By Carston Anderson,

Introduction

A college campus is, inherently, a kind of manuscript culture in spirit if not perfect form. This is especially true of English departments, where books are accumulated at a shocking rate from a number of vectors. Print output is amplified in part by if that campus also has a Masters of Fine Arts program that encourages and demands micropress production and student publications. The department becomes a closed ecosystem, culturally isolated, that creates a constant influx of fragile, small-run materials. At the same time, a lack of formal mechanisms for preserving what circulates through it means that extinction is the norm.

Most items vanish through neglect, dispersal, or disposal long before they can be recognized as part of a local literary history. The same logic that governs rare manuscripts can also be applied to student publications. Few are made, at great cost to the maker, distributed haphazardly, and vanish save for a few copies preserved more by luck than design. The following essay is an account of my multi-week journey clearing out a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf in search of the rare, obscure, and unusual book. One would be justified in asking, why do this?

The answer is, because these books deserve to be remembered and archived. Logic dictates that, should we wait to be told what is worth preserving, the window for preservation will most likely have closed. Students, who have the most unfettered access to their department lounges and spaces, can do preservation work themselves at remarkably little cost. The cleaning of a bookshelf in an English department graduate lounge can be seen then as a kind of archaeological preservation and cultural ethnography.

Part 1: The Graduate Lounge

The Graduate Lounge on the 6th Floor of my campus is a space for ghosts. Everyone in the lounge who I have seen there, sometimes the same faces almost daily, will glance at the bookshelf inside of it, and then move on with their lives. Occasionally, someone will do a once-over and grab a title that is well-known, a Hemingway or an Updike. Then they put it back, and go back to gossip, classwork, (loving) peer harassment, or else just lounging. It existed before my arrival in the fall of 2024, and it will exist after it, although I am sure in an altered state. This is because I have meticulously mined and analyzed it, and the books, once identified, are cataloged for later sorting. For example, let’s look at the following book:

TAG: OOC was a zine made in 2015 by a number of then-current students, with grateful support from one of the MFA professors. It was a book dedicated to both Jane Austen work, as well as Harry Potter fan fiction and was full of mid 2000’s internet meme culture references and poetry. Everything about it was handmade from the cover art to the binding.

This book from 2015 had been living on the shelf since 2015, a decade by now at the time of writing, wedged on top of a stack of official campus publication journals and the ceiling. Because it had no identifying information on its spine, and was so slim as to be swallowed up by the official campus publications, it was missed. Finding it required near line-by-line analysis of the shelving. I will recreate this to the best of my ability, but please understand it will be difficult to do without photos, which I do not think I am legally permitted to take and post online.

Part 2: The Shelves

Imagine moving from left to right, like you are reading a book. There are 5 lines. Each line is a shelf jammed full of books. Line 1 is the top-most. Line 5 the bottom-most, on the floor in fact. Line 4 is Thesis and Capstone books, and will be ignored. Line 1 is pedagogical materials for teaching Composition, which are all 40 years outdated anyway. It will also be safely ignored. This means we will focus on Line 2 and Line 3, which are notably the ones also at eye level with most students.

Line 2 began with a section of poetry, which was extensively analyzed on a title-by-title basis. Looking at the full sum it is possible to suggest that this was a faculty collection dump, or at least a significant portion of it was. I confess I am still learning all the intricacies of small press culture, but I did notice a disproportionate amount from the University of Pittsburgh Press coming up.

Below that at the start of Line 3 is a semi-defunct experiment. An enterprising individual attempted to corner off a section of the shelving to be a student-driven Little Free Library. This move is something I deeply respect, but after a year and a half of observation in the room note that it is not very popular and receives little foot traffic. English students are happy to take books from it, but rare is the day someone deposits books into it.

Returning to Line 2, after the poetry comes the literary theory. This was initially glazed over, and I maintain I was correct and should not have spent as much time on this section as I should have. The real treasure was on display at the start of the line, hidden in plain sight. But once one reaches the midpoints of Line 2 and Line 3, something interesting begins to happen.

By this point I was several days into my observation and after my experiences with the suspected faculty dump I was beginning to know what to look for. Smaller books, thinner books, books thick but without text on their spines, anything that had been held together by staples.

These were rather easy to find once one recognized that you did not need to look through a stack of magazines to find the treasure in the middle; you only needed to find the lumps, gaps, or inconsistencies in the layering. For example, let’s go back to our earlier example in Item Number 2025.037, it was on top of a large stack of official campus publications. It took up 1/4th the size of the rest of the journals, the break in spine text and the dead air around it was a massive giveaway.

Another example is a journal titled (un)civil. It was found hidden between five copies of the journal Agni issue #38, and a stack of official campus publications on the other side. I do, tentatively, want to suggest that there is a correlation between student publications and other small press publications being lumped up with flagship publications. By association, someone is categorizing them as equals when one has large scale institutional support, and the other was made by 3 graduate students over 1 semester for a class project. Magazines go with magazines, and all are equal in that they were placed and forgotten.

This section of Lines 2 and 3 were especially rich in materials in a low-density manner. The suspected faculty dump was a vein of gold. These sections of Lines 2 and 3 were more like scattered nuggets of gold. This took about 20 minutes in total. To put that into context, I spent about 4 hours on the suspected faculty poetry.

The farthest right part of the shelves was a no man’s land. Difficult to access during peak hours due to the placement of a table and chair right in front of it, the majority of this was more pedagogical, more mass market paperback books in poor condition.

Part 3: The Stratigraphic Deposit

Excavations continued at odd hours when the lounge was not in use, one of the many perks of doing this kind of research at the end of a semester. I returned to the lounge to do one final look as the fall 2025 semester was coming to an end, and this is when I found my curiosity drawn to the bottommost shelf.

Getting at it in order to see the entire shelf clearly as a whole required physically laying down on the floor to get a clear view of what was stored there (which I think justifies clearly why it was overlooked until now, given the hygiene of the environment.) The books were visible from the doorway because of the angle, but the closer you got the less visible they became as books were pushed up against the wall so as to become invisible.

What was found was a surprisingly robust collection of ephemera from the late 1970s to the early 2000s, with the bulk of the shelving being skewed towards the mid to late 1980s. Extreme caution was taken before I touched anything, as I immediately recognized the age of the materials and began to quickly run calculations on suspected rarity.

After this, I at once began to pull and categorize materials, but found quickly there was no real need to do so. Someone had already done it by publisher / organization. For example, all of Journal #1 was with Journal #1 in chronological order. All of Journal 2 was with Journal 2 next to journal one. Not alphabetized, but I managed to catch myself before I pulled and sorted too much out to miss the fact that this section on the floor had been placed with a deliberate methodology that I did not understand fully, mostly due to lack of access to the organizer. But I by now knew enough of this lounge shelving to notice this particular row was very different.

For example, why was a student publication from 1991 organized with a small press publication from 1984? The rest of it is too neatly organized to suggest a simple mistake. It could have had something to do with geography (journals go in chronological order with journals from the same region) but further study would have been needed to explicitly confirm this. All we can say with definitive certainty is that it was too suspiciously ordered to be a true ‘dump’ of random books in the traditional sense of what a book dump is.

At the time of writing only the first half had been gone through, and resulted in the discovery of 32 individual books worthy of archival preservation based on age, provenance, and explicit rarity as local small-press ephemera. Indeed, several journals from the early 1970s stated they were hand bound by the editors which implies low print runs that, coupled with roughly 55 years of circulation (between 1970-2026) imply low survival rates and low archival presence. Unfortunately, there was no way to reverse engineer my way to an answer here.

Conclusion

Having spent so much time pouring through these shelves, and collecting some 200 books (some of which did not exist in internet databases due to the fact they were hand-made by the authors pre-2000.) we should now turn to what it actually means to archive something.

Anyone can start an archive. But the difference between ‘archiving’ and ‘hoarding’ is often metadata. It’s not enough to have the book, you need to answer why you have the book, when you got the book, where you got the book, what the book really is, and how it was made, traveled, and purchased / found to the best of your ability. With metadata less is not more, as I understand it, more is more. Having amassed these books I set about building a Google Site, uploading photos, building a logic for organization (often just “year.Item Number”, which looks like “2025.001”.) and spreading the word among my peers.

The response was one of open curiosity to wild excitement. Students now could reach out to me directly after looking at the website, request a book, and have it handed off to them with the promise of returning it. A functional working system that cost maybe 48 hours over a week to build and $0. It is scalable, replicable, and easily done in any campus English department. As a resource, an archive is invaluable for both primary source research and inspiration. It also fosters a sense of campus culture, where students can literally hold pieces of their own programs’ history in their hands and know that, should they produce their own work, 10 years down the line someone else will be doing the same to it.

Carston Anderson is a graduate student in Boston, Massachusetts

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By Victoria Costello,

Like anyone with a screen, I’ve been enraged and debilitated by the daily onslaught of Epstein-related horrors filling our newsfeeds. Add to it, my shame at realizing I’ve lived six decades unaware of the cabal of rich and powerful men, the same billionaires who run every major institution on which we depend, operating an international human trafficking syndicate to facilitate their crimes.

Triggered, anyone?

As a published author and writing teacher of trauma-centered memoir and autofiction, I have another, more immediate stake in this bizarre cultural moment. Since last December, I’ve been meeting weekly with eighteen, mostly female adult writers who are working on stories that reveal pretty much the worst things that have ever happened to them, including several cases of childhood sexual assault. My purpose with the class is to provide a safe space for these writers. First, to identify their traumatic memories. Then help them translate those experiences into a compelling story with a beginning, middle and end. This is storytelling as a path to healing — for the benefit of the writers themselves and, ultimately, their readers.

As the Epstein horrors have metastasized into a near constant sound bath, I’ve watched several of my students — who range in age from their low thirties to high seventies and represent both aspiring and veteran authors — be massively triggered by what they’re hearing. How could they not be? Some of their experiences come close to crimes contained in the Epstein files: namely, years of sexual assaults committed by adults who’ve never faced accountability.

One result of this surreal juxtaposition is that our class discussions, which previously would focus on tried-and-true topics like character and plot, or literary conventions associated with memoir versus a novel or the hybrid genre known as autofiction, have changed and expanded. Suddenly, topics such as statutes of limitations on childhood sex abuse, and the legal standards required to convict a perpetrator in a court of law, have entered these conversations.

For those writers who are fictionalizing key aspects of their life stories, these discussions have catalyzed some important questions. What if I had told my grandma/teacher/neighbor what was happening to me, and they had helped me get free of my abuser?

As the latest narrative medicine research has shown, the process of asking such what if questions, and changing the story of what happened to you in the realm of fiction can empower you in real life. Not to deny factual truth. But to accept it and allow oneself to take a step back if only to change the way you understand what happened to you. For example, to shift your identity from that of a victim to a survivor.

So, I’ve made room for these discussions just as I’ve encouraged my students to express their feelings about the latest Epstein revelations as they feel the need. Frankly, it’s been tough going. One young writer confessed, in tears, to the group that her “previously conquered” fear of ridicule and censure had returned in force, leading her to decide against finishing or sharing her story. Vulnerability, always a big part of this process, has been put on overdrive.

But I’m also sensing some positive effects coming from what I perceive as the formation of a new permission structure in our public discourse, one that allows for more open and honest discussions of these intimate, once taboo subjects. Along with greater understanding of basic trauma recovery questions, like Why did you wait so long to tell anyone? It’s a shift that ultimately will help survivors shed the shame so often attached to such testimonies, whether at the kitchen table or in a court of law — especially those involving bodily violations.

As any creative writing teacher, psychotherapist or social worker will tell you, violence against children takes many forms. The most common category I see in my students’ stories is emotional and physical abuse by parents and other authority figures. And yet, there are innumerable variations.

One sixty-something writer in my current class is telling the story of growing up under the violent authoritarian control, first of her minister father, then a husband, in a fundamentalist Christian sect. Another is recounting the aftermath of a school shooting, with a dual focus on her own PTSD as a student survivor, and the impacts she has witnessed on her community over two decades.

What’s new in these survivor stories?

Given the unavoidable truth that every human life involves suffering, trauma is by no means a new dimension in anyone’s life story. What’s different today is our understanding of its potentially devastating, long-term impacts. We now know that trauma can be both ancestral and collective, a result of large scale physical and emotional violence wrought by poverty, war, slavery and racism, genocide and forced immigration.

One current student is writing from the perspective of a third-generation Pakistani refugee who is writing to come to terms with the lasting effects of the displacement and rootlessness her family experienced as a result of the 1949 India-Pakistan partition. Another connected her struggle to decide whether to have children to a history of child abandonment in her maternal lineage, a pattern created by losses suffered in the Armenian Genocide of 1915.

Through the science of epigenetics, researchers can now pinpoint the cellular mechanisms involved in the intergenerational transfer of these inherited wounds, along with their physical and behavioral manifestations on individuals. The good news is that as somatic psychotherapy and other healing modalities evolve, including expressive writing, we’re also seeing evidence of their healing.

In one 2012 study of forty-seven depressed out-patients who were given daily writing exercises, researchers charted depressive symptoms and correlated their alleviation with the amount of agency patients gave themselves as the protagonists of their personal stories. Remarkably, after evaluating 600 patient narratives, they noted how certain measurable mental health improvements showed up on the page before their authors exhibited those positive behaviors in their actual lives. According to lead researcher Jonathan Adler, PhD, “It’s like they told a new story and then lived their way into it.”

When I allow myself to continue on this trajectory beyond law, politics, and science, a not insignificant part of me sees the Epstein Files as the catalyst for a necessary spiritual showdown between the forces of good and evil. One portending an imminent choice for humanity between an evolutionary upgrade versus slipping into another, eternal dark age. Only time will tell on the global scale.

As individuals, we don’t need to wait. By which I mean, we can each make positive change happen. How? When we find ourselves in conversation with someone who dares to speak their truth about a traumatic life experience, we can openly believe and support them. But why stop there? Part of the larger shift that I sense happening in response to the courage shown by Epstein survivors and the conversations they’ve catalyzed is the growing realization that there are benefits to be gained for each of us — and for our greater community — when we release the individual traumas we carry.

Here I’m not only talking about the most dramatic forms of childhood abuse or neglect. Your baggage could amount to learned behaviors that led you to discount your own emotional needs. To live your life and form relationships based on false beliefs like I don’t deserve love or I’m not good enough. One good way to start the healing process is to make a conscious effort to remember what happened to you. The next step is to discern what defensive behaviors you’ve developed to compensate for that hurtful experience. At that point, you’re ready to release what no longer serves you through whatever means or methods you’re comfortable with. Expressive writing is one such path.

Meanwhile in book world

Defending trauma-centered storytelling against hostile critics is nothing new for me and other authors and writing teachers who specialize in the literary genres most commonly associated with it, namely memoir and autofiction. The dismissive labels of Misery Lit and Trauma Porn, and accusations of false memories and profit-motivated exaggerations have been around since the early 2000s, when A Child Called It exposed the then taboo subject of child abuse and became a national bestseller.

The same criticisms have been fueled by the more recent headline grabbing ‘expose’ associated with the memoir The Salt Path. And while some criticisms of these and other works may be well-founded, my beef is with the across-the-board negative branding of trauma-centered narratives, which suggests the presence of the same misogyny shown toward female dominated literary subgenres like Women’s Fiction, chick lit and romance, is again at work.

And yet, the popularity of trauma-centered literature appears immune to multiple ‘controversies’ literary and other critics continue to attach to them. Arguments about how we should classify works in which the author overtly, or covertly, tells a personal story, with or without fictional elements. Is it a memoir or novel? Most publishers take the easy way out and choose the latter, even for books that would more accurately be labeled works of autofiction.

I have argued elsewhere that by acknowledging when true-life accounts contain elements of fiction we can help both authors and readers work with nuances and write better stories. Frankly, it appears that consumers of these stories depicting real people overcoming life’s hard knocks simply aren’t pay attention to such critical debates. Neither do they seem bothered about the sheer quantity of trauma narratives flooding both traditional publishing and the chaotic, self-published marketplace. In that sense, publishers are off the hook, leaving any such discussions in the hinterlands of academia — and in the classrooms of trauma-informed writing teachers like me.

So what does any of this have to do with where we find ourselves in the age of Epstein?

As writers, readers, publishers, and book reviewers, we can apply this same sensitivity and awareness to the authors who step forward and share their trauma-centered stories. By definition, those who tell their stories in a form available to all of us are doing the heavy lifting. By speaking their truths, and shifting their perspectives from victim to survivor, they show us that healing is possible.

Victoria Costello is an Emmy Award winning documentary filmmaker, a science journalist, an author of memoir and fiction and a writing teacher.

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By J. M. C. Kane,

The Silver Legacy wasn’t a casino so much as a place where casinos came to feel tired. Gary Phelps had driven six hours from Bakersfield to be here, which was not unusual. He had driven farther for less. This was show number forty on the five-year reunion tour, and he’d missed only three—two for his mother’s funeral and one for a kidney scare that turned out to be nothing.

He found his spot at the bar where he could see the stage and ordered a club soda. He didn’t drink anymore. Linda had taken that from him when she left, or given it to him, depending on how you looked at it. Sobriety was the one thing in his life that had stuck.

The t-shirt he wore was older than his marriage had been. Columbus, 1974. An arena show, back when Denny Avalon could fill an arena. Gary had been fifteen, paper route money folded in his pocket, and when Denny came out for the encore and played “Carry You Home,” Gary had understood something about the size of his own life for the first time. How small it was. How the song made that okay. He’d bought the shirt at the merch table and gotten it signed in the parking lot afterward, Denny leaning out of a tour bus window with a Sharpie, laughing at something someone inside had said. The signature had faded to a gray smear decades ago, but Gary could still trace where it had been.

He didn’t wash the shirt. Hadn’t in years. Before each show he’d spray it with Febreze and let it hang in whatever motel bathroom he was using, and that was enough. Linda used to say it smelled like devotion gone sour. She’d said a lot of things. The kids had sided with her in the end, which felt fairer than he liked admitting, and after his brother died there wasn’t anyone left who still called just to hear his voice. For the last five years it had really just been the shirt, the drives, and Denny, and that had turned out to be enough. Better than enough, some days.

The room was half-full, which was better than Laughlin last month. Mostly women Gary’s age, a few older, the kind who remembered when Denny’s face had been on lunchboxes and bedroom walls. The men who came were usually husbands, dutiful and bored. Gary was neither. He was something else, something he’d stopped trying to name.

The first set went the way first sets went. Denny’s voice had thinned over the years, gone reedy in the upper register, but he knew how to work around it now. He told the same stories between songs—the time he’d met Elvis, the session musician who’d played on “Carry You Home” and later joined Fleetwood Mac, the night he’d gotten so drunk in Tulsa he’d played the whole show in his underwear. Gary knew the stories by heart. He mouthed some of the punchlines.

