#

Contestants respond to a Craigslist ad looking for participants in a study. Only those with a weak disposition are selected. A helicopter whisks them deep into the Amazon, to The Bunker. The Bunker is equipped with steel doors, a generator, supplies, and fourteen hidden cameras. Actors leave to scout the area. Soon there are screams for help, gunshots, the JaguarMan’s roar. Cameras zoom in on the contestants’ terror-stricken faces. Mr. Sutton cries and the laugh track goes wild. Mrs. Jackson says that she’s going outside to investigate. Before she has a chance, an actor bursts through the door. The actor tells them he actually works for a company called FeroTech, where they cross humans with animals. He speaks of vivisections and the JaguarMan. He hints that there are more creatures like it. He reveals that the contestants were chosen to be FeroTech’s next experiment. Mr. Rood was going to be crossed with a boa constrictor. Ms. Lopez, with a toucan. The contestants are horrified, but of course they are never in real danger. The JaguarMan is a Brazilian gymnast in a latex costume. The costume has a speaker in its mouth which produces the trademark JaguarMan roar.

#

I am suddenly ravenous. I pour a can of spaghetti with clam sauce in a bowl and heat it up in the microwave. It’s all we have in the cabinets. The kitchen smells like seagulls, low tide. From the living room, Grandma says, “Smells yummy in there.” I split the pasta evenly between two plates and bring them into the living room. I slide a plate in front of Grandma. Grandma nibbles, her eyes locked on the screen.

#

The actor tells them he cannot live with what he has done. He produces a forty-five. He steps outside. He closes the door behind him and nobody follows. A minute goes by. Close-up on each contestant. Gunshot. Laugh track. The last man standing is going to win a million dollars.

#

Grandma claps her little hands. She says, “that was some primo shit.” I put her to bed. I sit on the porch. The air here is different. It goes down easy. My ex-therapist claimed being away from the city would do me good, but on my drives home from work the teenagers often spring from bushes, chuck rocks at my car, and call me Grandma Bitch.

#

A little backstory: Grandma is too old to drive. Meaning, no car in the driveway. Meaning, before I moved in, nobody knew whether she was home or not. Meaning, before I moved in, it was only a matter of time before somebody smashed her window and climbed in without realizing she was upstairs. Bob lives in a doublewide in the junkyard across the street and knocked for baking soda. He found the house torn apart and Grandma curled in the bathtub. We couldn’t get a straight answer out of her, but knew it was the teenagers. Mom insisted I go live with her after that. It was a thinly veiled excuse to get me out of the house, which was agreeable to me because Grandma should have never been on her own, especially in this day and age when teenage gangs maraud unchecked. Now, Grandma and I play Othello, bake pumpkin bread, dance to Benny Goodman. I was sick of my job at PlaxiCo. I had two dozen coworkers and a string of managers, but at the end of the day, everybody was in their own little world and none of those little worlds involved me.

#

Coworkers diddling around the watercooler. Coworkers discussing the fake suicide. Coworkers doubling over with laughter. Coworkers slapping each other on the back. Coworkers gasping for air.

#

Mr. Rood leaves the presumed safety of The Bunker in search of the actor’s corpse and that forty-five caliber pistol, but the JaguarMan leaps from behind a tree and a fifteen minute chase ensues. The JaguarMan corners Rood on the edge of a cliff and the audience track cheers as Rood begs for mercy. Tears and snot run down his face. The JaguarMan pulls off his mask. The camera crew rushes out. The laugh track goes wild. Still in shock, Rood is airlifted to a hotel in Manaus, where he is fed a steak dinner. Keys to a brand new Ford Eclipse are placed in his quivering hand.

#

Everybody gathers around the copy machine. One coworker jams the Start button. One shakes the machine. Another smacks it. Yet another shoves paper into its mouth. The machine groans and whirrs, coworkers grunt and pound, the machine clicks and sizzles. I yank open a compartment to expose the heart of the machine. A crumpled sheet of paper is stuck in the roller. Bit by bit, I tear the paper away and the machine wakes back to life.

#

I dip into my savings to buy Grandma a puzzle: a Baroque painting of three bullfighters skewering a bull. Grandma loves anything that displays the clash of nature and man. Those are her words, not mine. She finishes the puzzle in an hour. She frames and hangs it over the couch.

#

I’m at the mailbox and the teenagers whoop down the block. Rocks sail through the air before I can react. One hits me in the temple and knocks me out. I wake up on the ground. Bob stands over me. It is as if he is spinning.

“Just got home and saw you lying there. Figured you were relaxing, but I changed out of my overalls and you were still on the ground. Your head’s leaking.” Blood soaks my shirt and runs down the side of my face. Bob waves a first aid kit. “What happened?”

I can’t answer. Every cloud in the sky is an ax. A rifle. A dagger.

Bob continues, “I know what happened. Little bastards smash a windshield of mine every week. They love breaking glass. I guess it’s a thrill, the way it shatters.” He cleans the wound on my head and dresses it with Neosporin and a bandage. “I never call the cops. Don’t believe in it. Karma will get those teenagers. Or maybe it won’t.”

I rub the bandage. The pad squishes over my wound. Bob invites me over for a beer, which would require I follow him across the street, through the rusted cars and into his trailer. Inside of the trailer, rims are piled to the ceiling. A bedroom door is used for a coffee table. Strips of fly paper hang from the ceiling like party streamers. I do not wish to enter Bob’s trailer.

I say, “There’s this show Grandma and I watch. It starts in a few minutes.”

Bob says, “Haven’t had cable in years. Sounds fine with me.”

That was meant to be an excuse, not an offer. But Bob continues down the stone walkway into Grandma’s house.

“Hello Indiana,” Bob says. Grandma does not respond.

#

Mr. Stoffle, Ms. Lopez, and Mr. Burke are outside scavenging for food.

“If only I knew it was going to end like this, I would have tried a little harder with Jenny,” Ms. Lopez says.

“We’d all do things differently,” Mr. Stoffle says.

“Now we’re going to die.”

“Takes a lot for you to realize certain things.”

“I never liked you,” says Mr. Stoffle.

“You never liked anybody,” says Mr. Burke.

Ms. Lopez stomps about. “The worst part about all of this,” she yells. “The very worst part is that I’m going to die with all of you.”

#

Bob says, “The drama. The thrill! What did you think, Indiana?”

“It deserves an Oscar is what I think,” Grandma says.

“Oscars are for movies,” I say.

“It is quite the thrill, this bunker,” Grandma says.

I say, “Listen to me: Oscars are for movies. Emmys are for TV.”

“Such a fresh mouth,” Grandma says.

#

I ask Paulo the night janitor if he has seen The Bunker. He says that he works nights and has family in Brazil whom he sends money to and does not have time for reality television. I let him know that The Bunker takes place in Brazil. He is intrigued. He tells me that he once worked for a logging company. He tore down large swathes of the Amazon. Tomorrow morning, he will watch The Bunker on demand. Three days go by and I do not see him again. Then there is a new night janitor named Rooney. Rooney has gapped teeth and smells of patchouli. He tells me Paulo stopped showing up and nobody can get ahold of him. Rooney asks if I have seen The Bunker. I inform him that yes I have seen The Bunker. He says that The Bunker is perhaps the greatest piece of art ever created, rivaling the works of Euripides and Shakespeare.

#

I sit in the park and a yellow jacket lands next to me. This yellow jacket wrestles with a bloated fly. It eats the fly alive and tears off its legs and wings. I wonder if perhaps bugs can scream and if those screams are too faint for human ears.

But now watch:

Watch as the yellow jacket flies away. Watch as the remaining bits of fly scatter in the breeze.

Then listen:

Listen as a bicycle clicks and a teenager skids to a halt in front of me. He drinks soda pop from a glass bottle. I lift myself from the bench so as to not make a sudden movement, but he chucks the bottle at me and it hits me in the arm and shatters on the ground.

#

I start lending Bob a hand with his projects. He says that if I stick around for a year I’ll know how to fix anything. He says he wants to build me a hot rod like the one he had when he was my age. He tells me “That thing got me laid.” He chooses a 66 Malibu from the far corner of the junkyard. We push it into his detached garage. “This is as much for me as it is for you,” he pants.

Has anybody ever been kind to you? It’s wonderful. I’d give anything for it to happen again.

#

Mrs. Jackson announces that she will no longer put up with this JaguarMan business. She says, “All of these strong men and not a single one willing to handle this thing. We could all go home if it was dead, or at least exist in relative peace.” She flips over the kitchen table and twists off one of the legs. She finds electric tape and wraps it around one end of the leg. The audience track goes berzerk. She rushes out the front door and nobody tries to stop her. She marches through the jungle shouting the JaguarMan’s name. She wants the JaguarMan to die and she wants to return to her old life, but when the JaguarMan pops out in front of her and roars his signature roar she throws the club and falls to her knees and she tells the JaguarMan that she is so, so sorry.

#

Grandma: “She got what she deserved.”

Bob: “Don’t go looking for trouble and trouble won’t find you.”

Grandma: “If that were me I’d make somebody else do my bidding. I’d wave my pussy until one those big strong men went after the JaguarMan for me.”

Bob: “When you look for trouble, it’s going to find you.”

#

The watercooler is gone. We are thirsty. Office manager Peter walks out of his office looking to manage us. We corner him. He flounders. We take one collective step forward. He stutters through an explanation of how the watercooler obliterates productivity. Somebody throws an empty water container at him. He tries to catch the water container and it bounces off of his chest and rolls away. He chases after the water container. We follow him down the hallway. We issue stern warnings to keep us in water or else.

#

That night, I find Bob slumped over the Malibu. The windshield is smashed. A closer inspection reveals several rocks on the floor and a gash in the back of his head. I nudge him. He does not move.

