Fear of Lovebirds

The Basement Door

To Mother, her pets were “Velcro birds” sticking to her fingers and shoulders, fully bonded to her, never wanting to let go whenever she allowed them out of their cages.

Les inséparables, she whispered to me. Under the right conditions, they could bond to humans as well as they bonded to each other. Mother had a talent for socializing her masked and peach-faced lovebirds, pets so colorful and so tame they could be sold for top dollar.

“For ten to fifteen years of companionship,” she used to say to her buyers, “it’s a cheap price.”

The man who kidnapped her in her childhood, wanting ten years of companionship, kept her in his basement until she became a woman, then set her free. He was a tiny, wiry man who wore short-sleeved shirts to reveal my mother’s name, Beth, tattooed on his left bicep. 

Once she was no longer a child, he wanted nothing to do with her. By then, she had been caged so long, she didn’t remember how to be free. She only wanted to go back into the cage, but he evicted her from the basement, banishing her into the world he had stolen her from when she was a little child. 

Freed, she still wanted to sleep in a basement or a coop. She could only sleep in a room with no windows. Or, that’s what my father told me when I asked him why my mother was the way my mother was. My father understood her history. He was a retired police officer who had worked her case since she first went missing and could never forget her, even after all his years of searching ended when an elderly farmer discovered my mother attempting to crawl into her chicken coop. 

My father couldn’t believe it until he saw my mother’s face washed clean of dirt and feathers. Only nineteen, she could speak but didn’t like to talk. She was pregnant and couldn’t stand to be alone or in open spaces. She needed to be in a basement full of bird cages to feel comfortable. Because no one else would be responsible for her, my father filled his basement with cages so she could sleep.

Eventually, as her family of lovebirds grew, my mother had less time for me, even less for my father. She devoted hours to her birds, moving them in and out of cages, allowing her favorites to snuggle against her cheek and toy with her chandelier earrings. In the morning, she carried the cages to a room with windows, and the birds dove into the caged light.

When I was a teenager, I did the math and always regretted doing the math, thinking about who my biological father really was and why in her last days she rarely left the basement.

“Are you really my father?” I said to the man I had been told was my father.

“I don’t know why they call them a lovebird,” he said to me. “They’re just an affectionate parrot.”

My father—or the man I had been told was my father, the man who raised me, the retired police officer—began to sleep alone in the little guest room above the basement stairs. Soon, my mother rarely visited the rest of the house, confining herself to the makeshift aviary where she ate and slept, no longer bothering to put the birds back into their cages since the entire basement had been transformed into a cage. The birds cried shrilly whenever she left the basement, and my father didn’t seem to care for the sound.

I suspect my father was secretly afraid of the lovebirds. He could never admit to his phobia and seemed ashamed of the way Mother’s pets made him cringe. Helpless in the presence of the birds she adored, he leapt when she opened the basement door. 

Freedom

Because I couldn’t fly like Mother’s birds, I wanted to swim.

I almost drowned after watching the movies Mother’s kidnapper made of her.

When I grew older, decades after her death, I began to wonder why. I realized it was strange that after having been kidnapped as a girl and held in a basement against her will, she married a man who looked so much like her kidnapper and moved into his basement. 

It was almost as if she never knew how to be free.

Mother’s soul escaped the cage of her body when I was still a young girl. A petite woman who adored large earrings as well as lovebirds, Mother died too soon, leaving me with questions about her death as well as memories of the birds she fed by hand.

Turning Colors

In the movies, her skin changes colors in dark light.

In the movies, a girl with my eyes does what the man says.

In the movies, my mother doesn’t look like my mother. She is too young. She looks like me.

I have the man’s silly grin.

My father, discovering me watching the movies in the attic, kept saying, “What did you see? What do you think you’ve seen?”

His eyes are why I ran to the neighbor’s pool to fly away through the night-dark water as if it were sky.

Our neighbor, the doctor, found me drowning in the kidney-shaped pool in his backyard and carried my body to Mother by wading into chlorinated water. She jumped into the pool, her yellow housecoat soaked and swelling. The doctor revived me, breathing into me and tapping on my chest with his fingers, cold and wet from the pool. By the time he smacked me, Mother was shivering, attempting to swim in her ruined housecoat. I started to breathe, again, screaming as the doctor handed me to Mother and then hoisted us out of his pool. Immediately after sending us away, he dove back into the water, never even allowing Mother to thank him. 

Her exquisite dark eyes wide and unblinking, Mother told me to remember the blueness of my flesh on a long-ago afternoon. “Turning colors,” Mother used to say. “Do you know what that means?” 

“No.”

“Another girl, one much older than you—a teenager—drowned in that pool a year before you.” Mother whispered, “She died there.”

“Why,” I whispered.

“Your soul tried to escape,” Mother used to tell me. “Your body was too quick and caught it just in time. Be grateful your soul is caged like my lovebirds.”

It was a strange idea, to be both caged and grateful, an idea that I came to embrace from a very young age. 