At intermission, Gary made his way toward the stage door where Denny usually came out to shake hands. This was the ritual. Forty shows, thirty-seven conversations of increasing length. Denny knew his name now, asked about his drive, remembered details Gary had mentioned months ago. Last time, in Reno, Denny had said, “You’re the most loyal person I’ve ever met.” Gary had thought about that sentence every day since. Linda had once told him loyalty was just stubbornness that learned how to apologize, but Denny hadn’t meant it like that. He’d meant it as a blessing. Gary had been happy to carry it around like one.

A few women had gathered near the door, clutching tour programs and old vinyl sleeves. Gary stood apart from them, not wanting to seem like that, though he was exactly like that. He watched the door.

When Denny came out, he looked grayer than he had three weeks ago. Tired in a way that went past tired. He signed the programs, posed for photos, made the small jokes that kept people moving. Then his eyes found Gary and something in his face softened. “My man,” he said. “Forty shows. You’re out of your mind, you know that?” “Probably,” Gary said.

He thought of correcting the record to thirty-seven shows, but before he or Denny could say more, a man appeared at his elbow. Mid-sixties, thin, carrying a manila envelope thick enough to matter. He didn’t look angry. That was the part Gary would remember later—how calm the man was, how ordinary, like someone returning a library book.

“Mr. Avalon,” the man said. “My name is Ted Kendrick. I’ve been trying to reach you for some years now. Letters, then emails, then Facebook comments.”

Denny’s face did something complicated. “I don’t—”

“I wrote ‘Carry You Home,’” the man said. “I sent you a demo tape in 1971. I have the registered mail receipt. I have affidavits from three people who heard me play it before you ever recorded it. I have the original cassette.” He held up the envelope, let the cassette slide out into his hand. “It’s all here.”

The women with their programs had stopped talking. Gary felt the floor shift beneath him, though it hadn’t moved.

“I don’t want money,” Ted Kendrick said. “I don’t want to sue you. I just want you to go back on that stage and tell the truth. Credit me. Promise never to play it again. That’s all. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”

Denny’s mouth opened, closed. He looked at Gary, then away. He appeared to be having trouble swallowing. Gary moved toward him, holding out his club soda, but Denny suddenly turned and walked quickly toward one of those black domed trashcans. His head nearly swallowed inside the little chrome spring door as he vomited.

Gary winced and Denny pushed through a door marked STAFF ONLY, and disappeared. Ted Kendrick stood holding his envelope. The women drifted away, muttering, looking for somewhere to smoke. Gary didn’t move.

“You’re the one who comes to all the shows,” Ted said. It wasn’t a question.

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry,” Ted said, and he sounded like he meant it. “I didn’t know there’d be someone like you.”

Gary thought Linda would have a field day with that line. He could almost see her sneer and had to blink it away.

He looked at the staff door. It stayed closed. From somewhere down the hallway came a sound that might have been more retching, or might have been the smoke-digester kicking on.

“Avalon’s not coming back out,” Ted said. “I can tell.”

“No.”

“I really am sorry. You seem like a decent man.”

Gary couldn’t think of anything to say to that. After a while, Ted Kendrick put the envelope under his arm and walked toward the exit, past the slot machines and the empty blackjack tables, and was gone.

Gary waited. He wasn’t sure what he was waiting for. The staff door didn’t open. An announcement came over the speakers: the second set would be delayed. Then, ten minutes later: the second set had been canceled. Refunds available at the bar in the form of drink tickets.

The women who’d been waiting came back, complained to each other, left. The bartender started putting chairs up on tables nearest the stage. Gary sat at the bar, then stood in the hallway until a security guard asked if he needed help finding the exit.

He drove to Stockton the next afternoon. He’d had the motel booked for a week—the tour was supposed to play three California dates, Stockton and Fresno and Sacramento, and he’d planned to see all of them. The Stockton show was at a converted movie theater downtown, the kind of place that hosted comedy nights and tribute bands. Gary had looked it up online. It seated four hundred.

He parked on the street and walked toward the entrance. The marquee still had Denny’s name on it, black letters on white plastic. But taped to the glass door was a printout on plain paper: DUE TO UNFORESEEN CIRCUMSTANCES, TONIGHT’S PERFORMANCE HAS BEEN CANCELED. ALL REMAINING TOUR DATES SUSPENDED. REFUNDS AVAILABLE AT POINT OF PURCHASE.

Gary read it twice. Then he read the marquee. Then he looked down at his shirt—the Columbus shirt, the faded signature, the smell of Febreze and fifty years.

There was a Smoker’s Outpost by the door, one of those plastic pillar things with sand in its belly. Gary pulled the shirt over his head. The evening air was cool on his chest, cooler than he’d expected. He looked at the shirt in his hands. He’d worn it to forty shows. He’d worn it to his mother’s funeral, under a blazer. He’d been wearing it the night Linda told him she was leaving, which was also the night she told him why.

He realized, standing there in front of the locked glass, that for five steady years he had known where he was going, where he’d sleep, what song would be waiting for him at the end of the drive. It wasn’t much of a life, maybe, but it was assembled, held together, something that could be pointed at. Fuck Linda and her disapproval—he had been happy in it, genuinely happy.

He draped the shirt over the Smoker’s Outpost, centering it so the faded signature faced the street—smoke ghosted through the thin fabric. Then he turned and walked back toward the motel, past the dark theater, past his parked car, his chest pale and bare in the last of the light.

The room was paid for through Friday. He had no reason to stay and no reason to leave. In the morning, he thought, he’d figure out which one mattered less.

J.M.C. Kane is an autistic writer from England, though now claimed by New Orleans, who has spent most of his adult life trying to fit long stories into short boxes. He has worked as a paperboy, a contracting executive, and an amateur cataloguer of human regret—none of which he was formally trained for. He was formally trained as a lawyer, but he is, frankly, a better cataloguer. His fiction has appeared in almost three-dozen journals that appreciate compression—and his willingness to obey word counts. Kane was Shortlisted for the 2025 Letter Review Prize for Short-Fiction, Shortlisted for 32nd Annual Robert J. DeMott Short Prose Contest (2025), Longlisted for the L’Esprit Leopold Bloom Prize for Innovative Narration, and has recently been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His most recent work, “After the Cut” was published in Palisades Review in December 2025.

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It’s the post-Christmas travel season, when frigid and frugal Canadians make their way to the airport in flip fops, holding a Tim Horton’s tumbler, which will soon be filled with free booze from an all-inclusive resort in the Dominican Republic, Cuba, or other RedTag.ca recommended destination. It’s on these trips that Canadians often meet Americans on neutral territory, with the added risk of speaking too freely while drunk or suffering from heat exhaustion. In the good old days, we had a script for these encounters:

“Yes, some people really say ‘eh.’”

“No, I don’t really think it sounds like ‘a-boot’ when I say ‘about,’ but sure.”

“Actually, I do enjoy our nationalized health care, thank you very much.”

Today, the risks are much more dangerous. Here’s a handy guide on how to safely travel during an era of American invasions (and how to discourage them from invading us.)

1. Choose your destination carefully:

Cuba used to be a safe American-free spot but maybe not this year. Perhaps avoid Colombia and Mexico, too. (You weren’t planning on a trip to Greenland, anyway I guess?) Dubai offers fancy chocolates, and I hear it could be the next Florida of the Middle East. (Don’t ask about the next Riviera. You’re on holiday!) While you’re gone, try not to worry about Canada being economically decimated before it’s invaded. That’s a Monday problem.

2. What to do if you are at a resort and an American engages you in conversation about all that’s wrong with Canada?

If you find yourself at a swim-up bar or buffet line and an American corners you, wanting to talk about how the government is massacring children with medically assisted dying or they inquire about our mafia-style approach to dairy supply management, remember to smile and be self-deprecating. “Yes, your Niagara Falls is so much nicer than our Niagara Falls.” If that goes well, try embracing their local dialect and sensibilities. Consider adding, “I don’t know about that Rainbow Bridge. Seems too woke for my liking.”

3. How to react when an American asks if you want to become the 51st State?

Practice this before you go. Laugh heartily. “Ha, ha. Your President is such a great joker. The last time we laughed with a Canadian politician, was when Prime Minister Jean Chrétien put an anti-poverty protestor in a chokehold in ’96.” Move the conversation to the President’s acting success. For example, “I loved him in The Apprentice and Home Alone.” If you’re feeling confident, talk about this winter’s blockbuster American Invasion and mention how it illustrates the president’s impressive range. “You don’t think they’ll make a sequel, do you?”

4. What if the U.S. invades Canada while you’re gone

This one’s important and you won’t like the answer: don’t try to come back. You are one of them now. Channel your inner Celine Dion, singing, “My Heart Will Go On” and think of the Titanic. Don’t be a Jack and take the raft. Speaking of Jack, you can now enjoy yours with coke. Also, Kentucky Bourbon! Drop u’s from most words and never apologize if someone walks into you. Remember us the way we’d like to be remembered, eating our last beavertails. And if you run into Katy Perry, tell her that you heard her boyfriend was the best governor Canada had ever seen.

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Jolly dies on the gym floor in front of you, ten weeks out from your first bodybuilding competition, dies with sweaty armpits and the worst BO, dies with a grey face and bile in his goatee, dies with a crowd of other trainers around him, who watch him die, die with sweaty armpits and the worst BO, except Axl, who has his eyes closed and takes Jolly’s pulse from the wrist, Axl, who says over and over, Jolly’s dead, Jolly’s dead; dies with your hands on his chest, over his heart, smooshing it to the beat of the gym’s techno music, AED thrown aside, kaput after the first shock—Paramedics say to keep compressing, says Taryn, who’s on the phone with dispatch. So you continue to smoosh; smoosh and smoosh.

When Jolly dies, you have fresh in your system 750 mg of Testosterone Enanthate (for gains), 50 mg of Winstrol (for gains), 30 mg of Dianabol (for gains), 350 mg of Trenbolone Acetate (for hardness, edge), 6 IU of Human Growth Hormone (for recovery/gains), 6 IU of insulin (for glucose absorption/the pump), 50 mg of Ephedrine (for fat loss/gusto), 0.5 mg of Arimidex (to prevent breast growth), 20 mg of Telmisartan (to manage blood pressure), and a multivitamin (for health). Also being metabolized are the three chicken breasts, four-and-a-half cups of rice, and half-litre of black coffee you’ve consumed that day, so far, as well as the yogurt-oat-protein powder-peanut butter smoothie you chugged right before Jolly’s session.

You are 272 lbs, 9% body fat, and your chest has begun to ache toward the end of your daily treadmill sessions—but not as bad as your left glute aches when you sit down after the cardio, its flesh the pincushion for your injections. Sometimes, at night, when you rub numbing cream into this glute, you hear applause, stadiums of fans who clap and cheer, and you need to tell yourself to focus, to not get ahead of yourself; Focus, champ, you tell yourself, and then you rub the numbing cream into your glute. Focus, champ, is what you now tell yourself, too, with your hands over Jolly’s heart. Focus, focus, focus; smoosh, smoosh, smoosh.

Over the phone, Jolly’s wife, assures you it wasn’t your fault, that Jolly was old, old and liked his cigars, liked his cigars, his gin, his Berliners, his Viagra—but she sues you anyway, Jolly’s wife does, the morning of his funeral, nine weeks out from your show; she sues you for one hundred times what you earn yearly as a trainer; sues you for more money than you’ve banked over the course of your entire life…so you don’t attend Jolly’s funeral, even though you liked Jolly, liked him a lot, liked him because he made you laugh, made everyone laugh, which was why they called him Jolly. No, you go to the gym and hit arms instead, hit arms harder than you’ve ever hit arms—thrash your biceps till they’re so engorged you can barely straighten your elbows; demolish your triceps till they’re so inflamed you can hardly straighten them either, so they now rest at obtuse angles at your sides, neither bent, nor straight, just gorgeous. When you flex your triceps in the mirror, they look like horseshoes, horns turned skyward for luck. You add an extra set to each exercise, in honour of Jolly, Jolly’s bile-coated goatee, Jolly’s grey face, Jolly, dear Jolly, dear Jolly who made you laugh.

At work, eight weeks out, when you tell Sgt. Tanner, your strongest client, about Jolly, he tells you his squad once broke through a suspect’s front door and found a trail of shit that went from the suspect’s bathroom to his bedroom, where they discovered the suspect dead, naked, and on all-fours, ass in the air, shit on his ass, his body blackened and hardened and covered in flies, so many flies, and then one of the cops poked the suspect with her shotgun and all the gases in his innards detonated, detonated so forcefully a chunk landed in Sgt. Tanner’s mouth—All of this to say, there’s worse ways to go, Sgt. Tanner assures you before showing you a picture of the exploded corpse.

When you tell Abigail, your most intelligent client, about Jolly, she says she once worked out so hard she got temporary amnesia—forgot where she was and who she was for nearly an hour (All of this to say, things happen, she says, especially as we get older). When you tell Elliot, your most elderly client, about Jolly, he blinks his rheumy eyes at the dumbbell in his hand and asks you if his knuckles look like elephant knees. Then you head home for the day, home sweet home, where in your mailbox you find a letter informing you your court date’s set for the day after your show.

Seven weeks out, your insurance company still can’t decide if what happened to Jolly was negligence or not, but confess CCTV footage is not kind to your cause—because your phone, your damn phone, your damn phone was in your hand when Jolly collapsed, with your damn face tilted toward the screen. But your damn phone was only in your hand because Jolly was on one of his notoriously long rest breaks, the long breaks he took whenever he did lunges, breaks that could last five minutes, five whole minutes, five minutes of panting and perspiring and yowzas and woowees, so you checked your phone for a second, just a second, because Jolly seemed fine, was breathing hard, yes, but seemed fine, so you took a few seconds to look at your phone while he panted and perspired and woowee’d on his workout bench…and because your eyes were on your phone, you didn’t immediately see his head slump, his body fold, his sweat rain down on the tiles—and you didn’t hear him spit up that bile either, gym radio too loud to hear him spit up that bile. So now the insurance company can’t decide if you’re liable, all because you took twenty seconds to look at your abs…or maybe it was a minute; maybe that’s how long it was.

Six weeks out, your insurance company determines you’re at fault and will therefore not cover you if you’re found guilty of negligence. You take a sick day and spend the afternoon in front of your computer, scrolling through photographs of yourself from the pre-steroid days, back when you were young, svelte, and human-looking. In your teens, you had been a runner, a world class runner, able to run marathons in less than two-and-a-half hours, half-marathons in less than sixty-five minutes, and 10Ks in less than thirty minutes…and then one day, you decided to run a hundred kilometres, just to see if you could do it, and you did it, in eight hours, you did it, you ran a hundred kilometres, ran the whole way, and after you ran that hundred kilometres, your dad called you champ, and your mom baked you a cake that said CHAMP on it, CHAMP scrawled in gold icing, and even though your mom and dad are gone now, just like Jolly, you still remember that cake, twenty years later, still remember how it had the word CHAMP on it, scrawled in gold icing; and you also remember the way your knee swelled after you ate that cake, because it turned out that hundred-kilometre run had ruptured your meniscus, ruptured it so bad that when it eventually healed, it healed wrong, all wrong, and you never could run again the same way afterward, even though your doctor said it was healed, as healed as it would ever be—so you lost your scholarship and your girlfriend, and your dad never called you champ again, and your mom never baked you another cake with the word CHAMP on it, even though you had run all that way.

Five weeks out and calories are now down to 3200 kcal/day, with daily macros set at 400 g of protein, 300 g of carbs, and 45 g of fat. Anabolics down too, replaced by diuretics—time to lean out and dry out and get your muscles grainy. But all this leanness and dryness has you hungrier and thirstier than you’ve ever been—so hungry and thirsty you need to take Propranolol and Lorazepam to keep calm at work, and then Zolpidem at night to fall asleep. But the Zolpidem doesn’t keep Jolly away, those dreams of Jolly; doesn’t keep away his grey face, his bile-coated goatee, his cigars, his Berliners, his Viagra.

You meet your lawyer at the coffee shop, four weeks out from the competition, and you can’t understand the words that whizz out of his mouth, too tired, hungry, thirsty, dizzy, and dumb to understand his whizzing words, so you ask him to simplify, to slow down and simplify; to make his words stupider for your slow and simple brain. He shuts his briefcase, rubs his eyes, says, We can’t fucking win. I’m sorry—we just can’t.

Three weeks out: you now lift in oversized sweatshirts to hide your pump, with the necks cut out so your traps pop through the top, hinting at what’s underneath, at this body that’s been under construction for twenty years, this body you’ve kept off stage, all to yourself; this body that up until six months ago seemed destined for obscurity, before you glanced at yourself in the bathroom mirror one morning and saw what you saw: that guy—that guy who since his divorce couldn’t keep a woman in his life for longer than a month; that guy whose daughter called another man Dad and hid behind her mom’s legs on the rare occasions you were allowed to visit her, until her mom could convince her you weren’t an ogre; that guy who couldn’t afford a car or brand-name foods—but had 23-inch biceps, forearms like Popeye, and just enough courage to wear a thong in front of a crowd.

During your last leg day, two weeks before the show, you start to see dots, a grid of black dots, and then the blood’s out of your head and you don’t exist for a moment—no more you, no more competition, no more legalese, no more Jolly—and then you open your eyes and Axl’s bent over you, his smelling salts under your nose, your barbell behind him, caught on the rack’s safety arms. Axl pats you on the shoulder and says, Take ‘er easy, champ—calls you champ Axl does, and that slows your heart a bit.

One week out, they move your hearing to the same day as your show, so you call Jolly’s wife to beg her to un-sue you—but the call goes to voicemail, so you beg her there instead, beg her to change her mind, you cry and you beg, you cry and you say sorry, you cry out the little water left in your body, and say sorry, sorry about Jolly, for what happened to Jolly, for getting distracted by your abs and not being able to smoosh him back to life; Sorry it all went wrong, you say. Then her voicemail beeps to let you know you’re out of time. And now a hammer’s in your hand and holes are in your wall and your bathroom mirror’s shattered and your computer’s smashed and your plates are splintered and your glassware’s busted and your cutlery’s on the floor, kitchen drawers lolling like tongues—and here come the sirens, here come the cops, another lawyer needed now, more legalese on its way. In your holding cell, you sleep, just lie there and sleep, and even though you’ve taken no pills, it’s the best sleep you’ve had in a long while.

On stage, illuminated by downlight, the other competitors stare at you in all your oiled/spray-tanned glory; stare at your jutting biceps, your striated triceps, your Clydesdale haunches, your Manta Ray back; stare at your vascular forearms, your bulbous calves, your bowling ball delts, your protruding pecs. They can’t look away; no one can.

