by Paige Greco

Dissolving a Pearl 1

Invasive species, anonymous violence, double negative, only daughter.
The wildflowers were blue that summer.

I wake up covered
with his poison ivy
Flowering.


The morning and the early signs of the fires.

Pinches the sky. Lush in a haze.
Collecting like fog.


Sweat sticks to the softest part of my thighs.
I close my eyes and dream of the freckles on his back.

A young American.
Hideous.


In August we began watching the ocean at night.

The waves travel miles to reach the coastline and break into whatever.
Energy dissipates.

It becomes dark, racing forward to break.
And when it breaks it grows deeper.

And at the bottom of it is just hell.


Paradise has to be beautiful.


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Paige Greco is an artist, writer, and curator living in Los Angeles, CA. Recent published works of hers can be found in Spectra Poets, No More Prostitutes, Dirt Child Vol 4 and Seasons of Des Pair amongst other places. She burns and bruises easily.

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by Paige Greco

Dissolving a Pearl 2

Dawn drags the blue glow to earth earlier now.
June hits me hard.


Someone pitiful had kissed him, it had never stopped.

A freckle just off center on his right knee, brushing the dashboard. 80 mph.
July.


My dog tears the blemish of skin beneath his collarbone.
It’s 10 pm, again.


Staring at baby doves in traffic, peak stillness, heat -
The high suspended, a forever low, weakening (humming) buzz. 10:02 pm



Summer ended. Unbearably.

Naked, pale in his bed, torn sheets. Screaming dogs, peak blue.
The fires had returned in the final days of August and stretched until January.
Screaming sheets, pale blue, peak dog

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Paige Greco is an artist, writer, and curator living in Los Angeles, CA. Recent published works of hers can be found in Spectra Poets, No More Prostitutes, Dirt Child Vol 4 and Seasons of Des Pair amongst other places. She burns and bruises easily.

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by Madeline Gilmore

Over Dinner I Discover

of all the ways we hurt one another
talking is the peak.

I attempt a sermon.
You attempt an apology.

I am a martyr, thirty-dollar
ravioli. You are the awning

of the restaurant, deep green
park at dusk, all inviting darkness.

Of all the things I remember:
unmistakable stink of ginkgo berries.

In fall beneath their yellow canopy
and the shadow of the monument

I spied a wasp nest. You kissed me.
Come night the alien lights

of the hospital drift across the table.
From our pockets our phones ping.

You are handsome and remote.
I am bereft. I am laughing. What’s better

of all the things that go together
than pain and pleasure?

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Madeline Gilmore has an MFA from Boston University. Her poetry has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, The Rialto, Epiphany, and other publications. She is co-editor of  Volume Poetry.

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by Jason Primm

On Train 91, the Silver Star

the tree closest to the train
          the tree closest to the train
blurs and blurs and blurs

                    but

the houses
and yards

in the distance

and the people looking up

are
clear
down
to
their
expressions:

recognition

ruefulness

a child at the top of the slide

the older folk,
suspenders,
plaid patterns,
note the time
on their watches
using our lateness
for omen

on the train
we move in and out,
sleeper cars,
club cars,
talk, books,
the moving scenery
at the end
of our inner resources

a boredom
played with
like a cat
with a wounded
sparrow

and approaching us,
our twinned fate,
the next numbered train
traveling the opposite way
once a day, once a day
the world and the world meet,
a dark clattering
that I’m waiting for
and despite the inescapable destiny of it

Surprise

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Jason Primm pursues modest goals in a coastal city. His poetry and fiction have most recently appeared in Stoneboat, The James Dickey Review, Miracle Monocle, Sweet Tree Review, The Atticus Review, and Palaver. He maintains a blog at jasonprimm.wordpress.com.

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by Rishi Singh

Growl Back

The summer you started menstruating, your mother started menopause. That July unfolded like a memory, the edges blurred, the light thick enough to drown in. You would be 12 by Halloween.

You turned sideways on impulse each time you passed a mirror. You attended flute lessons every Wednesday and never practiced in between. You discovered desire in the combined smell of sweat and too much cologne worn by an older boy in the neighborhood. On particularly sticky days you took a perverse pleasure in craning your head between your knees to catch a whiff of the new invisible things that were stretching across your insides like a spiderweb and crawling out into the world. You went to slumber parties where you kissed your friends’ faces and scratched their backs and learned to tend to your lust alone, in darkened basements, your sleeping bag pulled over your face.

