You can still hear the voices from before. The way you and your dad rigged up the old PA system, got the music playing again, sat and let the notes carry through the dead shopping mall. The broken skylight, sun coming in, vines snaking and low enough for you to take a running start, jump, grab and swing when it was a long day and low on food and you and Mom and Dad could use a little light entertainment.
Dad found an old bike in a woodchip park nearby, and though it was mostly rusted—tire rubber burnt and flayed on the rim, and you couldn’t see how it’d ever function again—Dad only saw his own bike from the beforetimes, the gleaming metal of the frame, and the cards he said they’d clip just so for the spokes to hit and give the illusion of a motor. And the tricks they’d pull, he said, and the scars he could show you when the tricks didn’t go so well.
So you scavenged for parts, and Mom painted all the walls in the whole shopping mall, put down record of all the living things that had ever existed and even some that hadn’t, the menagerie of life, before the glow set in and made the world you now know.
Dad made you an automaton friend. Nothing too advanced but enough to stand in for the friends you weren’t able to make, something you could teach to walk alongside your bike, then run when it got the coordination down. You collected knee scrapes and bloody elbows on bike falls as your metal friend scuffed paint and dented aluminum trying to keep up with you, to catch you when you’d fall.
The shopping malls are all dead now, and it isn’t like they weren’t before, but there’s no Mom around to breathe life back into them. They’re just walls and a ceiling, windows and a floor. You can almost see the way the night fire would light up the paintings back then, and the stories Dad would tell, the ones he could speak but could never write down, and when the glow was low you could see the stars peeking past the smoke as it wisped up and out the broken skylight, and Dad said one day he’d build you all a rocket ship. It wouldn’t be much, not like the stalled starliners of the beforetimes, but it’d work just the same, and he’d take you all out of here, away from the glow and the loneliness and the broken everything and you’d find a new home up there, one day, somewhere warm and cozy where you could start over, and it got so the coldest, hungriest nights were filled with the tallest of tales, but those nights you could count on dreams of a makeshift rocket blasting up and through the mall’s skylight, out and past the glow, past the sky, shooting true and into the stars. Those dreams were the best, even if you woke from them with an empty stomach and numb toes, ears red and nearly frostbit.
Your automaton friend took to patrolling just outside the mall’s walls most nights, standing guard for your family, but especially for you. There wasn’t much he could do if there was danger besides wake you. But he insisted that he stand guard, that he repay you and Dad for the life you’d given him. So you left him to it.
You were nine years old when you saw your friend broken to bits and left to twitch on the ground, frost gathering on metal in the early morning cold. When you yelled, it was a sound that came outside of you, and Dad ran over, Mom too. Your friend’s metal head was nearly severed from the body, hanging by a ribbon cable and a couple of wires. Some scavver had made off with most of the body, arms and legs removed, vital components in the chest yanked out. Whoever they were, something had at least kept them from stealing the still-blinking head.
You cried during the entire operation that followed, and even though your friend told you it was okay, that he wouldn’t need a body as long as he had you, you couldn’t help but feel like it was all your fault.
The salvage successful, you asked your dad to add a basket to the front of your old bike. If your friend couldn’t run alongside you, he could at least ride along.
You’re back now, twenty years to the day since you left, with your pack out in front of you, and the glow is low today, mercifully so. Mom and Dad are just a burning memory, but this dead shopping mall still stands. You reach into the pack, find what you’re looking for. Who you’re looking for. The primary colors of youth are gone, but you can almost remember them as your old friend opens his eyes and looks out at his birthplace: the building where so much was taken from both of you, the building where everything was given. You try to frame it in a broken skylight in your mind, to keep its bigness small: so much smoke trailing away out and to the stars. Sometimes you wonder if the world’s so small, or if it’s so big you can’t stand it. You can’t decide which, but you don’t need to make up your mind just yet.
Nick Olson (he/they) is the author of the novels Here’s Waldo and The Brother We Share and is the Editor-in-Chief of (mac)ro(mic). His third novel, Afterglow, will release in June of 2022. A Best Small Fictions nominee, finalist for Glimmer Train’s Very Short Fiction Award, and 2021 Wigleaf longlister in and from Chicagoland, he’s been published in SmokeLong Quarterly, Hobart, Fiction Southeast, and other fine places. Find him online at nickolsonbooks.com or on Twitter @nickolsonbooks.
My fingers had loosened their grasp on God, and my eyes were on the door of the high school classroom where we held the Christian club I’d started the previous fall. It was hot for April. I needed air, I needed to walk around campus with my five-dollar Walkman, smoke-thick voices of grunge singers drizzling into my ears. The other leaders watched me, waiting for me to speak, but the words were chalk dust on my tongue. I’d heard them talking lately, voices low as I passed: What’s going on with her?
I hung back until chitchat hummed through the room. I turned toward the door again, lungs thirsting for outside air, and then the girl with lavender eyes walked in and I felt an ancient familiarity, like night fires and the smell of leaves in warm wind.
Scrawl
I pretended I wasn’t looking for Max as I walked around at lunch the next day. When I found her crouched in a corner between brick buildings in a hoodie and headphones, I sat down. “Sorry if this is weird,” I said, meeting her purple eyes only for a second. I handed her a folded square of notebook paper on which I’d written everything: how the boy who called himself a pagan had lured me from God and had then been frightened by my intensity. How I couldn’t go back to Christian warrior and saving souls for the Lord!
The day after that, she handed me a letter.
“It’s not weird,’ she said.
Freefall
It rained that fall, and the world was all purples and greens like the lights I strung in my room and the sad, monotone Scottish rock singers moaning through my stereo. Without her contact lenses, Max’s eyes looked like sunlight shining through the bits of cola-colored glass we picked up at the beach, tying them with string to make windchimes. We spent hours on my bed, lying head-to-foot, our hands meeting in the middle. This is normal, right? we’d say, our fingers tracing each other. Friends do this, right? It was vertigo, I was falling into something and there was no stopping it. And God loomed overhead like a great black shroud, a ceiling pressing down on us, stealing all the air.
Infernalized
It was a year before we kissed, and by then my love for Max churned in my chest like massive clouds gathering, rolling over one another in a bruised sky. It drenched me like the rain that streaked my Volvo’s windshield as we drove around to coffee shops or the record store in the afternoons. Little day trips of desperation. When the darkness of my bedroom and the raw, slow guitars from the boombox became too heavy, I’d ask her, “Where should we go today?”
