It’s Sunday morning and my wife and I are sitting on a beach looking at Lake Michigan, but it’s not relaxing. We’re listening to a sermon instead of the waves. Our church holds its services here in the summer, and our pastor, Dave Pickett, is going on about “God’s needs.” I’m not sure what they are. I got distracted by the man sitting in the chair in front of me who is getting a sunburn on the top of his head.
The man’s name is Henry, I think. I’ve seen him around. He’s north of seventy, I’d guess, and the top of his head is already dotted with moles that make me nervous to think too much about. It feels like looking at myself in twenty years. Maybe less at the rate I’m slowing down.
Dave leads a prayer, and one of the legs of my chair sinks into the sand when I shift my weight. Farther down the beach there’s a young couple throwing a ball into the lake for their dog. They’re not part of the service. Probably tourists. I was in the parking lot before the service started, and I heard the two of them talking about a boat in the harbor. The “U.S.S. Whatever the Fuck”, she’d called it. He’d laughed and then grabbed her ass, and then she’d laughed too. When the congregation starts singing, they look over at us, and I’m embarrassed by how we must seem to them.
After the song, Dave points up at the sky and says, “God needs us to need him.” I’m not sure what that means, but it reminds me of a story I read once about how God must be vain. My wife sits up straighter when Dave looks at her and says, “Amen.”
After that, I look out at the lake, over the concrete walkway that leads to the old lighthouse. You can’t tell from this distance, but the lighthouse is covered in bird shit. You only have to get about halfway down the walkway to see the white streaks against the faded red paint. A lot of tourists turn around before they make it all the way there.
Dave is wrapping up his sermon now. He’s talking about humility, or something. We’re going to sing another song, and I want the young couple to move on before we start. Instead, they sit next to each other in the sand and watch their dog swimming. My wife is watching Dave.
When we stand, I notice the top of Henry’s head is getting pinker.
Ben Lockwood is an ecologist at Penn State University. He’s also a socialist, unionist, and prison abolitionist. Ben’s fiction appears (or is forthcoming) in Little Blue Marble, Tree and Stone Magazine, Creepy Podcast, and others. You can find Ben wasting time on various social medias.
I don’t remember exactly when the ladybugs came, but I know that morning the sky was clear, until they came rolling in, a storm of shadow that swarmed our house. They hummed, pulsated, trembled, weaving a thick blanket that drove out all the light.
When my sister cried out, I put on the brave face my parents taught me, a consequence of familial love corrupted. A love that bore down on us like the horde of insects above our head.
I once found ladybugs beautiful, and by themselves they were, but together they were ominous, a show of unexpected force, a thing I never knew to fear.
Caitlin O’Halloran is a biracial Filipino-American poet who studies in a poetry workshop taught by Katia Kapovich. As a high school student, she attended the Sewanee Young Writers’ Conference on the poetry track. She has a Bachelor of Arts from Boston University in Philosophy and History.
It starts with a pamphlet in my wrinkled hands. Or rather, it starts much before that: it starts with the beams of flashlights crisscrossing in the fields of our girlhood; it starts with you on a stage in a flush of white light; it starts on a slick highway where the wheels of a truck are locked and skating into the wrong lane.
Maybe it starts with the timejump waiting room.
I was sitting there, holding a clipboard, checking off boxes in the no column: No, I have not been recently hospitalized. No, I do not have breathing problems. No, I do not hear a ringing in my ears. It went on and on. No, I had to check off, I do not wish to alter past events.
At some point, an old bride walked in—this shrinking woman, around my age, who appeared to be caught in an enormous fishing net. Lifting her skirts of tattered tulle, she carefully stepped over to the receptionist to take a clipboard. Then she sat in a chair across from me, where the dress spilled over the armrests. I tried not to stare, truly, but you know I’m nosy. It was a hard sight to ignore: the woman’s over-rouged face, the mascara caked around her eyes.
You always pitied older folks waiting alone. Remember in the airport, before Vancouver? The man with a gray mop of hair, a suit too large, sitting in the corner with a sandwich. You had it in your heart that he was some forlorn widower, a man so alone. You started a conversation with him, and he and swore up and down about the teenager who made his Reuben wrong. I made fun of you on the plane.
I wonder—if you could see me in the waiting room, would you pity me? I digress.
It’s hard, I’m realizing, to tell a story in a straight line, as if we experience anything in such an ordered way.
Let me try again: the bride: alone like me. While you would have been kind if you were sitting here with her, I’ve become more blunt with age, if you can imagine that. I leaned over and said, you know, they’re going to make you change out of that.
She looked down, ran her palms across the fluffed dress, didn’t seem to get it. But I’m going to my wedding, she said.
So I said, of course, but you don’t need to wear it. You’ll already be wearing it, you see? You’re just there to watch.
She sat there, a small face in a big white web, blinking.
