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Weary from my travels, I turned the corner into their lane Coming home, back to them Everything a little different, but still just the same. The selfsame faces beaming round the table A meal and some deliberation The warmth washed around me in waves Even in that dry summer, offering salvation. My eyes were as bright as the yellow lights And I heard your laugh through the lull I can tell you now, as surely as I felt it then It’s simple. And when we walked back, stumbling and giggling I told you about my heartbreak and you told me about yours You’re aimless tonight and I’m throwing myself off the cliff Jubilant, gorgeous, screaming out the words to David Bowie’s “Heroes.” I don’t know what the year will bring If love will ever be within our reach But I can tell you now, as surely as I felt it then For those few brief moments, we were unquestionably alive. Amruta Gaiki (She/Her) is an Indian graduate student majoring in English. She likes reading, writing, and going on walks with earphones plugged in. Her work has been published by Rejection Letters, Livina Press, Bubble, and Alien Buddha Zine. She is an editor at The Milk House. Follow her on Twitter & Instagram @flames_n_ice and read her blog at: https://goingliterary.wordpress.com/

I took my mum’s hand, malformed, pitiless, In her age that guarantees no renewal. She looks at me, as I bury my face in the Crux of her arm. Briefly wanting to scour this fleeting moment upon infinity. She turns and looks out the window, The heart can only break so many times (at least that’s what I thought). I’m sorry mum. I love you. The silence that follows is complete. David Hay's debut publication is the narrative poem Doctor Lazarus. His first poetry collection is forthcoming from Rare Swan Press. He has a collaborative work Amor Novus/A Spontaneous Prayer with Soyos Books, a pamphlet due in November from Back Room Poetry and has a novel How High the Moon coming out from Anxiety Press later this year.

My Nemesis is a magnificent dancer. She performs pirouettes to the bar and passes after her first attempt so she can later explain the legalities of torture. This ornery oracle scans rooms and documents from left to right and right to left. She speaks every language but my native language. And practicing my second language will not save me from the horrors accompanying her swift gait and savvy social behaviors. My nemesis wears combat boots and moonlights as a flight attendant with a 500-year-old samurai sword hidden in the cockpit, headed for my destination. She is the reason dead sparrows appear on my doorstep, my car won’t start, and I swallow five pills every night to help me fall asleep. Sara Cosgrove is an award-winning journalist and emerging poet. Her poems have appeared or are scheduled to appear in The Seventh Quarry, Meniscus, and Notre Dame Review. She has worked as a writer and editor for more than a decade and has studied in the United States, Cuba, and France.

Dervis told me he wanted to “sleep on it” but after lunch, he’d already had an answer for me, so I guess he napped on his lunch break. He was not going to let me come back. His feeling was, “Yeah, sorry, you can’t go on vacation for two months and expect to keep your job.” I tried explaining that a tour is not a vacation. For bands like mine, it’s a bad dream. It’s dying of boredom in a van with no A/C surrounded by people with no communication skills, and the van dies daily, and you finally get to your gig and you’re going on way later than you thought, and even though you might have a few fans scattered about, no one’s dying to watch your set, so there’s a nagging feeling of futility and despair that you drink heavily to escape, knowing that tomorrow will be the exact same except now you’ll be hungover. So why do I bother? Because the alternative is I stay in this warehouse and keep working for Hal Dervis. What can I say, I still think our band’s gonna be huge. Friday was my last day and I left without a goodbye to anyone. Every one of my co-workers is either a divorced mom or the delinquent son of one of those moms. I don’t know how the trend started of the moms bringing their scary sons on board, but the sons sure do make their presence felt. They took over the radio so that there is always nu metal or countrified rap-rock playing, and if you don’t have anything to say about paintball or Fortnite, you get left out of most conversations. There are also some retired guys supplementing their social security, and a couple dudes in their twenties who are screwing a couple of the moms, unbeknownst to the sons. I don’t have anything against any of these people, I just never had anything to say to them and that includes “goodbye.” I did catch Dervis’s eye on my way out and gave him a vaguely threatening look, one I hope communicated, “You are a punk and a lowlife and no one on earth will remember you when you are gone. Working for you has sucked.” As I was getting into my car, I saw Kurt across the lot—he was smoking a cig by the loading dock—and I felt a rush of guilt. I’d needed work desperately a few months back, and even though we were barely speaking, Kurt hadn’t hesitated to get me this job. Sure, all he’d had to do was ask his dad (yep, the Rod Korver of Rod Korver Hospitality Supplies), but still, he asked. And in all the three months or so that I worked in the warehouse, I’d never once gone to the offices next door to check in on Kurt and see how the social media management was coming along (poorly, I figured, since Kurt has no social media skills and his dad only gave him the job so he could put something on his resume that’s not Dairy Queen or Pizza Hut). I felt I owed it to Kurt now to go tell him I was leaving, though I couldn’t imagine him caring and really didn’t want to talk to him. “Hey man!” I said as I approached, big fake smile on my face. He answered, “Yo,” in a low voice, almost a moan, smoke leaking out of his head. He looked philosophical, brooding, but sort of consciously brooding, as if playing the part of “guy with stuff on his mind.” It didn’t suit him. “Wanted you to know it’s my last day,” I said. “Shit, really?” I told him about Dervis calling my tour a vacation. Then I told him about the tour. Then I asked if I’d told him about it already. Then I thought, Why the fuck did I ask that? I knew I hadn’t told him and that he wouldn’t want to hear about it. But it used to be all we talked about, music stuff. Going on tour was a dream we’d once shared. Now I was living it and he was not, would never. Kurt put out his cigarette and said, “You’ll get your job back. Don’t worry about Dervis, fuck him.” It seemed pointed that he made no mention of the tour I had just mentioned. I could tell something was wrong but couldn’t bring myself to ask. We’d spent lots of time together but never discussed feelings, or anything very personal, unless drunk. I don’t know who’s to blame for that. I think I’m a sensitive guy, in touch with my emotions and whatnot. Girls I’ve dated have told me I am, anyway. But I was never in touch with Kurt’s emotions. Not knowing what else to say to him, I asked, “Do you wanna hang before I leave?” He hesitated, then mumbled, “Sure.” Pissed me off that he didn’t seem to care either way, when I thought me asking him to hang was a huge deal since we hadn’t in so long and I didn’t even want to. Maybe it sounded to him that I was inviting him to celebrate the start of another My Favourite Bastard tour, to toast my success. So I added, “Been a while.” “I know,” he said. “Are you asking to hang out because of what’s happening with my folks?” “Huh? What about your folks?” “They’ve separated. My dad’s fucking one of the sales ladies.” “Jesus, are you serious? What the fuck?” He told me Mr. K.’s been seeing this lady—I don’t know which lady—for like six months. His mom found out a few weeks ago and he doesn’t know where his dad’s staying. “I gotta quit this fucking job,” he said. “I have to see him every day and act like…but what can I do? Go back to Pizza Hut?” “How’s your mom?” “Not good.” “Fucking dads,” I said. Not sure why I said that. My dad’s probably the most supportive person in my life, and because he toiled so long in shit jobs before finally opening his own restaurant at 46, I still believe I can have a music career and he believes it too. Kurt knows all this and probably resented me saying “fucking dads” as if we were in the same Sons of Shitty Dads support group. “Look,” I said, “you have social media experience, you can tweet for whoever.” “There’s more to it than tweeting. You have to know SEO and all that.” “What’s SEO?” “I don’t know. Fuck! I’m so stupid.” “You’re not,” I said, putting my hand on his shoulder. How odd it felt to do that. When had I last touched the guy’s shoulder, or shaken his hand even? Had we ever hugged? We must have, at some point. Probably while wasted. Kurt said, “Well, I’m around tonight if you want to come over. My dad left all his booze in the basement, the real top-shelf bottles.” This excited me. I had sorry thoughts about Kurt’s family situation, but those thoughts were outshined by excited thoughts of drinking Macallan 12 Single Malt in his basement. I also had a guitar I’d left there years ago and it’d be nice to have it back. It’s an Ibanez, this sparkly blue junker I got for a couple hundred. “Dude, I’m there,” I said. Kurt and I met in high school, started a band, played together almost weekly in his parents’ basement, planning to tour the world as a guitar-and-drums duo like the White Stripes or the Black Keys, only we wouldn’t suck. We were called the Gray Slits. I loved that name. It meant nothing, but I liked that it was ambiguously offensive. My dad asked me if it was a reference to old ladies’ vaginas (it wasn’t, but I liked the idea of people thinking it was). I played guitar and Kurt played drums. He wasn’t amazing but I knew my playing was good enough that he didn’t need to be. And I was fairly sure I had charisma, which sounds weird to say, but now that I’m in My Favourite Bastard I’ve had people confirm that I have onstage charisma. Not enough to take the focus off Melanie, our singer, but people look at me. The Gray Slits never played a show. Coming up with the name was the first and final order of official Gray Slits business. Everything beyond that was talk. Kurt seemed content to jam and fantasize forever; I was desperate to be in a real band, so I found one. But after joining My Favourite Bastard I still had occasional practices with Kurt, which were awful. I’d conjure some workaday riff (my best ideas went to Bastard) and Kurt, knowing my allegiances lay elsewhere, would half-heartedly play along until we were both drunk enough on Bass Ale to quit for the night and go play NBA Jam. Then one night he got up from his drums and, without a word, left his own basement through the sliding glass door, got in his car, and drove away. When he came back 45 minutes later I was upstairs in the living room, eating Cheetos and watching Everybody Loves Raymond with Kurt’s mom (many of our practices ended with us watching CBS programming with Mrs. K. so it wasn’t weird that I was doing this). I said, “Where’d you go?” Trying to be nonchalant. He said, “Just drove around.” He took a seat on the couch and we watched the episode in silence. During commercials, he said, “I don’t know what we’re doing down there anymore. I think I’m having a bad time. Aren’t you?” It was our final practice. We stopped hanging out, too. Things got busy with my band and Kurt went to work for his father. Sometimes I’d lay awake wondering why Kurt seemed to take for granted that he could keep my Ibanez. Then I’d think about Kurt and his lack of ambition and I’d become inexplicably furious. Eventually, I stopped thinking about him. Then one day after a tour in which I lost pretty much all my savings I called him and asked if his dad might be hiring warehouse guys, and here we are. I pulled up to his house at about 7:30. I sat in my car a few minutes, suddenly having second thoughts about going in, about seeing Mrs. Korver looking all spurned and betrayed. What’s the appropriate way to act around your ex-best-friend’s mom who’s just been spurned by her husband who is your boss? It would have been a good idea to have a couple beers before coming here, and I wished I had a bottle of something tucked under the seat or in the glove box. But when she opened the door, I just wanted to hug her. She looked the same as always: cheerful, put-together, delighted to see me. She wasn’t on a six-day bender, shuffling around in pajamas with her hair in a huge ratty mess. Maybe she’d been doing those things but had put herself together knowing I was coming. “Sammy!” she cried, bringing her hands together. “Where have you been?” We caught up. She’s still at the same veterinary clinic. She asked about my band, I said it was going fine, though I made sure to portray tour life as bleak. We got to the kitchen and Kurt came up from the basement. I felt disappointed to see him then. I’d been enjoying Mrs. K, who, if she was depressed, at least put on a happy face, whereas Kurt looked almost petulantly glum. Mrs. K. offered us wine and I really wanted to stay with her, but Kurt said, “We’re going downstairs.” “Come with us,” I said. “No,” she said, laughing. “I hate it down there.” Kurt went downstairs without another word and when he was gone Mrs. K. poured me some wine and said, “Take a glass anyhow.” Everything was pretty much the same in the basement. Boxes piled up, pieces of old furniture, and Kurt’s champagne-colored