I stop going to work. I am unsure if they notice. Nobody calls me. Emails pile in my inbox.

Bob’s junkyard has cameras, so the teenagers are arrested. Bob’s niece comes to make arrangements. She puts the lot up for sale and scraps all of the cars. She even sells the trailer. She cremates Bob and leaves me the ashes. She asks me to scatter them around the junkyard.

“It’s probably what he would have wanted,” she says. “But I don’t know. I’m open to suggestions. You tell me.”

I am not going to tell her anything.

Tow trucks arrive that night. I stand on the porch cradling Bob’s ashes and watch them push the unfinished Malibu out of the garage. In the living room, Grandma is already sitting in front of the television. Tonight is the season finale of The Bunker.

“Get me some coffee before I pass out,” Grandma yells.

I place Bob’s ashes on the table and run to the kitchen and microwave instant coffee. Grandma downs the coffee and whoops: “Kick his ass! Kick his ass!”

#

The finale is filmed live. Only three contestants are left. They are gathered around a table and drinking the last of the scotch. The only weapon between them is another table leg. Mr. Kim’s groans are accompanied by the laugh track. Actors pound on the front door. “This is it,” Mr. Kim says. Laugh track. Cheers. Applause. Mr. Burke picks up the table leg. Outside: a GeckoMan, a TarantulaMan, a RhinoMan, and of course the JaguarMan. The JaguarMan beats the front door with a rubber mallet. Mr. Stoffle creeps behind Mr. Burke and yanks the table leg and exits out the back door as the AnimalMen pour in through the front. Laugh track. Cheers. Applause. The AnimalMen tackle Mr. Kim but Mr. Burke escapes. Mr. Burke catches up to Mr. Stoffle by a river. “How could you?” Mr. Burke yells. “Have you no spine?” TarantulaMan and JaguarMan, dashing through the jungle. Cheers and applause. Mr. Stoffle lunges at Mr. Burke. There is a struggle. The table leg is wrestled away and, n one swift motion, Mr. Stoffle’s head is bashed. Mr. Burke swings and swings until the leg cracks in half. AnimalMen rush out of bushes at full sprint. Slow zoom on Mr. Stoffle’s lifeless body. “Buddy,” the JaguarMan says in his regular human voice. “Put that down.” The JaguarMan steps forward and the crew emerges from the foliage. Mr. Burke charges one of them, screams, winds back what is left of the table leg.

#

The screen goes black. Scrambles. Switches to a rerun of The King of Queens. Grandma moans. She kicks Bob’s urn across the room and his ashes spill on the carpet.

“If I don’t get an explanation I’m going to freaking lose it,” she says.

She hurls her mug and it shatters against the far wall. The coffee spills over Bob’s ashes. I stare at the muddy ash pile for the entirety of The King of Queens. They use the same laugh track, it turns out. I lift the remote. I am going to turn the television off. The mug pieces rattle and spin and float into the air and form back into a perfect mug. The coffee floats back into the mug. The ashes stay put.

A translucent figure descends from the ceiling.

“Bob!” Grandma says.

This thing is not Bob. It looks like Bob. It even has a gash in the back of its head. But it is not Bob because Bob is dead. The thing that looks like Bob but is not him places the mug on the table and scoops Bob’s ashes into the urn. Grandma claps and cheers it on. The gash on the thing that looks like Bob’s head oozes and blurs and turns to static. The laugh track intensifies and something bubbles in me and all of a sudden I am clapping with Grandma. We stand up and clap some more. The thing that looks like Bob glows. We clap harder, the thing glows brighter. Yes, I finally understand. The harder we clap, the brighter it glows.

Quinn Adikes' fiction has appeared in Lit Hub, Five Points, Epiphany, Fiction International, The Southampton Review, Shenandoah, and other journals. He is the recipient of the Joseph Kelly Prize for Writing and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He lives in Brooklyn and teaches at Gotham Writers Workshop.

Are the myths of Icarus and Prometheus at last obsolete? Does Pascal’s anxiety speak only to his epoch’s ignorance compared to ours and lose every shred of meaning today?

Those are the questions being shouted—or whispered—from the rooftops, and what’s worse is that the two opposing great powers competing on this field agree at least on this point. A Marxist in breach of his oath, whom one might hope to return to the nonpartisan philosophy he is meant to teach, tells us: “The man of the 20th century becomes conscious of the planet as a finite world by leaving it behind for an infinite universe.”1  Such a statement is ambiguous, given that, from a purely external overcoming (of the spatial limits man has known up to this point), it suggests an overcoming of prior consciousness. This consciousness, as a product of a several-​millennia-old culture limited to this planet, would appear to be in dire straits. Goethe’s “more light”2 doesn’t go that far.

The exploit that is presented to us as the event of the century is in any case poisoned by the rankest propagandists. The issue of Russian-​American competition in such an area would not testify in favor of either socialism or capitalism.

The sensationalized news surprised me while I was immersed in the reading of Yves Bonnefoy’s Rimbaud par lui-​même. The questioning that followed here could not help but appear to me in another light. The speculative field into which newspapers strive to bring us doesn’t surpass that of Jules Verne and implies, in my lifetime, an appreciable regression. We can be sure that just before launch, Commander Gagarin had chosen to read Molière, which—in my view—settles nothing.

Paris, April 17, 1961.

Reyumeh Ejue is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop who is currently pontificating at the altar of Claude Simon and Luis Sagasti.

at night

The lamp in the middle of the room has two reflections

in the opposite windows of the house The scratching of a mouse

charmed within the wooden wall

A river always touches two

banks Truth doesn’t arrange itself like a cat It’s bigger

Much bigger It’s like a disease that only exists

when it incarnates someone Or like a fire whose

flame grows above the wood Or like a river, this river

is unpredictable

ariel rosé – transgender poet, essayist, illustrator, author of the books morze nocą jest mięśniem serca (PIW, 2022) (the sea at night is a muscle of the heart) nominated for the Orfeusz Award and Północ Przypowieści (North: Parables), Znak, 2019, nominated for the Polish-German Josepha Award. ariel is of Polish origin, resident of Norway, living as a nomad.

—Francisco de Assis Barbosa

Hurricanes are born in isolation

over the warm surface of the sea—

curved winds, humid air and the rotation of the earth

converging into a phenomenon transfigured from a current of energy.

From the distance of a satellite

one finds at the center of the thing,

a calmer, circular region known as the eye—clear or clouded,

open or ragged—that, like most lonely entities, is prone to pivot, to drift.

Sometimes, on its cruise, a hurricane

will encounter another of its kind: at 900

miles apart, the widening gyres are observed to orbit

around a new center, as if seized into a hypnotic swirling about an invisible core.

This is known as the Fujiwhara effect,

named after the Japanese scientist Sakuhei Fujiwhara

who, initially interested in acoustics, then turned his attention to

the order of the atmosphere—from waves to whirlpools, frequencies to tendencies.

In water tank experiments conducted

between 1921-1931 Fujiwhara discovered

that revolving systems in nature tended towards symmetry

even if that resulted from the deformation and displacement of their axes of rotation.

In maintaining a healthy distance,

and being relatively similar in stature,

the now-engaged hurricanes will maintain a cyclonical tango—white

skirts spinning over the surface of the earth—before heading their separate ways.

But in the event of a disproportion

in size or overlap, which bridges the

gap between, the likelihood of a merger or collision is significant

and potentially disastrous yet miraculous to observe: the one imbibing the other.

This potential occurrence often

provokes panic among meteorologists

as forces such as Dante, in the Philippines, or Helene, off the coast of the

United States, risk absorbing other low pressure atmospheres and waging a torrid war.

Fujiwhara noted hurricanes arise from

the tension of warm and cold currents on

both sides, the warm sector shrinking, isolated, before tunneling

upwards—the asymmetrical polar interaction activating its symmetrical circulation.

In the end, once cut off from its proximity

to the warmth, a hurricane will wither and dissipate,

or it may reinvigorate, undergoing an extratropical transition,

losing its symmetry and becoming attracted to the cold, a new kind of force.

Fujiwhara also observed the tendency

for hurricanes with the same sense of

rotation to attract, while those with the opposite repel

revealing an innate undercurrent, even in nature, to curtail the ways of the largesse.

Nirris Nagendrarajah is a writer from Toronto who writes about film, literature, opera and theatre. His work has appeared in MUBI Notebook, Little White Lies, The Film Stage, Metatron Press, Polyester, Intermission, Fete Chinoise, Ludwigvan, In the Mood Magazine and Cha: An Asian Literary Journal.

Pl ease stand by for a mess

age fro m the city of Ash e [sic] —

We anticipate valleys t ripping int

o tributaries , it w

ill be life thr

eatening [sic] before

it hes

it ates

The flood w

ill urge debris

to re loc

ate

and reloc ate , major trees w ill

lie prone, it w ill be both catastrophe and

act u al — Please

hurri [sic]

Please consider evacuating befo

re

consider before

evacuating. Consider

your ch urch es

are no t

ready. Your morn

ing w

ill open m

o re emerg

en seas [sic] , and

you r rive r [sic] ,

like you,

will be s eeking shh

elter [sic]

any whe

re

RK Fauth is the author of A Dream In Which I Am Playing with Bees, winner of the Walt MacDonald First Book Prize in Poetry and a finalist for the Audre Lorde Award. Fauth's work has been published by The POETRY Foundation, Agni Literary Magazine, The West Trade Review, The Academy of American Poets, and elsewhere.

