I like confessing things that aren’t completely true. Like the other day, a friend of mine asked where I’d been the last few months. I said, “You’ll never believe it but…” He waited for me to finish, and what I meant to say was, “Mason and I aren’t together anymore,” which was true, but halfway through, I chose this instead: “…Mason met another guy.”
My buddy groaned. “Shit, really?”
Yeah, really. Mason met another guy.
But the truth was I’d met one first.
When I saw Mason, weeks after we broke up, he was arm in arm with a man I’d seen a few times—okay, a thousand—at the grocery store, the gym, the park with his little dog, everywhere. Our town was hardly more than a few hundred people and a pizza parlor, so it was hard not to see him if you tied your curtains back.
Honestly, it didn’t feel great when I saw them spending a day together, but I couldn’t let them know that. So we smiled and said, “How are you?” and of all the things to lie about, I thought, that’s the biggest of them all, smiling when a tiny piece of you is dying inside.
“Man,” my friend said, “weren’t you guys engaged?”
Kind of—Mason and I bought each other ring pops at a movie theater and drunkenly posted, “Engaged!!!!!!” with six exclamation points and it was easier to click “like” on every phony comment than to let the world in on our joke.
“That’s what makes it so hard.”
My buddy sighed. “He tell you why or anything?”
I thought about what I’d told Mason. “He just said—sometimes you find someone else who fits you better.”
“Ugh.”
“It doesn’t mean they always will. It’s just about where you are right now.”
“Gross.”
“I know,” I said.
When I’d said these words to Mason, he cried. I’d never heard him cry before. We’d been together for two years, left Philly to find some place smaller, slower, where we could “lay down our roots” as if we couldn’t find a crack in the city streets to grow together. We drove an hour out and started looking, had our things packed into the back of his father’s pickup, found a one-road-town where the storefronts needed paint and unloaded our shit on the front step of a duplex that faced the main drag and called it “home.”
For months, we shared our little two-bedroom half-house, unbothered by the things we hadn’t known till then—like how the sink miraculously clogged each time he shaved or the way he slurped his soup when it was just the two of us—among smaller things we pretended not to see, like the unmatched socks he left on his bureau for so long he must have known any hope of reuniting the pairs was gone, dead, finito, and I wondered how anyone got along—I mean, to the point they could actually live together—unless they closed one eye and covered one ear and pinched a goddamned nostril shut because the sad, lonely truth of it all was no one needs to be seen completely, and to this day I wonder what kind of tears I’d have gotten if I told him this instead.
“Well,” said my buddy, clearly having done enough consoling for one night, “you need anything, you let me know.”
“Of course,” I said. And alone on my couch, I thought of the man I’d left Mason for. The one I’d seen at the bar, when I drove the hour back to Philly. He was on his second Manhattan, so I asked, “A Manhattan in Philly?” not knowing if this was funny. It wasn’t.
“Hey—” I leaned in toward him. “You think I’d like the total you?”
“The what?” he asked.
“If we moved in together. And I had to step over your smelly clothes and listen to you laugh at inane comedies and watch you bite your nails when you’ve got nothing to even stress about—you think I’d like you then?”
The man shrugged coolly. “I don’t do any of that.”
“Tell me then. What do you do?”
He considered it a moment, squinting at the row of TVs. “Sometimes I drive with one knee.”
“You mean if the traffic’s slow?”
He shook his head. “On the highway.”
“That would literally fucking kill me.”
The man searched my eyes, so I shut one.
“What about you?”
I shrugged.
“Come on. Name one thing that would drive me nuts.”
I didn’t know where to begin. So I started in as good a place as any: “When I get to know somebody, I run.”
“Is that it?”
“Or when someone gets to know me. I’m running from a man right now. He doesn’t even know it. But when I tell him, he’ll wonder who the hell I am. And for a moment, I’ll love him again. I’ll love him when he thinks about the signs he missed. I’ll love him when he wonders if we knew each other. I’ll love him when he passes our old house and—for the very first time—sees how the windows slope north, how the red brick fades by the roof.”
Matt Barrett holds an MFA in Fiction from UNC-Greensboro, and his stories and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Sun, Best Microfiction 2022, SmokeLong Quarterly, River Teeth, The Minnesota Review, Pithead Chapel, The Forge, Contrary, and Wigleaf, among others. He lives in Pennsylvania with his wife and their two sons and teaches creative writing at his undergraduate alma mater, Gettysburg College.
