In the time it took for Troy to realize I was truly pissed and finally leaving him, I’d already rammed my car into the side of his brand-new, jacked-up, man-confirming, white-knuckle Dodge Ram.
In the second it took to dent the passenger-side door hiding the purple-lace thong I’d found wadded into the seat crack where I thought I’d find my lip gloss, Troy screamed like I was actually cutting off his balls. His hands clawed at his face, which was as red as a boiled lobster, and I never craved tender flesh so bad in my life.
In the moments it took for me to back up and crash into that truck again, gravel rocketing like bullets off the wheels of my car, Troy had sworn at me using all those names women are called when they have a mind to do what they want. But those names were nothing I hadn’t heard before. None I hadn’t heard him call me before. But I didn’t stop. I kept battering that door, waiting for him to jump off the porch and throw himself between me and his truck, desperate to save what was left of everything I’d ever done for him—loaning him thousands for some crazy get-rich-quick bullshit scheme after I worked overtime cleaning rooms at the roach motel out on the highway, all while saving up so I could go to school to be an x-ray tech; covering for him when the cops wanted his whereabouts the night enough Oxys were stolen from the local pharmacy to drown everyone in that godforsaken town; cutting off Daddy when he asked me to come back home, telling him I needed to make my own choices, even though I knew I was making all the wrong ones, and Daddy knew it too.
In the minute it took for me to do enough damage to that truck to get Troy’s grease monkey buddies riled up when they saw, I imagined all those dented edges fighting them, white flakes peeling off in ribbons like Troy’s sun-burnt skin when he went blast fishing with those assholes, those self-professed good ol’ boys who drank beer in our living room and ordered me to get them another cold one during commercials starring better looking versions of themselves. They’d have to work real hard to hammer and suck my rage out of the body of that truck. But they’d try. And they’d probably imagine me as they did it, blaming me for their failure, calling me all those names again, names that made me want to trash everything Troy ever owned or cared about. When I drove away, I saw him in my rear-view mirror kneeling beside twisted metal like he was praying at an altar for some kind of miracle, bargaining to take it all back. Like somehow, he’d become a better man.
In the hour it took for me to get my shit together in the Dairy Queen parking lot, I’d jerry-rigged my bumper back on and sat on the trunk of my cherry-red Chevy Cavalier dreaming of going home, of starting over and living up to that potential everyone told me I had, and I realized I’d had in me all along, regardless of what Troy and every other boyfriend tried to convince me of. I guzzled that peanut-butter milkshake like I was dying of thirst. Because I was. For salt, for sugar, for piercing cold. For that brain-freezing focus. For that thick creamy fat on my tongue. It all melted into such warmth, such sweetness, that I couldn’t help feeling a tiny bit like me again.
Melanie Maggard is a flash and poetic prose writer who loves dribbles and drabbles. She has published in Cotton Xenomorph, The Dribble Drabble Review, X-R-A-Y Magazine, Five Minute Lit, and others. She can be found online at www.melaniemaggard.com and @WriterMMaggard.
My junior prom corsage was big and wet as an open mouth. A decadent purple. My high school boyfriend liked to give me decadent things. When he asked me out for the first time, for example, he gave me four squares of cake with frosting shiny as lip gloss.
There’s a long-standing association between the flower and the vagina. I don’t understand the resemblance, though in fairness I don’t spend much time staring at vaginas. I prefer to dive in tongue-first and get to work. Still, I do wonder if my boyfriend was thinking about pussy when he looked at the flower he gave me. Based on my interactions with him I’m pretty sure he was thinking about pussy ninety percent of the time.
I never had sex with him. He asked me, shortly after we started dating, if I wanted to “you know.” I told him that if he was not going to say the word “sex” then we were certainly not going to have sex. He didn’t think I was funny.
We spent our dates in my basement, curled up on a pale green beanbag with his hands skimming my surface like water striders. He would always ask, “Do you like this? Is it good?” which at first I thought was nice, but he got so upset with me when the answer was “no” that lying was just easier. So, I let him touch me, because I didn’t want to be a bitch. But I was still just enough of a bitch to keep my pants on. Mostly I made encouraging noises while trying to subtly crane my neck so I could see the TV over his left shoulder. In retrospect, this was maybe the meanest thing I ever did as a teenager.
Since I couldn’t offer him sex, I offered him secrets—even my biggest secret of all, that I too was thinking about pussy ninety percent of the time. Though, while I can’t speak for him, I was also interested in the person attached. Back then, I was sort of Catholic, in that my parents told me to attend Catholic school and I preferred to avoid conflict when possible. I knew some of my teachers wouldn’t like me anymore if I came out as bisexual, so I resolved to stay in the closet for the time being.
