Unsocialized

By Ania Payne

A frail gray mouse runs out from underneath the fridge and I chase it outside, the dogs chasing behind both me and the mouse, and a man who lives in a neighbor’s shed across the alley sees us and opens our gate with his good arm that’s not in a cast to let himself into our backyard, the bottoms of his Batman pajamas dragging through our muddy yard because we’ve finally gotten some rain–it’s been so dry–and he smokes a cigarette with no hands and as he tells me how much he loves our dogs (especially our husky) while the cigarette bobs up and down in the corner of his mouth but never falls out, I hear his own husky howling from inside the shed that he lives in–I think your dog is crying, I say, I’ve got a Zoom call in fifteen minutes, no, you can’t come inside because we’re social distancing, yes, the dogs like you very much, c’mon dogs, gotta get to that Zoom call, yes, my husband has your phone number written down somewhere, I’m sure he’ll text, ok bye, and I drag the dogs inside and he shuts the gate but I see his eyes still peeping through the holes in our wooden fence while his own dog continues to howl from his shed, and I wonder if we’ll all emerge from the pandemic like that–in our pajamas, struggling to read social cues (we had fooled ourselves into thinking we were so stable)–and back inside the house I open my computer but I don’t really have a Zoom call, just remorse, and the dogs chase the cats upstairs, but they’d be thrilled to go back outside and get pet by the neighbor again, they’d greet him with such pure dog joy.

Ania Payne lives, writes, and teaches in Manhattan, Kansas where she lives with her husband, Great Dane, Husky, and backyard chickens.

Art by Jeff Kallet.

All the Haircuts You Used to Have

By Liza Olson

It started out with the bowl cuts, obligatory for that time period, every kid the same, and then the buzzcuts via wall-plugged clippers, sweaty in the bathroom, hair collecting on skin and floor, and your dad trying to teach you how to shave, years before you’d shave legs and pits, years before the eventual gelled-up spikes, insisting it’s not a phase, and the fascination/excitement of longer hair, even if you did feel compelled by gender norms to wear it up, make it shoot out of your head in all directions the way you wished you could shoot out of that tiny town, to just be Away, and then the experimental bleach-blonde tips, the duckbills, buzzcuts again when those didn’t work out, and the pain in your stomach when it was all gone, hair in the trash, later that year kissing a boy and not telling anyone, hearing in your head the chorus of slurs that the other boys would use, had already used before, and then doubling down, growing it out real long, teenage Catholic rebellion at the all-boys school, being taught that you’re an abomination, spending religion class picking apart the dogma, forcing questions your teacher can’t answer, but doing so well on homework and tests that they have to give you an A anyway, then growing it till it breaks dress code and you’re forced to bring out the clippers again, making it through somehow to graduation, to distance, to trying every style imaginable, getting a job and making a little money and saving up and abruptly moving very far away, and kissing more guys, letting the shame curl away like smoke from the cigarettes you’d share with them, sickly sweet, and not cutting it anymore, not a single lock: hair down to your shoulders, hair like a queen of the silver screen, and months later, long after the move, it was finding those old clippers in a long-forgotten box, finding them, and taking them away, and oh how beautiful it was when they disappeared, when you let them drop, finally, into the trash.

Liza Olson is the author of Here's Waldo, Editor-in-Chief of (mac)ro(mic), and a Chicagoland transplant now living in North Carolina who's been published in SmokeLong Quarterly, Hobart, Fiction Southeast, and other fine places; find her online at lizaolsonbooks.com or on Twitter @lizaolsonbooks.

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

A Weirder America

By E. Nolan

A collage of images, flowing, ebbing, bobbing, weaving, a close up of you walking through a woods, pushing away branches from pine trees that block your path, block your youth, when other images take over the focus: a moody ocean, a boy climbing down a ladder, a steelworker welding in a factory, sparks flying, sparks from a sparkler stick at a parade, a spinning basketball, a candle in the corner of an attic flickering, the music coming out of an extended synth intro, the analog character slightly distorted, meaty, a little dirty, the chords droning, vintage yet modern, cowboys sitting on contemporary furniture, a weirder America, a stranger, more welcoming setting, your voice, the lyrics, the nonsense, the chorus, the instrumental section, the fingerpicking, the cadence, the swing, the gentle way you hold that thing, your voice front and center, not hidden at all, not tucked away, but offered to the listener like a gift, you’re running in the woods, the spinning camera on the top of a building in Brooklyn, the boy still at it on the ladder, flash cuts, dodging and burning, the burning sun on the waves of Jones Beach, the jangly iron sculpture welded and unwieldy, a fire in a trashcan under a bridge, the heavy, final chords lingering, fade out.

E. Nolan, whose work has appeared in McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Passages North, and X-R-A-Y, as well as other magazines, teaches English as a New Language in a public school in the Bronx and can be contacted at @normanunfirom.

Art by Andre Dos Santos, a photographer who can usually be found wandering the far flung, industrial, and (increasingly rare) desolate areas of New York.