To the north, above the Devil’s head, a soul writhing in eternal agony. On his right hand, a man with infinite bowels being disembowled, infinitely. At his feet, a vain woman looks into a mirror where boils rise continuously to the surface of her face. To his left, a quiet old man masturbates. To the northeast and southeast, solemn demons. Northwest and southwest, fallen angels snivel. It is difficult, he explains, after millennia of existence, to get off.

Marie finds it hard to move her bowels properly under the circumstances. She is constipated, seized up, she anticipates the look of disgust on the face of the masturbating man; the angels in their chains rattle in a most distracting manner, and the castor oil has not yet kicked in. She bears down, she changes her position to a squat, she balances herself on the shoulders of one angel and one demon. The devil looks at her with the familiar look of a man about to come, who needs just one more, just one more thing.

Marie has been taking 25 mg of hydoxyzine, an anti-anxiety medication, to deal with her difficulties shitting on the Devil’s face. She feels it a personal failure; she has never failed to fulfill a man sexually. She doesn’t think to blame it on the fact that he has never been a man.

She blames herself but also the fetish and moreover the look on the devil’s face, possessive and mocking under his thin beard as if daring her anus to discharge. The next time the situation is arranged, the dias well-lit, the tortured man mocking her with his ropes and ropes of loosened bowel, she mounts the devil, then turns to face his horny corny feet. He grunts, he is displeased. She turns to look at the masturbating man, she leers; he blushes and she notices his penis has literally been worn down to a ragged stump from the friction of his hand. His right arm is massive while the rest of him has wasted. He is ashamed and it is their mutual shame that finally moves her.

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The curator is hot. He’s wearing a nice suit. I can tell it’s a nice suit because it doesn’t make any noise when he walks. My suit sounds like a handful of grocery bags, even when I’m standing still. There’s a breeze and my pants flap like a cheap flag.

The curator asks me if I like art.

I suck on my cigarette. I have epilepsy. If I suck on my cigarette too many times, I’ll have a seizure. I suck on my cigarette again. I’m one of those smokers who keeps the cigarette in his mouth the entire time he’s smoking. The curator hardly draws. He lifts his cigarette to his face like it’s a glass he wants to inspect.

“So?”

“So, yes,” I say, “I like art. I went to art school.”

“Ha ha. I thought so.”

The curator bends over and mashes his cigarette into a bucket of sand. He’s bending over that way on purpose. His ass. In my face. I’m lucky I don’t have a bigger dick. I can hide an erection in these circus tent pants, no problem.

“You’re young,” he says. “You’ll feel guilty for making useless shit after a while.”

I’ve heard this before. When I graduated art school, I showed my mother my portfolio. She put on her reading glasses and considered every piece. It was like watching someone play a very slow game of solitaire.

When she finished, she said, “Why are you an artist anyway?”

I went out on the front porch. I sat on the swing. My father was standing in the driveway smoking a cigarette. He took the pack from his breast pocket and tossed it to me. I held the pack like it was a tiny Bible.

My father said, “Didn’t anyone teach you to smoke?”

I took a cigarette from the pack, the lighter too, stuffed in there like a little gun. I put the cigarette in my mouth. My art school friends tried to teach me to smoke once. I couldn’t move my hand the right way to ash the cigarette. It was like when my brother and I tried to teach ourselves magic tricks from a library book.

My father watched me try to light the cigarette. The little gear on the lighter hurt my thumb. My father didn’t help. I got it, eventually. I sucked in so the tip of the cigarette glowed orange. I kept sucking in. I got dizzy. My father came up on the porch and sat in a rocking chair.

“Your mother knows what she likes.”

“Tell me about it,” I said.

“Not much to tell. Just the way it is.”

It’s the same way at the museum. People know what they like.

I turn the cigarette in my fingers, twisting my wrist to make a forceful ash in the curator’s direction. He straightens up. He smoothes his pant legs. He stands by the bucket of sand as if waiting.

“Listen,” he says, “I’m sorry. Just make things because you want to make them.”

He holds the door open for me. I pretend he’s looking at my ass. Maybe he is. Maybe he’s assessing. I see him in the galleries and it looks like he’s been assessing things his entire life.

I’m posted in the fish gallery tonight. There are paintings of people buying fish or eating fish or celebrating, in some way, the freshness of fish.

When I was a kid, the homeless man by the river taught me about fish. He said, “Never eat a fish that looks like this.” He put his hands in a bucket and took out a fish. It had three eyes and messed up scales like a dropped deck of playing cards. The homeless man held the fish like a snake, supporting its middle so it didn’t get jumpy. He put the fish to my nose. “See,” he said, “it doesn’t even smell right.”

When I’m trapped in the fish gallery, I smell my fingers. I put two of them to my nose like they’ve just been somewhere private. The smell of cigarettes is strong. Sometimes, I lick my fingers before I smell them. The wetness makes the scent stronger. I’m licking my fingers when the curator comes into my gallery with another curator.

Neither of them look at me. I stand against one of the walls covered with period-appropriate fabric. You can touch these walls and they spring a little, like a t-shirt stretched over a mouth.

My curator is questioning the authenticity of one of the fish paintings. The other curator doesn’t say anything. He humphs a lot. My curator points at the fish in the painting and whispers something. The other curator leaves.

My curator says, “This is a fake.” He flicks the canvas. It makes a puffing sound like when you take the lid off a popcorn tin.

I point at the fish in the painting and say, “That looks like a big black cock.”

The curator grabs through my uniform like someone who’s lost something in the sheets. He finds my body. We kiss. I’ve never kissed another smoker. It’s like kissing myself. If I was pressed to define an artist, maybe I’d say an artist is someone who can kiss himself.

The curator says, “We can’t do this if I hate your artwork. Do you have a studio?”

My studio is downtown by the river, which smells like shit. I go to yard sales and buy half-used scented candles. When the candles are lit, my studio smells like imitation vanilla and fruit punch.

The curator and I take out our lighters. We go around the studio and light every candle. My artwork looks animated and evil. The curator says he’s never seen anything like it.

“What are these?”

I tell him they’re crocheted monsters. I tell him my mother taught me to crochet. She crocheted when her body ached. She was in the living room one morning slapping her legs. She said, “Not today, you soft monsters.” I tried to hug her, but she said, “Don’t touch me.” I started to cry and she said, “No, wait. Help me crochet.”

The curator pokes a crocheted gargoyle.

“It looks like stone, I’ll give you that.”

I take a crocheted harpy from a bookshelf. The harpy has little yarn breasts. The curator pinches one of the nipples and laughs. I fly the harpy back to the bookshelf like it’s a toy airplane.

The studio is starting to smell like a greeting card store on fire. I sit on the futon while the curator inspects each monster. I light a cigarette. The curator touches the spear-tail of a crocheted demon. He shakes his finger like the yarn was hot.

“God,” he says, “you must be tortured. I don’t want to mess with your mood by kissing you too much.”

I tell him to get over here and feel guilty.

He blows out some candles. Now the studio smells like a match lit over a toilet.

I suck on my cigarette like it’s a straw. I’m dizzy. The studio is almost dark. I fold over on the futon, so tired all of a sudden. I bite my tongue and my left arm lifts without me telling it to. I growl. I’m having a seizure. I’m a little person in my head looking out my eyes.

The curator says, “Where the fuck are you?”

I slap the legs in my head. Here I are. Right here. But my left arm keeps lifting and I’m not in the studio pretty soon. I’m dead a while.

When I come back, I kiss the curator and try not to throw up in his mouth. I pretend nothing happened. I light a cigarette and put it in his mouth. I pick up a ball of yarn and start to crochet in the near dark.

The curator puts his hands all over my body. It’s warm for him because I’m alive again. I act like I can feel it. For so long after a seizure, I can only feel my body popping back into place. The curator asks what those noises are and I say, “I don’t hear anything.” He squints his eyes like there’s something inauthentic about my body. He pulls my mouth open with his clean, curator hands, searching for an end to unravel.

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“Why are we doing this?” I asked, buckling myself into the truck, but my mother didn’t answer.