My boyfriend liked this secret very much. Especially when I gave him permission to fantasize about me with other women. Pussy times two. Three, if he was feeling devilish. All I needed to do was occasionally contribute more secrets to flesh out his dirty talk. Which girls in my class I liked. What I wanted to do with them. There was an odd irony to it, finally giving voice to my most fervent teenage longings only to watch them transform into material for someone else’s wet dreams before my eyes. But they say a good compromise leaves nobody happy.
On prom night, my friend hosted an afterparty in her basement, featuring games, plastic bowls of chips, and absolutely no alcohol. My boyfriend and I came early, and the four of us waited on the tattered brown couch for everyone else to arrive. He pulled me close to his body and gripped me tight, ran his hands up my thigh. My friend and her date sat in silence, unimpressed by our shameless PDA. Sorry, I thought. If it helps, I don’t like this any more than you do.
“You should kiss her,” my boyfriend said to me, indicating my friend with his head. He did not whisper, or even mumble. I looked at my friend and thought, would she know? Would the knowledge pass from my body to hers? I looked at her date, who was practically a stranger. I wondered who his friends were, and what kind of stories he might tell them. I looked at my boyfriend, and there was nothing in his eyes but hunger. A rotted hunger, brown and wilted and wet, and it stank. Like a corsage left lying in the trash after a prom night when no one had any fun and no one got any pussy.
Annie Schoonover is a queer writer from Minneapolis. Her work has appeared in Mycelia, Barnstorm Journal, Thimble Literary Magazine, and other publications, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She is the associate prose editor at The Chestnut Review.
The week I resigned myself to break up with him, I had to wait until Thursday to tell him in person. There seemed to be an inordinate number of deer carcasses along roadsides that week, one especially haunting, its ribcage visible, most of the flesh having been consumed by vultures. The red sinews of each meat-lined rib were seering, vibrant against the dreary wet winter afternoon. I slowed the car as I passed, mesmerized, torso aching in response: a world in which people slow down to stare at a creature splayed open, exposed, one second living, the next devoured.
Nicole Wilson is the author of the collection Supper & Repair Kit (The Lettered Streets Press) and is a graduate of the MFA Poetry Program at Columbia College Chicago.
In the cobwebbed eaves of the house on Fig Street, the third pigeon drops dead.
I hear her struggle from the front lawn, where I am deadheading the roses. My hand goes up to shield my eyes from the sun. At this point, I am expecting the fall. Her feathers iridesce green, blue, purple, with each twitch of her little head. She twists almost gracefully to the very edge of the roof. To linger on the precipice, body limp but briefly suspended, brings to mind something beautiful: a ballet dancer about to fall into her partner’s arms, Anna Karenina on the train platform. A papery brown blossom flutters from my gloved hand to the ground. Then the pigeon topples into the rain gutter.
I am the only person in this neighborhood who knows how to garden. I walk four blocks to the bus stop every day, and every day I notice another thing left to fester. Ivy gnawing at an exposed brick facade. Mistletoe snared in the boughs of a slowly graying tree, drinking the living from it. Squashed plums on the sidewalk, crabapples rolling into the gutter. The whole scene stained syrupy and sickly-sweet.
I know I cannot reach the rain gutter with the only ladder at my disposal, a squat A-frame left in the garage by a handyman Aunt Nell briefly courted. Still, I cannot become another keeper of rotting things.
Aunt Nell was a collector. She collected forever stamps and uranium glass dishware and ceramic Precious Moments figurines. She collected stray cats, left them bowls of dried up kibble on the white oak porch. She collected me from the train station when I first arrived in town. Most importantly to my current predicament, she collected long lists of phone numbers. Magneted to the fridge, overlapped by a 10% off coupon for the pizzeria downtown and a postcard from the Vatican, is her list of pest control companies, scrawled out in her looping hand on the back of a Salvation Army receipt.
The third number on the list picks up.
“Greenbriar Wildlife Services, how may I help you?” A voice—smoky, feminine—tins from the receiver.
I explain the situation. Dead bird in the rain gutter. Can’t reach it on my own.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” she says. “But it sounds like an easy fix. I could come out tomorrow afternoon?”
I almost laugh. Stupidly, I realize, I hadn’t imagined that this woman would be the one to come and take my bird away. I figured they would send a wiry twentysomething, a former high school track star. A burly quarterback with dark hair on his forearms and coffee on his breath. I adjust my mental image of the woman on the other line, from a cream-bloused secretary to a coverall-wearing, slick-haired androgyne.
