Author:

I am an infant, and I am strapped to my mother’s stomach with taut fabric. I see everything my mother sees but five inches sooner.

Right now, we are in the hardware store and she is buying clay to make a fist. I know that we will do this many more times over the next few weeks, and I think maybe she knows this too, in a way. I marvel at the drive gears and the chucks and the feed screws as we walk through the aisles, because I know what everything is for and this is pleasing.

The clay stains both the kitchen table and my mother’s hands terracotta red. A fist manifests on the kitchen table. The fist is huge and meaty and prehistoric looking. Its short finger joints are out of proportion with the flat backside of the hand, which is knotty and mottled with veins. Every part of it is the dense, terracotta red of the kitchen table and my mother’s hands.

And then we are at a yard sale and my mother is asking them if they have any clay. She clutches the classifieds in one of her red hands. Then she is reaching around my body and into her purse to find money to exchange for more clay. 

My mother makes another fist.

And then another.

And I try and talk to my baby sister through our mother’s stomach. I can feel her there in her womb, between me and my mother, but she doesn’t know how to speak my language yet. Instead, she lets me see our mother’s dreams, which I have lost touch with since being born.

The night after our mother makes her first fist, she dreams that she has her own personal mosquito, who only feeds on her. It follows her everywhere she goes, her mosquito, drinking her blood. And when she wakes up, she knows she is pregnant again.

Our mother makes more fists. The terracotta red wraps all the way around her hands so that they are only defined from the clay fists by their motion. When she holds me, the red does not transfer, and I am disappointed.

When fists hold all the pencils and stop all the doors and pot all the plants, our mother starts to replace the walls with them. Then the furniture.

Then she dreams that she is in a lighthouse whose walls are all made of stained-glass. Seagulls slam their salty bodies into the stained-glass lighthouse and make the light red with their blood. There are so many seagulls. They slide down the sides of the lighthouse making slimy pathways like snails into a pile at the tower’s base. There are so many seagulls, but they never break through the stained-glass. Our mother is safe. When she wakes up, our mother knows that my baby sister is a boy.

When the money runs out for clay, our mother trades for it—packs of playing cards, pairs of shoes, half-burnt column candles. And then the rugs and the couch and the kitchen table so that she has to make the fists on the floor now. 

And I’m getting bigger and so is my baby sister and our mother has to crouch now to make the fists on the floor, so our mother has started unwinding my fabric and placing my body apart from hers in the middle of one of the biggest fists she has made so far. I cannot hear my baby sister’s dream reports from here. I cannot feel our mother’s heartbeat. I only feel the fist, which is still warm from the work of our mother’s hands but growing colder.

And so I realize that the next dream my baby sister can relate to me will be the last.

In the last of our mother’s dreams that I will know, she dreams of goats. Our mother hates goats, which is complicated, because she is a triple Capricorn—Capricorn moon, Capricorn sun, Capricorn ascendant. But in this dream, our mother cares for a baby goat. She brushes the bugs from its hair and braids its beard and strokes its horns. The goat licks her hands and nuzzles her neck and reflects the image of our mother back at her in its sideways eyes. And when our mother wakes up, she loves goats. Our mother loves goats so much.

But the thing is, our mother is not a triple Capricorn; she is not even a double Capricorn. Our mother will learn this in a few years when the Internet will tell her that she is only a single Capricorn and that her mother had lied to her about yet another thing.

But that will be then. Now, our mother loves goats. Now, our mother loves goats so much. And now, our mother stops making fists.

 

Abigail Swoboda lives in West Philly.

On your death-bed, you smell like that night. That convenience store and how we swam in its green-sweet fluorescence to buy up cream sodas. We covered our faces against the gas fumes as I pumped and you stood staring down the quiet highway. We needed the tank full enough to get us to the edge of town where the other locals said a dog-man haunted that brambled field. We got there and hopped the thin fence hugging it. I wanted to find the dog-man and tell him everything would be okay.

Who we actually found was Jesus Christ, sweeping his palm over the ground in front of him. Light emanated. He had lost his pet fox. She must have dug under the pearly gates, snuck past St. Peter, and dove down some portal. Her name was Tabitha and she’d been gone for three days. Jesus wept.

