Buck Rogers in the 25th Century

by Kevin Wilson

The sound of a psychic restriction ray is that of a Schick razor, whirring, pressed against new skin.

Ajan, Efeb, Imar, Opri, Umay, Bejun, Culy, Daugu, Fisep, Gocto, Jocto, Lovem, Medec.

Here I am on a submarine, searching for the lost city of Atlantis. Here is Ardala, evil and cunning and possessing a deep-seated though infrequently acknowledged love of me. She refuses to wear the uniform of a submarine Third Officer while on board my ship. She looks like a flapper, slicked-down hair, a garter on her arm, a dress like wet paper. Wilma looks pale in her presence. “You like that, Buck?” Wilma asks me, and I gulp. She whispers in my ear, “I’ll make Ardala look like a rag doll,” and then she is gone. Ardala says she will make love to me and then, when I finish, will kill me painlessly. It is the best offer I’ve ever received. But there is Wilma, returned, stripped out of her uniform. She looks like a boy, a long-distance runner, and she bends Ardala over backwards. “Ouch, quit, you’re hurting my back, owwch,” says Ardala, and I turn my jumping belt way, way down, and wait for the ocean’s pressure to crush us all.

I am a Rocket Ranger and every courtesy is to be extended to me in whatever Interstellar Confederation I may be.

I liberated the planet from the Mongols, pounded the Tiger Men from Mars into a frothing, angry paste, and disintegrated Killer Kane’s internals with the XZ-38. All it got me was one night in Niagara with Wilma, ten kisses in thirty-eig

Nick and Nate, five and six, watch me play the keyboard. My three songs, memorized at ten, mesmerize them. I’m flat and rhythmless—grown-ups would see me for the trained monkey that I am—but Nick and Nate think I’m a gifted musician. I’m just their mom’s best friend, a sad case crashed on their couch, but they listen like I’m Beethoven. When you’re little, musicians are magicians: they summon something wonderful out of nothingness.

In four minutes I’ve exhausted my repertoire. My hands fold into my lap, somehow ashamed. Nick says “Again.”

Impatient violent Nate is bored by the second run-through of “Fur Elise,” and hammers keys in the lower octaves. Nick pushes him off the bench, and he runs to another room in search of weapons.

“Your breath smells funny,” Nick whispers.

“What does it smell like?” I ask.

He turns his head, sticks his nose in my open mouth. “Like gross,” he says.

What it smells like: blood and milk and alcohol gone rancid. Last night’s ramen. Hunger and loneliness.

“How long are you going to stay with us?” Nick asks.

“I’m not sure. Until your mom gets sick of me, I guess.”

“Can you teach me how to play?”

“Maybe,” I say.

A Nerf ball, thrown hard, hits me in the head. Nate roars as he runs at us. Climbs up onto the bench and stands, grabs me in a chokehold. His little arm is tight enough to make me gasp. He could kill me, I think.

“Stop it,” Nick says. Nate pouts, jumps down. Heads for his Nintendo.

Mom made me take piano lessons. At first I loved it, learning each note, putting them together into simple songs. In fantasies I was played by Gregory Peck, and everywhere I went there was a piano, and my spellbinding one-man symphonies made everyone love me. One year in, I could barely get through “Turkey in the Straw.” Two years in and I had my three songs, and I stopped going to lessons.

“I don’t know how to play the piano,” I tell Nick.

“Yes you do. You just did.”

“But I don’t know how. I learned those songs a long time ago, and they stuck in my head. I barely know a simple scale.”

Nick’s fingers form chords, press down on the keys.

Kids think the world is an obstacle course. A series of steps. Master tying your shoes, and you can master riding a bike. After the bike, attack algebra. After algebra, beat up that bully who’s been hurting you. And life goes on like that, one simple challenge after another, until you’re an adult, and there are no more challenges.

The phone rings. Nick and Nate both run for it.

“Hi Mom!” comes Nick’s triumphant voice. Nate kicks a kitchen chair. “Yes… yes… yes… grilled cheese.” He hands over the phone.

“Hi,” Nate says. Sullen. “Sure. No. Sure. I don’t care.”

He walks it over to me.

“Hi, Margie,” I say.

“How are they doing?”

