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Pressed within milk-bottle glass, I am the coarse rock to man. My holes are bitty with pilled glitter. I cook breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Every tawny morning, a corpse with a dab hand; me the wife, opens the cans. Sausage and beans in a pool of tomato syrup, red like chilli oil. He scarfs it down. Then comes a blister. I am the sickness; the pus-rich boil. Born and raised in the North of England, Courtenay Schembri Gray reared her head as a budding poet with a penchant for the macabre. After finding a kinship in the rich verse of Sylvia Plath, Courtenay has amassed a grand amount of publishing credits. Her poetry collection, The Maggot on Maple Street, was published by Anxiety Press in 2023. Twitter: @courtenaywrites WordPress blog: www.courtenayscorner.com

You ask what I want and you look expectant. I want to tell you that I want a day in a hotel room with you. I want a nowhere space, where we talk, and I gaze at you, and you touch my hand, and we laugh, and eat takeaway, and half-watch something, hyperconscious of each other. That sometime late in the day, we would kiss and I would touch you and you would moan into my mouth, but I wouldn’t follow through, I would just bring you to moaning then I would stop. And then you would laugh and do the same to me, a path of discovery. And finally, when it’s too much waiting and wanting, you would ask almost shy if we could, and I’ll want to, so we will, and it’ll be good, and we both know if we carry on for the rest of our lives it could be great. But since you’re waiting for me to answer, I guess… I’ll have a latte? Hobbies Ad hoc hypothesis: every PhD student gets good at something that isn't related to their degree. I know someone who became a marathon runner. She says she runs to take her mind off things, but I wonder sometimes why she needs to take her mind off her work for five hours every day. I know someone else who is a potter. I mean, she doesn't just make pots, she makes all sorts of pottery and has gotten big into chemistry and making her own glazes and everything. She's a historian. I have a friend who got big into cats. I mean, like, hardcore. She travels around the world volunteering on neutering missions. She's not a vet or a nurse. It's just her thing. I'm not gonna say that I wouldn't recommend a PhD though lots of people do say that. I think they're great if you're into long-term projects with limited support and being part of an institution steeped in racism, sexism, and a culture of not giving a single solitary fuck about doctoral students' wellbeing. If your experience was different, well, lucky you. You'd think anyone in that sort of toxic work environment would just say screw it and walk away, but startlingly few of us do. I finished up last year, after four tedious years of feeling totally shit about myself, but that's fine because my PhD hobby has turned into my career. It's amazing how that happens, right? I thought maybe I'd stay in academia. That's what a lot of us think, going into the PhD. We're going to be incredible researchers, we're going to change the world, one reference at a time, and everyone will sit up and listen when we convert our findings into public-facing blog posts. Journalists will beg us for interviews, other institutions will pile job offers at our feet. I don't know what the average drop-off point is for that career aspiration, maybe somewhere in the second year? That's what it was for me, anyway. I was in a meeting with my supervisor, and I mentioned postdoc positions after my PhD, and she just goes 'ah.' Like, not 'ah!' and not 'ah?' Just 'ah.' And I walked out of there knowing, just knowing, I had no chance. It was my hobbies that saved me, just like they save us all. Ad hoc hypothesis, but grounded in anecdotes, which is all social science is anyway, right? Don't tell my supervisor I said that, she'd probably cry or pull all her hair out. Which is maybe why she said ‘ah.’ Anyway, now I'm done, and my hobby is my life. Most of the others I know with a hobby passion haven't turned it into a career move, like I did. The runner still runs, though not as much anymore, because she doesn't need to escape her life for 25 hours a week. The potter, well, can you really turn that into a career? Anyway, she still needs to finish her doctorate, so there's that. But in my line of work, there's plenty to get paid for. I mean, it started as a hobby, and I was paying to learn everything. And then I joined a team, because university is basically still like school, and everyone loves a team player. That's when I got noticed. I got offered an absurdly cushy scholarship by an exclusive old boys club that didn't seem to care that I was female, if I would promise to keep practising and go twice a year to a training camp somewhere warm and sunny, but spend most of each day indoors and promise not to sit out in the sun too much because it might destroy my eyesight. I signed immediately. My work takes me all over the world now. My contract is basically the same. Travel where they tell me, and try not to do anything stupid. Take your pay, go home and eat obscene amounts of sushi. Find some new, low-risk hobbies. Live your life, basically. I'm just saying, if you need a hobby when you're doing your PhD, choose one that turns into a great career. Sharpshooting worked out pretty great for me. Emma Burnett is a recovering academic. She’s big into sports, cats, and being introverted.

A sudden tap on the shoulder made her twitch. She looked up at the scruffy bearded man as she yanked a little oval pill out of his hand without meeting his gaze. Her eyelids became heavy with shadows dancing their last dance of the day. Silence set upon her mind once again. I left not knowing if I’d ever see her again. *** Throughout my thirty years career as an investigative journalist, I dealt with all sorts of stories, from political corruption to serious crimes, always looking for the ulterior motive. Unveiling deliberately concealed truths was my forte. I was perceived as relentless when it came to fighting dishonesty and lack of integrity. My stories led me all over the world, yet somehow this particular story left a profound impact on my psyche. Maybe because it originated in my own neighbourhood or maybe because of her innocence, not really sure, all I knew was that being an observer was no longer enough. *** Her name was Jayce and she was an only child. She told me that she used to live in a land far far away, across the oceans and dark blue seas, over frosty, unfriendly mountains and that she was named after a Greek goddess of healing. Her family believed that having a strong name would help her in the years to come as she was born small and premature. I was never sure what to believe, but occasionally I’d sense a faint imperceptible accent which would disappear as quickly as it would emerge. She was a toddler when her father died at sea, on one of those offshore fishing boats. While other kids spent their days outdoors, on the playgrounds, Jayce grew up with her nose buried in a book. The only memory of her father was a faded children’s picture book she carried with her everywhere. I never got to read its title. No matter the good rapport between us, that one childhood possession was her most cherished treasure and she didn’t trust it with anyone. Jayce was also not a big fan of animals. She didn’t dislike them, she just liked books more. Not sure how or why, but she found herself surrounded by them, nonetheless. The tortoise Donatello, who was named after one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the famous children’s cartoon from the early 1990s, loved eating out of the little girl's hand, especially mulberries. No one could really remember how he came about to live with them. Parrot, whose name remains a mystery to this day, got rescued in the most fortuitous way. This dainty jade-coloured parrot was saved from a tree in the park by none other than her mum who climbed the tree to fetch it. Muki, the orphan bunny was also extricated by Mum during one of their trips to the country. She told me she remembers tiny soft paws on her head and a series of hops he would make in the same pattern: head, shoulder, down her arm to the floor and back. He slept in her bed, ate out of her hands and used her head as a hopping board. He was by far Jayce’s favourite. Sometimes she would gaze at me with those big piercing eyes as if wondering why anyone would be interested in her life. She once revealed as much. It took me a while to realise that I was her island, someone who didn’t judge her, and in a way, she was mine. We were both alone in this world, the only difference was that I had chosen it. It happened on one of those gelid winter mornings when you could feel parts of your body getting numb to cold exposure. As her milky breath reminded her of a smoky curtain rising from an ashtray on her grandfather’s escritoire, she found Muki outside on their balcony, motionless. The carcass prompted her to think of the stiff lifeless animals she sometimes saw on National Geographic. Not long after she discovered Muki’s tiny little body, Parrot broke his neck during one of his frantic indoor flights and was buried in the park from which he got so unexpectedly liberated. The irony of the situation didn’t escape her so she gave Donatello away, never to be seen again. “The thought of losing him as well would have been unbearable”, she admitted in strained voice. A year later, her mum passed away. Her illness was no secret but as any child, Jayce believed Mum was invincible. After that day even books lost their appeal. I still remember the devastation in her eyes when she declared to finally understand why she always favoured books. “In their world, you are but a mere observer of someone else’s pain”. From what I gathered, her mum was her whole world. She was a sickly yet determined lady who came to this country when her husband died, together with her father and Jayce. They had some savings and some distant relatives who helped them settle in. Due to limited language knowledge, Mum worked all sorts of odd jobs, from Paper Towel Sniffer, Face Feeler, Pet Food Taster, Rubbish and Bin Collector to the most recent ones, Laundry Worker and Housekeeper. “The latter ones were the most dignified of her jobs”, Jayce would state matter-of-factly. During one of our interviews, she conveyed feeling ashamed of her mum, especially when she was a teenager. It had taken her a while to understand that her mum dedicated her whole life to securing a better future for her child. “Mum never complained. She would sometimes work three jobs at the time and all I did was ignore her in front of my friends. Once I even denied she was my mum, when she came to pick me up. What child would ever do that?!” By this point she was yelling at me and it took a while for her to calm down. On occasions like these, scruffy bearded man would appear out of nowhere as if having a sixth sense to the needs of his customers. When I asked Jayce where she got the money from, she’d point those big piercing eyes at me, almost with a crazed look on her face, swallow a pill and walk away. Her teenage years were especially challenging. Her behaviour alienated her further from the family and with no kindred-soul to turn to, she closed herself off to the world. Her grandfather did everything he could to help her get out of her shell. I gathered that she was very fond of him. Her eyes would tear up each time she’d mention his name. As her recollections were often incoherent, I was not always certain about the timeline of her stories but I did sense a tremendous guilt when she spoke about him. At one time, and I couldn’t say with an utmost conviction what she told me was true, she blamed herself for her grandfather’s untimely death. “He did for me so much over the years and I’d never acknowledged the fact he lost his daughter at the same time I lost my mum. So selfish, so ungrateful.” Her voice merely a whisper. “Yet he never punished me. Once I ended up in jail for solicitation (that he knew of). I couldn’t have known he was a cop.” The embarrassment in her words was unmeasurable. “Worst thing of all was that he hugged me when he came to bail me out. I don’t understand it.” Through an avalanche of tears, she sobbed: “All is well Jayce, you’ll see. We’ll get through this.” As if she had fallen into a trance, she started swaying back and forth, back and forth in an endless mantra: “All is well Jayce. We’ll get through this.” This was the worst I had ever seen her. The blame she carried on her young shoulders seemed unbearable. When we met, Jayce was already homeless, eating out of the garbage cans and using different means in silencing her tortured mind. In the course of that year, the interviews I conducted with her for the homeless series for my newspaper, struck a chord. Her innocence was remarkable and her pain palpable. Sometimes it was more about the things she didn’t share, as if they were too precious or too defective to be exposed. From time to time I’d come back to check up on her, trying to encourage her to check herself into a rehab centre, offering to support her every step of the way. More often than not, she was rarely lucid enough to recognize me and I knew that her mind wanders through the land, far far away where once lived a girl, just an ordinary little girl with big eyes and with love of books. The dreaded moment arrived and Jayce was nowhere to be found. I still visit the spot where I last saw her, a patched-up army tent tucked under a highway overpass, away from judging eyes, hoping for a miracle. Occasionally I’d check nearby refuge places that are considered a 'bellwether' of homelessness, but to no avail. Thanks to Jayce and stories like hers, homelessness in my city finally got the attention it deserves with residents coalescing to advocate for the forgotten ones. I still see her in the faces of displaced youth wandering our streets, hoping she had found her peace. Andrea Damic who writes from Sydney, Australia has words published or forthcoming in The Dribble Drabble Review, 50 Give or Take (Vine Leaves Press) Anthology, Door Is A Jar Literary Magazine, The Piker Press, The Centifictionist, Spillwords and elsewhere. You can find her on linktr.ee/damicandrea or TW @DamicAndrea.

