<

CLAMS
BY MEGAN BOYLE

Anne is sitting at a bar in Portland with a group of people she just met. She lives in Philadelphia, and has flown here for her friend's birthday. Everyone has been vying for the birthday friend's attention all night, which has left Anne to fend for herself socially. She is tired of having the same conversation with everyone. Even if their exchange results in something genuinely stimulating, Anne is eventually traded for something more interesting, or the bathroom. The only person Anne has not connected with is Nate. She wants badly to interact with Nate, because he is quiet like her, but seems to care less about being quiet than she does. She is very attracted to him. She is drunk enough to feel charismatic and invincible. Nate is sitting in a booth, three feet from anyone. The ceiling is leaking. Anne sits next to Nate, points to the ceiling, and says, “uh oh.” Nate smiles and says, “yeah, I know.”

“Give Me Just a Little More Time” by Chairmen of the Board starts playing. People have been talking about dancing all evening. An unknown force seems to have made everyone get up to dance. Anne joins them and sees that Nate is still sitting. She walks to him and grabs his wrists.

“Come on, come dance, it will be fun,” she says, and immediately feels worried about promising this action to be “fun.”

“No, I don’t want to,” Nate says, but doesn’t protest as Anne pulls him out of his seat.

“What’s wrong, do you feel self-conscious?"

“What do you think?”

“Yeah, probably, you probably do, it’s okay though.”

Anne realizes she has no idea how to move Nate once she has him where she wanted him. They gingerly spin around a few times. The song is about to end and she feels relieved.

“You want to get a drink?” Nate says.

“Sure,” Anne says. They walk over to the bar. The bar has a list of drinks with names from western movies that don’t describe the drinks at all. Nate suggests they get a drink called “Cool Hand Luke.” The bartender acts disapproving when he orders two Cool Hand Lukes.

“Damn,” he says, “guess we picked the wrong thing.”

“It’s just that no one ever gets this,” the bartender says, “I forget how to make it, no one ever orders it.” She pushes two blue things in whiskey glasses at them and walks away.

Anne shrugs at Nate and makes a face which attempts, “I had no idea this was going to happen.” She wants to laugh. Nate makes the same face at her. They smile.

They talk about other people in the group. Some people are more socially awkward than others. They talk about feeling awkward, how different people cope with feelings of awkwardness. They talk about displaying personas. They talk for a long time. Anne wonders if and when they are going to kiss. Sometimes she catches herself staring at his mouth.

“I liked it when you made me dance with you,” Nate says.

Anne can feel her stomach heating up. “Oh, sure, yeah, I wanted to. You were alone, I don’t know."

“Where do you live again? Pittsburgh?”

“Philadelphia, I live in Philadelphia.”

“Why can’t you live in Portland?”

Anne's mouth opens as if to say something. She looks at the illuminated bottles behind the bar.

“Hey, can I be honest with you for a second," she says with a vague awareness that she is acting like a teenager cliché in a John Hughes movie, "I really want to kiss you right now.”

They kiss. Anne is too preoccupied with the action of kissing to tell if Nate is a good kisser or not. She feels like she has swallowed a small, energetic frog. Nate looks around to see if anyone from the group saw what just happened. The group has gone outside.

“Hey, we should go outside, I think they’re all outside,” he says.

“Yeah,” Anne says, “oh, yeah.”

Nate is taking the bus back with two other people. Anne is walking. Everyone is taking turns saying goodbye. Anne dislikes the slow social obligation goodbyes create, but she is excited to say goodbye to Nate because it will validate their meeting in some way. She goes in to hug him, knowing the Parameter for Acceptable Physical Contact with Nate now includes kissing.

“We can’t,” Nate says to Anne.

“I know, I didn’t think we would."

“Are you going to be at the barbecue tomorrow?”

“Yeah, I think I’ll be there.”

“Okay. Good. Great. I’ll see you there, then.”

“Okay.” Anne is grinning.

“Okay.” Nate is grinning.

“Bye.”

“Bye.”

*

At the barbecue, Nate shows Anne the contents of his wallet. He finds a small picture of his face.

"Here. You can throw it away or keep it, it's yours if you want it," he says.

"Oh, cool," she says, "I'll keep it."

It is Anne's last night in Portland. As the sky gets darker, people leave the barbecue to go to her friend's house party. It is loud inside, so Nate and Anne spend most of the time on the porch, drinking forties of Budweiser. A couple Nate is friends with comes up to talk to them for awhile. The girl talks to Anne and the boy talks to Nate. Nate's arm is around Anne, he is squeezing her hip. Anne is talking with the girl about moving to Portland. She is distracted because Nate keeps moving his hand on her side. The boy bumps Nate's and Anne's heads together, and everyone laughs a little. Then Nate and Anne are alone again. They kiss for the second time. Anne wonders if the objective of kissing is to try to pass through the other person and come out the other side.

As other people filter onto the porch, Anne realizes she has been talking only with Nate all night. They go inside and share a bowl of noodles on the couch. Sometimes after Anne says something, Nate's neck straightens, a slow smile forms, and his eyes narrow almost as if he got too much sun in them. Anne has never met anyone with this facial expression. It makes her feel safe and liked. Many people are around, but appear occupied with other things. Anne and Nate gradually slide down to a lying position, and fall asleep tangled together.

Anne wakes up before her cell phone alarm and gets dressed. She says goodbye to her friend who had slept in another room. She needs to be at the airport soon. Other people are still sleeping around Nate, on the floor and another couch. Anne tries to be as quiet as possible when packing her suitcase. She sits on the couch where Nate is waking up. She pats his thigh a few times and says, "hey, so, I guess I have to go now."

"I know." Nate is looking at the ceiling and it is impossible for Anne to tell what he is thinking.

"Here, write your email on your picture," Anne says. Nate does. She writes hers on a sugar packet and gives it to him. She wonders who is going to say something next.

Nate gets up and hugs her for a long time. He watches Anne pick up her suitcase. The air between them feels compressed and nebulous. Nate says, "hey, you have a stain on your shirt."

Anne is taken aback and almost laughs. She says "okay," quickly looks at her shirt, and smiles while squeezing his shoulder. “I really have to go.”

“Okay. I know." Nate holds onto Anne's hand a little as she walks out the door. "Bye."

*

With each email, gchat, or text message conversation Anne and Nate have, she feels less connected to the memory of her time with him in Portland, and more adjusted to a new, faceless dynamic. There is an equation operating behind all of their textual interactions:

(-physical interaction)/(Time) * (increased need for contact)/(detachment felt when relating to text on a computer screen) = (x)Stream of Conscious-like Honesty

*

At the airport, Anne paces and compulsively chews cough drops. She has forgotten her gum. She goes to the bathroom to confirm with the mirror that she is still attractive. She resumes pacing.

Nate is descending from the escalator, wearing a green jacket and carrying two small bags. Anne feels a sudden loss of control of her face. She hugs Nate and he kisses her, which she did not expect. She is vibrating.

“Hi,” she says, close to his face. His eyes are bigger and darker than Anne remembered.

“Hi,” he says, and hugs her again, “are you nervous?”

“A little, yeah, yeah, I feel like I look visibly nervous. Are you?”

“A little.” It is quiet. Anne doesn’t know where her eyes are looking.

“Hi,” she says.

“Hi," Nate says, "let’s go.”

*

Nate is sitting on Anne’s couch. She looks at everything else in the room and can’t get used to seeing him sitting there. They are talking about the friends they have in different states. Anne can’t look at Nate for very long.

“You keep looking away from me,” he says.

“I know, I don’t feel comfortable yet, I think,” she says, “what are you thinking?”

“I was thinking it seems like you really like me.”

Anne feels exposed and vulnerable and desperately wants to convey the opposite, but knows that Nate will feel alienated if she is any way but honest. She wants to run into her closet and scream the word “confidence.”

“I like you, I mean, sure, I. Don’t you like me?”

“Yes, I like you.”

“Okay.”

Nate looks at Anne and moves his eyebrows together.

“It seems like it really matters what I think of you.”

“Well. I think I worry about what everyone thinks of me. I think it matters what a lot of people think about me. It matters what you think about me, yeah.”

Nate exhales and looks in the opposite direction. Anne thinks he has looked in the opposite direction so he can roll his eyes at her without her knowing. She thinks of every word for “god” and “shit” she knows. She looks at a crumpled receipt next to a tiny swirl of wood in her floor. She must have forgotten to throw it out.

“You’re very honest, it’s different for me."

“I think it’s important to be honest. Honesty is the only thing that leads to significant experiences.”

“Yeah,” Anne feels like she has lost all contact with her brain and is functioning on reserve power, “I guess it is.”

*

It has been thunder storming all afternoon. Nate and Anne have been drinking vodka tonics and playing cards. They sit on her chair and ottoman and smoke cigarettes out the window, holding their drinks. Anne feels more like a person Nate would want to be around the drunker she becomes. Nate accidentally touches her leg with his leg, and then puts his leg on top of her leg. Anne thinks, “successful leg contact” and starts hearing the song “Success” by Iggy Pop in her head. She laughs through her nose.

“What’s funny,” Nate says.

“Oh, it’s. Oh. Nothing, I forget,” Anne says.

They listen to music from Nate’s iPod and he makes dinner. The rain is coming down hard. When lightning strikes, they stop what they're doing to make a directionless but somehow necessary comment about it. After dinner, they go out to get ice cream and more tonic water. Anne thinks anyone observing them in the convenience store must assume they are a couple. She wonders if Nate is having this thought too, if he would be happy with that reality. She wonders if she would be happy with that reality, decides it doesn't matter, that it's just nice to come into the convenience store with someone else, and glad that the "someone else" is Nate.

Nate makes them each another drink. They sit on the couch watching Star Trek, Anne's head in Nate's lap. During commercial breaks, he leans down to kiss her. Anne is aware of her neck craning upwards after Nate kisses her, still reaching for something unsatisfied. Anne thinks her kissing ends in deep space, Nate's ends at the appearance of Patrick Stewart. She tries to dismiss this thought, his unmatched eagerness could simply be a product of the weather, a fluke.

After they have sex that night, it is completely dark in Anne's apartment. Nate rolls over and doesn’t say anything.

“What, what are you thinking right now,” Anne says.

“I was thinking... I don’t have feelings for you, I don’t feel emotionally attached to you, I just had sex with you.”

“Oh.” She tries to negotiate the gravity of the situation, was this appropriate for Nate to say and she has just missed cues all along? Should she replicate his response with the same aloofness? She looks at the graceful curve of his calves in the dark, how they seem somehow smaller than human. She realizes no one has said anything for awhile, that the silence feels sharp and oppressive, that she needs to leave the bed and go as far away as possible. She puts on her pajama shorts and t-shirt. “Okay,” she says. “I feel really shitty right now. I feel like a piece of shit.”

She walks into the kitchen and stares at the hotel outside her window. A few lights are on. She wants to be any of those people with a light on in their room. The possibility of being an anonymous hotel guest or any other person in the world seems defiantly close to her, tempting her. She is jealous of her window glass. To be anything else right now must be better than being what she is. She begins to cry, softly at first, wanting to keep it private, but with each second she cries, it matters exponentially less that she is doing it softly. She is sobbing.

Nate approaches her and they have a conversation. She tries to explain what she's feeling, but the alcohol she has consumed has made her thoughts both more intense and less communicable. Nate presses her to talk about her feelings. She reverts to explaining her sexual history, hoping this will somehow present raw research material for him to gather a thesis on his own. When she remembers this conversation the next day, only select words and phrases resound: “worthless,” “I’m sorry,” “honesty,” “important,” “Jesus,” “I’m not thinking ’Anne is emotionally fucked up, I will stay at a motel for the rest of the time,’” “relationship,” "meaningless," “I don’t know.”

Nate hugs Anne hard while she cries. They move back to the bed and she falls asleep on him.

*

In the morning, Nate's eyes are suddenly open and looking at Anne. He asks her how she's feeling. She says okay, but a little embarrassed about the night before. He tells her not to worry about it. She almost feels reassured. She tells him she feels reassured.

They decide take a day trip to the beach. Anne has a mental picture of them spending all day at an old arcade, getting cheeseburgers and sitting on the boardwalk, then running onto the sand at night with a cheap bottle of wine, sitting on their towels to keep them from flying away. Then they will swim, kiss passionately in the water, and check into a motel with a carpet that smells like stale cigarettes. Their interaction last night could’ve possibly not happened.

Nate makes salads for lunch while Anne researches motels on the internet. Everywhere seems too expensive, but she assures Nate that there will be more affordable places when they get there.

Anne drives them to the beach. Nate stares out the window and talks about corn. Periodically, Anne gives a mile count and the energy in the car raises. They stop at a gas station. Anne thinks that anyone observing them now would not first assume they were a couple, but something irregular instead -- estranged cousins, possibly a hostage situation.

When they get to the beach, they spend fifteen minutes looking for parking and walk to the boardwalk. It is not the same boardwalk Anne envisioned and described to Nate. They walk behind a morbidly obese woman in a beige shirt and shorts. People are carrying jumbo buckets of french fries and stuffed animal prizes. Families are having conflicts. There is an abundance of flesh being displayed, flesh that shouldn't be seen. "Barbie Girl" by Aqua is playing on a ride that spins people around at a high speed. Someone in a Spongebob Squarepants costume is sitting, playing the banjo with a hat in front of them. Children yelling, people talking, vendors on loudspeakers, seagulls, the ocean, and the clanking metal of rides has elevated the overall volume of background noise to an uncomfortable level. Anne feels guilty for having brought them there. She thinks Nate is picturing her face on the bodies of everyone they see.

They walk on the shoreline.

"So fucking loud," Nate says, "the people and the ocean together."

"I know, it will be better if we keep walking, I think, I think it gets quieter down there," Anne says.

"The tide seems, I don't know, high, the tide seems high."

"Yeah. I think it's a high tide."

A young boy dressed in black has buried himself in the sand and the tide is washing over him. Anne makes eye contact with him as they pass.

"That kid looked so depressed," Anne says, smiling a little. Nate says nothing.

Anne points out the tiny bubbling holes in the sand, "you know what those are?"

"Um. Fleas, sand fleas."

"Yeah, or like, really little clams, I think. God, it would suck so bad to be one of them, just getting stepped on by feet all day, underground, water dumping on you all the time," Anne's voice is loud in her ears, "you'd just feel totally out of control. You have like, they have like, no control over their lives, clams."

"Yeah. It would suck."

They walk silently down the beach in single file for a long time. Anne stares at three stationary kites. They stop walking and look in opposite directions.