It’s okay, I said. They have wardrobe back there. You’ll be able to change.
If she heard what I was trying to tell her, she didn’t show it. His name’s Carl, she started. They cut flowers growing in a vacant lot across from the hotel for their centerpieces. Stuck them in little jars. Somewhere in her rambling, she said she’d be going to the wedding for thirty minutes, and I nearly dropped my pen. I was using nearly everything I had, which would only scrape up eight. But I suppose unlike her, I wasn’t using them to enjoy any big day. I just needed to see if I could tell you something.
I know you can’t read this, but it comforts me to write as if I’m speaking to you. Really, I’m writing this for me. But I’ve learned, there’s this problem—it is hard to pull you and me apart. How do I dissect where you end and I begin, or the other way around? How do I write about us, even a moment at a time, without acknowledging the universe of memories each moment connects to? They say time is a line, or maybe, to some, it is a loop. But to me, time is a field we sprawl on under the sun and moon, where I can feel every blade of grass—some soft, some bristled, all at once.
A nurse took my weight and height and blood pressure, then led me to a room where a serious-looking man in a white coat stood behind a wide desk. He shook my hand, said I could call him Nathan, and told me he’d be my Jump Attendant. He asked me how I was feeling as we took our seats, and I said I was feeling ready.
That’s great to hear, he told me, but then paused and leaned forward, said we needed to talk about my preferred timepoint. He wanted to know why I selected it.
So I told him about it. It was a beautiful spring day in May. We found a little tapas restaurant in Seattle. We ate outside. Cherry blossoms littered the street with pink confetti. I don’t remember what we talked about, do you? But there was an air of sweet calm, of spring waking up.
It’s not necessarily my favorite moment with you—not even close. But I didn’t tell Nathan that. I told him I would simply like to see you and me, in the sun, eating and laughing.
He looked at me, then at the computer on his desk. All this waiting, he said, and to be frank, all this money—not to mention the forms, the psych evaluations, physicals—all the pinpointing and witness accounts. And you’re choosing to watch your friend eat?
I nodded dumbly—what else could I do? Yes, I responded. To see her and me, in the sun, eating and laughing, I repeated. Maybe my lines sounded too rehearsed.
Nathan leaned back in his chair. This timepoint, he explained, is nine days before your friend Mara died. He peered over to his screen to read something.
I didn’t say anything. He told me he’s sorry for my loss, but visits like the one I was requesting were ones they couldn’t grant. There is too much emotion in it, too much risk.
I felt my old body spur with fight. You know how I get sometimes. I told him the facts: the pamphlet’s fine print said that someone cannot request a timepoint within one week of a loved one’s demise. My timepoint follows the rules.
Nathan said I was technically correct (though he also added that he personally thought the timeframe should be much longer.) He went on to tell me that I’m certainly not the first client who’s requested a timepoint just before a cherished person’s demise. He gets it.
Sometimes home is not just a place, but a place and a time, he said gently, quoting nearly word for word the brochure they sent in the mail. We can bring you back home, no matter when that is, and allow you to observe it, feel it again. But we can’t change what happened to Mara—do you understand?
I thought if I could see you, even from a distance, I could figure out a way to warn you. And if I figured out a way to warn you—well, then, I don’t know what would happen next. Would you poof suddenly into existence? Would all life rewind, start again from that day when you decide to not risk the interstate during that relentless downpour? Or would time fracture off into some parallel universe, where I can only imagine that you and I are safe, and laughing, and growing old, pinching at our flabbed underarms and cursing our grays, still thinking we’re twenty-two in our bones?
Nathan, who was turning out to be more stubborn than me, repeated himself and told me that he could not permit me to jump unless I understood I am only a spectator, a ghost from the future.
I told him I understood, even though I didn’t want to.
He was denying my preferred timepoint request—the last time I saw you. But said he would be happy to go through my other submissions to see if we could make an earlier timepoint work, one with less emotionality to it, he said, one where I could simply be happy and watch.
I only submitted the Brooklyn performance in the application because it was easy to do so. In order to request a timepoint, I had to submit the exact location, date, and time, and have witnesses to confirm it. I still had the program for the show on Saturday, January 9th, 2010. But I already knew there was no way in hell I’d actually want to go back and rewatch that thing. No offense.
Remember our two-bedroom apartment in Williamsburg? Bathroom the size of one on an airplane, kitchen barely any bigger. We were still young enough not to care, because we were in the city, and our nights were full of music and vodka, and we saw our shitty little apartment through an enchanted lens, like it was a necessary stopping point on our path to greatness.
You had been working for months and months putting together your piece for the company’s showcase. You didn’t tell me much just that it came to you once in a dream when you were younger, and you always wanted to translate it to the stage, to the body.
