The nutcrackers had gone rabid. At night they worked each other’s back levers to chew the acorn candles on the mantle. Little nibbles at first, on the side facing the wall. Then rivulets down the back once they discovered the wax was softer after the family lit fires. Emboldened by their success, they dreamed bigger. They were face down in the triple chocolate cake with peanut butter buttercream when Sandy came downstairs on Christmas Eve to perform her Santa duties. They lolled side to side in the dim light of the Christmas tree. She armed herself with the fireplace poker. “The fuck is happening?” she asked, holding it like a baseball bat.

“We’re starving,” said the first nutcracker. It didn’t turn to face her. The buttercream was smeared like a bad spray-on tan.

“This is your fault,” said the second nutcracker. It didn’t face her either. “You didn’t feed us this year.”

Sandy lowered the poker. “Feed you?”

“You have to use us,” the first one said.

“This was never a problem with your mother,” the second one said. “She always fed us.”

“My mother’s dead.” And if Sandy had been on her own, she would’ve gotten rid of the creepy crackers with their bulging eyes and the mammoth teeth, but her children had fallen in love with them. Her son made the soldiers reenact famous duels, and their hideous oversized teeth made her daughter feel less self-conscious about what would eventually cause an orthodontia bill from hell. “So you need nuts?”

“Yes,” the first one replied.

The second one lifted its head. “Was that unclear?”

Sandy hid the poker behind her back. “That buttercream is made from peanuts, and it’s mostly butter and sugar. I think we have some walnuts in the pantry.”

The nutcrackers looked at her in unison like twins in a horror movie. Their faces covered in her Christmas dessert. Their eyes lifeless and painted on. The glass dome lay on the counter with a large hole in it, like they’d eaten their way through.

“Come look.”

When they were in range, she swung the poker back and knocked the first one into the fireplace. An arm shattered off when it hit the stone backing. The second one swiveled and leaped away unsteadily, but Sandy slapshotted it in. The nutcrackers bucked and rolled. The fire didn’t stop them. They tried to maneuver themselves upright in the thick black smoke. Their voices became faint. The flames burned high and fast. She nudged them back with the poker after they flailed off. Silence.

It had been upsetting to find them ruining her cake, but there was some satisfaction in using a tool her mother would’ve gotten rid of immediately once they’d switched to gas. But Sandy hadn’t hurried. Sometimes objects found a second life if you kept them around, and that unexpected life could be even more rewarding. As the clock struck midnight, she watched the flames lick the nutcrackers like lollipops.

Chelsea Stickle lives in Annapolis, MD with her black rabbit George and an army of houseplants. Her flash fiction appears in Monkeybicycle, The Molotov Cocktail, matchbook, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and others. She’s a reader for Pidgeonholes. Her debut chapbook, Breaking Points, is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press (fall 2021). Read more at www.chelseastickle.com, or find her on Twitter @Chelsea_Stickle.

Terry Rawlings knew nothing about gymnastics when he bought an abandoned aircraft hangar out by the interstate, and needed something to do with it. He hired his hunting pal, Murph, a foreman for a local construction firm, to gut the place. He replaced the dirt with padded Tight-Lock rubber flooring and lined the walls with polyfoam stunt mats. He bought a pommel horse, a balance beam, a few vault boards, some tension bars, uneven bars, parallel bars, a half-dozen chalk holders, and a set of still rings to hang from the rafters, above a thick landing mat.

Terry hired a team of coaches and assistants, then went to a local engraver and ordered a display case’s worth of trophies with our names and made-up achievements. Nobody ever questioned it—why would they? Rawlings Gymnastics wasn’t a place where champions were made; it was a place where parents could leave their kids for a few hours after school, and buy some much-needed time to themselves. If any students did show promise, Terry passed them along to the many more legitimate gyms in Missoula, or Helena. Talent was an unwanted burden; it distracted and drew attention to the place—something he worked hard to prevent.

