Eric Sonstroem CC



​
Car smells like hot gatorade


Lately, I have this dream where a friend in a trenchcoat is telling someone in a Jason mask --

 "Not her." 

I can make out his leg bouncing under a wooden picnic table and a bag of white wine, sliding into my lap.

It's Halloween, and the waitress is so pissed she isn't even mean to us like usual. We always tip her at least 20 percent, except recently we found out Sarah has been totally stiffing her, which is why Halloween this year is very controversial. Our friend group waddled down to seven, with the other five leaving the group chat.

Whether or not our waitress deserved an extra two bucks, who can say? 

I can't say much. I used to like to steal strawberry jam packets from here, but someone noticed once and decided to fall in love, so I had to stop. Tonight, I told myself I was going to get a grilled cheese and tip five dollars. Instead, I got an omelette I couldn't finish, so I had to leave it in Sam's car alongside her mountains of receipts and pop bottles. 

Sam and I aren't very close, but she thinks it's really funny when I tell her --

"We're moving to Michigan because everyone is so nice here."

Earlier today, I was working this job where all I do is float between two entrances and tell strangers --

"Hi, Here is your gallery ticket, madam." 

Then she usually says how she's so excited to come in and has been waiting all her life to come. You can tell by her face she isn't lying, sadly. Most of them coming in feel the same to me. Nice new car, big tires, choose your plates: California, Texas, Florida, Conneticut, New York, whatever. I also work at a chain furniture store on the weekends, and I see a lot of license plates from California, there too, actually.

Someone once told me Michigan has the highest # of vanity plates in the country. 

His 2014 Honda has new plates, someone told me. His plates say ILOVEDOU. There used to be a blue car that passed by my aunt's house late at night and the plates said --

"IM SORRY FOR 
 FALLING IN LOVE." 

But like, ISF FILV. 

Sometimes, they also said other things, she said to me.
         
She went to Haven View after, for a few weeks. I used to go to therapy twice a week there, when I was a kid. When I visited her last week, her body looked tired, still, against the grey office chairs. She said,
     
"Angelina, you need to be safe this Halloween."

I know. 
I know that the world isn't about me now.

A full moon hangs out above all of us as we walk to the next bar. There is a very beautiful woman dressed like a chandelier spinning to D12 in someone else's front yard. I don't think she's a chandelier. Neither does Aubrey, our only real DD. I'm already spinning myself, and Katie and I are talking about ancient dinosaurs with an older man smoking a cigarette. 

"I only know one dinosaur, the pterodactyl,"

I say this too loud and then I bump into some guy at the entrance, who then buys Katie a ten dollar sour at a dive bar. Damien finally shows up, and the first thing he says is --
     
"Angie, I hate to break this to you, but they aren't technically dinosaurs."

Patrick's friends I don't know hit on us, telling us more facts about dinosaurs, and we tell them Wrong Girls and they smile. We let them sit with us, though. One of them buys Aubrey a song on TouchTunes instead of a drink. I get nothing! I don't need anything. There are already three Rum and Ginger Beers in my stomach, and one I forgot in a gas station cup in his car. They are disgusting. 

Everyone keeps asking me why I didn't just get a normal rum and coke. Anthony says I should have gotten a dark and stormy. I don't know what that means. But I do know everyone is also saying this Halloween is colder than last year, which is weird because it was almost 70 last week, I swear, but none of us are wearing coats, except for Jamie, because it's part of his costume.

Jamie is three years older than me, but I'm the youngest in the group, still, after two years. He has been known to scare other people. Not because he's scary, but because he can get very loud. Whenever I call him about my aunt late at night, I instead picture his hands in my hair. I'm surprised he went out with us tonight. He's been hungover all week.

Earlier today, when someone tried to cut in front of Anthony, who was holding a spot for us in the line at the JoAnn's earlier, he started talking really loudly about how we should all start exercising our Second Amendment rights more. I then blurted out how I used to go deer hunting because I did not pick up on the social cue that he was threatening the couple in front of us. 

Later, when we got back into Samantha's car, heading to Ypsilanti, he played this Pity Sex song I showed him. I played Aaliyah after, and someone in the backseat said 
     
"Guys, neither of these are Halloween songs." 
 
Then everyone else got out of the car and he said, 

"I gotta show you something later tonight." 
        
I said -- 

"I'm freezing."

He said --

"Angelina, I know it's chilly. But if we walk twenty minutes with everyone, then we can drive forty minutes in my car to Detroit instead of making Sam drive all the way to Belleville and back. It just makes more sense this way."

"Can I play the Drive soundtrack again?"

He smiles.
   
I have never owned a car in Michigan. Everyone asks me how I get anywhere. Once or twice, I got very sad, and I had to walk on the side of the road for hours where the sidewalk became just patches of tired brown grass littered with whippet containers, and once some guy rolled his window down and asked me if I was okay, did I need a ride? No, I said. I saw him at the grocery store a few months later with his wife and I realized some people are just good people, still. I really do know that the world isn't about me now.
  
But I still don't want to own a car. 

But if I did own one, it would probably smell like hot gatorade.
​


​

Phoenix Alaska is a writer and musician from Michigan. Their work has appeared in Misery Tourism, Michigan City Review of Books, and notably in this year's celebration of PoetTreeTown in Washtenaw County. You can find more of their work at phoenixalaska.com. If you like this story, please buy them a Ko-fi, they don't drink much Gatorade.
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John Buie CC




Atonement

      My mother stops the station wagon along the shoreline, leaving her shoes in the gravel. She marches towards the water, waves me over, and points at a seam in the air.

        Remember this! she yells. No two sunsets were ever alike! Now I know how calling out a moment can force a memory. 

        The sea rolls beyond us like blue pebbled leather. For a moment, her body eclipses the sun, her figure both invisible and haloed in light, before she turns back, rubbing warmth back into her arms.  Until then, I’d had no idea that a mother could be a person at all.

​


Brigid M. Hughes is a writer from San Francisco whose work has appeared in The Rumpus, Quiet Lightening, Memoir Magazine, the anthology Being Fifteen edited by Dave Eggers. She was recently shortlisted for the 2025 New Flash Fiction Review prize. She holds an MFA from the University of San Francis
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Bob CC


​

How to Return to Neverland Before Turning Twenty

When you hear the soft sound of tapping against your bedroom window, don’t panic. Instead, crack your bird-bone fingers once before you swing your spindly limbs out of bed faster than you learned how to count to three. It does you well to remember why you’re letting him in, after all. Plus, you already know how insufferable he can be if he’s left waiting for too long.

Open the window and watch the way he soars through the room like Icarus, infinite, illuminated, innocent in the way only children can be as they bounce back and forth in beds, backseats, and restaurant booths. Always awaiting their next adventure. Listen to his laughter, sweeter than the cotton candy comet dust circling through the cosmos and accept that tonight, you might finally take him up on his offer. Tonight, Neverland no longer seems like a honey-drenched dream destined to dissipate as soon as the clock strikes twelve. No, tonight it is tangible, like slipping your foot into the glistening glass slipper, a fit once thought impossible, now made true.

When Peter suddenly stops his endless spinning and extends his hand towards you, contemplate your options the way your mother always taught you to do. Think of brushing him off and returning back to your routine of reciting the periodic table of elements before you go to sleep to avoid thinking about how the promises carved into your father’s palms crinkle more as each day passes, about your mother’s more salt than pepper black curls, about spending your days caressing creased photographs and wishing you were still ten and not almost twenty. Think of intertwining your bony fingers with his and feeling featherlight for just a second, minutes, hours, your brittle body brimming with all of the possibilities and promises you once carried in your pockets like coins until you grew older and tossed them into the fountain to forget that they were never yours to keep. Stare straight into his sea-glass green eyes, at the cedar-colored freckles dusting his ruby-red cheeks, at his charmingly crooked grin and make your choice.

Tangle your fingers together. Relish the lightness of your limbs, the long-forgotten taste of butterscotch candy that floods your tongue, the look Peter gives you that whispers you are no longer a disappointment but a dreamer, doer, don’t you dare look back. Take his advice and slip out of your room without stopping to check if you put away the thousand-year-old photographs of you with your parents scattered all over your bed, the kind where everything was picture-perfect and your mother’s hair was still midnight-black and your father still looked at you with love and not loathing.