I went to your show that night with Ben who went by “Benny”—surely you remember him—and the first number featured all the dancers in the company. They leapt with wide legs like open scissors, they jumped straight up and fluttered their pointed feet, they planted one flamingo leg on the ground, raised their perfect arms, and spun like falling leaves.
This is pretty good, Benny admitted, and I nodded. It was extraordinary.
After the group number, your piece was first. You walked on tiptoes to center stage, knelt. The lights cut, then all flashed on again in blinding whiteness.
On the side of the stage, a hunched figure appeared in an off-white leotard, her face covered in a veil. She hobbled slowly towards you, then paused to raise her hands to claw at her throat as if she were choking. Two ethereal tones chimed, and the hunched figure dropped one limp arm and dragged it around on the stage. The woman, this weird broken creature, pulled her way toward you, reached out to you.
What the hell is this? Benny whispered, and I wish I understood it myself and could say something poignant. But I didn’t. My hands started to prickle and stick with sweat.
The hunched lady stood then, and in a wild burst started leaping in a circle around you. She jumped and jumped with arms over her head, and finally, you arose. The figure rushed towards you, throwing her arms up to the skies, then pirouetted round and round. You twirled like her, then dropped to the ground. The creature dropped, too. Then you both flailed, on opposite sides of the stage, like you were both laughing, or maybe crying. The two eerie tones crescendoed, and the stage cut to black. People around me applauded.
Benny looked at me, wondering what we just witnessed.
It’s art, I tried to defend.
It’s fucking weird is what it is, he said.
And I hate to say it, but I agreed.
Afterward, we joined you at a bar down the street with your ballet boyfriend Ivan and a few others from the company.
Your piece was the best, a thin girl tells you. There was so much emotion in it. So much expressed between the dancers.
I was drunk by that point. Oh my god, yes, the emotion, I parroted, then raised my cup.
You looked at me and asked—Really? You liked it?
I nodded too much.
You smiled, ready to challenge me. So what do you think it was about?
I had to think of something, so I told you that the dance represented a battle with your inner demons. It wasn’t a half-bad answer, I thought.
You rolled your eyes. It’s not as dark as that, you said. You were trying to present more of an awakening, a catharsis.
That’s when Ivan butted in—Yes! Catharsis. That’s exactly the word he was going to say!
No you fucking weren’t, I told him, then turned to you again. What was that thing, the hunched figure crawling towards you. A monster? A ghost?
You nearly spit out your drink laughing. You said the thing on the stage was a companion.
A twin flame, Ivan added. (I don’t understand how you dated him for eight months.)
Ok, sure, I said. And you laughed, and I laughed, because the thing was, it didn’t matter if I got it or not, if I liked it or not. You know that everything you touch is beautiful to me.
Still, of all the places I could ever return to, a post-college interpretive dance showcase wasn’t going to cut it.
Nathan asked if I was sure. Said that since it was a dark theater, a crowded public performance, it would be an easy timepoint to spectate.
I was sure.
Nathan scrolled on his screen, then asked to hear about Maine.
I found our itinerary in an old email, so it was another easy timepoint to submit. By that time in our lives, it was difficult to see each other often. There were phone calls, long emails. It had been nearly six months—the longest we’d gone without seeing each other—when I picked you up from Logan Airport.
I got us an AirBnB on a sparkling lake in the deep woods of central Maine, and when you entered the renovated cabin you joked that we’d come a long way from our first apartment. But there was a tension between us—I could feel it in the way you politely asked about my work, in the way you over-complimented the bottle of wine I’d picked up. Then I over-complimented the pasta you put together, and talked too much at dinner about a farmer’s market I didn’t actually go to that often. For a moment, in terror, I thought perhaps we had entered a new, fixed state, as if there was something automatic about being in our forties that dulled our souls and cast us into the quicksand of small talk.
When I soaped the dishes, I asked how Julian’s job was going, and you lifted yourself onto a countertop with your glass of red and asked me if I really cared.
Of course I care, I started seriously, but then you laughed. No, not like that, you said. Said you know I care about you and Julian, but do I really want to hear about how his accounting is going?
I rinsed off the tomato sauce that was stuck to a plate. God no, I laughed.
Then let’s not, you said. You grabbed the bottle of wine and wandered through the back door, and I followed down to the dock that stretched over the lake. Shadows of hills sloped around us, dots of stars punctuated the sky. You leaned your head back in my lap to take them in, and then we didn’t talk about job updates or farmer’s markets. We laughed about the time we got into a historic screaming match about something we couldn’t remember, but even in our anger we called for takeout and ate it on the roof of our apartment building, passing our last clean fork back and forth. You recalled your big dance recital sophomore year, where I stood and cheered and clapped after your solo, only to find out it was a serious kind of event where everyone else sat silent. There was the double-date we double-dashed, and the day we couldn’t stop crying, when we almost adopted a cat named Peppers to assuage our sadness, and whose picture on the website made us sob even more.