Instead, she unfolded a pair of white-rimmed sunglasses, tucked the ends into the wild nest of her hair, and let them rest them on her forehead. Even in Dad’s pick-up littered with dog hair and sawdust, she looked glamorous. “I told your dad we’d be back by four. No time to waste.” She looked over while revving the engine. Her eyebrows arched into a shape that, even to this day, I have not been able to imitate.

“Right,” I said.

“This is going to change your life.” She tapped the sunglasses down to her nose. “I suggest you get with the program.”

My parents had both attended the high school I was entering, but they didn’t fall in love until years later when they locked eyes at a line dance. I’ve asked my father about his life beforehand—before my mother and that dance—but he has nothing to say. No stories to tell. Like he didn’t exist until that moment.

As the pick-up gained speed on the open road, my mother and I sped past fields full of drooping Queen Anne’s lace and milkweed nearly turned to fluff.

We stopped first at Swidell’s Taxidermy. “Terry Swidell,” she told me in the parking lot. “First boyfriend. Total loser.”

Instead of walking to the front door, I followed my mother to the square window on the side of the building. We lifted our noses to the edge of the glass. Though the lighting inside the shop was dim, I could make out several squirrels arranged on a shelf against the back wall.

“We’re not going in?” I asked.

“Of course not,” she said. “How would we explain this?” A dozen white-tailed bucks stared at me from different spots on the wall, their antlers curved upward like shrugging arms.

“There he is,” my mother whispered and Terry entered the room through a door in the back. He was short, stocky, carrying a fish. He lifted it high above his head, assessing its position on the wall, and held it there for several seconds. From the side, his teeth looked like kernels of sweet corn beneath his nose.

“Terry always used the word critters,” my mother said. “Just look at him.” She guided me back to the truck with an arm on my elbow.

The next stop was Vince Bowden’s Auto Repair. “Vince once proposed to me,” my mother explained, “in his grandfather’s sugar shack.”

The auto shop was closed, but Vince’s house was only ten yards away. We tip-toed across his junk-laden yard, threading through rusted cars on cinderblocks and the hollowed-out carcass of an old gray van. Through his window, I saw Vince—barefoot in his kitchen, chopping something with a knife. His beard looked uncombed. In the living room behind him, two kids in dirty sweatshirts sat on a couch, watching TV.

“This here,” said my mother, “this could have been my life.” She shuddered, but a smile teased at the corner of her mouth.

“I have no idea why we’re doing this,” I repeated.

“You will,” she said.

The tour took all afternoon. We drove downtown to peek over Wesley Hill’s clapboard fence, and then to the Best Western, where I watched Martin Beauford tend bar through the leaves of a potted plant. None of the men looked as bad as my mother made them out to be. They were just men—some smiling, some with five o’clock shadows, some with mysterious stains running down the sides of their shirts, but all decent-looking men. All men who had lived in our town for years, but had not existed before my mother.

“Tony Dalton,” she said on Main Street, pointing at a man waving a cardboard sign by the side of the road. Your choice of pizza toppings for 99¢! “Only once, but it still counts.”

“Roger, too,” she said, nodding to the man pumping gas at the Citgo. “Oh, and Vinny! Right there. With the eagle tattoos. Coworkers—what are the odds?”

“Mom,” I finally said. “You didn’t sleep with all of these men.”

“I did,” she answered.

“That’s impossible,” I told her.

“Look, I hope you’re getting the point here,” my mother said. She turned the radio down and looked at me through her gorgeous, reflective sunglasses. “You don’t want to be the kind of girl I was. That’s the point.” For a second, I thought she was about to cry. Then the moment passed. She just reached out and cupped her hand around the back of my head. I felt her fingers press against my hair, which was nothing like a wild nest, and I thought of all the men on Main Street. In our town. In the world. I didn’t have what it took to bring one into existence, even if I wanted to.

“Let’s get home,” my mother said then. She removed her hand from my head and put her foot on the pedal. “Your dad’ll be waiting.”

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Read more about Liz here.

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He lives in a city three hours away from her, but registered on the dating site in her city to avoid awkward run-ins with people who might know his wife, which he explains away to the woman by saying he is looking to move to her city soon, so what’s the point in dating in his? Now he is coming to visit her, coming on a train because he’s actually never been on a train, and she loves trains and insisted that he has to ride one once in his life, has to pay attention to the landscape sliding by the windows, which you never pay attention to driving a car, has to walk up and down the train cars while it’s moving until he masters it, can stay steady on moving ground, gets his train legs. This was part of one of their many conversations about the small joys in life and the things they have and have not done and still want to do, which seem to them to be more in-tune and romantic than any conversations they’ve ever had in person with anyone. They are amazed at how well they understand each other. The woman wonders if it is possible to meet your soul mate on the internet at age thirty-six, and the man wonders if he married the wrong woman fifteen years ago.

The woman doesn’t know which train he’s on. All she knows is that she’s meeting him at an Italian restaurant at eight o’clock.

There is a train wreck. It’s not the train the man is on, because he never gets on a train at all. He goes to the train station and stands in line and can’t go through with it. His bag feels too heavy, packed with two changes of clothes and a roll of condoms. The cash he withdrew as to not leave a paper trail is a treacherous bulge in his wallet, a palpable wad of his deceit. He thinks about his wife at home making lunches for his kids, thinks about how there was a time when he drove five hours every other weekend to see her when he went back to business school so he could support a family, support her. He can still feel the brusque kiss he gave her this morning as she got out of the shower, thinks he can smell her shampoo on his cheek. The emails were one thing, but the idea of sitting across from this woman and smiling at her and perhaps holding her hand across the table (which is what he imagined he would do) makes him feel hypertensive, and when he looks at his hands he can see his veins bulging green and wormy under his skin. He feels very old and wonders about his blood pressure. He steps out of line and drives home, tells his wife the business meeting out of town was canceled at the last minute. His business contact had a sudden heart attack, but it looks like he’ll be fine.

But the woman goes to the restaurant not knowing about the man’s defection or about the train wreck. She puts on a new dress in a dark green that complements her skin and makes her chestnut hair look lustrous, wears lipstick for the first time in months, and sits at a table facing the door. She brings the photograph of him from ten years ago that she printed out at home, in which he is too orange—something is wrong with her printer—and she holds it up every time a man walks in. When it becomes eight o’clock and he’s not there yet, she tells herself that he’s running late. She had given him her phone number in an email, but he had forgotten (purposefully?) to give her his, so she can’t call him, but maybe he’ll call her. She places her phone face up on the table. She goes ahead and orders a glass of white wine.

When ten minutes have passed, and then fifteen, she becomes self-conscious that the wait staff is watching her, pitying her. She drinks several more glasses of white wine, so cold the glass wets her fingers, to calm her nerves, but it doesn’t work. The wine lands cold in her stomach and feels as if it doesn’t stop there but keeps on falling to the floor, through the floor, through the foundation of the building and farther, as if there’s a large hole in her that plunges straight down into the earth, like she’s a sinkhole waiting to open up. The photo in her hand shakes with as if with mocking laughter. She wants to crawl through the hole in herself and sleep somewhere in the dark soil without an internet connection. And then she starts to hate him. Who is he to stand her up? He’s forty, for Christ sake, there must be something wrong with him that he’s still single, especially looking as cursedly handsome as he does. She wonders what his flaw is and focuses on it as she finishes her last glass of wine after sitting for a little over an hour at the table: maybe chronic bad breath, an annoying laugh, self-obsession, a tendency to interrupt when others are speaking, a small penis, a foot fungus. She pays her own bill, which she had been expecting him to pay. She tips poorly.

When she gets home and turns the TV to the news, there it is on the screen: the smoke, the burning, the twisted metal, the ruined dotted line of the train as seen from a news helicopter above. It’s on every news channel: two trains collided, the passenger train and a freight train carrying chemicals, at least twenty presumed dead and the count rising. She immediately thinks that it was his train. It was going from his city to hers. She thinks she made him ride a train and he did and now he’s dead and she’s responsible. She thinks of the horrible things she thought about him in the restaurant and pulls his photo out of her purse, and as her hands shake, his image quivers like a last breath, like an eyelid closing, like his spirit dissolving into the smoke over the burning train. She imagines his body mangled and burned, that body she was planning on running her hands over that night, that body with moles and chest hair she had been looking forward to learning and loving fondly in its imperfections. That sweet man, riding a train headed for her. They have not yet released the names of the deceased so they can contact their families first, notify their loved ones, and the woman wonders if she would count as a loved one, maybe not yet, but eventually.