Let go of his hand as soon as you feel the wind caressing your snow-pellet soft skin. Embrace it like the homecoming it is. Watch as the rusty roofs and chipped sidewalks grow smaller while the constellations grow closer with every breath you take. Fly until you catch sight of Neverland. Stare at the branches and the brambles and think of the sweet scent of blueberry pie that clung onto your clothes the summer when you were seven and spent all of your time learning how to bake with your mother. Think of building blanket forts in the backyard with your father, the way he’d utter all of the things that you could be with wonder as your five-year-old limbs swayed to playground hymns only you could hear. Think of everything you could have been and never were. When Peter gently squeezes your wiry wrist, silently asking are you sure about this, squeeze back. Your father always taught you to be decisive, after all.

Follow him as he floats past the chipped sidewalks you and your mother used to make beautiful with chalk illustrations, past the movie theater you’d visit every weekend with your father, past the rollerskating rink and the splashing sprinklers and all of the places where you were once happy and holy. And when you stand in front of your childhood home under the pinwheeled sky of open-lettered stars, with your mother’s onyx hair and your father’s crescent moon mouth curled up into a million-watt smile bathed in the porch’s warm golden light, close your eyes. Breathe in the scent of stardust and turn back the sands of your hourglass hips. Let yourself be six and eight and ten and twelve, all twinkle-toed with rainbow loom bracelets wrapped around both of your wrists. Open your eyes when you feel your parents embrace your spindly-limbed eleven-year-old self. Watch as they twine their wing-thin fingers with yours. And when they start to walk you inside as they tell you all about the seat they saved for you at the kitchen table, turn around and look at Peter, at the boy who dances with the dandelion fibers, who spins the stars on his fingernails, who brought you back to life:

Nod and finally accept his offer.



​
Luna Vallejo is a twenty-year-old writer hailing from New York who enjoys incorporating alliteration in her work, listening to music, and reading. She is currently double-majoring in communications and history and serves as the Creative Writing Team Manager for The Incandescent Review. You can find Luna's work published in Kalopsia Lit and Moonflake Press.

Ben Seidelman CC




Spark

He’s framed like a Botticelli painting, you think. Long face, twitch of glamour smirking untold secrets of Bosch-like dwellings. You think that maybe this person has seen both Heaven and Hell, a kaleidoscope of both; he’s juxtaposed in the paradox, a mandorla, the centre of wisdom itself. He’ll make you poached eggs and fuck you hard in a cemetery. Above the din though, it’s difficult to make an educated assumption.
    The slope of his neck suggests humour high in capacity for self-deprecation, but that outfit screams otherwise. He wears the dress, shroud of silky silence.
    You clock eyes. Swamp green and boggy as the future. But… There’s a head thrown back in laughter-
There. It. Is. 
A spark of some kind of hidden honour; a myriad of technicolour and a penchant for the absurd. A pronounced Adam’s apple like a plum of evil, but jawline laced with kindness. If you could smell him, he would smell like pencil sharpening and earth. An alchemical mix of kink and wholesomeness in one fruit.
Ah, you think.
    You could have it all. 
    An old tenement in a faraway village, at the foot of the Campsie Hills. You could mix saliva, genitals, an atom bomb of DNA that could produce your ‘something else’. You picture how he speaks, how he educates, like a weary deity that’s so tired of this place, his lane, this terrain; dishevelled and frankly, boring. You have both outgrown this circus in pursuit of something bigger.
    Your spawn. You can see them now; their golden blonde heads bobbing in the waves of your domestic spells of homegrown rosemary and potatoes; the kinds of foods that you never used to allow yourself to eat. You take pleasure in simple things these days. The weight of your iMac, magnet to your kitchen table, the many meals with your ersatz children, tangled in their strangled flaxen hair. The rapturous joy when your dog - a Labrador? something like that, yes - walks at your heel, instead of dragging you along, much like life. How your children brush each other's heads when one scrapes their knee. See? 
See? 
Look what we did. 
The only thing that will ever guarantee your legacy because you’re pedalling against the grain - You. Got. Lazy, you know - you were told you could 
only teach. 
Those who don’t

Breed. 

But you are happy, fermenting in your town. You think:
This is enough
This is enough
This is enough
A mantra you hum like a tired bumblebee, martyrs together, the hive has given up honey for the more noble pursuit of never dying. You content yourself with gluey butternut squash risottos, and panting orgasms every second week, hurried like unkept promises. Your friends still ask you how you are and the children sing it for you instead. Speak over your once shrill, untamed protests, calling for
more
more
more
in every interlude of chaos. 
Your children are the new type of nursery rhyme that scream of peace. Black sheep that don’t get bullied.

    But no. You’re happy. Happy, you tell yourself. You awake each morning to smiling arms and soft cheeks that smell like spilt milk. Your life runs like a carousel but no one ever gets off. Except old Dorothy down the road. An elephant grey menhir at the end of your garden track, back arched like a threatened cat over her zimmer frame, crooked pose against the roses. When you didn’t see her for a year you didn’t think too much of it, only worried fuzzily about your dog with her yeasty ears, and how the boys don’t ask you how you are yet. What age is empathy supposed to develop? Frantic Google quests at 5am with whisky breath (wheezed out the wrong side of bed) you ask things like:
      How to spice up the bedroom
                                   Heard Depp defamation
                   Symptoms of depression
                                                     Proper ways to make curry
                                                                                                      How to bury a dog
                                                                                                                     Girl-on-girl    
    And then Dorothy was dead. A skeleton found in an armchair, fraught with parmesan cheese skin flakes; and you never even got past, “the days are fair drawing in.” Tight smiles all around. 
    But the hills, they have a mellow temperament. Permanent and true. They anchor you in this ocean of routine and breezy practicality, school runs and feigned civility. Your pinky’s getting sore from all the soaring over tea, clipped syllables, stifled giggles about stuff you could never say. You find shopping lists scrawled in coat pockets, to-do lists in drawers, half-baked poetry, detailing people you will never be.
      Gouda cheese from the Hebrides.
      A five-man tent.
                    A better barbecue.
      And somewhere, small, scrawled in the corner of a journal, 
      anal beads.
The minutiae, marginalia, such a tease.

      Bin them. 

You get an allotment with him instead. A real dream you fall into through some rabbit hole that was meant for someone more established than you. Here. In this paradise. You are still outsiders in this town but this might give you a chance to focus on growing something other than your own ennui. 
    The rhubarb is all that ever grows, limp and uneasy; insipid pink as your couch. You picked it from Ikea. You wade from dinner to dinner chastising them all, and flagellating yourself with E numbers and the knowledge of things you wish you never knew. You writhe in homemade macaroni, all you want is cardboard Pot Noodle but you have

                        Responsibilities 
                        Now.

But you watch their golden heads bobbing, asking obscenities like: 
“Will the sky fall down?”
“Why isn’t Hammy moving?”
                                                                   “What is time?”
“When did you and Daddy meet?”
And you think of him, as he is now, framed like a beacon. Untouched, untarnished, by this wisdom you have garnered by the crook of his nose, the half upturn of his smile. The lack of filter.
     Actually-
     Now you look at it, he might be a Right Wrong’un. So you sigh the long sigh of a tired oracle

and swipe left.

​


Jess McColl is a writer and poet from Glasgow, Scotland. She holds a First-Class BA in Creative Writing and is currently learning the craft of psychotherapy. She loves the bittersweet alchemy of spinning tears into gold, and can often be found collecting the city’s stories through a hearing trumpet alongside her bonny collie dog, Rapha.