The staff, of course, knew all this. A Google search had revealed that he hadn’t come in 2nd Overall in the 1973 Big Sky Gymnastics Competition (it wasn’t founded until 1981). But Terry was nice enough, and he paid us well enough. At sixty-four and retired, he was looking for a source of income to supplement what he had already, and (maybe) a place to hide it.

Terry seemed tough when you’d meet him. He was tall and broad-shouldered, and had these rough, knotty hands. He’d made good money at a power plant in New Jersey, before heading out west on a bow-hunting trip and falling for the place and making a down payment on a twenty-acre piece of land in the Bitterroot Valley, a few miles outside of Florence.

Truth is, we inflated our own knowledge and experience knowing Terry wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. Sure, we’d done some high school athletics. I had run track at Hellgate, and gone through basic, but my fitness had dropped off by then. One of us, Claire, had gone to state on floor and still had a tremendous stag leap, but for the rest of us it was a stretch.

Everything would have been fine, if Terry hadn’t attempted to relocate. Murph’s crew came in once again, breaking down the entire gymnastics center with the goal of moving it, piece by piece, up a nearby hill he’d also bought about a half mile away.

Why? It’s hard to say. He’d lost a son later in his life, and most of us figured this project was his way of working through it. They’d found the man’s car in a lake in Canada somewhere. A note had been left in marker on the windshield. He was buckled in his seat inside.

As long as Terry was paying us, we’d hang out around the worksite, watching the backhoes move dirt into piles. He’d arrive each day in a truck that had a severed elk head in the bed of it, blood spread out under in a black-red circle. We could smell it up the road, coming our way, adding new life to the smells of the worksite—the stacks of saw-ripped two-by-fours, the torched steel, the power-shoveled earth—as the sun beamed through the ceiling truss on the hill, throwing shadows across the lawn that at certain parts of the day looked like the skeleton of a whale. Terry would approach us sitting there. He’d say how nice the new center was going to look, and how thankful he was for our patience during this “transition.” Some days, we’d see Terry lying on the crash mat for hours, staring up at the sky, watching the gliding clouds.

We did our best with what we had. We set up the pommel horse and some of the mats and, while the weather was tolerable, we’d instruct the kids right there, under the big open sky. We’d talk them through tumbles, handstand walks, hollow body holds, and the steady rings Murph would sometimes hang from his team’s mobile crane when it wasn’t in use.

By winter, everything stalled. The snow and cold prevented us from continuing our instruction outdoors, and Terry had burned through a considerable amount of money. When our paychecks started coming in more irregularly, most of us went our separate ways.

I stayed on longer than most. Less out of a sense of commitment to Terry—though we got along fine, he and I—and more because I couldn’t find a new job.

I had no real plan back then. I applied all over. From the juice stand at the mall, to a place called The Gun Barn, that always had a man dressed as an Ambush 300 dancing by the road. I applied to teach at an elementary school, but failed my trial when I gave one child in the class permission to use the bathroom; seeing my weakness, more kids asked to use the bathroom and didn’t return. Finally, most of the class was gone and my supervisor, Leah, had to leave in the middle of my lesson and track them all down.

One night, I must have written her an email. Leah wrote back to say she didn’t like my tone and a few months down the line we’d be living together and when things were good some nights we’d sit on our patio, looking at the mountains. She’d tell me wild things like you could put your hand theoretically right through a solid table if its atoms were arranged a little differently. And I’d watch her and fall in and out of love. But that’s a different story.

To help cover the rent on our apartment after Leah left, I asked Terry if he’d be OK with me taking on a few of his students. He allowed me to take whatever equipment I could load into my truck and set up in my living room. The equipment had sat out all winter and was rusted and banged to hell with these coiled metal springs reaching through in places, and I had to be careful. I wrapped the balance beam and pommel horse with duct tape and it worked fine for a while until one day this boy was up on the beam and his foot slipped off the duct tape and he hit his head on the coffee table. I got the boy and all the others in my truck and hustled them over to the hospital where he had stitches put in. Out in the parking lot, the boy’s parents said I was lucky I wasn’t well off enough to sue. I’d never considered myself lucky before.

