Cooter don’t mean for his butt, half of it at least, to have to be chopped off. He had to have his right butt cheek and some of his thigh cleaned out good and that meant cutting and digging and cutting some more so as to get rid of the infection that was starting to go in and eat up his pelvic bone, up top near by the iliac crest. I saw it myself cause Cooter came to me looking for help with caring for the wounds and didn’t wanna deal with no more hospitals. He was all cut up and it was like looking at a piece of exotic fruit, trying to identify something familiar.

Cooter had gotten skin grafts that set like two little islands of meat from his thighs and saw where the doctors left them in the ocean of red where his butt shoulda been. He said the doctors who had done it were jerks and he told me that he didn’t want to go back for more skin grafts. I told him he should go back cause the edges of the grafts had all rolled up and there was pus everywhere and it was hard for him to find any parts of his butt left to inject his dope in. I told him I’d go with him to see the jerk doctors even though I knew he was brave and could handle himself.

But he wasn’t gonna go and he didn’t have much money. Cooter picks up scrap metal and other useful things from the yards of hoarder houses while chickens and sometimes guinea hens run about in the yard. Cooter just wanted simple things like gauze or period pads or baby diapers, anything that could be put across the area where a butt should be and keep the weeping things a bit more dry.

Lisa, Cooter’s sometimes girlfriend and sometimes thorn in the side, was creative and torn white sheets into large strips, large enough to cover a man of smaller stature’s butt, but she had torn all the sheets she had, cut up the towels for padding, got him puppy pads at Dollar Tree and then would tape it all down to him like she was wrapping a present. Lisa was a good friend to Cooter even though she said he doesn’t always treat her right and he spends more time in jail than with her cause he don’t listen to the things she says when she tells him all the things he shouldn’t be doing.

Sometimes I bring him puppy pads and abdominal pads and medicines in a big brown paper Kroger bag. Sometimes my friend The Nurse helps me out and I can bring antibiotics when the place where his butt is gone turns red and green like Christmas with little drops of plasma weeping a twinkle light in the sun where he’s working and you can see it on his jeans where the wetness has come through. I give him a shot in his other butt where the cheek is still there and it gives him some antibiotic coverage for a bit. It’s hard to keep wounds clean when everything you love has touched the dirt. Sometimes after I leave he texts me and says “baby, ur blue eyes smile in the light” and I say “u idiot my eyes are green”.

Rebekah Morgan is a writer based in East Tennessee. Their writing can be found in Oxford American and Joyland Magazine among other fine places.

⦆

The sound goes out from my dark little room at the end of a long metal pier, collides with something, and returns.

Protocol: note all targets. The sonar display doesn’t give details, submarine or creature both just blurring dots. But I know that’s her, on the scan at last.

I can hear the stories in the ultrasonic echoes, the specifics that the machine can’t detect. I was slow to learn to keep it to myself. Aboard the Suffrance, I said too much, became a standing joke.

Now the closing shape’s a beacon, lit by spinline. Bright as the line passes and fading through the next rotation. Flaring another tick closer. Moving towards my dark little room, chasing the source of the sound she can hear.

In the log, I write: unknown target, though I know what it is.

⦆

One of the stokers on the Suffrance had something wrong inside the chambers of his chest. When I told him so, he said I could keep that to myself. But he took a shine to me. Rankled like a bear at the other boys’ derision.

Radio crackles. Downcoast checking in. Bored, congested with a cold.

Ears, this is Downcoast. How’s the view?

Can’t complain. Over.

Got a name on the monster they pulled up. Over.

They hauled the young one in at the downcoast station just yesterday, tangled in a trawler’s net. Whether or not it was dead when they caught it, it was lost to the world an hour later.

What is it? Over.

Architeuthis, he says. Big old squid.

I’ve heard the young one and its mother: long heads, too many limbs for me to count, eyes that scatter sound. But the sonar carries more than shapes. Today, the whole resounding space of the sea is raw with grief.

Huge, he says like this is news. Six meters long.

Under the floor, the pier’s bearings groan like men. Where the beams meet the platform, the metal is red with rust. It comes away on my fingers, sticks under my nails, leaves smears on the lid of the coffee machine.

⦆

I first saw the mother and the little one as smudges on the sonar screen. Listened as they feasted through a school of fish. The little one was slow to learn.

Once, when they wandered close, I paused the spinline and pinged them a hello. The baby darted forward, echo full of curiosity. The mother set her body in the sonar’s path. Mantle wide, she rushed the little one away. Broad like the stoker, squaring his shoulders at the others’ mockery.

