The Cuckold

by Noémi Kiss-Deáki

I
Leaves and Ashes

It was time for the Mistress' breakfast, and Rees looked at the multitude of concoctions, beverages, meat parts and roots on the table. Like a small army, they looked like, a small army of food. Although, their purpose was not to ravish and conquer, but rather to spur, elicit, draw forth. Magick forth, but no one would have dared to say that. But that was what the whole household hoped for, that each root, beverage and concoction, lamb testicle, fig and pig's womb would lend some of their power and magick forth a living babe in the womb of their Mistress.

Six years it had been, six years since the Master first brought his still-young bride to the house, the future hopeful and bright before them, only for it all to turn to fallen leaves and ashes in every year that went by without a happy announcement, with a Mistress still bleeding.

There had been many efforts and endeavours throughout the years; the maids had recounted that most amusing story among giggles several times when the Master and Mistress had been asked to let their water in pots with barley, and the one that sprouted first would show which one of them was fruitful. The barley in the Master's pot sprouted first. But there were many more efforts; the test of garlic, performed many times and on different occasions, so ardent was her wish for a different answer; the Mistress was covered in cloths, with garlic placed under her, and if the smell of garlic travelled up to her mouth and head, she would be fruitful. The family physician, who had conducted many of these tests, must have grown soft-hearted, because he this time said he couldn't be sure when smelling her breath and head and so called upon the rest of the house, to aid him in determining the smell that so much hopes and wishes surrounded; the Master came to smell, but must have grown soft-hearted and unwilling to upset his wife also, because he said he couldn't be sure, so Thomas, the first manservant, was called upon, and he was a people-pleaser, because he said garlic; then Frances, the favourite chamber-maid, who said she couldn't be sure, then Cecil, the footman, who said he could smell no garlic, only the clove she chewed on for her tooth-ache, so she spit it out in Frances' hand to be chewed on later; then some more servants, two hesitant ones and two people-pleasers, then Margery, the scullery-maid, who said she could smell nothing, and then Rees, who was collected while emptying the chamber-pots, he had never been interrupted in that task before, but was now ordered into the bed-chamber also, to smell the head and breath of his Mistress, and said he could smell no garlic, because he couldn't.

And each month, blood on the sheets and rags, blood to be washed and soaked with salt and vinegar, until the stains were gone. Rees only knew this because the maids often accepted him as company when chatting about the tasks of the day, or idle matters. He had been fifteen years of age when he had entered the household, and despite it passing six years since then, they still didn't seem to consider him a proper man, like Thomas or Cecil. So, this way, he soon knew all ins and outs about the handling of the Mistress' monthly disappointment and sorrow.

And the Mistress' mood grew foul. They had often thought, had she been a barren village-woman, she would have been pitied, ridiculed and shunned a long time ago; but she was their lady, so her moods became their moods; her sorrow their sorrow; her melancholy their melancholy and discontent, a discontent so thick and all-encompassing they could taste it, they could cut it with a kitchen knife, it surrounded them like noxious air, leaving them writhing like gasping fish on land.

Once he had happened on a scene to wrench the heart; it was during one of the family physician's visits, although Rees had thought he had left already, and he had gone into the chamber to collect any used chamber-pots, and the Mistress was there on her knees, gripping the hand of the physician, her head bent, the physician standing over her, immovable, and Rees thought it looked like something from the Scripture their priest recounted to them during the long and cold hour in church on Sundays, his neck itching from fleas gained from the fellow people standing too close—like something from the Scripture, the Saviour and the woman at his feet, hoping for salvation. Couldn't she see he was only a mortal as she, an ordinary man?

Perhaps she could; each week the reverend came and prayed with her, sometimes they prayed for hours in the small chapel adjacent to the house.

Then there were the fumes. All sorts of fumes and scents she was treated with, sweet ones, foul ones, to entice her womb to turn this way or that way, to become bountiful, giving and willing; another time, collecting the chamber-pots, another scene: two physicians who had brought with them galbanum, musk, civet and cloves, and they placed them under her nose and on her stomach, and, lastly, topped it all off with some burnt partridge feathers. Rees supposed they knew what they were doing.

*

No one seemed to consider him to be a proper man, he was Rees, forgotten and looked over, except when some unpleasant task needed to be done, but one afternoon when coming to collect the pots, the Mistress had sent out Frances, she wished to be alone, she was resting in bed. It was one of her dead-days, she called them, when her moods were low and nothing could move her to merriment or gaiety, her rich chestnut-hair spread out on the pillow, and she stared at the bed canopy and she said, right out in the air:

"What if 'tis the Master."

Rees thought someone else had come into the room, so unused was he to the Master or Mistress speaking to him directly. He looked around, but no one else was there.

"Are ye speaking to me, Mistress?"

He noted he had managed to make his voice low and steady, and not as shambled as he felt.

