Search Party

Harley Parker

One time when I was a kid, I hid in the backseat of my mother’s navy blue minivan until she noticed I was gone. Even when she had the whole neighborhood looking, and I could hear them calling to me, I didn’t come out. Even when their voices rang out like a chorus of church bells, I didn’t come out. There is comfort in being missed. I stretched my thin, white legs like toothpicks out on the ﬂoor in the backseat, and I stared up at a single, cigarette-burned point of the dusty upholstery. I wanted to kiss it. I wanted it to kiss back, and spit in my mouth. I wanted it to ﬁll me with ash like an urn. I wanted my mom to think about scraping my white, little body off of the road like burnt toast. I sat up, and opened the sliding door with a smile on my freckled face.

56 Title for What?

Jen McClellan

So real quick I’m throwing down an account of this state I’m in right now because I live in three worlds and this is one of them. This is the one after I didn’t sleep last night and it’s been daylight for at least ﬁve hours and I’ve been interacting with people for at least two. Here my mind is sustaining at a highly caffeinated level brought down by obvious lack of rest. The chances of sarcasm are in the red here. Also wit so dry the Sahara would seem like a wet dream in contrast. In the normal world sentences don’t begin with so or also. Whoever You are, you are in that world. Normal people know how to convey emotion and end sentences before they run on and on and on.

This is where I’m at. I am getting caught up on grammar when I’m supposed to be explaining how my body is weeping for sleep in its hunched and over-exaggerated lazy physicality. My mind on the other hand is running some ridiculous race with a crazy number of kilometers and obstacles, and really bad weather. Don’t worry about my fucking grammar! It doesn’t matter in this state. I’m sorry I drew attention to it in the ﬁrst place, but You can just get over it.

It would be obvious if I said this new and slightly unrelated paragraph was a side note so I won’t mention it. I will however say that the third world that makes up my being exists on pieces of paper and computer screens. Most of the paper trail I have traced back at least once. It’s hard to do this though since there is so much of it and most of the good combinations of words I’ve invented I’ve transferred to type. Now! I know you’re thinking, “Woah-ho there kid, I’ve read the best of your ‘worthy of the type’ collection and it’s not really earth shattering.” Allow me to retort to this supposition I oppose myself with in your favor, hence doing you another solid, and say, “Actually, avid reader, while you are right to say what you have read isn’t helping anyone to access that dead part of their brain, what you don’t know can hurt me. To explain—this is not my ﬁrst computer. This computer, while completely in love with me, lets me feel that it shares open agreement with all the other computers (precursory to this relationship) in saying I…well, I get around. The scattered thoughts those machines, which I don’t recall ever meeting, hold might be brilliant. I know for a fact that the last personal laptop I shared a long standing relationship with held the most and the best of it, though. I mean truly historic sentences I had saved there. Paragraphs even! Stanzas and rhyme schemes never even seen before! The documents that machine held would’ve put the very existence of the haiku to shame. Shame! On haiku and haiku’s whole family!” THAT wealth of information, those documents without hard copies, died. They’re dead and now You have an anxiety disorder just like me because WE’LL NEVER KNOW. This universe here though. Focus. This is limbo. This is purgatory and chaos and there’s no P.I.C. 68 THAT WAS WAY TOO LONG FOR A SIDE NOTE. Good thing I said nothing of the sort. I’m not sure where to go from here other than to remember what I read (something I wrote) recently (today) about how people like conclusions and since I keep coming to the same conclusion (we’re going in circles) I’ll say that I’m going in circles with these three places. I don’t know if I’m leaving my brain in one world, or if it’s with me the whole time and just not telling me something, but I think it’s safe to say there’re three points here and could very deﬁnitely be the un-mappable existence of the Bermuda Triangle.

I’m just saying. It would explain a lot.

By the way P.I.C. Stands for people in charge.

69 THAT WAS WAY TOO LONG FOR A SIDE NOTE. Good thing I said nothing of the sort. I’m not sure where to go from here other than to remember what I read (something I wrote) recently (today) about how people like conclusions and since I keep coming to the same conclusion (we’re going in circles) I’ll say that I’m going in circles with these three places. I don’t know if I’m leaving my brain in one world, or if it’s with me the whole time and just not telling me something, but I think it’s safe to say there’re three points here and could very deﬁnitely be the un-mappable existence of the Bermuda Triangle.

I’m just saying. It would explain a lot.

