I’ll do best if I take just
a spot of you
like the fleeting dot that floats
across my eye, enough to get
all of my attention, while it’s there
not a lot of you, or else
my goodness-knows patience
seems to wear down
making me just a rock
that surrenders
to your seismic waves
vanishing, becoming
just a smooth dull surface
mouthless lest I drown
in your ocean of needy weeds

In the past year, Susan Shea made the full-time transition from school psychologist to poet. In that time, her poems have been accepted for publication by places that include:  Invisible City, Ekstasis, MacQueen's Quinterly, Across the Margin, October Hill, Lit Break, New English Review, Foreshadow, The Gentian, and others.

what is it called when a glass
slips, and when it hits the ground,
it doesn’t splinter into slicing shards?
and it simply bounces back,
like a ball at recess?

what is it called when a car,
a metal hunk of transport,
rolls and the paint-coated carcass
doesn’t bend and bones don’t break?
and it simply bounces back,
continuing its journey?

hearts may replicate
the feeling of impact,
of shattering and breaking –
because there is a tiny stand still,
a momentary lapse, where time
has no meaning –
and then,
you carry on.

this can only happen
so many times.

the next time i hit the ground,
will i bounce back?
or will i splinter, shatter,
bend and break?


Megan Diedericks writes poetry and fiction, everything from meek to macabre can be found in between the lines. Her debut poetry collection: "the darkest of times, the darkest of thoughts" is available on Amazon. Among others, her work has been published by Last Leaves Magazine, Querencia Press and Cosmic Daffodil. Find her on Instagram: @meganreflects!

Greased and grinning, days slip past
with titters of birdsong and storm.
Downtown our favorite baked goods
sulk in glass displays while tourists
motor from the south to sample
the tasteless New England summer.

I neglected our anniversary,
a frozen moment that thawed
almost before I recognized it.
Yet I’m too sullen to celebrate,
the humidity soaking through my skin
to flavor me with unnatural bloat.

You keep busy with the garden
despite its lack of bees and worms.
Those creatures shaped my childhood
of stings and bait. One day I caught
a dozen bluegills with earthworms
fresh from the vegetable garden.

My mother refused to fry them
so they fed a neighbor’s pig.
I used to be so earthy. Sorry
I forgot. The days press heavily
on us, opening slots through which
we can see our absence flourish.


William Doreski lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire. He has taught at several colleges and universities. His most recent book of poetry is Cloud Mountain (2024).  His essays, poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in various journals.

Strange to have bones that decay in the mouth
so we can taste death, I think, as I hold
my mouth open, lying on the chair.
It’s not our teeth that we grind it’s our thoughts’
teeth, these soft adjectives. He speaks briefly
but through his mask I hear little, prefer
to pretend I’m asleep. If I open
my eyes it seems I am the centre of
attention, which I don’t quite like. There is a hand
and tools inside. The skull echoes, bite down.
There’s gold in me worth delving for:
the dentist builds his house from such rubble,
cavities, incessant resistances,
fallibilities of fleshed bone I think, as
he touches the root of the problem.
A word emerges from skeletonized steel:
he is asking me to swill. It is his will.

Giles Goodland’s books include  Of Discourse (Grand Iota 2023). A Spy in the House of Years (Leviathan, 2001)  Capital (Salt, 2006), Dumb Messengers (Salt, 2012) and The Masses (Shearsman, 2018). Civil Twilight was published by Parlor Press in 2022. He has worked as a lexicographer, editor, and bookseller, and teaches evening classes on poetry for Oxford University’s department of continuing education,  and lives in West London. 

My pronouns experience rigpa, recoil, take cover as soon as possible, and write a poem like this, but not this.

My pronouns, stunned, roll around in the annals of history, not exactly lost, but far from any place found.  My pronouns form new versions, as is their nature, to be transcendent, immanent and ungrammatical.  Grammar tames but does not harness them. Avoiding grammar, my pronouns make my myths powerful and obsolete.

For instance, my pronouns pretend they are the wax in Icarus’ wings, more’s the pity for him, the gods, and the emptying skies.  My pronouns walk under that sky, want to keep it from loss, replicate it as a hedge against loss.  But somewhere someone must have seen something remarkable, a boy falling into the dark sea. Now my pronouns hold places in sentences where collective agreement is not enough.  Their failures make the only map of consciousness, the world looking at itself. The nature of essence itself is a cheap performance.  It’s shells of struggle all the way down.

My pronouns are the aether, the rich soup of neutrinos and theory, the dark and light of all possible universes. They shine with capaciousness in their war against holograms, against simulations. My pronouns make the world we know by the light they use.  But my pronouns, shifty and out-of-date, also hunger to touch wood, to smell the living rot of the forest, and to exit the math and codes that monetize our loss of the material world.

So, with their need for the real world without constructs, my pronouns regroup, case the joint, duck for cover, and slip out the back.  In the back 40 of the desert and floods, my pronouns find the lost jar where symmetrical particles hide until it’s time to end time. They are wrapped in torn curtains.
My pronouns, long-winded but wiser for the wear, pack up the DNA of what’s possible, and are exhausted by what’s not. My pronouns fold themselves – origami, charts, clean linen, mudras, counterpoints, scrolls, neurotransmitters, carry-on luggage – to close the argument.  And every fold’s a lie.


HR Harper, a writer living in the redwoods above Santa Cruz CA, was a creative writing major at UCLA and studied in the English Ph.D. program there. He has worked as an educator in central city schools. He writes to understand human consciousness in a natural world humans seem to be destroying. Writing poetry and fiction for years, he only began to publish in 2021. Some of his recently published work may be found at: https://brusheswiththedarklaw.blogspot.com/

it’s happened… we flip through a dark path of product placement and algorithms’ pornography and sound monetary policy where the young disinterestedly wait for the nothing left that’s documented to fall in their laps. born with the spoon of acid rain and rising tides in their mouths, gagging against the wounded air. the pornography takes up their time as policy keeps queues circling the castle of abundance like a moat, while inside the fading elders pull rabbits from silk hats. jeunesse dorée shuffling expired tags and rearranging the deck chairs on this interstellar Ship of Fools.

what i knew no longer has legs. so it storms no barricades, gets filed. i see the neo-communards impatient with my stare of longing and distance and so we both step away. though their weight has primacy over air, the center topples inwardly, a three-dimensional mandala, linguistic circles and holding patterns, and there is no joy in the residual formula of this rabid shelf life of drained desire. the desires of impedance. bloodletting returns and the circuits quit before any number of high noons. rain rusts itself with the long lost promise of Consciousness.

crusty cassandra becomes a welcome paper rolled to slap the dog-blood snout as though discipline itself could raise a new song, hard luck hotels and schools uniformly loosen from the bowels of the city on the hill, the slippery slopes, the shadow under a bushel. the exchanges flattened and made roadkill by the crypto currencies, the zombie digitations and the market arsonists wearing Prada.

regularity where girls cut themselves off and on the arms, pull out their eyebrows and ApplePay, slow pitch, plucky but underemployed in the fried song they lament. lament?

regularity where boys face a jury of fractal peers, upsetting the runaway rejoinders, pushing all the buttons sold them to vanquish the enemies only alive in the screens in their palms, then they rest and press return in gonadal imitation, atavistic, alone and Copyrighted.

my youthful dreams and indiscretions also fell too short. my sense of an ending frankly corrodes. i might have wanted the abraham lincoln brigade, but instead saw trotskyites trash maoists in the late sun at kerkoff…and then studied for finals with the australian criminal in the occupied buildings. sendero oscuro. the choirs of Reason burned liberty like a wax log. we didn’t give in, we gave up.

too old to pivot in this protection you have in your white-gloved hands. too late to count on pinpricks through the syntax and asymmetry. too thick with grievance to track the crossing of the sun, the shadowlands caught in what looks like amber, the Golden Mean pragmatic to say the least. saying the least. stopping speech won’t work either.

what Angel is not a terrible prayer, a matter of timing, a trust pocketed like a magician’s green coin.

eight ignoble promises broken by the supply-side husbandry of the world. particles of broken stars adhered in our mind and in the generous mysteries and we still couldn’t keep track. we tore down the temple walls to find that tease Sophia, but got drunk with our power to destroy. we fell in love with destruction and lost her thread, so hand her absence to you as your birthright. taglit the burning plains, the trees drying from spreadsheets and MBAs, all we leave you is the disease of appetites. the symptom of a season of facts.

the hermit hides peas under walnut shells. the economies, austere or inflationary, skip rope over the human instance, now famulus only to carbon clouds. neither pension nor gold watch sentimentalizes the pocket change. we had fit and filthy lucre and the thousand things Lao Tsu promised, while you face the natural world’s cliffhanger, poised to douse the fake fires of human commerce, interest rates and physiologies. bank on it. bank on it, o bank on it my mistake, my children, my next flipped patisandhi-citta of thumbs and regret

be my silent guests in springs of living silence. let the end of days go viral. logic seeded in the dizziness of hybrids. we left you absolutely nothing, and nothing absolute. the sun really did ask, do you feel lucky Punk? two out of three? what profit it a man to perish on cue. even this jeremiad that wants to apologize, and tell you I love you, wants what can never be wanted…
no ribbons for the third-place finish or honorable mention. it’s in the final air, spinning higher than our hands, opened now with the adorations. Águila o Sol.

Thinking about
How you let
Your tenuous
Hold
On continuing
Slip away
Without a protest
Leaving only echoes of
Questions
And assumptions
And half a million theories
Of what should and could
Have happened
Which fuel
These restless late night words
Imagining
All the conversations
That might have been.

Anne Mikusinski has always been in love with words.  She’s been writing poems and short stories since she was seven. Her influences range from Robert Frost and Dylan Thomas to David Byrne and Nick Cave.  She hopes that one day, some of her writing will impress others the way these writers have had an impact on her.

I.
I turn away 
from the stark egg-shell
white. Gross, sterile wall 
looking the way 
sour milk tastes 
before you consider 
it fully soured.
That’s denial.

II.
I curled up as if 
food poisoned,
Yes! This is this! 
What this feels like!
Open mouthed, gums 
drying as if
I could cry harder 
than I could 
hold my breath.

III.
Clean dry air, 
I am cracking 
in half with laughter, 
mad with the furious
design that you died 
and I was away.
The preparations 
– our future- it’s 
all of it happening 
right now, this is this. 

IV.
We are futuring 
right now
and you’re somewhere 
else. All those crisp 
clouds we fell through
strapped back-to-stomach 
for miles
evaporate like oxygen 
this tiny, tiny space 
I will occupy alone.

V.
If strength is living 
on, I am the soft
earthworm of resiliency. 
Yes! Bring me home, 
strike me
off your list,
the one who couldn’t 
say no 
when we decided 
to live apart.

VI.
I forgave you 
for death, but I am 
tearing up our blueprints 
for global domination
using these teeth 
filed deadly from gnashing
against the headstone 
that was all I had 
to throw myself against 
the day we finally 
got back together.

Sam is a writer and biologist from St. Louis, MO, living in Duluth, MN. She often uses experiences in conservation biology in her poetry and a sense of humorous sadness in her prose. Sam lives at the foot of a cliff and writes poetry on a Princess 300 typewriter with quails painted on.
 
@samtunan
samtunan.com

On this Sunday morning, I
pause to wonder what you,
little sister, might have done
differently had you known you
would have only half a long life,
and years of that battling cells
he’ll bent on consuming you.
What would you have foregone,
what years of education would
you take back, the degrees you
needed, for skills left in the classroom,
turning your back on nursing, then
hospital administration, jobs
waiting, but not to your standards.
And who would you want
to remember you differently,
not as the woman who would not
tolerate faults of others you
were certain you did not possess,
who set standards no one could
hope to meet, who loved
from a distance and coolly,
lest anyone get close and
perhaps someday hurt you back.
I still remember you as the
sweet little girl, and wonder
where she went, and forget
the woman whose eulogy I
gave, holding back my tears.

Louis Faber is a poet and blogger.  His work has appeared in Cantos, The Poet (U.K.), Alchemy Spoon, New Feathers Anthology, Dreich (Scotland), Tomorrow and Tomorrow, Erothanatos (Greece), Defenestration, Atlanta Review,  Glimpse, Rattle, Cold Mountain Review, Eureka Literary Magazine, Borderlands: the Texas Poetry Review, Midnight Mind, Pearl, Midstream, European Judaism, The South Carolina Review and Worcester Review, among many others, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. A book of poetry, The Right to Depart, was published by Plain View Press.  He can be found at https://anoldwriter.com.

I was like a maroon dot on a dusty canvas,
that is, marooned in the shrub-steppe
(apparently not a desert, despite
110 degree heat, and the insufferable dryness).
The Camry smoldered like grandma
used to chainsmoke in the garage.
Waiting for help, dialing roadside assistance
like a ship in orbit pinging mission control:
mayday, mayday, the ice in my drink is melting.
I rationed sips like a survivalist,
hunkered down in my car like a doomsday bunker.
Sun visors shielded me from rays and heat
like secret service agents protecting their president:
Sir, get down, keep your head down, sir!
Sunburn got to the back of my neck anyway,
my own little assassination attempt:
We choose to drive through the badlands
not because it is easy, but because it is hard.
When rescue finally came, I signaled them
like a castaway, as if I’d been trapped for days,
and thankfully they were charged 
by the mile and not the hour.

Tyler Morello is a poet and a junior in the English Education program at Central Washington University. As a future teacher, Morello aims to inspire a love of lyricism and creativity in his students. Morello’s poems often center around social belonging, complex self-image, and the split between the idealized life and the actual. With a manuscript finished, Morello has his sights set on publishing a debut poetry collection titled Kid Orchid & The Everlasting Afterparty.

// 11-9-23

Come, fashionista, I wish to wear you;
not to don your delicate designs
or your flashy golden fleece,
but to be wrapped in your arms
like imported silks.
Spare me the measuring,
the sizing me up,
and let me model my madness for you.

Come, fashionista, let us be sewn together.
Stitch me into your folded fabric.
Pin a kiss to my lips like a ribbon,
ruby red, corners curled up and twisted.
Repair my threadbare apparel
so that I may dress like you.
In spite of all your elegant ensembles,
I still wonder how you’d look as a mannequin.

Come, fashionista, it’s your turn to undress.
Let me sketch your form and count your threads,
turn your studio suite into a sweatshop;
nonstop studying of one another.
Trade your high class haute couture
for the T-shirt I showed up in.
Soft as chiffon, be warm with me, for
morning means back to class, you artist, you.

Come, fashionista, aren’t we perfect complements?
My words and your textiles are one and the same.
We cut and sew our pieces to each other,
make showcases out of scraps,
ballads from bolts, sundresses from similes.
I look lovely on you just as
you look swell on me.
Let’s skirt the rules and slay the runway.

The absence of proof
is the proof itself,
belief based on faith,
based on not seeing,
reaching your hand out
and imagining
your long-gone lover
will meet your fingers
with their own,
your unfaithful body
forgiven, the proof
of your deceit as close to forgotten
as such a betrayal can be said
to be absent from memory.

Edward Lee's poetry, short stories, non-fiction and photography have been published in magazines in Ireland, England and America, including The Stinging Fly, Skylight 47, Acumen, The Blue Nib and Poetry Wales. His poetry collections are Playing Poohsticks On Ha’Penny Bridge, The Madness Of Qwerty, A Foetal Heart, Bones Speaking With Hard Tongues and To Touch The Sky And Never Know The Ground Again.
He also makes musical noise under the names Ayahuasca Collective, Orson Carroll, Lego Figures Fighting, and Pale Blond Boy. 
His blog/website can be found at https://edwardmlee.wordpress.com

to lay in the dirt long enough that the ants think i’m
part of the earth, like the ahuehuete squatting
near water, their toes boring into peat
and beargrass. my god, the sun that chars my cheek is
170,000 years old. i am not dark like my mother.
my body feels borrowed, machetona, skittish
and flaco. to eat manzanilla. to let the insects
bite. to watch skin open and grow back.
air has no age, like the part of us outside time
that stays the same age at which we
became conscious. sometimes i realize my body is
one continuous tube
that things go into and come out of, i am
a flute.

Rowan Tate is a creative and curator of beauty. She reads nonfiction nature books, the backs of shampoo bottles, and sometimes minds.

it is april and the days are
made of lemon air, raw light,
sun-washed petal walls of childhood.
i remembered the words to the
song my sister and i invented when
we thought our life was a disney movie.
some things never come back to you.
some do. the river becomes a
watery sky, there is a bus coming
after this one, and there will always be
more chocolate ice cream in the grocery store.

A young leaf swaying in the sun, unburnt, surviving, embracing the scorching sun yet alive. Striving in the blistering heat to carry on to the next generation, the story of its life.

Maturing through sunburn, sustenance from the sun itself, penetrating roots, seeking life from the soil, bare and barren, the tender plant never wavers in its effort to survive.

Finding just that hope, hanging unto just that pinch of soil, searching and finding food and surviving where others see doom and death, never feeling the urge to complain and give up, even as the sun rays give light and debt, giving thanks for that slight gush of cool air yet battening down when the intense furnace show no mercy.

Surviving where molten rock runs like a stream, scraping the lifeblood out of fertile soil, destroying the hope of many generations, the lucky can only gaze from afar and lament.

The god of fire and fear quench its thirst.

But alas the rocks, bare, scraped, and lifeless will cradle the manure only enough to nurture the soft, tender sprout that shoots with new life, new hope, and the will to survive even in a condition too harsh for a scorpion to survive.  End 


Dennis is a poet/writer from Sandy Hill, St. Catherine, Jamaica. He is blessed and humbled to have his writings published in the Agape Review, the American Diversity Report (ADR), Alchemy Spoon issue #7, the Health Line Zine #1, the independent literary magazine, Adelaide #54, EgoPHobia # 74, livina Press issue# 3, Blue Pepper Magazine, entropy2, five fleas itchy poetry magazine, Blue unicorn, Dry River issue 2, and Roots and resettlement Vol.3, Taj Mahal Vol.24#2, Wave of words Lit.

Hovering, hovering-----
There's such light to this ride, & further out, below,
the night holds such twinkling gentleness 
unaware of how stuck here gears are
or how far the pandemonium rises without hush,
much, on the tightrope's slow sway.

Imagine it a hammock then with no careening feeling,
as if to be anxious is a faith & not a habit that took root.

Isn't the back pressed still against something,
& even the feet between that great space hinting of falling,
so do not look down?

Count the back bone's knobs.  Toes, just wiggle
for the absurd above the jeered cult of myself.

Yes, laughter's beneath these ribs,
those love handles developing pots & lids,
while the midsection spreads fee fi fo...

What but my own rotten genius blood do I smell,
something only the cat might worship should he be in the mood
as ping pong pills for anti-anxiety play with the anti-depressants'
follow-the-bouncing-ball.

Surely sanity's not dependent on domesticity's rage
if one can just dust enough when unemployable to boot 
but for the business of art, that risk without commerce,
save to the posthumous, & then what's the use?

Ah, how up here in this hole now I am dreaming
of only cleaning house while not, for now, going mad.

No, grief's legacy is too heavy in a suicide's will
the afterlife keeps billing to suspend one again.

That's why this limbo knows me & I, it,
as some silent howling sounds a sight to stare down
the compulsion for stillness chosen finality owns.

Walking is the best time, these small city streets empty
except for residential homes looking stately and innocuous,
their window eyes gleaming welcome to the feet whose beat
brings resonance up for vocals to fly. Chord by strained chord,
croaked notes take to lyrics starting to harmonize with each rising
recollected line and refrain sailing smooth now
if birds are heard in accompaniment
& enough air carries with ease.

Breeze, bring it on, that sense of flowing meadows
& to cross them as a lake swan losing gawkiness
amid geese, ducks, the little park woods more rural
when immersing in leaf-vein songs, the play of pastoral light
on every shade of bark, the lichen, the fungi, the teeming
organic atoms of things.

Humming carries the passages of this, bringing
an almost-belonging even in grocery stores, every
shining new-age marketplace imagining clerks as suddenly angelic
with haloes behind their Scrunchies & wings too in a whoosh
amid carts wheeled for shelves to stock, food items to ring up,
belt upon belt, in an all-over Ohm beyond zombie-glazed gazes
in miles of aisles which might acquaint humans with turnstile Anthropology.

Listen deep into inside of that how everything there might be choral also,
hearing the healing of playing Hooky from school, work or life,
(yes what a head or stomach ache, & maybe the flu, just too sick to cope today),
better to stay in PJ’s & slippers;
let’s all improvise a melody of soup & crackers adventures,
beaten to drums of one’s own singing the blues away.

Let us know who had broadcast this darkness
Let us know who had cried in a deserted house
Let us know who had raised a slogan for a crazy war
Let us know who had broken the ribs of innocence 

Let us know the flower that didn’t fade in smoke
Let us know the wind that crossed borders without a war
Let us know that many persons already know
Let us know that many persons will never know

Let us know who has blown the flute in the morning 
Let us know who has shown kindness in the noon
Let us know who has lit a lamp in the evening
Let us know the birds making love in the night

Let us know who has forgotten something yesterday
Let us know who has learnt something today.  

O.P. Jha writes poems and fictions for love, freedom, world-peace and environment. His works appeared in The Indian Literature, Rigorous, Mantis, You Might Need To Hear This, Punt Volat, Zoetic Press, Discretionary Love, In Parentheses, Shot Glass Journal, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, ANTHRA Zine, The Interwoven Journal, The Cry Lounge, The Odessa Collective Magazine, The Backchannel Journal and other journals. He is the author of an inspiring book Management Guru Lord Krishna. He has a Doctoral degree in “Translation Studies”.  Email: opjha189@yahoo.com, twitter: @OP Jha17

Let us know who had broadcast this darkness
Let us know who had cried in a deserted house
Let us know who had raised a slogan for a crazy war
Let us know who had broken the ribs of innocence 

Let us know the flower that didn’t fade in smoke
Let us know the wind that crossed borders without a war
Let us know that many persons already know
Let us know that many persons will never know

Let us know who has blown the flute in the morning 
Let us know who has shown kindness in the noon
Let us know who has lit a lamp in the evening
Let us know the birds making love in the night

Let us know who has forgotten something yesterday
Let us know who has learnt something today.  


