Hagar by Imani Benberry

This piece was first published as part of Quarto’s 2020 Spring Print Edition.

Illustration by Anna J Chavez

“We’ll try it once,” Sarah had told Hagar that morning, as Hagar ironed the tapestry that read “Your offspring will number the stars” on the floor of the den. It was a quote from God. Sarah had had the words embroidered in gold stitching onto a sheet by the tiny Mrs. Anderson, who lived downstairs and had a sky-scraping level of respect for Sarah. Each night, the tapestry blew in the breeze from the open window as it hung over Sarah and Abraham’s four-poster, like a talisman.

God had told Sarah about the descendants, and the requisite pregnancy, almost two years ago now. Hagar had just moved in, and she observed the excited, agitated way Sarah began to conceptualize their existences. She was a founding mother now, after all, and everyone’s perspectives ought to widen a little, encompass a little more of the after beyond their lives.

“Abraham’s very uncomfortable about the whole thing,” Sarah had continued as she pointed out a wrinkle in the top left of the fabric, where Hagar’s arm didn’t quite reach. Hagar had lifted herself onto her knees and clamped the hot machine down on the rumpled corner. “But we haven’t got much else choice.”

Hagar had nodded, offered Sarah a corner of the sheet when she began to cry. While Sarah made a return to the craft store on 77th, Hagar and Abraham would try to conceive.

Sarah had had her eggs destroyed a month before she took over the carseat company. A senior adviser and trusted mentor had recommended the procedure right before Sarah had been published in Forbes’ 30 Under 30, nearly twenty-five years ago. With as fast as HappyRide was growing, no one could imagine the CEO applying for a Release-from-Duty waiver for something as trite as maternity, not even Sarah. The year before Sarah’s promotion, the president had gone into labor in the Oval Office. The post headlines had carried mixed tones of awe and repulsion about it. There was a New York Times piece that asked what it meant to live in a society where leaving work to have children was considered backwards and indolent. “Successful, empowered women simply don’t want to infirm themselves for nine months,” a designer from Los Angeles commented on a Good Morning America segment. “Something about pregnancy is deeply offensive to contemporary feminism,” a conservative from Sarah’s hometown had lamented on CNN. No matter the nay-sayers, it was commonly taken for granted that child-bearing was what the Waiting Women were for, if you were a wife who was desperate.

Sarah had decided she wasn’t.

But the message from God, confirmed by Abraham’s having the same dream as Sarah about a thousand children surrounding the couple in the building lobby, had flipped everything. Hagar listened weekly to Sarah complain about the doctors she was haggling.

“It’s ridiculous,” Sarah would begin from the sofa, where she watched marathons of the Kardashians and scoffed. “I tell these med grads God himself instructed me to become pregnant, and what do they recite? The shit they print on fertility.gov: Egg incineration is irreversible and permanent.”

“Ridiculous,” Hagar would say, before touching her stomach. The suggestion of her being the one to bear Abraham’s heir disturbed her, but it also anchored her in the precarious inclusion she had in Abraham and Sarah’s scope of concern. Sometimes, they didn’t leave any meat for her at dinner.

When Hagar arrived at nineteen to become one of the Waiting Women, she’d watched the sleekly dressed twenty-somethings, with their swank, affectionate mistresses, stand at the Lennox Avenue bus stop with their host families. The Waiting Women were always beautiful in that very effortful, self-conscious way Hagar suspected had something to do with careful instruction and expense. Still, Hagar had been jealous of that decisive air of belonging that they walked with, the way the older mistresses walked next to them with a protective hand on one shoulder. All the care that followed being one of the young women who sold her womb. When Hagar looked at the picture of her and her sisters, five sets of straight white teeth set in five dark faces, she considered herself fortunate to be picked to come so far, to a place so white and neat.

The first month, she’d paid her rent with the money she made from sweeping up hair in the braiding salon near the boarding house. It was the same salon many Waiting Women were dropped off at to have their hair fixed, usually after their pregnant bellies had deflated and their mistresses were feeling grateful.

One of Hagar’s first evenings there, before God had spoken to Abraham, she cleaned the house alone as snores escaped Sarah’s bedroom. She was picking up the pieces of debris the expensive vacuum never sucked up. As she pulled at bits here and there of the living room carpet, she thought of the things she’d memorized about the house so far.

Abraham was quiet and did not watch the evening news with them at 6 p.m. Instead, he went on walks around the neighborhood and planned out the next forty years or so of his retirement. When he came back, he’d tug Sarah into a hug and whisper something like “Morocco” or “scuba lessons.” Sarah would find Hagar’s face, usually bent over the kitchen sink that felt so deep it could swallow her, and roll her eyes, the corner of her mouth twitching.

Hagar’s room, which had once been a walk-in closet with a window, was five feet from Sarah’s dressing table. When she retired to it at ten o’ clock each night, she could hear the rustle of Sarah slipping into her pajamas, and the click of the moisturizer pump. Sarah had explained that Hagar should take the closet instead of the narrow bedroom on the opposite end of the hall because it’d be more like they were a family. “And I like to keep an eye on everyone,” Sarah had mentioned one day with a wink Hagar pretended to understand.

Hagar tried to recall the sounds she had fallen asleep to before: her parents putting pots away in the kitchen, the swell of locust music, her youngest sister’s breathing on the mattress nearby. It was hard to imagine who they might be with the money she’d been exchanged for. There were so many things it could’ve solved: Duaa’s medicine, the down payment on the newer apartments in town, Lillith’s tuition. Hagar couldn’t bear to respond to the last letter they’d sent and ask them. Her mother had written I hope you’re doing your part to keep the house clean. They thought the Waiting Women program was a kind of adoption. That they were trading Hagar’s womb for her to be protected by faraway people in a land she’d afterwards get the best of: an important job, a house with carpet, her own American children. They didn’t realize that, while Hagar waited for her fertility to be remembered, she had to earn her keep. Beyond her womb, they’d purchased her hands and muscles.

Though there was a kind of love involved: if Hagar could get pregnant, if she could deliver on God’s promise, Sarah would look at her like she was a miracle. She’d touch Hagar’s body like it was something ethereal. Those were the moments she tried to imagine when Sarah’s allusions to “helping them out” threatened to choke her.

***

Hours after Hagar had finished ironing and rehanging the tapestry, she sat in her bedroom with the door closed. She’d left Sarah and Abraham at the table alone after serving dinner. She’d felt nauseous since Sarah’s visit to her that morning, and the garlicy smell of the stew made her want to vomit. Every time she glanced at the withered but solid bulk of Abraham and imagined herself beneath him, she felt her stomach twist.

A few evenings ago, Hagar had entered the bedroom while Abraham and Sarah finished dinner downstairs. She’d wanted an ibuprofen, and the bottle was missing from the bathroom cabinet. She scanned the room first--the rumpled bed she hadn’t made that morning because Sarah had left it covered in used Kleenex, the cluttered dressing table, the book shelf. She crossed the room and peered over Sarah’s nightstand. Then, ignoring the guilty stiffness of her arm, she grasped the nightstand drawer knob and tugged.

The small white bottle rolled across a calendar covered in hectic red pen marks. Hagar lifted the calendar delicately, and did not stop herself when she read OVULATION printed across the top.

In between the red hieroglyphs and doctors’ names that covered most of the days in February, a tiny black H enclosed in a circle stamped the week starting with the 14th. A trail of oblong eggs filled the space just beneath the symbol. The 14th had been two days ago. “Ideal” Sarah had scrawled. “Talk to Abraham.”

It was one thing to be Sarah’s surrogate, another for the woman to know the intimate details of Hagar’s fertility cycle. It dawned on Hagar that Sarah was counting on her to conceive that very week. She’d been planning it for who knew how long.

Now, as she waited for Sarah to leave her and Abraham alone, Hagar tried to make her face look triumphant in the little mirror that hung over her chest of drawers. She lowered her eyelids and set her mouth. Perhaps Abraham would look at her in that same way he looked at Sarah when she salsaed during the jeopardy theme song. Perhaps he’d be excited and sorry.

Sarah stopped by for a kind of pep talk on her way out of the door for the craft store. She had just finished telling Hagar about Ruth Jensen, who had had a few of her Waiting Woman Joanna’s eggs artificially inseminated and then inserted back inside of her.

“The amount she paid—wow. That’s what happens when it’s all underground. I have to say I’m glad they outlawed most of those procedures,” Sarah said. “Those instruments are incredibly invasive. And so artificial,” she continued as she spritzed a curtain of her daily perfume at Hagar. Then she made a face, as if she regretted it, and returned to stuffing knitting yarn in the plastic shopping bag. “How much time should I give you all . . . no, don’t answer that. Ha ha.” Then she paused again. “I don’t know why I’m so nervous. This is your job. Women all over the country are doing what they need to do to—”

“Car’s ready, Sarah,” Abraham called from the hall.

“Well, goodbye. Thank you. Loosen up.”

Hagar tried to smile, but Abraham only looked slightly above her as she undressed. The quiet was unsettling. Hagar found herself cold.

He walked over to the bed, reclined, and waited.

And then she was closer than she’d been to anyone in a long time. It did not feel nice, but she bit Abraham’s lip—an impulsive, frantic gesture that she guessed was designed to make him open his eyes.

When it was over, Abraham asked her to take a look at the washing machine. Was it leaking, or was he just imagining the wet on the soles of his feet when he exited the bathroom?

***

A few months into the pregnancy, Abraham began to assist Hagar with her chores. One night after his walk, he swept the kitchen floor while Hagar put away the sliced vegetables.

Abraham had asked her to call the baby Ishmael, if and whenever she talked to the fetus she never forgot. It was hard for him to hide his excitement around Hagar, around the ever- growing thing in her belly. Constantly, he asked Hagar how she was feeling.

As a result, Sarah had stopped smiling at Hagar and cursed when she was late to bed.

Contrary to what Hagar had hoped, Ishmael did not make Sarah love her better. Instead, Hagar felt essential and despised. In the evenings, the proximity between the two women was painful, but the second bedroom was slowly being converted into a nursery.

Hagar had listened to Sarah and Abraham whisper about her one night in the dark cove of their bedroom as she exited the hall bathroom after her shower. “She wouldn’t understand how lonely she makes me feel,” Sarah was saying, “And did you see the look on her face when the Pearsons’ asked to touch her belly? So much . . . satisfaction, Abe. Perhaps Ruth knew what she was doing after all. You don’t know the ego on these girls until they’ve lied with your husband . . .”

Hagar entered the room then, went quickly to her closet, and shut the door loudly.

***

Ishmael was born much darker than Sarah had hoped. She allowed Hagar to nurse him, and grimaced when he came inside from the sun, on a July afternoon four years later, holding a monarch butterfly on his deeply brown forefinger.

“He looks less like his father each day,” she commented as she took Ishmael’s hand to eat lunch.

Hagar slept on the floor of Ishmael’s bedroom, and combed his hair in the morning. She’d heard snippets of conversation, that God was going to do something else, that Abraham’s heir could not be half black. Hagar found it nearly impossible to fathom Sarah’s apprehension about Ishmael. He helped Abraham carry wood, made them Fourth of July cards, and did not whine during jeopardy.

The fact that Ishmael was an heir was both thrilling and gut-wrenching. She had a complicated relationship to the reality that her body had made the heir. On the one hand it was a heartening thing to come this far west and start a lineage that would be forever, on the other she felt achingly inconsequential. Ishmael had Abraham’s surname, and the emergency contact on his school forms was always Sarah. Hagar felt more essentially connected to Ishmael than she ever had to anyone else, but still his future was beyond and estranged from her.

Two years later, Sarah gave birth to Isaac. The pregnancy was a miracle; the baby shower was held at the Plaza, with a harpist and waiters. After the legitimate heir’s third birthday, Hagar was officially dismissed. The three of them stood on the sidewalk in front of the apartment building.

“I don’t want Isaac to grow up confused. And Ishmael is quite rough with him—he doesn’t realize that his brother is very important,” Sarah was saying.

Abraham shook the ice in his Coke and took a long gulp.

“Thank you for waiting. But, really, we’d like to move on now,” Sarah continued, “Do things the proper way.”

Hagar left that evening, with Ishmael’s warm hand in her fingers.

***

On their third night in Central Park, Hagar and Ishmael slept on separate ends of the bank on the Pond and found each other in the morning. They spent the day with their hands entwined when Hagar made the rounds between the community Depositories for leftover barbeque stuffs: half-deflated bags of Lays, wrinkled hot dogs, a sloppy strawberry shortcake. They liked to let go of each other at night, spread out and let the grass absorb their sweat.

That first week, before they looked for shelter in one of the immigrant communities downtown, Hagar liked to watch her son make forts out of dirt, and squeeze his eyes tight when the wind swept it up in swirls around his face.

When Hagar slept, God showed her Ishmael’s children, their princely faces with her nose. She slept easily: Hagar and Ishmael belonged to each other, and it did not hurt.

Imani is a member of the class of 2021 and is majoring in English and African-American Studies. Recent writing inspirations have been George Saunders’ Tenth of December, Narfissa Thompson-Spires’ Heads of the Colored People, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Friday Black. Outside of books, she also enjoys consuming unhealthy amounts of Youtube and TikTok. Imani writes for The Columbia Witness, Columbia’s journal of Christian perspectives. 

The Absence of the Bees by Owen Monroe

Usually cursing doesn’t bother me, but the man seated next to me, having erupted in a fit of teeth-baring aggression, looks almost exactly like my grandfather. I glance sideways at him after he spit three ugly words down at his tray table. He has papery white skin with red blotches that match the color of the Canadian passport he is clutching and show through his beard like dry patches of earth in withering grass. The thin white hairs are strong at his chin but fewer and far between as they struggle to reach his ears. Although his words did not match my conceptions of Canadian politeness, his accent was similar to the country Midwestern one my grandfather affects to match the people of the Wisconsin town where he used to spend his summers. The stewardess had just confirmed what the co-pilot had broadcast to his cabin: we would not be landing in Amsterdam on time and my neighbor had missed his connecting flight to Vancouver. I already knew I had missed mine to Boston.

I had spent the past week in Berlin, visiting my girlfriend after time apart, and I had never travelled alone before. Now I am circling through Amsterdam’s air space, and smiling at the baby across the aisle from me. I make eye contact and engage my entire face in a wide smile. The wriggling baby looks back from its mother’s shoulder and seems to cease its nervous fidgeting and calm down some. I had heard that a baby’s favorite sound to make was “pa!” because the sound of the consonant p exploded from pursed lips and out into the world unlike any other, allowing the baby to revel in its own power and ability to disturb and shape its environment. That is why I always smile at babies whenever I could catch their eyes, to show him or her that they had an effect on me, as I was smiling for the baby and the baby alone. The baby instinctively knows this, of course, and is reaffirmed as being at the center of the universe. It calms down, and sometimes he or she even smiles back.

As the stewardess readies the cabin for landing, I finish a magazine article I had been reading. It was about how the author’s brother had essentially disappeared, to the horror of their family, who later learned that he had been arrested for failing to pay child support. The author explains that the prisoner’s right to a single phone call is a myth, and says her mother only received calls from a machine. An automated computer voice from the correctional center, asking for money to be placed in a prepaid account to contact the son. She thought it was a scam, a deception, and never paid, never called back, just let the monotone messages fill her voicemail. The author reflects that her brother was made missing, yet that those like him had always been missing, inexplicably ignored, irretrievably lost. I place the magazine in my bag, and the plane descends.

