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The gym I went to was old-school. No internet/wireless. No air-conditioning. It had racks and plates and bars and dumbbells that went to 160 pounds and two giant standing fans for the hottest days of the summer. It did have a water cooler. There was a stereo, an assemblage of cast-off equipment and a CD player. Excellent volume, by which I mean you could crank it up. The gym had a lined notebook at the counter. The policy was that everyone, before changing/training, had to sign in with their name and the date and time they were in. I was standing in line to sign in behind a guy we called Big B – an enormous man who weighed well over three-hundred pounds and one of only two guys I knew that ever benched over five-hundred drug-free. As Big B was signing in, the owner, from behind the counter, nodded towards a woman training in the back of the gym. Big B, he said, is that your wife? Big B didn’t even look. Nope, he said. My wife runs about three-fifty, chews snuff, and has hail damage on her ass. He walked into the changing room without looking. The owner and I still laugh about that one. I know Big B’s wife, by the way, they were clients of mine. She did not, in any way, fit the description. I Another time I was signing in, a woman who trained there regularly stood behind me. Her name was Paula. The owner asked her about Trucker D – her boyfriend. He’d been coming in with her regularly. She had him on a diet and a training regimen – he’d started to lose some weight. I haven’t seen Trucker D lately, the owner asked Paula, where’s he been? We broke up, Paula said. That’s too bad, the owner said. What happened? Well, Paula said. It’s like this - D is a long-haul trucker. He was never around. Once a week he’d stop by, leave the truck idling, and I’d give him a blow job and make him a sandwich. Then he’d be out the door and gone for a week. There’s gotta be more to life than that. Paula finished signing and walked into the ladies changing room. Nope, the owner said to me, there’s not much more to life than that. I said it sounded pretty good to me, too. After I had signed in and changed, I got on a treadmill beside Paula. Did I tell you about my friend, she asked? She had a bladder-lift – do you know what that is? I did not. Anyways, she had a bladder-lift, Paula said, and it didn’t work. She sued the gynecologist who performed the surgery but she lost. $60,000 in legal fees. She’s paying it off now, eight-hundred and change per month, just like a second mortgage. II Big B told me that in order to own a weight you had to rep it 100 times in a single training session. After that it would never feel heavy ever again. He told me that to own 140-kilos (308 pounds), he’d benched it one-hundred times. He started with an eleven-rep set, and did sets up until three reps was all he could do, but eventually he benched that weight for a hundred total reps. It took me about an hour-and-a-half he said, but I own it. III Leo was not drug-free. He benched 575 pounds. He had the worst bacne I’d ever seen. bacne is a type of acne you get on your back when running a steroid cycle. Acne Vulgaris of a sort, a moonscape of red and yellow. His bench workout consisted of working up to a few heavy single reps and then some incline dumbbell presses. That’s all. No secret Soviet formula. No curls for the girls, no beach muscle. I’d spot for him. After he’d finished benching, he’d do the incline dumbbell presses with 160-pound dumbbells. He’d do three sets of eight repetitions. After he’d done eight, he’d drop the dumbbells to the floor. When he was ready for his next set, I’d pick them up and hand them to him one side at a time. Picking those 160’s up from the floor was one of the more difficult things I’d ever do in the gym. Leo, I said one time, I’ve gone as far as I can go doing what I am doing. I need you to hook me up. He knew what I was asking. You don’t need steroids, he said. You just need to learn to handle weight. Picking those 160’s up off of the floor and handing them to him felt like handling weight to me. He never admitted to using. That’s fine. Some guys never do. Some are proselytists. I like the proselytists. Leo ate like no one else I knew. Not in terms of volume, but in what constituted that volume. I’d seen him take a loaf of bread, still in the plastic bag, and crush and mold it with his hands until it was a large, dense, ball of bread. Then he’d take it out of the bag and eat it like an apple. IV Super Ed, the other guy I knew who could bench five-hundred drug-free, asked me if I took steroids. I do not, I said. Good, he said. Don’t ever use them. He was very serious when he said this, but Ed was always very serious. He then told me that when he was sixteen, he was being, in his own words, a shithead. I was skipping school, he said, smoking pot every day, breaking into parked cars looking for change – stuff like that. One day, I got up around eleven, put on my leather coat, and went to walk out the front door. My mom blocked me in the hallway. Are you going to school now, she asked me? Fuck off, I said, and tried to shoulder my way past her. My mother was a large woman. Six-feet-two inches tall,two-hundred-and-forty pounds. She grabbed my head in one hand and slammed it through the drywall. She stepped over me and then walked back into the kitchen. I was sitting there with pieces of drywall and drywall dust in my hair and on my clothes. So, I got up and dusted myself off and walked out the front door and went and found the nearest pay phone. I called my older brother up – he had a good job on a drilling rig – and I asked him for a job. By the end of the week, I was working full time, and I never told my mother to fuck off ever again. I believed him. V Paula’s daughter had posed nude for a glossy men’s magazine so Paula brought in a few copies. The girl had sometimes trained at the gym but I didn’t really know her. I looked. The girl was very attractive, and the photography high-end. It looked a lot like fame. Paula put the copies on the counter, beside the sign-in book and over top of the supplements that were under lock and key. The owner and I discussed it. Neither of us had daughters, and we agreed that although we wouldn’t dissuade a theoretical daughter from posing for a legitimate publication, we also would not bring copies into the gym. Too many fuckin’ pervs, the owner said, starting with me and you. I laughed. In about a week the copies were all gone. The owner said that he thought a Hutterite had stolen them all. The Hutterite sometimes came in to use the bathroom when the colony was at the feed mill next door. That guy comes in just to take a shit, the owner said, and now he stole our locally-sourced porn. That’s wrong. The owner went on to say he felt he could not say no to the Hutterite for asking to use the bathroom because the mill was the gym’s landlord too, and they did a lot of business with the Hutterites. VI A guy named Saul trained there. He was a real biker. Flowing hair, a Fu-Manchu, and a metric ass-load of really good tattoos. We shared the same taste in music. You don’t look like a Motorhead guy, he told me once. What can I say? I am a Motorhead guy. He and his brother promoted Tuskers – a kind of biker-bash. A mini-Sturgis. Bands, hot-dog eating and wet-t-shirt contests, a motorcycle show and a burnout pit. He booked the bands. He had a good working relationship with the clubs. I knew he was real when he said the clubs. No one in that world ever refers to the clubs by name. It’s considered disrespectful. Back to tattoos, he said he always got a new one when a relationship ended, to mark the passing of whatever the relationship-thing was back into the annals of his personal history. It was how he moved on, he said. He took off his shirt and turned his back to me. I got this one done after the last one, he said. The tattoo, a full back-piece, was of a screaming eagle diving, wings outstretched, talons forward. Below the eagle was a nude woman reaching up into the eagle’s chest, tearing out its heart with her one hand. Blood from the eagle’s heart dripped down onto the classical masks of comedy and tragedy that lay at her feet, and this blood ran down from the mask’s eyes like tears. Holy fuck, I said. I know, he said. She was something. Saul was one of the best people I ever trained with. He was AA and spent every Christmas driving drunks around, having coffee with them, nursing their battered souls through their worst time of the year. He'd had his moment, he said. We kept a party room at a local hotel, he told me - we meaning the club. I woke up hung-over for two straight years. The first thing I did every morning was puke. I woke up one morning and puked, then looked in the mirror. I saw a dead man. I kid you not, dead. Grey skinned and grey-eyed. I knew what I would look like dead. I cleaned myself up as best I could and went to AA. I’ve been sober ever since. Saul rubbed Tiger Balm into every joint before working out, and wore wraps on his knees, elbows, wrists. I gave him a hard time about this. It takes you forty-minutes to get ready to work out for forty-five minutes, I said. Wait until you are my age, he said. He was right about that. When I got divorced, he complimented me on my weight loss. Divorced guy diet, he said. Working out, lots of coffee, not much real food. He was right about that too. VII The owner had gone to a seminar on running a gym as a business. I asked him if it was helpful. Yes and no, he said. There are really only three rules to running a gym: Firstly, never let anyone in the door whose membership is not paid up to date and in full. Secondly, no juicers. They intimidate the more casual members and the casuals are who you