Justin Taroli‘s atmospheric short story follows a photographer who returns to Albuquerque after their grandmother’s death. Intertwining themes of grief, spirituality, and collective memory, the mystery of “Coyote Map” takes gradual shape through the camera’s snapping lens.

TMR’s online-only prose anthology, BLAST features prose too vibrant to be confined between the covers of a print journal.

***

Coyote Map

The first one I see is crossing the gas station parking lot at sunrise. I’ve got coffee in one hand, a bag of ice melting against my hip, and I almost drop both when it stops mid-step and looks at me. The sky is pale gold, same as its fur, so it’s like the coyote is made of light. Behind it, the street is empty—no cars, no early walkers, just the humming of the fluorescent pumps. 

I’ve been back in Albuquerque two weeks. The house still smells like my grandmother’s soap. I sleep in her bed, listen to the trains at night, think about how her voice always seemed older than her face. I came back to clean the place, maybe sell it, but I keep finding reasons to stay. 

The coyote blinks at me. Its ears twitch toward some invisible sound. Then it moves on, passing between the gas station and the boarded-up pawn shop, stepping over weeds with the same precision my grandmother used for embroidery. I don’t take a picture, not that first time. 

The camera comes later, when I see the second one. I’m driving down Central and it’s there on the median, bold as anything, standing between a Walgreens and a strip-mall Mexican buffet. I pull over and snap it through the car window. It doesn’t run. Its mouth is open, tongue out, like it’s laughing at me. 

At night, I scroll through the photo, zoom in until the fur turns into pixels, then zoom out again. The streetlight makes its eyes burn white. The next day, I bring the camera with me everywhere. 

I start looking in places I once avoided—behind the train depot, at the edges of vacant lots, under the freeway overpasses where you can smell burnt sage from the encampments. I walk the same stretches of road over and over. When I find one, I slow down, wait, click. 

The photos are just for me at first. Then I post one to socials. It gets a few likes from high school friends who still live in town, and a few from strangers who’ve probably never been here. I post another, and another. Within a week, people are tagging me in their own coyote sightings. 

One night, I dream of my grandmother’s voice. She’s telling me a story I barely remember—something about animals that guide you home if you’ve lost your way. I can’t see her face in the dream, only the movement of her hands. She’s tracing something in the air, a shape I almost recognize. 

The next morning, I find her sewing kit on the top shelf of the closet. Inside, under the tangled thread and rusted scissors, is a folded piece of paper. It’s a map, hand-drawn in blue ink, the kind with creases worn soft by years of opening and refolding. The streets aren’t labeled, but I know the landmarks—the old mission church, the arroyo by the railyards, the cottonwoods out by the river. When I overlay it in my mind with the routes I’ve been walking, it matches exactly. 

* * * 

I trace the map again before bed. I’m not sure what I’m looking for—maybe a missing street, a hidden landmark—but there’s nothing extra. Just the familiar sprawl of the city, drawn the way she must have remembered it, the way it was before the Walgreens and the Mexican buffet, before the pawn shops turned into churches and back again. 

A week later, I’m at the edge of the railyards, waiting. The sun is dropping behind the warehouses. A train passes, slow and loud, pulling a string of graffiti-scrawled cars toward the horizon. And then I see it—another coyote, smaller than the others, with a torn ear. It’s watching me from the opposite side of the fence. I step toward it. It steps back. 

There’s a gap in the fence where the chain link is curled like paper. I push through, the metal snagging my jacket. The coyote doesn’t run. It turns and walks, head low, glancing back every few steps to be sure I’m following. 

We leave the tracks behind. The ground turns to packed sand and brittle weeds. I pass a burned-out car frame, a mattress half-buried in dirt. The coyote slips through a line of tamarisks, and then we’re in the arroyo. It’s wide and dry, walls the color of rust. I smell something faint and sharp—maybe the last trace of a fire put out days ago. 

The city feels far away here, like it’s been folded up and tucked inside a drawer. The only sound is the wind moving sand in soft scrapes. The coyote stops in the middle of the stream and stares at me. Through the lens, I see the outlines of more shapes. At first, I think they’re shadows, tricks of the light—but no, they’re other coyotes, emerging from the shade. One, then three, then seven. Their paws make no sound. I take the shot. The shutter clicks, and in that moment, every head turns toward me at once. 

The smallest one—the one I followed—steps closer. It blinks slow, almost human. I can see the torn edge of its ear, the dust clinging to its fur. For a second, I think it’s going to brush past me, keep walking. Instead, it sits, tail curled over its feet, waiting. 

The sun is nearly gone. The light in the arroyo shifts from gold to the color of bruised fruit. I lower the camera. My hands smell like metal. When I look up again, they’re gone. 

* * * 

A week later, one of the photos ends up on a wildlife blog. Someone emails me to ask if I’ll give an interview. They want to know if I’m “documenting an urban reclamation phenomenon.” I tell them I’m just taking pictures. Another email asks if I’ll sell prints. I ignore it. 

My follower count climbs. People tag me in grainy night-vision shots from their doorbell cameras, coyotes caught mid-stride across suburban lawns. Others send me blurry frames from dashcams—tails disappearing between rows of parked cars, eyes flaring white in headlights. 

It’s late September now, the light thinning earlier each day. My grandmother’s map stays on the kitchen table. I mark in red pen the dates and locations of each sighting. Over time, the lines between sightings connect into a shape I almost recognize—curves and points like a constellation, something my grandmother might have drawn in the air while telling her stories. The pattern seems to be closing in, pulling tighter toward the center of the map. There’s one place it hasn’t touched yet: an empty square near the river where the street names fade into dirt roads. I circle it. 

The day I go, the air smells of rain though the sky is clear. I walk through neighborhoods where the chain-link fences sag under the weight of windblown trash. The ground dips toward the river, and the houses thin out until there’s just a single trailer with a blue tarp roof, its windows papered over from the inside. Beyond it is an overgrown path. The earth is soft, damp in places, lined with cottonwoods that tremble without wind. Somewhere nearby, water moves—a slow, steady trickle. 

I see the first coyote at the bend in the path. Then another, half-hidden in the brush. They’re watching me, silent, holding their place until I pass. 

The path opens into a clearing. It’s smaller than I imagined, just a shallow basin ringed by sage. In the center, a pool of water no bigger than a bathtub, perfectly still. My reflection wavers, then sharpens. Behind me, in the water’s surface, are the coyotes—dozens of them—standing at the edge of the clearing. In the reflection, they are nearer than they are in the air around me. I turn, but the space behind me is empty. 

I back away, careful not to disturb the dirt, and retrace the path to the trailer with the blue tarp roof. By the time I reach the main road, it’s dark. The streetlights hum, throwing rings of weak light over the cracked asphalt. I cut through a neighborhood I don’t know well, passing yards with abandoned swing sets, cars on blocks. At one corner, three kids are sitting on the curb, tossing gravel into the gutter. They stop and watch me as I pass. I wonder if they’ve seen the coyotes too. 

Back at the house, I spread my grandmother’s map on the kitchen table and draw a small circle where the pool should be. I don’t remember her ever telling me about it, but the way the lines on her map seem to radiate toward that spot makes me think she knew. Maybe she’d been there herself, a long time ago, before the fences and the trash heaps and the boarded-up pawn shops. 

I start leaving the house earlier each morning. I want to see the city in the hours before anyone else is awake, before the light flattens everything. At the railyards, I watch pigeons scatter from the rafters. In the industrial zone, I pass a man in a grease-stained shirt wheeling a bicycle with no chain. Sometimes I catch sight of a coyote at the far end of a street, trotting between shadows, gone before I can raise the camera. Other times they appear so close that I can hear the soft clack of their claws on pavement. 

The more I walk, the less the city feels like streets and buildings, more like layers of something older—canals buried under dirt, trading routes erased by freeways. My grandmother’s voice comes back in fragments: her warning to avoid certain areas after dark, her habit of touching the doorframe twice before leaving the house. I’d thought those things were superstition, or just habit.  

One afternoon, scrolling through the photos on my phone, I notice something I can’t explain. In three separate shots, taken in different parts of the city, the same coyote appears—a female with a jagged scar running down her muzzle. In one photo, she’s by the riverbank, in another, she’s trotting through the empty lot behind the Walgreens, and in the last, she’s standing on the roof of an abandoned laundromat. I took all three shots within the same hour.  

I go back to the laundromat the next day. The roof is empty. The front door hangs open, and the inside smells of mold and mouse droppings. I climb the back stairs to the roof. From up here, I can see the city unfolding in all directions: the brown river ribboned with cottonwoods, the grids of houses, the sharp blue line of the mountains in the distance. There’s movement in the alley below. A coyote slips between two buildings without looking up. 

That night, I print out all my photos and spread them across the living-room floor. The scarred female shows up more than I thought—always at the edge of the frame, never the focus, as if she’s been watching me watch them. 

I start looking for her. Days pass without a sighting. Then, one morning before dawn, I see her at the far end of the street, standing under a flickering streetlamp. When I take a step toward her, she turns and walks away, steady, as if keeping time. I follow. 

We pass through the empty parking lot of a shuttered grocery store, through a gap in a cinderblock wall, across a stretch of dirt scattered with beer bottles and sun-bleached shoes. The air smells like damp earth though it hasn’t rained. 

She leads me toward the river again, but from a different angle this time. The path winds between stands of mesquite, the ground softening underfoot. I can hear the slow movement of water somewhere ahead. The sky is lightening, streaked with pink and orange. 

We reach the arroyo. The scarred coyote steps down into it without pause, her body moving through the shadow like a brushstroke. I follow, camera in hand. This gully is narrower than the last, its walls closer, the air cooler. My footsteps sound loud in the stillness. The coyote glances back once, then keeps walking until we emerge into a place I don’t recognize—a shallow hollow lined with smooth stones. 

The hollow opens onto the same pool I saw before. The water is just as still, the surface holding the sky like a sheet of glass. The scarred coyote stops at the edge. She steps forward, dips her muzzle to the water, and drinks. I lift the camera, but I can’t make myself press the shutter. 

The scarred coyote lifts her head from the pool. Water clings to the fur along her jaw, catching the early light. She looks at me, still and waiting, as if there’s something I’m meant to do. 

I step to the edge. The reflection shows the sky behind me, streaked with pale gold, and the ring of coyotes that I can’t see in the air around me. Their ears are pricked, their bodies motionless, as though they’re holding a breath we all share. My grandmother’s map flashes in my mind—every path, every mark, leading here. I think about how she used to pause in the middle of her stories, leaving a gap I was meant to fill. Maybe this is one of those gaps. 

I take a step forward. The water is colder than I expect. My breath catches, but I keep moving until both feet are submerged. The pool can’t be more than a few feet across, yet as I step forward, the bottom drops away. The reflection ripples and breaks. The sky disappears. 

There’s a sound like wind through cottonwood leaves, only faster, sharper. I can’t tell if it’s above me or inside my head. When I look down, I see the coyotes moving, sliding across the surface like shadows. They circle tighter, their bodies forming the same shape I traced on the map, the shape my grandmother drew in the air. 

The cold climbs my legs, my ribs, my throat. I expect to feel the panic of drowning, but instead there’s a stillness, a weightless suspension, as though the water is holding me in place. The coyotes’ eyes are brighter now, reflecting something I can’t see. For a moment, I think I hear her, my grandmother, calling my name. A steady voice in the distance, as if she’s been waiting for me to catch up. I turn toward the sound. The pool widens. The edges of the creek fade. The city is gone. 

In its place: open ground stretching in every direction, dotted with shrubbery, the air carrying the smell of dust before rain. Coyotes move through the grass, silent and sure-footed. The scarred one stands nearest to me, her gaze level, unblinking. The ground feels firm beneath my feet, though I don’t remember leaving the water. The light shifts, and for an instant I see both landscapes at once—the gully with its rust-colored walls and this open plain, layered over each other like two photographs held up to the sun. Then the arroyo is gone. 

The scarred coyote turns and walks. I follow, the rhythm of her steps steady, familiar. Somewhere ahead, the horizon shimmers, and I think I can see the outline of the mountains, blue against the pale sky. I don’t look back. 

***

Justin Taroli is a writer based in New York. He is the author of two books, one novel and one short–story collection. His work has appeared in publications including fugue, Philadelphia Stories, and Door is a Jar. He is currently seeking representation. You can find him at a movie theater or bookstore in NYC. 

In this sparkling, spare sci-fi by Zoe Ballering, the descendants of Earth’s elite trawl space for “the barest hint of life,” aching for what, and who, they left behind. Most of all, it’s the “unbridgeable chasm of difference” that they crave.

TMR’s online-only prose anthology, BLAST features prose too vibrant to be confined between the covers of a print journal.

***

The Dogs

In the beginning, everything died.

Songbirds, those perfect pockets of merry life, and parrots that spoke to us with our own voices; brawny, wise-eyed rhinos and gray whales with their bellies full of plastic bags. Seahorses dancing with their mates and the long-lashed camels that our ancestors once entered into beauty contests, and the squirrels on the branches sprinting and freezing and sprinting and freezing again. Our stories tell us that squirrels were nothing special, but we still miss them. Sometimes, as our children zoom around our tiny quarters, we scold them with the tenderest of words: “Settle down, little squirrels, settle down.”

It feels cliché even to recite the reasons why—these litanies we know so well. Microplastics, warming oceans, crazy weather. Forever chemicals slopped across our fields. All the calves came stillborn that year, the first year of the New Plague. It was like the biblical stories, but sadder and longer, for there was no Promised Land, there was only our planet, which was dying.

That which had integrity grew thin. Eggshells, spiderwebs, chitin, bone.

And the rivers ran red with toxic algae.

And the trees released their leaves in a great denuding.

And during all that time, cancer bloomed within us, so that we—the avatars of uncontrolled growth—were defeated by the principle that had enabled our dominion.

Furiously, we worked to save ourselves. We fled the cities, then the Earth. Only the best among us survived, or the richest. Sheikhs and oncologists. Playboys and botanists. Oligarchs and engineers. We come from a collection of kings and scientists and now we travel the universe searching for the barest hint of life.

Every so often, one of us passes through the solar system and reports back to the rest of the fleet. New Venus is what we call our planet, a name we use to distinguish between the world of our stories and the hot beige ball it has become.

“There is still nothing here,” say those distant, tinny voices. “We are alone—there is only ourselves and the dogs.”

***

In the beginning, we saved them.

Perhaps it was some lithium magnate who loved his Afghan hound more than he loved his girlfriend, or some hermit chemist who brought his mutt because he had no family. In the rush to leave, our record-keeping suffered. But however it happened, a single canine set off a chain of similar requests, and our fleet set out with 9,978 humans and a complement of dogs.

At first, we had no intention of leaving the solar system or even of leaving New Venus. We only wanted a clean, quiet place to fix ourselves. And we watched, despairing, as the network of lights, like a great beaded blanket draped across the land, went dark in ragged patches. Perhaps we would have stayed and devoted ourselves to bringing back life, but then the New Venutians tried to knock us from the sky. We had taken most of the useful space tech, but they still found a way to make their shoddy, deadly missiles. When our first ship fell, we understood their message: “If we have to die, why should you get to live?”

We wanted to call down and defend ourselves. We wanted to say that the answer was contained within the question. Die, live, life, life. We left to save ourselves, yes—we were frightened, unyielding, entitled—but we also left to save the evidence of life.

After that, we drifted through the solar system, though we gave New Venus a wide berth. Our scientists worked diligently in their labs, finding ways to arrest the spread of cancer and rinse the forever chemicals from our bodies and the bodies of our dogs. We perfected our skills as a spacefaring people: we improved our air recyclers and mined asteroids and tweaked our plants to make them hardier in space.

It was the dukes and the moguls and the socialites who were charged with managing our vessels, usually with a specialist or two to oversee their work. It was they who ran the galleys and purged the air recyclers and walked in space, encased in stiff white suits. At first they were resentful and inept, but over hundreds of years they became their own expert caste. Those hierarchies died out long ago—we no longer distinguish between scientists with their abstruse knowledge and aristocrats with their useful skills—but language remains. Still, when we taste something we do not like, we spit it out and say, “Who made this, the Queen of Spain?”

