Chelsea Uncategorized

Triangle by Fiona J. Mackintosh

Even in the womb, Mother said, Giula and I twined round each other like fish in a barrel. Born just thirteen minutes apart, we slept heart to heart in the same bed, warming our feet between each other’s calves. 
 
Her face was mine, except for the scar above her eyebrow from when she fell on the fender as a baby. We wore our hair in the same long braid so no-one on the Bowery knew which of us was which. 
 
Everything we did, we did together. Dripping hot candle wax on our fingertips to harden them for the sacks full of garments Mrs Leventhal brought every day. Scratching our names with a pin on the side of the mantel when no one was looking. Sent out to the fire escape to peel potatoes, we’d drop the eyes onto the horses’ heads and talk about who we’d marry, craning to stare at the Russian boys with the wide black hats and long dark curls down their faces. 
 
Whatever happened, on the street, in the family, we knew it all. We knew Mother was done after having Santino, Rosetta, and Angelo in five years. When Papa came home from building mansions on the Upper East Side, she’d turn her back as he washed his bare chest in a basin by the stove. Sometimes he’d go out late and not come back all night. We were sure he had another family over by the bridge, till we saw him coming out of Ma Rozzoli’s whorehouse. When he’d scratch himself through his breeches, we’d bend our heads over our sewing, red-faced with hidden laughter.  
 
Nothing ever came between Giulia and me till Vicenzo Romano. Vic. Yellow-haired, green-eyed, full red lips. He was the stock boy at Benedetti’s Delicatessen where I worked behind the counter. Behind the towering wheels of parmesan, he kissed me, his mouth dusty with the peanuts he liked to chew, splitting them at the seam with his thumbnail.
 
Giulia was working in a loft shop up near Washington Square Park. On my days off, I waited for her under the sooty trees, pigeons pecking round the toes of my boots. Sometimes Vic came with me and he’d walk us both home. When Ma invited him for supper, I saw Giulia bend to smell his hair as she took his plate. That night under the quilt she asked, “Do you love him, Fina?” but I turned away blushing in the dark. 
 
When Vic bought me a red velvet ribbon, we were as good as engaged. We’d roam the streets at dusk, stopping to kiss just beyond the light cast by store windows. Giulia went about with her friends from the factory. I’d leave the lamp burning for her and wake as she slipped into bed and turned her back to mine.  
 
One night when she came home, I waited up and gave her my ribbon. I knew how much she’d wanted it, how she’d touched the velvet with one wary finger when she thought I didn’t see. She took it without a word. When I woke the next morning, she’d already left for work, leaving it coiled loosely on the dresser, a splash of flame in the dim brown room. Leaving it for me. Running the soft velvet between thumb and finger, I made two loops of it and tied them in a bow.  
 
Later, Vic and I walked to meet Giulia from her shift, weaving through the almost evening crowd, dodging the soft green turds dropped by the dray horses, breathing the vegetable stink of the gutter. As we strolled the pathways of the park, March rawness made me clutch Vic’s arm close. A clatter of heels and a woman ran by us, then a patrolman wheeled his horse towards thick black smoke pulsing across the skyline. From the building where Giulia worked.
 
High above us, faces crowded the blazing windows, mouths open. Fire horses skittered, eyes white, a hose slithered across the asphalt and a ladder cranked up and up, with a great groaning, then stopped – “Too short!” – and women wailed and screamed and covered their eyes. Girls clinging to window frames launched like a flock of birds, raining down on the asphalt in a drumroll of moist thuds. 
 
A girl balanced on a sill, up on her toes. Even from afar, I saw the red circle round her neck. Arms raised high, muscles of fire arcing from her shoulders, she leaned gently forward and fell, sparks cartwheeling from the ends of her hair.   
 
Wrenching myself from Vic’s grasp, I ran, seeing nothing, hearing nothing but Vic behind me calling “Fina!” Up the tenement stairs, past women leaping to their feet in an avalanche of cloth, I raced to our cold dark bedroom, snatched the ribbon from the dresser and fell to my knees.  “It wasn’t her, it wasn’t her!”
 
But when I turned to look at Vic, when I saw his mouth twitch and his eyes dart, I knew that Giulia had her own ribbon, as red as mine and just as soft between the fingers.   
 