“Yes,” I say. “Tomorrow afternoon works.”
I cup the handset to my cheek—warm from the mist of my breath. I give her the address.
The first dead pigeon I blamed on Rocky, Aunt Nell’s only surviving stray. It was lying in front of the door like a gift, something dark oozing onto the daffodil-colored welcome mat. I wrapped the body in the doormat and put it in the compost bin. When Rocky next trotted up the driveway, I shook my head at him and clicked my tongue. He only rubbed his head into my hand, purring like a locomotive. Cats can’t tell when you’re mad at them. Cats have no sense of shame. Cats are not born guilty.
The truck pulls into the crook of the cul-de-sac. Greenbriar Wildlife Services, it says on one side, green and yellow like a parakeet. Humane Solutions for Pest Problems. A grinning cartoon raccoon stenciled next to the lettering, cheekily fanning out its burglar hands. No man with an oversized mallet. No panicked line of rats or termites. Just a raccoon, who looks like he knows something I don’t. This cools my nerves some, quiets the thudding of my pulse. I don’t like brutality. I like cleanliness. I like English mystery novels. I like strict teachers. I like solitaire.
The woman who gets out of the truck does not look how I pictured her. Her hair is pulled into a short ponytail at the top of her head, jagged ends spiking out like a crown of thorns. She wears a faded gray Laguinitas t-shirt, tucked into a pair of straight-leg work pants. Her face is studded with sterling silver, piercings above her lip, notched into her eyebrow. A tool belt weighs down her hips, swaying with each step.
I startle out of my position at the window, suddenly aware that I am watching her, aware of the way my hair feels on the back of my neck, the chappedness of my lips. I open the door before she has the chance to knock.
“Hey,” she says, “You the one with the dead bird?”
“Yes, yes I am.”
“My name is Syd.”
“Florence.” I accept her proffered hand. Her palm is dry, her grip strong.
I found the second dead pigeon tangled in the neighbor’s fence. Caught on the ragged hole in the chain-link gnawed by the neighbor’s portly rottweiler, the bird’s feathers embroidered with metal. She must have fallen and gotten stuck. Wings spread, head limply bowed, a suburban martyr. I cleaned that one up too, hurrying across the cul-de-sac with a newspaper-wrapped bundle tucked under my arm.
Syd sets up her ladder where I direct her. While she pulls thick gloves onto her hands, her eyes wander around the yard, taking in the greenery. She compliments my roses, although half the blossoms are severed at the stalk and the other half are brown and withered, the ground at their feet still heavy with fallen petals. I haven’t found the time to rake them up.
“Thank you. Lots of people don’t know how to tend to them properly.”
Syd smiles. Her canines are slightly sharp, giving her the look of a wily fox. “But you do.”
“Yeah,” a laugh buzzes my lips. “I suppose I do.”
“Any plans for the holiday?” She’s halfway up the ladder when she asks this. I find myself wishing she would remain at ground level, where I can watch her eyes flit from the bed of clover by the windowsill to the poplar fanning its branches over the lawn, the dandelions polka-dotting the grass.
“Housewarming party,” I lie. A sweet-sounding frivolity for the long weekend. In actuality, I will be working all three days. Nametag clipped to the collar of my shirt, corralling escaped shopping carts back into their pens. I don’t mind. The holiday pay is nice.
“You just move in?”
“Yes.” It is easy to imagine that I’m new to the neighborhood. Aunt Nell wrote me into her will but it still doesn’t feel like the house is mine. I brush dust off the furniture, but my fingerprints don’t leave a mark. I’m a groundskeeper. A haunting.
Syd rests her elbows on the edge of the rain gutter, and looks in. There’s a rustling as she digs around for the fallen bird, and a few dislodged dead leaves twist languidly down to my feet. The ladder creaks. I can see her bicep muscles moving under her thin t-shirt, dark halo of sweat blooming under her arm. My stomach tightens. Worry, for her balance.
“Yep,” she calls. “Found it. Good thing you called me when you did, things could have gotten real smelly up here.”
She whips a rag from her back pocket, a matador with his cape, and scoops the creature out. She descends the ladder gingerly, with her cotton-wrapped bundle kept close to her chest.
As her boot hits the ground, the pigeon’s head lolls back, the makeshift burial shroud flapping open around it.
“Sorry,” Syd moves to cover the bird’s fragile head with her big gloved hand. “If you’re squeamish.”
“No.” I drift closer.
Syd makes a humming noise in the back of her throat, cups the pigeon’s neck gently, like she’s holding a baby. “Sad, I know. But whatever it had, it probably wasn’t avian flu. See, no swelling, no discoloration.”
In fact, the pigeon looks like it might start flapping at any moment. Gray feathers collaring her neck, eyes glassy but open.
“She’s beautiful.” I lean forward. Bergamot and cedar tangle with the earthy smell of early decay.
“You can look, but, uh,” Syd swipes her tongue over her lip, the ball of her piercing bobbing as she swallows. “Don’t touch. It’s good to be careful. We don’t know what killed this thing.”
“Of course.” Heat pools in my cheeks. I take a step back.
Silence cools the air. I try to think of something to say.
“Did you know that, genetically, pigeons are no different from doves?” Syd offers. “But one we call pests, the other we… release at weddings.”
I smile, imagining a magician flourishing a pigeon from his sleeve. People used to keep pigeons as pets, train them to carry our mail, take messages for us. It’s no wonder they stay at our sides, nest in the awnings of our skyscrapers, even when we decided there’s no use for them anymore.
“I’m worried about them,” I blurt out. “The pigeons, I mean. I keep finding them dead.”
She makes a humming sound in the back of her throat, considering. “I don’t know what to tell you,” she says eventually. “If it’s a disease, it doesn’t look like anything I’ve ever dealt with. Sometimes things just die.”
The nervous, feathered creature inside me lurches, a half-hearted attempt at flight. Syd turns to go. I am sorry for standing mutely as she walks away. I am sorry I could not save them.
After the drivers-side door thunks shut and the engine of Syd’s truck sputters to life again, I walk up the stairs of the house. I keep expecting Aunt Nell to emerge from around a corner, chiding me for moving her leather recliner, throwing out her empty shampoo bottles. As the sounds of the vehicle disappear down the street, I kneel at the side of my downy, quilted bed and pray the rosary. It’s the first time since I was a child. Aunt Nell kept an expensive, pearly one hanging off the side of her old mahogany bureau, and I never had the nerve to move it from that spot. Now I slide my fingers along the beads. My hand still buzzing from where Syd pressed it, the warmth of her palm on my palm, I duck my head and pray. Hail Mary Full of Grace. Hail Mary Full of Grace. Hail Mary Full of Grace.
It is December now. The plum and crabapple trees that once infuriated me with their useless plenty now fruit nothing. The stickiness and rot-stench of summer has given way to fog and frosted windshields in the morning, bitter sun in the afternoon. I still walk to the bus stop every day, a flannel coat and knit gloves over my maroon polo shirt.
The pigeons have stopped dying. At least, they have stopped dying where I can see them. This is fine by me. I trim the birch tree in the backyard. Pruning shears for the thin branches, pole saw for the thick ones. I wrench stinging nettles out of the flowerbed by the roots. I keep myself busy.
At the grocery store I stack boxes of cereal, rearrange displays of organic almonds and pistachios, mop the linoleum tile when someone drops a carton of oat milk.
Four hours of my shift have crawled by when I see her across the produce section. Syd. Wearing a heather gray sweater with a moth-hole just below the collar. Testing the skin of an orange with one finger. I set down the box of Medjool dates I’ve been arranging on the endcap. Although her gaze is leveled at the display, yuzu and grapefruit and tangerines, I am certain she can feel my eyes on her head. Look up.
The disease that laid waste to the pigeons has not gone away. It hides in the intestines of the dead ones’ broods, settled and waiting. Disease is a patient thing. Intent on survival, on procreation. It will lay dormant until it is time to fell another one of its hosts. Until it is time for another pigeon—on Fig Street or any of the identical streets branching outward through the endless suburban grid, on another eave of another roof—to drop dead.
I imagine Syd splitting an orange down the center, burying her thumbs in the flesh, citrus juice stinging rivulets into her knotty wrists. I imagine her laughing, mouth open, head tilted back.
I swallow, my heart battering the inside of my throat. The air fizzes between us, carbonated by dust and light. She looks up. I look away.
Charlotte Bruckner writes about bureaucratic dreamscapes, martyrs and their wounds, and repressed queer longing. His short fiction and poetry have appeared in TOWER Magazine, Vagabond City Lit, Broken Antler Magazine, Nowhere Girl Collective, and elsewhere. When not writing, he works in theatrical costume design.
The kids want to know what it feels like to be killed by lava.
I tell them many would have retreated to the countryside, or run to the sea, thinking it wouldn’t reach them there. I tell them most would have suffocated before the lava reached them.