***

In the beginning, we stayed close.

When we finally returned to New Venus, we found a planet that was fully dead. New Venus, like Old Venus, was covered in a scrim of sulfur clouds. Even the amoebas had been burned away. Then we understood that there was nothing left to hold us to the solar system.

We drifted farther out. We still visited planets to collect the materials we needed, but mostly we adapted to space. We built vast and extravagant space stations and improved our ships. And the dogs walked beside us, always.

Our dogs are supermutts—an admixture of all the dogs from that first generation—but the hounds are the breed we have cultivated most. In space we have no rats to kill, nothing to herd, nothing to fetch. It is dogs’ noses that we need. They have grown longer and leaner, with deer-like legs and that exquisite S-shaped curve that greyhounds had. Our dogs are a rich golden brown we still call honey, and they have velvet ears that drag across the floor when they are following a scent.

Mostly we keep them because they please us. But they still work. They sniff out low blood sugar and the first signs of cancer. They identify bacteria in the air vents and fungus in the hydroponics bay, and when the nutrients in the soil aren’t exactly right for growing plants, they return to the red mat rather than the green one. It is the dogs that know, with utter certainty, when it is time to change the air recyclers. Our tech can do the same, but the dogs are faster and more accurate and we love how they sit and thump their tails when we tell them they’ve done a good job.

We are the eyes and they are the noses of the universe. But we miss the other creatures. Our stories tell us about bats that could hear the shape of the world and catfish whose bodies were covered in tastebuds and the star-nosed mole with a nose five times more sensitive than a human hand. And we miss the senses beyond our simple five—like the sea turtles that used the Earth’s magnetic field to navigate the oceans and the pit vipers that perceived the body heat of their prey.

If we didn’t have the photos and the samples and the proof from the scientists on Earth, our stories would seem like fables. Space, after all, is mostly space. It was an Earthman named johnmilton who named it so, so very long ago. Even then, trapped on that lush and living world, he understood that our universe was mostly made of emptiness.

How vast it is out here. How narrow it seems, now that we and the dogs are the only creatures able to perceive it.

***

In the beginning, we had company.

Lice, pinworms, bedbugs, fleas—all those passengers that rode upon our bodies. But they were unraveling too. Their egg sacs deflated; their damaged DNA unzipped itself. And those that survived—the superlice, the mutant fleas—could still not survive our attention.

Once we had stabilized ourselves, we exterminated them. It is a great regret among our people. But how do you explain to a scion or a surgeon or an astrophysicist, still in the early days of exploration, that their ancestors will miss the pests and parasites—fleas coursing across dog flesh and the brown speckle of bedbugs and the aphids and spider mites and fungus gnats that terrorized our crops.

We shouldn’t have killed the parasites, no. And pondering that error, we find others. Sometimes, when we think about the first generation that set out from New Venus, we wonder if we were wrong to bring the dogs. We could have brought more humans in their stead, but does it really matter? If twelve billion humans had to die, is sixty extra humans any sadder?

We wish we’d had more time to prepare. We wish we’d answered the New Venutians before we left that squandered world. We wish we’d assembled a menagerie, a Zooship full of life, a Noah’s Ark. And we the arks, when we noticed our affliction, purged ourselves. We wish we hadn’t done that. We wish we could go back. We wish we could go forward and find the evidence of life.

But the dogs, oh, the dogs! We can’t regret bringing them, not really. We love our children too, but each day they grow more legible to us, more human. Dogs never do. We’ve grown to understand them very well, and yet a gap remains—that unbridgeable chasm of difference that we crave.

We love to watch them scratch at the thin carpet in our quarters and turn in circles before they settle down to sleep. We love how delicately they smell our breath, their yips and bugles of affection, how they course across the cargo bay during Canine Hours with the pure joy of moving. We love how they fetch a ball with greater fervor than we devote to anything. We love their pink bubblegum tongues lolling from their mouths and how at any moment they might drop to the floor and assiduously lick their own crotches. We love how they cock their heads in confusion. Sometimes, when faced with a cosmic phenomenon that we don’t understand, we replicate their actions, standing on the bridge with cocked heads and questioning eyes, as if to say, “What newness is this, in this universe we thought we knew?”

***

In the beginning, we despaired.

We drifted even farther. We made our star maps. We sent back our reports.

We still perform our routine bioscans, which, after all these years, have come to seem like rituals. We still laugh and flirt and doodle and inspect our faces in the mirror. We still name our dogs after animals: Bear and Moose and Bee and Finch and Ferret and Lapwing and Lizard and Snail and Swan. If we close our eyes during Canine Hours and listen to the owners calling to their dogs, it really does sound like we built the ark we wanted.

We have wandered for ten thousand years. But what are years, even, when we have no Earth? “No life detected,” say the ritual bioscans. If we wait long enough, perhaps life will invent itself again. We are a melancholy people, it is true. But when we are playing tug-of-war with our dogs, when they dangle from our hands by a braid of rope, their eyes locked on ours with absolute devotion and resolve—well—then it is hard to be too sad. It is dogs that let us love this black expanse, this endless space.

But there is one more thing.

Sometimes, we wake to hear our dogs scratching at the door. Then we roll from our beds and take them out. Usually, our dogs are so obedient. They heel, they wait, they sit, they do not bark. But sometimes, very late at night, they disobey. They lope ahead of us as we chase them through the labyrinth of the corridors. They pass the dog-waste area and they keep running. It feels like a dream to follow them through that invented night. The lights are dim. The walls are gray. The air smells stale and familiar.

Each time, they lead us to the stardeck. They sit at its center. We stand at the edge where we belong. Then they lift their muzzles to the hard white stars and howl in overlapping spikes of harmony, deep and piteous and long. Our necks prickle at the first notes. So wild they sound, and so bewildered, crying their question to the void: “Where are the others? Where are the others in the universe?”

***

Photo by Michelle O’Shea

Zoe Ballering is the author of the story collection There Is Only Us (University of North Texas Press), which won the 2022 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction. Her stories have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, Hobart, and Story Magazine. Zoe is a 2025 Oregon Literary Fellow. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

Darryl J. Benjamin’s “The Art of Falling Water” is a short story about a man who applies for a challenging new job to support his daughter’s future. Learning the traditional Moroccan tea-pouring service at the historic Dar Maghreb in Los Angeles turns out to be more challenging than anything he’s faced in his aerospace engineering career.

TMR’s online-only prose anthology, BLAST features prose too vibrant to be confined between the covers of a print journal.

* * *

The Art of Falling Water

Omar Farid discovered the position at Dar Maghreb the way desperate men discover most things—by accident, late at night, while the rest of the world slept. The restaurant’s website showed candlelit tables draped in jewel-toned fabrics, geometric lanterns casting amber patterns across white walls, and a promise: “Servers earn competitive wages plus gratuities averaging $400 per night.” 

He’d been an aerospace engineer for twenty years. Now he was forty-five, unemployed for eight months, and his daughter Leila’s college fund had evaporated like morning dew. She started at UCLA in six weeks. The math was simple and devastating. 

* * * 

That night, he made ramen at 11 p.m. while Leila hunched over her laptop at the kitchen table, toggling between UCLA housing forums and Reddit threads about Westwood parking. 

“So apparently,” she said, not looking up, “parking’s basically impossible near campus. Like, people literally camp overnight for permits.” 

Omar stirred the pot, watching steam rise. “We’ll figure it out.” 

“There’s this off-campus lot that’s cheaper, but you have to walk through this sketchy underpass—” She caught herself. “Not that I need a car. The dorms are fine. I could bike.” 

“You’re not biking at night in LA,” he said, more sharply than he meant. 

She glanced at him then, and he busied himself with the noodles, hoping she couldn’t see the way his hand trembled against the pot handle. His phone sat face-down on the counter, hiding the bank’s automated message: Second mortgage payment 67 days past due. Foreclosure notice: 23 days. 

“Dad.” Her voice softened. “It’s gonna be okay. I could defer a year, work, save—” 

“No.” He divided the ramen between two bowls, concentrating on keeping his hands steady. “You’re going. You got into UCLA. That doesn’t just happen.” 

She came around the table and squeezed his arm, and he felt how much steadier she’d become this year, how easily she could see through him. “Too much coffee today?” she asked, looking at his shaking hand. 

“Yeah,” he lied. “Too much coffee.” 

After she went to bed, he sat in the dark living room of their Glendale bungalow—the one with the cracked driveway and the lemon tree his wife had planted before the cancer—and opened his laptop again. The Dar Maghreb posting glowed in the blue light. Immediate hire for experienced servers. He wasn’t experienced. But twenty-three days was a deadline he understood. 

* * * 

At nine the next morning, he stood outside Dar Maghreb’s carved wooden door on a side street near Little Armenia, rehearsing his pitch. The door itself was a work of art—geometric patterns in dark cedar, the kind of door that belonged in a medina, not a Los Angeles strip mall wedged between a tax preparer and a wholesale rug dealer. I’m a quick learner. Excellent with details. Twenty years managing complex systems. He left out the part about his hands shaking every time he thought about the mortgage. 

The woman who answered his knock was perhaps sixty, elegant in a charcoal suit, her silver hair pulled into a severe bun. She looked him up and down with eyes that missed nothing. 

“Madame Zara?” he ventured. 

“You’re here about the server position.” Not a question. She stepped aside. “Come.” 

The dining room was even more beautiful in daylight—all those lanterns dark now, waiting. Silk cushions in burgundy and saffron lined low banquettes. The walls held framed photographs: black-and-white images of Casablanca’s port, a Jewish quarter in Fez, what looked like Zara herself as a young woman standing before a different restaurant in another lifetime. Madame Zara led him past empty tables to the kitchen, where copper pots hung from ceiling hooks and the air smelled of cumin and preserved lemons. A young woman in a headscarf was prepping vegetables, singing softly in Darija. 

“You have restaurant experience?” Zara asked. 

“No, but I—” 

“You’re Omar Farid. Aerospace engineer. Worked on satellite guidance systems for Northrop Grumman.” She said this while examining a bunch of fresh mint, not looking at him. “You think precision transfers across industries.” 

He blinked. “How did you—” 

“I google everyone who applies. I also see you’re a widower. One daughter. House in Glendale with a second mortgage.” Now she looked at him, and her expression wasn’t unkind, just unbearably direct. “I don’t hire people who need jobs, Mr. Farid. I hire people who want this job. Do you know the difference?” 

Omar’s throat tightened. “No, madame.” 

“Good. Honesty is better than cleverness.” She set down the mint. “There is one requirement. In Morocco, tea service is an art form. My servers must master l’atai—pouring mint tea from shoulder height into a glass on the floor. You will stand. The glass will be at your feet. You will pour without spilling a single drop.” 

She demonstrated with an empty teapot, her arm extending in a graceful arc, miming the motion. “You have one week to learn. On the seventh day, you will perform for me and for the Board of Health inspector who has concerns about my hiring practices.” Her jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. “Concerns about who I hire and how I treat my staff. They think I exploit immigrants. They don’t understand that some of us are just trying to keep a piece of home alive in this city.” 

“One week?” 

“Is that a problem?” 

Omar thought about Leila. About the letter from the bank. About the tremor. 

“No problem,” he said. 

Madame Zara smiled slightly. “We’ll see. Come back at three p.m. We practice before dinner service.” 

* * * 

That afternoon, he met the other applicant. 

Jules was twenty-four, beautiful in that careless way young people are, with perfect stubble and expensive sneakers that probably cost what Omar’s mortgage payment used to be. He’d graduated from the Culinary Institute and spent a summer backpacking through Morocco. “Picked up the tea thing in Fez,” he said, loud enough for everyone to hear. “It’s all about wrist angle and confidence.” 

The senior server, a man in his sixties named Hassan, distributed the equipment: heavy brass teapots with curved spouts, small glasses with gold filigree, and prayer rugs to mark where they’d stand. Hassan moved with deliberate care, and Omar noticed how he used his forearms more than his hands when lifting anything heavy. 

“The glass goes here,” Hassan said, placing it on the floor at Omar’s feet. “You pour from here.” He lifted Omar’s arm to shoulder height. “The distance creates the foam. Moroccans call it the crown. No crown, no respect. Spilled tea, no job.” 

Omar lifted the teapot. It was heavier than he expected—maybe four pounds of brass, the weight distributed wrong, already throwing off his calculations. Water sloshed. He aimed carefully, compensated for arc and distance, calculated trajectory and velocity, began to pour— 

The stream hit the rim, splashed everywhere, and the glass tipped over. 

Behind him, Jules executed a perfect pour on his first try. The sound of water hitting glass was like music. 

“Show-off,” Omar muttered. 

“Muscle memory,” Jules said, grinning. 

* * * 

Day two was worse. Omar broke a glass. Day three, he drenched his shoes so thoroughly that he left wet footprints across the kitchen floor. Hassan watched these disasters with an unreadable expression, occasionally offering cryptic advice: “Don’t fight the water” or “The pot is not your enemy.” 

But it was the cryptic advice that haunted Omar that night, lying awake in his too-quiet house. Don’t fight the water. In his old life, he’d spent twenty years fighting everything—friction coefficients, orbital decay, the inexorable mathematics of entropy. He’d fought and calculated and solved, and he’d been brilliant at it. 

Then cancer came, and no equation could save his wife. 

Now he couldn’t even pour water in a straight line. 

Day four: another soaking. Day five: he knocked the glass over before he even started pouring. That afternoon, Jules leaned against the prep counter and said, loud enough for everyone to hear: “Maybe engineering’s just about computers doing the thinking for you. This requires actual skill.” 

Hassan, who’d been silent until then, looked up from the mint he was sorting. 

“Jules.” Just the one word but spoken with enough weight that the younger man went quiet. “Come here.” 

Jules approached warily. Hassan held out his hands, palms up. 

“You see these?” 

The hands were gnarled, knuckles swollen, fingers bent at odd angles. Arthritis, Omar realized. Severe arthritis in a man whose livelihood depended on those hands. 

“Thirty years I’ve been pouring tea,” Hassan said. “Started when I was younger than you. Now some mornings I can barely hold the pot.” He closed his hands into loose fists, wincing. “But I’m still here. You know why?” 

Jules said nothing. 

“Because this work—this real, authentic Moroccan restaurant—it’s what pays for my daughter’s nursing school. It’s what keeps food on my table and a roof over my family’s head.” Hassan’s voice was calm, almost gentle, but his eyes were hard. “So when you talk about ‘actual skill,’ maybe consider that some of us would give anything to have young, healthy hands. Even if they belonged to a guidance systems engineer.” 

Jules looked down. Actually looked down. “I didn’t mean—” 

“I know what you meant.” Hassan turned to Omar. “You’re too tense. Like you’re still calculating orbital velocities. Water doesn’t need equations. It just needs permission to fall.” 

* * * 

That night, after everyone had left, Omar stayed late to practice. Hassan stayed too, though Omar hadn’t asked him to. The old man sat on a stool near the wall, hands cradled in his lap, and watched without comment as Omar missed. And missed. And missed again. 

Finally, around midnight, Hassan stood. 

“You know what your problem is?” he said. “You’re still thinking like an engineer. You want control. But l’atai isn’t about control. It’s about trust.” 

“I don’t understand.” 

“In Morocco, tea service is about community. About hospitality. About showing respect.” Hassan picked up a teapot—carefully, Omar noticed, favoring his right hand. “When I pour, I’m not pouring for myself. I’m pouring for my guests. For their comfort, their dignity. You? You’re pouring for some abstract idea of success. Of not failing.” 

“I’m pouring for Leila,” Omar said quietly. 

“Are you?” Hassan studied him. “Or are you pouring because you’re terrified of disappointing her?” 

Omar’s hands tightened around the pot handle. 

Hassan continued, his voice taking on an edge that Omar hadn’t heard before—not anger exactly, but something raw and honest. “You think you’re special because you’re desperate? Jules dropped sixty thousand on culinary school and can’t make rent. Amara left her family in Rabat and sleeps in a studio apartment with three other women so she can send money home. I work here with hands that feel like broken glass because if I stop, I starve.” 