"Some people like, come here and like all of the noise, they like it to be loud, really externally stimulated people," Anne says.

"Yeah," Nate says, "I don't think I want to stay here overnight. I don't think it would be worth it."

There is a pause. Anne is desperate to fill the pause with goal oriented behavior.

"Okay. I know. I'm sorry."

"It's fine."

"Okay. What are we going to do. Are we going to leave? Should we leave?"

"I don't know. I don't care. Sure."

"You want to go back?"

"Yes. Okay. Let's go back."

Anne drives for a long time, intermittently lighting cigarettes. She wants to have an interesting conversation with Nate. She considers several topics and decides that attempting conversation would show defeat in some way. She is strong. She does not need to talk. She wants Nate to know that she is having fascinating private thoughts that he could know if he asked her a question, any question. She directs the thought "ask a question ask a question ask a question" out of the right side of her head. It is too quiet. She needs to say something. Her throat tries to say something before her brain can think of something to say. She chokes a little, and swallows.

"I'm really tired," she says.

Nate offers to drive so Anne can sleep. They pull over at a Comfort Inn. Anne realizes that Nate's picture with his email address on it is in her car door, in plain view. She doesn't want him to know that she has seen his face every day for the past month and a half. She tries to hide it between two boxes of cigarettes and takes the boxes to the passenger side of the car. Nate sees her taking the boxes and knows that something is happening. After Anne wakes up, they switch seats at a red light and she drives them home.

When they arrive back at her apartment, Nate picks up the boxes as he is getting out of the car and finds his picture. He is holding his picture and looks slightly amused. He turns it over and sees his email address. Anne shuts her car door.

"Oh," Anne says, "yeah. That's."

They say nothing. Nate doesn't look at Anne. He puts the picture back and shuts the door.

*

In Anne’s apartment, they drink beer and Nate turns on the television. “Goodfellas” is on and they decide to watch it. During boring parts of the movie, Anne takes inventory on the space between them on the couch and tries to decide if they are moving closer together or further apart. Further apart, she thinks. Joe Pesci stabs a man in the trunk of a car, then shoots him five times. Anne and Nate have each had three beers.

“You want another beer, I’m getting one I think,” Anne says.

“Sure.” Nate looks unsure.

Anne is mystified by the change in their dynamic. She thinks of Nate kissing her at the airport. She wonders what she has done wrong. Joe Pesci is sitting in the back seat of a car and stabs the head of a man sitting in the front seat. Nate eats tuna from a can. The movie is over. They go to bed. Nate opens his arms, signaling to Anne to put her head close to him. She does. They are quiet. Anne pictures falling asleep in his arms, waking up the next day, attributing their lack of sex to exhaustion, and gradually reaching a point where they don’t speak at all.

“What’s going on Nate, why aren’t you being affectionate with me anymore,” she says.

“I don’t know. When I’m with a girl I’m interested in, I just want to touch her and kiss her all of the time, it’s like, it’s natural to do that.”

“But didn’t you feel that with me? I thought you felt that with me, I thought that's why, you know.” Anne isn't sure if she has finished talking.

“Yeah, I did. I just don’t feel like having sex with you anymore.”

“You just don’t feel like having sex with me anymore.”

“No, I don’t.”

Anne thinks “honesty vs. tact.” She pictures Nate’s face on a child’s body, then a robot’s body, then a sort of hybrid child-robot. She remembers his voice saying “honesty leads to significant experiences.” She is not wearing shoes, and hasn’t been for awhile, but feels markedly shoeless at the moment. She predicts that in the future, she will want to go back to this moment and punch Nate, but right now she feels no drive to engage in any activity that would make her physical body apparent.

“So why did you even come here then,” she says.

“I came to see if I wanted to have a relationship with you.”

“And you decided you didn’t want to.”

“Yes.”

“Well that’s weird, that’s like. That’s just weird. I thought you were just coming here for an experience, you know, not to find a relationship, that’s just weird.”

“I don’t think that’s ‘weird,’ I think someone flying across the country to see about me, I think that would be flattering.”

“I know. I know. I’m sorry, that was dumb. I didn’t mean ‘weird,’ I was just being defensive or something, I feel hurt, I’m sorry.”

"I understand that." Nate inhales and exhales. "I mean, look, I didn't come here to like, fall madly in love with you or have some kind of cathartic experience or something."

Anne is fairly sure that he has used the word "cathartic" incorrectly. Maybe not incorrectly, but atypically. She becomes distracted and momentarily forgets her goals in this conversation. She remembers feeling bad.

“I didn't think you came here to fall madly in love with me. I don't know. I guess I just feel rejected and like there is something fundamentally unlikable and disappointing about me that I don’t know about and I’m just like, I’m powerless. I have no power. You decided you don’t want me, and here I am. What is to be done. You know. You’re here for three more days. Fuck.”

“I don’t have to be here.”

Anne has moved to a sitting position. She feels like the only person in the universe.

“Okay. I think I want you to go, then. I think you should go.”

There is some debate over where Nate will sleep. Anne puts him on the couch. She limply throws a blanket and pillow to him and says, “here, want a blanket.” It is three thirty in the morning. She takes her computer into her bedroom and looks at Facebook photos of nice people she knew in high school.

*

Anne wakes up at seven thirty and the sun is making everything in her room yellow and hot. She stares at pieces of dust floating in the air. The air seems harder to breathe at this temperature. She goes into the bathroom and takes a shit. When she gets out, her computer is gone. Nate has taken it into the living room. Anne feels a latent embarrassment about shitting within his earshot. She puts on clothes and walks into the living room.

“Hey. I’m going out to get coffee. I’ll be right back.” Midway through locking her door she thinks, "why am I doing this?" and envisions Nate as some kind of captive. She debates unlocking the door after she has locked it, but just keeps walking instead. She doesn't know where her hands should be.

Anne spends an hour getting coffee. Her thoughts are fragmented, fast-moving, and mostly detached from emotions, though she vaguely senses that she should be having some kind of profound, dominant emotion right now. She has an overall feeling of existential bankruptcy. She wants to be a mosquito, operating autonomously with blind fervor, unaware of its rapidly forthcoming death.

When Anne returns, the door is open and Nate is gone. He has taken the book he said she could borrow and left all of the vegetables he brought. Automatically, because she doesn't know what else to do, she begins washing dishes. She touches a glass he used last night and feels an almost electric shock when she realizes how close in time she is to last night. She scrubs the glass hard. She thinks about it breaking into tiny pieces in her hand, and molecules of Nate's saliva or skin cells being absorbed into her blood. She feels unable to control the pressure she places on the glass and stops doing dishes. She walks around her apartment, aimlessly at first, then with a fury to erase all physical evidence of his presence. The cushions go back on the couch. The beer cans are thrown away. Her computer is open and she looks at its web history. Nate has googled "hostels in Philadelphia," flight changes on Orbitz.com, and directions to public transit. Anne's blood feels as though it is changing from a liquid to a solid form. She walks to her bed and falls asleep for most of the day.

Anne wakes up with her face on the pillow Nate was using. She has not yet opened her eyes. She breathes deeply and knows that something smells hazily good and masculine, but is not sure what it is. She breathes deeply four more times before waking up enough to recognize the smell as Nate. She stops and sits up, still seeing the pillow in her peripheral vision. She averts her gaze from it as if it were a person.

She checks her email and sees Nate's first and last name listed multiple times in her inbox, on already viewed emails. Out of habit, she feels excited for .6 seconds before correcting herself.

She calls her mother and asks if she can come over.

It is four in the morning. Anne can’t sleep. She sits on her mother's balcony smoking a cigarette and watching the trees move from the breeze. The trees look as though they could be sea anemone, moving softly with the current. She thinks about how it is impossible to be in any other time than this, but any other time than this would be preferable. She remembers the taste of Nate’s cooking and tries to remember the taste of his mouth, but realizes his mouth had no distinguishable taste. She throws the cigarette off the balcony and it lands in an orange burst on the grass. Insects and bacteria around the cigarette feel the impact of an atomic bomb.

<

COLOR OF DARKNESS
BY JAMES PURDY

Sometimes he thought about his wife, but a thing had begun of late, usually after the boy went to bed, a thing which should have been terrifying but which was not: he could not remember now what she had looked like. The specific thing he could not remember was the color of her eyes. It was one of the most obsessive things in his thought. It was also a thing he could not quite speak of with anybody. There were people in the town who would have remembered, of course, what color her eyes were, but gradually he began to forget the general structure of her face also. All he seemed to remember was her voice, her warm hearty comforting voice.

Then there was the boy, Baxter, of course. What did he know and what did he not know. Sometimes Baxter seemed to know everything. As he hung on the edge of the chair looking at his father, examining him closely (the boy never seemed to be able to get close enough to his father), the father felt that Baxter might know everything.

"Bax," the father would say at such a moment, and stare into his own son's eyes. The son looked exactly like the father. There was no trace in the boy's face of anything of his mother.

"Soon you will be all grown up," the father said one night, without ever knowing why he had said this, saying it without his having even thought about it.

"I don't think so," the boy replied.

"Why don't you think so," the father wondered, as surprised by the boy's answer as he had been by his own question.

The boy thought over his own remark also.

"How long does it take?" the boy asked.

"Oh a long time yet," the father said.

"Will I stay with you, Daddy," the boy wondered.

The father nodded. "You can stay with me always," the father said.

The boy said Oh and began running around the room. He fell over one of his engines and began to cry.

Mrs. Zilke came into the room and said something comforting to the boy.

The father got up and went over to pick up the son. Then sitting down, he put the boy in his lap, and flushed from the exertion, he said to Mrs. Zilke: "You know, I am old!"

Mrs. Zilke laughed. "If you're old, I'm dead," she said. "You must keep your youth," she said almost harshly to the father, after a pause.

He looked up at her, and the boy suddenly moved in his father's arms, looking questioningly at his father. He kissed his father on the face.

"He's young yet," the boy said to Mrs. Zilke.

"Why, of course. He's a young man," she said. "They don't come no younger for fathers."

The father laughed and the boy got up to go with Mrs. Zilke to his bed.

The father thought about Mrs. Zilke's remark and he listened as he heard her reading to the boy from a story-book. He found the story she read quite dry, and he wondered if the boy found anything in it at all.

It was odd, he knew, that he could not remember the color of his wife's eyes. He knew, of course, that he must remember them, and that he was perhaps unconsciously trying to forget. Then he began to think that he could not remember the color of his son's eyes, and he had just looked at them!

*

"What does he know?" he said to Mrs. Zilke when she came downstairs and sat down for a moment with the newspaper. She lit a cigarette and blew out some smoke before she replied to him. By then he was looking out the window as though he had forgotten her presence and his question.

"He knows everything," Mrs. Zilke said.

The father came to himself now and looked at her gently.

"They all do now, don't they," the father said, meaning children.

"It seems so," the woman said. "Yes," she said, thinking. "They know everything."

"Everybody seems forty years old to me," the father said. "Even children maybe. Except they are complete mysteries to me. I don't know what to say to any of them. I don't know what they know, I guess."

"Oh, I understand that. I raised eight kids and I was always thinking the same thing."

"Well, that relieves me," he told Mrs. Zilke.

She smiled, but in her smile he thought he saw some thought reserved, as though she had not told everything.

"Of course we never know any other human being, do we?" he told Mrs. Zilke, hesitating as though to get the quotation right.

She nodded, enjoying her cigarette.

"Your son is lonely," she said suddenly.

The father did not look at her now.

"I mean by that," she went on, "it's too bad he's an only child."

"Doesn't he have other children over here, though. I thought--"

"Oh, it's not the same," Mrs. Zilke said. "Having in other youngsters like he does on Saturday and all. It's not enough."

"Of course I am gone a good deal."

"You're gone all the time," she said.

"That part can't be helped, of course. You see," he laughed, "I'm a success."

"Mrs. Zilke did not return his laughter, he noticed, and he had noticed this before in plain strong old working women of her kind. He admired Mrs. Zilke tremendously. He was glad she had not laughed with him.

"No one should have just the one child," she told him.

"You know," he said, confidentially, "when you have just your work, as I do, people get away from you."

He looked at the bottle of brandy on the bookshelf.

"Would you have a pony of brandy with me, Mrs. Zilke."

She began to say no because she really didn't like it, but there was such a pleading look on his young face, she nodded rather regally, and he got up and poured two shots.

"Thank you for drinking with me," he said suddenly, as though to brush away something that had come between his words and his memory.

"Quite a bouquet," she said, whiffing first.

"You are really very intelligent," he told Mrs. Zilke.

"Because I know the bouquet," she said coldly.

"Oh, that and a lot of other things."

"Well, I don't know anything," Mrs. Zilke said.

"You know everything," he remarked. "All I have is my work."

"That's a lot. They need you," she said.

He sat down now, but he did not touch the brandy, and Mrs. Zilke having smelled the bouquet put her tiny glass down too.

They both sat there for a moment in silence as though they were perhaps at communion.

"I can't remember the color of my wife's eyes," he said, and he looked sick.

Mrs. Zilke sat there as though considering whether this had importance, or whether she might go on to the next topic of their talk.

"And tonight, would you believe it, I couldn't remember the color of his!"

"They're blue as the sea," Mrs. Zilke said rather gruffly, but with a kind of heavy sad tone also in her voice.

"But what does it matter about those little things," she said. "You're an important man!"

He laughed very loud at this, and Mrs. Zilke suddenly laughed too. A cord of tension had been snapped that had existed between them earlier.

The father lifted the glass and said the usual words and Mrs. Zilke took her glass with a slight bored look and sipped.

"I can taste the grapes in that, all right," she said.

"Well, it's the grapes of course I buy it for," he replied in the tone of voice he might have used in a men's bar.

"You shouldn't care what color their eyes are or were," Mrs. Zilke said.

"Well, it's my memory about people," he told her. "I don't know people.

"I know you don't," she said. "But you have other things!"

"No, I don't. Not really. I could remember people if I wanted to."

"If you wanted to," Mrs. Zilke said.

"Well, why can't I remember my wife's eyes," he brought the whole thing out. "Can you remember," he wanted to know, "the color of eyes of all those in your family."

"All forty-two of them," she laughed.

"Well, your husband and your sons and daughters."

"Oh, I expect I can," she was rather evasive.

"But you do, Mrs. Zilke, you know you do!"

"All right, but I'm just a woman about the house. You're out in the world. Why should you know the color of people's eyes! Good grief, yes!"

