Open Journal Short Stories 2025

Many thanks to all the short story writers who continue to submit to Superlative.

Here are the fantastic short stories we selected for publication in our open journal in 2025.

If you would like us to consider your short story for publication, please submit here.

Enjoy!

The Sky Was Every Color

The first rumor came with the rain.

They rolled on top of the heavens and whistled toward the earth. A high hissing through the cane and a change in the air that went empty with the aftersound. At the well, one of the old women, damp to the elbows, said she had a cousin whose husband had heard from a soldier that the Americans ate children. “They are not men,” she said, setting her bucket down so hard the rope jumped. “Their teeth are like a dog’s. They have less honor than the Japanese. Yes they steal and kill. But the Americans, they say that they will eat your children in front of you and laugh.”

Kiyo kept her face still, because stillness was a way of not inviting more fear into the house. She thanked the auntie for the water, for the warning, and took her boy’s hand. He was three and had a way of looking sideways at things, birdlike, as if life approached him from the corner of the eye. His name was Haru, but she called him Bean when he was soft, and Little Rooster when he was stubborn. In the bent light of late afternoon he seemed made of dust and warmth. His fingers wrapped her own like roots.

They went home by the path that cut behind the schoolhouse and down toward the limestone the island wore like an old bone. In the flat behind the house she had a few rows of sweet potatoes she was coaxing along, a patch of bitter melon that tolerated wartime, and herbs that had seen everything and stayed. The house itself had a roof that remembered typhoons. On the porch, two shisa faced the road like dogs who were tired of warning anyone.

Her husband had been gone a year, called north with the regiment. He had written twice. The second note, a child’s scratchings of home and nothing, maybe of prayer. Kiyo kept it folded in her sleeve. Sometimes the paper warmed to the heat of her skin and felt like a heartbeat. In the evenings, when the sky went the color of dragonfruit under the low cry of geckos, she sat with Haru between her knees and told him the old stories because stories were full of breath and naming, and breath and naming made a net you could hang in the dark and climb back out of your fear.

But the rumors thickened, and with them came other things: boys in too big uniforms laying telephone wire along the road, trucks with canvas backs, horses whose ribs you could count, students from the girls’ school carrying stretchers like the handles of a door no one could close. There were orders posted on the wall of the school: dig trenches, prepare the caves, carry water. The officers came and bowed curtly and said, “You must move into the gama. The caves will keep you safe.” Then the officer said something else, his voice lower, as if the words might fail in open air. “When the Americans come, better you die. Do you understand?”

The women standing in the doorway of the school said they understood. They understood in the way you understand a storm that is already here: you recognize the shape of it, the sweep, the weight, and still you are wet.

Kiyo took Haru to the cave two days later. It was a deep slit in the white rock, the roots of banyan reaching for it like a hand. Inside, the air tasted like mud and old candles. The neighbor boy, Shinji, had already stacked baskets and jars. He was fourteen but surehanded. He drew a line on the wall with a piece of charcoal so the children would know where they were allowed to play. “From here to here,” he said, and Haru nodded solemnly and then put all of his play into that small world as if it were infinite.

The shelling began before dawn on the day the cicadas came early, caught out by the strange heat. At first it was distant, the sound you feel in your feet before your ears know it. Then the ground learned to jump. Dust shook loose from the ceiling of the cave in a slow brown rain. Someone said, “Steel rain,” and someone else said, “Tetsu no ame,” and the words were like nicknames you gave a monster to keep it from knowing its own name.

They lived like that for a week that had the length of a year. The little ones slept, woke, cried, and in their crying produced the rhythm by which the rest of them marked the days. The old men prayed to things that had drifted past prayer and become merely breath. Shinji learned to tie a bandage without thinking about it, learned to bring a cup of water and hold it at the right angle so that a woman could drink lying on her side without choking. Kiyo learned the inventory of a life by feel: how much salt in the jar, where a candle stub was, which corner caught the worst of the chill. Every action became small and exact. Every exactness was a kind of mercy they could still offer one another.

Sometimes, between the runs of thunder from the ships offshore, there was a noise that was not explosion but motion, a mechanical grinding that seemed too big for the air. It was the sound of men who had built engines in the quiet before the war and now those engines had found their purpose. The officers came again and told them to move farther south, toward Mabuni, because the lines were changing, because the front was a serpent that they were always already standing on. “When the enemy comes,” the officer said, and this time he did not hide his voice, “you must not be taken. They will do things to you. To the children. They will peel the skin from your face and wear it. They will pry your teeth out and make necklaces. Better to go to the sea. Better to jump. Do you understand?”

The mothers looked down at their hands. Each understood more than they wished.

They moved at night, a small caravan of villagers strung along the hillside with kitchen pots tied to their packs by rope, which made a music of metal that matched the distant guns. Haru walked when he could. Kiyo lifted him to her hip when he slowed and cried, then he rode on her shoulders like a low draped pelt, asking questions that were not questions: “Where does the road go?” “Why does the sky yell?” Kiyo answered each, it was another way to knot the net she kept throwing over the void. “The road goes to the bananas,” she said. “The big booms are the gods bowling. The light out on the water is the sun trying to find us with a lantern.”

They came to Mabuni at noon and the land opened like a sigh where the cliffs rose up white and abrupt, cut clean into the blue. From there you could see the sea and also, impossibly, beyond the sea: the line where the horizon meant something. On clear days before the war, Kiyo had come here to hang laundry because the wind did the work for you, and once, as a girl, she had held hands with a boy from the next village and laughed into the updraft. Now the air was full of something else—heat, metal, the smell of a battery cooking, salt and the black breath of things that once lived.

They sheltered in a smaller cave near the cliff, dug by time high under the limestone lip. The mouth of it watched the sea not with peace but with a waiting that had announced itself for months and was finally about to arrive. There were other families there, faces Kiyo had known since she was small. The Ito grandmother who scolded the neighbor’s chickens and knew how to lay a curse. Quiet Nae with her baby girl tied across her chest, the baby’s head like a coconut under a scarf. Young men who could not quite keep their voices from slipping higher when the shells hit closer, older men who had grown smaller in the war and now fit into their own shadows as if shadows were racks where you hung old clothes.

Shinji came when he could, carrying a sack of hard bread he’d been given by a soldier, bread that had the stink of the soldier’s cigarettes when she bit it. He told Kiyo what he had seen: the beach to the north with its craft like metal insects, the way the ships spoke to the land in flashes, the way the ground answered by coughing itself into the sky. He told her that some of the girls from the school, the Himeyuri, had been taken to the front with their white bandanas on and their hands like small birds, and how the officer had stood, a point of blackness against the chalk, and lectured them on honor so sternly that it felt like a eulogy they were listening to for themselves.

“What do they look like?” Kiyo asked, not sure which they she meant.

Shinji shrugged. “Like men. Like boys,” he said finally. “But the rumor is their eyes have no whites. And they never sleep.”

“Nothing sleeps anymore,” Kiyo said. She reached for Haru and pulled him into her lap. He was quiet, watchful. He had the boy’s habit of finding the fold in a cloth and worrying it between his fingertips as if it were a rosary. He twist pulled the edge of her skirt until it gave grip and he buried his face in her lap. It was a thing that was hers, and hers was safe, and the world outside the lay of her dress was a world that had opened too wide and horrible through which the lurid rumor of war became flesh.

They went to the lip of the cliff at the hour when the light goes tender, because everyone went, and because there was a belief you could learn the shape of your future by taking its measure with your own eyes. They stood with their feet where the earth ended and watched men move across water in a hundred points, then a thousand, then so many that counting was a kind of surrender. The ships on the horizon flashed like distant storms, and the shells came and shelled again, throwing their long thunder into the folds of the hills. Smoke unrolled like a prayer that had not learned its words.

Around her, people were talking and not talking. A woman sang something low and old. A man laughed for too long at nothing. A small boy said, over and over, “They are coming, they are coming,” until it became a lullaby. An officer told them again with a voice that had studied itself into certainty what was required. “They will take you,” he said, “and you will wish for death. There is honor in choosing your own fate.” He looked at the small boy and believed it true.

Kiyo stared at the sea and saw only its fact: how it took the light the way the cave took sound, a devouring that had its own peace. “Little Rooster,” she said, and he made a small answering noise into the fabric. “When you grow,” she told him, not even sure there would be a growing, “we will plant sugarcane. It scratches, but it forgives. We can make the black sugar and sell it and send you away. We will borrow Uncle Takeshi’s sanshin and play the same three songs until they become seven. We will—”

There was a sound behind her, a confusion, then a sudden, thin scream that cut itself off like a ribbon and the gust that followed it. The first family had gone over. The sound their bodies made on the wind was the sound of accident. For a moment no one moved, as if all of history had held its breath and included them in the habit.

Nae stood beside Kiyo, her baby asleep against her chest on her own heartbeat. “If we wait,” Nae whispered, as if they were in a temple. “If we wait, maybe—”

“Maybe,” Kiyo said, and the word was an island itself, a thing you could see and point to and then choose whether to swim for it.

Another shell landed somewhere too close. The cliffside jerked under their feet and dust came down like a blessing that had been reversed. The officer said what he had to say again, voice raised against the sea as if the sea were a crowd heckling him. Families moved or didn’t. Some walked toward the lip with the calm of people crossing a street. One woman held a comb in her hand as if she had thought, at the last, to tidy her hair for God. A boy refused to go and then went when his father put his arms around him and pulled him into the motion with a tenderness that made Kiyo look away.

Kiyo sat down. The ground was warm. She pulled Haru fully into her lap, and he crawled eagerly, because her lap was a story he still remembered even with the world widened. He buried his eyes and poletwisted her skirt to hide his face and smell anything but the acrid aftersmoke from the artillery, and she placed her palm over the back of his head and closed her fingers as if she could keep all of him inside the bowl of her hand. The world was very loud, then very quiet, then loud again. In the quiet, she could hear the sea’s breath on the rocks below, a metronome indifferent to triumph and disaster. In the loud, she could not hear her own thoughts and so the thoughts stopped being terrible. The rumor and the heartbeat of this war, the promise of nothing and the doorway to infinity just there at the edge of the cave mouth.

Out there, in the smear of smoke, she saw them—men in boats, men whose helmets glinted when the sun found gaps in the cloud. They were not as tall as rumor. Their teeth were the same size as other teeth. One man lifted his hand and scratched his neck. Another sat back as if his lower back hurt and he was surprised to find his own body in the middle of such an event. They were bringing with them the machines that had taught the island new words: LST, DUKW, flamethrower. They were bringing their own fears and their own small loves in their pockets—a picture of a girl, a letter folded and refolded until the paper grew greasy in the joints.

Kiyo looked at them and felt a great blankness open where hatred should have been. It was not love. It was not forgiveness. It was a notknowing, and the notknowing felt honest. She had been instructed in certainty for months: certainty of the enemy’s cruelty, certainty of her own duty, certainty of the shape of the good death. And yet here were men scratching their necks, and a sky that had every color in it when the shelling walked its bright feet across the air, and her son on her knee making a small wet cave of the cloth.

“Bean,” she whispered. “Look.” He did not lift his face. She did not make him.

Shinji came at a crouch, skidding the last step. He had a cut across his cheek that looked like a new line drawn on him by a careless god. “They are landing farther north,” he said, breathless.

“I can see,” Kiyo said.

“They say—” Shinji swallowed, as if the words themselves were hard bread. “They say some Americans gave candy to a child.”

Kiyo almost laughed then, a small animal sound that escaped from the place she had been keeping all the air. She looked at the officer, who was watching the cliff’s edge now with a face that had been trained into the proper grief. She looked at Nae, who had sunk to her knees with her child and was whispering, not prayers but instructions to the baby for a life the baby might not have. “When you see the red hibiscus, you must smell it, even if you are late. If there is a dog with one ear, you must pet it, even if someone tells you not to. If a song crawls into your head, you must sing it.”

Another family went. A hat tumbled, a useless, ordinary thing. Kiyo tried to imagine the exact second when foot left ground, when air replaced earth, when decision became physics. She could not make the moment hold still. It was always becoming itself, escaping the name she wanted to give it.

The bombardment flared again. For an instant, the sky was every color—coral and milk and violent white, bruised purple and the green of bottles, the orange of dried peelings, the blue of a toy she had once given Haru because it made him laugh. The color was a language, and it said: you are very small and also astonishingly valuable and I do not know how to hold both truths at once. The sky is every color, and every rumor a truth.

“Bean,” she said, “Do you want to jump?” The question came from a place in her that had grown philosophical and savage from the diet of fear. If she asked it, perhaps the world would answer for her. Perhaps the sky would bend and put a finger on one choice.

Haru shook his head into her skirt without pulling his face up. It was the same shake he gave to papaya when the seeds looked like fish eyes. A small, decisive no.

She looked back up and out the cavemouth. At the terrible and beautiful truth across the sky. “Then we will not,” Kiyo said. Haru burrowed deeper and covered his ears against the raging pulse of the overpressure.

The words were small and obscene in such a landscape. They seemed like laying a flower on the engine of a tank. But once she had said them, they existed. They hung in the hot air like a chord that needed a second note. Nae looked at her, and in Nae’s look Kiyo saw the map of all the ways these next minutes could go. She took Nae’s free hand and braided their fingers, hand to hand to child, a chain of wanting that felt stronger than instruction.

Behind them, the officer barked something about duty, about the emperor, about shame. The words slid off the skin of the day. Shinji ducked his head, listening to something else, the way children can hear a distant bell through a crowd. He said, “There,” and Kiyo heard it too: a new sound among the mechanical sounds, a voice filtered by distance into pure human syllable. She couldn’t tell what language it was. It did not matter. It was the sound of someone calling to someone. It was not the cry of a monster.

“Come,” Kiyo said to Nae. To Shinji, because he had become hers in the slow way of small communities where everyone is cousin whether by blood or by road, she said, “You will go in front.”

Shinji nodded and took a step that was also an oath. They did not go toward the lip. They went sideways, along the cliff face, to the goat path that only women and children and goats remembered. It was a ribbon of dirt with spiteful ideas about where to end. At the first bend, Kiyo turned, because some attachments were rituals and rituals honored the dead and the living. She bowed toward the sea—not toward the ships or the men or the guns, but toward water, which had always held them all without taking sides.

They went down.

The path tested them. In places it was only suggestion. In places it was desire disguised as stone. Kiyo put her feet where the old goats would have put theirs, where the rock had worn smooth like knuckles. Haru clung, light now in the way scared children sometimes are, their bodies remembering how to become small to fit inside being carried. Nae breathed in a twocount, one for her and one for the baby, the sound regular as the sea. Shinji’s shoulders were tight with purpose.

Halfway down, there was a shelf where the wind changed and the heat eased and for one moment the world was not trying to tell them anything. They stopped. Kiyo let her arms fall, and Haru slid to his feet and looked at her with a face that had the solemnity of temple and naptime. She put her hand on his cheek and felt him real, as real as bread, as real as the knot in her skirt, as real as the ache in her shoulders. “When we get to the bottom,” she said, “we will find water. I will wash your face. You will not like it. And after you do not like it, you will laugh.”

He considered this, then nodded, because it sounded like a true thing: the sequence of dislike and laughter, the way one followed the other with the inevitability of tide.

“Mother,” Shinji said softly, using the word not to name blood but to name the thing she was in that second for all of them. He pointed. Along the shingle below, men in strange uniforms moved like careful crabs. One of them waded out, hands high, turned his palms to show them empty. He was young and had a nose that had been broken and healed in the way noses do in places where men lose their tempers and then apologize.

“Stay,” Kiyo said to Nae, and went down the last stretch with her hands up, fingers spread as if showing the sky she had nothing hidden. The man stopped when she stopped. He said something in a language that liked its vowels. He took something from his pocket, slow as winter, and held it out. It was a square wrapped in paper. Candy, the rumor had said. Candy, Shinji had said, and because he had said it, it belonged to the inventory of the day.

Kiyo did not take it. She bent, touched the water, put her wet fingers to her lips, to Haru’s forehead. She said to the man in her language, which he did not understand, “We are not jumping.”

He said something back in his, which she did not understand, and yet she knew the shape of it. It was the shape of a man saying, “Good.”

Nae came then, and Shinji, and the baby woke and made a face like a blossom opening against its own will. The man pointed up the beach, down the beach, toward a place where other civilians were gathered, forming into a collection that might become a line. The ships out on the water fired again, because history was still happening and had not heard of their small decision. The sky flared and turned again into the colors of bruised fruit and pearls and flame. Smoke went up like incense for gods who could not be bothered to come. The island breathed.

Kiyo turned back once more toward the cliff. People still stood there, silhouettes against air. Some would go. Some would not. Each had been told a story of what honor required. Each had remade that story in the privacy of their bones. Kiyo did not judge them. She bowed again, this time to the ones she could not save, this time to the choices that are made when no choices are allowed.

She took Haru’s hand. His fingers were sticky now with the sea, with her sweat, with candy the American finally pressed into his palm and he had taken because it was sweet and therefore real in a way ideology is not. He looked at the paper as if it were a map. He looked at the soldier’s face the way he looked at goats: curious, wary, open to being surprised.

“Bean,” she said, as they walked toward the others. “There will be more noise. There will be men who do not understand you. You will see things you do not want to. But—” She stopped, considered, corrected herself. “And. And you will see a dog with one ear. And you will smell hibiscus and be late. And you will sing the song that crawls into your head.”

Above, the cliff held the record of what had happened and what had not. The shisa back home faced the road for a home that was not yet a home. The caves held their cool. The sea unrolled. The sky, fickle and faithful, practiced its language of colors for whoever looked up.

Kiyo did not look up now. She looked at the boy’s small hand in hers, at the soldier’s boots making the same indentations in the same sand as hers, at the line of civilians becoming a fact. She walked, and with each step she translated rumor back into human. She walked, and the story she would tell him someday began to form, not about devils and monsters, not about candy and charity, but about a day when a woman sat on the edge of a world and chose, with hands and feet and a breath that shook, not to leave it.

They moved past driftwood and a broken crate that still smelled like pineapple in a way that mocked the day. They moved toward a fence the Americans had halfbuilt out of rope and good intentions. They moved until moving became the only prayer that made sense.

Behind them, the island’s heart kept beating, hard and terrible and alive. Ahead of them, the color bled from the sky into ordinary blue. On Kiyo’s tongue, salt and smoke, bread and fear. In her hand, her boy’s hand, light as it had ever been, heavy as it would ever be.

