Prose

Alison Theresa Gibson

Holidays with Cher

Sallyanne’s giggle is infectious, but I stop when the sound of it reaches me on the front step. I haven’t seen my family for two months. Two months in which Australia’s countryside has dried to dust, Christmas trees have browned on garbage piles, and the hollowness of my life has settled around me like the echoes in an empty cathedral.

If I’m being dramatic about it, that is. 

It’s too hard to be around them. Their lives haven’t become hollowed. Her absence is a mild dent in the family structure, rather than a reordering of its molecules. 

“Mags!” Sallyanne has spotted me through the flyscreen, and she pushes it open so it slams against the wall of the house. There is a line where the green paint has been chipped, over and over, into white dust.

“Hey Sal, sorry I’m late.”

“Don’t be sorry, come in come in. Everyone’s here.”

I follow her up the stairs, aware of the three dopey blowflies which follow us through the open door. Sallyanne closes the flyscreen behind us but it is too late.

Mum, Dad, Fred, and Joan are standing in the open kitchen, drinks in hand. Dad, Fred and Joan hold beer bottles in crude stubby holders, while Mum has a glass of sherry. They are all laughing, but freeze as I appear, and the atmosphere cracks, my presence an earthquake through the room’s foundations.

“Hi everyone.”

“Darling,” Mum says, rushing to hug me. “How was the drive? Let me take that bag. Roger, take her bag. Oh, darling.” She flutters around like a blowfly injected with speed. Ava comes dancing into the room, the skirt of her pink tutu stained with dirt, food dribbles down the front. She stops and stares at me, mouth open, like she thought I’d have two heads. She must have heard them talking about me as something precious, strange. Something to be handled.

“Hey Aves,” I say, and she nods, then, clearly deciding the pressure of interacting with me is too much, runs from the room again.

“Don’t worry about her,” Sallyanne says. “She’s been strange all afternoon. Too much sugar at lunch probably.”

I don’t want her to make excuses. “I’ll put my stuff in my room,” I say, because despite Mum’s directive, no one has taken my bag. A look is exchanged.

“Actually, I made up the room at the back for you,” Sallyanne says. We can hear Ava playing in the laundry, singing something high and off-key. 

“Where are Mum and Dad sleeping then?” Dad is studying the picture on his stubby holder. It’s a cartoon of three busty women in bikinis and a weedy bloke trying to flex his muscles for them. There is some slogan on it, but I don’t remember what it is. Carrie never wanted to use the stubby holders, and her beer would turn warm in her hand.

“The room through there,” Sallyanne says, then blunders on. “Dad finds the mattress better for his back. We thought about changing the mattresses but you know, we figured you wouldn’t mind being in a – different room – ” she trails off.

I take the handle of my suitcase and drag it across the kitchen. The wheels are a grainy whine against the floorboards and the sound stretches in the emptiness like I’m dropping a trail of biscuits behind me. 

I stay in the bedroom for twenty minutes. I can’t prolong it without feeling worse for hiding. I fold my clothes into the chest of drawers. I never used to fold clothes, but my life has been broken into small, manageable actions, and this is one of them. It takes four minutes of my life. 

The décor in this room is heavy: dark green curtains and carpets, a wooden bedhead that takes up most of the wall, matching chest of drawers. It’s always been Mum and Dad’s room; they like it quiet and dark even in summer. It is chilled, away from the direct sun that hits the other sides of the house. As kids, we’d come bursting in, but I’ve been a stranger to this room for years.

When I return to the kitchen, Sallyanne and Joan are chopping vegetables. Dad and Fred are at the barbeque. Mum is setting the table. The best of Cher is playing and all the women are bopping, moving their hips in that genetic way we all have, humming between conversations.

“Hi!” Sallyanne says, much too loudly considering she’s just seen me. “Do you want a drink? Or tea? Or coffee?”

“Wine,” I say, and sit at the table. “Thanks.”

Mum has put the placemats and coasters on the table, with the napkins in the rings that Joan and I made on a rainy day when we were teenagers. It was a craft project straight out of Martha Stewart, but they’ve lasted well. Papier Mache painted gold, though now it’s faded to rust. 

“They’ve been around a long time,” Mum says, as I run my finger over the one in front of me. She puts spoons by each of the places, then wine glasses on the coasters.

“Where’s Ava?”

“Out the back,” Mum says.

“She’s discovered a lizard and is waiting to see if he’ll move,” Sallyanne adds.

“How long’s she been waiting?” 

“About fifteen minutes.”

Through the back door I spot her feet. She’s lying on her front, her head near the railing. Her feet tick backwards and forwards in their pink sandals. I never had that much patience as a five year old.

The thick ropey smell of steak comes from the front deck, where gusts of smoke pour from the barbeque. Dad isn’t paying it any attention.

“Can I help with something?” I ask, as Sallyanne puts a glass of wine in front of me. Condensation is already dripping. It’s too hot to eat.

“We’ve got it under control. You must be tired after the drive, just relax.”

Back at the kitchen bench, she scoops the layers of colourful vegetables that she and Joan have chopped into one of the ceramic salad bowls that Mum buys at the local pottery store each year.

“Have you been swimming?” I ask. Cher is bellowing about Memphis in the background.

“The water’s lovely,” Mum says. She has finished with the table and sits at the other end, a replenished sherry in her hand.

“A lot of jelly fish around though,” Joan says. Her voice is husky, like she might be sick. 

Ava comes stomping in. “He’s gone,” she announces. “That stupid old man next door made his motorbike loud and vroomy and Rocky just – pichew!” She makes a flying motion with her hand.

“Rocky?”

“He likes the rocks,” she says, like I’m an idiot. 

“I think we’re ready,” Dad says, coming in with a pile of steaks in the chipped blue oven tray.

“Us too.” Sallyanne sprinkles something over the bowl – cheese perhaps – and carries it to the table. Joan is at the oven, removing two loaves of what smells like garlic bread.

“This looks great, thank you everyone,” I say, and there are murmurs of ‘don’t worry’ and ‘you’re welcome’, but no one looks at me except Joan, who says nothing. 

Ava takes five pieces of garlic bread and shakes her head to everything else. Sallyanne looks at Fred, but I can’t read the look, and neither of them say anything. We pass plates, clink glasses, and start eating. Dad says nothing when Fred puts tomato sauce on his steak, but his eyes narrow. Sallyanne starts talking as though to distract from her semi-foolish husband. “So what should we do tomorrow?” 

“Swim, eat, same as usual,” Joan says.  

“Yes, of course.” Sallyanne stabs a piece of cucumber with her fork but misjudges it and it flies off the table. Ava sniggers. 

“I wouldn’t mind going for a walk,” I say, and there is a pause as they digest this while chewing through the meat.

“Where?” Dad asks.

“Around the headland maybe.”

“That’s a long walk, darling,” Mum says. She has put half of her steak on Dad’s plate, and her knife and fork are crossed as though she is finished.

“A few hours maybe.”

“Are you sure you’re up to it?” Dad asks, and everyone looks at their bloodied plates.

“I’m grieving, Dad, not injured.” I say it quietly but still there is a shuffling in seats. Even Dad is concentrating more than necessary on cutting his steak. Into the silence comes Cher’s voice, crowing about life after love. Sallyanne jumps up, stumbles over her chair, and rushes to the stereo. The sudden silence as she cuts the track is worse than any lyrics, and I can’t breathe. I put my knife and fork across my plate. The salad is already wilting in the hot evening air. 

“Actually, I might go for a walk now.” I take my wine. At the door I look back, and catch them sharing something, a look that keeps me separate. Except Joan, who is filling her plate with more limp salad. “I won’t be long.”