1. I wore the same green, sleeveless jumpsuit two days in a row. We had landed in another temporary home, this time in a small rural town in Germany. I had survived a very long, five-hour drive from the Frankfurt airport to our new apartment in Hannover. My partner drove. I sat stiffly in the back of the rental car, attending to my cat while trying to ignore my fatigued body. She had been the perfect travel companion, sitting almost noiselessly throughout the seven-hour plane ride. I unzipped her carrier and let her round head peek out. She sat erect, staring regally at the sight in front of her. When we arrived, I met the realtor briefly. He had just handed the keys over to my partner and they were reviewing the wohnungsgeberbestätigung. A very long German word that translates into lease. The well-dressed man turned his attention to greet me, a display of good manners. I was too exhausted to engage in small conversation. “Please forgive me,” I said, my voice scratchy and hoarse. “I’m too tired. I have to rest.” I turned away before he could respond, though I may have heard a surprised “okay.” I closed the bedroom door and let the cat out of the bag. She feared the bare, unknown territory. She made a dash under my sweater and curled inside. I draped another jacket on the floor and I fell asleep on it almost immediately. I woke up some hours later. My partner’s body was next to mine, the cat still curled in a ball under my jacket. It was only mid-afternoon. We refreshed ourselves and went out despite our rumpled clothing. When he visited in April, he mentioned an incomplete building across from our apartment. Four months later, a small discount grocery store and a bakery opened. I stared at the display signs of the baked goods. German words seemed strange, too long with too many letters. How would I ever learn the language? I asked myself in panic. I relied on my partner, who has but very cursory skills. I whispered to him to order a large pretzel and what I thought was a raspberry cheesecake. I’d later add butter brezel to the list of things I liked about Hannover. The list is still quite short. We were the only customers occupying the outdoor tables. Inside, a few elderly folks leisurely enjoyed their coffees and their own afternoon treats. “Is that jello on the cheesecake?” I asked, removing my surgical mask. I poked the top of the cake with my fork. It didn’t jiggle or dance, perhaps from the weight of the raspberries. I took a small bite. The crust wasn’t made from graham crackers, the cheese wasn’t quite cream cheese, and the topping seemed almost watery. “Käsekuchen,” my partner called it by its German name. “It’s not like American cheesecake.” “I gathered,” I said, making a face at the obvious. “The crust is…?” “A shortbread, maybe?” “And is there always jello?” I poked the remains again, for emphasis. “I think so. And the cheese they use is called quark.” Ever the curious philosopher, he had used Google to expand on his knowledge of encyclopedic trivia. “Quark,” I repeated. “Quark, quark.” ~ We live in a building full of older or retired tenants. The only other younger couple live across from us. They were about ten years younger and owned their apartment. They also rented another one of the apartments to a different younger couple, in a different building. Our neighbors could speak in English. I often gave them samples of my baking successes and failures. Successes because it was the exception when my cakes rise well. Failures because the German ingredients did not always translate well for American recipes. I offered the more presentable slices and rolls to them. Linus knew my name. I stood out amongst all of the white Germans living in the complex. He referred to my partner as Richard, a name that bore no resemblance to his actual name. Linus once presented us with his own baked treats. It was his girlfriend’s birthday, and he gave us three slices of käsekuchen. It was almost the exact same cake from the bakery across the street. It was raspberry-flavored, complete with a raspberry red jello topping. I looked at the slightly burnt but very buttery crust. German grocery stores didn’t sell graham crackers, one of those unremarkable items. Grocery stores aren’t universal. The more I stared at the slice, the more I thought about aspic, a relic of the past brought back as kitsch. Germany, I would learn, was not self-aware but was actually stuck in the past. The end of the second world war became the only significant event in Germany’s collective memory. Their history, so thought the white Germans, were not connected to the grammatical tenses of language. They’ve moved on because the war had ended. But neither colonialism nor racism end simply after a war. I ate the slice slowly and almost painfully. I rarely waste food. “You can eat the other slice,” I told my partner. Now it’s rare for me to swing by a German bakery, but my curiosity led me to try baking my own käsekuchen. I looked up a recipe online, to make sure I found a recipe that used quark. When I opened the container, I was surprised it resembled a thick yogurt. The käsekuchen baked quite beautifully, especially without the aspic, jello topping. Unlike the conventional American cheesecake, the golden-brown crust rose like a shield. It was a very dense, somewhat creamy cake. I was grateful for the lemon juice and zest, to offset the peculiar quark. But it still tasted unfamiliar to me. When I served the cake for the next few days, I always made sure my slices were smaller than my partner’s. ~ My partner asked his parents to send us a large box of goods from Arkansas. A box that would serve as a housewarming, Christmas, and birthday gift. The large package arrived with two boxes of graham crackers, local coffee beans, cans of pumpkin pie, baking powder from the United States, and some odds and ends. Customs must have been rough with the box. Packages were ripped and opened. Some of the crackers were already crushed. But he nearly wept in hyperbolic happiness, holding the dented boxes delicately and joyfully. A box of graham crackers contains three packages of cookies. One package makes one crust. I could make six pies. Some pies my partner greedily ate, declining my offer to share some with Linus. When the taste of cheesecake lost its novelty, I managed to cut two generous slices for Linus and his girlfriend. I had also spread a lovely blueberry compote, if somewhat haphazardly topped, over the lemon cheesecake. I tend to think citrus and blueberries, both acidic, aren’t as complementary as recipe developers assume they are, and always omit the extra squeeze of lemon juice for the compote. A fleeting essence of lemon is enough. When Linus lent us his toolbox, the topic of food came up. He had spent a year abroad in the U.S. and marveled at the wonderful food he sampled. Like so many others, he lamented, with a faraway look, that he had gained so much weight upon his return home. I didn’t have a similar story about Germany, so I didn’t regale him with a disingenuous tale. “That is the best cheesecake I’ve ever had,” he texted almost ten minutes later. It must be the crust, I didn’t write back. I’m better at silence than offering small talk. 2. Brown sugar, if available, can be purchased at Asian grocery stores. He found out by enlisting the aid of Google. It is confounding that some of the more colonial grocery stores, like Edeka — the k is an abbreviation for Kolonial — considered them too exotic or a rarity for their shelves. The chain has a very small aisle for Asian ingredients, filled with small boxes of ready-to-eat curries or instant noodles written in bold and offensive, exoticizing eastern script. Some days, brown sugar is available at the two Asian grocery stores we frequent. Other days, they may be completely out of stock. Sometimes they would have a sparing amount of light brown sugar, a product from South Korea. If the light brown sugar is out, there may be a few bags of a darker brown sugar imported from China. It’s only ever one option, not both. At the Asia Supermarkt downtown, I think I hear Vietnamese. The family and workers speak so softly to each other. Their German is louder. The older woman with the long, straight black hair always fixates on me when I enter her shop. Her eyes follow me as I walk down the refrigerated section. I once speculated every person bearing a Vietnamese surname spoke the language simply because I learned and grew up speaking it in Arkansas. It was a childish assumption. When I ran into the daughter of a family friend at the mall, I greeted her in Vietnamese. “Oh, I don’t speak Vietnamese!” she answered with a chuckle. I thought I had misremembered, but she was right. When we played together, we exchanged loud, excited bursts in English. It was the children’s language, free from the ears of our parents. They couldn’t really understand everything we were saying. Vietnamese was the language of the adults. At the checkout line, the woman peered at me through her silver, wire-rimmed glasses, casting a quick glance at my partner. She didn’t wear a mask, but she sat behind a plastic partition. She used short phrases in German. First, a polite greeting. Then the amount. Each time she spoke, she gave me a meaningful look. I nodded at her, hoping my eyes and wrinkled forehead conveyed my masked smile. When she said her third sentence, tschüss, I almost responded with tạm biệt. Instead, I repeated her farewell in German. I used the first bag of German-purchased light brown sugar to make pecan pies for Christmas. A day before, I made more so-called American baked goods to give to Linus. His parents lived nearby, in a cozy home tucked away somewhere in the neighborhood. I brought over very warm apples and pecan pies, each hand covered with a tattered red oven mitt. “I hope your family enjoys them,” I said, carefully placing them on his kitchen counter. “Have you had pecan pie before?” He hadn’t. But it was the apple pie that he praised when I received a text from him days later. ~ He and I had decided to take a weekend trip to Spain, something that we had planned since the spring. A sick cat had delayed our plans. So had my fear about traveling during an ongoing pandemic. This would be the second time I’d been on a plane since the transcontinental move. His professorial salary allowed him to find cat sitters. When the couple came over, I introduced them to the cat. “She looks like an eule, doesn’t she?” I said, pointing to the tortoise-shell cat sitting on one of the yellow plastic IKEA chairs. Her cautious green eyes appraised them suspiciously. The cat is not fond of strangers but will become affectionate when she realizes her human roommates are away. The couple tried to decipher that one German word they couldn’t understand. They asked me to repeat. “Eule,” I said again. It was one of the recurring words on DuoLingo. The mascot of the app is an eule. “An owl.” “Oh!” they both exclaimed. “Eule.” I thought our pronunciation sounded similar. My partner gave them a tour, pointing to her litter box and water and food bowl. They seemed shy and nodded at everything he said. It was just a job after all. Before they left, I told them I’d bake them a pan of cinnamon rolls. To enjoy while they sat around with the cat. “And please take them to share with your family and friends,” I urged. “You can return the pan along with the keys.” Like gracious strangers, they insisted I didn’t need to trouble myself. “I’m happy to,” I said sincerely. “It’s just an extra thank you for taking care of our cat.” Curious if they had something resembling a non-German cinnamon roll, I asked if they had tried one if they had been abroad. An image of Cinnabon floated in my mind. They hadn’t. “I don’t think I’ve tried cinnamon rolls here, but I imagine the ones I’ll be baking might taste different,” I continued. “Maybe sweeter? Especially with the cream cheese frosting.” Before they left, they thanked us for trusting them. “We’d love to try your cinnamon rolls if you decide to make them,” the young lady said. ~ The day before our trip, he returned home from his professorial duties with two bags of very dark brown sugar, the Markt's only option. I cut open the bag and was surprised by the chocolatey, almost rich coffee smell of the sugar. As I prepped the first rise of the rolls, I worried about the taste. I hadn’t ever eaten cinnamon rolls made with dark brown sugar. The very strong scent of the sugar lingered on my mind as I mixed half a cup of it into the softened butter. It seemed impolite to use the cat sitters as taste testers for my experiment. I hesitantly topped the rolls with generous amounts of the cream cheese frosting. The dark brown sugar traced the edges of the swirls like a marble effect. There were ten rolls in the white pan. I thought about trying one but didn’t want to destroy the image of a full pan. I left them to cool. I set out the box of Earl Grey tea and mugs on the counter next to the electric kettle in case they wanted to drink tea with their rolls. ~ They promptly returned the key and the pan the evening we returned. I placed a mask over my face. I had been sequestered with too many unmasked people in the confined airport spaces. Some coughed, some stood too close to me. Before gesturing them inside, I had an impulse to ask them to take off their shoes. My parents rarely had white guests over. When they did, they never asked them to leave their shoes at the door, but their eyes followed the shoes to the table or to the sofa. I shook away the instinct. They would only be inside for a few minutes. They thanked me again for the baked goods. Their families had enjoyed them, they said in delight. “Is it different from the cinnamon rolls you’ve tried here?” I asked. “It’s definitely sweeter,” the man replied. The woman returned the empty and gleaming white pan. I held it close to my chest. They left, and we saw one of them had tracked in a flattened dead mouse. I stared at the creature in rigor mortis. My partner, for once, acted more quickly than I did. He cleaned up the spot and disposed of the body. Wearing shoes inside a home, wearing a mask, I hoped I never again have to be the person demanding hygienic boundaries ever again. A day later, I made another pan of cinnamon rolls. I had leftover cream cheese frosting. In three hours they were finished. The taste is almost like the smell. Too potent. We had trouble polishing off the pan, each uneaten roll drying out. I wished Linus was home. He’d probably take half of the pan. He and his girlfriend had left for a year-long European trip. I wondered where they had parked their RV this time. I only hear about their adventures through my partner. I don’t keep in touch with them. I haven’t used the dark brown sugar since. It is tucked away in one of the cabinets. Perhaps when the holiday season came around, I’d bake a few more pecan pies or make caramel sauce. If I could remember in time, I’d just use less brown sugar. 