I’m 90 years old now and the people here are very kind. They move the mirror with me from the chair to the bed and back. They know I like to talk to Giulia. It’s like it always was for us, there’s no one else we need. I no longer see her scar. It’s sunk into the fretwork of our ancient face, those lines I trace all day and night, my finger on the cold unyielding glass. 
Fiona Mackintosh
Fiona J. Mackintosh is a British-American writer who has been widely published in both countries. Her stories have been shortlisted for the 2016 Exeter Story Prize and longlisted for Plymouth University’s 2015 Short Fiction Prize, the 2016 Bristol Short Story Prize, and the 2017 Galley Beggar Short Story Prize, and her flash fictions have been published most recently in Spelk, the Nottingham Review, and the Bath Flash Fiction Anthology. She is a proud recipient of a 2016 Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist’s Award.

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Chelsea Uncategorized

Tiny Hands by Daniel W. Thompson

It’s true what she said, my wife, she said I have tiny hands. She tells me this while we are out to dinner for our anniversary. I pull my hand back from hers. We’d been holding hands across the table where the candle light turned everything to shadows. Except my hands. They glowed. I stick them under the table behind the long white cloth.

Not a real popular time to have tiny hands, I say.

No, no, she says. She didn’t mean anything bad by it. It was a light-hearted joke. And by the way, as far as she was concerned, that asshole doesn’t have the confidence to overcome his differences. You’re better than that, she says.

My own hands come to a point, paring down like a traffic cone. The boys on the basketball team used to joke how I couldn’t palm the ball.

But in bed, you know, I’m more than adequate, right, I ask my wife. She smiles from across the table. Oh my, of course you are sweetie, the best I’ve ever had, she says.

Then again, she is my wife, my for better or worse.

When I shake another man’s hand, I think firm but not aggressive. Let him know I’m worthy. So often I short the handshake and the larger hands swallow my small offering. I’ve lost right then. Oh, think of the disregard a man with tiny hands receives. They say, he’s not the one to deal with, he lacks the proper fortitude. Bigger is better, bigger is better, would you look at the size of his-

I have big feet, those I have, but nobody worries about feet. Feet have never made an impression. You don’t hold feet in the candlelight.

Are you okay, my wife asks. I think your hands are beautiful.

Right then, the waiter, a giant man-child with baseball mitts for hands, brings us steaming red lobsters. Would you like me to crack them for you, the man-child asks.

No, I yell. Do you think I can’t crack my own lobster?

He’s a little tired, my wife tells him. It’s fine, really, we’ll be fine, thank you, she says.

I pay the check and it’s everything I have to not stiff the man-child. I know his fortune is not his fault.

In the car I can tell my wife feels bad about her comment. She puts her hand on my thigh but I leave mine where they are. She has finally cut me open.

I swear it was a joke, sweetie. You have to know that, she says as we pull into our driveway.

The babysitter peaks out the window.

Can I make it up to you, my wife asks.

We pay the babysitter and go upstairs to make love. The entire time I am on my back, hands to the sides, watching a bottle of nail polish on top of her dresser. My wife’s eyes are closed until she finishes and then she opens them to look at me like it’s the first time she’s met me. I know there’s no way she’s thinking of me when she’s up there.

That-was-amazing, she says as she rolls over. No man in this world can do that, sweetie.

She leans over and kisses me on the cheek. Happy anniversary, she says.

Hey, I say to her.

Yes?

Never mind.

After she has fallen to sleep I get out of bed and walk over to her dresser. Rose, extra glossy. That’s what the nail polish says. I pick it up.

Downstairs in the kitchen I paint my toenails under the light of the stove. I’ve watched my wife do it to our daughter enough times to know I should go easy with the application but I lay it on thick. Polish is running over the sides of my long toes.

After I finish, I go outside onto our back deck. The moon is full and everything is either blue or white, except my toes. They’re on fire, and because of it, I decide I’m going to wear only flip flops from now on. That way everyone can stop staring at my pointy, feathery, god forsaken hands and look down to where I am all man, thinking what they may of my rose colored, extra glossy nails.

 

Photo of Daniel W. Thompson

Daniel W. Thompson’s work has appeared in publications like decomP, WhiskeyPaper, Wyvern Lit, Third Point Press and Cheap Pop. He works as a city planner and lives in downtown Richmond, VA, with his wife and children.

