Author: okaydonkey7

A Reading List for the End of the World by Julia Rose Greider

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Robin and I are coping well with the end of the world, by which I mean we usually wake up by eleven and agree that eleven is not bad at all. We start our day with reading: Robin prefers Plato, while I prefer Garfield. My love, ever the philosophy major, has drawn up a list of essential texts and downloaded as many as our laptops can hold, since the Internet will go out any day now. We argued for weeks over whether Garfield deserved to survive the apocalypse. Robin said everyone would hate a fat cat when they were starving, and I retorted that wrestling with Plato would burn too many calories. Eventually I pointed out that matters would likely snowball too fast anyway for starvation to be our cause of death, and if Robin wanted me to be bearable to live with until the end came in whatever way it did, they’d better stockpile some Garfield. They’ve never been able to resist me.

Once we’ve read our fill, it’s time for a late lunch. Robin insists that we discuss our respective literatures to keep our minds agile. They say we’ll need our problem-solving abilities when things get worse. This is another reason they resent my Garfield: they say it does not stimulate the brain. But I point out that, unlike Plato, Garfield is very good at procuring sustenance. While Robin descends into the cellar to make a selection from our menu of freeze-dried camping food, I go out to the yard and look up. Each day it becomes more difficult to breathe. The sky toys with the hues of an oil spill, sometimes green, or yellow, or purple. Most of the time, though, we are cloaked in a grayish-brown that shimmers vaguely, like some vengeful god changed his desktop to a color named death.

We force down our reconstituted pad thai or bun-less lentil sloppy joes or scrambled eggs which, in their freeze-dried form, are crispy like chips. For now we’re still vegetarians, but the vegetarian meals down in the cellar are getting low, and pretty soon we’ll be reverting to a more primitive carnivorous state. The idea makes Robin anxious, even though I point out that the animals we’ll be eating have already been dead and bagged for years.

After lunch, we have our nature walk. If I were in charge, I would probably take a nap instead. Doom’s approach makes me snoozy. But Robin says we have a responsibility to exist in the world while it lasts. I slip my hand into theirs, and they lead me into the woods and make me look at things. They make me look at trees and mushrooms and birds (if we’re lucky), and they call them immense rough-skinned intelligences and fleshy fruiting bodies of fungi and the ones who could still escape if there was anywhere to go. They exhort me to fix the images in my mind, and I say what good will it do for a dying beast to remember other dying beasts?

But I only say this in my head, otherwise it makes Robin pull their hand away and pat at their eyes. Robin still finds hope useful, and I try to be sympathetic.

The woods are quiet these days. When we stand still, my ears feel the fuzzy silence of earplugs, like there might be something to hear if only I could take them out. But I can’t. So we don’t stand still very often; instead, we create the illusion of life by cracking twigs under our feet. Today I nearly step on something else: a matchbook. Robin bends to pick it up. The cardboard, still dry, bears the unfamiliar insignia of a bar called Dante’s. Someone has been burning the matches; only two are left. Robin says, Who—? And I say, Don’t think about it. Robin stares at the packet in their palm, and by the time I lead us home, it’s nearly dark. The sun doesn’t set because it’s never there to begin with. The pall just dims and dims.

After dinner, Robin usually tries for something more contemporary: Hegel or Nietzsche, or Foucault if they’re feeling cheeky. But tonight they make me sit while they read Mencius aloud, and for a few minutes I admire the length of their fingers absentmindedly turning the matchbook over and over. They’re looking for answers, but I already have mine. So I excuse myself to the bathroom. They think I have a weak stomach, that the camping food doesn’t agree with me. I let them think this even though it isn’t particularly flattering. In the bathroom, I sit with my back against the tub and grope around in the depths of the cabinet under the sink. From beneath the rolls of toilet paper, I pull out a stack of small square pages that I ripped off years ago from a cartoon-a-day calendar. If we’re still alive when the toilet paper runs out, these pages will see things they never asked to see. But for now, I peruse a few of the cartoons every night. Sometimes I find one that makes me laugh even though it never did before. People used to get that worked up over a family dinner? A fender bender? A fractious boss? Ha-ha. The days are hopelessly out of order, and I never bother rearranging them.