We split up from Him to help search and after the heat sweat through my shirt, I spotted her rolling in the grass, chattering. She was okay. You carried her while we found Jesus and then passed her off to Him like she was a baby that fell asleep on the drive home. They ascended and you and I waved.

In the hospital, I hear a breeze pass from the hallway, through the door, over your body. Now you smell like red wine. You lift your arms, and then they drop.

 

Bishop V. Navarro (they/she) is a poet, fiction writer, and film critic from Tampa, Florida. They hold an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of South Florida and currently pursue a Ph.D in Communication at USF. Their creative work often seeks to transform Christian iconography for queer pasts and futures. You can follow them on twitter @vnavarrowriter.

The family fair in the parking lot of the large Texas grocery store was on, rickety roller coasters and such. Misha was giving head to his boyfriend behind a large ferris wheel. When Victor came on his brown face, the whiteness of the cum shimmered—no really, glistened as the carnival lights hit here and there, a lustful contrast of white and brown. Victor helps him clean up. Then lightly slaps his face, says good boy before walking out into the bouncing lights, among the families and cotton candy. Misha felt something drip from his throat down into the pit of his stomach that wasn’t the fluid from his newly-minted boyfriend. 

Misha saw some little flags, red or maybe light red, orange even but he saw past them and walked straight into a relationship. Victor was nice enough, his arms big and his lips soft. Misha enjoyed having sex with him. A new experience for him. The good sex. No more little shame creeping in after cumming. Just a small bliss. Goodness spotted in the distance. And that was enough for Misha. 

In the car, Misha waits for Victor to say something. He doesn’t. Misha knows that Victor often doesn’t have much to say. That’s what he says anyway. He just has a blank brain, free of anxious thoughts splashing around like children. Victor says he’ll talk when he has something to say. And he doesn’t mind listening. The last thing being a kind of good thing, a thing that, though actually bad and selfish, seems like a good thing and Victor knows that, he can get his way if it appears to be in good faith. As the houses pass, the convenience stores, the big highway leading from North to South, Misha says something about how the city used to be divided from East to West, that’s why the highway’s there. Victor smiles and says well, yes, that’s because of racism. 

Then, because he truly is trying to escape Misha (or his vision is failing), Victor hits the car in front of him. Misha looks at Victor’s face and there are already tears welling close to the eye’s edge. Misha and Victor get out of the car. Misha feels a little bit of his heart, for the first time in a long time. A waving feeling that pumps blood to everywhere, parts of the body almost forgotten about. The person in the other car opens their door, out comes Misha’s therapist; Greg. Greg’s eye sparkles. He smiles and looks at Misha. And then to Victor. And there is a slightest of frowns but Greg recovers. 

Greg shakes Misha’s hand. Misha introduces the two. Victor suddenly struck with words goes Ahhh, I’m sure you’ve heard a lot about me. And Greg makes a joke of it. Though, it’s very true. Misha can’t help but spend at least thirty minutes of their sessions talking about Victor. Though he could have spent time talking about his sexual assault or his absolutely shitty relationship with his parents and sister. His therapist reminds him that he’s there to listen to whatever it is he wants to talk about. Misha hands over his credit card after every session and Greg pops it into his own credit card machine. 

There was little damage. And the men huddle close, exchanging insurance information, phones clicking away. When Victor reaches the car, he sighs heavily. Misha only notices because this is the most energy he’s expended since he came on his face. The ride home is short. They get into bed. And Victor goes to the bathroom. Where Misha can hear him jerking off. Misha barely moves, being the master of falling asleep, closes his eyes and fumbles into dreams. 

Misha dreams that he is in a very high castle, like a maiden, a princess. He looks out onto his kingdom. There is almost nothing. Smoke rising in the East. He rings a bell and a small man comes, greets him, and puts a glass of water by his bed. The glass is modern. It’s like the one Misha was drinking from earlier, in his quaint kitchen. He drinks all the water. He pulls a scroll from his mouth. He reads it. And it says nothing nothing nothing. He wakes. No revelations. No hidden psychology. Nothing changes. 

