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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As the hopper rose in elevation, past the treeless hills that banked marshlands in waiting, past the serrated black mountains of shale and iron, and finally, past the planet’s newly self-regulating atmosphere, Corrine double-checked her notes. Her Cress-issued electronic notebook had new soil and silt caught in its seams and screw holes. Ruby sunlight cut through the cabin at a hard angle, lighting the fine golden dust that suffused the air and coated every surface. Now Corrine could only read through the small portion where her thumb had been scrolling. She paused to wipe dust off of the screen with her forearm and continued typing,  finalizing the ground crew’s order for the bombmaker. 33oW, 5oN through 26oE, 12oN: Meso Standard 56oW, 8oS through 41oW, 3oN: Michigan, Deciduous Plus 15oE, 16oS through 38oE, 25oN: Saltwater Group E. Note: Temperature now fluctuating along expected patterns (see table 7a). Strait is ideal for Category A Migratories, but Categories B and C would also be compatible. Ask Em about concentrate supplies. 55oE, 20oS through 64oE, 13oN: Temperate Mixed. Note: Secondary habitat regions. Likely only needs six drops to establish canopy before arrivals. Corrine finished typing this last note when a thudding noise broke her concentration. Nikoletta had removed her boots and lobbed them over her shoulder toward the airlock at the rear of the hopper. They bounced and knocked against the door. The amber soil that dried thickly around the boots cracked away on impact. One landed upright, the other on its side.  Corrine looked up from her notes and said, “It looks like you’re playing craps. We should put marks on your boots and place bets.” Nikoletta let out an exaggerated guttural sigh. Corrine caught Nik’s eyes, saw Nik’s open mouth, slack and vacant in exhaustion. Nik’s face broke off from the act, her mouth cracking involuntarily, and she and Corrine laughed the same aching laugh. “Hell yes,” Nik said. “Can’t wait to win stacks of dried noodle flavor packets.” “Would be the only way to scare up the spicy shrimp ones,” Corrine said. She powered off the notebook and stretched as dramatically as her seat’s harness would allow. “I’m still convinced Alain is hoarding them.” Nikoletta called toward the front of the hopper, “Alex, when’s the last time you’ve seen a spicy shrimp?” Alex remained facing forward, one hand on the yoke, one dangled behind him. He exhaled hard. “I dunno,” he answered. “I dunno, who cares?” Both women loudly booed. Corrine pulled off one of her own mud-covered boots and launched it toward him. It sailed wide right and hit a small handful of toggles on the console in front of Alex. The interior lights shut off instantly and were replaced by the red backup bulbs. The women booed louder, fighting against their own spontaneous laughter. They couldn’t see his face, but Alex’s body was shaking as well, delirious in the red light. He reached over and manually triggered the fire alarm. The two biologists and the chemist pilot spent a minute cracking up underneath bursts of crisp, clinical beeps, stunningly loud and just below the threshold of pain. The three were still gasping and bent against their harnesses as Alex punched the settings back to normal. Now several kilometers above a cloudline that was brewed in strategic, violent jolts six standard Earth years ago, the Queen became nakedly visible, a matte silhouette in three segments. Over time, this cresting view became commonplace for the ground crew, though they still caught occasional pangs of disbelieving awe. The Queen steadily dwarfed the approaching hopper until its impossible hovering mass consumed the whole of their vision. This sensation was staggering yet brief, hopelessly entangled with the opposing sensations of imprisonment and obligation. The Queen had been their home, their workplace, their employer for thirty-two months now, and their reverence toward it could only extend so far. As they approached, Alex toggled in a series of commands, and the familiar grind and click of landing gear in motion could be heard and felt throughout the hopper. Upon reaching the heaving gray vessel, external observation lights flooded the cabin with a harsh cleansing white, bathing the crew’s squinting faces, catching thousands of airborne dust particles in slow motion. Alex pulled up unexpectedly, positioned the hopper over the Queen’s thorax, and began a slow descent. Still recovering from a laughing fit, Alex asked in his best monotone, “So where do you two want me to drop you off? Is this okay?” Nik punctuated the words of her yelled response by stomping her bootless feet. “I! Am! Going! To! Stab you!” “Alex!” Corrine cried. “I haven’t seen a real bathroom in two months. In ten seconds, I am going to use you as a toilet.” Struggling to keep a composed tone, Alex replied, “That sure will make for an interesting incident report. Now it looks like there’s an exhaust duct to your right that might get you inside, would it be okay to land–” The electronic notebook connected with Alex’s shoulder blade, jerking the arm that held the yoke. The hopper went cockeyed. One of its landing wheels made contact with the dense steel of the Queen’s exterior. The three burst into laughter again. Nikoletta let out a long, groaning yell. Alex pulled the hopper forward to the docking entrance within the Queen’s open mandible. They connected with the outer airlock, and Alex made a single loud clap at the moment of repressurization. The muddy airlock door at the back of the hopper opened to reveal a steel-white paneled hallway. This first interstitial space within the Queen functioned as a makeshift mud room, a space for hiking boots, for duffels and coveralls, a demarcation between the dirty hands-on business of terraformation and its clean, computational counterpart. A four year contract would be a long time for the crew of six, and the cleanliness of the bridge quickly became a self-evident priority. Having already undone their harnesses during the docking procedure, the two biologists ran out. Corrine, the supervisor of the team’s ground expeditions, was still wearing her left boot. She kicked it hard against the hopper’s airlock then took off, making a crooked half-run toward the apartments in the Queen’s thorax, yelling the whole way. Alex was spent but still smiling as he heard Corrine’s voice trail off into the steel halls. He stretched and entered slowly, hearing the crew’s laughter underneath wordless, repetitive music as he approached the common area. He found that Nikoletta had already joined the rest of the crew in the loungers near the bridge. Demetrius, the Queen’s pilot and comms tech, raised a short glass of amber liquor upon seeing Alex.  “Welcome, welcome, welcome!” Demetrius said. His eyes were wide, flickering with a puzzling excitement as he held the drink. Alex knew Demetrius and the rest of the Queen’s permanent crew to greet the ground team warmly upon their returns, but those receptions were routine. They were sincere but tired. This felt new, Alex thought. It felt off. “They won’t tell me,” Nikoletta complained while accepting a similar drink from Emily the bombmaker. “We have news,” Em said smiling, dragging out the last syllable into a long “ooh” sound. Alain, the Queen’s engineer, was looking at the floor and laughing to himself between sips from his own glass. “Where’s Corrine?” Em continued. “We need all of you in here.” “She’s running errands,” Alex said while heading toward their bar, a rolling stainless steel surgical cart the crew took from the med bay. “Picking up dry cleaning, stopping by the deli.” Em interrupted him, “No, no, no, we’re making the drinks. That’s part of the deal.” She and Demetrius cast each other a wordless glance.  Corrine walked in wearing clean sneakers. She offered a sweet but exhausted greeting and curled up at one end of a lounger. “What news?” she asked. “One second,” Em said, jumping up to make drinks. With her back to everyone, she called out, “No peeking.” She returned and handed identical short glasses filled with the same amber cocktail to Corrine and Alex. “What news?” Corrine asked again. Demetrius held out the drink in his left hand then gestured to it with a flourish of his right. “First you must drink,” he said. Alain still hadn’t made eye contact with any of the ground crew and was rocking slightly now, laughing to himself. “Oh, simply out of the question,” Nik said. The three members of the ground crew each took heavy swallows then looked expectantly to the Queen dwellers. Demetrius pulled out a remote, and the six of them watched as the central eight-foot by ten-foot viewport became a digital display screen. Demetrius gave a hearty, “Ta-da!” as a large legal document filled the display. In all-caps, bold at the top of the page, comically oversized on the vessel’s largest screen, read the words “NOTICE OF CONTRACT TERMINATION.” It took just a moment to sink in before Alex exclaimed, “What!” He stood up and started running laps around the loungers with his head down, lurching at a dangerous forward angle, cracking up. Corrine threw back her head and cackled.  Nikoletta put down her drink, started clapping, and shouted, “Yes! Yes, of course! Of course! Why not! Yes!” Em broke in, “Dem, pull up the news story. Everything about this is beautiful.” The central display shifted to a business report posted in Axis Capital detailing the outright buyout of Cress-Intractiv by the LinneFabar Group. The ground crew cheered. Nikoletta kicked her feet as Demetrius highlighted text within the news story. He read aloud, “LinneFabar plans to dissolve most of the business arms within Cress-Intractiv, with the exception of its entertainment division Truant Bloc and its streaming provider Haptic, both of which will see extensive restructuring in the coming months. The CEO and founder of Cress-Intractiv, Nicolas Olivér, was unavailable for comment regarding the sale of his company in time for this article’s publication. As part of this sale, he has been granted a seat on LinneFabar’s board. At present, it is unclear if he will be given a further role within the company.” “Olivér!” the ground crew shouted simultaneously. Alex jogged over to the bridge console and turned the music up louder. Demetrius switched back to the legal document and scrolled down a few pages before highlighting a section titled “Effective Date.” He read, “As of DATE–which is this morning,” he said as an aside, “all present and future terraforming operations will cease. This includes projects that are currently en route to new terraforming sites. Terraforming projects that are in process, regardless of the project’s phase, are to immediately cease all activity. In addition, terraforming projects related to the regular maintenance of previous sites are to immediately cease all activity.” Corrine howled. “Wait, wait, this is the best part,” Em called out. She read, “All terraforming teams must return all materials to COMPANY at the earliest possible convenience. All vessels, including any vehicles, provided technology, and tools therein, must be returned to COMPANY at the earliest possible convenience.” “Wait!” Nik said, still laughing. “Okay, okay, wait. Okay, so we all just got fired. But!” She had to pause to catch her breath. “Yes,” Demetrius answered, nodding a wide, red-cheeked smile. “Yes, exactly.” “We all just got fired,” Nik continued, “Hundreds of millions of miles away, two and a half years years into building a new Olivér rock, and they are literally asking us–” “Yep,” Demetrius said. Alex broke in while making himself a second drink. “Hey, if you could bring all of our stuff back, that would be really great. Please? Yeah, yeah, you’re definitely super fired, but all of our stuff, could you bring it back? Please?” Em waltzed over to the surgical cart and took the drink from Alex’s hand. “Trust me, I’ll get it.” Alex watched her, mildly stunned. Had she ever spoken so close to his ear before?  “Hold on, hold on,” Corrine said. “Like, we are right now, as we sit here, currently fired? Contract over? We are, right now, making zero dollars? Are we even getting paid for the return trip?” Demetrius gave a closed smile and answered, “Yes to fired, yes to zero dollars, sort-of-kind-of to the return trip.” Alain started rocking in place again. Demetrius continued, “LinneFabar is only willing to pay quarter-time while we’re in cryo, and then they’re dangling a small payment based on the condition of the ships and the concentrates. We get paid after an inspection.” Alex smiled wide and started jogging in place with his head thrown back. Corrine and Nikoletta cheered. “Oh my God,” Corrine said laughing. “But then what can they actually do to us out here, other than withhold the saddest little payout in history? There’s no one remotely close. Are they gonna shell out for an escort? Call the cops on us?” “The next letter is gonna be really mean,” Em said. “They’re gonna underline stuff. Hold on, let me make y’all another round.” She turned back to the surgical cart and began mixing a new batch of cocktails. “Yeah, this is what, whisky ginger and what else?” Nik asked, rotating in the lounger to look at Em, who only answered with a suggestive shrug. Nik turned back and said, “Right, if they can’t touch us from this far out, we’re kind of in a position to demand more money.” Demetrius said, “Thought of that, too. It’s early, and there’s still plenty of shuffling going on, but if LinneFabar never takes up any of the terraforming projects, and it sure looks like they won’t, we have nothing to bargain with. I think they’d be happy to let us rot out here.” “Jesus, that’s definitely true,” Nik said. “I still wonder if we could wait them out, for a bit anyway. There aren’t many applications for concentrates outside of terraforming. If LinneFabar isn’t planning on taking up the projects themselves, I imagine they’re at least looking for a buyer to offload all of that inventory.” “We could literally just finish the job and live here if we wanted,” Corrine said. “Or we could start chugging redwood and marlin juice,” Alex called, slowing from a jog to a trot. Alain burst into a new peal of nervous laughter. Emily the bombmaker returned with a tray of fresh drinks. Alex continued, breathless as he sat down, “Or start making freakish and forbidden mistakes of science. They can’t fire us twice.” He grabbed a new drink. Corrine said, “I’m only half-joking. I could learn to build log cabins now that I have a hold on a studio I can no longer pay for.” She took a long sip from the fresh cocktail. “Even if I could pay for my hold, the building doesn’t even exist right now,” Em said laughing. “It literally won’t be there if we head back now.” Corrine leaned forward, elbows resting on her knees, glass held at an angle. “We could just live here until our fuel runs out in, what, a decade? Start working remote clickjobs from the console.” “Cool if my Dad moves into the spare apartment then?” Nikoletta asked. She let out a long groan. “That’ll be a real fun conversation. So, you know how I’ve been paying your rent? Well, funny story…” “Finally time for me to meet a nice widow,” Alex said, “one who’s rakishly beautiful and cursed with a terrible secret and rich in square footage.” “Make sure to ask if she’s cool to adopt five dead-broke twenty-somethings,” Corrine said before finishing her second glass. “Yeah, I’m still confused. We don’t work for Cress, because Cress doesn’t exist anymore. We also don’t work for LinneFabar, but LinneFabar still expects us to return Cress’s terraforming ships and concentrate tanks. But also LinneFabar has no plans to continue terraforming. Did I get all that? Yeah, Em what’s in this? What’s the secret?” Em and Demetrius grinned toward each other. Alain finally looked up and spoke. “Okay, so, nobody get mad.” Corrine’s eyes widened. Nikoletta looked backwards and studied the surgical cart for the first time since returning to the Queen. Nothing jumped out as she took an inventory from left to right: the nearly empty fifth of whisky, a just-opened identical bottle, the long-expired grenadine, two open cans of ginger ale, the bitters, the soda water, the still-untouched handle of gin that no one liked, a glass of water, the half-full scotch, and the plastic jug of vodka with maybe two shots left. For a few seconds, the only sound was music. Alain continued, “You know how we keep concentrates for a few dozen spore genuses?” Corrine slammed her palm into the lounger and looked to the keeper of the concentrates. “Em, you didn’t.” “Yes I did,” Em sang, adding a touch of vibrato as she held out the last syllable. Alex went to the speakers and cranked the humid, stomping music, his head knocked back in laughter. Nik started clapping then put a hand to her mouth. Corrine started slapping the lounger with increasing force, calling, “Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Em. Em! Alex, holy shit, turn that down. Em! How much psilocybin did I just ingest? You guys dosed us? Em, what am I on right now?” Hearing real distress, Alex turned the music off. Em’s face dropped to match the sudden shift in tone. “It is so, so little,” she said. “I dissolved 150 milligrams into three liters of water. You’ve had maybe a shot and a half, barely anything at all. Not even four milligrams.” Nikoletta looked back and clocked the glass of water on the surgical cart. Corrine’s breathing was audible as the crew went silent for a moment. She placed her glass on the low steel table between them and asked, “What else was in it?” “Nothing else from the concentrates,” Em said. “Just whiskey and ginger ale. Sorry, I absolutely didn’t mean to freak you out. It is such a small amount.” Corrine exhaled, her focus darting between Em and the empty glass on the table in front of her. No one was comfortable holding eye contact with anyone for longer than a moment. Corrine felt the expectant weight of the crew accumulating by the second. “Okay. Okay, sorry guys. I was just surprised,” Crorrine finally said. She paused for another moment and picked up her glass. “Jesus, Em, you scared me. So, I’m assuming this didn’t get recorded in the log?” Demetrius leaned back into the lounger, tension cautiously leaving his body. “To quote our dear friend and chemist Alexander, ‘They can’t fire us twice.’” Corrine’s shoulders relaxed. She rested against the back of the lounger as well, taking the cue from Demetrius, wanting to show that she was a good sport. With slow relief, she said, “It’s cool. Sorry, I just need a minute to digest those and see how I’m doing.” She looked around at five hesitant faces and offered a full, obliging smile. “What the hell is this? Please don’t let me stop you.” Alex beamed, fell into a rolling chair, then launched himself toward the loungers with a single hard kick against the bridge’s console. “Do y’all have any idea how long I’ve wanted to break into those tanks?” He asked. “We have so many options.” Em sensed it was safe to smile again. “Believe me, I’ve been building a menu ever since the notice showed up this morning.” Nikoletta tip-toed to the surgical cart, downed the rest of her glass, and made a new drink with equal parts vodka and dissolved psilocybin. She sipped it, then turned to the crew. “You know, if we want to make proper cocktails, this mushroom juice needs to be much stronger. I have no interest in a drink that’s half water.” “Heard!” Alex called before locking eyes with Em. He felt a shiver and asked, “You’d be cool with that?” “Obviously,” Em said, leaning in. Alex kicked his way toward the left-side hallway that led to the Queen’s abdomen. He braked with his feet, changed directions, and said, “One quick second.” He rolled back toward the console, turned the music back on, then ditched the chair. He and Em took off down the hall together. Nikoletta made a face and chuckled after trying another sip of her watery test cocktail. Corrine looked up and said, “Jesus, I forgot about your Dad, Nik. I guess the sooner we get back–” “No, no, no,” Nik interrupted. She joined Corrine on the lounger. “That’s for tomorrow. I think we deserve to worry about nothing for a nice long moment. I don’t know, I’m still in shock, but it’s starting to feel nice, you know? I don’t think I’ve been truly relaxed since our contract started.” “Fair,” Corrine said. She let her head fall onto Nik’s shoulder and was now eye-level with the watery vodka cocktail. “That as good as it looks?” Corrine asked. Nik laughed, “I feel bad wasting it.” Demetrius finished his own cocktail and said, “I think Em only used a percent of a percent of barely anything to make that. We effectively have an infinite amount of psilocybin. I cannot imagine our new overlords would even notice or care how much was missing. I feel like we are more than entitled to it at this point.” Nik put the glass down and rested her head on Corrine’s. “I’ll wait for those two idiots to come back with a proper mixer.” She glanced down conspiratorially to Corrine, then to Demetrius. “Anyone else pick something up there?” Alain grabbed Nik’s abandoned cocktail, downed it, and let out an exaggerated, “Blegh!” He fell back against the lounger and started laughing again. “This is incredible.” He closed his eyes and bent his head at painful angles from side to side. “Of course. Of course this is happening. It’s perfect.” Corrine raised her eyebrows toward him and asked, “You okay, Alain?” Alex and Em were giddy as they passed by the apartments and reached the code access airlock at the end of the thorax. This code requirement was an irritating security precaution that Demetrius and Alain tried and failed to dismantle every few months. It was especially hopeless now, as overriding code access-only doors required authorization from someone within a company that, as of this morning, no longer existed. However, as the keeper of the concentrates, Em secretly preferred this slight hindrance, disliking the idea of the entrance remaining propped open to everyone at all hours.  