The basement of the old gym is a good one

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.

What Kind of Body of Water are You?

By Edmario Lesi

The week I finished begging my dreams for answers, I kissed two boys at a DJ slash artist slash ex-boyfriend’s birthday party, and they both seemed grumpy afterward, I think because the two boys were rival actors in the same performing arts academy, so I decided to only invite the taller boy to my cousin's pondwarming—my cousin who lives near a pond—and although this boy never accepted my friend request on Instagram, he did arrive at the pondwarming the next evening and wander into conversations asking 'What kind of body of water are you?' while I preoccupied myself with a boy I had kissed once last July, whose eyelids were sagging from too much weed, yet there was a voltage between us which meant this pondwarming offered again the mixed pleasure of getting caught between two boys who almost wanted me, or wanted me once just never during the appropriate time, and because neither boy seemed desperate enough, two days later I met with a boy decades older than me, an author of young adult novels, and he told me he’d endured fourteen ex-boyfriends, two of whom had died of drug overdoses, he said 'I really know how to pick them,' which I think was the boy’s only effective joke, because the rest seemed written by God, like the final minutes of our date, when he needed to buy chicken broth from his local supermarket before it closed, and I felt so humiliated he chose broth over me that I abandoned him to sleep with a boy someplace a few hundred metres away, who asked if my name comes from anywhere—it doesn’t—then talked about himself while his cock sluiced out of me, so I learned he was a brand manager for a yogurt company where he worked alongside his boyfriend, who was dating another boy who planned to relocate to Alaska next July, which reminded me of my first evening in Melbourne, when I stayed with a boy who lived inside a converted warehouse that smelled like gum leaves, and I surprised myself by telling this boy about the recurring dream where my boyfriend and I, some non-existent combination, are pissing on the frozen lake beneath us until it smashes apart.

Edmario Lesi is a PhD candidate of English and Creative Writing at The Australian National University; his short stories have appeared in Island, Carte Blanche, The Suburban Review, and elsewhere.

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

Dry Maintenance

By Ruby Rosenthal

I somehow have become a woman instead of a girl and this fact is very confusing to me; a few years ago I didn’t floss very often or moisturize frequently, I’d take some of that slick cool Neutrogena hydrosauce, coat my fingers, and slather it all over the grooves of my face once a week max because sometimes it would get into my eyelashes, sometimes I would wake up and it would be stuck in my hair, sometimes being nineteen was all fun and games because I didn’t know yet what ailments I had, I didn’t know yet how quickly my body would be prone to developing pockets of fat in undesirable areas, I didn’t know yet that in my twenties, I would become dry everywhere—dry knuckles in the winter: peeling, bleeding, cutting, blood dripping onto my laptop into my gray snowflaked flannel sheets—sheets, by the way, that I never had to own, until my twenties, never knew they existed, until my twenties—but back to my hands, my hands are flaky and falling apart, no Walmart-branded moisturizer will soothe me, I pay full-price now for O’Keefe’s to keep me together and full price for a tar-scented medically induced moisturizer because eight months ago, my eyelids started peeling and I rubbed them until they became red and splotchy and so I put Aquaphor on my eyelids and then at a birthday party a friend’s rude girlfriend asked if my shiny eyelids were the new trend, but then I went to Charlottesville and my cousin asked me if I wanted to borrow her psoriasis medication, and that solved it, I guess, I have psoriasis, I guess, I have the thing that she has—thanks genetics, I guess—I have the thing that we in my family have up and down our elbows and our knees, the thing that we think would make no one ever fall in love with us, and so now, I have to face the how do I get rid of it, the what do I have to slather nightly, the how do I keep the flakes away, so now it’s tar-scented moisturizer on my eyelids, tar-scented moisturizer beneath my chin, tar-scented moisturizer on the small spot right below my lip, because it’s itchy, so itchy, I just want to scratch it all away and let the flakes fall to the ground, like when I was a kid that’s what I would do to my dandruff, taking my fingernails and carefully affixing them to my rounded scaly scalp scabs, hardened yet puffed, sensitive yet sturdy, and I would circle them, find where they started and where they ended, and slowly pull them out, doing it until my hair, my very dark hair, was dotted with white flakes dispersed between its roots, and the floor would be covered in my dead skin, impossible to clean up quickly, requiring a real vacuum or broom, not just the palm of my hands, but now I am a woman,

Ruby Rosenthal is a Chicago-based writer whose work appears or is forthcoming in Hypertext Magazine, The Rumpus, HerStry, Defenestration, and elsewhere.

Art by Yuliya Klochan.