She turns off the news and reads all of his emails, all of his chats. She goes to his profile on the dating site, and everything is just the same as it always was, and she doesn’t know what she thought would be different, of course it would not be instantly updated with his death, but it seems especially cruel that it’s still there, listing his interests, his hobbies, his birth date without the death date, his picture still there, eyes crinkling with his smile, as if he’s right on the other end of the internet, waiting to meet someone special, and all she has to do is click “send.” She sends him an email. She nurtures the small blossom of hope in her heart that maybe it was not his train. Maybe his train was coming after that one and so it was delayed and that’s why he never showed up at the restaurant. In the email, she asks, “Were you on that train? Please tell me you weren’t. I’m so sorry I told you to take a train.”

He doesn’t see her email. He goes home and dreads how he will have to break it off with the woman. He feels some responsibility to her even though they’ve never met. He feels he knows her very well, and she knows him, understands him like his wife doesn’t anymore, except she doesn’t know he has a wife, and perhaps she wouldn’t understand as much if she knew about that. When he goes home, he takes off the new boxer briefs he bought for the woman and makes desperate love to his wife while the kids are in school, which they haven’t done like this in months, not during the daytime anyway, and she is pleasantly surprised and blushes at him as he tugs off her cardigan, and he feels his love for her expand like a collapsed lung un-collapsing, finally letting him breathe. He looks at the back of her head while she dozes afterward and thinks of how stupid he almost was. He remembers how things were when they first met, in the first years and months. He remembers how he felt the same way about her as he feels about this woman on the other end of the train. If they had a relationship, it would have gone the same way, he tells himself. They would run out of conversations, their excitement would degrade into complacency, their feeling of possibility would fold into itself until it was a grocery list of paper towels and Metamucil and children’s chewable vitamins wadded in a pocket. He tries to craft tomorrow’s email to the woman in his head. What will he say? Can he tell her he has a wife? That would probably do it.

He sees the woman’s email the next morning, in the secret email account he set up just for the dating site. He hadn’t even heard about the train crash yet, having spent last night with his family with the TV off. But then he realizes his opportunity; he guiltily, shamefully realizes his opportunity, his out. Let her think I am dead.

And she does. By the time the names are released, she has already decided he is dead, but she reads the list anyway and finds three dead men with his first name, and she puts their last names in her mouth, feels them with her tongue, trying to determine which one was his, thinking she should be able to tell. She drives to his city, too afraid to take the train and the track still being cleared of wreckage anyway, and goes to the memorial outside the train station and leaves her orange computer printout of his picture propped against a candle.

She mourns him. She mourns him as if he were her true love, becomes convinced he would have been her true love, mourns the premature loss of the life they would have had together, the beautiful life they would have had. She makes up conversations with him in her head, how everything would have been perfect in the restaurant, how they would have gotten drunk on wine and taken a taxi back to her place and discovered their true selves in each others’ bodies. She already misses the late-night movies they never watched, the antique furniture they never restored, the books they never discussed. She stays away from dating websites for awhile, still too fearful of all the possibility that could be abruptly found and taken away.

Years later, when she has a new boyfriend she met on the internet and it’s going well, but not perfectly, she still sometimes returns to the emails and chats she saved on her computer and re-reads them and thinks of the life they could have had, their love still pure and unconsummated, preserved in a binary of x’s and o’s.

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Read more about Claire here.

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On our front lawn, a strapped effigy with brown skin and an accursed smile is purged by an intense, flaming iridescence. Beneath the flames, a crowd of men stands with their eyes beaming into the burning wooden doll like bolts of lightning, as if to zap it totally from existence. I recognize almost everyone: Mr. Bedford who runs the corner store, Mr. Wallace who lost his job only days ago, and Jerry, the fat leader of the mob, a gruesome man with cheeks that crumble together like curds of cheese. My father is downstairs opening the refrigerator and some cabinets, perhaps looking for a firearm, or a stash of money to plead for our lives. After patting me on the back, he walks silently onto the second floor deck of our house, smiling at the crowd with the same smile of his own effigy burning to pieces just in front of him, and holds up a packet of Jet-Puffed marshmallows and a six-pack of Oscar Myer hotdogs. “You boys need help with your campfire?” he says, shaking the marshmallow bag, as if to taunt a hungry dog. The mob doesn’t seem to know what to do. Their leader, Jerry, is stricken. They have no idea what to say to him.

October 19th

My father doesn’t believe in the written word, all he knows was passed from mouth to mouth to mouth. So I have to panhandle for pencils before every test. But I’m not afraid to beg, what dignity I had went out with him. “Never let your enemy be above you,” my father once told me. “If they are on the first floor, you better be on the second. And if they’re on the top floor, your better be on roof.” This is not a metaphor. “So long as you are physically above someone,” he said, “you are always their superior.” This is his tradition, not mine. I am a mutt with no home. For me, tradition is a lost and found box of unclaimed, disowned items that I can pull out whenever I need. Where it comes from does not matter. So I use pencils, but not erasers. I bow to statues, but never kneel. I kiss, but never flirt. No tradition is worth a failing grade, a cut on my face, or giving up the snap of a busty, white-girl’s bra-strap.

December 1^st

The phone has been ringing again, almost every night. My father will only take it on the rooftop, since he can never tell just how high up the caller might be. Just tonight I heard him through the open window of my smoke-filled room, heard the threats of the man on the other line, screaming so loud that I could make out particular words—“scum” “invaded,” “parasites” and “kill.” My father responded in his accented, nonchalant way: “Jerry? Jerry, is this you? How’s Eric, he still in the first grade?” After the man hung up, my father came back down the stairway, a smug smile across his lips, and said to me in his self-satisfied manner, “I heard his television in the background. You know what that means? He was in his kitchen! That’s only the first floor of his house!”

December 6^th

Today I was buying a game from Bard, when Kara pinned a “pride” sticker on my backpack. Like an asshole I say nothing, because she fucks guys in the bathroom and I wouldn’t mind a piece of her when the opportunity arises. But still. Who the fuck is she? Like I’m going to join her after-school “pride” groups, sit in a circle with a bunch of fucking nodding heads who opine their minority sob stories while they wear traditional earrings, submit their minds to their traditional Gods, learn five words of their traditional language and eat at traditional restaurants. As soon as I got home I tore the sticker to shreds. I ripped it between my teeth. I stomped it out of existence. “Pride!” She says I have no pride? She has swallowed her pride so deeply that she is choking to death on it, her arteries blocked by every useless traditional value, her intestines buldged with government handouts, her stomach dripping with indigestible aphorisms like: “Never let your enemy be above you.” What a joke!

December 12th

It’s been two days now since they set fire to our house. The fire didn’t take much, most of the garage and the dining room, but everything still feels charred and black. This morning a young journalist knocked on the door while my father was still in his morning prayer. “Why is your father taking such a stand?” he asked me. “What does he hope to achieve?” I considered telling him the truth, that the roof of our house is over a foot taller than any other house in the neighborhood, and that my dad is fucked-up in the head, but I know this is not what he wants to hear. So I reach into my lost-and-found box, and pick up a gem. “My father will not hate anyone,” I tell him. “There is nothing they can do that will make him hate somebody else. My father stands for equality, and so do I.”

December 25^th

Today at church my father was received in awe. I could see sparks of hope in the eyes of the congregation, sparks unlike any I have seen before. Their eyes were raised, as if everything they looked at was in some hallowed spotlight. Even Jerry, the man who terrorized us and set our house aflame, kneeled before my father, his hands clasped in shame, his heart turned from hate to love. The crowd cheered with such jovial passion that they lifted my father onto their shoulders, and paraded him about like a King. Everyone joined in: the priest, the school teachers, the police, the store owners. I could see tears of joy trickling down his brown skin. He was above them all.

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Read more about Kawika here.

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There’s a woman on stage, topless, gyrating around a shiny pole, and there are women throughout the room, topless, gyrating on the laps of men. Some of the men look like stockbrokers. Some look like thugs. It’s hard to tell the difference.