By the way P.I.C. Stands for people in charge.

69 Daddy’s Hands

Shaleen MacReynolds

I don’t know if all little girls do this. Perhaps all children do. It’s a funny thing, feigning sleep. We’d be watching a movie, downstairs on the couch, and it’d be far past my bedtime and you’d say come on, kiddo. Time for bed. But my eyes would remain shut, my cheek pressed firmly against tiny hands clasped in prayer beneath my head. You’d stand there for a moment, looking down on me, I could feel your eyes watching, softening, amused...you knew I was awake all along. When I didn’t rouse myself, when there was no movement excepting the small flicker of my eyes beneath shut lids, you would step forth. Reach your arms out and slide one under the crook of my neck and one under the bend in my knees and you’d lift. You’d stand with the weight of my small frame in your arms and you’d take the stairs, one at a time, follow the path to my room and place me on my bed. And as I grew older and the burden of my weight grew, in turn, heavier, you would groan a little more as you lifted me from the couch. Your arms would tremble. Every step on that staircase lit a fire in your knees and the muscles of your legs quenched and quivered but you never faltered and you always kept on. But one day, my weight became too much to bear and instead of being carried, my weary legs were forced to carry themselves, weaving like a drunk along that same path. Stumbling on the fourth step. Clutching at the banister for balance. Toes dragging across the carpet. I had to carry myself. And years later, I watched you. I watched you at the bedside of your mother who had grown so small and frail, weighing no more than I did on those late nights. The life had left her body but her spirit was still there and for a moment I saw you as a small boy. On nights when your mother was out late at glamorous parties in her dazzling sequined dresses with her vibrant hair and daring eyes. I saw you waiting up. Sitting before the fire on New Year’s Eve, the two slender flutes of sparkling cider glimmering against the backdrop of the flickering flames. Your eyes grew tired and your head began to nod and eventually you could not fight the sleep that threatened to consume you. And she returned, those little kitten heels tapping out their melody along the hardwood floor, the tassels of the dress swaying against her legs. She found you there, your hands tucked in prayer beneath your darling little cheek. And she stood for a moment, watching you. Her eyes held such love and adoration and melancholy. She reached her arms out, placed them beneath the crook of your neck and the bend in your knees and lifted, swaying a bit on those heels but a mother’s love is strong and so she did not falter, but continued on the path. Tucked back the covers and placed you into your bed, smoothed back the hair that clung to your brow. And then I’m back here in this room. The glow of the fire has become the burn of a dying sun in a setting sky. The champagne flutes have become half consumed glasses of water scattered 71 by the bed. And the little boy has become a man and the mother has become a memory and you reach out your arms, place them gently beneath the crook of her neck and the bend in her knees and you lift. You struggle, not from the burden of her weight but from the burden of this grief. No words escape your lips but I clench my teeth in agony as I hear a small sob erupt from the confines of your chest. You bring out the woman who brought you in. You follow the path through the house, heavy feet dragging against the hardwood floor. You pause in the doorway, climb the stairs. The concrete mounds in the earth are like mountains, but in a moment you have become the most accomplished climber this world has ever seen. You tuck back the sheets and lay her upon the gurney. Place a chaste kiss upon her brow and tuck those frail hands between yours in prayer. And you step away and you let go just as she let go of you and as, once, you let go of me. But her presence lingers in your arms as this memory lingers in my mind. You have done well. You have carried with strength and with love. With pride and with joy. Your arms will always know the memories of the weight they have carried. Your heart will always know the bonds of this love that you have forged. And one day, I’ll open up the door to a room and discover an empty bed. I’ll hear the droning of a television and see the glow of a light flickering against a wall. And I’ll head down the stairs and discover a child, sleeping soundly on the plush fabric of a cushioned pillow. His eyes will be closed and his hands will be tucked beneath his rosy little cheeks. And I’ll bend down and place my arms beneath the crook in his neck and the bend in his knees and I’ll lift. I won’t call for his father for this is my time. My arms will remember his weight and my mind will remember this moment for I have both felt and seen it before. I know what to do. You have taught me well. I’ll struggle a bit and I’ll waver on bare feet and my knees will tremble and my back will come close to breaking but I’ll lift. And I’ll follow the path up the stairs and tuck back the sheets. I’ll place a kiss upon his darling little face and I’ll remember.

72 Of Crashing Shoulder

Jake Rarick

It was sedation day, 1965, when farther gone patients were given cold war cartoons to cry over. Cowrie, after months of preparation, spat those tarry pills down his collar and performed the signature glare of a crash test lobotomite. When the nurse let him alone in his wiped colorless room with only a charred red polaroid to keep his memory, he popped up and ripped half the power cord from behind the television, sliding the exposed wire into the magnetic lock on the door. When the lights went off, duck and cover fanfared onto the round screen, and the door opened. Full steam, Cowrie ran those raw, third-degreed fingertips along the dried candlewax of the sanitarium rails and sills—echoes of babel cutting through his second skin of electrical tape and surgical gauze. He rushed down and out from the stairwell, hard against steely doors. An orderly whipped a baton from a plastic sleeve and rapped him across the thigh as he rounded the corner, but he barreled onward past the cordless telemonitors and electroshock kits before scrambling into the security box near the rearmost exit. He snatched up a radiation suit on his way out the facility. With his beige bandaged arms and face hidden behind stained, rubber coveralls, Cowrie hiked miles into the wood outskirts, huffing through the attached mask at every step. A furless, lilac rabbit treated itself to some thistle and thorn with the backwards chewing of a lawnmower, its hindgut gargling—hissing—as he reached over to pat it. He nearly felt the grotesque creature before it flickered like a bulb and darted off, lost in the toxic brush. Cowrie could taste the miasma of plague decay even through the mask, and so he continued somewhat directionless down an ever so silent trail.

The walk ate away at the muscles in his legs, at his cloth boots and lazy lungs. He felt as though pulled along a fishing line—a worry that he was followed and awaited all at once. When the trees cleared, the ancient court ruins rose from the black hole of the earth: an old-world country house, surrounded by a sea of pink leaves and ash branches. The gates were rusted, everything closed up and bolted down; the windows were grown into by grass and bird dropping. It was, despite its open dilapidation, the same as the other patients described. Inside, the long gallery was a grotty list of forgotten portraits, clay busts, and shelves upon shelves of books. In a heave, Cowrie crashed his shoulders through the brass framed door and unzipped his mask, taking in the ghostly art and air. He scratched at his knotted hair, lined away under the bandages. At the far reach of the room was a splintered and discolored piano, portioned off by a beam of light. He was, for unsure reasons, drawn to the instrument—not enough that he could see the thing; he needed so desperately to hear it. Thus, he overstepped. 94 Cowrie fussed across the broke piano, his fingers down heavy on the frame until the legs gave and the whole deal collapsed to pieces. The bursting of string and ivory rattled him to the core with the distressing shock of a sewing needle sneaking itself through fabric and striking the pathetic thumb. When he dropped from his clamoring heights, he was gone to a fiery puff of autumn leaves, kicked up like glitter in a globe. He closed his eyes to the flames, resting his weary head against the tile and humming, to himself, the songs he could not play.

Back before the atomic meltdowns of 1957 and 1959, Cowrie was newlywed to an acclaimed vocalist, Curie Marshwater, who often saved her sensitive voice between each and every performance, hardly speaking to anyone besides members of band and family. This, at ﬁrst, was nothing more than charming habit he embraced—but, after the silent death of the world and all her audience, she subdued her voice entirely: an anti-soundtrack for worlds away. In time, her mourning hush began to drill into his mind, and an ever disturbed Cowrie began to resent that she allowed him to have forgotten her voice.

Cowrie rolled around on the grimy ruins, trying to picture Curie’s cotton-puff cheeks and bloodshot hair—working in vain to remember that ghost of a voice. In his memory reach, he tasted orange juice kisses, wet fingers slogging through dead galleries from spine to brain—only for them to return to the red matchhead, pinching it between thumb and strike pad, and letting it slip away. When it tumbled free for the gasoline to catch, Cowrie could smell burnt skin—like rattrap and tire smoke. Remembering the fire stirred his stomach; he clenched his teeth until the hatred faded from sight. Having enough of the floor, he stood and switched to a lower area with cushioned benches and armchairs. But, before he could dust off a seat, a static muttering echoed from the adjacent room. He kept silent and still as two figures stepped into the light of the hallway, both scanning for movement. Cowrie tensely slipped himself under a bench, calming his breath and twitchings as much as he could. “Patient Cowrie—ARS, burn victim, schizo. Not here?” the male figure questioned. “This place creeps the shit out of me. I don’t think he’d stop until he reached the city.” The two in hazard suits—one male, one female—walked by Cowrie, going on about other old constructs in the forest. They both sounded surely familiar, yet he could not place it. After they moved on into the next room, he gently snuck himself into the foyer, then up the stairs to the second floor. In a windowless room—the darkest of the house—Cowrie shut the door behind him and sat down behind a grandfather clock. In the dark, the house felt immediately insignificant and cut off from the world. He could hear the two figures beneath him. Cowrie felt as if there was hot blood in his lungs, as he dreaded the torture that would come after his capture. It was inevitable, he realized, that the two would find him if they were diligent enough to check every room. He looked around him, straining to find something with which to defend himself—coming up with nothing more than a handful of brick crumbs. He anxiously rocked back and forth against the clock, footsteps tapping at the stairs. One of the voices, sharp and sour, instructed the other to inspect the room with the “big fucked up door.” The knob turned with the stretching, settling sound of ancient bones. With an electric torch, the man entered and swept from corner to corner, the beam grazing Cowrie on its second pass. In one more drift, Cowrie would have been spotted—so he popped out against the man and