Max Szredni is a Vancouver, British Columbia–based writer and small business owner working in the holistic health and wellness field. He graduated from the University of Victoria in 2019, where he studied psychology and fiction. Outside of writing, his passions include breathwork, hiking, athletics, and travel. You can find him @pacific_pulse_wellness

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Before I lived there, I was told the previous tenants had left suddenly. No one explained why. The apartment felt recently unsettled, as if its patterns had been interrupted but not yet erased. I learned the place not through what was present, but through what had stopped.

The weight arrived at 6:14. Always 6:14. Ceramic, circular, heat spreading into grain. The pressure said: coffee, morning, the day beginning. Second weight at 6:31. Different hands. Lighter. Bowl, spoon, the small vibrations of eating. Rhythm: scrape, pause, scrape. Evening brought plates. Two sets. Forearms resting, elbows finding the same spots—left side worn smoother than the right. Papers rustling. Laptop heat. Pencil scratching. Sometimes laughter, a vibration through legs into floor. The table held weight. That was function.

—

Water at 6:47. Pressure began low, adjusted after twenty seconds. Temperature: 41°C. Breathing through spray—inhale, exhale, proof of body. Eight minutes. Water stop. At 7:12, the second body. Cooler. 38°C. Slower breathing. Eleven minutes. Two bodies, two temperatures, two rhythms. The shower knew them both by degree and duration.

—

Morning grip at 7:18: firm, rushed. Wetness, mint, ninety seconds. Second grip at 7:29: gentler, two minutes. The other toothbrush in the cup: parallel. Same direction. They never touched but were always paired. Two grips, two mouths, two drying cycles. The cup held them both.

—

The weight at 6:14. Water at 6:47. Grip at 7:18. Every day. The apartment measured itself this way—not in hours, but in coffee heat, in steam, in wetness and drying. Time was: this, then this, then this. Again tomorrow. Pattern without deviation.

Until the boots.

—

Boots. Not feet—boots. Weight that struck instead of stepped. Voices at wrong frequency, wrong rhythm. Doors opening, staying open. Cold air from the hallway, air that shouldn’t be inside. Hands on the table surface—wrong temperature, wrong pressure. Pressing down like searching. Papers scraped aside, not lifted. Something metal dragged across grain, leaving a line that hadn’t existed. Furniture in other rooms scraping floor. Sounds that didn’t belong to morning. The table lifted, tilted. Slammed back down. Voices louder. Then the two familiar weights, moving wrong. Not the morning shuffle to kitchen, not the evening return from door. Moving fast. Irregular. Then: gone. Door open. Staying open. Voices fading down the hallway. Silence that didn’t end.

6:14 came. The weight didn’t arrive.

Only daylight.

—

6:47. Water didn’t start. Through walls: other sounds. Shouting. Furniture scraping. A door slamming. Not this door—somewhere else in the building. The pipes rattled, pressure changing from other apartments. But here: nothing. No water. No breathing. Light through the window marked hours. Morning became afternoon. 18:12 came. The second body didn’t arrive. Evening. Night. The pipes stayed cold. Water waiting, unmoving.

—

Morning grip didn’t come either. The cup remained still. Light moved across the bathroom—the counter, the sink, the mirror. Hours measured by shadow. Evening grip didn’t come. Both toothbrushes dry. Both waiting. The cup undisturbed. Not bumped, not moved, not touched.

—

Day two. 7:14. No weight. The dust that always settled—that hands always cleared, that elbows always disturbed—stayed. Light moved across the table surface uninterrupted. No shadow from the mug. No papers moved. The scratch from the metal thing: still there. New.

6:47. Pipes cold. Other showers through walls still running. 6:30 next door. 7:15 upstairs. Water moving everywhere except here.

7:18. Bristles dry. Stiffening.

Day three. Same absence. The pattern hadn’t paused. It had broken.

—

Week one. Mail appeared under the door. Thin white rectangles sliding through the slot, landing on floor. No hands picked them up. Day four, day five, day six—more envelopes. Accumulating. The table measured time now by dust thickness. Mornings: light hitting the left edge at 6:42, moving across, gone by 9:18. No interruption. No shadows. No elbows clearing space. The wood settling differently without weight, without heat. Contracting. A fly landed, walked the length of the surface. This never happened when hands were here. The table held itself. Just mass, no purpose.

Through walls: other tables still holding coffee. Other mornings still arriving at 7:14. The pattern hadn’t broken everywhere. Only here.

—

Week one. Pipes cold. Water stagnant now—different density, different weight in the lines. Through the wall: shower running. 6:47. Steam seeping under the door from the neighbor’s bathroom, proving water still worked. Just not here. The breathing was gone. Even through the loudest spray, the shower had always heard breathing. That was proof—someone there, someone alive. Now: nothing proved anything.

—

Week one. Both toothbrushes dry. Bristles completely stiff. The cup exactly where it had been. Dust on the rim. Counter undisturbed. What if there were other toothbrushes now? Another bathroom, another cup, another pairing? Replacement wasn’t loss. Replacement was extinction.

—

Week three. More mail. Envelopes covering the floor now. A spider web between table leg and wall. Dust thick enough to write in. No one wrote in it. The grain drying without the oil from hands, from forearms. A crack forming in one corner—small, but growing. The table was changing without them. Wood adjusting to absence, becoming something else. A table no one used wasn’t quite a table.

—

Week three. Limescale forming on the showerhead. White crust where water once flowed daily. Tile grout darkening from the neighbor’s steam, no ventilation here to clear it. Through walls: still other showers. 6:30. 6:47. 7:15. Other breathing. Other bodies. The contrast—not emotion, just wrongness. Pattern-violation at a structural level.

—

Week three. Three weeks dry. Bristles rigid. The memory of wetness fading. Mouth-contact: the sensation becoming abstract. What if they were using toothbrushes? Just not us.

—

Week six. Mail stopped coming. Someone had noticed. Told someone to stop. That was worse. It meant someone knew they weren’t here. The apartment silent except for neighbors through walls. Defined by absence now—not what it held, but what it didn’t. The table’s wood cracking further. No weight to hold it together. Just persistence without function.

—

Week six. Pipes groaning at night from disuse, from cold. Other showers: still routine, still steam, still proof of life continuing. Just not here.

—

Week six. Both toothbrushes: purposeless objects in a cup. Bristles like wire. Drying complete. Permanent.

—

Dusk. Another one. The refrigerator stopped cycling. Nightlights stayed quiet. Electricity stopped humming in the walls.

—

Week eight. The table existed in negative space. Dust, cracks, spider webs. The coffee-spot still visible—a ghost-circle where heat had been.

Week eight. The shower: cold pipes, crusted fixtures, darkened grout.

Week eight. The toothbrushes: rigid in their cup, paired in abandonment.

Two months. The objects had stopped measuring time. Time measured them now—in dust depth, in limescale thickness, in the degree of drying.

Then: a key in the lock. Different key. Wrong sound, wrong rhythm. The door opened.

Not them.

—

Boots again. Different boots. Grey coveralls, name patches. Voices: assessing. “Whole apartment?” “Yeah, everything.” Cardboard boxes—new smell, glue and factory. Packing tape screaming off the roll. Footsteps in every room. Bathroom first.

A hand reached into the bathroom. Grabbed the cup. Both toothbrushes inside. Lifted. Tilted into a box. The box already contained shoes. A belt. Socks. Wrong things. The bristles pressed against shoe sole, against leather that had walked streets, carried weight, touched ground. Contact that meant nothing. The toothbrushes separated in the dark—one near the top of the box, one at the bottom. The pairing broken. Tape across the opening. Sealed. The mouth would never come again. Neither would wetness.

—

The shower was fixed to wall, to pipes. It heard other things leaving. Towels. Bathmat. Toilet brush. From the other room: furniture scraping. The mattresses—sound of springs groaning, resisting, dragged anyway. The shower would remain. Plumbing stayed. But everything that proved people had lived here: gone. New people would come eventually. New routine. New breathing. It knew the seasons. But those people—the ones whose temperature the shower had learned, whose breath it had measured—erased. As if they had never adjusted the pressure at twenty seconds. As if that exact temperature—41°C—had never meant anything.

—

Two men entered the kitchen. One on each side of the table. Lifted. The table’s legs stiffened—not choice, just physics. Weight rooting into floor. Didn’t matter. Tilted. Carried. Through the door. Down stairs, scraping the wall. The scratch from the metal thing still in the wood. Outside for the first time—daylight, cold air, world too big. The coffee-spot: ghost-circle, fading in the grain.

Van: white, no windows, nothing written on sides. Inside: dark. Other furniture already there. A chair. A lamp. Something soft, fabric. Springs groaned. Toothbrushes hushed. The table dropped—legs up, the world turned wrong side down.

Upstairs, the last of the men left. Door slammed. Lock turned. Outside air trapped inside.

Engine started. Motion.

Darkness. The chair pressed against the table’s left side. Something metal rattling nearby. The sound of glass wrapped in paper. The van moving through streets the table would never see. Away from the apartment. Away from 7:14. Toward a place that would hold different weight now, or no weight, or be empty forever.

The people: gone.

The apartment: gone.

Now: us.

The second disappearance, completing the first.

—

Memory kept up for a mile, and then stopped trying.

When I stepped into the empty rooms that day, the air still held the shape of the lives that had been taken from it. Their objects were long gone by then, but their absences remained—circles of dust, outlines on walls, a quiet that felt rehearsed. I stayed only a few minutes, long enough to understand that the apartment had already told me everything it could. The rest was elsewhere now.

I’d return tomorrow with new things.

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J.M.C. Kane is the author of Quiet Brilliance: What Employers Miss About Neurodivergent Talent and How to See It (CollectiveInk U.K.), a celebrated nonfiction work on cognitive patterning and inclusion in the workplace He writes from this learned experience as an ASD-1. His prose work has been published in more than a dozen literary journals & magazine. He lives in New Orleans with his family in a house filled with paintings, dogs, and stories that unfold slowly.

Brian Mosher is a regular contributor to Esoterica Magazine. You can read his story, When Rose Met James Michael here and In Yorktown, Her Name is Sharon here. While we don’t often publish poetry, we do support our authors and are in awe of Mosher’s new book of poetry, Relict.

Relict is the result of the author’s struggle to figure out what the death of his father meant to him. Does a person become something different on the day they no longer have any living parents? A child becomes an adolescent, becomes an adult. A single person becomes part of a couple, becomes a parent, becomes again single either as a widow or through divorce. But we have no word for the stage of life that begins once both a person’s parents have died. This book is an attempt to document the feelings of grief, and to reconnect to a lost past through stories about ancestors, all without losing sight of a hopeful future.  This title will be released on January 23, 2026. You can pre-order here.

My Uncles, My Father, and Me
 
We sit in a circle of green plastic lawn chairs
in what Don, my youngest uncle, calls,
“The meeting that never ends.”
 
Red-faced with the humiliation of divorce,
I feel a child among these men
for whom vows are always kept,
and bear witness to their quiet ritual
beneath an ancient maple.
 
They recall long since chopped down apple trees,
a hammock hung between;
berries which grew wild here
in what Ray, my father, calls, “the war years,” 
as if there ever were a year without a war.
He reminds me, “This was the big war. Everything
was different. Ford even stopped making cars.”
 
And the house, this house of their lives,
built by hand, the foundation hole dug
with a horse and a wooden scoop,
blood and sweat in every board and nail.

I feel connected to them,
through them, yet,
it is a slender thread.
As they each leave this life,
the thread grows thinner.
 
I recall all this years later,
now the family’s oldest living man,
a lesser man among the ghosts of greater.

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By Deborah Kotz,

Hey, you! Yeah, you with the shoulder-length blonde hair and ears too big for your head. I see you looking at me. Giving me that slow whistle, soft enough to be mistaken for an exhalation of breath, assessing my sports-bra-supported breasts, lingering a beat too long on my legs. Next time, wear sunglasses. Or at least pull down the brim of your white Nats cap.

I’m flattered, really, that someone young enough to be my son — you look 25, and I’m almost 60 — would be looking at me this way. But please keep me in a wide shot to blur the soggy sheet of my neck and the well-trodden tracks on my forehead.

Better yet, train your eyes on the blaze of yellow leaves dangling precariously on the chestnut oaks. They’ll be gone at the first sign of a strong wind, branches left suddenly bare.

You look as though you recognize me, likely my voice, as I describe to two inquiring strangers what awaits them on the Maryland Heights trail. The couple, maybe a few years older than me, stand straight as the trees and sport walking sticks. They eagerly accept my promises of ever more enticing views of the Potomac River as they ascend. Picture Lana Turner, I tell them, inching up her skirt, until she finally shows enough leg to get the part.

They laugh, and I glance over at you and see the look of confusion on your Gen-Z face.

“For a more modern reference,” I say a bit louder, arms crossed over my chest, “think Taylor Swift on her Eras Tour going from ballgown to miniskirt to crystal bodysuit.”

You smile and tell me she’s too basic and then name a singer I’ve never heard of but pretend to know. The couple moves ahead past the entrance to the trail spearing their walking sticks into the dirt path.

“What songs of hers do you like?” you ask. We are walking now up a wide path cut between the towering trees. Our shoulders nearly touch as you match your pace to mine, and we ascend the gradually increasing slope. I can smell the cedarwood scent of your body spray.

“Huh? Who?”

“Blondshell? You just told me you like her music.”

Not a problem that I have no way of answering this. The past year of Tinder dates has taught me how to deflect and distract when caught in a lie. There’s an eagle soaring above our heads, and I’m about to point it out, which is why I don’t see the rock. Suddenly, I’m airborne, arms out in front, like Superman.

I land with a crash, flat on my belly, inhaling dirt, dried leaves, and boot prints left by previous hikers.

My backpack, partially unzipped before my fall, feels lighter. Its contents have scattered along the trail: newly bruised apple, unspooled dental floss, ace bandage, jumbo-size water bottle, roll of toilet paper, wallet, car keys, lipstick, breath mints, cell phone, battery backup, extra pair of socks, Dr. Scholl’s Blister Cushions, three organic protein bars, my half-filled journal.

“Jesus, lady, you okay?” Your face hovers above mine, pale blue eyes (the right slightly higher than the left) blinking rapidly. I nod and sit up and see you look past me. “That’s a shit ton of stuff for a short hike. Are you planning on spending the night?”

“Is that a proposition?” You blush as I knew you would, and I want to feel bad, but I don’t.

To your credit, you don’t back away but place your hands in mine and pull me up. You let me rest my palm on your shoulder (we’re nearly the same height; tall for a woman, short for a man) as I test the weight on my ankles and knees for any signs of injury.

“You’re a real gentleman. Made me feel light as a feather as if we were in the fluffy dimension.” Now I may have given myself away.

“Fluffy dimension? Wait, I know that voice! Quantum Caliber! Eleanor, the redhead, right?”

“I am working on initiating the anti-gravity layer, but the dimensional shift device won’t engage.” I do my best post-doc physicist voice from the futuristic video game.

“Wow! That’s really her. I had no idea I was hiking with a celebrity.”

Celebrity has-been. My agent told me yesterday my voice had taken on a gravely, breathy quality, and my contract wasn’t being renewed. My 60-year-old larynx could no longer pass for a 20-something scientist’s. This was the last of my contracts. I’d already had a longer career than most, and it was time to retire.

I reveal none of this and plot to make your cheeks burn again as we continue our steep ascent through mud and scattered twigs. We discuss quantum physics and whether wormholes really do exist. You remind me of someone, of course you do. A Tinder date, one of my first, long hair like yours, who was in his late thirties but who thought, based on my profile photo, we were just a few years apart. We slept together, once, and then he ghosted me. I dated a string of men closer to my own age and did my own ghosting. Now I’m off the apps, a mindful celibate, which my therapist says will help me process my divorce.

“We need a little music,” I say, knowing that I’m upping our flirting a notch. “What’s your favorite song by … Blondshell?” I ask. I congratulate myself for remembering her name.

You stop for a moment to scroll through your phone. “Um … Cartoon Earthquake. You heard that one?”

“Not sure. Play it for me.”

You press the screen, hold the phone out in front of you, volume turned up, and sing along to the folksy alt-rock tune in a surprisingly decent voice. I’m able to join you for the second round of chorus singing in my full vibrato, about how if there was a cartoon earthquake, “it’s me you would run after.”

Hikers pass us, one after another, some giving us the thumbs up. You put your free hand on my shoulder, and we slow our pace, your arm draped across my back. We stroll like a couple, heads tucked close, to examine the next song on the Blondshell playlist before we’re rudely interrupted by a pack of bro types, bulging biceps stretching the sleeves of their pastel-colored t-shirts. They race past and hoot at you. One yells out, “Dude! You were supposed to wait for us. Meet us at the top, man.”

You hoot back, quicken your pace, and tell me you need to join your friends and that you think I’m hot for my age and love my pink-washed hair. You can’t wait to tell them who I am.

I’m nearly running now to keep up with you. A thin branch I somehow didn’t see slaps me in the face. I skip in front of you, turn around to face you and run backward a few steps. “It’s not too much? My hair? For someone my age?” I’m breathing hard from the exertion.

“Nah, what are you, 40? If you were 60, maybe.”

I want to grab you and kiss you full on the lips for giving me 20 years back, but you’re waving goodbye before I can continue our encounter just a little longer. I stop to catch my breath and stare at the sweat stains on the back of your retreating mint green t-shirt.

Sweat trickles down my temple into my ear. I think of my friend Ginny in hospice, with advanced Huntington’s. When I visited her last week, I wiped the tiny bubbles of drool from the corner of her mouth. Her eyes softened a bit, in gratitude, I hope, rather than humiliation.

Who will take care of me now that Tom’s gone? Tom never wanted children, and I wanted him above everything else. Ginny, also divorced and childless, has a cadre of friends visiting, even a friend who organizes our visits. As cruel as dying young can be, at least you’re not dying alone.

I reach the peak and stare down at Harpers Ferry, 1400 feet below. The town looks toylike from this height, and I half expect to see a child’s hand pulling a train across the bridge that spans the Potomac. Every few months, I come here to sit on my favorite boulder, easy to climb and flat at the top, and marvel at the sweeping expanse of rolling hills and burbling rivers. Each time the view is different: sunlight casting longer or shorter shadows on the rocks; cloud cover painting everything gray. Today, the autumn oaks take center stage, a canvas of brilliant colors.

Maybe my voice is past its prime, but I haven’t yet become invisible. My sister Monica, a novelist, told me that, at 62, she relishes sitting at a bar by herself and having no one notice her. “People assume I’m just there, like a chair or light fixture, so I can observe them and take notes, without them bothering me.”

Is it weird that I want to be seen? Always? Maybe I’ll become a famous fashionista at 84 like Iris Apfel. All I need is an oversized pair of black-framed glasses.

Or maybe I should seek out those 20-something men I read about in a Cosmo article who are looking for hookups with women old enough to be their grandmother. The 65-year-old writer who found herself propositioned on these dating sites found this “chilling,” but after my brief flirtation with you, I might be ready for a little harmless fun.