Chelsea Uncategorized

The World’s More Full of Weeping Than You Can Understand by Lori Sambol-Brody

When my sister returns after seven days missing, she tells us the faeries stole her. Oona ate seven mushrooms at their feast and a faerie knight commanded her to ride with them for seven days. She says, He set me before him on a stallion. They ride bareback, you know. She grins. Cherries stain her teeth like blood. You become the favorite child if you go missing; my mother feeds her fruit out of season and lets her paint her nails black. Oona tells me, I had never felt more protected; I had never felt more afraid. She promises to make me a love charm she learned from her knight so Julian will kiss me behind the ears. But at a cost she doesn’t name: there is always a cost. She tells me, I had never felt more loved; I had never felt more hated. I wonder if the faeries returned a changeling instead of my sister. I pretend to brew coffee in eggshells, but she doesn’t laugh, just rolls her eyes. I spy on her after she takes a shower. Through steamy air I see her rub a salve smelling of night flowers on the green and yellow bruises marring her thighs, her arms. When we watch Pretty Little Liars, she cocks her head, says, Can’t you hear the faerie music? In the flickering underwater light of the television screen, she dances. Her arms sinuous, her hips gyrating. I don’t hear anything no matter how hard I strain. Wondering why they chose her over me.

 

LoriLori Sambol Brody lives in the mountains of Southern California.  Her short fiction has
been published in Tin House Flash Fridays, New Orleans Review, The Rumpus, Little Fiction, Necessary Fiction, Sundog Lit, and elsewhere. She can be found on Twitter at @LoriSambolBrody and her website is lorisambolbrody.wordpress.com.

Chelsea Uncategorized

Alone and Not Alone by Kate Gehan

At the club, Clarissa listens to the Dirty Dancing soundtrack on her Walkman and experiments with sitting in different positions to watch her flesh ooze through the lounge chair’s plastic strips. She flips onto her stomach and lets her head drop until her braid, thick as rope, swings down to touch the grass. Beneath the chair, her stomach and thighs squeeze through the open slats, gravity an unflattering force. Nothing could be more difficult than being the age she is now.

Jonathan walks by and snaps her back with the tip of a wet towel. It stings. His teeth remind her of yellowing shells but his wet swim trunks cling to his muscles nicely. All summer he has been teaching her how to dive after swim team practice.

“Watch this,” Jonathan says as he climbs the pool high dive. He positions his toes along the edge of the aqua board.

“Flip!” Clarissa yells.

“Show us how it’s done, Merman!” Jonathan’s friends scream from the water.

He nods, bounces a few times, and vaults high enough for two summersaults before entering the water. Everyone knows he’ll go to a big school in Florida on a diving scholarship if his grades aren’t good enough for an Ivy.

***

Before he jumps, Jonathan curls his toes across the tip of the diving board and forces quick, hyper, breaths until he is nearly dizzy. As he bounces, he takes a few of the longest breaths he can to clear out his lungs. He ignores his friends’ taunts from below. If he holds enough air in his lungs this time, he may go deeper than ever before. Jonathan takes one final gasp, launches himself into a tuck, and after a few spins, he descends.

Once he cuts through the surface, he opens his eyes to the shallow water’s burning chemicals and sunlight. He pulls himself away from it, and his nose tickles with an emerging coldness. Deeper into the darkness, away from rules. This longing to swim like a water creature is a petulant exercise, because of course Jonathan lacks the gills and the webbing. The water changes, becomes murky. A seahorse floats past, up towards the cheery surface.

His organs compress. He reaches a place of depth where paddling is no longer required and he begins to fall like a stone without moving his arms or kicking at all. Teaching his body to do this is important during the planet’s current stage, when communion with the water is still a pleasurable pastime and there is just enough dry land. Jonathan knows this stage will not last forever.

His body desires oxygen at the mitochondrial level and the mighty pressure of the water begins to wipe his thoughts clean. How many minutes has it been? It definitely seems longer than the last dive. Years have maybe passed when he hears singing in the distance—less song than vibration, not something communicated through his mollusk ears. Gargantuan mammals sense life from miles away. Perhaps they feel him in the water now, sinking down to the place where they feed from grasses, and they will welcome him. Jonathan is but a dollop of life in this place and the blackness drenches him now, seeps through his skin in a somnambulistic erasure.

Fingers and toes numb, he convulses involuntarily and instinctively turns his body around before it’s too late. Furiously reversing all of his effort, Jonathan follows the upward direction of the bubbles.

After what seems like another set of years, he wheezes at the glorious surface, beneath the diving board. His friends beckon him to play their stealth attack army game of pretend-drowning in the shallow end of the pool. Jonathan swims over to them, still transfixed by the inevitability of a time ruled by scarcities in a world where nearly everything is afloat. He is not frightened because he is learning the mysteries. The next day, and the day afterwards, his diving will improve and he will decode the songs of the deep.

***

Clarissa claps for Jonathan when he emerges, but he’s too far away to hear, swimming perfect strokes over to the boys pretending to be Navy Seals choking one another. The lifeguard blows her whistle on the shenanigans.

