failbetter.com - Fiction

Tenterhooks

mjordan — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Summer Newett

I don’t know what duct tape is, but I know the sound of it ripped from a roll. That sound. It’s to the left of me. I know it as well as I know my head slumps to the right, my chin rests against my chest. As well as I know the soreness in my neck and the sharp pain at the end of my nose.

The sound is deafening. Another is coming. What does that mean? Spiders wriggle in the pit of my stomach, replacing butterflies. They used to dance when I discovered new things.

What are butterflies?

Without opening my eyes, I imagine the room. I’ve awoken here dozens of times. There’s a somber, gentle old man. What’s his name? He sits at a worktable weaving wire through wood. Carves, chisels, sands to perfection. Screws limbs to joints. Not too loose, but not too tight, he says. Snug comes to my mind, whatever that means. He takes great pleasure in it. Careful, considerate, methodical. I want to look, but the spiders warn me. I remember I’m hiding.

I believed if I closed them, I’d be invisible, but I don’t think that’s how it works. The duct tape is about to snap. Anticipation causes the spiders to sink, and wetness rushes to my eyes. How is that possible?

I’m just a puppet.

My right arm hangs limp. It doesn’t budge under the might I exert. The spiders are my friends, I decide. They urge me to escape. A white wire suspends my left hand above a wooden table. I brush the surface with a finger. It’s a strange comfort, touching the material I’m made of. I have to open my eyes. The trick isn’t working because if I hear ripping; he hears me sob. A sheet of water pops as I blink. Salty liquid drips down my cheek.

Hand, rod, and string puppets litter the walls, exposed on meat hooks. Wait, no, not meat hooks. Wooden pegs. Why did I say meat hooks? I shake cobwebs from a head that won’t move. The old man dances with my clone, the one dressed in flesh. Doesn’t he make us of wood? The spiders return. It won’t be exquisite enough to dance with when he becomes bored. He told me I was exquisite once. Where do I get these words? The spiders roil. He danced with me too. I don’t know how I know this, but it rings true, unlike dreams. He’ll notice the skin doesn’t sit right. Pulled in patches. Stapled at seams. Patches. It wasn’t duct tape. He treats the skin to make it taut, makes it crackle. He twirls my copy with strings. Leads him through the air. Its eyes are lifeless pearls.

Red liquid drips from the workbench. Paint. The spiders disagree. There’s a picture pressed behind cracked glass beside me. The old man hugs a woman from behind. She’s pretty. The small boy in the photograph doesn’t look like the puppet he’s dancing with. The person he attempts to recreate. How could we? We’re not real. I’m not real.

The picture distracted me from the dance, but if it didn’t, would it matter? My right arm won’t listen, and a wire shackles my left. It’ll move, but not with a strength that will change the outcome of his attention. He sets the puppet on the table, head dangling, contorted, staring at me.

“There you are.”

His smile comforts me. I want to respond, I do, but a rasp emerges, a voice through a fan. Not the voice in my head. Feeble, slurred, half-awake from a drug-induced dream. Noise without lips. I have no lips. Papa.

“Yes, it’s your Papa,” he says, matter-of-fact, crouching to reach a stool low enough to line his sight with mine. Metal slides against leather, revealing a pair of shears, which he uses to snip the wire suspending my left hand. He sets it down with a gentleness I didn’t account for. I crawl it atop my knee. Why can’t I move?

He exhales, cleaning his spectacles with a towel too dirty for the job. “You don’t remember?”

I shake my head. At least, I think I do.

“You said you wouldn’t run away, but I knew you would.” He brushes his thumb across the jagged tip of my nose. “I wish you wouldn’t lie. It’s unbecoming of a growing boy.”

Why can’t I move? I want to move again.

“I had to…”

He pauses, doffing spectacles, tilting them skyward to check their cleanliness. A glimmer flashes in his eye. Joy, or sorrow? He doesn’t need to explain further. The fracture in my right arm and missing leg jog my memory. He beat me when I lied. Broke my leg when I tried to run.

Please, I won’t run away again. I’ll be a good boy.

I don’t know why I said that. Pain pierces my broken nose.

The old man smiles. He takes my nose between his fingers, pulls them away, and wiggles his thumb between them. “Don’t worry. We’ll try again.”

But I don’t want to. I won’t be me.

I’m unsure if he didn’t hear, didn’t answer, or I just thought it, but he responds by tilting my head back.

I could never have escaped. There’s eight hooks anchored in the ceiling, wires cuffing me. Connected to places I can’t see. Could never reach. I sit in the last place I will think for myself. He will move me to a new body. Older versions on similar hooks scream at me without sound. Slack mandibles. They plead with no limbs. Implore with hollow stomachs to remember. He’s sawing me there now. I whimper. There’s a puppet that can’t scream. He’s not made of wood, but spaghetti. I don’t understand. I try hard to remember them…me, but I can’t. The new one won’t either. Skin won’t make him the boy in the photograph. He must know that. He must know we experience pain. The spiders agree. My new body will wail at stapled seams. What does the old man want? Why wasn’t I good enough? I blink, and my surface absorbs the wetness before it reaches my chin. His hands search inside my stomach, writhing where they shouldn’t be. Something there makes me alive. Lets me think. Allows me to dream. I plead with him. Please, Papa. Stop.

I wish I could join a circus, even if it meant being a donkey. Wish for a sailboat, even if it meant getting swallowed by a whale, because then, at least, I’d be far away from him. I laugh, but I don’t think it's audible. He meddles inside, choking life from me. I squeeze my left leg. I wish a fairy would come and save me. It’s not me. It won’t be me. I picture the flesh puppet’s vacant eyes one last time. I hope they make it. Hope we make it.

Genre:

Fiction

Author Bio:

Summer Newett is a fiction writer who holds a BA in Creative Writing from Temple University and served as an editor for Barrelhouse’s "Something’s Missing" issue. Her fiction is forthcoming in Chiron Review. She lives in Philadelphia and is at work on her first novel.

Issue:

Grandma Orinka

mjordan — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Yurii Tokar

It doesn't matter why the trim, fifty-eight-year-old Sergei Viktorovich Krapchishin, in an elegant dark-gray suit, an ironed white shirt, and polished black leather shoes, unexpectedly found himself, on a spring morning in 2025, on a narrow, sunlit, straight, and quiet street, the houses on which were lost among the incredibly close acacias, maples, and tall bushes—that is, on the street that had run toward him from his childhood.

No, he wasn't going to fall into nostalgic memories while strolling slowly through the town where he'd lived sometimes for weeks during his school years, sent from the regional center by his busy mother to visit his grandmother, Maria. It was just that a mosaic of events had conspired to ensure that, that day, he should walking over the painfully familiar remains of old, time-worn concrete slabs mixed with gravel, sand, and unknown building materials.

"It seems like nothing has changed here," a ridiculous thought flashed through Sergei's mind. Indeed, the thought was absurd, for so much had changed over the years. After all, even the maples and acacias had grown taller, and in many houses, the owners had replaced the painted wooden window frames with white plastic ones, now called European. Yet, a cursory glance along the private buildings revealed no signs of modernity, such as shopping malls and ubiquitous advertising. The rows of mostly single-story houses, located on both sides of the road, seemed lost in time, and they exuded a patriarchal air. It was on this street that a kind, elderly woman named Orinka once lived.

Orinka, not Arina, was the name of Sergei's great-aunt. Sergei didn't know her actual age as a child, only guessing from snippets of relatives' conversations he had overheard that she was over seventy when he started first grade.

And then, during Sergei's years at school, then at university and afterward, for several years teaching mathematics at a college located hundreds of kilometers from where he grew up, in those rare moments when chance would bring him to the house of Aunt Galya, whose last name was Letskina, Grandmother Orinka's daughter, it seemed to him that this same grandmother hadn't changed at all with age. She was always dressed almost identically, simply and neatly—a long, dark skirt that maybe touched the floor, a blouse of an indeterminate color, and a vest, or, more accurately, a kind of zhupan (a coat) that would probably have looked natural at the beginning of the twentieth century, but not at its end. Oh yes, and the headscarf, of course—the ever-present gray headscarf that made Aunt Galya's very thin mother so recognizable.

This elderly woman belonged to that rare breed of people who always radiate an all-pervading, unconditional kindness. When did Sergei first experience this? Back at the age of six. That day, he woke up to the sound of someone else's quiet voice that somehow immediately felt familiar. He realized someone had come to visit. It was, in fact, Grandma Maria's cousin, with whom the boy was living at the time, and her name was Orinka.

The thin, elderly woman spoke very quietly, but the boy heard everything. The conversation centered on household chores; despite her age, she was still busy with housework, specifically raising two pigs.

Later, when Grandma Maria sometimes took Sergei along to visit the Letskins, the boy always asked to see those piglets.

At the same time, he was not bothered by the specific smell of the pigsty or by the fact that he had to walk to the animals on old and dirty boards lying on the clay floor of a small barn, where, behind a plywood partition, small and funny-looking creatures with pink snouts grunted, looking at the little visitor with bewilderment.

But when Sergei first visited the house of Aunt Galya, or Galina Stepanovna, the chemistry teacher, it wasn't the piglets that made the biggest impression on him, but the tiny room of another small shed—a micro-house, really, consisting of one room and located directly across from the piglet barn, a few meters away. Grandma Orinka lived in this tiny room. There were icons, many icons, and, for some reason, candles burning near them. This home, quite strange in both its location and size, which Sergei glanced at through the open door, immediately struck the boy as surprisingly cozy, somehow much cozier than the large house occupied by Galina Stepanovna and Uncle Kolya, their daughter Nadezhda, a grown woman, and their son Yura, who was younger than his sister.

No one could really explain to Sergei why Grandma Orinka couldn't live in the big house with the whole family, despite his efforts to find out. Only as an adult did he realize that, - subconsciously, Aunt Galya and Uncle Kolya considered themselves more civilized and modern than Grandma Orinka. So, it wasn't that there wasn't a place for her in the house, but at a family council, a decision was made—and Aunt Galya's mother resolutely agreed with it—that her home would be a separate outbuilding, like a barn. She believed it wouldn't be a nuisance, and the piglets, who needed care, would be nearby. Sergei immediately felt sorry for the slightly hunched and hard-working Grandma Orinka, especially because she had poor hearing, and when Aunt Galya tried to speak to her, she always spoke very loudly, right next to her mother's ear.

The dark-haired beauty Nadya played the piano beautifully. From childhood, her relatives called her an actress, as her petite figure, expressive face with delicate features, and incredibly open, sincere smile perfectly matched the image of a future movie star. In reality, after graduating from high school, she enrolled in a music college and was learning to teach music, while Yura was a first-year student at the Metallurgical Institute, intending to follow in his father's footsteps, or rather, even further. After all, the always self-assured Uncle Kolya had no higher education, despite working as a foreman, and his son planned to become an engineer.

One New Year's Eve, at the Letskins' New Year's table, where Sergei and his mother were invited, he tried for the first time a sandwich made of toasted bread with golden sprats on it. Until that day, Sergei had only heard about the extraordinary taste of sprats from his classmates, some of whom had already eaten this rare canned food.

On the way home after the festive feast, Sergei asked his mother, "Why did the Letskins have sprats on the table, while we never have them?"

He received a clear answer to his question: "Well, the Letskins are well-off." And so, a previously unfamiliar word entered Sergei's vocabulary.

Uncle Kolya earned a lot since the metallurgical plant paid quite well by those standards. Aunt Galya not only taught chemistry but also worked as the vice principal of a prestigious school. Although she earned less than her husband, she had the opportunity to "get" cheap, hard-to-find items or delicacies that were unavailable on store shelves with the help of the parents of her pupils who worked in retail. Running the household also helped. All this formed the basis of being "well-off," and Sergei somehow sensed its spirit. However, for some reason, he had no doubt that this spirit, although still carrying a negative connotation, had absolutely no connection with Aunt Galya's mother or the pianist Nadya. They were too kind—they were not just seemed so.

Once a year, on Christmas Eve, Grandma Orinka would send gifts to Sergei and his mother, who raised her son alone, through Grandma Maria. That is, she would pass on Easter cake, already blessed by the Church, eggs dyed red, and blood sausage. Oh! Blood sausage with the inimitable taste of homemade sausage—a taste of childhood! Sprats couldn't even come close! Only Grandma Orinka could make it—or rather, not make it, but create it with her thin, dry, yet magical hands, using pig intestines and filling them with chopped lard mixed with meat trimmings and buckwheat. Of course, somehow, the old woman's caring fingers would sprinkle just the right amount of pepper and salt into this mixture to create a soft, crumbly, almost melt-in-your-mouth blood sausage.

Clearly, the piglet in question was one of the ones Grandma Orinka had been caring for. It had been slaughtered before Christmas. Although a slight sense of bewilderment, tinged with pity, arose somewhere in the depths of the boy's subconscious, it didn't stop Sergei from savoring the delicious sausage.

Of course, the Letskins invited Grandma Maria and Sergei, like many other relatives, to visit on their special day—the day they purchased a Zhiguli, a car recently launched at a factory in distant Tolyatti.

A Zhiguli seemed like an impossible dream to Sergei, but owning a Volga, which in the boy's mind was the most prestigious car in the world, was simply a fantasy.

Nevertheless, during the inspection of the white Zhiguli by the guests entering the garage one by one, accompanied by tongue-clacking and boasts about the new owner, Sergei had the misfortune of asking a pointless question to the plump, short Uncle Kolya, dressed in black pants and a white T-shirt, who leaned his right hand on the roof of his car with a confident, yet cautious and proud air. The boy naively asked, "Why did you buy a Zhiguli and not a Volga?"

Sergei didn't expect the reaction that followed. Uncle Kolya's neck and face turned purple, and, looking at the teenager with disdain, he squeezed out an almost hissing voice: "Your mother can't even afford a Zaporozhets. And I'm glad I was able to buy a Zhiguli." Sergei realized his question was unnecessary, but the child harbored no resentment toward his adult relative. After all, Aunt Galya's husband had told the truth about the Zaporozhets. The boy was only confused by the anger evident in the car's new owner's words. "The well-off" could afford more in life than the "poor," and this seemed natural to Sergei.

Time passed, and Arkady, a handsome young man with whom the kind and naive Nadya fell headlong in love, moved into the Letskin house. "Fireman," Sergei nicknamed Aunt Galya's son-in-law when he first saw him in the Letskin house and learned that Arkady worked for the fire department. He didn't have his own place, but he wouldn't disrupt the lives of his parents and younger sister; he moved into Nadya's spacious house. The wedding, to which Sergei's mother and son were also invited, took place in a café. However, the abundance of food and drink on the table, the music, and the ostentatious merriment couldn't guarantee a happy future for the newlyweds. For a while, everything was fine. They had a son named Vladik. And then...but more on that later.

It's difficult to explain why Arkady seemed insincere to Sergei, merely seeking his own gain. Perhaps the boy discovered early on that he had the ability to recognize people's inner worlds. When he was already in ninth grade, his mother asked Aunt Galya to tutor him in chemistry, which the teenager found difficult, unlike, for example, mathematics.

Indeed, Sergei had several lessons at home this way. But one day, during the fall break, while arriving at the Letskins' house for yet another lesson, he took off his shoes and stepped over the curtains, sheets, and duvet covers lying on the floor, ready for the wash. He realized that Aunt Galya was busy with a massive laundry day. She then invited him to her desk. Sergei leafed through his notebook of stubborn formulas while waiting, overhearing Aunt Galya whisper something to her son-in-law. A few minutes later, Arkady approached the boy, sat down in the chair next to him, and asked bluntly, "Are you sure you want to study today? Maybe we should give you the day off? Your aunt has a lot of things to do today."

Aunt Galya's son-in-law, with a mischievous glint in his eyes, looked at Sergei as if he were a poor but slightly amusing relative. The boy almost opened his mouth to ask why Galina Stepanovna hadn't told him this herself, but for a moment, he felt it wasn't worth it. Without directly answering the question, he shrugged, stood up, and said, "If it's a day off, it's a day off," and headed for the front door, where he'd left his shoes.

Of course, it's impossible to say that Sergei was eager to spend an hour poring over a notebook of formulas that day, composing chemical equations. But when he stepped out of the gate, closing it behind him and leisurely strolling toward his grandmother Maria's house, his heart was pricked by the encounter with Aunt Galya's little trick. For some reason, an old saying about the Letskin family flashed through his mind: "They're well-off, aren't they?"

"And here's the pear tree," Sergei Viktorovich stated with surprising calm as his gaze fell on a tree growing slightly below Aunt Galya's house, not in someone's yard, but right on the street. Of course, Sergei recognized the pear tree he'd climbed as a boy many years ago, despite his mother's categorical prohibition. The large, juicy green-yellow fruits with a reddish tint stubbornly beckoned the teenager. However, the lower-hanging ones had been plucked, so he had to reach for the ones hanging above. One of the branches couldn't support even Sergei's modest weight and snapped, causing the boy, dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, to fall, escaping with scraped knees and a bruised right elbow. Despite the bleeding wounds, he didn't cry like a man; instead, he picked up a large pear from the ground, which he had plucked before his fall, and placed it in the wide pocket of his shorts.

Sergei, who had left for permanent residence hundreds of kilometers from his hometown after graduating from university, learned of the Letskins' fate many years later. Nadya, who had masterfully performed minuets and sonatas on the piano with her fragile fingers, divorced Arkady when her son Vladik grew up. She later died of a then-incurable blood disease. Uncle Kolya also passed away, and Aunt Galya raised Nadya's son alone. As a teenager, Vladik first began to talk incoherently, then to see things that weren't there, and eventually ended up in a psychiatric hospital. Grandmother Orinka also passed away, as quietly as she had lived, simply not waking up in the morning. She cared for her piglets until her last day.

All Krapchishin had heard about Yura, Nadya's brother, who became a metallurgical engineer, was that he had managed to start a family. It's possible that Yura and his family were now living in the Letskins' house.

Or maybe Aunt Galya was still alive? Then how old was she? Eighty-five? Yes, Sergei passed by the Letskins' house; that same pear tree grew down the street. Should he have opened the familiar gate and entered the yard? Maybe he should have, but he didn't, not wanting to dredge up the past. And who really owned that house now, he didn't know for sure. Of course, as he passed, Kropchenko couldn't help but glance at the building's whitewashed wall, just as he had years ago. But naturally, the thin, welcoming face of Aunt Galya's mother, beaming with a smile, couldn't appear from around the corner as it had so many years ago.

And so, Sergei continued walking down the street, intending to turn left and take the path leading uphill toward the commuter train, which would whisk him away from childhood memories and into the bustling hustle and bustle of everyday life. However, along the way, he firmly resolved that when he got to the church, he would definitely light a candle for the repose of Grandma Orinka.

Genre:

Fiction

Author Bio:

Yurii Tokar was born in 1967 in the USSR. In 1988, he began teaching mathematics in the region affected by the Chernobyl disaster. His stories, essays, and poems have been published in Ukraine, Germany, the USA, and elsewhere. For example, his work has appeared in Litbreak Magazine (USA), Adelaide Literary Magazine (USA), Brief Wilderness Magazine (USA), StylusLit Journal (Australia), and others. He is the author of the book "Ukrainian Essays," which has been published by Lulu.

Issue:

Only the End of the World

mjordan — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Jean-Luke Swanepoel

It was following the Great Divide that men and women stopped cohabitating. Men lived with men and women with women, and the sexes did not intermingle. Human sperm counts had dropped to a negligible level, and for many there now seemed little point to life as we had known it. The last baby to be born had died swiftly and without ceremony—cementing our doom—and so why continue the silly charade? Nuclear family nuked. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man—bullshit. And love? Where there is love, there is life—not the case anymore, I’m afraid.