3. September was a long month. It also marked our first year living in Hannover. I was unhappy here. My university had neglected me. The same university had made my partner reassess if he wanted to remain in academia. The university made our lives hard in different ways. I lost some joy in cooking and baking. I preferred to clean or do laundry, mundane tasks over creative ones. When it was time to go grocery shopping, I vetoed the thirty-minute walk to Edeka. I didn’t want to deal with the crowds, didn’t want to deal with maskless people, didn’t want to hear the guttural sounds of the German language. I didn’t want to witness yet another curious glance from a white German, either their eyes on my tattoos or indulge them in their game of guessing where I might be from. In line at a coffee shop, a man, eavesdropping on our conversation in English, had stood too close to me and asked if I was Vietnamese. In Germany, too, I heard men yell out “me love you long time!” when I pass them. In English, not German. For a country obsessed with maintaining its own nation-state and upholding German citizenship, its inhabitants parade their ignorant allegiance to American culture in the worst possible ways. We began relying on the discount store nearby. Every week, we made sandwiches. My partner became obsessed with the soft bread from the shop. “It really reminds me of Wonder Bread, you know?” he said, one night when we made a stack of sandwiches for dinner. “It’s like sweet white bread.” I didn’t grow up eating Wonder Bread, but I could easily conjure the white packaging with the solid circles in primary colors. The bread he buys from the discount store is wheat with grains. It must be the texture of the breads he is half-heartedly comparing. When he left for his conferences, I relied on the packaged loaf of bread. I didn’t have the energy to cook a meal for myself. I didn’t even want to go to the grocery store, the one barely two minutes away. But I did have a schedule. I’d wake up, make coffee, write or read for my supervisor-less dissertation, run, and continue my writing. In between these tasks, I let myself be distracted by the cat. Maybe I would snack on toast or make myself ramen. With my partner away, I rarely had an appetite. I’m not sure why that is. I have never relished the act of cooking and feeding him. I don’t consider myself domestic. But I could go hours without eating when he’s gone. Maybe it’s the solitude that fills me. We spent too much time together in our shared living space. I forced myself to eat a slice of buttered bread. Finishing it took a couple of hours. The apartment was quiet for a few days. I’d call for the cat. If there was noise, it was from my DuoLingo app. Bier oder wein? I heard constantly. Those words were from the first lesson. I have never actually heard a server ask if I wanted bier oder wein when I sat outside for a meal. “Etwas zu trinken?” I have heard. Rarely do language classes capture everyday living. I did hear bier oder wein uttered once in Germany when we were summoned to the police station to give a witness account of a neighborly dispute. Linus had been assaulted by a tenant downstairs, over an ongoing argument about the noise ordinance. On our way to the grocery store, we found him, shaken and pale, standing outside in front of the building. A large blue bruise was forming atop his right eye. The tenant had attacked him in the garage. Linus was waiting for the police, holding a bag of shattered glassware. He had dropped it when the neighbor headbutted him. Months had passed since the incident. Before leaving for his road trip, he told my partner he may be contacted by the police station. He wanted to punish the neighbor, he told us in a cold voice. He must have misspoken. We each received an ominous, official letter with appointment times and dates in early September. Not attending, the letter threatened, was against the law. At about seven thirty in the morning on the designated day, we walked to the police station, ten minutes away from our apartment. I’ve never been inside a police station before. The door to the reception was locked, and we had to be buzzed in for permission. We could see one of the officers pick up the phone and ask, in German, what we needed. In English, my partner answered that we had appointments. As we were ushered into an office, I glanced at the posters and photos of weapons tacked on the long rows of white walls. There were also black-and-white photos or sketches of wanted people. Many of them had dark hair. The young officer motioned for us to sit down. I took the chair across from him. He was very blond and muscular. Unlike the officers at the front desk, he didn’t wear a uniform. He wore tight jeans, a grey t-shirt, and a light jacket. On his feet were spotless white tennis shoes. He had gelled his hair so that not one strand was loose. He began in German, his face serious. I glanced behind my chair so I could safely roll my eyes. Had Linus not informed his lawyer we couldn’t speak the language? That seemed to be a vital piece of information. When the cop finally realized he couldn’t interrogate us in his language, he guffawed and mumbled something to himself. This will be interesting, I think he said. He began his line of questioning, using names I didn’t know. His cadence changed when the language changed. “I’m sorry,” I interrupted. “Who are these people?” “It’s who you have been referring to as Linus,” he answered, confused. The other name was the name of the accused. “Oh, that’s their surnames?” I hadn’t known. We tried to recall the events. We hadn’t actually witnessed the ordeal, we emphasized. We saw the assaulter enter the front door sometime in the afternoon, but we hadn’t seen the two of them together. Their hostile history was only passed down by Linus. I watched the cop make short scrawls on a notebook. When he tried to communicate and couldn’t find an English equivalent, he relied on Google translate. It was clear he didn’t treat this interrogation as formally as he should have because he couldn’t do his job in English. Our statements and any additional questioning took about fifteen minutes. He asked if we had any questions. “I do,” I piped up. “If you were to contact the assaulter for questioning, would he know that we talked to you as Linus’ witnesses? If there’s a history of violence, I don’t want him to know we spoke to you. I don’t want him to put us on his list.” We had seen the assaulter a few times, our interactions never amounting to more than a simple hello at the front door or in the laundry room. He and his wife seemed to be well-acquainted with the other residents. They all looked to be in the same age range. “I don’t think you should be worried,” he answered, after a pause. “I don’t know these people, but this is just a small dispute between neighbors. I’ll ask Linus’ lawyer.” This did not assuage my fear. He took my concern of possible assault too lightly. He then asked why we were here in Hannover, a question of interest directed to non-German speakers. My partner said he was hired as a professor at a nearby university. “I’m a beamter, too,” my partner responded, much to the cop’s interest. Their jobs were both classified as employees of the state. They held the same titles. “How long do you think you’ll live here?” When the interrogation stopped, we should have been allowed to leave. I couldn’t help myself. “Yes, for how long?” I turned my attention to my partner, staring him down. It was a double question. The cop’s eyes lit up. He must enjoy gossip. “Did I start something?” My partner laughed nervously. As much as he tried to deny his upbringing in white Arkansan culture, his parents had encouraged small talk with people of a particular rank. They also tried to avoid looking rude, mainly to other white people, for networking reasons. He hadn’t yet unlearned this habit. The next question was about learning German. I didn’t join the conversation. I didn’t have a reason to. I sat with my hands folded in my lap. My partner mentioned that he wanted to learn more than just bier oder wein, brot und wasser. The cop laughed and said that bier oder wein was in fact a useful question. I made a face behind my mask and pretended to pick off a piece of invisible lint on my blue polka-dotted jumpsuit. I didn’t want him to see me roll my eyes. Maybe he was trying to practice his English. We were finally allowed to leave. He wished us a good day as he walked us out. I didn’t return the salutation. “He seemed more interested in talking to you than in hearing the details,” I remarked to my partner as we walked home. “It seemed like he didn’t want to do his job.” I was trying to reprimand him for indulging the cop. Aside from a follow-up telephone call from the cop, who discussed our testimonies with Linus’ lawyer and ensured our anonymity would be protected, the case went dormant. On our end, at least. ~ In late September, I spent a few nights alone. As I was finishing up a slice of buttered toast, another dinner, the doorbell rang. I froze. It was rare for someone to ring my doorbell at all. The person was already in the building. They hadn’t buzzed from the outside. I waited, hoping the person would go away. There was a loud knock. I took off my slippers and approached the door as quietly as I could. I heard some angry words. Or maybe German just sounds angry. It’s not a very beautiful language. I stood without movement for some time before I gathered the courage to open the door. No one was standing at the door. I heard footsteps on the second floor, the one below us. A door slam shut. The person lived on the same floor as the person who assaulted Linus. I shut my door quickly, turned off the living room lights, and fled into the bedroom. My hand gripped my cell phone. I called my mother. I had already spoken to her two hours earlier. I rarely call her more than once a day, our allotted time together. She answered on the third ring. “An-nah?” she answered. I grew up thinking this was the only way to pronounce my name, the first syllable a memory of her forgotten Vietnamese name. A wave of foolishness swept over me. I was now in my mid-thirties and called my mother when I was frightened. In my own apartment. All of the anecdotal stories about my unhappiness in Germany led my mother to believe the country was damaging to my livelihood. She concluded every lament and complaint with “don’t leave the house without him” or “come back to the States.” “I’m waiting for him to call,” I finally said, trying to keep the panic out of my voice. “I’m just bored. Will you talk to me?” Quickly grasping for a different topic, I asked, “Have you been summoned to a police station before?” “Still thinking about your visit? Have you seen that man since?” “Yes. Mainly in the laundry room, in the basement.” “Never speak to him.” Her voice was stern. “Have you been to the police station?” I repeated. “I have been arrested and sent to jail.” “In the United States?” I screeched before reminding myself to keep my voice low. When we moved in, we had been informed the concrete walls were soundproof. Germans took pride in this architectural design, highlighting it as a remarkable feature. No one had informed us that it may just be a result of ruhezeit, the designated quiet times Germans expected every day. “No, no!” she quickly responded. “I never got in trouble in the United States. It was in Vietnam. I was very young. A soldier wanted my chicken, my pet, to cook for their happy hour.” I wanted to laugh, as I usually do whenever my mother offers these glimpses of her previous life in Vietnam without warning. She was a little girl, not yet ten years old, when the war began and would see the ravages of it for another twenty years. She grew up in and with violence. “You were in jail because you refused to give your chicken to a soldier?” I repeated, more for my own understanding. “I was raising the chicken! It was just a couple months old!” my righteous mother exploded. The soldier had requested the police arrest my mother in the afternoon, where she was held captive for a night at the station. She spent another night in a jail cell. Her uncle had bailed her out. Soldiers would retell this story to other villagers, changing two nights into six months of imprisonment. “Did the cops say you were in jail for six months? Is that why the soldiers repeated it?” “The cops don’t care,” she muttered. “The soldiers just wanted to frighten and threaten the others into giving them whatever they wanted.” “Did you have a record?” “No record. But some people were surprised to see me at the markets. I was supposed to be in jail. They thought I broke out of prison.” I thought her last sentence was an appropriate place to laugh. She and I talked for another half an hour. She probably sensed that I was withholding something from her but didn’t push. “What have you been eating while he’s gone?” The topic of food only ever fills up space. “Sometimes ramen, sometimes bread.” She didn’t seem surprised by my underwhelming meals. “Just eat something that fills you up. Sometimes making elaborate dishes is tiresome.” Most of her work now involves feeding her four young grandchildren. A mother and daughter can only hold a telephone conversation for so long. We eventually ran out of things to say to each other. Before hanging up, she again advised me not to leave the house. “I know you say it’s quiet in your neighborhood, but quiet doesn’t mean friendly,” she said. “Or safe.” I stayed up for hours that night, the unknown person keeping me awake. I even tiptoed into the kitchen to feed the cat without turning on the lights. Since that unresolved incident, no residents or neighbors have rung the doorbell or knocked on the door. If there is someone behind the door, it’s a delivery person handing us a package. The only occasion I do see people in the building is when I am walking downstairs. The residents stand outside of their doors, engaged in conversation. They grow quiet when I pass them, barely returning my nod or a “hallo.” When I’m no longer in sight, they resume their chats in a language I have stopped trying to learn. Anna Nguyen is a PhD student and instructor currently in Germany. She likes to blend theoretical creative non-fiction while thinking about food, science, and the mundane without enforcing academic conventions. She hosts a podcast, Critical Literary Consumption. Website: www.ilostmyappetite.com

