American Terror

Vincent is breaking up with Jack.

He sits in the car, staring at the green doors of his high school. Jack will be done with track practice at 6:30 PM, and Vincent will drive him home. Jack will blabber on about Demi Lovato supposedly quitting music while Vincent bites his cuticles and steers with his left hand. He will pull up in front of Jack’s house, and Jack will try to kiss him. Vincent will not reciprocate, and then he will end their relationship.

Because it’s that easy.

Vincent and Jack grew up going to school together. When they were in eighth grade, Jack asked Vincent to be his date at the winter formal. Jack wore an ice blue tie with a white button down shirt and navy suit. Vincent wore a red suit and black button down because why not? They shared their first dance and their first kiss. They went to Waffle House with some friends after the formal, and then they made out in Vincent’s car until curfew at 12am.

Jack’s father was some big shot at a steel plant, and he’d hire Jack to work during the summers. He would take Vincent up to the rooftop of one of the abandoned warehouses, and they’d drink root beer and eat beef jerky. That’s where Jack said, “I love you,” for the first time, and Vincent said it back even though they were only sixteen years old. You gotta fall for somebody sometime, right?

Jack opens the passenger door and sits down, his hair wet from a locker room shower. Vincent half expects a peck on the cheek, but it doesn’t come. They pull out onto the highway as the sun starts to set. Vincent asks if Jack would like to get something to eat, but he declines. The silence is palpable; Vincent’s heart pulses a little faster because he feels like Jack knows he’s going to break up with him.

“Vince, I think we need to talk,” Jack says.

Vincent forces his eyes not to widen as he asks, “What about?”

“Us.”

Jesus, he does know, Vincent thinks.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about what our future looks like,” Jack begins. “We’re juniors now, and senior year is gonna be so busy with college applications and SATs and all that.”

He’s going to do this for me, Vincent thinks with George Costanza charm. He nods, furrowing his brow to show he’s hurt, but understands.

“I just think - Vince, stop. STOP!”

A skunk is walking across the road, taking its time in the dark. The beams from the headlights reflect off the white stripe down its back before Vincent runs over it. They feel the skunk collide with the bottom of the car, and then the odor pours in through the vents. Vincent does not slow down.

The silence and stench held onto each other for what felt like hours.

“That was horrible,” Jack says.

“Ugh, yeah, that smell?” Vincent replies.

“No, Vince. That you killed it. You fucking killed it when you could’ve stopped.”

Vincent stares ahead, unsure of how to respond. He’s thinking about the blood that might be on the car, and if the smell if going to go away anytime soon.

“I thought the car was higher. I wasn’t trying to kill it.”

Jack scoffs, folding his arms over his chest and shaking his head. “You thought the car was higher.”

“Whatever. God, I’m sorry.”

Vincent turns into Jack’s subdivision, driving past the neighborhood pool and clubhouse. There’s an older couple out for an evening walk with their golden retriever. He pulls up to Jack’s house and puts the car in park. Jack doesn’t say anything, and he doesn’t move.

Vincent has been spending time alone, pouring over news and Wikipedia articles about guerilla warfare. It’s hard being seventeen and feeling like the only way you can change the world is through violence. Vincent was breaking up with Jack because tomorrow he will detonate the bombs he planted beneath the stage in the gymnasium of their high school. Republican vice presidential nominee Governor Sarah Spoke will be there, and her death will be a great victory for the LGBQT community. How could he ever forget the leaked audio recording of her hatred for “fags and their ilk?” His classmates and teachers will be a necessary sacrifice.

“Hey, I really am sorry for hitting that skunk. I didn’t mean to, I swear,” Vincent says.

“Vince, we need to break up. It’s not just because we’re going to be busy next year. It’s because you’ve been really weird. I mean, I know you’ve been at the school in the middle of the night. What the hell are you doing?”

Vincent feels his heart pounding in his throat. His palms are slick with sweat and he presses them against his thighs, staring at the clock of his dashboard.

“Why were you spying on me?”

“Spying?” Jack asks. “Why the fuck would you share your location with me if you didn’t want me to know where you were?”

Vincent had completely forgotten that they had toggled their phones to share their locations. After months of preparation, he never once thought about Jack wondering what he was doing.

“Forget it. You’re right, Jack. We probably don’t need to see each other anymore.”

“Are you even going to tell me what you’ve been doing at school at fucking four o'clock in the morning for the past two weeks?”

“I’ve been hooking up with Sam Guest,” Vincent blurted out.

Another immeasurable silence before Jack says, “I see. Well, no use crying over your backstabbing ass.”

Jack gets out of the car and shuts the door, stuffing his hands into his pockets as he walks up the driveway to his house.

Vincent thinks about Jack’s dad’s plan to surprise him tomorrow with a trip to the mountains, and how they’ll be three hours up the interstate when the bombs go off and make Vincent a hero in the war against intolerance.


Written by: Natasha Akery
Photograph by: Daniel Vidal

Heuristic

My dear, Trevor. My obedient, idiotic, heuristic son, Trevor. You lived my dying words for all they were worth. And what were they worth? A fastpass to our reunion.

“Life is an experiment,” I said. “Be a good scientist,” I said.

Well, Trevor, you certainly listened. From the day my remains were placed into that sparsely decorated urn, you wore your ill-fitting suit jacket like a lab coat; twirling your pointer finger around in my ashes, and worst of all, TASTING IT. My God, son—is what I would’ve said if that was anyone else bonding with your saliva and sloshing around your tongue. What troubled me most was your playful laughter, as if you farted in a confessional versus technically becoming a cannibal. From that moment on, I knew watching you debauch my overwrought attempt at an eloquent ending would be as painful as it would be entertaining.

Your teens were nothing short of a horror movie, with “DON’T” being my constant refrain: DON’T try to jump onto that trampoline from a third-story window, DON’T sneak into the girl’s bathroom to see the tampon machine, DON’T play ding dong ditch in a trailer park, DON’T text a picture of your pubes to your friends, DON’T spike the prom punch with peach schnapps, and definitely DO NOT be the guy who streaks their high school graduation. Alas, you ignored my protests like the naive characters beaming from a theater projector, and I had no choice but to watch as you narrowly avoided catastrophe time and time again.

My teenage years were spent dominating spelling bees, conquering quiz bowls, cultivating an Elite Tauren Chieftain—it’s a World of Warcraft reference, and I know by your extracurricular activities you wouldn’t get it—not a single demerit to my name. As a matter of fact, I was the valedictorian of my graduating class, and if one of my peers did decide to disrupt my speech by exposing their privates, I was prepared to unleash the perfect quip; “The only thing funny about you, sir, is the size of your genitals.” I assumed it would be a male. I don’t know what I would’ve done if it was a girl. Regardless, no one did, and my speech was flawless. I wish I could say the same for that bright young woman at the top of your class.

I thought maybe, just maybe, you’d grow out of your exploratory phase by the time you reached college—or I’d be used to it by then. HA! Now who’s naive. I expected you, the same kid who tried to get high by smoking pencil shavings and lost their virginity to the sleeve of my old goose down parka, to squash your self-indulgent trial and error in an unsupervised smorgasbord of mind-altering substances and sexually-aware coeds? You know how kids feel awkward watching a sex scene with their parents? Imagine how I felt watching you contort your way through a mixed-gender fivesome—on multiple occasions, mind you. It’s amazing you even made it past your freshman year, with all the drugs you were ingesting and all the sex you were having. But then again, it’s amazing you got into a college in the first place.

