The cemetery I’m touring is entirely out of my price range. Still, I let the realtor show me around. She’s a lovely woman. All her corners are polished clean, and her skin is pulled taunt against each sharp angle. Her name is Monica Hanson, and she’s introduced herself to me five times in the last hour. Monica’s smile is blindingly perfect.

We stand in front of a hole, three feet deep. Clumps of dirt give way when we stand too close to the edge. There’s already a name carved on the tombstone, but Monica assures me that roommates can’t be helped in this economy.

“Just look at this open floor plan,” she says. “And the view, you can’t forget about the view.”

The bright sunshine is making a mockery of what would otherwise be fantastically morose surroundings. Monica assures me that the weather is overcast normally. She tells me to picture the potential of the place, ignore the inconvenience of a little sun.

Potentially, it does have the prospect of gloom. We passed a willow tree on the way in that seemed to infuse the atmosphere with just the right amount of melancholy. Ivy grows rampant on every surface. The atmosphere could be fantastically morose. It’s the kind of place you imagine haunting for years to come. I don’t even mind sharing the plot. This is the city, after all. Privacy is an antiquated notion.

“The neighbors, how are they?” I ask.

“Quiet, for the most part. You’ll have such a restful time.”

Then she quotes a price.

Her nails click against the clipboard as she watches me. Her nails watch me too. On each one there’s an immaculate eye painted. Even they seem to realize that there’s no bank in the world that will loan me enough for something as whimsical as a comfortable afterlife. They swivel upward to ask God for patience in dealing with people who haven’t been pre-approved. That smile flashes.

“Why don’t I show you some more affordable options? There’s a charming little spot in a converted warehouse if you don’t mind your ashes getting mixed into concrete.”

She’s starting to wander off, but I don’t follow. I’m staring at the three-feet hole in the ground that I can’t afford. The tombstone has a name on it, but it’s nothing I would recognize. The only thing I can read is the ‘Dearly Beloved.’ I wonder if you can be beloved to yourself.

When I finally drag my eyes from what could have been my final resting place, if it wasn’t for something as damnable as my credit score, Monica is almost out of sight. She’s bobbing between tombstones. Her heels sink into the soft ground a little deeper with each step, and I can hear her talking from here. I’m certain she just introduced herself to the willow tree. It doesn’t seem impressed.

A skeleton burst from the plot one headstone over. Loose dirt and dust stain my cheek. I try to brush it away subtly, like I would if an older aunt accidentally spit on me. There’s no sense in being rude. These things happen.

“Touring or grieving?” the skeleton asks me. Their jaw clicks with each word. The grin they offer is garish without lips. They lean on their headstone, but it must be hard to look casual when the bare bones are all you have to work with.

I try to read the name before I answer, but the only thing engraved on the stone is a pair of hands, praying or pleading. It’s hard to tell the difference between the two. I don’t want to ask their name either, in the unfortunate case that they have forgotten the heavy syllables that used to weigh on their tongue during introductions.

“Both,” I say instead. “Any pest problems?”

“Rats, but only until the flesh is gone.”

That seems reasonable in the way that terrible things seem reasonable once they’ve become familiar. I try not to let the image of rodents burrowing into my organs invade my subconscious. The valiant effort for that is not rewarded.

When I turn back around, the skeleton has been joined by a corpse. She must’ve only been in her forties when she died. Whoever dressed her for her funeral stuck her in a mauve dressing gown that could only be described as a punishment from beyond the grave. She looks furious, and I think that I love her for that alone. From some invisible pocket, she produces a half-empty pack of cigarettes. I watch the one eye that she still has left bounce from the cigarettes to me. She doesn’t offer me one, and I don’t hold it against her. I think I prefer the dead ignoring me.

“They’ve started digging up bodies in the east end,” she rasps to the skeleton. “Bastards are just dumping them in the river.”

The skeleton turns their faceless skull to the sky. They drown themself in sunlight, and I wonder if they can feel the warmth. I hope they can.

“A change of scenery might be nice,” they say.

“For fucks sake, we deserve peace.”

“Do we?” the skeleton asks. “Sometimes, I think I remember guilt.”

She crushes her cigarette under her heel. The embers flare longer than I expected them to.

“And? I still deserve the sanctity of death.”

I don’t notice the guy behind me. Not until he slips his hand into mine. The coolness of his skin does not shock me, but I flinch anyway. I wrench my hand from his, politeness is never something I can fake for long. I take a step away from him then I take another. He watches me. There’s no recognition in his gaze, and I shiver. He does not blink. His eyes are brown.

The skeleton speaks to me softly.

“You know how it is. The freshly deceased take a while to acclimate.”

