Bread

/in , , /by Genevieve Abravanel

[fiction]

One morning, there are people in her house.

Caren lives alone. She never married and her last long-term thing ended five years ago. She’s fine. She likes it: those early hours sipping coffee, her cat, Guster, winding through her bare legs. She can wear her rattiest t-shirts, hum off-key while getting ready.

But now as the light slants in the front window of her little city rowhouse, two people are sitting at her kitchen table. She’s never seen them before. Their clothes are formal; the man in a yellowed button down and the woman in a white dress with a lace collar. Their posture is impeccable. They’re not from around here, she’s pretty sure.

The man and woman stare back at her. The woman looks frightened. She turns to the man as if Caren’s the interloper, a pale ghost before them.

Caren thinks about picking up a fork or a butter knife. Calling the police. Her cell phone’s in the bedroom.

Guster threads through the strangers’ legs. The man clears his throat. “Bread,” he says in a strong accent.

Caren wants to ask all the questions. She still wants to pick up a butter knife. But instead, she looks through the fridge.

“It’s low carb.” She’s apologizing to them. She’s lost her mind.

The woman still looks frightened.

*     *     *

Two days later and they’ve fallen into a routine.

The man is Michael, she’s learned; the woman’s name is Bea. Michael speaks English, badly, then translates for Bea. Caren doesn’t recognize their language.

She’s just not sure about the whole thing. They’re so quiet, so dignified. They sleep in the living room, only use the bathroom when she’s at work. They eat modestly, hardly more than Guster. She probably throws out that much in a week.

*     *     *

The next night, she brings home candy from the office. Twizzlers. They each take one and manage to eat them neatly, which seems impossible.

Then Michael brings out a fruit plate. He’s carved her last, neglected apple into thin slices that cover the entire surface. Caren feels like crying. Michael’s a magician, making something out of nothing. A meaningful gesture out of what would otherwise rot.

*     *     *

In her bedroom, she decides she will call the authorities. She’s not in any danger, or not, at least, the usual kind. But she can’t let them break her heart every night.

She won’t be that bourgeois woman whose life is transformed. She refuses to make them her new family. She’ll never truly know them and that is as it should be.

The trouble is, she shouldn’t have waited so long. It would have been easier to call right away.

Two weeks later, the number’s still on the notepad beside her bed.

There’s a knock at the door.

A tall, sandy-haired man smiles at her, lines crinkling around his eyes. “I’m looking for someone. Two, as a matter of fact.”

The living room is empty. They must be hiding.

Caren smiles back at the man. How easy it is to be with someone who speaks her language, whose gestures mirror her own.

“Sorry,” she says. “There’s no one here but me.”

 

Genevieve Abravanel is Associate Professor of English at Franklin & Marshall College. Her scholarly writing has appeared in such venues as Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Modernism/modernity, Mosaic, The Journal of Caribbean Literature, Journal of Modern Literature, and Modernist Cultures. She’s held grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Association for University Women, and the Penn Humanities Forum; in 2012, she published a book of academic nonfiction with Oxford University Press. She lives in Lancaster, PA, with her family.

Like the Fourth Finger of My Left Hand

/in , , /by Laura English

[creative nonfiction]

So damned sick of delicate things.

My co-worker who was raped over and over. I want to time travel,
tell his five-year-old self, Punch your father’s friend in the face the next time he touches you.

Don’t say resilience. Children are breakable.

I’m tired of my toe poking through the sock printed with zebras, and I just bought the socks.
Stupid delicate things. As if they were made of sand.

How my oldest son barely keeps the sarcasm out of his response when the cop studies his license
and is surprised he has an Anglo surname. When he and a friend are pulled over
for an infraction so slight.

Control of the voice, hair trigger.

A sock that should last more than a season.

The brain’s hair-fine bridge between thought and action. Tired of delicate cycles,
how they leave clothes soaking wet.

Bones of the ear like scrimshaw, one’s favorite drinking glass,
the balance of water in semi-arid regions of Kenya.

The part that snaps that they don’t make anymore.

Your shield against inner rage that crumbles like a brittle castle

of drying sand. So fed up with delicate issues in your family, between brothers born too close.
Like who pays for the fiftieth wedding anniversary bash and is thereby king. The fur on Esau’s body.

Sick of the whiskey makers putting it delicately on their labels, Enjoy responsibly. The moment
the bridge is crossed.