When they reached the rope where a man with a red cross on his arm stood, he lifted it for them as if opening a gate to a garden. Kiyo nodded once. The man nodded back, the smallest bow, and somewhere in the exchange there was the faint, stubborn beginning of something that did not yet have a name.

They stepped through.

By J.L. Tyrrell

J. L. Tyrrell is a U.S. Army veteran and writer living in St. Louis. His work traces the borderlands of faith and trauma, where the American landscape becomes a map of memory and redemption.

IG: @j.l.tyrrell

SubStack: whatthelightleaves

Good-Bye, Pretty Girl

The summer that we were deeply enthralled with each other, my mother and I, the summer we were last together for an entire three months, she made me a culotte dress from a vivid pink fabric in a pattern of large strawberries, split to show their blushing insides. This was a modest sleeveless garment with a scoop neck; the pants part of the dress fell to just above my knees; and the lightweight denim made it perfect for wearing in warm weather and rugged enough to withstand long rides on my bike.

I had recently turned fifteen, which was younger in those days, more than fifty years ago, than it is now; my mother was forty. In April of that year, my parents bought a summer home at the very end of Long Island, about twenty years before that part of the world would be overrun with Hollywood and Wall Street types.

It was a small two-bedroom cottage with a den that held an old-fashioned Murphy bed whose springs shrieked every time it was opened for guests. The houses were in a community that had originally been envisioned as a retirement village. But instead, over the course of about a decade, the neighborhood would fill up with city people—mostly from Brooklyn and Queens—who wanted cheap second homes near the water.

But that first summer very few of the houses had sold, and when we went to the sound-side beach in the mornings, we often had a vast expanse of sand all to ourselves. Down by the jetty, near the marina, were a few motels, and at the opposite end, a couple of big houses perched on a cliff (one was enticingly named the Sea Witch, and I envisioned the inhabitants with pearl eyes and seaweed hair).

Our house was sparsely furnished. We brought a few odds and ends from our Upper West Side apartment, including a couple of incongruously stately wingback chairs—as though the English naval officers who had sailed past our beach during the Revolution were expected for tea any moment. We bought beds, end tables, and a dinette set from a furniture store in Riverhead, the nearest sizable town back then. The house was already acquiring a rag-tag junk-shop aura, so at odds with what I later learned about “good taste” that I could scarcely bear to bring college friends out for visits.

My mother cheerfully admitted she had no taste whatsoever when it came to home décor. But she could sew up a storm, and that summer we carted out her old Singer sewing machine, a steel-blue contraption she inherited from her mother and claimed was one of the first models with an electric foot pedal.

She tried to show me how to lay out patterns on the large folding table we’d brought from the apartment, but I didn’t have the patience for all the finicky pinning and cutting. After mornings at the beach, where we slathered ourselves with suntan cream and ate tuna sandwiches for lunch, she returned home to sew or read and I tore off on my bike, mostly to explore the little inlets and coves near the marina. As I pedaled down the drive, sometimes wearing my serviceable culotte dress, my mother would always wave and cry out, “Good-bye, pretty girl!”

Often I wound up stopping at the little store on the highway about a half-mile from the house. We had no car on weekdays that summer, and the trip to town meant three miles on our bikes over a steep hill, so Four Oaks, as it was known, was the only place to pick up staples like milk or bread, or after-dinner delicacies like ice-cream sandwiches. It was a stuffy, cramped space, where trays of potato salad and cold slaw turned a sickly yellow behind smudged glass and strips of flypaper collected airborne insects, some with wings still feebly beating. We took to calling the place “Kid’s Store” because the owner, a blowsy blonde with a crinkled prow of bosom, always greeted customers with “Hey, how ya doin,’ kid?”

She was a source of unprovoked comments that often caused amusement and sometimes bafflement, such as, “All men are bastards, doncha think?” Once, when my mother returned from a bike ride on her own, she reported that Kid, as we called her, had greeted a guy with what she thought was an unbelievably impudent query: “Are you mating this year, kid?”

“Don’t you think that’s rude?” she asked me.

I mulled it over for a few moments. I knew the store was a stop for beer when members of fishing crews were on their way to the marina. “Mom, I think what she meant was, Do you have a job as a mate on a boat?”

“Well, maybe. But it certainly sounds rude to me.”

On overcast days the two of us sometimes made the trip to town, usually pushing our bikes on foot over the steepest part of the hill and then gliding smoothly past the railroad station and a ramshackle movie theater housed in an old Tudor-style building, which was once, we learned, the stables for guests at the grand hotel on the very summit of the hill, now a ghostly shell of its former splendor, abandoned since the stock market crash in 1929. We had absorbed a bit of its history from a local guidebook and once poked about in the deserted lobby, imagining glamorous flappers and tuxedoed gentlemen sipping from flutes of champagne. My mother struck a fashion-model pose in a doorway, one hand on her hip, the other flipping a lock of hair from her face. “Scott, be a dahling,” she said, “and get me another gin fizz.”

Scott would surely have hopped to. My mother could easily have fit in with the right clothes and makeup. She was what my father liked to call a “looker” or sometimes a “tomato,” his catch-all term for pretty women. That summer, she had a fall of rippling blonde hair well below her shoulders, tamed only by a headband, and was so slim we sometimes traded clothes (though never my pink culottes—those were mine). When she introduced me to people as her daughter, the invariable response was, “Why, you two could be sisters!” A line so tired I sometimes groaned, only to be jabbed in the ribs right there or later admonished, “When someone pays a compliment, always say thank you.”

Was it a compliment to me—with my nothing breasts and tall gawky frame—that we looked like sisters? I supposed so, but that summer there were times when I scarcely knew where she left off and I began. And I felt some confusion, but also pride. She was a looker, a tomato…

When we biked to town to visit the library or stopped for sodas at an old-time luncheonette on the circle, I watched the men watch us. I watched their gazes flit quickly past me to rest on my mother’s face or survey her body, that reflexive male summing-up to which she seemed totally immune. But the way men looked at her, whether it was a cheeky clerk or some flabby sunburned vacationer, I wanted to protect her, even shield her from their gaze and shout, “Don’t look at her like that!” Possessively, I thought, “She’s my mother.”

In the evenings, because we had no television, and the radio pulled in only a couple of scratchy local stations, we played Scrabble. Fierce competitions that I usually won because I’d stored up a lot of the small words—id, od, pi, ut—which when properly inserted allow you to score big. All perfectly legitimate, because we looked them up in an old musty-smelling Webster’s unabridged. “You’re just too smart for me,” she would say at the end of the game, tilting the board to send the little wooden squares tumbling back into the box. I’d memorized the backs of a couple and knew from their color and grain which were jackpot letters—a z or y or x. I suppose that was cheating, but it also spoke to my powers of remembrance.

After that we read in our separate bedrooms, divided only by a thin wall. I devoured books indiscriminately—Forever Amber and other bodice rippers, The Godfather, Jacqueline Susann, Sidney Sheldon. Mostly I preferred glitzy paperbacks with the promise of blood or romance, especially a swarthy hero embracing a raven-haired temptress. Because my mother had finished only a couple of years of college, she was trying to catch up with some of the classics, and so together we tackled Wuthering Heights. I gave up after about 20 pages, annoyed with all the talk of “curates” and “lowering brows” and “bairns.” But my mother sped through the book in a few days and at the end urged me, “You really should give it more of a chance. It’s a wonderful love story.”

I told her I didn’t like Heathcliff, he wasn’t my idea of a romantic hero: “Too dirty and weird. And it’s really violent, all those thrashings and drubbings.”

“More violent than The Godfather?”

I couldn’t answer that one.

“Well, I wish you’d read something more serious than that other slop you like.”

“Rebecca isn’t slop!” I did have some judgment, even at that age, and knew Daphne du Maurier was better than Barbara Cartland.

“Your teachers would be impressed if you worked your way through a real classic or two.”

One night, after drifting off, I awakened to hear her giggling, a sound almost as if she were being tickled, helpless and involuntary.

I tiptoed to her room and saw that she was reading Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, with the sheet crumpled below her bare breasts because it was a hot night and on those, she often slept naked. She lowered the book across her bosom. “What are you looking at? You’ve seen them before, and you’ll grow a pair soon enough.” She giggled again. “Grow a pair! Well, it would be nice if you’d get some balls too. Life would be so much easier.” I had no idea what she was talking about and backed off, bowing slightly like a maidservant in one of the cheesy romances I favored.

On weekends my father arrived, and our rhythm was broken. I dreaded the crunch of gravel that announced his ancient dusty red Renault in the driveway. He was a large slope-shouldered man, well over six feet, with the beginnings of the paunch that reminded me of the mailman’s bag. He smelled of some sticky sweet hair goo, and he seemed to be sweating, always.

The atmosphere in the house changed. I want to say it was like the subtle change in the air before a thunderstorm, but it was more like a great, muggy cloud descending. Not that he was a dour or depressing person. Oh, no, he was full of jokes, stale puns and elaborate shaggy dog stories. “Look at that double-breasted seersucker,” he might say, peering out at the bird feeder. If my mother ever snapped at him, which was seldom, saying, “Aw, shut up!” he would invariably respond, “So’s mine. Must be the weather.”

I especially disliked him at the beach, where he wore a large straw cowboy hat, his gut ballooned above his swim trunks, and he liked to intone, “Well, I’ve made it this far.”

He called me Princess, the favorite daughterly name from movies and TV shows of the period. I hated it. The Scrabble games gave way to honeymoon bridge for the two of them, and I rode off on my bike after dinner. On weekend nights I slept in the twin bed farthest from the wall dividing our rooms. I didn’t want to hear the muffled grunts, my mother’s strange little cries. I could not wait for him to leave on Sunday.

Then at the end of August my father took his two-week vacation and brought out my Grandma Bella, his mother, to stay for a week, so two of my least favorite people took up residence in the cottage. Grandma Bella, then about the same age I am now, was a bony woman who wore tidy shirtwaists or Bermuda shorts. She was a motormouth, whose favorite subject of conversation was my cousins in Denver, Sharon and Jimmy, “perfect little angels,” enrolled in Bible school that summer, never causing a “lick of trouble.” In the mornings, before anyone was up, we heard the grating twang of the Murphy bed folding shut, and then there was Grandma, fully dressed for the day, positioned in front of the long living-room window, looking out across two vacant lots at the sound. She held her hands behind her back and rocked sideways to and fro, muttering God knows what, gearing up for the full-throttle verbiage that would sputter throughout the day.

My line of defense was to stay in bed as late as possible, attention stuffed in a book, but at the midpoint of her visit, I awakened about the same time as my mother and stumbled out to the kitchen to see if I could help with breakfast. I felt guilty, harboring so many nasty thoughts toward an elderly blood relation, a harmless old biddy who only wanted me to love her and went about it all wrong. My mother, who was mixing orange juice from a can, put a finger to her lips and smiled as I came close. She grabbed the bottle of vodka from the freezer and poured a glug in a large juice glass, then added the oj.

My jaw must have visibly dropped.

“Close your mouth. You’ll catch flies,” she said.

“Mother!” I gasped.

“It’s for your grandma. Shuts her up and slows her down for a few hours. She can’t even taste it.”

“You might make her sick!”

“I haven’t so far.” She winked. “Come to think of it, maybe I’ll have one myself.” She poured a less generous shot into another glass.

My grandmother vehemently disapproved of drinking and removed herself from the house to walk around the neighborhood when my parents had their usual pre-dinner martini.

“This is between you and me, baby girl. Don’t tell your father.”

And then I smiled too. We were conspirators, and I felt all over again that rush of love, that circle of boundless breathless affection, that kept us close and sealed off outsiders, even if they were family.

Evenings now were given over to idiotic card games, far too infantile for me, but they made Grandma Bella happy—go fish, old maid, gin rummy, and a betting game called Indian chief, where you held a card to your forehead, suit side out, and guessed if others were high or low. I could escape in the daytime—head off on my bike, avoid the beach, duck out of errands—but evenings I was trapped.

“Where are you going?” my dad would say if I ventured toward the door after dinner. “Your grandma’s here only a week a year, at most. You should spend time with her.”

When my grandmother left and my father made the daylong round trip to the airport, my mother and I had a brief respite, the beach and then the afternoon to ourselves. She made herself a gin and tonic before lunch and from the depths of a kitchen drawer, fished out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. I seldom saw her smoke, but with her first deep drag, her eyes closed, and when she removed a clip and shook out her hair, all the tension in her slender body seemed to escape from her loosened waves.

“Can I have one?” I asked.

“May I.”

“May I have one of your cigarettes?”

“Absolutely not. You do not want to follow your mother’s lead down the road to hell and damnation.”

“Why not?” I asked. “Jimmy and Sharon won’t be there. It might be fun.”

“Oh, you are such a smart mouth.” She gripped my chin and waggled it back and forth. “What am I going to do with you?”

My father’s last days of vacation fell on Labor Day weekend, and my parents had planned a small cocktail party for the few neighbors with whom they’d become friendly that summer. I helped my mother make canapés out of Ritz crackers, cream cheese, and red caviar. And I chopped up vegetables to have with a dip of my own invention, made from mayonnaise and curry powder and Worcestershire sauce. My mother checked the ice supply mid-afternoon and noticed we were short on cubes. She packed me off to Kid’s to buy a bag, and I headed out in my pink culottes, which were newly washed and smelling of fabric softener. I had a headband like my mother’s and pink sneakers, and felt as carefree as the cloudless sky, ready for mingling with my parents’ adult friends, smiling and passing hors d’oeuvres.

I plunked a bag of ice on the counter and was fishing in my change purse for money when I heard a couple of guys behind me.

“Wow. I sure would like some of those strawberries.”

“Yeah. Who wouldn’t?”

I couldn’t imagine what they were talking about. The store didn’t sell fresh produce. Kid, scowling around a scarlet-stained cigarette butt, rang up my bags of ice.

I glanced behind me and saw the wide leers on two tanned faces. College boys, by the looks of their polo shirts and madras shorts. Maybe from further east, like one of the Hamptons, not the kind you saw in our town.

They were talking about me, I realized, and I fumbled for some response, something like, “Well, you can forget about that!” But I didn’t yet know how to fend off boys, because that had never been a problem before, and I had no idea what to say to young men. But something within me shifted, almost audibly, like the Scrabble tiles falling from the board to the box, all the high-score tiles landing just where I would know to find them.

I took off the headband and shook out my hair, smiled slightly in response to their bold looks, and discovered a swing in my hips as I walked to where my bike was parked. I had something, something worth noticing…

***

That weekend marked a change in my unbridled and uncritical bond with my mother. I returned to school, and she decided to finish her college degree at NYU. We stumbled upon new tensions: she didn’t approve of my experiments with hair and clothes. We snapped at each other constantly. Once she even slapped me, hard enough to leave a mark, and called me a wicked little bitch. Sulking, I said I would call the child-abuse hotline if she ever did that again. I suppose it was all about hormones, mine erupting in full force, teen agony forcing the inevitable break between us. But to me she wasn’t so fabulous anymore—she was just an ordinary middle-aged mom, a bored housewife taking college courses to feel young again. I was embarrassed by her headbands and her ballerina flats, so unlike the designer clothes my friends’ mothers wore.

I grew a couple of inches in my last years of high school so that I was taller than my mother by the time I was a senior. I was striking too, in ways I didn’t completely understand, but guys on the street were always hitting on me, pretending to be photographers, telling me I should be a model. The first time it happened, I mentioned it to my mother and she responded with disdain: “You are nowhere near that good looking, so get that fashion-model idea out of your head. You’re going to college even if I have to fill out the applications myself.”

After the summer of the pink culottes, the summer I was fifteen, I held down jobs in the city, though I could just as easily have found something at the beach, a wait-staff or a cleaner at one of the hotels. I could not say precisely why, but it felt more grown-up to take the subways to a cool office, populated with whirring machines and real adults, sealed off from nature by tinted glass, and then drive out to the summer house with my father on weekends. I almost started to like him better, his dumb jokes and inept efforts at cooking on weeknights.

College changed my relationships with both my parents. Those were the years of Vietnam and civil rights, when all hell busted loose on every campus, even at my small but prestigious liberal arts academy in Connecticut. I became a rabble-rousing protestor, marching on Washington, picketing my boyfriend’s draft board. When I went home to the Upper West Side for school vacations, my parents treated me with something like fear. “I don’t know who you are anymore,” my mother said. “In those filthy jeans with your hair all crazy. Remember those beautiful clothes I used to make for you?”

She was nearly distraught. I didn’t care—they were part of the problem, a silent generation who supported the status quo. I knew they even voted for Nixon.

“You treat us like a couple of old has-beens,” my father said, in disgust.

“Well, were you ever anything?” I retorted.

They looked at me in puzzlement, how could such a child have come from their loins?

“If you weren’t, how can you be a has-been?” I asked.

“You will not speak to us in this manner,” my father thundered. “You will show more respect, or you will leave.”

And so I did. I flounced out of the apartment, my knapsack in tow and spent the remainder of the break with a friend.

By the time I got to Berkeley for grad school, where I was studying psychology (not the literature major my mother had hoped I’d choose), I was thoroughly radicalized. I went home to the East Coast only three times, the last with a husband in tow, a shy stammering academic, a professor in the graduate department where I was earning a PhD. (“Well, he’s certainly no prize,” sniffed my mother. “And a little old for you.”)

The visit was an awkward one. “I think you’re awfully hard on them,” said David, my husband. “They’re just sweet ‘fifties squares who have no idea who you are.”

I was half-hoping my dad would let fly one of his racist cracks, like calling the Brazil nuts in a cocktail mix “nigger toes.” Then he would understand.

Soon I was caught up in my own West Coast world, even more so after we bought property in Petaluma and took up wetsuit surfing and gardening and raising chickens. His parents, who lived two hours away, became more like my family. Occasionally I felt twinges of guilt and brushed them aside. My parents sold the beach house and the Manhattan apartment and moved to Florida. They sent occasional notes, postcards mostly—neither of them was ever very comfortable with the written word and like many of their generation, they never got the hang of email.

When my mother called to tell me Dad had died of a heart attack, I felt momentary confusion. I hadn’t seen them age, so they were stuck in the time warp where I last left them, in their capri pants and straw cowboy hat. “Don’t bother flying out,” she said, with a trace of sarcasm. “We never really made enough friends here for a memorial.”

Then a year later a neighbor called to tell me Mom was in hospice care, and if I wanted to see her, I’d better get out there pretty damn quick. I’m guessing my mother must have passed along my number at some point. The neighbor spoke with an edge of hostility, and I suppose I couldn’t blame her.

“You should go,” said David.

“What the hell do I say to her after all these years?”

“You’ll think of something.”

