Joshua Gessner

And Then It Rained

Our family’s first dog was a black Labrador Retriever, and when we bought him, he was only a few months old. He was a dark color, charcoal, and small enough to hold with one arm. His eyes were the color of chocolate milk, and when I was younger, I used to think it was because he drank too much of it as a puppy. His top coat of fur was short and kempt which framed him well, and allowed him to stay warm through the winter.

We called him Chase. He loved to play more than he loved to eat, and though my mother—whose name is Mary-Lynn—was never fond of throwing a wet tennis ball, I enjoyed throwing the ball around and seeing his ears flop as he’d dash across the yard, stumbling when he tried to stop himself. After all, it was how he got his name.

“Chase, go chase!” I said.

I had wanted a dog since I was eight. I saw a Purina One commercial featuring a Golden Retriever plodding its way in front of a family that sat on a sofa watching television. The parents had large smiles, a young boy between them, and the pup lay down at their feet. They laughed as the remote was found under the boy’s cushion.

A dog, a young jubilant Golden Retriever—that I assumed would act the same as the dog on the television—would make me joyful just the same. It would remain peppy, innocent, and ignorant with a flapping, flicking tongue as it hung wet and stupid in the air.

Chase proved to be a far more problematic pet than I’d imagined though.

It began when I asked Lynn for a dog.

“Why not,” she said. “I’ll ask your father.”  

David—who was not my father, but a man she met when I was five whom she liked to call my father—said no. A week passed, she asked David again.  

Then, David said yes. In response, she stomped her feet, fell silent when he entered rooms, and rolled her eyes whenever he spoke that day. I envied David.

I asked it be a Golden retriever.

“We’ll take a look around and see what we can find,” Lynn said. David’s answer was yes, and he was ignored by my mother.

Two silent days passed of my mother’s brooding. David found me in my room writing an English essay and slipped his head between the door and its post. He remained there as he spoke—a bodyless fool.

“Hey, Millie, don’t want to bother you. Your mom and I found a black lab that’s more our vibe,” he said. “Door open or closed?”

“Closed.” I said, and then it was.

The next morning, Lynn made him coffee: two sugars, four creams, extra caramel. Extra sweet, just like you, she said to him.

In eight years, Chase tripled in size. The fur at the end of his snout had grown whiter, the whiskers on his muzzle were longer, and they were congregating closer toward the nose. He had gained quite a lot of muscle in his legs, though it was countered by a bad hip—not unusual for a dog of eight years. I also had a new half-sibling: five-year-old bouncing baby Joel. The mistake never corrected.

Lynn and David’s reckless behavior birthed the young blond boy who enjoyed screaming, pissing, and riding the tricycle – the last of which he was allowed to do freely as long as he stayed in his mother’s line of sight. He was the gift nobody needed, with a distinct and infallible no-return policy.

In those years, he had probably gained over fifty pounds (much like Chase) which had fitted him nicely, seeming only slightly overweight. Sometimes, however, it seemed David wanted to change that, as he often snuck pieces of fried-chicken and apple slices onto Joel’s plate and under the table for Chase.

“Keeps the boys fed,” David would say with a grin.

With Joel, though, came new and unwelcomed struggles. We fought over who would cut the grass, do the dishes, watch Joel, etc.

At the time, Lynn was returning from her work at Dinah’s Diner. Joel sat on the couch watching Looney Tunes with his chubby legs tucked under him, “crisscross apple sauce” as he was taught, and I lay on the tussock carpet below tugging at one end of a knotted rope which Chase clung to with his teeth. I shook it this way and that, his head following, the two moving as one. He was transfixed by its motion, but his attention was stolen as the front door flung open.

Lynn came in looking a little wiped. Her armpits were damp with the dark, sweaty circles of manual labor, her eyes were red and fatigued, and her hair was wiry from the steam that often flooded out the kitchen doors of the diner. She went to put her hair in a pony-tail as she stepped in, leaving her exhaustion at the door with a sigh.

Chase dropped the rope and I went searching for another toy to capture his interest. I grabbed the big green ring that rested off to my left, and squeaked it to tease him and get him to look at me again. It worked and he breathed heavily, smelling the new thing. Like the rope, I tugged and tugged, his teeth setting tightly around the curious noise-maker. All the while, I felt Lynn glaring at us from above.

“What about this one?” I said. “Come on. Want it?”

“Let Joel have a turn,” my mother said.

“He doesn’t want to. He’s watching something.”

“You didn’t ask him.”

I let the words pass as I went on tugging the toy, squeezing it and feeling Chase jerk himself backwards trying to break my grip.

“Millie!” She said. I said nothing.

She came over and took the toy. Lynn went over to Joel then, knelt down and spoke in a high, amiable tone to her son.

“Hey, buddy, want to have a go with him? Come on, take a turn. Isn’t he cute? He wants to play, Honey.”

Joel glanced over at the pup; his brows raised.

“Go on, take it.” She said.

Joel started to cry as he took hold of the green ring shoved in front of him, and Chase plodded his way over with a smile and a loose tongue, ready for another go. I swear he hadn’t a clue what was going on; he just wanted to play.

“Great, now look at what you did.”

“What do you mean?” I said, my face contorting with disbelief. “How the hell is that my fault?”

“Don’t use that language around Joel.”

“This is your fault, Lynn. He didn’t want to. He was watching a show.”

“I’ve had enough. Room, Amelia.”

I slammed the door to my room with a grunt, and clenched my teeth together; my eyes were welling up with the frustration I refused to vent. I flipped her off with both hands for twice the effect once the door was closed. Sometimes it was the small victories that mattered. But, even with the door closed, I could still hear Joel’s muffled sobs. He must have been one of the ugliest criers in the world. His snot was always dripping, slowly oozing its way down to his lip while the fatty bottom one quivered.

I never blamed Chase for any of it. Partly because he wouldn’t be able to defend himself if he wanted to. But I also couldn’t stay mad with him if I wanted to.

The fact is, I wasn’t a very happy kid either. I had to find small things to make me smile. The smell of gasoline before David put the nozzle back in its holster; the rustling of leaves as they flicker in the wind; the feeling of driving down a steep hill, when you sink a little. I could go on walks, even just down the street, and find a pebble on the road that sparkled and was smooth and not be afraid that someone would take it from me. It was mine and I would smile because I had put the pebble in my pocket; it was safe with me, at least until my mother saw the bulge in my pocket.

Chase made it even easier; he had a way of pulling a smile out of me. It was a sort of automatic reaction. When it was just him and me—napping with him, washing him in the bath, playing on the floor—those were the times that I felt my muscles ache from smiling. Whether Chase was a trouble-maker or not, it made no difference to me.

Though, my favorite times with him were probably whenever it rained. We liked how the rain pattered against the windows; the blackness of wet pavement beneath heavy shadows; the sound of sloshing puddles as cars sped past. He’d come to my room then, because everyone else was always too busy to pay him any mind, and so I could be alone with him; without being lonely.

We even liked to go on walks when the rain fell lightly enough, and I let Chase lick at a few pools gathering by the curb. Then, when we got home, he’d shake himself dry leaving an ungodly odor of sulfur, fruit and feces while his tongue would hang out as he waited for me to dry too. When the rain fell harshly, however, battering the house, we felt safe with one another; sometimes, it rained so hard we couldn’t hear anything outside my room and I could say anything to him then, because he was the only one who could hear and was incapable of judging me.