Robin and I go to bed early. I fit myself against the soft curve of their back and nestle my nose into their neck, where the musk of wheat and lilies soothes me just the same as it did when our ends were not so imminent.

In the darkest part of the night, I wake. Robin is sitting up. They’ve lit one of the matches, and it blazes towards their fingertips. Their face is shining with silent tears. Mencius, they say, believed in the fundamental goodness of humans. Shouldn’t we be struggling towards survival like the products of evolution that we are? Shouldn’t we be devoting our time to useful pursuits, figuring out how to hunt and forage and make fire?

I hold my breath as the flame gobbles its own lifeblood. For months this question has hovered between us unspoken. Robin has tried to ask it before, and I’ve stopped them with kisses, eaten the words out of their mouth. Yes, my sage, I want to say. You and I will be the library, and the library must go on.

Just before the flame blisters their fingers, Robin extinguishes it with one sharp hiss of breath. Into the black silence, against the blue memory of fire that twitches before my eyes, I find I can only speak the truth.

I fumble the matchbook out of Robin’s hand and rip off the last match. I fold the book around the nubby tip; from it, I pull a conflagration. And to Robin’s question, I say no. Because survival—isn’t that how we got here in the first place?

Julia Rose Greider lives in New Hampshire and works in Vermont as a public librarian. Her fiction has been published in Nat. Brut, West Trade Review, and CALYX Journal, and she is an alum of the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop.

Bikini Atoll by Rowan Pollard

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A wild driver, her feather coat flying in the wind,
Cadillac convertible southwards out of town but again
I found her half-sunken into the reservoir.
I’ve had enough, she said, I’ve done everything twice.
I’ve been a storm chaser, I shot Kennedy, twelve years
I spent in Vegas drinking gold and winning. My
velvet’s all worn out and I’m stuck here and I can’t
remember my own name.
I made one up for her, something American, Arizona
Castle, Georgia Crossroads, Mississippi Bravo.
I entertained her for a while until the shock wore off,
and once home a hurricane stuck the tower block and kept us
stuck. Some days, I was sick of tracing a trail of ash. I was sick
of extravagance. Where were my pearls to swallow? My
untruthful movie star carpets and gunshot near-misses?
I didn’t miss a word of lies but I got sick anyway.
Last night, under the low moon, I said I loved her. She told me
I like Mississippi best. Like the river always moving through the land.
The dam burst that morning, and I looked for her in the clear
dull water. I thought I’d find some goodbye note and
more, but beside our front door was her feather coat like a snakeskin.
The Cadillac drove toward the sun.
Mississippi, bravo.

Rowan Pollard is a writer and poet living in a nowhere town somewhere in the UK. He has been published in Apocalypse Confidential.

Emily Jarred by Toni Leonetti

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A poet’s X post argued
for art apart from artist.
His example?
We love Dickinson’s verse,
even though she killed kittens,
drowning them in pickle jars.
Look it up, he said.
What?
I checked.
Everyone but me knew.

Hope is the thing with feathers—
Unlike cats who can’t fly away

Because I could not stop for Death—
I tossed him softer fur to hug
Fresh eyes to blind in brine
Purrs to choke

My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—
Until blasted in helpless corners

My letter to the World
Met no reply—
After I tore it into tuna
Crammed down one hungry last meow—

Toni Juliette Leonetti lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and has written short stories, poetry, plays, and a mystery novel. Her work appears in publications including DarkWinter Literary Magazine, Literally Stories, Elegant Literature, and Soul Forte.