For each question do not write more than 150 words

1. Human nature is good. Is it?

A scientist probes human nature and pulls a dirty finger out of the wet soil. To decide whether we are born naughty or nice is to delineate character before the fact. Shame on us for thinking that the civilized could only be human, while the barbaric are fizzing globs of spit on the pavement. Sermons on the following subjects: adorning fingers with rings before throwing the punches; swapping raisins for chocolate in that one cookie recipe; throwing your wedding ring into a salt lake (hint: it will not float). Oh, benevolence! Goodness should be analysed ex post facto as its implicit goal is to achieve some optimal behaviour at the longest time horizon. Now, let me posit My Goodness into my own heart, which is blushing red–as it always should be–and shaped like a shovel. Do all systems settle on a unique good at infinity? Or does the horizon of goodness only shuffle backwards with each step closer?

2. Can the eyes recognize what only the hands have known?

The fog does not affect the blind man, and hence he is able to help the poet.

The blind man builds his ship, with all its decks and sails and right angles. The poet describes the shape to its architect with all the power of a God, but does the blind man recognize his own creation when he gains sight? The hands are all touchtouchtouch and the eyes are all sharpsharpsharp. Some philosophers believe the human mind possesses the ability to visually identify objects through only a description. Our senses resist a monolithic answer. Our senses are The Fool. Memories of my mother now, telling me the story of when she first heard the world through hearing aids, and how she was surprised that the sun didn’t make a sound. Here, it might be worth remembering that experimental testing cannot account for intuition AND/OR prescience AND/OR a third eye AND/OR shaky hands due to lack of sleep or heartbreak¹. How could I look for you if I had never found you? Perhaps recognition is not in the learning, but in the knowing even in blindness, or from around the corner, which I know you are about to turn, even if I can’t see you yet.

¹Smith (2000) argues convincingly that this is not an idea we should take seriously any longer.

3. Write the history of a colour.

Writing the history of a colour, then. Writing about the qualia of seeing red when one is red colourblind. God has coined these Seers protanopic. Protanopic vision is not an absence, but rather a bending of what is present–something that exists inside and behind the eye, somewhere underneath and a little to the left. These qualia have been waiting patiently since the beginning of time to have a perceived manifestation in the “real world.” I heard through the grapevine that there are various simulators that mimic the condition of protanopia. Everyday challenges: traffic lights; taking a bite from a Honeycrisp when you thought it was a Granny Smith; slipping on something that you cannot distinguish between tears or blood unless you get up real close. If half of tasting is smelling, does half of seeing exist in feeling? When I first held a rose up close, I wondered if I was missing out on something, but then, like a quick strike, I realized that true pleasure just hadn’t been invented yet.

4. Given completely deterministic physical dynamics, can we make sense of an objective notion of chance?

Welcome home. Please, wipe your feet on the fuzzy underbelly of the Earth’s electric field. We can always rely on the truth that probability and chaotic dynamics make little sense together, but trust in the universe’s kinship with fate. Please, do not mistake me–I know that I must do justice to the use of chance-talk in connection with typical games of chance, which, in this instance, I will use synonymously with “probability.” Nothing is predictable, except the path straight to the front door of your old house (don’t look at me like that–you know I can’t help myself). My desire to seek an objective response to chance can be persuaded. Let me propose a unique example of a deterministic system and allow you to come to your own conclusion: if my heart is in working order (that is, my hand is in your hand, the wires connected, etc.) and you turn to say goodbye, then I will collapse to the floor.

5. Can we think about, or talk about, everything that exists?

For this question, use your best judgment to select ONE (1) of the following answers:

1. Existence itself is a property.

2. The cruelest things are always shallow where they should be deep.

END OF PAPER.

DO NOT WRITE ON THIS PAGE.

Kalliste is a writer based in Berlin. Her work has been published in Honi Soit, Voiceworks, miniMAG, and more. She is currently enrolled in a Master of English Studies at Freie Universität, and is writing her first collection of short fiction.

Unhindered, branching far in reach,

Below whose timeless shrouded sight

Lie rolling waves with crushing might.

Two talons tapping in the sand,

The gaze affixed upon the land,

A crow with pearly marble eyes

Descends from grey and swirling skies.

Where surf and fume besiege the shore,

And crashing waves let thunder roar,

It knows, the coming flood, alas,

Means nothing to the hourglass.

And for some time the bird remains—

Unstaggered by the shifting plains;

In drifting dance, yet all the while

Itself a black and watchful isle.

Like fashioned from a matching kind,

They both contain a kindred mind,

And like a feathered ancient guide

Convene the raven and the tide.

And once eternity has passed,

And all the seas lie bare at last,

And when the stars have ceased to burn,

Just then, the raven may return.

Pebbleton is an aspiring young poet from Germany, currently 18 years old and in his final year of education. He began writing in early 2024, drawing his greatest inspiration from traditional Romanticism, particularly the works of Edgar Allan Poe.

He was polite, at least. Greeted us with a pleasant evening. Joked about how dark it was in our cramped, rickety shanty in Manila, steaming even after sunset.

My parents laughed; I didn’t.

My father led him to the window in his bedroom. From there, the jumper clambered out, pliers, flashlight, and electrical tapes in hand, then stomped across our tin roof toward the nearest utility post. He rattled and tinkered with the cables, a tug-of-war that showered us with dust and cobwebs from the ceiling, until the lights finally came back on.

The fridge hummed back to life. The TV blared about the costs of living. The fan in the room I shared with my sisters started whirring.

It made my skin crawl; I was repulsed by its cool caresses.

My parents were so delighted that they gave the jumper twenty more pesos than they were supposed to. They even apologized, knowing he used to earn much more when he was still a law-abiding electrician.

“It’s just for a few nights,” my father assured us afterwards. “Until I get my salary to pay our reconnection fee.”

My sisters nodded, then immediately proceeded to fight over our long-missed electric fan.

Not me. I spent those few nights in the farthest, dustiest corners of our room, disgusted, not wanting any of that refreshing, immoral breeze.

I didn’t see that jumper again until years later, when I was on my way home from university.

I was drained from the two hour commute. My legs could barely navigate through the narrow alleys of our compound, which were always clogged with gossiping bystanders and smoky barbecue stands. Kids battled with Beyblades in one corner and teens played basketball in another, all while merrymakers chugged beers out in the open—chaos in the slums, as usual.

Adding to all that was a frantic shout up ahead, inflected with chilling urgency: “POLICE!”

Everyone backed away from the middle of the street to avoid getting run over. There was a spontaneous shoving competition; I lost badly, my right foot plunging into a street gutter.

Then I saw the neighborhood jumper scampering past, his face contorted with panic and desperation. A pair of cops were in hot pursuit.

I continued limping on after they passed, my shoes grimy with muck and embarrassment. Around the corner, I saw the electrical pole where all the commotion had started. The jumper’s tools were scattered around it.

Suddenly, I was nine years old again, wincing at a convenience I knew was criminal. I eyed his belongings with disdain, thankful I was on a path to be making video games or phone apps by the time I reached his age.

My stinking leg didn’t seem like such a big deal anymore. I was smirking like a goat, tickled by the thought of the jumper’s terrified face.

The third time I saw him, he was in a coffin.

To my surprise, his dilapidated shack was quite crowded. I didn’t expect his wake to be so well attended. I supposed that many of the guests were clients for whom he’d stolen electricity. Even more mourners were seated around the tables outside the house—mahjong or Tong-its enthusiasts gambling their donations, supposedly so that they could contribute much more later.

My parents slid a few fifty-peso bills into a jar labeled with the deceased’s name. It was already full.

I didn’t give anything.

Not that I had anything to give; I’d been laid off two months prior and forced to move back to my parents’ house, three hours away from the dream apartment I could no longer afford.

“That’s all right,” my father said as we queued up to glimpse the casket. I knew he was referring to my inability to donate for the funeral, but his tone reminded me of when I asked them if I could have my old room back.

“By the way, if you don’t have any job interviews tomorrow, I have a friend who needs someone to fix his computer. Five hundred pesos.”

I sighed, fighting the urge to clarify, for the thousandth time, what software developers actually did. “Do you ask a chef to raise pigs?” I was itching to quip.

But he was right; I didn’t have anything on my plate the next day, or the day after, or the following week. Sending out resumes and applications had begun to feel like a desperate game I would never win.

The fix would be a simple Google search anyway, I was sure. And while five hundred pesos wouldn’t have salvaged the dream of my own apartment, it was still five hundred pesos I didn’t have. I might even get a bonus, like the one the jumper got from my parents long ago.

Soon it was my turn to look into the coffin. The jumper had been withered by the years. His hair was almost entirely gray, his face engraved with countless wrinkles. Burns and scars pockmarked his skin from all the live wires he’d worked with. Despite all that, I saw no trace of the immorality and disgust that I’d come to associate with his face.

Instead, I felt tiny shocks of guilt bolting through me. The feeling only grew pricklier as I touched his casket.

