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by Gina Yang Four days prior, Mars was in Aries. This meant, according to magazine columnists who would know, that desires should be acted upon immediately, because Aries energy is impulsive and restless. I was glad to hear this, because I had in that week acted somewhat impulsively. It was the first week of June and I was in my socialite era. Long, expensive dinners with friends, evenings at the opera, Broadway musicals, readings at the Whitney. I had given notice at my job and could focus on distracting myself. Fortunately, I was about to leave for a holiday in Italy. *** Rome was so hot it felt like I was dying. I might have been—from jet lag or illness—it was still ambiguous which I was experiencing. My throat was sore, my glands swollen, and there was an ache behind my eyes. These were the symptoms to watch out for, but they were also how my fatigue manifested itself in those days. My mother took me to Borsalino and I bought myself a hat. It was painfully chic and cooled me off considerably, though it did nothing for my general condition. That could only be cured by a lie down, which could only happen after lunch. So I sat in that big mall on Via del Corso, sipping an acqua frizzante, trying my best not to be a vessel of disease, while my parents took care of some business across the street. Every woman passing by wore a sundress. Some were better than others. The worst ones were too short, like dresses made for toddlers. The ones I envied were longer, made of linen or eyelet. The color of the summer was bubblegum pink. *** As it turned out, it wasn’t jet lag that had given me chills. Of course, this was how it always happened. *** I recovered in Venice, and then we went to San Felice Circeo. The resort was gorgeous, all bougainvillea and white stucco and turquoise water. I swam alone in the grotto each day. Being there made me sure that I had made a mistake. My mind ran in an endless, pointless loop, fantasizing about showing this place to a person with whom I was no longer on speaking terms. I wanted more than anything to see him swim, and to know that he could save my life if I began to drown. To make matters worse, I looked more beautiful than ever. I had gotten a tan, and a slight burn down my nose and across my left thigh. My hair was long and loose and soft from swimming in the sea. Butterflies had taken over the resort and its surrounding areas. But to the dismay of the resort owner and guests alike, they were not a pretty species. They were dusty brown, like moths, and boldly accosted us all, flying into our faces and hair and flapping their wings unsettlingly on the backs of our necks. They crowded the outdoor dining table, brushing over the pasta and buffalo mozzarella to swarm around the prosciutto and melon. They would be gone within a week, we were told. We were returning to Rome sooner than that. *** I spent the last two days shopping. I returned with my suitcases full of linen clothes in shades of ivory and cantaloupe, summer sandals to match, Sermoneta gloves, a sable coat, birthday gifts for my Gemini and Cancer friends, and the Diptyque taper candles that were sold out everywhere. *** Back in New York, everything was fine. I took yellow cabs everywhere I went. I hailed them on the street, which I was told few people did anymore. It had become a novelty. But it was the cheapest and easiest way to take a car, if you were in Manhattan. Still, I couldn’t shake a feeling of uncertainty. My daily horoscope reminded me that life was long and nothing was guaranteed, which meant things could always turn out in my favor. I searched for flights to Seoul, to Auckland, to LA. Fuel prices were high. The market was down. The housing bubble was due to burst any second. Overall, a sad state of affairs. Parents, pundits, and even friends were saying to wait, wait, wait. It was good advice. I clicked. I scrolled. I hit refresh. *** In certain circumstances, I’m not entirely above begging. When he wouldn’t take me back, I reasoned and argued and pleaded into the phone for a full hour. Later I would say, quite sincerely, “At least I gave it my all.” *** At this point in the season, the heat was cloying and muggy. Stepping outside felt like putting on a sweater. The air in the apartment was kept cool and crisp by newly-installed AC units that ran liberally. Peaches, plums, cherries lay chilled in the fridge. But outside the weather was inevitable, all-encompassing, and frozen margaritas and Aperol drinks sweated sprawling puddles onto tables outside. Over a month had passed since Mars was in Aries. I realized I had been wrong. The color of the summer was orange, not pink. *** A group of friends took the ferry to the beach and spent a day in the sun. We drank cold beers and mixed warm rum with cream soda. We ran through the waves until our feet no longer touched the sand and we were rocked up and down like children. I laughed and screamed and got so much water in my mouth and nose that I claimed to be drowning, but I wasn’t. Gina Yang lives in New York City. She can be found on Twitter @jeanhole_.

By Megan Denese Mealor “She gave me a vibe,” blazons a tax law student parading Golden Goose suede star sneakers and stonewashed seagull-print skinny jeans around the spectral Pink Lemonade Club, hunting the slinky showgirls in studded bustiers contorting neon-lit limbs to Motley Crue and haunting covers, flamingo patent platforms footwork clinical, algebraic. “I bet she would have danced the third song for free.” He takes another slug of his archaic Belgian ale, nods firmly, convincing himself of competent caliber. Megan Denese Mealor resides in her native land of Jacksonville, Florida with her husband and 9-year-old son, who was diagnosed with autism at three. Her poems, fiction, and photography have been featured in literary magazines worldwide, most recently The Wise Owl, Across the Margin, and Brazos River Review. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee and current Best of the Net nominee, she has authored three full-length poetry collections: "Bipolar Lexicon" (Unsolicited Press, 2018); "Blatherskite" (Clare Songbirds Publishing House, 2019); and "A Mourning Dove's Wishbone" (Cybernet.wit, 2022). A survivor of bipolar disorder, she considers it her main mission as a writer to inspire others feeling stigmatized for their mental health.