Loving a Dead Girl

Some nights Father left without warning. In the kitchen, Mother held an egg to the lamplight—candling, searching for the shadow chick developing inside the shell. Whenever I caught her candling, a part of me longed to break free, to go to where I was forbidden. The teenage girl who drowned in the doctor’s pool was a shadow silhouette gliding through my dreams. I was in love with the idea of the dead girl. Thoughts of the girl drowning became inseparable from my hopes and fears about the future. I kept trying to escape our house, our yard, and our family to run away past the trees to the doctor’s pool. 

By now, Mother was too busy hand-feeding the baby lovebirds that had been rejected by the hen, too busy to keep track of me as she disinfected the syringes, heated the formula, tested the temperature, and then lowered the syringe to the fragile beak of the chick resting in her steady hand. Because Mother could no longer depend on Father or watch me herself, she hired a babysitter named Martha, a bold teenage girl with intense watery eyes and distracting red streaks in her blue-black hair. 

“Please don’t,” I said the first time Martha tried to hold me. This angered her, as I had hoped.

The week before Mother died, Mother said she would have to fire Martha, and I was glad because I was beginning to dream the lovebirds escaping.

Sky Gazer

Sometimes a cloud moving over the moon seemed to take up the entire sky, so Martha and I thought the cloud was the sky. She became frightened, hiding with me in ditches or beneath trees. She said we could disappear. I believed her. Her lies were shifting clouds. 

“That’s the way words are,” Martha whispered. “Say what happened again and again, so that the truth is forgotten, and the details of what really happened seem strange.” 

“What is happening?” I was almost afraid to ask. She might lie. She might tell the truth.

“Your mother thinks I’m after your father. And maybe I am, but just for the hell of it?” She looked at me and had to know I saw the way he left the door to his room open in the night. “You’ll probably think it yourself,” she whispered. “You have to remember, no matter what happens, it was never about you.”

Glue

When the doctor’s pool had to be filled with dirt and leaves, I became a pack rat, saving stamps in a shoebox under my bed. Occasionally, I gave the stamps to Martha, as if they were money she could use to buy the things she wanted. 

In the days after Mother died, I kept finding the stamps all over the house—hidden in the closets, in dresser drawers, behind posters on the walls, inside pillows, beside the sewing machine, underneath the television, and on top of the radio. 

In her last days, Mother spent so many hours caring for her lovebirds that she was out of sorts after selling off her newly weaned brood. In the evenings and mornings, just before sleeping or after wakening, she kept candling eggs, her face illuminated by the promise of new life.

“No, Avie. No,” Mother used to say, gathering the stamps off the floor, exasperated as they stuck to her fingers. “This is a fire hazard. Throw this trash away!”

“But they’re Martha’s. I gave them to her,” I said.

“Trash,” Mother whispered, throwing stamps into the wastebasket.

I put my face to Mother’s hands. Her skin smelled sticky, minty, sweet like the glue the stamps left behind. 

The Playhouse

My family’s home was a big wooden house with an identical miniature house, a playhouse, in the backyard. After Mother’s funeral, Father wouldn’t look at me anymore, wouldn’t talk to me. Loading up the cages covered in dark blankets, he drove away in his pickup and was gone for weeks at a time, supposedly delivering lovebirds to a breeder in Florida, a woman who would take the remaining birds and their cages while offering a handsome price for Mother’s precise notes on taming, feeding, and weaning.

Alone with Martha when Father went on his journeys, I used to tell Martha stories about Mother. Martha used a knife in the playhouse to make her drawings on my arms while I spoke. My body was her canvas. Sometimes I fainted while she drew the things I described. She covered me with designs until there was no skin left untouched except for the places clothing couldn’t hide. 

Designs, I used to love that word! I still do. Designs, designs! Her designs! 

The first time I ever heard the word I was standing in the bathroom near the vanity mirror and admiring Mother’s perfume bottles. The clear or yellow-tinged liquid misted out of blue and violet glass. While examining the lattice edges of the metal tray, I ran my fingers over the flowers and vines that were flowing into each other in a linked pattern that had no beginning or end. 

“What is this?” I asked Martha.

“What?” she asked.

“This. What is it called?”

“That’s a design, Avie.”

“What’s a design?”

“A decoration or a drawing. A big picture made up of a lot of little pictures that keep repeating.”

“Like these?” I wanted to ask, opening my shirt and unwinding the gauze that Martha had wound so snugly against my skin. We never spoke of Martha’s designs or even alluded to the drawings on my body.

The perfume stung the cuts on my skin, so I sprayed it on my hair until it was practically dripping from my forehead. I was the sweetest smelling girl in town. When the wind blew, people could smell me from half a block away. They knew I was coming long before I was there. The perfume was like those little bells that cats wear on their collars, some sort of warning and location device alerting those who were near me. 

Hero

My father was afraid to be alone with me because of what I might say. I could see through lies. I understood Martha’s words in ways he sometimes didn’t.

“There’s still at least one lovebird somewhere in the house,” I used to say to see him squirm. “At night, I hear it flying, calling through the vents.”

I had hidden one lovebird in my closet, Mother’s favorite, an old masked-face named Hero. Secretly, I kept Hero hidden in the house for years and fed him lettuce and fruit stolen from the kitchen as well as some food pellets I had tucked away.