*

The beach is smooth and silver under the moon. There are shadows of a couple strolling at the water’s edge. Further along is a group around a fire. Their movements are boisterous, jumping and dancing and running to the water and back. Teenagers, I guess, down for a weekend away from their parents. 

I sit just before the tide line. The sand is still warm from the day’s sun, and I run my fingers through it, cupping the grains in my palm. They’re cooler when they’re separated. I dig a dent for my wine glass and settle it in. I don’t even want it, it was just something to prove I wasn’t going far, or for long. I’ve barely drunk alcohol since she died. At first, there was a loss of appetite for anything. Then it was a worry that if I started, I’d never stop. 

I kick my thongs off and check the state of the polish on my toenails. It is still there, tiny squares in the centre of each nail. We painted them together on the first day of December, sitting on our balcony, toes on the railing, smoke curling around us from her cigarettes. And then it comes, the hollow spirals like the bottom has dropped out of the world. I lie back and stare at the moon. I stare hard, like I can see shapes, and I breathe in and out, painfully at first, like sucking an empty glass through a straw. The teenagers begin singing, indistinct words until they reach the chorus, and I start to laugh.

“Do you think they heard it from our place?” Joan is stumbling towards me, her sandals flapping on her feet, scooping sand as she trudges forward.

“Maybe. Maybe Cher is just in the air tonight.” I sit up, and rescue my wine from its precarious tilt. Joan sits, her shoulder warm by mine. Her beer is in the only plain stubby holder there is. She swigs then nestles it between her feet. We stare at the black and silver water. The surf is low, but the echo still rumbles off the cliffs around us. 

“Sorry it’s so weird,” Joan says. 

“Yeah.” I stretch my legs and we both look at my toes with their chipped polish, before I dig them into the sand. 

“Everyone wants to do the right thing, you know. We just don’t know what it is.”

“Yeah,” I lie back on my elbows. “I know. I’m not mad. I’m just – ”

“Yeah, I know,” she says.

The moon is bright enough that I can see the grey in her hair, wisps by her ears. There is something faded about her, like she is a photocopy of the real Joan. “What’s going on with you?” I ask. She laughs, in a way that makes it clear she isn’t going to answer. 

A couple pass in front of us, their shorts wet from where the sea has surprised them. They’re holding hands. I drink the rest of my wine.

“I think Sallyanne nearly had a panic attack when you said you were coming,” Joan says. “She’s taken on organising this whole thing, I don’t know when it happened but Mum asks Sal about the arrangements now.”

“She’s the one with a kid.”

“Yeah. But it’s still our family. When did we stop inviting friends? Or having all-night discos on these holidays? There was always a whole gang of people, not just us.”

“When we started inviting partners, I guess.”

The first time Carrie came, she was stung by a bee, and spent three days on the couch with an icepack strapped to her shin. It was an excuse to have time alone while the family trooped to the beach each day, but it didn’t bother me at all. I loved the idea of her curled up in our beach house, feeling at home.

Joan takes another long swig. “It kinda sucks. We do better with outsiders around. When it’s just us it’s like – ”

“Like Sallyanne is going to implode with the pressure?”

The teenagers are screeching as they kick sand over their fire. I’m impressed with their fire safety, but remind myself to check it once they’ve left. After a few minutes, they wander off in the direction of the campsite. 

“We should go back,” I say.

“I know.”

“It must be time for that all-night disco.”

She turns to me and grins. “Must be. I can feel a Cher medley coming on.”

We walk back to the house via the campfire, but the kids have done a good job and it’s completely covered. The sand has an edge of heat to it.

“Do you think Sallyanne feels rested after these beach holidays?” I ask. We’re passing through the scrubland which separates the sand from the houses, and I pull my shins away from the prickling branches.

“God no. I don’t know when she last had an actual holiday, the sort that refreshes you.” Joan drops her beer bottle in the wheelie bin at the end of the driveway, next to the tilting letterbox.

"Maybe tomorrow should be about her. We'll give her the day off. No cooking, no organising. Mum can take Ava in the morning and we'll ask Dad to keep Fred out of her hair."

"He'll love that."

We've stopped halfway up the drive towards the house, but still we lower our voices. 

"He'll get over it. Do you think it'll work?"

"Yeah, it's a good idea." She starts walking towards where the light falls across the grass from the door. "It'll give you a rest from being the centre of attention, too." Her head is bowed, like the light weighs her down.

“That’s not why I’m doing it,” I say, my voice too loud. The murmured conversation inside halts.

“I know.” She is nothing but darkness with the light behind her. “I know,” she says again. “You care about her.”

The coating of steak in my mouth is too bloody, an animalistic taste of decay. I bend forward, slowly, breathing in and out. The door creaks softly, without hitting the wall of the house, and I know they will be clustered in the light, watching. Cher is playing again, her throaty gurgle of strength cascades over the garden, anthemic, made for dancing. I straighten slowly, my family gathered just as I knew they would be. 

“I don’t actually,” I say quietly, just to Joan. Mum steps forward, trying to hear. “Not yet. But I will. A month ago I barely knew any of you existed, this is progress, or something.” Her face is too dark, I can’t read her. My admission of selfishness feels wrong, extra selfish, when I have no idea about her life at the moment. 

But then she holds out her hand. “Let’s dance.”

Inside, Ava has beaten us to it. In her crusted pink tutu she is twirling by the speakers, clapping out of time and grinning. Joan raises her arms and I slink in behind her, my feet instinctively finding the beat while I watch as if from afar. Behind me, Sallyanne giggles, the sound infectious despite the anxiety that runs through it. They are a family barely dented by her absence, but they are dented by their own lives. One day soon I will care about what that means, and in the meantime there is Cher. 

Alison Theresa Gibson grew up in Canberra, the illusive capital of Australia, and currently lives in Birmingham, UK. She has words in a number of publications, including Spelk, Litro, Crack the Spine, Meanjin, Sunlight Press, and Every Day Fiction. She was nominated for Best Small Fictions in 2020 and Best of the Net in 2019. She is currently completing her MA in Creative Writing at University of Birmingham. Find her @byAlisonTheresa and alisontheresa.com.

Andreea Ceplinschi

You Might Be an Illegal Immigrant

I had woken up wet with my own piss before, but this was different. It was still warm. When I turned over, my inner thighs stuck together with what felt like maple syrup. The pain started in my tailbone, came around and settled on my lower belly like a prize belt. I couldn’t remember fighting. I couldn’t remember falling. 

“Another one, darling?”

I remembered having another one, the sweet barrel taste of brown liquor still on my breath. I blinked awake, propped myself up on my elbows and more pain leaked out of me. Blood had soaked through the mattress in a tie-dye mandala stretching outward from under my ass in hues of cherry, eggplant and brick. It smelled like low tide. It was beautiful. 

I counted minutes in the shower staring at my feet until the water ran pink and the sun came up. I’d missed a patch of hair on my ankle shaving. I wondered if I had any clean underwear. I wondered if only Eastern-European mothers insisted on clean underwear for doctor’s visits.

*

20min walk to the health center. The snow on the ground squeaked under the rubber soles of my sneakers. The cold helped me file away pains: some were hangover, some were not. 

“Just a bad period,” I lied under my breath, fingering the laminated edges of the fake ID in my pocket. You might be an illegal immigrant if: you’re 25 and still need a fake ID. Every time the wave of cramps pulled back, I tried turning around.

“I’m fine,” but my feet kept walking.

The receptionist knew me, small women in a small town. She didn’t look me in the eye as she took my Green Card.

“It won’t scan,” I whispered. “You have to enter it manually,” but she knew. She didn’t ask for an insurance card, I didn’t have one.