A curious little songbird cocks its head as I place a box of unopened letters on the Palladio stone table. It’s morning here at the Evergarden. The sun has begun to rise, casting radial lines of warm light that reach just over arched hedges, clipping pastel-colored flowers along the cobblestone paths. I’ve wandered this place for what feels like years. I’ve seen many trees, flowers and stones, but never another person nor an end to this vast space. No matter how far I walked the day before, each morning begins at the same stone table, with the same curious bird, in the same warm light, and with the same pain that this box of letters brings. Although these letters will certainly involve people I used to know and love, the pain doesn’t come from love—at least not anymore. No, not from love, but from gridlock, born from the fear of uncertainty. It’s an odd thing, knowing nothing about your home. What I do know is that significant outcomes are usually the consequence of significant circumstances. Whatever led to the creation of this place and to my inhabiting it cannot be insignificant. And I don’t know if it’s worse to continue spending my days wandering this endless landscape without purpose, or to pay for answers with sorrow and heartbreak that will stay with me until the end of time. I want to know the why of it, but . . . the why could be too much. Maybe finding a new path today will help. I bid the bird farewell and begin walking toward some high arches in the distance. The Evergarden is evergreen and ever in bloom. It has 256 different species of flower, each frozen in time at its blossom’s peak. There are 128 species of trees, 64 species of luscious grass with interleaved blades, and 32 types of stone. Massive stone structures find themselves in the company of deep green vines, which, in turn, intertwine with the bright foliage that rests along the steel arbor trellises. Everything is in perfect order, as if an artist had painted directly onto reality. Rounding the corner of a brick wall, I spot a patch of chrysanthemums nestled against a stone pergola. The chrysanthemums are my favorite. When I was a young girl, I would walk with my mother and father in our garden, where purple, white, and yellow chrysanthemums lined the stone wall. We would each pick one and sit there in the afternoon, counting the petals to see whose bloom had the most. The purple ones always did. Sometimes my father would keep the petals after we counted. He always seemed to collect organic bits from around our garden and house. He was the chief research scientist at his company, NData Medical Technologies, and always studied other species’ secrets of life. There’s a lot we can learn from these beings, Naomi. Some would say they have figured out living better than we have. Many of them have unique properties that can help people like us live longer lives, and who wouldn’t want to live a longer, healthier life if they could? A longer, healthier life. This made me think of Finely, our pet goldfish, who, after an out-of-tank near-death experience left him without much (any) perceptive ability, had managed to reach an astonishing 40 years of age, kept alive by a special food bioengineered by my father. Finely definitely lived a longer life, but not so much a healthier one. One day in our garden, the warm sun felt too hot, and the stone path felt too hard under my feet. I grabbed onto my mother, feeling almost too exhausted to stand. “Oh honey, you look flushed! Why don’t we sit at the patio under some shade?” said my mother as she placed the back of her hand on my forehead. She helped me back to a seat under the covered patio. Soon after that, my father brought several flowers for us to count. I tried to count the petals, but my eyes wouldn’t focus, and I saw too many of them. My father said, “Don’t worry, Naomi, it’s just a little heat exhaustion. Once you feel better, we can spend the whole day out there and even plant new flowers.” I had no idea that day would never come. Over the next few days, my condition worsened. I felt hot all the time, not just in the sun, and my legs felt shaky everywhere, not just on the stone path. I couldn’t even make it out of bed, much less to the patio. I felt . . . frail. My father’s company employed some of the best doctors in the world and had access to cutting-edge diagnostic equipment (some of which were unavailable to the public), so he wasted no time turning my room into a space-age medical laboratory. The familiar warm lamp light in my room was now overpowered by the bright glow of equipment screens dotted with the colors of various LEDs. I could see the machines react to every movement, every breath I took, every heartbeat. They were like a living extension of myself, with every bodily signal being tracked and analyzed in real-time. Being a child at the time, I hadn’t really thought past what a drag this was. I only thought about how much I hated being in bed all day and how, once I was better, I would tell my friends about how I had been so sick that I almost died. But then I’d tell them how my father, the smart doctors, and all the fancy equipment saved me. I thought about this the way a child would: like part of a plotline in some movie. I wasn’t thinking about actually dying. That all started to change the following week. None of the tests or medications seemed to help. I could feel myself getting worse. I couldn’t eat anything, and just thinking about food, even the special treats my mother would bring, would cause waves of nausea to wash over me. Every time I tried to move, I felt like some old machine with all its gears and hinges rusted in place, howling with squeals and shrieks as it struggled to start up. My thoughts shifted from impatience and what I would do after getting better to being scared of getting worse. What if you never get better? This question would sometimes creep into my mind, and I would shut my eyes as hard as I could and shake my head to get rid of it. One day, I remember hearing the muffled sounds of an argument at the foot of my bed as my awareness stumbled through a hazy fog of lethargy. I could barely make out what they were saying. Rapidly progressing . . . alternative . . . dangerous . . . must be explored. Then, and I’m not sure if it was hours or seconds later, I heard the front door slam, and I saw my father storm past my window to his car. Sometime later, I awoke to my father placing a bunch of stickers all over my head, each with a clear wire attached to it that was almost as thin as a strand of hair. He moved quickly but with the jittery energy of someone who hasn’t slept in days. “. . . Dad” I groaned, as both question and acknowledgment. “Just hold on for me, baby. Almost done,” he said. “There we are. Bill? Bill, are we up and running? Yes? Ok, Naomi, I’m going to ask you a bunch of questions. Ok, sweetie? Now don’t worry about the answers being right or wrong. Just say whatever you think of first, ok?” He held up a picture. It was of himself. “Who is this?” he asked. “That’s you, Daddy!” I said. “Very good. Now, what is the first story about me you can think of?” I told a story about how Mother and I had cooked a special breakfast together all morning for him one Father’s Day, but I accidentally used cayenne pepper instead of black pepper. His face got red and sweaty with every bite, but he ate it anyway so I wouldn’t feel bad. “Very good, sweetheart. Now, how about this one?” We went through different pictures for a long time. Some triggered happy memories, others sad, and some were related to scary dreams I had. We also solved school problems and did quizzes. Some strained my brain, like quickly saying the color of letters which spelled different colors (the word “blue” written in red crayon, for example). On one of the machines, I saw a three-dimensional image of my brain. As we went through the questions, I watched as different sections lit up, and pairs of numbers that looked like coordinates were recorded in a table on one side of the screen. “Did I do ok, Daddy?” I asked as I watched my father’s eyes dart around, lost in the data. “You’re perfect, Naomi,” he said without looking away from the screen. “Now, you should get some rest.” I hardly saw my father over the next few days. I heard him drive up to the house but not come inside. I remember seeing my mother stand outside with a worried look in her eyes as my father walked past carrying two big bags, leaving a flurry of chrysanthemum petals in his wake. One evening, I stirred awake to muted yelling outside my room. It was my parents. You can’t . . . lose you both . . . have to try. Then the front door slammed shut, rattling the house, which shot me out of the hazy fog into cold awareness. After the sound of my father’s car faded away, all I could hear was my mother weeping. She stood outside my room for a long time. “Mommy?” I called out. It must have startled her as she drew in a sharp breath. I can still remember the sound of it, the sharp, sudden inhale of someone being ripped out of an entire lifetime of emotions they just experienced but did not have the chance to process. After a minute, the door slowly opened, and she came in and sat on the bed. “Naomi, honey, I . . . need to talk to you.” I remember her eyes were puffy, illuminated by the soft glow of blue LEDs as though the equipment was trying to help tell a story of despair. “Where’s Dad?” I asked. My mother looked down at my hand as she held it. “He . . . something has come up with his work, and . . .” she looked up at me. “He has to go away for a while.” I felt completely frozen. I could feel the blood drain from my face, and my hands turned cold. My initial shock sank into the depths of the large pit in my stomach, making room for fear. Thoughts flew through my mind at a rate I could not control. Why was he really leaving? Did he know I would die and couldn’t bear to be around when it happened? He just . . . gave up? What’s going to happen to me? I started to hyperventilate; the escalating hums and beeps of the equipment echoed my panic. “Breathe, Naomi. It’s going to be ok,” said my mother, adjusting one of the dials on a machine. My reaction seemed to snap her out of her own anguish. My breathing calmed, but tears began streaming down my cheeks. I asked, “Is he leaving because he . . . thinks I’m going to die?” My mother winced with a pang of sadness that stabbed to a depth I may never truly understand. She looked down for a moment as she took a deep breath, her bottom lip quivering, and then met my eyes with a resolute gaze. “Sweetie, you are not going to die. We’re still just trying to figure out how to make you better, and your father’s trip may be able to help with that. He’s doing it for you, Naomi. He would do anything for you, and so would I. We both love you so much.” Mother’s voice wavered as tears of her own pockmarked the bedsheet. “Now, please, try to get some rest. The medicine should be kicking in.” The days felt different after my father left. They felt . . . indistinguishable, like frames of film blurred at the edges to the point where you can’t tell where one ends, and the next begins. Doctors seemed to float around in my bleary state of existence. Their movements were choppy, like random pages missing from a flipbook. At some point, the gyrations of doctors and colors began to settle, like how water swirled in a glass comes to a rest. I remember everyone standing around my bed, and then, suddenly, they were gone, except for my mother, who held a bright purple and white chrysanthemum. She smiled and sat down on the bed like she had the night she told me my father had left, except she looked tranquil, and her eyes held a steady gaze of adoration. She placed the flower in my hands. “This one is for you, Naomi. Let’s count the petals together.” Each number she spoke sounded more distant than the last as the light in the room started to fade away from the edges, leaving only the brilliance of the flower, shimmering as if under the warm sunlight in our garden. I began to walk toward the flower, following Mother’s voice, which slipped further away until it was a distant echo. I return to the table at the Evergarden, where I am once again greeted by the little blue bird. I take the first envelope out of the box, open it, and remove the letter. My heart starts to crawl into my throat. Naomi, If you are reading this, then you have made it to the place I call the Evergarden: the best parts of our home garden, scaled up to a large, beautiful place where a lifetime of discovery waits. I am so sorry I had to leave, but I could think of no other way to save you. After we exhausted every conventional treatment method to no effect, your illness was deemed terminal. I considered this a valid assessment in the realm of conventional treatment, but as a medical professional, I have never limited myself to this realm. The need to shift from conventional to unconventional was clear, and so I began searching for other solutions. My company was in the early phases of experimental research into transferring the data and behavioral tree of mammalian brains into a virtual environment where the subject could continue life with all their memories and personality traits intact. It is the chance to live forever and still feel like you. I started to map all the addresses of stored memories in your mind and model your emotional and behavioral circuitry. This process went extremely well, and we were confident we had enough information about your brain to successfully locate your stored memories for extraction and build a model that would emulate your personality and decision-making logic; we had your behavior and a map of your data. The only piece we had not solved was the actual transfer of memory data. In every test prior, extensive inflammation of the subject’s brain would cause data corruption of both the transferred and remaining portions of the data, manifesting false memories and aggressive behavior. A vegetative state and, ultimately, death then followed. We worked day and night to figure out how to transfer the data while maintaining its integrity throughout the process, again exhausting all conventional methods. One evening in the lab, I noticed a tingling sensation on some of my fingers. I had been deep in thought, unconsciously fiddling with something in my pocket. Chrysanthemum petals. I discovered the sensation was due to compounds in Chrysanthemum indicum, which contain anti-inflammatory properties different from those of typical steroidal and non-steroidal drugs. I wondered if a concentrated form of the extract, if potent enough, could be used to keep the swelling at a level that would not interfere with the transfer process. I gathered as many of the purple chrysanthemums from our garden as I could and formulated an incredibly potent compound. I was confident in this new approach; however, the problem of testing it remained. Advancing studies to the human testing stage would take a long time, and we could not afford to wait. At the same time, I could not bear the thought of the potential side effects corrupted data would create for you. I had to be sure it would work, so I decided to test it on myself. Telling your mother that I would not be coming back was the hardest thing in the world, but this was the only way I could be sure. As you now know, the test was a success. However, there was another complication. Because there was no time to accurately model my behavior, only the data of my memories were transferred, which you have here in these letters. This essentially means that I am a read-only dataset that you cannot interact with, but in an effort to still be relevant in your later years, I spent my final days thinking about what our family’s life together would have been and the strong person you are and will continue to be. I hope you still feel like a part of me is with you, not just as a record of the past but also as a companion in the future. When her time comes, your mother will join us, and I look forward to the day when we can count the petals on the flowers in our garden. I love you with all my heart, Dad I fold the letter and place it back into the box. Although I now know the tears on my face are produced by an emotional algorithm, they still feel real as a gentle breeze dries them, cooling my skin. I look up at the bird, which in turn cocks its head. And just as I begin to think about this as rudimentary programmed behavior, a gust of manufactured wind carries a soft howl from the distance, which the bird immediately turns to and flies away. As it disappears into the orange light, guided by song, the feeling of hope from knowing it might find who it’s been waiting for fades away into a terrible awareness. Elliott Dahle is a software engineer and indie game developer living in Austin, Texas. He enjoys writing science fiction and horror stories.

