by ed. Pela Via
“I Tabitha.” Unblinking. She looked at the twins.
“Will you be Tabby?” Tilly asked.
Tabitha shrugged.
The afternoon passed untying the pieces from the tree. The yard became a giant chessboard of slowly reassembling dolls.
Tabitha looked up, her twin was gone.
The little girl wandered the rows of fragments, a plastic arm in hand.
Searching room to room, Tabitha finally stopped at the doorway she had not crossed in years.
The broken glass had disappeared, the wood floor glowed bright honey. The cradle in the corner was empty, and the curtains reached inwards, offering their wispy shadows.
Shaking, she climbed through the open window onto the roof.
Tilly stood near the chimney, hair loose and blown into the exact shape of a gingko leaf. Urn in one hand, lid in the other.
Approaching carefully, quietly, Tabitha extended a spidery arm to meet her sister’s.
The metal container was the size and heft of a baby bottle when she wrapped her clammy fingers around it. Before thinking twice, Tabitha flipped her wrist and swung her arm in a wide arc, tearing a gash in time and space.
A rainbow of ashes caught in the wind, tossed into the branches of the tree. Rustling leaves spread them further. Some drifted into the old sandbox, but that was okay.
Below, the child Tabitha saw the twins on the roof, jumped up and down, and clapped her hands.
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Mantodea
by Matt Bell
From across the bar, I couldn’t stop staring at her, at that breathtaking mouth of hers. Obviously as orally obsessed as I was, she filled that laughing cavity with whatever was close at hand: lime wedges, olives, tiny black straws she chewed between cigarettes. Gallons of vodka or gin, I couldn’t see which. She cracked ice cubes between strong white teeth, the sound audible even above the jukebox and the clatter and clack of pool balls coming together, spiraling apart. I wanted to stick my fist in there, to get her bright red lipstick all over my watchband.
Getting up from my table in the corner, I steadied myself on chair backs and unoffered shoulders. The floor was the sticky history of a thousand spilled nights, and other couples danced between the pool tables and the bathrooms, their shoes making flypaper two-steps to the country-western songs spilling from the jukebox. I weaved between them until I reached the bar, where I took the stool beside the woman.
I lit a cigarette, signaled the bartender for another whiskey with a raised pair of fingers. From up close, the woman was all mouth, the rest of her thin, too thin, hungry and lean like cancer. I wondered about the nutritional value of her life, of everything that passed through the furious red smear of her lips. I imagined both our mouths working furiously on each other, kissing with jaws unhinged as snakes.
I turned toward her, lifted my glass. Tried to remember how to smile without opening my mouth. Felt I probably wasn’t doing it exactly right.
Her own mouth said, Whatever it is you’re thinking of saying, it’s probably the wrong thing.
I waited before I responded. Waited until the urge passed to tell her about my old life, about all that I swallowed in the months before the hospital. I wanted to tell her though. Wanted to tell her about the coins and thumbtacks and staples. The handfuls of dirt and crushed light bulbs.
I wanted to tell her that like a lot of poisons you might eat, you have to swallow a lot more drain cleaner than you’d expect, if you’re trying to kill yourself. At least, the stuff hadn’t worked on me, not as I’d once hoped it would.
What it had done was clear me out, get rid of all kinds of things that had once been stuck inside of me. That had backed me up.
What it had done was take away my lower intestine, give me a short throw of a colon that couldn’t handle spicy food or even most solids. No citrus or tomatoes. No milk or milk products.
This new body, it wasn’t supposed to be exposed to alcohol, but giving up the booze was never really an option.
What I said to her instead was, I like watching you eat, drink.
I want to buy you a meal.
A meal with courses. Appetizer. Soup. Salad. Fish. Meat. Miniature loaves of bread with mounded pats of butter.
I said, I want to watch you eat desserts that you have to chew and chew. Taffy. Caramels. I want to give you hard candies to suck thin and crush between your molars.
