Poetry
After Meeting at an Awful Poetry Reading by Lewis Leicher
“Let’s keep things this side of surreal,” Daisy said to me,
unbuttoning my shirt. “I think we must have different
definitions of ‘surreal,’” I replied, putting my hand
on her pretty cheek, softly, while agreeing to stay
far from whatever it was she was hoping to avoid.
She didn’t mention it again.
We’d met that evening and were on my couch making out.
The truth is I didn’t know what the hell “surreal” really meant,
not generally and definitely not in this... context.
I thought it might mean bizarre or something somewhere
between bizarre and strange, with maybe a dash
of incongruity thrown in.
I looked it up the next day but still wasn’t sure what
she was saying. Maybe it was a line from a movie
or play, and I didn’t get the reference. Or maybe
someone once said it to her, in a similar situation,
and she thought it sounded cool. It did.
We continued to undress each other, gradually...
ignoring the concert coming from the next apartment
and an ambulance singing along below. Then she pulled
away a bit, stared at my face, and asked if we had met
somewhere before. I said I doubted it but, holding her hands,
agreed she did look familiar: “Maybe our paths crossed
at a half-decent poetry reading...” She laughed and led me
to the bedroom and we kissed some more.
I didn’t know her last name and was wondering whether
her first name was made up – she had said it was Daisy
and responded to that without delay, but I suspected
she might have chosen a random flower and, if we’d met
on a different night, would have been Iris or Rose or Violet.
“No one our age is named Daisy these days,” I thought. “I bet
her real name is something like Annie or Beth....” I didn’t
try to learn the truth and, instead, kept calling her Daisy.
On which side of surreal was that?
___________________
Looking back on that night, here’s my best guess about
what whatever-her-name-was was trying to tell me:
It’s fine to mix some fantasy in with your reality,
especially in bed, but try to keep it below...
let’s say... 30%. We did.
Old Judas Cain by William Teets
Snub-nosed monkeys on monorails
smoke cigars
Laugh at blue-haired tourists
who sip herbal teas
A preacher hands out pamphlets
to lost tribe members, who scan barcodes
to be saved by Jesus
Sisters and mothers
and another child of God
In the back of an unholy alley
just say once you used to know me
From a ghost town, where second chances
are rivers, and the whole fucking village is dry
Emily as a Poem for Elizabeth Willis by Darren Demaree
I lost the instinct
for right
& wrong
years ago,
but I know
I belong
to the dirt
when Emily
is blooming.
That is a reason
to be buried.
She is all
of my reasons
to not become
winter’s dusk.
It’s opulent, this
lack of judgement
in all seasons
& I am spoiled
by it. I lived.
She is proof.
OKLAHOMA MULE BOYS by Stephen Barile
Before the tractor arrived,
man and animal strained
to make to the soil yield
bolls of white gold.
Kindred in cottonfields,
plowmen walked the day
behind their mules
burdened with harnesses
and plows tilling soil
or pulling cotton wagons.
A tractor could do the work
of forty men and mules.
“Oklahoma Mule Boys,”
painted on the stake-sides
of the Model “A” truck
used to haul two mules.
An attraction at county fairs
and rodeos in the region.
Jack and a Mollie,
were much smarter
than the two brothers
dressed like hillbillies
from around Carnegie,
Caddo County, Oklahoma.
Mules regarded as pets,
like family members.
Favorites proudly shown
like a brand-new car.
Mules that could count,
pound out numbers
with their hooves,
add and subtract,
do long division.
Somehow, a 600-pound mule
could defy gravity,
on the off-the-ground end
of a teeter-totter,
a human on the other end.
Two backwoods’ hicks
found to be stupid
mules kicked them sideways.
At the end of the act,
in a display of manners
toward the audience,
they bowed their heads,
wide-eyed, and long-eared,
right legs before them.
Amid the applaud,
mules piled into the truck,
the boys drove in circles.
There was wonder
and laughter watching
a well-trained mule act,
in days before the tractor.
