Jordan Catalano Won’t Die a Heartbreaker

By Jeanine Skowronski

One day, when he was around, like, 36, he went to his old friend Tino’s Halloween party and he met a girl (not you, but, ehh, yeah, sure, I guess, if you squint a little) and he was dressed like a heroin addict (I KNOW) and she was dressed like a Boston Terrier, her Boston Terrier, a fat-faced dump of a dog named Flatrick Slobchunks (I KNOW), and they started talking, sort of on accident, sort of just because they were sitting next to each other on a couch, but he said something clever (I swear), something about Visine, maybe, and she said something tough, but disarming, something like “I’m sorry I’m drunk; I’m training for a jiu-jitsu tournament” and then her ride was leaving so she asked for his phone number (something you’d never do, something she never did, TBH) and a week later, they went to Hooters because that’s where they could watch the UFC fights and, at the end of the night, when he was thinking about maybe not calling her, about getting into his cherry-red car and finally driving all the way to, I don’t know, Temecula, California, she looked up at the fog-filled sky and started crying because, look, there was one really bright star; and he liked that she was crying, liked, later, that she cried so often and so easily, about polar bears and party favors, dentist appointments and dead fathers, his dead father specifically (this girl never cried about him, but sometimes, she cried for him, you know?), about half-birthdays and car trade-ins and that movie Firehouse Dog, which, yes, Jordan Catalano watched with her, and he cried too, because, well, he was waiting to—no, he was ready to, he needed to, he realized, so it finally would hurt less to look at things—and once they were both at least temporarily out of tears, he reached under his soft flannel shirt, his rough, white tank top, and took out his big, beating, bleeding heart (you know, you knew) and asked her to hold onto it as tightly as she wanted for the rest of his so-called life.

Jeanine Skowronski has published work in Lunate Fiction, Meet Cute Press, and Dwelling Literary, and was a finalist in NYC Midnight’s 2019 Short Story Challenge.

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

Remains

By Beth Tillman

I had an estate client who wanted to be cremated and have their ashes dropped from a helicopter over a UNC football game and another who wanted to be buried on top of his father and a client who wanted to be tossed in the ocean while his friends smoked cigars and drank fine bourbon paid for by the estate and a client who directed she be sent to a body farm to be set outside to decompose while wild animals and insects ate her so that the police could learn more about the way a body disappears and how long that takes and a client who requested he be mixed with the ashes of his dog Coco and sprinkled over a lake in Wisconsin only we couldn’t find Coco’s ashes until the neighbor found them and brought them to the firm where my confused assistant thought she could mix them with water and drink them until we stopped her and a client who wanted his brain removed and preserved so that he could be brought back later though he couldn’t tell me if he thought life would be the same after he was reinstalled and another who said to divide up her ashes among her friends and have the estate pay for each of them to go somewhere they went together and to sprinkle their allotment in that place and a client who preferred cremation but not right now, she said, not right now, only after I die of course and I agreed we wouldn’t do anything prematurely and another who wanted to go out in a blaze of glory on a floating funeral pyre with his archer friend from the shore shooting a flaming arrow at his body, and I want to say keep it simple, but I am the one who pressed this question, warning you don’t want to end up in an unlabeled box in someone’s closet, and each time as they answer, I can’t help but imagine myself dead, imagine myself buried or barbequed, parceled out to the mountains and beaches and streams, and I don’t want my children standing over me wondering what do we do with her, so I’ve left these instructions in an envelope on which I’ve written “Read First”: Take what is left of me, don’t drain me, dig a hole deep enough to keep the animals away, gather the people I loved, wrap me in the rose quilt my mother made, let everyone hold onto the soft edges, lower me gently, have each throw in a handful of dirt, then fill in the cracks, mound up the soil, and finally, read something that reminds you of what truly remains, not my dead body, not me, but your life and all that is yet to come.

Beth Tillman is an estate attorney in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, is enrolled in the M.F.A. program with Fairfield University, and is writing a memoir about her daily dances with death and incapacity.

Art by Amie Souza Reilly

People Keep Saying My Hometown Has a Monster, But Let Me Tell You

By Kirsten Reneau

I grew up in Grafton, so I can tell you there’s no such thing as a Grafton Monster – hell, there wasn’t anything like a Grafton Monster myth or cryptid or like what Flatwoods or Point Pleasant has always had (that is, a legit monster with a real mythology, something people can grab onto) not till some TV show decided so and then the Fallout Games decided so and then all the sudden, where there was once nothing, now the only coffee shop in downtown (which is the only coffee shop in the county) is selling Find the Grafton Monster t-shirts and cookies in the shape of him (if he had a shape, which he doesn’t, because he’s not real and also if he was that’s not what he looks like anyways) with hopes that some tourists may pop in, but I’ll tell you I’ve never seen a tourist in Grafton (not counting when I bring my boyfriend home with me) since it’s too far out of the way and if you’re there you might as well be in Morgantown, or go another few miles and see those big Flatwoods Monster chairs that the Braxton County commission put up or even take a left on old route 50 and go to the Mothman Museum in Point Pleasant and take your photo with the statue or hell, go all the way down state and check out the cave where Batboy is from, just don’t come to my hometown because we don’t have any monsters except black lung and opioids, which is what the whole state has anyways so not even that is special, and I just want to make it clear that I’m not deviling you, there is no Grafton Monster here, not a single one, so don’t go looking and if you do, well, don’t say I didn’t tell you.

Kirsten Reneau is a writer from West Virginia, where all the good monsters come from.

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