by Andrea Saravia Pérez
Heard of a boy
Who lived down under
In a box of lumber
Hidden in soil.
So his soul would rise
For demise was not enough
To keep him away
From one more dance.
Pasture Statues
by Alfredo Salvatore Arcilesi
Millie mooed.
Cate mooed with her.
The cow stared at them.
Millie giggled at the old joke, a pure, authentic song.
Cate giggled with her, exaggerated, trembling notes.
The cow stared at them.
Millie continued to pet the cow’s cheek. Cate stroked the other, looking for signs of impatience in the otherwise stoic animal, searching its blank yet somehow knowing eyes for knowledge of her charade. What made her want to release the scream that had been lodged in her throat for inconceivable minutes was how Millie, sitting comfortably in her numb arms, was so far away from screaming; Millie, who had every justification for adding her shrill voice to the one behind them.
She hadn’t asked Millie if she was all right; doing so would have given her the impression something was wrong. She hadn’t asked Millie her actual name; as far as the little girl’s amiable behaviour indicated, they had known each other all their lives, and names didn’t matter. She hadn’t asked Millie her age; from the moment she took the little girl into her arms, she could tell the small human being was no older than her career.
Three-years-old, Cate mused again, as she transferred Millie from one desensitized arm to the other, careful not to break contact with the cow. Three years, and once again she imagined the retirement banner, growing longer and larger as the idea cooked in her mind, advertising the pitiful number.
Cate was grateful for the brown-and-white animal’s presence. Moreover, she was grateful that the cow was the first thing Millie had noticed. She wouldn’t have thought to mosey on over to the cow; instinct—training—would have told her to immediately transport the dishevelled little girl to her car; and there they would have waited for the next routine steps. And then she would’ve known something was wrong, she thought. And then she would’ve started screaming.
A scream perforated the ambience, a cocktail of pain, fear… and perhaps a note of anger.
“Mooooo!” Cate issued her loudest impersonation yet. Millie echoed her sentiments, prolonging and exaggerating the bovine language until it devolved into more giggling.
Another scream smothered the laughter, and, for a terrible moment, Cate thought she felt
Millie stiffen; thought she saw registration on the little girl’s suddenly sagging face.
“Moo mooooo moo moo moo mooooo moo,” Cate interjected, the single word spoken in the rhythm of conversation. She fixed upon Millie’s eyes, hoping the little girl would take the bait, ready to shift her little body should she decide to go peeking behind her back toward the scream.
Millie’s bowed lips glistened, saliva pooling as she gathered her thoughts about the conflicting sounds. Cate readied her own lips with another string of nonsensical cow-speak, when Millie broke out of her trance, and fired off a meaningless statement of her own: “Mooooo mooooo mooooo”—laughter— “mooooo moo moo moo.”
Relieved, Cate kept the dialogue flowing for as long and as loud as was necessary to beat the intermittent screaming from Millie’s ears. As their banter rose and fell with the outbursts behind them, she imagined how the others must have seen them: vulnerable backs; a revolving red light highlighting Millie’s arms wrapped comfortably—Or is she in shock? Cate couldn’t decide—around her neck; mooing from unseen lips; the cow itself unseen, blocked by their combined bodies. How unreal it must have appeared to them.
How grotesquely real it was to her.
How beautifully real it was to Millie.
A terrible thought returned Cate to their cozy huddle: This is your first time, isn’t it? The scream she struggled to keep deep down in her gorge threatened to erupt. It occurred to her that this cow—not the pair grazing further down the fence, dangerously close to the break; not the calf flanked by several adults; not the others standing nonchalantly, laying nonchalantly, living nonchalantly; not the countless others that might have been a blur in Millie’s passenger window—but this cow might very well have been the very first cow Millie had ever seen.
Cate mooed, and wondered if Millie could detect the underlying melancholy. You don’t need to meet a cow, she desperately wanted to assure the little girl. Not now. Not like this. She was certain that when Millie was one day no longer a size fit for one’s arms—there’s no guarantee of that, Cate sadly reminded herself—she might learn to hate the cow. All cows. The way Cate hated them for what they had done to Millie. To her.
To Millie’s mother.
The human sounds behind them were less frequent now, quieter, the pain, the fear, the anger—if ever there was—giving themselves to realization. Cate hoped Millie’s mother would soon forget how to scream. This line of thinking was drenched in selfishness, but Cate had accepted it for now; may guilt torment her later. It was just that she and, more importantly, the cow had worked so damned hard to keep Millie occupied. Or are we keeping the cow occupied? Cate thought for the first time.
She looked into the animal’s eyes, glossy black islands surrounded by thin halos of bloodshot white. Pulses of red light, rotating like an angry lighthouse—an eye of its own—searched those eyes, much as Cate was doing now, for knowledge.
Do you see the red light? she mentally transmitted to the cow. Do you understand it? Did you see what happened before the red light? Do you understand what happened?
The cow stared.
Do you understand that this little girl I’m holding, the one mooing at you, the one petting your face… do you understand that her mother is the one who killed your calf?
Based on its indifference, she couldn’t tell if the calf was blood-related to the cow. Would he or she—Cate couldn’t tell which—bite Millie if it understood the situation behind them? Would he or she reconsider biting if it understood the whole thing had merely been a matter of a broken fence? Would he or she refrain from seeking revenge upon Millie if it understood that the calf had wandered through the broken fence, onto the asphalt, and before Millie’s mother’s car? Would he or she rethink their potential bite if it understood that Millie’s mother had, from the looks of the finale, done her best to avoid the calf, but instead clipped its behind, sending her speeding vehicle into the ditch? Would he or she accept that the calf had been mercifully put down, quickly and painlessly, unlike Millie’s mother, who found herself wrapped deep within her metal womb, gasoline-for-blood everywhere, unable to be reached or moved, lest she perish sooner?
The cow stared.
Cate focused on Millie’s silhouette within the animal’s sheeny eye: do you understand?
