Issue 1

They surveyed the landscape from above. It was prime property for development. There was only one problem. It was occupied already and the current tenants would have to be removed. Of course, there was the heavy-handed approach to remove by force. But they realized that would destroy much of the pristine paradise they saw below them. No, they decided the more gentle, albeit more slow, approach was preferable. They calculated, entered into the water supply, that the parasites created to make the sex act unpalatable, would cleanse the third planet from the star of tenants in less than 50 years.

This morning I spoke to Ray, who runs our town, about the state-wide program to control mosquitoes—they intend to spray, and that means killing birds and bees, and very likely harming humans, too. I agreed to help draft a letter with an opt-out plan. Once home, I planted tomatoes I’d started from seed—a kind of miracle as those seeds are no bigger than a sneeze. But now look how their brave stalks thrust up from the warming earth. Even at this tender stage, they smell indelibly of summer—oh no—what is that whining sound above my head?

A scuffle broke out at her feet. “Stop it!” yelled Lydia, chasing her dogs from the kitchen. Harlow, the victor, chomped loudly with a hint of gagging. “Drop it!” Harlow continued the grotesque sound as Hunter watched longingly. “You don’t like it. Drop it!” Lydia reached for the dog, but Harlow ran. Hunter laid and whimpered. “It wasn’t a prize,” she scratched behind his ears, “it was a pickle, and she doesn’t even like it.” Later, on the stairs, Lydia felt a squish beneath one foot before she tumbled to the landing, remnants of a discarded pickle between her toes.

When he was two, seated in the antique highchair, he might have fallen, taking a dangerous crash. But Auntie was quick to catch him. No one yet knew he could kick himself backward from the breakfast table. Earlier, Auntie drew him close to smell the coffee beans as she opened the tin. But ZCHOOSH! the bean particles flew into his eyes when the vacuum released its contents. Tears and more tears, as Auntie apologized and tried to soothe. I, mother, stood by. All would be well—this, only the first time disappointment would follow anticipation in his dear, young life.

Winter is near. I saw a field mouse, except he was in no field, he was running across the sidewalk and hid under a bush as I walked by. I wish him luck as he tries to get into the auditorium before the winter snows. Somehow, I want to call him Oscar, though I know of no one by that name. If you don’t have any luck there, knock on my door, and I’ll let you in. I have only two rules: one, don’t gnaw on the furniture or rugs, and two, don’t leave any mouse piles on the floor.

Alone, I sit silently searching for poachers. Something murmurs at the far edge of hearing. An underground spring, or perhaps a wood nymph? This rifle seems an intrusion in this magical space, but there are bears, and bears care not for nymphs. They feast on meat, not magic. Their hunger is undeterred by noble work. I don’t trust bear spray, or the badge in my back pocket, to stop a hungry bruin. Behind me the rustling of leaves triggers my back hairs to tingle. I slip off the safety. Darkness arrives with a furious rush and a crunch of teeth.

Aiden was a rising literary critic, renowned for his fearless iconoclasm. Twain, Whitman, Kerouac, Emily Dickinson: no one was safe, the living with the dead. On the eve of the publication of his first book, Aiden awoke to see Death standing over his bed with a length of rope. “I’m dreaming!” He gasped, frozen with fear. “ I created you in my mind!” “Created me?!” Death replied, “You haven’t created one thing! You throw stones at the dead who dare to try! Aiden lay sleepless, self-diagnosing his vivid sleep paralysis until the morning light revealed the rope coiled beneath his window.

Sam Adams met Maria his wife in a dream. The dream started in high school when he fell asleep in a physics class and saw the most beautiful woman in the world staring at him. He yelled out, “who are you?” and she disappeared. He started having the same dream weekly. One day he realized she was in Korea, so he joined the Peace Corps to find her. Three years later, he had the last dream. She said, “Don’t’ worry, we will meet soon.” That night, she walked off a bus into his life; became his wife two months later.

Marie’s hands skipped across the black and white keys, spinning the staccato tones of Balakirev’s “Islamej” for a spellbound audience.