She was still staring at the canopy and repeated:

"What if 'tis the Master. What if 'tis the Master who's barren."

A nervous laugh was rising in him at the thought, but also, fear, because her tone was not easy, it was the same tone she had when she one day came home after seeing a beggar-woman in the streets, a beggar-woman with twin-children, that whole day she had scorned and berated that woman to them, the words she used made one think she was harsh, cruel, hateful, but they soon understood that under it all, was a pain most immense, that found no other way out of her than anger, hate and spite.

He looked at her, his eyes big. 

"But, the barley," he said. He could only say that.

"What if the barley is wrong," she said.

"What if the fumes are wrong."

"What if the food is wrong."

"What if the physicians are wrong."

"What if the priest is wrong."

He was quiet then. Stunned. 

And then she asked:

"How old are you, Rees?"

"Twenty-one, Mistress," he said. A little proud.

"You are a man, then," she said. 

Yes, he thought. That is true. But she was the first one to say it.

"Give me your hand, Rees."

He went pale then. Not his hands that handled the pots, to touch her soft, noble ones! 

But she was his Mistress, so he had to oblige, with fear in his heart and jelly in his knees.

"You have fine hands," she said, "Fine and strong."

She drew him closer. 

And then, reality cracked in two; what was most forbidden but at the same time true and good happened.

II
A Trout

He thought afterwards it must have been a dream, or too much ale imbibed during lunch. But it wasn't a dream, or if it was, it was a recurring one, for it happened, during another dead-day. And again, and yet again, because she had those dead-days several times a month. But to the rest of the household, he was still invisible.

But then it happened; the miracle. There was no blood. And another month came, without blood. And the physician held up her urine in a glass-flask, the day-light streaming through it, and everyone had come into the chamber, even Rees. And the physician said there was no doubt, the colour of her urine spoke of a child in her womb. And then she started growing, and so all house-folk, down to the lowest servant such as Rees, could see there was no doubt.

And despite aches and ills, and swelling of the feet, and pains in her bones, the Mistress was happy, joyful and her happiness became their happiness, her joy their joy.

One time, when no one else was in the chamber but him, she took his hand and pressed it on her stomach, its arched roundedness like that of a dome, and despite the layers of petticoats, silks and fabric covering it, he felt it, a trout, wielding its powerful tail, a mighty movement, greeting him. And he was awed and a little afraid and thought; I am not ready.

But then he realized; he didn't need to be—that child would never call him father.

And then, she took his hand and placed it somewhere else. And he was lost to her again.

*

But the Mistress was not careful; she must have looked at him with too soft eyes; or given him a smile too beaming, for the reverend once gave him a dirty look when visiting, as if saying—watch out.

And then, one afternoon, he was carrying several pots, carrying them through the corridor, and the family physician came from the other side, and he halted, watching him. A stern, old man, once perhaps good-looking in his youth, but now autumn had passed over his hair, with winter approaching, and Rees went past him, and the physician stuck out a heeled foot, Rees thoroughly stumbling over it, the pots falling with a great clang, their contents out, and his own nose on the stone-floor, bloodied.

"Careful there," the old man said.

And then he left Rees there, as if nothing had happened.

That's how he knew the physician had his own buried feelings, and that he now had wished to punish him.

III
The Babe

There came an autumn day, an autumn day when the trees had dropped all their leaves and great winds tugged at the window-glasses, and in the evening there was a smattering of rain on them; and the Mistress had grown big, like a castle, and she was wandering the rooms, the maids noted she behaved queerly, and thought perhaps it was time. They had thought right, and soon the midwife and the physician were called to the house, and a great flurry of activity ensued; as usual, Rees was left with the most menial of tasks, heating water, bringing up linens, taking down soiled ones, emptying the pots. Everyone was up the whole of that night, it was impossible to sleep, even if most of them were kept out of the chamber, a tension in the house, the Master wandering its corridors. And then her cries started, and as they grew in strength and took the whole house over, Rees couldn't stand it anymore, a great shiver rising in him, as if he was about to weep, and he ran down in the cellar, covering his ears and sat there in the cold and dark, with only rats, cobwebs and old wine to keep him company.

When more hours had passed, the Mistress' cries like something muffled, far-away from above, his nose, fingers and bottom were freezing too much, and he had to go up again.

As he did, to his relief, he heard the cries had changed, there were no sounds of despair or pain coming from the chamber anymore, instead it was as if a bull or cow had taken over the room, nay, something feral; a great feral force was at work in that room. And some hour later, a new sound, never before heard, a sharp cry, coming in waves, growing and falling and growing again. The Master was running down the corridor, and the doors were opened, and everyone was allowed to come in. The Mistress in the bed, tired, and with a smooth expression on her face, as if dead, but she was alive, and the midwife held the child up, a strong babe, male, and the physician was standing beside her, beaming like a peacock, or a rooster, despite having taken no part in the birth himself; perhaps he thought all his efforts with fumes and food and feathers had brought forth this miracle after all. Rees looked at the babe and could see he looked like his grandmother; he had her nose and wise, striking eyes and there was rich hair on his head, the rich hair of the Mistress and his feet looked like Rees’ feet.