“Pretty good. Me and Nick are trying to figure out how this keyboard works.”

Hearing his name, he comes running. Plops himself back in my lap.

“I’m stopping by the supermarket,” Margie says. “Anything I can get you?”

“I’m fine.”

“You don’t sound fine.”

“I’m just—”

Margie lets ten seconds go by. “Just what?”

“I just feel like such a fuck-up.”

Nick sucks in wind at the curse word.

“I feel like I’ve made such a big mess of things.”

“We all go through times like that.”

“I feel like I’ve never not been in a time like this.”

I’ve been here before. Evicted, kicked out, laid off. Every time I thought my life was heading for something, I’ve ended up back here. When Nick and Nate were three and four I thought I could handle a relationship, could live with a lover, could make compromises and follow rules, and then a meltdown fight put me back on Margie’s doorstep. When Nate was one and Nick was a fetus, I was a McDonald’s assistant manager and I thought I knew how to hold a job. Thought my drinking was under control.

“You know the boys think you’re God,” Margie says. “And God knows it’s nice to get some help with them. So when you’re drawing up the list of what’s miserable about your life, don’t forget to look at what’s not.”

“Okay.”

“I’ll be home soon.”

“Okay.”

We click off.

Nick’s hands are folded in his lap, making the exact same shape as mine.

“The first note is C,” I say. “Every note has a letter.” I tap my way up the scale, calling out each name: C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C again.

Nick stares at the keyboard.

“This is C.” I pick up his hand, press his little finger down on C. “You can always find C because it’s right before the two black keys together. You see: the whole keyboard is the same scale, repeated over and over.”

Nick picks out another C, higher up. Presses it, cautiously.

“Exactly!” I say.

“And this next one is D?”

“It is, Nick.”

Nick goes back and forth from C to D, faster and faster, whispering their names.

“I have to go to the bathroom, Nicky Nick.”

Nick nods.

With the door locked, I take the lid off the toilet tank. Pull out my pint bottle of scotch.

The keyboard’s bottom register thunders. “Go away!” Nick yells. Nate pounds some more, then retreats to the Nintendo.

Scotch tastes like wood and smoke, like manhood. Hunting and cabins. Sunset on an autumn day. I fill my mouth and hold it, like holding my breath underwater. Far away, Nick taps at the keyboard. Taking it slow, determined to master the start of the scale before he ventures further.

Robert Casting's 25 Random Things About Me

by Kevin Winchester

Ye Olde Rules: Once you’ve been tagged by someone else on Facebook, you write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged.
1. When I first see a stranger, I imagine what they’ll look like dead.

2. I’m sixty-two years old, retired from my University position two years ago, and have not returned since.

3. The theme from the TV show M.A.S.H is my favorite song.

4. My book, Post-Modern Aesthetics: Suicide as Art, sold thirty-four copies. I glued the remaining copies, all 966 of them, to my basement floor and covered them with compliant beige carpet.

5. I don’t play golf, but I joined the Old Cypress Country Club. I spend Wednesday afternoons in the clubhouse, playing poker with a pharmaceutical sales rep, an economics professor from Tulane, a real estate attorney, and Ira Shuler, my oncologist. All low-stakes, ironically — nickel, dime, quarter.

6. I’ve never owned a dog, don’t understand the appeal. Who takes care of them when you’re gone?

7. At seven, when the doctors removed my appendix they discovered I had no gall bladder. They wanted to do more tests, but my mother wouldn’t allow it — no practicing medicine on her son.

8. My second wife left for good the night of our third anniversary. Some mornings when I get out of the shower, I’ll turn just so and study the purpled scar running diagonally along my shoulder blade in the mirror, remember that evening and think fondly of her.

9. I opposed the Vietnam War but during college, I could never bring myself to protest and even avoided dorm room discussions of the subject, the movement, the politics. My guilt arrived with the first casualty from Iraq.

10. Cooking is my favorite form of therapy. My signature meal is eggplant parmesan with veal-stuffed mushrooms and grilled asparagus. I preface that with a simple Cobb salad and complete the culinary excursion with apple-cinnamon dumplings. While I admit the preparation serves as therapy, eating in solitude can be counter-productive.

