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.

Label Scarred

By Amy Barnes

I’ve returned to my hometown but not my home because that is gone forever and all that’s left is a stripped down strip mall left standing in strips and straps and strops with closed department stores and childhood haunts, all label scarred across openings and exits, jagged in my mind jean stores and Jean’s Store and pet stores with cats and smells of cat food in tins and warm cookies in tins too wafting when I try to shop in the shops but have no money and there is no one selling anything anyway, as I can feel smell radiation smoke clouds hovering in blown out windows and glass ceilings and over the empty center fountain that is dry and full of only rusted pennies when I grab handfuls of dry change and make wishes but they only leave ghostly orange dust on my fingers, granting nothing to nobody even the man that is there trying to rescue all the cats while wearing a detective trench coat filled with ticking alarm clocks and candy watches hung on hooks, dragging on the ground with cat food cans and bacon in his pockets on the news, on TV store tube televisions that blast Max Headroom anchors spouting propaganda and praise songs and the national anthem of somewhere, telling me he’s searching and rescuing because that’s what he does but refuses to rescue me or see me as I pick up a hungry cat that is shopping for a home and stand in this man’s path, but he brushes past, brushes my shoulder into cinder ash fallout, all the while there’s a sale on cat food in the second floor pet store that is still announcing sales on a loop de loop when I drop penny dust in the carousel ticket box and climb aboard a looping copper dappled horse that sends splinters of hot wood into my thighs as we stand still, a girl and a cat and a horse that can all hear dog barks echoing but don’t encounter even one spaniel or pit-bull or bull terrier, just a deep voice on the loudspeaker and sad Burl Ives Christmas music playing because the man isn’t there to rescue the dogs, either.

Amy Barnes lives in the South with dogs and kids and words and at @amygcb on Twitter.

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