Swim practice begins in an hour and Clarissa decides to head over to the club snack shack for lunch. This summer she has stopped eating French fries with her sandwiches because most of the girls on the team have pancake-flat stomachs, some concave even. She wants to winnow herself into a sharp blade. She imagines executing a dive alongside Jonathan where they slice the water together, perfectly synchronized.

Clarissa sucks in her stomach and almost succeeds in disappearing her little roll of belly fat as she walks by Jonathan and the boys horsing around. Jonathan expertly flicks water at her leg and says something about her “fantastic breath control.” Because her Walkman headphones are in her ears Clarissa pretends she can’t hear, but she holds her breath as long as she can, until the fir trees along the snack shack pathway are blurry and her thoughts become microscopic objects just out of reach, floating off to some larger sea.

 

KGehan

Katherine Gehan’s writing has appeared in McSweeny’s Internet Tendency, Literary Mama, The Stockholm Review, Sundog Lit, Split Lip Magazine, People Holding, Whiskey Paper, (b)OINK, and others. She is nonfiction editor at Pithead Chapel. Find her work at www.kategehan.wordpress.com and say hello @StateofKate.

Chelsea Uncategorized

How I Learned My Name by Sandhya Acharya

The kids in my kindergarten class would already be on the second page of their assignments while I was still remembering the letters to my name, Gobind Lambodhar Banerjee, which contained half the stinking alphabet. In third grade, I insisted people call me Gollum.

Overnight, from a freak, I became the cool kid. It was a bit strange at first. The scrawny brown boy in a class full of white kids being called Gollum seemed a bit offensive. But it gave me an identity, made me stand out. I walked around calling girls “my precious”  and they didn’t even mind. They giggled and locked hands with me. Gollum had struck gold.

My mother she still called me Gobind. She stressed each letter and ended the D emphatically. Sometimes she’d add an “O” and call me Gobindo. The “O” would trail on the air like the lingering scent of a skunk.

One day my friend Sara called and asked to speak to Gollum. Confused, Ma explained to Sara what my real name meant; ”Gobind or Govind like the the God Krishna. The blue one, you see.” I cringed. Did she really say that? I felt flushed, more red than blue. Sara laughed when I took the phone. She teased, “Gollum, are you a God?” I didn’t eat the lunch Ma sent to school for days. She made fish curry, samosas, even Mishti Doi one day. Staying away from Mishti Doi, that creamy, milky, sweet concoction, was hard. But I did. Food was a powerful tool, and I used it against her by rejecting what she made.

After I began middle school, she stopped packing my lunch three days a week. Instead, she slipped a few dollars into my hands and said, “Go have fun! Eat what you want.” It was liberating. I got ready by myself in the mornings while she made her tea, pounding the ginger and cardamom patiently. She would stand by the door, steaming cup in hand, stealing glances of me while I put on my shoes. In the evenings, two days a week, she drove me to piano lessons. She made me go, no matter how many jarring, off-key notes I played.

When I turned sixteen, I could drive myself to classes and back in our old red Corolla. I managed my own schedule—friends, library, school. I was on top. Though I’d given up piano by then, I excelled at debate and swimming. I would have no problem in getting into the college of my choice.

I didn’t see Ma much on weekday evenings then. She said she’d joined the gym. But when I studied at night, her light in the bedroom stayed on. When I came out to go to the bathroom and get ready for bed, she’d walk into the kitchen for a glass of water and to ask if I needed anything. Once, when I came back late at night from my swim meet in another city, I saw her peep down from the window. I groaned and braced myself for the questions, but when I walked in, I didn’t see her anywhere. Just a plate on the table with my dinner. It was then I realized I wouldn’t have minded her sitting across from me, asking how my day was.

A few weeks after that lonely night came my graduation. The phone rang while Mother got ready upstairs. My old friend Sara called to see if I was ready. I was supposed to ride with her. I apologized, and said things had changed, and that I’d see her at school. I bounded up the stairs and found Ma. She looked beautiful in pink tussar Sari.

“I’m ready to go if you are,” I said. As she looked at me surprised, I asked, “Can I drive?” She hugged me and patted me on the back. Before we left, she lit a lamp in front of the deities and  dragged me to the kitchen. She pulled out a little pot stored in a corner of the refrigerator and handed me freshly made Mishti Doi, which I promptly ate. The sweetness stayed in my mouth the entire two miles to the school. She held my hand while on the road for a brief moment and then mumbled “sorry” before breaking into a sheepish smile. That smile passed away too fast.