A voice answered the question. Cate couldn’t make out the words, only the harshness of the voice. She sensed an approaching presence, and immediately understood what was happening. In a voice tailored for Millie’s benefit, Cate said, “Please, don’t come any closer,” and resumed mooing along with Millie.
“Officer?” The voice didn’t sound so harsh. Perhaps it hadn’t been at all. Perhaps, Cate decided, she was prejudiced against voices outside of she and Millie’s precious bubble.
Cate sensed the intruder take another step forward.
“I said don’t,” Cate said in her rosiest voice.
“Officer, I need to examine the little girl,” the soft voice said.
The well-meaning plea incensed Cate. She’s fine. I checked her when I pulled her out of the car. Some scratches, a few bruises, but she’s fine. I checked her. And I named her. She knew someone close to Millie must have known her real name, but for tonight, in her arms, the little girl would take the name of the first girl Cate had lost on the job.
Footsteps crunched behind them.
“Don’t,” Cate emphasized, momentarily breaking her character of utter serenity. Before the intruder could interject, she added: “I—just give us a few minutes, okay?”
And then what? she thought.
Once again, she caught Millie’s silhouette in the cow’s eye. Do you have a father?
Grandmother? Grandfather? Uncles? Aunts? Anybody? Do you know your name?
What would become of Millie when Cate decided enough “few minutes” had elapsed?
What would become of the little girl when the cow was gone?
The intruder’s footsteps—a paramedic just trying to do her job—retreated, but Cate sensed she hadn’t gone far; Millie did need to be examined.
She realized the screaming had died. It made sense to her, not because the outcome was inevitable, but because the paramedic now had time to check on the only survivor.
But they still had a few minutes.
And so Millie mooed.
Cate mooed with her.
The cow stared at them.
Alfredo Salvatore Arcilesi has spent the decade penning award-winning short- and feature-length screenplays, while working as a full-time artisan baker. His short stories have appeared in over 50 literary journals worldwide, and he was a finalist in the Blood Orange Review Literary Contest. In addition to several short pieces, he is currently writing his debut novel.
Thumb Out
by RC DeWinter
i have no car
and i’m in desperate need
of a ride
and i’d like you
to be the one to drive me
crazy
over the edge
off the cliff
straight into the mindless abyss
of ecstasy
i want to be the hitchhiker
you pick up
on the side of the highway
that has so many names
call it what you like
i’m well beyond
shame and shyness now
all i know
is that you’re driving
the car i want to ride in
around every curve
and straight on into forever
let me slide in beside you
we’ll drive cross-country
to places neither of us has ever been
RC deWinter’s poetry is anthologized, notably in New York City Haiku, Coffin Bell Two, Winter Anthology: Healing Felines and Femmes, and Now We Heal: An Anthology of Hope. It also appears in2River, Event, Meat For Tea: The Valley Review, the minnesota review, Night Picnic Journal, Prairie Schooner, Southword, and Yellow Arrow Journal, among others, and appears in numerous online literary journals.
Let Me Tell You about the Boy
by Duncan Mwangi
Let me tell you about the boy who came into my room last month. I’d just come home from work; I didn’t have enough for the bus so I’d walked for what had been two hours. I was in the shower washing out the weight of Nairobi on my joints. As I tried stroking my member to get hard, soap got into both my eyes like spat venom and the water suddenly stopped flowing. I reached for both the faucet and the shower head but all I grabbed was air. A sudden wind was blowing at the soapsuds on my back; I could feel them pop. Then I heard footsteps. I decided to take a chance and open my eyes. The lather made me wince.
There he was, in a black flowy abaya. Everything about him, even in stillness, was flowy. Still, I could tell he was not a boy—don’t ask me how. I was not trying to clock him or anything. He motioned for me to follow him. His fingernails were long and painted a singed-plastic black but I swear to God I knew him somewhere and in that somewhere, wherever it was, he was not a boy.
For a moment, I wanted to scream but I didn’t. I live in a cramped neighborhood with my unit facing twenty to thirty windows thereabout, and screaming while naked was bound to not work out well. Anyway, I knew this not-boy. I just had to remember from where.
I didn’t get a chance to follow him because out of nowhere a blast of cold water was hitting me and once it rinsed out my face, he was gone. As soon I was decently clothed, oiled and ready for bed, I checked around my bedsit but there was no trace of the strange boy.
At night, I dreamt about my mother atop a grassy hill and I was at the bottom. There was the wind; not that I could hear or feel it but because I could see the tall grass stir like stew ingredients in a pot. Or maybe it was the moon doing it the same way it likes pulling at the hems of an ocean like a perturbed child. My mother saw me and waved me to climb up to meet her, but every step I took was a spreading knife on a buttered slice of bread. I could only make three–no—five steps before I ended up back down. It reminded me of high school when I tried to up my grades in Mrs. Kiai’s Chemistry class on a whim (she was a total MILF). I’d be sore with lack of sleep for weeks for a measly B after which I’d slack off and glide back down to my permanent C’s. They were insectile efforts: she barely even noticed.
Eventually, my mother got tired of waiting. She slowly crouched to her knees then lay down on her back. Then akaanza kugaragara. On and on and on, down and down and down, until she was nothing but a hypnotic spiral. As soon as I blinked, my eyes met the brown stain from my ceiling.
It was a bit after seven the next morning. Switchboard was already awake in the next building playing really loud rhumba, which my feet kept getting tangled in as I peeled, diced, washed and roasted five plantains for my breakfast. On my morning shower, I waited for the boy to make an appearance, but all I got was a rising water level that had licked its way up to my ankles by the time I noticed. There was a clog in the drain. The cap was full of wet bits of my hair and some slime. I used an old toothbrush to clean the pores and set it back down. My hands would’ve probably shuddered the whole day if I hadn’t done that weekend Nairobi Water and Sewerage stint in Njiru back in Uni. On those nights I remember being so afraid of getting stink on my bed linens so I slept on the floor with my hands far above my head. While asleep, I’d tuck them under my chin again, and the ghostly smell of human discharge would mischievously stick two fingers up my nostrils and force me awake. The pay was ass but it kept me alive for my classes so I stayed.
