because we are always eating and drinking and consuming the dyes — who cares
BLUE 1 (brilliant blue)
Blue candy is the best. Blue gummy bears, lollipops, Italian ice. Raspberry. And blue raspberries aren’t even real. Whatever. They got me, man. I remember drinking melted ice pop liquid. Drinking the spicy sauce of a frozen blue glow-stick, mom calling poison control, and it’s all fine. No superpowers. No blue glow. I’d do anything to drown the earth in blue, to make blue raspberries real. Sitting in my room at night shoving skittles and gummy bears and ice cream and sucking 13 lollipops at once mixing a beautiful, brilliant blue alchemical potion inside a comically large brew. Crying. Begging for more blue. It seems this food dye causes kidney tumors in mice. That’s fine.
I’ll give you my kidney, really.
I would.
***
RED 40 (ALLURA RED)
I never understood why “red” cars were meant to be “faster”. Boldness. Passion. Whatever. Pharmaceutical companies make their medications certain colors, abiding by the “psychology of color.” I don’t think any of my medications are red. Mostly blue. White. Orange. Yellow. Pink.
I remember learning that uh, the old red dyes were made out of squashed bugs. I was on some field trip. St. Augustine. An old medical center. I remember asking: “How long did it take to saw off his leg, with that thing? Did it hurt? Does it all hurt, for everyone, all the time?” Mom wasn’t there. She was working, always.
Apparently there’s some other fucked up version of Red Dye 40 that is combined with aluminum.
Aluminum. Smoked so much aluminum as a kid. It accelerates nerve sensitivity and hyperactivity in children apparently. Doubt it had any impact on me. Aluminum in my lungs. Microplastics in my balls. 14 medications fighting for ownership over my brain. Aluminum and ground pig feet in my jell-o. Crushed bugs.
I love you, Mom.
I’m sorry.
***
YELLOW #5 (TARTRAZINE)
They did these lab tests on rats. Rats. Always mice, rats. Rest in peace Algernon. They made this configuration where a rat im a room would be given two hallways to access. One with food. One with a morphine drip. And they always chose the morphine, of course they did. Of course they did. Emaciated, crawling. Some bespectacled lab coat hovering above, watching, God watching us, dying, our tongues out. Lapping at the beautiful, tartrazine colored nectar.
All the rats of NIMH, dead and forgotten. Dying addicts. Starved. Mutilated. Vivesected.
Sunsets and sunflowers and summer. Foul. Lemon cake? Foul. Smiley faces and yellow sneakers. Bees. Wasps. It’s in Red Bull I think. Whatever. My organs are all melting, always, forever on the brink of spontaneous combustion.
C16H9N4Na3O9S2. After three hours of exposure, yellow 5 caused damage to human white blood cells in every concentration tested. Cells damaged in the highest concentration were unable to heal themselves.
There was this other lab rat test I think about a lot. The one where they learn to help each other. A rat is trapped in some sick fucked up contraption. It learns how to escape. When a rat who has learned the trick next to another rat, a new one, with both under duress, once free, the learned rat will rush to free this new one. They aren’t friends. They don’t know each other.
I’m just glad Algernon never died a dope fiend. He died with respect. Beautiful, innocent.
Excuse me, I must place tartrazine colored flowers on his grave.
I broke my ankle on Super Bowl Sunday because I slipped on the ice in my driveway while bringing in the groceries and bidding on wrestling cards on my phone at the same time. It was an embarrassing accident, to say the least, one that kept me at home on the couch, unable to drive myself to work, make dinner, or go up and down the stairs by myself.
I hadn’t left the house in over a week, until my partner took pity on me and drove me around our neighborhood like an old, wounded dog about to get put to sleep. Our mailman saw me as I struggled to get out of the car, comically large orthopedic boot on my right leg, crutches wedged in my armpits.
“Are you ok?” he asked. I told him I broke my ankle and the mailman told me that Joe Rogan recommends I eat deer meat. “Lots of deer meat,” he said, “because deer are fast and have more protein,” unlike slovenly pigs and cows, he added, and eating deer meat would heal my broken bone faster. He claimed he once had a broken hand that his doctor told him would take six months to heal, but he ate lots of deer meat and was better in three, then he told me which of my neighbors had ring cameras, and which would be easier to have packages stolen off their porch.
“Thanks, I’ll try the venison,” I said, tucking away his suggestion to rip-off my neighbors, and was reminded of my mother, who treated her bulimia-induced anemia by eating liverwurst and braunschweiger sandwiches (for the iron, of course). I hadn’t gone deer hunting since I was sixteen and I wasn’t sure I could even find deer meat where I lived, aside from fetid piles of roadkill or the occasional bag of venison jerky, but I suddenly had a craving for succulent, milk-fed veal.
When I was a kid, my favorite food was veal parmesan, so rich and morally dubious, but I never had it homemade, despite my mother’s Italian roots. Every once in a while, my mom would splurge and buy a tray of frozen Stouffer’s Veal Parmigiana, and it made any meal feel like a bacchanal.
One time, my step-grandparents took me and my little brother out for lunch at Country Kitchen and told us we could order anything we wanted on the menu. My step-grandparents ordered ribeye steak and onions, well done, with pools of Hunt’s ketchup, my brother chicken tenders, and I, the adopted bastard, didn’t hesitate to order the veal parmesan. Upon hearing my order, my Scandinavian step-grandmother scanned the laminated menu and recoiled, “The most expensive thing on the menu,” and my fat face burned with shame.