*

The doctor’s name was Amy P. Her name tag floated on a white sea of lab coat fabric buttoned against its will over her chest. I wanted to reach over and free her bosom, then bury myself in it and cry while she healed me with the warmth of her massive breasts. I envied her nametag.

“Pain, on a scale of one to ten?”

“Seven,” on a scale of walk it off to throw it up, seven felt like a reasonable answer.

“How much blood?”

“A lot,” however much blood a twin mattress holds.

“Are you still bleeding?”

“I don’t think so,” I tried to feel the texture of the maxi pad in my clean underwear, was it spongy? I couldn’t unclench the fist in my pelvis enough to tell, the 4-inch strip of back skin showing through my hospital gown went ice cold if I tried.

“Has this ever happened to you before?”

“My first period. I was 13. I would faint,” my mother believed in intervention divine more than medical, so she waited two weeks before taking me to the hospital.

“Are you taking any medication?”

“I get Yazmin mailed to me from home. It’s late this month.”

Dr. Amy’s eyes narrowed into the folds of her cheeks. You might be an illegal immigrant if: the person talking to you raises their voice so you can understand their English better.

“Where are you from?”

“Romania,” for the 2856th time grateful to be white.

“Any chance you were pregnant?”

Not according to Romanian doctors.

Not according to the literature regarding long term use of combination birth control to manage symptoms of Polycystic Ovary Syndrome.

Not according to the length of time passed between my last remembered period and my last remembered sexual encounter.

Not according to my casual fuck friend who didn’t remember cumming inside me.

“…technically, no,” because there was also Jack Daniels.

“Urine. Bloodwork. Ultrasound.”

*

You might be an illegal immigrant if: you can wait 3 January hours between a doctor and a nurse without question, while bleeding in nothing but a hospital gown, socks and clean underwear.

*

Drip. Drip. Drip. 45minutes for the saline IV to refill my bladder so that the ultrasound wand could tell it apart from my uterus. The gurney smelled like alcohol, bleach and rubber. The neon lights in the empty hallway made my eyes water. Drip. Drip. Drip. Morphine-softened seconds wondering how they’ll know when the IV is done dripping. If I take the needle out myself will the itch stop? Drip. Drip. The wet maxi pad molded to my labia, starting to burn. Drip. Drip. The pressure in my bladder grew and faded over anodyne cottonmouth heat. Drip.

“Sign here.”

You might be an illegal immigrant if: you need to sign a billing agreement while experiencing a medical emergency, accepting the costs of said emergency should you not meet the requirements for Medicaid eligibility. Drip. Drip.

*

“…miscarriage.”

“That’s not possible,” my bladder still full, ultrasound gel stains starting to crust over my swollen belly.

“Do you know how babies are made?”

Dr. Amy’s beady blue eyes sneered at me from behind her gold wire-rimmed glasses. A thin gold chain spilled down from the sides of the frames. I stared as her creamy cleavage swallowed it like quicksand. Her nametag was staring too.

“Well?”

You might be an illegal immigrant if: your first and only reaction when being rhetorically questioned by someone in a position of perceived power is to remain quiet, thus signaling remorse over your obvious stupidity.

*

I bought two gallons of bleach and a pint of Jack on the way home. I knew it wouldn’t be enough, but it was all I could carry. The mattress was still there, waiting, stain looking up at the ceiling like a stoned iris edged in rusted lace. I opened the Jack first and poured a little on the mattress. It drank it up. I did too. 

You might be an illegal immigrant if: you’ll bleach yourself out of the mattress to keep a security deposit. 

*

My room smelled of bleach and motherhood and I slept on the floor.

Andreea Ceplinschi is a Romanian-born writer currently living on Cape Cod, MA. Having only recently been reacquainted with the art of writing, she’s currently trying it all, from fiction to personal essay and poetry. Her creative non-fiction has won an honorable mention in the Women on Writing Q2 2021 Creative Nonfiction Essay Contest. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in Passengers Journal, La Piccioletta Barca, Prometheus Dreaming, Prometheus Unbound, Into the Void and Fly in the Head.

Joan Halperin

Indulgences

My bare feet rest on his brown leather cushion. My ruby red toenails shine.  He frowns at my toes. I don’t like him. I don’t want him.  He never makes eye contact. I sit high up on his chair where I’m treated to a view of his freckled scalp.  He seems to be counting my toes.  He looks up.

“You should have taken the polish off,” he says.

There was a time in my life I said “sorry” to any accusation. Now I remain silent. Those forever years of therapy are kicking in.  I think of my toes years ago when I walked the sands of the Aruba.  Back then my toes lined up with my small, firm, breasts.  I didn’t know what a podiatrist was.

My toes carried me along to the beat beat beat of tropical music. I watched them dip in and emerge from lapping waves.

I remember, Monroe Rosenthal, who when we were both sixteen, dared to put his hand under my green cashmere sweater and touch in a halting and erratic way, my breasts. Oh that strong sexual pull that travelled down my breasts through my belly, poised at my groin, zapped my vagina…then eventually came to rest in my toes. My toes shouting “more, more.”  Oh those days when I could easily tap my toes!

I once had a podiatrist whose wife who was also his office manager, died of lung cancer after smoking for fifty years.  Dr. B. lived in a large suburban house in Yonkers, New York. In his back yard, he kept a large cage holding two pit bulls who barked the moment I started up his steps to his office.   They not only barked but also lunged against their wired cage in attempt, I was sure, to escape and pull me to pieces. 

 Now lonely since his wife Evie was no longer at the desk, he tried everything he could to keep me with him after my appointment was over.  Each visit, he insisted on showing me a book full of deformed toes that he’d treated over the years. There were bent toes, spiraling toes, toes that seemed to be wrapped around other toes.  I didn’t have the heart to say no but the experience was so unsettling that the pit bulls gnashing their teeth as I left didn’t frighten me as much as when I entered.

My new podiatrist wears a white jacket and wields a large nail clipper. I hear it crunch my toenails as if they are a bunch of potato chips being executed.  Then he takes a buzzing drill and runs it over my nails in an attempt to get rid of uneven surfaces.  He decimates my ruby red polish. I believe he enjoys this process.  I would like to pour nail polish remover over his scalp. What a lovely skating rink it would make.

All those days when I took my young children ice-skating, I smiled, smiled, smiled as I glided across the ice on my turned ankles.

Like mother like child, it didn’t take long for my children to suggest we go into the changing room where hot chocolate and cookies were sold.  Those nights I stretched out on the sofa exhausted from doing the good mother thing and wiggled my unpolished toes. 

The pit bulls are asleep somewhere. The ice rink is closed.  My podiatrist has retired and moved to Clearwater, Florida.  I do hope he is not attempting to use his toe book to attract those Florida widows. My children are in their sixties. When I was little, I was able to put my toes in my mouth. I practiced this over and over which probably says something about my self-esteem. Now I need to settle for choosing adventurous colors such as The Right Cut, Seductress, and Pink Lemonade to cover them up. I can no longer taste them. 

It’s all right. I am always wiggling them, these faithful but often distressed travellers.  I take them for pedicures where they are soaked, creamed, patted dry and coated with exotic colors. There is no polish too young or brash or sexual for them.  When I take off my sneakers or orthopedic shoes they glow in the dark, the spirit of me lodged beneath every nail encouraging them in any indulgence they crave.