Years ago, musicians had called Balakirev’s piece the “unplayable fantasy.” Nowadays, things had changed.

As the crowd applauded, Marie rose, smiling, and turned to face her audience. Her diamond earrings glittered in the spotlights as she curtsied, lifting the hem of her concert gown with twelve manicured fingers.

Years ago, music students had looked at those hands and called Marie a freak. Nowadays, things had changed.

Today, Marie’s name was in lights outside Symphony Center. “Tonight Only: The Polydactyl Pianist.”

Spinning

A mile away, the car flipped over and over, appearing as a large red thrown object, hitting, bouncing from road into the median. Instinctively, I slowed my car, foot leaving the gas pedal until I was coasting. Brake lights lit up all around me as a sea of traffic drifted forward, necks craning to see wreckage, victims upside down, suspended from seatbelts, broken glass, and rubber streaks across the road. The violently twisted guardrail was bent around the front section of the car as if hugging it. My eyes fixed on a spinning tire, mesmerized, like a macabre carnival ride.

I put the phone down, gripped the kitchen sink, and felt my heart shatter somewhere deep inside myself along with so many expectations. I struggled to make sense of what I had heard. Words strung together into prophecies like “chromosome deletion”, “won’t meet milestones”, “the doctor will help you make plans”. We had already made plans. I had no desire to make new ones. I cradled my huge belly in my arms returning to my tea on the counter top. I watched the pale brown liquid ripple in my cup and wondered if anything would ever taste the same again.

After wandering the yards of his abandoned neighborhood, 12-year-old Gavin cannot find his family and cannot escape the fireworks’ finale. “Too loud,” he cries, rocks, holds his hands to his ears as he stands alone. The booms and sputters of colored spark light up the sky and yards around him, but Gavin responds only to the noise, running from it. Finding the closest house, he punches through glass. Shards explode, cut his skin, blood runs in streams. His face turns upward as he howls into the emptiness. The fireworks persist, insist on celebrating the end of this, all of it.

The symbols became clear on the stick as she sat there. Thou shalt not become pregnant this month, either, and she flung the test into the metal wastebasket with a clang.

As she stepped into the shower and was soothed by the force of the warm water running over her body, a thought too true to be a lie hit her. No wonder Lilly let her leave the coven so easily. She knew Laura would voluntarily come home for only this.

She’s not returning home to have a fertility spell put upon her. She’s getting an infertility spell removed. Witch!

He really didn’t know how long they’d been living down that particular drain. But at least it was east facing; offering eight minutes of luscious sun each morning. More than once he’d spied envy in the eyes of the other drainies. Living in such a place certainly had its challenges, though. None more so than finding a wife to replace his dearest, Millicent. Of course, bringing up another man’s drain-children was not every woman’s cup of tea. He’d nearly snared one just last week. His grimy hand clasped around her creamy ankle. “Yep. She had quite a kick, that one.”

Before the storm, Philip would frequently get a kick contemplating his situation: a solitary guy who enjoyed living amongst the horde. Long-distance running seemed more akin to Philip’s nature. And as close to passion as it got. Those local road races he participated in (likewise casual Reservoir jogs) provided a microcosm of city life – alone amid others. But easiness wasn’t relevant tonight. Official closing time approached. Philip was ready. Instinctively, he took his meds. This elicited mordant chuckling. Central Park awaited. A police sergeant found the body. Her off-the-cuff remark furnished tabloid fodder for days: “He ran himself to death.”

Every night, I roll over to face the empty side of my bed. In varying levels of distress, I call out to a friend. My busy friend always stops by for our chat. I beg. I plead. I offer. It’s when I attempt bribery Death laughs in my face. Death is beyond desire. This is a human emotion. An emotion that has been bedeviling my existence the last six years. She is dead. I am not. Death is patient with my tantrums, my screams, my tears. “I’m not afraid to go,” I say. “No, my child, you’re afraid to live.”