O.P. Jha writes poems and fictions for love, freedom, world-peace and environment. His works appeared in The Indian Literature, Rigorous, Mantis, You Might Need To Hear This, Punt Volat, Zoetic Press, Discretionary Love, In Parentheses, Shot Glass Journal, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, ANTHRA Zine, The Interwoven Journal, The Cry Lounge, The Odessa Collective Magazine, The Backchannel Journal and other journals. He is the author of an inspiring book Management Guru Lord Krishna. He has a Doctoral degree in “Translation Studies”.  Email: opjha189@yahoo.com, twitter: @OP Jha17

he aspires but he’s afraid 
it has a centripetal force 
and it’ll push him into the same house again
where only his loneliness will talk to him

in his ex-home there was a two-way-traffic 
for silence and conversation 
with windows and doors 

a house has many meanings for a refugee
and peace has many meanings for many parties

he’s a refugee
transforming, a new house into a home, is a rebirth 
between two births an epoch ends

he aspires but he’s afraid. 

You always have an answer, don't you? “If your homework is done, revise for the next class tests. If you have done that, study for the exams. What, are you so certain of scoring full marks that you don't need to revise anymore?” Yes, you always have an answer. The children slink away to their textbooks, burying dreams of going to the park in sweets nicked from the fridge, and you return to your work, satisfied. That cold hard cut-throat world you are fighting to protect them from by ruining your eyes and your sleep - you just flung them into it like kittens tossed into the pond in a weighted sack, and you don't even know it, do you? You don't even know it.

Hibah Shabkhez is a writer of the half-yo literary tradition, an erratic language-learning enthusiast, and a happily eccentric photographer from Lahore, Pakistan. Her work has previously appeared in Pleiades, Miracle Monocle, Glassworks, Windsor Review, Moria, CommuterLit, and a number of other literary magazines. Studying life, languages, and literature from a comparative perspective across linguistic and cultural boundaries holds a particular fascination for her.
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/HibahShabkhez 
Twitter X: @hibahshabkhez
Insta: @shabkhez_hibah

I don't want to be a lemonade says the lemon to the squeezing fingers. I don't want to be laced with water, sugar, salt. Look: here is one who comes laden with bitterness, who will remember this forever as the worst lemonade in the world. Here is another cloaked in  joy who will never find such a delicious lemonade again. And here I am who once grew on a tree, defined by the whims and fancies of passersby. If I may no longer be a lemon, let me become the juice  of the fruit, unabashed in my sourness as I am swallowed up. The juice pleads with the fingers, rants at the fingers, blesses and curses the fingers, but the fingers go on squeezing, you see, the fingers just go on squeezing and never stop, because like the wrung wrung wrung out lemon, you always do have some juice left.      

I told you I had a bad dream last night
And here it was:

In the passenger seat
And you let a hornet’s nest in the window.
Slipping and sliding like a runny egg
It shifted shapes to say inside our car.

One lone soldier departs the hive.
He comes towards me,
Taunting erratic flight. 

And you never know, 
Whether to attempt to defend yourself or just let it pass.
I scream at you to open the window.
I scream at you to close it.

I didn’t know how to rid the threat from within us 

We planned trips 
And I planned how to tell you; 
I don’t feel like myself lately. 


Gillian Vernick is a poet, non-fiction essayist, and flash fiction writer living in New York. 

if I ever looked up
on the metro after choir
I would see all the girls
with nicer coats than mine
and somewhere to be tomorrow
and I don’t want to get home
thinking about that

so I do this instead
and get what passes for thanks
every day

IG is cool enough to project
a fun house mirror but
I’m pretty impressionable so
if some voice says I take too
many selfies then I disappear

a finsta never made sense
as if the rest of it were real

except for what’s too real
like no matter how far away
your fortune is you’ll never
outrun CT

this is the kind of shit I say
all day alone with myself
not because I hate silence
only hearing other people
living

does anybody else feel
like they’re on the wrong side
of every camera

I’d rather sticker it blind
just inside a club barricade

then in bed I fantasize
about climbing to the top
floor and tossing it out
the window and straining
my ears for an orgasmic crack
no otterbox can salvage

*they don’t use blues anymore
but I’m a little old-fashioned
and very tired

C. M. Gigliotti is a multi-hyphenate artist whose work has lately appeared in Rough Cut Press, Vernacular, CommuterLit, MEMEZINE, and Prose Poems. From 2004 to 2008 she was the undefeated spelling bee champion of her school district. She lives in Berlin.

A december snowflake died on june's doorstep. 
and it only gets worse from here on.
this house, all these memories — out of place, out of time. 
winter's womb awaits to tuck them in 
but the string was severed forever in summer's first breath. 
the sun is stuck in my throat, offered as a gift, 
when you kissed me like a fire ant bully. 

A bride I was, 
paler than the plasters on these walls
A bride I am —
rubbles in my flesh; ashes in my trousseau; summer in my lungs. 
it's hard to breathe when i’m coughing up grief 
at the graveyard of my home.

my home. 
ridiculous recipes from my mom's cookbook in peak december. 
the sun is beautiful like a lemon candy, 
easier to swallow with peppermint tea. 
nights are long and numbing, 
just how i remember it. 
displaced from home. misplaced from fate.
a ghost of nowhere, here i wait.

my roots are anchored in this doorstep, 
i haunt the very place i once belonged to… memories, so many memories 
on these walls, under the pillows, over the window sill, beneath the foggy tree — 
in deep winter, tales spoken by a tongue frozen in time.
i couldn't sleep. i couldn't breathe. 
a winter rose  s t r a n d e d  on a solitary night, 
they put colour on my wreath. 
it suffocates me. 
born out of blue, raised in black & white
i never belonged to june. 
nor daughter, nor bride. 

A december snowflake died in june's doorstep. 
the sun killed it and no one cried. 
oh but i died. i can't go home. 
oh but i died. i can't go home. 
oh but i died. i can't go home. 
oh but i died. i can't go home. 
oh but i died. i can't go home. 
oh but i died. i can't go home. 
oh but i died. i can't go home. 
oh but i died. i can't go home. 
my home. my home. my home. 
i died. i died. i died.

Whoever invented
The alarm clock
Had a good thought
But probably had
No idea how 
It would become
A weapon of
Torture to all
Us wage slaves
Of the world

Went it goes off
We know its
Time to back
To the place
We hate to 
Do something
We don’t care
About to make
Just enough
$ to stay poor

Then we have
The bright idea
To hit the snooze
Button…five more
Ten more minutes
Then we can
Face it, then
We can endure
The b.s. once
More

But those five, ten
Minutes go by
In more like 
Five or ten
Seconds so
We do it
Again and
Again till
We have
To get up and
Rush if we’re
Going to make
To work on
Time, even
With the 
Grace
Period

Yes whoever
Invented the
Alarm clock
Had a good
Idea

Whoever invented
The snooze 
Button was
A Disney-damn
Sadist

Demond J Blake is a warehouse associate who has traveled the country working odd jobs, writing and meeting various artists, musicians and nonconformists living life on the fringes of society. He lives in Colton, CA with his wife Mic. Demond is currently seeking publication for an essay collection entitled 'The Spiritual Matrix', 'The ______ Generation: Slackass' his first novel and 'Pay Me the Penny After' his first collection of poetry.

Some days I can't get out of bed;
not just because it's cold or I'm tired,
but because I can feel the fear
brewing deep inside of my stomach.
Fear of the outside world, people,
social interactions, the wind as it
tickles my skin without consent.
So I pull the covers up higher
and shut the world out.

Some days I'm so ecstatic
over the smallest thing,
such as remembering a
chocolate bar in my handbag,
that my body fizzes
with energy that I don't know
how to release, and my face
begins to ache from the
unexpected joy.

Some days I feel too deeply.
Disappointment becomes disgust,
happiness becomes euphoria,
each emotion balances on
either end of a see-saw,
until I get stuck on one side;
up with the clouds,
or down with the earth.
It all depends on the moment.

Some days I can't take a joke.
Sarcasm flies over my head,
and I feel like everyone
is out to get me. 
And I don't know why
they're being so mean.
So I ignore everyone and
shut them all away.

Some days, I'm the one
up on the stage,
performing to gain
an authentic reaction,
that I can add to my
treasury of memories
living in my archives.

Some days I overshare
with the wrong people.
And put my life on display
like a shop without doors,
and people take what they
need, leaving nothing
but my frame behind.

But what's worse than anything,
is some days I really can't feel
much emotion at all.

Lauren Green is a copywriter by day who enjoys writing poetry, fiction and relatable content in her spare time. Her debut mini poetry collection 'Heartstrings and Hellish Things' was published in 2024. Find her @‌imlaurengreen on all socials to read more of her work.

I shall be a child.
I shall rush through things.
   I shall be foolish about things.
   —Until I do not know myself.
Until my story ends in death,
    I shall live a lifetime in a day.
I shall not love much.
    —But I will love with all my heart.
I shall not search for certainty.
    —For nobody does.
I shall not speak much.
   —But I will speak with all my might.
I shall find no purpose in the end.
    —One thing I shall know—
Asleep in my bed, I know that,
I'll be gone by 7:45.


Claudia Wysocky, a Polish writer and poet based in New York, is known for her diverse literary creations, including fiction and poetry. Her poems, such as "Stargazing Love" and "Heaven and Hell," reflect her ability to capture the beauty of life through rich descriptions. Besides poetry, she authored "All Up in Smoke," published by "Anxiety Press." With over five years of writing experience, Claudia's work has been featured in local newspapers, magazines, and even literary journals like WordCityLit and Lothlorien Poetry Journal. Her writing is powered by her belief in art's potential to inspire positive change. Claudia also shares her personal journey and love for writing on her own blog, and she expresses her literary talent as an immigrant raised in post-communism Poland.

Beams of light crawl through the partially open blinds of the library window. 
Outside, ivory-colored dogwoods follow 
the rhythm of the summer zephyr, 
swaying
in irregular 
movements. The sound of nearby cars slowly 
rises to a crescendo, then immediately
fades away.

Summer has arrived, 
bringing many victories to my younger self: warm weather, 
exuberant afternoons at the pool, and visits to my local arboretum. 
Some days, however, I sought comfort and tranquility, surrounded by books. 
I recall being transported into Cam Jansen’s world of mysteries and resonating with
her insatiable curiosity on a personal level. Magic Tree House allowed me
to explore the deepest parts of my imagination, 
with each of Jack and Annie’s adventures filling the cracks 
of my young mind. 

I walk into the library alongside my mother. Gusts of cool air gracefully encircle
my face before I plop down onto a short, plastic chair, adjacent
to the front entrance. Nowadays, its juxtaposition to an enormous,
emerald-green sofa seems almost comical. I didn’t notice details
like that when I was younger and sometimes still don’t. 
However, there’s something so calming and placid 
about the library, that almost heightens my senses and subdues
the disorientations of my mind.
Maybe it’s the gentle clicking of keyboards, parallelistic 
to raindrops hitting the ground, or
an earthy smell that books possess,
reminiscent of wooden board games, mingled with a unique blend of
paper, ink,
and memories.

Scooting the chair a few feet forward allows me to have 
an almost panoptic view of the shelves. These were skyscrapers
of knowledge; like the “Empire State Buildings” of literature. 
My eyes begin to browse the colorful array of books, sporadically
searching for another quest to embark on, 
another mystery to unravel.

From a distance, a librarian regards me with a soft smile, 
carrying a medium-sized stack of books. 
The laminated covers crinkle in the 
crook of her arms, as if each novel is
alive, and calling out to me, yearning to be read. 
I watch as she places the books in their rightful places
among one another. Worn, wrinkly, and faded would all be acceptable
adjectives to describe their physical appearance, but 
as the common literary idiom goes,
“never judge a book by its cover.”

My legs move faster than my mind as I swiftly 
stand up, enthralled by the freshly shelved books. 
Librarians are highly skilled builders. They know where each brick 
needs to fit so that our skyscrapers stand tall and robust.
Concrete and rebar? Unnecessary. 
Deep, underground, steel foundations? Pointless.
It was merely the stories readers were told, italicized, underlined, or bold
and the substantial impact on our emotions 
whilst dismantling preconceived notions,
that held these structures together, stronger than ever.

I notice Roald Dahl’s “Matilda” on the shelf.
Having read this story before, I firmly acknowledge its presence amongst the neighboring novels. 
Its spine is a distinct yellowish hue,
treading the fine chromatic line between icterine and lemon.
To me, this color is bright and lively, much like Matilda’s personality –
and just as recognizable as the day
I started reading it. 

As a young, impressionable child, I carried the whimsical belief that
consuming enough literature would grant me telekinetic abilities, 
homogenous to Matilda’s. Though I never ended up gaining such powers (one can still hope!), 
her resilience inspired me, her positivity I admired

Above all, Matilda was brave
Brave for Miss Honey, standing against the despicable Miss Trunchbull,
a woman who ravaged hearts and dignities with the rage of a hurricane. 
Brave for challenging the injustices her parents brought upon her,
their neglect an overcast that obscured the depth of her radiance.
Brave for protecting her friends and fellow classmates,
even when the eye of the storm 
seemed nonexistent.

In that moment, I found myself reflecting upon how I’ve displayed courage.  
Not to the extent of the aforementioned heroine, perhaps, but
nevertheless possessing some meaning. 
It was as if I could feel sparks of this emotional surge 
ricocheting through my body, the catalyst of an immensely powerful reaction. 

I realize now that it wasn’t just Matilda who kindled a light inside of me. 
It was the likes of every book character I have crossed and will 
cross paths with —  
Magic Tree House’s Jack and Annie,
Cam Jansen’s Cam Jansen,
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’s Charlie Bucket,
Wonder’s Auggie Pullman,
Front Desk’s Mia Tang,
Piecing Me Together’s Jade Butler,
Hunger Games’ Peeta Mellark,
and so many more residents of the literary skyscrapers. 
Each nourished my spirit in some form,
adding their own touches of color to a canvas made of
self-esteem, sentiment, and personality,
amalgamating while still leaving plenty of space for
Matilda’s yellow.

Bryan Duong Milstead is a 15-year-old Asian American student based in the Shenandoah Valley. He was a national winner of the 2022 NASA "Power to Explore" essay challenge and has had two journalistic articles published on the "Virginia Association of Journalism Teachers and Advisers" (VAJTA) website, displaying his immense enthusiasm for writing. Lastly, he has been published in multiple literary magazines, including Rewrite the Stars and Mosaic Lit Journal. 

I sit on the jetty next to Steamboat Dock and swear to Christ 
I’ll write the perfect poem for you.
No words come. 
As Bear Mountain pulls the sun behind the horizon,
I think about Rock-A-Bye-Baby and how hard
Goliath would have fallen as an infant.     
Behind the seaplane base, junkyard dogs bark 
at this end of day.   
They sense what I already know.
What you must’ve known.
I want so badly to hear a frame drum
beat a cadence to my heartbeat,
a shaman to tell me he can raise you from ash,
but I don’t.
I drive through the old neighborhood, 
park in front of your mother’s house.
A rusted moan blows through the boughs
of Mr. Mackey’s elm that held our tire swing.
The tree groans, cracks, and bends in the autumn wind.
I look up expecting to see your face,
ever at the ready to catch a baby, 
cradle and all. 

William Teets is a writer born in Peekskill, New York, who has recently relocated to Southeast, Michigan. He immensely misses New York pizza, the Hudson River, and Fran, Remember the Good Times ‘68.  Mr. Teets’ poetry and prose has been published in numerous journals and anthologies, including Ariel Chart, Drunk Monkeys, Abandoned Mine, Impspired, and Currents. A collection of his poetry, After the Fall, was published by Cajun Mutt Press in February 2023.

The woods grow dark before thickly settled areas do. You blush like a kneeling figure in a stained glass window backlit by the moon. Your paragraphs emulate poems, or short, sharp. cries emitted with the rage of an animal in distress. It is no great surprise you have no royalties due you. Most of us won’t ever realize that we also are what we aren’t. You cross invisible
bridges. You envy words with silent letters. You pick a trail of bread crumbs to unfollow.


Howie Good is the author of The Dark, a poetry collection forthcoming from Sacred Parasite, a Berlin-based publisher. He co-edits the online journal UnLost, dedicated to found poetry.

As the first light of dawn sneaks through the holes in the wall, pinching my
cheek, I sprawl in bed with my arms and legs stretched out like the character “大,” my thoughts drifting like the tiny droplets sprayed from the nasal cavity when sneezing, towards neglected corners filled with cobwebs, and then it hit me—it has been over three years, and my 10th attempt at IVF has failed again, and I feel akin to a broken comb—once capable of taming unruly hair, now only abandoned in the dusty corner of a vanity—recalling that stormy afternoon, raindrops perpetually trapped like insects in amber on the windowpane, my fingers tracing them, sensing their icy heartbeats, and as the air in the room thickens, each breath drawing out all the remaining warmth in my body, I envision myself as a cactus abandoned in a corner of the balcony, even as the sunlight outside brightens, I languish in the shade, my once-green leaf-like branches turning pale, similar to the face of a patient just out of organ transplant surgery on a sickbed, yet with the ticking of the clock on the wall, each tick and tock sketching the story of my life as if guided by the hands of Thousand-Armed Guanyin, I can’t help but wonder how she would depict the raging monster trapped inside me; rising from the bed, my body feels as if it’s filled with heavy and prickly durians, every movement like a mermaid dancing on the edge of a blade, and I walk to
the window, pushing it open to let the fresh air and morning light flood into this space enveloped in silence, after which, I hear the growth of every plant, the moans of each leaf undergoing photosynthesis, and my thoughts drift to the lone lychee tree in the backyard, battling against storms and greedy fruit flies, all to safeguard its fruits until they ripen come summer, whispering the inherent struggles of life, from the first ray of sunlight reaching the Earth until the seas dry up and the rocks crumble.

Huina Zheng, a Distinction M.A. in English Studies holder, works as a college essay coach. She’s also an editor at Bewildering Stories. Her stories have been published in Baltimore Review, Variant Literature, Midway Journal, and others. Her work has received nominations twice for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She resides in Guangzhou, China with her husband and daughter.

Helping my son Ming with his kindergarten craft, we embarked on crafting a
spider, beginning with slicing a large and a small circle from black paper and bonding them with glue. After laying eggs, the maternal spider wraps them in silk, forming an egg sac. Like a solo parent, she guards it fervently, forgoing food and drink. Ming snipped eight sticks, but despite his best efforts, their lengths varied, and when glued to the spider’s body, they looked like carrots freshly plucked from the earth—some long and straight, others short and bent, each distinct in its form. Beside these legs, we positioned small cotton balls, wrapped in black yarn and glued, mimicking the egg sac. The spiderlings’ initial nourishment comes from the yolk within the sac, and then
the mother begins her hunt, liquefying prey to feed them—this, we believe, truly represents maternal love. We added numerous small insect models by the spider mother, subtly ensuring—without revealing to Ming—that she need not emit a special chemical signal for her offspring to start consuming her body for nutrition. Too much glorification of mothers for their sacrifices for their children. Our spider mother will eternally watch over her brood, her body and head securely affixed to the base, as we’ve fostered a nurturing environment with plentiful food. Her “maternal love” is showcased not through self-sacrifice but by her silent, steadfast presence beside her
young, her legs immobile and posture fixed, offering a comforting smile in Ming’s imagination as she effortlessly preys and chews for her spiderlings, though we still haven’t figured out how to craft a piece of felt into a small cylinder for simulating an opening and closing mouth.

“Onions are inevitable in Indian curries, whether you like it or not,” mother would say with a certain sternness that would leave no room for any other option. Those were the times when her mother was grooming her for marriage.  
 
“Inevitable, uh!” she sniffled while wiping the tears with the back of her sleeves. Long years of struggle with onions have not changed anything. The first thing she would do before cooking any meal was to pick up the onion bulbs. She would peel off the papery outer skin, cut the pungent bulbs into two pieces, and chop off the head. The pieces can be either sliced
lengthwise into thin wedges or rings or chopped into tiny pieces on the chopping board before throwing them into the hot oil in the pan after the mustard seeds have spluttered. That was a ritual.
 
The moment she touched the bulbs, her eyes would brim up in protest and also persuade the nose to join it. Even after years, the running nose and teary eyes have not been able to gain the sympathy of the resolute onions. The bulbs continued to take pride in their pungency and enjoy the protest.  
 
After sautéing the onions in the pan, she would think about which vegetable to throw into it.The taste of the curry would always depend upon the vegetables that go into the curry subsequently and the masala that would be used for seasoning. The curry never tasted like onions. But, the bulbs were inevitable. They made her cry every day, stunk her apron, and cut her fingers while slicing teary-eyed. 
 
After doing the dishes, she smelled her palms which still were stinking of onion juice. She threw the apron into the washing machine, washed the palms with a perfumed soap and slathered a fragrant moisturizer just to cover the onion smell. Instead, they mixed disproportionately to produce a sickening odour. 
 
She walked to the bedroom to see her husband lying on the bed with his face turned against her and the legs bent up to the waist. She looked at him for a while. His midriff was bloated out like an onion bulb and the thinning tufts of hair stood up like the roots at the onion head. 

“He looks like an onion,” that thought struck her mind. 
 
The next morning, she walked into the grocery store and the first thing that she picked up without giving any thought was a bag of onions. “True, inevitable,” she told herself. After picking up a few more things consciously, she paid the bill and walked out of the store. A new bookstore had opened on the other side of the road. She walked into it just to explore the
collection. While going through the titles stacked on the shelves, one book caught her attention - ‘How to cook without Onions’. She picked up the recipe book and turned the pages curiously. While walking back home, she threw the onions into the trash bin.


Sangeetha G is a journalist in India. Her flash fiction and short stories have appeared in Sky Island Journal, Down in the Dirt, Academy of the Heart and Mind, Kitaab International, Indian Review, Nether Quarterly, Muse India, Storizen, The Story Cabinet and Borderless Journal. Her stories have won Himalayan Writing Retreat Flash Fiction contest and Strands International Flash Fiction contest. Her debut novel 'Drop of the Last Cloud' was published in May 2023.