She’d shrug and smirk sadly. “Somewhere nice?”
I knew what she meant. Not somewhere expensive or fancy, but somewhere soft and warm, with mellow lights and sweet-scented air. A slow, sheltered place where we could let ourselves ask questions, let whatever this was between us unfurl like a hand opening, without the demand to define and damn it before we could even whisper its name.
When Max’s lips found mine that first time, I felt heavy, solid things shifting themselves inside me. After the pagan boy, I’d sunk into my misery, worn it like a comfortable old coat, draped with musky incense, minor-key guitar. But I’d held in the back of my mind the possibility of returning to God, a secret coin in my pocket, turning it between my fingers. This kiss, the taste of her, her scent like smoke and leaves—there was no reigning this in. Her amber sea glass eyes. Her narrow fingers. The rain against the windows. My life was petals pelted by rain, determined to bloom outward and outward despite the pounding drops knocking them to the concrete. I tried to cling to tangible things, like the punk rock mixtapes she made for me, the hand-scrawled Emily Dickinson poems she slipped in my pockets. But I dreamt I was in a car sliding backward down a steep hill. I felt dragged away into eternity, unable to stop loving her, unable to stop believing we were damned for it.
Flatline
The horizon of Max’s set lips across from me in my Volvo that night. The eerie orange streetlight painting jagged shapes across her face, her eyes quivering like the skin atop water. It was too much: the constant holding back, restraining our hands, our lips which once explored each other now reciting Bible verses. Each time, we’d failed, clutching at each other in the darkness, feeling the heavy, metallic condemnation. Stuck in a loop of loving and then repenting.
Her mouth was a flatline of finality as she said, I can’t do this anymore. Words bubbled to the surface of my mind and popped, words meant to make her stay. Their futility settled over me like snow, the chill of this knowledge seeping into my bones. We were over.
Cloves and Bones
The air was thick with salt as I walked up the front steps to the house in San Francisco’s Sunset District. Do you like bones and moonshine, fire dancing and accordions? the Craig’s List ad had read. Lavender-grey streaks of fog danced across the sky like cream in black tea. I shuffled my feet on the front porch, wondering what they would ask, how I could talk my way into this house by the sea. I was afraid of how much I needed this: to let myself be shaped by this city of salt and fog.
The man who answered the door was smoking a clove cigarette. He was in his late twenties, tall and tattooed, his eyes lined with kohl, his turmeric-colored braid stretching to his tailbone. He eyed my coat with its wide black and white vertical stripes like an old-time prisoner’s outfit, my oversized thrift-store leather boots, and the calligraphic swirls of eyeliner at my temples. “I think you’ll be a good fit,” he said.
I packed the Volvo with only a few things: hoodies and headphones, a boombox, a book of Emily Dickinson poems, bottles full of sea glass. I painted my new walls: maroon, forest green, black. I played a CD of Bach cello suites and lay on my back on my new giant futon, watching the ripe orange moon outside my massive window. And the fog swirled against the glass like the smoke of ancient fires, painting the mystery of my future.
Noreia Rain is walking below lights like candleflame pearls strung in the trees, the air brushed with roses. She needs this, the strange poetry in her ears, the long shadows below the streetlights. She is straining to hear ancient whispers in forgotten languages. She is tearing apart the burlap, desperate to find the rich soil blooming with thorned, reckless, exuberant life underneath. Her writing has appeared in Transfer Magazine and The Ana. Her poem “bitten” was featured in Wingless Dreamer’s 2021 Halloween Anthology. She is currently seeking a publisher for her poetry collection, The Yellow Inbetween, while working on a memoir and a second collection of poems.
first it appeared like an oil of rainbow, shimmering under the sunlight, dancing
with the ripples & stretching toward the shore to baptize little multicolored stones.
i have seen fire run like an athlete on water. i have seen it lick a river like a child
does a bowl of his favorite broth. in the place i come from, i have seen fire dance on the skins of
men who received an impromptu visitation of misfortune. they say: something must ignite a fire.
what if the nascence of burning is within, would you call it self-forging, like the malleability of red steel?
i have heard stories of how a memory can incinerate the soul & make the body: a warehouse of ash. perhaps,
all of us have mastered the art of our burnings; we’ve learned to feed this flame with water to quiet
our consummations. i know from my childhood, between my first tooth and first walk, i have accessorized my lungs
with enough gasoline to fuel my continuity. like holding water in your hands, i submit to the fluidity of time.
Joshua Effiong, Frontier VI, is a writer and digital artist from the Örö people of Nigeria. His works have appeared or are forthcoming in The Kalahari Review, Rough Cut Press, Madrigal Press, Titled House, The Indianapolis Review, Chestnut Review, among other places. He is the author of a poetry chapbook, Autopsy of Things Left Unnamed (2020). Find him on Instagram @josh.effiong and twitter @JoshEffiong
“Fucker!” Floyd yelped loudly when the car door grazed his calf as Annie opened it.
“Oh, I’m sorry, hon!”
“The fuck you are.” Floyd slapped the door and instead of offering his hand to help her out of the car, spun on his heels, and headed toward the church.
Annie took a deep breath, pursed her lips. Floyd is sensitive about his leg, she told herself. It ain’t you. He would have sounded off at anyone. She collected her purse and swung herself around in the seat, grabbed the handle with one hand, and heaved herself out.
Floyd was maybe twenty feet away and had stopped, took out a cigarette, and lit it.
“Hon,” Annie said, “can’t you wait til after? You know I hate when they can smell it on you.”
“To hell with them. Either the good lord is the good lord of tobacco too or he ain’t the good goddamn lord at all.”
Annie walked toward him. “Please.”
“You drug the damn door right across my leg! It hurt and now I need to calm down before I sit in there for two hours listening to bullshit.”
Church was, for Floyd, either “bullshit” or “snake oil,” depending on his mood. When he’d had a few beers he became philosophical and described religion as “more about feeding the preacher’s pocket than feeding my soul.” When he was in a miserable mood it was just “so much bullshit to keep us from having any goddamn fun.”