by Inga Oliveira In the Meijer parking lot Brad’s dog, Moz, pressed her front paws into Clara’s left thigh as Clara punched the 1-800-Triple-A number into her phone. The dog shifted her 12 pounds of weight, her nails passively assaulting a slightly different part of Clara’s thigh. Throughout Clara’s visit to Michigan, she’d seen the dog chewing at its nails to the quick. And, like with any DIY project, the dog’s manicure was never done well or to completion. But it didn’t matter. Both the trimmed and longer nails left pink scratch marks that were rendered invisible by Clara’s sunburn. This was the second powerless gas station the couple had been to. When Brad noticed the fuel gauge light had lit up, he’d pulled off on Exit 67 to go to the Pilot station. There, they found signs taped over the gas pumps: the rain storm had obliterated their electricity. Not all the gas stations in this town were suffering power outages—the Meijer station, surely, would have a generator. It was the same storm that made Clara suggest that the two end their trip to Saugatuck early. Brad was hesitant and even a bit pissed at her suggestion, despite knowing she was right. Even if the rain let up, it would be hard to find dry outdoor seating for Moz and traffic back would almost definitely be slower. Clara didn’t think she could spend any more time than necessary on the I-96, looking at “cash 4 houses” signs next to casino billboards. Initially, she’d been fascinated by such exotic scenes, but after a week she found that paying attention to your surroundings in Michigan was a good way to feel shitty. The entire state was an interminable panorama of deciduous trees against a perma-dark grey sky. No lights from buildings to interrupt the dull monochrome of the midwest, no lights to hint at a population, only lit-up Bible billboards: Every saint has a past... every sinner has a future. Her mood was better if she just focused on Brad and little Moz. Clara felt the sunscreen on her cheekbone melting with the heat of the phone and realized that the Triple A Roadside Assistance membership was Brad’s. She thrust the phone out to Brad with the urgency of someone afraid of being put back on hold. “Take it.” The phone wasn’t on speaker, but in the silent car in the silent Meijer parking lot in the grey pit that is rural Michigan, Clara could hear every word meant for Brad coming out of the phone. “We typically don’t dispatch our gas trucks to gas stations,” Tara explained, slowly, annoyed, from a location surely less pathetic. Maybe she was somewhere with an international airport that flew beyond Canada. But Michigan car insurance policies were absolutely wack, probably because of the drivers’ suicidal tendencies—always changing lanes twenty miles above the speed limit and without turn signals—so Tara was likely local. Two holds and several minutes later, Triple A concluded that Brad and Clara could get fucked. The regional dispatcher was also out of gas, so they’d have to send someone from a different zone. “They can’t send anyone. Well, they can, maybe. But in two hours. She didn’t give me a particularly clear answer.” “Yeah, I heard.” “Oh, right, okay.” Brad rolled down the windows before turning the car off. It became obvious to Clara that her only option was to unironically kill herself. She didn’t need a painless death, just a quick one. Tragically, Brad wouldn’t be much help. He wasn’t going to kill his girlfriend so it’s not like she could ask him to run her over with the car. Maybe she could slip the teen cart guy a $20 to “accidentally” let go of the string of carts he was hauling across the parking lot. Crushed to death by 200 tiny red wheels. Or she could kill herself inside the store. She could stick her arm inside the reverse vending machine and wiggle it around until it tore her arm off and she bled out. It was impossible to accept being stuck in Ionia, a place that made Clara understand Metro Detroit as a bastion of culture. Just because Dearborn was home to some Middle Eastern food and a couple reality TV stars didn’t make it the cradle of civilization. “So what do we do?” Clara refused to believe Brad, now resting his elbow on the windowsill, was willing to settle into their fate. “We could call an Uber.” “What are we going to do with that?” Brad ignored Clara and opened Uber. She continued talking at him. “You think there’s an Uber in ‘Ionia, Michigan’? Someone’s gonna Uber their five dollar HOT-N-READY to the farm?” Even if they did find an uber, what would they do with it? Lansing was too far, Grand Rapids was too far, and if they went, how would they get back? The Uber probably wouldn’t let the dog in, and Clara would not be left in the car with Moz for an indefinite amount of time. Brad closed the app and then his eyes. Clara would ride off in an Uber, day would turn to night and night into day, and Brad would be stuck in the cornfield of Ionia, Clara and electricity never returning. “I was right, wasn’t I?” Clara lifted the dog and dropped it in Brad’s lap. “We’re stuck. I’m going to die here.” “We’re not stuck, but yeah there aren’t any Ubers.” “Right, these people don’t even have phones.” *** Clara didn’t reject moving to Detroit for Brad outright. She felt that she was in love with Brad. They saw each other frequently, once or twice a month—fabricating long weekends out of sick days and Brad’s remote-work-day here and there, and always in Chicago. It wasn’t that Clara refused to visit Brad in Detroit, it’s just, as she put it, why go to Detroit when you can go to Chicago? Regardless, the two agreed that their relationship would never move forward if they didn’t move in together. But their plan devised over the past several months was that Brad would join Clara in Chicago. Clara had a specific vision for Brad: he could aim for a job at a boutique press, or settle for another university press, and eventually she could insist that the two begin all over again in a “city-city,” like New York. To Clara, a West Coaster by birth and East Coaster by aspiration, the midwest was nothing but a metaphorical and literal pitstop. Not immediately rejecting Detroit was about as much enthusiasm as Clara could muster. “What’s even in Detroit, uh art museum?” she said, dragging the “an” out into “uh” as in “duh” and “poduhnk.” Her intentional affectation emphasized the singleness of the DIA; it was like she thought having one art museum, even a well regarded one, was in some way more gauche and cultureless than having none at all. “You’ll be in Eastern Time, that’s cultured.” “Being in the same time zone as New York doesn’t make me coastal elite, Brad.” If he put in at least another year and a half as an Associate Editor at Wayne State, he’d have a much better shot at Associate Editor positions at bigger university presses like Routledge. It wasn’t what he’d planned, but after one internship at Poetry, Brad learned that there was no such thing as an editorial position at a literary magazine. It wasn’t a bad point, and Clara did like that Brad was thinking of a long term