My grandmother said the body remembers what the mouth is too afraid to say. She said the ache in her knees was every border crossed without consent, every history folded too small to breathe.
I believe her. My bones hum when the news is bad. My lungs flinch at flags. Some nights my heart beats like it’s trying to escape jurisdiction.
Tell me what is a country if not a story told loudly enough to sound like truth? What is obedience if not fear dressed as loyalty?
I was taught to kneel before I learned the names of things: soil, spine, hunger taught that silence was a form of cleanliness and that pain, if borne elegantly, might pass for virtue.
But the earth does not kneel. It splits.
There is a sound to it not thunder, but a long, intimate tearing, like fabric giving up on being useful. Like a mouth unlearning prayer.
We live over fault lines we pretend are roads. We pour concrete over grief and call it progress. We teach our children to count borders but not to listen to the ground.
I want a language that stutters on purpose, that refuses to behave. A language that cracks open the word home and asks who was locked outside to make it possible.
When I say I am here, I do not mean safe. I mean breathing despite. I mean stitched together with borrowed courage and the stubborn muscle of staying.
The chasm is not ahead of us. It is what we fall back into every time we choose comfort over witness.
Still there are hands reaching across it. There are voices guiding us out like ropes.
There is the radical act of looking down and refusing to look away
If the earth asks anything of us now, it is not forgiveness. It is attention.
To feel the ground move and learn to move with it. To stop pretending stillness is the same as peace. To stand at the edge and speak anyway.
Khayelihle Benghu is a South African poet based in Johannesburg. Her work explores themes such as memory, grief, faith, family, and the quiet endurance of ordinary lives. Her poems have appeared in Person of Interest,Aloka, Decolonial Passage, AKE Review, Eyes on the Telescope, and Metphrastics. She is also the author of the poetry collection The Names We Carry.
Not the words his daughter spoke but the spaces between them, the way her sentences began to stall mid-air, looking for a place to land and finding nothing solid. Averill had always spoken quickly, words tumbling over each other, anxious to get out. Now she started and stopped, started and stopped again, as if listening to something else overlaid on top of what he could hear.
“Dad,” she said on the phone one evening, “can you turn the TV down?”
He was alone in the kitchen. The television in the living room was off.
“There’s no TV on,” he said.
A stretch of silence, so long he pulled the phone from his ear to make sure the call hadn’t dropped.
“Oh,” she said finally. “Then it must be one of the others.”
“The others?”
“The other channels.”
Before he could ask what she meant, she hung up.
Outside the kitchen window, the street looked like an advertisement for itself. Every lawn edged. Every porch light calibrated to an identical amber. Sprinklers ticked in synchronized arcs, the water catching the orange of the setting sun, breaking it into neat fragments. The cul-de-sac curved like a closing parenthesis, containing them all.
Clara stood at the counter arranging cucumbers in a glass bowl, each slice nearly translucent. “She’s just tired,” Clara said without being asked. “She’s in her last semester. Of course she’s hearing things. We all hear things when we’re tired.”
Malcolm did not say that when he was tired he didn’t hear nonexistent televisions. He did not say that his mother had started this way too, with sounds no one else heard, signals no one else could decode.
Later that week, he drove forty minutes across town to see Averill. Her apartment was in one of those low, aging buildings near the university, all beige stucco and thin exterior stairways that rattled underfoot. A rusting satellite dish jutted from the roof like something broken.
He knocked.
“Who is it?” Her voice came through the door thin and sharp, like it had been pulled taut.
“It’s me. It’s Dad.”
A pause. Then the sound of half a dozen locks being undone, locks he didn’t remember from his last visit. She cracked the door and peered out. Only when she saw his face did she open it the rest of the way.
The apartment smelled wrong. Sour, stale, with a chemical edge. The blinds were fully shut, the sliding glass door covered with a blanket duct-taped along the edges. Light leaked in around the corners, turning the room a dim, underwater gray.
“Ave,” he said. “What happened to the window?”
“Glass works both ways,” she said, moving past him into the room. She wore an oversized sweatshirt and flannel pants, despite the early heat. Her hair, once a heavy, dark sheet, had been hacked unevenly. Some places were shaved close to her scalp, others hung in ragged chunks. “It lets them see you. You think it only goes one direction, but that’s not how it works.”
“Who?”
She moved into the kitchen, ignoring him. Cups lay everywhere—mismatched mugs, plastic takeout cups, a row of rinsed glass jars lined up along the counter. Some held water. Some held nothing. One had a few pennies at the bottom.
“You have to separate it,” she said, picking up a jar with both hands and holding it at eye level. “Tap water. Bottled water. Rain.”
He followed. The sink was clogged with something hidden under a plastic grocery bag. When he reached to move it, Averill’s hand shot out, fingers gripping his wrist so tightly he gasped.
“Don’t.”
“Why?”
“They can track you through what you throw away. It’s the easiest way to do it. People think it’s their phones, but that’s just in movies. They use waste. They map you through what you think you’re done with.”
His skin prickled. She’d always been a bright child, good at science, facts, the kind of logic that reassured him. The logic was still there, he thought, but it had twisted on itself, like a ladder that had unfolded so far it fell back to the ground.
“How much are you sleeping?” he asked. He tried to modulate his voice, keep it casual, as if they were discussing her course load.