make money off of. So, no juicers, not even in the parking lot. Finally, no one touches the music but the owner, no exceptions. Just like the juicers, a steady stream of metal or rap at volume ten sends the majority of members running the other way. That all makes sense, I said. The first one especially, he said. They still let me touch the stereo. It’s metal for breakfast, lunch and dinner when I am in. Rock on. VIII Once in a while they’d have to kick a member out for some transgression. There were only two reasons for this: Creepy shit with women and fighting. One day I was in and a creeper sat on the leg extension machine and stared at women using the mirrors in a thinly-veiled attempt to hide what he was doing. He sat there for at least an hour. Never even moved his legs. I asked if I could work in – he shouted at me. No. I’m still on it. The weird little dude was just another creeper, for sure. The next time I was in I mentioned this to the owner, that I was sure Creepy McCreeperson was just checking out ladies. Already kicked him out, the owner said. One of our members came asking for a refund. She said she couldn’t train here anymore. She’d come here because he was doing that shit at the gym she used to go to. I kicked him out and he didn’t argue. I called the other gym she’d mentioned to give them a head’s-up and they said they’d already booted him too. There were a couple of fights, both started by young guys with room temperature IQ’s and the confidence born of exogenous testosterone. After they’d kicked the one guy out, one of the female members told me that she’d used to room with one of the guy’s ex-girlfriends and that her roomie had broken up with the guy for asking her if he could watch her take a shit. I thought that was fucked up. The guy was like, twenty-one. Odd kink to start with. I told her exactly that, about the kink/age etc. and then told her that what made it weirder is that everyone knows girls don’t poop. We both laughed. Want to hear about period shits, she asked me? Mine are the worst. No, I said. Not at all. Ever. The one guy that got kicked out who wasn’t a creeper or a shit-starter was booted for stealing cds. I can’t remember much about him except for him telling me, every time I saw him, that alcohol was the worst thing that you could ever put into your body. He was a proselytist, but of a different sort, and he stole a few cds. He got my Jackyl Cd - the one with the “The Lumberjack” and the chainsaw solo. Mind you, I never saw him take it. I only knew that it was gone. A lot of people might have taken that one. IX Paula wrote a book and put it online for sale. Self-published, unedited. It described her childhood sexual abuse. It did not sell very many copies. I did not read it. I felt bad for her for a number of reasons. She’d started selling supplements in a multi-level marketing thing too. A fat burner – caffeine and ephedrine. It was hot, like 30 cups of coffee all at once, and it made my blood pressure skyrocket. I didn’t lose much weight. I quit taking it. X Big B wanted to tell me how his brother had died. He was surprised I had not heard the story, but I was much younger than Big B and his brother had been older than him. My brother’s daughter, he said, my niece – died from a rare form of cancer when she was nine. My brother got up and went to work every day after that, but he was in a fog. It hit him hard. Then, one day, he comes back from work. The house is empty. All of the furniture, all of the dishes, glasses and plates – knives, forks, bedding, the doormat even - everything except for his clothing, is gone. The phone is ringing – at least there is still a phone – so he picks it up. It’s the bank. His mortgage is three months in arrears, they are going to foreclose. They are just letting him know, as a courtesy. We’ve tried to call, they say. No one answers. His wife, of course, is gone. He went to the police to report her as missing – he feared the worst, but a different kind of worst than what actually was. The police never really looked for her. They assumed she was just a runaway. Anyways, he deals with the bank, the utilities, all of that stuff. Gets it together. Still can’t find his wife. A few weeks go by. One night the phone rings and he picksit up. A man he does not know tells him that if he wants to know where his wife is, call this number, and then gives him the number. Write it down, he says, and then call it. You have to remember all this was way before caller ID and all that. So, he calls it, and a familiar voice answers the phone. It’s his best friend. It was a different number from what he’d known for years, but still, it’s the guy. My brother adds two plus two and gets it. He got drunk after that, B said, so drunk – and he was never a drinker. He took a butcher’s knife out of the kitchen drawer and got in his car - a big old four-door Chrysler, and put the pedal to the floor. He drove wild. People from all over were calling in to the police about him. He drove to the cemetery and smashed through the gates – it took him four tries, according to witnesses. But he got in. He drove to his daughter’s grave and got out. It was his intention to use the knife to kill himself right there after talking to his daughter one last time. The cops showed up then, two uniforms and a K9 officer. They told him to put the knife down but he just looked at them, knife in hand, so the uniforms shot him. I don’t know how many rounds they fired but they hit him three times and he dropped the knife. They called an ambulance and got him into emergency and the doctors saved his life. A few months later they finally had a trial. He was convicted of a few things but the judge was lenient and gave him a suspended sentence. Under testimony the K9 officer had said that he thought the other cops were too quick to shoot and that he thought he could have put the dog on my brother and subdued him that way. Good enough, the judge said to my brother, don’t find your way into my courtroom again and we’ll all be square. Wait – so he’s not dead then, I asked? Oh, he’s dead, said Big B. Three years after all of this he was unloading trusses for a construction project. He touched up against a power line and was electrocuted. I am surprised you never heard of this, he said, it was news at the time. XI Eventually, the original owner sold the gym. He sold it to a guy who had won a number of amateur boxing matches and “tough-man” contests. He turned it into a “key club” – no sign-in anymore. No counter staff. Everyone got a key. A few people gave duplicate keys to their friends. Stuff disappeared. Fuck that shit, the new owner said, and he sold the gym over time to a fitness equipment salesman. The locks were changed. We had the sign-in sheet back. We had new cardio equipment. Good stuff, too. Then the new owner was arrested. He'd taken the equipment from his day-job and put it in the gym with neither lease nor purchase. The gym closed. The second owner got his own equipment back and many years later, still has it. He won’t sell it except as a whole. I wanted to buy a rack, a couple of bars, five-hundred pounds worth of plates, and set up in my garage but he wouldn’t sell me anything. All or nothing, he said. I don’t think he had anything against me and my four-hundred dollars, I just think he thought he could sell all of it at once. It’s out in the open I am told, in a farm-yard south of here, rusting. XII I saw Big B the other day, in his car. He rolled down the window and yelled at me. Hey you fucking asshole, how come you never wave? I waved. He laughed and drove away before I could ask him where he was training these days.

I sit down at the diner and order a cold blueberry pancake and wait for Jenny, who asked me via text to go sit down at the diner and order a cold blueberry pancake and wait for her. Jenny and I both work at the nearby pharmacy. Not as pharmacists but as people who take things out of boxes and place them on shelves. Sometimes we get lunch together and talk about how it tastes. Other times we get drinks together and say things like, "Our boss is so annoying." Jenny and I are best friends. The diner door squeaks and Jenny bounces into the room, eventually landing safely on the seat opposite me. Her hair is in a ponytail, but only about half has made it in. She smiles and says, "I replaced my teeth with dimes," but really it sounds more like, "Ithe replathe my teth with dies." Lodged in her gums are indeed about thirty-two coins. Some of them have dried, crusty, maroon blood on their front. Her gums are much redder than normal gums, probably on account of ripping out her teeth and replacing them with metallic objects. "Why?" I ask. "Thithe our tithet ouw." "What?" "Thitss our tithet ouwtthh. Weh goin tah be famouthhh ah hell." Jenny explains she could now quit the pharmacy and move to Los Angeles, where she will become famous. And I could tag along and be the friend of someone famous. I say that sounds good. I figure it must be better than taking things out of boxes. Taking things out of boxes is not my passion. We stop into the pharmacy and I tell our boss I’m quitting and Jenny tells him to go fuck himself with a roll of dimes. She then takes a roll of dimes out of her pocket and throws it at him. She takes the uneaten cold blueberry pancakes out of the diner box and throws them at him too. We leave. On the bus from Sacramento to Los Angeles, Jenny shows many people her mouth. They say things like, "Wow, dimes!?" and "Isn't that something?” One little girl throws up. Jenny's high school pal, Autumn, picks us up from the bus stop. Jenny shows her the dimes and Autumn says, "OMG, that's so you." Then she says, “We better hurry home before the wind turns yellow.” Jenny laughs. I