The Signs by Gabe Montesanti

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Backtracking is a rigged poker game, and yet, I still play. I bake backtracking on the top rack of the oven and scatter its crumbs through the forest. Like a bait dog, backtracking still growls at its own reflection. Backtracking and I steal every No U-Turn sign in the city of St. Louis, Missouri. Mounted on the wall like a moose head, backtracking stares at me through empty eyes. I bite into the poisonous pit of a backtracking plum because I’ve survived those juices before. Sometimes, backtracking pitches a tent in the wilderness. What’s the difference between me and nostalgia? backtracking wants to know. Mirrors reflect backtracking like a set of circular footprints in the sand, the hump of a question mark. Backtracking is the frozen tundra in the arctic onto which I can’t help but keep my cheek pressed. Like sandpaper, backtracking wants to use mindless repetition to make smooth what was once rough. Backtracking is disiecta membra, limbs of a scattered poet, Latin from Horace’s Satires. At the 7-Eleven soda machine, between the root beer and the cherry cola, backtracking induces nausea. Extraterrestrials don’t buy into backtracking because their aircrafts only move forward. Beam me up, I scream from a barren field of corn. Don’t let me track back into myself what I have collected by running away.

Gabe Montesanti is the author of BRACE FOR IMPACT: A MEMOIR, which chronicles her time skating for Arch Rival Roller Derby. She earned her MFA at Washington University in St. Louis. Her work has been published in Huff Post, LA Times, Lit Hub, and elsewhere. She is currently at work on a second memoir. 

Rules for New Girls by Leslie Pietrzyk

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1976

That Bicentennial summer everyone talks about tennis, desperate to be pretty Chrissy Evert, thwacking balls into meteors. We’re tired of being Iowa girls. But tennis rackets cost real money, meaning of us five, only Janelle’s got a racket because she’s got one of everything. Still, no one plays tennis, so Janelle can’t much lord her fancy Head racket over us. Boy, that makes me secretly happy. 

Suzanne and Tracy find a ratty badminton set in their garage, so we agree being Chrissy Evert with badminton rackets counts. One problem solved but there’s another: four rackets, five girls. They had been an easy four until my mom, her boyfriend, and I moved into the neighborhood in March—as Janelle reminds us while we rock-paper-scissors to see who plays and who’s stuck being line judge. It’s Donna, the nicest and fairest. “You’re swapping with Donna first,” Janelle tells me. “That’s the rule for new girls.” 

Suzanne and Tracy’s dad sets up the net: no wobbling. We’re in the front yard because the back’s a hill, only good for sledding. Where I lived before was flat and concrete and no yards and no kids. I didn’t know not to like it. “Ew,” Janelle said.

Playing out front will be exposed, with cars passing, strangers eyeing us swat the birdie like it’s a fly in the kitchen, belly-laughing as we leap and miss, crashing into the scratchy crabgrass. I hate people watching, can’t stand people knowing things about me. “New girl’s got a secret,” Janelle told the others yesterday, smack in front of me.

Suzanne and Tracy team up, leaving me with Janelle. She tugs the top off a dandelion. “Fine,” she says to no one, tossing away the yellow flower. “Fine,” I say right back. The thing is, I might actually be good at badminton. Keefer, our cranky gym teacher, liked me best of the sixth grade girls because I can run forever. “This girl,” Keefer said on the last day of school, handing me the highest presidential fitness certificate with the biggest, goldest seal.

Janelle’s terrible at badminton but criticizes me left and right. I’m in her way, she complains, or she shouts, “Stop your dumb, weird breathing.” I whack my racket hard, making air whistle between the strings. Suzanne’s good, and we whoosh the birdie between us.

Then Janelle pushes in front of me so I can’t swing without hitting her, meaning Suzanne wins the point as the birdie arrows feathers-up into the grass. She and Tracy high-five. “You’re hogging,” Janelle says.

“That doesn’t count.” I don’t know why I say that because I don’t care.

“Ask the line judge,” Janelle says.

“You guys,” Donna says.

Janelle arcs her racket through empty space, and I step back. She might never like me, even if I wait forever. We’re not moving back, and those old friends are gone. “No way,” my mom says. Her creepy boyfriend has his important new job. I hate him.

Right then, a station wagon with wood paneling pulls curb-close, and a woman wearing too-big sunglasses rolls down the window and calls, “Can one of you girls pretty-please help me for a sec?” A checkered scarf covers her hair, is knotted tight at her throat. Like she’s the wolf waiting in Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother’s bed.