With my appointment with you at ten and a mover’s job at one forty-five, the course of my day was pretty much set. I locked up my house and stood on the balcony for a moment. Outside, like a dull fat cloud swallowing a couple of small bright ones, Saturday was coming together. Children in shorts, sandals, sleep lines and saliva stains were running down staircases with clutched fists and back up with bread, hot mandazi, eggs and milk sachets. The sun was vainly checking itself out on every window. Once every five minutes a boda would zoom past, breaking the sound coming from Switchboard’s building.
As I made my way downstairs, a Chihuahua tried to take a nip of my red leather coat on one of the staircases. As soon as its owner had her back turned, I flipped her dog the middle finger. We were now lifelong enemies. If the thing was smart, like a cat, it would probably find a way into my house, take a good long dump on the floor and spread it on my furniture with its paws like it was making a smelly Picasso. That’s what cats do when they hate a person. Kind of like they did my mother.
You were late, which was unlike you. Lagat let me into your office because all the charging points at the reception were full. I had to sit on your black couch and wait. The curtains were drawn and the only sound in the room was the comforting hum of the fluorescent bulb.
I’ve never seen you look sexier than you did when you barged in that morning in a plain white tee, an ocean blue pair of ankle trousers and your braids hanging down like breathing roots on an old tree. You had that fresh-out-of-bed look and traces of your husband were still all over you. It made me go hard, thinking about you and him having done it barely minutes before you got there. Let’s just say that I naturally love being a follower, in all things.
We were deep in the mundane stuff, those meds I was supposed to be taking but couldn’t afford, when I proposed the thing, asked you to peg me like you previously wanted. Remember? I will never forget your face. Every part of it wanted to close up like a fist. Then you found air again and began to laugh. I laughed too, then asked you again.
“We’re doing this,” you said out loud as if for you the fringes of reality were combusting like a photograph on fire.
“We’re doing this,” I promised.
I helped you stack your patient files on the couch and we dragged it across the carpet and right next to the door. It made no sound at all, thank goodness.
I did that striptease routine you liked until all that was left on me was an outline of chest hair and a blue pair of ankle socks. When I got on top of your desk and spread my legs, your laughter was hysterical. “Unakaa kuku porno inazunguka kwa window tao.” Thanks to me, you said, Sonford chicken was on your mind at eleven in the morning and you couldn’t go through with it. Chickened out, you quipped, feeling like you just got a Harvard degree handed to you. After one measly blowjob, I let you dress me and I slumped to the floor and sat sulking on the carpet while you moved the couch and the files back.
I saw the boy again, still in his abaya. He was crouched right next to me on your carpet, staring me down. I broke eye contact, but he didn’t seem to notice, so I waved a hand over his face, but that didn’t register too. As soon as you opened the door for me to leave, it was like he melted into the carpet leaving no stains behind. Not like we did.
I was late to the move at two. The boys patted my back and handed me a couch and shared a spliff between lifts. We’d never met before in our lives. While we were in transit to Machakos, feeling smothered by the truck’s body heat, naming our lost dreams and lost wage jobs, the lifetimes we had spent apart from each other were shed. We learned that to become kin is to share less of blood and more of misery. Once the move was done and we were paid, we decided Nairobi could wait. It was always going to be there anyway. Nairobi is kind of an oxalis; as long as someone pisses on that corner it’ll stay evergreen.
One of the boys had a baggie with him and suggested that we find a secluded spot. The Machakos park grass looked inviting with the sparse lights creating elaborate shadows on it. We could hear the water in the lake swishing and the trees rustling their leaves, like children with rattles who couldn’t use their words. Probably trying to warn someone, anyone, that five men were jumping the fence. The leather coat under me grew moist as I sat on the grass, but I stayed put, as unfazed as the rest of the crew was.
We passed the blunt around and blew smoke at the moon. From the corner of my eye, I saw the moon blow something back. The piece of paper did a dutty wine in the air before making up its mind on the lake. Then it plunged downward, a flapping meteor.
Standing by the edge of the water, ready to receive it, was the boy who was in my room last month. He came up to me, took my hand and led me to the lake. The water was bathtub-silent now. I watch him fold the paper into a plane and toss it back up. It was forcefully snatched from its slow parachuting by a sudden breeze and whipped against a tree bark. It held onto the tree for dear life momentarily, then was pushed off by the wind again, which clearly was throwing a shit fit.
“Do you know how to make one?” the boy asked me. “Every good boy should know how to make a paper plane.”
A memory that was previously hard to recall shoved itself forward and was now within reach. The last week of December 1999 found my mother and I lying on a lot of sacks with maize spread out to dry, about two football fields of it. My mother was knitting another grey beanie hat for school. I was seven at the time, and would lose these woolen head socks—these mboshoris—nearly as fast as I lost skin cells. The old millennium was fast shelling the last of its seconds from its cob. Most of the neighborhood was out of their houses. The Christians were huddled in their iron sheet churches, deep in prayer, with them the fear of mice on a ship caught in a bad storm. The rest of the world was stacking colorful soda crates and black Tusker lager crates on their verandas. Chicken and goat thighs were browning and wrinkling above hot coals every day outside the tenement house.
I pushed out the Mathematics Kasuku exercise book I was sitting on, opened it, plucked a page and handed it to my mother. “I don’t know how to make a paper plane”
She stopped knitting and took the page into her hands. “Every good boy should know how to make a paper plane.”
***
Yes, Soni, the boy was my mother. In the beginning, I said that I could tell that the boy was no boy. While I believed my eyes and the boy they saw, I believed my ears too. I believed the mother they heard. Even before he told me about the cats and the couch, every detail of that story being just like she would have remembered it, I believed him.
He also told me things about my father, who is now living in Nakuru’s leafy suburbia under my sister’s thumb. “We signed the divorce papers thirteen years ago, but we never knew what to do with them so we kept them in his sock drawer. I always meant to take them to the registry every morning when I would leave for work, but he always waited to leave after me.”