Two years later, though, Chase would die, and I would stop doing those things.

When it happened, the midday sky was a strong, deep, gray and was filled with many clouds clumped together, curtaining off so much light, and the clouds never broke. The air came with the soft, infrequent chirp of bluebirds and sparrows and there was a coolness too that needed no wind to spread it. I had woken with a sharp sting in my throat I thought might have been the beginning of a cold, and I was happy because the cold, dark weather carried promises of rain.

Chase was sprawled out somewhere on the kitchen floor, lifting his head to see a squirrel resting on a branch and nibbling on a nut. He tried to stand and jump and scare off the little animal, but I could hear his claws scratching against the wooded flooring for traction and failing to get it. It was a loud sound and I could hear it from my room. His bad hip had worsened, and had left him to strike his feet at the wood and tire himself out. It came more in the last couple of years, and it had made me sad because the effort in the sound was of old things trying to be young again. I left him to try for a while, hoping he’d find the strength to stand and helping him up once I knew he lost it.

After that, the whole family gathered around Chase to talk.

“I had to get him again.”

“Christ, seriously?” David said. “Little guy reached the end of the line.”

“Poor thing,” Lynn said. Chase wagged his tail and moved to sniff me while she went on. “He’s been a real trouble-maker, but I’m going to miss him.” She clicked her tongue; shot a look at us like we were the dried gum on the heel of her shoe. “Remember when Joel would play with him? How he’d tug his little tail and make him run all around the house?”

 Over the next half hour, they shared stories about him and I knelt down to his smiling face and whispered to him. His tail wagged at the air excitedly, making me think he might’ve gotten a word or two.

“Hey, buddy. I’m sorry you’re hurting. It’ll stop soon, don’t worry. Just know that I love you—that I always have and always will.” I hugged him then, careful not to crush him too hard because he’d grown fragile over the years, and I gave him my love. Love like the kind a parent gives a child. David carried him gently to the car, Chase was stiff and whined a bit in his arms, and the rest of us went after them.   

It didn’t take us very long to get there. David was a fast driver and didn’t mind speeding in residential areas, especially during emergencies. He placed Chase between Joel and I, his head in my lap, as Joel cried over him.

“I know, Honey. I’ll miss him so much,” Lynn said, watching the road.  

Luckily, they were able to take us right away. The doctor visited swiftly and analyzed Chase’s hip with careful hands. He told us somberly and with his eyes fixed to the ground that Chase would likely need surgery, that it would likely do little good, and we’d likely have to do it all again. So, we chose to spare Chase the trouble and he left us to say our goodbyes.

For the millionth time that day, we told Chase that we loved him and wished him the best, and Joel tried to run and give him a hug but we pulled him away. Chase was hurt and wasn’t able to be loved so strongly then, and my mother didn’t want him to get the smell of him on his jacket. She thought it would make the grieving process too difficult; she took him to the car in order to spare any unnecessary tears. David and I chose to stay. We wanted to see him off. I cried quietly, petting Chase as they euthanized him. David said something in Chase’s ear and placed a hand on my shoulder. Chase’s eyes closed and David and I left together. I let him hold my hand on our way out.

As we started back home, Lynn sat in the back with Joel and I listened to the wheels on the road, churning the concrete, pushing us on. On and on. The birds flew overhead and trilled terribly on their way south, and in the back came the ugliest cry in the world.

“I want him back,” Joel said.

He cried and his tears made me grimace. I didn’t like his words; the Is and the Mys were wrong. Chase is happier, I wanted to say, that’s what matters. Not you today.

My mother wrapped her arm around Joel’s shoulder, held him tight, and took a finger to fix his crazed hair as she whispered to him. His tears were wetting her shoulder and he wheezed out his grief.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, “How about we look into buying another one?”

I could hear the volume of her words rise and fall in step with the heaving of Joel’s chest. 

Everything outside was blackened by clouds and on the windshield a couple of raindrops fell, a thousand more following their descent. Lynn went on holding Joel as he wept, telling him things she’d hoped would settle him. I couldn’t really hear them, though; I was listening to the rain prattling against the car, falling like pebbles all around me.

---

Joshua Gessner is a student at Southern New Hampshire University, an editor for Ghost City Press, and has received his associate degree in English from Manchester Community College as of 2021. He has been published in multiple Black Hare Press anthologies such as: Twenty Twenty, Oceans, Ancients and Year Two; his other works can be found in Manchester Community College’s Literary Magazine, The Queen City Review. Joshua often spends his free time reading the classics and honing his craft.

Chris Klassen

From Time to Time

The people who remained were initially ecstatic when the first drops of rain began to fall.

For almost two years now, the drought had baked the land hard as concrete.  It was harvest season.  The corn stalks should have been close to six feet tall, beautiful in their green and yellow.  Instead, they were dead brown, laying flat on the cracked earth.  They had tried their best to grow earlier in the season but it had been impossible.  There was no moisture, no nutrition.  Only relentless heat and murderous sun and inevitable acceptance.

There had been teases of rain.  A few times over the last few months, dark clouds had formed, the wind had increased, and the farmers had crossed their fingers.   The flashes of lightning and crashes of thunder seemed encouraging.  But just as quickly, the clouds passed without a drop and the sun resumed its pounding heat and continued evaporating the ponds and drying the wells.

Families had experienced droughts before.  They were an accepted and understood risk of rural life.  But this was beyond acceptable and understandable because it didn't seem to have the potential to end.  And it wasn't just the crops that were perishing.  Mice, rats, snakes were perishing too, dehydrating in the fields and on the gravel driveways and dirt roads.  Fish lay belly-up on the edges of dry stream beds.

Even the old-timers had no answers and no historical point of reference to explain the conditions.  The Miller family, for example, farmers on their land for over a century, were speechless.  The farm's founders, the original Millers, a young married couple, emigrated - escaped - from Manchester in 1898 when they were only twenty years old, leaving behind an existence of poverty and urban misery.  Somehow, they had been able to scrape together enough money to buy third-class tickets for a trans-Atlantic crossing to New York.  It was horrific with sea-sickness and overcrowding.  They arrived with nothing in their pockets.  Successful in their escape, they quickly discovered that the urban misery of their past was going to continue in the city of their new world.  But they worked as hard as they could at whatever they could find.  They sold cloth and pots and pans and cleaned houses and shined shoes.  Mr. Miller occasionally engaged in petty crime when times were really tough, sometimes stealing food, sometimes stealing from houses in the richer neighbourhoods.  He went to jail once.  Mrs. Miller occasionally engaged in petty crime too, but never the kind that she confessed to her husband and he never asked where the extra money came from.  It was understood between them that desperation could not always afford morals.

After several years of struggle and intense discipline, they had saved enough to purchase a plot of land a few states away and so, with no experience, they left the city, migrated west and began the Miller Farm.  Over time, with a growing family, more employable hands meant greater returns.  They learned and harvested and were satisfied and decently fed.