Arvee Fantilagan grew up in the Philippines and lives in Japan. He hopes to write a better bio someday.

respiration heavy with mold & soaked leaves; it floods the wynds, drowns the gutters, laps at doorstep with sly grin; we loll inside, gazing at the glass sweat; roof stammers above us

tin against thunder, thunder against tin; she lights candles from emergency stash

those stubby ones that reek of antediluvian wax & forsaken nights

her hands shiver, true-blue; my hands true-blue, shiver

there’s a ravenousness in the habagat & a hush in our room

i adore her shadow stretching across the wall—long-necked, bending, folding

i behold bucketing gnaw at the streets like a hound with a bone

everything inside cinches, clenches, releases & clenches

we voice in half-sentences, ‘power will go soon;’ ‘let it;’ ‘you always vocalize that’

‘because it’s veracious’

the rain thickens; it doesn’t drift, it hurls; roof is a drum; our hearts its echo

her face flickers with candlelight; mouth pursed like a laceration refusing to bleed

i wonder if we’re the cyclone outside or the stillness inside; or both

i reminisce the river rising last year, how it engulfed fields & yanked trees like broken incisors; i reminisce her hands gripping mine; how it forecasted everything & nothing at once

safety isn’t soft; safety is razored, sudden & brutal

tonight, typhoon glares like a lover scorned; windows buckle; walls breathe

we devour from chipped glasses, warm water savouring like iron

she guffaws at nothing, or maybe at everything, ‘tomorrow, roof will leak again’

‘it already is;’ i glance the drip-drip-drip near the kitchen, steady as heartache

she watches me watch it; everything here loops; the tempest outside turns into tempest inside

the flicker morphs into flame; the fear evolves into familiarity; the wet transpires into warmth

we’re drenched in this current of not-quite-amore, not-quite-hate

we’re storm watchers; not fighters; not survivors; just watchers

we let it in; we let it pass; we let it lounge & then storm erupts

i can’t verbalize if it’s outside anymore or just inside me

Hannan Khan — a nefelibata, poet, and scholar of literature & linguistics from Pakistan. He combs through moments of love, death, delirium & relational complexities, seraphically tracing what’s breathed and what flickers unbreathed.

She was usually consistent about her online presence. When she left London for Kyiv in February, at the beginning of the full-scale invasion, her posting only increased. She documented her every step and emotion, sharing photos of her journey. A coffee in a Pret paper cup at the airport while catching a flight to Poland. The bare bones of Kyiv in winter. Rows of Czech hedgehogs blocking the streets. She wrote public posts about how scared she was when the Russian troops were trying to encircle Kyiv, how she never regretted her decision to return.

I followed her updates like a hungry dog. By that time, I had lost all contact with my former life in Ukraine, with my old schoolmates and friends. I didn’t talk to my parents very often either, visiting them for Christmas and briefly in summer, and thus the tapestry of our connection had become threadbare. When Lesya suddenly went back, her posts became a window into the world that she and I had left so many years ago.

I checked her posts and stories daily, until it became a habit. I was stunned by her abrupt decision to return after years of living abroad and curious about the effects of that decision on her life. I also wanted to make sure that she was alive. If she posted something at least once a day, I knew she had survived another airstrike.

I started to work up the courage to try to contact her for the first time since she left the UK.

My chest tightened when I thought that she might not want to speak to me, the one who’d chosen to stay in the safety of London. Or that she wouldn’t have time for me, busy as she was with work and survival. I wasn’t even sure in what language she would respond—in Russian, which had been our mother tongue, or Ukrainian, which she now used on social media. I messaged her anyway.

Lesya replied, in Russian, which made me hope that at least one part of our friendship—the language in which it spoke—remained, so far, intact.

We arranged a Skype call and as she told me stories of her new life. I collected them like rare butterflies. She told me what it was like to joke with strangers while sheltering in a metro station at the time of an air-raid. What it was like to sleep in a bathtub. Or walk along the cobbled streets of the city center, knowing that any minute they might not exist.

Lesya was charged with energy, like an electric wire, and I wanted to be a part of that current. Listening to her, I felt like she was living her life to the fullest, while my own life, in comparison, seemed more like a feeble attempt.

Over the next two months, we chatted whenever she could. On top of that, she posted diligently online. Then she stopped.

My immediate thought was that she had been banned from social media for sharing something war-related. Her disappearance came right after the territory around Kyiv had been liberated from Russian troops. The news of the troops’ atrocities had spread all over the Web—photos of muddy streets and dank basements, burnt-out vehicles and ruined buildings. Then there was Mariupol, razed to the ground every day, providing more grisly content for the news mill. Facebook was diligently deleting any related posts with graphic content, as well as routinely shadow banning and blocking Ukrainian accounts for sharing them.

Not terribly concerned, I dropped her a message —“How are you?”—to which she didn’t reply.

Throughout the next two days I kept checking my messenger app to see if Lesya had read my note, waiting for the speck of green by her name to light up. I sent similar messages through WhatsApp, Viber, and Telegram. There was not a breath of activity.

If she were up to something, I thought, she would have told me. I had been her best friend since we were schoolkids, after all, and if she had disappeared like that, without notice, it was not of her free will. In that case, I had to do something.

I contacted Lesya’s parents, who, I knew, weren’t happy about her departure from England. They were in Ukraine—not in Kyiv, where Lesya lived, but in Zaporizhzhia, our hometown in the southeast. It was her mother, Aunt Natasha, who I called.

I swallowed nervously while I waited on the line, feeling like a small child. Aunt Natasha always sounded and looked tired, as if her whole essence, from her cheeks to her soul, was sagging under the burden of life. When she answered me, it was in her familiar soft voice. She said that no, they didn’t know anything about Lesya, they hadn’t been talking much with her since she came back.

Aunt Natasha wanted to contact the police immediately, but I said that I would message a few of Lesya’s friends first.

One person in particular occupied the top of my list: an older woman called Anna, who sported a masculine haircut and intimidated me. She had appeared in many of Lesya’s photos recently and, as I understood it, they had become close friends through volunteering in Kyiv. I wrote to her and then left a comment under one of her posts, asking her to check her DMs.

Anna saw my message almost immediately but took her time to reply, as if there was nothing urgent about the matter.

She’s gone with a group of journalists south, towards Mariupol, she wrote back. It was some days ago.

Apparently, Lesya had sent messages to Anna after her departure, but they hadn’t talked in the last few days, a fact to which Anna didn’t attribute great importance. The news made me sick. Mariupol was hell. There were countless stories and photos circulating of its buildings hollowed out by artillery blasts, corpses lying unburied in the mud, people collecting water from puddles, huddling in basements or attempting to escape under the constant barrage from the Russian artillery. Everything in me went sludgy with fear.

I wouldn’t get super worried, Anna typed into my silence. She won’t go too close to the front line with those she’s with. They are meeting evacuees from the area for interviews. Maybe she’s busy. Maybe a bad connection. Things happen, you know how it is.

I didn’t really know how it was, but I knew that it wasn’t good to be anywhere near the front line. Looking through the news reports, I made quick calculations: evacuees from Mariupol would probably make their way through the occupied territories of Zaporizhzhia Oblast, from where they might head to Zaporizhzhia itself. Lesya could be there, I thought, maybe even in our hometown, waiting to interview them. I wondered why she hadn’t contacted her parents if she was in the area.

Despite Lesya’s dangerous destination, Anna’s messages were reassuring. At least someone knew what Lesya was up to. At least I knew where to look, if need be. But gradually, poisonous thoughts slithered into my mind: it wasn’t me who knew Lesya’s plans, it wasn’t me she’d confided in. I pushed these thoughts away. I waited for a day, two. To my shame, I even dug out a deck of Tarot cards, still smooth and shiny, unused since a divination session that I had held with Lesya the last time she visited me. My husband and I had been at each other’s throats over our vacation destination, and Lesya read the cards for me. “There will be obstacles in your way,” she said. “Must be Simon’s stubbornness,” I laughed. But it was the war that put an end to our vacation. Now, to staunch my worry, I took the cards out of their sleeve and, following the instructions on the leaflet, spread them on my desk to ask them about Lesya. The cards that kept coming weren’t reassuring, even to my unpracticed eye: Moon, Hanged Man, Death. When I looked at them, all I saw was a desolate moonlit landscape, a wide Ukrainian steppe dotted with ruined buildings, silent except for the howling and squabbling of stray dogs, former pets, who were dragging Lesya’s corpse across the muddy ground.

I considered calling the police, or volunteers, or the government—anyone in a position to know what to do. I had already started combing the Web for any useful information when I received a new message from Anna: Lesya had contacted her through another person’s number, saying that she and the journalists were fine, that she had lost her phone. They were driving to Kyiv. I sighed with relief, my shoulders sagging. But I wanted to get an update from Lesya herself.

I received a message from her the next day. Although reassuring, it didn’t satisfy my curiosity, simply reiterating what I had already known: she was fine, she had lost her phone. Yes, we could talk properly, with a video, in a few days, she wrote. Once she got her bearings.

On the day of our video chat, not willing to risk a missed call, I sat at my desk and switched on the computer long before the agreed time. I browsed, checked emails, but my eyes kept straying to a photo of Lesya that I’d pinned to the wall in front of the desk after she had left London. It was a photo I’d taken myself, with a cheap film camera, when we were teenagers vacationing in Crimea, without our parents for the first time, many years before the war in Ukraine. In the picture, Lesya was standing in the shade of pine trees, the sea spread out far below, shimmering, beckoning. As I looked at the image, I could almost hear cicadas buzzing in that oppressive midday heat, could almost smell the dust of the beaten mountain path and the tang of tree resin, could almost taste the salty sweat on my upper lip. Lesya was wearing a frothy summer dress and there was a wide-brimmed straw hat in her hand. The mass of her dark hair was even more unruly than usual because of the humidity of the seaside. She was smiling—with her lips, cheeks, eyes.

It had been many years since we’d been to the peninsula. The pine trees and the sea in the photo looked somehow foreign, and the terrain of Lesya’s soul, too, had changed. Her eyes had always sparkled with the easygoing joy of someone who was in the habit of being loved. But now, the light in her eyes had dimmed, as if shining up from the bottom of a pond. She’d become quieter too, in an assured way, and now commanded a different kind of presence—sometimes biting, sometimes cool, detached, but always tinged with shadows.

Lesya’s call came right on time, but the Internet connection was poor. It dragged and stumbled. Whenever we managed to connect, the image was non-existent. All I could hear was a distortion of her voice: vowels pixelated and stretched out, like the sound of a mechanical creature slowly dying. When, finally, the black screen relented, I could see her perfectly, as if she was sitting in the same room with me. The illusion of her presence was broken only by the room itself. She was in the bathroom. The wall behind her was tiled white, the color of the sea foam she liked so much. She was reclining against the rim of a bathtub that had been padded with a white fluffy towel. Beside her, a white shower curtain hung in heavy, opaque folds.

