Editor Selections for Issue 269
Poetry & Short Fiction

Poetry

Thank You

            After Ross Gay

Thank you last blank sheet of notebook,
thank you, notebook paper trail of the last three months
of lists and ideas and books to read.
Thank you dried flowers on the table standing tall
from your copper vase.
Thank you, heart that keeps pumping
no matter what rock I’m pushing uphill,
or when the wings fail. Thank you, eyes, always
mapped in red veins, straining for me because I cannot see
enough, cannot take in all the color.
Monarch butterfly disappearing from Earth, I’m sorry
we couldn’t save you, that I’m writing instead
of planting milkweed, that I’ve lost faith
one person could do enough good to save something.
But thank you; I don’t believe that every day.
The earth will keep spinning, and I won’t be here
to see it, but someone I knew or who knew someone I knew
will sit beneath the oak trees giving shade,
the oak tree just being an oak tree but helping someone nonetheless,
so thank you, tree shadow, for reminding me to draw a circle
around hope and cultivate this little patch.
Thank you dear ones who walk with me in this narrow patch.
Thank you trees of this wood floor, all the tones and scrawl, texture
and bend beneath my feet, merciful to these knees—
knees, thank you for aching only sometimes after all I put you through,
sports and roughhousing and gardening and the many more times
I will need to ask for forgiveness and strength, kneeling.

~ ~ ~

Paulette Guerin lives in Arkansas and teaches writing, literature, and film. Her poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Best New Poets, epiphany, Contemporary Verse 2, and Carve Magazine. A suite of twenty-five poems appears in the anthology Wild Muse: Ozarks Nature Poetry. She is the author of Wading Through Lethe and the chapbook Polishing Silver.

Faith In Miami

Each oil is hand-mixed and blessed by authentic Practitioners,
using time-honored family recipes.

In a strip mall on the edge
of Little Haiti we stumbled
into Chango Botanico,
a store selling religious articles
and pet supplies. She was trying
to get pregnant and I was trying
my best to help. The store smelled
vaguely—no, not vaguely, but very much
like the pet section in the dime stores
of my past that sold birds, rabbits,
hamsters, kittens, and puppies
pitiful in the stench of filthy cages. 

If you bought them fast
perhaps they wouldn’t die—
what a sales pitch. I once got
two birthday birds from Federal’s.
Both died within a week. Stiff
at the bottom of the paper-lined cage.
So, yes, that smell.  

Behind a curtain on one wall
cages of chickens stacked high
and rattling. They only had to live
long enough to be sacrificed
in a voodoo ritual the clerk offered
to teach us. Despite our deep desire
for a child, we demurred, and instead
bought a bottle of red perfumed water
labeled FERTILITY. 

The woman gave my wife
the change, then took her hand
and held it. While the potion
was only good for one lunar cycle,
ours must have had extended
powers, since two years later
she had our first child. We never
even had to open the bottle.

~ ~ ~

Jim Daniels’ latest fiction book, The Luck of the Fall, was published by Michigan State University Press. His most recent poetry collections include The Human Engine at Dawn (Wolfson Press), Gun/Shy (Wayne State University Press), and Comment Card (Carnegie Mellon University Press). His first book of nonfiction, The Abridged Book of Water, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press. A native of Detroit, he currently lives in Pittsburgh and teaches in the Alma College low-residency MFA program.

~ ~ ~

Nora Kirkham is a writer from Maine. She teaches English literature on Boston's North Shore and researches contemporary literature with the University of Aberdeen. Her poetry is featured in Ruminate, Tokyo Poetry Journal, Arboreal Magazine, and The Amethyst Review. Her chapbook, Landing, is forthcoming in 2025 with Solum Press.

Miss you. In honor of Gertrude P. Nut

Miss you. Would like to take a walk with you. Watch
your ears flap up and down as you
bound. Miss you. Miss our walks. You can go real fast
or slow it doesn’t matter as long as I’m with you. Miss you.
Miss your nonchalance the way you were always there
in the next room                      over. Miss your snores & coos
the sound of your voice                hollow & raspy & sharp.
Such a beautiful bark. Miss the way you ate         like
it was your last meal     like you had to gobble up
every bite in case you might      never eat           again. Miss
your messiness: your tangled fur & fucked up teeth.
Miss your gnarls and the grief you gave me any time
I tried to          kiss you & hold you. When you
were on my lap it was all I could do not to
pet you: to touch your fur and run my fingers through
but if I wanted you to stay I had to stay still too and
I miss that. I miss you. Miss taking care of you &
caring for you. Come back & I’ll do
anything you want me to: you can eat the apple
straight from the core & tear the tennis ball to shreds &
more. I’ll put my sneakers on & we’ll go for a walk:
quick & long & you can pee on all the grass you’d like.
Miss you. Can’t believe we’ve gone once around
the sun   without you. Forgotten
what it’s like to smell you & your canned food like
hot garbage & damp & your breath when you
pant with your tongue out in the          heat. Miss you
begging whenever I eat & the jangling of your
collar & the clicking of your feet.
Sometimes when I’d walk in circles you’d
follow me around. I miss the look on your face
when you’d growl or frown & I don’t think
you ever once smiled in all the sixteen years of your life like
for real                 except unless      maybe if the sun was out
& you basking in the sun with your belly up
or getting scritchies under your leg
or playing fetch in that strange way you did where you
never seemed to      like         giving up the toy        like
you couldn’t understand     why
this was a game we played but you                   liked it
& hell if I even miss cleaning up your shit          because
when you           died   I didn’t know what to do
just walking around                  without you & no one to hand feed wet dog food to
& since then you’ve been haunting me & I’m glad because
I miss you. Miss all the things about you that make you you.
I’m lost without you still in truth         and I think you would have liked that.
you liked when everything was about you.
Miss you Miss Gertrude P. Miss you Miss Nut. Miss you,
Peanut.

~ ~ ~

Alexandra Servey has their MFA in Creative Writing from Naropa University. Servey works mainly in the genre of poetry, but also dabbles in fiction, the epistolary, and the occasional dnd campaign. Servey's first manuscript, eggs, was a finalist for the National Poetry Series 2023. Servey is a library worker and resides in Philadelphia.

Short Fiction

Adolphe

Hello. There’s a story I’ve been trying to write for years, but every time I start, I get bogged down. It’s based on a pretty tense period in my life. I’m a very different person now, so writing about that time freaks me out. It brings back that old neurotic me that I’ve left behind, and I can never get past the first page. But I’ve heard that chatbots can write stories if you tell them what to write. Can you help me with this?

[…]

OK, great. Please write a short story about a sad young man named Adolphe who works in a university library. Adolphe takes as his lover an older coworker named Ellenore, and they have a passionate and ultimately disastrous love affair.

Pretty straightforward, I guess, but there is one twist: the story you write should be a literary homage to Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe. As you’ll see when you read Constant’s novel, Adolphe’s relationship with Ellenore is suffocating and all consuming. This is the kind of relationship the characters in your story should have.

[…]

Pretty good. I like that there is a sort of arc to the relationship, from initial flirtations in the library to the tragic letter at the end. That seems right. But I’d like you to try again. This time, write the story in the first-person voice of Adolphe. This voice should be inspired by my own voice, or, rather, the voice of the young man I was twenty-five years ago. This might be difficult for you because my online presence is kind of thin. I’ve published a few stories and some scholarly articles about Louisiana. Look at my posts on Facebook, if you can access that. My doctoral dissertation is up there somewhere, but I doubt it will help you much. You might just borrow from the voice that I’m using right now, in this very chat, but make it younger and more naïve. Less confident.

[…]

OK, yes. I do see that it is problematic for you to access my work on the web and then write in my voice. I suppose that is exactly the kind of thing causing so many doomsday freakouts about AI, so I understand why you are so sensitive about it. (And, weirdly, you do come across as sensitive. Touchy, even. Rather human of you, Mr. Chatbot!)

So, let’s just forget that I asked you to write in my voice. This time, write the story in the first-person voice of young Adolphe, a voice that borrows from the voice of a fifty-year-old New Orleans school teacher who is inspired by nostalgic memories of his twenty-five-year-old librarian self. It isn’t me. Really, it isn’t.

And, since you are so worried about stealing voices and identities, go ahead and forget what I said about Constant’s novel. If you can’t borrow from my work, don’t borrow from his. Let’s just set up nice clear boundaries around everyone involved here, writers and characters. No connections, OK?

In the end, this sort of strict segregating of characters and real-life people is probably for the best. As I’m sure you’ll learn in the next nanosecond, Constant himself was kind of sensitive about people reading his book as a roman à clef. He was especially offended by suggestions that Ellenore was based on his own older lover, the famous courtier Madame de Staël, even though there are some obvious similarities. They were different, he said in response to reviews of his novel, not at all the same. Constant insisted on this point, so let’s give him the benefit of the doubt: in this story you are writing, Ellenor should not be confused with Constant’s Ellenore, and especially not with Madame de Staël.

 You would likely be curious, at this point in a human conversation, about how I came up with this idea, so maybe I’ll just tell you: I first discovered Constant’s novel in my grad student days. I remember the peculiar resonance the book had with my own life because I too had a problematic love affair with an older woman named Ellenore. It was a really weird coincidence. When I found the book, I read it in one sitting, right there at my workstation in the college library offices. I had a pile of books to catalog stacked next to my computer, but I stopped working and just read, non-stop, for about three hours, long after my chatty colleagues had left for home.

 The weirdest thing about it was that my Ellenore and I were also deeply in love—the kind of all-consuming love that leaves one feeling dry and spent when it is over—and, as in Constant’s novel, the affair lasted too long and became destructive. But of course, as we’ve already established, the story you will write and the characters you will invent have no relation whatsoever to me or my life, or Constant’s novel, or Constant’s life, or anything else, for that matter. The names match, the situations are quite similar, but there is no true connection.

[…]

You're getting it, I think, but the characters are not quite right. Your Adolphe is an inept lover, and he hurts Ellenore because of this, but he is fundamentally a good person. This is too generous. Adolphe should actually be something of an asshole.

Show this asshole side of him in a scene in which Adolphe is untangling himself from Ellenore after they make love. She is breathing deeply, asleep perhaps, or maybe she just has nothing to say at that moment, so he slowly slides out of bed with a pillow and grabs his pants from the floor and goes to the couch. The first light wakes him. He’ll have to talk to her if he uses her bathroom, so he takes a piss in a plastic Mardi Gras cup, pours it down the kitchen sink, and then buckles his belt and slips out. His T-shirt is still in her bedroom. He will do all of this just to kind of throw her off and make her confused about his feelings for her because he himself is confused, and he resents her confident manner and her open, symmetrical face and the easy way she just asks for things. Touch me here. Fuck me like this. Harder. All just because she knows who she is and what she wants.

But Adolphe lacks confidence even in his own assumptions about Ellenore, and he should consider, lying there awake with no blanket on her too-short couch, that she might not actually be as confident as she seems. Maybe she’s deeply insecure, doing the fake-it-till-you-make-it thing that he always does, just white knuckling it and hoping that his dick will get hard at the right moment and that he won’t say something awful that will haunt him later, sitting in his dark apartment at night, all alone. Maybe she’s secretly a lot like him. This makes him want to go back to her and wrap himself around her warm body. When they were in bed together, he said that he was in love with her, but, thinking about it on the couch, he can’t tell if she really meant it when she quickly said it back to him. What could he possibly be to Ellenore? The sex is terrific, but the terrific is all her—her kisses and her jokes and her snuggles and then her surging and moving as she presses into him with her strong legs. He thinks of her hand on the small of his back, the way she wants more and pulls him deeper into her, and he decides to stay there on the couch.

In the morning, he should kick at a stray dog on the way to his car, not actually making contact, but coming close. This casual cruelty will, perhaps, suggest to you that Adolphe is simply a bad person, and coupled with his unfortunate name and the sink pissing and the troubling interior monologue, it might be tempting to you to make Adolphe a kind of twenty-something Hitler, someone who will use a vague early humiliation to launch himself into a life of hatred and destruction. But please don’t do that. Remember, clear boundaries. He’s not a baby Hitler; he’s just a bit lost.

[…]

Yes, of course you’re right. I forgot who I was talking to there for a second. I fully understand the Puritanical nature of our culture and the fact that you are programmed to reflect only the best part of humanity back to us with your pearly white American smile. I apologize for the sex and the attempted dog kicking and the foul language. I guess I was trying to help you get a sense of who Adolphe is. From here on out, please just ignore anything that offends you.

Here’s more that might help: Ellenore’s age should be a constant presence in Adolphe’s mind. He will think of it as he’s driving home. She’s ten years older than he is. For a man to date someone even a little bit older is a big deal, he will think, but ten years is quite a lot, and he must come to terms with it somehow, especially since she’s his first real lover. A woman, not a silly girl. She teaches him to take his time. She whispers instructions when he gives her head. And he makes her come. He’s never made anyone come before. Not really. 

Ellenore should have two kids. Adolphe won’t have met them yet. Four months of seeing her, and only pictures, but he is familiar with her C-section scar. It’s two scars, really, one incision right on top of the other when the second kid came, the girl. She splits them with her ex-husband who works on the rigs in the Gulf, two weeks on and two weeks off, which means that Adolphe’s life has taken on this same monthly rhythm: two weeks of isolation and masturbation and sleepless nights while the kids have her and then a two-week marathon of lovemaking, like a sailor back from a year at sea.

My own Ellenore, I should say, also had two children, but they were born vaginally. She only kept the second one, the boy. Except for two weeks in the summer, he lived with his father, an oil-industry lawyer. The girl was quickly given up for adoption when Ellenore was sixteen and living with her parents in some trailer park in Florida. That baby’s father lived in the trailer next door. And he didn’t work offshore. He didn’t work at all. See, it’s different.

The sensory details in Adolphe’s remembered sex scenes should be vivid and evocative. Adolphe should have trouble imagining what their love means to Ellenore, what he means to Ellenore. When they are together, she can’t get enough. It frightens him sometimes, her wildness and her lust. He doesn’t know what to make of it all. It’s too big. It comes at him fast and he can’t catch it all and it falls around him like rain in a sudden storm. He’s soaking wet by the time they’re done. When they’re apart, he’s lost—dry and lost.

Ellenore does not, it seems to Adolphe, have the same problem. He sees her every day at the university library where they both work, and she seems fine, completely content and undisturbed by their two-week love hiatus. They do not interact much during the day, and they only occasionally text during those off weeks, a quick “goodnight” after the kids are asleep. She doesn’t need him; she only wants him.

Try that. Oh, and be sure to use the storm metaphor. It’s pretty good.

[…]

Better, I guess. Not much in there about the sex, but whatever.

There should also be a few minor characters in this story, just to give some context to the love affair. Invent a flirtatious character named Antonio who talks to Ellenore at a grad school dinner party. Adolphe should be jealous of Antonio and, in talking to Ellenore afterwards, he makes fun of the fact that Antonio pronounces his name with an Italian accent even though he grew up in Chalmette. But Ellenore defends Antonio and his pronunciation, and she asks Adolphe why he doesn’t switch from the flat American pronunciation of his name–A-DOLF–to a more open-voweled French pronunciation, because it is, after all, a French name, and it would create more distance between him and the name of history’s worst human.

This episode is somewhat similar to a post-dinner-party conversation that I had with my own Ellenore who asked me why I pronounced my own name in a sort of Frenchy way. I explained to her that I went to France once and realized how absurd it is to have such a name and say it like my Yatty New Orleans family does. But, lest they all think of me as a ridiculous snob, I slide back into the regular way of saying my name when I am around my family or around people in New Orleans who are actually from New Orleans. This was a complicated conversation because when I first met Ellenore I assumed, incorrectly, that she was from New Orleans, and I said my name in the New Orleans style, and that was how she continued to pronounce it. But then we went to a dinner party thrown by someone in my department—a real party, not the fictional one that Adolphe and Ellenore go to—and she laughed at the way everyone said my name with their best French accent. She couldn’t get over it. It cracked her up all night. Later she called out my name with the French pronunciation while we were making love and then let out a kind of muffled giggle as I thrust myself into her. In this regard, I am, once again, quite different from Adolphe, who kind of chickens out when it comes to his own name difficulties. He decides to go by his initials, A.P.—Adolphe Pierre—and he lies about what the initials stand for. Amos Paul, he says when asked. Alfred Putney. Acute Pain.

[...]

Thank you. But somehow the opening changed a lot. I liked the opening in the previous version better. Please restore those first two paragraphs.

Let’s also flesh the story out a bit with another episode.

In the weeks before Mardi Gras, Ellenore should take her kids to the suburban parades in Metairie. Her girlfriends from her mothers’ group have staked out a spot on Veterans Boulevard, and Ellenore says it is easier than going to the Uptown parades because her kids have friends there. Adolphe is a Carnival snob and would never stoop to the level of a Metairie parade, so he is relieved that she does not ask him to go. Adolphe meets people in his department on St. Charles Avenue, and they drink after the parades at a bar, but he feels listless and annoyed, even several drinks in. He wants to be with Ellenore. He can think of little else.

They should spend Mardi Gras together. On Sunday, Ellenore’s ex-husband picks up the kids to drive them to Disney World, and as soon as they leave she calls Adolphe to come over. They don’t get out of bed until Tuesday morning, when they put on costumes and head downtown. Even when he’s older and married to someone else, Adolphe will think of this Mardi Gras day as a shining moment in his life. They are both so happy, just walking around, watching the costume contest, seeing people they know. It will never be quite the same again.

As they are headed home, they should run into Adolphe’s older sister Yvonne, who is quite drunk. Yvonne has survived breast cancer, and a mastectomy has left her with a single enormous left breast. For a costume she paints the breast green and glues on a hat and beard to create Seamus the Tit Leprechaun, as she names it, complete with puppet arms that she controls with small rods. (My own older sister did not survive her breast cancer, and my Ellenore never had a chance to meet her, but she insisted on going to the funeral with me, and she was gracious and supportive. My family loved her immediately.) Seamus the Tit Leprechaun speaks to Ellenore and Adolphe in a squeaky voice and demands a hug. Adolphe hesitates. Ellenore does not. It is the first time she and Yvonne have met, but they are immediate friends.

[...]

More dialogue will be helpful. In the next draft, be sure to put more words into these characters’ mouths to make them come alive. Here’s a bit about Adolphe at work. Write it as a scene with dialogue.

The closest thing to a friend that Adolphe has should be his stylish Black co-worker and fellow graduate student Colby. They sit side-by-side at computers for twenty hours a week cataloging books in the library’s back-office area, and they carry on a friendly banter which makes the time slip by. When Colby sits at his computer one day, he’ll look over at Adolphe and say: “A.P., you look terrible. What happened to you?” Colby is well dressed, as usual, and Adolphe will be deep into the second week of an Ellenore dry-spell, and he will not have done his laundry or showered or even slept or eaten.

Adolphe should briefly consider confiding in him. Colby has, after all, told him all about his many love affairs, with men and women. He’s rarely without a story. And it is, perhaps, a slight bit of jealousy over Colby’s rich love life that originally inspires Adolphe to pay extra attention to Ellenore, to bring her cataloging questions that he might have easily looked up for himself, to linger in her office chatting. He decided that he wanted to be loved, like Colby is loved, and that started the whole thing. Perhaps, Adolphe thinks, he might now tell Colby about his doubts.

He can’t point to anything specific. All he knows is that something has shifted between them, and he’s pretty sure that the shift has happened in him. But he can’t say this out loud. It’s too risky. Ellenore’s office is just down the hall, and he and Colby sit too close to Yelena and Kaito who process interlibrary loan requests and who are always listening in to their conversations. Furthermore, Ellenore is essentially their boss, so he can’t really go around talking about their relationship.

Adolphe should avoid Ellenore at work. She smiles calmly when they run into each other, not unfriendly but not charged up. Demagnetized, he thinks. Perhaps it is her somewhat dowdy professional wardrobe or her airy librarian voice, but she seems to be a different person at work: Ellenore’s plain sister. And he can’t smell her. The cold AC in the library sucks all of the moisture out of the air, leaving only the faint odor of floor polish. But when they are in her old Marigny house, her smell is everywhere, like the lingering incense in an ancient chapel. It’s saturated with her scent, and it’s purely her that he smells, not just her hair or her neck. Her essence. He could find her in the dark if he needed to, he thinks. He could track her, his nose in the air, running naked across a barren heath for hours until he discovers her lair and falls into her arms and she swallows him whole.

My own Ellenore haunts me in a similar way. She comes to me not as the tall, tasteful woman I see in the photos on the internet, not as the author of an obscure but well-reviewed epistolary novel about a woman from a conservative community who divorces her husband to be with a younger lover, a lover who has certain fuzzy traits that I can recognize as my own. No. These are not the Ellenore who creeps up and surprises me in the middle of a regular week as I’m walking from my car to my front door, stepping over my son’s scooter. She comes as her moist musk. Unmistakable. And it pulls me back twenty-five years to her house, to her bed, to her skin.

[…]

Yes, I’m sorry again. It is hard to strip out the sensual bits and still have this make any sense. Remember, just ignore anything that offends you.

Adolphe’s April fortnight of Ellenore should be interrupted by her mother who will drive in from Florida for Easter to stay with her. Adolphe convinces Ellenore to skip her weekly mothers’ support group to be with him—dinner at his place. She’s been to his apartment once before, when they were hanging out at a bar near campus and both got too drunk to drive back to her house. He made her eggs for breakfast the next morning, but on this night in April he will cook his grandmother’s lemon shrimp. He calls his grandmother for the recipe and then goes out and buys a sheet pan, which he doesn’t already have. He also plans what he is going to say. They will discuss things. He will talk about what he needs. He wants all of her. He wants to meet her kids. He wants to know where things are headed.

Ellenore will be gracious and funny. She will eagerly eat the shrimp and the risotto he made from a box. (She never feeds him when he’s at her place. He’s welcome to eat the kid snacks and any leftovers he can find, but she doesn’t cook. They order take out, or he brings food for them.) After the shrimp, she will pull him to the bed. This is the moment when he is supposed to stop, to talk to her, but he doesn’t. He can’t do it. He was wrong, he thinks. He can’t bear to hear what she’ll say. It will hurt too much.

[…]

Looking good now, but the end is a mess—not an end at all, really.

Please create an ending that goes something like this: One day at work, Colby finally asks Adolphe about Ellenore. Colby has known for a while that they are seeing each other. Everyone has. And Adolphe will tell him that he isn’t sure where things are heading, that he has considered asking her to marry him, that he is certain she would say no. He doesn’t know what will happen, and he can’t bear it anymore. This will all just flow out of Adolphe and into the air around them. They stop entering data into the computers. The books lie forgotten around them.  A crow lands on the ledge just outside of their window and taps at its shadow in the glass. Colby asks if he and Ellenore have ever talked frankly about where things are headed. They never have. There is a long silence. They both look up as the crow flies away.

And then the unlikely thing happens. The magical thing. Adolphe takes the next book off the cart marked “To Be Cataloged” and sees that it is his book, his name, Adolphe by Benjamin Constant. An English translation in paperback. He flips it over to the back-cover blurb and there she is: Ellenore. An older woman, passionate and beautiful. And she and Adolphe have a tortured, intense affair. It’s a really weird coincidence. And so he begins to read, right there at his computer. Colby says goodnight and gives him a meaningful look, sympathetic. Adolphe smiles back, but he doesn’t leave. He stays and reads.

It’s a different Adolphe in the book. Sure, there are some surface similarities, he thinks to himself, but deep down it is not him at all.

And Ellenore is so proud in the face of those who would look down on her. She fights so hard against her destiny. This is what Adolphe finds so compelling about her. She is poor, but she makes something of herself, pulls herself out of the ditch she grew up in, and it doesn’t really cost her anything. She remains exactly who she is, even when the others look down on her. They are gathered around her to do just that—this circle of bleached suburban mothers—to watch with interest and curiosity as the storm of her life blows all around her. She stands still in the middle of the tempest. Such a woman. Such a mother. She often talks to Adolphe about these women and their perfect lives; she laughs at them and how much they’ve given up. But she actively gathers such women around her, there in her salon, with their haughty laughs and their parasols and their porcelain bosoms bulging out of gauzy empire dresses. They call on her, not out of any social obligation but out of sport, and she invites it. They are her collection, and she knows they think she’s trash, that her life is a scandalous mess. It gives her strength. It makes her taller, somehow. Taller than Adolphe is, at least. She looms over him. Her brown hair falls over his face and tickles his nose. She stays there, still, breathing him in, pressing down on him. He can feel his heart, his actual beating heart, flattened and displaced in his chest. He loves her. Desperately. It frightens him. His body is fully beneath her. He is trapped there, pinned down, and she just hovers over him, their faces inches apart. Ellenore. Her eyes are closed. She breathes deeply and smiles and moans and grinds herself into his thigh. Ellenore. She is still. She is completely herself. Ellenore. This is all the space there is for him here, only this and nothing more.

There will be a letter at the very end. A letter that finally says the true thing, however difficult. It’s all over between them. It has been for a while. It was too painful, so neither said it for so long that it couldn’t be said. The letter tells the truth, a truth so powerful that it might kill them both.

And Adolphe knows, that night in the library when he reads Constant’s novel, that it is all over. He logs onto his computer and catalogs the book and affixes the barcode and call number stickers.

Her office door is open, but he can’t tell if she's still in there. He gets up and taps gently on the door and sticks his head in, but he finds only darkness. “Ellenore?” he whispers. But she’s gone.

Perhaps he’ll go to her that night. He knows it is over, but perhaps he’ll still go. He can see himself alone now, sitting in his dark apartment, her name echoing in his head. It will hurt. Perhaps he should still go. He grabs his bag and heads upstairs to the PQs to shelve the book himself, so she won’t see it sitting there on the cart, so she won’t pick it up and read it. But he’s not this Adolphe. He’s his own Adolphe. He’s sure of it. It’s not the same at all. And Ellenore is different. So very different. Ellenores are all very different.

[…].

~ ~ ~

Jean-Marc Duplantier teaches in the Humanities Department at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. His short fiction appears in Willow Springs Magazine, The Pinch, Descant, Sequestrum and others. His work won first prize in the short story category of the 2021 Faulkner/Wisdom Creative Writing Competition. He also won the Frank O'Connor Award for Short Fiction (Descant). He is currently writing a novel about kayak fishing in south Louisiana.

Salvage

“I wish you would reconsider.” Hand on the doorknob, I make one last appeal before I leave.

My mother holds her ruined hand up to me, signaling me to stop. The bullet hole has healed into a pale, puckered circle, a bulls-eye scar in the center of her palm. The fingers are arched and stiff, unable to make a fist. The bullet was a secondary missile, slowing down after it twisted through some other target. She still has a hand, however poorly it works. Her left hand rests in her lap. Her nails are polished. Today they are a vivid blue. At first Stella had been buoyed by the thought that Mom ventured out of the facility to care for herself. It devastated her to find out there was a beauty shop on site. Mom still gets dressed every day, does her makeup and wears jewelry. I tell myself that’s something. Her rings are fewer, reduced like everything else in her life. She wears a slim gold band from her mother on her forefinger and a tiny turquoise pinky ring on her left hand. The silver butterfly ring Cliff bought her is the only one she wears on her right hand. Up close you can see that one wing is misshapen and that the ring has been repaired from where they cut it off her finger. It was in the bag from the hospital emergency room. They saved everything but the shredded and bloodied clothes she wore. The police kept the shirt and jeans as evidence. The ring fits her index finger now, her atrophied hand looking as though it belongs on someone twenty years older.

“I don’t intend to be a public exhibit. Called a ‘crisis actor,’ a liar.” She lifts her chin at me, her tell that on the subject she is immovable. “What’s the use? I testify. Then what?” I want to say it matters, but maybe she is right. Nothing moves the needle.

I come back into the room. Every visit, it is hard to leave her like this.

Sometimes I still shout at the politicians on news show, full of empty platitudes, until Stella turns off the television. “They can’t hear you,” she says.

*

The chyron is etched in my brain: “Shooting at DazeFest. 17 Dead, more wounded.” At first I didn’t notice, more focused on the baseball trades the newscaster was detailing.

“Wait,” Stella said. “Isn’t that the festival your mom and Cliff were going to?”

I called her cell phone, then Cliff’s. Straight to voice mail. The news channel had a bit of video, people running, blurred bodies on the ground. The shooter (I will not say his name, I will not give him publicity) had climbed the scaffolding to one of the speaker towers and strafed the crowd from above. It took less than two minutes for the guys who charged the tower to reach him. The festival cameras kept rolling, and for a few days, news stations played the images over and over again, first at real speed, and then slow motion. Him turning from side to side at the crowd, the requisite black trench coat flapping. It played like a music video, villain and hero.

He didn’t see the hand come up the ladder, couldn’t hear over the screams of the crowd the relentless thud of foot on metal. It was a scene out of a 007 movie, except it wasn’t. There wasn’t some climatic scene of hand-to-hand combat, a careful choreography of movements, only Brett Kirk lunging forward onto the platform. We know his name, that day’s hero, a veteran who ran towards his hill as sure as any war-movie actor. He grabbed a leg and pulled, tripping the guy, no longer a Bond moment but Chaplinesque if there had been no bullets. The shooter hit the deck stomach first, a belly flop that knocked the wind out of him, the long gun sliding out of his hand, out of reach. He couldn’t turn the gun on himself as they often do. Kirk was reaching for the gun, two other guys balanced on the scaffolding, a second line of defense.

The shooter pulled himself up, and then he jumped, arms and legs flapping as if he could control his fate even then. It makes me sick to see kids imitate him, their arms a parody flail, propped on boxes or jumping three feet, endless videos on TikTok and YouTube. They never try for the full monty, the twenty-foot drop that left the shooter broken and brain damaged. The bastard survived, and I only wish he knew how much he is suffering, his lingering as pain filled as the survivors. It isn’t enough. If I ever see you imitate something that stupid, I tell Ethan and Rory, but they swear they wouldn’t. Dad, they say, it’s too real.

It is and it isn’t. I didn’t see her in the first news coverage. Most was of the band, rocking out a bluesy number, unable to hear the gunfire. For a few seconds they play on, then the bassist dives for cover, the lead singer looks up and freezes, her voice stops mid-syllable. A roadie runs towards her, pulling her behind the organ. The singalong chorus turns to screams.

There is a lot of video. Concert goers post their content, endless scrolls that end abruptly or pan, following the sounds. My mother is a tiny image in the crowd, jerky cell phone video showing, off in the corner, her hand outstretched as Cliff pulls her down and shelters her body under his. Her purple shirt is the first sign it’s her. When the first responders pulled his body off her, they didn’t know whose blood was whose.

She refuses to look at the newspaper articles, the graphics of the kill zone, the posted videos of survivors still filming on their cell phones. I have them all, in a digital file I keep hidden from everyone. I don’t look at the documentation any more, but I need to know it is there, proof of a moment.

Stella called around to the hospitals while I drove the thirty miles to Millford to see where and if Mom had been admitted. “Try Presbyterian,” Stella texted. “Let me know when you hear anything.” The hospital was chaotic. Police blocked the entrance to the emergency room, waving us over to a frantic huddle of families near the front entrance. People were crying and pushing, others stoic as they pleaded with security to let them in. Beyond the ring of families, camera crews were setting up, on-air talent arranging their faces for filming. Ambulances were still pulling in, lights and sirens adding to the chaos.

I had to produce I.D. and write down the names and ages of who my family or friends were. The woman in front of me couldn’t hold a pen. “It’s my son,” she kept saying. Her whole body shook as she tried to remember how old he was. “He’s just a kid.” The security guard wrote down his name. I didn’t know if she wanted help, but I held on to her anyway. The guy waved us to the right, where a woman in bright green scrubs stood by the door. “I know, I know,” she said though we hadn’t said anything. “Go down the hall, turn right.”

The hospital had a waiting room just for us, away from the press. Outside the room, we could hear the frantic footsteps, the endless beeps and bells that signaled something we didn’t understand. We were silent. The waiting wore us out. One by one we were handed a paper with our info on it, clutched our family member identification as if it were their hands. I volunteered to identify Cliff since his brother, his only living relative, lived in another state. Delia, identified by her jaunty badge (“Hi, I’m Delia. Your family support liaison”) said it wasn’t possible. “I’m afraid it is hard to identify some of the dead,” she told me. She looked me in the eye, deliberately, but I could catch the gleam of tears in her eyes. “Do you know what he was wearing? His shoe size?” I shook my head no. “You need to remember him in life,” she said. My mother was alive, just barely, in surgery.

How lucky you were, people told her, in those first few months. You survived. They see the hand, but never her torso, the long scar from the hurried incision, the surgeon frantic to staunch the bleeding. He came out to tell me she made it, so far. He shook his head, face gray and already showing stubble. “It’s touch and go,” he said. He held my gaze until I had to look away. His shoes were covered in blood spray, fine dots, and I understood the word lifeblood for the first time in my life.

Ethan got into a fight the week after it happened. He would never say what egged him on but I can guess the sort of comment some preteen parroted from a parent or toxic website.

When she left the hospital, her care team lined up to cheer her on, her wheelchair guided by Manny, one of the staff who held her hand. She clutched the plastic bag of her things. That night she went through the bag, taking out her purse and the ring. Here, she said handing Stella the bag. Throw the rest away.

She has discarded so much. Even the claim of lucky. She scoffs at the platitudes. At the grocery store, the first time I took her out, she was still in a wheelchair, me pushing the cart. I had turned around the reach for the yogurt she liked, when I heard the voice. “What happened to you?” It was Jody Carmichael, the clueless neighbor from the last house on their dead end street.

“What does it look like,” my mother said. “I got shot.”

“Oh,” she said. “Where’s Cliff?”

* * *

The busybodies were worse. They descended on her next stop, the rehab center, wearing her out, those hovering crisis hounds, full of sympathy and hoping for a sight of the scars. Annie Laughton even wanted Mom to draw a map of the venue. “Now where were you?” She pulled out her phone, and a panorama of the layout of the festival appeared. When I arrived at rehab that night, there was a new sign on the door. NO VISITORS. FAMILY ONLY. She was still shaken. “Lucky,” she said. “That idiot told me I was lucky.” They didn’t see how she looked those first weeks, so small in the hospital bed. Bandaged, hooked up to monitors, legs atrophied and propped on pillows to help with drainage. I couldn’t bear to imagine what lay beneath the sheets, the missing kidney, the liver with a bullet track across what remained. They weren’t there when the surgeon came out of the operating theater, shaking his head. “I tied off what I could, stopped the bleeding. But part of the liver is shredded.” He was needed back in surgery, he said. “Later,” he said, “I can go over the details. Let’s see where she is.”

Carla hooked up a new pain feed, then took me into the hall.  “Look,” she said. “Do you want me to keep them out in the future. Company is usually good for people, but.” Her voice trailed off. She leaned in to me. “I’m not supposed to say, but there are others here. It’s been a nightmare keeping out the media, the hangers-on.”

“Keep ’em out,” I said.

When I went back inside, my mother was too tired to speak. “No, stay,” she said, and I held her left hand, gently in mine, until we both fell asleep.

She does not think she is lucky. Moving on, moving past, she says. Yeah, two hundred miles, I say, but why should I blame her. Why should she be the object of gossip. In a new place she is just another aging widow. Let them think heart attack or perhaps an accident. She will not talk about Cliff, but bears the weight of his absence. Anyone with eyes can see that something happened to her. If they ask, she doesn’t answer. I make the trip once a month or so, saving a day off or taking a weekend if Stella and the kids don’t need me. They cannot bear the visit most months. I made excuses until Mom waved them off. “It’s fine,” she said. “It’s hard seeing what is left of their grandma. Let them remember how I was.”

And so I drive alone to Deep River. The drive up to prepare myself, and the drive home to shake off whatever remains. I take her shopping or maybe to lunch if she will agree to be in a public place. I always thought places like this were for people waiting to die. And perhaps she is. The careful way she moves, one hand holding onto the side table or shopping cart or counter, tells me that pain is always with her.

* * *

She sits down again, and I remember the Amazon box by the door, the one I forgot to bring inside. I fetch it, then lift it onto the dining room table, three steps from her door. Do you want me to open it, I ask, but she says she’ll do it later. I want to see what she ordered, but the smallness of her needs would only depress me. Her condo is neat and spare, nothing like the comfortable clutter of her life with Cliff. All of that has been wiped away. She sold the motorcycle, the bikes they rode on weekends. Threw away the beer bottle collection from the festivals they attended. Donated his concert tees. She kept his favorite flannel shirt. I saw her hold it to her face before she packed it in her suitcase. I try to still see the wild child my mother was, the teenage mom who raised me, the fierce and independent spirit who ran and danced and hiked. The woman who raised me to think for myself and stood up for me no matter who bullied or ridiculed her or me. She was small and mighty, a dynamo who threw herself into everything with enthusiasm. When I went off to college, she found her match in Cliff. Now she is merely small, a human being cleft in two, Cliff saving her but leaving her alone.

Nothing of that woman is left in this room with its modular couch and breakfast bar, its furniture as impersonal as a showroom vignette. She took a few of Cliff’s photographs. Without the vintage camera collection he was proud of, his black and white photos of gears and machinery hang in diminished isolation. I took the old oak table she rescued from a dumpster and refinished, the one she hauled from apartment to apartment in her old Subaru. My wife hated it, but I needed something to anchor me to the old life. Every scratch was one I traced, those days of homework and figuring out bills, trying to hold it all together another day. Get rid of it, she said, when I brought her home from skilled nursing. We tried to get her to stay on with us, until she was ready to go back home, but she was insistent on looking for a new place as soon as their ranch house sold.

“But why,” I asked, “you love that house.”

“I did,” she said. “But that was another life and I don’t have the heart to stay there by myself. Every single thing reminds me of Cliff.” She packed a few boxes. I scheduled an estate sale; all day people expressed their sympathy as they picked over her collections, the Depression glass, the corner cabinet, bookcases, her whole life salvage, bits and pieces picked over as if she were already dead. I had no idea how difficult it was to get rid of lifetime of possessions. So much no one wanted, but I couldn’t tell my mother that. I drove endless boxes of stuff to Goodwill, posted notices to Marketplace, Buy Nothing Groups, and Freecycle.

Even the coffee cups are new, wide white cups with blue stripes and comfortable handles. There is a coffee machine these days, no more boiling water, then carefully dripping it into the pot. She manages with her one good hand to make a cup of coffee well enough.

“I just want to be left alone,” she says. In a community with the sixty-pluses, she doesn’t stand out. Why should people know that one fact about her, everything else of her life wiped away, her life reduced to that one day. It is her right to refuse to speak. She is alive and smiles as I turn to leave.

I leave the invitation for the news show interview on her table next to her package. I wish she would speak out, would show the public how it is for her. This could be you, I want her to say, trying to salvage enough of yourself to make a life, after the bullets are silenced, after the screams die down, after the dead are buried, after the story moves on to the next. But she does not want to be a story, and I cannot speak for her.

I close her door. Walk down the green space, key in the code to leave her annex. I stop at the main desk to sign out. “How is she today?” Devin asks. I shrug, not certain he knows her back story. He walks me to the door, then buzzes me out, another level of security since the jewelry thefts. The door locks behind me.

It isn’t dark yet. In the parking lot I scan the horizon. There are no glints off the rooftops, no open windows hiding a barrel, no movements among the trees. Today at least I can make it into my car.

 ~ ~ ~

Julia Hardie’s characters experience the world through the lens of trauma and dislocation. A native North Carolinian, she has returned to the state after teaching at Penn State University and Louisiana Tech University. Her work has been published in literary journals, including The Greensboro Review, Cimarron Review, The Examined Life, and Fiction International. She is currently working on a novel, Excavating the Bones, about the intersection of justice and revenge.

Furry Death Over Comrade

Sometime after Mitters earned his helicopters but before the government considered ballistic missiles, Alphonse gathered the Reba McEntyre muscle shirt he had hidden deep under his bed and went to The Lover’s house to make a final return. Despite the impending death that hung over the city of Comrade, Georgia, Alphonse felt a great sense of hopeful yearning towards love, a parapsychic current he shared with his neighbors, who had themselves discovered that apocalypse makes a great emotional lubricant. Alphonse waved warmly towards the orgy writhing on a concrete driveway, kneepads clacking like nervous horse hooves. He waved to the group of children dancing in a circle, children who had been led to believe that death was a brief, transitory amusement, like a vacation at Disney, and who were wearing Mickey Mouse ears. He waved at the couple moaning possible futures never-to-be-lived into each other’s mouths: “Acolytes who hunt for love in hidden animal places, competing news anchors who can barely conceal their passion.”

Behind them all, the feline head of Mitters, growing ever closer to heaven, his enormous eyes stupid and unblinking in the amber-bled Georgia evening.

The Lover’s house was the pale yellow of a zested lemon or a dirty pillowcase. Their living room window was broken and lay in a glittering field of polychromatic light across the carpet. Alphonse could see directly into the house, where The Lover was seated on their green suede sofa, completing a Thomas Kinkade puzzle, their long fingers as thin and austere as Alphonse remembered them. Alphonse, a sentimentalist, felt his breath catch in his throat.

“Oh,” The Lover said, looking to the window. “I’ve been expecting you.”

“You have?” Alphonse said. He felt his pulse like an army of tirelessly cheerful gerbils in wheels against the veins of his neck.

“Step over the window. The door doesn’t work.”

Alphonse placed his hand on the sill and cut his finger on a shard of glass. A thin strand of blood welled in the whorls of his finger. Sucking, he sat down on the couch and offered the Reba McEntyre muscle shirt. “I have to tell you something,” he said, drunk on the bravado the apocalypse provides. “I want to spend the last hours of my life with you.”

The Lover had eyes that were always laughing and a mischievous mouth that played against the edges of their face. For as long as Alphonse had known them they had told jokes, from places even as hopeless as the hospital bed after their first suicide attempt, where they begged the nurse for a knife, giggling about how the wristband cut off their circulation. Alphonse was delighted to see that after three years the humor remained in their features, deep-cast, untouchable.

The news played softly on the TV. “There are helicopters up in Comrade, buzzing around the head of Mitters the housecat who, since this morning, has been continually growing in size. If you’ll look at our distant camera footage, the helicopters form a halo of bright light, not unlike the radiant countenance of my beautiful co-anchor.”

“Thank you,” the co-anchor said, straightening the papers on her desk, “There’s a dappled patch of golden sunlight that falls through the opening of the clouds, like God’s own shining whisper on Mitters’ face. This radiant square is the exact hue of the olive skin of my handsome co-anchor.”

“It’s hard to contain the rapid pattering of my heart,” the first co-anchor said, “When everything in the world seems to corroborate such joy. Projections show Mitters the housecat reaching the upper troposphere sometime around twilight, where his little lungs will run out of oxygen and he’ll fall over the island that the city of Comrade was built on, killing most of the inhabitants. The government is currently debating ballistic missiles, but they’re not sure exactly how they work or what effect they’ll provide.”

“Yes,” the second co-anchor said, “and since the National Guard has closed off all of the bridges leading in and out of Comrade, the townspeople have been taking their sacrificial status incredibly well. Mitters seems to be one of those good, quiet kitties, content to just watch the sunset before his lungs explode, and our citizen correspondents claim that they don’t blame him, although the situation does seem to them like a bit of a shit deal. We turn now to a street orgy that makes my own throbbing loins glisten with the wispy, fragmentary memory of my gentle co-anchor’s kiss on my thighs.”

Alphonse and The Lover turned to the window. Across the street, the orgy was picking itself up off the pavement, wiping each other’s fluids from their bodily cavities. Two of the orgy-goers, a married couple who walked in step, climbed a ladder to the roof of the house, where they had set out champagne and two folding chairs, first-class tickets to the end of the world.

“Help me find the roof to this gazebo,” The Lover said, gesturing to the puzzle. Alphonse skimmed the puzzle pieces, looking for something that might resemble a roof. The Lover’s hand brushed briefly against his own. He thought he had never felt softer skin.

Outside, the moaning couple told each other more possible futures: “Foremost connoisseurs for pimento cheese, tragic authors who write referential, self-effacing shit.”

Alphonse imagined grabbing The Lover’s fingers and placing each of them in his wet mouth. “I need to tell you about Reba McEntyre,” he said, “and what that shirt means to me.” Alphonse had, for a long time, withheld the word love from the privacy of his thoughts, but these were during the heartache days, right after The Lover’s departure, when his pillowcases were yellowed with snotty tears and his hamper oozed filth from its pores. Now, love had returned to him in the form of a gun (metaphorical) that he wore in his hip like a cowboy, a weapon that could save or unmake him, and which would hold all the force of feeling in its language and articulation, if he could only aim the term and hold it steady, and although he had dreamt of this moment for three years he was still afraid of saying the word. The Lover had never been a romantic person. Alphonse, on the other hand, knew that rejection would make his skeleton implode under its sadness like shitty piping.

“Listen,” Alphonse said, “For three years I’ve been living a waking death. This heart, it whimpers—”

“Put the shirt on the pile,” The Lover said.

“What?”

“The pile.”

Alphonse saw, in the corner of the room, a stack of shirts dyed, bleached, and cut from the bones of former concert bills and album covers for famed country singers. Toby Keith, George Strait, Shania Twain, all smiling, wrestling cattle in starlit rodeos, playing guitar. Outside, the sky had turned the color of blood. Mitters was in the distance, still staring stupidly into the clouds that reached their arms to him.

“I don’t understand,” Alphonse said.

“Most of them came early in the morning, when they first heard the news about Mitters.”

“Most of them?” Alphonse felt his heart trip and catch a street curb with its teeth.

The door opened and hit the wall with a bang. The Stranger stepped inside the house. “What’s cooking, good looking,” he said, making a stupid gesture with his fingers. “I’ve got a Faith Hill hoodie with your name on it.”

“Oh God,” The Lover said, “I was hoping this guy wouldn’t show up.”

“You told me the door didn’t work,” Alphonse muttered, mostly to himself.

Alphonse hated The Stranger immediately. He had a mullet and earrings and a barbed wire tattoo on his neck that looked like it was drawn up by a toddler. His facial hair was unkempt in a way that suggested maniacal grooming, and he dressed like a mechanic, or the ugliest member of NSYNC. He smelled like a wild animal dipped in a vat of chocolate, and despite Alphonse’s awful, seething hatred, he understood in the man’s musk and calluses and the rippling sinewy muscles of his shoulders that he was a type of handsome jackass who was irresistible because he was bad.

“I don’t know who this loser is,” The Stranger said, jerking his thumb at Alphonse and slapping the Reba McEntyre muscle shirt out of his hand, “but you might as well forget he ever existed. You’re spending the last couple of hours with moi.” He must have read moi in a book, because he pronounced it like moh-eey instead of mwah. It took Alphonse and The Lover several seconds to understand what he was saying.

“Don’t blame me for this guy,” The Lover said to Alphonse. “This one was an early mistake, back when I thought love was a concept that you could pick out and wear, like a designer jacket.”

“It’s okay,” Alphonse said, “I understand he’s some kind of handsome jackass.”

The Stranger waved the Faith Hill hoodie in front of The Lover’s face. “I’ve built you up to be a monolith in my mind,” he said. “For all my life, I haven’t been able to forget you. If you deny me now, I’m certain my skeleton will bust under its sadness, like a piñata filled with bees. I’m willing to do awful, dangerous things for your affection which is, as I mentioned, a life-justifying force. Alternatively, I might just be very horny. It’s really hard to get laid when your job is euthanizing old people at Comrade’s nursing home.” The Stranger made a jerking off motion which had, Alphonse noted, an intimidating amount of girth to it.

“Wish I could help you with that,” The Lover said.

The Stranger grabbed The Lover’s hair. “Oh, but you can,” he said.

Alphonse was not a strong, heroic person. He was not a superhero or an action star. So, when he punched The Stranger in his perfectly symmetrical face, he broke his pinkie, and began to cry. Then, The Stranger was on him, and they were rolling around on the carpet, hissing and swearing.

Glass from the broken window dug into Alphonse’s back like sharp little teeth. The Stranger was taller, broader, and more muscular than Alphonse could have ever hoped to be. Alphonse had taken three years of classical wrestling in high school, but it wasn’t any use to him now, both because classical wrestling was mostly just an excuse to exorcise the demons of homoerotic desire and because The Stranger had kneed him in the crotch and Alphonse couldn’t feel his legs. He gasped and wheezed and pushed at The Stranger’s outstretched hands. The Stranger began to smack him in the face.

“You’ve got to be shitting me,” The Lover shouted. The two of them stopped rolling around. The Lover pointed to a gap in the puzzle, as empty and striking as the patch of evening sun that dawdled in the vacant hole of the window frame. “There’s a piece missing.”

The Stranger began to slap Alphonse in the face again. “You’re harshing the vibes,” he said, spitting on Alphonse. “You’re being a cock-block.”

Alphonse struggled against The Stranger’s meaty arms. “Get your overt sexual aggression away from the person I love.” Bang! went the gun (metaphorical). As Alphonse rattled off the word for the first time in three years, he noticed how easily it slid from his mouth, silky as a water birth. He couldn’t see The Lover over the hulk of The Stranger’s shoulder, but he saw their perfect fingers stop, and he knew his words had hit home. Hang ’em high, cowboy.

“I can do whatever I want,” The Stranger said. “I have a gun.” He lifted up his sweat-stained T-shirt and revealed the shining face of death hanging from his hip. Then he pulled out a length of rope and tied Alphonse and The Lover together on the green suede couch.

* * *

It was that evening hour where the only barrier between the orange of the day and the indigo of night is a band of teal. Alphonse and The Lover had been tied together for half an hour, and he could no longer feel his wrists. His back was pressed firmly against The Lover’s. This gave him a little thrill.  “Do you think that the people across the street, sucking hole in the driveway, are in love?” he asked. “Do you think that love is some animal thing, fluids, genitals, a chemical experience used to codify some survival-based connection? Do you think I only came here today to convince you to fuck me before we died? I want to be very clear. I would much rather be loved than fucked. I’d take a hug over some head. I’ve been thinking about how much I love you, and why that is. I feel like I can say that now, on account of the adrenaline that’s still pumping. I love you, and I always have. Maybe I’ve just built you up so much that I can’t stand to think of you any other way, or maybe you spend the rest of your life trying to capture the sensation of first love. Do you think two brokenhearted fools like us have a chance for romance before the end of the world?”

“Alphonse,” The Lover said. “Please shut up.”

The Stranger appeared in the doorway between the living room and kitchen. He had a tub of pimento cheese in one hand and a spoon in the other. His gun sat on his hip. His lips were smeared with the orange cream of the cheese, stuck in the untidy hairs of his moustache. “God damn Jesus Christ,” The Stranger said, pointing the spoon at The Lover, “You make the best pimento cheese. I hadn’t even realized how hungry I was until I beat that scrawny dude’s ass. Remember, if either of you try to get up off that couch, I’ll kill you.” He pointed to his gun and then made an okay gesture with his fingers before disappearing back into the kitchen.

“I feel like I need to address the other elephant in the room,” Alphonse said. “I know you were sad, and I know you wanted to die. But when we were together, wasn’t it good? I keep trying to get in your mind. It’s been three years, and I’ve got nothing. Was I not enough? Did you not trust me to take care of you?”

The news anchors on the TV were gesturing to crudely drawn graphics depicting a giant cat crushing rows of south Georgia neighborhoods. “Doubtless some of you have come across troubling times in Comrade,” the anchor said. “Maybe you’re right now tied up together on a couch while a psychopath eats your pimento cheese. Take this as a teachable experience. The end of the world isn’t supposed to be fun.”

“Yes,” the other anchor said, “The government has decided not to use ballistic missiles. The Secretary of State has issued the following statement.” The anchor opened an envelope and turned around a sheet of paper to reveal a charcoal sketch of a balding man shrugging his shoulders.

“For the people of Comrade, this is surely the most terrifying thing that can ever be experienced, the awful trauma of knowing your death is immediately at hand and being completely unable to prevent it. For the rest of us, however, we watch our TVs with a mingled horror and delight, and we wonder if there’s even a distinction between the two things. Maybe all horrible thoughts have something precious and bright waiting inside of them.”

“You’re so hateful when you talk like that,” the second anchor said, petting his colleague’s hair.

“No,” the first anchor said, pointing at the teleprompter. “You were supposed to say hot.”

“I’m going to check for more pimento cheese in the garage fridge,” The Stranger called. “Don’t move, or you’ll die.” His heavy boots thumped over the linoleum. There was the sound of a distant door opening and closing.

The sky was now the ugly purple of a bruise and nascent stars emerged twinkling far above the wispy clouds. “I don’t think love is a useful concept,” The Lover said. “I don’t think it means anything. When I was in the hospital after the second suicide attempt, the psychiatrist told me that there are many other people who each day can’t comb their hair or brush their teeth. What does their depression have to do with me? Is it supposed to make me feel good that this awful shadow has touched so many others? I think love is like this. We can only trust our own feelings. And sometimes, we can’t even trust that.”

“Please don’t talk that way,” Alphonse said. “I’m sorry I asked about it. If you want, we can just sit in silence until we die.”

There was a pause. The world seemed to settle around them. Alphonse hung his head, broke his own silence. “I can’t believe you’d rather do a puzzle than have somebody fucking love you,” he said in a voice so tinged with bitterness that he felt his words curl up and die as soon he spoke them.

“Do you know why I did a puzzle today, Alphonse?”

The sun receded. The broken glass glittered on the carpet. Backs bony and tired of sitting, the two of them slouched together. Bad posture, at least, was something they shared. “Why?” Alphonse asked.

“Because I woke up today, and I felt good enough to do one.”

Across the street, the man on the roof downed the last of his champagne and flung the bottle against the backdrop of the twilight sky, where it hung for a moment, and then fell and, turning to his wife, he shoved her from the chair. She toppled backwards, scrabbled desperately at the gutter, and then slid from the roof. Her head hit the pavement first, where only half an hour ago there had been scabbing knees and orgiastic pleasure. Her skin split at the temple, and blood began to rain down her face. The man, crying, whimpering, throwing his hands up to the sky, said something that was either a prayer or a curse, and dove from the roof, following closely behind, like any good lover should. He landed next to the woman and hit his jaw. His head bounced like a basketball from a low dribble. His arm was bent at an awful angle, his hand stretching to meet his wife’s lifeless fingers. The children with their Mickey Mouse ears stopped dancing and began to scream.

Then Mitters fell.

It was time for furry death over Comrade. The people of the town were interrupted in their dancing, their singing, their praying, their fucking, interrupted by the flash of fur, by the face of the cat, his air emptied, his tongue out and lolling, his eyes rolled to his head, and all they could think of was how stupid this expression was, how arbitrary, how violent, how terrible they found their deaths. Their thoughts became a jumbled heap, and their neurons became acolytes who hunted for something to articulate the final hurt in the most animal recesses of their minds, not a word but a hollow sensation that would give it all meaning, that would crack some type of code, that would solve the riddle they had been asked at birth. Mitters hit the ground and they turned into paste.

* * *

After the ringing in his ears subsided, Alphonse opened his eyes, sneezed loudly onto his chest, and remembered that he was allergic to cats. Through the front window, the enormity of Mitters’ penis stretched over the ruined street, a pink tooth wedged in a jungle of soft fur like the mandible of some evil caterpillar. Alphonse and The Lover must have ended up tucked into the gap between crotch and thigh. They were safe, breathing heavy, feeling the rise and fall of each other across their backs. The living room was unblemished, but little tornadoes of sawdust were already rising from the kitchen, in the direction of the garage.

The Lover coughed and then spat onto the carpet. “Hello?” they called into the empty house. There was no response.

Alphonse tried to get a glimpse of something, blood, survivors, but the cat penis was all that there was. They were abandoned here, tied together, to live out some kind of purgatory, the same cold hell of their breakup, long hours where they drifted slowly apart. Except this time it was not just their emotional attachment which was at stake. They would starve to death, they would be slowly driven insane, their muscles would grow inert and their strength would leave in a slow, desperate trickle. Possibly they would try to cannibalize one another.

Alphonse sneezed again, and when he opened his eyes this time, he saw the faintest outline of a puzzle piece hidden in the fold of the green suede couch. He stared at it for a moment, uncertain of what he was looking at. “I found the missing piece,” he said.

“The crown of the gazebo,” The Lover murmured, sitting more upright. “Can you grab it?” For the first time that day, they sounded happy, and Alphonse realized it had never been about him at all. The death of an entire town seemed an absurd price to pay for a little shift in perspective.

The TV flickered and cut back in for one final message before all communication lines died with sickening finality. “We hope some people have learned,” the anchors said, tracing the shape of each other’s face, “that it isn’t always about saying what you feel you need to say. Sometimes it’s about leaving something well enough alone.”

Alphonse strained against the rope, trying to gather the puzzle piece, but his imperfect fingers couldn’t quite reach. Everything seemed to depend on this. The fold of the couch was a soft, yawning chasm, and although he was not a hero he pushed boldly further, searching…

~ ~ ~

Brett Hymel Jr. writes stories for bugs: mystical, upsetting, covered in dirt. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in several literary magazines, notably Subtropics, Puerto del Sol, and Hunger Mountain. Read more at Brett’s website.