A foreign melancholy you would later know as angst had settled in your chest as you began to fear that the mundanity of these days you spent balancing on the precipice of adolescence would somehow come to define you; the stench of your city and all its narrow hallways, the brown lapdog you were given in place of a sibling barking in vacant corners and backing down from his own echo, the kitchen chair left empty by a father who worked late, the staccato humming of a mother who didn’t mind.

You were close to your mother in those days, in a way that you never had to think about. Instinct told you to stay near, to study her outline as to understand the shape your own existence would one day take. When she appeared in your bedroom doorway, her leather sandals slapping the hardwood like a penance, her earrings casting strange shadows across the walls, her thin arm extended towards you, you knew to grab on as tight as you could, while it was still yours to hold.

***

No one told you how dark it would be. You sat on the toilet holding your once baby blue underwear stretched beneath your chin like string twisted in a back-of-the-classroom game of cat’s cradle, but fixed your gaze to the upper right corner where the green wallpaper was starting to peel and coil around itself. When you called your mother into the bathroom it was as though you were hearing the echo of some other girl’s trembling voice reach for the term ‘mommy’ for the first time in years,

“Oh no,” she exhaled before she’d even made it to the doorway.

That morning, you knelt to the carpet in front of her as she wound your copper curls, indistinguishable from her own, into two braids on either side of your flushed face while softly humming the tune to a lullabye neither of you knew the words to anymore. 

She left the pads she no longer needed on your dresser, wrapped in a silk scarf, tied into a bow. Like this, you inhabited the life that she was shedding. While you left cuts on your legs from hidden attempts at shaving with hesitant hands, she left hair to grow out of her chin and ears. She started cooking with the kitchen door propped open. When the heat rising through her stout frame grabbed hold of her throat, she would run to the threshold between in and out and close her eyes as if in prayer, waiting for the momentary relief of wind. During dinner you eagerly recalled every detail of your day, your mouth full of meat and sauce, while she stared at you blankly, without so much as making sounds of affirmation, as if just becoming acquainted with language, with being alive.

There were times it seemed to you she was becoming older and younger at once. One night you woke up to her hand over your mouth.

“I’m hot and hungry. Let’s get a treat,” she urged, and walked you towards the static fluorescents of the ice cream shop down the block. It was there that, through drunken girlish giggles, she revealed her bygone proclivities for marijuana and shoplifting. She told you that a year before meeting your father she fell into a brief engagement with a mustached banker two decades her senior. She told you that her former fiancee, now bald and fat, had recently found her on facebook where he messaged her to say she was more beautiful than ever. She told you she responded by deactivating her account, though you watched the reflection of her palm-sized feed expand across her bifocals as her thumb repeatedly swiped upwards the next morning. You bit your nails until your fingers were flushed and torn.

She started speaking to your dad in a way you had never heard before. There was an edge to her voice, a sharp indifference. She stopped wearing makeup and started ordering her steak rare. When she played tug-of-war with the dog she would growl back and bear her teeth. You knew then that something was about to change. Something already had. 

***

In August, a sliver of a girl from the suburbs who rode her bike everywhere and always wore her red hair in pigtails started coming over for dinner a few times a week. Your moms were on the PTA together.

“Mr. and Mrs. Willhite are… experiencing some difficulties,” your mother told you in a drawn hush the first time you looked up from the living room door frame to see blue eyes spread as far apart as a moth’s open wings staring back at you from the sofa where Maura discussed her time away at some summer camp in Maine with your father, like some uncanny replacement of you. 

You didn’t mind Maura’s company, but you didn’t indulge in it either. Most of the time she was meek enough that her presence was as perceptible to you as the dust churning through the air that seemed to fall, fall, and never settle. She would sink into the edge of your bed while you visited various tabs on the internet and occasionally murmur something like “I only feel like myself when I’m blue,” and you’d respond something like “I only feel like myself when I’m hungry,” and the silence that followed was so earned and earnest that neither of you ever seemed to mind sitting on opposite sides of it.