Joan Halperin lives at Orchard Cove a continuing care residence in Canton, Massachusetts. Here she writes, teaches, and participates in short story and book discussion groups, swims, exercises, writes and keeps in touch with three grandchildren. She's been published in Rosebud, New York Quarterly, Persimmon Tree, Leap Years, Light Years and others. She has sent out a newsletter, The Daily Touch, since the pandemic that features poems, contests, phantom trips. She can be reached at Jhalp1929@gmail.com

Linda Petrucelli

Animal Gaze

Feral chickens have taken over our driveway.

Palm seeds strewn up and down the concrete drive attract the wild birds to a makeshift breakfast. Needle beaks jab at the red seeds. Hens mostly, with their chicks, but also several roosters making a lot of noise. They’ve turned the driveway into a cement trough. Ku-carrr ooo. Ku-carrr ooo. Ku-carrr ooo.  

A stringy-legged male with a golden cape hollers, and then chases a hen onto the front lawn. His crowing goes guttural and the rooster flies up, landing on the hen’s back. She squawks, runs away, he mounts her again, his body furiously jamming her. 

A live sex show which the rooster repeats by chasing another hen from the driveway.

I go to pull open the front screen door. But even before my hand reaches the latch, the chickens are aware of possible danger. Can they smell me maybe, or sense a slight vibration from my footsteps? And by the time I intentionally let the door bang shut, the birds have already fled, scurrying away towards their private refuge, a bamboo thicket at the top of our property.

Flocks of feral chickens began invading our small subdivision about a year ago. In search of food and territory—they come from the rocky pasture that stretches along the southern side of our yard. Jacky, who lives two houses away, calls us The Neighborhood’s First Line of Defense. “Wait till they start roosting under our houses. Droppings everywhere! We’ll never sleep with all the noise they make,” he warns and threatens to buy a BB gun.

My husband and I agree that we will not purchase a gun. On a table next to the front door, we keep a slingshot. Not a toy wooden one but a massive metal Y we found on Amazon, equipped with an arm brace and triple elastic bands. A recycled bowl holds the ammo—ironically, the same red seeds the chickens like to nibble. We have neither the precision nor biceps’ strength to harm the chickens with the slingshot, but the sound of a seed whizzing over their heads gives a strong deterrence. 

A bruise from a misfired shot shows purple on my left hand. “I’m going outside for a second—” I call to my husband and leave through the screen door stepping down onto the mottled grey cement. 

Across the driveway, the squat lean-to with white metal roofing belongs to Jocelyn. One very early morning, Jacky watched Jocelyn furtively strewing seed along the community’s access road. Later he discovered tin foil plates filled with apples and water hidden behind a clump of pili grass. “She’s creating an ecological nightmare,” he said and went to confront her. She was unapologetic, though. Insisted it was her right to love the chickens and declared she would never stop feeding them.  

From Jocelyn’s back yard floats an earthy odor of rotting carrots. A conga line of chickens appears, crosses my path. I yield for a moment and then clap my hands. Startled, a dozen hens rise up and fly as one, a stocky rooster their pilot.  Rhee-ooo. Rheee-ooo. The birds land yards beyond me, staggering on twig-feet, ducking under the barbed wire fence and escaping into the pasture. Not one of the outdoor cats gives chase. They know enough to leave the talons and beaks alone. 

At the top of the driveway, a garlicky smell comes from the thicket where another flock scratches in the dirt around the bamboo trees. The roosting hens cluck a staccato cantata until the wind shifts, broadcasting my human scent. A rooster screams a warning. Twenty or more birds flee, speed-winging it into the pasture. 

The bamboo stalks cease jittering, turn silent. Then I see the egg.

My fingers, tempted, clasp the uppermost rock from a cairn my husband made. The stone’s heft makes me feel powerful in the presence of the egg, so vulnerable—a target that can’t run away.

I doubt that I have the nerve to dash the shell to pieces. But I’m not given the opportunity to choose. I look down. The brown shell is already pierced on one side, its jellied innards oozing in the dirt. 

When I walk back to the house, I feel the egg’s yellow pupil watch me retreat. As I side step the red seeds in the driveway, I spot another tin foil plate in Jocelyn’s yard—this one filled with oranges. 

Linda Petrucelli (she/her) is a writer obsessed with short form fiction and CNF. Her latest essays will appear in Sky Island Journal and Permafrost. She lives on the island of Hawaii where she writes and lives with one husband and ten cats. Her tiny stories are posted here— https://jackrabbitfiction.com

Denise Coville

Memory Foam

When I arrived for my first day at Big Mack’s HVAC there was a squirrel just outside the office door, dead, flat on the ground with its eyes wide open like it had had a heart attack and fallen from the sky mid-leap. Gnats were busy in its eyes, and its tubes and membranes spilled onto the walkway. The fob I’d been given for the door didn’t work. I stood outside in my skirt and heels, stepping over the squirrel to try the dead fob again and again until I gave up and called Janice, the office manager. 

“Sorry about that,” she said, taking my fob and holding the door open for me. “They say these little doodads are an improvement, but I just don’t see it.” On the way to my new desk I stepped carefully over and around extension cords that covered the carpet like a fishing net. This was the first time I had seen the office - the interview had been off-site at a coffee shop, “because the office has no private space for anyone to talk,” Janice had said. I saw now that I was overdressed.

I was new to the world of HVAC. For eight years I had worked at a garden supply store in Renton, Seattle’s closest suburb to the south, first as a sales associate, and then a shift supervisor, and finally as the assistant manager. Each day I got up at 5am to be at work by 6, and spent the early morning hours weaving through the aisles, watering the plants that needed watering and moving others into or out of the sun. What had begun as a half-serious job offer from my mom’s nail technician, whose husband owned the store, had left me with an extensive knowledge of all things landscape. I could name a rose variety by the shape of the closed bud. I could smell the difference between fir and redwood mulch. I saw patio tiles in my sleep. I had done all I could in garden supply. I had run out my road.

Janice thought my ability to pick up garden and landscape as quickly as I had showed an aptitude for what she called the “hands-on” fields - the various infrastructures of the physical environment, the frameworks of human comfort. I had found the opening on Craigslist, miscategorized under “medical.” I had been interested in working at the front desk of a physical therapy office, or maybe a dentist. 

My new job was to oversee scheduling. I would need to quickly learn the ins and outs of HVAC, so when a client called to request an air conditioner repair I could interpret the problem they were having and determine how long the repair visit would take. For new installations I would need to evaluate square footage and building layout to determine how many hours and days to block out on the schedule. I needed to know the area well, so I could schedule sufficient drive time between appointments. I knew none of this. And learning became difficult because that was when I began to forget things.

First came a text from Elijah, my boyfriend of two years, to let me know I’d left the hallway light on. I remember being irritated by that text. Like, what was his point? Was I supposed to drive home and turn it off? Nonetheless, it did startle me. I’ve always been a person of order. I enjoy a list. I act carefully, and I double check things. I’m not one to rush around flipping switches and turning knobs, to not look over my shoulder when I leave a room and ensure I’ve set everything back properly. I shudder to think of a cabinet left ajar.

“You never started the dishwasher this morning,” Elijah texted a few days later. “I opened the door and the little pod thing was still in the dispenser.”

Anxieties took up residence in my mind. It was my second week at Big Mac’s HVAC and I had made flashcards to memorize duct sizes and materials. I had already mastered a set of flashcards I’d made to learn approximate drive times between different points in the metro area. I’d learned not only the names of the technicians, but which ones had children and which ones had elderly parents, so I could make polite conversation. And yet there I was, unable to start a dishwasher. It troubled me immensely.

“The mailbox was unlocked - didn’t you check it last night?” came the next one.

And then: “the sliding door wasn’t closed - no wonder it was so cold overnight.”

