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< back matthew woodman november 8, 2023 Despite unearthing North America’s most complete fossil record of Clarendonian vertebrates —horse, camel, sabertooth cat, bone-crushing dog— paleontologists here have extracted but two articulated skeletons: a pair of frogs, whose atlases enable the skull to move up and down but not side to side. As my son sifts through the loose stone and holds up one shard looks like a bone to me after another I pull from my backpack a coyote gourd on which I have etched you are the only one to see this and set it on a slab the wind and rain have yet to smooth into streambed. I straighten, all two-hundred and some odd pounds perched on my ankle’s talus, which in a frog is called the astragalus, as in the local Astragalus lentiginosus, spotted locoweed, whose nitrogen-fixing soil bacteria spin air into soil. Astonish, from the Latin ex (out) + tonare (to thunder). In 1997 monsoonal moisture materialized in a flash flood that dissolved the canyon ranger complex : an arterial sluice of white noise, what could pass for a round of applause. No trick : it’s a routine : The individual is capable of seeing much more [...] than the human hand can set down. Matthew Woodman is the 2022 Kern County Poet Laureate and the founding editor of the journal Rabid Oak. He is the author of "This Is Not Your Moon" and the contributing editor of a series of anthologies, most recently 2022's "Writing Covid." His work has appeared in Juked, Puerto del Sol, Sonora Review, and Hawai'i Review. < back

< back dw mckinney november 30, 2022 ong gone are the days when Tara Stillions Whitehead worked 26-hour days on the sets of American sitcoms. A former assistant director and assistant to executive producers, she’s now a filmmaker and assistant professor of film, video, and digital media production at Messiah University in Pennsylvania. When people discover that Stillions Whitehead once worked in Hollywood, they often ask her about the most famous person she’s ever met or for a detailed account of Hollywood life. But she’s quick to tell you not to be fooled. Beneath the glitz, glamour, and prestige is an entertainment industry built on rape culture, suffering, and manufactured identities. “The American west, in terms of Hollywood and the culture it affects, is trying to constantly hold up this artifice of control over narrative,” says Stillions Whitehead. “And as a writer, I’m always just like, fuck your control. Let’s break out. Let’s undo all of this.” Her newly released book, The Year of the Monster (Unsolicited Press, 2022), is a middle finger to Hollywood culture. While Stillions Whitehead captures the essence of Los Angeles, Monster goes beyond the city and explores everything from climate disaster, loneliness, the #MeToo movement, mental health struggles of military families, and other aspects of American life and culture. Stillions Whitehead and I spoke over Zoom about subverting the Hollywood mystique, how television narratives influence our real lives, and writing books for the cinematic screen. This interview transcript has been edited for length and clarity. Content warning for mention of sexual assault. In The Year of the Monster , you focus on different monstrosities – people’s behaviors, natural disasters, black holes. Can you talk about what it’s like to launch your book in the midst of this pandemic, in the shadow of a real monster? I found that the book started to have more significance to me emotionally after the pandemic. And contextually, too. I think [the book] is more relevant now than it was before. The pandemic brought out a lot of different character defects in people, including myself. I think the idea of human monstrosity, and what we will do and what we will sacrifice for capitalism, for entertainment, for all of those things, are much more apparent now. When I look at things in the book, like even the entertainment industry stuff, it’s more laughable for me to see that superficiality in the wake of all this human disaster. So, the disaster surrounding a lot of those stories is different. In “There Are No Secrets in the Constellations,” which is probably one of the most difficult stories for people to read, the idea of climate change and of trying to move forward in a disaster that humans have created felt like it had a little bit more significance. Let’s talk about “Inciting Moment,” the first story, which had several California and Hollywood references. But there were points in that story, and others as well, where you demystify the California mystique. I’m using very specific details to actualize California in that way that you’re saying, to demystify it and to satirize the whole process of moving to L.A. and having this identity with a place. With that story, in particular, I was mining for a lot of different things that were real, but I didn’t have to exaggerate them. The whole thing about L.A. for me was feeling really lonely and craving intimacy and just making intimacy happen. Not just in a sexual way, but the sort of catastrophic intimate encounters where you almost feel lonelier afterward. And that’s that character at the end [of the story]. I wanted to open with [“Inciting Moment”] because it created a portal into the rest of the book. By deconstructing that experience of entry into a place, into a dream that is an anti-dream, then the rest of the book plays out that way. And that’s really what the book is. It’s like the anti-dream, the anti-narrative, the antithesis of expectation. Could you speak more about creating that anti-narrative and reconfiguring the ideas of the American west, especially when it comes to Hollywood? When we say the American west, people think of the frontier. That’s not what I think of when I think of the American west. There’s the cultural frontier, and the west thinking it’s the cultural frontier and how it defines culture. And I think that’s where Hollywood gets its esteem from, or previously had its esteem. It’s manufacturing stories, presenting them to the world, and people buying into those stories, emotionally and culturally. For me, the American west is so defined by the media put out in the 20th century, and now probably by media content. If you think about American television and its inception, sitcom writing is our foundational identity. Through the process of learning about how a script is written for a sitcom, [I learned that] it is a well-oiled machine. It’s the mass production of narratives. We lay this out, insert your characters here, and just find the situation that fits into that. What shapes the American west is this mass production model that you can replicate. And I think it’s terrible. With this book and all of my writing, I want to reveal to the reader how they’ve been taught to read, and teach them how to read a story. You blew my mind when you were talking about the shape of the sitcom episode and its different components. It felt very much like an assembly line. My goal is to bring awareness to the fact that you’ve been conditioned by what you watch – and what you read, too. How do you incorporate your scriptwriting and production techniques into creating your stories? You put some of the structure from filmmaking and script writing into them, but you’re also applying your on-set knowledge to deconstruct our ideas of narrative. On the one hand, I kind of want to merge the forms of screenplay and prose. I do it a lot more in my book that’s coming out, framing it with more than just scripts, but other kinds of film documents, like treatments. In a way it’s trying to open the door and potentially expose people who have never read scripts before to scripts. But it’s also to show, what both forms are capable of. One of the stories [in The Year of the Monster], “Plot Point I,” is entirely dialogue, with like two sentences of direction opening it and a couple of pauses. And that’s because I just wanted the dialogue of these two douchey Hollywood guys to play out uninterrupted for people to get what they get from it, knowing what I’m trying to convey. That this is the prestige that people ask about when they ask me, “What was it like to work in Hollywood?” What’s the difference between writing your book with the anticipation that it will become a movie and writing with the knowledge of how filmmaking directly impacts a story? Those are like the two panels that I’m on at [the Association of Writers & Writing Programs] next year. One of the panels is writing the screen-worthy story. And the screen-worthy story has to have visualized plots. For writing something to be adapted, I think you have to have a sense of space. I find that when most books are adapted, obviously they change, but they have to have what’s going to keep your butt in the seat, which is the plot. Everything else is what either makes it a good movie or not. And then conversely, with the impact of film on writing, I keep seeing a lot of complaints from writing professors or agents on Twitter who are saying writing is just too cinematic, it’s too visual. I honestly think it’s just because we live in a very visual culture. People are writing in a way that appropriates even the transitions in film. Not just what we’re seeing, but like smash cuts to a new scene or the way one scene trickles over into another like a crossfade. I definitely do that in the next book that’s coming out. I use cinematic transitions to kind of play with that and see how the audience can exist simultaneously in the written word and in the visual narrative that’s happening in their head. What’s your next book called? They More Than Burned (ELJ Editions, 2023), which is in reference to the Twin Towers, but it comes up in one of the stories. It’s basically a collection that’s hybrid, and it imitates an archiving and assemblage of footage for a documentary that doesn’t end up happening. How did you discover new relationships to the settings that you created in this collection? I left California in 2013. Once I got [to Pennsylvania], and we started making a life here, part of me was excited to move because I was deep in my alcoholism. I really wanted to go somewhere where people didn’t know me and I could pretend to be okay. And Mechanicsburg seemed like a place where I could do that. I would say 80 percent of the book was written before I got sober. Once I got sober, it was like somebody turned the light on and I could see things. I could see where I was, and with the light cast so far, I could see back to California. I was looking in that direction a lot of the time when I was doing the revisions and all the writing. So, while I was writing a lot of it while I was [in Mechanicsburg], I missed places. So I started reconstructing them. All of those locations are usually somewhere that I was longing to be. I was never in a place that I was longing to be in while I was writing about it. I do that with my stories a lot. It’s a way for me to travel emotionally. Even though I talk a lot of shit about Hollywood, I wouldn’t have stayed there for the amount of time that I did, and I wouldn’t have gone back in the last couple of years to do some things, had there not been some hope or something that place was giving me or revealing about myself. A lot of those places are places that I wrote about in really intense longing. When I go back to places where I came of age, it’s sort of like those places are still inside of me, and I can feel their geography. But when I write them, I’m translating those geographies into something new. ♦ Learn more about Tara Stillions Whitehead and her upcoming book, They More Than Burned (ELJ Editions, 2023), on her website . Shop copies of The Year of the Monster at Unsolicited Press. DW McKinney is a writer and editor based in Nevada. She is a nonfiction editor for Shenandoah and editor-at-large for Raising Mothers. < back