Men love men, women love women, and no one is left unloved or unsatisfied. But love cannot restore the forests razed for lumber or the icebergs which passed into legend long ago. Or undo the damage wreaked by Progress and Innovation on the human reproductive system. LET US HEAL proclaimed our leaders. LET US HEEL is what they meant, and like good dogs, we obeyed. The rich became richer—hardly a revelation—and the rest became dust beneath their well-shod feet. Joke’s on them, however. A fistful of dollars now means nothing to no one. Mausoleums made of money are still mausoleums—where was I? The upending—scratch that: the end of civilization as we know it. We’ve spent centuries courting obliteration and at last the wedding day is here. Cue glimmer of hope/silver lining—this isn’t that kind of story, however.

But is there a story? So far it’s been nothing but exposition. A story was promised and a story here follows, but the story has only one purpose: to make a harsh reality just slightly more palatable. Without further ado, let me introduce a man and a woman of the Last Generation.

Ada is a barren woman and Steve a barren man, and they are the renegades of the last of humanity. Ada and Steve choose mutual attraction and so are cast out and left alienated from the lives they had known. I won’t waste time on standard love story details—how do they meet? what are their common interests?—since none of us have much time left. The common consensus is that they’re defying the norm—this wouldn’t have been the case for most of human history—and consequently they can never know true happiness. A familiar refrain throughout all of human history. Let nobody be happy who isn’t like everyone else. There must be a common enemy now (by which I mean a brief span of tens of thousands of years) that we dominate and decimate all other life. But let me not lose focus. Ada and Steve are happy, if harassed, and in love—and no, they won’t conceive some miracle baby, saving human life from extinction. What would be the point? Together they’ll endure the boundless repercussions of humanity’s reign of terror, and on a glorious day not far in the future, the very last human will be snuffed out. Good riddance!

There really should be an epilogue—the recovery of the planet, the healing of a wound—but let me not pander to those who might have done something and chose instead to rape and hoard.

Genre:

Fiction

Author Bio:

Jean-Luke Swanepoel was born in South Africa, and he currently lives in California with his husband. His work has most recently appeared in Redivider, Electric Literature’s The Commuter, and Columbia Journal, with a piece forthcoming in Centaur. His sophomore novel, The Book of David, was published in January 2025. Find him on Goodreads at www.goodreads.com/jlswanepoel.

Issue:

A Nice Place to Retire

mjordan — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Melanie Faranello

It was hot when they finally arrived in Jakarta. It was the furthest they’d been from home together since their honeymoon thirty years ago. This time, Ellen and Joe were here to stay. Retire in paradise on Java’s pristine shores! Ellen had the brochure tucked into her purse; she’d carried it for the past nine months like a talisman. Their few belongings had been shipped ahead of time. Their grown son, Rock, the only thing left behind.

The welcome packets had arrived at their two-story colonial brick house in the suburbs of New Jersey. The house at 29 Riverwood Drive was no longer theirs; Joe’s position as Vice President of Communications at Wiley Technologies now belonged to a kid half his age; Ellen’s work at West Roger School’s library would be divided among parent volunteers. Rock was twenty-nine years old and had joined a new program, sober for eight months. Life would go on.

Ellen stepped into the airport bathroom as Joe headed through the sliding doors. Outside, the air was thick with fog. Joe felt younger already, as though they’d traveled thirty years into the past. He tried to put Rock’s struggles out of his mind. An entire ocean separated them now. This was a new start.

An Indonesian boy wearing dark-colored shorts took hold of Joe’s suitcase, and Joe followed him toward the line of taxis crowded at the curb.

“Any of these are fine,” Joe said, thanking him and pulling out his guidebook with a list of common phrases.

In the bathroom, Ellen held her hands under the sink then clapped water to her cheeks. It’d been a long flight, that’s all. A second honeymoon, the realtor had called it. Easier to think of this as an extended trip. It was hard to comprehend the one-way. She tried to think of the floor plans of the condominium and the sandy beaches from the association’s brochure. But of course, it was Rock who pressed into her mind instead.

He’d been Rock for most of his life, short for Richard. There was something strong and solid in him despite his thin frame, despite his drinking. Rock’s new mentor had gotten him the job at Paris Blue on 43^rd Street in Hell’s Kitchen. It was good money. When Ellen mentioned her concern about the atmosphere, Rock brushed it aside. Joe didn’t seem to have the same trouble letting go. She trusted in her husband’s assuredness. The move was good for him, Joe promised. Their son needed to be on his own. He’d be fine.

The meditation app she’d been listening to on the plane resounded in her mind: change is the only constant. She shook off a wave of light-headedness as she stepped out through the sliding doors. The heat and fog enveloped her.

“Nice hat,” Joe said, smiling as he opened the taxi’s door.

“Hello, Mrs.,” the driver said, motioning her inside with an open sweep of his arm. “Please.”

“It’s all worked out,” Joe reassured her. They slid onto the cracked vinyl of the backseat, the material hot against Ellen’s legs.

“Welcome,” the driver said. “This is your first time here?”

“We had our honeymoon here—thirty years ago. A few days in Java and then to Bali,” Joe replied.

“Very different now,” the driver said. “I think you will love our country very much.”

The car was suffocating. It smelled like cloves. Ellen rolled the window down and waved out an enormous silvery blue fly. Nothing looked familiar.

Joe held his Indonesian phrasebook. “It’s a nice day,” he attempted.

The driver replied fluently.

“Can you repeat that?” Joe said.

“Very good, sir. You wish to learn.”

They sped down a busy highway, bypassing the city, and eventually the land opened up. Terraced hills spread out forever. Beneath the clouds, volcanoes rose in the distance. It seemed the entire island was surrounded in steam.

“Borobudur,” Joe read from a flagged page.

“Of course,” the driver said, keeping his eyes on the road. “Very beautiful. Very popular.”

Ellen stared at the rice paddies stretching across the hills. Small villages appeared as suddenly as they disappeared.

“It says here that Jakarta was once renamed to mean Glorious Victory. Isn’t that interesting?” The engine’s rumble drowned out Joe’s words as they bumped over dips in the road.

Ellen fanned herself as they drove deeper into the land. “Do you think our things arrived yet?”

“They said by Wednesday, so I assume everything’s there.”

Everything but Rock.

Two nights before they left for Java, Ellen and Joe met Rock for dinner at an Italian restaurant near his apartment in Chelsea. Joe ordered a glass of wine, and Rock, a club soda with lime.

Joe talked about the history of Indonesia. Ellen reminded Rock of their plans to fly back at least once a year, maybe more. She reminded Rock they’d pay for his ticket to visit at Christmas. Of course, they would be together for Christmas.

Joe was eating a large twist of pasta from his fork. “Flight’s not bad when you have an overnight,” he said. “Just one stop. You go to sleep, wake up, and you’re there.”

“Nothing’s forever,” Ellen said. “We can always come back.” She reached for her son’s hand and then fixed the napkin on her lap.

Rock tilted his glass back, drained the soda. “What’re you gonna worry about without me, mom?”

Joe blotted his mouth. “Tell us you’re going to be alright and everyone’s happy.”

“Send me a postcard,” Rock said, leaning onto both elbows like he used to do as a kid. He shook the ice into his mouth as though unable to quench his thirst.

Ellen picked up her oversized fork and prodded her meal—a glazed chicken breast that she could not get herself to cut into, her stomach in a twist. “You’ll come at Christmas. It’ll be nice for you to get away at that time, I’m sure.”

The waiter came with the billfold, and Ellen’s heart sank. She held her hand over the check. “Wait,” she said, drawing a triangle in the air between the three of them, “Shouldn’t we order some dessert?” her tone more pleading than she’d intended.

She tried to focus now—the way the taxi jostled over each dip in the road, the mountains, the thick clouds streaming in. Two women wearing brightly patterned sarongs and dome shaped hats carried baskets of oranges alongside the road; a group of children—the girls in dark skirts, the boys in white shirts and red ties—carried notebooks beneath their arms. A man in the distance herded goats. A dog barked wildly. A village of thatched huts, multicolored fabrics hanging out to dry, a sculpted mosque, its metal roof shining. Ellen couldn’t breathe.

“Llamas,” Joe pointed.

“These are sheep,” the driver said.

“Oh, Javanese sheep. They look like llamas.”

Everything made her queasy as they forged deeper into the land.

Three years ago, Joe first mentioned the idea. They stood in the dark kitchen, the light above the sink cast a soft glow across the countertop which held a framed photo of Rock on his high school graduation day. Ellen thought it sounded crazy. Joe booked a ticket to look at property. Soon after, Rock relapsed again.

The taxi slowed along a narrow ridge. A woman wearing a sarong of blue and orange swirls stuck her palm into the window. Ellen pulled her purse from the floor. The driver glanced back and shouted, flapping his hand at the window.

“I’m sorry, Miss. You do not pay.”

“Oh, no. That’s OK.”

But the driver picked up speed.

They continued past a rocky cliff overlooking the ocean. They rounded another wide curve, descending through the fog towards the coast.

Joe read from his book. “Did I tell you this…shortly after World War II…”

It was getting hotter without air conditioning. Ellen used the association’s brochure to fan herself. She knew this brochure by heart. The new construction beach homes with large glass windows faced the ocean. It was this brochure that Joe had brought home from his trip when he told her he’d found the perfect place. The brochure implied a dream come true—cerulean skies, endless beaches, views streaked with perpetual golden sunsets, and smiling children playing with a carefree abandon that children ought to have—something she never saw in Rock. It was like muscle memory, the part of her that kept reaching out for him. Her watch was still on U.S. Eastern time.

A lazy blue fly buzzed into the backseat and finally the taxi stopped. The condominiums stood scattered along the beach, awaiting their arrival.

“Selam datang!” A Javanese man wearing a floral-patterned shirt tucked into tan shorts waved from the complex’s entrance. “Welcome!” he called, “Mr. and Mrs. Peterson.”

“My name is Mr. Don,” he said, pointing to the nametag on his shirt. “I believe most of your belongings arrived this morning. Please let me know if I can assist you in getting settled. You will find information inside.”

“It’s very exciting. Thank you so much,” said Joe.

“I’m sure you will enjoy your new home.”

It smelled like sawdust, free from history. The labeled boxes were set in their assigned rooms of their new two-bedroom condo. It was easier than Ellen imagined to undo an entire life. Things were not as fixed as they appeared—they could leave their jobs, sell their home, their son could live his life on his own.

“It’s just like the pictures,” she said.

“Same as the model,” Joe nodded. “This one was being built when I came.”

A vase of orchids along with a welcome note signed by Mr. Don and a copy of The Jakarta Post—the English language newspaper sat on the counter. A folder containing the association’s policies, information on local restaurants, and a list of residents, many of whom were European and Australian as noted in parenthesis.

“I met them when I looked at the complex,” Joe said, pointing at one of the names. “They’ve been here two years. Nice couple.”

“I can’t believe we’re actually here.” She exhaled. “Joe, I’m a wreck.”

He looked up, his mouth slightly open.

“Is there something on how to make calls?” she said. “We’ll need to get cell service.”

“Right here.” He pulled out a yellow sheet from the folder with directions on how to dial from the international calling booth.

“I’ll leave Rock a message and let him know we arrived.”

“Looks like it’s right across the way. Behind the main building.”

She hurried out, and Joe surveyed the room. He tore off a strip of tape from one of the boxes. Ellen’s favorite ceramic blue mugs. He unwrapped the newspaper from one of the mugs and set it down. Maybe they shouldn’t have brought anything from home. It seemed to taunt him. He shut the box and went to take a shower.

From the shower, Joe heard his wife scream. He ran, dripping, into the kitchen.

“Oh my god, look at that thing!” Ellen shouted, hands over her mouth.

He tried to wrap the condominium’s bath towel around his waist.

A giant thick brown centipede stretching almost a foot long curled around the kitchen sink’s basin. It looked like a small fur-covered snake with a thousand fuzzy tentacles. It appeared suctioned across the bottom of the sink.

“Damn,” he said. “That’s big.”

“What is that thing?”

“I don’t know. Look at all those tentacles…”

Ellen started opening boxes, hoping to find something they could use to get rid of it.

Joe stood over the sink.

Ellen looked up from where she knelt, holding the blue mug in her hand. “We need a pot.”

Joe looked for a paper towel. Actually, he would need more like a shoe, but he was barefoot. He removed the small bath towel from his waist, but wasn’t sure what he could do with it, how he would wrap the entire thing. What if it stung?

Various cups and bowls sat scattered around Ellen on the kitchen floor. Joe tried to refasten the towel around his waist, but the damn thing was too small. He dropped it and stood naked instead, still dripping, and considered the colander.

The centipede was too big to crush. He turned the pot upside down and carefully trapped the creature beneath. Hopefully, it would go back down the drain. But he couldn’t imagine that thing could have come from there.

“We’re gonna need something,” he said, watching the pot. Joe picked up the towel, pulled in his gut and wrapped as tightly as he could. “It’s one of the association’s,” he explained.

Joe thought he saw another creature slithering quickly across the floorboards, but when he looked again, it was gone. A shadow.

“Let’s take a walk. Get some dinner?” he suggested. “I’ll do something with this, and we’ll head out.”

Ellen agreed. A small flicker on the ceiling, and Ellen yelped, ducking beneath her hands. A mass of giant centipedes was crawling around the light fixture.

“I’ll find Mr. Don,” he said. “I’m sure he has…spray or something.”

Ellen grabbed her shawl and slipped outside.

Joe found the welcome note and read Mr. Don’s available hours—it was too late. They’d have to wait until morning. He found some clothes and took a careful walk through the condo. In the corner of the living room ceiling, he saw another cluster of centipedes, another in the hallway, and then another. They were nested throughout the entire condo. It was infested.

At the edge of the association’s property, an outdoor restaurant overlooked the beach. The patio was filled with small tables. Large-leafed plants surrounded the borders, and colorful lit lanterns were strung above. Pop music played softly. A calling station was situated on the upper ledge of a grassy terrace.

It was Ellen’s idea to call again. Back home, it was 8 a.m., and she wanted to get Rock on the phone. Joe waited at the table. He could see her through the door of the red calling station. He watched her gripping the receiver with both hands.

Joe was pouring his second glass of wine when he saw Ellen staring at him from the phone station with a strange expression. He waved her back to the table, gesturing to end the call with Rock. But she turned her back and kept talking. The waiter arrived, and Joe ordered an appetizer.

Ellen waved Joe to come take his turn on the phone. He hesitated, holding up a hand, but then, of course, hurried to the terrace.

Ellen passed him the receiver without a word.

“You there, son?” he said, watching his wife return to their table.

An overseas pause in the connection made Rock’s hesitation seem too long. Joe said again, “Hello?”

“Hey, Mom says there’s some nasty centipedes there.”

“Well, we weren’t expecting it.”

Rock’s laugh overlapped with Joe’s voice.

When Joe had heard Ellen scream, he felt he was at home, running towards some bad news about Rock again. They could handle centipedes.

“It’s actually wonderful here. We’re sitting outside to eat now, looking at the ocean. Did your mother mention anything else, or just the centipedes?”

There was a screech of static. Rock’s voice was mangled.

Joe said, “Everything ok?”

“What? I heard you say ‘the fish’ and that was it.”

“I said, how are you? That’s all I said.”

“I’m fine. Cool as a cucumber. They have those over there?”

“Have what?”

“Cucumbers.” Rock’s laugh interrupted Joe’s words.

“Do they have cucumbers? Is that what you are asking?”

“This is weird, right? It’s like echoing. Hello, hello!”

Rock’s words were sliding into one another with that familiar slant. It was only eight in the morning over there.

“I got one for you. Wait till you hear this one, Dad.”

Joe waited out the pause.

“I was serving the other night, right? And guess who comes in. Brenna Roberts. Or wait, Rogers? Anyway, Brenna—from your office? Big hair, big jewelry. She was with a dude. Big dude—looked like a wrestler.”

Joe felt the blood rush from his face. He looked through the glass door at Ellen talking to the waiter. He wanted to hang up. How could his mistakes follow him to the other side of the world?

“Listen, we should wrap it up,” Joe tried to interrupt. But the connection was already breaking it up for them.

“But they tipped real good, or I guess the big dude did. And anyway, Dad, you might think I’m a jerk-off, but I know some things. About Ms. Brenna. You and Brenna…what five, six years ago?”

“What the hell are you doing, Richard?”

“But who am I to judge, right?”

A burst of static. He didn’t want to remember the three-month affair with the administrative assistant from his office.

“You guys are happy now though, right? All the way over there in Shangri-La?”

“Listen now…”

Rock laughed.

“You probably blame it on me. Right, Dad? All the shit I put you guys through?”

“It’s time to hang up now, son. We’ll try to talk tomorrow. This is not the time…I can hear from your voice.”

“Hey, that’s all bullshit anyway. I wanted to tell you I won’t make it for Christmas. Holiday season is good business, and they want me for head waiter. I know mom really wanted me to come, but if you could tell her.”

It was a lie. For all Joe knew, Rock had lost his job. “Your mother will call you tomorrow. It’s been a long day. We’re pretty hungry.”

“That you are.”

“We’ll talk again tomorrow.”

“I’m pretty hungry myself.”

“Goodbye, son.”

Ellen lifted her wine glass for a toast when Joe returned to the table.

“He sounded good, don’t you think? Did he tell you about his promotion?”

Joe lifted his glass to hers. “Let’s enjoy our first evening.” He tried to keep from sliding into regret.

Joe navigated the conversation away from Rock or the centipedes. They enjoyed their fish, fed each other a taste of this and that from their forks, hints of curry and coconut oil, spicy chili peppers, mango and pineapple. As the sun went down, the lanterns shone above the patio.

Ellen’s sandals dangled from her fingers, and Joe rolled up the bottom of his slacks as they walked back along the beach. Joe reached for Ellen’s waist.

“It’s been so long,” Ellen said, resting her cheek against Joe’s shoulder.

They leaned together for a kiss, slowly exploring the forgotten territory of one another. The sand under their feet rose in uneven mounds, they were light from alcohol, a hint of fish and curry leftover in their mouths. It was like their honeymoon, Ellen thought as she kissed her husband, remembering how excited they were when they found out she was pregnant. She remembered the surprising colic, the way her son seemed to struggle even as an infant, the way sometimes she’d be frightened by the intensity with which he nursed in the middle of the night, his little hands gripping onto her for dear life. She felt her husband moving his fingers under the back of her hair. She thought of Rock, the man he’d grown into, finding him slouched against their front steps two years ago. Their last dinner, chewing his ice, bouncing his knee, scanning the room for the nearest exit. He was not OK.

Joe couldn’t remember kissing his wife like this for years. But the image of Brenna Richards haunted him and filled him with sickening dread.

Ellen felt Joe’s hands pause on her shoulders. She stepped back. “You don’t believe him, do you?” she said. “About the promotion?”

The evening air was cooling. Ellen wrapped the shawl around herself.

Joe shook his head sadly.

She took a deep breath. “There was something else.”

He felt the weight of Brenna Rogers wrapping a heavy leg around him, smothering him with guilt, with his own failures.

“Rock said something,” Ellen said, looking out at the wide expanse of ocean. “It didn’t make sense. But I have to ask.”

Joe covered his face.

“Oh god,” she whispered.

“I’m so sorry,” he said.

“Wait.” She tightened her shawl. “I thought I did, but I don’t want to know.”

Joe crouched down.