We finally land after circling the Amsterdam airport to avoid “inclement weather,” and my neighbor quickly stands up and pushes his way toward the front of the line. I calmly join the line of passengers, gathering their things from overhead and slowly filing out of the plane. The flight attendant had reassured us that we could board the next flight to our destination and it would be free of charge. As we spill out into the airport, I seem to be the only one alone. Families, couples, groups of friends grumble about how their flights had been missed, and some rush off to their next gate. I stand watching them, and anxiously come to the realization that I did not know what to do next. As people depart I notice that the airport is named Schiphol and that it is unremarkable. It’s cavernous, sleek, and modern, full of signs and symbols pointing crowds where to go. People throng ahead, but just outside the arrival gate the area is calm, empty. I look for some one to ask about how I could get a ticket for the next plane to Boston as the flight crew enters the airport. A stewardess anticipates my question and directs me to a kiosk of computer screens, telling me it would be easier to type my problem into the machine instead of talking to some one at an information desk. I doubt this, but line up for the kiosk. Once the other exasperated passengers had gotten a new ticket, I type in my name and destination. The screen tells me the next flight isn’t until tomorrow morning at 9 and that now it is only 2 in the afternoon. I have no choice. The computer prints me a boarding pass and then asks me if I would like to stay at a nearby hotel for a night, or if I would like 40 euros instead. I imagine spending all night sleeping in a hard metal chair in a corner of the airport, or stumbling through the streets of Amsterdam, begging locals who only spoke Dutch to point me in the direction of a cheap inn. I pick the free hotel stay. The machine dispenses three flimsy pieces of paper: one for a bus ride, one for a free meal, and one for a one-night stay at the Hotel Van der Valk A4 Schiphol.

I never knew or even thought to research what “Schiphol” meant, if it was the name of a Dutch region or a famous Dutch person, or if it was a focus-grouped series of sounds meant to subconsciously implant ideas of comfortable and easy air travel into the minds of European tourists. Van der Valk A4 meant even less. I walk through the airport, past gates, vending machines, and cafes, looking for the first exit that might lead to a bus to the hotel. I briefly consider going into Amsterdam, and seeing the sights, visiting the van Gogh museum. If I were to do so, I would have had no idea how to get back to my hotel. Was there a subway or a bus or a cab that could take me from the center of Amsterdam to the Van der Valk A4 Schiphol? I don’t think so. I imagine the hotel as an isolated colony of the airport itself, that can only be reached by the bus that the lifeless computer kiosk just determined I must ride, and it seemed, also prohibited me from deviating from that instruction.

I walk under signs buzzing and flashing out arrivals and departures, times and destinations, finally reaching a door, and leaving the airport. I join a massive crowd of people, all arrayed into several lines, filling in and spilling around the glass shelter of a bus stop. Europe is in the midst of an early summer heat wave and the sun beats down hard on the group, who like me, were the sorry result of missed connections and unpredicted weather patterns. Each line of irritable, sweating people is bound for a specific bus that would take them to a specific hotel in the surrounding area. I found a schedule on the glass shell that provided no shade and no respite from the heat, and discover the bus leaving for the Van der Valk A4 was leaving in 5 minutes. I wait among the others, listening to them gripe, call into their bosses, and comfort each other by some saying hey at least the hotel is free! Eventually, a bus pulls up to the airport, and its side is emblazoned with the garish logo image of a black toucan, its beak rigid, bulbous, and sickly yellow beneath a single beady red dot for an eye. A mass of people exit the bus, and one by one people in my line start to recognize that we might not all fit, and begin jockeying for position. I push up with the rest, moved by the flow and singular mentality of the crowd: this trip is the one that we will not miss. An older woman graciously allows me to step in front of her and board the bus. I move silently to the back, making myself as small possible, not taking a seat, but standing still and leaning forward against a luggage rack.

Bodies fill the bus, window to window, and I peer over black suitcases and watch as the landscape unfolds and then rushes past me. The land is unbelievably flat, a green lawn baked in the sun and nothing else. My sight is forced straight to the horizon with no discernible objects or landmarks in the way. The rigid blades of grass made an ocean without waves or shore. The cloudless blue sky was as oppressively blank as the land, the two meeting at a firm crease. The land was so low, vast, and empty as to seem infinite, and the line to the horizon so sharp that the landscape appeared like an unfinished painting that my eyes and brain strained to fully bring into comprehension. As my body began to reject these surroundings and the bus’s rapid movement through it, I turned my head from the bright, near-terrifying expanse.

Looking around me, people from all over filled the bus. An Asian woman and a man wearing an baseball hat entertain their child with French songs, rocking her stroller ever so slightly so as not to disturb those sitting next to the aisle. A wiry man next to me talks in English to an old woman wearing a tie-dye dress of soft pastel rainbow colors stained into thin white fabric. He tells her that he was travelling through Europe alone and was heading back to his home in Georgia before their stranding. When the woman in the rainbow dress tells him that she is a missionary, I notice the large wooden crucifix hanging from her neck. She speaks in an English accent, and tells him softly about how she had travelled to the continent to help support a congregation at a brand new Church in Germany. The soft but strained quality of her voice lets on that she is quite old, and as I stare out the window, I no longer listen to their conversation and only hear its noise, American, English, masculine, feminine, firm, soft. I remember my last bus ride from days before, during a day trip from Berlin to Prague. On our way back, the bus had driven right through Dresden at night, and for the first time I found myself in a city that my country had completely destroyed. I saw the large domed Cathedral as we passed a line of buildings, the architecture following the dark curve of the river. I had tried to imagine Dresden as others had: jewel box, fire storm, lunar surface.

A child somewhere in the thicket of people by the driver shouts and I remember where I am. The bus pulls up in front of a hotel made of white painted concrete, and a bright blue facade hung over the patio has the words “Van der Valk A4 Schiphol” printed across it. We all step out, and I see another bus schedule, emblazoned with the garish, staring toucan, on the side of the building. I have to take the 6 AM bus the next morning if I was going to make it to the airport on time. I notice a bench and another glass shell for a bus station, and again consider going into Amsterdam, but I realize it could take hours to get there and I wouldn’t know which bus to take there and back. Taking a bus and leaving this hotel seems to me like leaving an island for a journey across the ocean in a life raft. The crowd of people again push itself into the hotel, and swarm the lobby. The lobby is painted green with a low ceiling, floral patterned upholstered chairs are arranged in one corner, and a dim brass chandelier hangs from the center of the ceiling. A frustrated couple speaks Chinese angrily to a man at the front desk, who does not understand them, but gives them a room key and a voucher for a free dinner at the hotel’s restaurant. Families of various size and origin complain in Spanish, German, tongues I couldn’t place. What seems like an entire Sikh wedding had evidently had their travel disrupted, and families of turbaned men argue loudly with women wearing massive earrings that shudder as they speak.

Approaching the desk, I feel like I had been shipped there by some unknown entity, like I was a parcel arriving in the mail. My journey tracked, disrupted, and rerouted all through conversation and information transfers that I was for some reason, not privy to. I realize I had no clear idea of why I am here, in this particular lobby, or how exactly I had gotten there. The workers at the desk tell me I am staying in room number 1207, and they also give me a voucher for a free dinner. I am in the Van der Valk Schiphol A4, and there is nowhere else I need to go, and nowhere else I could go, as the hotel is nowhere, a building off of the highway coming from nowhere and leading nowhere, cutting through nothingness. The entire hotel should not have existed, and in a better world it did not. It was the product of clerical error, unforeseen mistakes in weather predictions, poor airport design, faulty aviation engineering, flawed logistics, and miscommunication. The architecture and bureaucracy of the place was accident, spreadsheet typos, and irreversible entropy as much as it was concrete, carpet, and room check-ins. Not a single person there chose or wanted to be at the hotel. Yesterday, none of the hotel clientele planned or could have predicted that they would be there the following day. Like jail guards, the hotel workers, hidden behind doors and watching behind desks, simply served and surveilled a rotation of the accidentally marooned. We could never truly know each other.

Since neither I nor any one else at the hotel could experience the Netherlands, only its very edge, the hotel was decorated with things that confirm a tourist’s kitschiest visions of the country. By the entrance to an indoor swimming pool, a map of the low countries demarcated with childish drawings of windmills, tulips, and landmarks, instead of legends or roads, hangs on a wall. By the elevator to my room the entire wall is plastered with an enlarged reproduction of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, except the militiaman in red and the girl to his left wear electronic headphones. I could not conceive what music they were listening to and if it fortified them on their watch. Another massive wall-sticker of The Anatomy Lesson featured one of Rembrandt’s students jotting notes on a laptop computer, and another taking a picture of the corpse’s flayed arm with a mobile phone. The corridor leading to my floor was decorated with repeating blue and white designs featuring floral lace and country towns, tulips, windmills, and children kissing and ice skating. I had been shrunk and placed in a porcelain jar from Delft, trapped inside so I could never appreciate its beauty or value. I am being digested by a clumsily-edited Frankenstein of the Dutch Golden Age. In my room, I see a van Gogh self-portrait, and a Heineken bottle cap on the lobe of his still-attached ear winks at me.

In room 1207, complete with white carpeting, orange furniture, and an en suite bathroom, I go to the doors at the end, open them, and step onto the balcony. I look out and see the rest of the hotel rooms, with their small unimpressive balconies, curving around an empty concrete parking lot. I suppose it was an area where trucks delivering food or linen to the hotel could park. I go back into the room, and let light come in from the coffin-shaped balcony and lie on the bed in silence. I begin to drift towards sleep, and the Chicago of one winter, years ago, fills my mind. My parents and I had visited my grandfather family there, but our flight back to the east coast had been cancelled due to extreme weather conditions. A blizzard had consumed city and temperatures had dropped to an astounding negative 45 degrees, all flights were grounded for days. My parents and I stayed at a hotel, its restaurant and bar were not properly heated and the extreme cold seemed to flow into the space through its large glass windows. The second day we walked outside to a nearby mall to stave off maddening boredom, and any piece of skin that was left exposed immediately felt like it was burning when it touched the air. A homeless person held a sign in front of the mall, and was so wrapped in coats and scarves I could not see their face. When I passed the person again, I realized I never saw them move and questioned whether they were alive, or if they were just petrified and frozen on the spot. As we waited to fly out, we were outside of time. The present and future, and their steady progress and the events they held, had become a foreign land.

When the cold subsided enough for planes to leave, my family took a cab to the airport. An older Greek man drove us slowly, but the car still fish-tailed on the frozen road. Feeling nauseous as the car whipped my body, I looked out at the city skyline and the tall buildings seemed like shard of ice, sticking up from the ground and thrown out toward the white windswept lake, frozen smooth as a polished dinner plate.

Waking fully, I think of the hotel’s pool that I had passed earlier, and decide that although I could not go to Amsterdam, I might as well do something at the hotel. Quickly, the desire to swim, to submerge myself in water and no longer feel the weight of my body, commands me. I have no bathing suit, but maybe they sell them at the front desk or at some small shop in the hotel. I take the elevator down, and see next to it a sign displaying a blueprint for an expansion of the hotel coming in the following year, as if the error and relocation is expected to increase exponentially. The garish toucan looks out over the digital rendering of the building with an intricate gridded floor plan, additional stories, and a new bar lounge. Seeing this blueprint, and the floorplan with its gridded, empty cells representing the bird’s eye view of rooms and tables, I am reminded of Berlin’s abandoned airport. My girlfriend, her roommate, and I strolled through an abandoned airport that the city had not torn down, but allowed its runways to be turned into a public park for walking, bike riding, and concerts. As the sun set, we walked under the crumbling, but still imposing, air traffic control center that stood above the ground like a grand decrepit dome. The terminal building below arched around the pavements, reflecting the sun off its numerous small rusted windows. We soon approached a large fence, and when I looked through its holes, I saw it contained a large area filled with hundreds of little one-room buildings, like bright white office cubicles, that abutted the abandoned airport. Behind the fence, a group of children chased each other, running and riding bikes around a block of the white squares, laughing and screaming. They were not Germans. I was told this stretch of runway had been transformed into a refugee housing center. I saw a sign, and noticed the words Unterkünfte in bold. I asked what that meant, and why the refugees were all fenced off from the park. My companions didn’t know, and they said the fence was for privacy. As I walked away, I saw an older man perched at the edge of one of the identical white boxes as if enthroned, holding a gleaming, golden hookah pipe. He watched the children, his eyes commanding the airstrip, as the children ran, encircling him again and again.

On the other side of that fence, in the jolting cab in Chicago, in this hotel, anxiety writhed in my mind and wormed through my body. My stomach is hollow, the back of my neck itches and aches. Looking away from the blueprint, I imagine that when I open the door to the indoor pool, I will find myself in the room, sitting by the water. He, my exact double, will walk up to me and demand I tell him what I was doing there, yell that I was never supposed to be here, and violently insist I leave to where I had come from. I walk towards that door, but by the entrance I find, as if in a miracle or a mirage, a vending machine full of small plastic bundles, zipped up to hold bathing suits inside. I followed the machine’s instructions and press the buttons on its screen. I buy a pair of trunks in my size, and the machine violently clangs and then gently whirred. Behind glass its coiled wire slowly, gradually, spins and retracts until my one black bundle drops down with a painful grace I can barely endure.

Holding this precious bundle, I search for a place to change and open a door to a locker room. Instead I enter the waiting-room of a sauna and see a woman in a white two-piece bathing suit, reclining on a chair under a tanning light. She makes no movement at all, her eyes stare blankly up and no gesture or intake of breath show that she is aware of my presence. The light above her buzzes and bathes her body in a sickly hot orange light. Finding a bathroom, I clothe myself in the fruit of that whirring metal tree’s corkscrew branches. The bathing suit was shorter than any trunks I had worn before, I felt nauseous seeing my pale thighs. Exiting the bathroom, I finally open the door to the pool. The rectangle full of water is in a space dominated by glass. The wall behind me is the concrete of the hotel, and the other three walls of the space and the ceiling are panes of glass erected in a grid, so the swimmers could look up at the blank sky or out at the infinite grass fields past the highway. Two British men mutter to each other at one side of the pool. I stand across from them and watch the water lap at the edge of the pool’s blue tiles by my feet. With a step, I let myself fall in, a lifeless plunge.

As I crash through the water, I close my eyes and slide under, determined to stay there as long as I can. As I linger beneath the surface, I let my body go limp, the rippling of the water and the voices of the men fade away. The water is cool until my body can sense it no more. The last thing I feel is my connections to every one in the hotel and every one I had ever known snap and fall loose like taught thread that’s been cut. The past week in Berlin fell loose in the water too, rippling and sinking, slowly dissolving. That city of gaping wounds, with its ugly gate topped with the awful black chariot and iron cross, passes into the distance and leaves my thoughts. The realization comes creeping that I had never felt more alone. I let the water push me up towards the surface and I float with my face down, my eyes still closed on blackness. I felt my nervous system, wires in unknowable paths and entanglements, drop through my skin, and land at the bottom of the pool, the fragile network of tubes making a gentle thud, while my skin unravels and floats away from me across the water, like a tattered shirt unbuttoned and tossed on the surface. This is where I have ended up and will always end up is my first thought after nothingness. No matter what one does or believes everyone will eventually end up here, at the Van der Valk A4 Schiphol, a helpless victim of entropy, inevitably awry, sent languid to this limbo. Even if I do leave and return home tomorrow, my itinerary will break down sometime later, and I will again be shipped out, unable to penetrate the minds and language of others and understand why. I was subsumed into the whirr of the ticket computer kiosk, the words Schiphol and Unterkunfte, the toucan’s dead eye, the raw rust of the air traffic control center, the endless grass field and rubble road. The hotel in its imperceptible and unstoppable forces had gradually driven me to numbness, slowly pushing me under the suffocating flat sheet of isolation. I, finally and justly, am erased.

I accepted it, until my lungs began to burn. I move my arms slowly as if I just now remember that I have them. I push myself towards the surface, and open my eyes as my head breaks through and into the air. I stand up, my feet find the floor, and chest-deep in the pool, look up at the curved cave of glass that encloses me. The sun no longer beats down and I see white clouds covering the sky. Suddenly, against this firmament and through the glass, a teeming flock of blue-black birds fly in a silent fury, a rush of darting unison. Without chirping or fluttering, their dozens of tiny beaks jut forward, their sharp wings firm at their sides, like jagged marks from a fountain pen across the sky, they streamed past without one deviating from the rest, as if the fleet was a single organism. Taking in the auspices, I stir and stare. The sparrows are arranged like notes carefully written by a scribe into a hymnal to be fervently sung after an ancient priest’s prayer, assembled like flowing data in a chart collected with unclear origin and indeterminate conclusion. The display of concerted movement and effortless coordination was over in an instant, the birds flying past the window lattice. I fell forward, and kicked myself across the side of the pool. I follow them, feeling my body stretch long and push hard, I heave and drag my arms through the water, and swim lap after lap across the pool, kicking and spraying water, gasping loudly for breath with every stroke. I swim until my arms ache, the pain a tonic beat.