It was never easy, they would honestly admit to that.  The Spanish flu took two sons.  The Great Depression almost broke them and the war years diverted their attention for too long.  There had been dust storms and locusts and parasites.  But they had always survived, subsisting at the least, living well from time to time, and the farm had passed relatively successfully from one generation to the next.  Today the Miller descendants felt they had no choice but to concede.

Leaning against their fence in front of the barn, they watched as the auctioneers emptied their house and loaded the truck.  With all their savings and resources gone, it was the only option left.  The children had already moved to the city, hoping to re-establish.  The parents would follow, first to a motel, then hopefully to something more permanent.

They weren't alone.  Neighbouring farms had foreclosed and neighbouring farmers had also fled.  The Pembertons, another generational farming family, a few miles up the road in the next county, along with having to face the drought's wrath, with a disappearing bank account and dry wells, had to contend with another tragedy on a morning a few weeks earlier.  Mr. Pemberton had discovered that none of his poultry, over three thousand of them, had survived the night.  Whether it was tainted feed or a bacteria or a flu, he didn't know and didn't have the energy or money to investigate.  He had to incinerate them all.  After, when the coop was empty, he chained the front door shut, walked back to his house, and told his wife it was time to go.  She agreed.

Despite the desperation and dejection, there was never any shame.  No one had done anything wrong.  They had cried in miserable frustration and yelled and cursed the Heavens and promised to be good and go to church if things got better and had been as patient as they possibly could.  And then, finally giving in, the majority of them locked the doors, conceded defeat to a power they could no longer oppose, and left as innocent victims, feeling ignored and powerless with prayers unanswered.

Only once did people hear of a suicide.  More would not have been surprising.  Mr. Ramsay, a very friendly and passive man, was discovered in his bed, laying on his back, arms folded across his chest, looking peaceful.  An empty bottle of sleeping pills was on the table next to the lamp.  His wife had passed a couple years earlier, taken by a degenerative disease of some sort, never conclusively diagnosed.  He had been alone on his farm since then.  His children visited regularly but they had their own lives to manage.  The drought and its effects were his tipping point.  The note he had written explained his thoughts.  He thanked his family and friends for their kindness and love and told them not to be sad, he had lived a good, productive, fulfilling life.  He apologized if he had let anyone down.  Everyone understood.  No one judged him but they were still sad.

Across the entire region, only a very few families had decided, and had the means, to endure no matter what.  They were fortunate enough, because of either inheritance from rich relatives or investments that had unexpectedly soared, to have considerable savings that could outlast any emergency.  Even if it meant locking everything up and leaving for a distant state or an even more-distant country, they would always be able to come back when the crisis was over.  For now, though, they would remain on their farms, at least for a little while longer, and survive on imported food and water that few others could afford.

So when the first drops of rain began to fall, the people who remained were initially ecstatic.  This time the black clouds and wind were not a tease.  They had developed slowly over the course of the morning.  People saw the clouds, heard the wind, scoffed without hope, and expected nothing, not willing to be disappointed yet again.  But then they heard the sound of drops hitting the ground and they looked at each other in disbelief and walked outside.  They stood on porches and on driveways, arms stretched up to the sky, almost in positions of Sunday church praise, and let the cool water hit their faces and run down their arms.  The rain came down softly and steadily, dampening the dust, cleansing.  The sun, their forsworn enemy for so long, was nowhere in sight.  The clouds were black and full.

The shower, refreshing and relieving and encouraging, continued for an hour, maybe a bit more, before its intensity started to increase.  Now the drops were large and the shower had developed into a storm and it was getting violent.   The clouds swirled.  The rain hit the baked-hard ground like little liquid explosions and could not be absorbed into the concrete earth.  Its intensity increased some more.

The residents, back in their houses, looked at each other with a new fear.  They watched as the water level started to rise and they listened as the noise of the rain hitting cars and tin roofs and wooden verandas got louder by the minute.  The water had nowhere good to go so it went where it could.  It found its way through little cracks in window frames and walls and front porch floors.  It rose and overpowered enthusiastically as new enemies do.

Recognizing the new crisis, the people who remained unplugged appliances and gathered as much food and water and as many blankets as they could carry and climbed the stairs to top-floor bedrooms and attics.  The rain pounded on the roofs deafeningly.  It entered and dripped down walls.  Everyone knew that life, at least for the next little while, was going to be horrific.  But life during the drought was horrific too and they had survived.  With no more anger to feel, they sat fatalistically but acceptingly on their floors and listened, eating when they needed, sleeping when they could.  For the first while, there was discussion but soon there was nothing more to say.

After six days, in the early morning of the seventh, the sound stopped.  Hesitantly, everyone dared to leave their rooms and descend their stairs to the lower levels.  Furniture and dishes and paper floated in water that was four feet deep.  In a procession, they waded, one by one, to the front doors, struggled through, and continued outside.  Porches were soaked and unstable, driveways were submerged and fields looked like swamps.  Creeks and streams, bone dry only a couple weeks ago, were raging.  The clouds and wind were gone and the heat of the sun was back again.  It was disastrous.  Everything seemed so random and pointless.  It looked like a beautiful day.

---

Chris Klassen is a hobbyist writer living in Toronto, Canada. After graduating from the University of Toronto with a degree in history and living for a year in France and England, he returned home and worked the majority of his career in print media. He is now living a semi-retired life, writing and looking for new ideas. His work has appeared in Short Circuit, Unlikely Stories, Across the Margin, Fleas on the Dog and Vagabond City.

Ali Sargent

Sequence Cause Effect

Doctor is passing by the ward when the music starts. It makes him feel giddy, as if the grey floor tiles are swaying beneath his feet. Five patients moving slowly, but unmistakably dancing, their hair prickly on their scalps. At the front Otto raises a hand, a tremor in the tips of his fingers like the string of a musical instrument. He is wearing an indigo gilet over pyjamas. Step shuffle, step shuffle. They scoop arms into the air, manoeuvring in little steps. Doctor watches from the door as nurse Alex leads the activities, a skim of white light overhead. There is a dulled space between the patients; when one of them moves to the music the others follow in delayed sync, as if leaning on each other from afar. Otto, entangled, enacting the dance’s small reversal; last week Doctor gave another patient, Stephanie, the same drug as Otto and it took her life.

In the afternoon Otto is in bed again, one flaky toe out the blanket, a quiet whistling coming from his throat. His daughter stands at the other side of the bed. Doctor tells her that he has been responsive to treatment. There is a pause.

So –

But we don’t have the option of keeping him here, Doctor says. His supervisor sometimes uses the word ‘luxury’ here, but Doctor doesn’t.

What will you do? She asks.

We can offer home visits.

She asks what Doctor means. He shifts his weight from one foot to the other, hands her a piece of paper. You are eligible, it says at the top.

So – you’re kicking him out?

Doctor feels a blot of anger, wants to scratch the moment out. He does this every day; checks vital signs, analyses scans, keeps a patient diary. Tells people there is no room. She looks at him as if he were telling her to be a cactus in the desert. A silent cactus who can survive for three months with no water, which is how long she’ll be on the waiting list, he thinks.

She finds him again in the corridor half an hour later.

It feels like you’re just playing games with us, she says, her voice one high, choked note. A plastic bag dangles from one of her wrists.

What’s the point of a doctor who just sends people home again?