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Martin Cathrae CC




GUTTED

    Most mornings, I walk about three or four miles on Whitehall Road. Not the one in London, although who knows whether that was on the mind of whoever named these winding rural byways long before they were paved or trafficked by automobiles? Even now, most vehicles are old farm trucks, tractors, and Amish buggies. I can do my miles without seeing a human or a car. Our small farm sits a half-mile off Whitehall, at the end of a gravel drive, so my walk begins with the lane, and at our mailboxes I decide whether to go left or right.
   Little changes. The seasons roll on with their indifferent regularity, their inexorable unspooling toward our individual demise and, it seems lately, our collective extinction. 
    I pass the two other homes on our lane. We are somewhat of a small village, and we’re friendly but not friends. We buy eggs and beef from Donna; we pay Jay’s kids to feed our chickens and dogs when we’re away. Tornadoes come through central Kentucky in season, and if one ever strikes directly, we know Donna and Victor have a basement we can go to. We do not, and our small modular home is vulnerable.
    It's the last week of summer and some leaves have begun to fall on the lane, fluttering down with their balletic grace, then lying helplessly to be mashed by feet or vehicles. Most are brown, but here and there a bright vermillion one reclines as if showing off amongst the others. These red and orange leaves will soon adorn all the trees. The first ones I see, in late August, make me sad. Another summer gone, and time will not stop. Its disregard of us mortals who, aware of our death, want to grab and hold onto youth, to the sap flowing through us, just a bit longer, seems cruel. 
   We live in a part of Kentucky where rolling hills are interspersed with cedar and oak forests. Just outside the Bluegrass with its thoroughbreds and millionaires. The soil here has been stripped by tobacco farming and is mostly good for grazing cattle and sheep. Along the lane, the neighbors’ goats cavort, the dogs bark as if I don’t walk by every day, and the long row of sunflowers that just a week ago nodded against the blue sky now hang their heads, their stalks bent over as if they’ve carried their burdens too long and are ready to decompose. As if they accept the inevitable end of their sun-saluting prime.
    I turn left at the end of the lane and head up a steep incline toward the farmer lady’s house. We know her name; it’s Mrs. Hardin, but we’ve called her the farmer lady for fifteen years. Mr. Hardin died on the lane when his tractor rolled onto him, a few years after we moved to our farm. He was a crusty, unsmiling man who asked for my husband when he came by with a question, as if only men could talk about anything that mattered.
    Sometimes now, her little terrier runs out barking and tries to follow me, but I turn and tell him to go home and he does. He looks like Toto. Whitehall is barely a road; about ten feet wide, so when two vehicles pass, one has to pull into the weeds along the side; there is no shoulder. When I’m walking and a truck comes along, I step right to the edge of the pavement, because the weeds are full of poison ivy. Today the tall grasses along the road have grown back and are leaning toward one another from each side as if they are spectators at a parade craning to see when the bands will start to arrive. They swish against the sides of a car coming through like brushes at the carwash.
     Just at the top of the hill, I see a carcass of something, smaller than a deer, and hope it’s not the little dog. But, no, it’s bigger. Could it be a fox? Then I realize, it is a deer, just a very small one. A baby. It’s lying on its side, legs spread out as if asleep, its eyes wide open. I gather it was hit overnight since there’s no odor of decay. But its torso has been ripped open, and all that remains are the ribs of the tiny creature, picked clean by the turkey buzzards that hover around the farms, cluster in the dead branches of trees like morticians or Halloween decorations, mocking us for thinking anything will last.
     “Gutted.” The word forms in my consciousness. After I pass, the vultures will be back, devouring the eyes, the brain, the delicate legs. Was it following its mother as the fawns do, hesitating before crossing so that a car speeding along clipped it and left it, not smashed but mortally wounded? Did the doe come back? Or did she continue on, leaving the baby on the road?
    People say they’re “gutted” when something bad happens to them, when someone dies, when they get shocking news. Just like for several years, they’d say, “I have no words,” and then just “no words.” How can that be comforting? The reality is that when tragedy comes, most people have too many words, or the wrong ones.
      But have these people who say they are gutted ever seen something like this? Freshly cleaned of all its organs, its heart, its intestines, its liver, its lungs? No doubt these are the most tasty bits. Hollow and bereft of anything but bones between its neck and its hindquarters? This is gutted.
     And when have I ever felt like that? Felt as if my core has been violently plucked and twisted out of me by hungry devouring beaks and claws? Felt as if the wind would blow right through me? Never. Never yet.
     Was I gutted when my mother died in her sleep and I was only five? When my brother and sister became alcoholics? When my sons did? When my marriage ended? When my best friends died, one and then another? 
     Castenada wrote that Don Juan told him that having children tore a hole in your side that broke your connection with the luminosity of the world. Paul Simon sang that losing love is “like a window in your heart, everybody sees you’re blown apart,” and there was a time when that metaphor appealed to me.
      But most of my grief has stayed in my head. My viscera remain intact.
     I am so sheltered from the forces that annihilate that I can barely imagine the suffering in most of the world. The baby deer, I think, or hope, didn’t suffer. It’s been spared from the merciless aim of the hunters that live all around me. 
      I walk on. Everything is as it was yesterday and will be tomorrow, with small exceptions that I note, sometimes with awe and other times with grief. The wooly mullein plant has grown huge, its olive-green fuzzy leaves like rabbit ears coiling neatly around its roseate core. I love the symmetry of nature and I love the randomness equally. The chicory has flowered in the September sunshine, its small purple blossoms a flag of protest against the waning season. Goldenrod waves in clusters, its beauty belying its menace, a harbinger of fall allergies. 
     A red-tailed hawk mocks the horror of the buzzards with its grace and nut-brown beauty. A woodpecker hammers away just out of sight. Always I have come back from grief and loss, turned from death’s menacing jaws to the world around me. Always I have dragged myself back to life with the small reassurance that although I will lose or leave everyone I love, life itself will go on. These fenceposts erected a hundred years ago, now weathered and hollow, will pass into the earth, these saplings will one day shade the roadside for other walkers. The offspring of these birds and butterflies and creatures that outnumber us a thousand-fold will still be here, most likely even after humans have carved ourselves and one another out of existence. 

​


Cindy is a retired Unitarian minister. She has an MFA in Fiction from Spalding University in Louisville, KY. A native of New Jersey, sometimes she wakes up and wonders what she's doing on a farm in rural Kentucky! She has four grown children, two boys who have been in recovery for ten and fifteen years, a daughter, and a bonus son whose mother, her niece, overdosed when Seth, now 21, was starting college. She and her husband have raised Seth, who is autistic,  since he was three. She likes to read, write, walk, dance, and cook... not all at the same time.
​

Cindy Shebley CC




Winner Winner

My mother-in-law called me after Travis' death and asked for his ashes. This might have seemed like a reasonable request, but her actual words were  “Someday when you’re remarried and have moved on, you’ll shove his ashes in the back of your closet”. Ten years later, I can honestly say, I would never have done that.  Regardless, that comment has become embedded in my mind as a deep-seated fear of moving forward. 

A decade feels like something you should celebrate. Or maybe commemorate is a better word? At least, something you should mark somehow. No one ever tells you how to navigate such an anniversary; or even what to call it, but for some reason I feel drawn to the idea of doing something. 

My Generalized Anxiety Disorder and Major Depressive Disorder really start to dance every December. Despite being heavily medicated, I can never quite get a handle on them in the midst of short days and increased darkness. When the air stings and the holidays loom. Everyone’s excitement, a frigid reminder of losing my husband to suicide.

December 7th, a date which will live in infamy.* For years I spent this death anniversary watching Pearl Harbor documentaries in bed; comfortably numb, using the black and white pictures to staunch the bleeding of memories into the present. Over the years, though, the memories have begun to seep through the walls I built to compartmentalize. 

Baking holiday cookies with my grandma somehow now only reminds me of Travis’ funeral. A tiny snippet that’s clawed its way to the surface of my memory. As I pour the dry ingredients into the bowl and turn on the mixer, I picture myself standing in front of his body. I can hear my grandma whisper “You can hold his hand if you want to”. Wisdom passed from one generation of widows to the next. It feels sacred. I take his gloved hand in mine. The black driving gloves, meant to hide the bruising of his shattered hands; broken in the fall. 

Travis was an avid poker player. He taught me how to play black jack, roulette and craps. Casinos were a second home to us and Las Vegas our favorite destination. So, when our marriage was suffering, it wasn’t really a surprise that that’s where he’d go in search of hope. “I took all the money and bet it on red” he told me from the other end of the phone as he paced the hotel balcony. I sat, absolutely silent, as he explained how the ball had landed on black. From over a thousand miles away, I pleaded with him.

“Just come home. We'll figure it out,” I lied.. Less than an hour later, I’d get a call from the Clark County Coroner’s Office. 

The idea of visiting a casino, any casino, after all these years makes me feel some sort of way. In fact, I am fucking terrified. Terrified that a deluge of memories is imminent and I’ll drown in the muck of it all. That bringing my second husband into this space means I’ve somehow forgotten. As though anyone could forget having chunks of their heart gnawed away by grief. 

