Radio Hour, 1964

Mikki Aronoff’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Ekphrastic Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Intima, London Reader, SurVision, Rogue Agent Journal, Popshot Quarterly, The South Shore Review, The Fortnightly Review, Feral, Sledgehammer Lit, Flash Boulevard, The Phare, and elsewhere. A two-time Pushcart nominee for poetry and one for short story, she is also a nominee for Best Microfiction 2022.

Put your hands on the radio, the preacher intones. Feel the warmth of our savior coming through. Aunt Flo scooches out of her rocking chair and inches on bandy legs towards the Bakelite Motorola, the one with the clock in it, the radio the colour of dogshit, what decorators would later call cappuccino. This chilly morning, she wipes her knobby fingers on her apron so the butter and flour she’s mixed for  biscuits won’t clog her pipeline to Jesus.

My aunt once found a dead baby sparrow, wrapped it in a dishtowel and put it on that radio to try to revive it. Years earlier, at the lake, she tried to revive her only child after he swam where he shouldn’t. After that, she turned from more often than towards her husband, the first and only one ever to lay his hands on her fledgling breasts, therefore sealing her fate with a wandering man. When it was his turn, she made no attempt to raise him from the dead. Jesus took them all, she tells me, even though she knows I shut myself down to such talk.

Long before the man she married died, before Aunt Flo found transistor passion and promise, her best friend was auburn-haired Grace, another waitress. After work, they smoked Camels and drank whiskey-laced tea and railed against their wages, their boss, the customers who pinched their butts (even though a better tip came with it.) They stayed pals for years, chose picnics over church, wet their pants laughing over things like the white pubic hair Grace found on her lover one night and plucked to take home. Like a monofilament fishing line, Grace told her. I’ve heard all the stories. So it surprises me on my first visit with Aunt Flo in I don’t know how many years to witness her hands on the radio. Was it strategic for her to schedule my visit at that time, perhaps an attempt to curb what she calls my post-divorce crazies, turn me towards God? 

After the program with her face shining, Aunt Flo pulls me into the kitchen . She catches me staring as she opens the oven door, her left hand in tremor, precision no longer possible. She stoops over, picks the biscuits up off the floor, places them on a platter, tears one open, hands me salvation.

Mudflats

Matt Barrett holds an MFA in Fiction from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and his stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Best Microfiction 2022, SmokeLong Quarterly, River Teeth, The Minnesota Review, Contrary, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, and Wigleaf, among others. He lives in Pennsylvania with his wife and two sons and teaches creative writing at his undergraduate alma mater, Gettysburg College.

The mother, who digs through the garbage for clams, hears her son reading to a boy she assumes is her grandson. Today she hopes today to find blueberry cake or soft-shell crab, but even the shrimp tails are picked clean. Her son, who cradles his child on a dock overlooking the harbor, knows his mother is watching him. He reads passionately to the boy, who laughs when he deepens his voice to sound like a sea monster. He does this both for his son’s sake and his mother’s, so she knows, in whatever synapses remain, that he is still okay. They are all okay, and he makes his son laugh to prove this.

-

When she disappeared the first time, he found her hunting for food like a heron, cautiously stalking the mudflats. He called to her from afar. It was the first he’d seen his mother fly and squawk and circle him. When she landed at his feet, he asked her for forgiveness.

-

Now, when she is finished digging, she lands on the table beside them. She has not looked at her grandson much—he is big, just like his daddy, with pale green eyes like the sea. The sound of their laughter sways with the dock. She listens for the bell at sea, gauges it like a metronome to match the rhythm of their voices, and disappears again.

-

He’d needed to go find himself. She begged him not to leave her. At night, in a tent beneath his favorite stars, he counted the sound of spring peepers, chirping, as lights glittered above him in the darkness. He understood it then. The interconnectedness, the mutability of things. When he returned to find his mother transformed, he understood that, too. He opened her door and she left.

-

Alone with his son, he lays the book down and counts boats with him in the harbor. They have not finished their mussels or the corn on the cob cut in-half. It is quiet but not silent here. Even the chill in the air has a sound. The buoy out to sea, the distant squawk. When they walk the mudflats in the afternoon, the boy buries his empty shells, hoping this is all they need to breathe.

