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even back then she lived too much in her head to care about such things, what other people thought.
The next photo I pass is much later, post-tarry summer, long after the year we were sixteen and it was hot, hot, hot. A couple of bars out on 18th Street had to close that season because their AC units couldn’t keep up and all of their ice had melted and the fridges were no longer cool and who wants to drink warm beer in a warm bar anyway? Apparently there was this one guy with tar-track shoes who kept coming back insisting Guinness was meant to be drunk warm anyway, and so he’d like to stay, but who in their right mind can afford to keep a bar open for one guy and one drink? And anyway, the point is, in the next photograph I pass already my sister’s twenty-three, a line of stitches stretching from the pierced nub of her ear up and over her temple, disappearing beneath the blond of her hair, as if something inoperable had been removed—though it hadn’t. She’s sitting on the zebra-striped couch and I’m sitting next to her, my face turned away. Afraid to look. She’d tried, she said, to get “it” out. “It?” I asked. “It,” she said, as if no further clarification were needed, and all I could think of was one of those larval white grubs, but with teeth like in those Alien films, the defiled thing writhing around inside her skull, beneath the skin. Chest-bursters, they called them in the films, though this one was definitely in her head. A result of what had happened.
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In the dream, the walls begin to narrow in front of me, and I imagine it might be best to turn back to a time before that summer, the one with the drapery maze in Rock Creek Park. Sycamores and elms. Pawpaws and maples. Cottonwoods. Ironwoods. But mostly ashes. The park was lined mostly with ashes then. White and green. Tall and bulbous and round. A man with size-nine shoes leaning against one, picking at his teeth as if he’d just finished a meal. Adèle’s hair, in the photo with the stitches, it’s frosted at the tips, the heat having left her long ago, sometime toward the end of that summer before parents worried about bogeymen, when the Park was illuminated in orange silk, a majestic waving wavering at night. Adèle and I often went down in the evening to check out that life-size maze, the heat letting up the tiniest bit then, my sister absolutely set on only one thing: no matter what, we could not break the rules, break through the maze walls, luminous and shimmering, no matter how lost we got, we would not be like those kids. We would follow the paths. Make Ariadne proud. Even if a Minotaur should appear, stamping his hoofs of tar, picking meat from his teeth, still we would not cheat.
Our family had to hire the house cleaners, too, that summer, to erase sixteen size-nine footprints from the hall where Adèle’s enormous roll of maze paper had spread, eight tar-prints tracking from the steps to her room, eight tracking back down. We weren’t crazy about locking our doors that year, but who was
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then—it was so, so hot, and though I’ve never believed Washington qualifies as the South, it does get scorching like down there, and we had a magnolia tree in our front yard like they do, perfumed white petals dropping all over the place, and the screen doors to the house were made of slatted wood and had transoms overtop to keep the air moving, and so, yes, okay, I get it: call an elephant an elephant. Especially if it’s in the room. We’d seen the guy before, Adèle said, later. He’d followed her around the day we split up in the Rock Creek maze, he sipping a can of warm Guinness. It was because our mother had let her, “a young woman in full bloom,” run around without a bra, our father said. “Didn’t I tell you,” he said. “It’s because I let us get separated,” I said.
And said.
And said.
“What an awful mess,” one of the cleaners said. “I have a daughter, too.”
In my dream, when I reach the door, the walls are so constricted I can barely move, barely budge my arm, barely get my hand up to open it, but I do, finally, clench my fingers around the knob, praying for escape, for space to breathe. For my sister. The doorjamb encrusted with grubs and browned magnolia leaves. But when I push the portal open, on the other side, there’s only another door and another hall, and another hall and another hall at the end of the hall, at the end of the hall another hall, hall hall all the way through.
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Friends
Laura van den Berg
Sarah had moved to a city of medium size, the worst size for making friends. A place is a place, she told herself, but she had never before lived in a city of medium size. People were moderately friendly. The streets moderately busy. Everything moderately expensive and moderately good-looking. She lived near a park with cannons and an American flag, the most patriotic park she’d ever seen. Beyond the park lay a river of moderate width, slicing through the city like a silver vein.
She was not a friendless person. In fact, she had plenty of friends, from cities big and small, and some of these friends offered to set her up with people they knew in the medium city. The site of her first friend
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date was a restaurant trying very hard to look like it belonged to a larger city. Sarah spotted the friend’s friend sitting at the bar, drinking a luminous green cocktail. She was sporty-beautiful, the kind of woman who could be glamorous in sweats because everything was of such fine quality. Sarah disliked her on sight and left immediately. On the street she sent a text. Sorry! Food poisoning! The friend texted back right away, with sympathy, and Sarah never replied.