with her, elsewhere. She agreed to try Detroit for a week, following Brad’s meticulously planned itinerary for her first visit in over a year. There’d been a trip to Dearborn for baklava, brunch at the MoCAD because there was more than “uh” art museum in Detroit, an experimental noise and art show in an old, converted bathhouse. Basically, the kind of bullshit Clara enjoyed in Chicago, but in Detroit, instead. Brad’s final Hail Mary was taking Clara to Saugatuck for a day. It didn’t feel like the midwest there. It felt coastal, or at least, how Brad imagined a “coastal” vacation might feel. He wasn’t too far off, even Clara would admit. In fact, she was kind of planning on saying yes to Michigan. As long as you weren’t in the middle of it, it was passable. “There’s even dumbass paper straws for me to hate here, it’s almost like I’m in A Place,” Clara had observed at one of the three weiner coffee shops in Detroit. It was smaller and undoubtedly shittier than a real city, but maybe Michigan was OK—for a year. *** Though the gas station had no power, the Meijer superstore itself was functional. Clara glared at the midwesterners coming in and out of the store, pushing the non-operational automatic doors. How dare they use the generator to partially illuminate the superstore and not the gas station. It’s like they thought people wanted to be here, as though it was impossible to imagine someone coming to Ionia for more than just gas to get the hell out. Brad got out of the car with Moz and told Clara he was going to go inside and see if anyone could help and that she could stay in the car or come with him, it was really up to her. Inside the Meijer, Moz struggled to walk on the linoleum floor. Her already freaky Chihuahua eyes bugged out of her tiny Chihuahua head as she slid around feeling, Clara imagined, but not understanding the horrible place she was in. Clara stood with the struggling dog and watched Brad wander around looking for an employee. He was only two inches taller than her and she liked that he got stressed when she wore heeled boots. He also did make life less annoying for Clara. Like driving her places when they were together or ordering her take-out as a surprise when they were apart. And, in this case, finding an employee in the Meijer. Intellectually she knew that because of this drive of his, this need and desire to shield Clara from being annoyed, being stuck in Ionia was worse for him than it was for her. She began walking. Several steps behind Brad and further slowed by the skating dog, Clara wondered how long it would take for someone to tell her and Moz to go back outside. She started fantasizing about a confrontation. A lumpy middle-aged midwesterner with a straw-colored bob would approach her and Moz. “You can’t hee-avh dogs in here” the woman would say, nasally. “Yeah? What’re you gonna do?” Clara would fire back. “Eat her?” “I’m going to call the myeeah-nuh-jurh.” At this point, Clara would slink towards the woman, trying to trap her between the Oreo display and the José Cuervo Margarita mix display. She’d pick the dog up and hold it like a corn-on-the-cob and make slurping sounds while moving in on her. Finally, the single fluorescent light from the generator as her spotlight, Clara would screech, “Hungry? Hungry? Do you want me to drop the chalupa?” and then calmly lower the dog and walk out of the Meijer, unscathed. Brad interrupted Clara’s reverie. “The cashier said there’s a Mobil a couple miles further into town that has power.” “Oh, shit, yeah okay,” she said, picking Moz up to more quickly follow Brad out of the Meijer, precluding her chance to yell at her imaginary Michigander. As they traversed the damp asphalt, Clara spoke. “I can’t live here.” “In Ionia? Yeah, neither can I.” Wasn’t it obvious that Clara was talking about Michigan, any of it? She couldn’t believe she’d been considering this move. Sure, she’d rather be stuck in Ionia with Brad than with anyone else, but why open potential for being stuck in Ionia at all? That was the thing about Chicago—there was no reason to drive anywhere else from it. She wouldn’t need to escape to Saugatuck if she were just in Chicago. “If you moved to Chicago we could still drive to Saugatuck, Brad. It’s closer. It’s literally closer to Chicago than to Detroit.” Brad reminded her of his job, his promotion. “First of all, I have a job, too. Second, you can get a job in Chicago in, like, actual publishing. You work on social science textbooks or whatever and you want me to give up my job and move to Detroit? I work in fashion. Nobody has fashion here because the only people with money are Oakland County moms, you said so yourself.” “You’re a visual merchandising manager,” said Brad, opening the door to the car. “No offense, but making window displays at Anthropologie hardly constitutes working in fashion. You work retail. You can literally just get transferred over to the Anthropologie at Somerset Mall.” The dog hopped onto Clara’s lap and wiped bits of gravel on her. “I have a college degree.” She flicked a piece of gravel off. “I have a college degree in fiber arts.” “Oh, you have a college degree so you can’t work at the mall? Is that what you’re gonna say? Work a job, rent a studio. You could actually afford that here and you could actually use your degree.” Clara thought about Somerset. She thought about the fluorescent mall lights that would seep in through the continuously open mall doors. Those lights were so harsh on the displays, washing out the fabrics and accentuating their ultimate cheapness. All of Clara’s guidelines from corporate were designed for natural lighting, for a space with control over doors and windows. She thought about taking lunch in the food court, unable to escape the clammy mall air. On her left, a group of teen boys squirted mayo into a 44oz plastic tankard of Dr. Pepper and dared each other to drink it. On her right, some zitty (somehow zittier than the teens) burn-out Zumiez employee accompanied by his underage girlfriend, there for a lunch break dry hump. She thought about driving up and down Woodward from home to work and back until she and Brad aged further north up Woodward into Birmingham. Clara “knew” that the Anthropologie on the Magnificent Mile was just one store in an open air mall masquerading as an urbane experience. But there are storefronts that are advertisements and there are storefronts that are simply stores. Sure, most of the people coming into Clara’s Anthropologie were Naperville moms out on a weekend with the girls who didn’t buy anything, waiting instead to buy what they saw on Clara’s displays at their own Somersets. Clara and the moms had an unspoken contract, an understanding that they were all engaging in private performance art shows: them as self-possessed city dwellers and Clara as an artist, as someone who did more than drape $300 chunky Merino wool cardigans over whatever weird pine needles corporate had sent. “Whatever, just drive to the Mobil.” “I don’t know how much gas each square means. We’ve been on