11. It’s been twelve years since I’ve had sex without paying for it.

12. I’ve never had a job outside of academia, never rode a motorcycle, never skydived, don’t know how to swim. Don’t know what compels me to mention these particular things now.

13. When my first wife gave birth to our son, I was in room 209 of the Park Plaza Drive Holiday Inn in Shreveport, Louisiana, with my TA, an unread draft of a story she’d written, and a bottle of Maker’s Mark. The name of the TA escapes me, but I do remember she was a redhead. Never read her story.

14. Some days I’m unequivocally convinced there are answers, most days I’m not.

15. In general, I take my religious cues from Nietzsche — god is dead and all; but recently, tempering them with Pascal’s Wager seems more prudent.

16. The only printed material I have read during the last six months is the local newspaper. For my time, traditional “book” publications are archaic and out-dated upon release. The Web is immediate — no future, no past.

17. I did not attend my daughter’s high school or college graduations or her wedding. She comes by the second Friday of every month. She arrives promptly at 11:45, toting a medium pepperoni pizza and garlic bread sticks with marinara sauce for dipping while we watch the noonday news. Her first glance at the clock occurs at 12:20 and continues until exactly one. I make the obligatory inquiries about her brother and her responses are sufficiently ambiguous. Her lips brush my left check ever so faintly as she rises — her standing, the kiss, her leaving one fluid motion as if each individual act is a component of an intricate ballet only appreciated as a whole.

18. I only have one mirror in my entire house. Their one-dimensional lies became unrecognizable.

19. I was engaged to Nancy Carrollton for thirteen months, nine days. We met at LSU during freshman orientation and I proposed on Valentine’s Day of our junior year. The wedding was planned for May 5th, the week after our graduation. Nancy and I returned to my hometown for Spring break our senior year and on a cloudless Wednesday afternoon, as she and my mother returned from a meeting with the caterers, Jim Ross ran the red light at Sycamore and Washington, killing Nancy and my mother. Seems like yesterday.

20. I don’t like pepperoni pizza. Actually, I don’t like any pizza.

21. I no longer own a cell phone.

22. I was an only child.

23. I bought my first firearm, a nice little Baretta 9mm, a few weeks ago. It’s anodized, with checkered grips for better handling.

24. For a little over a year now, I occasionally lose moments. I’ll find myself standing in the middle of an Appalachian bald. The rhododendrons are just beginning to bloom and the air is scented thick and heavy as if it just rained, but the sky gleams between azure and aquamarine, unblemished by even a wisp of cloud. A doe steps from the trees beyond the bald, followed by two speckled fawns. Naturally, they’re timid at first, wary, but the mother soon drops her tail and her babies relax. They seem unaware of my presence. I’m uphill from them and want to move closer, a photograph maybe, but I’m afraid the slightest flinch will spook them and I remain still. Beyond the deer, below me, fold after fold of blue hills roll away to the east. The slightest breeze lifts, carrying the primal salt smell of the ocean to me and then beyond. I turn and face the crest of the bald, my eyes tracing after the scent, but I don’t know why, don’t know what I expect to see. When I turn around again, the deer are gone, and with them, my moment.

25. I’ve realized I don’t actually know the person who tagged me.

The Two of You

by Jack Kaulfus

All summer, I’m confusing the two of you. One with the other. You come up behind me on the bridge when I’m throwing ragged summer leaves into the dry creek bed below. Nobody walks there. At first I think it’s the sweat in my eyes, the sweat sliding off the tip of my nose and down onto my uniform shirt. It’s you and then it’s not you, and I have to think fast, to lie into the mouth of one to preserve the memory of the other.

That night among the evergreens, behind the fire circle, I’m trying to explain this face blindness to Jules when you show up again. I see you through the branches and hope you are not coming for me. But then we are talking about what it might mean to forget the idea of only one option, and later, after everyone is asleep, I let the two of you lay just one arm across my hip.

I go ahead and roll my back against your front and shut my eyes. In my memory, there’s the smell of one of you and the feel of another. Maybe it’s obvious that I only have one kind of love to give, and maybe you don’t care that it’s not for you.