The babe was wrapped and given to the Master to admire, and Rees was left with cleaning out the waste; soiled and bloodied sheets and a soft, bloodied pulp, a long, fleshy chord coming from it. The midwife had opened it up with hands used to the task, and inside it looked like a tree, richly branched.

Note: The infertility treatments mentioned in the short story are historically inspired and one can read more about them in Jennifer Evans’ article “Female barrenness, bodily access and aromatic treatments in seventeenth-century England,” Historical Research, Volume 87, Issue 237, p. 423-443. The infertility diet is a product of the author’s imagination. The Mistress scorning a beggar-woman with twins is a reference to the popular seventeenth century ballad The Lamenting Lady.

Noémi Kiss-Deáki is an emerging writer living on the Åland Islands. She was born in 1991, and nowadays she works as a medical secretary and writes fiction in the evenings. Her short story "The Revenge" is set to appear in February in the digital anthology Stories of Rebellion published by The Selkie, and her debut novel, Mary and the Rabbit Dream, is coming out in July 2024 with Galley Beggar Press. Online, she can be found on twitter as @Ninonette.

 Chastity Crank

by Kara Crawford

You grow up with a crank between your legs. Metal, old-fashioned looking. Like the knob on the side of your parents’ house that activates the hose. You turn the valve and out rushes the water. Your crank looks like that. 

You learn that the space between your legs is a private place, and vaguely insidious. Your girlhood progresses and you discover that the valve is adjustable. You are a child, and this fact is mostly meaningless to you. In church, though, you learn that lust is a sin. You are not entirely certain what this means, or if you’ve felt it, but you excuse yourself from after-service brunch, and, in the privacy of a bathroom stall, you give the crank three right turns. You assume it will hurt, but it doesn’t feel like anything. “Whoever sins sexually, sins against their own body.” Better safe than sorry. You return to your family’s booth and set the crank aside in your mind. 

*

Seventh grade, getting ready for a pool party. You’re staring down the barrel of a tampon. You try pushing into place and it hurts. Your friends had not mentioned this. They seemed so wise, so cool. “Wearing a pad is like wearing a diaper,” they said. But every time you push you’re met with resistance. How can people possibly do this? Your mother is waiting outside the bathroom. She’s angry with you. You’re making her late. She wants to see the other moms at the party, to laugh and drink fruity drinks and complain about parenthood—piously, of course. She will be upset at you if you don’t swim, don’t act normal. This will ruin the party for her. 

Shove. Wince. It doesn’t fit. “You have to relax,” your mom whisper-screams through the door. But how can you do that when it hurts like this? Surely this cannot be a natural thing—to shove this plastic-encased bullet inside yourself. To put something in you and just leave it there. You finally force it in as best you can. It pushes uncomfortably against the walls of your inside. You get to the pool party and all you can do is sit with your feet in the water and your legs perpetually crossed. Your mom said you would forget it’s even there, but you feel it pressing you with an incessant push that won’t fade, the crank brawling with the absorbent cotton. You watch the other girls playing in the water, noticing the way their legs extend as they swim and how the water drips down their backs when they finally leave the pool. How their wet hair clings to their slender necks. 

You get home that evening and pull out the invader, painfully. You decide you’ll never be doing this again. It’s not for you. For good measure, you turn the valve. You crank yourself tighter. 

*

At fourteen you understand lust beyond its dictionary definition. Men begin to look at you, even follow you. To call out crude things on the street as you walk home from school. What is there to do but tighten the crank? To literally close yourself off to them? It’s not as if you can pluck out their eyes. Impenetrability will have to do. Especially because sometimes you wonder what it would be like, would feel like. You think you would hate it. Except, sometimes, late at night, you think maybe you wouldn’t—desire ringing your body like a wind chime. You touch the crank softly and then rip your hand away. Shameful. The Lord knows your every thought, and you need to focus on your studies anyway. No distractions. Each morning after this happens, you administer two stiff turns of the crank. 

*

Eleventh grade. The realization slowly settles on you. First a faint inking, then a sudden jolt. You like girls as well as boys. The walls of your mind threaten to crumble, to fall. You tell yourself that you must fortify them, fortify yourself. Maybe this is cowardly. It’s easier to turn the crank than to ponder religious teachings or worry about parental acceptance. You focus on your schoolwork with increasing intensity. No one notices, though. You were already a perfectionist. 