I take a couple more steps back, toward the gate and the willow tree and the crowds beyond on the busy streets that I can hear even now. It’s lovely here, but I’m not ready to stay.

“Don’t you have more questions for us? Don’t you want to pry and prod until your sick curiosity is sated? Don’t you want to know how the maggots fester?”

She lurches forward more with each word, until her nose is inches from mine. There’s a stench. It’s no use thinking about it, but the tilt of her chin makes me think she’s daring me to mention it.

“I think I’ve learned enough for today,” I say instead.

She grabs my coat, twists the material in her fist, and I pretend I can’t feel her bones.

I try to turn away, but her grip doesn’t loosen. I don’t like knowing the strength of the dead’s convictions.

“No, you wanted to hear from your prospective neighbors. Tell me, what is it you want to know? Let me tell you how it floods in the spring, how the coffins float to the surface. Your family will weep when they see your living conditions.”

The skeleton is pulling on her shoulder, but she’s not finished. They don’t have a homeowner’s association here yet, but I know she’d thrive in a position of obscure authority.

I try to turn away again, and the newly dead guy’s brown eyes are searching mine. I just know he’s going to try to hug me. There’s no escape and my optimism for mortality isn’t holding up well against their tirade.

My savior appears in the form of Monica, the realtor. She descends on the group, introducing herself with stiff handshakes and a barely superior tone. I’m not surprised that she can sense when a property’s value is in danger of plummeting. She’s offering business cards and a last cursory plot appraisal. And then we’re walking. 

“You’ll have to pardon the locals,” she says. “They do take some getting used to.”

I ask her for more options. Some place with a little more square-footage and a little less potential of wildlife absconding with a femur or two.

Monica sighs. It sounds like it comes from the very depths of her real estate agent soul.

“Look,” she says, drawing me closer and whispering like she’s known me for years, “These anti-social tendencies of yours are going to make finding you a final, peaceful resting place very difficult.”

I wish I could sigh with the same convention, agree with her assessment, and maybe try therapy. But Monica isn’t the type for daydreaming nonsense. She’s already taking long strides toward the gate, but she stops with only a quiet beseeching of patience from the cloudless sky and waits for me.

“Have you considered a nice, old-fashioned burial at sea?” she asks, almost entirely to herself.

She knows who’s in control of my death, and more importantly, she knows my price range. Monica grips my fate in her impeccably manicured hands.

I have no choice, but to bear my inescapable financial deficiencies and follow her to my next afterlife option.

Alexis Jamilee Carter is a software engineer in Denver, CO and holds an undergraduate degree in Computer Science with a minor in Medieval and Renaissance Studies. She wants to create, in every sense of the word and as much as possible, but writing has always been her home. Her work has also recently appeared in The Diamond Line and Runestone.

My dad is a ghost, but he’s not dead.

On my twenty-third birthday, he appears.

I consult with an exorcist. She does not understand. She tells me it is not possible to be both spirit and body, and suggests I’m making it up. “For attention,” she says. “Common behavior in women with daddy issues.”

I consult with a therapist. His specialty is Daddy Issues. He holds a notepad and a pen. “How does this ghost make you feel?” he asks.

“Scared?” I say.

“Of abandonment,” the therapist says. He writes abandonment over and over again, across the page.

“Actually, abandonment is the goal,” I say.

The therapist tells me to come twice a week.

Dad’s translucent body trails behind me.

* * *

At the salon, Dad calls me a harlot.

“It’s just highlights,” I say.

He hovers over my chair with a disapproving face.

Later, he spills wine on my date in an unfortunate location.

I go home.

Dad watches The Addams Family on TV. Drinks beer on my couch. It seeps through his ghost body onto the cushion.

Dad and I used to watch The Addams Family every Friday. Before he disappeared. And left our family for a new one.

* * *

“How did that make you feel?” the therapist says.

“Embarrassed,” I say, “by the cliché.”

The therapist waits for more.

Dad sticks his head through a diagnostic textbook, pretending not to hear.

* * *

At my tiny kitchen table, we eat Salisbury steak dinners.

Dad inhales his uncut beef, like a dog. “Shrinks blame fathers for everything,” he says.

I push my fork through powdery potatoes.

“Why are you here?” I say.

Dad levitates a spoonful of corn into his mouth.

Kernels float across his skinless chest, blinking over his heart, like stars. A yellow Ursa Major descends into Dad’s bowels before shooting onto the floor.

“Excuse me for wanting to spend time with you,” he says. “You complain I wasn’t around. Now I’m here, and you want me gone.” Dad shakes his head.

His words collect in my stomach beside the undigested meat.

He takes a sip of milk. “You know, I did my best.”

Milk drips through him like tears.