“It’s cozier than the cellar,” she said in reference to the basement of her block of flats, which was ill-fitted to be a bomb shelter. “Besides, I can’t be bothered to go into the corridor every time the air raid alarm goes off.”

I barely paid attention to her words. In the merciless white light of the bathroom, her face was all sharp corners. And her hair—it was no more. Instead of her unruly dark locks, there was the bareness of her scalp, albeit perfectly shaped, shadowed with dark not-yet-fuzz. Her pale face looked naked and somehow pure without the usual defenses of her hair. Ethereal. Her dark eyes seemed huge, and her thick eyebrows were smudges of black. Her bloodless face almost merged with the white tiles, the towel, the curtain. There was no dark hair to give it an outline anymore, to draw it out like a charcoal drawing on paper. She looked like a wraith.

I had an urge to slap her then—to bring the color out, to make her come alive. But at the same time I wanted to cover her up, as if she were a baby exposed in a snowdrift. My heart dropped. We fell silent.

“What happened?” I finally asked.

“I’ve lost my phone, so it’ll be a computer for a while now,” she said with an apologetic smile, nodding at the laptop screen in front of her.

“No, I mean, what happened to you? To your hair?”

“Nothing,” she said, biting the knuckle of her thumb. “I shaved it.”

I didn’t know whether to believe her or not.

“What for? Are you G.I. Jane or what?” I blurted out, then cringed at my own words.

She just shrugged. In the background, I could hear the sirens wailing, and I thought that she would disconnect and not talk to me anymore.

“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean it that way. But you are not joining the army, are you? Nothing’s wrong with joining the army, it’s just…”

She shook her head as if trying to chase off a fly, then looked away, listening to something outside (sirens, I imagined).

“You don’t have to shave your hair off in the army, dumbo,” she said and smiled again. “It’s not a movie.”

Then she told me how it happened.

First, she had cut her hair off with scissors, bit by bit, until it stuck out in clumps—long, short, shorter. It even made her laugh, she said, the way it stood out—“like a hedgehog.” Then she shaved off the rest with a disposable razor which she’d procured downstairs, at a small grocery shop that was open despite the threat of shelling.

It must have been hard to cut through that thick mass of hair with a pair of household scissors. Was it even possible? Her hair used to be so thick. And that cheap razor must have left cuts. I couldn’t even shave my legs without nicking myself. I imagined her struggling to reach the back of her head, blood trickling down her neck, dripping from her earlobes onto the white bathroom tiles.

She said it was okay; the kind of life people led in the ruins of Mariupol was hard. And this was just hair. She made a scissor motion with her index and middle fingers.

That made me so angry.

“They do it to our people to humiliate them. And you are doing it to yourself. How could you?”

She just looked away, straining to hear the sounds outside—sirens, sounds of shelling. Without her hair, she looked like a creature from a fantastical forest, alert and sad, as if she’d seen too much.

When Lesya turned back toward the screen, her mouth was set, her gaze defiant. A hair salon had reopened in the neighborhood, she told me, and they had taken over the job of maintaining her new “look.” She even made a couple of friends there, she said, getting more excited as she talked: women participating in all kinds of initiatives to better the country, joining the war effort in all kinds of ways.

“Ukraine’s not the same as it was when we left,” Lesya said.

I wanted to say something sarcastic, but she looked so inspired that I just nodded stupidly and said,“That’s nice.”

Lesya told me she was comfortable without her hair, but during our video chats, I could see her occasionally touching her scalp, absentmindedly, as if she was trying to dig her fingers into the nonexistent mass of her hair. That gesture paralyzed me.

For as long as I knew her, Lesya wore her hair long. It gleamed like silk, dark and mysterious, and not a boy at our school could resist touching it, covertly, and falling in love with her. Not even girls could resist Lesya’s charm. They might have envied her, but they always chose to be her friend, as if Lesya’s glow could rub off on them and bring them luck.

Once, when we still lived in Zaporizhzhia, I visited Lesya’s place in the morning. She called me into the bathroom, so that she could continue with her hair routine. Perched on the rim of the bathtub, I talked about Indiana Jones and Star Wars while she occupied herself with her hair. She shampooed and rinsed it twice, then gave it another rinse with an infusion of various medicinal plants: chamomile, dock, and nettles. Their bitter, vegetal smells wafted on the humid air, enveloping us in their warmth. Then she applied some kind of slippery mask all over her head and wrapped a towel around it, all the while asking me questions about the stories that I had been telling her: How did the chalice look? Did they save the girl?

I led her through each and every twist of the plot, imagining myself to be an entertainer in the court of the Oriental princess, maybe somewhere in exotic Crimea (the only vaguely exotic place I’d visited), because that towel and her regal manner made her look like one, until her mom called out,“Come on, Roksolana,” referring to the famous Ukrainian peasant girl who became first a slave and then a queen in the Ottoman Empire. “I need to do the laundry.”

We retreated to Lesya’s room, where she combed through her hair, slowly, almost sensuously, before applying oil to the tips.

Now, sitting in her bathroom shelter, Lesya sounded flippant about her hair, cruel even, as if her long-hoarded treasure was just some nuisance to be disposed of. Her baby face was gone, too: her once-plump cheeks had disappeared. Her cheekbones had sharpened, and dark circles had formed under her eyes.

“You shouldn’t have returned,” I said.

She just shrugged.

Back in winter, when the Russian troops positioned themselves on the Ukrainian border, ready to attack, the government exuded confidence, calling on people to remain calm and stay put. Lesya didn’t believe them. A friend of hers in the army had messaged her with a warning that the all-out war was going to start without question, that she should get her parents out of the country as soon as she could. It was a matter of days. She trusted the information and bought a one-way ticket to Kyiv instead.

“I want to be home when it starts,” she messaged me on the way to the airport. By home, she didn’t mean her parents’ flat in Zaporizhzhia—she meant Ukraine.

We didn’t have time to meet before her departure, and I was left with so many questions.

The word “home,” for starters, sounded weird in my ears. She had never referred to Ukraine like that before. She’d always said that the country felt foreign to her, that she felt like a stranger there, born to it by accident. On top of that, she had spent so much effort to obtain a proper UK visa that I couldn’t fathom why she’d left everything for some kind of a vague concept of home, especially when, as I knew her, she wouldn’t have given a fiver for Ukraine.

Her flight to Kyiv was canceled. The invasion had indeed commenced, stopping all civilian planes from entering the Ukrainian airspace. I thought that that would be the end of the whole thing, that she would stay in London and carry on with her life, arrange for her parents to get out of Ukraine and send some money to volunteers to ease her conscience. But she persisted.

Somehow, she managed to get a last-minute ticket for a flight to Poland, from where she made her way to Kyiv by land. Ukraine was being attacked by Russian troops from the north, east, and south and the roads leading west were choked with evacuees. She fought her way toward the capital, past the columns of cars streaming out of the city, making detours to avoid the Russian troops that were trying to encircle the capital.

Throughout the whole journey, she posted relentlessly. In the selfies, her face looked gaunt, her eyes red—either from tiredness or crying, or both. Then a photo appeared in which she was making Molotov cocktails. Getting that neighborly spirit going, she wrote in the comments. Apparently, residents of her building gathered together to help the Territorial Defense by making the incendiaries. In the photo, she crouched over a row of empty wine bottles and a heap of torn cloth fuses, her face turned towards the camera—it was pale and framed perfectly by that dark hair of hers. She’d braided it, arranged it in a wreath around her head, and studded it with artificial poppy flowers, blood red. A Ukrainian Valkyrie. Despite her smile, her eyes were sad, as if anticipating a darker future.

Then the territories around Kyiv were liberated. The photos and videos poured in. We were all shocked back then, as if hit with a club over our heads. That day, when I messaged her, she wrote that just thinking about what they had done made her feel sick, that she couldn’t watch the coverage, that she didn’t want to violate the dead with her curiosity. As if more violation was even possible.

“All those reporters—swarming like buzzards, looking for dead flesh. It’s fucked up,” she said.

She didn’t call the crimes committed there by their true names: rapes, killings, tortures. When she referred to them, it was always the things they’ve done. She cordoned the topic off with the barbed wire of her silence and, slowly, it became forbidden territory in our conversations.

I thought that the news of atrocities would be the last straw, that she would return to London, having had enough of the war. Instead, she went toward the front line to interview the refugees. The next time we saw each other, her dark tresses were gone. Whenever she called me on Skype and her image popped up on my computer, I couldn’t help thinking that there were two Lesyas looking at me—one from the seaside photo on the wall, the other from the screen. Both of them were strangers.

I stopped asking her questions. I listened, I watched. She shared a kernel or two of her feelings and her thoughts, and I learned to be grateful for it.

“Sometimes, I don’t remember how or what I was before,” Lesya said quietly one day. “It’s like I’ve been reborn.”

She did look alien. In my mind’s eye, I kept seeing her head still bloody from that first shaving, with clumps of black hair stuck to it, like a baby’s head emerging from a womb. My eyes started to sting. I blinked the tears back and swallowed.

“I miss your hair,” I said.

She just smiled.

I couldn’t resist that beatific face of hers, that Mona Lisa smile. Her face was stunning despite (or maybe because of) all that she was going through. It felt perverse to admire her look of suffering (was she really suffering?). But I took a screenshot of her at that moment all the same. After we finished the call, I printed out the image and cut my own face out of it, so that only she remained.

Olga Kovalenko is an exophonic writer from Ukraine, currently based in London, England.
BA, MA in Germanic philology, literary translation, and American literature.