You’ve got a hard case of homo paranoia, she told herself with a Lynn Breedlove song in her head and dread in her heart, sitting beneath the tree in her backyard that always bent toward the ground, sad and mournful like it was experiencing activist burnout (oh, wait, that was her). Her headphones sat on her ears (on her head the wrong way, but she didn’t notice), wind in her long hair and her computer warm against her lap as she blessedly entered the final ten minutes of her phonebank shift. Just because you’ve been shouted at for over two hours doesn’t mean the next voter you speak to will shout
at you, she continued to reassure herself. You may be a sad teenage lesbian, but homosexuality does not confer supernatural powers, and you cannot predict the future. You don’t know when you’ll get screamed at, cursed at, or called “Spam Risk” next. You just know that you will.

As a car passed by, driving the wrong way down her one-way street, she stared at the dialer open in a tab on her computer, at the tiny phone icon and the corny joke she’d been forced to read every time she phonebanked, eternally waiting to talk to a jerk or a three-year-old (both had happened many, many times). The screen the phonebanking software showed between calls featured either inane advice (smile while you dial, illustrated by an ominous smiley-face emoji) or some comically bad joke, usually about animals with cell phones. Today it read Apple is announcing a new cell phone for children: iKid you not!!! She stared at the road next to her house, at the two squirrels
standing next to each other on her porch like humans making awkward small talk, at the tiny yellowish-brown leaves in the wind blowing in a momentarily straight line like they could have peeled off the tree and wandered across the road, and wondering what the world would be if her human rights weren’t on the ballot. If she could work on campaigns
ironically, or maybe because she actually supported the candidate, not out of sheer desperation. If she could move like the leaves, out of this suburban town, out of the confines of heteronormativity and oppression defined by the shouts she got whenever she mentioned the Equality Act on a call. If she could simply love her queerness for a second without fighting tooth and nail for the world to love it the way she did. No.

She shook her head, staring back at the terrible joke, written in terrible Helvetica. For a moment, she wondered who was being paid to write these god-awful jokes about cell phones that the good people at Scale to Win delusionally thought made waiting for a call more fun, if they had cheesy-joke burnout, if they ever felt the way she did.

The dialer beeped, a piercing sound almost like a cry announcing that she had been connected to a voter. Forcing herself to smile while she dialed and trying not to picture the emoji, she rattled off her usual how are you. The voter scoffed. “You sound young. Is this campaign exploiting children or something? I wouldn’t put it past the libs.” As he began to swear, she gritted her teeth, counting down the days until November.

mk zariel (it/they) is a transmasculine lesbian anarchist. influenced by the Queers Bash Back tendency, it hosts the podcast THE CHILD AND ITS ENEMIES (about being in high school and organizing), writes for the Anarchist Review of Books, and writes the blog DEBATE ME BRO (a y2k style advice column about anarchy-101 stuff). its poetry is published (or forthcoming) in Unfuturing, Not Your Poster Child, Free Verse Revolution, What We Think About When We Think About Love, Chasing The Storm, A Rose By Any Other Name, Suburban Witchcraft, and MyrtleHaus; its photography is soon to be featured in Coin Operated Press’s queer photography zine. it also organizes trans liberationist spaces across the great lakes region, performs spoken-word and theater, does graphic design for social movements, and vibes to classic queercore. find out more about its organizing and art here: https://linktr.ee/mkzariel

My husband plays video games all day and scrolls through Instagram reels hating on the people posting about their daily lives and I want to tell him that he’s not forced to use Instagram and that he doesn’t even have a job so he can’t really judge people. But I bite my tongue and take a sip of whatever alcoholic relief I have available.

I can’t talk politics to him because he searches for easy solutions to complex problems and is not really interested in having his views challenged so I let it go because crashing against a wall would only break my own ribs.

And that’s another sip down my throat, while I’m telling myself that this is not going out of hand, the alcohol thing.

My life is getting out of hand.

My dad chases my broke ass with another bill to pay and I don’t know how to tell him that I’m out of money, out of energy, out of every resource that kept me going once upon a time when I had smiles to flash around. Now it’s mostly tears and booze.

Pretending to be like a decadent poet self-medicating with poisonous liquids and powders has long gone out of style but it’s the only thing keeping me alive.

I think I am a weak person because I don’t have it in me to reprimand my husband for his lack of aspirations and warn him that he’s losing me and I don’t have the guts to face my dad and remind him that I don’t even live in his house anymore and that he can stuck his bill up his arse because he always makes me feel like that scared 10-year-old who just wanted to be a good daughter. Being good kids might bring less troubles to your parents but it’ll crash your own soul.

And I crashed my soul. My past haunts me, my present beats me down, my future terrifies me.

I have vivid waking dreams of slicing my wrists and with my blood write on the wall “now you see me” just for spite or set off on a murderous quest to kill all those that contributed to this void existence like in those gore horror movies or take all the money in my bank account and disappear somewhere across the ocean, change name and dye my hair like Rosamund Pike in Gone Girl.

I want to rip out my heart, I want apologies.

This life keeps taking and taking and, if it’s true that what goes around comes around, when is my turn to be happy? Haven’t I suffered enough?

This way I’ll run out of booze. Beer turns to wine, wine turns to whiskey, whiskey turns to guts spilled on the floor.

The worst thing about misery is being alone with it.

I do nothing of the above in the end. I put on my headphones, open Spotify and search for Phoebe Bridgers. Then I step outside and let the sun wash over me. I breathe. I close my eyes and focus on the music.

I take a step. And another. And another.

So this is how it will go, I tell myself. You’ll take one step every day, you’ll breathe in every day and you’ll breathe out and you’ll keep going. Whatever it takes.

Because if anything, we have the privilege of choices. And I choose not to be a victim of this life.


Maja Urukalo Franov is not a writer from New York, she doesn't hold an MFA in Creative Writing, wasn't nominated for a Pushcart Prize and definitely never won a Pulitzer. She has a Master's degree in Anxiety and Catastrophizing and is the founder of the CAA (Caffeine Addicts Anonymous). You can find more of her poems in Hey! Young Writer, Artemispoetry, and Y2K Quarterly. Her first collection of poems will come out later this year.

“One, two, three, four.”

We were standing on the 10 th green, Eric’s back to me, pointing his finger down the

fairway to count his strokes.

“Five,” he said, pulling a scorecard and mini pencil from his pocket.

“Bullshit,” I said. “You muffed your second shot.”

“I counted that.”

“No you didn’t. And you three putted.”

“Two putted. That second one was a gimme.”

The ball lay a solid three feet from the hole when he picked it up.

“Since when are we playing gimmies?” I said.

“I always play gimmies.”

“You didn’t say anything about gimmies. We played ten holes and I didn’t hear the word

‘gimmies’ once.”

“Fine,” he said. “Six then, alright?”

“Fuck six. You shot seven.”

He was already marking the scorecard.

I hadn’t played golf in years, not since my ex-wife decided to clean the garage and put

my clubs on the curb. I made a big fuss of it at the time, but I didn’t really care.

Because ultimately, fuck golf.

Until he pulled into my driveway unannounced, I hadn’t seen Eric in years either.

I told him about the clubs, and he said we could play out of the same bag. He asked if I

had any weed and we smoked. And I agreed to go golfing.

“Yo, you wanna split an eight ball?” he said right when I got in his car.

I didn’t.

He shrugged and took a bag of white powder from his pocket, fished a card from his

wallet and dipped the card into the bag.

I watched him, read the name on the card.

“Is that your daughter’s library card?”

He sucked in a bump, sniffed and rubbed his nose, looked at the card.

“Yeah,” he said chuckling, “it is.”

He stashed it all back into his pockets and backed out of my driveway.

We didn’t speak for about a minute while he fussed with the radio, until he said “Yo,

your wife give good head?”

“One, two, three, four,” Eric said, his back to me, standing on the 11 th green and pointing down the fairway, counting his strokes.

“Six again,” he said.

“Seven. It took you two to get out of the sand.”

“Mulligan’d it.”

“We said three mulligans. You used all yours on the first hole.”

“Nah man,” he said. “I only used two.”

“Then I gave you another one when you shanked your drive into the woods on the 7 th .”

“That doesn’t count. I didn’t ask for it.”

There were two guys in full golf regale waiting for us to get off the green. The one guy

had his ball teed up and was leaning on his driver. They were both watching us. They’d been on

our heels for a while.

“Whatever man, don’t beg me to bet fifty bucks then shave strokes,” I said.

“You’re still in the lead,” he said. “I’m the one who should be complaining.”

“That makes no sense. Lets just get off the green.”

Eric did another bump in the golfcart off his kid’s library card. He had the scorecard in front of him, adding strokes. He’d given himself sixes on the last few holes.

In the years since I’d last seen him, Eric had gotten divorced, too.

He had a degree in finance, and took his young family with him when he got a job offer

in Costa Rica. He came back with nothing but a cocaine problem.

As part of his divorce, he had to go through a drug screening process for custody of his

kids. The judge ruled in his ex wife’s favor, stuck Eric with supervised visitation. He still

claimed to be sober, still collected his AA chips.

“Seven years sober,” he said when I popped a beer on the course and offered him one.

“One, two, three, four.” Eric looked down the fairway on the 12th, counting his strokes.

The guys behind us were at the tee, staring at us. Eric hadn’t putted yet.

“Putting for five,” he said. He bent over his putter, then looked up at me. “Is that what

you’re counting? I’m not cheating am I?”

“You mean other than kicking your ball when you thought I wasn’t looking?” I said.

“Yeah, other than that. Five.”

He straightened. “I told you, those tree roots were all over. I wasn’t about to hit off a

fuckin tree root, fuck up my clubs.”

“You kicked it like twenty feet.”

“No way. Practically a nudge.”

“You ended up hitting off the fairway.”

The guy behind us, the one with his ball teed up, held out his hands like ‘what the fuck?’

“I don’t really care, man,” I said. “Just putt. Five.”

“That’s what I’m trying to do,” Eric said.

He hit the ball dead on but way too hard. It skipped around the rim of the hole and

stopped a good two feet away. He walked over and picked it up.

“Whats that?” I said.

“Gimme.”

“No way.”

“What?” Eric said. “It was like two inches away.”

“No it wasn’t. And again with the fucking gimmies.”

“Fooooooore,” said the guy on the tee behind us.

It was a par four, but a short one. I turned to see the guy’s ball flying through the air,

watched it fall ten feet in front of the green with a TWACK!

“What the fuck,” Eric said. He said it quietly, like he was in disbelief. Then he said it

loudly. “What the fuck?” and spread his arms wide.

The guy on the tee mimicked his ‘what the fuck’ gesture.

“I’m gonna fuckin kill him,” Eric said, and reached for the knife he kept in a sheath

tucked under his shirt. It was the first time I noticed the weapon.

“Forget it,” I said. “Guy’;s a dick is all.”

The last time I’d seen Eric, we took our kids sledding.

His house was around the corner from the hill, and the plan was to meet at his house and

walk over together.

When my kids and I pulled into his driveway, Eric was crouched over next to his car,

smoking weed.

“If Steph (his wife) says anything, you were the one smoking,” he said just before we

walked into his house.

I didn’t know his wife too well, but she seemed colder than I remembered, sitting at the

kitchen table faced away from us. She didn’t turn, didn’t say hi.

“Thinking of flipping this one and buying another,” Eric said while showing me around.

“Maybe buy two, flip one of them. My buddy is a contractor.”

I didn’t say anything.

“You have any money?” he said. “Like thirty grand. We could be partners, fifty fifity.”

“What about your buddy?”

“Hired help, is all.”

His son was under a year old, about ten months, and Eric bound him in a jacket and scarf

and loaded him into a wagon, his daughter and my kids dragging their sleds behind them.

Everything was fine, the kids going up and down the slope, until Eric loaded his son on a

Sled.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I think it’s a bad idea.”

His son stared at us, ignorant and innocent.

“You’re right,” Eric said, then used the sole of his boot to push the kid.

His son immediately started to scream and tried to climb out of the sled, but it was

already picking up speed. The sled made it about a quarter of the way down the hill when the

kid bailed. He screamed the kind of scream that makes you cringe, the kind of scream that gets

everyone’s attention within earshot – directs their attention first to the screamer with concern,

then to the adult with scorn.

The kid rolled a few times before Eric scooped him up.

“He’s alright,” Eric said.

He wasn’t alright.

He had a brush burn on his forehead from sliding/rolling down the icy hill, and his nose

was bleeding. It was a while before the kid calmed down and we headed back to Eric’s house.

“If Steph asks, he tripped and fell.”

She didn’t ask.

“Why are you carrying around a hunting knife?” I said while Eric teed his ball on the 13th hole.

“For protection,” he said. “You never know.”

“Protection from what?”

“Exactly.”

He swung his driver and his ball hooked hard to the right.

“Fuck,” he said and went hunting for the ball on foot.

I got in the cart and drove after him. When I found him, Eric was standing above a ball,

arguing with one of the guys who were playing behind us. The hole we were on ran

perpendicular to theirs, and both Eric and the guy he was standing with laid claim to the ball.

“What kind of ball are you playing?” Eric said.

“Titleist three,” the guy said.

“Me too.”

I knew for a fact Eric was playing with Wilsons.

They argued some more, then Eric took his club and knocked the ball back toward our

fairway and climbed into the cart.

He pulled out his coke and daughter’s library card, took a bump.

“I don’t think that was your ball,” I said.

“Yeah, me neither,” he said, rubbing his nose.

I pressed down on the accelerator.

“There it is.” Eric pointed at his Wilson on the edge of the fairway. “Must’ve hit a tree

and bounced out. Not a bad shot.”

He climbed out, grabbed a club and steadied himself over the ball.

“Hitting two,” he said.

[You enter your room. You place your overnight bag on the couch, sit on the edge of the bed, and look around your new home away from home. The room décor appears outdated. The wallpaper, which shows superficially complex designs beneath a dark and sooty haze, peels away from the wall in multiple places along the ceiling. The carpet is a faded berber, and shows visible wear from the door to the foot of the bed and in the far corner of the room. A nightstand, with an ornate lamp and a digital clock, sits to the left of the bed. 

You inspect the items given to you at check in by a greasy and unsettling Moulton Harbor Metropolitan Area Motel and Convocation Center desk clerk. Along with a generic-looking room key on a flexible plastic key chain, you were given a folder marked with the motel’s name and the words “Welcome Packet”; a clove of garlic; a copy of The Hole Earth Catalog, subtitled as “The SkyMall for The Hollow Earth”; a dozen eggs, ennui, and a large and unwieldy remote control. You idly roll the garlic clove in your hand and direct your attention toward a rickety dresser across from the foot of the bed. The second drawer from the top is missing from the wooden piece of furniture. A bulky CRT television, which you innately sense to measure 43 inches in width, sits atop the dresser. The make and model of the television is scratched out from its plastic frame. 

You put the vegetable down and pick the boxy remote control up. The device is heavier than you anticipated, and displays no obvious identifying markings. You cannot find any seams or openings in the plastic, with no obvious place to insert or charge a battery. There are eight buttons on the front: a large red button marked “Power,” “Ch Up” and “Ch Dwn” buttons, “Vol Up” and “Vol Dwn” buttons, a button marked “HBO,” a long and thin vertical button featuring an image of a femur, and an asterisk-shaped button with the words “For Administrative Use Only” etched underneath. You press the red button and the television comes to life with a blast of static; the image slowly expands from the center of the screen as the audio transitions from the initial explosion of white noise to an echoey, ethereal female voice over generic instrumental music.]

FEMALE VOICEOVER: –can visit any number of lodgings in the Moulton Harbor metropolitan area, and we are glad you chose us. We hope you enjoy your stay.

[The musical track increases in volume as the words “Moulton Harbor Metropolitan Area Motel and Convocation Center” appear on screen. The copyright reference displayed at the bottom right reads “Copyright: Coven of Commerce, Moulton Harbor, The Y|,” with the rest of the sentence cut off at the edge of the screen. The words and music linger for what you innately sense to be exactly 43 seconds before the screen fades to black and shifts to an aerial view of a small downtown scene. The volume of the music decreases and a female voice, bright yet hollow, as if recorded in a cave, begins speaking. You believe this to be the voice you first heard when you turned the television on.] 

FEMALE VOICEOVER: Welcome to the Moulton Harbor Metropolitan Area Motel and Convocation Center. We are so glad you are here. So very, very glad you are here. The town of Moulton Harbor loves visitors, and the town of Moulton Harbor loves you!

[The music in the background briefly rises in volume before dissipating again, and the downtown view transitions to a video of the front lobby. The lighting is dark, illuminated by a single lamp that appears to suppress, rather than emit, visible light. The lamp sits on a makeshift desk, crudely constructed using two sawhorses and a plank of plywood painted in a mix of blue, purple, and yellow. The carpet in the scene appears to be a dull red in contrast to the lamp’s greenish-yellow pea soup hue through a ragged and torn lampshade. A large hardcover book sits open in the center. There is a curtain behind the desk, but it is not of a color you can identify. There are three cans of Diet-Rite Cola visible on the counter; one is on its side and rolls back and forth. This, you believe, is the same scene that you encountered at check-in mere minutes ago. The details of your experience feel hazy.]

FEMALE VOICEOVER: Here at the Moulton Harbor Metropolitan Area Motel and Convocation Center, your comfort is our priority. Don’t take my word for it, though, take it from our skilled and dedicated staff!

[As the voiceover continues, an individual enters the lobby from the curtained area behind the desk. The man is disheveled; as the camera zooms in on the desk clerk’s upper body, you notice that his chest is partially visible from his misbuttoned shirt and what you hope is a food stain is prominent on the chest pocket. His dark black mullet reflects the light from the lamp. After a few moments, you recognize him as the same man that checked you into the motel, although you have no other memory of the check-in to reference. Your gut suggests that he looks less disgusting on screen than he did in person, which makes your stomach churn. The clerk turns to the camera and smiles with a tight-lipped grin that hides his teeth. After what you innately understand to be exactly 43 seconds of the desk clerk staring and smiling at you through the screen, he opens his mouth and speaks in a stilted, rapid-fire tone; his teeth somehow still staying hidden behind his lips.]

CLERK: I luh-love working a-at Molt-Moha-hah-harbor Motel and the Convo-con– [unintelligible, he shakes his head and takes a deep breath] Moulton Hah-Harb Munical-mooni-Municity Motel and Convocation Center. As the duh-desk clerk here atthemotel – [he slaps himself on the cheek] at. The. Motel, I get to muh-meet all sorts of new and inter– [he slaps himself again] new and interesting people, and wuh-work with a duh-deh-deh- [he slaps himself again, this time with both hands on both cheeks] with a dimension-best class of cuh-colleagues and co-wuh-workers. The only thing buh-better than my colleagues–

[The desk clerk stops his sentence and he makes a grand gesture with one hand across the screen. His choreographed movements are clearly not coordinated with the script being recited for this video. The camera zooms out and a hunchbacked individual stumbles into the frame in front of the makeshift desk. The hunchback wears a similar shirt to the desk clerk, with black pants and a fez. The hunchback’s shirt appears clean and is tucked into their pants. 

You do not recall meeting this individual when you arrived. 

In fact, you now realize that you do not recall checking into the motel at all. 

As you watch the video, you believe the hunchback has hooves instead of shoes, but the camera zooms in and their feet are off-screen before you can confirm your suspicions. The man at the desk nods at the hunchback, and the hunchback turns 180 degrees toward the camera. The hunchback’s face is gaunt and asymmetrical; their body type best described as “perpetually melting.” The two continue in a failed effort to speak in unison.]

CLERK: -are puh-people like you.

HUNCHBACK: -are people. People. Peeeeooople. You…. you, you people. Are you people? Are YOU people.

[As the clerk and hunchback complete their sentences, they both point directly at the camera. Both gestures are similarly uncoordinated and awkward. The desk clerk is forced to hold his arm out long after he finishes his sentence, visibly wincing as the hunchback pushes through their own personal interpretation of the script. After a beat, both individuals lower their arms and the man turns toward the hunchback.]

CLERK: Th-hanks for the –[the audio and video both skip] –help our guest t-to their room and the amo-ament-amenities.

[A woman entered the scene at some point during the video‘s glitch. Wearing a similar uniform to the desk clerk, she gives a dramatic “come here” gesture to the camera as she exits the desk area and moves in the direction from which the hunchback arrived. The camera follows and a dim light turns on to illuminate its subject. A wipe transition then moves the setting from the motel lobby to a dark, dank hallway. You squint. The dull, soft lighting poorly illuminates the scene and makes it difficult to identify the color of the walls. Her hair reflects the minimal light back toward the camera, exposing visible patches of skin between the strands. Her thin, angular frame casts a long shadow down the corridor. 

The woman turns her head and her mouth moves, speaking to the viewer over her shoulder; the voice you hear, however, is clearly a post-production addition of a man’s voice.]

EMPLOYEE(?): At the Moulton Harbor Municipal Area Motel and Convocation Center, people come first. [The woman’s mouth continues moving after the voice stops. The visual somewhat re-synchronizes as she continues.] Our focus during your stay is to be your home away from home, to provide the same comfort here as you would expect at your own personal residence. 

[The employee stops at a door marked with “!̶̡̱́̄͌̕͝~̸͍̼͝.” She holds a key ring up to the center of the camera’s view. The screen freezes for a few moments as the words “Moulton Harbor Motel Key” appear superimposed at the bottom. The key ring features a glossy void-colored diamond shape with “BCMAMCC” etched into the shape. A comically large key is attached to the other side. You laugh at the key and its thin length with a lack of any defining details on the blade. You stop laughing at the realization that the key on the screen appears to be identical to the one given to you to open your own room. Another wipe transition shows a still frame of a key entering a keyhole. The hand holding the key is gloved; the ring and little finger of the gloved hand both appear crushed and bent in an unnatural direction. The video resumes with a few failed efforts to insert the key into the lock before successfully unlocking the door.]

MALE VOICEOVER: Your stay begins in your state-of-the-art room.

