Issue 11 - Spring 2021

Fiction

A Few Seconds of Consciousness

Ace Boggess

She woke me. I was dreaming, and her palms eased gentle pressure against my shoulder blade and bicep. “You were groaning and talking in your sleep,” she said, her tone babying, kind, reassuring. “You were having a nightmare.”

I felt dazed, my eyes opening to a blur and black. I didn’t remember dreaming—not the spies who plot against me some nights as part of a cinematic adventure, not zombies stalking after I’ve binge-watched The Walking Dead or something comic like Z Nation. There was no shadowy stranger who chased me until I walked backward off a cliff and woke up startled, out of breath. I didn’t drown in my recurring childhood visions of sitting in back of the station wagon while my dad drove us toward a tidal wave, turned left to find the wave there, too, approaching from the front, then left again, the same.

She said groaning and talking, which fit more with something sexual, tender, or romantic, but I didn’t recall that either. There was a brief opening of my eyes to see darkness, followed by closing them to see it there as well.

Did she save me from monsters, sleep apnea, an ex-girlfriend arguing about the cost of my mp3 collection? I recalled none of these later. I slept as if drugged, awoke once to the shushing of her voice as if she were humming my name like a mantra: “Shawn, Shawn, Shawn.”

Wish I had responded with her name in the dream language of a Catholic rite, “Dirige nos, Eloise,” followed by a prayer not worth remembering.

I never played this role: the rescued. I was the one who gently nudged my exes when their nights turned sour. There was Genevieve, tall and creamy-skinned, whose head held a haunted house of blank-faced men that hurt her. How many horrors did I save her from? And Carol, whose round face wore sadness like a porcelain mask—every other night she envisioned me in flagrante delicto with a woman not her, her biggest fear that I’d cheat on her. Which, of course, I did as prophesied. Then came Sheila, short and dye-dark-haired. She never told me her dreams. They were awful. She screamed in her sleep as though pierced in the spine by an icicle spear—sudden, chilling agony. She cussed and flailed her arms about, one time waking me with an unintended elbow to the chin. Finally, there was Cynthia, who looked like me but with longer, slightly sandier hair. We had the same wide forehead, the same sunken, black-banded eyes and somewhat-overweight bodies. For four years, I held her while she whimpered like a scorned animal. Sometimes, I woke her and she calmed. Others, she slept through my attempts at comfort, even if I shook her and said her name. When I asked her what troubled her, she always said, “My stepfather,” and left it at that.

Now, I was the nightmare keeper. I was the lost wanderer in a dystopian dreamscape. But what did I witness? I couldn’t account for it in the few seconds of consciousness before I drifted off again, and when I awoke that morning, I barely remembered Eloise’s touch and whispers.

I felt cheated. Nothing’s more personal than a nightmare, and I had been robbed of one before it could leave an impression on me, before it could define me in some small way I didn’t understand at first and now never would.

What disturbed me so? Were there guns, knives, teeth? Did the graveyard of my sleep city come alive with phantoms? It could’ve been a tiger sizing me up from the underbrush—I always thought a tiger would be the perfect villain for a nightmare, its addition leaving any bad dream worth remembering. Was it that? Much worse?

The last time I had a terrible vision, one from which nobody woke me, it involved a snake in an unlit basement. I was packing up everything in the house—whose house, I can’t say—before effecting my escape to somewhere new. Through dark, I saw boxes stacked on top of boxes. In one of them, the serpent lurked. It lunged and struck my ankle. I cried out in pain, but the snake disappeared before I could figure out if it were venomous. Had it murdered me? Had it tricked me by playing a mysterious game of tag? I lay on the floor for what seemed like hours, clutching my leg and calling for help. No one came—not friends or family, none of my former lovers, not even the movers in their puffed blue jumpsuits. I had nobody, nothing, just hours of agony and dread that the viper—if it was a viper—might come back.

Now that was a nightmare worth its salt.  I think it meant I had a fear of leaving or moving on. My relationship with Cynthia would end soon. I knew that already, though I refused to admit it at the time. So, the pieces fit. It made sense, and it was interesting. Maybe my subconscious razzed me, its passive-aggressive way of telling me to get going.

Before the serpent dream, I had the same nightmare three times about being yelled at in a coffee shop by a dead celebrity I was obsessed with at the time. I always found the same setup, same wood-paneled coffee shop, same beginning—my fault as I bumped into him and spilled hot coffee down his back—but a different dead celebrity. First, the long, wrinkled face of William Burroughs berated me in words that each seemed to drag on forever. I had listened to the Dead City Radio album on YouTube a few nights before, so clearly heard his drawn-out phrasing as he hurled obscenities I didn’t always comprehend. The second night, I doused Kurt Cobain, who, in a weird coincidence, once made a record with Burroughs. Kurt wore that olive sweater I always pictured him in, now stained down the back with coffee. His eyes were calming as he cussed me and my wretched existence. The last night brought me Hermann Hesse, whose voice I had never heard.  For some reason, he sounded like a preteen girl as he squinted at me, punched me in the chest, and told me to “Get some goddamned serenity.”

I loved my night terrors. I found them clever vignettes from lives I never lived. I collected them and wrote what I recalled in a little moleskin notebook.

Not this time. I kept nothing from the night except Eloise’s fingertips and kind voice: You were groaning and talking in your sleep. Maybe there was more. Maybe she would recall something specific I had said. I decided to ask her.

She didn’t get up until a couple hours after I did. It was Sunday, and neither of us had to work—she at the bank, I at the courthouse where I handled deeds and tax forms. We weren’t churchgoers, so nothing compelled us to leave the house. She slept, and I waited, sitting at the kitchen table and staring at my mug of joe. My auburn bathrobe hung open around my stained white tee and boxers with cats on them. That’s how she found me. “Morning,” she said as she came down the stairs.

“Good morning.”

“You’ve been up a while.”

I saluted her with my mug—green with a Marshall University logo on it.

“Did you sleep okay?”

“I think so,” I said, “other than that nightmare. How about you?”

“Fine, fine.”  She hesitated. “Oh, yeah. The nightmare. I already forgot.”

“Thanks for waking me, by the way.”