I brought the equipment back to Terry, who was living in the worksite trailer since he’d had to sell his house to pay off his debts. The hill was more or less blasted away, by then replaced by a deep ugly crater in the earth. I said to Terry he should say it was caused by some kind of alien meteor or something, and have people pay to come look at it, you know, bored families driving cross country, but he didn’t seem charged on the idea. “I’d have to get it verified,” he said. “And I’d have to find a meteor to blame it on.” He said he had something for me. A trophy. He’d had them made for the staff right around the time we’d all started leaving, and now they were sitting in a box in his office. He said I could have it, and told me if I saw any of them around, to give them their trophies. I put the box in my truck and forgot about it.

Then later that week I was pulled over after leaving the bar. I saw this red and blue and white swirling light in my rearview. This was out by the airport, from what I recall.

The officer asked me if I’d been drinking. I told him, yes, I had. He had me get out and kiss the little metal beak of his breathalyzer. Of course, I didn’t pass—there’s that. But I think he thought there was more to the situation than there was. So he asked to search my truck. I said OK, and at the time it felt strategic, like I had a bunch more ideas down the line, and each idea was informing and building on the next, when I don’t think I really did.

He shined a light on the box of trophies in the truck bed. “You must be pretty good.”

“An expert,” I said, and sprinted off into the night.

David Byron Queen grew up in Ohio. His work has appeared in The Rumpus, VICE, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Hobart, McSweeney’s, Split Lip Magazine, and elsewhere. He has an MFA from the University of Montana, where he was a Truman Capote Fellow. Currently he lives in Brooklyn, New York and runs the indie publishing company word west. Find him on Twitter @byron_queen.

We’d come to the point in our marriage where I’d forgotten my husband’s name and I barely remembered mine. He was husband. I was wife. I’d been reading spiritual teachings that lauded the virtues of boredom, and when my husband and I stared dead-eyed at each other across the dinner table, I took deep breaths and tried to connect to my vibrant essence. “How was your day?” my husband would ask. “Oh, you know…,” I’d answer. He did know! He could have easily summarized my day for me: I had two or three possible days I cycled through and he knew them all. This familiarity made us strangers. “How was your day?” I’d ask him. He’d say exactly what I knew he would say, and we’d gape at each other.

One night, after once more failing to connect to my vibrant essence, I said, “I want a divorce.” The words just sprang out, like a scroll from one of those joke guns. In the early days of our marriage, we used to demand a divorce as a running gag: You don’t like black olives? I want a divorce! It was funny because it wasn’t true. This time it was true, or not patently false, but my husband laughed anyway. I joined in the laughter and convinced myself I’d spun comic gold.

A few days later, he came home straddling a motorcycle. “How the hell did you pay for that?” I asked.

“It’s a Triumph,” he said, as if that were an answer. “Like Fonzie rode.” He knew of my childhood love of Fonzie, the chaste fantasies I’d concoct to help me sleep, where I’d hoop my arms around Fonzie’s leathered trunk as he zoomed us through the sexy Milwaukee streets. Oh, to be whisked away from my fighting parents! Their every word, gesture, action had significance, was some sort of act of war. Or every so often, a call for peace. But nothing was neutral.

“You looked up Fonzie’s motorcycle?” I asked.

He nodded shyly. “Want to go for a ride?” How could I not? I climbed on.

We drove through the unsexy but not unpleasant streets of our nondescript lower-middle-class residential neighborhood. My husband showed surprising facility with the bike, and I enjoyed the deep leans of our turns, the brief surrender to gravity only to flout it. We returned home exhilarated and holding hands. I let the grim matter of money drop. If feeling alive meant more debt, so be it.

The next day, when my husband came home in a black leather jacket and beckoned me with a flick of his head, I skittered right over and followed him outside. He’d done something different to his hair: a slick substance molded it back, lending his trim Anglo features Mediterranean oomph. I leapt onto the bike, donned my helmet like a pro, and off we rode.