She let go of his wrist and shrugged. “They rewrite you while you sleep. The scripts you’ll follow, the pathways they lay down. You wake up and you don’t even know what’s changed. I stay up until my head buzzes, and then I lose time. That’s the same as sleeping. That’s when they get in. I tried keeping the lights on to stay awake, but they send messages through those too, the same ones that rewrite you, so it’s better to just turn everything off and sit very still.”
He looked around. All the lights were off. The only illumination was the thin, gray light seeping around the edges of the taped blanket and the glow from the microwave clock. It read 3:33, though his watch said 11:18.
“You saw Dr. Hauer before,” he said. “Do you remember him? You liked him.”
“He wrote down everything I said,” she replied. “I watched him. Every sentence, he made a mark. They share those marks. That’s how they decide what to do with you.”
“Who decides?”
She looked at him then, really looked, and a flicker of something moved through her eyes, pity, maybe, or anger, or a kind of exhausted contempt.
“You know,” she said quietly, “you’re the one who taught me about patterns.”
He had. When she was little, they’d walked the neighborhood together, counting things. Four mailboxes in a row. Six identical cars. The way the cracks in the sidewalk formed grids. He’d done it as a distraction, a way to calm her. She’d been anxious even then, easily overwhelmed by noise, by sudden movement. Patterns had soothed her—something she could rely on when everything else felt random.
Helen had done the same thing with him, once upon a time. His mother, tapping the side of his cereal bowl with a spoon: three taps, pause, three taps. “See?” she’d said. “That’s how you know it’s me. That’s our code. Three, three. Our way back to each other.”
Years later, after she’d started talking to the radio and unplugging appliances because they were “leaking thoughts,” the tapping had turned frantic. Three-three. Three-three. Three-three. Her fingers on windows, doors, his shoulders, as if reasserting the code could pull her back to where he still lived.
“Patterns help,” he said now, but his voice sounded thin in his own ears.
Averill smiled without humor. “They help them more.”
He drove home with the radio off, the highway a long gray ribbon. Every overpass looked like something that could collapse. Headlights in his rearview mirror felt too close, the beams washing through the interior of the car, making his own hands look like borrowed objects.
Clara was already in bed when he got home, their bedroom cast in the blue of the streetlamp. Their curtains were just sheer enough to let the ambient light in.
“How was she?” Clara asked, eyes closed.
He sat on the edge of the mattress. “She’s not sleeping. The apartment’s…dark. She taped blankets over the windows.”
“College kids are strange,” Clara murmured. “They go through phases.”
“She thinks they’re tracking her through the pipes.”
“Who doesn’t think that some days?” Clara sighed. “This world is crazy-making. The important thing is not to catastrophize. If you start seeing her as sick, you’ll make her sick. Self-fulfilling prophecy.”
Her words slid over him like oil on water. He remembered his father at the kitchen table, decades ago, hands wrapped around a mug gone cold. “If we don’t call it that,” his father had said, not looking at him, “then maybe it’s not.”
They never said the word schizophrenia out loud. It had been implied in bottle labels, in hushed consultations, in the way certain neighbors stopped making eye contact. Not saying it hadn’t saved anyone.
That night, Malcolm woke at 3:33 a.m., heart hammering. The digital alarm clock glowed red.
Three-three-three, he thought.
The house was very still. Then, faintly, he heard it: a whispering hiss in the walls. The air conditioner? The refrigerator? Pipes shifting?
It sounded, for a moment, like someone breathing through the drywall.
He held his own breath and listened harder, straining his ears until they rang. The sound resolved into nothing specific, just the usual house-sounds that came when everything else was quiet. He told himself that. He told himself that again over coffee in the morning, watching the sprinklers pulse in uniform increments across the neighbors’ lawns.
Days blurred. Averill’s text messages became less frequent, then more frequent but unreadable: strings full of numbers, street names, times of day, weird phrases. 11:11. HUM UNDER FLOOR. TURN OFF MAIN. HEARING BLEED.
He tried to call. Sometimes she answered and spoke in half-phrases, distracted by something he couldn’t see. Sometimes she didn’t answer at all.
He went back to her apartment, nearly two weeks later. Someone had spray-painted a crude eye on the building’s back wall. The door to her unit had another new lock, the brass still bright, fresh screw-holes pale against the weathered paint.
“Ave?” He knocked gently. “It’s me.”
“Let me hear it,” she said from the other side.
“Hear what?” His mouth had gone dry.
“The one you used to do.”
He stared at the door. His hand rose and he knocked: three, pause, three.
The quiet on the other side felt like a held breath. Then several locks turned, and the door opened.
The apartment was darker than before. She’d covered the remaining sources of light: the microwave display masked with tape, the tiny LEDs on her router blacked out. She moved through the gloom like someone used to it.
Light from the hallway sliced through the room as he entered. Before she hurried the door closed, he glanced around.
“What’s that on the walls?” he asked.
His eyes adjusted to the dark, and the graphite caught what little light bled around the blanket, the whole wall faintly silver with it. Pencil covered nearly every surface. Lines, arrows, circles, numbers. Floor plans overlaying maps, connecting points with loops and jagged strokes. Under one set of arrows he recognized their street, labeled in her careful, cramped hand. Under another, three names: HELEN. MALCOLM. AVERILL. Date ranges beneath each. The lines between them were thick, nearly carved into the drywall.
“It’s the network,” she said. “You can feel it, right? The hum. The way certain moments double themselves.”