Two Complete Half Sonnets #7

The quarterback needs to learn how to throw

the football with his big sun bear paws. his

coach gives him drills to practice on his own

before practice. the quarterback practices

well then goes to practice. at practice there

are many large defensive lineman sun bears

trying to chase him down. the quarterback

hurts his arm. the doctor runs onto the field.

the doctor practices medicine.

All the sun bears are working hard and trying their best. does that make you feel

better. the doctor sun bear went to school for a very long time and has the internet

for when he forgets the half life of drug compounds. while one sun bear monitors

the heart rate of the sleeping sun bear on the o.r. table the doctor sun bear hands

the scalpel to his fellow. right now it doesn’t matter which sun bear had other dreams.

Two Complete Half Sonnets #8.5

The quarterback dreams of open fields,
but his dreams glitch—cutscenes of claws
gripping leather, the linemen larger than rules.
In the locker room, they say Be a Leader.
In the film room, they say Trust your reads.
The quarterback studies angles, practices silence.
He listens to the coach’s voice inside the headset.
The voice says the play is broken. Run.

Outside the stadium, a sun bear sells churros
from a metal cart. He’s saving up for classes
at the community college. He wants to be a vet.
Not for bears. For cats. Small ones. One day
he will explain the difference between hurt
and injured. But for now: cinnamon sugar, steam.

Two Complete Half Sonnets #9.5

The sun bear kicker arrives late to practice.
He forgot his cleats. He borrows a pair
from the equipment shed. They are too tight.
He nails a 52-yarder and limps off the field.
Someone claps. The coach mutters Something about grit.
The kicker smiles, swallows the pain. Later,
he ices his paw in the team sink. The faucet leaks.
He doesn’t say anything. He wants to start.

A maintenance sun bear fixes the faucet.
He used to play tailback. Tore his acl
during a scrimmage. Now he carries a wrench,
not a ball. Says This leak is not personal.
Says You gotta fix what you can fix.
And tightens the pipe until the water stops.

Sean Cho A. is a writer living in the southern united states.

When you moved abroad, your mother distributed your possessions haphazardly throughout boxes marked with your initials. Your mother asks what you want to do with them. It’s your dowry, she jokes. You take your dowry straight to the skip.

—

The new downstairs neighbor is an asshole.

You had just returned from walking the dog when Dog (which is the dog’s name) darted nose-first through the grass of the communal garden, The downstairs neighbor did as anyone would do: yelled from the balcony that if he saw any shit smeared through the gardenias, he would democratically elect you out of the building. Greeks will never let you forget they invented democracy.

Also, his massive baby wont stop crying.

So you complete 400 star jumps from your brother’s bedroom, which you think probably maps onto the nursery.

—

You take to the suburban streets of Athens to dispose of your old belongings. There is something ceremonial about it. You don’t feel attachment to all this debris, or to the version of yourself that felt compelled to collect fifteen defunct Nokia phones, but you wonder whether it’s sacrilegious to disturb the goods, which remained entombed for several years.

On your doorstep, you run into the twins, Atalanti and Fotini, clad in matching jogging attire. No one stays hidden for long in Athens.

It’s been almost a decade since you last spoke, but they’ve been around, peripherally; at parties, in your classes.

These are people you care little to see, but coincidence frames the reunion as joyful, as though they’ve materialized through sheer providence.

You recall how they defaced your childhood bedroom during your fifth birthday party. You remember sobbing and bellowing so hard and for so long you began to ululate, inviting concerned and slightly disdainful glances from the other parents. You resent the fact that you are still resentful of five year-olds, two decades later.

Are you back for good now? one of them asks.

Sort of, you respond.

Didn’t you have a job? asks the other, you think.

You haven’t rehearsed your response, so you just smile and say, Long story. Actually, that’s not what you say. What you really say is, I quit last week.

That’s also a lie. You tell them you were Laid Off, and laugh to mitigate unease, mainly your own.

They tell you you’re better off here, that South London is basically the ghetto. They effuse and effervesce in unison.

Everyone’s at Sabar tonight. You’ll come, eh?

—

That evening, as you return from walking Dog, the neighbor awaits in ambush by the apartment building entrance.

You need to stop slamming the door every morning—he begins to say.

Mummy said I shouldn’t speak to strange men, you interject.

Dog tail-wags in celebration, as though pleased with the outcome of the interaction, as though the appendage doesn’t just oscillate incessantly, with little incitement.

—

As you set off for Sabar, you brace yourself to extract the car from its narrow parking space. Until now, you had avoided this exercise by grace of your wit (and by bribing your brother to ferry you around).

You aren’t an awful driver. You got your licence without resorting to inducements (you had forgotten the standard €100 you were meant to slip the examiner, and he let you pass anyways, though he made it very clear you should not have).

If only you were as adept as you were intrepid.

You manage to connect—not collide—the car with a Toyota, which was jutting out obnoxiously. The act of detaching the cars requires resolve, doggedness, balls; you reverse resolutely against the caterwauling protests of the automotive pair. You inspect your handiwork. It’s bad.

—

At Sabar, someone strums at a baglama, competing for attention against a debate on the ethics of war journalism and the merits of going dark, as in, “offline.”

You’re seated amidst familiar faces: the one who cosplays a member of the Soviet cadre, with his goatee and wiry frames; the one who identifies as “culturally queer” on account of having dressed in drag for Pride once, thus positioning himself to be hate-crimed (though he was not—is that a prerequisite condition for validating his experience as queer-adjacent?); the one who is a militant leftist, though you were invited onto his yacht once. He distances himself from his nautical estate by impressing on everyone that it belongs to his father, a Member of Parliament representing the Communist Party.

You are asked by Trotsky, the ouzo socialist, and Peter Arnett what brings you back to Athens.

Until now, any interest they had taken in you had been incidental.

The homily around the virtues of going incognito (on Instagram) has devolved into discourse around The Decline of European Democracy, reducing the live rebetiko music to a tinny peal.

You’re offered to be put in touch with a family friend in your field. You’re asked whether you’re dating anyone. You’re asked what happened to the guy in your pictures. You’re asked whether you left because of the breakup, or whether you broke up because you left. You’re offered to be set up with a single guy around our age—oh wait, you already know him. You didn’t like him? You’re asked about the girls in your Instagram pictures—they’re pretty hot. You’re asked why you cut your hair off. You’re asked whether you’re still in touch with Nick—no, not that Nick. No, not that one either. You’re told you looked better with long hair. You’re told you look much healthier now—you were scary skinny before. A relationship is the best diet, you don’t have to worry about what they think. You’re asked—

You preferred it when you weren’t being asked anything at all.

You know in time you’ll become accustomed to this lifestyle. Drinking biweekly with these people, running into old teachers at the grocery store—bearing, no doubt, a similar litany of questions—and chewing through answers that never sound convincing to them or to yourself, even. The thought makes you nauseous, and everything turns lurid.

You rise. You grab the carafe of rakomelo from across the table and down it theatrically, down to the final dredges, letting the rivulets travel down your chin, down your shirt, staining it a dilute, watery red. You vomit immediately, everywhere, where you stand.

—

You are later informed that the victimized Toyota belongs to the downstairs neighbor. You feel some satisfaction for your hand in the deliverance of karmic retribution.

—

You are walking Dog when the Paliatzis rattles by in his roving flea market. You wave him down to inspect his wares. For the most part, it’s crap—an accumulation of suburban discharge and effluvia. Broken watches, a child’s chair adorned in marker, fifteen defunct Nokias.

Fonie Mitsopoulou is a London-based journalist and writer. She has worked for POLITICO and City AM, before going freelance. She was also on the editorial team at Penguin Press.

into the fruit and wings

evanesce in the labor. Gives

birth and dies, absorbed. Easy to

grasp so far, it’s the metaphor of my

hometown palpable as low

hanging fruit. Kids copulate how

ever insects do, new winged

and sticky, bleary

eyed, I reckon, in pitch

dark flesh. Brothers bore

holes to the outer world while the sky’s

dozen pinpoints beam as they

die tunneling. Sisters devour

them in pregnant flight, fig

fattening behind them, belly’s stiff

rivulets browning into skin wizened

from the branch. Does

it remember gore

breezing through leaf

strewn ground or into a fist on

its way to my lips, back

molars and tongue?

Mischelle Anthony’s work has appeared lately in Autofocus, Naugatuck River Review, The North (UK), Cimarron Review, and Little Patuxent Review, and in her chapbook, [Line] (Foothills Press). She grew up in Oklahoma and lives in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

She was a new arrival at the Sakura Guest House. The house was in a wealthy neighborhood of Tokyo, close to Yoyogi Park, where it stood out for being large and shabby and hosting a large contingent of foreigners. The narrow space between the building and the gate was dotted with cigarette butts, and spidery vines clung to an ambiguously off-white exterior. The surrounding houses were small and architecturally distinct, with well-tended gardens and seldom-seen inhabitants. She liked to walk down the pretzeled streets and look at the different homes, imagining the occupants engaged in a slow-motion facsimile of real life.

A variety of people stayed at the Sakura Guest House. On her floor was Uzair, a refugee from Afghanistan; Aldo, an engineering student from Brazil; Emilia from Chile on a working holiday; and Ren, a half-Japanese model from France.

During the day, Ren hung out with other models and posted pictures on Instagram of them walking around Tokyo, their tall, thin bodies taking up the entire verticality of the screen. She watched the Instagram stories alone from her bed. At the guest house in the evenings, he was lonely and homesick. She would lounge around his room while he played Aphex Twin from his laptop speakers and talked about France. Sometimes, even Aphex Twin was too intense, so he played progressively more ambient music until all she could hear was white noise. She liked when they reached the white noise stage of the evening. Everything that used to have a coherent shape fell apart—the table wasn’t a table, it was just white noise. Her dinner wasn’t food, it was just white noise. She felt a few grains of rice fall from her lips. Her mouth was slack. It was just white noise.