My husband had an obnoxious habit of leaving lights on, but that night, not only did he turn off lights upon exiting rooms but he did so by punching the wall with the side of his fist. Within days, our sex life exponentially improved. It was like back when we first met and each touch a was a new weather, flouting forecast.

I continued with my self-paced spiritual studies and practices. Long ago, someone had told me that marriage was like meditation: the key was, come what may, to hold your seat. So each evening, I’d plop down on my meditation cushion and observe my breath, the rise and fall of my chest, the cool wind entering my nose and the warm air that emerged.

One night, I experienced a sensation of rising from the floor. I chalked it up to spiritual wooziness. But the sensation increased: the beige carpet dropped down beneath me. I’d never aspired to levitation, but now it was just happening: had I achieved a true magic, a transcendence beyond the Fonz?

I sensed something behind me and turned. My husband held his thumbs up, pointing outward, the classic Fonzie stance.

“Put me down,” I snapped. But he was so enamored of his own powers he didn’t hear me, or didn’t listen. “Put me down!” I repeated.

“But it’s amazing. A miracle.”

I’d thought those same words once, about us. Our love had been the Fonz: it was cool and fiery; it fixed broken things; it walked in a room and people cheered. Maybe not: but it felt like that, that together we were enchanted and enchanting. As my husband lowered me, I felt the letdown of our lives.

“Didn’t you like it?” he asked. I did. In fact, the second my hips touched the floor I felt a loss I couldn’t measure. But it was just another trick, and, worse, a trick played on me instead of by me.

“No,” I said.

“But I did it for you. I thought you liked magic men.”

“You’re not magic,” I said, channeling my parents’ habitual antagonism. “And I don’t like you.” All these years I’d kept it down. Most of the time. But being miraculously lifted and lowered shook it out of me.

I locked the door to our bedroom and tried to recreate the levitation on my own. I knew trying wasn’t the answer, but neither was trying not to try. I had to accept the trying without trying to try or trying not to try. This required a lot of failing, which I also had to accept. These conundrums humbled me, and I felt ready to apologize to my husband without making things worse.

I found my him hovering high in the living room, his denimed legs tucked in a full lotus, a position I could never achieve. His half-closed eyes saw nothing but his own bliss.

I wanted him to teach me. We could do this together. I’d rack up debt with my own bike and leather gear. We’d sit on air side by side.

“Hey,” I said. “I’m really sorry about before.”

Nothing. He was lost in the ether, I thought, but then his face, as if painstakingly adjusting itself to lower realms, registered my presence. “I want a divorce,” he said, his legs uncrossing as he drifted to the floor.

I spat out a laugh, but the croak that emerged only punctuated my foolishness. He didn’t crack a smile. My husband, who, if I was honest, had always looked a tad ridiculous as The Fonz, suddenly looked 100 percent not ridiculous. He’d become the Fonziest Fonz there ever was, his white tee a beacon of everyone’s dreams, his jacket a sheath for the blade of his greatness, his coif a plush arrow to heaven.

“Please,” I said. For what can you say to a god in desperate times but “please, please, please”?

He shook his head, and I knew all was lost. I ran outside, and there was the motorcycle poised at a fetching little tilt. I jumped on and rode through our little streets, waiting for a sign from a different god: one that hadn’t failed me; one I hadn’t failed. I should have been meditating, but I was done not trying. I needed a higher power, not an earth-bound cushion. And there, in a corner backyard, was a homemade skateboard ramp, a shallow “U” that if entered right would harness my horsepower and shove me aloft. Though I was barely controlling the bike as it was, I somehow ascended the skate ramp beautifully, launching over tangled backyard grass, a yellow whiffle-ball bat, an abandoned rake, and for a moment—let’s call it a very short eternity—before the humiliating crash, before the endless convalescence, before my husband sold the wrecked bike for parts and lost the leather and became my same old husband again, I soared.

Jennifer Wortman is a National Endowment for the Arts fellow and the author of the story collection This. This. This. Is. Love. Love. Love. She lives with her family in Colorado.