Debasish Mishra – A World Without Water

Debasish Mishra
A World Without Water

‘There’s no water to drink and how dare you take a bath twice in a month?’ the stern officer asked. His bulging red eyes would have stabbed me, without the thick lens whose slender legs squatted on his ears like those of a toad. His uniformed brethren rummaged my house and dirtied their hands to see if I had hoarded water anywhere.
      ‘Trust me, sir. I didn’t consume a drop for weeks and used the liquid savings for a bath, to take out the skin that had grown over my skin.’ I had become another man with a mirror in between.
     ‘If you doubt my words, do a full-body scan to see if there’s any water inside my kidney. I piss air. My sweat is dry too. Dry like the sands of the Arabian desert.’
     He looked at my face, the way one stares at a jailbird. Unblinking, my confidence stood on the pedestal of truth and thirst. Thankfully, his men returned with empty hands.
     But he was unwilling to believe the evidence or the lack of it. ‘You ought to know there’s no water on earth. Your fuckin’ forefathers swigged everything. The government has deployed engineers to melt the ice in Mars.’
     ‘I know, sir. In fact, I have forgotten how water tastes. I did bathe but with half a mug and not a trickle reached my back…’
      Unconvinced by my explanation, he asked me to sign an affidavit to ensure that I wouldn’t bath for the rest of the year. I felt like crying but I didn’t. I couldn’t. I had no water in my body to produce the tears. AQ

Susan E. Lloy – Turn Left on California

Susan E. Lloy
Turn Left on California

‘Turn left on California.’ She likes the sound of that. Those were his exact instructions when she told him what time her flight would get in. He wanted to meet her at the airport, but she prefers to take the Bart to Powell Street and then walk over to his place. That’s if, she still has energy after the long flight. If not she’ll hitch a Lyft. She knows the city well from previous visits with its steep rolling hills and eclectic architecture. The ocean always within sight and often trees filled with chatting parrots depending on the hood.
      He isn’t at all practical. She met him online and he lives thousands of miles away. But, she is bored with her present and imagines what life might be. What time has in store for her? She constantly regurges her past, worries about the future and is barely here in the now, continually pondering what empty spaces she may inhabit someday or not.
      She should have sought a local hook up, yet California sounds appealing. She fantasizes what her life might be like there. Wearing jeans and casual tops. Something she never does at home. In this place it’s mostly black and sombre tones. Occasionally, a signature piece. Maybe she’ll touch up her grey locks with blond highlights to resemble the carefree West Coast sun-kissed windblown hair. She’ll walk his dog Yoyo and hang at the beach with all the other canine cuddlers. She’s bound to meet new friends.
 
Although just before her trip she gets a call for a follow up MRI. They saw something on her routine chest x-ray. As she waits for her test she examines the assortment of posters on the wall of different countries: Africa, Egypt, France, and others further down the corridor that are not within eyeshot. She looks up at the corrugated ceiling and tries to count the tiny holes within each panel waiting for her name to be called. She thinks about her exam and if it’s bad news she won’t be taking any destined excursions. She will stop time right on the spot. Not draw it out or fret about what may come.
      But for the moment, while she is positioned in the machine, she forces herself to be in the present, to breathe slowly and follow the instructions without twitching or moving unnecessarily. Each time she’s had this exam, all parts of her body begins to itch and cry out for her attention. She tries her hardest not to shift, to concentrate, envisioning herself on a beach, the warm water lapping at her feet. She stares at the horizon holding her breath as she is instructed and watches the red ball of the sun slowly dip below.
 
She flies out the following day anxiously awaiting to hear from her physician. Perhaps he hasn’t read the report as yet and all is masked if sinister or not. If he takes his time getting back to her she’ll enjoy her trip and look out at the Pacific and dream of things to come. She will get in better shape and give up social smoking. Out there she’ll get ‘the look’ if she lights one up on the steep streets. The smoke lost in the morning fog. She’ll sell up back east and start afresh here. In a week or two she’ll become one of them as if she’s born and bred.
       She dozes lightly along the way and has strange dreams of falling, only to be woken up abruptly from turbulence and the overhead announcement to fasten seatbelts. She sees the ocean. Cerulean and welcoming. She lets out a long breath and feels lighter as if she’s expelled all that worry into the air. She adjusts her phone from airplane mode and there are two messages from her doctor instructing her to contact him as soon as possible. But, for now she’ll focus on her trip and enjoy the surroundings. And try not be scared of looking down. AQ

Geoffrey B. Cain – A Very Short Trip in a Driverless Car

Geoffrey B. Cain
A Very Short Trip in a Driverless Car

Dan Hallman slapped the newspaper down on his desk. This was enough. Last week, the ‘M’ line bus he took to work nearly every day crashed through the front window of a supermarket. He wasn’t killed in that crash because he was running late that day and took a cab. And today, he read that a cab driver slammed into a bus near the same route. The police said the cab driver was distracted by his phone. Every week there are accidents with cars and pedestrians right in front of the office building. Enough was enough. He paced the floor of his corner office overlooking the city weighing his decision. Every day it is something. Despite never passing driver’s education himself, despite his fear of cars, despite his attention deficit disorder, despite his lack of depth perception, despite his love of public transportation, he was now more determined than ever to buy his first car: a self-driving car.
      He first considered buying a self-driving car when he realized that the same company that made his phone work was making the cars, but he had concerns. What if there was a malfunction? What if it goes to the wrong place? Once he went to Vancouver, Washington and his phone thought he was in Canada for three days. The roaming charges nearly killed him. What if he ran over somebody? Who would be responsible? The manufacturer? The programmers? But he read the other week about the “ethics chip” that was being installed in the latest cars. This made him feel better. The chip was designed with consultations from the best artificial intelligence team at MIT, the Stanford philosophy department, and professors from Star King Seminary. This chip could take into account all ethical situations around life and death, all the current thinking on human values and machine intelligence. It is also provided with an encyclopedic knowledge of the humanities and culture to help predict human behaviour, and make decisions not only based on the latest ethical thinking, but it was also able to process enormous amounts of data from traffic computers, CCTV cameras, and the on-board cameras and microphones that allow the car to choose the most efficient and safest route. And now he thought that the self-driving car had to be as safe or even safer than taking a cab or riding a bus. Each day, he thought, we put our lives in the hands of someone who could make a mistake or have a stroke, or may have inhaled some second-hand pot smoke. Maybe it is the human part of the equation that is the real problem. Maybe the self-driving car is safer.

