(content warning: childhood trauma, strangulation, snakes)

When I was young, I loved minerals. My favorite corner of our local natural science museum was home to the gem vault and its glass cases full of sparkling stones. I was so small in the beginning that I had to stand on tiptoe just to catch a glimpse of them on my own. My second favorite place was the gift shop where miniature synthetic replicas were sold. Each time we visited, I was allowed to buy one, until soon I had my own collection at home in a tiny, clear plastic container. I liked the way their bright colors jumbled together. I liked the rattling sound they made when I gave the box a gentle shake.

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When I was young, I had beautiful hair. At least, that’s what everyone on the playground always told me. My long locks were straight, shiny, silky, and blacker than a bottomless hole. All the popular girls, who would never acknowledge me otherwise, came up to ask whether I washed with kids’ shampoo or shared a bottle with my mother. As if those were the only two options. I told them the tangled truth, that neither theory was correct.

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When I was young, my best friend tried to strangle me with her bare hands. She did so repeatedly, each time taking me to what felt like the brink of death. I didn’t understand then what I’d done to provoke her. I didn’t understand then that I was only a stand-in for monsters at home that she herself was too young to fight. Most of all, I didn’t understand then why I never even considered confronting her until her family had moved away and left me without the option. I never saw her again, though later, much later, I desperately wished I could.

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When I was young, I was afraid of snakes. My father and I regularly took weekend walks down by the creek behind our house, during which we’d swap stories about our weekday lives. On one excursion, he pointed out the dark, cylindrical shapes near the water, like coil pots made of unbaked clay. “Snakes in hibernation,” he warned me. Five poisonous varieties roamed our region, so we had to stay vigilant: “Remember, by the time you hear that telltale rattle, it’s already too late.” I wasn’t afraid of their venom, though. I wasn’t afraid of their fangs. I was afraid of their entire bodies, the way they looked like they could wind themselves around my neck like a garrote, stealing both my breath and my voice in one swift movement.

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When I was young, I started losing my beautiful hair. At first, I only found a few stray strands curled around my hair elastics, or little nests in the drain strainer of my bathtub. But by ninth grade, I had a bald spot the size of a half dollar on top of my head. I began parting my hair to the other side. Instead of spending weekends at birthday parties, I spent them at doctors’ offices. Everyone there told me I was perfectly healthy. They wondered aloud if maybe I was putting too much pressure on myself. “Relax, Medusa,” they said. “You are young. You have nothing to worry about.”

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When I was young, we dissected earthworms in Biology class before moving on to larger, more anatomically complex animals. I tried not to think about their snake-like bodies as I ran the blade of my scalpel down their cold bellies. In that classroom, my hair continued to betray me. My lab experiments were often tainted by wayward strands. I became so notorious for this dubious feat that if the same problem befell anyone else, our teacher would call it “pulling a Medusa,” and she always watched with a crooked smile as my cheeks burned at the taunting remark.

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When I was young, that same teacher informed us that she could tell whether a girl was a virgin just by looking at her fully clothed. She uttered this proclamation in front of the boys in our class, too. They spent the rest of the semester ogling us girls from each and every angle, their x-ray gazes hunting for the key that unlocked the puzzle box of our bodies. My hair only grew thinner after that. I began wrapping a scarf around my head to hide the patches of exposed scalp. No one ever called those thinning tresses beautiful anymore.

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When I was young, I woke up one morning to the soothing sound of sibilant voices inviting me back from the depths of sleep. “It’sss almosssst noon, Medusssssa,” they hissed, in a Greek chorus of collective sighs. Earnest. Filled with expectations. I opened my eyes to find myself face-to-face-to-face-to-face-to-face with a seemingly endless parade of rattlesnake heads crowding my personal space. I thought I must be dreaming. I thought I was trapped in my worst nightmare. But I couldn’t wake up because I was already awake. I scrambled out from under the covers to escape the hotbed of slithering creatures that must have somehow invaded my pillow during the night. But when I did, they followed. Because, I quickly realized, they had sprouted from the back of my head the way my hair once had. I screamed.

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When I was young, I thought this new development was a punishment. A punishment for my vanity. My fear. My ssexuality. Some cruel act of puberty. I avoided mirrorss, refussed to look at what was right in front of me. Until an amazing thing happened: I opened my lidss in the middle of Biology classss and found my teacher sstaring back. As ssoon as she made eye contact, she turned to ssstone. Gemssstone, to be exact. Not a ssstatue, but a perfectly sssmooth pebble of mottled green-and-black ssserpentine that rocked gently in the ssspot where she once ssstood. The whole classssss ssscreamed.