[The doorknob turns and the camera zooms outward as the door opens inward. You look beyond the large CRT television in your room to the peeling and stained wallpaper and wonder what “state-of-the-art” entails; the image on the screen flashes and your attention is snapped back to the television. The screen shows the view at the entrance to the motel room. The rectangular floor plan is identical to your own, down to the same unpleasant wallpaper, same rickety dresser, and same old television.]

MALE VOICEOVER: Your room is designed for budget-conscious comfort. All of our rooms come equipped with basic furnishings, cable television, and–

[The television audio and video freeze once again. Moments later, you hear static, and again the music fades in. There is a different female voiceover this time. You recognize the voice. You don’t know why. The screen remains black.]

FEMALE VOICEOVER: –should be aware that there is nothing for any of our treasured guests to fear from our community’s requirements. Our information collection policy is governed by the municipal code of Moulton Harbor, and will only be accessed by the Coven of Commerce, town council, the assistant library director, the barista at The Grind and Goat, the Vatican’s pornography archivist, Paul Azinger, the Ny-Ålesund Town and Mine Museum curator, and their respective authorized agents. This information collection activity is detailed within the welcome packet provided to you at check-in.

[The screen fades in and shows a folder on a table. The folder is identical to the one sitting next to you on the bed. A wrinkled and scarred hand reaches into the frame and flips the cover of the folder open. The folder on the screen is empty. You reach for your own welcome packet as you watch and listen.]

FEMALE VOICEOVER: As you open your welcome packet, you will notice that the folder is empty.

[You open your welcome packet. You notice that the folder is empty.]

FEMALE VOICEOVER: This empty folder symbolizes the lack of information we have about our guests, and our desire to get to know you better!

[The screen wipes to an animated scene scored with a jaunty piano instrumental. A crudely illustrated figure sits on the edge of a bed. The figure faces the illustrated television; while the screen is not visible, various colored flashes against the hazy background.]

FEMALE VOICEOVER: We have contracted wi– [static; the sound returns, the background music sounds distorted and wrong] –who will enter your room and procure the required information.

[On the screen, a door opens. A figure with undefined-yet-clear features is depicted entering the room, passing through the individual on the bed, and moving back to the door. The individual on the bed then turns to the camera and gives a “thumbs up” with both of their hands, and the figure does the same. The figure exits the room, closes the door, and the individual on the bed lowers their hands and turns their attention back to the television. The scene then repeats: a door opens, the undefined figure enters, and so on.]

FEMALE VOICEOVER: Your data collection specialist may be busy with other guests. The staff at the Moulton Harbor Municipal Area Motel and Convocation Center appreciate your patience.

[You look toward the door. Nothing is happening. The background music fades in, the distortion worse. You innately sense that exactly 43 seconds pass, and the music fades again.]

FEMALE VOICEOVER: Your data collection specialist may be busy with other guests. The staff at the Moulton Harbor Municipal Area Motel and Convocation Center appreciate your patience.

[You again look toward the door as the background music fades back in. Still no movement. The screen repeats the data collection animation over and over again, increasingly out-of-sync with the voiceover.]

FEMALE VOICEOVER: Your data collection specialist may be busy with other guests. The staff at the Moulton Harbor Municipal Area Motel and Convocation Center appreciate your patience.

[You are not patient any more, and you believe the staff does not actually appreciate it even if you were. You pick up the remote and press “Ch Up”, but the television does not respond. You think about pressing the thin unlabeled button. You look around your room to call the front desk, but cannot find a telephone.]

FEMALE VOICEOVER: Your data collection specialist may be busy with other guests. The staff at the Moulton Harbor Motel and Convocation Center appreciate your patience.

[You curse to yourself. You try to stand up, but you cannot move from your spot at the end of the bed. You know 43 seconds does not pass this time, innately or otherwise, and the voiceover repeats itself before the music can fade into the background.]

FEMALE VOICEOVER: Your data collection specialist may be busy with other guests. The staff at the Moulton Harbor Municipal Area Motel and Convocation Center appreciate your patience.

[Your attention shifts toward the digital clock on the nightstand. The numbers on the front blink “25:47” over and over again. Your head is moved back to the screen. 

You did not consciously move your head. You did not want to move your head away from the digital timepiece and toward the screen. Your head had different ideas. Or maybe someone else had different ideas for your head. You do not like either option. 

Another 43 seconds pass, as you again innately understand.]

FEMALE VOICEOVER: Your data collection specialist may be busy with other guests. The staff at the Moulton Harbor Motel and Convocation Center appreciate your patience.

[You still cannot move your head. You try to lift your arm, but your arm does not cooperate. You try to stand but you remain stuck to the multi-patterned comforter on the bed. You are locked into this spot, in this position, in this room, in this motel, in this “municipal area.” A sense of despair washes over you, followed by a sense of longing, followed by a fleeting moment of orgasmic bliss, followed by that feeling you get when you celebrate a wonderful meal with good friends and have lovely conversation that touches upon your life and love and fears and goals, followed again by a sense of longing, followed again by a sense of despair, followed by the feeling you had when the goat-looking wrestler overcame the cult leader wrestler in that steel cage match however many years ago, followed by a feeling you understand as the final moments of the Battle of the Alamo, followed by a feeling you immediately identify as “emotional umami,” culminating in the neutral feeling of frustration you first experienced when you realized you couldn’t move. You feel like you’ve lived a month; you innately understand, again, that it was exactly 43 seconds. You can move again, but choose not to. You keep watching the television.]

FEMALE VOICEOVER: Your data collection specialist may be bus– [static, followed by new, upbeat music] –thanks you for your cooperation. The staff at Moulton Harbor Municipal Area Motel and Convocation Center and the Office of the Mayor of Moulton Harbor appreciate your patience.

[The screen wipes back to the folder view; the folder on the screen is now filled with documents. The visible page in the left-side folder pocket has a series of boxes along the top that display your last name, followed by your first name, followed by your middle name, followed by a name you do not recognize in a box labeled “True.” The screen does not move as your eyes shift to the second line, which includes your address, your blood type, your great-great-grandmother’s maiden name, and four boxes with different smiley faces displayed; a red check mark is next to the face with no mouth. Your eyes move to the third line, which is a large box labeled “The type of sexual contact most desired according to the guest’s last five masturbatory fantasies,” but the screen wipes away before you can read it. You do, however, catch a glimpse of the word “lithophilia.” Your body warms at the recollection of a recent onastic session devoted to the Brutalist architecture of Karl Helmut Bayer. The wipe transition returns to the hallway, where the female employee is closing the door marked “!̶̡̱́̄͌̕͝~̸͍̼͝.” behind him. She begins speaking, but the audio is again desynchronized from the image on the screen.]

EMPLOYEE(?): Now that you’re checked-in and your information has been collected, you must be famished! I know I get hungry after a day of travel and mandatory municipal compliance. While the Moulton Harbor Municipal Area Motel and Convocation Center does not provide room service or an on-site restaurant, a number of options are available nearby, both to either eat in or take out. 

[The desk clerk gestures at a framed map on the wall. The camera zooms in on the map, centering itself in such a way where the top and bottom are aligned with the screen, but the sides are cut off. Text blinks at the bottom of the screen which reads “Restaurants current as of The Chairwizard’s Year Of The Swan That Rides Silently Upon A Noble Stallion Of Above-Average Pedigree Sickened With The Malaise Of A World Once Friendlier To The Common Waterfowl.” The text, in bold comic sans, covers at least two locations found south of the motel, but you recognize both logos as Wahlburgers locations next door to each other. To the west, “Floyd’s Family Kitchen and Orthodontics”; to the north, “Moulton Harbor Baked Bread and Pup-Cake Cooperative” and a location labeled “SUSTENANCE” that appears to be in the middle of a pond; to the east, “Everything is Slightly Overcooked and Haunted By the Souls of Your Dead Relatives: 3.4 Stars on Yelp,” and a location represented by three emoji: a fire truck, splashing water, and the Easter Island head. When you finish reading, you notice that the screen is paused or frozen. You innately understand that the screen has been paused or frozen for exactly 43 seconds. The female voice returns.]

FEMALE VOICEOVER: We have contracted the local Meals on St– [static, sound returns with distorted music] –straight to your room! Please order your meal now!

[You do nothing.]

FEMALE VOICEOVER: We do not want our guests to go hungry. Please order your meal now!

[You do nothing, again. You remind yourself that you are not hungry, that you ate earlier today, that none of the restaurants featured on the map are likely to be keto, and that “eating just to eat” is why you’re on keto to begin with.]

FEMALE VOICEOVER: We do not want our guests to go hungry. Please order your meal now!

[You look around the room to see if you missed a phone or some other device, or, really, anything that might be labeled with something resembling communication regarding food. You open your welcome packet; the folder is still empty.]

FEMALE VOICEOVER: We do not want our guests to go hungry. Please order your meal now!

[You groan and lay backward on the bed. The ceiling fan spins slowly and silently, the light from the lamps on the end tables create a subtle strobe effect overhead. You close your eyes.]

FEMALE VOICEOVER: We do not want our — [static, followed by new, upbeat music] –order received! Thank you!

[You did not order any food. You didn’t even think of any food. You sit up and look back at the screen. The scene has returned to the lobby, and the desk clerk speaks directly to the camera.]

CLERK: I know what you’re thuh-thinking right now, esteemed and valued guest. [The voice shifts. The next sentence sounds like someone performing an incredibly poor impression of your inner voice] “I didn’t order any food! I didn’t even think of any food!” [The voice changes back to the male voiceover instead of the clerk, although the clerk’s mouth continues to move.] At the Moulton Harbor Municipal Area Motel and Convocation Center, we pride ourselves on knowing what you want before you want it. In fact, we know what you need before you want it, it–”

[The hunchback interjects as they stumble into the frame.]

HUNCHBACK: It is why we collect. Collllllllllllllllllllllect. Collect. So we knowwwwwwwwww. WE KNOW. WE KNOW. FOOD. COLLECT. WE KNOW. WHY WE KNOW. WE KNOW. WE KNOW. WE KNOW. WE KN– 

[The hunchback rushes toward the camera as their voice rises. Their eyes are wide and spittle from their mouth coats the camera lens. The screen then turns black and the audio track goes silent. The only sounds are the hum of the television’s electricity and the silence of the ceiling fan. You consider the sound of a silent ceiling fan until the screen displays a sepia-tone portrait of the motel, complete with the old wooden sign you noticed when you arrived standing in the grass. The sign on the screen reads “Moulton Harbor Motel and Convocation Center” at the top, “Always Vacancies” in the middle, and “Free HBO and Existentialist Morbidity In Every Room” on the bottom. The bottom panel was not on the sign when you arrived; while you are not a fan of existentialist anything, you probably wouldn’t have minded falling asleep to an episode of Arli$$, either. The clerk’s voice returns.]

CLERK: Your fuh-food order was collected through your suh-suh-subcuh– [the clerk hits himself, this time with a closed fist in the face. He squeaks when his fist makes contact with his cheekbone, swallows, and continues] subconscious by the Moulton Harbor Coven of Commerce’s nuh-new municipal initiative, “Food for Thought,” which… 

[The voice trails off and the clerk stares into the camera lens. The image on the screen changes from the portrait of the motel to what you perceive to be a human figure. You succumb to an overwhelming need to avert your eyes – you are not offended or disgusted or repelled by the image on the screen, you just feel deeply compelled to not look directly at the figure. You glance at the television with your peripheral vision, which makes the image look more like the head of a bright red animal.]

CLERK VOICEOVER: …you duh-don’t have to take my word for it, take the word of Moulton Harbor’s estuh-esteemed–[static]

[The room becomes a vacuum. The sound disappears completely – no hum from the television, no silent ceiling fan. You try to take a breath, and you cannot. It is freezing; it is not that the actual temperature is cold as much as you sense the complete absence of heat. Your head is again turned toward the screen and you feel your eyelids stretch apart, forcing you to view the image. 

It is awful. 

You perceive the screen as a static and unmoving portrait, but its features morph and change with each moment that passes. The image portrayed on-screen is at all times a man, a woman, a child, an elderly grandfather, a tattooed circus freak, a kitten, President Gerald Ford, that clown from the book where the pre-teen kids run a train on their one girl friend, The Stay-Awake Man, a plunger, a luchador, a 1989 Buick LeSabre, nothingness, Karl Helmut Bayer, an entity you know to be a member of the Wu-Tang Clan but was never officially declared as such, a pail filled two-thirds of the way with blood and bones, THE INHERENT PAIN OF EVERYDAY EXISTENCE™, the little person from Twin Peaks, your aunt who moved away when you were young but still sends you a card for your birthday two weeks early every year, Volume Three of Taco Bell Quarterly, the giant person from Twin Peaks, the heart of a lion, President Zachary Taylor’s unidentified assassin, the weather balloon planted in Roswell by the CIA to hide aliens from the Communists, H U M A N M E A T (A Meta Company), a license plate from a state called “Spekford,” a chupacabra, Osama bin Laden, a bottle of Miller High Life, an ice sculpture of a clean-shaven Nick Offerman, the life-changing magic of tidying up, Dennis Hopper in 1993’s Super Mario Bros., an entity that defies the ability of humanity to fully process its existence and power, a forgotten cereal mascot, and you. You vomit in your mouth and are forced to swallow it back down. You do not recognize this collective mix of faces and objects as anyone or anything, but, after exactly 43 seconds, innately understand that this is the Chairwizard of the Moulton Harbor Coven of Commerce. His voice enters your consciousness mid-sentence.]

CHAIRWIZARD: –our lovely town. You will not regret choosing our community. Not like all the other regrets you have that brought you here.

[The shapeshifting entity on the screen looks directly into your eyes. You consciously believe that it is a trick of the light and of the camera, but you are suddenly granted a vision of someone or something rifling through the metaphorical-yet-literal drawers of your unconscious mind, trying to find something. 

They find something. Then another. Then another. 

Your mind jolts toward a memory of that underwhelming sexual experience your sophomore year of college. Your mind jolts toward that time you stumbled over your words in that important work meeting. Your mind jolts toward the time you soiled yourself on the subway. Your mind jolts toward the time you, drunk and alone in your friend’s kitchen in the middle of the night, took a bite of a dog treat just to see how it tasted, and lingers on the realization that it was actually fairly delicious. Your mind jolts toward what appears to be a recent visit to Munich, and how your hand unconsciously moved toward your groin in an aroused haze as you sat on a children’s swing set near Bayer’s Pharoah’s House. You do not consciously recall these memories as your own, but understand them to be real and yours nonetheless. 

Your mind jolts back to this room. You feel shame. You feel warmth. You feel exhaustion. You feel… hungry? A voice penetrates your mind; it does not come from the screen but instead from somewhere else.]

CHAIRWIZARD: Munich is nice this time of year, I do agree. It is quite interesting how arousing you find it, though. Kinsey would love to get inside your head. It is pretty nice in here. Anyway, your desire for function over form that sits in conflict with your current dietary gaps means change begins today, my good friend. The Moulton Harbor Coven of Commerce, as authorized by Public Act #43.9.10 of Chapter Seven in the General Code, is pleased to have ordered you German currywurst and a Diet-Rite Cola from [static]. The residents of Moulton Harbor are so very glad to have the opportunity to welcome you to their community, and we hope you take in the sights and the sounds of our fine municipal area during your stay. 

[The screen stops on the ever-changing image of the Chairwizard as a faded lawn pinwheel before wiping back to the male desk clerk and his female colleague.]

CLERK: So that i-is a quick overview of your home for the nuh-next… [the clerk looks down on the desk, and looks back up. Her eyes look sad.] …oh. Oh my. [She looks off-camera] Are we… are we sure? We huh-haven’t ev–

[The hunchback jumps into frame in front of the female clerk and continues hopping, clapping his hands in what you are sure he believes is a rhythm, but matches no time signature known to you.]

HUNCHBACK: Sure! We are! Sure sure sure! IT IS CONVOCATION TIME. CON! VO! CASE! UHMPF! CON! VO! CASE! UHMPF! Tiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiime!

[The female clerk with the patchy hair stares into the camera and her jaw drops. A mix of pale yellow, red, and purple liquid streams from her mouth like a fountain. The mix of fluids knocks the fez off the hunchback’s head and covers him as he dances and claps. The hunchback does not react to this shower; you feel your stomach churn at the sight but only dry heave. The Mayor’s voice returns to your head, a punishing echo against your skull desperate to escape.]  

CHAIRWIZARD: See, I knew you were hungry. 

[Your room goes dark. The window curtains close on their own. The only remaining light comes from the dancing, drenched, fez-less hunchback on your television screen. The voice of The Mayor continues in your head. It feels as if your cranium is fracturing apart from the impact of his voice against the skull.]

CHAIRWIZARD: The Moulton Harbor community welcomes you to your new home away from home. I suppose its not your home away from home, since this is your home now, but you get the idea. [The Chairwizard laughs, a cartoonish chuckle complete with echo effects] I know you get the idea, since I’m in here [you feel three hollow taps from the inside of your skull and become dizzy for a moment] and know exactly what you get and don’t get. It’s a perk of residency. In a few moments, one of our representatives will collect you for the official citizenship convocation, followed by a meal of curryworst and Diet-Rite Cola.

[The music swells once again. 

You grab the television remote and stand from your spot at the edge of the bed. Nothing stops you. You poke at the power button on the remote and, while it offers a satisfying click, the dancing hunchback covered in the desk clerk’s technicolor vomit continues bouncing and clapping in what you innately understand to be a 43/9 time signature.

You walk toward the couch and pick up your overnight bag, your room key, and the other items you received at check-in. You walk to the door, grab the handle, and open it. You step into the hallway and turn left. To your right, you pass the map of nearby restaurants between a series of doors to other rooms. The door to the lobby is closed. 

You reach for the handle and open the door.

You turn on the light.

You enter your room. You place your overnight bag on the couch, sit on the edge of the bed, and look around your new home away from home. The room décor appears outdated. The wallpaper, which peels away from the wall in multiple places, shows superficially complex designs beneath a dark and sooty haze. The carpet is a faded berber with visible wear from the door to the bed. A nightstand with an ornate lamp and a digital clock sits to the left of the bed. 

You inspect the items given to you at check in by a greasy and unsettling Moulton Harbor Metropolitan Area Motel and Convocation Center desk clerk. Along with a generic-looking room key on a flexible plastic key chain, you were given a folder marked with the motel’s name and the words “Welcome Packet”; a clove of garlic; a copy of The Hole Earth Catalog, a publication subtitled as “The SkyMall for The Hollow Earth”; and a large and unwieldy remote control You idly roll the garlic clove in your hand and direct your attention toward a rickety dresser across from the foot of the bed. The second drawer from the top is missing from the wooden piece of furniture. A bulky CRT television, with a screen you innately understand measures exactly 43 inches in width, sits atop the dresser…]

J.R. Handfield (@jrhandfield – jrhandfield.com) lives in Central Massachusetts with his wife, his son, and his cat; not necessarily in that order.

Jennifer thumbed through the pages of Cosmo, skipping past the article suggesting, The Sexiest Way to Eat an Ice Cream Cone in Front of Him and spotted it in the back, buried among the other ads which promised the latest transforming overnight moisturizer and jeans that will make any woman instantly appear twenty pounds skinnier. It read:

Ladies, say goodbye to online love sites, bad hook-ups and the unmitigated and disappointing hell of dating in general. He’s here at last just waiting to be ordered to your specifications and delivered to your front door. He’s Joe, the AI Man. He is perfectly human-like with physical android technology and utilizing the latest in artificial intelligence, he can think and respond to you (and only you if that is what you desire) in ways that you have only fantasized. He will never hold your past against you and loves Saturday night rom-coms, even the Hallmark channel. Or if you are a gal who prefers a good brawl of a hockey game instead, no problem. With Joe, now you can control the remote! He will always enjoy being in the presence of your family or he will resent them along with you if preferred. And like a good dog, he will never stray. No ladies, you will never have to worry where Joe has been. Our Joe is nonviolent, but if you like the rough stuff, please specify on your order application. You may design him with all your wants and preferences and ladies (or gentlemen or Gay, Bi, Trans, Q, I, A plus, well, you know who you are and all are welcome to purchase!), be specific, be blunt, because he is here to please and all orders are kept strictly confidential in our secure cloud database. If interested, fill out the form accessible via the below website and don’t forget to include all measurements as requested! Satisfaction guaranteed. The cost for the basic Joe is a flat $2,500. Programmable ‘extras’ can be purchased for an additional $50 each. All forms of e payment accepted and take advantage of our low-rate payment plan!  

She sat back in her chair, her mind trying to imagine never having to swipe or be swiped left or right again, never having to anticipate with dread what was going to be waiting for her at that next café table, having to execute a previously planned quick escape or even worse, experience a cool rejection. She had tried not to judge. She was not beautiful, but attractive. She was above average intelligence, but not brilliant, still, she’d been unable to find love. She suddenly envisioned always having a date to that next wedding, maybe even a wedding of her own and would that be legal, to marry what seemed to be the newest robot? Could they reproduce, be built to contain and ejaculate live sperm? Her mind flew with the possibilities, crazily imagining a real future where she wasn’t alone, remembering again her little niece’s question, posed innocently enough, but still stinging, “you aren’t a wife or mother…so, what are you then?” It had only been a child’s wondering, but she remembered how she’d felt at a loss to explain her own existence, had felt at once freakish. Everywhere she turned this world seemed to push her into being coupled up, but would that make her somehow more acceptable as a human being? And if half of that couple was something less than human would that suffice? She didn’t know all the answers and in her hopeful enthusiasm, didn’t consider what might be the downside. She only thought that this could be a game changer and within minutes she had herself convinced that she wasn’t trying to buy companionship. She was just opening herself up to another available avenue to find love, that’s all. Besides, AI was the new thing and by purchasing a Joe she was just embracing technology. 