The Literary Bubble by Diana Raab
There’s a calm in this room, as people enter, scrambling to find a seat
for this reading of passions we both share. It’s not mine nor your day to read, but we gather to
support our literary friends. Had I known you’d sliver back into my life after those two months
away, I might have dressed for the occasion—the shortest skirt and tightest blouse in my
daughter’s closet.
I love seducing you, but there’s no warning of your rare appearance, those silvery blue eyes of
desire, framed by shoulder length salt and pepper hair, upon your six-foot three frame, and
glistening smile, a composite that pleads for my attention.
You stare at my tantalizing jeans, fashionable tennis shoes, a white blouse and purple shawl,
trying to hide secrets about your fantasy woman as you enter arm in arm with the one who you
call your partner.
You and I have never spoken any forbidden words of lust and desire. Our eyes and all the cosmic
forces do it for us, and in the climate of our literary world,
jumping into the sack with you would illuminate trouble.
For months I’ve shifted from longing to disgust wanting you in my space and then wanting you
gone. My heart cannot take this trance you put me in.
I am no longer seventeen. I hate games, but I still love hiking the mountains and baking
chocolate chip cookies and making love under a moonlight we both share.
Your presence confuses me, like grabbing a lobster in action. I am pulled into your intoxicating
bubble which engulfs me and robs me of vital oxygen, as I hold onto the desire to keep my own
family together.
The strangers in this room know nothing of these ethers which pass between you and I, as we sit
patiently waiting for poets to read, but just feel the beat of one another’s hearts.
I glance in my purse, scrambling for a pad, but instead pull out a knife. I want to cut through this
bubble you put me in. A Swiss Army knife— a gift from mother long-gone who used it to cut
apples for her horse lover, who I hated because she loved him more than me.
Suddenly, our bubble collapses, we walk out, way before the clapping and the last chance for
you to turn around and cast your spell on me. I didn’t want to see the face of that woman who
you fuck every night, while thinking of me. What I did want was for you to admit that I was the
reason you showed up tonight, but you never will. Men are liars.
Happenchance by Kathryn Lasseter
How odd is randomness?
If there is an order in things,
Est modus in rebus,
as my Tarot deck claims,
if we look for order and find it everywhere:
buildings, picture frames, arithmetic, calendars,
crossword puzzles, traffic lights, tv channels,
families, institutions, tennis,
Can coincidence be random?
We thrive on coincidences,
as when you pray for rain and soon after,
water rinses the sky,
or you run into your secret crush in the bakery,
when you are buying a lemon meringue pie
to eat at home alone,
after dreaming about him the night before.
Especially in novels and films,
can there be story without coincidence?--
a famished Jane Eyre fainting on the
doorstep of unknown cousins.
Are coincidences odd—or even?
Not so very odd—happening as they do
several times during the course of a day,
or not at all.
Sadly, despite our rage for order,
alignments are not ordained
by the stars, planets, moons,
or earth-bound asteroids.
I would not have met you.
except for a birth, two deaths,
and my husband’s failed
application to law school,
quite a conjunction.
Yet for forty years, we were out
of alignment, star-crossed,
living in different hemispheres,
out of sight, out of touch.
At last our paths have merged,
despite the pandemic,
despite the distance,
despite the alignments of others,
still waiting for the stars to uncross.
Despite the odds, we connect.
We are connected.
If odds favor randomness,
how can there be randomness?
How can there be stars?
How did we fall into each other again?