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When I wassss older, I realized my new head of hair wassss actually a gift. Because of it, I was eventually able to overcome my fear of baldnessssssss, of ssssnakessss, of humanssss and their threatening pressssencessss. I managed to ssssusssstain fulfilling relationshipssss without face-to-face communication. But ssssometimessss I encountered people who reminded me of that teacher, thosssse boyssss, my childhood friend. When these unfortunate souls looked me in the eyessss, I wassss still richly rewarded. With ssssstunning cutsssss of authentic amber, opal, sssssapphire, aquamarine, onyx, garnet, emerald, amethyssssst, and cubic zirconia. Very sssssoon, I had to find a much bigger box for my ssssstonesssss. And the delicioussssss sssssssound they produced when agitated echoed like the ghosssssstssssss of my new friendssssss’ missssssssssssing tailssssss.

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Header photograph and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

you enter the scene and nobody gives a shit. you don’t make a big show, but you do make a little one—clear your throat as you walk in, raise your eyebrows and your hands, try to say, “Hey, what’s up? I’m here!” but the first word barely comes out, and when it does your voice cracks so it’s mostly a whisper that sounds like, “heAYyywha…”

the door’s open to everybody, but you brought an invite anyway. you grab it from your pocket and pull the host aside to show them. they barely even look at it but they’re like, “Dude, where did you even get an invite anyway? Door’s open to everybody,” so then you say something fucking stupid like, “yeah, i know, i just thought it would be funny to make one because i’m fucking stupid,” and that’s a pretty big buzz kill even though you said it like it was a joke—because it was—but your sense of humor is all Big Sad and Big Weird and everyone else’s is Just Normal, so the host pats you on the shoulder and mutters something about mingling before leaving you standing alone in the middle of the room like a weirdo.

you shove the stupid paper back into your pocket and tap your foot to the ground a few times, checking its structural integrity, and decide that right here is probably as good a spot as any to pop a squat. sitting criss-cross applesauce on the bare wood floor hurts your ass, but it’s fine because life is basically always a little uncomfortable. 

some guy who’s into weird chicks spots you. you can tell he’s into weird chicks because he’s got several buttons pinned to his denim jacket and facial hair that looks the way a piece of velcro does when you accidentally drop it on the floor and then pick it up and go, “eww there’s hair on it,” and anyway, you just heard him say to the person next to him that he’s into weird chicks before immediately turning his attention on you.

he stands stupid close with his knees near your eyeballs, hands you a drink, then looks down at you and says, “We’re sitting indian style, huh?” so you take the drink and look back up at him and say, “no, we’re not,” because we are not doing anything and you are very clearly sitting criss-cross applesauce, so then the two of you just look at each other for too long. way too long. so long that you have time to wonder if he thinks you’re as a strange as everyone else does or if bitchy women get him off; then you’re imagining that he’s imagining falling in love with you, and you’re getting grossed out by the way you’re imagining him imagining your life, and your marriage, and your old wrinkled hand cupping his sagging balls 40 years from now, and now so much time has passed since you first started this staring contest that you think you should probably just get up and leave but your ass has fallen asleep, and anyway, you were here first, so you decide to commit to the power move and not move. the situation diffuses when he spots some other weird chick doing weird chick shit and goes to see if maybe she’ll let him smell her armpits. 

you pull the handmade invite from your pocket and try not to look at your name scrawled across the front like it even has any business being there in the first place. you fold it into a little origami canoe because that’s the only origami you ever learned how to make, then you flip it upside down and wear it like a hat. the host catches your eye from across the room, probably wondering why you’re sitting on the floor in the middle of the party wearing a paper hat, so you tip it gingerly in their direction before moving your eyes to literally anything else. sipping from your solo cup, you think: in another life, that boat could have been folded up itsy-bitsy-teeny-tiny into an even smaller version of itself and been placed right inside that cup; it could float on that liquid and ride your next sip into the cavern of your mouth, crashing against the great and gnarled rocks of your teeth before dropping down the waterfall of your esophagus and into the vat of toxic acid at the bottom to be digested and dissolved. but today, it’s a hat.

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Header photograph and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

I like confessing things that aren’t completely true. Like the other day, a friend of mine asked where I’d been the last few months. I said, “You’ll never believe it but…” He waited for me to finish, and what I meant to say was, “Mason and I aren’t together anymore,” which was true, but halfway through, I chose this instead: “…Mason met another guy.” 

My buddy groaned. “Shit, really?”

Yeah, really. Mason met another guy. 

But the truth was I’d met one first.

When I saw Mason, weeks after we broke up, he was arm in arm with a man I’d seen a few times—okay, a thousand—at the grocery store, the gym, the park with his little dog, everywhere. Our town was hardly more than a few hundred people and a pizza parlor, so it was hard not to see him if you tied your curtains back.