Clutching the concrete rim, I pull myself out of the pool. The cool air breezes past my almost naked body, and I let the water drip down my back and fall down my legs. I revel in the sublime sting of chlorine in my eyes. At that moment, I decide I will strut in my too-small swimsuit with bare feet and a bare chest draped in an unused towel into the hotel restaurant, and yell, scream, demand my free meal in my American voice. I will deny my erasure for all the diners to see and hear, drip water, leave wet footprints, and finally make my own indelible mark on the hotel, refusing to allow it to force my silent complacence, my complicity in its nefarious systems, and fly in the face of resignation and helplessness. Maybe other diners will join, yell, demand from our captors a flight home now to Tamilnadu to Mozambique to Sarasota to Saskatoon, or we will unite and rise up and take control of the hotel for ourselves, never leave, and live out our days alone together in this lair with its own food, paintings, and highway exit, away from trouble, danger, the loved ones we inevitably resent. No, no, I decide. I would, must remain civil, it wouldn’t be right, and although I had craved it more than anything, looking out at the immeasurable, singular lawn of the land, I could not bear to feel all their eyes on me as I rail and remonstrate, and fling myself against the hotel, the entropy, the inconvenience, the collective and bequeathed loneliness, against this hotel that I now realize is not a glimpse into the maw of death, but instead the drawing back of the curtain on the scenery of life. No longer jumping at its shadows, I towel off and walk back to my room, leaving no wet trace.

I shower. I methodically put on my clothes and brush my teeth. I walk into the restaurant, humbly present my meal voucher and am given a table. A waiter gives me a plate of glazed chicken and a side of small potatoes. This waiter was the first employee of the restaurant I had really looked at, paid attention to. He is tall and handsome, he moved confidently in his white uniform, and looked exactly my age. He smiled and told me to enjoy. After he leaves, I take in my surroundings and realize I am inside a panoramic bouquet. The room is wrapped in one massive still-life of flowers. It is as if I had landed on the very stamen of a Ruysch painting. On the walls, the petals are voluptuous, curving satin shapes of impossible size, softly holding the tables and diners in an embrace of pinks and purples, violets, lilies, carnations, tulips. All these flowers are at the height of health, perfectly preserved in their sway. I notice no withering and see no bees within their many folds. In Berlin, my girlfriend and I had gone to an art museum, looking through galleries of paintings where Christ was hidden behind meat stalls, in the throng of a dancing wedding crowd, or in the canvas’s corner with mother and donkey leaving bustling fairgrounds for Egypt. I had compulsively taken photographs of every painting I saw. With every click of the aperture I became more and more worried, desperate that I would forget the paintings soon after viewing, that my eyes were not enough, that my memories and the fleeting sensation of first encounter were not to be trusted. She told me that an exhibit in the same museum that I never got to see had focused solely on bees in Dutch still-life painting, and that a friend had written an entire dissertation on these paintings and their iconography. Sitting inside a refracted chamber of these images, each wall lacking a bee, I could not recall her conclusions. Caught in time, the bees may have been a vanitas symbol or one of memento mori; the bee as a vector of pollination and the life-giving harvest, or the harbinger of fecund putrescence, a symptom of that abundance’s rot.

Finishing my meal, I glance across the table and catch color in the corner of my eye. There at the table next to me, also enjoying her meal, is the missionary woman I had overheard on the bus, still wearing her tie-dye dress and wooden crucifix. Looking over across the small gap in space, I imagine her name, where she was born. A small English town, Lancaster, 1955, her name is Flossie. She had a humble upbringing in a large family, her father was a fisherman. She had lost a sister to polio, and found the Church as a way to make a living and understand her feelings of loss. I imagine childhood memories of ice skating on a lake in a blank biting winter, dancing to the Beatles on a fuzzy TV her father saved for, falling in love with her brother’s school friend, but never marrying, finding constancy in her Church, in Christ. She was a flawed singer with an imperfect voice, but excelled in Bible study and even learned Greek to get closer to the text, but she still sings proudly to this day. But how could she believe? Has she ever had any doubt? She must have. What converted her, was it the cry of a child? The meaning in the patter of children playing hopscotch? A dream, a death vision, the searing truth of John 1:1? The explicatory footnotes of her marked-up and dog-eared Bible? The rambling catalogue of Deuteronomy or an ancient manuscript’s liber generationis? Or was it the shining and sprawling marginalia? The miracle of the machine that brought us here, our comfortable, commodious, and economic sky flight complete with infotainment system? Maybe it was one priest’s oratorical power, the culture of her upbringing, a sense of community. How long had she sought proof and does she still? What was the closest to it she had ever been, ever felt? Was it enough to keep going, to fly all the way to Germany to speak to strangers? Was her belief pathological? It couldn’t be illness, I thought, if it was liberating. Still, I knew she woke up every morning with the cross heavy, sharp, and tight at her chest, to another day of searching, and maybe finding, what? A solace, a meaningfulness. What would she say if I reached over and touched her shoulder, for I am that close, and asked her how and why we ended up here?

That night, in just a few hours, we would sleep in the same building, she and I, and then awake. Walking the same path through the delft jar corridors, boarding a plane, and flying across the blue sky and white clouds behind windows, we complete our crossing. We found each other here, maybe we will again. I want to catch her eye and smile at her softly. I look over at the woman in the tie-dye dress, and think it like seeing the world’s colors and shapes shimmering through the diaphanous film of a wasp’s wing.

Owen Monroe is a senior in Columbia College and will receive his degree in May, 2020. He is double majoring in art history and English. Owen is originally from Providence, Rhode Island, but is currently taking the coronavirus quarantine one day at a time with his parents in Southwest Colorado. He would like to thank his friends and family for all of their support and guidance during his four years of college. Check out another nonfiction piece of Owen’s published in the University of College London’s Student Magazine (pages 30-32) here. Instagram | Facebook

Burnt Focaccia Bread by Parth Chhabra

Illustration by Sophie Levy

When Raunak’s bakery starts to burn—when it catches fire bread by bread, pastry by pastry, muffin by muffin—no one is around to smell the smoke. It is 6:00 am on a cold Sunday morning and everyone, Raunak included, is asleep, fast asleep, knees pressed against their chests, dreaming of heat and warmth, and so no one is around when the bakery comes alight.

No one except Aunty Bilimoria. Famous Aunty Bilimoria. Famous Aunty Bilimoria and her famous nose. (It can smell anything off you: trouble, pre-marital sex, yesterday’s undercooked roast). Even though Aunty Bilimoria and her nose are four streets away, bundled up in a mass of scarves and cardigans at the bus stop, they know, almost instantly, that something is wrong.

When the burnt toast smell first reaches Aunty Bilimoria, she thinks she is having a stroke: she read about it in a WhatsApp. Heart racing, she smiles (the WhatsApp said to smile) and lifts both her hands above her head (also the WhatsApp) and finds, to her relief, that she can—not a stroke. A heart attack then? Too much butter on the pav last night? Maybe the WhatsApp said heart attack?

But before Aunty Bilimoria can test her heart, or figure out how she would even go about doing that, the smell changes; it develops a texture and becomes familiar and warm, like a focaccia sandwich at that new bakery. (The bakery is five years old and no longer “new,” unless you’re operating on Aunty Bilimoria time, which, like geographical time, is slow and tectonic.)

Aunty Bilimoria is, at first, hesitant to go check. The bus will be here at any moment and if she misses it she will have to wait at least 30 minutes for the next one, if not more: buses are unreliable at the hill station as it is, even more so on Sundays. At least 30 more minutes in the cold, away from the empty school, the warm teacher’s lounge, from her aching calves and swollen ankles stretching themselves over its small but hardworking heater. But there is something distinctly wrong with the smell now: it is charred, black, smoky. With an audible sigh, she abandons her outpost and turns, following her nose.

By the time Aunty Bilimoria is just over a street away from the bakery, she no longer needs her nose. Her eyes start to burn as heavy black smoke rises in the air in front of her. She turns the corner and sees it: Morning Sun bakery, burning like a star, a hot mix of flame and gas with a continuous series of reactions at its core—bread and fire, table and fire, thick brown envelope and fire, chair and fire.

In spite of herself, in spite of her eyes, Aunty Bilimoria cannot help but think how good the heat feels from this distance: with the bakery still about 100 meters away, the fire is rejuvenating as it thaws her icy skin, spreading it open and letting it breathe. A loud crash and flare of light snaps her out of her reverie and Aunty Bilimoria pulls out her (new, son-bought, expensive) phone. Fumbling, her pudgy, purple fingers slowly call for some help.

***

When Raunak gets the call, he is dreaming about a beach. At the beach, it is hot—not pleasant, but hot, hot and humid, with the sun clawing its way down his exposed torso. He steps into the water, which is unpleasant also: dirty and lukewarm, like an old bath. Sweat collects at the base of his neck.

Suddenly, a blast of cold air rushes from the sea in front of him—icy wind, that starts off as a relief and quickly becomes uncomfortable, the wet hair on his skin freezing into crystals. Below him, the water turns icy too, and his toes go numb—

6:15 am. Call received. Raunak scrambles on some shoes and runs—runs, runs, runs. He runs and runs, till his windpipe feels like the beach, full of burning sand.

Raunak has an affinity for the dramatic and so when he gets to the now doused fire, he immediately falls to his knees. It is not that his shaky legs can no longer hold him and have given way—it is just that a lifetime of melodrama (movies and otherwise) has taught him no other way to express shock.

What is authentic, though, is the silence: Raunak cannot think of a single thing to say. Somewhere behind, or around, or in front of him, an aunty is talking to him; she oscillates between comforting him and chastising him—for what? For not being more careful. He can hear her; he understands what she is saying and realizes, somewhere in the back of his brain, how ridiculous she is being, how he should probably be angry at her for insinuating that this is somehow his fault. But the anger stays there, at the back. It does not make its way to his tongue, it gives him no words to utter. Raunak cannot think of a single thing to say.

The aunty’s hands are on his shoulder—rough, uncaring, evil. He resists, wills with all his power to stay on the ground, but soon she has help. Other hands, also big, their owners in giant war suits, with hoses wrapped around their shoulders grab at him with her, and even though Raunak wants nothing more than to be on his knees on the ground, to commit his grief to the town’s historical record, he is dragged away.

***

Every day, for the past 23 years, the Colonel Lt Captain has left his home for a morning walk at 6:30 am sharp. Every single day—with only three exceptions.

The first time was the morning after his son’s wedding. It was a loud, yellow, happy night, and the Colonel Lt Captain had allowed himself four glasses of whiskey (and one shandy, but we don’t talk about that). Drunk, full on buttery parathas and oily chicken, knees hurting from bobbing up and down to the music, he had let himself sleep in the next morning. He left for his walk at seven.

The second exception was the morning after he accidentally took double his post-dinner medicine dosage. That night, he had knocked himself out cold, woken up at 11:00 am, and spent the day unable to do anything but sit quietly on the couch, his world unrecognizably tilted off its axis. The third was the morning after he got the email, the one everyone his age is always expecting, from his best friend’s wife. He didn’t sleep that night, and didn’t realize as 6:30 am came and went.

But that was two years ago now, and so by 6:29 am, the Colonel Lt Captain is at his gate, in his Reeboks, muffler, and favorite mustard sweater. He lifts the metal latch, cold against his dry palms, his digital watch beeps 6:30, and he is off.

The Captain Lt Colonel loves his little hill station. His hour-long walks take him up and down its small roads, past its regal old houses, past the ugly tourist ones, through its bald trees. He loves the hill station’s cold mornings: puffing at the top of a steep incline, he is still fascinated by the way his breath clots together in a cloud. He turns the corner, down past Izzy’s new café, to the right now, where he crosses the Church, and then the little stall where truck drivers going from big cities to other big cities have stopped for some chai and some mountain.

On Sundays, the Captain Lt Colonel likes to end his walks with a little treat: black coffee and a pastry, at the Morning Sun Bakery. The bakery is only a few streets away from his house—he finishes his walk, pops into his kitchen for a glass of water and is back out, already tasting the banofee on his tongue.

***

As Ali walks towards the billowing black smoke, it does not occur to him that it might be coming from the bakery. Earphones in, jamming to some sick tunes, he continues down his route to work in the direction of the black cloud, wondering about what might have happened, his mind skipping over the concern that should have begun to take shape the closer his walk to the bakery brought him to the smoke.

It is only when the charred storefront comes into sight that it hits Ali—fuck. Raunak bhaiya is going to kill him.

Ali had shut the shop last night, which means it had been his job to make sure the gas and oven were off. Fuck, fuck, fuck. The cold morning is suddenly a lot hotter and Ali’s back, which hasn’t hurt in years, begins to prickle under his heavy jacket.

Still a few meters from the store, most of Ali’s view is blocked by small crowd that has gathered outside: firefighters, police, some loitering aunties and uncles out to shop, or on their morning walks. But Raunak bhaiya is nowhere to be found—does he even know? He must know. Has someone called him? Ali calls—nothing. Where is he? Where is he? Where is he?

It occurs to Ali that he could walk up to the bakery and ask any of the firefighters or members of the police. But he does not approach them, happy to stay behind their busy backs, unseen. He is filled with the irrational fear that they will arrest him, accuse him of intentionally leaving on the gas, or oven, or whatever it was—what was it? He tries to remember, grasping desperately for a mental image of his hand on the stove knob, or on the oven button. It does not come. Instead, he sees a knob handle turned left, he sees the oven glowing orange, he sees gas hissing out of both, still images that he cannot comfortably categorize as either memory or imagination.

Where is Raunak bhaiya? Ali decides that he will only talk to Raunak bhaiya—tell him it was all a mistake, mother swear just a mistake, of course it was, and then Raunak bhaiya (after he is done killing him) could talk to the police for him, vouch for him. But where was he?

From the other side of the street, Ali sees a tall, commanding man approach the bakery—he stops at a distance too. As soon as Ali spots the Captain Lt Colonel’s face, he forgets all about Raunak bhiaya, about the firemen in front of him, about the fiery remains of his place of work. All he can think of is his heart—he can feel it working, pumping blood to organs that don’t exist anymore. With nowhere to go, the blood collects in his stomach, mixes with acid, and his gut swells. But his heart has not been informed of this recent incident of organ disappearance, so the blood keeps coming, like gas from a cylinder, like electricity from a generator, frayed copper wires, spark, spark, screech. Ali’s body is on fire.

***

Chai, a suspiciously old box of fruit cake, and a new packet of digestives: Raunak is now in Aunty Bilimoria’s kitchen and she is talking and talking, trying whatever she can to help his singed insides, to clear the smoke that is accumulating in the cold air. She tells him about a WhatsApp forward she got this morning.

“These cold-drink companies are all thieves, man. Bloody fools think we will buy any shit they give us. I always knew they were bad for you I never let Royston drink all this. See, now, who was right. This World Health Office is also saying now, see”—she pushes her phone across the table to him—“not to buy all this Diet-Coke and all. Gives you cancer you know.”

He’s seen that one before and so he only smiles and nods.

Aunty Bilimoria, for her part, cannot figure out what to do with the boy—he will not speak, he will not eat. He is still in his pajamas: a thin grey t-shirt from the fancy foreign university that girl— what was her name?—used to attend and soft comfortable pants. Sitting in her heatless apartment he is shivering, his body shaking gently, his head nodding, saying nothing.

“Are you cold, beta?” Aunty asks.

“No, no, I’m fine.” His first words.

“You’re shivering—come to the sofa, its next to the window.” He is almost limp in her arms as she lifts him from the table to her worn green sofa, which, as promised, is under the east facing window. There are some flowers on the windowsill, and as a snapshot, it is bright and happy, oblivious to the circumstances.

It is no warmer, though. The sun pours itself in through the thick glass but does nothing to sooth the goosebumps in the air—the sunlight is soft and meaningless, spreading itself thin over brick and bone.