* * *

“I cannot watch The Addams Family without crying,” I say to the therapist.

“This is not surprising,” the therapist says. “It reminds you of your childhood—when you watched it with your father.”

“No,” I say. “That’s not it.”

The therapist writes this down. “Gomez and Morticia Addams were a father and mother in love,” he says. “Gomez never tired of Morticia. In fact, his love grew stronger every day. Gomez loved his children, Pugsley and Wednesday, very much. He was active in their lives. It makes you sad to see what you did not have.”

“No,” I say. “That’s not correct, either.”

“You feel like Lurch, the Addams family butler,” the therapist says. “He was like Frankenstein’s monster, unable to fit in. Trapped in a house with a family he did not really belong to. He kept his words bottled up inside of him until they escaped as unintelligible groans. I can see how this plays out in your life, through your emotional constipation.”

“I have never had an issue with my digestive faculties,” I say. “And I would not consider myself a monster.”

I hear Dad laughing in the corner behind me.

“We’re at the end of our session,” the therapist says. He writes DENIAL in red block letters on a post-it note. “Next week, we’ll talk about Uncle Fester.”

“What about Thing?” I say.

The therapist taps his watch.

* * *

Dad stuffs himself with ice cream. I watch mint chip roll through his body, then onto the rug. He snaps along to the beat of the opening credits. Lurch plays the piano and Wednesday frowns, her tiny braids falling down her shoulders, like snakes.

And there it is, the disembodied hand, the Addams family handservant—Thing. The lump returns to my throat, but I swallow it. I do not want to give in. It’s just special effects, I tell myself. Thing pours Morticia a cup of tea from the center of the breakfast table. It’s not real. But my sadness does not care. I am flooded with the same intrusive thoughts every time I see it.

Dad looks at me from the side of his eye. “What’s the matter with you?”

“Nothing.” I wipe my face, casually, with my sleeve. “I just hate that Thing,” I say. And I do. How terrible it would be to be a Thing. A hand without a body. No anchor to ground it. No heart to warm it. No stomach to feed and nourish it. Just a random, dismembered appendage. No one to love it.

 

Aileen O’Dowd lives in Toronto. Her writing has appeared in Peach Mag, Maudlin House, Rejection Letters, Monkeybicycle, and elsewhere.

I found some skeletons in the closet the other day, when I was moving back into my childhood home. There weren’t many, just a few, but I certainly wasn’t expecting to find them. But that’s the thing about skeletons, they come out when you least expect it.

So, of course, I sat down to sort them out.

The one on the very top was gilded with gold, pennies in its eye sockets, nickels for teeth, dimes lined up in a spinal cord. Its fingers were curled around a restaurant receipt. I tugged on it but the skeleton wouldn’t let go. I could see the tip: $100.00.

It was from the summer of freshman year, when I was working as a waitress. The tip was actually for Janice—Janice Quarl, my best friend since the days of nap time and sippy cups.

Cynthia, can you take over my tables? The customers are just about leaving, I promise.

What could I say? She’d wanted to go to the movies so badly. With her other friends, not me. Too bad it was during work hours—but of course, there was always Cynthia to fall back on!

Afterwards, she found me in the bookstore. “That’s a lot of books, Cynthia.”

I shrugged, lugging a plastic basket that swung with the weight of more than ten paperbacks. “Guess so.”

“Did you get a big tip or something?”

I clutched the basket tighter. “It’s my money. I get to use it however I like.”

There hadn’t been much she could say to that. But when she left, neither of us was very satisfied with the other.

I pushed the skeleton away to find another beneath it grinning. It shone with the metallic sheen of candy wrappers: Almond Joys for a rib cage, Twix bars for a pelvis, pumpkin seeds for toes, skull grotesquely round like a jack-o’-lantern. In its jaw was lodged a McIntosh apple, its green flesh sporting a gradual blush.  It looked like the apple Janice had stuffed into the mouth of the seventh grader dressed as Snow White, on the Halloween of our sophomore year. Snow White had stumbled back, her mouth an O around the fruit, and I’d snatched her bulging trick-or-treating basket. Her tear tracks glistened on chubby cheeks in the lamplight. We cackled as we ran off. Happy Halloween, Snow White!

Later, as we were strolling home, I wondered if we’d really had to use the apple on her. “Maybe we were meaner than we should’ve been.”

Janice jostled me, hard. I stumbled. “What’re you talking about? The apple was for her costume—no Snow White is complete without an apple. Besides, I don’t know why you’re feeling so bad. You’re the one who has better experience stealing.”

She took her share of the candy home, while I took mine. It wasn’t like the old days anymore, when we’d dump all of the candy on her bedroom floor, when we’d shared secrets and basked in guilt and glory together.