Classic hip-hop thumps the walls and everybody’s eardrums. The music’s like sex, but better. It’s like porn: never ending, never limp, never falling sleep.

An aura of menace permeates the room, created by the ogres at the door, the dark red decor, the sneering lyrics booming from the speakers. The cartoonist imagines mob bosses hidden in backroom offices, fondling handguns and snorting coke through rolled up hundreds.

At the bar are women waiting. They smile at the men, press their breasts against their arms, ask if they’d like lap dances. The men say not just yet, they want to get drinks first. The women are predatory, hungry. One of them asks the cartoonist what they’re celebrating. Is one of them getting married? “No,” the cartoonist says. “We’re not celebrating anything. Just Thursday night.” The stripper’s smile flickers.

The men order a round of gin and tonics, which cost them $15 each.

They each choose a woman.

The doctor chooses a freckled redhead from Kentucky. When she asks the doctor what he does, he says he’s a gastroenterologist. She says that’s cool, that she once considered going to medical school, too. The doctor nods, imagining this other life for this pretty woman. In another world, she might have been his coworker. In this world, he’ll soon pay $250 for 20 minutes of her time in a semiprivate room.

The lawyer chooses a Korean woman with curly black hair and enormous tits. When she asks what he does, he says he’s an intellectual property attorney. She asks if he likes his job. He says he likes the money. The stripper giggles.

The cartoonist chooses a petite brunette woman who resembles his ex. She says her name’s Marissa.

“Larissa?”

“No, Marissa.”

“Oh. I thought you said Larissa.” He assumes it’s a stage name, but get’s freaked out all the same.

“So what do you do?”

“I’m a cartoonist.”

“Oh. Like Saturday morning cartoons?”

“No. Like graphic novels. Comic books.”

“Cool. Like superheroes?”

“No. Like robots, and monsters. And ghosts.”

The lawyer shoots the cartoonist a dirty look. The cartoonist looks down at the carpet.

Two by two by two, the three pairs head upstairs, where an ogre in a suit tells the men that 20 minutes with their girls will cost them each a quarter grand. The doctor hands the ogre his AmEx.

The cartoonist asks Marissa if she could spit her gum out. She asks why. “Don’t worry about it,” he says. She shrugs, chews her gum. He asks her once again to spit it out. She rolls her eyes and spits the slim pink crescent into a trashcan.

Their booth reminds the cartoonist of a confessional. He’s never been in a confessional. His parents were raised Catholic, but he wasn’t raised anything. He wasn’t even baptized.

The cartoonist sits. Marissa stands over him, gyrating her hips. She asks why he didn’t want her chewing gum. He says he doesn’t know. She says her ex-boyfriend, who was also an artist, used to tell her when she chewed gum she looked like a cow chewing cud. She says it as a joke, but it makes the cartoonist feel bad. He says, “I didn’t want you chewing gum because it made you look like you didn’t want to be here.”

Marissa dances, although the music seems far away. He tells her she smells good. She throws her head back, exposing her neck. He asks if he can kiss her. She says no. Kissing’s too intimate, and they just met. She says this after taking off her top.

He says she has a great body, something she hears from customers every night. She sticks her ass in his lap, says nothing. He runs his fingers over the octopus tattoo on her back and kisses her shoulder. He wonders if that’s bad, if he’s doing it wrong, if he’ll get kicked out for kissing the stripper on her bare shoulder. He imagines there’s a hidden camera somewhere, watching. Guilt gnaws at him. When the cartoonist said he couldn’t afford a trip to the strip club, the lawyer said not to worry about it, the doctor was buying, but now, in the private room that resembles a confessional, with the stripper that resembles his ex-girlfriend rubbing her ass on his lifeless crotch, he wonders if the doctor’s getting his money’s worth.

Time passes slowly. Marissa asks the cartoonist what his favorite sexual position is. He hesitates, then says reverse cowgirl. Marissa pumps her ass in his face. Five minutes ago, she asked the same question, and he said doggystyle. She said that was her favorite sexual position, too. He feels confused. Did she forget she already asked him that? Is she having a good time? And why won’t his dick get hard? Sometimes his dick can be such a pussy.

He asks if she has a boyfriend. She says no. He sighs and says he just got out of a four year relationship, and now he lives in a haunted apartment. He feels his thoughts turning dark and tries to focus his attention on Marissa. He asks what she does for fun. She responds by yawning. He mock-apologizes, “I’m sorry, am I boring you?” She says she’s just tired. He says he hates when people yawn. It makes him feel like he’s not being entertaining enough. She says he shouldn’t worry so much.

Marissa arches her back and pinches her nipples. Somehow they start talking about the internet. He mentions craigslist, how he likes the casual encounters section.

“So you do a lot of online dating?”

“No, I just go on there and look at the ones with pictures, before they get flagged as inappropriate and taken down.”

“Well, do you like to meet people online, like on Facebook?”

“No,” he says. “I’m not on Facebook.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. I don’t like it. I don’t like social networking.”

“You should get on Facebook! Everybody’s on Facebook. You’ve got to get on Facebook.”

“OK,” he says in a defeated tone.

Marissa dances a little more. He admires her body’s elegant curves and imagines drawing her. They make eye contact. She smiles. She’s beautiful. He stares. He’s ugly. He calls her Larissa. She continues dancing. He tells her he misses her. She tells him his time’s up.

As they leave their booth, she says he doesn’t have to tip her, but he can if he wants to. He nods absently. She whips her hair over her shoulder and walks away.

He walks downstairs, where the strip club’s still in full swing, with half naked women gyrating on the laps of fully clothed men. Men with rings on their fingers, with pictures of kids in their wallets, with love like a heartworm in their chests. The men leer, and grin, and beckon the women with their fat hairy hands.

The cartoonist calls the lawyer, but there’s no answer, so he sits and watches the dancer onstage, working the pole. Almost immediately, a blonde Ukrainian sits on his lap, and a blonde Haitian starts rubbing his shoulders. They both ask if he wants to go upstairs. Across the room, he sees Marissa, talking to a silverhaired man in a suit. He smiles at her. She smiles back.

His phone rings. The lawyer says he’s at the bar, drinking another $15 gin and tonic. Reunited, the cartoonist asks where the doctor is. The lawyer says he threw up and went home, then regales him with a story about snapping the Korean woman’s thong.

“Awesome,” the cartoonist says with uncertainty.

As the men leave, the cartoonist sees Marissa, and tells the lawyer to give him a minute. He tells Marissa he had a great time, then digs in his pocket for his thin fold of cash, which takes him a moment to find. He smiles with embarrassment. She says, “You’re so smiley,” to which he replies, “I’m a happy guy,” then hands her a ten dollar bill. They thank each other, and the stripper tells the cartoonist to take care.

Marissa watches as he retrieves his messenger bag from the coat check, shaking her head slightly. She’s encountered many men at her job, plenty of perverts and assholes and creeps, but the cartoonist is the type of guy she worries about the most. She can’t imagine things will end well for him. He just seems so weak. She watches him and his friend exit the strip club, then she gets back to work.

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Read more about Ethan here.

Read more about Johannes here.

Folks down the block had ghosts last year: she suspected it was her turn.

With that Victorian writing table in the foyer and the Edwardian prints she bought at a steal, how could they not infest her? She’d watched too many old stately English movies.

“Where are the oven mitts?” she said out loud. She’d handle ghosts like a tuna casserole. Like a tuna casserole you made with the last ingredients in the pantry.

The ghosts were many: lavender in spots, opaque, like greasy smoke. How small they were. Much smaller than she’d been led to believe by movies and television. They swayed, polite, in the corners, shimmering like wavelets.

Shooing them away with hissing noises didn’t cut it. She pointed a box fan at them with no results. Finally, she seared a bulb of garlic in a pan because she heard the folks down the block did it and the ghosts fled soon after. The garlic seeped into the walls and the ghosts remained.

The ghosts didn’t look like her or anyone she knew but resembled enough people for her to linger over their features for a disproportionate amount of time.

Problem was they followed her everywhere. To her meeting with a mortgage and loan officer. To her weekly whist game. To her bedroom, where she had sex or masturbated.