On the second attempted friend date, Sarah, after two beers, started talking about her mother. Her mother had visited recently and insisted on staying in a hotel. It did not matter that Sarah, for the first time in her life, had rented an apartment with a guest room. It did not matter that she had promised to clean the bathroom. Her mother said she did not feel safe staying with Sarah. Her own mother! At the bar, this one communist-themed, the second friend shredded a cocktail napkin, a mural of Lenin peering over her shoulder. Sarah went to the bathroom and by the time she returned, the friend had paid her share and left.
The third friend suggested meeting in a park. Odd, since they were getting together after work, but then again she hadn’t had much luck in indoor spaces. Aided by the flashlight app on her phone, Sarah found this woman, Holly, sitting on a bench in an eggplant-colored trench coat.
“You found me,” Holly said. “That’s a good sign.”
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A sign of what exactly Sarah did not think to ask.
Before long she was recounting the story about her mother’s visit. She knew this was off-putting but could not help herself—did not want to help herself, perhaps. Holly didn’t leave or change the subject. Instead she said, “I can see your mother’s side of things.”
“You’ve never met my mother,” Sarah said. “You don’t know anything about us.”
“All I need to know is what’s right in front of me,” Holly said, with a shrug.
Sarah wanted to argue, but when she went to compile evidence to demonstrate that she was indeed a person others could feel safe with, she came up very short.
She and Holly continued seeing each other, always outside and at night. They played tennis at the courts by the library. They went for runs along the river. By April, Sarah had lost five pounds. “You’re the perfect friend,” Holly said once, in the moonlight. The statement struck Sarah as half-finished, like there was another piece Holly was holding back, but she wasn’t used to compliments and it felt ungracious to push for more.
One Saturday morning, Holly sent a text asking if Sarah wanted to meet at the train station. Up for an adventure? Sarah was pleased; spending time in the daylight seemed like a friend-promotion. On Platform 6, she found Holly leaning against a concrete pillar in her eggplant trench, holding a round leather case by its handle.
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“I
got us two tickets.” She passed one to Sarah. The destination had been crossed out with black marker. Holly gave Sarah the window seat, and as the train chugged away from the medium-size city she pressed her palms to the glass and thought of the succulents lined up in her windowsill—waiting, she imagined, for her to come home.
They rolled past Trenton, Philadelphia, Baltimore. Big cities. They drank coffee and ate BabyBels. When Sarah asked after their destination, Holly just said, “We have a ways to go.” By the time they hit Washington the sun was melting across the sky. In Alexandria, Holly made another trip to the café car, and returned carrying a cardboard tray packed with little red wines and hummus cups. She handed the tray to Sarah and collected her round case. She said it was time to go to the roomette.
“This is an overnight?” Sarah said, frowning.
“We have a ways to go,” Holly said again.
The roomette held bunk beds and the smallest toilet Sarah had ever seen. She sat on the bottom bunk. Holly joined her, the round case wedged between her feet, and unscrewed a little wine.
“That city was not a good size,” Holly said. “The people who built it should have stopped sooner or made more.”
Sarah was troubled by the past tense, as though the city had ceased to exist upon their departure.
“You won’t miss it much,” Holly added, handing her the bottle.
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Sarah closed her eyes for a moment, felt the sway of the train.
“Are you kidnapping me?”
“Do you see a gun? Can a friend kidnap a friend?” Holly laughed and punched her in the shoulder. Sarah killed the bottle, one eye trained on the round case. She imagined a weapon rattling around inside.
“Seriously, though, I can’t start over in a new place without a friend,” Holly said. “Can you imagine?”
“Yes,” Sarah said. “I can.”
“You, my dear, are a cautionary tale.” Holly loosened the belt on her trench.
“I should call my mother.” By then the land around the tracks had gone dark.
“Forget about your mother,” Holly said. “She doesn’t want to hear from you.”
In Hamlet, North Carolina, they climbed into the bunk beds. Sarah took the top, the ceiling so close she felt as though she’d been sealed inside a carapace. A little while later Holly’s voice floated up from the floor.
“So what happened with your mother? I’d like to hear about it in your own words.”
Last year, Sarah had moved in with her mother to help her recover from a double knee replacement, an arrangement that brought out the worst in them. Her mother had a little silver bell she rang every two minutes. Every way Sarah tried to help was wrong.
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She got the wrong things at the grocery. She always forgot to refill the bedside water glass. One afternoon she locked her mother’s door from the outside. She listened to the chiming bell. After thirty minutes, she unlocked the door. She claimed to have been out of earshot in the backyard, but they both knew. The next day she left a sandwich and a half-glass of water at her mother’s bedside, locked up, and went to see a movie.
“Let’s just say things did not improve from there.” Sarah thought it was close to midnight, though she couldn’t be sure because her watch had stopped in Cary. Her phone had died too, and none of the chargers in the roomette were working.