I point at an image on the screen, What’s this?
A statue!
I affect a grimace, Not a statue.
They cock their heads, thinking. Murmurs travel through the classroom; I tune into one, Dead body.
I nod, This is a person frozen by lava. I don’t have better words. Mummified by lava? Fossilized?
One boy gets back from the toilet and looks over his shoulder at the white board, God, what’s that! I tell him to tuck his shirt in and take a seat.
They ask if any animals died too, so I close out of the slideshow and Google the Pompeii dog. I tell them to cover their eyes if they don’t want to see something too sad.
They erupt, they ask, Why does it look like that!
It’s contorted into a ring shape, limbs flailing and mouth open just enough.
Because it was in pain.
They squirm. They don’t want to look at the dog anymore. I return to the original slideshow, where we see the face of the “statue” turned to the black sky and its knees gathered to its chest, a final protective gesture.
Madeline Crawford lives, teaches Latin, and writes in London. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in or are forthcoming from Paloma Magazine, The Mantelpiece, Vast Chasm, and Die Quieter Please, among others. She has worked as a reader and editorial assistant for A Public Space. She went to Hunter College and received her MA in Classics from University College London.
I hold grievances grown so old they are calcified, rounded, smooth-pearled possessions— each tucked away in its own bitter sphere. I know each by feel, by weight, by passion— I know where they’ve been lodged and exactly why I keep them there. I’ve grown used to their presence, to the collected gravity of each and every ancient reminder of who and what and why and when rotten things happened. I’ve kept them all. Kept them all this time. Felt their sharp angers dull, soften into me, felt them become mutable as I held them, shaped them perfectly. And when I die I will take them with me.
Juleigh Howard-Hobson’s work can be found in Think Journal, Mezzo Cammin, Able Muse, The Alabama Literary Review, Birds Fall Silent in the Mechanical Sea (Great Weather for Media), Under Her Skin (Black Spot Books), and many other venues. She’s been nominated for Best of the Net, the Pushcart Prize, the Elgin and the Rhysling Awards. She was a Laureates’ Choice prize winner in the 2024 Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest. Her 6th and latest book is Curses, Black Spells and Hexes (Alien Buddha Press).
I know we just did one of these earlier this year, but wasn’t it fun? Aren’t you ready to make some more connections? I bet that’s exactly what you’re longing for. Well, here it is. Sate your dark hunger on these words and categories from the latest issue. After all, isn’t connection what we’re all seeking in this vast chasm of human experience?
How to Play Find groups of four connected words (e.g. point, shrug, smile, clap – Gestures), then hit submit to see if you’re right. See how many guesses it takes to get them all, then send it on.
Crow calls puncture the icy air. In the silences between—our snowshoes punching a trail behind us—we make small talk like we have practiced in class. In my pockets I tuck his facts, the siblings and cactus-spotted landscapes of his youth, the book clubs and home brewing of his present. I save them like squirrel-stashed pinecones, as if the same snow-damp air that balloons my lungs might soften his details to something digestible, something familiar.
He will no longer be my teacher. This is what he told me after the asking, in the in-between of the classroom and the hallway, blurry chalk-print hands on his trouser legs betraying the nervous fingers he gripped in stiff fists as the other students streamed past to their night shifts, to their cramped apartments. He told me two times, as if I maybe did not understand the significance, as if I am wet behind the ears. We will be breaking no rules now if I agree to go on a date with him, he said. It was touching, his earnestness. His nerves shivered across his forehead while he waited for my answer. Like he no longer was the expert of verb tenses or slippery idioms sketching strange pictures in my head. Like this time I owned the words he needed to borrow. So I rolled the bones with my yes.
It is a yes I now wish to swallow back. We cross over our own tracks, looping a noose around an unmapped patch of forest. Shadows curl blue in the hollows, darker than they were on our first pass; dusk drops suddenly here. When I point this out, he does not worry. He dismisses my suggestion that we retrace our steps, like he ignored me when I told him his snowshoes should go each on the other foot.
“Just a bit further,” he insists. “This must remind you of home.”
I watch the teeth of his snowshoes bite through the crust and flick up powder from underneath. The sun no longer sparkles the snow. Nothing of this feels like home.
The trail unfolds to a field. As we cross the meadow, our talk becomes not so small. He tells me of the woman he says stole his job at the college, of the daughter he sees every other weekend, of the voting he will not do because too many contenders are corrupt. He tells me of his friend who believes immigrants are vectors of disease and crime, that they should be rounded up, imprisoned, shipped away. “Not the ones who came here the right way, of course,” he adds. He floats these ideas to me, swiveling his head to watch them land.