Despite being terrified, I’m drawn to the casino in a way that feels primal. The walls I’ve built between the past and present are beginning to crumble and I’m desperate for some form of resolution. In this case, resolution stinks of camel lights, old lady perfume and desperation so syrupy thick you can taste it. It’s a familiar scent. One that smells alive. 

As we walk in, lights whirl and pirouette across the casino floor. The machines ching and clang; a cacophony of bells and more bells. The anticipation is palpable and sings in sharp contrast to the people who are actually sitting at the slots. In a haze of gray sweatshirts and cigarette smoke, they tap, tap, tap the buttons, oblivious to the chaos of sights and sounds that surrounds them. 

We make our way to the sportsbook and I feel an unexpected sense of calm as we bet on the Vikings to win over Green Bay. Travis was a huge Vikings fan and it feels cathartic that my first foray back into this world of betting honors that. The visit is so surprisingly mundane. We watch the Vikings win the game. We drink drinks. We order food and chat with strangers at the bar. Life happens like this sometimes I think, especially when you have a tendency to catastrophize. Sometimes we face our biggest fears and nothing happens. We collect our winnings and make our way to the car. There is no catastrophic event. No breakdown. Not even tears. Maybe that all comes later, but for today, things are okay. 


​
*Franklin D. Roosevelt's famous "Day of Infamy".



Ashley Olien is an emerging writer, poet and member of the Sustenance Writing Community. She received her MA from the University of Minnesota (Twin Cities). Find her on Instagram: @ashley_olien 

Carl Wycoff CC



​
I Am Needy


It's disappointing.
Seeing who I used to be and feeling like that person wouldn't care to be friends with the person I am now. She wouldn't even recognize this person as identical in a mirror, 
because we're not.

Now I'm more quiet.
Now I barely talk to anyone.
And worst of all:
Now I am needy.

I used to naturally become the center of attention in a room and would orchestrate that spotlight in such a way that would leave people around me charmed and enamored. It felt like a superpower I could wield around like a wand at times, "Now I'm friends with you! And you! And you!"

There were so many days filled with plans, interest and wanting to know what this Me is like in hopes some of my nature would rub off onto them.

Now I lay in bed at 10:41am, staring out at a big window that reveals the backyard. 

I sit in my quiet. No whirlwind of charisma. No sounds of laughter or agreement or awe. Just the distant hum of a lawnmower outside. 

It's a strange thing. When you're doing great and the world is a happy blur, you don't stop to look around and soak in those moments, or maybe I just didn't. 

The love, the care, the feeling of taking up space unapologetically. I remember twirling friends on the dance floor and hiking up Enchantment Rock while talking about the deep theories on life. How people would be so mesmerized by this. "She's surprisingly smart for being so pretty!" 

That gold star stuck for so long, so well onto me, that I almost forgot that the stickiness fades.

These current times, these current years, these current 2,190 days, I soak and I soak and I soak until I'm drowning in my loneliness, going over every little piece as if my fingers could run over it and even feel it. If they could, I imagine it'd be prickly and warm.

Who is this shell of a person now who takes my place in this bed? I used to think all of my performances were validation-seeking and maybe they are. But now I even miss that so much. 

My circle gets tinier and tinier as I spin down the drain. I start to think that people only love you when you're shiny and sparkling and when you become less so, when I become a real human, they all disappear.

"She was so happy, I never expected this" they'll say in the fantasy I overplay in my mind again and again. How I love this fantasy. The one where I'm dead and people react to the news. 

I often daydream of their faces when they look back at how they treated me when I wasn't the sparkling firecracker bouncing its light onto others. When I wasn't making their lives easier; filling their world with confidence.

Only mine now is hard. While they venture out into new experiences, I lay here, looking at the blue peeking between the trees. The neighbor has now decided to use a weed wacker instead.

Would they think about how they should've been there for me? How they should've treated me better? Would they look back at all my kind messages and see how little they gave back? Would they see my attempts at connection that are met with nothing in return? 

It doesn't escape me that this fantasy is one of revenge. Yet the fact that I could never view the outcome because I'd, well, be dead, is part of what leaves it to stay in fantasyland. It makes me wonder though, if I was given a genuine opportunity of a lifetime (ha ha) to be able to see their faces after, would I do it?

I could've been a singer in a band, a well known artist maybe. A fashion designer. A plushie designer. I could've been a journalist. I could've been so many different truths brimming with hopes and dreams. But I lack the prerequisite. I always do.

I always fall short when it comes to becoming something worthy of love. I wish so badly that I could turn back the clock or better yet, be born into a new body with a new family who when I’m growing up, forces me to be who I'm meant to be and refuses to see me believe I'm any less. The family that cares about grades, cares about curfews, the parents who care about where their daughter went when she runs away for days on end.

But in this current life, instead I feel so small. So fragile. So stunted. 

In the fantasy, as I drown, I push further towards the deep end so that I won't wash up to sea ever again. I fight the innate will to live and I win and for once I am free.

These are thoughts my therapist tells me shouldn't stay. But what is there to change them? More time between the same white walls? Hours upon hours spent in silence with no human interaction? It feels almost cruel to take away my sliver of peace. 

Who cares if it's vengeful? I'm not acting on it and even if I did, nobody would even notice me enough to see the signs!

People make it loud and clear that while they speak of positivity, mental health and being a good friend, that they don't in fact like when someone becomes a person who needs them.

So now I'm more quiet.
Now I barely talk to anyone.
And worst of all:
Now I am needy.

​


Michelle Lee Aguilar is a writer from San Antonio, Texas. She crafts short non-fiction works and lyric essays exploring themes of deep isolation, mental health and personal growth; building structured philosophies based on her own personal experiences. Rooted in realness, sharp observation and at times, dark humor, her writing uses unconventional formatting to capture the precise shape of internal states. She is currently focused on building her independent voice and sharing authentic, creative narratives.

​

Paul Sableman CC



​
Miracle on the Garage Floor: A Memoir of Caregiving and Coercive Control 


The day my father rubber-bands a handwritten “Notice to Vacate” to the front doorknob, I have been my mother’s primary caretaker for seven weeks and the world has shut down from COVID. She has COPD, congestive heart failure, and advanced Parkinson’s. Ten days prior, he’d called police to come out and evict me.


The reason for that call was because he shouted at her for there being a cartoon on her phone when he borrowed it to save minute usage on his personal cell. He doesn’t know how to use an iPhone and was infuriated the call screen wasn’t available to him because she’d been watching a cartoon. 


“I’m sick of this bullshit!” he screamed as I stood in the kitchen making soup. He shoved the phone back at her so she could try to return it to the call screen. I said, “It is her phone.” He found his Tracfone, and called police. Within the hour, he called them a second time when they still hadn’t arrived. They told him they weren’t evicting anyone in a pandemic, especially since I was my mother’s caretaker.


Prior to making this visit, I’d been away from my childhood home for five years, since July after my first year of graduate school. That night, I’d returned home with my niece after a movie across the river. My father was in sour spirits for everything, or nothing much. “Is everything okay?” I asked.


Refusing to look at me, he screamed at my mother that I had been visiting one of his tenants, Randy, who by then was a friend of almost 24 years. I repeated to him that we only watch movies together. He boomed that I was nothing but trouble, “Always have been!” He lurched forward, swung out and struck me, and then called police. Upon arrival, one of the deputies asked me quietly in the driveway, “Do you think your daddy has dementia?” The deputy offered to give me the number to the local domestic violence shelter. But I’ve volunteered at shelters,  and know their resources are often limited. I didn’t want to use resources needed by others. So I got a hotel room that night. I didn’t return for five years until late February when I came back to visit my mother, who in FaceTime calls, I’d observed ailing health. During the visit, I saw her declining health and his, and decided to stay to care for them.


- 


Two and a half years ago, when I was in a PhD program in Wisconsin, my mother had a heart attack. She’d just been discharged from the hospital where doctors, concerned about my father’s insistence that she be discharged as soon as possible, made clear to him that any travel was ill advised. But he insisted that there was a house in Florida he needed to sell. Then his church tried to intervene. My father didn’t care: “I don’t see any difference in her sitting in a chair in Virginia or one in Florida and I need to get to Florida.” The afternoon as she prepared to leave, she fell in the floor from a heart attack. Thankfully, Randy was there. My father didn’t want to call emergency services. But Randy insisted. She was airlifted to Richmond where she had heart surgery. While there, she confessed to a social worker who documented that my father “throws things” at her when they’re alone.The same medical record has a note from a separate physician that they have serious concerns about the spouse’s ability to care for patient.


