The world is a whole lot less lonely when you’re making connections. Create groups of four using some important words from the pieces in this issue.
With this Connections game, we wanted you to get a small taste of what it’s like to organize an issue. Each one is a little different, but it’s always a special thrill when we start to see the connections between pieces. As an issue begins to take shape, each work shifts and twists, new details emerging as they bump up against one another. That’s partly why we take such joy and care in setting the order of pieces within an issue. It’s my favorite part: reading pieces aloud, listening to the beginnings and endings flow together and apart.
How to Play Find groups of four connected words (e.g. point, shrug, smile, clap – Gestures), then hit submit to see if you’re right. See how many guesses it takes to get them all, then send it on.
First came the birds, flapping in the same futile way I do when I swim—unable to make headway against the inexorable pull of a strange, incomprehensible physics. I ached to help them, but my manager screeched at me, gesturing toward a lineup of customers who couldn’t serve themselves. The birds couldn’t help themselves either, and unlike my classmate James they didn’t have jobs or rich parents, no money to draw people’s attention.
After the birds fell, the whoosh of fuselage through clouds heralded the plummeting airplanes. Unlike their feathered cousins, these loud metal birds roused people to action, even making a rubber-necking spectator out of my manager. The customers trailed into the road after him, and my shuffling feet now echoed through the store as if it were a museum on a sunny Tuesday afternoon. As much as I wanted to, I hesitated to follow my manager outside, for his favorite adage—one shared with my father—whispered in my ear: “Do as I say, not as I do.”
Next came the raindrops, holding hands in neat formation, dragged from their cloudy homes before they were ready. Their cries on the pavement stirred my heart, because I, too, never felt ready—certainly not ready for the sky’s antics today or I would have skipped this horrid shift and held hands with my family too. When customers returned to the store, seeking shelter, I went looking for my manager in hopes I’d glimpse a toppling rainbow slicing through him.
Instead, I was greeted by the cool touch of descending clouds, demoted from their lofty perch. I recalled how James had gushed on and on about flying amongst the clouds, in business class no less, and now maybe I would experience that too. James had a nice smile and arm muscles that reflected his summers spent on his uncle’s farm. But, even though he had promised to work this job with me, he spent his time chasing Jenny, whose gorgeous nails attracted magpies and boys alike. In this dreamlike world, fine droplets obscured all the nice smiles, strong arms, and expensive nails, and who’s to say it’s not better off this way?
The sky compressed around my feet and my head finally pierced through the clouds as the air rarefied, transforming Earth into a spaceship, the vastness of our galaxy hurtling past me. The forgotten five-year-old within me cheered, as my astronaut dreams escaped from under the heel of my father and careened into the unknown. The vanishing oxygen didn’t bother me, for we had all—me and James and even Jenny—become equally tiny under the stars.
Ian Li (he/him) is a Chinese-Canadian economist, developer, writer, and poet, who started writing in late 2023 after a lifetime of believing he could never be creative. He also enjoys spreadsheets, statistical curiosities, and brain teasers. Find his work published in Nightmare Magazine, Small Wonders, and Strange Horizons, among other venues.
Three facts. One: when researchers leave a man alone in a room for fifteen minutes, with a button they can press in order to shock themselves, two-thirds will—bzzt—press the button. Two: while I was a music composition major, I took a psychology class where I learned about the button-pressing experiment. Three, the most important: I have never played the viola in my life.
My brother, Luke, played the viola in school. But he never let me touch it. One December, he let me hold a fiberglass ornament his religious ed teacher had gifted him. I gave in to an overwhelming urge to—bzzt—squeeze it until it shattered. Another time, he got an action figure inspired by the hit animated TV show Gargoyles, which had a grappling hook attached to Goliath’s gun by string. I can still hear my mother, my father, and my brother all screaming, “no, Zach, no, stop it, don’t do it, Zachary John,” as my scissor-wielding hand advanced under its own will toward that string and—snip—ruined that toy. Bzzt. Bzzt bzzt bzzt.
I don’t have to tell you that I was the younger brother, or that after that birthday I always got a present on Luke’s birthday. I also do not have to tell you that I belong to the shock-button-pressing two-thirds of the male population. But I do have to tell you that I never, ever in my life, not even once for fun, have ever touched a viola—let alone played one. I respected that boundary.
I had no choice. Because Luke kept his viola locked in its case and, no, he apparently did not hide the key under the keyboard of the computer he and my dad built, on the shelf stuffed with the monumental paperbacks I couldn’t get through, or under his stack of All-State viola certificates of achievement going back to the third grade.
I have played other instruments. The cello for a semester. But it was very heavy and the freshman dorm RA kept commenting on the noise, reminding me that dogs, no matter how sick they were, were not allowed in campus housing. I played the piano. The trombone. Even the guitar. But never the viola, even once I got to college.
Why does that matter? Because for one of my classes I had to compose a solo piece for the instrument of my choice. Did I choose the guitar, the piano, the cello, or the trombone? No. I chose the viola.
Bzzt.
This composition class was traditionally reserved for seniors and I was seventeen. My classmates could all buy liquor. They smoked weed in their off-campus apartments. Mike’s band had a tour lined up for that summer. Kirsten already had a gig writing music for HBO. Tyler and Carson were gonna move to LA that summer and then figure it out. They were the coolest people I had ever met and I’d never felt more like a dweeb. My professor, Doug, had shoulder-tapped me to join the class. In his cruel and off-hand way, he said he didn’t think I could do it and that was why he wanted me to take it. He enjoyed proving himself right.