***

The Captain Lt Colonel has been the bakery’s first customer every Sunday morning since it opened: at 7:30 am, right as Ali turns the sign from closed to open, the Captain Lt Colonel is there, dabbing at a thin line of sweat on his upper lips with a handkerchief, ready to come in.

Sometimes, no one comes in for another half an hour, and so the two of them are forced to talk awkwardly: The Captain Lt Colonel asks about Ali—all well, nothing new, the same the same— and Ali asks about the Captain Lt Colonel—all well, nothing new, Aakash is visting these days. Still, there is some love: The Captain Lt Colonel likes Ali because he has a firm handshake and makes eye contact when he talks; Ali likes the Captain Lt Colonel because he tips well.

Other times, they are comfortably quiet—Ali busies himself around the bakery and the Captain Lt Colonel pulls out a small notebook and fountain pen from his shirt front pocket. Sipping coffee, he writes: grocery lists, to-do lists, mini accounts sheets, the occasional reminder to self.

For as long as Ali has worked at the bakery—which is basically since the beginning—the two of them have done this dance every Sunday morning. Except one.

The Monday morning after the missed Sunday, also a cold, grey day like this one, the Captain Lt Colonel came into the bakery with the weight of the world tugging under his red eyes. His face— which Ali had never seen anything but immaculately smooth, so much so that he assumed that maybe the Captain Lt Colonel couldn’t grow a beard—was sprouting the beginnings of a little white garden, blades of grass sticking out of old, unfertile land.

“Uncle, are you ok? I didn’t see you yesterday.” The Captain Lt Colonel didn’t reply. “Uncle, should I bring you the usual? Sit down na, the seat by the window is free.” This time the Captain Lt Colonel nodded—but didn’t move. For a while, he just stood there by the counter, his head bent—from behind, it might have looked like he was just taking a long time to choose a pastry. Finally, monumentally, the six foot four man stirred, carrying himself to his table, his table that didn’t feel like his. His table was a Sunday table and today was Monday: so even though the actual material reality—like the wood, and the slightly off balance legs, and the napkin holder—was the same, this wasn’t his table. There was too much happening outside the window and there were more people in the bakery than he was used to.

When Ali made his way over with coffee and a small slice of the banofee cake, he found the Captain Lt Colonel on his phone, reading his email—no eye contact, no handshake. As soon as Ali put the tray down, though, the army man’s manners kicked in. He shut his phone suddenly, as if the clink of the tray had woken him from a trance, and looked up at Ali. “Sit, beta,” he said, his booming army voice replaced by that of another man.

“Uncle I...” Ali made the best, “I’m busy” face he could.

“Sit, please,” he said again in his new voice and Ali did.

Then, the Captain Lt Colonel reached under his sweater and pulled out a thick, bulging brown envelope and placed it on the tray in front of him. “Today, I...” A beat, that Ali lets sit in the air. “Yesterday, I...I lost a friend. His wife emailed me, that who’s...” he gestures to his phone. “It doesn’t matter. I need you to keep this envelope. Keep it somewhere here. Give to me when I ask for it.”

“What’s in it, uncle?”

“That’s private.”

“Uncle, come on, you know I can’t just keep this. What if it’s black money, or some illegal documents, or—”

“It has...it has our letters. And some photos. Do not read them, do not look at them, do not open the envelope at all. I cannot have it home. One day, when I am ready, I will ask it back from you.”

At 9:00 am on the cold morning in which the Morning Sun Bakery realized the full potential of its name, Ali finds himself on the Captain Lt Colonel’s doorstep. He does not say anything; neither does the Captain Lt Colonel. There is nothing but silence and prolonged eye contact, silence and eye contact in which apologies are asked for and given. A hand on the shoulder.

***

Aunty Bilimoria looks up at the clock—10:00 am. The boy has been crying for hours now, refusing to stop, leaking snot and tears onto her upholstery. He is shaking uncontrollably, even through the thick, rough blankets she has put over him, and she wonders if she should call someone. Who?

She stands up and goes to the kitchen one more time, bringing him more paper towels, more biscuits for him to ignore. For a minute, she allows herself to feel resentful: she thinks of the empty teacher’s lounge, of the soft, hot, white heater, of her magazines, of her Sunday.

Suddenly, guilt. Skipping church on the occasional Sunday is something Aunty Bilimoria has done for years now, but she still feels guilty about it. No one said anything, of course, and she attended enough times through the week for everyone to know she wasn’t lacking in her faith—it’s just...Sundays are Sundays, brief respites from the bratty, entitled, snotty (her mind lingers by her upholstery) third graders who dominate her week, and she feels like the higher ups wouldn’t mind her claiming a few for herself.

Back to the boy: what is to be done?

***

On a hot night last summer, sweat under their knees and puddling in their armpits, Ali and Raunak bhaiya sat with cold beers on Raunak bhaiya’s terrace, talking, as Raunak bhaiya liked to do, about sad things: death, corruption, the state of Test cricket.

The night had started off fun: they had watched the cricket match, laughing, betting (why Ali continued to bet on Delhi he did not know and could not explain), shouting at the TV. With four beers still left in the fridge and some weed in Ali’s pocket, they had decided to move to the terrace.

But as they gazed down at lit up slope of their hill station, Rauanak bhaiya had done his thing and Ali found himself listening to yet another sad monologue about how we’re all going to die alone; about how nothing will ever change as long as the rich have the ministers in their pocket; about how India needs to sort its middle order before the World Cup. Ali didn’t like talking about these things: not because he disagreed, but because he knew there was nothing that could be done about any of them. Ali liked his weed with silence.

But the night, Raunak bhaiya moved onto something new: he was talking about moving back to Bombay, restarting everything he had left. “I’ll give you the bakery, Ali, it’ll be yours, you take it. You’ll be comfortable, it’s a nice bakery, the people here will buy there for years.”

At the time, Ali only felt sad. He did not like the idea of Raunak bhaiya leaving; he could not bear to think of the prospect of his nights returning to how they had been five years ago: bored and high, in front shitty weekday reruns. But the next morning, Ali had been—still sad, though, still sad—also a little excited. He liked the idea of the bakery being his. His. His to design, his to run, his money to make. He could finally take out that shitty painting. Finally change their milk supplier, because Raunak bhaiya did not believe him that the current one was diluting their milk by like 10%. Finally experiment with the cakes.

At 11:00 am on the morning the bakery said its fiery goodbye, Ali finds himself remembering this night as he sits in Captain Lt Colonel’s living room—he had been kindly invited in for a place to eat and call Raunak bhaiya. Ali’s phone rings: Rajesh chacha, his neighbor.

“Beta, where are you? Some mad lady, some Aunty Bilimoria, is calling everyone looking for you.”

***

Ali picks up Raunak at Aunty Bilimoria’s gate. She lives in one of a line of small two floor apartments, bunched together a street away from the tourist market. Aunty Bilimoria does not come down—her watermelon knees cannot handle more stairs today. Raunak emerges from the stairwell, his grey t-shirt streaked with miscellaneous substances, his eyes redder than that night the two of them accidentally put double the amount of weed they should have in the brownies. Upstairs, Aunty Bilimoria’s face appears in the window and Ali shouts, “Thank you Aunty!” She nods, half smiles, and turns away towards the TV, to see if she something can be made of this Sunday yet.

“Bhaiya, I—” Ali begins.

“Let’s go see it.”

“We don’t have to.”

“No, I want to.”

The two of them walk in silence—through the market, up past the residential lane where the Captain Lt Colonel lives, past the football field, to the bakery. The firefighters and police have cleared and the crowd has vanished. People stream past the bakery like it has always been like this—a black structure, jutting out of the ground with no purpose.

To Raunak, though, the bakery looks like it is still on fire. It is still in the act of burning, the ash still eating away whatever is under it.

“The firefighters said it was some trip wire in the generator,” Raunak tells Ali, though it is not the truth. The firefighters had said it was a gas fire: though they could not be sure if was because the gas has been left on or the cylinder had leaked. Raunak chooses to spare his friend.

The two of them stand staring at the charred remains of their workplace, the faint smell of warm butter, and brewed coffee, and their famous focaccia still in the air, almost definitely imagined. The ashy bakery is suddenly still—it is as if, in a moment, the hot ash has cooled, settled into its new, darker look. It is noon and the burning bakery becomes the burnt one.

La Reina de Azucar by Carolina Dalia Gonzalez

This piece was first published in Quarto’s 2019 Spring Print Edition.

Illustration by Gisela Levy

Abuela lived in the back room of the Garcia house on 105 Andalusia Avenue. It was a small room, with egg shell white painted walls and a twin sized cot that took up half the space. Only one window allowed for views of rotting palm leaves and small slivers of light to enter. There was one closet in the corner, filled with luxurious batas de casas¹ of all prints and colors. On a seven-day drawer was an organized tray of multiple pill bottles, with long names for prescriptions my nine-year-old tongue could not begin to pronounce. Next to those pills were half empty jars of rich anti-aging creams from La Prairie—a reminder of the beauty queen she once was in Cuba. It was an indulgence mami never understood, but abuela always cherished.

Abuela’s routine was simple while she lived at 105 Andalusia Avenue. In the mornings, she walked out to the kitchen and joined me and my sisters for breakfast. She took her café con leche with more milk than coffee, and made sure to add as much Splenda as mami would allow. Sometimes, I would catch her in the corner of my eye sneakily trying to add just one more packet of the fake sugar. But her hands would fumble and drop the packet on the floor for the family dog, Pinky, to quickly lick up. In pure Cuban tradition, Abuela would then dunk her Publix toast into the cup, letting the salty buttered bread soak up the artificially sweetened liquid. If it was not café con leche, abuela would drink a tall glass of the fake orange juice, Sunny-D, to wake her up. Mami kept the refrigerator in the garage visibly stocked with bottles and bottles of Sunny-D—unnaturally orange and toxic looking in their packaging. On every third Saturday of the month, Papi would buy in bulk the sickeningly sweet drink at Costco—just so Abuela always had the option.

At breakfast, and on every other occasion, Abuela felt a self-appointed responsibility to keep us Garcia girls in check. She hissed while Gloria cried about the lack of French toast sticks on her plate and yelled at me when she heard I did not finish my scrambled eggs. “Piensa de esos niños en Cuba!” her voice would bleat out to us at the dining table. I rolled my eyes, and let my scrambled eggs go untouched.

When us Garcia girls were finally out the door—on our way to school or day care or running errands with Mami—Abuela returned to her room and spent most of her day with her head on those frumpy cot pillows. She let her favorite talk show, Cristina, fill up the small room with pre- recorded laughs and ridiculous interviews with trendy actors she did not care enough to know about.

Every other afternoon, Mami drove abuela to the local clinic down Flagler street for her dialysis treatment—past abuela’s beloved La Rosa Bakery. Before diabetes took away her eyesight, abuela would ask mami to go see the delicately baked pastries, so perfectly cut and assembled in their large trays shelved on top of each other. If she could not take a bite, at least her other four senses enjoyed the delight that were freshly baked Cuban pastelitos. Occasionally on these visits, Mami would order a guava y queso pastelito and describe to her mother in such exact detail how flaky the pastry was or how sweet the guava tasted. When the sensory description was not up to par, abuela would walk straight to the counter and yell at the camerera² on how the pastries were a disgrace to the Cuban tradition and community in Miami. And yet—without fail—Abuela and mami would be at La Rosa Bakery the next week to give them one more chance at baking a guava y queso pastelito the right way.

Indeed, it was Abuela who taught Mami to never accept anything less than perfection in her consumer goods. When Mami was in middle school, Abuela would drive them both to McDonald’s for fresh fried French fries as their American treat. If McDonald’s served them lukewarm or unsalted fries, Abuela would park the car and march Mami and herself into the golden arch establishment. Once inside the fast food chain, she stomped to the counter and shook the bag of French fries at the young server. “I paid two dollars for these French fries, and they are not hot or crispy!” her thick voice getting louder with each syllable. Abuela knew she was a spectacle, but if fleeing her beloved Cuba and becoming a proud American citizen taught her anything, it was to stand up for what you believed in. In no time, abuela and mami would be back in the car with fresh hot French fries in their lap.

On these afternoons in the clinic, abuela sat herself down in a worn out brown La-Z-Boy and greeted Polly, her favorite nurse on shift. Abuela had slowly grown to trust Polly, and definitely appreciated the nurse’s willingness to listen to stories about her youth in Cuba. While Polly pricked Abuela’s arm with two needles, Abuela closed her eyes and squeezed Mami’s arm hard. Her veins pulsated through her paper-thin skin, visibly showing her blood’s circulation throughout the treatment. Mami could not stand to watch her own mother in pain. Abuela would twist her legs together, or bite her bottom lip. But Mami would still make eye contact with abuela, to let her know she was there, by her side.

Pain, and the pain of others, was something mami could never handle well. When Isabella would run down the hallway and bang her head on the corner of the wall, Mami would cry out and leave a trail of kisses all over Isabella’s forehead. When Gloria skidded her knee learning to ride a bike, Mami squeezed Gloria’s hand until her fingers turned white from loss of circulation. To watch her mother’s blood be filtered through loud, whirring machines only echoed the strenuous discomfort mami felt inside. Yet, Mami saw it to be her daughterly duty to drive her mother and stay for her three-hour dialysis treatments.

Abuela would get home around the same time as my sisters and I got home from our tennis practices, soccer games, or ballet rehearsals. She would walk back to her room and lie her body down on the small cot once more. There she closed her eyes and allowed her body to rest in the singular seconds of quiet that filled the Garcia home. Almost immediately, us Garcia girls disrupted the quiet with our dance marathons located in the family room. I was always DJ, and chose a mix of Celia Cruz, NSYNC and Britney Spears as our track list. Abuela would simply stay put in her room, too disturbed and tired to watch the show us Garcia girls put on in the room next to hers.

The dance marathons that resumed in the family room lasted whole afternoons, an unlimited energy radiating from our tiny bodies. Gloria and Isabella took it upon themselves to make every inch of space their own, and began to jump on the couch to keep things interesting. This truly pissed off Abuela, as she could hear our jumps from couch to couch through the vibrating walls. Our shrieks and giggles and singing could not distract abuela from our activities, and thus led to her bleating yells of my name from her small back room. “Carolina! Carolina! Carrrrrrolina!” Her rolling of the r in my name acted as an authoritative pronunciation I hated to hear. After the fourth or fifth time she shrieked my name, I left Gloria and Isabella in their own antics and answered abuela’s call.

I was never really interested in visiting Abuela’s room. It smelled like old people, a smell that usually acquainted me at relative’s homes where I was given too many kisses on the cheek. The light that filtered through the window only emphasized the stale dust that floated in the air. I entered Abuela’s room to see her, laid down on her bed, eyes closed. “Yes Abuita? You called me?” I asked her as I slowly stepped closer to her bed. She would turn on her side, eyes still closed, and arms stretched out to reach for my face. I knew Abuela was blind, but I could never wrap my head around her condition. I was too fresh with youth, still seeing everything as if it was for the first time.

I would come just close enough for her to place her hands on my cheek. “Carolina,” she then cooed, sweetly. Her frail, spider veined hands traced themselves around the baby soft skin on my forehead. I noticed her own skin began to turn darker, as if she enjoyed afternoon sun bathing sessions when us Garcia girls were out. But I only ever saw Abuela in her room or at the dinner table.

“Please, can you and your sisters stop jumping.” She croaked out in thick, accented English. I nodded to her request, frozen in place as her hands still caressed my face. “Y esquela?” she then asked. I mustered up some lame response, a mixture of updates on my good grades or upcoming birthday parties I would be attending that weekend. Her hands would then retract themselves from my face, and slowly she would place them beside her. I noticed the pain in her twitching muscles, how every movement of her body was a chore in of itself.

“Que linda eres.” She cooed once more to me. I never believed this, since I knew Abuela could not see the snotty, sweaty pre-pubescent girl I was. But I would smile to myself anyways. I was the last grandchild Abuela got to see—Mami told me this. I was the last grandchild she had a visual memory of. And because of this, she always told me how beautiful I was. I ate it up, always.

“Gracias, Abuita.” I thanked Abuela. I would run back to the family room, and lower the music a bit. I then yelled at Gloria and Isabella to stop jumping on the couches, and began to shake my hips to Celia Cruz’s cries of “azucar!” through the speakers again.