Now, after heart surgery and two hip fractures, as well as Parkinson’s that has rapidly advanced, mom is confined to a wheelchair and must use a portable toilet. When I arrive in late February, at first, my father is grateful to me. He’s been freed, he says.


A few days into my stay mom and I are in the library. She tells me she’s afraid for the security of her own long term health care. He recently showed her a bank statement in his name alone. “That’s a million dollar balance,” he’d nodded. The cost of the home health aide who was mandated to come at least 20 hours a week is drawn from my mother’s retirement, and paid on her personal checks that he signs. He splits the cost of the few groceries he keeps in the house to within ten cents. When I pick up a prescription for her, he goes to her wallet and pulls out a credit card in her name.


On another occasion, again in the privacy of the library, she confides that he shouts at her when she falls. She recounts three serious falls when he’d left her alone when she crawled across the floor to pull herself up before he got back so he wouldn’t get mad. One fall happened on cement of the garage floor. That time too, she pulled herself up. She could scarcely believe she suffered only a scraped hand. “That was a miracle,” she says.


A miracle.


My father is a 46 year member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. No one in the family joined the church immediately after him, because the contrast between the tenets of the church and the families of the local branch could not be reconciled with the violence in our house. My sister was the first to join eventually, and she agrees now and mom and I could see then, she did so in an attempt to please him, to calm him. It would be a decade before my mother joined, and she did so after he threatened divorce.


On a Sunday before he serves the “Notice to Vacate” to me, I roll mom’s wheelchair to the window to look at birds in a tree and squirrels. As Brigham Young University television flickers on screen, he loudly announces in agitation,.“The President is speaking!” I hurry her over. I watch from the stove and fry potatoes and eggs while I stir brown gravy for the potatoes, an addition I hope will please him. The President and subsequent speakers praise family unity, familial love, forgiveness.


The blue garbage bag that mom is made to sleep on is covered with a faded, fraying towel that when needed, he hoses off on the clothesline and leaves to dry. Some time ago, the health agency provided a free pack of bed liners. To prolong their usage, he cut them in half and reused them when possible. Then they ran out, and were replaced by the garbage bag and towel. One afternoon, after he leaves for McDonald’s, Rhonda*, the home health aide who mom has grown close to, jokes about his insistence on the garbage bag. Then Rhonda retells his imposed limitation on the dollar menu on the occasions he treats my mother or her to McDonald’s. Rhonda is the reason there’s any food in the pantry, since she told him not long ago he needed to provide food so she could make lunch for mom. That was an afternoon she almost quit after declaring, “This is a crazyhouse!” Today Rhonda shakes her head in amused wonder. Then I remember the key he gave me last night and tell mom I have a house key now. “You go girl!” Rhonda laughs sarcastically. Our laughter is momentary relief. But after a moment, Rhonda says she reported him to the agency the day he pulled a used diaper from the trash and berated her for changing a diaper that could have been used longer. She reported him again for the garbage bag.


The obvious answer to anyone is social services, eldercare experts, guardianship. It’s supposed to be simple. After all, there’s documentation from social workers, physicians, nurses. Many of these have begged mom to move in with me. She has said repeatedly that she wants to be with me. But the head of the battered woman’s shelter who visited her when she was in a medical facility – the same facility that by court order barred him from setting foot on the property – reported to me that mom has “classic battered woman’s syndrome.” The social worker at that facility, Grace*, got to know mom well and called me almost daily. Before he was barred from the facility, he regularly exploded on staff and tried to take mom out. One afternoon while I was teaching, I got a call from Grace. “Your daddy is trying to take your mama out of here.” She wanted me on a conference call, she said, because unable to stand or feed herself, anyone could see she should not be sent home. But then, as now, he tried to separate mom from anyone whose aim was to help her, to keep her alive.


When I undress her after a bath and at night, she says about her clothes, always with a note of urgency, “Make sure it’s right-side-out.” Her constant reminders are unnecessary. I’ve seen him belittle her for leaving a shirt inside out. And he requires that she wear the same shirt for days, so as to reduce laundry. Splotches of a bit of chocolate morph into different shapes across three days of wearing. After a bath, I sneak a new shirt on her. An hour later, he appears perturbed, holding the shirt pulled from the laundry and demands to know, “Why is this in the hamper?”


I’m not allowed to use the washer. No one is. Rhonda laughs at the absurdity of his telling her the washer is broken. “He said that so I won’t touch it,” she states.


Two days after rubber-bands to the knob the Notice to Vacate, I look out the kitchen window where I’m washing some dishes. He is stomping across the lawn to Randy’s house. I go outside, concerned, and find him screaming at Randy, who I’d learn had said to him, “You’re scaring the girls.” As advised by a deputy sheriff familiar with the situation, I pull out my iphone and capture the goings-on. He looks at the phone and screams, “I’ll destroy that thing!” and lunges at me to hit me, as he did successfully five years ago. This time, Randy steps between us. I go inside Randy’s house. Minutes later, I hear him return. He throws another “Notice to Vacate” on the ground, this one for Randy.


After I am sent from the house, a church official tries to intervene and calls the sheriff’s department. They are familiar with what’s going on here, he tells me. But she has to be the one to report him. She is scared.


She’s not the only one. My sister tells me that without me there as witness, she’s afraid he’s going to hurt her. My sister would visit and help more with mom, but the last time she and her husband visited, my father flew into a rage about their parking their camper in the wrong spot and told them never to return. Isolation always the rule. In another phone call, my parents’ closest friends of decades finally tell me they feel the same fear.


On a Sunday afternoon, mom calls my sister and says he’s had a “kicking spree.” He kicks furniture and doors, she says. I call and ask how often. “Not that much,” she answers. “When he really goes nuts.”


Mom occasionally calls and asks me questions, asks for items he can’t find. In the background, he shouts questions at her to deliver to me. When I ask him to simply make the calls to me himself, he screams profanities and insults from behind her.


Today mom told me she’s not getting her breathing treatments.He isn’t assembling her medicine.The home health aide is not legally permitted to. The aide is concerned but she’s not permitted to handle these tasks. Mom had another message from him to me: He has my purse and won’t return it until he gets some keys he lost, keys he believes I have. Yesterday he told the health aide she isn’t doing enough to justify the cost and he’s going to let her go. In the middle of a pandemic, he takes mom out several times a week. “I don’t want to go!” she has told me. She understands the risks to her health in particular. Still, he goes out almost daily. She says she’s scared about the state re-opening. Today Randy told her on a FaceTIme call, “We love you and we want you to be around a long time.”


“It’s not going to be a long time,” she said.


Randy and I make lunch and deliver it to the side porch when he’s not in the house. I’ve delivered her Mucinex, the vitamin supplements she’s been prescribed, boxes of organic gummy bears – her favorite – and mini chocolates. I watch Express Scripts to keep tabs on her medicine delivery.Today Randy took over two roast beef sandwiches, pickles, a jug of herbal raspberry tea sweetened with honey that I made her, and a Starbucks Frappuccino with the label removed so he won’t fly into a rage over her drinking coffee. Mormons forbid coffee, but elders gave special permission to mom because her doctor cited research that small bits of caffeine help Parkinson’s patients. Their permission is a frequent subject of my father’s rants.


Today’s message from him to me: He’s going to have me barred from the property. Property half owned by my mother.


Bruises on my arms in my prom photos. Holes kicked into doors of every house I’ve lived in. The doors to my high school bedroom and bathroom removed from their hinges. Wite-Out painted over my genitals in baby photos. Much of high school spent with aching pubis and tailbone from being kicked. I have mostly stayed silent. Out of shame as much as loyalty, I’ve kept quiet for the most part, even as I’ve tried to sort through the agony of watching my mother and sister and me actively abused by writing a little about it, I’ve avoided the darkest secrets, and still do.


Yet when I was writing full time for media outlets, if I encountered something he perceived as an injustice – a radiator that apartment management was lagging to repair, a store who wouldn’t allow me to return a phone bought broken – he would say,  “I don’t understand why you don’t use your job to expose this. Write about this for one of the papers.” Out of respect for him, I didn’t want to point out that newspapers and editors have production schedules to cover more important issues and events than my minor consumer complaints. Not wanting to insult and anger him, I’d say, “Maybe so.”