Something in his chest clenched. “What do you mean double?”
“Like this,” she said, and walked to the window. “You stand here and you hear the siren, and you think it’s the first time, but it’s not. It’s the fifth or sixth. They loop it until you give the right reaction. The fear. Whatever they came for. I figured that out. That’s why I stopped reacting.”
“When did you last eat?”
The question sounded stupid the moment he said it, a normal question in a place where normality had already lost purchase.
She shrugged. “It’s not important. The body is just…hardware. They can swap it if they want. They did it with you.”
His stomach lurched. “With me?”
“They replaced you after the last time you left.” She said it like a fact she’d verified. “The real one would have come back sooner. The real one wouldn’t have been able to stay away.”
“I came as soon as I could.”
“You came when they told you to.” She tilted her head, studying him. In the dim light, her eyes looked too large for her face, catching any glint. “It’s not your fault.”
He wanted to argue, to insist that he was the real one, but the words stuck. His memories of recent weeks were..fogged. Had it been three days since he last visited, or ten? Had he really called every evening, or had he only meant to? The days at work had become interchangeable. Conversations with Clara drifted apart at the edges.
He wondered, suddenly, if there was a version of him somewhere else, one who had done everything right and on time, and this version was the defect.
He shook the thought away with physical effort. “I’m going to call someone,” he said. “A doctor. We can go together. Just to talk.”
“No doctors,” she said sharply. “We can’t trust them. They’re archivists. They record you until they know your most vulnerable thought. Then they send that thought back at you when you’re weakest. That’s how they break you down.”
“That’s not…”
“You know how I know?” Her voice dropped. “Because that’s what they did to her.”
He knew which her she meant. In the graphite maze of her wall, one line led to HELEN in thicker, darker strokes than the others.
“Grandma was sick,” he said. “She had an illness.”
“She had a signal,” Averill whispered. “She wasn’t sick. She was tuned to something others couldn’t hear. They tuned her wrong on purpose.”
He thought of his mother tapping three, three on everything. He thought of the way she’d stared at staticky television screens, eyes wide, as if waiting for a message to emerge from the gray. He thought of the neighbor across the street now, seventy years old, always out at 7:00 p.m. sharp to drag his garbage bins to the curb with ritual exactness.
He called the crisis line in his car after the visit. Hands slick on the wheel, he used words he’d avoided for decades: psychosis, delusion, risk. The woman on the phone was calm, asked if Averill had threatened harm to herself or others.
“She’s not sleeping,” he said. “She’s not eating much. She thinks people are tracking her through the plumbing. That they replaced me with a copy.”
“Has she made explicit threats?”
“No, but…”
“If she’s over eighteen and not an immediate danger, we can’t force an intervention. You can encourage her to seek help or call again if she expresses suicidal intent.”
He thanked her, hung up, and sat until the parking lot lights flicked off one by one, plunging the asphalt into darkness.
That night, Clara didn’t ask if he’d called anyone. Sitting on the couch, she stared at her phone, scrolling an endless feed of other people’s dinners, pets, vacations. “You get what you focus on,” she said. “If all we focus on is illness, that’s what we’re going to live inside.”
They were already inside it, he thought. It had walls and a roof and crown molding. It had an HOA and a quarterly newsletter. It had a block party every summer where everyone brought their best dish and no one mentioned the house two streets over where an ambulance had appeared at 3 a.m. and carried someone away under a white sheet.
He started waking in the night at precise times. 2:22. 3:33. 4:44. Each time, the red digits greeted him, and the house hummed, and his heart tried to beat out of sequence. He began to notice other repetitions: the same silver sedan parked at the corner every morning; the same dog bark at precisely 6:15 p.m.; the streetlamp outside his window flickering twice, pausing, then flickering twice again.
He told himself the brain was built to find patterns, that it was simply doing what it did. He’d read that somewhere, in one of the articles he’d started skimming late at night about genetic risk factors and environmental triggers, about how having a first-degree relative with schizophrenia could increase risk many times over. He read and read, the words piling up on the screen, forming a shape he refused to name.
Sometimes, the hum in the walls glitched. There would be a stutter, a tiny drop in the sound, like a heartbeat skipping. In that half-second of silence, he imagined he could feel Averill on the other end of it, like two people on either side of a door, each with a palm pressed to the wood.
When the police finally went to her apartment, it was because a neighbor had called about “strange noises” and “concerns.” Not him. He had called numbers, talked to people, been told about thresholds and rights. The neighbor had heard her shouting at three in the morning and thought, I don’t want this near me.
They took Averill to the hospital. Malcolm arrived to fluorescent lights and a waiting room television tuned to a channel no one watched. Clara refused to come, saying that if they turned this into “a whole thing,” it would be harder for Averill to return to normal.
Normal.
The psychiatrist used words like acute episode and treatment plan. Medication names with too many syllables. Recovery curve.
“She may experience disorganization, paranoia, auditory hallucinations,” the doctor said. “But with early intervention, we often see significant improvement.”
“How early is this?” Malcolm asked. His voice sounded like it was coming from the bottom of a well.
The doctor hesitated. “It can be hard to say. Often families notice changes months or even years before formal treatment begins.”
Months. Years.
He thought of the pauses in her speech. The way she’d started wearing headphones in the house at all times, even when she wasn’t listening to anything, because, she’d said, the silence was too loud. The way he’d told himself she was just introverted, just sensitive, just busy.