don’t have access to the inside joke and so I fake chuckle for a moment to be part of the group and then look out the window. Autumn moved to LA to become an actress a few years ago, but now she mainly drives strangers around in her car. She says it’s nice driving us around because we’re non-strangers. We sleep in Autumn’s basement. In the morning Jenny says we should go to the local news station on Sunset Boulevard and show them her mouth. Autumn drops us off and then goes to drive other people to places so she can continue to eat and drink. The local news building is made of glass. Its name is KPLA. Jenny does not know what the “KP” stands for and she doesn’t care. Inside, a receptionist is looking at the wall. His skin is very pale. Jenny asks me to do the talking because her mouth hurts and she doesn’t want to move it. I tell the receptionist that we have an important story, that we would like to speak with a reporter. He stops looking at the wall and says a lot of words that mean “no.” Jenny grabs each of her lips between finger and thumb and pulls them open. The receptionist gives us a one-day printed pass to enter the office. The local news people love the dimes. They’ve never seen anything like it, they say. They tape Jenny for a segment to air the following morning. Jenny tells the camera the brand of pliers she used to remove her teeth and the average age of the dimes. The news people ask if she has had any struggles and she talks about her difficulty eating, about how she has to cut food into minuscule pieces and swallow them whole like a pelican. They film her mouth from many angles. After we leave, Jenny says she made up the age of the dimes. The next morning, we watch Jenny on the television. It’s just like when they taped it, except two-dimensional. Within minutes, videos and messages start to pop up on social media—people reacting to Jenny’s mouth. One man in a football jersey has tweeted that Jenny is a “dime with dimes.” She likes it. An anime snow leopard named KindCat625347922 has tweeted that Jenny is a “stupid attention-seeking cunt,” who he’d love to “throat fuck until the dimes fall out.” She doesn’t like it. A gay youth has glued dimes to his teeth and posted it to TikTok, writing, “Jenny shows us it’s okay to be ourselves.” She likes it. By the time Autumn gets home from driving, “#dimegirl” is trending all over social media. The world is awash in dimes. Jimmy Fallon’s new LA office gets in touch. Jenny goes on Jimmy Fallon. Jimmy says it's time to play a game called “Guess That Coin.” He holds up coins and asks Jenny to guess them. “Ten cent euro,” she says to one. “Halfpenny,” she says to another. She gets none of the answers right. Jimmy asks if he can touch her mouth. The crowd laughs and makes noises like “oh oh!” and “yessss!” She wipes her hands against her thighs and smiles at the ground, looking bashful. I can’t tell whether she is actually bashful or is pretending to be so because it will look better when she ultimately acquiesces. The audience begins to chant, “Let him touch! Let him touch! Let him touch!” Jenny lets him touch. The crowd explodes: one old bespectacled man knocks out his own teeth with a hammer; a teenage boy tears off his shirt and fervently rubs his crotch; a rail-thin woman attempts to snort a pile of pocket change; a rail-thin woman fails to snort a pile of pocket change; two pudgy middle-aged couples pee themselves, holding each other and moaning, “Delano!”; a child crawls the floor for loose coins. Screams of “We Love Dime Mouth!” ring through the theater. Jenny goes on more talk shows and starts to make money from Instagram endorsements. She and I move into a hotel, but Autumn stays at her place. She doesn’t want to impose. Jenny says if anyone mentions acting roles she’ll be sure to give them Autumn’s information. We fly to New York City, where Jenny makes appearances on even more talk shows. These talk shows are just like the ones in LA except colder. The two of us buy matching sequin gowns—their silver discs looking like thousands of miniature dimes—from Saks Fifth Avenue. On the sidewalk, a man with trash bags on his feet who only has a beard on one side of his face screams something at us he probably thinks is nice, but we think is frightening. We eat at a place so expensive they serve only crumbs: one crumb of parmesan-encrusted, gold-flaked salmon, one drop of Negroni, half a caviar egg. I tell Jenny how grateful I am to be her friend. She’s still the same Jenny; the fame has not changed her except in that she now looks at her phone much more often, maybe a few times each blink, and she’s perpetually making little pouts and smiles in case people are taking photos of us, and she has a more expensive hair tie in her hair, and more of her hair is in the hair tie. Which I guess is maybe a lot of changes (I don’t know how many changes are a normal amount of changes for when one becomes famous), but she is still just as nice to me and she is my best friend and she lets me try half her steak crumb. She says she loves me and asks what I’d like to do besides being the friend of a famous person, now that I don’t have to spend all my time taking things out of boxes. No one has ever asked me this before. I think about it and then say I’d maybe like to glue rocks and twigs onto paper to make art. Jenny says that sounds great. She says she’ll just continue to be famous. I put the meal on my credit card and Jenny will pay me back—hers is maxed. We sit in the airport. Done with the talk shows, the future is Jenny. Her inbox is filled with brands begging her to become their spokesperson. Wendy’s says she perfectly fits their irreverent online persona. Capital One says the money connection is impossible to resist. Crest says they want her for their new “When You Don’t Brush” ad campaign. Netflix has requested full access to her life to make a six-part origin documentary, tentatively titled, “Nickel, Copper, and Love.” Marvel has reached out about adding Dime Mouth to their cinematic universe. Jenny smiles while she scrolls through the endless emails. I think about all the ways one can arrange sticks on paper and I smile too. We get on the plane and continue to smile. But as soon as we land back in LA our phones blow up. Everyone on the flight is already staring at theirs, mouths agape. A man has cut off his dick and replaced it with a large red carrot. The carrot is the size of a small arm. “#CarrotCock” is trending everywhere. It’s horrific. Mentions of Jenny are found only in comparison and nostalgia. For example, one Instagram caption reads, “Dime Mouth walked so Carrot Cock could run,” on a photo of Carrot Cock’s carrot cock. Another user has replied, “Who the fuck is ‘Dime Mouth’?” Jenny rubs her temples and yells. Then the stewardess yells at her. Jenny shows the stewardess her mouth. The stewardess does not care. We take a taxi to Autumn’s house, essentially maxing out my credit card in the process. Autumn says we can stay there as long as we need. She and I fall asleep, but Jenny can’t due to the increasing, pounding pain in her gums and jaw. She spends all night replying to the brand offers, contacting the representatives of the shows she’s been on to ask if she could do another round. No one responds. In the morning she takes and posts varying photos of her open mouth—her mouth in the bathroom, her mouth in the living room, her mouth in the kitchen, her mouth outside. All receive a paltry number of likes. Half the likes are from me. Jenny smashes her hand into a pillow twenty-seven times. She continues this pattern of posting and smashing for a week before giving up. We go back to the building named KPLA and the receptionist refuses to even look away from his wall. Outside, I try to think of ways we can get her famous again. I suggest she chop off her breasts and replace them with balloons filled with oregano. She drops to the ground, sitting cross-legged on the curb. Salty water emerges from her eyes and falls down her cheeks. She moans between sobs, “Ithe ovah! He replathe his cothe! He replathe his futhing cothe!” I rub Jenny’s back. She says there’s nothing to do. She just wants to go home. She says we can get jobs at the local pharmacy and move back to Sacramento once we have enough money for a security deposit. This makes me sad because I won’t have much time for the rocks, but it's what has to happen. We sit in the sun and Jenny sends an email to our old boss in Sacramento to ease tensions, in case she needs to go back there once we return. She explains that in her culture—she is a white atheist—it is actually a sign of respect to pelt someone with dimes and cold pancakes, in fact, in her culture, when one turns thirteen, one is supposed to pelt their own parents. She then scrolls through her old Instagram posts and whimpers. She says she’s hungry, but there’s no food at the curb in front of the building named KPLA. At the pharmacy, we fill out applications. Jenny grabs M&Ms because they’re cheap and she’ll be able to swallow them without chewing. “Two ninety-nine,” says the cashier. We search our pockets and wallets—neither of us has cash. And of course, our credit cards are used up. Jenny shakes her head and rubs her foot into the floor and makes a noise that can only be described as a short sorrowful mewl. One by one, she pulls the dimes out of her gums. Tyler Plofker is a writer in NYC. His recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Identity Theory, Maudlin House, Idle Ink, Defenestration, Bear Creek Gazette, Sublunary Review, and elsewhere. In his free time, you can find him eating sugary breakfast cereals, laying out in the sun, or walking through the streets of New York City in search of this or that. He tweets badly @TylerPlofker.