*

The crank does not always serve a practical purpose. Tampons are an impossibility, of course, and you run into some trouble when, at sixteen, you get a yeast infection. It itches and burns and you don’t know how to ask anyone about it. Your mother would be scandalized, would accuse you of having done something untoward. And even if she were understanding, it’s not ladylike, not right, to talk about a problem going on down there. Is God punishing you for something? For staring at Natalie Khaw’s legs when she wore a miniskirt to school? For watching the rain drip down the back of the shirtless jogger in your neighborhood? Maybe you deserve this, this burning. You’re desperate for relief, though, so you look up your symptoms on WebMD and you figure out what needs to be done. But, when you arrive at the pharmacy in your most comfortable sweatpants, you see that the over-the-counter remedies have one thing in common: they all require insertion. 

You get home and attempt to loosen the crank, just enough to get the medicated tube inside of you. It loosens, slightly, but you falter—you remember the tampon. So you drive to an Urgent Care. There they give you a prescription for a pill instead. When taking a swab for testing, they politely ignore the valve between your legs. Maybe it’s more common than you think. In any case, the nurses do not mention it. You fill the prescription and feel better in a day or so. 

You tell yourself you’ll start practicing unscrewing the crank, just in case something like this happens again, but you get too wrapped up in your classes to really think about it. It stays tightened. There is safety in constriction. The danger is letting loose, is opening yourself up to something trying to burrow and shove its way inside you. 

But then you go to college. What people think of you seems a little less important. So does the Church. You try worshiping at a few places near your school but none of them feel right. You make a few friends, go to a few GSA meetings on-campus, get a part-time job at a cafe. You get a boyfriend, your first. He has broad shoulders, lovely dark hair, and works at the shop with you. He makes the first move, and the two of you fall into a relationship. Your coworkers gently tease you about it, enjoying making you blush. Then he applies for a study abroad program and is whisked away to somewhere in Europe, finding himself. You try to miss him. 

*

A few months later, you get a girlfriend. You sort of surprise yourself with this, as if it’s not really you doing it. Like the you that sat in a pew listening to sermons isn’t the you holding hands with a tall, pretty redhead as you both walk to class. You don’t tell your mother, but you don’t try to hide the liaison from the world either. For good measure, you delete the Bible app off your phone. You still pray, though—that doesn’t stop.

In both relationships, you almost unscrew the crank. You almost give in to the moaning and the touching, to the rosiness of want. Loose kisses and velvety caresses. Lust.

You almost unscrew it. 

But when their hands brush up against the crank, you push them away, you freeze up. You tell yourself it isn’t the right time, the right moment. It never is, and the relationships fade. Maybe because of the crank, maybe because you never had much time for them anyways. You’re not a particularly devoted girlfriend, not one for the spontaneity and impromptu adventures on which other young people seem to thrive. You cling to safety and impenetrability the way your significant others cling to you. Until they get tired of your restraint, of what they perceive as prudishness, and leave you. But that’s alright—you have exams to study for.

*

Every night, before you go to bed, you pray for straight lines and an orderly schedule. For precision and uniform rows. God sends you a soul-mate instead. In this new relationship, you feel a fervency that had eluded you before, a passion. It’s a crescendo kind of love—one that sings. This person gets you, sees you, and you know that you can’t lose that. The two of you do homework in comfortable silence, and get brunch every Sunday. You spend as much time as you can together. And you feel something you didn’t before. You kiss each other passionately every chance you get. Even when you’re busy. Even when you’re stressed. For you, that’s love. They tell you how much they want you. You explain about the crank and they laugh and tell you it’s nothing. “That’s the point of cranks,” they say. “You turn them. So turn it for me.” You think about this, holding your lover close and praying in their arms.  

You want to, really want to. After all these years of guilt and fear and stagnant rigidity. So you reach down, your partner waiting expectantly, and you clasp the crank. 

You hope you have the strength to make it turn. 

Kara Crawford is an MFA student at George Mason University. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in Abandon Journal, The Dread Machine, The Hunger Journal, and elsewhere. You can follow her on Twitter @kara_sweaters.

 You’re a Werewolf

by Billie Chang

When I tripped on the broken-up concrete and ripped my incisors clean off, the rain was just beginning to fall down, the wind just getting started to run. 

*

“It all feels so loud.” Denise has a tendency to stretch out her vowels. She speaks slow because of it. We watch the bubbles gurgle in the tank. 

“I can’t turn it down. It’s the oxygenator or whatever.” I’m picking up some glass off the floor. Part of the aquarium cracked, but just the top left. The fish are unaffected. I gave the movers $15 more because one of them cut their hand on the edge. 

“Is that what Paul said?” Denise winks and puts her tongue between her two fingers, which are up and forming a V. 

I blush. Paulie has a pimpled cheek and hairless arms. He works at the yellow Petsmart. The blue one is too far of a drive, now that I’ve moved in with Denise. He touched my hair, lightly, the last time I’d gone in to buy some lights for the tank. Denise says that means he’s into me. I don’t have his number yet, but I’m working my way up to it. Tomorrow, I’ll go in and buy some more food for Miss Aquamarine Boom, our newest betta fish, and if Paulie is wearing that red polo and looking at me with his gums showing, I’ll take his palm and pen my number on it. 