I don’t mind the gawkers, but my ex-wife Sheryl hated the attention. She’d say the type of person who comes to the zoo is the same type of person who slows down to rubberneck a car wreck. Whenever I reminded her that was the whole point, that we were supposed to entertain and educate guests about the ins and outs of a loving, married human couple, she’d always retort: “I don’t remember agreeing to love anyone.”
She was right. She hadn’t.
I was sentenced here for selling an ounce of weed. For a while, the exhibit was called The Life of a Pious Bachelor. I’d spend all day raising and donating fake money to real churches. I guess the courts figure if we imitate who they want us to be for long enough, we’ll keep on imitating this made-up person forever.
Sheryl showed up around a year ago, and they renamed the exhibit The Idyllic Life of Married Americans. For authenticity, the zookeepers forced us to tie the knot for real. Each guided tour was the same. We’d begin in the kitchen, Sheryl cooking breakfast while I read a months-old newspaper. We’d exchanged pre-written lines like: “How did I get so lucky?” We’d finish eating, and Sheryl would kiss my cheek goodbye. I’d go to the dummy office attached to our pseudo-studio-set home and pretend to answer calls and check emails. Sheryl would pretend to vacuum and wash dishes. We’d end in bed talking about our days like stars from some cheesy 1980s sitcom.
Last Saturday, we got divorced.
The day started normally. I’d gotten up late; I tend to oversleep. I have nothing to wake up for, no one waiting for me at the zoo’s gate. I’ve never done anything worthwhile to miss. Sheryl had a life to get back to, had friends who’d sneak her snacks and trinkets. When I slid the half-Windsor to my Adam’s apple, she was already in her dress. She glanced at the clock next to the cots behind our mock house and mumbled something. I didn’t blame her for being pissed. If we weren’t ready by the time the zookeepers arrived, they’d threaten to tack on years.
I finished threading my arms through my state-issued blazer just as the zookeepers appeared behind the plexiglass. They all look the same. Same gray polo with the zoo’s logo, a giraffe with the scales of justice pinched between its teeth. Same short crew cut. Same cattle prod dangling at their waists.
One of the zookeepers shoved a box into the compartment they used to deliver our meals. I retrieved the box and opened it. Inside was one of those dolls whose eyes close when you tilt it downward. “Congratulations,” another zookeeper said. “You’ve just had a baby.”
On the stove, speakers emitted the sound of sizzling bacon. Sheryl cracked a fake egg and dripped the counterfeit protein into a skillet. I flipped to the Sports Section. Across the table, our plastic child sat in a highchair. Savory smells blasted through the air vents to make our guests’ mouths water for their own slice of marital bliss.
“Breakfast is almost ready,” Sheryl said. “I hope you’re hungry.”
Field-tripping students pawed at the plexiglass. Their teachers hovered like vultures. A zookeeper spouted fabricated details about how Sheryl and I met: high school sweethearts who waited until marriage.
“I’m starved, dear.”
Sheryl carried over our plates. I folded the newspaper. As we mimed eating, a zookeeper informed the crowd about how through hard work I’d been promoted to assistant manager, about how Sheryl took pride in her home.
“Well, dig in…”
Sheryl turned away. At first, I thought she was glaring at the kid up front who was giving us the finger. Then I noticed she was looking behind the little punks at a man packed into a navy suit. The man smiled at Sheryl like he knew her. He was leaning against the back wall, one hand relaxed on his hip, the other holding the arm of a stuffed animal version of our next-door neighbor, Milo the Mountain Lion.
Sheryl touched her arm. A zookeeper banged on the plexiglass, and she jerked her hand away like she hadn’t realized what she was doing.
“I refuse to be your stuffed animal anymore,” Sheryl said.
“Stick to the approved material,” a zookeeper piped into the exhibit.
Sheryl grabbed my plate and displayed the fake calories. She lifted our son out of his highchair and popped off one of his arms, revealing his hollow insides. Then she pointed at me like I was standing in a police lineup.
“I don’t know him, and he doesn’t know me,” Sheryl said.