I had serious concerns about my brain. I researched what vitamin and mineral deficiencies might be taking a toll on my memory. My diet, which consisted of several Macho Burritos a week from Las Palmas, the Mexican restaurant down the street from my apartment, could certainly have been improved. I came home from work each day on edge, afraid to hear about something else I didn’t do. I was afraid Elijah would stop trusting me as a person to share an apartment with, as a partner, as the potential future mother to his children. I started taking fish oils and a B-complex. 

My fears about Elijah were never realized, though - not once did his support waiver. When I walked through the door with tears shining in my eyes each evening he’d pull me close and try to comfort me, try to tell me I wasn’t suffering from early-onset Alzheimers.

There were other stressors in our relationship - finances, for example - but Elijah never stayed angry for very long about my deteriorating memory and for that I was grateful. Sure, he would get upset when he found something left on or open, but after his initial frustration he would tell me everything was going to be okay, that he still loved me and that we were going to keep working through everything together. I was worried I was dying. I saw a doctor and had my blood drawn and my brain scanned. No deficiencies or disturbances were found. 

I introduced melatonin to my night-time routine, hoping for rest and repair. I’d never slept easily, my mind always too busy, and Elijah suggested that it was finally catching up to me. In the absence of any other diagnoses it sounded reasonable, and so we bought a new mattress. It was a king-size memory foam mattress that Elijah had wanted for months, and I’d been dragging my heels because we really couldn’t afford a big-ticket item like that. Elijah hadn’t been working, and I’d taken a slight pay cut when I’d begun my new job, hoping that sacrifice would pay off down the road. But the connection between quality of sleep and cognitive performance can’t be ignored, and, at Elijah’s urging, I finally came around to the idea that a good mattress might make a real difference in my life. I put the mattress on my credit card. That was hard for me - as a person of order, I avoid loose ends and a credit card balance is a loose end. 

After leaving a burner on when I left for work one day I decided I’d had enough. I’d become a very nervous person, afraid to attempt basic tasks for fear of making a mistake. I was terrified that Elijah was going to leave me. I couldn’t concentrate at work, wondering instead about what I might’ve left on at home. I made a habit of checking the news, just to make sure my apartment building wasn’t among the headlines, engulfed in flames. Elijah was almost always at home, but I didn’t want to call attention to anything I might’ve done wrong so instead of texting him and asking him to check things I just started taking photos. I began photographing everything I touched - the turned-off burner after making tea in the morning, my unplugged curling iron after I’d curled my hair. I photographed the locked mailbox and the turned-off headlights. When I began to feel the clouds of doubt form over my head, the general sense that something was wrong, I looked through those photos and they calmed me.

After about three weeks of this Janice asked me to meet her at the coffee shop.

“Some days I really do wish we had a better meeting space at the office,” she said to me, licking from the whipped cream piled high atop her mocha, “but most of the time, I have to admit, I don’t mind the excuse to get a coffee. Anyway, I hate to say this, but I’ve found your performance to be lacking of late.”

“My performance?” I repeated. 

“Your performance, yes,” she said, sticking her index finger into the whipped cream.

“I’ve been,” I began, trying hard to control my voice. “I’ve been trying to learn the terms, and…and the routes. And pricing.” I barely made it through the sentence, and I blinked rapidly at the tears forming. I was not accustomed to being admonished by a supervisor. I was accustomed to excelling, to recognition and praise.

“It’s not that,” Janice said. “You’ve picked the material right up. I would say it’s a matter of professionalism.”

I glanced down at my hands folded tightly in my lap. I had toned down my attire after that first day, and now wore slacks with sweaters and flats. I thought I had adequately matched Janice and Beth, the one other woman in the office, in terms of attire - had I been wrong? Were my slacks too casual? I never wore a belt, because I didn’t like how they cut into me. There was whipped cream on Janice’s nose.

“You spend an awful lot of time looking at your cell phone, is what I mean,” she said. “And I know young people these days - you’re just used to being attached to that thing. But this is a professional environment. You’ve got to learn what’s appropriate in the office and what has to be done before you arrive or after you’ve left.”

“Oh,” I said. When I had begun checking the news and looking through the photos on my phone I had been careful to make sure Janice wasn’t within view. Had I become careless as my anxiety progressed? The photos had gone from something I checked once in a while to an impulse I had to satisfy the moment the thought crossed my mind, a fix I needed to assure myself everything was okay in that exact moment.

I dreaded telling Elijah about my troubles at work, but I knew I had to - it was his livelihood at stake too. I rehearsed what I’d say on the drive home. I stopped at Las Palmas to pick up Macho Burritos. When I got home and sat on the couch I just sobbed. 

“I’ve just been so preoccupied with, you know, my health,” I cried, tears dropping into the shredded lettuce alongside my Macho Burrito. “I’m just always afraid I might’ve done something else, something worse. Like that I’ll get a phone call from, I don’t know, the hospital or the police or something.”

Elijah looked gravely concerned, but he said nothing. He just put his fork down in his Macho Burrito container, scooted toward me on the cushions and put his arms around me.

For a couple weeks after that I saw some improvement, and so did Janice. I didn’t know if the job scare had sparked something in my brain or what, some survival instinct that kept my mind sharp, but gone were the messages about the things I’d done wrong at home. At first I thought Elijah had just stopped telling me, out of fear I’d lose my job, because then we’d really be in trouble. Elijah hadn’t worked in about six months, since his ticket booth gig at the football stadium had ended for the season, and even that had been twenty hours a week at best. After a string of four or five good days I gathered the strength to ask him - had he just been hiding my transgressions from me, quietly retracing my steps and righting my wrongs? But no, he said that wasn’t the case. I felt optimistic. And as I left the office one evening, two weeks after our meeting at the coffee shop, Janice asked me to stay behind.

“Your effort hasn’t gone unnoticed,” she said after Beth had closed the door behind her. “If you keep this up, I see very good things on the horizon for you.”

In that moment I felt hopeful - truly hopeful - for the first time in weeks. I was excited to tell Elijah. I was excited to have something to celebrate, for a change. I picked up some Macho Burritos and when I got home I pulled the good plates down from the top shelf. 

But my progress was short-lived, as that was a Friday and the following Wednesday I left the coffee pot on with an empty pot, nearly shattering it. This one really threw me for a loop, because I had no memory of turning the pot on, but as Elijah pointed out, he didn’t even drink coffee. If the coffee pot was on, I was the only one who would’ve done it. My photographs failed me here - how could I photograph a turned-off appliance when I had turned it on under some thoughtless spell, in some sort of a blackout?

“I don’t know what to do,” I said to Elijah that night through tears. “I don’t think the mattress is working.”

“These things don’t change overnight,” Elijah said, patting my knee reassuringly.

“I just don’t know what else to try,” I cried. “I don’t know what my next step should be.”

Elijah thought for a moment. “Well,” he said finally, “what about stress?”

“Stress?” I said. “What about stress?”

“I don’t know,” he said, “when was the last time you took any time off?”

“I can’t take time off,” I said. “I haven’t even been at my job for two months.”

“We could take just a long weekend away,” he continued.

“I can’t afford a long weekend away,” I said, my head in my hands, a new wave of despair washing over me. 

“I know,” he said. “I’ll be back on my feet soon and things will get easier. I just…” and he trailed off.

“What?” I asked.

“I just don’t think you can put a price on your health.”

I said nothing more. A weekend away was a nice idea, but it was out of the question.

I was on edge the rest of the week at work, trying to remain focused while inside the office walls, trying to keep my mind off of my phone, which sat silenced in my purse. On Friday I wore a skirt and blazer, hoping to distract from what I assumed would be my sub-standared performance. 

Janice left the office for lunch just before noon and I reached quickly for my phone. As I sat sweating in my blazer under the fluorescent bulbs, I read a message from Elijah.