Honestly, it didn’t feel great when I saw them spending a day together, but I couldn’t let them know that. So we smiled and said, “How are you?” and of all the things to lie about, I thought, that’s the biggest of them all, smiling when a tiny piece of you is dying inside.

“Man,” my friend said, “weren’t you guys engaged?”

Kind of—Mason and I bought each other ring pops at a movie theater and drunkenly posted, “Engaged!!!!!!” with six exclamation points and it was easier to click “like” on every phony comment than to let the world in on our joke. 

“That’s what makes it so hard.”

My buddy sighed. “He tell you why or anything?”

I thought about what I’d told Mason. “He just said—sometimes you find someone else who fits you better.”

“Ugh.”

“It doesn’t mean they always will. It’s just about where you are right now.”

“Gross.”

“I know,” I said.

When I’d said these words to Mason, he cried. I’d never heard him cry before. We’d been together for two years, left Philly to find some place smaller, slower, where we could “lay down our roots” as if we couldn’t find a crack in the city streets to grow together. We drove an hour out and started looking, had our things packed into the back of his father’s pickup, found a one-road-town where the storefronts needed paint and unloaded our shit on the front step of a duplex that faced the main drag and called it “home.” 

For months, we shared our little two-bedroom half-house, unbothered by the things we hadn’t known till then—like how the sink miraculously clogged each time he shaved or the way he slurped his soup when it was just the two of us—among smaller things we pretended not to see, like the unmatched socks he left on his bureau for so long he must have known any hope of reuniting the pairs was gone, dead, finito, and I wondered how anyone got along—I mean, to the point they could actually live together—unless they closed one eye and covered one ear and pinched a goddamned nostril shut because the sad, lonely truth of it all was no one needs to be seen completely, and to this day I wonder what kind of tears I’d have gotten if I told him this instead.

“Well,” said my buddy, clearly having done enough consoling for one night, “you need anything, you let me know.”

“Of course,” I said. And alone on my couch, I thought of the man I’d left Mason for. The one I’d seen at the bar, when I drove the hour back to Philly. He was on his second Manhattan, so I asked, “A Manhattan in Philly?” not knowing if this was funny. It wasn’t.

“Hey—” I leaned in toward him. “You think I’d like the total you?”

“The what?” he asked.

“If we moved in together. And I had to step over your smelly clothes and listen to you laugh at inane comedies and watch you bite your nails when you’ve got nothing to even stress about—you think I’d like you then?”

The man shrugged coolly. “I don’t do any of that.”

“Tell me then. What do you do?”

He considered it a moment, squinting at the row of TVs. “Sometimes I drive with one knee.”

“You mean if the traffic’s slow?”

He shook his head. “On the highway.”

“That would literally fucking kill me.”

The man searched my eyes, so I shut one.

“What about you?”

I shrugged.

“Come on. Name one thing that would drive me nuts.”

I didn’t know where to begin. So I started in as good a place as any: “When I get to know somebody, I run.” 

“Is that it?”

“Or when someone gets to know me. I’m running from a man right now. He doesn’t even know it. But when I tell him, he’ll wonder who the hell I am. And for a moment, I’ll love him again. I’ll love him when he thinks about the signs he missed. I’ll love him when he wonders if we knew each other. I’ll love him when he passes our old house and—for the very first time—sees how the windows slope north, how the red brick fades by the roof.”

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Header photography and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

I don’t mind the gawkers, but my ex-wife Sheryl hated the attention. She’d say the type of person who comes to the zoo is the same type of person who slows down to rubberneck a car wreck. Whenever I reminded her that was the whole point, that we were supposed to entertain and educate guests about the ins and outs of a loving, married human couple, she’d always retort: “I don’t remember agreeing to love anyone.”

She was right. She hadn’t.

I was sentenced here for selling an ounce of weed. For a while, the exhibit was called The Life of a Pious Bachelor. I’d spend all day raising and donating fake money to real churches. I guess the courts figure if we imitate who they want us to be for long enough, we’ll keep on imitating this made-up person forever.

Sheryl showed up around a year ago, and they renamed the exhibit The Idyllic Life of Married Americans. For authenticity, the zookeepers forced us to tie the knot for real. Each guided tour was the same. We’d begin in the kitchen, Sheryl cooking breakfast while I read a months-old newspaper. We’d exchanged pre-written lines like: “How did I get so lucky?” We’d finish eating, and Sheryl would kiss my cheek goodbye. I’d go to the dummy office attached to our pseudo-studio-set home and pretend to answer calls and check emails. Sheryl would pretend to vacuum and wash dishes. We’d end in bed talking about our days like stars from some cheesy 1980s sitcom.