Two zookeepers stormed the back entrance. Lightning jumped from their cattle prods. Kids screamed. Sheryl darted back and forth as the zookeepers attempted to herd her into a corner. She was right. I didn’t know her, at least not how two people in love are supposed to know each other. I pushed one of the zookeepers to the ground. The other went to zap Sheryl, but I stepped in front of the cattle prod, sending ants crawling through my veins.
Sheryl shrank and shrank until she was just a black dot.
They’ve renamed the exhibit The Life of the Regretful Divorcee. I now spend all day crying and apologizing for being a bad husband. I don’t know what happened to Sheryl, if she escaped, if she got to stop pretending. I do know the zoo is getting an elephant today. Apparently, this elephant killed a group of poachers. They’d sedated her and were sawing off her ivory when she woke up and gored them all to death.
Will Musgrove is a writer and journalist from Northwest Iowa. He received an MFA from Minnesota State University, Mankato. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in TIMBER, Cleaver Magazine, Oyez Review, Tampa Review, Vestal Review, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter @Will_Musgrove.
This ain’t your daddy’s Cosmo quiz. Explore your relationship, whatever form it takes: with yourself, a friend, a partner, a family member. Then read a story. Take the quiz again.
who buys brown-spotted eggs direct from the chickens. Who never scoops out the blood spots or tosses shells in the trash. I will wash and sort my recycling. I will bundle cardboard with rough string and gift-tie it in neat bows. I will cook fresh soups from scratch. I will wrap my leftovers in beeswax cloth softened against my heart. I’ll become a person who sweeps and mops the front porch and waves hello to the neighbours. Who appreciates the relationship of bees to apiarist. I will return strange mail to the sender. I will switch from outdoor shoes to slippers. I will become a person who can knit baby socks on tiny needles. Who can tame a songbird on an outstretched hand. I will eat crystals. I will work miracles. I will wake up with the sun to be mindful. I will be a person who speaks only in song. Who sends handwritten notes to mark minor occasions. Who bakes crispy pies and writes in fountain pen. I will scrawl to-do lists onto my palms. Collect dryer lint in apron pockets. I will be the kind of person who changes the sheets daily and hangs them to flutter in the cinema of the yard. I will dream with brightness up and saturation down. The one who consumes her receipts. Weeds the sidewalk. Boils the roots for tea.
Kate Hargreaves is the author of 4 books of poetry and fiction, including the poetry collections Leak (Book*hug, 2014) and tend (Book*hug, Fall 2022). She lives and works in Windsor, Ontario where she also plays roller derby and talks too much about her cats. Find her work at CorusKate.com.
At 5:00 a.m. Mark’s pager squeals. It’s a fire call.
In the kindest voice I can muster, I ask, “Can’t you skip it? It’s our wedding day.” I mash my face into the pillow. The real Catharine wants to break his face for leaving that damn radio on to disrupt my sleep. Pregnant, exhausted, awake most of the night because of his snoring, and planning to marry later that day—all are good reasons to let me sleep in just this once, to let another volunteer take the call, to allow the fires to burn. He says he won’t be long.
I can’t go back to sleep, so I get up, eat a Pop-Tart, take a shower, and wait. An hour or two pass. Bored, or maybe suspicious of all these “fire calls” that have occurred almost daily since I moved in, I search his emails—he left the computer unlocked this time—dig through the files and folders in the steel filing cabinet in his office, flip through his baby book and other photo albums on the shelves, and rummage through boxes in the basement. This is my first time alone in his house when I’m not busy unpacking my own boxes, or getting ready for work or a class, or reading What to Expect When You’re Expecting, or trying to get back to sleep in the middle of the night after his pager crows and he rushes off. I push through the papers, albums, and files. I ignore the sting of the sunburn on my shoulders and chest and the urgent calls to pee every hour. Unsure of what I’m hunting, I keep digging until I have to leave to get my hair done. He’s been gone seven hours. We’re to be married at 4:00 p.m. Will he make it? Is he actually out fighting a fire? Why hasn’t he called? I get into the dress, the shoes, and drive.
I sit in an off-white wedding dress, size 12, while a woman curls my hair. The salon is loud with hair dryers, chatter, and the roar of my blood. My palms sweat. My back and neck ache. I close my eyes as she twirls my hair around the steaming iron. I don’t want to look at the woman in the mirror—fat, burned, and abandoned.