I said, I’d lick all the sticky sugar off your teeth for hours, if you wanted me to.
Her mouth laughed, said, The only meals I eat I find at the bottom of cocktail glasses.
She fished her olive from under her ice cubes and popped it into her mouth, then licked clear liquor off her dripping fingers. I watched a single drop spill down the back of her hand, trace the blue ridge of a vein from knuckle to wrist. I laughed too, but with a hand over my mouth, hiding the teeth destroyed by chewing steel, the gums peeled black by the Drano. She reached over and pulled my hand down, saying, When I was a little girl, I thought mastication and masturbation were exactly the same word.
She had a disorienting smile, and for a moment I didn’t know who was aggressing who. She laughed again, slipped off the barstool with a swish of skirt. Drained her glass.
Her mouth said, It’s not love at first sight, but it is something, isn’t it?
She walked away, past the pool tables and the dancing couples, their temporary lusts. I watched as she pushed through the swing of the bathroom door. I stubbed out my cigarette, finished my drink, then walked toward the bathroom myself, my guts burning and my throat scratched with smoke, my brain brave and dumb as a lizard’s. I put my hand on the cool metal panel of the bathroom door. I pushed.
The bathroom was two stalls and a single sink beneath an empty frame that once held a mirror presumably busted by some drunken stumble. She was inside the near stall, the smaller one. There was less room to move than there would have been in the handicapped stall, but there was enough.
The door wouldn’t lock, but I didn’t care. Her back was to me, that glorious mouth seen only briefly when she looked over her shoulder, the wet slash of her lips framed by the toss of her chopped blond hair. I wanted her to turn around, but I thought she was teasing me, even though she wanted what I wanted or something close enough to count. She didn’t look back again, just put her hands against the slick tile wall, planted her feet on each side of the toilet. Waited for me. When I got close, the nape of her neck smelled like bad habits, tasted worse. I didn’t care. I wasn’t there to feel nice. Neither of us were. She flinched slightly at the sound of my belt buckle striking the porcelain toilet seat, then asked me my name. I whispered a fake one, then told her the truth when she asked me to repeat myself, knowing she’d assume it was a lie.
Right before I finished, I felt her back arch toward me, felt her hands reaching for my face, pulling it close to hers. Her mouth opened, taking in my cheeks then my nose then my right eye, the whole side of my mouth. I felt her teeth tugging at the scratchy pouch between my ear and my jaw line, wanted her to keep going, to keep devouring me until I was gone.
I’d once thought I wanted to eat something that could end me, but now I knew I really wanted something else, something approximately the opposite. Something this woman could give me.
Later, after it was over, I realized she’d wanted the same thing, that I’d failed her by not tearing her to pieces, by not taking her inside me one bite at a time.
Too focused on myself, what I thought instead—right before I pulled out of her, before she pushed me against the stall divider with her tiny wrists full of their fragile bird bones, and definitely before she slipped past me without giving me the last kiss I so desperately wanted—what I thought then was, This one time will never be enough.
Still misunderstanding everything, what I said was, I’m going to need to see you again.
Her mouth laughed as she exited the bathroom, the sound so loud my ears were already ringing by the time I got my pants up. I rac
ed after her, out of the bar and into the cold parking lot, where I lost her to the night’s thick blanket of confusion, its sharp starlight and fuzzed out streetlamps.
I waited for the sound to stop, and eventually it did. Nothing she’d done would turn out to be permanent. Her smell would be gone by morning, and the teeth marks on my face would take less than a week to scab over and then, to my terror, heal completely.
For the first time in months, I went home to my apartment and emptied the kitchen junk drawer onto the dining table. I picked up the tiny nails and paper clips and stubs of pencils and erasers and whatever else I could find and then I jammed them into my system. I considered pouring myself a drink, then stopped and took a long hot swallow from the bottle. I smashed the unnecessary tumbler on the corner of the counter, watched as the cheap glass shattered everywhere. Stepping carefully so as not to cut my bare feet, I picked up the most wicked shard I could find. I held it in my hand, then set it in my mouth, rested it on my tongue. I swallowed hard, and when I didn’t die I went back for more.
