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Through the Wall “Nico,” Amari whispered, his lips brushing the rough edges of drywall that separated our bedrooms. “Niii-co. Are you there?” I was always there. Before a mouse had chewed through our shared wall in the housing complex, I had never considered that the most popular kid in the second grade slept on just the other side. I never considered that I would find him balled under the bed he also had pushed up against the wall, his sobbing interrupted only by a sharp, croaking inhalation. When I first heard Amari through the wall, I thought my hideout had been ruined. But I didn’t find Amari, the first pick in gym class. Not the nucleus to a constant orbit of girls. I found an ear framed in crumbled drywall, a mouth that confessed all the same things I could never say. Being closed in under my bed was the only way I could end my day. It felt like a time capsule, untouchable and easily forgettable. No one to taunt me, no one to pull my ponytail or piss in my apple juice. It had never even occurred to me that there could be monsters under the bed. In my house, they had free reign. Amari felt the same way. Whenever he felt his parents’ footsteps lurching upstairs, he pressed an eye against the hole in the wall, trying to find me in the dark. “Let me through, let me through!” he’d say, like I was responsible for keeping the hole too small for Amari to squeeze through when he most needed it. *** Nothing could be left unknown—not my fear of heights or Amari’s fear of clowns—not the first time I had an erection and thought I had woken up with a new appendage—not Amari’s dream of becoming an Olympic sprinter, being the fastest kid on the block and probably every block in every country in the whole world—not my fantasy to marry Nekeisha Dawson, nor Amari’s dream to hold hands with Trevor Colson, even if those things made no sense to us at the time—not Amari’s strained weeping when I asked why it sounded like his mouth was full of cotton—being treated like a diseased goat—another goddamn mouth to feed—ungrateful failure—but—nothing was too sacred for the hole in our wall. *** Sometime after Easter, I spent a night alone with my face in front of the hole, waiting for Amari to poke me awake with a ruler that never came. I woke up in a sneezing fit after midnight, knocking my head on the bed frame. The next morning I found Amari waiting for the bus. Like usual, he pretended he didn’t know me. I understood. We would have to talk about it through the wall. But that night Amari only wanted to talk about Power Rangers. About how the Green Ranger randomly shows up and fits into the existing Megazord. No one knows him, no one trusts him, but in the end, he’s there for them. We had already debated the Green Ranger. I didn’t want to rehash old news. “Amari, please…tell me,” I begged. “What’s going on?” He didn’t answer. I wouldn’t have understood anyway, not until it happened. In three days, Amari’s family was gone. Someone new moved into Amari’s room. They rearranged furniture, setting their bed on the opposite wall. No more listening ear, no more honest mouth. Now, when the lights in the other room were on, they bled into the dark sanctuary beneath my bed. *** Even if I wasn’t cocooned beneath my bed, I was still awake. I wrapped myself in bedsheets and stared at the ceiling. It felt so far. Like a cavern, or a castle hall. Through my window I could hear the chorus of traffic that was quieted under the bed. And then, like a whisper that focuses your attention in a crowd, I heard a voice. I threw off the sheets and slipped under my bed. There were whispers coming through the hole in the wall—two voices from the bed on the opposite side of the room. Two boys were talking into each other’s mouths. Something about Oh God and not yet and the occasional mm-hmm. The room was lit by a single candle, a K-Ci & JoJo cassette playing on a boom box. I had to ask what they were so excited about. Then, they didn’t seem so excited. They coughed and cursed. I asked if they were okay. Nobody wanted to answer. The boy without the pencil moustache crawled over to me, sticking his face against the grate. “Who are you?” he asked. I asked if he knew Amari. He wanted to know why. I told him Amari had gone away, but maybe Amari would visit if he knew him. The boy kneeling at the hole looked back at the boy on the bed. “You know him?” “What? I didn’t know there was a fucking hole there.” “Amari,” he said. “I thought you said we were alone.” “He’s just a kid.” The kneeling boy was on his feet now. His heel pounded into the wall, cracking the drywall. “Hey, hey, chill. What are you doing?” “You promised we were alone.” I rolled out from under the bed, where their shouting competed with the jack-hammering of a truck’s engine brake outside my window. Their argument didn’t even make sense. They were together, not alone. They were together, without a wall in between. They didn’t even have words in the way—just mouth directly to mouth. I didn’t wake up the next morning. I hadn’t fallen asleep. I waited at the kitchen table, ready to tell my mother about the hole in the wall. Jack Caseros is an Argentine-Canadian writer and environmental scientist whose creative work has appeared in cool places like Every Day Fiction, Syntax & Salt, and Drunk Monkeys. His uncreative work has appeared in drearier places, like boardrooms and government databases. He’s an Assistant Fiction Editor for Pithead Chapel and a student in Stanford’s Online Writing Certificate. You can read about how exhausted Jack is at www.jackcaseros.wordpress.com.