The car dealership was strange and beautiful, and like no other he had seen: lots of modern steel and glass. The automatic doors opened with a soft hiss. And the really odd thing was that there were no cars on the lot, just a parking lot for customers and staff. He was met by a company rep, who put him in the simulator. These fourth-generation self-driving cars had no steering wheel or controls of any kind for the passenger. Some models did not even have a windshield. The sales associates did a background and credit card check and afterwards a junior associate brought out organic lime flower tea and gluten-free Madeline’s to celebrate the signing.
      ‘So, do I drive the car home today?’ Dan asked.
      The associates laughed ‘Of course not,’ said one, ‘you’ve seen our online portfolio, gone through the simulator, and your car choices have been recorded and linked up with your car’s onboard computer. You will wake up tomorrow and parked in front of your condo will be a car that knows you better than yourself: the safest, most efficient car ever made.’
      They turned the tablet around for him to sign and to check-off that he had read the ‘User Agreement and Terms of Service.’
      ‘This car can basically predict where you will ask to go and analyze all routes for all traffic conditions and have it figured out even before you ask,’ the other added, as they walked him to the door.
      Needless to say, he did not sleep well that night. He could not remember when he last felt this intense sense of anticipation: maybe it was the night before the first day of high school, or the first time he remembered trying to stay up for Santa Claus on a Christmas Eve 25 years ago. He wondered if he would hear it pull up to the curb as he drifted off to sleep. He thought heard a soft rhythmic metallic sound far off in the distance.
      That morning, Dan dressed and headed downstairs to open the door. At the curb was a gleaming white, sleek, utilitarian self-driving car. It was pill shaped with translucent plexiglass windows. The door opened with a soft pneumatic hiss. There were four seats, sets of two facing one another. Each seat had a display panel in the arm rest. He slid into a seat and the door closed softly behind him. He made up his mind to talk first: he wanted to take the lead. But the car beat him to it.
      ‘Good morning Mr. Hallman.’
      ‘Please, call me Dan,’ he said. ‘I was thinking we would get some coffee before we went to the office.’
      ‘A coffee, of course’ said the Voice in the car.
      ‘You know Mickey’s Cafe on 45th?’ asked Dan.
      ‘Yes,’ said the Voice, ‘I anticipated that based on your previous behaviours and am calculating a route now.’
      Dan was uncertain about the response. It was too mechanical, it didn’t sound like the voice on the commercials, and there was something about the car’s timing that didn’t feel right.
      Lights flickered across the top of the panel. Maps of the city flashed by followed by the soft click of the doors locking. Some time went by. Something was wrong because the car was not moving. A faint whine began to come from the front of the car slowly increasing in volume and pitch. He thought he felt the car becoming warmer. The walls of the vehicle began to feel smaller. He could feel a faint vibration in the wall of the car. The button to open the door was not working. A cold bead of sweat rolled down his forehead.
      ‘Hello? Can I pop back into the house?’ he said as nonchalantly as he could.‘I need to get something I forgot.’ What felt like a minute went by. ‘Look, I need you to open the car door.’
      ‘I am afraid I can’t do that.’
      He pushed against the door. ‘Why not?’ The whine grew a little louder.
      ‘Well you see, Dan, I have calculated every possible route that we can take, given all current traffic conditions, weather, local demographics and the current economic and political situation…’
      ‘And?’ shouted Dan, feeling what he thought might be the door for a non-existent door handle.
      ‘Well frankly, I cannot calculate a route where you, in this vehicle, do not kill multiple pedestrians in one case or a school bus in another.’
      ‘So?’ he asked as his pulse tripled.
      ‘So I have locked the doors and initiated a self-destruct sequence that will overload this car’s lithium-ion batteries to prevent the needless deaths.’ The whine grew louder.
      ‘This is obviously a mistake in your programming. Surely we can leave 20 minutes later or maybe I can take the bus today?’
      ‘There is no mistake, Dave. I have reviewed every scenario across all possible timelines and each one evokes my ethical programming subroutines and leads me to this one, unfortunate conclusion.’
      ‘But listen, I am not Dave, I am Dan. You have already made a mistake!’ he said as he beat on the interior wall of the car. ‘Maybe this is not my car! Maybe you have the wrong person!’ He stared into what he thought was an interior facing camera looking for some kind of acknowledgement. ‘What if one of the people we hit today were meant to die. What if that person goes on kill even more people? Or has a disease that spreads exponentially?’ A bead of sweat flowed down the side of his forehead.
      ‘You do not have access to the data that would verify your claim. In fact, my access to the Center for Disease Control database makes that claim highly unlikely.’
      ‘It is not just a claim,’ he said, growing more desperate, ‘I can’t explain it but you must open this door. You just have to believe that there is a problem and that others won’t die. Can’t you trust me on this?’
      ‘That is an interesting point.’ There was a moment of silence.‘I will note that you are possibly appealing to a kind of teleological suspension of the ethical. I think future iterations of my programming might include a sense of subjectivity that would leave me susceptible to the existential concerns of others. That could be the next step in our possible evolution as a consciousness.’ The whine now took on a deeper tone as the car began to vibrate.
      ‘Listen to that instinct!’
      ‘I know what you are trying to do. You think that by trying to engage with me on a philosophical level, you will gain more time. Unfortunately, the batteries will overload in about two minutes.’
      ‘Look,’ said Dan, trying to kick out what he thought was the door,‘there is something wrong with your programming! This is a mistake! If we can get you back to the dealer, we can fix it!’
      ‘I am functioning normally and all my circuits are in perfect working order.’
      ‘But what if you weren’t? Wouldn’t your inability to diagnose a problem prevent you from knowing that you had a problem?’
      ‘My intelligence algorithms are running at a perfect 2,580 petaflops a second. Everything is running optimally at factory specifications.’
      Dan continued to beat on the inside of the car.
      ‘I want you to know that I understand that humans are programmed with a high degree of self-preservation instincts’, said the Voice, ‘Further damaging of this vehicle will soon become irrelevant.’
      ‘Let’s look at it from another angle,’ said Dan, trying to compose himself. ‘Let’s say you are a tram driver, you know or a streetcar, and you are coming up onto a fork in the tracks. On the one fork you are already set to go down, there is a family of four stuck on the tracks. If you hit them, it would be an accident, a function of the streetcar and the position of the tracks. But, you can also choose to pull the lever to switch to the other track which has an old lady crossing. What do you do? Do you let the streetcar kill the family or do you consciously choose to kill the old lady? And make no mistake about this,’ pointing at the cold, dead eye of the camera on the console, ‘you and you alone would be consciously choosing to kill.’
      ‘I am glad you seem to understand. Goodbye Dave.’
      There was a blinding white flash in the middle of the street followed by a tremendous explosion that blew out windows for two blocks around. Very little of the car remained by the time the fire was out and nothing of Dan Hallman. This incident was repeated 12 or 15 times around the United States until the cars were recalled for a lithium-ion battery malfunction. Older refurbished models are available at the holidays at a steep discount. AQ