A Sonnet for 2024, set to the opening scene of Blade (1998) by Victoriano Cárdenas
“You better wake up. The world you live in is just a sugar-coated topping. There is another world
beneath it: the real world, and if you wanna survive it, you better learn to pull the trigger!” –Blade
Tonight, we dance. Our computers may be unable to follow past midnight, hiccuping forward
in the footprints of our broken time. I’ve heard whispers that The World might end next year,
and many have hoarded water, toilet paper, armloads of processed food, money, liquor, beer,
bars of gold, all stashed in the basement. We bought and ate bloody lies, and a pointed sword
dangles over our heads, ever closer. We live in constant fear of the Western descent toward
fascism, but I digress. For now, the tempo accelerates, pumping with thick bass, each seared
note coaxed in and out of gasping mouths as hearts and beats throb together, one entity to ears
thirsting for the raw, panting, collective exhaustion of all our worry, invisible to vampires’ bored
eyes sifting through a writhing crowd. The handmade sign on the DJ booth says BLOODBATH,
and who knows, maybe there’ll be one–every place and time whistles with screams or gunshots–
but, no: we’re here to forget we’re drained daily by work and rent and doing basic needs math
on our fingers at the cash register, hospital, courthouse. Coffers always empty. But not one stops
dancing, no: those white eyes and long sharp teeth are hypnotic tricks of the strobe, and no path
is cleared to the door and blood rains down to soak the dancefloor and everyone’s gulping shots
down dancing to metallic trance confusion as hot blood clots on us in a sticky corrosive swath—
and Blade just walked up in this club, but no one stops
dancing. They’re all drinking
the blood.
Time is a mistake that I kept making while my body spent her resilience pulling the
pigment from my foolish hands by Sarah Sorensen
The cactus bloomed a surprise, not unlike a violet. I peered into it, my fingers clasping the yo-yo, respooled into my fist. It was perhaps not a miracle. But it was a thing I’d never seen and that was enough. Running sock-footed forward, I knew better than to touch the billowing floss cloud of spikes. But I’ll forget this caution in my selkie life, slinking from the sea and casting down my pelt. I will kneel before her naked and let her bloom her twisted violet on my tongue. Her hands clutching at something unseen. And she’ll snatch all of the warmth that I encased my body in, my summer fading out. Forgive me, but she was something I had never seen. And I’d waited so long to touch.
“WHEN XIMENA IS SAD....” by George Franklin
When Ximena is sad,
The red anthurium fades to white,
The flags in front of schools
Hang drenched on their flagpoles,
And a burnt smell clings
To apartment hallways.
When Ximena is sad,
The dogs lie on their mats and stop
Barking at squirrels and strangers.
The black and white ducks
Take shelter under oak trees.
Clouds sink like a sudden frown
Above the cheekbones of sky and ocean.
When Ximena is sad,
The crows in her poems fly off the page,
Nest in the light fixtures, caw
From staircases. The fly who’d found
Heaven on an apple core buzzes
Hopelessly against the window.
The garbage chute refuses to open,
And the elevator on the right
Gets stuck on the 11th floor.
Ximena, don’t be sad. The world
Is fragile and depends on you.
My Beagle’s Tooth by Matt Thompson
lives outside the bounds
of her mouth.
I always joked it would fall out first,
but eleven years and it hangs on.
Free from the corrosion of her breath
we say.
A lone sentinel
never tearing flesh
as she runs down game,
as some men centuries gone
intended.
Only in her twitchy sleep
through blankets not bracken,
she bounds, pounces, and traps.
Her bared tooth striking fear
into tiny pumping hearts of hares.
She turns,
waiting for some ghostly version of me in tweeds
to pat and praise
her purpose.
Desiccation by Richard Stimac
The great rivers of the Midwest have gone dry.
Sections of grain burn beneath the August sun.
Seasonal floods refuse to follow their time.
This summer, the earth cracks like the thin, dry skin
of the old. In winter, the soil freezes to the touch,
as if the circulation has gone out of it.
The earth is in its dementia. If we make this land
our mother, how can a child witness the decline
of the womb that bore it, the breasts that gave suckle?
Our bodies are the true lands of our birth.
If from dust we came, to dust we return,
then, when all is dust, what have we become?
Prose
Local Stone by Ella Leith
The boy balances on the curb above the pooling gutter water, the asphalt glittering like quartz, and tries not to hear the buildings whisper.