Suzanne and Tracy stare at the grass. Donna’s face reddens. Only Janelle watches me, a strange, hard, unfriendly smile distorting her face. Like a painted clown who’s not funny. Like she wants me to cry. Like she knows what happened in my old neighborhood though I’ve told no one.

I remind myself to breathe, because Stranger Danger is the scary man with handfuls of candy. He’s a troll, an ogre, the witch in the forest. He’s not real. This is a lady like our moms driving a car with a bicentennial license plate from Michigan.

My own mother worries about strange men, about boys demanding to see my underwear, about the priest. “Tell me if anything happens,” she says, “promise.” I promise. But when it did, I didn’t know any words she wanted to hear. Like, what if he’s not a stranger?

Janelle points at me. “Go see what she wants. You’re the new girl.”

“Are you afraid?” I ask.

“Never.” She tosses her racket way high in the sky and starts sauntering toward the car even before the racket crashes to the ground.

It’s not a game. I despise Janelle, but it’s not like I truly want her to disappear. I pick up her racket, curving my fingers into the grip, touching the warm, worn leather where Janelle’s fingers were.

“Wait,” Donna says, not to Janelle but to me.

Suzanne and Tracy poke their fingertips against the taut strings of their rackets, maybe testing them. What if no one likes Janelle? Maybe the rule’s that the new girl says it. Say it, I think. Give them what they want and they’ll like you.

I say, “Let her go. She’s fine.”

We watch Janelle talk to the woman then slide into the front seat of the car. The door slams, and the car drives off. “She didn’t even wave goodbye,” Tracy says.

“How come dumb Iowa doesn’t have special red, white, and blue license plates for the Bicentennial?” Suzanne asks.

“Great question,” Donna says.

So we four wonder about that for a while, and other stuff, until our mothers call us in for dinner, Janelle’s mother’s voice coming hoarse and wretched through the screened window of my bedroom late into the night.

Leslie Pietrzyk’s collection of linked stories set in Washington, D.C., Admit This to No One, was published in 2021 by Unnamed Press. Her first collection of stories, This Angel on My Chest, won the 2015 Drue Heinz Literature Prize. Short fiction and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, Story Magazine, Southern Review, Iowa Review, The Sun, and Cincinnati Review, among others. Her awards include a Pushcart Prize in 2020.

Animal Relief by Rachel Becker

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We’re sitting on our first adult couch
to which the cat has already done his worst,
fabric pilling. It’s from Jordan’s.
We spent real money.

From here, the crooked chandelier jangles
on its chain. Mismatched bulbs flicker
like filmstrips, our dinner table,
paint-stained, pocked—again, the cat.

Sometimes I clear plates too soon.
Evil waitress, my husband jokes, fork raised.

So different from how my father ate,
hunched over and full of complaint,
the meat, too dry, and beans, over-boiled.

He left the table, still chewing,
like a child, who had soiled himself.

Rachel Becker’s poetry appears or is forthcoming in journals including North American Review, Post Road, Crab Orchard Review, Poetry South, and RHINO. She is also an assistant poetry editor for Porcupine Literary: A journal by and for teachers. She lives in Boston. 