She put her glass down, and picked up some socks that she had been darning before she had put the boy to bed.

"I'm going to work while we talk," she said with a firmness that seemed to mean she would be talking less now and that she would probably not drink the brandy.

Then suddenly closing his own eyes tight he realized that he did not know the color of Mrs. Zilke's eyes. But suddenly he could not be afraid anymore. He didn't care, and he was sure that Mrs. Zilke would not care if he knew or not. She would tell him not to care. And he remembered her, which was, he was sure, more important. He remembered her kindness to him and his son, and how important they both were to him.

*

"How old are you?" Baxter asked him when he was sitting in his big chair with his drink.

"Twenty-eight, I think," the father said vaguely.

"Is that old enough to be dead?" the son wondered.

"Yes and no," the father replied.

"Am I old enough to be dead?"

"I don't think so," the father replied slowly, and his mind was on something else.

"Why aren't we all dead then?" the son said, sailing a tiny paper airplane that he had made. Then he picked up a bird he had made out of brown paper and sailed this through the air. It hit a philodendron plant and stuck there in it, as though it were a conscious addition.

"You always think about something else, don't you?" the boy said, and he went up and stared at his father.

"You have blue eyes," the father said. "Blue as the sea."

The son suddenly kissed his father, and the father looked at him for a long time.

"Don't look funny like that," the boy said, embarrased.

"Like what?" the father said, and lowered his gaze.

The son moved awkwardly, grinding his tiny shoes into the carpet.

"Like you didn't know anything," the boy said, and he ran out into the kitchen to be with Mrs. Zilke.

*

After Mrs. Zilke went to bed, which was nearly four hours after the boy had gone, the father was accustomed to sit on downstairs thinking about the problems in his work, but when he was at home like this he often thought about her, his wife of long ago. She had run off (this was almost the only term he used for her departure) so long ago and his marriage to her had been so brief that it was almost as though Baxter were a gift somebody had awarded him, and that as the gift increased in value and liability, his own relation to it was more and more ambiguous and obscure. Somehow Mrs. Zilke seemed more real to him than almost anybody else. He could not remember the color of her eyes, either, of course, but she was quite real. She was his "mother," he supposed. And the boy was an infant "brother" he did not know too well, and who asked hard questions, and his "wife," who had run off, was just any girl he had gone out with. He could not remember her now at all.

He envied in a way Mrs. Zilke's command over everything. She understood, it seemed, everything she dealt with, and she remembered and could identify all the things which came into her view and under her jurisdiction. The world for her, he was sure, was round, firm, and perfectly illuminated.

For him only his work (and he remembered that she had called him a man of importance) had any real meaning, but its meaning to everything else was tenuous.

As he went upstairs that night he looked into his son's room. He was supposed to see that the boy was sleeping with an enormous toy crocodile. The sight of the toy rather shocked him. For a moment he hesitated whether or not to remove the toy and then deciding not to disturb him, he went to his room, took off all his clothes, and stood naked, breathing in front of the opened window. Then he quickly went to bed.

*

It's his favorite doll," Mrs. Zilke said at breakfast. "He wouldn't part with it for the world." She referred to the toy crocodile.

"I would think it would give him nightmares," the father said.

"He don't have nightmares," Mrs. Zilke said, buttering the toast. "There you are, sir!" and she brought him his breakfast.

The father ate silently for a while.

"I was shocked to see that crocodile in his bed," he told Mrs. Zilke again.

"Well, that's something in you, is all," she said.

"I expect. But why couldn't it have been a teddy bear or a girl doll."

"He has those too. It just happened to be crocodile last night," Mrs. Zilke said, restless now in the kitchen.

"All right," the father said, and he opened the newspaper and began to read about Egypt.

"Your boy needs a dog," Mrs. Zilke said without warning, coming in and sitting down at the table with him. Her hands still showed the traces of soap suds.

"What kind?" the father said.

"You're not opposed to it, then?" Mrs. Zilke replied.

"Why would I oppose a dog." He continued to look at the newspaper.

"He's got to have something," Mrs. Zilke told him.

"Of course," the father said, swallowing some coffee. Then, having swallowed, he stared at her.

"You mean he doesn't have anything?"

"As long as a parent is living, any parent, a child has something. No, I didn't mean that," she said without any real apology, and he expected, of course, none.

"I'd rather have him sleeping with a dog now than that crocodile."

"Oh, that," Mrs. Zilke said, impatient.

Then: "All right, then," he said.

He kept nodding after she had gone out of the room. He sat there looking at his old wedding ring which he still wore. Suddenly he took the ring off his finger for the first time since he had had it put on there by the priest. He had left it on all these years simply because, well, he wanted men to think he was married, he supposed. Everybody was married, and he had to be married somehow, anyhow, he know.

But he left the wedding ring lying on the table, and he went into the front room.

"Sir," Mrs. Zilke called after him.

"Just leave the ring there," he said, thinking she had found it.

But on her face he saw something else. "You'll have to take the boy to buy the dog, you know. I can't walk on hard pavement any more, remember."

"That will be fine, Mrs. Zilke," he said, somehow relieved at what she said.

*

The dog they bought at the show as a small mongrel with a pitifully long tail, and—the father looked very close: brown eyes. Almost the first thing he did was to make a puddle near the father's desk. The father insisted on cleaning it up, and Baxter watched, while Mrs. Zilke muttered to herself in the kitchen. She came in finally and poured something white on the spot.

The dog watched them too from its corner, but it did not seem to want to come out to them.

"You must make up to your new little friend," the father said.

Baxter stared but did not want to do anything.

"Go to him," the father said, and the son went over into the corner and looked at the pup.

The father sat down at his desk and began to go through his papers.

"Did you have a dog?" Baxter asked his father.

The father thought there at the desk. He did not answer for a long time.

"Yes," the father finally said.

"What color was it," the son asked, and the father stirred in his chair.

"That was so long ago," he said almost as though quoting himself.

"Was it gray then?" the boy wanted to know.

The father nodded.

"A gray don," the son said, and he began to play with his new pet. The dog lifted its wet paw and bit the boy mildly, and the boy cried a little.

"That's just in fun," the father said abstentmindedly.

Baxter ran out into the kitchen, crying a little, and the small dog sat in the corner.

"Don't be afraid of the little fellow now," Mrs. Zilke said. "Go right back and make up to him again."

Baxter and Mrs. Zilke came out of the kitchen and went up to the dog.

"You'll have to name him too," Mrs. Zilke said.

"Will I have to name him, Daddy?" the boy said.

The father nodded.

After supper all three sat in the front room. Baxter nodded a little. The father sat in the easy chair smoking his pipe, the pony of brandy near him. They had gathered here to decide what name to choose for the dog, but nobody had any ideas, it seemed, and the father, hidden from them in a halo of expensive pipe smoke, seemed as far away as if he had gone to the capital again.

Baxter nodded some more and Mrs. Zilke said, "Why, it still isn't bedtime and the little man is asleep!"

From below in the basement where they had put the pup they could hear the animal's crying, but they pretended not to notice.

Finally, Mrs. Zilke said, "When he is housebroken you can sleep with him, Baxter."

Baxter opened his eyes and looked at her. "What is that?" he said.

"When he learns to take care of himself, not to make puddles, you can have him in bed with you."

"I don't want to," the boy said.

Mrs. Zilke looked stoically at the father.

"Why don't you want to, sweetheart," she said, but her words showed no emotion.

"I don't want anything," the boy said.

Mrs. Zilke looked at the father again, but he was even more lost to them.

"What's that hanging loose in your mouth." Mrs. Zilke suddenly sprang to attention, adjusting her spectacles, and looking at the boy's mouth.

"This." The boy pointed to his lips, and blushed slightly. "Gum," he said.

"Oh," Mrs. Zilke said.

The clock struck eight.

"I guess it is your bedtime," Mrs. Zilke said.

She watched the boy.

"Do you want to go to bed, Baxter," she said, abstractedly.

The boy nodded.

"Say goodnight to daddy and kiss him," she told him perfunctorily.

The boy got up and went over to his father, but stopped in front of the rings of smoke.

"Goodnight," the boy lisped.

"What's that in his mouth," the father addressed his remark to Mrs. Zilke and his head came out of the clouds of smoke.

Mrs. Zilke got up painfully now and putting on her other glasses looked at the boy.

"What are you sucking?" Mrs. Zilke said, and both of them now stared at him.

Baxter looked at them as though they had put net about him. From his long indifference to these two people a sudden new feeling cam slowly into his dazed, slowly moving mind. He moved back a step, as though he wanted to incite them.

"Baxter, sweetheart," the old woman said, and both she and the father stared at him as though they had found out perhaps who he was.

"What do you have in your mouth, son." the father said, and the word son sounded queer in the air, moving toward the boy with the heaviness and suggestion of nausea that the dog puddle had given him earlier in the afternoon.

"What is it, son," the father said, and Mrs. Zilke watched him, her new understanding of the boy written on her old red face.

"I'm chewing gum." the boy told them.

"No, you're not now, Baxter. Why don't you tell us," Mrs. Zilke whined.

Baxter went over into the corner where the dog had been.

"That dog is bad, isn't he," Baxter giggled, and then he suddenly laughed loudly when he thought what the dog had done.

Meanwhile Mrs. Zilke and the father were whispering in the clod of tobacco smoke.

Baxter sat down on the floor talking to himself, and playing with a broken piece of Tinker Toy. From his mouth still came sounds of something vaguely metallic.

Then Mrs. Zilke came up stealthily, a kind of sadness and kindness both in her face, like that of a trained nurse.

"You can't go to sleep with that in your mouth, sweetheart."

"It's gum," the boy said.

Mrs. Zilke's bad legs would not let her kneel down beside the boy on the floor as she wished to do. She wanted to have a close talk with him, as she did sitting by his bed in the nursery, but instead now, standing over him, so far away, her short heavy breathing sounding obnoxiously in the room, she said only, "You've never lied to me before, Baxter."

"Oh, yes I have," Baxter said. "Anyhow this is gum," and he made the sounds again in his mouth.

"I'll have to tell your father," she said, as though he were already away in Washington.

"It's gum," the boy said in a bored voice.

"It's metal, I think," she said looking worriedly at the boy.

"It's just gum." The boy hummed now and played with the Tinker Toy.

"You'll have to speak to him," Mrs. Zilke said.

The father squatted down with the son, and the boy vaguely realized this was the first time the father had ever made the motion of playing with him. He stared at his father, but did not listen to what he was talking about.

"If I put my finger in your mouth will you give it to me?" the father said.

"No," the boy replied.

"You wouldn't want to swallow the thing in your mouth," the father said.

"Why not," the boy wondered.

"It would hurt you," the father told him.

"You would have to go to the hospital," Mrs. Zilke said.

"I don't care where I go," the boy said. "It's a toy I have in my mouth."

"What sort of toy," the father wondered, and he and Mrs. Zilke suddenly became absorbed in the curiosity of what Baxter had there.

"A golden toy," the boy laughed, but his eyes looked glassy and strange.

"Please," the father said, and he put his finger gently on the boy's lips.

"Don't touch me!" the son called out suddenly. "I hate you!"

"The father drew back softly as though now he would return to his work and his papers, and it was Mrs. Zilke who cried out instead: "Shame!"

"I do hate him," the boy said. "He's never here anyhow."

"Baxter," the father said.

"Give your father what's in your mouth or you will swallow it and something terrible will happen to you."

"I want it right where it is," the boy said, and he threw the Tinker Toy at Mrs. Zilke.

"Look here now, Baxter," the father said, but still sleepily and with no expression.

"Shut your goddamn face," the boy spat out at his father.

The father suddenly seized the boy's chin and jaw and forced him to spit out what he had.

His wedding right fell on the carpet there, and they all stared at it a second.

Without warning the son kicked the father vigorously in the groin and escaped, running up the stairs.

Baxter stopped deliberately from the safety of the upper staircase and pronounced the obscene word for his father as though this was what he had been keeping for him for a long time.

Mrs. Zilke let out a low cry.

The father writhing in pain from the place where the boy had kicked him, managed to say with great effort: "Tell me where he learned a word like that."

Mrs. Zilke went over to where the ring lay now near the Tinker Toy.

"I don't know what's happening to people," she said, putting the ring on the table.

Then, a weary concern in her voice, she said, "Sir, are you hurt?"

The tears fell from the father's eyes for having been hit in such a delicate place, and he could not say anything more for a moment.

"Can I do anything for you, sir?" Mrs. Zilke said.

"I don't think right now, thank you," he said. "Thank you." He grunted with exquisite pain.

"I've put your ring up here for safekeeping," she informed him.

The father nodded from the floor where he twisted in pain.

<

TODAY
BY VICTORIA TROCK

I woke up at 8.30 and thought “mmf” or something and went back to sleep. I woke up at 1:00 and downloaded songs from Frostwire and watched something on Hulu I think. At like 2:00 my mom said “I need your help” and then I went downstairs and there was a box of vegetables in the kitchen and she said “can you get the other box from the driveway,” and I went to the driveway and there was a box of fruit. I saw two things of strawberries and two things of blueberries and thought “mm” or something. I carried the box inside. My mom said “great, unload the dishwasher please.” I walked to the dishwasher and took things out of it and put them in places around the kitchen. Then my mom said “I'm going [somewhere that I don't remember], I'll probably be gone for an hour, please mow the lawn.” I made my face “fall.” I sat down on the stoop and made a sad face. She walked around me to get something. She walked back outside. “Do you want to do it in two hours,” she said sympathetically. “What difference does it make,” I said sadly after pausing dramatically. “Well...do you want to do just half of it,” she said. “Okay,” I said. She left. I went upstairs and got my iPod. I played the playlist called “dance.” The song “Rehab” by Amy Winehouse came on. I got the mechanical mower from like 1703 out of the basement and mowed half the lawn. I sweated. I stepped in dog shit. I put the mower away and took a shower while playing iTunes loudly. I sat down and watched things on Hulu. The phone rang. It was for my mom. I gave it to my mom. I wasn't wearing pants. “I'm not wearing pants,” I said. I got a yearbook that said “Fort Benton 1965” on it. I looked at my dad when he was a sophomore in high school and felt “sad and confused.” I looked at more pictures of my parents in high school. “Joyce Adcock,” I thought. I went on the computer. I watched the pilot of Glee on Hulu. I looked at Facebook. I went to Yahoo! Answers to get my point for logging in. I thought about food. I went into the kitchen. I looked at the things in the fridge. There was no bread in the kitchen. I wanted a peanut butter and jelly like in the pilot of Glee. I made pancakes using imprecise measurements and methods. Two of the pancakes were big and three were really little. At the end they tasted nasty. I watched a video on YouTube of the band Grizzly Bear being interviewed in a hotel room. Someone commented “Chris slept next to Ed, awww” or something.