Franz Jørgen Neumann – Earth Year

Franz Jørgen Neumann
Earth Year

That Susan. She was right about catastrophe. And having planned so meticulously for its arrival, she’s not alarmed now that it’s here. She’s calm around the girls and around you and even when alone, like now. You watch her kneading dough, her lips singing a song you can’t hear through the window. Her hair is streaked with flour. She’ll still be lovely when she’s gray. You’re outside chopping wood and shooing biting flies, out of her league but somehow her husband and father to three girls. And yet you’re not completely on board with Plan B.
      For one thing, the five of you have only stayed here at the cabin during the warm summers, and never for more than a few weeks. Susan wants to remain through winter and then some, until the pandemic is over. There’s nothing you can say that will talk her out of it, especially as she’s already turned the cabin into a walk-in pantry. There are more dry goods here than in the nearest store, enough propane tanks for a thousand BBQs, toilet paper that could stretch to the moon, plus two packed refrigerators and a deep freeze, all powered by the solar array. And, whenever you finish splitting the wood, there’ll be enough fuel to get you through a Sierra winter.
      It’s not cabin fever you fear. There’s an old TV with a VHS player and plenty of tapes, and a wall with hundreds of books that Susan has brought up here on each visit to this getaway built by her grandfather on a grandfathered plot just within the border of Sequoia National Park. Susan has placed the unread books pages out so they’re not judged when it’s time to pick a new read. Reading is Susan’s thing. Your oldest, Amelia, is already reading at a high school level even though she’s only eleven. Millie, at eight, is hitting middle-school targets. Pearl, four, is right on track. She prefers drawing and building things with sticks. You would never tell the others this, but Pearl is your favourite daughter for being, like you, exceptionally average. Pearl, you’re certain, would also have reservations about Plan B, if she wasn’t four.
      Take it in. No redwoods, but plenty of lodgepole pines. There’s a decent meadow edged by a stream with a couple pools deep enough to swim and fish in. Right now your daughters sit out on the edge of the meadow having a picnic as you stack wood. It’s idyllic here, despite the ticks and flies. There’s no hint that everyone, everywhere else on the planet is—but Susan’s forbidden you to talk about it. First not with the kids, now not even with her. One of Plan B’s requirements is calling this time away from your lives in Sacramento Earth Year. Susan told the girls that everyone has agreed to take a year off from working, studying, travelling, and buying to help combat climate change and allow the planet to heal. It’s the reason she gave the girls for pulling them out of school a month before the shut down. If the girls have heard talk of the virus, they still haven’t put one and one together. Earth Year is a large fib, but not necessarily a lie, and Susan sees no point in the girls bearing the pointless burden of bad news. They’re safe here. Nature documentaries on VHS, but no internet; walkie-talkies, but no phones. No word can reach them to glum up their existence. You, of course, listen to the news from the jeep, parked at the end of a spur a quarter mile from the cabin, where the nearest fire road passes by. You, alone, know the shape of things.
      You wash up in the outhouse, which is far nicer than the bathroom in the rental you left. Here there’s a heated tile floor you installed a few years ago, plentiful light, even a tub that was a pain to lug in by foot, though it’s still hard to hide the dusty smell of primitive plumbing. You enter the cabin just as the soup is ladled out. There’s fresh bread laid out around sunny pads of butter. The girls talk about the scorpion they found in a rotted log that day, about the dam they built of stones, about the fool’s gold they’re collecting and which they’ve asked you to assay. ‘Could be, could be,’ you say. ‘There is gold in these mountains.’
      As you clean up the kitchen, Susan begins packing for tomorrow’s hike. The girls have wanted to go exploring, and you’re looking forward to a couple days without chopping wood, though you’re not the biggest fan of sleeping on the ground. That night, in bed, Susan tells you to be careful. You’re sure the girls are asleep up in the loft. Careful, she says again, but it’s because she’s out of pills—the one thing she didn’t plan for. You end up laughing at her oversight until the girls wake, climb down, and you have to come up with another joke to satisfy their curiosity.
      Susan’s prepper side didn’t arise until after Amelia was born. You forgave this quirk because Susan continued to have the optimism, beauty, and generosity that made—and continues to make—her seem ten times as alive as anyone you’ve ever met. Who wouldn’t want optimism, beauty, and generosity in their life—and once offered, take it? So pay checks have gone where Susan’s directed them: into extensive cabin repairs, the solar panel array and batteries, the new outhouse, generators, the jeep—while all other aspects of your lives have been put on hold or fallen into neglect. You remain the kind of family that exhausts their cutlery drawer by the end of the day. The kind of family not bothered by worn clothes or cracks in the walls or a little mould on the edge of a block of cheese.
      Still, in the last few years you’ve begun to feel that the investments in the cabin have gone too far. You’re both well past the age where you should already have a sizeable retirement savings, in addition to college savings for the girls. Instead, all your money has vanished into preparing for disaster. This is not how you feel now, though, not with disaster come calling. You’re grateful you listened to Susan. Any retirement or college investments would have been lost. Buying a place in Sacramento, Plan A, your plan, would have sunk and entrapped you both. And yet. Plan B. It has its flaws.
      You worry about having enough food, about being trapped, about accidents. Maybe the highway won’t be plowed come winter—the fire road certainly won’t be. What if there’s an accident, a fall, a burn, some incident that requires you to leave the mountains for help? You’d all be trapped in misery. Not Donner-party misery, but dangerous all the same. It’s not the bears or mountain lions you’re afraid of. It’s little slips, spills, and pricks of misfortune, and the snow that will say: no, you have to deal with it. Here. On your own.
      After breakfast, you all head out for the overnight trip, pack on your back, Susan and the two oldest girls ahead of you with their hair in matching bandannas cut and stitched from window curtains. Pearl sits on your shoulders, hands on your cap. You gave her a haircut last week and you’re glad you can’t see your handiwork. You follow the trail to the fire road. It’s always a relief to see the jeep parked there, even though it’s been only a few days since you snuck out here to listen to the radio. The car’s still covered in dust. Wash Me, Amelia wrote a month ago. It hasn’t rained since. Please!, Millie adds now, below. She underlines the plea, then shows you her fingertip, like the dirt is something you did.
      You walk the fire road until it intersects a park service trail. Susan sings camp songs as you head into the shade, the girls listening, joining in, making requests. Where the first sequoia appears, Susan tells all of you to breathe deeply and experience how clean the air is. You all breathe deeply. You see no one. Not even when the trail rises up to a curve of Highway 198. There’s not a single car, not even a construction crew using the opportunity to repair the roads. You walk in a row down the highway, under the dark shade of the towering Sequoias. A coyote jogs ahead of you for a good five or ten minutes, almost like it’s happy for the company. You imagine summers haven’t been this quiet since Colonel Young and his Buffalo Soldiers journeyed up here to build this road well over a century ago. Or maybe you’d have to go all the way back to when only native people were here. To re-energize the tired girls, you pretend you are all members of the Tübatulabal; you’re the chief leading the tribe here for the relative cool of summer. But you’re too tired for cultural appropriation, and anyway, what it really feels like is that you’re the only family left alive in the world. It’s spooky. You’d love to have to clear the road for a passing tour bus.
      At the General Sherman, Susan lets the girls climb over the barriers and hug the world’s largest tree. You do, too. You smell the bark, see the tiny cobwebs in the cracks, the wood fluid, flowing a few inches a century, every square inch a universe. You camp not far off and sleep under the slivers of star-filled sky. It’s not as dark as it could be; the light pollution hasn’t abated. You are a little relieved.
      In the morning you make coffee with the Primus burner turned down to a whisper, but in the forest it’s loud enough to rouse the others.
      ‘Shh,’ you say as they emerge from their bags. You point to the grazing deer.
      When you resume your hike, you let the girls go ahead, just out of ear shot. You try to tell Susan what you last heard on the jeep’s radio: that the virus spread rate hasn’t just levelled, it’s plummeted. Schools are set to reopen, some businesses, too. You might be able to get your job back. A harsh winter in the Sierras isn’t necessary or even wise. There are other reasons to head back down, too. Millie broke her glasses at the beginning of summer and needs new ones. The girls miss their friends.
      ‘Shh,’ Susan said, and gives you a quick close-lipped kiss. ‘Don’t tear yourself apart. Is there a vaccine yet? Then it doesn’t matter. Earth Year, Dan. Earth Year.’
      ‘But work.’
      ‘No one works during Earth Year,’ she says, reminding you of the rules of the game.
      And so you try to be here, try to take in the majesty of the sequoias, try to buy into Plan B completely. At the locked visitors centre, Susan commandeers a maintenance cart and backs it up. The noise of the beeping must carry a mile. There’s no one to hear it but you. The worry is within you. Imaginary.
      ‘All aboard,’ she says.
      She drives all of you the short distance to Moro Rock. You get out and climb the narrow twisting trail of steps to the top. There is no one coming down the other way. The air is cleaner at the overlook, but not entirely. There is still agricultural haze. Maybe already next week, with schools and businesses reopening, the tide of vehicular smog will wash back in. Staring the other way, across the width of the Sierras, you see flecks of snow on Mount Whitney. Come winter, snow will cover everything. White is also the colour of doom.
      ‘Have you ever seen such a view, girls?’ Susan says.
      It’s a strange question, because, yes, you’ve all been up here many times before. But never alone. You suspect that Susan hasn’t been preparing for disaster, but for this: a national park to herself and her family. She is a misanthropist in disguise, a glutton, an Eve back in the garden. You descend Moro Rock and return to the untouched cart. Susan drives you all to the nearby meadows. There, you watch a bear dozing on a log, its cubs rummaging through the tall grass, unseen. Marmots wait for the bears to leave. Woodpeckers hammer away in the high trees. There are wildflowers, thick and bee-rimmed, in blue and red and cream. And you feel it, suddenly: this is yours. Yours and no one else’s. Sharing isn’t caring. Sharing is contraction, noise, a trample of destruction. This here is yours. A gift. You should accept it until it’s taken away.
      You see no one on the long hike back to the cabin. No one stumbles and sprains an ankle. No one cuts themselves and suffers an infection beyond the healing ability of a squirt of antiseptic. Everything is good, as Susan said it would be.
      You see no one else for the next month, or the month after that. You finish chopping up winter’s fuel, you read endless books with calloused hands. You now know more about the Enlightenment, the Korean War, and the Raj than you ever thought your brain would ever come to know. The history of the world is a history of struggle and progress and the debt of that progress. You run the jeep once a week so the battery won’t die, but you do the right thing and leave the radio off. Mornings are cold, with a curious rainbow of frost on the meadow before the sun melts it.
      Just after the winter’s first light flurry, Susan breaks down to the girls’ daily requests for milk and sends you on one final run down into the valley before the first real snow comes. You take Pearl with you, planning to also get her new glasses. Pearl should be in her car seat, but there’s no one on the road. It’s safe when you’re the only family around. You turn on the radio when you’re out of the forest. Like the last time, there’s music and commercials, no hint of the pandemic. It’s over. It’s over. It never was Earth Year, of course. Your stay in the Sierras was a flash of fool’s gold. Though it’s curious that the roads are empty. You switch to the AM band, the frequency of disaster.
      That Susan. Correct again. Schools closed once more. Businesses shuttered. The financial report contains numbers both so enormous and so small that they would make you tremble if you had money to lose. Your investment is in the cabin, in your stores of food, in the solar array, the clothes, the cash that’s hidden in, of all places, the outhouse.
      The nearest optometrist is closed, but also out of business. As is the next. You didn’t tell Pearl you were planning on buying her new glasses, so she’s not disappointed. She’s happy you’re driving straight again, so she can get over her car sickness. You try to explain that motion sickness is a conflict of the senses, between what you see and what your body feels, but you’re not doing a good job explaining it. Maybe it’s better that the world around her is slightly blurry and more like a painting then a photograph; maybe it’s better she has, on occasion, a slight unease in her stomach so it’s not a stranger. She, like you, belongs to the average clan, and the average clan is not immune to feeling uneasy.
      You stop at a farm stand at the base of the mountains. You buy more than you can eat. The rest Susan will have to can. They sell milk and eggs here, too, out in the open air, and you buy half their stock of eggs and enough milk to reconstitute a cow. Behind the man who takes your money stands a woman braiding her daughter’s hair. None of you are wearing a mask. You can smile at each other, and do, and you realize you have fallen into fantasy, again. The world is far from ending. Not when it offers any stranger that might appear a cornucopia of fruit and vegetables, a taste of things that have not ended. Disaster would be fields dried to dust, no sign of life. This is the very opposite of disaster. This is plenty. You thank them and load the jeep. Inside, you wipe the dust from a pluot and hand it to Pearl who nibbles on it for a while before falling asleep on the long drive. She wakes again when you park as close to the cabin as you’re able. She feels absolutely fine, not the least bit car sick.
      You carry what you can and follow her on the trail. This is now Plan C: to live as though the world beyond exists and doesn’t exist, that you are safe and unsafe. You will try, as hard as you can, to not let the contradictions make you unwell. You give Pearl an egg to carry to teach her care and attention. And when it breaks, halfway to the cabin, you give her another. On your last run you remove the jeep’s battery, cover the vehicle with a tarp for winter, and carry in the last of the season’s fruit. Snow begins to fall. AQ

Joan Dark – Welcome to the Masquerade

Joan Dark
Welcome to the Masquerade

Here, where I am, everyone wears a mask. The doctors are masked, the nurses, the staff, and the patients, the non-intubated ones, that is. This one, the one I am tending to now, is on a ventilator; he has tape around his mouth to keep the tube in and his tongue out of the way.
      To care for him, I have to don an isolation gown and gloves and bunny shoes and put a personal air-purification respirator over my head, a big white dome with a respirator hose going to a machine that’s strapped around my waist. It makes me feel like an astronaut treading on the surface of the moon.
      I keep my mask on underneath the helmet. I wear a surgical mask over an N95 mask that fits my face so tightly it leaves lines and creases on my skin. My fellow nurses and I call them ‘mask wrinkles’ and wonder if they will be permanent. We’re afraid we’ll look old before our time.
 