< back lindsay hunter october 17, 2022 he’s looking in the mirror. What does she see? On your good days, you imagine she sees bags under her eyes, puffy cheeks from those pills you’ve read about, and those pink drinks you can’t afford, teeth too white and square, wad of gum perpetually wadded, smudged eye makeup, ratty extensions. You pretend she hates herself as much as you hate yourself. As much as you hate her. So rich, so lucky! This morning you discovered your dog had peed inside your shoe, the left one of the pair you bought at Payless because you squinted and convinced yourself they looked nice, though at home they were dull, not shiny, the toes rounded, making you think of the way you used to round your shoulders and retreat at recess, parties, work. Used to. Britney has dogs, and her frayed hems and knotted underhairs make you think surely that’s happened to her, surely one of her platform slides smells like animal, but she snaps her manicured fingers and someone with rounded shoulders comes and cleans it for her. Buys her new shoes. Buys her a new house, a new dog. You had to soak your shoe in hot water and dish soap, the cheap kind, thin, no bubbles, because dish soap was out of your budget that week. You can’t afford new shoes. You can’t even afford one new shoe. You slopped through a shift at Red Lobster two towns over in that shoe. Britney’s on all the magazine covers. Everywhere you go, she sees you. She sees all of you. Britney’s in love! those covers bleat. You wonder if you’ve ever truly been in love. She wonders the same exact thing. You’re in love with her, or the closest thing to it. You, all of you, the way you obsess over her. Her nude body, flashing stars off her hips. No, just a flesh-colored body suit and rhinestones. Still, you imagine. A man asks her on live television about her breasts. My breasts, she repeats, the way teenagers do when you ask them something that dumbfounds them. My grades? My friends? My job? My breasts. Britney laughs; it’s funny! Right? She looks offscreen, maybe hoping to see defiance, rage, in her assistant Felicia’s eyes. Instead she sees the same dumb giggle. Haw haw. She went back that night and stabbed that man in his ear with his own monogrammed letter opener, collected the blood and brain matter in her Versace Medusa. If you stay past the encore, you can watch the lights go out one by one. Then you’re in total blackness. She stayed until he knew what she meant. Here you go, Fe, she said, handing over the bag the next morning. You work so hard. Now she’s on a private jet and where are you? In your shitty hatchback on your way back to Red Lobster. You hate the dayshift, you hate your stacked block apartment on Chipeta and that you will return to it. Britney smells like an old bra and you smell like you walked through the breezeway of a Bath & Body Works a hundred times. Four hundred times. The clouds like a massive fluffy carpet rolled out for her. You hear the engine of a passing plane above and you see yourself in your rearview mirror and you look like someone is pressing you down, pushing you into the ground. Buried. There are stories you’ve heard and you don’t know if they’re true but they’re fun to consider. Britney is high all the time, those lavender pills that cost a year’s paycheck for you; Britney has sex with whomever; Britney died and was replaced by a lookalike with brain damage. Britney put a hit out on her father. Britney cries every night because she misses home, misses her family. You cried the other night because you couldn’t afford to eat; you’d have to wait until the dinner shift and hope your manager Terry takes pity on you, doesn’t punch in your order but just hands over the plate and waves you away. You don’t have enough even with your employee discount.. Has Britney ever felt that? You don’t know this for sure, but some part of you knows: Britney killed a paparazzo that wouldn’t stop following her. Lured him by letting him follow her, whipping around the curves in the Canyon, driving wildly, driving herself, she used to know someone who lived up there, that home that looks so cozy and clean all lit up at night, but he hurt her bad and thinking of it makes her sick to her stomach in the car. Her driver wanted to drive her, she is repeating this sentence over and over because it’s fun, it’s sort of musical, she is a musician. Her driver wanted to drive her, repeat. Her foot has pushed the gas pedal to the floor. If she dies at least her story will finally have an end. Instead she’s driving right up to the edge of a cliff, the paparazzo on her tail, accelerating into the promise of a photo, the photo, and at the last second Britney turns and he doesn’t. He sails right off the edge. Beautiful, really. She thinks she can hear his car burst into flames, but there is always roaring in her ears. Applause, feedback, terror. It’s all the same to her, now. The man had a fiancée and a tiny daughter who just had her ears pierced. Britney feels nothing. You don’t even like that song, the one that came out about her. Melodramatic and tedious. You wonder how she feels about it. You imagine she is steel inside when it comes to him, her first. You don’t know that he is a bore, that he wanted constant reassurance from her, that he made her hold his penis like a mother holding her nervous child’s hand. You have only ever been cheated on. You’ve never been the cheater. You hate these other women, these whores. They are better than you, aren’t they? They are. They are all Britneys and you, you don’t even have a name. Britney’s name is like two neat stabs, choreographed and rehearsed and on their marks. Swishing sharply away before the blood even runs. One boy you loved, though. You aren’t aware of what Britney knows, that love is a game of pretend and inevitably it gets tiring for one of the players. He just stopped talking to you, like you were something he imagined and he’d pivoted to a different creation. You were supposed to evaporate, to cease, but you couldn’t and you can’t. Hard as you try, because you’re a dumb bitch and you’re not even cool enough to say that part out loud. Britney is a human being and she makes mistakes. Britney just wants to fall in love, fall right through the floor and keep on falling, past where those long camera lenses can find her. If she can just smear an eraser over herself. She knows she can’t become anyone else but she can ruin what is there. It is no longer possible to keep all of herself together. Every day she watches another little bit departiculate or unarticulate or whatever word Oprah would use is, watches it flutter off like the butterfly on her back and that is smeared too. At clubs people hear her yelling FUCK IT and WOOOO and YEAH but they don’t hear the rage, a tone which hovers above human hearing. She lets the cameras take her picture, take and take and take and take. She shows them her face, her creation, how it no longer does what it’s told. Her eyes change; now they stare into flashes without blinking, those great black pools that reflect back what they see, which is you, staring, grimacing, searching, laughing that mean laugh. You like what you see because you hate what you see. It’s you. Britney is you. Next she kills a bartender she fucked. He fell down her spiral staircase. He fell, she says, in her baby voice. I see, says the cop, but he is wondering about her breasts. It wasn’t his fault, she thinks, but she can’t remember the reason. She kills her cook, just pushes his face right down into the vat of oil he’s boiling for her favorite fried chicken. He lets her, it’s heartbreaking how little he fights. He’s erect as he dies. She kills Leeza Gibbons, strangling her in the shadows of a red carpet, who is replaced by a lookalike, brain damage, before the first award is given out. Britney has people. Her people have people. Then: where did he come from? He’s rangy and he has dimples and he smiles at her the way everyone smiled at each other in church when she was a girl. Anonymous and polite. It reminds her of something she’d long forgotten. She never figured out what that was. Girl, her assistant says, halfheartedly, already on the walkie about troubleshooting this one. They drink and they fuck and he knows about drugs, she lets him think he knows more than she does. This one, she kisses. She didn’t know kissing could be a search, find me, find me. He tries harder than anyone before. Or maybe not, maybe he was just as blank as a kite and she flew him and she was also the wind and it felt the way she wanted it to feel. It is hard to know if she is the world or if the world is a projector on a big blank wall. She has his babies, it is so fun to have his babies inside her. She doesn’t kill for nine months and that lasts through the next pregnancy. She has them so close together. A blessing, everyone tells her. A blessing, a blessing, she’s nodding and nodding and the tears coat her face. Aw, they say, aw. You have kids, too. The cook at work is nice, and he stays until morning, and so what if he can’t have a driver’s license. We all have issues, don’t we? Before you even figure out if you wanted the first baby another comes along. They feel like invasions, like someone hooked up a hose to your chest and turned on the vacuum. You check your bank account, you check again. They’ll eat but you won’t and it’s fine, it’ll be fine. The cook moved three states away, because there’s work there, something with construction. He doesn’t own boots or a hammer, it’s his brother’s company or a friend of his brother’s company. Who knows. A woman downstairs watches the boys when you’re at work, and you’re always at work, and when you pick them up the woman is enraged and the boys are so sleepy, so sweet and warm and sleepy. Does Britney walk around feeling like this? This blanket of fear that something will happen, that something always happens, that the illusion of any order in the universe is just a card trick. Ask for help, the articles say just before your laptop dies. So simple! I am asking for help, you think. You haven’t showered in weeks. You cling to them, your babies, because making sure they know they’re loved, even if it’s a desperate, brackish, terrified love, is a mother’s only allowable violence. The TV is too loud and that’s something you can fix but you’ve forgotten how. The nannies smile at Britney’s children in a way that makes her desperate, too. Is she jealous of her boys? I’m their mother, she reminds them. I’m their mother, she hisses at her assistant, her own mother, an interviewer from a third-rate magazine who buzzes at her gate. Yes you are, darlin, says her assistant, but she’s hidden her mouth behind her hand. Where’s Daddy? someone is asking. Where’s Daddy? Britney repeats. One of the nannies smiles at her and Britney smiles back even as she hits the woman, hits her again, can’t stop hitting her, the baby thinks it’s funny and she keeps going. Babe, her assistant says, babe come on now. That felt good, Britney says, out of breath, like the old days when she’d hop off the stage into the cool darkness and it’d finally be over, until the next one. She dials his number and he picks up and he says he was at the store, that she sent him for juice and brownie bites, but wasn’t that days ago? She tries to say something to her assistant. Tries to prep her by saying, I am about to say something. What day is it? is what she says, but her assistant is already turning, already laughing. It feels better when she is on the floor with the children, when she is really in it, when she is playing blocks or reading books about a grumpy fish but she looks up and only three minutes have passed. What will you do with your life? she remembers her pastor booming this at them when she was a child. What will you do with the life God has given you? It used to make her feel an urgency but now she knows the answer doesn’t matter. God? she thinks. God? She lets an interviewer touch her, smothers him with her thighs. Begs her assistant to keep him, put him in the case with the gleaming awards, but it’s another no. God never answers. She’s never looked better, they all say after her appearance on a late show. She’s back, they crow. But I was never even here, she thinks. You’re all liars. You’ve figured something out. One day you look at your oldest boy’s shoulders, so tiny, his perfect posture, the delicate lines of his neck, and you want someone to come and do something, protect him, take him somewhere safe. And you hear a voice and maybe it’s Britney’s and it’s saying, That’s you. That’s your job. And from that day forward it is your job. You surrender. You go on food stamps and you take one less shift and you water down the milk, let yourself eat half a sandwich a day, because it’s what you can do. Let’s go to the library, you say. Let’s