners and nearly stumbling; or, in some cases, pouring tea with studied expressions, straightening books on a shelf, folding baby blankets, sorting mail, determined to maintain the double illusion that everything is real and nothing is wrong. You are both of these classes of actors with each other, you and your husband.  There’s a bar in the middle of the immersive theater experience, but it doesn’t serve drinks, not in the way you’d expect. There’s a bartender, but only one glass, which he dries slowly and interminably. There is sawdust on the floor and a single amber spotlight. There are bottles of liquor, all unlabeled and still. And there is a tinny jukebox— Billie Holiday singing Johnny Mercer, “If You Were Mine.” And there is a dancer in a velvet mask, a waistcoat, shirtsleeves. And he takes your hand and pulls you into the center of the room, and other guests recede toward the bar, including your husband. He takes a small wooden box from a plinth in what you suppose is a dance floor, there in the bar at the immersive theater experience, and opens it. Inside is a shotglass on a bed of wood shavings, and he offers it to you, and you bolt it without thinking—tequila, maybe? And then, If you were mine/I would live for your love alone/To kneel at your shrine/I would give up all I own, Billie confesses in her inimitable croon, and with one hand the dancer holds your hand to his heart while he encircles your waist with the other. He is warm, a bit sweaty. Between the mask and the dim light there’s not much to see of his face, but you can see dark hair that might need a trim, scruff on the chin. And you know that he can’t see much of you either, that the scarlet lips and curled hair are doing a lot of work, and you know he must have done this half a dozen times already tonight and will probably do it half a dozen more, but your hand is on another man’s chest, feeling his heart beat, in full view of your husband and all the other guests who Chose Their Own Adventures and found themselves there with you, with the dancer. The liquor was strong, and the dancer is warm, and the spotlight has found you—your cheeks are hot, and the Johnny Mercer song is short and sweet but Billie makes it sting, and the dancer bends his neck and lays his mouth beside your ear and whispers something you don’t understand, and then he lets you go and spins you back into the wave along the bar and he dances away into the dark. You can’t look at each other for a minute or two, you and your husband, at the immersive theater experience. You know it wasn’t real, right? That the dancer was an actor, that you don’t know what he told you? That’s what you tell your husband when he asks you, eventually, and you’re telling the truth when you say you don’t know. And you make your way through the rest of the dark warehouse and gather with the rest of the guests to watch the finale, a heap of bodies in various states of undress and unrest, the lights finally clear and icy alongside gasps and whispers.  The snow is still on the ground when you leave the immersive theater experience. You shrug into your coat, your husband shrugs into his. That was something, he says finally. Yeah, you say, wild, slinging your purse back over your arm. For some of us, he adds, giving you a look. Oh, that, you say. Part of the show, I guess. And he rolls his eyes and hails a cab, and you say little in the cab on the way back to the duplex in Queens, where he doesn’t watch you undress or put on some Billie Holiday or dance you into bed, where he just rolls over and goes to sleep and leaves you staring at the dark ceiling wondering if you will ever touch another man’s chest and hold his heartbeat ever again. It will be almost a year to the day after the immersive theater experience when you will leave him. You’ll never go to another immersive theater experience, but you won’t need to. You’ll give yourself time to linger among curious lighting and the smell of good books. You’ll drink audacious liquors. You’ll wear a white dress that makes another man say you look like an angel. You’ll know what the dancer said after all.  Abigail Myers writes poetry, fiction, and CNF on Long Island, New York.  Recent work appears with  JMWW, HAD, Discretionary Love, Tangled Locks, Farewell Transmission, Stanchion, Major 7th,  and The Dodge,  among other publications, and is forthcoming from Amethyst Review  and Atlas and Alice . Find her at abigailmyers.com  and on Twitter/Bluesky @abigailmyers.

The crayons are hard to write with. They catch and drag on the walls. I want the red crayon, red, but it keeps breaking and my hand hurts more and more trying to hold it. The janitor washes away the word of God every night while I sleep and Dr. Frey pretends I never heard it in the first place. He gives me an Underwood with a red ribbon but I must promise to behave, promise not to write on the walls, and give him my red, red crayon. The typewriter hurts my hands too but it's different. God speaks, and I type. WILDFIRE DESTROYS RESORT TOWN. Dr. Frey says it’s fire season and anyone could have predicted that. UNHOUSED PERSON FOUND DECEASED IN LOCAL PARK. Dr. Frey says I’m just playing the averages now. He has no faith, even though everything God said has come true. Then God is quiet for a while, so Dr. Frey says words like “discharge” and “halfway house.” But before I can leave, God tells me PSYCH PATIENT ESCAPES FROM LOCKED WARD and Dr. Frey says words like “restraints” and “shock therapy.” God never told me to type those words. In the morning Dr. Frey stands at the window of my tiny room while I watch him from the trees near the fence. He shouts and points and pounds the glass like a crazy man. Dr. Frey’s God may be dead, but mine is not. Linda M. Bayley is a writer living on the Canadian Shield. Her work has recently appeared in voidspace zine, Five Minutes, BULL, Short Circuit, FlashFlood Journal, Underbelly Press, Stanchion, Does It Have Pockets, and Tiny Sparks Everywhere, the National Flash Fiction Day 2024 Anthology. Find her on Twitter and Bluesky @lmbayley.

Do you crave your other half? Yes, when the storms come and the animals have spread themselves far from the croft, out across the dark hills. They seem uncountable, unfindable, gone from my care. I wish that he was still here, sometimes, if only to help me catch them in. Yes, when I am wakeful, and the bedroom bloats with shadows. Yes, when the night is bleak as a crypt, full of ghouls . How  did it feel when that hole was eroded through your shell? It began as no more than a pinprick. A thing I did not notice. It  grew bigger. I began to imagine my thoughts as creatures, aching to escape. Each dream became a radula, grinding its way out. There has always been pain in my head. One day, I felt my mind passing through the back of my skull like a calf slipping from its mother’s womb. Did you ever worry that you might drown? The Sunday parlour has curtains, swirled the colour of sea. Blue-grey drapes to close against the blue-grey dusk. After his funeral, folk came to gorge the tiny sandwiches I had made. They touched my things, said how they were sorry for my loss. I didn’t lose him. I knew exactly where he was. The last time he touched me has faded from my skin. Their prattle rose like a flood. It closed above my head. Was it easy for you to find love? I used to watch him as I walked back over the fields. His whistle would carry like a kite’s shriek upon the sky. The sun made him a false saint, lit him from behind with light. The hearth-flames made him a vision of hell. I would think, this is not my house. When did I marry? Who knitted him that scarf? Who chose that wool? Who dropped that stitch? I cannot remember casting it on . Do  you know that you are unhinged? I remember a knowledge of growth. A swallowed secret. I used to stand at the window with hands across my stomach and a smile upon my face. There was something inside me, once. I saw myself in the bubbled glass door – how I laughed at the lady with untidy hair. Her fistful of flowers seemed a sad thing. If unhinged be the clasping of foxgloves, then yes, I know this word well.  Jane Burn is an award-winning poet and hybrid writer and working-class person with autism / person with a disability. Her poems are widely published. Her current collection, Be Feared , is available from Nine Arches. The Apothecary of Flight  is due in 2024, also from Nine Arches. She lives off-grid in a Northumberland cottage. Jane is the Michael Marks Awards Environmental Poet of the Year 2023/24, with her winning pamphlet A Thousand Miles from the Sea.

What’s it cost? The cost of living, that is. How many of us are struggling? Why is my life considered valueless? No matter what we do, the struggle is real! No matter what we choose, are we uplifted? It’s too much to bear, the cost of living is tightening. Not releasing its chokehold of death or to the brink of it.  What does it have to take, for us to be and feel ok? Counting bills that keep coming. Reorganizing in the sense of Importance, picking and choosing if I make it today. Picking and choosing if I pay this bill or the next one that comes later this month. It’s not ok.  The cost of living is changing, changing for the worst. I’m really trying, god knows I am! Trying to lift myself up again! But even then it requires me to cough up money, money that I don’t have. I can’t go to school to better myself, without paying an arduous amount that isn’t always forthcoming and easy to spend. Because yes in the end it’s worth it. But can I even get to the end? I mean putting food on the table, and a roof over our head is more significant in the short term right? The cost of living is too high! It’s taking a lot from me. Everything that I can muster, everything that I have, and it’s never enough. I don’t get paid enough, yet I’m expected to pay more than I have or even make. Even if I choose to live better, the cost of living chooses the latter. Even if I’m ready to sacrifice, it almost requires my life. When is enough enough? Do I have that choice in my hands?  Is it really in my making that I stand a chance? I’ll be honest, you may call me a bitch and maybe I am, but right now it feels like I don’t have the power to stand… Moises Flores is a Poet and Blogger based just outside of Chicago in the town of Cicero. Through his poetry, he explores themes of love, fatherhood, and everyday life experiences, often through the lens of personal growth and self-love. A single father to two young daughters, much of his work is inspired by his journey through the new life experience of divorce. He actively shares his creative process on his blog, poeticdad.com

the last time anyone saw her  she was smoking Pall Malls in the back of a town car and ashing into a green glass brick. now, rising from the surf like a giant,  taller than Capitol Records, wearing the broken Hollywood  o like a halo, she is barefoot and  crushing all the studios. she is picking up executives and  hurling them into the Pacific Ocean. later, their bloated bodies return with the tide, bobbing like pin-striped manatees, later pushed back out to sea  by a great gray whale who doesn't give a shit about  movies. DJ Wolfinsohn’s first published work was a riot grrrl ‘zine. Her fiction and poetry can be found in Gone Lawn, HAD, Variant Lit, Brawl, Lost Balloon, Jake, Vestal Review, and on her website,  debbywolfinsohn.com . Her 'zine can be found in the rock 'n roll hall of fame in Cleveland. Born in Detroit and raised in Wisconsin, she currently lives and writes in a 70's ranch house in Austin, with a large collection of rescue pets, rescue plants, too much yarn, and her wonderful family.

Maud Lavin’s latest chapbook Silences, Ohio  (Cowboy Jamboree Press) is set squarely in the Midwest, a place I’ve spent very little time. As a native Californian, who grew up on the rural edge of Silicon Valley, I didn’t expect to relate to these tales from the middle of the country. But in this collection of essays, I recognized the silences, and the exclusion that often comes with them. These are the same silences that my grandmother carried with her from Wisconsin when she moved to the West Coast, and that she taught her California-born children to hold onto, that I learned from my mother and her siblings.  In her powerful collection, Lavin moves through the decades from her youth to more recent high school reunions, and offers glimpses into her Ohio home from different points in her life. I was especially struck by “4-H Church Basement Meetings,” in which she recounts time spent in a 4-H sewing club. She includes the pledge in the story that I remember from my own stint sewing and raising a rabbit as a kid. But the kick of the story is that Lavin learned decades later that while the other girls were often invited over to someone’s home for dinner, she never received an invitation. I know that silence of exclusion, and the way it gets filled up with extrapolation about what might be wrong with you, or what you might have done to deserve the exclusion. I have my own tale of a friend whose parents would not allow her to visit my home, but never gave a reason for it.  “I really really liked 4-H,” Lavin writes. “If I’d known how much I was left out of the dinner social scene around it, that would’ve ruined it for me. I would’ve felt horrible.” Lavin chooses to hold onto the positive memories, and to cherish the adult relationship she has with a friend who attended 4-H with her. She doesn’t ask her friend about the dinners, or the why she wasn’t included. The silence in this instance provides a protective buffer. In “Night Swim or Silence Only Goes So Far,” Lavin recounts an encounter with an old crush from high school when she returns for a visit in her late twenties. It harkens back to the first piece by her I ever read, “Bodies, Water” a vulnerable CNF piece published in Roi Fainéant’s “Heat” special issue. In this new body of water story, Lavin flirts with the idea of a romance with this old crush, though stays faithful to a boyfriend she has back east. The next they meet up, the boy has become a man who has shifted into a new being, a conservative who openly uses racist slurs. This time, Lavin speaks up and calls him on the inappropriate language, a rebuke he brushes off by calling her a “humanitarian.” The encounter is the last one she has with him.  While most of the 14 short essays focus on a specific person or encounter, in “To Someone Moving to the Midwest,” she offers some advice for how to break silences, and how to speak up for your ideals. “The bigotry spreads wide. Be prepared to say, ‘Oh, I have a really good friend who is X.’ Make that friendship unassailable, ‘We grew up together. She was my neighbor, we’re still in touch decades later.’ Cast aside prejudice for the moment.” Like Lavin, I have been silent for much of my life, and like her, I have found a voice through writing. In times such as the ones we are living through now, post-2024 election, we must use our voices to speak up for ourselves and for those around us who may not have the power to break their silences. Lavin provides the beginnings of a blueprint for what we can find in the quiet if we let our words out. Silences, Ohio  (Cowboy Jamboree Press, 2024) Available from Amazon.com. Melissa Flores Anderson is a Latinx Californian who lives with her son and husband. Her creative work has been published in more than two dozen journals or anthologies, and she is a reader/editor with  Roi Fainéant Press . She has a chapbook “A Body in Motion” (JAKE), a novelette “Roadkill” (ELJ Editions), and her first full-length short story collection “All and Then None of You” (Cowboy Jamboree) is out fall 2025. Follow her on Twitter and Bluesky @melissacuisine or IG/Threads @theirishmonths. Read her work at   Melissafloresandersonwrites.com .

‘Compassion was the most important, perhaps the sole law of human existence. ~ ‘The Idiot’ by Fyodor Dostoevsky The realisation he is sleepwalking comes to me abruptly, with a slightly delayed sense of eeriness and confusion. Soon I realise what sort of a sleepwalker he is, and it scares me. I came to London after the hysteria with Covid, which was not taken seriously in my home country, was replaced with another, this one coloured in yellow and blue. I don't want to sound cynical, I just want you to understand me: I am angry, and I am sick of it all. Because of this I leave my own country, a no-longer-young professor of history and language, left to start over from nothing in a country I deeply respect but am still an alien in. I would love to come here in prosperous times, with a confident smile on my face and friends extending their arms in greeting. Instead, I arrive alone, depressed, broke, and broken. I still consider myself lucky when I move into this little room on the first floor. There are four rooms and a shared kitchen. Right on top of me lives a man from Kyiv — Mikola, we call him Nick. We share Russian as our native language, so I am glad to have him around. He also appreciates I know some Ukrainian and greet him saying ‘dobrogo ranku’, which means ‘good morning’, so we get along. Two other rooms are rented by quiet and reserved English guys who work for a construction site nearby, and we rarely see or hear them. Nick, though, says he is more English than Ukrainian. He settled in London long before the invasion, six years ago, works in a law firm, cut all ties with his homeland, and stays away from the news. ‘What is happening there is horrible, of course,’  he says to me once, ‘but I am no longer a part of that world and I cherish my feeling of being local here; this is why I don’t get mad over the war — I help when I can, I donate some money, but I still treat it as just one of the inevitable things happening in a globalised world.’ I don’t doubt his words, which amplifies my surprise later. Most of my time is spent either searching for a teaching job or working on my academic writing. I don’t spend much time in my flat to avoid the acute sensation of loneliness, which is always lurking around me. I am just glad I can  sleep here for a reasonable price.   The first couple of nights at the new place are quiet —  I don’t hear or feel anything because of how tired I am. Then, during my second week here, a strange shuffling noise from above wakes me up;  like someone slowly pacing about their room. I glance at my watch: it is one in the morning. I think that maybe Nick has just returned home from somewhere, but then remember saying ‘good night’ to him around three hours ago.  I lie without moving, breathing quietly. The noise doesn’t stop. I think it is all nonsense, but soon I hear steps. I calm myself with the thought that Nick probably just can’t sleep and decide to go downstairs for a cup of tea. However, as soon as he gets down he starts to go up. I am lying in my bed, all sleep gone,  listening to footsteps creaking because my neighbour is going up and down the stairs, up and down, up and down, and then again, up and down. He never pauses. Then I pick up another noise — a steady murmuring.  I am afraid to move —  Nick is a friendly and chatty type, but what is happening now is something else, but the Nick just behind my door now is a different man. It takes him about half an hour to calm down and to return to his room. The noise ceases. I can’t fall asleep for an hour  before my tiredness takes over.   In the morning we greet each other like nothing happened — he doesn’t say a word about that night, and I am not confident enough to ask. Next night is calm, and I decide it was a one-time accident enlarged by my frayed nerves. I blame myself for being paranoid and aim to forget it.  But then it happens again. And again. Four weeks in and I am starting to develop insomnia fuelled by  the unrest this strange case of sleepwalking is causing. I read Wikipedia about whether it can be dangerous. I start to think I can distinguish words – and these words scare me.  Finally, it all culminates  to an even more grotesque encounter.  It is late at night. I try to finish my paper on the Russo-Japanese War — my area of academic interest — and the final point of my argument keeps eluding me. Well after midnight I get up, pick my empty cup and go to the kitchen for some peppermint tea.  It is dark in the corridor and even from afar I see the light is off in the kitchen. However, when I come closer, it becomes obvious someone is inside: soft blue light is sinking from under the shut door, and there is noise, as if someone is watching a TV. I gently push the door open. What I see there doesn’t look too grim at first: Nick is sitting at the dinner table, his staring face illuminated by his laptop screen. The sounds the laptop is making are strange, though: it seems he is watching some kind of reportage with shouts, crashes, and something resembling gunshots.  What is even more ominous is that Nick is murmuring something to himself, as if he repeats what he can hear on his laptop. ‘Hey mate’, I say in a low voice.  He pretends he doesn’t see me.  ‘Is it alright if I switch the kettle on? Need more tea.’ No answer.  Only then do I pay attention to what Nick is watching, suddenly distinguishing a mix of Ukrainian and Russian in his murmurs. On his screen there is GoPro footage from the camera mounted on a soldier’s helmet. The owner is sitting in a trench, peeking out to shoot automatic fire over his head. Next moment he sees a soldier running towards him and fires at him without taking time to aim. The soldier falls to the ground. The shooter comments on his kill. A dreadful realisation: this is real footage of one man killing another in a war happening right now in Ukraine. The soldier is shouting and swearing, and Nick is glued to the screen watching this ravenous display and repeating all the words he can hear in a half-whisper.  He looks like a zombie. I glance at him: a glassy stare, his hands hanging low along his sides, he is dressed in his sleepwear. ‘Nick’, I call in a low voice and wave at him. Nothing. He behaves as if I am not there. I become scared. I forget about my tea, rush to the door, and, closing it behind me, lock myself in my room.   When later I hear the stairs creaking, I think my heart is going to blow up right inside my chest. Nick, still swearing and murmuring about recharging arms and fighting the invaders, gets into his room. The rest of that night is black and silent.  When we stumble upon each other again in a few days, I am not brave enough to ask if he knows he is a sleepwalker. Instead, I say: – Did you start following the news about the war in Ukraine, by the way? – No. Anything happened in particular? – Nothing, same stuff, basically.  – I see. As I’ve said before. It is a terrible thing, but I don’t feel I should be too concerned about it — my home is here now, and here we have our own troubles. Thank God my relatives are not there  anymore. Why do you ask?   – Ah, nothing, just… wondering when it all ends. – Man, do as I do: stop reading news, and start thinking about what you actually have influence upon. Worrying about stuff you can’t change never brings any good. – Yeah, you’re right, one hundred percent.  – There you go! You’ll see you’ll sleep better at night. I wish him a great day. He has absolutely no clue.  In a few days I finally manage to get a job as a tutor, and decide to leave that place for a small flat in the outskirts of London, exchanging shorter commutes for the right to cope with my own demons only. *** After I settle at the new place, my routine of long commutes via the Tube starts. I am used to it, so it doesn’t bother me: most of the time I am just reading without paying attention to what is going on around me. However, there are encounters that both trouble and resonate with me.  Like this girl with a duffel bag.  She is standing right in front of me, and as soon as I glance at her face I know she is from Ukraine. I can spot a war refugee by the look of their face . She is in her early twenties, dressed in an old hoodie sweatshirt with worn out ‘NASA’ logo, a military-style khaki-green jacket on top of it, sweatpants, and heavy boots.   In her hands she holds a small women’s bag, and with her she has just one duffel bag. I can say she is cold, but I can understand why it doesn’t seem to make the top five of the things bothering her right now.  That look on her face, on all of their faces — let me try to describe it. First thing you notice is deep, boundless tiredness. Second is fear, fear of two kinds: of the unknown, and fear for those who are still there . Never for themselves. Third is homesickness. Right from the moment you are forced to leave your home, the longing starts, and with time it only becomes stronger.  Quite unintentionally she glances at a woman sitting across from her, who looks either Russian or Ukrainian, but is very different: she has lush black hair, wears a lot of makeup, a rather exposed dress, and a Gucci bag. The girl only briefly gazes upon her and stares away. When the train stops, the announcement says it terminates here and won’t be going further. With occasional grumbles, people start to leave. The girl looks around, disoriented, hesitant about what is going on. Train announcements are hard to understand even for those with a good command of English. Finally, when everyone leaves, she also gets to the platform, still trying to figure out what is going on.   When the train starts moving, there is a sudden harsh noise followed by abrupt shouts. The girl screams and kneels down, covering her ears. Nothing out of the ordinary has happened: just an unusually loud crack of train wagons, and two agitated men joking between themselves about it. However, I think I know what is happening with her at the moment. The cracking noise could have reminded her of mortar explosions shattering and smashing in all the windows in a place that was her home. And men shouting… well, it is rarely a good omen.   When the next train arrives, a man gently touches her shoulder and helps her to her feet. – There you go, it was nothing, just an old train. Here comes the one you need — you can board it. She is hesitant at first. Slowly, she grabs her belongings. He accompanies her.  – Thank you, — she says with a strong accent. — Thank you very much.   – No worries, there you go. When the doors close, she realises a pleasant gentleman has not followed her. A feeling of not being alone that illuminated her soul for a fraction of a moment is now gone. Her shy smile gave place to a familiar look of tiredness, fear, and homesickness.   I hurry to leave the platform, feeling sickeningly powerless. It is all unjust. I want to scream. *** A few weeks later my younger cousin, who at the moment lives in the Netherlands with her husband, comes to London to spend a weekend with me. We have been close friends since the time I visited their family in Kherson when I was just a boy. Between visiting Hyde Park and Tate we pop in a supermarket. My cousin is a wide-smiling, chatty, and charming type; she manages to make friends everywhere.  – Where are you from? — one of the store clerks asks us. He is an elegant, neatly dressed man in his fifties, wearing glasses with golden rims. He is more polite than curious now.  – I am from Ukraine, — my cousin says, — and this is my brother, he is from Russia.  The man does not look surprised. – I could say you are from Eastern Europe by your looks. Very beautiful. And a gentleman as well, — he slightly bows to me. His compliment is nothing but respectful. We smile. He adds, — I am sorry for what is happening, — after a nod of acknowledgement from my cousin, he is addressing me, — I have been to Belarus, you know where it is? Minsk? Of course I know. I say so.  – I studied physics at the Belarusian State University, in the nineties. I am myself from Syria. I have got a PhD in astrophysics there as well, and have been teaching physics to students for fifteen years! Optics, quantum physics, biophysics — you name it. — He looks proud, but most of all — he looks pleased just having an opportunity to remember it and to share it with someone.    – This is serious, — I say. — And very difficult. — I don’t feel it would be right to ask him why he is here, working in a store at a low-paying job. I know it should be a sad story.  – Yes, I guess so, — he smiles. — It has been ten years already since I came here.  We are silent for a moment. My cousin saves us from an awkward pause: – We are going to Tate! Do you remember how to get there? Should we turn left or right from here? A former physics professor turned supermarket clerk explains how to find the way to the gallery. I marvel at his patience, and at how he hasn’t lost an ounce of his dignity. I felt we have something in common with him. Was it because this big city and the reasons we are here made us both aliens? A man from Syria with a degree in astrophysics and a Ukrainian with a Russian passport fleeing the reality in which two of my motherlands are sending their sons to be shelled and killed by each other. We are of the similar kind. The rest of the day we enjoy art, we walk, we laugh, we recall the past.  My cousin says she is glad I am here. She has been to St. Petersburg once, she knows it is much safer there than in Southern Ukraine, but still she feels better knowing I am far from there. I know we both keep thinking about that man, wondering where we are going to be in ten years after life has banished us from our homes.   She leaves the next day for the Netherlands. When parting she asks me if I follow the recent news. No, I say, I don’t follow it. But I still know.  She nods. We both cry in our souls.  *** When I feel particularly lonely, I come to Holland Park’s Kyoto Garden, a tiny island of contemplation and beauty with its small ponds and a toy waterfall.  I am here now. I would love to say it is lovely weather, but it is not: a grey sky hides any glimpses of sun, and the wind keeps reminding how precious our warm scarves are. However, I feel better here. Everything and everyone is still. People are slowing down. A stately heron stands right outside the pond overseeing the surroundings.  I sit at the bench. There is a girl not far from me, reading a book. I quickly glance at it and see that it is ‘Idiot’ by Dostoevsky. I also see it is in Russian.  Very soon I cannot restrain myself from approaching her.   – Excuse me, — I say to her in Russian, — I am sorry, I hate to bother you when you’re reading. I… just wanted to say, it is a great book. And I admire people who read it so carefully, with such concentration, as you. I hope it cheers you up.   She smiles and says it is all right.   – I’m reading it for the third time, — she confesses. — It gives me hope in times of despair. We exchange words about where we come from, but very sparingly. We are always careful when talking to strangers — old habits die too slowly even in the youngest of us. She is from Mariupol, once a beautiful romantic city on the shores of the Black Sea, now lying in ruins after becoming a battlefield for the opposing Ukrainian and Russian forces. She managed to escape it before the siege. She is lucky, although it sounds sacrilegious to use the word ‘lucky’ here. Her home is obliterated, its history and good name wiped out. Google ‘Mariupol’ now and instead of sun-drenched seashores you’ll only see occasional splashes of smoke and fire breaking their way through the dead dark-grey ruins. She is alone and she is much less welcome here than she would like to be — it is just the way it works. She doesn’t need to say it, I know it. Instead, she says: – I love this novel because of Prince Myshkin’s character. He is from another world… so different. An outsider. And yet he stays true to his nature and principles. This… life, it doesn’t change him. After everything that he goes through, he is the same: kind, intelligent, sincere. He possesses such a beautiful soul. She turns to me. – I’d love to have a beautiful soul.  Our smiles are sad, but we are smiling nevertheless. Soon I leave. While on my way back to the place where I currently live, I feel a pleasant warm light inside. We don’t need much: a couple of kind words and an understanding gaze is enough to grant us hope.  If only more people would notice how beautiful the souls of every one of us are. Mark Marchenko is a writer and a scholar of Ukrainian origin, born in Moscow. Mark writes both in English and in Russian, and has six short stories published recently, including several in English in 3:AM and New Pop Lit literary magazines. Mark has also recently received his MSc degree in Mediaeval Literature and Languages at the University of Edinburgh.