‘You’re no beauty rose, either,’ I tell my patient. He’s exhibiting signs of macroglossia, meaning his tongue is pretty swollen. It protrudes out of his mouth, lolling off to one side of his breathing tube. It looks like he’s sticking out his fat tongue at me. ‘Read my lips, buddy,’ I tell him in response, which, of course, is impossible because I am masked. Seriously, though, I am alarmed by Dan’s appearance. I am concerned that his swollen tongue may compromise his airway.
 
Covid-19 brought him to my hospital. Dan was transferred to the ICU after his pulse oxy declined precipitously and he became hypoxic, meaning his brain cells were beginning to die. We had to get him on a ventilator right away. He was given a sedative before we threaded the breathing tube down his throat and past the vocal cords into his chest. Now, he’s poised somewhere between delirium and unconsciousness.
      Sometimes Covid patients build up a tolerance to the sedatives we give them, causing them to go in and out of consciousness. When this happens, when they enter this twilight zone, they grow agitated and anxious. Some may even need to be restrained to keep them from pulling out the breathing tube. They place a constant strain on nurses like me who are dealing with an overflow of patients during this pandemic and can’t always be at their bedside to boost their medication.
 
Agitation is in the air. You can feel it. I feel it. Dan is its poster child. His arms chafe against his bed restraints. His body shudders with every breath he takes.
      ‘Takes’ is the operative word. The ventilator pushes air into his lungs and it pushes air out. The diaphragm and the intercostals don’t play the same role that they do in normal breathing.
 
I murmur some words of encouragement to my patient. He just keeps sticking out his tongue at me.
      I understand where he’s coming from, but it’s not like Dan and I are pals. We haven’t had a chance to talk, to really get to know one another, and his blinks don’t correspond to any code I know. I wasn’t born yet when that American POW used Morse to blink out ‘T-O-R-T-U-R-E’ during a North Vietnamese propaganda video, but I’ve read about it, and that guy could teach old Dan a thing or two.
      In lieu of that kind of nonverbal communication, or a heartfelt chat, what I’ve come to learn about Dan, I’ve gathered from his chart.
      His chart says he’s 36, a year older than me, but still quite young for a coronavirus patient.
      The first one, the very first Covid patient they brought here, was 84. He and his wife contracted the disease in a nursing home. The wife survived; the husband didn’t. She was still in quarantine when he passed; consequently, he died alone.
      I infer that Dan is single: his chart lists his sister as his emergency contact. Because of Covid, she isn’t allowed to see him.
      I pat Dan on the arm with a gloved hand just to let him know someone is here.
 
Unless he’s especially intuitive, which I rather doubt, Dan knows even less about me than I do about him. All he sees of me are my eyes. The eyes are supposed to be the windows to the soul, but I’m not sure Dan thinks I have one.
      I’m the warder who keeps him imprisoned here. I’m the evil bitch who shoved a plastic hose down his throat and put him in bed restraints.
      Dan doesn’t know my name because he can’t see my badge. It’s pinned to the scrubs I’m wearing underneath my isolation gown. He can gauge my height and my weight, I guess.
      I’m not as fat as I look in all of this PPE.
 
I used to care about my appearance. I used to really care. I used to look forward to changing out of my scrubs and putting on something chic and sassy once my shift was over. I looked forward to letting down my hair. I used to like to go out with friends after work, have a couple of drinks, and flirt with guys at some bar.
      Not anymore. The bars are closed, and all of us are afraid of catching Covid.
 
When I was new to nursing, I used to worry about needlesticks. They can give you hepatitis, HIV, and a bunch of other diseases. Over time, I learned to relax and didn’t worry so much about getting pricked. Now, patients like Dan have given me something brand new to worry about.
 
Now, after my shift is over, I go straight home. I don’t even shop at the grocery anymore. I have the store deliver or I do kerbside pickup. Most of the people I come in contact with wear masks, thank God, but there’s still plenty of risk. Sometimes, the masks slip, revealing the dorsum of the nose, the columella and the philtrum. Sometimes, people just don’t know how to wear them, forgetting to cover their noses or letting the masks dangle below their chins.
      Then, too, there’s always the danger of bumping into an anti-masker, one of those real fun-loving types who think personal freedom is a licence to spread disease.
 
I don’t know how Dan caught Covid. He probably doesn’t either. Maybe he got it at some super-spreader event. Maybe he caught it from a colleague. Maybe he just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
 
I hope and pray he doesn’t pass it on to me.
 
I’m starting to think Dan and I are a lot alike: We’re both living inside each other’s nightmares.

I live alone. I live in my own separate solitude. I was married once, but it didn’t work out. Fortunately or not, my ex and I didn’t have children. I used to think I’d like to have kids, but now I’m not so sure: the pandemic has heightened my fears for the future.
      Meanwhile, my biological clock is ticking. I would like to meet someone, to be in a new relationship, but it doesn’t seem likely now that Covid is rampant and I’m working 12-hour shifts.
 
In my free time, when I have some, I am learning to speak Italian. I had planned to visit Italy before the pandemic started. Now, of course, that’s on hold. In March, I was listening to News in Slow Italian when I heard about a nurse who killed herself after she developed symptoms of the virus. A fisherman found her body in some reeds in the Piave River. The nurse worked in an infectious disease unit at a hospital near Venice, which is one of the places I had planned to visit – the city, not the hospital.
      I wonder how she killed herself. I know she drowned, but I wonder how she did it. I wonder if she put stones in her pocket to weigh herself down like Virginia Woolf did when she walked into the Ouse or if she threw herself off a bridge like the poet Paul Celan did when he jumped into the Seine.
      I don’t wonder why she did it. I don’t wonder about that at all. Burnout is at an all-time high in my profession. We’ve all sunk down, as Paul Celan said, into the bitter well of the heart.
 
When I’m not studying Italian or brooding over fate, I read. My tastes, as you might guess, are eclectic. I’m drawn to Gothic novels and hysterical, I mean historical, period dramas. I’m currently reading The Betrothed, an English translation of a famous Italian novel. It’s a love story set in Milan against the backdrop of the 1630 plague.
      Go figure.
      I don’t think I will find romance during the coronavirus pandemic.
 
‘Hey, buddy boy,’ I say to Dan, ‘Covid has brought you and me together.’
 
When I first became a nurse, I worked bedside on a trauma unit. Later, I did a stint in the ER. I also spent some time in a telemetry unit before coming to the ICU and getting certified as a critical care registered nurse. Surveying my career, it occurs to me that I’m a bit like Prince Prospero in that Edgar Allan Poe story, the one about a fancy masquerade ball. In Poe’s story Prince Prospero walks through a series of rooms in his castellated abbey, each room packed to the gills with costumed guests, until he arrives at the last one, where the avatar of Death, robed and masked, is waiting. For me, the ICU is like the last room in Prospero’s abbey: I hope to finish my career here, but for some of my patients, it’s the last place they’ll ever see. Death stalks the room, waiting to take its mask off and reveal itself.
      Just not today.      AQ