Last Saturday, we got divorced.

The day started normally. I’d gotten up late; I tend to oversleep. I have nothing to wake up for, no one waiting for me at the zoo’s gate. I’ve never done anything worthwhile to miss. Sheryl had a life to get back to, had friends who’d sneak her snacks and trinkets. When I slid the half-Windsor to my Adam’s apple, she was already in her dress. She glanced at the clock next to the cots behind our mock house and mumbled something. I didn’t blame her for being pissed. If we weren’t ready by the time the zookeepers arrived, they’d threaten to tack on years.

I finished threading my arms through my state-issued blazer just as the zookeepers appeared behind the plexiglass. They all look the same. Same gray polo with the zoo’s logo, a giraffe with the scales of justice pinched between its teeth. Same short crew cut. Same cattle prod dangling at their waists.

One of the zookeepers shoved a box into the compartment they used to deliver our meals. I retrieved the box and opened it. Inside was one of those dolls whose eyes close when you tilt it downward. “Congratulations,” another zookeeper said. “You’ve just had a baby.”

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On the stove, speakers emitted the sound of sizzling bacon. Sheryl cracked a fake egg and dripped the counterfeit protein into a skillet. I flipped to the Sports Section. Across the table, our plastic child sat in a highchair. Savory smells blasted through the air vents to make our guests’ mouths water for their own slice of marital bliss.

“Breakfast is almost ready,” Sheryl said. “I hope you’re hungry.”

Field-tripping students pawed at the plexiglass. Their teachers hovered like vultures. A zookeeper spouted fabricated details about how Sheryl and I met: high school sweethearts who waited until marriage.

“I’m starved, dear.”

Sheryl carried over our plates. I folded the newspaper. As we mimed eating, a zookeeper informed the crowd about how through hard work I’d been promoted to assistant manager, about how Sheryl took pride in her home.

“Well, dig in…”

Sheryl turned away. At first, I thought she was glaring at the kid up front who was giving us the finger. Then I noticed she was looking behind the little punks at a man packed into a navy suit. The man smiled at Sheryl like he knew her. He was leaning against the back wall, one hand relaxed on his hip, the other holding the arm of a stuffed animal version of our next-door neighbor, Milo the Mountain Lion.

Sheryl touched her arm. A zookeeper banged on the plexiglass, and she jerked her hand away like she hadn’t realized what she was doing.

“I refuse to be your stuffed animal anymore,” Sheryl said.

“Stick to the approved material,” a zookeeper piped into the exhibit.

Sheryl grabbed my plate and displayed the fake calories. She lifted our son out of his highchair and popped off one of his arms, revealing his hollow insides. Then she pointed at me like I was standing in a police lineup.

“I don’t know him, and he doesn’t know me,” Sheryl said.

Two zookeepers stormed the back entrance. Lightning jumped from their cattle prods. Kids screamed. Sheryl darted back and forth as the zookeepers attempted to herd her into a corner. She was right. I didn’t know her, at least not how two people in love are supposed to know each other. I pushed one of the zookeepers to the ground. The other went to zap Sheryl, but I stepped in front of the cattle prod, sending ants crawling through my veins.

Sheryl shrank and shrank until she was just a black dot.

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They’ve renamed the exhibit The Life of the Regretful Divorcee. I now spend all day crying and apologizing for being a bad husband. I don’t know what happened to Sheryl, if she escaped, if she got to stop pretending. I do know the zoo is getting an elephant today. Apparently, this elephant killed a group of poachers. They’d sedated her and were sawing off her ivory when she woke up and gored them all to death.

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Header photograph and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

We love The Plunge. The promise of swimming on a hot summer day is the only reason we get up early and clean breakfast dishes without being told. We hurry-brush our teeth, wash our lagañas, and slip on our new swimsuits. Tia bought them at Mervyns. All the same size but each a different color. Joanna’s green one, of course, fits perfect. Elisa complains that the purple shoulder straps dig into her skin. The back of Delia’s blue one goes up her crack a little, so she puts on a pair of jean shorts to cover her nalgas. Maribel’s orange one is stretched so thin it looks almost see-through and goes low in the front so it’s good she doesn’t have chi-chis yet. She throws on a long T-shirt. Larissa’s is loose all over, the red fabric bunched on the sides and her straps slide off her shoulders. We get a big safety pin from Junior’s diapers and fasten the straps together in the back.