<

A GORGEOUS HOTEL, IN A GRAND CITY
BY MICHAEL EARL CRAIG

I had walked across the carpetted lobby and down a long marble corridor, passing glassed-in phonebooths and rows of tall potted plants, and staggered into the Men’s Room.

My eyes were stinging. Everything had grown blurry as I’d made my way through the lobby. I moved toward the sinks and the mirrors. I could no longer see my own hands, but in the brightness I sensed the expanse of tile and brushed metals and knew at once I was alone.

I was squinting I guess. I contracted every muscle in my face. As I did this a series of droplets came out of both eyes and stayed close to my cheeks, travelling down them, each droplet leaving a kind of track. Streaks I suppose. For a few brief moments I could see again. The tiles and the metals. And then again the room grew blurry.

It was then I heard a faucet running. Someone was there. A man was suggesting I was crying. Crying! I doubted this—told him I seriously doubted this. I slumped down onto my knees, holding my head in both hands. More droplets. My head felt just like a trophy, so I held it as such.

<

EVERYONE I'VE HAD SEX WITH
BY MEGAN BOYLE

Adam: I had a big fixation on him that lasted all of high school. It happened my first year of college, on leap year, 2004. I'm glad it was him, I was a little drunk so I don't remember feeling that self-conscious during it, but afterwards I did. It hurt, but in an exciting way. There were a lot of awkward moments. I weighed a lot then, probably 165. We used a condom, it was strawberry flavored, and my underpants said "POW!" on them like a Roy Lichtenstein. One of the best kissers. It was at a party which raised money for a hard cider home brewery. I bled on the sheets and he got them cleaned. Nice person. Terrible ex-girlfriend who he was still in love with. I was convinced that this ruined my life for awhile, but I don't feel that way anymore.

Jake: I also had a crush on him in high school, based solely on physical attraction. If someone had told me in high school that I would someday have sex with either of these guys, I wouldn't have believed it -- not because they were 'out of my league', because I was painfully shy and insecure and didn't really even talk to boys until my junior year of high school. Jake didn't use a condom because I was on birth control, and that really shocked me, I used to think any time you didn't use a condom you automatically got pregnant. We hooked up for a few years, on and off. Never kissed me, unless I asked.

Noah: We met in college. He was in acting school and had a fairy tattoo. One time we smoked weed under the el tracks and started making out. He liked Paul Simon a lot. Sex was kind of routine, but okay, he was a mechanical kisser. We didn't use condoms. Happened a few times.

Nick: We went to summer session at an art school together in high school, then both ended up at the same college. He got in a car accident and died last year. I had a big crush on him, but he didn't want to date me. We only had sex once, in the laundry room, standing up. My friend walked in on us. It was his second time. We didn't use a condom. He told me I looked like a Greek statue.

Jess: Jess is a girl and she gave me my first orgasm from another person. We hooked up twice. We were really good friends. I wish we hooked up more. I wish we were still friends. It felt weird giving/receiving oral sex to a girl, like my head was above my body, and it was surfing or something. I don't know how to describe it.

Ryan: Ryan 'got lucky' because he was a boy who hung out with Jess and I one night and we had a threesome. He reminded me of Frodo, I wasn't attracted to him. We didn't use a condom. We had sex for maybe three minutes. It only happened once. It wasn't good.

Derek: Derek was Jess' ex-boyfriend and one night we stayed up all night talking, I forget how that happened. We had a really good talk, got sleepy, and started spooning. Then we had sex. It was dry and unmotivated, I remember thinking "why am I even doing this?" We didn't use a condom. I don't think he came either. He said he owed me one. Only happened once.

Mike: Mike is Jake's brother. We were/are really good friends. One night on spring break, a bunch of us had a fire in the woods and ate hotdogs. Mike came over to my house after that and we watched Return of the Living Dead and Night of the Living Dead, I think. We ended up spooning on the couch and touching each other's faces for a long time. He took off his glasses and asked when my parents would be awake. I said "late," and then it happened. It was really good, I was very attracted to him and he was a great kisser. I had a big crush on him that didn't go away for awhile. We've hooked up several times. I've had a few orgasms with him. No condoms. Maybe once we used one.

Anonymous guy: We had sex at a friend's party. I was drunk and I didn't want to and I think I started crying and made him stop.

Dave: I'm surprised I remember Dave's name. He followed me home from this party one night and we had sex in my creaky loft bed. I didn't want to have sex. I had my period. I was drunk. He was persistent and I think I was really bored the whole time. He 'dirty talked' and it was annoying. I was mean to him. After he finished he said, "uh, one of us is bleeding," and I said, "oh my god, is it your first time!?" and he followed me into the shower. I said, "you can wash up but then you have to go." He wanted to stay. It was probably a 45 minute train ride back to his dorm. The next day he called me and asked if I had AIDS. I said, "no." We didn't use a condom.

Justin: Justin and I dated for a year. It was a shitty relationship but I think I just really wanted to be with someone, which is a shitty reason to be with someone, but I didn't realize it at the time. Sex was okay, he gave me orgasms. It got boring/routine pretty fast. I 'wore the pants' in this relationship, which he didn't mind on the surface, but I think it actually bothered him a lot. We had melodramatic fights. One night after I broke up with him, he sexually assaulted me and I dropped out of school. No condoms, ever, I don't think.

Neil: Neil and I dated in high school and I broke up with him. Then we weren't friends. Then we were friends. Then we were really good friends. Then I thought I was in love with him and we had sex one night. He gave me an orgasm. Then I told him I was in love with him and he rejected me. We somehow pushed through it and are good friends. I feel very comfortable having sex with him, I don't feel self-conscious. One time he tried to fist me, and it felt very intimate and good, which surprised me. He's physically curious in a way I feel I also am. Everything feels heightened with him. There is an open line of communication during sex, which feels natural and genuine. I have orgasms. We use condoms, mostly.

Steve: Steve was my other serious relationship. Over winter break 2006, I hung out with Neil a lot, and Neil hung out with Steve a lot, so I also hung out with Steve. I was still dating Justin at this time. Then I broke up with Justin. Then the thing with Neil happened. About a week later Steve and I drank mead and hooked up at Neil's apartment. Then we hung out a lot, and decided to try a long distance relationship. Then I dropped out of school and it wasn't long distance anymore. Sex was consistently good, sometimes great, I always had orgasms, he was a good kisser, he had a scar on his lower lip which I liked to feel. I felt an understanding with him that I have yet to feel with another person. We listened to the Velvet Underground's "Self-titled" and Broken Social Scene's "Feel Good Lost" a lot when we did it. I was the 'big spoon,' almost always. I broke up with him and treated him poorly towards the end, then immediately regretted it and drunk dialed him a lot. I regret a lot with him. We met at the wrong time. Sometimes we used condoms. He is a good person. We don't talk.

Ricky: Ricky and I used to work at the same place. We dated for a month, after I broke up with Steve. After Ricky and I dated, Steve and I dated again for a month, and were 'confusing' for another two months. Ricky was a very good guy but not for me. Sex was pretty good, kind of too violent sometimes, but I still had frequent orgasms. He 'dirty talked,' and that always kind of removes me from sex, it makes it a parody or something. We used condoms.

Vincent: Vincent was an influence in my decision to break up with Steve, but I didn't want to admit that for a long time. He was one of Neil's friends. We flirted one Halloween and at his Christmas party we had sex. We sometimes had 'dates,' which were confusing. I was never sure if they were dates or we were just hanging out, but 97% of the time they would end in sex. One time at a big dance party I got extremely drunk and cried a lot and asked him why he didn't love me, and talked about how existence is meaningless while sobbing for about two hours. We still hung out and hooked up after that. Our 'thing' lasted from January to March, then carried into July a little. I still like him a lot, despite. He lives far away now, and has a girlfriend. We always used condoms. He is a great kisser. Sex was adventurous, imaginative, very intense and had lots of eye contact. He never went down on me, though. One time we fell asleep on his basement floor, holding each other.

Jamie: Jamie is a girl. She was a very good kisser. It felt different in a good way, but I always feel confused when I'm with girls, like I'm one step outside of myself, watching myself. We have the same bedspread. She's funny and I like her a lot. I wish I felt like I could have a relationship with a girl.

Anthony: I visited my former college to go to homecoming with my old friends. I met Anthony while dancing. He was a freshman and it was his first time. He was a really good kisser. I bought him and his friends a handle of gin (they paid me back) and we hung out in my old dorm. It was nice. I wanted him to be sure he wanted his first time to be with a stranger, he said he did. I left right after it happened. We used a condom.

Will: Will is Jake and Mike's older brother. One day after a bonfire he asked if I wanted to come over to his house and smoke a bowl. We ended up having sex for ten hours, nonstop. It's the longest I've ever had sex with anyone. We hooked up/hung out from February to May. We had a lot of fun together, he would make me breakfast and dinner and liked to be sung to. It felt like a relationship but it wasn't. I wanted it to be, so I ended it. For a few months during Will's and my thing, I was also hanging out with Vincent probably once a week. I thought that if I put together these two non-relationships that felt like relationships, they would make one whole one. Not really, though. We never used condoms, and I wasn't on birth control. We have the same sense of humor. He had a foot fetish. He went down on me a lot. I had lots of orgasms. I liked being with someone who had a foot fetish.

Frank: Frank and I worked at the same place for awhile, but then he quit. We flirted a lot at work. One night I asked him to come over. He said "oh baby" and used my name a lot. I didn't like it. I think I had to stop myself from laughing a few times. Afterwards I was hungry, so we got falafel. It was maybe two in the morning. He said grace before eating his falafel. I asked him what that was about. He said one time he did acid and saw god or something, and now he blesses his food. He mumbled a lot and didn't make eye contact. I tried to get him to leave for about two hours and he finally did at four in the morning. Never responded to his text messages or calls after that. We used a condom.

Kevin: I was roommates with Kevin, but then we had sex and I think it made our relationship more complicated than it should've been. I was the aggressor. I wanted to date him. We had sex maybe twice, but a lot of nights we would make out or I would blow him and he would tell me to go to sleep. We got in huge fights and projected a lot of shit onto each other, I think. He never went down on me. He was a very good kisser and we used condoms. I felt intensely attracted to him. I never had an orgasm. I feel positively about him now.

Josh: Josh and I met at my work. He was very shy and we had the same sense of humor. He only mentioned to me once that he had a girlfriend, and it was to tell me that they broke up, but I inferred that it was probably a more 'complicated' situation than that. We hung out and hooked up a few times this summer, but I wasn't sure if it was a 'just sex' thing and honestly I'm tired and bored of wondering this all of the time with guys, so I wasn't motivated to find out what he thought. He was maybe the best kisser I've kissed. We used condoms, mostly. I would've liked to date him, under different circumstances.

James: I had known James through mutual friends for about five years, and this summer there were people over and he was one of them. I've always been attracted to him. He has a way of looking at you, but not at you, just past you or something. Pretty good/average kisser. Probably the most 'adventurous' person in bed. He lasted a long time. I had an orgasm. He wanted to do it again in the morning but I had to work. We didn't use condoms. I said, "I hope you don't have Secret AIDS," he said, "I hope you don't have Secret Pregnancy" and we laughed and parted ways. I feel good about this. (As of right now, I'm not pregnant nor do I have AIDS).

Kyle: Kyle was the most attractive guy at a Halloween party this year so we had sex in the basement. Unfortunately it was the basement of a girl who didn't know that people have sex at parties sometimes, and had a little sister who screamed, "get out of my house!" This was a ridiculous experience and I think it's funny, I almost can't believe it happened. We didn't use a condom. He was an okay kisser I think. It was just alright. We were both drunk. I was dressed up like a piece of pizza. I don't think he had a costume.

Age at first time: 18 years, 4 months, 2 weeks, 0 days
Age at present: 23 years, 2 months, 2 weeks, 2 days
Total penetrative sex partners: 21
Total males: 21
Total females: 2 (2 not mentioned, I'm not sure they count as sex, it was just making out and fingering)
Total oral sex partners: 20-30
Oral sex giving to receiving ratio: 9:3 (probably)
Total official relationships: 4
Total ambiguous relationships: 9
Total one night stands: 11
Total partners I've said "I love you" to: 3, and maybe two .5's
Total partners who have said "I love you" to me: 3.5
Alcohol involved in first sexual encounter: 13
Marijuana involved in first sexual encounter: 2
Total STD's: 0
Total pregnancies: 0
Butt sex: 0
Came on my face: 0
Came on my tits/stomach/back/ass: 2+
Asked beforehand: 2
Places I've had sex: All rooms a house can have, not counting the garage. Car. On a blanket under a tree. The woods. Public bathroom, maybe -- probably. Laundry room. Trampoline. Started to on the top/roof of a construction site at night (he was not a construction worker).
What I felt after completing the list: Satisfied for having completed a task, surprised at how many details I remember, surprised at how passive I've been, detached from myself, angry at myself a little bit, self-pity a little bit, sad about failed relationships, happy remembering some moments/times of my life, irrationally hopeful, glad that I'm not in the past, puzzled at why I divert to other people to decide things about my personal safety, relieved that I don't have AIDS or children.

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FLORALS
BY REBECCA CURTIS

They were sitting on the floral, drinking after-dinner Baileys, watching a TV show featuring a woman with a big ass. Stephanie said, Honey? Do you think I have a big ass? Fred paused. She had asked him this many times before. Before, he’d always said something like, No, you’re beautiful, or No, I love your body, or, Honey, don’t be silly. The reasons for this were many, but chief among them was Fred’s desire for peace in the house, as well as his belief that his informing her that her ass was big would not have any serious long-term impact on the size of her ass. tonight he said, Well, I don’t know.
What do you mean, she said, you don’t know?
Well, he said, I haven’t looked at your ass lately.
You haven’t? Stephanie was surprised. In her mind Fred looked often at her ass.
No, he said, I haven’t. Why don’t you stand up so I can see it, and then I’ll answer your question.
Okay. Now Stephanie regretted that she’d asked. She stood up slowly. Well?
Why don’t you turn around a couple times, he gestured, so I can see it.
She did, turning slowly. The TV went to commercials. She did not look at him.
It’s hard to tell, he said, with your pants on. He flipped a few deliberate channels. Why don’t you just lower them a minute and turn around that way.
Stephanie unbuckled her belt and unzipped her pants. She pulled her pants down to her ankles.
Underwear, too. Fred was looking out the window. He could see a few stars. He was trying hard to recognize that hunter constellation.
She bent and pulled down her good florals.
Now turn, he said.
She did. She turned slowly. She saw the butternut trim he’d refinished for her, the anniversary grandfather with the hand-painted moon. Well? she said.
You have a big ass. Fred flipped back to the show. He felt sort of very bad and sort of very good, both at once.