I was seventeen when Aunt Sarah, who became my legal guardian, called the police after discovering Martha’s drawings on my body, but there was nothing the police could do but look for Father and Martha, who left in the night, abandoning me. 

I cradled Hero. In caring for him, I honored Mother. Remembering her small basement world, I imagined the way it kept getting smaller. Her world could never be small enough to make her feel safe. 

The world is too large and full of too many possibilities for people like Martha and Father to stay in one place for long. There is always someone else to meet, someplace else to see. There is always there, which is so much better than here. There is a way and away—another man and another woman, another mother and another father, another motel, another house, another city, another town, another life, another story, another you, and another me. 

After Mother’s funeral, I kept a tiny photograph of Hero on a locket on the silver chain around my neck. On several occasions, I caught Father staring at the locket when he wouldn’t look at my eyes. 

The Smoker

Now at nineteen, I’m still trapped inside this scarred body. Ever since I got my license and saved up enough money to buy a car, I’ve been driving around with my lovebird Hero while showing strangers photographs of Martha and Father.

After months of searching and dead-ends, I finally locate my father at a garage near a motel less than ten miles from the house where my mother died. My father looks old now, so much older than I remembered. 

Father seems frustrated, crouching on his hands and knees beside the broken Chevy. His long white hair is soaked, and his frayed jeans are wet with oil and rain. Assuming he doesn’t recognize me, I try to pass by without notice. He gazes up at me, his hammer held in mid-air.

“Do you have any cigarettes?” he asks, his face smeared with mud.

“Yes,” I say, not surprised by the request.

After all, he is a smoker, and cigarettes are swapped among strangers for conversation or companionship or various information. Even though I don’t smoke, I’ve carried almost every brand at one time or another and given them all away, one cigarette at a time while asking strangers if they have seen anyone like Martha or Father in their town. Marlboro Menthols, Camel Lights, Kools, Pall Malls, American Spirits, Lucky Strikes, Winstons, Dunhill Golds—I remember the months of searching by what brands of cigarettes I used to carry in my purse. 

I take my pack of Lucky Strikes from my purse and shake out a single cigarette, trying to shield it from the rain.

“Do you know of any place around here where I might purchase lovebirds?” I ask.

He smiles warily, gestures toward my oversized purse. “Lovebirds?” he asks.

As I remove my silver lighter with Beth etched on the side, Father whispers, shaking his hammer close to my face, “Give me all the cigarettes you’ve got. I’ll need that lighter, too.”

“Okay,” I whisper, shivering as I once again recall how little I know about him, how limited my understanding of him has always been. 

“What do you want with lovebirds?” he asks after lighting his cigarette and tucking the lighter into his pocket.

“What’s it to you?”

Glaring, he catches my hand and rubs something that feels like glass and mud against me, between our skins, an object placed on the hearts of our palms. I stuff whatever it is into my purse and stumble to the other side of the motel.

Motel Balconies

Martha looks down at the garage from one of the motel balconies, but she doesn’t see me watching her. She waves to my father, and he nods to her. When she turns away from the streetlight, her face disappears into shadow. The shadow makes her appealing to me. Her features fade into darkness. Without a face, she could be anyone. I have a sudden urge to go to her. Because I cannot see her eyes, it never occurs to me that she might not want to see me.

On the balcony stairs, I fall at Martha’s high heels. Instead of reaching down to help me, she holds her hands straight out in front of her, palms towards the streetlight. Splaying her fingers, she turns her hands slowly.

Her fingernails are extremely long, chipped and curling under, painted with a thick glossy topcoat with pale green glitter trapped inside. Underneath her nails, near the tips of her fingers, bright white lines are drawn with an ivory makeup pencil. It’s the oddest French manicure I have ever seen. In the white space, diamonds, ovals, and stars have been scraped as if etched with a scalpel or an X-Acto knife. 

The tip of each fingernail is pierced a little off center. Some of the holes are larger with rougher edges than others, as if the holes had been made with an ice pick. The holes have begun to crack, down the center to her cuticles.  

Through each hole, a tiny, silver jeweled charm is strung. The jewels are very small, amber and ice blue. The charms are shaped like sea creatures—octopus, whale, dolphin, seahorse, starfish, mermaid, shark, eel, turtle, and clown fish. They jangle like cattle bells in the distance. The jewels glint in the window light. Hair-thin, green curling ribbons are stranded through each of the holes, along with the charm catches, tangling her fingers.

“Can I touch your hands?” I ask.

“Don’t,” she says as I try to stand. 

I smile up at her while stumbling through the open door that leads to her room where the walls are chipped and painted a dull golden ivory clashing with bright blue-green paintings of the sea.

“Get out,” Martha says in monotone.

Ignoring her, I empty my purse onto her bed to see what Father gave me. The thing itself doesn’t explain anything. It’s just a small piece of soft blue clay full of red-glass shards.

“Where did you get that?” Martha asks, as if she has seen something like it before. “Who gave it to you?”

“My father,” I whisper, holding the blue clay to the lamp so the red glass turns to embers in the yellow light.