DW drums, the most beautiful kit I’ve ever seen. I hate to think of them not being played, just wasting away in Kurt’s basement. I ran my finger along one of the cymbals and showed Kurt the dust. “Not practicing much?” I asked. “What for?” “Fun? Or just to stay on top of it?” “Nah, one day, maybe.” “It’s a beautiful kit, you know, if you ever wanted to—” “Yeah, yeah, I’ll get back into it,” Kurt said. “Hey wanna see the bar? You’ve never seen it.” I’d been scanning the room for my Ibanez. I’d left it in its stand right by the drums. Where was it? I followed Kurt to the bar, figuring I’d ask about it after a couple Macallans. The new bar was not new anymore. There was a big mirror that had a huge decal of the mascot from the college Mr. K. went to, and there was this long crack along the mascot’s chest. The floor tiling looked dirty. And there was a clear plastic bowl, half-filled with an obviously stale salad of Cheetos, ridged potato chips, and pretzel sticks, in the corner. I said, “I take it that’s not a snack you just whipped up.” “Oh fuck!” Kurt said. He was looking at the shelves next to the mascot. “Where’s all the…dude, where the fuck is the good shit? Mom!” He bolted upstairs. I looked at the shelves and I saw what he meant. There really was no good shit. No Macallan 12, no Lagavulin, no Johnnie Walker Blue, or even Johnnie Walker Black. What remained was Seagram’s, Dewar’s, Jim Beam, Evan Williams, Wild Turkey—how had all this rotgut accumulated? Why would Mr. K. have this crap to begin with? I drank the rest of the wine Mrs. K. had given me and looked at my phone. There were new messages in the My Favourite Bastard group chat. Melanie: Hey Bastard bros! So psyched for the tour kickoff! Looks like we can leave a couple hours late tomorrow since we’re not scheduled to play in Cincinnati until like midnight. Also I’ve been listening to this Cyndi Lauper song and we NEED to cover it! Chip: I love Cyndi! And great news about Cinci! Richard: [surf’s up emoji] I put my phone away. I didn’t want to leave late and play a show at midnight. I felt exhausted just thinking about that. And I didn’t want to learn a fucking Cyndi Lauper song. I was growing tired of Melanie’s whims and relentless chipper attitude. Kurt came back looking defeated. “It’s gone,” he said, “he took it all. Came one day to get his golf clubs and other shit and apparently took the good booze as well.” He went behind the bar to take a frowning inventory. He got the Wild Turkey bottle and showed it to me, displaying it like a sommelier presenting a rare Bordeaux. “I got him this. He said I was drinking too much of his scotch and needed to contribute something.” “And you contributed Wild Turkey?” “The price was right.” “It isn’t scotch.” “I don’t know much about whiskey.” “Wild Turkey’s not a great one.” Kurt then sort of slammed the bottle down. I was surprised it didn’t break. “He left it as a fuck-you to me,” he said. “There’s no other way to see it.” “He probably just doesn’t like bourbon,” I said, but Kurt’s theory was just as likely. Anyway, not leaving the Macallan 12 or even one nice bottle was the real fuck you. “Not much of a bar now. See that mirror? My dad had his friends over to watch the Rose Bowl and they got shit-faced and one of them, probably my dad, fell into it. There was blood. My mom had to clean it.” When he mentioned the Rose Bowl, I was reminded of something, and I probably shouldn’t have brought it up but I was feeling bad. “Remember like five Rose Bowls ago? We had the chance to play that college party at Pete’s, but you chickened out once you saw all the people there?” I was trying to laugh about it, but it wasn’t funny to me. He got quiet. “Yeah,” he finally said. “They were just drunk Abercrombie & Fitch types, they would have hated us.” “That’s what would have made it fun.” “Not for me.” We started drinking heavily. He opened the Wild Turkey and got down two glasses and poured us each a big shot. I quickly downed mine and poured another as he drank his. He made a disgusted face and said, “Okay, I get why Dad left this.” I agreed it was awful and said, “Let’s try a different one.” I got down the Jim Beam. We had some of that, then the Seagram’s, then Evan Williams. It was all so terrible. “Why are you still living here, man?” I asked when I was starting to really feel the booze. “When are you gonna get your own place?” “You sound like my dad.” “Why couldn’t you try harder in our band? Why were you so chickenshit?” “Wasn’t chickenshit. Just didn’t have the desire like you did.” I was drunk now. The whiskey pours were getting longer. My thoughts returned to the Ibanez, and I thought of a clever way of asking Kurt to find it. “We should jam,” I said. “Jam?” he repeated like he’d never heard such an idea. I didn’t care for his judgmental tone. “Yeah. Grab that Ibanez I left here. We’ll fuck around.” He looked troubled and weird. “I’ve never heard you say jam,” he said. Which is bullshit, I’ve always said jam. He was trying to hurt me. “So that’s what you do in your band, jam?” “Yes, we jam, Kurt. It’s how bands write songs.” “That’s cool, don’t get offended.” “Well don’t get sour.” He laughed. “Yo, listen—” “And what’s with the yo? You never used to say yo. What’s with that?” (And actually he used to say yo quite a bit but it always seemed unnatural and I never called him on that, so this was my way of finally calling him on it and getting him back for saying I never say jam.) He said, “I’m not sour about your band or anything to do with you at all.” “So you’re not at all sour about me being in a touring band and you doing SEO for your father while not knowing what SEO is?” I felt cruel saying that so I laughed to ease the blow. But the laugh sounded cruel, too. “It’s a job, so what. I’m sorry being in a band wasn’t my calling.” “Social media is your calling, then.” “I don’t have a calling.” Then he called me a dickhead under his breath. After a tense period of quiet, I asked, “Where is that Ibanez, anyway?” He took a deep breath and sighed, not looking at me. “The Ibanez isn’t here. I gave it to my mom.” “Your mom plays guitar now?” “I gave it to her for her church drive.” “Church drive. As in, a sale?” “To raise money for the church, yes.” “Why did you give my Ibanez to your mom to sell at her church?” “She asked if I had any stuff to donate and—you were never gonna come get that thing, come on. You always said it’s a piece of shit.” “But it was my piece of shit. I was keeping it here, but—” “You left it here.” “Maybe I liked knowing it was here.” He didn’t get that and neither did I because hadn’t I hated knowing it was here in his basement? I kept talking: “Maybe that kept us connected in my mind. As long as your drums and my guitar were here, it meant…” We heard glass break above us—Mrs. K.’s wine glass. We looked at each other then ran upstairs, which was unnecessary, as Mrs. K. probably knew how to handle broken glass, but I think we wanted to escape the awkward moment we’d found ourselves in. She already had the dustpan out and was saying, “Relax, relax, I’m just a klutz, it’s fine.” But it was clear from her concentrated, ineffective sweeping style that she was in bad shape, maybe as drunk as us. “You okay, Mrs. K?” I asked. “Fine,” she said, standing with the dustpan despite several glass shards still shining on the tile. “Careful,” I said. “She’s fine,” Kurt said. “Let’s go.” But I didn’t want to go back downstairs. I thought I’d call a cab or go sober up in my car, even take a long walk by myself. Mrs. K. dumped the dustpan out into the wastebasket while I stood guard over the remaining bits on the floor. In the joining living room, I could see the TV was showing a trailer for a new Sonic the Hedgehog movie. It looked cozy in there. I said, “What’s on?” “Becker,” she answered automatically, pouring more wine. “You like Becker?” She took a big swig of Cabernet. “I love Becker.” Kurt went downstairs and I suggested he come back with some shitty whiskey and then we could all watch Becker, but he didn’t acknowledge me at all. I swept the remaining glass and then joined Mrs. K. on the couch as the Becker theme song started. “Damn, this guitar part really rips,” I said. Mrs. K. laughed. I tried to focus on the show but I worried Kurt wouldn’t come back. Then I was scared he would come back because, unless I was imagining it, Mrs. K. was very close to me on the couch. I turned to her and she was looking at me. “It’s so nice to have you back here, Sammy,” she said. “Oh, yes,” I said. “Good. Happy to be here.” “So, are you seeing anyone now?” “Uh, no, not at the moment.” It seemed our faces were nearly touching. I’d never had fantasies about Mrs. K. and never in my right mind would try to kiss a friend’s, or even an ex-friend’s, mom, but when drunk I assume anyone this close to me wants me to kiss them, and I’ll kiss anyone. Thank God I had enough presence of mind to snap out of it and look away. “I should check on Kurt, probably,” I said. She nodded, maybe in disappointment, I couldn’t say. I went downstairs. He was not at the bar, or in the backroom they used for storage. I called his name, checked the bathroom. I went to the sliding glass door and found it unlocked. I opened it and stepped out into the cold. The Korvers have a lot of property, with woods behind their backyard, and I wondered if Kurt was out there. “Kurt,” I yelled. Nothing answered. I went around to the front. His car was gone. I called his phone, which went to voicemail. I texted him, Where are you? Don’t be stupid. Trust me, you don’t want a DUI. Seriously. Don’t fuck around like this. I went back in through the front door and went into the living room and sat beside Mrs. K, putting distance between us this time, but not much, if I’m honest. “Everything okay?” she asked. “Kurt’s gone.” “Oh,” she said. “He’s been doing that a lot. Leaving without a word. I’m sorry. He’ll come back.” After a few minutes, I put my hand on my leg, but because we were so close it was basically on her leg. My pinky was definitely touching her leg. I felt her looking at me and I was sure that as soon as I turned my head toward her we’d be kissing. Then I turned my head toward her—I was right about her looking at me and, while we did not immediately start kissing, we definitely would if we continued staring at each other like this. I was drunk enough so I leaned in for it. But then she turned away and cleared her throat. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Sorry, I…I’m going through—you know, and…” “Don’t be sorry,” I said. “It’s okay.” She laughed at herself, or maybe at both of us. “Mrs. K.,” I said. “You might as well call me Cheryl.” “Cheryl…” “What?” “That guitar Kurt gave you, the blue Ibanez? You sold it at your church drive? mine. I really want it back. Do you have the details of who bought it? I’ll buy it back if the guy wants. Is there a record of who bought it?” “What’re you talking about, Sammy?” “The guitar. You sold it at your church.” “I didn’t sell a guitar,” she said. “No.” “Yeah, you did. The blue Ibanez? Kurt said—” “He has a guitar in his room,” she said. “I know that. He’s been learning to play it.” I looked at the ceiling as if I’d be able to see into Kurt’s room. “Is it blue?” She shrugged. I excused myself and went across the room to the stairs. I hadn’t seen Kurt’s bedroom in years; it felt like a violation of his privacy to go in there without him. But him keeping my Ibanez and lying about selling it at a church drive was a way bigger violation, I think. But then also, I’d tried to kiss his mom, so we were probably square. The room was oppressively messy. I had to wait for my vision to adjust as there was so much crap on the floor vying for my attention. But quickly enough my eyes found the Ibanez. It was on the rug by his bed tangled up in some shirts. I picked it up, feeling victorious for a moment, then suddenly despondent. I put the strap over my shoulder and checked the tuning. It really was a piece of shit, this guitar. But it’s what I’d come here for and I wasn’t leaving without it—which seemed so pathetic, that I couldn’t just leave it. But I couldn’t. I started walking back downstairs with the guitar still strapped over my shoulder. Mrs. K. saw me like that and immediately laughed, which was appropriate as I looked like I was about to burst into an emotional staircase guitar solo. She stood and came toward me. We met at the bottom of the stairs. She put her hands on my chest, her right hand moving under the guitar strap. I hadn’t realized before how much taller than her I was. “Found it,” I said. She launched her head at mine, kissed me. An ungentle, hard kiss, her tongue lashing inside my mouth. It was weirdly unsettling and arousing at the same time. I felt disgusted with myself and with her a bit as well—what a betrayal of Kurt—and yet I really wanted to see where this would go. I started putting my hands anywhere I wanted—her body, her face, her hair. This was insane. The front door opened. “I’m back,” I heard Kurt say. “Now we can party.” Mrs. K. darted back to the sofa and was almost sitting down when he got to the room. Kurt was holding up a bottle of Macallan 12, which he let drop to his side when he saw us. He looked back and forth between us, his mom breathing heavily and her hair a mess, me probably with lipstick on my face and holding the guitar he’d lied about giving away and all I could think was I wonder if this means he’s not going to share that whiskey. Brad Austin is a writer and comedian from Michigan currently living in Melbourne, Australia. His work has appeared in the New York Times and Vulture.