Now I Turn Myself into Origami by Susan Israel

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I make myself into a chrysanthemum so I can fit in this box, the box our vacuum came in; it’s not so big that I don’t have to fold myself first. Knees drawn up, arms wrapped around me, head down. It’s 85 degrees but my teeth are chattering; I’m a fluttering paper flower. I can still hear the heavy footsteps that stomped through the classroom, stopping to reload, stomping again. Pop. Pop. The teacher didn’t even have a chance to ask why he was there. I hear stomping in the breezeway connecting garage to kitchen. I’m in the box and the box is in the closet and I hold my breath; he’s coming in here too! He followed me from school and now he’s coming to get me. I might puke. It’s not safe to come out. “Rachel, are you here?” he calls, then louder, “Rachel!” He knows my name. It’s a trap. My screaming classmates cried, running to the door, to the windows. Pop. Pop. Pop. I can still hear them. My paper hands reach up and cover my paper ears. I was lucky there was a box in the classroom, a box like this. It was turned upside down. And I folded myself into a swan and ducked my paper head under my paper wing, trembling. The popping stopped. “Is anyone alive in here?” I didn’t budge. “It’s safe now.” I didn’t believe them. I didn’t want to see what I knew was outside the box. And then I had to and I saw blood, so much blood, my friends’ blood. I spread my swan wings and flew, I didn’t look at anyone or anything else; I just flew home over the chaos, over the ambulances and police cars and panicked people to my home, to this box and folded myself into a flower, sprouting roots right through the cardboard, through the floor, right through the earth, my heart still pounding. “Rachel?” I can hear his voice breaking. Then, “I was at the school. I couldn’t find her. They don’t know if she’s one of them, they haven’t all been identified yet. So I came home, but she’s not here either. I don’t know where she is.”

Home. I push aside my petals and peek out the closet door. He’s sitting on the couch, my father, his face in his hands, the phone still lit, lying on the floor next to his feet. 

 “Dad?” I can’t fight back my tears any longer; they gush from my eyes. I’m a girl again, not a chrysanthemum and my petals scatter as I stumble into his arms and they fold around me.

Susan Israel’s work has been published in Blink-Ink, Backwards Trajectory, Does It Have Pockets, MacQueen’s Quinterly, JAKE, 50 Word Stories, Bright Flash Literary Review, Flash Boulevard, among others. She lives in Connecticut.

Breaking News: Barbie Eats Trump During Baltimore Pride Fest by Chrissy Stegman

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What else was left for her to do? Giant in pink,
her laughter clanging down Charles Street
like bells rung wild to the dystopian melody.

She was a blaze in glorious sequins. Swirls
through the crowd, her skirt sliced the air
like ribbons of rampage, her manicured hands filled
with noise and want. She saw him, glitterless,
small in the gold chair he made for himself.
A throne as yellow as piss. The crowd parted
like the sound of rain. She moved toward him,
her shadow a blossom of organza fire in the setting sun.
She plucked him like feral lint from a coat lapel.
She flicked him, a spinning trinket tossed
to gravity’s obsequious gamble & caught him
mid-fall. Her mouth opened into a cave of cherry
and fuchsia, a holler of lipstick

When he fell, she swallowed him whole.

Love did this: the riot of it. Love
for the smashing, the making,
the breaking. Love
for our country and the streets
lit like a sky of teeth.

Chrissy Stegman is a poet/writer from Baltimore, Maryland. Recent work has appeared in: UCity Review, Rejection Letters, Gone Lawn, Gargoyle Magazine, Anti-Heroin Chic, Stone Circle Review, Fictive Dream, Inkfish, 5 Minutes, Libre, and BULL. She is a 2x BOTN and Pushcart Prize nominee. www.chrissystegman.com.

[When a man and a] by Jason Fraley

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When a man and a woman love each other, they can opt (i) for sexual
relations or (ii) to memorialize their feelings in a securities contract.

English makes it difficult to gender a piece of paper.

Even though I babble Latin, the doctor assuages my parents’ fears,
assures them I’m indeed living.

My parents, perhaps biased, repeat that I’m the most beautiful legal
document in the whole world.

After leaving the hospital, they take me to the exchange.

My crib is a plastic sheet tucked into a writing desk drawer.

A bespeckled man with a milky beard gazes from atop a wooden
crate. He predicts that, one day, I will be worth 30 pearls, an entire
bundle of flax, or six counterfeit rubies.

My parents are keen on those three outcomes.

What my parents learn is that securities contracts are not
circumcised. They are sliced into tranches.

Some price my finest details: a stylized T to start a paragraph, an
anachronistic diagram of a human skeleton.

Some speculate that a thumb-smudged page number or struck-
through drafting error will solicit a turquoise shaving or heron
feather at some later date.

Bidders disperse when they must pay more than quail eggshells for
my errata.

My parents are aghast as I’m confettied to the highest bidder.

Think of tranches like trenches.