To your credit, you did learn one thing during your three semesters of higher education that I never really got the grasp of; the value of friendship. Whenever you were late for class, there was always someone there to give you their notes or knock on your door or forge your name on the attendance sheet. When the dean of admissions sent you packing—saw that coming—your buddies set you up with a job and a bedroom in less than twenty-four hours. And every year, when the anniversary of my death rolled around, you were surrounded by smiling faces deeming you, “The World’s Greatest Scientist.” Yes, those words were emblazoned on the back of your ceremonial lab coat—nice touch, by the way—but I’ve been watching you long enough to know that most of those people were truly there to chase away the lingering sadness of my premature passing.

Hell, you’ve been shown more love and support as the son of a dead man than I experienced on my death bed. To be fair, a bar is a much easier sell than a hospital room, but I would’ve had just as much trouble filling a Super Bowl suite. I’m sure you, me, your mom, your grandmas and grandpas, your aunts and uncles, your cousins, Jim and Judy Johnson, and Stephen from my office would’ve had a blast, but that was about the extent of my friends list. And even some of them missed my funeral—which is probably why you were able to get away with your cremation taste test. Point is, you had a lot of friends. I just wish they were a little less supportive.

Maybe then you wouldn’t have had the money to go to Taiwan. Maybe then you wouldn’t have been introduced to Taiwanese snake whiskey. Maybe then you wouldn’t have bet that gangster you could jump through fire. Maybe then you wouldn’t have tried to collect your winnings? Maybe then, you wouldn’t have a knife in your chest.

What are you going to say to me once your heart stops beating? Are you going to curse me for giving you the thoughtless piece of advice that led you to an early grave? Are you going to berate me for being such a bore, you couldn’t help but take it?

I can’t believe you are LAUGHING. Don’t you realize you are dying? There is blood spurting through your teeth with every chuckle. There is no one around who can save you. This is game over. Every plan you made for the future is no more. Every milestone you hoped to achieve is officially out of reach. Everything you have been working toward your entire life—your career, your family, your retirement fund—will cease to be.

Oh. right. 

See you soon, Trevor. We have some catching up to do.

Written by: Mark Killian
Photo by: Blake Bronstad

The Caravan

The caravan stopped again.

“Two more,” someone near the door shouted. The passengers all groaned and huddled even closer together. Most had been left behind before. Days, weeks, even months spent walking down deserted streets, desperate for a ride to the camp, only to watch their potential salvation speed past, cries of “full up” trailing behind. So they make room now, though it means sitting on laps, and on the floor, and not being able to sit at all.

How did Jonah put it? “Packed in like cattle off to slaughter.” Alec tried to remember if he had ever learned about cattle back in school, but couldn’t summon the image. Perhaps that was what he would have learned in second tier, he thought. He’d never know now. Jonah says that the cattle died off long ago anyway. That’s why being compared to them made Alec uncomfortable, he was afraid he’d share the same fate. Jonah smiled at him when he confessed this secret fear and told him he was a worrier like their mother had been. Alec didn’t like this comparison any better. He did not want to share her fate either.

As the truck began to move again, Alec wondered about the new arrivals, what their lives had been like before. It was a game he played to pass the time and to distract himself from the fear that had started to grow in his belly. The lady was a doctor, he decided. And the man was a baker. No, not a baker. His mother had been a baker and it was best not to think of her. Because if he thought about her too much, he remembered how his mother looked the last time he saw her; tears in her eyes, but not on her face, trying to be strong. How she had told him to be brave and that she loved him and told Jonah to care for him. He remembered how her arm reached out to touch him one last time, before she realized what she was doing and recoiled into herself. There would be no hug goodbye. No kiss. They couldn’t risk it. So it was with a wave that Alec had said goodbye to his sick mother and started on the long walk with Jonah. They were lucky, climbing aboard the then half-full caravan after only a week on the road.

A cough interrupted Alec’s thoughts. The whole truck went still. Another cough. The brakes slammed so hard they fishtailed in the sandy road before coming to a stop. Light filled the truck as someone swung open the doors.

“Who was it?” came a booming voice. Alec recognized the gruff accent of the Commander that had interviewed Jonah and him before their intake. He was a large man with hair covering his face but none on his head. Not even eyebrows. “See, mom was right,” Jonah had whispered to Alec when they had first seen the Commander. “It’s from the treatment!”

Now, Alec ran his hand over his own bare head, a nervous tick he had developed, and waited to hear what would happen next.

“No one’s gonna own up to it huh? Fine then, everybody out. Everybody,” ordered the Commander.

Slowly the mass of people spilled out of the truck. They were separated, the vaccinated, or Baldies, as the Commander called them, on one side of the road, the Untreated, on the other. Still no one had admitted to the cough.

“Look around you. Look at all the people you are putting at risk. You know the cough is the first sign. You know it will progress quickly, that it will begin to spread. And still you stay silent. Coward!” the Commander bellowed. He addressed only the Untreated, the ones that weren’t lucky enough, or rich enough, to get the vaccine. Still, no one came forward.

“Then you leave me no choice. Obviously the scanner we have doesn’t work. Everyone registered clean before we let you on the truck. I cannot bring an infected to the camp. And since I do not know who is sick, I have no other option but to leave you all behind. Baldies in the truck”.

The Untreated began to panic. Children sobbed, men and women began to accuse each other of being the cause for their banishment. An old man simply sat down, defeated, in the dirt on the side of the road.

Then, finally, Alec watched as a man stepped forward, wrenching himself from his wife’s grasp. “It was me. I coughed. I’m sick. Just me though. There is no fever yet, you can feel my head. I have no rash. I am not contagious. My family is not ill, I couldn’t have infected any of the others yet. Please, just leave me behind.”

The Commander himself went to feel the man’s head. He looked him over for the rash. Satisfied, the Commander nodded once at the man. “Fine,” said the Commander. “Everyone back in the truck. But your family sticks by me. The first sign that they’re sick too and it‘s over, you hear? Let’s move.”

The man nodded to his wife, and whispered something to his children. They reached for him but his wife held them back. They would only get a wave as well.

As they boarded the truck, each member of the caravan nodded to the man and wished him well, knowing that he wouldn’t be and that the virus would take him slowly and painfully. They’d all seen it. But for the man’s sake they pretended they hadn’t and said their goodbyes. All but Alec, who avoided the man’s eyes as he boarded the truck behind his brother.

Later, after Jonah had fallen asleep, and the whole truck was quiet, Alec sat up rubbing his head. Over and over he repeated to himself what his mother had said before they left, as she showed Jonah how to shave their heads to look like the Baldies. “You just need to make it to the camp. They have the vaccine there. You just have to make it to the camp. Whatever it takes….”

“Whatever it takes,” Alec whispered to himself, running his hand over the stubble on his burning head. He’d need Jonah to shave it again tomorrow. Alec spent the night watching the now fatherless children sleep, telling himself they would be at the camp soon. They’d all be safe soon. “Whatever it takes”, he whispered again, burying his head into his arm to suppress another cough. Whatever it takes.