He gestured at the restaurant around them. 

“This place—this ‘authentic Moroccan experience’—it’s beautiful, yes. But it’s also survival. Madame Zara isn’t preserving culture out of nostalgia. She’s preserving it because she has no other choice. None of us do.” Hassan’s voice softened. “So don’t stand there feeling sorry for yourself, calculating angles like this is some kind of physics problem. Just pour the damn tea.” 

* * * 

On day six, something shifted. Not dramatically—there was no sudden revelation, no moment of perfect clarity. Omar just got marginally less terrible. 

He poured a glass that only splashed a little. Then he poured one that created a decent crown. Then—impossibly—he poured three in a row that would have satisfied Hassan. 

Jules noticed. His jaw tightened, and that easy confidence flickered. “Guidance systems guy finally getting it. Only took him five days to do what I did in five minutes.” 

But that evening, as they were packing up, Omar heard Jules in the back hallway, phone pressed to his ear: “I know the payment’s late, Mom. I’m working on it—no, not like last time, this is a real job . . . . Tell Dad I don’t need his lecture about being twenty-four and still asking for money. Tell him—” 

He saw Omar and hung up abruptly, the smooth confidence sliding back into place like a mask. But Omar had heard it: the fear underneath. The shame. 

Later that night, Omar lay awake thinking about Jules. About Hassan’s arthritic hands. About Amara sleeping in a crowded apartment, about Madame Zara looking at photographs of another lifetime. About how this whole beautiful restaurant was built on people with no safety net, no backup plan, no choice but to keep pouring. 

The paralegal who washed dishes. The line cook with two jobs. The busboy putting himself through community college. All of them balancing on the knife’s edge between making it and not making it, between dignity and desperation. 

Omar had spent eight months feeling uniquely cursed. Now he saw the bitter truth: his desperation was the least remarkable thing about him. 

* * * 

Day seven. Test day. 

Rain hammered the restaurant’s windows—the same kind of cold February rain that made Los Angeles drivers forget how roads worked, that flooded the streets in Glendale because nobody built proper drainage in a desert. 

Madame Zara had arranged the test in the dining room. The Board of Health inspector—a severe woman with a clipboard and reading glasses on a chain—sat at a front table. The entire kitchen staff lined the walls. Amara whispered encouragement in Arabic. Hassan stood near the back, his face carefully neutral, his hands hidden in his pockets. 

Jules stretched his wrists like an athlete. 

“Mr. Jules will demonstrate first,” Madame Zara announced. 

Jules stepped onto his prayer rug, lifted the pot, and poured. Perfect arc. Perfect crown. The inspector made a note. Jules bowed slightly, shooting Omar a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. 

“Mr. Farid.” 

Omar’s turn. He positioned himself over the glass, feeling forty eyes on his back. The teapot felt like it weighed fifty pounds. His hands began their familiar tremor. Through the window, rain turned the street into a river of gray light. 

Don’t look at the glass. Look at your daughter. 

He closed his eyes for just a moment. Saw Leila at eighteen, brilliant and terrified, standing in her dorm room at UCLA—wherever that would be, whatever it would cost. Saw the future he was fighting for—not just college, but the message it sent: Your father doesn’t give up. Your father finds a way. Even when his hands shake. Even when the math says it’s impossible. Even when everyone’s watching him fail. 

When he opened his eyes, he looked at the glass on the floor and saw her face reflected in its curved surface. 

His hands stilled. 

The pour was instinct—his arm extending, the pot tilting, water becoming tea, becoming foam, that perfect crown rising in the glass like a blessing. The sound it made was like rain on copper, like his daughter’s laugh, like every good thing he’d almost lost. 

Not a drop spilled. 

The dining room was silent. 

Then the Board of Health inspector stood and clapped, just once. “That is what I needed to see.” 

Madame Zara nodded and something eased in her face—relief, maybe, or vindication. “Welcome to Dar Maghreb, gentlemen.” 

* * * 

Omar’s first shift was Sunday night. 

He wore the traditional server’s vest, dark blue with gold embroidery. His section included a table of four elderly Moroccan women who’d made reservations weeks in advance, who spoke in rapid Darija and laughed at private jokes and adjusted their headscarves with hands that showed decades of work. 

When the time came for tea service, he felt that familiar flutter of nerves. Then he remembered: You’re not pouring for yourself. 

He positioned the glass on the floor beside their table, lifted the pot to shoulder height, and let the tea fall. 

Perfect arc. Perfect crown. 

One of the women—she must have been eighty—pressed her hand to her heart. “Ya Allah,” she whispered. “Just like my father used to do in Marrakech. I haven’t seen that done properly in forty years.” 

She insisted on tipping him an extra hundred dollars, folding the bills into his palm with shaking hands. “For keeping the tradition alive,” she said. “For remembering.” 

Across the dining room, Hassan caught Omar’s eye and gave the smallest nod of approval. 

* * * 

Three weeks later, Omar found himself in the kitchen after closing, teaching a new applicant—a nervous woman in her fifties who’d been a paralegal until the firm downsized. 

“The glass goes here,” he said gently, placing it at her feet. “You pour from here.” He lifted her arm to shoulder height. “The distance creates the foam. No crown, no respect.” 

Her first attempt missed by a foot. The second shattered the glass. 

“It’s okay,” Omar said. “I broke three on my first day.” 

“How did you learn?” she asked. 

Omar thought about Hassan’s arthritic hands—hands that still moved through the dining room each night, pouring shorter distances, relying on Amara’s strategic positioning, holding on for however long his body would let him. About Jules, who’d started leaving his expensive sneakers in his locker and wearing a scuffed pair similar to Omar’s, who’d stopped making jokes the day his first paycheck went straight to rent. About Leila’s acceptance letter to UCLA, now framed on his bedroom wall, the thing he looked at every morning while his coffee brewed and his hands found their daily steadiness. 

“Someone taught me that the water knows where it wants to go,” he said. “Your job is just to agree with it. And to remember who you’re pouring for.” 

She tried again. Missed again. But something in her posture shifted—a small becoming, barely visible. 

Omar glanced toward the hooks where Hassan’s vest still hung, though the old man had finally scheduled his surgery for next month. They’d thrown him a party last week—the kind where everyone pretended it was a celebration and nobody mentioned that he might not come back, that his hands might never hold a tray again, that this restaurant and these people were all he had left of a country he hadn’t seen in forty years. 

Outside, rain fell on the city, same as always. Inside, the prep cooks were singing in Darija while they broke down the line. The copper pots gleamed on their hooks. Madame Zara was in her office, probably looking at photographs of another restaurant in another lifetime, probably wondering if keeping a piece of home alive was the same as going home. 

The paralegal tried again. This time the water fell in a clean line, missed the glass by only an inch. 

“Better,” Omar said. 

His hands were steady now. Not because the fear was gone. Because he poured anyway. 

“Let’s try it again,” he said. 

* * * 

Darryl J. Benjamin lives in Port St. Lucie, Florida. He is the author of Farm to Table: The Essential Guide to Sustainable Food Systems (Chelsea Green, 2016) and has spent years teaching writing and sustainable food systems at the college level. He holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and a BA from McGill University. His work explores the friction between natural ecosystems and the domestic ones we struggle—and usually fail—to manage with grace. He is currently revising his first coauthored novel, Seedland.

“Thanksgiving, 2001” is a black comedy set in a “pentagram” of punk houses in Olympia, Washington, in the months after 9/11. Never flinching, Liina Koivula’s short story explores queer community, human connection, and the decision to define oneself on one’s own terms.

TMR’s online-only prose anthology, BLAST features prose too vibrant to be confined between the covers of a print journal.

***

Thanksgiving, 2001

The first time I encountered the criminal, the week of Halloween, he counted my cash by the dashboard glow. It’s in the trunk, he said. Half my body was out of his car when he hit the gas and took off, knocking me into the wet vegetation in front of our house. I could afford to sell weed to my friends without pinching. I could not afford to lose three times my rent. My housemates, who’d pitched in, offered cautiously suspended grins as I limped into the living room. It’s gone, I said.  

The second time I encountered the criminal, late at night on Thanksgiving, I was suffering from brutal period cramps. A squeamish ache radiated from the spasm between my hips up to my shoulders and down to my knees. I’d brewed tea from a tablespoon of green matter I’d found in our communal kitchen, labeled with a female symbol in Sharpie on gaffer’s tape. It didn’t taste like anything, didn’t do anything.  

With my ex, Maren, I’d felt smothered and craved a night smoking weed alone, but this was pathetic. Rolling around in bed, curling into a ball, stretching out facedown, grinding my fists beneath my ovaries. Maren still had my vibrator, the only proven remedy for period pain. Her new girlfriend was probably using it, while I resorted to humping my hand. All I wanted was a little sleep before my opening shift as manager of a fast-food restaurant, prodding half-dead teenagers and hungover lifers to fuel the Black Friday stampede.  

I had to get up for work in four hours. Insomnolent, I got stoned in the bath.  

The bathroom door rattled in its frame when the front door opened. I hollered, I’m in here, and pulled the mildewed shower curtain closed. Jared could sit on the toilet lid and hit my bong and tell me how his family dissed his butternut squash and brown rice casserole, cut him off after two glasses of wine. But the footsteps across the creaky floor did not belong to Jared, or any of our housemates.  

Lydia, I said to myself, you fucking dumbass.  

The bathroom lock had never worked, just spun around and around. Olympia’s worst punk houses, including ours, were owned by a goth chiropractor who wore a funny hat. His rentals were plotted in a pentagram and painted black to drive down surrounding property values. We called our house the Solar Plexus house, because everyone except me was in a band called Solar Plexus. Those who weren’t with relatives were at a vegan potluck at my ex-girlfriend’s place. Friendsgiving for the so-called orphans, families too homophobic or too far away.  

I stayed motionless in the water for as long as I could. Finally peeked around the curtain. The criminal stood in the middle of my bathroom wearing a leather jacket and a cagey look, like he was afraid of being tricked. I asked him what the hell he was doing here.  

The criminal said, Lydia, right? He was sorry for robbing me. He was getting out of that life. One hundred percent. In fact, he had enlisted, and he was shipping out to boot camp, then off to the Middle East. In fact, he wondered if I could help him with something.  

What. 

He needed to get laid.  

I’m the first girl you thought of? I was scarcely flattered. I’m sorry man, but I’m gay. Like, really gay. He could see my noncommittal shaggy bowl cut, but not my nipple rings, my happy trail, my pubes and leg hair waving like seaweed. I drew my thighs to my pinched uterus. He couldn’t see the water turning pink. And I’m on my period. Dirty jokes about eatin’ spaghetti aside, I figured that would be a deal breaker.  

The criminal removed a box cutter from his pocket. He clicked the blade to a satisfying quarter of an inch. The real deal. Not some pansy-slap-ass, neon-colored piece from Office Max. A Stanley knife encased in heavy metal. 

Thanksgiving, 2001: we were ten weeks post-9/11. We had been astonished that the terrorists did it with a box cutter. A box cutter! Why didn’t the pilot just slap it out of their goddamn hands? That’s what any, I don’t know, red-blooded American would do. 

I did not necessarily consider myself a red-blooded American (evidence between my legs notwithstanding), but I would’ve tried to slap it out of his hands, if I wasn’t in such a compromised position. That would be rape, I told the criminal. Scarier when I said it out loud. I tried to remember my self-defense moves from the Home Alive workshop. I couldn’t. All I could do was talk. You don’t want to rape me, I said. You’re a criminal, not a rapist.  

He closed his eyes and exhaled loudly. You could suck my dick? 

I had never sucked a dick, and I wasn’t about to start now. Let’s just get stoned, I said to the criminal, and packed the bowl generously.  

When I was a kid, an older girl in our neighborhood was home alone for the weekend when boys from her high school showed up drunk. Maybe on drugs. They peed and vomited on her furniture, my mom told me as a warning, or because she had no one else to gossip with. One of them, quote, unquote, showed the girl his penis. The boys said she had thrown a party, invited them over, said she had been drinking, too. My mom shrugged, on the girl’s side but unwilling to defend her outright. I’d avoided boys and men most of my life to avoid this outcome.  

Now that three of my four housemates were dudes, I was always asking them to repeat themselves, unaccustomed to paying attention to deeper voices. We ran a party house, so my life wasn’t entirely free of misdirected urine or puke. But ours was a queer, feminist, punk party house. The offender might leave a sorry-I-got-too-fucked-up note on our porch with a nosegay of dandelions.  

The criminal took a bong rip. Aren’t you cold? he asked.  

I told him to imagine what it cost to heat this place, a hundred years old and drafty. He scratched layers of paint off the wall, revealing a farm scene on the wallpaper underneath. If the house had been taken care of, he said, it could be on the historic register. 

Talk to my slumlord.  

He handed me my towel, eyes averted. I asked him for a tampon from the bottom drawer, a little smug. Maybe he’d never touched a tampon before. Maybe he was a virgin. Once I’d secured both and stepped out of the tub, he pressed the box cutter below my ear, cool, with the blade retracted.  

Let me get dressed, man. You’re right, it’s cold. 

I’m going to watch, he said. He blocked my bedroom doorway, blade extended, and was disappointed. As a teenage dyke in locker rooms, I’d learned to dress without exposure. 

I inventoried everything in the house that could be used as a weapon: the mic stand, a heavy flowerpot filled with dirt, the cast-iron skillet slimy with burnt food, rusting in the sink.  

The criminal’s box cutter warmed against my jugular. Adrenaline finally overrode my cramps, and I was momentarily elated, free. Then I remembered that I had to get up for work in three and a half hours. Not enough sleep to get through my shift on the rag. If he did me some real harm, I wouldn’t have to go. But my team would be screwed, huddled in the pissing rain, waiting for me to unlock the store. And it’s not like I had health insurance.  

The criminal backed off while advancing the blade. Lowered it in front of my face with performative menace. If I wasn’t going to fuck him, he said, and I wasn’t going to suck his dick, I was going to make him mac and cheese. The third and final use of a woman’s body.  

Unfortunately for both of us, the Solar Plexus house was vegan. Too fatigued to consider boiling pasta and making nutritional yeast sauce, I checked the fridge. A takeout container was labeled with Ivy’s name, but she called a house meeting every time she thought someone had picked the fake chicken out of her General Tso’s. Ivy would say, if I catch anyone sticking their filthy fingers in my food . . . 

It was Thanksgiving. All he really wanted was a meal. He was shipping off to Afghanistan to protect the American right to buy cheap crap, Black Friday ads star-spangled, every holiday now patriotic. I’d take him to Maren’s potluck. 

We looked up and down East Bay Drive. No people, no cars, no cops. I told the criminal to mind the rotten side of the third stair. The city lights across the water were filmy, Olympia’s Black Hills invisible in the frosty night. Chill found the damp tendrils of hair at my temples. I was so tired I felt prickly. If anyone asks, you’re my coworker.  

The criminal made a show of keeping his hand on the box cutter in his pocket.  

Out here in the Northwest, we’d nearly forgotten 9/11 already. The war the criminal had signed up for was far away, barely begun. I hadn’t even been to a protest yet. Expecting total societal collapse, all we got was old men ordering freedom fries.  

The night before the attacks, Jared and I had crashed in my bed, shit-faced. He and Pete were in an off phase of their on-again, off-again romance, but they still shared the attic bedroom with the cool slanted ceilings. I woke to Benny tapping on my door. Due to mold and toadstool issues in his basement lair, Benny had been sleeping on a camping bedroll behind the couch. (Did I once come in late and catch him and Jared swapping spit back there? Nope. Never happened.)  

Are you guys awake? They’re blowing up the Pentagon.  

Hell yeah. The chickens are coming home to roost. I joined Benny, Pete, and Ivy. We were shouting at the second tower’s collapse like a sports event when Maren showed up. 

Look out, it’s the women’s temperance league, Pete said. Ivy snorted. Benny set the bong out of view behind the arm of the couch, as if the room wasn’t filled with smoke.  