On the scan, she flares bright again as the line continues its rotation. I calculate her distance and her speed and note it on the clipboard.

○

Hey, Ears, Downcoast calls again. Boys’re saying they’re gonna pay to stuff it. Sell it to a museum or something. The monster. You wanna buy in? Over.

Under my tight fingers, the pages of the log crumple, nearly tear. The rust under my nails leaves red lines across the neatly labeled rows.

I’ll pass. Over.

Your loss, he says. Dull as rocks otherwise. Anything down there?

Her outline etched by the reflected sound. The billows of her long limbs, her vast intent. Two kilometers and closing.

Protocol: call in unknown objects. The whole point of dark little rooms at the end of long metal piers. Safety and security and the national interest.

All clear, I say. Out.      

⦅

After a dive off Peterhead, the Suffrance surfaced in a bank of fog. Nobody knew yet that we’d drifted. Only blurs on the sonar screen. But I could hear the edges through them, some dead volcanic peak.

I told the control crew we would break our hull along the ridge. The navigator took my collar in his hand. Not going to change course because a sparker thinks he’s better than the scan.

The bow took water and we sealed it off too slow. Saltwater hit the batteries and turned to chlorine gas. By the time a merchant steamer reached us, 46 hands were lost. No one could tell me what happened to the stoker, if it was sea or gas that put him on the roster of the dead.

⦅

The radio again, static before his voice crawls through. Always wondered, he says. Did you believe it? Your magic hearing thing.

Don’t clog the channel. Over.

Boys down here say you’re really crazy.

Jeers in the crew mess. The stoker standing, head scraping the ceiling, asking if anybody wanted to say that one more time.

I put my thumb on the switch that stops the sonar’s spin. She’s closing now, her jets in the display’s revolving beam.

⦅

Protocol: maintain and observe the rotation of the scan. Whether gas burned through the fluid in his lungs or breakers trapped him in the hull, I never found out how the stoker died. As the mother nears, the only sound she makes is the rush of water through her body like blood in the valves of the heart. She won’t find her baby’s body here, but I know where it is.

I thumb the switch, a narrow slice of ocean stranded in its range. Direct it south, a degree offshore, where the downcoast station and the body of her little one sit just beyond the sonar’s beam.

For a moment the scan is empty. But then a blur on the display. The echoes contort behind her as she follows the signal’s course, her intention sharp and set.

At the sonar’s farthest reach, she slows. In the sound I see her drift a moment upright. Her eye turns towards my sound, smooth and round and shining black. As though she can hear me in the echoes too, I lift my hand.

Ellen Wiese is a Chicago-based writer. Ellen’s previous publications include Portable Gray, AGNI, Wigleaf, and Lost Balloon, and her writing has appeared on the 2022 Bristol Short Story Prize shortlist, the 2022 Brick Lane Bookshop Short Story Prize Long-Longlist, and Glimmer Train’s 2018 Very Short Fiction Top 25. She graduated from the MA Prose Fiction program at the University of East Anglia.

Dear Mr. Mayor,

I write to you today not because of your many scandals — you must be sick to death of your many scandals, and you must, like me, wish to move beyond that which you have done with the left hand of your conscience. Yes, Mr. Mayor, I am angry about the lying and the cheating and the misappropriation of public funds and the sudden violent disappearances of friends and neighbors from our city’s streets, but all that is for another letter. Let us put anger aside, Mr. Mayor. This letter, if I may be so bold, is about redemption. As cans may be redeemed, so may we all. 

Mr. Mayor, something simply must be done about the subway. This is your chance to turn it around. The subway must be fixed. Let me explain. Last night, quite late, I needed to get home. I had tied a few on, you might say, with a friend. Out of nerves only — I’m not a drinker, Mr. Mayor. I tipple, sure, but that’s different. You understand. Nerves might be the wrong word. I was with a friend, you see — a good friend. A good man, my friend is. Good, and strapping. Enough about his straps. We stayed out late. Our other friends had all gone home — they walked, or biked, or were suddenly and violently disappeared. I only know that I was laughing with my friend, and when I looked away my glass was empty and our friends were gone. 