Anna Karenina didn’t die under a train. She divorced her husband and lives with Vronsky and their daughter, Annie, in St. Petersburg. She and her ex have joint custody of Serezha, who is a fantastic big brother and goes on vacations with his new family to Italy, where Anna and Vronsky know the art scene thanks to Vronsky’s post-military occupation as a collector. He and Anna don’t see much of his cousin, Betsy, because Anna can’t forgive the hypocrisy. When Anna went public about her relationship with Vronsky – and how could she not, after they all went on a carousel ride and, as the only one sober because she was pregnant, she rushed to him in front of everyone when he got his leg stuck trying to dismount – Betsy broke off their friendship and badmouthed her to mutual friends. One of them insulted her and stormed out when Anna ran into her at the opera. Anna will never understand why these people think it’s fine to cheat on your spouse discreetly, but unforgivable to bring your affair into the open because you want an honest life. She’d hoped for a more enlightened attitude; it’s the late nineteenth century, after all. At this point, though, she’s done worrying about public opinion. Also, she’s busy. She’s worked her way up to head librarian in their local library, because, far from the emotional wreck people mistake her for, she has a logical mind and solid organizational skills. Due to her efforts, this library boasts the city’s largest collection of English novels. She also recently finished her children’s book, which a publisher quickly bought because there is a growing need for material to help kids navigate their parents’ divorces. Of course, Vronsky’s mother doesn’t miss an opportunity to criticize her for hiring a nanny and working outside the home, but Anna just keeps sending her journal articles on the woman question. She and Vronsky have talked about getting married, but with her experience, she has no desire to do it again. She’s filled with unmitigated rage each time she remembers having to sneak back into her own house to bring Serezha his birthday presents after her husband decided she wasn’t a good mother because she fell in love with somebody else and liked having sex with him. (She does really like it, and laughs at herself for that scene she made the first time, babbling about sin and forgiveness while Vronsky felt like he’d murdered her, a display fitting for moralistic novels but absurd in real life). From what she hears, her bureaucrat ex is dating that psychics-obsessed psychopath who lied to Serezha about his mother being dead, but Anna stipulated in the divorce agreement that the woman is not allowed to be with him unsupervised, and at least the ex and his weirdly shaped ears are now someone else’s problem. She and Vronsky fight less because she knows there’s no one to be jealous of, the nightmares and need for drugs are gone, and she stopped feeling suicidal once she decided she wasn’t going to let any man write her out of the narrative. Dolly, Anna’s sister-in-law, is also doing well. She has finally separated from her philandering husband, Stiva, who, as if flings with French governesses weren’t enough, had the gall to ask her to sell her share of her family’s estate to cover his debts. She’d always blamed herself for the state of their marriage: he felt neglected because she was too wrapped up in their six (6) children; she was too drab and disfigured by pregnancy for him to want her. Growing up, she was conditioned by family members and male novelists to believe that women’s calling was marriage and motherhood and that if you had problems in the former, you still had to dissolve yourself in the latter. Angry and embarrassed, she recalls how she understood nothing of her son’s math and Latin lessons but was an expert on bassinette design. And then she went to visit Anna and Vronsky and there was Anna, who didn’t know how many teeth Annie had, didn’t breastfeed and used birth control, and was busy helping Vronsky build a local hospital; not only did the world not stop spinning, but it moved more brightly in her direction. Dolly understood that it’s the unhappy families that resemble each other because the wives are all miserable; happiness, on the other hand, was individual, and she needed to find hers. She is deeply grateful to Anna for taking her side while being Stiva’s sister because Anna knew what it was like being stuck in an unworkable marriage; she is also grateful to Anna for introducing her to skin creams and hairdressers. Following her sister-in-law’s example, Dolly put her younger kids into childcare and is turning her forcibly acquired life skill into a profession by training wet nurses and organizing for their improved working conditions. Whenever Stiva begs her to come back and she feels herself weakening, she reminds herself that her road to fulfillment does not consist of analyzing the contents of her children’s diapers. Unlike her older sister, Kitty is depressed. She adores baby Mitia, but she’s exhausted from having to take care of him by herself, including the never-ending breastfeeds. She wishes Kostia was as concerned about her now as when she was pregnant. If she hears one more time, “Remember how I didn’t warm up to our son until I found you standing with him in that rainstorm, while you bonded with him right away because women are naturally maternal,” she will start pelting him with the glass baby bottles she got for the surreptitious formula feeds. She’s had to face the painful truth about her marriage. She convinced herself she loved Kostia because Vronsky dumped her. She curses having gone to that party and watching Anna and Vronsky fall in love on the dance floor, although she gives Anna credit for feeling guilty and asking Dolly to pass on her apologies. She realizes the game they played where one of them wrote the first letter and the other had to guess the word screwed them up because they mistook their seamless communication for love when it was just good friends’ familiarity with each other’s thoughts. She will also never stop kicking herself for playing this game instead of standing up for women’s rights in the all-male discussion that was happening simultaneously. Still, the wedding was lovely, and she thinks things could have worked out with her dependable but unexciting husband if he hadn’t turned out to be so impossible to live with; having got over his fear of death, he’s now killing her. The virtue that everyone admires in him is in reality an insufferable blend of religious fervor – he had an epiphany and found God – and a self-righteousness that makes her want to throw herself under the nearest train. He’s forced them to live in the countryside and has become obsessed with best farming practices, although she’s put her foot down at having to hunt their food or spending hours making jam. There’s also his incessant lawn mowing, which he claims makes him one with nature and all creation. Meanwhile, they have no grass left. And then there’s the sexual imbalance. She was a virgin when she got married, becoming a mother soon after, without any opportunity to explore what it means to be her own woman. But she was well aware that Kostia had done plenty of exploring. She feels like throwing up whenever she recalls how he made her read his diary before their wedding. At the time, she consoled herself that his idea of not wanting any secrets between them was noble, even if his execution was deeply flawed. But now she just wants to rage, because who the hell does that? She’s admitted to herself that her jealousy wasn’t about the women he’d slept with, but because he’d gotten to sleep with other people and she hadn’t. When she realized that, she spent a week polishing off the contents of their wine cellar and binge-reading Wollstonecraft and George Sand. She badly needs to talk to someone, but she’s embarrassed to bring sex up with her sister, and her best friend, Varenka, has little experience. Kitty decides that tomorrow, when Mitia is napping, she will write to the one woman she knows who can help: Masha, Kostia’s late brother’s girlfriend, who used to be in the profession. And then she will talk to Dolly and Varenka, including reminding the latter not to spend her life taking care of everyone but herself. For Mitia’s sake, she hopes things with Kostia will work out, but just in case, she’s pre-ordering Anna’s children’s book. Female protagonists aren’t the only ones on strike. Sofia Behrs, who as a widow is using her own last name again, has written a tell-all book about life at Yasnaya Polyana, putting forth her own story because she’s more than the copyist of her husband’s drafts. Unlike her memoir and diary, which were genuflecting homages intended to soften her reputation as a hysterical shrew who made Lev’s life a living hell, Sofia paints a vivid picture of him as a tyrant demanding total allegiance to his unattainable demands and blaming her for everything, when she was simply trying to stop him giving away their estate. In passages that prompt her rage all over again, she describes her thirteen pregnancies and his diktat on breastfeeding, including when she had mastitis, her raising the eight surviving children single-handedly while he was busy reaching his daily word count, his inability to comfort her when her beloved Vania and the others died, and his disregard for her exhaustion in demanding sex which, given his stance on abstinence, is as hypocritical as high society in Anna Karenina. She admits to throwing fits and attempting to kill herself because, as she reminds her readers, you try living with that death-obsessed moralist, not to mention a vegetarian in Russia. In contrast to the image of her husband as an inherent genius in her previous writings, he emerges here as a man with the time and energy to devote himself to art, ponder God and death, and playact as a peasant because she took care of his every need. The chapter about how he snuck out of Yasnaya Polyana in the middle of the night to escape her after she’d sacrificed herself for him and their children required several bottles to write. She doesn’t hold back in her hatred for the con artist Chertkov, who was responsible for the fiasco by bamboozling her husband with all the disciple talk and turning him against her. When Lev was dying shortly after – at a train station, how ironic – Chertkov wouldn’t even let her see him, although as she explains, she was so fed up by then, she could care less. She was nervous when the book came out, but the reviews have been favorable, and she regularly receives warm letters from female readers, as well as invitations to speak at woman question events. Encouraged by the book’s success, she is at work on a long-germinating project. As much as she loves Anna Karenina as a novel, she hates that her husband used their dysfunctional relationship as material for Kitty and Levin, presenting this marriage as aspirational while pushing the woman who refused to fit into his domestic straitjacket under a train. She is impressed with Chekhov’s “Lady with a Little Dog,” which allows that Anna to have an affair without endless authorial moralizing or transportation incidents. She is working on her own variant, in which the female characters get to explore life and love on their own terms. She hopes such rewritings will give women an alternate way of seeing themselves in literature, which might be one piece among many that helps them write their own differently imagined texts and live differently unfolding lives. It does, and they do. Yelena Furman lives in Los Angeles and teaches Russian literature at UCLA. Her fiction has previously appeared in Narrative and The Willesden Herald. She co-runs Punctured Lines, a feminist blog on post-Soviet and diaspora literatures.

A perfect storm happened in 1990 for the sensory-me. I was beginning to understand what being horny meant. There’s no need for me to be elegant about the language here, because there’s nothing elegant about middle school horny-ness. I was twelve and there was this music video by Billy Idol called “Rock the Cradle of Love.” We all knew it, we all waited for it, and we all watched MTV or VH-1with our mouths slightly parted. Now, up until this point here’s what I knew: I had an opening down below, it was sensitive, and something was supposed to rub over, across, and near it. At twelve, that’s all I knew, or admitted, to know about my pink nerves. It should be noted that this was two years before my mom started to pay attention to MTV on the family room T.V, deciding “No more!” Too late Mom. I saw what I needed to see already. I saw the asses and the boobs of a few “dancers” and the mouth of Steven Tyler wide open ready to probably lick all of those things. Guns and Roses will not trash my mind now that I am suddenly a freshman in high school. Billy Idol however, alerted me to my own sexuality two years ago, Mom. Of course, I never told her any of that. Let’s back up to the dark apartment on some unnamed city block. So there’s this young neighbor girl around sixteen years old who knocks on the apartment door of an older man. Likely, he’s about thirty years old, and because there was no dialogue about anything related to the inappropriateness of the age gap and her being a minor, it was what it was: 1990. PS- I’d never let my daughters watch this portrayal of the fantasy of a minor. But again, I didn’t see or understand that aspect as a middle-schooler in 1990. I only saw the lust and desire that this man had for this girl. And, well, I wanted to be her in many ways. Or so I thought. I didn’t really. I wanted fantasy. I wanted the tingle. What I did learn from this video was my own potential and power as a female. I learned how the female body can spark certain feelings in onlookers. Basically, this video taught me what it meant to turn someone on—-something I wouldn’t practice until years after, but the awareness was there. Isn’t that the first step toward truth? Once this unnamed neighbor girl enters the business professional’s apartment, she claims her stereo is broken and asks if she can play her cassette in his stereo. Oh, the days of directed dialogue, leading up to the music video’s plot before the music even begins! His apartment is posh, modern, and clearly urbane in the white privilege sense of the word. She pops the cassette in, and Billy Idol graces the big screen of the man’s television on the wall. In 1990, the average consumer couldn’t afford flat screen TVs on the wall or anywhere, so clearly this man had enormous amounts of money. As Billy lip syncs his own song, the girl begins to strip down to her bra and skirt and performs some basic seductive dance moves. Acting aloof and as if she’s in her own world, but clearly knowing exactly what she’s doing as the man trembles, drops his glass, and fidgets all over his apartment. He’s in such a startled state, uncertain of where his eyes should be, and really where he should be in terms of the entire apartment. I mean, he should’ve asked her kindly to leave, but Billy Idol and the girl’s black lingerie have him in a chokehold. Same as my eyes. It all made my crotch tingly. The movement of her body and the man’s awareness of her made me think about my own femininity and what I was able to conjure if given the opportunity. I didn’t have breasts yet because I was a late bloomer, but I knew they’d be dazzling enough to get a second glance from boys in a couple years’ time. At this point, I had never kissed a boy with tongue—only pecks on the cheek. Now, I am a believer in art and its influence, but I do not, under any circumstance, believe that art can force people to do things they’re not supposed to do. Art cannot cause a person to harm someone else or in this case, find an older man and seduce him with a Billy Idol-led strip tease. We have free will, and when we are guided through life with rights and wrongs from role models; we make our own decisions. Though my crotch tingled and I enjoyed this video, I didn’t have sex until I was almost nineteen years old. Orgasms? Many, but never from actual sex. The discernment is stupid, but I’m saying it anyway. The other music videos that created a bit of a nerve-ending ruckus in my pants were “Ragdoll” by Aerosmith and “Cold Hearted Snake” by Paula Abdul. “Ragdoll” was about Steven Tyler’s sexy-ugly face more than anything else. His mouth made me feel things. The way he led with it, a kid with raging hormones couldn’t help but envision the way he’d use those lips on my mouth. The last minute and a half of the video is what got me. Steven kissing the woman on the porch. The opening scene of the video is the drummer banging between a bass and a snare drum being held upright in the street. For a sensory-me, the drumbeat set the thrilling, sex-in-the-air pace. The drumbeat got me in a headspace of what I didn’t even know about yet—a sort of Burlesque-peep show-Amsterdam energy with people strutting, tongues hanging out, and people moaning behind closed doors. Paula Abdul’s “Coldhearted Snake” is the most obvious in its sensuality—a bunch of scarcely clothed dancers slipping and sliding all over each other’s bodies at a fluid pace and with facial expressions that invoked nothing but sex on display. That video was a music-centric orgy with really cool outfits and dance moves—the way the human bodies sort of slid over and around each other, like it was what they were born to do. I mean, isn’t it? The thing about these videos and their appearance on my TV was that you never really knew when they’d be on. Maybe I was in tune to the latest best video countdown, and it was highly likely they’d be in the rotation? Or maybe, it was just a stroke of luck. Yes, I said stroke. I’d watch from the corner of my eye. My wide eye. My parents never really noticed. The things that really counted were invisible anyway, like the tingling in the body and the rush of something warm filling in the spaces, and the acute awareness of my femininity. It makes me chuckle that the “Paradise City” video was the catalyst for my Mom to say, “No more MTV for a while! It’s garbage.” Oh Mom…If you only knew. Axl Rose had nothing on Steven and Billy. Maybe to other kids, but there was something about the entire direction of the “Rock the Cradle” video. The way it was shot, the darker lighting, and the many red paint colors in the apartment scenario. Or Billy’s tongue. Was it the worst thing in the world to learn of the crotch tingle from Music Television? Rock and Roll has been synonymous with sex since the beginning of time, so why should it stop at pop music? The instances in which most of us learn about the crotch tingle range from posters, commercials, sitcoms, movies, magazine pages all the way to the real-life waiter or waitress taking our order at the local pizzeria when we’re thirteen years old. Art can be sex, and I think that’s fabulous. If you see a woman in Doc Martens drooling over a 1964 Chevy Impala like it’s candy, it’s probably Elaina. Her first two books are Italian Bones in the Snow and Black Licorice. Elaina’s poems and prose have been published in various mags and journals. She’s the editor of 50 Give or Take with Vine Leaves Press and lives on the Jersey Shore with her husband and daughters.