“I wasn’t perfect either,” Ellen said.

“What?”

Ellen squatted beside him. “It’s all so far away now.”

“What happened?”

“Can’t we just leave it behind? Over there—across this ocean?”

She cupped a handful of sand.

He didn’t recognize the assurance in her voice. He had no idea she ever cheated. There was a brief time when she was working with a new consultant for the school, around the same time as his affair with Brenna, that he had a slight suspicion. But in a strange way it now made him think that they’d been more connected in their isolation than either of them had realized.

A jellyfish washed up on the shore, its translucent tentacles barely visible on the wet sand. Green slashes of seaweed wrapped around its body.

“We’re here now. That’s for sure,” Joe said. He took her hand. It was too dark to see the water. A cool breeze came off the shore.

At the stone path leading up toward the condominiums, they stopped. For so many years, Joe had tried to protect Ellen from the truth—about his affair, about Rock stealing, about how he knew Ellen gave Rock money. He needed to be honest now. “I know about the savings,” he said.

“Oh, Joe.” Ellen shook her head.

“I get it,” he said. “You were trying to help him.”

“It didn’t work,” she said.

“That’s why I pulled the rest out. We were going to have nothing.”

Ellen covered her mouth. He could see her understanding turning to tears.

“It’s a good investment,” Joe said, pointing at their new home.

Ellen nodded.

“He not coming for Christmas,” Joe told her.

“It’s still a ways off. He might.”

Joe shook his head. “Let’s not do this.”

She knew it was true, Rock wouldn’t come.

The narrow section of beach in front of the condominiums was populated with couples. It had the feel of a private cove, undiscoverable to the rest of the world, where people came to escape, to recreate themselves. They faced their new home. Ellen imagined they were observing a window display at Christmastime, some idealistic scene which, if one could just move through the glass, would become real.

Joe had left on the lights inside their condo, hoping the centipedes might find their way back outside.

“There were more,” Joe said, “throughout the place.”

“What do you mean?”

“A lot of those…creatures.”

“What?” Ellen cried. “How many?”

“I’ll find Mr. Don first thing in the morning. Don’t worry.”

The sky was bursting with stars.

“It’s infested?”

“It’s solvable.”

He wanted to assure Ellen that everything would be fine—Rock, their lost savings, their marriage. He wanted to say something about the bugs, their son, the chronic disappointment—how all of that made this real. But he couldn’t find the words. Instead he said, “It might come with the territory. We’ll just have to deal with it.”

Something frantic unleashed in Ellen’s expression. The light reflected off her eyes, shrinking her pupils. “Isn’t that what we’ve been doing all this time?”

He felt the ground tilt in the way it did when things began to slide out of control. An overwhelming desire fell over him to go home, back to their real home on Riverside Drive, back to their life, no matter how messy. He tried to think of something to say to make it better, something about the centipedes, about their dream coming true.

“I just need a few minutes alone out here,” Ellen said.

“Please, we can face it together.”

“Go. I’ll be right in.”

Joe hesitated. “Don’t be too long.”

Ellen sat on the beach. The ocean crashed loudly. That Rock’s illness was her fault, that she’d failed him, that they’d never find their way back, these were the fears that wedged themselves into the ventricles of her heart, causing constrictions with every inhale. She tried to think of something from her meditation app, but everything felt like the sand sifting through her fingers.

Ellen could discern a couple laying on the sand; the shape of their embrace made them blend into one figure. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been with her husband, just the two of them without the worry of Rock between them. Maybe Joe was right, they’d flown across the world to get away, to start over. She dusted the sand off her palms.

When Joe entered the condo, the centipedes were everywhere. “Get,” he hissed. He picked up the towel he’d dropped earlier and swiped at a cluster of them. But they clung to the corners and the walls, their tentacles undulating. He doubted for a moment if this was actually solvable. Maybe it was something they would have to accept as part of their new environment. He turned off the lights. Maybe in the dark, the creatures would hide. He tiptoed down the hall. In the bedroom, he opened a cardboard box and pulled out a blanket—the lime green one they’d had on their bed for years. He crawled onto the bare mattress, draping the familiar blanket over him. The floor lamp cast a circle of light on the ceiling.

Ellen felt her way inside. In the kitchen, she saw multiple overturned pots. Those things were not going to make them run away. They were here to stay, with or without them. She picked up a tennis racket from an opened box and pushed at a cluster of centipedes on the countertop. They were heavier than she imagined. They didn’t budge. She used both hands and stretched the racket, giving them another shove. “Ugh,” she said, “what are you?” The cluster uncurled itself and slithered over the edge of the counter. She left the racket and hurried down the hall.

Joe looked at Ellen in the lamp light. She looked limp and worn, as though she’d been washed in from the ocean. She came toward the bed.

“Just like home,” she said, crawling onto the mattress beneath the lime blanket.

And even though it wasn’t anything like home, something about their unsteadiness, the unexpectedness of what was to come, the infiltration of these unwanted arthropods, felt familiar to Joe. He thought if he opened his mouth, a tsunami might come pouring out.

Ellen brought her head to rest on his chest.

“I’m so sorry,” his voice cracked.

Ellen sat up. “Joe?”

But it was too much. He couldn’t bear to tell her that he was wrong, that he couldn’t help their son, or that no matter how far they went, it would never be enough, that the distance wouldn’t change a thing. An ocean couldn’t separate them from the worry they’d always feel. He was sorry he’d brought them across the world to these centipedes. It was proof—the trouble will always follow. He couldn’t protect them from it.

The waves whipped violently through him. Yet his wife of thirty years held him now, strong enough for both. He felt her arms across his back, anchoring him.

“Everything’s going to be fine,” she said, and for the first time in as long as she could remember, she believed it. Something about those centipedes made her certain. It felt good to say. She said it again.

They lay together beneath the lime green blanket. Joe held onto her like a buoy.

The room was empty aside from their unpacked boxes. Ellen listened to Joe’s breathing settle into the low steady rhythm of sleep. She rolled onto her back and saw another centipede, the biggest one yet, creeping into the circle of light on the ceiling. Its long thick body stretched above her, waving its furry tentacles. She considered turning off the lamp, but she wanted to see where it was going.

The centipede stopped at the edge of the light. Ellen waited for the creature to keep moving. It slowly slithered across the ceiling, all the way to the edge where the ceiling met the wall and stretched its body along the seam.

Joe snored softly, and she moved closer beside him, comforted by his familiar scent. Tomorrow, they would unpack. They would get some furniture—a desk, nightstands, something for the walls. Yes, tomorrow they would settle in. They would start to make it a real home. A dresser over there. A mirror over here. Linens, maybe even a canopy for the bed. She’d always wanted a canopy. Something with islets or lace.

The centipede inched along the crevice of the wall, making its silent stitch around the room. She watched its smooth, precise movements, mending their walls, securing them safely inside.

Tomorrow, she thought, tomorrow she and Joe would go to the markets.

Genre:

Fiction

Author Bio:

Melanie Faranello is the author of the debut story collection, Everybody Needs Something, which won the 2025 Donald L Jordan Prize for Literary Excellence. Her fiction and essays have appeared in Swamp Pink, Electric Literature, Hippocampus, StoryQuarterly, Blackbird, HuffPost Personal, Catamaran, Vol 1 Brooklyn, Vestal Review, Columbus State University Press (in which this story first appeared) and elsewhere. She has been nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize. Her novel-in-progress won an Emerging Writer Award from Key West Literary Seminars. She holds her MFA from The New School. Originally from Chicago, she lives in West Hartford, CT and is the founder of the community engagement project, Poetry on the Streets. Read more at www.melaniefaranello.com

Issue:

Between the Head and the Heart Lines

mjordan — Thu, 21 May 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Alison Gadsby

Sibley notices immediately that Arianne Hebert’s life story is scattered across her palm like a handful of freshly tossed pick-up sticks, she’d be easily misled, easily convinced. There is very little space between her thumb and life line, and the shallow heart line with the circles across it – like someone had pressed two pennies into her palm – indicate this woman has suffered. The woman with a billion dollars in the bank has no fate line on either hand and the head line is so shallow, Sibley uses a magnifying glass and sketches the lines on a piece of paper, to show Arianne what she’s talking about when she says, you have no future, you have no past.

Sibley Young has been reading palms for twenty-five years, blackmailing rich clients for two. She grew up in the two-bedroom apartment upstairs. This is her mother’s “Crystal Palace and Chiromancy” shop, now curtained off from the world and stripped of the neon signs, with the only evidence her mother ever existed, a deep pain in the middle of Sibley’s palm, between the head and the heart lines. When she was ten years old, she started working alongside her mother who read palms and tarot cards for the wealthy Toronto socialites who needed weekly reminders that everything they had would never go away.

Arianne, the heiress to the Hebert fortune has somehow made it to forty with sad and indeterminate palm lines.

“Would you mind if I took some photos?” Sibley grabs her digital camera from under the cash register.

“I need to know today. Does he love me? Or is he after my money?”

Sibley knows the easy answer. Arianne Hebert is the ten-times-granddaughter of Rolande Hebert, perfumier to the House of Bourbon, whose ancestors were miraculously not murdered by Napoleon III. Now, Hebert Inc. mixes unique perfumes for celebrities, owns two of the largest make-up brands in the world, and half of the wine-producing land in France. They’re known as the rich woman’s Hermès. The dog-walker may not have been after her money before their little meet-cute in the park, but why would a guy end a relationship no matter how mismatched when he makes forty-dollars a dog, fifty for an extra-large breed, and Arianne makes a million dollars a week by simply existing? Arianne tripping over a mastiff was a lottery ticket and he’d be a fool to not cash it in.

“He wants to keep working. That means something doesn’t it?” Arianne presses the corner of her eye with a shellacked pinkie.

Arianne also said he wanted to expand his business, maybe get on television to talk about the breedism that negatively affects the pack of Rottweilers, Dobermans, Mastiffs, and Bullies in his care. He wants to be famous.

“Didn’t you say he stopped walking dogs a few weeks ago?” Sibley videos the woman’s unique palms, the tops and sides of her hands, and her arms up to the elbows. Then takes photos.

“Only because he had to join me in Paris for a meeting with the president’s wife.”

“He had to join you?”

“He’s been so lonely since his golden retriever, Glossy, died. I couldn’t leave him.”

“Who’s taking care of his litter of special clients now?”

“We hired a couple of young men who’d been volunteering at the humane society.”

“We?”

“Well, he can’t afford to pay them a living wage, and I can’t stomach the idea of someone not getting paid what they’re due.”

“How long have you been having doubts?”

“I don’t have any doubts, but my friend…Trish…she’s the one who referred me to you. She said she got a bad feeling when she shook his hand. She’s very sensitive to that sort of thing. Like you.”

Trish? Sibley doesn't have a client named Trish. “She referred you to me? She’s a client of mine?”

“I’m not sure. She’s a consultant. Works with people like me who find themselves in this sort of predicament.”

Shit.

“What’s her last name?”

“I’m not sure, to be honest, she’s very. Secretive.”

“But she’s a friend?”

“Not a friend, I guess. Helping me. Like you.”

If this Trish woman referred Arianne to Sibley, Trish has been told that Sibley can be trusted or that they were conned out of $50K, and they believe Sibley’s the mountebank, which would make Arianne Herbert, a plant.

“I’d love to meet her.” Sibley sends the photos from her camera to her printer. “Just a minute.”

“I really do have to be going.” Arianne wraps the scarf around her neck, tying it at the front in a French twist. The Hebert silk scarf is worth as much as Sibley’s car.

When Sibley returns with the photos of Arianne’s hands, she packs up the tarot cards and astrological charts, before spreading the pictures across the harvest table in the middle of the shop. Sibley has no intention of reading them, she only needs to get Arianne under her control.

It doesn’t take long for Arianne to succumb. She sits just as Sibley instructs, back bent, arms straight out in front of her, head limp and relaxed with her chin resting against her chest.

“Who referred you to me today?”

“Dilys Firth, but I call her Trish.”

“Who is Dilys Firth?”

“A spiritual consultant.”

“What does that mean?”

“Trish helps people who are being emotionally conned.”

“Conned by whom?”

“Anybody, really.”

“Did you call her because you were worried about being blackmailed by me?”

“I thought she might help me with Thomas, but she said that she can’t predict the future.”

“Does she think I can predict the future?”

“She sent me to you because…”

“Because what?”

“You…”

Arianne is coming out of her spell. Sibley’s incantation normally gets her fifteen minutes.

“Am I the blackmailer? Sullomeeee, sullomeee, sullomeeeeeee…”

The incantation isn’t working. Arianne opens her eyes.

“What do you see?” Arianne asks, as though she hadn’t been asleep for five minutes.

If her mother were here, she’d know what to do, but her mother would offer to follow the dog-walker around for weeks, she’d give up hours of unpaid time to ensure this pathetic woman didn’t have to worry about a thing.

“I see a fate that was determined before you were born. It runs deep in both hands, intersecting the head, the heart and the life lines.”

“What does that mean?”

“Your right hand, your dominant hand, represents external action, the conscious choices you make, the impact of family, your wealth and fame, for example, and the choices you made that have steered you to where you are today.”

“I never had a choice. I’m here because of my family.”

“Yes. I see that. Your lines are chaotic, and they appear to have been imprinted, which corresponds with that theory.”

“And my left hand?” Arianne wipes the sweat from her upper lip with the corner of her scarf, still tied around her neck.

“The left hand is the subconscious, your karma.” Sibley pushes the photo closer, circles the faint lines between the head and the heart lines with a blue marker.

She kneads the same spot on her own left hand. When she was a child, her mother had traced the mystic cross with a feather pen dipped in her own blood, pressed Sibley’s tiny palm against her own and promised that she would live forever there, that they’d forever be connected. Now, it’s a gaping hole full of grief.

“What is that circle?” Arianne points to one of the penny prints.

“It is your due,” Sibley says.

“What am I due?”

“Nothing. You’re owed nothing in this life, and you deserve even less.”

Arianne quietly sobs. “That’s cruel.”

Sibley’s mother held monthly seances where rich people enchanted loved ones back from the dead. Toward the end, she had people flying up from New York to learn their futures, including their deaths. They wanted to know their ancestors weren’t swimming in a lake of fire. Her mother never disclosed how they would die because she believed, like a good book or film, spoilers ruined all the fun. Sibley never feared her mother’s death because she had faith that somehow, they’d be able to connect. She’s tried a hundred times and her mother hasn’t answered the calls.

Now, almost forty, she’s made more in three years than her mother made her entire life and Sibley doesn’t care what she has to do to get the money her mother deserved.

“I don’t mean to be cruel. I see Thomas.”

“How do you know his name is Thomas?”

“It is Thomas, right?” Sibley forgot that Arianne hadn’t wanted to share his name.

“Yes, but.”

“I see Thomas very clearly. He is turning handles on the front doors of houses and waiting for one to open.”

“I’m an unlocked door?” Arianne is surprised.

“Yes. I’m sorry.”

Arianne removes her scarf and uses it to blow her nose.

“What if I lock the door?”

“I suggest you do.”

Arianne pushes the scarf into her cashmere sleeve and opens her purse. She places three hundred dollars on the table.

“Thank you.” Sibley watches Arianne. “Can I ask you another question. About Trish?”

“Please don’t. I’m afraid I’ve said too much already.”

What hold does this Dilys Firth woman have on her?

Arianne reaches into her bag and takes out another four hundred dollars, slipping it under a photo on the table. “Thank you for your discretion.”

Sibley observes Arianne as she walks to her car, shoulders slumped. Arianne whispers something to the driver who stares back at Sibley watching between a narrow opening in the curtains. The driver closes the windows of the black Phantom. It’s up to Arianne now. The devastation in Arianne’s face revealed that she is in love with the gold-digging Thomas. Just as Sibley once dreamed of moving to Scotland with her mother, living the rest of their lives in a thatched cottage on a hill overlooking the sea, the rug’s been pulled out from under her, and she’ll have to find happiness in all that money.

Friday morning, Sibley runs through the client list. She has six bookings, five repeats including Marcus March, a man who stupidly dumped a box of puppies in Lewiston, New York. After a deep, deep internet dive, Sibley thought she’d found the unicorn, a wealthy man without skeletons, but then she found it. Ten years ago, he’d paid handsomely to have the internet combed of the video originally posted on Twitter. Someone found it and included it in a Substack note about rescue dogs, with #sharktank, misspelling Marcus’ company, @thebueatyplace. The footage was grainy enough that he wouldn’t jump out at someone, but also the stacker had four followers, three of whom seemed to be aliases of himself. Marcus had been a dragon on Dragon’s Den and The Beauty Place was now called Victoria’s Beauty Shoppe, since his wedding to Victoria Haliburton. This would be an easy $50 grand.

Sibley sent the email on Monday. She described herself as someone who’d overheard his drunk confession at a bar, said she was disgusted when she learned he was married to Victoria Haliburton, spokesperson for the Humane Society and staunch critic of animal testing, and what did Victoria think of him dumping a box of puppies on the side of the Niagara Scenic Parkway? Someone had tried to locate the owner of the atomic email address, but Sibley had dedicated a year of her life developing a process that not even the best hackers would figure out.

Sibley jumps at the sound of the bell above the door. She forgot to lock it when she went out for the mail.

“Sorry. I’m not open to the public.” She swallows her heart now beating at the back of her throat.

A woman wearing a floor length eggplant coloured leather jacket enters with an Hebert scarf wrapped around her neck like a cowboy’s neckerchief. She turns the lock on the tinted glass door.

“Sorry. I’m not open.”

The woman sweeps her wind-blown blonde hair to the side, casually braiding it and tying the end with an elastic she pulls from her wrist. She tips her John Lennon sunglasses to the top of her head, and the whites of her eyes light up the room. Her lips have been stained a plummy pink either by nature or an expensive silky lipstick, her cheeks rosy from the wind, and her slender fingers – the ones she’d delicately tied her hair with – are like eagle talons, nails tipped with black polish, curved and filed to a point.

“Sorry, but.”

“Sibley Young?”

“I’m Sibley. And you are?”

“Dilys Firth.”

“Can I help you Dilys?”

“I’d like to chat, if you’ve got time.”

“I don’t, actually. I have a busy schedule today.”

“Marcus March?”

“He’s on the schedule.”

“He won’t be coming today.”

“Why’s that?”

“I think you know why.”

“I’m sure I don’t.” Sibley is nervous, and it isn’t because Dilys has uncovered her little scheme. Dilys exists not just here today in this moment but in Sibley’s journals upstairs in her bedroom. Sibley has lived this moment, she’s scribbled a picture of a beautiful woman in a long purple coat in the margins of schoolbooks, on the backs of printed paper images of other people’s hands. This is the future.

“Victoria called me on Wednesday. Marcus broke down and admitted the truth to her. She’s all he cared about. They’ve planned a news conference this afternoon. But that isn’t why I’m here.”

Sibley motions for Dilys to sit while she pulls out the burgundy leather chair opposite.

Dilys picks a piece of food from between her teeth with her pinky talon.

Sibley remains still.

“Victoria doesn’t like animals. It’s all a marketing ploy.” Dilys reaches for Sibley’s hands and she’s powerless against her. An energy field surrounds them, and Sibley’s locked in this embrace.

Dilys rubs a tear from Sibley’s eye and licks her thumb.

Dilys drops her head, rolls it from side to side.

Sibley breaks free, pushes her chair back and falls on to the floor.

“Whoa, whoa. How'd you do that?”

“You never met my mother, I guess.”

“I have actually.” Dilys grabs her hands again.

“No. Stop. What do you want?”