She smiled, her pale lips glowing under bright blond hair as if roses backlit in a glass case. “What was it about, anyway?” Her voice sounded concerned, but also a little unnerved.

“I have no idea. I was hoping you could tell me.”

She scowled and shrugged, her red and gray flannel nightdress rising with the motion to reveal flushed thighs. “I don’t know,” she said, her voice like a sigh. “Why would I know?” She turned and reached for the cabinet with the mugs, her flannel rising even higher in the back.

As she poured her coffee, I said, “You told me I was talking in my sleep. What did I say? Could you make anything out?”

She didn’t reply, staring at her coffee as she scooted over the floor toward the chair across from me.

“Were they real words or, like, sleep words?”

When she had herself situated, she said, “Oh, they were real enough, I think. Keep in mind, I was half asleep.”

“What did I say?”

“Something about fire. I think you were being burned.”

“Ouch,” I said, rubbing my forearm as if to put out a flame. That sounded terrible, but not something I’d forget right away. “What else?”

“I don’t know. You grunted a lot. You were shaking. I heard you mumbling stuff.”

“Stuff like what?”

She looked away and shrugged as if she didn’t understand why I kept pushing. She was anxious, and I couldn’t figure out the reason. Had I talked about old girlfriends? Had I said unpleasant words about her? “You know…,” she finally replied.

“I don’t,” I said. “Tell me.”

“A name. You said a name.”

All the more worried, I pressed on. “What name?”

“I….”

“Come on, El. What name?”

She hesitated again, looked away, looked back. We stared each other down like dueling cowboys.

“El?” I said.

“David,” she gasped. “There, all right? You said David.”

I felt my jaw drop but forced it closed before it could become offensive. David, I thought. There had been no nightmare—not for me. David was her ex. He was the villainous spy, the skin-sloughing zombie lurching after skin to eat, the bile-spewing Kurt Cobain. She had told me about him. It was a long time ago, but she clung to the abuse. He did things to her that left my worst nightmares feeling like merry-go-rounds. Things involving broken bones. Things involving lit cigarettes. I shuddered as I considered the stories about him—the ones Eloise had been willing to share. Now I understood. She hadn’t saved me from my dream; she had saved herself from hers, using me as a life preserver and pulling herself back onto the boat of reality. 

I smiled at her but said nothing. I could tell she didn’t want to talk about it. So, we pretended. We pretended David was a man-sized lizard that tortured me in my sleep since childhood. It shot fire from its eyes. Scary. And just this once, El came into my room, slipped inside my dream, and stood between me and the beast. She wrestled it to the ground, forced it to tap out, and that was that. I would never have a troubled sleep again.

Ace Boggess is author of the novels States of Mercy (Alien Buddha Press, 2019) and A Song Without a Melody (Hyperborea Publishing, 2016), as well as six books of poetry, including Escape Envy (forthcoming from Brick Road Poetry Press). His recent fiction appears in Notre Dame Review, The Laurel Review, Lumina, Folio, and other journals. He recently won the Robert Bausch Fiction Award. An ex-con, he lives in Charleston, West Virginia.

In the Woods

Ada Hardy          

It would be a good place to abandon a dog.

From the high curves of Donner Pass Road, the mountain pines seem to go on and on, stumbling up the rocky shoulders and then massing into one vast greenness that climbs the gentle slopes of the Sierras. Erin leans against the passenger-side door and searches the passing landscape for the unlucky creature that she’s created. Filthy, obviously–muddy enough that you can’t tell its real color until you get it cleaned up in the bathtub. A big doe-eyed golden retriever with a limp, a smart dog who knew that there would be no one there when it returned from chasing the ball, but who did it anyway to spare its owner the misery. Out here too long, its ribs countable beneath its matted coat, its nails curled into its paw pads.

She tries to imagine the wheedling and the whining it would take to get her father to admit it into the car, and reality, now with one foot in the door, pushes her a step further. She thinks of the way such a little thing as a new dog would, upon their return, ruin her mother’s day, and she drops the daydream immediately. The past hour on the road has been relaxing; it’s a rare trip that doesn’t include her mother, and the thought of fighting with an adult again just makes her tired. She is sixteen now, and she lives on angst and heartbreak, strumming their chords deep into the night to the saddest tune she can think of. Abandoned dogs are sad. Mothers? Just infuriating.

The parent driving the car isn’t all bad. She feels, on days like today, that they’re united against a common enemy. They stopped outside Auburn for coffee for him, a hot chocolate for her, and sat at a picnic table in the weak winter sunshine without having to fill the silence. Her father is still a mystery to her, muted by the force of her mother’s neuroses, but she can always count on him to be delighted by an enormous dog. Quietly, the golden retriever becomes a mastiff.

They are going to the mountains to pick out rocks for the yard, big cookies and cream chunks of granite that cost money down in the Sacramento Valley but are free for the taking higher up if you’re discreet about it. There’s no real reason for Erin to come along today; she’s extra gas in the car, an extra lunch later on, and she won’t earn back her cost in the lifting. But she knows why he’s brought her. It could have been his own idea or it could have been her mother saying, “Get rid of her, I’m sick of her,” and either way, she’s grateful because now she can breathe.

Her father turns the car onto a side road. The only sounds are the birdsong, the slamming car doors and the crunch of pine needles under their shoes. It doesn’t occur to Erin to wonder how he knows where to go; he just does. He moves through the world with competence that she takes for granted. He builds things, tears them down, plays peacemaker, knows about taxes and landscaping and the location of wild rocks in the Sierra Nevadas.

“Wouldn’t it be cool if we saw a bear?” she says.

He laughs. Not a real laugh, just a sort of “Hah!,” but when she glances over at him she can see that he’s amused. “Maybe if we’re in the car,” he says.

“I’ve never seen a bear. Remember when Grammy and Grampy would spend the summers up here and there was a bear that got into all the garbage cans? I always hoped I would see it, but I never did. Or a mountain lion,” she adds.

He looks at her like she’s nuts. When he turns away, he shakes his head, and she feels adrift. She had meant to draw him into a conversation but has lost him somewhere, as she usually does. There is something wrong with her, she’s sure: some fundamental way in which she’s never settled perfectly into this family the way that her non-adopted friends fit into theirs.

