Blast | February 26, 2026

“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.