“I think you know.”

“I don’t. Actually. Really, I don’t.” The images of Dilys in her dreams reappear in Sibley’s head, swirling, dancing around, just as they had when she was a child.

“Your mother sent me.”

“What? No.”

Sibley sits on the velvet chaise under the portrait of Madame Beaufort, her maternal great grandmother.

“By my calculations, you’ve raised a couple of million dollars so far.”

“Six.”

“Six million? Wow. Good for you.”

“I can’t stop.”

How can Sibley describe the pain in her hand, the emptiness forged by her mother’s absence, her heart line as broken as the life lines in both hands, all the lines engraved before she was born now thinned and hollowed of meaning?

“I can’t.”

“Sibley, you must.” Dilys’ lips touch her ear. “My darling, it is time to move on.”

“Mummy. I can’t.”

“You must.”

Dilys removes her leather coat. Her dress the colour of her peachy skin, her body sinewy and slender, she stands before her without moving. Yet her hands surround her hands, the nail of her index finger carves new lines in her palms. Sibley’s life stretches beyond her wrist, curving down and joining the lines on the back of her hand. The head line unites with the life line above the thenar eminence of her thumb; the heart line arches up toward her index finger. The spot bordered by her health and fate, between the head and the heart lines, the mystic cross, it throbs. The emptiness she’d been trying to fill with money, gaping, aching, waiting.

Sibley screams in pain as Dilys plunges into its depths with her nail.

Sibley opens her eyes to see Arianne unravelling her scarf and then running it under the tap beside the coffeemaker. She kneels beside Sibley and rests the cold silk against her forehead. Sibley sits up. A man and a Great Dane, dark silhouettes in the doorway. Thomas.

“Are you okay? Your door was swinging open and closed. Thomas noticed on his walk and called me.”

Sibley manages to stand and staggers over to her red book. Her next five targets have been erased from her schedule.

When she asks Arianne about Trish, about Dilys. Who is she? Where can she find her?

“I don’t know who you’re talking about,” Arianne says. She’s never heard of her.

“This is my fiancé, Thomas.”

“Fiancé?”

“Yes. We’re going to be married in Paris in August.” Arianne looks happy.

Sibley shakes his hand.

She turns them over. She stares at her hands. Her palms, soft and warm, the tenderness when she touches her mother’s spot between the head and the heart feels less like fear, more like love, happiness even.

Genre:

Fiction

Author Bio:

Alison Gadsby, a first-generation Canadian writer and literary chatterbox, currently lives in Tkaronto/Toronto in a multigenerational home that includes several dogs. Author of story collection Breathing Is How Some People Stay Alive (Guernica Editions, 2026), other short fiction appears in Blank Spaces, The Temz Review, The Ex-Puritan, Blue Lake Review, and more. Her novel, Dreams of the Weary is forthcoming (Palimpsest Press, 2028). She holds an MFA from the UBC, and a degree in English Literature & Creative Writing from York University. She is the host of Junction Reads, a prose reading series. Find out more at www.alisongadsby.ca and www.junctionreads.ca.

Issue:

//Glue

mjordan — Thu, 07 May 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Matthew Thomas Meade

//Glue Part I – Glue

One of the greatest fears of your young life was of running out of glue. You had full faith in the healing properties of the substance. You’d been assured. You’d been convinced, proselytized to by the zealots of adhesion. You were sure that losing a limb could be solved were there enough glue to connect the arm to its socket.

When Paul Campanelli came back from hitting his head on the swing set that looked like a horse, he told you his mom said they’d glued it at the hospital. When the decorative plate that grandma gave your mom broke while you were doing dishes, the wood glue was the first thing you looked for. When the window was broken, with a NERF football, it was glue you looked for to try to put the window back together. When you were somehow, despite their advertising campaign, unable to solve the problem with the Elmer's glue at your disposal, you became convinced that it was only because you didn't have Super Glue that you were unable to reconstitute the pane of glass.

“Isn't there any glue in the junk drawer?” you asked your brother.

“There is paste,” Jackie said.

“No. I don’t need paste. I need glue. Crazy glue, or gorilla glue, or super glue. For real.”

“Paste is the same as glue,” he said.

“No. Only glue is glue,” you told him. “Tape is ok too, but not as good as glue.”

You never did find the glue. Your mother was livid when she discovered the broken glass. You know she was livid because she told you she was livid. You were grounded for a while for that one. And you think you lost your allowance for a while. Not that they were paying you much to begin with.

//Glue Part II – Screwy Louis

Screwy Louis used to sniff airplane glue. Some people thought the glue was what made him screwy. You weren't sure exactly what that meant until you saw him in the grocery store one day. His blond hair was long and caked with something thick and dark. His head tipped forward and he placed a single, tall can of beer on the rubber conveyor belt at the grocery store.

He turned the insides of his jacket pockets out, his scum caked jeans firing the coins onto the conveyor belt.

The cashier could barely bring herself to pick the coins up, but eventually she was compelled by the ritual of currency.

Louis didn't notice her disgust, but you did. You imagined the cashier going home to tell her husband and kids about the fact that Screwy Louis came into the store again and made her count out all this crazy change so he could buy his malt liquor. You imagined the delight with which she would describe how badly he smelled and how he would probably soon die.

When you glued together your airplanes and model cars you made sure not to breathe whenever you used the glue. You held your little breath until black bubbles appeared in front of your eyes while you glued the chassis together, B167 fitting into 15-482. The glue was warm and stung on your fingers and it made your nostril hair and the inside of your eyelids hum. It was only proof that it was powerful. The good stuff.

The existence of glue made you believe in second chances and in the triumph of life over death. It was paramount in your understanding of Christ's ascension. It made you believe that anything that happened between your parents could be fixed. And anything that you did to piss them off could be corrected with some version of glue. And in later years that anything you did to one of your partners could be forgiven. Solved. Fixed. Glued. Super glued. Gorilla glued. Taped could work too but not as good.

Genre:

Fiction

Author Bio:

Matt Meade is the author of the short story collection, Strip Mall. His fiction has appeared in The Sun Magazine, Bourbon Penn, The Saturday Evening Post, Columbia Journal, and elsewhere. His website is terrible. See for yourself: www.matthewthomasmeade.com

Issue:

Shallow Wounds

mjordan — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Neema Samawi

I’m allergic to water. Not deathly, no anaphylaxis involved, just a skin-deep intolerance for that most life-giving of substances. Out loud, I address questions about my condition with the practiced factuality of WebMD, but in my head I’ve become a little more colorful. “How do you shower?” Like you, I want to say, naked. “How do you manage to be allergic to more than half of your own body?” I don’t know, how do you manage to have the most evolved brain in the animal kingdom and still ask such predictable, annoying questions? They ask how I go outside in the summer (I don’t), if there’s a cure (no), how I treat the hives that carpet-burn my body. I try not to scratch, but the pain demands it: feverish, rabid scratches, until my capillaries rupture into blackberry bruises.

So naturally, a job at a shoreside sleepaway camp sounded less than ideal. But ideal becomes a luxury when you have nowhere else to go, the college dorms closed to all who could not pay the summer fees. The only alternative—return to Reading, Pennsylvania to stay with my father—was not an option.

Tori drove with the windows down on her white Range Rover. She strained her voice against the stereo, honeyed strands whipping her skin, to emphasize for the hundredth time how thrilled she was to work together. The job had been her idea, and with her referral I quickly landed the position. For the next twelve weeks, we would inhabit a college-campus-turned-summer-camp in Long Branch and co-counsel a small group of preteen girls.

I tried to mirror her enthusiasm, but the proposition made me nervous, and not just for its proximity to the Atlantic. Tori and I had only been friends for a year; we’d never spent so much time together. I suspected she might be the kind of person best experienced in small doses.

We pulled into a tree-lined park. Cool air grazed my arms, the early June day not yet sweltering. The other counselors had already arrived, circling a sunny patch of grass.

“We’re here!” Tori sang. She slung her hair into a high ponytail, eyes tinted pink by oversized Pradas. “Everyone, this is my best friend, Irene.”

A chorus of welcomes surrounded me. I lifted my hand in a half-hearted hello.

“You two could be twins,” said a man standing across from us. He was blocking the sun from his eyes, smiling beneath his handmade shadow.

“Twinsies!” Tori interlocked her arm with mine. “You all have to promise to be nice to her, okay?”

We were accustomed to the twin comparisons. When we lived across the hall from each other, our freshmen floormates mixed us up constantly, swapping our names like Freudian slips. I didn’t see the resemblance beyond the surface: tall but not towering, blonde but not too blonde, green-eyed with golden flecks. Her hair cascaded in lush, hydrated layers; mine was brittle and dry like straw. Her body filled out and tapered; mine ran up and down in parallel lines. Next to her, I looked like a scarecrow.

The staff cycled through icebreakers. If you were an ice cream flavor, which would you be? Which Cartoon Network character is your spirit animal? Would you rather have toes for fingers or swallow a thousand bees? At the end of this exercise I learned nothing about my coworkers except their willingness to entertain inane questions. We then carried supply crates from a storage unit into a U-Haul driven by one of the lead staff members, a tanned sandy-haired man in his early thirties. His spirit animal was Johnny Bravo.

As we unloaded the crates at Monmouth University, the temperature climbed from pleasant to stifling, my armpits and forehead prickling with hives. Sweat could trigger the allergic reaction; so could tears. But I had tucked away a three-month supply of non-sedative antihistamines in my backpack, and the pills I’d swallowed that morning reduced my symptoms to irritating, but bearable. As for the hives, they hid behind bangs I’d snipped weeks ago with kitchen scissors.

At the end of the day, we crowded around a Domino’s pizza, the cheese half-solid and cold. “That’s amóre,” said the guy who’d called us twins. This produced laughter and knowing glances, and the conversation soon devolved into a round of “Remember when…?” Most of the staff, Tori included, had been campers themselves from the ages of eight to eighteen, their collective presence a wellspring of nostalgia. I struggled to imagine this, a whole decade’s worth of summers spent in sunrise-to-sunset schedules, islanded off to this ecosystem of kids supervised by pseudo-adults who were almost certainly sleeping with each other.

Tori and I unpacked from opposite sides of our shared room. Lip balms, beach reads, and swimsuits in every cut and color crowded her duvet. Meanwhile, I folded away my clothes and surveyed my few possessions: journal, phone, meds, umbrella.

My skin had accumulated a filmy layer of dust and dried sweat throughout the day, so I reluctantly endured a two-minute rinse-off in the bathroom, followed by a generous slathering of medical cream. When I returned to our room, towel-clad and fatigued, Tori hovered by the door.

“We’re going down to the shore to smoke,” she said. “You should come.”

I pretended to consider this. “You know that’s not really my thing.”

“So? You could still join us.”

Tori already knew I would say no. Arguably one of her best traits, it was maybe the strongest binding agent of our friendship, her short-term memory loss when it came to rejection. But when drugs were involved, I refused to take risks. I couldn’t afford to provoke my father, or compromise my scholarship—or, in this case, lose my job.

“What if we get caught?”

“We won’t. They don’t care. The head staff goes right to bed anyway.”

“But the wa—”

“It’s not like we’re going in the water. You’ll be fine. I promise.”

I stared at her with bleary eyes. “I’m really tired. I kind of just want to sleep, if that’s okay.”

“How else will you get to know everyone?” Tori sighed. “It’s really important to me that you have a good time this summer. I love this place, and I want you to love it too.”

I didn’t have the energy to fight her puppy-eyed resolve. “Fine,” I said, and fumbled through my drawers for a sweatshirt and leggings. I tried, as I got dressed, to ignore her celebratory squeals.

We met up with four counselors splayed out on beach towels: a mustached man strumming a guitar, a leggy girl with red-streaked hair, a guy in a Metallica shirt crunching on pork rinds, and the guy who’d called us twins. Their faces erupted into view, blue and grainy in the nighttime. As Tori and I strode up to their spot, their names escaped me, sounds I knew I’d learned but couldn’t assign to one face or the other.

“You made it!” The guy in the Metallica shirt held up a fistful of sand. “We thought you bailed.”

“Never.” Tori nudged me with her elbow. “I had to convince this one to come.”

“Hell yeah. Irene, right? Come, sit.” The mustached man patted the ground beside his thigh and offered me his weed pen.

“No thanks.” I crouched into a seat. “I’m, uh, just here to hang.”

“Suit yourself. Hey, Tori!” He snapped his fingers at her. “Did you bring the beers? So your friend can have some?”

“I also don’t drink.”

He gave me a look like I’d sprouted antennae, then turned to the girl with red-streaked hair. “Where’s Dave? Is he coming?”

“He’s probably trying to get one of the new girls to ‘get supplies’ with him,” she said, doing air-quotes. “You know, the skinny one with the nose ring? She’s definitely his type.”

The guy who’d called us twins grinned like a madman. “Dave, that dog. Hey Tori, remember when you guys had a thing?”

Tori took a drag on the pen and rolled her eyes. How could any of us forget, I wanted to interject. Classic Dave, am I right, guys?

They recounted past flings, love triangles, unrequited crushes. As they soared higher and higher, I trailed a twig across the sand, making wavy lines and geometric patterns.

“Hey, we should run into the ocean,” someone said.

“We absolutely should run into the ocean.” The mustached man turned to me. “Irene, you coming?”

I shook my head as casually as possible. “I’m good.”

“Damn, don’t you wanna do anything fun?” he teased, nudging me.

Tori softly socked his arm. “She’s allergic to water, you asshole.”

The group dissolved into laughter.

“I’m serious!” Tori said, though she was laughing now too. “It’s a real thing.”

“How’s that even possible?” asked the other girl. “We’re like, made of water.”

“So true.” The guy in the Metallica shirt gazed off into the distance. “We’re pretty much just huge sacks of water, if you think about it…crazy.”

“It’s just my skin. I break out in hives. I take really quick showers, basically.”

“That sounds so hard,” whined the other girl, but she was looking at Tori, not me. “I love hot showers. I would stay in the shower all day if I could.”

“In Irene’s honor,” the mustached man said, “I say we don’t go in the water.”

“You don’t have to do that for me, really—”

“To Irene!”

“To Irene!” they cheered, holding up whatever items were within reach.

I decided that would be the last night I joined them.

When I first emerged from a shower in searing pain, I was thirteen years old. Six doctor visits and a thick stack of medical bills later, one physician put a name to my suffering: aquagenic urticaria. I rushed home and immersed myself for hours in articles and Reddit posts until my father pried me off the family laptop. Online, I discovered a smattering of others, people like me who shared this stupidly rare diagnosis with less than one hundred reported cases worldwide.

I reacted, at first, à la the aggressive rhetoric of motivational videos. Your greatest challenge is your secret weapon! boomed entrepreneurs with throbbing neck veins, and accordingly, I resolved to spin my circumstances to my advantage. The allergy could be isolating, keeping me indoors in the warmer months and excluding me from sports, but isolation had one upside: plenty of time to study, to accrue the string of straight As and gleaming letters of recommendation needed to escape.

Miraculously, it worked. Once I secured that full ride to Cornell, my ticket out of that two-bedroom hellhole, I felt invincible—so invincible, in fact, that when the twins from the nicer side of town invited me to their end-of-high-school pool party, I convinced myself I could sprawl out on a lawn chair and attend from the sidelines.

That feeling died when I trudged home, scaled over with hives and scratching myself senseless. Pure roughhousing, claimed the boy who’d shoved me in the pool. Probably some pathetic attempt at flirting, explained a friend. I suspected I’d be punished for lying about my whereabouts, but only my mother was home, and her face collapsed when I walked through the door. She scheduled an appointment the next day.

The doctor recommended an expensive series of injections. My mother encouraged me to go through with it, her support unwavering despite my many attempts to question her sanity. I asked why she hadn’t balked at the price, which surpassed our household income on a good year. I hate to see you suffering, she said, and smoothed down my hair.

When my father discovered the bill, sliced open the envelope with a steak knife, and looked at us with coal in his eyes, I think she regretted that decision.

“Why didn’t you tell me about this?”

He spoke softly, but I knew what lurked beneath. My mother and I, hunched in opposite corners of the kitchen, said nothing.

“Do you think we’re made of money? Do you think I slave away for you to be this irresponsible?”

“Irene is in pain.” The note of defiance in my mother’s voice surprised me. “I had to do something.”

“We can’t afford to do something!”

A half-empty bottle of High Life launched from his hand, sloshing the carpet and splintering the television. We barely flinched. My father never hit my mother or me, a fact he held in high esteem. Instead, he lashed out at everything around us, our home a collection of broken objects: chairs with fractured legs, plates in jagged halves, photos of us smiling behind shattered glass.

“No, you’re right, I’m sorry.” She flattened herself against the pantry door. “I don’t know what I was thinking. I know how hard you work.”

“Hard? He doesn’t even have a fucking job.”

The words flew from my mouth before I could stop them. In slow, heavy steps, my father approached me. “You wanna say that again?”

“Leave Mom alone,” I said. “I’ll stop the treatment, okay? You win.”

“I win? I win? You think I’m the bad guy, is that it? After everything I’ve sacrificed?”

“You’re literally a parent! That’s literally your job! And you’re not even good at it.”

“Oh wow, she’s telling us how to be a parent now!” He made sidelong glances at my mother. “You think you know so much, huh?” My father came closer, so close I could smell his cigarette-stained breath. “You don’t know anything. Do you hear me? You’re just a stupid, spoiled, self-centered child.”

I looked him right in his bloodshot eyes. “I wish you weren’t my father.”

That did it. He tore a picture from the wall and flung it at the ceiling, shouted at decibels that rattled the window panes. Ungrateful, worthless, bad-mouthed brat. Nothing I hadn’t heard before.

My father slammed the door and pulled away in his battered pick-up. His favorite coping mechanism, long drives that left us anxious he’d road-rage himself into a lethal accident. He often didn’t return until the early hours, coming from God knows where.

In the kitchen, my mother stared at dishes in the sink, looking small and breakable. She took my father’s side because she needed him to survive, I knew that, but still it smacked of weakness. She always folded so fast. I couldn’t decide whether it appalled me or inspired something like envy. She could discard her ego with ease, set aside her defenses, apologize to my father when he was clearly in the wrong. She would probably shoot her own foot to soothe his shallow wounds.

We kicked off training at 8 a.m. the next day with twelve straight hours of info sessions (common behavioral issues; how to perform CPR; Camp Apollo theme song!) The day concluded with Kraft grilled cheeses and sad cafeteria soup in a small cup. I felt relieved when they dismissed us, eager to crawl into bed as soon as we returned to our rooms. Tori, however, had other plans.

“If you’re not coming out with us tonight, will you work on the door decorations?”

Tori said this in her Daddy, please voice, the infantile, beguiling tone she used when asking for anything—answers to Psych 101 study guides, or help rearranging furniture for the twenty-third time. I’d only dealt with this side of her on occasion, the shameless way she molded the world to coddle her. A small price to pay, I thought, for the generosity she granted without so much as a breath: the fully comped dinners at upscale restaurants, the winter holiday at her family’s cabin in Vermont.

“Sure,” I said. How long could door decorations take, I figured.

“You’re the best.” Tori smooched the air beside my cheek, grabbed her tote bag, and flew out of the room.

That night, as I watched The Shining on my phone and crafted mermaids out of construction paper, I didn’t resent Tori. In fact, I enjoyed the time alone, the chance to tackle a creative task. But the late nights continued. The head staff stacked our schedules from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. and reserved no time for other items on our to-do lists: organizing the supply closet, loading up on snacks and toiletries. I assumed the bulk of the labor, since Tori often wanted to stay out. Day by day, the sleep deprivation compounded into a persistent headache.