One day she showed up with swollen eyes and splotches of red spreading beneath her freckles, and when she closed the door to your bedroom she started to weep with such grief and fervor you had to fight the urge to giggle at the surreality of the scene. You knew how to cry like this, and often did, but only ever in practice for sadness rather than the presence of it. Whatever Maura was feeling raged deep in her being, kicking and clawing at her insides like a distressed fetus.

It had finally happened. Her mom signed a lease on an apartment a few towns over.

“I’ll only be back on the weekends, when my dad gets me,” Maura said through sobs.

“But junior high’s a month away. Who am I supposed to talk to now?” You heard yourself ask and immediately felt a slippery rush of guilt about the ease with which you could turn Maura’s pain into a spotlight for your own.

“I’ll ask for the landline number, okay? You can call me whenever.”

“Why do you have to go at all? I mean, why does he get the house?”

“I guess… I guess because he’s the one who bought it,” she resigned.

“What a dick!” the word fell out of your mouth sounding just as contrived as it was.

She laughed, but shook her head, and said “No, he’s not. He’s just a dad.”

“I got my period,” you blurted without knowing why, only that she had offered a type of vulnerability you had never received before and felt obligated to respond in kind. She looked at you with a wayward expression, but then squeezed your shoulder twice as your foreheads gently fell towards each other. This was all it took to imbue your forced companionship with depth. Though you shared very few concrete similarities, from that day on your closeness was sustained by a nameless force that all of your future relationships would approach but never quite catch.

Every weekend after that, your sleepovers went like this: you held onto your mom’s waist and avoided eye contact with strangers for the whole train ride to the suburbs where Maura’s dad would invite her to stay for a glass of red. You and Maura would change into your swimsuits, yours a black and white checkered one-piece with an attached skirt that your mother said looked flattering, and Maura’s an indigo bikini with ties resting on either side of the bony hips she said made her look like a boy. Maura would tell you about the latest tenant who winked at her in the elevator of her mom’s apartment building and while you pretended not to be jealous of the newfound attention her part-time home had brought with it, she pretended not to hate it. Your mom would wave goodbye from the driveway and go home. Maura’s dad would get drunk and go to bed. As you waded through the evening, you and Maura would grow progressively high off of one another’s presence until your bodies called you back to them with a shiver and a heave. 

Maura always fell asleep first, beside you on the living room floor, beneath a too-small blanket, her open mouth breathing into your ear as though perpetually whispering a secret, the back of her hand falling where your right tit would soon sprout. 

***

A week before your first day of junior high, your mother hung a yellow quilt to dry over the second floor railing, sending the scent of bleach and artificial citrus to echo through your cramped foyer. It was the hottest day of summer yet, and all the colors of your life were bleeding into one blinding shade of nothing. 

You had just laid your sticky body spread across the oak of your bedroom floor when your mother came raging through the door, yelling about the dirty handprints you left all over her expensive blanket.

“You had it on the railing,” you said, as if she had done so by accident.

“When will someone in this house think about anyone other than themselves?” she cried, throwing her arms out so quickly that she knocked a small bottle of floral perfume off of your dresser and onto the floor where it shattered, a piece of its acidic glass nicking your left ear.

You sat up and looked at her expectantly, waiting for her to run to you and cradle your head and tell you how sorry she was for everything that had ever gone wrong in your life, but she didn’t move at all. When you touched your ear and extended the red, wet tip of your finger forward, you could have sworn the corners of her mouth dimpled as they inched upwards.

***

On the last weekend of summer, Maura’s parents hosted a party in their backyard. They had put their separation on hold and were trying to make up for a summer spent at odds. 

“You must be pretty happy about all this, huh?” you asked Maura from her windowsill where the falling sunlight burned the sterile scent of chlorine into your swimsuits permanently.

“I’ve kind of stopped caring,” she sighed, and you almost believed her. 

You watched the adults below like they were dolls. There was your father, miming a golf swing to a group of polo shirts and khakis. There was Maura’s mom flitting around, filling every empty glass and pause in conversation, laughing at jokes that weren’t funny, even at jokes that were at her expense. Maura’s dad had taken refuge in his study hours ago. Your mother was nowhere to be found.

“Let’s get some beers,” Maura declared, a devilish glow in her eyes. 

“What’s the rush, Mo?”.

“We could split one. Just to see.” 

When you looked at her then, you felt beautiful just by proximity. Maura, with wispy cherry bangs and well-arranged freckles and a big house with a pool in the yard. You didn’t know what she was really getting at with the beers, but you didn’t care. Your body moved faster than your mind did. 