The costume is old; it smells of others' sweat; their dread woven into the fabric. The corset of scarlet velvet, good for disguising small blood spots, doesn’t quite fit. Maestro Montague has promised a new costume, he suggests crimson brocade. He suggests my name should be Ruby. Ungrateful girls have no voice here. His preference is for short knives; each has a razor-sharp edge. I watch him honing his blades, cleaning their luminous handles because brighter is better for the audience to see. “Do not move, do not tremble. Look at me, trust me,” he breathes heavily, then sucks deeply from a hip flask. A construction of clowns plays pretend trumpets, splatting custard pies as they haul a circular board, painted with silver stars, into the ring. I twirl and curtsey as I stand before the stars. Maestro Montague straps me into place. He looks into my eyes tightening the leather, my wrists and ankles throb with the constriction. He gives me a wide smile, his teeth crooked, and stained with tobacco. His spangled mask does not disguise a tremor in his left eyelid, and the drop of sweat forming on his lip. Rough splinters painted over many times worry my limbs, the haunting shapes of the others before me. He is a silhouette against the dazzling lights. I feel a trickling tear emerge. I cannot wipe it away. A drum rolls. Air thrusts towards me. A knife slices, vibrating into the board below my left arm. The audience cheer, as another knife lands at my right ear. The drum continues, my heart thuds, I must not move. A knife edge catches velvet fibers. The audience gasps and brays for more. He takes his final knife, cuts a silk ribbon, it flutters mutilated to the floor, and he turns towards me. I feel my muscles tremble, the final thump between my legs, the coldness of the blade threatening my inner thigh. He removes the straps and takes my hand, I am light-headed, the applause intoxicating. I take a gulp of the fuggy air, acknowledging the deluge of noise. Pulling me towards him, he kisses me, his fetid breath haunting my cheek. “Ruby you are a natural, we will practice the wheel of death.” I smile, walking backwards out of the ring. The Ring Master takes my hand, crushing my fingers as he kisses them, he whispers, “take care.” Maestro Montague pulls his knives out of the deep wounds on the board; he sings a lullaby as he places them with reverence into a velvet-lined box. He caresses the slits, the scars of others. He murmurs names. “Scarlet, Cherry, Magenta. Ruby.” I hug myself, try to rub the shivers away. The sting of ruby jewels of blood on my skin makes me wince. Doubt gouges as deep as knives, the wheel of death spins. Ungrateful girls leave while they still can. Joyce Bingham is a Scottish writer who enjoys writing short fiction with pieces published by Ellipsis Zine, FlashBack Fiction, VirtualZine, Funny Pearls and Free Flash Fiction. She lives in the North of England where she makes up stories and tells tall tales. When not writing she puts her green fingers to use as a plant whisperer and Venus fly trap wrangler. @JoyceBingham10

Someday In one thousand years (if I can wait that long) I shall reemerge as the red-winged blackbird I wrote about clinging to the tall bended grasses and flitting about the summer-sweet’s branches. I will land on a small book which someone left behind on a stone beachside bench. I will turn to the very page where I wrote about me and read each word again as though for the first time. Seeing White Horn Brook Behind the house flows White Horn Brook, but the underbrush guards its banks. Unfair I can’t walk through the woods to witness the wondrous clear purl. Good fortune I have to live close by a weather grayed sturdy bridge that crosses over the slow brook just a short pleasant walk away. From the rails of that perfect bridge I have seen all that little brook has carried from the upstream flow through the woods and onward downstream. I’ve often gazed down into the eyes of the old man staring up from the mirrored smooth brook below who stared back through me with wonder into the depths of the vast clear sky blue universe up above knowing White Horn Brook carried him to me and me to him those days. Andy Perrin is a writer/photographer/cyclist/teacher from southern Rhode Island. Andy often explores the roads and trails near his home on one of his bikes. On occasion, while he is out exploring, he is moved to stop to take a photo of some inspirational thing. On the best days, the thoughts of the things photographed turn into words and the subjects of his writing.

Poetry Reading (Explanation 1) Everyone expects a poem to rhyme at some time or another. My brother blames it on those creatures - English teachers. I don’t! I won’t! Rather let me say, the poem begins to roam while most people stay at home. It would be easy and kind of sleazy for me to blame TV. Let me just say that today poems don’t have the time to rhyme. So don’t get upset just let your mind find the pulse in the words, just like flocking birds, you see poems are wild and free. Hollow Notes In Philadelphia for the third day of an I.R.S. audit, I visit the Liberty Bell during the lunch break. About to lose My shirt and with nowhere to turn, I suddenly realize that this bell ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. R. Gerry Fabian is a poet and novelist. He has published four books of his published poems, Parallels, Coming Out Of The Atlantic, Electronic Forecasts and Wildflower Women as well as his poetry baseball book, Ball On The Mound.

Running in the Winter silence, The season holds its breath. The sky, A wrapping paper blue Gifts us a perfect Winter scene. Ice decorations hung in a promise Of a Christmas card moment. We breathe, pain forgotten, The cold too, will pass. Mist hangs in the valley, Darkness capturing the shadows, the gifts we bring making it light. The egg yolk sun spills its promise, There are better days to come. Helen Openshaw is a Drama and English teacher from Cumbria. She enjoys writing poetry and plays and inspiring her students to write. Words in Green Ink Poetry magazine, Words and Whispers magazine, The Madrigal, Fragmented Voices, Forge Zine, Acropolis Journal and The Dirigible Balloon magazine. She has just had her first chapbook, 'A Revolution in the Sky', published by Alien Buddha Press. Twitter = @pocket_rhyme

On Contemplating Consciousness Open sky with whittled clouds splintered by rain. A bitter tang loops through ideas of matter that shore up solitude. I’m dizzy with concentric thoughts, framing myself one way or another, in light or in shadow. In search of a place for my lack of faith, what lugs my sorrows along, what tests my need for fit, tongue and groove, hook and eye. The drudge of January pushes me inside the house, under the afghan my mother made, a cloud of cream wool. The lamp is always on, pooling around me to make a cocoon. I should light some candles too, for their tenderness. Missing Where are the birds? Not among the still trees iced and crystalline, but asleep in the rules of winter, slow heartbeats with no echo. Such Winter Lies such winter lies, the labored boughs empty of birds, the wind, bitter then convulsive a note disturbs silence, high and unwitting as if the dead had long memories the carry of memory, stiff, garbled at other times, extravagant, we twist and turn, examine and decipher some of it left behind the solemn months where forgiveness comes easy, isolation smoothes what we hoped for and lost, insects burrowed in glad sleep words boiled down to letters, pause such winter lies, the stubborn sky vacant above drifts of gold leaves and broken ferns an old grief with no shadows furled beneath Mercedes Lawry is the author of three chapbooks, the latest, In the Early Garden with Reason, was selected by Molly Peacock for the 2018 WaterSedge Chapbook Contest. Her poetry has appeared in such journals as Poetry, Nimrod, and Prairie Schooner and she’s been nominated seven times for a Pushcart Prize. Her book, Vestiges, was just released by Kelsay Books.

My name is Gavin. My claim to fame is that I am reusable. I can be filled with shopping, time and time again. Multiple use is my raison d’être, my nous, as it were. This makes me environmentally friendly. I’m a hard worker, with strong edges. I’m just waiting for someone to pick me up and use me. I’ve been waiting a long time. I was born (or made) in a sweatshop on the edges of Mumbai, India. In the sweatshop, they make plastic bags, amongst other things. There is a Tesco factory here, where several million workers are promised corrupted employment. They work in the factory for twenty-seven hours, every day. Reusable plastic bags are made by the workers, who squeeze liquid plastic into a machine with a firm pressure, as though they are oozing white cake icing out of a nozzle. The machine then flattens the liquid plastic into the shape of a bag. There is a short moment for the newly born bag to dry, before it is cast aside onto an endless pile of perfectly identical, blank bag brethren. I came out the other side of this rather uncomfortable process as a clean plastic bag – neat and durable. Then I was printed with the Tesco logo and label informing my recipients that I am recyclable, reusable and, I believe, very friendly for the environment. Well worth my 20 pence price. Finished and complete, I was plonked on another pile of identical reusable bags, chucked into a humongous container and transported to Slough, a dense town somewhere in southern England. The other bags and I are identical siblings. We are stuck in a dark, brown cardboard box. I sit in between Glenda, on my right, and Geraldine on my left. We are the ‘G’ box. We stay closed and silent in this box for a long time. I talk a lot, to no one in particular; I am practising how to sell myself. I read all the terms, conditions and warnings about using plastic bags, which are printed on the inside of the box. I know exactly how environmentally friendly I am (and am not). I realise there is a fault in my ingredients: I am made of non-biodegradable plastic. I should never be thrown away! I must be reused, again and again and again. I learn that humans should be wary of