We help each other with hair. French braid for Delia that only Joanna can do tight enough. Larissa uses a lot of gel and slicks her curls back tight against her head, makes the hair ballies wrap twice. It’s so tight her puff ball in the back looks like a second tiny head. But we don’t tell her that. Maribel gets two braids that capture all the feathered hair around her face. Elisa’s hair is short enough to leave loose and Joanna likes hers in one skinny ponytail.

We pack our bag with five towels, our new sunglasses that match our suits, baby oil, and five oranges for snack later. Delia stuffs her book in the bag too.

“Why’d you do that?” Maribel asks.

“So I can read while I dry off.”

“Think that’ll make you look smarter?” Elisa always gets straight As.

“I think if I read ten of these this summer, I get a free personal pan pizza.”

The rest of us scramble back to the room for our own books.

At half past nine, we slip on our new yellow flip flops—Tia found them on clearance, all size 6—and pile into Tio’s blue Chevy Astro van. It’s brand new, doesn’t smell like baby butt or big brother feet like the old van did. We name her Bettina and tell Tio the boys should have to walk everywhere so they don’t mess her up. Maribel and Larissa get in the way back seat. Joanna and Delia sit on the middle bench, and Elisa, because she’s the oldest—12 in September—gets to sit in front. We each get a window so everything is fair.

On our way, Tio stops at the Circle K for cigarettes. He buys us each our own slushie and lets us pick our favorite candy. “Shhh,” he says, “don’t tell Tia.”

We can’t get chocolate because it’ll melt in five seconds. Larissa gets Now and Laters, which will pull a filling out of her molar the next day. Joanna gets Jolly Ranchers, “Because we have the same initials.” Elisa picks Nerds proudly and Delia gets Everlasting Gobstoppers. Maribel takes forever to decide, wanders up and down the candy aisle so long Tio yells that he’s gonna be late for work. 

“Licorice!” 

The rest of us groan. “You did that so you don’t have to share,” we say. 

“I’ll share.” She smirks, knows the rest of us don’t like it.

So later, when a few small bits are stuck in her teeth and she smiles at the boys walking by, we don’t tell her. Just let them laugh. Until her eyes fill with tears. Then we surround her. Delia gets a napkin from the bag to clean Maribel’s teeth. We make her eat an orange to chase away the gross licorice smell. Joanna throws the rest of the licorice away.

But we don’t share our candy with Maribel. “Next time,” we say, “make a better choice.”

Larissa makes a different bad choice. One we pray Tias and Tios don’t find out about or we’ll never get to go back to The Plunge. Maybe because Larissa is the youngest—just turned 11 in May—she doesn’t understand why Joanna’s classmates, the ones who think they’re all that and dissed Joanna because she lives on the east side of town, sit in the spot near the deep end where all the boys jackknife off the high dive and cannon ball from the side.

Lifeguards yell, “Hey!” and “Stop that!” but no one listens. Those girly girls squeal and twist their bodies to avoid splashed water on their faces. We think some of them are wearing makeup. At the pool? How dumb! None of them have hair that’s ready for the water either. We know better. 

Maybe Larissa wants them to see how it feels to not be all perfect. She slips away while the rest of us are reading, runs the length of the pool on the slippery cement to the corner closest to those giggly girls. The rest of us look up when the lifeguard’s whistle blows and he yells, “Walk!”

Larissa combos a jackknife cannonball at this crazy angle and a wave of water the girls can’t twist away from arcs over them, drenches their whole pretty selves. Joanna is horrified, so the rest of us stifle our laughs. The wet girls sputter and screech. The guys clap and hoot at Larissa’s performance. She swims to the opposite side and boosts herself out. 

The noises change to cackles and oohs. Only then do the rest of us see that Junior’s diaper pin didn’t hold and the straps of Larissa’s too-loose suit have failed, the top half folds down at her waist.  She smiles over at us until she feels her nakedness. Her barely budding chi-chis chill in the air. She freezes and embarrassment creeps up her cheeks. The hoots and laughs get louder. The pointing and staring keep Larissa super still.

Maribel grabs a towel and sprints toward Larissa, jumps over two toddlers and twirls by the lifeguard who yells “Walk!” again and reaches out to grab her. The rest of us follow behind with the bag and Larissa’s flip flops. 

We surround her and head to the baño. Maribel gives Larissa her long t-shirt. Delia gives Larissa her jean shorts. Joanna undoes Larissa’s hair bally. It whacks Joanna’s fingers but she holds in her ouch and uses some baby oil to calm Larissa’s frizz.

When Larissa finally speaks, she says, “You see how I splashed those sangronas?”