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LA PEÑA
BY DEB OLIN UNFERTH

from MINOR ROBBERIES

I. Pilgrimage

What we had decided to do was go to La Peña. We did not go to South America to do it. We were already in South America for another reason which we had forgotten. But then we heard of it, La Peña, and thought we should do it, though we didn’t know what it was. We asked a man and he told us we would have to go to the mountain. We took three buses and a jeep and it took two days. We arrived at last at the foot of the mountain.

The path to La Peña was winding and high and jungly. We walked, my boyfriend and I, stepped around stones and went up. On the way, we talked about it, what would it be like, La Peña? I said I thought we should light candles, that to light candles would be nice. He said he hoped there wouldn’t be any tourists. I said there would be at least two, he and I. He said that depended on whether we counted ourselves as tourists. He thought that maybe I was a tourist but he was not. In that case, I said, I was lucky because I wouldn’t see myself so when we got to the top I wouldn’t see any tourists. But poor him, he’d see me and have that horrible experience of tourism in a holy place. Yes, but you’ll still know you’re there, said my boyfriend.

II. Priest

On the path we met a spiritual guide. We would not have known that was what he was if he had not told us. He said he would guide us a little way for a small fee. We could walk on the path ourselves but we said it would be fun to be guided. The three of us walked a little way until we came to a creek. Our spiritual guide showed us the statue of the miracle man of the creek. The statue was small and it was of a man in a black suit carrying a briefcase. We thought it was an odd outfit for a South American miracle man but we said nothing. Our spiritual guide smoked a cigar in front of the statue. Nothing happened except an enormous butterfly floated by, big and blue as in a fairy tale. I didn’t see it. Everyone did except me—everyone, my boyfriend and our spiritual guide. No one thought to show me.

III. Prophecy

We left our guide by the creek and kept climbing up and winding around to La Peña. My boyfriend said he hoped, more than candles, that someone would be selling cokes at the top as it was damn hot. Then I stumbled over a tiny tiny man. He was crouched in the middle of the path. He said to us, “La Peña!” and we said, “Si, si, ahora vamos,” which means yes, yes, we’re on our way. As we walked off, I tripped over his can. It was rusty and aluminum and had a piece of string attached to it of which he held the other end. Toy? I don’t know. I shouldn’t name it. It was his.

IV. Fellowship

We climbed and climbed and it was certainly hot. Who knows how high it is, my boyfriend said. You can’t even see the top from here. Then we came upon two men going down. They stopped on the trail and held out a box. It was a small box, like for shoes, and it had flowers on top made of plastic and sparkling bits on it like glitter. We asked what was in the box and they said a virgin. It was a very small box and no one could fit in it, not even a virgin. But they insisted and even cracked it open so we could see and yes, there was a virgin inside but it was made of plaster so we didn’t think that counted but they were convinced. They said they were bringing the virgin to the waters. We talked a bit and then we said goodbye.

V. Salvation

We climbed and climbed. It went on forever. We thought we’d never make it, at this or at anything else. We thought there was no top, no end, only striving and rest to gather thoughts and strength. We thought we’d have to go back, return defeated. Then suddenly we arrived and we were there. It was the best of everything we had hoped for. We lit candles and we drank cokes. We did not count ourselves as tourists. We saw it, La Peña, and then we went back down.

That should have been the climax, La Peña, but it wasn’t. The climax came at the bottom not the top. We couldn’t find a jeep to bring us back to the buses. We walked and walked, asked the people in the dirt floor huts. No one knew or they weren’t telling. We were alarmed and sweaty. What will we do? I said to my boyfriend. There were no restaurants, no hotels, no concrete. It was a small crisis. He held my hand and we were brave. We sat on stools and waited. At last a jeep came splashing through the puddles and stopped. We were saved. We took the jeep and three buses back and later an airplane back and later other things forward and back, forward and back, with arrivals in between.

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MINIMIZING AND MAXIMIZING MOZILLA FIREFOX REPEATEDLY
BY BRANDON SCOTT GORRELL

It is 10 PM now, and Godzilla has been sitting at his desk in front of his laptop for six to seven hours. He has accomplished hardly anything today. Godzilla is drinking a lot of beer. He can not stop smoking cigarettes. His room is blue with cigarette smoke, and Godzilla sits on a chair in there, minimizing and maximizing Mozilla Firefox repeatedly. He is not over his girlfriend's house because she said on the cell phone that she needed time, alone, to think about their relationship. Godzilla worries that he will not be able to take care of himself they break up. He tries to remember how to shave his face or even where to get the best deal on razor blades and can not recall any of that information.

Godzilla doesn't know what to eat for dinner, so he eats a KitKat bar. He gets a stomach ache. He keeps drinking beer. He had told his girlfriend, after she said needed time alone to think about things, that he "needed to work on writing stuff all night, anyway". But Godzilla has not done anything. All Godzilla has done is minimize and maximize Mozilla Firefox repeatedly. For seven hours. He has checked his MySpace account a number of times. Godzilla knows he is getting nothing accomplished, but for some reason, has the secret belief that he is getting something accomplished. He doesn't articulate it, or even let himself form this feeling into words. He just keeps drinking beer, sensing that this is what he is supposed to be doing. He just looks at his laptop, drinks beer and smokes a lot of cigarettes. There is a new sense of hope every time he refreshes his MySpace.

Godzilla is a piece of shit. Godzilla knows he really is a piece of shit. His posture is very bad, but he does not care out of a vindictiveness for the fact that it is uncomfortable to sit with a correct posture. "Why should I do anything that makes me feel uncomfortable" is Godzilla's outlook on life. Godzilla has slowly alienated himself from every single person on the planet, especially his girlfriend. Godzilla feels totally fucked. He wants his girlfriend to hold him like a baby. He lights another cigarette. He doesn't know what to do.

"There's nothing going on here," Godzilla says, looking at the screen. "I'm not even doing anything." Something in his brain tells him to work on something, then something in his brain tells him that he is incapable of working on anything. Something, much louder and more persuasive than the aforementioned two somethings, is repeatedly telling him that beer and cigarettes are totally the right thing to do. Something else is telling him that he is very unhappy. Something is wondering if he really does want to kill himself. Something is saying not to kill himself. Godzilla knows that he is too much of a piece of shit to kill himself. He can not do anything. The only thing Godzilla is capable of doing is lifting the cigarette to his lips, inhaling, and tapping its ashes into the ashtray. Godzilla can not even look at his roommates. He can not even walk anywhere in the room without being afraid they will here him moving around because the floorboards creak and they creak too loud and Godzilla is such a pussy that he makes little winces whenever he makes a floorboard creak. Godzilla just wants to disappear, but for his personality to exist somewhere, maybe floating in midair, perceiving the environment, untouchable, immovable, sterile, direct, forceless, complete, devoid of responsibility.

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MCDONALD'S
BY ABIGAIL LLOYD

I am sitting in the backseat of my mom's rented car. In the driver’s seat is my brother Jason. In the front passenger seat is my boyfriend Conor. We are drinking Coors Light. Jason is drunk. We are talking about drugs. Jason says “You don't know me, I'm a mother fucking badass.” Jason has never been arrested before. He knows every police officer in town. All the cops “love him.” Jason says he robbed a bar when he was 14 with his friend Tod. Jason broke the bar’s vending machine. Jason and Tod ate all the snacks. The robbery was in the local newspaper’s police report. The report read “they sure liked their peanuts.” I ask Jason if he kept the police report. Jason says “Fuck no, are you kidding me? Cops will find that shit.”

Conor talks about meth addicts in Missouri. We talk about our parents. Jason says when I was born he ran down the street with me in his socks while our parents were fighting. He says I am his “baby girl.” Jason says if my mom dies he is going to kill himself. Jason is 29. Jason lives in my parent’s garage. Jason has 2 cats. Jason has brain damage. Jason is retarded. Jason is my half brother. Jason's dad died when he was 6. Jason says he is going to kill my dad. Jason is 9 years older than I am. Jason says “Let’s get the fuck out of here.” Jason peels out of our driveway.

We are going to McDonald’s. McDonald’s is an hour away. It is 1:00 a.m. I plug in my ITRIP. I play music I think Jason will like. Jason is driving fast. I play “The Roof is on Fire” by Bloodhound Gang. Jason sings along. Jason says “Solders kill fucking towel heads to this.” I open another beer. We drive past a house. There is a lawn mower in front. Jason says “Lets fucking steal that shit.” I say “No, there isn't enough room.” We keep driving. I play “Lump” by Presidents of the United States of America. The windows are down. Jason turns up the volume. I am sort of afraid but I feel happy. I hand Jason another beer.

We pull in to a gas station. I walk in to the convenience store alone. I am not wearing shoes. I use the bathroom. I buy cigarettes. I stare at a “Talladega Nights” DVD behind the counter. I get back in the car. Jason drives away. I play some Nirvana song. Jason says he has to “piss.” We pull over by a dumpster and a donation box. Jason and Conor get out. I am smoking a cigarette. Conor gets back in the car. Jason runs out from behind the donation box laughing. Jason jumps in the car and pulls away. Jason says “I just took a shit and wiped my ass with a Spiderman t-shirt.” I wonder if the t-shirt would fit me.

We pull in to McDonald's drive thru. The drive thru window is still open. The inside is closed. I think this is strange. We are behind a blue pick up truck. Conor is excited about the McTastey. The McTastey is the only McDonald’s burger with tomato. Jason calls it a “McNasty.” Jason says “It gives you the shits.” I order a Double Filet-o-Fish. Jason says something about pussy. Jason is nice to the fat boy in the window. Jason says “People like me.” I am eating my Filet-o-Fish. I peel off each layer of the sandwich. I eat the fish and bread separately. I eat leftover cheese off the wrapper. We leave McDonald’s parking lot. Jason is driving fast. We go off the road for a moment in to some gravel. Jason says “Fuck this car.” I play “Jane Says” by Jane’s Addiction. Jason sings along. I am surprised Jason likes it. I wonder if he thinks about the lyrics. I think about Jason when he had long hair.

We pull in to the driveway. My mom keeps an iron goat on the porch. I am staring at the goat. We get out of the car. We smoke cigarettes. Jason asks us if we want to watch a movie. I say “I guess so.” We go inside. We walk upstairs. The stairs are carpeted. The ceilings upstairs are slanted. The ceilings upstairs are very low. At the bottom of the stairs is a door. Jason says “The house is haunted.” Jason says “I can hear someone jiggling that door knob at night.” We are in Jason's room. I am sitting on Jason's bed. I am playing with an American Idol toy from McDonalds. Conor is sitting in Jason's Lazy Boy. Conor is looking at a Martin Lawrence DVD. Jason pulls out new DVDs. Jason says we can watch “White Noise” or “Stranger than Fiction.” Jason says “‘Stranger than Fiction’ is a smart movie. It makes me cry.” Jason says “I can relate to these movies.” Jason says “I am going to die young like my dad.” We start to watch “Stranger than Fiction.” I fall asleep.

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SYNCHRONIZED SWIMMING
BY MAZIE LOUISE MONTGOMERY

I am bored. I am bored with this place and this desk and this carpet. The desk is old and has "character" because it is heavy and made out of a tree that doesn't grow in nature anymore and I am supposed to like it more than, say, the fake-wood desk I could buy from Wal-Mart for $49.99, but I do not. I would rather have the fake-wood desk covered with the fake, wood-design contact paper so I could play with edges and peel it up, piece by piece, over time. The carpet has a unique design, delicate swirls of red and pink and black and it comes from a country where the people don't speak English and was made by someone who probably slaved night and day in a tent in the desert, or at least in a hot factory on the bad side of Chicago, while they put this beautiful rug together, but it is also boring and I think I would rather walk on shiny black linoleum tiles that never need to be waxed.

There are books around my desk written by people with impressive sounding names and the insides of these books are filled with substantial words like Cataclysmic and Calamitous, words that sound like they could get up off the couch and kick my ass should I come in and interrupt their cartoon watching time after work. I think the words in these books could actually drink me under the table if given the chance, and maybe kick my ass in pool too. But these words are still boring because the cartoons they watch are perverse and shocking in that over-the-top, grossly violent and overtly sexual kind of way. Sometimes I think I'd like to see Cataclysmic and Calamitous watch a pornographic cartoon in front of the kids as they are enjoying a satisfying after-school snack of Oreo cookies and a glass of 2% milk. I'd like to see the porno staged in one of those George W. Bush, No-Child-Left-Behind inspired "charter" elementary schools where the "older" and dumb yet street-wise fifth grader who can already grow a beard becomes enamored with the newly graduated, idealistic teacher who is both "youngish" and nimble and wants to save the street-wise fifth grader from the harsh streets of some heathen place like New York City, or Durham, North Carolina. But then I think this would also be boring because it seems like something I've already seen or been told about as a recent dream from a friend of mine who shall go nameless because he's currently serving in the Marine Corps as a Special Op in Afghanistan and I wouldn't want to put his security clearance in jeopardy.

Sometimes I think I'd like to take Cataclysmic out for a Budweiser or a gin and tonic and then maybe take him to bed. My feeling is that Cataclysmic has a tiny penis. I think the chip he has on his shoulder is a dead give away. Most of the words I've ever met who had such an immense hatred for the human race and a ready desire to punch a complete stranger in the face usually had a tiny penis. I'm making generalizations and I probably shouldn't do that but I'm bored and I don't really care about what I should and shouldn't do. In fact, I think I'd like to start simultaneous relationships with both Cataclysmic and Calamitous. Maybe we could have a threesome. Maybe Calamitous could play the part of the psychiatrist and tell me what a mess I've made of my life lately and give me some good advice on how I should go about fixing it; maybe he could be a judge, watch me go down on Cataclysmic and then critique my performance: That was a nice twisting half gainer, but you made too much of a splash upon entry so I'm giving you an 8.