Averill refused medication. She signed herself out after three days. Adult. Competent. The words felt like a cruel technicality.
After that, she sank into the city like something dropped into deep water. He caught sight of her occasionally, the back of her head at a bus stop, her profile in a crowd near the grocery store, but when he blinked, whoever he’d seen dissolved into strangers. Her online posts became more fractured, then stopped altogether.
He thought, once, that he saw her in their own neighborhood. A figure two blocks away, walking slowly along the curve of the cul-de-sac, moving her hand along a row of mailboxes as if reading Braille. By the time he got his shoes on and stepped outside, the street was empty. The sprinklers on his lawn ticked on, right on schedule.
His own days grew soft around the edges. At work, he found himself staring at the photocopier, convinced its whirring lined up with his heartbeat, and that if it skipped, his heart would too. He’d stand there, hand hovering over the START button, breath shallow, until someone asked if they could use the machine, and he’d laugh, pretend he’d just drifted off.
At home, the flicker in the streetlamp began to feel personal. Two flashes, pause, two flashes. He counted the interval: six seconds. Two-six-two-six.
Three, three.
He woke one night to find himself sitting in the hallway outside his bedroom, back against the wall, knees drawn up. He had no memory of getting there. The carpet fibers had imprinted themselves into the skin of his ankles. The digital clock in the bedroom read 3:33.
Inside the walls, the hum and hiss rose and fell. For a moment, clear as a voice in the next room, he thought he heard Averill whisper his name.
He pressed his ear to the drywall. “Ave?”
Silence. Then the faint rush of air through the vents, impersonal as weather.
He started tapping again. He didn’t mean to; his fingers did it of their own accord. Three, pause, three. On the countertop, on the steering wheel, on the arm of the couch. Clara slapped his hand once, sharply, when he did it at the dinner table.
“Don’t,” she said. Her eyes were bright with something brittle. “Don’t start that.”
It was then he realized she remembered. The sound had been in their house once before. His mother’s sound. The code that hadn’t saved anyone.
“You’re worrying yourself sick,” Clara said, but her voice shook. “You need to stop reading those articles. Stop looking for patterns. She’ll come back when she’s ready.”
“Come back from where?” he asked.
But Clara had already turned away, rinsing plates, water running clear and hot over porcelain.
He thought of calling the crisis line again, telling them this time about himself, about waking in hallways, about voices in the hum. But compared to what Averill lived inside, his symptoms felt…small. Amateurish. Like a child imitating an adult’s handwriting. Besides, what would they do? Evaluate him. Ask if he intended to harm himself or others. Offer numbers to call during business hours.
It was late autumn when something in Malcolm finally gave, though nothing dramatic happened to mark it. The subdivision’s trees turned color in unremarkable unison, red and gold leaves spiraling politely to the ground. Plastic skeletons and fake cobwebs appeared on porches. There was an email about a neighborhood potluck.
He was driving home from the grocery store when he saw her.
At least, he thought he did.
She stood under the streetlamp at the entrance to their development, hands at her sides, hair a ragged halo. The light above her flickered twice, paused, flickered twice again. Her face was in shadow.
His heart slammed so hard the world narrowed. He pulled the car over so abruptly the tires scraped the curb. When he looked up, she was gone. The streetlamp hummed, its light steady.
Maybe she had walked away. Maybe she had never been there. Maybe she was everywhere now, thin as a broadcast he could almost catch if he tuned the dial exactly right.
He left the groceries in the trunk. He walked home on legs that didn’t feel quite attached.
Inside the house, Clara sat at the table with her laptop, light from the screen blanching her features. “Did you close the garage door?” she asked without looking up.
He stared at her. Her voice sounded slightly delayed, as if traveling from a great distance.
“You didn’t see her,” he said.
“See who?”
He opened his mouth to say their daughter’s name and found he could not. The word stuck like a pit in his throat. His eyes burned.
“I think I’m getting sick,” he said instead.
“Then go lie down,” Clara said. “You’re always tired lately. This is what happens when you don’t protect your energy.”
Protect your energy. Protect your thoughts. Protect your illusions.
He went to the bedroom. Sat on the edge of the bed. The alarm clock glowed 7:07. The numbers pulsed faintly, as if with breath.
He lay back without undressing and stared at the ceiling. Cracks followed the length of the room, forming an almost perfect mirrored pattern: one fracture line on his side matched by another on Clara’s. Symmetry, he thought. As above, so below.
The hum in the walls rose, then smoothed into a long, unbroken tone. It sounded, for a moment, like someone holding a note: a voice stretched past what should be possible.
In that sound, he heard everything at once: his mother’s fingers tapping three, three, Averill tracing lines on the walls in her dark apartment, Clara rinsing plates while pretending not to notice she was crying. He heard the sprinkler systems ticking on across the neighborhood in perfect time, water arcing over grass, washing away nothing at all.
His chest felt hollowed out, as if someone had reached in and unplugged something essential.
“Okay,” he whispered to the room, to the hum, to the invisible grid he’d spent his life both inhabiting and denying. “Okay. I hear you.”
He could feel himself sliding, not a drop but a tilt, a gradual redistribution of weight from one reality to another. The doctor had said early intervention. The articles had said genetic load. Clara had said phases. His father had said nothing at all.
He turned onto his side, facing the wall. His hand lifted and pressed flat against the paint, feeling for vibration.