go to the park. You hand them strawberries, frozen because they’re cheaper. You become that thing everyone warns against, that pitied and embarrassing thing. You become a mother, and the secret is that you’ve never felt more powerful in your life. They grow and grow and they’re polite and curious and impossibly sweet and when they talk back or say No! you are sure you’re doing something right, because you’re not a weed choking the life out of them, you’re the sun and water and air and they flourish. Your pockets are filled with wrappers and pebbles and snotty tissue. You feel a sort of communion with the natural order of things, but every once in a while, you strut. You start to think maybe this is better than everything she has, everything you thought you wanted. Smoothing your kid’s cowlick, offering a Band-Aid, there you are, forgetting to covet her. You see pictures of Britney. She almost drops her baby. She’s crying in a restaurant, seated right by the window, clutching her child. Someone help her, you think. Then you remember she’s rich enough to have all the help she could stand and your boy wants a string cheese and you forget all about it. You smell like seafood blend out of a plastic bag but you don’t smell anything. Britney’s head hurts. It always hurts so fucking bad. The doctor gives her pills the size of gumballs but still it throbs. She can’t hear what anyone is saying. Roaring. Her teeth push against each other, the only way to distract from the pain. Sweetie, it’s these nasty extensions, someone says one night. He’s got his fingers in them, examining. Honey, this is a crime, he says. He’s shouting and she can’t hear him but she figured out how to read lips long ago. Come to the salon, he says. But she doesn’t know which one. She finds one and it’s closed but an ugly woman lets her in. It smells like the hairspray of her childhood and the walls seem to hold the roar of hair dryers in a yellowy hush and the woman says No, I won’t do that, so Britney does it herself. It’s nice to remember she can do some things by herself. See, Britney says to the woman, who isn’t ugly, just plain, and Britney almost cries she is so happy to see a face that hasn’t been surgically adjusted, See, she says and hurries out the door and leaves the woman to wonder what exactly it is Britney Spears smells like, is it body odor or takeout or some new expensive perfume she doesn’t understand, and years later she will realize what it was, it was decay. Britney takes a taxi home. The driver clucks and says it’s a shame, what she’s done to herself. Says it like he owns a part of her and maybe he does. She pushes the pen she stole from the salon into the driver’s neck and leaves the door open as she walks away. Where are her boys? She has to find out. Her head doesn’t hurt anymore, does it? The whole world is saying they’re concerned but they’re saying it behind their hands. She’s fine because she has the money to be just fine. At one point everyone has felt envious of her and for that she’s paying an appropriate price. The Leeza Gibbons clone wonders if it has something to do with postpartum depression and the man next to her clamps his hand over her mouth. How dare you, he grits, motherhood is a gift. Then it’s too late, they all talk about how she needs help. Britney Needs Help, sources cry out. Not sexy, not pretty. Kill her, they start to think. She should die. If she survives, she’ll show up wearing next to nothing again, just the way you like her. You’ll all pause and stare at her abdomen, at her thighs, at the return of those extensions. Sometimes she’ll make a triumphant return. The next one will be a disaster. The one after that will be nostalgic, filled with grace. But it all depends on you. It all depends on what you’re willing to allow. You’re aging, so why does she have to? You scroll and zoom. If you’re feeling even that day, you’ll comfort yourself. She must have gotten help, you’ll think. I’m glad she got help. ♦ Lindsay Hunter is the author of two story collections and two novels. Her most recent novel, Eat Only When You're Hungry, was a Book of the Month Club selection, a finalist for the 2017 Chicago Review of Books Fiction Award, and a 2017 NPR Great Read. Her next book, a novel titled Hot Springs Drive, is forthcoming on Roxane Gay Books in November 2023. She lives in Chicago with her family. < back

< back d.t. robbins october 18, 2023 I. he sun showed no mercy. A gust of wind blew across the desert. Death and sand rose from the earth, drifted into and filled the air. Tumbleweed rolled past a rattlesnake coiled up on the side of the highway. Trucks passed, missed the snake by inches. The diamonds etched on its back shimmered in the daylight. It released its forked tongue. The snake stretched its head forward. Its body followed. An eagle screeched above, circled back for the snake. Picking up speed, the snake slithered further across the blacktop. When the rattler reached the broken yellow lines dividing the highway, the eagle took a nosedive, went in for the kill. Closing in on the snake, the eagle opened its talons to collect its prize. A burst, flames engulfed the snake. The eagle withdrew into the sky. Fire crackled the snake’s scales. It writhed and shook and twisted and contorted in the middle of the highway, rising several feet into the air and slamming hard on the road. The fire burned faster, harder as the snake’s body expanded, tore. Arms. Toes. Teeth. Flames turned blue. A scream gave birth between the flickering. Hair. Nails. Skin. The fire ballooned out, then disappeared. The Woman lay naked in the road. Her pale skin dripping wet. Red hair. Green eyes. She stood to her feet. She breathed. She walked. II. Honey ran her fingers across Shooter’s chest. “How will you do it?” “I’ll put the gun to his head and pull the trigger,” Shooter said. He pulled back the bed sheets, exposing their bodies. He climbed on top of Honey. “He’ll be as dead as dead can be.” “Are you scared?” “Nah.” Shooter leaned down and sucked on Honey’s neck. “You scared for me?” “I’m scared that you ain’t scared.” “Don’t worry, baby. Nothing can kill me.” Honey stretched her neck forward, took his lip in hers, sucked hard, let him loose and whispered, “Cigarettes. Cigarettes will kill you.” Shooter rolled off Honey, let his feet fall heavy on the green motel carpet, spread the thick velvet curtains apart, allowing a blast of sunlight to invade the room. He stood there naked with his head tilted back, eyes closed, bathing in daylight. A snap of electricity, Honey turned on the television. She flipped through the channels until landing on a televangelist in tears, holding up a white linen with gold trim as a 1-800 number flashed below. The preacher warned viewers about Satan’s inevitable attack on all the Lord’s children. “But he, that devil of old, has been already crushed beneath the heel of God in the flesh, crucified, buried, resurrected, and seated at the right hand of the father! Stand with me, brothers and sisters in faith. This prayer cloth is my gift to you—having prayed over, anointed, and blessed everyone myself—with any love donation of one-hundred dollars or more to help me spread the gospel of Jesus Christ to the nations. He’s called me to be his prophet, I must prophesy! I cannot go unless I am sent. Will you help send me?” Honey grabbed the telephone next to the bed and dialed the number on the screen. “I want one,” she said. “Are you fucking serious?” “Yes. That thing is gorgeous, and I want it.” “For a hundred bucks?” A man’s voice came in over the receiver. “This is the day that the lord has made. My name is Moses. How can I help you?” Honey covered the phone with her hand and looked at Shooter, “You might need all the prayer you can get.” “Hello?” Moses called from the other line. “Hi, I wanna give you some money so I can get one of those pretty white cloths.” Shooter grabbed his pack of cigarettes, lit up, walked to the bathroom mirror. He swayed his hips back and forth, humming an old Waylon Jennings song to himself. “Nothing can kill me,” he said with the stick hanging between his lips. Nancy stood behind the register, counting cash. Truckers and tourists filled the diner with a few locals scattered throughout. She watched as a family of four sat in one corner of the restaurant, talking and laughing with one another as the father and mother held hands under the table. Two truckers on the opposite side of the room sat across from one another in silence, eating their blueberry pancakes, drinking black coffee and orange juice. Andres, a local, waddled up to Nancy with the usual display of cotton balls stuffed up each nostril. Nancy smiled, “Morning, Andres.” “Hello, darlin’,” Andres smiled back. “How’s Melinda?” “She’s good.” He set his check on the counter and dug through his pockets for cash. “She had a growth on the back of her leg. We shaved it off.” “I’m glad to hear it. Please tell her I said hello.” Andres set a twenty-dollar bill on the counter. “You and your little ones should come by sometime. Let us serve you for a change.” “That’s sweet, but I don’t think I’d be as good of a tipper as you two are, and my kids can be a lot to handle. Last thing I want to do is to mess up your home.” She handed Andres his change. “That’s yours, Darlin’.” “Thank you, Andres,” she said, slipping the bills and coins into her apron pockets. “Kids don’t mess nothing up, really. And between you and me, Melinda’s cooking ain’t exactly fine dining, so I don’t think we’d be expecting no tips.” “Oh, I’m sure she cooks just fine.” “Tell that to all the dogs we’ve had to bury who had the misfortune of eating her scraps,” he said. Andres smiled, left the diner. Nancy went on about her day, taking and delivering orders to her patrons, making small talk with locals and passersby, counting her tips in the bathroom. At the end of her shift, Noonan, the chef, asked her to join him at Elk’s Bar down the road for a few beers. “Not tonight, Noon,” she told him. “Why not?” he asked, removing the net from his curly hair. “Because I’ve got one night to myself, and I don’t want to spend it in some shitty bar buying shitty beer.” “Fine,” he said, “I’ll buy the damn beer, then.” Nancy turned and faced Noonan, hand placed firmly on her hip, smirking. “You’re twice my age, old man. What will everyone say about us?” A smile inched its way across Noonan’s face. He walked slowly to her, put one hand in his pocket and the other on her cheek. “They’ll say you’re gorgeous,” he said, “but dumber than dirt because I am gay as fuck.” Nancy laughed, slapped his hand away. “Jesus, Noonan.” He guffawed, walked to the back door, turned, looked back at Nancy. “You want to be my wingman or not, since I’m assuming you’re closed for business downstairs?” She rolled her eyes. “Next time.” “Well, come on by after you close up, maybe I’ll even buy you a shitty cocktail. If I’m not already somewhere else, with someone else, fucking my brains out,” he said, turned and left. The stars poked holes in the blanket of black desert sky outside the empty diner. Nancy turned out all but the lights behind the counter, poured herself a cup of coffee and sat down in one of the empty booths. She added a pinch of sugar, stirred the spoon as her eyes lost themselves in the beauty of the night. Took a sip, stirred. Refill, stirred, stared some more. The bright red hair of the Woman caught Nancy’s attention first. Then, the glow of her naked skin under moonlight. The Woman seemed to float toward her. “What the hell?” She ran to the entrance door, checked the locks. The Woman approached the glass door. Nancy reached for words to say, found none. The Woman smiled. “I know you,” she said. Nancy shook her head. “Sweet as a peach,” she whispered. Nancy trembled, began to cry. She ran to the register and grabbed the phone, tried pushing the buttons, but her fingers lost their strength. She steeled herself, dialed 911. The operator asked what the emergency was. Nancy opened her mouth to explain that some crazy buck-ass naked woman was outside her diner, and she needed someone to come out to her immediately. But the only sound to escape her lips was the Woman’s voice, speaking in a tongue she didn’t understand. The dispatcher asked if Nancy was okay and if she needed help, to which Nancy continued to reply with indiscernible language, in the Woman’s voice. Nancy’s eyes welled with tears as she watched the Woman mouth the same sounds, speaking through Nancy like a megaphone into the receiver. Nancy screamed and threw the phone at the door. The Woman closed her eyes. Click. The door opened. The Woman walked in. Nancy lost all feelings in her legs and dropped. The Woman knelt in front of Nancy, studied her, shushed her. “I am not the thing you fear,” she said. She ran a finger through Nancy’s hair, down her face, and lifted her eyes to meet her own. “There will be a healing,” she said, smiling. The Woman leaned in, kissed Nancy’s forehead. Nancy fell into The Woman’s arms, weeping. Shooter rapped on the window, trying to wake Nancy as she lay sprawled out in one of the diner’s booths. “Hey!” Nancy shot up in a panic, grabbing her chest, her eyes darting around the empty restaurant. She looked up to see Shooter standing outside, staring at her. “I gotta talk to you,” he said. Shooter sat in the booth, running his hands through his slicked back hair. Nancy put coffee in front of him. He lifted the cup, staring into the black sludge, slurped, and let the rim of the cup linger on his lips for a moment. Nancy folded her hands and leaned back. “I never see you under better circumstances,” she said. “Might not ever,” Shooter said. “I hope you’re wrong.” “Maybe.” Shooter took another long drink, set the cup down in front of him and met Nancy’s eyes. “I’m doing it. I’m going to kill him.” The buzzing of the kitchen lights echoed throughout the diner, filling the silent space between them. “You’ve been saying that for years,” Nancy said. “It’s different now.” “How?” “I got a woman. Want to start a family of my own.” “Why do you need to kill him to do that?” Shooter looked out at the empty parking lot. “I asked you a question,” Nancy said. He returned his attention to her. “I know,” he said. “I’m waiting.” “It’s already done.” “It doesn’t have to be. You could move on with your life. You won’t be able to do that if you kill him.” Shooter leaned forward, “You remember what he did to us.” “I do.” “There’s no moving on. It’s this, then whatever is next. But it ain’t moving on. So don’t call it that. We were kids. What he done, there ain’t any undoing, except this. That’s all that’s left.” Nancy bit her bottom lip. “It’ll always be this way for you so long as you let it, you know.” “I’m just setting things right,” he said, downing his cup. “I don’t believe that.” “You don’t have to,” he said. “You’re going to end up killing yourself if you do this, Shooter.” Shooter stared at her. “I love you, sister.” “I love you,” she said. He slid the cup across the table. She carried it back to the kitchen. Nancy stood over the sink for a moment, looking in the mirror at the crow’s feet around her eyes. She took a deep breath. The Woman flashed like a single frame in a motion picture before her. Nancy snapped to. She walked back to the booth. Shooter was gone. The Woman watched as Shooter parked his motorcycle in the parking lot of the bar and headed inside. Swirls of purple matter, thick as lava, formed in the sky. Tunnels to somewhere. She lifted her head. A young boy’s face took shape at the epicenter of the largest vortex. Shooter, the child. She smiled at him. The usual crowd of desert weirdos filled the barroom. The bartender handed out bottles of this and glasses of that. Gram Parsons blared from a dusty jukebox. Shooter sat next to Elroy, who was fidgeting and looking over his shoulder every few seconds. “Knock that shit off, man,” Shooter said, “you look like a fucking tweaker.” “You sound like my dad,” Elroy said. “You don’t know who your daddy is, Elroy.” Elroy laughed. “Where’s Holtz?” “You sure you want to do this, Shooter? He’s got at least half the boys with him. All carrying. Maybe some dogs, too.” Shooter pulled his jacket back, showed off the handle of his .357 pistol. “And?” “That won’t help you if you miss. Holtz’ll whoop you to death. And you know I’m right.” Shooter grabbed Elroy’s Modelo Negro. “You mind?” Elroy shook his head. Shooter finished the bottle, set it down in front of Elroy. “You know why I have to do this, man.” Elroy waved to the waitress down for another round. “You talk to Nancy about it?” “Against my better judgement.” The waitress dropped off two Modelos. They drank slow and in silence, until both bottles were empty. “Holtz is meeting a crew from Bakersfield at the house off Beacon Road. Some new transpo deal. That’s all I know,” Elroy said. “Thanks.” Shooter got up, left the bar. The house off Beacon Road looked like something out of a seventies horror film. Chipped paint, roof damn near falling off. Shooter left his bike half a mile away, laid up in a thicket about fifty yards from the front of the house. Lights flickered inside. Shadows flitted across the walls. Two sedans—detective vehicles—sat out front alongside a cluster of Harley Davidsons. A black Dodge Ram rolled up to the house and parked behind the other vehicles, blocking everyone in. Two men came out of the house and down to the truck. The driver’s side door opened and out stepped a massive man with a Silverbelly Stetson cowboy hat: Chief of Police, Allyn Holtz. “They’re inside waiting for you,” one of the detectives said to Holtz. “Better be,” he said. “Rogers and Kinchen are at the back of the house,” the other detective told him. Holtz nodded. He eyed the detective cars, then the detectives. “What the fuck is this?” The two men looked at each other. “We thought it would be less conspicuous,” one said. Holtz punched him in the gut. The detective crumbled. “Do I look like I’ve got my fucking cop car here with me?” The detective gasped for air. “No, sir,” he said. “Last thing I want is for anyone seeing my fucking department’s vehicles outside this shithole.” He turned to the other man still standing. “You two stay out here and keep an eye on things.” “Yes, sir.” Holtz fixed his Stetson, hocked and spit on the ground. “Lot of money being made tonight, boys. Let’s not fuck this up,” he said, and went in the house. III. The boy and girl sat on the steps of the house. The evening sun painted yellow streaks across the turquoise sky. The girl stared out at the skyline, the boy played with his wooden pistol, shooting rubber bands into the yard. “You better pick those up,” the girl said to the boy. “Shut up. I will,” he said. The girl took the hem of her denim dress, twirled it in her fingers. “How much longer is Mama gonna be?” the boy asked. “As long as she needs to.” “Sissy?” “What?” “Is Mama a whore?” The girl turned to the boy as if jolted with electricity. “Who told you that? That’s an ugly word you don’t call girls, especially not your mama.” “What’s it mean?” “I want to know who told you that?” “Thomas Bellfire.” “That little shit,” she said under her breath. “What’s it mean?” “It means someone who does nasty things for money,” she said. “Like what?” “Nasty things in bed.” “Oh.” The boy scrunched up his face, fought back tears. The girl reached her hand across and put it on the boy’s back. He let out a small sob. “Is she?” he asked, his voice quivering. “No. She’s not a whore,” she said, and continued rubbing his back. “I’m gonna kill Thomas,” the boy said. “No, you won’t. Don’t worry about him. He’ll get what’s coming to him.” The boy wiped his face on his sleeve, picked up more rubber bands and shot them. “Mama’s a witch,” the girl said. “Huh?” “That’s why everybody comes to see her. She helps them with her magic. Spells and stuff. Her mama was a witch, too. One day, I’ll be a witch.” “How do you know?” “Grandma told me last year, before she died. She said we come from a powerful family that’s full of magic. Some of them were shapeshifters. But don’t you go telling anyone that. Just because you know something doesn’t mean you can just go and tell anyone you please.” “Is she really a witch?” “Yeah, she is. Me too. One day.” “Okay,” the boy said. “Am I a witch?” “Boys aren’t witches.” “Why not?” “Because only girls are witches.” “Oh. That sucks.” The boy shot another rubber band with more force than the ones before. “Don’t say ‘sucks’. Mama doesn’t like that.” “Sorry,” he said. The screen door burst open. The boy and girl jumped to their feet and cleared the way as a young officer stomped onto the porch. He adjusted his Stetson, pulled a pack of cigarettes from his brown leather bomber jacket. Mama followed, holding the skirt of her long black dress in one hand, a glass in the other. She looked down at her children, smirked and winked. The girl smiled back. The boy turned to examine the officer, the cigarette shaking between his fingers. “You sure it’ll work,” the officer asked Mama. “I don’t doubt it,” she said. “All right.” He turned to Mama. “And you ain’t saying nothing about this to nobody, right?” Mama smiled, scoffed. “What’s to tell?” “You know what’ll happen if you do, right?” Mama took a step toward the officer. “You know what’ll happen if you threaten me, right?” The officer took a long drag, flicked the stick far off into the yard. He looked at the boy holding his wooden gun, then pointed to his own in the holster at his side. “I got one, too,” the officer said. The boy lifted his wooden toy, pointed it at the officer. The officer roared with laughter. “Hold on there, shooter. That’s your name, ain’t it? Shooter?” “Maybe,” the boy said. The officer smiled at Mama. Mama didn’t blink. He turned back to the boy. “I can see why,” he said, turned and left. Mama wrapped up the boy and girl in her long arms and pulled them to her side. “Inside, you two.” “Yes, ma’am,” they said. Mama, the boy, and the girl sat at the dinner table, finishing their Hamburger Helper. “How was school,” Mama asked the girl. “It was fine. Same old,” she said. “How about you, handsome?” “Boring.” “Boring? What made it so boring?” The boy shot up in his seat, “Oh! Me and Ricky saw a baby rattlesnake out past the gate at recess. I wanted to catch it, but it was too far away.” Mama’s eyes widened. “If you see a baby rattler, you run. You don’t want to get bit by one of them. If a baby snake bites you, it releases all of its venom and can kill you in a minute. You want that?” The boy’s eyes fell to the floor. “No, ma’am.” Mama lifted his face with her fingers. “I can’t have nothing happening to you two, okay? I love you both too much. Please just do as I say. Both of you,” she turned to meet the girl’s eyes, “all right?” They nodded, said yes. “My sweet babies,” Mama said, smiling, “Sweet as a peach.” The girl beamed. “You both finish up and get in bed. It’s past your bedtimes.” The boy lay half-awake when he heard the noise. He opened his eyes and saw the girl standing in the doorway, looking down the hall, tears rolling down her cheeks, hands covering her mouth. He got out of bed quick, went beside her, saw Mama slumped over in the corner at the end of the hall, her nightgown lifted over her waist. Blood poured down her legs. Her face purple, distorted. One eye shut, one wide open. No breathing. The boy heard a car door slam outside. He ran past the ripped screen door and onto the porch. The police car sped quietly down the street, disappeared. IV. The detectives smoked cigarettes in silence outside the house. Holtz’s bolstering laugh boomed from the windows, followed by other voices. Shooter lay still in the thicket, his finger on the trigger of his .357. Half an hour had gone by when the bikers started leaving the house. They ignored the detectives as they got on their motorcycles and roared away into the night. Holtz came out last, strutting, wearing a shit-eating grin, dusting off his Stetson. Rogers and Kinchen appeared from around the corner, joined the rest of the police department in the front yard. “All right. We’ll get the first delivery next month. I’ll send y’all the details. Going to need those roads cleared. Eyes on them the whole time. Safe passage and all that shit. When it’s done, you’re paid. Understood?” They said yes, of course, anything you need. Shooter rose from his hiding spot, careful not to make noise. He pointed his gun, walked. Bang. The shot echoed across the night sky. Rogers hit the ground. Bullet through his skull. The others went for their guns. Shooter fired off four more rounds, unnaturally fast. Four more bullets. Four bodies fell. Four dead men. Holtz clawed at his holster. Shooter took a few long strides and pistol-whipped the chief square on his temple. Holtz collapsed to the dirt. Shooter took the handcuffs off one of the dead cops, cuffed Holtz’s hands behind his back, threw him in the back of the truck, cranked the engine, took off down the road. The Woman stepped out of the house, watched the taillights shrink and disappear. She turned to the four bodies. Crickets chirped on every side. They grew louder the closer she got to the bodies. Her eyes went black. Nancy couldn’t sleep. It’s too damn hot, she thought. Taking a deep breath, she threw the sheets off and got out of bed. Moonlight poured across the wooden floors like cool silk on skin. The boys’ room was covered in dinosaurs and Spider-Man toys and puzzles. She took a beer from the refrigerator, went and stood on the front porch. She glared out at the nothingness surrounding her home save the road leading into town. High-beam lights bounced in the distance, growing larger and brighter the closer they got. She shut her eyes and whispered to herself. The Woman walked up behind her. “Is this it?” she asked the Woman. The Woman nodded. Shooter barreled up the twisted dirt road leading to Nancy’s house. He slammed on the brakes. Holtz bounced several feet in the air, crashing hard on the truck bed. Shooter got out of the truck, holding his .357. He opened the tailgate and yanked Holtz out by his cowboy boots. Shooter grabbed the Stetson, now covered in dust and dirt and specks of blood and threw it away. Holtz fell hard on the ground. He gasped for air, muttering a barely audible threat at Shooter. Shooter laughed. “Keep talking, you piece of shit,” Shooter said, and kicked Holtz several times in the ribs. Blood spewed from Holtz’s mouth. Nancy ran down the steps, tried to pull Shooter away. The strikes came fast and heavy against Holtz’s side. Nancy heard the crunch of ribs breaking. Holtz tried to scream but ended up choking on his blood. “Shooter, please,” Nancy said, putting herself between the two men. “Fuck that! This motherfucker’s dying tonight.” “And so will you,” she said. Shooter stopped, looked at Nancy. “I’ve been dead. Long time now. Just decided I’m taking him with me.” “That’s not true. He’s not worth this, Shooter.” “Mama is. Mama’s worth it. And that son of a bitch killed her.” Nancy placed her hands on Shooter’s face. “I know he did. And his death will be worse than you can imagine. But please. Not this way.” Holtz struggled to his knees, hacking and wheezing. “Ain’t no other way, sister.” Shooter pushed Nancy aside, raised his pistol, fired off the last round into Holtz’s heart. The chief’s eyes froze wide as he fell onto his back, rattled off a breath, and died. Nancy and Shooter stared at the body. Another gunshot went off like thunder in the night. Shooter lifted a hand to his chest—blood. Nancy screamed. No sound came. Shooter turned around and saw the boy holding a wooden gun, aimed at Shooter. “I know you,” Shooter said, and fell. Nancy dropped to Shooter’s side, wailing. The Woman came behind the boy and put her hand on his shoulder. “No more shooting,” the Woman said to the boy. “Yes ma’am.” He lowered his wooden toy. The woman stepped softly over to Nancy and knelt beside her. “He has a second chance. Your mama made sure,” the Woman told her. Nancy looked at the woman, tears cascading. She eyed the boy, nodded at the Woman. Nancy stood, reached for the boy’s hand, and walked towards the house. “Nancy,” the Woman called. “Your mama wanted you to watch.” “Watch what?” Swirls of purple matter, thick as lava, formed in the sky. Tunnels to somewhere. The Woman touched Holtz’s forehead, whispered to herself. The chief’s eyes opened. He sat up. “The fuck just happened,” he said. “Who the hell are you? Where the hell is my fucking gun? Ah, fuck. I need to get to a hospital. I’m hurting. Something’s wrong.” “You took her magic, and you took her life,” the Woman said. Holtz blinked through the blood in his eyes. “What the hell are you talking about? I need fucking help! I need medical help,” he said, trailing off. “You took her magic, and you took her life.” The chief looked at Nancy and the boy, let out a deep growl. “So fucking what? I killed their little devil-fucking mama. Who gives a shit? She was pure evil. Pure fucking evil. World’s better off without her.” The Woman’s eyes went black. She stuck out a forked tongue. She convulsed. Her skin stretched, twisted. A burst. Hundreds of scaly things slithered around Holtz. He let out a scream. One of the serpents struck him on the leg. Then another. They slithered up his sides. “Help me,” the chief screamed to Nancy. Nancy and the boy stood silent, watching, holding each other’s hands. The purple vortex swirled violently above. Red lightning crashed. Another bite. And another. The snakes covered Holtz’s body, striking every inch of him. His cries and screams were muted when one snake slid down his throat. From the epicenter of the vortex, Nancy saw something moving. Flesh of some kind. When it finally occurred to her what was coming, she covered the boy’s eyes with her hand. The boy didn’t fight her. The giant snake head pierced through the vortex, reared itself back, and struck. It took Holtz in its mouth and withdrew back into the portal, the smaller serpents still attached to his arms and legs. His body convulsed until it disappeared, sunken into whatever hell lay beyond that purple matter. The vortex shrunk and swirled until a pop was heard and vanished. Nancy stared at Shooter’s body. She closed her eyes. “Please take him somewhere peaceful,” she said. His body faded, like a bad memory. The engine in Holtz’s truck cranked. The headlights came on. It backed itself out of her driveway and took off down the road. Nancy turned to the boy. “Are you okay?” The boy smiled. V. Nancy watched from her porch as the three children chased each other in her yard. Her oldest ran up the stairs to her. “Mama,” he said, “is he gonna live with us now?” Nancy raised her brow, “Yes, he is. He’s a part of our family.” “Really?” “Yes, really. Is that alright with you?” He turned to the others and shouted, “He’s gonna live with us!” The children celebrated, giving high fives and hugs and doing silly dances. Nancy laughed as she watched them. The children lay in their beds. Nancy went one by one, kissing them on their foreheads. “My sweet babies,” she said, tucked them in, closed their door. Nancy sat at the kitchen table when she heard the boy tip-toeing in. She smiled as he poked his head around the corner. “Come on, then,” she told him. The boy sat at the table. “What’s got you up?” “I can’t sleep,” he said. “Me neither.” The boy opened his mouth, ready to speak, then closed his lips. “Go on,” Nancy said, “what is it?” The boy swung his feet in the chair, nervously. “Are you a witch?” D.T. Robbins is the founding editor of Rejection Letters and author of Birds Aren't Real. < back

< back emily nelson march 1, 2023 hen his wife shoots the neighbor’s sheep he thinks alright, I guess there’s something wrong . Up to this point, he’s noticed a few new strange behaviors here and there, a husband’s instinct that the woman beside him is not exactly the same woman that he was sitting next to a few moments ago. Occasionally he catches a cloudy look in Denise’s eye that he has never seen before, confusion that reads like fear, but there will always be a blink and she returns. He is able to tell himself, after these moments pass, that she’s just slowing down a bit, like they all are at this age. Even when she is cruel to him out of the blue, or when she goes for a walk and forgets the way home—all things that he can explain away, however desperately. Those things that happen as you age. Killing the neighbor’s sheep is not one of those things. “They were on our property” is the excuse she gives him when he arrives home to find her shivering on the couch in her bathrobe, away from the crowd of people who have gathered out front to witness the spectacle of bloodied wool and sheep brains on the lawn. Tate did not see it happen, but there are several witnesses; Tilden Island is small enough that despite the acres between neighbors, not much goes unnoticed, especially when a gunshot rattles everyone at seven in the morning outside of hunting season. When Tate had left the house that morning, Denise had been sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee and doing the crossword puzzle on her iPad as she always did. He had not worried about leaving her alone. Sam had been the first one there, had just happened to be driving down to the dock when he saw Denise standing on her porch with Tate’s shotgun in her hands, the heaving carcasses of three Merino sheep in the front yard. Sam told Tate that Denise was crying when he found her, and for a moment she seemed so disoriented, he wasn’t sure if she was going to turn the gun on him next. But when Sam reached for the shotgun, she gave it to him wordlessly, her hands limp, before retreating into the house and locking the door behind her. The sheep belonged to Grace Pham, who lived on the other side of the island, and it wasn’t clear what they were doing so far from home. One of them died outright, and the other two were wounded so badly by the buckshot that Sam had to finish them off before Grace was even notified. Nobody wanted Grace to call the police, but she did anyway. There is no law enforcement on Tilden Island, one of the many reasons that Tate and the other lifers love living here. The homeowner’s association voted against building a sheriff’s outpost on the island a few years back, citing concerns about land availability that were really just flimsy cover for the usual libertarian worries about government overreach. Most of the lifers are here precisely because there was no law enforcement, and while there has never been anything more serious than a speeding violation in the last twenty years, it has been understood by everyone that the police very rarely need to get involved, that everyone on Tilden can work things out like grownups. Obviously Grace feels differently. She’s much younger than Tate, probably not even out of her forties, and has not been on the island as long as him. She wears expensive leggings and college sweatshirts, and has clean hands for someone who works with sheep so much. One of the few people Tate doesn’t know all that well, one of the few people on the island that hasn’t had dinner at the Waylan’s, never received a can of Denise’s cherry plum preserves. Not out of spite, of course. Grace keeps to herself more than most, out there on the rich side of the island with the tourists and part-time residents. Her standing in his yard makes Tate feel uncomfortable, something that was never supposed to happen. The police take a report from Grace over the phone and tell her that they will be in touch. Denise could be charged with “maliciously killing or causing substantial bodily harm to livestock belonging to another,” a Class C felony with a ten-thousand dollar fine or up to five years in prison, depending on the findings of the judge. He expects Grace to be hysterical, crying like Denise did over the loss of her animals, but instead she is maddeningly quiet, her eyes sympathetic as she talks over the situation with Sam. When Mitch Jackson finally arrives with his pickup to take the carcasses to his burn pile, Grace turns to Tate and presses her lips together. “I’m really sorry about this, Tate,” she says, her voice heavy with a familiarity that the two of them do not share. “I’m sorry this is happening to you and Denise.” She climbs into her golf cart and speeds down the dirt road towards her side of the island, following Mitch’s pickup. Sam lets out a sigh through his teeth. “This is bad,” he says, and it’s so obvious of an observation that Tate almost laughs. He finds Denise in the living room. She’s changed out of her robe and is watching the television on mute. The San Juan County news is playing, a shiny-haired woman gesturing broadly at kitschy graphics of the sun and rain clouds. He has barely had a second alone with her all morning. “Gonna be nice this week,” Denise says. She smiles up at Tate, her glasses sliding down her nose. “Denise,” he starts, but she’s already looking past him and suddenly stands up. “I’m making lunch,” she says, sweeping into the kitchen. He watches her go, every limb weighing a thousand pounds. She doesn't seem to realize what has happened. The woman on television is now gesticulating towards a cluttered traffic pattern, her eyes sparkling in HD. “Denise, honey,” he says again. “I’m in here, Tate,” she calls. “I can’t hear you.” He gets as far as the kitchen doorway, watching her rifle through the cupboards. She’s murmuring to herself, her voice low and undulating, almost as if she’s singing. “I was just thinking that we need to start planning our Christmas cards this year,” Denise says, turning and smiling at Tate. “I always feel like we get behind on it and then we’re rushing to do it at the last minute. Don’t you think?” “Denise, honey, it’s August.” Tate watches her go through the knife drawer, and wonders briefly if he should hide those too. He’s familiar with the pattern of her days; if she starts out lucid, she will generally stay that way, but the earlier the incident comes, the longer she stays disoriented. “Well, I know, but…” Denise procures the bread knife and starts hacking at the half-stale loaf of sourdough on the counter. “I wanted to do a newsletter this year. Lots of people do them, and I think it would be nice. Something to let our friends know what’s going on with our lives. What we’ve been up to and everything.” “What have we been doing?” Tate asks. He hopes it doesn’t sound like a challenge. Denise turns to him again. “Lots of things, silly,” she says, smiling. “We rebuilt the Bearcat in April, and I’ve got the new herb garden set up. You’re the secretary for the Homeowner’s Association. People want to know what we’re up to.” She goes back to her work. It seems foolish for him to point out that they haven’t sent out Christmas cards for at least ten years; they don’t have anyone to keep in touch with on the mainland, and everyone on Tilden already knows everything about everybody. “Honey,” he says, “I talked to Sam Sparrow just now.” “About what?” Denise does not turn around. “I—about what happened this morning.” “Oh, that,” Denise says, and she turns slightly to pull a bowl from the sink. He tries to catch her facial expression, but the sun burning off the fog outside is reflecting in her glasses. Her mouth is firm, unreadable. “He says that they’ll need to confiscate our guns. And that there will be some sort of fine.” Tate watches his wife’s back move up and down beneath her denim shirt as she scoops celery and onions into the bowl. She doesn’t turn around. “Well, I think we’ll be alright,” is all she says. “Honey, they’re going to take all our guns,” he says, feeling slightly desperate. “Grace wants to take legal action.” Denise waves her knife-wielding hand dismissively. “Oh, she’s just uptight. She’ll relax. It’s not like she doesn’t have eighty more sheep where those ones come from.” Tate thinks, well, at least she knows what she did. “You shouldn’t say that, Denise,” Tate hears himself saying. “This isn’t a joke. She did say she wanted to sue us.” “She’ll cool off,” Denise says. Then, “I’m making chicken salad, do you want some?” Tate rakes a hand through his hair. It feels greasy and damp, as if he has run several miles, even though he has been standing still for what feels like hours now. “No, honey. You know I don’t like it.” He sees her stiffen before turning around and nodding. “Of course,” she says. “I just wanted to make sure.” “Anyways,” Tate tries again. “Sam was telling me what we’re going to have to do next. With the trial and all.” Denise freezes. “Trial?” “For the felony,” Tate says, almost afraid. “The felony charge. For shooting Grace’s—“ Denise drops the knife and whirls around. “Did that bitch really call the cops on me?” The look on her face is more betrayal than anger. “Just because of that?” Tate feels defensive, pulling away from the doorframe. He has a sudden desire to hide from his wife, a feeling he has never had and never wants to have again. “Honey, it’s…” he looks at the floor. “It’s technically a crime, what you did. I can’t—“ “I’m gonna call her,” Denise says, darting past Tate towards the landline in the living room. Tate races after her. “No, Denise,” he says, catching her and wrestling the receiver from her hand. “It’s already done. If you call her it’s only going to make it worse.” Her hand is wrapped around his wrist, her frail fingernails biting the skin of his arm. Up close, her eyes are wet, pleading. “It’s not my fault,” she says. “They were on our property. What was I supposed to do?” When they met, they were both divorcees, her three years out and him only six months. They met on a flight from Seattle to Sacramento; she was a flight attendant, and he swore to himself he wouldn’t do anything funny, make any moves like he had seen his father do when he was a little kid. He only asked her out when he ran into her at the arrival deck, both of them trying to get a cab, and he decided it must be fate to see her again. She had changed her shoes and was wearing glossy white sneakers instead of pumps, and her hair was falling out of its twist. Denise said that she had gotten left behind in the bathroom and missed the crew bus; years later, he would know that this was a lie, that she had stopped for a drink at the airport bar without telling the rest of the flight crew. They got to talking and agreed to split a cab, first dropping her off at her hotel and then him at his. But when they arrived at the Sacramento Sheraton, Denise invited Tate in to get a drink at the hotel bar, and he obliged. He loved how easy she was to talk to, not a hint of insecurity. She was a woman who had seen the world and was largely unimpressed with its inhabitants, but those who surpassed her expectations she loved with a ferocity that reminded Tate of a mother lion. Neither of them had any children, him by accident and her by choice, one of the many reasons she and her first husband didn’t work out. When he left the bar that evening, she followed him out, the two of them bathed in the fungal orange light of the streetlamps. They stood for a moment, letting the cool wind scatter the leaves across the parking lot. “How long are you here for?” she finally asked. Her four vodka sodas had turned her cheeks pink, and even though she was well into her fifties she looked like a young woman. “Oh, just a few days. I’m in town for a meeting, but then I’m going back to Seattle.” “Well...” she adjusted her coat, cheap polyester standard-issued from the airline she worked for. “Give me a call the next time you’re in town. I’d love to do this again.” He wrote his number for her on a piece of hotel stationary, and she took it. She moved like she was going to hug him, then reached out and patting his upper arm. When he got home a few days later, the light on his voicemail machine was blinking. It was Denise, asking him to get drinks again sometime soon. A year later, they were married. # The officers from the county are at their house a week after the “incident,” as Sam Sparrow has delicately begun to call it. Tate watches them from the upstairs window as they pull up on someone’s borrowed ATV: soft, middle-aged men with round pink faces and dark glasses. One of them has a beard, red streaked with gray, and neither wears a uniform. He expected something different when he was told that men from the state government would be coming to remove all the guns from the premises; in his head, he envisioned a swarm of stiff-backed g-men in tactical gear descending on the airstrip, ready for a fight. Even if this were the case, Tate is not going to fight; in another circumstance, certainly. But the man from the county explained it over the phone to him that morning. “It’s a precautionary measure, ahead of any potential fines,” he’d said. Tate was only half listening, watching Denise in the living room look at the television impassively. “We’ll have to take all firearms out of the house until Mrs. Waylan is deemed psychologically sound.” Tate appreciated that the man said “until,” as if this stranger was also sure that there was nothing really wrong with Denise deep down, that this was all a temporary arrangement, and that eventually everything would clear and they could go back to their normal life. He meets the officers in his front yard, hoping to keep them away from Denise, who does not know that any of this is happening. The officers show Tate their badges, introduce themselves as Officer Beasly and Officer Smith. Both of them are young enough to be Tate’s own children. “Can you tell us how many guns you have on the property, sir?” the smaller one, Officer Smith, asks. Neither of them have taken off their sunglasses and Tate sees himself reflected through them, his face swollen and helpless in their eyes. Tate shrugs before he can realize that he shouldn’t. It looks careless, the attitude of someone who doesn’t keep track of his firearms, the type of person who would let his rapidly deteriorating wife destroy someone else’s property without thinking twice. “Twenty-five,” Tate says finally. The taller one, Beasly, writes something down on his notepad. “And you have them all out of their safes? Unlocked?” “Yes.” What is unsaid is that they were not in the safe to begin with. It was Denise who convinced him that a gun safe was necessary in the first place, and while he had gotten one shipped over from Anacortes a few years back, it had gone unused and the guns stayed unloaded in his office. Denise had said more than once that she didn’t think he needed so many—after all, the biggest threat on Tilden was Anton Check’s old Charolais bull, Timothy—but she agreed that it was his right and as long as she didn’t have to trip over them, he could have as many as he wanted. He follows the officers into the house, watching from the doorway as they loaded the guns into containers. They sweep the house, Tate trying to keep them as far from the living room as possible without it looking suspicious. They tell Tate that they will be in touch if anything changes and give him a phone number for the SJPD if he has any questions before buzzing down the road back towards the dock. Tate watches them leave. A small crowd, noticing the officers when they arrived, are gathered outside the Waylan property to watch the proceedings. Sam Sparrow is there, and when the ATV rounds the bend towards the dock he makes a motion to the onlookers and they head on their way. Sam gives Tate a sympathetic look, shakes his head. “Doesn’t he have anything better to do?” Tate mutters to himself. Denise has been in the living room for all of this. She’s finally turned off the television and is reading a magazine when Tate returns. “Why were the police here?” Denise asks, not looking up from the page. # It shocked him at that age that love could still feel this way, giddy and bashful. It was different with her, different than he expected marriage or love to be now that he was closer to retirement than starting life. The wedding hadn’t been big, a courthouse affair on a Tuesday morning, Tate in the suit he wore for business meetings and Denise in a pale blue skirt-set, a bouquet of roses from the grocery store across the street. She moved into his house out by the Boeing plant in Everett and settled into a life quickly, the two of them almost dangerously happy. She had a mission to protect people: waitresses at their local diner, the mail carrier, her dry cleaner, taking it upon herself to take care of them, tipping too much and bringing them clothes she was going to donate. Even when her hairdresser massacred her dye job, Denise insisted on going back the next time she needed her hair done. “If she loses customers, she’ll get kicked out of the salon,” was her logic. “She’s got three kids at home and no husband, what am I supposed to do?” When he learned that she had been hiding his drinking from him, he was more humiliated by the fact that he had not noticed anything sooner, that she had been able to keep it from him so easily. She had been a functioning alcoholic for several years, and by the time Tate entered her life she was an expert. But her tenacity for deceit was slipping in old age, and ultimately the catalyst was being drunk on the job, which led to her being fired from Horizon, hauled off the plane sobbing in Portland. She was four years away from her pension when it happened, but Tate assured her they made more than enough without it. The move to Tilden came later, not long after Denise got out of rehab. All of Tate’s friends from work were moving out of Seattle, looking for smaller towns or states with less rain and crime and liberalism, and it was one of these men who told Tate about Tilden, intrigued him with the idea of an “off the grid” place to live out his golden years. Tilden wasn’t connected to the ferry route like most of the other islands north of Puget Sound. There was no law enforcement presence on the island, nor any stores or restaurants; there wasn’t enough need or want for anything like it. It sounded like a paradise to Tate and Denise, both of whom were getting increasingly desperate to leave Seattle for different reasons, and when they went to visit one summer before Tate retired they fell in love. They arrived in April, snatching up a prime piece of property by the airport that was really a glorified landing strip near the mail shed. The house was two stories, a rarity on Tilden, with a big wraparound porch on the second floor with a view of the Salish sea out the dining room window. At first, Tate had been worried that the change in lifestyle would be too much for both of them, but Denise took to it immediately. She had never been a woman much concerned with her appearance, but on Tilden she quickly adopted the uniform of the other retired wives, trading slacks and sweaters for loose denim shirts and practical work pants, letting her hair go gray and coarse instead of heat styling it every day. There was a garage where Tate and Denise worked on their airplane, a Cessna 206 they bought secondhand from a fellow islander and repaired as one of their first retirement projects. Denise built a garden like the one she had had at home in Everett, stringing up netting around the plot to keep deer and rabbits at bay. Both of them read every day, worked on projects—he wanted to build airplanes, so she helped, and she wanted to grow more food, so he dug her a garden. They didn’t install a TV for almost three years after moving in. On warm evenings they sat on the porch and watched the bats chase after mosquitos as night closed in, the only noise the occasional call of an owl or the dull roar of a neighbor’s ATV, the plaintive cry of a foghorn somewhere on the water. She even gave up smoking, the only vice she had kept after rehab. “It just feels wrong to do it here,” she said. “Everywhere I look there’s trees and grass and I can’t stop thinking about accidentally setting it on fire.” She told Tate how surprised she was about how easy it was to quit, something she had never been able to do on the mainland. “Island magic,” she called it. They settled into a routine that, to Tate, was nothing short of idyllic, and every morning when he rolled over to find Denise already out of bed, dressed and working in the garden before it got too warm or too rainy, he would see her reading glasses balanced haphazardly on the nightstand and feel a rush of calm that he had, up to that point, only ever associated with coming home after a long day of work. Early on, Tate had wondered what would happen if he or Denise got sick. At the time, it wasn’t likely; they went to their doctor’s appointments on the mainland every year, got checked for everything. Tate’s family was unusually healthy, and his own mother had lived to ninety-nine before dying peacefully of old age. Denise was not close with her family, and had not been for some time, so she didn’t know if there were any health issues to be aware of. But they were both in good health—you had to be, to weather the cold winters and long boat rides and hours spent working in the sun that came with life on Tilden. Tate never worried, and the two of them had already planned where they would like to be buried together on the island. When someone on Tilden got sick, really sick, they moved off-island to deal with it. A faceless realtor whom nobody had ever seen would sell their house, and it would be like that old sick person had never been there. There were no wailing sirens to cut through the night, no sudden heart attacks or strokes. Like most things on Tilden Island, death usually came at a leisurely pace, always with enough time for one to prepare for its approach. Enough time to get your affairs in order, enough time to vanish off the island before anyone saw you sick or weak or broken, had to think of the fate that was no doubt awaiting all of them. There had never been an on-island funeral, unless you count the wake that the McIvers held for their 16-year-old cat, Katrina, after she died of kidney failure. A lot of the homeowners only stayed for the spring and summer, taking their old bones to warmer climes for the harsher part of the year. Over the years, Tate saw several long-time neighbors move, gathering the castoffs they left behind as they returned to the security and confinement of the mainland. It was how Tate got his truck, the fishing boat, a trailer and more buoys than he knew what to do with. The collection grew with time: Denise strung the buoys across the deck like enormous year-round Christmas lights, Tate put the stag horns from Andy Wood on the grill of his truck. A colorful array of paintings, photographs, and maps from past residents lined the walls of the Waylan home, and there was even a dog at one time, an aging Golden Retriever named Buddy who was too old to manage the boat ride and was now buried in Tate and Denise’s backyard near the garden. “I’ll stay as long as I’m able. You’ll have to drag me off kicking and screaming,” Denise always said, and Tate believed her. He kept waiting for something, a lump or a twinge or a sudden loss of appetite to signal that their time was coming, and for years it never came. Tate and Denise began to watch neighbors their age deteriorate and move away, selling their houses or going part-time, and without meaning to they became the longest-standing residents of Tilden Island. # Sam calls again later that evening. Tate wishes he wouldn’t; Sam is only trying to help, he takes his job as the HOA director very seriously—perhaps too seriously—but it’s almost more than he can take after today. “We’re doing fine, Sam,” Tate says before he can say anything. “I know, Tate. I just wanted to let you know that Grace decided that she is gonna go through with it after all and take it to court if you don’t pay the fine.” Tate glances at Denise, who is cleaning the dishes at the sink, and turns his body away from her. “The ten thousand?” “Yeah.” “Why doesn’t she tell me that?” Tate asks. “She will. I told her to call you. But I wanted to give you a heads up.” Tate rubs his eyes behind his glasses. “So that’s it? She wants the fine and everything?” “Yeah. She says she’s really sorry about it, but it’s a loss of inventory, so she feels like—” “Bullshit,” Tate says. “If she was really that sorry she wouldn’t have dragged the police into it. She wouldn’t have made it such a big deal.” “I hear you,” Sam says carefully. “But I guess she feels it’s what she has to do.” “She didn’t have to do anything. Can’t she tell it was an accident?” A pause. “Well, I mean….” Sam sighs. “I know, but to be fair to Grace it didn’t really look like an accident. But listen, Tate, I tried to talk her down, and I think she’s listening. I told her—I mean, we all know that Denise hasn’t been doing so good lately.” This is a surprise to Tate. He thought he was the only one who had noticed the changes in his wife’s behavior, at least until now. Shame floods him; what has Denise done or said to Sam that would make him realize that she’s not as sharp as she used to be? “What do you mean?” Tate asks. Denise is murmuring to herself again, the low thrumming words that sound like singing. “Come on, you know how it is with old age. Dementia and all that, makes you act different. I’m sure if you told the judge that, they’d be more lenient with you. Maybe even let you settle. But I don’t know, I’m not a legal expert or anything.” “Yeah,” Tate says, because what else can he say? “Listen, a bunch of us are gonna help you out. Nobody wants to see you guys go through something like this. I’ve got Greta working on a list of all the folks who can bring you guys food, Annette was talking about helping out with the house—” “Sam,” Tate says, harsher than he means to. “Nobody’s dead. You don’t need to do that.” “I know, but—” “If you can get me ten thousand dollars, I’d sure appreciate it. Or a time machine. Other than that, we don’t need anything.” He can’t tell who hangs up first. All the phone calls are starting to make him feel unfaithful somehow, a secret that everyone is in on except for Denise. Tate thinks about what Sam said, imagines trying to explain to Denise what their options are now, ask her if she understands what is happening and what it might mean for the two of them. He sees hospitals, retirement homes, dust-colored hallways and waiting rooms reeking of other people’s breath. Sedate watercolors on the walls, IV drips, handfuls of pills that Denise won’t swallow because she’s never liked swallowing pills, even Advil has to get crushed up in her orange juice. A quiet life of crossword puzzles and dinner on the deck turned into a series of appointments, in-home care, constant boats back and forth to the mainland, the faceless realtor materializing to tell Tate what the house might be worth. “Honey?” Denise startles Tate from his vision. She’s finished the dishes and is wiping her hands with the sunflower towel, a castoff from the retired schoolteacher who moved to Alaska. “What are you thinking about?” she asks. Tate shakes his head. “Nothing, honey,” he says, and she comes up behind him and squeezes his shoulders. He feels her forehead come to rest between his shoulder blades. “It’s getting late, my love,” she says. The closest Denise usually gets to pet names is “honey,” and the intensity of the words catch Tate off guard. Her arms snake around his chest and clasp tight. “I know. We should get to bed.” Tate can’t fall asleep, but at some point he must drop off, because one moment he’s staring at the ceiling and the next moment he is on his stomach and Denise’s side of the bed is empty. He jolts up immediately, fumbling in the dark for his glasses. There is no sound from the house, just the endless whirr of crickets drifting through the windows. The fan shut off sometime during the night, and Tate’s shirt is plastered to his front with sweat. “Denise?” He called down the hallway, but there was no answer. Panic seizes him; there are no more guns in the house, but God knows what Denise could find to wreak havoc with. He bolts down the hall and is relieved to see the keys on their usual hook. At least she hasn’t taken the car anywhere. He calls her name again. If she’s gone out on foot, it wouldn’t be much better. It’s three in the morning, she won’t know the way back. Even with the clearest of memories, Tilden Island is incredibly dark at night. No lights from streets or buildings—one of the many blessings of living so far away from civilization. When he goes out on the porch and looks into the yard he sees her, bending down in her garden, surrounded by the late-summer harvest that is caged in to keep out the deer and rabbits. She was still wearing her robe, the same blue terry cloth one she wore that first night she slept over at his house in Everett. Under the glow of the quarter moon he watches her work, her fingers moving gently through the dirt, harvesting or weeding or watering, he can’t see. A cold wind moves across the lawn; autumn is on its way. Denise is not worried. ♦ Emily Nelson is a writer from the Pacific Northwest currently pursuing an MFA in Fiction at the University of Montana. Her writing has been published in The Rumpus, Ayaskala, and Drizzle Review, and has received support from Tin House and Bread Loaf. < back