“I’m not cooking venison,” my partner said as she helped me hobble up the front stairs, and I asked, “Well, do you think Stouffer’s still makes a veal parmesan?”
Waffle House is open 24/7/365. No exceptions. Waffle House will keep serving when the South falls again. Waffle House will be open when Chick-Fil-A gets raptured. Waffle House has a dedication that makes the Marines look like amateurs. At Waffle House you can get your hashbrowns:
Smothered Covered Chunked Diced Peppered Capped Topped Country & All The Way
I haven’t tried them all, but I’ve tried a couple.
I. Smothered & Covered: Lincolnton, NC
I was maybe fourteen, sitting with my Dad in a booth in my hometown. Behind us, a woman was yelling at her friend.
“I told her ‘he’s thirty-seven, you’re seventeen, good luck honey, he’s just gonna leave you for someone younger.’”
The next time we were there together, the waitress and a guy from out in the county were talking.
“How’s your day goin?” he asks.
“Oh not too good, I was backing out of the driveway on my way over here and I ran over my little dawg. It was just pitiful, you know. My husband had to shoot him.”
The last time I remember going to Waffle House with my Dad, we were there with my little brother because my Mom was out of town. I think we ate Waffle House four nights that week. It was the miserable time of the Carolina winter where it dumps rain and the days are still short. The world felt like hunger. The only other people in the restaurant were a couple and their young son. He kept running back and forth to the jukebox, putting on songs, dancing. He was husky, and he was swinging his hips like late-career Elvis. The kid was born to be a star. Finally, he put “Let’s Get It On” on the box and, as we all avoided eye contact for three-odd minutes, entered a world of soul only available to the motown greats and chubby white kids, and the world felt less hollow.
II. Diced: Harrisonburg, Virginia
I met Cary for the first time at her house in Harrisonburg. I was two hours late because I didn’t have a car, and my ride to town got lost during Army ROTC training. We went to lunch at Waffle House. The waitress told us about Jesus, her grandbabies, and overcoming meth. After lunch, Cary had work until eleven at the nicest restaurant in town, which, surprisingly, wasn’t Waffle House. I had homework, so I posted up at the library to knock it out. The library closed at nine, and I got kicked out, so I relocated to Starbucks, which closed at eleven. Eleven came. No word from Cary. I was 20 and couldn’t get into the bars. Everywhere else was closed. Wintry mix was spitting down outside. I only had one place to go.
I downed cup after cup of coffee and ate two eggs and hashbrowns. I called my ride. His girlfriend told me he was asleep. I called Tony, who was partying in town. Tony didn’t pick up, because Tony’s a dick. I chatted with another waitress about nothing and watched the drunk crowd trickle in. Two old folks with their grandbaby walked in at two. I was resigned to the fact that I would stay there until dawn. At three, Cary asked me where I was. I told her. She drove over and I met her outside. She’d been caught up at work, she told me: private party, phone died, closing bullshit. I’d had about ten cups of coffee, and I sat in her passenger seat bugging out as we drove back to her house. There wasn’t a second date. I’ll always regret not staying at that Waffle House.
III. Chopped: Southwest Virginia
My roommates, friends, and I usually crammed into a booth on Sunday morning, feeling less than holy. Somebody always brought up the time that some guy tried to pay my roommate Jim to have sex with his wife on camera in a Waffle House bathroom. It was actually an IHOP, because Waffle House is a family establishment, but the story sounds better when you say it happened there.
IV. Peppered: Southwest Virginia, Again
The summer after I graduated, I met one of my professors at Waffle House. He gave me a notebook to take with me when I left for the next chapter of my life. He told me to write in it. I filled it with attempted budgets, workout logs, and to-do lists. The literature of life, some might say, but they’d be wrong. I just wasted a nice notebook.
V. All the Way: Southwest Virginia, the Last Time
The first time I met Anne she was wearing bandages around her arms because she had poison ivy real bad. I didn’t care. She said it made her look meth-head pretty. We rolled around the backroads of the national forest and talked about the summer camp and flower farm where she used to work. Her dead chicken named Boob. Weird Southern childhood memories. She bought 40s and we drank them while cruising. We listened to Rick Ross, who was hospitalized at the time, and Townes Van Zandt. We desecrated a Baptist church parking lot and I ripped my pants down the crotch. At the end of the night, too hungry to give a shit, we hit up the only place open at five. I almost fell asleep in my steak & eggs, and then she dropped me off and headed back home over the mountain. It was the first of many trips.
I can only think of one other Waffle House memory with her. Near the end, hungover after her friend’s birthday party in northern Virginia. Laughing at the table with them all, then riding back south with her through the fog, knowing it was all coming to a close and it wouldn’t be good for either of us. I have a lot of other memories of non-chain diners with her, from New Orleans to DC. But I don’t really want to think about those, and this essay was about Waffle House.
Sy Holmes is a writer from western North Carolina. He lives in central Montana with other people’s dogs.