Invasive Species

Cressida Blake Roe is a biracial writer. Her fiction can be found in X-R-A-Y, Chestnut Review, The Citron Review, Stone of Madness Press, and elsewhere.

The sky beat like open wings at three in the afternoon when we stopped at the gas pump in the last town with a name and you bought us scorpion lollypops. Provisions, you said with your false humor. Meaning: (1), supplies for a journey, and (2), insurance against a known liability. The liability was the nonexistence of definitions. I wasn’t definitive enough for you, hovering between identities like the suspended Y of the brittle insect, catatonic in sugar syrup. I stared in fascination at the one you gave me, wishing I knew how the candy makers first came up with the idea, or if it had been only an accidental encounter of matter. I felt some fellow sympathy for this confectionary freak.

When the car ran out of gas halfway to nowhere, you invoked both conditions: last one to reach the stinger pushes the car the first five miles. 

Somehow, I didn’t lose, despite the strange rapture of self-consumption. You would rather burn out your muscles than your tongue. This was the time I traded for the privilege of sitting shotgun in your beat-up Subaru and cradling your soft vintage jacket, which deposited the dust of other deserts over my lap. I slipped it on, hoping it might finally contain me. But it was only a reel of corduroy, after all. I looked like a kid playing dress-up, face sexless and obscure, and it made me think the mountains desired me more than your empty arms do.

After those purgatorial miles, the dust, untouched by the paternalism of boot soles, started tasting serpentine in our mouths. I jumped out of the cab to join you in your labor behind the taillights, where we traded verses of Beatles songs we only half remembered. We made up the rest, and the words, hanging between truth and falsehood, sounded a little too much like real life.

A little closer to nowhere in the middle of the dark, you lit a cigarette. The flame reflected two points of light, waist-high among the creosote, that you ignored, disliking the reminder of all the wildness you were unable to tame. I wrapped myself more tightly in your jacket, my skin bristling against the rough weave, but I ran when the first howls broke across the sky. I ran after you, chasing your terror into the night, to join the bones shining white under a paper moon. But I went back, at the end, to put out the fallen cigarette butt. It might have started a fire and destroyed more than you ever could. I ground it out so well, no glow remained to glint on the points of my teeth.

AURAL, GESTURAL, SPATIAL 

Sean Ennis is the author of CHASE US: Stories (Little A) and his fiction has recently appeared in Maudlin House, Hobart, X-R-A-Y, Diagram and Bending Genres. More of his work can be found at seanennis.net

Rejoice with me, I have beaten mania. There’s this trick I have of lowering the bar. My student athlete, Wes, is sulking because I won’t tell him the answers to this quiz question: “The conductor of an orchestra primarily uses this mode of communication: a) aural b) gestural or c) spatial.” There’s a number of problems here, not the least of which is that I don’t know the answer. Also, Wes has never been to the orchestra, nor does he have any great sense of what a conductor does. Of course, these are some of the things I like about Wes.

The weather is homely. The weather is lonesome in winter here. No songbirds or thunder. The window above my computer is just a gray sheet.  We left our holiday lights up, and because they are up, we left them on. 

Quiz failed, Wes leaves sore with no inclination to google “orchestra” or wonder for even a second longer what the word “aural” might mean. I am filled with joy. I’m waving my hands in space and, like, whooping. My job is sometimes just cosigning what people have no interest in. It’s ok, Wesley.

I know the check-engine light is on in my car because it has been to the mechanic three times and they charge $100 to turn it off. Enigmatically, they insist the problem is not the engine. I’ve warned them—so gruff. I mean,  I do hope one day Wes goes to the orchestra and feels the power of the baton on his own terms. Regardless, on the last day of the semester, it will be summer, and we’ll mock the professor together. 

When I find Grace in the hallways of the house, she is calling out her phone’s name. She has her hands cupped around her mouth like she is deep in some wooded valley. If there are degrees of being lost, the phone is only slightly—she just had it! As a professor herself, she knows everything else about the world, except the location of her phone.

I call her to help and it rings somewhere.