For the first time it occurs to her that maybe he’s brought her here to abandon her.

It’s not a thought that has any bearing in reality. There are places for kids like Erin to go. She has biological parents out there somewhere, though whenever she brings it up her mother has been quick to point out that maybe they don’t want to know her. Erin is under the impression that she has worn out her welcome in one family and is quickly doing so in the other. But she’s secure in her mother’s possession, knows well that, despite her threats to take off when she’s eighteen and never see them again, she won’t escape that easily from her mother's control. If she is to be abandoned, it won’t be in the woods. So she is free to wander the mountains like an abandoned dog, looking through bungee-corded trash cans like a bear, asleep in her thin cotton hoodie as a bank of insulating snow forms around her.

The pretending is sweet, and it doesn’t take any effort. That’s what she loves most about her father and why she worries for him: his passivity makes him whatever she wants him to be, and there is little he does to ruin the illusion. She can pretend he’s leaving her here and adore him for it at the same time.

They come across the rocks sooner than Erin thought they would. Of course; how would they get them back to the car otherwise? Her father bends and pulls one from the banks of a meltwater stream, and rocks it back and forth in the water until the mud washes away. He judges it. It has to be perfect somehow, and he’s good at perfect, or at least the illusion: the diagonal lines of the back deck, the caulking around the bathtub. The wild granite will have to fit together in an aesthetically pleasing way—not exact, but like nature could have maybe had a hand in the arrangement of the rocks under the living room window. Erin tries to make suggestions, but they’re clearly not right, and so instead of arguing, he just agrees as though he’s taking her advice, and picks different ones entirely.

“Why don’t you go see if you can find some more,” he tells her. “I need about ten.”

This is it, then, she thinks bravely, and stands. When you’re sixteen and wallowing in your own sadness, heartbreak is easy to manufacture. Tears come unbidden to her eyes and she turns away, the obedient Dickensian orphan aware she’s about to be left in the forest, colluding in her abandonment. She sniffles as she walks, and tries to stem the tears; her father will wonder why she’s crying when he catches up, and it’ll ruin the fantasy. It’s such a delicious one, too, ripe with the sympathy she craves. The specter of her mother’s scrutiny lifts, and relief washes in.

Erin has found no suitable rocks by the time she hears her father’s footsteps. “By the creek,” he says, watching her tug at an enormous piece of granite that the ground refuses to surrender. The ones in the water come up more easily, and she stands over him as he lifts another. It comes up with a great sucking sound, and the water and mud rush to fill the hole it left.

“You want these ones?” she says. He has made a pile. “Dad.” When he doesn’t answer, she pulls her sleeves up and carries one to the car. Her father has the keys, so she sets it by a back tire and goes back for another, again and again until she can’t feel her hands. In the car, she presses her knuckles against the hot skin of her stomach and waits for her father to finish arranging the rocks in the trunk.

They turn onto the main road. Her story shifts. She has been rescued. The cold that’s gotten under her sweatshirt is the cold of a month of mountain nights, and the vague hunger of an approaching lunch has been eating her for days. She has lived on wild strawberries and roast squirrel for weeks, but nothing now; it’s too cold. She is going to be okay. There will be a hot bath and a filling meal and a warm bed at the end of things, and the arms of strangers who will protect her. People with whom to start over, and in her fantasy, this time she gets things right.

As they descend the Sierras, the pretending gets harder.

He has been sitting on something, Erin realizes, and she knows what it is the moment he sighs. They are stuck in traffic close to home; this is the last opportunity he has to say it, unless he detours and keeps driving.

“I called around to a bunch of group homes yesterday,” he begins. His gentleness is clumsy, or maybe Erin just isn't used to hearing it.

She stares steadily out the window.

“None of them would take you because you’re not a ward of the state and you haven’t committed a crime.”

So they’re not giving her up. They can’t. From the corner of her eye, she can see his head turn to her, assessing her reaction. She wonders if he is disappointed. She probes at her own feelings, wondering if she is.

“Look. You have to try to get along with Mom. I know she doesn’t make it easy. Maybe if you just try to breathe once in awhile. Count to ten.”

Erin laughs, silently, bitterly. They are so far past counting to ten.

“She loves you. You know that, right?”

“Yeah. God. Okay.” Get her out of this conversation. Let her sink back into where she’s spent the day.

And he does. He doesn’t like to linger on life’s discomforts; he will take, as always, the past of least resistance, and it’s easier now to let the conversation die.

Erin tries to think of something sad to bring the fantasy to life again, but reality, abrupt and ruinous, dogs her the rest of the way home.

Ada Hardy is a software developer and adult adoptee living in Southern California, whose work has appeared The Fredericksburg Literary and Art Review and Fantasia Divinity's Autumn Harvest anthology. For more about Ada, visit https://adahardy.com.

The Minor Indignities of Age

H. S. May

Research has shown that even old people don’t care to be around the aged. He had read about a study that said so, maybe in the Times. Perhaps that is why he had just been eased out. Let go by another man his age—a friend, or so he had believed. The friend had said his job as a vice president was being eliminated. He knew with certainty that after a month, the company would create a new position lower down the ladder that was half his pay, for someone half his age.

His first reaction when given the news was disbelief, and then rage. After all he had done for the company, to be turned out like a stray cat. He had promised to sue as they ushered him out. But he knew age discrimination would be almost impossible to prove. There was no chance of finding another job, not at age sixty-two. He wasn’t actually elderly, just an “older man” and overqualified.

He had been sitting in his condo for an hour, the day after he was let go, trying to read a book, becoming increasingly depressed. He needed to get out, to be around people, and wanted a drink in the worst way. But he had sworn it off a few years ago after the head of personnel had warned him of an alcohol dependency. A visit to the coffee shop then.

He put the book under his arm, headed out the door, took the elevator down, and walked a half block to the coffee shop, where he waited in line. He liked the place. It wasn’t a Starbucks—outsider art on the walls, old furniture from the Salvation Army, not overly clean. The young woman in front of him had purple hair, a tattoo of a serpent on her neck, and at least a dozen piercings in her nose, lips, eyelids, and ears. He decided that Miss Piercings must be the young woman’s name. She was perhaps twenty and also carried a book under her arm.