The man that taught me to read proper was a fairly distinguished professor in Indiana University’s Comparative Literature department. He was held in well enough regard to have been trusted not only to teach rhyme-blind wannabees like myself, but also to have been given the King James Bible by Norton for to clean up. I do not know if he’s still alive. All I know is he could turn a line of Wallace Stevens into an uninterruptible two-hour lecture. That ancient and corduroyed exegete held it as gospel that ‘Poetry is language operating at its maximum capacity…’—but, this Irvin fella’s gotta gun and says I ought to write about his book, not my incomplete course of study.
In so far as language’s capacity is concerned, you’d be hard-pressed to find four words more full-up (which is to avoid saying loaded) than Graham Irvin’s titular declaration—I Have a Gun. To riff on Irvin’s premise: a six-shooter revolver, of whatever make and model you wish, is only at its maximum capacity when it’s loaded. Unloaded, it’s a paperweight at worst, a blunt impact weapon at its best; it could perhaps also be, depending on the owner’s temperament, decorative, a keepsake, a hollow intimidation, or, hell, a phallic compensation. These are all aspects of Graham’s object, and I Have a Gun explores most of them in a fashion that is obsessively thorough. This example, though, this loaded pistol doing its damnedest, doesn’t quite hit on capacity the way I mean to make it mean in terms of Poetry…
I had a gun. I’ve had several, being honest. But only one stands as metaphor for the spirit of Irvin’s text—indulge me here, Graham, keep that finger off the trigger if you can, I’m building something here—the gun I had was an Ithaca 12-guage. I got it for my twelfth birthday, I believe. My father and I bought it at a pawn shop in Statesboro, Georgia. Special thing about it, other than its being mine and significant for that fact alone, was that it came unplugged. This is some illegal ass hick shit, but keeping it short, unplugged means the sucker was modified in such a way that I could load it past the legal limit of three shells. I think it was nine I could get in there at a time, maybe twelve… depends on how big a boy you are. Another uncommon feature was its slam-action. No pump, jack in the next shell, and pull the trigger. Just pull the trigger, Boom!, hold the trigger and pump until she’s emptied out. Last thing, the monster didn’t have a choke, just raw cylinder, so the shot come out spread all the way from the get—That gun was Poetry. Nothing added to it, just shit taken off it—unplugged, unchoked, unsafe—paired down to its maximum capacity.
This is the fundamental strength of Irvin’s project—this pairing down. Irvin truly understands his subject’s immediacy. His central image, the gun of whatever changing sort, is an object jam-packed not only with meaning, but with consequence. The title’s threat serves a time-breaking, future-opening function of fantasy. Once the gun is, once the poet has given it to himself, and once he’s told us he’s got it, there’s not much more that needs to be said. Irvin’s poetry, line by line, keeps itself lean for this sake. All that needs naked utterance is, and will always be, ‘I have a gun.’
True or not, this utterance shatters the world. Irvin plays his game among the broken pieces of a formerly placid reality. Threat leveled, the first three sections of Irvin’s collection do the work to parse out every register his four frightful words, culminating—to my reading—in a longer poem nestled in the third section:
‘…but it’s all for naught since they’ve shriveled [re: the narrator’s testicles] to butter beans because there’s an inherent well-established inarguable customer-worker hierarchy if only there was a way to change this maybe a gun ha ha I don’t know it could work maybe…’
If only a gun—then everything would turn out as it ought to. The fantasy. The presence of a powerful object to immediately render null the world as it’s come to be, to further shape it in the image of the weapon’s wielder.
Now Irvin gets to the real work: What of this fantasy? The metaphor of the gun falters for there being, in reality and among the living, guns and bodies left bleeding.
Onward from the fourth section of his collection Irvin sets about a blending of form—The opening salvo of which is a jarring dip into prose. There’s an oft-quoted sentiment from Faulkner about the hierarchy of literary form, something along the lines of every prose writer being a failed poet; if I am to be critically transparent, it must be said here that this sudden eruption of prosaic languor in a work so swift and terse was not warmly greeted by my reading. But Irvin’d made an ironclad case toward trusting him in the first chunks of his book, so any kind reader must continue on and follow the man… He’s got a gun, after all. Do as he says, and no one gets hurt.
I hold it as a sacred tenet that the prime responsibility of the poet is to do as Whitman does with himself on the Brooklyn Ferry: Make one’s subject universal. Metaphor is the force in language which stitches the pieces of reality into its whole—it makes the one many and the many one. This is no small task. Even with this conviction held tight, pushing through Irvin’s sudden change in mode, the feeling that the poet has in some way failed ebbs to ease.
The gun’s potential as poetic object—once we’ve taken every dick joke and run the gauntlet of comic violence—must come into question. The limits of the thing must be dealt with. A gun is no rose, it is no image on a Grecian urn… No crucifixion… No road less traveled…
From the recurring character of a Belgian arms manufacturer during Nazi occupation to tender personal history, Irvin drags us through the shift from myth to experience, then from narrative to data. This is Irvin’s greatest turn: Instead of rendering the gun as any other poet would, somehow making it mean everything, he shows us its banality, its ever-presence in our culture and history. Irvin need not universalize the gun—it is imminent. It is already a small, angry god.