Maybe Cataclysmic, Calamitous and I could form a synchronized diving team and compete for the Olympic gold. I think I look good enough in a bathing suit to cinch us a hefty endorsement deal. I think the three of us could stand a real chance in the 3-meter springboard event, but not the 10-meter platform, because I still have that persistent case of acrophobia. I was hoping one day to replace my fear of heights with the fear of loud noises, or at least add it in, because the fear of heights is just so common and I thought that an acrophobia/acousticophobia combination in a synchronized diver might just win the hearts of the American psyche. But I'm told the fear of loud noise is more common in pets than humans and anyway it would all still be boring unless I came up with something really intriguing, like a fear of chickens, or German culture. Only thing is, I'd have to convince the Olympic Committee into letting me compete in a bikini. You have to acknowledge your limitations: I just don't look good in a one piece.

If the three of us could just find some redneck girl from the Ukrainian team to whack one of us on the knee or the head with something original, like a yard stick, or a rolled up newspaper, that would be choice. And in front of a camera crew, even better. But it couldn't be too scripted. It would have to look spontaneous. There are just too many of those sentimental Olympic stories out there already. It's hard to compete for air time against a beautiful Romanian gymnast with a blind mother or a 139 pound multiple-world-champion Chinese female weightlifter who can snatch 250 pounds while simultaneously dealing with the emotional pain of a cancer stricken sister on her deathbed.

But even with the threesome and the fake-wood desk from Wal-Mart and the shiny black linoleum tiles and the porno and the gin and the Budweiser and the pool playing and the synchronized diving, I would still be bored. I think Cataclysmic and Calamitous would eventually leave me for some other boring words like "deserted, wet streets" and "patches of green, green grass covered with dew" and "dim streetlights" that "buzzed and crackled" in the night and then maybe Cataclysmic and Calamitous would get together with these words and make a sentence, or better yet a short story set in California in the 1960s involving poor and uneducated itinerant farmers enduring poverty and depression. Maybe there could also be a grandmother and a social worker. Or maybe they could form a sentimental poem about teenage love in which they compared falling in love to drowning in the ocean or their lover to a giant wave slamming down on them or a rip tide slowly pulling them under. Maybe they could both drown together like two virgin lovers fated to never consummate their love; maybe I could stand on the shore of a secluded sandy beach and watch. Maybe at sunset the sky would alight with the color of their love and my feelings of boredom would be replaced by empathy and a melancholy sadness that would inspire me to greatness.

Or maybe I could just stay bored and drink Budweiser alone while I watch Cataclysmic and Calamitous compete without me. Maybe it would be better for the team if I just stayed home and went to bed early, which sounds like the most boring thing of all but has a certain appeal if preceded by at least four shots of Jack and followed by one strange sex dream in which I capture gold medals in both the shot put and the long jump. Then maybe a passionate if not slightly misguided Canadian from the equestrian team might run across the infield of the arena wearing nothing but a placard that said: WAR BAD. And that right there would make all my years of hard work and self-sacrifice worthwhile.

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SHOPLIFTING FROM URBAN OUTFITTERS
BY VICTORIA TROTT

Jane goes into Urban Outfitters. She feels okay like she looks not out of place or anything. Her hair is clean, she feels okay. Jane is on caffeine and feels excited. She read that caffeine doesn't make you do things better but it makes you feel like you are doing things better.

Jane picks up six pants. They are in European sizes, she thinks about how Urban Outfitters is stupid for trying to be European. Later she thinks they probably are European, she heard somebody say something about them being European once. Jane goes to the dressing room with her pants. The girl counts Jane's pants. She makes a nervous smile thing when it's awkward for the girl to count her pants because they are over her arm. The girl makes a confident smile back and Jane feels stupid. She goes in the dressing room stall and feels stupid for calling attention to herself with the awkward smile interaction. Jane looks in the mirror and feels okay, nothing is broken or leaking, she is wearing makeup and a black coat.

She tries on all the pants and then tries on some of the pants again. Sometimes she dances with the music and looks at herself in the mirror wearing pants and dancing and hopes no one sees her feet from the outside. She takes off the tags and metal detector things from some pants. She puts one of the pants on underneath the pants she is wearing and puts two pants in her bag. The metal detector thing falls on the floor and makes a noise and when she zips her bag it makes a noise, she wonders if someone will connect those sounds with shoplifting.

Jane feels cool because of the dim lighting, the act of shoplifting, and her makeup and non greasy hair, maybe. She puts the pants on her arm and bunches them up so it looks like there are more pants there. She walks out past the girl who counted her pants and feels scared. The girl looks at her, Jane can see from her peripheral vision maybe. The girl is talking to another girl and finishes talking as Jane walks by her but Jane doesn't really think the girl will do anything, she is only nervous as a cautionary method.

She puts the three pants back where she got them and walks quickly towards the door. As she walks towards the metal detectors things in her body change, blood and heart things, she feels different and faster. She thinks things to counter anxiety, 'I want it to go off. It should go off. It would be exciting to go to jail. Corporate bitches. I’ll feel cool. I'm wearing makeup. Nobody cares. They'll just tell me not to ever come back and it will be funny, I’ll be okay.' She goes through the metal detectors and outside and feels victorious and secretive, she feels like the wind is blowing her hair around and she should skip or something.

Jane walks down the street. While she waits at the stoplight a black man with a beard asks her for change. She gives him some from her pocket and feels self-righteous even though she gave him like sixty cents probably. She feels aware of the people waiting at the stoplight seeing her give the man money and worries that they perceive her as stupid and naïve or something. The man said ‘bless you’ after she gave him change. She thinks if she had no money and an addiction to something that gave her temporary relief she would want people to give her money. She uses her money to buy substances that give her temporary relief like opiates from food and caffeine. She supports being homeless and asking people for money so you can shoot heroin or drink alcohol or something.

She goes into Rittenhouse Square and sits on a bench. She takes clothes out of her bookbag and puts them in a red bag that was also in her bookbag. She goes across the street into Barnes and Noble. She goes to the magazine place. There is a tall man talking on his cell phone about Obama in front of the fashion magazines in a voice that is used to indicate gayness in males or something. Jane looks at the fashion magazines diagonally to him. He keeps talking on his cell phone and moves over a little. She looks at the magazines more without touching them. She used to like to read them more than she does now. She feels a little bad about that. She likes watching movies and TV shows where the characters act trite, clichéd and melodramatic, because of the way the people look in the movies.

She walks to the New Releases section and picks up New Moon, the second book in the Twilight series by Stephanie Meyer. She walks into a corner and flips through the pages looking for the metal detector thing. A woman comes into the corner in a wheelchair maybe. Jane tries to make it look like she is skimming the book. The woman lowers herself onto the ground while reading a book. Jane doesn’t register what the woman is doing, just her presence, Jane leaves the corner. She goes up the escalator and sees a bathroom with a sign next to it that says Please Leave Merchandise Outside Bathroom. She walks toward it, she sees a white shiny half globe that might be a camera on the ceiling, but she goes into the bathroom anyway, carrying New Moon, her bookbag, and the red bag.

In the bathroom she goes to the handicapped stall and a woman comes in the bathroom, Jane makes eye contact with her through the crack where the door closes and thinks ‘oh no!’ and that maybe the woman could see New Moon through the crack.

Jane goes over to the toilet and stands next to it not doing anything for like a minute. There is shuffling and then peeing noises from the woman. Jane is still carrying all her objects, she thinks maybe if she puts them down that will be suspicious. After a minute maybe she starts trying to unzip the red bag, still holding her other things. She thinks she can get out her water bottle and pour some in the toilet to sound like peeing. But it is hard to unzip her bag and she thinks zipping noises sound suspicious. She puts her things down and pees regularly, so that it will seem like she is a normal person peeing. The other toilet flushes and feet walk into the stall next to Jane, she is worried, what if it is the same woman, waiting to catch Jane and search her or something. The woman next to her makes a sighing noise when she starts peeing.

She puts the book into her bookbag and leaves the stall and washes her hands. The woman comes out of the stall next to her, it is not the same woman. Jane leaves the bathroom and avoids making eye contact with the white shiny half globe attached to the ceiling. She walks out of Barnes and Noble quickly.

Jane walks to the subway. When she goes into it and gets on a train she looks at the other humans while tensing the muscles in her eyes and making them wide. The humans see her reflected in the train windows and continue thinking about their lives.

She gets off the train and gets on a bus and then gets off the bus and walks into Han Ah Reum Supermarket. She used to steal apples and tea and blueberries from this store and feels afraid people will recognize her from the camera footage and confront her with wide eyes or something. That hasn’t happened and she goes to Han Ah Reum often. People mostly avert their eyes inside it. There are buckwheat noodles and a sushi section and a produce section. When they stopped carrying Nutella Jane felt sad.

She buys a can of coffee grounds that say something about chicory on the front and an apple. She hasn’t eaten anything all day and feels good about that, coffee covers her appetite. She leaves Han Ah Reum. There is a man riding a bike. She crosses some streets and now she is going in the same direction as the man on a bike, he is behind her. She hears a bike noise and moves over fast and feels stupid. She watches the man on the bike ride away. Han Ah Reum is like seven blocks away from her house. There is a quiet street that she could take to her house or a loud one, she sees the mailman walking in the quiet street and takes the loud one.

She walks to her house and goes into her room. She puts on plaid cotton pants and a T-shirt and feels comfortable. She puts the coffee grounds on the shelf in her closet next to some stolen teas. There is a Korean special tea with corn syrup solids and pine nuts in it and a tea called Sleepytime from Celestial Seasons and organic brown rice and green tea and Earl Grey tea. She keeps them in her closet because she feels ownership of them and unwillingness to share. Jane lives in her parent’s house and buys 2% of the food she eats and none of the heat, electricity, or water she uses in her house. She invalidates them on purpose and keeps her tea and coffee hidden in her closet. Also a small jar of raw organic honey from Brazil. Hiding food and eating it in secret is one of the symptoms of compulsive overeating.

Jane moves things around in her room. When she is alone Jane feels less like she is performing for other people. When Jane was nine years old or something she was riding the school bus and looking out the window and a boy saw her face and put his hand next to his ear with his thumb and pinky sticking out and mouthed some words at her. Jane laughed and felt confused and said to another person on the school bus ‘what?’ and the person said ‘he said “call me.”’ Jane felt embarrassed and the person smiled a little and looked away. Jane went home and for like the next week did things with the boy outside the bus in her mind. Like imagining what she looked like, and doing things differently to present an identity more suitable to him.

Jane sits on her window sill and feels the heater, it’s warm. Her mom says ‘dinner’ up the stairs and she goes downstairs and sits at a table with her mom and dad. ‘Food is bad’ she thinks. There is food on the table. Jane’s dad prays. Jane makes an annoyed face during the prayer and then feels stupid. She eats soup made of beef, onions, soy sauce, and potatoes. Her mom makes dinner every day. There is bread and salad, Jane doesn’t eat those things. Her mom eats mostly salad and a little soup. Her dad eats a lot of soup and some bread. Later her mom eats some bread. She talks to her parents because of the coffee maybe. Every time her parents say words her brain finds things she doesn’t like about what they say. When they stop eating Jane’s mom says something about singing a song and starts to get up and Jane’s dad says ‘don’t get up’ and Jane’s mom sits back down. Her mom says ‘how about o come all ye faithful?’ and raises her eyebrows and Jane’s dad starts singing ‘o come all ye faithful’ and Jane’s mom sings with him and Jane sings not loudly. She feels like an asshole for not singing loudly because she knows her mom likes it when she sings loudly and feels supported and like the holy spirit is present. She is showing she doesn’t support singing after dinner but the message her mom is receiving is ‘I’m all alone’ and the message her dad is receiving is ‘insubordinate bitch,’ maybe.

<

NERVOUS ASSFACE
BY BRANDON SCOTT GORRELL

Yesterday I was nervous.

I was supposed to go to a show with you.

I was really glad we were friends and you were smart and you challenged me to think.

I sat in front of a computer before I was supposed to go to your house and I felt anxious.

I drank two beers and smoked some cigarettes and I felt a little less anxious.

I went to your house and you gave me a Xanax and we drank alcohol and we had an interesting conversation.

A children’s movie was on your television screen and I played with your cats.

I ate the Xanax you gave me.

You had a happy and depressed facial expression and I looked at you.

We walked your dog before we went to the show.

The show was filled with five hundred drunken frat boys on cocaine.

I looked at you and I felt disappointed and I said that I thought everyone was on cocaine.

You gave me another Xanax.

I hated the frat boys and I ate the Xanax.

You looked at the crowd and you said, Yeah, fuck them.

I laughed and I felt happy.

We watched the show.

I felt happy and amused.

You looked sad and depressed and happy and you ate two morphine pills.

You asked me if I felt anything from the Xanax and I said that I wasn’t sure.

Then the show was over.

We were bored and didn’t know what to do and we went to your house.

You gave me two morphine pills and I ate them and I played with your cats.

We went to a bar with no cover charge and we drank alcohol.

You looked depressed and tired and I felt a little depressed and tired.

I watched the DJ for awhile and I moved around a little bit and you stood behind me with a neutral facial expression.

I looked back at you sometimes and you were staring at me.

Sometimes you were looking at the ceiling.

We went to a booth and had small, two sentence conversations.

The bartender told everyone to leave.

We went outside and we were bored.

You asked if I was feeling the Xanax and the morphine and I said that I didn’t know.

I felt tired and I said that maybe I was feeling the Xanax and the morphine.

We decided to go to the gas station to get alcohol.

There were a lot of people at the gas station and I felt a little drunk.

You looked happy.

The clerk at the gas station told us it was too late to buy alcohol and I tried to bribe him with a five dollar bill and you laughed.

We were bored again and decided to go back to your apartment because you had alcohol.

When we got there we drank alcohol that tasted like cinnamon.

We talked about something and I felt interested and you had an anxious facial expression.

You called me a sexist and I felt bad.

I said that sometimes you made me feel like you didn’t like me and you got up and went to the bathroom.

I waited for you for ten minutes and you didn’t come out of the bathroom.

I played with your cats and your cats liked me.

I moved close to the bathroom and the door was open.

I asked if you were okay.

You said that you didn’t feel very good.

I asked if I should leave.

You said yes.

I looked into the bathroom and you were looking at yourself in the mirror with your hands holding the sink.

I walked past the bathroom.

I said that I hoped everything was okay and you didn’t understand me and I said that I hoped everything was okay and you didn’t say anything.

I left your apartment and I felt confused.

On the way home I felt really high on Xanax and morphine and I listened to my iPod at a low volume.