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Header photograph and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

You can still hear the voices from before. The way you and your dad rigged up the old PA system, got the music playing again, sat and let the notes carry through the dead shopping mall. The broken skylight, sun coming in, vines snaking and low enough for you to take a running start, jump, grab and swing when it was a long day and low on food and you and Mom and Dad could use a little light entertainment.

Dad found an old bike in a woodchip park nearby, and though it was mostly rusted—tire rubber burnt and flayed on the rim, and you couldn’t see how it’d ever function again—Dad only saw his own bike from the beforetimes, the gleaming metal of the frame, and the cards he said they’d clip just so for the spokes to hit and give the illusion of a motor. And the tricks they’d pull, he said, and the scars he could show you when the tricks didn’t go so well.

So you scavenged for parts, and Mom painted all the walls in the whole shopping mall, put down record of all the living things that had ever existed and even some that hadn’t, the menagerie of life, before the glow set in and made the world you now know.

Dad made you an automaton friend. Nothing too advanced but enough to stand in for the friends you weren’t able to make, something you could teach to walk alongside your bike, then run when it got the coordination down. You collected knee scrapes and bloody elbows on bike falls as your metal friend scuffed paint and dented aluminum trying to keep up with you, to catch you when you’d fall.

The shopping malls are all dead now, and it isn’t like they weren’t before, but there’s no Mom around to breathe life back into them. They’re just walls and a ceiling, windows and a floor. You can almost see the way the night fire would light up the paintings back then, and the stories Dad would tell, the ones he could speak but could never write down, and when the glow was low you could see the stars peeking past the smoke as it wisped up and out the broken skylight, and Dad said one day he’d build you all a rocket ship. It wouldn’t be much, not like the stalled starliners of the beforetimes, but it’d work just the same, and he’d take you all out of here, away from the glow and the loneliness and the broken everything and you’d find a new home up there, one day, somewhere warm and cozy where you could start over, and it got so the coldest, hungriest nights were filled with the tallest of tales, but those nights you could count on dreams of a makeshift rocket blasting up and through the mall’s skylight, out and past the glow, past the sky, shooting true and into the stars. Those dreams were the best, even if you woke from them with an empty stomach and numb toes, ears red and nearly frostbit.

Your automaton friend took to patrolling just outside the mall’s walls most nights, standing guard for your family, but especially for you. There wasn’t much he could do if there was danger besides wake you. But he insisted that he stand guard, that he repay you and Dad for the life you’d given him. So you left him to it.

You were nine years old when you saw your friend broken to bits and left to twitch on the ground, frost gathering on metal in the early morning cold. When you yelled, it was a sound that came outside of you, and Dad ran over, Mom too. Your friend’s metal head was nearly severed from the body, hanging by a ribbon cable and a couple of wires. Some scavver had made off with most of the body, arms and legs removed, vital components in the chest yanked out. Whoever they were, something had at least kept them from stealing the still-blinking head.

You cried during the entire operation that followed, and even though your friend told you it was okay, that he wouldn’t need a body as long as he had you, you couldn’t help but feel like it was all your fault.

The salvage successful, you asked your dad to add a basket to the front of your old bike. If your friend couldn’t run alongside you, he could at least ride along.

You’re back now, twenty years to the day since you left, with your pack out in front of you, and the glow is low today, mercifully so. Mom and Dad are just a burning memory, but this dead shopping mall still stands. You reach into the pack, find what you’re looking for. Who you’re looking for. The primary colors of youth are gone, but you can almost remember them as your old friend opens his eyes and looks out at his birthplace: the building where so much was taken from both of you, the building where everything was given. You try to frame it in a broken skylight in your mind, to keep its bigness small: so much smoke trailing away out and to the stars. Sometimes you wonder if the world’s so small, or if it’s so big you can’t stand it. You can’t decide which, but you don’t need to make up your mind just yet.

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Header photograph and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

Untethered

My fingers had loosened their grasp on God, and my eyes were on the door of the high school classroom where we held the Christian club I’d started the previous fall. It was hot for April. I needed air, I needed to walk around campus with my five-dollar Walkman, smoke-thick voices of grunge singers drizzling into my ears. The other leaders watched me, waiting for me to speak, but the words were chalk dust on my tongue. I’d heard them talking lately, voices low as I passed: What’s going on with her?

I hung back until chitchat hummed through the room. I turned toward the door again, lungs thirsting for outside air, and then the girl with lavender eyes walked in and I felt an ancient familiarity, like night fires and the smell of leaves in warm wind. 

Scrawl

I pretended I wasn’t looking for Max as I walked around at lunch the next day. When I found her crouched in a corner between brick buildings in a hoodie and headphones, I sat down. “Sorry if this is weird,” I said, meeting her purple eyes only for a second. I handed her a folded square of notebook paper on which I’d written everything: how the boy who called himself a pagan had lured me from God and had then been frightened by my intensity. How I couldn’t go back to Christian warrior and saving souls for the Lord! 