I lean closer to her face, almost too close, and I realize how beautiful and confusing her face is. Like an old-fashioned jigsaw puzzle of a woman’s face that has been taken apart too many times, her features are worn down so that the edges don’t quite fit together the right way, leaving gaps on the seams. 

“Who is he?” I ask because I am certain that she knows my father better than I do.

“Just an old man. He could be any old man.”

“Why did he give me this?”

“Did it look like this when he gave it to you?”

“Why?”

Touching my chin with a fingernail, she tries to turn my face back toward hers. There’s a dark ridge under her nose that is too deep and shadows on her face that don’t make sense—shadows that aren’t supposed to be there, cast by protrusions under her skin. Her cheekbones are too high, moon-shaped, one slightly lower than the other. Her lips are swollen, sensual yet unnatural, so that they move in delayed response, as if she were trying to shape the words just after she speaks them. Hair-thin scars like starbursts are hidden just under her earlobes. When she blinks, her eyes make a slight popping sound, but the lids don’t close all the way.

“You have to remember,” she whispers.  “Try.”

“It looks a little twisted.” I lie to her while studying the clay. “Look. You can almost make out its eyes. Here.”

“It’s an insect or a bird?” She says, “Can I have it? You don’t want it anyway. It cut your hand, and it’s broken. Right?”

“Sure.” I’m not sure. I don’t know why she would want it. “Only I don’t feel right giving it away.”

“It’s ugly, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, I guess so. But just because it’s ugly doesn’t mean I don’t want it.”

I whisper Mother’s name into her ear: Beth.

“Go away,” Martha says, holding the clay to the light as if it’s a piece of jewelry. Then, as I back away from her, she says, “Wait! Don’t you see? This is supposed to be a lovebird.” 

No matter how long I stare, it’s just soft blue clay hiding jagged shards.

“A mingling of grasshopper and swan, a thing of insect and bird, shore and meadow, beautiful yet common . . . sky-bound yet earth-bound, malleable yet sharp,” she says. “I want to know if you’re who I think you are.”

“What happened to you?” I ask.

“Avie?”

She tugs at my shirt to examine the old scars, then removes her clothes, showing me her story scars for the first time. Studying her body, skin so rough and patchy and shiny pink and mauve and gray in its uneven tone, I realize we are the same.

She puts her fingers into my shirt, tracing my story scars with her fingernails, delicately following the designs. 

“Why?” I ask.

Her voice is low, soft, trailing away. I was you, I think she says. A long, long time ago. Her fingernails work fast over my chest and back and arms, making me shiver. 

“Why?” I ask, again.

Helping me remove the rest of my clothes, she whispers, “It tells a story.”

Carved

The story carved into me touches what she wasn’t supposed to touch: reasons Mother left this world with lost birds, a drowned girl, and Father holding Martha in the night. After the funeral, Martha borrowed the knife from my father, and she and I began hiding in the playhouse, holding secret meetings while he worked at the garage. 

Martha created openings—doors and windows, cups and bowls—for my blood to flow through, blood used to paint the trees and the giant flowers and stars Mother showed me in dreams. The rainbow perch Father caught in the lake, the chicken hawk and the sparrow hawk, the ducks and the dogs, the ants and the crickets and the tree frogs were carved into my body along with the lost birds. 

Martha wrapped me in tissues and paper and rags and white cloth, so tight, again and again, so the blood wouldn’t show. She began cleaning everything with bleach—my clothes and the floors of the little house and the big house. 

Every night before I went to sleep, she sat on my bed and whispered to me, so sweetly, that I wouldn’t tell anyone what she did, that I would quit reminding her of the way Mother cried in the movies clutching feathers in her trembling hands the same way that Father would later gather petals of the damp roses that were strewn across her grave.

“Why?” I asked her.

“You.”

Images scabbed over, darkened then lightened, building up mysterious textures over the years as my skin grew with me, stretching over my bones.

The textures grew and grew into one large drawing from my collarbone to my chest and arms, my back and my hips, my feet and legs—even the spaces behind my knees, in between my toes, under my arms. Then there was nothing left to scar, no skin left untouched besides my neck, my buttocks, my face and hands, which the knife would never touch. Martha told me as much. She promised me that.

“Can I touch your arms?” Martha asks.

I stare at our reflection in the dresser mirror. She runs her fingernails all over me. A blind woman could read me like Braille. Behind the television, she holds me close to her chest the way she did when I was a little girl, cigarette smoke drifting through our hair. 

“It must have been really painful for you.”

“Remember?”

“Why?”

“What was my mother’s name?”

She motions for me to come closer and lights a cigarette. Her hands are shaking.

Beth

“This is your daughter,” Martha whispers when Father finds us in the motel room. He begins to laugh as if we’re joking, holding the hammer in one hand and the knife in the other. I reach for my shirt on the floor. He spits into his hands then uses the spit to clean off dirt crusted on his knife. Reaching under his sleeves, I caress his arms, the scars that have erased the tattoos of Mother’s name. Beth, I whisper. Beth.

“Hold it right there,” he says. “Lay flat on your stomach.  Don’t move.”