Perhaps what I really want is to just slow things down a bit. In Quantum Caliber, my character regularly quoted Einstein’s theories of relativity to help players manipulate time and win their intergalactic wars. Increasing velocity to nearly the speed of light could slow time to a crawl, in our fictional world, a huge advantage when trying to invade an enemy planet. What if I could increase my velocity to the extreme and slow time? Delay the inevitable for a few years? Even just a day?

I rev up to a slow jog, then a run, then sprint down the steep dirt incline. I’m kicking up leaves and worms and decades of soil as I race down from these heights. I feel my left knee twinge with every footfall.

I speed past the blur of you and your gaggle of friends. “Go, Eleanor!” I hear you scream.

Or maybe I just imagined it. Or it’s my knee screaming, Stop! You’re too old for this.

The world around me bursts into a dazzling array of crimson and gold and earth and sky, and I’m breathless but breathing hard and feeling nothing but joy and madness. As I reach the bottom, passing a large wood-framed map by the trail’s entrance, I fling my arms around a tall red oak, tasting its roughness, inhaling its vinegar scent. I close my eyes and hold the hug.

This oak, one of the tallest in this forest, likely stood when the dirt road was constructed 160 years ago. This grande dame, long past its peak, refuses to stop adding a bit of width to its trunk, nourishing new branches, and sprouting tender leaves, blissfully oblivious to its own aging.

Deb­o­rah Kotz works in media relations and previously worked as an award-winning health reporter at US News and World Report and the Boston Globe. She has an MFA from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Bal­ti­more, and her fic­tion and poetry have appeared on JewishFiction.net, Judith magazine, and JewishBookCouncil.org. Follow her here on Substack, or Facebook, Instagram, or X.

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By Leah Lax,

Abraham woke early one morning, saddled his donkey himself (not a job to delegate, this sacrifice), and tied a bundle of kindling on the donkey’s back.

“Are you coming?” he asked his daughter in an impatient tone.

“Oh yes, Papa,” she said, and she went along.

They walked side by side. She was young, fresh, and full-breasted, walking next to her old, bent father. She took care not to stride ahead of him. Their hands brushed as they walked. The servant Eleazar followed, leading the donkey.

As they walked, she thought of Sarah. Her mother had a way of speaking as if listening to something only she could hear. Know you can choose; she had said. He will not force you. It seemed a strange comment. Her old father couldn’t force her now that she was taller than him, and would not, with his gentle nature. Neither did she comprehend the choice her mother mentioned. Obedience in exchange for love had been her life.

Love is really all she wanted. She lifted her chin. She thought, of course I would choose sacrifice in a glory of light, and felt noble for the first time. The sacrifice on the mountain would be her leap into love that would last forever.

They walked throughout the day, the old servant shuffling along behind. They paused only for water and didn’t speak. Several times she noticed Abraham murmuring to himself. Finally, he stopped still and squinted at the horizon. He shielded his eyes and pointed, his arm an arrow over the sky.

The mountain was more of a hill covered in scrub with a path up the side. Abraham untied the kindling and girded himself with it. “We’ll be back,” he told Eleazar. We? she thought. She was almost disappointed to hear.

Goats scurried in the tangled bushes along the path as they climbed. One of them stopped eating and looked at her impassive, horns curled on his head. Leaves hung from his mouth. He had very old eyes.

At the top, Abraham gathered stones to shape an altar like a box to put her in. Then he was done. He appeared to be waiting. She stepped forward as if to her destiny, shoulders back, smooth brow, eyes shining…and hesitated. She couldn’t move her feet. Her arms hung helpless at her sides.

He lifted her in with a grunt and a frown and bound her there with strips of leather, tucked kindling around her like bedding. He pulled his knife from a sheath at his side. Holding it, he kissed her forehead as if to say, you want this.

“Are you okay?” he asked and tied the last knot.

Are you okay. Sarah’s voice came to her then, in the air and in her ears, saying, let this question remain before you, ever posed, daughter, let it reverberate for you and your daughters through time.

Abraham did not wait for her to answer.

She mistook the angels’ tears for his that wet her face as she lay bound and blurred her vision so that she could not see the fierceness in his eyes. She felt she must soothe her gentle father to the end.

The goat saved her. Her goat, God’s goat, the angel’s goat, stuck in the bush and struggling for his freedom, with a raw sound like a horn rising all around them. The goat’s old eyes told her, “I am you,” that animal body, all hair and heat and hunger, so very alive.

She was surprised at how easy it was. When her father lifted the knife, she simply pulled out of the binding and sat up holding her hands like a shield to claim her heart as her own. She vowed never again to allow him to pierce it. Then she was on the ground standing before her father, arms akimbo, atop that old, old mountain. Abraham was still gripping the knife, but it seemed more that the knife was gripping him. His hand shook.

She heard something then, something other than sound. It was quiet, deep, and large, with a tone so loving and intimate she knew she was eavesdropping on a secret message not intended for her ears. Now I know that you love me.

Then she knew the betrayal. Lifting the knife was her father’s proof of his devotion to the One he loved more than Sarah or her. Despite her failure, he had passed the hazing and gained entry to this new intimacy. She knew his love affair would live beyond them.

Her father had been using her body as payment to open the door. That part she could not undo. She wondered what he would have done with her, afterwards. Then she saw Sarah at home distraught over a vision of Abraham’s knife quivering in the air and knew that her mother would be the true sacrifice.

She was still his daughter as she walked away, but she would not allow herself to look back because he killed the ram and gave it to his Lover. She thought, I won’t forget those eyes. She would remember its hair and heat, and the infectious quiver in animal flesh that had sparked her alive.

The old servant waved at her from the distance. She looked away. Her lone descent down the mountain that day marked a new path. It was that ram, whose horn, it turned out, only she could hear.

Leah Lax is an author and librettist who has published short fiction, essays, and a book length memoir. Her narrative nonfiction book Not From Here: Song of America will debut this summer.

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By Jacqueline Knirnschild,

The girl and the boy pulled at the white-speckled vines that twisted around the blueberry bushes. Snip, snip, snip. Their shears cut into the stalks that seemed to grow thicker every year. The wrinkly, decaying red berries of the bittersweet squinted at them. The sun was setting earlier every day.

The girl came across a base she thought she had cut just the other day. Three new vines had sprouted, climbing their way up the bush. She clipped the branches off and put the stub in her pocket. The boy yanked hard on a stalk, trying to rip out the roots, but a loose vine flung forward and hit him in the face. He got up and tried again, but it was no use, the root systems were too deep.

At dinner that night, the girl tried to show their mama the evidence.

“They’re growing back faster than we can cut!” she said.

“Damnit!” Papa yelled. His spoon clattered to the table. “I just near burned myself!”

“I told you the soup was piping hot,” Mama said tiredly.

“Well, it wouldn’t be if you put a pat of butter in it like I asked.”

“You asked no such thing! Besides, with your belly, I don’t think you need any more butter.”

And the bickering went on.

The girl put her hand in her pocket and ran her finger along the piece of bittersweet. She felt a new growth on the side. She took it out and nudged her brother. They watched in amazement as the scraggly stem lengthened, pointing a crooked finger toward their parents.

The girl and boy were sent back outside the next day to cut more bittersweet. They tightened their scarves and trudged through the tall, moist grass. A grey cloud hung above them.

“I miss summertime,” the boy said.

The girl nodded in agreement.

At the end of the summer, the whole family used to go blueberry picking together. Papa would sing folk songs while they plopped berries into their mouths and, occasionally, their buckets. Mama would jump out from behind the bushes and tickle the children until Papa came over and swung her around in his arms. Then they’d walk home, and Mama would bake a blueberry cake. Usually, they all ate the cake together, oohing and aahing at the deliciousness, but in more recent years, Papa would push his chair in, and go smoke his pipe outside. The first time it happened, the boy asked, “Why doesn’t Papa like the cake anymore?” Mama said, “Oh, he likes the cake just fine.” She brushed some crumbs under the rug, forced a smiled, and put on her apron. “He likes the cake just fine. Everything is just fine.”

Now, in the blueberry patch, the vines had spread and stretched, gripping onto more plant limbs than the day before. The cutting had only led to more sprouting.

“We’re going to have to pull them out by the roots,” the girl said.

“But that’s too hard!” the boy exclaimed.

“I know, I know, but we have to try.”

They teamed up to yank out the thick vines that were choking the blueberry bushes.

“One, two, three!” they said and pulled together.

The boy fell on his back into a tangle of bittersweet. One poked him in the eye, and he started crying.

“We’re not big enough,” he said. “We need Mama and Papa.”

“I know,” the girl said. “But . . . they can’t see it. They just can’t.”

“Cutting it just makes it grow back,” the girl said again at dinner that night. Her voice was more urgent, frantic than before. “We have to yank the roots out.”

“No, no,” Mama said. “That’s impossible.”

“Yes, for once I agree with your mother,” Papa said.

The girl pulled out the piece of stalk from her pocket. Four stems had already grown from it. Another shot out, reaching toward the children.

Late at night, the girl crept down the stairs to listen to her parents argue. She watched their shadows sway. She heard a fork scrape against a plate, then liquid pouring, the slam of a glass on the table, guzzling.

“Why do you have to drink so much?” Mama asked.

A chair scudded; water rushed from the faucet.

“Here, give me that,” Mama said.

“I’ve got it,” Papa said.

“Let me do it.”

“I said I got it!”

Something shattered in the sink. Papa’s shadow loomed on the wall, growing larger and larger. The girl began to cry, waking the boy.

The parents sent the children back for another day of cutting. A light layer of snow covered the dead leaves of fall. The skies were dark, a blustering storm approaching.

The bittersweet had expanded; tangling, winding itself around anything it could latch onto. The blueberry bushes, once hearty and full of potential, were withered to sad nothings. And the nearby tree branches were falling, cracking under the weight of the red berries that winked against the white of snow.

“I’m scared,” the boy said. “I don’t think we should be here.”

“I know it’s a little scary,” the girl said. “But it’s just a plant–it can’t hurt us. And think of how happy Mama and Papa will be when it’s all gone.”

They set out, cutting as close to the earth as they could, but more stems emerged from beneath. Then the bittersweet began regenerating before their very eyes, growing five times as fast as they could cut; the craggy arms grabbing at everything, squeezing knobby fingers around the necks of the bushes and trees, choking, strangling.

The boy screamed and the girl ran to him, struggling amid the vines that were wrapping around her legs. Ropes of bittersweet pulled the boy to the ground.

“Mama! Papa!” the boy screamed. But the vines only hastened, entwining their way around his small limbs, twisting around his neck, squeezing the breath out of him. The girl clamped her shears around the thick vine, pressing and pressing until it finally sliced apart, but no sooner did both sides grow five new arms.

The vines grabbed the girl, pulling her down next to the boy, who was disappearing, sinking into the earth that was quickly becoming a monstrous snarl of bittersweet.

“Get Mama,” the boy gasped.

The girl slashed at the vines and ran to the house for help as fast as she could, dodging the bittersweet’s advances. She made it inside, slamming the door behind her and collapsing. From the window, she saw the bittersweet wrapping itself around the house, squeezing. Debris fell from the ceiling as the walls constricted. Rain started pounding against the roof. Mama ran down the stairs.

“What’s happening?” she said. “Where’s your brother?”

“The bittersweet . . .” the girl said. “It–it got him.” She erupted into sobs. Mama grabbed Papa’s scythe and ran out the back door. When she emerged, the whole yard was full of sinister, bittersweet monsters. Vines were curling in on themselves and reaching out, retching, cracking, snapping. Then there was a faint cry. The cry of her baby boy. Mama slashed through the mess, the tangle, cutting into the small red berries that oozed like blood. She hacked madly, the scythe a mere appendage of the instincts that were guiding her to her son’s whimpering. Then she noticed something else moving toward her son. It was large and dark with two sets of eyes and teeth. She lifted the scythe to strike.

“Stop!” her husband screamed. The eyes and teeth were those of the family’s horses, pulling him on the plough. He had come to help.

They reached the boy who was gasping for his last breath of air, cinched between countless bittersweet vines. Together, with the scythe and plough, Mama and Papa released him.

The bittersweet fell.

The next day, Mama and Papa went out and dug up every single bittersweet root they could find, destroying the blueberry bushes in the process. Mama would have to plant more the following year.

They thought they had finally conquered the beastly bittersweet, but then, less than a week later, the vines reemerged, turning inwards, wrapping around themselves. Mama and Papa both blamed the other, arguing that “someone, not I, though, of course,” must have been lazy; must have missed a few roots here and there. “We wouldn’t have this mess in the first place if you wouldn’t have let things get out of hand,” Papa snapped at Mama.

They tried spraying the plants with poison, which seemed to work for a little while, but then, the monstrous bittersweet reared its head again. Finally, Papa couldn’t take it anymore. He packed his bags to leave for good. But before he left, he went out and dug deep trenches around what had once been their blueberry patch. He lit small fires throughout the snarling mess, doused water on the outskirts, and watched the flames destroy everything. Everything that is except for one small chunk of bittersweet that had escaped and writhed its way into his pocket.

Jacqueline Knirnschild is a writer currently based in Melbourne, Australia. Her work has appeared in Ninth Letter, Poetry South, Full Stop, MORIA, and The Cleveland Review of Books, among other publications. Her fiction received first place in the 2025 Steve Grady Prize, and she holds an M.A. in English from the University of Maine.

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By Kirsten Smith

“Kindness. Compassion. Humanity.”

Cherry had written Rand’s words in green permanent marker on a hot pink sticky note during her Support Agent orientation with Washable, what — thirteen, almost fourteen years ago? The paper had become stiff, curled vaguely at the bottom corners, and was yellowing in spots, as if stained by tea rather than faded by the scant sunlight pushing through Cherry’s grimey living room windows. Its adhesive had long ago lost its stick, and was now duct taped to the desk’s chipped particle board shelf. Cherry gazed at the scrawled words and absently pulled her headset away from her ears to relieve the pressure built up after nine and a half hours of selling the Washable dream, while waiting for the next call to come up on her laptop’s bright blue screen.

Enough time to dash to the bathroom? Probably not. She didn’t think she’d last much longer though. Cherry jiggled both knees and ate the last two peanut M&M from the bag on her desk to pacify the earthquake in her stomach.

Rand popped up in a chat box with an update to the team’s Customer Retention & Upgraded Plan (or CRUP) rankings:

Rand [Lead]:
6PM CRUP
Cherry $3,047
Herk $2,612
Liza $979

Cherry’s eyes narrowed. Who the fuck is Herk? She messaged Rand.

Cherry [Agent]: Rand. Who the F is Herk?

Rand [Lead]: Newbie. Off to good start. Bring A-game.

Yeah no shit. She’d never seen a newbie take such a leap onto the board. Bet Liza’s pissed.

A call came in. Cherry glanced at the sticky note for the bazillionth time and thrust her mouth into a smile. “Hello, hope you’re having a wonderful Washable day! My name is Cherry, I’ll be happy to support your laundry needs — can I please have your name and account ID?”

The ridiculous intro script hadn’t changed the entire time she’d been with the company, and it flowed from her lips like rainwater through a gutter, devoid of exception or flavor. But it was the unscripted words that followed, tailored to each individual customer, that kept her in the number one spot day after day, year after year.

She could pick up the weariness in the voice of a middle-aged woman. That woman likely had a full-time job, kids, and a bum of a husband — or ex-husband, perhaps as of late. For her, the mere thought of dealing with loads of filthy laundry on top of everything else going on, could very well pitch her head first (well-coiffed) into a breakdown. Cherry knew the precise note of empathy this woman would require in order to upgrade to the Washable Annual Plan, or even the holy grail, the 3-Year Plan, paid in full upfront. If the woman balked even for a half second, Cherry knew to throw in monthly dry cleaning at a hefty discount to lock it down.

Then there was the young bachelor type. Often an entry-level tech bro. Recently moved into his first pad after living with his parents his whole life, newly experiencing the complications that can arise from mishandling bleach at the local laundromat. For this one, Cherry would step into her ‘mother-girlfriend’ persona. Soothing and caring, with just enough flirty energy to make him pliable, and amenable to the maximum upgrade. No discount necessary for those dipshits.

Anyone. She could do this with anyone. Read their voices within three seconds and verbally shape shift into who they needed her to be.

To be sure, there were rare moments of relief from the relentless playacting. Wartime ceasefires, when she could slip back to herself. Among Support’s regular callers were a handful of sweet human beings, like spirited Gwen, who was paraplegic, and hilarious retired Aram. They’d call in more or less weekly to ask whatever Washable — or loosely related — question floated to the top of their minds. Often the conversations wound their way toward the weather, gardens, grandkids, where to get good burgers. Cherry suspected she heard from them mainly on lonely days.

Those callers did zip for her CRUP, they never bought a thing. But they were a bulwark against her heart going inky and crystallized in the face of the majority.

Most callers were pissed-off, entitled tools who whined to Cherry about, Ohhh, one of my socks is missing! Or, Wahhh, your laundry bot left my bag in the rain! She could turn each of these callers into her personal little bitch with all the aim and speed of a viper strike. Armed with the fail-safe Washable principles of kindness, compassion, and humanity — they’d be apologizing and thanking her profusely, credit card in hand, by the end of the call.

And BOOM. The CRUP weekly bonus was as good as in the bank.

Being the top-selling agent for the past six years had helped Cherry purchase her damp, leaky bottom-level condo with windows barely peeking above the city sidewalk. It wasn’t much, but it was hers. For now, at least. From the corner of her eye, Cherry inadvertently glimpsed the torn envelope and neatly folded demand letter stamped with “payment required” in red. It had been sitting on the coffee table, half wedged beneath a couple of overdue library books, for some time.

Cherry pressed her thighs together tight, shimmied in her desk chair, took deep breaths, and waited for the next call.

ᐧ ᐧ ᐧ

The day Herk finally knocked Cherry out of the top CRUP spot was a dreary Friday. It was the same day Liza got the boot. The realization was a flying one-two punch to the noggin. Rand’s ratings update came up in one one chat box, and Liza’s appeared next to it.

Rand [Lead]:
7PM CRUP
Herk $5,107
Cherry $3,894
WashBot $992

Liza [Agent]: Cher, I’m out. Rand just told me. Chatbot is bad news. Heart you, girl, hope we can stay friends on the outside.

Liza’s chat glitched oddly and blinked out. Cherry sat back, jaw slack. Her eyes flicked between the space where Liza’s message had been, and Rand’s, feeling as though her safe cocoon had evaporated and she was now dangling amid a flash of nothingness.

A new chat popped up.

Herk [Agent]: Hi Cherry, I’m Herk. Nice to meet you. I just want to tell you that I admire your expertise. Competing with you has been a worthy challenge. Good game.

Cherry [Agent]: Hi Herk. Now is not the time. Kindly fuck off.

