Month: October 2024

Teri gave Amy the worst advice.
If you want Joel to notice you, crash your car in front of his house.
Now, a Dodge cruises slowly down St. Ann’s Avenue.

***

I take a black car uptown. I sit on an examination table and listen to the best fertility doctor in Manhattan say crazy things like the tests are normal and you should be able to get pregnant.

***

1988 just looks like bad luck. Double eights, twin infinities standing back to back like fat little snowmen. 1988 is also when we got into the dark arts, ordering supplies from the back pages of comic books, next to ads for x-ray glasses and black soap, where the print is small and smudged, stuff like horoscope scrolls and love wheels, fortune dice and curse books. We stuff Snoopy envelopes with babysitting money, sending it off to small town PO boxes, waiting 6 to 8 weeks for a response. I whisper these addresses out loud, at night, in the dark, before I fall asleep. Pueblo, Colorado is my favorite incantation. It feels like a smooth grey stone on my tongue. I am 17 years old and I have never left Bloomington. While we wait, here is what we do: visit graveyards. Pour salt circles. Fall asleep with our radios on, tuned to ghost stations.

***

One test involves injecting my stomach with dye and crawling into a machine that looks like a convection oven. This experience had been described by someone in my online support group as “a pain worse than childbirth.” I replied this was a cruel analogy to use with a group of infertile women who had no idea what childbirth felt like and would’ve given anything to experience it. I received 275 likes and a gold coin.

***

Amy circles the block in her dad’s car, a green Dodge sedan that seats 9. I can’t do this, she says, panicking. Winners make bold moves, Teri says. Goddamn Teri! When Amy hits that pole, the windows and mirrors shatter, spraying the sidewalk in front of Joel’s house with tiny blades and suddenly he emerges into the fog wearing a slouchy trenchcoat. His hair is spiked. The rain mists his face like a special effect. He lives inside a music video and we wilt in his presence. Teri jumps out of the car and lies on top of the broken glass on the sidewalk and asks Joel to take pictures with her new Canon. He does. Then he starts messing with her hair and arranging the glass shards around her face and Amy gets out and leans against her car and just stares at them. After a while we all leave, except for Teri who stays with Joel. Amy drives to this empty lot behind the school and we sit in the backseat with the doors open eating Little Debbies because they’re 99 cents a box and Amy’s crying saying her dad’s going to kill her and she destroyed his car for nothing and she’s going to curse Teri tonight at midnight. What kinda curse, I ask. Acne, she says, pulling out her little spiral curse book, the new expanded edition with the baby blue cover. I have the pink one, it’s older. She goes to the index and runs her finger down the list. Acne. Agitation. Barren. Boils. Cancer. Colitis. Death. Gas. Hirsute. Hives. We all agree that Acne sounds perfect. Then we do some fortunes.

 ***

I go to another specialist, Dr. Faron. I like her right away. She has blue glasses and a bunch of tattoos under her lab coat. When she holds my hand and says we’re going to sort this whole thing out I actually start crying, which I’ve never done in a doctor’s office, not once during all these years. I cry for a long time. She brings me Kleenex and water. Then she asks me the strangest question. Did you, or anyone you know, purchase a “curse book” from the back of Archie’s Pals ’N’ Gals in 1988? When I say yes, she nods and writes me a prescription. Eight pills, twice daily, for two weeks.

***

Brushing glass off the dash, Amy throws her fortune-telling dice and gets world travel. Tracey gets rich. Didi gets famous. I get…many children. This fortune is a horrible trick and Amy knows it. She knows I would die before ending up like my mother. She knows I’m leaving the day after graduation. And she sure as hell knows I’m never having kids because I’ve only said it about ten million times. I try to explain all of this but everyone’s laughing and finally I get out of the car and walk home in the rain. Amy yells you know those fortunes are bullshit but I just keep walking, singing a song that goes fuck you Amy fuck you.

***

Almost midnight and the kitchen phone rings. It’s Amy, apologizing and offering to do a special curse, just for me. The one that makes it so you never have kids, she says. I say sure, why not, and then she throws in a second one. “A bonus,” she calls it. A curse so I never forget her. This makes me laugh. I wasn’t going to forget her, even if I wanted to.