I toiled on that piece, but probably not as long as I should have considering it would determine whether I could shove an A in Doug’s face, whether HBO would ever hire me, or my band could ever go on tour, whether I could ever hack it in LA.
And I really did want to impress Doug. He was teaching us about the greats of atonality that semester. You know—household names. Bartok, Schoenberg, Eisler. Those guys who composed songs that sound like math theorems. Of course, they wrote using tone rows such as in Webern’s Variations for Orchestra which I know I don’t have to tell you he derived from three tetrachords, all of which give it a unity in motif and chord. I wanted him to hear I got it.
“You can compose it in a key,” Doug reminded me. “Any key. C… G… F-sharp.”
We were listening to a computer play the latest draft of my piece. It sounded like the computer had dropped its simulation-viola on a cat.
“It’s… esoteric,” I explained to Doug. “See, I created a tone row, that—”
“No, I know,” Doug squeezed the sheet music so hard it crinkled.
So I revised it. And the next week Doug became very preoccupied with his combover, and his glasses, and his breathing, as we listened to the computer perform what can only be described as surgery on the cat the computer had previously abused. “Can a… viola even play these notes?” he asked.
“Oh. Yes,” I said. Bzzt. That hadn’t even occurred to me.
Professionals were coming in to perform our pieces before my next one-on-one with Doug. Even if he could talk me out of writing a solo for an instrument no one really writes solos for, or at least to write for an instrument I played, it was too late to write anything good.
The night before, I devoured my final meal in the dining hall. Scrambled eggs, cookies, cheeseburgers, fries. All as fast as I could. I was seeking sensation. I had felt this way before: in the parking lot of St Mary’s of the Lake Church, for instance.
Put Luke’s fiberglass stocking-shaped ornament into your hand. It’s cool to the touch. It’s lighter than you expected. How strong is it? You want to know. It’s not like you want to be in pain, but how strong is the shock of that little red button? You want to know. And your religious ed teacher didn’t give you an ornament, even though you–mostly–sat still in class for once. You watch the ornament in your hand become a billion little pieces. Just because you squeezed it. And you had to squeeze it harder than you expected. And now you know.
And then there’s another feeling. I don’t know the word for it. It’s full of shock, and horror, and permanence. Because you can’t just go back into the rectory and get your brother another ornament, and you can’t unpress the button, and you can’t go back in time and just write a damn piece for piano like you know you could do decently, even if it had no key, and you can’t stop eating the dining hall cookies.
That night at dinner I was having the epiphany I was trying not to have: My greatest defeats have all come by my own hand. And this was about to be one of them. Luke would not ever press the shock button. The button-shock researchers concluded that people will push the button to avoid being alone with their thoughts. Thoughts like these. They wrote, “Most people seem to prefer to be doing something rather than nothing, even if that something is negative.”
It would have been nothing for me to write a piece for piano, or guitar. It would have been something for me to write one that Luke heard and went, “wow.” I chose the viola because, even if he wanted to, Luke would not push the button. He wouldn’t crush the ornament, or snip the string on Goliath’s grappling gun. I chose the viola because I was sorry he was such a nice, patient brother and I was always so lousy and I had no better idea how to say that.
The next day, the violist introduced my piece last. He said, “And then there’s… this one.” He had ashy hair, an ashy goatee, and dark glasses he apparently pushed up to his brow when he was exasperated. “Who wrote this?”
Doug pointed at me. A lot of spite in the way he twisted his hand and flicked his finger out at me. But I was ten years away, looking around my living room at the shreds of wrapping paper and Goliath’s severed string in my brother’s hands.
Zach Edson teaches science to middle schoolers with learning differences in Providence, Rhode Island. His work has appeared in Twenty-two Twenty-eight, On the Premises, and Lowlife Lit Press. He loves house spiders, his wife, and their two dogs, Kenley and Triss.
they said my great-grandmother taught herself to read by whispering hymns backward into a jar. kept snakes in the stove, sucked pennies clean for luck. the men said she was feeble. the women said, nervous.
i chew the same rhythm into my sleeves. rub the fabric raw until my hands forget the weight of being witnessed. this is how i pray, in repetition, in retreat, in the hum behind electric things.
in my uncle’s trailer there’s a buck head nailed to the fridge and a child’s drawing of a sun with no face. my cousin says i blink wrong, like a deer deciding whether to bolt.
my mother once locked me in a linen closet because i wouldn’t stop spinning. said she couldn’t take it anymore, the noise, the flapping, the bright click of me not being like the rest of them.
when i came out, i spoke in color for three straight days. she burned my drawings in a metal bowl and told god to come collect me if he had the stomach for it.
they call it a spectrum but in this house it’s a curse, a bloodline of girls who look away when spoken to, who name their toys after latin verbs, who learn affection by studying taxidermy.
the living room smells like mildew and lilac. granny’s perfume still haunts the upholstery. they say she went silent for twenty years and came back speaking perfect French. i understand. sometimes you have to leave language just to survive it.
i sit on the porch and stim with a pop tab and a dead wasp. my cousin’s boy says i’m touched by something evil. i tell him so was christ.