He drops the knife to the carpet and puts the hammer down on top of the television. I fall on the bed and close my eyes. He rubs something dry and rough and cold against my arms and shoulders, all over my body. When I open my eyes, I see it’s just a big stick of charcoal.

“You missed a spot,” Martha says to him as she halfway sits up on the bed, watching him with her elbows resting on the pillow and her face in her hands. “Make sure you get it all.”

After he covers the back of me with charcoal, he says, “Now, roll over. Slowly.” 

I turn over, no longer afraid of him. His eyes are kind, the irises greenish-brown, flecked with blue and gold. They are the eyes of the man in the movies with Mother when she was a girl but also the eyes of the doctor who saved me long ago—or rather, the eyes I imagined the doctor had, as I never remember seeing his face. 

Father holds me higher above the bed, and I feel my soul flutter in the cage of my body, a prisoner dancing at the chance to be set free.

Martha smiles. Fluttering before skipping beats, my heart stops and then starts. Stops and starts. Avie, I think she whispers, I drown, waiting for you to swim with me.

His Large Arms

Perhaps Father doesn’t know what she’s saying. I’m hyperventilating. He lifts me higher and higher, cradling me in his large arms. Then he smiles at me, gesturing back toward the bed with his chin. 

When I turn away from him, Martha is no longer smiling but looking down at the space where I have lain. Father holds me tight. Gazing into Martha’s mercurial eyes, I wonder if we really are inseparables. 

Father releases me.

The distinct shapes between my raised scars, Martha’s drawings, reveal a silhouette of lovebirds on the charcoal-blackened sheets.

---

Author’s Note: “Fear of Lovebirds” was published online in a digital journal that seemed to disappear without warning over a decade ago. Its name has been scrubbed from the internet and my mind. It is truly a ghost zombie story ripe for resurrection. 

Sketches

An angler delivering fish
into glorious day
draws them down listlessly;
his cigarette smoke fading over yellow irises
bending into a mist.

---

A tarmac raker straightens from his work
to lean into a breeze and pick out blessings:
atavistic phantoms like snow unseen
over a backwater;
a world away beyond the cones, the heat,
the endless bullying of engines . . .

---

May flower falling to a dirty stream
stirs the bones of an idea:
a note in the mythology
of someone looking on,
someone seemingly forgotten.

---

Author’s Note: The poems were first published in a now defunct poetry magazine/anthology called Decanto in 2012.

Actor: A Flash Fiction by S.S. Mandani

The snake made its appearance soon after the usual pool maintenance checkup. An orange band choked its neck—printed it dangerous. A line of black ink, puddled with scales, its stomach arched above the water, limp. Seemingly dead. An amphibious thespian, the kind that eats the labeled yogurt in the fridge at work, only to act stumped when questioned. Myths speak of this serpent. The bad omen type. The family, sheltering itself, resurfaced later that night. LED water light on, they found the silhouette squirming, expecting some kind of standing O. A Technicolor spectrum of blue ripples, they let it perform through the night, witnessing its climax. No clapping, no. Their teal-mirror eyes were applause enough.

---

Author's Note: "Actor" was my first publication almost a decade ago at TheEEEL from tNY Press (formerly theNewerYork). This was of course a big deal for me. While it was a small piece, having my writing accepted for publication and paired with custom art was incredibly validating. I had finally felt one notch closer to feeling like I was a writer.

Summer Child: An Essay by Lisa Renee

Kathe and I are Olympic swimmers, passing the summer days in her tiny blue above-ground pool. We score each other (9.7!, 8.9!, 10!!) after magnificent flips and dives and she almost always wins because she’s older and a little bit mean. We are absolutely convinced of our superior skills. We are quite possibly the best at everything.

Kathe is my neighbor; when you’re a child, the most important quality in a summer friend is proximity. She’s a little older, she has a pool, and her father takes us to the 7–Eleven for Coke Slurpees when the afternoon gets so hot that we begin to melt and complain. On Tuesday evenings, her parents take us to Rustler Steak House and I get a rib-eye, well-done because of the crusty black char that we now know causes death. She’s my very best friend, until school swallows and separates us in the fall.

We spend the summer almost exclusively at her house because she’s sort of an only child and I’m the oldest of four. Her house is bigger, quieter, and cooler, in both temperature and amenities. She has access to endless soda, the best of 70’s junk food, and a servile mother. She also has a basement where her much older brother’s record collection awaits with bean bag chairs and a vaguely dangerous, psychedelic vibe. It is there I learn about the Beatles and Ringo is my crush, to my enduring quiet shame. We listen to “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” on a near endless loop and I still wonder what that did to me.

Upstairs, we playact Cher — Half-Breed Cher, not Sonny and Cher Cher — and I always have to be Cher’s little sister because I’m younger. I ask every time if I can be Cher and the answer is always no. Kathe tries to convince me that this little sister is cool, maybe even cooler than Half-Breed Cher, but I never buy it. We dress in a child’s found version of the befeathered diva and parade down stairs and out the front door to stand on two tree stumps and sing made-up songs in our best full-throated approximation of the half-breed amazon.