One night, she woke to the ghosts sitting on her chest as she slept. They would attempt to talk to her, but the words sounded flat like old soda. For a week, they only watched her through windows or the slits between drawn curtains. And, occasionally, they stood on the other side of the shower stall door while she cleaned herself.

Frustrated, she put the ghosts into a jar and shelved them. But she didn’t preserve them right. The lids leaked. They spoiled.

Laden with a glug of rotten ghosts, she decided to cook them. Some charred well with eggplant and red sauce. Others coat-glazed ham shanks. Replete with ghost bits, she concluded to host a fête and feed those who needed grub.

Strangers and alley-dwellers ate her food. One moist and cold man approached her and shook her hand. He said he ate his wife with grapes and cheese and never had she gone down so well. A few others recognized a friend in the ragú or a cousin in the stuffed figs.

She’d not eaten a scrap for fear of tasting what she may recognize as a flavor so foreign that it could only be herself. But maybe we taste bitter to ourselves, so it wouldn’t matter.

Encouraged by the response, she opened a small food truck serving her spoiled dead. Customers waiting in line argued while she served them.

Her truck was traded for a restaurant, which curried success, was a blur of server’s arms, fat laughing, and pink swollen faces. Diners fressed with a golden sheen on their foreheads, sweating a good sweat for the dead on their plates. Then customers began to die. The dead stuff she was canning leaked through their guts and outside of them, taking their precious vitals along. Customers didn’t cotton well to deliberate poisoning and soul-seepage.

You can’t serve the dead to the living. It’s like giving cows beef or pigs pork. It’s like dividing by zero: not recommended.

Baked through with guilt, she could only think of eating some ghosts herself. So she forked them in. And there it was. A taste like ditchwater or a handful of dust. A fragrance of ennui and frenzy. She was chewing up that which was better left undone. Which was bitter love, unstrung.

The meal was not doable. You can’t survive on nothing. You can’t divide by zero. All this time she’d been sharpening a hunger for that which did not exist.

There was a restless motion in her belly like a sea. The nothing swelled in her stomach and crashed. She let it shore her up and carry her out to a place that was awash with grey distance and foamy ripples. On her couch, feet up, she felt a dank weight creep in her bowels, lurching out and out, way out.

After this passed, and the moment was digested, she woke to find herself afloat, wordless in a dark sea, far from land, where the few people on shore moved as lost punctuation among the long sentence of the beach which kept writing itself into the gutter of the horizon.

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Read more about Kyle here.

Read more about Kelly here.

“She’s all done milking,” my teacher said.  “Let’s move around to the other side and watch her eat.”

We squished together, puffy fall jackets rubbing against each other, ears centimeters apart.  The cow bent down to chew her cud.  It looked like grass to me.

“Why are her insides on the outside?” one boy said.

A girl fainted.

“They’re still on the inside,” my teacher said.  “The scientists gave her a glass side so we can watch her food digest.”  We could see the pink, slimy organs contracting and expanding.

“That’s impossible,” the boy said.  “She’d have to die if that happened.”

“Your teacher’s right,” the milking man said.  “We removed her side so that we can see what goes on in there.  That way, kids can come and learn something, but we don’t have to hurt the cow.”

“But you cut her open and made her part glass,” I said.

“She didn’t feel a thing,” the milking man said.  “She doesn’t even notice.  This way we can learn more about her.  It’s the wave of the future.”  He smiled too much.  He liked what he’d done to the cow.

I held my stomach.  I looked instead at the old blue barn at the edge of the pasture.  I bet there were cobwebs in there.  Beautiful cobwebs hidden in the dark until someone swung the creaky hinged doors open.  I could understand wanting to watch something, spy on something, but I’d rather be watching a spider than the inside of a cow.

The dark is dark.  No light.  Nothing can be seen until your eyes adjust.   On the walk home my keys stay wedged between my fingers.  Work is only five blocks from home.  Arnold is expecting me for dinner.  We’re cooking tonight.  Practicing for when we have a family of our own.  When we have children laughing and eating at the table.  He’s already home, I bet.  He’s already setting the table, already winking at the couch.

As I approach the next block I hear footsteps.  I turn.  There he is.  A man.  A man just walking his dog.  Actually standing at a lamppost as his dog trots around finding a good place to stop and pee.  As I pass the dog chooses the hydrant near by.  Light drapes the man, his red plaid shirt half untucked, his shoes either scuffed or shadowed.

I clench my keys with one block to go.  There’s an alley I have to pass.  I wonder if a rapist would drag me by my hair or my arms.  I wonder if when I try to scream any sound will come out.  That happens to people.  They try to scream, but there’s no sound.  And the defense attorney will say, “No one heard you scream at all.  Did he gag you?  Well then, how are we to believe that he really abducted you?  Maybe you met in the street.  Maybe you wanted it.  Maybe you’re ashamed to admit that to your husband.  You wanted this other man.”  No, I’d plead.  I tried.  I tried to scream, but nothing came out.  Please, how can you not understand what I’m saying?

“I’m home safe,” I say, kissing Arnold hello.

He kisses me, sliding his hand under my shirt, skimming the small of my back.  “Of course you are,” he said.  “I wouldn’t let anything happen to you.”

“Children, look,” our teacher said.  “You can see the food moving through her now.  See the intestines bulging.  That happens in us too.”

“But how do we know what’s inside?” one boy said.  “We can’t see through the intestines, how do we know what’s going on inside?”

“We make a guess based on the other things we know,” the milking man said.  “We know that bile will break down the cud as it moves through the chambers of the cow’s stomach, turning it into some sort of mashed—”

“Mrs. Patrick,” the boy said, “Stacey’s throwing up.”

I wiped my mouth, trying to mash the vomit into the manure so it would disappear.

“I’m fine,” I said, wiping away a tear.  “Can I sit down somewhere?”

The milking man moved me to a blue chipped bench—as worn, I imagined, as the barn at the edge of the pasture—inside a museum of cow information.  A poster at the entrance read, The True Inside of Cows. There was another girl there, holding her stomach in the corner on a rickety chair.  She stared at the floor, kicking at the dust on the wood planks, but it didn’t get any cleaner.

“You just sit here until everyone else is done,” he said.  He looked at the little girl in the corner and she pulled her knees to her chest.  He turned to me.  “You understand?  No wandering.”

Arnold’s hand brushes against my thigh and he slides on top of me.  His stubble scratches my lips.  His leg snakes around my foot, pushing it out.  He says, “I love you,” as he enters me.  I tighten around him.  Tighten, release, tighten, release.

His skin is warm against mine, and the sliding, and shifting, and clamping, and thrusting.  My teeth sink into his shoulder.

Dinner, I think, looking over the edge of the couch into the kitchen.  We never bought a vegetable.  Just pasta.  You can’t feed children dinner without a vegetable.

His hand reaches around my waist then slides down my back.  Kisses on my neck, then his finger, sliding into my asshole.  He likes to do this because it makes me laugh.   I wiggle.

The tomatoes will go bad tomorrow.  If they’re still firm enough I could make some sort of salad.  And the onions too.  They’re the kind that make you cry when you’re peeling them.  But tomato and onion salad seems like a good idea.

His finger pushes in further as he kneels up.  Angle shift.  Slipping against the top wall.  I clench him.

Tomato salad and pasta with tomato sauce. Too much tomato.  Children need a balanced diet.

“I love you,” I say, kissing his neck.  I pull his hips towards mine.  I feel him pulsing as he finishes.  One, two, three, pumps.  It fills me with happiness.  There’s nothing closer.  He is literally giving me a part of himself.  Placing it in me for safe keeping.  Like a secret.  But the good kind.

He rolls off me, balancing one leg on the floor, the other knee still on the couch.  “Did you just say tomato?” he says.

“That’s crazy,” I say, pulling my skirt down.  “I said, I love you.”

“But I still don’t understand why you need the glass,” I said to the milking man, before he left me alone with the girl in the corner.  She was chewing the skin next to her nails as she watched him.  I could hear his breath when he crouched down to my eye level.  I peeled a paint chip from the bench.

“This way we don’t have to cut up all the cows.  We know everything inside them is the same.  So we look at one cow and understand them all.”  The milking man thought I should like the cow.  That I shouldn’t question him.  He was the adult.