Denise grew up on a farm. The worst part of it were the crows, who were unafraid and one time, pecked her brother’s hair clean off. They found him screaming, with a thin piece of his scalp flapping in the wind. He had to wear a toupee, she laughed, for three months afterwards. He still won Homecoming King. Denise tells stories so they feel like horrors: I still can’t tell if her brother recovered, fully, from the crow attack. His blood was thick and dark, she said, running down his cheeks like he’d just been spit on. When she told me all this, her eyes were so wide and dull that I felt one push of my thumb could dislodge them, and they’d just bounce against the hardwood. She said the farm got a scarecrow afterwards. It worked until last Halloween, when she and some friends got high and ripped it all up with a pair of craft scissors. 

I saw her first, outside Professor Lung’s office, with one hand hiking up her skirt and the other rifling through his mailbox. I was sucking a grape lolly and thinking about Sarah, because it was raining. My hair was damp and so was my body, like someone had chewed me up. The History department had a direct elevator to the parking lot; it was a short-cut, away from all the water. 

Denise heard me coming. She straightened up, pushed her fingers behind her ears, and said, loudly, “I threw a mean thing in here, but he gave me an A so now I regret it.” 

I put the lollipop between my teeth. “What did it say?” My words felt muddled, shy.

“Fuck you.” 

“Oh.” That is a mean thing. 

“I was in a mood.” She turned back to the box and stuck her arm in. It’s freckled, all the way up to her shoulder. “It’s not in here,” she finally declared. “He must’ve read it then.” 

“Or maybe the wind blew it out,” I suggested. I crunched down and bit the candy in two. 

Denise laughed and looked up. Her eyes met mine with a flicker. “Or maybe the wind blew it out.” 

When the smoke finally cleared, I was fifty-two days into my friendship with Denise. I’d forgotten all about before, sitting on the dusty carpet below the television, with good-mood Sarah in my ear saying she’d gone to the doctor’s and had to make me her emergency contact. I’d pushed our old babysitter off the list, and was right above hot neighbor Terry and below long-gone Mom. So when the call came, it felt too fast, the words trailing out of the phone like a bowl of runny soup, my mind blaring static when the man said that after the faulty light burst, Sarah was trapped in her apartment for so long that she’d been burnt to a crisp. After, Denise found me sitting cross-legged on the tile, with my arms raised up high above my head. I think it was because I liked feeling them loose, liked knowing the blood was rushing down and it was me who controlled how much. We used to have those all the time, at the farm, like on the fields, I remember Denise saying, her voice low and soft. The fire would curl up in your nose, leave soot on your snot. It doesn’t feel like anything. Maybe like a dog after a run, when he’s panting and licking the tail of your heel. It’s just like that. Nothing more. Not if you don’t want it to be. 

Denise was five when she’d watched her mom give birth in a wood-paneled room, with the heater on and the window open. They’d laid on the bed, side-by-side, Denise silent and her mom not. And when her brother came, pushed out like a sack of limp rice, Denise was the one to hold the umbilical cord between her two fingers and scissor it clean off. She’d taken it to the damp dirt and left it to bury itself. Her mom built a dollhouse, afterwards, to take her mind off of the emptiness. It took her years. She was silent for most of them. She built it the natural way, from flaps of a sturdy tree, the wood streaks always rising up and around the room. 

Sarah was my older sister. She was the one who had a mind, forked her tongue and spit out lies like they were breaths. There are things I remember. When I jumped on the back of her motorcycle twice, gripping her shoulders one time and the seat the next. The room we shared at ten. When she was arrested for fraud and she cried for three days, then never again. Her palm slapping the ground when I’d caught her rifling through my wallet, her knees up to her chest in the big bathroom stall. My saliva-stained cheek after she’d shouted at me for telling her to stop with all the stealing. How she’d made a list of things she’d miss and I was three-quarters to the bottom. When she finally ran away, I tried to catch her, but all I got was a scraped knee and a trip to the dentist. Only at dinner do Denise and I really talk. We have pasta, mostly, sometimes with chicken. It rains again, one night, and I find myself telling her these things, the words fighting through my teeth. When it feels done, she lets me know that change is called that for a reason. The word is loose, fast, hangs in the back of your throat. It’s not something you can stop. 

We lose Miss Aquamarine Boom on a Thursday. I realize the goldfish, the older one, looks too big. It is my idea to take him out, let him flop around on the marbled counter. When he stills, Denise uses two fingers to push his belly and out comes Miss Aquamarine Boom, still whole, her gills fluttering, as if inviting a slice of lemon or stick of herb inside. As if to say, I’m still here, and I hope you’re hungry.