A Tree That Starts with H 

Jennifer Evans (she/her) lives in Boston. Her work has appeared in Longleaf Review and Outlook Springs.

I couldn’t sleep and I made it your problem, so you told me to name trees alphabetically in my head. And before I could say no that won’t work, that’s dumb, I’m no tree girl, I thought: Apple. Birch– bone-barked and papery–popped in my mind next. C is for Cedar. Then Dogwood, Elm, Fig, and Ginkgo trilled one after the other like a run of notes on the piano, and I thought: look at me go, perhaps I am a tree girl after all. But when I arrived at the letter H, I couldn’t think of a single genus or species. Finally, I considered hibiscus–but is there a hibiscus tree? Is it a flower, or plant? What was the difference between those things? I wasn’t sure it counted, even if I was my own judge, and kept searching. I started rattling random words in my head, hoping one would invoke the name of a tree. I sleepily thought of a Hamburger Tree and pictured its scrabble of skybound twigs dripping with the weight of meat. I thought of Homer Tree, with a robed bard underneath spinning stories to an audience cast in its leafy shade. And then, when I really started searching my mind, I thought of His and Hers trees, a shiny silver bar drilled into the trunks of each so that clean, monogrammed towels could be draped. I thought of the Happy tree boasting songbirds and the Hidden Tree, which grew upside down in the dirt, its tangle of roots bristling above ground like live wires. I thought of Heaven and Hell trees, of Husband and Housewife trees, of Hetero and Homo trees, and before I knew it, there I was again, stuck deep in the split forest of my mind. Now I really couldn’t sleep, so I guess this was a dumb idea after all, but you were snoring and I was still in the woods. So I imagined walking into a glade of Hallelujah trees, big-armed and sure, who all raised their fingertips up to hold the sun and whose leaves shimmered like tambourines. But even this did not entirely comfort me, so when I closed my eyes and pictured myself in the woods again, this time I did not label a thing around me. No tree had no name. Instead, I simply listened to buds peeling in sunlight until I found rest.

When the Wind Blows Cold Through Our Town,

On the Sill of Morning’s Window,

& 

The Circus Came to Town from the West

Kevin Grauke is the author of Shadows of Men (Queen's Ferry Press), winner of the Steven Turner Award from the Texas Institute of Letters. His fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared (or are forthcoming) in journals such as The Threepenny Review, The Southern Review, Quarterly West, and Columbia Journal. He’s a Contributing Editor at Story, and he teaches at La Salle University in Philadelphia. Twitter: @kevingrauke

When the Wind Blows Cold Through Our Town

When the wind blows cold through our town, it carries the iron perfume of the abattoirs, turns bumbershoots into baskets of rain, whistles obscene shanties through the sewers, yanks the ropes of steeple bells like the pigtails of the prettiest girl, rattles the forks in the kitchen drawers until the old folks curse into their Bibles, strips paint from the door of the whorehouse, unlocks the hoosegow and frees all the mugs, makes kites of businessmen’s trilbies, plays “Taps” in B-flat on the war vet’s bugle, and whips bruises across the face of the moon with what’s left of the sad rag gibbeted long ago to the flagpole and then forgotten.

When the wind blows cold through our town, winos splay themselves like penitents across every steam grate, candles tuck away their flames, prostitutes seek refuge from its fingers in junkyard wrecks, coalmen arm themselves with truncheons, and Pete pawns his fiddle for fifteen minutes alone with the town’s last Franklin stove. 

When the wind blows cold through our town, crack does the butcher’s cleaver and crack does the smithie’s anvil, freeze to the street do the moon’s shadows, and fill with ice do the pockets of every man the night finds alone.

When the wind blows cold through town, the one-legged girl unfastens her stump for kindling, the gravediggers head south to find softer earth, the barn’s dangling ropes petrify like bones, the kettle’s whistle shatters into empty teacups, the grifter’s dice splinter like ice, the hands of the tower clock swirl backward into the past, the moon’s flag-bruised face blackens with frostbite, and I, on a park bench, well, I wheeze my last beneath yesterday’s headline: Happy New Year!