Em punched in the code without looking, and the airlock door swung out to reveal the Queen’s abdomen, a vast multi-level chamber whose arched steel hull stretched back more than a kilometer, whose avenues of densely packed black tanks revealed themselves hundreds of meters at a time above and below them as the cool lights of this cathedral snapped on in series. At the distant click of the final lights, they could just make out the compressed gas tanks at the end of the abdomen, towering and impossible with light glinting off their reflective white surfaces, the perfect grinning teeth of a monster. Alex had only been in the abdomen a handful of times, as Alain acted as assistant to Em when it was time to pack concentrates into individual bombs. Made from a thick green biodegradable canvas and stacked high as flat sheets, the bombs assembled like origami, folding along crease lines to create the shape of pointed diamonds. Each bomb yielded the interior storage capacity of a refrigerator. The crew would first place an upside down pyramid weight inside to keep the bombs oriented in freefall, then they would pack in combinations of concentrates, synthetic fertilizers, and a simple remote trigger.  These bombs would drop out of the back and fall toward the surfaces of worlds in waiting before a precision mid-air whip-crack implosion would spit organic material hundreds of kilometers wide, raining down the ingredients for life or the embryos of life itself. The crew could further determine the moment of detonation within hundred-meter windows above the surface to adjust the density of these downpours. Each moment of contact marked the meeting of strangers, materials that were biological aliens to each other, and after several years of predictably unpredictable growth, these budding planets, wild and unknown, would receive a visit from a different Queen and a surface investigation conducted by a different ground crew. In this way, new destinations would be molded in increments, sculpted by figurative and literal degrees. In only a few decades, human colonies could land and find familiar crops ready to harvest.  Em jumped into the driver’s side of the electric two-seater and turned to Alex. “Grab a clean tray of erlenmeyers,” she said, pointing back to the shelves of glassware by the door. Alex gave a quick salute and pulled out a tray of sixteen erlenmeyer flasks, each safely spaced apart by thick blue foam. “Alright, spores first,” Em continued as she flicked on the car. Alex fell in next to her and yelled, “Wait!” He leaned over the side and pulled out the charging adapter. “Okay, spores first and then–” Em took off, racing down narrow ramps and avenues, driving deep into the abdomen at a reckless speed. The labels for each level and section were written in over two dozen languages, and they were moving too fast to read any. Em accelerated into the lower decks, taking turns at too-comfortable speeds before stopping in front of a series of black tanks indistinguishable from the others, each ten feet in diameter and fifteen feet high. Without having to double-check, Em reached out of the vehicle and smacked open a nozzle on the outside of one of the tanks. A viscous line of homogenous gray syrup inched out in slow heaves. Em caught it in a flask that she whipped around with her other hand. Alex watched as the spore concentrate rose to meet the black 200 ml line when Em closed the nozzle, waited for the stubborn final drops, then handed the flask back to him. With fifteen more flasks waiting empty in his lap, Alex gave a healthy, cavernous clap and asked, “Alright, where are the fertilizers?” The sound of pumping dance music grew as Em and Alex traveled back through the thorax. In the bridge, they found Nikoletta, Corrine, and Alain dancing, taking turns looking as purposely idiotic as they could near the console’s speakers. They had dragged the loungers and table off to one side to create an impromptu dancefloor. The Notice of Termination flashed joyously behind them on the central display screen. Evidently, Demetrius had created a quick program that showed the document cycling through a series of bright, celebratory colors. He was still absorbed in something on the bridge’s computer, typing one-handed in bursts and stutters while taking sips from a glass in his other hand. Alex was pushing a second surgical cart loaded with diluted concentrates, and Em called out with an exaggerated, “Yoo-hoo!” Unspoken and with a single mind, the crew all decided to theatrically tip-toe in the direction of the surgical carts, each trying to look as classically sneaky and guilty as possible, shushing each other very few feet. Em noticed that Corrine had a new drink in her hand, thank God. “There’s a few different strains here,” Em said. “Couldn’t tell you how each one is different, but you’re only gonna need a couple drops this time.” The beakers of clear liquid each had their own dropper and were labeled with a bit of torn blue tape. Alex demonstrated by pouring two fingers of scotch into his glass followed by a few drops from a beaker simply labeled “B.” “Voila,” he said before taking an ambitious sip and coughing. “A very generous gift from Daddy Olivér.”  The rest of the crew made themselves new cocktails. They made a beautiful toast to their fallen executive and began to dance again. The six of them were in love, reveling in this surreal unity, in the sudden derailment of having no work to do while confined to a space that allowed no other way to earn money, in the absurdity of simply being where they were, comically and incalculably far from another living human for no reason at all now. They kicked their legs, made faces, and got down to the serious business of looking as stupid as possible. Demetrius was the first to break off. He jogged back to the computer and was joined by Nikoletta a few songs later.  “Whatcha’ reading, Demmy?” Nik asked. “Are we all hired again?” “It is so much better than that,” Demetrius said, not looking up from the screen. “I managed to find LinneFabar’s entire organizational tree. I also just, totally by chance mind you, happened to find Nicolas Olivér’s new direct messaging account at LinneFabar.” Nik steadied herself with both hands on the desk as she tried to read over Demetrius’s shoulder. The words on the screen weren’t quite staying in place. “Not sure I’m following, Dem.” “I wrote a code that will send him an inter-company message every week from a different low-level employee,” Demetrius said. “Middle managers, product photographers, the people that copy and paste ad text on their website’s backend. They’ll all be sending a private message that looks like this.”  The bridge’s giant central display changed from the legal document disco lights to a coding program, and Demetrius highlighted a short paragraph at its center.  Wow! Can you believe little Caddie is alreay 2? Welp it’s true! Her party is happening this Sunday at Funky Dunks same place as last year. The caterer fell through so we’re all pitching in with a covered dish. Most dishes are spoken for but we still need someone to bring potato salad easy enough for you to handle I’m sure! Thanks Again and see you there! “Dem, you are an idiot, and I love you,” Nik said. “And you misspelled the word ‘already.’” “I did?” He asked, squinting. “Huh.” Instead of correcting it, he added an additional error to the next sentence so that it read, “Welp it’s is true!” He gave the screen a ponderous look before asking Nik, “Too try-hard?” Nik laughed, “A touch, yeah. Leave the first one though. It plays, I think.” “It absolutely plays,” Demetrius said while hitting the backspace key. “So yeah, the name of the kid and the covered dish also cycle through a dataset, so there’ll be different ones for each message.” Em called out from the dancefloor, “Dem, you left your signature on, you know that, right?” Demtrius looked back, not understanding. Em pointed to the corner of the central display, to Demetrius’s full government name and Cress employee ID at the bottom of the coding program. She kept dancing with her pointed arm stretched out. “Your signature is still on. Was it on when you pulled all that proprietary and private LinneFabar data?” Em put extra stress on the plosives, lining them up to the music’s kick drum. Demetrius’s eyebrows rose in cartoonish surprise. He laughed, downed the rest of his cocktail, and looked from Em to Nik. He knocked the base of the empty glass against his head, and with a long exaggerated “h” sound, called out, “Whoops!” “Looks like it’s lawsuit o’clock for you, Demmy boy,” Em said, laughing and making circles with her pointed hand in time with the music. Corrine was marching in place and making wild takeoff and landing signals with her arms. She was winded and chanting every few steps, “Let me! Represent you! In court! You ding dong!” “God, you’re an idiot,” Nik said before making clumsy, mischievous motions back to the dancefloor. She slipped in a puddle of someone’s spilled cocktail, falling sideways and bracing herself with a flexed forearm. Alain stopped mid-plié and ran over to help her off the floor. Unharmed, she laughed and thanked him as he pulled her up by both hands. Alain responded by dropping to the floor and doing military push-ups directly above the offending puddle. He clapped in mid-air each time before his hands landed with heavy smacks back into the spilled cocktail again. He managed an even ten before returning to his stuttering approximation of ballet. Alex took a break from his increasingly hazardous side-shuffling, and he risked leaning into Em’s ear. She responded with sharp, smiling nods. The two took off toward the abdomen with purpose, Alex dragging a couple fingers along the steel-paneled wall as they disappeared down the hallway. Just inside the abdomen’s entrance, solutions of ephedra sinica, zinc oxide, tetra amine, iodine, hydriodic acid, hypophosphorous acid, and red and white phosphorus were in a line where Em and Alex left them. They had left all of the solutions open save for the white phosphorus, which they stoppered to control its odor, an overwhelming rancidity that set off alarms deep inside their lizard brains. The two fumbled with goggles and gloves. Alex was eye-level with the solutions and kept leaning in and out, giggling silently to himself. “Funny to wear these when we’ll be drinking this stuff in a minute,” Em said after snapping on the second rubber glove. She snapped it against the inside of her wrist a few more times with increasing force, noting the ripples of sensation, the wake that traveled outward from one nerve to the next, curious to know if she could document the termination of this signal, the last nerve to receive it, the first nerve to refuse the order to carry it further. Or perhaps a ghost of this sensation reached all of them, registering in ever-shrinking fractions at the ends of her toes, doubling back from that outer bank to return in increments to the source on her wrist, subliminal now, a covert movement undetected by her nervous system at large but unmistakable to the individual gatekeepers, counted as only a handful of electrons now, present in the most literal definition, in its mere refusal to be nothing. “This is normally smoked, right?” Alex asked as he began mixing hydriodic acid and red phosphorus.  “Drinking should be safer. Greater control over the dose, won’t peak all at once,” Em answered as she started making a competing cocktail with iodine and hypophosphorous acid. “Same concept as the mushrooms, ingesting it gives you a gradual arc, a less severe comedown. We gotta do something with the white, if only for the effect, right?” “Obviously.” Alex began mixing a third batch. Seeing how quickly Em worked, Alex sped up his own dropping and measuring, anxious to show how capable an assistant he could be. The two breathed through their mouths after he exposed white phosphorus to the air. “How have you never invited me to do this before?” “This?” Em laughed as she added distilled water. “Making low-dose meth with company property?” “Well, yes, exactly that. But I mean any of it,” Alex said. “Dummy,” Em said, and she bumped her shoulder into his. “Job descriptions, I guess. And I don’t know, I’m probably a little overprotective of this space. Too precious with it. I’ve gotten attached over the years.” Alex returned the shoulder bump, causing Em to spill half a dropper of zinc oxide on the counter. They laughed, then choked on the smell of white phosphorus. “You’re the mother hen,”  he coughed out as they backed away from their work, “laying and hatching eggs.” “No, Alex,” she said, making hard eye contact and pointing with another dropper full of iodine. “I am the Queen herself.” Returning to the bridge, Em and Alex found the rest of the crew split off into two crying couples. Dense, sweaty music was still pouring out of the console’s speakers. “That’s exactly the thing, that’s exactly it,” Nikoletta was saying, heavy tears ready to fall down her face. “He wants to act like it never happened, and like–” She made wide gestures with her arms.  Demetrius was nodding and leaning at a severe angle against the left observation panel, his forehead a mess of wrinkles. His own eyes were swollen and wet as words fell out. “It’s gotta be hard to–and I’m speaking, if I’m speaking out of turn, you know? If I’m speaking out of turn, stop–let me know. To reach a sense of, of closure here–here being the, you know, the situation in itself, of itself, but here in the literal sense, of being in this space–literal environment I mean, and, and, and–” Corrine and Alain were embracing across the room. Alain pulled away and wiped his eyes with long drags of his arm. “You’re right,” Corrine was saying, “but it’s not like there are these specific, correct words you can say.” “I’m just so scared to wade back into it at all,” Alain said before giving way to a new burst of tears. “I know there aren’t any objective, magic words. I know that. But trying to say anything at all could just cause even more…” Alain couldn’t finish the sentence. His face was a map of red distress, and Corrine embraced him again. Pummeling and ecstatic dance music was playing to an empty dancefloor. From the bridge’s entrance, Em filled her lungs with as much air as they allowed. “Absolutely not!” Em bellowed. “What on earth! No, no, no, unacceptable.” She skipped over to the console and had trouble finding the volume dial. Her eyes achieved focus, and she turned the music down to conversation level, then switched it to the earnestly inspirational classical piece they liked to play as a joke during chess matches. Alex was pushing a cart that had someone’s comforter draped over it. He consolidated the bar detritus and found that most of the alcohol was gone. The cans of ginger ale and soda water were empty, and the gin had finally been opened. The crew collected themselves, ran hands through their hair, took steadying breaths, then made their way toward the surgical carts. The change in music recharged the air and softly reset the stifled interior. Once the crew was gathered, still a bit raw and reluctant, Alex said, “So, I would just like to start by saying I love all of you deeply and would happily murder your enemies with no hesitation. Your attention, cutie pies.” The crew seemed to soften, and Alex assumed the role of a crackpot presenter from a centuries-old World’s Fair. “I present to you– oh, Em, the lights. Aha, yes, very good, yes this is just right. Ladies and gentleman, I dare you to resist looking away as I present…”  Alex pulled back the comforter. In the now-darkened bridge, six vials glowed a faint yellow and white. They floated in the middle of the room, the only visible lights.  “Awful, terrible, stinky glow shots,” Alex announced. One vial seemed to travel into the air as Alex picked it up. “No idea what’s going on in here,” he continued, breaking character, “but one of you sweet, beautiful gifts from heaven is gonna take this with me.” Corrine, her voice arriving from nowhere, asked, “Didn’t exposure to that make people lose their jaws?” “Forever forever ago,” replied Demetrius as he picked up a vial in the darkness, “after years of breathing it in for fifteen hours a day with no ventilation and zero dental care.” He held it close to his face, his eyes just becoming illuminated, hovering, widening. “Sure,” Corrine answered. “Isn’t it also literally an actual forreal chemical weapon?” “Jesus, it smells,” Nikoletta said. “Can we cut this with something?” “Vile vials,” Demetrius spoke in a grave tone as he brought the glowing chemical solution close to his open right eye, nearly making contact. “Vile vials.” The edge of his closed, peculiar smile was faintly visible. “No, ma’am, what you’ve got here is a down-the-hatch situation,” Alex said.  Em jumped in, “There’s only just enough white phosphorus to make it glow. It’s pretty harmless.”  “We made some much less scary ones if you want,” Alex said. “You won’t hurt our feelings.” Alain wordlessly grabbed a glowing vial and downed it. He hollered and pounded a single heavy fist against the floor. “Yep, yep, yep,” he said, beginning to laugh, then interrupting his laughter to howl again. “Yep, that’s what you want. God, I need something else immediately.” Alain groped around one of the surgical carts and filled the now-empty vial with gin. He swallowed all of it. The remaining vials floated around the room as Alex handed them out. Demetrius counted down from three and the white phosphorus methamphetamine cocktails disappeared down the throats of the crew, with the exception of one. After a minute of convulsive wailing, Em hit the lights and passed around the handle of gin. Demetrius approached Corrine, the vile vial still untouched in her hand. “Look, I’m not trying to be a downer,” Corrine said to Demetrius, anticipating the conversation. The rest of the crew was choreographing an interpretive dance to their classical chess soundtrack. “Believe me, I’m okay with the…” Corrine paused. The passage into Demtrius’s right ear began to widen as her vision of his face cracked. “With the concept. I’m just already pretty fucked up. And this is literal poison, right?” It grew to the width of his head, an open black punch bowl. His face was folding. “What I’ve learned from all of this,” Demetrius said, making a non-committal gesture toward the bridge with his arm, “is that life is hardy. It’s sticky. You probably know even more than I do, seeing it on the surface. Grows anywhere, everywhere, where we do want it, where we don’t want it, where we weren’t even trying. Humans especially. Despite our best efforts, we can’t seem to rid the universe of ourselves. Staying alive, proliferating, multiplying in spite of. Life is sticky, you know?” His eyes caught focus on a seam where two steel-white panels met on the wall behind Corrine’s head. How exacting is that seam? What was the spacing tolerance used by the ship’s planners? And why did they find this music funny? It was gorgeous. The panel seam responded to his focus by layering itself, fanning out, a stack of steel-white envelopes. His teeth were crushed foil. Corrine exhaled as she fell onto the edge of a lounger and said, “Dem, I’m not quite sure that’s…” It wasn’t a punch bowl. Something was making a nest in the side of his head, a nest of charcoal and dustmotes. They were gathering, living on a perpendicular axis of gravity. “Here, I’ll make you something less scary.” He took the white phosphorus shot from Corrine and shuffled off, returning with a glass of clear liquid. “No phosphorus in this one. In fact, I think this one contains zinc oxide, a natural antiseptic. Gets used in skin creams.” He no longer felt individual teeth, but two unbroken rolls of metal foil, crushing against each other, compacting. Corrine sniffed the glass and laughed. “Sure, I’ll drink your skin cream. I always drink skin cream. Perfect snack at the cinema.” “Exactly,” Demetrius said as Corrine started drinking. “A tub of it that you have to eat with a cupped hand.” “A bear paw,” Corrine corrected. The babies were hatching. Alain was whooping for the feel of it, unloading the contents of his lungs, disconnected from the beat of the music. He danced by slamming his weight into the deck with one steel-toed boot over and over, his head slamming down with it, a human jackhammer. The floor was a bent sheet, a pure sine wave. It lacked a third dimension. His body was a needle against it, dragging across the hills and valleys but never piercing the surface. A soft-focus halo of neon pulsed with every heavy step, rippling outward from his stomping foot. A neon halo radiated from each of the crew now, a slurred glow under the cabin’s can lights. He left briefly to vomit behind the console, then returned. Alex understood hands now. He watched and understood that hands were always correcting themselves. He was dancing in and out of people. Inside and outside of them. Their hands were in a constant state of reevaluation. Their hands. His hands. Even settled, they would only ever adjust their course in time. Em was in front of him more often than not. The gin appeared and shrank and was gone. He was in front of Em more often than not. Corrine was doing that mom dance with her hands that he loved. Finger guns, hopelessly unreliable, they were constantly adjusting themselves, their muscles tensing and relaxing. Reevaluating, always. Couldn’t trust their aim in a crisis.  