placing me over their heads, since there is the potential for asphyxiation. I realise that I have more power (both good and bad) than anyone ever knew. I have the whole world at my plastic parameters. If only someone would open the box and use me. I mumble a lot, although Glenda, Geraldine and the other bags are silent. I know she does not say much, but I feel particularly close to Glenda. I feel we are part of the same substance; I feel compassion for her silence. I know I can read her thoughts. I reckon we have conversations – silent ones – through the plastic veneer that separates and joins us together. I could be making this up, but my instinct tells me that Glenda and I are intimately twined. One day, a young-ish human comes over to the storage capacity at Tesco’s, Slough. He picks up our box and throws it (us) haphazardly over to the self-checkout tills. “’Ere we are,” he says. “Use these.” The young lad is called Dave. He is 17 years old. Working at Tesco’s is his fourth job. He has been here for approximately two months. He is working his way up the ladder of promotions (currently at the bottom, but ever hopeful). Today, his task is to refill the reusable bags in the shop. I am very excited about this happening, and so is Glenda (I am sure of this). This is our time to shine. Geraldine and the other bags are silent; it’s almost as if they aren’t alive, which is ridiculous. Everything is alive. All of us are thrown out of the box and plonked in a pile next to the self-checkout tills. The air around the supermarket is stinky and close. I am reminded of the factory where I was made. I flap my handles to generate some breeze. As I lift up, I immediately notice that the middle of my bag form, my heart, is still attached to Glenda’s heart. We are conjoined, we are Siamese twins, as close as can be. A fault yet an asset. I am deeply moved; I will never be alone. “Glenda,” I say. “I knew it – we are together forever; our hearts are one. You are my Siamese twin!” Glenda replies, “I was wondering why I had an itchy chest. You realise that when they find out that we are conjoined, they will tear us apart. One of us will have their heart removed, and be discarded thrown away as rubbish, and the other will have a double beating heart, but remain alone, overwhelmed by grief.” “Or,” I venture, “we will be upheld as unique and brilliant, always reusable Tesco bags.” Whilst Glenda and I consider our fate, we do not notice that we are taken up (together) and used by a random shopper. The random shopper is a middle-aged woman named Smokey, on account of the grey-purple eyeshadow and eyeliner she applies to her vision organs’ exterior, every morning at 6 am. Smokey is a dark, mysterious Gothic woman. She knows all there is to know about death and destruction. She writes lyrics about these things. Smokey is in Tesco’s for her weekly shop. She has, on this occasion, unfortunately forgotten her shopping trolley, so she has to purchase a new bag to hold the items she wishes to buy. She’s not very happy about this because she thinks it is a waste of money. She could buy a packet of dry pasta or a tin of baked beans for 20 pence, rather than wasting it on a plastic bag. But this is the situation. Smokey picks up the nearest reusable bag in the pile next to the self-checkout till. She notices that this is no ordinary bag; it is extraordinarily good-looking, shiny and shimmering in the glistening light of the electric bulbs above her. Yes, she has picked me up. Smokey immediately notices that I am attached to another bag. “What is this?” she wonders. “Two for one? Excellent value for money.” I peer at this human. She has long dregs of coarse, matted, black hair. She wears knee-high leather boots with 6-inch heels, a tartan kilt, and a hot pink crop top (in the middle of winter). Glenda and I, we love this human. She gives us meaning. We leave the pile of bags who shriek at us, “Good luck! Have a lovely life, be used and be happy!” This is my chance to make it in life, with my Siamese twin. We are still attached. I hope we are attached forever. Smokey is buying some interesting items, I notice. Two boxes of matches, a toothbrush, a packet of forget me not seeds, three tea towels, baked beans, sourdough bagels, mayonnaise, a shoe cleaning kit, a travel hairbrush, and some dog biscuits. I can see all this because although Glenda is full of these items, my role currently seems to be as a bystander and observer. I am currently empty. “Are you okay, Glenda?” I murmur. “I must say,” she replies. “It’s simply marvellous to have a role in life. To be filled with items, to be needed in society. What about you, empty hang-er on-er? What are you going to do with your life?” “I am protecting you,” I say. “This weird human must know that. Here I am – I will protect the human, but most of all I will protect you.” “How on earth will you do that?” asks Glenda. “You’re just a…” At this moment, Smokey grabs hold of Glenda’s handles and hauls us both out of the shop. I blink in the bright Indian summer sunlight. My heart, still attached and beating with Glenda’s, rushes on faster. ‘Welcome to Slough’ I read on a sign we pass. I am full of wonder. I look over to Glenda. She is waning and drowning with all her contents. She has never carried anything before. It’s too much. “Take care, Glenda. Don’t drop anything!” Smokey fastens Glenda’s handles through the handlebars of her motorised broomstick. I’m still attached to Glenda, so not left out. Smokey mounts the broomstick like a horse, and revs up its motorised engine. “Vroom vroom…” I did not know that motorised broomsticks existed before this enlightening moment. I did not know I could fly. This is an epiphany. As Smokey powers up her broomstick, we soar and cruise through the sky. Glenda’s handles are stretched to their limits because she is holding so much weight with Smokey’s shopping. I inflate, as air rushes into my volume and fills me up. I have a weightless but inflated mass – full of air, dancing like a balloon in the wind. I feel like I’m at the silent disco, held – my heart beating with Glenda’s heart, but lifted, elated, free. “I feel very queasy,” says Glenda, quietly. “I have closed my eyes, so I don’t have to see where we are going. If I open my eyes, I think I will be sick. I was not built for this. The weight I am holding is dangerous, I am about to break…” “No,” I reply, ignoring my sister’s warning cry. “This is the best day ever. We are flying in the air on a broomstick. Has any reusable Tesco bag ever done that before? We are unique, we are perfect. Conjoined Siamese twins, flying on a broomstick. Together forever…” As I say these powerful touching words, Smokey drives her motorised broomstick through a huge gust of wind. This wind vent blows very hard. The broomstick, laden with its challenging load, can hardly move through this turbulent section of powerful air. “Vroom vroom, come on, broomstick!” shouts Smokey, revving the engine. “We’ve got to get home so I can have my tea. We are running approximately four minutes behind schedule. Come on!” But the broomstick is not coming on. The wind is winning. “Hahaha!” bellows the wind, who has never felt so strong in their long, arduous life. “I will demolish you.” Glenda is bouncing around, pulled down by gravity, yanked this way and that by the wind’s rough embrace. “I can’t take this much longer at all,” she says. Her voice is becoming quieter; she is whispering. I can hardly hear her, but I feel what her heart—our heart—is saying, all of a flutter. “Hang on my dearest sister Glenda,” I say to my beloved. “We just need to get through this rough patch. Look – Smokey is trying her best to keep us balanced and secure. We are nearly there!” In an instant, the rough, angry wind gives one enormous belch of hot air, growling and hissing. Smokey’s broomstick gives up entirely. It rears up and shudders, blown away by this aggressive windy air. Smokey grabs hold of Glenda and leans down low on the handlebars, to secure both her shopping and her balance. But I am left to fend for myself. Only my - our - beating heart connects me to safety. I find myself suddenly, completely overwhelmed. The wind enters my flapping bag-ness and fills me up. I am a taut balloon, growing so tight. I’m at the edges. I can’t scream, I can’t shout, I’m completely taken over by this totalitarian air. This can’t go on. Soon enough, there is a small “pop” sound, followed by a “fizzzzz”, as I break off from my Siamese twin and fizzle out. I fall to the ground, somewhere completely unknown. There is a hole in my centre, where I was once attached to Glenda. She has all of our heart. I am left alone, flapping lamely in the breeze. I mope. The days go by. I do not find out what happens to Glenda or her shopping. I never see her again. I try to retain some sort of hope about my future, but it is not up to me. Nature takes her course. I remain wounded, open, and dreadfully sad. There is no conceivable ending. It will take over one hundred years for me to eventually break down, and even then, I will continue to tarnish the environment. Nothing good will ever happen again. ~ Oh dear. Gavin the plastic shopping bag is now heartless piece of rubbish. He has become what he was made to prevent. But one day, drifting across a polluted piece of sludge, Gavin meets Stacy. Stacy is a discarded brown paper bag. She is biodegradable – Gavin’s dream substance. As the clouds empty themselves, Stacy becomes moist. Her clammy brown paper sticks to the hole in Gavin’s middle, filling the place where Glenda once was. They may be litter, but Gavin and Stacy are wedged together now. Clasped in an unlikely but deeply passionate embrace, a whole new world has opened. The two bags have never known anything quite like this before. Gavin is for the first time glad that he is made of plastic. When Stacy’s brown paper starts to dissolve, as it inevitably does, Gavin squashes her into the far bottom corner of his plastic cavity. She is safe and dry here; she will not erode. They squeeze together and are conjoined for a very, very long time. Lorna Collins is an artist, filmmaker, writer, journalist and arts educator. Amongst other books, she is the author of 'Squawk: A Book of Bird Adventures' (Pegasus: Vanguard Press), a curious, hilarious, illustrated collection of short stories for children. Lorna has written articles about mental health, the NHS, creativity and art in 'The Independent', 'The Guardian' and 'The British Medical Journal'. In her TEDx Talk, “How Creativity Revived Me", she talks about how art helped her recover from a severe traumatic brain injury and many years of mental illness. @sensinglorna https://lornacollins.com