It’s only the new ones that do it, the fancy townhouses and luxury apartment blocks that shot up recently where the line of flat-roofed shops used to be. The chippie, the laundrette, the minimarket with its plastic jars of clumped sweets, its freezers full of brightly-coloured tubes of sugar ice. Those buildings were cheap brick and pebble-dash boxes, unlovely and functional, open all hours. The newbuilds aren’t like that. They’re beautiful, built in stone, built to last—to outlast and outclass the rest. Gentrification, Dad calls it, scoffing to hide his fear. Already the rent’s doubled. His parents have discussed moving.
He doesn’t want to move. The walls are thin, the carpets are frayed, and the tiles in the bathroom weep tears of condensed steam under the keening extractor fan, but it’s home. It’s where the third floorboard in the hallway coughs in the night when someone gets up to pee; it’s where the loose panel at the back of the cupboard conceals a shoebox of treasures; it’s where the skirting board behind the TV is scuffed with purple and blue from crayon scribbles, and grey smudges from frantic attempts to remove them. It’s where Mo taught him crazy eights, taught him handstands, told him stories in the night—her voice drifting through the darkness, him drifting into dreams of witches and dragons and curses and castles. It’s what he’s always known.
He doesn’t want to move. Not without Mo.
The new buildings call to him constantly, voices as fine as dust catching in the corner of his consciousness. He always keeps as far away from them as he can, keeps road-side, tottering right along the curb however much his parents yell at him when he’s sprayed by
passing cars. Only for Mo will he venture near.
He found her in a low wall by a new townhouse’s front steps. “Jax, is that you?” He would have missed her whisper if someone hadn’t jostled him against the wall. Now, he visits her every day.
“We miss you,” he says.
“You have a case number,” he tells her.
“I don’t know how to tell them that you’re here,” he admits.
He’s tried to broach the subject with their mother. She’s started tucking him in again as though he’s still a little kid, reaching over to squash the duvet between him and the reassuringly silent breezeblock wall. Last night, he thought he’d try again.
“Do you think she’s alive? Mo?”
He felt her sharp intake of breath, her muscles cringing inwards, away from the question.
“What if she’s not missing? What if she’s just stuck somewhere?”
“Jax. Just... don’t. Please. It’s bad enough.”
She stumbled on the way out, steadied herself on the doorframe. He wanted to run after her, to throw his arms around her, but he was pinioned like an effigy under the faded yellow duvet cover.
Now, shuffling along the pavement, he wishes that Mo was further away from the glass-fronted showroom, the new, glossy one that sprang out of nowhere a few years ago. As always, he avoids the glaring gaze of the woman who runs it—Old Witchface, Mo used to call her. As always, she’s at the window, fidgeting with her jewelry, her eyes following the passers-by as though weighing them up. Quality Construction, reads the sign. Finest Local Stone.
She’s told him to clear off, before, to stop loitering, he’s lowering the tone of the neighborhood. She’d fixed him with a Medusa-like stare that froze his bones. But—“It’s our neighborhood!” he shouted back at her. “We’re not going anywhere!”
She’d fixed him with cold, knowing eyes. “Perhaps not.”
He crosses the road to reach Mo and sits down, resting his back against the damp wall.
“People are leaving,” he tells her. “Just going off in the night, leaving without saying goodbye. The school might have to close next year, Mum reckons.”
“Some of us can’t leave,” she says ruefully. The stone next to her murmurs sympathetically. Jax ignores it.
He wants to ask Mo what will happen to her if they leave. Instead, he asks what he always asks.
“Can I free you?”
“Not easily. You’d need to bind her with a hair from her own head, take the ring from her finger and turn its stone three times. Like in the story.”
Which story? There were so many. He loved to hear her gentle voice in the darkness, but he never listened much to the words.
Further down the street, two men with hard hats and high-vis jackets are pacing around in front of another row of boarded-up, scruffy houses. The closest one has a vinyl banner stretched over its face, proclaiming a new development, elegant villas, fine local materials, high-quality homes for the discerning resident. In the overgrown front garden, there’s a red plastic tricycle on its side in the nettles, yellow pedal kicking forlornly into the air.