this one square for a few miles now.” “Yeah and you wasted some moving from the gas station into the Meijer-proper parking lot.” “We can’t park in a gas station.” “I don’t care. Just get me out of here.” Clara buckled her seatbelt and tried to petulantly sink back into her seat, struggling to extend her legs under the dog’s weight. “You would rather be stuck on the side of the road in Ionia?” “Yes, get me the fuck out of this parking lot.” Brad put the car into drive. It was 2.4 miles to the Mobil station. If Clara were really in the mood to ruin things, she’d point out that driving down this stretch of the M-66 was a microcosm of Michigan: closed, closed, closed, Little Caesars, closed. “It’s, like, just one more mile after this bridge,” she mumbled. As they followed the bend of the road off the bridge, the sky lit up with neon lights. Was Clara hallucinating? They’d been driving for several miles with nothing but headlights and the occasional traffic-light-cum-four-way-stop, and suddenly, some sort of funky skyline. Clara’s eyes focused. It was like a mirage, but instead of turning out to be nothing, it was worse. It was nothing nothing. She knew this wasn’t the cause for the outage, and yet: “Is that a—” “Yeah, I think so,” Brad said as the Ferris wheel came into focus. “A fucking fair?” Periwinkle chicory weeds grew tall around the guardrail that separated the car from the downward slope that led to the lot. The wet grass looked as neon as the lights against the sweaty asphalt. Clara clenched her jaw. Out Brad’s window, she could see two boys in Detroit Lions shirts chasing each other around the minivans in the fairground parking lot and throwing bang snaps at each other, tormenting and thrilling each other with the pops of light. Garbage cans grew tall with pop bottles and half-eaten elephant ears as families exited and entered the fairground gates. Somewhere beyond those gates, perhaps near a ring toss and a pile of teddy bears, stood a weekend reporter with a loudly patterned blouse holding a Fox 17 microphone to mouths, all of which would say: Personally? Their favorite part of the fair is the farm animals and funnel cake and, “you know, just seeing everybody out together on a day like today.” And on they drove, past the enthusiastically lit signs that advertised “The Miracle of Life” farm animal birthing show, a Journey tribute band, and the “World’s Largest Free Fair,” past its glorious neon and noise. Inga Oliveira lives in São Paulo and tweets from @_thotology.

by Katie Vogel I tell a story in which your words to me, my love, are not virulent quicksand but a sweeping thread that I may take between my fingertips to feed back down your throat. (I avoid your cracked tooth on the way down, including no threads of my own.) I’m done. (I go to each of your cats, kiss them goodbye, and skip every other step on my way out.) I wander under the roaring BQE and pause at the 24 hour bakery for iced jamaica tea. I’m five minutes early for the N, transfer at 62nd street, notice a frayed end of your thread - its continued protrusion from my tear ducts. (Its jagged edges slice fissures across my cornea.) (I’m gnawing on the plastic straw.) I grab at that thread with ferocity. The strength my friction creates rips open the vessels around its home in my head. My blood dyes your thread a slick crimson. I tell a story in which the more I drag, the more fragile this line of yours becomes, my dear, until it crumbles into a vile glob in my hands. My train slips into the station, and, as I bounce through the doors, I tie your line’s end to a pillar. The rest, which had not moments before wound deep into my belly, leaps into the sky. (My belly blood stipples the tracks.) The wind and curious children will unravel it, I know. I dream I am those children. I tell a story about saying no. I sway with the train’s motion. I tell a story about saying nothing. I push through the emergency exit gate. I tell a story in which I caught the yawn in my gut (before the first thread). I insert my headphones and press shuffle. I tell a story. I trust the yawn in my gut (again). Katie Vogel (they/them) is a queer writer raised in North Carolina, living in Brooklyn, NY. They are earning their BFA in Writing through Pratt Institute and are curious about syllabi, screenshots, asides, saints, and storytelling. They digitally occur on instagram @iamkatiebird.

by Bethan Northwood The fictional tom-boys I grew up with— How would you identify today? Etched into my being, You light the path ahead for me. /I have always related more to characters that stubbornly refuse to comply, /Than with female friends, making their homes in femininity. /The Famous Five are eighty yet bound in paper;, I grow and they never change. /Imagine George as a twenty-first Century woman! We would be best friends. The unruly short-haired girls—when He was the biggest compliment from strangers— Evading the she-shaped molds even then Misjudging how tightly I would hold them Bethan Northwood (they/she) is 21 and from Wales, UK. They find inspiration from nature and their feelings of grief since the loss of a parent. She's still finding her voice and very pleased to be here.

by Will Musgrove Outside: rain and sheets of gray. Inside: tiny metal scrapers, drills, and mask-hidden mouths. The dental hygienist lowers the vinyl chair. Tapping the side of my supine chin, she tells me to open. Wider, wider. She peers inside. Years of tartar. Years of neglect. Floss? I meant to. Brush twice a day? I meant to. She shows me the points of her glinting instruments. She says to raise my hands if I can’t tolerate the pain. Instead I slide them behind my sweating back. Bzzt. Whrrl. Old meals, the TV dinners, the countless cups of teeth-staining drip coffee, wipe away. Drool streaks my cheeks like tears, and I stare at a cloud-filled blue sky covering a fluorescent light. To put me at ease, she says, scratching my incisors. I imagine her carving her initials into them like an artist signing a painting. One patient swore he saw the clouds move. They’d been in the chair for a spell. She says spell like she’s casting one. How long have I been here? The clouds remain frozen in front of the humming, fluorescent sun. Not long enough. I focus, cross my eyes, let my mind go slack but can’t get the clouds to move. We finish up. Water sucks everything away. I want to ask her for more time but I don’t. I had my chance. She shows me the before pictures. A sea of stained brown and yellow. Then she clicks through the after photos like a flip book, and I see them, the clouds. I’d swallowed them. They float along my gumline. I smile, and for the first time since I was a boy lying in the grass, I assign meaning to their shapes. Will Musgrove is a writer and journalist from Northwest Iowa. He received an MFA from Minnesota State University, Mankato. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in TIMBER, The McNeese Review, Oyez Review, Tampa Review, Vestal Review, and elsewhere. Connect on Twitter at @Will_Musgrove or williammusgrove.com.