The Piedmont Interstate Fair didn’t look like much to an outsider. It was a half-mile dirt track, but it represented a long line of winners. NASCAR greats had taken victory laps here, and Tilly would be no different. Tilly was the reigning queen of the Best in Baked Goods category and Best Overall. Her lemon pound cake, complete with blueberry glaze, had earned her a decade of accolades. Folks shoved orders at Tilly faster than she could make pound cakes. But today was all about winning. She was on her way to the fairgrounds to admire her blue ribbons. Tilly made her way to the agricultural building. As she entered, hands patted her back and greeted her. Tilly felt electric. Her eyes found her lemon pound cake. Only one small blue ribbon draped across her cake. Where was her Best Overall ribbon? Her eyes frantically searched the table and rested on a mason jar full of whole figs and cinnamon sticks. There was her grand prize ribbon. Tilly struggled for air. The chatter intensified. Judgment rolled off the others and pushed up against her. Who had stolen her grand prize? She went straight to that fig jar. The card said pickled figs. Who had ever heard of such nonsense? A neighbor approached. “Pickled figs. Can you believe it, Tilly? I had a small taste when Mr. Ross was experimenting. Pure genius, I tell you.” Tilly forced a smile. Mr. Ross was new to the area. A widow who wanted a fresh start. His fresh start had spilled over into Tilly’s life. As Tilly exited, she spotted the fair director. She cast her eyes down to avoid conversation. “Tilly!” Tilly! Congratulations on your baked goods win. I can’t wait to get a sample of that lemon pound cake at tomorrow’s celebration of winners.” Tilly nodded and kept moving. Her nails ripped into her palms. Opening her hands, she saw that she had drawn blood. In a flash, Tilly knew what she would do. The celebration of winners’ ceremony was tradition. The judges and the winners visited and sampled the prized goods, while the press snapped photos and interviewed the attendees. If new experiences were what they wanted, then Tilly was going to give it to them. As Tilly prepared the batter for her lemon pound cake, she peered out the window over the sink. Her potted plant arrangement was gorgeous, all fall mums, marigolds, and chrysanthemums. Nestled between all the oranges, reds, and golds was a plant with shiny dark berries. Her belladonna plant that she had grown from seed. The juice from those almost black berries would blend right in with her blueberry glaze. Days later, Tilly was ready for the celebration of winners’ event. Judges, friends and family, and the press gathered to sample the prize-capturing treats. As the 4-H youth members ferried her cakes from the car to the building, Tilly supervised. The table groaned under the weight. It looked like the Lord’s Supper but the Southern edition. Everyone’s plate was weighed down with slivers of cakes, dabs of preserves, and those damn pickled figs. Tilly spied her lemon pound cake with its special glaze on most everyone’s plate. A panic ran through her like a sprinkler system, soaking her in sweat. What if a sliver of lemon pound cake wasn’t enough? Tilly stared at her plate and a pickled fig stared back like a wet slug. She plucked the whole fig from the plate, dropping it into her mouth. Her mouth filled with a mix of vinegar, sugar, and spices in a perfect layer. Exquisite. One week later, Tilly had three fewer neighbors. Most had recovered from the poisoning, but not the unlucky handful that indulged in more than their fair share. Of course, the majority were still battling some aftereffects. Tilly cut two large slices of lemon pound cake complete with special glaze. The doorbell rang. Mr. Ross had arrived. “Tilly. So nice of you to invite me over.” She led Mr. Ross to the cheery yellow kitchen and seated him in front of the largest slice of cake. Next year, the Best Overall category would be with its rightful owner again. Katy is a writer and editor for a national engineering and surveying organization and a fiction editor for Identity Theory. Her writing has appeared or will appear in The Dead Mule School, Reckon Review, Cowboy Jamboree, Salvation South, and elsewhere. Her first job was being the Easter bunny at her local mall. She peaked early. She was born and raised in South Carolina and lives with her spouse and two pups, Finn and Betty Anne. You can find her on Twitter at MarchingFourth and katygoforth.com

a frantic species she walks so slowly you can see the wicker becoming a basket and then she bends over to pick up a penny but, it’s simply to reshuffle flesh; to pull gravity from the sky and throw it down. the night is a vibration full of calm and the candle remains solid though you breathe on it in spasms. she wants you so badly you can hear it in her crackling hair. her brain is full of gargling sounds and her hands offer you a cup of smiles: a bowl of tadpoles pulling each other like lashes closing an eye. she waits for you where elephants shake their heads at memories of mastodons; where letters form words at the edge of a silence spongier than language. and you lift her dress because her pockets are empty as a waterfall and she begs you not to weigh her down. water in the sahel in the vernacular of hegemony there are mountains spanked to white dwarfs; cutlasses dulled to butter and the button that sealed my lips was a toothless curse. i made a promise to forestall witlessness, to ingratiate a species not convinced of extinction. it was thought that a consequence of stupidity was to winnow blood pressure so a heart had no reason and laid flat. but i can’t ship darkness to you with its heavy feet; in air, it is simply a hindenburg that refuses to burn. and all day long, the consolation of a slow heaven sails out to a sea looking for handouts freer than horse- weight on the old plains. consciousness is what i promise you; where confection finds a suitcase to spill alcohol; where tiny legs of crickets are so quiet in their truth. at the door, listening and sun comes in sprinkling its lungs in river fire; crusts baked in wallpaper, screamed in disease. and i wait for you, myriad in what i want to say: cascades thrown as if they weren’t waterfalls. one impenetrable rock formation; one army of silhouettes yawning without fatigue or outlines. and i’m still a disembodied ear at a gravesite sniffing cut roses through rain. circled by wind, an alp is a small hill. a movement is an orchestral arrangement. a dry riverbed scraped by a harsh word or two is really a thready cloud offering its wrinkled skin. and i can still wait for you as a redwood finding the first foot of morning in a desert wiping sweat from its face. even if a crocodile is hungry as a blizzard it can never take down a wildebeest in penny lane. anna waits it was the end of an hour. untimed. echoes of no particular ethnicity running out of caves speaking promises, articulating gestures they had never bothered with before. it was emptiness and capacity; bone and water. if you’d seen the day of the triffids it was blacker and whiter and less real than the plants. there were cowbells without mooing; milk without cows. and chandeliers of broken cobwebs tinkling out of tune. i wanted to talk to you even though listening was archaic in that fog, and flames crumbled in a watered hiss. you wouldn’t have appreciated my voice anyway, as long as it dragged in the air and no one laid down a carpet for a picnic. trees popped open like baskets dropped from threes storeys. there wasn’t a smell or a pastry for the wind to linger on. no xylem and phloem to carry water, and i still wanted to talk to you. i still thought butterflies were free. “a-han-a…. i want you know now…….” that sundays will never come home. they won’t have to as long as days have names and the sky threatens us with sagging eyes. “go with him.” the sun will only make a desert of you and when sand flies, the flames are deafening. “girl before you go now……..” passing motion detectors to enter a beanfield, measuring acreage with lipstick – a ship’s galley spills more love than beans. a minister argues more catholicism than the lightbulb above his head. “just one more thing, girl……” ireland has its sword of light wrenched from a bog; fairy tales falling not too far away. one man pulled in a donkey cart, hands chained behind his back. don’t listen to me. “go with him.” they’ll tell you the fanfare of midnight is a sound squeezed from the sky where streets are wide and no one screams. they’ll tell you cranes lift nothing without a loss of gravity. cranes won’t even fly. and if i listened with every sensory organ i might hear deserts pleading to the sun. they’ll tell you that dusk baking into dark is just a memory struck with cement, or a shovel turning over soil. but i know my heart makes more noise than all the picture windows on the horizon and each bullfrog adds a dollop to the thunder. they’ll tell you persons named smith can’t explain night and day and a seal’s bark is more precious than both. so when you see a bush bleeding leaves in summer, you would have to think disease. you would have to breathe without purpose to feel the weight of your lungs and swear to only pick ripe fruit. they’ll tell you, you can’t really sleep on a beach with all that sun and crabs that move like moles under your back. those umbrellas are really so many mushrooms. ever hear of the death cap? Livio Farallo is co-editor of Slipstream and Professor of Biology at Niagara County Community College. His stuff has appeared or, is forthcoming, in Helix, Rabid Oak, Ginosko, Otoliths, Panoplyzine, Brief Wilderness, Triggerfish and elsewhere.