Before coming to Tokyo, she’d broken up with her boyfriend. While moving out of their shared apartment, her vision obscured by grief and rage and the boxes she was carrying, she’d been sideswiped by an Amazon delivery van. Though essentially uninjured, the resulting settlement of $8,000 had inspired her to quit her job designing marketing emails for a direct-to-consumer seltzer company and spend some time traveling. On the phone at the airport, her former boyfriend told her she should have asked for more in the settlement, and that if they had still been together he would have advised her to do so. She knew her inability to ask for more in the settlement was emblematic of the very problems she had suffered from in her relationship, and she resented being lectured on it by her ex-boyfriend.

To distract herself from the breakup, she downloaded Tinder and discovered that it was common in Tokyo not to include pictures of your face, but instead to use images of flawless desserts, landscapes, and cute illustrations. She didn’t have access to the more serious dating apps run by the Japanese government in order to increase the birthrate.

She went on a date with Haru because the blurry photo he uploaded seemed to suggest a party, or an otherwise good time. Since she was American, he took her out to a hamburger place. The hamburger was really good, better than any she’d had in America, but juicy, with a lot of toppings, and she was afraid to put it down for fear it would be too messy to pick back up again. She determined the only option was to eat the whole burger in one go, bite by bite. Haru expressed amazement at how much and how quickly she was able to eat.

Haru was cool. He worked at a boutique clothing store and DJed on the weekends. He’d previously dated a Ukrainian actress. He only owned one book, but it was a massive art book of the Tate, as big as at least three regular-sized books. Each shoe he owned was the coolest in its category of shoe. Afterward, he walked her to the train and smiled at her widely as they said goodbye. She was unsure how to read this, of whether he had wanted to kiss her. She messaged him that she’d had a nice time, to preclude any confusion on his part, and received a grinning “sticker” in response. On the train home, she thought of his entryway, lined with his carefully chosen pairs of shoes, and felt a needle of loneliness. The train pulled out of and into the station while time compressed and expanded like a slinky.

In the morning, she had coffee with Uzair in the guest house kitchen, and he shared with her some dried fruit he’d bought in Okubo. Neither of them were doing anything else that day, so they walked to Yoyogi Park. It was windy, and the trees reached their branches to the sky with long, begging arms. They watched a teenage boy about a hundred yards away practice a gymnastics routine. He practiced it again, and again, and again, and again, and again.

Magdalene Kennedy is a writer and animator living in New York City.

In deep night I shine a light to see water rise

to her chin. By bucket I send her an orange

she’s too weak to peel. A buoy of bread bloats

beside her. On a scrap of paper, I write,

we have come into deep waters, but the ink bleeds

before she can read my psalm. Well: rise

to the surface and spill, as in tears. Well, from the German:

a wave. The water rises and my mother waves—

hello, goodbye, hard to tell. May well be bye.

Nothing to do but go down by rope. Hold her

head. Swallow the swell of water. Tread

until my arms and legs burn. Her lungs breathe

water, her jaw goes slack. I try to carry her,

but she keeps falling. My mother is dead

weight. By bucket I send up her glasses and teeth.

Where there’s a will, there’s not always a way.

Incant enough words that rhyme with well

and maybe my mother will

will herself up and out. No poem can save her,

but I keep writing them anyway. My way

of never leaving her in the well. Or my way of trying

to get well. Hard to tell. Well: used to mark the end

of a conversation, as in, well, I must be going.

I clutch the rope and climb. When I reach the top,

I’m poured out like water.

Nicholas Montemarano was born in Brooklyn and grew up in Queens. He is the author of three novels, a book of short stories, and, most recently, a memoir, If There Are Any Heavens (Persea Books, 2022).

She had been standing at the sink when the son came in through the side door. He tried hiding it, wrapping the bone in a fist at his back. But a mirror hung near the door. The woman—the mother—blocked his way.

What? the son asked. He tried to look confused.

No, the mother said, no no no. She spoke calmly. She said bones didn’t belong in a house.

The son nodded. He was nine, short for his age, somewhat shy, often slow to speak, though his mind moved quickly, the mother had always thought. Only lately was he allowed these afternoons alone outside. He smiled, looking up at his mother. But their bodies, he said, their bodies were filled with bones, didn’t she know that? That you can’t have a body without bones in it? And weren’t they, weren’t their bodies allowed in the house?

The mother did not smile at this. You know what I mean, she said. Either back outside or it goes in the trash, she said next. But the son had a look on his face, eyes shining like he might cry. He held the bone out front of his body now. He stared down at it, until finally the mother sighed and shook her head. Fine, she said. Keep it.

And just like that the smile came back, the boy seeming suddenly a bit taller as he tried to walk past.

But that’s when the mother called for him to stop, she had to clean it first. She held out her hand, palm up.

The son shrank back. He tightened. Slowly, he lifted the bone and held it out where the mother could reach—for a few seconds, three or four, they were both holding it—and then he grew trusting, the mother thought, or he remembered that he could trust her, that the mother was trustworthy, and then he loosened his grip.

He stood nearby while she washed it at the sink, then filled a pot with water and dropped the bone inside, the mother speaking all the while, asking where had he found it, where had he been, how far from the house, but the son stayed quiet. He watched as the water began to boil. He watched her stir the pot, which wasn’t necessary, of course, only a habit—the mother smiled at herself, still holding the spoon. With his arms folded, the son watched the steam, his eyes tracking it toward the ceiling. He tried touching it—he raised an arm, leaning, up on his toes, and tried catching a handful—but the mother swatted his hand away with the spoon, which was long, wooden, the handle about the same thickness as the bone. As she swatted, a drop flew from the spoon, a droplet, and landed on the son’s arm, near the wrist—he was burned, thought the mother, noting the way his face angled so quickly toward it, she had scalded her child, her baby boy. But he only stared for a second or two, then smeared it away.

After a minute or so, the mother grabbed a second spoon and used both like pincers to fish out the bone, letting it drip water back to the pot. She tried asking once more where he’d found it, the bone still dripping.

Again now the son didn’t answer. He kept his eyes on the bone.

The mother held it clamped between the spoons with one hand and opened a drawer with the other and pulled out a small blue towel, folded in thirds. She placed it on the table. She laid the bone on top of the towel.

Don’t touch, she warned. Let it cool for a while.

And the son listened. She was surprised, actually, at not having to say it twice, instead seeing the son simply nod, no protest, no questions. He kicked off his shoes in the kitchen and shuffled away, his socks making static with the hallway carpet.

The following day, the bone was still on the table.

And the day after that, and so on, a week going by, the mother never asking why the son didn’t take the bone to his bedroom, why he’d bothered bringing it home at all, sneaking, if he didn’t really want the thing. The son never mentioned it. Never looked at it, as far as the mother could see, not even at meals, the bone there between them at the table. Of course it bothered her—she kept a clean house, even as a child she’d been particular that way, tidy, everything in its place—but she would wait, she decided. Summon patience. If the son didn’t touch the bone, then she wouldn’t either.

Another week and the mother got used to it. The towel underneath, though, was an irritation—she swapped the blue towel for a white linen napkin with a ruffled edge. The son found her smiling as she arranged the bone diagonally across it.

But then he came home with another one. This was early in June. At first the mother thought it was the bone from the table, the son must have picked it up earlier, on his way out, but she turned and saw the first one still lying on the napkin. The son had just stepped into the kitchen. The mother was there with a loaf of sourdough cooling on the counter, on wax paper. The second bone did look like the first—ten inches long, give or take, slender, smooth, with a curve at one end. The son handed this one over without the mother asking. He looked uneasy, though, when she didn’t do what she’d done the first time—the mother wasn’t filling a pot with water to boil, she wasn’t wiping it down. She kept her eyes on the son. They already had a bone, she told him, did they really need another one? After all, she went on, the son wasn’t doing anything with the first one, was he? Look, she said, look at it, the first bone still on the table, just lying there like…

Again the son’s eyes were shining, wet. He told her this one was different, and when the mother pressed, asking how, how was it different, the son told her the first bone was just something he’d seen on the ground, in the woods, he’d almost stepped on it. It had given him an idea, though. That’s why he had this one now, the second bone, which was from him, he said. A present. He said he wanted his mother to have it.

And this time when she asked where he’d found it, he answered. Her thinking was there must be a deer out there, a dead one, somewhere in the woods. She hoped it wasn’t on the highway. But the son said it wasn’t like that at all, he didn’t find the bone anywhere—didn’t she understand? He held up his arm, the left one, bent at the elbow, so the mother could see a thin line still dotted with blood, a scratch from elbow to wrist. The son kept the arm up for a moment, looking proud. He’d used a rock, he told her, one he’d found out close to the road, but he hadn’t stepped onto the road, he was quick to add, he was only near it, where the trees stop, the gravel there in the ditch?

The mother nodded.

He told her the rock was tiny, the one side so sharp you could hardly see it. He said he’d barely felt a thing, then rotated his arm so the mother could better see.

The mother waited.

He said, You have two bones in your arm. Did you know that? He pointed. In this part. He waved the scratched arm around, up, down. He moved it fast, the hand whipping forward and back. See? he said. It’s fine just with one.

The mother was tired. She had things to do—the birdfeeders were empty again, the floor needed sweeping, the laundry was a pile. She turned and told the boy to leave his bones inside his body.

But it was too late, he said. The bone was already out, he couldn’t just put it back in, it didn’t work like that.