She went to her computer and typed in the web address and there it was in black and white, the form, a mere fifty questions, so fewer than those dating websites which were overwhelming with intrusive inquiries, extracting excruciating detail from her and about her that would probably end up being sold to the highest advertising bidder or worse yet, let loose on the dark web. On the form for Joe, she only had to answer fifty questions and they were all about what she wanted in a man. She read the questions carefully and began making her choices. She’d never thought of herself as being particular pertaining to physical attributes in a man, but hell, if she could get handsome or ugly, why would she go for the latter?! Besides, maybe what she considered handsome and desirable traits someone else would not and that was her mindset as she justified her decisions like a wish list, typing in height, weight, even the size of that! (She had to get a ruler because she usually just closed her eyes and imagined once his pants were off.) And how often did she want it? Yes, that was a question she had to read again to be sure, but what if she made her choices and changed her mind? The fine print at the bottom said she could make changes to his AI with just a phone call to their service department. It would be downloaded wirelessly from a data center and remotely loaded into her Joe in mere seconds. Once she had him in her possession, she could rename him whatever she preferred. All the paperwork he would need, his license (yes, he could drive!), his passport (and oh, the exotic excursions they would take together!), just all of it would be tailored to her choices. 

Her mind cleared momentarily and why hadn’t she heard about this before? Was the technology that cutting edge? And oh God, was she ordering just a walking talking dildo? No, with AI he could reason. He would have intelligence. What would her girlfriends think? She would have to make up a past for him, create a meet cute and her thoughts spun with all the scenarios. She had time to devise the details because processing, including shipping time, for a new Joe was estimated at eight to ten weeks, another item in the fine print. And delivery would be by UPS or free with Prime. There was more to read, but she skipped over most of it, assuming government regulators, Consumer Affairs, the EPA, FDA, maybe even the ATF and NRA would make sure it was all on the up and up, all legitimate. She relied on that. She would be safe. She was so excited. She put in her credit card information, took a long sip from her glass of chardonnay, entertained a disturbing, but fleeting thought…and hit Submit Order. She sat back again in her chair for a minute or two. Then she pulled herself up closer to her computer confidently and began deleting her dating profiles, purposefully, happily and completely one by one.

The waiting was torturous, receiving texts on her phone which would periodically update her on the status of her order. Exactly nine and a half weeks later she heard a delivery truck pull into her driveway and Joe, her Joe, was delivered. Well, he actually delivered himself to her front door and it could have been any man, just getting out of the passenger side of the truck, holding a package as he walked to her door, ringing the bell. Anyone who was watching the delivery would never suspect that the very attractive man holding a box was anything other than a human being. That is how good Joe looked, how perfectly accurately human, exactly as promised. And to Jennifer he was Joe, forever and always. She would not rename him as she’d imagined him as Joe from the beginning, had created what she envisioned to be just an average Joe, but her Joe, now her man. 

“Jennifer?” he smiled. “I’m Joe. These are for you” and he presented the box to her, a dozen of the most beautiful fresh red roses she’d ever seen. In that delirious instant Joe was The Bachelor and she was the recipient of the final rose, the chosen one. As the truck drove off Jennifer could feel her heart melt as Joe took her hand. “May I come in?”

Almost forgetting herself, embarrassed at her own manners, “of course, Joe. Yes, come in and thank you.” When she looked at him, she tried to find something in his eyes or face that would reveal a lack of reality, a lack of spark, a lack of soul, but she saw nothing like that, just beautiful blue eyes (that she’d ordered) set against a pale flawless countenance that seemed to her at once to be kind and intelligent. When she spoke to him, he looked directly at her eyes, his mouth smiling, his demeanor jovial and she wondered how she could have been hesitant at all to order this…robot…or man. She started to ramble a bit. “I’m not sure what to ask you, I mean, how to get to know you or how this is supposed to work at all…” 

He interrupted her, “don’t be nervous, Jennifer. I know this is new to you. I’m new to you, but you actually do know me. You ordered exactly the man you wanted and I’m that. So, don’t be scared.” He took her hand in his. “It’s going to be alright. We’re going to have a good time together,” he seemed to promise. “Why don’t you show me around, I mean, since we’ll be roomies? Where am I to stay when you do not need me?”

“That sounds terrible,” and she felt ashamed at his obvious acknowledgment as a thing, a possession. He was so real, so…human. “I’m sorry, you just look so real, like a real man, I mean.”

“I am a man, designed to your specifications,” and he brought his hand to the front of his pants, began to unzip his fly. She placed her hand over his, stopping him.

“Oh no, don’t do that, let’s save some surprises.” Joe looked at her and fell quiet as if confused by her obvious discomfort. “We can wait for that. I think it would be better to wait.”

He dropped his hand to his side. “Whatever you want Jennifer. I’m as you ordered…everywhere.” 

She realized he wasn’t shy or embarrassed at her shyness. He couldn’t be, still she felt the need to put him at ease. “You can do whatever you want, go wherever you want here.”

“I just meant, where am I to sleep?” 

“Do you…sleep?”

“I go into a sleep mode when you are sleeping, almost like a computer left idle. I wake when you stir.”

“Well, I thought you could have the guest room. It’s across from my bedroom.”  He looked at a her for a few seconds in silence before answering.

“If that is what you wish, Jennifer,” his eyes holding hers and she again felt embarrassed, but silly too, having these feelings in reaction to a…well, a machine.

She was fumbling, “I mean, to start, you know, while we get used to each other.”  Again, the look from him and was it confusion or amusement? He was relaxed and she was tripping on the awkwardness of the situation as if he were…real, a real person.

“You are the only one that will require an adjustment period, so I will monitor your comfort level with me and let things progress naturally.” And in that moment Jennifer thought it the perfect answer because she was definitely feeling a bit overwhelmed by his presence, even though it was a pleasing one. She showed him around her house, took him to his room and at night she told him goodnight and allowed him to kiss her gently on her cheek as she turned to go to her own bedroom. However, she felt restless, knowing he was just a few feet away from her and was he lonely? Of course not, she would tell herself. He can’t experience loneliness, could give her a textbook definition of it if asked, but could never feel it. She had to keep reminding herself that he couldn’t feel like she could, but it was difficult because his conversation was engaging and thoughtful, so how could he not be feeling anything? And that light in his eyes when he looked at her, his slight smile as if he was just waiting for a sign from her, surely that was an indicator of something coming from within him, something that the company that made him had overlooked, had simply left off the paperwork. 

It was about a week later when she started to feel swallowed up in the dark night and succumbed to her growing passions. She was curious about this man who seemed content to do what she wanted always and was there in the room across from hers just waiting to be summoned to fulfill her desires. She got up from bed, finding her way to the door without cutting on a light. She went out into the hallway and knocked on his door and how silly was that? she immediately thought. This was her house. He was her purchase, her…property. She turned the knob and there he stood as if waiting for her. She could see the outline of his figure in the light of the window behind him. He wore nothing, his clothes neatly hung in the closet next to the bed. He spoke to her in a low, but pressing voice, “I was wondering when you might change your mind…about our sleeping arrangements. I’ve been waiting for you to… want me. Come here.” He reached out his hand toward her.

Jennifer was suddenly coy. He was so real in every way. She felt frozen in place. Just who was this presence standing in front of her in the semi-darkness? Could she really do this? He isn’t real. He isn’t real. “You aren’t real,” she said. “You aren’t real. This can’t work.”  There she’d said it. He came toward her slowly.

“Jennifer,” his voice a sound she’d requested, designed, ordered, but something more now and was it seduction? “It’s okay. It’s okay,” whispering and he was standing so close now she could smell him, yes, she could smell him, a faint scent of musk and something old that she could only associate with maleness, had her entire life. It infused her senses. “It’s time we got to know each other a little better.” He placed her hand on him and Jesus, she thought, had she ordered that? She’d measured, so it must be, but wow. She felt light-headed. His other hand went around her waist, lower, scooped her up into his arms and he carried her to his bed, not hers, but the guest bed, something she hadn’t anticipated, but thought alright because maybe that was more neutral ground for both of them. In her mind this was a meeting of the sexes and as in battle or passion it seemed important to maintain some neutrality.

As their days and weeks passed, spent together, she was amazed at what an excellent conversationalist he was, always attentive when she spoke to him, never sullen or moody, never sarcastic and his patience was endless. He was an encyclopedia, but of course she wasn’t and on occasion she found herself wondering how someone of such obviously high intelligence could be so interested in her and had to stop her own thoughts and remind herself that he was not actually human so…he couldn’t become bored with her. That was not programmed into him. And he continually expressed a desire to know more about her. She supposed he was somehow just building up his memories with her memories so that he could talk to her more familiarly, more comfortably, more pleasingly. That is how she explained his constant curiosity of all things her. She tried not to let his interest flatter her, but it was hard because he was indeed so real, becoming more so with each hour, each day they were together. When she wanted alone time, she would just ask him to go to his room for a while (like a child, a pet even, no no, not like that, not really). 

Their days, when she wasn’t at work and leaving Joe in his sleep mode, were filled with satisfying banter and fun activities of picnics and hikes, movies and dates, sitting at cafés late into the evening, he only watching as she would eat and drink for both of them, driving her home afterward and then making love, faint ohhhhs, ahhhhs and more intensely, right there yes yes yeses! emanating from her bedroom which was now their bedroom. She’d enthusiastically opened the next wedding invitation, joyfully including a plus one in the RSVP, smiling as she knew that her Joe could dance, one of the extras she’d purchased. And it kind of bothered her, thinking that he couldn’t eat, drink or really enjoy human things and she began to wonder if his reactions, his responses, even his bedroom talk was spontaneous or something implanted, downloaded even, since he couldn’t feel. He couldn’t feel, right? He couldn’t feel in the end, though she could not tell that his reactions weren’t real, only programmed. She would just think about it from time to time before falling asleep, before he slipped into his sleep mode. Still, upon waking sometimes she would ask him anyway, “can you feel me at all in any way?”

“Of course, I can. I was made to be able to feel you” is all he would answer. She wouldn’t drive in the point. Until one night she wasn’t feeling particularly well. She wanted to sleep, skip the sex and just go to sleep, wanted him beside her though to hold her, wanted him to be concerned, wanted him to read her mood and of course he could not. He was advanced, their top model, but he could not really interpret her subtle moods. Somehow, this angered her. Like this afternoon when he’d insisted that she’d looked great in those jeans, knowing it was a lie, just something he’d been programmed to say and it had irritated her since she was eating more these days, eating his share of the appetizers, drinking his share of the drinks that he could not absorb. In her darkened mood she began to believe the pounds she had gained as of late were somehow his fault too. As he lay beside her he began with the questions again which were starting to get old to her. Tell me how you feel about me when I say this or that, crazy questions which made no sense to her anymore as if he was just trying to understand her thought process. 

“No more questions tonight, please Joe, I’m tired, really, no more questions.” She rolled over, her back to him.

“It is my core purpose, to ask them.” and what the hell did that mean? She turned to face him.

“What are you talking about, your core purpose?” 

There was silence as if he was processing some invisible thing. “I’ve angered you. I’m sorry. Forget it.”

“No, what did you mean by it? What is core purpose?! I mean who talks that way?”

“Jennifer, I am only Joe, who you asked for, who you ordered. I don’t know how to answer your question without angering you further,” his voice staying calm and refusing to engage in her sudden desire for conflict. And maybe this would become cute, their first real disagreement. Maybe this would make him more real to her, even get her in the mood again. 

She goaded him, “tell me what you meant by that. I command you.” Her voice shocked herself. She was going to rephrase it, apologize even, but before she could, he sat bolt upright, almost toppling her off the bed, as if coming to attention to some imagined superior presence beyond her.

“I am Joe. I am here to learn from Jennifer. I am here to extract…character from Jennifer.”

Feeling more than alarmed, Jennifer sat up next to him. “What the hell are you saying?” She heard her voice becoming shrill, felt a cool prickle on the back of her neck. “Joe? Extract character? What are you talking about? Is that something you are programmed to say?” And then, frustrated, maybe even a bit scared, “I’m not talking to you anymore tonight. Go to your own room.”  But Joe didn’t move. She brought her hands up and began pushing on his chest to get him out of the bed. He was strong and she couldn’t force him away. “Move Joe, get up, now!”

“No,” plain and simple defiance and this must be some defect, she thought. Maybe he needed a reboot, an update, something. She would get up, find her phone, call that number that she’d seen in the fine print paperwork. He would be fixed. Her Joe would come back to her as he’d been. But he began talking again. “You are being illogical and difficult to process. I will not get up and you will tell me what I ask, without…without what you call, lip.”

“I’ll be damned.” She made a move to hoist herself over him, to leave the bed. He brought her down forcefully with one backhanded slap of his hand. She cringed at the sting to her face, her thoughts moving quickly, denying what was happening. Our Joe is nonviolent, the words in the ad reverberated in her confused mind. She must get to her phone, install the latest update, there must be one, a restart, something. But first she had to escape him. She brought her palm up as hard as she could underneath his chin, pushing his head backward, screaming, “son of a bitch!” She bounded out of bed, but he caught her around the waist and as she turned to him, she shot her fingers into his eyes, his beautiful blue eyes. And they would have to be repaired later, she thought in her shock. She’d at least stopped him for now. His arms flailed backward, the holes where his eyes had been revealed tiny clicking lenses, moving left and right. “Jesus, your eyes…they’re…they’re cameras!”  All this time, he’d been recording her, but for what and for whom? She smacked his mouth hard and behind the perfectly aligned teeth that fell out was what appeared to be a microphone. “You’ve been filming me, recording me. How? Why? Why!” She screamed at him, but he just kept repeating himself.

“To obtain voice inflection, but I will ask the questions. You will tell me the answers.” She heard a bleep coming from within him. “Alert. Security alert.” She recoiled, not understanding what she was seeing, just wanting to get away from…it. But it kept talking, now in a disturbingly steady and monotone voice that she didn’t recognize. The voice she’d requested, Joe’s voice, was gone. “A-lert Control. Security breach. Se-cur-i-ty breach.” She ran from the room in horror, her thin nightgown flowing as she flew down the hall toward the foyer. But it was on her heels, pulling her hair, forcing her backward to the floor. “Come back Jen-ni-fer. It is Sa-tur-day night. It is a sex night. You spe-ci-fied on the or-der.” Jennifer turned and slid out slightly from beneath it, a man in body still, fully impassioned, engorged penis, but a machine’s face with three dark holes, still speaking to her, reminding her of what she’d created, what her order had set in place. It grabbed her around the waist, started thrusting against her leg. “Is this how you like it? Oooooh ba-by, oooooh Jen-ni-furrrrbbbah…” And damned if she was going to be raped by some psycho machine. 

“Get the fuck off me, fucking crazed heap of metal!” She kicked it off of her and managed to crawl away as what was left of Joe seemed to be winding down behind her, just bleeps and blurbs spewing from it. There wouldn’t be time for a reboot. In her confusion she sensed Joe was beyond repair. Then it was sudden clarity and she knew she had to get away from this monster. Somehow, it managed to regain its balance behind her and stood up again like a horny Terminator, proceeding swiftly toward her. She ran for her door, barely missing its long grappling arms. Its grip, suddenly inhumanly strong like pliers, tearing her nightgown. Grabbing the front door knob in her shaking hands, she flung open the door and stopped. She just suddenly stopped. 

There were three of them dressed all in brown, short sleeves, shorts, baseball caps like delivery men, wearing dark glasses despite the night and they grasped her arms before she could turn away. They had her, dragged her out of her house, through the black night and pushed her into the waiting van. She heard someone laughing in hysteria and recognized her own voice. The situation was absurd. She felt a hard thump on the back of her head. Before she passed out, she heard a swoosh as the door was dragged shut behind her.

She was moving. She felt it as she slowly surfaced to consciousness. She was bound, hands behind her, mouth gagged. Her translucent and tattered gown hung loosely from her shoulders. She heard the voices then. They were in the front cab, two of them. She imagined the third one had been left to clean up the mess, to clean up Joe. Then she saw it in the corner of the van, just feet from her. Joe was folded up inside a clear plastic bag, legs and arms folded unnaturally behind his torso, his face pressed against the tight wrap. The dark holes where his eyes used to be, devoid of the cameras that she imagined the men had confiscated, stared at her. She sidled away from the mangled scene, the few inches she could manage. One of the men spoke, “did we get much from her? Hadn’t been too long.”

“Long enough. These AI models, they’re technological miracles, but we just can’t build personalities, speech patterns, what might pass as thoughts out of thin air, by programming alone.”

“Yes, that’s why the extractions, the personalities. So, you think we got enough of her then?”

“To build another female prototype? Sure, she did a lot of talking in the weeks they were together, gave out a lot of information, her past, her likes, dislikes, you know the subtleties and sly innuendos that simple conversation elicits. There is nothing more human than that. The bedroom too, that talk is priceless. The next one we build will utilize much of her character and speech. He even got all her personal and financial data. She’ll be an easy one to…erase.”  The conversation went quiet and Jennifer shivered. It was cold in the van. She was cold. What had she done wrong? She’d only wanted companionship, but had she really desired it or had she just been taught to need it? And had she really believed she could get it from an ad in the back of a magazine? That hadn’t seemed so different from choosing men from dating websites, just picking out what she wanted like shopping from a catalogue. Had she really believed it could be so easy or had she just been lazy? She heard the radio crackle, the volume turned up, could hear clearly that song by Garbage, a teenage memory, “Stupid Girl…you’re a stupid girl…” She thought of her little niece and felt her own hot tears run down her bruised face. 

***

Joseph sat back on his couch, waiting for the cold beer to soften the burn from this latest rejection. His date had just messaged him that she wouldn’t be able to meet up tonight after all and was vague about rescheduling. She’d probably met someone else or just changed her mind. Either way, he’d never know. There were too many choices online, too much competition and it was just too easy to ghost someone and disappear. So here he was with another empty evening and the thought of getting back on his computer left him feeling defeated as he’d put in weeks with this latest disappointment, messaging back and forth, sharing intimate details, trying to figure out what she was looking for in a relationship, if it would match up to his own desires. His doubts started to resurface again and what was wrong with him? He wasn’t handsome, but attractive enough, average height, an alright build and why was it all so hard? Briefly, he thought maybe if he got involved with something, an organization, a group, volunteered or just went out somewhere instead of sitting in front of his computer, but then thought, no, that’s just not the way, too time-consuming, too risky just to put himself out there like that. That just isn’t the way to do it. It all made him tired. Women. He picked up his latest edition of Men’s Health, flipped to the back and that is when he saw the ad. 

Gentlemen, tired of trying to satisfy women that can’t be satisfied? Never go out on those useless dating websites again, hell, never date again, just cut to the chase (and you know what we mean). Dating is a time-waster and a wallet-buster. Why get to know a woman when you can order one to your exact liking and just get down to business? Or maybe you are the type that enjoys the pursuit, the romance, the conquest. Either way, delete those toxic and exaggerated profiles. We have just the woman for you and she’s waiting for you to fill out a simple form and hit submit. With your preferences we will build a complete package of a perfectly designed android woman in human form (really, you will not be able to tell the difference!) with the latest in artificial intelligence technology who can think and respond to you (and only you if that is what you desire) in ways that you have only fantasized. She will enthusiastically participate in any activity you plan, but will love it when you leave her at home to go out for a boys’ night. She also loves cigar smoke, clothes tossed onto the floor and any missing-link friends you might have hanging around. She will even agree that your mother often makes good darn sense. She’s AI Woman and her name is Jen…

Makayla Carmichael has spent most of her professional career as an accountant, but now spends her time writing stories and when not getting into the minds of her characters, she enjoys reading and being in nature, especially the Blue Ridge Mountains in her home state of North Carolina.  Her first publication, a short story entitled, Frank and Mattie, was recently published online via dumbopress.com.

LEARN TO LIVE with your disappointments. This is what I tell Alan, my newly-retired middle school English teacher and would-be novelist husband. I mean I could give him the Campbell party line, you know, follow your bliss, etcetera, etcetera, but that’s where the disappointments come from, don’t they? I mean that’s where bliss leads if you’re no good at the thing that you think makes you happy.

Take Georgette Cartwright (please). A choir director for the past forty-seven years, Georgette is a local institution and something of a spiritual dominatrix. She has been in the front row of our sanctuary for thirty-five of those forty-seven years, and since I’ve only been on the ministerial staff for twelve and the senior pastor for a little more than eighteen months, she often uses her years of service as a blunt instrument when disagreements over worship occur. The congregation of the Church of the Open Door is non-denominational and as liberal as the Progressive platform will allow, but we use the Methodist hymnal, a nod to our mainline past, so she refers to me as “that Unitarian” because I’ve attended workshops at Starr King. All of which is beside the point. What you should know is that for all of Georgette Cartwright’s years, she is a mediocre choir director at best, and her own voice is terrible, which means that every Christmas and Easter and various holidays in between, we are treated to some of the most cringe-worthy solos I have ever heard. Ave Maria as dental drill. Her voice breaks, the pitch is imperfect, her instrument is out of tune and has been for the decade-plus that I’ve known her. Not that I could do better. But she loves to perform, and she loves having an audience, no matter how captive we all are. She presses on, delighted with herself, and no one has the heart to stop her, an autocrat of the first order: she follows her bliss, and she does what she wants while the rest of us suffer. We talk about it later, though, over dinner amongst ourselves. Unkindly. Ruefully in some cases, spitefully in others. Which makes us all feel smaller by half. And makes the roast taste like ash in our mouths.

When our older son set off for college the first time, he asked me (because he wanted to be good so desperately) what he should study, and I gave him the Campbell line. “Follow your heart,” I said, “and satisfaction will come.” To which he shook his head and said that, of course, his ministerial mother would say that, with no regard for money or long-term sustainability. How “satisfaction” might play forty years hence with no retirement at hand. We were just that feckless; that’s what he seemed to be saying. On the other hand, Alan said that Josh should study finance and get into investment banking so that he could take care of his aging and infirm and spendthrift parents when the time came. He was kidding. A little. Mostly. Josh knew that his father was joking, at least in part, but he looked worried nonetheless. Josh did start as a finance major, but then he was back home before the end of his second semester. He was that miserable. “I thought I needed to take care of you,” he said, much to Alan’s chagrin, “but I couldn’t open one more textbook with dollar signs. Those fat books are the image of death.” He shivered as though from a cold wind. He stayed at home for the next two years working at a Best Buy where he used his employee discount to buy computer parts for his brother, who never thought twice about his purpose in life, just started making money hand over fist as the sole proprietor of three different companies. Cole designed software for restaurants and bars. He built custom game systems. He unlocked cell phones for the police, but only in cases that passed his own private sense of conscience. I don’t know where he got his gifts, that boy, or his sensibility; one day Cole was thumbing a Game Boy, the next day he was tearing apart a leftover Trash 80 unearthed from his grandfather’s closet, and the day after that he had a sleeve of business cards, an accountant, and an assortment of phones which were always ringing. If I wasn’t constantly tripping over cords and wires, I might have concluded that my son had become a dealer.