Hannah’s dad holds the local paper close to his cataract-clouded eyes and cries when he reads about Ken Todd. Dabbing his face with a grubby handkerchief, he eulogizes his old friend. Good mate. Genuine bloke. Hannah remembers Ken Todd’s hand gripping her thigh, inches above her grazed, plastered knee, on the back seat of her dad’s car. She remembers his sorry not sorry look, blaming her dad for taking a corner too fast. Life and soul of any party. Always up for a laugh. Hannah remembers Ken Todd’s fingers, pincering the flesh between her jeans and her crop top. She remembers how she cried when he asked who’d eaten the pies, and her dad, embarrassed, saying she needed to learn to take a joke. Student at the university of life. Hannah remembers Ken Todd’s thumbs kneading her shoulders. She remembers how he told her to relax as he leaned over, pretending to help with her homework, his cigarette breath on her neck and his hands wandering down to where her bra fastened, lingering there too long, his laughter at her panic. Pillar of the community. Salt of the earth. Hannah remembers Ken Todd’s hands, clasped beneath his chin in a parody of prayer at her mum’s funeral. She remembers them later, at the wake, circling her waist as he whispered whisky-sodden words of consolation into her ear, all the time looking down her blouse. Heart of gold. Would give you his last pound. Hannah must have blocked out, until now, Ken Todd’s hand in her knickers, the time he took her to see his backyard aviary and the five-pound note he produced afterwards, from his wallet in exchange for her silence. Always something about him though, says Hannah’s dad, meeting her eye at last, that you couldn’t quite put your finger on. Alison Wassell is a short story, flash and micro fiction writer from North West England. She has no plans to write a novel.

I. Amsterdam has many open-air public urinals, but I can recall only one. It consisted of a semicircle of vertical 2x4s enclosing a slanted piece of piss-rotten plywood over a sidewalk drain. It stood right on the pedestrian thoroughfare just a few feet from a shop window on one side and a straight drop into a canal on the other, and I’m assuming the drain sends all of this untreated urine—mine and everyone’s before and since—gushing right into the canal, where open tour boats cruise all summer and skaters glide during winter cold snaps. I saw plenty of men on passing boats pissing right over the side. Consider the amount–the sheer, concentrated volume of human urine discharged into a municipal waterway. That shoddy little outdoor urinal always had a long line. A very priapic place, De Wallen. Amsterdam’s largest red light district. A lot of penises come out for various reasons, not all of which are immediately clear. II. The naked man was half a block away when I first saw him. He must have been in his early twenties, as I was, at the time. It was a little like looking in the mirror while dressing in the morning and seeing a reflection that was a few seconds behind putting on the bottom garments. Was there any doubt he was American? No, none. The nakedness was not the tipoff. The non-vocal cues made him: the rigid hips and shoulders, the Midwesterner’s plod, and most strikingly, the way he carried his pants, the grip for a four-seam fastball, so ubiquitous and so often-practiced as to be ingrained and reflexive. A national tell. His hair was dark, cut close to his head, shorter on the sides than on top, George Clooney-style, and severely rumpled. Sweat would have made it look that way—sweat and rolling around, spending a few moments with the damp hair mashed down on one side, then another side, then mashed and slid laterally, and finally dried in the breeze off the canal. Heavy black eyebrows laid at the bottom of his forehead like great dogs with broken legs. His eyes, distant nebulas, saw ... what? What dreams from childhood arrived at long last on the back of some faint and flickering neural pulse, after endless light-years of synaptic ricochet? Theirs was the ambivalent dual-vision of absolute focus and clarity against a field of fog and daydream: the somnambulist’s eyes, fixed on the torch behind the movie screen. Those eyes floated in a delicate gravity, pulled inward by something heavy and dull, pulled outward by a pinprick, white-hot but remote. III. There’s something about the De Wallen penis fountain I envy. Not necessarily the size; one could probably carry it onto a bus, although not under one’s clothes. Not necessarily the water-powered spinning testicles at the base of the fountain, either—scrotumaqua rotātus. The fountain is impressive if for nothing other than the determination of its creators to summon it into existence, to invest in its planning and execution, to acquire and complete the necessary permits, to hire a sculptor to fashion it and a team of workers and technicians to transport and install it—from the formulation phase of chewed pencils and wastebaskets full of wadded paper to the moment a faucet was screwed out and the thing first spasmed and sputtered to life, a collective human hand stroked it along, despite aesthetics, civic propriety, or, of course, a sense of empathy for that chance pedestrian who may, at some point, have had a negative experience involving the subject of this particular graven image, the signifier behind this sign. What must they have said to their project’s detractors? Surely local opponents of the penis fountain voiced their displeasure. Surely they asked, “Does our city, already somewhat notorious for depravity and vice, need this kind of thing?” “Yes,” the fountain people must have answered. “It will punctuate a pre-existing statement—an exclamation point for the sentence, ‘Only in Amsterdam!’” But then wouldn’t someone surely have said, “What about the victims of sexual abuse who will have to walk past it, or worse, to dine or work in the restaurant on the corner beside it? Must we remind them of personal agony with such a landmark when a reasonable substitute—a bird or a fish—might be obtained instead?” The answer: “We must and we shall. How many die needlessly each year from equestrian mishaps? Yet, the horse statues remain.” Finally, an exasperated, “But it will be an eyesore!” answered by, “It is the function of good art to stoke passions, challenge preconceptions, and penetrate boundaries. The penis fountain will do these. Afscheid.” Indeed. I found my preconceptions challenged. I had not expected to encounter so literal an expression of symbolism I had long assumed was starkly obvious anyway. As for the fountain penetrating boundaries, another mark in the success column. I could not imagine such a permanent transgressive object existing in public view anywhere else. More shocking still is how it becomes even more surreal and horrifying at twilight. The waning summer sun is groggy and weird at the 52nd parallel around 10 p.m., when it lies full down and pulls to its chin a purple blanket atop a thin, pale sheet. The penis fountain supports this tent of sky, and the first twinkles of starlight are caught in the prism of its relentless ejaculation as a delayed sunset splashes the slick, wet metal shaft with swollen violets and shimmering whites. IV. A tremor went through the crowd, so slight as to almost go undetected, and from farther away it would have, but not on the street, with so many people close together. One picks up on the sharp little jolts that jump the gaps between bodies in a group like reflex signals racing over the chasms between cells in one huge, writhing beast. A little tug somewhere up ahead, a slither to the side, then all at once the great snake of the crowd disgorged a male nude who did not appear to have noticed. In truth he was only half-naked, but the naked half was serious. He’d kept his t-shirt on, a dark gray cotton one, and it was sagging but not soiled, the battered shirt of a man on a tear, not that of the long street-dweller, the hard-begrimed and waxen garment of the institutionally homeless. As he walked, the man’s torso trailed a step or so behind his legs, which bowed his posture like the bowl in the capital letter D, his arms extending down like the stem. His dick swept slowly before him like a divining rod, and the shirt draped limply off the bow of his chest and belly, stopping just above his groin, and settling itself against the grooves of his ribcage. The ribs beneath the shirt looked rounded like stones in a creek, as opposed to the severe, corrugated metal rib angles of the starving. In his left hand, behold—the pants, secured with the fastball grip. He—or someone else—had wadded them up tight, almost packed them, like a parachute. Something the naked man was merely waiting for the right moment to deploy. No belt was visible—was it wound around the pants? No shoes, either. Were they in the pants bundle, too? Impossible. The bundle was too small. It could only have been the pants, nothing else. But inside the pants ... was his wallet there, snug inside the back pocket? His passport—was it still in his control? Was it secure? V. It was summer, 2001, when this happened. I forgot about the naked man after he passed through the crowd and continued down the road, obliviously parting small crowds in his path, his nakedness encircling him in an orb of personal space like the bubble of light that surrounds a lantern bearer. I boarded a flight and returned home, and I did not think of the naked man for the rest of that slow, sleepy summer. Only weeks later, in mid-autumn, did my confused, milling crowd of thoughts part and reveal the naked walking man. Suddenly I remembered him, his every detail, and the whole scene, too, full and plain. I remembered, and I will always remember, standing near that penis-shaped fountain, watching the naked American lumber past. There were bar-hoppers, coffee shop stoners and sex-gawkers jamming the sidewalks, tourists of all sorts bunched together like the gabled canal houses whose reflections rippled darkly in the water. Scattered sniggering followed the naked man as he strolled along carrying his trousers, but there was no cry of alarm. He was less an individual than a kind of host, either a medium possessed by the powerful spirit which hovered over the place or the latest avatar of the communal id. A temporary mantle, though. Soon drugged up and naked would be someone else’s gig, and everyone seemed to understand this—that trouble was close, maybe imminent, for the pantsless walker, who did not adjust his shambling, steady gate, did not seem to feel the hot breath of danger on his bare ass cheeks. We who watched him go saw the collision course he was on with some indeterminate disaster. We all sensed his doom. Many of us were his compatriots. No one helped. We could only guess the form they would take but bad times were almost certainly coming. The man moved forward unswervingly, at the even pace of a rail-mounted machine. Nothing in his expression indicated he knew something was amiss. Nothing in his posture betrayed the vulnerability we all recognized in this bulletproof automaton on a piss-splattered track, this friendless, drugged, sexed, single-minded, irreducible American. How he aroused my pity, and my envy. No one could touch him. He had nothing to take away. He had no fear. So vulnerable, his bare feet trudging the old cement, the still-smoldering butts and roaches scorching his soles. So invincible, advancing for lack of a path of retreat, forging ahead through the night because he could not return whence he had come. I will never know what became of the naked American. In my mind, he is walking still, forever oblivious, doomed, relentless, spectacular, sad, eternal.