I met Maren on the porch. She was frantic, unable to get through to me, the line busy. We’d all been taking turns calling our parents, but Maren hadn’t crossed my mind. She couldn’t believe we were getting stoned at a time like this, 7:30 on a weekday morning, no less. Before I could remind her I’d ended things because she disapproved of my lifestyle, she kissed me, then complained I tasted like an ashtray, smelled like a brewery. 

Maren was a freshman and I was junior in college when we met at the Evergreen Women’s Center. Our modest age gap had seemed to widen over the months we were together. But everyone we knew slept with their exes. I sent Jared upstairs with a glass of water. Maren and I spent the day making out, dozing off, watching the towers collapse again, and again, and again.  

After that, it was really over between us.  

The criminal and I arrived at her painted-black house, another point in the pentagram, and found Maren on the couch with her new girlfriend, a high school senior named Patsy, who wore polyester plaid pants that were as hot as they were trying too hard. Patsy’s best friend, Hailey, one of my regular weed customers, hovered protectively.  

Past exhaustion and on the edge of delirium, I clutched my criminal’s arm. He squeezed the box cutter. I needed him to be my date, not my coworker. Hell, he could be both. When I partied with my jerk-off coworkers at the closing manager’s, the boys politely whizzed off her balcony, not on the furniture. They let me take drinks out of their hands and joints from between their fingers, smiling indulgently even though they knew I was a dyke. I thought I was hilarious. 

Oh my god, right, I said to my criminal. He played along, fake-snickering into my hair. I pretended to just then notice Maren and waved from across the room. She turned my way but wouldn’t look me in the eye. The girlfriend regarded me coolly, and her best friend gave me a nod, loyalties split. Hailey didn’t want to go back to buying pot from creepy guys. I escorted my criminal to the crusty potluck table, where I recognized Jared’s casserole. Jared himself wandered in, wasted.  

Let me introduce you to my coworker.  

My criminal nodded, feeding his face. Jared said, the casserole’s good, right? He nodded again. My family said it was too weird. Whatever. This is real food. Too spicy. Spicy my ass.  

While Jared monologued, I went to enlist Maren’s help in getting rid of this guy. I sat on the arm of the couch. Hey. Maren took two fingers and flicked at my thigh but missed. She hadn’t been avoiding my gaze. She couldn’t focus. Maren was drunk.  

Lydia, how the hell are you? she asked, magnanimous as can be.  

Um, I’m on my period. I have to get up for work in three hours.  

Do you want to taste my drink? Maren handed me a whiskey and Coke in a Mason jar. Generous on the whiskey. An unexpected development.  

Last summer, at my backyard birthday party, Maren was the only one who had refused to shotgun a beer. I took a gravity bong hit from the five-gallon bucket Pete had rigged in the mudroom, and Maren told me I didn’t need weed to make me happy. I told her duh. She wanted me to stop drinking. I’ve had like two beers, I said. Three, she said, plus that shot you thought I didn’t see.  

I wanted a girlfriend, not a hall monitor. Concurrent with Olympia’s summer music festival, I initiated the weeklong breakup process. Maren and I rotated between slam dancing at shows, negotiating, weeping, screaming, and having the best sex of our relationship. When she dropped me off for the last time, I kissed her by accident.  

Now, I downed the rest of her drink. I gazed into her watery eyes and asked if I could talk to her alone. Patsy and Hailey’s jaws literally dropped. Daisies, I said. It was our safe word, mine and Maren’s. Daisies. She squirmed out of Patsy’s grasp.  

In her room, Maren said, check this out, and brandished a black faux leather harness with a Band-Aid colored cock bouncing in the O-ring. Cyberskin, she said. Want to feel it?  

I told her no, it had been in her girlfriend’s pussy.  

You’re missing out, she said. Now I have a cock and I’m drunk. 

My bad. At the feminist sex shop in Seattle, she had lingered over the strap-ons, but we settled for nipple clamps and the classic Hitachi Magic Wand.  

Dude, I said, I’m trying to tell you something. 

Lydia, I miss you, she said.  

I missed Maren’s easy boyishness in ancient-goddess-like form, short with a big belly and big tits. I didn’t miss being treated like I was fragile and feminine, in need of protection. Early in our relationship, I said I was a lesbian in part to avoid that dynamic. She had given me a shit-eating grin and squealed. My big butch daddy! Let me schlob your knob! That was far worse. 

Maren, seriously. That guy who’s talking to Jared. 

Screw him, she said. I don’t like him touching you.  

You don’t have any say. I fumed. She was still trying to protect me. He’s my boyfriend. 

Your what? Maren tossed her strap-on aside, nostrils flaring theatrically. 

You were always trying to make me decide if I was butch or femme, I said. Straight women don’t have to choose. With him, I can just be myself. 

You get with a trans guy and suddenly you’re straight. What kind of cock does he have? 

Not cyberskin, I said, with exaggerated air quotes, gloating. The criminal was a bantam, but I hadn’t considered that with me, he’d be assumed trans.  

He’s full of it, Maren said. I’ll kick his ass. 

No, don’t, I said. He’s a criminal. I had no idea what uninhibited Maren was capable of.  

He’s an amateur, she said, and stalked off to start a fight.  

The criminal wouldn’t be able to grab the box cutter, caught off guard, holding a plate of vegan slop. Jared would do something. No, Jared wouldn’t do anything. He was trashed. I picked up the cordless phone. I could call 911.  

 Maren pushed past her housemates, through the kitchen and out the back door. I followed, Patsy and Hailey behind me. In the shadows under a perfect half-moon, Jared and the criminal shared a smoke. Maren jumped on his back and tackled him to the wet grass. We were all yelling. Maren yelled loudest. Jared, give me that. Bewildered, Jared handed her the cigarette. 

Maren had the criminal pinned facedown, one arm twisted behind his back, the other stuck beneath his body in a bad way. Did she learn that at the Home Alive workshop? She held the cherry in front of his eye. I’m going to put this out in your goddamn neck unless you . . . 

Hailey and I hauled her off. I slapped the cigarette out of her hand and shoved her at Patsy. The criminal was screaming in pain. You broke my arm, you fucking psycho. He reached for the box cutter with his uninjured hand, but it had fallen into the weeds. Maren didn’t know he’d half-assed threatened me. She thought he was my boyfriend, and she wanted to put a cigarette out in his neck.  

Hailey had the cordless phone. Should I, like, call an ambulance? 

The criminal shrieked. No! I don’t have health insurance. 

Maren’s housemates took her inside, struggling. Jared gave me a wild, helpless look. Was I the least fucked up person here? There was no way I was taking this piece of shit to the emergency room. I had to get up for work in two and a half hours.  

Hailey brushed lint off an ibuprofen from her pocket. I’ll drive you, man, she said. I haven’t been drinking. I know I shouldn’t have let a high schooler take off with an attempted rapist, but he was unarmed and incapacitated. And Hailey had completed the Home Alive training. 

The criminal called a few days later to ask if I was still selling weed. Post surgery, with a cast on his arm, he couldn’t start boot camp for another six months. Yeah, come by.  

I opened the door with his box cutter in my hand, blade clicked to the full half inch.  

Can we start over? he asked, weary.  

Do you have my money?  

I mean, I have forty bucks . . . 

I can get you a job in the drive-through where I work. You can do that one-handed. Otherwise, get off my porch.  

He fit right in with my jerk-off coworkers.  

In the spring, the criminal left for basic training, but he was back as soon as it ended, discharged over failure to adjust. He came over and I smoked him out. He was going to get back into dealing. The only way he could see to be his own man.  

I sell drugs so girls and queers don’t get ripped off by creeps like you, I said, contemplative. You’re in it for a different reason.  

The American fucking dream, he said, bent forward with his head in his hands. I laughed. He looked at me between his fingers and said, I’m serious.  

I passed him the pipe. What does the American fucking dream mean to you?  

You wouldn’t get it. You like to live this way. 

What way? 

He waved his hands at the walls of the Solar Plexus house. Your gay shit, he said. 

Dude. I took a toke. You think we don’t want security? A partner, a home, a family? No, seriously, Luke. What do you really think of me? What do you really think?  

Lydia, he said. He looked out the screen door, across the bay, and rubbed his eyes. I think, what the fuck. He giggled, high-pitched and nervous, like he was in trouble. As for me, I held that in my heart for every decision I made for the rest of my life. I made sure to choose the thing that would make the criminal go, what the fuck. He was right. I like to live this way. 

***

Liina Koivula’s fiction celebrates queer relationships and subcultures of the North American West. Their short stories have won an AWP Intro Award and been nominated for Best of the Net and a Pushcart Prize, and published in Feign, Puerto del Sol, Room Magazine, Spokane Campfire Stories, The Table Review, and elsewhere. Liina holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Eastern Washington University and writes the Substack Lifeguard of Love. Hailing from the Pacific Northwest, they are currently living and loving in Western Massachusetts. 

Jennifer Jang’s “Instant Ramen” is a story of trying to find where one belongs. When two Taiwanese expats meet in New York, they are drawn to each other even as they plan their separate ways.

BLAST, TMR’s online-only prose anthology, features prose too vibrant to be confined between the covers of a print journal.

***

Instant Ramen

A week ago, when we were alone and watching the sunset and pretending it wasn’t a romantic thing to do, Wei said, “We should do something before my flight. Go to Philly or something.”

I’d only known him for one month. Every community has its designated activity for meeting mutual friends: bar hopping, dinner parties, beer and barbecue on the beach. For Taiwanese people in New York City, it was karaoke in Flushing.

Wei had arrived late and proceeded to talk to every girl in the room.

“Nice necklace,” he said when it was my turn.

“My boyfriend brought it from Korea.”

“He’s Korean?”

“American,” I said, then added, “White.”

Wei was tall and slender. He had nice eyes—one might think he’d gotten eyelash extensions. But his eyebrows were a tangled smudge. I didn’t think he was my type at all.

Then his JJ Lin song came on, and he nailed every note. It was the way the blue lights flashed over his tilted head, like lightning, that helped me decide, upon learning that he was part of my neighborhood run club, that I could add running to my yoga routine.

He didn’t look as fresh when he showed up at the run club the following week. There were shadows under his eyes. His legs looked even skinnier in the full sun, and I felt reassured, almost smug, that his looks had been but a trick of the light.

I said, lightly, “Did you ask out anyone from karaoke?”

“I went on a date with Lily, but we had zero chemistry.”

I snorted. “You’d turn down Angelina Jolie herself.”

“I’m only dating Taiwanese right now,” he said, taking my comment literally. “I’d like to preserve the option of going home.”

Preserve the option. Like it was a pickle. I couldn’t stand people who came all the way to New York just to date within their own group—it was close-minded, even wasteful.

“I’ve made up half my mind to go back,” he continued. “I’ll miss the art scene, though—there are so many places I haven’t visited yet.”

Places we ended up visiting together—Wei was probably leaving anyway, and my boyfriend, Mark, wasn’t interested in artsy places, like MoMA, Mercer Labs, or the art galleries in Chelsea.

That, too, was what I told myself on the train to Philadelphia: it was just another artsy trip between friends. Not just another—the last; Wei had finally booked his flight. Plus, I’d gotten Mark’s blessing; he was going on a hiking trip with friends.

“Hey,” Wei said, sitting straight and showing me some Airbnb listing. “How about this room? It has a king-size bed—should be big enough.”

“Let’s just get two hotel rooms,” I said. My cheeks felt warm.

We stepped off the train and took an Uber to the Barnes Foundation. Stepped through the large atrium of the museum, where light fell through a length-long crack in the high ceiling, and into the inner galleries, where I followed Wei through the chain of small, intimate rooms, from painting to painting, always two paces behind him, watching his too-narrow back, the spirals in his ears, and the rapid thrust of his every step.

“That’s a Seurat,” he exclaimed. “Look at those pinpointed hues, like light scintillating off sand . . .”

Seurat always made me think of summer, or, how summer was supposed to be: clear skies, periwinkle shadows, and shimmering turquoise seas.

I met Mark in such a summer, on Manhattan Beach in Los Angeles. I had just left Taipei, that furnace of a city aggravated by churning air-conditioning exhausts; left the moody afternoon thunderstorms and the humidity that clung to my skin like tar; left behind two years of my youth—roiling summers, bipolar autumns, snowless winters, and rain-filled springs—that had blended into a dark mauve nightmare of mock examinations and cram school lectures. Years I’d staked on getting into my dream school, only to fail.

Mark had woken me from the nightmare and led me into a golden Hollywood movie. That smart Stanford kid whose snowbird parents called me sweetie. Mark was eager, quick to jump into things, a bit brash—not as meticulous as Wei, who planned every detail of our Philadelphia trip. Mark, who was never jealous—a fact I found odd, but oddly freeing.

After the museum, Wei suggested we head downtown.

“There’s no one on the streets,” he commented, and I knew he was comparing to Taiwan.

“That graffiti looks like President Tsai,” I chimed in.

He pointed at a traffic signal. “How can a flashing red hand possibly mean go?”

With Wei, who also grew up in Taipei, our conversations seemed like common reminiscence. And though I was reluctant to admit it, it was comforting how he understood the small things, the defaults I’d taken for granted.

Mark and I had fought so much when we first moved in together. I couldn’t understand his sarcasm, and he missed my passive-aggressive hints. There were Taiwanese holdovers like not letting him in bed without showering, and Asian ones like no shoes in the house and wanting to sit down for every meal; then there were immigrant peculiarities like calling my parents every week but sticking to lighthearted scripts—something he found dishonest. And though most things we’d ironed out over time, the wrinkles were still there, perceptible at second glance.

I slowed my pace, and, noticing me, Wei slowed too.

I stopped.

“I’m exhausted,” I said.

“I could carry your backpack,” he said, taking me literally again. It would never occur to Mark to offer such a thing—perhaps I might even be annoyed—but I gave my backpack to Wei and was surprised to feel relief.

“How are you still single?” I teased him.

“Spent my twenties buried in books instead of chasing girls.”

“I could set you up with my girlfriends in Taiwan.”

He said nothing. His slender fingers tugged at my backpack straps, loosening them. I felt a burst of fear and shame; I’d crossed the line, offended him. He’d hate me forever.

But he straightened, slung my backpack over his shoulder, and said, “Why not?”

“They’re all my age though,” I said.

“Five years is not a big difference.”

So he remembered how old I was—how young. Retrieved the fact so easily, as if it were a postcard he kept in his shirt pocket.

He continued, “As long as they want kids eventually.”

We started walking again. I walked next to him now, small skipping steps.

“How can you know for sure you want kids?”

“Just like how you know you don’t want them.”

“I don’t know that,” I said, and, feeling that we were talking about something other than children, changed the subject.

After dinner in Chinatown, we stepped into a grocery store to pick up breakfast for the following day and ended up with beer and instant ramen. Cup noodles brought me back to elementary school: school field trips and first nights spent outside of home. Some of my classmates had cried. Not me. I was thrilled to be away, to have freedom—however limited it had been. Mark—he probably didn’t have any memories related to instant ramen, did he? How many memories of his will I never be able to relate to?

Wei and I checked in at the hotel and agreed to reconvene in half an hour. I freshened up in my room, took out the chilled beer from the fridge, and, after debating for six minutes in front of the mirror, ditched the cardigan and marched over next door in not-too-short shorts and a sleeveless bra T-shirt. He was in a loose T-shirt and shorts and had put on the indie rock music that I loved; not that it mattered that we had the same taste in music. Not that it mattered at all.

We busied ourselves making cup ramen, running our hands over the crinkled plastic, searching for a hitch or a knot to pinch and peel away. I watched over the steeping cups as he dragged the metal desk over to the bed. We sat like that, at the edge of the king-size bed, bent over our steaming cups, slurping noodles and drinking beer.

I thought again of Taiwan, of the last time I had instant ramen there.