“For more than ten years, you could not wake up before him once?”
“Some mornings, I did not want to leave him for a cold bed. On all the others, I did not have enough money to think about leaving.”
A stretch of clouds now covered the moon, giving us privacy. “You are a fertile man,” the boy said out of nowhere.
I told the boy that no boy wants to hear his mother talk about his sperm. “I can be reborn to you as a son, or I can become the wind.”
I’ve never had mixed feelings about having children. The stretch of my life so far is a pit with a deep bottom. No children can grow in it.
As if I had said it out loud, the boy affirmed my train of thought. “Don’t worry. I’ve seen where you live, and I want to relinquish the chance.”
I’m usually high-strung, but I laughed. The boy laughed too. The moon threw back the cover of clouds on its face, revealing that it was also laughing.
***
After promising to join the chorus and chaos of the wind instead of burdening my strange little life, I thought the boy was gone for good.
My mother died many times when I was a child. My father said she was probably listening in on the dead as they gossiped. The part about gossip was true: my mother would have bought chinks in people’s walls if there was such a purchase category in real estate. I wonder what he would think of her current quest to become the wind, to pick up everyone’s private chatter at will. My sister, who had just delivered her first child, told her to quit her charcoal burning business because of the deaths and bring everyone to live in Nakuru. For a firstborn who is a product of hands-off parenting, all Beryl ever does is act like an extra set of hands. Outside of this trait, I must admit that I don’t know much about her. We’re not close.
The dispensary doctor called this sudden death in the night sleep apnea, gave her medication, and made her promise to hire someone else to help. Without Beryl to squeeze free labor out of and unable to stomach the possibility of being grifted by having a stranger as her employee, my mother shut everything down. By the time I was eleven, she had blown through her pension.
When I called home last year a week before she died, she was filing documents for a government relief.
A week after my pact with the boy to leave, I got a free vasectomy in the clinic right below your office. I see the sign many times before whenever the elevator door opens on my way up, the one with the heavyweight dark-skinned man whose clothes fit like bandages. I’ve always wondered if he’s just an agency model or some random guy who was sitting at the reception waiting for his own snip snip appointment, and why he would come in dressed like he was not about to receive a wound. It also beats logic to market an attractive-looking man as unwilling to propagate his genes. Just saying. It’s not a selling point I would fall for.
Anyways, I’d manscaped between my legs. I followed the steps my bunkmate used to shave with; lathering with soap and gently running a razor around the area. His pubic hair used to grow back really fast. Pathogen fast. Him shaving it so openly made for a couple of awkward Sunday afternoons, but I got over it and paid close enough attention to pick up the skill.
I was also in some loose tennis shorts in case things turned out painful. My doctor, a certain Dr. Wangdu, was pretty confident it would be dull pain at best but I’ve learned that my body is often a bitch about things normal people find to be a breeze.
After she was done, Dr. Wangdu handed me some ice in a plastic paper bag and some eclairs. “For your trouble,” she said.
“I have no sweet tooth, or children to give the sweets to,” I said, my words coated in mirth and an aftertaste of irritability from the pain I was feeling.
Right there, clear as day, stretching out a hand to me was the boy. Despite the sudden appearance, he no longer felt to me like an apparition of any kind, really, but just a companion who’d stepped out of the room to catch a breath and a smoke. I did my best not to acknowledge him. Without skipping a beat, I said goodbye to Wangdu and let the boy follow me to the reception to book a follow-up consultation.
When we got to the elevator, I handed him the sweets. “Forget something?”
He shrugged as he opened one, bit into it and pocketed the rest. “I knew that you would probably throw these away. I could not let that happen.” I asked him if he was, in any way, bothered by my vasectomy.
“A little bit, but I get over things now.” Just as well that he added now, for my mother was never the one to talk like that.
“You could have got over me throwing out those eclairs too.” “On that, I chose to intervene.”
Then the boy and I were shit-talking my sister, finding fault in how she liked to feel needed, so needed that on the day the cats came and filled the living room with their poo she cleaned everything up by herself. I did not hear the elevator ding nor the doors slide open.
I did not see you curiously take a peek inside, and wonder who I was talking to.
Duncan Mwangi is a Nairobi-based fiction writer, poet, and graduate of the Nairobi Fiction Writing Class NF2W4 2020 run by 2018 Caine Prize Winner Makena Onjerika. His works have been previously been featured on Afreada and The Shore Poetry.
A Conversation with Elizabeth Sims
By Esty Loveing-Downes and Jacob Shapiro
Mystery writer Elizabeth Sims knows a whole lot about a bunch of stuff.
After all, she’s a former newspaper reporter. And photographer. Also, a ranch hand, corporate executive, certified lifeguard, bookseller, symphonic percussionist, and member of American Mensa.
An award-winning author of books stretching from one end of the literary spectrum to the other, Elizabeth Sims’s expertise on the subject of writing runs the gamut of fiction, craft, publishing, and education. Along with the publication of her Rita Farmer Mysteries, the award-winning Lillian Byrd Crime Series, and her nonfiction work, You’ve Got a Book in You: A Stress-Free Guide to Writing the Book of Your Dreams, Sims somehow has found time to become the most published contributing editor at Writer’s Digest magazine. Whether launching her own imprint, Spruce Park Press, or teaching seminars on craft, Elizabeth Sims does it all when it comes to writing. A former professor of mystery, horror, and short story, Sims has a knack for appreciating and analyzing the written word.
Recently, she agreed to an interview with Shift, where we discussed her take on all things literary. “Zooming” in to meet with us from her home office in Michigan, she graciously commented on a wide range of literary topics, offering wisdom and insight into her life, work, and theories on writing.
Presenting a conversation with Elizabeth Sims…
On writing during a pandemic
“Twenty twenty was a big deal for me. I wish I could have been on lockdown when everyone else was instead of trying to deal with a home sale and a home purchase, because I’m part-introvert. I moved with my wife from Florida back to Michigan, which is our home state, during the pandemic. There was a slowdown in freelance work and an opportunity for ramping up of my own work. And so, everything is now going on in my new little office in my new little house.”