I pushed the skeleton off. That was Janice’s skeleton, not mine. I’d only done what she’d told me to do. I didn’t know what this skeleton was doing in my closet.

The third skeleton wore a glittery black prom dress. My breath caught in my throat. Janice, again! This was hers. I was about to take it off the skeleton when I was hit with the stench of rotten eggs. I scrambled back, pulling my shirt collar up to my nose.

That smell.

After Janice had turned him down to go to prom with someone else, her boyfriend had recruited several of us: she needed a reality check. She couldn’t do that without consequences.

That night, her dress sparkled in the shade of her porch as she peered out to see if our approaching van was her date’s car. The headlights cast her in a ghastly yellow, set her dress ablaze, forced her eyes into slits. I don’t think she even saw the eggs sailing out the windows until it was too late. But she must have seen me, my face bobbing in the van’s dim interior.

The last skeleton lay on the carpet. Words crawled along its pristine polished bones, like tattoos running up its legs, hips, arms, shoulders. On its rib cage, over where the heart should go, was stamped: THESIS STATEMENT. On its sternum was typed the name: JANICE QUARL.

In our last year of high school, Janice and I both interned at the community women’s clinic. We both planned to study to be OBGYNs. Even so, she rarely looked at me when we arrived, when she passed in the hallways, when we crossed paths in the bathroom. But I was struggling with my college application essays—I simply didn’t know what to write. I’d done what Janice had done all my life. So why could she write an essay about herself with ease while I struggled to form the first sentence?

At last I worked up the courage to ask her for help. Janice studied me. “Help?”

I took a deep breath. “All I need is some insight. I’m not asking for much—just tell me how I should write it, or what you wrote about, or….”

“So you want me to help you,” she said slowly.

“Yeah.” I proffered a small, hopeful smile. “Is that okay?”

She sent me a folder of her essays. One look told me I would never be able to write like that. She was good. So good that I highlighted her name with the cursor and typed in my own.

What else could I have done? What the admissions officers didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them. What my parents, who were counting on me to get into a good school, didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them. And what Janice didn’t know definitely wouldn’t hurt her. But after we’d graduated Janice called and asked to see the essays that hers had helped me with. I said I’d lost them. I didn’t expect her to go to my mother, who’d saved copies.

Janice didn’t need to rat, to get me kicked out of school. I hoped that she, at least, was happy with the mess I was in.

I pressed my lips together and shoved the skeletons back into the closet. I’d visit Janice later, just as my parents had been telling me to. I needed to apologize, to mend our relationship. I wanted to ask, What relationship? When had I ever had a choice in the decisions I’d made?

I closed the closet door. I’d go and pay her a visit. She’d have skeletons in her closet too. All I would have to do is go and pull them out.

 

Rina Olsen is a Korean-American teen writer living on Guam. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in 101 Words, Dreams & Nightmares, Emerge Literary Journal, The Hopper, Jellyfish Review, Nanoism, and Write the World Review. She is a general editor for Cathartic Youth Literary Magazine. Her debut novel, Third Moon Passing, is forthcoming from Atmosphere Press in late 2023.

Then there was the time my father ended up with only four fingers on his right hand. Four and a half, really, and we probably could have saved the part above the knuckle if we weren’t so deep into the woods. That was when my parents began to notice something strange about me. Most likely, it was why they noticed it.

We were camping, of all things.

We never camped. We weren’t that kind of family. But something had gotten into my father’s head. He’d watched a special about the Smoky Mountains, and off we went—all that gear, “a real adventure,” he called it. The seams on our packs were straining, and while we hiked toward our campsite, my father was all of a sudden a wildlife fanatic. 

“Stop,” he’d say. “Freeze.” And my mother and I would stand where we were on the trail. “Do you hear that?” We’d listened to hours of bird calls on cassette tapes driving down. “A warbler . . . no . . . a chickadee.”

My mother cocked her head, an ear angled toward that avian domain. But her eyes darted down at me. They seemed to say, It’s good for him to be out, don’t you think, Christine? For him to have an interest we can all take part in?

“Christine!” he said. “Are you listening? A chickadee?”

And my mother nodded to me, and I said, “Chickadee. Yes. I hear it.”

Then we’d walk some more, and he’d say, “Freeze!” again, and we’d wait while he inspected a pattern in the sticks. “Snake tracks,” he said, bending so that his pack almost tipped him over. “No…deer more likely, white-tailed deer.”

My mother lifted a handful of sticks to her face then lowered them to mine. “Yes,” she said. “White-tailed deer! I see it. Christine, do you see it? Christine?”