Demetrius brought over two armloads of clear chemical solutions. Some glasses had labels that no longer held meaning. Most remained naked. Nik grabbed one and downed it like it was water. She may have thought it was water, Demetrius thought. He should have clarified. Someone should get water. Someone’s heel knocked over one of the solutions, and Demetrius dropped to the floor and began licking it up, kicking his legs. He was their lifeguard. The crew created a dance circle around him and cheered as he followed the moving puddle with his mouth. The cheer became a yell, the yell became a chorus of full-body screams, a playground test. As a unit, they bowed over him with praying hands. Nik’s hands could not come apart, and they never would again. She accepted this new reality, was hopeful for its future. Back on his feet, Demetrius spent a long minute putting the legal document disco lights back on the big screen. Corrine vomited moments after its flashing colors reappeared. The whole crew, Corrine included, repeated “Ooh no!” in an identical falsetto. They each took a few steps to the left. Nik was spinning Alain, Alain was spinning Nik. Both would pause to curtsy to the other, seeing how low and respectful they could get, a game of genteel modesty as brinkmanship. Alain’s head was a spilt handful of ball bearings, wet and glowing from the blood of cracked glowsticks. They were lapping hard against his skull, sinking down the drain of his throat now. His hair flushed down along with it. Alongside it, not on top, not following after. He was becoming one. The solutions were running low. Alex and Em were back in the abdomen. Alex picked up half-full solutions from their previous batch. The remainders, hanging dividends, the dividers. Dividends. No, not dividends. Remnants, waiting to be factored in again. Remainders. Left to be dealt with later, and later was now. Each gloveless hand held a few flasks, and Alex was swirling them, at first clockwise in his left and counter in his right. It was wrong. Not like that, not against, not in conflict. He had to switch, counter in his left now, clockwise in his right. The reversal caused the solutions to splash over their glass tops. The liquid met in mid-air, no longer strangers, falling into the flasks of their neighbors, falling onto Alex’s moving hands. In concert now, in harmony. Always reevaluating. He watched his hands become blurred circles, multiplied and indistinct. Multiples. Dividends. No, not dividends. “Memorized,” Em said, preparing her own phalanx of leftover erlenmeyer flasks. “I’ve it memorized. I’ve it mem’rized.” She wasn’t using droppers, but instead leaned in to eyeball the concentrates as they slid into different solutions. As a test, she let her eyes close while viscous, pencil-thick lines fell toward the counter. “Mem’rized.” “Who’s it?” Alex kept asking, his eyes stuck to his own blurred hands. “Who’s it? Who’s it?” Em clapped and squinted at the sensation. She tried again, her hands horizontal this time, then back to vertical. Alex wasn’t helping, she saw. “Done, done, done,” she said, gathering up her new babies. The colors of Alex’s blurred hands were lost traces of white, thrown silver, a glowing and teeming ruby. The ruby was the blood inside his hands, he knew, visible through his skin. Blood through his skin, barely contained. He couldn’t believe how fragile he was, how paper-thin, how even when his hands were in motion, he could see the pink blood inside them. Should he stop to slap the backs of them? Bring the blood even closer to the surface? Amplify their signal, their saturation? Where did Em go? He was suddenly alone in the abdomen. Tears grew in his eyes, and his hands slowed down. He understood where he was again and took deep, steadying breaths. He’ll make it up to her. He can do that. He’ll make something new.  In the bridge, Em found the crew sitting on top of and underneath the console. They had switched the music back to classical. Demetrius was speaking slowly, his back draped over a panel of black knobs, “You know how often people try to overdose and fail? It's nearly impossible. Especially with us. We’re still young. Immune systems in full swing.” “We're trying to overdose?” Nik asked from the shadows below the console. Seated even farther behind her in the recessed and dusty dark was Corrine, cross-legged, her head ducked down, silent for a minute now. “No,” Demetrius laughed. “I'm just saying that as… a… an… example.” Em caught the end of this conversation and jumped in. “We're being smart about it,” she said, dropping off a new set of unmarked flasks. She placed their foam blue carrier on the floor in front of Nik. “I do this every day. I mean, not this. No, yes this. We’re doing this correctly, I mean. This is the way to do it correctly, carefully measuring single drops at a time, ingesting slowly, letting it take effect in a nice, slow arc. We’re being smart about it.” Alain was lying on his stomach across the console, his face red and dangling over the front edge. His shirt pocket caught on a metal toggle as he tried to slide his head closer to the new flasks. Nik cracked up at the sight of his pathetic upside-down head, at his sweaty hair pointing toward the floor.  “Poor dumb baby,” Nik said. She picked up one of the new flasks and tried to gently pour it into his smiling, inverted mouth. Some made it in, some ran past and inside of his nostrils. He coughed, then inhaled as hard as he could through his nose. From deep underneath the console, Corrine made clicking insect noises. “This is good,” Alain said, getting dizzier. “This is doing correctly.” He reached a tentative arm over the edge of the console to take the flask from Nik. He made a mess trying to return the favor, spilling the solution over Nik’s chin and down her shirt before making it to her lips. “Life is sticky,” Demetrius said, his eyes tilting back, looking through the observation window toward the screwed-up pin-lights of distant stars. Corrine’s body was against the floor now. She was trying to sneak around Nik, who was making out with Alain’s upside-down head. Corrine paused when one ear made contact with the plated ground, and she listened to the living organs of the Queen, a body in as much internal motion as her own. Corrine continued sliding out from underneath the console in slow, deliberate silence until she reached the collection of new flasks on the floor. Her mouth was stuck open and inhaling dust. She picked out a flask for herself. Alex was in the med bay, under the counter. In the counter. He was looking for something, wasn’t he? Held by charred wooden arms, it was peaceful. How did it get so quiet? That’s right, he walked in here to find… He turned to look out from the womb and saw a trash can. He walked in here, and the first door, “door number one” he called it, roar of applause, was the trash. Traded places with it. Codeine. He would have to leave home to search through more drawers, wave goodbye to Mother and Father. The glass doors normally slide open but they could be pulled too, I bet. Alex’s bloody hands searched through the thin boxes of pills and dripping medicines that were packed in wide, wide shelves. Standing on handfuls of cracked glass, he found the correct blisterpacks by their shape. He and Em will fix the glass tomorrow. Kintsugi, it will be better than before, a work of real art. They’ll blow powdered gold across the fresh-repaired cracks. Alex could no longer read. He defecated where he stood with glass underneath and inside of his boots. The two-seater crashed into a white tank that held compressed carbon dioxide. Why would he be here if he didn’t need carbon dioxide? What was it, codeine and… codeine and… the tank was glowing white, it grew taller, stretched the length of the ceiling. Cold blue lights cleared a path for it. Gasoline. Codeine and an accelerant, red phosphorus, iodine, hydrochloric acid. Grocery list. Fuel for the bombs was near the compressed air tanks. “Overfloweth,” he whispered as gasoline ran over the lip of a flask and down his bleeding arm. “Overfloweth,” as he leaned in to inhale the running tap. Gross realist. He held out his tongue. The crew was fucking on the crooked pile of loungers. Alain’s pants never made it over his steel-toes. Shocked by the flashing colors on the central display, Alex gagged on stomach acid. “Hey,” he tried, standing next to them and holding out a pitcher of cloudy pink liquid. “Hey.” Em, undressed and much too pale, took Alex’s belt buckle in her fist and pulled him in. She isn’t this pale, he thought, and she needs to be taken to a hospital.  Alex found a way to set his pitcher on the low metal table near the loungers while his clothes disappeared. Vomited blood landed next to and inside of this new cocktail. With each beat of the electronic music, the ceiling took a deep breath, remade itself from concave to convex, closer to their heads each time. What was he sweating? Alex’s hands were leaving smeared red trails over Em’s white and blue body. She was one of the ceiling lights from the ship’s abdomen, that’s all. No hospital, that’s alright. She took his bleeding fingers into her mouth. Alain fell backwards off of Demetrius and onto his bare ass. He tried to reach his bootlaces and wept heavy tears. Shuffling back to the table on his knees, he took sips from the pitcher of cloudy pink liquid without using his hands. Shit ran down his leg. Corrine saw him struggling, helped to tip the pitcher into his mouth, then climbed on top of him. Nikoletta began to cry once she saw Alain’s tears, then laughed hoarsely as the lounger that held her and Demetrius tipped over. The floor didn’t matter, and they didn’t need it. She would remove it with her hands. She would force her fingers into every seam and remove the floor with her hands. An excavator, another builder in the family. An un-builder like her father, it’s genetic. A laid-off excavator waiting one hundred entire forevers away. The tears came back. “God, I need water,” Demetrius said, and he made uneasy steps toward the irregular collection of clear liquids lined up under the console. He drained one and sat cross-legged, his eyes refusing to cooperate. The world had less color before this. Nik’s body seemed tinted, exaggerated as he watched her scratch into the floor. Flooded skintones, flooding past their own borders, too much color somehow. “Might run out soon,” he called to no one, and the bridge shook with each syllable. He’ll be more careful next time. It wasn’t safe anymore. He crawled over and stroked Nik’s back. “Wanna make something with me?” he whispered as he helped her to her feet. Nik smiled and nodded, her eyes open too wide, too overcrowded with veins. “How hard could it be?” Demetrius asked as he, Nik, and Alain looked out into the abdomen, toward the endless sentry of black tanks.  