My Life with Cheetahs

By Brendan Sheehan

Mom went on a girls weekend to Vegas and stayed in a hotel casino famous for its elevator that roared like a cheetah every time the doors opened, and she loved the effect so much that as soon as she got home she made Dad trigger all the closet doors to play the same roar through tiny speakers mounted above the frames, which freaked out all of us boys—Bobby, Craig and me—because we used closets for things best kept hidden, items we reached for after dark, and just as we expected, our nights became filled with cheetah roars bringing attention to mischievous behavior like Bobby digging out his secret Nintendo controller so he could keep playing Contra instead of doing homework, or Craig pulling a Juggs magazine from the bottom of a Sports Illustrated stack, or me grabbing my shoebox and rereading notes with little hearts and bubble letters exclaiming You Float My Boat! that Amelia D’Amico slipped me during first period Social Studies, and yet as the years passed and we got older, the cheetah roars became background noise, sounding duller, wearier, less scary when closet doors opened for Dad gathering clothes to bring to his new apartment, or Bobby scrambling for his rig so he could shoot up after deciding a week of sobriety was plenty, or Craig storing his biker jacket and denim vests in a garment bag because he wouldn’t need them in Iraq, or me grabbing my shoebox and rereading notes that Justin Gaveston slipped me during sixth period Chemistry that didn’t have little hearts or bubble letters but rather chaotic declarations of true love, threats of suicide if we couldn’t run away together, and eventually after I’d opened the closet door, grabbed my shoebox and reread those notes hundreds of times, the cheetah went on the fritz, roaring on a warped loop, a sad dying roar fighting through static, a roar that continued even after I’d shut the door, kissed Mom goodbye and left the house.

Brendan Sheehan writes and lives in New Jersey. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Columbia Journal, HAD, Pithead Chapel and X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine.

Art by Brendan Sheehan.

Lesson in the Form of an IUD

By Lauren Rheaume

When they did the insertion it felt like a dull knife searching for my heart, pushing up higher and deeper than I thought it needed to go, and I cursed whoever told me all I needed to do to prep for this appointment was pop some ibuprofen, cursed the doctor holding my cervix open with dilators, cursed, even, the sweet attendant who put a cold compress on my forehead and a hot one on my abdomen, who asked if I was okay and told me the reason my face was going numb was because I was breathing in and out too fast, slow down, and I did: it seemed like all I did for the next two and a half years was be slow, stopped, doubled over, in bed, in the fetal position—how ironic—feeling inflamed in chains stained, cramps so strong it felt like my organs turned to heavy stone, like a sharp-gloved hand gripped my uterus and tried to drag it out of me, and the blood—oh, the blood, like a river, like puzzle pieces slipping from the box, metallic, and sometimes it made me feel strong, all this ache, all this loss, almost a release and a survival, like when I washed my underwear in the sink, the satisfaction of my hands under the water wringing it pink, watching the work of my body drip down the drain.

Lauren Rheaume got rid of her copper IUD ages ago and she’s a writer currently obsessed with the body and nature who works at GrubStreet, tweets at @laurenxelissa, and who occasionally updates lauren-rheaume.com.

Photo by Lauren Rheaume.

A Mashup of Jobs You Could Have Had Growing Up in South Central Pennsylvania

By Andy Brown

You’re sitting on a low wooden stool picking celery plants from the starter bed while asking the guy beside you for a minute of his time, but he’s hungry, so you brush the dirt from your hands and grab a tray with plates of banquet chicken and the kind of mashed potatoes you could use to plaster a ceiling, a ceiling that will last for decades until you climb this ladder and start busting a hole big enough to climb through, so you can wiggle into the crawlspace and cut the ties that hold it, except of course that means when it falls, you fall too, but then again when you land it’s like landing in a public pool that hasn’t been cleaned, which is to say there are floating turds and dead mice that someone has to scoop out with a net, and that someone is you – today, tomorrow and every day until something different comes along, something that pays a little more or offers more hours, such that when you fall back into the pool and drown, you wake up driving a forklift in reverse, moving a pallet piled high with bags of crushed stone, and you’re so careful not to crash that you don’t notice until it’s too late the fledgling bird leap from the nest hidden in the overstocked lumber, leap only to discover it’s not ready to fly, to discover that it’s not even agile enough to flutter away before a solid rubber tire turns it into a stain the rain will wash away later, and maybe that’s when you could say you witnessed something real or had a life-changing experience or learned a valuable lesson or all the above, but you still have to wake the next morning and drive to work, where you flirt with a purple dragon and guard the entrance to a roller coaster, and when a child begs to be let on the ride, and the parent says, “Ask the man,” you don’t hesitate to say, “No, you have to be at least this tall,” because your childhood ended years ago, and it’s not fair they look to you for an answer, and it makes no sense, since you’re not even old enough to buy cigarettes or join the army, but you’re the man nonetheless, the man with the blue polo shirt sporting a castle logo and wavy font that says Dutch Wonderland.

Andy Brown is a full-time freelance writer who left south central Pennsylvania 20 years but still considers it home.

Art by Andy Brown.