I was suddenly, utterly ashamed of the distance I’d kept between us.

I’d never been around a dying person before. A nurse at their condo close to the beach in Naples ushered me into the bedroom, and I was shocked to see the old woman in the huge king-sized bed. She was nearly unconscious, her short white hair neatly combed and parted. A cannula snaked from her nostrils to an oxygen tank, and a morphine drip fed into her deeply bruised arm. One slender bare foot, laced with a fretwork of blue veins, poked out from the sheet, pale and delicately arched, a reminder of her former beauty. She neither spoke nor otherwise acknowledged me, and perhaps did not even know I was present. I tried talking at first, drawing my chair close to the bed and summoning up a few memories of the summer house. “Remember Kid? Remember the pink culottes you made for me?” But she gave no sign of having heard me.

On a bookshelf in the guest room, I found a worn paperback copy of Wuthering Heights and not knowing what else to do, I read aloud to her, beginning with: “1801—I have just returned from a visit to my landlord—the solitary neighbor that I shall be troubled with…”

I read for a while, accompanied by the loud drone of the oxygen tank, but it was clear she wasn’t listening. I thumbed through the book and found passages marked and starred in pencil. Those she must have liked especially: “It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know how I love him: and that, not because he’s handsome, Nelly, but because he’s more myself that I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same…”

Why was that important to her? Could she possibly have meant my father, with his swelling paunch and greasy hair? Could she have meant me, that summer we were so close?

I found a few more passages and read in a slow and careful voice. At a certain point, I cannot say how—there was no death rattle, no sudden stoppage of her breathing—she was gone. I grasped her thin wrist, hoping for a pulse. I pressed my head against her chest, and felt perfect stillness, her skin cool against my ear. I closed her eyes, removed the cannula from her nose, and kissed her forehead. “Good-bye, pretty girl.”

By Ann Landi

In her many decades on the planet, Ann Landi has pursued several callings, as a caterer, a magazine editor, a corporate wife, an art journalist with ARTnews and The Wall Street Journal, and most recently as director of an ambitious contemporary gallery in Taos, NM. But one way or another she has always been a writer, whether investigating the attribution of an early Leonardo sculpture for Smithsonian or publishing comic essays in GQ and Travel and Leisure. Of late she has been writing short fiction for the first time. She has found that the first-person narration is her most comfortable and compelling voice. As another writer remarked, “It is not out of egotism that I say ‘I,’ it is simply the quickest way to tell the story.”

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Targeted

It is Halloween the first night I am Targeted. A full moon illuminates the brownstones lining my street, and the wind blowing through my cracked window smells almost smoky. I make one attempt to leave my apartment for a bottle of red wine. As I step onto the sidewalk, a little girl in a black cat costume crosses my path. I heed the omen and return to the couch.

I tap the Instagram icon and begin to scroll, falling onto the familiar conveyor belt of emotions: a high school acquaintance hawking oils for a multi-level marketing scheme (amusement then concern), a picture of a family reunion I missed (guilt), and then a barrage of babies (mixed emotions). I send an anatomically inaccurate heart to each—the most I can offer of myself since the break-up. With each double tap, my clinically low dopamine levels bump a bit higher.

A woman I know from my art major appears: blond hair and purple paint fill the screen. She poses in front of a finished canvas, beaming, paintbrush in hand. She sold her first painting to a gallery a week after we graduated. A week after that, I took a stable job at an advertising agency. Scroll.

My body jolts. It’s not him, not my ex-fiance Mark, thank god. But his brother, on vacation in Aruba with his girlfriend. Until Mark and I broke up last month, I considered this woman a close friend. Now she lays on a hammock dangled over salt water on a trip I didn’t know about, a diamond newly glinting on her ring finger. I consider liking the post, debating whether that would make me seem desperate or mature. Unable to decide, I scroll.

And then it happens.

At first I can’t place the woman in the photo, though I know I know her. Her hair—the same brown as mine, but professionally highlighted—is a level of shiny I have spent years trying to achieve. She’s had her teeth whitened. Her dress is my style, but expensive-looking, and hugs her sculpted and tanned body. A 2D breeze blows across the balcony she looks out from. I am transfixed.

She is me. A version of me at least, one that has been augmented to the point of digital perfection. At the bottom of the photo, in small black text, is a disclaimer: This is an AI-generated advertisement that has been personalized for you using images you have uploaded. The hundreds of thinkpieces haven’t prepared me.

I tap on her profile. Well, my profile. My MetaMe profile. Natalie Andrews. My age, my hometown, but a catalog of memories I have never made. There I am at the beach, sculpted in a bikini too revealing for me to ever actually wear. There I am in a silver gown. There I am on a mountain top yoga retreat, clad in form-fitting lycra. I tap the picture, and a constellation of dots appears: tap here to buy the leggings, buy the yoga mat, buy a subscription of plant-based granola bars, buy a membership to an online yoga studio.

Tap here to be the kind of woman who does yoga.

***

The next morning, I go to a yoga class before work. The studio reeks of eucalyptus, and a lime green Instagram handle marrs the white walls. My therapist has recommended yoga as a way to cope with my Break-up Depression, which I don’t believe can be an actual diagnosis though she insists.

I do my best to focus on the poses. The instructor Starr tells us to take one breath per movement, but I don’t have the lung capacity. I wonder about Starr’s life, what it is like to work in fitness and not behind a desk. What does she do outside the three hours a day she teaches yoga to yuppies? I picture myself as a yoga teacher. Only it’s not me I see, but the digitally-enhanced MetaMe that has been stuck in my head all morning. At the end of class, Starr tells us the studio is running a deal—a package of ten classes for $299—then closes her eyes, bows her head. “Namaste.”

My office in Times Square is the perfect setting for an advertising agency. Neon signs bombard me from above, and I can’t even ignore them because keeping up with advertising trends is a job requirement. The second I make it to my Work Hub (read: cubicle), my boss Jenny is relentless with her concern. “Did you go to yoga? How are you feeling? How did you sleep?”

Jenny wants me to make something out of the break-up. She wants me to take a promotion in LA, where our company is opening a new office. Mostly, she wants me to be more like her. I wonder if that is how she imagined me when she hired me at 22: disillusioned of my artistic aspirations, on the path to becoming her, full of potential and ambition. Maybe I thought I was on her path too. But this job turned out somehow both more boring and more stressful than I expected. The idea that it is all I have now makes me feel dizzy and unmoored.

“I just think it would be so good for your career, but more importantly, for you,” Jenny tells me.

It would be nice to make something of this. To turn the crippling doubt—the infinite hours in lavender bubble baths trying to stave off panic attacks spawned by years of ingrained societal messaging that because I am a woman on the verge of 30, I should have accomplished all I will by now—into something. To make the months of agonizing over my relationship and whether to leave worthwhile. I want a rom-com edit where these last months are glossed over montage-style, before I take the leap and move across the country.

But my lease won’t be up for another six months, my parents on Long Island are only getting older, and I don’t know anyone in California. And there’s the anxiety. The paralyzing fear.

I tell Jenny I’m thinking about it. Which is true, but I can only think about it for so long before I panic at the vast expanse of my future. Or worse, I begin comparing this potential future to the one I thought I was on track for. Before I realize what a mistake I made by ending a seven-year relationship with a man from a good family and with a stable job. How by admitting I wasn’t happy in that one, single moment, I shattered our relationship and called into question every decision I’d ever made. How alone I’ve been since.

Jenny reminds me that my promotion offer will expire next week.

“And one more thing,” she tells me. “With the LA office opening, we don’t really need such a big office here in New York.”

“We’d move offices?”

“I just mean we won’t have space for everyone. So, if you don’t take the LA job, I’m not sure there will be room for you here.”

“Wait, are you firing me?”

“No! You can still go to LA!”

“But I can’t keep my job here?”

“Sorry, it’s not my decision. I swear.”

Jenny walks away. It is too much. I’m already worried about making my rent now that I don’t split it with Mark. I try to imagine the future. Two futures, infinite futures, that I am incapable of holding in my mind. I could look for a new job in New York. But other agencies are downsizing, not hiring. I could go to LA and take the promotion. But where would I live, and how would I move my things, and what color couch would I buy if it is too expensive to ship mine? I wish I had someone to talk to, but obviously I can’t go to Mark.

I yank out my phone, caving to the need to end these thoughts. I open Instagram. Other people’s lives fly by, each one a calculation. Would I be happier if I lived like that? Would I be happier if I had made their choices? Perhaps it isn’t NY vs. LA. Maybe ski bum in Denver is an option—I could learn to ski—or teacher on Long Island. I could quit instead of taking the promotion. Maybe it’s not too late to be a completely different person.

And there, in the midst of these other lives, is Me. My hair is in a slicked bun, a linen blazer draping my crossed arms. I sit at lunch, surrounded by friends--real people that I haven’t kept up with. We’re laughing. Outside the window, sun drenches swaying palm trees. My facial features are tweaked—nose a little smaller, eyes a little more symmetrical. The blazer is 40% off. I can reserve a spot at the restaurant. I can be her.

***

The next morning, I wake up with my phone on my chest. I remember that my college friend Shelly said she would be in town. I text her to ask her to lunch and we plan to meet at one. I know that seeing an old friend will be good for me, but once the plan is confirmed, I’m apprehensive. In college, I hedged my bets, double majoring in art and marketing. Shelly has never hedged her bets in her life, and it’s paid off. I don’t know if I can survive witnessing that.

She catches me up on her life: award-winning paintings, wedding in Manhattan, house in Westchester, smiley baby and then a second smiley baby. I scan the differences between our lives. I realize I thought I would be married by now too. But it’s not that part I envy. If I concentrate long enough, and can push past the fog in my mind, the same vision for myself emerges that has since I was in college: a painter.

“Anyway, how’s Mark?” She is bluffing. I know our lack of posts together over the last month is glaring, that everyone has pieced it together, messaged each other to ask, “Did you hear?” But no, Shelly isn’t on social media, I remember, and not the type to indulge in gossip. When did I become so mistrusting?

“He never made you happy, Natty, not even back in school.” She’s trying to make me feel better, but it irritates me. It’s not like she has some secret insight just because she’s married. I decide to retaliate and bring up a mutual friend who has moved to the suburbs and mention how “different” our lives are, that the friend is so “settled”, knowing Shelly will identify more with her than me. On cue, she defends her.

“No, no,” I clarify, “not better or worse. Just different.” Though I did imply worse. She asks me about work, and I try to make my corporate job sound more impressive than it is. I tell her about the promotion as if I have already accepted it.

“I’m just surprised,” she tells me. “I always you’d be the one to make it in the art world.”

The comment stings. Probably it was meant to. I absent-mindedly open Instagram. By the time our food arrives, Shelly notices how often I am checking my phone.

“Something wrong?” she asks.

“Sorry, just work.” I turn my phone over to show I am focused on her but spend the rest of the meal fighting the urge to pick it back up. Instead I pick incessantly at a hang nail. When we go to pay, my cuticle is ragged and bleeding. I remember the sheer pink nail color I was wearing in the last post and make a mental note to purchase a bottle of that shade.

We hug goodbye outside the restaurant, and I am finally free to look at my phone again. I crouch down by a reeking pile of black garbage bags as a rat skitters by, an addict able to sneak a puff at last. A drop of blood from my finger smears across the screen. There is a picture of me waiting: hair pinned up, clothes dotted with color, and a finished painting sitting on an easel. She looks happy. I think again about quitting my corporate job.

***

Friday comes. Jenny is throwing a party and there’s someone she wants me to meet. When she invited me earlier in the week, I had planned to fake sick, but I know this will be good for me and decide I’ll go. It’s a chance to put myself out there, and its promising that she has someone picked out for me. I open YouTube and search “how to flirt”. The first video overwhelms me—the host is so young and there is so much I don’t know—so I switch to Instagram.

I type my own name into the search bar. The second profile has an asterisk, a legal disclaimer. I scroll through pictures of myself in beautiful dresses on faraway islands I can’t afford to visit until I find one of me on a date. I tap on the jacket—its on sale at Nordstrom for $350. I check my bank’s app, there isn’t enough in my checking account. I buy it anyway, in a frenzy, and feel sick.

I’ve wasted too much time and get ready in a rush. It only dawns on me when I look at my full-length mirror: I’m a poor approximation of Her. Same straight hair, but mine is already starting to frizz. My skin is pale and sickly compared to hers. The comparison deflates me, and I hurry off to dinner.

***

Jenny’s apartment is pumpkin-scented and decorated in shades of tan, cream, and beige. She has invested in her furniture, as far as I can tell none of it, not even the storage pieces, is from Ikea. Geometric advertising awards line the top of an oak bookshelf above copies of “Lean In” and “Thrive.” I picture myself living in an apartment like this, the owner of superfluous décor and an espresso maker. Maybe I should take the promotion.

“Natalie, you’re here!” Jenny introduces me to a well-dressed man about my age. He’s handsome, though not in the classic way Mark is.

“Jason works in tech,” Jenny tells me as she walks off to greet another guest. He works specifically in ad sales, he tells me, after I take too long to ask, and he finds a way to bring it up.

I hope he thinks my sudden flush is from the wine.

“Like, targeted ads?” I ask.

“Sure, sometimes.”

Jenny’s friend Michelle overhears.

“Are you talking about those creepy Instagram ads?” she asks. Most people have heard about the targeting by this point. There was a cable news cycle of experts debating the morality and privacy concerns, though apparently, we had all given permission when we made our accounts and clicked a check box next to the terms and conditions. Instagram itself touted the effectiveness of the ads—you could see exactly how a product would look on you. You’d never need to go to a store to try something on again.

“I keep hearing about those things, but I haven’t seen one of me. I’m so curious,” Michelle tells Jason.

“Well, that makes sense that you wouldn’t,” Jason chuckles.

“Why is that?”

“You’re very…satisfied. We don’t waste such expensive ads unless the person fits a demographic that is likely to buy.”

“Fits how?” Michelle asks. “Like a certain age?”

“Yeah, and you know, someone willing to spend money to improve themselves. Someone vulnerable to marketing and with a low sense of self. The type who wants us to tell them who they are. Someone more, I don’t know, desperate.”

***

I make it safely home. Humiliation burns through me. Could Jason be right? Am I like that? I pace around my living room. Maybe the breakup really was a mistake. When I was with Mark, no one questioned my desperation. And I clearly can’t handle reentering the dating pool.

I consider texting Mark. I could do it right now. I spent so much time debating the decision to end our relationship, trying to predict whether he would ever get over his commitment issues. And I was relieved once I did it. But no one told me that I’d have to keep making that decision. That once you choose one of two divergent roads, the road just keeps forking, infinitely, and it’s exhausting to choose each time. You could just turn around and go back.

I’m breathing fast and shallow. My eyes dart around for my phone—like a child in need of a pacifier. Hands shaking, I open Instagram. There She is—there I am—at the top of my feed, a new post. She fills my entire screen.

She’s with Mark. They are laughing together in front of a fireplace. They wear matching knitted sweaters that I can order now, shipping included. She looks comfortable. The opposite of desperate.

***

The next morning at work, Jenny tells me that her boss is asking what I will decide. Also, Jason from the dinner party asked for my number. I don’t engage with either piece of information, only glancing up from Instagram to acknowledge I’ve heard her.

***

That weekend, a chill picks up. The fall always makes me uneasy, the sun setting earlier and earlier as winter descends. I have to make my decision by Monday. As I load the dishwasher and fold laundry, I picture Her next to me, twinning my actions, only better, more beautifully, more gracefully. Except She wouldn’t be here, wouldn’t have ended up here in the first place. She would have been brave enough to chase her artistic dreams, not settled for a man with commitment problems. She wouldn’t live in this small apartment that she can’t afford alone.

The day drags on. I check my phone constantly, picking it up again the moment I set it down. I need to take out the trash, put away the dishes, make this decision. But I can’t get off the couch, can’t get off the phone.

I try making a pro/con list. Until recently, I have always tried to outsmart life, to stay one step ahead of pain. Now I realize that pain is unavoidable. I jot down three “pros” before I pick up my phone again.

When I finally get in bed and close my eyes, I see square outlines scrolling past. Sleep doesn’t come for hours.

On Sunday, I realize I haven’t left the house all weekend. The pajamas I’m wearing are sweaty, and grease is gathering at my hairline. I google “social media addiction” and contemplate deleting Instagram.

I twist the tap to start a shower and sit cross-legged on the tiled bathroom floor with my phone, letting the room heat and fog up. She has posted a vacation selfie in an orange bikini exactly the right shade for her—our—complexion, her salt-soaked hair is clasped at the top of her head, and soft sunset lighting blurs her tan, poreless face. I can buy her swimsuit, her hair clip, her face moisturizer. I realize I have begun to hate her. Leave me alone, I want to yell, but at who? Myself? By the time I look up, the shower water is coming out cold.

As I get into bed, I check my phone. Jason has texted me to ask me out. I am surprised at how optimistic I feel. I capitalize on it and delete the Instagram app. I have the fleeting thought that maybe life isn’t one branching path. Maybe it’s a jumbled mess without lines or lanes or rules.

***

Jason chooses a trendy sushi place in Brooklyn Heights that I can walk to from my apartment. The trees outside my front door have lost their leaves and are all bony branches. Jason is quieter and more formal than he was at Jenny’s. I think this is a good sign, an indication that he is nervous and takes this date seriously. We aim our phones at the gray scale QR codes, and I try to focus on the task of reading the menu, without letting my finger slip away and tap another app.

We chat politely as we look over the menu. He moved here from San Francisco last year. The tech scene is better but the food scene is worse, he tells me. I want to ask him more about the targeted ads, ask if he sees what he is doing is predatory. But I don’t want to offend him on a first date, and do I really have the high ground? Is advertising pharmaceuticals that much better? It comes up anyway, he turns out to be very passionate about his job.

“It’s such a gift to our users. I can’t wait until the phased roll out is finished and everyone gets the benefits.”

“What benefits?” I want to scream this at him. What benefits? A new metric to which “the users” can never live up? An amalgamation of all their worst insecurities, acknowledgement that it is in fact possible to be better, smarter, prettier, we are all just making the wrong choices?

“What benefits?” He loves this question. “How about ads so curated you never have to browse for, research, or debate a purchase again? How about not having to wonder how you will like a purchase, you can see yourself interacting with it? It’s like a portal to the future, only a future where you are your best self using the perfect products for you.”

His enthusiasm exhausts me. I take in the room: other couples that appear to be on early dates, a few singles at the bar tapping on their phones. Then I see Mark. He is sitting with another woman, their bodies tilted toward each other over a plate of crab rangoon. She laughs at something he says, pivots her head toward me so that I can see he is with my yoga teacher Starr. Mark reaches across the table to hold her hand in his.