Mami told me that abuela loved to hear about how I was doing in general, that she spoke about me during her dialysis treatments. I beamed inside, proud to know that I was the favorite. Even if I did not enjoy the back room visits to abuela, I would never reject any affirmation.

Abuela only ever left her bedroom in the late afternoon once, where she joined my sisters and I for dinner. While we scarfed down our arroz con pollo, Abuela slowly brought a spoonful of the dish to her mouth. Her hand shook, spilling some of the arroz on the floor. Mami would then take action and spoon feed her mother, the tenderness and patience between them palpable.

There were certainly bad days. The kind of bad days where abuela was not able to come to neither breakfast nor dinner. She was not able to yell my name when my sisters and I got too rambunctious. She was not able to feel my face, to see how much I had grown in mere weeks. She was not able to tell me how pretty I was and in turn I was not able to see her toothless smile. I began to miss it all. These days of Abuela’s absence became more and more frequent. Her hospital stays got longer and longer. Mami stopped coming to dinner too.

It was not unusual for us Garcia girls to come home to an ambulance outside the house on 105 Andalusia Avenue. It was a stomach-turning image to see Abuela carried out on a stretcher, her eyes still closed. I did not yell to her, but Gloria and Isabella cried hard and loud. I stood there, my spine frozen. I saw Mami, fresh tears still on her face. We all collectively felt helpless.

After one hospital visit, Mami came home and told us Abuela had her right big toe amputated. Her body began to shut down on her, and the first thing to go was her big toe. I could not help but laugh, and Mami scolded me, hard. “Your Abuela is not well, and you laugh?” She hissed at me. I began to cry big fat tears.

Mami did not like when us Garcia girls visited the hospital. She was scared we would get sick, or maybe she did not want us to understand what was really happening to Abuela. I only heard in passing the terms “diabetes” and “heart failure” when Mami and Papi would talk alone in the kitchen.

I knew though when abuela’s sickness became really serious. Abuela’s stays at the hospital spanned into weeks and Mami eventually started to let us visit. Papi would pick us up from school and we would drive to Doctor’s Hospital, sweaty and sticky in our plaid jumper uniforms. Mami only had us see abuela in small pockets of time, usually when Abuela was asleep. I was upset by this, and yelled that I wanted to talk to Abuita right now. Mami began to cry at my temper tantrums, unable to emotionally deal with three growing little girls and the decay of her mother.

My temper tantrums only got worse, and I would begin to bite Gloria or scratch at Isabella if I was not able to see Abuela that day. I began to crave Abuela’s hands on my face, her soft fingertips gently on my cheeks. I wanted to tell Abuela about my day at school, about how Robert pushed me at recess or about how my new friend Cristina drew me a picture in glitter markers. I wanted to hear her say my name, with the rolling of the r included. I wanted to hear Abuela yell my name, Carolina, Carolina, Carolina. Over and over and over again.

Abuela tried to say my name when she saw me during my few visits. Sometimes I could hear her, other times the big medical machines would beep too loud and drown out her attempts. Nurses ran in and asked me to leave, and I would start to cry in the hallway. I did not understand what was happening to Abuela. Mami and Papi would still not give me an answer. They would continuously tell me Abuela was not doing well. Mami would then start to cry and I knew not to ask any more questions.

Abuela was not going to get better, Mami told me and my sisters at breakfast. After months of Abuela in and out of the hospital, of her routine at 105 Andalusia Avenue officially and steadily broken, Mami accepted Abuela’s decline.

Mami did not let us say goodbye to Abuela, and I screamed so loud the neighbors called. I pushed Mami hard and hit Papi everywhere. I was mad. I could not process why my parents did not let me say goodbye, why my parents thought it was not a good idea. I was the last granddaughter she ever got to see, I held importance to her. Yet, Mami shook her head and cried more to me. She whispered sorry into my ear and began to comb her hands through my hair. “Don’t cry. You sound just like her when you do.” I cried harder.

---

¹ Night gowns
² waitress

Our Dad the Robot by Corinne Rabbin-Birnbaum

This piece was first published in Quarto’s 2019 Spring Print edition. It was awarded the 2019 Best Fiction Prize by Guest Judge Emily Gould.

Illustration by Lalitha Maduri

Dad came home from the hospital and now he is a robot. His brain is a MedCorp PlatinumCerebroTM Model 6.3.

Robot dad is a little strange but we love him anyway. He was watching football just the other day when he began to scream, like he always does, but the things that came out were a little odd: “ducking pieces of shit!” he yelled forcefully. Someone fumbled a pass: “jesus’s fucking crisps alright tea!” An interception: “I can’t take this to store!” Later, we were informed by the doctors that autocorrect was the default setting on dad’s robot brain. Dad was not happy about this, and our mother reluctantly took him for an appointment so they could reconfigure his settings.

Dad does not like it when we call him Robo-Dad. We also tried The Bot-Father but he began to sweat and get red so we stopped. Little brother had to fan him with a sheet of paper just so he could get back to standard operating temperature.

One day Little and Middle brother were in their room playing VR soccer when Middle knocked over a pottery figurine someone had painted at a birthday party. “My puppy!” Little shrieked, trying to piece together the figurine’s shattered remains. “You broke him!”

Middle shoved his hand over Little’s mouth to stifle his screeching.

“Shut up!” Middle said. “If you don’t tell anyone, I’ll give you ten bucks.”

Little grinned behind Middle’s hand. “Okay!”

“I’ll give it to you tomorrow,” Middle said with a wave, and darted away to find the Roomba 12.0 to clear away the mess. After some time, he found the Roomba sitting on the side table in our father’s study. Dad was sitting in his leather armchair, one of his hands holding a book while the other stroked the cleaning device.

He did not seem to notice when Middle entered the room.

“Um, dad?” Middle said.

“Hmmmmm?”

“Can I maybe use the Roomba? Little broke something.”

“Of course,” dad said, turning to Middle and smiling. He looked over at the Roomba he was still lovingly petting and jerked away from it, as if he had not known it was there or what he had been doing. “Here, just take it!” he said quickly, shoving the Roomba into Middle’s arms.

From then on dad and the Roomba kept a wide berth of each other.

Dad did not go outside as often as he did before he became a robot. Gone were the Sunday morning donut shop runs, and we oddly missed the embarrassing jogs he used to take around the neighborhood clad in obscenely tight red spandex running pants. Instead, dad sat constantly in his study, attached to his charging port while staring at the oscillations of his desk fan. We were convinced this self-isolation had something to do with embarrassment over having become a robot.

“It’s so normal,” Older sister assured him. “Pretty much everyone will be a robot in the future. My friend at school burned out his retinas in the VR machine and they replaced his eyeballs. He says he can see through everyone’s clothes now but I don’t believe him.”

Little began to cry. “But I don’t wanna be a robot!”

Middle whacked him on the arm. “Stop that, you’re making daddy feel bad! There’s nothing wrong with being a robot!” But Little was still crying. “Would you rather daddy have died? Is that what you want?”

“If the choice was between Robo-Dad or Dead Dad, I’d pick Robo-dad any day,” Older sister said.

But Little cried on, and dad began to get hot again.

“That is enough!” mother declared. “Your father is still your father, robot or not. We will have no more of this talk!” Then she sent us to our rooms while she poured our father iced tea and helped him attach to his charging port.

The fact that our father was a robot did not come up again until Middle asked if he could bring him in for show-and-tell at school. This came on the heels of a comment from Older, who said proving to everyone that he had a robot dad would greatly increase Middle’s street cred.

Mother was very upset at this request. “Your father may be a robot, but he is not a spectacle!”

“I want to do it,” dad said, surprising us all. “I do not want to hide in this house anymore. I want the children to see me with my robot brain so that they will not be afraid.”

Middle was ecstatic. He asked if he could paint dad’s face silver, so the message would really hit home. This request was declined.

The day Middle brought our father to school was hot one. The A/C in the classroom was very weak. Dad was sweating profusely and everyone could hear the whirring of his robot brain inside his metal skull.

“So, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?” the teacher asked him. He opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out. He blinked very slowly. “Is everything okay?”

In response to the teacher’s question our father’s robot brain exploded.

Bloody wires and molten, steaming skin flew about the room. The children began to scream. With pieces of our father’s metal skull stuck in his hair, Middle cradled our dying robot father in his arms. “I’m sorry, daddy!” he sobbed. “Please don’t die.”

“Someone call 911!” a person yelled from the back. Another asked: “Does anyone have rice?”

Soon an ambulance came and took our father to the hospital.

When he was returned to us he was much the same as before, except that now he had a MedCorp PlatinumCerebroTM Model 7.1. It turned out that we had overlooked a notification that our father’s old robot brain had been recalled due to being too prone to overheating.

We all hugged Robo-Dad close. “I love you, robot daddy,” Little said. “I was so scared when you exploded.”

“I was scared too, little man,” dad said. “When I was sitting in that classroom, half-dead, most of my brains spewed out, all I could think about were dogs. All sorts of dogs. Big, massive, giant dogs. Small, yappy, fluffy dogs. Even stuffed dogs. They were all standing in a circle, staring at me, watching me. Like they wanted something. Something from me....” We exchanged concerned looks, but decided not to read too much into it. Robo-Dad had said strange things before.

Later that night we went to the study to bring dad some ice cream. He was sitting there like always, reading a book in his big chair. The Roomba was in his lap. From the doorway we could hear it whirring.

Quietly the three of us crept away. The ice cream, we decided, could wait.

Canned Pineapples by Seowon (Angela) Lee

This piece was first published in Quarto’s 2019 Spring Print Edition

Next to Ursa Major and Minor, a princess and a prince, next to Cassiopeia the arrogant, next to the archer aiming his bow in valor, next to those honored by gods and those punished by gods as fables, is the constellation Canned Pineapples. A distinctly cylindrical formation that appears as spring reaches its peak and brightens as the burning heat of summer arrives.
Why this canned shape was not soup as Andy Warhol would plainly see, or green beans or sardines (actually that is a more terrible alternative to the pineapple so scratch that) or lima beans or pinto beans or anything but canned pineapples (Dole if you have it) is commonly linked to the discoverer of the constellation who simply said, “I like canned pineapples.”

What she meant was that it was what she ate in a fever. Cold sweet pineapples, poked through with a single chopstick fed to her by her mother, who couldn’t afford orange juice so made do with canned pineapples from the pantry below their apartment as a source of vitamin C. The sweetest damn thing she’d ever eaten. Her mother had fed her to the last drop. She had gotten sick in the stomach from drinking the syrup meant to be preservative but her head had felt a little lighter. She wondered later if the syrup would melt her bones like what mama said about coca cola melting teeth or if it would preserve her insides like what diet coke did to the lady in the newspaper article. Or would this sweet nectar turn her sweeter still.

Many an outraged anti-big money journalist accused the discoverer of receiving an enormous pay out to lease the celestial hall of fame as an advertisement board for one of the most atrocious fruit-juice coated conglomerates that profited from imperialism.
Reading this the discoverer simply said, “well then, guess it’s going to be called the goddamned Canned Tomato Soup in a couple years.”

Her husband left the day canned pineapples flooded their driveway. Dole had tried to pay her. In a lifetime supply of canned pineapples no less. Her husband hated canned pineapples, but what he hated even more was being Mr. Canned-Pineapple-discoverer’s-husband. He had always been the amateur astronomer looking for new stars through a telescope that could’ve paid for hospital bills, or a new car, or a child. But he was more preoccupied in the heavens, and she in teaching Classics and so in their home was a state of the art telescope, and a beat up station wagon, and no baby crib. It had happened half on accident and half on whim, by word of mouth and propulsion of absurdity. Perhaps it was because of the romantic notions that he always dismissed her of, or perhaps it had been written in the stars all along.
As she opened up another can of pineapples bought from the Walgreens down the block, she remembered how her mother had taught her that girls weren’t supposed to have short hair, girls weren’t supposed to swear and girls weren’t supposed to go against their husbands. But apparently, girls weren’t supposed to discover constellations either.
She wondered how she could effectively destroy the cans that seemed to multiply on her driveway and now infected the lawn. She simply said, “fuck it” and let it fester. They shone like stars in their tin and yellow wrap with each passing headlight that wasn’t a beat up station wagon.

“The Greek poet Aratus is credited with the creation of constellations and their fascinating stories. He weaved beautiful and heart wrenching tales. The sky was a canvas that promised meaning in its mysterious patterns.” But who deserves to be immortalized?
The chalk stopped. Who created the narrative in the sky?
She remembered how her sky had been divided in four—an azure dragon chased a black turtle who chased a white tiger who chased a red phoenix. The guardians of the four corners of the earth smiled on her. She remembered the day when she realized the sky was written in english, while her stories sang korean. In the eyes that stared back at her, the tiger’s tail was the belt of some guy named Orion who also apparently had a bow (probably to kill tigers with).
She donated the cans to the food bank, sold the telescope on eBay and bought a new car. She cut the long straight hair he loved to run his finger through and left him a voicemail to take the rest of his shit with his fragile masculinity.
The new generation was getting tattoos of Canned Pineapples. Canned Pineapples graced many a shirt in Forever 21 and Target. The occasional angry reporter still showed up. But soon Canned Pineapples was a part of the sky as much as her highness Andromeda or Zeus’s Aguila. She smiled, Orion be damned.

Momma by Tristen Pasternak

Illustration by Gisela Levy

Momma I’m sitting here right now on the couch thinking how soon I won't be doing this anymore. It hit me while I was washing my face actually. A wave of anxiety washed over me I’m afraid for this to end, our great meals with you sitting across from me. It has been so nice spending this time together your love is so warm and calming. Writing this I’m already missing you and I feel like I need to hold on tight I want to look you in the eyes next time I talk to you. I got to spend all of this time with you and I am so lucky I don't want to take it for granted I just want to take a moment to look at your face right here next time I see you just right at your face and take in your presence. I did the same thing on the couch before I left for France. I was reading my book and you and the dog were asleep on the other couch right next to me and I realized everything was perfect. No matter where I was or if I died in France for some reason I knew that moment was the most perfect life can be. So I made sure to save it, that at any time if I needed to come back here I would be able to. I took ten long breaths, being sure to count carefully each second of the inhale and exhale. I did this ten times, to freeze time, to breathe the moment in me so that it would always be there. When I got too drunk on New Years I went there, and I’m certain I texted you saying something about I can’t wait to be drinking tea on the couch but you couldn’t have understood how I wanted to be there but more than anything I was afraid. Each day I feel like I need to be more present. I feel this kind of urgency to make you so real to me so that you can stick in my mind. The first few days I was home I was so under water I felt like I couldn't even see you. I couldn’t reach out and touch you across this unfathomable abyss. Even though you didn’t want to cross it. But now I think I am finally present. I am finally here with you. I am afraid of going back to school and losing you all over again. Losing myself. Losing sleep and privacy and your kindness. I am so sorry please look me in the face when you talk to me.

(I don’t want time to do anything to her.)

Tristen Pasternak is a freshman at Barnard College. She is unsure of a major; she enjoys playing the trumpet and writing poetry. Tristen is from the Philadelphia area.

All Eyez on Me by Angelo Hernandez-Sias

Illustration by Charlie Blodnieks and Dora O’Neill

This piece was first published in Quarto’s 2018 Spring Print edition. It was awarded the 2018 Best Fiction Prize by Guest Judge Rebecca Curtis.