It was the night after the exams. The three of us, high school classmates, all aiming for medicine, celebrated—certain that all uncertainty was conquered—by bringing a bottle of whiskey to the beach, where we watched the sunset. Later, drunk-footed, we had sought refuge from the cold sea wind dredging our hair and found it under the familiar banner of a convenience store. We had gotten a large bowl each, had slurped all the noodles and were working on the soup when one of us said, with the certitude of a clairvoyant, “We’ll get full marks this time. I know it like I know the taste of MSG.”

“We’ve gone through hell and back, but it’ll be worth it.”

“We’ll be classmates, then colleagues,” I said. “We’ll be friends forever.”

I had said it as a promise, because back then, promises came easily. Words like definitely, always, and forever hung off my sentences like silver charms, except they were hollow, made from nickel, and tarnished easily with time.

I didn’t know then that my scores would be one point away from perfect, and rather than settle for another major, my pride would drive me abroad. That years later, after all my friends had gone on to college before me and grown up without me, grown into the versions of themselves they had foreseen on that beach, I’d still be an unmoored boat, drifting, uncertain if what I sought was even on this shore.

“Would you ever go back?” Wei asked.

I set down my empty ramen cup and was about to answer when I saw his gaze; saw that, again, we’d slid into double entendres.

Mark never presumed to have any answers to life. But here was Wei, looking at me like he knew all my doubts and held all the answers to them. How could anyone make up their mind like that, have enough mind made up for two people?

No, Wei wasn’t a Californian sun overhead; he was an island sunset, one you thought was lost behind the serpentine green mountains, only to come across again, unexpectedly, after turning the corner—there he was, just above the horizon, over the low, lapping waves, his gaze still patient, persistent, and warm.

“I—I never thought of going back,” I said.

“But you have dual citizenship now.”

“I have no life in Taiwan. I don’t even have a Taiwanese bank account.”

“So what?”

He stacked my empty cup over his, aimed and threw it overhead at the trash bin. Like some high schooler trying to show off.

“I suppose I’d feel like a failure,” I said.

“Do you think I’m a failure?” he said, teasingly.

I shifted in my seat; my overlapping legs felt warm.

“It doesn’t matter what I think of you.”

“It matters to me.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said, too strongly, because then he sat back.

“Do you think Mark would be okay with this?”

He gestured with his eyes. Us on the same bed. His hand resting next to mine, a palm’s length away from touching.

I snatched my hand away.

“Of course. It’s about trust. He trusts me.”

“Because I’m not real to him,” he said. “I’m not real to you either.”

“I’m tired,” I said.

“We both are. Exhausted.”

And I knew he understood what I had meant earlier that day, when I had stopped outside the museum.

It pained me then, that I’d asked for two rooms. I’d much prefer to face the torture of lying in bed with him, together yet apart, on either edge of the bed. To, after the lights had gone out, stare out over the precipice and watch the darkness melt away into a cloudy gray. To suffer the vigil of silence, silence broken by dams of saliva being swallowed. To wonder if he wondered, too, what would happen if our limbs sought the other’s, and if they were to seek, what, by the end of the night, would be found?

Instead, I went back to my room and lay down on the large, impersonal bed, among too many pillows, thinking about that salmon sunset a week ago, how I had gaped at him while the sun’s afterimage shone like a silver coin between his eyes.

***

Jennifer Jang (she/her) is a coder, web designer, and writer. Her writing has appeared in the Massachusetts Review and JMWW. Originally from Taipei, she now lives in New York City, where she’s at work on a collection of short stories that explore connection and alienation in close relationships. 

In Michael Pikna’s story “Once Is Never,” an elderly Czech couple looks back on their lives, remembering both joys and unspeakable suffering. As Marek and Tereza move toward the next realm, each with their separate wishes, they ponder questions of finality, meaning, and eternal return.

BLAST, TMR’s online-only prose anthology, features prose too vibrant to be confined between the covers of a print journal.

***

Once Is Never

He has taken to narrating his life in moments that seem to require it. Sometimes under his breath and other times loudly enough for someone to hear. Call them abstracts, excerpts, ruminations. Epitaphs?—possibly. He tries not to do this in the company of others, but he has been letting his guard down more and more, especially when he is tired, and he is always tired now. His oldest son calls them CliffsNotes on his life. It drives Tereza crazy, seeing him move his lips when he thinks he’s by himself. Marek, what are you doing? she will say. You look like a crazy person. He can’t say he disagrees. And to prove her point now, although she is in the house and cannot hear him, he says, Here I am, a one-eyed Czech expatriate in his eighty-ninth year, sitting out back under a red oak on a nice spring afternoon, sipping Hammerhead and reading a Czech novel. As the words leave his lips, he is lighter, as if the facts they contain, as true as they may be, are simply ballast.

But the novel, beginning as it does with a deliberation on the concept of eternal return, weighs him down again with the agitation it provokes. The idea that after we die, we live our lives over again, exactly as they occurred. An endless loop. What a horrible notion, one that not even the fine single malt whiskey can offset. Yes, there were some golden moments in his life, mostly having to do with Tereza and their sons. Blessings, to be sure. But then there is the war to consider, the bloodshed in Banská Bystrica, his capture and confinement in Mauthausen, the torture. Wounds that bled backward and forward in time, tainting everything in his life that was and would be. His great-grandson, only five and as vigilant and skittish as a shell-shocked soldier—how could he not have passed on to him something of that ugliness?

No, once is more than enough, thank you very much. Even if he never again sees Tereza in the Royal Court Tavern in Hořice all those years ago, she an underage barmaid and he a seventeen-year-old self-proclaimed partisan fighter, as yet unbloodied, spoiling for war and a beer. The feeling in his chest as she smiled at him when he walked in, as if she had already met him and was pleased with the recurrence. Even if he never gets to hold his newborn sons in his arms again, hear another symphony, read another masterpiece, sip another single malt. Even so, let once be the last time, for God’s sake. Hasn’t he returned to Mauthausen many times already, if only in his mind? Each time he looks in the mirror and sees his glass eye, its lid drooped with weariness, he is reminded of it. He never wanted the blasted thing; it was more for Tereza and his sons. An eyepatch, although just as capable of transporting him back there, would at least be more honest. The glass eye says, He’s fixed now, all better. But he will never be fixed, a fact of considerable weight.

Leave it to the hubris of philosophizing writers to spoil a perfectly good afternoon. He takes a consoling sip of whiskey, then removes his lying eye and exiles it to the small cocktail table next to him, covering it with the book for good measure (let the pretend eye read that nonsense). Around him, the garden and the flowers and the trees are flourishing while he is diminishing rapidly, a fact more burdensome than he previously allowed. Over the past few weeks, he attributed the heaviness instead to the by-products of a life lived, the accretion of debt and responsibility, of choices made, indignities suffered. It bothered him so much, he reacted like a snowbound man in a hypothermic crisis, casting off everything that had kept him warm and alive. He boxed up most of his books and had them delivered to the local library. He felt lighter, so he kept at it. He threw his Czechoslovak war-cross medal—the smallest object but heavy with irony—in the trash when Tereza wasn’t looking. He bubble-wrapped a stack of his albums—Dvořák, Janáček, Smetana—and mailed them to his second cousin in Colorado. Most of his clothes he gave to Goodwill.

The uncluttered space loosened the band around his chest, let him breathe easier. When Tereza caught him only days ago trying to shred their marriage certificate, she put her foot down. No, she said, plucking it from his hand, enough. He looked up at her and saw the burden his life had imposed on her, saw in her eyes his heaviness bearing her down. He could shred everything in the house and it would not change a thing. Still, he persisted. Sweetheart, we’re married now for more than half a century. A lifetime. We don’t need a piece of paper to tell us that. All the proof we need lives right here, don’t you think? He placed a knobby hand over his heart. She narrowed her eyes at him. I think, she said, holding the marriage certificate close, that you are full of shit, old man. She walked away with it, no doubt wondering where she could hide it.

He takes another sip of his whiskey, laughs at his foolishness, and shivers in spite of the warmth of the afternoon. I’m an old man, he says. And no matter how far I have come, that awful place is looking to finish the job it started. How long do I have to live to say I survived it? As he looks around, the light is sepia-toned, and everything he sees exists in the two dimensions his one good eye allows. He is nothing more than an old photograph to be hung on the wall, an artifact.

He looks up into the canopy of branches and says, I lived while men around me, better men than me, died, and this fact, the heaviest of all, is liberated. He is buoyant, insubstantial; as if a weighted blanket, like the one used to calm his great-grandson, has been thrown off. He closes his sighted eye, the one that has seen enough, the light candles to a warm orange, and he takes his last breath, gathering the fragment of life that is left, bringing it forward to a threshold. As Marek crosses it, his very last thought is this: I have been here before.

***

Tereza does not mean to intrude on Marek, but she is worried about him. When she steps through the French doors leading into the back, she wants to show him how well she is walking without the cane her sons have recently badgered her into using and to wheedle him in for dinner (he hasn’t been eating much lately), but when she comes close and sees his head slumped forward . . . Oh Marek. Today is the day? She checks for a pulse, but he is gone. She knew it was coming and thought she was prepared. How stupid of me. The tumbler in his left hand still contains a finger of whiskey—not even death could make him spill it. She sets the tumbler next to his book on the folding cocktail table, then kisses the top of his still warm bald head. Without thinking about it, she sits in the grass, more of a barely controlled fall on her backside; she will not be able to get up again without help from Denise, who is not scheduled to come again until morning. She will likely be dead by then. The thought calms her. The pain in her knees keeps her company while she weeps quietly.

The old tree tries to soothe her with the shade it throws. The air smells like lilac; no seepage from the septic tank today, thank goodness. Aside from the occasional scolding of blue jays and the whine of insects, it is quiet. The kind of quiet she enjoys when there is family around, someone to lean into and remark: Isn’t it nice out here in the country? You can hear yourself think. But she is not sure she wants to be alone with her thoughts. The breeze toying with strands of hair that escaped her chignon feels improper somehow, so she lets her hair down. Marek always liked her hair, did not mind the bottled color. Her sister, whose arthritis inflamed more than her joints, said she was foolish for dyeing her hair at her age.

It is not a bad place to die. Beautiful, if a little wild, the blackberry and gooseberry bushes running riot, the apple trees in need of a trim, the grass long enough to wave in the breeze. If only she and Marek could be left to the anarchy of nature, in time they would be shrouded in green burial garments and folded gently into the ground. She will sit here and wait for her life to wind down and stop, as it must, while the pain in her hips and back sing a dirge. Marek would do the same for her.

She finds that time passes with cruel indifference, whether one is waiting to die or not. In this way, the afternoon lapses into twilight, with bats in tortuous pursuit of mosquitos, fireflies winking, crickets fiddling for a mate. Eventually the air cools, and stars dangle from the lowest branches. To pass the time, she talks to Marek in Czech. The words sound almost foreign to her. She has been in America for so long that at some point, she can’t remember when, she started thinking and dreaming in English, a language she considered mastered when she could make the th sound and her boys couldn’t mock her anymore for her pronunciation of words like refrigerator and aluminum. It was not so easy for Marek, who held on to his accent like a souvenir.

You were insufferable when I met you, she tells him now. That night at the tavern in Hořice, thinking I would spend the night with you because you were going to war and might die. And yet I did, didn’t I? Her laugh is a croaking sound that startles the concert of crickets into a brief caesura. She slides a cigarette out of a crinkled pack and lights it. I know you don’t like me smoking, but you had your whiskey, so please don’t begrudge me a last cigarette. She is considerate, blowing the smoke away from him. Do you remember, dear? I was smoking when you found me after the war, working the streets in Wenceslas Square. You never judged me for how I survived, not a word, but oh the looks you gave me after that whenever you caught me smoking. She shakes her head. You were so thin when I saw you walking toward me, I didn’t recognize you. Your clothes had no shape, more a walking clothes hanger than a man. I never told you, but you frightened me. I could almost see through you. And that eye patch, my God.

She picks up the novel, one that she read years ago, and underneath it she finds his glass eye. Sometimes he removed it when he was reading, telling her it would keep a lookout while he was otherwise occupied. Remember, sweetheart, when our sons were little and they asked how you lost your eye? You told them wild stories, each one more ridiculous than the next. You sneezed too hard and it popped out. One eye couldn’t see eye to eye with the other one, and it left in a huff. You opened one eye during the closing prayer in church, and God snatched it from your head. To me, you would say only that you made an unwise remark to an unscrupulous man in an unimaginable place. I’d like to tell you that I wish you had told me more, but I’m glad you didn’t. I wanted to forget as much as you did. Thank you for that.

She fans the pages of the novel, remembering that she shares a name with one of the characters and that the narrator speaks of eternal return, a concept she found weak-willed in its refusal to accept that life ends. But now the thought of their lives ending forever strikes her as absurd. Her life and Marek’s—over, as if they never occurred. The immensity of what they experienced and felt, ground down into nothingness by the weight and relentlessness of time.

Once is never was the phrase the narrator used.

To quell the thought, she drinks what is left of the whiskey. Despite the sleek notes of citrus and red currants, it goes down like shards of glass, and she wishes she had tossed it on the ground in front of her as a christening of their next journey. One that requires her death, yet her body thinks it knows better. Since the war, it has done what it wanted, as if she had not been living in it.

She lies on her side, hoping the chill will seep into her bones and stop her heart, but instead she falls asleep, and when she wakes, she is wet with dew, shivering, and in so much pain that she can barely move. To make matters worse, she has to pee. She will be damned if she is going to let someone find her in her own mess, so she rolls onto her stomach, the way Denise taught her, then walks her elbows back a few inches at a time until she can sit. From there she grabs Marek’s knees to steady herself and, after a few tries, pulls herself up. She stands behind him, blinking away cobwebs, her hands on his shoulders. You will have to start without me, sweetheart. Marek’s book lies on the cocktail table, his glass eye a placeholder. The thought occurs to her that, no matter how many times he lives his life, he will never finish that book.

Around her, the birds are working themselves up about the light haloing the horizon, as if it is the first dawn they ever witnessed. She touches Marek’s cold cheek, then turns and walks back to the house, her steps slow and painstaking.

There are phone calls to make, coffee for Denise, who likes it strong and sweet. But for now, sitting quietly in her kitchen, there is the irreconcilable current of life, her old heart punting along with it. There are her hands on the table, veined and dappled, the simple gold wedding band adrift between swollen knuckles, its circularity a comfort: sometime soon—she is not sure how eternal timekeeping works—Marek will walk into the Royal Court Tavern, the same princely smile on his peasant face, and start it all again.

***

Michael Pikna lives in Colorado with his wife and an unruly schnauzer. His stories have appeared in Water~Stone Review, Still Point Arts Quarterly, Hobart, The Briar Cliff Review, and others.

“Eighteen People Every Hour” by Dennis McFadden is a moving meditation on memory, death, and desire. First featured in TMR 46.4, McFadden’s story is a portrait not only of decline but also of resilience: how small gestures of care can transform despair into something startlingly alive.

***

Eighteen People Every Hour

***

Note from the Author

“Eighteen People Every Hour” began life as one of four linked novellas, each recounting the same events from the perspective of a different protagonist. The fourth novella featured a middle-aged man living and dying with cancer; this is the one I cut out, folded, spindled, and mutilated into “Eighteen People Every Hour.”

Write what you know, said Twain, advice I don’t always follow. This time, however, I did. I did live in Hartford many years ago, and I did work for a company called the New England Insurance Rating Association—or the IRA, as I and my Irishness liked to call it. And I did have a friend and colleague from Poland, whose dress was spiffy and whose English was iffy, and upon whom I modeled the character of Henry. We lost track of each other after a few years, so I don’t know if cancer ever sank its teeth into him (I hope not). For that I had to turn to my own experience. Having lived with cancer and its gradual, inexorable diminishments for the last twenty of my eighty years of life, I have to agree with Hank: of all the cares and cures and treatments you can try, the best by far is love.