John often scheduled trips, then changed his mind at the last minute. He’d spend hours looking at maps, photos of diners, old railway stations, Post Offices covered in kudzu, and haunted hotels (where he liked to stay). He’d make plane and car reservations, charge his cameras, and map out his routes. He’d arrange for the neighbor to bring in his mail and move his car on street cleaning days. He’d be ready to go. And then he’d realize half-heartedly that he didn’t want to go. He’d built thousands of airline miles up this way, and he was fine with that.

It was difficult to attend her friend’s baby shower. How could she be joyous when she had just lost her own? Little Chloe was delivered prematurely. Her little lungs were not mature enough for her to survive. Tina had sunk into a deep depression. This was her first social event. She begged Todd to come along. They were summoned upon arrival.

“Jeff and I would like you to be Emily’s godparents.”

Gazing into exuberant faces, they pushed their grief aside.

“We’d be happy to,” they replied, “if you’d be ours.”

“Oh, my goodness! You’re pregnant?!”

“Yes. It was confirmed today!”

A yellow-eyed Calico cat guarded the parsley patch. Calico sounded like prairie skirts, gypsy breezes, flute notes drifting dunes. That cat and I had been staring at each other all summer.

Mrs. Casio’s high heels clicked onto the duplex porch.

“Cat’s meaner than hot tar,” she warned. “Watch out.”

Orange sun baking parsley fragrant. Peeling paint poking my thighs. When I stood up, the cat stopped licking. I crawled toward her patch, my mouth watering.

“Nice kitty,” I cooed.

She howled, struck. Red blood dropped, nodded green leaves. Tambourines clanged.

The Calico’s claw missed my eye by one silk thread.

“Eh, naw, lad.” Queensferry Mack spat into the water. “Ye’ll no be gettin a brig ayean they waters. There’s seventy men’ll die afore ever ye span the Forth.”
The engineer laughed. “We’re pretty good at building bridges nowadays,” he said.
Mack shot him a sideways glance. An accident, men’d call it. Drown this city-bred coofie, save the lives of seventy men and the hearts of seventy mothers and wives. Let the Firth of the Forth remain a ferry-crossing, given wind an weather.
* * *
I shid ha’ done it, whispers a ghost in a phantom ferryboat, as the death-toll begins to mount.

He always felt well situated, close to the wisdom of the stream, the empathy of trees and foliage, the warmth of squirrels, rabbits, chipmunks as they stopped in the shadow of his girth. He hadn’t moved in eons, but his inner workings were humming,

teeming with anticipation.

They were like the other uprights only noisier, he thought it could be fun. They named him after previous visitors, covered him with graffiti, spit on him, left plastic and tin.

His majesty, the magic of the area diminished, at his age he learned anew - to pity, to mourn and to fear.

They loved pulling pranks, cruel ones, the kind that blurred the lines between laughter and pain. So when the doctor called, he answered and heard the prognosis: cured. Smiling, he told her the opposite.

Screaming, she grabbed the gun from the drawer and aimed it at his chest. If she was dying, he was coming too.

Panicked, he confessed it was a joke.

She laughed, breathless, lowering the gun. She was joking, too.

Then the phone rang again.

The doctor apologized profusely. The test results were mixed up.

His smiled stayed.

He couldn't tell her.

She was still watching him.

We lived on coins, counting pennies and nickels before walking to the Episcopal Church off Locust Street for supper. There was joy in dropping our last quarter into the coffee can for the poor, trusting something would come back around. Afterward, we wandered to the overpass, slipping beneath concrete ribs, settling onto oil-stained cardboard. Above us, cars rushed east and west, unseen but relentless. Below us, it was silent. You reached for me, drawing me close. Our breath held its own weight. I lay still, aware of your warmth, trying to measure what was real and what I had imagined.

I watched the blind beggar drag himself into the shadow at Broad and Samson, settling where the noise funneled toward him. His cup rested, catching coins by sound alone. Each drop told him something, the quick spin of a dime, the dull fall of a penny. Once, a man with rings tossed a coin, spat, and crossed the street. The beggar did not turn. A sign beside him read Love Your Neighbor, its edges worn by hands that no longer give. I stood there, listening, a bill folded in my pocket, unsure what I offered would mean anything at all.