On the last night of training, I intended to pass out for a full eight hours, serene in the knowledge that our preparations were in place. But Tori tugged on my shirtsleeve. “Will you do the laundry, pretty please?”

I’d forgotten that our counselor polos, a crucial component of the welcome-day uniform, were soiled with sweat and campfire smoke. Tori stood halfway out the door, canvas bag slung across her shoulder.

“I’m so tired. Can’t you do it?”

“Well…I was going to go down to the shore tonight.”

“Again? Jesus Christ, how many times can you all hang out with each other?”

The sound of my own voice startled me. What was I doing? I couldn’t afford to pick a fight with my co-counselor, let alone my only friend.

“It’s just, these people mean so much to me. And I only get to see them once a year. You get that, don’t you?”

“But you’ve hung out with them every night this week.” I took a deep breath, tried to steady my heart rate. “You still have the whole summer left.”

Tori pouted. “It won't be the same when the kids get here. You’ll see—we’ll get busier, people will start going to bed earlier. This could be, like, our last chance for a while.”

The word no simmered to the surface. I was tired. I had done enough. But I shoved it down. “Fine,” I said, my voice not free of venom. But I twisted my mouth into a neutral line.

“Thank you so so much!” Tori gave me a bone-crunching hug. “You’re an angel!” She flitted out the door before I could so much as serve up a sarcastic you’re welcome.

I tossed my journal atop our combined laundry loads. In high school, I’d spent more afternoons in the counselor’s office than some kids did in class; the school counselor, a bottle-blonde soccer mom who worshipped Martha Stewart, shared many tidbits of what she called “mental health hygiene,” chief among them journaling. Don’t act when you’re upset, she told me after one of my outbursts. A girl had taunted me in gym class for “faking” my medical condition, claimed I’d forged my own doctor notes to skip track laps and burpees, and in response I’d hurled dodgeballs with enough force to crack ribs. Channel your anger into words, my counselor had said. Into art! Heck, you could join a boxing gym!

Machines vibrated and gargled in the basement as I heaved laundry into the nearest washer. My threadbare boy shorts tangled with Tori’s silk camisoles. As the laundry somersaulted, I sank into a butterfly chair and poured all my thoughts across the page. How I wished I didn’t have to be here, complicated by the guilt of knowing I should be grateful. And Tori, had she always been like this? At Cornell, we spent the better part of our free time together, but classes and extracurriculars drew a nice clean line between our lives. By the time we tired of each other, we would usually separate. We hadn’t been living in the same room, breathing the same air. Soon we would be responsible for the same set of twelve-year-old girls.

The journaling did help, though my rage looked suddenly pathetic on paper. The anger faded, leaving only fatigue, and the percussive rinse cycles doused me in drowsiness. On a current of whooshes and whirs, I drifted to sleep.

My ankles itched. I jolted awake. The scuffed gray tile had disappeared, submerged beneath a foot of water.

It took me a second to realize I wasn’t dreaming. The journal had fallen from my lap; I reached forward and plucked it from the detergent-frothed slurry. The pages buckled, blue lines bleeding over smeared graphite.

A small grief trickled in. At the beginning of freshman year, I had documented each of my experiences in this journal. The heady thrill of potential, the liberation of starting anew. Free from my father’s grip, from the reputation I’d developed in my hometown, I realized no one had to know about the allergy. No one had to know anything about me at all. For the price of solitude, I would’ve gladly traded the illusion of normalcy.

Then I met Tori. From the second we swapped snide comments at a mandatory floor meeting, she’d inserted herself into my life. She would accompany me to Psych 101, babbling with the saccharine energy of a Labrador puppy. She would invite me to gossip in the dining hall, to pregame in off-campus housing, to cram for finals at Mann, all without me asking. All those stories, moments, and memories, once carefully preserved, were now bloated into wet blotches.

Any hope for a reasonable night of sleep drained away with the laundry water. No one said anything hostile, but they asked questions like are you sure you loaded the machine correctly? Needless to say, they did not seem particularly thrilled to be called in at midnight, scooping plastic buckets into an industrial sink.

I took an extra dose of pills and found a pair of disposable gloves in the supply closet. But when I reached for a bucket, one of Tori’s friends batted away my hand, as if reprimanding a dog.

“What are you doing?! Aren’t you allergic?”

“It’s fine,” I said. “I started this mess, I should—”

“No no no. Don’t even worry about it. We’ll take care of it.” His gaze fell to the patches of pink around my ankles. “Your skin! Oh my God, are you okay?”

“It’s fine. I took pills for it, I’m fine.”

Tori sulked in the corner, deflated by the premature death of her social hour—and, I realized, her possibly damaged clothes. I wrung out each sock and shirt before loading the dryer. While our clothes tumbled, I hauled water into the sink, though several staff members insisted I stop. Everyone, it seemed, had found out about the allergy.

After one cycle, our laundry had meshed into a damp, spongy mass. I re-ran the machine, praying I hadn’t ruined her designer items.

I wanted to apologize, but Tori thwarted my attempts at eye contact, her back angled toward me as she leaned over the sink. Before I could say anything, she slammed her bucket down, sighed theatrically, and plodded up the stairs.

To this day, I’m not sure why Tori chose me.

What could I offer to someone who had everything? What made her drag me to parties in Cayuga Heights, where she slipped into bathrooms trailed with toilet paper to do lines of cocaine while I traced the knife-edge of sober? What made her open up to me one night about what happened to her in high school? Her parents, both overworked doctors, paid so little attention to what she did, and so Tori had navigated the party scene well before college, had discovered its pitfalls early, had accepted a roofied Coke from a much older boy, had woken up the next morning with a hazy recollection of the night before and a plunging in her stomach.

Something about her candor compelled me to confide in her too. When I first explained my condition, she tilted her head. “Can you drink it?” she asked. “Or is it like being lactose intolerant? Dairy makes me violently flatulent.”

Eventually I told her about my father. I started with the inciting incident of my family’s downfall: my conception. Barely eighteen and both from conservative households, my unmarried parents were cut off from familial support when my father got my mother pregnant. In lieu of college, my mother accepted the role of stay-at-home mom. My father opted for breadwinner. But for a man who could make himself useful in so many contexts—construction worker, landscaper, mechanic—he couldn’t hold down a damn job. Eventually he would lose his temper at some small trigger, cursing out his superiors and damaging valuable property. It’s the people, he complained, time and time again, they’re impossible to work with. Always deflecting blame, incapable of self-awareness. I centered my stories around these faults, painting the most negative picture possible.

In truth there had been moments of humor, my father terribly funny when he wanted to be, blasting some crooked politician with commentary so ruthless, we laughed so hard it hurt to breathe. It seemed unfair that he had that power: to make us smile with tears in our eyes one day, to make us wary of stepping over some tripwire the next.

The first time I mentioned him to Tori, I expected a clipped, awkward response. Instead, she latched on, absorbed every detail in a way I never knew I craved. Not pity, not distant solace. A small part of me exhaled.

That’s when the charity started. Meals she paid for without a word, invitations to stay with her family when the dorms closed. She offered help with such grace that I never felt bad about it. I don’t know why Tori chose me, but I know—despite her infuriating traits, the grating sunshine of her princess personality—why I let her.

The onslaught of campers upended us. Days slurred into a panorama of recreational classes, cabin bonding, shared mealtimes. An eight-year-old wore star-shaped glasses and cried over a boy dribbling worms down her back. Older kids performed viral dances in the hallways. Chlorine wafted through dorms converted into cabins with paper decorations. In the afternoons I taught art classes, though my drawing skills had never progressed past basic shading. God knows I wouldn’t be assisting with swim lessons.

Our cohort of middle-school girls, with their naive sweetness and playful banter, diffused some tension, but no doubt things between Tori and me had shifted. She would only address me to coordinate logistics or relay directions, a cold edge in her tone. I tried to apologize for the laundry, but this she barely acknowledged, cutting me off with a curt, “It’s fine.”

One night Tori asked me to swap on-call duty so she could smoke again with her friends, a habit that had slowed but certainly hadn’t stopped. At 2 a.m. the emergency phone pierced through my sleep with its alarm. One of the younger girls claimed to be dying of a stomach ache, which, after a journey to the bathroom, we concluded was just gas. I escorted her back to her room and talked her down from any lingering health concerns.

On the way to bed I passed by the bathroom again. Muffled voices mingled with the rush of running showers. I paused, prodded the door open, careful not to make a sound. Inside, their words crisped and clarified. One voice, high-pitched and lilting, belonged to Tori.

She groaned and griped with a counselor I couldn’t identify as they washed the weed smell off their bodies. “Bringing her here was such a mistake,” she said. “She has no idea what she’s doing. I have to ask her to do everything. It’s like pulling dead weight.”

Her comments clouded my thoughts for days. I thought about confronting her, but in none of my imagined scenarios did this play out well. Without my journal, I resorted to the notes app on my phone, listing out grievances. Words I fantasized wielding against her. Texts I couldn’t send. Lines I would relish to deliver.

One day my screen flashed with a text from my father. Have you seen that new slasher film on Hulu? Absolute crap. All flashy effects, no substance. His appeal to our shared enjoyment of the horror genre was not lost on me. Part of a recent string of messages, feeble attempts at reconciliation, though likely fueled by genuine remorse. I considered not responding, though it felt surprisingly nice to hear from someone I knew. Someone who knew me better than all these strangers. I haven’t, I typed out, I’ll steer clear of it, thanks. My thumb hovered over the send button. Instead, I pocketed my phone. I wondered how he was faring alone, no one but the walls to absorb his moods.

Halfway through the summer, we hosted “Sunday Funday,” an afternoon of volleyball and corn hole by the water. The head staff excused me from participating, but I wasn’t about to give Tori any more ammo, so I supervised from afar. Kids stomped over sand castles and chased each other with plastic shovels. Thorns of laughter interspersed with forearm thwacks, sanitized pop blasting from a glitchy speaker.

At the water’s edge, Tori lounged in a foldout chair. One of her camp friends sat beside her, the girl with red-streaked hair, Erin or Karen or Sharon or something. She never spoke to me directly, only through Tori, so on principle I never bothered to learn her name.

Tori’s eyes flickered in my direction. I almost looked away, but she waved me over. When I hesitated, she waved with even more fervor.

“Aren’t you lonely over there?” Tori asked as I approached. “We could come join you.”

I didn’t know why she was being nice to me all of a sudden. It made me nervous. “It’s okay. I wouldn’t want to make you move from your spot.”

Tori turned to Erin/Karen/Sharon. “Irene never wants to hang out with us anymore.”

“Too good for us or something?” said Erin/Karen/Sharon. She was smiling, despite her deadpan tone.

“She’s always typing away on her phone. So strange. So secretive.” Tori frowned. “What are you even doing on there? Are you texting someone?”

Erin/Karen/Sharon gasped. “Maybe she has a lover.”

Tori’s eyes ballooned. She sprung forward and grabbed my phone. “Can we see?!”

I yanked it back, but she wouldn’t let go, her fingerprints smudging the screen. The last thing open on my phone was the note where I dissected every negative aspect of her personality. “Stop it. I have a passcode.”

“Oh please, it’s your birthday, I’ve seen you type it in a hundred times.” She tugged forward. “Why are you being so weird?”

“Weird?! It’s my phone!”

I wrestled the phone out of her grasp—and out of my own. It spun in the air and clattered to the ground. A wave rolled through, lapped it up, and deposited it back on the sand.

“I’ll get it.” Tori leapt to her feet. Before handing it over, she swaddled it in a towel like a newborn. It looked fine on the outside, but its components were soaked, already drowning in saltwater.

Over the next week, my phone suffered a crackly, pathetic death. The phone wouldn’t charge no matter which way I finagled the cord. In its final days, the colors inverted, the saturated pixels slowly corroding. A splatter of black opened into an abyss and swallowed the screen whole.

None of my data had been backed up. I mourned the photos in my camera roll, the thoughts jotted down in my notes app. I had no outlet for my complaints about Tori. Cut off from the staff group chat, I also relied on her more than ever.

The more I needed her, the more she asked of me. Requests turned into demands. I have a headache, I’m going to lie down. You take the campers for the evening. When the cafeteria broke out in mayhem, she batted her lashes. I’ll take them back to their rooms. You can deal with the mess.

To make matters worse, as the weeks dwindled, so did the antihistamines. I thought I’d brought enough to last me the summer, but some days I’d needed extra doses. Other days I’d dropped some, pills vanishing into piles of sweaty socks and shorts. These I went looking for, tearing through towels, rummaging through laundry, all to no avail. I rationed out the remaining doses for whenever I would need them most.

Few counselors had brought cars aside from Tori. With two weeks left in the session, I worked up the nerve to face her on the way to breakfast, campers trailing behind us, and asked if she could drive me to the nearest pharmacy. To my surprise, she agreed.

But the opportunity evaded us; the pharmacy closed at seven, well before our daily programming ended. I pleaded with her to find coverage, someone to sub in for our classes or supervise the girls. Of course, tomorrow, tomorrow, she’d say, then tomorrow would roll around and she’d slap her forehead, feigning remorse for her faulty memory.

Eventually I confronted her in our room, right before she slipped out for the night. “I know things are busy. I can ask someone else.”

“No, I can do it! Tomorrow, I promise. The kids will be packing, we can go then. Meet you in the art room at six?”

I nodded, though I no longer had much confidence in her promises. It boiled beneath my skin, this growing desire to lash out. To vent my frustrations with no regard for her feelings, for what little remained of our friendship. But I managed, for one more day, to resist the pull of destruction. Unfortunately, I knew exactly what kind of damage I was capable of causing.

The night my father found the medical bill and drove off, a palpable tension swelled in the kitchen. My mother made no sound as she lifted chipped plates from the sink and scrubbed in elliptical motions. I waved my hands around, but she fixed her gaze on the dishes.

“Well? Aren’t you going to do something?”

“What is there to do? You know your father. You know how he is.”

I shoved my hands in my pockets to keep from punching the wall. “So what, he just gets to treat us however he wants? That’s bullshit.”

“Language.” She shut off the tap and shook her hands dry. “I’m disappointed in you, Irene. I didn’t raise you to be this way.”

“What are you trying to raise me to be? A doormat? He doesn’t give a shit about us, or my allergy.”

“Of course he does. He worries about you constantly.”

“He should do a better fucking job of it, then.”

“Irene.”

“And you should do a better job keeping him in check.” My fingers shook, the words surging forward without forethought. “You could’ve left him ages ago, if you’d been brave enough. We could’ve had a decent life without him. But no. You’re too much of a coward.”

I felt electric. Every syllable landed with such satisfying force. The second I realized what I’d said, the rush turned sour. But God, for that split-second when the words left my mouth, it felt euphorically, deliriously good.

My mother said nothing. She held herself delicately, like if she relaxed she might unravel.

Sometimes, when I startle awake at night, that memory etches into the fuzzy darkness. Her caved-in cheeks, the tremble of her lips—I might as well have slapped her. I retreated to my room, hid beneath the covers, as though I could sleep off what I had said.

The next morning, I found only my father at the table. He stared, silent and still, at a scrap of paper. Without his rage, he looked softer, younger, like a fully-bearded man after he shaves. His eyes were vacant and devoid of light.

“She’s gone,” he said. In the note my mother explained that she had taken my advice, packed up in the middle of the night and left our family for good. Irene, you’re an adult now, she wrote in her immaculate penmanship, so neat it felt premeditated. You don’t need me anymore. You’ll be fine.

My mother refused to tell us where she went. She didn’t want us coming after her, not that we didn’t try. It didn’t take us long to figure it out—she could only be in North Carolina with her sister, who, unlike her, had chosen a harmless mop-handle of a man, had done things the right way, had married at a respectable age, then had children. Still, I couldn’t imagine their lives were easy, both underpaid schoolteachers with three ravenous boys cramped in a two-bedroom ranch house. I couldn’t imagine they had room for one more.

Maybe it was for the best, now that my mom didn’t have to deal with my father. But it left me unbuffered from his rage. As I geared up to leave for college—the two of us trapped in that shitty saltbox, launching verbal assaults that prompted wellness checks from the neighbors—I knew I couldn't come back.

When I glance in the mirror, sometimes I flinch at the resemblance. Those same severe eyes, that asymmetrical jab of a mouth. I try to soften my gaze, to slope my lips into a smile. I try to erase all evidence that I could be like him.

After my final class of the summer, I tidied art supplies while rain drummed against the roof. The empty pill bottle mocked me from my backpack, nothing but my umbrella to protect me now. Above the door ticked the Platonic ideal of a wall clock: 6:01 p.m. Tori had agreed to meet me in the art room at six and drive me to the pharmacy, but without a working phone, all I could do was hope for the best and stare at the children’s scribbles.

A crayoned cow leapfrogging a Swiss-cheese moon. A princess with butterfly wings and a crooked tiara. The minute hand inched forward.

6:05. 6:10. 6:15.

An older camper’s charcoal drawing of her charm bracelet. A half-decent watercolor of a beach ball.

6:20. 6:25. 6:30.

Thirty minutes until the pharmacy closed. If only I could call her. If only I could call anyone at all.

6:35. 6:40.

I fished my stupid, useless phone from my backpack and hurled it at the door. The screen spiderwebbed into stupid, useless pieces. If Tori wouldn’t show up, I would go find her.

Outside it was shockingly sunny, the stormclouds outlined in yellow light. I speared open my umbrella, oriented toward the dorms, and ran as fast as I could without getting wet. An eerie mood had descended on campus, the fields and pathways completely deserted.

Back in the dorms, the hallways buzzed with silence. No sign of Tori. No campers in their faux-cabins. No staff members I could ask about her whereabouts. I ventured into our room, but she wasn’t there either. Had I forgotten some crucial detail? Some last-minute group activity? Where was everyone?

Faint laughter trickled outside the window. I pressed my face to the glass and peered around the corner. Behind the building, a group had gathered in a pinwheel of raincoats, dancing and twirling in the sunshower.

I clutched my umbrella and thrust myself back outside. My sneakers squelched through mud as I marched toward the group, and then I saw her: Tori, laughing, her ponytail stringy with rain. Even with her hair flattened against her skull, she still gleamed with an untouchable glow.

Tori glanced in my direction. Her face fell. “Irene. I’m so sorry. I was just coming to get you.”

“Really? Is that so? It’s a little late for that now.”

“It’s just, the girls said they saw a rainbow, and they wanted to play in the rain, and then everyone did, and I didn’t think we’d be out here so long, and—”

“And you could have, I don’t know, come by and told me?”

Tori chewed her bottom lip. “Well, I figured—I didn’t want you to feel left out.”

“Oh my God, how sensitive do you think I am? You think I’m not used to this? I don’t need you to protect my feelings. I need you to help me get my fucking meds.”

My voice slashed through rain and laughter. Campers paused, angling toward us.

“I’ll take you tomorrow, I promise. I just wanted to enjoy one last moment with the girls.”

I bit my tongue hard enough to puncture. My mouth bloomed with a metallic tang. “Of course you did. You don’t give a shit about anything other than getting high and doing whatever you want.”

“I’m sorry, okay? I told you I’m sorry. Calm down, you’re being kind of a bitch.”

“You don’t get to say that to me!” My vocal chords fractured. The umbrella quivered in my grip. “You make me do everything and I just shut up and let you. This whole time I’ve tried to be nice—”

“Well you could’ve tried harder! You really thought I couldn’t tell? Please, you’ve been acting passive-aggressive all summer. I was trying to be nice to you.”