“Three,” he whispered, barely audible even to himself. He tapped his fingers against the drywall: three, pause, three.
On the other side, somewhere in the vast tangle of wires and pipes and foundation, someone answered. Or he found his answer in the heat kicking on, the expansion of metal.
The house around him settled deeper into its own silence. Outside, the cul-de-sac lay under its orderly grid of streetlights, each perfect circle of illumination failing to touch the next. Neighbors moved behind their curtains, performing the small rituals of evening. No one looked out. No one saw a man lying in the dark, listening for his daughter in the bones of his home.
No police cars came. No doctors. No saints in white coats.
Just the hum, and the patterns, and the knowledge that somewhere, in some other dim room, a woman with uneven hair might be pressing her palm to her own wall, feeling the echo.
Trae Stewart is a poet, fiction writer, psychiatric-mental health nurse practitioner, and academic based in Las Vegas, Nevada. His creative work explores memory, identity, masculinity, grief, belonging, and the complexities of mental health, often finding moments of quiet transformation within ordinary lives. His poetry and fiction have appeared in Transition, Poetry South, Rappahannock Review, The Argyle Literary Magazine, The Sunlight Press, Defenestration, and numerous other literary journals. He is currently at work on new collections of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction.
Unlike the rules you set at your house, the Millers have an under-18s go phone-free policy, which means that Marcy Miller’s kid beats you and yours at Scrabble in the low kitchen light. Just you, in fact, because your thirteen-year-old abandons their turn after they are dealt the Q without a U and instead, retreats to reading a Pullman at the counter, white marble cool and threaded gray, without further explanation. A power move, one that you, her mother, would have never been brave enough to pull and it isn’t long before Marcy Miller’s kid leaves you behind with confound, a triple word score, and you’re annoyed that all your morning crosswords failed to prepare you for losing a grown-up game to a child.
This was not what you had planned when you’d mentioned the invite to your daughter who had groaned and said, It’s so boring over there, and you said something about being nice to her classmates because life was long and that she could bring a book. A mistake, you realize, because you never thought she’d make good on her threat of blatantly ignoring the rest of the room, reading in the open like that. You would rather she do something truly scandalous like eat chalk or count the ceiling tiles out loud in German or ask Marcy Miller how many units of botox she injected into her face but instead, she decides to embarrass you in the most subtle and pointed way, just as you embarrass yourself with your final tiles.
When your last turn is over with a simpering fun, six points, you observe how Marcy Miller’s rules don’t stop Marcy Miller herself from scrolling BookTok in the open, the screen’s glow hitting her cheekbones from below. Ever since you met her during her first pregnancy, at one of those all day silent meditation retreats in the heart of Cambridge, she’s had an angular bone structure, never consumed by her own flesh. You wonder if one day, those pointed bones will become cliffs from which her skin will hang, hollows that you could put a Werther’s in, but you don’t hope and so, instead, you press your fingers against the flat planes of your own face for comfort. A tactile meditation, you remember from your training and think about how you should get back into it. That maybe you could remind Marcy Miller of her experimentation with mindfulness, a passive aggressive nod to the screentime that she could bitch about later to her country club group.
Adults only, she wags her phone when she catches you looking at her, as if you don’t count, even though you’re three years older. Anyway,it’s educational. People don’t read anymore. You shrug because you’ve spent more time than her on serious content, like investigative reporting about Lime bike injuries or lead in nineteenth century houses like yours, neither of which actually stop you from cycling around the city or forgetting to pick up a filter. It’s better for her to think you’re judging the phone instead of her face.
To fill the awkward space left by a distracted fellow adult and your absorbed, daresay rude, daughter, you put the board away and, as you move around the cushioned bar stools and clear the island of letter tiles, you see Marcy Miller’s kid pantomime swiping a screen using the kitchen counter, inches from your daughter’s elbow, and your chest aches seeing the two of them next to one another, yours reading about Pullman’s stance on mortality and conscience and institutionalized religion, the other pining for a battery covered in glass. You offer something to this poor child of Marcy Miller’s because you understand.
No need to practice, you say, You’ll get the hang of it and honestly, you’re not missing much, and her kid, who has eyebrows plucked into thin, two-bar rainbows, says hotly, You’re the one who could use the practice. At least that’s what my mom says, before storming off, and you stand there, your mouth hanging open because, for the life of you, you have no idea what they mean but also know it has something to do with the fact that none of you, at the end of the day, not even Marcy Miller, want to be here.
Thankfully, Marcy Miller doesn’t notice because Marcy Miller is still scrolling vampire smut on her phone, so you live in that lonely moment, half-hurt, half-awed, and wonder if you were both talking about the same thing: about growing up, or if you’ve missed something deeper, truer, now off limits because it’s in the past.
Confound, you say aloud, because it’s fitting and prescient.
Huh? Marcy Miller replies, eyes flicking up from the screen to your face and you swear, for a moment, you see disgust there before it rearranges itself into sharp, flat planes. A muddling along, that’s what this is, a traipse through school nights with the same people in the same place, and it hits you in its dizzying repetition. What, you wonder, are any of you practicing for? What, you wonder, are any of you doing making words out of the same jumbled letters and hating each other for it? But instead of asking Marcy Miller if she only started meditating all those years ago to say she did or why won’t she just put the damn phone down and have a real conversation about the unpaid labor of childcare and the very much paid labor of tutors who went to Harvard that can’t seem to find a job in this economy, an unemployed future towards which your own expensive children are trending, you say, It’s a good word. She smiles and says something about private school entrance exam prep.