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1/1/2019 0 Comments Sasha by Caroline HoodSasha “I don’t know why you want a pet, Lila. You’ll probably just kill it,” Jacob, my brother, narrowed his green eyes at me. I stared at the top of his faded black head. His hair had always been a lighter black. It was almost a grey color. I sighed and turned towards the dusty window of the brown Jeep we were traveling in. Though it was difficult I could make out trees through the smudges of dust. They were oak trees, and they towered high above our car. “You know that mom thinks it is a good idea for me to have an animal. She thinks it might help with all my eccentricities,” I said. Our mother had very interesting ideas about what my brother and I were supposed to be like. They weren’t society’s ideals but rather her ideals. My differences labeled me outside of the realm of what was acceptable by her standards, and she had been attempting to fix me since I was young. My eccentricities were of course my tendency to go into fight or flight mode fairly often even when faced with non-threatening stimuli. For example, crowds made me very nervous, but that was only one of the many things that caused me anxiety. I often compared myself to an anxious guinea pig. However, to get my point across I gestured at my body. I hissed as my hand caught a strand of my black hair flinging it into my green eyes. My brother always insisted that I had beautiful features, but I wasn’t so sure. I adored his hair and his eyes. His green eyes looked like some kind of special stone you would own. Mine looked like something you would scrape off your shoe. Jacob looked ahead at the road. His tanned hands tightly gripped the steering wheel. I knew from personal experience that the bottoms of his hand were calloused due to his work in our yard. “You’re just you. That’s what makes you lovable,” Jacob said. I gave him a big smile and waved my hands in the air. He rolled his eyes. “Loveable and annoying.” I sat back in my seat and watched the trees go by. After a few minutes, I closed my eyes and relaxed into the familiar bumpiness of the car and the ever present clicking of the steering wheel. “Sis, sis.” Jacob poked me in the side. “We are here.” I grabbed his hand, and he swung me out of the Jeep. Ahead of us was a one-story brick building with a faded sign that read Hope’s Friends in navy blue lettering. “You ready for this adventure?” Jacob asked. He took my hand in his. I grasped securely onto his hand. “Bring it.” We walked towards the building. The doors creaked open, and I was assaulted by the smell of urine and feces. I scrunched up my face. Though the place was only one story it seemed that they had managed to fit a large number of animals in the inside of the building. “Let’s go that way.” I pointed to the left where there were several rows of dogs and pulled on Jacob’s hand. The first dog we came to was some kind of mixture between a Golden Retriever and a Collie. I stuck my finger into the cage to try to pet the dog. “Hi, sweetheart. Are you a boy or girl?” I asked. “She’s a girl.” A woman had come up on our right. I felt my heart rate increase at her unexpected appearance. I clenched Jacob’s hand and took deep breathes. Her brown eyes peered at me through her wide rimmed glasses. “How may I help you two?” “We’re looking for a pet for my sister,” Jacob explained. The woman tapped her pencil against the clipboard she was carrying. There appeared to be some kind of form attached to it. “Well, I am Ms. Ivory, and I can assist you.” She turned to me. “What kind of dog were you looking for?” I fidgeted underneath her gaze. “I really don’t care. Sweet and not too wild.” She tapped the pencil underneath her chin and then stuck it in her tight bun adjusting her brown hair. “Well then I have the perfect pet for you.” She led Jacob and I down the right. It was away from where we had been. It was darker this way, and the smell of urine increased. I tried to pinch my nose every so often without Ms. Ivory noticing. “Here she is,” Ms. Ivory said. She gestured to a cage where a grey Pitbull huddled in the background. She had her paws covering her nose and her head lowered to the ground. However, her eyes did flick to us as we drew near the cage. “Who is she?” I asked. Ms. Ivory placed one hand on the cage and the Pitbull whimpered and curled further in on herself. “Her name is Sasha. We don’t know much about her background. She is shy but very sweet.” Jacob chewed on his lip. “I don’t know. She seems kind of timid.” Ms. Ivory sighed. “Sadly, she is quite skittish. I am hoping that the right family will soften her up though.” I stared into Sasha’s brown eyes. They were flicking rapidly between all of us. I could particularly sense the fear