The day after that, she handed me a letter. 

“It’s not weird,’ she said. 

Freefall

It rained that fall, and the world was all purples and greens like the lights I strung in my room and the sad, monotone Scottish rock singers moaning through my stereo. Without her contact lenses, Max’s eyes looked like sunlight shining through the bits of cola-colored glass we picked up at the beach, tying them with string to make windchimes. We spent hours on my bed, lying head-to-foot, our hands meeting in the middle. This is normal, right? we’d say, our fingers tracing each other. Friends do this, right? It was vertigo, I was falling into something and there was no stopping it. And God loomed overhead like a great black shroud, a ceiling pressing down on us, stealing all the air. 

Infernalized 

It was a year before we kissed, and by then my love for Max churned in my chest like massive clouds gathering, rolling over one another in a bruised sky. It drenched me like the rain that streaked my Volvo’s windshield as we drove around to coffee shops or the record store in the afternoons. Little day trips of desperation. When the darkness of my bedroom and the raw, slow guitars from the boombox became too heavy, I’d ask her, “Where should we go today?”

She’d shrug and smirk sadly. “Somewhere nice?”

I knew what she meant. Not somewhere expensive or fancy, but somewhere soft and warm, with mellow lights and sweet-scented air. A slow, sheltered place where we could let ourselves ask questions, let whatever this was between us unfurl like a hand opening, without the demand to define and damn it before we could even whisper its name.

When Max’s lips found mine that first time, I felt heavy, solid things shifting themselves inside me. After the pagan boy, I’d sunk into my misery, worn it like a comfortable old coat, draped with musky incense, minor-key guitar. But I’d held in the back of my mind the possibility of returning to God, a secret coin in my pocket, turning it between my fingers. This kiss, the taste of her, her scent like smoke and leaves—there was no reigning this in. Her amber sea glass eyes. Her narrow fingers. The rain against the windows. My life was petals pelted by rain, determined to bloom outward and outward despite the pounding drops knocking them to the concrete. I tried to cling to tangible things, like the punk rock mixtapes she made for me, the hand-scrawled Emily Dickinson poems she slipped in my pockets. But I dreamt I was in a car sliding backward down a steep hill. I felt dragged away into eternity, unable to stop loving her, unable to stop believing we were damned for it. 

Flatline

The horizon of Max’s set lips across from me in my Volvo that night. The eerie orange streetlight painting jagged shapes across her face, her eyes quivering like the skin atop water. It was too much: the constant holding back, restraining our hands, our lips which once explored each other now reciting Bible verses. Each time, we’d failed, clutching at each other in the darkness, feeling the heavy, metallic condemnation. Stuck in a loop of loving and then repenting. 

Her mouth was a flatline of finality as she said, I can’t do this anymore. Words bubbled to the surface of my mind and popped, words meant to make her stay. Their futility settled over me like snow, the chill of this knowledge seeping into my bones. We were over.

Cloves and Bones 

The air was thick with salt as I walked up the front steps to the house in San Francisco’s Sunset District. Do you like bones and moonshine, fire dancing and accordions? the Craig’s List ad had read. Lavender-grey streaks of fog danced across the sky like cream in black tea. I shuffled my feet on the front porch, wondering what they would ask, how I could talk my way into this house by the sea. I was afraid of how much I needed this: to let myself be shaped by this city of salt and fog.

The man who answered the door was smoking a clove cigarette. He was in his late twenties, tall and tattooed, his eyes lined with kohl, his turmeric-colored braid stretching to his tailbone. He eyed my coat with its wide black and white vertical stripes like an old-time prisoner’s outfit, my oversized thrift-store leather boots, and the calligraphic swirls of eyeliner at my temples. “I think you’ll be a good fit,” he said.

I packed the Volvo with only a few things: hoodies and headphones, a boombox, a book of Emily Dickinson poems, bottles full of sea glass. I painted my new walls: maroon, forest green, black. I played a CD of Bach cello suites and lay on my back on my new giant futon, watching the ripe orange moon outside my massive window. And the fog swirled against the glass like the smoke of ancient fires, painting the mystery of my future.

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Header photograph and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

When I told my daughter I’d take care of her dad while she had knee replacement surgery, I didn’t think she’d be laid up in a rehab center for this long, or that her dad’s urn would look so urn-like, or that my second husband would be so creeped out by it, so I put her dad’s urn in my closet beneath a red, perfume-soaked scarf and an old army jacket to remind him of how things used to be—or maybe, to remind me—and every night I’d wink at where he was hidden and say, Hank, you behave in there a while longer and maybe I’ll let you see what I do with those toys tucked in next to you.