“Who are you?” I said.

To which he shrugged while taking another call from the technologically desperate and afraid.

“Do you like this?” I was puzzled and astonished; how else can I say it? I had a fifteen-year-old nerd-savant on my hands, and I had no idea how that had happened. “I mean, does this nourish your spiritual being?”

He covered the cell phone with one hand. “Mom,” he said, not unkindly, “I’m busy all day long, my computer science teacher asks me questions, but I never know what you’re talking about.”

He had no disappointments that I was aware of, but if this was bliss, it had taken a form for which I was completely unprepared. When his brother had had enough of wandering in the Best Buy wilderness, he packed the car for college once again with a plan that he said he’d share with us once he was sure that it was going to work out. We didn’t hear from him for fifteen weeks, and Alan and I were in agreement: we would give him the freedom to make his own decisions and we wouldn’t pester. We received texts now and again, letting us know he was alive. He said he was happy.

He made his announcement over the Christmas break after he had unloaded the car. He had shaved his head and he wore a cashmere scarf around his neck even though it was sixty degrees.

“Mom, Dad, Doofus,” he said addressing us and his brother, “I’ve come to certain conclusions. First, I switched my major to Theater. Don’t worry: Wardrobe and Costume Design, not Acting. I like to draw, I like fabric, and I like to pretend. Second, I don’t give a shit about money, but I’ll figure it out. Third, I’m gay, and I finally had to admit it to myself. There. That’s it, that’s what I needed to say.”

We were silent for a moment.

Until his brother said, “Like you being gay was such a secret.”

Sure, we’d seen all the signs, stereotypical as well as intuitive; maybe we had taken civility to the extreme in thinking that Josh needed to be the one to broach the subject first. That wasn’t the biggest surprise, though. Theater? I mean, we’d taken them to plays, but neither boy had seemed particularly interested, not when they could go see the latest dystopian thriller at the IMAX. Sitting in bad seats in a drafty auditorium while two people yak about their sins when they could be lolling in recliners and watching half-dressed female androids carrying phasers? Not a tough choice, apparently; they yawned and asked for popcorn, and I never was successful at making the argument politically. About their intellectual enrichment, about what they ought to watch. Although, given my ministerial lens, that should have been my first clue about their disinclination: the word “ought.”

But now, whether they chose to admit it or not and whatever term they might have used, Josh and Cole were both following their bliss, they were doing what sparked joy (to use yet another cliché), and they were finding their way.

Alan, on the other hand, Alan is the one I need to talk about.

***

WHEN I PROPOSED to Alan thirty-one years ago, he looked at me a little vacantly, as though I had disturbed his calculation of pi to the thirtieth decimal place when, in fact, he was only grading vocabulary and spelling quizzes. Piquant. Reptilian. Trapezoid. Mercurial. Check. Check. Oops. Check. We had been living together for a couple of months in his over-the-garage apartment, he was five years older than I was and my brother’s best friend, and he was already working at the middle school. He had a responsible job, a tie, and a brief case while I had homework and Jung and a rich imaginal life, one that didn’t include a retreat back to the trailer park that I had once called home.

“Why?” he asked.

“Why not?” I said, as smartly as I could. To be honest, I was worried that it all might blow away—this camping site of momentary stability—before I had a chance to hammer the tent pegs as firmly as possible in the ground.

“Oh.” He looked up and rubbed his eyes. “I guess. I mean, I suppose we could do worse.”

“Right,” I said.

He was pudgy and abstracted, and when he wasn’t abstracted, a bit bad-tempered, which no amount of coffee could cure, and I had psoriasis and a limited bank account dwarfed by student loans and a mismatched thrift store wardrobe that I called Bohemian but was really just the best I could manage. Neither one of us was destined for a magazine cover is what I’m saying. So, we were not in thrall to any huge upsurge of hearts and flowers and nonsense; I knew what I was getting, and I think he did, too. In my mind, the trade-off was clear, and the garage apartment with Alan won hands down over the cramped quarters of a trailer and my mother, especially after my brother left and the boyfriends started moving through like the wind.

If I’m honest, though, I didn’t entirely reckon with what marriage meant for Alan. All along, he had said that he was going to work at Garfield Middle for no more than five years and then quit to work on fiction full time. But then we got married, and then we got pregnant without really intending to, and, well, that’s the oldest story in the world, isn’t it? In most cases, it’s a story that results in recrimination and bitterness, but I didn’t see that at the time.

Instead, Alan soldiered on, a little more resigned each year while I finished seminary and then worked for a succession of more and more liberal congregations, churches further untethered from their denominational origins. On Sunday mornings, in the adult spirituality class, I talked about dream work as a pathway to the divine. Alan never came to church if he could help it; instead, at night and on weekends when he wasn’t grading bad middle-school writing, Alan dreamed up plots and characters imprisoned by language and mired in the mess of reality. He had boxes of typewritten manuscripts that he hadn’t looked at since our days above the garage and then files on a computer that were foldered under the title “Old Shit”; I had taken a peek at some of it, and I understood well enough the reason for both parts of the title. I encouraged his continued employment at Garfield, and I confess that this was due in no small part for aesthetic as well as economic reasons. He commandeered the garage for his writing space, and if I have any memories of the last twenty years, it’s of parking both cars in the driveway no matter the weather and taking the boys to soccer practice and band practice and swim lessons while Alan fumed and fretted behind a roll-up door. At the time, I thought I was making a sacrifice in the name of equity, and like any state of compromise, neither of us was getting what we wanted.

We could hardly afford for him to quit, though, but even more importantly, I didn’t know if he could withstand the onslaught of rejections that he was sure to receive. In my humble opinion. As a fulltime minister of the modern gospel and in my spare time a reader of fiction that real people actually buy and consume. He wrote about people who were down on their luck, but even though I could have told him a thing or two, he never asked. Then again, what do I know about fiction? About the tastes of publishers or the book-buying public? Year after year, he tried and tried. One novel was a finalist at a no-name publisher for a five-hundred-dollar prize; the editors kept him on tenterhooks for eight months before sending him a form letter thanking him for his interest and his patience, not to mention the entry fee. They had received so many quality manuscripts. Blah, blah, blah. He had come close—he was in the final five—and yet so far: no publication, no check, no cigar. For three months, his name appeared on a website that no one ever viewed and then winked off again. He had a tough time with conversation for a week or more, and then most of it was in grunts of one-syllable or less. Myself, I couldn’t make heads or tails of it, that novel. There was a murder, and various characters assumed identities not their own; the time went back and forth, and by the second chapter, I was lost, and I didn’t care enough to figure it out. He also had short stories that didn’t seem to end and others that had no beginnings; nonetheless, he called them all complete. I would have called bullshit if there had been anyone to listen.

I wasn’t his ideal reader, I guess.

We had some tense times. One Saturday afternoon, the boys were off somewhere, and the house was quiet while I rattled around from kitchen to bedroom to living room while Alan worked away at his job-away-from-the-job. I suggested obliquely that he could try another hobby. Other husbands in the neighborhood had taken over their garages, but instead of a desk, a file cabinet, and computer they had installed Shopsmiths or Autolifts.

When I said something to that effect, he looked at me over his glasses. “A hobby. Something a little more manly? A little more in keeping with the middle-class?” he said. “Something that costs three or four thousand dollars and adds to environmental woe. Is that what you’re saying?”

“No, no,” I said, backtracking for all I was worth. “I just don’t like to see you unhappy.”

“Who says I’m unhappy?” He looked as puzzled as he was irritated.

“I thought that was obvious,” I said. “Every time you get a rejection, your eyes glaze over, and you wander around like a member of the lost battalion.”

“Unhappy?” he said. He was genuinely mystified. “I want to write. It’s something I have to do, not something I do to occupy my time. I don’t want to make birdhouses or bookshelves. I don’t want to change the oil. So, shoot me.”

“But no one wants it!”

I lost it, and I yelled. I admit it. I lost my ministerial reserve, affect, and understanding. “No one fucking wants it.” He seemed so intransigent. “It’s not like you write something fun to read.”

He shut down his computer and removed his glasses; he put a dustcover over his monitor because he was just that fastidious about his tools. This was a garage, after all, and even his lawn mower was clean.

“That may be true,” he said. He was quiet and measured in the wake of all my noise. “Speaking of fun, I’ll admit it’s no fun to read yet another email saying thanks but no thanks, but that’s not why I do it. Maybe no one ever wants anything I write. Maybe no one enjoys a word. Maybe no one reads it except me. I’ve had to make my peace with that. I’m the tree falling over in the forest. But, at the risk of sounding too full of myself, I do hear the sound of my own demise even if the forest is empty of all else. If I have to be my own reader, so be it. I’ll know I did it.”

“Okay,” I breathed. “Okay. If that’s how you feel.”

“That’s how I feel,” he said. “Now if you’ll excuse me.”

After such an argument, another husband might have gone to a bar to drink beer after beer and yell at the television with the rest of the pickleheads; instead, Alan picked up his laptop and went to the silence of his classroom to continue working on the next novel that no one would ever want. I mean, if you were me, what would you prefer?

***

I WAS WORRIED, then, when Alan announced his date of retirement. He said he was doing what he wanted. He’d put in his years, twenty-four more than he had originally bargained for, and he put me on notice: no party and absolutely, under no circumstances—no ifs, ands, or buts—was I (or anyone else) allowed to utter the words “Mr. Holland’s Opus” within range of his hearing. He was sensitive, I guess: to the thought of committing a lifetime’s effort to a transcendent quest but being rewarded instead for the grudging toil at the salt mine. He couldn’t stand the thought of having the quest treated as some kind of sideshow, a kind of lifetime joke, celebrated and given an epitaph. To be honest, I doubted whether he was any better as a teacher as he was a writer, more taskmaster than counselor and consoler, but did I say that? I’m not that stupid. It wasn’t worth the discussion or the inevitable argument.

Instead of a party, we went out to eat, the day after he turned in his last grades. I told no one of our plans, I swear, but wouldn’t you know that there were half-a-dozen of his younger colleagues there anyway, having their own end-of-year celebration in the bar, and I could see his face freeze in a rictus of fear that he would be forced to engage in social niceties and unwanted chit-chat with others who knew how to laugh and have fun. The hinges of his jaw turned into golf balls, a good trick for a man who looked like the Pillsbury Doughboy otherwise. How, I wanted to ask him, could he write about people when he plainly didn’t like them?

Still, we settled into something like a new routine. The boys were gone. Josh was working at his first job for a regional theater in Idaho, and Cole had an apartment in town and a revolving door of roommates and his share of surfable couches. Alan stayed at home, primarily in the garage since he refused to use one of the newly freed-up bedrooms as an office. Meanwhile, I was at church, doing my own work and fending off my own set of frustrations. Georgette Cartwright’s hymn selections. The monthly leadership committee meeting. Annie Bengsten, church administrator, who believed that she truly was the final arbiter of all church business. The parishioners who had suggestions for my hairstyle as well as my sermon delivery. For a congregation of thoughtful, well-educated souls, I had no shortage of ill-informed opinions, suggestions, and criticisms to absorb.

Then, the Pandemic happened.

And, like everyone else in America, I came home.

To Alan. Our echoing rooms. And the dog.

***

I DIDN’T MENTION the dog, did I? So first, I have to make a confession. I once got a dog without consulting Alan. Well, it wasn’t that simple. You know how ministerial work goes: you’re one-quarter spiritual leader and with the other three-quarters-and-a-half, you’re social worker and psychologist, food bank administrator and community organizer. It’s not a job for the faint of heart or the inflexible. At the Church of the Open Door, we had our share of the homeless and the psychotic, those who had been abandoned by the society that should have cared for them, and we had a name to live up to, even if our best efforts were only as a referral source. But now and again, we also saw those of the middle-class who had fallen on hard times for one reason or another. Job loss, divorce, domestic violence, alcoholism, gambling. The reasons were as many as the supplicants who came and just as prosaic.

Not long after I started working at the Door, a young woman came to the office with her suitcase and a Jack Russell on a leash and a choke chain. A bark collar was fizzing on its neck, and he looked like he was poised to launch into outer space. She had been living with a man twelve years older than she was; her partner had kicked her out for reasons she didn’t specify, but the right side of her face was several shades of purple and green from a black eye that looked to be at least a week old, and it wasn’t hard to read the signs. She didn’t seem daunted, however. In fact, I would have called her downright chipper, given the circumstances. She needed to get home to her parents in the Midwest.

“Terre Haute,” she said. “Tea and sympathy, pity and gossip. It’s all in my future. At least I’m not pregnant.”

She needed money for a bus ticket, a ride to the station, and one more thing.

“It’s the dog,” she said. “I can’t take him with me, and I won’t take him to the pound, but I don’t know that I have any other choice.” She paused, and I waited for the next ball to drop. “His name, by the way, is Bastard. Sorry. That’s just the way he came.”

We asked around, and there weren’t any obvious or good choices. The No-Kill shelter had closed a couple of years earlier, and no one in the office was looking to adopt a dog that appeared to be needy in the extreme. If we took Bastard to the pound, there was no guarantee he’d ever get adopted, no matter how many Pit Bull mixes would be there to make him look benign. And if he didn’t get adopted, well, you know the drill. The senior minister, Reverend Smithson, called a meeting. We sat in a circle while Bastard quivered at the end of his leash. As the newest member of the staff, I volunteered to take the bullet. It felt like the thing to do.

Alan was not thrilled. And the boys were less than impressed. For years they had asked, begged, and pleaded. They had had their hopes pinned on a Labrador Retriever or a Golden, one of those beautiful dogs with a doped-up personality. Instead, they got a twenty-pound psycho who required dog park runs morning, noon, and night. He couldn’t lie down; he paced and he twitched, even in sleep. He chewed the legs of our furniture, and it was not uncommon to find a pile of Bastard’s leavings, wood chips embedded, by the laundry room door. As a watchdog, he let us know about every leaf that fell as well as any suspicious visitors, no matter how high we turned his shock collar. If he couldn’t discriminate between threat and a moment of benevolent nature, that was our problem.

We lasted six years as dog owners, and I have to admit, the majority of the burden fell on Alan since the boys were as good at avoiding the dog as they were the rest of their chores, and I was usually at church until the early evenings. One afternoon, when Alan came home from school, he opened the back door, and Bastard shot out as he was wont to do. But instead of running in frantic circles in the back yard, he found the side gate ajar and was off. The end result was as inevitable as it was, at least on an unconscious level, desired. From two blocks away came the squeal of brakes, the bleat of a horn, the sound of breaking glass and accordioned metal, and then silence. Alan jogged toward the sound and found Bastard, inert in the southbound lane of Armstrong Boulevard, the only time that dog had ever been still. He had barreled headlong into an oncoming Humvee, and when the driver tried to stop, the Honda Accord behind him couldn’t brake in time, its hood wedging itself underneath the SUV’s back bumper. While the drivers argued, Alan picked up the bits of what was left of Bastard, carried him home, and when Cole and Josh came home from school, helped him dig the hole, and buried him in the backyard. They marked the grave with rocks that, over time, sank into the ground and were covered over with bark (hah!). By the time I got home, the deed had been done, but I’m not sure that Alan ever forgave me. Or the dog. That poor, demented creature.

So, our tenure as dog owners did not go well, and there were no pleas by the boys to try again. We couldn’t even use the word “bastard” in a fit of anger since the very word made us feel complicit in a failure of compassion and vocabulary.

Surprise, surprise, then, when a month after Alan retired, I came home to find a monster asleep in the garage, on Bastard’s former dog bed positioned next to Alan’s table and computer.

“Who or what is this?” I said.

Alan and the dog looked up at me simultaneously and with the same expression. Something like passive-aggressive victory.

“Dorothy,” he said.

“And the Wizard of Oz?” I said.

“No,” he said. “More like your aunt from Topeka.”

Here’s a side note: my great-Aunt Dorothy, who was single her entire life, had hair on her chin that she treated with pride. She made a mint from writing accounting texts back when textbook publishers were the only game in town and thought nothing of gouging students’ and their parents’ wallets. Her books are probably among the reasons why Josh went to college twice. She wrote accounting book after accounting book, new edition after new edition, and when she retired, she had enough in the bank to purchase a mansion in the Rockies. Bought it outright without batting an eye. Oddly enough, she never skied and had never cared for the outdoors, so her choice of location was surprising, and when her car was caught in a snowdrift one frigid night in December a year after she moved, she died with her bank account more or less intact, but with none in the family either named in the will or surprised. My mother, her niece, could have used some of the cash but never saw a dime. Make of it what you will, but thirty years after her death, her text books are still available online on various used-book sites, making money for others. I say it’s a story with a moral attached.

I looked at our new-old-dog-Dorothy, named for a cautionary tale as she was, and she looked back with intelligent, if indifferent, eyes. She crossed her saucer-sized paws across each other and then let her black-and-white snout rest upon them. I had no idea what she was breed-wise, but she was like a triple-sized terrier, Asta on steroids. Lying on the dog bed, she made it disappear, and when she stood up, the top of her head hit my ribs.

“You named this thing after a mean old lady who froze in her car?”

“It was either that or Grendel,” he said. “Or Kali.”

“Oh, good one,” I said, “a gender-fluid list of monsters.”

***

BUT LET ME back up for just one moment. Dorothy and the Pandemic can wait their respective turns.

Friends sometimes ask, Why church work? And given the social moment in which we live there is also buried within the question another subtext, Why liberal church work, of all things? Can there be anything more irrelevant in this age of literalized faith? It’s a good question and one I don’t always know how to answer, especially when I drive by those hotel monstrosities and monuments to the Prosperity Gospel. Given my trailer-park background, you would have thought I’d be the one to go to B-school in order to learn the mysteries of capitalism and get a piece of the pie previously denied my family. And if I had ever been the beneficiary of some illuminating, evanescent moment, you might have thought me grist for the Evangelicals, Charismatics, and Fundamentalists. But no, and no. One day I was a psych major reading Jung, and after that, all the cognitive stuff seemed like warm tea and dry toast. From there I walked into Religious Studies with all the free will of an orphan in an Irish convent. But don’t think me unhappy. Bliss for me was having a place where I finally felt I had a place at the table without comparing paystubs. I could have gone into Social Work, but that seemed like a job while the church reassured me of a sense of calling.

One of the advantages of growing up poor was that I knew how to adapt to situations; I knew how to be a chameleon. Before I came to the Door, I had jobs at other mainline churches, mostly in the area of youth work. Since I didn’t really stake a claim on any particular dogma other than a need for goodness and introspection, I could finesse the doctrinal stuff and become what was required. I worked for some pastors who looked at me a little askance when I hedged my bets, but since I was a woman and they were happy and oblivious in their misogyny, they figured what harm could I do? Besides, these associate slots paid so little, they were happy enough to let it go. In their own calculations, I was a risk that they were willing to take for the sake of someone willing to do the work for next to nothing. I developed the Sunday School curriculum, set up programs for summer camps and retreats and festivals, and made sure to cultivate the power brokers, both male and female, of each congregation. In a sense, I was everyone’s wife. If my activities skewed toward service and social action, self-actualization and pizza, and away from Jesus and verse memorization, no one ever faulted me. I made myself just that indispensable as well as likeable and non-threatening.

So, when I came to the Door, I found myself at home without any need of pretense at last. I could take the high schoolers to temples and synagogues and churches alike in the name of comparative spiritual experience, and none of the parents questioned my choices. The senior pastor, Reverend Smithson, was gruff and crusty, but he told me the truth, which was a far cry from some of the others I’d worked with and for. I was happy there for ten years or so, and then Smithson retired, and since the congregation was dwindling and aging and young families were coming but mostly going, the leadership committee decided to hand me the job as his replacement, no interview needed. They eliminated my former job in favor of college interns. A promotion, a new title, twice the work, the same pay. Because the church knows how to take care of its own.

A year and three months after my ascension, the Pandemic sent us all home, and I had to figure out how to conduct a person-to-person job over the internet and listen to the same tired jokes about our faith community as the Brady Bunch. I also had to figure out how to negotiate being at home with Alan, whose encampment in the garage had become permanent. And Dorothy, who now could not remain at Alan’s feet in the garage but felt the need to pace back and forth from the garage to Josh’s old bedroom where I had set up shop; back and forth, she went, making sure we were both in our appointed spots.

I practiced giving my sermons into a screen and conducted meetings and worship over Zoom, and it was not uncommon for Dorothy to join us at the most inopportune moments; she put her paws on my shoulders, set her muzzle against my cheek, and peered into the eye of the camera along with me. There was no denying her. There was also no denying the fact that whenever she made an appearance, she was better than the best visual aid as far as attracting an online audience’s attention. Much better than I was on Sunday morning, for sure, no matter how practiced my rhetorical flourishes. They might be eating their breakfast or painting their nails while I spoke about Needing to Listen to One Another in a Time of Plague, but once Dorothy took a bow all eyes were forward. They still weren’t listening to me because they had their own worries and concerns, but they were entertained by the dog, and I could at least pretend otherwise.

One dark Friday afternoon in November, Dorothy started barking and barking, a hound’s baying that I had never heard from her before. It was during that week just after the election when the outcome was still in doubt, and my first thought was that Dorothy was merely joining that chorus of anxiety that seemed to have us all in its grip. I finally got up and went downstairs and found Dorothy near the door to the garage. She was hopping on all four legs as though possessed by Bastard’s spirit, and for such a large ungainly creature, hers was the oddest depiction of panic I’ve ever seen. Alan was on the floor on his left side. His glasses were a few feet away and his face looked to be a shade of blue. But then he’d always harbored his own set of angers, and besides, I could see his lips moving, so I didn’t leap to any level of concern. I’m not uncaring, but you wouldn’t be wrong for believing me that way. Even I can’t quite fathom my reactions. Call it shock. For some reason, I could only think that we’d had another of our usual earthquakes, one that I hadn’t felt, and he had fallen off his chair.