“Well you could have actually done something for me for once. But no, you’re too much of a stupid, selfish bitch.”

Tori drove her words in like a dagger. “You wouldn’t even be here if it weren’t for me.”

I wanted to hurt her. I wanted to hurt her because she was right. Faces crowded around us, faces of kids who returned here every summer, who frolicked in the rain and didn’t dread coming home. Among all those onlookers, my worst fear came true: the back of my throat blistered with tears.

In one impulsive pinch, I drew the umbrella’s ribs into its spine. It collapsed and fell to the ground. Rainwater flushed over me as I stood there, exposed.

Silence, save for the steady patter of rain, the almost-audible collective shock. In front of all those wide-eyed expressions, I managed, briefly, to maintain my composure. Somehow, in those seconds before onset, I tricked myself into thinking this time would be different. This time, I thought, I’d feel nothing, I’d be cured, I’d be a different person—only to be greeted by that familiar, needling pain.

Hives stubbled my collarbones, my arms, my shins. The rash blazed down my body, coaxing me to scratch, but I succeeded, for a second, in controlling myself. I clenched my fists, chewed the inside of my cheek. I breathed through the pain. The effort, at least, distracted me from crying.

And then the urge turned overwhelming, and I tore myself apart.

I scratched recklessly, violently, raked red lines across my forearms and thighs. I dug in with my nails, destroyed any hope of leaving the skin undamaged. I knew the internal bleeding would take days to fade. I knew I was making a spectacle of myself. I knew the self-loathing would shroud me as soon as I stopped scratching.

But God, in that moment, it felt euphorically, deliriously good.

Genre:

Fiction

Author Bio:

Neema Samawi is a Syrian-American artist and fiction writer. She grew up in the suburbs of Chicago and completed her Bachelor’s at Washington University in St. Louis. She currently lives in Washington, DC with her partner and an abundance of plants.

Issue:

Chirahora

mjordan — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Kelly Murashige

Chirahora (ちらほら): here and there; now and then; from time to time; occasionally

Everything one can ever feel about a person, she has felt about him.

She is in the first grade, seated on the blue plush rug, her short, stubby legs folded in crisscross applesauce. In the corner is a stain from the time someone threw up, on account of the most recent outbreak of the stomach flu. She sits in the opposite corner, her back perfectly straight, as she awaits her final fate.

The teacher is a sweet-faced woman with hair that flips above her shoulders like mirrored ski slopes. Craft tongue depressors rattle around as she shakes the repurposed can of instant coffee. Squinting, she extracts one stick and reads off the name scrawled out in black marker.

“Nathan.”

A boy’s head pops up, his hair poking up at all angles, as if he has just been electrocuted.

“Today, you will be pairing up with”—she shakes the coffee can; shack-a-shack-a-shack—“Ayumi.”

Ayumi’s eyes jump to Nathan. When her gaze meets his, he swings his arm around in a comically exaggerated wave. It is a miracle, she thinks, that he did not dislocate his shoulder.

She knows Nathan. Knows he is the cheeriest boy she has ever met. He laughs at the smallest, most ridiculous things, even the jokes printed in black sans-serif font on plastic taffy wrappers. He quirks his head to one side when he grins, as if he cannot possibly hold the weight of his own happiness.

This is what she thinks in the moment.

Later, she will realize she no longer remembers what he looks like when he smiles.

Once everyone has been paired up, the teacher herds the class outside, to the black-topped lab tables. It is science-experiment day, and, as she tells her students, “things are about to get messy.”

Ayumi clips her worksheet to her rusting clipboard. While she takes care of the administrative work, writing her name and Nathan’s at the top of the page, Nathan fiddles with the top of the roll of Mentos.

“This is so cool,” he says, picking at the foil. “I always wanted to make things explode.”

Ayumi’s head snaps up, her eyes wide. She casts a glance at the teacher, as if to scream, HELP! You’ve paired me with a maniac, but the teacher occupied with other matters, hoping to keep the students from sticking Mentos in their mouths and taking small sips of soda before she can even explain what these items are for.

Nathan cranes his neck until she has no choice but to look at him.

“Hi,” he says.

Ayumi frowns. “Hi.”

He tips his head to the left; she is reminded of her favorite video game, in which she plays with a virtual dog who barks at the sound of its name and, when confused, tilts its little pixelated head to the side.

“I don’t think we’ve ever been partnered up before,” he says. “We’ve talked and stuff, but not a lot. You don’t say much.”

Her cheeks grow warm. “I’m not really good at talking to people.”

She isn’t even good at talking to her virtual dog. It embarrasses her, having to speak into the little microphone. She drives her parents mad, repeating her dog’s name until it turns around.

“What do you mean?” Nathan asks, still working on the foil on the Mentos, a determined look on his face. “You’re talking to me right now, and you’re doing super good.”

Well, she thinks.

She reaches for the roll, eager to help. In her haste, her fingers brush his knuckles.

“Whoa,” he says, releasing his grip on the Mentos. The tube hits the table with a clank. “Your hand is super warm.”

He curls all his fingers around hers.

Later, when they are older, she will think of how easy it would have been to cling to his hand then. To beg him to stay. She would have been there for him, no matter what, and would have said so, had she known.

“Do you have a fever or something?” Nathan asks. “‘Cause if you are, if you’re sick, you should go home. Or else you’ll get me sick, and I’ll get other people sick, and at the same time, you’ll also be getting other people sick, and we’ll both be getting people sick, and then the whole world would be sick, even the doctors, and then what?”

He looks over at her, as if he’s expecting a response.

“I don’t know,” she says.

“Then the zombies would come,” he says, nodding solemnly, “and we would all be zombified.”

She picks up the roll of Mentos and peels it open, foil spiraling out and hanging off the tube like smoke from a cigarette. “I don’t think I’m sick.”

He unscrews the soda’s cap. “Maybe I healed you.”

She lifts her head, her brow furrowed.

Then, smiling, she says, “Maybe.”

He initiates a game of jan ken po to see which of them will get to drop the Mento into the soda. She does not remember saying she has any interest in being the one to carry out the experiment. In fact, she would rather be the one to take the notes.

He wins anyhow.

She has just begun to wonder why she has, just now, begun to feel the slightest bit feverish—perhaps she is sick after all?—when he grabs the bottle of soda and says, “I’m gonna put in a whole bunch.”

Her eyes widen. “Nathan, wait.”

Too late. The bottle explodes in a fountain of amber froth.

Ayumi shrieks, struggling to shield both her head and their worksheet. With the hand not yet covered in soda foam, Nathan grabs her arm and pulls her under the table.

“Take cover,” he yells, presumably to the others. “TAKE COVER!”

He and Ayumi huddle under the table as the teacher sighs and heads for the sink.

“We’re in trouble,” Ayumi whispers.

“Why?” he asks. “We did the right thing.”

They watch, still hunched under the table, as soda drips off the edge and onto the floor in a marvelous display of caramel rain.

“Just,” he finishes, “a little too much of the right thing.”

When she laughs, he looks over at her. “Hey. I’ve never heard you laugh before.”

Color rises to her face.

The teacher stops before them, one foot tapping out a fast, impatient rhythm. “Are you going to help me clean up this mess, or are you just going to crouch under there and make me clean it for you?”

Nathan opens his mouth, but Ayumi shakes her head.

Rhetorical question, she tries to tell him with her eyes.

He clamps his jaw shut.

They pull themselves out from under the table and begin to clean. Soda laps at her palm as she soaks up the soda with a paper towel. She has just turned to grab another when there’s a blur of motion to her left.

“Nice going, Nathan,” one of their classmates jeers. “Now the teacher’s gonna in a bad mood all day.”

“Why can’t you just follow directions?” a girl standing at one of the other tables asks.

Nathan drags his paper towel along the soda stains. Everything is sticky.

Ducking her head, Ayumi makes her way to the sink and wets a paper towel. When she returns, he looks up, as if he expected her to leave him all alone.

“I didn’t mean to make her mad,” he tells her.

“I know,” she says. “I believe you.”

He frowns at her for a moment. Then, as they resume mopping up the mess pooling around them, he smiles.

It is the most beautiful thing she has ever seen.

Nathan seems to reach all the exciting milestones first. She supposes this is only natural, as he is five months her senior, but it still feels unfair. The only thing she has accomplished before him is completing her reading log. She was the first in the entire class to fill her grid with foil stars, her paper gleaming like the chest of a decorated veteran.

The most recent milestone Nathan has reached first is discovering a loose tooth. Ayumi, whose teeth are all still firmly in place, is both fascinated and disgusted by his uncanny ability to push his tooth forward with his tongue. She is reminded of knockdown dolls at the state fair, bowled over by a well-aimed toss of a softball.

One day, Nathan enlists her help with a super-secret project. It isn’t until Quiet Homework Time that he explains his plan to her. Even once he has gone through it, she’s not sure she understands.

Sliding past her, Nathan ties one end of a comically long piece of floss around the doorknob. The other end has been fastened around his tooth.

“Now,” he says, pushing the door open until it just barely brushes her arm, “you just have to slam the door real hard.”

She shakes her head. “I can’t do that. What if I hurt you?”

He waves off her concern. “You won’t. My cousin did it before. He got blood all over the floor, but he was fine.”

“He got BLOOD—”

“Not that much. Just a little.”

She crosses her arms. “You said it got all over.”

“He was probably overexaggerating.”

She frowns. She isn’t sure how one can overexaggerate. Isn’t exaggerating overstating something already?

“If I bleed,” he says, “we can clean it up later. Come on. Help me. Please?”

She glances over her shoulder. The teacher is in the middle of assisting one of their classmates with a problem he doesn’t understand.

When she turns back around, she is faced with a problem she doesn’t understand. Why Nathan would ever want to yank his tooth out of his head, she has no clue.

“Come on,” he says again. “Please? You’re the only one I trust.”

She blinks. “Really?”

He smiles. The floss is still tied around his tooth, as if to keep him from floating away. “Yeah. Of course.”

She holds his gaze for a moment, then nods. “Okay.”

His grin widens. “You’re the best.”

She watches, her arms crossed behind her, as he braces himself against the cubbies. Once he has curled his hands around the sides, to ensure he won’t shoot forward from the momentum of the slam of the door, he says, “Ready when you are.”

She takes a breath, then slams the door shut.

His scream is so impressively shrill, the teachers in the surrounding classrooms mistake it for the wail of a siren.

It isn’t the Great Pyramid, and isn’t a great pyramid either, but she takes pride in it, her small bright-blue creation.

She is in the second grade, stacking sturdy plastic cups on the floor of the pavilion. She and the others should be playing flag football, but it has been pouring rain for the past week, and the field is so muddy, several students’ shoes have been lost to the muck. After running a few laps around the pavilion, she was presented with the choice to play four square or stack cups. She would have preferred to do neither but has opted for the cups.

She lifts her head now, searching the pavilion. In the distance, Nathan plays a game of four square, laughing as he dives for the ball and whacks it with the heel of his hand.

She is just about to place the last cup on her pyramid when someone shouts. She turns, then shields her face as a red rubber ball crashes into the pyramid, knocking cups everywhere. Her arms drop to her sides as the plastic lips tick, tick, tick-tick-tick-tick-tick along the floor.

“Ayumi!”

Nathan’s by her side in an instant, abandoning his own game of four square to grab her spilled cups. He tries to place them where they were but ends up knocking most of them over again in his haste to catch more.

“Are you okay?” he asks, still reaching for the cups.

She nods, her eyes glassy.

He looks around, his brow furrowed. “Who did that? Say sorry to Ayumi for knocking over her cups.”

She ducks her head. “It’s okay.”

“Nuh-uh. That was a super-cool pyramid. I saw it.” He collects the last cup, slides it over to her, and rockets to his feet. “Who did that?”

She swallows. Everyone is staring. She wishes she could disappear.

Nathan pauses for a moment, his hands on his hips. He can do this, as they are still young, but in the years to come, standing in such a way will be deemed girly. Every boy who ever stands in such a way will immediately be called a slur.

“Do you wanna play four square with us, then?” he asks.

She shakes her head, her face burning. “I don’t know how.”

He holds out a hand. “I’ll teach you.”

She stares at his outstretched palm. Then, turning back to the cups, she gathers them up, places them back in their cloth bag, and sets the bag back on the folding table. After a pause, she takes his hand. It’s warm and raw from knocking the ball back and forth for so long.

She holds on as tightly as she can.

Every time she climbs the library stairs, she feels like a beautiful, graceful princess mounting the steps to her throne.

She is not a princess. Nor is she beautiful or graceful. She is twelve, with a blotchy bruise on her knee from taking a spill in the middle of PE. To her left is a corkboard, a flyer for the middle school’s book club pinned at the bottom-right corner. She glances at it, then turns away. The only book club of which she has ever been a part is the unofficial one she holds with her best friend, Nicole, and they don’t discuss the books as much as they gush over them, talking about all their favorite parts and, frankly, all their favorite love interests, from mysterious bad boys with hearts of gold to happy-go-lucky rays of sunshine.

Tightening her grip on her bag, she ascends. The chilled air and clean, bookish scent of the library bring a smile to her face. She often arrives early at school, holing up in the library and leaving at the very last minute. She knows the librarian’s name, as well as her favorite books, some of which Ayumi has read, with mixed results. Though she appreciates the classics, she can’t help but find the books she and Nicole squeal over far more enjoyable.

She checks books out every day, about almost everything. Though novels are her favorite, she also borrows the occasional nonfiction book on writing, art, or music. There are some books she has checked out so frequently, all the stamps on the right side of the due-date slip are hers.

She grounds a foot on the first step to the next floor, her grip on the railing tight. Her fingers clench, then unclench as she makes her way up the stairs. After all these years of friendship, she has never gotten over that fuzzy, fizzy feeling, as if someone has set off soda fountains in her chest.

The study section on the upper level of the library is small, about the size of a living room. The study desks are partitioned by long wooden barriers; the room resembles the maze of a caged white lab rat.

Nathan sits on the edge of a desk, his legs miles long and hidden under dark-wash jeans. He is careful not to place his shoes on the seat. She wonders, for a moment, if anyone else has ever noticed this before, this small display of consideration. She doesn’t think so. Most days, it seems as though she is the only one who sees every part of him.

He has changed over the years. Though his eyes have remained that sweet, hazelnut brown, his jaw has sharpened. His limbs have stretched. His brow is heavy, leaving him with a permanently skeptical, irritated expression. She supposes he perhaps is skeptical and irritated, being twelve years old, but sometimes, when he looks at her, she feels as though he is glaring at her. As if he is blaming her for sins she has not yet committed.

Today, however, he brightens at the sight of her. All these years later, and his smile is the same.

“Hey,” he says.

“Hi,” she says. They are the only two people in the study section, but they keep their voices low.

He scoots to the side, one knobby elbow knocking against the partition. She takes the chair, the one on which he made sure not to place his feet, and smiles up at him.

Then she stops. She will not have braces for another year or two and is convinced her teeth are crooked and ugly, two pairs of yellowing picket fences handcrafted by a tipsy carpenter.

She covers her mouth with one hand. “Thanks for meeting me here.”

“Yeah, of course.” He tilts his head. “What have you been up to?”

“The usual. Homework. It’s whatever,” she says, trying very hard to sound blasé.

“Cool.” Nathan places a hand on his black heavy-duty camera bag. “I brought my camera today. Photography class after lunch.”

He too is attempting to sound blasé.

“Am I allowed to see?” she asks.

He raises a brow. “You think I’m gonna ramble on and on about aperture and shutter speed and not let you see?”

She grins as he starts to unzip the bag, pausing every so often, purely for dramatic effect. He’s fun, she keeps thinking. Or he can be, anyway.

“Voilà.” He takes out his camera. “Ayumi, meet camera. Camera, Ayumi.”

“A pleasure,” she says, extending a hand to the camera.

“This one is really good.” He is petting the camera now, as if it is his sleek, hairless cat. “It has these really cool settings. Most cameras can’t do this, but if you look here…”

She watches him, her eyes running along his face. It doesn’t seem to occur to her that he could, at any moment, raise his head and catch her staring.

She loves looking at him. The way his black hair sticks up at the ends. His face is angular, drawn by an unforgiving hand. His deep-brown eyes sparkle with excitement as he tosses at least half a dozen terms unfamiliar to her.

Setting an elbow on the desk, she rests her head on her hand. “If you could take a picture of anything in the world, what would you choose?”

Leaning back, he rests his head on the partition. The excitement in his eyes has dissolved, making way for contemplation. “Anything?”

She bites her lip. “Anything.”

Say me, Nathan. Please, please say me.

He won’t. He can’t. He’s not the love interest in the books she reads with Nicole. He’s just a boy, still young. He loves cameras, talking shop, not awkward twelve-year-olds.

“Well, well, well. What do we have here?”

She and Nathan freeze, their blood running cold. She sinks into her seat, her side pressing into the desk, her eyes gluing themselves to the soft library carpet.

Nathan straightens up, the slides off the desk, his leg bumping her arm. He does not apologize. He does not even notice. His hand hits the wooden barrier, then the desk, then his thigh in a prolonged three-part collapse.

“Are we crashing your study date, Natey-boy?” one of the newcomers asks.

She winces.

“It’s not a date,” Nathan says.

“A nerd having a date in a nerd place,” one of the other guys asks. Then, to ensure his point has properly come across, he adds, “The nerd library.”

“I’m surprised you even know what a library is,” Nathan mutters.

The guy narrows his eyes. “What did you just say, nerd?”

Nathan turns his head.

One of the newcomers glances over at Ayumi. Nodding to her with his chin, he says, “Hey, Ayumi.”

She clamps one hand over her knee. “Hey.”

She and this boy share a home economics class. All she can remember about him, aside from the fact that he obviously hates Nathan, is that when they were supposed to make orange-dream smoothies, he neglected to put the top on the blender and sprayed the kitchenette with orange foam.

Funny. Nathan did something similar years before. She has always had this hypothesis that people hate those who are eerily like themselves. It’s like the uncanny valley, in a way, or a mirror shattered into so many pieces, it almost looks whole.

In any case, this is not the first time Disaster-Smoothie Boy has specifically called out to Ayumi. He thinks it’s fun to tease the shy girl. Fun to bully the happy boy.

So very fun.

Years later, she will think about it. The things she did not witness. She and Nathan were never in the same class after that first year. They were only in the pavilion at the same time in the second grade because their classes had been paired together for PE.

Afterward, they had to seek each other out, and though she always did her best to look out for him, there were countless hours she must have missed. So many times he must have been picked on. So many things he must have hidden from her.

Had he really hidden them, though? Or had she chosen not to see?

Once the other boys have left, she looks back over at Nathan. Every time she tries to speak, he shakes his head and turns away.

He never does tell her what it was that he would take a picture of. Yet she knows it would not have been her.

Because in the end, he leaves. The way he always, always does.

Hello?

Hi. This is Ayumi.

Yeah. I know. Caller ID.

Right. Yeah. I just…wanted to…I don’t know. Call, I guess. Because you weren’t here today. I was worried.

Oh.

Do you…have a fever? Are you sick?

No. I just…didn’t go to school today.

Oh. (The faint sound of a phone cord being wound around a finger. It’s an old phone, one her mother doesn’t have the heart to get rid of, though by this point, cordless phones are all the rage. Soon, no one will even have a landline.) Is everything okay?

Not really.

Oh. I’m sorry. is there anything I can do?

Not really.

Oh. Okay.