I guess we made our own kind of time machine that night in Maine.
We talked about our apartment in Brooklyn, the boys we filled it with. We laughed, thinking about poor sweet Benny, how I made you break up with him for me.
You said you were happy to do it, said he always questioned your dancing, never really understood it. I took a swig from the bottle of wine and confessed I wasn’t totally innocent in that regard.
It’s okay, you said.
I always liked it, your dancing. I tried to explain it’s an art form I didn’t totally get, but that I liked it because it felt so you. You’ve been dancing since you were a kid. I wish I had found something like that for myself.
You sat up on the dock and took the wine, said you always felt like dance found you, not the other way around. I burst out laughing, and so did you, because what a pretentious thing to say.
Then things got quiet. You missed the performances, the tediousness of rehearsal. But you told me that you still go to the studio by yourself. It makes you feel centered, you said, now that it’s just you and the dance.
What about the hunched lady? Your twin flame? Does she ever make an appearance in the studio? I asked, chuckling.
You slapped me playfully. Then on the edge of the wooden dock, you stood and raised yourself up on your tiptoes. You were tipsy and twirled perfectly anyways. A lightness entered your body. You pirouetted again, like that Brooklyn performance all those years ago. I watched with admiration, a shadow on the dock.
Nathan typed something into the computer. Said that because it was a private residence and isolated, this specific timepoint would be riskier to access, and I would have to pay a fee. He swiveled the computer screen my way and showed me the number. I shook my head. I could barely afford my eight minutes as it was.
He told me he could drop me down to three minutes, and it would kind of balance out. But I wanted all the time I could get with you. He clicked around the screen, and I knew I only had one more timepoint on my application.
This one seems sweet, Nathan said reading over the form, and I knew because it was the last submission, he was going to try to really sell me on it before I walked away with everything but the deposit. Nathan had already blown up my plan—my dumb, obvious, hopeless plan—and I wasn’t exactly sure why I still sat there, nodding along to these places I never intended to revisit. I should have left but found myself caught in the gravity of your name, in the spell of our memories.
The last one was a throwaway, something to complete the application. I put flashlight tag—your favorite. I loved that carefree time when we were nine, when we’d spend every Saturday night at the middle school soccer field with kids from our street. I could pick any Saturday of the summer of 1997, and I know we’d be there.
So I nodded at Nathan, sure. Let me see us young, in the dark grass, laughing and oblivious before it all. Why the hell not.
He printed a packet, I signed many lines. He left me momentarily then returned wearing denim jeans and a denim jacket. I didn’t have to change my clothes—he assured me that my blouse and capris were “timeless”—and I wanted to smack him.
We walked down the hallway to the elevator and descended. In the white room, I stared at the machine, a silent, tall tube, stretching from floor to ceiling. Nathan opened a clear bag and removed something that looked like a plastic dog collar. Told me that to rewitness a memory can bring intense emotion, and intense emotion can make people create noises they don’t intend to. Noise will bring attention. The noise cancelation necklace was part of the contract I signed.
I nodded and he clasped it on. I opened my mouth to say hello. Nothing came out.
Then Nathan placed a bracelet around my wrist, the numbers 8:00 blinking on the face. Nathan reminded me that I had to follow him, as he’d secure the location and make sure we could spectate without interference. Told me too that he’d monitor my pulse and blood pressure, and when the eight minutes were up I’d be automatically transported back to the office. If for any reason I wanted to be transported back before then, there was a little red button on the watch I could tap and be locked out of the timepoint.
Then Serious Nathan became even more serious and stated that if at any time I displayed behavior that seemed “risky, overemotional, or violent,” hecould lock me out of the timepoint. He showed me this little silver case. Inside was a single metallic sticker he could stick on me. It would bring me back to the office before the eight minutes were up. He met my eyes, made sure I understood not to try anything. Voiceless, I gave him a double thumbs up.
Then we stepped into the tube. He typed numbers into a screen. Said it would feel like nothing at all, though my ears might pop. Then he pressed a button. My ears popped.
And then you wouldn’t believe it, Mara. I was standing on the black pavement of Cedar Street—it was sleek and glinting from the dull dazzle of a few crooked streetlights. It must have just rained—an uncapturable smell of wet slate and earth filled the air. The soccer field waited across the street, where the dots of our flashlights zig-zagged like drunk fireflies.
We approached the fence around the field, and when Nathan attempted to push open the chain-link door, it creaked, making him pause with animal stillness. Then he waved me over, and from behind the fence, I searched for you and me.
How do I describe the rediscovery of us? Yellow cones of light bobbing around the field. Me, you, the others out there—probably Graham, Chloe, Vanessa—yelling joyously in the night. Sometimes I could see an arm or a shoe momentarily illuminated. Somewhere out there, you and I were sprinting and laughing, bending grass under our untied sneakers. Trying our best to stay in the dark.