 

travis tate is a queer, Black playwright, poet, and performer living in Brooklyn. Their poetry has appeared in Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Underblong, Southern Humanities Review, Vassar Review, The Broiler, and Cosmonaut Avenue, among other journals. Their debut poetry collection, MAIDEN, was published on Vegetarian Alcoholic Press in June 2020. Queen of The Night has been produced at Dorset Theatre Festival and Victory Gardens Theatre. They earned an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers. You can find more about them at travisltate.com.

That’s it. That’s the story.

Or:

She was six years old with hair the color of a summer sunset over Lake Erie the first time you saw her. She grabbed your hand and pulled you into a new world called Emriolan. She was not a princess but a knight; you were not a dragon to be slain but a dragon to be flown, to be pointed in the direction of enemy armies, to be the protector of the kingdom of her freckled body.

The two of you roved the countryside rescuing damsels and razing tyrants for many years, until she grew too old for Emriolan. Too old for adventures. Too old for a terminally uncool baby like you. 

You are twenty-nine when you receive an invitation to her Facebook memorial page. You imagine her crossing the border into Emriolan, where she can blaze, magnificent, forever. You spend a week scribbling in a notebook all the things you and she did there. When that’s full, you pull another from the shelf and begin to write. 

Sir Emily of Clan Dervishon was hiding a dragon egg. 

You save her, over and over again.

 

Jasmine Sawers is a Kundiman fellow and graduate of Indiana University’s MFA program whose fiction appears in such journals as AAWW’s The Margins, Foglifter, SmokeLong Quarterly, and more. Their work has won the Ploughshares Emerging Writers’ Contest and the NANO Prize, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions. Their debut collection, The Anchored World, is forthcoming through Rose Metal Press in fall of 2022. They serve as an associate fiction editor for Fairy Tale Review. Originally from Buffalo, Sawers now lives outside St. Louis. Learn more at jasminesawers.com and @sawers on Twitter.

The night is blacker than black, the kind of black that shouldn’t happen in a city this size. Every time you step into a Lyft when it is either very early in the morning or very late at night, a number of scenarios roll through your mind. You do this as a way of preparing, as you imagine many vulnerable people—trans people, non-binary people, women—must do. We almost never speak of it, but we look at each other with knowing. Now, you know better than to leave those preparations only in your mind. You text a friend your destination. You share a location with that friend on your phone. You set a reminder to let your friend know when there’s no more need for danger. 

You would have never picked a flight this early, even though you have no trouble waking up early. Your love made all the decisions—which airline (Spirit), what time (6 am). The only thing he managed to get right was the location. New York City. But that was easy, because he’d seen you travel there twice a year for too long. Funny thing when a loved one’s way of making up a wrong is to take you farther away from him. You felt the irony of the choice. But you didn’t say a word.

The driver, at first, seemed innocuous enough. A South Asian man in his mid-50s, you’re guessing. Harmless enough. You hoped he’d leave you alone to your phone, your book, your sleepy dissociative state in the obsidian dark. But. Of course not.

Are you married? Yes. Do you have kids? Not yet! You should have kids. Don’t worry if it takes some tries. I had to get a surgery to have my daughter and she means everything to me. What do you do? I teach at [redacted]. Oh, do you know Shirley Wong? No, I don’t think so. 

Then he launches into a long story that you didn’t ask to hear, from a man who will mean nothing to you, or at least he *could* have meant nothing, but that was before. Shirley Wong, a young woman from Taiwan that he took a class with twenty years ago, before he met his wife, before he had his surgery, before he had his child. They were in love, he told you. And then she got pregnant. And he didn’t handle it well, and he begged her to get an abortion. Shirley was supposed to go to Chinatown to get an abortion. In some alley. And then he went to Dallas, and then she wouldn’t answer his calls. But, what if she never had an abortion? What if my child is just out there, never having known of me? 

