Issue Nineteen

Umberto’s cooks the juiciest veal cutlet in the entire city. You know this because you’ve eaten veal cutlet at every Italian restaurant in the entire city. You’ve given second chances; with the sand-haired boy two weeks ago you revisited Butera’s and then Pomodorino with the freckled boy last week, but at both places the dish still tasted like copper. As you sipped your third glass of Merlot and feasted on cold garlic bread, you realized this is why you stick with what you know won’t disappoint.

At 7:50 you peer over your steering wheel as your date shuffles toward the restaurant. He had offered to pick you up, but you told him you live far so you’d meet him instead. It’s safer this way. Your date fiddles with his bomber jacket collar. His posture rivals the Hunchback and although you’re parked yards away, you can tell he’s not six feet tall like his profile claims. Maybe five ten, at most. Strike one.

What else is he lying about?

You unlock your phone, pausing to recall which dating app you two matched on. Ah, yes. Now you remember. You open his profile. You conduct your research in the days prior, but it’s useful to brush up that evening. Looking for a smart girl to make dumb decisions with. Not your first encounter with that tagline, but you prefer a cliched bio over an exhaustive info dump and the photos are what determine your swipe’s direction, anyway. In the first, he wears khakis and a Serengeti National Park shirt. Two monkeys perch atop his shoulders. After a quick Google search, you learned that last summer he worked as a safari guide in Tanzania. You hope he isn’t a vegan; you dated one of those once. The whole dinner the guy eyed your plate with a look one reserves for clogged toilets.

In his second photo he dons a tuxedo; he links arms with a girl in a wedding dress who’s a female version of him. According to his social media, he and his twin sister studied at the same university, and her husband was his fraternity brother. You stalked the sister’s page, too. She’s an equestrian and graduated from the top veterinary program in the country. She reminds you of the girls your foster mother urged you to emulate, but those girls pelted you with brown paper bags in the cafeteria.

Your phone buzzes. Just arrived. Let me know when you’re here 🙂 He can wait a couple minutes. You switch back to his profile. The third photo is a selfie. He’s handsome in an obvious way, chiseled jaw and eyes like a verdant countryside. He looks like a hybrid of seven other guys you dated, but what earned him your right swipe was his hair. You only date blonds.

You had a great love once. That man was your sun. The air you breathed. The blood in your veins. You still gaze at the photos under your mattress. He was perfect. You still sleep in his old football t-shirts and replay his voicemails like a lullaby; you imagine his velvet voice transcending your recordings and asking for you back. You conjure him so vividly — from his shaggy blond hair to the birthmark on his left cheek — it feels like he‘s there. As if he never left. Some mornings you think it was all a bad dream. But then you remember you’re forbidden to contact him and have no information how.

The moon hovers in your rear-view mirror. Crescent tonight. Awesome, be there in 5 you text back. Punctuation smiley faces aren’t your thing. Not that it matters what your thing is, because your thing can be whatever you want. You can be whatever you want, and men can’t perform the ubiquitous pre-date social media autopsy because you don’t exist on social media. You haven’t since The Breakup. The only truth your dates have is your first name, and that’s all you ever give.

Who will you be tonight?

Certainly not an orphan. Or a stalker. A threat. Sociopath. Whatever else the restraining order pegs you as. You usually curate your life based around that of your date’s, so perhaps tonight you will be a twin. You’ve always wanted an identical sister. You two could’ve pranked all the kids in your foster home. Maybe tonight you’ll have a pet snake. Last week you had two pet squirrels and a hedgehog.

You adjust the ruby heart dangling from your neck, the last Valentine’s Day gift from your love. Sometimes you incorporate it into your fictitious life. You’ve said you inherited the necklace from your baroness great grandmother; your father is a jeweler and he created it for your sixteenth birthday; it was a souvenir from vacation in Aruba; you found it in a Manhattan taxicab at 3AM. Tonight you’ll say you bought matching necklaces while you and your twin studied abroad in Greece.