Jax gets to his feet, wipes his hands on his jeans to brush away the grit.
“I’ve got to go. Mum and Dad’ll get worried. You know what they’re like.” He pauses, realizing that she doesn’t. She doesn’t know how they changed after she vanished, how they became anxious and taut and shriveled. How the house changed, as though holding its breath, as though under a spell. How the third floorboard in the hallway coughs throughout the night, now, as his parents pace around in the darkness, worrying and wondering.
“I’ll come back tomorrow. Promise.”
The wall sighs, all the way down the course.
“OK,” Mo says sadly. “Be careful.”
The rain is falling harder now, passing in flinty streaks through the beams of the streetlights. Jax pulls his hood close and slinks away into the estate. Across the road, he can feel Old Witchface’s eyes still on him, weighing him up.
White Horse by Nathaniel Spain
When I reached the house, Nancy looked desolate. It was cold. She sat at the kitchen table wearing her coat.
‘I’ll go right out,’ I said. ‘Any idea which way he went?’
She shook her head. I told her to stay in case he came back, letting the farmhouse door thump behind me. Clouds scudded over the fields. The old stable was dark and empty.
I squatted, wincing at my knees. There were plenty of tracks in the yard. The older ones brimmed with rainwater. I soon spotted recent prints: the horse and the boy. Beyond the gate, in suppurating mud, the two sets became one. Hooves turned sharply up the hillside.
At my grandson’s age I had ranged over the hills. Their contour lines were like those upon my palms. I had followed the solicitations of distant woods and hilltops, to taste their air, to mark foreign soil with my bootprints. I would’ve said my daughter worried needlessly, had it not been for the horse.
We thought my grandson was lying until we saw it ourselves: a wild beast, haunting the hillside above the farm. As pale as milk, right down to its feathers. I had tried to catch it twice but the animal was clever. It disappeared into the clouds before I drew near, thistle and gorse hiding its tracks.
Where I failed, my grandson had been lucky. He led it down one evening by its long, snowy mane.
‘How did you manage that?’ Nancy asked. Her son told her it came as willingly as a little cat. She had said it must be lost, that she would call the police tomorrow to find out where it had come from. In the morning, both boy and horse were gone.
She wanted to report him missing, but I told her to wait. I said he might only be gone a few hours. Doing as boys do; playing the rascal.
Now I was in the hilltops, I wasn’t so sure. Clouds swaddled me. Cold and damp on my face. Each foot of grass emerged sudden and sharp from the white. I thought I should be lucky if I found my own way back to the farm.
I was beginning to panic when the clouds parted. The neighbouring ridge rose; a great green flank, framed by mist. Upon that moor I could see the horse. My grandson astride it without saddle or harness. The pair rode skywards, cutting higher and higher. I waved my arms, shouting, but neither looked back. The clouds claimed them again, as quick and dreamlike as they had appeared.
I ran after them frantically, tumbling through gorse. I clattered over sheep’s bones as pale as that horse, lungs burning, legs aching. When I struggled up that far hill, the clouds had thinned again. The sky cleared; a white sheet pulled back from a blue mattress.
The hill ended there, as flat as if it had been ironed. No horse, no boy, not anything at all – save short-cropped grass and the droppings of rabbits. They could not have gone higher; there was nowhere to go. Not unless they rode into the clouds themselves.
Where is everybody by Hannah Morehead
Ever since the pandemic forced work online, conforming to a standard way of living was no longer required. My back was curved into an arch, casting a hunched shadow across the floor that hadn’t been swept in weeks. A thin layer of dust had accumulated on the TV, door handle and kitchen countertops. An aroma of rotting fruit and meat stained the kitchen air, but I hardly noticed. I didn’t notice anything besides the flame at the end of the welding torch that burned brightly enough to leave pale-colored imprints under my eyelids. After hanging blackout curtains on every window, I could finally bury myself in my passion project.