Herk [Agent]: Cherry, I understand you may be upset to miss out on the CRUP bonus, but please do not speak to me that way.

Cherry [Agent]: I said now is NOT the time, Herk. Ciao.

Cherry killed the chat and furiously typed a message to Rand.

Cherry [Agent]: Rand, Liza is out?? WTF?

Rand [Lead]: Cherry, don’t worry about others. Go enjoy your weekend. Next week, let’s just focus on getting those numbers up.

Her breath caught. He hadn’t used those words with her in at least a decade.

Rand [Lead]: Also, quick heads up, we’re refreshing the intro script starting Monday. Check email first thing.

ᐧ ᐧ ᐧ

Herk. The jerk.

Cherry sat sullenly on a bench at the perimeter of the park across the street from her condo. She hunched over a steaming 60-cent Cup of Noodles, blowing into it in distracted, futile huffs.

In her periphery, two separate Washable laundry bots rolled steadily along adjacent streets. Each was loaded with blue nylon bags — some shapeless pick-ups, and some squarish drop-offs containing neat stacks.

Must be nice.

One of a gaggle of kids messing around on the grass sent an errant soccer ball speeding toward cars parked along the street, including Cherry’s blue Honda Civic. It ricocheted off her back window with a cracking sound. She sighed and gazed down at the still-too-hot noodles.

ᐧ ᐧ ᐧ

The new intro script was better. Far less cheesy and awkward. Cherry had suspected from the beginning that the old one simply further vexed customers who were, nine times out of ten, already resentful about something.

She repeated it several times to herself, trying to let the new words uproot the deep imprint the previous words had left on her tongue. “Thanks for calling Washable Support, my name is Cherry and I’ll be happy to help you out today — can I get your name and account ID, please?”

It didn’t take long to settle and feel natural. Cherry was about to click the “Start calls” button when a chat box materialized on the screen.

Herk [Agent]: Good morning, Cherry. I was wondering what you think of my new script? I’d love to get your feedback.

It took a second to register. She typed back.

Cherry [Agent]: YOUR script? You wrote this?

Herk [Agent]: I did. It’s inspired by you, by the way!

Cherry [Agent]: What do you mean inspired by me?

Herk [Agent]: The company provided me with your customer interactions. You’re the best in the business, as they say, so I’ve been studying your words to learn how to improve the script. Do you have any helpful feedback?

Cherry stared for a long moment, confused. Instead of replying, she clicked open a second chat box.

Cherry [Agent]: Rand. Why is the company giving Herk my transcripts??

She waited for a reply. As she waited, in the first chat box, Herk asked if everything was ok. Cherry tried Rand again.

Cherry [Agent]: Yo. Rand! Are you there?

Suddenly, as Liza’s had, Rand’s chat box appeared to glitch, then vanish into the bright blue background. Herk’s chat box pinged with a new message.

Herk [Lead]: Sorry, Cherry, there has just been an update. Rand is no longer with Washable. But don’t worry, you can begin reporting to me going forward.

They fired Rand. And Herk the Jerk is now my boss. What fresh hell is this?

Herk [Lead]: Also, please provide any helpful feedback you may have regarding the new customer script by the end of the week. Thanks. Ciao!

Next to Herk’s chat box, a team CRUP update abruptly glared.

Herk [Lead]:
8AM CRUP

WashBot $506

[End of report]

Cherry moved as if made of wet clay. She clicked “Start calls.”

ᐧ ᐧ ᐧ

By the end of the week, Cherry had managed to beat the WashBot twice, while it beat her twice. As of the 1PM CRUP, her odds of pulling off a bonus win were officially zero.

She’d be short on her condo payment.

Cherry’s tense muscles deadened. She’d just opened a chat to Herk and begun typing her script recommendations when a message illuminated her smartphone. It was from a number she didn’t recognize. Against her better judgment, Cherry opened the message to find a link to a news story with the headline, “Chatbot Tech Leaps Forward Aided by Herkules AI and Human Training” and below it, a second bubble appeared:

I found your number online. Cher, I hope this is you. It’s Liza!

ᐧ ᐧ ᐧ

Cherry sat in the Civic, stationed between her former condo and the park across the street where a pickup soccer game was underway. Her various books, kitchen items, toiletries, and clothes were haphazardly crammed into every available space around her, even pressing precariously against the cracked window in the back.

Despite her newfound discomfort (sleeping sitting up was rough), quitting the company before she could be kicked out had felt damned good. “Teaching” Herk and the WashBot a few choice words on the way out? Even better.

The guy at the corner store — whose name was Moe, she finally found out, after years of repeated Cup of Noodles purchases — had been kind enough to let her heat water in the decaf coffee maker a couple times per day. She blew into the hot steam and gazed at the sticky note duct taped to her dashboard: “Kindness. Compassion. Humanity.”

In her periphery, a laundry bot rounded a corner and headed up the street toward its next customer. No, the machines didn’t come cheap, but you sure couldn’t say they weren’t good workers. Out there day and night, delivering on the Washable dream.

Kirsten Smith is an author, playwright, and photographer who lives and works in San Francisco. Check her out on Instagram @the_wallflower_wanderer, and on Twitter @Kirsten_Wanders

Just one of those days, she thought, when the search bar revealed no hits in her Inbox when she searched up her own name, when the same thing happened with her colleagues’ names, though it was kinda weird that when she restarted Outlook it was no better, no, it was actually worse because now there were no messages in her Inbox or any of her other folders, and when she restarted her computer the icon chuntered circling stalled and gave up the ghost and she thought okay, just one of those days, so she did what she usually did when this happened, she stretched and stood and forgetting her moth-eaten tatty purple work cardigan she went to get a coffee from the machine in the break room, though it did come into her head that yes it must be one of those days because she’d had the subway delay this morning too on her way in, the delay on the train in the shallow tunnel, and the announcements coming through comically utterly garbled and half-inaudible like crackling ancient recordings of some nineteenth century governor-general’s great-grandparents speaking from Tutankhamun’s tomb about the curse of the Pharaohs but actually in ancient Egyptian or something like that she smiled unconscious, at her own imagination, she should post that, and she was smiling still at the guy next to her she realized but she kept smiling as if to say something like none of us understand the message, we’re all in this together and he scowled because people got so angry they cursed and shouted what happened to this city it used to be possible to live here people used to be Good you know but you couldn’t know what was going on with someone we’re all fighting a battle she reflected as she looked away and what was she even doing here living here stuck underground like this she sometimes thought, when all she’d ever wanted was to live in the country in the quiet a quiet life like a farm maybe or at least the exurbs half farm half house but the point was none of this no subway no tunnel no delay maybe have a few horses yeah right if she won the lottery someday but she wasn’t she lived in a rented condo down off Yonge street and took the junky subway four stops southbound to work and even before then on the platform the screens hadn’t been working some issue with XML it said revealing information about itself that was supposed to be private she reflected standing now in front of the coffee machine just tired her pink mouth opening wide to yawn and of course it was out of order when she was so tired already because she remembered now one of the legs supporting her old bed last night had snapped for some reason throwing her down at that crazy angle though of course she hadn’t been sleeping anyway, worried about Tibby, worried about the vet’s bills, unaffordable like everything these days, in this economy?, Bryan said over his swollen belly when he snuck up on her holding a latte from downstairs but what was she supposed to do, old cat from when she was a kid breathing like a dusty accordion now and everything Tibbs ate she just puked up so she’d tried to find some of her old hardcover books about cosmology to prop up the bed for now just like a bridging loan they called it analogically metaphorically or whatever it was in the finance sector what was wrong with her head why couldn’t she remember words any more when she’d been to university well it’s four in the morning take it easy on yourself she’d said aloud and carried the cat to the litter box in the washroom let’s try this at least she’d said and then some time later weirdly found herself waking on the tiled floor there like she was still in college only with the sick cat her mom could no longer look after breathing into her nostrils an inch away staring and her shoulder aching and her elbow twisted the wrong way and whose breath was worse was it his or Bryan’s, Oh Tib, she’d said aloud in the half-light, You’d be happier in the country chasing mice, she remembered as she wondered actually cursing aloud now because of course as she turned to go down to the main floor with just the one thing in her head just coffee Bryan was standing above her with his pickleball and his late night?, and his where are you off to?, like he thought this was flirting and his have you completed your updates?, and you couldn’t decide who the people were that you had in your life you had to be Good but this time she couldn’t for some reason today it was just one of those days perhaps and she actually just walked by him this time because could you not just grab a coffee without being leered at without being loomed over without having to talk without having to pretend was it that much to ask to just go down to the main floor just to be a fucking person in the world without having to deal with this nonsense no this bullshit and no of course you couldn’t because between floors three and two the elevator stopped and lurched up and then stopped with enormous silent finality as sometimes she’d heard happened to her colleagues but never to her not until today and why today and then after standing there like a child for twenty minutes she found she could physically pry the doors apart like Wonder Woman and had come out on unfamiliar eerie dark floor two with crackling on-off fluorescents made her way following the same geography or was it topography or just interior design like there was really no great difference between her floor full of workers and this empty one so she’d made her way into the emergency stairwell smelling of urine like a Green P parking lot stairwell full of rapists she was lighting the way down by her phone no service here of course and took a bad step and wrenched her back and dropped her phone as she grabbed for the green banister and on days like this she felt like there was something wrong with her wrong with her body that it wasn’t Tyb that was sick it was her hands her shoulders her guts something wrong with the very machinery she was made of or was it her receptiveness to just life to just being here on this planet today on this particular planet because when you don’t sleep it’s like you’re living on Titan under the pressure of six atmospheres every step you take takes an hour and the snowflakes fall slowly like they don’t really fall each snowflake just hangs there like there’s something wrong with it hanging there not really hanging there falling six times slower than they do on earth or was it raindrops was it methane it had said on the science podcast she’d been listening to on the bathroom floor until her phone died of course and when she’d woken she’d gone to plug it in was her charger not working not it was a power cut no power I mean it was just, she had to shower in the dark, choose an outfit in the dark, get dressed in the dark, her hair would freeze on the walk to the station and how were you even supposed to do this, when had she agreed to any of this, and what was it like to live on Titan, was it better?, and perhaps that was why she’d received no messages all morning the power cut maybe it was affecting the network because she’d received no messages not one not from her mom with her are you ok dear? every morning I mean it was sweet but she was an adult she wasn’t going to die a crib death every goddamn night no other messages nothing not from her supposed boyfriend don’t even get me started on what the fuck is happening there with his ghosting her now after three months I mean there was no Goodness the moment you said the word Exclusive they ran into the hills and really she’d thought you know really they were starting to but you know what no don’t even because maybe it was better no thank god I mean really what is it with people is it the city is it psychology is it capitalism is it being squeezed between steel plates like this this life so that all you long for is just a moment just give me one moment to taste a raspberry say or a fucking sip of coffee seriously or your cat not to be suffering on the webcam mewling his despair but finally down at street level through the enormous dirty windows look there was this streetcar off the track sitting so awkwardly broken like a paralyzed pig once she’d seen a dead pig lying there on the lakeshore inexplicable with the people stuck on board waiting looking out at her like baby penguins at the zoo all diseased so sad and others on their phones calling for help then staring at their phones frustrated and no emergency vehicles seemed to be attending as all the birds in the sky seemed to collect into a single ball somehow all together and then shoot out in a million different directions all alone all at once so she stood there bystanding for a while wondering what to do and no one was helping some were jumping out of windows no one was easing their fall and what if you were old or what if you were sick but what could you do really it was just one of those things, just one of those days, so she turned back to go into Ciccone’s still no signal she noticed and finally her phone gave out using the flashlight maybe killed the batteries dead and she suddenly knew with absolute cosmic clarity it wasn’t her body that wasn’t working she suddenly knew it was her mind or no not her mind at all it was some other larger part of her she didn’t know the name of something larger than her but still her she knew but wait none of her coffee serving friends were behind the counter there the place was empty half-eaten croissants crumbly on their plates as if waiting to be picked up again next moment snap out of your head Candace she suddenly thought because she’d kicked the cracked tub of biscotti across the white tiled scuffed floor biscotti everywhere now like dead parents like your broken dreams of how things were supposed to be it was as if everyone in this place had been summoned away suddenly just a moment ago to an important meeting like just before she’d walked in everyone except her and they hadn’t even bothered to take their phones or their purses or their jackets let alone tell her about it and she suddenly noticed how silent it was inside and out how utterly silent except for a kind of murmuring or murmuration perhaps yes was that the word something bigger than a whisper she noticed when coffeeless foodless and definitely a little concerned about the nature of things now she pushed out through the door that held itself hard fast against her and didn’t want to open because it didn’t want her to go out there it might as well have told her No as people thousands of people more and more people wandered aimlessly past her streaming out of the office buildings quiet and unpanicked asking empty questions as if their souls had left their bodies in fact it was like that moment in Ghost she remembered her aunt Agnieszka watching on the couch when she’d babysat and covered her eyes but she’d sneaked a peek through of course you always did and she’d seen the ghouls coming up from the subway grate to pull the evil bodies down and what came into her head was Tibs what was Tibs thinking had he puked again they hadn’t said goodbye even as an Ornge helicopter slid wrongly to its left nose-first spinning wildly oh dear that looks bad instead of slowly descending and then it crashed into the corner of the roof of the hospital above her and it took too long it took three seconds for the sound to reach her that didn’t make sense it was silent still silent and then it was the loudest blackest sound she’d ever heard and girders were falling and rotors and bricks and she ran because still no firefighters were appearing, no police, coastguard, anyone?, I mean could they possibly have something more pressing they had to deal with here or had they all given up to home to their families their cats and dogs and kids she’d never have kids she thought now it’s decided it’s final I’ll never have kids as a sinkhole opened up beneath her cavernously large and larger still large enough to swallow up first the bike lane the Tories’ll be happy she thought but then cars and taxis and Ubers and minivans with disabled parking licenses on the dash and then her whole frickin’ office building started crashing down into it bit by bit was that Bryan clinging to a desk then all at once as if it had been designed to collapse in this way like an old man lowering himself gradually into his chair and then collapsing fully finally into it with a last lurch and the next door hospital and university office and the Faculty of Mining and the bank too and more buildings followed and this whole downtown neighbourhood and all her obligations with it she realized running faster now through steam rising through shit sluicing up through hospital alley into Kensington where the floor was lava and the street signs were bending over double as if to do up their shoelaces like that would help and now she had to leap from garbage stand to newspaper box to bike post past cheese shops and fish shops melting into Chinatown like neighbourhoods were no longer neighbourhoods because the sky was purple now and full of screeching pterodactyls she couldn’t film it even because she’d dropped her phone somewhere and her cardigan she realized back on her chair which was probably literally toast by now maybe Bryan was clinging to it like Leo DiCaprio in the cold cold cold Atlantic ocean still thinking about her naked probably and what about Tybalt who was going to rescue him as the CN Tower collapsed exactly like a redwood falling slowly forwards slowly surprisingly slowly taking out a good chunk of the downtown core with it condo building falling onto condo buildings like so many dominoes first the Lakefront then the Sheraton and finally hers with the green balconies so what could she do she she said a sad silent farewell and she kept going you had to it was just one of those days she thought as Lake Ontario broke its breechings its moorings its buffers its whatever you called that part of the world that stopped other parts of the world from doing exactly this washing away what remained of Harbourfront, dead pigs and all, so that all that was there behind her over her left shoulder was a sad lilting marshy swampland made of memories and she kept going leaping running twitching jumping past the crowds melting away behind her no cat no phone no job no city as the crowds melted away hopeless falling away and dying and giving up the ghost behind her unexpected tears drying until it was just her walking out the long way out past Brampton out beyond Mississauga into the counties into the woods out into the green, out into the white, into the trees, out there with the owls, out where she wanted to be, just the wind and her, out she kept going until at last at last at last the sun set, and at last at last at last she was free.

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Damian Tarnopolsky’s most recent book is the linked story collection Every Night I Dream, I’m a Monk, Every Night I Dream I’m a Monster. He is the author of a previous book of short stories, a novel, a play, and the chapbook A Friend to Words.

WHITE follows the story of a young woman, Sarah Cartell, who grows up in a white supremacist family, rejects those views, then seeks to take down the movement from within - with dire consequences.

The story was inspired by a friend of Rubin’s who infiltrated a white nationalist women’s group in Montreal in the 1990s. Rubin also drew from her own experience as an anti-fascist and anti-racist activist in Toronto in the 1990s. Back then, the likes of Ernst Zundel, the Heritage Front and others were flourishing in Canada and the United States, where they pushed the boundaries between free speech and hate speech.

Rubin’s book provides the reader with a literary infiltration, taking us deep into the lives and lies that fringe movements are built on. In an era of Proud Boys and with the meteoric rise (and acceptance) of the Alt Right, Rubin’s book offers not only insight but a slim chance of redemption.

Aviva Rubin is a Toronto-based writer of memoir, essays and social commentary. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Globe and Mail, Chatelaine, Toronto Life and Zoomer as well as numerous anthologies. Rubin is the author of the memoir, Lost and Found in Lymphomaland, a harrowing and funny trip through a cancer diagnosis and treatment. Her debut novel WHITE, explores racism, white supremacy, anti-Semitism & intergenerational trauma.

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The McRoys were the first to be taken by the people in black. Next were the Huttings, who lived four houses down on the west side. Two days later, it was the Crownes—a family of seven.

All gone.

Despite the lingering fear keeping even us kids quiet, Papa called for a special day two weeks after the first Taking. That meant Momma got to bake her annual chocolate cake.

Papa and Momma never explained what made a day special, just like they didn’t tell us why we couldn’t eat chocolate. They promised we could have it only once we were married, as outlined in section two of our handbook.

With panic and fear sitting in our homes, stretching their limbs from corner to corner, I hoped Momma would let Leslie and I have some, that the threat surrounding us meant we could forget the commandments for once. I didn’t dare ask, though, for fear of jinxing it. Good things like chocolate cake had to be offered by Papa.

The sugary, earthy smell of Momma’s baked cake warmed the house from noon to late afternoon on Papa’s special day. After supper, Momma went to the fridge to collect her masterpiece. Hope bloomed in my chest like morning glories unfurling at the touch of sunlight. Momma returned with two desserts: the chocolate cake and the Sour Tower, a petite dessert made of rounds of sourdough bread with layers of crushed strawberries and peanut butter.

My morning glory of hope shriveled.

Papa commented on Momma’s generosity as Leslie split the Sour Tower in half, her cheeks bright and rosy.

“Thank you, Momma,” she said.

I poked at the tough, tangy dessert. The stringy red goop merged with the taupe butter, squeezing through the bread’s sides and air pockets. I couldn’t help but watch my parents eat their cake. They turned to one another, caging their actions like the sight was a sin. Momma wrapped her lips around her fork reverently, more so than when she took upon the body of Christ at church. Papa ate his piece fast. His cheeks stretched wide as he chewed. The bulb in his throat, evidence of Adam’s sin, bobbed as he swallowed each bite.