By Hannah LaFond I wish for you to always find a home where you come from, and that your people will love you without provisions. But, if you don’t, and if they don’t, I hope you won’t stay long. Don’t drag your feet over splintering floorboards or scratch the days on peeling paint. Don’t measure the marks on the doorframe to shame yourself for changing. When the crate they built gets too tight, and the halls once loved turn foreign, I hope you listen to those warnings. I hope you leave at the first sign. If there’s no home where you come from, you’ll find another. In strange rooms with stranger people, in the arms of lovers and friends in food, and books, and art, in lonely walks, and sordid bars You’ll find it wherever you are. And when you do, I hope you’re not scared to make it known. To plant barefeet in the mud, call to the sky, and cut your hair. Address the curls to those you came from. Not a ransom but a declaration of the home you have become. Hannah LaFond is an LGBTQ+ writer living in New York City. Her story "Goodbye Three Times" was recently published in the New York Times’ Modern Love Column. As a freelance journalist, her work has appeared in Health Digest, The List, and Deseret News, including interviews with Kristin Chenoweth, Heidi Klum, and Katherine Langford. She received her bachelor's degree in communications from Brigham Young University, a private LDS school, where she first began exploring the intersection between her lesbian identity and Mormon upbringing in her writing.

by Wynter Miller My boyfriend stumbles into bed sometime after 2 a.m. Stories that start with sentences like that usually involve bad people—bad boyfriends who lie or cheat, or both. My sister’s boyfriend drinks too much and yells obnoxious, half-true words over the din of his ugly music that demolish her self-esteem. My boyfriend is careful. He measures his words. My boyfriend tells me that I am talented and stubborn. He says those two qualities are enough but it helps that I am beautiful. He is forever saying nice things I do not understand. I think: Enough for what? Enough for you? Fuck your “enough.” But I measure my words, too. I don’t say horrible things aloud, they just live inside my head. I am the bad person in our story. My boyfriend spent the night trapping a skunk in his friend Tyler’s backyard. An explanation like that sounds like a lie, but in this case, it isn’t. Tyler’s text lit up my boyfriend’s phone after we were already in bed watching a show about inmates at a women’s prison. It is an aggravating show with an absurd plot that neither of us like, but my boyfriend cares about being culturally engaged. A woman in the class he teaches convinced him it’s a critical commentary on corruption in the criminal justice system. I think this woman wants to sleep with him but saying so would be petty—so we are watching the show. From it, I have learned that I would not survive in prison. In my dreams now, I disappear into crowded cell blocks and die early in inmate riots. I wake up drenched in sweat and feel so claustrophobic, I sneak out of bed to smoke cigarettes on the porch. Tyler’s text reads: bro marshmellow worked! skunk in cage MAYDAY come ovr. I have spent full minutes of my life that I will never get back trying to figure out whether Tyler is using the word “bro” ironically. I’m almost sure that he isn’t. Irony seems like a high bar for someone who has otherwise rejected all the usual niceties of communication. Like grammar. And spelling. And a decent hour. I would ignore 90% of Tyler’s texts. But my boyfriend sees things differently. My boyfriend questions the value of irony. He raises an eyebrow at me and tells me that David Foster Wallace thought irony was destroying sincerity and that sincerity was the soul of art. He tells me that Tyler is sincere, “he has his flaws but at least he’s honest about who he is.” I tell my boyfriend that I sincerely believe David Foster Wallace was an asshole. My boyfriend sees the best in everyone. And so now, it’s 2:37 a.m. and my boyfriend is stumbling into bed. He climbs under the comforter, he curls himself carefully around me. He does not smell like booze or women or misdeeds. He smells like a man who has spent three hours with a wild animal in someone else’s backyard. He smells like a man who shows up for a friend in the middle of the night. He is exhausted and triumphant and he is the kind of man for whom victory can smell like skunk. I don’t sleep much anymore. In my head, prison inmates line up for mug shots and the camera flashes again and again. Each time, the picture is of me—my own version of counting sheep. Flash. Flash. Flash. I pretend to be asleep until he is, and then I creep out of bed. My boyfriend is up before me the next morning. When I walk into the kitchen, he’s humming under his breath and buttering toast. He doesn’t say good morning—not because he doesn’t want to, he is a good morning person. But we’ve been living together long enough that he knows I will hydrogen bomb his good mood if he gives me an opportunity this early in the day. I am the type of person who wakes up slow and hard, a feat I manage on a daily basis only with the aid of strong coffee and minimal interaction. My boyfriend tells me I’m a four o’clock flower. “You just bloom in the late afternoon.” In the bathroom, I sit on the toilet lid and watch my boyfriend swish his mouthwash and spit into the sink. “I have that evening class tonight,” he tells me. I nod. His spit is the same shade of green as the lycra of his bicycle shorts. “If you don’t mind eating later, I’ll grill up those burgers.” I nod. “Hey,” he says, reaching over and nudging me. “Don’t forget your patch today.” I nod and try to remember if I hid the Diet Coke can with my cigarette butts back under the stairs. Later, I look up four o’clock flowers on a gardening website and laugh out loud at the idea of myself as “a low-maintenance bloom in shades of pink, purple, and yellow.” I fall into an internet hole for the next hour, intent on identifying my true spirit flower. I settle on Puya chilensis. That night, sitting on the porch steps in the dark, I tell my boyfriend about my research while he flips burgers for us on the grill. It’s called the sheep-eating plant, I tell him. It grows spiky flowers that look like medieval maces and animals wander into them and die. It uses their rotting corpses for nutrients. My boyfriend looks at me then, his spatula in suspended animation above the sizzling