“Will they do that to a person eventually?” I said.  “Put glass in her stomach so we don’t have to cut her up?”

“I don’t know about that,” he said, his eyes lighting up at the thought.  “But it’d sure make it easier to know what people are like inside.”

“It’s gross though,” I said, gnawing on my lip.  “Will they do it to every one?  Will we see everyone’s intestines?”

“Science hasn’t come that far,” he said, ruffling his hand through my hair.  “I wouldn’t worry about it.”  He was saying to me, Just be a good girl and be quiet, let me do my job.

At dinner Arnold asks if I’m having an affair.

“No,” I say.  “Of course not.”

“You said tomato tonight.”

“I did not.”

“Are you thinking of someone else?  This man you’re seeing?”

“Of course not.  There’s no one else.  Anyway, ‘tomato’ is not a name.”

“Don’t you like being with me?”

“Of course.”

“I’d think you’d stay for it then.”

“I’m here,” I say.

“You’re mind’s someplace else.  I can tell.”

“I said ‘I love you.’”

“We need to do something, then,” he said.  “You’re so closed off.  After five years you still don’t let me in.  I can see you’re thinking, Stace.”

“I’m thinking you’re nuts,” I say.

“You’re so secretive,” he says, scooping tomatoes and onions onto my plate.  “But I love you anyway.”

“I tell you everything I think.”  It’s true.  I tell him every thought, let them gush out of me.  That way he knows I’m not hiding anything.

“But never how you feel,” he says.

So I say, “Let’s go to the lake.  I go there to think, and you can come too.  You always want to come.”

I want him to see I am willing.  I will let him in.

So right after dinner we fill the trunk with inflatable tubes, and towels, and sun block and water.  The next morning, I let Arnold drive.  The windows are rolled down and the air smells like trees.  Rain.  Fresh.

“It’s a perfect day for the lake,” he says, rubbing my knee.  “I know how much you love the water.”

The car is hurtling over the highway.  Pushing forward.  Forcing air, shattering the invisible.

“Aren’t you worried about cops?” I say.  I try to smile.  “That guy’s a maniac,” I say, pointing to a car flying by us and swerving from lane to lane.  I want to say, Slow down, but then he’d know I’m afraid.  Then he could choose not to slow down.  He could say, No, I’m in control.  “There aren’t going to be any cops,” Arnold says, reaching his hand over to mine.  With his squeeze I force a smile.

“Do you want to sneak away?” I said to the girl playing in the dust.

The cow poster hung over her head.

“Where would we go?  We’ll be in trouble.”

“There’s a barn out there,” I said.  “It’d just be for a minute.  In here is boring.”

The girl shook her head as I stood.

“Okay,” I said.  “Don’t tell.”

The blue barn was beautiful and dusty when I got near.  Pushing the door open spilled light onto the floor.  The rest of the structure was dark, but I could see hundreds of shadowed bales of hay.  They were easy enough to climb.  I crawled all the way to the top and sat there, looking down at the door.  I had thought there would be spiders inside, but I couldn’t see any.  Instead I pulled strands of hay from the bales.

There were probably a million pieces of hay in one bale.  I started counting as I plucked.  When I got to two hundred and three the door to the barn opened further, but the light dimmed.

“Stacey,” the milking man’s voice yelled.  “I know you’re in here.  Your teacher will be very upset.”

I held my breath, dug my legs and back into the hay.

A light swept across the barn from a flashlight.  When it lingered on my face, I smiled.  I couldn’t see his face.

“You’re trespassing,” he said.  “Very bad.”

“Okay,” I said, jumping down.

When I reached him at the entrance he grabbed the back of my shoulder and said, “You could have gotten hurt, you know.  You can’t just hide away like that.”

His eyes were nice.  He wanted me to understand that he needed to protect me.  That everything was for my own good.

“Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I said.  His hand was heavy on my shoulder.

“You were bad,” he said.  “I have to make sure you don’t do this again.”

He walked with his hand on my shoulder.  He walked me over to the shadows of the barn.  The door was still open a crack.  He said, “Don’t worry, no one will see.”

Then he sat me up on a hay bale.  Needles of hay pushed through my pants, under my skin.  I made a face that I didn’t think he could see in the dark, but he did because then he took off his shirt and lay it on the hay, and lifted me up and sat me down on it.  “Better?” he said.

“Yes.”

His fingers were too big for my buttons.  He said, “You’re going to have to help me.”

“I can’t,” I said, because I didn’t want to.  But his fingers kept poking at my buttons so I did it.

He pressed my back down on his shirt.  It smelled like sweat.  His body was heavy on top of me.  I could hear him in my ear.  His face scratched like the hay.  His fingers moved around, poking at me.

He stopped breathing then.  In my ear.  Then he stood up.

“Now let’s go find you’re teacher.  The kids are all waiting for you.”

While we walked to the bus he made me pass the cow.  Its insides still pulsed at me.  It just chewed its cud.  He smiled at the cow.  He loved how he could see inside.

Floating in the water, liquid tingles at my back, the sun heats my front.  I push my legs down and let my body be encased.  I wonder if this is what it’s like for Arnold to be inside me.   To penetrate something, separating it from itself to fit yourself in.

Then I crawl up to the shore next to Arnold, sand imprinting craters on my knees.  His body is hot and sticky from the sun.

“What are you looking at?” I say.

He slides a book below a towel.  “Nothing.”

“Oh, and I’m the secretive one,” I say.

“Will you just tell me what his name is?  Tell me where you met him.”

“There’s no one,” I say.  “You’re completely paranoid.”

He pulls out the book from below the towel, it is my journal.  “I’ll read this until I find it,” he says.

It is easy to snatch the journal away from him.  His grip is loose.  “You’re a bastard,” I say.  “That’s private.”

“We’re married,” he says.

“That’s ridiculous,” I say.  I wish there were another man.  I wish there were another man so I could tell Arnold all about it and make him stop this craziness.  I stand up above him and begin to walk off, pounding into the woods.

“What?  You’re just going to leave,” he yells.  “You’re going to walk home?”

“Fuck you,” I say, as twigs burrow into the soles of my feet.

I find a rock, rest on that, let my mind flatten.   The air is cool and warm at the same time.  Breathing, I think, is nice.

“I’m sorry,” he calls to me through the trees.  He’s close enough for me to hear him, but still far in a way.  “I just needed to know.  Something.”

“Not good enough,” I say.  “It’s an invasion.”

“I didn’t mean it that way.  I just wanted to know what you’re hiding from me.  If you want to leave me, just say so.”

“This isn’t the way.  You could ask.”

“I do—”

“And I say there’s no one else.  I’m telling the truth.”

“Okay,” he says.  “I won’t do it again.”

I want to yell at him.  I want to kick.  But I don’t want him to leave.  So I pretend things are fine.

I stand up and move towards him, lace his fingers through mine, and move back towards the lake.

“The cow was cool,” the girl next to me said on the bus.  “Even though you threw up, you thought it was cool, right?”

“The cow was fine.”

“It made me want some cookies and milk,” she said.  “We tasted the milk after you left and it tasted like normal, just warmer.”

“What did you think about when you drank the milk?  Was it strange it came from the glass stomached cow?”  Insulation hung from a split of the seat in front of us.  I poked it in with my ring finger to where it belonged, letting my finger linger within the darkness.

“I didn’t think about anything,” she laughed.  “Anything except this cookie in my bag.”  She reached into her bag and pulled out a crushed chocolate chip cookie in a plastic bag.

“Don’t you think it’s weird?” I said pulling my hand from the hole.  The fake leather puckered towards me.  “Not natural, I mean.  Seeing so much.”

“People are better than cows.  It’s our job to use them like this.”

“I guess,” I said.  “I guess otherwise they’d just be hamburger.”

“Exactly.”  She extended the cookie towards me.  “Do you want half?  I don’t have any milk, but it’ll still be good.”

I nodded and took the cookie from her, popping it into my mouth before I had a chance to think of my intestines.  I clutched my belt buckle, chewing and swallowing, feeling the dough spread down my throat, and into my stomach, massaging my intestines so it’d travel through fast, not worth observing.  Probably my intestines were pink and bulging too, except for one part that would be bloody and brown.  A pile of mud.  Of tar.