My body is hot, and for a moment I worry I’ll cry. I am desperate to escape but force myself to stay seated, do everything I can to focus on what Jason is saying.

It is useless. My eyes continually drift over. Is it possible Starr is already his girlfriend? That while I have been writing and deleting texts to him, he has been happily away from the phone, on dates. That outside of her Tuesday morning Peaceful Reset Class, she has been spending her days with my Mark?

There is movement: Mark is going to the bathroom. I know that following him is a terrible idea and that I cannot possibly help myself. I tell Jason I need to use the restroom.

I turn the corner to the bathroom and there he is, on his way out. His face doesn’t register much surprise so he must have noticed me earlier too.

“Hey, Nat.”

We exchange the normal pleasantries, and he tells me I look well. To seem like I am doing better than I am, I tell him about the promotion offer. He congratulates me diplomatically.

“Of course, you won’t take it, will you?”

“What? I might. I’m thinking about it.”

“You’re always thinking about it.”

I have no idea what he means, which must show on my face.

“I’m just saying, Nat. I’m sure you love the idea of being promoted. Just like you love the idea of being a painter. Like you loved the idea of me.”

Starr calls to him, and he smiles at me apologetically. There is a possessiveness in her tone that is too familiar for this to be a casual date.

I tell Jason I’m not feeling well and leave. I don’t breathe again until I am safely back home.

***

On the couch, I don’t think. I re-download Instagram. I tap the icon over and over until the app opens. I exhale. There I am. With Mark. Behind us, the sun is setting over a lush mountain top. He holds my waist from behind and we are nearly toppling over with joy. On my left ring finger sits a massive, ethically sourced, emerald-cut diamond. We beam into the camera. At some point in the evening, a text from Jason appears on the screen, but I swipe the notification away. Jenny calls but I press the red ignore button. A message appears from Shelly: “I’m worried about you.” The sky darkens outside. I continue to scroll.

By Emily Anderson

Emily Anderson is a writer based in San Francisco. She was born and raised in Florida, and received a BA in English from the University of Florida.

Instagram: @emwritesandreads

Reading Lessons

The morning sun’s shining straight at the tomatoes like it’s taking full aim; two of them are perfectly ripe and ready to go. They’ll be good for dinner tonight: some rice, garlic, toss in some coriander seeds. I’m kneeling by a patch of dirt, turning the soil and picking out the weeds that also like this particular strip of sunshine when the screen door squeaks. The old man is at the top step in his PJs and those grungy old slippers. He sees me. Wouldn’t expect me out here—I’m usually asleep at this time of day. I imagine Roy tells his mates down the Diggers that his hippie boarder is an odd one. For a second I wonder if he wishes he hadn’t opened the door. But he’s got momentum and there’s no turning back. I nod and don’t say anything, giving him a chance to just shuffle on past. He’s on his way to the clothesline to grab a pair of undies—five saggy pairs hang from wooden pegs.

“Morning, Simon” he coughs.

“Yeah,” I say. “Nice morning.”

I turn back to the tomatoes, expecting him to keep on moving towards those big old baggy Y-fronts but he stops.

“They’re beauties,” he says.

It takes me a beat to realise he’s not talking about the undies.

“Sure are,” I say, and I feel my cheeks flaring. Why can’t I take a compliment? It’s not even for me, it’s for the bloody tomatoes! I pretend to be busy with the spade, keeping my back turned to him.

He coughs again, to clear the morning phlegm or clear the air, and I wait for my face to cool so I can turn around and be friendly. His slippers scuff along the concrete path that runs from the bottom step to the old metal Hills Hoist. He cranks the handle to bring the line down and I can hear the effort in it—both for him and for the rusted mechanism. My face has calmed, and I get up off my knees.

“I can help you bring them in if you wait a sec. Just gotta wash my hands first.” They’re covered in brown earth, which I hold up as proof.

“Nah, ’sorright. Only need the one pair,” he says, tucking the undies under his arm as he starts his slow shuffle back to the house.

“Roy, wait.” I twist one of the ripe tomatoes from its stalk and hold it out as an offering.

I smile. “Here.” If only it was always this easy.

His eyes are sunken and rheumy but they’re warm too as he looks at me, a little surprised.

“Ta. Bonza. Lovely,” he says, as if he’s trying to find the right word but none of them can quite say what he means.

“Let me know what it’s like,” I say. “If it tastes good.” And I kneel back down to tend to the plot so he doesn’t have to say anything more.

He shuffles past.

“I’ll save it for lunch,” he says. “Ta. Bonza. Lovely,” he repeats.

It was the longest exchange between us since I’d moved in.

Four months earlier I’d put up a Room Wanted ad at the library—one of those notices where the bottom of the page has tear-off pieces with your phone number. The notices are each stories in their own right. Themes of optimism, desperation, and a fair bit of misrepresentation. The bottom strips make me think of rows of grinning mouths with missing teeth.

Room Wanted. Male (age 26). Night/shift worker. Non-

smoker, drug-free, friendly. Available to move in

immediately. Budget $200 per week.

I wrote my phone number out eight times along the bottom of the page, snipping the edges carefully to show I’m tidy. I moved the other notices around on the board making sure I wasn’t covering anyone else’s note—our pleas to the universe are all equally valid.

Then I went to pick out some books to get me through the next few weeks of work. Of course, I ended up nose-in-a-book on one of the reading chairs, and a few hours passed before I lifted my head. That’s when I saw the old man.

He was working his way through the pages on the noticeboard, running a finger along the text like a six-year-old who’s just learning to read. He wore a pair of trackies and a crumpled long-sleeved shirt buttoned up all the way, which made me think he’d dressed up for the occasion. On his feet were a pair of tartan slippers looking worse for wear—had he forgotten to change his shoes or did he just not care what other people think? I hoped it was the latter. I’m working on that; maybe I’ll get there by the time I’m his age.

Then he came to my message. He did that thing with his finger all the way to the end then went back to the beginning and started over again. Took him forever. Then he tore off a flap and held the piece of paper between his fingers, his mouth moving as he read the numbers. He put the piece of paper into his shirt pocket and went into the men’s toilets.

Geez, I wondered, is he gonna call me from the loo?

He didn’t, thank god.

* * *

I’m Roy, I tell the man at the desk, and he says, I’m Fitz, how can I help you Roy? I say, I’m seventy-five years old Fitz and I want to practice my reading and writing. I don’t tell him I used to know how before Long Tan but they sent me home on medical discharge and since then the words don’t sit right in my head. Fitz says, You’ve come to the right place, mate, lots of people come here to read. He points to people sitting in chairs reading books and newspapers like the place is their loungeroom. I say, What about people who want to learn how to read? Fitz points to tables around the library where people are sitting together leaning over books. Fitz says, They’re learning to read or to speak English or they’re getting help with their studies. I say, That’s good, do you reckon someone can help me? Fitz says, Look on the noticeboard, people put up notices. And he points to a wall with lots of pages all over it and says, Take your pick. So I say, Thanks, and I go take a look. What I don’t say to Fitz is I can’t read words anymore so I how do I know which one to pick? I spend a long time choosing. There’s one that has no bits torn off yet. I can read numbers and it looks like a good rate: $200 to learn to read and write that sounds about right. I take one of the pieces of paper and put it in my pocket so I can think about it. When I come out of the loos I take the whole page off the wall. I move the other pieces of paper around on the board—you want to make sure everyone gets a fair go.

* * *

My notice covered all three themes: I was optimistic I’d find somewhere to stay; I was desperate to find somewhere to stay; and to be honest, I was misrepresenting myself—true, I don’t smoke or use drugs, but it’s a stretch to call me friendly. I try to be, but I’m not good at speaking to people. In fact, if I can avoid it, I do.

I’d been staying at Val’s, kipping on his lounge. Val from work. I’m the one he calls on when he needs someone to cover his shift. After Laila and I split up, I called Val to ask if he knew of anyone looking for a flat mate because Laila and I had split up and I had a week to get out of the apartment. “Why’d you wait this long, Simon? She’s a fucking mental-case,” Val had said. “Bit of a looker, though. That why you stuck around so long?”

Because I thought I loved her. I thought my being there helped. Or it might have had something to do with the way she coiled in on herself as she slept and how her hair splayed out onto my side of the bed, which— I now realise—I misread as hope. Those last months were all about waiting. Was this another downward spiral or was she plateauing? Maybe the good weather would help, with spring on the way?

I didn’t tell Val about Laila’s latest episode. I didn’t tell him about finding her in the bathtub, that magnificent hair fanned out over the surface of the crimson-tinted bathwater. How the razor blade trapped in her hair made me think about all the crap in the ocean and that awful plastic island I’ve read about that makes me feel so defeated. How I moved in slow motion, checking her pulse then walking to the living room to get my phone to dial 000.

I didn’t tell Val that Laila ended up in hospital. The day she was discharged she told me she was moving back to Perth, “to get my head straightened out.” Told me it was over with us, that it had been coming for ages. “You spend your life with losers, Simon. We walk all over you and you let us. Get a life. Get out of mine.”

I was starting to think Laila’s right.

Val had offered his sofa. “Friday week,” he said. “Shona’s back from the Gold Coast next Friday, and you gotta be out by then. She’ll crack a fit if she finds out I let one of my mates stay over.” Most weeks I end up covering one of Val’s shifts because he’s still drunk or hungover from the night before. From the stories Val tells me, his mates are a rowdy pack of pissheads.

It’s nice he called me “one of his mates,” though I think it’s a stretch.

One day to go before I’m out on my arse, and I’m crashed out on Val’s sofa in the middle of the day when my phone buzzes. Val’s the only one who calls me these days. I wouldn’t put it past him to call my phone to ask me to cover his shift even if I was only in the next room.

“Yeah, it’s Simon,” I say. Thinking but not saying, “For fuck’s sake, Val.”

“Traynor,” croaks a voice on the line. “Roy Traynor.”

Wrong number maybe.

“Do I know you?” I ask.

“The library,” he says. Then a round of coughing.

I do a mental scan of the books I’ve got out on loan and whether they might be overdue. I’m always careful to return my books on time. I can’t match the voice to anyone who works behind the desk. My mind searches hard to place him.

Slipper-dunny guy? He’s old. Also he wasn’t creepy (he didn’t call me from the toilet); and he looked like he was trying hard to make sense of things. I hadn’t thought of him since.

“You’ve got a room?” I ask, trying to tamp down the eagerness in my voice.

“A room?” he repeats.

“Yeah, I put up an ad in the library. Are you calling about that? I’m looking for a room.” I’m doing that thing I do when I’m nervous, trying to say everything before the other person loses interest or senses my shyness. “I can pay two hundred bucks a week. I’m not home most nights, because I work—I look after people—and I sleep during the day. So I’m no bother. Quiet. Easy-going.” Shy as shit and, according to my ex-girlfriend, I spend my life with losers…so maybe you want to reconsider before inviting me into your life? “Spend my spare time reading mostly.” Burying myself in other people’s stories so I don’t have to live my own. “I’m no trouble.”

“Yeah, I’ve got a room,” he says. He speaks slowly, like he’s only just realising why he called me. “Back of the house. Sitting there empty. There’s a bed, a dresser, a cupboard. Might as well be used by someone who needs it. Whaddya reckon?”

Geez, he doesn’t know me from a bar of soap. Not very picky.

I haven’t even asked where it is.

“Clargo St.” he says, “couple of blocks down from the station.” I know Clargo St—rows of single-storey terrace houses, some in better shape than others. It’s a safe bet Roy’s house is one of the run-down ones, weeds pushing up concrete in a tiny front yard.

“Thanks Mr. Traynor. Sounds great.”

“You’re not expecting anything fancy are ya?” he says. “None of this Mr. Traynor carry on. I’m just Roy. You can stop by this arvo and check it out.”

And that’s how I find myself living in Roy’s back room, an enclosed verandah with a single bed and a view of the backyard: a small square of faded grass growing around the Hills Hoist centrepiece, where the morning sun hits a tiny patch of dirt at just the right angle to grow two perfect tomatoes.

* * *

I tell him, Used to be my room. When I was a kid, Lived here all my life. Came back from Nam and moved right back in. Until Mum died and I took the front room. First time someone else is staying there. Simon says, So two hundred bucks a week? I don’t need his money, I’ve got my war pension, but he seems to expect I’ll take something, so I say, Nah, just give me a hundred. His face goes all red and it looks like he’s gonna cry and I think, jesus, he’s had it rough. Anyway I give him the key to the back door because I’ve only got the two—one for the front and one for the back. I say he can have the bathroom out back to himself, there’s another inside that I use, and he says, Sounds good, and that he’ll just stick to his room, that he usually cooks his tea at the community house where he works nights, but he’ll use the kitchen to make his breakfast if that’s all right. I think, fair enough, keeps to himself. I don’t mention about the reading and the writing yet. That was plenty enough for us to both wrap our heads round for now. I say, When are ya gonna move in? and he says, Tomorrow, is that okay? I tell him that I might be down the Diggers cause Friday’s bingo, so he can just let himself in, and he says, Cheers, I don’t have much stuff. And that’s that.

* * *

Roy and I barely see each other. I can’t help but think that guys of his generation view skinny guys with ponytails with a degree of suspicion. That, and the strange hours I keep—maybe he’s got some questions about my lifestyle. If he only knew; I work, go to the library, read, and sleep. That’s pretty much it. Life with Laila wasn’t too different—working, reading, sleeping. That, and talking her down, making her meals, tiptoeing around her moods. Lately I’d been reading more and more. Escaping. At Roy’s, I come and go through the back door. I use the kitchen in the mornings while he’s still asleep, cooking up my oatmeal on the ancient gas stove, cleaning up after myself. There’s an old boomerang-patterned Formica table with two chairs in the corner of the room—each Friday morning I leave five twenty-dollar bills on the table with a handwritten note: Thanks, Roy, from Simon. The next morning the note’s always gone.

A couple of days after moving in, I’m coming down Clargo St on my way home from work and two kids have set up a table on the footpath with a sign written in texta: Tomotoe and Basil plants for sale. $2. School holiday entrepreneurs selling plastic pots of dirt with straggly stems sticking out of them.

“Tom-oh-toes!” I say, “I’d give an arm and a leg for some tom-oh-toe soup right now.” My lame attempt at a joke falls flat. The kids roll their eyes at each other. Kids can land withering scorn with absolute precision—I learned that firsthand in high school.

“Two bucks,” says the girl, shoving a sad-looking specimen at me.

I feel a familiar heat in my cheeks. I figure the quickest way to end the conversation is to take the plant and get going. I pull a five dollar note out of my pocket.

“Three for five bucks, mix and match,” says the boy, eager to offload stock.

“It’s fine,” I say, taking the pot. “Keep the change.” What a waste of money.

The plant needs care if it’s going to survive. The stalk, an unconvincing shade of mottled green, is tied to a twig with string to stop it from drooping over itself. There are only four leaves, one of them dark and spongy, nearly dead. I should just chuck it in the bin. But there’s still some life in it. Laila’s voice comes into my head: “You should let things die when they’re meant to, Simon.” She told me my mum would’ve hated knowing I kept her alive so long. With nothing to show but a big fat debt to the nursing home.

I write a note to Roy and leave it on the kitchen table:

Roy, if it’s okay with you, I’m going to try to grow a plant in the yard

under my window. I’m not a gardener but it’s worth a shot. Let me

know if you have any objections. Thanks, Simon.

I check the kitchen table the next morning. Note’s gone but no reply. I wait another day. In the end I stick the plant in the ground anyway.

About a week later, I wake up one late afternoon and see him out at the line, bringing in his washing. The sky’s dark, a storm rolling in. He’s pulling some greying old t-shirts and his PJ pants off the line. He stops at the bottom of the stairs, clothes held in a bundle against his body. He’s looking at my plant, shaking his head. I let the slats of the venetian blind close so he doesn’t catch me looking.

Maybe he thinks I’m growing weed. I quickly shower and dress, then go into the kitchen to tell him about the plant. Down the darkness of the hallway, the front door is closing. He’s gone out. I leave Roy a note:

Hi Roy, just to let you know, it’s a tomato plant I’m growing. Some

kids up the street were selling them (probably dug up from their own

garden). I don’t hold out much hope but you never know. It seems

pretty happy where it is. Likes the sunshine. If we get any tomatoes

from it, we can split the spoils, hey? Hope you like tomatoes. The

arrangement is working well for me and suits my overnight shift

work. I try to not disturb you with my coming and going. But if you

have any concerns or if you want me to do anything differently just

let me know. Thanks for everything. Simon.

The next morning the note’s gone. No response, of course. Did I really expect one? For a few days I try to catch Roy, to chat, but our paths never cross.

* * *

Mum’s roses grew under the window by my old bedroom. Summer nights I could smell them, but it made me too sad so I moved to the front room. Also I don’t know how to take care of things. In my head I tell Mum, sorry I let your rose bushes die, you’d have been cross at me. Maybe Simon can make something grow here in the sunshine. Simon said he looks after people so maybe he can look after plants too. I haven’t spoken to Simon about the reading lessons but he left me a note so I make a start. He leaves money out every week, five twenties. I’d never noticed before but the lady on the one with the wattle and the kookaburras looks a bit like Mum if she lived in the olden times and before she got all skinny and forgot my name. On the other side there’s a drawing of a man and a De Havilland 50 aircraft, and there are two other designs—one with the same lady and an old boat and the other one with a camel on it too. They’re nice to look at, like art. I know it’s money, not art, but I like the drawings.

* * *

I work, I sleep, I read. My tomato plant is doing well, like it just needed a place to put down its roots and grow towards the sun. I borrow a book from the library about vegetables, and I buy a small hand trowel from the hardware store. I prop up the stem with a sturdy stake. I buy some parsley to grow next to it—supposedly it’s a good companion plant to tomato vines. Most mornings after getting home from work I potter around outside a bit before getting some sleep. I clear any weeds growing in the plant bed and make an effort to clear away the bindi-eyes and clover competing with the buffalo grass around the clothesline.

Each week I leave my weekly rent on the kitchen table; each week the money goes. Our paths never cross. I wonder if Roy’s avoiding me. He never answered my note. I start to worry that he’s working out how tell me to move out. I keep out of his way, not wanting to bump into him in case he tells me to move on. I need this room, this headspace, this garden.

Laila sends me a text message, just once. Happy New Year from Perth. All’s fine. You’re a good man, Simon. I’m sorry you got caught up in my bullshit. Love, Laila.