Miss Piercings finally reached the cashier and fumbled in her backpack. “Fuck, I left my wallet at home.”

“I’ll pay for it,” he said, hoping to strike up a conversation.

Miss Piercings looked at him with suspicion. “If you’re trying to pick me up, grandpa, forget about it. I’m not a hooker if that’s what you think.”

“No, no. That’s not it at all.”

“Fine with me then. But don’t expect anything for it.” She shrugged, the cashier gave her a knowing smirk, and Miss Piercings ordered a nonfat macchiato. She moved down and waited for the barista to make her drink.

He decided on a nonfat macchiato himself. He had never had one and thought it would be a novelty, something in common with the young woman. The nonfat was a plus—his doctor had told him to avoid cholesterol and put him on Lipitor for his heart.

The cashier took his order with studied indifference, inscribed hieroglyphics on a paper cup, and pushed it down to the barista. He moved along next to Miss Piercings, who ignored him. She picked up her cup, went to an empty table, and began reading her book.

In the fullness of time, the barista handed him a steaming cup of white frothiness and espresso. He looked around. The place was full of people, sitting in twos and threes, everyone young and trying their best to avoid his gaze—no free tables. Miss Piercings glanced up and shrugged again. “You can sit here if you want,” she said, pointing at the chair with her book.

“Thanks.” He put his book down on the table. “Do you use sweetener? In the macchiato, I mean.”

“Nothing artificial,” she said, not looking up from her book. “Sometimes honey, but they don’t have any here.”

He took a sip. “Not bad.” Miss Piercings was attractive, as young people often are to those who are old. Why the tattoos and piercings, he wondered? But it would be impolite to ask. He could see the roots of her hair, a nice brown under the purple. She would find it painful and expensive to get the tattoo removed when she was older and needed a job. Perhaps the piercings wouldn’t be noticed with the right makeup. When he was younger, he might have asked her out, even with the hair, the piercings, and the tattoos.

Miss Piercings continued reading. He could see the cover—The First Bad Man by Miranda July. “What’s the book about?” he asked.

Miss Piercings sighed, turned down the page, and put the book on the table. “You wouldn’t understand.”

He looked down at the cover. “You know that the first bad man was actually Adam. So that would make the first bad person Eve.”

“Very deep. But I don’t think that’s what Miranda July had in mind.” Miss Piercings reached across the table and turned his book around. “The Hidden Eisenhower—are you kidding me?”

“I’m reading it for my book club,” he said. “I prefer fiction, but the others like biographies and history—mostly politicians and generals. Teddy Roosevelt, Churchill, George Washington, Eisenhower.”

“Dead white males,” said Miss Piercings.

“Are you referring to the members or the books we read?” Miss Piercings laughed. “Is your book for school?”

“Hardly. The English department is still obsessed with Harold Bloom. As it happens, it’s for my book club, as well.”

It struck him as odd that this young woman, a veritable child, could be in a book club. Reading groups were for people in middle age and older. “You’re in a book club?” he asked.

“Me and about a million others. It’s online.” She mentioned a famous actress he had seen on HBO. “You sign up and get her recommendation every month. You can post comments—I do it all the time. Pretty standard book club. You could join.”

“Really?”

“Anyone can join. If your AirDrop is on, I’ll share a link.” He hesitated, having no idea what she was talking about. Miss Piercings sighed. “Give me your phone and I’ll turn it on. You have to put in your passcode,” which he did and handed it to her. Miss Piercings punched the screen three times and gave him the phone.

The screen was alive with colorful images. He looked down at the cover of his book—a black and white photo of Eisenhower sitting at his desk in the Oval Office signing papers. This was the third book on Ike the club had read.

“So, I can join this club,” he said, “just by putting in my name and a passcode?”

“Yes, but no one uses their real name. You can make something up. You could be Old Dude.”

“I would rather be someone younger.”

“Sure. Anything you want. But I’m going to call you Old Dude.”

“So, what’s your book club name?”

 “Emily Brontë’s Granddaughter. I’m a Brontë fan, but I would never have let Heathcliff behave the way he did.”

“Brontë didn’t have any children, so you couldn’t be her granddaughter.”

“It’s intended to be ironic,” she said. “You know about irony, don’t you?”

“I’ve heard of it. Should I call you Miss Brontë?”

“You can call me whatever you please, my good man.” This she said with a lilting voice and an English accent.

“I’ve been thinking you should be called Miss Piercings, because of the facial jewelry.”

She reached her hand to her face. “I rather like the name, Miss Piercings,” again with an English accent. “I’ve needed a new name, and Miss Emily Piercings it is. It could be from a Jane Austen novel.”

 “I have a fondness for Jane Austen,” said the Old Dude.

“Of course. Everyone loves her. But she is rather old fashioned.”

“Do you have a Mr. Darcy?”

“No, I have a Miss Darcy.”

“Very modern indeed,” he said. “I’ve never had coffee with a lesbian.”

“How do you know you haven’t? You shouldn’t stereotype people, you know. I’m what you would call transgender, as a matter of fact.”

The Old Dude looked at Miss Piercings carefully. She was tall for a woman but slender. She could be a model, he decided, except for the tattoos and piercings. He supposed there must be a telltale sign somewhere of her birth gender. Her voice was a little deep, her wrists larger than average. But there was nothing obvious.

“You must be kidding,” he finally said, then hesitated. “Sorry, that was rude of me.”

“I’ll take it as a compliment. It’s comforting that you can’t tell.”

“Has it been difficult?”

“It hasn’t been a walk in the park, but it’s behind me now. My girlfriend has been understanding, but we’ll probably break up. She thought it was a heterosexual relationship when it started. She’s pretty confused at the moment.”

“I can relate.” He fell silent trying to figure out what he had just heard.

“You remind me of my grandfather,” said Miss Piercings. “He died.”

“I’m only sixty-two.”

“That was about his age. I miss him.” She paused. “I shouldn’t have mentioned death, you being old and all.”

“No need to apologize,” said the Old Dude. “Mortality comes up a lot nowadays. When I was your age, I couldn’t imagine dying. But it happens to everyone.”