* * * 

At the site, my mother and I unfolded the tent poles, while my father unwrapped cellophane from a roast and started up the white-gas stove. We sat on rocks and held plastic plates on our laps. My father’s back was toward us as he fiddled with the flame. The stove roared and quieted, roared and quieted. He scraped a cast iron skillet atop the burner. My mother hugged me toward her.

“We’ll be okay,” she said softly. “This is what he wanted.”

The roast began to hiss.

“Ultimately that’s all people really want, Christine, is choices.”

I could still remember how his sobs had traveled through my bedroom walls. Back then, there’d been frequent sobbing. “I want you to take an interest in something,” my mother had pleaded. She’d just suggested an open relationship. “No,” he cried. “But you can try it. I’ll stay home with the cat.”

Now he stood with a knife in his hand, the other holding slabs of meat. “Eat, eat,” he proffered, gesturing toward our plates. 

So much had changed.

We ate, but we couldn’t eat it all. “Stuff it in,” my father said. “Christine, try burping. Your problem is that you’re full of air.” The leftover roast rested on the table, in a puddle of juices like a wounded animal. We would leave it there, unfinished. That was our mistake. But what did we know about camping? We were city people.

By 8 o’clock, we’d retired to the tent. The hike had wiped us out. My mother and father played cards by lantern light, sitting cross-legged in the tent. My father was letting her win at Bartok. She touched his ankle and smiled in a distant, knowing way.

I was glad they were getting along.

I was in my sleeping bag, watching the nylon of the tent start to fade from blue to gray to black. I thought of the night my mother had shouted, “It’s only been two dates, Frank!” She’d been pleading with him to try a bar, any bar, even if it was just to meet another Mets fan. I thought, Mets fan? From my room, I cried out, “I’m scared!” They’d both rushed in. They took me to their bed and said, “You can sleep here, if you’re scared.” I’d burrowed into the spot between them, smelling my father’s sour shirt, the heat from my mother’s back warming my own. “OK,” I whispered, “ I am.”

In the tent, my father was flipping cards. “Your turn,” he said in an agreeable way. In my half-dream I was tucked between them again. In his confidence, the future of our family could still rearrange itself, unformed.

Then, outside, we heard a baby shrieking.

“You hear that?” my father said. “Sounds like a baby shrieking.” He tilted his head. “Interesting. Northern poke weasel, I’d say. Don’t see many in these parts.”

My mother had laid her cards down on the nylon floor. “That’s no weasel,” she finally said. She did not reach for me, but I could feel how much she wanted to.

The shrieking outside grew louder.

“Oh dear lord,” she said. “They’re killing it.”

“Killing what?” my father asked, panicking. “Killing who?”

“Does it really matter, Frank? Can we do something?”

He placed a hand atop her shoulder and got to his feet.

“Frank,” my mother started. He turned to regard her. They looked at each other deeply for a moment.

Before those wilderness shows, he’d always been afraid of noises. Tree limbs scraping the house could make him curl up with a baseball bat. But now he strode into the dusk, carrying a lantern by its wire handle. He lifted it to inspect the trees. He shined it on the white-gas stove facedown in the dirt. He swung it across his body, a sphere of light bobbing all around him, and there, at the edge of the campsite, a bobcat was tensed above our roast.

He had never been a strong man, or a brave man, but my father did not run. He said, “Ohgodohgodohgod,” but stood there, turning into a wall between that wild thing and us.

“Frank!” my mother shouted.

He kept his eyes on the bobcat and reached back to the table where he’d done the dinner prep. Blindly, his hand fumbled among the utensils. The bobcat hissed and exposed its teeth in the way of a venomous snake. My father’s hand found the carving knife and he brandished it—but he’d grabbed it by the blade. He pointed the wooden handle at the cat. It hissed again, and my father cried out, “This is not your domain!” Then he squeezed the knife so tightly it severed his middle finger above the knuckle.

It cut so cleanly that it took several seconds before the blood and pain arrived—before he started screaming.

I remembered him in that darkened living room, while my mother was out. How he’d laughed at the wilderness host in a khaki vest. “Look at this guy,” he said. “All alone. He’s gonna get himself mauled!”

Suddenly, I was marching past my father’s naked legs. I was banging on a pot with a metal spoon, marching toward the beast. It smelled like cat food, I thought. The way my father had smelled, the first night my mother hadn’t come home from the bar. Christine! This cat’s breath smells like cat food! I’d been watching wilderness programs with him, but he’d been kissing the cat. It was 9 o’clock. Even back then, I understood what was possible.

I got closer to the bobcat and it made that sound of a wailing infant again. It arched its back. Its hair stood in a ridge. I thought, Maybe I’ll be mauled. I got closer, making my terrible racket. I thought, Look at you. Smelling like cat food. Then I smacked the spoon into the pot as hard as I could and the bobcat popped away and disappeared. 