A trench may be a rut, channel, furrow, or cut depending on when a
shovel breaks or Orion hides his bicep behind cloud cover.

A trench doesn’t become an excavation just because that’s where
the wind hides confetti squares appraised as worthless.

But that is one reason.

Jason Fraley is a native West Virginian who lives, works, and periodically writes in Columbus, OH. Current and prior publications include Salamander Magazine, Barrow Street, Jet Fuel Review, Quarter After Eight, West Trade Review, and Pine Hills Review.

giving all my heart to the dirt sprayed across my hands by Fabiola Cepeda

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Sometimes I like to draw on my teeth, but not today. I do not like to draw on my teeth today because yesterday Luis ate dirt. The day before Luis was sprayed across my hands and my shirt; I had to dig a hole in my backyard. I said a prayer for Luis, my friend Luis. Today I put my pillows on the top shelf in my closet, I am giving up sleep for him.

My reasons for anything are always temporary, so it doesn’t matter if Luis killed the rabbit, even when he bit him. I miss my old life, when we would skip over rocks on the river, dip our feet in, get a cold. I miss being frozen in our room, unable to move, forgetting what it felt like to feel normal and healthy, wishing for more than anything to be warm and healthy again.

My feet slipped from under me during class while I fell asleep with my head down. looking out the window, my friend Sarah asked me if I was okay. I do not know how to tell her that I do not have time, I gave time up for Luis.

The rain falls all over the place, and my CD keeps skipping in my ears. Today is All Saints Day, I dressed up as, well it doesn’t matter, now that you can’t see it. My mom made me dress up for All Saints Day, I tried really hard not to celebrate it without you, I know it was your favorite. No one really likes All Saints Day. Mom and Dad’s breath comes from the same bed now, they gasp and are curious; I forget how thin the walls are here. I am going to stop crying all the time, I want to be as alive as one could try to be, even if that means doing the bad things. I want to hear people say, “That’s not like you! Luis would be disappointed,” but I know they are lying.

On the underside of a fog you are so lonely. Alone, with dirt sprayed across your face, wedged between your skin. I don’t want to be shot brushing my teeth with you. Alone in the modesty of our gums, waxed with baking soda. It was easier to avoid a greater sadness than whatever this is, I guess that’s why I did it. Why I buried you in the backyard, sliced up, full of juice.

It is still raining and you have stolen the warmth from this earth. But someday secretly, I will work on bringing you back up. That way we can walk into the theater, hand in hand; see the tiny stage hold up the great fools. Their shadows bouncing behind their eyes. And yes, it is all necessary, to see multiples of you through my backyard window.

The leaves are a yellow and it reminds me of you, and even though the road is closed I go down in. taking in the trees, searching for you. It is hard to find you in the dust that fills the air. I wish I could have looked at you a little longer, Luis. I know I must go but my ears hurt from wind blowing. The new is not important to me anymore, how could all of this keep happening when you are gone. You’ve been far from land for too long, just come back.

I could almost see you floating in class today. I didn’t cry, it was an awkward mask I forced myself to wear. Tall people do not seem to understand, Luis, the destruction of moldering at a wooden altar. At the funeral, others laughed. In your towel my knees killed grass, feet were brown and shone through the crack that ran up the wall. I got thrown to the tub, but I leaked out of my knee and made my escape to your grave. But they twisted me back and lives carried on.

My feet hurt from walking across streets for you. I can’t go go home anymore and sleep. I don’t think you would have this Luis, but I can’t keep squinting my eyes just so I can remember you. It is hard Luis, to eat when I think I see you on the kitchen table. It is even worse when I go to Abuela’s house and see multiples of you swaying in the wind. I go drawing on my teeth and smearing my nose on the couch. I don’t miss you anymore, you were just a lemon, Luis.

Fabiola Cepeda is a Mexican-American Writer from San Antonio, Texas. Her work has been published in Gravel, Cargoes, and The Hunger Journal. She is currently pursuing a degree in creative writing and studio art from Hollins University in Roanoke, VA. You can find her on Instagram @whatfabifound and @fabiolaleyendolibros.