I existed in a constant state of exhaustion. I only took breaks to use the bathroom or sleep. The house would shift around as my legs dragged the rest of me out the living room, past my desk covered with notes and old photos of the four of us, through the kitchen and to my room boasting a naked mattress. The sheets were stolen while I was washing them at the laundromat, and I had yet to buy replacements. My bed matched the rest of the bedroom; barren and slightly stained.
Sleep was hardly a break, however, as I had started dreaming of numbers and dials and graphs from the constant tests. Sometimes I would dream about Cassie, but those always ended with me waking up sweaty and shaking. The only upside is they would motivate me to work extra hard for the next few hours of useful consciousness. I knew I was on the verge of it, the coaster’s apex drop that would start the thrilling ride to discovery.
The fourth dimension was something I studied passionately. My obsession didn’t start until I studied it further at the lab after graduation, where I still worked five years later. I spent hours writing and reworking equations for the passage of time, reversing and skipping. I would write Fourier transformations and watch the waves twist and form into frequencies that intertwined with wave functions, all dancing about a common axis. It was nearly impossible, trying to constrict a four-dimensional presence to mere numbers and mathematical symbols tailored specifically to human understanding. And yet I couldn’t let it go.
Funnily enough, I couldn’t remember the exact moment the machine started to work. There was no Thomas Edison moment where I saw the bulb flick to life and suddenly realized I was the most acclaimed inventor of my millennium. It happened when my back was turned. Perhaps it’s because I wasn’t doing any of it for science. I was doing it for love.
I reached across the floor for a thin tool to move one of the smaller wires, and by the time I came back, the floor was shuddering. The area in front of the two arms sticking out below the screen was thin and waving, looking like a small pool of completely clear water. I blinked many times, initially thinking it was just an illusion of sleep deprivation. But it was a product of the machine, a punched hole through space and time.
I cried silently. The tears left clean lines on my dirty face. I was surprised I had water in my body to cry at all. The screen on the monitor connected to the tangle of wires above the arms had a simple prompt in white that illuminated the room amongst the black background.
DATE__LOCATION:
My typing was clumsy and shaking.
AUGUST 30TH 2014__413 EAST SIDE AVE, PLANCK UNIVERSITY
The pool shimmered and waved unsteadily, warping the colors and light around it. I could faintly smell a different air.
In my years of constructing the time shuttle, I had imagined cleaning myself up beforehand. I wanted to look good for my new life in the past. However, now that it was working, I couldn’t think. I needed to go back before something went wrong and it suddenly stopped.
-
At first, I thought I was dreaming. I took a moment to look at my hands and count my fingers. All nine were there. I turned in a slow circle to take in where and when I was.
The autumn air was cool, and through the streetlights I could make out the orange tone of all the leaves. The waving pool of time had washed me onto the middle of the street, still rugged with potholes that wouldn’t be fixed until the upcoming April. Small and rickety college houses lined either side. Even in the dark, I could see they all begged for a power washer and weed eater. The air was smooth and clear, easily entering and leaving my lungs.
I couldn’t help but laugh. I was hysterical, I had invented a functioning time machine. One of the greatest inventors in history and I had developed it out of pure obsession over my mistakes in my grungy downtown apartment.
A chilly breeze brought goosebumps to my arms, and I suddenly regretted jumping to the past without bringing a jacket. An old habit was triggered, like driving down a road from childhood one is surprised they still remember as an adult. Harriet and I used to wear each other’s jackets so frequently that our closets were a mixture of one another’s. It was a habit that started our freshman year when we literally shared a closet. We weren’t on good enough terms at the end of our senior year to discuss exchanging them, so I moved out with half of mine and half of his. I often wondered if he still had mine after half a decade.
But this wasn’t 2020. This was 2014. We were all still friends, and we were still excited to graduate together.
I paced up the sidewalk toward the main road where Harriet and Isak lived. The sight of their porch made my eyes sore with tears. Isak’s bike was parked out front, his elaborate chain looped around to ensure it was impossible to steal. We used to play games where we’d take turns trying to untangle it and drink as we watched. The only person who was able to do it successfully was Cassie, and I remember falling more in love with her as I watched her triumphantly hold the lock above her head.