The hospital falls away, becomes a pain that circles his body. On the step outside the ward he pictures his patients dancing, palms swaying, can almost feel their presence. His colleague Jack is out smoking too. Are you sure Otto should leave, Doctor wants to say. Instead he says, we’re going to vacate him. Jack nods. That’s their supervisor’s word: vacate. Between them is the cool air, the smell of lunch somewhere else turning his stomach, smoke dry in his mouth. He thinks about when he first wanted to study medicine, in the last years of school. When Doctor was a teenager he loved the ticking over of bodies, the self-regulation. Your body will fix itself, he always told friends when they asked for health advice. That’s who he should see tonight: Milo, Milo who’s been saying drinks for a while. Drinks with Milo always happen on a Friday, always near where Milo lives. But Doctor hasn’t gone in - How long? A year? He can’t remember.

Maybe he was just arrogant to take this job, he thinks, coughing. He considers spitting on the ground but doesn’t. This is his penultimate placement before qualifying: first there was orthopaedics, then paediatrics, then a mental health ward. All with their difficulties but somehow easier. Paediatrics felt good, the children’s bodies like beating hearts. At the end you could nod and say: they will be here for many more years. It gave him back a sense of the infinite. The elderly care ward was different, so easy to make a mistake. He cups a heavy chin on his hand. But also - and also - there is Sofia, the obliterating love in his life, who at some point told him that love is an irreversible change, one that we accept and then sometimes forget. We are not the same when we begin and when we depart from each other, he had slowly agreed, piecing the argument together, back to Sofia, like two fingerprints smudging. He calls her now, phone pressed to his ear.

They’re old, Sofia reminds him.

How can we take such big risks with them? I don’t want to experiment with people.

You’re not. They’re old and he’s responding. That’s –

What happens?

This is why I quit, she said.

But Sofia hadn’t quit, she had done the same undergrad as him, she just wasn’t a doctor. Now she works in the Comms department of a medical charity. Sometimes they meet for lunch and she tells him about their campaigns, trying to whittle down the words -

Learn a language to avoid Alzheimers, she says. Try and make that one snappy.

It’s perfectly snappy, it’s a solution.

Don’t go to A&E unless you absolutely need it - that one I reject, Sofia continued, her fork moving with each word. I won’t make people feel responsible for underfunding which is out of their control.

On the phone she asks him when he’ll be home for dinner. I need your help with something, she adds. Doctor smiles. From the steps he watches a paramedic close an ambulance door slowly, its yellow diamonds catching the light. Doctor sips the air, squeezes the brown root of his cigarette, thinks of Otto’s shivery breath.

That night at the pub his friends look at him from around a little wooden table.

How long do you have left? Milo asks.

Two months after this placement, Doctor says. One year left to qualify.

The Milo who is sat across from him, biting a lemon between words, is also the Milo from years ago, egging houses dressed as Frankenstein on Halloween, crispy brown hair, from a posher neighbourhood. He was going to be a journalist, and to find out what’s really going on you need to take risks, Milo used to say. Doctor remembers flicking through Milo’s photos on the way home from first year classes, the times when he still went to parties and drank in the same way these guys drink now. Milo’s photos were of him in places that looked like the moon but sunnier. But now they are talking about the special effects in a film Milo saw recently, then the actor in it, then he looks over at Doctor and says,

We saw the doctors on the news. That’s you, isn’t it?

I’m a junior doctor, yes.

What’s it about again?

Pay, mostly.

Salaries –

Shouldn’t there be a limit to how long you can strike, says James.

It’s good - I support it, but they can’t really not work.

I’m not actually – 

Are you striking?

Doctor’s friends look at him, his fingers on the edge of the beer mat. He wonders if he is imagining their searching expressions.

We trust them with our lives, says Darren.

James turns to them. I agree though, he says. They need better conditions or we’re all fucked.

In the pause Doctor watches the slice of lemon bob like a medallion in his glass.

Are you still in paediatrics? You liked that, didn’t you?

Doctor nods, thinking of the infinite. Of Otto and of Stephanie who took the wrong medication.

Milo sits upright.

You know Matt Thomson? He announced. He’s pregnant. I mean, Anna is pregnant. I reckon he’ll keep it. I mean they’ll keep it                  Or like, as far as I know from knowing him.

Imagine if this was our grandparents’ time, they’d be old for this.

Darren looks back at Doctor.

Look at the picture, you know about this stuff. What kind of baby are we talking? Fully cooked, still raw?

About four months. Sort of a real baby at this point.

They hover their hands over the phone screen             white noise, form-solid, electricity or breath.

Here’s its head

An alien in the fridge kind of baby

At the bar Doctor can see his reflection stretched in the brass above like a comic strip. His friends are getting up to dance, hips knocking glazed wooden tables -

Doctor’s friends are singing a song together                  The song is waves.

Doctor thumps a hand on his side and feels his tongue fat in the bottom of his mouth,

touches the metal ring on his finger. Doctor opens his mouth wide                  

Wide like the front door of a house.                Doctor’s heart is the floor

Someone in the carpeted room full of coats          thick pint glasses, someone says -

Leave a little room then –

Dancing in the middle of the pub? The tables are right here, fucking idiots.

Palms swaying, weight shifting.

Doctor thinks of the whistle-throat man whose name he can’t remember, his mind a shuffling blank. Of when he thought he would be able to care for people. There is a word behind Doctor’s teeth. The search for a name.                    And there is blonde Milo laughing safely into the night, beer froth at the corner of his mouth, or in a lunar landscape, his boot knocking a rock, scudding along the floor. Milo’s responsibilities which fit the circumstances of his life -

You’re going to end up alone, Doctor murmurs

What mate? Huh?

You don’t know what actual responsibility is, Doctor replies

Alright

Okay

Alright man

I don’t get what your problem is -

Someone is pushing Doctor a little, then pushing really pushing then almost knocking him over – two eyes, two dots on a domino coming towards him, swaying. Shoulders bump and jostle. A security guard at the door is advancing towards the group, his eyes full of precise, sharp identifications.

Is there a problem?

Doctor flaps open the door of the pub and runs. Skips three bus stops, catches one not even seeing the route. The bus cocoons through the night. Sitting somewhere near the back, Doctor sweats off some of the beer. Faces shuffle between sleep and work.

The first dizzy hours            Bodies move through the deciduous world          Through the sick and the hungry unnamed new, new -

Death fizzes at the hospital floor, but still we cling to sequencecauseeffect

The bus doors open. For a minute Doctor watches an electrician working across the street, two green doors open like a wardrobe in front of him, imagines two snapped wires in the electrician’s hands, electricity at his feet. The softening current. Doctor stands in the doorway and Sofia on the stairs. Midnight, one, all the hours Doctor has no answer for.

I’m not that much later than I said                I only finished a few hours ago.

Her eyes and his. The lights are off in the corridor. Sofia walks away from the doorway he is still standing in. Calls out something from the kitchen.

Well.

You’re awake anyway                 The kitchen light splitting the house

She is pushing and pulling doors and plates in the kitchen

He is opening cupboards

You’re hungry aren’t you.

Well –

Want this?

She slops something at him. He takes a bite, breath audible as he chews.

It’s frustrating you are so late.