 ***

The day after graduation, I leave, just like I said I would. I travel the world. Barcelona, Mexico City, London, Paris. I adopt a new name. I cut off all my hair. I even lose my Midwestern accent. But pregnancy’s a funny thing. The dreams are so real, and they’re always the same: I’m back in Bloomington, riding in Amy’s green Dodge. We’re usually having what feels like an important conversation, too, one of those long, intense sessions that seems like it holds the key to life or the secret of the universe or something. When I wake up, I can’t remember a single word.

---

DJ Wolfinsohn’s first published work was a riot grrrl ‘zine. Her fiction and poetry can be found in Gone Lawn, HAD, Variant Lit, Hog River Press, Vestal Review, and on her website, debbywolfinsohn.com. Her ‘zine can be found in the rock ‘n roll hall of fame in Cleveland, where it is part of the permanent collection. She lives in Austin, Texas, with her family.

It’s her job to keep vigil of the small pad of paper next to the overpriced pens, to make sure there is enough space for doodling, signatures, and the occasional confession. Her job until she finds a better job, a real job, but she’s been out of work for too long, and now marketing copy is written by robots and she has never been strong at bookkeeping, even her own.

Some customers draw squiggles or three-dimensional boxes. She finds spirals and infinity signs. An elderly man boasts that he can draw a perfectly straight arrow. Occasionally a profanity.

Eat me. Bite me, written with a garden party gel pen.

Three weeks before her husband killed himself, a stranger at the grocery store told her that she was blessed. Her toddler sat in the shopping cart with a smile and a wave for everyone. Her baby slept against her chest in the carrier—his soft cheek glued to her skin with his drool. After the meals and groceries stopped crowding her front steps and freezer, she was responsible for feeding her children again. They never cared for the lasagna or Shepard’s pie—meals convenient for freezing but unsuitable for toddler and baby taste buds.

Sometimes she wonders about her bad luck. Maybe it was the test paper she stole off the History teacher’s desk in 8^th grade, and how she lied about it when they questioned her. Not me, she said. Someone else.

I have lice, someone writes in green cursive.

Let me get a different pen, the pediatrician said when she was fourteen, leaving her topless and cold on the examining table, wondering why.

Don’t tell her, in opaque ink.

When her son’s fever doesn’t drop by Monday, she decides he’s just about old enough to stay home alone. He can call her at work in case of an emergency. The $85 she’ll make during these six hours will fill the gas tank and pay for the children’s Motrin if she can find any on her way home.

At the end of the shift, she tears off the sheet and smiles when she sees her name. She looks around. She’s never met another one. Is this customer also named after the dad she never met?

Maybe it’s because she’s never been caught stealing one of the Positive Pens ($15.95) – the gray one that nobody every buys, with the mantra: Today is a Good Day. 

A smooshed stink bug lies besides the pens, and she uses a blank page to scoop and discard the carcass.

I love you. I love you. I love you, written with the iridescent fur pom pen.

This time she pulls the paper off carefully. Before she leaves, she folds her love message, careful not to crease the edges, and drops it inside her coat pocket next to her heart.

---

Liz Matthews holds a Master of Fine Arts in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and a Master of Arts in English Education from Teachers College, Columbia University. Liz is the the Program Director of the Westport Writers’ Workshop, a nonprofit literary organization based in Westport, Connecticut where she also teaches creative writing workshops. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in Milk Candy Review, The Tishman Review, The Rumpus, and Brevity among other places.

My husband and I have not spoken for many years.

We’re not estranged or anything. We live together—happily I might add—but at a certain point silence just became easier than talking.

I could never have imagined this silence when we were first together. Back then it seemed like we could talk for a millennium and never run out of things to say. We used to drive way out past the outskirts of our little college town, talking, talking. I would have listened to him describe every blade of grass. That town was the first place I ever lived where you had to use the high beams at night. One night when I was behind the wheel, Bill—my husband, Bill—laughed as he explained to me that you have to turn lights on and off for other cars. Maybe that’s why talking felt so much easier when we were young. We had so much to learn, so much to teach each other. So much to argue about. So much to resolve.

