Elephant on My Back

By MaxieJane Frazier

Six muscled litter carriers deposit my sister’s soul-slipping body in her Happy Place of soft bedding, motivational quotes, and perfectly picked wall colors; meanwhile an elephant sits folded in on itself on my passenger seat because we just left the pharmacy with enough liquid morphine to kill, well, an elephant, but she doesn’t mind because her trunk snakes across my Subaru’s dashboard; she rests her dorsal and ventral fingers over my driving hand sounding just like my dying sister when she whispers, “So this is it?” then after we park, she clambers on my back to climb all twenty-four steps to the Happy Place vigil where together we balance on a fold-out out chair, or stand, or stretch together as one weighted being through the night and day and one last long night before my sister’s haggard, autonomic breathing smooths out until, in that only moment when I’m not looking, sometime a little before 3 a.m., she, the elephant, slips down off my back, though I feel her weigh just the same, still I turn around and catch a glimpse of my sister riding just behind those gray, flapping ears, through the walls of her Happy Place, astride the elephant’s swaying march over the Columbia River.

MaxieJane Frazier, author, editor, and teacher, cares for geriatric equids and other furry beloveds while writing from the Okanogan Highlands of Washington state where she seeks out perfection, mostly in words.

Art by Evva Durkee.

Indiana Jones and the Giant Pit of Consequences

By Timothy C. Goodwin

In hindsight, my hat looked nothing like a fedora, and the mustache my best friend Charley made from scribbling black marker on paper, cutting out, and taping to his upper lip looked nothing like Hitler's; in hindsight, we should have stayed at the scene of the accident, calling out to my parents for help from the backyard instead of running to get them, so that we didn’t look like we were fleeing the scene; in hindsight, there are plenty of other ways to play Indiana Jones, so taking the swings off the swingset and dangling from the top bar, crossing from one end to the other, hand over hand—Charley chasing me over an imagined, giant pit of lava-snakes—might not have been the best idea, because of course my five-year old sister would want to join us, even though there was no role for a kid like her in our serious pretendification, and—in hindsight—maybe I could have told her to scram, but I didn't think she would follow us up to the top of the swingset, I didn't think she would fall, and I didn't think that landing on her butt with her arms behind her would snap her wrists—all 2 of them—like 2 plastic straws, and after keys were swiped from the table top and coats were ripped from hangers while my parents shouted new concepts like CONSEQUENCES and WHAT WERE YOU THINKING and HINDSIGHT over the sound of lots and lots—and lots—of sisterly screaming, the front door slammed shut and the wailing receded into the distance, leaving Charley and I in (sniffling) silence, together on the couch, his mustache barely hanging to his lip, flapping with each pant, my hat crumpled in my fists in my lap, both of us now aware of how much thinking we have to do in our world, how there are consequences in our world, and in that silence, from the backyard, we could still hear the Indiana Jones theme playing on our cassette player, soundtracking an adventure that, in hindsight, now seemed so childish, now seemed so long ago.

Timothy C Goodwin has work included in HAD, Trash Cat, Twin Pies, Dishsoap Quarterly, JAKE, Maudlin House, and elsewhere; he lives in NYC.

Art by Gary Goodwin.

Carbs

By Andrew Maynard

Annie told Kyle that her grandpa had a heart attack and she’d have to bail on what was supposed to be a double date at the Olive Garden, so now Kyle sits across from Jen and Eric on the lonely side of a four-person booth trying to think about anything other than the profound hand job that mangled what once was a perfectly balanced tricycle with defined systems (Jen and Eric dating, Kyle, a little jealous but mostly cool with being third wheel) into this wobbly clusterfuck of a dinner party that can barely enjoy oversized plates of Fettuccine Alfredo and endless breadsticks because it’s hard to eat when you know you’re a bad friend, and Kyle knows he is a bad friend, though he can’t possibly tell Eric about the hand job because it would ruin everything they built, and a 12-year friendship is worth more than—Kyle’s train of thought is derailed as he and Jen make eye contact at the precise moment her long fingers curl around the end of a golden-brown breadstick and like deja vu Kyle is back in the back of her Honda Civic where she made him promise, mid-jerk, that he’d never tell Eric, and he won’t, he can’t, and he accepts the fact that he’ll never be the person he thought he could be, because that person would never get a hand job from his best friend’s girlfriend, no matter how much he loves her—and Eric picks up his phone and apologizes, but he has to leave, because he’s on-call, and Kyle didn’t know being on-call was the responsibility of a dermatology PA, but when Jen tries to get up, Eric insists that she stay, because there is still fettuccine on their plates and a half-full basket of breadsticks and more drinks on the way, and now it’s just Kyle and Jen, alone for the first time since what Jen thought would be the last time, and she doesn’t regret giving Kyle the hand job because it snapped her and Eric out of the stasis of a stalled relationship, and he’s been so much more present since she told him, and she just knows that they have what it takes to get through this, and if they can get through this they can get through anything, but man she wishes Kyle would stop being such a puppy dog about the whole thing, the way he looks at her is so pathetic, and she didn’t know it was possible for a grown man to put so much weight into a handy, and Kyle and Annie both understand that the heart is a spider web capable of trapping and feasting on small, beautiful joys and being swiped into oblivion without notice, but what they don’t know is Annie’s grandpa’s heart is totally fine, and Eric is not on his way to the office but Annie’s apartment where he’s been going weekly since he found out about the secret hand job, and Eric and Annie intend to do things to one another that make a hand job seem more like a handshake on the spectrum of philandering, and the waitress sets down Jen and Kyle’s drinks and smiles and says, Is there anything else you need, and the answer is, of course, yes, but neither is ready to admit it.

Andrew Maynard is a teacher and writer in Richmond, Virginia. His stories and essays have appeared in HAD, DIAGRAM, Mud Season Review, True Story, Rejection Letters, and elsewhere.

Art by Ryan Meadows, a 24 year old queer artist and hairstylist living in Phoenix, AZ.