<

THREE STORIES
BY MATTHEW ROHRER

DOG BOY

One

Late at night in Oklahoma, a very small, an extremely small man ran across the road in front of my friend’s car. He does not doubt this is real, though the rest of us do, and it doesn’t bother him. He continues to paint portraits of astonishing trees each day and take long drives through the country at night. Nothing else can be learned about this mysterious incident.

Two

On Scott Road, in Pittsburgh, which is a steep and winding city, full of good-natured people, just at the point where the road bottoms out beside a gnarled and ancient cemetery, a very small, an extremely small man ran across the road in front of my brother-in-law’s car and scrambled into the tombstones. For the purposes of this story, I will refer to my brother-in-law as Matthew. Matthew had a friend in the car with him, and both of them saw this creature pass in front of them through the headlights. Matthew is the type to downplay this kind of thing, whether he dwells on it inwardly or not. Later, another friend of his who lives on Scott Road told Matthew he heard something outside one night and when he peered through the French Doors he saw the same extremely small man leaping over the sandbox. How did he know it was the same one? I asked Matthew, and he shrugged and continued to strum an imaginary guitar, and Matthew’s unconcern is the biggest mystery of them all.



MONGOLIAN DEATH WORM

One

They say in the dry flats of Mongolia, underneath the burning sun, burrows the Unnameable. Four feet long, or eight feet long, or two feet long, a pale, pudgy worm the mention of which brings death. It is not necessary to touch it to be killed by it; some say it spits poison, others that it emanates rings of death, like a radio. That no one has ever caught one should be no surprise; that no one who has seen one directly can be found should also produce in you yawns of recognition. I have lost interest already, in these few lines. I have been pausing for so long after each period, and nearly as long after each comma, there’s no reason for you to still be here. There’s nothing more to learn about the worm.

Two

I did once try to find the Unnameable, years ago, but there is not much to say about it, and nothing for you to learn by reading any more. The plains were endless, and empty, the sun pressed down with all its might on the sand. My guides fell into torpor after seven days and refused to speak. I learned more from their horses, who were ribald and entertaining. One evening as the red sun burrowed into the crumbly hills the oldest guide shrieked and fell from his saddle, clutching his eyes. A great cacophony rose up from the horses, and a rare species of bright red bat rose up from the grass. But that is where the Definitive ends. After that came nightfall. Speculation.

Three

The riders I encountered in the desert had fabulously gaudy tents. Their horses slept in them, or stayed awake bickering, but the riders would not sleep in the tents because they had no floors. When I asked what they were afraid of, they moved their fingers across their lips as if to signify a zipper, though I never saw a zipper in Mongolia. When, one bitter morning, we entered the tents to see why the horses had not joined us for breakfast and found them all dead, the riders quailed and zipped their lips. But I was unconvinced. Many mysterious things can occur in a tent full of horses.



THE STRANGE CASE OF THE GENTLEMAN WITH WINGS

One

I spent as much time thinking of the future as the blue stones in the street. I grew fat and bold, but the sun rarely penetrated deeper than my ears. I stopped reading books at 20, except for subjects related to my field, but I quickly regretted that, I regretted that the moment I opened the door to my apartment and encountered the Gentleman with wings.

Two

It was dusk when I met him at the mailbox, trying to stuff a rolled-up carpet into the slot. I looked around, but nobody else paid any attention to his leathery wings. It was the solstice again; they seemed to come around all the time, and what’s worse, it always rained. I dismissed the past year with a quick shake of the head and turned back to the extraordinary Gentleman, but he wasn’t there. I looked up and saw nothing in the sky but a balloon escaping. I was very agitated, and acted like it, until I looked closely at the carpet in the mailbox. It was fantastic. The weave was so wavy. I paused to consider taking it, forgetting the Gentleman entirely. And indeed this is the first I’ve thought of him since the day of the carpet.

Three

Small fires erupting prismatically on the neighboring roofs. A dark, oppressive pall. An ashy steam. An absence of birds, or any sounds. A sharp moon. The Gentleman with wings stood and surveyed the damage so it appeared the moon fit snugly on him, like a hood. Nobody else even looked at him. I was amazed and I finally just said Hey, and he uncurled and loped my way. Seeming to understand my confusion, he laid his right hand on my right shoulder and took a deep breath, and opened his mouth.

The next thing I knew, I was jogging on a treadmill in a white office, with my shorts hanging low.

Four

At dusk, on the black tar roof in the city, I met the Gentleman with wings. I spent each evening up there because of the silent community that gathered on their roofs. Only a few storey’s up and it was strangely silent. We saw each other from across the streets at our idealized, fluid speeds, at peace, or singing over the trees. The Gentleman stood with his weight on one foot and sipped an expensive beer. I was stunned, and did not know what to do with my hands, which they say is a mark of shame. If my secret stories were told both of my hands would fly away.

Five

Everyone I know appears to know the Gentleman with wings more intimately than I, or they feign this friendship in front of me to hurt me. Even if they’re lying they’ve made their point. I saw him once, at a bicycle race, shoved right up against the tape that kept the fans from the path. He cheered along with everyone, he was just a guy enjoying speed and technology, except he was a gentleman, you could tell from his cuffs, and he had wings. We stood near each other in the spill of the wet pavement and paper cups. I said Hello, and asked him a few questions about his situation. I missed most of what he said over the cheering and deraileurs grinding, but what I heard him say was like a sermon of peace, or that is what it sounded like at the time, but now I am not so sure. And I do not know him intimately.

<

FLATBED, SEABED
BY TARA WRAY

from PINDELDYBOZ, issue 3

We drank purple grape wine till dawn, then drove to the water and parked the truck just at the edge of the beach. Some waves came up the tires. Hello tires, they said. We laughed with our heads thrown back, kissed for a minute with forceful lips, and then passed out on the flatbed, sleeping bags and cold wheelwells pinning us ever closer.

First light came after a long black sleep. The truck had drifted into the sea. We must have been out there for hours; it could have been days. I had some chocolate covered mints in my pocket and ate two and so did Jack. We hugged frantically, then wondered aloud about the state of things.

Water is a very beautiful thing if you are not afraid, said Jack. Are you afraid?

A little, I replied, because I was. There was so much of it and just the two small bits of us.

Don’t worry, he said, and climbed into the cab through the back window.

I’m not so much afraid of the water, I told him, climbing in myself, I’m more afraid of what’s inside the water. There are jellyfish and stingrays and sharks and Fungleharder fish and, I’m sure, some eel.

Jack tried to start the engine but it was flooded. There are all those things, he said, but if you do not bother them, they will not bother you.

I had no intentions of bothering them, so this relaxed me. But then… What If I accidentally bother them, I said, you know, we accidentally run into the head of a baby shark and the mother gets mad, what if she calls her poisonous friends and they jump out of the water and fly into the truck and sting me or chew me dead or…

Jack stopped me and said: Let’s listen to the radio.

We picked up only one station, and the reception was poor. It was someone named Roy and he was playing a banjo. It was a very beautiful distraction for about twenty minutes. I held Jack’s hand, ate a sandwich from the night before, rolled down the window and let me hair blow back all salt-water tangly. But then the plunk of the banjo started to get on my nerves and I picked a fight.

I told Jack if he hadn’t won the lottery he wouldn’t have been able to buy the purple grape wine we drank till dawn, and he certainly would not have been able to buy the truck we drove to the beach; and he told me not to worry (don’t worry, he said) because the money was all spent anyhow and as soon as we got back to shore, he said, I’m gonna give up the bottle and trade the truck for something smaller, a two-door maybe. Something red.

I folded my arms in a pout. Jack turned to me: What? What, goddammit!?

There was no time to be reasonable. It was getting dark and the sea kept folding itself over and over like a giant green bowl of batter. It reminded me how frightened I was, and how hungry I was. How delicious a cake would be! Then Jack pulled from his jacket a package of spongy sweet snacks and in that instant I forgave him for everything. But he must not have forgiven me because he did not share. And so I was still mad. Turned to face the window, away from his gnawing maw.

That’s when I noticed something up ahead. Not far in the distance. Just right there. I looked, blinked, Jack was eating his cakes, not paying attention, but for sure, it was, indeed…. holy shit! A four way stop! Signs and everything. And a small bobbing car of teenagers. It was terribly exciting. It was people, other people! Oh how nice, I thought. But then we realized, and they realized, that we had no brakes, that neither of us had brakes, and we were coming to the stop at exactly the same time. We put on our seatbelts, braced.

Bump.

Impact was slight due to the speed at which we were traveling. Nonetheless, we needed to take down their names and insurances.

Hello, they waved.

Hello, we said.

Purple grape wine? they asked. They knew.

Yes, we said, a little embarrassed.

Us too, they motioned.

Because we could not stop and they also could not stop, we did not have a chance to get their information. They drifted through the intersection, noses pressed to the glass, then fell out of view.

Jack…I said.

He handed me the last bite of his cake. I stuffed the sweet thing into my mouth and apologized for earlier, for the accident, asked was he ok, did his neck hurt or anything, was he sore?

No, he shook. No. But, he said, I feel as though we’re sinking.

Sinking? I managed to say, the cake being very thick in my mouth. We’re sinking?

He stuck his head out the window to put a chalk mark on the tires. We waited several minutes in relative silence. There was a noise of considerable lapping. Then he stuck himself back out the window and saw that the mark had disappeared.

Yes, he said, we’re sinking.

I cried for a good amount of time. So did Jack. I looked to the rear of the truck and found it was many inches thick with water. Small sea frogs backstroked across our bed from the night before. When I could not cry any longer… I stopped. We tried a little to make love, but decided it was neither the time nor the place.

It got darker and darker until it was full-blown night. Jack turned on the headlights. Frosty pockets of sea shone bright. My eyes were gummy from the salty air and also from the crying. There was nothing left to eat and only a little time before the weight of the water in the back of the truck would pull the machine down, including us.

So this is what it feels like to be doomed, I said.

Jack was too preoccupied with his own gloom to comfort me in mine. I thought: this cannot possibly get any worse. Then it did. A swarm of Fungleharder fish surrounded us. These are the smiling kind of fish. Theys mile when theya re about to eat something. They circled our sinking selves like big black non-winged buzzards of the sea, and I think they were more leering than smiling actually. They glowed a little too.

They nipped at the truck, taking small bites at first, then moved onto larger chunks: tires and hubcaps and wheelwells at once. They got into the engine. Metallic clatter came from under the hood. It was the sound of fish teeth on spark plugs and it was horrendous. Some wires must have shorted or crossed because the radio came back on, and it was Roy, and he was playing his banjo, and it was the sweetest saddest song I’d ever heard and I wanted nothing more at that moment than to hear him play. I asked Jack would he like to dance and he sulked and said I was an idiot.

I love you, I said. Love, love, love you.

Then I unbuckled my seatbelt, rolled down the window and squeezed my way out. The water was choppy and cold, but no more so than Jack. I swam very fast.

Goodbye, I yelled. Goodbye to you! I saw him look out the window. I saw him look. He did nothing else but this. The truck bobbed for a little while more. I could hear Roy strumming on the old banjo, I could hear Jack cursing me and the lottery and the sea and the truck and the snack cakes and those Fungleharder fish biting into his body—he cursed as much as I’d ever heard him curse before. Goodbye, I whispered. Goodbye to you. And then he was gone. The truck was gone completely. The tinny banjo, silent. Jack, silent. And me, out there by myself, surprisingly, welcomingly, unafraid.

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NORM MACDONALD
BY ELLEN KENNEDY

Norm Macdonald walks out of the subway station. A man is walking toward him. The man is carrying a Whole Foods bag. There is a line of cars stopped at a red light. As the man passes Norm Macdonald, he kicks the side of a black car service car. Norm Macdonald looks at the car. There is a large dent in the side of the car. Norm Macdonald looks back at the man. The man is still walking. Norm Macdonald makes eye contact with the driver of the car service car. The driver looks confused. He is smiling a little. Norm Macdonald laughs. Norm Macdonald looks at the other people around him. They are laughing. Norm Macdonald will not kill himself today. Norm Macdonald walks to the Duane Reade to buy a seltzer water. He starts drinking the seltzer water while he is waiting in line. He pays for it with his debit card. “I’m rich,” he thinks. Norm Macdonald thinks about going outside, drinking the seltzer water, and then coming back with the empty bottle and bringing it to the counter to buy again. “I’m so rich,” he thinks. Norm Macdonald doesn’t do that. Norm Macdonald walks to Koreatown. Norm Macdonald wants to buy dinner. Norm Macdonald goes to a Korean restaurant that says it is open 24 hours. It is big. Norm Macdonald looks around. “This better not be expensive,” he thinks. Norm Macdonald laughs. “I’m rich,” he thinks. No one comes up to Norm Macdonald. Norm Macdonald is confused. Norm Macdonald walks up to a man and says, “Can I just sit anywhere?” The man makes a noise and looks around. He points upstairs. Norm Macdonald walks upstairs. Norm Macdonald is still confused. On the second floor a man notices him. Norm Macdonald picks up a magazine that is stacked next to the register. It is about Japan. Norm Macdonald walks to the table the man points out for him. Norm Macdonald sits and looks at the magazine. He is given a menu. Norm Macdonald stares at the menu. “This is fucking expensive,” he thinks. Norm Macdonald can’t decide what to eat. No one comes up to him. Norm Macdonald feels embarrassed. The people at the table next to him are staring at him. They stare at him and then talk quietly and then talk loudly again. Norm Macdonald feels fucked. Norm Macdonald finally decides what he wants to eat. “An avocado salad and a casserole that has kimchee, baby clams, scallops, and oysters,” he thinks. Norm Macdonald looks at the magazine. “I’ll just read and someone will come soon,” he thinks. He opens up to a page that has an article on washable menstrual pads. They are colorful and made from organic cotton. “Wow,” he thinks. At the bottom there is a promotion for a free trial set. An email address is given. “I want those for my wife,” he thinks. Norm Macdonald takes out his blackberry and sends an email to the address. Norm Macdonald might now have another week of not killing himself until the package comes. No one comes to take his order. Norm Macdonald doesn’t want to eat here. “Shit,” he thinks. “I’m just going to leave,” he thinks. Norm Macdonald sees the people next to him looking at him. “They know I’m Norm Macdonald,” he thinks. “They know I’m not getting service.” He gets up and walks out. No one notices. Norm Macdonald walks into a Gamestop. Norm Macdonald buys himself a Nintendo DS Lite. He buys a game that involves taking care of interactive hamsters. He buys a Princess Peach case. “My wife will think I’m funny,” he thinks. He pays with his debit card. Norm Macdonald feels drunk. He is not drunk. After walking out of the store he thinks, “I wonder how sad my wife would be if I killed myself.” He walks to a park and plays Nintendo DS Lite alone.