It was late, as I said, and I’d chosen the wrong shoes by any metric but how long they made my legs look. But because my man is a good friend — my friend is a good man, that is — he offered to ensure I got home safe. As you know, Mr. Mayor, these streets are encrusted with danger. You campaigned on this danger — I need not explain. Offers like this are what make my friend so good to the bone, all beam and burr. Down the street he held my elbow, a gentleman. His hands are strong, my friend’s. In a different life, he could have been my shampoo girl, and then his touch would have meant nothing; I could have known it for a tip. I had the sudden, violent urge to lay my head down and feel those hands in my hair. Mr. Mayor, I’m not too proud to admit that I tried. Get up, he said, that’s a good girl, we’re almost there. The heavy ring a golden warning on his finger. But then, across the mouth of the subway, do you know what we saw? Tape, Mr. Mayor! It was taped up, shut. No warning at all, and no trains home. 

Mr. Mayor, do you remember when all the drivers organized a strike until they got what they wanted? Well, it’s a good thing they did, or I’d have gotten no ride home. The wait was too long, and the price was too high. You have simply got to do something about the prices, Mr. Mayor, and the waiting around. These nights are so long and so dark. Have you thought about doing something, Mr. Mayor, about the long, dark nights, at least? My friend, being good, said he’d wait until the driver arrived. I got cold, in the waiting and the darkness. My friend tugged my collar up around my chin. I won’t tell you what happened next, out of respect for your office. 

Dark times, Mr. Mayor, call for brave and original solutions. I ask you, is there anything less brave than having a beautiful wife? Is there anything less original than finding her lacking? I admit, Mr. Mayor, that for a moment I violently wished that she would suddenly disappear and leave my friend alone with me. I’m not proud of it. To make things worse, I wanted it. But you understand, Mr. Mayor, about wanting things, about being full to the brim with desires. You know how to cut deals. You want things, and you find a willing party to give them to you. We both know, Mr. Mayor, that this is called bribery — but no, I did tell you this letter is not about your many scandals. I understand, Mr. Mayor. We are not so different, you and I. I want things all the time. I want a sandwich, a hot bath, affordable healthcare, to be touched in love and reverence. Most of all, Mr. Mayor, I want you to do something about the subways. 

None of this would have happened, Mr. Mayor, if the transport in our city could only run on time. I implore you, Mr. Mayor, to do your job. Citizens like me depend on you.

Most cordially,

Claire Delacroix

Sarah Bess Jaffe is a writer, translator, visual artist, and award-winning audiobook producer with 15 years of experience at Penguin Random House. She is a current MFA candidate at St. Joseph’s University where she is a two-time Barbara Germack Foundry Fellow, undergraduate lecturer, and co-editor of the Writer’s Foundry Review. She is also a translations reader for The Adroit Journal, a 2025 writer-in-residence at La Porte Peinte Centre pour les Arts in Burgundy, France, and co-founder of TBR, a monthly reading series for emerging writers. Her work has been featured in Electric Literature, Peatsmoke, and elsewhere. She is currently working on too many things, including a hand-watercolored graphic novel about the rise of the far-right in the US and Europe, and a regular novel with no pictures at all.

Today the milk smells like a barnyard. Grass makes animals taste like animals. Even before her belly swelled, she didn’t want cow in her coffee and now she triple checks the date on the milk carton, counts the days it’s been open on her hand (five). Time has been troublesome since 33 weeks and 4 days ago. She throws the milk away.

*

Moo moo, says the cow in her dream. The cow is her mother 25 years ago at Mt. Kisco Country Club and the moo moo is the long, flowing dress her mother wears because tonight there is a BBQ on the pool’s lawn. They will eat watermelon and roasted pig and corn and the kids will chase fireflies into paper cups while the parents talk and drink bubbles from plastic flutes.

When she awakes, she wonders why her mother called that outfit a moo moo and not what it really could be: a goddess gown.

*

She sits on her leather couch and waits for the lactation consultant. Now, at 40, will her body know what to do? The doorbell rings. As she peels her pink hide from the gray hide, she’s aware of all the flesh around her bones— too much flesh— her diagnoses of pregnant and slightly overweight have creamed together. Even though she can’t see them, she knows the hinds of her legs are now red and stippled.

Knock knock, says Katie the Consultant. 

As she takes her breasts out, she remembers: the pool’s dressing room. It smells like chlorine and spray deodorant, sunscreen and grilled cheese. There are milky-white wooden walls. Every day, she leads her trio to the tampons under the bathroom sink. They peel off the paper and stick their fingers through the cardboard, wondering where to put it and who will put it there first. 

Then they stand on the rickety bench, peering out the windows into the pool area. There is Matt the Lifeguard, eighteen and blond-haired, blue-eyed, lap-swim-muscled; and then, their mothers, gossiping in lounge chairs. Hers wears tennis whites instead of a bathing suit.