By the end, as if the lowering of register from Poetry to Prose wasn’t heartbreaking enough, Graham starts to list. For the sake of fun ranking games, the List must be the lowest of forms. Those that do it well, that string together innumerable word-objects in a manner that is at all compelling, are hard to find and often, if at all modern, of an ancienter temperament—Whitman, again, comes to mind. Robert Burton may be the ultimate master of the list, but I’ll never finish his book. Irvin is aware of his list’s banality, popping in occasionally to check on the reader, taunt them, plead with them to just keep going and allow the information to sink in. Gun against your head, don’t stop reading:
‘…On January 18, one person was killed in a mass shooting. On January 19, three people were killed in a mass shooting. Do you feel a cognitive dissonance between the word “mass” and the number “one?” On January 23, ten people were killed in a mass shooting. I know what you’re thinking: “Thank God I get to properly mourn.” On January 27, one person was killed in a mass shooting…’
There’s no small amount of grace between Irvin and his reader. He’s chosen a tricky subject, and his voice is not one that comforts. Though the book comes to final rest with a series of haiku, formatted as to seem afloat on the page, the project continues on his Twitter:
And the joke comes full circle. The gun is everywhere. It is our reality. Nothing near a poem…
You can put it down now, Graham. I’ve finished. I liked the book. Quite a lot.
Easy does it…
K Hank Jost is a writer of fiction born in Texas and raised in Georgia. He believes language is the only remaining commons, and through its meaningful deployment all lost commons may be rendered fresh. He is the author of the novel-in-stories Deselections, the novel MadStone, and is editor-in-chief of the literary quarterly A Common Well Journal–produced and published by Whiskey Tit Books. His fiction and poetry have been recently featured in Vol.1 Brooklyn, The Burning Palace, and Hobart. He is currently seeking representation for his newest novel, Aquarium, while he works on his fourth book. He has led fiction workshops at the Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research and writes event reviews for the New Haven Independent. Residing in Brooklyn with his partner, he reads as much as he can, writes as much as he can, and works as much as he must. Instagram: @hank_being_a_better_ape Twitter: @hank_jost
I turn twenty-one in Budapest. My family is here, visiting me, and we go out to dinner. It is August and warm and my birthday. I wear a new dress and I order a drink. No one IDs me. I’m twenty-one, and I keep on asserting that it’s not that exciting.
There’s a story my family always recounts on my birthday, one about the day I turned eleven. My whole extended family had gathered in the living room to celebrate. Night had fallen, the gift-giving was over. We’d all eaten cake, and I’d pretended to look shy as they sang the happy birthday song. Then I’d stood up tall on the armrest of the couch, announced I had a few words to say.
“This was the best birthday ever,” I’d said. Thank you for the presents. I’d paused. Waited a beat. “I just–” I’d continued. “I just cannot help but regret my fading youth.”
The crowd must have laughed at this punchline. I’m sure I gave an impish smile. Maybe I even bowed.
And so a decade goes by and I’m in my twenties and this is the youth which everyone talks about. In my communism class, the teacher asserts, “it can be a general feeling that you are happier in your twenties then, say, in your seventies.” She’s talking about nostalgia for communism among older Hungarians but all I can think about is yesterday, in the subway, when I looked at my reflection distorted by wavy plastic and saw an old woman looking back. I write down this teacher’s words, though I’m not entirely sure why.
I keep a daily journal. Dutifully, I mark down pages, calculating how much I have to write a day to fill every single page. I put my dreams there, my night sweats, my bowel movements. It was supposed to be a memory log or perhaps even the beginning of a My Novel. Mainly, though, I paste in old receipts I find crumpled in my pockets and pretend as if I’m writing something real.
It’s hard to write something cohesive about an era you’re still in, and no one cares about My Year Abroad. But I’ve been itching to write lately and not knowing how. It’s a feeling I’m not used to; this disconnect between language and thought, a lack of rhythm, words I force together instead of simply allowing to flow out.
It must stem from limbo; from four months of a life outside the context of Myself. No strings, no tangles but that also means no anchors, no tethers between the moment and the self.
I decide I want to write fiction again. I want to tell stories and make up characters. I’m bored of the personal essay, bored of myself. I ask my mom to send me the fiction prompts she gives her students. I read through half of one, open TikTok, try to go to bed.
Sylvie Pingeon is a junior at Wesleyan University, with work featured in Expat Press, both online and in print.
Like many, I fantasize about starting a band at some point, but I don’t think that I’d be able to commit to just one—so my dream is to join a group of like-minded individuals who see themselves going out on tours under rotating monikers for every leg of the way, under relevant, and sometimes, seasonal circumstances.
Around my 31st birthday this last July, I began compiling a list of names that I found meaning in (one for every year I’ve had to endure), which would synchronistically come to mind periodically…
Do you know anyone named Dick? Well, maybe their real name is Richard, but they don’t go by Rich, Rick, or Ricky, just good old-fashioned Dick. If so, does it make you uncomfortable? Do you giggle when they introduce themselves?
Have you ever uttered the phrase, “you can suck my dick,” when someone irritates you? How has that affected you when someone special wants to literally suck your dick? Do you feel it’s extra degrading because, in addition to putting a vessel for waste disposal in their mouth, they are also committing an act that you previously deemed a killer insult?
Let’s talk about the term “dickweed.” How do you feel about that? Here’s what the Oxford Living Dictionaries have to say:
A stupid, obnoxious, or contemptible person (especially a man).