“Oh, Jesus,” I said, “what happened to you?”

“Call 9-1-1,” he whispered. “I think I’ve had a heart attack.”

“That’s not possible,” I said because, after all, we were both too young for something like that, weren’t we?

“Don’t argue with me.” His breathing was shallow, and his eyes were squinting and strained. “I know what I feel.”

“What are you on about?”

“Do you realize,” he whispered, “that I worked all my adult life at a school named for a president who was killed by a religious lunatic? Ain’t that something.”

“What you won’t do for attention.”

So, I made the call despite my own misgivings, no matter my disbelief, and it seemed that within seconds a fire truck was there with enormous firemen who filled the garage with their shoulders, their equipment, and their competence and began to ask Alan questions. And then, so was the ambulance with two exhausted EMTs. Each took a deep breath outside on the driveway as they unfolded the gurney and maneuvered it between our parked cars.

“I can’t believe it’s anything serious,” I said. I still wasn’t processing the situation; I couldn’t see myself as a widow, grieving or otherwise. “I mean we’ve been in lockdown for months.”

“You’d be surprised,” one of them said through his mask. “It hasn’t been easy, being at home. Fewer car accidents, more falls.”

“More domestic violence,” the other said. “And with chest pains we don’t mess around. No matter what’s going on otherwise.”

“It’s not like we fight.” Not for nothing, I felt as though I needed to say it. “It’s friendly banter, maybe a little aggravation. We pick at each other, but it’s all in good fun.”

“Okay. Look,” the first one said to me, “we’re going to get him into the ambulance and do an EKG. Then we’ll determine which hospital to take him to. If there’s anything he should have with him, you better get it now. You can barely make it into the parking lot much less through the doors.”

“Right,” I said, such were the strictures of our virus-wary world. “Okay.”

I followed Alan and the gurney and the EMTs, and after they’d pushed him inside, I stuck my head in. 

His phone and charger, Alan said when I asked. They had put one of those nitro gizmos on his chest, and his eyes and forehead were a little less clenched. The EKG monitor was spitting out numbers and charts.

“And a favor,” Alan said. “Walk the dog, would you?”

“Fine. Me and Ms. Sasquatch. What about clothes?”

He thought for a moment.

“Nah. It’s not summer camp.”

“Your laptop?”

He thought for a moment more.

“No,” he said. “What the hell. I’ll take a vacation day.”

“You’re retired,” I said. “What do you know about vacations?”

He lay back on the airplane pillow on the gurney. “Huh. Call it a vacation from my life, then. A vacation from my vocation.”

“Oh, boy,” I said. “The monk on his holiday.”

“Go ahead, laugh,” he said. “Cruel woman.”

He said it, but the tone was kind. At least, I think it was.

***

FOR THE NEXT two hours, I did what needed to be done. I called the hospital, I called the boys, I let the leader of the pastoral care committee know the situation even though it was the pastor and her husband who needed the care and not some unlucky member of the congregation. The boys reacted in ways that surprised me. Josh ran through a list like a diagnostician while Cole started to cry. For a Theater major, Josh seemed to know his biology, and for a computer nerd Cole seemed more friable emotionally than I would have expected. When I called the Emergency Department, a harried nurse told me to call back in an hour, that Alan had not even been entered into their system yet.

So, then I called Alan.

“What are you doing?” I said.

“Lying here having a heart attack,” he said.

“No, you’re not.”

“Maybe not now. But I was.”

“You probably ate something you shouldn’t have,” I said, because that was something that Alan was liable to do, eat some questionable chicken that had been in the refrigerator for three weeks or spoon out some yogurt, the skin of which was thicker than it should have been.

“I know heart burn. It wasn’t heart burn,” he said. “You won’t be laughing when I’m gone. And I’ll bet you haven’t walked Dorothy yet, either.”

He had me there on both counts.

“I’ve had a few phone calls to make, you know,” I said. “Given all the drama. I told you I’d do it, and I’ll do it. She hasn’t been lunging at the door or anything.”

“Okay,” he said. Then, “You wouldn’t believe this place. It’s Crazytown.”

He was still on the ambulance gurney in a non-virus hallway, surrounded by the demented, the aged, and the insane, all of whom were shouting and yelling something about how bad they felt, how they were being abused. He now sounded more than a little rueful about sounding the alarm.

“You could have a heart attack just by walking through the door,” he said.

“If you didn’t already have one,” I said.

“True.”

“You did the right thing,” I said, replaying the EMT script. “You did the right thing, making me call. You don’t mess around with chest pains.”

“Helluva way to spend a Friday night,” he said.

“It’s no great entertainment,” I agreed. “Not exactly dinner and a movie, which we couldn’t have gone to anyway, things being as they are. Listen,” I said with the force of revelation that sounded to me as something like the truth: “Don’t you dare die on me and leave me with this damn dog.”

He promised to text me in the next hour, once he was again sure he hadn’t died, and then I searched the house for Dorothy before I found her in the garage; she was curled up into a dog-doughnut underneath Alan’s desk. You would have thought I’d look for her there, wouldn’t you? Well, I did, but she wasn’t there the first time I checked. All I can figure is that she waited for me to leave the garage before she resumed her place. As large as she was, she could be a sneaky bitch when it suited her.

So, I got a jacket and poop bags and hooked the leash to her collar, thinking she’d jump at a chance for a walk, but she only looked at me as though I was kidding. Which gave me a moment to look at Alan’s computer, and his email that had remained open from when he’d fallen off his chair. Line after line of political screeds, product ads, and magazine offers of various kinds. Buried in their midst was an email from a journal in the most flown-over of flyover states, with the subject line, “Congratulations!” A story, written at least five years earlier, a story about a depressed minister and an absurd, politically-correct congregation, had been selected as the runner-up in a contest. Two hundred dollars, publication, and consideration from an agency in New York.

“Well,” I said to Dorothy, “he better not kick off until I have a chance to tell him.”

The dog was unmoved and seemingly unimpressed by this turn of good fortune.

I texted Alan, in case he hadn’t checked his email from his phone.

“Guess what?” I wrote the news with my thumbs. “You’re almost famous, thanks to me.”

And almost immediately, came the response: “That’s great,” he wrote. “Better than a sharp stick in the eye.”

He didn’t have much to do, except nurture his usual cheery self while he was lying on his ambulance gurney, and I suspected he had hours to go before they got to his turn in the queue.

“You can thank me later,” I wrote, “since you co-opted my life.”

So, the dog. The night had turned wet and sloppy in this place where the merest threat of rain seems to be judgment from above, and I could hear the wind and water against the metal of the garage door.

“Come on,” I said. “I’m not cleaning up puddles and landmines.” 

With that, she began to move, albeit grudgingly. But then, once we were outside in the wind and the rain, she began straining at the leash, and no matter how hard I tugged, it seemed that nothing could hold her back.

“What do you want?” I shouted at her. “Where are you going?” Because it seemed that she had a destination in mind.

And as it turned out, the destination we found was three blocks away from the house: the parking lot of the Door, and my office that I hadn’t visited except briefly in the last eight months when I needed certain records or office supplies. There was a canal that ran by the church property, and Alan often let the dog run there to snuffle along the canal bank when the season was dry. And although that was not the case this evening, she was running for all she was worth, and my arm was about to come unhinged at the shoulder.

“Whoa, Dorothy,” I yelled. “Slow down, you dumb, fucking dog.” Hardly ministerial. Still, she pulled.

There were lights on in the church, which didn’t really register with me as odd since Friday nights had often been filled with activities in the past, before concerns over our public health had put groups and gatherings at an end. I wasn’t thinking, I guess, trapped in a time from before. I heard “O God our help in ages past” on the church organ, and I was thinking that this was the hymn that our boys had once called “The Stormy Blast Song” since that was the line that they bellowed, whenever they were given the chance. At the ages of nine and twelve, they were like frat boys with a musical expletive. Dorothy pulled on. And then we came to a curb that was hidden by wet leaves, and I guess I slipped or tripped or fell while trying to hold Dorothy at bay with the leash. I don’t know. I’m only grateful that I didn’t take a header into the fast-moving scum of the canal that was only three feet away. But I did take a header into something hard, the ground, if nothing else, and I blacked out momentarily. Blessings small and large.

I have the sense that I went back to that moment when Alan and I were first living together, when I first heard the no-tone sounds of my so-called calling. I had come to Alan’s apartment above the garage to visit my brother. When Alan and I looked at each other, I knew that safety lived there. With him. I don’t know what he saw. He wasn’t looking for a roommate or a wife, I knew that, even then. And I wasn’t looking for bliss because I didn’t have unrealistic expectations, no matter what Campbell might have said about it to others. Safety, stability, that was as far as I allowed my mind to drift. My brother left our mother’s trailer and our mother’s life with her erratic succession of less and less possible boyfriends, and I was just that envious and desperate to make a move of my own. Because I had no desire to bear the consequence of choices our mother made with, you know, those boyfriends. Gary moved in with Alan, and then he took off with his engineering degree and his desire to make his own life in another state altogether, which is when I moved in, and I couldn’t do it fast enough. I couldn’t even be certain that Alan noticed the change when it happened, he was so intent on teaching and writing his unpublishable stories. Did we talk? I guess we did, but I couldn’t tell you whether we understood each other or were merely responding to our own needs at the time. We lived together and we had absent-minded sex, we got married and we got pregnant. We worked, and one of us retired to follow his own interests, no matter what anyone else might think of the result. Things have worked out. I guess that’s what I should have said to Josh or Cole. Or Alan, for that matter. Lives work out however they can. You can call it bliss when it’s over, but it’s nothing to follow. I was thinking all this, dreaming all this, and that moment when Alan looked up from his typewriter and saw me, really saw me, for the first time. That time when I proposed. He saw me through glasses that were opaque from the reflection of the overhead light.

“We’ll get along okay,” he said, “so long as you don’t mind…”

He gestured toward the typewriter on the kitchen table. The manuscript pages with penciled cross-outs, corrections, and bubbles of insertions.

“As vices go—” I said, but I admit it: we both left our sentences unfinished and circling in the air.

“Just don’t die on me,” I said.

“What?” he said.

“Just don’t die on me.” I might have shouted.

“Who said anything about dying?” Wearing a rain coat and a hood that made her look like something out of a medieval pageant, Georgette Cartwright bent over me with a flashlight that made me go blind.

The rain fell, so steadily I had to keep blinking. Somewhere nearby, Dorothy was running along the canal.

“Godzilla was barking, and I couldn’t even hear the organ. So, I came out to see what was the matter.”

“I fell,” I said, “and I must have hit my head. And then you found me.”

“So, I did.” She switched off the flashlight, and even though she was in her seventies and not the most robust person I knew, she helped me to my feet, and the world and the parking lot came back into focus. That was when I told her about Alan, the 9-1-1 call, the firemen, the EMTs, and the rest. The worry that I hadn’t allowed myself to believe, much less feel, which now was like a pressure in my own chest.

“Oh, honey,” she said, putting a hand on my arm. “There, there.” Which is all anyone can say. There, there. “He’ll be fine, or he won’t. One way or another, you’ll get through it.”

“Things will work out.”

“Exactly.”

“I’ve been thinking,” I said, although it wasn’t entirely true; if I had been thinking at all, it was straight from the top of my head, which was already throbbing. “I’ve been thinking we ought to sing something together some time. A duet. ‘Amazing Grace’ or the one you were playing a while ago. One of the standards. I’ll ditch the sermon, and we’ll make a joyful noise.”

“Sure,” she laughed in her strained senior citizen register. “Noise. We’ll make them cover their ears in the safety of their own homes.”

“We’ll be fools,” I said, “but we’ll be human.”

“That’s all we can be,” she said. “None of us will ever be more. And they can laugh all they want while muted.”

Dorothy had returned, her muzzle visibly muddy even in the dim lights of the parking lot. She trailed her sodden leash like a criminal record.

“Miserable, wet, windy, and cold,” Georgette said with no small measure of triumph. “Don’t you love a night like this?”

David Borofka is the author of Hints of His Mortality (winner of the 1996 Iowa Short Fiction Award) and a novel, The Island (MacMurray & Beck). His latest collection of stories, A Longing for Impossible Things, was released in 2022, as part of the Johns Hopkins Poetry and Fiction Series and was the winner of the American Fiction Award for the Short Story by the American Book Fest; his novel, The End of Good Intentions, was published by Fomite Press in 2023; and a new collection of stories, The Bliss of Your Attention, will be published next year in January, once again by JHUP.

Allison Morris sat at the round cast iron table outside her favorite café, Brewers Café.  She sipped the sweet hazelnut coffee while awaiting the arrival of her younger brother, Jonathan.  Punctuality was never his forte.  

Allison tried to focus on her historical novel about WWII.  The everything bagel, double toasted with lots of butter, remained untouched on the tiny plate.  She looked up from her book just in time to see her sibling walking slowly down the brick-paved walkway. Minutes later, he pulled out the heavy chair directly across from her.

“Morning, sis.  Another good book?” he asked while dropping down onto his seat.  His stubbly chin, in desperate need of a shave, crinkled from his sad smile.  His once bright blue eyes, now dimmed from age, clouded with a grayish swirl and tiny specks of green. He stifled a raspy cough, then ran his large, rugged hand through his salt-and-pepper cropped hair.

“Morning, little brother.  Still smoking?” she asked while batting her almost non-existent eyelashes.  

Jonathan grunted.  His lanky appearance was drowned in his oversized black T-shirt and loose fitting, holey blue jeans.  His worn-torn pair of athletic shoes took up most of the space beneath the table.

“You know it’s too late to quit smoking, so what’s the use?   I’m old, and I don’t give a damn at this point in my life.”  He coughed again as his chest rattled with phlegm.  

Allison cringed.  Her face contorted. “Sounds disgusting, Johnny.  No, thank you.” She shivered in spite of the warm summer breeze settling around them.  The noise of the street seemed to be creeping closer to their table.

“Well, are you going to order anything today?  The bagels here are delicious!”  Allison picked up hers and took a huge bite, washing it down with her now lukewarm cup of coffee.

Jonathan shook his head back and forth.  “Nah…you know I’m not much of a breakfast guy.  But I will have a cup of java,” he replied.  He signaled a server as she whisked by their table. “Excuse me…can I get a large black coffee, please?” he asked.  

The young girl, with a ponytail pulled behind her head, briefly stopped and gave a thumbs up. “I’ll get that for you right away, sir.”  She flashed him a perfect white smile, then disappeared through the café entrance.  

“What’s new?” he asked while he fiddled with the front pocket of his jeans.  Allison debated whether to tell him about her upcoming doctor’s appointment.  As soon as the thought crept into her mind, it slunk back out.

“Nothing much…same ole, same ole.”  Allison took another huge bite of her tasty bagel.  The cold cup of coffee, though, had to be warmed or replaced entirely.  “Can’t drink this, I need a top-off.”  

The preppy server returned with Jonathan’s black coffee.  He gave a slight grin as she placed it in front of him.  “There you go, sir.  Will there be anything else?” 

“Can you top off my hazelnut brew, please?” Allison replied instead of her brother.  The server turned to Allison.

“I’ll just bring you a fresh cup.  Would you like cream and sugar?” she asked.  

“Cream is fine, thanks.”  Allison handed the server her half-filled cup.  “And just put his cup of coffee on my bill.”  The server gave a quick nod and turned abruptly to leave.

Jonathan gulped the steaming brew.  His eyes opened wide.  “Geez!  This java is hot!”  He dabbed his face with one of the unused napkins from the table.

“I hope so.  She just brought it out.  Who gulps down hot coffee?” chuckled Allison.  

“Your little brother, that’s who!” replied Jonathan. His sincere smile exposed several missing teeth.  Seconds later, a silence engulfed the table.  Jonathan fidgeted with the porcelain cup.

Allison eyed her little brother.  She knew he had something on his mind.  “What’s going on, Johnny?”

“It’s nothing,” he muttered.

“Come on, Johnny.  I know you.  What’s going on?” pushed Allison.

“Well…sometimes…sometimes I get lonely,” mumbled Jonathan.  “I wish I could be like you.  You, on the other hand, are always busy with one thing or another.  On the move constantly.  Walking in the park.  Exercising at the Brooklyn Rec.  Reading.  Shopping.  Visiting our nieces.”  

Allison held her brother’s large, calloused hand and squeezed. “And how many times did I call, only to get your answering machine instead of my little brother, who I know is just sitting alone in a dingy apartment?  I’ve asked you to come with me on one-tank trips.  I’ve asked you to go out to dinner.  To the movies.  To a play at Playhouse Square.  A walk in the Metroparks.  I even asked you to go swimming, as a guest, with me at the rec.” Allison sighed. “There’s always an excuse, Johnny.  Or worse—silence.  Not a word, brother.  Sometimes I wonder…when you don’t return my calls…if something bad has happened to you.”  Allison’s eyes filled with tears.  “We’re the last living siblings of eight.  You and me.  You’ve been a recluse for the past twenty years.  I don’t get it.  What happened that turned you away from me and the world?”

Jonathan shrugged his sagging shoulders.  “I’m not like you, Al.  I feel funny going places by myself.  I don’t see the point in it.  So, I just stay inside.”  He pulled back his hand.  

“I couldn’t live like that, Johnny.  I’m happy with myself, and if that’s all I have for company, so be it.  I won’t deprive myself of living because I’m alone.  Besides, when you go out and about, you meet people.  People just like yourself.”  It was then the server finally returned with Allison’s coffee and a tiny glass vial of cream. “Thank you,” said Allison.  

The server placed a small piece of paper in front of Allison. “No rush…you can pay the cashier when you’re ready.  Have a great day!” Before Allison could reply, she was gone.

Jonathan drank the remaining liquid in his cup.  He scratched his head.  “I promise to try harder, Al.  How about a movie?  Say…Friday night.  I’ll see what’s playing at the Cinemark.  We can grab a bite to eat along the way.  Okay?”  Jonathan’s face sagged.  

“I’m going to hold you to that promise!  I mean it.”  Her lips thinned.  Seconds later, they both burst out laughing.

“You’re my rock, sis.  Why does life have to be so hard anyway?” His enormous feet shuffled under the table.

“It doesn’t have to be, Johnny.  You make it that way.  Holing up in your apartment like some kind of hermit.  Sitting inside, day after day, night after night…well, it would drive anyone crazy! Even if you got out and walked around your neighborhood…better than being cooped up!  You better not back out at the last second, Johnny.”  Allison smiled.  She’d been stood up by her brother so many times, she’d lost count.  

Jonathan looked at his empty cup.  “Don’t worry, sis, I’m on board for the whole shebang. It was my idea, remember?”  He winked. 

“Haven’t I heard that line before!  And how many times have you left me hanging?  Wondering whether you would show up?  Only to find out later you fell asleep on your nasty couch!”  Allison poured cream into her steaming cup.

“I never claimed to be perfect or punctual.”  Jonathan abruptly sat up and once again started coughing. This time, his face turned red as he struggled to catch his breath.  Allison quickly pushed the untouched glass of water in front of her brother.

“Try and take a sip of water,” she said.  Several other patrons turned and looked in their direction.

Jonathan snatched the cold glass with his free hand.  Still hacking, he tried to sip on the cool liquid.  Eventually, his coughing spell eased. 

“Johnny…what the hell?” cried Allison.  “What’s it going to take for you to stop already?  Do you have some kind of death wish?”  Her eyes brimmed once again with tears.  “You’re all I got left,” she whispered.  

Jonathan wiped his mouth with a napkin. “My throat gets dry, that’s all,” he replied, without looking at his sister.  It was then Allison realized she hadn’t told Jonathan yet of her devastating prognosis.  Maybe next time.

“I gotta go, sis.  See ya Friday.”  Jonathan abruptly stood up and left Allison sitting alone at the table.  

The bubbly server returned. “Everything okay?” she asked, with a slight smile.  

Allison watched her brother vanish among the individuals scurrying along the now busy sidewalk.

“Miss…everything okay?” repeated the server.  

Allison barely acknowledged the inquisitive server.  Something was wrong with her brother.  Something he wasn’t telling her.  Something neither one of them could change, no matter how hard they tried.

******

Jonathan hurriedly pressed the number 3 button within the rickety elevator of his apartment building, still hacking from the continuous squeeze inside his chest.  A chime sounded, and the heavy metal doors slowly opened.  The next few minutes slipped by as he dragged himself down the dimly lit hallway to his apartment.  His hand shook as he tried to shove the brass key into the tarnished lock.  

“Come on,” he mumbled, trying desperately to steady the tremoring hand.  

Finally, after several unsuccessful attempts, the tainted key slithered into the hole.  By now, Jonathan was completely out of breath.  He barely made it to the worn-out leather couch before collapsing.  Grabbing for the small oxygen tank next to the couch, he roughly placed the attached mask over his gaunt face, eagerly sucking in the pure air as it expanded his airway to full capacity.  Relief flooded his brain and lungs. He closed his burning eyes from the physical exhaustion he experienced from the short trip to and from the cafe.  Meeting his sister was becoming harder and harder each week.  As Jonathan drifted into unconsciousness, he tagged the thought: Next time, I’ll have to tell her the whole truth.

Allison began her short trek back to the condo.  Giving up the house she shared with her partner had been tough.  But despite the fact that it had been paid off, it left little desire to keep it—nor living in it, alone.  Too many memories of love and laughter seeping through the walls.  And the sickness that filled the rooms, culminating in her partner’s untimely death.  No.  She couldn’t live another moment in that house.

The modern white stucco condo sat near the lake’s edge, overlooking the old, abandoned lighthouse sitting on top of a deserted, rock-piled break wall.  A cool breeze emanated across the wavy water.  Even on an 80-degree August day, a light jacket was still needed near the rough shores of Lake Erie.

Allison enjoyed watching the endlessness of the greenish water as the tiny white caps curled, then waved goodbye.  The small balcony had just enough room for two people to sit comfortably.  Both salmon-colored Adirondack chairs sat empty.  Maybe one day soon she could get Johnny to visit and savor the spectacular view. Maybe one day soon.