*

She alternates making C’s and U’s with her hand over her size G’s. 

It will feel natural, Katie the Consultant is reassuring her. Baby will know what to do.

She is not convinced. 

Will baby know this—that she has never known what to do with her breasts? In the last two decades, she’s fought nature, augmenting them into larger, raised shapes, detaching the nipple and then anchoring it into a higher, perkier place. If baby is a piece of her, severed, will it too, fight nature? 

She contains acres, wide-open pastures of all the people she’s been. And oh, how that body now stretches, stores, expands. Is it natural then, that she should be so concerned about cramping, contracting, shrinking? She’s more worried about fit: into her bikini, into her child’s gaping little mouth.

*

At the pool, her brother, four years younger, always wiggles around with a woggle between his legs and says things like amaze-balls, tiggle-bitties, and awesome-sauce.

*

Katie has brought a plastic baby doll with flanged lips.

Katie models football hold, where baby feeds wedged under the armpit. She wonders what the little toenails will feel like around her back, if they will flounder or grip or curl.

Don’t worry about the arms or legs. Katie the Consultant reads her mind. Baby is used to being smooshed all together.

No one has prepared her for this type of intimacy.

She’s taken aback at how a newborn, like a vampire or a pet, doesn’t eat; it feeds.

*

Ol’ McDonald had a farm, E, I, E, I, O. 

*

Her mother calls from North Carolina after the appointment. 

I finally lost weight and wore a bathing suit, her mother is saying. And your dad, you know how he just hates big boobs. Hates ‘em. He just walked by me, raised his eyebrows, and said Barbarella.

*

These are the words about birth her mother and sister swat around: bloody murder, ripped, freaked out, elderly pregnant, ruined, huge. 

These are the phrases about motherhood her friend—an acquaintance, really—texts about her newborn, age 42 days: exclusively breastfeed, why am i doing this to myself, husband is useless, cried 3x, brain fog, don’t drive anywhere. 

Every text contains a command or a recommendation. You should. Don’t. 

Which fears are her own? This unsolicited chatter swarms into her mind and she is once again frightened. She will be: zombie cow. 

Why not: divine mother? 

*

Her mother refused to change in the pool’s dressing room and her father gladly shelled out for a cabana every season. A windowless 10×10 closet behind the pool’s entrance. One afternoon, a storm rolls through and she and her trio squish inside. Under the thunder, she hears a softer twinkling: laughter, music. She shushes the girls and together they squint through the cabana’s slats.

The teenage lifeguards dance close together. Matt the Lifeguard roams his hands freely over Liz Head Lifeguard’s chest. In front of everyone! No one seems to mind.

Something inside her shifts and she nervously jams the V of her toes into her Achilles’ heel.

The music is low but the lyrics are unmistakable. 

Bwok, bwok, chicken, chicken. Bwok, bwok, chicken heads. 

The words travel from the cluttered, musty lifeguard shack, through the sliding window, and out into the green, impressionable world. 

*

Her mother arrives with a can of formula, just in case.

She doesn’t know that, in those first dark days after baby is born, her breasts will work on an invisible clock that no one, not even Katie, told her about. It will disgust her. She will leak and spurt milk from bedroom to kitchen and her daughter — no longer the anonymous baby— won’t latch and will scream for hours, days, and what seems like years.

Tiggle-bitties. Big ol’ titties. 

Her mother won’t whisper Told you so. She’ll shake the bottle and say See, isn’t this easier?

Ol’ Macdonald had a farm.

The formula will froth. Her daughter will struggle to digest. Time will pass more slowly than those endless summers of girlhood. Together they will pace the kitchen and she will drink cold coffee and track her steps, each one getting her closer and closer back to that body that she never knew what to do with. 

She’ll forget what she was called before she was Sandra’s mom.

E, I, E, I, O.

Christine Aletti has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. Her work has most recently appeared in Twyckenham Notes and the Saw Palm Review. She lives with her daughter in Florida, for now.

You emerge from your apartment, wheatfield hair ablaze in the afternoon sun. My big sister, skinny in a form-fitting dress. Today you are 60. I smooth my Hawaiian shirt over my paunch. 

“Birthday girl.” I hand you your gift, a bottle of second-to-cheapest tequila. I got Bellflower Pete to stop at the liquor store before he dropped me off. I’m thinking ahead to what I will drink. How you and I will arrive early and can get in a round or even two before your guests arrive. It’s been so long.