“I suppose so.” Miss Piercings gave a skeptical shrug. She took a drink of her macchiato. “My parents won’t talk to me anymore. They don’t approve. My grandfather would have, I’m sure. Not that he could have understood why I did it, but it wouldn’t have made any difference to him. He wrote me little poems when I was growing up—little funny rhymes.”

The two fell silent and sipped their drinks. Miss Piercings suddenly looked down at her watch. “Got to catch my bus.” She drained the macchiato, rose from the table, and hoisted the backpack. “See you.” She walked out the door.

 The Old Dude sat sipping his macchiato, thinking of his encounter with Miss Piercings. He had read about the modern phenomena of changing one’s gender and had followed the controversy about bathrooms, of course. But Emily Piercings was unimaginable. The Old Dude got up, forgetting Eisenhower lying on the table, and walked out the door.

It was a brutal August day, and the heat took his breath away as he left the air-conditioning. He saw Miss Piercings at the bus stop down the block, rummaging in the bottom of the backpack. He felt in his pocket for change. Did they even take change on the bus now, or did you need a card of some sort? He walked toward the bus stop.

The bus arrived, Emily Piercings got on, and the Old Dude followed, having run the last twenty yards. He rested for a few seconds after climbing into the bus, trying to catch his breath. His heart was racing. He dumped a handful of quarters into the machine by the driver. Miss Piercings was reading her book, sitting in the last row. He took a seat in the front.

The bus moved haltingly, stopping every two blocks, working its way toward the university side of town. A black woman got on the bus and sat next to him. He wondered if he should smile and decided he should not. He kept looking back to check on Miss Piercings; the woman moved to a seat across the aisle.  

Emily Piercings got off the bus through the middle door in front of a rundown duplex. The Old Dude followed through the front. They were the only two at the stop, which was awkward. Emily Piercings shook her head, rolled her eyes, and walked down to where he was standing.

“You are my first stalker,” she said. “Perhaps you should get a medal, some sort of recognition.”

“I’m not really a stalker,” said the Old Dude. “I just wanted to talk.” His heart began racing again and he touched his chest.

“When a man follows a woman to her home unasked, he is, by definition, a stalker. You are an unusually bad one, though. I saw you leave the coffee shop and get on the bus, for Christ’s sake. I could call the cops—that would be an old school thing to do. But I haven’t had the name and sex on my driver’s license changed, and the police sometimes don’t understand. Why don’t you cross the street and get on the next bus downtown?”

“I’m really sorry,” he said.

“It’s okay. But some women wouldn’t understand.” Miss Piercings turned, walked up the sidewalk, and into the duplex.

The Old Dude pulled out his phone and called a cab. He supposed there weren’t many left now that everyone used Uber, but he didn’t have the app. The dispatcher said it would take fifteen minutes before he could get a ride.

The cab hadn’t come after twenty minutes. He was sweating in the sun and thought about moving down the block to the shade of a tree. But he thought he saw the cab, and waited, then it passed by. His breath grew short and his heart raced uncontrollably. His head felt light; his left arm began to ache; he fell to the sidewalk and hit his head; blood dripped from his forehead, clouding his vision. It felt like an elephant was sitting on his chest. He cried out, “Help me. I’m dying.”

The last thing he remembered was Emily Piercings leaning over him, saying, “Are you okay?”

                                                            ******

He awoke in a pale green room, hooked up to a half dozen beeping monitors. Bags of fluids led to a needle in his arm, and a tube fed oxygen into his nose. I had a heart attack, he thought. He realized that his chest was wrapped in bandages.

He looked over and saw Emily Piercings sitting in a chair reading her book. “What happened?”

“They cracked open your chest and did a quadruple bypass,” said Miss Piercings, looking up. “Ninety-five percent blockage, they said.”

“I feel pretty good.”

“I would feel pretty good too if I had that much oxycodone in my veins. You will have to quit the drugs, so don’t get hooked.”

“I guess I’m lucky they did the operation in time.”

“Yeah. I signed for it.”

“You did what?”

“They didn’t want to do the operation without permission from the next of kin. Would have done it eventually anyway, but they were screwing around making phone calls. The way the doctors talked, it sounded like you might die.”

“You said you were my next of kin, and they believed you?”

“I told them I was your granddaughter, and my mother was on safari in Kenya. They just wanted someone to sign the form so they wouldn’t get sued if you died. I signed it Emily Piercings.”

“I don’t even know if I have insurance. I lost my job.”

“Glad I didn’t give them my credit card,” said Miss Piercings with a shrug.

“I owe you my life, I guess,” said the Old Dude. “When I was a boy, in cowboy movies, if an Indian saved a person’s life, the Indian was responsible from then on for the person he saved.”

Miss Piercings shook her head. “They are called indigenous peoples now. In any event, I can’t be responsible for you. I’ve got my own problems. I just didn’t want to see you die in front of my duplex.”

“Thanks anyway.”

“No problem,” said Miss Piercings with another shrug.

A pretty young nurse in a pink uniform came into the room. “You woke up,” she said with a smile. “Welcome back to the land of the living. How’re you feeling, sweetie?”

Sweetie—an epithet the young reserve for the old, infirm, and helpless—one of the minor indignities of age. If he were the nurse’s age, she would have never called him that. But at least I’m alive. “Okay, I guess. Do you know what’s going to happen to me?” he asked.

“You can leave in a few days, a week maybe. You’ll need someone to take care of you for a month after you get out of the hospital.” The nurse looked skeptically at Emily Piercings. “Is there someone we can call?”

The Old Dude considered his options. Two grown children, one in LA and the other in London; both blamed him for the divorce and rarely called. A boy from his second marriage was still receiving child support. “No close relatives,” he finally said.

“So, could you call someone from work or a friend?” asked the nurse. “They won’t let you out of here unless you have someone to take care of you.”

“Maybe I can hire somebody.”

“You can if you have to,” said the nurse, “but it’s expensive.”

The nurse busied herself with her stethoscope, listening to the pulse in his neck, then his chest. “Still ticking,” she said brightly, then looked at the monitors. “Blood oxygen fine. The doctor will be in shortly.” She patted the Old Dude’s hand, smiled, and left the room.