I ice my ears to them, ice my face to betray none of my thinking. It is not logical that out here, dwarfed by the expanse of white-frosted pines and white-blanket sky, he seems larger even than he did in the cramped classroom with walls the same ill green of the hospital tent, of the helicopter that plucked me from the fighting in the nick of time, of the uniforms on the men who stitched back together my skin and sent me into this familiar snow and unfamiliar syntax. A shudder—of cold, I pretend to myself—xylophones up my spine.
At the trailless far edge of the clearing, tree shadows stretch, warning us away. I wish to heed them, but I do not suggest again that we backtrack, do not use the word lost. It would change only his mood, I think, not his mind.
“Looks like a dog.” The print he points to is larger than my mittened hand, tipped with crisp triangle claws. Here, under drooping cedar branches, blood and feathers mark the snow.
“Wolf,” I correct him.
He smiles with too many teeth. “Good thing you’re with me. These woods are dangerous.”
The commotion now flapping inside me cannot be pretended away; I cannot tell myself it is only butterflies in the stomach. I breathe to trick my heart back into rhythm, breathe to grope toward some floating hope, but all the lift has left my lungs.
The snow crust holds a pink-stained scallop of wingtips where the bird pushed off. I know I cannot join in her escape; gravity has cracked me open and pinned down my pieces. I can only squint to the now-silent sky, wishing her safe in the deepening blue.
A native of the Pacific Northwest and a recovering English teacher, Lindsey James draws inspiration for her writing from the people and landscapes of eastern Washington State. You can find her published and forthcoming work in Necessary Fiction, The Saturday Evening Post and Penmen Review.
We must rewind to the glaring, too-bright, yellow-green lights of the PATCO train.
To the walk down a darkening Arch Street in the chill of a March evening. To my shoulders, draped in a white lab coat on weekdays, draped now with the heavy suede of his jacket, the sleeves hanging far below my hands and flapping against my knees as we walk, the streetlights blurring before my eyes, the lights of the bar where we’d met several hours earlier growing dimmer in the distance.
Let’s rewind further to the shots of Jäger he insisted I do despite my protestations that I was not a much of a shot girl. To him, handing me the glass and goading me to try it, his buddies behind him, urging me on, because, in his words, it “tastes like purple.” To me, it tastes like Dimetapp. They all circle around me, and I am holding court, the unlikely object of their attention.
Rewind a little further to my emerging from a stall in the ladies room and finding him there, grinning in a more menacing way than he had out at the bar, pushing me against the cold, tiled wall and kissing me forcefully. Here is where you will say, why didn’t you know then? Where were your instincts? And here is where I won’t have an answer that will satisfy you. I was drunk? I didn’t want to make a scene? He was a friend of a friend? Would any of these answers satisfy you? Probably not, because they don’t satisfy me.
Do you have more questions? Do you want to know if I kissed him back? So do I.
Rewind all the way to the beginning of the day, to me, walking into the sparsely populated Irish bar, all dark mahogany and dim lighting, even at ten thirty in the morning. Zoom in on me, a walking juxtaposition, a bespeckled, bookish blonde with a Barbie doll body, clad in jeans, a navy zip up sweatshirt, and blue Payless sneakers, eating a bowl of Irish oatmeal—the first and only food I would consume on this day—and sipping a glass of Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPA. I am looking for no one’s attention, but somehow, I have attracted his. Watch as he materializes next to me, his jeans brushing mine. Do you think I’m intrigued? Attracted to him? You’re not wrong.
He is the tall, tan, human embodiment of a redwood tree. His nose is crooked—perhaps from a rugby ball to the face, perhaps an elbow—but his smile is straight and Colgate commercial white, framed by the parenthetical laugh lines of someone who smiles easily and often and with confidence. Someone the opposite of me. He tries to explain what’s happening in the rugby game on TV—the one I’ve been invited here to watch by friends I’ve now lost track of—and he says he is rooting for England because he’s English, but with a name like Colleen, I must be Irish. I walk right into it. I say, “I have a little English in me.” He says, the grin spreading slowly across his face, “I’m going to make a really bad joke now.” He says, “Would you like a little more?”
Are you exasperated when I laugh even though his remark makes me slightly uncomfortable? Are you flabbergasted that I could have missed such obvious foreshadowing? So am I.