Written by: Lindsay Sakatch
Photograph by: Anthony Delanoix

On the Other Side of the Mountain

Trees grew at the mountain’s snow-covered base, left undisturbed by a less primitive race of people. To Jeannie, the summit didn’t seem so far away, but the path took a snake-like route, adding far more miles than a direct path to the top. The group paused momentarily to take in the view, then continued on the frosty trail.

“I can’t believe we’ve hiked thirty miles already and we’re only at the base of the thing!” Archer’s younger sister Amie laughed and shook her head.

Jeannie sat watching the sunset while the brother and sister built the fire. It didn’t bother her that she barely knew them or why they were willing to help her; the fact was, she needed help. Archer the navigator and Amie the nature expert, the perfect traveling pair. She was just the tagalong. She shivered remembering how cold she was when Archer had found her. How long this journey was taking her. Amie interrupted her thoughts.

“I can’t believe we haven’t had one blizzard! This might just be easier then I thought! Just think, the three of us fighting our way to the top of the mountain. Will we make it? That’s up to chance.”

What a flair for the dramatics--nothing like her brother, thought Jeannie.

That night, Jeannie dreamed of fireplaces and wooden walls, felt the utter joy when she saw…

“Sorry to wake you--” Archer’s head appeared in the tent flap. “We need to get going. There’s a storm coming.” He backed out then called, “You’d better hurry.”

Snow had fallen so thick they could barely pick up their feet. Archer half carried Amie over snowdrifts so deep her tiny frame sank to her waist.

Jeannie said nothing the entire three miles, and by the time the sky showed the pink signs of sunrise, she was exhausted.

“Please, can’t we just rest for a while?” she begged. For once, Amie said nothing and plopped down on a rock next to Jeannie. Jeannie tucked her icy fingers under her arms, looking for heat that wasn’t there. She had never thought she was crazy until now. Her goal had always blinded the insanity of her endeavor, and even when Archer saved her, she had thought she was being rational.

It was a miracle Archer had thought to look near the snow slide. She had thought the cave would be a good place to sleep until the snow stopped, but as she slept, the mouth of the cave slowly covered with snow. By the time she tried to dig herself out, the pile was too thick. If Archer hadn’t been there, heard her scream, she never would have made it out.

                                                                                                    ***

We must be nearly to the summit, Jeannie thought. They had covered only five miles in six hours, and the snow was still falling in sheets.

“What are we going to do? How can we go on in this weather?” she asked. Amie just smiled and Archer shrugged and pressed forward. I guess we just keep going and hope for the best, she thought.

That night, Amie told stories while cooking dinner over the fire. “We needed more money to travel. I was only working at the general store, and Archer was writing for the tiny paper back home.” She blabbered on, but Jeannie was hardly listening. She was dreaming about what was waiting for her on the other side of the mountain.

                                                                                                    ***

“There’s the summit!” They all looked at the mountaintop only a few miles away. It had been a long few weeks before the snow had stopped. Archer shared his sister’s excitement, but Jeannie remained silent.

Her mind drifted back to a boy waving as he boarded the train, his green army uniform still clean, his pack too big for his back. Then she remembered the call that he was gone. MIA, miss. I’m so sorry. But she knew he couldn’t be gone gone. She pictured the log cabin where his family had stayed when he was young, the times that he had told her about it, how it was it was his favorite place on earth. And now, finally, she was so close, just on the other side of the mountain.

Tonight, she thought. I can make it on my own now. Archer talked with Jeannie by the fire that night. She liked his company, the way he treated her like a sister instead of some girl he had picked up on the way. She knew he thought of her as one of them. But I’m not, I can’t be, she reminded herself again. No one can follow me.

The crescent moon was high and the stars in full shine when Jeannie began to steal away from the sleeping camp. Wind whipped her face as she crept through snow-covered trees. She turned toward a sudden noise.

“JEEAANNNIIEEEE!!”

Archer stumbled through the snow, shouting. She ran through the snow as fast as she could and hid behind an evergreen, knowing the darkness would hide her tracks. She nearly cried as she saw Archer stumble past, begging her to come back.

She wanted to call out to him, to tell Archer to come with her, but she couldn’t, she knew that. What would they do? she thought, What if they told someone? Deserters are not taken lightly. Who knows if I would ever see my beloved soldier boy again.
As Archer’s calls faded into the distance, Jeanie slipped out from behind her hiding place. As the night wore on, she became increasingly lost. The snow, gone for several weeks, returned so heavy she could barely see where she was going. She stumbled as the wind whipped around her. Just keep going, you’ll be there soon.

But by sunrise, she was still alone. “What have I done!” she cried, “Why did I think I could do this alone? Oh Annachie, I’m so sorry.” In her exhaustion, she lost her footing and tumbled down a snowy slope. That’s when she noticed the little column of smoke from between the trees. Her heart racing, she ran in its direction, half crying with joy. Tripping over herself, she fell face first in the snow.

“Stay where you are,” came a voice behind her. Jeannie looked up and saw the little cabin only a few meters away. She heard the crunching of snow and turned to see the end of a shotgun barrel only feet from her face. Her eyes traveled up the gun to the man holding it. “Three years,” he said. “It took you three long years.”

“Yes, Annachie, but I’m home.”



Written by: Tess Selby
Photograph by: Blake Bronstad

2 Drink Minimum

The bar is small, dark, and trite, nestled in a strip mall between a prosperous and garish Korean nail salon and the upscale Gourdough’s Public House. This bar is not upscale. It survives precisely because it’s a hole people can climb into and pull over themselves.

It’s as anonymous as porn theater sex. It has no windows, no sign over the door, no chipped and faded little cigarette-company decal with a penguin proclaiming Come on in, it’s KOOL inside! The metal door is old and rusted, dented here and there, with two punctures that let in rain. It works with a scream of protest, just like most of the bar’s patrons.

The place has weathered barn wood nailed to the wall at the far end, and a few dart players of unreliable skill throw feathered projectiles at a target hung from a nail. A ragged color printout of someone’s ex-wife is taped over the ten-ring, encouraging accuracy. Most of the darts embed into the barn wood anyway.

As a celluloid Nick the Bartender said to the you-never-existed George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life, this too is a place where men, and now women, are hard customers who come to drink hard liquor, and get drunk. If you can’t drink at least two, you are out of your league here. Go next door to Gourdough’s where there is better lighting and you can order your fucking Mojito.

Coincidentally, the bartender here is also named Nick. He hasn’t mixed a White Russian in two years. There was that Manhattan last month, but it was served to a regular who followed up with a triple Lagavulin neat. The woman’s date never showed—married prick, got cold feet. After almost two years on that bar stool, she never came back.

This is a destination bar, where men and women often meet with others not their spouse. Couples huddle in booths around the perimeter of the main room. A few more sit at booths and a few tables in satellite rooms even darker than the main area. There are other regulars, too. You can buy or sell information here, or plan some deal, but don’t get caught with dope or it’s your ass. If someone calls in looking for a customer—a frantic wife, an angry husband—no one is ever there. Sorry, really busy. Take a message?

Detective Inspector Douglas Lee Pavlichek is distinguishable from the other customers only to the bartender. Nick has served the cop booze since he came on the job; through two marriages, three killed partners and six promotions. He does a very passable simulation of a businessman, with his Abboud suits and Burberry trench coat. The homicide cops are well known to be natty dressers, and Pavlichek does his part. You need nice suits when you go to your partners’ funerals. Pavlichek doesn’t have a terrible average, though, for his thirty-two years. That works out to less than one dead partner per decade. But after he lost Mooney, Pavlichek decided he’d rather work solo. He’s on the glide slope to a disappointing retirement anyway, so the bosses agreed.