The knob turned with a rusty squeal. The sound was a charm of the house I had forgotten. I held a breath as I pushed the door open, imagining everyone in the living room gathered around the TV watching basketball or playing video games. My heart was beating so hard I didn’t hear that the house was silent.
All the lights were off, and no one sat at the couch. I felt pressure above my eyes as I lowered my brows. The entryway had everyone’s shoes and some jackets on the coat rack, including one of my own that I never got back after the big fight. I gently lifted it off and slid it around my shoulders, the arms feeling larger on me than the last time I wore it.
I had no idea what time it was, but it had to be the middle of the night. Not wanting to wake anyone, I slid back out the door.
Returning to campus was something I never wanted to do. Between the bad memories and how much it had changed in the five years since I was there, I had no interest in revisiting where I got my diploma. But the opportunity to see a time capsule of what it was when I was there- that was not something to be passed.
Harriet and Isak lived a couple streets over from the Physics buildings, where I had spent most of my time. The dehydrated leaves crunched under my shoes, the ones before me were coated with dew and glistened orange from the streetlights. Orange was a common hue in this town between the brick sidewalks, brick buildings, and the school colors. It would be more prevalent in a month when the leaves began to turn. There was already a chill in the air, a foreboding warning of the winter to come.
The Physics building was locked, as they all were after midnight, but peering through the windows I could see the study lounge that Isak and I used to occupy into the early hours of the morning before an exam. Our schedules were the same almost every semester, which was great until the spring of senior year when we sat on opposite sides of the lecture hall trying to act like strangers. All my studying from that point onward was spent in a decrepit, failing coffee shop on the other side of town.
The buzzing sound of each building’s AC units harmonized into a numb drone that fogged over campus, constantly existing in the auditory background. It had been so long since I went for a walk that I couldn’t help but find the otherwise eerie environment peaceful. Even the total darkness brought by clouds occasionally covering the slim moon was comforting.
I peered ahead at the large, glass building that served as a popular study location. Even though there were almost always people there, none of the main or room lights were on. There was nobody. It was the middle of the night, but that was still unusual. There was an unease that came from not having seen another person.
My pace quickened as I passed the large buildings and headed into the residential side where underclassmen lived. My machine worked fine; I knew that. I was back at Planck before we graduated in 2015. However, I couldn’t shake the feeling there was something horribly wrong. I had to see another person, one person, just to be sure. The lot that would later be a new dorm sat empty next to one of the dining halls. There was a night Cassie and I slipped under the caution tape and climbed on the tractors, trading kisses under a sky packed with stars. I tried not to think about the way her hair smelled as I ascended the steps to Curie Hall. I had only been there once, and that time was also when I learned all front desks were manned 24/7 and had access to an advanced first aid kit.
The front doors were heavier than I remember, slamming shut with a solid bam! and sliding of the latch. I climbed the stairs, expecting to see a tired RA watching a movie on their laptop, but there was no one. The desk was empty and dark. The whole lobby was scarce- not a soul was playing pool by the window, eating pizza on the couches, watching a game on the TV- it was as if no one had ever lived there.
The doors felt a lot less heavy as I threw them open and ran down the stairs. I ran so fast that I lost coordination of my legs and tripped over my own feet, sending my face into the sidewalk below. Flashes of hot and cold and spicy and stale shot up my nose, and when my vision cleared of tears I saw a spray of blood. It was like the night of the fight but slower, more time to watch the deep red ooze into the crevices and crannies of the concrete.
I ran as fast as my weak body would allow, frantically scanning my surroundings for anyone else. It was hard to breathe as I ran with blood dribbling down my nose and into my mouth. I passed the bars at the edge of campus, and the sight was so haunting it made me fall into a sprint to the house. The bars were empty, and no lines waited for them. Usually packed the first week of school, it was as if they had never opened to begin with.