On working from home
“I do a mix. Variety seems to be good for me. I have my own little space; I can shut the door and do my own thing. I listen to classical music on an old school radio. I really enjoy the cafe, and I miss that. It’s not attractive enough for me to risk Covid-19 sitting there with a mask on. ‘People in Hell want ice water, but complain when they get it,’ to quote Patsy Cline. When I have my radio on in my office, it’s my attempt to duplicate Starbucks.”
On self-discipline
“It’s easier for me to procrastinate [at home] than when I’m sitting at the cafe. I can’t look at email; I can’t shop for something on Amazon. So, I do tend to get my work slammed down more efficiently if I’m at a cafe out someplace. And then, of course, you get to have your coffee. It’s that part I kind of miss. I have to be more self-disciplined at home.”
On writing queer characters as an LGBTQ author
“It probably would have been easier for me to have written straight-oriented material. I know if I hadn’t written queer subject matter, it would have been way easier to land a mainstream publisher right away. It definitely was harder to break in and try to figure out what to do being an outsider, but I’m glad I did write what I wrote first, which was the Lillian series, and that I used my real name and just decided not to try to game it in any way or in any way disguise myself. I feel good about that decision.”
On apprehending story
“I taught Short Story Writing and Writing Mysteries and Thrillers at Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, Florida. … I had [students] read too many. [Now] I would have them read fewer and spend more class time analyzing them: ‘What is the author trying to say here? What am I supposed to interpret from this?’”
On theme
“I certainly like ‘the quest for truth’—honesty at whatever cost. Many times there is a cost. Readers read to learn things. They want to learn how to live their life, how to live better. We put ourselves in the position of those characters: ‘What would I do if that happened to me? What choice would I make? If I was in that situation, would I run away or stand and fight?’ Some of the greatest literature has to do with moral questions, whether it’s Shakespeare’s tragedies or a perennial straightforward classic like To Kill a Mockingbird. Aesop’s Fables do a similar thing. The Old Testament and New Testament Bible stories, old Judeo-Christian principles—and the Qur’an has a story in it as well.”
On work as contributing editor for Writer’s Digest
“I have a bit of a dual career. I found I have a bit of a talent for helping authors get better/more efficient/closer to where they want to be. That’s been nice. It’s certainly a symbiotic thing. I learn about how to write by writing my fiction. I’ll be writing a novel or something, and I’ll be like, ‘Oh yeah.’ And I’ll solve a little puzzle or something will trigger the idea for an article. I’ve written 53 articles for Writers’ Digest all this time. I think I’m their most prolific contributor, which is cool.”
On holding reader attention
“Pure, plain honesty really can be funny. Which is kind of sad actually, because people are expecting someone to be trying to act a certain way, or put out a certain persona. But, when you totally give up on any cogent persona and just let it all hang out? It can be funny.”
On developing authentic voice
“How I developed my own voice: I stopped trying to be like anybody else. I stopped trying to write like I thought a good author should write. I let out all the stops and would use vernacular, use my opinions. Actually, lots of opinions in your fiction can help characterize your voice. Helping other authors find their voice is really hard. Take the work seriously and do a good job. The writers that I’ve worked with who had the best voices were probably fairly well read, didn’t take themselves too seriously, and they felt relaxed and loose—more so than other writers—as they’re writing. You have to give yourself permission to throw down crap in order to get to the good stuff, and sometimes the crap is better than you think it is.”
On modern writing
“I’m an analog girl in a digital world. I love these old tools. And I love old style and old things, but of course one must adapt to changing times. A couple years ago, I wrote a piece about using throwback writing technology. I wrote about using a quill pen, pencils, ballpoint pen, a very old 1926 typewriter—things like that. That was a fun piece, and it got so much response. I guess you have to be entertaining, but the personal was very interesting to people.”
On the little things
Tea or coffee?
I drink both every day. Coffee for medicinal, tea for comfort.
Summer or winter?
These days I’m picking winter, because I’m a Michigander now.
Sleeping in or waking up early?
Early on weekdays, sleeping in on weekends.
Mac or PC?
PC. Android.
Kindle or paper?
Paper. I don’t even have a Kindle anymore—gotta have paper.
Fallon or Kimmel?
Who’s the one who’s in that famous SNL skit? Debbie Downer at Disney. Was that Fallon? I’ll go with him. I can watch that and laugh my ass off every single time.
Short stories or poetry?
Short stories.
Target or Walmart?
Target. If you knew the Target and Walmart where I lived in Bradenton for 10 years, you would absolutely be with me on that one.
Podcast or audiobooks?
I don’t really listen to either, but I like podcasts because they’re happening now—and a lot of them feel like a voyeur.
We Walk The Long Hall Down
William Snyder
Me, my father, nurse Joanne—the blue
carpet, the clean fluorescence, the open
rooms. And inside those rooms,
people with gift-wrap paper, soda cans,
TV remotes. My father doesn’t look,
though days ago he would have, would’ve
asked, even strangers: How are you?
Beautiful day, isn’t it? But now it’s his
feet—if he can align them properly,
one foot in front of the other. His arms stiff,
tremulous, his fingers too, gripping
the walker handles. Legs, knees, hips—
stiff. Head, neck, shoulders sagging.
Joanne says, Lean back on your heels. Try
to stand up straight. But his feet
lag and she says, Step, step up, step up
to the walker. He tries, his slippers
toeing the carpet like a toddler’s might.
I walk behind, watch the gown sleeve slip
from his shoulder, the gown bottom open,
his flattened butt, the serrated veins
like tobacco leaf. I push the wheeled, silver
pole he’s tethered to—plastic bags
swaying there like translucent fruit. I stop
when he stops. He’s tired. Or it’s just his
stubbornness. Food, water, medicine
slosh in the bags, seep down
tubes to the hole in his side, cut
there for drips, for funnel spouts the nurses
use when time is important. Time is
important, even on this walk—how long,
how short, is anybody’s guess.