He also doesn’t care about any two-drink minimum, because Detective Pavlichek hasn’t had two or fewer drinks at a sitting since 12th grade, when he partied so hard that he barely graduated. Only Mrs. Ellsworth had saved that, allowing a retake of the final exam over the angry objections of Mr. Crawford, the so-called “guidance counselor” who hated Pavlichek since he was a southmore. That’s how they say it here, southmore, not sophomore. So he passed with a D-plus—still hadn’t studied—and drew the Logan green cap and gown to make the high school perp walk with almost a thousand other seniors that year.

Here’s a piece of info for that next lull in class reunion conversation: Today, a man named Logan Green is the co-founder and chief executive officer of the ride-sharing service Lyft.

No, that doesn’t mean anything. Nothing does.

Pavlichek doodles on a bar napkin. When he looks up, Nick is already watching him. The detective waves an index finger in airy, imperfect circles, ordering another round. Nick pulls a Stroh’s from an ornate tap and then pours an extra-double Johnny Walker Black while the beer foam settles. By the time Pavlichek survived the summer after high school, he could drink a whole fifth of Johnny Walker Black and still be just walking-around high, could drive and everything. That time he wrecked his car down the street from Griff’s house, where Griff’s mother always bought the party alcohol, the local uniforms didn’t even know he was wasted. That was the first time Pavlichek thought about a career in police work.

Police work is how he describes it, because cops will tell you honestly, in quiet moments, that “law enforcement” isn’t the same thing. Rookies do law enforcement; veterans do police work. Police work maintains order and keeps people safe and free, keeps the jackoffs in their own districts, at least. Those lofty goals are not always the purview of laws, so most cops don’t enforce laws. They do police work.

Pavlichek’s phone buzzes in an inside-left coat pocket, but he doesn’t have to look at it to know who it is. His personal cell is in the inside-right pocket, but it never buzzes. He downs the scotch at once, then powers down the beer.

“Gotta run, Nick. Work,” he says. He leaves a fifty on the bar, because if you tip a bartender well now, he tips a cop well later. Pavlichek gets only two steps away before turning back to Nick.

“Hey, you havin’ a good day, man?”

Nick shrugs. “Yeah. I guess. You know, it is what it is.”

“You are right about that.” Pavlichek waves a two-finger salute and turns to the door. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

“Okay, Inspector,” Nick says. He wipes wet rings from the polished surface of the bar and picks up the napkin. Pavlichek has carefully torn up the business card of the department psychologist and left it in a perfect teepee of matte pasteboard on the bar.

On the napkin, Pavlichek has drawn the crude image of a handgun shooting a bullet through a cartoon badge, and all around it, over and over, he’s written the words Kill me now.



Written by: Daniel Charles Ross
Photograph by: Chris Boyles

Chewing Gum

The cold rain fell in sheets of vellum paper—thin and transparent enough to see the shapes and colors of the life it was trying to protect. We ran, like ink on a page, dripping sweat and pain and ecstasy. She had just finished working and I had just finished watching. She said she was tired and wanted to go home. I wanted to be anywhere but home. Home reminded me of my wife.

The sun had long set and slow jazz spilled from the speakers of the End Street Depot as we waited. She cried. Or maybe it was the rain, I couldn’t be sure. I hugged her close, smelling her hair—a mixture of lemon, rosemary, and artificiality. I liked it.

The train pulled into the station, slowly coming to a halt a few feet away from where we stood beneath the overhang. We held newspapers over our heads and ran into the safety of barren seats and chewed gum left to die on the metallic floor of the nearly empty car. She sat next to a window, avoiding me. I sat across the aisle, staring at her from behind the steel pole that stretched between floor and ceiling. Her sleek black hair now soft with damp waves. Her red lipstick smeared across her face—and mine.

“It’s not enough for me,” she said, watching the blurred landscape as the train sped out of the station.

“I’m sorry,” I replied, not knowing what else to say. I could feel unfamiliar eyes staring me down from a few rows up.

It started as sex. No strings. An escape from my life. She stayed with me for the money, the gifts, the things she couldn’t have as a stripper. I was fine with that.

“I can’t give you more.”

She turned to face me, her freckled nose crinkling in frustration. She was fucking beautiful.

“It’s not enough,” she repeated.

I sat up, as though correct posture might make this conversation easier. I turned to face her, my legs blocking the aisle. I no longer cared about who heard us. “Elana, I don’t know what else you want from me. This was the deal. A good fuck and a nice new dress…nothing’s changed.”

“Everything has changed,” she said turning to face me, her eyes bloodshot. “I want--”

“I already told you—there’s nothing left to keep us apart. She’s gone!”

“I know what you said,” she snapped, turning back to the window.

I thought about the day I first met her. Stubb’s Hall. She lit up the stage with her black glittered heels and wicked smile. I thought about the slow burn of the whiskey as I watched her undress to the wail of the low saxophone behind her. I knew my wife would have killed me if she knew where I had been, but the whiskey had already convinced me that I didn’t care.

Sinking back into the hard seat, I let my hands fall helplessly to my sides. “I just need more time.”

“For what?” she yelled. “I’ve given you nothing but time!”

I told Elana I would leave my wife, but I didn’t mean it. In the same breath, I promised my wife that it was over, that I was through with Elana—she was just a toy, a plaything. Something to keep in my back pocket for the days I got bored—like chewing gum. She would ask why I got bored, but I never could seem to answer that question. The sicker she got, the more I clung to Elana—coming home with glitter stuck to my groin—and the less I tried to hide it.

“I just…I don’t know. It’s complicated. My God, she hasn’t been dead a month.”

The night my wife died, my heart broke. I buried it with her and I knew I would never get it back. I didn’t deserve it back. Fuck Cancer, I thought. Fuck me for being such an asshole.

The train jarred us both as it pulled into the next station. The rain kept a steady beat on the car’s metallic roof, falling harder. The soft shapes of the world outside now hid completely behind opaque sheets.

“You’ve had enough time, Shawn,” Elana said as she stood, steadying herself on the steel pole that stood between them. “I can’t wait another six months for you to decide what you want.”

I watched her tears fall in a stream of sparkling black. There was no mistaking them for rain this time. I shoved my hands in my pockets and made no attempt to go after her. The train jerked forward to the next station. I thought about my wife. Her innocent smile. The paper skin around her gray eyes. How I chewed her up and spat her out just like I did Elana. I hated myself.

The beckoning lights of Stubb’s Hall flashed pink through the window. I hadn’t realized that the rain had stopped, once again revealing the world around me. Bracing myself for the next station, I stood and took hold of the pole. The cold stung my hand. When the car had come to a complete standstill, I made my way to the exit. Apparently, this was where I got off. Stepping from the platform to the ground, I stopped as my foot caught on something. Inspecting the underside of my shoe, I couldn’t help but laugh. A wad of gum. Freshly chewed and strung along between the bottom of my foot and the hard metal floor.

Written by: Amber E. Box
Photograph by: Matthew Wiebe

Sorry, Beautiful

From the top of the water tower, I can see the whole neighborhood—the roof of the library, the buses ferrying everyone home from work. Everyone’s feet hurt because it’s Thursday, and one can expect sore feet by that point in the week, so the men and women are shifting in their seats and thinking about dinner. About the ice crystals melting from frozen burritos. About the chicken and rice in the slow cooker, all of it waiting.

Inside the library, Caroline is helping an elderly man reset his Yahoo password. Or she’s scanning the barcode on the back of Charlotte’s Web. She always liked Charlotte’s Web. If Caroline finished whatever she is doing and went out the side door to take a smoke break, she might look up and see me.

When you fly, just one small passenger in an airliner hurling itself through the atmosphere like a precarious bullet, you look down during takeoff and feel fragile. But from the top of the water tower, I am more like a god. The people aren’t ants, per say. They’re still very real and large in their own way, but up here, I’m untouchable.

Caroline will get off work at 5:15, and then she’ll run the carpet sweeper in the children’s room to pick up the confetti of crumbs—sticky Cheerio bits, beheaded teddy grahams. Then she’ll come outside and wait for the 5:36 cross-town bus, and I’ll yell “Caroline!” and she won’t hear me, but she’ll get a tingle at the back of her neck. She’ll think the tag of her wrap dress from the Loft is irritating her skin, only to reach back and remember she cut it out weeks ago. I’m here, the tingle will say, and she’ll shrug it off and get on the bus, winding through the aching and hungry people until she finds a seat beside someone who hasn’t been sweating or drinking. Maybe a nice, middle-aged woman who smells like lavender lotion.

I’m not going to jump, if that’s what you’re thinking. Caroline breaking up with me won’t send me over some psychotic or literal ledge. Of course I miss her. Of course I miss everything about her. The things, mostly. The human detritus. The twist of her hair she stuck on the shower wall so it wouldn’t clog the drain. Her empty mugs with used tea bags huddling at the bottoms like luggage left out in a storm.

It’s always the things. I could go on: the bleach spot on the carpet where she spilled nail polish remover. The Netflix queue she trained to suggest cerebral independent comedies. The things she doesn’t even know she left behind—a single wool sock, a hairpin, a tiny fake-gold earring back resting near a bathroom baseboard. All the matchless things.

“Caroline!” I yell.

I can see the top of her head, her hair pulled up into one of those awful sock buns that looks like something a bird would construct. She’s shifting her leather tote from one arm to the other. She’s poking at her cell phone screen.

“Hey!” I hear, but it’s not Caroline’s voice. Across the street, Caroline is still gazing into her phone. It’s telling her everything she wants to know. It’s showing her pictures of all the things she deserves—expensive wallpaper, smiling children, the secret to a slender and happy life, one Instagram at a time.

“Hey!” I hear again. “You’re not supposed to be up there!”

Supposed to. So many things that are supposed to be never become.

I tear my eyes from the bird nest of Caroline’s head and look below, near the legs of the water tower. It’s a bald man with a uniform shirt and a blank face.

“This is city property!” he’s yelling.

“Is it?” I say.

“What?”

“Is it city property?” I say, this time loud enough for the bald man to comprehend.

“Come on down, now, sir, or I’ll call the police!”

I consider a list of my crimes: trespassing, stalking ex-girlfriends, shoplifting a birthday card once when the line got outrageous at the Hallmark store. I needed the card, not the hassle. Caroline is the type of girl who never forgets important moments. I tried so hard to do the same. I needed that card.

“Sir, what you’re doing is dangerous!” the bald man yells.

None of this is building to an epic moment. A graceful dive, at the end of which my vertebrae collapse like a compressed accordian. Or a police chase, where Caroline looks on as I lie gasping like a fish, my skin pierced by the barbs of a pulsing taser. There will be no thunk of the police car door, no smack smack as the cop sends the message to his partner, he’s in, all clear to go.

I have come to realize that actually, bald man, nothing I do is dangerous. There is nothing dangerous about me. There’s no edge. And that, in the end, has to be why Caroline left. I’m the sort of person who is complacent in his car insurance job. The type of person who knows that processed foods will cause me to die an artery-clogging death, but still buys store-brand, frozen lasagna. The person who goes home to Ohio for Christmas and gives his mother a scarf from an upscale store because only quality will make up for not knowing what she truly wants. For knowing who she, and every other sorry, beautiful person, truly is.

So I climb down the ladder to the ground, just as the police car pulls up. The 5:36 cross-town bus glides into the stop, and Caroline boards. She finds a seat by the window. She looks up from her phone. The officer and I have a civil conversation as the bald man watches, his arms crossed over the front of his uniform shirt so I can’t see his name. I promise the officer I will never climb the water tower again. Caroline squints out the bus window. She sees me. The officer writes me a ticket on a piece of flimsy yellow paper. The bus pulls away.


Written by: Dot Dannenberg
Photograph by: Daniel Vidal

Motives

Angie’s cat gave Jayden that I-know-what-you’re-about-to-do look as he sat on the curb and spun his cell phone back and forth in his hands.

“Shut up, cat,” Jayden said. He sounded as stupid as Angie when she pranced out onto her patio in her underwear to feed the cat the dregs of her breakfast cereal. Sweet kitty! Kit-kit-kitty! Angie lived next door, and according to Jayden’s mother, spent rather a lot of time in her underwear as a profession, not just to give the neighbors a show.

The cat folded his flabby body in half and began to groom his undercoat, as if to say, “The thing that makes cats refined is we never say anything.”

Jayden checked the time on his cell phone. The plan would work. Wouldn’t it?

The cat stretched out his legs and began licking his privates. “At least I’m the real deal,” he seemed to say. “No shame. You’re a faker. Just look at your shoes.”

His shoes were brand new Adidas that he’d run over with his mom’s car to make them look beat up and vintage.

Jayden was going to call in a bomb threat. He was waiting until 11:05, the very moment the bell would ring for fourth period, to call the school’s front office.

It was 11:00. Jayden was almost sad he’d miss the chaotic moment. The skeptical but pounding pulse in Principal O’Shannon’s neck as he smacked the phone into its holster and hissed for the secretary to summon the campus cop. The teachers scuffling to herd everyone out into the parking lot across the street from the school, the one behind the old Piggly Wiggly.

The Piggly Wiggly, where the real bomb was hiding.

11:01. Angie’s cat stopped his beautification project. He was still slumped over, his white legs poking out like those of a pale man just home from work, stripped down to his boxers and collapsing into a Lay-Z Boy.

“You want me to bring you a beer?” Jayden drawled at the cat.

He knew when they linked the bombing to him they’d question his sanity. Talking to cats was a good start.

They’d peel through his life. They’d look for all his secrets, find none, and then construct some out of thin air.

They’d have his mother on TV, asking for privacy. The news would broadcast a street view shot of his sister’s dormitory at the University of Alabama. His sister, a bright young girl studying to be a doctor, recently returned from a medical mission trip to Belize, the news anchors would say. They’d shake their heads. They’d speculate about terrorist connections in Belize. They’d compare him to all the others who had come before.

But he wasn’t like all of them, his friend from an elementary school soccer team would say on Channel 5. Jayden wasn’t angry. He wasn’t bullied. No, I don’t think he was a psychopath.

11:03. It was interesting thinking of himself in the past tense.

Angie’s cat had enough of Jayden’s gaze. He stretched his back, spiking his claws into the ground a few times, before stalking off across the parking lot.

Jayden wondered what it would be like to be reborn as another person, maybe in Texas, maybe with a new name. He knew that wasn’t how it would shake out.

11:05. He tapped the school’s number into his phone, then Principal O’Shannon’s extension. Three rings.

“Ashton High School.”

“There’s a bomb in the building.” Jayden didn’t make any effort to disguise his voice.

“’Scuse me?”

“A bomb. In the building.”

“Who is this? Is this a joke?”

Jayden hung up the phone. His heart beat normally. He felt neither hot nor cold. He watched as if, almost in slow motion, Angie’s cat sauntered through the parking lot and sat in the middle of the drive.

The sun was shining. The students wouldn’t complain as they were led out of the school and closer to the ticking Piggly Wiggly building. They’d laugh. I bet it was Colton Simpkins, since he got suspended! Yeah, I bet he’s mad about missing football. Nah, I think Dontavius called it in. He hates fourth period chem.

11:08. And now, he waited. The bomb was set to go off at 11:17, just enough time for everyone to make it to the safety area. They’d done timed tests for fire drills. The current record was ten minutes, but Jayden had planned conservatively.

A white Honda Accord roared into the apartment complex from the street. It was going way too fast, thumping some R&B disaster at top volume. When the front bumper made contact with the cat, its furry black body, now looking somehow smaller, flew through the air and landed crumpled in the gutter.

The driver got out. It was Angie. Jayden could read the string of expletives forming on her lips. She stumbled toward the cat, but then pivoted and got back in the car.

The Honda reversed, skidded, and peeled out of the complex.

Was she drunk?

Jayden knew this was not a moment for judgment. He checked his phone as he walked towards the gutter. 11:14.

The cat was stiff. He nudged it with the toe of his Adidas. The cat gave a little rumble. Purring? Its dented body inflated.

“You good, buddy?” Jayden said.

The cat cracked an eyelid. Even having just dodged death, it could make time for a stink eye.

“What life was that? Four, seven? Hope you’re not up to nine.”

Jayden knew without checking his phone: 11:17. The ground of the apartment complex, only a mile from the abandoned Piggly Wiggly, shook. The cat lifted his head up out of the gutter. Jayden scratched him behind the ears.

Then Jayden ran towards the woods away from the direction of the blast.

They’d find his name on the absence list at the school. They’d trace his number from O’Shannon’s office phone. They’d bring in Angie as a witness. I might have seen him skipping school. He always did seem a little strange. They’d ask themselves why. They’d construct and deconstruct possible motives. They’d count the bodies. They’d hold a candlelight vigil. They’d find him. If he made it through the stakeout alive, they’d ask their questions.

And then he’d fold himself in half in the interrogation room chair. He’d look at the cops as if they were idiots. He’d say nothing. Just like the cat.


Written by: Dot Dannenberg
Photograph by: Emily Blincoe

The Outer Borough

It was all too familiar. After awhile, all crime scenes started to feel the same. Especially the smell. The tinny smell of blood always saturated whatever shithole apartment the victim died in. And they were all shithole apartments in this part of town.

“Give me the rundown, Peterson,” Detective Thorne said as he snapped on a pair of rubber gloves, squatting to get a better look at the body.

“The victim’s name is Esther Walker. Sixty-three years old. Cause of death appears to be multiple stab wounds to her chest. Lives here in this apartment with her husband, Charles Walker.”

“Do we know where he is?” Thorne asked.

There were gelatinous mounds of blood surrounding Esther’s body, which told Thorne that the stab wounds he saw had penetrated her lungs. The blood had coagulated inside her body before seeping out onto the dated beige carpet.

“He’s supposed to be at work. South Bronx Auto Body over off of White Street. Our boys already checked it out, he’s not there. We got an APB out on him. Get this though, Charles is six months out of the pen. He was released last year after serving thirty years on a life sentence for the murder of a seventeen-year-old girl back in '79. The medical examiner’s report indicates that the girl was sexually assaulted and then stabbed to death.” Officer Peterson eyed Esther’s body and the similar wounds on her body. He was giddy, “You think he did this?”

Thorne glared at him. Peterson’s smirk quickly faded.

“Any eyes on a potential murder weapon?” Thorne asked as he scanned the one-bedroom apartment, hoping to gather enough clues to reconstruct the events leading up to Esther’s death.

“No, nothing yet.”

There was religious imagery everywhere. Esther was a woman of faith, after all. She had held on to hope all those years that her husband was innocent. For three long decades, she had filed petition after petition to have her husband freed, paying attorneys inordinate amounts of money, and begging non-profits to take on her husband’s case.

“My Charlie is innocent,” she had told reporters. “Charlie always told me that we would save up and move out to the country together. He wanted to get away from the big city. Charlie never did like it here. He said it corrupted people. After this experience, I believe it. The prosecutors, they didn’t have any leads, so they pinned it on him. Well, I have faith that Charlie and I will be reunited again one day and that we’ll make his dream of leaving this place a reality.”

Esther’s resolve ultimately paid off. She had finally brought her husband home and they would start saving up to move upstate, out of the city.

                                                                                                    ***

Charles had been nursing a glass of Jameson for a few hours now. The Blarney Stone was a few blocks away from his apartment, but Esther would never know to look for him there. He had lost his taste for alcohol in prison, but didn’t know where else to go.

“Charlie,” Gary started from behind the bar.

“Don’t call me that, only Esther calls me that,” Charles replied, still looking into his glass of brown liquor.

“Charles,” Gary continued, “what’s going on? You’ve been coming here every morning for the past week, ordering a glass of whiskey that you don’t touch, not saying a word to anyone.” Gary had known Charles from before the conviction, he hesitated before adding, “Look, I can’t even imagine what you’re going through, but you gotta start living again. Get back into a normal routine – go to work and at the end of the day, go home to your loving wife.”

“I killed her Gary,” Charles said suddenly.

“What?” Gary was taken aback.

“I’ve never told anyone, but I guess it doesn’t matter anymore. I was drunk, that’s not an excuse, just a fact, and I killed her. I killed that girl.”

“Alright Charles, I think you should stop talking about all that now.” Gary wasn’t sure what to do with the information he was now privy to, wasn’t sure if he was supposed to do anything with it.

“I wanted to confess to the police, I really did, to get it off my chest. But Esther…I couldn’t break her heart. She was fighting so hard for me, you know? I never actually thought she’d be able to get me out. But she did it and they let me go...they let me go on a fucking technicality.”

“Charles, look buddy…” Gary was desperately trying to plug the leak he had inadvertently caused.

“I accepted it Gary,” Charles was looking straight at him now. “I was guilty and I accepted that I was supposed to be in there. I thought it was all over. How are you supposed to go on living after you’ve already accepted death?”

                                                                                                    ***

Nothing in the apartment appeared to have been disturbed, Thorne realized, at least not in any obvious way.

“What happened here?” Thorne wondered to himself.

The only thing that caught Thorne’s eyes was two framed paintings that were hanging at an angle. One was a reproduction of the Last Supper and the other was of a farmhouse. Thorne couldn’t be sure if the paintings had been jarred by a struggle or if they’d been crooked all along.

                                                                                                    ***

“Prison was supposed to be my punishment,” Charles continued, “It was supposed to be how I suffered. But now I’m a free man, living on good fortune that I didn’t earn. Human experiences are always paid back in turn,” Charles said as he threw back his glass of Jameson.

“You’ve been given a second chance Charles,” Gary mustered, not really knowing what to say at all.

“I’m an old man Gary. Even if I had all the time in the world, you can’t make up for taking away someone else’s.”

“You can at least try to lead a good life with what you have left.”

“Maybe, Gary, maybe. At least I have Esther.”

Written by: Sam Chow
Photograph by: Emily Blincoe

A Tremor in Your Name

(continued from "Beloved" and "Bury Their Own")

Anna stands by the window, resting her head on her forearm propped up against the wall. Searching the backyard, she spots the noose that almost ended her client’s life and the little red stool that kept death at bay. The yellow police tape wrapped around the perimeter of the house quivers as rain begins to fall. Anna closes her eyes as the pattering resonates through the ceiling, recalling the boil of her blood when Lucas appeared by her side, a ghost that had possessed an innocent man and compelled him to attempt murder. Suri, her client, hired Anna to extract Lucas from her life. For fourteen years he has haunted her and taken control of men’s bodies in order to do her harm. While Suri recovers, Anna remains in this abandoned house with nothing more than a name to go by, but in her line of work, a name is all the power she needs.

She sits down on the floor in the center of the room and rubs the cross dangling from a chain around her neck. In the blink of an eye, a ten year old girl sits in front of her wearing an easter dress and a blue bow in her blonde hair. Lydia Marie is the ghost haunting her necklace, and her phantom sidekick. She tilts her head to the left and studies Anna’s face, furrowing her brow.

“What’s wrong, Anna?”

Anna smiles with just the right corner of her lips and shakes her head, “I’m trying to track someone down.”

“A ghost?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, you can only see him if he lets you see him.”

“Yeah, I know.”

Lydia Marie wrinkles her nose and offers an impish grin. “But I can see him even if he doesn’t want me to.”

Anna looks up and mirrors the spectre’s expression. “Precisely. Lucas knows the rules; if I say his name, he has to come. You can be my lookout for when he decides to show up.”

“But how are you going to extract him? It doesn’t sound like he’ll be too interested in taking orders,” Lydia Marie says with some concern.

“He’s obviously got some unfinished business and it’s centered around Suri. A game of twenty questions is in order. If he gives me a motive, then I just need to provide him with a suitable substitution.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

Anna doesn’t answer. Instead, she claps her hands and rubs her palms together, fighting the chill down her spine. “You ready?”

Lydia Marie nods, unsure at first, but gaining confidence with the prospect of helping Anna catch the bad guy. Anna imagines her lungs expanding in every direction as she inhales, then whispers.

“Lucas.”
                                                                                                  ***

Lydia Marie hides in the closet, peeking through the shutter-style slats with her hands over her mouth. The hair on the back of Anna’s neck stands on end and her skin prickles with the presence of another otherworldly being. She does not see Lucas pacing in front of her with his hands behind his back, grinning from ear to ear. She waits for Lydia Marie to signal her, but instead the young ghost passes suddenly through the closet doors with horror written in her eyes.

“What are you doing here? Where’s my father?”

Lydia Marie is all but shrieking, her spectral hands balling up into fists and tears welling up in her eyes. Lucas turns toward her, still invisible to Anna who is startled and jumps to her feet. He narrows his eyes as he searches his memory for who she is and recognition passes over his face.

“Ah, Lydia. I left your father long ago…”

Lydia Marie’s entire body trembles, her bottom lip quivering. “It was you! It wasn’t Daddy! It was you!”

Lucas pulls the corners of his mouth up into a smile and shrugs. “If that makes it easier for you to cope, my dear, but I didn’t make him do anything other than what he’d already considered himself.”

Anna, unable to hear Lucas, asks desperately, “Lydia Marie, what’s he saying? Ask him what he wants. Ask him why he’s doing this!”

“You’re a monster! I’m all alone because of you!”

Lucas chuckles, his hiss like poison. “You and your father, ripped apart. All alone. Just like me.”

Before Anna has a chance to confront him, the chill leaves her skin and she knows that Lucas has disappeared. Lydia Marie wraps her arms around herself and looks up at Anna, shaking her head from left to right.

“Before Daddy drowned me, there was always a man at the house. He would sit with my dad while he drank and watch him when he hit me. I never knew who he was. I thought he was Daddy’s friend, but I understand now. It wasn’t Daddy who hurt me. It was Lucas.”

Flesh and spirit, the two stand in silence. A dog barks in the distance as thunder rips through the rain.

“Anna, Lucas said Daddy and me are all alone just like him.”

Kneeling down in front of Lydia Marie, Anna meets her gaze and whispers, “Let’s go find your father.”

The ghost looks down at her feet and asks, “What if he doesn’t want to see me?”

Anna shakes her head and says, “Baby girl, I think he’s been dying to see you since 1962.”

Lydia Marie looks up and says, “I want Daddy to know I forgive him, that I know it’s not his fault.”

Anna realizes that this is the reason why her friend hasn’t been able to crossover. All this time Lydia Marie was wandering between worlds because she believed a lie, that her father never loved her. Reconciliation could be the very thing she needs to move on, a bittersweet notion once Anna considers that she would lose her. But this is why Anna entered this obscure line of work, to secure peace for both the living and the dead.

“Come on. Maybe we can track him down before dinner time.”

Written by: Natasha Akery
Photograph by: Emily Blincoe

Zuhause

She believes that life is good while he believes that life is not any particular thing. How long has she felt this way? It’s been a good fifteen years since the church thing. Fifteen years since she started waking he and his younger brothers on Sunday mornings and ten years since she stopped trying and let them make their own decisions about it. Before that there’s no telling. He assumes she’s felt this way all along and religion simply extracted it, like a nurse taking blood. But people turn to church for a reason. Hell, let’s be honest. People turn to church because something has happened or something is missing or because that’s just how it’s always been. In the end, is it going to matter? Religion or no religion, she is happy when her children are happy. It sounds conspicuous, but the degree to which she has fused her children’s lives into her own cannot be overstated. She has a most important thing, and the fact that her son knows this and believes it so unconditionally attests to her skills as a mother.

She says that she counts the days since he has been gone, and he has been gone a long time. He knows that she’s kidding but there’s something in her smile that hurts him. Pain births humor and he knows pain props up her smile. He will take bits of this pain back with him along with her smile, and maybe a hundred dollar bill. Don’t tell your father, she whispers as she slips the cash mischievously into his palm. It’s nothing less than beautiful when his father repeats the action five minutes later. Don’t tell your mother.

She says that she knows and has accepted that he’s not coming back, but he doesn’t believe her. He doesn’t believe her because he knows what that lie sounds like - he uses it all the time. She believes that he will come home. For a myriad of reasons, most having to do with family, she believes he will come home. Most of the time he knows he’s never going back. Nothing personal, it’s just not who he is. But then he remembers the night he called her and told her he was thinking about coming home. He asked her to talk to Dad about the job. She refused, acting in direct opposition to her desires. Is there a more honest representation of love? He gets older and tries not to make such declarative statements as he’s starting to suspect most of them will eventually turn on him.

And after all of it, he is selfish. Selfish as he has always been and perhaps always will be. So selfish that it became a running family gag. In typical fashion, he rushes to fix his flaws, but knows deep down that this is impossible. He believes in nothing over the power of the conscious mind and so he wants to believe that he can take control of his own personality, but goddamn, there are certain things in life that simply cannot be grasped or handled or morphed. His brain is neither Play-Dough nor Plato. Once he was too young to care, and hopefully one day he will be too old to care, but for now, he has nothing to do but care. He works to become the man he wants to be, but he’s worried he won’t recognize the final product. It’s in this context that she shines brightest. It’s in the hour-long phone calls and it’s in her honesty with him, something that he would never have expected but would never, ever trade. It’s right there on the surface, his definition of home.

They used to go to movies. He loves movies, thinks they mean more than they do, and she does not. And yet she went with him to the apocalypse movie that said the F-word over fifty times. She really does not prefer the F-word. She went with him to see the movie with the child soldiers and the drugs and the violence. She really does not prefer child soldiers or drugs or violence. The list goes on. They never saw a Meg Ryan movie or a Sandra Bullock movie or an underdog movie or a feel-good movie. And still she tells him constantly, every time, that she misses going to movies with him. But she hated those movies. He asks her if she goes to see films with her girlfriends, or her sister, or her husband. She replies that it’s not the same. What’s not the same? You don’t even talk in a movie. He thinks about her going to a movie alone, sitting there in the darkness, and he has to stop because it will make him cry and he is not in the habit of crying for no reason. He vows that eventually they will go see a movie that she wants to see. It’s the least he can do.

He wants her to know that it’s not all about his father, regardless of how it appears in his writings or songs or conversations. With his father there is ego, respect, gratefulness, stubbornness, and a whole host of other issues that he has yet to unpack. And he wants her to know that its not that those things do not apply to her, only that with her they come under a fresher and more hopeful light. Because of their soft edges, they are easier to swallow. And above all else, he wants her to know that he thinks of her often, though his actions sometimes do not align with this theory. His actions are often flippant and cruel, but never, ever malicious.

He wants her to know that when he sees a wheat field, or a picture of a wheat field, or a drawing of a wheat field, he thinks of home and he thinks of her. He wants her to know that she is home. They are one in the same. They are inseparable. And in the end, words do not do them justice.

Written by: Logan Theissen
Photograph by: Emily Blincoe

Wheels

Robbie leaned in the passenger door, wrinkling his long nose. Trace had one tanned arm slung over the faded top of the car.

“It looks like someone died in here, Trace,” Robbie said.

Trace took in the wretched interior with a critical eye. The stuffing spewed out of the cloth seats and there was the faint reek of decay in the air. “I’ve been looking for this car for years, Rob.”

“You’ve been looking for a car somebody’s grandpa doesn’t even want?” Robbie shut the car door with a creak and folded his arms on the weathered, rusted top. “You’re going to spend the money you saved—that you worked your ass off for—on this?”

“Maybe I am.” Trace struggled to close the driver’s side door.

Robbie laughed.

                                                                                       ***

Poking around an engine with his older brother, Jack, in the driveway was one thing; overhauling an entire car was another. If it wasn’t rusted or corroded, it was rotten. The headlights seemed to be the only thing that worked. All summer, the most anyone saw of Trace were sneakered feet sticking out from under the Chrysler New Yorker. His friends laughed at his single-minded mission to resurrect the old car. Robbie kept him company for the first week, making suggestions and asking him if he’d been back to the future yet. Trace threw a wrench in his general direction, swearing as grease dripped into his eye for the thousandth time.

Trace sat on the driveway, feeling the heat of the concrete beneath his legs and the warmth of the metal door against his shoulders as he leaned against the old Chrysler. Shuffling steps caught his attention and he scrambled to his feet, wiping sweat and grease on his jeans.

“Ma, go back inside, it’s too hot out.” He gestured back to the house.

His mother cocked her head to one side and held something out to him, her hand shaking. Trace took the beer from her and swallowed past the lump in his throat. He and Jack always had a beer after a long day working on Jack’s car.

“Thanks, Ma.” He twisted the cap off, taking a long pull.

The cold liquid trickled down his throat and he felt the weight of it settle in the pit of his stomach. His mother’s mouth twitched in a parody of her old smile, her pre-breakdown smile. Jack’s smile. She fluttered a skeletal hand at him before scooting back up the driveway in her worn slippers. Trace rubbed his hand across the peeling paint on the rusted hood of the car; the condensation on his hand left a smear that quickly evaporated in the late afternoon heat. It was impossible to tell which shade of paint came first. He squinted up at the sun and drained the rest of his beer. There were still hours of light left. He crawled back under the car.

                                                                                       ***

“You have got to relax,” Robbie said, handing Trace a beer. “It’s supposed to be a goddamn party.”

Trace tried to conjure a smile, switching the beer from hand to hand without cracking the tab. He resisted the urge to check his watch.

“Well if it isn’t the grease monkey,” Carl said. “Sure is a lot better view than the undersides of a heap of junk.”

Trace followed Carl’s gaze to the girls lounging near the pool. A few of them looked up and smiled. Trace waved—he vaguely recognized one or two. He opened his beer and took a gulp to keep from answering.

“What’s with him?” Carl asked Robbie.

“What’s been up with him all summer? First time he’s been away from that damned corpse of a car.”

Trace looked down at his watch. He’d been there fifteen minutes. He took another swallow of beer; the taste of aluminum overpowered the cheap brew.

Carl turned back to Trace. “What brought you out, anyway? Get tired of looking up the same skirt?” He grinned.

“She’s getting body work done and a paint job—stuff that needs a professional,” Trace said, feeling the thin beer can flex beneath his fingers as he tightened his grip.

“Not the only one that needs a professional,” Robbie said.

“What’s that?” Trace set his beer can carefully down on the table.

“What’s with you, man?” Robbie asked. “You search junk yards like you’re on a mission from God and then you buy a rusty Chrysler for chrissakes. If I didn’t know any better I’d think you’d gone crazy like…” Robbie stopped, his freckled cheeks flushing.

“Crazy like who, Rob?” Trace felt the muscles in his jaw contract. “Crazy like my mom?”

“Robbie didn’t mean anything.” Carl sidled between them. “We just missed seeing you around is all.”

“Sure,” Trace said.

He let himself out of the back gate and walked the five miles home.

                                                                                       ***

Two weeks later, he could hardly believe his eyes. There she sat, shiny coat of red paint looking like melted candy poured over her, the upholstery inside as smooth and flawless as a Playboy centerfold. Trace slid into the seat and flipped down the visor. He looked at the picture of him and Jack, arms flung around each other’s shoulders. Growing up, Jack had pictures of cars taped all over his walls—but one predominated. The Chrysler. Trace never understood it; there’s the Mustang, the Impala, the goddamn Ferrari, he’d always say. Jack simply shrugged, and said, “She’s my favorite.”

The engine thrummed as Trace turned the key. His gaze returned to the faded photo taped to the visor. Its corners were curled from the time spent in his wallet. Ten years time. He smiled and, for a moment, he was the boy in the photo again. He felt a desire to glance over at the passenger seat so strongly that his hands froze on the steering wheel. With the windows down and Jack’s favorite cassette in the refurbished player, Trace inhaled deeply before shifting the car into drive.

“She’s all yours,” Trace said.


Written by: Hannah Sears
Photograph by: Emily Blincoe