radiating off of her. She and I were not that different then. I was scared of everything, and it seemed she had a certain level of fear herself. “I’ll take her,” I said. Jacob turned to me. His mouth opened partway. “Lila, you can’t be serious,” he said. “No, no I’m serious. Mom wanted to get me an animal so I would have someone to comfort me when I get nervous. What better dog to comfort me then one who knows what it is like to be scared,” I said. “Fine, it’s your decision.” Jacob turned to Ms. Ivory. “We’ll take her.” Ms. Ivory smiled. “Good, let’s go to my office.” Jacob went to Ms. Ivory’s office to fill out paperwork and then Ms. Ivory let Sasha out of her cage. Ms. Ivory handed me the leash, and Jacob and I walked towards the car. I walked behind Jacob allowing Sasha to take her time. She walked slowly with her tail between her legs. Jacob and I opened the back of the car, and Jacob hoisted Sasha in. She gave a slow whine while he had his hands on her. “You’ve got your work cut out with this one,” Jacob said. I nodded towards the Jeep. “Just drive.” We climbed into the Jeep and exited onto the road. I watched Sasha to make sure she was handling the turns well. She was curled up in a small ball in the back. Her tail was twitching slightly. What was I going to do with her? I smiled as our house came into sight. Two stories with purple peeling paint and fairy lights adjourning the yard. It was not an average house, but I liked to think that we were not average people. Jacob helped get Sasha out of the car, and I pulled her into the house and up into my bedroom. I placed her in the center of my room on top of my purple carpet. She glanced around the room. She wouldn’t be able to notice that the walls were navy blue, but I hoped that she would still find my room comforting. I sank down into my cream-colored blanket on my bed. “I’ll leave you two to get acquainted,” Jacob said. He headed down the curved steps. I stared at Sasha. She had to let me pet her. She just had to. She was going to be my dog. I slowly inched my way towards her, and she began to whine. Her right hind leg began to shake. “Okay, you don’t like that. How about this?” I lowered myself to the purple carpet and crawled towards Sasha. I had my hand over her flank, and she growled. “Not that one then.” I placed my hands on my head. “I’ll just sit here then.” I sat there. I stared at the clock as the minutes ticked by. After 30 minutes, Sasha raised her head and began crawling to where I was sitting. She placed her head within petting distance. I slowly lowered my hand and began to pet her. She did not growl. She leaned her head into my hand and made an appreciative noise. “See we got this girl. We can do life together. Just a bunch of scaredy cats learning to live life,” I said. I pulled a book off the shelf nearby and began to read while I continued to scratch Sasha. Somehow within the next hour Sasha wound up in my lap. She was a heavy thing. “Looks like you made a friend,” Jacob spoke up from the doorway. “Looks like I did,” I said. He handed me a food bowl. “You still have to feed her though.” I laughed. “I would expect nothing less.” I scratched Sasha’s head. It looked like things were settling in just fine. Caroline lives with her family and her four cats in Georgia. She can most often be found curled up with a book in her hand and chocolate and diet Dr. Pepper in front of her. Stories have helped her throughout the years and helped shape who she is. She hopes that her stories might help shine a little bit of brightness in world where it is hard to see. She is excited for you to read her books and hopes you enjoy coming on this journey with her. Jenna Post CC I Am the Word Snatcher’s Daughter I guard my alphabet from the word snatcher. He is insatiable. The snatcher abuses his family with a hunger blind to the damage it causes. Assaults leave wounds, visible and invisible. Alone, the snatcher chokes on his own lexicon, he doesn’t know how to feed himself. The snatcher’s wife is damaged too. She denies her appetites, hunger buried deep, defeat her main course. The snatcher’s family is lonely. Appetites run rampant. One of the snatcher’s sons consumes heroin. The other son of the snatcher consumes so much rage his body enlarges twice its size. The snatcher’s daughter has a hunger for books. She first whets her appetite on The Poky Little Puppy, then Harriet the Spy and Trixie Belden and when she is older, Waiting for Godot and The Price of Salt. In her teens the snatcher’s daughter discovers libraries taste delicious and autobiographies are scrumptious. As an adult the snatcher’s daughter encounters Carole Maso and Maggie Nelson, a taste of rare delicacies. Finally, the snatcher’s daughter learns some books have the taste of freedom. Rachel Newcombe is a psychoanalyst in the San Juan Islands and Seattle, Washington. Her writing has appeared in Contemporary Psychoanalysis, The Psychoanalytic Review,Fort/Da, The Rumpus, 7X7LA, Anti-Heroin Chic, Hippocampus, and elsewhere. She can be found on Twitter at @rachelnewcombe8 Karen Blakeman CC Relapse Grindr Sex these days is sometimes born from terse, laconic bursts of text, flying through the snowy air