We arrive now at the moment in question. This is the moment where my eyes open and struggle to focus on the cracks in my shitty, eggshell white apartment ceiling. This is the moment, on the living room sofa handed down to me by my parents, that I become conscious of him moving inside me, the moment where the slow, cold panic of realization spreads across my body and I somehow summon my voice from the pinned down pit of my stomach to rise through my trachea, somehow summon my lips to move beneath the stubble of his jaw and force out the words, slurred and hazy and more whisper than protestation, “Hey, wait a minute.” He does stop. With a grin that now calls to mind the Cheshire Cat of Alice’s Wonderland, he says, “Oh, I guess we forgot something.” He thinks I mean he should put on a condom. My mouth is dry, and my mind is a gelatinous fog, and I don’t know what I mean.
All this rewinding has gotten us no answers.
Let’s fast forward through the part where I wriggle out of the jeans and underwear that are around my ankles, where I stand up, bottomless, and lead him to my bedroom where I have condoms in my nightstand—safety first, for I am nothing if not a sexually responsible adult—and where I consent to him completing the act I had not consented to in the first place. Let’s fast forward through that because my motivation is confusing to me even now. Because I don’t know what I was thinking, except isn’t this what I expected when I invited a stranger back to my apartment? Did I invite him? Onto the train? Into my car? Into my home? I don’t remember, but at some point, I must have. I must have expected this. Except I had probably also expected to be conscious.
But let’s also fast forward through the act itself, because I don’t remember it. It’s possible I enjoyed it, or parts of it. The next morning, he interprets the raw, red trails my fingernails left on his back as proof that I had. He emerges from my bathroom to show them to me with pride before he pulls on his white undershirt.
Let’s skip the part where we have breakfast at a diner and I drop him off at the train station, grateful he doesn’t ask for my number, because I am confused about what even happened between us and whether I want to lay eyes on him again.
Let’s skip ahead a few months later to me at a different bar with the same mutual friends I had been meeting to watch the rugby tournament. Here I am, still bespeckled, moving my way through the crowd to the bar to order my friend and myself a couple of beers, when I feel someone’s body pressing against me, trying to occupy the space I am in, and I realize it is him. I am dwarfed by his presence. His back is to me, and before I can decide if I should say hello or hide, he gestures with his hand to the friend he is talking with, and hits me in the mouth with the neck of his beer bottle. He doesn’t notice. No one notices. I swallow the pain silently. We don’t speak that night, and I never see him again.
Fast forward now to the next morning when I wake up alone in my bed with an ache in my mouth and go to the bathroom mirror to locate the small, almost imperceptible chip in my tooth.
We could end here. We could fade to black on all this ambiguity, but let’s press on. Let’s fast forward four years, to me in a car with my husband and our infant son, running mundane errands on a mundane afternoon. We are stopped at a light and half listening to the Kavanaugh hearings on NPR. My stomach drops and my skin goes clammy as Christine Blasey Ford describes in detail what Brett Kavanaugh (allegedly?) did to her on the night in question. Something in her words, in this thin, small voice emerging from this educated, accomplished woman, stirs the long buried discomfort of the encounter that I had filed away as a one night stand borne of my poor judgment. The memory had been buried in the recesses of my brain, a VHS tape collecting dust in a basement. Blasey Ford’s voice pressed play on the tape. The cracks in my ceiling, the weight of his body are suddenly a humiliation so visceral that my forehead breaks out in sweat and I have to force back the bile in my throat. I stare at the dashboard. I say to my husband, “I just remembered something I haven’t thought about in years.” I say, “I think I’m going to be sick.”
When I tell him the story, his knuckles go white on the steering wheel.
Switch scenes to later that night, and zoom in on me alone on my living room sofa, my husband asleep, the baby asleep for now. Always a night owl and now plagued by postpartum, anxiety-induced insomnia, I sit in the darkness and scroll on my phone. I open Facebook. I find him. He is easy to find, his last name so unusual that I still remember it, though he never told me. I found it on his driver’s license when I woke before him the next morning, found his jeans on my sofa and went through the pockets looking for clues about the stranger snoring in my bed. Here I am, years later, still sleuthing for clues.
Facebook informs me that he now lives in Colorado. In his profile picture, he stands shirtless in front of the ocean with his arm around a pretty, tan brunette. He is still tan. His nose still crooked, his smile still disarming. Somehow, seeing his face again, I feel unsafe in my own home.
The comments beneath the picture congratulate him on his engagement.
It’s about time, his friends write. Congrats, dude.
I don’t wonder if he ever thinks about that night in my old apartment; I’m fairly certain I already know the answer..
I wonder about her. I feel strangely worried for this smiling stranger.