beef, and I wonder what he is thinking. I wonder if he is reconsidering. Then he says: “Do you want cheese on your burger, sheep-eater?” We eat our burgers sitting next to each other on the porch. It occurs to me to ask what happened to the skunk. “Did you kill it?” “Of course we didn’t kill it,” my boyfriend tells me, shaking his head. I think there is nothing wrong with killing a wild animal that has been terrorizing your backyard but I don’t say so. My boyfriend is against gratuitous killing. He is against gratuitous anything—violence, anger, wealth—but he is against killing especially. He is forever relocating spiders, releasing fish, gently encouraging the birds nesting in our attic to find new homes. He is not a vegetarian because killing for consumption is not gratuitous, which is lucky for me. I have very low tolerance for vegetarians. “We trapped it,” he tells me. He is matter-of-fact, very that-is-the-end-of-that. “And?” “And what?” “Well, you didn’t just trap it and leave it in Tyler’s backyard,” I say. “Jessica would kill him.” Jessica is Tyler’s girlfriend—she is smart and pretty and has her life together. I cannot figure out why she is with Tyler because her self-esteem seems fine. “Yeah, no, Jessica was pissed,” my boyfriend says. “She wanted to call Animal Control.” I wait for him to continue but he just goes right on eating. “And?” I ask. “And Tyler didn’t want to pay for it.” “Do they charge for that?” My boyfriend just shrugs. “Maybe.” I put my plate down on the step below us and look at my boyfriend until he is forced to make eye contact. I ask him again. “What happened to the skunk?” He glances at me and for a moment, I imagine I know the end of this conversation. It becomes something different, a conversation I have had before. I am talking to someone else. Old boyfriends. The things I imagine are never good. But then, the moment passes, and we are just two people again, having dinner on a Tuesday night. He tells me the skunk is in the garage—our garage, not Tyler’s. We stand in the doorway and I peer into the dark space while my boyfriend explains California law. “It’s definitely legal to bait and trap skunks,” my boyfriend says, “so we’re fine there.” I wonder if “we” means him and Tyler, or him and me. “The problem is, once you’ve trapped a skunk, there are really only two options . . . .” I am only half listening. There isn’t much to see in the dim light, a metal cage on a concrete floor. But the smell is dirty and insidious. I imagine it unfurling across the concrete, vaporous curls creeping under doorways, climbing up walls, settling deep into the bowels of the house. A permanent stench cloaking us forever. “—sorry, what?” I’m tuning back in, cutting him off. “I mean, he’ll be fine in here for now. We’ll feed him marshmallows and—” “No, I missed the two options. What are the two options?” “There were two options,” my boyfriend clarifies. He holds up one finger. “Trapped animals may be released on site.” He raises a second finger. “But unless released, trapped animals must be killed.” He grimaces. “Released on site would have been released in Tyler’s backyard and there was no way Jessica was saying yes to that.” He pauses. “So.” I stare at him blankly. Several seconds pass. “. . . So, I’m going to find him a good place, and relocate him when I get back. I was thinking maybe in the canyon?” I remember then that my boyfriend is flying to LA in the morning. He’ll be at a workshop for two days. I will be here—with the skunk—and he will be in LA. He will be in LA, I will be here, and this creature will be in the garage. For two days. Something like panic is rising inside of me. “No,” I say. “No . . . ,” my boyfriend repeats. He is looking at me. “No, what?” No, I think. No, the skunk is not staying here in the garage. No, the plan is not safe harbor and marshmallows. No, thank you, I’ll take option one, please. “Can’t we just . . . ” I start to say. But then I see myself, what I look like. Flash. I look back at my boyfriend. Flash. Flash. Instead of no, I tell him something that sounds like yes. He’s up early the next morning, dressing quietly in the dark. He has exactly one teaching-a-workshop outfit and so I know without looking that he is wearing corduroy and a white shirt. You can’t tell my boyfriend is the nicest person in the world by looking at him. He looks really normal. He is handsome but not too handsome, the kind of face that most people don’t notice, the kind that can be folded down, set aside, forgotten. My boyfriend is the kind of handsome that happens when you refuse to spend more than six dollars on a shirt that you will wear for every workshop for next several years. He is the kind of handsome that does not trigger the asshole alarm bells inside my head. He has a wide smile, but it takes a long time to see it. That was one of the things I liked most about him, at first. You have to earn my boyfriend’s smile. But when he smiles at me now, it feels like an accusation. My boyfriend leaves behind a bag of marshmallows and detailed instructions. A Girl’s Guide to Skunk Maintenance and Management. I don’t read them. I check the Mammal Hunting Regulations from California’s Fish and Game Commission and read an article called “Living with Urban Wildlife.” I learn that it is standard operating procedure in the City of San Francisco to euthanize all captured skunks. I research commercial services. National Wildlife Removal will send a qualified exterminator for $150. Animal Control will do it for free. I spend some time constructing the defense I will use: Relocation is illegal. Skunks are vectors for disease. I copy a line from a government website into my notebook. Relocation is inhumane and ineffective—wildlife will not know the location of food and water sources and will usually die within two weeks. I scribble over the sentence in black ink until it is unreadable. I tear out the sheet of paper and shred it into tiny pieces. I look up the number for Animal Control. Then, I spend several hours pretending there is nothing in the garage. I shower and fold laundry and chain-smoke and think about calling my mother. My boyfriend calls and tells me about LA. He says the people are nice and the weather is nice and the hotel is nice. The closest he comes to admitting that LA is not nice is when he says that it is not San Francisco. Eventually, I stop pretending. I go outside and sit on the garage steps and peer into the darkness. I leave the instructions and my notebook