Downstairs, you rifled through the fridge on Maura’s instruction, looking for cans, not bottles. Once you had one wrapped in your sweatshirt and were starting to make your escape back to the bedroom, a noise you had never heard before halted you. 

An animal was trapped, you thought. It had to be that. You shuffled towards the sound, towards Maura’s father’s study, the door to which had never loomed so large. As you did, what you heard grew louder and more frenetic. A passing shadow caught your eye as it interrupted the bar of light coming from under the door. When you looked down, just for a moment, you could see the illuminated outline of your mother’s leather sandals, perfectly parallel.

When you handed Maura the beer, she finished it seemingly in one gulp, and you spent the rest of the party in a smog, watching her mouth form strange shapes without being able to make meaning of the words coming out of it. 

While she murmured nonsense in her sleep beside you that night, your stomach convulsed and fear crept up your throat. You called your father and, in feverish whispers, asked him to pick you up.

“Don’t tell mom!” you insisted, but she was awake and pacing through the house when you walked in, the ghostly swell of her nightgown making it look like she could lift off the ground at any moment.

Without a word passing between you, she tucked you into bed and kissed your eyelids shut. You wrapped your arms around her neck and tugged her tightly towards the tender give of your young body, not to keep her close as much as to keep her from drifting away.

Alone in the suffocating stillness of your bedroom, the dog curled by your feet, you pressed your thumb against the back of your front teeth and soothed yourself with fantasies of a future in which you were a totally different type of girl.

Once the house had grown settled and silent and sad, you watched your mother’s shadow steadily emerge in the hallway and grow impossibly large as she descended to the ground floor. You sat up,  the reluctant surveyor you had become, into an angled ray of moonlight that bore through your curtains as though hungry for you. 

You tightened your jaw and listened to the front door creak open as your mother stepped out into the ripe night, where for every breath of air she let into the depths of her, an even deeper howl followed.


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Rishi Singh is a writer and filmmaker living in Philadelphia. She grew up in the Pennsylvania suburbs where she first developed her love of books and movies. In her free time she fosters dogs and cats from her local shelter, hosts a book club, and enjoys spending time in nature with her dear family and friends.

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by Tyler Mendelsohn

Grief Language

The new woman I’m talking to says she feels Mandy. She never met Mandy while they were alive, but she wants to do a grief ceremony with me and thinks Mandy is skeptical of her; she imagines Mandy saying, “Game recognize game, but if you hurt my friend, I will HAUNT you.” Those were the words the new woman used, and they sound like Mandy—especially that last clause.

I don’t really remember what a clause is, if I’m being honest. I looked it up, and one thing said, “The subject of the clause is the [with cartoon images of a person, a place, and a thing] …performing the action in the sentence; the predicate describes the action the subject performs.” This is interesting because it’s what the new woman and I are doing in messages, sometimes for hours when we’re supposed to be working—describing what we’ll do to each other. Sometimes I am the subject and sometimes I am the predicate. I don’t remember all the words for sentence structures; sometimes I’ll leave a comma where I know it’s not “supposed” to be because it sounds better; everything is about feeling for me.

*

When Mandy was alive, they told me there were ghosts in my old apartment building; she often felt them late at night when she was walking down the steps to the front door. I almost never used the front door. I entered and exited through the fire escape in the back.

It seemed like I was the only one who lived in that building. It wasn’t just that I only took the back entrance. I never heard or saw anyone. I’d have big, loud dance parties in my relatively small one-bedroom. Some of us would go on the roof I technically didn’t have access to, or smoke cigarettes on the back steps, and no one ever said anything. Maybe my only neighbors were the ghosts Mandy saw.

I think of this a lot now, how eerie it is to know Mandy would be a 36-year-old ghost just six, seven years later. How those days in that apartment and the ones after would be a ghostly presence haunting me at random.

I want ghosts to be real because that means a person still exists somewhere. Some people say that ghosts are only ghosts if they have unfinished business—that they inherently can’t be at peace. Maybe we say that because we can’t be at peace knowing there are ghosts among us.

What do we know of what ghosts feel? Ghosts are just a word for our dead. They’re something we’ve made scary. And I am scared of them, too.