Let me make this clear, and in some odd way, finally take him up on that suggestion to tell the truth openly and publicly: A man is murdering his wife day by day.

And by the end of August, the clock ran out. That summer ended everything: her patience, her breath, the life she had carried through years of suffering, all under my helpless gaze.




​
C.J. Springacre is an essayist, poet, and publisher based in Virginia. Her prose is rooted in a sense of place with broader themes of cultural heritage and survival. She adopts the Springacre name to find distance needed to write through unfolding, unpeaceful histories. When not writing, Springacre can be found hunting for vintage art or working in her pollinator garden. Contact her at [email protected]

Doc Searls CC




RUNNING ON DOPAMINE

There were signs of complexities since my teenage years. I was a not-so-sweet sixteen, hiding in my boyfriend’s wardrobe, not a stitch on me. He rammed me into the closet and firmly closed it after we heard the front door of the house slam. Footsteps plodded up the stairs. It was his dad, who would never suspect a thing. That was unless he casually opened the wardrobe to rifle through my boyfriend’s soccer gear and chuck it in the wash. 
    That same day, me and my boyfriend planned a night on the tiles with some of my older siblings. We had fake ID, but it didn’t always work when going out with peers our age. It worked with an older crowd. We were strategically camouflaged in the middle of a group of twenty-somethings. I wasn’t long into my drinking career and the numerous beers I drank made me quite literally sick. The night was young and I puked up my guts into an empty pint glass, with careful craft – no spillage and my vomit had neatly reached the top of the rim. There were no chunks of undigested food spilling over. My older sister, in her own intoxication but without the need to be sick just yet, came back to our table and thought her boyfriend had ordered her some type of reddish-purple smoothie. She proceeded to drink the beets that had churned inside my stomach that day.
    As academic and sporty as I was, I was also very experimental. The youngest of seven, I fooled myself into believing that I would learn from all of my siblings’ mistakes. I used to watch them, and as a copycat I dabbled in everything they did, whether that be study hard, go for a run, binge drink at weekends, take up smoking or even experiment with cannabis and ecstasy. It was certainly a colourful transition; I was never bored. I could be a walking advert for what an addictive personality is, and I craved more and more dopamine, cheap or not. Cigarettes and booze yielded an instant cheap high, but I would also pound the pavements, giving me a rich endorphin kick for hours each day – my slow-release reward, one which required effort. Then there was music, which always brought me joy – a rush for what I believe to be our most special neurotransmitter. Dopamine is responsible for thought, movement, reward, motivation, learning, and pleasure. 
    But what was it about smoking? It provided a fast dopamine hit. Smoking was never frowned upon in our household. It was welcomed and nourished. When my mum and dad threw massive house parties on the eve of Christmas for us kids and our friends, Mum not only put on a display of her best culinary skills but she ensured that the ashtrays were tongue-licking clean before lacing them with fresh unlit cigarettes that she had plucked from each packet. The older friends who smoked could enjoy as many puffs as they wanted. Another ten or so ashtrays were scattered around the house for tipping the tarnished tobacco leaves before quenching the butts. This was the turn of the millennium, not long before the indoor smoking ban came into Ireland, and smoking was still a socially acceptable habit. Our house was a clouded crib. My mum smoked, my dad puffed on the pipe, my big sister smoked and my brother, four years older than me, smoked. It was inevitable I was going to sample the dirty drug, with half of my family setting fire to white tubes packed full of tar, tobacco and thousands of chemicals on an hourly basis. I was rebellious, adventurous and wanted to dabble in life, a risky experiment. A coin flip. I had been a runner since the age of fourteen, gliding along the pavements several times per week, and I promised myself that surely, I could not get hooked on the weed. I was aware of the health risks, I hated my first cigarette, and no matter what they said, I wasn’t the type to become hooked.

My childhood was colourful; I had everything I needed – a Discman, a landline and a desktop computer. Connecting to the web took time, and the computer cackled and sang off tune for minutes before loading a web page. I went into chat rooms with weirdos and spent hours downloading music on Napster, even though it was illegal. I couldn’t pocket the music, meaning I glued myself to the computer, chatting to strangers from all corners of the world, while streaming beats. Email was also revolutionary and I’d create an account to send mindless threads to friends who had jumped on that bandwagon. [email protected] was my first ever email account. Another dot com taking off during the internet bubble. 

In other ways, I was late to the party and didn’t get my first smartphone until I was twenty-five. I thought I was clever in delaying this gratification.
   “That phone of yours looks like it could squirt water,” my friend Martin told me when he joined me to live in London town. I was still playing around with my old Nokia, and spending thirteen pence to send a text. I recall being in a pub in the city one evening, waiting for my friends to arrive. I discreetly pulled my water gun out of my handbag, attempting to shield it from prying eyes. After sending a text and planting the brick back into my bag, I gazed over to my left and noticed a group of boys jeering as they pulled out their smartphones from their pockets, dancing them in each other’s faces. Their eyes darted over to me and they all sniggered. Still, this event didn’t force me to cut ties with my block. 
    I had heard a lot about the hype of WhatsApp, a messaging platform which was gaining in popularity, but I wanted nothing of the sort. My trusted iPod provided endless entertainment, and my laptop was my crutch for when I wanted to log onto Facebook or Gmail. I remember it so vividly, when I first got my hands on an iPod – I had landed on the moon. The transition happened so fast. No more running on the pavements clutching a bulky Discman, with wired earphones that kept popping out of my ears. No more MiniDiscs that had limited storage capacity. Fast forward to my mid-twenties and the stubborn streak remained. I felt the need to cling dearly onto three devices – my Nokia, iPod and laptop. 
    “You need a breathalyser on your laptop,” Martin used to say the morning after a night out. I’d arrive home pissed, open my laptop and, being left to my own devices (quite literally) and the glowing screen, I would post nonsense to my wall. Not the sort that required psychiatric intervention, but one or two drunken comments which made sense to me but were probably gibberish in front of my audience. I had all of my kit. Facebook was now the new chat room. What else could one need? 

My next boyfriend in my twenties didn’t drive me crazy for the most part, but I could see how he was addicted to his device. I thought it was wacky, him lying supine on the bed, his iPhone locked between his palms as he scrolled. I always fell asleep before him. Was his habit a contributor to the end of our intimacy? Now everything we need is stored on one device. Many people are going to physios to combat their aches and crunched spines due to “text neck.” It’s all too common we see people wandering down the street, heads hunched forward, eyes glued to their little machine as they meander right into us. We dart our eyes towards their foreheads, prompting them to cop the fuck on and look up, but paradoxically we’re most likely guilty culprits of this behaviour ourselves. We’re in a tech culture, which has led to an epidemic. Phones most definitely provide a quick dopamine hit, and it’s estimated that the average person will pick up their little machine 150 times a day. Time is the most precious currency we have, and a lot of time is spent mindlessly scrolling, taking away from productivity and cherished time with loved ones.  
    It was 2011 when I got my first smartphone, by no choice of my own. I didn’t go out shopping for one, but when I resigned from my job at an electronics company, they gifted me a brand-new Galaxy, a bottle of wine, vouchers and to top it all off, a monster of a glass that fit a full bottle of wine. Around eighteen months later, my psychological quirks surfaced. I wouldn’t say I was a phone addict, but perhaps the thrill of having all I needed on one glowing device caused my psychological excitement to surface, along with all the other dopamine hits I mentioned. 
    Was I running on dopamine? I craved more and more of the good stuff. Dopamine is synthesised by tyrosine, a basic amino acid and is stored in synaptic vesicles. Alcohol feeds dopamine, nicotine binds to nicotinic receptors in the brain which deliver more dopamine to cells, and exercise is proven to fuel dopamine release. I was intoxicated with this special neurotransmitter and kept its neural circuit ticking with each heartbeat. Was it a deadly soup, feeding my head and fuelling my ego? 

It was so damn flippant. The carefree ride into mania. How does someone with bipolar type 1 journey to an optimum point, ever so slightly hypomanic? The edge of creativity stabbing them with razors, puncturing scars into their depressed brains, allowing it to bleed ideas which land on the page in a coherent, magical way. I’ve been there, but only once, and it was the ride of a lifetime. There was no “on” or “off” button. The plasticity of the brain is delicate. It’s the most mysterious organ, offering only a glimmer of insight into how the mind works. Not one person can be credited with fully understanding its unique architecture and how neural pathways fire constantly like bonfires on Halloween night. I had no control that May, but it was pleasant.  
    After my latest boyfriend and I broke up, as I approached my forties, I didn’t break down. I put all my energy into the crafting of words, assembling them like ants in a line, some stepping to the side, others carefully planted in a row which moved with ease. I spent a week after the break-up going through the usual emotions. Rage at him, rage at me for letting him treat me that way, melancholy and disappointment. These thoughts always woke me from my sleep and had a typical lifespan of a few minutes. I must vent my frustrations onto the page. I was sure that I was leaving a sour toxicity behind and decided to channel the energy I gave him back into myself. I had several short stories on the go. I wrote and wrote and wrote. My brain’s neural circuit firing, generating ideas, words, sentences, paragraphs. 
   Sleep was a little elusive, but nothing to warrant an intervention. I was still getting around six hours under the duvet each night, but would write when most of the country’s delicate brains were re-charging. What I like to call hypomania may not have even been hypomania at all, but I’ve had enough experience with mania to give an educated guess as to what I was going through for about a month. Two more writing deadlines were due, and the hyperactive state was waning. Normality returned without me switching the “off” button. I wasn’t ready to wave goodbye, and was reluctant to welcome writer’s block back into my life. Writing felt more like a chore rather than a great genius riding the train of consciousness, not wanting to ever get off. I’d open an incomplete piece, read it over, and at best type a sentence, kill a darling or two and at worst a micro-edit here and there. The fun was over. June was the month for routine; as mundane as a sticky schedule was, it also injected a healthy stab of discipline into my life. The creative ego hid behind the curtain, dormant for now, unaware when it would express itself again. Bipolar disorder is truly senseless and no one can ever tell when it will spark a fire. Certain life events may trigger a warning, but life must go on, and we cannot shut down our day to day. 
    The ride in May felt like ecstasy. Why can’t I be bipolar type 2 – the less severe form of the condition? Those who suffer from bipolar type 2 will experience more periods of depression, but their highs are never as extreme. They experience hypomania – a less debilitating high that generally doesn’t require medical intervention. Once an episode of mania is experienced, the person is automatically labelled with bipolar type 1. Needless to say, I’m fortunate my depressive episodes are under control – a few grey days here and there, but I always jolt myself back into a manufactured happiness. I’m grateful the hyperactive state that May didn’t escalate into a prolonged euphoria, a hard-wired mania that never gets me anywhere, not even in writing. It only lands me in a ward, surrounded by crazy. 

Are we, as a collective culture, chasing too much dopamine – the cheap, fast highs? Phones, cigarettes, booze, drugs, screens, junk food? We need dopamine, but we must achieve a healthy balance and that is to nourish ourselves with more of the slow-release dopamine – exercise, sex, wholesome food, love, physical connection, books, music and nature. It’s only with balance that the ballerina comes out of the woods – the depression can’t win. Its ugly paralysis of pain crumbles. 
    While there are no biological tests for bipolar disorder – no brain scans, no blood tests to tell whether an individual has elevated dopamine, there is a field of research which shows that once an individual has been placed on a neuroleptic or antipsychotic drug for a prolonged period of time, their brain naturally offsets this dopamine blockage by sprouting new dopamine receptors. Does this make the individual more sensitive to dopamine in the long run? It’s a very delicate game. I have to be very cautious with how much dopamine I reach for each day. For me, that meant cutting ties with the sneaky cigarettes. Not only is tobacco wrecking mental health in some, but my twenty-two-year long smoking career gave me periodontal disease and deep vein thrombosis. Countless quit attempts were made in the past – the cold-turkey approach, the Allen Carr book, or the help of an app, all of which have been successful at removing the brainwashing the tobacco industry have ingrained into smoker’s minds for some, but not all smokers. I wasn’t one of the fortunate ones. I was back puffing the dirty weed within a month or two. 
    One of the most common myths about smoking is that it relieves boredom. But when smoking, with no distractions, no TV, no scroll hole, I realised how boring the filthy weed was. Most of the time, we aren’t even aware we are smoking a cigarette. I paid attention to the sinister smoke entering my throat and deep into my lungs, only to expel the smoke after it had successfully poisoned every inch of my body. Smoking is not only habitual, but it is a drug addiction, and one which is supposedly harder to stop than heroin. Moronically, I had never tried nicotine replacement therapy (NRT). I had chewed the odd gum or sucked on a lozenge from time to time, only to dispel them from my mouth within seconds as I found them vile. After my diagnosis of deep vein thrombosis, my motivation to quit was at its peak. NRT was the answer, and I decided to get a greedy supply of Nicorette patches. To my pleasant surprise the transition was easy. Even though there was nicotine being released slowly into my body, I was no longer hoovering up a quick-fast hit of dopamine. 
    I no longer chase the quick highs. 

​


Mary Guiney is an emerging writer from Ireland. She left her career in finance not long after experiencing an acute episode of psychosis in Vietnam in 2012. She has finally found a literary agent for her memoir, and will know very soon if he finds a home for her book. She has a piece published in the Blackbird at the Seamus Heaney Centre and has been volunteering and working with CRAFT Literary since May 2024. 
​

 ​Chaim Dönnewa CC




du hast schon augen (you have beautiful eyes)

~

I had a Greek professor – in my line of work (those who strive to become doctors of philosophy), we do executive administration and personal assistant-type stuff for senior academics. It’s an intellectual apprenticeship but knowledge must be caught like clasping hands around glowbugs and occur whilst one is doing other things, like thematizing someone else’s bookshelf or finding out how much it would cost to fly in their boss’s friend from the wilds outside Edmonton. She was Greek but taught Literature in English. She brought her mother over from the continent to have her live nearby in an old people community in the Casa Loma foothills, high walls and hedgerows, other Greek speakers in the building. I was there trying to speak with her – we stopped in on our way to do some catering logistics for a thought party – but my professor had to translate. The story her mother most wanted to tell me was that she had kept her apartment in Thessaloniki: did I want to see the key? She was going to show me anyways. She pulled it from a small wooden box she kept on her vanity, opened her fingers to show it resting jewel-like on her palm, scotch tape begrudgingly affixing a fleck of white paper with a number made of a triangle on it to its small bronze chest. On the way out along the carpet to the elevator, I asked my professor when she would take her mother back, and the answer was that she would not. The fantasy of the Casa Loma apartment only worked because she thought she could leave it; having the key made her feel like she still could.

i

I kept a small piece of land on an island in the Strait of Georgia in the Pacific Northwest, no key required, but only accessible by private boat and I would need to build a shelter there to make it habitable. I had these three friends there, they already had shacks they had inherited from their parents. They had dogs who ripped around the beaches, and they lumbered about with snuggies on their tallcans. There was a dock that was owned by the regional district and one dirt road that led to my friends’ cabins. To get to my land you would have to go past theirs and up into the forest where there was a clearing my patriarchs had made, there were even parts of their fingers in the meadows they had forged. A chainsawed-off top half of a middle finger feels too OG Christian Andersen for this story, a fuck-you gone too far. But this detail is not a metaphor, it happened.

I got the land as my custody settlement (which is too clinical an epithet for the things I had to go through to get it), and because my grandfather was the island’s original developer (I shouldn’t say original because stolen land). But he was the first white guy to begin to sell off parcels of it to other white guys looking to expand their dominion beyond Vancouver real estate to rural areas. He sold “more space,” “more privacy.” This was back when privacy was in great supply so prospective buyers needed a little convincing. Nowadays this is the Malibu of the north or the Hyannis Port of the west, but it wasn’t when my grandfather started; perhaps he cultivated such a sensibility. I had thought myself impermeable to the marketing. I didn’t want to Instagram it or try and bring others into it – just to be in it, wearing nothing but an old trench coat and growing zucchinis the size of small terriers was enough. Then again, maybe this particular vision of me doing just this was the message he had been incepting.

ii

All I wanted was that trench coat plus zucchini potential, but I had to keep staying away for lengths of time that harmed me. Staying away required a form of dissociation I now see in middle-aged parents particularly who can no longer make the kinds of changes to their lives they believed possible when they were unencumbered. Their dissociation involves planning vacations and telling other people about them, or re-renovating their homes to the point that they no longer inhabit the same domicile. Malcolm Gladwell explains Heraclitus’ Mereological Theory of Identity in a podcast about golf-club membership: a thing is a thing because of the sum of its component parts, so if you change the parts you change the thing.