The Loneliest Universe
Addison Rizer
The morning I put my dog down, a love letter skitters across the sidewalk. I can tell by the flashes of pink scribbled onto the thick envelope turning end over end as it dances with the wind. On a bench, across the street, I wonder if it’s real. If I am real. I’m half-convinced, too late now, that I should have kept him alive.
Yes, there was the tumor. Yes, there were the seizures, two and then three times a day, but only when he got excited. His tail was wagging and then, all at once, it was stiff and soaked in his urine as he yelped on the floor. Yes, there was the heart murmur that the overweight vet said was a six out of six. Not a murmur—a pause, a giving up.
But he was coherent most of the day. Sleeping underneath the television, walking, skewed sideways by his growth the size of a baseball, then a softball, then even larger upon his ribcage. He followed me to the kitchen when I came home with his favorite tortillas from the Mexican food place down the road. Yes, most times he was himself.
But then for an hour after the seizures, he was walking into walls. He was staring at nothing. He was unaware of his own name.
Though 90 percent of the day he was himself, the other 10 percent he was empty, and the balance was growing ever more to the hollow side. What percentage was I waiting for? I told myself not yet. Not until it felt right to say goodbye. Until it didn’t feel so selfish to say enough was enough, knees aching from cleaning up his pee from the carpet for the third time in a day.
It was convenient to consider putting him down. Horrible to admit to when he still slept curled against my side every night, chasing the neighbor’s cat through his dreams. When he still knew the smell of fresh tortillas. It was selfish of me to want not to worry so much about him. To want him to be his old self. To be easier—my entire shift at the gas station spent counting how many stains I would have to scrub when I got home, carpet marks pressed into my skin permanently, it seemed.
But the seizures got worse. Still, I couldn’t be certain. I couldn’t be sure. Not with a decision like this. I asked the vet what he thought, and he only looked at me with sad eyes. He couldn’t make this decision. In every universe I existed in, this was the one in which I was the loneliest.
I nodded. I nodded. How could I have nodded?
I’m convinced now, as I watch the love letter slide away, that I was wrong to put him down. He could have lived a few more years. He could have walked sideways into the kitchen and bit my fingers as I fed him tiny pieces of tortilla broken from my own quesadilla, warm from the oven. He could have been happy and alive and dreaming, still.
But the seizures. The tumor. The way his heart was giving out.
The love letter slides against the sidewalk, drifting farther from the mailbox glinting sunlight into the eyes of everyone who passes. Farther and farther away from me. The love letter will waste away. It will find a puddle and sink into it. Pick up boot-print and mud-streak and deteriorate beneath the sunlight.
Surely, someone else will pick it up. Surely, a passerby will make sure it reaches its rightful place.
But no one stoops to pick it up off the ground. Eyes glance, mouths frown, but still, no one touches it.
I have to be at work in 20 minutes. I have to dry my eyes. But I take seven steps after the letter even as it takes seven steps more away from me. I lurch for it. It lurches for someone else. I understand that. I wish I could lurch away from myself, too. I killed my friend just hours ago. I held him as he died.
I crash into the shoulder of a man walking in the opposite direction. I don’t even apologize. I notice the throb in my shoulder only after he has already disappeared. I look back and wonder if I collided with a ghost. That doesn’t matter now. The letter needs to find its home. It would be a tragedy to expect a letter on Saturday and find only an empty mailbox. What if it’s the last love letter that person will ever receive? What if it’s the last love letter in the whole universe? I can’t let it stay lost.
I have suspected for a while now that love letters are only ever about one thing: regret. Regretting leaving, regretting staying, saying the wrong things, never saying the right ones. Attempts at righting wrongs, even the simple wrong of the universe’s distance between two people. Who am I to witness the destruction of that? Who am I to enable it by my inaction?
I’ve waited too long. I should have started running when the letter hit the ground. I should have caught it before it fell. Now, it will have wounds it doesn’t deserve, scrapes picked up from the ground.
I run. The letter catches air, envelope shining in the light. The suggestion of rain clouds on the horizon. My shift is starting, and I’m still running. The sun shifts, and I’m still running. I slip on sidewalk cracks and push off passing people and bruises bloom on my biceps. They ache with my reaching.
Still, I reach. I lunge. My lungs burn. My legs go numb. The sun begins to set, and the suggestion of clouds becomes the reality of rain.
I miss the entirety of my shift. I miss dinner with my mother. I miss 10 phone calls from my boyfriend. I miss my dog—my friend—and I picture his face as his eyes went dull. I miss the letter, over and over again, hands always empty.
Still, I inch forward. The letter slows, in my eye line but ever out of reach. Midnight nears. Rain falls. Is it fair to stop running now? Now that I’m soaked and starving and have missed all my plans? Now that the water is ruining the letter, smearing the words?
When the sun comes up, the letter is half-sludge, crawling upon the sidewalk. The name on the envelope has disappeared in the night. Should I keep running, now? When can I say I tried hard enough to be satisfied with failing? With losing?
If I scoop it up in my palm, it can’t be delivered. The mailman won’t try.
What now? A trashcan sits nearby. Should I throw it away? A letter once so full of meaningful regret? A letter that meant something to someone? A tragedy thrown in with orange peels. That feels wrong. It all does.
In a patch of grass, I dig with my hands, nails broken and fingers pruned. I slide the sludge into the hole. I cover it up with damp dirt and mark the spot with an uneven heart and say goodbye aloud. I cry.
I’m not convinced I shouldn’t have put him down. I’m not convinced, sludge stuck to the crevices of my fingers, of the suffering I had spared him. Too early or too late. I tried for so long to catch the letter. Tried until my legs gave out.
It’s impossible to know if, had I tried harder, I could have caught it in time. But I did what I could. I did what I could. I promise, my friend, I did what I could. I hope I can be forgiven for that.
I hope a tree grows from this place. I don’t know; I don’t know. I was only trying my best in this loneliest universe, and more than anything I am grateful for the body that slept beside me, for the fact of the love letter at all.