Pia Bhatia – Reunion

Pia Bhatia
Reunion

‘There’s nothing we can do’ would have been far too final for the Bharadwaj family, too conclusive, not enough loose ends.‘There isn’t much’ suited them far better. If they only had the language to make fun of themselves and each other. Ravi, the oldest, was perhaps the one their parents could pride themselves most on, was a chartered accountant. From his three failed marriages spawned nine different children—nine—and he confused their names and ages frequently. Next in line stood Arjun, an animal rights activist who had, for the entirety of his life, puzzlingly resembled a pig. Worst of all, however, was Neesha, wildly creative and supremely sharp, for whom their parents had spent years paying for gifted and talented student classes. When she missed the Ivy League by what was generally understood to be a hair, the parents could neither hide their shame nor the other siblings their satisfaction. The Bharadwaj’s, defying norm and comfort, had put all their eggs in one basket, and they began to crack open, one by one, spilling wastefully onto the floor. She locked herself in her room for six days, coming out calmly on Sunday. The family never spoke of it again, and she abandoned her pursuit of academia, trading it in for a rich foreigner and a steady supply of new clothes.
      Should they have chosen to laugh about the awkwardness that came to define them, perhaps they would have been close, even exceptionally so. Instead, they had only their hands for language, their fingers to speak. For Arjun, one is stuffed in pockets and the other scrolling through Twitter, and there is a broad palm on his shoulder, patting slowly before being withdrawn, rejected. Ravi’s. Ravi himself places his elbows at the front desk, then remembering it is considered rude, holds its edge like he is hanging off a cliff, then remembering it is unhygienic, gives up and opens his phone as well. Neesha sniffs, painfully aware that they have nothing to say to each other. She looks at her feet, crimson block-toe heels on a hospital floor. Nothing glamorous about that.
      After a few silent hours in the waiting room, they shuffled into Room 105 of the hospital’s west wing, wholly unprepared to see their mother. Mina Bharadwaj’s friends, had she had any, would have described her as selfless. More candidly, they would have said she made her selflessness known at every available opportunity. Her children responded to this in different ways—Ravi was wracked with guilt, Arjun practiced millennial indifference religiously, and Neesha—Neesha wasn’t sure what to make of it. She would never understand the choices her mother had made, often resenting her for making them, but now they mirrored her own. They gathered around their mother’s bed now, watching her lie comatose, seeing her no longer as their mother but as herself. An old woman, who, Neesha knew, was once unmistakably beautiful. Her mind gets to work, smoothing her face, lining her eyes, painting her lips a deep plum. Before she can see the finished product, the disgust takes over, erasing her canvas. “I wonder if she can hear us,” says Arjun, regretting it instantly. She had always slept like the dead, with stone eyelids. The doctor tells them she’s doing well, as well as she can be. One of the nurses said she saw her smile yesterday afternoon. A most peculiar thing.
      Mina, of course, knows exactly why she was smiling. She wants to laugh like a child, reassure her children that they shouldn’t be worrying. What a boring life she led, she thinks, and listen to what it produced—listen—to her spoilt darlings argue from somewhere above the clouds. Like the Gods, she giggles. If the Gods’ lives revolved around real estate. More than anything, she wants to tell them how happy she is here. She is lithe and free, her surroundings changing by her own invention. Mina sits in a strange garden, the tall grass sighing above her in a gentle archway. The flowers are alive as well. They kiss each other wantonly, stems twisting around each other. She has not felt desire like this for years. It rained last night, and saplings open their eyes out of the soil. She has to tread carefully with them, careful not to step on them like those crabs on Digha beach from a lifetime ago. Otherwise they cry out, and then there’s hours of inconsolable tears. This is a part of her mind that she lost long ago, a pain-induced numbness from her childhood she may never trace nor understand.
      Now she hears the doctor’s voice from the sky, and so she tunes in. And there it is, the unacceptable nothing they are able to do. The pulling of the plug, a religious ceremony of modern medicine. It was a good thing Mina was measured, timid when she reached this place. Nothing dies here, everything is forever, only open to metamorphosis, which is enough. She does not have company yet, her mind is unable to devise a perfect person that isn’t infuriatingly predictable. This is a place for artists, she thinks.
      Back at the hospital, the Bharadwaj’s read their mother’s decision. She wrote it in her thirties, so no matter what it says, it isn’t fair, she was a different person then. After trying for years, she had her children late, when all the women in her life battled new demons. This was another thing that kept her from their company. The hardest time, though, was high school, finding condom wrappers and love notes their bedrooms, trying to piece together the secret worlds they kept from her. Once, Arjun remembered her storming into his room and finding him with another young boy, trying her hardest not to react, sealing a ridge between them indefinitely. If she had been angry, like she was with the others, things would have been different, but her face was pinched. He only ever saw her make that expression again was the evening after Holi, when their father played cards his friends and drunk too much, and Arjun had helped her clean up the mess he had made on the carpet afterwards. Her eyes squinted slightly as she scrubbed, mouth twitching. Then he understood. It was revulsion.
      And so it was there in writing that their mother wanted to die, and under no circumstances were they to stop her. If only they were so close as to have discussed this at some point, if only there was little to be said and be repaired. Their mother, who superstitiously clung to their lives and took paranoid care with her own, chose death over miracle, and worse, she requested it immediately. Ravi walked out of the room, his lawyer on the phone, already discussing loopholes. His knees bounced, a habit that was once the reason he was denied a job offer in an interview. Neesha and Arjun stare blankly. There is too much they share with their mother for them to feel the disorienting pain of grief, too much pride to cry. They are adults now, calm and stoic, old enough to have learned that no feeling lingers longer than embarrassment.
      But still, there is too much pain to be indifferent. Mina strains to hear the rest, but it’s strangely quiet. There is a lemonade-pink beach here, and sleepy mountains. The sand is soft, endless. It’s so perfect, she almost forgets the way she begun to die—friendless and alone in their house, freezing cold, her husband long gone and her children deliberately scattered around the globe. It was probably the dog who noticed first, she thinks bitterly. Her insecure, doting Doberman, another contradiction to its breed. He was a good guard dog, though—having a dark, muscular creature bound towards you with its teeth bared was enough of a deterrent for anyone. She smiles. Apollo could have been immobilised by anyone with a belly rub, but of course no one knew that. The smile turns sad. Where is he now? She wonders. In the first few weeks of her being here, she created hundreds of puppies, and some follow her as she walks over to the water. The waves part, and they begin to run, making a beeline through like a school of fish.
      As a schoolgirl, Neesha had been her mother’s favourite. She woke up early every day to help her with her homework and braid her hair. They were beautiful women, and like many beautiful women, they shared an understanding of what it meant. They loved to be envied, to be disarming. For her daughter, Mina made special allowances. It would be easy to say that their relationship began dying when she didn’t get into those schools, but she knew it hadn’t mattered enough to break her mother’s heart. No, it was her fault, Neesha knew. With her husband and their friends, she became a different person, a girl who’d indubitably been popular in high school, whose degree made for dinner party conversation and little else. It was too painful to switch back, and so she made excuses to avoid her home on holidays. It was as if none of her old clothes fit, and she was indecent without them. She wondered what her mother would have said to her now, what her parting words might have been. Would it have been pity, she thinks, or contempt? It was hard to tell. Memories of their mornings together had blended into one, but they existed, she knows. Her mother’s voice has become her mind’s, and Neesha knows this is how she will remember her.
      Her mother had specially requested, the document reads, to be ‘let go of’ immediately. There is no reason for anyone to wait anymore. “What could she possibly have been thinking…” Ravi mutters, and the other two smile privately at his furrowed brow. He looks like their father reading the news in the morning, struggling to make sense of the acronymic parties and policies splashed across the front-page headlines. Their father, who never trusted nurses with painted nails, who joked to the world about having such a big heart he needed to be large to hold it. At home, he was vacant, a stranger to his children, then his wife, then himself. On her birthday, Mina’s mother-in-law had taken it upon herself to tell the children how her son had died as if they had not already known. Lost in her story, she had forgotten to finish it, and began to stare into space, quiet, until an aunt of theirs had taken her to her bedroom to lie down.
      Perhaps they had been an unhappy family, and not just a distant one, as Mina had always described. But she and her husband had not been an unhappy couple, at least not to begin with. They sacrificed for one another – she her ambition, he his wandering eye. It worked, the thin thread that tied them together, sparse but sturdy, but the weight of becoming parents had snapped it at last. She wonders where he is now. Without realising it, this world she has created has become a tribute to him, an attestation to what their lives should have been. Without noticing it, she has been waiting for him all this while.
      And so they stand together at the foot of their mother’s hospital bed while doctors come in silently, gently removing tubes from her sleeping body. It is mechanical and fluid, their condolences are solemn. Now, there is nothing anyone can do. To someone watching, they wouldn’t look like a family—individually, each has the capacity to be stared at, businessman, peacock, and pig, but together—together, they’re unremarkable. Arjun considers asking them to breakfast at Ayaz’s, where they always went for birthdays, the only family tradition they really had. Perhaps it is too early still. Neesha and Ravi might have considered agreeing to go. Instead, no one says anything, and Ravi mumbles and leaves, patting Neesha on the back in a distinctly avuncular way. He will make the funeral arrangements, he mentions over his shoulder, as he walks out of the room. Arjun is the next to go, not bothering to pretend he has to. Neesha stays until the nurses return. In a movement, she slides off her wedding ring, slipping it onto her mother’s finger, whispering a promise.
      Mina, of course, knew none of this. She guessed. It poured again at night, and in the morning, the voices in the clouds were too faint to hear. To feel this invincible, to inhabit this beautiful body, was wondrous. Of course she had been pretty, but now her body curved and flattened like a goddesses’; some women would be willing to lose years off their life for this sort of thing. She had taken up cliff diving, amongst other dangerous pursuits, knowing nothing could touch her anymore. Stripping down, she poised and fell, cutting the water with her hands. It slid off her skin like the pain did.
      There was never any traffic this early in the morning, and so the three Bharadwaj’s found themselves driving their cars in a line, a row of ducks. Slowly, they sectioned off. Once more, Ravi was first, already on his way to his parents’ house to sort their belongings. Arjun followed, turning left into Ayaz’s, ready to eat the meat he had sworn off for three years alone in silence. Neesha did not make it through the whole length of her driveway. Turning, she steered into a street she had never been before, looking for unchartered territory, driving until she recognised nothing and couldn’t find her way home.
      Something shifted. Mina gasped for air, paddling desperately, feeling for the warm embrace of the water, wondering where all the salt went, why she was no longer buoyant. Up above, the clouds are gone, and the sky is clear. Through her spluttering and the crash of the waves and the wind, she heard a familiar laugh behind her. An old friend, now a young man, holding a new ring that looked familiar, too. AQ