Not a bad definition, but thank goodness for Urban Dictionary and the user that goes by Phuqit. Here are Phuqit’s definitions, uploaded on October 11, 2006:
1) A completely self-absorbed, useless asshole with shit for brains;
2) A person so irredeemably stupid that their idiotic behavior causes pain to everyone that they interact with.
Personally, I think Phuqit knocked it out of the park with the first definition. A “useless asshole with shit for brains” has got to be the winner.
What if the person you know that insists going by Dick isn’t just anyone, but he’s your dad? How does that work? What if he rails against the vulgarity of society and how it has ruined his preferred nickname, but you really want to call your boss a fucking dick? You can’t escape the vulgarity, right? You could call your boss a cock, I suppose. “Hey, you fucking cock!” That doesn’t really work, does it? I mean, you need something extra on the back end, like cock gobbler or smoker. Even so, the vulgarity is ever-present, and guilt will gnaw at you because you know that you’re just substituting for dick, and it’s not like saying penis is any better.
Can you imagine talking shit about the boss with your co-workers, and you decide to bust out penis? “Wow guys, he’s being such a penis today.” They’d laugh you right out of the group. Then, sitting alone in the break room, watching your co-workers laugh and carry on, you’ll wonder why you even felt the need to compare your boss to a phallus. Your boss might be a jerk, but a dick? A prick? A cock? Why the insatiable urge for vulgarity? After all your dad, that guy named Dick, didn’t he raise you better?
T.L. States lives in Tucson with his wife and kids, and some shit he wrote can be found at Hobart and The Daily Drunk. He wastes time on Twitter as @epmornsesh
I need a place to stay for the night. I’m commuting two hours to school and can’t splurge on gas to make two trips in two days. I make a call to a friend. It’s been a while since we’ve talked. He answers in two rings. Before I can ask a favor, he tells me come over. My phone is dying. I scrawl the directions in my notebook.
I make the drive to Alameda, wondering how long it’s been since I’ve seen him. Just over a year. We were the last of six to move out. It’s dusk when I pull up to his house. His roommate lets me in and tells me he isn’t home. I call him.
He answers: “I just got home.”
I tell him I’m here.
“Are you telling me the call is coming from inside the house?”
We gasp.
I open the door, welcoming him into his own home. A good, long hug follows.
Sometimes it’s awkward seeing a friend after an extended absence. There are the people we used to be and the people we are now, and it can be hard to tell how much is left of the person we remember. Sometimes the middle section in the friendship Venn diagram gets too small to hold. Those people take up ninety percent of my Facebook feed.
That’s not what this is. This is an instance where two friends part ways for a while and pick up right where they left off. We crack jokes, talk at annoying volumes, and laugh about our failures du jour. Before long, we’re sharing books, quotes from authors who inspire us, and little snippets of our own creations.
We mack some burgs and reminisce about how we used to buy a pack of cigarettes after lectures and hate ourselves for it. It’s a reminder that we’ve grown up—in some ways.
We watch Drew Barrymore’s directorial debut, Whip It, and he rewinds the movie every time we start talking even though we’ve both seen it before. He says that if he doesn’t, we’ll miss critical character development.
It’s after one o’clock when the movie ends. We watch an episode of The Simpsons. We play a card game until 3:30. I tell him we should have blown up the air mattress earlier, but turns out he has a great air mattress. It’s got a built-in pump that’s real quiet. Before long, we’re talking about our relationships. I’m no longer crashing at a friend’s house—this is a full-blown sleepover.
Why is it that a sleepover demands that all members of the party be in pajamas and tucked in bed before talking about feelings? Maybe this is a guy thing, meaning it’s likely that emotional repression brought on by toxic masculinity has caused us to only speak truthfully about love only under a literal blanket of protection. We’re older now; we’ve seen therapists! We can talk openly about our feelings, sure, but it’s just easier when we’re cozy. The moment is not unlike when, after a long day, my dog lays on his back and lets me scratch his belly. We call it a night at 5:30, but the sun is almost up. We’re well into morning.
At 9:15, my alarm reminds me of an impending phone interview. It’s for food stamps. I scramble around the room gathering necessities. My eyelids weigh heavy, but I’m awake. I walk outside and the morning air whispers you can do anything and I believe it because I’m twenty-five and I don’t know any better. The rest of the world is worried about when a boy becomes a man. Growing up in California, I’ve only ever been a dude. But after a night of friendship, I feel like a kid again.
The plan was to drive down from the city to my mom’s place to cut the lawn, maybe do some aerating, play with the dog. She called me that morning and said her friend Smokey’s basement had flooded. Everything was wet and fucked: the carpet, the couches, the treadmill piled with rollerblades.
Smokey was crying in the garage when I showed up. Mom hugged her and she cried and cried. She put her head on Mom’s shoulder, cigarette dangling out the side of her mouth, and kept on crying. I found out later that Smokey had to put her mom in hospice two days earlier. I felt bad before and more after that. Bad things happen to good people sometimes, but lately they happen a lot.
Smokey’s real name is Cheryl, but everyone at the hospital calls her Smokey because she smokes a lot. Nicknames don’t need to be clever.