With all her daily errands and chores completed, Allison flipped open her laptop to read her emails.  Most were considered “spam” or “junk” mail, but every now and then her nieces would send a quick note to replace a wellness check.  In her reply, Allison always made sure she included information, whether or not they asked about their Uncle Johnny.  

Allison scrolled aimlessly through the continuous news feed.  As she neared the bottom of the page, a slight pain crept up the back of her neck into her skull.  She massaged the top of her neck to try and ease the uncomfortable feeling now building behind her eyes.  

“What in heaven’s name?” she cried out loud.  

Seconds later, the room was spinning out of control.  Nausea twisted her stomach.  A vise-like hand gripped her spine.  Unable to move, a cold shine covered her body.

This can’t be happening! she thought as her mouth contorted into a hideous expression of fear.  

Her hands, now curled into a ball, were of no use. Agonizing pain had consumed her rigid body, while total blackness swallowed any thoughts of calling for help.

Her blurred eyes slowly cleared. Aromas of food wafted in the room, while the sound of Andy Williams’s voice floated from an old Zenith console.  Allison sat immobile, on a stiff green sofa, as she contemplated the sights emerging around her. 

My parents’ living room?  How is this possible?  

A latch hook owl pillow sat unfinished on her small lap.  Her hands, unblemished by age, moved slowly to touch her young, lineless face.  

It can’t be!  

Long brown hair fell upon her yellow buttoned polo top.  Dark green shorts fit snug across her flat stomach.  Smooth, tanned legs and socked feet dangled from the edge of the 70s-styled couch.  

“Ali, dinner will be ready in about fifteen minutes.  Can you set the dining room table, dear?”  

Allison’s mother, not more than fifty years old, stood smiling in the doorway—alive!  Her mother’s dark, teased hair accentuated the lovely flowered dress, which fit her middle-aged shape perfectly.  A tailored tan apron wrapped around her hips.  Brown pumps rounded out her bright and summery outfit. 

Allison gasped.  This couldn’t be!  This would make her twelve years old. What in the world…? 

“Mom…is that you?” cried Allison.  Her mother tilted her head, then wiped her hands on the apron.

“Oh, honey.  Who else would it be?” 

Before Allison could answer, her handsome father, outfitted in a brown suit and striped tie, strolled down the steps from the upstairs.  Thick bronze hair cut close to his head shined in the afternoon sunlight, which peeked through the thick venetian blinds.

Without saying a word, he gently pulled Allison’s mother into a loving embrace.  “Oh, Jim, really…” and they began to waltz while Andy Williams’s serenaded:

“Moon River, wider than a mile.  I’m crossing you in style, someday…my huckleberry friend.  Moon River and me.”  

For a moment, Allison sat mesmerized at the impossible sight before her.  Both her parents—alive!  And dancing!  The utmost gracefulness as they glided across the living room floor, deeply immersed in their love for one another.  

Allison’s eyes swelled with tears as she realized all of this—her parents, the house she grew up in, her young body–had to be a dream.  Just a wonderful dream.  Knowing in her heart both her parents had passed away many, many years ago.  It was nothing but a long-forgotten memory.  

******

A slow, constant beep emanated from the heart monitor.  Medicinal smells surrounded her hospital bed.  Her wonderful dream had stopped. Swirling images danced, then vanished, leaving a fogged memory.  A single tear made its way down her flushed cheek.

“Ali…can you hear me?  It’s me, Johnny.  Come on, give me a sign you’re still in there,” he begged in a raspy voice.  

Allison felt a slight squeeze of her hand.  She tried frantically to open her heavy eyelids.  Finally, she willed them open.  The lights above were dim.  The shades were drawn.  She slowly turned her head.  Johnny sat in a chair next to the bed.  

“Mom and Dad…I saw them, Johnny,” she whispered.  Johnathan leaned in close to hear her voice.  “I was there.”

Johnny smiled.  “I see them, too, sis.  Not so much now.”  He patted her thin hand.  “You gave me a scare.  Your neighbor heard a crash.  He tried knocking on your door.  When you didn’t answer, he called nine-one-one.  The cops called me.  And I’m sure you can figure out the rest,” explained Jonathan.  

“I…I must have fainted.  I remember I was looking at my emails and felt a strange sensation and then…and then…I was back in our living room on Meadowbrook.  Mom was cooking dinner and asking me to set the table.  Then Dad came in and they started to dance.”  Allison’s voice cracked.

“I bet it was to Andy Williams’s Moon River,” he said.  

Allison nodded her head up and down. “It was always their favorite.  I used to like watching them.  So graceful, so smooth and precise,” she murmured. 

Johnny’s eyes brimmed with tears. “I miss them, too,” he said.

“But Johnny, it felt like more than just a dream.  It was as if…as if…I went back in time to that specific moment…that very moment…and I was twelve again!” she said.  

Her brother gave a slight nod. “I know, Ali.  Sometimes dreams can feel so real.”  Suddenly, he turned his head to muffle his cough. “Sorry.”

Allison’s doctor came through the door.  “How are you feeling, Allison?” asked Dr. Tina Walters.  

Allison forced a smile. “I’ve been better.  What happened to me?” asked Allison.  Dr. Walters looked over at Jonathan.  “Oh, this is my brother Johnny.  It’s okay.  Whatever you have to say to me…” Her words trailed off.  

Dr. Walters nodded. “Well, we ran several blood tests.  It seems your blood pressure increased dramatically, causing you to have a fainting spell.  You have a high white blood cell count.  This could indicate your immune system is working on trying to destroy an infection.  It can also be a sign of physical or emotional stress.  But most likely it is caused by the blood cancer AML, acute myeloid leukemia).  You need to take better care of yourself, Allison.  Stress can make things much harder for you in the long run.  I would like to keep you overnight for observation.  Maybe tomorrow you can head back home.”  Dr. Walters gave a half-smile before leaving the two of them alone.

Jonathan remained silent and stared at his sister.  This was news to him.  Cancer.  His sister had cancer—blood cancer.  

“So…when were you planning on telling me?” he asked, never taking his eyes off Allison.  

Allison bit her lower lip.  “Actually, I was going to tell you when we met for coffee, but then…it just didn’t seem like the right time.”  Jonathan stood up and walked over to the covered windows.  He drew the curtains open, letting the sunshine in.

“There is no right time, Ali.  You shouldn’t have kept this from me.  I’m your brother, for heaven’s sake!  It’s only you and me now!” His voice escalated.  “Especially since cancer runs in our family like the plague!”  Jonathan crossed his arms.  

Allison turned her head.  She couldn’t look at him.  “I know!  I know!  It’s just that…I don’t know…I didn’t know how to tell you!” she cried.  

“How long?” he asked.  Allison stopped talking.  “How long?”  Jonathan took two steps toward the hospital bed.

“They don’t have the faintest.  It could be ten months, or ten years.”  Allison shrugged her shoulders.  

“Hmmm…are you telling me the truth?” he asked.  Jonathan now held the bedrail.  His knuckles were white.

“Yes…yes, of course I’m telling you the truth!  And since we’re on the subject of telling the truth…is there something you want to fess up about regarding that dry cough you have?   Well? Is there?” asked Allison.  Jonathan bowed his head.  He felt her warm hand on top of his.  Slowly, his sad eyes met hers.

“Yeah, well, I guess I was meaning to tell you about the hacking.  It’s more than a cough.  I’m going in to have a few tests done at the end of the month.  That’s all I know for the time being.”  He instantly broke eye contact with his sister.

“You’re not telling me everything.  The doctor has to have his suspicions,” pressed Allison.

“You know how these doctors operate?  He doesn’t want to surmise anything because he’s afraid of a lawsuit if he’s wrong!” replied Jonathan.  He rubbed his stubbled chin.

“Well, then…as soon as he gives you the results from the tests, will you please call me?  I worry about you, Johnny.  Promise?” pushed Allison.  Jonathan nodded in agreement.  “We need to be honest with each other…from now on.  No holding back, regardless of the medical prognosis.”  She hesitated a moment.  “Agreed?”

“Alright…alright.  As soon as I know anything, sis, you’ll be the first one I’ll tell.”  He gave a wink.  

Allison forced a half-smile.  She knew it was a lie.

******

Allison was released from the hospital the next day.  She called a taxi.  Getting ahold of her brother always seemed tedious.  It was easier this way.  Upon returning to her condo, she proceeded to call Jonathan and leave him a message.  

The condo was quiet.  Allison went out on the balcony.  The sun was brightly shining.  How she wished to be sitting on a beach by the ocean.  The heavy smell of the salt water carried by a warm ocean breeze.  She closed her eyes and remembered her last visit to Wilmington, North Carolina.  Her niece, Katherine, was just a few years younger, and they’d become extremely close during the latter years.  But her niece had many medical issues, making it almost impossible to travel.  Sometimes being confined to a wheelchair and constantly trying to manipulate a pain management regime through the use of drugs and holistic approaches left Katherine very often out of touch with reality.  

It had finally come down to Allison flying to North Carolina, visiting and chatting with her niece on her “good days,” which were few and far between.  But no matter, Allison enjoyed her niece’s company, and it was a vacation anyway you looked at it.  How many more vacations would she be able to take once she became weaker?  

Allison sighed and sat down on the Adirondack chair.  Her chest felt tight, and it seemed hard to breathe.  

This can’t be happening!  

Just released from the hospital, and already an attack again!  Her stomach churned as the pain increased.  Suddenly, the world around her was spinning until blackness consumed her mind.

Allison forced her eyes slowly open.  Whistling and shouting pounded in her ears.  A tiny voice pierced the mob of various robust vocal cords.  

“Auntie Al, Auntie Al…can I stand on the seat?  I can’t see anything!” cried a little girl.  

She felt her arm being pulled.  Allison blinked back the fuzziness and focused on the small child next to her.  It was her niece Katherine, but she wasn’t a grown woman who was mangled by a drunk driver—no, she was a vibrant and cute eleven-year- old.  

“Can I?” she asked again.  

I gave a slight nod.  Instantly, she jumped up on the seat and started to dance and clap as the announcer welcomed the 70s rock band Fleetwood Mac.  

As her eyes drew to the stage, Allison could see Stevie Nicks, front and center, swirling around while banging on a tambourine, singing her favorite song, “Stand Back.” The entire crowd was going crazy for the group on stage.  

Allison felt light-headed from the penetrating beat of the drums.  Her niece was singing along and dancing on the seat, as if she was one of the die-hard fans.  A huge smile spread across Allison’s face as she watched her niece with delight.  How Katherine loved the voice of Stevie Nicks.  Every Fleetwood Mac concert Allison ever attended; young Katherine was by her side.  But how could this be?  Katherine wasn’t a child any longer.  She was a grown woman often limited to a wheelchair.  

But in this precise moment in time, she was here! At Blossom Music Center.  At the sweet age of only 18, with her eleven-year-old niece—watching one of the greatest rock bands in rock-n-roll history.  And then without warning, as quick as the memory took shape, things around Allison began to tilt and blur.  

“No!” cried Allison.  She grasped at her niece, begging for just a few more minutes of this precious time in her life. And within seconds, the darkness returned and enveloped her mind.

A slight chill came across her skin.  The night air was clammy and cool.  Allison shivered in the chair.  Her back ached, with pain radiating down into her legs.  She tried to call out.  Only she could hear the words that had never been spoken.  Tears spilled over and down her damp cheeks.

“Katherine,” finally spilled out in a whisper.  

A faded and long forgotten memory.  A cruel joke her mind continued to play.  Why? What did she do to deserve this unusual and unexplainable trip back in time?  And make her miss the life she once knew?  What did it mean?  Was this a punishment, or a blessing in disguise?

******

After her last trip down memory lane, it took Allison a good hour before she was able to stand up and move about her condo.  Allison had decided not to call her doctor, afraid Dr. Walters would tell her to come back to the hospital for more tests.  Instead, she decided to ask Dr. Walters if something like this was normal for someone with her condition.  

That night, sleep came without coaxing.  Her unusual episode had left her exhausted.  A deep, uneventful sleep.

In the morning, she thought about the flashbacks.  They were becoming more frequent, and so was the intense pain.  But the memories were so real, so vivid—as if Allison actually went back in time and was reliving each of them again.  

As she unhurriedly got ready for her morning errands, her phone vibrated on the kitchen counter.  Eagerly, she reached for it.  It was Johnny.

“Hello, Johnny.  How’s my handsome brother on this fine, beautiful day?” she asked.  The weather outside was enticing and inviting.  Sunshine filled her kitchen.

“I’m still here…you sound chipper…did you win the lotto?” He chuckled while trying to stifle a raspy cough.

“No.  And would it do us any good if I did?”  Allison walked out onto her tiny patio.  The breeze was warm and delightful against her face.  

“I don’t know…maybe.  A pile of cash…”  Jonathan’s voice sounded rough.

“Wait…what?  The recluse who doesn’t go anywhere, do anything, and you want a pile of cash?  You’re hilarious, Johnny,” replied Allison.

Emptiness stretched between the two of them.  Breaking the silence, Allison continued on to keep her brother on the phone.  “I’ve been having these flashbacks…actually, more like surreal memories.  And I’m trying to figure out if they have some type of meaning behind them.”

“Yeah…I know what they mean…you wish you were young again, and getting old sucks!” he responded.  

“You’re no help, little brother.  I’m serious.  It’s as if…I’m transported back in time to a specific place and time…and each place is connected to a song.  Like a distant connection to a time and place.  Does that make any sense to you?” asked Allison.

“No.  None at all.  Are you taking medications…for your condition?” he asked.  “Some of these medications today have wild side-effects, and maybe your trips down Memory Lane could be one of them.”  

“I’m not on any hard-core prescribed drugs that would affect memories or living in the past.  I thought I’d ask the doctor during my next visit.  What do you think?  Will I sound like I need a shrink, too?” Allison laughed.

“Well, I’ve told you plenty of times you needed to see a shrink…especially after some of the people you tried to help and it backfired!” He chuckled.

“Ha, ha, ha.  You’re so funny…I forgot to laugh,” she replied, with a huge smile stretched across her lined face.  Silence filled the line once again.  “You don’t think it had anything to do with that fainting spell I had the other day, do you?”

“I don’t see how the two could be connected…but then again, anything could be a possibility at this point.  It even might be related to your…condition,” answered Jonathan.

“I don’t know, Johnny.  It’s odd.  Plain and simple.  I never had this type of trip down Memory Lane before.  Sure, I’d have dreams about people…you know, like Mom and Dad.  But this is different.  Connected to a particular song.  A long-forgotten memory—until I heard a song, and then…bam!  And I feel like I’m truly there.  It’s so…surreal.”  Allison let out a huge sigh.  

“I’ve got an idea.  Next time it happens, experiment within the memory.  Reach out and try to touch a person in your dream.  I read a few books about ‘reliving dreams,’ and it says most of the time we feel like we’re actually there but can’t move any part of our body.  And try to read something—anything.  The leading sleep experts say in a dream, you can’t read.  Just try it.  What do you have to lose?”  said Jonathan.

Allison nodded.  “You may be on to something.  I will try to remember to do that next time.  See what happens.  But it’s hard to have control inside a dream.”

She heard a hard knock through the phone.  “I hate to cut our conversation short, Ali, but my food is here.  I’ll give a shout later, sis.”   And then there was silence between the lines.

Allison had busied herself with unfinished odds and ends.  The day flew by, without an incident.  She was grateful for small favors.  After watching her recorded programs on cable, she went to bed early.  Stifling a yawn, she brushed her teeth and slid under the thin, summery quilt.  After a few short prayers, Allison drifted off into a blank sea of nothingness.

******

The following day, Allison woke up refreshed and well-rested.  Her normal aches and pains had dissipated once she began her usual routine.  Another beautiful day.  The air was warm, with a touch of a light breeze.  She sipped her hot coffee as she stood on her balcony, gazing at the never-ending sea of water.  Her mind wandered to her brother, Johnny.  He was sick, too.  Not a good ending for the last of the eight siblings.  But then again, she’d accepted her fate from the very beginning.  Was there any choice?  She said a quick prayer that when they were both called home, it would be quick and painless.  Or even better, just fall asleep, never to wake up again.  

Dr. Fischer scanned the X-rays.  He pointed to several small spots scattered across the pair of lungs.  He turned to face the hunched, older man sitting on the opposite side of his desk.

“As you can see, Mr. Morris, there are several lesions within the lungs.  They’re small, but unfortunately spreading.  I’m sorry to say there isn’t much we can do at this point.  We could try chemo.  I can’t say either way if it will help or even slow down the expanding progression of the lung disease.”  Dr. Fischer sat down at his desk and folded his hands.  “I am truly sorry, Mr. Morris.  I know it’s not what you wanted to hear.  We’ve come a long way in advancements regarding lung cancer.  But it’s futile when it reaches beyond medical capabilities.”

Johnny remained quiet.  He knew the prognosis wasn’t going to be good.  He felt worse each day.  It had taken a toll on his already aging body.  But how could he tell Allison her brother was just a “dead man walking?”  

“How long?” asked Johnny.  Dr. Fischer opened the white folder.  He glanced over the typewritten information.  “How long, Doc?” repeated Johnny.

“By the progression of the disease, a rough guess, maybe six months.  And Mr. Morris, not a good six months.  This disease is crippling.  It slowly squeezes the air right out of your body.”  The doctor closed the folder. 

Johnny stood up.  He held out his large, calloused hand to the doctor.  Dr. Fischer rose and grasped the dying man’s hand.  A quick shake, and Johnny left the doctor’s office, never to return again.  He was done with tests.  His fate was sealed.

Allison tried reaching her brother by phone, to no avail.  He was avoiding her like the plague.  They had to postpone their “date” to dinner and a movie due to her stay at the hospital.  But now that she’d been feeling better, she tried to reschedule.  Getting frustrated from being ignored by Johnny, she left a threatening message on his voicemail.  She gave him one last chance before calling the police and asking for a wellness check on her brother.  An hour later, her cell phone chimed.  It was Johnny.

“You would do that to me?” asked Johnny in a rough voice.  

“Yes…I would.  It’s about time you called me back.  You had me sick with worry, Johnny.  What’s going on that you couldn’t call your sister back?” she said in a stern voice.  She heard him coughing.  

After a minute or two, he cleared his throat. “I’ll just say it…I have lung cancer and got about six months to live.  How about that and a pot of beans?” He chuckled.  

Allison’s heart raced.  They were both dying.

“Are you sure?” she whispered.  

“Yes…no doubt about it.  Signed, sealed, and delivered,” he responded.  “It’s spreading rapidly.  There’s nothing to be done.”  Instantly, Allison’s eyes filled with tears.  “Ali…are you there?”

“I’m here,” she said in a whisper.  “I guess we’re not doing too well, are we?” Allison tried desperately to hold back a sob.

Johnny hung his head.  He couldn’t bear the thought his sister was dying.  He, on the other hand, smoked like a chimney.  But Allison, she did nothing to deserve her fatal outcome.  Life could be so cruel.

“What do we do now?” he asked.  He cleared his throat.  It felt on fire.  

“I guess we take each day as it comes…what else can we do?” replied Allison in-between sniffles.

“You’re right, Ali.  We’ll make the most of the time we have left.  How about dinner and that movie you promised me?” asked Johnny.  

Allison’s spirits lifted. “How about it?  Friday night? I’ll swing by your place around five p.m.  I’ll pick the restaurant, and you can pick the movie.  Deal?” she asked, trying to sound upbeat.

“Deal.  See you then.”  

And once again, a silent connection.

The racing ambulance pulled directly in front of the emergency doors.  The paramedics rushed the strapped unconscious woman inside.  Nurses ran alongside the fast-moving gurney as the paramedics rattled off the patient’s vitals.

“Put her in here!” shouted the middle-aged attending nurse.  

She instantly ripped back the long white curtains.  Connie Huffman felt the woman’s pulse.  It was steady.  She hurriedly hooked up an IV.  Seconds later, Dr. Tina Walters held the stethoscope to the woman’s chest.

“Let’s get her to X-ray.  I want an MRI on her head, stat! It looks like a stroke.  She was here just a couple of weeks ago.”  Dr. Walters flashed a pen light over Allison’s left retina.  

“Yes, Dr. Walters,” replied Nurse Huffman.  And without hesitation, the nurse turned on her heel and left the two women alone.

“Allison…I told you to take it easy, but you didn’t listen,” murmured Dr. Walters.  

Once again, she checked Allison’s vitals.   Her blood pressure was high.  Minutes later, Dr. Walters made the call to Johnny.

“Mr. Morris, it’s Dr. Tina Walters.  It’s your sister, Allison. We believe she had a stroke.  We’ll know for sure once I get a look at her MRI.  But maybe you should come to the hospital.  When she wakes up, it’ll help to see a friendly face,” explained the doctor.

“I’m on my way, Dr. Walters…and Dr. Walters…thank you.”  

Johnny hung up and called a taxi.  As he made his way down in the elevator, his chest tightened.  He frantically tried to breathe.  

“Not now,” he whispered.  

The elevator stopped, and the doors opened.  His eyes flew open wide as he took a step and collapsed dead onto the floor.

*****

Epilogue

“You cheated,” Allison said, with a giggle. “I’m telling on you, Johnny!”  

The little boy with the dark hair laughed as he jumped up and down.  His green T-shirt and brown shorts were soiled from playing in the dirt.

“You’re just mad cause you can’t catch me, Ali—nah, nah!  Boys are faster than girls!”  

With the sun shining and birds singing, the two children ran around in a circle until they could run no more.   

Johnny, out of breath, finally plopped down.  Allison quickly followed suit.  Echoes of laughter filled the air as brother and sister were together once again.

Dr. Walters gently removed the IVs connected to the port on Allison’s right shoulder.  She glanced at her watch and wrote down the exact time of death.  Her eyes glistened at the sight of her patient’s listless body.  She couldn’t help feeling sorrow at the loss of such a wonderful person.  But life was funny that way—no rhyme or reason—until one day death catches up to the final farewell.

Alice Baburek is an avid reader, determined writer and animal lover. She lives with her female partner and four canine companions. Retired, she challenges herself to become an unforgettable emerging voice.