The last time I saw Tango Master was downtown in front of Veracrúz Church. A busted gramophone sputtered on the sidewalk in front of the stone chapel. I was sitting on a bench across the avenue, waiting, sweating under the before-shower sun, irritated with the slowdown of life in the dank heat. A collective whisper leapt: It’s him! I jumped to see the elder showman pause in front of all that crumpled architecture and adjust his suit and tie. He started gliding around, eyes semi-closed. One arm was raised: his wrist was circled with string. Attached to this string was a cloth puppet: a saddening woman with a dark bob. Her vino-tinto dress whiffed across her knees. Tango Master held her blank face to his cheek. His feet slunk over the pockmarked tar, and he paused, dipped, straightened his back. She did the same. He closed his eyes, reached up to touch his cap with his fingertips. She reached with her padded hand. Her woven heels moved within the beat of his dusted wingtips. We didn’t say a word. There was no music: they were still warming up. A few more steps, then a little stumble. His poise fell, his arms slipped to his waist, she drooped over his thin shoulder. Tango Master took a long persuasive stride, then bent and placed his partner on a plastic tarp lying next to the gramophone. He unhooked the strings from his wrist and released his friend. He straightened his back, his shoulders, his tie. He lifted his hat, revealing a crooked nest of hair on his grainy scalp, and slid around the square of sidewalk. Some people deposited money into his cap. Tango Master nodded, wisely hid the cash, and returned to the gramophone. In the following scratchy moment, he ran to retrieve his partner. They fastened themselves to one another and floated into position at the center of the crowd. A purple milonga emanated from the cracked cornucopia. It grew, dipped, stretched. We watched antique melodies ripple and reveal the floating figures of Tango Master and his doll as they danced in front of posters peeling to the ground, damp with humidity, even under the before-shower sun. Rants and harmonious groans steamed our psyches. The mechanical horn belched. Sparks from the vinyl record stuck in my sideburns and accordion notes flung themselves at old Veracrúz Church. Tango Master’s cap flew off at a spin. It settled near a young woman. She picked it up. As the duo swung their way to the other side of the clearing, the nest of hair on Tango Master’s dome fluttered. Our inner ears churned as we inhaled the velvet swoon. The couple dipped over holes in the concrete. The rhythm was too much. The feeling was out of control. We tried to swallow our tears as Tango Master’s dance pulled us into the bowels of our deepest, most melodramatic recollections. We shut our eyes, revisiting failed admissions and car accidents and our first real breakups. We won our first trophies and lost our religion. I found myself tapping my toes as I ran a deadly half-marathon, years earlier, and then clenched my jaw as I recalled the result of that race: a melodious ingrown toenail. Strangers by my side made similarly anguished noises and faces. We swayed and swerved to the tango. At the end of the dance I was sweatier than before, and exhausted. I remember turning to leave, shirt damp and hair slick, heart pounding. I had heard only that one song. To watch the full ricochet of dance moves in the street takes time. It takes years of avoiding bursting clouds, years of sprinting two blocks over during lunch. I had to return to work before getting soaked by the incoming rain. Tango Master and his friend glanced my way. He lifted a hand, and his woven companion did the same. I waved back, hopefully in time with their tune. He recognized me: I was sure of it. He knew I spent my lunches there, waiting for a memory, every other day. Behind me the crowd applauded: their affections overflowed in front of old Veracrúz Church. I crossed the avenue, patting my forehead with a cloth and wondering if his woven friend had a name, not yet knowing the elderly showman was dancing his last tango. Johan Alexander's work has received support from Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance, and he was a member the Periplus Collective cohort in 2022. His writing appears in LatineLit Summer '22 and Unstamatic, and is forthcoming from LatineLit Spring '23, Eunoia Review, the Periplus Anthology, and elsewhere. Born in Medellin, Colombia, he currently lives in Portland, Maine.

In 2011, you couldn’t find many places in Seoul, South Korea selling Mexican food, authentic or Americanized. Choi’s Tacos, a small, privately owned Mexican eatery, walking distance from Yonsei University, where I was attending graduate school, was a rare exception. That year, Taco Bell made the very ruthless and/or savvy (depending on your feelings about international corporate capitalism) choice to set up a new location in the building across the street from Choi’s. Fellow graduate student, Evan*, an American like me, decided to champion Choi’s Tacos cause. Evan, also like me, had taught English at Korean public schools for two years in the southern part of South Korea before attending our small global studies program, in which half the students were Korean nationals and half were foreigners. Evan often became red-faced and righteously angry when tactlessly sharing his many opinions, embodying the rudeness and entitlement of American stereotypes. He complained loudly about how Koreans treated foreigners, assuming prejudice even when there wasn’t much evidence. He enjoyed riling people up, claiming things like: “Abraham Lincoln was a tyrant.” In a discussion on Barack Obama, he tried to explain that many people from his home state saw the current President as “just another n-word”, but because he said the actual word, he rightly offended a lot of people. Evan hated that Taco Bell. He told us not to eat there and encouraged people to go to Choi’s Tacos instead, where they’d encounter an affable Mr. Choi, a big man with round glasses and apron who spoke English fairly well because he’d spent some years in the US. The restaurant was almost too well lit with fluorescent lights and small, with just a few tables and a basic menu. Evan went there multiple times a day, trying to save the small business by eating as many quesadillas as he could. Occasionally, Evan had valid points: Taco Bell could handily outcompete Mr. Choi, and sometimes, policies towards foreigners in Korea were unfair, and unfortunately, some Korean people were prejudiced or ignorant. Although, as graduate students (especially white students, like Evan and me), we generally experienced far less discrimination than other groups of foreigners, like migrant laborers from Southeast and South Asia, and we could return to our home countries and easily find employment. Anytime I started to like Evan, he’d do something offensive again and I’d feel like he deserved to be ostracized. I tried to avoid Evan, but our program was too small. During breaks from the semester, I worked at an English camp for elementary students at the Yonsei campus. Evan worked there, too. *** When I lived in Korea, I volunteered for a few North Korean human rights organizations, helping them edit English news articles as well as some documents to present to the United Nations and assisted with some charity events. I volunteered with these groups before I started attending Yonsei, when I was still teaching full time at a public school in Ulsan, South Korea. In South Korea, NK human rights groups are associated with Christian missionaries, right-wing politics, and pro-US and anti-China stances. I’ve met and seen online plenty of international cheerleaders for North Korea’s government, who doubt that North Korean society is as bad as activists claim it is because they associate maligning NK with pro-USA propaganda. There have been incidents of activists lying about or exaggerating situations in NK, including the well-known Shin Dong Hyuk, who was born and raised in a concentration camp but escaped. He admitted recently that he had lied about some details of his past out of shame. I’ve met pastors and activists that admit to entering China illegally to escort NK refugees through the country, and when you ask them about these trips, they understandably are loath to give out many details about when these trips happen, the routes they take, or the exact locations of families that receive aid. Most of them look fatter, older, or nerdier than the type of person you’d imagine as an international secret agent guiding refugees over kilometers of land and past multiple borders into countries that won’t repatriate them, such as Thailand. Some of these activists also get healthcare, food, education, and other needed supplies to North Korean children and families in China. It is Chinese policy to repatriate North Korean nationals caught on Chinese land, often forcing North Koreans to leave their children behind, including many children with North Korean mothers and Chinese fathers. These children have a hard time accessing social services, including food, healthcare, and education, because they or their North Korean mothers entered the country illegally, and they are not official Chinese citizens. Of course, these activities cause some tension between South Korea and China. Most foreigners who are curious about NK human rights don’t immediately understand how Koreans view the movement. In 2011, I volunteered, along with some other Americans and Koreans, at an event raising money for this cause. We stood around our little table on a street corner with a box for collecting cash along with activist performers playing instruments or wearing fake chains, near crowded bars in Seoul. A drunk European man, seemingly very offended, called us idiots and American imperialists for getting involved with causes that had nothing to do with us. Instead, we should worry about poor people back in America. At first I thought he was not too serious, but he got louder and more aggressive. I wanted to ignore him, but my friend argued back. He got close to her face, and his friends egged him on. I was protective of her, wanting to get her away from him as she started to cry while telling him to mind his business. Eventually, his friends pulled him away. She removed herself from the crowd and went down some alleyway where she squatted and curled her tall body into a small ball. I followed her and tried to rationalize how he was wrong because I am not good at comforting people, and I was trying to convince myself, too, while secretly wondering if he had a point. I suspect that his anger stemmed more from a dislike of Americans than any actual knowledge or feelings about NK. However, the incident made me consider, why did I, an American, feel like I should get involved with North Korean human rights issues? The question continued to nag at me. For a graduate school class on social movements, I interviewed some American NK human rights activists, trying to understand why this cause moved them. Was it their religious beliefs? The mystique of knowing more than most people about a mysterious society? An act of rebellion? Did they have Cold War fetishes, spy fantasies, a fascination with dystopias? Or was their motivation simpler, like, they found friends and community among the activists? The answer for each person was a different combination of all those reasons. Sometimes the cause just moved them, they just wanted to help those people, and they couldn’t tell me exactly why. However, no matter what initially interests someone in a particular cause, they need to feel a part of the community surrounding that cause to sustain their activism in the long term. *** Choi’s Tacos eventually did go out of business some months after Taco Bell moved in. “Mr. Choi is nice,” one of my friends admitted while sitting in the freshly painted yellow and purple dining room inside of Taco Bell. “But his food is more expensive and this Taco Bell is pretty good, better than back in the States. Plus, if I go to Choi’s, I’m afraid Evan will be there, and I don’t want to have to talk to him.” Ironically, Evan’s enthusiasm for saving Choi’s Tacos might have actually scared customers away. Maybe that drunken European might have donated to North Korean children if Americans weren’t the ones asking. In activism, both big and small, who delivers the outrage can matter more than the cause itself. *** One of my graduate school professors brought in an American woman activist to talk to students in our program about the NK human rights movement to inspire more students, especially the Koreans, to care more about the issue. She gave a short talk about North Koreans and the human rights abuses they experience. Though some activists have lied or embellished stories from NK, there is a significant amount of evidence of widespread human rights abuses. North Korean political prisoners are sometimes sent to concentration camps and subject to communal punishments. Much of the population suffers from lack of nutrition, and illicit drug use and production is rumored to be encouraged by the government. There is little open communication between cities and towns, extreme censorship, rampant sexism, religion is banned, and so on. When the floor opened up for questions, I asked something like: “As foreigners, we can bring different resources and perspectives to the issue, but how do foreigners respect the South Korean perspective? If North Korea collapses and millions of North Koreans suddenly become South Korean citizens, or if North Korea starts