We walk into town carrying a small bag of dog shit for the veterinarian (“stool samples,” my mother says, and she has somehow convinced me this is normal). After dropping off the parcel, we head to the drug store where we pool our change and purchase one package of fake nails. Later, we lie in the lush grass, each of us admiring one elegant long-nailed hand. I feel very beautiful and womanly with these nails and I brush them on my cheeks and drag them through my hair, gently.

We sit on fence rails under the mulberry trees and pick the ripe fruit, stuffing our mouths, staining every exposed bit of ourselves and all of our clothing. My mother will yell at me later about my purple feet and ruined shorts. We sit on the fat pony in the field and chatter about nothing and everything. The pony is so warm and alive and I love the way it smells. Sometimes it kicks, shrugging both of us off in one swift gesture, one of us flying over the pony’s head, the other over the tail. We bruise but we laugh in our shock and surprise, infused with the power that comes with cheating death.

We cross the lilac-choked gardens, where we half-heartedly pretend to be brides, to visit Kathe’s ancient grandmother. She has great bowls of hard lemon candies in her living room and she leans imperiously in her chair to fart. Our mad glee is barely contained. We sit in the barn loft and wonder when we’ll die.

We play Monopoly for hours when it rains. One game lasts for days in an effort to break the Guinness World Record. Eventually, we tire of the challenge and spend hours scouring last year’s thick Sears catalogue, building our Christmas lists, fantasizing about all the things that will make us happy and beautiful and popular.

We make butter, mustard and sugar sandwiches and marvel at our culinary genius. We eat baloney and neon cheese and bags of snacks that are vaguely like packing material and we drink gallons of soda.

In the upstairs bathroom, her father keeps a stack of Playboy magazines by the toilet, right there in the open. I make excuses to go to the bathroom sometimes because it’s the most incredible, scandalous thing I’ve ever seen and I can’t believe I can just sit there and look. I feel fevered and weird about it, a thing like thrilling shame, and I snap the magazines shut and force my confused self back downstairs for the next game, afraid that my absence is suspicious.

I cut my finger on a corn stalk in the back field and, while cleaning it in Kathe’s bathroom, I look at the white cream mixing with the red blood and I faint at the vision of pink, smashing my head on the washing machine. Later, in our profound boredom, we sprawl on the kitchen floor with knitting needles, scraping the dirt out of the swirling designs in the linoleum. This is a mesmerizing and oddly satisfying endeavor. 

All summer, I run the yard back and forth between her house and mine, my mood dependent on the hour and the direction. Off to Kathe’s in the morning, eager for a summer day of purple feet and ponies, swimming and Slurpees, dreamy Ringo and furtive glances at impossible naked ladies. Silver medals, chasing records, catalog shopping and forbidden food. Home in the evening, anxious antennae alert to snakes in the yard, a tangle of little people, and the tepid drama of my own house with its buried thread of menace. The low waning days of summer.

---

Author’s Note: "Summer Child" was published by The Hairpin sometime in 2017, when the publication was a presence on Medium. Silvia Killingsworth published a few of my essays there that year and her previous affiliation with The New Yorker (and her kind editing) made it feel that the sun was briefly shining on me.

Fossils: A Flash Fiction by Joe Kapitan

Fossil me, she says, on a Sunday afternoon when snow strikes and shackles everything tight under its belly.

She larvaes in front of the fireplace, cocooned in quilt.

Explain, I answer, watching the flakefall from my chair, noting that my car has become a tumor beneath thick porcelain skin.

Rediscover me, she says. Search for me, but do your homework first: organize an expedition, hire a local guide, endure hardships, read the strata, hypothesize, then dig. Dig, like nothing else matters.

I’ve loved you for fifteen years, I say. Without Sherpas. Isn’t that expedition?

Long expeditions are deadly, she says, they breed institutions. Discoveries disappear into textbooks. 

You want some time away? I ask.

I want to be unearthed again, she says, marveled at, brushed delicately, cradled, magnified, examined, taxonomied, announced at symposiums. 

It falls harder, that downy sediment.

Cephalopod or gastropod? I ask her, in that way of mine.

Neither, she says, yawning. Something that flew once, before the sap, and before the amber. A dragonfly, maybe. A careless one.

Ah, no bigger than a grapefruit then, I figure. So how would I find you?

She turns to me. You found me once, she says.  

Something in the fire snaps.

We played this game, once:

Me: What’s sadder than a shovel buried?

You: A fossil reburied.

Outside, the lump that had marked my car is no longer visible.

We stop talking, to conserve oxygen.

---

Author’s Note: This flash fiction piece was first published in Fractured West 3, way back in 2011. Editor Kirsty Logan gushed about it, and it was the encouragement I really needed at that moment.

Frying an Egg: An Essay by Melissa Wiley

Sometimes she separates her pinkie toes from all the others, making them stick out from her sandals. To her, they resemble the arms of incarcerated men reaching through their prison bars for women. She does this to shock onlookers, though usually she has to point down at her feet for them to notice. She takes comfort knowing all her toes were once webbed in amniotic water. She likes imagining when the skin between them was stitched into something seamless. Their prior wholeness inside her mother.