The new kids never even met you. They know the story of you. They will have it by heart by the second week and include the gruesome part in a letter home. They don’t know about the about the blue veins in the backs of your hands, calcium deposits flowering your front teeth – the things you can’t help. In the picture on the wall in the Mess Hall, you lean against the giant dusky boulder in the middle of Senior Quarters. A group of kids pass the framed picture and one of them makes a frog face, aping your on-duty posture. Something about your presence there makes them defiant.

This whole camp is haunted – by campers who never belonged anywhere else, by girls who drowned in the lake or broke their necks beneath horse hooves, by women in their thirties who loved a counselor one summer and then never loved anyone else. Those women send their kids here. Those kids ghost the grounds looking for things that don’t exist anymore.

***

I am lying beneath the trees and the sun is setting on an interminable afternoon. The longest night of my life is about to happen. Later, I will try to recount the chemical story of sex, of tomato leaf and vanilla, and the strength of your wrists, but I will use numbers instead of words, and it won’t work. Later, I will say that we guessed together, guessed correctly, and so felt bound.

The next morning is suddenly late August, early fall. You are leaving, and I’m staying, and there are lies being told, though that hardly matters. A mosquito stings my upper lip sometime in the night, under the cold trees, and I can’t quit running my bottom teeth over it in the morning. The sting blows up like a tiny red balloon. You are gone, not coming back, and the colors of my body match the colors of the camp. Red lip. Red leaf. Red boat straining against its ties in the wind.

Today there’s a white sky, and a light rain. The tree canopy is so thick I can walk down the path toward the bridge without getting wet. Beneath the bridge, the leaves I’ve dumped are beginning to float downstream. Again, there you are. This once, I am hoping for you both.

You show up at the staff meeting, a blandishment. I work at ignoring you, but then you sit in the chair beside the fire, looking at nothing. I can’t tell if we are doing this together. All your stories took place here, on these grounds, in these wooden buildings, and I am trying to remember things that happened to you, not me. I feel a hot hand on top of my head, and Jules drops heavily onto the couch beside me. You there, she here, somebody counts down. We always start with a song.

Unbecoming

by Emma Straub

Anna was hired for the way she looked; the way she looked in clothes. The store was small enough that it only needed one person working at a time, and so that person—the right person—was of the utmost importance. Anna was already almost thirty, with clean, short hair the color of melting chocolate. Her eyes and wrists were small, as were most other things about her. She fit into a sample size dress that Clotilde pulled off the rack, and didn’t smile when Clotilde asked to walk the length of the store as if it were a runway. Anna understood that it was not a joke. The dress was made of cotton and had been hand-dyed in Milan. It cost approximately three times what Anna would be paid in a week, making it one of the more affordable items in the store.

There was no name on the door, or anywhere else that a passer-by might see it. Clotilde wanted to discourage walk-in traffic. After all, this was still Atlantic Avenue, and sometimes when the door was open for too long on a hot day, some of the more fragile garments began to take on the smell of incense from the makeshift storefront set up on the sidewalk, where two African men in dashikis sold small bottles of oil and sticks of jasmine and mrryh. The front door was half clouded, the glass opaque and white from about eye level to just above the average person’s ankle. When they rang the buzzer, Anna looked at their shoes first, then at the top of their head, before deciding whether or not to let them in. Sometimes it was hours between customers, and she spent the afternoon inside the shop alone, folding and refolding, sweeping the floor, and removing any traces of lint from the clothes with her fingernails.

When Clotilde was away, which was most of the time, Anna pretended the store was her own. She would shift the clothes from rack to rack, giving them new experiences. After all, they had been places. When they arrived in Brooklyn, they had already lived in other cities, other countries, spoken other languages. They were more well-traveled than Anna herself, who had not been on an airplane since she was in high school. She had hardly left the neighborhood for five years, when she started at the store. Once she had taken the subway to the Upper East Side to see a doctor; now, when she needed something, she could do it over the telephone. Whenever possible, she liked to communicate with machines. She liked it when a manufactured voice asked her questions, and she could hit buttons in response. She could have been mute, she thought, quite happily. How freeing it would be, not to have to engage with people on the streets, in taxicabs, at the grocery store. In New York, you could have almost anything delivered. Clotilde—both the store and the person—were ideal in this regard. The store never opened its doors when it didn’t want to, and only needed to sell a few items per month in order to cover the rent. When the stock was low and the store nearly empty, Anna thought it was even more wonderful. The spaces in between the hangers got larger and larger, making each item more special. Once, a few years ago, there was only one dress left in the store, and every woman who came in wanted to buy it. All of the room around the dress acted like a spotlight, or a heat lamp, and the thing grew and grew until it was their wedding dress, their husband, their Rosebud.

