Ritual / Habit

By Dee Mohammed

My bi-annual check-up on my elementary school crush goes how I expect it to, with me frowning at the scraggly mustache that sprouts unattractively from his upper lip and the thick, American traditional tattoos sleeving down his arms, “US Navy” in his bio and “college dropout” in the subtext, all the makings of someone who, a decade down the line, would raise his children to call him “sir,” children conceived with a girl who is a petite shade of his mother, because he doesn’t follow his sisters on Instagram, but he follows his mom and a handful of swimsuit models who could very well be his mom’s age—regardless, he’d be known around the neighborhood as a stand-up guy who faithfully attends his kids’ basketball and football and baseball games, never mind that he arrives for only the last ten minutes of his daughter’s kindergarten performance of The Nutcracker, and his shirt is always tucked smartly into his Levi jeans, smooth down strong legs as the other dads call him "sport" and "man," even though the natural curl of his dark lashes and owlish set of his eyes belie a strange and fidgeting girlishness in him, one that I’d liked in third grade when I solemnly told him he had the prettiest eyes I’d ever seen sit on a boy’s face; this was before kissing his cheek and running off, though that was then, when he used to smile with all his teeth, and this is now, so I let myself linger on the semi-familiar face of a stranger who knows the shape of my mouth against skin before I close the tab, memory settling like sediment until, inevitably, it becomes disturbed again.

Dee Mohammed is a very tired, very hungry student at Texas A&M University, and her works appear in a handful of literary magazines from over the years.

Art by Jay Baker, an artist from Colorado living in Oregon, by way of New Mexico; he records music as Tom Foe.

New York

By Oleg Olizev

In New York, you're always on camera — too many people chasing money or organs or both, and there’s plenty to go around; money doesn’t stink, but organs come in every shade and shape, and sooner or later they’ll catch you, so don’t bother hiding — lean out and let the city have you, because screaming here makes you prey, to cops, to strangers, to time, to anything that doesn’t look like you, or worse, they’ll walk past and you won’t even notice you’re already gone, so leave a trace — something that says you were here, that you never smoked in the subway or drank beer on the edge of a flowerbed, because that’s not allowed and they’ll misread you, misfile you, misplace you like a bad bet, and maybe you’re out here dancing naked and wild, maybe you’ll get jumped and spend the rest of your life drooling skyward, that happens too — ugly, yeah, but who’s to say, and maybe your buddy’s wrong but you still only have one answer: this or nothing, maybe something filthy with a wink, and maybe I’ll be hauling busted jaws and bricks to the ER later to cover up what’s obvious on the warehouse floor, and you’ll come with me for cheap tea at La Grenouille and tell me how your bones ache from being handled too rough in this city and how your teeth still shine, and you’ll say it without shame and it’ll all pass by Monday, just like everything else, because here, dead fates sit in the corners of skyscrapers and mops shake from applause in the basement, so take your pick of exposed adolescence before fate skips you at the intersection of desire and steel, where the cars will hit you hard enough to make you see stars and your eyes’ll scatter like loose change, and that’s why I’m wrapping this up — because in New York, everything’s an accident: the rain, the snow slipping off a stranger’s shoulder, the legs that go on forever, the stupid plans over dinner, the insomnia, the shameless ones, the natural beauty dangling in your face like someone’s earring, like a birch tree in the wind, so stop sulking — worse shit has gone down here when the wine got too bold.

Oleg Olizev writes like New York bleeds — messy, fast, and full of things no one wants to talk about.

Photo by Oleg Olizev.

The basement of the old gym is a good one

By Brendan Todt

Sure, Sarah tells the students, the basement of the old gym is a good one, but the scariest experience she’s ever had was at the Historic Pierce Mansion on Jackson Street at the end of March a few years ago when she was part of a committee raising funds for the symphony, when she got separated from her group and ended up in a second-story bedroom filled with ceramic pigs and origami pigs and needlepoint pigs framed in pictures on the walls and pig dolls with round pink pig faces and pigtails for hair, and the room had too many chairs to be a bedroom, or, plausibly, any kind of room, and on each of the chairs was a knit afghan with a different letter in a bold color in its center, and through the ventilation system—somehow—she was able to hear what must have been every conversation going on in the house, and some of the pig dolls must have been made by children because they did not have mouths, but Sarah was convinced they were speaking to her, the way her new writing students believe the muse will speak to them, and through one vent in the floor Sarah heard a wealthy patron admit how much he would like to fuck the one with the black hair and the bourbon breath—it would just take a few dollars or drinks more—and Sarah remembered that most of the pigs she has seen in real life have not been pink or cute but dark and dirty and hairy, and the voices kept arriving through the bowels of the house—Keep those checks coming, gentlemen, says one of them: the music director—and she remembers that one of the men she loved most, early on, sheepishly admitted his preference for thick pubic hair and unshaved legs, primarily because he had never seen it in person, so Sarah offered herself up to him that way, which she doesn’t tell the students, though perhaps she should, because even this could not satisfy him—More checks, think of the Christmas program, the elementary school visits; think of your legacy, your tax liability, your name over the lobby concessions—and in a room nearby Sarah heard no footsteps but a toilet flush, and then everyone in the house seemed to stop talking, as if they had realized that Sarah was like the house itself, big and empty and spooky and listening, but then they must have figured that couldn’t possibly be the case, no haunted anythings around here, so polite and Midwest they all were, so well-meaning and generous, so they picked up talking and begging and flushing and fucking and still she hasn’t been able to shut them all up or all out.

Brendan Todt, who writes and teaches writing in Sioux City, Iowa, has been working on a series of stories about a character named Sarah--who herself writes and teaches writing--some of which have appeared in Smokelong Quarterly, Necessary Fiction, and elsewhere.