Blood Brothers

Kevin Brennan is the author of seven novels, including Parts Unknown (William Morrow/HarperCollins), Yesterday Road, and, just released, The Prospect. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Berkeley Fiction Review, Mid-American Review, Twin Pies, The Daily Drunk, Sledgehammer, Elevation Review, Misfit Magazine, Flash Boulevard, Fictive Dream, Atlas and Alice, LEON Literary Review, MoonPark Review, Atticus Review, and others. A Best Microfiction 2022 nominee, he's also the editor of The Disappointed Housewife, a literary magazine for writers of offbeat and idiosyncratic fiction, poetry, and essays. Kevin lives with his wife in California's Sierra foothills.

So this guy approaches me while I’m waiting for my Lyft ride and says he’s my brother, how’s it goin’, and I tell him that’s impossible, I don’t have a brother. I’m an only child as a matter of fact, but he insists. He says we were actually separated at birth, and that makes him not just my brother but my twin brother.

Been a long time, bro! he says. Thank God I finally caught up with you.

He’s an all-right-looking kind of guy, attractive but a bit of a slacker, in a collarless button-up shirt and a loose-hanging pinstripe vest that screams thrift store. At least he lacks the odor of mothballs. His jeans have a shiny quality at the thighs, where I can imagine him rubbing his palms while he waits for buses and panhandles lattes. He looks nothing like me.

Look, I say, rescued by the Lyft pulling up to the curb. Nice try. I don’t have a brother, but you have a nice day.

He’s raising his hand in a hey, wait, don’t leave gesture as the car merges into the bloodstream of late afternoon traffic.

That night I call my mom and ask if she remembers having twins when I was born.

No, honey, I don’t think so, she says. That sounds like something that would leave an impression on me. Let me ask your dad.

Don’t bother, I say. He wouldn’t know.

It doesn’t surprise me much that the same guy is waiting outside my office building when I come out for lunch the next day.

I can’t help rolling my eyes and going, Seriously?

He’s wearing the same clothes as the day before, but now he’s also sporting the unmistakable fragrance of Old Spice, like he scored a sample of the stuff at Walgreens.

I’m more than serious, he tells me. I know all about you. All about us. We’re family, man, I kid you not. To prove it, he recites Mom and Dad’s names, Mom’s maiden name, my childhood address, accurately guesses my favorite color (goldenrod), and tells me we’re both ambidextrous (true). I bet you like water skiing too, he says, and you can’t pass up a good plate of seafood linguini either—frutti di mare, am I right?

Though all this is a little cringey, I invite him to lunch. My treat. The hope is he’ll accidently let slip his true intentions, and I’ll be able to ditch him as a con man.

But what actually happens at lunch is completely unexpected. He anticipates my thoughts. He talks about things in my life as if he were there. Somehow he knows me. We’re weirdly simpatico, as if something in our brains is suddenly communicating after decades of silence, a cranial Bluetooth connection.

I tell him, straight up, I’m confused as hell right now, and he says let’s hang out for a couple of weeks, and you’ll see how it is. We’re together again, bro! It’s a womb-mates reunion.

And we do just that: hang out. We catch a baseball game together, go to hear some live music, hit a restaurant near my office with the best frutti di mare in town, and I even toy with the possibility of taking him to meet Mom and Dad. Or to re-introduce him, that is. If he really is my twin brother. He advises against it though.

Let’s wait ‘till we’re sure, he says, and then explains there’s only one way to be sure: DNA. He’s already done the legwork and found an outfit that does sibling tests.

All due respect, he says, I’m a little short on funds, right?

Sure, I’ll do the honors, I tell him. I’ll pay and have the results sent to me.

You won’t regret it, he says. And that’s when he finally tells me his name; it’s Tim.

My name’s Tom. A sprinting of goosebumps runs up my spine.

Tim and Tom. Together again.

After our ceremony of the swab, the wait is excruciating. I don’t know why I’m so invested in it all of a sudden. I didn’t even know I’d been yearning for a brother all this time.