*

The new woman calls me hungry, says she likes how hungry I am.

I think of high school, stuffing dinner in my underwear to later flush it down the toilet, eating cracklin’ oat bran cereal in the morning like it was good because I couldn’t get away with stuffing milk into my underwear and I was happy to have no choice but to eat. It’s because I was hungry. I was hungry for food because I was anorexic; I was anorexic because I was hungry.

The new woman says she’s writing an adaptation of a novella—without saying the name of the novella—about two women, one of them a vampire, that came out a few decades before Dracula. I say I’ve read Carmilla, the one Carmen Maria Machado edited. She says I’m the first person she’s ever met who’s also read Carmilla and she’s speechless.

When I tell my best friend Haley, they are a Capricorn about it and say Carmilla is part of the queer vampire canon. I tell them that when I was reading it, a lot of queer people I told about the book hadn’t heard of it. Anyway, it doesn’t matter when everything feels romantic and you’re both so hungry to know each other you try to learn everything about the other—and be known—really fast.

*

In a way the woman and I are vampires. The vampire and the bitten become the same beast. They merge.

*

I realize I’m wearing Mandy’s cardigan and no pants or underwear as the new woman and I fuck for the 100th time this weekend. Wearing it while fucking is not something I could have done in the first few months after they died. That’s all I would have thought about and it would have felt too strange. Now it feels exactly right—joy and pleasure and grief so intertwined they’re fucking.

How grief intertwines like this, when the new woman leaves for the weekend and I want to show her a video of Mandy reading poetry so I text it to her but when I do I listen to it too and cry. I’m thinking of sitting next to or across from Mandy and how it’ll never happen again and how it’s been almost a year that went by like nothing but waves and waves of grief and joy. How my cat is sleeping at my feet and I have a book of poetry next to me that Mandy will never get to read.

In the middle of talking about how hot we find each other, I write a text to the new woman that she and Mandy would have really liked each other, then delete it, then write it again, then delete it. I don’t want to ruin the mood, even though the new woman and I have already talked about everything. We’re hungry, and when you’re hungry, it feels like you don’t have time.

I feel my hunger transforming into something good, like something Mandy would have wanted for me.

*

I come back to write about the new woman and suddenly it feels strange to call her “the new woman.” We’re now solidly in love. I’ve been writing this—without really knowing what it was about—long enough for that to happen.

First I thought it was about hunger, then I thought it was about ghosts, then I thought it was about grief, then I thought it was about love.

In the beginning of my relationship with the woman, she said she’d never started something with someone while they were grieving. When we began dating, fall had arrived and I was already emotionally preparing for the one-year anniversary of Mandy’s death, two months early.

I look up “falling in love while grieving,” and while reading about all the ways one can say that grief is love, it clicks. I’m writing this because I’m loving the woman differently than I have others because of this grief. 

*

Grief for friends, even close ones, doesn’t get the same kind of societal attention as that for partners or family. But a 2019 study about grief for a close friend says, “Significant adverse physical and psychological well-being, poorer mental health and social functioning occur up to four years following bereavement.”

The study goes on to discuss the effects of grief on the collective, and it makes me think of another definition I found for the word “clause:” “a group of words containing a subject and predicate and functioning as a member of a complex or compound sentence.” I think of how Mandy’s friends, our writing group that Mandy was in, Mandy’s family, our local writing community—all these groups reeled from the news of Mandy’s death, all in different ways, each person acting both as an individual and on the collective.

I have been the subject and the predicate. I feel my own grief and that of others. Other griefs compound my own.

As a society, we don’t do well with grief in general. We’re supposed to go through the stages one by one, none bleeding into another. We’re supposed to be pretty much done after a year. We’re supposed to feel uncomplicatedly sad and nothing else. We’re not encouraged to understand how grief might impact our relationships or even our own bodies.

My grief is often psychosomatic. When Mandy died, I struggled to eat for eight months.

In the newest and most intense parts of grief, I am pared down.  The intense hunger isn’t there, or if it is, it’s only because my body needs food. I can eat only enough to keep me minimally functioning. The grief is in my body—it reminds me full force that I have one—but in a way I am also a ghost. In Mandy’s poem “Recipe for a ghost,” one ingredient is “Vessel of/for grief.”