I wanted to get closer, but wasn’t sure how to tell Nathan—the absurd dog collar took my damn voice. I used my hands, made little legs with my forefingers to show walking and pointed to the field.
Nathan shook his head, whispered that we only spectate from a distance. And I felt the fight in me again. Of all the memories we have, I couldn’t believe I allowed myself to be convinced to choose one during the night, when I wouldn’t be able to see us clearly. Nathan could have warned me, but he didn’t.
I considered actually smacking Nathan this time, but then, in a split streak of light, I saw your face. It was really you. A young you, decades before the truck would swerve out of its lane and into yours. And I know I should’ve just let you be a kid. But there’s a sharpness to the knowing, a stinging.
I started to shake the chain link, making it rattle and ring in the night. Did you hear it, as a kid? I can’t remember—did I? Nathan about lost his mind. He whispered to calm down, calm down or else, and that’s when he took out the tiny silver box, the one with the shiny sticker that would permanently whisk me away from you and back to the office.
I paused, took my hands from the fence and froze. I’m sorry, I mouthed. I was. The box was open, and Nathan stood waiting, wondering what to do. He looked at the watch on his wrist, the one with the screen showing my pulse flickering in a fury. And before he could decide my fate, I decided for myself. I grabbed the sticker from the open box and placed it on Nathan.
Poof. He disappeared, locked out.
When I looked back out, though, I realized that the dancing flickers had stopped, and I couldn’t see us anymore. The game was over. Young me probably cut by the school to go home, and you may have already hopped the fence on the far side. So I ran. Ran to those tall light poles behind the bleachers, remembering where the control panel was from that dare in sixth grade.
Desperately—I only had a few minutes left—I switched the rows of toggles up and down until, all at once, the field shuddered brilliantly into view. I waited, hand over my eyes to shield the glare, hoping the sudden strange brightness was enough to make you turn around, enough to draw you back like a moth to the porchlight.
You appeared, a small figure near center field staring up at the lights, stepping closer, all pigtailed and overalled. Do you remember it? I took shaky steps out onto the field, but my jellied legs didn’t seem to work right, like the ground was uneven, the world slant.
I fell then, right on top of my wrist. There was a short snap, like the crack of a twig. I couldn’t say anything, the collar blocked my cry. In the damp grass, I cradled my wrist like a baby bird.
You pitied me. In a nervous, high-pitched voice, you asked if I was okay. You called me ma’am—imagine that!—and I swallowed my pain and nodded.
I pulled myself up to my feet, then walked nearer, all hobbled over, clutching my broken wrist. I tried to say your name but could not. If my voice didn’t work, I thought maybe I could write a message, trace the shapes of letters in the grass to tell you all I had to tell you. Maybe, I could write the date of the accident, and that would be enough.
Young you stared as I lowered my right hand, a throbbing, limp thing. I tried to trace the M for May, but a pain shot up and through my arm. It wouldn’t do. I tried with my left hand, dragging it in hopeless loops and crosses. You took a step back, biting at your lower lip.
I realized I was terrifying you. That to you, I was unrecognizable, just some voiceless lady that emerged from the dark, hunched over and with my hands trailing through the grass.
Then I remembered Benny’s voice saying what the hell is this? And I laughed and laughed, or I silently did. Because of course, of fucking course. It was not a monster, never a demon on that stage. I get that now.
What did Ivan call it? Twin flame.
I stood, ready. Then, in the best triumphant leaps I could muster, I pranced in a line down the field. My hands as high above my head as they could reach, just like I remembered. Gazelle-like, I bounded around you, you who took everything in with scrunched eyebrows, but no longer biting your lip. I twirled my best impression of the pirouettes I’d seen you do countless times. Again and again I spun. Then I pointed to you, inviting you to the dance. You were confused, you were entertained, you lifted one leg and spun until you fell. I spun and fell too, laughing and laughing and laughing. I could feel each blade of grass under me.
In a moment, I would be zapped back to the white tiles of the Jump Attendant’s office. In a moment, I’d be gone from you. In a moment, you would stand alone in an empty field, but still, the dance would exist, would always exist, between us.
Jennifer Evans is a pushcart-nominated writer who lives and teaches in Massachusetts. Her work has appeared in Tiny Molecules, Longleaf Review, and Outlook Springs.
Then come take a seat with me, for I, too, am articulate in the dialect of grief
Abduljalal Musa Aliyu is a school teacher and poet. He writes from Zaria, Nigeria. He has a chapbook, Encyclopaedia of Dolour (Chestnut Review, 2024). His work appears in Chestnut Review, Brittle Paper, Ninshar Arts, 3 of Cups anthology and elsewhere. He is the third prize winner of the inaugural Writing Ukraine Prize and PIN’s 2020 Poetically Written Prose contest. He rants on Twitter @AbduljalaalMusa.