Ten days earlier, Floyd had been at the gas plant when he stumbled and fell on a catwalk, causing his left leg to be pressed against a generator exhaust pipe. His leg had been burnt enough that he was sent to the emergency room and had to talk to a company lawyer who gave him two days off, paid. Since then, Floyd had walked with a little limp and complained about the pain. He wouldn’t sleep with the sheet on his leg, and groaned when he put his pants on, saying the fabric itself felt like sandpaper on the burn.
Annie had been patient, of course, as always. She kept the dog from jumping on him, made cold compresses for him every morning when he got home. She made his follow-up appointments and went to the pharmacy for his various medicines on her lunch break, or after her shift, if the diner happened to be busy. She took care of him, like she always had, and all she asked was for him to go to church with her without complaint. She’d been raised in the church. It was important to her. And, she often had to remind him, if she was important to him then he’d go without complaint.
But his leg was burnt. Not deeply, but it had been terribly red for a few days after the incident, so she was willing, always, to give him the benefit of the doubt.
The accident had happened on a Thursday, so of course she had stayed home with him that first Sunday. Last night she had asked if he was well enough to attend services the next morning and he’d said that he might be. It had taken some urging but he did finally get dressed this morning and say, “Well, guess I’m going.”
Floyd flicked his cigarette to the ground as they walked toward the door. As was the custom, Pastor Edgar stood at the door greeting each member as they arrived.
“Floyd and Mrs. Turner. So very glad to see you here this morning.” He took Annie’s hand in both of his. “Sorry you missed Sunday School, of course, but I understand you’ve had your hands full taking care of your husband?”
Floyd cleared his throat. “Yeah, she’s had to watch me hobble around a bit.”
Annie smiled. “Oh, you know Floyd. He’s strong as a bull and twice as ornery!”
Pastor Edgar laughed and Floyd said, “Well, I guess we better get in there. Don’t wanna miss the show.”
They began making their way through the crowded foyer. Channel Methodist wasn’t a large congregation, but the building, built some thirty years earlier, was now too small to comfortably handle the flock.
As they walked through, Annie saw a child running toward Floyd. Before she could warn him, the kid barreled into Floyd’s leg. She screwed her face up, hoping to get there before Floyd let out a holler, or worse, said something to the little boy, but Floyd didn’t seem to notice. Annie was confused.
When they found a pew, Floyd started a conversation with Gary Miller and Annie reached for a hymn book on the backside of the pew ahead of them. She made sure it bumped Floyd’s leg, right where he’d set the cold compress the night before—all the while complaining that she’d sure taken her sweet time while he’d sat there in agony.
Annie considered all this as the announcements were made. She wrestled with what to do as the choir sang hymns 38, 232, and verses 1, 2, 3, and 5 of hymn 166. As Pastor Edgar began his sermon, titled “What Are We to Do?” Annie considered the man next to her, who had fallen asleep, sometime between verse 5 of Hymn 166 and the reading of the day, the Gospel of St. Luke, chapter 3, verses 1-18.
As they exited, again Pastor Edgar stood by, shaking hands and politely refusing offers for dinner.
Annie extended her hand and her offer of a casserole dinner, as the moment demanded, and then, after Pastor Edgar assured her that he had a dinner engagement at his mother’s in a few hours, Annie said, “Pastor, Floyd was wondering if you might pray over his leg. That it be healed.”
“Do what now?” Floyd, unlit cigarette in his hand, seemed to sway backwards as if a strong wind had caught him.
“Pray over his leg?” It was obvious that Pastor Edgar was equally unprepared.
“Yes,” Annie continued. “It’s been ten days, and it still hurts him terribly.”
“Now, Annie,” Floyd said, “no cause for that.”
“Why on earth not, hon?”
Pastor Edgar swallowed hard, his discomfort apparent. This sort of thing was uncommon, Annie knew. She’d never asked or even seen a congregant actually ask Pastor Edgar to pray over someone. Still, he was a man of God and, while he was no Pentecostal snake-handler, his job was to pray. Annie smiled and held his gaze until he turned to Floyd. “I could say a few words, if you’d like.”
“I think that would be good, Floyd.”
“Well I don’t want to be a bother.”
“Oh, I’m sure it isn’t a bother, is it Pastor?”
“Well, no, of course not.”
Annie looked at Floyd. He was pale and small looking. The unlit cigarette still held between his fingers, his lips quivered. Annie knew there were few things Floyd hated more than bowing his head to anyone or anything, the Lord included. On any other occasion, he would have balked, refused, and walked away. But Annie had maneuvered herself and the Pastor into his way, with folks behind Floyd, staring, wondering why the Turners were taking so long to say their goodbyes. Floyd’s face was now red with embarrassment and Annie knew that was the only thing he hated more than praying.
“Bow your head, hon.”
Pastor Edgar proceeded to ask the Lord for His healing mercies, and that a hedge of protection be placed around the Turner household.
“Amen,” he finished.
“Amen,” Annie replied.
As they walked back to the car, Floyd was quiet. He started around the car to his door when he noticed Annie standing at hers, staring at him. He paused then came back to her side, opening the door for her.
“Thank you, hon,” she said, and got in. Floyd went back to the driver’s side and sat behind the wheel. He hesitated with the key, and stared straight ahead. Annie took the rearview mirror, turned it, and checked her hair.
“I think I’d like you to take me out this evening, Floyd. There’s a new seafood place up in Jacinto City that Pam told me about.” With that she sat back and began pulling a cigarette out of the pack she’d left on the dashboard. “Could you light me up, hon?”
Floyd looked out the way an animal at the zoo looks out of a cage. He reached into his breast pocket, produced a lighter, and turned to her.
“Course,” he said.
Travis Cravey is a high school maintenance man in Southeastern Pennsylvania. His first collection, Manifold, was published by Emerge Literary Journal in August 2021. Honestly, he seems like a pretty good guy.
I thought of you when she turned to me with those pleading desperate eyes and begged for us to go away somewhere. I knew from the way she spoke that she’d go anywhere I wanted. It came as no surprise that she agreed to Pittsburg.
When she and I lived together, she used to do this thing where she’d climb into my bed when the lights were out and we were alone and she’d tell me that she didn’t like girls but she liked me. And my skin would get hot and she’d giggle at how I’d blush. She’d tease me for my goosebumps that popped up whenever our hands touched. But when the lights came on, she’d act completely different. She’d tell her friends I was the one to flirt with her.