“You left your curling iron on,” he said.

That was impossible, I immediately thought. He must be mistaken. But he assured me it was true - I had left the curling iron plugged in. In a panic I flipped through my photos from that morning, past the locked door and the shut-off burner, and found the photo of my unplugged curling iron.

For the next hour I sat stunned at my desk, unable to think, to speak, to move. My face beaded with sweat that ran down my neck and into my shirt. When I stood to get some water the dingy green of my office chair was stained through. Janice walked back in the door and stood directly in my path to the sink.

“Honey, are you feeling okay?” she asked as I hurried past.

“I’m fine,” I said, wiping my hair from my forehead. The hair stuck to my hot face. “I think I just, I don’t know… I might have eaten something bad.”

“Well do you need to go home?” she asked, concerned folds on her brow. “I don’t want anyone yakking on the carpet.”

And while I did want to leave, I knew I couldn’t go home. I didn’t want to walk through the door early and raise alarm. So I stayed and stared blindly at my computer screen through the final hours of the day. Janice, worried I would “yak,” left me alone.

When I walked in the door Elijah was in the bathroom. I had spent the drive home carefully considering what I might say when I saw him, but I hadn’t considered the possibility of not seeing him at all. I rushed into the bedroom, pulled my backpack from the closet and stuffed in as much clothing as I could fit. I was in and out of the apartment in two minutes, back into my car, and on my way to my sister’s house. The drive was long and I took stock of my feelings - I was confused, yes, and I was hurt. But mostly, I was overcome with a very specific anger - here I was, finding out I wasn’t actually in cognitive peril, but I was being denied the immense relief this situation warranted because now I had to grapple with every other aspect of my life, with this reveleation that Elijah had been lying to me. And for what?

And I saw it then, the mattress, the weekend away - what would be next, a bigger TV for maximum relaxation? I wondered if the whole thing had come to him one day as he sat fantisizing about that mattress, whispering “memory foam” to himself over and over until his plan had materialized.

“He has to pay for this,” Vanessa said after I arrived and told her everything.

“I don’t even want revenge,” I said wearily. “I just want to get my things, and to never see him again.”

“No, I mean he has to pay money,” Vanessa said. “You got a CAT scan because of him.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well that didn’t actually cost much. They billed on a sliding scale.”

“That doesn’t matter,” she insisted.

“Well anyway,” I said, “now I know my brain’s fine. There’s value in that.”

“None of that is the point,” she said. “The point is, you might have had to pay for the CAT Scan, and he was willing to just let you.”

I could no longer ignore the incessant vibrating of my phone in my pocket. It was Elijah, of course, not yet understanding the reason for my absence. I sent him what I believed to be a thorough explanation: a screenshot of the photo I’d taken that morning of my unplugged curling iron, with the timestamp shown above it.

“Have you been taking photos, just to use against me later?” came his eventual response.

At that I wanted to laugh. I wanted to be hysterical. I wanted to laugh wildly and intrusively, gasping for breath, my liquids escaping in small droplets, but I was just so tired.

For several days Vanessa and I considered how we might be able to get into my apartment and get my things without seeing Elijah, and for several nights I slept fitfully on her couch. We came up with nothing. Elijah almost never left the apartment. That Tuesday, though, the answer came in a text from Elijah’s brother.

“Are you still coming to Mom’s birthday dinner this Friday?” he asked. “Elijah keeps saying he doesn’t know if you can make it.”

I had forgotten it was Elijah’s mother’s birthday, but it was clear Elijah hadn’t told his family the truth about why I wasn’t coming to the party. I thought it best to play along - I responded that I would be working late and would not be able to join.

On Friday Vanessa and I made the 30-minute drive to the apartment in silence. I made a mental list of my belongings: there weren’t many. I had clothes, shoes and toiletries. I had a few books. There wasn’t much in the kitchen, as neither of us cooked - some forks and spoons, some plates and bowls and mugs, all from the dollar store. A pot and a pan from the dollar store. A chef’s knife and a bread knife from the dollar store. A cutting board and a colander from the dollar store. The good plates had been my grandmother’s. I had only used them a few times, for fear of breaking them. I would take those.

There was the long orange sofa we’d found discarded in a parking lot, part of a modular set from Ikea that was missing an arm, perhaps missing a corner and an entire additional piece, but while it was incomplete it had been in decent condition and, most importantly, clean. I didn’t want it.

Also in the living room there was a mini-fridge, upon which sat a small flat-screen television, both of which Elijah had brought from his bedroom at his mother’s house when he’d moved in. Obviously I would be leaving those behind as well.

And then there was the bed, that king-sized monstrosity that had come vacuum-sealed in plastic, stuffed inside a relatively small cardboard box. When we had opened the box and sliced carefully into the plastic wrapper I had imagined the mattress would burst from the plastic and reveal itself triumphantly, but instead it had inflated slowly over the course of three days, gradually leveling out and losing its chemical stink. The mattress was his real prize, of course - after months of longing, all it had taken in the end was this little thing of convincing me my brain was in decline and I had bought it. I didn’t want the mattress either. I never wanted to see the mattress again.

There was also the issue of where I would be going once I gathered my things. The answer in the short-term was back to Vanessa’s apartment, but after that? Where was I going to live? By some stroke of luck the lease on the apartment I shared with Elijah had only another month to go. That was one thing to be happy about in all this.

I turned into the neighborhood and went the long way through the apartment complex, past rows of identical buildings so I could approach ours from around a corner and make absolutely certain his car was gone. It was. We were safe.

We wasted no time once we entered the apartment. I pulled several trash bags from under the kitchen sink and began filling them with my clothes, my shoes, my shampoos and lotions. An armful of books and a few hats. My curling iron. The lamp from the end table. I opened and closed the kitchen drawers fruitlessly - they were still just as empty as they had always been. I looked nervously around as we loaded the trash bags into the back seat of my car, as if Elijah might pop out from around a corner at any moment, but he didn’t. I packed the good plates carefully between bags of clothes. We went back into the apartment for one last look around, and my eyes rested on that mattress. Vanessa saw me looking at the bed and came to stand beside me.

“It’s too bad we can’t take it,” she said.

“I wouldn’t want to sleep on it again anyway,” I said, feeling thoroughly disgusted by the sight of it. “I just hate that he gets to keep it.”

“He shouldn’t,” Vanessa agreed.

And suddenly I was acting before my thoughts could follow. I didn’t know what I was doing. I threw back the blankets, just a pile of old quilts because we hadn’t yet bought a comforter big enough for the bed. I peeled back the dollar store sheets. I unzipped the scratchy outside cover of the mattress and wrestled free the foam slab. It sat naked before us, a sickly green. I thought about what could be done with it all, the heap of bedding piled on the floor and the bed itself, freed now from its wrappings.

“This makes too ambiguous of a statement,” Vanessa said, scrutinizing the scene.

I grabbed a corner of the foam slab and tried to pull it toward the bedroom door but it was too heavy to maneuver, so I went to the kitchen for the bread knife and then I took to the foam. I began carving straignt through the middle. It was hard physical labor that I was unaccustomed to and my breaths became ragged. I got tired and Vanessa took over the sawing. We had not discussed our plan but we shared the same vision. Finally the foam had been sawed in half completely and we each dragged one half through the apartment door and into the parking lot. We looked around the lot, unsure what to do next.

“It shouldn’t be thrown away here,” Vanessa said decisively. “It’s best if he never knows where it went.”

The parking lot was empty. It was 7:00 on a Friday evening in August, and the people were out and away. They were laughing with friends and sitting down to dinner. I felt the dull ache of hunger in my stomach. 