I went down to the basement and Smokey’s husband, Bob, was taking pictures for the insurance. He pointed his phone at the carpet, the couches, the treadmill piled with rollerblades. Everything smelled musty and damp. Click click click his thumb went on the phone. The shelves of books lining the walls, the soggy brown boxes of Christmas decorations.
“I needa get it all,” Bob said, “needa get every dollar.”
“You got valuables down here, Bob?”
“Nah this is all junk.”
“Cool.”
I started grabbing whatever was close and carrying it up the stairs. I moved stuff from the basement to the living room. I carried one box up the stairs. And I carried another box. I carried random stuff not in boxes up the stairs. I did this for like an hour.
This is some stuff I carried: tubs of winter coats and fake Christmas trees, bathroom rugs, shower rods, folding chairs, folding tables, family photos, photo albums, metal signs, stacks of wood, fishing poles, baseball bats, the treadmill, the rollerblades, candles, clocks, boots, gloves, a soccer ball in a milkcrate, some more candles, a mini whiteboard, and a shit ton more of candles.
I thought about what I’d be doing if it hadn’t rained: mowing grass, just doin’ lines back and forth, back and forth.
I’d do the front yard first because it was more complicated with trees and landscaping. Plus the driveway. You always want your east–to–west lines to match up on either side of the driveway. Not matching up your east–to–west lines is the sign of an amateur. My mom doesn’t care, but I do. That’s me looking out for her: my dear mother who tells me to get whatever beer I want and put it on her card, and tries to give me her credit card, even though all I drink is High Life from the bottle and have for years, and it’s like seven bucks for a twelve-pack, Mom.
That’s what I’d be doing if not for the rain. But it rained, so here I was. Here I am. Here we were.
Doin’ lines back and forth.
Sweat popped on my forehead and under my arms. My boots sloshed in the rain water that had invaded their basement. I plopped a soggy box down in the living room. It was getting crowded with junk already and there was still a lot left downstairs. This wasn’t going to work.
“Smokey,” I said. “We needa get a storage unit. Like a POD.”
She looked at the stacks of crap in her living room. She considered the boxes of the crap and unboxed crap downstairs. Then she said, “You’re right.”
So I called the storage unit places. The first place was closed. The second place’s phone just kept ringing. When I called the third place, they answered by the name of the second place. Eventually I got one to be delivered in a couple hours. In the meantime, I started moving the junk from the living room to the garage. The soggy boxes started falling apart, disintegrating into sloppy nothings.
“Smokey,” I said. “We need bins.”
She looked at the soggy boxes disintegrating into nothing. She considered the loose junk still downstairs. Then she said, “You’re right.”
“I needa go to Menards.”
I love Menards. I always save big money when I shop there. They always have what I’m looking for, and the aisles are wide and well-marked. I happened to find myself down the one with the air compressors.
They were on sale. I’d been price-checking compressors for weeks. You have no idea. An air compressor is useful for a lot of things: inflating stuff, powering a nail gun. I imagined placing the hose between my lips and filling myself with air, filling myself more and more until I was crunchy like Rice Krispies. I wanted to be inflated. I wanted to feel full.
Then a little voice in my head said Hey, you’re here for storage bins. So I went to look at the bins. I found some good sturdy ones and bought fifteen on sale for the price of ten.
I always save big money there. Always.
I came back from Menards and Bob was in the garage, moving boxes around. I watched him from the edge of the driveway for a bit. He took a box from a stack and carried it to the other side of the garage. Then he moved it a few feet over. Then he muttered something to himself and moved the box again. Then he muttered some more, this time with his hands involved. Oh shit, the little voice said, Bob’s starting to lose it. Not you too, Bob. You’re my rock. I need you to be strong, Bob. There’s so much war left to fight. Look, I just picked up some bins.
Bob saw me standing there and kind of shook his head. We both knew I’d saw what I’d saw and there was no use saying anything about it.
“I’m no good at this,” Bob said.
I set down a stack of bins and started dumping loose candles into one.
“Me either,” I said. “No one is. No one should want to be.”
I could hear Smokey yelling from inside.
Bob said, “Smokey’s starting to lose it in there. Probably good to stay out here.”
It probably was, but I went inside anyway.
Inside Smokey and my Mom stood at opposite ends of the kitchen table. My mom gave me a look like You should probably go back outside. But it was too late.
“Kevin,” Smokey said. “Do you think I should get ridda dis table?”
“Why would you get rid of your kitchen table?”
“I hate it,” Smokey said.
“But you needa kitchen table. Where you gonna eat?”
“On da floor.”
“I think you should wait,” my mom said. “Maybe sleep on it.”
“I’m not sleeping on my kitchen table.” Smokey lit a cigarette. “I’m not supposta smoke inside, but fuck it. My whole house is fucking upside down.”
I looked at the floor. I looked at the table. I looked at my mom.
“I don’t do disorder, Kevin,” Smokey yelled. “I’m organized.”
She opened the cabinet by the stove. It was full of Tupperware.
“Look at dis!” she yelled. “I keep da lids here and da bowls here.”
She took a long inhale of her cigarette.
“Everything has a home. I have AD… OCD!”
“We all have our quirks,” I said.
Smokey is really religious, so I thought about adding in something about us being God’s children, but everyone in the room would know I was bullshitting. Smokey was still showing me her cabinets. This wasn’t a time for bullshitting.