The auditorium was full by the time we arrived, so I ran to join my friends. Ma found her seat. Dozens of parents sat proud and beaming, ready to cheer their children. From the stage, Ma’s pink Sari stood out in the crowd.

The roster set on the podium, and the announcer Mr. Ross was about to start. I ran to him. He nodded, scratching and rewriting on his paper. When it was my turn to do the walk, my friends looked around surprised when they didn’t hear the familiar Gollum. Mr. Ross instead, very adeptly pronounced the words Gobind Lambodhar Banerjee. I heard Ma clapping loud from her row. I could see her tearing up as she mouthed the words, “my Gobind.” I grinned, waved her a kiss, and murmured “my precious.”

 

IMG_2938
Sandhya Acharya grew up in Mumbai, India and now lives in the Bay Area. She worked as a financial professional and loves to dance, run, and be Mom to her young sons. Her articles have been featured on NPR (KQED), and in India Currents and IMC connect. She blogs at www.sandhyaacharya.com.

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Chelsea Uncategorized

The Eclipse by Nicholas Cook

The brochure says this is the best place to see the eclipse, only the brochure is a year old, and we have missed the eclipse.

“People don’t bring people into the desert at night,” I say.

He unfolds the legs of his telescope and tells me I can count the rings of Saturn if I want.

Through the lens I see a fuzzy planet turned upside-down.

We are miles from anything resembling life, and the air is cold and dry. Above our heads the night sky glows horribly.

“Jill?” he asks now. He has focused the telescope on something—the word he uses here is celestial. “When will you know?”

I look at a blurry collection of dim white dots. “As soon as they tell me,” I say, and move the telescope to empty sky.

My fingers are cold, and there’s a strange wind coming from whichever direction that mountain range is. A smell, too, I can’t quite describe, like disinfectant.

He hovers lightly over the soil as if trying not to leave a mark.

***

Last year, at the time of the eclipse, rooms here were renting for over a thousand dollars. Now we rent a queen room for just under a hundred. The brochure makes references to eclipse chasers, people who believe in the celestial and other worldly transformations. They come from all over to witness something that lasts only minutes.

I stare at my phone even though it’s late, and they will not call at this hour.

He tries to find something on TV.

My eyes are dry, and the lights in the room are haloed.

“Where were you during the eclipse?” he asks.

I make up something better than what happened. “I was on another continent,” I say. The truth is I was here, with the chasers, in a room my friend had booked three years earlier. What I had felt was this—I had felt nothing.

He finds an infomercial for kitchen gadgets, something that slices and dices, because two is better than one, isn’t it?

***

Life is just one moment then another. I do not love my boyfriend, but he treats me nice, and maybe that is enough for most people.

In the morning, I take his car keys and drive alone into the desert. I find the spot where I stood a year before and pretended to be interested in what was just a shadow moving across the sun.

My phone rings but I do not answer it. I know the caller is him, I didn’t leave a note.

What it looked like: white dots floating in grey masses. Aspiration is the word they use to describe the process of extracting cells—is that to make you feel hopeful?

I call him back and say, “The Sun is just floating in space, did you know that?”

He exhales slowly and says to come back to bed or says we’ll get breakfast or says none of this.

Last year so many people had transformations. They gasped and held their chests as if they might die. One woman fainted and her friend poured bottled water over her face to wake her.

When the eclipse began, the first thing I did was close my eyes. I thought it would make the experience better. I turned to my friend and asked, “Am I missing anything?”

“What am I missing?”

“Shouldn’t I be missing something?”

 

 

image1Nicholas Cook lives in Dallas, TX, along with his dog. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Jellyfish Review, (b)OINK, 100 Word Story, A Quiet Courage, New Flash Fiction Review, Camroc Press Review, and elsewhere. His story The Peculiar Trajectory of Space Objects won second place in the Feb 2017 Bath Flash Fiction Award. Find him at @thisdogisdog.

Chelsea Uncategorized

The Body of a Man by Melissa Goode

School children walk through the Art Institute, two by two, holding hands. They are quiet. They are clearly under strict instructions, filing in behind their teacher, but still I think maybe.

***

“The Vitruvian Man” is superimposed upon himself and stretched within a circle, within a square. I lean closer. He is bare, anatomically perfect—he could breathe. In 1490, there must have been a real flesh man flayed with ink by da Vinci down to muscle, sinew, vein.

***

I sit on the front steps, eating sushi from the gallery cafeteria. He walks up the steps towards me. His security pass swings on a lanyard. His glasses catch the light and they flash, making his eyes invisible, then visible again. He leans down and kisses my cheek and smells of his last cigarette.