This is back in Throggs Neck, the summer I turn ten. It’s too hot for whiffleball, handball, stickball, or stoopball. I’m sweating into my bowl of Cap’n Crunch when I get the idea. “Ma! Ma! Am I allowed to walk to the pool?” Ma says I’m allowed. “Can I have a quarter for Pixie Sticks?” Ma says don’t be a jackass. I’m out the door, down the stoop, on my way to the McKenna Community Pool, named for the late Bonehead McKenna, who somehow managed to crack his skull open on the high diving board and sink to the bottom of the deep end before anybody noticed. And why people go around naming pools after people like Bonehead McKenna I have no idea. I’m in the men’s locker room, slipping out of my shorts and underpants and into my bathing suit, when I spy, in the drain in the middle of the floor, money. I’m down on all fours. Yup. It’s dollar-bill green, just a few inches down that filthy drain. Now I’ve got a shoelace with a wad of already-been-chewed Dubble Bubble on the end. Down the drain and up, down the drain and up, down the drain and up, up, up, and I’ve got the dollar. Only it’s not a dollar. It’s a ten-dollar bill. From behind me, a voice goes, “Whoa, Bobby!” It’s my buddy Hickey. “Ten dollars! You’re Bruce Wayne!” “Hickey, what are you talking about Bruce Wayne? I’m Tony Stark.” “What are we gonna do with it?” We. Hickey’s the kind of person, when his name comes up around the house, Ma says “I suppose he’s got a good heart.” “Hickey, I don’t know about you but I’m getting in the pool.” “Bobby, we are rich and alls you can think about is getting in the pool?” “Hickey, it’s my ten dollars.” Hickey goes, “What are you, some kind of pussy?” Now we’re hotfooting it to the snack bar. “No running, dinkywinkies!” It’s Gigantor, the lifeguard, flexing his hairy arms. Asshole. Now we’re at the back of the line, squinting at the distant menu. I say, “Zotz!” Hickey says, “Razzles!” I say, “No, wait a sec. Pixie Sticks!” Hickey says, “No, wait a sec, wait a sec. Chili Velveeta dog!” I say, “No, wait a sec, wait a sec. Double chili Velveeta dog!” Hickey says, “No, wait a sec, wait a sec, wait a sec. Ding-a-ding-a-ding-a-ding-ding- ding! The Moby-Dick! The Moby-Dick!” Nine dollars and ninety-five cents later, we’re sitting at a picnic table, each of us has the Moby-Dick — a triple chili Velveeta dog smothered in grilled onions, a basket of french fries, and a king-size chocolate egg cream. “Hickey, I don’t think we’re supposed to get in the pool for an hour after we eat.” “Says who?” “Says everybody.” “Who?” “Pop, I think.” “I’ve never seen your pop swim.” “Maybe it was Ma.” “I’m not a-scared of my mommy, Bobby.” “You were a-scared of your mommy that time she beat the crap out of you for mooning the Ancient Order of Hibernians.” “I was not mooning the Ancient Order of Hibernians. I had a scorpion in my bathing suit.” There’s no scorpions in Throggs Neck. There’s no scorpions, I don’t think, in the mid- Atlantic region. Hickey opens wide and takes a huge bite of triple chili Velveeta dog smothered in grilled onions. The Moby-Dick. From hell’s heart I stab at thee. I open my mouth and take an even bigger bite. Now we’re both taking gargantuan bites. Chewing, chewing, faster, faster. Hickey’s got a bigger mouth than me. I double my speed. Hot dogs, chili, Velveeta, greasy fries, sucking down those chocolate egg creams. Then our empty paper plates lie stinking in the sun. It’s got to be a hundred degrees. From the pool, splashing, laughing. I feel… Well. I feel like I just wolfed a triple chili Velveeta dog smothered in grilled onions, a basket of fries, and a king-size chocolate egg cream. It’s time for a nap. But first we tear the tops off our Pixie Stix and pour radioactive neon-colored sugar powder down our throats. Hickey says, “Bobby…?” He says it kind of sing-song. I say, “What?” I say it like I don’t really want to hear what comes next. “Cannonballs!” “No way.” “Cannonballs! From the high diving boards!” “Hickey, we’re not allowed on the high diving boards. You gotta be twelve.” Hickey goes, “We’re not allowed you gotta be twelve, we’re not allowed you gotta be twelve, we’re not allowed you gotta be twelve.” I go, “Maybe later.” Hickey goes, “Later is never, Bobby.” I go, “Never, then.” Hickey goes, “What are you some kind of pussy, what are you some kind of pussy, what are you some kind of pussy?” Now we are racing toward the high diving boards. “No running, dinkywinkies!” Gigantor hollers from a lifeguard chair. Hickey hollers back, “We got scorpions in our bathing suits!” Then Hickey somehow manages — while running — to slip out of his bathing suit, and now he’s running one hundred percent nude. And so am I. Moms and kids and babysitters fleeing from our path. Gigantor blowing his whistle. We reach the ladders. We ascend the ladders. The high diving boards are high diving boards. I look down. We’ve got an audience. Moms and kids and babysitters and lifeguards looking up at us and all they want to know is what’s going to happen next. We strut to the end of the diving boards. We bounce. We bounce. I’m feeling extremely nude at this moment. Reconsidering my choices. We bounce. We bounce. Giving that triple chili Velveeta dog smothered in grilled onions, greasy fries, and king-size chocolate egg cream a good churn. We strut back to the platforms. I look over at Hickey. Our eyes meet and I know we are going to do this. I know we are going to sprint to the end of the diving boards and fling ourselves— But Hickey’s face turns white. Hickey’s face turns green. Hickey’s knees buckle. Hickey smashes his head on the high diving board and plummets into the deep end. It’s Bonehead McKenna all over again. I dive headfirst like Tarzan on channel 9 into the deep end. I hit the water. Hickey’s lying at the bottom. He’s not moving. What’d Ma say? Don’t be a jackass. I swim to him. Down, down. Eight feet of water crushing my skull. Hickey’s not moving. Then all of a sudden not only is he moving, he’s climbing on my back like a friggin’ monkey. I’m pinned to the bottom of the deep end. Water rushing up my nose. Jesus Christ, they’re gonna name the pool after me. Then huge arms wrap around us and we are rising, rising. I recognize those hairy arms. Gigantor. Asshole. Saving our lives. We burst to the surface, gasping. Gigantor dumps us at the edge of the pool. We should thank him. But we have just discovered there is nothing funnier than cheating death. And we will leave Bobby and Hickey here. Two ten-year-old boys sitting on the edge of the pool. Naked, laughing, immortal. Before each boy opens his mouth, and in an act of synchronization that rivals anything you will ever see at the Olympics, nine dollars and ninety-five cents worth of chili Velveeta dog, grilled onions, greasy french fries, and chocolate egg cream, not to mention radioactive neon-colored sugar powder, explodes like fireworks over the deep end of the McKenna Community Pool. A Note from the Author: My writing has a bratty, trashcan-Kierkegaard vibe that I hope will make you smile. I’m a two-time Emmy nominee (for Outstanding Achievement in Music Direction and Composition for a Drama Series) and a Folio-award-winning magazine editor. I regularly perform experimental solo theater pieces at NYC-area venues including Dixon Place, Irvington Theater, Emerging Artists Theatre, and Bad Theater Fest. I hold a Master of Music degree in composition from the San Francisco Conservatory, a BA in English from Colgate University (where my mentor was novelist Frederick Busch), and I made my show-business debut at the age of five on WOR-TV’s Romper Room. I’m represented (as a novelist) by Jill Marr, at Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency.