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A PALE WHITE HAMSTER YAWNS IN BED
BY ELLEN KENNEDY

The hamster is buried under many blankets. It is 6:42 in the morning. Outside the sky is gray. The sunflowers in the hamster's garden have all died.

The hamster leaves the bed and goes to clean itself. Inside the hamster's shower is a bottle of organic cruelty-free shampoo, a bottle of cruelty-free lemon wash, and a small green poof. The hamster puts the cruelty-free lemon wash on the green poof and moves it around the hamster's body very quickly. The hamster's arms are its body. The hamster then takes the cruelty-free shampoo and puts some in its paw and moves its hands very quickly around its face. The hamster watches the suds disappear into the drain as it rinses them from its fur. The bathtub is very clean and pale. The hamster is very clean and pale.

Next the hamster walks to the kitchen. The hamster eats two forkfuls of pasta made from organic soybeans that the hamster prepared the night before. Inside the hamster pantry are three boxes of organic soybean pasta that the pale white hamster's friend sent as a gift. The pale white hamster's friend is a panda hamster with black fur and big eyes that become very shiny whenever the panda hamster is sad.

One time the hamster friends were walking in New York City. They went to Whole Foods to shoplift. The pale white hamster got caught shoplifting. The panda hamster once said "any hamster who gets caught stealing is stupid." The panda hamster made the pale white hamster feel sad and ashamed. He said "any hamster who gets caught stealing is stupid," after the pale white hamster was able to leave Whole Foods. A few weeks later the panda hamster was also caught stealing. Neither hamster discussed much about it.

Both hamsters are writers. Both hamsters write poetry and short stories. The panda hamster writes poems and stories that focus around feeling existentially challenged. The panda hamster's poetry and stories are very good. The pale hamster writes pointless stories with no meanings or ideas, and pointless poems with no meanings or ideas. The pale hamster is bad at writing but feels consoled by it.

The pale white hamster walks to the bus stop. On the bus the hamster presses its face against the window. When the bus shakes the hamster's face hits the window hard. The hamster sits on the bus quietly and with a neutral expression while its face is hit against the window. The hamster is going to work.

The hamster works as a janitor for a preschool. There are fourteen baby hamsters in the preschool. The hamster hates its job. While the hamster is mopping up some vomit, it stares over at the baby hamsters. In an effort to calm down the baby hamsters, their teacher sets up plates and puts animal crackers on the plates and pours each baby hamster a glass of apple juice. The baby hamsters scream and run over to the crackers and apple juice and begin eating loudly. One severely disillusioned red baby hamster stays in the corner of the room and stares at the other baby hamsters. He is standing by the door. He pushes his face to the glass on the door and looks at the things outside. The pale white hamster feels terribly depressed while watching the red baby hamster but also feels a little consoled. When the pale white hamster was a baby hamster it jumped and spun off things while pretending to be an ice skater in preschool. The pale white hamster thinks of this, then feels embarrassed of itself and jealous of the red hamster.

After work the hamster walks to the bus stop and gets back on the bus. The hamster pushes its face against the window of the bus and lets its face hit against the window. The hamster closes its eyes and feels calm as its face rhythmically hits against the window.

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BUTT TEEN
BY R.B. GLASER

from CAPGUN, issue 2

Day broke in the window again. The two teen heads didn’t want to leave pillows. Their pillows felt like sleepy eyes; their sleepy eyes felt like pillows. The heads were in soft dreams and understood that in between was the best situation. Ten more minutes seemed like an hour. An ice-cube that didn’t feel cold. Mirrors were videos. Everything coolly the same. There was a pretty layer of air; Philadelphia was a good name for a girl. Fuzz ball was laughing. The heads and the pillows kept realizing how they preferred each other to anything else. Any eyelid dare opened, traded comfort for facts.

One of the teens tried to kiss the other, but the closed-lip teen turned away. Eyelids closed, the pillow feeling, cold air from under the bed, plus hot light from the window. The mirror was a video-camera. The dad was stuck in the car. The pillow, hot light, and the kissing teen pushing his first erection of the day. The dream of the dad began to separate from the hot light. One eyelid opened. Deformed in a sneer, the teen head had a fleeting understanding of the long line of mornings preceding, and the longer line of ones to come.

Boner teen touched the teen body in a convincing way. The touched teen indulged this attempt, briefly lost track of facts. Back into covered eyes, the pillow pushed up its little ideas. To feel good was numbers. 72, 88, 81, 64. Then it seemed too big a fuss; the touched teen turned away. Kissing teen wanted to kiss, but to touched teen, a tongue was one enough in a mouth.

They woke with this early tag, touching and turning away. The morning shone on in, a peaceful, nagging normalcy, an anxiety that the day held nothing for them. Boner teen reached under the bed, bringing out a tube of something. He asked for touched teen to help, to see what happens if. Touched teen smirked, laughed, forgot the fear of morning. Touched teen extended a palm-up hand, pointer finger wiggling. The finger met for the first time, CVS brand lubricant. The finger flinched.

The bed held aging teens, their cell phones, their smelly socks. The roommate was away for a week. Bare balls on the chair. Each day, while boner teen fucked, the fucked teen scanned the spines lined in the roommate’s book shelf, met the longing gazes from the eyes on the roommate’s posters. The apartment was in an area recently swarmed by aging teens. At night they walked in groups of two and three, praying they were going to have fun. Their prayer was talking loudly, was laughing all at once, was ignoring the blinking hand signal and running wildly across the street.

While the other hand grabbed the smooth erection, the finger brushed aside squeamishness and pushed pointed towards the teen’s skinny butt, past rough hairs, not curly or straight, but kinked, frazzled. Through this swampy stretch, the finger found a bit of skin more like itself. The bit was both opened and closed. The finger moved in circles, wiping off the CVS brand lubricant. Boner teen became Butt teen in a gasp. His erection twitched. The finger pushed itself in, finding next to no room, a cat’s unwilling mouth. Pushing further forward, ignoring Butt Teen’s frenzy, the finger dug in, let out, dug in, pushed further, stubborn, like a drill. There was nowhere to go. Butt Teen’s heart jumped. The finger kept its dull push. There was no more room. There was just enough room. The finger didn’t care.

It felt like the finger was making fun of Butt Teen. The finger let itself be pushed out. It pushed back in. It hooked around. Butt teen made his noises. One hand running up the erection, while the finger squeezed in and out. The jabbing of the finger was like science lab, ‘what the hell.’ Nothing mattered. Butt teen gasped. Finger teen looked for some toilet paper, or a towel or something. There was only the underwear and the socks, the cell phones. Butt teen found a black t shirt balled beside the bed, came on the t-shirt, then gave it to giggling finger teen to wipe off the lubricant, plus anything else. The finger was sniffed, was washed in the sink over the unclean t-shirt, the t-shirt was so honest. Finger teen brushed teeth and spit toothpaste foam on the poor black t-shirt, but the shirt got grander with each complication. The morning was overthrown by the new place for finger. The aging teens grew older. Outside the apartment the strangers were continuing onward with life. Dogs were sniffing, shitting; ATM machines were pausing to print out receipts.

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GODZILLA
BY BRANDON SCOTT GORRELL

Godzilla woke at 8:37 AM and knew, because of the time, that there would be no new emotionally significant emails. Godzilla knew, by now, not to be disappointed by no new emotionally significant emails at 8:37 AM. "The real time for concern," Godzilla thought, "is around 11 AM." By then, Godzilla knew, his east coast friends would have been awake for some time, his west coast friends would most likely be awake, and the jobs at which he applied would have checked their email accounts and responded to suitable applicants. Godzilla sighed, turned on his back, looked at the ceiling, and worried about running out of money. Godzilla did some mental calculations with figures he had seen from checking his bank account online the other day and decided that if he didn't find a job within a week he was fucked. Godzilla let out a soft roar, which sounded more like a depressed and exasperated Chewbacca. Four hours later, Godzilla was sitting on a riverbank in the small forest that Ravenna Park surrounded, crying softly and making quiet whimpering sounds. Godzilla knew that he should be looking for jobs, but felt paralyzed by the anxiety of not having

He had gotten so used to his days on the riverbank in the forest that doing anything else made him feel either extremely uncomfortable or like he wanted to destroy Seattle and all the people he had given resumes to that hadn't called him back. Godzilla felt a terrible despair. He considered ripping the Space Needle from the ground, holding its base while spinning around repeatedly and using his momentum to hurl it far into the Puget Sound. Godzilla felt excited while considering this sequence of events, so he stood up and began walking towards the Space Needle. But as he approached the top of a hill and the Space Needle came into view, Godzilla was overcome with a feeling of apathy. He fell on his side and obliterated some pine trees. He lay there and stared at the horizontal tree trunks, moving only to blink, and a tear came from his eye.

Godzilla felt such a sense of apathy that he lay in this position for two weeks, not even moving to defecate, hardly any thoughts passing through his brain at all. Toward the end of the second week, Godzilla felt a slight excitement about the fact that he would have, possibly, fifty new emails to check when he decided to go home again. Only when Godzilla began to feel extreme urges to check his emails that were as strong as any intense physical pain he had ever felt did he stand up, bathe in the nearby river, and walk home.

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CLICHES VS. CONCRETE WORDS
BY BRANDON SCOTT GORRELL

Clichés are not as good as concrete words because clichés leave out information. Clichés do not refer to concrete reality and do not state exactly what the speaker is thinking, they only make the speaker sound normal and boring and unintelligent, or maybe to people who are impressed by clichés cool and interesting and smart. My friends mostly go to parties and do drugs and stuff, so when one of them says ‘SOFT AS A BABY’S BUTT,’ I punch them in the face and tell them to say instead ‘VERY SOFT’ unless they are a mom or a dad, in which case I nod my head and walk backwards slowly with a scared expression on my face that is meant to show alienation, estrangement, and that I do not accept them any more. Some clichés don’t make sense at all, like ‘THE CREAM OF THE CROP.’ I think that cream does not come from any crop, it comes from cows, unless you are talking about a soybean crop, which you can make ’soy milk’ out of, but even ’soy milk’ is a kind of cliché, because it’s not really milk, it’s just juice that people substitute for milk and kind of looks like milk. Two other clichés are ‘CUT TO THE CHASE’ and ‘FOLLOW MY LEAD.’

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A COLD WIND BLOWS TONIGHT
BY NOAH CICERO

Vasily had hope yesterday.

He sat with his sister Sasha at the kitchen table eating Taco Bell, Sasha says, "Vasily, I don't care if you get a whore. I've been making good money lately at the bar. You should."

"I know, but money, it will be gone."

"I'll give you money."

"No, the money, it will be gone, I'll die. Death."

"No, listen, you need to get laid. It has been months. Your self-esteem is withering away."

"Like the state."

"No, Vasily, not the state. Quit fucking thinking about the state. The state doesn't care about you, stop thinking about the state and start thinking about your penis. Your penis is more important than the state today."

"I'm very busy right now thinking about the state."

"No state, penis, think penis."

"Penis."

"Damn, I'm looking into your eyes and your eyes are thinking of the state."

"Okay, let me think, penis."

"Listen, take your check and go the strip joint and find a girl that will do a private with you for 200 dollars."

"But money."

"Fuck money, your penis needs this."

"My penis is lonely. A cold wind blows over my crotch. My penis resembles the steel mills of Youngstown, once populated with energy and labor, now abandoned and unused, rusting, falling apart, with leaky roofs and broken windows."

"You are so fucking dramatic. That's your problem, you out dramatic the girls and girls don't like that. They like to be the masters of drama, and there you are being all poetic and weird all the time."

"My soul is an unpicked strawberry."

*

Vasily goes to the strip joint.

It is wonderful in there.

There are women in bikinis and beer.

Vasily gets some mexican beer. He doesn't drink American beer because it gives him gas. He is convinced that American beer gives everyone gas, but Vasily is so nervous all the time making his ass tight that instead of just farting he gets bloated and hates himself.

A Puerto Rican girl comes over named Janisa.

Janisa is short, skinny, has mosquito bites for tits, and is a fine looking person.

Vasily has gotten dances from Janisa before, so Janisa knows he will probably get a dance.

Janisa says, "You want a dance?"

"Yeah."

Janisa dances for Vasily.

When Janisa leans back and puts her head near Vasily's mouth, Vasily says, "You do privates?"

"Yeah."

"How much?"

"300."

Vasily knows they always say 300, he also knows they will go lower.

Vasily says, "How about 200 and no sex."

"All right."

Janisa says, "Just wait for me outside when we close."

Vasily has to sit there for another hour, waiting, waiting, waiting, to get some loving.

He sits there, orders more beer.

Plays the touch machine.

He imagines Janisa's little Puerto Rican body naked and curled up next to his, her soft brown skin, her pretty long dark indian hair, her skinny little arms tangled up in his.

This makes Vasily very happy.

Vasily has not gotten laid in a long time. He needs this. He needs some loving, or he may die.

No one has died from not getting loving, but life feels very hard without it. Life can drag without loving, life can weigh a lot without loving, poverty, sickness, and trying to show up to work on time and care about work enough to do a good job to not lose the job seem so much easier when one is getting some loving.

But Vasily is getting no loving.

So here he is, purchasing time with a lady.

He has chosen Janisa and not the other girls, not because Janisa is the prettiest, because there are prettier ones, but because she has the best personality. Or a personality that he prefers.

Vasily dreams and dreams of the night ahead, of nakedness, softness, and eventual orgasm onto the Puerto Rican ass.

The bar finally closes.

Vasily goes outside and waits in his car.

He sits there holding his penis, getting all stupid with desire.

Janisa walks out and goes to her boyfriend's car. He doesn't hear what they are saying, but he obviously says something like, "Get in the car, we're going home."

Because after a minute of talking, she gets in the car and leaves.

Vasily sits in the parking lot, Janisa is gone.

The loving is gone.

He sits there.

He thinks about punching the steering wheel of his car. But he realized he thought about it, and therefore has lost its power.

So he drives out the parking lot to a local 24 hour super market, buys an expensive brand of mint chocolate chip ice cream and goes home.

When he gets home Sasha is sitting at the kitchen table writing, Sasha says, "Where's your whore?"

"No whore."

"Oh Vasily."

Vasily opens the mint chocolate chip ice cream and eats it. He decides that tomorrow he will rent five movies of considerable length, go home, order a large pizza that will last him the whole day, watch the movies and not leave the house, or pick up the phone.

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