I want to quit, he mumbles back. I can’t keep abandoning people –

You think you don’t have choices but you do, Sofia calls out to him. Doctor is standing by the sofa. His patients all crowd in              They are learning to dance, palms swaying, weight shifting, hips pointing one way            then another

His heart is the floor his mouth is open like a door –

There are no more beds. I am leaving, Doctor mouths to his patients. Shadows trace

over them                 

Doctor stretching out on the living room floor, open-belly starfish.

I’m sorry              I love you         Yeah I know

I’m sorry

Everything is fine

Yes

I’m sorry to everyone, really.

Sofia the science communicator. Sofia who knows how to tell people all of this. Articulate it. How to sell it, even. Lying on the floor, doing push-ups in the air. He rolls over, sees the chest of drawers Sofia always leaves open, the playstation he bought a few months ago, the cable touching his feet              the grey carpet             the grey carpet on his face. He loves playing playstation. Watching the figures move like grasshoppers through angular landscapes. Sofia tells him where to mind, where people hide behind trees or in houses, or crouch down tired, where he can gun them down. He loves Sofia whose head floats above him now. He thinks of the woman waiting for her father to receive more care. Doctor laughs, the carpet a desert behind his head.

Sofia -

Doctor hiccups a tiny hiccup of vomit into his mouth and suppresses it again. Hides his eyes. His palms tingle with sweat.

Yes

I want

(white noise)

A baby.

---

Ali Maeve Sargent is a writer from London. Her work has appeared in Lighthouse, and in 2022 she was shortlisted for the Out-Spoken London poetry prize and longlisted for the Aurora Prize for Writing.

Scott Taylor

RIGHT ON THE EDGE OF PARADISE

I was in a van, heading south.  The night was hot and black.  There were about two hours before the show.

"Man, we sucked last night," Zack whined. 

Zack was the lead singer.  He made a lot of noise even when he wasn't singing.  I guess most lead singers did that.  The other two guys in the band were Stuart, who played bass, and Nasty Boy, who played drums.  I played guitar.  Nasty Boy's real name was Wade but he got real mad if you called him that.

"Nah, we weren't that bad," Stuart said. 

Stuart was so tall we could barely fold him into the van.  He always sat in the back where there was more room.

"Where are we playing tonight?" asked Nasty Boy from the driver's seat.

"A place called Davey's Dive, just outside of downtown," replied Zack. 

Zack always made all the arrangements.  We didn't have a manager and so Zack kind of did all that stuff for us.  It helped when you could talk like he could.

"What the hell town are we in anyway?" Stuart asked.

"Richmond," said Zack.

"Never heard of it," Stuart grumbled.

"It's only the capital of the state, dumbass," Zack laughed.

"Yeah, but I don't live in fucking Virginia, do I."

We were on a road trip, the latest in a series of about twenty.  Zack insisted we needed to tour as much as possible to get ourselves known.  I didn't know anything about Richmond or Virginia or any other damn thing, I just knew we were a long ways from home.  We'd been driving for hours and I could already tell I was going to be exhausted for the gig.

Nasty Boy found the place and we pulled into the parking lot, tires crunching on gravel.  It was a roadhouse bar full of old beat-up cars and motorbikes.  We got the gear out of the back and started dragging it inside.  We were running late, there were only a few minutes before we were supposed to start.

"You boys are late," the bartender said when we walked in.

"Sorry 'bout that," Zack said.  "Made a few wrong turns back there."

We hadn't made any wrong turns, we were just late.  It was a decent sized place but there were only about five people in there.  Another one of these.  I didn't see the point in playing if we were always going to be playing to five people.  I could count on one hand the number of times we'd played for ten or more, especially recently.  We weren't going to 'get ourselves known' playing to the bartender and his three dopey drunk friends.

We got our gear set up on the little stage and started right up.

"Hello, Richmond!" wailed Zack.  "We're Cosmos, and we're here to rock your world!"

A few heads turned, then turned right back again.  Stuart looked at me and rolled his eyes.  We'd talked about this shit before.  I turned and looked back at Nasty Boy and he looked about the same as ever - raring to go, chomping at the bit, ready to pound the hell out of those drums.  Nasty Boy didn't care, he just lived to play drums, he'd play for the furniture if that was all there was.

Nasty Boy counted off and we launched into orbit.  That was how Zack always put it, the way we were supposed to start the show.  It went with the name Cosmos.  I strummed my chords with as much energy as I could muster, Stuart fluttered his fingers along the bass, head down and frowning as always, Nasty Boy flailed around like an epileptic on speed and Zack made love to the microphone, his hair all in his face, crooning away like the diva he was.  We were about ten seconds into the show and he was already starting in with the hands waving in the air and the girlie posturing and everything else.  There wasn't a single girl in the place, I didn't know who he thought he was going to impress.  The rednecks didn't like what they were hearing, apparently, there was some hooting and hollering starting up in the back - it wasn't Willie Nelson, it wasn't Waylon Jennings, it wasn't anything they recognized.  Soon enough they'd be throwing bottles.  We'd been through this before too.

We finished the first song, to no applause whatsoever.  A beer or two would have helped, but we were all underage and the bartender didn't look like the type who'd look the other way.  It was going to be a long night.  We'd been doing this touring thing for almost two years already and I was sick to death of it.  You drove around all day and night and got nowhere fast, you played songs for people who couldn't have cared less and made about enough money to cover expenses, if you were lucky.  Zack and Nasty Boy could have gone on doing it forever but Stuart and I were pretty much done.  The second song started up, this one not quite so fast, and now they were ignoring us completely.  Fine, it was a rehearsal night.

We went outside for our break and stood around in the parking lot.

"That's just fucking ridiculous," Stuart said.

"You say that every night," Zack spat.

"Because it always is.  Every single night."

"That's not true, the show before last was a good one.  There were a lot of people there and everybody was having a good time.  Lotta chicks, too."

"You hooked up that night," said Nasty Boy with his customary goofy grin.

"That's right dude, I did..." said Zack, and the two got to reminiscing about it.  Stuart looked around to see if he could get away with lighting up a cigarette, and since no one was in sight he decided to chance it.  The last time he'd done it, a cop had driven by and almost hauled us all in.  I stood there in the dark with the sweat pouring down my face.  Man, was it hot down south.  I couldn't imagine having to put up with that for an entire summer.

Ten minutes later we were back inside and I was strapping my guitar back on.  Only about ten more songs to go.  We launched into the second half of the set and now Zack was jumping in the air like David Lee Roth, trying to whip the crowd into a frenzy.  There was an older lady who'd shown up and she was taking an interest, standing off to the side and grinning.  Way too old, even for Zack.

A few more rednecks wandered in as the night progressed, and by the end there was actually a sizeable crowd.  Some of them even appeared to be digging the music now.  The beer was helping.  It was Friday night and everyone was getting drunk, getting loose, trying to kick back and have themselves a good time.  It was an okay scene, I supposed, and yet more and more I was feeling like I never wanted to see the inside of another bar for the rest of my life.  I forced my hand to continue its strumming and picking, forced a smile or something similar to my face.  Almost there.