“All I have to do is put on a bear costume and march for two hours?” Jen asked. “Yes.” The casting agent on the other end of the phone could barely contain her excitement. Finding an actor to don a bear suit had not been that easy. “You march in the parade. You’ll have a rope around the neck of the costume – loose, of course – to symbolize your captivity in the circus”. “And I’ll get paid $1000?” Jen’s voice sounded doubtful. This was not the gig she had in mind when she quit her full-time job in Human Resources to put more energy into finding acting work. “You need to show the Universe you’re serious about this,” her friend Samantha had urged. Samantha was also an actress; her beautiful blend of Hispanic and Asian features were a natural for film and television, even stage. She had quit her job ten months ago and been working steadily ever since. Jen wasn’t sure she’d be as lucky. Her looks weren’t all that castable or interesting, she wasn’t getting that many calls from agencies. The bear job was the first to come her way in a long time, and she hadn’t even had to audition. Jen wondered what it was about her headshot that suggested covering her face up with a big fake head to this particular casting agent. “I’ll do it.” The bear gig turned out to be pretty strenuous, although at least the rope was attached to the body of the costume by a hook, and not tied around the neck as suggested. The problem was the weather; it was a warm day, and being inside a furry bear suit and head was excruciatingly hot. The client, an animal rights agency known as Animals Are People Too (AAPT), had been very positive when Jen arrived, telling her she truly “embodied the desultory spirit of the overworked bear”. Jen was the only actor – the dog, wolf cub and several bunnies in the parade were all real. At the end of the march, Jen took off the bear head to grab a drink of water. “That’s not a real bear!” someone – a reporter? – shouted, as a flash went off in Jen’s startled face. She started to laugh, pleased – her attitude and body movements must have been really convincing – until she heard, “This is animal appropriation! Why wasn’t a real bear used for this?” Jen looked to the agency spokesperson, who’d been fairly eloquent during the press conference at the beginning of the march. She was shielding her face and scurrying away. “How do you think the bears feel about their opportunity being taken by a human?” another reporter almost spat at her. “Answer me that!” “I’m an actor. I’m playing a bear,” stammered Jen. “Tell that to the bears!” someone yelled. “Don’t you think the bears deserve to earn a living, too?” “Uh – I guess they’re pretty dangerous, right?” Jen said. “Whoa! Are you bear shaming?’ “N-no, I “- “The bears belong to this land more than we do! They were here first!” shouted a frizzy haired woman with a twisted mouth. “But I’m – I’m sympathetic to the bear. I’m depicting the bear as –“ “The bears don’t need your HUMAN depiction! They need to be representing themselves and earning money for it!” a man’s voice bellowed. Jen could see AAPT’s publicity person gesturing from a large white van. Jen made a run for it just as what felt like a woman’s shoe hit the back of the bear costume. “What the heck?” Jen almost shouted to the publicity woman. “Please don’t shout,” said the woman, looking hurt. “I’m sorry. I – did you see what happened out there?” Jen was shouting again. “I had no idea people felt so strongly about the plight of the bears,” said the publicity woman, her voice trembling a little. “I mean it’s beautiful the way they felt that the bear deserved to make a living, too. I didn’t expect that.” She started to tear up. “Do you have a tissue?” Jen held out her furry bear arm. The publicity woman looked appalled. “Bears aren’t Kleenex for humans”, she said, before fishing around in her purse. Jen called the casting agent the next day to see if she had more work for her. “I think you might want to take a little break from acting,” said the casting agent. Jen was stunned. Nobody could argue that her characterization of a bear wasn’t authentic; she’d managed to fool an entire crowd into thinking she was real. “I – I was good, right? They believed –“ “We take animal appropriation very seriously here,” interrupted the casting agent. “We have zero tolerance for this kind of exploitation, you understand?” “But you’re the one who got me the gig!” Jen couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “You were hired to play a bear, not be a bear. You know, be playful. Like a dancing bear. They weren’t supposed to think you were real.” “They wanted me to be put upon! I was being taken advantage of by the circus! Not a lighthearted role.” Jen could feel herself starting to get riled up. Be calm, she told herself. You need more work. “Nobody expected Method bear,” snapped the casting agent. “That’s just the kind of attitude that’s going to brand you as being difficult to work with.” Jen could tell by the tone in the casting agent’s voice that she was already there. “I’m very easy,” said Jen, remembering to unclench her teeth before she spoke. “I’m sure,” said the casting agent in a tone of voice that said the opposite. “Listen, I’ll call you if anything comes up, okay?” “Sure,” said Jen dejectedly. The bear stunt was all over social media; Jen in the bear costume next to a photo of a real bear curled in the fetal position, presumably sad because he or she or they didn’t get the gig. Jen started to type underneath it, “Maybe THEY should have stayed with the circus” but thought better of it. Jen had also left two text messages and one voicemail for Samantha, who hadn’t texted or called back. It didn’t take long for Jen to realize that that casting agent, or any other casting agent, was never going to get her work. She’d been blacklisted. She called her old company, hoping to worm her way back in, only to be told, “We don’t think that anyone involved with animal appropriation should be working in human resources”. Jen thought she heard a snicker in her former colleague’s voice. In desperation, she called AAPT. “I see you have an open position for “ – Jen swallowed hard – “a telemarketer”. “Sure.” The woman on the other end of the phone sounded ecstatic, as these were not easy positions to fill. “What’s your name?” Jen told her. The woman’s voice hardened. “Are you the animal appropriator?” It took Jen every ounce of acting ability, as well as improv skills, to answer the question. “I am. And I feel a really strong, and I mean strong, need to atone. This is the one way that I can truly give back. To the bears. And the bees. And the wombats. And the bunnies. And the wolverines –“ “Okay,” sighed the woman. She really didn’t want to do this, but times were desperate, as most young people couldn’t bring themselves to pick up a phone. “Come in on Monday. Starting salary is $11.50 an hour, with bonuses every four months if you make your quota”. “Health insurance?” asked Jen hopefully. “This isn’t a charity for humans,” snapped the woman. “You’re here to help the animals. That should be enough, don’t you think?” “Sure,” said Jen, in a desultory tone. Telemarketing didn’t sound all that fun, but she needed the money. Maybe she’d join the circus.

I’m sure my moans could carry across 4000 miles. More maybe. They go as the crow flies when I think you’re in another woman’s bed. I have my fingers crossed against it— the thought of your closed curves, your celestial bodies ascending in euphony… nauseating— warm hands, heads, tongues; caresses are just speculative structures and, god, I’m linking them all, killing Spacetime. Your disparate points should be mine. In another version, somewhere, a ghost cat stuck up an impossibly branched tree; its non-stop crying across dimensions for the you who wants to be with me can be heard right through Earths 1-42. Syreeta Muir (she/her) has writing in Sledgehammer Lit, A Thin Slice of Anxiety, Misery Tourism, The Daily Drunk Mag, Ligeia Magazine, The Blood Pudding and others. Her art has been featured in Barren Magazine, Olney Magazine, The Viridian Door, Rejection Letters and Bullshit Lit. She received Pushcart and Best of the Net nominations for her work in The Disappointed Housewife and Versification (2021/22)

The Summer I Got Diagnosed With Hypertension you will forfeit salt put 2300mg into an envelope the one with your rent check bike 4.33 miles to the property manager’s compound blitheproof glass it looks like sodium azide’s chemical formula the road will still be armored with january’s roadsalt it will not be a gratifying ride your intercostals and asshole will ache they will grudgingly sweat people who think wearing a helmet is gay will walk on the left side of the road not to spite you they get aura-cleansing asmr from being wrong that’s their prescription you must remember to hydrate every sip of diet coke equates to your credit score dropping by a half point you can purchase a rubber proboscis at the front desk our receptionist can spear it right under your ungainly cloddered skull’s occiput it will drip cucumber water directly onto your brainstem there is a 27% chance you will perceive hallucinations of marathon runners shaking their heads at you instructing their buff heatstroked goldendoodles to avoid acting like you can you please remove the blood pressure cuff you can just condemn it into the biological waste bin i find your left bicep to be categorically abhorrent Lake Verna, Colorado or The Sublime Misery of Hiking i hardwalk uplong now 8 milers out all back gorgeous grotesque noon sprains this pine treachery of yours inconvenient like boulders slippage into rollage fucked jointhucking down my toenails mauve my patellas brave but outyondermatched 78 degree bottled water i love lake full of antlers and kindless scat yes unsentenceable beauty but i am a sapient scab Jenkin Benson is a 2nd year PhD student at the University of Notre Dame. He principally studies the creative interchange between Welsh and Irish modernists. You can find his poetry in New Note Poetry, The /temz/ Review, KEITH LLC, Deep Wild Journal, UC Irvine’s faultline, and Squawk Back.

Frost Bitten (after ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ by Robert Frost) I was a teenage atheist Lost to Frost and a world full of words The unease of snow falling as poetry Sieved through me And drained me of faith in things I couldn’t see I screamed with the violent wind Disbelief in a God Who only offered questions When I wanted statements Maybe on the brink of silence I longed to stop like a war widow Who looking through her window At the teakettle wren Forgot for the longest minute The potatoes to peel Or the need to white wash the front step Knowing it would never be blackened again But instead I set up a rhyme to move me on Like the horse in those friendless woods That Frost so loved Yet now in my middle ages I see the import of all the silent words An atheist still Yet in that strange syntax of your leaving I looked at the stars and felt the despair of heaven We only care about the smallest things The way your front teeth cross just slightly Or the comfy hollow of a promise I could never keep Some poems work every time But not this one So on this darkest night I’m drawn to the lovely woods In the hope that I may sleep In the hope that I may sleep Burnt Bridges Am I able to live in my age? To let my heavy lidded life / be weighted down with glitter / rather than gruel / not worrying / if my thighs are not as smooth as river rocks /or my breasts move to the beat of their own drum / and why can’t I just affirm myself / as a writer / in a poetry workshop / without sniggering like a teen / asked to put a condom on a banana? Am I able to stop self censoring? To let my words out / not caring if they are deemed delightsome / there are surely enough out there / wanting to shut me up / writing rejections / with / not a fit for us at this moment / and why can’t I let go of the dangling hope / I might be more acceptable / on a different date / at a different time? Am I able to be on my own? To let go of the people / and ghosts / crowding my shoulder / yet I know / like any weaver / that tension is needed for creation / so maybe I’ll can my words / let them condense like milk / so they are sweet / and glossy / and / why can’t I hold on to one of my ghosts / my Welsh fire talking mother / and burn everything else down? trimming the blue spiraled slowly passed // she could neither float or swim // and she fought the blessed grace of drowning in its umbral hug // instead she idled // starched and distorted // friends tried to trap her in the silvery weeds // they swayed together in an abstract ballet // of disintegrating parts // whilst the unseeing lot whooped // sit down // to save her self she’d always lived her life in pieces // tucking away the sprawl // winding it around her neck // slathering it with crepe erase // and stuffing it into nude shape wear // but in the end // she flaked off all her paint // leaving as quietly as a sigh // and it was cold enough to see the bird song // and my howl // left on air // Adele Evershed was born in Wales. Her prose and poetry have been published in over a hundred journals and anthologies. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net for poetry. Finishing Line Press will publish Adele’s first poetry chapbook, Turbulence in Small Places, in July. Her Novella-in-Flash, Wannabe, will be published by Alien Buddha Press in May.