Tim and I go out two or three times a week, text each other constantly, swap stories and memories (he was raised two thousand miles away but always knew he’d find me eventually) and grow so close that I have trouble remembering my life before he came back into it. You’re super-attached to your womb-mate even if you’re separated at birth, it turns out.

The day finally arrives. I’m alone in my apartment when the priority envelope from the lab appears, and I wish Tim could be here for the big reveal. I tear at the zip strip and take out the scant report.

Signatures at the bottom certify the strobe of definitive phrases I’m able to pull out in a blink: The probability of siblingship is 00.0000%; the probability of half-siblingship is 00.0000%.

Tim and Tom are not brothers. Much less twin brothers.

I sit for the longest time with no lights on, wondering if he can feel how bummed I am right now, wherever he is. I really wanted him to be my brother.

But what’s clear to me, as I stand at the window and look out at the forlorn entropy of a city evening, is that I’m never going to tell him the truth.

Heart Trouble & Slipper Justice

Anita Brienza is a Maryland-based communications consultant/coach and business writer. Her creative work has appeared in such publications as Tiny House magazine, Washington Family Magazine, The Deadlands, and Red Fez, where she was nominated for a 2021 Pushcart for fiction.

Heart Trouble

Sullen and grim with a face like a melting candle, Paula lumbers to her feet, collecting the paper plates she’d shoveled her homemade cake onto and pushes her way past the screen door to the kitchen. She was hospitalized a month ago for heart problems, and told she had to give up her beloved Marlboros. When she returned home, her niece Joann gave up her first-floor bedroom so Paula didn’t have to do the stairs. That was before she caught Paula sneaking cigarettes in the backyard, sucking them hungrily right next to her oxygen tank. Joann, who paid all the bills, said “Do that again and I’m turning you out.”

But she stayed, and today, on Joann’s 61st birthday, after they had a calm hour sitting outside together, after they talked about how they’d have to rake up the leaves soon and bring the lawn chairs in, after Joann sat down to work and her aunt went into the sacrificial first-floor bedroom to nap, Paula died of a massive heart attack. At dinnertime, Joann found her slumped half onto the floor, face blue, mouth open, tongue bulging. The EMTs needed room to work, so they dragged Paula out onto the hallway floor and pronounced her dead at 7:30 with her bodily functions leaking through the sheet that covered her and her hands slipping out on either side. Even on her birthday, Joann couldn’t get anyone to pick up the body until 2:00 in the morning. She didn’t want to touch Paula’s hands, so they stayed like that, palms-up, imploring the world for a better life. 

Slipper Justice

My cousins and I make a half-circle around Aunt Willie’s casket. Her hair was perfect, a permed and dyed red-brown parentheses framing her unfortunate face. She never married, and from the time she was in her thirties, she’d come home from her government job and change into one of her flowered cotton housedresses and slippers. Even in the winter, she wore a housedress – she just tied a fuzzy robe around it. It’s how we all remember her – I’m not sure I recall her in regular clothes, in fact, so the navy casket attire was a surprise. I was a little shocked she wasn’t wearing a housedress now. As you live, so shall you die.

She was a pit bull of a woman, not even five feet tall, her hair so big it was comical on someone of her stature. Her skin was flushed in spots, and her features coarse and bulbous. She yelled constantly, and if any kids around her weren’t listening to what she wanted or did something she didn’t like, she’d take off one of those slippers and throw it at them with a sharpshooter’s skill, and then scream at them until they brought it back to her. Our parents never intervened – they were probably afraid she’d aim that missile at them, too. My cousins and I all had a slipper scar somewhere on our bodies. Mine was on the temple near my right eye, and I’d find myself rubbing it at work when I was writing an article that wasn’t coming together.