The split second I’m no longer your wife but a she-devil. The delicate shift of target.
Dendrites soaking wet with Tullamore Dew, tentacles in a tide pool slammed with waves.

The fractured plastic that keeps the sliding door of the van on its track.

The cheek of our son with autism which the broken piece almost grazes

when you hurl it.

Thin quilts on the bunk beds where I lie with our sons. The vapor of alcohol on your breath
in the next room.

The door that never works again, and the boys

forgetting and standing at it to be let in. The flimsy gate of memory that then admits
a deafening howl, the party gone wrong, fists, Why did Daddy push Rogan?

The soft-spoken man I’m tutoring from Kenya who’s writing a story about a boy collecting every drop of rain. The way the man sets down the glass bottle holding spring water. He’s brought it for me, carrying it in a quilted bag.

The circle of damp
on the library’s table.

* Oh, delicate ring.

 

Laura English posts a daily blog called “Eat More Life,” a healing space for women living with anorexia. On Sunday afternoons, she teaches writing to people from all walks of life. Her work has appeared in dozens of magazines including the minnesota review, The Sow’s Ear, Cider Press Review, Adanna, and Straylight. A chapbook, Graves Too Small to Be Red (Finishing Line Press), was published last year.

A Mountain of Invertebrates

/in , , /by Christopher Gonzalez

[fiction]

Austin orders an entire seafood boil for himself. He ignores the crawfish and halved cobs of corn, focusing instead on the crab legs, which he cracks open with such force the buttery juices mist Jorge’s face. Jorge’s plate is nearly empty now. He had devoured his crispy-fried cod sandwich in five minutes and spends the rest of their meal together picking at coleslaw, catching only two or three strands of wet cabbage at a time on his fork. Austin finishes a fourth crab leg and leans back in his chair. He drapes a napkin over his lap. That was delightful, he says, but I can’t eat another bite. Austin smiles at Jorge, his teeth flecked with parsley. You should try some, he says. But seafood is not Jorge’s thing. The ocean, he believes, is swarming with aliens. No need to search for them in outer space when they lurk in the darkest depths of the earth. And certainly no reason to eat them. To roll the aquatic flesh around in his mouth would be an act against God. Hard pass, he thinks. But there was still so much shrimp and sausage and crawfish and potatoes cooling out on the newspapered tabletop. He imagines biting into the untouched crawfish now: some uneasy chewing to start, then a rough swallow. Then, he suspects, the dead little fucker would be revived by the bath of his stomach acid. Reborn, it would swim down, deeper into his gut, burrowing itself within him forever. Jorge, you really must try some, Austin says again. Just one bite, please. He grabs a lobster from the pile, twists its body, and pulls until the tail separates from its torso. They could get a to-go container. There is still time. It’s what other couples might do: wrap up the remains and tote the bounty back to Jorge’s apartment, to be later consumed in a post-sex haze. But that never happens, does it? Jorge sees into next morning, and he knows Austin would leave the bag in his fridge, as he had done with a slice of vodka pizza from their first date, and the stuffed cabbage from date two, and the Thai food from the third. The chocolate cake from date four never made it home. But for all those other leftovers, Jorge made sure to eat them. He was raised to be a garbage disposal. No waste, ever. He picks over whatever Austin leaves in the mornings, shortly after Austin vanishes into the backseat of a Lyft. Off to class or work, Austin says. Alone in his kitchen, scraping his fork against the aluminum takeout container, Jorge watches the Lyft app every time, notes how the driver passes Austin’s job, and the school, and even his apartment. Jorge watches Austin slip away, upstream. Austin is squeezing the lobster’s torso now, and the red shell compresses under his fingers, cracking. Juice rains down over the newspaper. From the carnage, Austin presents Jorge with a lump of yellowish-green meat pulp, balanced delicately on his fingertips. That’s it? Jorge laughs, he has to, everything feels too wild. So much effort and mess? All of that for so little? He’s serious. He’s confused. You’ll see what all the fuss is about, Austin says. He swears it, raises the mass to Jorge’s face. Jorge thinks about the bag of seafood, how it will surely sag, the paper thinning out over time, long after tonight, eventually breaking open all over his bottom shelf. Rancid garlic butter everywhere, and a mountain of invertebrates left to rot. Jorge opens his mouth, welcomes Austin’s fingers. He rolls the meat on his tongue, fights against the stinging in his eyes and rising bile in his throat, tries to push through. Austin is a wide smile and two celebratory balled fists. So good, right? he gasps. I knew you’d love it. But Jorge is still chewing the lobster, nodding his head over and over again. The hope is the movement will guide the sea bug down his throat and he can will himself into saying this thing is good. The hope is it won’t be a lie.