But then she moved out. Now whenever we see each other, she hangs off my arm in public and follows after me. I think she got lonely. She reminds me of how I was with you. Just more obvious.
You never knew I loved you, did you? I can’t blame you. It’s my way I guess. I’m not one to seize opportunities when they present themselves. I tend to let that opportunity pack up and move hours away and find other people who love them.
“The University of Pittsburgh?” She asked after I typed the directions in. She sounded skeptical but turned when the phone told her to.
“It has beautiful architecture.” I replied, staring out the window.
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
To be honest I didn’t know if it was true or not, I just needed a reason, an excuse, and she would have taken any.
“Well then,” She smiled at me, “I can’t wait to see it.”
I couldn’t help but think about how sweet she looked.
She had this habit—a favorite hobby of hers— of leading me on time and time again. To be fair, I let her. I knew her tricks, the little traps she set. I stepped into them willfully. I never brushed her hand away when it found its way onto my knee. And I always let myself melt into her hands when they cradled my face or traced patterns into my skin. It felt nice to have someone flatter me and touch me the way she did, even if I knew it didn’t mean anything to her.
She made me feel the way I felt when I was younger and you were still around. How willing I was to fall in love.
Do you know what I thought about when I started to fall for her?
I thought about how much I missed you. And, suddenly, I felt so overwhelmed with how far away you were. I wanted to see you when I loved her. I wanted you to stop it.
I thought I might find you at the University of Pittsburgh. I remember when you told me you were accepted there.
She draped herself over my arm and told people who didn’t ask that I was her girlfriend. She looked to the sky, admiring the excuses I’d made—the buildings, the bridges—while I searched the crowds of students and cars that rolled by. She held my hand and rested her head on my shoulder, and I was embarrassed—embarrassed of what you might think if my eyes ever did find yours in the swarm of people. She whispered in my ear, trying to coax a blush to my cheeks.
I could hardly hear her. I could have sworn I heard your voice everywhere.
I searched the museums and greens and sidewalks. I examined every face. I stayed until it was dark. And still, I couldn’t find you. Her hand tightened around mine. She smelled nice. I knew when we went back to the hotel she’d kiss my cheek and watch my skin redden and I’d think of you and I’d think that I was in over my head.
Being in love with her feels like falling out of love with you. And then I’m mourning you all over again. Losing you all over again. You promised me better things when you went away. But there I stood, in Pittsburg, and all I could think was that my better things had been with you.
Cole Hediger is a Philadelphia-based writer and student at Temple University. She has previously been published in Sunstroke Magazine with her piece “Breaking Ice” and in Bloom Magazine with her poem “Self Exploration.” While Cole’s procrastinating writing, she’s watching movies and reading.
Good afternoon cmcrockford; I am from Phoenix also. Here the insects make no noise, though something sings along with the night.
Are you in my Phoenix, where the roads shiver when it’s cold? Do you get lonely even when hearing the songs of the dark?
Me too, me too; I wish I was between your legs.
Why don’t you answer my emails or reply to the texts?
Will you not come to my dying patchwork house? Will you come and see the nettle leaves now spreading along my ceiling cracks?
Please
Are you here?
I am willing to offer 20 percent for your time; hurry while it lasts.
C.M. Crockford is a neurodivergent writer who’s been featured in Wilde Boy, Neologism Poetry Journal, and Daily Drunk Mag among others. He currently lives in Philadelphia but has lived all over. Crockford loves Bowie records, animals, and that he has been cited twice on Wikipedia.
The great moray eel whips her head out of the cave, demon-faced, cursing, a prehistoric ghost.
Even with the glass between us, you pull back from the glittering eye, the thirsty mouth, this spectacle of ruined survival.
I want to say, yes, death comes like this— powerful-jawed and unrelenting— to remind us, by contrast, how fragile the anemone is.
Watch how it waves, tentacle-bright. That kills, too. Just in brilliant color.
Death always comes out stinging— bite & poison, eel or flower, disguised and hidden in the craggy reef.
I want you to know I see the coral is the same color as the bedsheets at the nursing home, the same color
as the scrubs of nurses who wipe your mother’s mouth and wheel her to Mass. And I want to say, yes, I, too, see her face in the moray’s—
the mouth gasping open and closed, the trembling jaw that spells mortal. We will all have our moment like hers,
we will all be spit out into that unfathomable blue. The cave’s invisible veil will float us into primordial sea. But until then, slip
back into the darkness with me. Hold my hand among all the glowing tanks,
all this breakable glass, hold me close in the water until the inevitable last.
Christine Butterworth-McDermott’s latest poetry collection is Evelyn As: Poems (Fomite, 2019). She is the founder and co-editor of Gingerbread House Literary Magazine. Her poetry has been published in such journals as Alaska Quarterly Review, The Massachusetts Review, Prime Number Magazine, and River Styx, among others.
Lena McCuskey took Danny’s virginity on a hot Friday afternoon an hour after last period. He’d pulled his car into a shady corner beneath the cherry blossoms at the edge of campus, his car half-hidden by the dumpster situated next to the back door of the gym. It was all thanks to the car that he found himself splayed in the back, Lena pulling down his pants with one hand while managing to yank up her t-shirt with the other. He was sweating and trembling, his hands shaky as they reached up and cupped Lena’s sides. Her mascara was running, not because she was sobbing with regret or fear but because of the melty heat; it grabbed her hair and slapped it against her face, like tendrils of dense, rotting seaweed. The car’s interior was already humid like a greenhouse, the windows gathering condensation, which Danny could barely see thanks to their dark tint.
Danny drove a hearse.
When his parents bought the car, surprising him on his eighteenth birthday, a heavy snowstorm came through in the middle of the night. They brought him outside in the morning, blindfolded. He could tell his parents were proud of themselves, both grinning above their steaming coffee mugs, wearing their matching pajama suits and puffy slippers. They stood in the jaw of the garage while Danny tiptoed out into the driveway, his feet crunching through the chunky, ice-slicked snow. He uncovered the recognizable humped vinyl roof.
“Really?” he said.
His mother frowned. “It’s what we could afford.”