You nod, you mm, mmhmm, wow. You keep moving your attention back to the glowing screen of your phone, not because you are interested in scrolling through your socials or reading an email, but because you want him to take the hint that you have no interest in this story. But, nothing works. It never does. You could become stern with him, but to move through the forty-five minute ride with the awkwardness that could ensue, or the constant badgering about why you won’t even think about whether or not you might have seen this woman in one of your classes (even though she stopped taking classes two decades before you became a teacher), or have passed by her among the throngs of people that make their way through Chinatown, or that some Asian people (even when he is one) just will collide like that, it could happen. 

What you want to do is be away from the noise of this man’s stories, and shed them like a cloak covered in the pus of someone’s life you didn’t ask to hold. But, you’ve been here before. You know that you can’t. There is, now, a little piece of him that has attached itself to his story in you, your brain, your skin, and it will never fully let you go.

 

Addie Tsai (any/all) is a queer nonbinary artist and writer of color, who teaches and lives in Houston, Texas. She also teaches in Goddard College’s MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts program and Regis University’s Mile-High MFA program. They collaborated with Dominic Walsh Dance Theater on Victor Frankenstein and Camille Claudel, among others. Addie holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College and a PhD in Dance from Texas Woman’s University. Addie is the author of the young adult novel Dear Twin and Unwieldy Creatures, their queer biracial genderswapped retelling of Frankenstein, is forthcoming from Jaded Ibis Press Fall 2022. Their writing has been published in Foglifter, VIDA Lit, Banango Street, beestung, The Offing, The Collagist, The Feminist Wire, Nat. Brut., and elsewhere. She is Fiction co-Editor and editor of Features & Reviews at ANMLY, contributing staff writer at Spectrum South, and Founding Editor & Editor in Chief at just femme & dandy.

This work uses Percival Everett’s American Desert and text generated using one of Hugging Face’s GPT language models as source text.

One.

Its head was placed under its left arm, the fingers of its hand falling over its mouth which was frozen partly open, and the cool vinyl bag was zipped from bottom to top. The ride in the coroner’s wagon to the morgue was protracted, the medical examiner’s assistant stopping at a fast-food restaurant, his mother’s house, where he was given a small white plastic box in which to stay overnight. The matter, however, rang with an air of incompleteness, as it was the case that the body was never identified, only the head and isn’t that what is always required? That the body be identified? This is the problem with the present state of the human world. The most probable scenario is that the body was the product of the sexual union between the two persons.

The question is: is this a reason to avoid the question?

 

Two.

The trucker wore suspenders, which he called “braces,” and seersucker suits no matter how cool the weather turned. He was wearing a heat-crumpled seersucker when he rose and walked from the third row to the altar. When he was done, he said, ” I don’t have to go to work any more.” At the tram ticket office, It began to feel antsy, nervous and it attributed it to its long-standing fear of heights, as they were about to be suspended high in the air on a thin cable. The kids even tried to tease it about the last time they had gone up, telling it that the jagged rocks were really a lot closer than they looked, assuring it the cars hardly ever fell. But, to its credit, it managed to get back to the station without much trouble. The day was sunny and warm, and it felt as if it might be a good time to get down and enjoy it.

It would have been great fun if it hadn’t been for the fact that the tram was moving faster than it could keep up with and that when it finally stopped at the station, it was a little more than a block away from the building,

Ms. Trucker, steely Ms. Trucker, cool Ms. Trucker, eyebrow-licking Ms. Trucker, shed a single tear which appeared at once as the most controlled emission It had ever seen from a human body and as a flood of terrifying uncontrolled emotion. “I’ve fallen in love with you, It,” she said. “You are mine. You have no right to be anywhere else.” She hasn’t said so on the air, but that’s what she said to that makeup guy. You can see it in the video. She said she never said that. She said that if she ‘d ever had to make a choice between the two, she would choose the one that felt most “real.”

The truth is, as the saying goes, the truth is seldom as beautiful as the lie.

 

Three.

“Let’s just stay cool,” It said. In fact, it was cool—cooler than it had ever been. Perhaps it was simply that without a pulse, there was nothing to race, but it knew that it was more than that. It seemed it was not entirely the same as it had ever been, perhaps, but it was still very much there. Martha, however, began with a wide-eyed stare at her father, not so much of surprise but of rage and anger, a fiery anger which found air with a screaming fit and a dash up the stairs to her bedroom. She was a year old then, and she had not yet learned to fear what her little mouth would say. And the little things like that had not come easily for her.