“What are you doing here?” he says, and it is kind.

“The da Vinci exhibition.”

He sits beside me, twenty centimeters away.

“You should come after hours,” he says. “I can show you around without the crowds.”

The sushi rice is sticky. I push my tongue across my teeth. I smile.

***

I have pushed my tongue along his neck, across his knuckles, down the ladder of his ribs. He was underneath my hands so that it was not his skin I felt, but his blood that hummed, hot.

***

His voice is low, so low, crawling around the pit of my stomach. It takes its time, scraping over and over, finding its old place.

“Are you okay?” he says.

I nod. “Sure.”

He smiles, but I see it: she was always a dreamer.

How to tell him that I am listening intently? Not to his words, but his voice, the texture of it, the timbre, the base, the way it moves through me, the way it stays.

A group walks past us up the stairs and I slide five centimeters closer to him.

***

Almost two years ago now, he took off his shirt for me for the first time. The afternoon light got in around the edges of my bedroom blind and his skin ran with goosebumps. His clavicle was a wishbone, stretched across him. I wanted to break it in two. I did. I wanted him to push me to the edge. Sometimes he said, “Are you sure?” He pressed the words into my skin. Nothing hurt then.

***

I pay attention. The things I could tell him: clavicle derives from the Latin “clavicula” meaning “little key,” because the bone rotates like a key when the arms are raised. The clavicle is the bone most often broken in the human body.

***

We danced in a club and the music beat and vibrated through me. It soared. He leaned against me, his skin burning. He kissed me, pushing a pill from his mouth into mine. I swallowed. He smiled.

“Let’s go home,” I said.

He bent closer. “Home? Why?”

The crowd pressed against us, strangers, every single one of them. They slid against us. I could not breathe. He closed his eyes and tipped his head back away from mine. The chemicals hit my veins and they ran and ran.

***

“Studies of the Fetus in the Womb,” dated 1510-1512/13. Leonardo da Vinci drew a foetus with its knees raised, its head bowed and pressed against its hands and knees, hiding its face. The umbilical cord sweeps across its body. The womb is cleaved open, like two halves of a shell.

***

The children leave the gallery and run down the stairs, a tumble of legs, arms, small bodies, oversized backpacks. They laugh and shout. They push their faces to the sun and they grow, their cells dividing, multiplying, unfurling.

***

He was illuminated by the moon, its cold wash of lilac-blue light. Shadow lines of the window fell on him as he looked into the night.

“What’s out there?” I said.

He turned to me. “Nothing important.”

I believed him.

***

In bed, he slept and I drew my finger along his clavicle, first one way and then the other, finding the halfway point, finding the ends.

***

The gallery asked him to help curate an exhibition of Impressionist works at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. He planned to travel through Europe afterwards.

“For how long?” I said.

“I don’t know. There are so many things I want to see. Cities I want to visit again.”

All I heard was I, I, I while he listed galleries, cities, icons.

***

A drawing of da Vinci’s compares man and animal: “Studies of legs of man and the leg of a horse,” dated 1506.

***

Another drawing shows a man inside a woman: “Coition of a hemisected man and woman,” dated 1492. She is far less detailed than him. She fades into nothingness.

***

He sent postcards. One was from the Galleria Nazionale di Parma in Italy, da Vinci’s “Head of a Woman,” dated 1500, painted in oil on wood. On the back he had written—she looks like you.

I studied that postcard. “What the fuck?”

Her hair was tangled, her gaze downward, fixed on nothing it seemed. I threw her away.

***

“I should get back to work,” he says. “It was good to see you.”

He puts his arm around my shoulders and he is hot all down my side. I see his clavicle beneath the collar of his shirt. Little key. Old friend.

“Have you seen the drawings of the human heart by da Vinci?” I say.

“Of course. Why?”

In 1513, da Vinci must have reached inside a human body and pulled out the heart, or somebody did it for him.

***

In the gallery gift shop, “The Vitruvian Man” is everywhere. I buy a fridge magnet and I don’t know why. 

***

I walk back to the train and realize the actual man that da Vinci drew from in 1490 might not have been alive at all. In fact, he probably wasn’t.

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Melissa Goode’s work has appeared in Best Australian Short Stories, SmokeLong Quarterly, New World Writing, Split Lip Magazine, WhiskeyPaper, Atticus Review, (b)OINK, and Jellyfish Review, among others. One of her short stories has been made into a film by the production company Jungle. She lives in Australia. You can find her here: www.melissagoode.com and @melgoodewriter.