A month ago, I was in Los Angeles and my husband was in New York on his way home from Madrid and Paris. He’s a writer, fancied himself a poet, though he’d been working on a film. Or so he said. It wasn’t long before I discovered he hadn’t been traveling alone. His companion was a young, married Italian woman. Sooner or later, often without any research, we find whatever we need to know. Whether we want to or not. He wasn’t supposed to return when he did and the surprise weekend erupted in a marriage-ending war of words during which he deftly quoted Hemingway. He should have known I’d recognize his habit of often quoting without credit. Upon the breakup of their marriage, Hemingway said to his first wife, Hadley: “I wish I had died before I loved another….” My ex paraphrased, but only slightly. It should be noted that Hadley, bless her heart, went on to another life and lived to be 90-something. Hemingway, as we know, eventually blew his brains out. My husband ran the quote by me and I reacted by throwing things across the room. Dramatic? Damn straight. The things I tossed were mostly unbreakable, and nothing I really liked. But during my controlled frenzy, and in a moment of startling awareness, I realized that life was more complicated than the word love. It turns out love really isn’t all you need. Certainly not all I needed. There were those other words— respect and kindness—that got lost in the years. Words impossible to live without. While my husband was busy fucking up our lives, I’d been working hard at my business. Which he resented, and which, by the way, supported us. So listening to him giggling over his new love and quoting dead writers just put me off ever-so-slightly. He would always love me, he repeated, then left again for Europe to be confused. Confusion was his métier. I changed the locks on the doors and my life and thought about getting out of town. I didn’t have a lot of time or money, but Cabo San Lucas wasn’t far from Los Angeles. I’d bring books and wallow in aloneness. I didn’t want to go anywhere I’d been with my husband. Don’t go back. Go different. Out on the edge of the world, the view was spectacular. Cabo San Lucas sits on the southern point of Baja California where the Pacific meets the Sea of Cortez. Blue ocean smacks up on a barren desert landscape with stark serenity. Three hours in I met Shirley and Ray. They’re also Americans and talk about the land they’ve bought in Washington state and their plan to build and retire. Shirley is 45. So am I. Retire? Who thinks about retiring at 45? It sounded almost obscene. They’ve noticed I’m here alone, but don’t ask questions and I soon discover I’m the only lone woman in the entire resort. I didn’t care. Determined as I was to maintain my death-defying optimism. With the sea as background music, I write every morning on hotel notepads. Ramblings. I wasn’t a writer, never kept a journal. Maybe that would change. I eat breakfast on the terrace where waiters smile politely at my limited Spanish. In school I’d studied French, never considering that I lived in a city where over fifty-percent of the population spoke Spanish. Ray and Shirley at the next table. Shirley leaves for a swim and Ray brings his coffee to join me. He's a nice man. I could survive about twenty minutes with a nice man like Ray. I load film in my camera. A real camera. It was the ‘90’s. I want proof I was here. I even snap a picture of myself on the beach. Now, with the proliferation of selfies, perhaps not as pathetic as I thought. In my hotel room, the overhead fan soothes. Like the waves and the stirring of the palms, everything moves in a mesmerizing rhythm, slowing the heartbeat and bringing peace. My life waits for me and these few days are a way to help me get on with it. But what if I just stayed? Thoughts of every city person visiting paradise. My husband ran away and left the door open. He was incapable of closing it. So I would have to do it. Meanwhile, the sun glowed and my skin slowly turns brown. Traveling alone had sharpened my senses, forcing me to notice everything. There is no backup. No one to say, look, over there, see that. One evening after dinner, Benji the headwaiter stands near my table speaking halting English. A handsome face with startling white teeth he tells me about the weather at different times of the year. He says he will bring me coffee at 6:30 in the morning. Because I was up early and he’s kind. The next day, Roberto from the hotel drives me into town. He talks about his young daughter and I tell him I have a son in college. The child of my first marriage. Roberto is surprised, thinks I’m too young to have a grown son. I have no trouble understanding his compliments in Spanish. In a hurry to get back to the sea, I don’t stay long in the small town of San Cabo. The following afternoon I head to a nearby cove and snorkel in crystal clear water. Remarkable for me, because, though I’m a good pool swimmer, I have a healthy respect for the ocean. Knee-deep in the water, equipment in hand, I try to figure out the best way to get the clumsy fins on and the mask adjusted. A plump woman, expertly navigating the waves, swims over and shows me what to do and, amazingly, I do it and stare at the glistening fish at my feet, imagining the magic beyond the small circle of the cove. I have a new confidence as I put one webbed foot in front of the other. From the balcony of my room on my last night, I watch the phosphorescent laced waves aglow in the light of the moon. Tomorrow I will go to the airport and go home. This side trip isn’t a wild adventure, neither far away, nor dangerous. But a journey nonetheless. And a beginning. Janet Clare has had short fiction and essays published online at Literary Hub, Assignment, Manifest Station, Red Fez, First Stop Fiction, among others, and anthologized in New World Writing, Elm Leaves Journal, The Truth of Memoir, and Spent. Her first novel was published in 2018 out of Australia. She lives in Los Angeles.

An MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) scanner has a little secret that only those who’ve been scanned know about. The time spent waiting for my name to be called was less than calming as I overheard more than one person being told they’d have to come back another day and be sedated for the scan. It made me wonder if it was a good idea to have an MRI even though I’d been waiting over a year for the appointment. Eventually a woman in a technician’s white tunic called my name and escorted me down a corridor, through a set of double doors and into a room that held the MRI. It looked huge and yet the bed she pointed at was incredibly narrow. As I lay down, the technician started warning me about how important it was to stay still. She gave me ear plugs and then pieces of foam were tucked behind and beside my head. She looked down at me, holding up what she called a panic button and I felt her putting it in my right hand. She told me to use it if I felt I was going to move suddenly or cough or couldn’t cope with the confinement. Then a cage was pulled over my face and I felt suddenly imprisoned. She gave me one last smile, pressed something on the machine and the bed began to move inside the narrow tube. It was almost impossible to suppress the sense of panic at being so confined with no way out and no idea what to expect. The beginning of the scan sounds like a metal ping pong ball is being bounced around every part of the machine and then it starts to make a noise that I can only compare to a pneumatic drill. The earplugs were completely useless. The noise scared the absolute shit out of me and I closed my eyes tight focusing on what felt like the mammoth task of staying still. All of a sudden the thunderous roar stopped and I heard a speaker crackle in the vicinity of my head. A reassuring voice told me that I was doing well and that the scan would begin again in thirty seconds and last for two and a half more minutes. I rolled my eyes back, trying to see the speaker and spotted the MRI’s little secret, a mirror that showed the booth with the technicians coming and going, clutching files. I also saw a woman sitting near a microphone and assumed it was her speaking. Her voice would come through the speaker during every quiet interval. I took each one as an opportunity to roll my eyes back and glance at the mirror to see what was happening in the booth. Back in 1998, MRI’s were a rarity in Ireland and I had turned eighteen and completed my first year of university waiting for the appointment day to arrive. I was put on the waiting list after an epilepsy diagnosis, but lying in the tube, I doubted whether it was necessary as my seizures were well controlled with medication. When the reassuring voice said the test was halfway through, I rolled my eyes back and saw a very different looking booth. It was filled with people, some in uniforms, some in scrubs and some in suits. They all had one thing in common, each was staring at a screen that had an image of my brain on it. As the scan went on, I kept looking in the mirror, hoping that the booth would suddenly empty, that all those people had gathered for a few minutes for some other reason, but each time I looked, there they all stood, focused on the problem of my brain. After what felt like an eternity the scan finished and I emerged from the tube. I knew from the way the technician looked at me that something was wrong. She walked me to a different waiting area to my parents. A doctor appeared and said that there was something of concern on the scan. I was put in a wheelchair and told that I needed skull x-rays. The doctor remained with my parents while a porter whisked me away. I found this incredibly frustrating because I knew an explanation was being given to my parents and not to me, despite the fact that I was eighteen. When the porter brought me back, I knew from one look at my parents that it was serious. A brain tumour, my mother said. I was to be admitted as an emergency through Accident & Emergency and the neurosurgical team would see me later in the day. I remember walking ahead of my parents through the main foyer of Beaumont Hospital with tears streaming down my face. I found it almost incredulous that I had something growing inside my head. Something so dangerous that I couldn’t go home. It was a beautiful summer’s day, the heat was high and the sun shone in a cloudless sky. Being able to stand outside in the summer sun was a vital reprieve. Waiting in A&E was the same then as it is now, long, boring and overcrowded. The simple truth is that not enough has changed in the health service. Late in the evening, a bed was found for me in the hospital’s renal ward and I would wait there until a bed became available on the neurosurgery floor. It was terrifying and I recall feeling terribly alone once my parents left for the night. A woman in the bed opposite me came over and asked how I was and why I had none of my things. When I explained the emergency, she offered me a pair of pyjamas and something to read. She also introduced me to something that is now long gone from any hospital, the smoking room. To this day, I can remember telling a fellow smoker that something had been found in my head, but nobody was sure what it was. With hindsight, I doubt that was the