Carrie Farrar is a poet and musician whose work explores neurodivergence, memory, and the quiet intersections between survival and grace. Her poems have appeared in Kaleidoscope Magazine, Down in the Dirt, Flare Magazine, and The Art of Autism, among others. Blending lyrical precision with emotional candor, she writes to make sense of a world that often misunderstands difference. Her poem “I Am the Twitch in the Family Line” reflects her recurring themes of inherited pain, resilience, and the beauty of the mind’s odd wiring. She lives in California, where she continues to write toward empathy and light.
You shift on M’s bed to sit cross-legged, a little closer to her. Her hair is creeping into a mullet, the kind that sneaks up on you during the grow-out. Candlelight paints her leg hairs gold. You watch her gesture with her slender, marker-stained fingers, watch the words tumble from her lips and flit before you like a hummingbird.
M. tells you the Greeks have three words for love. Eros, as one loves a lover. Philia, as one loves a friend. Agape, as one loves a God.
Outside the canvas tent, coyotes scream to an impassive moon.
You met M. in a class your junior year of college. You spoke a handful of times, but these conversations aren’t what you remember. What you remember is seeing her across the dance floor at a student band performance around Christmas. They were playing “Sunday Candy,” and you were swaying with your boyfriend, who stood behind you with his arms wrapped around your waist.
Now, you think that she must have been dancing, but you only remember catching her eye, the way she held your gaze, her smile, almost a smirk.
After graduating, you remained connected only by the tenuous, erratic thread of your Facebook feeds. You saw that she moved to Philadelphia. That she shaved her head. Then, she didn’t post for a long time. There are some people that the mind relinquishes easily, like ripe fruit off the vine. There are others that, for reasons inexplicable, cling there long after the harvest.
Six years later, you wind up working on the same vegetable farm in the Pacific Northwest. You get there in June, and she arrives in July. You go there because you have been flying too close to the sun and think you need to spend some time on the ground, bent low with your hands in the earth.
What happened was this: You were 25 when you were diagnosed with lymphoma. When you were 27 and your hair had regrown past your ears, you read Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic” and concluded it was your civic duty to pursue your authentic “yes,” to carpe the fuck out of the diem. So you quit your government job and broke up with your boyfriend and booked a flight to Colombia.
You see, you wanted to live on your edge: to scream and dance and fuck and let your heart bleed. To dissolve the boundaries of your reality and stare into the chasm. This way, you wouldn’t ever forget your mortality. This way, you wouldn’t arrive at the end of your life like a sleepwalker stirring at sunset.
You intended to travel for a year. But a few months in, the fear of dying caught up to you. So you went to an Ayahuasca retreat where maggots crawled out of your skin and you burned up in flames and met God and understood what it would be like to die. It would be blissful, a coming home. You left thinking you had transcended your fear of death. But then you fell inexplicably ill with what the doctors thought might be the cancer and you blazed out of the sky.
It wasn’t the cancer. But then, this: You were back in the States with no home and no job and no idea what to do. You had fallen off the edge.
Hence, the farm: room and board and a purpose.
There are seven of you on the farm: four young workers and a family of three. The four of you live separately on the property and cook meals in the main house. You live in a tiny shack near the compost pile and M. lives twenty paces away in a big canvas tent, in a clearing where you will later slaughter a goat and have a dance party on grass still wet with blood.
M. strikes you as intense and sensitive, palpably fragile. She alludes to histories of trauma and neglect and abandonment. She came to the farm to heal, too.
M. speaks earnestly about energy healing and chakras and Spirit—the sorts of things you feel both curious about and skeptical of. You were raised by staunch atheists but in the past few years you have started to wonder if there isn’t more to the “energy of the universe” thing than you thought. You go to Burning Man and do breathwork meditation and dance barefoot in your yard, but you also use LinkedIn and buy things on Amazon and listen to Ezra Klein rather religiously.
M.’s first week, you teach her to prune tomatoes: how to choose one or two promising stems to trellis and prune the rest. At first this feels like butchery, but then you learn it’s more like mercy. Unpruned plants lack airflow and grow vulnerable to disease; they also over-invest energy in their foliage, producing fewer and smaller fruits. You both agree this is good advice for life: Invest energy in a few important things and prune the excess. It’s not something you’ve ever been good at. Commitment to any one thing feels too much like death.
M. prunes slowly, handling the branches like a tentative lover. When she clips a main stem by mistake, she gasps and bows her head before its severed spine like a widow at a gravestone. By evening, she looks like a child after a long day of play: knees muddied, pale face marbled with dirt, sandy hair spooled around sticks. You think that you have never seen somebody look so peaceful.
After work most days, M. changes into a blue one-piece and hurries to her car, a ratty sarong draped over her shoulders. It’s one of the only occasions that she moves with something like impatience: on her way to go swimming. Her wheels churn up gravel as she backs out from under the apple tree and careens down the road toward the lake. When she returns hours later, her skin is dry and rosy, her face serene.
M. feels to you like a river: one moment bubbling with fast-flowing fervor; the next, languishing in brooding eddies. She surrenders to the swell of these currents in a way you rarely do: She ripples her shoulders, shakes her hands, blows air through her lips like a horse. She screams her frustration, dances her joy. When she laughs, she covers her mouth with three fingers while her eyes roll up into her head in pleasure—as if she just ate something delightfully decadent, as if she’s thinking, if only you knew. Some days, she spends the whole day in bed because she’s so sad. You have never been so sad that you couldn’t get out of bed. You have never even considered that this was an option.