“The driver’s seat is actually really luxurious,” his father said. “It’ll make you interesting and different.”
Danny resisted the urge to say, It’ll make me a freak. He knew his parents cared, that they worked hard. His father managed a Walgreens, and his mother worked at the local university’s health center doing medical coding. They must have saved and discussed and searched and searched to buy him this car.
As if reading his mind, his father said, “We got a good deal.”
“Thanks,” Danny said. “Really. It’ll be, uh, unique.”
“That’s the spirit,” his parents said in tandem. They drank their coffee. His mother said, “Now let’s get inside. It’s cold. I’m pretty sure you have a snow day.”
That cold was gone as Lena pulled off his underwear. Danny was semi-hard, and she took it in her hands without a word. When he’d first shown up in the hearse, his classmates had guffawed and elbowed him in the ribs, making jokes about how the goth kids would love it. Danny’s parking spot—he’d paid for one at the start of senior year in the hope that he’d have a car before school was over—buttressed the walkway between the school’s two buildings, and word of Danny’s ride spread fast. The popular kids made jokes about Danny’s parents changing careers (not that any of those kids had any idea what his parents actually did for a living) and one of the football players started calling him Mort.
“Get it?” he said one day, sidling up next to Danny at his locker. “For mortuary.”
“Yes,” Danny said, shoving his physics book into his locker. “I do.”
“Oh, come on,” the beefy red-headed linebacker with bloated arms and a beer belly said. “It’s funny.”
“Ha,” Danny said.
The football player wandered into the scrum of students. Scuffed lockers opened and closed, students laughed and jawed one another, sneakers squealed against the tile floor. Danny threw himself into the din, marching toward his AP English class, where his teacher tried to get them to discuss Timequake, asking what they would do if they had to relive the last ten years of their lives without being able to change anything, knowing exactly what was coming.
“Be pretty awful for everyone who died,” Lena McCuskey said. “Imagine getting on an airplane you knew would crash.”
Lena was the leader of the goth group. They all wore dark, monochromatic pants with t-shirts that looked like they’d been sucked through a wood chipper. Their lips were black, their eyes heavy with mascara. Lena’s backpack was strangled with safety pins. She was smart, the English teacher’s favorite despite the deadpan delivery of her conversation-halting comments. Danny had been paired with her as a junior in their college composition course. They’d written a partnered research paper on the Pennsylvania Turnpike murders, leaning over microfiche machines to read four-line blurbs from ancient copies of the New York Times. She’d been studious, not one for chit-chat, and had driven them to the St. Louis Public Library off Lindbergh because their suburban dinker, while full of paperback romance novels and a vibrant children’s section, suffered a dearth of archival materials.
Lena’s Buick LeSabre smelled of clove cigarettes and McDonald’s fries. She didn’t speak while they drove, nor did she play music. Instead she rolled the windows all the way down despite the cold that spun her hair into her face. She didn’t push it away from her eyes as she navigated I-270, passing cars left and right, engine rattling as she broke eighty, eighty-five miles an hour before at the last second, at the Olive Boulevard exit, careening off. Danny had expected her to perhaps relish in the grisliness of the Turnpike murders, the mystique, but no: when she spoke, it was only to call out roll numbers and dictate how the order of events should unfold in their paper. They received an A.
She approached him months after he started driving the hearse, after his new nickname had spread like an infection. Everyone was calling him Mort, as if he were old and balding and clammy. Lena stood next to his locker just like the football player had, slouchy against the neighboring steel grille. Her hair was glossy in the hard light, so dark it looked like a wig, her pale skin like porcelain.
“I like your car,” she said.
Danny blinked at her. It was the nicest thing she’d ever said to him.
“Could I check it out?”
“There aren’t any dead bodies.”
“Well that’s disappointing.”
Danny shut his locker. They started walking toward English.
“I think it suits you.”
Danny wasn’t a jock, though he did go jogging on weekends and grunted through pushups and crunches every morning, so he was in better shape than anyone would have guessed. He wasn’t a band geek, or a drama nerd, or a gamer. He didn’t count himself among the stoners, and definitely wasn’t among Lena’s goth crew. Danny liked to read, but he didn’t carry thick tomes into the cafeteria. He had a smattering of friends from various cliques. His best friend went to the private high school a few blocks away, and on weekends they sat on one of their back porches, playing cribbage.
“After school, then?” Lena said when they arrived at the classroom door.
Danny nodded.
She said little that first time, looking over the interior, which was clean: beige leather seats, onyx accents on the dash and radio consoles. The casket rollers and bier pins were still installed, but Danny’s mother had helped him cover them with some blankets and had even made jokes about him bringing girls back there; that’s why she’d chosen a muted gray color: “We don’t want the back to be too romantic.”
Lena fiddled with the evergreen air freshener dangling from the rearview and then toyed with the radio, letting staticky whisper fill the interior.
“I expected it to smell like embalming fluid.”
“I think they cleaned it pretty thoroughly before it went up for sale.”
She stretched out her long legs. “Lots of space here, at least. What’s it like to drive?”
“Like steering a boat.”
“You’ve steered a boat before?”
“Metaphorically, I guess.”
That made Lena McCuskey smile.
On their second afternoon together, Lena said, “Do you ever wonder about the bodies that have been in here?” She looked around as if doing an appraisal.
On the third occasion, she turned to look in the back and said, “Can we sit there?”
“Sure, I guess.”
A stud winked in Lena’s left nostril, and Danny asked about it.
“New,” Lena said. “Did it last weekend.”
“Did it? Yourself?”
Lena laughed. “I have a cousin who works in the mall. Does it all for free.” She pointed up at her right ear, which was a panoply of stones and tiny gold hoops that munched all the way up to the cartilage at the top.
“Tough time getting through airport security.”
“I’ve never flown anywhere.”
“Really?”
She shook her head. The interior of the car was warm thanks to the sun. Lena’s upper lip was dotted with the lightest bit of sweat. “My parents are homebodies. They went to fucking high school here. They live in the house my dad grew up in.”
“Wow.”
“What about you?”
Danny shook his head.
She kissed him then. Danny could taste the perspiration on her skin. Her breath was warm and smelled of strawberry. Her tongue plied at his lips and he opened them just so. He wasn’t sure what to do, so he kept kissing her, his hands pressed against her sides, where he could feel trim, sinewy muscle.