The set finished with a bang, our big finale number, the song Zack was most proud of.  I'd never thought much of it but Zack was convinced it would be a top ten hit someday.  He told us all the time.  He screeched the last line, jumped in the air one more time, Nasty Boy crashed into the cymbals in a big orgasmic climax and we came flying to a halt.  There, finally some decent applause.  We were on our way to superstardom after all.

The bartender came over.  "You boys sounded real good, here's your pay."

Fifty dollars, split four ways.  Take out money for gas and food and maybe we'd get back home.  What a crock.  Meanwhile there were CEOs out there dressing up in suits and playing golf all day long and getting paid a million dollars for nothing.  At least we gave the people a few tunes, at least we did something.  The world was fucking silly.  We got the gear back in the van and drove off.

"It's way too hot to sleep in the van tonight," Nasty Boy said.  "Let's get a motel."

"Come on man, that's gonna blow every dollar we just made!" Zack said.

"It's too fuckin' hot," Stuart agreed.  "I'll die if I try to sleep in this."

"Chris, you're the deciding vote.  What say you?" Zack said.  All eyes turned to me.

"Let's get the motel," I said.

The motel it would be.  We drove for another few minutes until we came to a rathole place right next to the highway.  There was exactly one other car in the parking lot; considering the fact it was a Friday night, that wasn't a good sign.  But the room wasn't too bad, a little musty and mildewy but nothing we couldn't handle.

"We're gonna get bedbugs," Stuart said as he lay down on the bed.  There were two twin beds, plenty of room for all.

"Where's that bottle of Jager?" Nasty Boy said.  "It's in your bag, Zack, isn't it?"

"Sho nuff," Zack said, yanking the bottle out and immediately taking a swig.  "Let's get this party started.  Livin' the life, baybee......"

I'd seen this about a million times too many.  'Getting the party started' meant Zack and Nasty Boy getting shitfaced inside of an hour and then howling like loons before passing out.  We'd be lucky if we didn't get thrown out of the place.  Then again, there appeared to be no one else there so we'd probably be okay.

Even so, I didn't feel like hanging around to watch.  Stuart was already out cold and snoring and so when Zack went to the bathroom and Nasty Boy had his back turned I slipped out the door.  The air was so muggy I felt like I was having trouble getting it down my throat.  The moon was out, half hidden away behind the clouds, and the crickets were making one hell of a racket.  That was the other thing about the south, the size of the insects and the noise they made.  Whole nuther world down there.

I stood confronted by the night.  A ribbon of two-laned asphalt, going to the left and to the right, a wall of dense forest in front.  Me and the road and the trees and nothing else.  Better than bars and motels.  I wasn't going to make it in the band much longer.  Maybe when we went back home I'd put my notice in.  Zack would be pissed but I didn't care; Zack was basically an asshole anyway.  I looked left, then I looked right.  Nothing but darkness in either direction, no distinguishing features of any kind.  I picked left and started out.  I was going to walk until I got to something, whatever that thing was.  One needed goals in life.

A car came by, another young kid like me.  "You want a ride?" he asked.

"Sure," I said, and got in.

---

Scott Taylor is 48 years old, and hails from Raleigh, North Carolina.  He is a writer and a musician, and an avid world traveler.

Sarah Reichert

Distance

There wasn’t much a runner could do. Her feet wouldn’t stop bleeding unless she stopped. And she couldn’t stop. More than that, the road kept cycling beneath her. She’d worn-out crying a while ago. Her body long lost every tender droplet of moisture. Sweat away, cried away, sucked away by the ever-present distance and the pounding of wounded feet that would. Not. Stop.

She didn’t count days anymore. They bled together like the stains on her socks; like the painted ticks on the highway, one after the other into endless lines. Delineator posts graciously keeping the miles in check.

Gotta know your miles.

Time was in heartbeats that didn’t come. In the pounding of feet no longer present on this earth, yet somehow always moving. Her real carcass, the real Bridget, lay crumpled and leathery on the side of the road, somewhere miles behind.

She tried to stop when the body dropped, but the relief of its weight gone was like a sling shot snapping back in the launch-code aftermath. She looked back to the wasted mass that used to be her only way out. She never stopped to wonder if she missed Bridget. It seemed a pointless question to ask. How can you miss something you can’t remember being tethered to?

Can you miss your umbilical chord?

Still, she was here. And she could not stop.

What else can I do? The runner formally known as Bridget asked the wind that blew memories of her hair free from a scraggly ponytail.

Without the body bag? How far could I go?

How far can a soul go, untethered?

No purpose.

No reason to stop.

She passed by a field; one just the same as the last. Green and stagnant but for the waves of Indiana heat rising off irrigated dirt. The fences the same, farmers on tractors, cows grazing.

This soulless square sat no different.

But what was that, tucked into the corner of the field? Just beside the dirt road, stretching its long arm to a distant farmhouse, stood a small boy, his arms propped up on the fence. It struck her strange that his eyes followed her as she approached. For miles she was a wind, felt not seen. Yet here were two beady blues on her, above a sour scowl.

Bridget’s specter paused, looked away from the ticking lines, the pebbled shoulder, the endless distance. She stared back. Surely he’ll look away, or through, or go back to doing little boy things. But his eyes pierced like hooks into soft hay bales.

“Where you runnin’, lady?”

His voice impatient and unnerving; the click of a grasshopper’s frantic leap.

She felt the breeze skim a layer of ragged soul away.

I don’t know.

“Don’tcha have a home? I ain’t never gonna leave mine.” The boy turned away, sunlight hitting the columbine’s teeth marks marring his round, toe-headed skull. The specter stared in bereaved awe until her feet, knowing the distance still left ahead, dragged her on.

---

Sarah Reichert is a novelist, poet, blogger and dabbler in non-fiction. Her work has been published in Cooch Behar Anthology, Rise: An Anthology of Change, Sunrise Summits: A Poetry Anthology, The Fort Collins Coloradoan, and Poetry Ireland Review. She owns and operates The Beautiful Stuff Blog, a quirky website devoted to writing and building up new authors.

Kelly Blane

Today, and Yesterday

There are days when I can see clearly and days when I cannot.

And anyway, nothing is there, and nothing is not there. I said this all in a very long train. The train was not really a train. It was more like a bus. There were wheels. Nobody has been believing me lately.

Believing things takes leaps, and leaps are for people suspected of taking. There is nothing to take anymore. All the things to take are behind this heavy plexiglass—for example, apples. Apples are the food to take at the grocery store because they are fiber-rich and vaguely breast-shaped (they do fit well).

However, they’ve been waxed and are now behind glass. Which, in my personal opinion, ruins the taste. What I have been accused of is:

being very dramatic.

So I’ve said to others when they say things like, “that’s very dramatic,” I say, “let’s do other things.” We do not always do those things, but still, there’s that weight to it. The other things could be talking to children at the playground, renouncing our affiliations, or standing in line and not going in. the not going. Sometimes I plan to go somewhere, like church. I like to wait in line. I like to stand in the communion line. I like to watch people in the communion line filing in and out. in and out. I like to cup my hands once and walk towards the door. I like to watch their bodies swell the pews. My body is that standing one. And usually, they are sitting. Then I leave. What matters is that I went, not that I stayed.

So, there is no point.