My shadow stretched then shrank then stretched again as I passed streetlights, nearly twisting my ankles on some potholes and dips as I went. From the end of the street, I could just make out Isak’s bike and the porch in the dim glow.
I ran up the steps and yanked open the front door. The quiet of the house hit me in a similar way it had the first time. But instead of nostalgia and an instinct to keep quiet, it was an instinct to scream.
“Harriet! Isak?” My voice was hoarse from lack of use. “Where are you?”
No answer. My voice barely echoed, just lingered in the corners of the room long enough for me to realize how old and parched I sounded.
I ran up the stairs and shouldered open Harriet’s room at the top. His bed was unmade, and his dresser sat with half the drawers agape and a pile of clean clothes sat on the floor. But no Harriet. It was as if he disappeared in the middle of putting away his laundry. I ran to Isak’s. His poster’s weren’t all up yet and he had books spread across his desk. Again, it was as if he vanished in the middle of laying out his materials for the next day. I checked their bathrooms too in case they were passed out in them. Nothing.
Instead, I was met with my own haunting reflection. I was a shadow of who I used to be. The college version of me, slightly extroverted, muscular shoulders, cleanshaven, waving hair and blue eyes was gone. My eyes were hollow and gray, my shoulders slim and frail, I had no idea when I last shaved or even spoke to another person. Blood was clotted and caked on my crooked nose, dry aside the two thin lines of red that ran from my tears.
Not knowing what else to do, I screamed. I punched the door. I threw my fists again and again, trying to understand what was going on and what was wrong with my machine and why I couldn’t fix my life and how I managed to screw it up in the first place and why I cared so much about friends that dropped me so easily. I raised a foot and kicked. It went through. I yanked it out and slammed it on the floor, huffing hard and sending a spray of blood across the sink.
I raised a hand to feel the sweat forming on my brow when I heard something fall and clatter downstairs.
My heart was in my mouth as I crept to the top of the stairs. I lowered myself gently, taking care to not overshoot and trip again. Making my way through the entryway and living room, I blinked quickly and flicked my eyes from spot to spot, searching for the source of the sound. The couches were both empty and a thin layer of dust had accumulated on the coffee table, a few empty Modelos decorating its surface. I peeked into the kitchen to see a knife sitting on the floor, and my guard instantly lowered.
Harriet had a chef’s knife gifted to him by his mother and was very proud of it, but not proud enough to buy a better place to store it. He insisted on keeping it perched on a couple Command Hooks above the stove. When Isak and I pointed out how stupid of an idea it was, he waved it off. It was so precariously balanced that shutting a door too hard would make it tumble off its perch.
I used my four-fingered hand to subconsciously feel the entryway frame, the bloody divot not yet there. Phantom pains sizzled in the ring-finger stub.
I remembered it had started as an argument. Cassie broke up with me and the guys invited her to their party and not me. I yelled they were taking sides, and they yelled I was being selfish and told me to leave. I was so caught up and offended that I hadn’t noticed Harriet reaching above the stove.
“Get out!” Harriet’s scream frequented my nightmares. So did the flash of silver that thunked through my hand and into the doorframe.
I remembered looking down to see that it hadn’t been severed all the way and was hanging on by a thin string of red glob. I ran to the closest dorm in a panic, thick drops of blood following me like a breadcrumb trail to hell. The RA had my hand wrapped and an ambulance phoned within a few minutes, like she had rehearsed that exact situation. The paramedics couldn’t save it.
“At least you didn’t get your thumb,” they had said. “You shouldn’t be dicing vegetables while intoxicated, you know.”
Harriet’s voice echoed in my head as I walked backwards through the living room, not turning around. I didn’t turn until I was out on the porch next to Isak’s bike.
Move on.
I dropped my hips slowly until I was in a deep squat, then fell back into a sitting position. The force of my hips colliding with the wood sent a jitter up my spine. It was the only sound on the entire street. There was no breeze, leaving the leaves eerily still.
“They let time take them,” I croaked to nobody. “They all did. I’m the only one who can’t live past this.”