Kim Magowan │Fiction

Shoelaces

It was another thing that Robert found both annoying and amusing about his wife: she didn’t seem to mind looking silly, even ridiculous, in public. Here she was in Paris, wearing a brand new, absurdly expensive sweater which she had put on as soon as she had clipped its tag, but her feet were in nothing but socks. She had taken off her boots (in a café! In full view of snobby Parisians!), pulled out their old, frayed, but perfectly adequate laces, and asked the waiter to dispose of them—actually handed him the old shoelaces, which the waiter took with a grimace, as though they were a wad of chewed gum. The only thing remotely satisfying about this exchange was that the waiter’s prior impression of Becca had seemed far too positive. Sure, her French was excellent: she knew the word for scissors. Sure, his wife, even at forty-six, was extremely pretty. But sometimes Robert found being married to a woman strangers admired exhausting, and perhaps this is why he didn’t unilaterally mind (though he did to some degree mind) the actions Becca performed that also made her ridiculous, for instance this removal of boots in public.

Now Robert looked underneath the table. Curled at the base of its iron stem, he saw the shoelaces. Again they reminded him of a baby snake—something poisonous. Weren’t bright colors intended to communicate danger?

He bent down, grabbed the shoelaces. “Here they are.”

If Becca had smiled. If she had conveyed, in any trivial way, her gratitude that Robert had found the overpriced shoelaces, in the same dependable way he found (over and over again) her reading glasses. But Becca instead stretched out an imperious hand, as if Robert were the waiter, as if this were some play-in-reverse of that scene five minutes ago where she had handed the waiter the old shoelaces. Except imperfectly reversed, because when she handed over the old shoelaces, Becca had accompanied that cavalier gesture (which made the waiter grimace) with her signature dazzling smile (which made the waiter soften and smile back after all—Becca’s smile was a force difficult to resist).

“Give them to me,” she said.

“I wish you’d say ‘Please,’” Robert said.

Peyton Prater Stark │Nonfiction

A Virtual Reality Itinerary According to the Harrison-Wheeler Equation of State for Cold, Dead Matter

I started seriously thinking about black holes at the same time that I started writing poetry. This synchronicity is poetic, perhaps, but also, perhaps it’s not. This was also the time that I started drinking coffee, and cooking my own dinners, and working at a bakery that sold cookies until 3 a.m. This was the first time I went on a date with a boy in college, who I met in Black Holes class. And the first time I met a different boy, who I would later marry, who also took the Black Holes class, but with a different professor. All of us eating dorm cereal and drinking unlimited chocolate milk and riding our bikes thinking about the same thing: what is a black hole and what would happen if you fell into one?

How it would feel to fall into one is speculative, since 1) presumably, no one ever has and 2) anyone who has or does would/will be unable to communicate their experience to us, should they survive at all. How it would look to fall into a black hole depends, like most things, on perspective. It depends on who you ask.

It’s like this: You, the one falling into the hole, stretch into a long, slim thing. Assuming, of course, your continued ability to see despite the speed and the pressure and the terror of it. Around you, a sort of turning of space like time looping back to itself. A snake eating its tail. You see and feel your body stretch and if you survive this immense and elongating pain, you see a tumbling settle into a singular bright light.

But it’s also like this: You, the one watching a person fall into the hole, see only a blink of light as the person falling crosses over the event horizon, the boundary of a black hole beyond which there is no coming back. Bodies go in and do not come out. Yet, because, in our universe, matter is neither created nor destroyed, the information of a body can’t simply disappear. There has to be evidence that the body is gone. Thus, as you watch a person fall into the hole, you see a flash of light: a body exploding on the boundary of the unknown.

A body crossing over a boundary feels no particular jolt, but rather, an immense and excruciating stretch. And yet that same body is seen to explode in an instant, to explode upon crossing some line, some clearly defined point. The body is seen to be gone.

Laura Price Steele │Fiction

This Life of (Y)ours

My oldest brother Pete didn’t like going to our grandparents’ house. I think he preferred the tepid love our parents had for each other over the verbal brawling of Nana and Pa. Every Sunday began with Pete crying because he didn’t want to go. He cried quietly over breakfast and we kept a washcloth in the freezer so that he could lay it over his face during the car ride. For Pete, the only thing worse than spending the day at their house was to have Nana and Pa know that he’d been crying over it again. When we pulled into their driveway, Pete had us check his face to make sure it was back to normal and we always lied to him and told him that it was.

The fighting didn’t get to me like it got to Pete. There was something romantic about the way my grandparents fought, as if only two people who loved each other could stand to hate each other that much. I preferred the furious love of Nana and Pa to the transactional conversations of my own parents. It was often a relief to be in their household, though sometimes Nana V screamed so loud we couldn’t hear the TV.