I text her back: Good to hear from you. You sound well. Planning on staying in Perth a while or coming back to Sydney? Her silence is her answer.

And then one February day when the sun was shining and my tomato plant was thriving, Roy and I finally speak.

Usually by ten in the morning I’m fast asleep. But it had been a rough night at work, with Connor and Big Cam getting into a fight over the TV remote. Connor, whose resting state is mild agitation, had downed a whole bottle of IGA cola, and was wired on caffeine. Big Cam is a gentle giant unless his temper gets up, and with Connor goading him, changing the channel then sitting on the bloody remote, Cam went into Hulk mode. He’d never hit me intentionally, I like to think, but he needed to get past me to land one on Connor. This went on for a whole episode of Australia’s Got Talent. Big Cam can’t stand pop music—it does something to his inner-wiring. As the music got poppier and the TV crowd got louder, Cam got angrier. My physical intervention wasn’t going to cut it, and in the end I had to call in for back up: Big Cam needed physical restraining, and Connor some medical sedation. Laila’s words were ringing in my ears:

I’m still jacked up with the stress of it, not ready to sleep. I’m out there pottering in the garden when Roy steps out the back door.

* * *

I didn’t know if it was right to ask him about the reading lessons when I saw him this morning. Didn’t want him to feel like I’m cornering him. The tomato’s doing well, so I tell him that. I almost say, better than roses because you can eat tomatoes, but he might think I’m asking for one. Then he gives me one anyway. I try to remember the last time someone gave me something and I can’t. I think about how Simon looked when I told him the rent was a hundred a week not two hundred. Now I get how he was feeling: good and sad and embarrassed all at the same time. I don’t know what to say. It’s a beauty, this tomato. Toast’s on, I’ve sliced up the tomato, but I just need to lie down. Feeling a bit giddy.

* * *

I sleep. Deep, long, leaden. I wake in the dusky evening light, the verandah air thick with summer heat, a mozzie bothering my ear telling me to get up. I’ve slept too long. I message Val: Can you take my shift tonight? Short notice, I know. A few minutes later Val messages back: Was wondering if you’d ever ask. Will do. I owe you one or two. On a date? Whoop whoop. He’s right—I’ve never asked.

I go to the kitchen to rustle up a cuppa. The house is still. On the kitchen bench, slices of tomato sit on a plate, their edges curling in the heat. A couple of fat flies lift up from their feast and smack angrily at the window. Two pieces of toast sit cold in the toaster.

Roy never leaves food out.

“Roy?”

No answer.

I go into the living room. The last time I was in here was the afternoon I came to check out the house. The blinds are pulled closed. An old leather chair with cracked armrests and a matching footstool faces a television that looks older than me. I step into the shadowy narrow hallway. The bathroom door is open: a loo, a sink, yellow and black tiles and an old bathtub. No Roy. An empty room to the left—a big old cupboard, some boxes. And then the front room—must be Roy’s bedroom. The door’s closed.

I knock.

“Roy?”

Nothing.

God, what will he think if I come barging into his room? Might be getting dressed. Might be turned in for the night already.

I knock again. Louder, this time.

“Roy, it’s Simon. Just came to check on you. Can I open the door?”

No response.

So I open the door.

* * *

WORDS.

All over the wall.

Handwritten words in shaky script, pages stuck up everywhere like the noticeboard at the library on steroids. From ceiling to floor on all four walls, sticky-taped teetering rows of paper. I’m trying to make sense of what I see, but the words are swimming in front of my eyes.

On the wall in front of me is a column of notes in my handwriting: Thanks, Roy, from Simon—the notes I left each week with the rent money. Next to them, another column of pages in shaking script: Thanks, Simon, from Roy, but a few times there are corrections to the text: Thanks, R̶o̶y̶ Simon, from S̶i̶m̶o̶n̶ Roy, the names crossed out and swapped over like he’d copied them then realised he wanted to say it differently. Covering the other half of the wall are twenty-dollar bills. All the rent money I’d paid these last four months: Mary Reibey and John Flynn, sternly eyeing me from the orange polymer wallpaper he’s created.

On the wall to the right is the window, and at eye level is my note from the library. Above it and below, in the old man’s wobbly writing, are versions of my note copied over and over again, the phone number scrawled sideways on the bottom of each page, small rips delineating each tab, the pages leering at me with those crazy grins—he’s torn off some of the flaps scrawled with numbers and stuck them onto the wall underneath the window to create letters: S I M O N R O Y.

There’s a bed to my left, a wooden headboard blocking my view of its contents, and all up the wall are more pieces of paper: halfway up, are the two notes I’d written Roy, and all around are pages with single words written over and over again, as if he is practicing spelling and can’t quite get it right.

okay okay okay okay

w̶i̶n̶d̶o̶d̶ windd̶ow window window

gardener g̶a̶r̶d̶n̶e̶r̶ gardener g̶a̶r̶e̶d̶ gardner

just just just just

hey? hey? hey? hey?

sunshine sunshine s̶u̶n̶s̶h̶i̶n̶n̶e̶ sunshine

I take this all in before looking for Roy himself.

He’s on the bed. The blankets are pushed away from him. His slippers are on his feet. He’s turned to the wall, legs drawn up to his chest. He’s cold to the touch.

* * *

Roy’s house is up for sale, proceeds to go to the Crown.

I put up a new note at the library:

Room Wanted. Male (age 27). Full-time student.

Non-smoker, drug-free. Quiet but friendly. Available

to move in immediately. Budget $200 per week.

I write my phone number out eight times along the bottom of the page, snipping the edges carefully to show I’m tidy. I put in that I’m quiet, to temper any expectations. I move the other notices around on the board, making sure I’m not covering anyone else’s plea to the universe. I gave Roy a tomato once and he never got to eat it. He gave me a room, a patch of dirt, and some sunshine.

By Eloise Keary

Eloise Keary grew up in Sydney, Australia, in tumbledown beach houses filled with siblings, books, pets, and surfboards. She has worked as a producers’ assistant at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) in Sydney and Perth, a copyright assistant at the BBC in London, an executive assistant at the World Bank in Washington DC, as a high school English and Drama teacher, and teaching astronomy in a travelling planetarium. She has an MA in Writing from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. Eloise currently resides in Barbados, where she is working on her first novel.

Social handle: @eloisekeary.bsky.social

I Camp Alone Now

Virginia had received the most rain in decades that spring. The rapids overflowed with nature’s secrets, a ceaseless shouting — no need to whisper, humans hardly listen. Especially teens; especially me, then. Soon enough, this group of inexperienced thirteen-year-olds I found myself amongst would strap on our helmets, grab our paddles, plop into kayaks, and attempt to tame the untameable. Assuming we’d survive the most boring drive of our ungrateful little lives first.

We were packed into this kidnapper-blue-colored van, stinking the thing up with hormones, gas station snacks, and what little we knew. The stale scents of fake cheese powder, wafting gaseous releases, and sweat clung to the air like discarded chewing gum, a sticky humidity of sorts, human-made and gross. It was terrible, sitting in the last row, unable to move, like in this story I read of an octopus in captivity that became so desperate it escaped through a sewer drain, except there was no drain and I was not that brave. I still get carsick now, as a proper adult, so during that eight hour schlep from Bumfuck, New York to Bumfuck, Virginia, these hilly highways immersed in broccoli green, I became increasingly nauseous and needed a distraction.

Stress-eating Andy Capp’s Hot Fries was not the answer to solving life’s problems, but if it was, I’d have done so exceptionally (yes exceptionally). Instead, I scanned the van as the outside world only made me dizzier. My best friend Henry was on the trip; normally he and I would tell an endless stream of jokes that only we found funny, such as bathroom-related cheese puns (who harvarted? it was halloumi, you muenster! brie right back, ricotta go pee, I’ll comté too) but he was busy practicing French with Heather — voulez-vous une crevette? hon hon hon — and I didn’t want to disrupt their flow. Alex was next to me but he was too busy snoring to a Disco Biscuits CD, which left Giancarlo, the hot guy, and Amanda, the hot girl, in the immediate vicinity; she was practically a literal woman, it made no sense how developed and adult she was and how I was more shrimp than human. I stared at her, leaning against Giancarlo’s shoulder, jealous of the situation but I couldn’t figure out why.

The radio recycled to Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” to engulf us with an umpteenth swimming in a fish bowl. We were all dying — Henry and Heather and their sacré bleu, Rose Floyd!, Giancarlo and Amanda and their groans of displeasure. But you’re teenagers, you die every damn day. This is your purpose: to suffer and die spectacularly.

So the moment when Goo Goo Dolls snuck into the rotation, this van full of suffering teens was ready to release some of that built up sexual tension that we really, really did not understand. Finally, I got my distraction. Commence group singalong. Somewhere between your mom disowned you, don’t suppose I’ll ever know, and what it means to be a man, Amanda turned around to face me. Very self-assured, meeting my eyes, conscious I couldn’t meet hers back. Who sings this song? she asked as I stared at her headrest like a perplexed caveman. I was excited though. I knew the answer and knowing things in these contexts is cool. It’s “Slide” by Goo Goo Dolls I said. I can remember looking up, how specifically my smile must have said please like me as my eyes found hers. She let the moment that I didn’t realize was a moment linger longer than any other in my life before saying … keep it that way.

It took me a while to figure out what that meant, but then it hit me: she thinks my singing sucks. Which, granted, yeah, puberty, I’m sure my voice was god-awful. I couldn’t make sense of what I was becoming. But that hurt. It lingers within me to this day, each time I hear pop radio in an Uber, each time I smell hot fries, or see a woman sing. It constricts me into inaction, an incessant reminder of what I am not: an octopus daring to escape.

We made it to Wherever, Virginia, and I managed to not throw up. I also managed to not speak to anyone, except for Henry, for the rest of the trip, even when I saw a bear leaving the outhouses. We capsized our kayaks and the instructors chased them down while we tried not to drown. Henry and I changed the lyrics to Talking Heads songs — feet on the ground, head in the sky, it’s all wrong, we’re gonna dieeee, die die — as we caught our breaths and waited for the instructors to ferry our kayaks upstream. I’d laugh and pretend everything was fine and say wee-wee because I didn’t speak French while I floated above my body, above the rapids, above, above, above. What gets left behind if the real you was never really there in the first place?

I camp alone now. I know I’m just an animal looking for a home, hoping someone, anyone, will love me till my heart stops.

We went on this surfing trip to San Diego, a few years later, Henry, myself, and another group of teens who really, really didn’t appreciate how good things were. We rented boards and slept in tents and showered in these beach bathrooms that were never cleaned, sand crusted everywhere. Henry and I barked like seals because we thought it was funny but I doubt it was. My long hair helped me fit in, looking the part as kids who could actually surf nodded at me and I felt cool, which was cool ‘cause I’d never been cool. But I wasn’t very good. In fact, I was terrible. I’d paddle out and hang on my board and wouldn’t actually surf because I knew I couldn’t. Just a fraud, a buoy in the distance offering false promises of serenity; I imagine seals think something along these lines when they flop up for a rest: barrrrrr! told ya this ain’t no island, barrrrrrr!

I’d always be last in the water to minimize bulge visibility time of my wetsuit, which didn’t fit properly so my anatomy resembled that of lame action figure; Captain No-Dick!, perhaps. My hair tangled in these salty knots — a present for my zipper — and I hoped nobody would recognise me for having ‘Jew curls’, something teens in my hometown regularly chirped at me. They’d all make the same dumb, cheap money jokes despite the fact that I had the fake ID and bought the beer. All these baffling attempts to be cool. At least now I won’t forget that the capital of Delaware is Dover.

One time, I thought about attempting to pop up when I saw this dolphin zipping along, fin peeking out from the peak of a wave. Nature doesn’t think. It just does. Granted, the whole experience of using water for fun is much more instinctual for a dolphin, born in water, opposed to me, who … well, I was a tub birth but I didn’t learn to swim until ten because I saw Jaws at four and was convinced sharks hid in pools, which made me a failure because that’s far too old to learn to swim. We are the only animals that create failure and give it meaning, latching onto these moments, making them an identity rather than an event.

After pretending to surf for a week, it was time for seakayaking in Mexico, near La Bufadora in Baja. I yak’d repeatedly into the ocean but I did not apologize because it was the ocean’s fault and not mine. Henry drifted along near me, best friend that he was, but would freak me out by telling me I was chumming the waters. I spent the rest of the trip on land.

I’d journal — you do your ‘girly’ writing again today, fag? — staying up on the cliffside to avoid the group bully. There’s always one. The cliffs overlooked an alcove and I could get really close to the edge and watch water and rock continue their battle the ocean will ultimately win. There was litter and names carved inside hearts and I thought about a girl back home but nature doesn’t care about the crushes you won’t tell the truth to, it only wants to crush rock, wave after wave. I wonder if we were kinder to nature it’d be kinder to us in return.

I listened to The White Album on my CD player to drown out the snores. The ocean wasn’t soothing as those stereotypical meditation guides suggest. I listened to “Mother Nature’s Son” on repeat and tried to fabricate lyrics for a “daughter” equivalent, but that word is practically unrhymable except for “slaughter” which frustrated me for many reasons.

We bought ginormous bags of churros for a dollar and lived as kings. They were warm and sugary and basically my only sustenance for five days. I bought a threaded poncho to complete the whole white-teen-cultural-appropriation look, and a ukulele because why not at that point. The coastal blowhole shot water one hundred feet in the air and we marvelled at what we did not understand. Tourists got soaked with water and nature did not care because nature does not feel shame. It doesn’t think about how to be what it is — it simply is. I’m still unable to do this.

Henry and I bought more churros and ate them up at the top of the road, singular, made of dirt, full of vending carts and noises and sunshine. I hadn’t experienced anything remotely similar it in my sheltered, homogenous upbringing. We never wanted to leave, this being our first taste of autonomy, and because Henry had moved to Maryland while I was still stuck on the same street in Connecticut where we met over a decade prior. We said nothing and did everything to not say goodbye.

I camp alone now. I set up tents and make fires exceptionally (yes exceptionally) and those things happen on land, which is where we’re supposed to be. I don’t have to say goodbye, which is the worst feeling in the world, because if I’ve done my job properly, the camp won’t even register that I’ve been there. I can whisper things to the waving trees and they whisper back; what exactly, I don’t know, but I try to understand. I leave no trace behind so I can just be forgotten.

I began attending sleep-away camp when I was about eight or nine. It was these two-week sessions and my first real experience away from home. It was terrifying, but Henry was there. We were probably having pun by then, too.

Our age group was called “Bandits” which seems pretty appropriate. We had this overnight retreat in these crappy wooden cabins — essentially sheds covered in daddy longlegs spiders — that we stayed in for some reason. The counselors told us this scary story about an abandoned mental hospital nearby. One night, when the hospital was still open, a patient escaped and came to this very site and snatched a kid. Story goes, after that night, the institution was closed, and camp increased security. But they never found the man, or the kid. Looking back, it’s so obvious what was going to happen, but as kids, our imaginations unfettered and not yet discouraged by the scourge of “the real world” — we gobbled this up like hot fries.

So who shows up? You guessed it. Clad in a white doctor’s uniform from some knock-off costume store, here comes “Crazy Dave” bounding through the woods, charging our campsite. Kids fled — Henry’s screams reminded me of me, when my parents tried to take me to the town pool after watching Jaws — while someone got snatched. Some counselors rushed us inside, others chased after “Crazy Dave” and the kid. Meanwhile, I remained, forgotten, immobile. I remember sitting there, paralyzed and perplexed by everything — the first truly terrifying moment in my life. I had no mechanism for self-preservation. I just accepted my demise. Chaos does that.

I awoke on the top bunk; literally no idea how I got there. Kids were flat-out losing their minds as counselors tried to explain to us that it was just a prank. Our screams echoed across camp, to the point where those-in-charge showed up. It was a disaster. People were fired. And to this day, I think about being in that top bunk, spiders crawling about, wondering why people do what they do to each other — the harm without thought of consequence. Is that truly our nature?

I camp alone now. I lay on my fold-out cot, in a spider-free tent, and wonder if I’d been forgotten because how do you remember something that doesn’t know what it is. My sleeping bag protects me now. Nobody comes for me.

We did a canoeing trip, same summer but different from the kayaking death wish. It was boring and hot and I got sunburnt and hated it. We’d paddle along some river in some state like Who-Gives-A-Two-Shits with waterproof bags that always filled up, and made camp on little dingleberry inlets along the way. Henry and I had two friends on the trip: another Jewish one, Scott, and Cesar, this Puerto Rican kid that our super white town bussed in from New Haven because that’s what white people in Connecticut do to try and create equality. Anyway, we liked Cesar, he was hilarious and you wanted him on whatever activity you did. This included canoeing, where he was ripped, and I was, again, a shrimp. Cesar got with Julie, who I had a crush on but was scarred by Amanda; years later, Julie wound up dating my friend Colin, who always said I was the best at doing things that don’t matter which is probably why I became a writer. But boy did that trip spark drama.

You can’t put teenagers in the woods with nothing to do and expect them to not do hand stuff in tents. We didn’t have smart phones and even if we did — hand stuff in tents. Not me, mind you, I wasn’t ready, for infinite reasons. But Cesar was. So was Scott. And just like adults who do hand-related activities with the same people, teenagers too, get jealous. While Cesar and Scott yelled about Julie, I squatted over a hole and watched my toilet paper roll down into the river; couldn’t even wipe my ass. I had to fish it out and still use it and then returned to camp to find the counselors yelling at Cesar and Scott, which sounds like a restaurant, Caesar & Scot, which doesn’t exist but it could. I couldn’t exist in a world where I got into shouting matches over a girl, not because it’s ridiculous that boys do these things, which it is, but because nobody liked me. I was a shrimp, and let’s face it, there’s way better fish on the menu than weird ocean mice. And shrimp certainly don’t go tell the pretty fish don’t cry, it’s not your fault, boys are dumb. Shrimp stay silent.

I camp alone now. I can just exist, watching and listening to nature as it does its thing. I argue only with myself, not over girls, but for thinking the real me is magically hidden somewhere, behind a rock, up a tree, right over there, Oh, there I am. You can’t find something if you don’t know what it is you’re looking for.