and the number for Animal Control on the kitchen table. I take the bag of marshmallows. It is early evening, and the sun is already setting and the air is warm, but the concrete in the garage is cold. It seeps through my jeans. The smell is still there, like a physical presence, and I stretch my legs out into it and wait. I open the bag of marshmallows and eat one and then another. The skunk has positioned itself in a corner, its black form just visible in the two inches of exposed caging beneath the towel my boyfriend has used to cover its prison. For a long time, very little happens. I think about whether the skunk can smell me or smell the marshmallows. I decide that whatever its olfactory abilities, it definitely knows that I am here. I carefully pull my legs back under me. I make a small move forward. It is less than a step and more than a crawl, but it is silent and I sit there like that, in my gargoyle crouch, for unknowable minutes, the bag of marshmallows clenched tightly in my hand. I wait. Then I crouch one crouch forward. And then one more. And then another. All the while, the skunk sits in its corner and does not move. It is only when I am finally next to the cage, when I have traversed the concrete desert, that I realize I have no plan. The pungent smell is heavy and dark around me. I have no plan and it smells bad and needles of sleep are beginning to prick in my legs and for a moment the simultaneous experience of all these things is overwhelming and I am trapped. That night, in bed, the inmates prepare to riot in their black-and-white stripes and I stockpile marshmallows in my cell. The night I moved in, my boyfriend pulled the comforter off the bed and spread it on the porch. It was August in San Francisco. “Lay down.” He pointed a finger at the comforter. I stood in the doorway and shook my head no. He smiled, sat down, and turned his head up to look at the night sky. “Okay,” he said, “but you’re going to miss it.” “Miss what?” “Whatever there is to see up there.” He stretched out, bunching the comforter under his head. I watched him watch the sky. “Where do you think we’ll be a year from now?” he asked. “Dead,” I told him. “Zombie plague.” He laughed. “We wouldn’t survive the zombie plague?” “Definitely not. We’d be some of the first to go.” “You,” he said, “are always imagining the future apocalypse.” My boyfriend cannot imagine the apocalypse. Not really. Even when I rig the question—I ask him to imagine a future destroyed by a zombie plague. Burned out cars and highway bonfires. Your family is dead, I tell him, looters are coming. He raises an eyebrow. Looters? My boyfriend is skeptical there would be looters. He tells me about the San Francisco earthquake in 1906, the fires that followed, the 400,000 homeless and 3,000 dead. He tells me about the woman who stitched together blankets in Golden Gate Park, how her tent became the Mizpah Cafe, a soup kitchen and sanctuary for hundreds of refugees. He tells me about the dozens of tiny street kitchens just like it that proliferated across the wreckage. People behave better in disasters than you’d think, he tells me. He gives me a book about real-life “disaster utopias” and tells me that Hollywood gets it wrong. There would be heroism, he says, not looting—and I can tell that he believes it. He believes the things he says, every word. My boyfriend can find little pockets of hope in every misery I can imagine. The next evening, I sit on the stoop and wait for my boyfriend to get back from LA, stress-eating what’s left of the jet-puffed marshmallows from the giant plastic bag. I read the ingredient list and marvel at all the different names for sugar. Corn syrup, dextrose, modified corn starch. I think about animals and people in cages, and how easy it is to be imprisoned by nothing more than a little whipped sugar. When my boyfriend steps off the bus, he walks the half block to our stoop at a slow meander. He looks rumpled and normal. He looks the way he always looks and I feel relief. He looks like himself. When he sees me waiting, he picks up his pace. He drops his body onto the step, knocks my shoulder with his, tugs gently on my ponytail. “Wow,” he says. “Marshmallows for dinner.” He reaches a hand into the bag and pushes two into his mouth, talking around them. “Things are really falling apart here without me, huh?” His voice is muffled by puffy sweetness. I don’t say anything, pop another marshmallow into my mouth. “How’s our skunk?” he asks. “I let it go,” I tell him. Sticky marshmallow residue coats my tongue. He pauses to swallow the wad of marshmallow in his cheek. “You let him go?” I nod my head. “Yes.” “Where?” I nod again, indicating the street in front of us. “Here,” I say. “Here?” His eyes widen and his eyebrows go up. “Here.” He glances down the street as if he’s expecting to see the skunk, “our skunk,” returning to the scene. He looks back at me. “Why?” I tell him something like the truth. And then, suddenly, I feel like I might cry. He looks at me for a long second, a second that expands until it is the size of our entire future. And then he smiles his wide smile and pulls me into him. “Okay,” he says, kissing my hair. “Okay.” I lean into him and eat another marshmallow. It tastes like burned rubber and asphalt. “Your hair smells like smoke,” he says. People behave better in disasters, I tell myself. I close my eyes and the camera goes off. Flash. Wynter K Miller is a writer and editor living in California. She almost never tweets @wynterkm.

by Jose Hernandez Diaz I was having a cup of plain coffee by myself at a café downtown when a man in a reindeer mask entered and approached my table. He said he was raising money for the dying rain forests throughout the world. I told him all the money I had I spent on coffee and that I was sorry I couldn’t help. He proceeded to read me a Haiku he’d written. It was about the rainforest and the vanishing trees. I told him I appreciated the sentiment of his Haiku. When he saw I genuinely had no money, we shook hands, and he left. The man in a reindeer mask exited the coffee shop and boarded a busy bus. I thought about the brevity and beauty of his Haiku all day, though. And the next day and week as well. A fading rainforest. A lone deer. The utter void. Jose Hernandez Diaz is the author of the chapbook of prose poems, The Fire Eater (Texas Review Press, 2020). He has been awarded a fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts, and he lives in southern California.