“I’m not getting enough oxygen to my brain,” she said, tipping her cigarette ash into the sink. “Don’t tell Bob I’m smoking inside.”
She collapsed into a chair. Mom rubbed her neck.
“Bob,” Smokey yelled at the ceiling.
The garage door opened and Bob poked his head in the kitchen. “What?”
“I needa pop.”
Back in the basement, I took photo albums from the shelves and stacked them in the bins. The basement walls were lined with shelves piled floor to ceiling with photo albums. You’ve never seen so many photo albums, trust me.
Smokey came down stairs, saw me putting all these photo albums in bins. “Now we’re cooking with business.”
A photo album slipped from my hand and fell open on the floor.
“Who even are these people?” I said.
Smokey looked at it.“Dat’s da neighbor kids from ’04 to ’05.”
And then she started telling me about the other ones, even though I hadn’t ask.
“Dat one dere is my niece’s volleyball games. Dis one’s of the old house. Dis one’s baby pictures from ’92.”
But then she started taking albums out of the bins.
“Aw. Dis is Jim and Nancy at one of da block parties,” Smokey said. “Dey’re divorced.”
“Who?” Bob said, coming down the stairs.
“Little Jimmy.” Smokey handed the photo to Bob.
“Little Jimmy? Nah, you mean Big Jimmy.”
“Well, the son’s taller than the dad,” I said.
“Big Jimmy is getting a divorce.”
“Been divorced,” Smokey said. “Now he’s buying da house back from her.”
“Where’s she moving?”
“I think she’s staying.”
“Staying?”
“Dey share custody of da dogs.”
I stopped listening and slammed the lid on one of the bins and started for the stairs.
I imagined dumping a bag of cut grass into a yard bin. Breathing in that grass clipping air, getting all full on cut lawn air—that’s all I wanted.
“Here’s one of you,” Smokey said.
I turned around. She had a picture of my little sister sitting on tile floor with a vacuum.
“That’s not me, that’s Liz.”
“Well here’s a picture of your sister den.”
There was my sister. A head of big brown curls. She couldn’t’ve be older than three.
“I useta run the vacuum when you kids wouldn’t stop crying.”
“That’d make us stop crying?”
“Not really, it just kinda drowned you out.”
I carried more bins up the stairs. Turn right into the kitchen, then walk sideways around the kitchen table I convinced Smokey to keep. Wedge the bin against the wall to open the garage screen door. Then out the garage to the POD. I did this for hours.
Just doin’ lines back and forth.
At some point I wandered into the utility room to find Bob fighting with the sump pump. He had his arm elbow-deep in it, a towel around his neck because he was sweating so much. He turned it over and dumped out a bunch of brown water.
“You’re not gonna to believe this,” he said, picking something off the cement floor.
“Believe what?” I said.
He showed me what was in his hand.
A soggy cigarette butt.
That’s all it took. To do all this. To do this all.
Just the ass end of a cigarette.
“Don’t tell Smokey,” Bob said. The fluorescent shop lights gleamed off his shiny forehead. “It’d break her.”
I tossed the cigarette end back in the sump pump and carried it up the stairs and outside to the trash.
I found Smokey standing under the basketball hoop smoking.
We gave each other a nod. Then she let out a long sigh and said “Yep.”
“Sorry about your mom.”
“Me too. But thank you.”
She smacked her pack of cigarettes into her palm and handed me one. I borrowed her lighter. “Don’t tell me my mom.”
We smoked and looked out at the front yard. Down the street, a car returned to a driveway. A flag flapped on a pole. The sun was setting and the maples were making big shadows on the grass. Big lines stretching. Oh my, look at all that beautiful grass.
“Smokey, let me ask you something,” I said finally. “Who cuts your grass?”
“Bob or the neighbor kid, usually.” She squashed here cigarette out on the cement. “Why, you wanna do it?”
Some stuff I should mention:
My mom never offers to buy me alcohol. She discourages drinking while operating machinery.
She has a friend named Smokey, but this happened to a different friend.
Bob is a real person.
It wasn’t a cigarette that flooded the basement. It was a Band-Aid.
Everyone was milling around the lab waiting for the meeting to start when Hailey told me we were going to the amateur adult film festival.
‘You’re going to this with me and Brian,’ she said. ‘No significant others.’
Brian came up beside me. ‘Did she tell you we’re going to that porn thing?’
‘I already bought you a ticket,’ Hailey said. ‘You need to pay me back.’
We met at a bar on the north side of town. My girlfriend was working. Hailey left her boyfriend at home. Brian didn’t have to worry about it—he had just gotten out of a five-year relationship. They’d owned a house together, a Jeep, two pugs. He’d joked about finding a ring and she’d told him straight up that she would never marry him. He found a room in a house three blocks from the lab and had been living there for a couple weeks when I first met him. The ex had already bought him out of the car and the house, but they still shared custody of the dogs then. It would take an entire year to break him on that. By the time we were at the bar on the north side of town, he was drinking every day and too much, juggling three girls, and hooking up with his ex every time he went over to walk the dogs just as a fuck-you to her new boyfriend. One of the girls I never met, much less learned her name. Val was nice but all I remember about her was that she had dark hair and all of her friends were lesbians. I think Brian kept her around because she let him borrow her car. Stacy, the last girl, was about ten years younger than Brian, a few years younger than either Hailey or I. She was pleasant in a dumb way and, according to Brian, loved cocaine and sex in the bathtub.