One night at dusk, M. runs with a bowl of grain yelling “COOOOME ON,” as you bring the goats back to their pen from the pasture. She is running in front of the herd and you are behind, trying to ensure Trixie doesn’t stop to chomp on the flowers, and you are both squealing, stumbling over the uneven ground and feeling the breath of night on your cheeks. You hate this chore and you usually do it alone, but right now she’s laughing and so are you, and you’re marveling that she’s doing this in flip-flops, which you would never do.
“Cinnamon is my nemesis,” you say as you watch the goats jostling in their pen afterwards, referring to the alpha goat who always bullies the others out of the grain. “Oh! I love her,” M. responds, “I love her the way…that you love something! You know? It doesn’t matter what they do, you just love them.”
You feel slightly ashamed, and you look at Cinnamon again and reconsider. You want to love things like this, too.
Like you, M. is a writer. She writes about swimming in the ocean in winter. She says that while others dive under without hesitation, she wades in slowly, gripping her belly, her breasts. She wonders why she must draw out the entry, why she can’t just throw herself under. She says, “I realize it’s the initial transition into the known unknown. The choosing, leaning into, surrendering to—abyss.”
At her suggestion, you start a two-person writing group.
That first night, you walk to her tent with your computer, your heart like the hoofbeats of goats running out to the pasture. The canvas tent is musty and dark and cartoonishly large to contain just her bed and the two of you. She lights candles and you sit on the edge of her bed while she reads you a piece about a female pleasure ritual that she attended. She’s obsessed with rituals, with processing grief and honoring growth and reclaiming power.
Her voice is like straw: wispy and stiff. She clears her throat. Whispers “sorry,”her cheeks pink like sunrise. She starts reading again and her voice strengthens as she recounts grinding her hips, awakening her erotic animal. You close your eyes because you can’t focus on the words with them open. You keep your face still, feel your heart quicken. You don’t want her to ever stop reading because then you will have to say something.
Later that night, she texts you a piece she wrote about grief. Grieving her childhood, her unrealized potential, her young body. In it, there is an old photo of her with her top off. She’s wearing high-waisted tights and nothing else, and she holds her hair as she spins toward the camera. Her breasts are like bright little moons and you can’t take your eyes off them.
Partway through the summer, you and your long-distance boyfriend break up during a weekend away from the farm. “Boyfriend” and “break-up” are both the wrong terms: You were together then apart then together and then you left to go traveling. He’s the kind of person who folds his clothes right after they come out of the dryer and keeps up with bike maintenance. He shaved your head and read you Harry Potter while you were sick. He’s kind and funny and safe and you always felt like something was missing.
You can’t commit, and so you relinquish. It’s soft and sad. A halting pair of shears taken to a bright green stem. You return to the farm on a Sunday and M. is cooking zucchini fritters for community dinner. The kitchen is full of people and crackling oil and laughter and she sees your face and holds her arms out. You fall into them.
“What do you desire?” M. asks you one day at the lake, her amber eyes boring into yours like midday sunbeams. She invited you to come swimming, and you feel as though you’ve been granted entry into a realm that is secret and sacred.
You close your eyes and pause, the way her presence allows. “To feel connected,” you say. “To belong somewhere I feel seen, where I have a purpose.” You open your eyes and look at her, your face a question. “What do you desire?” The words feel thrilling, forbidden. You don’t think you have ever spoken them aloud before. Want, yes, but desire? Want is a child holding out a palm for a Tootsie Roll. Desire is an arching back, a thrumming pulse, heat pooling under the tongue.
She sighs. “To roll around on the ground. To play! I just want to play.” She sinks back and leans on her hands and you have the surprising and overwhelming urge to tackle her to the ground. To show her you can play.
Instead, you listen while she recounts a theater production she once saw where the friends on stage stuffed Oreos into one-another’s mouths and they all had Oreo spit dripping down their chins and she said that was what she wanted life to be like: messy, intimate, covered in Oreo spit. “People here,” she says, “They’re not like this. They’re gray. They choose comfort and practicality over color and self-expression, boundaries over connection. They’re allergic to physical touch.”
You wonder if M. perceives you as gray. You hope she doesn’t, but you picture yourself shoving a handful of Oreos into her mouth and it pains you how out of character it would be. You feel like an artist who has spent twenty-eight years sculpting a masterpiece and now you want to smash it to bits and start over, and in your mind you are pulling your hair, punching through plaster, screaming and throwing tools at the walls. But to M.’s eye you are just sitting there with your hands in your lap, your face cloaked and impassive.
The farm holds a talent show and M. asks to borrow your black pants for her costume. She wears them with a suit coat and a white button-up and paints her face like a French mime, complete with a pencil moustache. She has you record her performance, which is a theatrical interpretation of a French song about a woman in grief. Her commitment to every emotion and movement is so complete that you feel in equal measure embarrassed for and in awe of her.
When it’s your turn, you approach the stage to read a series of haikus you have written about farm life. But simply reading them seems dull in the wake of her performance, so you spontaneously decide to also interpret them with your body. You perform the first one, which is about getting attacked by the rooster, and M. laughs and claps her hands in delight. You feel giddy.
Another coworker announces a surprise lip sync performance of Les Misérables’s “I Dreamed a Dream.” Everyone joins in for several Les Mis tracks, and you close the evening beating your chests with the fervor of the French revolution, and crumpled under the weight of Fantine’s broken dreams.