Helen had stolen a chicken. She ran now through an open field, bird in hand. At 80 meters, all things considered, (gravity, wind, migrational patterns of barnacle geese) the bullet would have a 2.3765% chance of hitting her. From a distance of 1 meter it might've been possible to see Helen was thinking of Tadhg—a slight dilation of pupil, for example, the way a large, spring-canopied oak might cast a field of cornflowers in shadow. Marcus was a farmer. He'd been in love before. At 1 meter, he might have seen himself in her. At 80, Marcus fired.

In the matter of wintering birds: consider Barnacle geese, who make their homes and families in cliffside nests. The barnacle gosling is full of tiny organs, like a tiny heart (full), or a tiny stomach (empty). The empty stomach makes it jump from the cliffside to the rocks far below. The full heart helps them believe they will live. The ones who live fall in love, beget cliff-jumpers of their own—the ones who don’t render their new bodies to the earth; their flesh and feathers unfurling like some midnight flower, revealing the pale treasure of hollow bones, tiny.

Marcus fell in love with an Algerian girl named Raina. They never spoke to one another. Raina mended clothing for small sums. In the evenings Marcus tore holes in his shirts with a metal toothpick. In the mornings he watched Raina silently mend his shirts at a small wooden desk. The sun, he remembered, had a way of striking her face so that the table held her featureless portrait in stark black shadow. The shadow had no language. He fell in love with this, too, the way it moved like a formless waterfowl, gliding gently across a lake of sunlight.

The tire blows in the loading zone. A rider weeps into his phone, leaves one star, vanishes. My girlfriend says enough. The line goes dead.

I walk to the library. Chairs are damp. Tall windows hold the grey. Paper smell steadies me like a hand on my shoulder.

I open my notebook and copy the lives I half know: the nurse, the contractor, the wife who made me choose. I try to draw a map that holds them. It won't.

An old man sits, reads, adds one line in my handwriting.

I see the door I drew.

I open it.

The ghostlight flickered with each pass on the catwalk above. Theatre workers swore they felt an entity at the precise spot where Fritz Kreider plunged to his death inspecting construction in 1895. Impresarios don’t fall — and no one lands with a slit throat without additional cause. A jealous lover, convincing her beau to finish off Kreider had made for great theatre over the years. It made for great cover now, as Reilly climbed the ladder, crossed the catwalk, thus extending the legend. The ghostlight dims… the house fades to black… the grand old edifice, now tainted with new blood.

He sank onto the bed, exhausted. “Maybe I’ll stop trying to change the world through music. I should just plan a regular concert...safe music...easier programs...” He muttered this as he fell into a deep, coma-like sleep, only to be awoken with plans for the next big “change-the-world event” percolating inside his mind. It was neither safe nor traditional, but it was indeed different – untried – risky, even. More importantly, he was certain it would continue to make a difference, if but one note at a time. He also felt the unmistakable need for a second cup of coffee.

One late August afternoon, thunder rumbles. I dash and open the door, longing to see a damp porch and water droplets on blades of grass. Instead, I count eleven circles, tears of disappointment, sprinkled on worn, wooden planks. The warm, moist wind blows my hair back and shoves laden clouds across the Vance-Granville County line. Sheets of rain cascade from distant clouds. Nasturtium and hollyhocks stretch to catch raindrops, then droop; their thirst unquenched.

I shake my head, throw up my arms, and stomp back inside. The phone rings. I answer to hear a friend say, “It’s pouring here.”

There’s no graceful way to ease out of this world. Water floods the walls around the heart. Breathing is labored. Kidneys refuse to function. Doctors shake their heads. Say you’re in a pickle. You know. By the way you shuffle clumsily across the floor. By the way your arms turn the color of ripe plums when you so much as bump a butterfly. But food tastes good most of the time, if you eat the things they tell you not to. There are still a handful of decent shows on TV. If you’re lucky, you’ll slip away in your sleep.

