The knife thrower picks her volunteers based on how they’ll look with their backs against her fake wall, their wrists restrained in little Velcro loops. How the man in the striped t-shirt will look with an apple on his head. How the girl in the sundress will look with a balloon in either hand. Their lips softened to a surprised “o.” A perfect little gasp when the apple slices, when the balloon pops.

She picks her volunteers based on how they’ll look tumbled in her floral sheets. How they’ll fill up her trailer at the night end of the midway. Mouths wrapped in a surprised “o” as she drags a tooth down their neck, drags a nail down their thigh. A perfect little gasp as she thinks: what if I slip just this once.

 

Meghan Phillips is a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow. Her flash fiction chapbook Abstinence Only is forthcoming from Barrelhouse Books. You can find her writing at meghan-phillips.com and her tweets at @mcarphil.

 

Jack arrived with a metallic blue Sharpie and wrote his name on me as if adding his signature, signing a receipt. Underneath it he wrote my name too (spelled wrong and crossed out and spelled correctly with a smiley face) so whenever we were half-dressed in the half-dark together and I could trust it was just him touching me and no one else, none of his friends alone or in a group, and I could trust where his dry fingers would fall like the soft rubber of an old pencil’s stained eraser, and I could trust when, and could trust that I could follow his instructions and he would answer my questions, or at least the important ones, and I could trust we belonged to each other, that I was capable of belonging to someone. While we waited for the gleaming ink to dry before I let him lay me on my bed and press me into romance we sat half-dressed, kissing and being kissed, and I thought of how when I was young and slid under another surface I’d trail the other kids as we wrote stylized tags on telephone poles and neglected walls––we’d seen it on T.V. and that kind of ownership felt rebellious––and I kept in mind how Jack told me “they say silence is golden because is beautiful,” reminding me that being quiet added to my appeal, that mystery meant value and naming meant knowing, and it was only later that I asked him why he’d named us on my lower back close to my waist and a small constellation of moles, he told me that from now on, in our future of shadowy bedrooms, neither of us would need to worry about forgetting who either of us were, and that this was a sign of his love. Love, he said before his fingers caressed my lips to erase my reply, was a good kind of stain, and not as painful as a name.

 

Nicholas Grider is the author of the story collection Misadventure (A Strange Object) and the chapbook Forest of Borders (Malarkey Books). Their work has appeared in Atticus Review, Conjunctions, Five:2:One, Guernica, Midnight Breakfast, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and X-R-A-Y. They can be found apologizing for things on Twitter at @ngrdr.