On the Sill of Morning’s Window 

On the sill of morning’s window, the town’s nine crows cough like a choir of tubercular barflies. Swatted with brooms, their wings beat the winds out to where Blind Joe Rudd was buried without his cane, his torn King James, or a fare-thee-well. Before Death tapped him on the shoulder, he had nearly cured his sickly self with a concocted dram of kerosene gin imbued with the juices of an old bandage and pages from Deuteronomy, but Death did tap, and Blind Joe fell like October’s last acorns.

On the boot-stomped, mephitic mud of Blind Joe Rudd’s unmarked mound, the nine crows strut to the wheezes of an accordion seeping from a taxi waiting to ferry the next rider downward, but they ignore the ticking meter—nothing but a tin bucket beneath a weeping pipe—now that the moon is awake and watching. She washed her face special for the occasion, to shine all the brighter on the black nine’s final salute there on the lip of midnight’s casket.

The Circus Came to Town from the West

The circus came to town from the west, the killer from the east. This was Thursday. With a patched tent and a limping clown: the circus; with a smile and a straight razor in his sock: the killer. In the morning, the sun refused to report to duty; she called in sick with ptomaine, or maybe scurvy. Hungover and pissed, the moon worked overtime. When the clown and the killer collided at the racetrack, they each put money on Bend Sinister, who had to be put down on the straightaway with a slug to the brain, having splintered a fetlock and coming in last. The clown, whose name was Down, cried.The killer, who had no name, whistled. To him, not even money was better than blood and pain and wild-eyed terror. He treated the clown to double whiskies at the Splintered Pulpit, listened to his flimsiest dreams and foulest fears, sang roundelays with him in the pissy alley, held him up as he stumbled, held him steady as he retched, held him close as he cried, and then held him up after slitting his throat to put an end to yet another week.

The Almost-Kiss

Rosaleen Lynch, an Irish community worker and writer in the East End of London with words in lots of lovely places and can be found on Twitter @quotes_52 and 52quotes.blogspot.com

Kiss me, I say to the boy that was once you, sitting on a park bench on Primrose Hill, looking at the city of London splayed out before you, at your feet, high-rise buildings and church spires, puncturing the low-rise sky, and your head tips back towards me, behind you, standing over you, like an angel you say, and I lean and grasp your stretched out arms, lying the length of the back of the seat, like a crucifix, and I bend and lower myself onto your upside-down mouth, tilting to fit, and as our lips lift, about to touch, a stranger shouts out, get a room, and we come apart, look at him, look, look, look at him, and the stranger says, what you looking at, and we look, my hands holding your arms pushing up against them, your hands grabbing the back of the seat, fingers digging in between the wooden slats, inviting splinters, and the stranger says, God knows the likes of you can't be together, and we look at each other, and your arms soften under my hands, and yours release, and it's only now we tell each other, how we were never sure if he was as mean as we thought he was, and how that almost-kiss was the first and the best we never had, and that maybe proving a stranger wrong, was what got us to our now; kiss me, I say to the boy that was once you.

The Stories in the Collection

James Miller (he/him) is a native of the Texas Gulf Coast. He is published in Best Small Fictions 2021 (Sonder Press) and in the Marvelous Verses anthology (Daily Drunk Press). Recent pieces have appeared or are forthcoming in Kissing Dynamite, On the Seawall, Phoebe, Yemassee, Elsewhere, The Madison Review, Sledgehammer Lit, Neologism, Press Pause, Coal Hill Review, The Shore and Indianapolis Review. Follow on Twitter @AndrewM1621

The stories in the collection are mostly one paragraph long. I read a dozen on the pot, while mother and brother argue over packing boxes.

It is time to toss the old My Own Private Idaho poster. For years it hung over the fold-out couch in my room, dead Phoenix staring down at stains of cat pee and coffee on the cushions. June heat forces my eyes shut as I cross the parking lot to the dumpster. 

I say mother and brother because their real names are dry like fig newtons. Mother insists brother should stay home tonight, we have to get started real early next morning, drivethru hashbrowns, that sort of morning, and she’ll take first shift on the uHaul with its shit brakes. I volunteer to join her in the van, and everyone knows it’s because I want the decent AC. That leaves brother for the monster bluetruck following behind. No one bothers to check its juices. It’s like we want the truck to die on the road.