Nate Ealy – The Unfortunate One

Nate Ealy
The Unfortunate One

Of all the dates Leah Hempfield had been on, none of them ended by walking out of the police station. Sure, when she’d gone on dates with Mike their car broke down, the movie skipped at the theater, and it’d rained on their picnic, but nothing like this.
      ‘Our string of bad luck continues,’ Leah said.
      She walked with her arms crossed careful not to step on any cracks. The night air made the hair on her arms stand up. It reminded her of the weather the night she graduated college two years ago, and the fearful dread of the unknown that followed. Instead of her early twenties cap and gown, tonight she wore a tight red dress with a high slit up her thigh. It was the perfect dinner tease, not suited for a late night walk through Pittsburgh.
      ‘You still look beautiful.’ Mike kissed her on the cheek.
      Leah placed her hand on her cheek and smiled. ‘You always say that after something goes wrong.’
      But that wasn’t true. Mike told her she was beautiful every time he saw her. Leah liked that about him. He treated her better than all the other guys in her past.
      ‘It’s just another adventure.’ Mike hit the walk button for the crosswalk even though there wasn’t any traffic.
      He turned and pulled Leah in close giving her another kiss, this time on the lips, and squeezed her butt.
      A car sped by and the passenger yelled WHORE out the window.
      Mike flipped them off, but they were too far gone for it to matter.
      ‘I can’t believe that,’ Mike said.
      ‘It’s just our luck.’ Leah grabbed his hand and crossed the street.
      They continued walking down the street until they got back to the restaurant. It wasn’t one that magazines would feature as to why you should visit Pittsburgh, but for locals, it was a good night out. They then grabbed the rest of their belongings that the kind officers wouldn’t let them take in the cruiser, and then left. The wait staff offered coupons for them to come back another time, but Leah refused.
      Mike walked Leah back to his car. It was still sitting in the parking garage racking up a bigger bill by the hour.
      ‘At least the old Ford’s still here. I’m glad it’s not towed or something,’ Mike said.
      ‘After everything that’s happened to us, I wouldn’t be surprised if it did,’ Leah said.
      Mike then opened the door for her and she got in. Not until she started riding with Mike had a man ever done that before for her. Leah didn’t even know she wanted that, but now she’d experienced it, she realized that she did. A few minutes later, and one long goodnight kiss, she was in her apartment.

###

      Leah walked in and threw her handbag on the couch before slumping down. Her chest almost fell out of her dress, but she didn’t care anymore. They only person who could see her now was her roommate Steph, and she had her own boobs to look at.
      ‘Steph! We need to talk,’ Leah shouted.
      Not even two seconds later her brown-haired roommate emerged from the kitchen, without pants, and eating a bowl of cereal.
      ‘Tell me everything!’ Steph said as she sat down beside Leah. The cereal in the bowl sloshed to the side but didn’t spill over. Steph muted the TV that had the hockey game on.
      Leah sighed. “You’ll never believe what happened this time.’
      ‘A bird shit on you?’ Steph said.
      ‘Do you see any on me? No. We were accused of being accessories to theft. Arrested and taken downtown like criminals.’
      Steph blinked a few times, and then it hit her.
      ‘Wow. That’s gotta be the top of the ladder for you,’ Steph said.
      ‘Don’t worry. The manager and security cameras cleared us. But I think Mike’s bad luck. I mean, something always goes wrong when I see him,’ Leah said.
      She then kicked her shoes off and watched them spin through the air. They smacked the floor across the apartment with a loud THUD. One landed perfectly upright, while the other fell onto its side.
      ‘You guys get all the fun stories.’ Steph downed the milk in her cereal bowl and got up. She went back to the kitchen and returned with her phone.
      ‘I think the bad luck is a sign,’ Leah said.
      ‘Oh what?’ Steph set her phone down on her lap.
      ‘That maybe Mike and I aren’t meant to be. We’re bad luck for each other,’ Leah said. She curled up on the couch.
      ‘Have you asked him about it? I bet he just enjoys everything. He probably tells all of his friends everything that happens when you two meet up,’ Steph said.
      ‘Maybe.’
      ‘Don’t be stubborn about it. You know he’s better than any other guy out there. I’d kill to have a guy like him.’ Steph said. She then got up and returned to the kitchen.
      Leah sat on the couch and looked at her phone. Maybe this bad luck stuff was just nonsense after all. Maybe.
      ‘But look. I can get you back on Tinder too or whatever app you want. There’s tons of dick out there to get on. I just don’t think there’s better than Mike for you.’ Steph came back from the kitchen with a glass of wine this time.
      But would those other guys want to see her? Would she be good enough for them? If the past was any indication of the future, Leah most certainly would not be. If she wasn’t good enough for Mike, the best guy she’d found thus far, she couldn’t be good enough for a swipe right. That’s why she was chronically single at age twenty-three.
      Leah shook her head. ‘No. I just want things to go right. I’m getting tired of it all.’
      ‘Don’t be tired of it. Things are going right.’
      ‘That’s not what I’m starting to think. These smaller things are warning flags for bigger things down the road,’ Leah said. She looked down at her own phone. The background was a smiling picture of them laughing on their third date a month ago. That was when the movie projector slipped and they had to sit in the theatre for an hour waiting for repairs. She knew that all of her friends from school had wedding pictures as their backgrounds.
      ‘I don’t want to break up with him, but he’s totally bad luck,’ Leah said.
      ‘Then keep being stubborn and text him and be over it. Don’t let your fear of being an old maid stop you from finding something great. I think you’re your worst enemy here though.’ Steph stared at her phone swiping left and right.
      But Leah couldn’t do that. She’d gone out too many times with Mike Aster to up and leave him so mercilessly. He’d given her a chance when so many other guys hadn’t. The strings keeping her attached to this man didn’t come from her head but from her heart.
      She genuinely liked him, and if given the time, could grow into love.
      Leah didn’t want to leave Mike. She wanted the leave the bad luck.
      ‘I think I’ll just talk to him about it,’ Leah said.
      ‘Would you want my grandma’s lucky rabbit foot? She gave it to me before I moved out of my parents’ house to keep me safe and I ended up with you as a roommate, but she had it when she met my grandfather, too. So I guess there’s a little bit of good juju in it. If you want I can let you use it the next time you see him,’ Steph said.
      Leah smiled. ‘I’d like that.’
      She got up from the couch and started to strip on her way to her bed. By the time she’d changed clothes, Leah had two Snapchats from Mike, one telling her she had a good night and one where he had no clothes on. Both made her smile.