FUCK COKE
First job I took after active duty was as a security guard at the Coca-Cola plant in Moanalua. It wasn’t what I lived for. Work had never been that for me or anyone I had known. What I lived for in those days, I thought, was college. I had just enrolled part-time at Honolulu CC. I might have been half a decade older than the kids sitting at the front of the room, and I might have been dumber than them, too—high school math in Panama isn’t what it is here, not even for you suburbanites who spend adolescence too drunk to apply for university—but every time I walked into that building, I felt as if I was getting payback against those predatory fuckheads who had recruited me on a promise that I’d be able to go to school while serving in the infantry. After I had spent eight weeks crawling in the mud and busting out of dryers which confederate grandsons had shoved me into and then turned on, I asked the fuckhead recruiters how I could start classes. And what did they say? Nothing. They were busy cackling. But that’s another story. The point is, I thought, and would tell Maria this during our late night phone calls, that I had finally found some kind of purpose. And that much was true. What wasn’t true: school wasn’t really it. Ass was.
This was nowhere clearer than in my spending. Maria’s income had been nominal, so when we split, I didn’t lose much. No dog food, more money, and even with the new cost of rent, you’d expect my standard of living, or at least the amount that I was sending home—same shit—to go up. But I swore, long distance calling cards got more and more expensive, and even when I did make time to call my mother, her complaints grew louder and more incessant. Julianita es la mejor en la clase con pies llenos de vejigas porque sus zapatos no le quedan, she’d say, or Renato está creciendo como futbolista, y como quisiera poder meterlo en una liga—both of which meant the same thing: wasn’t I going to send something their way again soon, or, if you want to go deep, I hadn’t forgotten about them, had I? And man, how I wanted to send more, how the heat hit my face every time my card bounced in line at Moanalua 99 with only eggs, spam, and rice in my cart. It hadn’t occurred to me that the money I spent at nightclubs was real. I saw no connection between my being broke and my clubbing.
Even my friendships were about ass. Some friends are brought together by music, others by drugs, and while those certainly brought us together too, they were only our ayahuasca— there to enhance our worship of the Ultimate Good. It was what we talked about, what we chased, and why we hung out: collectively, our individual stocks rose. The only dude in my friend group more sex-crazed than me was this Salvadorian guy named Yeffrey. I met him through another buddy, Tommy, who had been in my platoon and who had met Yeffrey I don’t know where. Tommy and I had been tight until I found out that Maria was fucking him, along with some other dudes in the barracks, and from that point on, even though I never brought it up to him, I kept a distance between us. Again, another story. Yeffrey, on the other hand, I drew myself to. We would work out together, hit the beach together, and, of course, club together. He was the kind of guy who would scream while he lifted and who would let his free weights crash onto the floor, the kind of guy I had always fantasized about punching in the face, but he got more ass than me, and so, for a brief while, I became his loyal, albeit hesitant follower—more witness than apprentice. I couldn’t dig the tight-fitting neon-colored t shirts he wore, and I would always refuse when he offered me the syringe that he’d jam into his ass cheek—and, except for once, I never did coke with him.
Yeffrey was the kind of guy whose compliments didn’t depend on the amount of respect you had for him. One moment, you’d be cringing at him for eating cereal in water, and the next you’d be red in the cheeks, glancing down at your biceps and flexing lightly or toying with your crucifix pendant because he had said you looked like Arnold Schwarzenegger or Tupac. Maria was like that too.
I think I liked hanging out with him because he was the only person I knew who appeared to feel emptier than myself.
Aside from what I could observe during our weekends out, I knew nothing about his personal life—what he actually did for a living, why he had immigrated to Hawai‘i—and I didn’t ask. I prefer to keep people out of focus.

PETITE
There was nothing special about the night I met Maria. We were at Rumours—and then we weren’t. After we’d finished, she put her hands on my waist and giggled the word petite. I got pissed and put on my clothes and left. The next day, I called and apologized. So began us.

HAND IN HAND
“You’ve got to quit that shit, man.” Yeffrey poured skim milk into two jars already filled nearly halfway with chocolate protein powder. He twisted the cap onto the carton and put it back onto the shelf in his fridge, which he had left open. When he shut the fridge, a few droplets of the protein shakes spilt onto the white countertop.
“I know,” I said. “I know.”
After tightening the lids on the jars, he shook them vigorously, as if there were stones in them that he was trying to grind to dust. “Moving on. Fucking your ex. The two don’t go hand in hand.” He offered me a shake.
“Thanks,” I said, grabbing the jar from him. I took a swig. The powder clumped at the back of my throat like small chunks of mud.
“You married too young.”
“I know.”
“You always do, don’t you?”

NEIGHBORS
I didn’t consider telling Maria that we should stop seeing each other for good until I met Mamaisa at my first AA meeting. She told the group a story about her last relapse, which had occurred a few weeks prior. She had started drinking again—in secret. She would hide in her car in the parking lot outside her apartment and get drunk while her husband, also in recovery, and eight-month-old slept through the night.
Me, I gave few details about what had brought me there.
After the meeting, I approached where she sat alone at a table on the other side of the hall. She wore a Death Row t shirt and a pair of over-the-ear headphones, and she watched the wall on the opposite side of the hall like it was a tv. When I sat down next to her, she pulled one headphone off her ear and sipped the brown liquid in her dixie cup. “What?” she said.
“Oh, I didn’t say anything,” I said to her. “You can keep listening.”
“Thanks for your permission,” she said, pulling the headphones down onto her neck, “but it’s all right. I should, er, interact with other humans.”
“I’m not human.”
“Me neither.”
“I fucking knew it.”
She smiled and set down her coffee.
“So you have a....”
“We all make mistakes.”
“Jeez,” I said. I took a bite from the stale wafer on my plate. “You’re....” I held out an mmm sound.
“Mom-eye-suh.”
“What a name.”
“Hitting on married woman at an AA meeting, are we?” she said, reaching for her headphones. When I blushed, she pulled her hands from her headphones and said, “I’m fucking with you, dude.”
I laughed sheepishly and immediately hated the sound that emanated from my throat. “I just liked your t shirt.”
She held it between her thumbs and examined it. “Have you heard Pac’s new album?”
I shook my head.
She reached for her headphones and actually put them back on. We both laughed, the noise in my throat now warm and round. The shuffle of the other members filled the hall.
“And you are?”
“Alone-so,” I said. I studied her face. “You look familiar.”
She brought her lower lip and her brow toward her nose. “So do you.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Another guy who thinks Asian women look alike.”
I blushed again.
After laughing, she said, “Nah, you’re right. I think we’re actually neighbors.”

PARAKEET
It wasn’t until I learned that we lived in the same apartment complex that I began noticing Mamaisa—on the elevator, in the laundry facility, you know, the usual spots. That was the extent of our contact, and yet, especially given the nature of my job, which involved little more than staring at a clock for several hours a day, be it in a factory or a classroom, this was more than enough to send my mind into long bouts of fantasy. What was her life like? I only knew what little I’d learned from our conversation after that AA meeting, the first and only I had seen her at. Her mother was from Guam, her father from New York, she had graduated from the University of Hawai’i a few years back, and she worked for a nonprofit downtown. She drove away from that meeting in a run down Mazda. I pictured us rolling down the highway, her car rushing into the green mountainscape like a parakeet into a hurricane.

EATING ALONE
On workdays, I would eat small meals during lunch breaks—rice, tuna or spam, a hard boiled egg, a strip of seaweed—all heated in the microwave of the office in the facility where I worked. The office workers would give me dirty looks, so I wouldn’t eat at their table in the office kitchen. I’d take my lunch to a bench outside, where some of the factory workers would smoke cigarettes during their breaks. I’d eat silently, looking beyond the city’s skyline toward the landscape’s jagged green peaks. They were similar to the ones I’d stared at growing up during my walks home from the bus stop, though I’d learned to stop staring when one time I awoke from a daydream with a knife at my neck. I gave him the fifteen cents my mother had given me for the day and went a little hungrier than usual, which wasn’t saying much. I had always looked forward to meals, then. That might have been because they were infrequent, meager. But it also could have been because they had reminded me of the people in my life, and now they reminded me of my solitude. Now, I ate quickly and savored the skyline.

ONE WAY OR ANOTHER
Dozens of messages on my answering machine. Some of them from Maria, most of them from Yeffrey. A few times, he banged on my door and shouted, “I know you’re in there!” while I sat in the living room on the couch and held my breath and hoped he didn’t kick the door in. I wondered why he was so desperate to see me. Throughout our friendship, he had given me the impression that I was an accessory. There was a part of me that enjoyed what I wielded over him. This newfound power, inevitably, was short lived.
I got home from work one night and found him sitting on the bench outside of my apartment complex, his buff calves glowing in the yellow light of the streetlamp, the toes of his sneakers barely touching the pavement. He pulled off his sunglasses and cleaned them with his shirt and asked me where I’d been. Before I could answer, he told me to shut the fuck up, he knew where I’d been, I’d gotten a new girl, hadn’t I? Why was it that every time I got a new girl, I forgot that he existed? When was I going to learn who the real people in my life were? He might have pushed things a little too far the last time we hung, but he wouldn’t do it again. That was the difference between me and him. He learned from his mistakes. He was gonna teach me, one way or another. This Friday night. He wasn’t taking no for an answer.

LINEUP
Eventually I stopped seeing Mamaisa around the apartment building. I wondered if she had moved, or if she had started drinking again again, or if she had abandoned her family. Whatever the case, she ceased to be the subject of my fantasies. This is not to say that I stopped thinking about her. It was just that she eased into the realm of nightmare. We’d be in that mazda whizzing through the hills—only she’d be tugging on the doors and crying for help as if I had trapped her in the car. I would push on the brakes and the car would accelerate. The doors would unlock and fly open and she’d get sucked out into the gray night and skid along the concrete, smearing burgundy splotches where her body bounced. I’d pull over to the side of the road and dig through the wet brush, which basked in the blue and red lights of the police cars that had pulled up behind me. They’d arrest me and toss me in a lineup with five other suspects who were clones of myself. Through the one-way window, I’d see Mamaisa, smiling as she picked me out.

BAITING
Maria’s calls had dwindled. One morning, after a long night of dreams, I called her back and begged for forgiveness. For what, I wasn’t sure. I wanted an apology from her, and I (stupidly) expected one in return. After she forgave me, she asked me out. “Yeah,” I said, my jaw clenched, “Friday works.”

BOTTOM HEAVY
As he had done during the last night I hung with him, Yeffrey got the evening going with a couple lines of coke, snorted from my countertop through a protein shake straw. He didn’t offer me any. Those were my terms. I was to hit the club sober. I offered to drive. He refused. Yeffrey, as usual, was on some boys-come-first shit, which I found hypocritical, since his unemployed ass had every other night of the week to chase pussy. I hadn’t told him about my reconciliation with Maria, so he spent the whole pregame and the dangerous drive that followed talking about how much I needed this, a boys’ night out, to get back on my feet. I was young and soon I would learn that bitches weren’t shit, he shouted over Danny Tenaglia’s “Bottom Heavy,” which ricocheted throughout the car’s interior. Once I understood this fact, I would understand what it meant to be a man.
I half-listened and said nothing. All this talk I knew he’d forget as soon as we walked into Rumours and he locked onto a target and rode his own heat-detecting dick to her, which was no mean feat considering the magnitude of that club. A dance floor with two cylindrical cages which propped up on each side sprawled out from the heart of the club, and a waist-high wooden ledge traced the dance floor’s borders in a sad effort contain the bodies which coagulated on it. Cushioned armchairs wrapped around this ledge so that the idle could watch the dancers while they drank. The whole square—dance floor and surrounding ledge included—was insulated by several layers of tables on each side. On the half nearest to the entrance was the full bar, behind which several bartenders toiled, and in front of which the regulars clustered. I walked to the bar and quietly ordered a cape codder on the rocks.
“What was that?” the bartender asked.
The woman next to me repeated my order for me, adding, “He’s embarrassed.”
Her voice was familiar. “Mamaisa,” I said, “what are you doing here?”

OH, THE USUAL
“Wrecking myself,” she said.
“Aww, don’t say that!” I told her. When the bartender set a drink before me, I took a big gulp and then asked, “Where have you been?”
“You ask good questions.”
“And you give generous compliments,” said Yeffrey, who had somehow appeared next to me, a blonde woman by his shoulder.
Mamaisa gave an uneasy laugh, which intensified when he offered his hand to her and introduced himself. “You know Alonso?” she asked.
“Oh, yeah,” he said, rubbing his hand into my shoulder. “I know him better than he knows himself.”
My face grew hot.
“Is this the new girl you’ve been ditching me for?” he asked me, loud enough for all to hear.
Mamaisa appeared not to notice. “And who is this?” Mamaisa asked about the woman standing beside Yeffrey.
“Oh! I’m glad you asked,” Yeffrey said to Mamaisa, wiping the sweat from his forehead,
“this is, er, this is....”
“Go on, Yeffrey, introduce her,” I added.
The woman smiled a smile that said that this wasn’t the first time she’d done this, and began,
“I’m Tiff—”
“Tiffany!” Yeffrey said, though the fact that he had forgotten was already clear.
“He’s a classy one,” I said to Tiffany rather loudly, my hand cupped next to my mouth.
Immediately, I regretted what I’d said, but before I could apologize, Tiffany glanced at his crotch and said to me in another fake secret, “It’s not his money I’m after,” at which point all of us—all of us except for Yeffrey—burst into a laughter half-mortified, half-spiteful. Tiffany then said something into Yeffrey’s ear and left the three of us at the bar.
I ordered a third drink and downed it. As I set the glass back onto the countertop, I asked,
“Where’d she go, Yeffrey? The bathroom?”
“Yeah.”
“To hide until you leave?”
“Oh, fuck off,” he said, brushing off his nose and leaning onto the counter to order a shot.
“You two bicker like an old couple,” Mamaisa said. “It’s adorable. And sick.”

ALL EYEZ ON ME

Live the life of a dog nigga
Till the day I die
Live the life of a boss player
The future’s in my eyes

I sang with the voice that emanated from Mamaisa’s sound system. She looked at me, tossed her head toward the wheel, and laughed. “That’s not how it goes, dude,” she said. “Fuck you,” I said, “talk to me when you know another language.”
“Buenu,” she said.
I stared out the window at the black mountainscape. It inched against the star-speckled sky as we drove along the highway. In the window, the lights of the city blurred into the white and red reflections of the speedometer and the blue light of the stereo control panel. “What is it, then?” I asked her. She sang along with the next chorus:

Live the life of a thug nigga
Till the day I die
Live the life of a boss playa
We been gettin' high

Then she said, “I like your version.”
I felt something open up inside of me. I wondered how she could fail to hear questions like are you drinking again? and where have you been for the past month? yet distinguish dog and thug in the uncertain and accented English in which I rapped. I didn’t ask. Part of me didn’t want to know. I was staring my fantasy right in her face. I could touch her, smell her, let her laughter ring in my ears. I didn’t want to know. She was perfectly out of focus.
“Of course,” I had said when she asked if we could go back to my place. It wasn’t until we entered the apartment and found Maria twiddling my pager between her thumbs at the kitchen table that I remembered that I had made Maria the same promise only a few days earlier.

OUCH
“What are you doing here?” I asked Maria.
“Who is she?” Maria asked me.
“I should go,” said Mamaisa.
I grabbed her by the shoulder. “No, no, stay, please. This isn’t what it looks like. I can take care of this, I—”
“Alonso, who is she?”
“How did you get in here?”
Maria dangled a key in front of her face.
“I really should go,” Mamaisa said, and tried to pull away from my grip, but I held on tighter. “Ouch,” she said, “let me go.”
I didn’t. “Mamaisa,” I said, “please, just give me a second, this isn’t—”
“It’s exactly what it looks like,” Maria said to her, “and you’re right. You should go.”
A piece of Mamaisa’s dress tore when she finally tugged hard enough to escape my grip.
“I’m so sorr—” I began.
But she had opened the door and there on the other side stood Yeffrey, his chest rising and falling with his heaves, his eyes completely open and as red as his face.

GET YOUR ASS OVER HERE
Mamaisa didn’t dare squeeze past Yeffrey, whose body filled the whole door frame. She retreated into the apartment on her tiptoes, as though he were approaching her. But he didn’t notice her. He only noticed me. Indeed, everyone seemed to be watching me, waiting—for what, I don’t know.
“No,” I said, unsuccessfully suppressing the quiver in my voice, “You come here.”
Yeffrey didn’t hide his quiver. “I’m not going to ask you again,” he said, “you ungrateful fuck....You don’t get it, do you? You and me, we’re the same. No matter how many fucking books you read. You are me. And I ain’t shit. Now, get your ass over here so I can show you.”
My eyeballs swelled. “No,” I said. “You come here.”
“Ah,” he said, “who am I kidding.” And then he unballed his fists and left the doorway.
I made eye contact with Mamaisa and laughed nervously. She didn’t crack a smile. It was as if I had become invisible, as if she were looking through me at some grotesque occurence—a conquistador throwing an infant to canines. She shook her head, then left.
There was only me, Maria, and a heat so heavy that it seemed to make the floors sag.
“Baby,” she said, “It’s not your—”
“Go,” I said.