As soon as I get in the car, my phone rings. Mark says he and his crew just finished fighting a large grass fire on the outskirts of town—two other volunteer fire departments were called in as well. Now he’s coming home. It’s 2:15 p.m. I say I’ll meet him at the house.
I sit in the salon lot, my car running. All those emails to and from former girlfriends—Anne, Sharon, Susan, Linda, Janet, Stacey, Heather. They flip through my head. All those photos on his computer—vacations to Colorado, Las Vegas, Scotland, Arizona, Florida—organized in labeled folders with all those ladies’ names. All those faded Polaroid photos of a naked brunette in a bathtub in a box labeled “1985.” All those tax documents with his ex-wives’ names. All those receipts for rings, earrings, computers, limos, dinners, storage units, and trips. All those documents for apartment rentals, car leases, and purchases. All those credit card statements with balances in the thousands. He never mentioned debt. In his pen holder shaped like a fire hydrant, I found the key to a locked filing cabinet drawer. It held bankruptcy papers from 1997. He never mentioned bankruptcy.
My dad calls to say he and my stepmom are in town and they’ve checked into the hotel. They’ll see me at the ceremony. I keep my voice cheerful. “Yes, see you there!” His call is the toll of a bell—time’s up—I put the car in drive and head to Mark’s. Because of my sunburn, Mark probably will not be able to tell I was crying. My face, neck, and chest burned, my skin peeling and pink. When I enter his door, he doesn’t say anything except how pretty my hair is as he buttons his white shirt. He has his shoes on. He’s ready. First stop: the flower shop to get my bouquet, and then the ceremony.
My mother, with her large black sunglasses and cane, and her boyfriend David, wearing a terrible bright yellow shirt like always, are already at the Gerald Ford Rose Garden. They show up early to everything. Mark’s mother arrives in a bright white pantsuit. I wonder what her angle is. My dad and his wife Becky come up. My dad points at his Winnie the Pooh tie and says, “I know how much you like Winnie the Pooh.” I don’t correct him. If I ever did like that character, it’s been many years ago, so many I don’t recall watching that show like I remember Saturday mornings watching the Smurfs or She-Ra or Sunday nights spent with The Simpsons. I’m not angered by this—how could he know what I like or don’t like? He doesn’t really know me.
My friend Melissa, my maid of honor and only attendant, wears a lovely, flowing black dress. She was the maid of honor for my first wedding as well. This whole scene is a repeat. But this time—instead of the traditional tacky purple bridesmaid dress, rehearsal dinner, bachelorette party, church ceremony, and all the trappings she endured less than two years before—we are in a garden, and I said just wear a black dress, and please read this Pablo Neruda poem before the vows. I wanted everyone to wear black, but few did. I’m grateful Melissa is here. She applies my concealer, foundation, blush, and lipstick in the nearby restroom. Unfortunately, because of my sunburn from the week before, my skin is flaky, and she can’t do much to make me look better. I’m glad she’s willing to participate in this event, though I am not sure whether it is a farce or real. The other bridesmaids I had in 2002 are not there—Gina cut ties because I told her I wasn’t going to raise my unborn child Catholic. At least that’s what she claims. But I know the truth: She watched me cheat on my first husband for over a year and lost all respect for me. Who could blame her? Erin’s stationed out of state and couldn’t take leave on such short notice. Samantha, who had been pregnant at my first wedding with her second child, has her hands full with those two babies. I told her not to worry about coming. She had attended the first wedding. There may be more in the future, I joked with her on the phone. I had been out of Mark’s earshot. This time, instead of two hundred people witnessing my vows, we have maybe 40 guests. I’m surprised that Mark has only a handful of friends to invite. None of the other volunteers from the fire department are invited, which I find strange.
This is his third wedding and my second, so we don’t register for gifts, and we don’t bother to invite distant cousins and aunts and uncles. I assume people who are no-shows don’t come because this is just a rerun. My extended family from Minnesota, Chicago, and Washington all attended my first wedding—I couldn’t bear to face them again so soon and did not invite them. It was bad enough this was my dad’s first time meeting Mark. They shook hands. I wonder what my dad thinks of him, of me.