The milking man would know what I look like inside.  He’d seen more of me than anyone.

I chewed my cookie, trying to forget.

If we all had to wear glass panels, I was sure the cookie girl’s intestines and stomach would be beautiful.  People would pass her, do a double take, and think that she was a model example of the human digestive system.  They would think that what’s inside her is inside everyone.

“Come here,” Arnold says.  His hand grabs at my hip and rolls me towards him.

“We shouldn’t,” I say, kissing his cheek.  The trees above us, fifty, sixty feet, sway in the breeze.   Just the tops.

“There’s no one around.  You shouldn’t be scared.”  He is never scared.

He pulls me on top of him, sliding his trunks down to his knees.

“You think too much,” he says.  “You should feel something.”

So I push my bathing suit to the side.

I rock on top of him, slowly, hot sun sucking the water off my back.

The crunching of sticks to the right.  Snapping under feet.

Do you hear that? I think.

He flips me to my back and lowers himself onto me.

Hard rock sticking into my back.  Glare in my eyes.

“You’re so wet,” he says.  He doesn’t mean like the lake.  I can never really understand how he means.  I can’t be inside me the same way he can.
I grip his back, bite his shoulder.

There are spots in my eyes from the sun. I don’t like it.  His heavy breathing in my ear.  I want to scar him, hurt him.

A bird shoots through the sky.

Each thrust moves him closer inside of me.  Closer in alignment with my body.  Getting to know places I do not know.  I bite him as hard as I can.  As hard as I can without him telling me to stop.

Twigs snap again in the distance.  Snap.

I want him to stop.

He holds himself close as I feel the pulsing.  He retracts.

Arnold rolls off me pulling up his trunks.  My bathing suit is wedged in my ass.  I squirm until it’s free.  He stares at the branches above him.

“At least you didn’t say tomato,” he says.

He thinks if I told him everything he would understand me.  But I know he would see what’s inside me, and instead of understanding, he’d say, “You’re not who I thought you were.  I thought you were good.”

He thinks he wants to understand me, that he could listen to my secret and still love me; people always do.  But really, when they see inside you, that it’s black not pink, they are horrified.  When they understand, they say, “I’m sorry” and leave.

He would leave.

“Well, that was fun, right?” he says.  “Aren’t you glad you gave it a try?”  A warm glob rolls down my thigh. 

“Sure.”

“Tell me the truth, Stace.  That’s the point.”

I feel braver.  “I don’t know,” I say, because he’s my husband and he says I don’t trust him—that I should tell him more so he can understand me better, “I didn’t feel safe.”

“Don’t you feel safe anywhere?”  He pulls his body away from me.  The inches of air between us become solid.  “I can protect you.”  This is old fashioned.  It assumes crimes in the future.  He tries to smile.  “If someone came I’d throw my body on top of you.  They wouldn’t see you at all.”

“I guess,” I say.

“No one caught us,” he says, kissing me on the forehead like a child.  “There’s no reason to be scared.”

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Read more about Jena here.

Read more about Charles here.

Vicky emails me to say that she’s VERY INTERSTED. The lap desk sits over your legs and the top surface has an adjustable angle so you can do your crossword without having to crane your neck.

I’m selling the desk for ten dollars, but Vicky’s emails make it sound like she’s struggling to come up with the money. She’ll also have to talk her husband Doug into making the hour’s drive into Pittsburgh. He hates driving in the city and she doesn’t have a license.

The greatest obstacle, though, is Vicky’s size. She asks me for measurements, and though she says she could never fit her legs into the sixteen-inch space between the magazine or remote-control baskets that support the desk, she’s going to buy it anyway. “It’s so Victorian,” she says, and I think she’s wrong. I’m surprised she knows the word.

I meet Vicky on Liberty Avenue in Bloomfield, proclaimed “Pittsburgh’s Little Italy” by a proud, garish sign at one end of the main drag. Aubrey and I are throwing our goodbye happy hour at Silky’s, where we’ve spent little time except at other peoples’ goodbye happy hours. Such things happen often in grad student communities, but Aubrey and I are the last to leave in a particularly busy season.

The lap desk is the last thing I will sell before we leave Pittsburgh in a few days. We are leaving because of Aubrey’s fellowship at Colorado College, and I’ve been selling like a maniac, both to simplify the move and to justify having quit my job in April, fully three months before our wedding and four before we’ll depart for Colorado Springs.

Outside Silky’s, a white minivan pulls up to the curb where I stand holding the lap desk. Doug hulks over the steering wheel, his brow obscured by a Larry the Cable Guy cap and his nipples showing through a mesh camouflage T-shirt. As Vicky squeezes out of the passenger’s side, her old-school housecoat snares itself on something automotive and nearly takes her down.

She regains her balance, laughs, and without any greeting reminds me that the desk doesn’t fit her lap. “But like I told Tim,” she says, “if I have to put it over one leg, I will.”

I’m struck by her British accent, the kind I imagine I’d hear from sheep farmers in small towns on the border with Scotland. I wonder how Vicky ended up here: in a minivan, married to Doug, outside a bar an hour from home, buying a lap desk she can’t really use with money she doesn’t really have. My eyes water. The whole scene is so Pittsburgh that, for the first time, I begin to miss it here.

Perfect pullup, brand new in box

Our second week in Colorado, Curt writes to tell me he’ll take the Perfect Pullup, with the ab straps, swing arms, and rotating handles that you think might slow your 30-year-old body’s rapid aging. I bought the unit for fifteen dollars on a deal-a-day website the winter before the wedding, but I’m selling it for twenty in the unopened box. I didn’t realize I’d have to mount it with screws, and it didn’t seem worth damaging the walls.

On my friend Jay’s recommendation, I bought another pullup bar from Target, the kind that hangs in your doorway, as if by magic. I got several bites on the Perfect Pullup in Pittsburgh, but nobody closed the deal. On moving day, I loaded it into the seventeen-foot truck with the rest of the stuff I couldn’t sell.

I notice that Curt’s phone number, like mine, has an out-of-town area code. When I call him to arrange a meeting, neither of us can suggest a place. We don’t live near each other, and don’t know the town well. It lies on me, the seller, to compromise, so I offer to meet him near his place. Curt suggests we meet that evening in the parking lot outside a Wal-Mart on Woodmen Road. Once I agree, he starts to make small talk, but I excuse myself with a lie about having some urgent errand.

I arrive at Wal-Mart 15 minutes late. I haven’t been this far east in Colorado Springs yet, and in the thin air, my scooter struggles on hills smaller than the ones it handled with pep in Pittsburgh. I have to pull over often to let schools of light trucks pass me, their engines shouting and horns mocking as they emerge from the blinding sunset.

Curt tucks the Perfect Pullup behind the seat of his truck and leans on the door, trying to force a casual demeanor. He asks me where I’ve moved from. I can tell he’s just waiting for me to get through my answer so he can share his.

“Pittsburgh,” I say, “Pennsylvania.” I mention Aubrey’s job at the college.

Without my asking, Curt mentions that he moved from Arizona for an internship with a man whose name I don’t recognize. Curt tells me the man is Lance Armstrong’s trainer, and seems surprised I didn’t know.

He says, “So far, I’m loving the Springs. Spent all day on my bike today, just exploring.” Without a job, I have nothing if not time to explore, so I don’t immediately figure out what the implied alternative might be. Curt’s pride in having avoided it, though, is impossible to miss.

He asks me if I ride. “Not particularly,” I say, but it’s a lie. In fact, I can’t wait to get on my bike, to ride around a city with hundreds of miles of bike lanes and paths and perfect weather every day. I rode fifteen or twenty miles most days in my last two years of college, but on my first ride in Pittsburgh, a city bus ran me off the road.

I can tell Curt wants to be friends, but I’m not ready to settle for him. We only just got the apartment unpacked, and I’m sure when I get a job I’ll make better friends than Curt could ever be, with his internship and his contrived body language and his penchant for just exploring. I make an excuse to leave and hop on the scooter, riding back into the sun that pours over the city from just over the mountaintops.