95 clapped down against his mask with a swarm of rock and powder, shattering the glass in his gasmask and sending him backwards into a taxidermied horse, which tore open and released a thick cloud of broomdust that had them both coughing harshly. In the chaos, Cowrie charged back into the hall. Cowrie turned toward the staircase where the woman was waiting and paused for a moment. He was ready to throw her over the rail before she raised her hands and stammered out the lyrics, “Faces look ugly, when you’re alone.” His chest tightened up, and he was paralyzed. This combination, a song he knew, was one which had haunted Curie when her hair started to fall out and her body became a brittle husk. He remembered how he begged her day and night, desperate to hear her voice, pestering her to speak and replaying those same songs over and over. “How could you know that song. I never told anyone—,” Cowrie rasped. He tried to yell, but could only hack more dust. The hooded woman backed up against a splintered railing. Cowrie balled up his ﬁsts and, in haze, now saw Curie standing before him. She was grotesquely emaciated everywhere but her stomach, when he clamped down on her shoulders and shook her until she collapsed to pieces, screaming for him to let her go. For Cowrie, her cries became the only music in the world, and so he kept twisting and shaking his wife until she was dead. He turned away, vicious and manic—cursing the woman up and down for having dared to know that song. “It wasn’t my fault, had she only sung for me. I needed her voice. She had no right to keep it from me.” The woman did not respond, now lowering a red syringe that she was wielding out of sight. She tried to appease him by exposing both her hands, but he was too far gone into a frenzy by then. He yelled out, pounding his hands against the wall and sobbing. “I tried to burn you away, but everything else burned.”

For a final time, Cowrie lost himself to memory and felt his wife’s limp body in his hands. When police arrived those years ago, he was a misshapen ember—all his skin in darkened flakes, that it seemed he was resurrected out of some horrendous black hole. The record player was melted, trapped, “You’ve been living like a little girl, in the middle of your little world…” In the aftermath, Cowrie wondered if her burnt red hair might have smelled any different than his own, and he tried to figure a name for her death song. No name would do.

Back to it, Cowrie could hear the crashed man coming out from the other room. He would again be cornered if he did not ﬂee—but the woman was blocking the only way out, as dead end halls and empty rooms were all that were behind. He dug his eyes to the stairs and into the strange woman and back at his phantom lover. “You were music. And you abandoned the world when it went to shit.” The woman jolted in response that he needed to “Please, for god’s sake, listen—” He rushed in, and they both ﬂew over.

* * *

All matter in the air was bleak and hazard, sirens blaring on the outside as a full search party from the sanitarium arrived. Cowrie was regaining color through the concussion fog. There were splinters in his arms and legs, toothpicks in a pincushion. Cowrie glanced over at the women,

96 soaked up in brain shadow. The air was thin and freezing; he must have been bleeding out for some time with all the red soaked up around him. He dropped his face against the floor and muttered a final piece, “Women seem wicked, when you’re unwanted. Streets are uneven, when you’re…” The other man had chased the two down the stairs as fast he could, but it was far too late for the woman in the bloodstained radiation suit and the shattered faceplate. She was gone, broken along her entire anatomy—internally decapitated above all else. The man opened her mask as wide as it would go and looked upon her red, innocent corpse for a final time, before a crew collected the bodies. “The sins of the mother.” He sat on the bottom step, clasping his hands. He raised his head and looked over the ending, but was ultimately silent.