You hop out of your car and saunter to the restaurant. Your date is probably waiting for your arrival at the bar, debating whether he should go for a handshake or a hug. People are predictable. The host will escort you two to the table and he’ll start with small talk, either a comment about the weather or he’ll inquire about your day. That’ll be the segue into asking if you worked and if so what do you do, to if you went to school and if so where and what did you study, to your long-term goals to your hobbies to if you’re watching any shows on Netflix.

When he speaks, you will listen. You will ask questions. He will feel seen. He will feel heard. Your charm will mesmerize him like a child at Fourth of July fireworks. He’ll be so enamored he won’t even have thought about sleeping with you, and when he walks you to your car, he’ll say it’s been a while since he felt this excited after a first date. You’ll blush, and when he asks to see you again, you’ll tell him you’d like that.

But that’s the last he will hear from you again.

Just walked in you text as you enter, spotting his blond hair at the dim bar. You chirp his name and he turns. His eyes light up like a fresh lamp bulb. He walks in your direction, smiling shyly when he approaches.

“Hi,” you say, beaming. “I’m thrilled to meet you.”

 

 

Melissa Kerman is a writer living in New York. You can follow her on Instagram @melissakerman

 

1.

Charlie’s the new kid in the class and boy, does he stand out. It’s not that he’s funky lookin’ with a crooked smile or poofy hair. Nah. He looks pretty normal. It’s just that he’s new, and we never had a new kid before. I live in a small town, ya see, one that you can’t even find on the maps. Try, I dare you! Look up “Daisyville, Tennessee” and nothin’ will pop up. So when you go through middle school knowing who ya cheat off of, who ya avoid, and who ya befriend, and then some new kid shows up with only a month of 8th grade left, what are ya supposed to think of him? And he don’t talk like us either. He talks all fancy cuz he’s from Connecticut. He just sits in the back of the classroom reading all these books with real small print so we don’t talk to him and he don’t try to talk to us. But today was different. Cuz while Mr. Smith was writing some dumb Shakespeare lines on the chalkboard and blabbin’ his mouth about comparing a chick to a summa’s day, Charlie stood up and threw the sharpest paper airplane at his head. Hit him right smack dead on his bald spot. And I’ll tell ya, Charlie wasn’t the new kid anymore. He was a god.

 

My Grandpa Eugene was the greatest paper airplane maker in the world. He traveled to London, China, and even Australia showing people how to master the art of paper airplanes. He was going to teach me how to make a folded piece of freedom this Tuesday. Grandpa Eugene was going to fly down to our new house from Japan, but not all planes are as sturdy as his paper airplanes. The principal called me down; the sound of “ooooos” from my classmates followed me as the secretary brought me into his office. I should’ve known something was wrong when he called me “son” and offered me a piece of caramel. The principal said I could go home early if I wanted to, but what would I do back at the house? I would just end up sitting in front of the glass cabinet that held some of Grandpa’s greatest work, and think about how we would never need to expand the showcase; that those are all the paper airplanes Grandpa Eugene would ever make. I walked back into English class and Mr. Smith was teaching us Sonnet 18, but I learned that last year. So instead of listening, I folded last night’s homework, mimicking Grandpa’s motions. There is a certain feeling that takes over your body when you are finally able to fly the perfect paper airplane. I don’t know if I could even explain it in words; Grandpa Eugene probably could. You feel it in your fingertips and surprisingly also in your left big toe. I released it and wow. I was aiming for the trash but hey, I’ll have time to work on my craft during detention.

 

Nobody thought a tree could fly, but look at me go. I’m soaring.

 

 

Livvy Krakower is a high school senior from New Jersey. She has been previously published in Jewish Women of Words, The Writers Circle Journal, and others.