Dennis McFadden (1943–2025) lived and wrote in upstate New York. His collection Jimtown Road won the 2016 Press 53 Award for Short Fiction, and his first collection, Hart’s Grove, was published by Colgate University Press in 2010. His novel Old Grimes Is Dead received a starred review from Kirkus Reviews and was selected by their editors as one of their Best Indie Books of 2022. His stories have appeared in dozens of publications, including New England Review, The Sewanee Review, The Massachusetts Review, Arts & Letters, and The Best American Mystery Stories. A Pushcart Prize nominee, he was awarded a fellowship at the MacDowell Colony in 2018.

BLAST, TMR’s online-only prose anthology, features prose too vibrant to be confined between the covers of a print journal.

Crockett Doob’s “SOCIAL MEDIA PROXY” and “LUKEWARM MESS” are both critical and humorous in their exploration of counterfeit social media lives, polyamorous relationships, monogamous relationships, and lukewarm tater tots.

***

SOCIAL MEDIA PROXY

I am aware of social media. I’ll see “doomscrolling” on the bus, or kids dancing towards an empty bench, or a bearded jogger speaking so authoritatively into his phone that I hope he’s speaking to the masses and not just one person like that.

I am aware of Zuckerberg. I saw on PBS News Hour (back when it was one word, RIP Newshour) his deer-in-headlights routine for the Senate Committee hearing, apologizing for bullying, eating disorders, et al.

But I’m still not on social media.

Mostly because when I started getting the “Are you on Facebook?” question, I was easily in the worst depression of my life—though there was nothing easy about it; although, I was living with my parents rent-free, eating their cheese, and watching cartoons. Okay, so that does sound pretty easy, but it wasn’t!

Depression is no joke. Although it can be funny. Like my ideas of what I’d post were laughable (see?):

Besides the cheese and cartoons, my hobbies include “trying to stop” drinking, screening calls, and plotting suicide.

I must’ve also had some intuition about this concept of “stalking.” Like how detrimental it would be to see pictures of acquaintances smiling, accomplishing things, going rock climbing—I imagined a lot of rock climbing—all to convey:

happy, have shit together

When I sobered up in 2009 and semi got my shit together—not really, and I wasn’t that happy either—but anyway, re: Facebook, my friends told me, “You dodged a bullet.”

Okay. We’re going to jump all the way to 2024, before DT’s second inauguration and Zuckerberg was there with his new hairdo.

Through my literary pursuits, I stumbled upon a website that said this:

“Stop Hiding.” (Meaning join the online literary community.)

This haunted me. Was I hiding all over again? Yes. I mean I thought I was finally putting myself out into the world, but according to this website, I was still at my parents’ house, eating their cheese.

I brought this up in therapy. “I’m trying so hard to be a writer. Do you think I need to join social media?”

Being a good therapist, she said, “You already are a writer,” then didn’t answer me one way or the other.

But she’d brought up this proxy thing before, and this seemed to fit into that. Like having proxy emotions—shame about what people think rather than fear of abandonment—or proxy relationships—I’ll get to those—and with social media, I was doing things like reading about it in books.

To butter up agents (and this does work sometimes; you can steal it if you want), I’d read one of their authors’ books and compliment the shit out of it in my query letter. And a lot of these books were chock-full of social media!

So close enough?

No. That’s still proxy.

And then I realized my last big relationship ended thanks to social media, by proxy.

This was my summer of poly (2022). I was suicidal again. But no more cheese and cartoons this time; just writing two novels a day and having stressy sex with two women, respectively. Polyamory, though advertised as “all about the love,” had become exactly what I feared it would be: war.

My “teammate”—I couldn’t call her my “girlfriend” because her husband would get jealous, so we settled on “teammate” because when I had suicidal thoughts, I’d rat myself out to my team of close friends, and my poly-lover said, “I want to be on your team,” which was supportive but also connoted suicide every time she said it, but at least now we had a title—so my teammate was back on social media. She’d quit—inspired by me!—but now was back, for activism purposes.

But she hadn’t taken down old pictures of her and her husband, and her other lover, her girlfriend, was jealous. Now, the girlfriend—who was too jealous to meet me—had recently been groped by the husband when he was in an alcoholic blackout at his birthday party—which I was not invited to, though he and I had met, just the two of us, on a park bench, like in the M&M’s commercial. But a few weeks had passed since the birthday party scandal, because my teammate wanted to tell me about how, though the girlfriend was initially jealous of these Instagram pictures, saying she felt “outside the marriage”—

“Hmmm, I wonder why,” I said, which led to us fighting, meaning my teammate had two fights with two out of three of her lovers about this, but when we resolved our fight, she wanted to finish the story about when she and her girlfriend resolved theirs.

The happy ending was when the girlfriend said, “I want to be part of your family.”

My therapist was often talking about “a resounding yes.” This was my resounding no.

Two years later, my ex texted me. She overexplained why she’d googled my name, said she found herself in one of my stories but wasn’t pissed about it (?), then congratulated me for doing “rad stuff.”

I brought this up in therapy. This “dream text” from my ex. As usual, my therapist didn’t say what I should do. But right then and there, she googled me and burst out laughing.

“You look so happy!”

I’d never done it. But now that I did, I saw I’d become exactly what I feared when I first heard of Facebook:

happy, have shit together

Smiling pics, accomplishments. No mention of listlessness, of empty days, months, years. And although some of my stories reference depression and suicide, it’s surrounded by kinetic humor, some of my best writing.

“You know what this would be good for?” my therapist said. “Dating apps.”

***

LUKEWARM MESS

Three guys sitting around a table, talking about our love lives. We’d just left a group therapy about this and had been encouraged to bond after.

So here we were, bonding away, sitting in a cafeteria-like restaurant in Brooklyn, waiting for our food.

The new guy sat across from us. He was small, muscular, wearing a tank top to show off his arms. He told us about his ex, his heartbreak, how he was still in touch with her even though she was on another continent.

“I’m back on the apps,” he said. “But the apps suck.”

This was exactly what I feared when I started going to these groups: sitting in dark restaurants, listening to musclemen complain about the apps.

But who was I to judge? Just because I didn’t do the apps, I was no better. I was in my own pickle.

“To me, it’s about doing something different,” Alex said to my right. I liked Alex. He was more senior and seemed like he knew what he was talking about. He had a history of pursuing unavailable women, but now he was in a serious relationship. “Like if I always go fast, I try going slow. Or if I’ve always done the apps, I’ll try not doing the apps.”

“Or vice versa?” I said.

Alex hesitated. “Well, you’re not there yet.”

“So what’s your story?” the muscleman said to me.

I told him about the Christian. Alex already knew about her.

“Our values are not aligned,” I began.

“What does that mean?” said the muscleman.

“Like she said she’s against abortions in all fifty states. She also said that after Trump’s first assassination attempt that if his personality changed, he’d be born-again and so, if he got elected, we’d all be saved.”

Raised eyebrows.

“Yeah, I know. So that was my moment, like: crush over. But then . . . she started paying attention to me again.”

Alex snickered.

“How do you know this person?” the muscleman asked.

“Work,” I said. “Which is a pattern for me. And she’s younger, which is another pattern. And she used to be homeless and was living with her ex to stay out of the shelter system, which is . . . also a pattern for me. Though that one was a lot older!”

“Who?”

“My ex who was living with her ex and was on the verge of being homeless.” I sighed. “She had another guy pursuing her, too, besides me. That was my first love trapezoid.”

“You’ve had more than one?” asked the muscleman.

“Yeah. With the poly-married woman. She had a husband and a girlfriend and then, yeah, me.”

“But hey,” I said, looking at Alex, “at least this time, it’s not a love triangle?”

“Unless you count Jesus,” Alex said.

“Anyway,” I said, turning back to the muscleman, “now she’s in Maryland. She left where we worked to work at a halfway house for Christian women.”

“That’s cool,” the muscleman said.

“Yeah, it is. But on her last day on the job, she asked me for my number.”

“And you gave it to her.”

“Right. So, of course, now that she’s two states away, we’re finally texting.”

Our food arrived.

The muscleman had ordered a burger with fries. Alex had ordered the “Hot Mess”—a fried chicken sandwich with coleslaw—and I copied him. Mostly because I liked the name. Alex had ordered a side of tots, and I copied that, too, even though I don’t really like tots; they’re just fun to say.

“Damn! These tots are cold!” Alex said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Or lukewarm. Like they’ve been sitting around all day.”

“Should we take them back?” Alex asked, but neither of us moved. He ate another. I did, too.

“So have you and this Christian girl hooked up?” the muscleman asked me.

“No, no. Like I said, she’s in Maryland.”

“So?”

He had a point.

“Well, we’re not there yet. I don’t even know if she likes me. Actually, she went out of her way to say she doesn’t like me. Or what she said was, she didn’t want me to think that she liked me.” I sighed again. “Then she compared me to a prophet from the Bible.”

“So what do you talk about?” the muscleman said.

“We don’t talk. Just text.”

“Okay, what do you text about?”

“I mean not a lot. Music, mainly. It’s pretty formal.”

“Dude, that sucks!”

I hated him briefly, then ate another tot.

I turned to Alex. “Hey, instead of the ‘Hot Mess,’ they should call this the ‘Lukewarm Mess.’”

Nobody laughed.

I didn’t think of it then, only a few days later, that what I had cooking with this Christian in Maryland was the real Lukewarm Mess.

***

Crockett Doob lives in Rockaway Beach, NY, and does not surf. He plays drums in a vacant courthouse, works with autistic teenagers, and edits a documentary about a cemetery. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Cleaver Magazine, The Good Life Review, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Fiction Attic Press, and Does It Have Pockets. You can find more of Doob’s writing and contact information on his website: crockettdoob.com

Steeped in the divisive cues of status, Emily Neuberger’s “Under the River” traps a group of New Yorkers in a subway car at midnight and explores what we owe to ourselves, our loved ones, and those we’ll never meet again.

BLAST, TMR’s online-only prose anthology, features prose too vibrant to be confined between the covers of a print journal.

***

UNDER THE RIVER

Early in my relationship with my husband, he said something to me that was so right I felt as if he’d reached between my eyes and placed his fingertip on the very bottom of my psyche. I’d been seeing someone else at the time who I thought more exciting. But then my husband, who until then I’d thought of as the safe option, kissed me goodbye after a date, then leaned over and whispered this endearment in my ear. It was a kind word, unsexual, but it made me feel exactly what I’d always hoped to feel. At the time it felt like there was a lot of negotiation left to do—I remember a weeklong upset started by a sofa—but in hindsight it was just logistics. I already knew that together we’d find a renewable passion, based more on how we related to each other than ephemeral desire. 

I was thinking about this as we bumped along the subway home one night. I was tired, letting the train’s inertia rock me into the warm pillow of his body. We’d just been to a movie and my husband wanted to discuss the cinematography. I made the appropriate noises, my eyes closed, my cheek sweating against his rain jacket. Moments like this, when we both performed our marital duties separately and without complaint, made me lonely. I had once wanted love to mean alignment, a constant miracle of coincidence, but it had turned out to mean he helped enable my desires and then waited patiently for his turn. More and more lately, our desires skirted off each other. But we upheld the terms of our marital contract. I let him talk and he let me not listen and neither of us got what we wanted but we had no cause for complaint. 

The film had been about a woman leaving one long monogamous relationship for another, then finding new and equivalent problems. It made me think of the promise I found in his endearment. I remember visualizing our whole life in front of us after he spoke to me that way. Our life now looked little like the one I’d pictured. 

We were in the tunnel beneath the East River when the train halted. I sat up, my tiredness blinking out with the lights. My husband straightened too, searching for a way to be useful. He was a dutiful man. If we lived in olden times, he’d always be running off to fetch water to put out a neighbor’s fire. 

I provided a job for him by reaching for his hand. I didn’t like being under the river, and especially not at a standstill. I could smell it, claylike and cool, and tried not to picture water flooding the antique tunnel, bursting through the wet stones on either side of us and filling the car in one terrible second. I wonder if the pressure would be enough to kill us or if we’d have to wait to drown. 

“You okay?” he asked. 

“Mmm.” 

He squeezed my hand. 

Usually, I thought, the trains stopped near the stations, held off by the dispatcher to balance traffic. I’d never, in my twenty New York years, stopped in the middle of the river. I didn’t like to be reminded of how unnatural the city was, how much we all depended on life support. 

The train car opened at the far end. A woman in baggy dark clothing walked through. She had long, white, gnarled hair and a thin face with a long nose, like a child’s drawing of a witch. She looked as though she weighed less than one hundred pounds, and when she came close, there was a smell, one that I knew but had only encountered the faintest whiffs of on my own body after camping trips. A smell of this potency took weeks to mature, disturbing not only for its unpleasantness but for the reminder of what was possible. 

I watched her because she helped me banish thoughts of drowning. She walked until she was standing near my husband and me. We were in the middle of an old car with orange seats and shoe scuffs crisscrossing the floor. It was full, midnight on a Friday. She looked around. Most people ignored her. Then she said, in a thin high voice loud enough to make me jump, “I’ve been raped!” 

No one reacted. I looked around. People stared into their phones despite, I assumed, the lack of service. A woman in purple scrubs rested her head against the window, seemingly asleep. 

“I’ve been raped!” she repeated, louder. 

My husband looked at me, as if I should tell him what to do. I shook my head. 

I looked around, as I always did in moments like this, for potential allies. There was a handsome man sitting opposite us, mid-thirties, in a beautiful gray suit. He blinked up at the woman as if her cry had woken him from a nap. There was a young man on my other side, clutching a program from a Broadway show, his thin arms the color of lima beans, and I felt that if things became strange in this subway car, this boy was my husband’s and my responsibility. 

The woman was turning on the spot, a hideous music box ballerina. She repeated her plea at everyone she faced until she reached me. 

“Help me,” she said. “Please.” 

There was a look in her eyes of aimless, overwhelming fear that suggested to me that the rape had really happened, but some time ago, maybe years, and yet lived perpetually at the front her mind. 

Across, the handsome man used long fingers to pick pods out of his ears. 

I leaned forward and spoke slowly. “Please wait,” I said. “At the next station, we will get you some help.” As I said this, I wondered how I could keep this promise; the police seemed a betrayal. I checked my phone without hope, and it had no service. 

“I called for help,” she said, now in collaboration. “I stopped the train.” 

Suddenly the other riders began to pay attention. I watched the woman with the shopping bags raise her head. “You what?” 

“I stopped the train.” 

The beautiful man across from us entered the conversation. He had dark, thick hair and a well-shaped face with visible bones, and beautiful hands which he had clasped together, his elbows on his knees. “You pulled the emergency brake?” 

His voice was soft, low, steady; the kind of voice meant to be in charge of things. I leaned back against the seat. My husband put his hand on my knee and squeezed. 

“I called for help,” she said again.  

He closed his eyes at the frantic attack of her voice, then breathed and opened them again. 

“Did you pull this?” He indicated the emergency brake inside the box. “In another car?” 

“Yes.” She nodded, seeming relieved. “The cops are coming and they’ll catch him.” 

I was thinking of a project I did in the seventh grade during a unit on Chicago homelessness. I remember reading an account from someone living on the streets who said that the hardest part was how no one ever looked at him. He said he felt like he was trapped behind glass, invisible and silenced, watching everyone but unable to reach them. I wondered if the woman felt like that. If she’d pulled the alarm to make everyone see her. 

Meanwhile I heard my husband swear under his breath. Not angry; resigned. He knew before me what was about to happen. He was good at things like that, practical things. I worried more, but he was more cautious. 

The woman in the scrubs spoke up. “Oh sweet Jesus, we’ll be here all night.” 

My husband wiped his palms on his jeans. 

“They’re going to get him,” she said. “They’ll catch him.” 

“Oh, shut up,” the scrubs woman called. She was on the far end of the car, and sprawled against her seat, looking as if her muscles had clocked out for the evening and it was all she could to keep herself from puddling on the floor. “I need to get home.” 

The damsel wailed. 

Several more voices joined in, telling her to be quiet. 

“I worked today,” a woman said, shopping bags taking up the area in front of her seat and several around her. “Some one of us have to work.” 

The man across from us leaned forward. He had a beautiful watch, which highlighted his well-made wrist. He spoke low. He rubbed his palms together in agitation. “Someone hurt you?” 