by Leslie Cairns Geese litter the lawn of the woman I’m dogsitting. Leashes and slobber and borrowed bones. They’re three streets down, a mile from where I saw them last fall. The red veined leaves cascading as I sprinted last autumn, momentarily calm. No one could get me. I was losing weight. I was feeling everything, but for once, it was okay. Then a goose was pecking in front of me, curious about the middle lines, and a car sped up at the last second, not minding that it was a protected species. The feathers were so close I could almost feel their tinseled, glittering weight. The way we made eye contact.Just two animals, breathing. Bleating. Geese tend to each other until they pass. They flock around, crowded, and bellow towards the frosty air. This year, there’s no geese in the pond across from where the goose died. This year I run slower than last. As if death left a handprint on my chest. Constricting. It makes me wonder if the geese learned to stay away from the slightly manicured lake, the roads curving from my house. If they can still feel the loss, all these months later. If when they flew down in their bottlenecked formations from buoyed skies, if they could see the loss from their wingspan. If they could hold it in their beaks, the air hugging their face as they flew. I can still feel the way your lips would snarl upwards when you wanted to hit me when I was already contemplating razors without the shaving cream. The way our eyes and bodies look alike, and the way I’d frown when you’d loop into the driveway. I wanted family as a meal: wanted to hold and cradle it down to the dregs—its last moments. Watch the life leave the word until it holds no meaning. I’d say it on my run in a whisper until the horses watching me from fences with hay would whinny. Now, no geese safeguarding my home. Nor the streets near my house. If you could see me then, road trips away, cradling a goose. Calling the skies for a funeral, but raindrops never came. A goose would take over three days to get to you. If you named me the way I wanted to be named, I’d sprout a beak that speaks in languages meant for gliding down the stars at night, propelling with the dawn. Spinning with amber, white, and black stripes that pattern me in the way we love, the way we ache to be held together by pinpricks and minnows, not by gathering and speeding too fast— If you saw I grew when I left home, I’d sprout a feather near my ribs. Next, I’d find myself full of down, that shield the rest from suffering— I’d circled back with my dogs the next day and saw that the goose was completely gone.I’d wondered if all wounds heal, if only there was a flock to protect you. Leslie Cairns (She/her): Leslie Cairns holds an MA degree in English Rhetoric. She lives in Denver, Colorado. She has upcoming flash, short stories, and poetry in various magazines, including Cerasus Magazine, Coffeezine Mag, Swim Press, Bright Flash Literary Review, Londemere Lit, and others. Twitter: starbucksgirly

by Phil Goldstein Content warning: child sex abuse Did you know that the windows talk when you flick all the switches off at night? They send the light they’ve absorbed during the day—rainbows, refractions, strong, fading— out in waves to one another. They’re communicating. You know, like tree root networks. Those are real, too. Everything around us is chattering. The weather vanes have their own secret code as they swing in the wind. Sprinklers in suburbia click their spritzes of water at individual cadences that spit secrets in between blades of manicured grass. Even the acorns talk. Did you know they send signals in the precise way they fall down & tumble across scraggly fields? They do. All around us is a silent symphony of transmission: a message, a receipt, a reply, a dance, a chorus. What are they all talking about? Well, everything, naturally. Everything we hope will stay hidden, that we barely allow to rattle around inside our skull-domes. The silent agonies they observe—that is their currency in this opera of exchange, the ever-expanding radio waves windows, sprinklers, wind-chimes, trees & all manner of leaves discharge into the air every day without a sound. They know. They know. They know. They know that the husband is cheating on the wife, who had started cheating on the husband six months before. They know the way the child expertly filches a $20 bill from a pocket book before breakfast. They know what kind of porn you watch when you’re alone. They know that the older brother has been molesting the younger brother for two years. They know the heaviness in the little one’s skin. They know the silence. They know the shame. They know it all—& they talk about it all the damn time. They can’t go anywhere, so they talk. They don’t experience hesitation, the way you or I do. They are so free to discuss, dissect, gossip, divulge. Aren’t you jealous? I am. Phil Goldstein's debut poetry collection, "How to Bury a Boy at Sea," which reckons with the trauma of child sexual abuse from the male perspective, was published by Stillhouse Press on April 2022. His poetry has been nominated for a Best of the Net award and has appeared in or is forthcoming in South Florida Poetry Journal, The Laurel Review, Rust+Moth, Moist Poetry Journal, Two Peach, The Indianapolis Review, Awakened Voices and elsewhere. He currently lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and animals: a dog named Brenna, and two cats, Grady and Princess.

by Sam Moe If you’re fine with the decay, we can be remarkable. I tell you about the architecture which consumes my mind, and you think I’m so smooth, how could a house follow someone so far out into fields where abandoned wells stand, dotting the landscape with dry patches of grass, the occasional circling of small purple flowers I used to pluck and tie together in wreaths for my grandfather’s head, but what about the way the porches wrap and snap until they connect in one looping square, and their surfaces are coated in all the toads and frogs from the swamp down the street, the bog in the backyard, did you know I’m keeping my heart safe for you if you don’t mind the hauntings then we can head out together traverse the floors of the ancient and many-floored house with its beautiful rouge carpets, the mermaids stamped into the foyer, the way the kitchen has a habit of growing waxy plastic leaves in coils and its shadow, a second smaller kitchen, is covered in boughs of ivy and empty pots and pans, beneath lives twisting floors like too-soft bricks, no one knows where to put their cigarette ashes, I want you to take the glasses gently from my face and know their designated spot on the nightstand my heart wants, ragged with haunt, and while you’re at it could you watch my back as we descend, I think if I reached for your hand I would twist turn to ash in an instant. And inside these walls which contain the history of the house itself a thousand endless movements crushed in liminal spaces where ghost lobsters and demon crabs glow unnatural shades of amber and azure there is a pasture of velvet, there is a ladder, we ascend between thin layers of kitchens, stacked as one boiling cake on top of another and I’m desperate to make it out of the maze alive—with you by my side—and if you don’t mind the way I scratch at my chest when I can’t breathe, if you, too, cover all the surfaces during a storm, if you house ruined horses, if you have soft stars in jars atop your highest cabinets, and might you also have a beehive with a pool of honey where the bugs can swim, and did you know there is another four-letter word for love but it hasn’t been revealed yet, but would you guess I have something else written on my tongue for you, and could you put away your teeth to listen, but would you take care to not insult the ghosts who have never left this place, so I guess we arrive together, intertwined like strands or rope or hands, we could make it through, you and I, and if we live to see oceans together, would you know to lead me along where it hurts? Would you trust the best shells are a little further out, leave your broken shards in the expertly labeled foyer drawers, then maybe we can make it through just fine, maybe we’ll drive like darling flames to lick the salt into soup bowls and stationary holders, well did you know there is a demon holding the core of this home and every time she hears me laugh she shakes, it only serves to bump us closer together, my teeth accidentally brushing your earlobe, I’m going to break your heart if that’s okay, I’m going to stoke your crush into a bonfire. Sam Moe is the first-place winner of Invisible City’s Blurred Genres contest in 2022, and the 2021 recipient of an Author Fellowship from Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. Her first chapbook, “Heart Weeds,” is out from Alien Buddha Press and her second chapbook, “Grief Birds,” is forthcoming from Bullshit Lit in April 2023. You can find her on Twitter and Instagram as @SamAnneMoe.