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Chelsea Uncategorized

Falling Leaves, a Sycamore by Clio Velentza

Jake’s body swung from the Gunnarsen’s sycamore until well into the evening. The oxygen mask hung from his neck stained with spit, its loose tip dangling into the sweltering breeze. Nobody was comforted by the solidity of his shadow, falling shimmering across the arid afternoon. We stood around it, blinking the sweat off our eyelids. A toddler shuffled into it for some relief from the heat and stood swaying, gazing upwards. Someone snatched the child back into the folds of the small crowd. Its wail made us wince.

The particular detail of the oxygen mask alarmed us most. We had ever seen him use one. The kids were already on an expedition to find the lost tank, surely having rolled off into a rain gutter, when they were promptly ordered back home. A couple of people resumed the search, but came back shaking their heads.

Becca’s hand paused on my shoulder, then pointed to the house behind the tree. The older Gunnarsen girl, Sylvia, was standing by the upstairs window, watching. I’d never seen her with her hair drawn up before. She reminded me of a plucked bird of prey. Even from this distance she was all angles and hollows.

“Look at her waiting,” Becca said, her warm, sticky hand on my shoulder again.
Jake was cut down, clumsily lowered onto the ground through the stifled curses of men wobbling on garden ladders. We took a step back as one. In the amber light his hair was the same shade of ginger as when we were small. The stubble around his swollen mouth shone golden. I was always jealous of his smooth, nondescript features, so soft and feminine despite his sturdy athletic build.

The ambulance sat quiet underneath the massive sycamore, as if embarrassed for its lateness. Medics were bent over the body, their latex-clad hands each pressing a different spot on Jake. One hand was over his eyes, covering them as if the sky was something indecent. I liked the contrast of the white car and the bright blue gloves against the undulating pale greens of the scenery. I would paint this as soon as my new oils arrived, I decided. Jake’s shape would be dim, dissolving into the parched grass. You wouldn’t even be sure he was really there without the thin white gleam, made with the finest brush, indicating the oxygen mask.

The door to the Gunnarsen house was left open. On the front step sat the middle sister, Erika, sobbing in the arms of her mother. Erika was in that paint-spattered Rocky Horror t-shirt she always wore in art class. Months in and still not showing. Girls whispered that they would kill for her flat tummy. We saw her clutch her stomach and retch on the flower bed.

“Pity about the baby,” said Becca. “Growing up without a daddy.”

Sylvia was still watching from the upstairs window. Perhaps she had never moved. Only her head was slightly tilted, following the body’s descent.

“Jake would be a crap father,” Becca went on, low enough for only me to hear. I wiped the sweat from my lip. She leaned in. “Remember the day he beat Cole black and blue?”
I shook my head although I did remember, I just wanted to keep Becca’s words out.

Through the corner of my eye I saw some of the kids inching back to the forbidden scene. They seemed unimpressed with the sight. One was already yawning and rubbing its eyes.
“Though Cole did say Sylvia had a stick up her ass.” Becca sucked her teeth, shrugging.

Erika kept vomiting and was carried off indoors. Our eyes turned to the gaunt figure in the window. Sylvia’s paleness shone through the gloom like the evening star. Even now in late summer, with school nothing more than a quiescent threat, her illness kept her cooped up inside on a strict regime of lung-strengthening exercises.

Any other girl in her place and we might have pitied her. But it was impossible to pity Sylvia: she radiated the unrelenting, destructive power of lava. At her birthday party someone had made drunken fun of her fit of laborious coughing, and she’d thrown a full can of Coke at him without batting an eye. The boy had needed stitches. I recalled staggering into the hallway afterwards and finding her sitting on the floor, working her oxygen tank. Her face was blurry, almost smiling under the plastic, eyes closed, dark eyebrows arched and chin up.

And then I realized.

“Oh,” I said, took a sharp breath and shivered.

“What?”

Becca was glancing around, listing Jake’s friends and enemies. A jumbled string of names of no consequence. The small crowd was now full of holes as everyone began to wander back home, absentmindedly considering dinner.

I contemplated the tree. It rose and rose and expanded, a disheveled giant of twisted, peeling limbs, making our gated community seem puny: little model houses, little model lives. The bark was mottled in a pleasant scale of greys and greens. The climbing rope was still hanging limp from Jake’s expert knot. The pale-edged leaves that had been dislodged by the commotion were falling softly on the body, and a medic was brushing them off.

The stretcher was rolled into the ambulance, its doors grated shut and it drove off. No joy in the sound or touch of metal, I thought. Unattractive in this hot, earthy evening, when dust and remnants of poplar fluff clung to our lips and lashes.