“This way,” I said, and I knew then just where to go. We each grabbed one corner of a mattress half and began dragging them across the concrete parking lot. We reached the main road, which was crammed with cars, everyone stopped in traffic and honking, an accident nearby perhaps, or just a lot of people all trying to leave somewhere. Against a backdrop of car stereos and the blaring of horns we dragged our mattress pieces down the sidewalk toward Las Palmas. The foams were heavy and we dropped them many times. There were shouts from car windows but I couldn’t make out what they were.

Two blocks away stood Las Palmas, and behind it were the dumpsters and a few broken chairs where employees sometimes gathered to smoke. The chairs were empty. I lifted the flap that covered the nearest dumpster and set loose a cloud of flies. I tugged one mattress half over my knee and up to the lip of the dumpster, and Vanessa knelt down, lifted the other edge from below and heaved it up over the lip as I pushed it in. As we repeated these motions with the other half of the mattress, a bus boy came through the back door and lit a cigarette. His nametag said Juan and I recognized him as somebody who had brought me my Macho Burritos in damp plastic bags. He seemed to register what was happening just as we replaced the flap over the protruding memory foam and walked away.

“Hey,” he yelled after us, “you can’t put that there!”

“Hey, lady,” he tried again, and I could hear him take a few steps toward us. “Lady!”

I glanced back and saw Juan, his arms waving, his cigarette smoke catching the breeze. He froze as our eyes met and he said nothing, just stared. I turned back in the direction of the apartment. The warm breeze carried a hint of cigarette smoke as it moved slowly by. To our left, cars honked. The sun was beginning to set behind the roof of the Arco across the street, the rooftop AC unit glistening against the orange sky, the scent of refried beans licking at my nostrils as I walked away. Juan stood by the dumpster in silent reflection.

Denise grew up in a small Western Washington town and lives in Seattle. She received her BA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington’s Seattle campus and her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington’s Bothell campus. She likes dogs, hip hop and mountains. Her fiction can be found in Delay Fiction and Typehouse Literary Magazine.

Caitlin Lydon

Bad Dog

A man named Billy Gunther walked into the shelter with a three-legged chihuahua. This was his fourth adoption and his third return. I kept my eyes down at my desk, using my tongue to push a loose tooth at the back of my mouth. 

‘Adopting or returning?’ I asked. I tried to say as little as possible to people at reception, as I found the adoption and returning processes equally depressing. Most of my days were entirely punctuated by lonely people signing forms to adopt dogs, hoping this decision would change them, and lonely people signing forms to return dogs, hoping this decision would change them. Billy was an exceptionally lonely person. We had had a meeting about him in the break room last month – my manager Jolene thought he was trying to fill some sort of hole in his life with dogs, and that we owed it to him to find the perfect one. I thought that he gave the shelter a big cheque every Christmas and lived two blocks from the shelter – if you denied him something, chances are you would bump into him two or three times on your way home to discuss it.  

‘Listen, you know how much I want to care for these dogs, you know how much I support this shelter.’ Billy put both hands to his chest, yanking the lead he was holding up with him. ‘But if the dog isn’t safe to own, it’s impossible. You know that. She growls at my rabbits, snaps at me – not worth the risk. Behaviour problems, you know?’ Billy let go of the lead and pulled his hair into a thin grey ponytail, his hands shaking slightly. I watched veins in his forehead spasm as I passed him the return form. Addict or sick, it was hard to tell. Maybe he just had low blood sugar. The dog sat by his side, sniffing his leg.  I covered my jaw with my hands and tried to feel for signs of swelling. This morning I had woken up with my finger in my mouth and dried blood on my lips.

‘Right. Well, you know what to sign - our behavioural officer will need to speak to you about what went wrong so they can add it to the file.’

I took the dog behind the reception desk and put her on my lap. The skin around her recently amputated leg was pink and scarred, warm to touch. I spent most of this morning googling ‘bloody gums’ and ‘dead tooth’ and ‘losing teeth at forty.’ Eventually the black hole of the internet led me to reading up on gangrene, chronic numbness and phantom pain.   

‘She might be hurting, you know’ I said, leaning over the reception desk as Billy scribbled his excuses.

‘Who?’

‘The dog. There’s this thing called phantom pain - how when you get a limb removed the pain of the limb can still exist. You feel it even though it’s gone. She might be in pain and not know how to tell anyone.’ I looked down at the dog, who was shivering slightly. Billy looked at me, mouth slightly open. For a moment, he stayed very still. Then he slammed the return form onto my desk.

‘Bullshit. That whole thing, whatever you just said. I’m trying to help these animals and you’re talking about something wrong with them that I wouldn’t know? I do a good thing trying to help these dogs.’  Billy stopped yelling to cough up something at the back of his throat, swilling it around his mouth. ‘She’s got behavioural issues; I saw them. Same as the last dog.’

‘OK, fine maybe she does. But where does that stuff come from? She might be-’ Billy moved his face towards the screen. My shoulders seized up as his breath fogged up the plastic.

‘What’s your job here? You’re a receptionist, not a… dog psychiatrist or whatever it is you’re talking about right now. It’s not my fault that she’s a menace.  I care for a lot of animals at home, not just the deranged mutts you’re keeping here - you know what, I don’t have time to see Jolene, get her to call me.’  Billy walked out of the shelter, leaving the door open behind him. 

*

Later that morning I spat blood into the sink of the women’s bathroom. I thought I saw a tiny piece of tooth floating in the spit and was trying to pick it out with my fingernail when Jolene walked in.

‘Jesus, what is that – is that your blood?’ Jolene clutched her chest and moved around me, as if I were contagious. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand.

‘Um. Yeah. Something’s up with my tooth, it’s dead or rotting or something– or maybe it’s already gone and I’m just feeling the pain of where it used to be.’  I laughed and wiggled my fingers at Jolene. She looked at me with concern. ‘Never mind, I’m sure Billy will tell you all about that on your call.’

‘He already called me. Apparently that chihuahua ate one of his rabbits and you were very rude to him.’ Jolene stood with her shoulders back, her body perfectly aligned. Jolene went to yoga classes every day after work. She was passionate about telling people it wasn’t for her physical health, but spiritual. She once told me her hips felt so open after a class that she burst into tears on her mat. 

‘The chihuahua Billy brought back today? That’s not true. I called him out on another dog return and he lashed out, but trust me, he didn’t say anything about her eating a rabbit.’ I laughed at the absurdity as I began to wash my hands, but Jolene remained stiff. 

‘That’s really not your job. You do not know the intricacies of how this shelter runs. If a customer tells us that the dog he adopted is violent, we don’t just-’

‘Have you seen this dog? He said she growled at his rabbits, that was it. He’s lying because I made him feel like he wasn’t some kind of saviour. He’s an idiot.’

‘Idiot or not, if there is evidence the dog was dangerous, which Billy says there was, we have to put it down. Billy is a funder, OK?’ Jolene pursed her lips and let out a slow, weird breath. Yoga breath, maybe.  ‘Your job really isn’t that hard, I don’t have time to deal with complaints about you on top of everything else. Jesus. Why don’t you go and get a dentist appointment or something.’ Jolene left the bathroom before I could respond. I spat into the sink until the spit ran clear. I realised my hands were shaking as I placed them to the tops of my thighs, where the dog had sat. 