Her father was a man of few words.

“I’m hot. Have somebody fetch a pail of water so Ms. Trucker can wash my feet.” The trucker looked at It. “Nothing cools you down like cool water on your feet.” It did call Channel 5 and in short order it was on the air live with Ms. Trucker. The woman’s voice was excited and thin, not quite a whine, but it grated on Its dead nerves, like a scratching across the sutures which held fast its head. For a few seconds her voice did not carry over, then it did. “Well it’s cold and the cold has a tendency to make you a little more aggressive.”

Her voice was a little more subdued than before.

Martha stepped in front of them and pulled open the doors, releasing musty but cool air. The smell of ozone wafted around them and it was hard to make out what was going on, they were surrounded by what looked like a city or town, a large bridge spanning the lake, the sky above was a pale blue as the water below, and they were in the middle of a large park. “We’ve got to do something,” the director said. “They’re dying trying to fill air at the studio.” But it wasn’t long before he realized that what was going to work was to go back and create an entire new world and take his time creating a world from scratch, then make his own world and then build that world into a new environment. He had an idea of what to do.

He had to go back.

 

Four.

The steps were concrete and lights were already burning inside, perhaps triggered by the opening of the doors, like a refrigerator—and like a refrigerator, because it was underground, the shelter was cool. It was not inside Ms Trucker’s head, it was not the dashboard of the automobile, it was not the air around her, but it was there. It was there in much the same way it’d often felt it was throughout its life—unweighted, uncentered—but at least in this scene from this sad woman’s life it understood what was going on. As one of the last things she said, before she had to jump back to the hotel, was: “They’re going to leave.” And the lights went out.

There was this really cool guy talking all about helping people. Was Ms. Trucker really sick the day it sat with her twenty years ago, on-air? How often do you lie to yourself? I’m sure she’s as sick now as I am. I hope the same happens to the person or persons responsible for this lie.

I know the story is told in various versions, but it is my contention that the story, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, is always as important as the falsehood, even if it doesn’t get the same credit.

It thought Martha was cool and it was sitting next to her. There was this stuff on Martha’s plate. It was a piece of meat, a piece of lettuce, and a piece of something that was shaped like an ice cream cone. The room was painfully silent and the dead air was just that, but no one was dashing to resuscitate it. Ms. Trucker called upon her years in the business, her professionalism, her steely control and said, “You’re mean,” and dipped her face into her hands and cried. Then her voice rose to the full cry. “Martha,” she said, “You have to go.”

Then she turned and left.

“It’s a bit cool.” She said and looked over at the fish and then back at the food. The trucker served, hitting the ball high into the air. The ball went higher and higher until it was just a speck against the sky. The ball bounced off the end of the truck and came to rest on the ground just in front of him. His face was all smiles, even though he had no idea what he did to make it so.

The ball hit the trucker right in the heart.

 

Edward Wells is a writer from the United States of America. They hold an MFA in Creative Writing and are an adjunct instructor of writing and literature. They are enamored of the possibility of connection and the cool air that descends into a desert with sunset. Their critical article, “Exploring a Framework of Unreadability in Narrative Fiction,” recently appeared in The Text, and their poetry manuscript, meyond, is available through Alien Buddha Press.

Louisiana

 

Coyote Shook is a cartoonist, Appalachian apostate, and PhD candidate in American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. They can also be found traipsing through New Mexico and Louisiana not infrequently. 

Their comics and visual essays have appeared in or are forthcoming in a range of American and Canadian literary magazines, including (but not limited to) Shenandoah Magazine, Tupelo Quarterly Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Maine Review, The Puritan, The South Dakota Review, and Santa Fe Writers Project Quarterly. 

Their debut graphic novel, Coyote the Beautiful, was the 2020 winner of the Jeanne Leiby Chapbook Contest with The Florida Review, the first comic to win. Feel free to follow them on Instagram (@coyoteshook) or to check out their website: coyoteshookcomics.com.