The front door swung open as if blown by a strong wind, and Grandma barged in, lugging a steel cage the size of her torso. Inside, a yellow cockatiel with orange-spotted cheeks and gray plumage stood on a wooden rod. Setting the cage on the kitchen table, Grandma cooed at it.

She had been acting strangely for months. Just last week, I was surprised by a stray dog sniffing at the refrigerator. For some inexplicable reason, Grandma had let it in, and I was the one who had to coax it out the front door.

Grandma called out in Chinese, “Look at the present I got you.”

Unable to feign disinterest, I walked over to examine the bird.

“What’s it for?”

“I thought you needed a pet. You look so bored.”

The bird squeaked, and I bent down to look at it through the bars. It was the size of a lemon and twitched at me with confused eyes.

From her shopping bag, Grandma pulled out a bag of birdseed and tossed it to me. I fumbled with it as if receiving an unwanted prize from a claw machine.

“Feed this to him every day and put fresh newspapers on the bottom of his cage so he doesn’t die.”

I would have rather had a new phone. Or a new bicycle. Or a bar of soap. But as I watched Grandma clap the dust off her shoes, I envisioned her journey from the conglomerate pet shop that smelled like sawdust to the bus stop with the dropping-covered bench. I imagined her awkward descent down the steep bus-steps and her trek through crowded intersections and past the barking bulldog in Mr. Miller’s yard on the way back to the neighborhood. Could I refuse such dedication?

Carrying the cage to my room, I passed by an oil painting of Mount Lu entrenched in white clouds, a towering reminder of Grandma’s childhood. It was one of the few things she brought over from her old Nanjing apartment, where the paint flaked off the walls. I set the cage on my desk, which overlooked the generic suburban neighborhood. I could fit the bird onto my bookshelf, but my science fiction books and treasured volleyball trophies would have to be removed.

I gave him toys: colorful wiffle balls and some Lego pieces. I gingerly offered him the birdseed. He plunged his beak into the hill of nourishment and nibbled. I named him Yu for euphoria because he squawked all evening.

A few weeks later, I came home from school and found Yu out of his cage, roosting on Grandma’s lap. Some balled-up tissues lay on the sofa, and a documentary on China displayed on the flatscreen. An open container of Haw Flakes lay on the coffee table along with an unfinished Sudoku puzzle. Our TV was twice as wide as Grandma’s old-style television in her tiny apartment back in Nanjing. The camera panned over the mystifying Shilin Stone Forest. I was about to make a remark when I heard raspy breathing. Grandma’s cheeks were watery and her eyes red.

“Are you sick? Is everything okay?” That sounded like what an adult was supposed to ask.

Grandma replied, “Ni ke yi ba niao fang zhou ma?” Can you put the bird away?

She placed Yu onto my fingers, and I carried him into my room. Seeing her cry was bizarre, as if I were watching her soul slipping down her face. I placed Yu inside the cage and listened until the crying had stopped.

That evening, Yu squawked continually in my room. Somewhere in my neighborhood, a kid was taking up the flute, and their unearthly screeches combined with Yu’s shrieking to create an ear-aching symphony. I tried to focus on my calculus homework, but the screaming noise was an auditory wound.

I stopped my pen. It was one of the queer things I didn’t normally notice: the sounds in my house. Before Grandma came, I’d blast my classical music on the Bluetooth speaker or watch old TV shows. But now I gave Grandma full reign of the television and wore headphones so she could nap undisturbed. During those days, noise came from my computer and Grandma’s television. Aside from the barest of communication for necessities, there was little organic sound besides that coming from Yu.

Unable to concentrate on homework, I carried Yu on my fingers to the backyard. The clouds had dissipated, and the dying orange sunset reflected off the windows. Standing in the shady spot next to the magnolia tree, I listened as Yu chirped incessantly just as he did on the first night. His food was provided for him, his shelter was given to him, his protection from predators was assured, and his only job was to sing.