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Header photograph by Deborah Hughes
Header artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

The thing about being the murdered newlywed is you set the plot in motion.

You and your wife will be found together, days later, where he left you, where he disposed of you, he thought of it as a disposal, out there in the cold by the river, with all the small, scurrying things.

There will be a fund set up to bring you home, there will be photos of you and your wife on social media, in the news, they were so happy together, they were so in love. In the obituary in your hometown newspaper: She is joined in death by her wife.

You will be joined in death by your wife.

You will be taken home in the cargo hold of an airplane, your wife left behind in the town where you met, your wife left behind in a county cemetery, in a soft, cold grave. You will go home nestled in your casket, closed tight in the dark, you will be picked up by a mortuary attendant in a pressed white shirt and polyester tie. He’ll only know you by your last name on his clipboard, the slide of your body as he loads your casket into his van. He will never see your face, never speak your name, never see the clothing your family has chosen for you to wear. He will go home that evening and kiss his three children on the tops of their heads, think how soft and small their little heads are, how soft and small and round.

There will be the closed casket and a church full of mourners, your father holding your stepmother’s hand in a velveted pew, your mother standing at the back, no, I don’t need a seat at the front, no, I can stand, twisting the strap of her purse, untwisting it, twisting it again, nodding glaze-eyed at the offers of sympathy, flinching when the minister pats her shoulder.

Thank you for coming, she will say to people as they pass her, smiling like it is a happy day, like this is somewhere she wants to be, smiling, smiling, smiling.

A girl’s mother should be there for her, she will say, to no one, to everyone, and later, she will go home and pour herself a shot of bourbon and look at the photographs from your wedding, my beautiful girl, she will say. My beautiful girl.

Your father will look back in her direction from time to time, his hand limply caught in your stepmother’s grasp, look from your smiling mother to your silver-grey casket, he will think when will it be all over? He will think oh, but it will never be all over. 

There will be no service for your wife, a county-paid burial, a line with her name in the local newspaper, a slip and a quiet and a nothing at all.

There will be the drop of dirt onto your casket, fistful by fistful, your littlest brother pinching his eyes shut as he stands above that hole in the ground, your littlest brother thinking of the snap-snap-snap of gunshots, your littlest brother’s hand going slack and letting the dirt fall, your littlest brother, that night, muffled crying into his pillow in the dark.

There will be the long wait for your gravestone to be placed, beloved daughter, beloved wife, and your mother’s daily vigil at the cemetery till it arrives, in dangling-hem nightgown first thing every morning, soon as the sun rises, the sky opening up purple and red and pink and finally, blue, blue, blue over the quiet, empty yawn of your grave.

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Header photograph by Deborah Hughes
Header artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson

In the last 20 years, nearly that many feet of snow had fallen and melted over the grave of William McIlroy. Not one footstep had ever patted it down; not one flower had ever given color to the gray snow in winter or the patchy dirt in summer.

Twenty-one years ago, the bones that lay there now had heated his kettle, steeped his tea, and turned newspaper pages on the back porch every afternoon at almost exactly 5:30. They did, for a few more months. Those afternoons, William remarked on the highlights of his reading to the dove nestled in the joint of the crossbeams, or to the fireflies that floated by. They didn’t say much in reply, though he wished they would. He had reached an age when old friends were long gone, and new ones were hard to make. So, he sat on his porch, accepting this with weary resolve, and solved the weekly crossword. At the end of May, he went with a whisper, and that November the first 5 inches of snow fell.

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Jim Hoss had a red pickup truck and not much else to speak of. He was a journeyman and had been since he finished trade school. He felt it suited him alright, but wished it didn’t. Going to trade school was the last bit of advice his father had given him. Jim felt it was his duty, so he went. 

When Pop died, there was no money to bury him. Jim and his younger brother split a case of Pop’s favorite, Busch Light. They drank it on the bank of the pond where the three of them used to go fishing, and said goodbye to their father.

It was October, and Jim found himself putting up lines in west Illinois. When his work was finished one Friday, he stopped by a convenience store, then drove, looking for a church. He found one at dusk. No stone bore the name William Hoss in that graveyard, nor at any other he had visited every October for the last 12 years. Any William would have to do. He finally stumbled across one: William McIlroy. But tonight, he’d be William Hoss. 

Leaning against the headstone, Busch Light in hand, Jim recounted the happenings of the last year to his father. And with a bouquet of dandelions over his grave, William McIlroy received his first visitor.

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Header photograph by Deborah Hughes
Header artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson