Carbs

By Andrew Maynard

Annie told Kyle that her grandpa had a heart attack and she’d have to bail on what was supposed to be a double date at the Olive Garden, so now Kyle sits across from Jen and Eric on the lonely side of a four-person booth trying to think about anything other than the profound hand job that mangled what once was a perfectly balanced tricycle with defined systems (Jen and Eric dating, Kyle, a little jealous but mostly cool with being third wheel) into this wobbly clusterfuck of a dinner party that can barely enjoy oversized plates of Fettuccine Alfredo and endless breadsticks because it’s hard to eat when you know you’re a bad friend, and Kyle knows he is a bad friend, though he can’t possibly tell Eric about the hand job because it would ruin everything they built, and a 12-year friendship is worth more than—Kyle’s train of thought is derailed as he and Jen make eye contact at the precise moment her long fingers curl around the end of a golden-brown breadstick and like deja vu Kyle is back in the back of her Honda Civic where she made him promise, mid-jerk, that he’d never tell Eric, and he won’t, he can’t, and he accepts the fact that he’ll never be the person he thought he could be, because that person would never get a hand job from his best friend’s girlfriend, no matter how much he loves her—and Eric picks up his phone and apologizes, but he has to leave, because he’s on-call, and Kyle didn’t know being on-call was the responsibility of a dermatology PA, but when Jen tries to get up, Eric insists that she stay, because there is still fettuccine on their plates and a half-full basket of breadsticks and more drinks on the way, and now it’s just Kyle and Jen, alone for the first time since what Jen thought would be the last time, and she doesn’t regret giving Kyle the hand job because it snapped her and Eric out of the stasis of a stalled relationship, and he’s been so much more present since she told him, and she just knows that they have what it takes to get through this, and if they can get through this they can get through anything, but man she wishes Kyle would stop being such a puppy dog about the whole thing, the way he looks at her is so pathetic, and she didn’t know it was possible for a grown man to put so much weight into a handy, and Kyle and Annie both understand that the heart is a spider web capable of trapping and feasting on small, beautiful joys and being swiped into oblivion without notice, but what they don’t know is Annie’s grandpa’s heart is totally fine, and Eric is not on his way to the office but Annie’s apartment where he’s been going weekly since he found out about the secret hand job, and Eric and Annie intend to do things to one another that make a hand job seem more like a handshake on the spectrum of philandering, and the waitress sets down Jen and Kyle’s drinks and smiles and says, Is there anything else you need, and the answer is, of course, yes, but neither is ready to admit it.

Andrew Maynard is a teacher and writer in Richmond, Virginia. His stories and essays have appeared in HAD, DIAGRAM, Mud Season Review, True Story, Rejection Letters, and elsewhere.

Art by Ryan Meadows, a 24 year old queer artist and hairstylist living in Phoenix, AZ.

Exposure Therapy

By Anyu Ching

He ordered the lasagna which, to Sharon, initially came across as a little childish and undignified until she realized that if it was truly a childish and undignified order then surely it would not have even been an option on the QR code menu of a restaurant that New York Magazine dubbed “the poor man’s Carbone” to begin with, and so proud she was of this complete self-directed restoration of her companion’s masculinity (within a few seconds too! A personal record her therapist would be proud of.) that she didn’t even notice when the doctor called her Shermaine until fifteen minutes after the fact, and by then it was too late to issue any corrections without revealing that her mind had been elsewhere for the past quarter of an hour, a fact that he would not have known otherwise because Sharon had mastered the delicate art of functional dissociation, a skill she employed both consciously and subconsciously in a variety of settings that included dinner dates but also job interviews, missionary sex, and any kind of instructor-led exercise that required grip socks, which always put her back into the ward, sliding around her room and up and down the hallways as if she were on skates and the vinyl floor an ice rink and the call bells thunderous applause from judges who held up pieces of paper with the number ten printed onto them, raising them up high above their heads, the score cards shooting out from interdigital folds as if the pieces of paper were merely an extension of their palms, like they were always there and would always read ten, ten, ten even if you ran them under water or through gel-slicked hair or slapped them down hard onto the desk, where they would make a sound like someone sticking the landing, like Katie’s body falling off the roof, like a twin-sized mattress hitting the floor.

Anyu Ching is a Singaporean writer and journalist based between Southeast Asia and the United States.

Art by Anjali, a multimedia artist currently based in Honolulu who spends her time dreaming up strange things and giggling.

Deathselves

By Sarp Sozdinler

After my last round of chemo, I at last showed myself the courtesy of being my true self, of shirking my duties as a member of the society, of not being polite, of not showering for days on end if I felt like it, of not taking the trash out, of sending everyone straight to voicemail, of feeling the liberty to be rude to my friends and family, of being able to say no to them for once, of not responding to their calls or emails, or more importantly their inquiries about my life, about my romantic life, about my sexual life—if it still could be called that—or of avoiding people’s interest in my disappearance, my sudden withdrawal from their lives, my becoming a ghost without so much as giving them a reason, an excuse in which they could find comfort to not take things personal, to excise themselves from the responsibility of having done something wrong, something that might have soured what would be our already disjointed relationship, all at the expense of my becoming the person I’ve always desired, the kind of person who prioritizes herself, her needs, her wants, her desires over anything, starting with her body, in my case my ailing body, my once prom queen body, my now easily bruised body, the same body with which I once came sixty-ninth in the Paris marathon, the same body with which I drew the attention of everyone in every room I walked in, the same body with which I built my baby an unsound crib, the same body with which I got on the bus and left my mother’s home for a new life in the city, a place that would give me a lousy phone and a small apartment, a kid with chronic disease, a pocket to crawl into, a couch to sleep on, and a proclivity for being sorry all the time, for apologizing profusely for most anything, even when I was in the right, for the benefit of the men around me, along with my lovers, my terrible bosses, my dubious friends, all selfish in essence, not even bothering to pretend, to ask how I’ve been doing, if I’m in need, if I’m at peace, those who would take my being unavailable, unreachable, inaccessible for once in my life as a personal affront, those who should basically go fuck themselves, fuck their wives, fuck their parents, fuck the planet, fuck something, anything anything anything but me, me who should be left alone, burned like a witch, kissed like a lover, caressed like a wife, hugged like a mother, and forgotten like an ocean that had long become a terrain.

Based in Philadelphia and Amsterdam, Sarp Sozdinler has been published in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Masters Review, Fractured Lit, Hobart, HAD, Trampset, and Maudlin House, among other journals.

Art by Michael Moreth, a recovering Chicagoan living in the rural, micropolitan City of Sterling, the Paris of Northwest Illinois USA.