You pass me a tin of gummies and some weed cookies from your job at the dispensary. “For you, Princely.” Your nickname for me; my wife Pia has family money. 

You hold up a finger and vanish inside to put away your gift. You close the door quickly as you always do, leaving me on the step. You think I don’t know about the stacked-up newspapers and books and bottles and cans and CDs and record albums. All the sentimentalia you kept after our mother went. These objects provide you with comfort. I get that.

“Been a while.” I say when you reemerge.

“In the flesh.” Also, before I lost my license, you are nice enough not to say. Before my knee replacement; the botched tropical ale startup.

For a long time, I wondered whether you and I would stay in touch, once our mother went. Like us, she was a person of appetites. We share her face, wide and placid. We two share memories of being taken to the movies, her slipping alone to the back row where her married boyfriend waited. Another time, our mother and us, asked to leave our town’s Octoberfest, because she could barely walk. The face of the lady volunteer: Those poor kids. But life with our mother included small joys. She loved a celebration. And it is I who keep it going, now.

It’s bright outside. I lean against your mailbox as you secure your door, “Hang on, hang on, hang on.” I’m floating lightly. I’ve taken a hydrocodone pill. I tap at my phone and order the cheapest option on the Lyft menu. After she finishes work Pia, a teetotaler, will meet us at the brewery and drive us home.

Our driver is a young Latina in a black SUV. Her posture is very straight. “Your hair is really pretty,” I say.

“Thank you, sir,” she says, and I hear your soft guffaw. She passes the first three onramps. She stays on Western Avenue, even in East Hollywood, which is dodgier than when we grew up. But none of the raggedy characters near the 7/11 or clustered near boarded up storefronts pay us any mind.

“I just got a knee scooter,” you say with your crooked smile. “Well, a neighbor left it behind.” 

“Ooh.”

You add so quietly you are nearly muttering. “Can’t walk more’n a couple of blocks.” I hear you breathing beside me, an unsettlingly intimate sound.

“Since COVID, every time I sit down, I fall asleep,” I offer. I drop my head to my shoulder, eyes empty and tongue lolling. Refreshing your lip gloss, you chuckle. 

“Maybe you have that thing where a person keeps waking themselves up when their breath stops,” you say.

“Ha! Pretty sure my wife would have told me.” Underscoring the difference between us.

“Point taken,” you say sharply. You flash raised hands like a blackjack dealer and turn to the window.

You once told me that if you’d gotten married, you’d have saved hundreds of thousands in online shopping. Partied less. Stayed in good health. The presumption being that if it weren’t for my being married, my life would look a lot more like yours. I thought that was idiotic—why should it be another person’s job to keep us in line? But I have allowed the truth of it to soak in. You know how Pia takes care of me. She tells me when my food is burning, that the tub is about to overflow. Alone, I’d neglect my hygiene. I’d forget to feed the cats or pay our bills and lose my phone. In the end, I’d forget language altogether, reduced to aping lines from television shows and podcasts and graphic tees. 

Like our mother, you and I both hold an unfillable void inside, even as we participate now and then in life’s parade. She was so skinny and jaundiced at the end. Her formerly dancing brown eyes gone flat. The thought of that happening to you makes me swallow hard. I’d be alone, then. The last of our family.

We arrive in San Pedro and gritty Pacific Avenue. I hoist myself out of the car. You are already flitting around to my side. The driver pulls away, heading toward the harbor. To clear the air between us, I defer to you, asking sotto voce what tip I should give.

“Most people don’t even tip,” you answer absently, straightening your dress. 

“How do these drivers afford nice cars, when they get paid so little?”

“I just hope ours doesn’t take that same route all by herself,” you say. I rush to agree. We like thinking of ourselves as concerned for others. I’d told Pia I was worried you had terrible news about your health. I didn’t say I was invited to this shindig after one of my late night calls to you, lonely and high. That you were always cool about these calls and never threw them in my face. 

I crook my arm for you to take. Smiling together at the brewery’s entrance, we make our way across Pacific Avenue, ready for a celebration. We are our mother’s children, after all.

Patricia Quintana Bidar is a western writer from the Port of Los Angeles area, with roots in southern Arizona, Santa Fe, NM, and the Great Salt Lake. Her work has been celebrated in Wigleaf’s Top 50 and widely anthologized, including in Flash Fiction America (W.W. Norton), Best Microfiction 2023, and Best Small Fictions 2023 and 2024. Patricia’s debut collection of short works is coming from Unsolicited Press in December 2025. She lives with her family and unusual dog outside Oakland, California. Visit patriciaqbidar.com.