Only when it was good and gone, deep in the woods, did my father wail, “Christine!”

If I close my eyes, I can still see the look on his face, regarding me, his daughter, as though I were someone he didn’t know. How unsettling that must have been, to no longer see me as his little child.

That was the last time we’d go camping, the last time he’d notice the sound of a chickadee, or the color variations of a woodland squirrel. Never again did he eat a wild blackberry, or grip a knife in his hand. From then on, it would be me who carved our meat. He would stand off in a corner of our kitchen, his arms crossed so that his missing digit was tucked in his armpit, watching me slice the flesh of some headless bird. He would nod at me, hiding what he’d lost.

At the back of the tent, my mother was cradling my sleeping bag against her chest, as though she imagined I was still within it. And while I stood in that chittering nightscape, among the invisible nocturnal creatures, my father retreated into the tent, finally, to be with her.

 

Benjamin Warner is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin and Cornell University’s MFA program. A lecturer at Towson University, he teaches courses in composition, environmental writing, and fiction writing. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in American Short Fiction, Guernica, Lithub, Salon.com, and The Washington Post Magazine. He’s also the author of the novels Thirst (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016) and Fearless (Malarkey Books, 2022).

My patron saint only visits when he needs something from me, his head bowed to bestow grace but watching for someone who might blow his cover. I first saw him in a dream, the kind that wakes you gasping, catching yourself as you fall back into your bed, but after that he started coming around every afternoon with some little request or other. He shuffles down the hallway to my room to ask for some little thing. I never know what he needs it for because he’s not really much of a talker.

Today it’s socks. “Do you have a fresh pair of socks?” he asks. His robes rustle around his feet.

“Fresh as in clean, or fresh as in new?” I mutter. His nimbus makes my dorm room look dingy. “What do you need the socks for?”

He doesn’t answer. He never answers my questions. Not about the things he needs and not about anything else.

I could give him an older pair, thin worn grey with holes burgeoning on the bottoms, but who gives garbage to a holy figure? 

I place a clean pair of socks in his patient hand. They’re among my favorites, thick and warm and navy-flecked with orange toes and heels; they make my new boots bite less sharply at my feet.

“What did you do with the safety goggles yesterday?” I ask. 

He just holds out his hand and waits for my offering. He makes that blessing sign with the other, his thumb and first two fingers up, gentle, like rays of light could shoot out from his heart and warm the air around me if I would just shut up for a minute.

I never know when it will be my turn to ask for something, or what I should ask for when my turn comes. For now, he’s the one who does all the asking. I watch him walk to the stairwell and wonder what he does with my stuff, why he chose me, when I’ll finally see some kind of blessing in return for all this gifting.

When he shambles over for a roll of film, the day after, I choose to be the silent one. Holy and beatific, my head ringed with light. A chorus of seraphim, rapturous, as I open the door. My patron saint tips his head back in saintly surprise, then rummages in his pocket and hands me a single crinkly butterscotch candy.

 

Laura S. Marshall (she/they) is a queer, nonbinary disabled poet, educator, and former linguist who lives outside of Albany, NY. Their work appears in South Dakota Review, Bennington Review, Juked, Lunch Ticket, 8 Poems, and elsewhere. She received her MFA in poetry from UMass Amherst, and has served as guest editor at Trestle Ties and special features editor for jubilat.

The night air sits still like the church girls in their pew at Sunday service. The night air is languid and sour, so thick that you could take it in your mouth and chew it. The church is on Pine Street. I watch them, the church girls, in smart dresses and small, flat shoes. I watch them from across the pews in the church on Pine Street. They have long hair to their asses and skin marked by sunspots and acne scars. They sit up straight. They sing. They pray.

I have sweat running under my arms, melting into ugly, damp pools in the fabric of my wrinkled blouse. I have scuffs on my black Oxfords, the same pair from my all-girls Christian high school. I haven’t gotten a haircut in a year and it clumps in a frazzled halo around my sad face. I don’t believe in God, but I keep going to Sunday service to watch the church girls from across the pews in the church on Pine Street. I slouch and pout at the dull scuffs on my shoes when we are told let us pray.

We are old enough that we don’t go to Sunday school, but we are the straggling members of the church’s young adult social group: the church girls, with their smart dresses and sunspots and bright faces, clicking tongues, hushed voices—and me. We all walk down the linoleum stairs to the church basement, the staircase lined with framed photos of mission trips to Africa. The church girls are in the photos and smile grins of glee at me, their bobbing faces pale and ghostly among the large groups of black and brown African children. They are always in a jungle, or on a beach, among dilapidated tin-roofed shacks, and the sky is always blue, and I imagine that the air in these jungles and beaches is as still and languid and sour and thick as the air on this Saturday night in the city.