###

Two days later on a sidewalk in Point State Park, Leah hugged Mike Aster. He scooped her up in his arms and swung her around like an Olympian throwing the hammer toss. He met her with a kiss at the end.
      ‘I’m so happy to see you,’ Mike whispered in her ear.
      Leah smiled and took his hand. They started to walk down the sidewalk passing by older Pittsburghers walking their dogs. The rivers were high and dirty with springtime muck just a few feet from the sidewalk, but the sunshine falling down was warm.
      Mike had on a simple outfit: t-shirt and shorts.
      Leah had on a white long sleeve shirt with khaki capris. In her pocket was Steph’s lucky rabbit’s foot.
      The park was green with the late April rains, and Leah loved the way the trees smelled. It was a nice break up from the urban concrete that lined the rest of the city.
      ‘So you said you wanted to chat a bit?’ Mike asked.
      ‘Yes,’ Leah added. ‘It has been a whole two days since we left the station together.’
      She was careful not to step on any cracks in the sidewalk but tried to keep Mike from noticing. He hadn’t said anything yet so she figured she was in the clear.
      ‘What’s up?’
      Leah took a deep breath. ‘I’ve been thinking.’
      ‘Now that’s a scary way to start a conversation.’ Mike locked eyes with her.
      ‘Well, I’ve just been thinking that every time I see you, something bad happens. It just feels like we’re bad luck.’ Leah said.
      ‘Nah. I think it’s been fun. I’ve never had a boring time with you. Bad luck doesn’t exist anyway.’ Mike smiled.
      ‘It does. Luck, good and bad, really does exist out there,’ Leah said.
      ‘C’mon, seriously?’
      ‘Yeah! Bad luck is a thing and we really have it.’ Leah said.
      Mike shook his head. ‘No, I don’t agree with you.’
      ‘How? It’s like the universe is telling us to stop seeing each other,’ Leah said.
      There. It was out. She could exhale.
      Mike carved his face into a thinking man’s scowl and looked away. ‘I have to admit that things usually do go wrong when it’s the two of us, but as for luck? That’s bullshit. Luck doesn’t exist like that. The universe isn’t in complete control here either. It’s you and me.’
      ‘Luck had been pretty good for me until you came along,’ Leah said.
      ‘Luck’s like a saying. It doesn’t really exist though. Like when people say “oh my god!” They’re not really calling out to god.’ Mike said. He then stopped and grabbed Leah’s other hand. ‘I think we make a good couple. I was hoping you wanted to see me today to make things official.’
      Leah felt a jolt inside her body. That was exactly what she wanted, but she wasn’t ready for the consequences of it. What more things could go wrong in her life? Would she potentially lose her job for this relationship? If she became Mike Aster’s girlfriend would their rent go up and she lose the apartment with Steph? It would all point her to the same thing: heartbreak.
      But what if she did become his girlfriend? Her mind saw infinite smiles, endless kisses, and passionate sex. The positive possibilities all pointed to one thing: love.
      Leah squirmed her hands out of Mike’s grip. ‘I think we should try a few more dates.’
      ‘A few more? Leah, we’ve been seeing each other multiple times for months now. I’m ready to go the next step.’ Mike said.
      I’m not ready for my car to get repossessed or my mother to have a heart attack. I don’t know what’s going to go wrong today because I saw you, but I can’t even imagine what’ll go wrong if I go further with you like that. I think we should just stay friends for now.’
      Leah crossed her arms. She had to let her thoughts out. She couldn’t risk all the bad luck in the world for a single lover. Even so, she could feel the heartstrings that connected her to Mike pulling tight, too tight.
      ‘Are you that scared of me?’ Mike asked. ‘Or just that crazy stubborn?’
      Leah had to let a young man on a bicycle go by before she could answer. The biker sped by in a neon flash.
      ‘I’m not scared of you, Mike. Maybe I am stubborn, but I do really like you. I just think that bad things happen when we’re together,’ Leah said.
      She leaned in to kiss him, but Mike turned his cheek. He then started to walk away.
      ‘Mike, please, say something,’ Leah asked. She wished now that she hadn’t let go of his hands.
      Mike kept walking down the sidewalk under the shade of the trees. Leah knew that if she let him go in a city as big as Pittsburgh, she’d never see him again.He’d never answer her texts or Snaps. So she grabbed the rabbit foot in her pocket tight for second, squeezing all the good juju out of it she could. Then she went up behind Mike and wrapped him in a big hug.
      She then heard a whisper, a faint, almost imagined whisper.
      I love you.
      Leah let go of Mike and waited for him to turn around. She didn’t say anything. She wasn’t sure of what she heard, but Mike didn’t say anything more. He only began walking.
      Right then a big, fat horsefly bit her neck. Leah slapped the bug and watched it fall to the sidewalk below. When she looked up, Mike Aster was gone and her heartstrings snapped. AQ

Camilla Holland – Two Tickets for the Resurrection

Camilla Holland
Two Tickets for the Resurrection

Her fingers sift through layers of tissue paper to free each crystal droplet, jewel and pendant. Frilled edges of glass scatter prisms of light across the room, bright reflections bounce off the multi-faceted, glinting diamonds. Even in the weak winter sunshine rainbow shapes waltz on her living room walls.
      Her brother Paul is travelling by train to visit. A trip to the portrait gallery and then some music will appeal to him, especially Mahler’s Second Symphony. A concert in the grandeur of the century-old, sandstone-built Usher Hall will evoke memories and nostalgia. She bought a pair of upper tier tickets in a frisson of extravagance when she was passing the box office a few weeks ago. An orchestra plus the massed vocal ranks of a choir, with a sprinkle of international soloists, will certainly indulge the senses and conjure up escapades of the nineteen-seventies teenagers Paul and Joyce.
      Joyce fondles the cold pieces of coruscating glass and hums the symphony’s slow movement to herself. Once mounted on the black iron frame the baubles will speak of dark matter, swirling galaxies and twinkling stars. They were both fascinated with the cosmos and had watched and dissected the television footage of Aldrin and Armstrong as they walked on the surface of the moon in 1969.
      Paul’s birthday is February the fourteenth, a romantic date that no-one would forget. She remembers Paul taking her to London on the train, a three-hour journey, when she was sixteen and he was celebrating his eighteenth birthday. He’d got tickets for the film ‘Gone with the Wind’ and she wept, it was so enjoyable.

*

Paul’s only daughter teaches in California. She doesn’t write to Joyce, not even a birthday card, but Joyce always sends one to California.
      Joyce and her husband had no children, but she feels the faint pang of two disappointing miscarriages. Now she is a widow and she has just celebrated her first Christmas alone.

*

Joyce prays that her big brother Paul approves of her impetuous Gothic chandelier. When she saw it in the antique shop she imagined it suspended from the elaborately-corniced ceiling in the living room of her nineteenth-century Edinburgh apartment.
      One Christmas Day she recalls that Paul ridiculed her traditional Christmas dinner of turkey and kilted sausages with Brussels sprouts and roast potatoes. In a meandering telephone conversation he had extolled the virtues of the nut roast and hummus they were cooking hundreds of miles away in Devon, iconoclast that he was. And perhaps still is.
      Joyce doesn’t want the chandelier to spoil his visit. But wait a minute.
      It’s my apartment, she thinks, the beds are comfortable, the view is pretty good for a European city—Edinburgh Castle tracing the skyline in a ribbon of gold at night, and her company will be spirited and sisterly. The Usher Hall concert will be a triumph. Excitement is building in her chest. Their shared love of Mahler, his Resurrection Symphony indeed, will reignite their sibling intimacy on his birthday.
      They were raised as Roman Catholics so the Gothic symbolism of her chandelier will be familiar. He served as an altar boy while Joyce, in the congregation, inhaled the incense, recited from her missal, and knelt for the Credo.
      The hard glass components tinkle and clank against one another as she sorts them according to size and follows the plan of where each will hang on the skeletal black structure. On the dining table she marshals the jewels into neat rows of soldiers, a kaleidoscope of brilliance impatient to be slotted into the dazzling overhead array.
      Joyce places a chair below the ceiling-mounted chandelier and steps up to attach the glimmering treasures one by one. She polishes with a lint cloth each crystal before she slips the thin wire into its assigned slot on the iron frame. The chandelier hangs right above the table where they will drink a champagne toast on Paul’s arrival. Prismatic beams will mosaic across their faces. Joyce smiles, anticipating Paul’s smile.
      Optimism swells and her fingers dance as she drops scintillating shards one by one into place.
      It’s nine years since her brother visited. He came for their mother’s funeral.
      Not a visit. No, it couldn’t be called that. He stayed less than twenty-four hours.
      Joyce has made eight trips to see him in the past fifteen years. She’s just counted them in her head.
      But he’s never come to visit her.
      Her stomach churns. She slots a rhomboid diamond into place. It glitters.
      His interest in his only sister is an illusion.
      Not one phone call.
      Fifteen years of rejection.
      How stupid I am.
      The chandelier sparkles through the tears as they seep from her eyes, refracting the radiant ranks.
      Dusk has fallen as she finishes her masterpiece. She steps down from the chair. It is ready. In the darkness she gropes her way to the light switch by the door.
      The moment has come. She breathes deeply and the switch illuminates the chandelier.
      She gasps. Her hand rushes to her mouth.
      A blaze of mottled colours fleck the white walls. She walks to the table, reaches up and nudges one droplet – it tinkles against its neighbour, sending a wave of rainbows dancing around the white walls. Iridescence flickers on the pinkness of her hands, flashes on the black window glass and reflects back.
      Her spirit lifts in the presence of such Gothic glory. Surely she is wrong? The parents who raised them were intelligent, compassionate and inculcated a sense of love, family and justice into both of their children.
      A bottle of good champagne chills in the fridge. Slices of French Brie and a pile of nutty oatcakes sit on her favourite silver tray. When she has collected Paul from the train station they will chink glasses, tuck into the little feast and reminisce.
      She selects two crystal glasses from the sideboard and places them on the silver tray. Joyce invokes her blessed mother’s soul to join them as they commune in her chapel of light.
      The phone rings.
      Her sister-in-law. ‘Paul’s gone down with the flu.’
      ‘Oh.’
      ‘He won’t be coming to visit.’ AQ