This time instead of a black limo, we ride in Mark’s Dodge. This time instead of not seeing my future husband before the ceremony, we shared a bed the night before and drove together to the site. This time instead of a priest who has known me since third grade, we have a judge. He is a short man, maybe 5 foot—cartoon-like with a handlebar mustache and waiting there by the rose bushes in an awkward stance. We emailed our script to him the week before. Having never met him in person prior to the ceremony, we have no idea how well his delivery will go.
This time instead of music, we have silence as people stand around and wait. Holding the bouquet, I face this small group. My mom’s boyfriend is taking photos. The photographer is off to the side snapping away as well. I asked that we skip the family group shots.
I am two women. Part of me wants to keep this baby, have this wedding, quit my job, stay at home, and raise our son well. I’d be better than my mother who only ever gifted me terror. She once screamed, “Pack your shit and get the fuck out!” and tossed my little red “Going to Grandma’s” suitcase at my head. I was seven. I’d be better than my father who took off (who could blame him?) and left me with the beast that still stalks my nightmares.
I’d give my son everything I had wanted: two parents, a house—not that trailer—nice clothes, family time, game time that didn’t end with a mother throwing the board or the cards in the trash, a place to land after a hard day at school, the embrace of a mother who listens to his stories when he’s young and keeps tabs on him when he’s a teenager. I won’t allow my son to run the streets with no curfew and no supervision. I won’t supply the wine coolers in our fridge, stay home if you’re going to drink. I won’t be the mother who’s at her boyfriend’s place every night of the week. Instead, I’ll be home playing the role of mother. Although I’ve never acted on a stage, never memorized lines, I would figure it out.
The other part of me wants to run from this rushed wedding and give the baby away. The open road, the open notebook, the open door all call, and I want to go. This could be my fire call. I must act now. The pager can’t be stopped—it’s screaming and screaming—I must leave. I could jump in his car, flip the lights and siren on, and take off. This baby would do better with a mother not as bruised, not as cursed, not as abused. How can I offer anything good when all that was poured into me was poison? I’m a deep well. First, tainted by my mother. Then, as a 16-year-old rebel, I’d sought out others who offered me cans, bottles, and glasses filled with something, and I drank and drank and drank—hoping to finally feel my thirst quenched. I drank until I blacked out, and I stayed that way until I woke at this rose garden, pregnant and confused. It isn’t the kiss of a prince that awakens me; it’s the pinch of the dress on my growing belly, the clatter of the cameras’ shutters, the sprinklers suddenly dousing the rose bushes. The bouquet falls from my shaking hands. Mark hands it back to me.
“You ready?”
It’s amazing what the years take away. I’m sure I looked into his eyes. I’m sure I said something when the judge asked for a response, but I can’t recall. All I have left are the photos and the script the judge read, which was from The Simpsons episode “A Milhouse Divided.” In it, after Milhouse’s parents announce they’re divorcing, Marge and Homer are worried about their own marriage. Homer feels bad that he couldn’t give Marge a nice wedding all those years ago because they were young and strapped. The episode struck a chord with us since we were marrying because of a surprise pregnancy too.
The judge read, “Do you, Catharine, take Mark, in richness and in poorness—poorness is underlined—in impotence and in potence, in quiet solitude or blasting across the alkali flats in a jet-powered, monkey-navigated … and it goes on like this.”
There was a note that the judge should shuffle his notecards before he said, “it goes on like this,” but I remember he didn’t do that. My only memory of the actual ceremony is my disappointment in the judge. He didn’t perform the piece like we had imagined.
Now I read those words and realize we’d selected them because they were ridiculous. We weren’t being serious. We were two people who happened to like the same cartoon show. Two people who liked to drink. Two people who liked sex. That’s why we were gathered there—and we couldn’t compose real vows because there was nothing connecting us but an unborn baby who neither of us had known or wanted just a few months before.
The judge announced us married and everyone clapped.
The day after the wedding, I ask about the bankruptcy. No point in hiding that I snooped—I left the emails up, the filing cabinet drawers open, and paperwork sprawled across floor. He knew I knew as soon as he returned home from the fire call, but he didn’t bring it up when I got back from the salon. He met me at the door, finished buttoning up his shirt, grabbed his tux jacket, and we drove off to get married.