“Yes,” she said. I could hear the relief in her voice. “Yes, someone hurt me. He attacked me.” 

“Just now?” 

“Yes.” 

“On this train?” 

“Yes!” 

He was looking at her carefully, one corner of his mouth raised up. “Tell me what happened.” 

My stomach began to hurt. 

I looked at my husband. I didn’t want to say anything someone else could hear, but I looked at him, because I felt that the man shouldn’t be asking this. 

I hoped to find my husband looking blearily off, unworried. But he was frowning at the man. My husband did not like men like this, men for whom the world bent. He, who had to work to earn women’s esteem, resented them. I hoped he was just biased, that whatever made him frown was his own insecurity. But the man’s stillness in this atmosphere made my stomach feel oily. 

She seemed confused by his question, made almost more afraid under the attention. “You want to know?” 

The beautiful man nodded. He had large dark eyes and thick lashes which, I thought, probably got him a lot of attention when he was a little boy. My mother always called boys’ thick eyelashes a waste. 

“He attacked me.” She sounded nervous now. 

“Who attacked you?” There was a small scold in his voice, as if her agitation was a disappointment. 

“The man. The big man.” She was holding up her skirt in her hands like a child, up around her belly button, worrying the fabric between her hands.  

I felt something in my throat then. More people had started to join in yelling at the woman. 

“It’s midnight, bitch,” the woman in scrubs said. “I worked all day.” 

My brain could no longer detect the smell of the river, but the air in the car was cool. I rubbed my prickling arms and leaned in to my husband. “I’m so glad I don’t have to pee.” 

“I’d hold up my jacket between cars.” But he was still watching the scene in front of us. The woman was rocking back and forth now. She no longer turned to look at the rest of us but kept her gaze locked on the well-dressed man as if he had bewitched her. 

“He attacked me,” she said. 

“That is interesting,” the man said, his face serene on hers, “but it doesn’t make sense.” 

“He did.” She rocked. “I don’t like you.” 

My heart began to pound at this. But then, I told myself, this woman was not an animal, or else, no more than I was; she did not have preternatural abilities to sense character. 

The man shook his head sadly, as if he wanted to help her, but could not. “I’m just trying to find out what happened.” 

“You’re bad. You’re bad.” 

She was just afraid, I thought. Likely, she was paranoid. 

He tensed and released his hand. “See, it doesn’t add up.” 

The woman didn’t speak. His response—his very engagement with her—confused her more. I watched her clavicles, brittle as pencils, rise and fall. 

The man smiled at her, a gentle curve of his mouth, and spoke low in a lover’s murmur. 

“You are a disgusting, dirty, flea-infested, rancid low-life,” he said. “No one would rape you.” 

My breath caught. My husband put his hand on my knee as if for balance. Neither of us looked at each other, but I could feel him wanting to. 

The boy beside me crumpled his theater program. 

The woman whimpered as if she’d been hit in the stomach. 

“Hey,” my husband said. I felt a jump in my heart. 

But then, unaware of any of this, two girls, nineteen or twenty, on one end of the train reached their own breaking point. They were holding onto the pole, birds of paradise with long, artificially colored hair in bright boots and shiny short skirts. They kept their sunglasses on and one yelled, “Get off the train, bitch!” then burst out laughing. The other nudged her friend and added, “You fucking crazy cunt!” They then turned to each other, hands over their mouths, and laughed, bending at the waist, proud of themselves. They reminded me of playing ding dong ditch as a child, doing something bad and running away as fast as I could. 

This seemed to rouse the scrubs lady more, and the woman with the shopping bags, who continued to lay back in their seats and shout in resigned tones about the work they have to do, the families waiting for them. 

“The train won’t move faster if you keep saying it,” I muttered. The boy with the program glanced at me, his forehead shining with sweat, and gave a little nod. I again felt a maternal responsibility for him. I pictured my husband and me sheltering him during a car-wide fight, a baby chick huddled between us. He was probably a foot taller than me but looked too young to be allowed. 

My husband was transfixed on the woman. His hand was digging into my knee, and I put mine over his. He loosened his grip at once and glanced at me in apology. 

“I hate this,” he breathed in my ear. 

“What happens when they pull the emergency brake?” I asked him. He tended to know things like this. But he shrugged. 

At that moment, the opposite train door opened and the conductor walked in. I was embarrassed to feel comforted by the uniform. As soon as he entered the car, he pulled the focus away from the woman, and the passengers began to yell at him instead. 

“I have to get home.” 

“It’s past midnight!” 

“Crazy woman pulled the brake.” 

He held out his hands, palms out, in the center of the train. “All right everyone, let’s take a breath.” 

I obeyed literally. This is something my husband would have laughed at once, when he thought everything I did was adorable. But now he was still watching the scene with that crease between his brows. 

“I’ve been raped,” the woman told the conductor. “I’ve been raped on this train.” 

The well-dressed man stood up then. His pants creased perfectly where his hip broke into his leg, and they draped down as he stood in a way that told me the fabric was expensive. He walked over to the conductor and offered his hand. 

“She’s confused,” he said gently. “When can we get a move on?” 

The conductor gave this man a strange look before he reached for the radio on his belt. He turned his back on the man and called in the cops. 

The woman had started to whimper, one thin sound, high pitched as a tea kettle approaching boil. 

The conductor watched all of us for a moment after he delivered his message, his hand on the belted radio, and then slowly backed toward the door. I watched him calculate whether he should stay and then decide that he didn’t want to be near any of us. I watched the doors close behind him with envy. 

My husband squeezed my hand. “Want to go?” 

The well-dressed man did not return to his seat. Instead, he paced the small space between the doors and the pole, walking around the woman in tight, angry circles. 

“Maybe,” I said. I did not want to leave this woman with this man. “No.” 

My husband nodded. I squeezed his hand. I felt gratitude then, for his goodness, for his inability to leave this stranger. 

At the end of the train, near the doors the conductor had just disappeared through, there was another couple. They were turned toward each other, clasping hands, and talking. While I watched, the woman laughed at something, angling her head back, her neck going long and curved. He kept his eyes on her face, watching her laugh, until she surfaced and he pulled her against him and kissed her. I wondered if they’d been together a short time, and that was why they could focus on their own company amid this tension. I hoped so. 

Suddenly the train lurched into movement. My husband put his arm around my shoulders as if this was something we had achieved together which deserved celebration. I remembered my earlier anxiety about the river, and leaned back, relieved, until we reached the lights in the tunnel that indicated we were approaching High Street. Then we stopped once more. 

This time, there was no hesitation before the chorus of dismay. Everyone—the shopping bag woman, the woman in her scrubs, the girls on their night out—groaned their frustration, all toward the woman with the white hair, who was clutching the pole in her thin hand, her shoulders trembling. By now, my husband had closed his eyes, murmuring under his breath, and I knew he was counting. He did this during unpleasant situations when he had no control. In traffic, long lines, even sometimes when I was angry with him. I had started to hate this management technique. Now I appreciated it. We all felt anger. How lovely that he expressed it through a whispered series of numbers. 

The well-dressed man did not yell. Instead he resumed talking to the woman in his low, sweet voice. I tried to tune him out. I did not want to hear the river of hatred emitting from his mouth. He frightened me in a way the real river never could in its amoral power. This man, this lovely man, harbored an anger far more frightening than random disasters. I realized there was a much worse way to die than by water. I pictured his man over me as he killed me. I wondered whether he had wanted to do something like that to someone. I imagined wanting to kill someone. I felt an inward shrivel at the idea of piercing someone else’s flesh. 

Quietly—but not so quietly that no one could hear, in fact, the two people nearest this man were doing an excellent job of ignoring him, reading their muted phones—he told this woman why she was worthless, why no one would believe her if she ever did go to the police, because no man would ever touch her, let alone have sex with her, because she was old, because she smelled, because she was worthless, because she was nothing. He said all this while clinging to the pole, stooped over her, his mouth near her ear, her gnarled white hair tickling his chin. She was nothing, he said. Nothing. 

He finished this diatribe by raising one of his beautiful hands in my direction. “You say someone raped you,” he said, his nose wrinkling in performed disgust. “But she is right here.” 

My husband reached for me then, his arm crossing my body like a seatbelt. I took his wrist in my hand and pushed him away, gently. 

I swallowed. My voice, when it came out, shook. “How dare you.” 

The beautiful man’s dark eyes flicked to me. There was no apology there, only the knowledge that he was caught, a child forced to swallow his disrespectful remark. He looked back to the woman. “I only meant, there are nice women here. Why would anyone choose you?” 

I could feel my husband’s anguish now like heat coming off his body; some mixture of male pride and genuine fear, his natural hatred of violence bumping against the man’s spew. 

“If he touches her,” my husband breathed into my ear, barely moving his lips, “I have to stop him.” 

I hadn’t considered that. The thought of violence felt distant until he voiced it aloud. Now I realized the only reason I hadn’t stopped the man was because I was afraid of him.  

The boy next to me had folded his program into an accordion, the ink breaking at the creases, which had become fuzzy and soft under his sweaty fingers. 

“He won’t,” I said, though I didn’t believe this. 

My husband stood then. I could tell he was afraid by the set of his jaw. I would be surprised to learn if he’d ever hit anyone, even as a child. But he grasped the pole, standing between the woman and the well-dressed man. He then nodded at his empty seat. 

The woman looked confused. 

“Sit,” he said. “Please.” 

She was trembling, but she obeyed. I hated how much I wanted to move once she was near me. The smell was dreadful. She was shaking very hard. 

The well-dressed man was watching my husband now. His face was still but there was anger there. I thought perhaps he was disappointed to have lost the opportunity to bully. But my husband didn’t rise to it, or look away, but instead continued holding the pole as if the train was moving, and everything was ordinary. So because of him I did something I otherwise could never have done, and offered her my hand. The woman took it. Her bones were small and thin, her skin too loose around. But she grasped me tightly and swayed back and forth. 

We sat like that for several minutes. I kept my eyes on the ground, away from the well-dressed man’s horrible stare. The woman rocked in her seat, singing softly under her breath. The boy beside us got up and moved to the far end of the car, but she continued to hold my hand. 

Suddenly the doors at the front of the car opened again. I turned and looked. The couple was sitting, her head on his shoulder, his upon hers, eyes closed, hands clasped. 

Two policemen entered in full outfit. I shriveled into the seat at the sight of the weapons on their belts. I had no experience with guns and was always sure they were about to fire at random. I had no experience with violence; I lived such a lovely life. 

The beautiful man assumed his position of authority. He approached the cops with an outstretched hand, like he knew we were all disappointed to find ourselves here, like bad weather, like a power outage. One cop, a short bald man with russet eyebrows, shook it. The other, who was tall and strapping, ignored him and continued on. I wondered if rank had made this man the leader or if it was merely his better looks. 

He knelt before the woman. 

She flinched away, seeing him, until she met his eyes. 

“Hello there,” he said gently. 

I was generally and specifically anti-cop; for a variety of excellent reasons, I thought this correct. But I saw the gentle look on this man’s face and understood that this individual had dealt with people like this woman before, perhaps even this specific woman, without rancor. 

“I was raped,” she said. She was still holding my hand. 

“I know, dear,” he said. “Let’s get you somewhere safe.” 

I stood and helped her up. The cop offered her his arm, and she, still trembling, transferred her grip to him. 

His partner was speaking with the beautiful man, who gesticulated with rolled-up sleeves. The taller cop frowned at him. 

“That’s enough,” he said. “Leave her alone.” 

At this, he ignited the ire of the car; the woman in the scrubs yelled out again about needing to be home. The woman with her bags moaned about work. The girls had wilted against the far door, no longer interested in the drama. 

“Leave her alone,” the cop said again, with the assertion I’d wanted to have. I wondered now why I hadn’t said it myself. I knew now that nothing would have happened to me, had I spoken up. He’d broken my fear and revealed its silliness. None of these people would have hurt me, not even the beautiful man. I had a lovely life. I was untouchable. I felt ashamed. 

The cop led the woman into the next car, his hand on her elbow like a dutiful grandson. I was not at all sure that her fate was bettered by this; he surely, despite whatever empathy exhibited here, had specific steps he now had to enact, steps of dubious benefit. I wondered where she would sleep and whether it was better than where she’d have slept before she pulled the brake. The partner followed, his gait forceful and fast, as if he had somewhere better to be. 

My husband returned to his seat now and took my hand, the one that had been holding the woman’s. The beautiful man sat down with a heavy sigh opposite us. He saw me looking and raised his eyebrows like we had gone through something together. I stared at him. I could not think what to say. I had only a feeling, pooling on my tongue, of fury. Then he blinked and tilted his head back, like this whole ordeal had made him more tired than he thought fair. 

The train lurched again. A minute later, we had arrived at High Street. 

It was not our stop, but my husband squeezed my knee. “Cab?” 

I nodded. We stood and got off the train. I saw the platform saturated with the feverish clarity of one who’d just been sick. My palm was warm and damp now after so long being touched. I looked up and down the platform for the woman and her escorts, but I couldn’t see them due to the staircases and pillars. 

Slowly, as we ascended to the street, we began to talk about what had happened. As we put it into words, the shock of it fell away until we padded the event in smugness, criticizing the others the same way we gossiped about my boss after a party. In rehashing it, the situation became banal, a crazy thing that had once happened. But when we got home, I kissed him in a way I hadn’t in years, not as foreplay, but as a pleasure in and of itself. 

***

Emily Neuberger is the author of the novel A Tender Thing (Putnam, 2020). Her writing has appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Sun, The Common, Joyland, the Bennington Review (Pushcart nominee, 2023), Swamp Pink, and elsewhere. She has an MFA from Brooklyn College and hosts the reading series Sunday Stories. emilyneuberger.com 

BLAST, TMR’s online-only prose anthology, features prose too vibrant to be confined between the covers of a print journal.

In a world not unlike our own, where unmodified perception has become a radical act, “The Cerebral Reclamation League” follows one man’s experiment in seeing with his own eyes. Lebowitz’s story explores what remains when technological enhancements are stripped away, prompting reflection on our own distorted lenses and technological dependencies.

***

THE CEREBRAL RECLAMATION LEAGUE

The Cerebral Reclamation League. The words, the name, the threat fell away from Oliver, disappearing, along with his headset, into the metallic black pouch. The pouch clicked shut, folded, sealed, and with that came a sharp sense of loss, and foreboding. He repeated the term, trying to extract some lingering meaning from it, but all he found, now, were two sharp prongs of pressure inside his cranium where his conductive magnets could no longer find the network. The feeling was so pronounced that he touched the spots, half expecting to see his fingers come away bloody.

“That’s better,” said Cass, wrapping the pouch and tucking it into her shoulder bag. “Now, you remember why we’re here, Ollie?”

Ollie. The term brought a new kind of headache. He had asked her not to call him that. Cass was his intern, not much more than a child, a recent addition at the lab with zero experience in product development or biotechnology, but she conducted herself like she owned the place. He had gently tried, several times, to remind her of the proper order of things, but it didn’t take. She looked back at him so oddly, with a hint of sympathy, that he immediately backed off. He often came away from their conversations feeling more puzzled than annoyed, wondering if maybe she was right. She was young, naive, blundering, with a hugely overinflated sense of self-worth, but maybe she really did have a sight line to a future that the rest of them were unaware of.

He peeked at her on the bench beside him. She had a big head and avid protruding eyes that, this close, seemed prone to zealotry. Everything about her was oversized, now that he considered it, slightly misshapen. Then he remembered that he was seeing her without filters and that she would see him this way too, and he quickly turned away.

It had been Cass, no surprise, who suggested this experiment in offline research, a way, as she put it, to better understand the Cerebral Reclamation League. “To know your enemy . . .” she tapped her temple, “. . . you need to think like your enemy. Amiright?”

