Indiana Jones and the Giant Pit of Consequences

By Timothy C. Goodwin

In hindsight, my hat looked nothing like a fedora, and the mustache my best friend Charley made from scribbling black marker on paper, cutting out, and taping to his upper lip looked nothing like Hitler's; in hindsight, we should have stayed at the scene of the accident, calling out to my parents for help from the backyard instead of running to get them, so that we didn’t look like we were fleeing the scene; in hindsight, there are plenty of other ways to play Indiana Jones, so taking the swings off the swingset and dangling from the top bar, crossing from one end to the other, hand over hand—Charley chasing me over an imagined, giant pit of lava-snakes—might not have been the best idea, because of course my five-year old sister would want to join us, even though there was no role for a kid like her in our serious pretendification, and—in hindsight—maybe I could have told her to scram, but I didn't think she would follow us up to the top of the swingset, I didn't think she would fall, and I didn't think that landing on her butt with her arms behind her would snap her wrists—all 2 of them—like 2 plastic straws, and after keys were swiped from the table top and coats were ripped from hangers while my parents shouted new concepts like CONSEQUENCES and WHAT WERE YOU THINKING and HINDSIGHT over the sound of lots and lots—and lots—of sisterly screaming, the front door slammed shut and the wailing receded into the distance, leaving Charley and I in (sniffling) silence, together on the couch, his mustache barely hanging to his lip, flapping with each pant, my hat crumpled in my fists in my lap, both of us now aware of how much thinking we have to do in our world, how there are consequences in our world, and in that silence, from the backyard, we could still hear the Indiana Jones theme playing on our cassette player, soundtracking an adventure that, in hindsight, now seemed so childish, now seemed so long ago.

Timothy C Goodwin has work included in HAD, Trash Cat, Twin Pies, Dishsoap Quarterly, JAKE, Maudlin House, and elsewhere; he lives in NYC.

Art by Gary Goodwin.

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.