(A pause. For a moment, she thinks he has hung up. This is the first time they have spoken on the phone. He gave her his number before, but she didn’t know what to do with it. She isn’t allowed to text. She wouldn’t want to anyhow. She is a bit of a snob, convinced that texting, especially with abbreviations such as lol and omg, is an insult to the English language.)

(Had she been allowed to text, however, she might have texted him. Just with ha, ha instead of lol and oh my goodness instead of omg. These would have taken forever to type using T9, but she would have done it, if she knew he would answer.)

(As it is, she rarely uses her cell phone, except to call her parents. She is not even using it now, having chosen to call him from the landline, for reasons she will never be able to parse. Maybe she thought she would reach him better that way. Landline sounds a lot like lifeline.)

You don’t have to stay home just to avoid them, Nathan. You could tell a teacher.

They wouldn’t do anything. (A swallow so loud, she feels it in her own throat.) They never do.

What if I went with you? They can’t just ignore both of us.

Yes, they can. They do. And I don’t need you to fight my battles for me.

But…

(She is wrapping the phone cord tighter and tighter around her finger. The tip has blanched, in the throes of suffocation.)

Will you be back tomorrow?

Maybe. I don’t know. (An exhalation, as if he is upset with her.) I have to go.

Oh. Okay. But…Okay.

The grounds of the state fair are covered in red dirt, making it seem as though she, eighth grader Ayumi Chiraku, has stepped foot on the faraway planet of Mars.

It’s not a date, she tells herself, kicking up a cloud of crimson dust.

“It’s a date,” Nicole says, trying and failing to bite into her caramel apple without ruining her slick of pink lip gloss.

“It’s not a date,” Ayumi says, smoothing a hand along her knees. She has dressed in her best outfit, a floral skirt and a pink camisole, with a half-sleeved white sweater to finish off the librarian-chic look.

It is not a very location-appropriate ensemble. It’s a hot day, as it always is in spring, as if the weather must somehow make up for bitter winter, and a white sweater and red dirt is a disaster waiting to happen.

“It’s a date,” Nicole says again, one hand rising to her ear as she absentmindedly fiddles with her earrings. The plastic strawberries jingle on their silver hooks. “What will you do if he tries to hold your hand?”

“He’s not going to try to hold my hand. And for the last time, it’s not a date.”

Her phone buzzes. She glances down.

Nicole, now attempting to extract the caramel from her teeth with one perfectly painted nail, cranes her neck. “Is that him?”

“He’s here,” she says, her words tumbling over Nicole’s.

“Got it. I’ll leave you two lovebirds alone.” Switching her caramel apple to her other side, Nicole reaches for Ayumi’s hand, squeezes once, then lets go. “Have fun. It’s a date.”

“It’s not,” Ayumi calls out.

Nicole sticks out her tongue, takes a bite of her caramel apple, and turns back around, strolling away like the impossibly cool girl she is.

A moment later, Nathan appears, lifting a hand and waving it in a circle, just as he did when they were all of seven years old.

She laughs. He laughs too. She falls silent just to hear him.

“Hey,” he says as he reaches her side.

“Hey,” she says back. “Thanks for meeting me.”

“Of course. This is gonna be fun. I haven’t been to the state fair in years. I don’t remember it being this huge.” He peers down at his shoes. “I remember all this dirt, though.”

She makes a face. “I didn’t. If I had, I wouldn’t have worn this sweater.”

He glances up at her, scanning her outfit. She fights the urge to cross her arms.

Of course, there’s nothing to hide. She has no real curves. She never really will. Her body speaks of her misguided determination to forever stay on the straight and narrow.

“We’ll try to keep it clean,” he tells her with a small, silly salute. “Soldier’s promise.”

“Oh, so you’re a soldier now?”

He shakes a head as they start walking. Neither knows where they are going. “Nah. I’m not cut out for JROTC. Photography’s more my speed.”

“And aperture,” she jokes.

He laughs. “And aperture.”

His attention is everywhere. She does her best to follow his gaze, trying to see it all through his eyes. The swinging boat. The spinning ride. The Ferris wheel. The bumper cars.

“There’s so much to do,” he says. “We could stay here forever and never run out of stuff.”

She nods, her mind hooking on his words: We could stay here forever.

As a teenager, she will ruminate on the concept of forever.

As an adult, she will instead focus on stay.

“Oh, man,” he says, his eyes lingering on two people hanging upside-down in a roller coaster car. “That looks terrifying.”

She winces. “Please don’t make me do that.”

A shadow passes across his face. Her stomach drops, as if she has swapped places with the woman whose sunglasses have tumbled off and clattered onto the roller coaster’s floor.

“I would never make you do anything,” he says.

Ayumi’s face falls. Her lips part, then purse, then part again.

He does this sometimes. This immediate shutdown. She never knows why it happens or how to bring him back.

When they were little, he told her everything. About the silly things, like his favorite joke—I was reading a book on helium; I just couldn’t put it down—but also about the more serious things. He’s hapa, the son of a mild-mannered white man and an affectionate Japanese woman. When his parents had married, his father took his mother’s surname, Horamoto, which they then passed down to him.

It felt so empowering to her, this departure from tradition. She didn’t have a story like that. Both she and her mother have her father’s last name. Even if they didn’t, she would always have a Japanese surname. Had her father taken her mother’s name, it wouldn’t have been nearly as groundbreaking. It would have felt, in a way, like he had simply walked into the wrong house on the very same street.

That being said, she often dreamed of it. Of having a new last name. Not her mother’s, or her father’s, but his. Horamoto.

Yet as much as she cared for him, she sometimes could not understand him. As they waded through the swampiness of their middle-school years, through the cruelty and the awkwardness and the fear, he began to pull away, one day at a time. He stopped spending so much time with her, stopped telling her his best bad jokes. He wouldn’t smile at the sight of her unless he was sure they were alone, and even then, it was rare, like a treasure. Like a treat. He missed school, days at a time, and wouldn’t ever tell her why.

They step into the line for the Ferris wheel. A woman bites into a salted soft pretzel, the child in her arms babbling angrily as he reaches for everything he can’t have.

“So,” Ayumi says, running a hand along her brow. “How have you been?”

“Fine,” Nathan says. “It’s pretty busy here.”

“Right? I didn’t think it would be so busy.” She shifts her weight from foot to foot. “I guess that’s just how it is at the state fair.”

He tilts his head. Then, raising an invisible microphone, he asks, “And what do you think of the state of the fair? How would you judge the fairness of the state?”

She blinks up at him, momentarily confused as he holds his fist out to her. After a moment, and a wiggle of his brows, she breaks into laughter. “You’re ridiculous.”

“You’re ridiculous.” He grins. “It’s not fair how ridiculous you are.”

She giggles, the sound frothy. “You’ve got me in a state.”

He hesitates, then leans a little closer. While most of the boys in their year have fallen victim to the allures of ridiculously strong body spray, he just smells like soap. Soap and sunscreen and just the slight hint of sweat.

“A state of what?” he asks.

Of falling for you.

“Hey, Nate!”

She flinches, first at the sound, then at herself. For the rest of her life, she will never forget that single thought of hers. That single, stupid thought.

She turns, her face flushed, and catches sight of a group of guys.

“This your girlfriend?” one asks.

Nathan’s jaw clenches so tightly, it’s a miracle his teeth don’t shatter. “No.”

She drops her head, her eyes on her red-dirt-stained shoes. They were white once, she thinks, but will never be clean again.

She keeps her head bowed, her heart pounding, as the guys elbow Nathan.

Stop, she tries to say. Don’t.

She bites her tongue until she tastes the tang of blood.

They leave, laughing like crows. Nathan won’t look her in the eye.

Two silent minutes later, they step onto the Ferris wheel. Their gondola sways. It takes everything in her not to reach for him.

“Nathan,” she says as they rise on the wheel. “Whatever those guys said, don’t let—”

“Don’t let.” His leg bounces. The bottoms and sides of his shoes bleed a harsh dark red. “Don’t let. As if this is all a choice.”

She closes her mouth, then peers out, her hands twisted in her lap. Down below, people are ants, small and inconsequential.

Stupid. So stupid. There has never once been a stupider girl.

In the days leading up to this, their great, momentous non-date, she let her anticipation build, little hopes gathering in her chest like cotton candy sugar crystals. She imagined him purchasing a cone of it to share, the two of them picking pieces off the paper base and tossing blue fluff into the other’s mouth. She imagined him leading her over to the face-painting tables, slowly inching his hand closer and closer as a stranger turned her into a butterfly. She imagined them at the carousel, the two of them choosing horses so close that, no matter where they were going, no matter what was happening in the real world, he would be right beside her as they spun around and around.

You know what the best thing about the Ferris wheel is? she wants to ask him. Even if you faint on it, you’ll still come back around.

It’s true. He always does. Just not then. Not that day. Because once the ride is over, before she can tell him how sorry she is for having stood there and done nothing, he says he’s going to go. Then he leaves her there, alone.

That evening, once she is home, having never told her mother she spent the last two hours by herself, she strips off her clothes, tosses them into her hamper, and cries into her pillow.

At the very least, she tells herself, Nathan kept his promise. Her white sweater remained absolutely spotless.

They stop speaking after that. Stop waving. Stop smiling. She keeps her eyes on the ground, her arms crossed tightly over her chest, as if to protect what has already been broken.

Nicole is furious on her behalf. Ayumi, doing her best to sound mature, informs her that there’s no point in trying to hold on to someone who keeps letting her go.

“You got that from a book, didn’t you?” Nicole says.

Ayumi bursts into tears.

The school year ends. She and Nicole begin high school. Early into the year, Nicole starts dating a boy in her history class who turns out to be one Mr. Nathan Horamoto’s new best friend.

“I’ll break up with him,” Nicole says the moment she finds out.

“Don’t,” Ayumi says, though she is secretly pleased with Nicole’s immense display of loyalty. It feels like something two book characters would do for each other, sacrificing their happiness to save the other.

“I can,” Nicole says. “Really. I don’t mind.”

Ayumi sighs. “You can’t do that, Nicole. What if this guy is the love of your life?”

“What if Nathan was supposed to be yours?” Nicole shoots back. “And what if he’s just too dumb to realize it?”

“He’s not dumb.”

“He is,” she insists. “Anyone who would ditch you like that is stupid.”

Ayumi shakes her head. She’s imagining it now, her heart pounding as she positions herself under the blade of the guillotine.

For you, Nicole, she thinks.

The rope burns her hands as she swiftly lets it go.

Yet in the end, her great sacrifice turns out to be relatively painless. Though her breath leaves her in a puff as soon as she sees him again, it takes only a matter of days for the tension between them to dissolve. They fall back into old habits, build up old jokes like they’re stacking cups on the floor of a gym. She has so much fun with her friends, her teachers sometimes catch her grinning in the middle of class, still ruminating on their last conversation.

The four struggle through their first semester of high school, clinging to the promise of winter break. After all those hours of studying for final exams, they promise to spend as much time together as possible, with absolutely no talk of school.

Then, suddenly, he leaves.

One day, they are joking about having caught senioritis three years early and musing about what their second semester will be like. Nathan is making plans to deliver presents to the three of them, his so-called Santa Trip, and Ayumi is furiously texting Nicole for advice on what to write on his gift tag. Your friend? Sincerely? With my utmost gratitude? The four of them are taking bets on which of them will take the worst photos of the fireworks on New Year’s Eve. Ayumi is trying to drop out, claiming she never takes good pictures anyhow, but Nathan keeps telling her that’s the whole point.

The next thing she knows, he’s not answering their texts, and he’s not picking up their calls, and when she and the others convince Nicole’s mother to drive them out to his house, they find it empty. They return to school and ask his homeroom teacher where he’s gone, and she says, “I’m so sorry. He left.”

He left. He left. What does that mean? Where did he go?

No one knows.

It isn’t just him. His whole family is gone. Someone says they heard his dad transferred for work. Someone else claims they’re in witness protection.

Yet when asked about Nathan Horamoto, most people say only, “Who?” and Ayumi, despite knowing she is not familiar everyone in their freshman class either, feels like tying all their teeth up with floss and slamming every door as hard as she can.

In her mind, there is a door labeled Nathan. For the past two and a half years, she has kept it tightly locked.

The summer after a stressful junior year, she decides to further stress herself out by beginning the college application process early. She hopes to go somewhere far.

It will occur to her, later, that it wasn’t so much that she wanted to get away from her hometown as much as it was that she wanted to get away from the person she was there. The girl so easily left behind.

Yet in the moment, as she studies the backs of two cardboard boxes of shake-and-bake chicken—one name brand, the other StarMart’s cheap knockoff—she is thinking only of the doors that college will soon throw open for her.

Then she turns, and something in her slams shut.

“Nathan,” she says, his name soft in her mouth. She isn’t even sure she’s really said it until he looks over at her, his brows lifting as he takes her in.

“Hey,” he says, as if no time has passed at all.

She shakes her head, overcome by a feeling so vertiginous, she’s worried she’ll throw up on his shoes. “It’s you.”

“It’s me,” he says, in a tone so close to sorrowful, she almost cries herself.

“What are you doing here?” she asks. “I thought you left.”

“I did.” He licks his lips. “But I’m back now. We all are. My whole family.”

“Oh.” Ayumi rakes a hand through her hair. “Wow. Since when?”

“I don’t know. A couple weeks?”

“A couple weeks,” she echoes. Later, she will lambaste herself for not having known earlier. If she really cared, she would have known. She would have sensed it. She would have felt it deep in her bones. “For how long?”

He doesn’t seem to know how to answer this question; she doesn’t know how to better explain it.

“Are you coming back to school?” she asks instead.

“Oh. Yeah. A different one, though.” His fingers pinch themselves into air quotes. “A fresh start.”

“Oh, ha, ha,” she says, as if this is somehow funny.

A beat.

“I can’t believe you’re here,” she says. “I never thought I would see you again.”

“Yeah.” He pauses. “Hey, so it’s been nice to see you. Could I give you my number? We could catch up sometime, maybe.”

Now it’s her turn to pause. She already has his number. She has had it since middle school. He’s the one who should ask for hers, since he keeps deleting her, again and again.

“Yeah. Sure,” she says. “What’s your number?”

In her first year of college, while taking Introduction to Psychology, Ayumi learns depression affects cognition. Those who experience trauma, on any scale, may experience a sort of dissociative amnesia, the brain’s way of distancing a person from the painful parts of a past.

I am a painful part, she finds herself thinking. That’s why he keeps forgetting me.

It is spring. She stands with her hands pushed deep into her jacket pockets. Sticky seed pods scatter the ground around her feet. She has a packet of tissues in her bag, in case of a sudden sneeze attack.

She turns as the sliding door opens. A part of her keeps turning, a clay ballerina on a music box. She cannot believe she is seeing him again.

“Ayumi,” he says.

She keeps her jaw clamped shut.

He is different now. Older. He has a hint of scruff. She is thrown by this. Alienated. He should still be in the first grade, should still be begging her to yank out his first loose tooth.

“Hey,” he says. “It’s weird to see you here.”

“Yeah,” she says. “Weird.”

She wants to cry. She wants to cry. She wants to fall to her knees and rock from side to side and cry.

“Are you here for spring break?” he asks.

“No,” she says. “I’m just…here.”

Forever. She couldn’t go anywhere else. As it turns out, small liberal arts colleges are expensive. She received partial scholarships to some, but her parents told her it wouldn’t be worth it.

You don’t even know what you want to do yet, her father said, and though this was true, and he had not said it unkindly, she will never quite forget it.

If Nathan survives by forgetting, Ayumi survives by remembering. Memories are all she really has.

“We should hang out sometime,” she blurts out, before she can think twice.

To her relief, Nathan doesn’t keep her in suspense, nodding immediately, as if he had been thinking the very same thing. “Yeah. Sure. Of course. Let me give you my number.”

She stares at him for a minute. Then, shaking her head, she says, “Sure.”

They meet up again. They talk. She falls for him once more. She thought she wouldn’t this time, thought she had finally grown cold enough to be the one to leave him hanging, but she hasn’t, and she can’t, and she’s so, so stupid.

She wishes she could talk to Nicole, but the two have fallen out of touch. Unlike the climaxes of their favorite novels, there was no real drama. It just got hard, once Nicole was accepted to college in some faraway land and Ayumi stayed exactly where she was.

When Nathan leaves, again, to return to one of forty-nine states she will never see with her own two eyes, she tries to keep the conversation going over text, as she did with Nicole.

It fizzles out. Of course it does. She can’t even blame him, really. They have nothing in common but those few precious years, all those lifetimes ago. He’s stepping out of his past and into his future. It’s time for her to stop clinging to his ankles. To stop begging him not to go.

She closes the door again. This time, for good.

Every time she sees him, it’s like she’s thrown back in time.

Despite having closed that door all those years ago, in her dreams, she still runs into him, her hand automatically rising to his shoulder as she says, Sorry. Then she sees his face, and he sees hers, and she’s touching him, as if she needs tangible proof that he’s here. That he’s real. That he’s back, and they are young, and everything is still okay, as evidenced by the cheesy soundtrack led by a family-friendly pop star.

Now they’re here, standing inches apart, and she is frozen solid—and not just because she’s reaching for the ice cream in StarMart’s frozen section.

“Nathan,” she says.

He turns his head. She holds her breath, expecting him to fumble for her name, or else smile politely, as if she is an elderly woman mistaking him for her grandson.

Instead, he smiles.

And she melts on the spot.

It does not matter how many years it has been. How much they’ve gone through or how much damage they’ve done and repaired and redone and re-repaired. She will never quite get over him.

“Hey,” he says. “Long time no see.”

She nods. She will not tell him she has been seeing him all along, in bursts, when she closes her eyes and opens her heart enough to let him in again.

“What have you been up to?” he asks.

She turns her head. She doesn’t know how to tell him she works as a remote call center agent for a travel agency. Nor does she know how to tell him she doesn’t like traveling, or agencies, or call centers, and though it’s great to work remotely, there’s so much turnover in the agency, she feels like she’s working at a rotisserie chicken shop.

“Working,” she says.

“Cool. Me too. Doing what?”

“Nothing really,” she says. “It’s just some stupid job.”

He gives her a look, as if she’s said something very strange. She is not the girl he remembers. She doesn’t think she will ever be that girl again.

“It’s a temporary thing,” she admits, even as something in her brain screams for her to stop. “I’m actually going back to school to become a librarian.”

His jaw drops. “You’re kidding. Ayumi, that’s amazing.”

She blushes. “Yeah. Nicole was actually the one to encourage me to try.”

It was a tragedy that had brought them back together. Not long after Ayumi first began losing hope that she would ever do anything besides get yelled at for an erroneously booked trip to Bora Bora, she received a message from Nicole: did you hear the news??

After wiping her frustrated tears and calming herself down, Ayumi picked up her phone. What news?

In response, Nicole sent a link to a press release. Their favorite middle-school book series was being revived, the rumored sixth book set to release a good decade and a half after the fifth.

NO WAY, Ayumi responded.

I’VE ALREADY PRE-ORDERED, Nicole type-screamed.

The two are different now, as expected, their texts more sporadic and their hangouts far less frequent. Yet they have slowly made their way back to each other, learning the big things—Nicole has two children now, a fact Ayumi cannot comprehend—and relearning the little things, fitting the puzzle pieces back together.

“That’s so great,” Nathan says. “I’m happy for you.”

“Thanks.” Ayumi pauses. “Can I ask what you do?”

“Of course you can ask. It’s you.”

And it’s you, Nathan. But when did I last mean anything to you?

“I’m a youth counselor, actually,” he says, “at this really great nonprofit.”

“Oh,” she says, her breath catching in her throat. “Oh, wow. That’s great. Wow.”