“Bummer about you not having anyone to take care of you,” said Miss Piercings. “Wish I could help, but I can’t take you home with me. It’s tense right now with my girlfriend.” She got up from the chair. “I’ve been here all night. I’ve got to go.”

The Old Dude could tell he was making Miss Piercings uncomfortable. Young people hate the feel of hospitals, the sick, and the dying. Who could blame them?

“Thanks again for saving my life,” he said.

“I said no problem, really.” Miss Piercings began edging toward the door. “See you at the book club. I’m going to change my online name to Emily Piercings, so you’ll know when I post something.”

“I’ll be the Old Dude.”

Miss Piercings hesitated, turned back, and came over to his bed. “Take care of yourself, Old Dude.” She kissed his forehead. “I get coffee at that place we met. It’s near my job.”

“Maybe I’ll see you there,” he said.

“Maybe so.”

Miss Piercings looked around the room. “Where’s your book?”

“I must have left it at the coffee shop,” said the Old Dude.

“You’re going to need something to read.” She handed him The Last Bad Man. “You can have it. I know how it ends.”

H. S. May began writing fiction four years ago and received an Honorable Mention in Glimmer Train’s 2019 Short Story Award for New Writers. He lives and works in Houston, Texas, and has recently completed his first novel. Set in 1896, it reflects the revolution in social norms that presaged the modern era.

Wild Child

Yvette Naden

My throat is full of moths.

Please, don’t make me start again. I don’t want to open my mouth, to repeat myself. If I do, I fear I’ll choke their little bodies into the sink. I fear their wings will continue to flutter, flicking bloodied spittle into my open mouth.

I don’t want to start again, but I can see you drifting. You always used to drift, like when you snuck behind that cardboard box on the farm where the warmth of the sun couldn’t find you. Instead of covering your ears to block out the noise, you closed your eyes. You built a raft out of partial thoughts and you drifted away. A few times, your feet slipped into the water. Salt powdered your nostrils, clumping like cotton in your ears. You managed to haul yourself back onto that raft, drowning out their voices, voices which will claim a few hours later that they were only joking, that everything is fine.

It’s almost amazing what we can force ourselves to believe.

I can see you. In the smallest corner, curling into your own shadow. You face peeks out in a crescent moon. You can’t hide from me. And, as it turns out, I can’t hide from you either.

I’ve never heard of two ghosts haunting each other. But here we are.

I’ve been sitting in the same position for hours, forgetting to stretch. My spine concertinas. Scoliosis. The genes diluted over the decades, yet my Father still walks with a limp and my natural position is hunched over a book, neck jaggedly protruding from my shoulders like a disused church bell. I wonder if we’re simply dilutions of our ancestors. If the last Briton is a mere echo of the first. In a way, I almost hope we are. I hope that the family curse is merely a single drop of blood in my veins. Then again, neither one of us believes in curses, or family for that matter. I’m only telling you this to prepare you. To remind you. To drag you back through sheets of the countless minutes we spent writing in that notebook, the dog-eared pages like wrinkled bandages as we brought pen to paper. The paper which I’m using now, coiled like an Ammonite in front of the fire. You say nothing as I crumple poems to ash, lighting match after match to keep the hearth burning. I won’t be the first Hamilton to set fire to the voices of others.

You’re wincing. I can see that you’re starting to remember. Or perhaps I’m starting to forget. Perhaps we’re locked in a paradox. After all, the two of us shouldn’t be sitting in the same room. We’re not breaking the rules by a simple technicality: you’re standing and I’m crouching. Curling over, hoping I can disappear into your shadow. Tiny fingers clenching into tinier fists and yet you stand tall.

I can almost taste the memory in your eyes. The static of Crewe, the smell of the Nantwich chippy. Both stripped away by the smog of Manchester. Invisible and yet it dances on our lungs. We cough every five minutes, suddenly missing the stasis of the village air. I can see your smoky eyes reflected in a puddle. I can’t tell if it’s urine, petrol, or rainwater. Perhaps it is a mocktail, a concoction of all three. You remember this, don’t you? You’re twelve and gasping at the Psychics department, which is shaped like a tin-can, pretending to listen to Mum as she talks up a storm. Her eyes are shooting stars, but they will soon dull and you will sit atop the stairs, listening to her sobbing, tearing tissues from a box you can’t bring yourself to give to her.

You look up, staring at where Mum is pointing. A rolling pin is pressed over your lungs. Manchester Museum. A fallen monolith of sandstone. Cream plasterwork with windows which appear as spiderwebs in your eyes. I watch as you run across the road, a motorbike missing you by a hair’s breadth. Mum is already on the other side; she has the road safety of a blind movie star, strutting over the tarmac with a too-wide smile. You wonder if she does this on purpose. To give you a heart attack at first, imagining that you’ll be the first pre-teen to die of cardiac arrest. Then perhaps because she’s hoping that one day, the cars won’t stop.

I smile as you search for the entrance to the Museum. There’s an archway, a great wide mouth of stone; it presses a kiss to your forehead as you step over the flagstones. I follow you through the glass doors, up the steps. Free entry. You take off at a run, ignoring the way a Mother pushing a pram shakes her head. Your Mum, little Emma, is not the type of woman who bleats, saying,

“Don’t run off. It’s easy to get lost in here.” No, you become your own navigator. I am your ghostly companion as you tear across the sun-bleached stones. You gasp as you spot the Liger, an organic crossover, lying in its case. Its eyes brim with glass but you keep staring anyway, as if expecting it to yawn and stretch contentedly. Mum catches up with you, not breathless despite the stairs.

“What did I tell you? Look at that. They bred a lion with a tiger. Isn’t that amazing? Beautifully preserved too, not like those amateurs down in Chester.” She crosses her arms, smiling proudly. When she walks away, towards the tropics exhibit, you watch the Liger in its case. You meet its gaze. Black, bottomless eyes, and you’re falling. Glass shatters, cutting your skin. You step away, wondering that just because the creature had been alive once upon a time, did that mean it had lived?