Alain was now wearing a t-shirt and nothing else. He sat on the floor next to the electric two-seater, stood up, sat back down. “I will roll two dice,” he spoke into the distance, holding out a hand that held nothing. “The first will tell us the level. The second will tell us the aisle. Wait. I will roll three dice.” He looked down at his empty hand. “The third dice is for which tank in the aisle.” He looked up at Nik and Demetrius. “Ok, ready?” Corrine was dripping through the Queen. She was lying down in the middle of the dancefloor, her ear pressed against the surface again. Her wet skin was welded to the deck, and the groans of the vessel were her own. The ons and the offs of the circulators, the heavings of great, distant machines were her lungs now, were her beating heart. She was out of reach forever, certain that she would never breathe again. The Queen was distributing her body, her lifeforce, throughout its lower decks, and she was helpless to stop it. In the dusty underneath, in the black pitch that kept secrets, a layout not of rooms and walls, but of unseen machines, of gray cable snake pits, of crates of duplicate parts that tarnished just the same as they waited their turn in absolute darkness, enduring the tragedy that is their incorruptible dream of one day serving the only purpose for their existence. This was the industrial landscape that held the wisps of Corrine’s dissolving body. Her trace and indefinable remains shared space with the solemn and roaming dustmotes, the tangled gossamer of charcoal mist, defying gravity with the lights out, moving upright and tree-limbed, varicose, traveling in somnambulist waltz through the cold and unlit space. They float in silence, dragging a short train of dust against the floor behind them, languid and unseen, while she is further dissolved and scattered. She lives now as pistons loosed into shallow mist, as gearboxes kicked and spilled out, as spares and glass outcomes.   Corrine pressed her ear harder against the floor but could no longer pick out her heartbeat from the series of patternless hums and clicks below. She was truly lost now, parceled. Held apart. In a moment, she will drip clear through the bottom, through and into the airless pull. She will become distant nothing. “Hey, Corrine, have you tried this?” Alex asked. Seated on the floor, he shuffled over to her, bearing the pitcher of pink krokodil. He took a heavy swallow from it before placing it next to Corrine’s eyes, black and unblinking. Her hands stayed where they were, flat against her side, but they would move soon enough. He picked up the pitcher and swallowed hard. Hands were reevaluating. “You can leave her,” Em said. “I think the others are in the abdomen.” Em knew everyone had the airlock code, but couldn’t they have asked her first? They just waltzed in there on their own. How could she be alone in this, in understanding the disrespect of their being in the abdomen without her? “Alex, we should find them. Leave her, she’ll be fine.” Alex took a departing drink from the pitcher and left it next to Corrine’s rising and falling body. Corrine was alone on the dancefloor now, hearing arpeggiated swells of mannered violins. Unhearing. Her eyes stared straight through a liquid pink mist, a slow motion storm moving on top of itself. Catching, resetting, catching against itself. She was famished. Em and Alex found the rest of the crew after minutes of chasing laughter that folded in waves inside the endless cathedral hull of the abdomen. Nik and Alain had their heads cocked back, both steadying a dropper over one eye. Demetrius was trying to whistle. He kept falling back into one of the tanks, first on accident and then on purpose. He noticed Em and Alex and turned his head slowly, playing the villain. “We think it’s tilapia,” Demetrius said, narrowing his eyes and grinning. “We’re playing the tilapia challenge.” “Your face is,” Em started to say. Nik and Alain emptied the droppers into their eyes. Their bodies were crushed wastepaper. They buckled and fell to their knees. Both were cackling on the ground. “You’re making a face like you expect me to be upset,” Em finished. Demetrius’s face split as Em’s eyes unfocused. She couldn’t make it whole again. Someone else’s face and body grew like a plant in its place, a seventh crew member whose mouth opened to the floor, past the floor. It was the heavy black door that led to the break room in the foundry where her father worked. How long had it been since she last had one of those automatic hot chocolates? Corrine found plenty of water to drink, but she didn’t know how to find food. She kept hitting buttons and toggles on the console with a closed fist, would occasionally hear a new, distant noise, but no food would appear. After hitting one of the buttons, the light of the central digital display screen shut off, revealing the hanging black absence outside, but that wasn’t enough. Why was the Queen keeping food from her? She had to eat, too. Running out of buttons, she slumped to the ground, her back resting against the side of the console. Her head fell forward, and, appearing as a miracle, noodles materialized in front of her. Dried noodles. A blessing. Exactly what she needed. An actual miracle. Exactly when she needed them. “Ferns! Ferns! Ferns!” The echoes of the cheering crew in the Queen’s abdomen were physically overwhelming Em as she forced down 50 ml of straight concentrate. She was topless again. The beaker shattered after she dropped it to steady herself against a tank. She took a risk on a burp and put both fists in the air. “Ferns!” Em cried, tears in her eyes, victorious. The cheers were horrifying. Her legs were caught against the floor. Stapled. She would have to remove the staples by hand, wrench them out through her boots, through the middle of both feet. Only moments apart from each other, Nik and Alain stopped clapping and gagged hard. Lurching, spasmodic movement inside their necks whipped them into violent seizures. The concentrate had traveled from their eye sockets and into their sinuses. Now it dripped down the back of their throats. As Demetrius watched, unsure how to move, colors were escaping from the laws that bound them in his vision. Nik and Alain looked like thrown paint as they shook against the ground. The entire ship had the look of heavy brushwork, globbed and piled into a third dimension. Wherever he looked, an overflow of excess paint was congealing and dripping down into a puddle somewhere that Demetrius did not want to find. Em leaned over the railing and watched as her bloody vomit grew smaller, reoriented itself in mid-air, separated into a chain of islands, then gathered back together as it was caught by the avenue below, a new red unity.  Seeing Nik and Alain locked in twin body spasms, Alex knew this was the crisis. He made finger guns. No, that wasn’t it. Where were they? He flicked on the two-seater. He thought he was speaking words, but no one seemed to react. It must be the same as reading. He suspected that spoken language was beyond him, too. He tried again to confirm this hunch, but this time everyone responded by piling onto the vehicle. That must have been what he asked for. Someone’s body was shaking against his own, digging into his upper back. They were staring into the glinting white teeth of a leviathan. He heard someone else’s speaking voice. He wondered if he could respond. “Air tanks,” Em said. “You have to turn around.” She looked down at her hands as they were holding Nik’s convulsing body. When did she become a ghost, a translucent blue ghost that was somehow able to hold on to Nik’s shaking green army jacket? Demetrius was running the sink in the med bay and delivering water to Nik and Alain, both relatively stable now on the same bed. Identical yellow vomit was pooled on the floor on either side of them. No one could find the med bay’s trash can. Demetrius filled up another pitcher of water for himself. He had held onto a small erlenmeyer flask of what he thought was tilapia concentrate. He watched it slide into the pitcher of water. Alex found Corrine sitting in the middle of the dancefloor, still listening to their chess soundtrack, alone and unmoving. He saw that Corrine painted her face while they were in the ship’s abdomen.  Alex joined her on the floor and said, “I think we’re all drinking water now. Do you want some?” It wasn’t face paint, Alex realized, but blood from her scalp. Portions of Corrine’s hair were missing. Corrine’s mouth curled slightly. She nodded yes. Alex left and found a pitcher of water in the med bay. He drank some himself before carefully administering it to Corrine.  As they sat, the bodies of Em, Nik, and Alain appeared around them. Nik sensed alarm upon seeing Alex and Corrine on the floor, but she couldn’t categorize it. A pulsing hell grew behind her eyes and roundly rejected all incoming concerns. She sat down beside them, and that simple motion tore a patterned lattice of pain deeper inside her head, a new and unknown geometric framework that constricted and shredded through nerves, segmenting the meat in her skull into strict, acute angles that continued into the back of her neck. Breakers of white bile swelled without warning, and it required incredible will for Nik to turn her head away from her friends before the mass choked its way through her throat and poured onto the dancefloor. Her head still turned, clear acid shining around her mouth, one of her hands found Corrine. Nik rested it on Corrine’s leg.  Demetrius was counting the glasses of chemical solutions lined up underneath the console. “That’ll,” he said. “That will. That is. That’ll.” His eyelids were the tin beaks of birds of prey, and they were snapping shut around his eyes. The talons of weaker birds were trying to escape through his iris. He couldn’t let the tin beaks around his eyes stay open too long. The smaller birds might escape. Nik and Em both accepted glasses from Demetrius. Em danced to the classical music as if it were the bass-heavy electronic from earlier. She spread puddles with her shoes. Her lungs were hot. Alain, still pantsless, rolled across the floor toward the console and picked up a half-full glass of solution. He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a silver packet of spicy shrimp flavoring. He dumped the whole thing in. Alex asked Corrine if she’d be okay, and he left her sitting with Nik and the pitcher of water. He had to make a call, and he knew his list of contacts was behind one of these steel-white wall panels. A memory came back to him of writing out a list of numbers longhand in case of a personal comms malfunction. Grows reel lisp. He sensed that the list was behind the panel that was neither the most nor the least tarnished, the wall panel that was at the precise midpoint of discoloration. He found it near the hallway that led to the thorax.  