Canon PowerShot A95 (5 MP, 3x optical zoom)

I will never learn False’s real name. His emails list the sender only as “False.” He’s buying a digital camera from me. We’ve been in Colorado Springs for a month now, and I still don’t have work, so I’m selling the camera for a hundred dollars, less than a quarter of what I paid. It has a swiveling display that lets you take low- and high-angle shots without having to scrape your knees on the pavement or risk perching on some rickety chair.

I’ve known enough Nigerians to know False’s accent when we speak on the phone. It’s a Sunday morning when I call him, and he wants to meet me later, on his way home from church.

On our front patio, False talks me down to eighty dollars, then asks me what I do for a living. “Ask me again next month,” I say.

He looks puzzled, so I explain that the job search isn’t going well so far. The jobs that do come up don’t suit my background, and anyway it’s a competitive market. False nods sympathetically, sensing the shame of the jobless, which I didn’t predict I’d feel when Aubrey and I decided to accept her fellowship rather than heading to one of the MFA programs that offered me funding.

False tells me that when he first moved here, he worked at Whole Foods. “It’s a good place,” he says. “I had to leave because it wasn’t enough money.” I can’t tell if he’s giving me the tip out of compassion or as a kind of mean joke, as if to say, It’s not good enough for me, but you are desperate.

When he’s done talking about Whole Foods and how he started his business with less than he’s paying me for the camera, False tells me he doesn’t have the cash on him and asks if I can follow him to his house.

I don’t recognize the neighborhood he mentions, but it sounds far away. I tell him I’m short on time—an obvious lie—and offer to follow him to an ATM on the scooter. I’m too embarrassed to tell him I can’t make it outside downtown.

Adjustable-height portable workstation / desk

A few days after I sell the camera, Mike emails to ask about a rolling laptop stand with adjustable height and a tilting platform. The platform has two black plastic guardrails to keep your expensive laptop from crashing to the floor like the dead weight it can be if you’re not working. I am asking fifteen dollars, a bit less than what I paid when I bought the stand at Rite- Aid, when my freelance career was at its peak and I was working from home daily. I have scratched the stand thoroughly.

On the phone, Mike has a dozen questions, since, as he takes care to explain, he can only tell so much from the picture. What are the minimum and maximum heights of the desk? How many of the casters lock? How big are they? Can I describe the mechanism that allows the cantilevered platform to swivel? What’s the platform made of? Is it cherry?

I say, “Good eye. I think it’s a composite stained to look like cherry.”

Mike asks his questions like he has them memorized, with a kind of vocal predictability that reminds me of the telemarketing job I had in Pittsburgh for three weeks when I first moved there. Our company only made calls for respectable non-profits, but the people we talked to still got angry as often as not. I was already working days as a proofreader at a marketing agency and nights at a Thai restaurant, so I quit after the first paycheck and downgraded my cable until my promotion to Jay’s department at the agency a couple months later.

As the phone call ends, I think the precision of Mike’s questioning might be an early and mild symptom of the military presence in Colorado Springs we’d heard so much about. Later, after I greet him on the patio, he gives the laptop stand an Army physical, spinning each wheel, checking my measurements, adjusting height and tilt several times each. It’s annoying, but I enjoy the company. When he learns I’m new to the area, he recommends a nearby Caribbean restaurant that his sister-in-law and her husband own. He doesn’t suggest we head there for a drink, or meet there for lunch with our wives. Instead, as the sun goes down and the evening chill sets in, he leaves our patio and packs his new furniture into the truck.

PowerMac G4 “Sawtooth” 450Mhz / 20GB HD

In Pittsburgh, perhaps one out of every ten emails I would get from Craigslist would end in a sale. My first six weeks in Colorado Springs, I am three for three. Then Timothy’s email comes. Timothy says he wants to buy the old Macintosh I bought from Jay, who’d bought it from the marketing agency. At 25 bucks, a fraction of what I paid, the machine’s a bargain. It has four slots for memory and two hard-drive bays to stave off the sense that the upgrade you really need is out of reach.

I respond to Timothy. I want to ask him what he’s like, whether he’s a cyclist, who he works for and if they’re hiring. But I restrain myself, telling him that, yes, the PowerMac is still available. And that I hope to hear from him soon.

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He cut the water with a causeway: on one side He placed ships of garbage and cargo and gulls hovering in halos; on the other He set down mansions with yachts bobbing in ocean parking lots. He invented the rich and famous to fill the mansions and yachts––this was before Christ was born, in the bathroom of an after-hours club, with long hair he wore in solidarity for the meek.

Anyway.

“Night club city hall hotel houses!” God boomed. He crafted condos in the clouds and signs that burned onto the eyelids of the night sky––vacancy, heated pool, hourly rates––turning night into eternal day. The moon was made of neon lighting and advertised drink specials.

“Mango terra-cotta two-tone!” God bellowed. He built buzzing beachfront boutiques, vending machines to dispense designer drugs, glaring gift shops brimming with kitsch: ceramic alligators, plastic flamingos, cigars, suntan lotion and rum. He poured people into the streets.

In the shadows of it all, He raised rundown walk-up tenements and implemented reverse rush hour for pornstar parents. He composed bass drones like baritone angels to sing their children to sleep. He provided them customers, waving soiled currency like flags of surrender.

And it was good.

When Christ turned sixteen, and realized His name came from a curse word spraypainted on a wall of the abandoned lifeguard tower in which He was conceived, He ran away from home.

God said, “Leave then! Utopian socialist! Bleeding heart hippy liberal leftnik! You’re destined to die!”

God was feeling bellicose, so He invented evangelicals, fully equipped with mistresses from the South Pacific. He hired them to freeze Jesus in jewel-encrusted removable platinum pieces, to be sold on the Home Shopping Network to the mothers of aspiring rappers. But despite Christ’s dismemberment and global distribution, God knew one day the boy would return.

Dear Father, the letter read, You designed me to love unconditionally, knowing I’d grow up to resent you. You designed me to be everywhere, even after I left that hard-on you call home, so that I’d still be there in Spirit. But it doesn’t matter, because you’re incapable of love, you just make shit without a thought or a care. Even if you could love, you can’t hug a ghost. You’re sick, dad. I pity you. But you already know that. The letter was signed, Your Begrudgingly Loving Son.

God underwent a spiritual crisis. He took a second look at the Bible and diagnosed Himself bipolar. A self-prescribed binge of barbiturates brought Him to meet Barbarous in a rundown bar on the edge of the beach, where he plunged a broken beer bottle into the brute’s back.

He left town for a while on a casino cruise until things cooled down.

For a while, God gave up on creation. He tried yoga and tai chi, yogurt and fruit, all fruitless. God was too restless. But eventually, God grew tired of sand and sun, of coke and orgies, and became indifferent, middle-aged, and alone.

He spent most hours in the den of a penthouse suite, making ghosts out of room service napkins, waiting for the boy. And then the headlines began to appear in all the papers that He read each morning before His swim:

Jesus Killed in the Mountains of Bolivia

Corpse of Christ Found in Congo

Holy Spirit Stabbed in Serbia

Holy Ghost Gutted in Gaza

Son of Man Suffers Sins of the World

God had to admit, the boy had balls. To die like that, again and again. To block the bowels of Hell instead of getting high in Heaven.

Knifed in Nicaragua

Burned Alive in Burma

And so on. The headlines continued, as God knew they would, for eternity.

With a semblance of parental pride, God installed a dimmer on the sky, turned down the neon, and pure daylight returned to the beach. He evicted the squatters from all the lifeguard towers, then razed the rickety structures. He reduced speakeasies and strip clubs to rubble, essentially erasing all history of His son’s conception, and the unruly teenage years that followed. He used the scrap to make an artificial reef.

He hoped these gestures would register on His son’s radar. That maybe the boy would pay the old man a visit.

He made preparations. He made adjustments. He made amends. And when Christ never showed, He made peace.

He made sure His final draft was suitable for humanity to inherit in His absence. And with that, God clapped the dust off his hands, unintentionally inventing stars, and left for limbo.

Business went on without Him, despite a few hitches—shark bites, red tide, an investigative reporter who smuggled a blacklight into all the hotels.

Every now and then a tourist claimed the beach was haunted by a homeless man with sand lice dancing through the tangles of a bushy brown beard, shouting gibberish from atop the dunes.

This story appears in Annalemma Issue Eight: Creation. Click here to order.

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