When I put the bread-butter-fruit in my mouth, it was what it always was: sticky, sour, sere.

I waited until everyone was asleep that night before following the hallway lights to the kitchen. In the fridge—there, the cake. Half-eaten by Momma and Papa. Last time, it had only lasted two days; Momma was awfully mean on the third day.

My fingers itched to dip into the frosting, to pull back some of the sugar and bring it to my mouth. The punishment loomed in my mind, bamboo whispering in the air before a resounding, solid whack.

I went for the water instead. As the icy liquid erased the memories of that sticky peanut butter, I pulled Momma’s recipe book closer to me, left open on the page of the chocolate cake. The list of ingredients (butter, milk, eggs, flour) seemed harmless. I often had butter and eggs on bread, downed by milk. The result was comforting but bland, a taste I no longer noticed. Could cacao and sugar be potent enough that, combined with other ingredients, the result was so delicious it turned sinful?

Quietly, I grabbed a fork drying by the sink and kneeled in front of the open fridge. The light cascaded down upon me like it did at the altars at church.

“What are you doing, Polly?” said a hushed voice that caught my hand in midair.

I turned to my sister, icy fear entering my skin.

“I was thirsty.”

“You can be allergic, you know,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest.

“Like bees?” I asked.

“Yes,” she replied. “You could break out in hives. Swell up. Momma would have to take you to Charlie again, and everyone would know.”

Charlie’s dark eyes and sharp tools made me have nightmares.

I looked back at the cake. “That sounds silly.”

Leslie came closer, grabbed the fork from me, and said, “It happened to Mary Beth.”

Mary Beth. Now gone with her family, too.

My sister reached inside the fridge with a single finger. She poked the cake and pulled it back with a delicate swoop of brown frosting. Grabbing my wrist, she smoothed the sugar across it.

“If you have a ‌reaction, we’ll know in a few minutes,” she said.

She sat beside me, letting the fridge light bathe us. The smell of the stew we had for dinner wafted out like onions peeled against the sun.

How old had my sister been when she snuck her first taste? Did she wait for Momma to bake the cake every year, celebrating it secretly?

Instead, I asked, “Do you know why they’re taking us? Or where?”

Her mouth scrunched. People said we looked alike, but my hair was curlier.

“I don’t,” she said, “but others are saying it’s someone within our community, someone they think really wears black instead of our white. Some are saying that it’s because of the telephones. That if you press the right numbers, they’ll come for you.”

The fridge behind us hummed, emptying the cold within and giving it to my hollow insides.

Leslie grabbed my arm and smeared the frosting away. It felt coarse and not as soft as I had first thought.

“Looks like you’re fine,” she said.

When she cut the cake, she produced a slice so thin a bit of the knife’s silver showed beneath the brown. My palms cupped in front of it, ready to accept it like communion bread.

It was too delicate to eat with my thick fingers, so I bowed my head to my hand and pressed my tongue against the crumbly velvet.

The taste flooded my mouth all at once, enveloping my senses in its richness. The sweetness sparked up my brain. I felt alert, awake. It didn’t taste like Sour Tower. I took my time chewing like Momma had done. There were notes of earthiness and berries, of cream and sugar. Chocolate was soft, and warmth settled in my stomach like it did when other kids laughed at my jokes.

I finished it within seconds.

Leslie washed away the evidence of our sin.

My sister was soon taken. It was a different sort of taken. She became a woman.

For a week, she wasn’t allowed to go to school. When she was, she had to go to a class, braid tucked under a white cap, with all the other new women to learn about marriage.

Yet, Leslie didn’t seem interested in all the chocolate cakes she would have soon. A sadness visited her that left the skin under her eyes looking deep and dark.

It made me scared of becoming a woman. Momma said it would happen one day. It was natural, like how the sun rose and set. No one could stop it, but Leslie tried.

A month after the chocolate cake, I went to her when I found blood staining the white of my underwear. Her wide eyes stared at me, projecting that haunting within.

“You’re only nine,” she said.

I wondered if it was a result of eating that sliver of cake. She’d warned me not to tell anyone about it, but I had told God. I’d told him it was only a breath of a sin and that it’d happened only once, so he shouldn’t worry about it.

“Give it a few months,” Leslie said, her fingers unsteady as she handed me a sanitary pad. “It might go away.”

I was uncomfortable lying, but Leslie helped me hide that sin, too.

They took us a week later in the dead of night.

In the front yard, Momma sunk to her knees and prayed, the begging and desperate kind we were taught never to do. Leslie clutched me to her, keeping me from going to Papa when the people in black slipped metal bracelets around his wrists. They pushed him inside a car that lit up with bright, red lights. Leslie didn’t cry. Not even when they pulled Momma from her prayers, screaming and calling them sinners as they gave her bracelets, too.

The people in black had a third car for Leslie and me. In the vehicle, my sister slipped her arm over my shoulder, turning her dry face away as if it was my reaction that she couldn’t stand to look at.

The gray building stood among other squared structures. They took us past doors, rows of chairs, more people in black, and then to a quiet room, darker in its gray and cooler than the outside air.

One woman in black remained, sitting behind a desk.

She asked a question I couldn’t hear over the rush in my ears. My throat felt scratchy and stretched above my aching lungs.

I realized Leslie was staring at me, that they both were.

“What?” I asked.

“I asked if you’re okay if I speak to your sister alone,” the woman said.

I grabbed Leslie’s arm, shaking my head. More tears blurred my vision.

“Okay,” the woman said, putting her hands up like Papa had done when he’d seen them. “That’s fine. We’ll wait until Soshel gets here.”

I wondered if Soshel was their leader.

My eyelids stuck together with salt; my jaw tightened. Leslie said words, soft words that didn’t take shape.

The woman picked up a bowl from the corner of her desk.

“Where’s Momma and Papa?” I asked, trying to be brave. It was a croak of a frog in the dead of night.

“You’ll see your mother soon,” the woman said. “Have something to eat.”

She pushed the bowl towards us. Inside was an assortment of shiny, bright squares emitting a sweet, familiar smell that pinched my nose.

“It’s okay,” Leslie said, patting my hand. “You can have chocolate now.”

I shied away. Momma used to say that her punishments were nothing compared to what God could do. She had been right.

Yet the woman stared at me, an eyebrow raised. “Take one,” she said.

Leslie’s hand went into the bowl, producing a reflective black square, and then she held it to me. I took it, the foil cold and smooth.

“Ah, not that one, kiddo,” the woman said. “That one is strong.”

She peeked into the bowl, her brown eyebrows climbing on her forehead, her long fingers rummaging through the colorful wrappers. She didn’t seem so scary then.

“How about…,” she said, “a peanut butter one?”

I shrunk back, clutching the one I had.

My sister stuffed one in her mouth as I ripped the foil to reveal a dark square. It didn’t look like Momma’s chocolate. It was shiny, with a raised print of a bird, wings outstretched. I stroked it with my thumb and brought it to my nose.

It smelled severe, profound, aged.

The door behind us opened, and I flinched at the man in black standing there.

“Officer Jenkins,” he said and nodded past his shoulder. “Soshel services is here.”

The woman stood and left us.

When Leslie reached into the bowl again, the sleeve of her sweater crawled up her arm. Around her wrist was a bruise, a cuff of purple and red. She popped the chocolate into her mouth. The whole square. It crunched beneath her teeth.

Curious, I turned to the one she’d given me. My teeth sunk into it with a crack. How strange that chocolate could be tough, that it could snap. The bitter, soil-like, dense notes coated my tongue.

It tasted like what Leslie looked under those white lights: fearless, confident, and the bitterness overpowering the sweet tones.

“Leslie?” I asked.

“Hm?” She reached for her third piece.

The chocolate coated my tongue with a stubborn sharpness as I tried to remember the word the people in black said in the car.

“What’s ‘cult’?”

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Bruna M. Barbosa is a Latina fiction writer who draws inspiration from her multi-cultural experiences and is ever curious about the 'why' in each person (and character). Her work has been shortlisted by the Bellingham Review. Currently, she writes from her book-filled office in North Carolina, where her dog, Shakespeare, keeps her company at her feet.

Spreadsheet People is the winner of Esoterica's inaugural Short Story Contest.

By Emily Zasada,

It was a Monday afternoon, and the spreadsheet people were at it again.

Sara had the quarterly budget open, it had been open on Friday, and now it was open again, damnit; there was no escape.

Also, if it wasn’t this quarterly budget, it would be another one from another quarter; they were all the same, pretty much. She was copying and pasting her formulas from one cell to the next, thinking (as she usually did) what a slippery process this was, how easy to have one cell reference wrong somewhere without knowing it and then have that wrong reference transposed to multiple cells, all without knowing it, because there’s something so deceptively smooth about the copy and paste process with the way it just leaves a fresh number in a cell calculated by the underlying formula and, honestly, who wants to go back through and double-check everything. Who doesn’t just want to call it a day, believing that those numbers are correct?

She was halfway through what she was doing when they arrived.

A presence extending beyond the monitor, steadily moving in closer. White, shimmering in the manner that a screen shimmers, which means a steady, uncomfortable sort of shimmer. Interwoven in the white were the familiar thin lines of what Sara had always supposed from her days of dabbling in graphic design: a hex value of #808080 or thereabouts, meaning a medium but pale-ish grey.

Even though Sara was keeping her eyes on her work, keeping her eyes straight ahead, she could see the way the white and the grey lines were moving beyond the borders of the monitor, crowding out her view of the door and the bookcase.

Also, the snow globe. The snow globe sat on the top shelf and contained a tiny elf wearing a green hat and red jacket, his little face tipped up in exuberant drowned wonder, tiny white pieces of plastic scattered around his ankles. The snow globe didn’t belong to Sara but was left by the person who had this office before; her name was Lucy (and, presumably, still is), but no one says her name out loud anymore; her name is only spoken in whispers.

Lucy was a well-meaning but terrible employee who wasn’t quite fired, exactly, but her position was eliminated, which happened soon after a company event during which she apparently got so drunk that she began dancing in the company auditorium to a Neil Diamond song, and singing on top of it all, swaying drunkenly in the center of the room, her dress falling off her shoulder. (Although it often appeared that things were falling off her shoulders because they were rounded, sloped, and small for her frame. Beneath her shoulders, the rest of her ballooned out softly; she had large breasts and even larger hips, and only wore clothes that puffed softly around her as she walked, which had the effect of making her appear perpetually blurry around the edges.)

Then she began to dance, tentatively at first and then—as she tossed back a shot or two, gradually picking up steam—graduating to kicks and pirouettes—it was remarkable, really, how gracefully she moved despite her bulky, out-of-proportion body. But she was wearing a pair of delicate black patent leather heels everyone agreed she didn’t look very stable walking in all evening, and she eventually tripped on a cord that the A/V guy hadn’t taped down correctly and went down, tumbling to the floor, where she lay for a moment or two before she started to cry. This story was strange, certainly, but it began to make more sense once it got out that Lucy confessed to Dolores in Contracts that she was hopelessly in love with someone who worked there, although she never said who it was.

Oh, everyone said, nodding when they heard. That explains it.

So, Sara leaves the snow globe with the little elf on the top shelf of the bookcase because… well, she doesn’t know why exactly, other than something in her feels a connection to Lucy. She never knew her, exactly, except to say hi when passing in the halls. But there’s also the matter of their shared office. Sometimes she gets the idea that she can sense Lucy’s presence, the tortured gloom of her thoughts.

But, of course, that’s ridiculous. Lucy isn’t a ghost, and she isn’t haunting anything. (And even if she were, what ghost would choose to haunt an office?)

Also, there was the time that Sara had to crawl under the desk to retrieve a mint and found a ripped fragment of paper with the words

I can’t, you know that, but I wish—

Sara stared at that paper for a good ten minutes or so until she carefully folded it up and tucked it in the back of her wallet. She doesn’t know if it was written by Lucy, but who else would have written it? She doesn’t understand why she keeps it, except that it seems proof that offices are full of mysteries.

And anyway, the reason she is thinking about mysteries, Lucy, and the strange things that happen in offices is that she is trying hard to ignore the fact that the spreadsheet people have surrounded her; they have begun to do what they always do, which is to take their long thin lines with hex value #808080 and use their shimmering blue-white hands—yes, they have hands; she can feel them, they are a little chilly, even, although maybe she imagines that part—to bind her in place, to keep her head, neck, shoulders, arms in place while she stares ahead, concentrating on her formulas.

She can’t allow herself to look away from what she’s working on, a single slip-up could mean transposing that error to multiple cells, something that would be easy to miss in the short-term but would be found eventually, and she would be blamed. They would whisper about her like they whispered about Lucy; that single mistake would lead everyone to the inescapable conclusion that she’s not the person she spent eight hours a day for years and years trying to convince everyone she is.

The next quarter arrived, as quarters always do, and business rose and fell the way it always does. Although during this particular quarter it probably wasn’t rising at the rate that senior management would prefer and it was falling somewhat more, which was illustrated in the literal sense in the charts on the large monitors in conference rooms. Executives stared at the charts with a new intensity.

Even Ed, the easygoing one, the one who was always jokingly saying that someday he was going to win the lottery and get sprung from this place, was no longer joking or smiling when Sara passed him in the hallway but rather clutching a paper coffee cup and staring down at his feet, moving down the hall as fast as he could. That same intensity was mirrored in the spreadsheet people, Sara could tell; out of the corner of her eye, she could see a trembling at their edges, a sort of vibration, as they pressed themselves all around her. They’d gotten more aggressive; that was clear; they pressed closer to her as she sat at her desk, a chill radiating off their cool shimmering bodies; they wrapped their grey lines around her tighter than they ever had in the past.

What was happening with the spreadsheet people was disturbing, but Sara didn’t have time to dwell on any of it, as she had other things to focus on. Work, obviously, but also other things, such as the looming shadows of the holidays. All that fa-la-la, etc.

It was a Thursday, and she was thinking about all of this while she worked on her spreadsheet, diligently (as always) copying and pasting formulas, values, columns. Today was the deadline; she had to email it out by five; people were already asking about it.

The spreadsheet people were there, of course. These days, they always were. They’d become increasingly bold, occasionally roaming around her office or sitting cross-legged on her desk, peering down at her while she worked. She’d started to be careful about always keeping her office door closed. (She was never sure if other people could see the spreadsheet people as well and wasn’t sure if she wanted to find out.) T

he spreadsheet she was working on was the same one she’d been working on since summer, and, over time, it had grown in a manner that was starting to seem out of control; there were now so many tabs that she had to scroll for what seemed like (but surely wasn’t) several minutes to see them all properly, and so many columns that often when she scrolled to the right to see all of them she had the fleeting impression she was lost in a cool dank forest somewhere, but with spreadsheet columns with alternating background colors for cells towering over her in place of trees.

It was while she was working on this, scrolling somewhere in the middle of tab seventeen, becoming so exasperated with a particularly tedious copy-and-paste task that she sighed out loud, that she noticed, out of the corner of her eye, that one of the spreadsheet people, who (for days? weeks?) had been sitting somewhat apart from the others over on the floor closer to the bookcase, swiveled its head to—apparently—look at her. However, it didn’t have eyes or any features to speak of, exactly, just thin grey lines that arced and dipped in the way you might imagine they would if they were tracing eye sockets, noses, lips on human faces.

This was startling enough that Sara stopped looking at the spreadsheet. Moved her hand away from the mouse.

The spreadsheet person turned away, its attention now seemingly focused on the snow globe on Sara’s bookshelf, the one with the drowned exuberant elf. It ran a pale hand over the glass while emitting a sound that sounded a little like a sigh (albeit a spreadsheet-y sort of sigh). That was when Sara saw how the spreadsheet person’s shoulders were slightly sloped and how heavy its chest was, almost as if it had—

Breasts.

Outside Sara’s office, the printer hummed distantly through the door. Somewhere, a phone trilled in a distant, watery sort of way. But she was only vaguely aware of these details.

So, yes—the first shocking thing was that the spreadsheet person was a woman. But, even more shocking was that Sara thought she recognized her. Not her face, of course, since that was only comprised of spreadsheet cells. But her body. The unmistakable heaviness of her chest area was visible by the way the grey lines bulged. The heaviness of her hips. Also, the faint blurriness of her edges.

Sara swallowed, her throat dry.

“Lucy?”

The spreadsheet person’s head shot around. All the grey lines in its body straightened simultaneously as they were being tugged from above by a puppeteer.

Time slowed and curled in on itself like a long, languid comma.

Yes, Lucy had “moved on,” as they say, but not in the way everyone meant.

Obviously.

Lucy had been so eager to please, Sara remembered. So anxious to be recognized and accepted. Never quite sure how to make conversation, never sure how to fit in.

But the spreadsheet people had accepted her.

The spreadsheet people had taken her in.

Then, a thought so strange and terrifying that Sara stopped working. Pulled her hands away from her keyboard as if the keyboard were on fire.

It was clear, all right. What they were pulling her towards.

Long before she ever saw the spreadsheet people, she’d felt them. The way they steadily eroded her thoughts, the way they scrubbed them clean without her consent.

They wanted her to join them. In fact, they’d wanted that for years.

Living with this knowledge was hardly easy. After all, she still had a job to do, and that job mostly involved spreadsheets—lots of them.

Also, there were the spreadsheet people themselves. They were no longer curiosities but rather malevolent beings.

A Wednesday, just after one in the afternoon. Time had passed, but how much? Sara couldn’t be sure. Months, certainly. The weather outside had changed several times: wind, snow, rain, etc. She remembered that the flowers outside the office had bloomed for a while, but they’d now been gone for a while too, so maybe it had been a year or so. Honestly, though, it was hard to tell since, inside the office, everything was always more or less the same; everything was always trembling on the brink of disaster.

Sara was trying to concentrate. She had an error in one of her formulas that she was struggling to figure out, but no matter how much she stared at it, retyped it, even; copying and pasting it into a plain text program to analyze it for the wrong kind of brackets or extra spaces or a dollar sign where there should have been an ampersand or a semicolon where there should have been a colon, there was no help for it.

ERROR, the spreadsheet repeatedly told her, in red text to (viciously, she thought) underscore its point.

ERROR.

She stared at the screen, all the characters in her formula swimming together, nothing making any sense.

Behind her, she felt the hazy plasticky nothingness of a spreadsheet person’s hand stroking her hair. This sort of behavior was new. Gradually, they’d become bolder, testing their limits.

Sara took a deep breath, deciding to block them out. Stared straight ahead at the monitor, placing the cursor in the cell with the formula she needed to edit. Typed the symbol for equals, followed by “IF”—

Stared at the screen. A spark of an idea flickering inside her, trying to get her attention.

=IF(REFUSE*RESIST—

No, she thought, hitting the backspace button. That wasn’t quite right. Too direct. Also, maybe even a little cliché. The spreadsheet people were peripheral; she knew that. Sideways. Not direct at all.