He tells me he married his second wife Amy in 1996. She was only 21 years old and he was 28. After knowing each other only a few weeks, they hopped a plane to Vegas, got married, then returned to Omaha to his shabby one-bedroom apartment. She started racking up debt almost immediately. He says Amy came from money. Her father was a rich lawyer, and she wouldn’t work, but expected a new place to live, fashionable clothes, a brand new convertible.
One night, several months after they wed, they had a nasty fight. She was drunk and threatened to take the fancy car and leave, but he didn’t want her driving drunk and he didn’t want to lose her and face another divorce, so he grabbed her, maybe too hard, and she called her father and the police. Mark spent the night in jail.
Some of the details he gave me are now cloudy, but eventually they filed for divorce, and he was loaded down with her debt. At the time, he worked as a manager at Wendy’s and couldn’t afford the mountains of credit card debt, so he filed for bankruptcy. He had no choice. Amy, he said, got away without consequence, except a sprained wrist.
I ask about the new credit card debt. Perhaps it’s strange for a 23-year-old to be so wound up about debt. But I’d been lucky—my college had been paid for by a family friend, and I have no debt besides a car loan that’s almost paid off. I was hired at a debt collection agency full-time when I was 18—before credit card offers made their way to my mailbox. After five years of listening to so many people cry, beg, and scream on the phone, I know what debt does to a life. I’d worked at the agency and attended college full-time, juggling 40-hour weeks and homework, losing friends because I was too busy, missing out on campus poetry readings and writing groups—all so I didn’t live outside my means.
Mark says he now has about $20,000 in credit card debt and $5,000 left on his student loans. This doesn’t include the car lease or the mortgage. We order a pizza, drink sodas, and talk late into the night.
I tell him about the cutting, the drinking, and the years of verbal and emotional abuse from my mother. He doesn’t seem disgusted or dismayed. He listens. He shares more. He paints a picture of a little boy sitting at the dinner table alone, playing by himself in his room, ignored by his father. Mark, first as a child, then as an adult, witnessed praise and gifts and money showered on his siblings—blood children of his father—while he was left to do it himself because he was adopted. That’s what he tells me and that’s what I believe.
The judge announced us married and everyone clapped.
After he tells me that his second wife Amy left him holding such heavy debt, after he tells me about years working at grocery stores and fast food places, after he tells me it took over a decade to earn his bachelor’s degree, after he tells me that he built this house for Anne—an ex-girlfriend whose name came up in those emails I found—and then, that Anne broke up with him just months before the house was finished because she didn’t want to be saddled with his debt, after he says how he’s been a stranger in his own family his entire life—a blond-haired blue-eyed freak surrounded by the much loved black-haired children of his father—after he tells me about the time his father punched him, breaking his nose out in the driveway when he was 16, after hours and hours of talking, his eyes sparkling with unshed tears, I say, “I have a $20,000 CD. It just expired and now it’s in a regular savings account. I can pay off your credit card debt.”
I know I must give this to him, though he’s hesitant to accept. He’s had a good job as a software engineer for only a few years, this new house was just finished in October, and now I’ve moved in with all my clutter and clothes and this baby I carry, and I can’t give him anything in return. I won’t even take his last name. He’s married me, and I must offer him something—a consolation prize, a thank you gift.
I do not consider all the free hours of housekeeping and childcare he will receive in the coming years. I do not consider myself having anything of worth to offer besides this measly sum of money. I do not consider why he has racked up this new debt—where did the money go? Would he continue to spend so carelessly in the future?—I am a sack of tears and scars and now stretch marks, and all I want is a place to call home. I give him the $20,000 as if to say, You’re stuck with Catharine, but here, take this check.
Cat Dixon (she/her) is the author of Eva and Too Heavy to Carry (Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2016 and 2014), and The Book of Levinson and Our End Has Brought the Spring (Finishing Line Press, 2017 and 2015), and Table for Two (Poet’s Haven, 2019). Her new poetry collection, What Happens in Nebraska, will come out this fall. She works as an adjunct creative writing instructor at the University of Nebraska, Omaha.
We love The Plunge. The promise of swimming on a hot summer day is the only reason we get up early and clean breakfast dishes without being told. We hurry-brush our teeth, wash our lagañas, and slip on our new swimsuits. Tia bought them at Mervyns. All the same size but each a different color. Joanna’s green one, of course, fits perfect. Elisa complains that the purple shoulder straps dig into her skin. The back of Delia’s blue one goes up her crack a little, so she puts on a pair of jean shorts to cover her nalgas. Maribel’s orange one is stretched so thin it looks almost see-through and goes low in the front so it’s good she doesn’t have chi-chis yet. She throws on a long T-shirt. Larissa’s is loose all over, the red fabric bunched on the sides and her straps slide off her shoulders. We get a big safety pin from Junior’s diapers and fasten the straps together in the back.