*

 Guilt settles in my shoulders. Always has. I had been doing shoulder rolls at my desk for about an hour when I decided to look up the chihuahua’s history, in a file I was vaguely aware I was not allowed access to. She’d lost her leg to bone cancer. My uncle Lawrence had bone cancer a few years ago. It ate away at his body until his left arm had to be removed. He was also a creep and a drunk and died alone at the bottom of his stairwell, but for a few months after the amputation, he didn’t drink at all. It was the longest he’d been sober. Free of something rotting inside him, and he knew it. It was his second chance. Sure, he had spent it on booze and continuing to pat his nieces too low on the back, but at least he got that chance. I thought about the quivering body sat in my lap. I pushed my tongue under my tooth, until I could feel the gum underneath it. I felt a twinge of pain shoot through my body and kept pressing until the pain made my body prickle all over. I walked down to the kennels, unlocked the isolation cage where the dog was kept and put her under my coat. I let blood drip out of the mess I had made in my mouth, I walked out of the shelter, got into my car and drove away.

I pulled up at Billy’s bungalow as the sun was setting. Barely five o’clock, but I liked it that way. Lighter for longer always made me feel guilty. His lights were on and his curtains hadn’t been drawn. I pulled the dog onto my lap and tried to see inside. As I opened the car door, I realised I didn’t have a plan. All I knew was that I wanted a confrontation, a recognition of what he had done. Maybe what I had done, too. To fix it. My jaw was throbbing, and a thin metallic taste filled my mouth. I put the dog under my arm and walked towards the house. As I walked to his door, I saw him through the living room window. He was sat, knelt next to his TV, with a white rabbit by his side. Bent over, his hands covering his mouth. Shaking slightly, as if he had just stopped crying or was about to start. I squinted into the window, trying to find the other rabbits. I felt a vibrating under my arm. The dog was staring through the window, teeth bared. Shaking, growling, snapping. I pulled myself out of sight of the window and clung to the dog until she calmed down, resting the back of my head on his front door. Why could I only see one rabbit?

I ran back to my car covering the dog’s mouth. Once I was back inside, the house looked dim. The dog hopped off my lap and sat on the seat beside me, curled into a ball. The patch of skin where the fur wasn’t growing back looked raw under the glow of the street lamps. Chicken skinned. She looked so small and her ribs were showing. She didn’t look full enough to have eaten a rabbit. I looked back up to the house and watched the lights turn out. Whether he was conserving electricity or already going to bed, I don’t know. Sad either way. I looked at my phone. The shelter would be closing in half an hour, expecting the dog. Expecting me. My swollen gums were pulsing and the sensation was starting to spread to the back of my scalp. I reached into my mouth, holding my breath. I twisted the tooth around with my fingers, feeling roots and nerves snap, until the tooth finally ripped free from the gum. When I held the tooth in my hand it was mostly grey and covered in blood. I poked the dog until she turned to look at me and showed her the tooth – shoving the smell of blood under her nose. She barely sniffed it before curling back up into her ball. I suppose as tests go, it was not the most conclusive. I ripped up a pack of tissues and stuffed a few up my bleeding gums and bit down, hard. My phone was ringing, the shelter probably. I silenced my phone and started the car.

Caitlin Lydon is a fiction writer currently studying for a Professional Writing MA in Falmouth, Cornwall. A story of hers recently made the official selection for the London Independent Story Prize. She is an aspiring Twitter user at @caitlydon.

Kellene O'Hara

The Wailing Woman

Fearless. She had no fear. She stood the edge of the precipice. 

Her mouth was open, as if she were singing, as if she were speaking. 

I could not hear her. She was silent to me. 

But I knew that there was sound. I knew that there was something even in its absence. 

I ran home and reported my sighting through the misty morning on the cliff. My mother said the woman in grey was a trick of the light.

But light does not play games. It is a physical entity. 

I knew she existed, that woman. I felt her presence with me always. 

I felt grey. 

The greyness grew as I grew. The saturation of color faded until everything was shaded in grey.

Although my mother assured me that I was fine, I felt sick. 

There was something wrong, I thought. At first, I was convinced that the greyness was an environmental concern, a result of pollution. I knew that I must travel to find color once again. I sat on a bus and I watched the grey rocks go by the window frame. Rock after rock after rock. This way the way that the earth was meant to be. It was meant to be a series of grey slabs, cracked and rough. 

This was the earth. Everything else was an illusion. 

I settled into a life where I drank grey tea and rented a grey apartment where I slept under a grey blanket. I paid grey bills and grey rent. I live a grey life until I almost forgot the word grey. I nearly forgot color altogether. 

But one night, a man asked me, “What brought you to the city?” 

And I answered instinctually, “Color.” 

I could not forget why I came. 

I came in search of color. There had to be color somewhere. 

My mother continued to tell me, over crackling phone lines, that it was normal for the world to turn grey. She said it happened everywhere, to every woman. She said it was part of growing up. 

I didn’t want the world to be grey. I wanted color. 

I convinced myself that my mother was wrong. My mother couldn’t be sure about the absence of color in the rest of the world. What did my mother know of the world? There had to be color somewhere. 

I wanted color more than I wanted anything else. 

I spent all of my colorless money on a grey ticket. 

I went to another grey city where the streets were grey. The buildings were grey. The streetlamps were grey. Everything was grey. 

Perhaps my mother was right. Perhaps color no longer existed in my world. 

My arms were grey arms. My hands were grey hands. My legs were grey legs. My feet were grey feet. My hair was grey. My eyes were grey. My body was grey, grey, grey.

I wanted more. 

I wanted more than grey. 

I wanted to see color. 

I wanted color. 

If it wasn’t the world, if it was me, then it could have been a medical condition. 

I went to the optometrist. I was turned away at first. But I insisted on being seen. The optometrist reluctantly examined my eyes. 

“As I have said, this isn’t a physical condition,” she said. “There’s nothing in the medical books to suggest that there is any cause for concern. It just happens.” 

“You see grey too?” 

“Of course,” she replied. 

My eyes were broken. I could not trust them. 

I went to the streets. Women were walking. I stopped them.

“What do you see?” I asked a woman.  

“What do you mean?” 

“This building, what color is it?” 

“Grey. Like everything else.” 

I stopped another woman. “What color is the sky?” 

“Grey.” 

I stopped a woman. I stopped a woman. I stopped a woman. 

What color is the grass? What color is the water? What color is the world? 

Grey, grey, grey. 

We were all grey. 

There was one final test to perform, one way of confirming a theory that I had long ago suspected. No, a theory that I had been told by my mother. A little girl passed and I stopped her. 

“What do you see?” I asked. 

“What do you mean?” 

“This building, what color is it?” 

“The bricks are red.” 

Red. I had heard that word long ago. That word meant something to me. What was red? What did it look like? Had I forgotten? What did it mean to be red? I could not recall. I needed to see it. I wanted to see it. 

The names of colors, perhaps that was the code. I went to the harbor and looked at the boats. I gave them color names. I tried to focus on the words, hoping to inspire memory of color. 

But the boats were grey boats on a grey sea. A grey fog rolled in. It became a foggy day and I could barely see. But I saw, in the distance, a glimmer of the woman in grey. Her mouth was open, wide. Across the water, the sound carried to my ears. She was no longer silent. 

But she was not speaking. She was not singing. 

She was screaming. I heard her screaming. 

I joined her, screaming into the bay. 

I screamed until the woman in grey had faded into the mist. 

I was alone. I became silent, but the sound continued. 

The sound pierced the greyness. There was no source for the sound. It existed without cause, a haunting siren call designed to drive them mad, all of them. The entire country. It infected them, it seeped across the seas. 

The world was sick with sound. 

Kellene O’Hara is currently pursuing her MFA in Fiction at The New School. Her writing has been published or is forthcoming in The Fourth River, Sheepshead Review, and Ab Terra Flash Fiction Magazine. Her Twitter handle is: @KelleneOHara