Once she asked for help wrapping her Christmas presents and I showed up with beautiful selections of paper and ribbon. But Willie had other ideas, and she barked orders at me as I was wrapping, like “Don’t give that one nice paper; she’s just a neighbor” and “Don’t put ribbon on that one, I’m mad at him.” At CHRISTMAS.  She was mean. And it wasn’t even her wrapping paper! But I did what she said, because… well, you know, the slipper.

When my cousin Maureen and I were trying to write Aunt Willie’s eulogy, we couldn’t think of anything nice to include. Willie wasn’t kind or generous or particularly smart. After three false eulogy starts, Maureen said, “I got it! She loved to get a bargain, and she loved good fabric.”

“Those aren’t really traits,” I said.

“What else do we have?” said Maureen, rubbing a tiny scar on her chin.

I reached up to my temple and touched my scar. “She had great aim.”

In Vitro

Tim Craig lives in London. A winner of the Bridport Prize for Flash Fiction, his short-short stories have been placed or commended four times in the Bath Flash Fiction Award and have appeared in literary magazines such as Milk Candy Review and Atticus Review, as well as the Best Microfiction 2019 and ’22 anthologies. His debut collection, Now You See Him, will be published by Ad Hoc Fiction in Summer ’22.

He keeps his mother in a glass jar on the mantelpiece — like a scorpion, or a tarantula.

The arrangement suits them both; like this, they can each keep a wary eye on one another, and she can watch TV.

When he brings new girlfriends over, he introduces them from a safe distance. From behind the glass, his mother looks them up and down; none of them ever lasts long.

She hates his friends and tells him so. When they come over, he takes them into the tiny kitchen instead. Later, she complains to him that the noise kept her awake, and demands to know what they talked about all night with their dumb mouths.

He tells her about his new job pinning butterflies at the museum. She snorts. That’s no job for a man, she says.

He suggests a trip to Spain or Portugal — just the two of them.

Too hot for me, she says. In this jar.

One time, while he is dusting, he accidentally knocks her off the mantelpiece.

You were always clumsy, she tells him, after he picks up the jar.

Just like your stupid father, God rest his soul.

It seems as if the two of them are destined to spend eternity together, each daring the other to die first.

Until the morning he enters the room to find his mother lying upside down at the bottom of the jar, rigid, and with her arms and legs in the air. He takes the jar from the mantelpiece, curls up with it on the sofa — the one she told him many times he overpaid for — and weeps long and hard.

But he keeps the lid fastened tight, just in case. 

Two Silhouettes

Isaac Fox is a student at Lebanon Valley College, where he majors in English and creative writing. He spends his free time reading and writing things that aren't assigned, shooting pictures, and playing the clarinet. His fiction, photography, and reviews have appeared in Green Blotter, Rune Bear, and Heart of Flesh magazines, and he has a piece forthcoming in Rejection Letters. You can find him on Twitter at @isaac_k_fox

None of us know the woman who makes the trout. We only ever see her in the Heaps, down where the stream tumbles and clots. She climbs over car doors, microwaves, slimy cardboard, her eyes always searching, never acknowledging our presence.

At the water’s oil-slicked edge, she finds a mangled comb. Ten feet away, in a black trash bag she’s torn open, a wealth of paper clips and a matching pair of faux-gold rings. Halfway up a Heap, mixed with a shredded pillow’s guts, a broken-open butternut squash, feathered with leaf-green mold. Way up near the Heap’s peak, a blood bank’s waste, and among it, half a dozen bags of expired human blood.

She clambers out onto a refrigerator leaning over the water, sits with her legs dangling, and arranges everything she’s collected around her. She straightens, bends, and links paper clips–half a dozen large ones for a spine, thirty smaller ones half-mooned into ribs. Another dozen become a skull, their points bent and file-sharpened into teeth. 

She cuts the comb up, attaching the pieces as fins, before filling in the paper clip skeleton with yellow-orange squash flesh. This half-born creature needs more color, so she coats its back with motor oil from the stream and just the slightest touch of green mold from the squash. Turning it from side to side, she dabs its flanks with large spots of oil, mixed with a few smaller spots of blood. Now, her creation only lacks a set of eyes, so she attaches a faux-gold ring to each side of its head and fills in the ring with a tiny sea of oil. 