While harvesting sweet onions one afternoon, M. mentions a friend, a woman she fell for at a music festival. She speaks about this woman’s beauty, about their chemistry on the dance floor and about sudden, overwhelming desire. Your stomach twists with envy.
You tell her about women you’ve had crushes on too, but you say that you’ve always been too scared to act. You don’t look at her as you say this, instead focusing on cleaning an onion. You grasp the outermost stalk and pull it down toward the bulb, carefully sloughing off the withered slime to reveal the gleaming, virgin flesh underneath.
At a backyard party you attend with M., she starts dancing before there is music. When you turn on a speaker, she throws herself on the ground and performs a dramatic floor routine to La Bouche’s “Be My Lover.” She crawls and rolls and arches her back, coating the pair of your pants she has borrowed with grass. Then suddenly you are on the ground with her, and as the bass thumps and the party swirls you feel strangely unselfconscious—not as though no one is watching but rather as though everyone is, and that what they are seeing is you together with M.
On the bike ride home, M. doesn’t have a bike light so you ride behind her, and she is delighted by the shadow projected onto the trees, her figure a hundred times larger than life. When you get back to the farm, she wants to go see the bioluminescence down at the beach. It’s late and you’re exhausted, but you say “Let’s go!” after weighing your want for sleep with your desire to keep spending time with M. She gets a mug of strawberry ice cream and you climb into her car and put on “Fill it up Again” by the Indigo Girls.
At the beach, you strip down to your underwear. You aren’t wearing a bra, and you hesitate for a moment before peeling your halter top off and walking to the water’s edge. Your toes curl as they cross the icy threshold, gripping smooth pebbles and shards of shells.
In the shallows, the bioluminescence is faint, but as you wade out farther you find yourself in a glittering galaxy. You take a deep breath and dive into the darkness, into the light.
It’s the kind of cold that knocks all the breath from your lungs and wrings screams from your marrow. When you surface, you try to take control of your breath. You inhale through your nose and then push slow, shuddering exhales through pursed lips. After a few breaths, you relax into the cold and stroke out into the starry expanse.
“You have to see how cool that looks!” M. squeals. She braces herself and eases into the water, gasping. Swimming, she looks like a glowing sea creature, some mystical being. She swims out past you and dissolves into the night.
Now numb with the cold, you swim back to the shallows. You stand and scan the horizon nervously, seeing nothing.
“Sara?” she says after a couple of minutes, the sound so small in the vastness. “Here,” you say, your voice cracking.
As you swim back to the shore, you notice a figure watching you from the beach. Your breath catches. You imagine a beach-goer discovering your naked bodies in the morning, your skin cold and necks slit with a knife. “There’s someone there,”you hiss.
“Hello?” M. calls out, her voice friendly and fearless.
“Oh sorry, I didn’t mean to be creepy,” says the figure, their speech slightly formal and stilted. It’s a teenage girl, and the relief leaves you dizzy.
“Are you guys dating?” she asks once you have both waded out of the water and stand shivering, coated in salty gooseflesh. You say nothing, and the pause swells like a balloon that might lift into the sky. “No,” M. finally answers, laughing a little. Why the laugh? The balloon pops and splutters. “No,” you repeat quickly.
“Oh,” says the girl.
You ride back to the farm in silence. When M. pulls into the gravel lot, she turns off the engine and you sit there together in the spaciousness. It’s the moment you have had before with so many men, when the engine dies and in the silence the car is charged with the energy of potential. You look at each other. “Oops, the mug,” she says, pointing. The strawberry ice cream. It’s tipped over. You pick it up. Your mind is buzzing and blank but you manage, “We ate enough so it didn’t spill.” The moment, if it is a moment, passes and you both turn away and climb out of the car.
M.’s ecstasies are cut with her melancholies. She grows anxious and moody. She mourns being wronged by old lovers and gets caught in spirals of victimhood. She was supposed to be an artist, she says, and she resents never having the support from her family to pursue it. She feels judged and misunderstood. She feels tortured by the evils and apathies of the world. She feels perpetually abandoned. She feels that years of her life have been lost, that she is 28 with no career to speak of, just disparate clues leading in different directions. She feels that the strength of her passions and desires is unmatched by the people around her. She wants to move to New York, where people know creativity, or to France, where they know pleasure.
You can’t relate to much of this, and you think that this is the point: She doesn’t believe anyone can. But you are particularly unsuited to the task. You have never felt abandoned; you feel loved by your family; you tend toward optimism and forgive easily; you have had your share of hardship, but you have also been lucky. You don’t doubt the extent of her suffering, but you also don’t know how to hold her bitterness.
Near the end of the summer, M. goes on a vision quest in the mountains and fasts for four days. When she arrives home, feathers are strewn across the floor of her tent, likely the work of a cat. An intact bird heart sits in the middle. It’s still red and wet and alive-looking, and you think you have never seen a heart laid bare like that. She squeals and recoils so you pick it up with a paper towel, feeling the blood moisten your finger pads. You carry it out of the tent and throw it into the compost pile.
Later, you look up “why does cat not eat bird heart?”
The internet says that some do. It depends on the cat, and on the heart. You suppose this makes sense: Not every cat is prepared to take on every heart.
Come fall, M. finishes her term on the farm and moves into a nearby apartment. You have said nothing to her about how you feel. You convince yourself that you are better as friends. You indulge your desire only in dreams.