The Playdate
Nathan Mann
Before Teddy’s mom goes, she teaches Jacob and his mom three signs.
- Thank you.
- You’re welcome.
- More.
Teddy can lip-read. But his mom worries. This is his first playdate. She leaves, turns onto the logging road, disappears.
Jacob leads Teddy inside to his action figures. They play quietly with the men, pointing to talk.
That man.
That man.
They should fight.
They play until all the men are dead.
Jacob wants Teddy to have fun because their school can be mean. He gives his friend a thumbs up. Teddy nods, signs thank you. Jacob’s heart is happy.
The wallpaper in the living room is faded. Teddy likes it. Climbing vines. Blue flowers. He traces the leaves with his finger and then taps Jacob’s mom. He gives her a thumbs up. She says “thank you” with her lips and then remembers to sign.
You’re welcome, he says.
Teddy feels like the house is perfect. It is warm with sunny windows and wallpaper, and he wants to explore every room and stay forever. Maybe Mom can, too. He wants to ask Jacob.
Jacob puts on the album that Teddy selected from the CD rack. The speakers crackle. Jacob turns them up halfway. Jacob sits on his bed and listens for the both of them. Teddy copies him, holds his head sideways, and signs more.
At full volume, the bed shakes. The window squeaks against the A/C. Jacob’s mom yells that he’s in trouble, but he can’t turn it down. Teddy is dancing. He bobs his head to the thundering bass. Teddy can hear. Jacob will show Teddy’s mom the impossible. Teddy can hear.
They go outside. Jacob tugs him around and points. The birds?
No.
The chimes?
No.
The whirring AC?
No.
They stand by the road and wait for a logging truck. Jacob holds up a finger, touches his ear. Teddy knows patience.
A truck bounces by, and Jacob pumps his arm. The truck tumbles on.
Did you hear that?
Yes.
The horn?
It was fainter than the rumble Teddy felt in the bedroom. The happy buzz. But it was there. He points to his chest. Here.
They find a dead deer beside the road, its chest caved in.
The truck? asks Teddy.
Yes, says Jacob. His mom would be angry if they touched it.
Rain comes and goes and leaves puddles in the logging road. Jacob and Teddy play. They splash, fling mud. Jacob’s mom is angry. She waves them inside, and Teddy obeys.
Jacob sits in a puddle alone, his eyes closed, his fingers in his ears. He needs to understand how Teddy hears so he can tell Teddy’s mom. He sinks into the mud, opens his heart to the world. A buzzing fills his chest. He pushes his fingers deeper.
More.
Pebbles shake.
More.
Jacob sinks into the mud, feels the music in his body, as the logging truck nears.
That Kid Who Saved the World One Time
J. Howard Siegal
I stop into the gas station the other day to pick up a pack of smokes, and I see him there, that kid who once saved all of humanity from a looming catastrophe, or just found himself really bored at a party, or possibly both of those things at once.
He sits behind the counter, his dark hair and narrow features folded into the crease of a newspaper, his limbs rumpled in his work overalls, framed by plexiglass and impulse-buy offerings, slouching through time.
“Hey,” I say, “box of Darts.”
His hand reaches up to grab the pack and, bringing it down, flips it into his other palm, where it momentarily disappears. He produces the pack from under the counter, then looks up, and his face softens in recognition. He gives me a weak smile.
“How do you like it here?” I ask.
He laughs.
“It’s better, right? Than people dying in the streets or something?”
“I’m dating Marie now,” he says.
I meet him for the first time at Marie’s house party, waiting in line for the bathroom. Lydia spills out of it, shouting into her phone at her boyfriend, and then as soon as she closes the door behind her, that kid opens it from the inside and peeks out, eyes darting above his slender nose and chin.
He just stands there for the longest time, saying nothing. Then he turns and walks straight into the kitchen. We all bust up—what the hell was that about!
I go into the bathroom, and the window is still nailed shut, from that time that creepy dude was arrested in the park.
Marie says, “Okay, I’m going to talk to that kid.”
We find him in the kitchen, looking through the cupboards.
Marie says, “Can I help you?”
He starts going on about orange soda.
She says, “Why were you in the bathroom with my friend, huh? What were you doing in there?”
The kid shrinks into his clothes and starts apologizing.
Marie grabs Lydia and drags her over. “Were you watching my friend?” She backs him up against the screen door of the kitchen.
Lydia swears the dude was not in the bathroom with her.
Marie pokes the dude in the chest and says, “I’m watching you, skinny.”
Lydia puts her arm around him. “This lamb is clearly lost as fuck. Let’s get him a beer.”
Marie tails along to surveil as Lydia sells the whole beer line on the idea that this kid has taken way too many drugs and needs a drink, like immediately. She liberates the tap, pours three beers, and whisks us out of the kitchen.
In the living room, Lydia and Marie sit the kid down in an arm chair and flank him.
Lydia: “Where are you from, honey?”
Marie: “What were you doing in that bathroom?”
Lydia: “Are you a student?”
Marie: “Hold on, I’m going to take your picture. Sit still.”
Lydia: “Are you, like, on the spectrum?”
Marie: “Do you even know anyone at this party?”
Lydia: “Did someone give you something to eat? Was it, maybe, mushrooms? A little piece of paper?”
Marie: “What the fuck were you doing in that bathroom?”
At long last, the guy mumbles something about air, then gets up and walks away. We lose sight of him through the crowd in the hallway.
David Hu says he talked to the kid. He also relates the curious phenomenon of walking into a seemingly empty bathroom and having this guy breeze out of it.
All David can think to say is, “Keep the door closed.”
A while later, we come into the kitchen for a refill and find the kid standing by himself, looking around. “Hey man, are you okay?”
The guy shakes his head, looks worried.
“Follow me,” David says, and we all walk out to the back porch. “Hey, this is, uh, some guy I just met. We’re gonna smoke this joint.”
“Nice,” someone says.
David puts flame to the joint and passes it. “Ever smoke this before?”
The kid shakes his head.
“No pressure,” David says. The joint goes around several times, and David and the rest of us lapse into giggling reminiscence.