Grandma’s window was open, but the flowery curtains were drawn. A phone rang, and Grandma’s voice sounded. I barely listened: “Alex loves the bird …. It chirps all day,” but she soon digressed into her aching joints, the lack of stinky tofu in San Jose, and the cost of noodles at Ranch 99.

“It’s too calm and quiet here. Back home, I could hear the cars, the motorcycles, and the noisy people. If I walk to the park and sit, I maybe see one, two cars, and one person walking a dog. It’s like being on an island waiting to die. Every day, I get up, watch TV, eat, and sleep.”

I knew she was a different person in Nanjing. She liked the country and fishing barefoot for freshwater eels. Now, she was a foreigner dropped into my living room. I almost felt guilty for her life like a prison inmate.

Just then, Yu leapt off my hand and flew through the two palm trees and into the sky. “Yu!” I called, while my mind scrambled to figure out how I had forgotten that birds’ wings grow back. He soared the updrafts and disappeared over the suburban houses. I dashed out the gate and out of my cul-de-sac until I reached the road, where the rush hour traffic flowed like the impassable Yellow River. My last sight of Yu was the setting sun glinting off his gray tail feathers as he flew over the six-lane road. It was the time of the year when it was still winter but close to spring. He could wither in the cold, unable to find food or shelter. Or he’d be eaten by some cat, I was sure.

When I told Grandma that Yu flew off, she scolded me, “Birds have wings! Did you think it would just sit there on your hand?! It protected you from bad luck, and now your luck has flown away.”

I stood there, not knowing whether to accuse her of wonky superstition or to apologize.

She handed me three twenty-dollar bills and said, “Buy a new bird on your own. But wait until you’re older, more responsible. It’ll bring your luck back.”

“Okay,” I said. I didn’t tell her that I didn’t want another bird, but I accepted the money, knowing I’d probably spend it on a used basketball hoop.

That night, Grandma caused a huge uproar with my parents.

“Who’s going to take care of you in China? Did we spend months getting you a Green Card just so you could tour America and go back home?” my mom bellowed.

They had had the same argument many times before. And on each occasion, I would pretend to continue my homework at my desk, or peruse a novel on the couch, staring at the black letters, but not reading.

I interjected suddenly, without the wave of boldness that I had been hoping for, “You get home every night, and you only see her sleeping, but don’t you know how bored she is? Could you watch TV on a couch every single day until you die?”

With grudging support from my parents, Grandma left the following month. She was received at the airport by relatives and returned to her old life in China.

A few years later, Grandma passed away in my aunt’s apartment in Nanjing. I often thought about her after she left, imagining she had settled back into her pleasant past life, talking to local market owners, going eel fishing with her neighbor, and falling asleep in a familiar bed in a familiar country.

The evening after we burned spirit money for Grandma, I was playing basketball in my driveway when I thought I saw Yu sitting in a tree across the street. It probably wasn’t him. The bird was plumper with shiny black eyes and smooth plumage. But the same orange spots dotted his cheeks. I cautiously approached him, but by the time I got to the tree, he had flown away. His chirping stayed with me as I went inside.

That night, I left my window open and thought about Grandma. I wondered if she received our money and what she would do with it.

 

 

Alex Zhang is a sixteen-year-old who lives in San Jose and attends Lynbrook High School. He loves reading novels, manga, poetry, and just about any piece of writing. Someday he hopes to write a novel about an alcoholic man trapped in a post-apocalyptic world struggling to find meaning in his life (it’s a work in progress).

Want to hear a story, baby girl? M’kay, I’ll tell you a story.

I’ve had my first love. It’s odd to think, because it was never something I looked for, never something I saw, never anything I’ll have again. Only something I knew in hindsight. He had wrinkles around his eyes when he smiled, and freckles in the summer. He was always steady, clear, shallow-water blue. I met him when we were eight and loved him until we were sixteen. I met him when his mama was pregnant with his youngest sister; you’re in the fourth grade now. Nine-years-old. I hope you know how excited he was to trace your little baby hands. To love your little baby lashes.