When she gripped his erection, he shuddered and said, “Do we need—”
She shook her head. “I’m good.”
“Good?”
She blinked at him. “I’m on the pill.”
“Oh. Okay.”
It was over quickly, which made Danny feel sheepish. Lena tilted her head and said, “That was your first time, wasn’t it?”
He felt a flare in his cheeks, which were already flush from the heat inside the car, their bodies’ mingled sweat. He could smell his natural aroma: salty and fuzzy and faintly tart.
“You were gentle,” Lena said. “Boys stop being gentle fast.” Her voice was different as she spoke, as if she was holding back something that she didn’t want Danny to hear, a bit of broken glass in her throat. Maybe it was her real voice. Or maybe it was an invention. He didn’t know for sure whether she was or wasn’t who she made herself out to be. Lena pulled on her clothes and smiled at him, her teeth bright and clean. Danny was still naked. He tugged his pants to his crotch in a ball of denim, his underwear tangled in the legs.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “You were fine.”
“Fine?”
“Trust me,” she said. “That’s a positive.”
Then she crawled over the center console and sidled out the passenger-side door, letting a burst of afternoon air in after her, leaving Danny alone with the sticky air and a shuffling feeling inside him. He sat still for a long moment before pulling on his pants, his crotch swampy. When he dragged himself into the front seat, his foot caught on one of the rollers underneath the blanket and he flew forward, nearly smashing his face against the dashboard.
He gathered himself and turned on the ignition, leaning into the air conditioning that crusted the sweat on his forehead. Danny gripped the wheel, stared forward at the rotting wooden fence at the edge of campus that separated it from the neighboring private property. A strong afternoon breeze danced the branches of the trees that loomed above the fence. He felt spent, empty, tired. Instead of the starry endorphin-laced euphoria he’d always thought would come after sex, he felt a thick malaise, like he’d eaten too much.
He drove home in a daze. Every light was red. At each stop he felt the eyes of the drivers idling next to him sliding his way and—though he knew the hearse was the source of this staring—Danny was convinced he must look different, that the stink of sex must be vibrating out of him, illuminating his skin with a blinding alien glow. But when he glanced down at his hands, they were the same as always.
When Danny came through the front door, his father was slumped back in his Barcalounger, grumbling at the television while he played video games. Danny didn’t know any other parents who still dug Nintendo, and it was a seesawing point of both pride and embarrassment; sometimes Danny thought it was nice that his father felt youthful enough to navigate Mario and Link and Samus around on screen, but other times he thought he was the one who should be obsessed with those pixelated adventures.
“Happy Friday,” his dad said. Danny’s father was a big man; he’d played football in high school, though he hadn’t been good enough for the college level. His face was always a shag of a full, thick beard, and he had hairy arms that seemed to go on for days. He appeared to have trouble finding polo shirts—that’s all he wore: endless polo shirts, even when relaxing in front of the television—that fit his barrel chest. Danny’s mom, on the other hand, was a petite woman, tiny with sharp features and close-set eyes. Danny didn’t really look like either of them but he knew this was how genetics worked: you were generally some weird amalgam of your parents. Even so, Danny looked at himself in the mirror and didn’t see a single trace of either of them, nor any of his massive relatives on his father’s side—he was lankier than any of his cousins or uncles—nor the more gnomish, stout members of his mother’s family. His hair was somewhere between his dad’s dark curls and his mother’s straight strawberry blond, and he had green eyes, unlike his parents’ blue and brown.
“Some lucky recessive genes you got,” his mom had said when he mentioned this. He’d smiled, but Danny had felt even more at sea.
His father paused his game and asked if Danny was hungry for a snack. His dad’s schedule was a chaotic, unpredictable mess, constantly changing thanks to the unreliable twenty-somethings in his employ. He was perpetually on-call, forced to leap from the dinner table whenever some crisis came through on his phone. They’d once had to leave a Cardinals game in the middle of the fourth inning because his store had been robbed at gunpoint.
“No,” Danny said. “Thanks though.” He felt swampy in his crotch, the slime of sex still rotting on his inner thighs. He was sure his father would notice something was different; he was observant, good at catching sight of would-be shoplifters. He’d majored in English but had never managed to find a job where he could really make use of it. He had studied poetry and the Renaissance, even had a small bust of Shakespeare that he kept on the fireplace mantel next to a trio of family photographs. His father didn’t write much anymore, nor did he read, and Danny wondered if this was out of necessity or transformation, time and transition warping him into a different person than he’d been.
“Everything okay, bud?”
Danny nodded.
“You seem tense. It’s the weekend.” He finally seemed to realize that Danny had been late getting home. “Were you studying?”
“Some library research,” Danny said.
“Studious. Good for you.”
His father unpaused the game. His character, some kind of monk, stood in the middle of a dark forest, carrying a bo staff. Danny watched his father walk up to a lantern hanging from a tree branch and whack it with the staff, which started a small fire.
“Whoops,” his dad said, sending his character running away from the growing flames. “Any exciting plans for the weekend?”
Danny shook his head. “I thought I’d catch up on homework. I have work tomorrow night.”
“No parties or anything?”
“None that I’m invited to.”
His father pursed his lips. “You could always throw one here.”
“I don’t know who I’d invite.”
“Kids will come to a party even if they don’t know who’s hosting.”
“Ouch.”
“That did come out wrong.”
Danny left his father on the couch and slipped upstairs to his bedroom, a small space with robin-egg blue walls and a bare dresser where he left spare change in messy heaps. He pulled off his clothes and stared at himself in the mirror hanging from his closet. Danny’s pubic hair was matted, his thighs were chafed bright red. He poked at his stomach and the curve of his nascent pecs. Aside from his gluey groin, he looked normal enough. This felt both like a relief and a disappointment.
On Monday, Lena asked if they could drive around after school.
“I have work at five,” Danny said.
She raised an eyebrow.
“I wash dishes.”