It starts with wondering which bridges would need crossing and which direction the river curved, which four roads you would need to get there when, in fact, it is the same road with four different names.
The road at the end of your street takes you to the far side of the city, beyond where the stalled train stops you, beyond the smokestack shadow and the swinging cranes above.
When you have reached the place you set out for, you realize you can just stay on that same road and drive, drive out toward all the other towns and cities, if you don’t stop, if your car has gas, if you have the time, if you are unbounded.
Brian Baker (he/him) is a London, Ontario poet who began writing back in the late eighties, publishing in such literary print journals as the University of Windsor Review, Dandelion, and The Antigonish Review.
My father stands at the center of distant summers woven from spruce trees and knee-high weeds and sizzling streaks of honeybees. Alone.
I see the sapphire sky, his greying stubble, his scalp studded with sweat. I hear his voice in the prairie silence. Monosyllabic in most settings, he brims with words in the bee yard, unsolicited lectures on the curative effects of propolis, the difference between capped and brood cells, burr and bridge comb.
I nod through his lessons. He knows I’m not listening.
He lights the edge of a newspaper and furls it into a cone that he blows down, making it puff like an herbal healer’s pipe. He slips it into the smoker, followed by a handful of cedar shavings. The shavings cling to the fissures between his bratwurst fingers. His hands are graceless in any context but this.
He puffs the smoker three times. The leather bellows rasp. The spout groans cedar smoke that rises warm and sweet over the abandoned Philpott yard, where he keeps thirty-two beehives, and where he brought me today to see a queen.
I hate the Philpott house. The windows are smashed. The paint and shingles have peeled. Canola grows in the fields the family once owned, and my father’s bees pollinate their loss.
He comforts me. “Don’t worry. They were an ordinary family. Nothing tragic about them.”
“So why’d they leave?”
“Who knows? Maybe they needed a fresh start.”
Three boxes make a beehive, and there are nine frames to a box. Stitches of wax hold each frame tight to the wood, and bee glue turns the boxes into a single tower that he methodically deconstructs. Unbroken focus at every step. Never a centimetre off. An almost reverent precision that I wish my mother could see when he forgets their anniversary, or lets slip an off-colour remark he doesn’t apologize for, or coughs in movie theaters, or nods impatiently at check-out tills, or when she complains that he only married her because of her looks.
A flutter of cedar smoke. The bees grow louder. He assures me they’re calm, and I believe him. His word is as true as the maneuvers that clear away the excess wax and pry each frame from its container. He never wears gloves. When stung on the hand, he uses his metal hive tool to pinch out the venom sac without spilling a drop, a sober exactness that amazes me every time I see it.
Six frames in, he smiles behind his veil. “Here she is.” He pushes his index finger into the fizzing rectangle of bees. “She’s a beauty,” my father whispers. “See her?”
I see her. She’s marked on the head with a dollop of pink paint. While the drones vibrate madly, she strolls through them with elegance, hauling a thorax twice as long as theirs. Sunlight hits her back and spins a radial of gold that looks like a wedding ring, evaporating.
Owen Schalk is a writer from rural Manitoba. He is a columnist at Canadian Dimension magazine and has contributed to non-fiction publications including Jacobin, Liberated Texts, and Monthly Review. His fiction work has appeared in Quagmire Literary Magazine, antilang., Fairlight Books, and others. His book on Canada’s role in the war in Afghanistan will be published by Lorimer Books in September 2023.
Leave the office. Get in the elevator. Hold your breath as you feel your stomach lurch into your throat. Make a dash for the exit. In the car, wait for the traffic to move. Collapse on the sofa with a glass of wine. Try to let your mind go blank. It’ll be okay. Your therapist said things are getting better. The anxiety attacks, the mad runs to the toilet every few hours to throw up, they are beginning to subside. You are getting better. You are getting better.
Each day stretches into the next without much distinction. What few hours of sleep you do manage are plagued by scenes of faceless men drowning in a darkness that persists into wakefulness. Todd will be coming round soon. You tried to distance yourself, the unread messages stacking up on your hardly-used phone, but still he turns up each week: husband from a life you’ve left behind, now returning with guilt and flowers. It’s not him, you think. It’s the hayfever. It’s the stress of work.
You haven’t broken up. Not technically. You just can’t seem to remember where he fits within the chaos that your life has become. He moved out a week after your brother died. Wanted to give you space, as he put it, and the gap has simply never been closed. Now he is here again, unable to stay away when the only thing you need is time alone, and you have to remind yourself how to smile.
You take the flowers and, when he’s not looking, dump them in the trash. The smell of wilted roses masked by rotting fruit. He asks how things are going, and you say they’re getting better. The hallucinations have stopped, and you are beginning to picture your brother in a better light. Before the bridge. Before the water took his body.
”That’s good,” Todd says. You want to punch him. You want to grab him and tell him everything you’re feeling, and then you want him to fuck you just like he’s talked about fucking countless other women. You remember how alive they had sounded in his stories. The women back at uni with blond hair and big tits and a solid grasp of reality, abandoning themselves to the moment. How far removed they seem from your own attempts at a subdued life.
Could that really have been you? The makeup and expensive dinners. The countless dates while Todd pleaded for your attention. Those years existed, of course, hidden somewhere amongst the naivety of blossoming romance, but now they hardly seem real. As if you’re remembering a fiction of a life, played out on a theatre screen to an empty room.
You sit there listening to him talk, or rather not listening but imagining the two of you upstairs in the bed you’ve hardly used. ”I have tickets to a play,” he says, and you’re not paying attention, so you nod. ”It’s a date.” He seems happier after that. As if this alone is proof of your recovery. He tells you about a piece he’s working on—a new take on Cheval—and for once you can understand. It’s getting dark now, but he doesn’t make any move to leave. It’s okay. You weren’t planning on sleeping anyway.
Two days pass in a whirlwind of toilet stalls and terror. You long for the day you can find the mundanity in it all. The day when the world comes crashing down around you, and instead of filling you with blackness, it takes you with it, and you look back with every ounce of clarity that has been taken from you.
When it’s time to meet Todd, you think about backing out. But he’ll only come and find you. ”It’s for your own good,” he’ll say, and you won’t have the heart to say no, won’t have the guts.
You wish he would stop trying to help. He believes he can control everything around him. Every problem he sees, including you, is something to be fixed. How blissful it would be to live in such ignorance.
It’s cold out, and you find him smoking at the back of the queue.
”You look nice,” he says, and although you know it’s not true, you manage to smile awkwardly.
”I thought of you as soon as I saw the advert,” he says, ”it’s about a girl who grows up on a remote island. When she comes to the mainland, she has a breakdown and has to be sectioned.”
Is he joking? He must be joking. You were just telling him how much better you’re doing. Why would he put that in jeopardy now? But you don’t have the nerve to leave and so you slowly inch along until you’re sitting in the theater and the play’s about to start.
He was right, of course. You could see yourself in the girl on stage. You could see yourself in the tired way she moved, and the heavy bags under her eyes. You could see yourself in the countless times she had been through the same performance, repeated ad nauseam until everything lost its meaning. You are comforted in this way. Knowing that there are other people out there, forced into the same endless cycles, all trying to appear sane.
You try to tell him this, to thank him for bringing you, but he doesn’t understand. He thinks you’re disparaging the play.
”I knew it was a mistake,” he says. ”I should never have brought you.”
There is no point arguing, so you keep quiet, and then the two of you are back at your flat. He’s put a record on, and you’re drinking another bottle of Bordeaux. The sound and taste of all the sophistication that has lost its appeal. You try to remember a time long ago, when he was still young and the madness had not yet set in. It’s like trying to climb a pole submerged in tar. Unfamiliar faces appear, teasing you with memories that are not, and perhaps never were your own.
You’re in the bedroom now. The sheets crack with starch as he climbs in after you. You no longer want him as you did the other night. Passion and lust are now concepts made vague by a much deeper desire that has arisen within you. Peace.
Despite this, you do not protest as he climbs on top of you. In the darkness a world of possibilities calls out, unheard over the groans of something like passion.
Afterwards, he rolls over and falls into a deep sleep. It’s late, but you’re wide awake. You think about the girl in the play, and the hundred more times she will have to give the same performance. You think of the audiences that will fail to see how tired she has become. No one is coming to save the girl. Tomorrow will come and you will leave for work. The girl will walk out on stage and you will run for the bathroom. Your time will never come, and nothing will ever change. And nothing should ever change.
Rory Perkins is a British writer focusing on shorter works about the human experience. Currently working in the energy industry, he writes whenever he can find the time, and hopes one day to publish a collection of flash fiction.
My roommate thinks I’m gay, and I haven’t corrected her. I mean, sure, Kara and I met in our fashion design class, and sure, she knows I crush on Oscar Isaac, and sure, I told her fiancé as much so he wouldn’t be jealous, and sure, I might’ve kissed him when Kara was passed out on Malbec and he and I were sharing a joint, and sure, I told him—swore to him—I wouldn’t breathe a word to her.
And so I don’t. I mean, I swore on my grandmother’s grave, and maybe she’s not technically dead yet, but it’s not like he has anything to worry about. It’s not like I’m going to brag I kissed some guy with no chin and a lopsided franken-smile. I still don’t know how he got with Kara (unless it’s his trust fund; of course it’s his trust fund) because she’s way too good for him. That’s what I’ll say when she wakes, after I hand her some Gatorade and tell her to drink up. And when she says Stop, you sound jealous, I’ll let myself blush even though I’m good about hiding that sort of thing, have known how to hide it since eighth grade and that time with Jay behind the band room, but now—now I’ll let her see the desire coloring my face, turning my lips red like the time I borrowed her makeup. And I’ll want her to say she understands, to not pull away saying she needs a shower, to not shoo me out even though she’s been naked in front of me tons before, to not click the bathroom door shut so I can’t smell her body wash, leaving me on the other side thinking about my promise to her fiancé, about the word fiancé and how cloying it sounds—so fucking French and upper class—and I’ll realize they’re probably made for each other, right?