Not raining. Fighting. Max thinks everyone is his best friend. Toby thinks Max is stupid. You know who is who. Max is lying beside me in the recliner. Minding his own business (for once). Toby, who has apparently attended Ninja training camp, comes out of nowhere, smacks Max on the head. Bap, bap, bap. Max looks betrayed. He’s the good boy (for once). I scold Ninja Toby. He blinks golden eyes. Once. Twice. Tail twitches. Then…bap, bap, bap. Max gets another round—retreats to my chest. Max could take Toby down—but maybe he is just a little bit stupid.

The small, sunlit bedroom once filled with love, we shared passion, silence, refuge from the world. That bed held memories both tender and raw. Our relationship burned in the late summer’s heat.

By autumn, I returned the keys, hoping he’d ask me to stay. He took them and handed back a box with fragments of my life. He admitted she had crossed into the sacred space upstairs. As the conversation ended, leaves wrestled, I searched for reassurance that what we shared still meant something. His quiet laughter made it clear: what was ours alone no longer holds space for me.

Once, while she was drowning, I saw her head break the surface for a moment.

She sat on the living room floor as she told me she wanted to leave him, but his family would never allow it. “Marriage is for life.”

I froze. I didn’t know it then, but my own flimsy lifeboat was capsizing.

She took a sip of wine and wiped away the tears sliding down her cheeks. Unable to stomach the silence, I asked hollowly how her job was going.

Years later, she posted a family Facebook photo. Though she smiled, her eyes didn’t have wrinkles.

“You ate all the fish and chips? You know, boys don’t like big girls.” My grandfather’s words still echo in my head more than two decades later.

And for what it’s worth, grandfather was right—my boyfriend doesn’t like that I’m big. A big saver, a big talker, a big deal at work. I show up, and he somehow has to shrink. And when he shrinks, he thinks he should be able to hit me.

But not tonight.

Tonight, I have a big ole’ hook waiting for him.

In preparation, I eat every last bag of chips in the house.

Each month, the smear of first blood pulled me back, the undertow beneath my days. I kicked against the current, my head dipping below the surface in the fight against the memory of Zoe.

I had been one of four unconscious women. I was another pair of knees spread open beneath the buzzing fluorescent lights. A flood of blood spread across the tiled floor as the packing was ripped out. Two white pills and a pat on the knee. Zoe was gone.

I had left empty and silent, and that silence became me.

My mistake had been in the naming.

My mother always made brownies the day after it happened. It was the only time she baked, her way of apologizing, I guess.

She refilled a container with them as we stepped over the crate of empty bottles, wine stain on the carpet, my smashed ceramic bear in a pile, family photo still ripped. At the park, we played on the swings, scrambled up climbing frames, gripped monkey bars, bounced on the seesaw, then ate gooey chocolate richness and guzzled lemonade.

For several days after, life was almost good until I realized she had stocked up on cocoa powder again.

His handgun out before him, the gunman ordered,

“Give me your wallet or I'll blow your head off.”

“Go ahead” The victim said. “I’m dying of cancer and I don’t want my family to have to go through all that. Let me go out heroically. It will be my finest moment.”

“Don’t mess with me, man. I ain’t foolin around.”

Reaching into his pocket slowly, the victim removed his wallet.

“I’m not messing with you. I watched my mother die. It was horrible. So be merciful. Wait! Weren’t you my student?”

The robber fired.

I couldn’t take my eyes off her. Good thing there wasn’t traffic, but I should’ve paid attention to the signs.

We turned onto an isolated road toward the Israeli coast. I wanted us to be alone. Wafa had mesmerised me since I’d met her. She was a Palestinian nurse, raised in Birzeit, me a volunteer doctor from Dublin. Our shy exchanges became daily lunches. Today was our first date.

The road ended at an Israeli army camp. Wire. Rifles. Suspicious stares. I backed away quickly. Wafa appeared fearful, then angry, finally amused.

She proposed that night.