 

Christopher Gonzalez serves as a fiction editor at Barrelhouse and a contributing editor at Split Lip Magazine. His stories appear or are forthcoming in a number of journals, including Third Point Press, Cosmonauts Avenue, Pithead Chapel, and The Acentos Review. He was the recipient of the 2015 Ann E. Imbrie Prize for Excellence in Fiction Writing from Vassar College. Cleveland-raised, he now lives and writes in Brooklyn, NY. You can find him online at www.chris-gonzalez.com or Twitter: @livesinpages.

Patty Cakes

/in , , /by Richard Graddis

[fiction]

I awoke from an exquisite dream. That pissed me off right there, cause in my dream, I was being devoured by love. When I flip the switch, a billion fucking cockroaches scatter. Naturally, I go batshit crazy, careening around the room, stomping and cursing. Now the neighbors are up. “Hey, cut that shit out!” this lady’s yelling. Downstairs, a guy’s shouting, “I have to come up there, I’ll break your fucking bones. I swear.” I recognize that guy. Big, fat Hungarian dude from the second floor. I don’t know his name. Same guy who busted my balls that time I was practicing my scales on the sax.

Next day, I call this fumigator I know. “Cut me a deal, Frankie,” I say. “No can do, Jimmy. Roaches, they got no respect for boundaries, see? You wanna solve your issue, you got to fumigate the entire goddamn building. Otherwise, you’re just playing whack a mole.”

So I go see Yorgi, the super. “Yorgi, we gotta fumigate this shithole.” I say. “Buy a fogguh.” Yorgi says. I think he and the landlord are cousins or something.

Next day, I run into Patty. Patty and I were kids together. I was walking around midtown, minding my business. There she was, demonstrating, marching around in circles, yelling and screaming with a bunch of fucking losers. I hadn’t seen her in forever. Patty with her buck teeth. I always had this crazy crush on her.

“Serendipity,” she says.

“Patty Cakes,” I say.

“Jimmy, you still playing the sax?” she asks.

I was really flattered she remembered. I didn’t wanna confess I pawned it.

“Nah,” I say. “I quit that business.”

“Too bad,” she says. “I’m singing in a band. We could use some more brass.”

She hands me a matchbook: Fergie’s Supper Club out in Queens.

“Come see me,” she says.

You ask me, there’s nothing sexier than buck teeth. The guys, they used to call her “Bucky.” Not me. I called her “Patty Cakes.” Back in the day, she’d watch us playing stickball in the street, dodging taxis and delivery trucks. Outta the blue, she appoints herself cheerleader. She starts doing cartwheels on the sidewalk. Then one time, this cop tells her to move cause she’s blocking the way. He was new on the beat.

“You got a bad case of stupid,” she says to him.

“Freeze right there, honey,” he says, like he’s gonna cuff her.

“Bite my crank,” she says and takes off laughing.

After that, everybody started saying it. Every time the guys got together, somebody’d say, “Bite my crank.”

So I took the train out to Queens to see Patty.

In the parking lot, a guy says to me, “You gotta move your car, buster.”

“I don’t own a car.” I say.

“Whadda you, a smartass?”

“Nah. I’m a pedestrian.”

This guy, he don’t like that remark, so at this juncture, I’m getting invisible quick. I got no ax to grind with this asshole. You can’t be channeling Jackie Chan every time some jerkoff starts feeling his oats. A guy could get messed up pretty bad going down that road.

Anyhow, some supper club this was. Buncha hooligans chowing down buffalo wings and fried cheese. Loud and rude, too. I felt like standing up and telling these clowns to shut the fuck up, but what am I gonna do? Start a brawl? Some people are just ignorant. I elbowed my way up front so I could hear. Patty sounded sweet, like an angel.

Sometimes I wonder if things might have turned out different. Like if this hadn’t happened, or that hadn’t happened, or the phone hadn’t rung that one time…or it had. Or I didn’t decide to do what I did that one night or decided not to do. Maybe I wouldn’t be living in a shithole. Maybe me and Patty coulda been a team. We coulda played at classy places. She crooning all torchy and heartbreaky. Me on the sax, hitting those soft notes; the one’s that purr like a cat when you stroke its belly.