One evening, she comes over because she wants you to show her a breathwork meditation. It’s October and freezing but she’s wearing a flowered, royal blue dress that swishes against her thighs and scoops low on her chest. Her fingernails are sparkly and her hair is drawn into a half ponytail that sprouts from her head like a broccoli. You’re wearing long underwear and an oversized red knit turtleneck.
You roll out two yoga mats and lie down side by side on the wood floor. You turn on your speaker and start the meditation. The audio guides you through rhythmic breathing and breath-holds, and you breathe together as the familiar buzzing energy builds in your body. At the end, the energy climaxes and explodes into bliss, like a full-body orgasm. After, you roll on your side to look at her.
“How was that for you?” you ask.
“Good,” she says.
Her face is strange, charged with something you can’t decipher. It has the quality of a foggy, rain-soaked window, transparent but impossible to see through clearly. She isn’t crying but you think she might, that perhaps she didn’t like the meditation or that some trauma has resurfaced, and you are already qualifying, saying, “This isn’t my favorite one, I forget that it goes a little too fast…” you trail off. She doesn’t respond.
Then she says, “Don’t be mad,” and she leans in close, opens her mouth and devours you.
Her lips on yours are eager and hot and your mind is blank except for the word yes, and your tongue finds hersand your hands seem to work on their own, finding her waist, her hair, her chest, as you draw her closer, inhale her.
You have never been with a lover so soft. Everything is circles and curves. She kisses all over you slowly, exploring your neck, your ribs, your wrists. She kneels and takes your foot gently against her shoulder, puts your big toe in her mouth.
Tasting her, you’re reminded of iron and moonlight. You find that being with her feels like play, like you’re two cubs rolling through the grass. After, she texts you: “Words are eluding me.”
Then,
“ok they’re coming now
You’re beautiful
You’re beautiful
You’re beautiful”
After you sleep with M., your infatuation inexplicably melts into a kind of peace.
She says that for her, your physical intimacy is like another layer of friendship. Though your ego bruises, you’re also relieved. Maybe because you knew that to date M. would be to conflate chemistry and compatibility. Because you would have resented chasing her kite string, would have resented always being the one on the ground.
You see M. a couple more times, but shortly thereafter you move away and gradually fall out of touch. But you still read her blog, where she writes about surrendering to ocean depths and about a girl becoming fire. She writes about her ex. She writes about her boss, a man who she falls in love with but can never tell. You scour her blog for clues of you, but you find none. You suppose that no one writes about the ones who chase the kite, who lend the pants, who shave the sickly heads.
Still, you think that you loved M. a little like a friend, and a lover, and a god. But something else was truer: You loved her in the way of breathwork and solo traveling and Burning Man. She made you feel alive.
She was an edge, where the world yawned below and you felt like if you leapt you might just fly.
But you’re learning that the edge is often rendered equally in light and shadow. You’re learning that the fullness of a shape emerges not only from its edges, but from the spaciousness contained within—from the nothing that is also everything. Not just when the sun trumpets over mountaintops or blazes like pink fire atop oceanic glitter, but when it hangs languid at midday. When time unfurls like a green tomato yellowing: unhurried, unremarkable, unwasted.
SaraSherburne (she/her) is a Pacific Northwest native who loves to write, DJ, and plan elaborate themed gatherings. Her writing has been published by Intrepid Times, Thrive Global, and Food Tank. She currently studies at the Yale School of the Environment and eats a lot of New Haven pizza.
It feels time to share the pandemic story no one asked for.
Other single women learned to bake sourdough. Some learned French. Some learned to make perfect little ice cubes with flowers frozen inside so they could host dinner parties for no one. But not me. I was busy becoming the most feral version of myself: a woman alone in her apartment ordering massive quantities of crab.
At first, I tried to resist. Tried to cling to the kind of polish I had worn like armor in an office of men, the performance of composure that kept me from seeming too much, too strange, too hungry. I remember my boss, Greg, saying on a Zoom call at the beginning of lockdown, “I hope all you single people are using this time to pick up a new skill. Maybe a language or an instrument.”
No, Greg, I’m not. All at once, I let go of the unspoken expectation to be the lady of the office and plunged headfirst into the delicate, delicious language of crab. Every Friday night after work, while the majority of our all-male team shut their laptops and wandered back down the hall to their families, I shut mine and entered a battlefield of my own making. I pulled the blinds closed. Removed my bra. Removed my pants. Stood alone in a tank top and underpants microwaving butter until it exploded all over the microwave like some divine, salty baptism.
Maybe if there’d been other women at work, I would have joined the office-sanctioned arts-and-crafts Slack channel or the pandemic French club. Maybe I’d have learned to conjugate verbs instead of deconstruct crustaceans. With other women, I might have shared the strange, silent weight of being alone, trading jokes or small comforts in a group instead of inventing my own rituals in the dark. I am so glad that I didn’t. I learned to wield scissors like a surgeon. I learned to eat crab like it was survival. Like I was Tom Hanks in Castaway, celebrating his first hot meal of roasted crab in his cave, Wilson by his side. I had spent years making myself small at work—well-fed on meetings and deadlines, but starving for something that was only mine. I realized then that no one else was going to nurture that version of me back to life.
I bought special crab scissors. Having grown up in an Asian household, I already knew the power of kitchen scissors for meat, but I had leveled up. I could slice clean through a thick crab shell like I was defusing a bomb. My hands smelled permanently like ocean brine and melted butter. I didn’t care.