Yesterday, while I was brushing out my hair in the bathroom, I heard a crash come from the kitchen. When I went downstairs, Bill was kneeling over a broken white porcelain serving tray. I couldn’t recall ever using that tray, even though I knew we had had it forever. Why did he have the serving tray out? Where had we stored it, where had it even come from?

I looked down at Bill looking up at me. I swept my hands around in front of me. Everything all right?

Bill’s shoulders moved just barely up and down. His upward-looking eyes seemed pleading. I dropped it. I don’t know how it happened.

I knelt down across from him and picked up a piece of porcelain. The edge was sharp. My finger bled.

I went to the sink to wash out the cut while Bill swept up the mess and threw it in the trash. The water rushed. The broken pieces went chunk chunk chunk. My finger stung under the cool water. I racked my brain: Who had given us that serving tray? Who would be fool enough to give us a thing like that? And why had we kept it, all these many years—through moves across the country, births and deaths—just to break it now, untouched, pristine, and never used?

That night with a Band-Aid on my finger I went down and searched the kitchen like a jewel thief, looking for things to throw away.

---

Susan Holcomb holds an MFA in writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and studied for a PhD in physics at Cornell. Her writing has been published in the Southern Indiana Review, The Boston Globe, Epiphany, and elsewhere. Her chapbook WOLFBABY, a collection of flash fiction, won the 2023 Cupboard Pamphlet chapbook contest and will be published this year.

I was the Sheriff.

I saw the kids in my back seat, leaning on each other, and knew that when people found out that I didn’t arrest them, they would say it was because I was soft. Not that I had gone soft – was replaced gone. Because I was a woman.

Gender would come into play again as soon as they discovered that the kids were in love. The girl rested her head on the boy’s chest and her eyes, though fixed on me, had a wide, glassy full-moon quality to them. She looked tired and scared. They both looked scared.

Of course, it would be as if they had forgotten I was a woman when they had elected me Sheriff – and for the past six months that I had been Sheriff, too. There I was a sexless thing…until I made a mistake.

I wasn’t exactly sure it was a mistake. These were good kids. I knew their parents, their teachers; they got A’s. They didn’t ‘liase’ around as the housewives around these parts liked to say. Teenagers eventually did questionable things; it came from the fact that at some point, at that age, you either thought you were or didn’t want to turn into: a popular person, a witch, Juliet, your mother or crucially, your true self. And that was only the half of it – I only knew what it was like to be a girl. The boy was lying back there almost as dead as Romeo. And the way they held hands: they were on the precipice, the cruel world on their heels, with nowhere to go but down, clutching to one another, the last thing they would ever do.

My deputy – he has a face as pretty as the boy’s impossibly long fine eyelashes – calls me ‘Ma’am’. The same thing I called my mother since I was three – especially when I was three. This deputy has been nothing less than expressly polite and efficient and eager to do a good job and I want to trust him like I want a hole in my chest so that my pudding heart can leak out. Not that I would trust him more if he was a woman but still; I feel surrounded by men who want to get me like single women vying for the flying bouquet. The boy was beautiful enough to be a bride and the girl didn’t know the toll of what being a woman was…at least, not yet.

Even I was making this about sex, I hated that. I was the Sheriff. I saw things, not just for what they appeared to be but for what they were, and not just because I was paid to do that, either. Shouldn’t I have been above that?

The boy spoke and I saw myself in his eyes: a dangerous thing incapable of mercy. And yet, in the eyes of the people of this little town, incapable of anything but mercy. Because I was a woman. I could be both and neither.

I told them what I was prepared to do. The girl cried. The boy called me “Ma’am.”

---

Ena Kaitch started writing proper stories when she was seventeen but has been writing practically every day since she was nine, when she still lived in the country she was born in, South Africa. She never thought she would be a writer but hopes to be worthy of the title one day. “pudding heart” is the first of her stories to be published.