*

When the woman and I had a fight once, we took a little space and then she asked if I wanted to play “Would you rather?” cards. The choices in “Would you rather?” are one shitty thing vs another; you have to decide which is less shitty for you. Perhaps because I got the cards from Mandy, playing it made me think of how this grief is the first time I don’t feel like I have a choice to suppress or not feel.

Some people become numb with grief or have difficulty accessing feelings, and that can be part of mourning too. There is no way to mourn wrong. But grieving fully, in my own way, is not the shittier option. Grief, as Mandy would often say about things that were important to her, is everything.

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Tyler Mendelsohn is a queer, non-binary Baltimore-based writer who also plays drums. Their work has been featured or is forthcoming in the Establishment, Little Patuxent Review, NAILED Magazine, 3:AM Magazine, OC87 Recovery Diaries, Queen Mob’s Tea House, CAMP Rehoboth, and more. Their book Laurel was published in 2019 by Ink Press Productions. You can find Tyler’s writing and other projects here and you can follow them on Instagram at @tyler_k_m.

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by Jasmine Basuel

Fish

Yellow leaves crowd the porch steps. Just in the corners. They look like small yellow fish, swimming in compressed triangles. Caught in an easy trap of wooden boards nailed together. 

I think about this when I press call. I thought I would call you. That it might be nice to skid onto a landing strip and stare at a screen with a missed call from me. When I dropped you off, windbreaker shoulder still wet from your goodbye, I thought about calling you. I am on the porch with yellow leaves sardined into the steps’ corners and it is four in the morning. 

The porch is canopied by the second floor. At four in the morning, the rainstorm creates walls around the porch. Small waterfalls are splashing onto the chipped planks, onto my feet. The planks creak under my weight. The drone of the heavy rain drowns out the phone at my ear. I know it will go to voicemail. 

“Hey. It’s me.”

A car drives past the house. The headlights sluice past me. I am only in a shirt and thigh-worn sweatpants. A small gust from the car hits my arms, raising gooseflesh in a second. It turns into the thinnest street possible, an alley between a parking garage and a small house that almost leans over the curb. The street is one way, spillage from the parking garage onto a residential street. The car should not be going through it from this side. But it is four in the morning and I am the only one to see.

“Hope your flight is going well. Gone well. You know. Whenever you hear this. I just thought I would call. That you would like a call. It’s four in the morning here. I couldn’t sleep. Obviously.” I’m sniffling, the rain and cold commandeering my comfort. “You know it’s funny—”

The porch creaks under my feet. I am wearing cream-colored slippers, the ones my mother gave me months ago, the ones I wear inside so the bottoms of my feet do not track all the dirt into my bed. We only have hardwood floors. The orange kind that are long and thin and old. Walking barefoot for more than twenty paces makes the invisible soil of the indoors cling to your soles. But I am wearing them outside on the porch and the wet is already climbing into the worn shoe beds. The rain bounces off the chipped paint and onto my toes. There is a vine crawling up a porch banister and down to the floor that hugs the width of the deck. 

“It’s funny. I wanted to tell you about the street I live on. When you were here.”

There is one street lamp, towards the end of the street, the end that opens up to the rest of the world. On one side houses are asleep in the early morning rain and the other is the four story parking garage. It looms. A concrete box with long rectangular cuts of light spanning each floor. The lights are bright white and shine into my windows at night. In the rain, I can see it traveling physically in the air. It dashes between slices of rain and turns the spaces brown. Even in the porch’s canopy the light washes the air brown. 

“You know the parking garage. I think it bothered you at night. You didn’t tell me but I felt like you didn’t sleep. It was too bright through the shades. But the parking garage is for the hospital. Did you know I was born there?” I breathe out long and slow then quickly breathe my cloudy breath back up, catching it in my mouth then my lungs. “I wanted to tell you. The deadend of the street. Past the chain link fence is the hospital. I’m sure you saw it. The hospital is big. Did you see it? The entrance is on the main road. It faces away from my street. You can’t even see it because of the parking. But at the end of the street past the chain links there’s some sliding doors. It’s where I came out. As a kid. Baby. That’s where the mothers come out with their babies. I thought that was nice. I thought you’d like that too.”

The rain is pounding so hard I can barely hear my voice. Thick streams pour around the porch, putting me in the negative space of non-rain. The porch keeps creaking. I wonder if the trains are passing by a mile away. I wouldn’t be able to hear. 