< back shelby hinte october 3, 2023 e are road tripping towards the Santa Cruz Mountains for your brother’s 50th birthday. We left after work, after dinner, to avoid the traffic. It’s dark over the valley which is as flat as the cow shit that stinks up the air. If you weren’t from around here, you wouldn’t know how close you are to the ocean, to tie-dye loving hippies with too much money, to frat boys who barf on the boardwalk. This stretch of highway is just another California contradiction. “Fuck,” you say, interrupting the country song I’ve put on for the drive. “What is it?” “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.” You are clenching the steering wheel and won’t look at me. You are in your own head. I know this look. I have seen it enough times in the last seven years to know what it means. “You forget your doses?” You don’t look at me, but I can tell just by the way your face twitches that you have. “I’m such a fucking idiot.” “Hey, don’t talk about my husband like that.” I try to take your hand in mine, to console you, but I also kind of think you are a fucking idiot. A better wife wouldn’t admit this, but it is nearly ten pm and we are an hour away from home, an hour away from our destination, and I don’t want to turn back now. “We have to turn back.” “Yeah.” “Are you mad?” “I’ll drive us to the cabin.” “You don’t have to.” “I don’t want you to have to drive four hours. That’s silly.” “Thanks.” I look in the backseat and see our kid still sleeping. He won’t know the difference. This is not the first time this has happened—your doses getting in the way of our life plans. Once, three years ago, on a camping trip for my birthday, we had to leave a day earlier than everyone else because you hadn’t earned enough take-homes from the clinic. You’d been pissing clean. You’d been banking on your counselor making an exception for my birthday. He hadn’t. I was less forgiving then. I wasn’t yet “in recovery”. I didn’t even think I had a real problem. This is easy to do when the person you’re with has a more ostensible problem. I was a queen at rationalizing the difference in our using—I never used needles, I could go long stretches with only drinking and not drugging, I never spent my portion of rent on a bender . I wasn’t thinking of all the ways my own using had inconvenienced you. How it made me quick to anger. How it made me paranoid you’d leave me. How I’d beg you to tell me over and over again you’d never leave me because I couldn’t hear it the first time through all the substances in my blood. No, at the time, I was only thinking of how we had to leave before everyone else, about how even in sobriety your addiction was ruining my birthday. I chugged three beers back-to-back in the morning before having to sit in the car next to you on the drive home. I picked little fights with you about it for weeks afterwards. I like to think I’m a more understanding wife now. Less quick to anger. Not as paranoid you’ll leave me. At least not as vocal about it. The last time you forgot your doses was the 4th of July two years ago. By then I was sober too —just a couple months. It wasn’t until we were a day into our trip that you realized you’d left your doses above the fridge in the little lock box the clinic made you carry. We were staying with your brother and his new boyfriend Matt, who, it turned out, has chronic pain and a government funded pharmacy of all our favorite pills to go with it. Matt’s morning ritual is to smoke a joint and take a fistful of pill with his coffee. I have often wondered if your brother, who was so intolerant of your using days, has ever questioned the behaviors of his own boyfriend. Matt knows we’re sober but that doesn’t stop him from offering us pills every time we wince when standing from the couch or massage the parts of our bodies that suffer from aging. Our suffering is one that cannot be so easily subdued. Whenever we’ve been offered pills, to my knowledge, we have both always declined the offer. I imagine we have both also privately wanted to sneak into his room and stuff a handful of his pills in our pockets to relapse in secret. On that 4th of July trip, you’d just hit three years sober. It was the morning after we’d arrived when you realized that you’d forgotten your doses. “Shit,” you’d said, pacing around the room and tapping your palm against your forehead like you could will a solution into existence. “It’s just one more day,” I said. I tried to sound calm, but I was just as afraid as you, thinking about the way your body would be drenched in sweat within a couple of hours, thinking about the way it would cloud your thought, and even though I wasn’t the biggest fan of you taking those doses from the clinic to stay sober, I knew what life had looked like without them. “I could just ask Matt for a Vicodin.” you said, looking across the room at me. I’d been sitting on the bed watching you pace and going through my own mental gymnastics to try and find a way to finish the weekend out without going home early, without risking your sobriety, without watching you crawl in your own skin from opiate withdrawal. “I could just take one, just to manage.” you said. You had stopped pacing. You looked at me, waiting for me for me to give permission. “That is a terrible fucking idea.” “I don’t think it’s as bad as you think.” “This is scaring me.” “Seriously?” “You can’t go a couple fucking hours?” “You don’t know what it’s like.” I didn’t say anything because I knew you couldn’t really believe this, but maybe you did. I think I know you, know what’s best, but I don’t live inside your body. I stubbornly stick with the memories of my own withdrawals. I project them onto your experience. I can be like this sometimes. Assuming I know everything. It is my least favorite thing about myself. It is an unlovable quality. You love me anyway. That you love me anyway means I will never leave you. Not even if you ask Matt for a Vicodin. Not even if it leads everything else. Not even if it took me with you. It’s the everything else I was thinking about when you suggested asking Matt for a pill. I know you aren’t the kind of person who can have just one of something. I know it because I’m not either. The first thing to come to mind whenever I think of a relapse is your last relapse. Funny how we never get rid of those old memories, how they just grow and grow and grow over time. It was so long ago now. It feels unfair that the image of it—you sleeping in the car out front of our home, me crying alone in the house changing the locks, thinking my great love story might have come to an end—has superseded other more pleasant images. Sometimes I think we are both just collecting days together in hopes that the accumulation of newer, better images, will finally wipe away all the bad ones. It only makes sense that this should happen, given the sheer volume of pleasant images to choose from. In the end, we didn’t spend the holiday with your brother and Matt. You feigned ill, which wasn’t too far from the truth. There was no relapse. We packed up the car with our barely opened bags and headed home. On the drive home, our son didn’t stop asking why. We were supposed to go swimming, eat hot dogs, drink soda, do other all-American type shit like a normal family. He was disappointed. You drove and every time I looked over at you, I could see you hating yourself. Your jaw clenched. Your fingers tight around the steering wheel. The way you wouldn’t take your eyes off the road to join the conversation. “Let’s order pizza and have a movie marathon tonight,” I said. “Yes!” Our son said from the backseat. Now, we are on the highway headed towards the Santa Cruz Mountains for a weekend trip with your brother and Matt. We don’t ever say it out loud, but I know these trips always have us both a little more on edge than normal. They are like a test, asking, have you really changed? Do you really want it? I like to think the answer is yes, but I can only ever speak for myself, and you can never know for certain what I am thinking. “Fuck,” you say again, and I coo and say it is going to be okay. I bring my index finger to my lip to remind you of our son asleep in the backseat. It is late on a Friday night, and we are both exhausted from a full week of work, childrearing, attempting to maintain sanity and sobriety. You change lanes and we are pulling off the freeway to get back on in the other direction towards home. I am annoyed, but I try not to let it show. I am always thinking of how much kinder you were to me when I got sober than I was to you when you got sober. You never made me sleep in the car in our driveway or changed the locks, and so I am repaying my debt by keeping my mouth shut when I’m annoyed. I think kindness comes so much more naturally to you than it does to me. It is for the best that you remembered the doses tonight and not in the morning when we are with everyone at the cabin. Matt will be there this weekend with his pharmacy of pills, and we need all the help we can get. We always need all the help we can get. I turn the country song up so we don’t have to talk. I saw the light I’ve been baptized By the fire in your touch And the flame in your eyes When we get back to the house, we leave the car running so we don’t startle our kid awake. We both go in, you for your doses and me for my Diet Cokes. I take one from the fridge and chug it in the halo of the open fridge. I crush the can and toss it into the recycling, grab two more for the road. We won’t get to the cabin until after 2am now. The sodas will keep me awake, maybe help make me feel some way different than the way I feel. We have to get gas on the way out of town and our son opens his eyes from the backseat when we turn the car off beneath the bright fluorescent lights of the gas station. “Are we home?” “Yeah.” “Why?” “We forgot something, but we are on our way now.” He nods. Closes his eyes. Falls back asleep. We pull onto the dark stretch of backroad that leads out of town and you reach across the center console and take my hand in yours. “Hey,” you say, and I look over at you, your face is in the shadow of night, but I can see your eyes searching mine, “I’m sorry.” “I know.” I squeeze your hand. “I love you.” I wait for you to say it back. You do. It carries me across the darkest stretch of highway. Shelby Hinte is the Associate Editor of Write or Die Magazine and a prose reader for No Contact. She has volunteered at various small presses including ZYZZYVA, Split/Lip Press. Her writing has appeared in BOMB magazine, SmokeLong Quarterly, ZYZZYVA, Hobart, HAD, Bending Genres, and elsewhere. She lives in Northern California. < back

submit submit guidelines hi, we're looking for writing and art and whatever else you've got that engages with and reimagines the 'west.’ ideally you or your work will have some connection to the western usa, but this theme is wide open to your interpretation. we like intersections and echoes, mythos and symbolism, and perspectives not as often seen. we like road stories and weird americana. most of all, tell us a great story. show us something cool. our goal is to remain open to the unexpected—to what surprises us, to what moves us, to what makes us see ‘the west’ in ways we haven't before. yeehaw 🤠 no submission fees. 1 submission per submission window. submissions will reopen late 2023. pitches for online content (reviews, interviews, etc.) will always be accepted. sim-subs totally fine. just please let us know if a piece is accepted elsewhere. 5k words or less for prose. up to 5 poems for poetry. pieces are read for both online and print. we aim to respond in 9-12 wks for print. online subs will likely be responded to sooner. $100 for each accepted print piece. $25 for each accepted online piece. thank you for trusting us with your work. ​ submit here

< back alex higley editor-at-large Alex Higley is the author of Cardinal and Old Open. His novel True Failure will be published by Coffee House Press in 2024. Raised in Colorado, he lives in Illinois.

< back hattie jean hayes interviews editor Hattie Jean Hayes is a writer and comedian, originally from a small town in Missouri, who now lives in New York. Her work has appeared in The Belletrist Magazine, Janus Literary, Hobart, The Puritan, and others. She has a poetry chapbook forthcoming from Bullshit Lit in 2023, and is working on her first novel.

guest dj lineup (2022) sept: david byron queen oct: danielle chelosky nov: ​ want to dj? contact hello@wordwest.co

< back karthik sethuraman associate poetry editor Karthik Sethuraman is an Indian-American living in California. His works have appeared or are forthcoming in The Rumpus, AAWW, Fugue, Fairy Tale Review, and Berkeley Poetry Review, among others. One work, Saramakavi, was performed at the Asian Art Museum where he was a KSW writing fellow. His chapbook, Prayer under eyelids, is available from Nomadic Press.