After the show, we went out to a diner.

“You want a coffee?” I say.

“I’m caffeine free,” she says.

I ordered her a lime Rickey and let her talk. I’m watching her teeth. She was so sexy.

She stirred the glass with her finger while she gabbed. That was sexy, too.

“Patty, be my girl,” I say.

“Bite my crank, Jimmy.”

 

Richard Graddis began his career as an attorney on the East Coast, but later moved to Los Angeles, where he became a private investigator, engaged in the business of tracking down missing heirs. He is now retired. He lives with his wife in Laurel Canyon. He has dabbled in writing over the years, but only recently took it up seriously. He spends his time writing, playing tennis, and worrying about the future of the human race.

A Compendium of Earthquakes

/in , , /by Hope Henderson

[creative nonfiction]

  1. The first one was in the egg shop. I was a baby, strapped to my mother’s back in a blue nylon carrier while she wandered Kotwali bazaar. Shelves of eggs, a single room with three walls and a pull-over aluminum door. All of the eggs broke. After the shaking stopped, the street dogs rushed in, thrilled, lapping the floor and shelves.
  2. They happened all the time in Dharamsala, my dad says. My brother remembers the one that broke the cottage above Macleod Ganj where the other ex-pats lived; he was in school reciting square root tables. My sister remembers, too; she had been on the roof, sweeping off monsoon rainwater.
  3. Halloween when I was 11: Katie and I went out—her witch hat, my face stamped with moon and stars—and got candy one last time. What are you? mothers asked, scowling at us. We were old now. In the morning, it was in the papers. They were rare in New England, after all. None of us had felt it, and we all wished we had.
  4. The train was too far from Matt’s house in Kent, Ohio, to hear the horn, but the vibrations woke me up at 4 a.m., 6 a.m., 8 a.m. I didn’t know yet that this is what an earthquake feels like. I slowed my breathing, one breath for every two of his, until I fell asleep again.
  5. In my lab in La Jolla, I was always worried I’d be working with radiation when one happened. I’d be closed in what we called the hot room, and the radioisotopes would spill over the bench, the floor, burn through my gloves and shoes and fry my ovaries. When one did come, I only had a bottle of saline solution. It went on so long that we all looked around at each other, wondering if we should get under the desks and hold their legs like the video said. We just stood there, eyebrows up, flasks and pipettes in our frozen hands, shaking. It passed and we got back to work.
  6. I felt one in the apartment in San Diego, too: rumble, pause, rumble. Max came back from his run, dripping, a half hour later. He hadn’t felt it: it turns out that in motion, you can’t feel the earth move under you. Oh man, he said, I missed it!
  7. In Berkeley, I sometimes startle awake at 2 a.m., bed shaking. I always wait, but when another movement doesn’t come, I know it’s just the subway shaking the ground.
  8. None of us are prepared. I have some dust masks, a hand-crank radio, but only a gallon of water stored under the bed. No canned food, no can opener, no crowbar to hack out of a collapsed building when The Big One comes. And my building will collapse: my walls already show cracks; my ceiling is already starting to buckle. No one I love has the money to live somewhere safe. Maybe this is why no one I love has bothered to get the recommended welding gloves, or waterproof matches. In the shape we’ll be in, we don’t want to survive.
  9. The last time, you were there with me. My bed was our bed for the evening; my body your body for the night. I was over you, my hands braced on your shoulders, hearts thumping. And then the bed shook. The headboard rattled. We stopped moving, eyes locked. A framed photograph fell from the wall. The ground kept shaking the building, and the building kept shaking the bed, and the bed kept shaking us, until my heart fell out of my chest and onto yours. It lay on you, throbbing, wet, ruby-red and oversized like a cartoon steak. I bled over you. The blood ran off your sides, pooled under your ribs, your belly button. You tried to place, and then shove, my heart back in my ribcage, but it wouldn’t fit. Well, you said, I think this is The Big One. You put your fist where my heart had been and stopped the bleeding.

 

Hope is a science writer in Berkeley, California. Her work has most recently been published in Lost Balloon, Pidgeonholes, and The Rumpus. You can find her at hoperhenderson.com, and on twitter @hoperhenderson.