It rained the whole time you were here. It was a few days. The rain came in waves. It drizzled on Tuesday so we thought it was ending. We went to a strawberry field. The place you love. By the time we got out of the car, the rain was solid with no air in between, all the air being pushed into the ground by the sky. We screamed on our way to the small building, cackles spattering to the ground. There was an umbrella in the backseat but we ran in it anyways. 

And you ran ahead. You didn’t care that your shoes were white and the road was made of packed dirt loosened and churning up in pools of water. The ground gurgled at your enthusiasm, celebrating the press of your feet into the earth. You were fifteen feet ahead of me and I felt a million miles inside of myself. Like I was knocking on my shell, watching myself watching you inside myself.

But I’m not there. I’m on the porch. I pull my phone from my ear because I’m wondering how long this message is getting. It’s slick with sweat from the side of my head or maybe it’s the rain. Either way, when I tap the screen, it stays dark. Just a black glass and smudged sweat and the slight suggestion of my face looking back at me. It must have died during the call. 

Without the phone, without my talking to you, the sounds around me close in. The rain isn’t just rain. It’s slaps of bare feet on wet asphalt and bodies landing on shallow pools and dogs slurping at bare water troughs. There’s rubber tires being thrown over heads and flags plastered and unplastered from poles. A father shouting over a fallen tree. Elbows clattering against hundreds of other elbows. It’s the only thing in the world.

Until a car alarm starts in the parking garage. Then the rain is just rain again. And I should have realized that there would be cars in the parking garage at this time. It’s a hospital parking garage. Hospitals don’t close. Always people passing through and staying inside and doctors and nurses and mothers and grandmothers and babies and children and some of them leaving out the door that I left. And me beyond the chain link fence, staring at the parking garage with a dead phone. The car won’t stop echoing its lonely horn, chasing its own noise with more noise. I think about my neighbors who might be asleep at four. Could they sleep through the car alarm or are they staring out their windows wishing for the unseen owner to come out to the unseen car and shut it off or does it not matter at all when there’s a warm body next to them on a full sized bed. 

And I think of you again and the voicemail you might get. When it had cut off and what you would think. And if you would listen to it at all. Maybe I should have texted it to you. We don’t even talk that often. Maybe you just wanted to think about the strawberry farm and the rain. Not the hospital or the street. 

I cannot think of you anymore. The car alarm keeps on but now there’s other noises between the rain and wind. It’s cooling off, the rivers trailing into streams into creeks. The storm is just rain and the rain is just mist. But there are voices in the air now. Lots of them. At four in the morning. The voices are swelling, taking up the space that the rain used to. And out the sliding doors I came out of are mothers and nurses and babies crying into fresh wet earthy air. The mothers standing in their hospital nightgowns, linen and paper tied with thin strings at the back, some of them not even tied. Some of them barefoot on the rough sidewalk, moss and worms damp and whirling from the rain. Some being pushed out on beds. In the dark morning, the only light is from the parking garage and the street lamps and the inside of the hospital through the glass sliding doors. The women are milling about in their large paper gowns, billowing softly like white and pink and blue jellyfish. Some of them are holding their babies, some of the nurses holding the babies. Men, probably the husbands, stand listlessly in dark clothes. And they’re all talking. But I cannot hear the words. 

A different siren careens forward. In the alley, red and blue lights are flickering in quick succession. I can’t see the fire trucks but that’s what they sound like. There’s a thunking of heaviness falling into the potholes outside the hospital. The rain is almost gone now. I actually can’t tell because the porch keeps dripping steadily. More people come out of the sliding doors, frantic and billowy. They gather in one large group, bodies uncomfortable in the soaked air and casually colliding with each other. 

There’s some shrieking rising above the talking mumbling frothing. A female voice arching through the crowd. From behind the parking garage, a few firefighters run to the sliding doors. Even from the porch, I can hear their clunky steps break through the thin nightgowns swirling outside. 

I decide to walk down the street. Maybe I’ll see things better from there. I’ll tell you about them. About the excitement only found at four in the morning while you are hundreds of miles away. So I trot down the porch steps, past rain flicking up at my ankles. The wood moans against my weight. I walk towards the chain link fence separating me from the people streaming like fish. A few women turn to look at me emerging from under the parking deck light in slept-in clothes. Their faces are worried but almost relieved to see someone beyond their situation. Maybe I am a reminder there is a place outside of the hospital their babies are coming out of. By the time I reach the fence, I can feel how much water my slippers have soaked up. The cream color is now a spattered brown and my feet sink into the cushion under them like the floor of a lake. 