Someone once said that to be alive is power. That’s a lie, you realise, as you wander the halls of the dead. Here, each taxidermist’s treasure becomes a landmark. Each stare – from a dead peacock or raven – holds its audience captive, ready to perform. The easiest performance of their lives: they stand or lie or sit in static as people gawp and stare and snap pictures for an Album. Immortalised just like that. Did you know that taxidermy comes from the Greek ‘taxis’ and ‘derma’? It means arrangement of the skin. Their final expressions, their final positions pre-determined by a person with a license. They’ve achieved fame with the power of glass eyes and galvanised wire. A stuffed fox with eyes aflame, a field mouse which scuttles with the prowess of a Danseur Noble.

You look around. Toddlers are traipsing behind their parents, a man is taking pictures on his phone. A young girl goes to stick chewing gum on the glass case containing a horse, right over its brown muzzle, until her Mother intervenes.

And you turn back to the Liger. It refuses to meet your eyes.

And I sit here now, watching the world as it slowly inches along without me. Without anyone. Snow wraps its arms around the trees, the tarmac, the neighbour’s sports car. There is a Santa standing lop-sided on the drive, silently battling the wind. You remember the Liger, don’t you? Locked in a glass case, watching the world go by.

You never knew how it felt. But you will. And I do.

2020: the year we too became Museum Exhibits.

Yvette Naden was born in Mayenne, France, but moved to the UK in 2006 to pursue a writing career. Having written strange short stories and poems since she was three, Yvette writes every spare second when she's not working as an English Tutor or composing songs and musicals. Her poems have received acclaim, for example, one of her poems won Bronze in the International Never Such Innocence Competition and her work was Highly Commended and subsequently published in the Elmbridge Literary Magazine.

The Lightness of Ash

Richard Spilman  

First, it was he and his mom and dad together, and he was always with them, and every time he said, “I want,” the world burst into motion.

During the day, when he wasn’t at preschool, there was Mrs. Bolton, who let him watch TV as much as he liked. At night, there was music. And games and puzzles with a blaze dancing in the fireplace. Sometimes they went out to eat, but when they didn’t, he and his mom would often bake—it was their thing, she said.

His mother was small and pillowy, his father nervous like a bird.

Often, he and his dad would explore the wooded hillside behind the house, or they’d make stuff in the garage. His dad liked woodworking and would give the boy sandpaper and nails and let him do what he liked with the scraps. Sunday night was for grownup movies, which often bored him, so he’d play on his DS or watch the fire on the grate until he fell asleep.

He loved to watch his father prepare a fire—laying the logs crisscross or like a teepee or spread out in points like a star. He loved how the flames would slip between the logs or erupt through the hole in the top or crawl from one to another like climbers on a jungle gym, never once the same. “Fire is a living thing,” his father said. “It has to have space to breathe.”

When his mom was cooking, he’d watch the rings of blue flame on the stove, but they bored him, chained to their little holes. He liked better when steam rose from a pan and turned the wall into waves.

When his parents didn’t speak to each other and his mother drank most of the wine, the room would go cold, and he would shrink in its chill like a flower. Usually, they made up before he went to bed, and his mother would join their hands together and say, “All for one and one for all,” like the Musketeers.

In kindergarten, he learned words and numbers and, on his own, the names of so many dinosaurs his parents said he was going to be a scientist. They took him to zoos and parks and museums. From the stream that came down through the woods, he would gather rocks with interesting patterns, which he put into a box his father had made for him. His mom bought him a polisher, and they kept his favorites in a little bowl on the coffee table. Some he and his dad set into molds filled with mortar, which, dried and sealed, they lay in the garden as a path.

Then it all stopped.

His father stayed away on business and came home late—there were fights all the time about where he had been and what he’d been doing. Even when they weren’t fighting, his parents stayed apart, and he had the TV to himself.

By first grade, it was always his mom who took him to t-ball. Between t-ball and soccer, his dad moved out. They fought over him. Neither seemed to want him, or want the other to have him. On school days, he stayed in an after-care program and played on computers.

Without warning, they sold the house and moved into apartments, and there was no hill and no woods. So he broke things. A vase his mom liked, the cellphone his father kept answering. But nothing changed.

Mostly he was with his mom, and since the apartment noises frightened him, he slept in her bed. It took a while, but he got used to the bumps and cries from the other side of the wall and to the wash of cars outside. He’d wake to find himself in his own room, but that was okay. As he watched shadows play above the window curtains, he discovered that night too had its flames, and they comforted him.

His mom didn’t cook much, and since she was trying to lose weight, most of what she cooked he didn’t like. There was no garage to work in, no woods to walk in. Instead, they gave him toys and got mad when he didn’t like them. His father travelled all the time; his mother complained she couldn’t go anywhere because of him.  

That winter, when they were together, he asked his dad to build a fire, but the fireplace in that apartment was just show. “Look at it this way,” his dad said. “The sun is a fire, and there’s fire in lightbulbs and the engines of cars, and in your body, even in the rocks. It’s everywhere.” They made a game of looking for flames in odd places, like clouds and trees, but it wasn’t any fun.

Then there was a new man, on both sides, and the new men were nice the way babysitters are nice. His parents talked mostly with the new men, and if he wanted to say something, he had to wait his turn. So he stopped talking, and they said he was being rude.

More than ever, he got what he wanted, but he never liked what he wanted for long.

Kids at school made jokes about his father’s friend, so he stopped talking to them, too. When three boys wouldn’t let him alone, he fought them, and after that, Mrs. Bolton, who lived not far from the school, picked him up and took him home with her, and she read to him from old books with hard covers that smelled like the attic. Uncle Wiggly. Mother West Wind. They were kind of dumb, but as he listened, the woods behind the old house came alive again; he knew the animals, and the animals knew him.

After school let out for the summer, his parents sent him to camp, but it didn’t last. One of the counselors, a high school girl with braids, asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, and he said, “Dead.” They made his mom come from work, and she blew up, “What the hell can I do?” and he hid under a table.  Going home, she said, “I’m going to lose my job because of this shit.” She bought a bottle of wine, a big one, and wagged a finger at him, “Not one word.” Later, when she was drunk, they made mac and cheese and she apologized. “It’s not your fault.”