It’s never too early to start nowadays, she says, when in fact, you know it’s already too late for her and hers and maybe even for you, but at least you’re not Marcy Miller. And though you’re not sure after all, you hope that makes all the difference.
Salena Casha‘s work has appeared in over 180 publications in the last decade. She survives New England winters on good beer and black coffee. Subscribe to her substack at salenacasha.substack.com and buy her sci-fi novella at ELJ Editions.
He was your first real boyfriend—the type you kiss on the curb of a church parking lot. The type you don’t really like all that much but you’re eleven and reading romance novels earlier than you probably should and you’re eager for the moment where fairy tale meets reality, a high you’ll continue to chase into your twenties with the same disappointing outcome you once experienced on the curb of a church parking lot.
And he looks stable, full of promise. Nice home. Nice family. Plays football. Loves to fish. Eats dinner every night. They go to church and you like church, though they arrive as a set and you an unsupervised drop-off. And maybe you do not like church in the spiritual way of complete devotion, but you love having somewhere free to go and something free to do. You were never all that picky. You survive on crumbs to the point where one day, an eating disorder will make a blessing out of poverty. You expect and crave nothing. Your standards will stay low for too long, always coming up short and measuring well below the max height of a well-maintained Ohio lawn: eight to twelve inches. That’s an innuendo, by the way. You always worry no one will get it.
He doesn’t, and he’s literally a thirteen-year-old boy. He can’t grasp his science courses, and he’s certainly not grasping you in any substantial way. But it’s not his fault, not really. Young and dumb. Besides, he’s not the protagonist.
It was actually his mother you remember best, she was the inciting incident. When he cried over the phone to you, an indication he may have felt this was more than just something to do, he revealed how he was downtrodden because his mother believed you were distracting him from football. You thought it rather silly. First that she would say something like that to someone obviously not cut out for a football career and second that he would cry about it—you’ve always been a bit callous.
You brush off his mother’s comment. You don’t think too much about it. Why the fuck would you let something so small ruin the rest of your day? The rest of your week? The rest of your something to do?
She wore blue, that mother of his, when you met her for the first time in the church basement during a Sunday school service—or what you now call “affordable childcare.” Blue sweater, blue jeans, white sneakers with blue accents. Blue, blue, blue, blue, blue. It was the kind of color that made your stomach churn, like the ocean’s depths or the inside of a day-old bruise. You expected she’d adore you the same way your own parents and teachers did, the way they beamed when you entered a room. You’re a rule follower. You like direction. You like reading. You like manners. You’re blonde. Adults have so much to love about you.
But she looked you up and down, those thin, mulberry lips forming a tight line of disappointment, her gaze on your abdomen for what felt like a little too long. You could see disgust in the crinkle of her nose. She says, “You can’t be dating her, she’s far too small to bear children. Her hips won’t be wide enough.”
You are fresh into your eleventh year of existence. You have yet to even bleed. Her words sink into your stomach, settling somewhere low and quiet, far below the surface. You feel sick with experience, blue around the gills, and you wonder if, for a girl, there’s really a difference between breathing and drowning.
You carry the event home and the women closest to you laugh at the story, telling you not to think too much about it. Your sister calls her stupid, your mother calls her a crazy bitch. When you’re alone though, you call her right. You look in the mirror, “Theyaretoo small.” And while one could argue you still had time to develop, they’d be wrong. You remain 4’11’’ and his mother remains right.
And a few years along the way, when you’ve moved on and moved away and your time is no longer spent in church basements, that boy becomes a teen dad. You’re not surprised. Dodged that bullet.
For years, you tell the story as some audacious humorous anecdote. Just another thing some stupid, crazy bitch said to you. But you never forget the disgust of not meeting her feminine expectation. An expectation you never thought much of until someone forgets to laugh when you recall the story in a university classroom. Until someone says, “That’s not really funny.” Until another voice chimes in, “I don’t know what I’d do if someone said that to my daughter.” And all you can think at the time is, Damn, me neither.
But that doesn’t stop you from laughing and telling it again because now all you can think is Why the fuck was she wearing so much blue?
Nikki Mae Howard is an Ohio-based creative nonfiction writer with a B.A in English Literature from Wittenberg University and works as a storyteller for MemoirForMe. She is a current MFA student of creative nonfiction at Antioch University-Los Angeles. Some of her work is available for viewing at YouMightNeedToHearThis.com, Lunch Ticket, Clark State’s Voices of the Valley, and The Argyle Literary Magazine.
In 2003, salvation has blonde extensions and a chihuahua named Tinkerbell.
I watch her descend from the Escalade in low-rise jeans that part the Red Sea of paparazzi.
that’s hot rain glitter reign, glitter
prophecy in a Juicy tracksuit, rosary of rhinestones
Bless my cheap gloss, my beaded clips, my Sony Cybershot— every pop girl who burned herself beautiful for the lens.
We kept the light spinning. We were the mirrorball saints— worshipped, ridiculed, necessary.
Shae is a queer, autistic goblin interested in the intersection of disability justice and design, collecting tiny trinkets and having an unwavering devotion to Shrek as both art and ideology.