I tried it all. Boxes arrived from Alaska, from Maine, from Maryland. I developed a loyalty to my crustaceans of choice. Dungeness for sweetness. King for drama. Soft shell for nights when I felt delicate and raw.
The pandemic was long. There were many lonely nights. There was always more crab.
This was not a hobby. This was a spiritual awakening. I was the kind of lonely you have to be to change. Each shell I splintered was another layer of polish breaking off, the shiny performance that once made me safe in a room full of men. But the safety was theirs, never mine. What I had left was hunger.
And still—so many stories from lockdown center around parenting struggles, and I believe every one. But single solitude was its own kind of strange, silent ache. No one saw it. No one talked about it. People made it sound like we were the lucky ones, spared the weight of homeschooling and partnerships and noise. But I was invisible. And that invisibility cracked something. I wasn’t eating crab in underpants because it was decadent. I was doing it because it was the closest thing I could find to celebration, to comfort, to proof that I could still treat myself like someone worth feeding.
At the time, I was working full-time with men who clung to the office until the bitter end. In California, where lockdown was serious, university departments had already been urged to go remote, but mine refused until the governor’s official stay-at-home order left them no choice. The men scoffed at the threat, surfed off Campus Point Beach between meetings, and emailed impassioned essays about “returning to in-person collaboration.”
I remember sitting in our silent office the day before we were finally sent home, looking around and wondering why no one else felt like we were on the edge of something. They wanted to go back to what felt like a deeply male version of domestication—out of the house, back with their buddies at work. But I was already gone. Already halfway to the sea.
It all culminated the following summer when I went to Maine for a writing retreat. The final dinner was lobster. The supposed prize of the sea. I sat next to a kosher professor who nibbled politely on broccoli. Another woman beside me tried lobster for the first time. Wide-eyed. Hesitant.
“It’s fine,” I told her, cracking my claws like I was some kind of grizzled, all-knowing seaperson, Quint from Jaws reborn. “But honestly? Crab is better.”
They looked at me like I’d said something scandalous. And maybe I had.
The next day, I ordered a lobster roll from a local favorite. And for old times’ sake, I got a crab roll too. No contest.
Was it wrong to spend my pandemic lockdown sampling the crustaceans of the sea instead of bettering myself? I did not learn French. I did not take up embroidery. I did not write the next great American novel. Instead, I was a woman working hard. Hustling for crab.
Once, in a weekly phone call with Greg, I licked a bit of crab off the end of a butter knife. The delighted slurping noise I made shocked us both. I thought I was caught until Greg urged me not to cry, reminded me we would be back in the office soon. “Totally,” I fake sniffled.
And then I hung up, stripped back down to my crab-eating uniform, sharpened my scissors, and got back to the real work.
Now, a few years post-pandemic, I walk past ice-packed snow crab in crowded grocery store seafood sections and feel something close to a heart tug. Lockdown was, for me, a return to whatever the hell I was supposed to be but had buried so deep down I’d forgotten—feral, free, eating crab while watching YouTube. No longer the girl at work in heeled booties and an array of buttoned-up jackets. Finally, I wasn’t trying to impress anyone. As alone as a person could be, I was unashamedly myself. Just feeding the creature who needed feeding.
Juliet Way-Henthorne‘s work has been featured in Hobart and AAWW’s The Margins and is forthcoming with Slant’d and Pine Hills Review. Juliet serves as Senior Creative Nonfiction Editor for jmww and works with Hunger Mountain Review as a Social Media Coordinator.
The young man at the next table is evangelizing to another young man. He is arguing we might live in a simulation. Something about light not behaving intuitively. He’s on to Lazarus and The Screwtape Letters now.
And I didn’t bring my headphones.
Outside, I watch boys hang loose as marionettes on a dying earth beneath a dying sun. And I worry about war and fundamentalism. I’m sick of dialectic dialogue.
The young man has moved on to talking about Fight Club (which is something you’re not supposed to talk about), misquoting the book and film, talking about a purposeless struggle.
And I marvel at a belief system cobbled together hodge-podge from religious texts and pop culture. Probably not so unlike my own.
Of course you are here. I don’t have my headphones to block you out.
Well, you aren’t here-here (I mean, could you imagine?), but you’re here the way I don’t notice my legs until they ache, or my stomach until I am hungry, or my heart until it’s breaking.
You are hiding in every poem I write and every story I tell, every journal entry and not far from every thought. (God, now he’s talking about love and his divorce and I feel pangs of sympathy and guilt.)
He says to the other young man: Let me ask you this. Let me ask you this.
But the questions are all rhetorical, simply there to further his points.
I sip the weakest tea I’ve ever had and it hurts my stomach as bad as the sympathy and guilt, but the barista said she’d try better if I wanted a refill and I’m trying not to be rude.
And of course you are here.
Textured tile covers the face of the coffee bar and it looks inside out the longer you stare at it, like an idea, like a simulation of a coffee bar.
And there is a father playing Go Fish with his daughter trying to ignore the young man talking now about the difference between the sexes and how dating is really like sales if you think about it.
And of course you are here.
Matthew Roy (he/him) lives in the American Midwest. He’s moved from a small town to a big city, from a rambling farmhouse to a small apartment, and from a major corporation to an up-and-comer. He’s writing more. He’s making changes. He’s querying his first novel and banging away at his second. His work has appeared in Eternal Haunted Summer, Haven Spec, IllumenMagazine, PenumbricSpeculativeFiction Mag, The Quarter(ly) Journal, Space & Time Magazine, The Sprawl Mag, star*line, Twenty-two Twenty-eight, untethered magazine, and So It Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library, among others.