No-one is ever really noticing. When I leave, they are thinking of bread. And the bread is that white round bread, which is sugar. And sugar is also white, but also not bread. They are all thinking this thought. And they are not noticing the cupping or the leaving. Or if they are, they are not saying.

The other choice is the children. And the watching of them. They notice that I’m noticing them. Children are more aware of that. Since they are shorter, they notice everyone looking down. Unless, of course, they are a very tall child. In which case, they’d be noticing everyone noticing them.

I don’t do this like a voyeur. Nor is it odd. I am old, so people assume that I am, which is not true. This feels like a lie. The standing there is more like this: once I was there and then I was not. And the children notice this. The earlier you realize, that-the smoother the day. And I will do anything to make anyone’s day smoother. I am pretty good at ironing.

Once I loudly announced that I was a communist. This was humorous to those around me because I enjoyed having multiple boxes of breakfast cereal open at once. Usually, I did not even finish the Raisin-Bran. Now everything is glassed, and it’s one per customer. But still, not everyone is a Marxist. Which, I think, proves something.

My daughter says, let’s go overhear and talk.

Mom, it’s not like that. It’s not like this.

She wears these curtains on her head. All of them do. Is it difficult to see?

Mom, it’s not a hat. It’s a had.

They were in fashion once. I tell her about the importance of this.

The importance is this.

She gives me these numbers to put on the fridge. What does it matter? I can’t take them. I can’t take anything anymore. So what does it matter? It’s not that I don’t feel old. I feel old enough for sex. Finally, I do. And now, no one will touch me. When I was born, my mother was a virgin. When my daughter was born, I was not a virgin, but I had not yet had sex. I told her it’s okay to lie sometimes.

At the hairdressers, everything smelled like pine needles. And I asked, “did someone die here?” No, no one died. They did.

I get my haircut somewhere else now.

---

Kelly Blane is a graduate of the University of Connecticut’s creative writing program. She is the recipient of the Aetna Children’s Literature Award and Jennie Hackman Memorial Fiction Prize. Currently, she serves as a poetry editor of the Aurora Journal, an eco-feminist literary magazine.

Kyle Walsh

The Imagination of Despair

1

In a warmly dark room with three windows that give out onto an infinite hive of canopies, I sit watching candleshadow arpeggiate across the wooden floor. Ants are building a two-way route from a breadcrumb, which sits atop an empty notebook on my desk, to a crack at the bottom of the door frame of the closet. I barely have enough energy to move my head, but if I do, I look at the leaves that cycle constantly in a soft wind outside. Clustered together, all of the trees seem to move as a single unit. The moon shines a bright silver-blue that sharpens the wind and the leaves. I slowly twist my head back to its natural resting position. Ants move in and out of the shadow of the flame.

I’ve been sitting here for so long I can feel the labored breath of the windows. The ceiling fan motors slowly, as if it wants to stop, yet continues on with an unconscious desire that flows against its will. The couch is slumped and despondent. A dozen nearly empty water bottles sit in different parts of the room, pensive as if guarding their final swigs of backwash. All of the objects in the room have gained animacy, but a reluctant one. Only the ants move with rigor and brutality.

I sit in despair, my head like a block of cement rebarred onto an alien body. As ants scurry in and out of my vision, moments of life seem to vanish as if they never even existed in the first place, like the extinction of species yet to be discovered.


2

How is that despair has no form, no body, yet compasses and encompasses every space?  

I seem to have acute awareness of every sound, every insurrection of the eyelid.

The canopies sway and tremor outside.

There seems to be some fracture in the self, in the very heart of existence itself. And this is where I encounter the regime of pure silence. Not the silence of a forest in a spring afternoon, but the silence of a black hole. Silence as the absence of sound — a fate not even a ghoul could undertake.

And yet, out of pure curiosity, I want to know what is spit out of the tail of a blackhole. To know what magical chaos arises in this anterior darkness.

I want let the despair weigh me down totally — up until this point, I’ve been rejecting its final push, as if I’ve been in a coma and living out of a feeding tube. I let despair press my slab of head down, so that it feels as if it is in the center of my chest. It sinks lower, and I’m looking up through my umbilical cord. It drops even further, all the way to the floor, where I can hear the light tapping of the ants’ feet. Three of them crawl toward me to inspect. As they get closer, I see that they are not ants, but three tiny feminine demigods who wear ant exoskeletons as armor. They march around my head, sneak up through my hair, then press a button that ejects a platform out of the back of my skull. Then they hop on and ride in and gives themselves entry to some kind of turret in the upper part of my spine. Their collective voice is more metallic oscillation than voice:   


3

“You’ve wasted your life away muzzled, your voice buried at the bottom of your neck. Do you feel the gigantic lump rotting there? That entire planet of screams waiting to be birthed? Begging to be loosed like a cloud of cicadas over the sorry tribulations of your life? We’ve assessed the somber architectures of your body. How you walk, how you sit, how you speak. You move through life as if trapped in an invisible straight jacket, the rules of which you obey at every moment, never budging beyond its illusionary borders. And what do you have to show for this timidity, but some icicles of semen that hang in the sewer over beds of human guano?

Here are your earliest poems, freshly retrieved from the chamber pot where we took turns shitting on them. Lines that do not contain a healthy dose of poison do not intrigue us! These are the remnants of some puppeteered discourse, engineered with elegant rhetoric, composed by one who’s only talents are in trained decomposition. This is mere trafficking in words and ideas. This is an impotent pumping of the rickshaw of poetry across the wasteland of a decaying empire.

Now you sit here a sullen creature, neither of the ground nor the air, just a middling little middle creature — in other words a human.

And what is human to us now? When we repeat the word over and over again, it sounds like nothing more than “man” getting sucked down a vacuum.

We’re finished with your empty image of the self. We’re going to force you to swim for years in a stinking bog, where you’ll pay witness to your own wretchedness.  

Upon return, you’re going to get drenched in a thousand different forms of rain, then get caught in the upward blizzards of the mind & body,

witness all manner of cataclysm and apocalypse,

light paths of fire through your own house,

get sick of living and try to eat your own hand and then find a sort of perseverance in its regurgitated ugliness,

get sick of living again and find better music in the farts of flowers than could ever be ossified onto a page,

then liberate ephemeral scrawls from your discarded selves,

& wander relentlessly above the event horizon of the ocean.

You’ll get lost in the glorious and terrifying mental landscapes of life —

and best of all, none of this requires any doing on your part. Becoming is not a question of doing. We’re taking care of that:  

We’re sacrificing Kyle Walsh.”

---

Kyle Walsh is a writer and musician residing in Sebastopol, California. Their work has appeared in Dryland, The Penn Review, and 8 Poems, and is forthcoming in Blood Orange Review. They play drums in psychedelic and indie bands in the Bay Area.

Iva Haze

Her Symphony

I'm sitting in a café, looking out to the sea. An endless Ocean. In front of me are three glasses - one of the glasses contains orange juice, the other two are empty. I do not tolerate caffeine. The café is almost empty, it is still too early for beach parties. A little further away from me sits an elderly couple. They do not talk to each other while drinking their morning coffee slowly. The older man seems to be stiff in the body. The woman does not look at him, she also looks out to the sea. At the right corner sits a younger woman writing something diligently in her notebook. The girl who works at the café discreetly glances at her wristwatch. She sighs lightly. I drink my third orange juice and look back at the sea. A shining sea - whose waves, like a calm melody, bounce against the sandy beach, back and forth, at the same pace.

The beach is almost empty. A naked woman lies on a red towel, in the shade of a small bush. There is a large newspaper over her head, under which you can distinguish the shadow of her dark hair. Her breasts look straight up at the sun. Her dark pubic hair swirls in round loops below her belly. Her small feet are covered with thousands of white grains of sand. She does not look like a tourist. Her tan is natural.

About every quarter, her slender fingers grab the newspaper above her head and set it aside. With the help of her right hand, she easily stands up from the red towel and walks slowly down to the sea. She swims for a long time in the cool water. She swims far out, so far out that her black hair just becomes a small dark dot on the horizon. The glistening water makes her appear even smaller. Once she comes out of the water, her whole body glitters with small drops of water, pubic hair loops hanging down in wet spirals. Slowly she goes up to her red towel and lies down on it again, without drying her body. She puts the newspaper back on her head.

She waits for a quarter of an hour until the glossy water drops on her body have dried, and then she repeats the whole process. She slowly stands up with the help of her left hand, swims for a long time, comes back, lies down on the red towel, puts the newspaper over her head. Her small heavy breasts bounce easily up and down every time she goes in and out of the water. When she has taken her last morning swim, she takes a white shirt dress out of her bag and wraps it around herself. She does not dry her body before putting on her shirt. Wet nipples are soon clearly visible through the wet shirt, like two red cherries on a vanilla milkshake. Her movements are a musical composition, where her swimming movements in the glistening sea water are the chorus.

The woman leaves the beach in a hurry. In the evening she is back to take an evening dip. I'm back too. I'm sitting in the same cafe. I drink a glass of non-alcoholic white wine. I do not tolerate alcohol. She is wearing a thin black dress, no underwear, and no towel. She leaves the dress on the beach and enters the water heated by the sun of the day. The evening's swim is short. She does not swim far out, rather takes a dip in the water and goes back up to the beach again, puts on her thin black dress and goes into the café where I sit and wait for her melody to begin. Her thin dress has become really wet from the sea water. She smiles to herself before quietly sitting down at the black piano in the right corner. Her long fingers lightly pull over the piano keys. Methodologically, she plays a melody, then another. The tourists at the café applaud. I drink my wine and applaud.

By midnight, most tourists have already left the café. The woman is still playing her tune. She always smiles to herself when she plays, seeming to enjoy it even more than the tourists. She usually plays Chopin. Like a world-famous pianist, she touches the keys easily and quickly. My eyes do not have time to follow her quick movements. A famous naked pianist at a very ordinary, insignificant beach café. Do tourists realise how sweet and wonderful her melody is? She only stops when it is closing time. Her fingers do not seem to be a bit tired. The woman leaves the cafe and the beach, only to return the next day.

Sometimes she lets me go home with her. We never talk to each other. She orders me with her hands. She takes me quietly by the hand and leads me to her small room with white walls. There is a large balcony. There is no bed. She sleeps on the red towel. The room is almost empty. There is an old turntable on an old wooden stool. On the floor there are LPs in piles. Every night she plays a new record. Always a new tune, always a new dance. Before we fall in love with each other, we dance to different melodies in the moonlight that light up her otherwise dark room. She never hears what I whisper in her ears, she only listens to the music from the records. In the dark, she lets me embrace her, touch her. She leads my hands to her breasts, to her sex. The woman lays down on the red towel and lets me penetrate the deep sea inside her. My mouth finds her nipples in the moonlight, absorbs them in my mouth, warms them with my breath. I whisper in her ear, yet she does not hear. She still only listens to the melody flowing out of the turntable.

It goes on like this for an eternity, maybe for two. I drink orange juice at the café. She lies naked on the beach on her red towel, with the newspaper over her dark head. Slowly she puts down the newspaper, takes a swim, comes back, wet, brown, lays down on the red towel, puts the newspaper over her head, walks away, comes back, takes an evening dip, plays the piano, plays Chopin, lets me follow home to her, dancing with me in the moonlight, I love with her, enjoying her red cherries, she does not hear my whispers, just listens to the melody blasting through the old turntable's speakers.

An eternity later, we have finished listening to all her records. It's a stormy early morning at the café. The rain pours down from the dark sky, flowing down the glass windows. The sandy beach is wet. The holiday season is over, the tourists have gone home. Apart from the barista, we are the only visitors. She's sitting opposite me, more real than ever. Her black hair is set in a high ponytail. She is wearing black – a linen sweater and a pair of black shorts. Her yellow rain jacket dries on the back of the chair, her small feet sit comfortably in a pair of light grey boots. Silently she sips her hot coffee latte. She looks at me without turning her eyes and smiles. If the naked woman lying on the red towel was a mature sophisticated woman, the one sitting in front of me is a small child.

I say something to her, she does not hear me but continues to smile. This is the first time I have addressed her, apart from my nocturnal whispers of desire. A feeling of insanity rises like a heavy stone from my deep interior. I speak louder and louder but still she does not hear me. She looks at me questioningly, picks something up from her backpack. I see that it is an unsharpened pencil and a small red notepad. With childish handwriting, she writes something in the little pad. When she's done, she puts the pencil in the backpack again. She turns the block in my direction so that it is easier for me to read. The letters are small, crooked. There are three small words on the block.

I am deaf.

She continues to smile like a small child. When she has made sure I read the three words, she takes the pad out of my trembling hands and puts it neatly in her backpack. Before she leaves for good, she jumps up from her chair and walks over to the black piano. The accustomed fingers play Chopin's Nocturne.

I remember how I used to feel her moist sex during my nightly visits. Inside her stormed a deep sea whose bottom I never managed to reach. The tones that her fingers create reach deep inside me. Her melody reaches my fragile skeleton, breaks my legs in half, then throws them to the dogs to eat. She does all this with a playful smile on her face. It was never me she loved, it was the music, I think. I was her tool, her instrument, her muse. I see her now, lying on the red towel and every now and then glancing in my direction, looking at me, the man who quietly drinks one glass of orange juice after another without moving for several hours. I now see how she explored me, created me. Her fingers touching my body - they always played only one instrument, me as an instrument. And when the melody finally ends, the instrument will no longer be needed.

Before the composition ends, she suddenly releases her fingers from the keys, interrupting the melody. All the records, all her compositions are finished playing, it just keeps raining. She sits back on the chair opposite me and drinks her latte. The café is dead quiet, the only thing that can be heard is the rain pouring down. We sit quietly and still. She and I - we listen to the rain. Then she leaves me without even waving. She simply stands up and walks, without looking back in my direction once. She was never my imagination, I was hers. Then I know - the deaf woman's melody is over, and so am I. She closes the front door behind her, I dissolve.

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Iva Haze is a twenty-six year old history student in South Korea, currently writing a master's thesis on medieval buddhist nunneries in Korea. Throughout life she has been wandering from one country to another, gaining different experiences. Culturally she is very mixed. She loves to write when procrastinating her studies. Her work is inspired by everything from dreams to minor details she notices in her everyday life. She loves willow trees because they are somewhat chaotic and usually grow close to water. You can find her on instagram @weepingiva.