on unseen wings like little bullets of lust. That’s how I met Jim. He had given me the address of his apartment, up near Yonge and St. Clair, and I was shivering through the snow towards him listening to deep house from the bathhouses of seventies Detroit. It seemed appropriate. This was our music, after all. Music for secret trysts in dark rooms and loneliness and isolation and liberation. I was 30 days sober. But I’d already popped a stolen Viagra from my dad’s medicine cabinet to avoid embarrassment, so who’s counting? I crossed the Beltline bridge and looked with sullen apprehension at the midtown skyline, glowing dimly behind a curtain of swirling flakes. His apartment loomed like a Soviet tenement, dull yellow brick against grey, cruddy snow. I rang his door, and he buzzed me up. I searched the frail timbre of his voice for nerves or signs of cold feet. Finding nothing, I entered. The lobby had that dingy, stale, despairing smell that the accumulated cigarette smoke of decades inevitably leaves, and that no amount of bylaws or regulations will ever take away. It was a congealed, hopeless sort of smell. Yellowed terrazzo floors squeaked underfoot and a few sad palm trees lined the lobby. The melting snow slipped under my boots. On the eleventh floor a sweet-looking old lady boarded the elevator and smiled at me through her plastic reading glasses. I smiled back, marveling at the incongruity of this ancient ritual of politeness and the thoroughly post-modern sordidness of what I was doing and what I was about to do. I’m always struck by what other people could be doing and thinking, as they go about their lives: the dazzling clash of refracting worlds would blind us as we walked the streets if only we could see it. I’m not closeted, or anything like that. I’m a sort of token of diversity and inclusion among my friends. I came out the year gay marriage was legalized, and was trotted out as everybody’s first gay friend, like a debutante at a ball. Common decency and courtesy were suddenly on my side, and the sullen glares of the straight men who felt differently were easy to ignore. My friends would giggle at my breathless descriptions of my first tentative escapades, what feels like eons ago. They don’t know the whole truth, though. Nobody knows that but me. And God, if he’s paying attention. The whole truth was that I was on the seventeenth floor of a faded old building, and just down the hall in apartment 2106 someone was waiting for me. The dim flicker of fluorescent lights showed me the way down the hall. The carpet was the sort of geometric pattern that might have been fashionable in 1982, faded and stained with salt. I knocked on the door. Here was the moment of revelation. The seductive promises of a thumbnail can so often deceive. What was in store? The air trembled with our shared anticipation as the frame swung quickly open. He would do, I decided. A little fuller around the edges than the picture had led me to believe, but such small deceptions are commonplace. This would be fine. “Hey.” “Hey.” “Come on in.” He was wearing a baggy t shirt with Fuck Trump stamped in black letters, the odd ketchup stain, and striped pajama bottoms. I gauged his anxiety, and found it roughly mirrored my own. Good. The room had a familiar funk. Of cigarettes, old weed, and desperation. A political thriller flickered on the television screen, providing the only light. Clothes and inexplicable pieces of crumpled paper were scattered everywhere. Bits of stale tobacco, bottlecaps, an old metropass. That unmistakable alcoholic filth, that transcends the merely messy to speak of genuine unconcern with the bourgeois details. A mirror to a soul in equal disorder. “Want a hit?” He proffered a green plastic bong as we both sat down on the battered linen loveseat. I didn’t hesitate. The 30-day chip in my pocket didn’t save me. “Sure.” It was already batched and packed. How hospitable. I fumbled for a moment with the lighter and inhaled deeply. I’d never been much for bongs. I’d always preferred the languid smoothness of a well rolled joint. Soft, relaxed hits; not insisting, but caressing. Bongs were too harsh and immediate. But I was past caring. The old, familiar choke seized me, and the warm clutch filled my chest as I coughed. I relaxed and lay back on the couch. Soon now. I made desultory small talk for a few more minutes, as the tendrils wisped away through the fetid air, and the chemicals danced in our respective skulls. Eventually we were fucking. He was a bottom, which suited me fine. I was ragingly hard, glorying in my clever little artifice of an hour earlier. The pathetic reality is I would have been helpless without my dad’s medication. I insisted on a condom, at least. He had this annoying habit of looking up at me as I fucked him, right into my eyes. As though this meant something. “Yeah, you feel so good inside me…fuck yeah…harder.” The lame porn dialogue began to grate. I kept mum, myself. The stone was beginning, numbing me to all feeling. The effort became strenuous and forced. Even with my chemically induced erection, climax wouldn’t come without work. A drudging chore. What was I doing? Eventually I gave up. I