Upward Snow

/in , , /by Whitney Lee

[creative nonfiction]

She is sitting in an arm chair next to a broad window that overlooks Fairbanks Avenue and Lake Michigan. She ignores me as I walk from the doorway, across her hospital room, then perch on the broad windowsill. I welcome the cold of metal as the sensation seeps through my white coat, then my scrubs, to the back of my thighs. I should inquire about her postpartum body—the new wound on her abdomen, vaginal bleeding, pain, her fevers, engorged breasts, swollen legs, bruised skin, distended belly. Instead, we watch the wind push snowflakes back toward the sky. “Look. Upward snow,” she says. “Sounds like a band name,” I reply. Then we settle into silence.

Yesterday, her baby died.

 

Whitney Lee is a Maternal Fetal Medicine physician, an assistant professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Northwestern University, former OpEd Public Voices fellow, and a veteran. She received her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ninth Letter, Booth, Typehouse, The Rumpus, Crack the Spine, Gravel, Numéro Cinq, Huffington Post, and Women’s eNews. She lives in Chicago with her husband and four children. Currently, she is working on a collection of themed essays about a physician’s experience with death.

Camellias in Black and Gray

/in , , /by Danielle Batalion Ola

[fiction]

I know I want Lea the way I do long before she pulls me into her room, but the way she shrugs the button-up off her shoulders still undoes me. She closes the door, reaching up and over her head to tear a wad of gauze off her back. She makes the white pad dance between two fingers before turning on her heel. “Do you like it?”

When I see “it,” sparks skitter across my skin. I stare for too long and the misstep makes her voice hike up one nervous tick.

“Bri?”

“I love it,” I rush to say. That’s the safe, expected response to the camellias—three blossoms total—bursting from the angry skin on her shoulder. It’s easier to say than “that’s sexy” or to gush that the piece sits so perfectly on her flesh and bone.

I know nothing about tattoos, but I decide the detail is exquisite anyway. The lines in the folds of each petal are clear and steady. There are tiny puffs of pollen peeping out from each flower’s heart. The leaves are veiled gray to help the flowers pop. It works.

Aside from a bit of shading in the slope of each petal, the flowers are filled only with the color of Lea, the kind of brown so lush that makeup companies can only describe it with awkward and ambiguously edible clichés. Mahogany Caramel. Sienna Truffle. Sycamore Espresso, Roasted Medium Dark.

It’s the kind of skin that inspires my mother to ask if “the morena” is still there long after Lea leaves for the night; to brush off my indignation with a laugh. It’s just a joke, she says. Don’t be so sensitive, she adds. Later she’ll hand me a bar of papaya soap and cluck her tongue and wonder if Lea’s mom wants some. We have extra. Doesn’t she know she can always ask?

These are the matters that haunt my mother: our various shades, our modest accomplishments, the bleach in our soap. I despise her obsessions, but I’m just as grateful that they distract her from a daughter whose only interest is spending hours on the couch with that morena, legs tangled for no other reason than for my body to touch hers. I don’t know what Lea’s distracted by, but as far as I can tell, she’s just as blind.

We’ve known each other forever, from kindergarten class to chatrooms. We’ve pantomimed heartbreak for boys who didn’t matter; cackled as we bared our budding chests to strange men online, shimmying side to side. It should be enough to have those moments, those precious bits of girlhood no one else could reach. But I want more. I want to consume her melancholy, audacity, and joy. I want to strip the petals off her back and let them sit on my tongue until they dissolve. I don’t want anyone else to ever have a taste.

I think mom would be livid if I followed Lea’s lead and pierced my skin with ink. What would she think if I let myself tip forward to drink my morena in?

“Where’d you get it?” I say. She says something about some old classmate of ours apprenticing in Lower Haight, and I have so many more questions. When? Why couldn’t I come along? Why haven’t I met her? It is a ‘her?’ I bite them back.

There are days when I think Lea’s noticed when I’ve laughed too loudly at something she’s said, or how goosebumps prickle along my arms when her shoulder brushes against mine. But in the end, I’m good at staying hidden. Invisible. A rebellion as quiet as the camellias on her back, fierce but hidden from view.

Lea looks over her shoulder and hands me the gauze. “Put it back on?”

I nod and place it back on her shoulder, adding a kiss of pressure as I run my fingers down the tape. Lea’s wearing a strapless bra to keep the pinch of elastic away from the tender canvas. I’m ashamed I noticed, embarrassed that I didn’t notice sooner.

“What does it mean?” I ask.

Lea scoffs as she shuffles her shirt back on. “It just a bunch of flowers.” Her fingers fasten the buttons. “Does it have to mean anything else?”