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All the Acid in the World
by Gavin Pate
Sunshine
At thirteen they made the pact, swore they’d reign forever. The Acid King and Queen. He told her you have to do it this way, taking off his clothes in the middle of the woods and folding them on a patch of pine, because it’s ritual, it shows a way to God. She nodded and peeled herself naked. He tried not to look at those freckled breasts, knowing she knew he was looking just the same. They couldn’t hide anything.
This is ceremony.
She said she knew that too.
They scored the yellow blotter from her cousin’s friend, the one who said it would burn right through their brains. No matter. They already couldn’t concentrate in class, couldn’t stop drinking their parents’ liquor, couldn’t wait the three months before they’d be policed at 4:00 a.m. in the orange chairs of the elementary school, Wizard of Oz singing Dark Side of the Moon off some teacher’s VCR.
In the woods they held each other’s hands and the trees bent into a portal blowing a voice through their flesh. She came down talking of a tunnel in her grandmother’s basement, that behind a bookshelf burrowed not into the middle of the earth, but a secret passageway to the second floor restroom of JC Penneys. He said God lived in the dirt, and she agreed, said Hippo Penis, and they found laughter everlasting under the cap of a small red tree.
Mostly he rode his bike past her house morning and night tasting the air that watched her window and not feeling the crucible already hanging from his neck.
Escher
Fifteen.
The stairways went up and down and came around to beetles and fish, open panes of window glass dripping soaked and drowned.
She hung posters in her room, he drew imitations on the desks.
The hits were big—MC Eschers under their eyelids—and they went to class, laughed off lessons, learned walls can cry and breathe.
They ran away from home and stole her grandmother’s Maxima with the factory equalizer and Guns N’ Roses all the way to the beach, a mix tape with nothing but Sweet Child o’ Mine and November Rain over and over again.
But later he’d remember not the strips of Eschers they ate like Twizzlers, but the way she willed their car into space and took him in a Motel 6, her hands showing him there were still some beautiful things.
He could look right through her skull.
She could taste him in her throat.
The Eschers got bigger, stronger, and sometimes he worried the acid would be too much.
Next thing they’re at the 7-Eleven and she’s just gotten her license and leaves the car idling outside. Somehow she’s arguing with the clerk, her purple batik skirt washing away the white light, saying the rotisserie dogs are cold, the nacho cheese is runny, and by the way, where’s the secret passage to the world under the sea? And there he is, his pupils wide as quarters, saying he’s found it, right here beneath the Pennzoil display. Somewhere in the distance a clerk is saying Hey now, Hey now, and the words slip away even as they’re said. Backing up, spreading his arms like Jesus Christ. At a full sprint he dives into the portal. Wow, she says. Wow, Wow, Wow. The bottom of the ocean shoots out of the hole, drips from the ceiling, spills from his scraggly blond hair. The clerk with a mop like a baseball bat, trying not to slip, pursuing and tumbling through the aisles. And because no one ever noticed, she rolls up the celebrity magazines and sidles out the door.
It was easy to blame the Eschers.
They found a way to hold hands at psychic distances and push their fingers safely through one another’s skin. And he’d only just started to say there had to be another way, as something made her smile, laugh, even as he knew it wasn’t funny anymore.
We’re made of plastic, she said, her face in her hands.
To prove it: a shard of glass he’d found the universe in, an anatomy lesson of flesh and blood.
Later during the three-day hold, the ER wouldn’t believe he’d done it for all the right reasons: not because he loathed himself or wanted to die, but because he loved.
There’s a way to lose yourself completely.
Which got his hold bumped to a week.
Microdots
This is when senior year never happened, when the holds and evals are steady and predictable, when she’s in his room, showing him the acceptance to a college he swears does not exist.