She eats eggs on an almost daily basis. She never scrambles them, however, because they will only scramble themselves later inside her stomach. Instead, she dangles a fork over the frying pan as if it were a lone pinky toe or finger. She touches a tine to the yolk so it thins and disperses but retains a wobbling roundness. Some people eat only the whites, but she eats the ovum. She eats the dark sun that might make her into a chicken woman.

Even those hens that do nothing all their lives except sit chaste inside some henhouse some farmer has built for them still undergo the birth-giving process. Unfertilized eggs travel the same pathway as those bearing the mark of a rooster. Unfertilized eggs are no larger or smaller than those stirring with fragile life inside them. To a hen, giving birth feels the same as what you could call chicken menstruation. Each emerging egg shimmers the same with promise, however lifeless.

None of the eggs she carries inside her have either the yellow or whiteness of those she seasons with pepper. Hers have all been scarlet, mixed with the deeper red lining her uterine cushion. Hours before another egg slips down her cervix, she is surrounded by deer women. They have antlers, are all leering and naked. They stand so close to each other their antlers gnash together. They stand on tiptoe then creep closer as she takes her underwear off to shower. She wants to break free from the membrane they have formed around her tub, around the liner grazing her shower curtain. Only she is the yolk and they the albumen. They are trying to bleed her so she disperses. They are trying to break her so she doesn’t seem so whole and circular.

Her mother once counted her toes for her. She had ten, the perfect number, porcine and foreshortened against feet that were even fatter. Having so many of them, each one separated from the one beside it, seemed then to be an accomplishment. It was as if she had cut the skin between them herself with scissors.

Her mother loved yet also seemed to want something from her. Wanted, she thinks, for her daughter to dazzle her. Only the daughter has never been a dazzler. Instead of a yolk, her mother must have mistaken her for what looks to be a purer substance. The deer women say nothing while she thinks this, while they rise from the albumen the mother once confused for the daughter. Her mother must have seen the antlers jutting from behind her and thought they signified something better to come in future, some promise. She must have had little conception how the naked women would later bleed her.

Yet from another egg she takes from the refrigerator she derives a certain pleasure. Its shell gleams so simply she hesitates to crack it open. The best way of frying an egg, she knows, is to turn on no gas fire. It is to heat herself along with all the eggs inside her.

Some days, she feels she is a chicken. Others, she is closer to an egg as she scratches against a shell she senses will easily shatter. She cannot tell who is lonelier, the egg that will never hatch into anything besides a wobbly yolk and albumen or the hen whose body houses so many eggs with no nascent life inside them.

Meanwhile the trees around her have begun to vanish. They have started disappearing from the park she walks through nearly every morning. Someone has taken an axe to them, has likely been given orders by the city. Where the trees once sprang from the earth now are only wooden shavings. Interspersed among them she has found several cards for playing blackjack or rummy. She has found one card after another—a spade, a queen of diamonds, a joker. If someone is playing with her, she has forgotten the rules along with the voice now of her mother. She never does play cards anymore, and finding them splayed among the ghosts of trees has become its own game for her. She plays alone, unsure if she is winning.

Her husband says she has started kicking her feet when she is sleeping but he isn’t. Not just kicking, he says, but swimming. He asks her where she’s going. “Where?” not “Why?” he asks gently, because he has so long known her. When she curls her fists closer to her heart and other internal organs, he knows she is traveling somewhere far beyond him.

“Back to my mother,” she acknowledges when he probes her, asking her again where she has gone without him. “To play cards with her.”

Yesterday afternoon, she walked to Kentucky Fried Chicken. Standing in line to order, she saw the man who fixed a problem with her Internet connection a couple days before this. She and her husband have recently moved apartments, and the man had to walk through a maze of boxes. She tapped him on the shoulder while he was ordering a couple legs of chicken. Neither one reminded the other of names they would only forget again. Still he seemed happy she said hello to him.

His hair was tangled and clung to his skull’s surface as if frightened to leave it. She prefers men’s hair that seems friendly, hair that waves to strangers freely in the wind. While walking through the city, she likes gazing at the heads of those men taller than she is then following their hair moving through air like music. She likes to listen.

The hair of those men who have started balding does the most flowing, she has noticed. An egg begins revealing itself behind thinning hair that moves independently of any air current. It is as if the little hair remaining is reaching for something. Yet she can come only so close, cannot seem to stare at an egg emerging from beneath that which is disappearing. Something that might be hatching deserves privacy.

These men have no eggs inside them, no ovaries hanging below their bellies. Still if you look closely, you will see their hair’s ends are stuck with albumen. The men too are sometimes surrounded by women with antlers sprouting from their heads. All their world is an eroticism.

The men hardly care whether the women speak to them, whether they ever attempt making cordial conversation. She guesses they enjoy the antlers’ poking, the prods and pinches. As for the deer women, she knows why they surround her during ovulation, why they don’t bother wearing any clothing as she showers. They too are motherless. Nothing in her experience makes a woman more shameless.