He’d taken the job after convincing his parents, who had wanted him to focus on school work, that his last semester of high school didn’t really matter; his college applications were in, and he had nearly perfect grades (junior-year chemistry his lone B) and had done well on all of his standardized tests. He promised he wouldn’t fail out in his last year, and he could use some spending money for when he went off to school. Danny hadn’t told them his real goal was to work his ass off, take as many eight-dollar-an-hour shifts as he could so that, by the end of summer, he could dump the hearse and buy something else. Anything else.
He told this to Lena as he guided them through the grid of neighborhoods behind the high school, where brick-sided ranches and vinyl split-levels with basketball hoops above their garages were arranged in neat, wide streets with ample room for curbside parking. The car’s acceleration felt heavy and elephantine through the gas pedal. Soccer moms unloading their kids and businessmen checking their mailboxes frowned at the hearse as Danny passed by.
“I can’t see you washing dishes for a living.”
“What can you see me doing?”
She shrugged.
They had sex again. Danny pulled up next to Lena’s car, the hood smattered with samaras from the blooming maples. He could see a skull-shaped air freshener dangling from the rearview mirror. This time, she laid down in the back and pulled him on top of her. When she strummed her fingers down his torso along the small gulf at the center of his abs, she said, “These are a nice feature.”
He wasn’t in love with her; Danny knew that much. In fact, he wasn’t even sure that sex with Lena meant that much to him. When Danny tried to remember the feel of Lena’s skin beneath his fingertips, and what it felt like to be inside her, the way her body moved in response to his, it all felt like a distant memory. He could, if he concentrated long and hard, recall the fruity smell of her body and her sweat, the way the interior of the hearse almost went briny. But he didn’t pine for her when they weren’t together.
He kept waiting for something to happen: for Lena to disappear, for Lena to come sobbing to him that she was pregnant, for Lena to ask him to go on a real date. She continued sauntering the halls with her coterie of pale-cheeked, dark-lipped friends, their fingernails the color of tar, their eyelids bruised violets or violent, shrieking green, then meeting up with him after school. He would tootle her around like a chauffeur, zigging and zagging through town, making turns at random, always ending up back at the school, always moving into the rear of the car.
Graduation loomed. Senior superlatives were announced, and Danny braced himself for something ridiculous. None of the slots on the sheet that had been distributed in homeroom—Most Liked, Most Studious, Best Haircut—had seemed like a fit, but, he noticed, there was a space for miscellaneous write-in superlatives. When the class president’s voice buzzed through the intercom system and read off the list—the football player was crowned class clown, of course—Danny never heard his name (somehow, no one on the student council had thought of Best Car).
He felt mostly relief, but bubbling underneath was a kind of sorrow. There weren’t nearly enough superlatives for everyone, he wasn’t alone in missing a wink of immortality. Watching his fellow unremarkable seniors, he saw not a trace of disappointment. They went about their business, slogging through the final days of the year with the same half-excitement, half-disdain as always. Danny wondered if he was the only one feeling the weight of anonymity, his unwanted nickname—even the horrible, half-senile AP history teacher had started calling him Mort—excepted.
On the last day of school, Lena said, “I don’t even know where you’re going to college.”
Danny told her: one of the cheap state schools, where half of their class was probably going, too. Twenty-thousand students, a sprawling campus, gargantuan lecture halls and TAs that didn’t care what your name was.
“What about you?” he said.
“I’m driving out to California for the summer.”
“To do what?”
She looked out the window, as if something interesting was happening in the nearby dumpster. “To be not here.”
“It’s that bad, is it?”
She smiled at him, which looked strange on her. “It’s just not somewhere else.”
“You don’t want to go to college?”
“Someday. There’s no expiration date. What are you going to major in?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, what do you like?”
Danny looked down at his hands, surprised at their tight grip on the wheel as if he was in the midst of a high-speed chase. He relaxed his fingers. “I have no idea.”
“You could be a poet,” she said.
“My dad wanted to be a poet.”
“What happened?”
Danny shrugged. “Life. Me, I guess.”
“You could write poems about driving a hearse without dead bodies inside.”
Danny chuckled.
“I’d read them,” Lena said.
Graduation day came: sun bleary, humidity a thick gravy. Danny’s armpits went soggy fast thanks to the unbreathable material of his cap and gown. Parents assembled in the air-conditioned gymnasium while the senior class gathered in the parking lot, students’ faces flush, girls’ makeup starting to smudge, the boys smelly despite their deodorant sprays. Danny stood in his spot between two people who were essentially strangers even though he’d been in at least one class with each of them every year; they spoke over him, as if he were a hedgerow or a park bench, about a party that night. He felt a tap on his shoulder, and when he turned, there was Lena, ignoring that everyone needed to be in their proper spot because the procession would begin any second now.
“Oh,” Danny said. “Hi.”
“Hi,” Lena said. Her cap was fitted tight to her skull. Lena wasn’t wearing heavy black lipstick for once, and her eyes were bare; she looked like a completely different person. How easily, he thought, she could transform herself.
“I have something for you,” she said. “A graduation present.”
“You do?”
“Find me after, okay?”
“Alright.”
The ceremony plodded along, the principal and dean of students saying the things they were supposed to say. The valedictorian gave a brief speech that everyone applauded. Danny fanned his face with his copy of the program; his gown’s polyester was like a shroud. When he crossed the stage for his diploma, his parents whistled even though they weren’t the type. His classmates and the strangers in the audience clapped politely for him just the same as everyone else. When he shook the principal’s hand, Danny could tell the man had no idea who he was. He turned his tassel at the same time as everyone else.
At the end, his parents gave him a hug. His mother wore a plum-and-white dress, colors in vaguely floral slashes across her body. His dad’s tie was cinched too tight. They looked like all the other parents, proud of their kids, wearing their slacks and holding their purses, beaming. As they left the gym, Lena caught his eye and he told his parents he needed a second. They glanced at each other and smiled.
Lena stood by her car. If her parents had come, Danny didn’t see them.
“Here,” she said, holding out a black picture frame. “Sorry it isn’t wrapped.”
“That’s okay. What is it?”
“Read it.”
He took the frame. Inside, printed on cream-colored cardstock, was a poem: “The Hearse Song.”
“It turns out there are a few hearse poems,” Lena said. “But I thought this one was funny.”
Danny read: Don’t you ever laugh as the hearse goes by / For you may be the next to die. / They wrap you up in a big white sheet / From your head down to your feet.
“Thanks,” he said. “When do you leave?”