Brother of course doesn’t stay home tonight. He calls from ER around 1 AM, left hand broken he won’t say how. The cast forces most fingers down, but the middle stands up for stiff service. All the way up Texas that finger pokes out his monster bluetruck window, and when we offer to take our turn driving, he always puts it off. Next stop, next piss. I know the tape deck in the truck is dead, and the radio has a rhythmic hiss, one furred burst every 13 seconds.

At the Texas-Oklahoma line we stop for Cheetos and photos. I take one of mother and brother rocking a celebration song, like they’re mid-leap in an old Toyota commercial. The monster bluetruck is struggling by now, we can all hear it when brother turns the engine. But mother doesn’t say anything. I can tell she has a song in her head, this time one with three verses and a bridge.

Drizzle, outside Oklahoma City. Night is coming in, behind the wet. Brother pulls over on the interstate, locks the monster bluetruck’s heavy door, slops in new mud, scrapes his thin boots, hops in the van, changes our station. We find a diner, pull in and park. The décor is vintage 1957, pink and green swirls. The marquee says Open 26 Hours a Day. Brother says they could be Martians, because the day on Mars is about 39 minutes longer than ours. I point out that this still leaves one hour and 21 minutes unaccounted for.  

We stay at the La Quinta next to the Martian diner. I sit on the pot with the collection, stories about drowned cities of the Gulf Coast. Sharp slaps across the kitchen counter, stale Stouffers Swedish meatballs, sweet tea in gallon plastic jugs. Each page streaked with squirts of whiteness.

Mother and brother are sitting on their beds, flipping through their phones. “We need M&Ms for tomorrow,” he says. Mother agrees: “Plain for me, remember. The 7-11 is right across the street.” 

I stand outside our room, thinking about Kansas City, a half-day’s drive away. Mother has an adjunct gig at the community college, where brother and I have promised to take classes. I’ve already looked at the catalog, the audio engineering track. There will be a drum set there, and plenty of free studio time. 

Every day I choose a few fucked up words to spin in my head. I let out a metal bellow, with plain and peanut in my pockets: came out and went into the pigs… came out and went into the pigs.

Air Bubbles

Marilyn Parr began her writing career as a political journalist in South Africa, where she spent her formative years. After a stint living off the grid in the rainforests of Patagonia and teaching and studying languages in Barcelona, she moved to London where she worked at ITV. Now settled in Bath, UK her writing explores our relationships with each other and the planet. She holds a first class degree in English Literature and obtained her MA in Creative Writing with distinction. In 2021, one of her short stories came second in the Cambridge Short Story Prize. She is currently working on a novel about pregnancy loss.

We meet at the shore, where white horses fling themselves onto the grit. The water is ill. Grey-green. Like the sea is a wheelbarrow in which some god is churning quicklime. I wish you wouldn’t stare at the sky like that; we won’t find any love up there. I wish I could stop the wind from whipping your clothes around the sharp angles of your body. I wish we could be nestled on the sofa, watching shit TV and drinking that sweet rosé you like. I'd drink gallons of it now if it meant you could stay. Instead, we turn our heads from left to right, scanning the beach. In the distance, there’s a lumpen shape. We make our way, clutching each other, our footsteps swallowed by the sand.

As we get closer, we see that the lump is a boat. We must get inside. We say it at the same time, which makes us smile. There’s such bravery in showing our teeth. You lean on my hand to step over the gunwale, as light as a ghost, and I worry that your next exhalation will dissolve you. The place to sit is a plank, not the bed of feathers or padded velvet armchair you deserve. All I can do is tuck a blanket around your legs. Over your shoulders I arrange a shawl into which I have sewn pebbles wrapped in photographs of our happiest moments together — extra weight to keep you on this earth. Into your palm I press the handle of a lantern. You hold it out in front of you, a pale haze swinging in the wind. 

I push off. The boat pitches and rolls as I struggle to haul myself over the side. I wish I’d learned more about rowing before now. When you get tired of holding the lantern, you set it down. I carry on turning and turning the oars, smelling iodine and strange medicine. The sea swells beneath us. We’re being lifted up, higher and higher, until we’re sailing on air. Looking down at ordinary life from up here makes us giddy. We’re laughing! Just like we used to when the days were bright with sunshine and tasted like ice-creams on the beach.