I met this girl named Sally at an Iron Maiden concert and took her to a Waffle House off Peachtree after the show. Late night, early morning—we’d had so much beer it was all a bit hazy. Waffle House seemed like a cop out for a first date, but since it was the only place still open and I’d paid for Sally’s beers and tour T-shirt, I thought I’d earned the right to be a little sloppy. It wasn’t like I expected anything—she’d been pretty goddamn clear about going to the airport as soon as we got done eating—but I figured what the hell. We were both hungry, and I thought I might as well be a gentleman and pour plenty of syrup on her waffles because I’m a nice guy and, well, just in case.
I gotta be honest, things got shitty pretty quick. The Waffle House parking lot looked like a ghost town and gave me the creeps. Inside, the pasty griddle kid and two hags ragging the counter were doing their damnedest to put the grave into the graveyard shift. The place already smelled like cooking oil and cheap cigarettes and piss, so none of the workers batted an eye when we rolled in with the stench of stale beer, hot dogs, and second-hand pot smoke. I sat down with Sally on some bar stools at the counter and handed her a menu. Sally looked at the menu and handed it back. She said where she was from, they didn’t have Waffle House.
That’s odd, I said. Then I asked her, Where ya from?
Upstate New York, Sally said.
I said, Long way down to Atlanta. You must really like Maiden.
Sally said, Uh-huh.
So what’d ya do Upstate? I put my hands in my lap to keep from touching this place I’ve got on my neck below my Adam’s apple. It’s not too big, maybe the size of a raisin, but my doctor says I shouldn’t touch it. He says it’s not cancer but I should leave it alone. He says it’s called a sebaceous cyst.
Different gigs, Sally said. Art and stuff. Freelance mostly, but I get by. You?
I’m a teacher, I said. Full time.
Sally said, You don’t look like a teacher. She twirled her fingers in her hair, which had these cotton-candy-pink-and-blue highlights I really dug. What subject?
All subjects, I said, and sat up a little straighter. I’m a substitute.
Huh, said Sally.
I didn’t care much for the opening band, I said. I tried to remember what they were called but had already forgotten.
Sally shrugged. Meh.
I said, So you like waffles?
Sally said, Dunno. Never had one.
I said, Really? That’s crazy.
Sally said, I guess I’m just not a waffle kind of person.
I said, You’ll never know until you try.
When the grill kid, whose nametag said Doug, took our orders, I got each of us the All-Star Special: two fried eggs, cheese grits, sausage patties, raisin toast, and of course a fucking waffle. I ate all of mine plus Sally’s untouched waffle and grits. Sally picked at her sausage and took the rest to go. I paid the bill in cash. Come to find out, Doug the griddle kid wasn’t quite the deadbeat I’d assumed. He even gave us free coffee when I told him we’d just seen Maiden. He said he was originally from Augusta, had Rob Zombie’s face tattooed on his ass, and liked metal. He said the opening band was the shit. Sally said he was sweet and patted his hand.
On the way to the airport in my Solara, I sipped my shitty coffee from the too-hot styrofoam and said, I thought you didn’t like the opening band.
Sally said, I changed my mind.
I said, Where’s my hand pat?
Sally said, I just met you.
I put on a mixtape with some real angry bangers by Megadeth and Exodus and Tool and didn’t say much after that.
Just after three AM, I pulled up to the South Terminal drop-off at Hartsfield-Jackson. I parked my car, flicked on the flashers, and touched Sally’s arm. Listen, I said. I don’t even have your number.
I’m not giving it, Sally said, pulling away.
I said, No sweat; here’s mine. I took a No. 2 pencil and yellow Post-It from the console, jotted down my number, and handed Sally the note. Sally handed it back. I said, Can we at least be Facebook friends?
Sally opened her door. I don’t want to miss my flight.
I said, Snapchat?
Sally said, Your palms are sweaty and that place on your neck is distracting, but I left you my sausage and toast. Then she got out of the car.
It took me a moment to realize what Sally meant, and by that time, she’d already gone. I watched her disappear into the crowd through the tall glass doors. On my stereo, which I’d never turned off, Dave Mustaine squealed and whined like a love-sick cat.
I exited the terminal and drove around until I found a Golden Pantry with all the lights off. There was a dead squirrel in the parking lot. Somewhere nearby, a dog barked. I dialed up the music and opened the doggy bag with Sally’s leftovers. The bag felt warm and moist between my legs and smelled good. I realized I was still hungry. I sat there in my car until the sun came up and ate all of it, thinking about music and teaching and my cyst. It was kinda peaceful, actually: head ringing from the music, ears swimming with the sound, watching the planes float up in pinpoints of bright red light.
Colin Bishoff lives and writes in Hull (basically Athens), Georgia. He has an MFA in fiction writing from Georgia College and State University and is a PhD student in the creative writing program at the University of Georgia.
He tells her that one must water the lawn once or twice a week, deeply, but infrequently. Give it enough to quench the thirst, but not enough to drown it, to spoil it, just enough to keep it wanting. Those blades of grass will grow higher, forever reaching for more sustenance, more water, more, more, more.
When summer comes, she stands on the lawn, barefoot with blades of grass coming up between her toes, and as he holds the hose and aims the nozzle, as streams of water arc into the air, she lies down and becomes the grass. She feels the slopes of the earth under her, the open cavities where the worms travel beneath her, and she lets the water wash over her and into her and under her.