“No.” I watch inch by inch as tan toffee Lea disappears from view. When I look up, she’s wearing a smile that makes me wonder if I’m as invisible as I thought. “I guess not.”

 

Danielle Batalion Ola is a Filipina writer who was born and raised on the island of Kaua’i. She’s found her way across mainland America to Brooklyn, NY, where she writes stories both real and imagined with the support of her tiny dog, Stitch. Find her online @_daniola.

Trust Me, Iago

/in , , /by Kevin Tasker

[fiction]

It is Laurie’s cross to bear, this cat that’s found a home in her abdomen. From its nature it must be a Bengal. It is frighteningly active at night. Laurie will be at a Meditation of Surveillance seminar, and she’ll feel it lunge at her stomach wall. Or she’ll be in the kitchen getting some of Susan’s aspic, and she’ll feel it clawing under her heart.

At first, she told herself she shouldn’t worry. She has bigger problems. She’s got her seminars. Her colloquia. Also: Susan’s been bursting into flames again.

While Susan’s a good sport about it—once when her arm caught fire in Whole Foods, she laughed and said, “Hurry, babe, grab one of those steaks and throw it on me!”—it really breaks Laurie’s heart. Susan laughing as she gets smaller, darker. Her fingers, from a burn at yoga last Wednesday, look like scorched wine corks.

“You just keep loving me and I’ll keep loving you,” Susan says.

“I do love you,” Laurie says. “I’m just worried.”

The abdomen cat doesn’t seem worried. It moves down to Laurie’s stomach and purrs against her navel. She feels like it must be immune to all the suffering of the world. She is beginning to hate it for that.

*     *      *

They’re at a Magical Relief from Narcissistic Desire seminar, and Susan is The Invisible Man. Laurie did the bandages herself.

Laurie watches a man at the podium as he pulls a giant mucosal baseball from his mouth and it bounces across the stage. “Seen it all before,” Susan says. “Come back when you barf a bowling ball.”

Laurie feels the cat dart past her hip. Down into her leg.

Susan starts to scream. Another burn, Laurie figures.

“Laurie,” Susan says. “We were wrong! Look! It’s nothing but a tabby.”

Laurie looks down to see the cat’s face emerging from her kneecap.

*     *      *

There are shameful moments when she squeezes the sides of her knee the way she would squeeze a pimple, trying to birth the cat in one go. But the cat never budges when she squeezes it; it only meows more insistently.

“Maybe it’s existential,” Susan suggests. “If we give it a name, maybe it’ll break free.”

A name. A name. She needs to give it a name she can coo soothingly at it. Nothing seems right. She grieves for the way things were. The marriage of her guts to the tiny animal.

*     *      *

By August, Susan has burned away to the size of a child. When they go to Whole Foods, Laurie puts her in her cart. With her burnt fingers, Susan grabs their peanut butter, their quinoa. Her eyes are gone now, so sometimes she grabs the wrong thing. Laurie lets it go. It is part of her love, this sacrifice. The cat—she has named him Iago—watches mutely.

*     *      *

Iago eats and eats. He is everything that Susan isn’t.

Their bodies form a bond that can’t be broken because it cannot be understood. It is he who nourishes her when she leaves a seminar confused. Bonsai Trees for the Technocrat ending abruptly when a woman sculpting a tree on a screen snaps the tree in half. The crowd’s inrush of breath haunts Laurie—until she is home with Iago, feeding him kippers on the porch.

Laurie folds her leg in such a way that Iago is looking up at her. His gaze is steely. She shakes her head when she sees the question in his eyes. It is not a choice she can make. But Iago continues to stare.

*     *      *

They go in to tell Susan what they have planned, but they are spared. There is only some ash on the sofa. Iago meows once, plaintively, and then she feels him coming out.

Laurie can’t abide it. Her sense of things is tied to him. “Iago,” she coos. “Stay. Trust me; I’ll be better.”

But he doesn’t listen. They go around the living room, pushing and pulling, as the sofa smolders behind them.

Laurie has no chance to mourn. Not yet. The mourning will come in the weeks that follow. Time sponged of its life, its color.

For now, Iago comes free in a jolt and lands at her feet. She looks at the hole in her leg. Iago is making for the fire escape. Later, when she is alone, when she has healed enough to think of herself and only herself, she will call into the hole, asking to be delivered another.

 

Kevin Tasker’s work has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Vestal Review, Every Day Fiction, and Flash Fiction Magazine. He lives in Cleveland.