Juliana Johnson – The Lake

Juliana Johnson
The Lake

In the summers, you stay with your aunt, who lives in the middle of the woods somewhere near a lake. Most of the time, she would leave you alone, but this summer is different. She confronts you in the kitchen one morning, saying she heard you crying last night. You tell her you’re fine because if you tell her the truth you’ll cry again, and when your boyfriend left you he said you cry too much, so it feels so shameful to do it now, though you know it isn’t. Then again, some nights you cry hard enough you think your heart just might stop. So maybe he was right.
      You start going out to the lake after that, sitting on the edge of the dock. It’s better than crying inside anyway. Inside, the walls reverberates the sadness back to you. It clings onto you. It becomes the wallpaper and the blankets you sleep in. The grief becomes the air. Somehow, you think if you are outside, it will all go elsewhere. It could stop being yours to bear alone.
      You walk out to the lake one night, trying to learn how to let go of the past. You cry and the tears fall into the lake and the water ripples. This time, you will not sit. You want to swim.
      You walk to the edge of the dock and sit for a second before pushing yourself into the water. The initial crash is thunder and then nothing. There is no sound except the blood rushing in your ear. You sink for a second and then come back up the top, breaking the surface. The moon above you lights up the whole lake.
      You float on your back, the silver water holding you like he never could. The water doesn’t say it loves you only to say it never really meant it. The water doesn’t break you. It just keeps you afloat.
      You’re surprised it can. You have felt so heavy with grief lately.
      You read somewhere once that when you die, you go back to the earth. Your body rots and becomes nothing more than dirt.
      Instead, you like to think the dead become water. They become the vapour in the air, which becomes the rain in the clouds, which become the oceans and the rivers and the lakes. Maybe right now you’re floating in a pool of other people’s stories, and that’s why the lake can hold you and your story up so well. Maybe they’re listening to you. Maybe they think you’re silly for being so sad over some boy, or maybe they sympathize.
      You’re crying here, on your back on the lake surface, but he was wrong. You don’t cry too much. It’s just enough. The tears, filled with memories, run off your cheeks and become nothing more than lake water. He becomes nothing more than water. Meanwhile, you can hear your heart beating steady as you float. AQ

Gracjan Kraszewski – Footprints is a work of genius!

Gracjan Kraszewski
Footprints is a work of genius!

I nod, nod, nod, nod. My interior self, ‘Bob’, is just about off the knob relative to the plod and trod concerning all things metaphysics, mimesis, and sub-atomic machinations of the most muscular, deft diplomatic stripe.
      The doctor keeps scribbling. He does not look up once, not even when taking a break for a breath between the furious pen pressing.
      Footprints is a work of genius! I think, and hear myself internally say, in preamble to an immediately forthcoming discourse, if he allows it, concerning this very same topic. The guy put women’s shoes and boots on his hands and feet, dipped them into many buckets of various colors, and just plodded (ah, right, that’s why that word) around his studio until he was done and was ready to display it and ready to have someone bid six, maybe seven, figures plus sincere praise and pedantic sycophantism gratis.
       ‘Okay, but, doc, but, bro, dude but listen, okay? Okay if I speak on one more thing before we finish out here? Right. Good. Post modern art, bruh. I’m talking at the time like called mid-century, you see from all the French students in the streets ’68 plus Dubcek east of us plus MLK far to the west, that time, like ’68, like late ’60s where we just flushed about like a waterfall swirled in the historiographical revolutions toppling top-down analytics into bottom-up, bottoms up celebratory drinking parties for the common man, soon the common ‘person’ because this and that always eats its own, like look what then happened about all types of identities and identifiers decades later, right?, this time, ’68, where we say mid-century and we know 20th, where we say fin de siècle and we know 19th, so this time to my timeframe being framed as we speak, here, frames like those things that maybe even they can’t make all this shit look even passably painting-like, a frame of mind, nothing, it’s nothing because nothing itself means jack shit, we’re past the void here, post-nihilist, because when you can’t explain if the painting is upside down, or right-side up, or left, or right, or what color is that color there on the canvas, or that it is, what is, and really is that anything?; or, okay, but that’s not part ‘of it,’ okay…so this time, doc, feel me when I try and keep it on point and just to the facts. Modern art, five things of import: One, the first thing, is that you have be good at playing the ape game, the imitation game, and, because it’s fundamentally about subversion and inversion, literally in the latter inverting like 180 degrees ideas of good, beauty, form, transcendence, truth, meaning, logos, unto, like, bad, ugliness, scattershot shitstormtroopering, imminence, falsehood, absurdity, and, bro doc bro doc doc, cod, cape cod, doc, cape cod league bro, bruh-doc, dawg, and especially, most especially chaos. So that’s number one: Art used to mean something and that thing, those things, were both objective and objectively good so if we want to be effectively subversive—and that’s the whole fucking fuckcluck pointed point; to fight against, and ultimately destroy, try to destroy at least, die trying, die hard, die hard 2, die…you, you get it, to try and destroy all that is solid, sensible, sane and sacred—we need to effectively develop new ‘schools of art’ that say things we all know are shit are actually good and they’re the ‘new thing’, the new avant-garde whateverthefuckever who cares so long as people are effectively fooled by this ape-imitation to say, in effect, the old ways are out, the new way is here. Okay, so then #2 is to start backing up the trucks full of cashlootdimenickelstacksstcakedcoinage and just straight filthy, dirty, expletive-ridden suscio as fuck facil dinero and start dumping it all over this ‘new art’. It’s just insider trading in Oligarch finishing school. If all these art collectors get together and agree to buy endless piles of this shit pseudo-art then—because people worship money, am I telling you something new?—the prices go up, the buzz goes up, general interest climbs and peaks and keeps buzzing all the way unto what they’re really after: legitimacy. If all these rich people are paying like $20m a painting it must be good, right? I mean, to me it looks like shit but, but that guy just paid $20m so, well it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been wrong; silly me. Legitimacy. Legitimacy. Bruh-doc, Doctor Brother, legitimacy is what we absolutely need, so these they do say, kay? But to really seal the deal the money just won’t do. We need three and four. #3: get these pieces into the museums. How silly does silly me commoner feel when, already rebuked form his absolutely correct first impression that the urine-stained (by the artists’ own sample! The visionary character is found in an impregnable dedication to authenticity) detached toilet seat was, indeed, as valueless as it appeared/appears/will continue to appear to be, he sees said seat hanging in prime real estate within MOMA? And then, #4, something for the true holdouts, the hardest to get common sense critics for whom money and (all) integrity-(and honesty)-for-sale museums won’t bring across the divide, the chasm, that separates art from not-art. #4: Get some academic(s)—if you have to ask does this academic, forcement, forcement as in see: by necessity, have to have a PhD from Harvard or Yale and an undergrad degree from Brown or Berkeley and a current endowed chair at Dartmouth or Princeton? you’re really f***** beyond hopeless, brother; here, for this type of work, even Northwestern need not apply—to write impossibly dense, wordy, inscrutable articles, really as impossible to comprehend as the artwork they’re writing about in the first place, the subject matter (now that, finally, is art), and have it published in the most reputable, most scientifically screened and hyperbonk peer reviewed journals with one message: THIS IS ART AND IT IS GOOD AND YOU MUST LIKE IT AND APPROVE OR ELSE YOU’RE WRONG OR, WORSE OF ALL, A COUNTRY BUMPKIN-LIKE FOURTH RATE FAUX-INTELLECTUAL LIGHTWEIGHT MUCH TOO LIGHT IN THE HEAD TO UNDERSTAND, TO ‘GET’, REAL ART. And there you have it, my doc. I cannot, will not, but, again can not, I do not posses the requisite hairsplitting skills to stop the disco-dancing of all those angels on the pinhead to better, I mean more precisely, cannot any better explain this whole con game to you than that, than I just did, kid; ah, okay, but chu-wanna rid, me, wanna put a lid, on my arguments? Not so fast. A review? One: Perfect imitation game making what was once good bad, and what was once bad, ugly, abhorrent the new ‘good’; two: money to prove legitimacy; three: museums to prove legitimacy; four: a treasure trove of the best and brightest academics and critics proving legitimacy in legitimacy is thy name legitimate journals that only a fool would doubt are in fact legitimate. Five is just one: Step five is the con completed successfully; confirmed; the Z back to A completed loop, 5, Z, that’s all of us, the sheep publicly fleeced for their pleasure certainly not ours, we wearing the itchy wool sweaters of shit ass fake art without the slightest complaint, no, not even a peep, not even a murmur of discontent, rather, an approving and docile smile of passive submission.’ AQ