She had a point. The CRL had been a gnawing concern to the lab. There were always groups of reactionaries who feared the future and tried to stop it, but usually they were bumbling and disorganized, showing up with misspelled protest signs, quick to disperse. The CRL was different. They had published a mission:To reclaim the sanctity of the human mind (whatever that meant!) through whatever means necessary, and they seemed prepared to act on it. There had been an explosion at a data hub. A container ship had been seized in a foreign port (that one cost their own lab three weeks of production). Most recently, and sinisterly, the CEO of a sister company had turned up dead, his body contorted in the sticky well of a drained silicon vat, a glossy black card clenched between his agonized teeth. On one side was the man’s name, like he had been targeted. On the other side was the group’s stylized logo: a robot skull with x-ed–out eyes and an evil, leering grin.

Ed, Oliver and Cass’s CEO, went nowhere without his security detail now. The CRL worked offline so they were difficult to trace, difficult to track. Ed could be seen swinging around in an otherwise empty hallway, half-crouched in warrior pose. More commonly he stayed in his office, gazing balefully out through the glass walls at everyone who passed. When Cass suggested her strategy, in the conference room, he blinked his one visible eye several times as if trying to clear it, then reached up and probed his headset as if to assure himself that it was still there. It was an ambiguous gesture that could have meant anything. But Cass took it as confirmation. “See?” She clapped her hands, delighted. “Ollie will take off his headset, and I’ll be his guide!” And Oliver felt an unexpected surge of excitement.

***

Though now he was hard-pressed to remember why. They had been walking for what seemed like hours along twisty overgrown paths through parts of the park he had never seen before. Or, he supposed, it was equally possible that he had seen them, maybe many times, just with no way now to retrieve the memories. If he made any attempt to look beyond the surface of things, to recall deeper information, he was met with such a blizzard of painful static that he immediately backed off. But as long as he focused on his surroundings—sunlight through leaves, rustling foliage, water bubbling over rocks—it was actually quite pleasant, and he was even beginning to wonder if maybe this was the point of the entire exercise—to free-float on a sea of minutia—when they emerged, suddenly and unexpectedly, into the central plaza of the park, and he realized that of course he knew where they were; the whole city radiated from this point—pathways and fountains, avenues and architecture—all extending from the singular majestic monument that rose so high above them that it appeared to tip with the drifting of the clouds.

“Okay,” said Cass. “Do you remember who that is?”

“That’s Sylvan Cutter!” The name came easily, even without a headset. Everyone knew Sylvan Cutter: the genius inventor and entrepreneur who had pioneered the system of cranial inserts that allowed seamless neural transfer. The man had been vilified in his day, persecuted, forced to live in hiding, but he had seen the future as clearly as Pythagoras or Galileo before him, and he refused to relinquish it. He died impoverished, but not before his ideas caught fire, spreading across the planet, a glorious truth that couldn’t be constrained. Now he was considered a hero, responsible for their entire modern era of cerebral offload, information equity and—

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, we know all that,” said Cass, waving away Oliver’s glowing report. “I just wondered if you noticed the adornments, that’s all.”

Oliver looked up again, startled to see swaths of orange graffiti on the beloved man’s bronzed sash and waistcoat, his eyes x-ed out, a leering robot skull overlaying his customary expression of benign goodwill. A cleanup crew dangled on a scaffold, scrubbing with long brushes as a floater sprayed plumes of foamy, soapy suds. But how had he missed this? He commuted this way twice daily, most recently that very morning, and he was sure it hadn’t been like this. Oliver looked around. The plaza was crowded with people crossing in every direction, most striding purposefully, their one visible eye twitching to private relays, but others were relaxed, sitting on benches, some even gazing directly up at the statue. Nobody seemed in the least bit concerned about what was happening above them.

“It’s edited out,” said Cass.

“What is?”

“The paint. The graffiti. Even the cleanup crews. It’s like they’re not there.”

“Edited out?” Oliver stared at her. “By whom?”

“By the headsets!” Cass seemed amazed by his ignorance. “Wow! Ollie, you really should know this. You create these things.”

This wasn’t entirely, technically accurate. The company assembled and deployed the hardware, true, but much of it, especially in the newer models, came prepopulated with features and modules that were applied by the central AI itself.

“It’s a privacy setting,” said Cass, settling into the role of instructor. “You can dial it back through the admin panel, but most people don’t know, or care.” She gestured at the hurrying pedestrians around them. “They prefer not to be bothered.” She glanced at Oliver. “Do you ever wonder what else you’re missing?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean . . .” She turned toward him, her face flushed with renewed anticipation. “Are you ready for your prime-nut challenge?”

***

Cass had a plan for the afternoon. She called it Ollie’s quest, or his level-up (gamer jargon, he assumed) on his journey toward enlightenment, and she even had shown him a small flat box that she flashed from her bag that she said would be his prize if he succeeded. Oliver was too busy being nervous to pay attention. It had been years since he had removed his headset (two years and ten months—he’d checked the logs) and to exist without one, even for a few hours, was, frankly, terrifying. He tried to shrug it off. “An experiment!” he said to his associates, playing the science geek. “I’ll see the world in a new way; why not?”

“More like, see the world without eyes,” was the usual, wary response. To them, the idea was anathema, like suggesting a stroll through an alien landscape without a spacesuit. Which, he supposed, in a way, it was.

But Cass had been thrilled, drawing up an action plan and a map. She called it his prime-nut challenge, a way not just to unplug, but to go deeper into the hearts and minds of the Cerebral Reclamation League, to get a true insight into their motivations and objectives.

And now she was happy to explain it. They had come full circle and were seated on a bench at the rim of the park, almost where they had started. In front of them was a busy avenue and beyond this: their own office complex—a system of blocky, glassy, stacked units rising above a perimeter of fountains and flags. Barriers had been erected recently, and there was additional security. Oliver could see the uniformed ex-military types wearing sunglasses and tactical vests and carrying stunners. It made him shudder, a reminder that they were under attack.

Which seemed to be exactly Cass’s point. The challenge, as she told him, was for Oliver to sneak into the building, past the guards, without using any of his usual keycards or credentials, go up to the lab, enter Ed’s office and take something from his desk without anybody knowing or catching him. “It’ll be easy!” she exulted. “Without the headset, you’re basically invisible, amiright?”

“You want me to steal something from Ed’s office?” Oliver was aghast.

“Well, yes.” Cass seemed confused by his reaction. “It’s nothing they wouldn’t do, the CRL. They might be in there right now, for all you know. You think the CRL would pause at a moment like this?”

Oliver wasn’t sure this was relevant, or whether it would stand up to Ed’s rages, but he was having difficulty articulating his concerns.

“Besides . . .” Cass sat back and crossed her arms smugly. “Even your pal Sylvan Cutter was an outlaw once, remember?”

***

Which is how Oliver found himself in a dim, flickering hallway somewhere in the belly of his own office complex. In one direction was a line of metal doors. In the other: more metal doors. He could hear shouting and clatter, probably from the warehouse, and he could also hear the whoosh and exhale from the silicon vats where the robot brigade did their repetitive labor in utter darkness, but he couldn’t tell which was which, or even if the sounds were above or below him. Cass had been right—getting into the building was easy; all the checkpoints relied on electromagnetic signatures, none of which Oliver was emitting. But now he had no idea where he was. Cass had drawn a crude map with directions and notations in her neat, graphite script, but that was useless. There had been a time when he would have been able to “read” this content, but that time had passed. Why hold on to such an archaic process when the headsets would do it for you? He turned the map over a couple of times helplessly, then shoved it in his pocket, resolved to rely on muscle memory to get him where he needed to be.

And it worked. After a few blundering missteps, he emerged on his own office floor. The relief was so palpable—to be back in familiar territory—that he proceeded down the open aisle between the desks without thinking, as if he had been there all afternoon. He passed unnoticed, a ghost, everyone engrossed in their own internal tasks. He paused by the desk of his primary partner and collaborator, Burt; Oliver was reasonably confident of the name. He had known Burt for years, sat across from him, spent countless hours harmonizing code, but without labels and facial recognition, he wasn’t sure of anything. Burt was doing nothing discernible, canted back in his chair, feet propped on the edge of his desk. But his fingers were twitching and the tiny flickering light at his temple indicated data transfer. Oliver waved a hand in front of his face — nothing. He snapped his fingers. “Burt!” The man jumped and dropped his feet and looked around, startled, but Oliver could tell he still was only seeing the grids and corridors of the headset. “Hold up,” Burt spoke to nobody. “I think Oliver’s trying to tap in. I just heard his voiceprint, but I can’t find him on the channel.” He pawed frantically at the air in front of his face, rummaging through invisible panels. “The fool is out there somewhere—ha, ha—lost!” He took a moment to appreciate the scenario. “Help me, I’m lost, I’m lost!” He wagged both hands on either side of his head like a wobbly toddler. “Poor bastard. Better him than us, right?” Oliver moved on.

In Ed’s office, he circled cautiously, careful not to disturb anything, but when no guards appeared, no alarms sounded, he became bolder, moving to the desk, the shelves, studying the mementos and industry awards that Ed had accumulated over the years. Ed had been a scientist too, originally, and Oliver lingered on one photograph that showed him younger, in front of a small house, the For Sale sign taken down, holding a young child and beaming next to a similarly beatific-looking wife. His hair was shiny and black, freshly combed, and he wore only the wispiest version of a headset, a cluster of microfilaments, hardly more than a daisy chain around his forehead, with a small transparent patch to cover one eye. Oliver had heard about these early models, though he had never seen one. The patch, apparently, was optional, and could be flipped up or down as needed. In the photograph, the patch was up, and Ed was looking directly at the camera, both eyes sparky and perceptive. Oliver leaned closer. The wife wasn’t wearing a headset at all.

There was a sound behind him. Oliver whirled around. Ed was there, filling the doorframe, glaring back at him with such outrage that Oliver squeaked and tried to back up, bumping into the shelves, nearly dropping the photograph. Ed circled the desk and came at him, so close and quick that Oliver could smell his sweat and cologne. Ed wasn’t a tall man, but he was thick and muscular, with fat veins on his neck. A thinly restrained fury pulsed in his visible eye. But the eye wasn’t focused on Oliver. It was focused slightly to the left, boring into the shelves beside his ear. Oliver had to restrain himself from turning to see what the eye was looking at; dimly he knew that it was looking at nothing. The rest of Ed’s face was encrusted in gimmicks. This headset was a new model, the latest prototype, so the elements were not sheathed in polymer, yet, but instead were exposed: a densely packed collaboration of chips and wires so tightly wrapped that Oliver had the surreal hallucination that they weren’t on the surface at all, but were underneath, a thin layer of flesh peeling away to expose them. Ed’s lips trembled, emitting a plaintive murmur. “Nuh-nuh. Yuh-yuh-yuh. Nuh nuh!” These latest models could accelerate communication to the point where the body had trouble keeping up. “Nuh-nuh nuh.” It sounded more like code than language. Oliver watched, transfixed, then cautiously edged out of Ed’s sight line, slipped to the side, and left.

***

Outside, Cass was waiting by the fountains. When she saw him, she jumped up, waving both arms dramatically. “Run!” she yelled. “They’re after you!”

Oliver thought she was teasing, but he didn’t take the time to check. Without the headset, anything could have been going on behind him: Ed’s SWAT team mobilized, stun drones overhead. He took off after Cass, dodging pedestrians, his shoes slapping the sidewalk like each step was trying to jumpstart his heart. He didn’t know which way they were going, or why, but he blundered on, and soon they came to the avenue, and the sight of the leafy park beyond it gave him a burst of acceleration. The avenue was crowded with traffic, but he didn’t pause, charging after Cass, weaving and ducking through the closed ranks of metal and glass. He caught a glimpse of an undercarriage, a gust of ozone and heat, one passenger, eye wild, jolted from her revery and pawing for manual override. This would have made Oliver laugh if he had any breath for laughing. Then he was past, still trailing Cass, back to the sidewalk, vaulting a low stone wall, crashing though underbrush, up a slope and out into the blessed space of the reservoir.

There, Cass stopped. She had her hands to her knees, gasping and laughing. She tilted back and howled at the sky—part triumph, part raw animal defiance. People looked around, confused, saw nothing, returned to their internal immersion. Cass sat on the cinders, tears of pleasure on her cheeks. “Oh, Ollie!” she said. “You should see your face.”

“I should?” All afternoon he had feared encountering a mirror—now he wondered if it might be okay.

“Absolutely. You look amazing. What did you get?”

Oliver handed her the photograph. Cass studied it, bowed until Oliver wondered whether he had made some mistake. But when she looked up, she was pleased. She also looked tired, and older. “It’s perfect,” she said. “That’s exactly why we’re doing this.”

“What’s next?” Oliver was dancing from foot to foot, adrenaline still pumping through his veins. He considered leaning back and howling at the sky, like Cass had, but decided he wasn’t ready for that. But he definitely wanted more.

“That depends.” Cass got up and rummaged in her bag. She turned and tossed him the lumpy pouch. “You can put that back on now.”

“I can?” He felt weirdly confused. All afternoon he had been desperate to get the headset back; it had been the single, bright focus in the corner of his brain. But now he hesitated.

“Yup. The quest is done.” Cass came close and put both her hands on his shoulders and studied him, and Oliver had to refrain from flinching and pulling away. It was unsettling to see someone like this, so close, without filters, and to know that they were seeing you like that too. It was terrifying, really. But it was also exciting. “You can put it back on,” said Cass. “And in a day or two, all this will be just a dream.” She motioned at the lake, the sky. He was pretty sure she was referring to something larger. “Or . . .” She rummaged in her bag again. “You could try this, instead.” She handed him the small flat box that she had kept as his prize. “You did it, Ollie. You leveled up.”

“I did?” Her tone didn’t sit right. “But I’ll see you tomorrow, at the lab, won’t I?”

“No. I’m through with that place. I have a new assignment.” She slung her bag over her shoulder and looked around, checking to see if she had forgotten anything. Then she faced him directly and laughed at his befuddled expression. “Don’t worry, Ollie, you’ll be okay. Use the headset to get home, if you need to. Or maybe try getting there without it.” She winked like they shared something, then she nodded once more, turned, and loped away in her odd bandy-legged fashion, and Oliver had to restrain himself from calling or chasing after her, filled by a sudden certainty that he would never see her again. He had no way to contact her. He caught one last flicker of her sweatshirt through the foliage, but that might have been a mirage of the light. Then she was gone.

Oliver turned the lumpy pouch in his hands. It was true, what she said. He could put the headset back on and everything would go back to normal, make sense again. But maybe he would wait a little longer. Maybe he really would try to get home without it. The concept was so ridiculous that it brought a quack of laughter out of his throat. He covered his mouth, surprised at the sound. Nobody had noticed. But maybe he would try it anyway; why not? Oliver put the pouch down on the ground and studied the small box she had given him, instead. It was flat and rectangular, and it hinged like a jewelry case. When he opened it, he found a thin, flat, glossy black card inside. On one side was Ed’s name, printed in simple block font. On the other: a robot skull with x-ed–out eyes and an evil, leering grin. He snapped the box shut and looked around, his face hot. The path was far from deserted—there were joggers and tourists nearby, a couple of mothers chatting and bumping infants in floating prams. Anyone might have seen what he washolding and would call the authorities, have him arrested, worse. Then he relaxed. That wouldn’t happen. He still was invisible.

Oliver put the box in his jacket pocket and turned and rested his hands on the iron fence. In front of him, the reservoir stretched away: a wide, dark, silken expanse reflecting sky and clouds. Beyond this, the city rose—layer upon layer of spires and towers twinkling in the fading light, each one more complex and mysterious than the last. All this might be just a dream. That’s what Cass had said. But she was wrong about that. There were many things that Oliver didn’t understand, yet, but one thing he knew for sure: he had never been so wide awake.

***

Mathew Lebowitz is a designer, futurist, member of The Long Now (longnow.org), and writer of speculative fiction that explores the shaky alliance between humans and machines. He received an MFA in Fiction Writing from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has stories in The Baffler, the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and other magazines. He’s a grateful recipient of the Mass Cultural Council Artist Fellowship Grant for Fiction. His alien spaceship blueprint-inspired doodles can be found on Instagram: @mathatter. More info: mathewlebowitz.com.