EPIPHANY
A few months later, during my first visit home since I had come to the U.S., I finally understood Yeffrey. I pulled my face out from the gap between the wall and the bedframe where I had been retching and wiped my mouth off with the covers. My high school best friend’s older sister lay in bed half-naked beside me. Let’s keep it, I said.
She smiled in her sleep.

Frogs by Franziska Nace

When I walk into the kitchen for breakfast, the frogs are having sex. The throaty, murmured gurgling feels as if it is leeching out from between the gaps in the kitchen tile, intermingled in the hiss of eggs I am frying on the stovetop. The stubby claws of the smaller one are wrapped voraciously around the bloated haunches of his counterpart. They float, suspended, in murky green isolation. I eat my eggs.

We get the frogs from my sister’s school, a parting gift after they have finished growing them in class, an opportunity for kids to take the science home. The frogs are small and dark and slippery, and we put them in a tank where they frolic with our pre-existing guppies. The frogs expand in what feels like only weeks, layers of mossy skin feathering off in violent strips. They are enormous. One day, we come down for breakfast and there are no longer guppies.

I name the one frog Coldplay, because when I watch them that first week and I see the larger one float down seamlessly, from the top where she has just drawn a breath, I am reminded of the lazy, controlled descent of parachutes, webbed folds of skin gracefully catching folds of effervescence. “Parachutes” is the band Coldplay’s first album. My father and sister do not seem delighted by the many layers of my genius. The other frog is named Fred.

“I think our frogs are gay,” my dad says one morning. Staccato croaks punctuate his point. The frogs have sex every morning and there are never any new frogs. They are suspended in an isolated world of only each other, one clasped tightly around the other, unaware of our eyes watching them every breakfast. At school, I tell my friends that my frogs are gay. We buy long stalks of aquatic plant to add nuance to their tiny world. We need to buy a bigger tank. “You can’t get one with a filter,” my dad says. He has read that it disturbs their sense of echolocation, blinds the reverberations of their sounds and movements, isolates them in a droning soundscape. Instead, a small layer of green film builds up and never leaves. When I butter my toast the next morning, I hear the croaking and know that they are finding themselves.

It has been two years, and every other kid’s frogs have died. Ours balloon with life, expanding, engorging. They are supposed to be African dwarf frogs, we say, and look up a picture, but can not reconcile the small, dark shapes we find online with the monstrous corpulence that float before us. “Often confused with African clawed frog,” my dad reads. African clawed frogs are illegal in eleven states. They can live to be thirty years old. They are named for their talons that rip and tear, our guppies, their aquatic plants, Fred’s claws curled in Coldplay’s back.

We begin to notice tiny dots that coagulate across the glass of the tank, even when it is clean. The dots unfurl to reveal tiny dark and slippery creatures that quiver confusedly in their murky landscape. They are the approximate shape of food pellets, and we do not fish them out. I come into the kitchen at night to get a glass of water and I find my father crouched, in the shadow of one fluorescent lightbulb, in front of the tank. He drops each food pellet so that it floats down slowly, right in front of their beaked faces, in between the ridges of their eyes, so that they cannot miss it. Sometimes it will float down near them but they will turn away, unseeing, lunging instead for a little piece of inedible matter, or perhaps nothingness. It is late. My father continues to drop pellets until he sees that each one catches three.

Franziska Nace is a first-year Columbia College student planning to major in English. She is from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

I'll See You in a Little While by Gus O'Connor

The office: a white box, pasty with stucco walls and paneled ceilings, with new LEDs that seared paper-white light into every crevice of the floor. Here there were forty-five sweaty and over-qualified employees clad in white button-downs and blouses, dragging themselves from their cubicles, to the water-cooler, to the bathroom, and back. 9:00am to 5:00pm. Monday through Friday. 260 days a year. Unfortunately, I was one of those people.

I kept a ceramic fish I painted at the pottery-barn, blown-glass paperweights, and a scented air-freshener on my desk that squirted little bursts of mist smelling like old yellowing books every seven minutes. 68 times a day. And every time I heard the air freshener go off, I leaned in to sniff pretending I was huffing paint thinner or cocaine. I had never done any drugs before, but I fantasized that one day someone would come up from behind and just inject me with something in my arm, so I wouldn’t have to do it myself. Sometimes I was sure that someone was running up behind me, but I didn’t want to ruin the surprise so I would close my eyes and tense up, waiting for the needle to pierce a vein, but sure enough, it was usually a jogger who wooshed by me in pastel spandex. Other times, it would—

“Hey Andy.”

“Oh, hey Mandy,” I said. She was new in the office, and today wore a mustard-yellow pantsuit. She cropped her black hair short and had a nose like a button, and her half-moon cuticles on her painted fingernails were starting to peak out from under the color so they looked like little oceans at night. The truth is, I loved her.

“Did you do something new with your hair?” she asked.

“Yes, just a new thing I’m trying out.”

“I like it, it’s a good look for you.” God, she was beautiful.

We stared at each other for thirty-two seconds in silence, and I felt beads of sweat form on my upper lip. She left and I watched how she didn’t let her feet drag across the floor, gliding down the hallway. She knew where she wanted to go. I envied her.

I had, in fact, done something new with my hair. The day before I had asked the barber to surprise me, and so he shaved the sides of my head and gave me a faux mohawk with green frosted tips.

After Mandy had complimented it, the others around the office started to notice as well as they’d walk by my cubicle. I’d come out of that mist of white button-down shirts and suit jackets, and congealed into a person. I felt my heartbeat when two people at the copier casted sideways glances at me, or the receptionist who looked like my mother winked at me and gave me a thumbs up as she passed, and felt eyes burn the back of my head staring at the thirty green triangles eight inches above my skin. I walked by Mandy’s desk and her forehead shone a bit from oil and I fell in love with her.

In the bathroom I examined the spikes that made two hemispheres of my head. I walked in and out of the frame of the mirror, practicing how I’d walk by Mandy on my way back to my cubicle. I let my hips bob up and down, twist around, but that didn’t feel right, so I shuffled out of the bathroom and sat down in my desk.

My fellow employees talked about my hair for five days. On the sixth day, there were no more sideways glances, eyes burning the back of my head, and, most importantly, no more compliments from Mandy. Sexy Mandy. My new look had become outdated. Only the receptionist kept winking at me. As quickly as I had solidified from that stifling mist of sweaty shirts and blouses, I was dissolving again, another particle in the cloud.

That evening I drove to the local tattoo shop to get my ears pierced. When the tattoo-artist put the needle through my ear I yelped like a little Shiba Inu. He sighed and I held back tears. His name was Matthew.

“Nice hair,” he said.

“Oh thanks, it’s new.” He was chubby with a goatee and a leather vest, and his nipples showed through the cutoff sleeves and I could see they were pierced.

“Yeah, it looks like you have little wings on your head,” he said wiping my ears with rubbing alcohol. His hands were big and warm like a pillow.

Afterwards I looked in the mirror and saw the silver metal balls in my ears and grinned, trotted to my Corolla, shivering in the fall wind, and drove home. The next morning, Mandy passed my swollen lobes: “Andy, did you pierce your ears?”

“Oh yeah, I did.”

“You’re a real edgy guy, Andy.” My mouth was watering.

She glided away in her deep blue pantsuit after my silence, and stopped by another cubicle. Jim’s cubicle. Bastard. She crinkled her nose into a button when she talked to him, and laughed at something he had said. I tried to imagine him choking on his words and spitting a little bit on his shirt.

Again came the furtive glances my way from coworkers by the copier and the water cooler, and again I drank more water to bob around the office. When I’d say hi to people I’d turn my head pretending to stretch or notice a fly, and scratch my ears lightly to direct their attention to my swollen lobes. I passed Mandy and managed a sexy wink at her, and she smiled at me. She had a green thing stuck in her teeth. I imagined myself licking it off her teeth and in return she’d suck on my earlobes and tell me I was the one. I walked back and sat down at my desk though, and the receptionist passed and blew a kiss at me. I felt like Frosty the Snowman, narrowly escaping death-by-melting under the spring sun.

Sure enough I started to melt again. But I escaped in my local tattoo parlor, and Matthew gave me a Frosty the Snowman tattoo on my forearm. I could make him jiggle by twisting my wrist around in circles. So the next day I made him jiggle for Mandy, and she laughed. In that moment she closed her eyes and I thought she was transporting herself somewhere special and new like Japan. Or Virginia. She could have been eating sushi and walking in Mount Vernon, and I’d be with her too.

But by the time I looked up, Mandy was gone. She was talking to Jim, that bastard. I clenched my fist and made Frosty jiggle, and laughed despite myself. The receptionist passed me as the lights flickered and in the shift of light she became my mother, and I remembered the redness on her face when I said I wanted to be handsome.

***

By the time spring had it’s first bloom, the skin on my arms was an inky black up to my sleeve, and I had rings coming out of my nose, tongue, lip, and eyebrow. I had a tattoo on my knuckles that said “love”. Frosty the Snowman was lost in the river of ink that had flowed—stabbed—into my skin. If I looked closely at my forearm and clenched my fist I could imagine him jiggling and I’d grin.

***

People around the office had stopped talking to me about each new change, but I’d still see them walk by with coworkers and “whisper whisper whisper.” Only Mandy (and the receptionist) came by to talk with me. One day Mandy walked by and said, “Hey, Andy.”

“Hey Mandy.”

“How do they feel?”

“They’re tender.”

She nodded. She was referencing my latest: little silver balls lodged into my dimples in my cheeks. They made it hard to chew. I’d thought after this new piercing I’d have the confidence boost to ask Mandy out on a date, but she made me dumb and speechless and I fell in love with her all over again. That damned Mandy.

That day as I left the office, I saw Mandy walking to her car. Jim stood in front of her car door, blocking her from getting in, that douche. But as she approached, Jim lunged! Their faces were caught in a furious battle. Go Mandy, Go! Fight him off! I wanted to yell. That rat bastard Jim attacking Mandy like that! When they pulled away he grinned triumphantly, possessively.

“Hey!” I yelled angrily to him, defending my Mandy.

“Hey!” they both yelled back. Mandy turned now and looked like sunshine. They waved at me simultaneously and then got into the car. Jim was taking her hostage! Or something. I had to act fast, so I lunged behind their reversing car to stop it in its tracks. I expected the car to halt and for Mandy to jump out quick to run away, but instead the car reversed over my leg and snapped my femur. In a hot blaze of pain I screamed against the black tar and heard car doors opening and slamming shut, horrid screams amidst my own and calls for 9-1-1. I looked down at my leg and saw blood spilling on the asphalt parking lot and white sticks that looked like ivory protruding from my thigh.

I closed my eyes and let the spring sun cook me like an egg on aluminum foil. As I began to sweat, I felt my skin melt into the black tar, rivers of ink thinning out from me and filling the cracks and divots of the bituminous pitch. The hot glow behind my eyelids began to dull to black...

***

I opened my eyes and saw white. Cold linoleum flooring and a pale curtain surrounded me in bed. The place for the diseased, broken, dulled. I glanced down and my leg was bound in white plaster. I wiggled my toes and felt stabbing up my leg and I felt hot tears sear down my face.

I fell back into my pillow a tired lump and twisted my arm and felt a tug in the crease of my elbow. Sweet joy! Injection at last! I smiled and felt tingly, fantasizing about the cocktail of pain medication and sedatives, deliciously swirled in my veins and pumped through my heart. Oh joyous day. I nearly forgot about my legs then, caught up in a euphoria of injection. I only wished I had seen them slip the long needle into my vein and watch the first liquid medicines trickle into my arm, spreading through my body and—

“Hey, Andy.”

“Hey, Mandy.” Sweet, sexy Mandy stood at my bedside. Could this day get any better?

“Oh, Andy, I’m so sorry.”

“It’s OK.”

“How are you feeling?”

“I’m fine.”

“That’s good.”

“Yeah, I’m feeling pretty alive right now.” She was wearing the same mustard-yellow pantsuit, and made me sweat. I smelled like hot plastic and salt, and I hoped she didn’t smell me. Her forehead still shone a little, and I could see wisps of hair on the corner of her upper lip; she intimidated me with her perfection.

“Why did you dive behind my car?” she asked after my usual silence.

“I thought you were in danger?”

“Of what?”

“Oh, just Jim. That bastard.”

“Jim and I have been dating for the past three months, Andy.”

“Oh, sorry, Mandy.”

“It’s OK. I wish you hadn’t done that, though.”

“I’m sorry, Mandy.”

“I forgive you, Andy. I hope you feel better soon.” I felt the medication swirl inside me and heaviness on my eyes, but I tried to keep them open to look at Mandy.

“Maybe you can wheel me around the office when I come back.”

“Sorry?”

“That was a joke.”

“Oh, yeah. It was funny.”

“Thanks. I’m actually trying out this one...” My eyes were closed now and I felt sounds drift away as I closed my eyes and let my fantasies of medication lull me to sleep. When I opened my eyes Mandy was gone. She had probably walked out of my room briskly in her own way. How could I emulate her purposeful walk now? On a wheelchair maybe, but that seemed like cheating. I would move too fast, too easily.

***

I left the hospital after a few days, but I had three weeks before I had to go back to work, so I spent most days at the tattoo parlor. I’d roll inside and Matthew would greet me. He owned the shop, and I loved him. There was one chair inside and I occupied it most hours of the day as he pierced or tattooed my body. Sometimes I couldn’t feel my toes and he’d assure me that my toes were in fact there. I was grateful for him. The walls were covered with either flaming skulls or beautiful portraits of butterflies. He loved butterflies, and he knew the Latin names of every species. He liked Eurytides marcellus the most. It looked like a zebra, and I liked zebras. He would tell me the names as he dug the tattoo needle into my skin, and made me repeat them back to him: Battus philenor, Papilio polyxenes, Papilio troilus. I’d let him tattoo them onto my chest and stomach, the portrait with their latin names written underneath, and I could push my pecks together to make them fly. It made me think of Frosty the Snowman, buried now in the lake of ink on my forearm. After a while, I had a garden of butterflies on my torso, and I loved them all.

He also would give me piercings, and I’d yelp with sweet pain the Latin names of butterflies as he slid the needle through my skin. I had silver balls in my nipples and belly button, on my temples and in the cartilage of my ears. The weeks after my leaving the hospital, Matthew and I had spent most days in this ritual of ink and metal, portraiture and biology.

***

Then one day, I asked him to tattoo my eyes, and he obliged. I laid down on the table and he held my eye open with a metal cleaver, and we recited the characteristics of butterfly metamorphosis together. I bit my lip and he injected a glob of ink between my sclera and conjunctiva and turned my eyes purple. I stood up and blinked and looked at myself in the mirror. I saw two black bug eyes, and suddenly I shed black tears.

To celebrate the newest addition, Matthew closed the shop and drove me to a butterfly garden he walked in on weekends. It was on the way up that my vision started to cloud, and I had to force my eyes to stay open so the black cloud wouldn’t spread.

“Matthew?” I said, “I don’t feel well.”

“What’s up? How are your eyes?”

“They’re clouding up, Matthew! Please help me, the road is a dark purple.” I knew something had gone wrong. I guessed he had nicked a microscopic piece of my sclera as he injected the ink, which was now leaking into my vision.

“Shit, Andy, I don’t know what to do!” he yelled out, “I’m sorry! I must have nicked you.” He started to cry now. “I’m so sorry, Andy.”

“It’s OK.” My vision turned a dark purple and I couldn’t see passed the front window of the car. Matthew charged into the parking lot then of the butterfly garden, and asked me what I wanted to do.

“We might as well go in, right?” I said.

“But what about your vision, Andy?”

“Well you’ll just have to push me in.”

“Maybe we should take you to a hospital?”

“It’s no use, just let me in.”