On the first warm morning of spring, Tom arrives holding half-wilted tulips like a man holding a bouquet of blunt instruments. He says he’s leaving me. For Amsterdam. Not the city—he clarifies—a woman from work. Named Amsterdam.

I do not cry. I do not rage. I do not pull his sweater over his head and pummel him with my fists like we’re in a hockey fight. No. I thank him. I say, Thank you so much, Tom, and close the door behind him, as if he’s just delivered an egg and cheese on poppy.

I don’t know why he brought a gift, but it would certainly make the whole thing worse if I refused it. I place the tulips—ten of them, all pink, smug, idiotic—in a blue Mason jar that’s been in the sink since Thursday. The tulips fan their little legs like debutantes on muscle relaxants. I put the stupid, little bitches in front of the open window by my bed.

Lovely women have fresh flowers in their homes. I read that in the Martha Stewart Living I keep under my toilet plunger. Lovely women don’t get left for women with architecture for legs. I want to be lovely, but my eyelids are heavy with exhaustion and SuperMax XXL Lash Wow! Mascara. In other words, I want to be unconscious.

I unzip my skirt like I’m shedding the fiction of who I thought I was. I remove the tastefully slutty blouse and distastefully supportive bra that I had so carefully picked for what I assumed would be a surprise brunch date. It’s horrific how excited I was. I collapse in bed. Flannel sheets from Costco. Grey and bleak, and so am I. The mattress groans. The tulips, meanwhile, look thrilled to be here. I can hear birds singing outside, and I hate them for it.

In another life, I was a sparrow. I sang loudly and often and took breadcrumbs from kindly strangers. I never once opened a shared phone plan with someone who said “babe” too often.

If I was a sparrow, I would be lapping at a glass of wine or pure love or whatever it is they drink in Amsterdam. This is not something I know. I have never had the occasion to get a passport. I’m not a globe-trotting hussy. My knowledge is limited to the Wikipedia page I skimmed after wondering what would possess someone to name a baby after a place half a world away. My guess is that it was a “creative” riff off one of those glossy city-names—Brooklyn, Paris, London—meant to sound worldly and sophisticated.

I’ve seen her photos, once, back when I was still trying not to be the kind of woman who Googles. But I Googled. It was after I saw her name on Tom’s phone. My first thought was, “oh, she’s lovely.” She has a face like a milk commercial. Her voice is a high-end essential oil. She probably doesn’t even try—or worse, pretends she doesn’t.

That’s the trick, isn’t it? Lovely women pull off femininity like backflips off the high dive. I’ve been trying so hard, since before I even met Tom. I smile at strangers. I go to Pilates. I say “sure” more often than “no”. I shave my body hair so that I’m smooth and blank.  Tom liked that about me, that I was “cool.” An iceberg. 

I watch the overripe tulips as morning turns into noon into everything after. One by one their petals fall, indecent and slow. He loves me. He loves me not. The petals scatter like little, pink casualties until there’s only one flower still perfectly intact in the ragged bunch. I reach from my supine position and pluck it out of the jar. I hold it to my nose, my lips. Then I bite. It tastes like pesticides and greenery. I chew and chew and chew the flower like cud.

Tulip madness. That’s what they called it. That’s what Amsterdam was famous for—at least according to Wikipedia. I think I understand something now, even if I’m not sure what it is.

I run to the bathroom and kneel on the floor. I vomit, knees pressed to the cold tile, hands gripping the rim as if I might fall through. The petals come up last—chewed, soft and blushing, floating wreckage in the toilet bowl. He loves me not.

I wash my mouth out in the sink. My lips are blood red, and my cheeks glow feverishly. My eyes shine—not with health, but with a kind of recognition. I look like someone I haven’t seen in a while. Not lovely, the way Amsterdam must appear when she enters a room like a neatly wrapped present, but raw and unruly.

I am already so alive.

I open the window all the way and lean out. It smells like warm dirt and a strange, feverish bloom. The birds are shrieking. They do not care if they sound lovely when they open their mouths. I scream back.

Sarah Chin is a writer with a day job in politics. Her work has been published in Epiphany, HAD, SmokeLong Quarterly, Points in Case, Sine Theta Magazine, and more. She lives in Chicago, Illinois and was born in the Year of the Fire Rat, which pretty much sums her up. More of her work can be found at sarahchin.net.