I stole your wife in the middle of an IKEA

By Helena Pantsis

or, okay, I understand the implications of saying I stole her, as if she is an object, as if she is your property to be stolen, but now I fear I might've done just that—so maybe what I mean is when I saw her across the way, wandering down the aisles between the TÄRENDÖs and the LAGKAPTENs, the tension was palpable—I saw the MALMs glistening in the halos of her eyes—and maybe it was one-sided to begin, me standing across her in the kitchen, her eyeing a stray FULLÄNDAD in the LÅNGUDDEN, and I pictured us there together inside our home, staring between our BORGHILD curtains and readying to start the day, but when she reached for the same TRÅDFI as me I knew it was serendipity, or destiny, or the Swedish word for lovestruck and all things meant to be (FÅGELHUS?), so I asked her to the dining hall to share an ALLEMANSRÄTTEN in the cafeteria with me, where the queues are long and the trays are never full, so I could stare into her eyes and refill her endless cup for eternity—but it wasn't until her fourth refill (I don't know how many hours it'd been; time in IKEA exists in a void) that I noticed the wedding ring, that the notion of my perfect woman—not mine in the possessive context but in terms of subjective evaluation (not that she is an object to be evaluated, or that she exists to be perceived from any given gaze but her own)—as a married woman made itself solid and possible in the goo of my mind, still when I asked her about it she said she hadn't seen you since the DJUNGELSKOGs, which might've been hours ago, or months, or maybe years, and so perhaps you had ceased to exist, or had walked into a KLEPPSTAD and found your way into another world, but either way she was ready to move on—“it happens,” she said, and even though she shares my SONGESAND now, and makes love to me nightly, and looks so sweet standing by our LÅNGUDDEN in the mornings with a hot UPPHETTA ready for pouring, and after supper time when she clears the OFTASTs from the JOKKMOKK she smiles at me so lovingly, last week she noticed that the BORGHILD curtains were fading, so now I'm afraid of losing my wife in an IKEA too.

Helena Pantsis (she/they) is a writer and student from Australia's south-east majoring in Psychology and Creative Writing—more of their work can be found at hlnpnts.com.

Art by Jeff Kallet.

Adam Duritz

By Emily Costa

One thing about my dad dying a few days into the new year is that the Counting Crows song “A Long December” has taken on some sort of deep significance, which surprises me because I’ve heard it a million times and always felt mostly ambivalent about the song and the band, and I don’t want to be cosmically moved by the nanananas but here I am crying at Adam Duritz and his little dreads swinging and he’s singing the smell of hospitals in winter and I’m like yeahhhhh because I’m thinking of the foam Purell and the wilting hospice flowers and the cafeteria food stink drifting into the hallway while I suited up in PPE during that last week, and Duritz is singing how it’s all oysters, no pearls, and I’m wondering about the part where light attaches to a girl—when does that part come in, that part seems nice, that part seems like all the bad stuff is worth it to see some holy thing like that, some transmutation, and I'm thinking: maybe I could be that girl.

Emily Costa's work can be found in Hobart, Barrelhouse, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Atticus Review, and elsewhere, and you can find her on twitter @emilylauracosta.

Art by Molly Capobianco.

Boarding for Tampa, Florida

By Joey Hedger

Your slow, steady collapse begins with the words, just my luck, spoken from your own lips as you recline against a crinkly seat at Gate 12, where on a ceiling-mounted television across the crowd reporters discuss plane accidents or something of the sort, the noise barely reaching you between the voice of a nearby mother saying that’s enough now, I mean it to a boy crawling on hands and knees looking for dimes and pennies across the carpeting where shoes have plodded on and on for centuries—oxfords, narrow nose, slick leather, wingtips, flip-flops, stilettos, flats, blue suede, Birkenstocks, Crocs; so the boy climbs onto his glow-up Nikes and takes a seat on the other end of the aisle from you, his eyes still casting about as though in the dark for dirty coins that store clerks would barely accept anymore, and the mother exhales for a moment, relieved at relief, while beside her, a uniformed flight attendant tries to conduct an official-sounding personal call on her smartphone, saying into it I agree with Betty that more direct data would help for making this decision and Could you hold for a moment, please as she spots a free power outlet where she can find her own solace in unlimited energy—yet you bear through the noise to interpret one more thing said on the TV, that great white encounters are up from recent years, possibly due to global warming, which can only resurface the anxiety you managed to bury about returning to your old home in the state most ready to dip off into the ocean at any second—Tampa, Florida, calls the gate attendant, boarding for Tampa, Florida; and getting up, you forget that most passengers still must line up and find their seats before you, based on the instructions printed across your boarding pass, but you still get up and go off to stand beneath another half-audible TV reporting on proper packing rituals for summer vacationing; when you are finally nestled onto the seat, 32F, by the window, you lean into the felt cushion, feeling yourself grow heavier and heavier as the plane takes off, and you wonder if this is indicative of your own weight, your own body growing denser and denser the higher you go, then beginning to weigh down the plane gradually until it slowly sinks back toward the earth, breaking past the land mass and zooming over the Gulf of Mexico, still sinking closer toward the waterline, toward the great white sharks, toward the unpacked sunscreen and seagulls and sandbars—it is out of your control, this density in your bones, this pain you find buried in your own veins at the very idea of facing the new lens of this old town, the new events, the funerals, the absent family, the growing population, the tourists, the eroding beaches—until it, the plane, careens into the airport, sidles up to a gate, and lets you all out with a wheeze, and here in his new airport, you ask the boy who plucks a penny up from beside a trash can whether he found it face up or face down, and the boy, not seeming to understand the question, runs off, leaving you nervously waiting for your bag, not ready to leave the building and see for yourself whether or not the land is still there or whether the ocean and sharks have already eaten it whole.

Joey Hedger lives in Alexandria, Virginia, and can be found at joeyhedger.com.

Art by Nick Botka, who runs the cassette tape label, StillVHS, and who snaps stills of VHS @stillvhs.