In the morning, the road is iced over so Denise and I take the train to the grocery. It’s crowded and loud; we stand with our hands stacked plain against the center pole, holding on as we pass Holborn and we’re pulled to the left. At the stop before ours, I get a text. It’s Paulie, asking me to a bar, later that night. I shine the phone at Denise and we laugh, giddy, my face flushed. I knock her head with mine and we hover over my fingers as they type out a shaky reply. But right as I’m hitting send, just before the double doors close all the way shut, I feel my hair grow. It prickles and when I look up, I catch a glimpse of something. A blur of a person. Sarah. Standing still with a cut-open sweater and fire in her lungs, her face shining upwards at the moon, her mouth wide open, like one big howling hole. 

The train moves forward. Denise feels cold beside me and I twitch, scared. I wonder, slowly, if this is what it is, if her eyes have become mine.

Billie Chang is a Chinese-American writer living in Los Angeles. She studies English and Creative Writing at UCLA. You can find her other prose work in Bright Flash Literary Review, Litbreak Magazine, The Racket Journal, and Literally Stories. 

 Hopscotch

by Sarah Terez Rosenblum

The week had been rough even before Laura climbed the stairs to her mother’s top floor apartment. 

On Sunday, she’d purchased a plant with waxy leaves that puffed like tiny couch cushions. She wanted to sit at the kitchen table and look past the plant through the open window at kids playing hopscotch on the street below. But the only kids on her street were pre-teen twins—a brother and a sister. They passed a cell phone between them and cast Laura suspicious looks while she waited for the bus. 

By Monday morning, most of the plant’s leaves looked deflated, like someone had pricked them with pins as she slept. She rummaged her purse for her Swiss Army knife. Maybe if she sliced off the dead parts, the plant would revive. 

The plant was part of a plan to become the sort of person content to watch night fall through an open window. Even Covid hadn’t kept Laura from the dark clubs that bloomed along Hudson street. In the first weeks she’d resisted the gauntlet of velvet ropes and pulsing interiors. Instead, she’d stood under streetlights vaping, thinking how unromantic a femme fatale seemed sans cigarette. But in June when it became clear the two week shutdown the government forecast was an air castle, she’d found herself tangled up on the dance floor with a sinewy man whose erection pressed the small of her back.

“I miss AIDS,” she’d told her friend Melissa.

Melissa delivered groceries for Instacart. “Disagree. It’s easier to fuck with a mask than a condom,” she’d said.

But even with a mask, Laura had wound up with Covid. The mild kind, apparently. Though all these months later, buttered popcorn still tasted like soil. 

Laura’s problem wasn’t drugs, though she let Melissa think that. She drank a little and when she drank, occasionally she’d crave cocaine or a cigarette. Some days, she was certain that if the right twelve step program existed, she’d avail herself, but she couldn’t imagine one primed for her kind of need.

Monday evening, Laura took the bus to Walgreens. The driver wore his face mask beneath his chin; a hospital-blue beard. In the store, she stood staring at the sheet masks for so long that someone with ice-purple hair and eyes widened by thick liner sighed and reached around her. 

“Smooth skin waits for no man,” they said.

On the ride home, Laura rummaged her plastic Walgreens bag. People Magazine and a lavender bath bomb. The Making of a Modern King, the magazine’s headline read. Even through its wrapping, the bath bomb’s scent nauseated Laura. Her apartment was tiny. The whole place would smell like a Victorian’s sachet. 

After the bus disgorged her, Laura straightened her coat and prepared to walk past the twins. Their apartment loomed across from the bus stop. Partner to all her comings and goings, they wore down coats in winter and went barefoot in spring. She’d seen them once or twice at four a.m. as she and that night’s man tumbled from an Uber, her breath a swamp of alcohol beneath her mask. They were like one of those haunted house paintings that watched you. She felt their eyes now, as she tossed the bath bomb in a garbage can and fit her key into her lock. 

The sheet masks had been a coworker’s suggestion. ExCo’s core values were Building Community, and Team Satisfaction. As far as Laura could tell this meant encouraging employees to lay bare their personal lives on Slack. Before landing in #SelfCare, Laura had scrolled past channels devoted to #LGBTQ+representation and #PetsofExCo. Nikki from customer service was vocal in all of the channels, organizing Zoom happy hours and encouraging straight cisgender whites to “shout their ally-ship," but wasn’t that just stealing focus from the people they claimed to support? Laura was too old, probably; certainly too judgmental. Probably she’d feel happier if she were more of a joiner, or at least of the generation that formed special clubs for people who didn’t belong. Or perhaps her problem was the money she made as a software developer. If she thought to spend it on a sensible car and a mortgage, maybe she’d be less driven to strap on heels and press between bodies until sunlight threatened the sky. But each month when her paycheck hit her bank account, Laura’s immediate thought was, Great now I have to deal with this. 

“I didn’t go anywhere,” She told Melissa on Tuesday night. “I just sat at my kitchen table, wearing a halter neck bodysuit and high-waisted jeans.” 