Or maybe I do tell her about the kiss, but not until she has downed her Gatorade and three Advil and is munching on the avocado toast she loves, thanking me for being such a good roommate then pausing when she sees my face darken. What is it? she’ll say. Tell me. So I’ll sit down and hold her hands and say I didn’t mean to hurt her, because isn’t that what they say in the movies? And sure, she’ll laugh at first, as if I’m fucking with her, until I tell her it was all my fault, until I insist that I’m the one to blame, and maybe I am, though of course she won’t believe that. She’s seen the warning signs for months now—not that her fiancé likes guys, but that he can’t be trusted, could never be trusted. Wasn’t he in another relationship when they first got together? Wasn’t she the other woman, maybe she’s always been the other woman? That’s what her eyes will say when she says thank you, just murmurs it, then says she needs to be alone. And I’ll realize what a stupid thing I’ve done, all over a kiss, and not a very good one—lasted only seconds with barely any tongue—and her bedroom door will click shut like it never does and there’s nothing left to do but slide the remains of her avocado toast into the trash.
Or no, I really don’t tell her, not when she wakes up the next morning, her hair smelling of weed, a string of drool plastered across her cheek. I say she looks like shit, but she hears the love in my voice, so she showers and calls me into the bathroom to tell me I simply have to join her at her bachelorette party, and I sit on the toilet and smell her cantaloupe body wash and say sure, why not, even though I’m not up for it, even though the party will end with me crammed into the corner booth at The Eagle, empty shot glasses scattered around us, and her girlfriend Tiffany next to me, insisting I switch teams for the night. And sure, I might be tempted, but it’s Tiff. Tiff, who still attends Young Republican meetings, who’s engaged to some MBA who everybody knows she’ll divorce in two years, Tiff who wears fucking body glitter—and there’s no way I’d let that rub off on me even if she is hot—so yeah, I might be tempted, but by then Kara will be crying, bawling huge drunk girl tears about whether she’s ready—really ready—and I’ll want to scream NO! but instead I’ll say Look at me girlfriend and snap my fingers in my best parody of the queen they think I am, and I’ll say You’ve got this though of course she doesn’t, none of us do. And if I let anything slip about how I kissed her fiancé, it’ll be later, to Tiff, when I lean into her mouth even though I know I shouldn’t since Tiff can’t keep a fucking secret about anything, and it won’t be out of spite, no matter what everyone says.
Joshua Jones Lofflin’s writing has appeared in The Best Microfiction, The Best Small Fictions, The Cincinnati Review, CRAFT, Fractured Lit, Moon City Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere. He lives in Maryland. Find him on Twitter @jjlofflin or visit his website: jjlofflin.com
He put his socks on first. I’d never seen anyone dress that way before. Standing in the middle of the wavy blue rug in front of his bed, he pulled on one after the other without losing his balance.
We lived two buildings apart in the same apartment complex, but to get here, we used Grindr.
Once we tapped each other, he made me comfortable and horny enough with dirty talk and dick pics to walk over—I wouldn’t have gone, if he wasn’t so close—then into the bedroom, to sit on the bed and kiss me mid-sentence.
I never knew when to shut up: You taste, like, so good.
So good that words crumbled into grunts and breaths and yelps so fast that I couldn’t stop, didn’t want to. Nor did he, until he found an angle that allowed him to finish.
When he pulled out, I didn’t feel lessened or empty or shamed, but open and relaxed and warm and—
He was dressing. After the socks, he found his underwear wadded at the foot of the bed, where I lay uncovered and easy.
“God,” I said, as he slid his tan, muscled leg into his jeans, “that was like… I don’t ever want to move.”
His shirt was on now, blotted and purple. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I have to pack. I’m moving tomorrow.”
“Like, to another building?”
“Another state. Out west, a fifteen-hour drive.”
I felt exposed only then, the sheets around my knees, the a/c’s chilling touch at my waist.
While I dressed, he put books into boxes and totes I hadn’t noticed earlier.
“If you don’t want to sleep alone, I’ll be just over there.” I pointed across the grassy courtyard.
He said thanks, and I walked home through the sticky, pulsating night, wondering how long he had wanted me out of there.
Lukas Tallent is the author of The Compromising Position. His work has recently appeared in Fast Pop Lit, Door is a Jar, Maudlin House, and many other places. He writes the substack, LTXXX, and lives in New York City.
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