Stories begin flowing, the evening air is cool, and everyone huddles closer. At some point, the kid reaches to intercept the joint, puts it to his lips, and inhales. He coughs out a billow of smoke. He hangs around the circle, smoking and smiling, chuckling at the borrowed stories. At one point, he lets out a deep sigh that halts the conversation. The kid looks around. Everyone starts laughing again. He phases out of the circle some time before we notice he’s gone.
He pops out of the bathroom, turns hard for the kitchen, and bashes straight into the back of some huge guy, spilling beer everywhere. The guy turns slowly, with a scowl. The kid shrinks.
Then we hear a voice, “Hey, it’s the Bathroom Dude!”
Lydia emerges from the crowd, puts her arm over the kid’s shoulders, and scolds her man. “This dude has now arrived at this party three different times, and you barely even got your ass here once!”
Bathroom Dude says he’s been too early.
The next time he shows up, we’ve adopted him.
“Bathroom Duuuuude! BD!”
He’s walking down the hallway. The crowd parts.
“Are you, like, an internet magician? Is this gonna be on YouTube?”
BD brushes past rims of plastic cups. Fingers pat his shoulders.
We follow him into the kitchen again, where he leans against the counter. Everyone looks at him, waiting for a trick. Several people hand him beers.
Suddenly he looks up. Someone else is parting the crowd in the hallway, holding aloft a trophy of stacked white boxes.
“Pizza’s here!”
Marie slides in next to BD at the kitchen counter. His eyes are locked on the pizza.
“Gonna grab a slice, BD?”
BD shakes his head.
Marie looks up at the side of BD’s face. “I don’t like you, Bathroom Dude. I don’t like you. I’m on to you. I think you’re full of shit, that’s what I think.”
She drinks half a beer in three gulps. “I think you’re just a tricky kid. I gotta be honest with you, man. I’m sorry if you, like—you know, have difficulties or whatever, but I gotta tell you, Beeeee Deeee, I think you’re here for a reason. And you know what else? I think you’re just a fucking scrawny lonely kid with poor social skills.”
BD tells her this is all true.
Marie rolls up her T-shirt sleeve. “You see this tattoo, man? You see that eyeball? I’m watching you, dude. It’s watching you. All the time.”
BD takes his eyes off the pizza, just for a moment, to look at all of Marie’s eyes.
BD is thronged in humanity. Someone has turned on music, loud, and all of us in the kitchen are moving. The floor bows in and out of rhythm. He keeps his eyes on the pizza boxes, trying to catch, in his periphery, what is going on with these moving limbs. People press and jostle him, but he smiles. The music is pulsing and articulate. The room smells of cologne, sweat, and beer. Marie is over there, dancing with Lydia and her boyfriend.
Someone bumps him. A laugh spills out.
A beer is pressed into his hands.
“Yeahhh, Bathroom Duuuude!” someone yells.
A chant starts. A hand guides the cup to his lips. A cup is pressed into his other hand.
We are patting his back, rubbing his shoulders. He drinks down the cups.
An energy seems to well in him. He throws down the plastic cups, pushes the crowd away, staggers forward, and knocks down the pile of empty pizza boxes on the table. He then attacks them, pulling them apart in strips, intoning to no one in particular, “I came here from a long time forward. There is a fungus that gets made here. It is catastrophic for humanity. The orange soda gets left out with the pizza boxes and some cigarette ash and the rotting wood of the balcony. It makes the mold.”
BD looks up at the partygoers, strips of pizza boxes in his hands. “Everyone gets sick. Few survive. Please, my friends, dispose of your food, your drink, your trash, responsibly.”
Everyone dies laughing. This kid is too much. We love this guy. He must be high as fuck. We beg him to stay. He admits he does like it here, but he has to make sure he finishes with these pizza boxes. And where is the orange soda?
Someone runs out to grab some.
After a time, the party flags out. The crowd thins, and stragglers condense into addled little clusters of conversation. BD sits on the couch, his eyelids closing and opening, Lydia breathing into his ear about her boyfriend.
The diehards sink into snoring poses all over the apartment.
The next morning, I get up to piss, and the bathroom door is locked. I lean against the wall of the hallway, rubbing my face. The lock of the door clicks, and the latch turns, and out stumbles BD.
“Hey, man,” I say. “No trick this time, huh.”
He looks pale and sick, totally lost.
I pull out my phone. “Can I get you a ride home?”
He scowls and shakes his head, then slowly turns and shambles away from me, down the hallway and out of the apartment.
I head for the kitchen to scrounge for a forgotten cigarette among the abandoned cups and party debris. As I push open the screen door, I have a momentary fright, that I’ll look down at the rotting wood of the back porch and see an open pizza box, slices going soggy under the drips of an overturned bottle of orange soda, and a greenish grey spatter coming to life on the crust.
But I find no super-mold, no evident aftermath of heroism, just the same old planks of the porch, the same old haze of the morning. I pick up an empty pack of cigarettes from the window ledge and rip it open. Inside, with a pen from my pocket, I write, “Here the world was saved.”
I let the paper monument float down into the future.
True Beauty
Eloise Schultz
Morgan finds the first louse on our bed.
I pinch the second in a piece of tape, drop it in the trash.
Our long-haired house is understandably horrified.
Jess won’t share her hair dryer. I borrow Gaia’s but don’t say what for.
Shir advises to drown my scalp in Cetaphil. At the pharmacy she waves, keeps her distance.
Drugstore woman murmurs, Good luck, sweetie.
TV detective shouts, We’ve got them cornered now—
At home I wear a plastic bag & think unwelcome thoughts.
Translucent droves descend the shower drain, clinging to licesaving rope,
Floating to lice afterlife while I wash the bedding
& my friends watch Italian art dramas.
True beauty, says Anđela, wavers between vulgarity & sensuality.
My mom used to check my head at breakfast. She pulled the brush so hard, I cried & begged for her to stop.
Now Morgan stands behind me & searches my hair.
Glides her comb through each curl: pronounces me clean.