The trout flops against her grip. She gently settles it in the water, and it shoves away, spraying her with oil and algae.

**********

On spring nights, we go to the water, after the sun has set behind the smog, and fish for her trout. The gray and starless sky provides just enough darkness to turn Heaps into mountains, a few decommissioned telephone poles into a hemlock grove, and the wild tangles of trash under our feet into high, Jurassic ferns, the kind of place that once could’ve hidden a fox or snake or even a lone bear cub. We check for trees behind us, listen for owl songs that will never come. We cast our flies onto black water shimmering with escaped city light on oil, and we can almost convince ourselves it's moonlight. 

Sometimes, a slurp breaks the water’s quiet, and one of us hooks into a trout. Everyone watches their tug against living resistance, their fumbling with rod, reel, and line as the fish springs from the water, sunset flanks catching the almost moonlight, the slap as it reenters echoing across metal and plastic. 

When the lucky fisherman kneels at the water’s edge to lift the trout’s flapping weight, the rest of us stand back, turn our flashlights off, and watch the two silhouettes, predator and prey, perched on an ancient and carnal balance. 

The predator twists the hook out from between paper clip teeth and breathes the stream’s acid stench.

Cancer

Thomas Kearnes' flash fiction has been featured at Adroit Journal, jmww journal, Foglifter, Gulf Coast Online, PANK, wigleaf, SmokeLong Quarterly and elsewhere. His current collection, Death by Misadventure (Dark Ink Books), transgressive short stories and novelettes, is available anywhere books are sold. He is a former Literary Lambda and Pushcart nominee.

His back to me, Benjamin sits nude on the edge of the bed. I lie on my side a few feet behind him, also naked, as if something still might happen. This isn’t the first time he’s mentioned his cancer. Three times, he’s had it. Survived them all. He’s grateful, he says. So grateful.

There are other men in the hotel room. We have an hour or so before Benjamin’s boyfriend returns with the dope. My friend, Roman, wants some for the ride home. He and I drove two hours to get naked and listen to our host talk about his disease.

“Where was it?” I ask.

Benjamin twists his neck to face me. Skin sags from his slim jaw and cheekbones. His eyes are bright even in the darkness of the room.

“Which time?” he asks.

I don’t know what comes next.

“When you were in the hospital during Christmas,” Roman says.

Benjamin turns to Roman. I fire my friend a look of gratitude. He’s so much better than me with strangers.

“It started out in my stomach,” Benjamin says and points at an incision wound below his sternum. “By the time the doctors found it, it’d spread to my liver, too.” Benjamin continues and Roman takes a seat. He wants to listen.

On the drive here, Roman said men would like me more if I were friendlier. I don’t think friendly was the word he intended. Perhaps he meant attentive. People want to like you, Ash, he said.

When they’re spun out and suddenly too exhausted or preoccupied to fuck any longer, some men tell you stories. About their exes, their lousy jobs, the corrosive emptiness at the center of this whole scene. They don’t say corrosive emptiness, of course, but that’s what they mean.

I look at the other men draped about the room. There are four of them. One emerges from the shower, drying his hair with a towel. Another piddles behind a laptop with one hand while stroking himself with the other. The two remaining men lie naked caressing one another on the twin bed beside mine.

I consider getting dressed.

“My grandmother was my last living relative,” Benjamin says. “She died a month after I got diagnosed again last year. I wasn’t worried about money or anything—I had plenty of that. But it was so lonely in there. I felt so alone.”

“But at least you could afford to be sick,” I say. “That’s something.”

Benjamin is just as high as the rest of us, so when his head jerks a bit after hearing this, I don’t know if what I said has truly registered or if he merely realizes someone else has spoken. While Benjamin is distracted, Roman lifts a finger to his lips and glares at me. I lean over the bed and search for my underwear.