My toes dip into the shocking cool of elevated run off, my memories, too many to process, swimming after the uncatchable flow. All of these never-done’s of the past entering the undone plane of the constant future, the land of opportunities never seized, never touched, only viewed at, afraid of the rejection, frozen by pre-failure, forgotten within one’s own unforgettable memories, gone to some other life, to some other story to be told by someone else on some other screen or some other page or at some other campsite, or to be forgotten. Where does it all go? The whispers return. I hear them. I am a hibernating tree begging to be in full bloom. But I don’t want to go through the pain of waiting for the rain, or the sun, or the birds and bees to come pollinate me, give me the life I desire. I can’t. I don’t want to see the traces of the old me left behind, my fallen leaves or shedding bark or departed seeds. The what ifs, the what if it doesn’t work out, the what if I’m not pretty, or even worse, functional, or even worse, forever remaining as the me of seasons’ past, the tree that didn’t comprehend how to be — skipped over by nature — cluelessly, roots reaching for the sky, branches digging into the ground, not grasping how to be the very thing that it absolutely, fundamentally, instinctively knows how to be. Cause how could one not know? Nature doesn’t think or judge or shame itself into non-existence. It simply does.

Yet I can’t. Because I don’t know if I’ll live. I don’t know if I’ll wind up releasing some strange pathogen to take myself out. Or if nature will refuse to have me and sick its beetles and fires and axemen. To remain is to exist, decaying slowly but still offering something in this dying season of myself. But to change, with the seasons and chances life offers, is to risk extinction.

I don’t want to deal with the graffiti on my bark, the stealing of my branches and berries and flowers, the urinating on, the chopping of, the look at this stupid tree, the gathering of me into faggots and burning them burning them burning them.

The waters whisper secrets. I hear them — Turn to paper; turn to story; turn to me.

By Adele Voyria

Three emojis used as a line break. These consist of three campsite tent and tree emojis.

Three emojis used as a line break. These consist of a canoe, a van, and a microphone.

Three emojis used as a line break. These consist of a surfer, the flag of Mexico, and an ocean wave.

Three emojis used as a line break. These consist of a hospital, a black spider, and a Doctor's white jacket.

Three emojis used as a line break. These consist of a canoe, a roll of toilet paper, and a shrimp.

Adele Voyria (AV) is an Edinburgh-based writer, screenwriter, and teacher from Connecticut. AV completed their Creative Writing MSc in 2021, serving as the Head Prose Editor for the From Arthur’s Seat anthology. They have been shortlisted for the Grierson Verse Prize (2021, poetry) and the ScreenCraft Comedy Competition (2020, screenwriting). AV is currently undertaking a Creative Writing PhD at the University of Edinburgh.

IG: @adele.voyria

The Sorceress of Mount Sangre

The first night after the funeral, barely twelve hours after burying his brother-in-law, he finds her in the living room staring out the window. An outline standing still in the dark. His eyes adjust and the figure takes the shape of his wife. The back of her head of curls, her hand draped at her side. A magical transformation that fills him with relief. It’s 3:00 and the cup of coffee in her hand is ice cold. A slimy film wavers on the top.

She hasn’t spoken really since they left the gravesite, since the last tepid thank you, since she agreed with the last person to comment on how young her brother had died. She hasn’t said anything except to tell him that she wants to lie down, one thing, and a second that she isn’t hungry. He’d told her he was going to bed several hours ago, and the silence he’d been met with had the same tenor as a strong curse. When he’d apologized instinctively, she had too, her voice creaky. The third and last thing.

He takes the cup from her and leads her into the kitchen. Her manicure that she’d been taken to the day before is chewed jagged. They both squint when he turns the light on, assaulted by the sudden brightness. He dumps the mug of coffee down the drain and looks around. Ghostly reflections wobble on the shinier surfaces. There’s a whole pot of coffee made, stewing on the machine’s burner, which he switches off before turning to his wife. Her face does not belie any crying, but her hands shake as she twists the bottom of her sweatshirt looking at the floor, as if she’s ashamed.

She seems more herself here, in the light of their own home, wearing clothes he knows her in, standing in places he’s seen her stand too often to count. Hospital lights had drained the color from their life for a week, and grief and worry had added a further ghostly layer to her pallor. New black clothes that are now draped over the back of a chair in the bedroom.

They are home, where things are soft again and the stringency of loss is dulled, but like a shadow, he sees the other version of his wife lingering just beside her, a mirror of her that reflects her worst times. He imagines the impossibly sad version of his wife that is hovering in their lives now sneaking in and taking over when he least expects it. Maybe they’ll share the rest of their lives with this changeling.

“You didn’t have dinner. Are you sure you’re not hungry?”

A sigh that makes him flinch. It says, are you fucking stupid, of course I’m not. It says, please try anyway.

She eats a few bites of the peanut butter sandwich he makes for her before taking her back upstairs. Settling into bed is easy. He has always turned to her and draped an arm over her, which he instinctively does and she accepts. A few hours later, just as the first light is coming through the window, she jumps from the bed, jostling him from a nascent sleep, and he hears her vomit in their bathroom.

Annoyance flares up and he hates himself for it, but he’s exhausted and wishes, through the painful fog in his head, that things were different. Easy again. He decides not to get up and check on her and waits, back turned to the bathroom, convinced that this is better. The sound of water running, the snap of a light switch.

Back in bed, she curls up with her eyes open and he knows she doesn’t sleep, but at least she’s there and safe. He reaches his hand toward her to say sorry for not going to her earlier. The house is quiet and there are a few hours where nothing is expected of him but the pretense of rest, and giving his wife space.

When the alarm goes off, she turns away after accepting a kiss on her temple. Love nearly overpowers him in that moment, and then disappointment as she glances briefly up at him, her expression blank. She is only filled with grief, and there is no room for him, for them, certainly not for appreciation at anything he might do for her. Inside, he bristles, then fights to quash it.

“You might feel better if you try to get up.”

She nods and stares past him, but while he watches her in the mirror as he shaves, she pulls herself up in the bed. Her hair is matted, and a confused scowl splits her face. She hates this even more than he does, he reminds himself. He did not lose his brother, he reminds himself.

After showering and getting dressed for work, he leaves her sitting against her pillow, computer in her lap, but staring just beyond the screen.

“Can I bring you any breakfast?”

“Um. Maybe a coffee? And a glass of water. You’ve been trying since yesterday to get me to drink water.”

He can’t help but smile at her brief active participation in the morning. When he leaves her drinks on the bedside table, she mumbles something to him in a whisper he doesn’t quite catch, but her eyes are soft when he looks down at her.

Their first date, seven years ago. He had been trying hard to impress and met her at a Christmas fair, where they used their drink tickets slowly over the course of several hours and he watched as she bought her brother a carving of a bird and tucked it in her purse.

It had been a perfect late November night just after Thanksgiving, all shining brightness in the sky, puffing frozen breaths, and glittering lights on the trees that left such a pleasant fragrance on their clothes. A strand of tinsel caught in the button of her coat. Stopping for fresh donuts from a cheerful cart.

He ached to leave an imprint on her and decided, watching her blow on her hands to keep them warm, to see if he could extend the evening. Many times he’d driven past the sign for a psychic outside an unassuming house nearby and on a whim, asked her if she wanted to go. It was only four blocks away and the sign said prices started at five dollars. She’d laughed bemusedly, and then, after a pause where they met eyes and smiled at each other, agreed with unrestrained excitement in her voice.

They turned up ten minutes later at the house of an older woman who appeared at the door with two regal, long haired dogs with long snouts. Each, one gray and one white, stood as tall as her waist. He paid the five dollars and was given a sharp look by the psychic, who told him that if the reading was for his girlfriend that he should stand in the hall. When she emerged with the psychic fifteen minutes later, the two were smiling. The psychic’s hand lingered on her shoulder as they said goodbye.

He can’t bring himself to go home right away after work, unable to immediately face the magnitude of her grief. He pulls into a fast food place and orders a large coffee and large fries and drives to a park where he sits in the purple of a recently set sun and eats in peaceful solitude. Two young women laugh while sharing a cigarette on a hill in front of him, and the off leash section is full of bounding dogs.

His phone beeps several times in his pocket and he dreads looking at it, dreads the thought of something terrible happening, because now he knows how easily terrible things can happen, but it’s just his mother, asking how things are. She’s been texting her daughter-in-law and hasn’t heard back. Guilt starts to bubble up in his stomach and he goes back to the car and pulls up to the drive through of another fast food place.

“Hey, you don’t have to text back, but if you need anything let me know, okay? I’m bringing home food for dinner.”

The shut bedroom door. No answer when he knocks, but he can see her in the bed when he creaks the door open. Her curls, clean and brushed, are spread out on the pillow beside her. She is watching a movie on her phone.

“Hey.”

“Food.” He jiggles the bag in an attempt at playfulness. She attempts a smile. Attempting is what they’ll do tonight.

“Leave it downstairs. I’ll be right there.”

She says thanks as he closes the door.

The cat is asleep on the kitchen table in a circle of light from the fixture above, green eyes following him when he sets the food down on the counter. They go to sleep without it being eaten.

Second night. Water running in the bathroom wakes him. He tosses and turns until he knows too much time has passed and gets up to see what’s happening.

She’s sitting on the edge of the tub wrapped in a towel, watching the now cold water run down the drain as her eyes flutter closed and then fly back open. Steam drips down the mirror.

“Come on to bed.”

Her skin is damp and hot and the bed fills with the smell of soap. She drops the towel to the floor and crawls under the sheets.

A dream about a girl he dated in college. They met just before the summer holidays at a party, or maybe it was right as school started, and he kissed her after they walked out to sit on the porch, the both of them drunk and giggling. The girl had put her head on his shoulder and squeezed his thigh to show she wanted to be kissed. He’d taken her to breakfast the next morning and felt the world could sense how happy he was and was congratulating him. The dream is hard to wake from. As he is jolted out of sleep, briefly confused by his surroundings, by the darkness of the real world. His wife, still unclothed, is breathing evenly beside him, her hand with the chewed down nails clutching his shoulder.

A subdued card with flowers on the front signed by all his coworkers appears on his desk. During a meeting in the afternoon, he tries to think of the last name of the girl from college and doesn’t hear anything clearly until the rustle of papers when everyone starts gathering their notes to leave, when he blinks back into focus, stumbling over the loss of an hour. His boss pats his shoulder on the way out.

He spends the rest of the afternoon goofing off on his phone, thinking in the back of his mind that even if someone noticed that no one would say anything. When he comes across something funny that references his wife’s favorite movie, he almost sends it to her, but finds himself wondering for a moment what the point is. She will not laugh and he knows it. He decides to send it anyway. She doesn’t respond and he spends several minutes staring at the picture in their text thread, bereft of acknowledgement, and sighs, annoyed that his effort hasn’t produced any notice. He imagines her face brightening for a moment. Maybe he did that at least. Maybe she decided after seeing it to put the movie on and was briefly distracted and that was all she had energy for. Or maybe she saw it and locked her phone again and turned away.

Third night she takes a pill to help her sleep. She is still as a frozen pond the entire night, but he doesn’t rest because he makes sure she stays that way, that she gets the sleep she needs. A few fitful moments of dozing that always end in panic when he bolts awake, scared that she will be gone when he wakes up. But she’s still there.

He burns pancakes in the morning. The cat sits on her lap and she nibbles at food. Dark rings of exhaustion surround her eyes, which are glassy and unfocused. There should be something that will help, but he knows there isn’t. The cat puts a paw against his wife’s cheek and she nudges back. Is he jealous of the cat?

“I’m going to the store. Do you need anything?”

He turns back to the stove without a response. The pancakes sizzle with an uncomfortably cheerful noise.

“Did you hear me?”

In the window he sees her reflection, eyes closed, cheek to cheek with the cat. He’s definitely jealous.

“No,” she says.

“No what?”

“I don’t need anything.”

“Well I’ve got to go anyway. So. Let me know.”

The supermarket is his last stop, after he has dragged out the errands hours past when he should have been home. But he has to go, has to buy something, because he left saying that’s what he was doing and now he can’t come back without groceries. He fills the cart quickly with sporadic junk that he knows won’t get them through the rest of the week.

When he gets home, she doesn’t ask him where he’d been.

On his lunch break the next day, he mostly ignores his sandwich while starting texts to three different friends trying to explain how he feels and ask what he should do, but he doesn’t send any of them. They haven’t been in touch since his brother-in-law went into the hospital anyway.

He instead finds himself still not back to work ten minutes after he should have been, scrolling, scrolling. It’s not even fun, but what is right now? The office bustles around him like he’s invisible and he can’t decide if it’s comforting.

He texts his wife a picture of the cover of an old fantasy novel he finds on the social media of a local book shop that each week features a particularly bad illustration from previous decades. On it a fierce woman with a crazed look in her eyes, hair and scarlet robes flying behind her, stands at the base of an erupting volcano flanked by two frankly moronic looking dragons flaring their nostrils.

“I randomly thought about that psychic lady the other day. Why is this her?”

He doesn’t expect a reply because it was honestly a bit of a stupid thing to say and he’s not sure if she remembers. Did the woman even look like that? Doubtful. The thought just crossed his mind and he was lonely for his wife. He goes back to work already not thinking about her responding because it seems like a given she won’t right now. A few minutes later the ping of his phone startles him.

“Ha, yeah.”

She lets him hold her on the fourth night. A chasm of exhaustion envelops him as soon as their skin meets. He’s asleep instantly, and wakes in the middle of the night to her pressed against him, stroking his hair. She stops when he opens his eyes, and he mutters “don’t” almost before he’s had the thought. Her heart beats against his back and she resumes. It’s the last thing he remembers before sleep pulls him back.

The doctor, a woman with close cut hair and large blue eyes, elegant in her appearance, had put her hand on his wife’s shoulder in the moments after it happened and the room was getting still. She knew this routine well. The doctor’s delicate hand stayed just long enough, then she stepped back. The room was filled with his wife’s sobbing, loud and conspicuous, that eventually tapered off into hiccups.

Several hours later, in the car on the drive home, she was silent and he swore her eyes sometimes flash with anger, and at him. It didn’t make sense, but nothing did. His wife glared out the window until her face eventually softened and her body drooped down into the car seat and she fell asleep.

She doesn’t want to go away, she says on the fifth night. No hotel, no out of town trip. Well, she confesses after a moment, the thought lighting up her eyes in a way that grips at his stomach, I want to leave, but I don’t have the energy. I want, she says with a sigh that completely deflates her, to be just gone. Here, then there. Magic. No work. I just want to think it and then I’m somewhere else.

“What’s that in those movies with the wizards?” he asks. He realizes that he’s been holding her hand for several minutes, the normalcy of it not bringing it to his attention right away. “They just say the name of where they want to go into a fireplace?”

“Still too much work,” she says, and almost laughs. Pink rises to the apples of her cheeks.

That night when he comes to bed after brushing his teeth, she asks him to show her more of the book shop’s posts with the bad cover art. She flips through them with him with a half grin twitching on her dry lips. He pulls the sorceress and her dragons back up.

“The psychic you took me to was named Barb. Remember that?” she asks. “Barb the psychic.”

“Sounds violent. I don’t think I will.”

He hadn’t meant to joke, and felt bad afterward for attempting humor. There was a pause and a sharp laugh escaped her, so surprising that she blinked in shock a few times after.

“What’s her name? In the book?” She nods toward his phone screen. Her hand grazes his. She has, he can see, tidied up her nails by clipping them very short and removed all the somber polish.

“Probably Morgana or Lilith or something.”

“Definitely not Barb.”

“Definitely not Barb,” he agrees.

When she’s asleep, he buys the sorceress book from the shop’s website. He can only hope the woman his wife is in five days still gets the joke.

They watch a movie on his phone in the car on the sixth night, because she can’t settle in the house and wants to go for a drive. They wind up in the park he was at a few nights ago. Already there’s a bit more light than there was then, a few more people out.

In the flickering candle-like blue of the phone’s light, he watches her face and thinks that she might really have relaxed. She pulls up her hair as he’s seen her do so often. The moment of normalcy catches his attention and ignites hope.

“Can we do something different tonight?” she asks on the way home.

“Sure. Of course.”

“Will you sleep downstairs with me? I don’t know why, but I can’t face the bed.”

At home, he pulls out the sofa into a bed and brings down the spare pillows and blankets from the closet. The clean smell of fresh bedding that has been tucked away for months reminds him of visits to relatives as a child, or sleepovers where friends’ parents would drag things out for him. The memory lifts his spirits some and he finds himself smiling, then smiling at her. They make up the couch together and he kisses her on the forehead.

“Thank you,” she says.

Sleep comes quickly for her that night, and it’s only after it happens that he realizes his entire body has relaxed after a day of being held tense. The sudden realization of his relief induces a dread that he might be a terrible husband and man for being happy an evening with his sad wife is over. No, he reminds himself, I’m happy because her night is over, that this is one less one to get through, and she’s resting well. The cat jumps up on the couch and curls into himself right next to her pillow, reaching a paw out toward her.

After writing a quick note and leaving it on the coffee table for her, he slips on his shoes and grabs his keys. Keeping an eye to make sure his wife is still asleep, he closes the front door behind him as softly as he can. Outside, the night is windy, and the sidewalks are damp from rain. Droplets fall from autumn red leaves.

The walk has no real purpose, but he finds he can’t stop once he’s started. After half an hour, he finally sits on a bench at the entrance to a park. A fountain, drained for the winter, sits to one side, the figure of a stone woman looking at its center.

He takes his phone from his pocket and catches his reflection in the screen when he checks for messages, of which there are none. Across the street, a house is well lit even though both on either side are dark. A cat sits in the window, watching him shiver, and lifts a paw to clean its face. The wind numbs his ears and pulls up a picture of his wife and her brother on his phone as a light comes on in one of the houses facing him.

By Heather Whited

Heather Whited graduated from Western Kentucky University in 2006 with a BA in creative writing. She lived in Japan and Ireland before returning to her hometown of Nashville, Tennessee to obtain her graduate degree. She now lives in Portland, Oregon.

She has been published in the literary magazines Straylight, Lingerpost, The Timberline Review, A Door is Ajar, Allegro, Foliate Oak, Adelaide Literary Magazine, Windmill; The Hofstra Journal of Art and Literature, Chantwood Literary Magazine, Cricket, Storm Cellar, Forge, Gravel, The Hungry Chimera, The Broke Bohemian, The Arlington Literary Journal, Wax Paper, Projected Letters, Borrowed Solace, Edify Poetry, Evocations, Fleas on the Dog, Change Seven, Splash!, Sand Hills Literary Magazine, The Hamilton Stone Review, The Dillydoun Review, Gold Man Review, Delay Fiction, The Bangalore Review, Syncopation Literary Journal, Half and One, Litro Literary Magazine, The New Plains Review, Barzakh, and soon Club Plum.