Again the urge to paint overcame me. No, oils wouldn’t do. It would have to be watercolors. Vague and mute, diluted into near nonexistence, brushed broadly until the paper warped and our figures distorted.

The upstairs window was empty and the door to the house was shut. The voices trailed off. I caught snippets of funeral talk. Inwardly I agreed; a sycamore wood casket would be lovely. A good, solid way to travel. Maybe Jake’s parents would order one on their way back.

2NjE3ewT

Clio Velentza lives in Athens, Greece. She’s a winner of Queen’s Ferry Press The Best Small Fictions 2016, and her work has appeared in several literary journals including (b)OINK, Corium, WhiskeyPaper, The Letters Page, Atticus Review, and Wigleaf.

 

 

 

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Chelsea Uncategorized

Nail Polish by Emma Faesi Hudelson

At first, it wasn’t about changing. It wasn’t about coping. It was about not drinking. Another hungover suicide attempt landed me in the psych ward, and I realized I couldn’t kick alcohol alone. So I went to meetings. I listened. I heard sober drunks say things like, “I try to do the next right thing. It’s nothing noble. It means making the bed. It means brushing my teeth. It means feeding the dog.” They told me to write gratitude lists. To forgive myself. To question my motives. To pray. They told me to get a sponsor. They told, and I did.

I found Charlotte.

Charlotte is old enough to be my mom. She has shoulder-length dreadlocks and straight, white teeth. She laughs a lot. She says “mmhmm,” with emphasis on the second syllable. She can pray like a preacher’s daughter and call your ex a motherfucker in the next breath. She’s heard my inventory of resentments, fears, debts, and sexual mistakes and hugged me afterwards.

In the beginning, her mantra was, “Honey, you’re okay.” I’d call her after fighting with my boyfriend and she’d say, “You’re okay.” I’d be pissed at my boss, ready to quit, and she’d say, “You’re okay.” I’d wake up anxious and she’d say, “You’re okay.” When that boyfriend left for good, I dialed her number and watched my face crumple in the mirror while I waited for her to say, “You’re okay.”

When depression left me gasping, fingers twitching toward knives, Charlotte would tell me to do my nails. I’d glare at her then—I want to die, and you’re giving me beauty tips?—but now, I get it.  A D.I.Y. manicure is like hitting “reset” on a camera. It pulls me out of my head, refocuses my lens. As usual, Charlotte was right.

So tonight, as my brain rages, telling me I’m hopeless, broken, not worth it, I won’t binge on whiskey or reach for a razor. Instead, I will paint my nails.

I will sit on the bathroom floor and choose a shade of blue from a dozen different colors, from black to pink to brown.

I will push my cuticles back and sever them with a tiny, U-shaped blade.

I will draw the brush across my left index fingernail first and feel the coolness of wet polish. I will paint three coats of color then a topcoat, just like Glamour says.

I will hold my hands in front of my lips and blow.

I will sit in stillness until they dry, careful and silent. For fifteen minutes, I’ll be okay, just like Charlotte said.

And when I stand up again, fingers tipped sapphire, ocean, stormy sky, I will be changed. Not brand-new, but better than broken.

 

EFH

Emma Faesi Hudelson teaches writing at Butler University in Indianapolis. She lives in a house by the woods with three dogs, two cats, and one husband. Her work has found homes in Booth, BUST, Linden Avenue, The Manifest-Station, and others.

 

 

 

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Chelsea Uncategorized

Us, Anywhere by Jules Archer

You made me cry on the school bus. Row two, window seat. I never truly knew what made the tears come fast and heavy. Maybe it was your awful motorcycle jacket, the one with the silly Mickey Mouse patched on the back, or maybe it was when you put your hand on my knee and squeezed. While I burned like gasoline, you made me promise to meet you beneath the bleachers that afternoon. I never did tell. What I did do was take lovers like you. Rest of my life. Lean, quiet men with gentle hands and sad, kind eyes. The snap of them made my heart break. Like yours broke, shot down in the rushing faraway jungle. Our last kiss, you held me like I was going out of  style. The homecoming crowd thundered above us. Popcorn, peanuts rained down through the slatted seats. I listened as you said we already had our home. We could be us anywhere. But young, we were young. Too young. And promises beneath bleachers never amount to anything. Only the weight of bodies atop empty beds. Stretching an arm out for a memory that won’t shut up.

 

julesa

Jules Archer likes to smell old books and drink red wine. Her work has appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, >kill author, Pank, The Butter, Foundling Review, and elsewhere. She writes to annoy you at julesjustwrite.com.