~

My dissociation looked different at first – I was still young when it came on. I knew I had to be away because I couldn’t learn what I needed to being tethered to a remote isle in Vancouver’s orbit. Outwardly I moved towards what I thought life was but inwardly I just cradled my invisible key and obliterated my longing through intricate affairs with human substances, dubious vocational decisions, and sucking on words.

It felt like:

i had a lover who called me ‘holt renfrew.’ did I represent the ‘organized disorder’ of the department store to him? did he have to wayfind my parts? he told me I could be the next lena dunham. i said, ‘I can’t write about my sex life until I’m no longer a sex object.’

iii

there is a woman (woman?) standing in the mid-day-week-day rain in her purple leggings, soaked sweater, shoes without socks like a kindergartener who dresses herself. what if you’re a hologram, a gortex, a face half taylor hansen half cameron diaz, a vincent adultman sans multiple heartbeats? no contouring – just hollow cheeked from hunger.

no rest in weeks so booked a tanning bed pod at schipol for twenty roaring bright minutes. tiny goggles they told me were single use but i put them in the pocket of my long coat anyways. it’s what you do, alte (a knowing phrase – you know what I mean, man?). i tried to make moabit a monkey bar to solve my can’t-go-home dilemma, ended up on the hana ulfer with boymen, skinny lumps comprised of equal parts ego and drama concealed by a hoodie, a career as a visual mediologist, and affect as flat at the spree.

i only believe that there is a conductor driving the train because of the stops i am let out at and the characters who end up across from me. don’t look back, nein blick (no look!). i am full of conversations only my subconscious remembers, like this one that shoots up as I fumble an
empty press-pack of aspirin.

iv

collect me like sand in a plastic red pail, mold me on this vinyl seat, just want to stick my tongue in your mouth but we are on a bus and I am an adult now. he puts on a scarf and winds it, rolls a joint, smokes it looking out over quebec and national, a monorail, a blinking scienceworld-orb dulled into the greyscape. he undercooks me a poached egg. i put my head on his shoulder as we watch a preview of a movie we will never be able to see together, yolk travelling faster than my fork can gather.

this comedown impossible to swallow, a wooden domino. the sun going down over farmland bitter-dry, saskatoonish of the global south, fog rising cold like a ghost-witch behind bars, i’m huddled wearing everything i own, my sooty un-fingered gloves cupping a hot cylinder of anything, attempting to scrawl in english backwards and upright, chasing real things i can’t see.

~

I tried all these things but kept wondering: How many people could I collapse into you? You an island, you a future, you in a beach chair; me watching over you in my trench coat. The therapist would say that this was about the man missing half of his middle finger. But I had dealt with that during the first circle of chaos.

Which circle is this one:

bruised from playing submission / head full of someone else’s myth

v

when i think of earthquakes in japan, i want to improve my german. i fret for herr kwon, my ex-lover, implementor of hematomas, being scooped out of his country town outside osaka, riding his longboard atop the tsunami to my window where i reside in the ass of a swiss chocolate shop. it’s always either ski gear, watches, or chocolate in the alps – a chunk of range that these over- affluent smugged-up folx think they own. in english march is a verb, but in deutsch it is a planet. which language is right, who gets to say what this month is? i march through it, this is what it is. i strive to keep my inner sponge wet at all costs.

in lauterbrunnen, the base jumpers like black fireflies against the white-grey of the Eiger, vertical sparks. a cluster of june bugs on a Ricola-package-inspired path all lying on their backs, legs wriggling. i go back at 3am in my long coat, turn each one of them over. danny is a streetwise doll. they call him a “puppa” here, but they are taking the piss – puppa is what I am, a female doll, the Swiss-German term for “migrant sex worker.” He is a cockney magician also surviving here; also surviving the label under which he was imported.

~

In my busted english I called it ‘handies for nap naps’ but nap naps meant more than just a place to lie down; it was the drugs that made you tired too and the fun that held all these moments together. These words, fun, cool, do not translate to any page – they are pure affect, you only know them when they course through you, when you’re empowered like a one-hundred-and- eleven-pound bouncer stalking around a club where the dj, Hanzi, will play that cheesy song about airplanes (“I could really use a wish right now”) as soon as you stroll into his field of vision. You some off-brand non-genius warhol of the swiss alps.

vi

Identity fatigue was a buzzkill. Switzerland’s caste system means that if you are brought in on a visa for a specific vocation then that mantle is your halo – people can see it even on your day off, when you go to Zurich for the weekend, or buy muesli at a shop outside of the bounds of your canton. I had money (Francs, Euros – the real shit), unfettered access to obscene extracurriculars (I could now somehow identify as a paraglider), and knew everyone on the darkside of this world. My only friends were basejumpers, dudes who worked oil rigs half the year so they could jump off mountain tops in squirrel suits the other half, and magicians who played pool against my businessmen for a living. I had people calling me “liebling sternbild” and teaching me words like liebling sternbild (my darling constellation). I had thought that all I wanted was language in my mouth, melting like those Ricolas. I had all these things, a life.

A constellation to some; a pariah to the Swiss. They strolled by me as I smoked a riverside kiffe (spliff), black coattails resting on small white flowers, greasy blonde hair as blinders, with their sweaters tied like royal capes around their shoulders, knowing what I was. Knowing in this line of work (of the handies and nap naps varietals) was codified by the male locals through their recitation of the line “du hast schon augen.” When they said it they looked knowingly first at your cleavage and then the corners of their lips would turn up before they gave you an unblinking wink; Tyra Banks would say smize. They felt ownership of this joke, it was correct to their minds since their tax dollars offset your wages. That knowing was what reduced me, a june bug flipped, staring up at a sternbild, wondering how I would get out. This time it wasn’t someone in a long coat picking me up. It was you leaving the place I was trying to get back to.

vii

People use that expression where they equate someone with furniture. When the text came from my estranged-ish half-brother, “merry christmas G. was the horrible news passed on to you?,” I was full june-bugging. Danny and I had partied until the bakery opened, 5am streuselkuchen with hot oozing berry jam, menthol cigarette rings like the caterpillar in wunderland. News – I think someone in the extended family, tons of them, many I don’t think of, especially nowadays in my alternate time zone where my responsibilities are to my transplanted meadows, writing books, and the schedules of the international businessmen. They would come into our toy-set train station, apparitions with gym bags, Clooney-like, eyes flooding with dissociation, trying to remember which exotic name they had me under in their handy (mobile).

You, the beach chair, were supposed to stay where you were: bearded dog yowling amok while you did gainers off the dock. Every single time we thought you would hit your head on the dock’s lip, but you never did – you just swirled through the air, the big Italian-logger mass of you, moving at perfect Kubrick satellite speed, plus-sized Olympian. Everyone that had left me before had had a diagnosis with a corresponding goal post, or was an intimate I became too close to, so much that a recoil was warranted. The guy with the finger – he left, too – but that’s what bio dads did before they started getting cancelled for it. You weren’t supposed to leave. Jenna conjectured “widow maker,” but you weren’t yet married so it shouldn’t have applied. Where I come from, furniture only left when it was thrown off a dock onto a pirate’s salvage barge.

viii

The more I learned about life the more I realized that what we all needed was someone to talk to, talk without thought, and someone to show our nipples to. I remembered an evening fugue where I sat over an open fire and burned every single page of a lonely planet india in Varanasi, rip by rip. It was an outdoor balcony and my bubas (friends) only half-watched; by then they were used to the strangeness of a small white person with no apparent compass. I knew that you could see my performance art, even all the way on the other side of the world, where to you it was only 10:34am. Your eyes would barely be opening, you’d be hung to the balls, dreaming of the open water – and you would understand it, the fat book crammed with text prescribing what white people should do in a place, being burned, page by page, by this long- coated person, despite you having received zero education in abramovićs.

~

How to go back now when the thing is no longer the thing?





​Evangeline Holtz-Schramek (she/they) is a writer who mothers on the Canadian side of the Great Lakes and who is from the Pacific Northwest. You can read her creative and critical writing in many different venues across literary and academic spaces. Evangeline was recently shortlisted for the Foster Prize for Poetry in CV2 for their piece, "on the beach chair," and won The Ampersand Review's Creative Nonfiction Essay prize for their piece, "ggirl in five acts."
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