Hey-hey-hey! I like it when the sun rises early and the day is bright and warm, long into the afternoon. The earth is happy in the sunshine. The breeze, my old friend, tickles and teases. Whoop whoop! My separateness calls to your separateness, and together we chase after the One... GLORIA I’m in the middle of a webinar in my new little studio office just beyond the kitchen – ‘Key Principles of Management Accounting’ – when I am distracted by some polite but persistent tapping on the big sliding window. It’s Theo, my old college pal and now, dear Lord, my landscaper. I close my eyes for a second as the flat tones of the lecturer run on about controllable and uncontrollable costs, and pray to an unknown deity that when I open them again, Theo will not be there. Never hire your friends to work for you. They may not mean to, but they take the piss. OK, so they offer you ‘mates’ rates’, but, as I’ve discovered the hard way, you have to make up the shortfall in Jaffa cakes, lunches, and silent fury. Theo’s good at his work when he does it, to be fair, and for the first time my little back garden is actually starting to look like a garden, rather than a Council amenity in a jungle. Visitors no longer have to make polite noises about its ‘wonderful potential’ as they stare through the studio windows at a cramped vista of old furniture, ragged shrubbery, and bald patches of lawn. But. Theo comes and goes when he pleases, he’s obsessed with his phone, and he wastes whole mornings going off to fetch tools and materials he was supposed to have brought with him. He is blissfully unconcerned about all the agreed timelines we’ve missed – he’s missed – and he has no concept of boundaries. No matter how often I hint to him about the course I’m doing – how it’s quite intense and full-on, and I really need to focus – he seems to think that I’m basically just sat in at home to make him a cuppa every five minutes and join him for a smoke and a natter whenever he decides to down tools. Even the nattering is hard work. When he’s not sharing his latest horde of internet factoids for another exhausting Did you know…? session, Theo will be in need of some energetic moral support ahead of his next date or – all too often – a shoulder to cry on after the disaster of the previous one. I blame the app he’s using – it keeps throwing up men 20 years younger than him. And his vanity, of course: Theo’s pretty well preserved for his age, but, well, I’ve got a grown-up daughter – Gabby – who’s older than he looks in his profile pic. ‘Sorry to interrupt, Glor,’ says Theo, spade in hand. ‘But can you take a look at this?’ Oh God, I think. Another gentle but devastating knockback. ‘You’re a lovely guy but I just don’t think we really have enough in common to take this forward.’ More tea and sympathy required. ‘Oh OK,’ I say, not even bothering to hide my reluctance. ‘Shall we have a cuppa in a quarter of an hour, say?’ Theo is gently stabbing at the patio concrete with his blade. ‘Not tea,’ he says. ‘It’s something you need to come and see. In the garden.’ Oh God. I bet he’s put a spade through a pipe. ‘What is it?’ ‘It’s a... He’s... Well, I think it’s him.’ Theo stops. ‘Oh God. Come and have a look for yourself.’ Something in his voice alarms me. I remember thinking: He? Who is he? I was watching one of those Scandi-noir shows the night before, and my first thought is that Theo has discovered a dead body, and it turns out to be a 30-year-old unsolved murder, and there’s only one woman in all of Brighton who can solve the crime. DCI Gloria Heaven. She’s a maverick but she gets the job done, and… Oh God, my garden’s going to be a major crime scene from now until Christmas! Theo won’t be able to do any work at all, and I bet he’s already smirking to himself at the thought of it. Theo leads me the few short steps from my studio to the bottom of the garden, where he is supposed to be digging out the remains of the old rockery and preparing the ground for my little garden room. I’m spending the money from my divorce from Angel at last, doing the course I always wanted to do, extending the kitchen, tidying up the garden. I cannot resist looking back up for a moment at my little terrace house and taking in its warm brick tones and the dappled magenta shades of the Boston Ivy that almost reaches up to my bedroom window sill. (Is all that ivy sound, structurally speaking? I’ve no idea. But I like it.) For so long, this place has felt like a holding position for me, a moment of temporary rest between proper destinations, like a bus terminal. Since the divorce it’s taken me years to mentally unpack my bags – my baggage – and really start to move in and move on. Brighton, place of becomings, as Theo likes to vape. Which, of course, is a very Theo thing to say. Theo is now peering into a big hole just to the left of a pile of not-very-big ornamental boulders that he seems to have been digging out for several weeks now. I am about to say something gently sarcastic about his inability to get his rocks off, but there’s something about the way he nervously peeks over the edge of the hole, as if to check that its contents haven’t changed since he last looked, then takes a couple of steps back. It’s oddly deferential, like a pallbearer putting down his precious load and stepping away from the coffin. If he had a cap on, I can’t help feeling he would remove it at this point. Gingerly I step forward. The hole is about two feet deep. At the bottom of it, I can see the tattered remains of a plastic bin bag. Through the tatters, I see something sticking out that looks sort of furry or bushy, almost knitted. For a moment, it looks like a paw. A teddy bear, I think. The thing is a sort of blacky-brown colour. Then I lean down further, and I gasp. Now I can see a furry back and stomach, and two more paws! The final third of the body is still covered by black polythene, but the woolly poodle coat is already unmistakable. ‘Oh my God,’ I say. ‘Only if you spell God backwards,’ he says, which is another very Theo thing to say. He gets like that when he doesn’t know what else to do. Less than a week ago, I dropped a turkey carcass in the recycling bin. Stupidly I forgot to put the bin out to be collected the next day, and when I lifted the lid a few days later, the remains of the bird’s flesh were turning to a putrid, gelatinous paste and the bones were caving in on themselves. In the spring sunshine, little flies were buzzing around the body in scratchy, restless patterns that rose up angrily at my appearance, and gangs of maggots had moved in to do their thing. The stench of the seven-day-old turkey was like a physical assault on the nostrils, and so I steel myself now for the inevitable wave of nausea as I bend down and nervously stretch out my hand. But there is no stench. Instead, there’s a sort of citrus musk that I don’t recognise – and I know a lot about perfumes, trust me – but which is really quite pleasant. I move to pull back the plastic, but the last piece comes off in my hand, and the face is revealed in full. It can’t be. ‘It’s a dog,’ I say. ‘It’s your dog,’ says Theo. ‘But it can’t be! That was… seven years ago.’ ‘It is though, isn’t it?’ he persists. ‘It’s Boyzone.’ He is perfectly, uncannily intact, the expression settled into that warm almost-smile I find I know still so well. The gentle eyes closed, the lashes surprisingly long. That little scar on his nose where a cat once nipped him. It is, without a shadow of a doubt, Boyzone. Our dear old labradoodle Boyzone, whom Angel and I bought as a pup 20-odd years ago, not long after we first moved in together. Boyzone, who died in his old age a few months after we separated for the last time as if the divorce was all too much, as if he just wanted some peace from a toxic situation that even his big selfless doggie heart couldn’t heal. Our own dear Boyzone. Dead still, yet untouched by time or biology. Solid, substantial, almost warm to the touch, as if he’d been put in the ground half an hour ago. He is more like a lovingly stuffed replica than a rotting corpse, in fact; the more I look at him, the more I expect him to open his eyes, give that little hello! yelp of his, and start jumping up and down at my side, tail thrumming in an ecstasy of unconditional love. Seven years have passed, but here he is, as fresh as the day he died. And smelling rather better too – he was a flatulent old thing in his latter years. I remember burying Boyzone with Theo. Boyzone had been staying with me at the time – I had accidental custody of him because Angel’s new girlfriend (now his second ex-wife) said that she was allergic to dogs. There was nothing Angel could say or do around that period which didn’t enrage me, but I remember being especially furious about this because Angel was always mad for animals. (More than for humans, perhaps.) Not surprising for a zoologist, I suppose, but it was Angel who pressured us into getting Boyzone in the first place (though of course I soon fell for him too), and it was Angel who always liked to say that he could never trust a person who didn’t like dogs. Boyzone. Our baby boy Boyzone. Yo-yo-yo! I lick the day, happy to live and not live. I am waiting again, just as we always do, hanging on every word for an invitation to respond. Love is our master, yay! We can only love, even when those we love seem not to love each other. GABRIELLA I come into the garden to find Mum and Theo bent over a hole. They are so wrapped up in whatever it is that they don’t even notice me peering over. ‘But… how?’ Theo is saying. ‘I have absolutely no idea,’ says Mum. ‘Well, I’m going to put it on the WhatsApp group,’ I say. ‘Hey! You frightened the life out of me!’ says Mum, startled. ‘Ooh, I think a ghost just walked over my grave.’ ‘Surely his grave,’ says Theo, pointing at the hole. ‘And I think you mean a goose,’ says Theo, brandishing his Google. ‘Let’s not get into all that again,’ Mum and I say, almost as one. The man is a trivia obsessive. Personally, I’m not given to superstition or over-thinking things, so when something doesn’t make sense to me, my impulse is always just to put the question out there. The local WhatsApp group started as a little support network for vulnerable people during the pandemic, but it wasn’t long before the polite requests for emergency shopping gave way to offers of second-hand furniture, thinly-disguised ‘personal recommendations’ for chimney sweeps, and feng shui consultants, and rants about the local traffic calming scheme. I think Mum felt a bit funny when she saw my message about Boyzone out there for all the world to see, and she probably wouldn’t have agreed to me sharing a pic if she’d known I’d taken one. But then, as she’d doubtless be the first to say, Boyzone was as much mine as hers and Dad’s. Remember Boaty McBoatface? Well, when I was just four or five, Mum and Dad decided, in a fit of parental foolishness, that I could baptise our adorable little puppy. Whatever name I chose, that would be his name, they said – no ifs or buts. Which was how we ended up with Boyzone. It was a ridiculous name, and I don’t even really know why I insisted on it now, though I do remember being completely adamant at the time. (Mum still blames my keyworker at pre-school, who she says always used to wear a Ronan Keating T-shirt.) Mum and Dad went back and forth about my choice, but in the end, Dad said that it was important to show me that a promise was a promise. (Which, given that Dad’s serial infidelities had probably already begun by this time, is pretty fecking ironic.) So Boyzone it was, even if, to start with, Mum and Dad had to keep explaining it to people, almost apologise for it. But you know how it is with names. Boyzone started to wear his like it had been made for him, and soon enough it was impossible to imagine that he could ever have been called anything else. Oh! I long for you to call me, for the run and the dance and the play. All names are my name if it’s you who is calling. Come! Go! Fetch! You send me away, and I love you for it, because you want only to watch me return. GLORIA Gabby’s WhatsApp post received quite a bit of interest. Many of the responses were surprisingly sensible, and even the silly ones weren’t too silly. Our local joker Barry merely observed that this was clearly a case for the scientists, who would need to carry out a PET scan and lots of Lab tests. Which were very Barry sort of comments to make, and actually quite funny by his standards. A few theories were kicked around – radiation, soil composition, sea air, a minor conspiracy about a switch of dogs. But several friends and neighbours also said how sorry they were about what had happened. As animal owners themselves, they couldn’t imagine what a shock it would be to come across your old friend like that and, as next-door-but-one Janice said, ‘have to mourn for your darling all over again, in a way’. And that was it really, that was the worst thing. Non-animal people will never get this, but in terms of pure grief, saying goodbye to Boyzone was right up there with my divorce and my own Mum dying. Perhaps because they all happened about the same time, in 2013 – unlucky for some, and me and Gabby’s horrible anus, as we like to call it. In my mind – in my heart – these sadnesses are all wrapped up in one messy tangle. But somehow, letting go of that silly little dog and pushing the earth down over his poor lifeless form was the moment I drew a line and began to move forwards. It’s taken me years to get back on my feet, but that was the moment. Perhaps we can’t connect with animals in all the ways that we can with humans, but then animals can bring us something that humans can’t. They can never hurt us, for one thing, except by their own pain and death, which only hurts them more. ‘Mum,’ says Gabby, right on cue, and by the tone in her voice I know she is preparing me for something I won’t want to hear. ‘I’ve got Dad on the phone.’ ‘Oh, for god’s sake, Gabriella.’ ‘He’s got a right to know.’ I go to the bottom of the stairs, where the landline sits on the little table, and I’m just about to pick up the receiver when the doorbell goes. ‘Hi,’ I say to the phone flatly, opening the door with my free hand. And then: ‘Hang on, I’ll call you back.’ I’m not trying to annoy Angel on purpose, though of course, it’s always a temptation. It’s just that, on opening the door, I find Senora Buena Muerte kneeling on my welcome mat. Next to her, she has placed a little coffee jar, from which the hot, sickly aroma of half-a-dozen smoking sticks of incense swirls up to greet me. A thick candle with a deep cross carved into it has been perched on my hedgehog shoe-brush, and an ornate black rosary swings from liverish hands that are tightly clasped in prayer. I should perhaps also mention that Senora Buena Muerte is swathed in one of those fine black-lace prayer shawls, and her bulbous lips chatter soundlessly as she works her way through the Decades. All this, as you can imagine, is more than I can easily explain to Angel. Senora Buena Muerte is a Catholic of the old school; and also, possibly, a tiny bit mad. For years now her hunched, shuffling frame has been a fixture in our streets, as she goes knocking on doors for a variety of causes, collecting for Christian Aid or distributing crosses on Palm Sunday, or circulating pamphlets about a miraculous new healing statue in the Philippines. One that drips tears of blood. She is always accompanied by her little Jack Russell, Benito, a weary old-timer who was a good friend of Boyzone back in the day. Left to its own devices, Senora’s face tends to wear an expression of otherworldly piety, as if she is deep in contemplation of the Sorrowful Mysteries – until you say hello, when at once her lovely smile, coated always in a thick, deep shade of burgundy lippy, appears. But although everyone recognises her, no one really seems to know her. I don’t know of anyone in the street who’s ever been inside her house, for example. ‘El cano,’ she says, and crosses herself. It’s been a good many years since I was in a church, but these habits die hard, and I am always tempted to return the gesture. There’s always been something reassuring to me about making the Sign of the Cross. ‘Boyzone? I know! It’s so sad and strange. And thank you, Senora.’ I don’t really need this whole circus camped out on my doorstep, but no one can say she hasn’t made an effort. Behind her, various locals survey the scene placidly as they walk past. A few wave or smile at the makeshift shrine on my doorstep, but no one bats an eyelid, which is of course a very Brighton sort of reaction. ‘Si, El Boyzone. Es un… incorruptible!’ ‘In… corruptibles?’ I think of the film, remember that brief window of time when Kevin Costner was quite the man. ‘Santo Boyzone! Ay Dios mio – que miraculo!’ Dances with Wolves, wasn’t it? And then, oh dear, Waterworld. Senora pushes a little booklet into my hand. It is published by The Society of Divine Truth, whoever they are, and it is called The Five Steps to Sainthood. She opens the book at a folded page and points to a highlighted section: ‘Sign 5: The miracle of incorruptibility.’ ‘OK, right. Thank you, Senora. Er, can you... leave this with me?’ ‘Por su puesto!’ ‘Now I’m very sorry,’ I say, as I try to think of a gentle way to draw this whole exchange to a close. ‘But I must inform Angel of the situation. Mi... hombre.’ It is the first time in many years that I have referred to Angel as my husband in any language, or at least not without wanting to spit blood at the same time. But Senora Buena Muerte is old school, as I say, and always ready to defer to the hombre. ‘Claro, Senora! Claro que si!’ She immediately gets to her feet. ‘I leave?’ she asks, gesturing hopefully at all her paraphernalia. ‘Leave... the incense,’ I smile. ‘Boyzone loved incense.’ Which is a very me thing to say, in that I’ve just made it up. Senora Buena Muerte looks pleased. She crosses herself deftly once more, kisses a medallion attached to her beads, and is soon gone. ‘Angel,’ I say, a few moments later. ‘You just won’t believe this.’ ‘Oh. My. God!’ he giggles. And for a moment it’s 20 years ago. Hey you! The air is brightly coloured with your smile. Your laughter is my birdsong. I watch sadness and happiness break over you, like the moods of the weather. If only you could see you as I see you! Oh yes! I wish only to reflect your joy in my eyes, so that you can see it at last. ANGEL I’m scrolling through the university research hub on my laptop. The case of Boyzone’s non-decomposition intrigues me. Tamara is at the other end of the sofa, tending to some chilli cuttings on a small table. ‘It’s a power animal thing,’ says Tamara. ‘I’ve told you about this before. It’s a manifestation of your animal essence, that’s all.’ She giggles, and I spot again the cute little gap in her two front teeth. ‘How is my dead pet a manifestation of my essence?’ ‘Oh don’t be so... linear,’ says Tamara dismissively. She hates it when I come all sciency with her. She smirks. ‘I always said you were a bit of an old dog.’ What is Tamara’s inner animal, I wonder? A vixen? A scorpion? A wolverine? ‘Well, thanks very much,’ I say. She strokes my arm. ‘Joking! You know what I mean: playful, strong, loyal. A faithful companion.’ A Siberian lynx? A Moorish Idol? A Northern hawk owl? ‘I’m not sure Gloria would ever think of me as “a faithful companion”,’ I say, for some reason. ‘Well.’ Tamara sits upright, as if she’s just taken a smart blow on the chin and is ready to strike back. ‘That’s because she never knew how to bring it out of you.’ She strokes my arm. ‘Let’s face it, I don’t think she’s very enlightened, you know… shamanically speaking.’ Oh Lord. I look into Tamara’s extraordinary violet eyes, so clear and challenging, and I know in an instant both that I have never desired anyone more – and that it is only a matter of time before I leave her. ‘Also, what kind of a ridiculous name is Boyzone??’ ‘It’s the name Gabby gave him?’ I try to mask it, but there is a definite edge in my voice. ‘Gabby?’ ‘My daughter?’ This chat is not going well. ‘Oh yah. Sorry.’ Tamara’s ways of repairing things are always physical. She slides over to me across her cruelty-free sofa and I inhale her scent and stroke her skin, and for a few moments I forget everything. I even forget the little comeback of my own that I’d been brewing – something to the effect that anyone who chooses to call their little boy Apollo Moondew Waterfall is probably not best placed to make fun of other people’s naming choices. I don’t care how beautiful the dawn ceremony atop the Tor at Solstice was, that poor little sod has many hard years ahead of him in the playground. It used to be exhilarating, leaving people. It was grim and painful too, of course, but I always felt I was doing something ultimately positive, something right not just for me but for everyone concerned. A growing pain; a moulting. Does it hurt a hermit crab to change shells? Does the caribou mourn the shedding of its antlers? Does the Mexican Red Kneed Tarantula grieve the loss of its old familiar exoskeleton? (Note to self: No more dates with postgrad students.) Perhaps if you were less obsessed about animals, you’d be better at understanding humans, a tearful Gloria said to me more than once. Gloria, who left me. Monogamy is not a universal norm, from the evolutionary perspective; I should have been an early Mormon. Then again, we seem to evolve towards monogamy as parents. Fathering requires sufficient sexual exclusivity to provide for assurance of paternity (him) and adequate resource provision (her). With Gloria and Gabby, for a long time, I was only too happy to build the nest, sit on the egg, feed and defend our chick. We enacted perfect romantic pair bonding. For a season at least. Tamara hands me a tab of something or other, and I ingest it without thinking. I feel the familiar tingle of narcotic panic as I cross again the threshold of self-control. I have never broken up with someone when high before, but why not? I have done it in so many other ways – in a rainforest, on a scuba dive, in a lion enclosure. Even in mid-climax, once, which did not go well. (As an organism we are programmed to keep scanning the radar. However committed to bi-parenting, we still possess powerful non-monogamous desires, because of course it will always be potentially adaptive to mate with a partner with the best genetic material or the most resources. But though I cheated on Gloria a-plenty, on her terms, I never cheated on the three of us, on mine.) ‘I must go and see Gloria tomorrow,’ I say. ‘She’s so upset about this whole Boyzone thing.’ Gloria, who left me. ‘Oh for God’s sake,’ says Tamara. ‘It’ll just be a pocket of radiation or a 5G surge. Or a vibrational vortex. The primal peoples write about such things all the time.’ I let this pass. ‘I must go,’ I say. ‘She’s really cut up about it.’ ‘Wow. Can you not see what she’s doing?’ ‘?’ ‘Even now, she wants to own your ego-self through time.’ ‘Through… time?’ ‘Yes! She demands your appearance whenever it suits her because she needs to demonstrate that you are still part of her circuit of psychodynamic control.’ ‘I’m not sure I follow. And I have to say, it’s a very, very long time since Gloria has demanded my presence for anything. Quite the opposite, in fact.’ ‘You just don’t see it, do you? How she tries to stifle your energy with hers. She has these long cold auric coils that she emanates, and you’re just choking in them vibrationally.’ I am starting to feel a little disembodied. ‘I have an A level in physics and a degree in evolutionary biology,’ I slur. (I forget in my rapidly altering state that I am also an associate Professor of Zoology.) ‘But I do not recognise this energy of which you speak.’ Tamara’s eyes are dilating and her neck is rouge. She says she has something to tell me, but it seems I have decided to blurt out my own news first. Never let them speak first, another lesson I have learnt the hard way. It’s all a bit of a blur, but I believe I go with, ‘This isn’t working’. Tears, punches, silent reproach. A few projectiles. These are the sorts of things I have come to expect. But Tamara snarls; suddenly she is a furious mandril, a pitiless serpent eagle, a haunting Great Plains Wolf. ‘We will meet again in the next life,’ I say. Even in my growing delirium I am aware of a little frisson of self-congratulation: this is surely the perfect line for breaking up with a New Ager. ‘No. We won’t,’ she says, and she looks at me with a terrible pity. ‘You are a very unevolved soul.’ And I seem to see her fold in half, reach down with tremendous yogic suppleness and pull something wet and precious from inside herself. An orphaned flying fox. A tiny spider monkey. A scrunchy, fluffy chocolate labradoodle pup. ‘You will never know your own,’ she says. GABRIELLA Boyzone was lying out in an open hole for five days before the women in the plastic suits moved in. They set up a cordon and a tent, and brought out instruments that beeped and clicked. They trod mud all over Mum’s new kitchen, and ruined all the landscaping that Theo claimed to have almost finished. The whole thing reminded me of that bit in ET when all the scary agents and government scientists move in on Elliot’s house. Finally, they took Boyzone away, in a special plastic crate. It all seemed a bit pointless, to be so worried about contamination or radiation or whatever, because by then half the neighbourhood had traipsed in and out of the garden to gawp at the miracle of ‘the dog that wouldn’t leave’, as the Argus put it. There was even a camera crew from the local TV station, and a couple of news agency stringers too. The journos all seemed pretty unimpressed about the whole thing, and you couldn’t blame them. There wasn’t any developing story to chase, just some static footage of what looked like a sleeping canine in a hole. (‘How do we know it didn’t die last week?’ I heard one of them mutter. ‘How do we know it’s even dead?’ said another.) One of them kept sniffing round me and Mum for some sensational backstory – they wanted some special symbolism or supernatural dimension, I think. Did Boyzone come back for a special reason? Did he have unfinished business? Had he always loved that part of the garden? Had anyone been in contact yet with the surviving members… of Boyzone? The questions were all a bit crap, really, because they all seemed to be based on the assumption that Boyzone had come alive again in some special way – that he had made an active choice to return. But he wasn’t a ghost or a spirit or anything. OK, something had happened to his body, to stop it decaying as it should, but no doubt there would be some boring scientific explanation for that in due course. But my dog Boyzone – my best friend through all the crap years of Mum and Dad – was still dead. He’d just been dug up. I suppose if you wanted to believe in a miracle, you only had to look at Mum and Dad sitting in the kitchen, hugging mugs of coffee and shrieking with laughter at poor old Senora Buena Muerte. ‘Boyzone reforming – now that would be a miracle,’ says Dad. Mum giggles, unembarrassed. It’s almost as if Mum never tried to run Dad over in the driveway, never threw his five-grand microscope out of a second-floor window, never hijacked one of his student lectures with a PowerPoint presentation of her own itemising all his infidelities. And it’s almost as if Dad didn’t deserve it all, as if Mum’s jealousy didn’t provide him with an easy excuse for going astray again and again. I think he liked to see himself as some sort of alpha primate for whom the usual rules don’t apply. But the fact is, he was just another selfish bloke who couldn’t keep it in his trousers. People split up all the time. So much is life, and usually it’s for the best. My own break-ups are always a relief, you can see them coming a mile off. Mum and Dad, on the other hand, seemed to spend half their marriage breaking up, and then making up – only to break up again. It’s hard for me to remember it this way, but people were always telling me that Mum and Dad were meant for each other. Everyone knew this, apparently, yet each was like an animal programmed to go on trying to hurt the other, even when they were hurting themselves more. And I had my own ringside seat on it all. I remember lying in bed every night, listening to them snipe and shout at each other. During the day, they would try very hard to keep things normal for me, but as a super-sensitive teenager, there’s not much you don’t pick up on. Anyway, it wasn’t exactly hard. The airing cupboard in the corner of my bedroom sat directly above another floor-to-ceiling cupboard in the living room downstairs. The water pipes must have left some gaps between the floors, because if you opened the cupboard door and stuck your head in a little, the sounds from downstairs travelled up perfectly. I don’t think Mum or Dad ever knew this, but I could hear every single word. I spent hours every night with my head on a pile of blankets, one side of my face all hot from the boiler, and an arm around Boyzone, who never left my side. Together we sat and listened as Mum swore and threatened and cried, and Dad waffled and protested, tried to deny or downplay everything, issued promises and apologies – then, when none of that worked, tried to make out it was her fault and turn the attack back on her. I learnt a lot of swearwords in those years, a lot about hatred and a lot about pain. Mum took me to church a few times when I was little. It always bored me rigid – the weird incantations, the endless silences, all the standing and kneeling like the living dead, the fake smiles and handshakes. But I must have taken something from it, because I remember at night I often used to kneel by the piles of lavender-fresh laundry, and pray for Mum and Dad. And me. Boyzone would rest his head quietly on my leg, as if he understood, as if he was praying too. And now: what? Were they going to get back together thanks to our old dog? Was this the real miracle behind his non-decomposition? Had my prayers been answered? The journos would love it, of course. But some things aren’t meant to be fixed. Sometimes ‘making up’ is just a Band Aid for a hurt that can’t really be healed. We do it for practical reasons, so life can go on, for the kids. Well, please, folks, don’t do anything on my account. As we now know, simply burying things doesn’t always make them disappear. Mum and Dad back together? Over my dead body. Whoa! When you are sad, I am sad. I have no power to change the things that make you sad. But I am here. Yee-hah! I am always here for you. THEO With my landscaping work on hold, I’ve had a bit more time for research. It turns out you can see a lot of these incorruptible saints online. There are various churches and cathedrals all over the place (well, mostly Italy) where the bodies are actually on view. It’s all on Youtube. Lots of these ancient bodies have survived various mutilations and removals down the ages, not to mention a suspicious number of fires. St Bernadette of Lourdes fame is the poster girl of the incorruptibles – a pious sleeping beauty in a glass case, her rosary-draped hands clasped in prayer. Bernadette’s body was exhumed three times as part of the canonisation process – an unspoilt corpse being one of the classic signs of sainthood. She was reported to be largely intact the first time they removed her, in 1909, 30 years after she died. But by the time she was pronounced officially ‘incorrupt’, parts of her skin were missing, and her face had a blackish colour, so it was decided a ‘light wax mask’ would be in order. And now she lies in her crystal casket in her convent in Nevers – ‘a martyr,’ it says here, ‘to our ghoulish curiosity’. Now I don’t mean to be funny, but a lot of these incorruptibles don’t look that great. I mean, they’ve been dead for hundreds of years so it’s kind of amazing they look like anything. Part of the problem, it seems to me, is that people kept wanting to dig them up. Also, different convents and monasteries were jealous of who got to keep the remains, so body parts were often hacked off and shared around – a leg to Segovia, the heart to Florence, the head in a special case for Rome. Not surprisingly, each of these upheavals made the body look even worse – apparently, the reason Bernadette went off colour was blamed on the poor nuns of the time, who tried to give her a wash, no doubt with the best of intentions. If she’d been left alone, who knows how great she’d still look? Who gains from a body being incorrupt? If I live a holy life of exemplary self-denial, is a flawless corpse really the reward I’m after? Perhaps it’s to help others believe, but then how do the patches of mildew and missing bits of skin encourage the faithful? If a miracle can be worked to make a body half-survive centuries in the ground, why not go the whole hog and give us pristine cadavers instead of these holy zombies? But perhaps you have to leave a little gap, for people’s faith to fill. Are they going to give Boyzone the Bernadette and Chairman Mao treatment, I can’t help wondering? Stick him in a see-through box in a chapel somewhere? Saint Boyzone has a sort of ring to it. Canonisation. Canine. Canine-isation. There’s a joke in there somewhere, but it just won’t come. Which is not like me. Can you get animal saints, I google to myself? Not officially, although there’s a story of a Saint Guinefort, who was actually a greyhound. Legend has it that he saved a child from a snake attack, but was originally thought to have attacked the child himself and was slain for his trouble. After people realised the mistake, a shrine was built and parents took to leaving their sick children by his graveside. According to legend, St Christopher came from a half-human, half-hound race known as the Dogheads. Half-dog sounds kind of cool. I mean, your sense of smell would be incredible. In Finland, they believe Christopher was so good-looking that, on being baptised, he asked God to make him less attractive to women. So God made him a dog! Not necessarily the best choice, in my view. My last boyfriend said that he’d never a better kisser than his Cavalier King Charles. Which, you know, was a little tough to hear. Dogs are faithful and kind, so were seen by early preachers as model Christians. Just as a dog heals wounds by licking, so prayer and teaching wash away sins. A 15th-century Islamic text advises those who seek holiness to adopt the ‘10 praiseworthy attributes of the dog’, such as not complaining of heat or cold, being happy with whatever you’re given to eat, and being incapable of hate, even if your owner beats or starves you. Also – a sign of a simple holy life, this – ‘leaving nothing behind to be disposed of’. Only his body, and our feelings. I was there the day Boyzone died. I helped to bury him. I don’t remember anything supernatural occurring, just a terrible sadness. It was pelting down with rain, and we kept slipping and sliding in the muddy yard. Our little grave seemed to fill with water quicker than we could dig it out, and I remember that the deadweight of a dead dog, even a labradoodle, is a surprisingly heavy thing. The body did not move, but it did its best to help us out by flopping and folding to fit into our hole. Here’s another question for the internet: Do dogs go to heaven? Some people say yes, because all our happiness will be restored there, and that’s got to include your dog. Just this side of heaven (it says here) there’s a place called Rainbow Bridge. All the animals you’ve ever loved wait for you there, healthy and whole again. When you arrive, they break from the pack, cover you in licks and kisses, and together you cross the Rainbow Bridge together. That’s what they say at animal funerals, and I do like the idea. Apparently it goes back to Norse mythology, and a burning rainbow that spanned the gap between the earth and the heavens. It sure beats the crappy euphemisms we use for death today, like ‘passed away’ and ‘departed this earth’. ‘Boyzone crossed the burning rainbow today.’ That’s more like it. Only: Why is he back? Is he waiting for someone to cross with him? Waiting is loving; loving is not forgetting. I call but you do not come, not now, not yet. And in your absence I am happy, for I have someone to wait for. GLORIA When Boyzone is brought back to us, he’s in a small cardboard packet about the size of a Tupperware lunchbox. The air and the damp have done their work at last, the woman from the lab says tactfully. As a thank you for sharing our find – which, she says, has yielded much ‘valuable but as yet inconclusive’ data – they offered to arrange the cremation for us. I said yes. What else was I going to do – bury him again? I don’t ask Angel if he wants to join us for the scattering of Boyzone. It was good to laugh with him, and remember a time when I didn’t hate him, remember why I actually rather liked him. (Understatement.) But there is a quiet happiness in making peace with the end of things. (Apparently he is going to be a Dad again, and I could not be more happy... that this has nothing to do with me.) In any case, if ever I did find myself slipping back down the slippery slope of Angel’s charm, I have only to catch a glimpse of my daughter’s expression. We move on. Theo, Gabby and I drive along the coast to Hove, the bit beyond the King Alfred where the dog-walkers all go. It’s where Boyzone used to run for miles, in and out of the tide, chasing sticks, balls, birds and other things on the doggie horizon that only he could see. He was more a paddler than a swimmer. He seemed to love the wind as much as the water, and I will forever see his woolly ears flapping up and down and coming together above his head in lazy time with his ridiculously bouncy stride. He was happy to be alive. As people often said, he always seemed to be smiling. We stand at the edge of the water, happy for the tide to wash over our bare ankles. Theo says some rather incoherent words, something about Boyzone making old bones (a joke, I think) and a bridge made of rainbows and Happy are the Dog-heads. Gabby gets her phone out and plays that Ronan song, You say it best when you say nothing at all, which ought to be ridiculous but somehow becomes very moving. The whole occasion rises up on me very fast all of a sudden, and I shed a tear or twelve. THEO Back at Gloria’s, we all sit outside for a cuppa and I show her and Gabby some pics of Friday’s date. Terry. We’ve only met the twice, but I can’t help feeling this is the one! Gloria and Gabby are both very complimentary about the little water feature that throws up a lovely column of spray from the pond that now sits on Boyzone’s old spot. Gloria seems pleasantly surprised at how quickly I did it all, and is especially impressed at how you can’t even see the filter. It’s so pretty the way the drops catch the sun and the water glistens and ghosts in the play of the breeze. I say I can’t accept the extra money she offers me for the work. It’s to remind her of Boyzone, I say, it wouldn’t be right. Plus I had nothing to do with any of it. GLORIA I forget the lyrics of the song now, but there’s a bit about how a look in your eye says we’ll never be parted. Nothing like the love of a dog to remind you of the crapness of humans -- the weakness of our will, the frailty of our promises. The ashes fly out over the sea for a brief second, but then of course a gust whips them right back in our faces. Whipped by the grit of his remains, we all lick a bit of Boyzone. It feels right. In the water we wake to a new life. The light sparkles and the moment wraps us all in its joyful embrace. The beach breathes in the sun, and the breeze tickles and teases. My apartness calls to your apartness, and together we chase after the One. Whoo-hoo!! Dan Brotzel is the author of a collection of short stories, Hotel du Jack, and a novel, The Wolf in the Woods (both from Sandstone Press). He is also co-author of a comic novel, Work in Progress (Unbound). His new book, Awareness Daze (Sandstone Press) is out November 2023. More at www.danbrotzel.com