We help each other with hair. French braid for Delia that only Joanna can do tight enough. Larissa uses a lot of gel and slicks her curls back tight against her head, makes the hair ballies wrap twice. It’s so tight her puff ball in the back looks like a second tiny head. But we don’t tell her that. Maribel gets two braids that capture all the feathered hair around her face. Elisa’s hair is short enough to leave loose and Joanna likes hers in one skinny ponytail.
We pack our bag with five towels, our new sunglasses that match our suits, baby oil, and five oranges for snack later. Delia stuffs her book in the bag too.
“Why’d you do that?” Maribel asks.
“So I can read while I dry off.”
“Think that’ll make you look smarter?” Elisa always gets straight As.
“I think if I read ten of these this summer, I get a free personal pan pizza.”
The rest of us scramble back to the room for our own books.
At half past nine, we slip on our new yellow flip flops—Tia found them on clearance, all size 6—and pile into Tio’s blue Chevy Astro van. It’s brand new, doesn’t smell like baby butt or big brother feet like the old van did. We name her Bettina and tell Tio the boys should have to walk everywhere so they don’t mess her up. Maribel and Larissa get in the way back seat. Joanna and Delia sit on the middle bench, and Elisa, because she’s the oldest—12 in September—gets to sit in front. We each get a window so everything is fair.
On our way, Tio stops at the Circle K for cigarettes. He buys us each our own slushie and lets us pick our favorite candy. “Shhh,” he says, “don’t tell Tia.”
We can’t get chocolate because it’ll melt in five seconds. Larissa gets Now and Laters, which will pull a filling out of her molar the next day. Joanna gets Jolly Ranchers, “Because we have the same initials.” Elisa picks Nerds proudly and Delia gets Everlasting Gobstoppers. Maribel takes forever to decide, wanders up and down the candy aisle so long Tio yells that he’s gonna be late for work.
“Licorice!”
The rest of us groan. “You did that so you don’t have to share,” we say.
“I’ll share.” She smirks, knows the rest of us don’t like it.
So later, when a few small bits are stuck in her teeth and she smiles at the boys walking by, we don’t tell her. Just let them laugh. Until her eyes fill with tears. Then we surround her. Delia gets a napkin from the bag to clean Maribel’s teeth. We make her eat an orange to chase away the gross licorice smell. Joanna throws the rest of the licorice away.
But we don’t share our candy with Maribel. “Next time,” we say, “make a better choice.”
Larissa makes a different bad choice. One we pray Tias and Tios don’t find out about or we’ll never get to go back to The Plunge. Maybe because Larissa is the youngest—just turned 11 in May—she doesn’t understand why Joanna’s classmates, the ones who think they’re all that and dissed Joanna because she lives on the east side of town, sit in the spot near the deep end where all the boys jackknife off the high dive and cannon ball from the side.
Lifeguards yell, “Hey!” and “Stop that!” but no one listens. Those girly girls squeal and twist their bodies to avoid splashed water on their faces. We think some of them are wearing makeup. At the pool? How dumb! None of them have hair that’s ready for the water either. We know better.
Maybe Larissa wants them to see how it feels to not be all perfect. She slips away while the rest of us are reading, runs the length of the pool on the slippery cement to the corner closest to those giggly girls. The rest of us look up when the lifeguard’s whistle blows and he yells, “Walk!”
Larissa combos a jackknife cannonball at this crazy angle and a wave of water the girls can’t twist away from arcs over them, drenches their whole pretty selves. Joanna is horrified, so the rest of us stifle our laughs. The wet girls sputter and screech. The guys clap and hoot at Larissa’s performance. She swims to the opposite side and boosts herself out.
The noises change to cackles and oohs. Only then do the rest of us see that Junior’s diaper pin didn’t hold and the straps of Larissa’s too-loose suit have failed, the top half folds down at her waist. She smiles over at us until she feels her nakedness. Her barely budding chi-chis chill in the air. She freezes and embarrassment creeps up her cheeks. The hoots and laughs get louder. The pointing and staring keep Larissa super still.