I will see the church girls tomorrow morning. They will pray. I will pout.

I imagine things about the church girls. It started with crude thoughts: kissing them hard on their sweet mouths, shoving my tongue down their throat to shut up their clicking. Their tight asses, hair floating down their bare backs. Now, it is situational: I liked to think about wandering through a grocery aisle with the church girls and imagine what they picked off the shelves, like store brand over name brand, or organic strawberries over the normal ones. Maybe, what they prayed about. Sometimes, fucking them.

On this Saturday night in the city, I walk past the grocery store on Fifth Street, closed because it is late. I turn onto Pine Street and see that someone has changed the church marquee from a bible verse to a C.S. Lewis quote, followed by: Service At 10AM Sunday. I’ve got an empty beer can in my right hand, and the last heat of a cigarette in the left. I’m thinking about the church girls, imagining what smart dresses they will wear tomorrow morning, when I hear a loud shriek from across the busy street, echoing over the heads of partygoers, drunks like me, dog-walkers, lovers, and bicycle messengers. I do not pay attention until there is another shriek.

The church girls are pursuing me, running in high heels through honking traffic to cross Pine Street.

Oh my God! they shriek, a chorus of the lord’s name in vain. I am still as they surround me. What are you doing out? Where are you going? Anything fun?

I shake my head and they all sigh smugly. I am still and I am shocked. Gone are the smart dresses and small, flat shoes; each church girl is glittering. Their short, frilly dresses are sequined, their hair is done up, and their high heels, closer to God, chatter on the concrete sidewalk. Their bright faces are darkened by sooty black makeup, acne scars erased and airbrushed away. They smell like soapy flowers and sugar and sex, letting off a cloud of cheap perfume as they sigh and sway on their long, bare legs.

I look at one of the church girls. She is the tallest of them, giving her an assumed command over the rest. Her pink mouth frames lipstick stains on her teeth. Her eyes are alight in the glow of the street lamps. She looks soft, and my mind wanders to reaching at the low-cut chest of her gilded dress, ripping it open with one yank, and leaving her bare.

Well? she smirks.

My breath is caught in my throat.

Don’t tell anyone we’re out, okay?

I hear my voice speak up, feel my mouth move around palpable words. I don’t know what I’m saying, but I hear myself ask, why are you dressed like that?

The tall girl crosses her arms over her chest and lets out a laugh that sounds like a siren. Then she looks me in the eyes, staring right through me. She knows I watch them across the pews, she knows I think about tearing her clothes off, she knows. She clicks her tongue and says something back, but I can’t hear her.

What? I ask.

The tall girl leans in and I smell soapy flowers and pineapple-scented lube. What do you mean? It’s sparkle time.

The church girls are gone in an instant of cheap perfume and chattering footsteps, the tall girl’s soft, bare arm brushing past the sleeve of my shirt as she leaves me behind. My cigarette is dead and the empty beer can crinkles in my hand. I am alone again and before I can think, I kneel on the concrete sidewalk, as throngs of people swerve around me, staring up at the cross that adorns the church on Pine Street. It is illuminated by spotlights between the stained glass windows.

My arm burns where the tall girl touched it. Before I can think, I pray: Amen. Amen. Amen.

 

Audrey Lee is the author of the poetry collections Disjecta Membra (Bottlecap Press, 2022) and Probably, Angels (Maverick Duck Press, 2020). She holds a B.A. in creative writing and American studies from Franklin and Marshall College. She’s the winner of the 2020 Jerome Irving Bank Short Story Prize, and her writing has been recognized by Columbia College of Chicago, the University of Virginia, and the University of Iowa. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from DIALOGIST, Glass: a Journal of Poetry, The Indiana Review, Teen Vogue, and Wax Nine. Audrey is a former resident at the Sundress Academy for the Arts and lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

They touched down near the 7-Eleven, just off MLK and Sumner. Four of them, decked out in full spacesuits, large boots heavy in this new gravity, labored breathing moving through their suits like Darth Vader with asthma. They emerged from their spaceship to the tree-lined streets of Portland in an early December downpour. Rain hissed and evaporated as it pelted the hot spaceship exterior. Had they come six months earlier, they would’ve experienced that moment in June, just after the cold snaps, but long before wildfire smoke tinged the sky. A magical time when gentle Spring sun gave way to street fairs, buskers, food trucks, and rosebuds brimming with promise.