I reach out to the fence. It’s decorated with thin vines, the woody stems twisting around the links like they were built to accommodate the wire. This season there are no leaves, just the vines stuck in a lifeless pose waiting for warmth to wake them up again. At first, I am just watching. There are more firefighters now. Their heavy coats huff with each step. I don’t notice until she’s right in front of me. A woman in a blue paper gown comes to meet me. She tilts her head, hair hanging in a frizz.

“Fire started somewhere in the hospital.”

“Oh.” I had thought so.

“They said it’s probably just a kitchen fire.”

“Okay.”

The woman shrugs and looks back at the doors. We can’t see any smoke or signs of strangeness. Just the women milling around and the heavy coats huffing on the firefighters’ shoulders. Still.”

“You all had your babies already?”

“I think. Yeah. Maybe not.” We look over at the women in beds.

“Congratulations.”

She gives me a bare smile, contingent only on the rise of her cheeks rather than the deep willingness yours have. “We’ll see. Her name’s Josephine.”

“Is she out here?”

“She’s inside.”

“Oh.”

“Was it raining hard? I could hear it from inside.” She looks down at my slippers, at my thigh-worn pants, through the woody vines and chain links. Her gown picks up a little in the breeze and her legs are mapped with gooseflesh. “My wife. She’s still inside. They only evacuated our wing. I think she was getting snacks.”

“It was torrential. But it’s cleared up now.”

“I’m glad. Wouldn’t have wanted to come outside otherwise.”

I let out a short laugh, the kind of quick gust of wind that slams a screen door. 

“You don’t think the fire was that bad, do you?” Her voice is steady.

“No. Not if they only evacuated some of you.” I try to reach her with my eyes. I hang my fingers on the fence. “I was born here. I came out of those doors there.”

Her eyes smile, this time a real one, half a second and then it’s gone. She reaches out and gently catches my fingers still caught in the fence. Hers are freezing against mine. The fence gives a stunted swing at her hand’s movement. The non-leafed vines reach like fingers to our fingers, tan and brown. “And now you live here.”

“Yeah.”

“It was probably just a kitchen fire. Couldn’t have been that bad.”

“Not at all. They just wanted to make sure.”

“What were you doing up? It’s early.”

“Making a phone call.”

She shakes her head. “It’s early.”

“I felt alone.”

Her fingers press into mine, something neither of us can ignore. Even through the vines and chain links, our coldness and warmth are seeping into each other. Her fingers, so freezing a minute ago, are my temperature. 

A firefighter, hidden in the crowd of squirming mothers, shouts an all clear. A few cheers sound across the pink and blue paper gowns, a resounding sigh settling in the space between the thin rain. The woman tangled in my fingers looks over to the doors. I cannot see her face but her shoulders sag. She turns back to me with another real smile, this time it sticks in the crinkles of her face. “I’d better go back in.” Her fingers withdraw from mine.

I watch the mothers, nurses, babies, and fathers enter the hospital again. The bustling from earlier has dulled to a relaxed trickle. The woman disappears into the shoal, floating gown matching those around her. I stand there until the fire trucks are pulling out, lights turned off. The morning is gray now, venturing out of the dark I called you in. When the parking garage lights turn off, I make my way back to the porch. A few early commuters are starting their cars in the street, sleepiness softening their movements. The wet ground littered with wet leaves absorbs the sounds of car doors closing. I tenderly make my way up the porch steps, trying not to make noise. Inside, I know my housemates are sleeping. The yellow leaves cluttered in the corners of the steps are still intact, the piles glistening in the dim light. My slippers track shadows of mud on the hardwood floors, a stamp of myself.

You call me an hour later. You tell me you miss the trees here and the lack of rain there and that the parking garage lights didn’t bother you in the slightest.


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Jasmine Basuel grew up in New Jersey, but currently lives in Massachusetts where they are teaching and pursuing their MFA at Emerson College. When they are not doing writerly things, they are walking their dog Momo, which is still pretty writerly. Their most recent work is in The Core Review.

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