“Tomorrow, probably.”
“That soon?”
“No reason to wait.”
Danny nodded and held the picture frame to his chest.
“Thanks for this,” he said.
“No problem.”
“I guess I should go find my mom and dad,” he said.
Lena nodded. “Take care of yourself.” Then she got in her car and shut the door. Danny backed away so she didn’t run over his foot as she pulled out of her parking spot. She paused, rolled down the window, and said, “Bye, Mort.”
Danny should have hated her for saying that, but out of Lena’s lips, it wasn’t so bad.
Danny didn’t know it yet, but in just two weeks, the engine in the hearse will putz out. The cost to replace it will be prohibitively expensive. He will spend the rest of the summer working at the restaurant, sloshing dirty dishwater onto his torso, his hands drying and cracking from the blasting heat. He will bank enough money to help pay for a used Civic that will remind him of Lena’s clunker.
When he arrives at college, he will join a fraternity. He’ll tell his new friends that, for a short while, he drove a hearse, and that his classmates called him Mort. His fraternity brothers will start calling him that, too, and, just like when Lena said it, he won’t despise them for it. He’ll tell them about Lena and the poem she gave him. He’ll find more hearse poems—by Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Francis Beaumont, James Whitcomb Riley—and he’ll do what Lena said and start writing his own. His friends will find them odd, but magazines will publish them. He’ll wonder about Lena, but he won’t ever hear from her again. He’ll meet his first boyfriend. He’ll have sex with him, and when they share their virginity stories, Danny will tell him about Lena and the hearse and they’ll laugh. Danny will laugh and be warm and happy and he’ll know, finally, who he is, and when he graduates from college, headed off for graduate school—for an MFA, not to become a mortician—he’ll pull the framed poem down from its place on the wall where it has stayed with him for four years. He’ll bring it with him into the next place, and the next, and the one after that.
He watched Lena go, sunlight flashing off her car’s hood and windshield. He’d have waved, but he was holding the picture frame with both hands.
Joe Baumann’s fiction and essays have appeared in Phantom Drift, Passages North, Emerson Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Iron Horse Literary Review, Electric Literature, Electric Spec, On Spec, Barrelhouse, Zone 3,and many others. He is the author of Ivory Children, published in 2013 by Red Bird Chapbooks. He possesses a PhD in English from the University of Louisiana-Lafayette. He was a 2019 Lambda Literary Fellow in Fiction. His first short story collection, The Plagues, will be released by Cornerstone Press in 2023, and his debut novel, I Know You’re Out There Somewhere, is forthcoming from Deep Hearts YA. He can be reached at joebaumann.wordpress.com.
When I told my daughter I’d take care of her dad while she had knee replacement surgery, I didn’t think she’d be laid up in a rehab center for this long, or that her dad’s urn would look so urn-like, or that my second husband would be so creeped out by it, so I put her dad’s urn in my closet beneath a red, perfume-soaked scarf and an old army jacket to remind him of how things used to be—or maybe, to remind me—and every night I’d wink at where he was hidden and say, Hank, you behave in there a while longer and maybe I’ll let you see what I do with those toys tucked in next to you.
Kristin Kozlowski lives and works in the Midwest, US. Some of her work is available online at Lost Balloon, matchbook, Longleaf Review, Pidgeonholes, Cease Cows, and others. Her piece, “Salty Owl”, will be included in The Best Small Fictions Anthology 2021. In 2019, she was awarded Editor’s Choice from Arkana for her CNF piece, “A Pocket of Air”. If you tweet: @kriskozlowski.
The thing about being the murdered newlywed is you set the plot in motion.
You and your wife will be found together, days later, where he left you, where he disposed of you, he thought of it as a disposal, out there in the cold by the river, with all the small, scurrying things.
There will be a fund set up to bring you home, there will be photos of you and your wife on social media, in the news, they were so happy together, they were so in love. In the obituary in your hometown newspaper: She is joined in death by her wife.
You will be joined in death by your wife.
You will be taken home in the cargo hold of an airplane, your wife left behind in the town where you met, your wife left behind in a county cemetery, in a soft, cold grave. You will go home nestled in your casket, closed tight in the dark, you will be picked up by a mortuary attendant in a pressed white shirt and polyester tie. He’ll only know you by your last name on his clipboard, the slide of your body as he loads your casket into his van. He will never see your face, never speak your name, never see the clothing your family has chosen for you to wear. He will go home that evening and kiss his three children on the tops of their heads, think how soft and small their little heads are, how soft and small and round.
There will be the closed casket and a church full of mourners, your father holding your stepmother’s hand in a velveted pew, your mother standing at the back, no, I don’t need a seat at the front, no, I can stand, twisting the strap of her purse, untwisting it, twisting it again, nodding glaze-eyed at the offers of sympathy, flinching when the minister pats her shoulder.
Thank you for coming, she will say to people as they pass her, smiling like it is a happy day, like this is somewhere she wants to be, smiling, smiling, smiling.
A girl’s mother should be there for her, she will say, to no one, to everyone, and later, she will go home and pour herself a shot of bourbon and look at the photographs from your wedding, my beautiful girl, she will say. My beautiful girl.
Your father will look back in her direction from time to time, his hand limply caught in your stepmother’s grasp, look from your smiling mother to your silver-grey casket, he will think when will it be all over? He will think oh, but it will never be all over.
There will be no service for your wife, a county-paid burial, a line with her name in the local newspaper, a slip and a quiet and a nothing at all.
There will be the drop of dirt onto your casket, fistful by fistful, your littlest brother pinching his eyes shut as he stands above that hole in the ground, your littlest brother thinking of the snap-snap-snap of gunshots, your littlest brother’s hand going slack and letting the dirt fall, your littlest brother, that night, muffled crying into his pillow in the dark.
There will be the long wait for your gravestone to be placed, beloved daughter, beloved wife, and your mother’s daily vigil at the cemetery till it arrives, in dangling-hem nightgown first thing every morning, soon as the sun rises, the sky opening up purple and red and pink and finally, blue, blue, blue over the quiet, empty yawn of your grave.
Cathy Ulrich knows the wait for grave markers is longer than TV makes it seem. Her work has been published in various journals, including Mayday, Leon Literary Review and Juked.
Vast 