Did their first meeting go like ours had? Or is she a woman he handled more delicately?
How would she react if she knew about the night I woke up with her fiance inside me? Would she forgive him? Would she think there was anything to forgive?
Do I?
Colleen Ellis’s work has been featured in Philadelphia Stories, The Schuylkill Valley Journal, and Epoch. She was a finalist in the 2024 Q4 Wow! Women on Writing Creative Nonfiction Essay Contest. Originally from Philadelphia, Colleen lives in southern New Jersey with her husband and two children. She works as a pediatric speech and language pathologist and spends her free time reading, writing, fighting the patriarchy, and having her heart broken by Philly sports teams.
My nephew Moe is hungover. Even though he’s only 17, I had him sample the product last night. That way, he knows what he’s hawking. Before he took each Troll Shot, he stroked the Troll’s long, colorful hair as if apologizing for unscrewing the top of its head and downing the liquor inside. Moe moves in slow motion, but he’s a good kid.
From behind the steering wheel, I explain All 4 Fun’s business model to Moe as he loads the final box of Troll Shots in the back of the company van. “Nostalgia sells, baby,” I say, turning the key in the ignition. Moe climbs into the passenger seat. I agreed to hire him last week when his dad, my younger brother, threatened to kick him out if he didn’t get a job after dropping out.
Moe unfolds the day’s itinerary and reads aloud the first stop, Pair-a-Dice. I mostly deliver to dive bars. Their clientele fits our demographic of both remembering these things and liking to get plastered. I pull away from the curb, the sound of whiskey sloshing inside the Trolls’ plastic bodies.
I told my brother it was an orientation when he dropped Moe off last night. I almost invited him up for a drink before I thought better of it, thought of the ensuing lecture. Instead, I flipped my punk-ass little brother off as his BMW rounded the block.
Drunk, Moe and I talked about how I came up with the idea after seeing an old photo of his dad’s Troll village, about how his dad had built the village outside our house with tree bark during a summer in the early ‘90s, about how I’d kept the neighborhood boys from destroying it and him.
“Old meets new,” I said, bringing a Troll and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s together.
Moe crashed on my futon. I texted my brother that Moe was spending the night so we could get an early start in the morning, and he just sent back a thumbs-up. I wanted to reply with how hammered Moe had gotten, with how we’d shit-talked him the whole night. I even typed a few words before deleting them.
My little bro wasn’t always such a dick. When we were kids, he was tethered to me like a shadow. I’d sit on a lawn chair inside our parents’ old garage, and he’d show me his Trolls, would tell me what job each of them had in the village. When we got older, we even hit the bars a few times. I’d order a pitcher of Budweiser, never letting him pay his half, and we’d discuss some sports team’s chances and other pointless bullshit that wasn’t so pointless since we were together.
Then he got a job selling insurance, started drinking red wine, started pretending he came from somewhere he didn’t. He started telling me to buy this insurance policy or invest in this mutual fund as if he knew what was best, like a little bit of money somehow made him better than me.
After stopping at McDonald’s for a greasy cure to Moe’s hangover, I drive into Pair-a-Dice’s parking lot. On their signage, dice hang like coconuts from a faded palm tree. Inside, a few drunks are already sipping on tallboys, surrounded by license plates mounted on the walls. Moe carries in a couple boxes of Troll Shots stacked one atop the other, while I head to the back to collect our check.
I knock on the door to the back office and imagine the bar manager handing me a check with a one followed by an infinite number of zeros written on it. I imagine tearing the check in half in front of my brother to show him how much I care about money, to show him that who he’s become isn’t that special.
Someone shouts, “Weren’t you ever taught to share?”
I rush back into the bar. One of the drunks has Moe pinned in the corner next to the ATM with one hand while he paws through a box of Troll Shots with the other. I grab the drunk by the back of his shirt and fling him to the sawdust-covered floor. The box of Troll Shots he was digging through rips open, and Trolls scatter everywhere like fleeing villagers.
“I’m here,” I say, trying to put the box back together, trying to fix what’s broken.
Moe looks at me, but I see my little brother. Old meets new, I think, and I’m back in my parents’ garage. A bully dusts himself off, staggers to his bike, and pedals away. I promise my brother I’ll always be there for him, no matter what, and I gather up the trolls, careful not to grip them by the hair.
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 Florida Review, Wigleaf, The Pinch, The Cincinnati Review, The Forge, Passages North, Tampa Review, and elsewhere. Connect on Twitter at @Will_Musgrove or at williammusgrove.com.
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