Maribel grabs a towel and sprints toward Larissa, jumps over two toddlers and twirls by the lifeguard who yells “Walk!” again and reaches out to grab her. The rest of us follow behind with the bag and Larissa’s flip flops.
We surround her and head to the baño. Maribel gives Larissa her long t-shirt. Delia gives Larissa her jean shorts. Joanna undoes Larissa’s hair bally. It whacks Joanna’s fingers but she holds in her ouch and uses some baby oil to calm Larissa’s frizz.
When Larissa finally speaks, she says, “You see how I splashed those sangronas?”
Chicana Feminist and former Rodeo Queen, Tisha Marie Reichle-Aguilera (she/her) writes so the desert landscape of her childhood can be heard as loudly as the urban chaos of her adulthood. She is obsessed with food. A former high school teacher, she earned an MFA at Antioch University Los Angeles and is an Annenberg Fellow at University of Southern California. She is a Macondista and works for literary equity through Women Who Submit. You can read her other stories and essays at http://tishareichle.com/
Your five-year-old daughter looks up at you with wet eyes and says, “I don’t think she wants to be my friend anymore.” Your stomach falls down an elevator shaft, and suddenly you are 11.
You are 11, and the girl who was your best friend meets you in the alley to walk to school together. “Don’t ever do your hair like that again,” she stabs at you as she walks ahead. The whole way to school you slowly untwirl the coils and braids you woke up extra early to put in. You are stunned and now your hair really does look ridiculous, with a mind of its own since you’ve forced it into and out of plaits. The whole day is spent trying to hide your shameful hair.
One day, you go to sit down with the girls who were your friends and the entire group gets up and moves to a new table, leaving you alone to stare at your lunch. But you did your hair right. Right?
The 11-year-olds are progressing, recruiting some of the older girls. They start following you home from school every day, hurling insults but never getting close enough to push you over. They say things like, “Look at me when I’m talking to you.” And when you don’t look, they throw gravel at your back. Sometimes a stick. But you don’t turn around and you don’t run, either. Somehow, you know to keep your eyes down, your steps measured, your mouth shut.
You start getting stomach pains so you don’t have to go to school. It goes on so long, you are taken to the doctor. The doctor examines you, looks at your mother and says, “There’s nothing wrong with her.” And you almost cry because: (1) You have been found out, and (2) This is the nicest thing anyone has said to you in a while.
The 11-year-old girls must be bored, because they call your house. As you twist the long rotary phone cord over and over your wrist, they take turns hissing into the receiver:
“Bitch.”
“Loser.”
“Scaredy-cat.”
“Pussy, come back to school.”
And now you must, as your stomach is fine.
“Who was that?”
“Nobody, just some friends.”
One day, rather than insults and gravel, the girls throw pieces of bread at you. “Chicken legs!” they call out, in a way to make you know this is a bad thing. “Hey, chicken legs, have some chicken food!” they shout, making bok-bok-bok noises and laughing. You think: (1) Chickens don’t eat bread, do they? (2) Wow, this took some forethought, and (3) Why is even the shape of my body wrong, a personal affront, something I am supposed to control somehow?
And then you look at your daughter’s damp blue eyes, little pools now, needing to say something. Social media tells you the 11-year-old girls are now also grown, with their own daughters. What do they say to their little girls? The right things, most likely. Some wisdom you don’t have access to. Here you are, failing again.
You cannot say, “She still wants to be your friend.” You cannot say, “Everything will be okay.” You want to say: (1) Harden your heart into stone, or (2) Practice staring into the middle distance. Be still, so still and so quiet, so as not to be detected. Or, (3) Start making art so you can have an endless conversation with yourself.
You bend your chicken legs at the knees, hoist up your tiny daughter. You press her chest to your own stone heart, and say nothing.
Heidi Nieling was raised on the Mississippi River banks of Wisconsin. After receiving her BFA, she transferred to southern Minnesota where she lives with her husband and two six-year olds. Heidi currently works as the chief cook, custodian, activities manager, and Band-Aid applyer of her household. She is also a crochet designer and fiber artist who sneaks in writing when she can. Heidi can be found on Instagram @heidi_nieling
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
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