The boat crashes back into the water. Cold spray slaps our cheeks. We don’t know where we’re going. There are waves in all directions, swellings as far as the eye can see. The lantern has disappeared. You turn your back to me, whispering a truth; that you left your faith on the shore, an anchor ripping a hole in your heart.    

We're taking on water, which I cup in my hands and throw overboard but it’s too much, too much water and you're sinking, your arms folded across your chest, the shawl with its useless fringe of rocks dragging you down. You’re falling to the bottom of the ocean, where the undulating tentacles of sea anemones reach out to hold you forever. 

I dive down, yank the shawl from your body. Take my hand! Swim! We must swim in the direction of the air bubbles. Follow them, those silvery globes, wobbling a way up to the surface. 

Ballet Lessons

Kristen Siegel (she/her) was born and raised on (never 'in') Cape Cod, Massachusetts, though she never tried her first lobster until she was twenty-two. She graduated with a BA in English from Duke University and is currently pursuing her MFA at Emerson College. She was awarded the 2021 Gish Jen Fiction Fellowship from the Writers’ Room of Boston and also received the top prize in fiction for the Emerson Graduate Awards for her short story, 'Gratitude Journal?' in 2021.

On Saturdays, we watch the older girls rehearse the snow scene. Miss Olivia brings us to the big studio with the wooden floors and sits us in front of the mirror — no sweaty backs on the glass, ladies! For twenty minutes, we gawk at the older girls in their pink satin pointe shoes. They look like music-box ballerinas with their oil-slick buns and gauzy skirts that flutter when they pirouette. Sometimes, they wear the white tutus with sequins that catch the light and sparkle like diamonds when they leap. Miss Olivia tells us that if we keep practicing our relevés, someday we’ll be in the snow scene too. 

Most of us have been Party Children for three years now. Party Children aren’t bad parts if you get to be a Party Girl, but you have to be in Ballet 4 to be a Party Girl and to be in Ballet 4, you have to be ten and your mom has to pay for extra “company classes” on Friday nights which she won’t do because she’s already paying “half a mortgage to that woman every year.” So we’re Party Boys in the Nutcracker again this year, which means itchy velvet jackets and black leggings, and no fake ponytails with ringlet curls pinned so deeply into our buns that our scalps feel like they’re being munched by fire ants. 

Miss Olivia presses play on the stereo and chai-cough-ski crackles from the speakers. The flute trills and the older girls glide across the floor on legs longer than our entire bodies. It’s hard to imagine they were ever Party Boys too. Party Boys don’t wear pointe shoes with ribbons tied in bows. 

After rehearsal, the older girls go to their dressing room that smells like hairspray and those floral perfumes with names like Liquid Seduction that we’re not allowed to wear until we’re sixteen. Our moms are waiting for us in their cars so they don’t get “guilted into working backstage again,” but we stay behind to eavesdrop anyway. We like listening to the older girls as much as we like watching them dance. They gossip about all sorts of things we don’t understand like I.U.Ds, whether “hand stuff counts???” and how you can drop a few pounds with Miralax. Today, they whine about dead pointe shoes, how unfair casting was, how they’re too fat to close their snow scene corsets on the tightest hook. That’s another thing we don’t understand — none of the older girls look like the overweight people on the brochures from the doctor that say things like “Outrun Childhood Obesity” and “Eat Healthy, Have Fun.” They’re just like our ballerina Barbies (minus the boobies). 

At home tonight, we’ll ask our moms what “inter-mitten fasting” means. Is that  when the older girls don’t eat before recitals, and have to sit down between dances? Or like when they won’t take extra cupcakes after the Nutcracker bake sale ends, and Miss Olivia says we can help ourselves? Maybe it’s something we need to learn, like pas de chats and “stage presence,” so we can be in Ballet 4. While our moms steam broccoli for dinner, muttering about “the lessons this studio is teaching you kids ,” we practice our relevés and suck in our bellies until our ribs poke out like the older girls’. We can’t wait to be like the older girls.