Then take it outside, she told him, and she could hear how she sounded, how stern—she didn’t like it. But when she tried handing the bone back to him, saying just get rid of it, she didn’t care how, the son wouldn’t take it. And so without thinking, the mother stepped past him, two quick long strides to the door, then out to the yard, out near the trees, where she stretched back her arm and threw the bone as far as she could, losing her balance in the process, hopping a little after she’d let go, then listening to hear it softly land out there somewhere in the dirt, the leaves and moss, she imagined, though of course she’d lost sight of it. The son, when she came back inside, was down the hall, his bedroom door not slamming but closing fast.

And because she’d done it that way once, she did it that way again, with the next bone he brought home. And the one after that, and on it went. A day or two or even three might pass in between, the son coming and going through the side door, humming, speaking in low tones to himself, words the mother couldn’t understand, but nothing in his hands, and the mother would begin to feel hopeful. She was the one, she would remind herself, who had urged him outside in the first place, worried, back then, early in spring, that it wasn’t healthy for a boy to stay so much indoors, alone in his room like he was.

But each time she began to hope, in he would step with another bone. There was always something different—the size or shape, or a marking somewhere, an indentation the mother would notice when she started to think maybe this bone was actually one she’d seen already, one she’d pitched back out to the woods. Each time, after handing her the bone, the son would show her a fresh scratch about the right length, somewhere on his body, just the thinnest cut, and each time, the mother would stop what she was doing and take the bone out to the yard and fling it into the woods, and find the son gone when she came back inside.

Weeks went by. Occasionally still the mother would hope, counting the days with no bones, but then she would hear the door opening slowly, see the particular way the son was smiling, a hand, or both hands, hidden behind his back.

Late in July she took to breaking them—the bones. It was thoughtless at first, she lost control, but she kept going, surprised at how easy it was with the smaller ones. Not so if the bone was thicker… With these, the mother would strain, and the son would watch her face redden until finally the bone would snap or the mother would give up, going outside to throw it whole. But he never cried out, never asked why, only winced and turned away at the moment a bone would break.

All over his body, the scratches, the delicate scabs.

I don’t know how I can still do this, he said one day. Look.

The mother was peeling potatoes. Her own finger was bleeding a thin stream, the paring knife had slipped. She had to rinse each potato again when she finished.

The son was standing beside her, up and down on his toes, wiggling his body. He squatted and pushed on his foot with one finger.

The mother made a sound that could have meant anything. She glanced at the son, then kept her eyes away. Lately she had been trying to be more careful in moments like these, in choosing her response, which is to say she offered little, no questions or scolding, no demand for the truth. Instead, these last few times, she’d said not a word, simply taken the bone from his hands on her way outside, and the son hadn’t spoken either.

Here, he said now. Feel this.

After a moment, he looked up at the mother, whose cut had stopped bleeding, but she flexed the hand a few times and squeezed the finger over the sink so it started again. She couldn’t, she told the son, not right now. She had to go, she said, she needed a bandage. She held up the finger.

Then later he found the mother in her bedroom, not sleeping but lying on the bed with her face to the ceiling. He leaned over and squeezed the mother’s ankle, then bent down and squeezed his own.

Yours is definitely different, he said. It’s harder. I wonder if…

The mother closed her eyes. She could hear the son whispering to himself. After a while, she told him she had a headache, which was true, in a way.

And then, somehow, it was the mother who felt like she couldn’t move. The son crawled up onto the bed and lay beside her, down by her legs, like a dog. He told her he would have guessed by now he’d be a pile, or a puddle—just muscle and blood and loose skin and inside parts. Teeth. He said one of these days it would happen, probably. Then he said no, not probably, it would happen, it would have to happen—the muscles and skin, he figured, had a kind of memory of where the bones had been, it made sense, but eventually they would forget.

But that was fine, he said. It was. He said he wasn’t scared.

With no effort at all, the mother kept quiet through this. She kept her eyes closed.

It’s not your fault, the son went on. You tried to stop me.

The mother could feel a fingertip sinking into her thigh, pressing from the side.

You did a good job, he told her. It’s been a good life.

Then the mattress shifted a bit and the mother guessed he was lying on his back. She could hear his breathing close by. It went on for some time—a minute, two minutes, five minutes, really the mother couldn’t say. You have to do something, she thought, say something.

Eventually the son said, I think this is it—it’s happening.

The mother’s mouth opened at this, but nothing came out.

It’s slow, he said. You almost can’t feel it at all.

Then he really surprised her—he said, I know I’m not the best. He said probably she wished she’d had someone else, a different son, or even a girl, maybe, and still the mother stayed silent—this part she would never forget, the fact that she offered no argument, no reassurance, not a sound. The son asked her not to keep him after it happened, whatever was left of him. He said, I won’t even look like me anymore. I’ll just be a mess.

Another minute went by.

You could try again, though. He was excited now—the mother could hear it. He said he’d forgotten, almost, but now he remembered. All you need is a bone and some dirt, he said. Just regular dirt, it doesn’t have to be clay, then put some water with it and build around the bone—you can make whatever you want.

A hand took hold of the mother’s hand, lifted it from her stomach, held it for a moment, then put it back.

Then the hand, the son’s hand, which was cool, almost cold, came down softly on the mother’s forehead. She hadn’t felt his body moving up that way, toward the pillows. The mother lay perfectly still.

They’re still out there, he said. In the woods. The ones you threw out there—I haven’t touched any of those, so all you have to do is go get one, or a piece of it, then get the dirt. Try the ribs first. You can make…how many? With a finger he poked the mother’s ribs, counting to himself.

Finally the mother spoke, still with her eyes closed. She said there was a bone on the table.

The son’s face was close now, close to the mother’s face. She could feel it hovering there. He asked what she meant.

On the table, she said. The first bone that he’d brought home. Why the mother was playing along, she had no idea. She wouldn’t have to go out to the woods, she said, she could just use that one from the table.

No, the son said. You can’t. That won’t work.

Sure it would, the mother said. That one wasn’t even broken. It was perfect.

But it’s not from me, he said. Remember? I just found that one—it has to be from a person.

The mother was smiling now. It’ll work, she said.

But you don’t know what it’ll be! If you’re trying to make a person, the son said, his voice getting louder, then you have to use a bone from another person. That’s how it works.

Okay, the mother said, and for a moment there was quiet.

Then she asked how did he know, and he said, Know what?

How it works.

Everyone knows, he said. It’s not a secret. It’s… Probably it doesn’t have to be a rib. It just has to be from a person.

The mother didn’t respond.

From a person, the son said again.

Okay, the mother said, and then she rolled over. Now she could sleep, she thought. It was still early, still light out—she knew even with her eyes closed—but she could do it. And then when she woke, it wouldn’t be this way, not precisely. They would move on.

The son settled in beside her, his head on the edge of her pillow.

He wriggled and whispered to himself.

Then some time later, the mother sat up. The son was talking—not quietly. It’s really happening, he said. I can feel it. I can’t move.

He was just tired, the mother said. She lay back down.

No.

His body needed rest.

No, he said again. It doesn’t feel like that.

She said he would feel better in the morning.

I don’t think I’ll be here in the morning, he said.

Shhhh. The mother rolled over.

Twice more, or maybe three times, she woke in the night and reached a hand back to touch the son. She patted his hip. Each time he was asleep.

But then in the morning she reached over and felt the bed empty beside her. She could see the rumpled quilt where he’d been. She sat up and swung her feet down to the floor. His clothes were there on the carpet. She didn’t call out. She went first to his bedroom, but the bed was empty, the covers still tight. She checked underneath, where sometimes he would hide. The bathroom door was open—she could see he wasn’t there.

She passed through the living room and found him in the kitchen. He was naked, stretched out flat on his back. Beside him was a milk carton. Milk was spilled on the floor at his shoulder. The mother nudged his foot with her foot. She still had her clothes on from the day before. She hadn’t slept that way in years. She took a step and then put her foot gently on his belly. It took another moment for him to wake up, his eyes closing tighter before finally they opened. But then he was smiling.

He had a hard time explaining, at first. He said he’d tried asking for help, but the mother wouldn’t listen.

She said that was because she was asleep.

He said he’d been scared—when it started, when he knew it was real. His legs were like bags, he said, without anything inside.

It actually really hurt, he told the mother. He said he thought he needed her, he needed help, but she wouldn’t listen.

I was asleep, she tried again.

But the son went on. He said he figured it out himself. He just had to roll down from the bed and crawl in here. His arms were weak, but not like his legs were, not yet. The idea just came to him—he knew milk could make bones stronger, but maybe, he thought, if you drank enough they could grow back. Really that was the worst part, feeling the bones grow and push and find their way back. But the pain was gone now.

I did it, he said. All by myself.

He had dried milk around his mouth. He licked at it.

The mother stepped backward. She turned in a circle, but she didn’t leave the room. Then she noticed the napkin on the table, the white linen—the bone was gone. The cloth felt cool when she put a finger on it.

She asked where it was, what happened to the bone, but the son wasn’t listening. He lay flat on the floor, his shoulders bouncing lightly on the linoleum. I can’t believe it, he said.

The mother stared at him now. She asked again where was the bone.

He said, It really worked…

He said, Look.

He sat up a little, resting on his elbows. He moved his legs like scissors.

Daniel J. O’Malley’s fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, The Kenyon Review, Granta, Subtropics, R&R, Alaska Quarterly Review, and The Best American Short Stories, among other publications. He currently lives in West Virginia, where he teaches at Marshall University.

We decided to launch this substack in order to honor our mission of publishing daring, experimental works that elude traditional boundaries of form and genre. We’ve missed connecting with you while assembling our print Issue 004: If/Else.

We will start by sharing some pieces from Issue 003: Currents, before offering fiction, poems, essays, interviews, and art from the vanguard.

Warmly,

Sasha Landauer
Angela Black
Editors