a new war, we can just leave. South Koreans are the ones who will suffer, die, and have to rebuild their society. If they join a North Korean human rights group, they get social backlash from other Koreans. How do we ask them to care, when they have much more to lose than we do?” The professor who had invited the American woman activist, a South Korean middle-aged man, known for right-wing views, yelled at me in front of everyone. He said I was disrespectful, and he was offended by my question. Truthfully, I didn’t mean to disrespect him or the activist woman because I was wrestling with those questions myself. Thank you, one of my fellow graduate students, a Korean man, texted me in secret as the professor scolded me. It is different for us. *** After the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, I saw a left-wing podcaster post on Twitter that instead of donating to help Ukrainians, Americans should be donating to homeless people and food kitchens in their own country. To me, this sounded strikingly like right-wing Americans who bemoan any expansion of social safety nets for immigrants or the poor when “ThErE aRe HoMeLeSs VeTeRaNs”, even if they don’t help veterans themselves. I’ve seen people debate the freedom, corruption, or racism of Ukrainian society. Debating whether or not Ukrainian people are moral enough to receive international aid feels like a dangerous slide into apathy, like, refusing to help NK refugees because some have exaggerated their litanies of hardship or because Americans offend you. Is it different from Fox News pundits arguing that some Black American victims of police brutality don’t deserve sympathy or justice because they had a criminal record? The victims’ flaws aren’t really the point. They’re just excuses to not care, or in many cases, to dehumanize the victims, to paint them as deserving of their suffering. Yet, the podcaster did have a point, sort of—why were white, Ukrainian refugees suddenly more important than a starving American neighbor? As others have noted, why do these refugees get more grace, attention, and sympathy from the West than those suffering from war in Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, or the millions of climate and economic refugees, mostly black and brown people, in the Global South? How much do our own biases, prejudices, racism, or personal interests influence whom we help or how we virtue signal? Activism and charitable organizations exist within a competitive market for funds and attention. Breast cancer fundraising, due to the marketing prowess, is often more successful than other types of cancer fundraising. How much money is spent on panda conservation while less cute animals are overlooked? People rail against nonprofits for wanting overhead, but some projects are complex and need well-trained employees to succeed, and how can an organization, in good conscience, help the poor and disadvantaged if they don’t pay their employees a living wage (many don’t)? In the marketplace of activism and outrage, whether or not you successfully make people care relies on successful navigation of both practical issues and peoples’ perceptions and identities. *** At the end of the summer, the teachers, both Korean and foreign, who worked at that Yonsei English camp went out to get celebratory drinks. Evan was there, as were some other foreign teachers. An Irish teacher went on a long rant about how Americans were idiots for being offended by the word cunt. In Ireland, it was just a common insult. One of the American women said: “Maybe if someone from Ireland called me that word, I wouldn’t care, but I think if an American man calls a woman that, you know he means to hurt you. It’s not the same.” We ended up at a Canadian-owned bar with a selection of foreign beers and thin-crust pizza. Most of the teachers went home after a couple of drinks, except for me, Evan, and one of the Korean teachers, a woman, around twenty years old. Evan and this young woman, Young Mi*, were getting very drunk while playing a game, ruining a deck of playing cards with greasy fingers and beer-glass sweat. I went to the bar to talk to the bartenders and some acquaintances, keeping an eye on Evan and Young Mi, knowing that they were probably getting too drunk to get home by themselves. Suddenly Evan yells, “Hey Jennifer, come here! Come here, you, CUNT!” That word echoed through the whole bar. No man had ever called me a cunt before, not to my face. Evan was not Irish. He was American. It wasn’t a funny joke. The whole bar grew silent, and I felt pairs and pairs of eyes on me, waiting for my reaction. *** To confront why we do or don’t care often leads to a realization that we may benefit from our activism (getting involved in North Korean activism makes you more interesting at cocktail parties) or from others’ suffering (asking people to care about Choi’s Tacos means asking them to give up the convenience and allure of capitalist junk food). Can we be critical of and reform how people care without shaming people out of caring, totally? People care so little, so rarely about things beyond their own lives, even if they’re imperfect carers. I’m afraid to criticize, too harshly, how and what people care about. Wouldn’t total apathy be worse? On the other hand, I think about how much damage failed international development projects can do, how much money can be wasted on fancy ideas that rich, privileged people have that don’t actually make sense in practice (piles of expensive unused computers for kids in classrooms with unreliable electricity come to mind). Caring too much about things you don’t understand well can actively be harmful, and is perhaps, at times, worse than apathy. I’m lucky to be able to debate the politics of caring—I’m not starving, in a warzone, dying of some terminal disease. No matter your intentions, when you talk about charity or activism, you always, somehow, sound like an ass. There is always something you should care about more, and passionate activism or taking offense about anything always says something about the person who cares. *** Shortly before I was about to leave Korea, Chae Won*, a human rights activist I met while volunteering, invited me to stop by her organization’s office because the staff wanted to formally thank me before I moved away. I admired this woman–she’s always seemed focused on helping people, and not particularly interested in political or religious posturing. She worked tirelessly, without losing patience or becoming deterred. Honestly, I didn’t think my helping with a few events and lightly editing some documents needed to be specially acknowledged. I had realized, too, that I lacked the intelligence, advanced language skills, investment, and passion to effectively help the North Korean human rights movement. However, it would have been rude to refuse a very kind gesture on the part of her staff, and it felt like I had been invited into some elite club. “Another American student is also coming,” Chae Won told me before I arrived at the office. “He’s volunteered a lot with us. We’ve got small gifts for both of you.” I was sitting in the small office, meeting the staff, composed mostly of shy men with big smiles and thick glasses, when suddenly, I heard Evan’s voice at the door. “This is Evan,” Chae Won told me. “Have you met before? I think you’re both at Yonsei?” We forced smiles and joked. We ate cake, and they made us take pictures on two chairs placed in the center of a room. “It looks like you’re getting married!” Chae Won teased. I pretended I wasn’t insulted by people joking I should marry this very annoying individual who thought it was funny to call me a cunt in front of a bar full of people. Evan also didn’t seem charmed by the joke; in the past, he had repeatedly stated his preference for dating Korean women, not fellow white Americans. Evan being there made me feel less special. I wonder if I would have continued to volunteer if he had come to the same events I attended, if I knew he was this active with this group and had to worry about the social backlash among my grad-school friends from being associated with him. Like me, Evan moved back to the states. From his social media, it seems like he became active in the Blacklivesmatter movement, joining a few protests. I’ve only supported police reform activism through modest donations. I’ve not yet, unlike him, actually marched for that cause. *** At that dimly lit bar, melting snow dripping down the large windows, the word cunt uttered from someone who already annoyed me, who thought that joking made demeaning words okay, who loved attention on his “good” deeds and sometimes embarrassed me as a fellow American, felt like a hot slap across the face. Yet, Evan and Young Mi were very drunk. If I got in a fight with Evan, it would ruin Young Mi’s night and make an awkward situation for everyone at the bar. This offense was so much smaller than human rights abuses, or war, or even Choi’s Tacos being run out of business, but, in that moment, I still had to navigate the politics of caring. To care enough to loudly scold Evan and leave him there, dramatically, everyone watching, might have been what he deserved. It might’ve taught him another lesson on overstepping boundaries. I would get praise and encouragement from my fellow students who loved to be offended by Evan. I put my beer down and walked over to Evan. “Don’t call me that again,” I told him quietly, choosing not to care (much). “When do you guys want to go home?” I helped them get home later that night because I would’ve felt guilty. Because the thought of him seducing Young Mi made me roll my eyes. Though he probably wouldn’t have done anything inappropriate to Young Mi, whatever his other flaws. He was stumbly drunk, himself, and if he had called the wrong person a cunt, that other person might not have been as forgiving as me. I wanted to feel like a good person, and not like a person who got in a fight over the appropriateness of a word that could hit so much differently, depending on who has said it to whom. Sometimes, I think, it’s okay to care enough to help someone, when you actually are the right person to help, even when other people might question why. *names have been changed for privacy Jennifer Jeanne McArdle‘s work can be found on her website: https://jenniferjeannemcardle.blogspot.com/ Author’s note: An essay about working with nonprofits, the North Korean human rights activism in South Korea, some wrestling with morality, offense, and passion for causes.

The Gaze as She Leaves the Country Club’s Annual Cocktail Party They want you to think you’re aggressive or even a little hysterical But your womb was removed when they found a blossom-end rot They want you to smile because it might never happen But of course you know it already has They want you to starve yourself and act like Martha Stewart But store bought brownies get eaten first while yours are left to molder in the tin They want you to freeze your face and plump your lips But then you’d look like artificial intelligence or a Nicole Kidman wannabe They don’t want your opinion or to hear you say the ‘c’ word And they definitely don’t want you to talk about misplacing your orgasm So you took stock over a plate of canapés And after eating five you still felt empty But you knew—you were not aggressive You are assertive (and at this age there are so many worse things you could be) On Twitter someone posted about speaking from the scar not the wound And people (mostly men) asked—but what does that mean? You wanted to add an eye roll emoji as wasn’t it obvious A wound is too raw, like licked lips in a bitter wind But a scar is raised and hard and a constant reminder you survived So the next time a man (and it was always a man) Told you to calm down—relax You roused a riot in your throat And baring your scarred chest You told him to suck your tattooed nipple And as you left the club to drive to the all night diner You conceded—after two decades of dieting Maybe you were a little hangry Contemplating your usual omelet You knew you no longer wanted this egg white life So you ordered the lumberjack pancakes with extra bacon And before you even took a bite You were suddenly full up Imagining The Taste of Longing Imagine a person is a hotel / not the four seasons / more like a quick roadside stop-over / waiting for the key in the door / wondering if a bedroom servicing will be ordered / or if a sometimes husband will prefer the mini bar In the dark / you require redemption / but find only the devil / burning hearts / so you order a door dashing hero / not caring Taco Bell fry the peppers in the oil from the meat / your life was always about cross contamination Imagine a lifetime of cravings / pretending your marriage was a cheesy roll up of days / even when he sang that Springsteen song / about you not being a beauty / and you found yourself / believing it And when he leaves / you find / you don’t mind / as for the longest time you’ve only found a Cinnabon delightful / and you can get your cravings filled online / giddy that you get rewarded just for ordering Imagine a restaurant with two health warnings / like the devil’s diner / abandon your waistlines / all who enter / tapping your fingers / to the rain / inside yourself / how can you care / who the bell tolls for / when it’s taco Tuesday every day Adele Evershed was born in Wales and now lives in Connecticut. 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, and her first poetry chapbook, Turbulence in Small Places will be published next year by Finishing Line Press.