faked an orgasm and went away to throw the empty condom out before he could see. “That was incredible.” “Mmm?” “That was incredible.” “Thanks.” Some lucid part of me rolled my eyes, mostly in self-disgust. The stone was coursing through my system now. Just as it had for eight horrible years. And suddenly I was right back where I’d been a month ago. In the blink of an eye I was a sad little stoner again, with nothing to live for and no reason to go on; alone, angry and miserable in a stranger’s apartment. I was fucking sick of this. How had I ended up here? “You want a drink?” He appeared in the hallway with two glasses of whiskey on the rocks. Jack Daniels, from the smell of it. If it had been scotch, I might have been tempted, because I’m a pretentious cunt. He extended the glass with his shoulders hunched. He had a strong disease in his soul, I realized, but I could recognize the symptoms because they were my own. His whole apartment was like home to me. It even smelled familiar, like month old laundry and stale sweat and closed windows. Filthy, unkempt, and pathetic. Like us both. “No.” As though that made everything ok. “Suit yourself.” And he drained my glass with a practiced motion. We sat down again. “I guess I should tell you something.” “Oh?” His face took on a deer-in-the-headlights fear. I realized he thought I had HIV. “I’m in AA.” “Oh.” Relief flooded his eyes, before eventually being replaced by a sullen apprehension at what was coming next. “Oh, ok.” “This was a relapse for me.” “Oh. Sorry.” “Why?” “I don’t know.” He really didn’t, and neither did I, but it certainly felt like the appropriate response. “I just feel like shit now.” “You and me both.” We looked at each other glumly. It turned out he’d been to the same treatment center as I had. Not only that, but it turned out the nightmare had finally happened, and I’d fucked someone from my WASPy little social circle. We swapped names, places, and stories. We laughed uproariously. We skirted around the dangerous characters we both knew from the drug trade. He ranted about Dick Cheney and the American fascists. He was angry, he was drunk, he was scared, and he was alone. His parents were slowly cutting him off, he couldn’t hold down a job, and he wanted to die. I could relate. We talked for four hours. I didn't cry until I was in the elevator heading back out into the snowy night. I wracked my brain for a reason I could tell myself I had done this sordid thing, other than the obvious certainty, when he texted, that he would have drugs. I couldn't think of anything. If I think of a reason, I’ll let you know. I twitched and shivered in the cold, the rush of icy January wind dispelling my high like so much smoke in the breeze. I tried not to think of the obscure motive force hanging over me, the inexplicable drive, whipping me to seek escape. I tried not to think of the shame of facing the people who had tried to help me, who I’d let down again. I tried not to think of the love I had abandoned that summer in the cool rain outside Spadina station. To get sober, of all things. I tried not to think of the other boy, the sweet boy who had loved me, stood by me, done drugs with me, protected me and sheltered me from the wrath of my parents, and never, ever judged me. And who I had betrayed. With this little escapade, and with others. I tried not to think about what I was going to do now. What he was doing now. He seemed to be doing well, from what I’d heard. A new boyfriend. A new life. No more worrying about me. But when I took a good look at myself, I couldn’t blame him. When I looked at how I was dancing to the tune called by the apps, at the panoply of my inexplicable compulsions, I realized that I was looking for what I thought I deserved. And that was a lot less than love. Jim came to a meeting with me the next day, and watched me pick up a desire chip. It’s been three years of sobriety since then, and I haven’t seen him since. He’s probably still out there somewhere, but who knows, maybe Grindr brought a guy to God? Maybe someday I’ll see him in the rooms transformed. Maybe in this fucked up, aimless, miserable universe, a tool of reckless, weaponized desire, of what an earlier era would have called evil, can be used to share the light with someone, and to heal one poor kid’s soul with the festering wounds of another. A kind of spiritual penicillin. Maybe then my insane compulsions will be justified and forgiven by this higher power they speak of. Or maybe just by myself. Maybe then I'll deserve love. If not God’s, and if not that of another man, then maybe my own love. For myself. What seems to be the hardest kind of all to give. Nicholas Pullen was born and raised in Toronto, and has spent the last decade bouncing around the settler colonial world to Oxford, to London, to Ottawa, to Montreal, and most recently to Quebec City, where he shivers in the dark, works hard to improve his French, clocks in for the government and writes to make use of the solitude. He has a BA in history from Somerville College, Oxford University, and an MA in history from McGill. He is gay, and a good friend of Bill's. |
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