“Did you plan on going out and just stop yourself?” Melissa’s glasses were frosted from the picked-over freezer section. Supply chain issues, a worker had said.

“I wanted to know I could do it.” 

At three a.m. she’d descended from her apartment to stand in the threshold, an alcoholic ordering a drink to see how it feels in her hand. From two buildings down, the twins voices carried. Something in Korean she’d heard them say before. 

“Would you accept DiGiorno as a sub for Tombstone?” Melissa asked.

“Do you accept Jesus as your lord and savior?” Laura leaned against the cool of the freezer case. “Can’t you chat the customer?”

“It’s a man. I don’t want it to turn sexual. The last guy I chatted to ask about orange juice ended up waiting in his driveway to show me his shlong.”

Just like Melissa didn’t probe too deeply into Laura’s nighttime activities, Laura never asked whether Melissa missed teaching. She knew she’d been pushed out for something to do with trigger warnings. After whatever incident, she’d changed her policy to require them, but the damage was already done according to a former student who claimed PTSD. (“That’s what teaching is in the 21st century,” Melissa said as events unfolded, “giving up on your beliefs in an attempt to keep your job.”)

Laura had thought briefly that if she cultivated a closer relationship with Melissa, she’d feel less unanchored. On a weekend trip the summer Laura’s mom was diagnosed with cancer, they’d gotten drunk and gone skinny dipping. They sat in Adirondack chairs and roasted marshmallows and talked about how adulthood didn’t hold up to childhood expectations.   

“When my mom was my age we had all these Le Creuset pots,” Melissa said, and Laura rubbed her back while she cried.      

The next day, Laura awoke queasy from intimacy. On the drive home they both wore sunglasses. When Laura dropped Melissa off, she leaned in the rental car window. “Let’s go back to mostly talking about movies,” Melissa said. 

“Could I come with you again?” Laura asked now. In her pocket she fingered her Swiss Army knife. The grocery store seemed a good replacement: music and lights and a purpose. Even if that purpose was some suburbanite’s frozen food. 

“Sure, if you want to.” Melissa checked her phone. “I’m going with Red Baron. Will you hand me one that’s plain cheese?”

Laura pulled a box from the freezer. Probably the shelves were black to showcase hyper bright packaging, but empty of products, they seemed boundless; inky and deep like a well. 

Wednesday night, Laura attended a French cuisine Zoom class someone in the #ExCoGotCulture Slack channel had recommended. When Laura’s mom went into remission, she’d sworn it was due to Laura’s cooking. Laura had haunted Mexican markets, picked through piles of chicken feet, simmered stock until her hair stunk of onions and her skin was slicked with grease. She’d made bone broths and kale smoothies and ground up the herbal concoctions the stooped acupuncturist in Chinatown wrapped in cheesecloth. Her cooking was purpose driven; not for pleasure. She’d donated her immersion blender, and packed away her mortar and pestle when her mother’s luck changed.  

Now, on Laura’s screen, a jowly man talked about the purpose of bouquet garni. Her eyes drifted to the kitchen window. She didn’t care about butter or rues or flaky pastry. She closed her laptop on his gesturing hands. Outside, soft rain made patterns on the sidewalk. The last of the sunlight seeped from the sky. When she leaned to press her head against the window’s glass she could just make out the twin’s feet on their porch steps. Both wore sneakers, vivid white in the falling dusk.

Maybe there was illness in the twin’s apartment. Or a neglectful parent. She’d never seen a caretaker. Only the paper doll pair of them, hair cut into pageboys, black framed glasses beneath. Last time she’d passed by, she’d heard familiar phrases in their whispers. She wanted to ask if they were talking about her, but that seemed at best self-centered, at worst a step toward claiming her neighbor’s dog spoke to her, demanding the blood of young girls. 

Later, she seated herself at the kitchen table. The microwave clock read 12:14. Midnight was nothing. She could breath through it. The real problem was three a.m. 

Ray Bradbury wrote that “three in the morn is living death. Women, never wake then.” But three a.m. brought men cheek to jowl with the limits of their souls. Laura had been the twin’s age when she read that, and she’d done the minority math of substitution: the women Bradbury referenced were stand-ins for unthinking people content with their inside life. And by men, he meant his readers; those in-the-know few who felt the bare soil truth of it: death was a constant, the price of a limitless world. 

Laura couldn’t have been reading that passage when her mother offered the bargain, but that’s how she remembered it.                                             

“Promise to stop telling me to quit smoking, and you can read during dinner,” her mother said.                                                                                         

Weeks before, Laura had learned in school that cigarettes caused cancer. Her mother kept hers in a crystal bowl on the kitchen table. Whenever her mother reached for one, Laura recited a statistic (“Last year, 418,690 U.S. deaths were attributed to smoking.”). She made protest signs and chanted slogans. She’d promised herself she wouldn’t stop until her mother came around. But in Laura’s book that evening, the boys were poised to slip from their homes and meet at the traveling carnival. Since her father left, dinner had been silent—no sound save the kids playing hopscotch on the street below.  