The astronauts pushed past gathering crowds. Some neighbors tried to offer umbrellas, but the astronauts couldn’t be bothered that first day. They needed to build shelters before nightfall. They established basecamp in the O’Riley Auto Parts parking lot. They set up portable habitats and sensors on tripods and a recharging station for their rover.

On the second day, the astronauts left basecamp as more rainclouds darkened the sky. They moved slowly around a four-block perimeter. They peered at dormant plant life and captured a pigeon. They inspected mailboxes and fenceposts, staring from behind their mirrored face shields, rain-streaked and beginning to fog. They were faceless and formless under these helmets, so alien-like, even though CNN reported that they had launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida several months earlier.

The neighborhood yet again took interest in this development. This time, the astronauts were more willing to engage. They asked lots of questions. For example: What do you call this place? In response: This is America. The astronauts looked around, seemingly unsure, as if they had already visited America and knew this wasn’t it. For another example: How long have your people lived here?

Eventually, the astronauts’ daily explorations expanded into the 7-Eleven. They inspected the shelves, picking up packages of Fritos and holding them beside some Funions for comparison. Having little money to purchase Fritos, Funions, or lotto tickets, the astronauts began asking for trades. They wanted to barter their freeze-dried rations and anti-gravity self-inking pens and spare bundles of wire and bolts and duct tape. In return, they wanted Krispy Kreme and hotdogs. They wanted glossy fashion magazines. They wanted Red Bull and cans of Starbucks Cold Brew.

Soon, the astronauts tired of the 7-Eleven, and they traded for more expensive items. They wanted to-go orders from some hip Alberta Street eateries. They wanted local art. They wanted televisions and stereo equipment. They cited all sorts of scientific reasons for these requests. For example: We’d like to study the effects of sonic distortions of Lizzo’s new album on your neighborhood’s atmospheric properties. For another example: The chemical properties of a small batch craft IPA could lead to breakthroughs in understanding human metabolic functional variance.

The astronauts got what they wanted because they were astronauts, and the neighborhood people knew that astronauts were admired and respected. The neighbors said emphatic things about the importance of this mission. For example: I’m glad I can do my part! Astronauts are the last true heroes. For another example: Sure! Anything you need. Did you know that Buzz Aldrin spoke at my high school graduation back in the day?

Though if anyone asked the neighbors in private, they’d admit they were thinking about more than civic duty. They were happy to get a souvenir from a bona fide NASA mission. They suspected that all these trades would be profitable. They went on eBay and OfferUp to see how much each collectable object might fetch them. In time, they learned that nobody cared about NASA trinkets unless it was something from the Apollo missions.

Trade relations soured. The astronauts went back to freeze-dried rations until they all began to complain. For example: Fuck this shit. Three of the astronauts took their little rechargeable rover into the rainy wastelands beyond their usual four-block perimeter. They sought other neighborhood frontiers, scouting for new sources of food and drink and culture and luxury and wealth—all for the sake of scientific cataloging, of course.

They left just one crew member to guard the skeletal remains of basecamp, already low on supplies, tarps fraying in the cold breeze, power generator flickering more often than not. The lone astronaut deterred gawkers. For example: Keep moving, shithead. She chewed on her freeze-dried rations with contempt. She collected rainwater in buckets. She dug up a pile of weeds and burned them for heat. She dissected a raccoon and smeared its blood on her helmet. She threw bricks through the 7-Eleven’s windows. For science.

The astronaut waited nearly a week for her team to return, but they never did. She feared her fellow astronauts had been lost to the wilds just beyond Lombard Street. She informed ground control that the mission had been a failure. She told them that this planet was harsh and ruthless. For example: It’s a shithole. Needs terraforming. The next crew needs drills. Big ones.

The astronaut initiated the launch sequence. She began her long, solitary journey into the cosmos, arcing deep into the cold void for months on-end. Finally, she reached an apex, reversed thrusters, and plummeted down, down, down to a sunny Florida landing site where she was hailed a hero. She did a press circuit. She wrote a memoir. She visited our neighborhood again to give a guest lecture at PCC’s Cascade campus—this time, she came during the summertime. Her Delta Airlines flight touched down at the PDX airport with enough time for a quick in-and-out on her way to a more important stop in Los Angeles. She congratulated a scholarship recipient and said inspirational things. For example: The children are our future. She shook hands with the college president.

In her guest lecture, the astronaut told us all about her mission to Portland and everything that she learned about our neighborhood. For example:

 

James R. Gapinski is the author of The Last Dinosaurs of Portland (Bottlecap Press, 2021), Fruit Rot (Etchings Press, 2020), Edge of the Known Bus Line (Etchings Press, 2018), and Messiah Tortoise (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2018). James teaches for Southern New Hampshire University’s MFA program, and they edit for Conium Press.