She pauses.

“Sorry,” she says. “I sound like Owen Wilson.”

He laughs, his eyes sparkling, just as they did when they were little.

“Wow,” he says, in that trademark adenoidal tone.

“Wow,” she echoes, laughing, one hand rising to cover her mouth.

They stop for a moment, regarding each other carefully like they’re waiting for the other to pounce.

“Well,” he says, “I don’t want to keep you.”

Keep me, she wants to tell him. Keep me the way I could never keep you.

“It was nice to see you,” he says.

“Right. It was nice to see you too,” she says.

All the yous.

She whirls around, the door once again slamming shut, and heads for the self-checkout.

Beep, beep, beep, beep. She’s scanning her items so quickly, a child stops to point at her.

“Thank you for shopping at StarMart,” the machine chirps.

She grabs her receipt and heads for the exit, blinking hard. She has just stepped out, her hands numb from the cold, when her phone begins to buzz.

Nathan Horamoto, the screen reads.

She stops, her heart pounding. She stares out at the parking lot. Imagines snapping a picture of it, of saving this moment, before it all comes tumbling down, plastic cups on a hardwood floor.

“Ayumi!”

She bites her lip. She should know better than to hope.

Yet she feels it, excitement bubbling up in her like Mentos in a bottle of soda.

She slides her thumb across the screen to answer his call. Then, raising her phone to her ear, she turns, her fingers warm, and slowly comes back around.

Genre:

Fiction

Author Bio:

Born and raised in Hawaiʻi, Kelly Murashige is the author of the award-winning YA novel The Lost Souls of Benzaiten and Adam Silvera’s July 2025 Allstora Book Club Pick, The Yomigaeri Tunnel. Her work has been nominated for Best Small Fictions. Though she can be shy, she loves obsessing over books, video games, and strange animals.

Issue:

Nowhere on a Screen

mjordan — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 10:00:00 +0000

Dustin M. Hoffman

Hector watched April suck down a Marlboro under The Strand movie theater’s yellow marquee dotted in scorched-black bulbs. Her pale face shot smoke through a black hoodie. Hector snuck across salt-sick Superior Street. The filthy Michigan streets needed a blanket of snow. It would soon baptize everyone: his worn-thin teachers, snow plow drivers, hibernating farmers.

He crept toward her, heard her snort. She was probably still thinking about her asshole dad who’d tried to ground her, tried to keep her in their home served with an eviction notice for next month. Fuck dads. They needed dads like the road needed more salt packed into its chalky cracks. A fractional family worked just fine. It was easier to love in smaller pieces. From behind her, he slipped one hand over her mouth.

“Scream and I’ll kill you, lady.”

A salt truck chuffed by on Superior then an unlit ambulance. She turned toward him, unamused, and blew smoke into his face. “I’m an icicle. Let’s go inside.”

April flicked her butt toward the street. It erupted into a flower of sparks against the side of a white Church of God bus carrying no followers, only a lonely driver headed nowhere. Hector trailed April into The Strand’s lobby.

The lobby was empty. No ticket seller. Sickly yellow lights glazed the glass cases stocked with three-year-old boxes of Raisinets and Snocaps and Junior Mints. Three years of summers were trapped in those petrified boxes—stashed in cardboard, under glass, entombed.

April lifted herself onto the concession counter glass, swung her legs over to the employee side. She scooped popcorn in bare fistfuls down the zippered neck of her hoodie until her belly bulged.

They walked arm in arm down the aisle, into the empty theater’s dark. The giant screen erupted its moonrise. Giant eyes, lips, skirt and thigh. A blue iris big as April’s dad’s gut. Movie stars blazed as bright as starlight. Hector had liked that lesson in science class, how starlight took thousands of light years to reach your eye, and at that point the star could be long dead, a suicidal supernova. Just like this movie, some teen rom-com released in the summer, now playing six months late at The Strand. This was stale life, flickeringly fake, and any of the actors could be dead, all of them could be.

They sank into the front-row seats. The screen was full of kissing. Violin notes choked through the tinny speakers. April tossed handfuls of popcorn above them, made a hailstorm of kernels. The screen flashed prom-dress-cherry-red against her throat. He wanted to kiss it, bite it, lick it.

“What are you looking at?” She chucked popcorn into his face. “Fucking pervert. Watch the movie.”

“Let’s get out of here.”

“There’s nowhere to go.”

“This is nowhere,” Hector said. “The people who work here can’t even stick around.”

“I like nowhere. It’s quiet here.”

Some pop song started up. A shiny blue convertible crested a hill. It snailed into a parking lot filled with more impossibly shiny cars. In the movies, not a single bug ever smeared across a windshield.

“Where would you rather be?” April said.

“We could go to my place. Mom’s probably working. Hell, even your house beats this,” he said.

“I can’t see my dad right now. He’s on a rampage after finding our stash.” It was only an eighth of pot, a few hits of acid. His mom would barely care, just flush it and slap him and then hurry off to work at the old folk’s home.

“At least your dad cares,” he said.

“Maybe he’ll adopt you.”

“He’s around. That’s something.”

“Showing up’s enough?” April said. “That’s bullshit.”

Hector grabbed her hand, slick with popcorn butter and gritty with salt. She looked away from the screen, down at their knuckles. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. Both our dads are assholes. Probably all dads,” she said.

He looked back to the screen and then regretted giving those plastic dead-star faces attention. He hated them. They would be disgusted by him and his cold, little Michigan town, his always-working mom and subsidized apartment. “You bitch about your mildly disappointing father, but you don’t really know shit about it.”

“I’m trying to be nice. Jesus.” She gazed back at the screen, at giant sucking lips, eyelashes big and black as midnight branches.

“I don’t want nice,” Hector said.

“What do you want?” she asked, and he could’ve said he just wanted for his mom to be happy, that for April, too. He just wanted the people he loved to stay and be happy in this town that wasn’t so terrible that it required escaping. He wished his father had left a letter explaining why he left when he was a kid: because Hector had been too small, too skinny, cried too easily. Because Hector’s mother had not loved him enough. Because Alma was too cold, too poor, too small. Because somewhere else he might grow a face big as a movie screen and drive a polished car to a pop-music soundtrack. Hector wished his father had documented excuses so he could hate him more accurately.

The movie played on like a silence.

“When they evict us,” April said, “we’re so fucked.”

Hector looked up from her neck to see what April was seeing. Those smooth-skinned, technicolor teenagers on the screen were now shuffling into their vinyl-sided, two-story homes in a suburban utopia.

“What if you could go anywhere?” he asked

“I’d go anywhere else.”

“Like here, where the movies live.” Hector hacked up phlegm, spat at the screen. “Look, it’s sunny and everyone’s beautiful and there’s a million ways to make the same happy ending.”

“Sure. I’ll go there.” April stretched out her legs, smiled.

“That’s nowhere-ist of all. California isn’t even real.” His face was getting hot. In this town, caught in its winter, it always felt impossible to be hot again, but here came the surge of blood.

“I know movies aren’t real,” April said. “I’m not stupid. I just want away.”

Back on the screen, some quarterback-type who looked like he was nearing thirty was at that moment falling in love with the unpopular, rowdy, tube-top-wearing sister of the cheerleader. She was dancing on a table and he was squeezing out a realization. It was a look the movies spent a hundred years perfecting—suddenly realized love furrowing the brow, curling the lips, swaying the chin left and right. April raised both middle fingers at the screen. Hector loved her for hating scripted lies.

“Okay, so where would you go,” she asked, “if you could go anywhere?”

“Where you are.”

“That’s fucking cheesy. Try again,” she said.

“I like our town.” And this seat in their town next to this girl freshly stung by her own father, waiting to lose her home.

“Then you’re stupid,” she said, and leaned her head against his, her frizzy hair tickling his nose, apple shampoo. He closed his eyes to erase the glow of credits rolling, ghostly text skidding up into the ether where no one would ever read.

Genre:

Fiction

Author Bio:

Dustin M. Hoffman is the author of the story collections One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist (winner of the 2015 Prairie Schooner Book Prize), No Good for Digging, and, most recently, Such a Good Man. He painted houses for ten years in Michigan and now teaches creative writing at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. His stories have appeared in New Ohio Review, Gulf Coast, Ninth Letter, Alaska Quarterly Review, and One Story. You can visit his site here: dustinmhoffman.com

Issue:

Ten-Cent Outpost

mjordan — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 10:00:00 +0000

Kate Henderson

An amateur might think of it as panic, but Estelle Marks didn’t. She knew better. She was seasoned. There would always be second guessing just before a show, but a successful competitor took it as an opportunity to remember the solid foundations of her thesis.

Estelle washed her breakfast dishes, a plate, a bowl, her coffee mug, one spoon. She dried them and put them away, too, because on days she had go out, she preferred not to leave anything in the rack.

Without panicking, she was thinking about the library. The focal point of the house. Yes, viewers were meant to linger there. To contemplate the shelves plus the piles on the coffee table, desk, floor. To wonder who would read so many hundreds of romance novels.

Here was the question, though: would a library like this be readily, ingenuously exposed to anyone who dropped by? Or would someone who had only ever read romances be more likely to hide the collection away a little self-consciously? Estelle owed it to herself, to the project, to consider relocating the whole thing, every volume, to the back. Visible maybe only through the rear mudroom windows. Secret.

She knew these were the big ideas the judges would be expecting. The competition at Ontario Miniature Enthusiasts regional finals was always intense, the jury severe and smart, and while they certainly rewarded attention to physical detail–the creases in curtains, the linens stacked in closets, the position of the soap in the soap dish–it was the consistency of the story your house told that would win you the ribbons.

But, no, Estelle decided in the end, there up front without shame, that’s where the books should be. This house wasn’t meant to be welcoming to visitors anyway. Plus, there was no time.

As of three years ago, in accordance with the directives of the province-wide organizing committee, all regional finals had been classified as “unoccupied.” Before that, the competition was called “unpeopled.” But when Marjorie Beane, then four-time champion, showed her Bones for Dinner Again tree fort inclusive of a family of golden retrievers, one setting the table and two staring longingly out the window, the administration circulated a clarification. Unoccupied: no people, no dogs, no living beings of any nature. Because anyone could be swayed by characters, empathize with them, and therefore overlook any number of shortcomings in the project.

The point is, the house should speak for itself. It should be as if all of its occupants just popped out to run errands. Or were on vacation. If the jury could surmise who was living there, who might be home soon, who had vanished, that was a success.

The irony was Marjorie Beane didn’t even need those dogs; Bones for Dinner Again would have won without them. Admittedly, Marjorie was pretty talented.

The evidence of animals featured in every one of Marjorie’s projects. It was her signature. She and her husband Philip had always owned dogs, and currently had a wire-haired fox terrier, a runt they rescued from a breeder who would never have made money off him. The poor thing was tiny, even for a terrier, and often fell when he ran, couldn’t climb the stairs and had to be carried, but what a great life he had, a whole life he wouldn’t otherwise have known, which Marjorie didn’t mind talking about any chance she got. It was heart-rending, the little thing following her around. Also, holier-than-thou a bit. Marjorie had a way of lording things over you in an intolerably kind fashion, in Estelle’s opinion.

Who knew what Marjorie would be coming in with this year. It was a fool’s errand to try to outdo her from the start. The only thing Estelle knew was there’d be no overlap. Estelle’s own projects were devoid of animals.

Estelle had never worked harder on a project than she had on this one. The idea struck her at Greyson’s one afternoon, as she rummaged through her change purse for a quarter to unlock the grocery cart. She remembered her first date with William, forty-two years before. How he took her to the waterfront.

She’d had money in her purse then, too. Mother had insisted. There should never be any presumptions, she said. A girl must always be prepared to pay her own way. But Estelle didn’t have to spend anything. She and William walked all afternoon. And later he bought a couple of lemonades, and for her a soft-serve cone. She remembered the jingle of coins in his pocket.

And there was a mime walking around, trying to embarrass people, make them laugh. Older couples and college kids were dodging him, watching the ground. When he did the classic box trick right up in front of them, Estelle was surprised by William’s good sportsmanship. While she herself shrank away, Willie played right into the whole thing, tried to help the mime out with a fake key. Tossed a dime in his hat as they left. Some musicians were setting up at the bandshell, but they never heard them play.

It was easy, being with William. As though he were a driver who knew all the roads and was in no hurry, so she could close her eyes and rest her head against the cool of the window.

He never understood Estelle’s interest in the miniature projects and teasingly called them doll houses, though he knew the proper nomenclature. Nevertheless, once she got more serious and started entering the local contests, he built a carrying crate into which she could place custom-cut foam. He helped her lug each house around, in and out of the car, lord knows how many times, breaking nothing.

Years ago he was driving her to a competition, just before Thanksgiving, and on the turnpike, under the bridge, a pigeon flew into the road and there was no way to avoid it. Estelle hoped they might drive right over top of it and leave it unharmed, but its feathers flew up, and when Willie looked in the rearview, he said, Oh no. Ah. Poor guy. We got him alright. A few minutes later, she noticed he was crying.

As she got increasingly nervous about the regional finals and the things she might have forgotten, she went to check on Willie. Okay, I’m off this afternoon, then, she said. She tried to straighten the oxygen tank beside his bed but the cord seemed suddenly too short and she managed to pull the tube across his face. Estelle straightened it, trying not to startle Willie, trying not to touch his cold, grey skin.

This was the only room in their house she couldn’t keep tidy, with the nurses coming in and out, with the machines and the constant laundry. If she had a room like this in her project, there would be a system in which the machinery could be tucked away in a cupboard, or affixed to the wall. The tubes would be untangled and tied with a tiny zip tie. The sheets would be pressed. And nothing would mess it up.

Wish me luck, she said to Willie. I should be back by 5:30.

Estelle put her white blazer on over her cornflower blue blouse, and ensured her hair was set right. She picked a small black thread off her cuff. Her pants were too tight. Her body had become as soft and heavy as water these past few years, and she was always fighting against it. She struggled to cram the case into the hatchback, hoping she wasn’t creasing her outfit. She dropped into the driver’s seat and pulled down the sunshade, cleared her throat and whispered, Please.

Regional finals were held at the Convention Centre, Hall B, which was the smallest of the halls but still square and empty despite being full of people, and unwelcoming. Everyone’s voices lifted up into the ceiling and came back strained and impersonal. The cheap swirl-patterned carpeting in blue and gold created static electricity every time Estelle walked over it and she kept shocking herself on the steel backs of the chairs.

There were twenty-seven entrants, all expectant and worried, which made Estelle feel a kinship with them she hadn’t expected. The judges moved around the room slowly and silently with spiral notepads. She had thought there might be something more formal in the scoring at this level. Marjorie looked over at her from a couple of tables down and held up both hands with crossed fingers, smiling sweetly.

When the jury awarded Estelle’s Ten-Cent Outpost second place, the head judge had this to say about it: It makes me want to be alone. It makes me think of a suitcase, in a way. Or a hotel room. And the judge gave a special nod to Estelle’s craftsmanship vis-à-vis the books, all four hundred and fifty, hand-crafted, printed and bound, displayed alphabetically, including the entire oeuvre of Barbara Cartland, whom the head judge herself admitted to having read, long before, with relish.

In an upset, Marjorie’s Damn the Expense, a series of pre-fab pods with an apocalyptic feel, dusted with the fur of a cat who appeared to have gone berserk, took third, behind both Estelle and a newcomer, Geraldine Forsythe. Geraldine was a cheery redhead whose entry was a loyal replica of the farmhouse from Little House on the Prairie, the twist being its futuristic, white fibreglass exterior. Not such a surprise, maybe, since at least a couple of the judges had grown up on afternoon tv as the latch-key kids of working moms in the ‘70s. Nostalgia played a part, certainly.

Geraldine seemed nice enough. She seemed like someone who might play accordion in earnest, genuinely eccentric. Her blouse was stretched at the buttons, leaving little gaps between, and at one point Estelle thought she might have seen the skin of Geraldine’s pale belly. She also noticed a cluster of scabbed-over scratches on Geraldine’s right hand and wondered if her body, too, was betraying her.

“Proud” or “happy” wouldn’t be right exactly. Estelle was more bewildered at the results. As though something was crooked, slanted. How sometimes the arrow pointing down comes on and you get in and press the button, but even still, the elevator takes you up.

As everyone was leaving, Marjorie came over to Estelle’s car to say congratulations. And how’s William, she also wanted to know.

He’s the same, thank you for asking. I guess we’re not expecting any change from here on.

Oh, Estelle. Marjorie said. That’s so hard. And she patted her back awkwardly. She added, without a trace of bitterness, Here’s to your great showing, though. Truly.

Estelle didn’t feel too badly for Marjorie. She’d come back next year, no doubt.

Estelle thought in the odd glow of her success she might be able to touch Willie when she went in to tell him. Brush his hair or hold his hand. The nurse said he seemed to be in pain when she had arrived earlier, but she had adjusted his drip, and now he was calm. Estelle thanked the nurse and watched her go.

One summer a few years before, Willie had bought some sandals. While he usually didn’t shop on his own, especially for shoes, he said he saw them in the Stratton Shoes window and thought they’d be a good idea, it being so hot. He took them out of the box, which he left in the front hall, and tried them on for Estelle, saying, Well, what do you think? Do they look good? And she laughed at him. They’re fine, honey, she said. Really. They’ll be nice and casual, she said, thinking he looked as though he was wearing a costume of someone who was comfortable in sandals and enjoyed summer. His stubby feet and ankles were white where he had no tan. He loved those shoes though, and wore them until they were falling apart.

Willie’s bed was freshly made, the afternoon nurse had changed the sheets, but the room still smelled like urine and bile, sweat also. With talc over it all. The skin of Willie’s face was ashen. Briefly, lightly, Estelle put her hand on his brittle shoulder.

Second, Willie. We won second.

Her voice sounded loud inside her head. She looked at the satin ribbon, then turned it to his face. We beat Marjorie Beane.

She laughed a little, as though he’d whooped with applause. Then she touched the palm of her hand to his. But it was cold. And she feared he would groan, or struggle to move, or throw up. It was that bad, sometimes, now. The other nurse would be in soon to change the IV and prepare him for overnight.

Love you, Willie, she said. But she was relieved to leave the room.

Estelle unpacked Ten-Cent Outpost in her workshop and put the ribbon in the display case next to a smattering of Ontario Miniature Enthusiasts Association Participant badges.

She had a cheese sandwich for dinner, and a glass of Riesling, and wondered briefly what Marjorie and Philip would be eating, if he had poured her a consoling drink, with that beatific dog lying under the table oblivious to the scraps falling all around him.

Later, by habit, she untucked the covers at the end of her bed, because Willie never liked having his feet pinned inside the sheets. Then she noticed the mystery novel on his bedside table was askew. She figured she had jostled it with the duvet. She crawled across the bed and returned the book to right angles. Even though Willie would have left it that way, tossed.

She found it hard to sit in that messy room with Willie. She was afraid, she supposed, that she’d have to clean up after him or that he’d die right in front of her. In particular, she found it hard to touch him. His body so strained and unfamiliar.

It dawned on her though, something she could do. She could read the rest of his mystery novel to him. She could go down there and sit in a chair just apart from his bed. She decided she would try that very night. Because that’s what he would have done if she were the one lying there sick and alone. He would have read to her so she could know the end.

Genre:

Fiction

Author Bio:

Kate Henderson’s short fiction has appeared in fillingStation and The /tƐmz/ Review, and she was a finalist in the 2023 NYC Midnight Short Story Challenge. She is an entertainment lawyer who lives in Toronto, Canada, with her family.

Issue: