The Apartment

The rickety elevator reached the ground floor with a noise reminiscent of the carriages on the train station. Afra stepped into the elevator and pressed the button for the eleventh floor. The elevator started moving upwards with a mighty sound.

Zahir sat at the edge, with his legs dangling pondering about what sort of work would he have to start looking for in the coming days. He had come across the abandoned, naked building while walking on the western fringes of the city that was once known for its skyscraper-studded skyline.

The door moved with a crashing sound. Afra walked into the room with a view that even the best penthouses could never afford.

"I managed to get enough food for the next two days. We just need some hot water to heat it up", Afra said while putting down the bags on the floor.

“Did you get enough rest today Zahir? My work was deadbeat. I had to transport some goods from one end of the city to another. The pay wasn’t bad. It was enough for food at the trader’s place.” She sat down on the deteriorating couch and started fiddling with her screen.

"Why don't you go and get some hot water from the people at the top floor like last time, if you don't feel like going down all the way." Afra knew Zahir hated the topic but she was in no shape to do anything after a day’s work.

"They might not let me in, Afra. I messed up their computers last time when I tried connecting my devices to their network."

"They don't know it was you."

"Who else comes to this building anymore? Have you noticed anyone around? It's obviously one of us that tried connecting to their network."

Afra sat down on a couch, torn all over the place. "What do you think they have up there exactly?”

"I'm not entirely sure, but they do have a strong satellite web connection. I worked for them a few times before you came here. They would ask us to code stuff in an extremely modular fashion. It was a bit difficult to make sense of the overall aim of what they really wanted us to do."

"What made you stop working?"

"I didn’t. They just stopped asking people to work. That's when the others started leaving the building. I waited long to see if they would hire again. They are very different than us Afra. They can’t seem ever to be satisfied.”

* * *

The night was cold and dark, but the sound of the sea crashing into the shore put both Afra and Zahir to sleep. There were no sounds of distraction tonight.

Zahir woke up and took a quiet walk to the elevator, then ran down the staircase. The ground floor was empty except for the sleeping dogs. He picked up his bike and rode to the nearest light post. There were some bodies huddled together under the light. He approached them, switched on his storage devices, took out his screen, connected to the mesh network and started syncing data on the storage devices.

The older unmarked data would be removed to make space for the new stuff, so he quickly reviewed all the older batches he had marked for deletion. It took close to twenty minutes for the data to get synched.

Zahir started westward toward the abandoned building. On his way, he stopped at another spot and synced some more data.

While climbing the staircase of the building he took note of the fact that the top floor with the furnished apartment was not drawing generator power. The silence of the generator was rare.

"Afra, sync your devices, I have fresh batch data." She woke up at his request and took out all her storage devices from her bag and started switching them on.

"Did you manage to go through last week's data?" she asked, while reviewing her existing data on her screen.

"Not really. Most important thing I came across was news about establishment of some sort of a socialist state in the north."

"Okay. I'm going to review what you got today. You can go to sleep if you want," said Afra.

Zahir laid down on one of the mattress and turned towards the dark sky as he fell asleep.

Afra's storage devices blinked the green lights as the network completed syncing with Zahir's. She started going through the data. There was a ton of video footage, some low res, some hi. She started sorting the videos by geo-location. Nothing interested her much. She entered the directory containing news pages, articles, and reports. She quickly did an analysis of the text and found that Masdar was trending heavily in the news.

The city-state of Masdar in the west had sustained some sort of carbon footprint attack. The news suggested that unknown groups or individuals had let massive oil spills burn in the desert within the territory of Masdar. Masdar had lost large amount of its wealth in blink of an eye as its carbon footprint soared. In a news connected to this incident she read about rogue groups profiting from the carbon trading speculative market.

Reading these pieces stirred something in Afra. She woke Zahir up, "What is it exactly that you would code for the guys up there?"

"I don't know Afra, it mostly had to do with a lot of number crunching."

"What kind of numbers?"

"Various sorts. Sometimes I only worked on trade histories of essential commodities, then I did menial work like cleaning, reviewing weather data every day, and some other days I did server maintenance. It wasn't always coding precisely."

“They must have access to data that the street meshes simply could never have right?” Afra couldn’t help but think about all the reports she read throughout the night. They always seem to have fragments and nothing more when collecting data from street meshes.

She held Zahir's hand and told him "I'm going to work for them, whatever menial work it may be."

Before Zahir had the chance to respond, she fled up the staircase and knocked on the door of the apartment. It opened.

"I want to work."

Written by: Debarun Sarkar

Photograph by: Matthew Wiebe

Red Sky at Morning

Carey stared at me from the corner of the room, chiding me for reading (The Strange Case of Jekyll and Hyde, which I never finished). I ignored her while she paged through my parents’ coffee table magazines: Nantucket Yacht and an untouched Parenting. She slammed them shut, stood up and glared at me.

“What’s the point?” she sputtered, exasperated and wild-eyed, watercolor sunburn splotches down her legs from a haphazard sunscreen application the day before. I looked up from my book. In her left hand, she held a plastic beach toy: a forlorn purple profile of a fish. It was a sad, bloated shape that ballooned and bulged a misshapen tumor tail, its lips puckered in expectation like the punks at our last middle school dance. It looked frozen in shock, with a final one-eyed look of powerless recognition of fate: Caesar’s final gaze as Brutus dealt the hardest blow.

“Come on, Hen!” She shook my arm. Carey was strong: a skin-and-bone arm wrestling champion. “Hen”, short for Henry, simultaneously belittling and endearing, which she loved. She was older by a month and taller by two inches, information volunteered unprompted (“cross my heart it’s closer to two-and-a-half inches”) with enough vigor for both of us. Once, while eating our split ham and cheese on the beach, I pointed out a drip of mayonnaise on her chin. She replied that she intended it to be there and refused to wipe it off for the rest of the meal.

I smirked. “Fine.” Book closed. “What are we doing?” But we did the same thing every day. Summer vacation. Too young to do much of anything, too old to sit at home.

She clapped me over the head with the fish. “Follow me.” She spun on her bare feet and walked out with face-forward determination, knowing I’d run to catch up before she walked halfway down the street.

* * *

The beach was our kingdom. More accurately, Carey’s kingdom and she was king, not queen. With seaweed crown and driftwood staff she carried herself with an awkward, spasmodic regality, shouting orders and castigating her subjects: banishing pearl-less oysters, relegating king crab to court jester.

It was hard to distinguish most days from others. Sunshine, honeysuckle and turquoise sea glass; convincing my mother to pack lunch for two (one sandwich, a party-size bag of chips, a carton of OJ, two fun-size Twix bars), bruises that seemingly appeared from nowhere, round rocks we tried to skip but that often plopped in refusal, the smell of sunscreen and sweat.

We sat atop the steep sand throne and looked down below, across the stretch of beach and water. It was early in the season, a cool day in early June. I don’t think I would have jumped in even if my bones could stand it.

Carey paced the peak of the dune, surveying her dominion as if it were a hundred feet below. I made sad fish imprints in the sand with the toy; mute and purple with that cyclops eye wide, unable to warn you about the sea monster behind your back, impossible to change its hopeless view of things.

“Henry,” she commanded, inflection rising on the last syllable in a proper British accent. Wind swept the paint-splattered patches of seagrass along the dune. I looked up from my petrified fish platoon to see the staff lifted high above her head. I winced and held up my hand in defense. How had I offended the king today? And it was only 10am?

A moment. She rested the driftwood on the crown of my head and said, “Sir Henry, for courage so pure and deeds so bold. Knight of my Kingdom.” I smirked and grabbed the staff, throwing it aside (“Treason, Sir Henry! Treason!”) and jumped on her. She fumbled for footing, my arms wrangled around her neck and feet around her waist (“Guards!”). I seized her crown in hasty revolt and placed it askew on my head. She careened to the edge, left leg tangled up in right; we fell in slow motion (did my lips graze her cheek?) and thumped on impact, plunging down the hill.

We barrel-rolled, tangled, swirled images of sea and sand bled into one another. Blue sand, white ocean, red sky.

I landed with a muffled thud, the right side of my face glued to the beach. Lifting my head, I sputtered laughter, sand-spit spewing from my mouth. My right rib panged, and I looked down to see a viscous trickle of sand-blood flowing down my abdomen. I winced.

Carey lay limp beside me. I prodded her. “Carey.” Lifeless. I observed her. “Not funny, Carey.” I threw half-broken sea shells at her back. Nothing. Repeating, louder, “Carey.” And I wanted her name to be longer, to have a fuller sound, as though perhaps a third syllable would be the one to wake her.

The ocean continued to splash sea and salt, low waves crashing in a white noise that accentuated the silence on the beach.

I shifted to look back to the towering dune. Lifting my legs from my seated inspection, I stepped back, climbing the dune backwards to face toward Carey’s contorted form. At the top, I retrieved the plastic fish, my imprinted fortune-telling fish legion staring at me: “We tried to tell you.”

Back at the shoreline, bedsheet of white foam erasing my footsteps, I flung the fish into the water and watched the piece of floating purple plastic wash out to sea. A fish that couldn’t swim, only drift, climbing the crest of a wave in a dead man’s float.

I walked home alone. An unnaturally wide smile shined from the toddler on this month’s Parenting on the doorstep.

And then gray bedroom, blue fog sleep. Numbness: something and nothing, my entire body like a fallen-asleep foot.

Written by: Gregory Duffy

Photo by: Daniel Charles Ross

River in Time

The river calls and I heed Her, my addiction. Once, a human load of clothes set to life-or-death. The spillway ravages my teenage body. I fight, but can’t win; sweet surrender. Then my hand bumps a rock. A hateful, unapologetic rock that put me into my predicament. One last fight to gain the murky light. I grab Gibraltar and propel myself to air, to heaven, to life. A sandbar oasis; August heat from a Midwestern sun. Her lust be damned.

* * *

The river summons and I gravitate to Her, my sun. Another time, a swan dive. Head first into quicksand. Stunned into stupor and paralyzed. I float downstream—a dead tree uprooted by tornadoes. Recovery, I’m not paraplegic. I’m sanctified, I’m whole, I’m vindicated.

* * *

The river begs and I barter, my sanctuary. A toppled tent, torn down by sweaty desire. Our voyeurs, a fisherman and Her. I can taste Her jealousy, Her fury, Her might. This time She’s indirect.

My beloved lab, Pardner, sucked into Her vortex.

Chelsea screams, “If he goes under, he’s dead.”

The water envelops me. His claws rake my shoulders and blood seeps from the gouges. I thrust him up into outstretched hands. Immense suction tickles the hairs on my legs.

Chelsea nurses my wounds. “You’re fucking insane.”

I reset the tent. A brown, furry lump lies in the sand; worn out. Does he know?

The tent collapses again. More sweat, more want, more flippancy. We lie under the vision of ten-trillion stars and She gurgles. A sultry siren crying out all night long. In the morning, dense fog. I pack up the Dasher, on edge. Her fishy eyes on every inch of me. Chelsea and Pardner cavort in Her wicked reach; She relents. We drive away without further incident. A mirror pond reflection in my rearview.

* * *

The river beckons and I run to Her, my abyss. Drunk strangers playing with danger. An infamous back current; their death between my fingers. She waits for Her meal, a crocodile in the shallows. Time to learn, to sort out transgressions, to let bygones be the truth. The early edition reads as day old news: Two Visitors Drown, One Local Teen Hospitalized.

* * *

The river commands and I obey Her, my true directive. A moonless night; revelers dance. Four old tires burn hot—Hades in July. On dare I take the fridge, rusted from age, for a canoe. It sinks into Her open maw, but not before I’m in too deep. A bootlace catches; turbulent water in turmoil. At the bottom, a loud thud. Then, whispering silence. Thousands of sounds muted; listening to intercourse through a wall. I scream, I thrash, I assail until my boot comes free. Surfacing onto a distant planet—salty, foreign, cool.

I crawl out of Her watery grip hundreds of yards downstream. Back in the throe I’m a god, a titan, the river lord. They chant my name; vulcanized rubber drifts skyward into blankness. The party rages and I fuck my first fuck, dab my first dot, fill up an unused tumbler, mark time; a legend begins.

* * *

The river cries out and I ignore Her, our separation. Houses blur, cars die and time recedes; an arrow to nevermore. At night in faraway lands She babbles. A brook bursting its banks. During the day a teasing allure, happy hour to an alcoholic. One day I’ll go back, return to sender, the melting ice of headwaters. How long have I been gone? Years, decades, but not a century that’s for sure—or is it? The call, the summons, the command nothing works. She cries out for me, a mournful moan. Wretches in heat, dinosaurs in bone, the whispering coughs of vagabonds.

I cheat. Swimming pools, lakes, seas and every ocean in between. My body’s escaped, but my mind’s shackled. It’s not my father that built me, nor the clergy, not my betrothed, not even every misstep along the way. The river, that damned North Platte river shaped me. She forged my soul, fired my loins, fed my hunger, and sustained me. In death’s embrace, life isn’t sweeter. It’s necessary. An ageless mandate, the ultimate order that causes chaos—a spark that ignited cosmic fire.

* * *

The river swoons and I come home, full submersion. Fishing pole, bait and a six-pack. On the bank under a searing summer sun, I’m scared and at ease. Things have changed, but it’s me…all me. I’m older, a shell emptied of all its turtle meat, a dead beaver bloating in the sand, the fleshless carp at the bottom of Her rapids. Still, She pumps me up, inflates my sails—the Hindenburg before Lakehurst. She flows downward and up, outward and inward; heaves to and fro. The windswept furrow blown back into a perfect line. Always in perfect alignment; Amazon, Yangtze, Mississippi, Nile, the Tigris-Euphrates.

The shiny lure skips across Her bosom and sinks into Her caveat. I tug the rod and then reel, tug and reel, tug and reel. Wham, fish on. Surprised, I stumble and slide down Her bank. Up to my knees; a wet, sloppy hello-kiss. I yank back the rod, but it’s a big one. Waist deep—a quick tryst under the oaks. One more attempt to land the monster. My head goes under, the pole drifts away. She’s there in front of me, behind, beside, every point of the globe.

* * *

The river lulls and I swim through Her, my reprise. My arms are fins, my feet the lateral line. Gills, if I had gills, I’d swim upstream to spawn. I stroke and it propels me downward. I stroke again—harder, downward more. I’m not disoriented or confused. Another stroke, deeper into the depths and then another, another, another. I hit the sandy bottom, my fist jams into the gravel and silt. Go with it; the other hand jabs even deeper.

I hold myself to the bottom, I’m a kid again. Her rushing current above, peace and serenity below. Pretend I’m Aquaman, pretend I’m leviathan, pretend I’m Neptune. Pretend … pretend … pretend.

Written by: David Grubb

Photo by: Daniel Vidal

The Secrets of Bayou Galafete

Meg needed money. She had graduated in the spring with a degree in journalism, and though she had been on more than a dozen interviews, stiff competition was making it tough to land even an entry-level position. With dwindling options, Meg took a short-term, temporary assignment filing reports, test results, and memos in a cramped, windowless storage room at a local research facility, Sidero BioLabs, Inc. There was nothing exciting about it—until she discovered a handwritten note stuck to the back of a report.

Heart pounding, Meg raced home that evening and booted up her laptop. Still trembling from her earlier discovery, she opened a search engine and typed “Bayou Galafete news articles.” The results included various human interest stories, articles on local history, and reported ghost sightings. However, two stories in particular looked promising. In the first, nearly a decade before, residents reported strange activities in and around the bayou including unmarked vans coming and going in the middle of the night. Others stated seeing fish disfigured and five times their average size, birds with only one eye, and aggressive behavior in animals typically considered docile.

The second, more recent article—dated two years earlier and buried in a small-town online newspaper—reported that evidence of illegal dumping in several waterways pointed to members of the Gedeon Clan, local swamp folk going back generations. Men further down in the clan pecking order were arrested and charged, but when questioned about dumping into the Bayou Galafete, a high-priced lawyer materialized arguing that the evidence was circumstantial at best and proclaiming his clients’ innocence. He brushed aside all of the accusations as unfounded ramblings by local drunks. He was quoted as saying, “The Gedeons are upstanding citizens with legitimate business interests in the community. They stand firm that these allegations are baseless and only meant to tarnish their reputation.” The judge quickly dismissed the charges and the clansmen were released.

Meg’s journalistic instincts kicked in.

***

“You want me to do what?” Jack said.

Meg had briefly explained her concerns about what she found but felt it best not to go into too much detail with her anxious roommate.

“Aren’t you overreacting just a bit?” Jack added.

“No, I’m not. Something weird is going on out at Galafete. This could be the break I've needed. If there is something to that note and I have the exclusive on it, then the sky’s the limit. Please, Jack. I don’t want to go by myself,” Meg pleaded.

“You know I would do anything for you, but that place freaks me out just thinking about it. Besides,” Jack said with a flip of his hand, “I’m busy tonight.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll have you back in time to watch ‘Housewives of Atlanta’,” Meg replied, rolling her eyes.

“Hey, that show happens to be an important sociological commentary on women’s role in a male-dominated culture.”

“Of course it is. So will you go?” Meg persisted.

“Fine, but you owe me. Big time,” Jack said.

***

The soupy bayou, entangled in ghostly vapors, slithering evil, and the raucous cacophony of bullfrogs, cicadas, and screech owls unnerved the young couple. Sunset was still an hour away, but deep in the bayou, darkness was already upon them as they wound through towering bald cypress and ancient oak trees draped in Spanish moss.

Meg’s flashlight beam caught on the weather-worn cottage as they made their way down the overgrown path. “Just a little further,” Meg whispered.

The crumbling stucco and rusted tin roof were clear indications the small house had been abandoned long ago. They stepped inside through a collapsed wall. The current residents – cockroaches and a family of mice – shared the mildew-covered room with containers of various sizes labeled SIDERO BIOLABS, INC. and marked with a crudely drawn skull and crossbones.

“Let’s get out of here,” Jack said, backing straight into a spider web. “Eew!” He screamed, flapping at the sticky tangle wrapped around his head.

“Shhhh. Be quiet,” Meg said.

“I’m outta here,” Jack huffed.

“Let me get a few pictures first.” Meg pulled her phone from of her back pocket and snapped photos of the containers.

A loud splash drew their attention.

“Omigod, was that a gator?” Jack said.

“Mmm, probably,” Meg replied, heading out through the hole in the wall.

“Meg...Meg....” Jack called out in a hoarse whisper.

“Not so loud,” Meg said. “Come on, just a quick look and then I promise we’ll leave.”

“Two seconds, that’s it,” Jack said stomping after her.

They crept onto the wobbly wooden pier, conscious of their every move as it swayed beneath them. Meg skimmed the water with her flashlight. A large shape breached the still surface twenty feet from where they stood, its disfigured tail fin slapping the water as it dove out of sight.

“What the hell was that?” Jack whispered, stepping forward.

Meg grabbed his arm. “I don’t know, but stay back.”

“Man, that was no gator.”

“Do you still think I’m overreacting?” Meg said.

“We need to call... Wait, who deals with something like this? EPA, FBI?” Jack said, watching for signs of the creature’s return.

“EPA I guess,” Meg replied. “But we have a problem.”

“What now?” Jack said, his voice jumping up an octave.

“No reception,” she replied, turning in circles, tilting her phone. “But I’ll get a few photos of this area, plus I have you as my witness, in case— “

“In case what?” Jack demanded.

“Never mind, let’s just get out of here.”

They turned. A dirty bearded man, menacing in head-to-toe camouflage, with his pistol drawn, blocked their path.

“You ain’t goin’ nowhere.”


Written by: Enid Cokinos

Photo by: Kassie Ritman

The Dictator's Lemonade

The Dictator was exiled to a small island in the Pacific, somewhere between Hawaii and Australia. The parallels to a famous, short, French dictator were obvious. But The Dictator, Our Dictator, stopped reading that biography around the halfway point.

“Why’d you stop reading?” I asked him under a blistering South Pacific sun.

I was writing a magazine article - a human interest piece commissioned by a now-defunct periodical - designed, I guess, to humanize him, my editor thinking, surely, exile must have done him some good.

“He’d just won a great victory,” he told me. He took a drink of lemonade. He smoothed his beautiful hair with one, heavily-jeweled hand. “It was very well done. He did very, very well. And you know what? I’d learned all I needed to know about him.”

“I have a gift,” he continued. “I know people. I really do. And I knew when I read of his victory, his great victory, very well-earned, I knew it then, I knew…”

He trails off as a very beautiful woman, very tall, exceptionally tan, approaches and puts her hand on his shoulder.

“I found your sock,” she says in a heavy, foreign accent. “I didn’t think I would find it, but then I looked again and...wow! There it was.”

“Wow!” he says.

The Dictator shifts his focus to me. “Did you hear that? She found my sock!”

“Fantastic,” I say.

“I thought it might be lost,” the woman says to me. “But then I found it. Later. At a different time.”

“That’s very good,” he says. “Very, very good.”

He pats her backside and she slinks off down steps behind the infinity pool, so that it appears she’s disappeared into the ocean.

The Dictator and I sit on the back porch with the ocean and a sweating carafe of lemonade as our only distractions. The house is all open white doors that hope to corral what’s left of the breeze after the heavy humid air shakes it down. There’s a television the size of a wall playing old Scooby Doo cartoons in the living room, and through our conversation the bizarre patois of slobbering Scooby bookends any silence found in our conversation.

The Dictator has had work done on his hair, his face, his hands, but peculiarly not his body. His paunch is a personal TV dinner tray under his button up white shirt. The shirt is too small and has somehow collected crumbs, though we haven’t eaten anything since sitting down. He’s wearing white linen pants. His tan is fluorescent even under an afternoon sun. He once joked, with his counterpart of some vaguely European, nuclear-powered dynasty, that, “If they turn the lights out on me I’d glow like a fucking night light,” and even now, years later, when you look at him you believe it.

“That’s what they don’t understand,” he says unprompted. “That’s the thing about guys like me!”

I wait for him to supply some context to his outburst, but he waits for me to respond. He does this all the time. It’s like he’s been interrupted by silence and he holds it against you, and more importantly, he wants you to know that he holds it against you. In conversation with The Dictator, you are responsible for the uncouth interjections of silence, so get used to it.

“How has your life changed since you’ve been exiled?” I ask him.

“Oh, I love it,” he says. “Look around. I’ve done very, very well here. Did you see that woman earlier?”

“You know I did.”

“That woman,” he leans in to whisper, “that woman is a treasure. I found her here. She was buried in the holds of an old Spanish galleon, The Conquistador, that’s wrecked a few miles that way.”

He points towards the open ocean but locks his eyes on mine.

“Under lock and key,” he continues. “17th century. Hundreds...hundreds of years she’s been there waiting for a guy like me to dig her up. Centuries. I went down there myself. My good friend, Billy, the director - you’ve heard of him - he has a submersible. A submarine. It has claws, and I went down there myself. And I tell you what, pal, I saw her down there shining like a billion Spanish coins, and that’s what she does...she lights up my life.”

He leans back and takes another sip of lemonade. I know he’s joking but his eyes don’t seem to agree. It strikes me, seriously for the first time in years, that perhaps he’s had a break from reality. In the beginning, of course, it was easy to think that way. He made it easy. It was his greatest trick. The Devil and The Dictator...

“The finest trick of the devil,” he says to me, somehow (no... surely not) reading my mind, “is to persuade you that he does not exist.”

The Dictator sits back in his chair, satisfied. “Shakespeare.”

I grin. “I think it was Charles Baudelaire,” I say. “French. Nineteenth Century. He was a poet.”

“Listen, Charles…?”

“Baudelaire,” I say.

“Right,” he says. “He might have said it. Technically, he might have said it. But it was Shakespeare that came up with it. Will Shakespeare. Greatest writer the world has ever known. Smart guy. Very, very smart guy.”

In certain circles, particularly circles of The Revolution, there once floated tales of arguments and consequences; a word cloud of disappearance, strangulation, poison, torture - all orbiting The Dictator, sucked in by that gravity of Power.

I keep my mouth shut about Baudelaire and Shakespeare.

“You see those boats out there?” he asks me, pointing towards anchored yachts not far off the coast of his island. “I’ll let you in on a secret.”

He leans in and whispers, “One day. Soon. Someday soon. Very soon. Those boats are going to take me back home. Back to my people. Back to where I belong. And when I get there, I’m going to do very, very well. Because they love me. They really do. It’s easy to see.”

“This,” he gestures to everything - the lemonade, the house, the ocean - “It’s rigged. Really. They know it, you know it, I know it. Everyone knows it.”

He leans back in his chair, and takes a long drink of his lemonade. “Jesus, fuck.”

After I leave his island, but before this story goes to print, The Dictator is found dead in his bath. The official causes are au naturel, but the country whispers, “Poison,” and then, even softer, “Lemonade? Really?”

Written by: Logan Theissen

Photo by: Victoria Ostrzenski

Where the Wild Went

Flames lick at the leaves. Burning captured in photos. The pictures flash over the stage, stretched into obscurity, but Pike knows them. A forest eaten by fire, frame after frame. 

Light pools and melts over their guitars; Pike purchased his sister’s portfolio for this purpose.

He drinks in the darkness off stage, large lungfuls of dank air from the club. Tonight Helen and the Torches are the headliners and he is not Pike, but Flint. No longer labeled a Flynn Twin.

Beer on the shoe, in the mouth, alcohol slows…the…songs…down. Acoustics arc the soul into shape.

Pike wonders what’s happened to live shows. The painful beat in the ear, in the head. Understanding the lyrics like no one else. The beauty of lavender light from stage on skin. Hot kiss of melody sung just off-key enough to be endearing.

Now people want perfection.

Their filters are new and they are new and he wonders why they can’t trust their own memories.

He only trusts what he remembers.

Keeps the music his own.

* * *

Pike took a beer out past the tree line, walked until the bonfire burned like a lit match in the distance. He’d been led from town by the blaze; hot and thick and delicious.

“Thought you'd forget, Pember,” he said.

His sister joined after the beer was gone, sipped slow, can crushed in his hand.

“A promise is sacred,” she said, smiling through her discomfort.

Pike knew she didn’t like the past.

They unearthed the plastic Power Rangers thermos, which once fit into the matching lunchbox before Louis Alexander stole it during their third grade field trip to the Jell-O museum. Pemberley had kissed Pike’s forehead after, took him to bury the dead.

His thermos had lost its twin.

“You’ll do the same when I die,” she’d said.

They’d sworn with paper cuts pressed together: “To be opened again, before we become different.”

College was coming.

They knew the world would change them.

Pike popped the lid, revealed old things inside. Their dad’s favorite matchbox car. Papers and pens.

Their secrets.

“Ever think, maybe, we were never the people we were supposed to be?” Pike asked.

“You think you’re so much smarter,” Pemberley said. The words arrived soft and sure, and they sounded raw. Too real. And it hurt Pike to hear this from his twin.

“Belongs to you,” he said, handing a piece of paper with her small, seven-year-old print on the lines.

“One secret for another,” she said, using her phone’s light. “Always Remember: Never trust dreams. They’re not real. Don’t show your emotions until night. Kids ruin you. Don’t fall. Always be strong.”

“That’s—Pember, do you—”

“Just give me your secret.”

“I don’t hate him,” he said, spinning the wheels of the matchbox between his fingers. He scrunched up his nose to keep himself from crying.

He knew, even as he said it, that the words weren’t the same for his sister. She’d needed their dad, and he hadn’t been there. Their father had left once when they were six, again when they were nine. He’d returned broken, and maybe Pemberley still blamed him for being weak, but he would never ask. And the silent way she still hurt had always been enough to keep him quiet, too.

“God, Pike. He’s not a parent. Not the way he should be.”

“Dad will miss us,” Pike said. “He loves us.”

He needed the words to mean something.

“Used to think that, too. But maybe he just loves the parts of us that belong to him. Your name, like some fucked up fishing trophy. My eyes. The way we fight. Whatever. But that’s not love.”

He wanted to write her a poem then about love being the wild within them, how he only felt it around her. But they walked back to the bonfire without words. Pike first, Pemberley a few steps behind.

* * *

Too often, he sees her in trees, the way leaves flutter. Pike uses her pictures throughout the set, his own paramnesia. The destruction. The death of it all. He believes this is his sister.

There are nights when he tries to find the only girl really watching. Other times, he searches for the one staring at anything but them. He can’t know how she’d watch, feel his music. But he hopes she wouldn’t want to sway with strangers who only see the show through phone screens. She might read about his band while openers calibrate voices and instruments to octaves she couldn’t care about. She’d still need him to sing some sense into her.

They’d parted ways; separate colleges on separate coasts where they’d needed to become separate people. The distance never meant anything. He knew they’d come back together for the important things.

After their dad died, she didn’t come home. She sent him a postcard, featuring a picture she’d taken on assignment. It was hers, words her own, too. But none of it was his sister. None of those things were real. Pemberley promised: see you soon. but not now. not for this.

The image of her first forest fire in Wyoming is obliterated by those words, projected on his face, in the song. He plays the opening chords of “Heart Attack,” croaks the first line: “She was obsessed with time.” But he doesn’t finish it, because he can’t. His father’s death is still too real.

He knows he could’ve been the one to go to her after.

But he is here now with music and words and the past trapped somewhere between them; the betwixt formed and fossilized from too many months of not speaking.

Now, when they open with “Of Embers and Pyres,” he understands her obsession with fire, bones breaking into dust; their father’s cremation too much like a Viking ritual.

Pike’s lyrics take the crowd to distant places: “Soon you’ll hear this song, and remember the fire. They will know your name. Sing of embers and pyres. Pemberley, Pember. All of us, liars…”

And they sing with him, voices in unison. Each of them calls her out instead of him, sets Pike free.

The blame should burn.

When Pike sings about her now, he gives her to empty people waiting to be filled, and they take her. He wonders if the crowd understands she’d burn down an entire town if given the chance. Watch it disappear.

Written by: Kayla King
Photograph by: Justin Maher

A Beautiful Place

There are dead things in the whirlpool. On hot summer days you can smell the remains of fish and birds and other victims of the river rotting in the sun.

Today is one of those days. The sun has just entered the sky and already it’s baking the world. The dead things that have been thrown from the swirling water fester on the banks of the whirlpool. Other dead things are still caught in the current. They’re hidden from view by movement, by the white water churning and spinning. The current keeps them for a long time, but eventually all the detritus are tossed out and wash up on shore. I wonder if I’ll join them.

I never liked Niagara Falls. It’s the sort of place that lets you know how close we all are to chaos. Other cities do a better job of hiding the animal madness of us, the ugly, the mean, the horny. This is a place that you could easily imagine abandoned and falling apart. So much of it already I s. The restaurants and shops and churches, now empty for decades. No one cares to fix them up. Those who build in the area, build new.

I hear Sam grunting with exertion. I want to fight back but I can't. Something broke inside me with that last kick to the spine. I can't feel my arms trailing along the dirt path, or my ankles that he holds tight, pulling me through the forest.

There’s blood in my mouth. I can feel it but I can't taste it and that scares me more than anything. I know the taste of my own blood. Last night wasn't the first time Sam hit me. I want to think it won't be the last, but I'm afraid that would be a lie.

“You should’ve never talked to me like that,” Sam says. His voice is trembling. He’s scared. He isn't mad anymore like he was when I mocked him last night. I shouldn't have. I know it, but I didn't want him climbing on top of me with the chlorine stink all over him from his shift at the water park. I should have said I was sick instead of getting mouthy.

Sam was the first person I met in Niagara Falls. I hitchhiked here from Oshawa to see a wonder of the world and instantly wanted to say fuck this whole thing and thumb it back home. Only, I didn't have a home to thumb it too. My home was supposed to be with Aunt Jen and her pervert husband but neither of them were missing me.

I heard the rumble first. It was hidden under the sounds of cars and tourists. I kept heading down hill and the sond kept growing. Soon I could hear it over all the other sounds of this shitty little city. It was everywhere. Next I saw the mist on the horizon. It rose above the buildings, stretching for the sky, like a cloud, and I knew I was getting closer.

The roar of the whirlpool is different than the falls. It fills my ears as I'm pulled helplessly through the forest. Sam drops my feet and stumbles away from me. I see him leaning against a tree. I think he’s vomiting. After, he falls on his knees beside me.

“I’m sorry, baby. You know I didn't mean to,” he sobs into my hair.

He has puke and mucus on his chin, and my blood on his hands. I want to move but nothing is listening.

When Sam brought me home I knew to be afraid of him – grown men who bring home homeless girls are trouble. He had a place on the edge of town, run down and faded like all the rest of this crap city. There’s no heart to this city. There’s a centre which fades to decay as you near the edges where it finally blends with the rural areas that surround it. Sam’s house sat, across from an abandoned warehouse and beside a forgotten train track. His place was near the whirlpool. I’d never heard of the whirlpool, but it was beautiful too.

Sam was old and ugly, but he took care of me so I didn't fight back when he started getting mean. I knew I could end up worse places. He didn't ask for weird sex stuff and when he was in a good mood he was funny. I know it's true—he didn't mean to kill me.

My first day in Niagara, when I finally found the waterfall, I was shocked by the colour of it. None of the pictures I saw ever captured the green of that water. I thought someone must have dyed it. I forgot that the falls weren't fake like the rest of this town. It wasn't made by man, but by thousands of tons of water crashing through rock and time. The river was real, and it didn't matter that all this ugliness had built up around it – the river was a beautiful place in the world.

Sam’s stopped crying and he's on his knees, rolling me over the rock. I know where we are. He brought me here once to sit on the ledge over the whirlpool. He wanted to hold hands, but I didn't want to hold his where tourists and families could come by and see us. I remember the view, the churning turquoise water and the forest all around.

I know now this is the end. I will fall from this cliff into the whirlpool and my body will be sucked into the current. I want it to stay there forever, bouncing around with the dead fish and raccoons and whatever else might be in there. I don't want to wash up and be found baking in the sun. I don't want them taking me back to Aunt Jen and her dick-head husband so they can cry over a grave and say they did what they could to help me. I don't want to think of Sam in a prison for the rest of his days.

My body rolls off the edge of the cliff and into the air. I don't want to think of any of that ugly shit while I fall through the sky. Instead, I think of the swirling green water, and I remember that the world is a beautiful place.

Photograph and Story by: Sarah Scott

Half Horse

“Cygnus 731 preparing for contact.”

The ship’s voice is metallic and feminine. The crew calls her Marta, a common North American name after the collapse of the Great Wall between the United States and Mexico. Cygnus 731 has been in orbit for close to three Earth years, which seems paltry, but the days have crept by like a lizard trapped inside for too long, eager to feel the sun and the wind on her skin. When Marta announced the presence of another ship within their vicinity, they were terrified and overjoyed at once.

“Marta, can you confirm if the ship is Deneb 864?” asks the captain.

Captain Liza Frederickson stands with hands on her hips, staring up at the smart screen in the command center. Sweat beads on her upper lip and loose strands from her high and tight pony tail are pasted against her forehead from the ten-mile run on the treadmill.

“I will be able to confirm in thirty seconds, Captain,” Marta replies.

“Going after Deneb 864 has been like chasing a chihuahua back into the yard,” says Sergeant Ballard.

“Yes, Captain,” Marta beings. “The ship is Deneb 864. Establishing contact now.”

“Deneb 864, Cygnus 731 approaches. Do you copy?”

The static is soft and distant before a cavernous silence replaces it. Captain Frederickson closes her eyes, praying for a response.

“What is the worst case scenario? Everyone is dead?” she wonders aloud.

“We’d just hook ships and head home if that were the case. Maybe if visitors have control of the Deneb, but that’s unlikely,” Sergeant Ballard says.

“Copy.”

The crew approaches behind her, eyes wide as they stare at the screen, waiting for more than a single word answer.

“Excellent. What is your status? Is anyone harmed?” Captain Frederickson asks.

“All is well. The Half Horse flourishes.”

“The heck is a half horse?” Sergeant Ballard hisses.

“He’s talking about the galaxy, sir,” Officer Truno whispers, rolling her eyes and folding her arms over her chest.

For centuries, the Milky Way ripped apart another galaxy named Sagittarius, pulling its stars and planets into itself, making them orphans and claiming them as her own. Earth is one of Sagittarius’ orphans. Deneb 864 and her crew went in search of answers of humankind’s parentage within the remnants of the ravaged galaxy.

“I am Captain Liza Frederickson. Who speaks?”

“Larak Nergal, right hand of Ninsun Uras.”

Captain Frederickson narrows her eyes, then turns her head to look back at Sergeant Ballard. He shakes his head.

“I wish to speak with Captain Fletcher Gallo.”

“Fletcher Gallo met his end in orbit. We have tended to his remains so that you may return them to his Earth family,” Larak says.

Cygnus 731’s crew shifts, murmuring to one another. The command center in Guadalajara mentioned the possibility of the ship being overtaken.

“Is Ninsun Uras your captain, sir?” Frederickson asks.

“Ninsun Uras, may she live in our hearts, is Monarch of the Heavenly Region in place of her father Anu.”

“And the crew - are they well, Nergal?”

“Yes, lady. They have been escorted to the Heavenly Region to recuperate after an arduous and unfruitful journey.”

“Finding an alien race hardly seems unfruitful,” chimes Sergeant Ballard.

“We desire contact with you so that you may return the Deneb ship back to your home planet. Ninsun Uras recognizes its value and does not wish to commandeer it,” Nergal says.

The screen flickers once.

“Image calibrating,” Marta states.

Cyngus 731’s crew beholds Larak Nergal, a dark-skinned man who looks no older than twenty four Earth years, green eyes clear and illuminated by screen light.

“When will the crew be able to rejoin Deneb 864, Larak Nergal?” Captain Frederickson asks.

“They will not rejoin, Captain.” Nergal’s voice is matter of fact.

“Pardon?”

“Captain Frederickson, the crew has suffered much. They wish to be still. To root down. To remain at home.”

Captain Frederickson’s armpits start to itch from the accumulating sweat, her toes curling in her boots with anxiety.

“To remain at home?” she asks.

“Yes, Captain. You and your crew are welcome home as well. Suffering several incarnations in another galaxy takes its toll on sensitive souls.”

“Sir, Deneb 864’s crew as well as ours have families that await them on Earth. I have made a promise to reunite them.”

“Yes, and we shall give you the body of Captain Fletcher Gallo; he died in the Heavenly Region so he will reincarnate in the Sagittarius galaxy. Your comrades have chosen to remain; when they pass, their souls will sanctify those of their families. All souls will reunite in Sagittarius. I understand this is troubling news; we will give you letters and recordings made by your sister crew alongside Captain Gallo.”

“It’s not just troubling, Nergal. It is hard to believe. I wish to board at once,” Captain Frederickson says, followed by her crew’s soft protest behind her.

“Of course, Captain. Ninsun Uras expected nothing less; she is eager to see you.”

When Cygnus 731 and Deneb 864 merge, the ships tremble. Captain Frederickson and her crew stand in the transfer bay.

“Sergeant Ballard, if I do not return, disconnect and retreat.”

Blue and white lights illuminate the transfer bay. Captain Frederickson walks forward, Cygnus 731’s doors closing behind her. Her footsteps and heartbeat are loud in her ears as the lights dim and her breath quickens. She is no longer alone.

“Liza. I am Ninsun Uras,” says a still, soft voice in the dark. “I implore you, come home to us. You have endured seven incarnations in the Milky Way; seek respite in the Heavenly Region.”

Captain Frederickson can see nothing, but she feels suddenly weary. So many lifetimes, so much suffering. Oh, to lie down. To find peace. To be still.

She feels Ninsun Uras draw her close, but she is not afraid. Captain Frederickson wants nothing more than to shed the fragile skin of this lifetime, and release the karmic turbulence of her previous incarnations.

“Welcome home, sister. I have missed you so much.”

Written by: Natasha Akery
Photograph by: Rob Gregory

Live a Great Story

Dakota Foreman faced the bright orange brick wall, staring at the eye-level sign. Underneath the words LIVE A GREAT STORY would be an ironic place to die, but that is what she thought she might do.

The middle-aged man behind Dakota reburied his pistol into the twenty-two-year-old's lower back. The barrel was hot from the warning shot he had just fired. It burned Dakota’s skin through her shirt.

The man had startled Dakota, jumping into her backseat as she was leaving the gym. She was trying to text the boyfriend she wanted to break up with that she had quit her job. The man’s gun was up before she could dial 9-1-1.

He made Dakota drive to the outskirts of Charleston. Now they stood in front of an empty building in an abandoned part of the commercial district.

“You’re the final piece to the puzzle I’ve been putting together for the past twenty-four years.”

Dakota felt the pistol barrel dig deeper into her lower back, pushing her forward towards the wall. She had cried the entire drive out to this location. But her nerves had calmed since she parked the car and climbed out.

“Peel off the sticker,” said the man.

Dakota hesitated for a moment.

“Three seconds,” said the man, raising the gun to poke into Dakota’s rib cage. “I don’t have all day.”

Dakota jumped forward and dug her fingers into the brick at the left edge of the sticker. The adhesive held at first. Dakota felt the brick scratching away her green nail polish while the sticker refused to budge.

Eventually, Dakota successfully pulled the sticker away, revealing a circular stone carved to resemble a screaming face. There were two dots for eyes, a big mouth and three slits on each cheek.

“What is that?” asked Dakota.

She partly asked because she had no idea why there was a screaming face cut into the wall – or why it had been covered up by a sticker. But she also asked because the face had an unexplained effect on her. For the first time in years, she felt at home.

“A doorway.”

“To where?”

“That’s for us to find out,” the man replied. “Push it.”

Dakota’s gut told her to oblige. Her mind screamed in protest.

“Why me?” she asked, biding time to settle her internal conflict.

“Because I’ve seen enough Indiana Jones movies. And I have the gun.”

“Fair enough,” replied Dakota.

Like the man, Dakota had seen plenty of Indiana Jones movies. She knew what happened to the no-names who messed with secret doors and mystical objects. But her gut told her she was far from a no-name here.

Dakota took two deep breaths and slammed her palm into the stone face. The rock resisted at first, holding its ground. Then there was a soft click and the piece slid back into the brick wall.

A soft hum started behind the stone face. It quickly turned to a louder buzz. Dakota peeked over her shoulder at the man behind her, but he looked just as perplexed by the sound.

Then the buzzing intensified.

“What’s happening?” asked Dakota.

“The door’s opening.”

“What door?”

Dakota had confirmed multiple times there was no door. But as she turned around, she saw that was no longer true.

The buzzing was thunderous now. The ground shook and the bright orange wall that had previously rested before them was splitting and folding away. When the rumbling stopped and the wall settled, there was now an empty doorway leading to pitch black mystery.

“I was right,” said the man, stepping up next to Dakota. “You’re one of them.”

“One of what?”

“An Atlantean,” he said. “I found the way to Atlantis.”

Suddenly, the smile was gone as a spear flew from the darkness and tore through the man’s midsection. In horrified shock, he looked down at the back of the spear protruding from his stomach. He dropped the gun, collapsed to his knees and then fell to his right.

Dakota froze next to the man. She wanted to run, but her legs refused.

A mountain of a man scooted through the doorway and stepped out in front of Dakota. His dark brown beard was thick, bushy and stretched down past his chest. His hair was pulled back into a braid that extended down the same distance. The man did not wear a shirt, revealing skin bronzed as if it had never missed a minute in the sun. His muscles were ripped – taut, holding another spear, ready to throw at Dakota.

The man’s expression quickly shifted from anger and questioning to recognition. Then a smile appeared.

In a deep, rumbling voice, he stated something in a language Dakota did not understand.

Chills rushed up her spine. Chills of relief.

“You’ve arrived,” the man said in English. “The princess is home.”

Dakota’s eyebrows jumped at the word ‘princess.’

“Follow me,” said the man, waving for Dakota to follow him.

She followed. The other side of the doorway was not the dark cavern she expected. Rather, Dakota found herself in awe of a white marble walkway lined by a majestic ceiling, grandiose walls and Greek-like columns.

“Where are we?” asked Dakota, walking along the Atlantean’s side.

“This is a portal station. A bridge between our world and theirs.”

“Our world?”

“Yes,” said the Atlantean. “Ours. Including yours. Heirs to the throne spend their formative years above so they can better understand the land humans. So that you can empathize with them.”

“I’m from Atlantis?”

“Everything will come back to you once you’re home.”

“And who was that?” asked Dakota, peeking back over her shoulder to where they had left the armed man.

“Doctor Higgins has spent the better part of three decades hunting proof of our existence.”

“I’d say he found it.”

“He has found proof before,” said the Atlantean. “But he was obsessed with proof he could share.”

Dakota and the Atlantean stopped at a set of tall stone doors, having reached the end of the long walkway. The man banged his fist on the door in front of him three times.

“I hope he lived a great story,” he said. “Or at least a good enough story for him.”

Written by: Kevin Treaccar
Photograph by: Sophie Stuart

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

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

How to Dispose of a Dead Body

Rainey struggles trying to get the corpse out of the trunk. I mean, I get it – it’s a big corpse stuffed into a tiny trunk. No leg room whatsoever. It took us a good twenty minutes just to get the fucker in there. Hell, I’m no engineer. Rainey can’t even spell engineer. But still, it’s a dead body. How hard can it be?

“You want some help, man?”

Rainey grunts and slips and gets the thing halfway out. He goes for the torso first so the corpse’s right arm is hanging real languid-like out of the open trunk.

“Naw, bro,” Rainey says. “I got this. Been watching a bunch of Breaking Bad, lately.”

I shrug and smoke the rest of my cigarette and look up to the big MOTEL sign above us.

The sign says the joint was established in 1940 and fuck me proper if it made it to 41’. The motel is deserted, and no wonder, out here in the fucking desert – no shit nobody wants to stay out here. Might as well advertise directly to serial killers and drifter vampires.

Kill someone? Come on down! Free HBO!

The sign looks good though. Very classy. Pretty clean and not missing any letters or anything. Like they hired a drunken caretaker who said fuck it to the motel buildings but took great pride in his sign. Dude probably would sit under the sign and drink whiskey and mutter things like, “A man can only do so much.”

But why here? Why the sign? Fuck me if I know. This is all Rainey’s idea.

See, Rainey has been part of The Family much longer than I have. I’m still a newbie when it comes to disposing of bodies; in fact, this is my first trip out to the desert. Big Don Martino, the big shit of the big shits, even gave me a crucifix to celebrate the moment.

“Hold to it tight, Niño,” he said, laying the cross delicately in my hand. “Do not let it go. No matter what.”

When Don Martino speaks, you best listen, so I fingered the cross all the way out to the desert as Rainey listened to his self-help tapes, that shit bumping in the little Nissan with fake New Mexico plates.

You are worth something. Now, say it with me. You are worth something.

Fucking Rainey, playing along, mouthing that he’s “worth something.”

It’s starting to get dark by the time homeboy gets the body out of the trunk.

“Yo!” he shouts at me. “Get the flashlight out of the glove compartment. And the boombox. Get the boombox out the backseat.”

I do as I’m told. The boombox looks about as old and useless as the motel buildings surrounding their precious sign.

“What the fuck are we doing with this boombox?” I ask for not the first time. “Seriously, what’s with all the mystery?”

The mystery is why Rainey, of all fucking people, is the designated disposer of bodies. As it goes, The Family is the type of family that often has to dispose of corpses. Heavy lies the crown sort of thing. And the Don? Well, El Jefe has decided that Rainey is the man to handle this rather important job. Personally, I think it’s a bit much for a guy who takes things for granite (“Solid like stone”), but that’s why I’m here…Rise and rise and rise. A soldier’s gotta find his spot in this world and The Don has made it clear that this is an important job.

“Don’t ask so many fucking questions,” Rainey says.

He picks up the corpse, throws it over his shoulder, and starts trudging into the darkness. We pass the vacated buildings of the motel as we make our way into the desert, Rainey slightly in front, me holding the boombox on my shoulder awkwardly and pointing the flashlight forward.

And we walk. And walk. And, fuck me, we walk.

Seems like hours before the flashlight beam hits the first tombstone.

“A fucking graveyard!” I shout. “You dope motherfucker. It’s brilliant!”

“Shut up,” Rainey whispers.

The graveyard isn’t really a graveyard, there’s no fence or anything - just a collection of tombstones in the desert.

Rainey walks to the middle of the cluster of graves and drops the body before hurrying back toward me. For a big dude, he steps lightly and I shine the flashlight at him to fuck with him.

“Turn that fucking shit off,” he hisses.

A serious Rainey makes me nervous. I turn the flashlight off.

“For what happens next,” he says, “I need you to be cool.”

His voice in the darkness is displaced and disconnected. I can hear him messing with the boombox on the ground at my feet.

“And do not turn on that flashlight until I say so. Understand?”

I nod.

“Hey, I said…”

“I got it,” I say.

There’s a moment of silence as I feel him stand up from the boombox. My heart rate is jacked. I hear a dull hum from the speakers at my feet.

And then there’s music. Very, very loud music. Very, very loud rap music.

Kanye West is shouting Yeezus into the desert.

What the fuck?

The bass bumps so hard I don’t notice Rainey yelling until he grabs my arms, scares the shit out of me, and snatches the flashlight from me. Right before he flicks the beam on, I realize he’s been screaming “Now!”

What I see are hands coming out of the ground, out of the graves, grasping at air. What I see are human heads buried beneath the earth, escaping. What I see are fucking zombies coming out of graves.

It’s gotta be the noise.

Rainey is screaming, “Run!”

He takes off and I follow the flashlight in his hand as its beam dips and jumps across the desert floor, toward the Nissan and our escape.

On the horizon, the MOTEL sign lights up the darkness.

I have questions. You would have questions. I’m sure fucking Rainey has questions.

But what comes out, hastily escaping from my mouth as I run from zombies in the desert, is “Why?”

Why all this? Why not chop the bodies up and feed them to the pigs? Why, Rainey? Why?

“Because they said so,” Rainey gasps. “Who gives a fuck about why?”

Written By: Logan Theissen
Photograph By: Daniel Vidal

All That's Colored

When the shift occurred, without reason or warning, there were enough talking heads to fill a stadium – and many did. Lecterns were manned with the rapidity of automatic machine gun fire. But this was always an intellectual war, fought in city council meetings and university halls, among other places. Theories and ideas were lobbed with a casual surety that had never been reserved for bullets. They settled on calling it evolution, and when they did, the divisive nature of the human race took form in two very different but equally important questions. Which question you asked would ultimately define you in this new age of COLORBLINDNESS. I use this word in the most literal sense because over a period of 252 days from Mid-February to Late-October, mankind – the human species in its entirety – lost its collective ability to perceive color. The world through our eyes had become entirely black and white. As I said before, there were two immediate questions. The first – HOW? asked by the scientists among us. Theories were raised and dismissed until only one possibility was left standing – evolution. By a method of deduction, it was acknowledged by the scientific elite that receptors in the human eye had been somehow naturally modified. Strange it seems that, given the cavalier nature in which we use a word such as evolution, there have been no significant theories proposed regarding the so-called end game. We are evolving, but to what? There have been reports of increased audioception, gustaoception, olfacoception, and tactioception in test subjects, though the authenticity of these reports has been questioned. Regardless, they are known collectively as “The Mutation Papers,” and bring us to the next question – WHY?

***

In the days of THE BLINDING, most found themselves in their house of God. I was no different. I sat with my mother and father, brother, and little sister on wooden pews. With my hands clasped together and my elbows resting on my knees, I bowed my head and prayed. The Sunday morning televangelists coined the term THE BLINDING. They shouted into microphones chronicling our many sins and thousands fell at their feet. My father, disgusted, would turn the channel and whisper, Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen. Like most everyone as time went by, we continued on. My father rested after a hard day’s work. My sister attended second grade. My mother cut fresh-grown tomatoes in the evening and sprinkled them with salt. And yet every morning I believe each of us opened our eyes, and for a brief instant, it seemed possible that the world was once again overwhelmed with color. I surely did. My mother jokingly called it the hindsight of the damned. Many believed this to be some sort of punishment, while a few others thought it an awakening. To this day, we all fail to speak of the future. There will be a time, not so far off, when the last set of eyes that recognized color will finally close - and on that day we all will have lost something and we will ask why. But my mother used to say that day would also bring our salvation, and I prefer to think of our future as such. God has taken our color because we will survive, we will persevere, but we will never be the same. I believe there is assurance in that.

***

We’ve come to this place because some need to see it and some need to feel it. Some need to remember what it meant to have these walls, these gorgeous murals with all this color smashed together. Bold and bright they sit in our memories like beacons in the sea. Of all the cultural phenomena that have taken place since the blindness, the glorification of graffiti must be the greatest. Across the globe people flock to these places like they once flocked to Roman ruins. These walls of graffiti, from California to Buenos Aires to Jerusalem and back again, have become something more powerful than simple tagging. They’ve become remnants of a lost age – like Stonehenge or the Easter Island heads – wrapped in wonder, mystery, and a bit of sadness. I suppose our mystery is that nobody does graffiti anymore. They still sell spray-paint of course, and one could still physically tag a clean wall - but nobody does. Out of some mutual desire we’ve decided that creating new pieces like the one in front of us is disrespectful, or even evil. Personally, I think everyone knows that if we create new graffiti the old pieces don’t work, don’t mean anything, and if that happens then what do we have left? Some would say we are left with a species and a world that is unexplained, and we as a civilization are afraid of nothing more than the unknown. So in some form of group therapy we’ve decided that we without color are different. We do not yet know how we’ve changed, or how we will continue to progress in this particularly shaded world, we just know that we miss our color. So we take comfort in memories like graffitied walls, and we lean on them like vibrant walking sticks. We crowd around the scribbles because there will be no others like them and because there is communion in past appreciation, even if said appreciation was not so long ago outlawed. We look because we are now black and we are now white and ultimately, we are all in this together.


Photograph by: Emily Blincoe
Written by: Logan Theissen

Bench Warmers

Tony met Miguel on a bridge about two years ago when he heard crying as he was packing up his fishing gear. He followed the sobbing to the top of the bridge and found Miguel about to jump. He was counting.

“...7….8…..9….”

“Hey,” squeaked Tony. “Wanna fish?”

“Fish?”

“Yeah … fish,” Tony said matter-of-factly. Luckily, it worked.

They fished together every Sunday after that and formed an unlikely friendship. Tony was a divorcee in his mid 40’s and Miguel was a widower in his late 60’s.

Miguel was a creature of habit, but after his Alzheimer’s diagnosis, he evolved into a creature of ritual. The number nine controlled everything Miguel did like a ruthless dictator. Instead of bowing to it, he counted to it.

He would turn lights on and off nine times. He’d lock his front door nine times, and before eating, he’d wash his hands nine times. If something interrupted him or it didn’t feel right, he’d start over again.

Sundays fishing with Tony helped Miguel free himself from the shackles of his OCD. He’d dip his lure into the water and watch his anxiety disappear into the river like rainwater.

Tony noticed his friend’s declining memory and chalked it up to old age. He didn’t mind Miguel starting a story he had just finished minutes earlier, but recently, things had gotten worse. Miguel would go through periods where he’d forget Tony’s name and treat him like a stranger.

On this Sunday, however, Tony marveled at Miguel. His memory was sharp and his banter was as witty as ever. They laughed and told stories. They even reminisced about Miguel’s fishing technique before Tony taught him the basics.

When they started getting ready to leave, Miguel began the conversation he had planned on having.

“I’m wasting away, Tony,” he said softly.

“What’s that?” Tony asked. He had been rummaging through his tackle box.

“I’m dying, man.”

Tony sat up and looked over at Miguel only to find him staring at the bridge.

“Did you go to the doctor or something? What’s wrong, Migs?”

“Remember that day on the bridge?” asked Miguel. “That’s the day I found out I had Alzheimer’s. I forget a lot, but I’ll never forget that day.”

Tony became angry.

“All this time and you didn’t tell me!? I thought you were just having a bad day.”

“I WAS having a bad day, Tony,” snapped Miguel. “I just found out that my mind was slowly wasting away, and that there was nothing I could do to stop it.”

“Do you remember what number I was on when you stopped me from jumping?” asked Miguel. Tony shook his head. He didn’t want Miguel to talk about that day anymore. He was afraid it’d make him walk back up there again.

Miguel answered his own question, “Nine. The number was nine.”

Tony tried to bite his tongue and let his friend talk, no matter how aimless it seemed.

Miguel continued, “And ever since then, that number has been my only hope. I counted to nine for everything. It was a superstition thing. I thought if I did it just right, I could keep the Alzheimer’s at bay. But now, now I can’t even remember most of my rituals. I can’t remember anything.”

Miguel, who hadn’t set foot in a hospital since his diagnosis, had been struggling with his Alzheimer’s like never before during the past few weeks. He could’ve gone to his doctor, but he had read the literature and seen other people suffering through his affliction. He already knew his fate.

“I never thanked you,” said Miguel. “Not only did you save my life, but you gave me something else to focus on. You gave me hope.”

Tony didn’t like to see Miguel give in. “There still IS hope, Migs,” said Tony. “You can fight this thing. They have treatments and ways to slow it down.”

Miguel hadn’t taken his eyes off of the bridge.

“I need you to do me one more favor, Tony,” said Miguel.

“Anything you need, bud. What is it?” asked Tony.

Miguel turned to look at Tony for the first time. “I need you to help me kill myself.”

Tony scrambled to his feet and looked down at his friend. Miguel slowly looked up and explained.

“I don’t want to be some guy who can’t recognize his friend, Tony. You saved my life before, now I need you to help me end my life.”

Tony, shaking, was hunting for words to describe what was whirling around inside his head. A loud “NO!” was all he could muster.

Miguel tried to calm his friend down. “I know this is hard to hear. But I need this, Tony. What kind of future do I have to look forward to? I’m going to die, can you please help me do it on my terms?” asked Miguel.

“How am I supposed to do something like that, Migs?” asked Tony.

Miguel decided to answer his question literally. “I want you count for me. I stop at nine so much, I don’t trust myself to get all the way to 10,” Miguel explained.

“And then?” asked Tony.

“I jump.” answered Miguel. “I jump to my freedom.”

With that, Miguel started walking towards the top of the bridge. Tony looked on, confused and horrified.

“Get back here!” he screamed. “You’re crazy, man! Let’s talk about this!”

When Miguel didn’t respond, Tony raced up to the bridge and found Miguel standing in the same spot where he first asked him if he wanted to fish. Only this time, Miguel wasn’t sobbing, he was smiling.

Tony had never seen Miguel so alive. He looked up to the sky and took a deep breath. He was calm now. Miguel’s tranquility seemed to be contagious.

“Please.” asked Miguel.

With tears starting to stream down his cheeks, Tony nodded and began counting, “1 … 2 … 3 … 4 … 5 … 6 … 7 … 8 ….9 ….10.”

Written by: Justin Grady

Photograph by: Emily Blincoe

Training

Clark bent down and gripped the rail with his right hand. The vibrations surging through his callused palms indicated the train was just beyond the horizon. He traced the length of steel beams and wooden slats with his eyes until they became an indecipherable speck where the sky and the earth converged.

“This is it,” he reminded himself, suppressing any doubt that was stirring inside.

Clark had been contemplating this moment since pimples started forming mountain ranges across his chin and the sight of cheerleaders made strange things happen behind his zipper. Puberty transformed every fiber of Clark’s being, including his brain.

As his limbs, blemishes and cerebellum grew, so did the distance between Clark and the rest of humanity. While boys and girls timidly flirted in the lunchroom, Clark isolated himself in the library behind a fortress of comic books. When his family gathered around the TV for supper, Clark excused himself and retired to the basement, where he spent the rest of the evening lifting the rusty weights his father had been neglecting since his college days.

Clark outgrew the home gym within a month of his first bicep curl. Even the heaviest dumbbell on the rack – the 50-pounder – failed to challenge his rapidly developing arms. He peddled to a nearby gym in search of a heftier test, only to be turned away on account of his age. He pleaded with the owner to make an exception, but he wouldn’t look past the business-destroying lawsuit that would ensue if an unsupervised minor were to get injured in his facility.

Clark channeled his rage to his fists and slammed them into the counter like a sledgehammer, sending shards of glass scattering to the ground like a shattered basketball goal. As amazed as the owner was by the feat of strength, he was even more taken aback by Clark’s injury-free hands.

Clark fled the scene before the owner snapped out of his daze. When he rounded the corner he found a malnourished man hovering over his bike. He followed the track marks down the man’s arms to the pair of bolt cutters he was positioning around Clark’s bike chain.

Rage reignited, Clark bent down, grabbed a stone and chucked it at the junkie before he could bear down on his tool. The stone disappeared the moment it left Clark’s hand, reappearing in an explosion of blood, cotton and flesh as it tore through the thief’s right shoulder. The skittish man fell to the ground, clutching his bolt cutters until he became one with the parking lot.

“YOU SHOT ME,” the criminal yelled, gripping his shoulder as he squirmed on the concrete. “YOU FUCKING SHOT ME?”

Clark didn’t respond. He sprinted to the rack, unlocked his bike and lifted it from the bar one-handed as if it were a children’s tricycle.

“Where do you think YOU’RE going, you fucking PUNK,” screamed the injured crook.

Clark straddled the seat and turned the bike away from the criminal. He placed his left foot on the pedal and pressed down like a motorcyclist starting his engine. The wave of flexed muscles surging from his glute to his foot sent his shoe and the pedal crashing to the pavement. The metal square beneath his forefoot embedded in the asphalt like a cookie cutter. He wiggled his foot free from the strap and dismounted the bike.

“Take it,” he said, pushing the damaged goods towards the speechless drug addict.

The bike remained upright until the front tire collided with the thief’s knee, bending his joint with a deafening crack of bones and ligaments. He ran home as fast as his legs could carry him, which, according to the speed detector in front of his old middle school, was 38 miles per hour. Clark looked back to see what car triggered the radar, but he was the only object in motion at the moment.

Clark took a small hop and turned his sneakers sideways, attempting to stop on a dime like a professional hockey player, but the physics didn’t add up. As the soles of his shoes dug into the weathered sidewalk, the seams that held his footwear together exploded, sending fabric particles, and Clark, flying through the air.

Clark was ejected from his shoes like a driver without a seatbelt. He landed in a bush almost 30 yards from where his soles remained, once again, without the slightest hint of injury. Clark continued to sit in the heap of broken twigs and crumbled leaves.

“What. The. FUCK?” he asked.

As unlikely as it seemed, he could only reach one conclusion.

“I’M THE HULLLLLLLK.”

Clark sprung from the rubble as if floating on a cloud of indestructible joy. Fueled by adrenaline, he began putting his supernatural strength to the test. He knocked down a 30-year-old pine tree with a single punch. He lifted a car by it’s back bumper and pushed it around a parking lot like a wheelbarrow. And then, he saw the train track.

Clark returned the car to its parking spot and sprinted through the field. Fearing someone would mistake his actions for a suicide attempt, Clark ran along the locomotive road until civilization was out of sight.

When the train finally appeared in the distance, Clark got down in a three-point stance and prepared for the ultimate game of chicken. The morning fog cloaked him from the conductor’s unsuspecting view until they were too close for brakes. The conductor pulled down on the train horn, hoping to force some sense through Clark’s ears, but his mind was as one-tracked as his steel opponent.

At the point of no return, Clark reared up like an angry grizzly bear and flexed every muscle in his body. 

--

The librarian bent down and removed Clark’s headphones.

“Class or detention, Clark? Your choice.”

Clark scoffed, saved his progress and shoved his laptop into his book bag. He rolled back from the table and wheeled off to class as fast as his hands could push him.



Photograph by: Emily Blincoe
Written by: Mark Killian