Women who nourish no new life grown inside them, who flush all their eggs down a toilet on a monthly basis, must grow antlers then dance and poke at something. They must shake their breasts at someone who cannot help staring, at the balding men with the last of their hair lightened with eggs’ whiteness. Their yolk must be broken by someone.

After she ate her sandwich at Kentucky Fried Chicken, she walked inside a store selling used clothing then tried on several pairs of sandals. She stuck her pinkies out of none of them, because there was no one there to stare and be disgusted. One pair of espadrilles with satin straps she particularly coveted. Looking at them, she thought they might fit. Only her feet, already small for her person, have shrunken. By the time she was an adolescent, they were a size seven and a half. Yet a pair labeled size six in the thrift store was too loose to walk in. Years after she was supposed to stop growing, she is growing out of all proportion.

The number of her toes remains unimportant. No manufacturer ever considers that humans might grow an eleventh. Shoemakers also fail to realize some of us may have lost one or more of them—through injury, through sex play, through motorcycle accidents. Still it is the only fact her mother ever told her. Ten toes, she lilted, over and over, as if this could make any difference. What am I supposed to do with them? she sometimes still asks herself in private, becoming angry all over again for having been told nothing that matters.

The only picture she has framed of her mother is of her holding herself as a baby beneath a magnolia tree that blossomed outside their kitchen. Her mother looks impossibly slender, as if she never did anything besides feed a daughter who looks to have been an enormous baby in comparison. Less than a year old then, she looks as if she has spent all her life doing nothing more than taking the meat off her mother. She looks already as if she would do better to eat more salads and less chicken. Her mother is smiling at the camera while she, wearing a white dress and bonnet, looks down while twisting her fingers, wondering about their purpose, deciding there may not be any. Her lips are wet and pouting.

Were she only born with six toes or even nine instead of the ten expected, she might have looked outside herself for wholeness. She might have made more friends, taken lovers. But her mother counted her toes for her, all ten of them, saying she was perfection. Nothing needed to be altered.

Her mother’s favorite restaurant served fried chicken. The cook sprinkled the skin with pepper—that was the secret, her mother whispered. While her parents drank beer and waited for the chicken’s skin to darken, she made a ritual of leaving the table to hang on the stairs’ railing at the entrance. The railing was only two iron rods whose paint was flaking, but when she was five and six and seven, she used to wrap her limbs around them with love bordering on possessive. She used to sigh and roll her eyes when older people needed to lean on them.

Once the waitress brought their platter, her mother came and fetched her, saying let’s eat the chicken while it’s still hot from the oven. She said this as if the chicken and egg question were then decided. The chicken came from the oven, and the egg came from the chicken. The oven was only another womb inside some kitchen hidden behind a door with wooden slats, some of which were broken.

The toes of a typical human form at nine weeks old, when the fetus measures little more than an inch in length. By this time, the developing male or female has an upper lip as well as a larynx. Emerging from the womb several months later, the person is complete in miniature. It is only as life goes on she realizes she is still hatching, long after her mother has birthed and left her. She notices the end of balding men’s hair looks sticky. She looks at them walking, wondering.

---

Author’s Note: When (b)OINK accepted this essay for publication, the editors were extremely kind and really made me feel like there was an audience for work as emotionally raw as most of my work still often is. While I'm sad the magazine no longer exists, I hope everyone who was once associated with it is still active in a public literary space of some kind. For someone whose writing often struggles to find a home, magazines like these have often made all the difference.

Poker After Funeral: A Poem by Hayden Bergman

Grandma flicked a deck of fifty-two
from a Shreveport casino past her
thumb, mimicking the noises in the dark.
All day we worked deep-sixing grandpa,
and now the day was gone,
so we sat in the dark
to play a game of five-card,
hoping that his soul was somewhere else, not stuck
inside the shallow box of lacquered cedar.
Uncle cut the deck and grandma dealt,
growling deuces wild as she snapped
her wrist. The bet went to my uncle,
check then to my second cousin, check.
And then it came to me check. Grandma’s
eyebrows lifted from her eyes. Three
dollars she said and pushed twelve quarters
to the center of the table. The bet
went to my uncle fold then to my second
cousin fold and then to me, call. I threw
three ones on the table. The family
and lookers-on raised their heads and voices.
Grandpa would have been howling
to her right, you ain’t got nothin’!
so I told her, you ain’t got nothin’.
We both drew another card, hoping
we would dig up luck, some glossy gift
buried face down in the deck. Neither
of us did. We played the cards that we were dealt.
Cards to chest she said, you first and so
I slapped mine on the table: triple aces.
Grandpa would have told her, give up
while you can — but I didn’t say that.
She laughed, exhaled, and showed her hand:
full house: three tens, one king, a wild deuce to pair.
She leaned forward, pulled the pot to her side
of the table. She threw her arms around the cash
and change, and straightened up her back.

---

Author’s Note: This poem was published in 2019 in Gravel Magazine — I can’t find their website anywhere on the web, either through their old URL or some new one — a casualty of COVID, I guess, the fate of many of our favorite magazines. I remember being so grateful for this publication, not in the least because a fellow wrote a sweet note to me about the poem — also, much of my first (and forthcoming) manuscript is informed by the narrative present in this poem.