“Am I a terrible person?” Sarah asked.
“Yes,” Holly said. “That’s what makes you perfect.”
Sarah asked Holly if she had brought a friend with her to the medium-sized city—and, if so, what had become of this person. In response, Holly began to snore loudly.
Sarah supposed she would get her answer soon enough.
Next door a toilet flushed. Someone was having a sneezing fit. When she tried to remember the friend who set her up with Holly, she failed to summon a name. But surely this person existed—otherwise how would they have found each other? She imagined this friend in the roomette next door, whispering through an air vent.
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The next stop was called Denmark, South Carolina.
Sarah rolled toward the wall. She listened for the voice of her friend, who she hoped would explain that while Holly had strange ideas about what constituted adventure she was really quite harmless, but that was not the voice she heard. Instead it was her mother, saying something about a bell.
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Minor Witchcraft
Chiara Barzini
Julieta la Bruja and I arrived at the wedding party inside the modern art museum. We had decided early on that our mission was to spoil the celebration for the bitch bride and her blond friends. They had haunted our adolescence and we were back for revenge. We arrived drunk, already causing a stir. We just didn’t give a fuck. We headed straight for the most prestigious room. Julieta la Bruja recognized our childhood friend, walked over to her, and told her what she thought: that she belonged on the streets of Tijuana.
I sat in the middle of the room like a real witch,
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focusing on what spell might cause the biggest uproar: How did one go about really ruining someone’s wedding? Julieta la Bruja held court with a smirk on her face walking the frightened guests down a dangerous memory lane: “Remember when you teased me and said I was an orphan? Remember when you invited me to a birthday party that didn’t exist? Remember when you force-fed me dulce de leche saying I was fat?”
The well-groomed girls in the corner of the room, De Chiricos hanging above their heads, shook their heads no. They had blocked all of it out.
I figured that when hatred really flowed, people usually burned things down. I filled a tank with gasoline and dipped my long, golden fingernails inside. Each time I extracted them, I shook the oily liquid into the corners of the room on an incendiary kick. I didn’t want to pour it. We wanted everything to happen little by little, like real torture. Julieta la Bruja lit a match and threw it on the ground dramatically. Okay, fine, it wasn’t exactly like in the movies, where the whole perimeter of the room caught fire in a second, but things got interesting when we began to spray the gasoline directly onto the squirming guests.
“Set them on fire!” Julieta la Bruja commanded.
We managed to cause a half-assed human combustion and ran away. The wedding people came after us. Outside, in a gas station by the parking lot, stood a huge, tubular truck. We set that on fire also.
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“To make things more epic,” Julieta la Bruja explained.
The flames spread. The guests chased after us with chopsticks from their Malaysian hors d’oeuvres and fire extinguishers at hand. Julieta la Bruja and I took shelter behind the blazing gas station. From a broken window we looked at the screaming blondes running past us, bile foaming at their mouths, and soon enough we too would combust.
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Three Scores
Nick Mamatas
He knows you’re not going to call the police,” Barb said.
“He’s right about that.” D’shawn was sitting in the reclining chair in the middle of the darkened living room. He liked to think of it as his captain’s chair. He liked to imagine the small house was the starship Enterprise, and the bay window through which Barb, on her knees, was looking at the viewscreen. She was even reporting what she saw, just like on the show, despite the fact that D’shawn had a clear view of Finn, Barb’s ex, on the lawn. Finn had just undone his belt and thrown his wallet to the ground. It bounced, flew open, and spread a variety of cards and slips of paper everywhere.
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“Come on out and face me!” Finn said. His shirt came off. Dad bod. Not that D’shawn’s body was much better, but he was bigger. “Don’t make me use the N-word!”
Barbara cringed, but D’shawn burst out laughin
g.
“Look, he’s going to ruin business unless you get rid of him,” Barb said, suddenly all business herself. D’shawn had two businesses, and one of them was dealing drugs out of his house. Barb was there for some. The other, less savory, involved comic books, action figures, and a mix of replica and occasionally actual championship belts from defunct professional wrestling promotions. That’s how D’shawn had first met Finn.
“All right,” said D’shawn, pulling his pants up.
Finn was stalking back and forth across the little bit of lawn in front of D’shawn’s house like an impatient cartoon character. D’shawn threw his arms up and said, “’Tsup!”
“You . . .” Finn pointed. “I figured it out. I’m no fucking cuck, not anymore.”
“Is this some right-wing bukkshit you got from the Internet?”
“The problem is that you have nothing to lose, D’shawn,” Finn said. “Or think you don’t.”
“That’s the exact opposite—”
“Shut the fuck up.” Somehow Finn had a thick yuppie kitchen knife in hand now. D’shawn felt something surge in his body, like his central nervous system
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