The rest of the summer, he stayed with Mrs. Bolton, and in addition to the soap operas and the books, she taught him to embroider, even after his mother told her to stop.

Sometimes, when Mrs. Bolton didn’t feel like reading, he read to himself making up most of it from the pictures in the book. So there were two sets of stories, his and Mrs. Bolton’s, and he loved them both.

Behind her house, was a small stream and, across the stream, railroad tracks on a low hill. He would count the cars of passing trains, how many of this kind, how many of that. She had a big barrel in which she burned trash, and she let him light the wooden match and throw it in. Only when there was lots of stuff could he see flames, but ashes would float out of the can and dance until they fell into the stream.

His mother got a job where she could work home some of the time, which gave them more time together, but now there were things he couldn’t touch and times when she could not talk to him.

Once, before the divorce, friends of his parents came to visit, bringing a girl they’d adopted from overseas, who did not know the language. She went through his toys, one at a time, silently, playing with each and then setting it aside. He tried to talk to her, but she acted like he wasn’t in the room. His father was that way with men. Before the boy got used to one, there was another, friendly but distant, like they were waiting for him to disappear.

At summer’s end, his mother cleaned house, throwing away most of the garden mosaics—and most of the dinosaurs, too, since he seldom played with them. When he cried, she said, “We only have so much room.”

He began to hide things.

On the next visit to his father, he took the box of rocks and the remaining mosaics, and his mother said, “Good riddance.” His father hung one of the mosaics from suction cups on the window of the boy’s room. All the rest, he put in the closet. When they were alone, his father asked what he thought of the men in his life, and the boy pointed to the mosaic in the window. “It’s like that,” he said. “There’s Seth and there’s Jerry.” He couldn’t remember the others.

“Where’s Jack?”

Jack was the new one. The boy rummaged in his rock box and took out one with green and brown stripes. “This is Jack,” he said, and his father hugged him so tight he couldn’t breathe.

“God, I love you.”

In first grade, one of the assignments was to make a family book and talk about it. For once, his mom and dad sat at the same table. They helped him put the book together so he wouldn’t have to answer a lot of questions. But so much had been left out, he barely recognized himself.

His mother saved the school stuff she liked, even from pre-school—pictures and tests and awards. She kept them in plastic bins and occasionally went through them to show him how sweet he’d been. It made him madder about the dinosaurs, so one day, while she was working, he went through a box, taking out what he didn’t like, and burned those things on a picnic table behind the apartment building, using a lighter his mother’s new boyfriend had left behind. She didn’t notice. The house smelled like smoke, anyway.

It had been hard to do, but he liked the little black spot on his thumb and how the flames changed shape depending on how he held the paper. The next time he tried it, the boyfriend came early and caught him, and from then on, they watched him and his father watched him, too. A few weeks later, he stole another lighter and burned some junk mail, just to show he could.

It was strange how scared they got, going through the apartment on their hands and knees. They sat him down and told him what terrible things happened when kids played with fire. The boy told them he wasn’t playing. He just liked how fire made everything stupid disappear.

They took him to a doctor, who asked if anyone had touched his private parts, and the boy refused to talk. His father wanted to find another doctor, but his mother refused. Another session and another. Even when the boy talked, he didn’t say much, because the doctor asked about the divorce and his parents and his parents’ friends, and wrote everything down. Finally, when the doctor’s back was turned, he took a lighter he’d hidden a long time ago and set fire to papers on the doctor’s desk.

The doctor didn’t get mad. He picked up the papers and put them in the wastebasket and took the lighter away, and for a while, the two of them watched it all burn.

“Why did you do that?” the doctor asked.

“I wanted you to stop.”

“Stop what?”

“Stop blaming people.”

The doctor shook his head. “I’m . . .” but then he stopped and held one of the boy’s hands in his. “That was a piss poor way of doing it.”

The boy laughed at the language. “Yeah, but it worked.”

After that, if he was mad, he just said so, and they’d talk about something else. But the doctor also prescribed pills, which made the boy feel dopey, so he made a deal with his mom: as long as he didn’t bug her, she wouldn’t make him take them.

At school, a girl tried to give him a lighter, but he told the teacher and she got put in “reflection.”

“Why did she do that?” he asked.

“Because it’s fun to get other people into trouble,” the teacher said, looking over the tops of her glasses.

His father now had bronze hair. Jack was still his boyfriend, and they stayed pretty much at home. Jack gave him an Xbox and often played with him.

His mother used her credit card to give her boyfriend money for the down payment on a car—$3,000—and after he got the new car, he got a new girlfriend and moved out. “We’ve got to scrimp,” his mom said, waving a handful of mail at him.

His father wouldn’t help. “It’s not my fault, your taste in men.”

Later, just before school let out, the boy came home to find the outside door part-way open and the mail on the kitchen table, along with a half-empty bottle of wine. And his mother on the couch, sleeping with the TV on.

He got a can of Coke from the fridge and sat at the kitchen table opening mail. Two he could tell were bills, and one of those had a red line across the top. By now, he knew all about bills, with or without red lines. There were more in the drawer next to the sink, what his mother called “the shit drawer.”

He hated the man who had taken his mother’s money, but he didn’t hate his father for not helping, because when his father gave him money, he had to hide it to keep her from borrowing.

He considered changing the channel, but then she’d wake up and start crying, and he hated when she cried. So he got the lighter from her purse.

It wouldn’t change anything, and it would piss her off, but at least he’d feel better for a while. He took the envelopes from the kitchen table and a handful from the shit drawer and went out to the picnic table.

One by one, he set the papers aflame and let each scuttle across the cement and onto the grass, where yellow butterflies went from clover to clover. Some he crushed into wads so that he could watch them writhe as the fire ate inward. Like the fires his father used to make, each burnt a little differently, opening like flowers as the flames took them.

Toward the end, a breeze came up, making it harder, but when they were lit, they would flutter out of his hand like birds and glide toward the parking lot till they blackened and fell to the ground, still burning.

Richard Spilman is the author of two books of short fiction, Hot Fudge and The Estate Sale. His most recently published story, "The Slugs Come Out When It Rains," appeared a couple of months ago in The Alaska Quarterly Review.