I never told him. He never told me. We didn’t have to, because we just knew, baby. We never kissed in the school yard, or held hands under desks, or touched at all. Just talked, talk, talking. You learn the smallest things with (for) your first love. You go out of your way to find out the middle names of everyone in their family. Connor. Patricia. You want to know what they’re thinking, all the time, what wishes and thoughts and sorrows are spooling ‘round their thrumming little heart. You think, they’re the most beautiful thing you ever saw. And they are, baby, they really are. Until the next beautiful thing.

The summer sun sets behind a powdered sky, and you see the same moon. You talk well into the night, when he’s in dust-red Utah and you’re here, and you’re both exhausted, but you’ll stay up for always if it means you get to keep talking. You won’t realize how fast always runs out. Don’t let it run out, baby girl. Don’t let it take your shine.

And something else happens, too.

Loves don’t begin or end in a moment. Loves are timelines without dates. Everything is ebb. Everything is flow.

You won’t ever really fall out of love with him, or her, or them, just learn to love someone else in a different way. You’ll feel guilty about that, but it’s okay. You never love the same way; it – the loving, the unloving – morphs each time, into its own lovely, pained shape. And you won’t be able to look each other in the eye anymore, because if you do, you might see that lovely, pained shape tucked away in the greener side, pooling beneath a mirrored pupil.  And you’ve worked so hard and long not to see that shape. An aching long time, baby.

And trust me, you’ll both wanna talk afterwards, when it’s ended, but you’re not sure what that means. Ended. Ended. How can something end when it never really began? You want to ask him. Her. Them.

But fear’ll hold your tongue tight and whisper untrue truths, and so a not quite something fizzles out into a not quite nothing. That will be with you forever. Beautiful, and sad, and it all really depends on what forever means to you.

He’s taller than me, now, baby girl. He’s stronger, and smarter, and he’s loved more and hurt more; you can see it in the way he holds his shoulders. Taut. Tense. Collar bones and cotton. You see? How his writing’s a little narrower, his beautiful mind, a little broader, and the world’s a little scarier. The wrinkles around his eyes (steady, clear, blue) are deeper, now.

I smooth them with my thumbs, just like this, baby girl; they melt into the miles of his skin. You feel it? Let it (me[us]) go, I whisper. Go to sleep. I hum (him, you, me, us) a lullaby; he wraps us in stardust. And in the nighttime, we fly away to where the remembered things go.

It’s quiet there.

 

 

Maya is a past tap dance princess, present book monster, and future movie maker. She believes radical empathy and pumpkin bread can heal the world.

“This is the biggest racing event this side of the Carrowniskey river, you know.”

I sipped the pint and pushed it into my jacket, protecting it against the wind and sand and sea spray. I processed Kieran’s words as he watched another line of dark spots grow into small horses and then into big horses. There was sand in my left eye. “Are there other racing events this side of the Carrowniskey river?”

Kieran shivered and I watched him try and get a packet of cigarettes out of his pocket with stiff fingers. Summer in Ireland was when the rain became slightly warmer. That didn’t hold true for the west coast.

“No,” he said at last. “That’s the Carrowniskey river there, and there’s really nothing else this side of it.”

He turned a sunglasses-clad head and thrust his pint at me. I tried to get both hands inside my jacket for warmth, but the drinks were even colder than the wind.

Kieran walked down the stones away from the beach. “I’m going to get beer. You watch our place. It’s in high demand.”

I watched the horses thunder past where I stood with the crowd on the rocks and decided this was the worst lads’ holiday idea ever. The others had disappeared. I looked around, but all I could see were adults wearing thick-soled boots and caps and Regatta jackets, and kids with damp candy floss and tall ice-creams.

Kieran came tramping back in his yellow Converse shoes and skinny chinos. “Drink up,” he said. “Quick. These’re freezing the fucking hands off me.”