Hailey could barely sit still, giddily leading us in a round of sexual confessions. ‘Dude, okay,’ she was saying, ‘I absolutely love it when a guy licks my asshole. Obviously I’ve never had Greg do it—’ Greg was her boyfriend, ‘—but back in college or if I knew it was going to be a one-night stand, I was always like get back there and make it happen, I don’t care if you get a disease.’
It was my turn. ‘Well, Megan is on birth control but last week she got super horny during one of those stretches where she’s on the placebos. We were out of condoms so she flopped over on the bed and shouted, Fuck it! Just put it in my ass!’
Hailey snort-laughed, sending bits of her vegan meatball sub crumbling across the table. ‘That’s so Catholic! I love it.’
Brian was making a face, a half scowl hidden in his pint glass. ‘That’s gross. I don’t do butt stuff. It’s a one-way street.’
‘I mean, yeah, with that attitude,’ I said.
‘I’ll bet you’d love getting your asshole eaten,’ Hailey said. ‘Anyway, good luck dealing with this fucking porn festival then.’
Brian’s phone buzzed. ‘Oh nice. Stacy’s here. She’s right out front.’
Hailey looked like he’d just slapped her. ‘What? Fuckin—what happened to no boyfriends or girlfriends?’
‘She wanted to go and it’s not like she’s my girlfriend.’ He used air quotes here.
Stacy arrived at the table with an oblivious smile. ‘I’m so excited! A movie fest! Wow.’ It was pretty clear Brian had not specified the style of films that would be shown. In her defense, its name was relatively benign. It could’ve been anything. ‘So, like, what’s the plan? Are we going straight there? I’ve already got my tickets.’
Hailey looked to me as if I could somehow disappear this girl. ‘We’re gonna take a cab to a whiskey bar down the street from the theater, have a drink or two, then go in.’
‘Oh cool,’ Stacy said. ‘I hope they have tequila. I don’t like whiskey at all. But I love tequila.’
Hailey puckered her lips. I hadn’t known her that long—I’d only been at the lab four months—but this was by far the angriest I’d ever seen her.
As we were paying up, Stacy got a text. ‘Holy shit, my friend is in town. I haven’t seen him since high school. Should I tell him to meet us at the whiskey bar?’
Before Hailey could protest, Brian cut in, ‘Yeah, sure. Let’s add another one.’
I don’t remember who was at fault, but we all ordered the special—a habanero bourbon that tasted like someone had simply mixed ground up pepper seeds and ribs into Maker’s Mark. The shots had us all choking. We sipped our little glasses to the bottom, complaining the entire time.
I was buzzed enough to be sociable towards Stacy. ‘So, who’s this friend we’re meeting?’
‘Oh, he’s like my best friend from back home. I haven’t seen him in years. He was like super Christian back then, basically a Mormon. I’m surprised he even wanted to come to a bar.’
When he did show up, he shook all of our hands and introduced himself as Chet, surveyed our empty shot glasses and asked the server for one of what we were drinking. He looked exactly the type of golden retriever I expected.
His shot arrived and I said, ‘Watch out, it’s pretty—’
He tossed it back. Immediately, he let out a trio of bronchial coughs. It sounded like someone had stabbed him through the lung with a screwdriver. ‘Oh my goodness,’ he said through an embarrassed smile, blinking tears out of his eyes. ‘Whew! You all did that?’
He asked what our plans were for the night and Stacy told him about the film festival. He ordered tickets on his phone.
The fest itself was fine—short films about pegging, nipple clamps, orgies, graphic blowjobs, gimp masks, a couple of narrative pieces—none of it was particularly sexy, which I think was mostly the point. Very little of it was compelling, which seemed less purposeful. Still, as each new title card flickered across the screen, Hailey would slap my thigh and stage whisper, ‘Ooh, watch this!’ as if I could do anything else.
Afterward, back on the street, Hailey was buzzing, in possession of too much blood moving too quickly, and asked if she could buy me a drink. She led our group to a crowded dive. Everyone split between trying to squeeze their way up to the bar or stake out a place in line for the bathroom. I didn’t want part in either so I stepped out front. Chet was standing next to the entrance, staring off into the middle distance.
‘Hey, man,’ I said. ‘What’d you think of the fest?’
He kept his eyes on some unknown point in space. He looked like someone had beaten the shit out of him spiritually. ‘I saw things that I will never be able to un-see. I just—I don’t know what to do with that.’
‘Oh, come on. It wasn’t that bad.’
‘Yes. Yes, it was,’ he said, getting angry. ‘It was that bad. I don’t think things can be the same anymore. I’ve seen stuff now. I don’t think I can even be the same person. I’m, I don’t know, different.’
‘Different how—’
‘Hey, take this.’ Hailey stood in the doorway sloshing the head of a beer all over her hands. ‘You need to come inside to drink it.’
‘One sec.’
I turned back to try and bring Chet inside, but he was gone, just completely vanished. I never saw him again, never heard what became of him. When I think of Chet, like I’m thinking of him now, I always imagine him happy, freed of unnecessary shame and fulfilled by his fall from grace. I know it could easily be the opposite.
Aaron Block is a graduate student at Oregon State University.
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