“I’ll stop telling you.”

“Promise.” Her mother watched her.

A promise, Laura knew, was forever. “I promise,” Laura said.

“Good girl.” Her mother reached for her pack of Virginia Slims and Laura bent over her paperback, free to run with the boys down late summer streets swept with wind.

That was how she learned she could shoulder the burden of someone else’s mortality. She’d feel weighted down and guilty, but ultimately she could survive.

Thursday morning Laura sliced off another few leaves and dumped People Magazine unread into her kitchen garbage. In a Zoom call about quarterly earnings, Nikki from Customer Service told a story about how her grandfather had body shamed her at a family barbecue.

Laura looked from one Zoom square to another. In one, the CTO's cat walked circles around a vase of flowers, but most were black like the freezer case shelves, a few peopled with faces she hardly knew.

Beneath her camera’s eye, Laura texted Melissa. Can I shop with you tonight?

I’m driving, Melissa’s phone texted automatically. I’ll reply when it’s safe to write back.

Thursday night, Laura paced the length of her apartment. She’d tried seeing a psychiatrist once, and he’d told her, “as children we think our parents are godlike; therefore, if something goes wrong we must be the cause.” Laura knew he meant she hadn’t actually killed her mother. Still, some nights the certainty drove her from her apartment. Bars and summer music fests, and, when she wandered near the college, the occasional house party might have been enough to soothe her, if one night the first man hadn’t followed her home. When he demanded her wallet, she turned fast and he stumbled backward. Standing over him with her pocket knife, she knew she should run but the guilt beat like a second heart in her chest.

After that she’d understood it could work that way; when you had a song stuck in your head you listened to another to dislodge it. Guilt over a stranger was tolerable, and for nearly six months, one stranger was all she required.

In her closet now, Laura’s sharp-healed boots shone silver. Her feet clacked across the kitchen tile. Downstairs, she stood poised in the wan light from the hall behind her. Beyond the threshold, rich sky swept with pale stars. The twins faces were an accusation. Illuminated by the sweep of headlights. The neon sign in the front window of a car.     

Friday after work, Laura dumped the deflated plant in the garbage can. Dirt covered the faces of the Royals, sinking the magazine down. She drained the sink and the soapy water receded, melting snow revealing each objects’ true form. Her yellow coffee mug and her lunch plate and silverware. She sifted through suds to find her pocket knife. Snapped it open and made sure the blade had rinsed clean.

On the way to the bus stop, Laura tightened the belt of her trench coat. The whispering twins drew together as she passed. Five p.m. and the bus sighed with weary workers. This time the bus driver wore his mask just under his nose.

Soon, she was climbing the stairs to her mother’s old apartment. It had gone condo sometime after her death. The stairwell no longer smelled like stale cigarettes and curry. The new owners had rehabbed the windows and ripped out the carpet. Sun slanted through in thick strips and wood flooring gleamed. When she was a child she’d sat like the twins on these steps reading. Had she judged their downstairs neighbors the way the twins judged her?

At the base of their porch, she’d smoothed down her trench and summoned her courage to confront them. “I hear you talk about me.”               

The boy had peered through his fringe of soft bangs, his lips moving.

“What’s he saying?” Laura asked his sister.

The girl hauled her brother to his feet and herded him toward the entryway. “He says, we know all the bad things that you do.”

The floorboards in her mother’s stairwell muttered as Laura climbed higher. She was no threat to the young couple who occupied her mother’s apartment, though they’d begun to act like it. Still, maybe this time they’d welcome her. Maybe they’d listen. She ran her hand along the banister. All she wanted was to sit once more at her mother’s kitchen table. She wanted to look past the hanging plants and see kids playing hopscotch on the street below.

Sarah Terez Rosenblum’s work has appeared in literary magazines such as The Hopkins Review (forthcoming 2024), The Normal School, Prairie Schooner (shortlisted for Prairie Schooner’s Summer 2020 Creative Nonfiction Prize), Diagram, Brevity, Carve, and Third Coast. In 2023, Sarah was a finalist for Kenyon Review’s Short Nonfiction Contest, and Sarah’s new novel manuscript, The Idea of Heat, was a semifinalist for Black Lawrence Press's 2023 Big Moose prize. Sarah has written for sites including Salon, The Chicago Sun Times, The Satirist, and Pop Matters. A two time Pushcart Prize nominee, Sarah holds an MFA in Creative Writing from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Sarah is a Creative Coach and Developmental Editor and teaches creative writing at Story Studio, where Sarah was voted 2022 Teacher of the Year, and at The University of Chicago Writer’s Studio, where Sarah was the 2022 winner of The Innovation in Teaching Award. Sarah’s novel, Herself When She's Missing, was called “poetic and heartrending" by Booklist.