***

And so Matthew rolled me into the building, and I saw the outline of fake trees and vines on the walls leading towards the front desk, clouded in a thick mist of purple. We paid and rubbed our hands with disinfectant wipes. As we entered, the blanket of humidity descended, and I could hear fake sounds of the jungle. All I could see was purple.

“Are there lots of them?” I ask.

“So many, Andy, Eurytides marcellus is here!”

“Wonderful!”

“Shit I wish you could see them.”

“It’s OK. Can you leave me here a while?”

“Sure.” He left and I sat in my wheelchair, letting the small drops of artificial rain fall on my skin. I sat perfectly still. Eventually I felt a tingling on my hand for a few moments, and felt a tiny wind blow as the tingling left my skin. A butterfly! It must be! I remembered the garden of butterflies on my torso and slipped off my shirt to let them breathe in their natural habitat. The tingling returned to my hands, and I felt the sensation work its way up my arms to my chest, on my legs and shoulders, and I froze in place to let the sensations cover me and envelop me, resisting the urge to shake the tickling off myself. I must have looked beautiful.

I sat for an eternity, and I felt myself sweating, melting into the chair and dripping into the ground like water off a long leaf, rivers of ink filling the damp gravel and mixing with the sweat and humidity of the garden. Billions of molecules evaporated like hot rain floating back into the atmosphere as footsteps came yelling, “they love you, Andy! They love you!”

Gus O’Connor is a Junior at Columbia College studying English, and is from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
He is a proud member of Fruit Paunch Improv. Instagram | Facebook

hello childhood best friend by Teresa Deely

Overall winner of the 2018-2019 Thunderdome contest. View the video prompt here.

who am i you vomit you are single now your existentialism feels cheap

you text your childhood best friend she is a rewind a second chance you were so happy you loved you believed you stopped time feels lost so do you

who am i who are my friends what is my life these questions are difficult now they always were no yes you just think more now and you think until it hurts and now you think it just hurts it hurts

childhood best friend hello i have dreams about you sometimes i hope that is not weird i am alone now doesn’t this feel sincere i became what i thought someone wanted me to be i was happy until i realized i wasn’t hello childhood best friend i am an adult now i do not know how to make friends what is your favorite color let’s be friends hello childhood best friend i am very alone now you seem happy we didn’t fight we grew apart you still live five minutes away what chasm i don’t see one hello childhood best friend let’s be friends again i don’t have many of them these days hello childhood best friend my life was my partner was my best friend was me now i am alone again hello childhood best friend please respond are you there there you are not where hello i am alone did you change your phone number what about facebook

hello childhood best friend you told me you would always be there for me i am waiting there now please hurry let me know when you get there childhood best friend see you there childhood best friend my subconscious will keep you warm in my dreams for now childhood best friend childhood childhood childhood

Nesting by Will Cagle

Winner of Thunderdome 2018-2019: Day 4. See the prompt here.

Open a human up, and there’s just another one inside. Like dolls on a shelf in a shop you wandered into by chance, in a place where your tongue is not spoken, and thus hardly seems real.
The first layer is the mask—constructed, a work of art, a work of fiction. It declares to the world: I am me.
But you are not you.
Inside is a second you, a realer you. This one the self might recognize, though the world would not. This one’s in charge, or so it tells itself. It watches through the eye-blanks of the mask, and thinks itself very wise.
Peel it away. It is arrogant, and unneeded. Go deeper.
The third you is a mess. It is all things at once and yet it is nothing. A taxonomy of selves. Different flavors of blood to pour into the veins. Today, I think I’ll try man. Tomorrow it may not suit me.
The fourth is foundational, and unrecognizable. A house is more than just the wooden frame, though the whole project may collapse without it. Maybe these are bones, or something far older.
Discard them.
The fifth you is smaller and wispier than a ghost. When exposed to harsh light, it may fall away to ash, so you must protect it. This one has been with us from the very beginning, and with a voice lighter than mist, it reminds you of your impermanence.
You could root around for a soul, but you won’t find one. If there is a soul, it is untouchable.
Now to put it all back together. What, have you forgotten where the pieces go? A terrible scientist, this—who can dissect and not mend. Your patient is waiting.
Dolls stacked within dolls. It’s as hopeless as that.

Security Camera by Patrick Ronan

Winner of Thunderdome 2018-2019: Day 3. See the prompt here.

A place to be. There is a woman from the Southwest kicking her heels at the bar; a young man in a sleeveless hoodie, finding as many occasions as possible to casually place his toned arms in such and such position as to catch the light just right; a boy with a patchy neckbeard; “what you see before you die is”; a toilet struggling to flush; a curly haired, black-rimmed glasses kid talking to a Jainist vegan who is explaining to him the extreme pacifist ideology behind Jainism and, to his glazey-eyed nods, how some of the more serious Jainists back in the day would wear masks lacking mouth holes in order to prevent the accidental swallowing of tiny bugs, and how no, the only masks she wears are for facial cleansing, but yes, she does practice her own form of extreme pacifism; a bald man in a black beret; a woman who looks like Adam Driver; strands of hair falling like pine needles onto the wet bar floor; “It was the YouTube algorithm that ruined my relationship with my liberal girlfriend”; jowled men at each corner trying to talk themselves out of buying that girl right there a drink; women fearing frostbite passing margaritas from left to right; elbows and butts and raincoats on pool tables stacked like sober jenga towers; “Christ on a tow truck!”; the desire to be liked nipping at the flesh under jaws; puffy jacketed freshmen turning back for their friend with the bad fake; a tired bartender whose son needs to be picked up from hockey practice; several doughy stomachs; the car crash of conversations something to close your eyes to. And me, a little black bump in the ceiling like a polished mole, always watching.

It Still Is by Parth Chhabra

Winner of Thunderdome 2018-2019: Day 2. Check out the prompt here.

This book is an insult. But that should not shock you.

How could it say anything of worth? How could it abandon a symbol so important to our writing, how could it banish so many words, so many things, and still say anything I should know?

Think of what is lost!

Lost: animals with trunks and tusks, big and smart. Lost: big plants with trunks of wood. Lost: bonds amongst humans that surpass companionship. Lost: companions. Lost: imaginations that allow us to hurt from what that human across from us is hurting from. Lost: conjugations of “is”. Lost: that famous bit from that old play about living and dying. How will that inquiry form in our mouths?

But it is good. I can’t stand it but it is good. For all its cutting and chopping and slicing, it still astounds. Astounds for though it abandons so many things, burns things without thought, it still is. Still is.

Frank and She by Alena Zhang

Winner of Thunderdome 2018-2019: Day 1. View the prompt here.

In the beginning of the world, you know, there was a fish. She didn’t mean to exist, but she tolerated her physical dimensionality with good old-fashioned patience. On a Tuesday, God came into existence. He declared two things: that there would be light and that it was a
Monday. So the fish tossed away her old calendars and accepted her spirituality without fuss.

A couple days later the fish found herself dropped into something very small and wet. It was the ocean. What she thought was that she been dropped serendipitously into a new dimension of existence. Whether it had existed all along, bold and blazing in the eternal void, or if it had come like beams from God’s fingers, love had entered her little life and blew it up. What I mean to say is that Frank was a gray lampetra fluviatilis. He had no jaw but she loved him, and by the grace of all that was holy, they were married on a Sunday.

And then there was fish sex, and fish babies, and little bubbling sounds of fishy pillow-talk, but really she and Frank were not bothered with all these lower-order concerns. What they could find they would eat; what they could digest they would eat; what they could not digest they would eat anyway. None of that mattered. The couple hovered against the tides like seaborne hummingbirds and contemplated theology, philosophy, and art; painted lovely pictures and wrote many lovely songs.

It was on a Thursday—I think—I tend to lose track of these things—that God created man. And you know the rest. He fumbled with a tree until he had a pole, fumbled with some rocks until he had a spear, and thrust it into the great big body of water until he had a meal.

I Would Die 4 My Betta Fish by Corinne Rabbin-Birnbaum

This piece was first published in Quarto's 2018 Spring Print Edition

If a murderer broke into my apartment tonight and pointed at me and then to my betta fish and said “okay, who’s it going to be?” I would look at him like he was batshit crazy and point to myself, of course. At that time my fish would probably be fluttering around his tank hysterically, thinking the murderer was just someone new to feed him. The murderer would shoot me, and as I lay bleeding out red blood the color of the fish I lay down my life for, he might ask me, “why not the fish?”
And I’d tell him, did you know in the wild, bettas swim in seemingly endless spans of shallow rice paddies? And that they can learn to recognize the vibrations that come from someone saying their name, and the face of their owner?
Or, did you know that when my fish gets tired, he twines himself around the wire protruding from his in-tank heater? He has such a slim little body, but sometimes the weight of it overcomes him and he just needs to take a rest. But he’s not lazy, for sure. I’ve even trained him to jump and eat food from between my fingers. It’s quite remarkable, if I do say so myself. He’s a very talented fish, to be honest.
And I would describe to this murderer how every night before I go to bed, even when I am so tired and anxious that my hands are shaking, I go up to his tank and say goodnight, and he flutters over and looks up at me and opens his tiny mouth for just a moment – like he’s giving me a goodnight kiss (though he’s probably just looking for food).
But I can’t leave out the story of that time he got rot and his lovely fins started to shred and disappear, how I changed his water and gave him medication every single day, even though I could tell he hated it. And when his little body started to heal, I felt pride for the first time in so so long that I practically burst into tears.
I think then I’d tell him about the way this fish of mine sits on the bottom of the tank and watches me while I do my work at the table, and how when I wave to him from where I’m sitting he starts swimming around like crazy, almost like he’s waving back.
“But I have a question,” the murderer would say to me then, after I’ve told him all of this. “If you die, who will take care of the fish?”
And with my dying breath I would say, “but if he dies, who will take care of me?”

Illustration by Cameron Lee

Consciousness by Willa Cuthrell-Tuttleman

"Consciousness" by Willa Cuthrell-Tuttleman is the winner of the 2018 Thunderdome contest. View the video prompt here.

I’m playing back the tape you brought me the last time you were here. It’s the one of you. I’m trying to understand, but the longer I watch, the longer I feel like this stitched-together compilation is just a cheap, polyester attempt at capturing something that I won’t find unless I physically enter your mind. Maybe it’s a tiny step towards insight, but nothing else. It’s like watching a foreign film without subtitles.

Some of the images on the screen are pictures, some brief clips. I stare hard, looking for the parts that you had already told me about. Baseball with your older brother. Orange. Lemonade in the summer. Waiting. For the bus, for the girl to call you back, for rain. The goldfish you won at the fair. Pringles before dinner and boxed wine and arguments with your Dad. Smoking his cigarette out of your window. Long drives in the snow.

And then the things that you don’t talk about. You steal. Attempts to ease your conscience by giving to the homeless. Empty charity. You do a lot of things that way. Letting me stay because you’d feel guilty if you’d said no. Strained kisses. Wanting to be alone. Moments in your room. Indecision. You make girls cry. I’m one of them, and I see myself on the screen, hunched over on a park bench. Shit in the toilet. You set ants on fire. Some white-blue color, the color of the sun after it collapses, the color of sun through closed eyelids. Flashing underwater.

I’m starting to get nauseous. I close the computer. There are eighteen hours left of your tape, but I can’t watch anymore, because there isn’t going to be anything else in that tape that I haven’t seen before; in yours, in mine, in anyone’s.

Quokkas by Zoe Grimes

Winner of Thunderdome Flash Fiction Contest 2018: Day 3. View the video prompt here.

There is a portal to another world and it’s one of introspection.
Kalay kalay kala, quokkas say.
It means – well.
It’s hard to say.
Perhaps kalay meaning to say and kala meaning-
Here. The human in red shorts. Is she…? Or real, even? Because humans have these strict rules, which, quokka-ka, make no sense. To you. Make no sense to you. The codification of herself. You watch the codification of her self. Her phone is: large, white, rectangular and bright. She has the back of her body to the ocean and the front of her body to the forest. The back of her phone to the forest, the front of her phone to her body.
Phone, in Quokkas, is si, and a short chittering noise.
Si chitter.
She has red jean shorts, and a pink cotton shirt, and she smiles. Why do you wait for her to leave, before…?
You stand in her footprints.
Her prints are much larger than yours.
It’s hard to say if her prints were truly there, of course. The tide comes in, the tide goes out, and feet go with it. Some things remain to be seen. But some don’t.
Your phone is: small, and black, and triangular. You stand with your furback to the ocean. Your phoneback to the forest.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
You don’t have red pants, is the problem. Or a pink shirt. Is you? Is you…you?
Take the picture, embodies the command.
Take it, and be real.
Re-alized.
Your back is to the ocean. The blue waving reflection only existing on the phone. The phone’s back is to the forest. There are leaves it can’t see.
The camera makes a chitter sound when you take the picture.
Si chitter. The ocean just says…
Whoosh.
And it’s a hard thing to hear.

Crowded Silence by Dejavis Bosket

Winner of Thunderdome Flash Fiction Contest 2018: Day 2. View the video prompt here.

F minus three hours and forty-two minutes. Berthe shifts around in the wicker chair next to mine. The dust on our porch alights into the expectant air as she slides her bare feet over the
boards.
“What are you reading?” I ask, looking not at her, but at the dripping honeysuckle moon.
“Gone with the Wind,” she replies brusquely, annoyed that she has had to snatch her cigarette out of her mouth.
I turn. The cherry at the end of her Parliament is as pink and smoldering as the moon tonight.

F minus twenty seconds. The damp hug of the sheets wakes me up, so I slither onto Berthe’s cool and untouched side of the bed. The clock calmly warns of impending sunrise. I can
see pale yellow light splashing up the stairwell, and I open my ears wide to the crowded silence
of the house.
I hear some clanging before the screen door suddenly opens and slams shut. Berthe is speaking, and then she is shouting. Her interlocutor stops whispering, growls hotly, then finally bellows with moaning vehemence while she leaves them behind and comes to me upstairs, unsurprised to find me awake. An alarm screams as we rush past our uninvited guest, who flicks and flails limbs that promise the warmest embrace.

F plus thirteen months. It’s my last day in New York. Her only relations have done their best to somberly console me: lung cancer was always lurking, they said. They took most of her personal hospital effects, save for her final book now on my hotel dresser. I walk outside and I’m cold again (looking forward to Australia), flowing along with this totem gripped tightly. There’s a bookstore  on this corner and I set the thing, heavy with secret memories, on one of the carts outside.

The Climb of the Ancient Mariner by Ainsley Katz

Winner of Thunderdome Flash Fiction Contest 2018: Day 1. View the video prompt here.

The Climb of the Ancient Mariner:
        an odyssey from water bottle to potted plant,
        or, there and back again by Mr. Carbuncle the Second

Mr. Carbuncle had a lousy day. And by lousy day I mean there wasn’t a single fish to be caught. The ocean was oddly empty and perfectly transparent. Instead of bearing fruits, it upchucked seafoam like a young apprentice after a night on the town.

Eventually Mr. Carbuncle washed up onto some plot of earth, sea-sprayed and righteously salty. His crooked grimace — as if he’d suspended a clothes hanger of heavy garments from his lip — told all there was to tell.

He pulled the water from his whiskers. Pluck, prim, tic-tac-toe.

The old man had a dismal disposition and just loathed being heaved onto terra incognita. It was truly a nuisance. On such days he'd miss the misanthropic glee he felt when, shuffling back to his fisherman’s cottage, townspeople all along the way dispersed as if he were Moses parting the Red Sea.

This particular no woman’s land was sparser than the hair on his head. A single tree was centered upon an infinite plane of dirt. He could no longer even see the sea, so far had it receded.

Because Mr. Carbuncle was too portly and stout to hitch a ride on a seagull — or (as he told himself now) because there were no gulls this far from the ocean— the only way out was down.

Out from his galoshes Mr. Carbuncle retrieved a spade. Fixing his pipe in his clothes-hanger lip, he dug and dug till his arms felt like jelly without the peanut butter glue.

As he dug, he delved into his hole until, suddenly, he found he was digging up rather than down. Out he popped from beneath the surface, to find another single-tree, soil wasteland. Exhausted and enraged he lapsed into a fitful rest, waking to the hands of a giant.