“That must’ve been awful,” I hear Roman say.

Awful, I think, gathering my clothes. Awful is driving two hours for men who wanted nothing more than an audience while they gave each other the same pleasures they’d give any other man in any other room on any other night. Awful is waiting and listening and another man knowing you can’t leave so you must listen. Awful is this.

“I never think of it that way,” Benjamin says. “It made me strong. It made me believe there’s someone up there who’s got my back. He doesn’t care if I’m gay, he doesn’t care about that shit. I was in pain and he knew that and he helped me.”

I pull on my T-shirt over my jeans. I’m grateful no one notices me. I stand and cross the room. I cast a quick glance over to Roman. His face grim, he nods but not to me. The door squeaks when I open it.

“Where are you going?” Roman asks. Benjamin doesn’t turn to see where I’ve gone.

“It’s a little smoky in here. I just want some air.”

I can tell by Roman’s face that I’ve put him in an awkward position. I’m always doing this. Saying the wrong thing, drawing the sort of attention no one wants.

“I’ll be back,” I say and slip outside.

A few doors down, I sit on the stairwell connecting the first and second floors. I light a cigarette and wrap my arms around myself. It’s too chilly to wait outside, but I can’t go back. I don’t want to hear about Benjamin and what the doctors had to cut out of him or how many times they cut it, or where it had to be cut from. I don’t want to hear about what Benjamin found inside himself after all that cutting.

From the top of the stairwell, Roman calls my name.

Dressed, he hurries down the stairs. “What’s the matter with you?” he asks.

I hold up my hand and shake my head. Roman sits beside me. When he puts his hand on my knee, I realize I want it there.

“I’m sorry. I just had to leave.”

“Everyone thinks there’s something wrong with you.”

“Maybe there is.”

I can’t look away from him. He says my name again, but there’s no anger in his voice, no pity. I’m not sure what’s there, so I kiss him. I feel his arms encircle me and I reach my hand to his face. As we kiss in the cold dark morning, something foreign and essential multiplies within me, and even if a doctor could cut it out, I wouldn’t let them.

In Terror

Elizabeth Kirschner is a writer and Master Gardener. She’s the author of the story collection, Because The Sky Is A Thousand Soft Hurts, six volumes of poetry, and an award-winning memoir, Waking the Bones. She currently teaches at Boston College and lives on the water in Maine with her little dog, Albert.

It began in the ER. A cubicle, like a pie slice with a curtain drawn around the front. A grey curtain, the color of worn stones, a morgue. Nurses in rubber soles pattered by, like dumb mer creatures.

I was seizing on the bed. Indecently, my head jerked, limbs flailed. The Johnny caught in my crotch, like a sanitary napkin.

My husband, Greg, sat neatly, tidily, on a grey chair in the corner, the briefcase on his lap, his lips thin, sealed. Everything smelled like tin, or tapeworms.

No, it didn’t begin in the ER. It began at home. It was May. The leaves chartreuse, like little green trumpets, pollen settling everywhere like a strange, embalming grace.

I was writing a grocery list. The windows were opened, like huge envelopes. I could hear children playing at the nearby school, the one my son, Teddy, attended. The pitch of their voices like a hundred triangles, the lightest, tingliest bubbles.

The day was wistful or wishful, wholly ordinary. Eggs, leeks, salmon, went down on the list. Butter, milk, macaroni.

A grocery list, so mundane, yet it encompassed what my family needed. Suddenly, there was a twitch, in my wrist, as if a small white spider had crawled inside it.

The pen flew out of my hand. Light as a child’s magic wand. When I stood up, my arm started jerking, taut as a tourniquet. My brain wasn’t able to discern what was happening—it, too, was spasmodic.

Something like hot wires veined my entire body, thousands of them, countless hot wires, and the dance they made me do was deranged, wanton even, an electrocuted kite.

I went down before I could get to the phone. On the kitchen rug. The one with bears and antelopes and black fish on it. Under the skylight, which seemed sworded by light.

I seized. In terror. Everything slowed down, was soaked in a hideous metallic otherness as the afternoon rolled over, tore open.

Wrenched, wretched, my body—I don’t even know how to describe it—was knotted, bound. I lost all speech, all mobility. I was forty-four years old.

I wanted to fold laundry. My son’s soft t-shirts, Gregory’s box-white boxers. They smelled like mint, or lint. But I couldn’t. Fold the laundry. Make a call. Get help.

After I stopped seizing, I crawled to the phone, the cord, almost umbilical. “Greg,” I sputtered, then dropped it, like a piece of hard candy.

Sirens then, shrill, like screaming castanets. Greg rushed in. Found me kited on the kitchen floor. The grocery list, like a love note. He took my hand in his, “Anna,” he asked, “are you all right?”

My eyes rolled up in my head, but I noted how mathematical his face looked. Evenly planed, his eyes, green-gold, like a momentary body of light.

As I lay there, I heard the mother in me say, let’s not get hurt, as if the creatures lurking down in the ocean’s trenches were still children, or were children and continued to lurk in those dark places.

Gregory’s devotion was simple, complete. It involved loss, the way winter allows the mind to imagine a line’s abstraction. That was us. The mind’s abstraction.

The sirens sent needles into my ears. A kind of crewel work that shrunk sound into a wad of tinfoil. The EMT’s rushed in, like lumbering giants, or giant dogs.                                                               

They fired questions at me, “what happened? Did you hit your head?” This as they fondled an IV into my arm. The blood pressure cuff went on. The sounds were imperious, confusing.

Onto the gurney I went. Strapped in, I stared at my right foot, which hung off of it, like a very soft, very frightened rabbit as they hauled me out of the house.

Into the ambulance I went. The doors whooshed close and a journey ensued. Worlds moved around inside me, as if jostling for a purer atmosphere.

“The breath,” I thought, “the breath,” but it was wobbly, scant, as if I were breathing through a thin straw. The EMT’s told jokes, bad ones. As I seized, even my lips were hard, rubbery.

Into the ER I went. When Greg came in, like a reluctant school boy, the curtain was pulled close. The sound of it, broken seashells. The walls were pale, a seasick grey, anonymous as an unsigned letter.

I started seizing again. I didn’t even know what that was, or meant, but my body gnarled, as did my head. So heavy was this body-breaking hour, I begged Greg, Please, forgive me.

He sat, ever so quietly, on a grey chair, his briefcase in his lap, the color of luminous wood. I loved this man, loved how he held the briefcase, like a beloved pet.

We said nothing as we waited for the doctor to come in. The terror I felt was inky, hard to subdue, but Greg steadied me with a look like a plain napkin.

The briefcase in his lap went everywhere with him. He’d been in a fire, after all. A lab fire while working on his PhD. Mice in cages, lots of mice, lots of cages, like querulous castles.

When he left the lab that night, he locked the door behind him, but as he walked away, the entire lab blazed. Towers of flame squirreled into the sky, the smoke, sordid.

Greg didn’t look back, but the mice in those cages, their screams were thin, wiry, like sharp objects.

What the fire did to them was like falling against blades until they shriveled, their tails liked the waxed points of sharp mustaches.

Smoke slid in like previous whiskey, the fire lisped, the fire drowned. And followed itself into a new form.

Greg lost all his research. The canary yellow legal pads, the equations neat as houses, and like the illness which would come to define me, equally unsolvable.

Which is why the briefcase sat on his lap, as if trained to do so. Like a ventriloquist’s dummy.

When the doctor came in, my eyes shied away. Dark as pansies, the irises, severe, black. I tried to back away from him, but the bed was narrow, like a lean coffin. And my mind, it wasn’t shy, it was beset.

His hands. They worked me, ugly, bare as calves. Under my Johnny they went, like a strange, sad thought. I was fragmented, as his hands scraped me.

Pugnacity. Fetid odors. The doctor smelled like onions. His eyes were full of rooms, a small death, as my back spasmed.

It was as if I was looking through a bubble. Everything slower, softer—the present, what remained suddenly worth loving, worth living through.

It felt as though the sky was being stapled to my eyelids. I went small in the face, like a drying bar of soap, or a field getting ready to weather.

The doctor pressed his stethoscope to my chest. Was my son waiting for me in his baseball pajamas? While I imagined my mind falling down, like an earring?

With all that leafy curtain, it was hard to breathe. There was so little air in that grey cubicle. This as the doctor told me I had a panic attack, sent me home.

Dying Animal

Originally from New Jersey, Maria Poulatha lives in Athens, Greece, with her husband and daughter. Her stories have appeared in Split Lip Magazine, Copper Nickel, SmokeLong Quarterly (finalist for the Grand Micro contest), Flash Frog (finalist for the Blue Frog contest), Okay Donkey, and others.

My wife asks me to bring her more tea because she doesn’t want to disturb the dying cat in her lap. The cat has been lying there, limp and droopy-eyed for days. Still, he does not die. My wife says that this is her baby, that this is the only baby she has and that she has failed him. I wish she had a real baby instead of this ghost of a cat with patchy hair, but then I picture the real baby, wilted like a poorly watered flower, tufts of hair drifting toward the corners of the room, and I am glad that it is just a cat.

The green veins on my wife’s hands bloom like moldy tunnels through cheese as she strains to keep the cat from sliding off her lap. She leans over him and the bulb overhead warms her hair but doesn’t make it shine the way it used to, not the way it did when we used to play sick and go to the beach in the middle of the day, when the sun shimmered off the sea and off her crown, and we would eat cold chicken and sip warm beer. She would remove her bikini and lie back and sigh and all I wanted to do was dive deep, deep, deep into that electric bed of hair.

No one has done the laundry. She takes one of my dirty shirts and curls it like a pastry to make a bed for the cat. She and the cat like the way it smells, so she tries to make room on the dirty shirt to lie around him. They look cold so I pile on more dirty clothes. It takes only two pants and three shirts to cover them because the cat and my wife have become so thin. She chews bits of steak and feeds him the softened clumps. I am getting thin as well. When I pinch the skin on my forearm, it folds like a paper hat. When my hair gets patchy, I wonder, will I fit on her lap? Will she still have teeth to chew my food for me?

There is nothing to eat or chew in the house and still the cat does not die. He floats on my wife’s lap, a splintered raft, grief a sea beneath them. At night I add three pants and five sweaters to the bed of dirty clothes. Then I dig a tunnel and crawl in to feel an elbow, a tail, a hard thigh, a patch of hair. I wind myself around. And I wait.

Cartwheels Cross the Floor

Michael Tyler has been published by Takahe, Bravado, Adelaide Literary, PIF, Daily Love, Danse Macabre, Apocrypha and Abstractions, Dash, The Fictional Café, Potato Soup Journal, Fleas On The Dog, Cardinal Sins and Mystery Tribune. 

Michael writes from a shack overlooking the ocean just south of the edge of the world. He has been published in several literary magazines and plans a short story collection sometime before the Andromeda Galaxy collides with ours and … 

And it is eleven am and my father says “Fuck” as the line of cars in front may ruin our chances of a decent seat and so he says “Fuck” once more and reverses, then drives half on the road and half on the pavement as we overtake at will. My father is usually a most cautious driver but today a ticket or an accident are well worth the peril.

 We finally arrive at the stadium and we park and pay and my father takes my hand before a gruff, “God I forgot how old you’ve got,” and releases once more as I follow in his footsteps toward the ticket line and entry into ground most sacred in a country where rugby is religion.

My father pays for our tickets and though we are in the cheap seats we arrive early enough to get the middle aisle which is of great relief to my father and therefore of great relief to me. My father has a flask of whiskey in a jacket pocket, “Don’t tell your mother,” and he takes a quick swig as we make our way up concrete steps and the crowd becomes a multitude and I keep as close to my father as my ten-year-old pride allows.

The ticket reads New Zealand V Australia but we all know we are here to watch the noble All Blacks defeat the devious and dastardly Wallabies. The afternoon is crisp without the cold and the grass is green with only the odd patch of mud as a ‘fuck-you middle-finger’ to the grounds man.

And yet, joy upon joy, my father and I are aware of the truth that underlies the truth - we are here not only to see the All Blacks do battle but also to see the new fullback, Christian Cullen, who blew his opponents away during the domestic season and is now bringing those same miraculous manoeuvres to the internationals.

Cullen has been difficult to describe even for journalists who ply their trade by dint of such description. He is swift and beguiling within a game that makes men of boys. Where collision is paramount Cullen skirts reason to flit and skate across the field, the way Ali would float and skip while men lumbered to keep the lad in check. In a sport where big men hit big men Ali brought a beauty to the feint, so Cullen brings a beauty to the angle, the slip, the step. Like a conman whose jive is so fluid the moment you realize all is not on the level he’s gone, leaving you, the sucker, in his wake.

Some thought he was too much the running fullback, many muttered ‘come a hard tackle the boy will be revealed in the man,’ and yet these predictions came awry on debut against the ferocious Samoans, when he was the recipient of a tackle around the forehead and fell cold, headfirst into the mud. Watching on television my father and I both held our breath, but Cullen simply kneeled, then stood and staggered back to position, ending the game with a trio of tries that gave warning to future opponents.

I open my backpack and retrieve a bag of chicken chips and am reminded “They’re to last you the game, don’t come and cry to me when they run out,” and place them back inside and resolve to wait till kick-off to enjoy.

A man staggers to the seat next to my father and slurs a “Gidday” and my father looks him up and down before announcing that he’ll, “Have no fucken drunk around his kid,” and the man takes a beat and head slung low turns and finds a seat two rows down.

And the anthem plays and we stand and sing as only New Zealanders sing, in a manner most reserved. The All Blacks perform the Haka, the Aussies stand their ground, the ref blows his whistle and all hell breaks loose.

I look to God as he points out the holes in the opposition backline, each and every courageous tackle of our boys in black, the Aussies are constantly offside while our boys obey the letter of the law – except when provoked in which case an uppercut or elbow is more than encouraged.

And I am halfway through my bag of chips within minutes but leave the Pepsi in the backpack, I have learnt from experience there is nothing more intimidating than joining a room full of adults all pissing into a trough come halftime.

And the Aussies kick for position and the ball goes to Zinzan who double skips a pass to Cullen in his own twenty two, eighty metres out from the opposition try line, and we all hope for a step and a shimmy at best, to make it past the gain line and take the tackle and set the ball up for the flankers … and Cullen breaks through a tackle and steps past another, and suddenly the field opens up and he does not run so much as glide ever so effortlessly down the field as another and yet another tries in vain to grab a limb, a flap of jersey, a neck if it comes to it. And Cullen beats all and finally there are but thirty metres to go but three defenders to beat and he steps inside and outside and inside once more as the defenders search over shoulder to see only that he has deceived them once more and as the try line beckons each defender finally sees the ploy and converge on Cullen and all three tackle at once but he shrugs yet another shoulder and drags them all over the line for a try between the uprights.

There is no applause.

During the feat there were shouts and screams to rival any tent of revival yet when he dives over the line the crowd as one turn silent, unable to process for a moment the fact they have witnessed history, that they will be able to say in all honesty, “I was there when Cullen made that run.”

And then as one the cheers and cries and roars abound and I look to God who simply smiles and takes a swig of whiskey and says, “That’ll be you one day my lad,” and I know he means it at that moment, as improbable as it may seem, and I smile and chew another chip and bathe in the majesty of it all.