Shannon lifted her face toward the open sky, waiting impatiently for the passing of a shooting star. John spotted one after another, their tails cutting through navy blue darkness and disappearing before Shannon could readjust her focus. The house next door was silent, and the two siblings whispered to accommodate unseen neighbors behind darkened windows. It wasn’t raining yet. It had rained every night since the first week of June. The tourists never quite learned when to pack up and get inside, but John and Shannon knew. They grew up here, they were sun-rusted townies and always would be. They could detect the slightest shift in air pressure, the smallest drop in temperature, a system of warnings baked into their skin. “When do you leave?” Shannon asked, the wicker chair groaning beneath her shifting weight. “I haven’t decided yet. Maybe tomorrow. More likely Monday. Sunday flights are too expensive.” “Sure,” Shannon said. “Bad luck to fly on Sundays, anyway.” “What about you?” John asked. “I don’t know. I don’t think I should leave yet. What is Mom gonna do with all this stuff, you know?” John said nothing. Shannon had all but moved back home after their father died and she kept starting the same argument with John even though she knew that it was unfair. “You could stay, too. She needs your help, too. And not just her, but me.” For most of their adult lives, Shannon had been in and out of their parents’ house, always claiming it was for the family and not because she got swallowed up by every city she tried to call home. John moved to Idaho, became a husband, became a father. John called Shannon a martyr. Unattached and unemployed, she had endless time to try on the weight on their mother’s shoulders, to fuss and coddle as if widowhood had made their mother needy, infantile. She had even more time to make John out to be the absent brother, the brother who never came home, the brother who didn’t care anymore. She knew that it was unfair but did it anyway, trying desperately to convince them both that they had more choices than they did. The sky seemed clearer somehow, each star a pinhole to a universe unseen. The tree frogs grew louder, their sheep-like bleating cutting through the thick, heavy air. The two took turns waving away mosquitos, Shannon cursing under her breath as they landed on her neck and face. Shannon opened her mouth, prepared to make small talk that would keep an argument at bay, but her jaw slackened as movement on the horizon overtook her attention. A mass—or maybe an orb, or maybe an aura—of blue mist was consuming the roof of the house next door. It moved like fog but denser, faster, propelled by some invisible force. The shape of it was hard to hold visually—Shannon noted that if it were a liquid, it would be about as viscous as oil—and the color was so vibrant, so electric blue that it hardly seemed natural. For a moment, Shannon was certain that the roof, itself, was moving away from the house as if unbound by eaves and nails. It was a moment as short as the popping of a flashbulb and equally as disorienting. As the thing kept shifting, Shannon rubbed one eyelid, then the other, wondering if it was a sign of some new disease of the brain or eye that was causing her to see this blue something. She pawed at John’s shoulder, eliciting from him a distracted swat that reminded her of long car rides and hot mornings in church pews. This wasn’t a misfiring of the ocular nerves. They both saw it. It was real. And then it was gone, moving noiselessly out of sight and disturbing nothing in its wake. “What was that?” Shannon asked. “I’m not sure,” John said. “Maybe… some kind of cloud.” Shannon stared up into the cloudless sky. “I don’t see how that’s possible,” she said. “And it had… a presence. I felt it.” “A presence?” John asked. “Yes, John, a presence.” “What kind of presence?” “Like, human. Or, no, inhuman. Otherworldly.” Shannon could feel John’s eyes on the side of her upturned face. “Maybe someone just passed away in that house,” Shannon said. “Someone what?” “Passed away. Died. Maybe what we witnessed was, I don’t know, the departure of their spirit.” “Or maybe,” John said, “it was the return of someone’s spirit. Maybe it was a guardian angel.” “Maybe it was,” Shannon said. John rolled his eyes. Shannon knew he thought she was difficult to talk to now, and not just because of the martyrdom, which John said had been part of her personality since day one. It was the spiritual stuff, which she hadn’t started gravitating toward until their father’s illness. She parroted the beliefs that he held, musing about trees having inner lives and the restlessness of an unseen dimension. When John asked her what had caused this shift, she’d said, “I have a new perspective now. Something you’d benefit from finding, yourself.” John snapped his fingers. “You know what? I just saw a video about ball lightning. It’s rare but it does happen. I bet that’s what that was.” “I know what ball lightning is,” Shannon said. “That’s not what that was. It didn’t flash. Besides, it wasn’t fast enough. It didn’t move like ball lightning. It moved sideways. I think that it might have been extraterrestrial.” “Oh, come on,” John said. “What? You can’t possibly tell me that you’re so narrow-minded that you really believe nothing else is out there.” “I didn’t say that,” John said. “I just don’t think they’re floating around the beaches of North Carolina. I mean, seriously. A UFO. Do you know who claims to have seen UFOs? Scammers. People with too much time on their hands. People who want to get on the local news. Are we those people?” “So, because other people have faked UFO sightings, you don’t think anyone will ever actually see one?” Shannon asked. “No, that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that whatever we just saw has a rational explanation and you’re going out of your way to ignore it.” “What makes my explanation less rational than yours, John?” Shannon asked, her voice glinting like shards of glass. “Who are you to say that clouds are more rational than ghosts and lightning is more rational than aliens? Do you know everything? Are you the smartest person on the planet, John?” “If you’re going to act this way,” John said, digging his fingers into his temple, “I’m going inside.” “Is that so you don’t have to admit that you’re not the smartest person on the planet?” “Jesus, Shannon,” John said, throwing his hands up in the air as if to catch something. It was a gesture that they’d both inherited from their mother. “I don’t think I’m the smartest person on the planet. You want it to be a ghost? Fine, it’s a ghost.” “I don’t think it’s for sure a ghost. I just don’t think we have any business ruling out that possibility when we don’t know what it is. I mean, what’s the point of that?” Shannon stopped speaking. She wondered what John was thinking about, sitting there with his hands balled, his lower lip tucked between his teeth. Memories of their only real fight, their one true screaming match flashed through her mind. John shouting, “If there was something wrong, the doctors would know.” Shannon shouting, “It doesn’t matter what the doctors know or don’t know. He’s dying, John.” Their mother pushing them both out into the driveway and slamming the door behind them. “Do you think it will rain tonight?” Shannon asked. “Doesn’t feel like it,” John said. “No, it doesn’t.” “I think I’ll head inside, anyway.” Shannon nodded and the two rose from their chairs and dragged them back beneath the porch awning. They slipped past the sliding glass door and up the stairs, turning in opposite directions when they reached the landing. Shannon shut the door to her childhood bedroom, wishing she’d said goodnight to John, sweet dreams, anything to show that she cared for him. She heard the sink in the bathroom open, a rush of water flowing over John’s hands and then his toothbrush. She kicked her shoes off and changed into a pair of running shorts and an old t-shirt with the words I Got Crabs at Stan’s Seafood Shack peeling off the back. Climbing into bed, she turned off the lamp beside her, not bothering to pull up the heap of twisted sheets at her feet. Thick, wet air hovered over her body. She was just beginning to drift into twilight sleep when the thin sound of her ceiling fan was overpowered by the noise of pouring rain. It beat against the windows and bounced off the leaves in the trees. When she awoke the next morning, the weatherman crackled over the radio that it was the most rain they’d gotten all week, marveling at how it managed to sneak in undetected. “I guess we never do know for sure, Doug,” the news anchor said. He never mentioned the unidentifiable blue something. Shannon wondered if John would continue to think about it, would embrace a question with no answer. She hoped that there was still value in sharing something, even if you could never agree on what it was. John found Shannon on the deck, her bare feet propped on the damp railing. She smiled at him and patted the chair next to her. “It’s wet,” she said. “Everything is.” John tipped the chair to the side, letting the puddles of water fall away before sitting down. “Some rain,” he said. “Sure was. You leaving today?” “Yeah,” he said. “Even though I’ve heard that flying on a Sunday is bad luck.” Shannon elbowed him and he elbowed her back. She chose to surprise him, to say nothing when he expected a diatribe. She could sense his tension leftover from last night, or perhaps it was a permanent wall he’d built between them. She tried to will it away as the tree frogs below bleated in praise of impossible puddles. Molly Andrea-Ryan is a prose writer and occasional poet living in Pittsburgh, PA. Her work can be found in Idle Ink, trampset, Barren Magazine, and elsewhere.

Hunger doesn't always jive with common sense. I guess that's why I went out into a February blizzard to the grocery store when it would have served me better to stay home. The A&P Supermarket was on Frankford Avenue, a gritty neighborhood in Northeast Philly. Snow fell a few inches an hour and no end in sight. At 7 p.m., there was already two feet of that white stuff atop a sheet of ice. Obviously, there were very few motorists on the road. I didn’t listen to weather advisories to stay off home. I had my own laws, and one was, no matter what the weather conditions are—a tornado, an earthquake, or a monsoon—if my refrigerator was empty, I would go to the supermarket. Hunger spoke to me on a visceral level, calling me to satisfy my cravings no matter the circumstances. And so, I bundled up with two pairs of flannel-lined pants, insulated duck boots, and a parka from L.L. Bean that was capable of withstanding thirty-below.. I was prepared to take my white Rabbit diesel into the teeth of the blizzard. Surprisingly, I made it to the supermarket. . I drove slowly and avoided streets that weren’t plowed. This isn’t so bad, I thought. The weatherman was full of shit. When walking the supermarket's parking lot, I barely stood upright, falling once and sliding the rest of the way. Not surprisingly, the A & P was empty. At first, I wondered if the store was open. There were lights on, but no customers. Then I spotted a woman wearing a hairnet at the number three checkout lane and a chubby guy at the meat department who seemed to be rearranging the cold cuts in the display case. The store was packed with merchandise, so I had no trouble finding what I needed. "You must be hungry?" said the guy whose name tag said ‘Tony’. “Can you get me some lunchmeat?” I asked. “Sure, you’ll have to get a number first,” he joked. I smiled. “Half a pound of Swiss Lorraine, a small tub of potato salad, and a pound of smoked turkey breast.” “No, problem.” “The snowstorm is giving me the munchies," I said, as Tony passed me a sample slice of turkey.” "I don't blame you," he said, scooping out some potato salad. "There's nothing to do in a snowstorm besides watching the weather on T.V. and feeding your belly." "Yeah, I hear we’re getting another one at the end of the week,” I said. “What do you expect? This is Philly.” Tony passed me the wrapped turkey and the other items, then he went back to stacking the meat case. *** Once the three shopping bags were loaded into my V.W. Rabbit, I closed the hatch and turned the key, hoping to get home before the icy rain comes and freezes up my windshield. I turned the ignition, nothing. Tried again, and it didn’t start. The third time, it almost turned over, but I didn’t want to keep pumping the gas pedal, fearing I'd flood the car. I waited a few minutes, then made another attempt; this time, I smelled gasoline and knew I was stuck. I had three bags of groceries, my engine wouldn't turn over, and I didn’t renew my AAA membership. I hurried back into the supermarket for help. "Let me ask Tony in the deli,” said the manager with the hairnet. “He usually has junk like that in his truck." Tony walked out of the backroom wearing a dirty apron and a smile on his face. “You’re lucky. What kind of car do you have?" "Rabbit Diesel," I said. "1982." "Damn, you bought one of those? Don't you know the fuel line freezes in cold weather? You should have bought a regular gasoline engine." "Yeah, I found out the hard way. Do you have any jumper cables?" "Sure do. Got ‘em in my truck. Where's your car, and we’ll start it up?" “It's that white one covered in snow in the middle of the empty parking lot." "Oh, I thought it was a snowdrift. Get inside your car, and I'll hook these babies up to my battery. I want to get you back home before the Eagles play tomorrow.” *** The engine started quickly, and I couldn’t turn up the heat and defrost soon enough. It was hard seeing out of the window with the amount of snow falling. With the street lights shining, everything appeared bright white from the snow, hurting my eyes. I must be lucky today, I thought, driving in the blizzard and having the meat guy start my car. I expected to make it home in one piece. All I had to do was go slow and not jam the brakes. But as I pulled out of the A & P, I looked both ways. I could only see about ten feet in front of me—it was a thick, snowy white fog. Just into the street, a speeding pickup came out of nowhere. It was a rumbling apparition in the form of a crazed driver, driving at deadly speeds on a snowy, icy road. A split second later, I felt a jarring crash that either signified death or a lifetime of paraplegia. My head hit the steering wheel, and I blacked out for a moment. Then, as if I were in a slow-motion dream; the fear of being a victim of a deadly collision. I told myself it was over. I was dead, but I kept feeling my achy forehead, and the world seems become a fuzzy concussion like I was viewing static electricity. My windshield shattered, and the pickup truck was stuck to the front end of my car with my hood bent in several places. I don’t remember how long I stayed inside the car, rubbing the growing welt on my forehead. A guy in a flannel shirt and a number 3 Dale Earnhardt hat asked if I was alright. “I think so?” I said, still rubbing the knot on my forehead. “You pulled out so fast; I didn’t see you.” I knew he was lying, just covering himself. I could smell the booze and cigarettes on his breath. He didn’t seem at all upset about the accident, even smiling about it—how alcoholics look when they’ve had one too many. “I need to call my insurance agent,” I said groggily. “No, don’t do that,” he pleaded. “The damage doesn’t look that bad. By the way, my name is Johnny Donnish. Pleased to meet you." If I called the insurance company or the cops, he’d be in hot water. He’d never pass a breathalyzer. “Why don’t I drive you home,” he offered, acting faux friendly. “You can work this out with your insurance company in the morning.” There were a lot of factors that went into my dumb decision to agree. It was freezing, I had a splitting headache, and couldn’t think or see straight. Instead of chancing he’d get angry, I deferred, thinking he would drive me back to my place and I’d handle the car issue tomorrow. “Okay,” I said, “but I want to go straight home.” “Sure,” he said, grinning like a Cheshire cat. As soon as I got into his beer garden of a truck, my anxiety level hit the roof. There were at least a dozen empty beer cans in the car, a load of cigarette butts on the floor, a crowbar, and what looked like a hunting rifle in the back seat. As he started the car, I imagined him side-swiping a dozen vehicles on the way home. “You mind if I stop at this club for a minute? It’s down the street. Have to clear something up with a buddy and we’ll be back on the road in no time.” I didn’t trust this loser. Johnny Donnish would have me sitting in the truck for hours, freezing my ass off while he was downing one shot glass after another. There was probably an APB on him for a slew of other crimes, like running over a pedestrian. A whole SWAT team was after him. I’d likely be viewed as an accomplice if I was caught in his truck. I reached for the door handle, and he grabbed my shoulder. “And where are you going?” “I changed my mind, Johnnie. My friend is going to pick me up instead. Go ahead to the club without me. Stay as long as you like.” Johnny Donnish gave me a menacing stare. “I thought I was taking you home. It’s not very friendly to agree to something and change your mind. I noticed Johnny's hand clenching and thought the man was about to strike me, steal my wallet, and dump my body in the Delaware. Just then, there was a knock on the window. Tony, the deli guy, was wearing a beanie and gloves along with his A&P apron. He motioned me to roll down the window. “Hey, I’m getting off from work soon. I’ll be glad to take you home.” Johnny Donnish didn’t say anything. He watched as I quickly opened the door, reached into the backseat for my groceries, and left with Tony. Johnny Donnish didn’t say anything, sped off crazily in three feet of snow and ice, spinning and swerving into tires spinning. “I wasn’t going to let you leave with that maniac, buddy. Look what he did to your car. If I had let you in that truck with him, I couldn’t live with myself.” We both looked at my totaled car covered in snow, and walked back to the supermarket. “I don’t know why I agreed to go, Tony. I wasn’t thinking straight.” “Nothing makes sense when you’re stuck in a blizzard. All you want to do is get out of it.” I waited for the police to arrive and told them the whole story, about how a man named Johnny Donnish who wore a number-3 Dale Earnhardt hat and was driving drunk down Frankford Avenue. I told the officer about the shotgun in the backseat, and he was heading to another bar. I felt safe for the first time tonight in Tony’s all-wheel-drive Jeep, knowing that soon I’d be home, safe and warm. “Next time, I’m going to eat what’s in the refrigerator,” I told Tony, who turned down my street. Once I got inside my apartment, I made a turkey sandwich. Mark Tulin is a recovering therapist who's been told that he writes like Edward Hopper used to paint.