case, it was just that it hadn’t been explained to me. After a few days, I was moved to the neurosurgery floor where I met different members of the team looking after me, but no serious conversations were had with me. They spoke with my mother in the corridor in hushed tones and I will never know how much or how little information was passed on to me. My mother did what any mother would do in such a situation, she erred on the side of protecting me. I’m no longer able to ask her what she remembers about those days because she passed away a number of years ago. I didn’t understand the delay at the time, but I know now that the surgery had to be planned very carefully due to the location of the tumour in the skull base. The exact medical term is intracranial epidermoid cyst, but tumour is less of a mouthful. This type of tumour is benign and congenital meaning it was there before I was born. As I grew, it grew. The bigger it got, the more problems I faced. I had my first seizure aged ten, but I didn’t know it was a seizure and told nobody. I would be sixteen before I spoke to a doctor about episodes that were different types of seizure. Epilepsy is a complex disorder that takes many different forms. The types of seizure I have don’t involve me falling to the ground and shaking. I enter a trance-like state and become unresponsive. I’m unable to remember the seizure and experience confusion and tiredness afterwards. To a stranger, I would look absolutely fine and that is the most difficult part of an invisible disability. If people cannot see that you are unwell, the illness is often treated as less serious or even non-existent. As someone once said to me ‘you don’t have real seizures.’ My epilepsy is very real and has put limits on my life for more years than I care to count. Cognitive impairment began in my mid-teens. I took a swan dive from the top of the class to close to the bottom. It was a miracle I made it to university at all. I also endured severe depression and personality changes. Nobody added all these symptoms up and thought brain tumour, but I was lucky in that one doctor recognised signs of epilepsy, which led to the discovery of the tumour. I can look back now and know that I didn’t become stupid at the age of fifteen, it was that the little monster inside my head was growing. I picked up scraps of information about the tumour from eavesdropping when my mother spoke to doctors and the occasional straight answer from a medic. I learned that if I didn’t have surgery I would be terminally ill within a year. It would be a slow death, preceded by paralysis on the right side, protrusion of the tumour through the forehead, coma and then death by the age of twenty-three at best. My life was very much in the hands of my neurosurgeon who looked quite like Rod Stewart. For reasons I can’t fully explain, I began to tell myself that the tumour wasn’t really in my brain, but rather just beside it. I was young, frightened and didn’t fully understand what was happening to me. Truth be told, nobody informed me that my brain was already damaged and that the act of surgery would leave extensive damage behind. It was explained that part of my skull would be removed to access my brain and remove the tumour. Gluing the bone back in place created a step in my skull and every time I touch it, I’m reminded of what happened. I was also told that half my head would be shaved which hit me like a ton of bricks. I walked into the hospital with long, auburn curls and found it hard to imagine that they’d be taken away while I was under anaesthetic. A few months prior, I’d read an article about a woman who documented her brain tumour and I asked my neurosurgeon if I could have my surgery photographed and he agreed. I wanted to see what the tumour looked like and what my brain looked like. I still have the photos, but it’s quite rare that I sit and look at them. If I do look at them, I feel grateful for surviving, but also saddened by the amount of damage that's been done. On August 4th 1998, I was woken early by a nurse and told to wash my hair. I wondered then and I wonder now why it needed to be clean to be shaved off. I was sitting on the bed drying it when my parents appeared. I didn’t know why they were there as I hadn’t been given the impression that it was a gravely serious surgery. What I know now allows me to see it in a different light. They were present because there was a risk of death, serious complications and damage to things we all take for granted such as seeing, hearing, walking and talking. I remember being put to sleep in an ante-room and the next thing I knew, my neurosurgeon was asking me if I could see with my left eye in recovery. Thankfully, I could. I would learn later that part of the tumour had been attached to the left optic nerve. The worst part of the hospital stay was the swelling pain after the drain was removed. It was excruciating. I remember clasping both hands against my head and curling in and out of a fetal position until tears were running down my face. All I wanted to do was scream from agony until the swelling stopped. Another patient politely told me that one side of my head had doubled in size. It reduced to normal proportions over a few days. The second worst was looking in the mirror and seeing half my hair gone and the other half matted with blood. After discharge, a lot of that had to be cut off too. I spent two weeks in hospital and even appeared at a neurosurgery conference feeling like a bit of a curiosity, but apparently what was in my head is exceedingly rare. It was also rather large, my neurosurgeon said the tumour was the size of a satsuma. I haven’t eaten one since. Years later, I read an MRI report and learned that the tumour had a diameter of 7cm. It’s hard to imagine something that big fitting inside my head. All my life when I opened my eyes, I could see my nose and I thought this was perfectly normal. As it had never been any other way, I naturally assumed that everyone could see their nose. You can imagine my surprise when I learned that the opposite is true. I found it hard to believe that other people can’t see their noses without a mirror. That small difference in my eyesight was the first sign of the presence of the tumour. An eye specialist called it a nasal deficit and told me I had decreased peripheral vision on the left. That was less of a surprise as I knew that I didn’t see as well on that side and if anybody wants to give me a fright all they have to do is approach me from the left. On the day of discharge, I was given instructions about wound care and using baby shampoo for a few weeks. There were no warnings about the consequences of a tumour and neurosurgery in the long term. I walked out considering myself fixed because the operation had been successful. The term ‘acquired brain injury’ or ABI for short was never uttered in my presence and it would be another twenty-five years before I came to understand how it applies to me. A small part of me was hoping that the removal of the tumour would mean my seizures would also disappear, but that wasn’t to be the case. The tumour’s biggest gift to me is epilepsy that remains difficult to control and during bad patches, limits what I can do. Within six weeks of the surgery, I returned to university and tried to get on with things as best I could. It was difficult always being in a hat to hide the fact that half my hair was just starting to regrow. News of my surgery had spread like wildfire through the university and I heard whispers wherever I went. It would take many months to shake off the feeling of being stared at and labelled as someone who had a brain tumour. Gradually I noticed that some things were different and that I couldn’t do things in the way I had before. I became highly sensitive to noise, allergic to busy areas and parties, sensitive to bright lights, more prone to stress and feeling overwhelmed by things that had never bothered me before. I had a part-time job in a pub, but found it unbearable and was forced to quit. I know now the issues are neuro-fatigue and sensory overload, but that language was unavailable to me at the time so I told nobody what I was experiencing. I told myself that it must be linked to my epilepsy even when my seizures were well controlled. I thought it couldn’t be anything to do with the tumour because the hospital fixed me. I spent a lot of time feeling like I was going mad. Despite those obstacles, I completed my primary degree and went on to complete a Master’s degree for which I was awarded a fellowship. While the left side of my brain is damaged, my core intelligence remains unchanged and that’s a blessing I remain grateful for every day. Last Summer, twenty-five years after neurosurgery, I began a program of rehabilitation for ABI and years of confusion about physical, cognitive, social and emotional problems are starting to make sense. There’s a huge relief in knowing for certain that I was never going mad. ABI is a bit like an iceberg, most of the problems are hidden beneath the surface and when you look fine, as I did and do, most people assume you’re fine. My mindset was always geared toward fixing the problems I have. I wanted to fix my epilepsy and the other issues related to having an ABI so that I would then be able to have a normal life, just like everybody else. I wanted to be fine, instead of just pretending I was. I have read MRI reports that detail extensive scarring and white matter abnormality in my left frontal lobe and left temporal lobe. This is the presumed cause of my epilepsy. This damage will always be with me and there is no repairing it. It is difficult to accept that these problems cannot be fixed. The solution lies in learning how to live with them and utilise strategies to make life easier and achieve my priorities. There’s also great comfort and support in friendships made with other people who live with an ABI. It would be easy to spend a lifetime grieving for all that I’ve lost due to neurological conditions, but I’ve spent enough time in mourning. I’m choosing to believe that while the tumour left me with obstacles, I can build a life with those obstacles in mind, rather than being a prisoner to them. Much of who I am as a person is linked to my experience of epilepsy and ABI as I have lived longer with them than I have without them. I have no doubt that I’d be different if neither of those things had befallen me. I believe that the combination of these two things grants me a perspective that is unique. A perspective that influences my writing whether it be fiction or nonfiction. Down through the years, writing has always been my saviour and it’s a cornerstone of my identity. When times get tough, writing is my safety rope. My ABI is an open wound that has never wanted to heal, but if life has taught me anything, it’s that I am a survivor. I possess the determination necessary to discover the best means of putting the little monster that once lay inside my head to rest permanently. Karen Browne lives in Galway, Ireland and enjoys exploring the darker side of life in short stories and novels. She also writes select creative nonfiction. Her work features in Issue 8 of Feels Blind Literary www.feelsblindliterary.com/karen-browne. She is currently working on her debut novel.