Once when we were over, she broke all ten of the dinner plates. We’d never seen anything like it. Until then they’d only ever yelled at each other. I’d had the thought before that maybe after we left, the space closed between them. Though I could never imagine either one of them throwing a punch exactly, I could picture Nana smacking Pa with a serving spoon or Pa shouldering Nan out of his way.

I remember it was raining. That house smelled rotten when it rained, like the water had bled into somewhere soft and dry. Nana V was doing dishes; she never seemed to be finished with the domestic tasks that kept her from sitting down to watch TV with us. Already, she had yelled twice for Pa to turn it down. “You’re going to blow out their eardrums,” she said. She liked to put us in the middle of things.

Arya Samuelson │Nonfiction

Sanctum

We sit. We stand. We sit. We stand.

The synagogue trembles with darkness and fire.

I am five years old. My butt is sore and I’m bored. I dig my hands underneath my dress and trace fingers along my flesh where my underwear band presses marks. Reading the language of my body, though I don’t realize it.

Everyone is singing now—the songs sound like grape juice, go down smooth, yet a darkness. Some man is standing at the front, pointing at an enormous scroll. We stand. The book is too heavy in my hands, want to fling my arms loose. My father points his finger to strange markings, flips my pages. A few weeks ago, he taught me to read Go Dog Go.

Sit down, stand up, sit down, stand up.

I don’t want to stand when I am told to stand. I don’t want to sit down. My thighs press against the seat, resisting. My dad, or maybe my stepmother, grabs my hand and hoists me to standing on both feet. Something electric pinches my spine. I don’t want to do anything they tell me I have to do. I don’t want to keep moving and leaving and losing. I go back and forth between my mom’s house, my dad’s house, my mom’s house, my dad’s house. There is no home. I want to go—to my mother, to her body, to her voice like milk, but my dad and stepmom tell me not to trust her. Nobody can be trusted. Nobody can be loved all the way. My hand burns. I can’t be loved all the way. I wriggle my hand free and sink back down. Close my eyes and grip the edges of my seat.

Brett Puryear │Fiction

Old Soul Dog

New Dog soared slung-bellied over the split-rail fence and beat hell out of the wind, and dove off the dock with a dead rabbit in his or her––no, quick! Study the undercarriage, his––mouth, this occurring while we gassed up that old trashed jet ski borrowed from Mr. Hurley. Iridescent gasoline on the water spread into a birthmark shape and forked around the hull. New Dog swam into the color-changing splatter like some special heavenly dog and ejected the dead rabbit out its mouth. Good dog.

Fetch that bunny out the water, Carp told me.

My friend Carp got the nickname from his mom ‘cause he was the gruesomest baby she’d ever seen, come out of her own inner chamber, but never did get better looking; a red birthmark splashed Carp’s back sized like all of Eurasia, but his mom couldn’t admit the mark had been fired upon his flesh via blood of her own––Nothing ugly came from my blood! she’d cry. That’s his shit-ass daddy!––because she’d been a pageant girl in McMinn County and once even dated the great handsome quarterback Rory Brock in high school. She hurled out this historical detail at every social event at some point so as to let everybody and their sisters and babies know she’d once been a debutante. What happened?

Julie Poole │Nonfiction

No Sweat

Soon, I understood why Gloria slept cocooned. Every few hours, a night staff would walk in and shine a flashlight on me, then pass over Gloria’s sleeping lump. “Bed checks,” they were called, meant to verify that you weren’t dead. Although I imagined something much more sinister, that they wanted to confirm you were so that an all-night necrophilia fest could ensue.

Rather quickly, I learned to distinguish between the various light-shiners. One guy was built like a husky unfit bouncer at an underage club. He was a dick. He wore a swishy-sounding tracksuit and seemed to relish playing cop. This was evident by the way he raised the light over his right shoulder to aim the beam into my eyes like a blinding stream of piss. All I could do was blink, let the brightness punish me until the shadowy face behind the light’s wide lasso had had enough. I sat up in bed listening to Gloria snore and to the other insomniacs shuffle down the hall in their hospital-issued flip-flops. A different light-shiner entered our room past midnight, a short skinny guy. He was more thoughtful, keeping a good distance while he pointed the flashlight at the foot of my bed and traveled it up slowly till the beam reached my body, sitting atop my neatly tucked bedcovers in lotus pose. I grinned and waved, looking as if my head might do a 180-degree turn, while a disembodied voice said, “Still not sleepy, motherfucker.”

I’m not sure how many days I was sleepless, but it was long enough to watch the night staff’s teeth grow into fangs and my own face in the mirror morph into a lemur. The cycle was clear: Each night that I went without sleep, the more paranoid I became; and the more paranoid I became, the more impossible it was to sleep. I could picture cortisol, pulsing red, light up in my brainstem like inflammation in a muscle rub commercial.