Sometimes Anna would spend entire days writing her name on small pieces of paper. She loved the symmetry of it, that her name was the same no matter which direction you were coming from, as self-contained as an egg. One day she decided she wouldn’t let anyone in the store ever again, no matter how many times they rang the bell. The store looked better when it was empty, and Anna could sit so still, so quiet, that she didn’t disturb the air. Even if you had walked in, you wouldn’t have seen her. You wouldn’t have seen anything but what she wanted you to see. You would have wanted everything.

Things You Can Do With a Can of Campbell's Soup

by Brock Adams

Cook it. Eat it.

Recycle it.

Clean it out and peel the label off and take it to your Cub Scout troop meeting. Take a hammer and nail and hammer holes into the sides until you’ve made the shape of something festive for Christmas. Or you can write fart or boobs. Then stick a tea candle in the bottom and paint the walls with holiday cheer or profanity. Compare your lantern to those of your Cub Scout friends, the friends you won’t talk to again after high school.

You can catch fireflies in it. You’ll have to cover the top so that they won’t escape, but then their light won’t get out.

Take several cans and line them up on a sawhorse and walk three hundred yards across a field under the summer sun to where you left your dad’s rifle. Do this early in the afternoon when there’s no chance he’ll come home from work. Lie on your belly in the grass. Feel the butt of the gun firm against your shoulder. Breathe slowly, quiet; listen to the insects whirring near your ears. Hold your breath while you squeeze the trigger. The report will be loud. Don’t be startled. Watch through the scope as the can flips into the dirt. Feel powerful.

Gather a bunch for a high school club and donate them to the homeless shelter.

You can paint a picture of it and call it art. It’s been done before.

You can mix some half-and-half and some seasonings and vegetables and diced-up chicken into a few cans of tomato soup and say it’s a centuries-old family recipe for tomato bisque. Serve it to your girlfriend while you sit naked on the couch together. She’ll be impressed. She’ll become your wife.

Make an ugly flower pot out of it and give it to her as an anniversary present.

Feed it to your kids when the rain’s trickling down the windows and your wife is working and you are feeling very lazy. And you are out of peanut butter and jelly.

You can eat it yourself when your wife tells you you’re not worth cooking for.

Hold it in your hand at the supermarket and marvel at its simplicity. It is metal; everything else is plastic and fluorescent and space-aged and extreme, but the can of Campbell’s soup looks exactly the same as the one that your grandfather bought during the Depression. Back when he scrounged for pennies by selling coal that bounced out of the train, back when he bought the soup from a man who is now dead.

You can fill it with things. Marbles. Seashells. Water that’s dripped from the soggy spot in the roof of the living room, the spot you never got around to fixing.

The can can hold all that. Hold it in your hand and look at the shelf. So many choices. Chicken noodle that smells like the flu. Vegetable beef that pops and sizzles over a campfire. Tomato that you can’t bring yourself to buy anymore.

Take a can off the shelf. The can has heft. Fill it with yourself. You can fit the things in it that you can’t fit anywhere else, the loss and the jealousy and the rage. If you want it bad enough, it can hold your children, wherever they are, and your parents, if they were alive, and the friends and the parties and everything else that you had before you started coming home to an empty apartment and eating Campbell’s soup for dinner every night. Toss the can a couple times in your hand like a pitcher biding his time at the mound. Wind up and chuck it as hard as you can down the aisle and leave a Bean-with-Bacon-shaped dent in the side of that woman’s head, the woman that looks kind of like your ex-wife. People will see you. They’ll come after you. That’s okay. You have an entire shelf of red and white ammo. You can knock them down, knock them down, bring them all down around you while you laugh and throw and throw. Feel powerful again.

You can hook two cans together with a piece of string and try to have a conversation with someone who isn’t very far away. Go ahead and put the can right up to your ear. All you’ll hear is metal and string.