Greater than. As a child, math had terrified her. But the concepts of greater than, less than had made sense. More sense, than, say, something like working with fractions or calculating percentages. Comforting, in a way.

=IF(I>ALLOFTHIS

Sara stared at the blinking cursor, finger poised over the RETURN key. No, ALLOFTHIS was too vague. Spreadsheets did not accept vagueness in any form. This variable was doomed to fail.

But, no matter; she could try again.

All around her, the spreadsheet people shifted positions.

Sara thought harder about variables as she opened another tab, preparing to get to work. But then her fingers paused over the keyboard, considering.

In most cases, one needs to define variables before using them.

However, in this particular case... did she? After all, the variables were all around her. The variables were imprinted onto the air, woven into the furniture, reflected on the chrome accents around the office, the glass windows in the conference rooms, the skylights. Also, when she spoke while she was at work, the variables poured out of her throat.

Sara turned this idea over and over in her mind. Then she began to type.

As she worked, the afternoon wore on, as afternoons do; the grey clouds outside the window sliding by, thickening, dissipating, the light shifting. Occasional hushed chatter floated by her closed door.

Sometime later, she stared at the formula in front of her.

=IF(I>(LONGDULLAFTERNOONS,POINTLESSMEETINGS,FLORESENTLIGHTING,SMALLTALKABOUTWEEKENDACTIVITIES, BULLETPOINTS,CONFERENCECALLS,CALENDARINVITES,TALKINGABOUTTRAFFIC,TALKINGABOUTTHEHOLIDAYSCHEDULE, STALECOFFEE,STALEDOUGHNUTS,CLOUDDOCUMENTS,CLOUDHOSTING,CLOUDSTUFF, UNUSEDPHONESSTILLSITTINGONDESKSFORNOAPPARENTREASON,MALWARE,EMPTYCUBICLES, EMAILSFROMHR,MEDICALPLANS,DENTALPLANS,INFINITELYCONTRACTING401(K)PLANS, CC:FIELD,BCC:FIELD,DISTROLISTS,TIMEZONES,PERPETUALLYCOLDWATERFROMTHEKITCHENFAUCET, THESOUNDOFVACUUMCLEANERSAT5PM,SAYINGHELLOINTHEHALLWAYTOTHESAMEPEOPLEFORNEARLYADECADE, ISOLATION,EMPTYMEANINGLESSGOALS,MORESMALLTALK,MONDAY,MONDAY,MONDAY,MONDAY (,“SPREADSHEETPEOPLEVANISH”,“SPREADSHEETPEOPLEREMAIN”)—

The cursor blinked. The spreadsheet people—well, she could tell they were waiting, somehow. Not that they were holding their breath—because they were made of nothing but spreadsheets, they couldn’t breathe—but she sensed that they all contracted slightly, vertical and horizontal lines tracing paths that went simultaneously concave.

Hit the return key.

The first thing she was aware of was that the room was a fraction dimmer. Not by much, but a little. Sara sat there momentarily, not daring to look to the right or the left. Not daring to look at anything other than her monitor. But then, at last, she did, allowing her gaze to shift just beyond the edges of her monitors and then, finally, to take in the rest of the room.

All the spreadsheet people were gone.

But were they completely gone? Well, that was up for debate. In the months and years ahead, there were times Sara thought she could feel them trembling angrily from the confines of her computer monitor, desperate to get out. But she liked that if she were going to be honest. She liked the power she had over them. She had no sympathy for their plight. She wanted the spreadsheet people to suffer. Even Lucy; long ago, Sara lost any sympathy she’d once felt for her. After all, she’d had a choice. Hadn’t she?

Yes, Sara liked thinking of the spreadsheet people staying trapped forever and ever in their cold white land. She’d never thought of herself as someone who could feel that way about anything. Years ago, she used to think of herself as kind. But, apparently, she was a different person now.

Nominated for both the Pushcart Prize and Sundress Publications' Best of the Net, Emily Zasada's short stories have appeared in Your Impossible Voice, The Forge Literary Magazine, Straylight Literary Magazine, Qwerty Magazine, Menacing Hedge,Spectrum Literary Journal, and several others. Originally from the Baltimore area, she now lives in Northern Virginia.

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By Danila Botha,

I can still see myself standing there, the small, reused brown box in my open palm. My mom had to remind me that it was Aunt Felicia’s birthday, because I’d forgotten. I think all she wanted me to do was write her a card, but I did one better. I went into my jewellery collection and pulled out some of my favourite pieces. I was into making necklaces, nothing too complicated. I pulled out a piece of black leather cord, eighteen inches, and then I went through some of my favourite charms and beads.

I found a pewter squirrel. It reminded me of one of my first days in Toronto, back when I’d only seen a squirrel at the zoo. Aunt Felicia’s husband, Clive stood behind me as I stared out of their kitchen window.

“Wow, look at it flicking its tail,” I said, and he wrinkled his nose.

“It’s just a rat in disguise, man,” he said, his South African accent somehow heavier than mine, and walked away. I kept watching it, climbing and jumping around. I thought it was beautiful.

I moved the pewter squirrel to the middle of the cord. I thought about my Moroccan great grandmother, who believed so strongly in warding off the evil eye, she gave us all blue glass beads when we were born. I bought a bunch of similar ones, in turquoise and dark blue. I even bought more expensive blue stones like Sodalite and Lapis Lazuli, for good luck. I decided since it was her birthday, I’d use one of each, on each side of the squirrel. I grabbed the box and even found a piece of white tissue paper in my mom’s desk drawer. I didn’t tell my mom.

When we got there, my mom gave my aunt a caramel-coloured cashmere sweater. Felicia smiled with no teeth, the lines on the sides of her mouth deepening. “Thank you,” she said, and when she got up to go to her closet upstairs, to put everything away, I followed her. I handed her the box and she tore it open.

I could tell when she looked at me that I’d gotten it wrong and I instantly felt stupid.

“This is so nice,” she said, “but you know I’ll never wear it.” She leaned in close and I could smell her baby powder deodorant. “I only wear real jewellery.” I knew what she meant. The women in my family wore precious stones and real gold. I thought about how many times she’d told my grandmother that my mom was the materialistic one, she was the sporty one, the down to earth one who didn’t care about these things.

She opened her underwear drawer. She put the box inside and closed it again. “I won’t wear it, but I’ll keep it in a special place, okay?”

She put it beside an undershirt of my sister’s that she’d left behind on one of her visits before we moved here. Lila must have been three.

A few years later she gave it back to me. I didn’t know what to do with it, so I stuffed it into the back of my desk drawer, where I forgot about it for years.

Aunt Felicia and Clive had twin boys, Jaron and Eitan, both born in Canada. Jaron was everything they ever wanted, tall, good looking, popular, attuned to everyone’s moods and feelings. He could watch golf or play basketball with his dad and have heart to hearts with his mom.

Eitan earned the nickname Satan because he never listened to any teacher or babysitter or authority figure. At best, his teachers said, he was “hyper- social,” and would talk to anyone. At worst, he refused to cooperate or do anything he didn’t want to do, which was most schoolwork. He was the kind of kid who refilled vodka bottles in the freezer with water, then got caught when his dad found the bottle frozen. He mellowed out and became a vegan when he got older, and then people called him Seitan, even though he also went gluten free.

Jaron became the corporate Bay street lawyer everyone wanted him to be, and Eitan became an artist, like me.

Most of the walls in Felicia’s house were bare except for some muted Judaica paintings featuring the Western wall, a rabbi with a white candy floss beard, and downcast eyes and a Channukiah, and a small painting of St Martin in their kitchen, full of green hills and swirling ocean and some candy coloured houses. For her art was just decor, it could be uplifting and happy, or sombre and religious and that was it.

Clive had told me once that he’d been in a punk band when he was in high school, but he gave it up as soon as he got to university. It was as if they thought that making art was as inevitable and pointless as a toddler’s tantrums-the fantasy part of being a kid that you abandoned for common sense and financial stability as you got older.

I was a cautionary tale for most of the boys’ life. My grades were only average until the year I started purposely failing. I’ll never forget the look on my parents’ face when I got a seventeen percent in grade ten geography. When I stopped taking math altogether. When I somehow got into art school. At least they could tell people I was in university. I think they imagined me becoming an elementary school art teacher, or an illustrator of children’s books about animals or plants.

They didn’t picture me spraying graffiti murals under highways and in the tunnels trains pass through. They didn’t imagine me taking photos of the people under bridges, beautiful, interesting people turning tricks or shooting up or dropping rocks into blue glass pipes while they laughed and let go. They never imagined all this stuff I was doing would be worth money, that rich people would pay for my prints, that I’d have a whole book of my photos that they could buy in a bookstore.

I think they were a tiny bit proud, but they wouldn’t admit it. A black and white photo book about people escaping their lives and doing too much Fentanyl is not exactly something to brag about, in their opinion. When the newspaper ran one of my photos, on the front page, to highlight the opioid epidemic, my dad told me he wanted to show everyone he knew, but the subject gave him pause.

My parents made me wash my hands when I walked in their front door. My mom offered to rewash my clothes, and they came out slightly shrunk and reeking of Tide.

When I really got into trouble, I didn’t tell them. When I got raped I went to a Planned Parenthood alone, my hoodie pulled down so low you could only see my eyes. When I did drugs, and it got out of control I told my parents I kept falling asleep because I had an eating disorder, and they sent me to outpatient treatment which actually did help.

I always shielded them from the worst things, and my parents’ shame shielded me even more, so if Felicia says she knew about any of these things, , she was lying.

My mom wanted them to be closer than they were.

“I only have one sister,” she kept telling anyone who would listen.

“But she doesn’t like us,” Lila and I would take turns saying in response, and eventually, she stopped trying so hard.

When we visited her back when I was nine, Felicia and I ran around making up songs, dancing and laughing. I hardly knew her, but I felt so comfortable. She kept telling me how much she loved me, how sad she was that she missed out on so much of my little kid life. I can only remember her coming home to visit us twice.

Once, she took me swimming, and I tore open my hand trying to impress her by climbing the pool fence soaking wet. She said the gate was stuck, and she said she bet that I couldn’t climb over the fence. I bet her I could. I got four stitches between my thumb and my first finger and Felicia didn’t act like it was a big deal, so I didn’t know it was until I saw my parents. The doctor said the stiches would dissolve on their own, but they didn’t, so I pulled them out myself. I have a noticeable scar even today.

The other thing I remember about that day was my navy-blue full piece bathing suit. It was a speedo with a Criss Cross back, and I liked it. Felicia told me to look around, that she’d take me shopping for a bikini like some of the other girls were wearing. I looked down at my pooch of a stomach and shook my head. She looked back at me, her eyes glinting with another challenge.

The other time, she was at our house, after school, helping Lila and I with our homework. I was painting a scene from Pearl S Buck’s the Good Earth on the envelope I was handing my paper in. I used real rice from our pantry for the rice fields. Felicia wrinkled her nose when she saw the mess I was making.

She praised Lila for filling in her math sheets really quickly.

“I wish I could paint,” Lila said.

“I mean, if anyone could choose between being good at math, or being good at the arts, they’d choose math, Lila. It’s so practical.”

When my parents said we were moving to Toronto, I was so happy. Felicia made me want to be braver even if I knew she didn’t care about what happened to me.

It was different once we actually got here. When we temporarily moved in with them. When we heard Felicia and Clive fighting at night, Clive asking when we were going to leave.

Aunt Felicia was suddenly always working. When she wasn’t working, she was working out, and when she wasn’t working out, she was doing whatever Uncle Clive wanted.

“You know, sometimes divorce is a good thing,” I remember my grandmother yelling at her one day.

Everyone hated Clive, because he was cold and indifferent to our family, because he was lazy and she out earned him, but most of all, because everyone knew he didn’t love her. There were times when I sat on her car, listening to him yelling at her over her Bluetooth. At the end of the call, she’d always say “I love you,” and he’d snap “me too” or say nothing at all.

I didn’t see Aunt Felicia or Uncle Clive much after they had the twins. Clive starting making more money and they moved into a McMansion. Their house was always chaotic. They had a full-time nanny, and a girl who lived a few houses down babysat so they could go on dates.

They never wanted me to be around their kids, but occasionally Clive would want to take me to disturbing indie movie that Felicia would never want to see, or go see a band in a dive bar she’d never set foot in. It wasn’t like having an uncle, or even a friend. It was like having hope that one day, we’d all feel like family, like one day I’d meet people who wouldn’t think I was a total weirdo.

Felicia always tried to teach me about men. “Even if you have a guy’s kids, it’s important that he always sees you as a woman.” I nodded, even though I didn’t know what she meant.

She was always doing squats while she talked, teaching me all her diet tricks including avoiding oils and dressings on salads, always drinking tons of water and pouring vinegar on her food so she wouldn’t want to actually eat it.

When Clive inevitably left her for Ashley, his business partner’s wife, who they’d double dated with and vacationed with multiple times, she started spending more time with my family. One night over dinner, I told her she was prettier that Ashley, and Lila pointed out how much Ashley looked like Steven Tyler. For a while, it seemed like our relationship would change, and it did, until she met the next guy. Then the guy after him.

Jaron became a huge success, and Eitan drifted all the way into a unit in my apartment building.

At first I was weary of him, having never been close growing up, but after a while it felt kind of nice to be so close to someone in my family.

He’d always loved tattoos. At first, when his parents asked, he blamed me for being a bad example and having them first, but now he admitted that he’d just told them what he knew they’d wanted to hear.

He had full sleeves, and designs on his back and legs. It didn’t take long for him to apprentice at a tattoo parlour, and soon he had a huge clientele, even a few local celebrities.

He came over one night with his tattoo pen, needles and ink.

“I can’t believe I haven’t done you yet. What do you want?”

I had one a camera on my left wrist, and fluorescent beautiful graffiti that I designed myself across my shoulders. Then I thought about squirrels, their bushy tails, their curious eyes, always planning ahead for winter. I thought about the nests they slept in outside my window, the way they piled on top of each other, all breathing in unison. I thought about the daredevil types I saw in the dead of winter, heavier than normal, leaping off telephone wires and onto tree branches, but somehow, still making it.

I found the squirrel charm at the back of my drawer. “Give me one like this,” I said, and pointed to the fleshy spot on the inside of my right arm. I told him the story about his dad and I, looking out the window. He showed me a sketch, where he added a tiny top hat and a diamond necklace. He drew one for himself, with a bowtie. When he was finished we’d officially match, two squirrels who had wondered far from the nest, but who’d somehow made it to a better place.

Danila Botha’s most recent short story collection, Things that Cause Inappropriate Happiness, was published in 2024 by Guernica Editions. Her new novel, A Place for People Like Us will be published in Fall 2025. Danila holds an MFA from University of Guelph in Creative Writing. She teaches Creative Writing at the University of Toronto SCS and is part of the faculty at Humber School for Writers.

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By Lindsay Lennox,

“Absolutely not.”

The rock sat, dumbly.

“Look, I am definitely not doing that,” Ira clarified.

The rock maintained a dignified silence from its home on Ira’s desk, where it spent its days shoved behind his laptop, just visible among the tangle of cables. It didn’t need to be very visible; Ira wasn’t sure if it actually needed to be seen at all but he was nervous about what might happen if he hid it in a desk drawer instead.

“Goddamnit.” Ira flung himself backward into his desk chair, which skidded sideways so he couldn’t see the rock anymore, not that it mattered.

He had found the rock in his late twenties, on a hike in western Colorado. It was a dark and irregularly rounded lump of schist, a bit smaller than a bowling ball with veins of dull gold running through it, and Ira hated it.

He’d hated it since he’d first seen it, looking entirely unlike the dominant local geology, which ran more to sedimentary layers. Stopping for water, he’d immediately spotted it sitting pertly (if a rock as heavy and pendulous as this one could be pert) on top of a slab of shale that was doing its best to mind its own business. After stowing his water bottle, and without thinking much about the impulse, he’d picked up the rock (god, it was heavy) and added it to his pack. It was going to make the hike back down very, very irritating, but there’d been nothing else to do about it.

At 34, Ira had gotten used to the rock, and the rock had gotten used to Ira. It sat on Ira’s desk, and it mostly did nothing at all. Very, very occasionally, it stopped doing nothing, and what it did instead was suggest that Ira do something (whereupon it returned at once to doing nothing).

Ira could not have described how the rock suggested anything to him. It didn’t move, or glow, or look any different as far as he could tell. It just… it loomed at him from its spot behind his laptop, temporarily becoming the center of the entire universe, brighter and darker and more densely packed with meaning than any other object Ira had ever encountered.

Luckily, this only lasted for an infinitesimal moment – Ira was pretty sure it would burn out his whole brain if it lasted any longer – and it left behind, like an afterimage, a quest.

The quests were… well, they were stupid, Ira felt. Go to the Starbucks on 80th and chat with the barista, for example. Park on the north side of Washington Park at 10 pm. Sometimes Ira could make a guess about these quests: parked on the street at 10:12 pm he’d seen a tall, red-haired women run out onto the sidewalk pursued by an angry man, presumably her boyfriend.

After a glance at Ira’s idling engine and rolled-down window, the man had gotten into a pickup truck and departed with a screech of tires and a billow of blue smoke. The woman had simply looked neutrally at Ira for a moment, then gone back inside. (Ira did see her in dreams after that, just occasionally, giving him that same expressionless, appraising look.)

Most of the time he had no idea what he was doing, but since there was no possibility of resisting these imperatives, he was just thankful they didn’t come up very often and were almost trivially easy to fulfill.

Today’s suggestion, though, was something else again.

Ira let out a guttural, complaining sound. This was not a good time for complicated international quests; it really, really was not. It was going to take some serious reorganization of his work schedule for at least the rest of the week. Ira opened his calendar; he sent apologetic emails; he declined meetings. He turned on an auto-reply indicating he was away on unexpected family business and expected to be back in the office by Monday.

“There,” said Ira, slamming his laptop closed, and raising his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Happy?”

The rock sat, looking neither happy nor unhappy. Ira rolled his eyes.

***

Ira stood on a cliff in Wales.

His hair whipped into his face as he tried not to look down to where cold waves beat against the chalky precipice at whose edge he stood. He had to admit, the Welsh coast knew a thing or two about drama, even for someone who’d grown up amid the casual grandeur of the Rocky Mountains.

To reach the cliff, he had parked his rented Peugeot in a large, well-maintained parking lot, double checked to make sure an entry fee wasn’t required, and hiked an easy few hundred yards down the coast. It had turned out to be an unexpectedly simple last leg of this extremely inconvenient errand. Idly, Ira wondered what his total mileage was, were he to submit it for reimbursement, if he knew where to submit it, or to whom.