From the Carmex container he dumps the purple microdots like caviar between.
To celebrate.
To push them all the way.
But she had given it up, too much unhinging the final door, coming too close to the God they’d been looking for all along. And she wasn’t ready.
But there she is, eating acid all the same.
They stare at the acceptance letter written in a language he lost in a swirl of mental pixels by November of eleventh grade.
She tells him not to apologize or abdicate the throne.
He doesn’t say it was always more than a pact, and she doesn’t say he never has to.
Jesus Christ on a motorcycle: these hits are really strong.
The thing with acid is this. It’s you in there, always has been, and just now, for this time, while your hand does cartwheels and your mind can’t hold the seconds together tight enough, even then it’s you.
Their clothes folded on floor instead of pine, their legs crabbed together, her hand in his stringy yellow hair.
They want me on medication.
Medication
Not like this.
The place where his laugh once was is disappearing.
Heavy.
She can see the word fall right through the floor.
Heavy.
Her neck elastic now, his hands working. She slips him inside and feels him crying Houses of the Holy and Wish You Were Here.
This is when you remember it’s dangerous to feel too much.
He snakes through and she lolls her head back and forth. It rushes between: what her mom’s boyfriend said he didn’t do when she was twelve, what his dad had said so often in whispers and in rage.
So many ways to use a voice.
It wasn’t about God, either. All the acid in the world. Because she saw through it that time they ran away, Guns N’ Roses for 200 miles, his hand on her neck like maybe, just maybe, her head would dislodge and fly out the sunroof, and there he’d be, trying to explain to cops, parents, everyone, why she’s lost her mind.
In the truck stop with the rigs lined like caskets, the smell of gas and yellow light, their seats reclined, the sunroof open, the night wide and forever above: they were too far already to double back. Dawn would beat them home and their parents would know the kids were not all right.
Sunshine, Escher, Microdots.
It gets into the hair, seeps into the spine.
He plucks one deep, the grey matter clinging to the follicle. She pushes her fingers through his neck, dips the hair int
o the spinal fluid, and they suck both ends like nectar from honeysuckle on a hot August day.
But that’s not what’s he’s saying with the acceptance letter still unread.
It’s about a squirrel.
Somewhere he remembers to roll down a window, clear his throat and spit.
She moves their hands, finds what might be a constellation and follows it to design. Gods and humans, November Rain again and again. A truck shifts into gear and a sun, their sun, blinks on the horizon.
Squirrels, microdots, medication.
Somewhere there are parents in an argument about who their children are.
It’s really about how he and his brother trapped the squirrel at the bottom of the outside stairs, the ones with the three stone walls that led to the basement, and how the brother, older, already gone, didn’t have to say anything to start the exercise, didn’t have to explain why to the twelve year-old at his side.
There’s a tunnel, don’t you understand? And when we find it we can get away.
Their hands on the emergency break together, he tells her this is my family.
His brother who chased the squirrel into the pit, and how all he had to do was nod at their father’s unused pitchfork beside the never-yet-strewn pine straw, the one his dad brought home, drunk, loud, standing in the front door with the porch light’s silhouette casting him across the room.
Only a perfect throw would do, gravity and patience, aim and will.
Afterwards they didn’t even bury it, just his brother slapping his shoulder, reciting lines from movies that never got made.
Already he knew God would stop listening and it didn’t matter from here on out—what he did, how hard he looked—the world would hide its beauty.
They leave the truck stop, hole up in the Motel 6, and she tries everything she can to show him how to find it, swearing up and down that they will be enough.
But this is when she’s not in the basement and losing her mind and crying on microdots, but when she’s alone and crying at the face he couldn’t shake, the one candle lit in the mirror, him picking at the corner of his pupils that refused to ever shrink, and she, rushing at him with the cup of water, trying to extinguish the candle and the mirror and everyway his face suggests all that has gone wrong.