In the spirit of jumping into uncertainty and making something new together, we invite you to pick two random numbers between one and eight (or spin our wheel twice) and form a new micro story.
I ready the house and myself for when they wake. I am the center of a seesaw and I keep the balance. I cook, clean, plan, arrange, manage, and listen. I hope my labor is efficient enough that it will be forgotten, that my family will be unburdened by daily domestic stresses. I hold the middle. I hold still.
Stillness can be a kind of death.
I tell myself joy cannot exist without misery. True joy, like faith, like love, is proven by its disappearance. A heart must be carved by suffering to be filled with the full power of joy.
I know this with my brain. It has been some time since I’ve felt such passions with my body.
Everyone’s midlife must feel this way, warm rushing waters frozen over time. Everyone’s marriage must feel this way.
Outside, the daffodils arrive and open, trumpets of sun. An April nor’easter hits New England and the flowers are pummeled by snow.
April 2024
My husband sleeps downstairs. We tell the children it is because he snores.
I sleep in the closet. I am following an instinct of my body that I do not understand, an instinct for less: less light, less space, less me.
I find a therapist who I hope will convince me to stay in my marriage. We spend our sessions discussing my husband’s manic and depressive swings. I do not tell her about the panic attacks or that I am sleeping in the closet.
On the floor, I reach out and touch the walls on either side of me.
My body tells me everything I have known is ending. My brain tells me it is all my fault.
I suffer panic attacks and hide in the bathroom until they abandon me. I quiet my voice by stuffing towels inside my mouth. A violence cracks my heart and there is a thunderous splintering down my arms. A frozen pond becoming undone.
Still, that April is the warmest on record. The tulips arrive early alongside the rabbits. I build a makeshift fence with buckets and empty birdhouses, but the vermin still eat the stalks to the ground.
April 2025
I am a separated woman—separated from my marriage.
It is Monday after midnight. March has just given way to April Fools. I ready myself for bed inside the nesting apartment I pseudo-share with my husband. He and I switch each night, one of us in the house with our children and the other in this studio apartment. He is here and not here, his life being lived in the alternating space of mine.
I’ve spent a year thawing, discovering a new self warmed by words and friends and bodies. Desire has been made strange by its absence of love. He, too, has soothed himself with bodies. Even now, we tell each other some truths.
I fill the apartment with seeds: marigolds, peas, cypress vine, squash. Some sprout after a few days and some take longer. Some never sprout. The sunflowers stand up first and I place them by the window with the shade open. Mornings, I am awoken by a stab of sun.
That April night, there is a strange scent to the room. I slide into the bed and rub my legs between the sheets. The smell arrives from the pillow. Sweet. Fecund. Vaporous. It is perfume. I turn on the light. I remove the comforter. Lipstick on white sheets. It is a shade more brown than red. It shows me the map of my husband’s most intimate pleasure. Color stains the middle and I imagine rouged lips on engorged flesh. Sweat and secretions soak into fabric, the fabric I have wrapped around my own skin. I try to exhale the perfume from my lungs. I am shocked—not that my husband has a lover, but that he has left the evidence for me to inhabit, a bed made up with dirty sheets.
The air tolls Over, Over, Over.
I throw the sheets into the trash. I spend two days crying. Fury and sadness and jealousy quake through me as if these emotions have never before existed. But good erupts through the cracks. There is love and hope and an appreciation for the bellow in my core, a constant message rising through the violent squall. You are not who you were and Let what must come, come.
Stillness, like control, is a grand illusion. I have learned not to trust a sheet of ice. It is truer to be sacrificed to the hungry waters.
Love and pain stand on opposite ends of a lever. They teeter totter back and forth, up and down, higher and higher until they are launched into the grand churn, that torrent of delights and sorrows and the hot in-betweens, where everything is felt and nothing is clear.
And finally, I know what it is to be alive.
Danielle Monroe is a writer, reader, mother and lover of all things RuPaul Drag Race. She is a proud Michigander who now calls Boston home. You can learn more about her at her website DanielleHMonroe.com
I asked you about the novel you were reading and realized too late I was flirting, despite wearing an oversized nautical sweater and a fanny pack designed to carry a child around my postpartum fat.
You were playing Pavement but didn’t know the band, and I forgave that, looking in your pretty face as you said witchy playlist, feeling that sense of undeniable possibility, and underneath, the scintillating savor of my own internalized shame.
It’s what we all dream of, right? Witchiness, which means taking ourselves to the forest to dance naked away from laundry and picking up countless old socks and half-full Coke cans— in other words, away from men.
I’m sorry for my fantasies of a wife, girlfriend, women, when I outlive my husband, sorry for breaking the illusion when he came in with his beard and his requests, his sense the world was made for him, and asked to use your restroom, to which you said no.
Harriet Weaver is a Los Angeles–based writer with an MFA from the University of California, Irvine, and a BA from Yale University, where she studied with Harold Bloom. She was recently published in the Los Angeles Review of Books journal PubLab and has poetry forthcoming from Roanoke Review. In her previous career as actor and producer, Harriet studied under Wynn Handman and brought shows to Broadway with Blue Spruce Productions. She was an instructor of poetry and composition at UC Irvine. She grew up in Bethesda, Maryland, and Wexford, Pennsylvania, and lives in LA with her husband and toddler.
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