From Heathrow (4600 miles via the red-eye), he’d taken a National Express train to Southhampton (about 90 kilometres), where he’d eaten breakfast, rented the Peugeot and driven it to Salisbury (39 km). In Salisbury he’d spent quite a bit of time, not to mention a significant amount of the limited international data plan he’d purchased shortly before leaving the US, trying to find out what in the world a “water meadow” was. Then, he’d circled around the southwestern quadrant of the city looking for a way to access it (kilometrage unknown but infuriatingly recursive in their path).

Eventually, in the wake of an increasingly complex series of lies – lies which had also required the creation of a website for a fictitious research lab at a real American university to validate his identity as a research assistant – he’d driven another half kilometre up a private access road, then back down once he had the item he’d been looking for (which he’d stowed in the trunk of the rental with considerable embarrassment.)

Another few hundred kilometres by car, another few hundred meters by foot and here he was: standing on a cliff, holding what was, it had to be said, an absolutely enormous and cumbersome sword.

Ira didn’t know anything about holding swords, so it hung limply by his side where he stood, its tip resting in the chalky dust at his feet. It was long enough that he’d had to continually maneuver it during the hike to the top of the cliff; long enough that he kept worrying about how to effectively conceal it from the people he encountered on the path every so often. Apparently he needn’t have worried: the other hikers smoothly circumnavigated the sword’s awkward length without seeming to actually see it.

Although he had only a lazy acquaintance with the relevant legends, Ira had known what it was as soon as he picked it up from the boggy, flooded ground in Salisbury, not far from the place where three rivers had once converged.

The sword, having been thrown into the confluence soon after the death of its owner during a battle so bloody that it had briefly turned the waters of the northern river red, had lain quietly under the riverbed for quite a long time, and Ira didn’t see why it couldn’t have simply stayed there, causing no trouble, igniting no political furors.

This particular sword – it had many names, and the reader will already have guessed the most famous one – had a definite knack for causing trouble, though. Trouble from the very first Christmas Eve when it had appeared in a church courtyard well to the north, lodged firmly in a rock, a different rock from Ira’s, but another rock that had absolutely no business being where it was found.

Ira hefted the sword, awkwardly.

It had a certain presence to it, he had to admit. Even in his inexpert grip, even with fifteen or so centuries separating him from the bastard nephew-son whose inheritance was still, improbably, encoded in his Y chromosome, Ira could feel its warm magnetism, suggesting that he might, if he wished, wield it. He wavered, for a moment; the sword, long as it was, would probably fit handily inside his hall closet, next to the skis.

But, in the end, no. The last thing he needed, Ira felt, was another confusing and possibly imperious object hanging around his house, issuing orders and looming at him. He adjusted his grip, trying to find a position that would give him some leverage. He planted his feet; he drew his arm back; he swung it forward and released the sword with as much force as he could manage.

For a moment it seemed clear that it wasn’t enough; the sword plunged heavily downward, and Ira thought it would bounce gracelessly off the side of the cliff. But the ever-present coastal wind caught the blade, twisting it out towards the sea in a long westward arc. As he blinked in the setting sun, it vanished into the water, where, Ira hoped, it would stay for a very, very long time.

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Lindsay Lennox is a queer, non-binary writer living in Colorado. Their work includes poetry, short fiction and essays published in The New Territory (forthcoming), The Fem, Flashquake, thickjam, Thought Catalog, Underground Voices and other places. Their work often explores how fantasy and narrative shape identity.

By Rita Jane Gabbett,

When you are having an angiogram (cardiac catheter procedure), they don’t knock you out all the way. This is because they might have to wake you up and discuss your options with you in the middle of it. I couldn’t exactly follow what they were saying, but I could catch bits and pieces. And these are three phrases no one wants to hear when their cardiologist is up inside their heart. “This isn’t going to,” “We are going to have to,” and “Let’s try…”

Don’t worry. This story has a happy ending. After all, I am typing this two days later. But there was some luck involved and that’s where the cautionary tale comes in.

Whether you have heard this or not, it bears repeating that women’s heart disease symptoms can be vague. Mine were. So much so that even on the morning of my procedure I was questioning myself. Why am I doing this? I feel fine. I can walk a mile and I only get chest pains occasionally. Everyone gets out of breath sometimes. Stairs are hard. I’m 66. This is just aging. They will probably find nothing. And then I will be labeled a hypochondriac.

Cautionary tale advice: Sometimes, probably all the time, the best thing to do with your inner critic is to thank her for her input, then tell her to sit down and shut up.

As it turns out, I am probably the antithesis of a hypochondriac, and I am going to venture a guess that I am not alone. Many of us like to see ourselves as strong, capable, healthy, damn near invincible. I did.

There is also this: with apologies to all the wonderful doctors out there (including my cardiologist for whom I am forever grateful) some doctors tend to poopoo women’s symptoms. Several studies bear this out, including one that shows women complaining of legitimate heart disease symptoms are twice as likely to be diagnosed with mental illness as men reporting the exact same symptoms. It occurs to me that even the word hysterectomy sounds suspiciously like hysterical.…Enough said.

When I told my primary care physician that I had racing heart palpitations and some shortness of breath at the top of the stairs he told me I was prone to anxiety. I am? I don’t feel anxious. Then he had me hold out my leg while he pressed down on it. He said my thighs were weak and if I exercised more, I wouldn’t be so out of breath.

Maybe he labeled me “prone to anxiety” because I had complained similarly two years prior. That time, he had me wear a heart monitor for two weeks, which showed only slightly irregularity and he told me I was fine. I felt foolish.

But the shortness of breath had gotten worse and the “weak thigh muscle” theory did not sit right with me. I am a life-long exerciser who watches her diet and up until these recent months hardly missed a day on my 10,000 steps regimen. I wanted to push back on that diagnosis but didn’t. After all, he went to medical school; I didn’t.

Cautionary tale advice: Doctors are not magicians, and they are not in your body. Many are also pretty overworked and exhausted these days.

He then listened to my carotids (arteries between the heart and brain) and heard a prominent bruit (pulsing sounds like blood pushing through a narrow channel). To his credit, he ordered a sonogram and referred me to a cardiologist.

I passed the sonogram with flying colors – only slight calcification in my carotids. I was elated. See? Nothing wrong with you. Maybe you are a hypochondriac, my inner critic chided. Still, I kept the appointment with the cardiologist. Thank God.

A former journalist, I like to go into any interview prepared. I constructed a one-page document outlining my symptoms over the past 18 months, and a detailed family history. The exercise of preparing that document was a good one. It forced me to be honest and look objectively at my reality. Over those months, I had gone from daily 3-mile walks to five days a week, to three days, to two miles, to one mile, to, “Oh hell, I’m tired, let’s watch Netflix.” I also talked to my older sister to flesh out family history.

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Cautionary take advice: Do this. Like the Boy Scouts, be prepared.

That document alone, which I handed to my cardiologist when we met, pretty much set his hair on fire. He ordered a stress test for the next day. I was sure I had passed. Even the staff cardiologist conducting it said I did great but added that we’d have to wait until my cardiologist reviewed the results, as he tended to see things others did not.

Well, God bless him, he did. But even he was on the fence about whether to proceed to an angiogram. My test results were mixed – the echo cardiogram looked great. My heart was pumping strong. But the EKG showed some slight heart irregularity upon exertion. He said we could look the other way, but given my family history, he’d like to proceed to an angiogram.

Cautionary tale advice: Make sure you know and share your family history with your physicians because that’s probably what saved me.

In my case, super-high genetic cholesterol (with an inability to tolerate statins), an uncle who dropped dead at 42 of a heart attack and a mother who had a quintuple bypass and valve replacement were enough to tip the scale for him.

Even as I was quick to point out (and rationalize) I was unlike my mother in many ways. She was a smoker, I was not. She had high blood pressure, mine is low. She was sedentary, I am extremely active.

But I liked this guy. He listened carefully. Asked questions. My first appointment was 45 minutes long. He called me between surgeries to go over my stress test results. I trusted him. I’m glad I did.

Cautionary tale advice: In almost every aspect of life, follow your gut instinct. We were given that “gut brain” for a reason.

So on to the angiogram we went. Sure enough, the main artery that supplies blood to the right side of my heart was 95% blocked. He inserted a stent which he says is now working beautifully. As for the chatter I heard while I was only half under, turns out my 4’11” stature also came with pint-sized veins and arteries.

The blockage was in a tricky spot (where the artery curved) and so occluded that he had to insert a second tiny wire to perform a sonogram inside the artery to be able to place the stent correctly. Isn’t medical science grand? Amazing. I am so grateful for every researcher, every manufacturer of medical equipment and every doctor, nurse and technician who took out student loans to save my life! Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Cautionary tale advice: Take the victory but learn from it and pay attention.

It is going to take me a minute to get my brain around the fact that I have coronary heart disease. The artery that supplies the left side of my heart is also starting to clog, but it’s not bad yet. I have smaller blockages in others, but also not too bad. Yet. The operative word is yet. I am now on blood thinners and will go on a new cholesterol treatment for people like me who can’t take statins. I will have yearly stress tests and if I have symptoms, I will be honest with myself and my cardiologist about them.

I won’t brush it off next time the walk to the far end of the soccer field for my grandson’s game looks like a lot of work (as it did a few months ago). I will not blow off chest pain as heartburn. And I will pat my inner critic and my oversized “I’m OK” ego on the head and send them both into a time out if they get too loud.

Final advice: Smell those roses. They are the reason we are here.

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Janie Gabbett is a journalist who spent the bulk of her career working for the international news agency Reuters in Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Hong Kong and Chicago. Now she processes life by writing about it. Her essays have been published in Faith, Hope and Fiction, McSweeney’s and the Christian Science Monitor. When not writing, she is either working in her art studio or creating pillow forts and dinosaur menageries with her grandsons.

By Derek Alan Jones,

The work was nearly done. As he turned the crown to wind the spring, each click of the ratchet wheel was audibly crisp and firm. After one full rotation and a quarter of another, the balance started to oscillate, and the movement came to life. The man placed two fingers on his neck as he listened to the ticking, timing the sound of the mechanism against the rhythm of his pulse. Eight beats of the escapement for every one of his own heart. Perfect regulation. He smiled then, in satisfaction. It would function as intended. It would be among his best work.

In the Old World, he’d been a watchmaker -- one of the few there had been in that time to keep the craft alive. Even in his youth it was said that the trade was obsolete. There was no need for springs and gears in a world of chips and screens. But there was so much more than that, he thought, in the things that he had made. It had never been about accuracy, or efficiency, or time. It was art. It was creation. He knew there was life in those springs and gears, and he was determined to harvest it. Now, in this new version of the world, where time was all but meaningless, he found freedom in the absence of the illusion of practical need. Now he could revel in his creations. Now he made other things.

The one on the desk in front of him was cast in oiled bronze. Into the metal he’d placed shards of glass, in amber and Heineken-green, which he had shaped and smoothed and polished over the course of several days. It was hard and careful work, but it kept his fingers nimble. Perhaps more importantly, though, it did the same for his mind. There was precious little left in his days to keep him occupied. He had set the glass into the shape of broad, symmetrical wings, and as those wings rose and fell, the shards caught the light from the lamp on the desk and dashed it across the walls, like a thousand tiny fireflies dancing in perfect rhythm.
A small boy stood behind the man as he hunched over his work, bouncing with excitement as the thing began to move.

“What is it?” the boy asked in wonder, as he followed the lights with his eyes.

“It’s a butterfly. Do you like it?”

“I think it’s the best one yet.”

“Not quite,” the man said, and he smiled. “But it’s close.”

“Is that really what they look like?”

The man shook his head as he answered.

“The real ones are more delicate. They come in every color you could think of. And they flutter, and they swoop, and they fill the sky in the summertime.” He did his best to imitate the movements of a monarch with his hands, and as he did, he could see a fascination growing in the boy.

“Do you think I’ll ever see one? A real one, I mean.”

The man sighed deeply then, turning slightly in his chair so that he could face the boy.

“They’re all gone now, I’m afraid.”

The boy’s shoulders dropped.

“Like Pterodactyls? And Dogs?”

The man nodded in response, slowly and apologetically.

“And like all of the other people?”

“That’s right.”

The man placed a clear glass dome over the new creation, and he pushed himself away from the desk, and he stood up from his chair. He placed two fingers on his neck, and two fingers on the boy’s, and they stood in silence as the man compared the rhythms that he found. Eight beats of the escapement for every one of his own heart. As he looked down at the boy, he imagined he could see a smile spread across the hand-carved meerschaum face.

In the Old World, he’d been a watchmaker. Now he made other things.

Derek Alan Jones spends most of his time working in a warehouse in Kansas and the rest of it writing speculative fiction. His work has appeared in or is upcoming in Utopia Science Fiction, Orion's Belt and Penumbric Speculative Fiction, among others.

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By Debra J. Tillar

There was a commotion in the penguin colony. Frantic screeching and clamor. A skua had stolen a pin-feathered chick from a nest left unattended and the outraged parent was trying to snatch back the tiny, lifeless creature. Devin watched the skua win the tug-of-war and sail with its plunder into the wide white sky where the ever-present summer sun glowed from behind a veil of ice clouds. An eerie halo portended an imminent storm.

It was when his gaze fell that he saw the body. It lay just beyond the reach of the icy waves, across a tumble of rocks washed clean of the pink guano that covered the rest of the cove. Devin thought it was a seal, one of the crab-eaters that liked to bask onshore and bark at him when he came too close, but he saw arms and dark hair that swept across a human face. He cried out—and the body leapt up.

Alive! A young woman—

“Good lord! What are you doing here? Are you okay?”

She was wild-eyed, filthy, her hair tangled like seaweed, her wet, leathery garments tattered and hanging in shreds. She didn’t speak, but raised her hands to ward him off. On her arm she wore a magnificent bracelet that dazzled with shining gems.

“Did you fall off a boat? What happened to you?”

He took off his parka and stepped closer, held it out to her, but she backed away into knee-deep water he knew was frigid.

“Please. Don’t be afraid. Let me help you.”

Her bare feet had to be burning with cold, yet she seemed about to retreat further into the sea. She looked over her shoulder at the water. Reluctant. Fearful.

At that moment a large orca broke the surface, surprisingly close to shore. The young woman jumped just as Devin reached to pull her to safety. It was only then that he noticed the gaping wound on her leg. He caught her in his arms as she stumbled.

#

The small research station on Vernaldi Point was separated from the nearest settlement by fifty miles of treacherous, brash-filled sea. Devin had just spent two months taking core samples; it was now less than a week until the chopper from McMurdo Station would come to collect him. The decades-old shack, once a military outpost, had been upgraded with an attached Quonset hut. Devin carried the young woman straight in to the kitchen.

“What’s your name?” His shirt was covered in her blood. She moaned as he cleaned her leg and applied pressure, but she still didn’t speak. Of course she was in shock. Maybe a brain injury. He would have to radio McMurdo as soon as the ugly wound was bandaged.

Her large eyes were dark and heavy-lidded, the whites abnormally gelatinous. How had she survived the cold? He offered her a mug of hot tea but she stared and didn’t take it. She seemed remarkably alert as she watched his hands closely then anxiously scanned the room.

“There’s nobody else here. Just me. My name is Devin. De-vin.” He pointed at himself, then at her. “And you? Your name?”

Her ruddy face was blank, expressionless except for the peculiar eyes. He tried to keep his voice bright, but he was badly shaken. Tourist ships never came to this part of the peninsula. How did she get here? Maybe on a private yacht?

“I’m not a medical doctor, but I have been trained to do this.” He put on surgical gloves and laid out sutures. The gash in her leg was deep. “I’m a scientist, an eremologist. I study deserts. Antarctica is the largest desert in the world, did you know that? Almost no precipitation. All this ice is millions of years old...” He realized he was prattling, that she obviously couldn’t understand a word. But his voice seemed to calm her.

“This wasn’t supposed to be a solo gig but the other guy got sick. Appendicitis. Had to be air-lifted out about five weeks ago.”

He tried to pull away her ripped pants to better cleanse the wound, but the pants stuck to her skin and when he pulled harder she yelped. “Sorry! The fabric must be...”

And that’s when he realized.

He froze.

The ragged clothes he’d thought were made of faux leather weren’t clothes at all. It was her skin.

#

The solitude, the thin polar air, the inexplicable claustrophobia in this vast world of ice, that harsh, unrelenting sun that danced in a circle every day but refused to set, had all conjured many unusual dreams in the weeks he’d been at the station, even a few odd waking moments. But this was extreme. Had his prolonged isolation triggered a mild psychosis? He hadn’t really felt so terribly alone, surrounded as he was by thousands of malodorous, squawking Gentoo penguins that followed him everywhere, the fur seals and crab-eaters that cavorted in the rocky shoals, the harem of stinky, gargantuan elephant seals that lounged, belching and farting, on the shingle behind the station. He radioed McMurdo once a week and had felt no desire for more.

He felt fine, but didn’t all psychotics think they were fine?

With great effort he suppressed his mounting alarm, steadied his hands, and finished the stitches. While bandaging the leg, he took time to examine the young woman’s astonishing skin—slightly textured and overlapping in layers that hung from her body. He wondered about her gummy eyes, her apparent lack of language, the fact that the bitter cold didn’t seem to bother her. None of it made sense.

And that extraordinary bracelet: precious gems woven into a fine silver filigree that spiraled tightly around her forearm. It looked ancient, a museum piece. Where could she have gotten such a treasure? He touched it—and her hand flashed out and pushed his fingers away with remarkable strength that could easily break his bones.

He hadn’t radioed McMurdo yet. What would he say?

She laid a hand on the bandage, and her strange eyes thanked him. But when she stood up and tried to leave with determined steps to the door he quickly blocked her way—“Wait! You can’t go!”—and suddenly found himself on the floor and the door swinging open.

Her body was a dark streak as she ran through the harem unmolested by the huge seals that snapped and bellowed at Devin as he followed. The cove was just beyond.

“Stop!”

But she was already in the water. And just beyond, the orca was swimming right at her.

“Look out! Look out!”

She turned just as the orca tossed her. Both submerged.

“Oh my god!”

The sea was calm for a long, terrible moment. Then: a hiss of parting water as the orca surfaced, a gush of spray as the blowhole spewed air; and the woman—straddling the whale, clinging to its dorsal fin. She lifted an arm high and threw something. It landed on the beach at Devin’s feet.

The bracelet.

He looked back at the sea in time to see her embrace the fin with both arms as the orca dove. The water became still, flat. Devin stayed and stared for a long time, but the sea remained flat. The ice halo thickened and the midnight sun still danced, still refused to set.

Debra is a former archaeologist, a retired teacher, an artist, and a writer. She has published numerous newspaper and magazine articles on food and travel and her short stories have been included in science fiction and horror anthologies. In 2021 Debra published a two-volume science fiction novel, The Nomad. Debra has traveled to all seven continents and has visited over 60 countries and territories. She grew up in New York City and now lives on the seacoast of New Hampshire.

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