He doesn’t notice, he’s too focused on the weeds. Tricky bastards, they come up slowly, one or two at first, and then you look away and back and the soft brown soil is littered with jagged leaves of green, working their way out. She’s got weeds for brains, she knows it, has always known it, she can feel them growing up through her head, and he is here on his knees, bending over her, and then his hands are in there, fingers probing and pulling.
He does this over and over, waters and weeds, until fall when he moves on to the leaves. He rakes them with care, into a tidy pile, covering her completely. From underneath she can see the leaves, really see them, the veins of each one, and for a moment it’s all so beautiful, and she is everything, the leaves and the grass and the dirt, but then she sees the tiny holes where bugs have eaten through, and where the edges are yellow and curling inward, and he is yanking on the mower cord until it comes to life.
Lindsay McDonald (she/her) writes poetry, flash fiction, and short stories. She is also working on her first novel. Her work is forthcoming/has appeared in Agnes and True, Dishsoap Quarterly, HAD, and Flash Fiction Magazine. She lives in Barrie, Ontario, Canada and her instagram handle is @lindsaymcdonaldauthor
when you are fat in middle school, your doctors tell you to join a sport. when you get cut from softball for never having played softball—every soft lob whipping past your swinging bat and racing heart, every careless toss slipping through your borrowed glove—your teachers tell you to run cross country. when you get bullied out of cross country, your parents tell you to walk. so you walk. you tell yourself you’re cute, that deep down, the cuteness of you that no one sees is worth everything, and you tape a black satin bow to a black plastic headband and wear it to remind yourself.
you don’t have a phone, but you’re just in your neighborhood, the same old neighborhood where the same old people live. the adults tell you to be positive, so you walk, crunching sun-baked leaves, slipping fingers through the scaly fronds of cypresses lining the yard of a girl who used to be your friend. cold shadows spear onto the crumbling asphalt like teeth, and the din of your thoughts obscures the crackling of tires.
a boxy brown car rolls to a stop beside you. you pause, curious. you are a girl scout, trained to listen and help. the window sinks down into the door. cigarette smoke wafts out.
he’s college age, brown hair, varsity jacket, tired eyes. he doesn’t say hi or i’m looking for… or can you give me directions to... he asks, do you want a ride?
the upholstery is red leather, cracked but clean, no crushed soda cans or crumpled fast food wrappers. just a blanket folded in the backseat. you take far too long to think, to wonder how you look to him, to scramble for a reason not to get in the car—the car of the only person who has ever, maybe, probably-not-even hit on you. yes, you want to get traumatized on red leather; yes, you want the touch of the hand that adjusts his side mirror too nonchalantly and the vein standing out on the back of that hand and the blood inside that vein; yes, you regret it immediately when you shake your head.
where do you live? he asks. you point beyond the cypresses at your once-friend’s house. she is thin and cute and never home. she has a boyfriend.
leaning an elbow out the car’s window, he frowns, disappointed, even pitiful. or perhaps that’s your reflection in the flake of the car’s paint, and he’s just reading your lie back to you, waiting for you to realize: this will be your only chance. a stranger in an old car at dusk. a scratchy blanket and nicotine-stained fingers and whatever violence he wants to enact on you, whatever cruelty, whatever pretend love. this is your chance, while you still hold the barest possibility that you are or ever were cute. no one actually thinks you’ll get any prettier; they make you try because they can’t stand to look at you.
so you don’t want a ride? he confirms, and you try to convince yourself his impatience is tenderness.
no, you say, and rush up your once-friend’s driveway, your black satin bow slipping. you stumble into a crouch in the drainage rocks behind her house, and it falls. you grab it and hold it to your heaving chest. it was supposed to make you cute; it worked in the worst way possible.
he sits there for a moment, tapping his steering wheel. he knows you’re lying. you know you’re missing your chance. if he gets out of the car and grabs you, drags you by your frizzy hair, you both know you’ll surrender.
the car squeaks as he pulls away. tears press against your eyelids. perhaps they’ll say you’re making progress, that your miniscule reluctance to be kidnapped is indicative of self-esteem, or bravery, or whatever other basic virtue they like to pretend pumps through the chambers of your preposterous heart. in reality, the only argument you can find against running back into the road, bow in hand, is this: whatever he wanted to do to you, you didn’t even deserve that.
EA Kane is a multidisciplinary artist living in New England. Their work has been published in Black Warrior Review, The Sandy River Review, and Exist Otherwise, among others. To view more of their visual and literary art, visit eakartist.wordpress.com
I am texting you pictures of cats: cats doing jobs, using “z” instead of “s,” Look! Cats in frog hats, cats riding on Roombas. I am texting you cats instead of what I can’t bring myself to tell you: I am sending out the save-the-date for the unveiling of my grandmother’s headstone. I need to shovel this morning’s snowfall and register my children for next year’s summer camp. I was in the emergency room with my dad last week— trying to recite prayers I didn’t know the meaning of, to take note of the medical words that I did— and I just want you to see how funny this kitten is: curled up in a pile of hay in the barn next to the lambs, as if it belonged there.
Pam Yve Simon (she/her) earned her bachelor of arts in English and American literature from New York University. Her poetry and photography has appeared in various online and print publications. She was awarded the Analog Science Fiction and Fact Analytical Laboratory Award for Best Poem of 2024 for her poem “Gravity.” Say hi to her on Bluesky Social @PamYve.bsky.social or visit: pamyve.wordpress.com