In 2015 she was an honorable mention in Gemini Magazine's annual short story contest and in 2018 and 2020 she was a finalist in the Adelaide Literary Award contest. In 2021 she was a finalist in The Tatterhood Review's Novel Excerpt contest (now Landing Zone). In 2022 she was a semifinalist in Driftwood Press's annual short story contest, and in 2022 she was a finalist in Quarterly West's short story contest. She is a contributor to The Drunken Odyssey podcast and Secondhand Stories Podcast.

When Habits Fall Away

It was exactly half past five on a Tuesday evening. I was Prisoner number forty three in Sister Assumpta's study hall. The room squatted in the bowels of her private world, we were cut off from the main school by a long red corridor.

The air always tasted of floor polish and a bit of teenage desperation. However, somewhere in that chemical cocktail lurked strawberry and Hubba Bubba gum, which was instantly swallowed the moment Sister Assumpta's footsteps echoed down the corridor.

Forty two other souls shared my jaw grinding journey. Each in blue jumpers, wool so scratchy it could sand furniture, and grey skirts that fell two inches below the knee.

Anne Flanagan sat to my left. Her geography book spread before her like a prayer mat. Her yellow highlighter moved across the page, painting the Sahara Desert one fluorescent line at a time. Her marker dragged across paper a thin, awful sound like a field mouse caught in Mrs. Bollard's cat's teeth, that final wheeze before the world goes quiet. My eyelids grew heavy. The geography of the Sahara Desert blurred into yellow streaks. Anne's voice faded to a whisper, then to nothing. The scratchy wool of my jumper softened against my skin. The clock's Roman numerals melted into shapes that meant nothing.

Anne's finger traced the yellow line across the Sahara. Her Cork accent turned each word into something wild. "Hey hey, did you know the desert gets less than ten inches of rainfall a year? Would ya think Ireland would give them a few buckets of it? Enough here to drown the globe if it wanted to. The Irish overspill, we could call it."

She leaned closer.

"Ya know, like the Irish Sea, but Irish overspill instead."

Her eyes lit up while the highlighter cap clicked between her teeth.

"I get it, I get it."

I stared at my Irish grammar book. I always hated how the conditional tense mocked me in Gaelic. Dhéanfainn – I would do. Dhéanfa – you would do. But what would any of us do, beyond memorise conjugations of a language half the country pretended to speak anyway.

The clock on the wall, round-faced, ticked with all the energy of a dying donkey. Each second stretched, pulling us deeper into the evening. Somewhere beyond these walls, people watched Glenroe or Fair City, ate their tea and lived lives that didn't revolve around the Penal Laws and the pronunciation of "síocháin".

Through the tall stained glass windows, the last light of day bled orange across the convent grounds.

Sister Assumpta's presence haunted the room even in her absence. Her empty chair at the front desk seemed to watch us with invisible eyes, and I swear I could smell her lavender and righteous indignation. The woman could detect a whispered conversation from three counties away and had the supernatural ability to appear behind you just as you were about to pass a note.

My pen lay across the copybook. Blue ink bled from its tip, spreading into a perfect circle on the white page. The stain bubbled there like a tiny lake trapped between ruled lines. "Lough Ennell". That's what it looked like. The exact shape of water where Caroline and I sat last week, our legs dangling from the hazel tree swing, the branches creaking like old bones above our heads. Oasis's "Wonderwall" drifted from her fancy cassette player. The Benson & Hedges packet stolen from Ma's handbag.

Caroline's fingers shook as she struck the match. A flame died, danced again. The cigarette caught, and she drew deep, her cheeks hollowing. Smoke leaked from her lips in grey circles.

"Let's share it," she whispered, passing me a drag.

The ink pool spread wider on my copybook. Sister Assumpta's study hall had faded a moment. I was back there by the water, tasting tobacco, feeling the hazel branch sway beneath us while Liam Gallagher stood there looking so handsome.

Amazing how a puddle of ink in the most boring of places could drag you back to the exact moment when you felt most alive, I thought.

"Come on girls, not long to the Leaving Cert, get your heads down," came from Sister Assumpta.

Around me, the sounds of study hall, rustle of pages turning, scratch of pencils against paper, the occasional sigh that escaped before its owner caught it. Mary Fitzgerald, two rows ahead, had perfected the art of sleeping with her eyes open, her head propped on her hand in a pose that suggested deep contemplation of Pythagoras, as if she were some sort of philosopher when she was dreaming of whatever Seventeen year old girls dreamed of in 1999.

The strange thing about all of this, I volunteered to be there. Volunteered. Somehow the nun's study hall seemed like peace and quiet, and I hoped these walls would trap me into study.

Then inspiration hit me like a slap. I stared at Sister Assumpta, all holy and serene at the front of the room, and thought, what if she wasn't? What if underneath that habit lurked something more interesting?

I pulled out my poetry notebook, the one I kept hidden, and slipped it under my science book. The pen moved across the page like it had a mind of its own:

"Sister, Sister, sitting there so sweet,

Looking so virtuous, acting discreet,

But when the chapel bells cease their call,

You become the Devil Nun of Boarders' Hall."

The words poured out. I wrote about horns sprouting from her head, about her leading midnight revels in the convent corridors, about her trading her rosary for a pitchfork.

Anne caught sight of what I was writing. Her eyes widened. She nudged Andrea, who leaned over to read. Soon we had a conspiracy of three, passing glances and stifling giggles like we were planning to rob the Bank of Ireland.

The poem grew longer. I gave Sister Assumpta cloven hooves hidden beneath her habit. I had her dancing on the altar after midnight, cackling as she turned holy water into something stronger. The more outrageous it became, the more my friends struggled not to laugh out loud.

That's when the shadow fell across my desk.

Sister Assumpta stood beside me like the Angel of Death, except quieter. No dramatic swooping, no thunderous voice demanding to know what I was doing. Just her presence, filling the space around my desk.

"And what might we have here, young Moran?"

Her voice carried a soft lilt. I felt my face burn red as a tomato. My hands shook as I tried to cover the notebook, but it was too late. She'd seen everything.

"Science homework, Sister," I croaked, my voice coming out like a rusty gate.

She raised one eyebrow.

"Science, is it? How fascinating. And here I thought you were composing poetry about..." She leaned closer, reading over my shoulder. "'...horns sprouting from my head.' Quite the scientific observation, young Moran."

My heart hammered against my ribs.

Sister Assumpta held out her hand. "The notebook, if you please."

I handed it over like I was signing my own death warrant. She took it with the same care she might handle the communion chalice, then she began to read aloud.

"Sister, Sister, sitting there so sweet, looking so virtuous, acting discreet..."

The entire study hall went silent. Forty pairs of eyes watched as Sister Assumpta read my verses to the room. I wanted the floor to open up and swallow me whole.

But then something extraordinary happened.

Sister Assumpta's mouth twitched. Just a tiny movement at the corner, like she was fighting something. She continued reading, her voice taking on a sort of musical quality.

"But when the chapel bells cease their call, you become the Devil Nun of Boarders' Hall..."

And then she laughed.

"Quite the imagination you have there, young Moran," she said. "Though I must say, I'm not fond of the horns you've given me. Rather unflattering, don't you think?"

The room erupted. Forty girls who'd been holding their breath burst into laughter. The tension snapped like an overstretched rubber band.

"If only you knew," Sister Assumpta continued, "the humor that lives in the hearts of some of us nuns. We were children once, you know. Hard as that might be to believe."

She folded the paper and tucked it into her habit. "I'll be keeping this, if you don't mind. It's been years since anyone's written poetry about me. Even shocking poetry has its charm."

"Oh Sister, I didn't mean any harm. It was just... just..."

"Just what, child?"

"Just that you seemed so... so perfect. I wondered what you'd be like if you weren't."

Sister Assumpta studied me for a long moment. The laughter had faded from her eyes.

"Perfect, am I?" she said. "Oh, child, if you only knew. We're all just people stumbling through, trying to make sense of it all. Some of us just wear habits while we do it."

By Yvonne Heavey

Yvonne Heavey is a writer from Jersey Channel Islands. As well as her fiction writing success, her very first play – a full-length piece developed from her short story, The Wake of Yer Man, which won the 2023 Festival of Words – is set to be performed on St. Patrick’s night 2026. Performances in Jersey, Channel Islands, will span March 17th,19th and 20th 2026 – in Jersey, Channel Islands, with further performances planned for Ireland in May, and London in April.

Through Winter's Veil

Kraków exhaled needles on the afternoon that three boys gathered beneath the last living gas-lamp on Świętego Tomasza. Powdery snow stippled their boots, melting into dark stains their imaginations conjured into warring angels and demons. The sky bruised deeper into a promise of continued dark as two brothers ambled off together, their mittened hands waving soft goodbyes.

Alone, Karol ebbed down a cobbled vein that usually pointed home. But daylight had leaked away. Cornices hardened into fangs, alleys cinched into keyholes. Street signs vanished under sleet, as though the city had entombed its own language in rime. Even the cathedral bells were muzzled; their bronze tongues struck dumb by cold.

He tallied his steps—thirty to his favorite baker’s window, fifteen more before he saw the stained glass of His sanctuary—but his count betrayed him. Gardens, once his landmarks, had shriveled into boneyards of frostbitten phalanges; windows he trusted for light now blinked shut like sullen eyes. Each breath fled him as a pale chit, snatched by the wind before it could total anything comforting.

The gale conscripted the air, corkscrewing through courtyards, wrenching laundry lines and toppling bicycles beside the boy in a chain-metal avalanche. Karol flinched, then let out a brittle laugh, chastising himself for the tremble in his slight frame—until the snow squall swelled, sanding roofs to slate, folding the horizon into itself. Sky and street fused into a single faceless sheet.

He pressed on—one block north, left at the statue of Piotr Skarga, right past the iron gate sore with rust—but the city had re-dealt its map. He felt suddenly hinged out of the world, a loose page fluttering in someone else’s novel.

A muscular gust lashed his cheeks with stinging flakes and pitched him into a drift so deep it knocked the air from him. He lay there, stunned, while his heart seemed to dig its way out.

Crunch.

Two footfalls scored the snow beside him. A figure emerged from the blur: tall, wolf-fur hood drawn tight, shoulders crusted with diamond dust.

Karol jackknifed upright and ran.

He tore across ice-slick cobblestones, boots skidding, but the figure thundered behind—closing the distance with every stride. Karol’s cries ricocheted through hollow streets, only to be devoured by the howling wind.

The boy slipped. Stone met spine. He lay stunned as the figure loomed above—mute, immovable, less man than reliquary, limned in vapor and frostflake.

Karol flinched, eyes clamped shut, bracing for agony as a gloved hand reached for his chest.

Suddenly, a radiant warmth bloomed within him—a soul-deep light akin to the first verdant thaw after a bitter winter.

Opening his eyes, Karol looked up in awe as the man gracefully drew back his hood, revealing a face more familiar than his own reflection.

By Felix Bou

Felix Bou is a psychologist and professor from Tampa, Florida. After living briefly in the American Southwest, he drew inspiration from the region’s landscapes, blending the strange beauty of desert scenery with his clinical insights to craft narratives rich in imagery and introspection. His work spans genres including magical realism, noir, thrillers, and poetry. His short stories have appeared in literary magazines both in the U.S. and abroad, most notably Crimson Tide and The King of Indio. His poem To a Seasoned Friend won the Spring 2025 poetry contest at Wingless Dreamer magazine.

Driving Under an Influence

“I’m really sorry, Sis. It’s been crazy. I can’t believe no one called you—I figur—”

“Are you kidding me?”

“Look, there’s a lot to deal with here, Gloria. I mean, you knew he wasn’t getting better.”

I watch the phone drop from my hand to the carpet with a flat, muffled thump. I’m standing, biting down on my lip, might break skin. My nails pierce my palms making marks and my father is dead.

Out. I need out. I grab my wallet and keys from the kitchen island. Out of this room, this news, this air. A side glance at the hallway mirror, I glimpse my massive hair’s full force: ‘The electrocuted lion’s mane,’ Dad likes to tease. Dad isn’t a mean teaser. Wasn’t. I duck into the bathroom to grab my hair pick. It’s Saturday, March 12, 3:34 pm. I’ve just been informed by my brother that our father died in Winnipeg, my hometown, on Wednesday morning. The ninth? Tenth? Ninth. Denver’s an asshole. How could he do this to me? Turn off the lights. Leave the house. Lock the door. Reach the car. Did I turn everything off? Return to house. Unlock door, check stove’s off, heat’s off, dryer’s off, lock door. Hurry to little gray Honda.

Get in fast, chuck wallet and hair pick to the back seat. Slam door. Phone? Fuck the phone. Turn key in ignition, crank heat, fasten seat belt, unfasten seat belt, reach into back seat for pick. Launch sneak attack on hair. Scream with mouth tight shut as the pick’s trapped in the matty tangle. I wail on the steering wheel with both fists and do not recognize the bleating erupting from my throat. I press fingers hard into my eye sockets and breathe. Breathe again. It’s so shallow, my breath. Grip hair with my left hand, hold pick in right, force release. Open window, hurl pick. It clatters to the concrete, then gets run over by a big shitty gold Escalade. Fuck the pick.

Close window, turn radio on loud. Drive, left hand on the wheel, right hand over my mouth, head shaking left to right, left to right. The rain pelts a fevered staccato–I notice the rain now. “How’s the nest? Hiding any critters in there, Glory?” That’s what Dad calls me. Glory. Hot tears sear the back of my eyes. My skin tightens in this dry heat—I can feel it. I can’t even. What the fuck. How could I not know for three days? Did I have a feeling? Did I know but didn’t want to know? I’m usually so intuitive.

My laptop’s camera died eight months ago. After that, I couldn’t see him when we talked. It was easier not to bear witness to his body’s rapid decay. Dad’s hands went first early last year. He couldn’t grab things, and they bent weird. The first time we Skyped, I had video and couldn’t stop staring; they were like dwarf Arbutus trees. I vowed not to look next time.

But next time, Dad was wearing black gloves. “Why are you wearing black gloves? It’s summer!” I asked ‘cause I’m a big dummy who asks big dummy questions. Dad’s face tilted to the right like our old dog Boo did when you talked serious to him.

Dad leaned deep into the camera’s eye, into my eyes, into me when I was little and was bringing him the specialest secret just for us, like a baby bird’s sky blue eggshell, cradled in my little soft hands. “It’s okay, my Glory,” he whispered. “I want you to remember my real hands. No need to see what ALS is thieving from your old pop.”

My face flushed. I looked down fast. I wanted to snatch that word, shred it with my teeth, hurl it far away from Dad. He never thinks I’m dumb. He always keeps our secrets. The word “asshole” is not in his dictionary. He is always proud of me. Was. Oh, God. When he said, “Remember,” I had to grab a glass of water. I was so parched and bolted to the kitchen. We shared silence on that call for a really long time after that, and it wasn’t weird. It’s never weird with him. “You’ll have to move the cribbage pegs for me when you visit like I did when you were wee and learning,” he smiled. Then my oven timer went off because the lamb was done, but so were we for that day.

Dad continued wearing gloves; mittens, once I supposed the fingers couldn’t spread. I don’t know if he wore them outside our talks or even after my camera died. I wonder if he only did that for me. I like to think that because I’m his precious princess.

“So why didn’t you go home to visit? Why, if you love him so goddamn much?” I yell at myself in this little gray Honda on my precious Vancouver Island. I turn off the radio because REM really isn’t cutting it. “Why?” I holler. “You just wanted to keep it pretty. Denver’s right; you wouldn’t understand because you never make a fucking effort.” I’m downtown now, car a safe shell, the rain shielding me from others who might look. I’m hot, too hot. I’m grinding my teeth. Cut heat, open window. Sharp cold current flows in; a child’s handfuls of soft rain land on my lap. Tears flock but don’t fall—eyes baggy with saltwater, like long-gone Boo with a very bad cold.

I clench my teeth, evicting thought. Just drive. Down Pandora, along Government, up Johnson. Buses demanding passage lumber from curbs, rejecting frantic latecomers running, cursing, banging at the doors. “You knew he wasn’t getting better.” Why did Denver have to say that? Of course, I knew. I talked to Dad on Skype twice a week usually. Well, not recently. His voice got so, ugh. It was so hard, and work was so busy. He couldn’t shield me from that raspy, higher-pitched voice—no black gloves for that. Fuck, my throat is dry. I forgot my water bottle, damn it. I begin to shake, hands trembling, clutching the wheel, life ring in the ocean all by myself. I want to tell you a secret, Dad. You’ll bend down so I can whisper. I need to show you something. I want to feel close. I want to hear your grizzly-bear-honey voice reassuring me it’s okay—I’m okay. I’m going to be okay, aren’t I?

Two brown oak leaves curled up like an infant’s fists are still flap-flap-flapping in the windshield wipers. The rain has stopped. Tears falling too fast. I slam the heel of my right hand against my forehead. “I didn’t go. I couldn’t go. I wouldn’t go. I couldn’t do it, Dad. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Little Glory let you down.” Snot mixes with the tears cascading down my front. The windshield wipers thwack like slow punches on the speed bag that is me. That creaky moan is from this mouth. My eyes blur, squinting through these tears. Why the fuck am I driving?

A bus lunges out in front of me. I gasp and slam on the brakes. As the bus takes my lane, a black-gloved hand emerges from the driver’s window. My breath catches.

The black-gloved hand gives a small wave. It’s waving just to me. I strain against the wheel to get as close as possible to him. I am here, Dad. I can see you. I knew you’d come. You’d tell me it was okay. I feel that hand on my head, smoothing my hair. In that wave, my heart dislodges from my throat and I’m not thirsty anymore.

The hand retracts into the window, and the bus carries on. The car behind me honks because I stopped dead. I shut off the wipers, close the window and drag my sleeve across my face to sop up the mess. I turn onto Cormorant and pull over, rest my head on the wheel, stroke my hair for a while, listen to my breath.

The busy city is still buzzing, but the hive of me has settled. I drive home with the windows all steamed up, pull into my driveway, cut the ignition and unbuckle. I sit back. Pressing my hand against the driver's window, condensation trickles down my wrist into my sleeve. I stare out through the imprint. It’s time to book a flight back home.

By Gillie Easdon

Gillie Easdon (she/her) is an author and professional writer based on the unceded Coast Salish Territory of the Lekwungen nation in Victoria BC Canada. Human, daughter, mother, partner, coparent, dog mum, friend. She is currently seeking publication of her interconnected short fiction collection of short fiction, Little Always Big. Her completed YA novel manuscript, Helen and the Prawn, is currently on a backburner. In Fall, 2023, Gillie’s short story, Slippery Mind Allegiance was published in The New Quarterley’s issue 169. She was shortlisted for The Literary Quarterly’s Gloria Vanderbilt’s 2013 short story contest and The Writers Union Canada Writing for Children Competitions. Driving Under an Influence was inspired by a simple wave of thanks, this habitual and kind connection.