Steakhouses, Earthquakes & Brothels: A Jetsetter’s Guide to Finding Love

Eric Scot Tryon is a writer from San Francisco. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Glimmer Train, Willow Springs, Pithead Chapel, Los Angeles Review, Pidgeonholes, Monkeybicycle, Cease, Cows, Longleaf Review, Berkeley Fiction Review, and elsewhere. Eric is also the Founding Editor of Flash Frog. Find more information at www.ericscottryon.com or on Twitter @EricScotTryon.

In Colombia, cafes leave your empty beer bottles on the table as a way to count up your tab. Paula and I take our seat outside next to a table where two men sit. There must be 20-30 bottles between them, but they seem lucid enough. Upright. Paula orders two beers and a half dozen empanadas, and the way Spanish dances out of her mouth I fall in love with her over and over and over. The men next to us are either arguing or telling jokes too loudly, but then they laugh a big belly laugh, and it is here I notice they have more bottles on the table than teeth in their mouth. 

In the Czech Republic, there are bars with individual beer taps at each table. Refill as you please, but the meter is counting. The bill at the end is always a surprise. But the American tourists who stumble out and vomit in Dvouletky Alley, their needle hardly moves. Adela and I slide into a booth, and she flashes me a smile that tells me she will drink me under the table, and there aren’t enough words in any language for how much I love that. Behind us are three loud men who will later get into a fistfight outside the bar. Some blood will drop, but everyone goes home laughing.  

In America, there are steakhouses that offer giant steak challenges. Finish in under an hour and the meal is free. The chunky hostess brings Jennifer and me to a round wooden table, and as we are given oversized laminated menus, the manager with the microphone announces that Ted McIlveney from Chesterton, Indiana has accepted the challenge. With a spotlight on him, he grins a wide grin that is more Texas than Indiana and tucks a napkin into the collar of his red and blue plaid shirt. Ninety-six ounces of cow. A baked potato. Steamed vegetables and a dinner roll. Sixty minutes. The patrons erupt with applause. 

In Japan, there are brothels with nothing but sex dolls. Choose your doll type: size, color, hole locations, positions, there are more options than one might think, pay the man up front and choose an open booth. Himari and I stand on the sidewalk outside the karaoke place watching older men slink into the brothel like cats. Later she will sing a version of  “I Wanna be Sedated” under flashing neon lights that will make me denounce everything I’ve ever believed. A group of American teenagers show up. Loud, cackling, pushing one another in through the red door of the brothel. 

In Sweden, there are bars made entirely of ice. Ice tables and ice chairs, ice sculptures and ice bar tops, even the glasses you drink from are ice. Annika and I are handed complimentary hats and gloves as we enter. Twenty-three degrees. But as I bundle up, preparing for a blizzard, Annika is unraveling the scarf from around her neck, and her thin icy collarbone is the reason museums are built. There is a blond couple in the corner making out. Their visible breath like a ballet of smoke between their lips.

In Indiana, Jennifer orders shrimp scampi, I opt for the chicken fajitas, and Ted is twenty-five minutes into his steak challenge when our food arrives. A third of his steak is gone, sitting hard like a softball in the pit of his stomach no doubt. The potato and dinner roll are both half eaten, and the steamed vegetables haven’t been touched. Most people don’t care. Not yet. Too early. There is a buzz of conversation highlighted by the clinking of silverware, and I watch Jennifer peek on Ted between bites of her own. Meanwhile, Ted is sweating at the forehead, his cheeks bulge with meat, and the corners of his mouth glisten with grease. 

In Spain, there is a restaurant that simulates large earthquakes throughout your meal. You never know when they’re coming, but a 7.8 shaker is no joke. Carmen and I take our seat with caution, careful not to get too comfortable. Conversation is light. Dishware is heavy. It is while forking the third mussel from my paella when the first one hits. Lights go out. People scream. I grip the table edge as Carmen grips my arm. We clench our teeth and ours eyes and we wait to die together. When stillness returns, some break out in hysterical laughter. Others cry. Sangria has doused most of Carmen’s blue dress, and as our eyes meet we feel like soulmates simply for having survived. 

In Kelsey’s Steak House, they all chant: “Eat, Ted, eat! Eat, Ted, eat!” Four minutes remain on the digital clock above Ted’s table. The sweat on his forehead has multiplied and traveled: his hair, his armpits and his neck. He drips. There is one bite of dinner roll, one bite of potato and two florets of broccoli all taunting him from a side plate. “Eat, Ted, eat!” They pump their fists in the air, gripping forks and steak knives. Everyone has their eyes on the steak. There looks to be maybe 5-6 bites left. But not to Ted. He cuts them in three large grisly chunks. His eyes can barely open, and his face is pained. Something dribbles down his chin, and I turn my gaze away from Ted and his 3 minutes, 41 seconds, and look at Jennifer. Her brown curls bounce about her shoulder as she leans up out of her chair nearly standing. There is a dinner roll in her raised hand that she holds tight like a baseball. “Eat, Ted, eat!” she screams as if her life depends on it, and she has convinced me that it does.

Catastrophizing

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Nice Story

Brooke Randel is a writer and associate creative director in Chicago. Her writing has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best Microfiction, and published in Gigantic Sequins, Hypertext Magazine, Jewish Fiction, Pidgeonholes, Smokelong Quarterly, and elsewhere. Find more of her work at brookerandel.com.

Catastrophizing

When Matt calls and says first of all, everything is fine and I picture both his legs broken, splayed on the side of a street with smashed beer bottles scattered around his body, is that panic at work, or a vivid imagination? When he says Mom felt a pain in her gut this morning so I took her to the hospital, and I picture the mail carrier’s sagging shoulder bag, dragging from the weight of the envelope holding our future medical debt, is that projection, or a hyper-realistic premonition? When Mom moans like a jackal in the background and I picture the pile of notebooks on her desk and wonder which one might have her passwords written down so I can hack into her work email and let her boss know she won’t be coming in on Monday, and also how does life insurance work, is that general anxiety, or meticulous planning? When Matt says she just had her appendix removed and is a little groggy from surgery, but seriously, she's fine, please stop crying, and I picture a scalpel cutting my own skin open, a port exposing my organs to the outside world; a part of me excised, bagged, and labeled; a tube whisking away fluid like we’re all supposed to be deserts inside; is that inherited trauma, or is it standard-issue empathy? When Lexi takes the phone from Matt and says look she can have visitors, you can come see her, it’s not contagious, and I picture a nurse pulling me aside to let me know it is contagious and they’d like to run a few tests on me and it shouldn’t take more than a day or two, is that a repressed memory, or something I saw on TV once? When I get in the Uber driver’s red Toyota Corolla and he asks with a grin if I’m going to my boyfriend’s and I picture the car turning toward a side street where my legs are splayed, phone smashed and pants scattered, is that hyper-vigilance, or the consequence of being a woman who reads the news? When the second Uber driver drops me off at the hospital doors and says have a nice day and I picture the day as a doorway that once crossed, that’s it, everything’s different, lighting change, set change, collective universe change, is that self-destructive thinking, or a vision of the future? When Matt and Lexi clear some room next to Mom’s hospital bed so she can see me, hold my hand and say I told him not to call you, is that cold-hearted coddling, or the kindest thing anyone has said all day? 

Nice Story

I wrote a story and read it aloud to my parents, who both laughed at different parts. What's so funny? I wondered. Your worldview, their chuckles seemed to say.

The story went like this: a girl was digging around in her mother's closet when she found her father's pistol. She stared at its textured handle, the curve of the trigger. When she looked deep into the inky black barrel, she fell into a wormhole, landing in a baseball field in Iowa. She was by herself, no one around. She walked to home plate and cried and cried and cried. A cornfield grew around her, covering the infield, watered by her tears alone.

Now that’s an imagination, Mom said. A wormhole!

I’ll say, Dad said. My gun in Mom’s closet!

It’s true I found Dad’s gun once and it wasn’t in Mom’s closet. It was in the garage with her winter clothes, bagged and boxed. And it’s true I’ve never fallen into a wormhole, only seasonal depression, which is harder to see.

I’m making corn chowder for dinner, Mom said, leaving the room.

Nice story, Kiddo, Dad said, leaving the house.