I downed what was left of my cup and put it on the ground and returned his. He handed me a fresh one. It was cold, frosted.

He shoved his hands into his jacket pocket and pulled out two dockets. “Here,” he said, handing me one. “I put down two bets on Lightning Bolt. Twenty quid.”

“Which one is Lightning Bolt?”

“No idea. Here they come now, though.”

The horses were led into a small ring where the jockeys mounted and people could judge where to leave their money. I squinted at the leaflet with the horse, jockey and owner names, and the corresponding numbers. I glanced three times to be sure I was right.

“It’s that tiny one there,” I said.

Kieran looked offended. “No, it’s not.”

“Number eight. It is.”

“That’s a pony.”

“True enough.”

“Why the fuck is there a pony racing against all those?”

“Why did you put money on it?”

“I didn’t know it was a fucking pony, did I?”

He was upset. I watched the jockey mount our Lightning Bolt, brown with four white socks, small but full of a restless energy. Kieran got upset easily since June. Local men and women eyed the horses and headed for the bookies, who roared and shouted, spittle flying in their fervour and excitement for the day’s gaming. My eye was really starting to hurt.

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s head for the shore. They’ll be starting soon.”

We stood right up at the front, tripping and spilling most of our pints on the way down and nearly stepping on a dog with three legs and a lacey collar. The barriers were cold, our hands sticking to the steel.

“Look,” said Kieran. “She’s already behind, and they haven’t even got to the starting mark.”

“She’s saving her energy.”

“Fucking pony.”

It was a 1.5km race and the starting mark was way down the far end of the beach. Kieran was shaking and he’d put the sunglasses back on. I thought about the kind of friendship where I could put a hand on his arm and comfort him.

The speakers through which the commentator’s voice emerged crackled and broke into little pieces in the sea air. The crowd judged the races on excitement rather than any distinguishable words.

“They’ve started,” I said.

He said nothing, his gaze fixed on the little brown and black specks. The commentator spoke a mile a minute. The crowd grew agitated and animated.

“Here they come.”

“She hasn’t a hope,” he said, his voice devastated.

A woman behind us suddenly shouted, “Here she comes! Katie is in fourth; John, would you look!”

She had good eyes. I examined the leaflet with one eye. Lightning Bolt. Jockey: Katie McNally.

Kieran suddenly lurched at the barrier. “Jesus Christ, that’s our horse.”

And so it was. Number eight. Her legs were shorter than any horse there but she was a little brown and white flash as she moved into third place, past a big black gelding.

“Fuck, Nate! That’s our horse.” Kieran thrust a fist into the air, the fist with the pint. We were showered with booze. “Come on, Lightning Bolt! Come on!”

The locals cheered at his endorsement. She was a local girl, then.

Kieran turned to me, his sunglasses slipping off and his eyes wild beneath them. “She wants it, Nate. She wants it more than any of them. She wants it so bad she’ll tear up that beach to take it.”

Even as he was talking, she slipped into second place. He let out a wordless whoop. His excitement was infectious.

“That’s it, Lightning Bolt!” I heard myself scream. She would do it. She was so close to taking it that I could taste it.

And just like that, the black gelding slipped past her. The crowd groans their dismay, the commentator shouts, and just like that, the race ended.

Kieran stood pressed against the barrier.

I tried to put a positive spin on it. “She came third. We nearly made a few quid.”

“Did you see that?” he asked, and there was a strange look on his face.

“Yeah.”

“Have you ever wanted anything that badly?”

I considered it. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

“I have,” he said, smiling suddenly. “I think I have.”

Behind us, the woman wept with pride for her triumphant daughter. She was flying, John. Our girl was flying.

 

Luke Power is a writer living and studying in Galway, on the west coast of Ireland. His work has appeared and is forthcoming in ROPES, Sonder, The Ogham Stone, Dodging the Rain, Perhappened, and Vox Galvia.