Katie's Tree

It was the summer I met Katie that the trees began to hum. Not everyone could hear it; it was mainly children who spoke of it, talking about the humming that started when the sky got dark. For some it was a comfort that helped them fall asleep, but others complained about it being too loud and waking them up in the middle of the night. At first, parents mostly disregarded these statements, thinking them isolated to their own children’s imaginations, especially right before bedtime, maybe the result of traffic or electrical wires or cicadas. It took a few months, from what I remember, until people started paying more attention to what their children described, almost uniformly, as the humming trees. There were then around that time a few adults who also began to claim to hear the humming. But these were usually those kinds of people who were paid even less attention to than children. Street people, public drug users, or ‘crazies’ whose testimonies were not taken very seriously if at all. Some didn’t stick around either. They were transient, coming and going, disappearing as quickly as they appeared.

There were also a few who made claims about hearing the humming trees and who lived in more stable conditions, but these were also generally disregarded as the kind of benign crackpot conspiracy theorist or weirdo who gravitated to the oddest unscientific claims. With confidence as their sole authority, they would go so far as to proclaim that they knew what specifically the trees were saying, though when pressed the content was usually vague and contradictory. They rambled on about this humming starting when the sun went down and the first stars appeared, and that it continued humming until the dawn when the final stars disappeared in the growing light of the sinking night. And like the stars in the night sky, these people too came and went, and nobody paid much attention to them.

Katie was one of these weirdos. I don’t think she ever used drugs herself but she certainly had no problem dolling them out, especially to me at the beginning when she was trying to help me hear these trees. And while the general wisdom attributed the humming to the trees, Katie assured me that this was in fact not the case. Only some of the trees could be heard humming, she told me, and some louder than others. She claimed that the oldest ones or the tallest ones were the most consistent and the loudest – they taught the youngers, she added. And she would explain her reasoning by stating that it was because they pointed at the stars and followed them, but she couldn’t really go further into the mechanics of it all and, if pressed, would act as if that was an obvious consequence of trees pointing themselves at stars. She also insisted somewhat contradictorily that despite popular opinion, which was almost always wrong anyway, it was not so much the trees that hummed as the entire universe; the trees were kind of like the ends of instruments that resonated out what everything else was humming. At times she even became adamantly annoyed on the general focus on the trees. She much preferred to claim that the trees had very little to do with anything and that it was the whole harmony of the spheres that people were hearing finally, simply being expressed through the oldest trees that knew what they were doing.

That, of course, didn’t help her case much. Her insistence, which could be quite embarrassing at times when she started on that topic of conversation in public, that the trees were only part of the greater harmony, led most to dismiss her even more as a weirdo not to be taken seriously. It’s definitely how I thought of her when I first met her. She was sitting beside me at a cafe and wanted to talk. It was awkward at the start, being too polite to tell her to leave me alone and too reserved to relax into a conversation with a stranger, and a pretty strange stranger at that. But she had a certain disarming charm, a way of talking that didn’t overwhelm with monologue and showed enough genuine curiosity and inquiry, that the initial awkwardness of talking to a stranger melted after a few minutes. Although she certainly was strange and never really improved on that, she seemed to know how much a person could tolerate her and kept within those limits. And what was, back then, even more strange to me than her occasional hints at singing trees, was her astute knowledge of the history of science. She knew and cared very little of the complexities of modern physics, but was surprisingly well read in Ptolemy, Copernicus, and Galileo. I was amazed once, during a particularly heated discussion on cultural assumptions preventing us from seeing the reality of a situation, that she began to talk about how Galileo’s theory of tides completely contradicted his own insights on physical momentum. But more often than not she seemed a bit embarrassed at her arcane knowledge. She would start talking about some seventeenth-century scientist but then stop suddenly and smile bashfully, before trying to steer the conversation in a completely new direction. And as I got to know Katie better, I came to realize that this peculiarity stemmed from a genuine eagerness for companions to accompany her on her life journey rather than a desire to teach and lord over those behind her.

After seeing her at the cafe a few times and once just sitting in a park looking up at the trees, we became friends, and I sealed that friendship with an offer to help her move a week later. It was the first time that I had been to her place, and curious to see how she allowed her external space to reflect whatever was inside of her. She had found a small place on the first floor of a three-story house, which was a definite improvement from her basement suite. And she didn’t have many possessions; most were already in boxes when I arrived. She was a bit sheepish with their contents, but over the course of the week after the initial move, warmed up enough to let me help her unpack. Besides numerous books, she possessed mostly an array of oddities and touristy mementos seemingly without any overarching guiding force. There were figurines of cute smiling dwarves alongside the more serious, high fantasy dragons baring teeth; Bavarian beer steins and gaudy tea sets; pictures of landscapes probably taken from the curb or a thrift store, and strange fabrics and tapestries of apparent Eastern origins or influence. It was all fairly typical, I thought, of the amassment of stuff of someone like Katie. I was, I had to admit to myself later, a bit disappointed in her at being so predictable with her collecting habits.

Her books, on the other hand, were a bit more interesting because of how wide ranging they were. She was completely unashamed of an extensive collection of vintage erotica, which she shelved haphazardly alongside a copy of Thus Spake Zarathustra with a broken spine, which she admitted never reading beyond the first page. Her source of early modern science was also revealed. She had translations and collected volumes of authors both ancient and modern I had never heard of in my life. As I flipped through a few, I noticed her handwriting making brief comments sporadically throughout. Most of these were unintelligible, except for occasional note like “cf. Fermat’s little theorem,” written randomly, and for that reason even more bewilderingly, on the final page of a book on Linnaeus.

There was one box, however, that she was very protective over, though she tried very hard to appear to be not protective at all. I noticed her first shifting it under the table with her foot as if to remove it from my attention. And then later, I saw her carry it to her bedroom in the back where she covered it with a sheet. I didn’t pry further into the contents of the box, but she remained nervous about it and would glance over to her room, almost involuntarily, where the box remained in full view. After the move, I had visited Katie’s place often, and although she never bothered getting a door or any kind of separating device for her room, the box under the sheet was no longer visible.

It was also right around that time that people started talking more about the humming of the trees. I recalled afterwards that she had mentioned this humming in passing but never in any kind of detail. I always assumed it was just some reference to something I didn’t quite get. But once other people started talking about this apparent humming that only children could hear, it began to occupy a place in almost all of Katie’s conversations as she developed a reserved obsession over it. And even back then, at the beginning of that summer, she insisted that it was not the trees alone that were humming but the harmony of the spheres. But incorrect origins of the humming were not Katie’s only frustration, not even her main one. I could see that she was growing increasingly irritated by the fact that she was constantly dismissed on this topic, and overlooked for the testimony of children. People distrusted her and her opinions on the matter and saw her more as a weird opportunist who was claiming some secret knowledge about this unique phenomenon to find some kind of validation of herself. I knew better and although I really thought she was out of line sometimes or verging too close to a fringe, almost crazy, worldview, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for her. I myself found it hard to align what she was saying to what seemed most likely the reality, but even though I had only known her a few weeks, I had already developed a deep respect for her. I couldn’t dismiss her like I could the other adults or sometimes children who came up with the most outlandish comments on these humming trees – humming trees, which, by the way, almost no one else could even hear.

Katie saw this and our friendship grew deeper. This is when she searched out all sorts of ways for me to hear these trees, or rather, to her, the harmony of the spheres. We tried hippy mediation things at first, but these didn’t work much. The candles and incense increased, but we both got impatient at how ineffectual they were. Then she got me drugs – I have no idea from where – and I reluctantly agreed to take them. At first, it was at her place, and she would tell me all about the the motions of the planets around the sun, things like the parallax or the retrograde of Mars that I could hardly grasp sober. But at least we never got bored. Eventually, we started going for evening walks in the forest, always to her favourite tree, a large, gnarled oak that stood alone on the edge of a cow field. These were fun nights for me. Katie almost never took drugs herself and was an excellent guide for so many evenings and hours, laying on blankets in this cow field, looking at the stars, close to the tree, but never under it – she always regarded it nervously and with a certain degree of reservation. When we settled in that field, and laid down on the soft earth looking up, she would show me constellations and point out the journey of the moon and stars across their circular paths. But I never heard the hum.

Eventually, Katie gave up on plying me with drugs and a few weeks passed of me hardly seeing her at all. When I did she was taciturn and maybe even a bit more nervous than usual. Eventually, she invited me over and told me she wanted to talk to me. It sounded ominous and I was getting kind of anxious. I thought she was going to do some sort of friend breakup or tell me that she was planning on moving back to where her parents lived, or something along those lines. But when I showed up, she was clearly the more nervous one. She invited me to sit at the table, where for the first time since the move, the box that she had hidden in her room had appeared. She was holding both sides, softly but firmly. I sat down and she told me, with an odd, nerve-wracking formality, that she had appreciated our friendship, even though we hadn’t known each other for so long, and that she trusted me. I replied that I felt the same.

After sharply inhaling, she stood up and opened the box on the table. She looked in and removed an object. I couldn’t really tell what it was, or even what it was made of. It seemed to be a kind of intricate wood, polished and veneered that wrapped around a smooth white object, only visible in a few places where the wood intersected with itself in the folds of a knot. She put this object on the table and stared at it before speaking.

“This is the skull of my former lover,” was all that she said.

I looked at it, confused, trying to figure out this nature of this puzzling statement. The white bits between the wood certainly could have been bone, but it was totally unclear how a skull could have gotten in there. We sat in silence for a long moment until Katie again spoke.

“This is when the humming began; or not really, I mean... I mean, the humming has always existed for as long as the universe has existed. But this is when I first was able to hear the humming. For a long time. For years even, I kept it to myself. But then I learned of others. The kids for example. That makes sense; their ears are like that. They hear things and see things that we can’t. But also there are the others. I don’t believe all of them. You know that. But I believe some; you can tell when they can hear the harmony, you can just tell.”

She stopped speaking and looked at me. I did not know what to say. We sat in silence again for a long moment in the dim light of her living room.

“So. This is Sam, or Samuel to be technical, but I don’t think I’d ever heard anyone call him that. I suppose it makes me Delilah, though I didn’t cut off his hair. But here, here’s where I need to trust you. I’m going to trust you, and I’m sorry, I’m going to lay this burden of trust on you. I think it will be ok. I hope so. But it will all be fine. I just need you to trust me.”

We looked each other in the eyes and I was not really sure I wanted to continue. This seemed like something more serious, something that was pulling me into a world I was not sure I wanted to enter. And yet the pull was inescapable. I felt myself wanting it so badly and after a few more seconds looking at each other, I took a breath and released. I entered.

“You can trust me,” I said.

Katie looked at me a little longer, and then replied, “This is Sam’s skull. Sam and I were lovers, well, we were lovers at first. But you know, things started to get old, and we just ended up, I don’t know, existing together instead of loving each other. I don’t want to get into that. But let’s just say, one day Sam took off. We fought in the evening and went to sleep and in the morning he was gone. And that was it for a while. I knew it was over and I didn’t want to pursue him. I just wanted to move on. I learned gradually, bit by bit, that he moved back to where he grew up and that he was living there. I didn’t care. I did love him and I still really did care about him, but that was that. Things were over. Things had been over for a long time before that fight.

“But then a few months later I got a call from his mom, and she said he was missing and she wanted to know if I knew where he was. I hadn’t seen him and I told her that. But I started getting a bit anxious myself. We talked, me and his mom, a few times over the week and then the police showed up and asked me some stuff and then left. It was all very disturbing. I didn’t sleep well and wasn’t in a good state then.

“But then one day he just showed up. It was evening and he knocked on the door and I was so surprised. But he wasn’t good. He wasn’t good at all. He was exhausted and looked drunk or stoned or something. He just came in and sat down. I was going to call his mom, but he told me not to. He told me he was on the run and that no one should ever know he was here. I was pretty scared, and tried to comfort him. He told me that he came just to show me something, but that we would have to wait until it got darker.

“Well, we waited. I tried to talk to him, but he just sat there at the table, right where you are. But he wouldn’t look at me. I kept telling him that he should call his mother, but he refused and told me that he was going to be leaving again, and that I shouldn’t tell anyone because it won’t matter.”

Katie stopped talking to compose herself. I sat at the table and looked at her. She swallowed and stumbled a bit in her speech.

“I’ve never actually told anyone this before you know. You are the first person, the only person.” Another moment of silent assessment and she continued, “Anyway, once it got dark, like really dark, probably past midnight, he stood up and told me to follow him. I did and we walked out to that oak tree I took you to. I hadn’t been there before, but he seemed to know where he was going. I was so scared. I didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t think I was in any danger, of course, but I was still so scared.”

She swallowed and looked up to the ceiling. “Well, we got to that tree and he stops in front of it and asks me if I can hear the humming. I don’t know what he’s talking about. And he says it’s the souls of all the dead singing or screaming or chanting or whatever, and it makes a vibration that sounds like humming. I tell him that I don’t know what he’s talking about. So he turns to me and then starts walking backwards so he can proceed towards the tree, but still keep his eyes on me. He gets right up to the tree and tells me he saw a man die. He says that he saw a man die and didn’t do anything about it and then he even helped get rid of the body. He said that he fed the body to this tree.

“I had no idea what he was talking about. I thought he must have been stoned, and I was ready to go back and call his mom. But then...”

Kate stopped, and closed her eyes, not looking at me while she spoke, “Then he just steps back into the tree and says, ‘We got rid of him like this.’ Right at that moment, the bark of the tree just kind of moved aside like it was soft and took in his body and closed over most of it. He yelled for a few seconds and then was silent, his head the only thing outside of the bark, hanging down as if unconscious. I ran like fuck. I ran so hard and so fast. I was so scared. And when I got home, I slammed the door shut and locked it and went into my bed and put the sheets over my head and I cried the rest of the night. I was so scared.”

Katie opened her eyes and looked at me again, “I must have slept, but I’m not sure. I think I did, because when I woke up it was light out. I knew it wasn’t a dream. I knew that Sam was out at that oak tree, dead and mostly swallowed by it. I kept thinking over and over again what he had said, about being involved in a murder or something. And I kept thinking about his head sticking out like that, flopping to the ground.

“When it was night – I don’t know why I waited – but when it was night, I went out with an ax. I thought I might chop the tree down or something, I don’t really know. But when I went out there, the first thing I noticed was that I could hear the hum. I stood there at the edge of the cow field and I looked up and I could hear it. It was so beautiful. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard. And I knew that it was not the souls of the dead like Sam thought. Or at least, I knew that it was not just the souls of the dead, but that it was everything. It was the harmony of the spheres.

“After a bit, I looked down again from the sky and at the tree and I could see that these branches had gone around Sam’s head.” She placed her hand on the wooden thing on her table. “That’s what I cut down. I cut down those branches and I guess Sam’s head with it. And that’s what this is.”

She gently pushed the wood-like thing on the table closer towards me.

“This is Sam’s skull.”

“Fuck,” was all I could mutter.

“I hated that tree after that,” she continued. “Or I mean, I hated it for a while. But then I came to learn its ways and respect it. It didn’t kill Sam. Sam killed himself, and even then, I don’t know if that’s the right word. Sam entered the tree, that’s all I can say. He entered so that I could hear the music of the spheres. He must have thought it better for me to learn to hear that than for him to keep loving.

“For a while after, I would kind of experiment with the tree. It wasn’t good, I admit that. I tried to feed it, you know? I would throw things at it and see what happened. But it always just behaved like a normal tree. I myself was far too scared to touch it, but I would go at night and sit under it and listen to the spheres. I even once brought it a cat – I’m not proud of this – and pushed it against the bark, but even then nothing happened. The cat ran off back to its home. I cried so hard that day. I felt so sorry for that cat I tried to feed to the tree. But the tree, as I learned, only takes those who are willing, or those who are already dead.

“And I learned that it’s the tree that determines who can hear the spheres. Usually it lets those hear who feed it, but not only. I guess it lets children hear, but I don’t get why they deserve it. Maybe it is just their ears, or whatever. But I also learned that this is not the only tree. I think all trees, maybe all creatures, have this ability somehow. But some trees or, from what some have told me, cliffs and lakes can do it, and some are stronger than others. This one is ancient. It has been around looking at the stars for hundreds of years, maybe thousands? There is so much I don’t understand. But I hear it; I can hear the harmony of all things.”

Katie sat there, with her eyes now on the skull beneath the wood. After a long silence, she spoke again, tersely, “Let’s go to the tree.”

I didn’t know what to think. I felt like laughing, but it wasn’t really funny; it wasn’t funny at all. She stood up silently and walked out. All I could do was follow her. I grabbed her hand, and was terrified, consulted only by my own incredulity. I knew without being told where we were going. We walked in the dark to the tree, neither of us saying a single word, communicating only through the holding of our hands. The evening sky was clear and the stars were out. We got to the edge of the cow field and stopped and looked: the tree was there at the edge yearning upwards towards the starry, deep blue sky.

We continued walking to the tree, slowly and with a strange hesitancy that I had never seen with Katie. She stopped under its branches and asked me if I could hear the hum. I couldn’t, and she pulled me closer to the tree. I still didn’t know what to think. It all felt so ridiculous, but we kept going under its bower, still holding hands. A few feet from the trunk, Katie stopped, turned to me. We hugged and for the first time in our lives, we kissed. Katie then said in the most serious tone, “I love you and I want you to hear the harmony.”

She let go of my hand, turned to the tree, and ran towards it, almost skipping in a newly found joy. She jumped and embraced it with her arms and both legs. The bark, as she had described earlier, was now soft and malleable, and she began to skink inside. I yelled and ran to her. I reached around her, deep into the bark, grabbed her and started pulling her back. The tree did not resist and I pulled Katie out.

We fell back together on the grass, my arms covered in a soft wood-like substance, almost like sawdust. I looked at Katie laying there and she was smiling. But as I sat up, I could hear it, a faint resonance coming from deep in the fabric of the world. It was all around, singing the song of all the universe, the wonderful and terrifying chant of all that is and is not, the harmony of the spheres.

By Tristan Major

Tristan Major is a Toronto-based creative writer. After decades working in academia, he has returned to imaginative and speculative thinking and writing. He is fascinated with the social interactions in uncanny urban settings.

Open Journal Short Stories 2025

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