What Alex sensed next was the presence of a thin blade, a skewer, a letter opener spanning the distance between his right temple and a point above his left ear canal. The sound of its dull tip dragging across bone and scratching into the inside of his skull resonated throughout his body, blocking out all other sound. It was doing something better than scratching. It was engraving. It was engraving capital letters. He was locked in place with an arm stretched toward the half-tarnished wall panel as he waited for the blade to finish engraving these words: GROATS SURREY LIFTS. Of course, he thought. It was always going to be this message, a message appearing as a miracle. An incorruptible purpose forever engraved inside of his skull. He was certain now. This would be the rock on which he would build his church. The pain inside his head was incandescent, a cascade of ruptured glass vacuum tubes, glass darts by the thousands firing past his eyes and down his neck. His arm wanted to reach the wall to balance himself, but it wouldn’t connect. The pad of his index finger, its ridges and canyons, its vibrating and busy interior, would approach and retreat from the steel wall one slow millimeter at a time. It’s cold, isn’t it. It’ll be cold, I bet. Em was yelling words of encouragement to Alain, who opened up the back of the console and was pulling out bundled groups of thin cables as far as he could without breaking them. The cables broke anyway. He must have found the surgical stapler in the med bay and was attempting to staple exposed cables to the walls of the bridge. The staples had trouble piercing through steel, so he climbed barefoot on top of the console to try and staple them to the ceiling, which was made of a more giving polymer. This was serious work, and Alain muttered to himself as he fired staples. “System. Nervous. System,” he said. His toe caught an array of metal toggles, and he fell face first into the console. “Nervous.” Em told him to keep trying, enjoying the sensation of pulling her feet away from the increasingly sticky deck as she danced. Nik managed to assign focus to Corrine’s face, to the drying blood diluted by sweat, to the white residue collecting around her mouth. She held Corrine by both shoulders and said, “Up, poor baby. Up.” Corrine managed to get one foot on the floor, but she couldn’t sort out her second step. Nik looked to a dancing Em for assistance. Has Em always been so pale? In the blur of motion, her white and blue arms were flightless wings. The last thing Nik saw was the pitcher that Corrine held, its contents a dark and cloudy gray, the suggestion of a slow clockwise whirlpool inside. Then Nik saw nothing as the stone weights tied around her eyes dropped over the side of the dock, pulling her eyes deep inside until they drowned, drowned, drowned. With loose wiring in one hand and a surgical stapler in the other, Alain bumped into Alex, who seemed distressed in his movements. Distressed in his absence of movement. Alex’s outstretched hand held a mess of cracked and drying blood, and the lids of his eyes visibly spasmed. Alain got on his knees to find the least invasive part of Alex’s body, a point of minimal injury. This had to be a loving act, a kindness for a friend in trouble. Alain chose a point at the center of Alex’s right calf. He used two fingers to hold a yellow wire taught against Alex’s pant leg, and with his other hand, he pulled the stapler’s trigger. “It’s automated,” Em said to Demetrius. The two were crouched in front of one of the computers, and she was helping him read. The chairs were missing.  “Right, it’s automated, but it’s real, isn’t it?” Demetrius asked. Em scrolled through the new legal document, then had to look away from the motion blur and throbbing white light of the monitor. She stopped scrolling and was relieved to see the end of the document. “It’s real. I’m pretty sure. You probably tripped something.” “That… was… fast,” Demetrius spoke, struggling to hold the weight of his head. “Fabar men. Fabar men. Linney Fabar men in suits. Men in suits are waiting for me.” Demetrius laughed a single laugh. Em caught something that threatened to climb up her esophagus. “Can’t they drain your account from here? If you don’t respond in ‘x’ amount of days or whatever?” “Well, let us just take a look-see at this here decree,” Demetrius said, his head falling to the opposite angle. His hands opened and closed around nothing at involuntary intervals. Em squinted at the monitor and answered, “No.” “Or consider,” said Demetrius. “Or consider,” said Em. “Or consider,” said Demetrius. “Or consider,” said Em. “Or consider,” said Demetrius. “Or consider,” said Em. Nik kissed Corrine’s shoulder. She had a sunken memory of someone’s blanket thrown to one side, and she found the comforter after a minute of casting around with outstretched arms. She wrapped Corrine in the drier side of the comforter. Nik rested her chin on Corrine’s shoulder. She whispered something and received no response. Nik then took careful, glacial steps away from the voices in the bridge, met the cold touch of a steel wall panel, and, aching and eyeless, found her way to her apartment. Inside, Nik had to pause every few steps to endure columns of pain. In creeping increments, by the edge of a braided rug, by the back of a chair, by the chipped corner of a composite desk, she finally reached the personal comms hub in her apartment. She still retained the muscle memory of powering on the machine, and, now hearing its familiar soft-static hum, she found the contacts dial and felt it click three times. “Good morning,” Nik spoke into the hub’s onboard microphone. Had she ever started a call this way before? Those greetings held little meaning here, orbiting a planet with nineteen hour and twenty-two minute days. She fought through a temporary paralysis that rose as scaffolding from between her shoulder blades. “I am starting over. Hey, Dad. I will be back sooner than we– than I thought. We. Than anyone. I am sorry. I do not understand. I love you. The account,” she said, wincing through the sensation of rebar dragging through half-congealed concrete behind her forehead. Her nails scratched farther into the chipped corner of the desk. “Is against. Yet. I will fix it. I’m sorry. I'm seeing you sooner. Love you.” Nik was unable to see the screen, unable to read the error message reporting that all outgoing comms would be saved and retained within the vessel until connection was restored. Outbound signals were severed. Cables that were crucial to their transmission were no longer inside the bridge’s console. Some were knotted under a lounger. Some dangled from the ceiling. One was stapled to Alex’s leg. Demetrius was having trouble writing new code. Em’s arm typed over his shoulder, and she smiled in approval. “Obvious,” she kept saying. “Obviously,” he would respond. The tin beaks around his eyes were snapping shut with increasing force.  Nik was back in the bridge and sitting with Corrine on the dancefloor. Both were inside of the comforter, and they held each other close. Corrine kept spitting up. Alex had trouble breathing through the drain in the floor. He imagined the holes in the metal growing wider. The drain was inhaling the cloudy pink solution that he mixed earlier. The solution was leaving his body through the back of his leg. Where was that pitcher now? He couldn’t breathe through the drain while it was drinking codeine, gasoline, and red phosphorus. He needed to make more for himself. Immediately. Watching the drain drink from his leg, he felt his face with a wet, pruning hand, and he found that his whole body wept for this loss. Of course it was. Why didn’t he have it? Why can’t I drink it right now? This is the saddest I have ever been in my entire life. Slow, deliberate, Alain dragged a shoulder along the wall that led to the showers. He found Alex sitting underneath a running shower head with both legs outstretched, fully clothed and soaked through. Next to him, half underneath the falling water, was a scuffed gray trash can ready to overflow. Single-use gloves and wads of swollen used facial tissue floated inside. Shower water flowed freely past and inside of Alex’s open mouth. His eyes were glass. The regular rising of his stomach was the only visible movement, his concave chest collecting and releasing shallow pools of water. Collecting, releasing. “Hey, we’re leaving,” Alain spoke softly, afraid of interrupting his friend. “You should come with us if you want.” The stream of water running down Alex’s face broke around his mouth as it tried to speak. All it could do was part, reshape, close again. He saw that one of Alain’s eyes was a red mess of burst capillaries, a codeine blisterpack. “Yeah,” Alain said, the weight of his body on one shoulder. Alex found it odd to be a passenger in the hopper, found it odd to see it so crowded. Demetrius held the controls, his body falling toward one side. Demetrius flinched in and out of unconsciousness, waking each time to the crack of a snapped tongue depressor, the sound originating from somewhere inside himself. Em placed her hands on Alex’s headrest for balance. Alex didn’t notice until she spoke. “We wanted to watch it,” Em said close to his ear. She chose to stand for this trip. Alex wondered why Em didn’t think to invite him, wondered if she would have left without him. Alex turned to see Nikoletta and Corrine slumped in their harnesses, their heads facing their bare feet. Alain’s eyes were stuck to a window as the hopper descended and broke the manufactured cloudline. The ruby light of a foreign sun reflected on Alain’s face. None of his muscles reacted.  “Did you bring it?” Alex asked Em, his mouth impossibly dry. Corrine began hacking, her body a violent stutter against her seat harness. Em didn’t answer. Alex would ask Demetrius. It was somewhere in the hopper. Piles and piles of hair exited Corrine’s mouth and collected at her feet. The wet accumulation was clotted and iridescent, crude oil black and moving between her toes. As they approached the planet’s surface, Alex heard the familiar sub-bass grinding of landing gear in motion. It was unmistakable, and it was wrong. The wrong grinding, the clicks arriving out of place. Demetrius de-accelerated as they reached a level clearing along an unnamed coastline. Alex remembered too late that he left the hopper’s wheels out when he last docked into the Queen. Demetrius wasn’t familiar with the hopper’s controls, and he hadn’t noticed either when he toggled the landing command. The wheels were fully retracted back inside now. With force and with purpose, the hopper planted itself deep into fresh, waiting silt. Em’s kneecap met the corrugated floor first, then the rest of her. Unfastened tools and supply packs spilled out and littered the cabin. The scuffed gray trash can tipped easily, spilling soaked garbage and shower water down the length of the hopper. “We’re okay. We’re okay,” Demetrius said, slowly swiveling to see the crew. “Yeah. We’re okay.” It was dark in the hopper. The planet’s surface reached halfway up the observation windows. Alex and Demetrius spent a minute struggling to open the roof’s emergency hatch. They helped the crew out of their harnesses and pulled them through the roof one at a time. Nik, awoken by the landing, kept asking for Corrine, but Corrine remained silent. The two found each other on the roof and sat cross-legged together with their hands clasped.  It was only a short jump from the roof to the dirt. Demetrius slid down the side of the hopper, and, for the first time, he made contact with this planet. He staggered and tripped in the direction of the freshwater lake. It lapped softly in the distance with an easy consistency that suggested it had always been, that it had always moved with this certain, solemn rhythm, giving no indication that only recently did it escape from ice caps in stages of intentional greenhousing. The peaks of its brief and countless waves gave the impression of a rose gold vanity mirror in a state of perpetual cracking and refracting. Turning his head, Demetrius fell in the direction of the jagged black mountain range, mountains with edges yet to be dulled by erosion, their finer splintered details kept secret behind fallen curtains of delicate amber fog, a powdered gold blown across the sky. The tin beaks around his eyes were open wide. They never told me, Demetrius thought as he stepped his first step into glinting pink water, a lake like a jewel case, blushing under this curious ruby sky. The view of his submerged bare feet in ruddy sand remained perfect, disrupted only by the natural distortion of light through clean unfrozen water. How could a place be so untouched? It is past beauty. New terms are needed, a new scale that we must never know. To even know the words is to ruin this place. To even observe it is to ruin this place. It is pure of import. It has yet to arrive at meaning, and it must never arrive. Nobody can know these valleys and these oceans lay waiting. They remain meaningless, unchartable, unutterable, objects of literal perfection so long as the human mind is forbidden from assigning consequence, forbidden from hanging weight and expectation.  A warm breeze traveled across the cracked and refracting rose gold vanity mirror and met Demetrius’s waist-deep body. He allowed himself to be held in its breath. Looking down to the clean image of his toes buried in silt, salty tears fell fast and easy from the tin beaks around his eyes. I must never assign thought to this world. It is past purity. Perfection in meaninglessness. How absurd is it for my body to hold space in this world? How presumptuous for me to breathe and exchange its air? My lungs are a corrupting presence, an engine of slow despoilment that can only unbalance this land, can only drag it further from an unknowable purity. Not to mention the violence of my arrival, the intrusion of steel and propellant. Unacceptable. Too ashamed to turn and look at the hopper that I know must lie behind me still. Even the trace wake of my skin and hair is a pollution. The salt from my tears landing in this freshwater is an arrogance. This is a world on a knife’s edge. Too fragile to look upon, a planet built by vast and accumulated circumstance, alive only in paper-thin margins, a miracle existing within the smallest window of potential physical manifestation, and I dare ask it to tolerate the foreign virus of my walking body, my sweat and my breath, an intruder who can do nothing to improve upon this purity, who can only sully it with every shedding cell?  Far above, a heavy striation of bruised charcoal clouds parted to reveal an unknown sun, and in the moments before the sky collected itself over again, the lake that surrounded him glowed the color of thin honey and rose petal from the inside out. They never told me. Alex watched Demetrius stumble farther away from the hopper and into the water. Em’s head was tilted back as she watched the movement of dense cloud figures. She was propped back against her arms, her useless and swelling leg hanging over the hopper’s edge. Alex saw that the skin around her gashed knee had turned purple and black. If Em felt it, she gave no indication. Alain was scrambled behind the eyes. The world dimmed behind numerics and cracked neons, speeding figures set against a hanging black absence. The characters eluded coherence, and he tried and failed to slow the images. They persisted, kept racing whether his eyes were open or closed. He sensed an acceleration in his vision, a ruby light singeing through his optic nerves, through his sense of balance. And yet, words untethered swam in a countercurrent, undaunted, appearing as a miracle, a spawning against the motion blur. These words broke the surface of heavy glowing traffic and drew breath, and for their effort, Alain resolved to speak them aloud. “Life is sticky.” They registered as pure phonetics, thudding, sinking immediately to the drowned bottom. He could not solve them, they were a subliminal reflex that carried no meaning. Though he knew he must have fathered these words, he could not claim them. His sense of gravity and orientation, of his proportion and plotting within the world’s grid, was beyond him now. Speeding cracked neon was the whole of his sensation. He could not claim his own body as it slid headfirst, inching in slow heaves back into the emergency roof hatch. “Okay,” Em said, her eyes on the mass of clouds that held steady above their wrecked hopper. “In a minute, I think.” Corrine was watching the sky now, too. She weakly pounded an open palm onto the roof. Alex expected a flock of birds. But they didn’t do birds. They do pollinators. Birds arrive with colonies. A portion of the bruised charcoal clouds grew brighter. Corrine pounded the roof again, and Nik squeezed Corrine’s other hand tighter. “Hey,” Corrine said, watching the area of glowing clouds. As the brightness increased, the portion of lit clouds narrowed in diameter. “Hey,” Corrine said, pounding faster with her open palm. Nik put both arms around her and wept through unseeing eyes. Something crept through Em’s throat, and she coughed black tar down her shirt. The glowing portion of clouds tightened and grew brighter, grew hotter until it reached a fiery white point. Alex watched as the Queen burst through the cloudline, kilometers above their heads, every one of its observation lights set to full brightness.  It was falling at an angle, abdomen-first. Its size was wrong. The space it occupied was wrong. Why was he seeing the Queen like this, with his body exposed to it, his skin sharing the same air as the vessel’s screaming exterior? It kept growing larger, but how? Nothing should ever be so large. Alex found it impossible to understand it as a vehicle, as a vessel. It read as pure architecture, as acres of unknowable heaving structure. It was an entire site unmoored, plucked up whole and flung from deep nowhere, lit for dead midnight and growing larger still. Somehow it was falling in silence, an endless moment of pure, helpless sight. Senseless. It should be crying. Wailing. Its array of alarms should be coughing and gasping as it sensed its own weight against the rushing atmosphere. He should hear its screaming. Senseless for it to keep growing like this. It read as a singular, private apocalypse. No one is supposed to see this. Somehow, it was still advancing, accelerating, filling more and more of the sky with an unyielding steel gray and dragging dozens of gashed white light trails behind. Em’s eyes widened, black bile dripping off the point of her upturned chin. It would be landing much closer to the hopper than she expected. Alex fell into the emergency hatch while Corrine’s pounding turned frantic. “Hey. Hey.” Alain was in the pilot’s seat, his unbreathing body draped over the yoke. Alex smacked on the engine toggles. The hopper sparked to life with the yoke already pulled to a hard angle under Alain’s weight. The hopper stuttered and groaned against porous dirt, digging itself deeper into the earth. Corrine was screaming now as Alex tried to pull Alain’s body out of the pilot seat. The surface around the hopper brightened far beyond daylight as the Queen grew improbably closer, seeming ready to make contact where they sat. Not exactly where they sat, Em knew. It will touch down a few hundred yards along the coast. She saw that Demetrius found the water, was shoulder-deep now. She looked farther down to the black vomit syrup on her shirt. This is valid, Em thought. I can use this. Hydrochloric acid, stomach tissue, organic plant material. I can separate it, use all of it. Easy. She studied the material closer. It was a liquid, and yet it was swimming. A black liquid swimming back up her shirt. Strange for a liquid to swim, for a substance to move against its own state. The crew was divided by shrapnel. The Queen’s ruptured air tanks fired concentrates into the planet’s surface at hundreds of kilometers per second and blanketed the coast with concussive waves of black smoke, of hydrogen and methane, of carbon dioxide and oxygen, of helium and nitrogen. Organic material climbed into the clouds. Some concentrates fell back promptly as viscous storms, landing onto the surface in sheets. Some concentrates were captured by the atmosphere, traveling far afield before returning as rain. This world took a hard, deep breath and inhaled all of it. In time, this site would become a paradise that its creators could never enjoy. The crew’s rescuers would find a planet no longer suitable for human life, but ideal for someone else. Hundreds of millions of miles away, Nicolas Olivér was standing in a bare office. He was directing a picture-hanger and pointing to a spot on the cream-white wall above where his redwood desk might go. As he side-stepped to a point on the carpet where his chair would sit, he received a notification. Seeing the automated emergency message, he was reminded that he needs to ask Lynval to remove him from the terraforming operations list. Nicolas deleted the notification, then received a stranger message. When he sees Terry later that day, he’ll ask how normal it is for LinneFabar board members to attend birthday parties for the children of warehouse inventory specialists.