Why Aren't You Calling 911?

By Zoé Mahfouz

My mom and I decided to go to the countryside for vacation to get a breath of fresh air, since exposure to air pollution can cause stroke, ischemic heart disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, lung cancer, pneumonia, and cataracts, and everything went just as planned: the tourist attractions we wanted to visit were closed until summer, which isn’t such a bad thing considering that’s where people usually put their unwashed hands, spreading cold and flu viruses, a mechanic told us the wheels of our car were assembled in the wrong order, which I’m pretty sure isn’t true, but I wasn’t about to accuse him of having dyscalculia, especially knowing his constant exposure to carcinogenic dust could cause him respiratory complications like lung cancer and mesothelioma, a group of partner-swappers invited us to join in while we were eating pizza, as if we were tempted to catch human papillomavirus, chlamydia, gonorrhea, syphilis, herpes, trichomoniasis, or HIV, an old man tried to steal my mother’s purse in the middle of a bakery, which really triggered my hypertension, especially when I realized he peed his pants in the process and could transmit leptospirosis if he got too close, a random guy who shared the communal pool at the spa with us smelled like he hadn’t showered in months, which usually leads to dermatitis neglecta, my mother accidentally swallowed the communal pool’s water, the vaccination center was fully booked for cholera shots, the pharmacies told us that drinking Betadine "preventively" was not a thing, the emergency room made us eat charcoal even though we are obviously not barbecue appliances, social security refused to reimburse us, I’m almost certain my moles multiplied in the meantime, and on the way back, not only did I see a tiger mosquito drink my blood, but a feisty field mouse also bit me when I dropped a fry at a motorway rest area, and I swear I heard her whisper a list of global diseases and threats in alphabetical order before handing me a tiny knife and telling me to go back in time to kill baby Hitler, so I’m pretty sure my days are numbered.

Zoé Mahfouz is a French actress, screenwriter, writer, and content creator, author of ADHD in D Minor (North Meridian Press, 2026) and Borges Must Be Rolling in His Grave (Dancing Girl Press, 2025).

Art by Jay Baker, an artist from Colorado living in Oregon, by way of New Mexico; he records music as Tom Foe.

Ritual / Habit

By Dee Mohammed

My bi-annual check-up on my elementary school crush goes how I expect it to, with me frowning at the scraggly mustache that sprouts unattractively from his upper lip and the thick, American traditional tattoos sleeving down his arms, “US Navy” in his bio and “college dropout” in the subtext, all the makings of someone who, a decade down the line, would raise his children to call him “sir,” children conceived with a girl who is a petite shade of his mother, because he doesn’t follow his sisters on Instagram, but he follows his mom and a handful of swimsuit models who could very well be his mom’s age—regardless, he’d be known around the neighborhood as a stand-up guy who faithfully attends his kids’ basketball and football and baseball games, never mind that he arrives for only the last ten minutes of his daughter’s kindergarten performance of The Nutcracker, and his shirt is always tucked smartly into his Levi jeans, smooth down strong legs as the other dads call him "sport" and "man," even though the natural curl of his dark lashes and owlish set of his eyes belie a strange and fidgeting girlishness in him, one that I’d liked in third grade when I solemnly told him he had the prettiest eyes I’d ever seen sit on a boy’s face; this was before kissing his cheek and running off, though that was then, when he used to smile with all his teeth, and this is now, so I let myself linger on the semi-familiar face of a stranger who knows the shape of my mouth against skin before I close the tab, memory settling like sediment until, inevitably, it becomes disturbed again.

Dee Mohammed is a very tired, very hungry student at Texas A&M University, and her works appear in a handful of literary magazines from over the years.

Art by Jay Baker, an artist from Colorado living in Oregon, by way of New Mexico; he records music as Tom Foe.

New York

By Oleg Olizev

In New York, you're always on camera — too many people chasing money or organs or both, and there’s plenty to go around; money doesn’t stink, but organs come in every shade and shape, and sooner or later they’ll catch you, so don’t bother hiding — lean out and let the city have you, because screaming here makes you prey, to cops, to strangers, to time, to anything that doesn’t look like you, or worse, they’ll walk past and you won’t even notice you’re already gone, so leave a trace — something that says you were here, that you never smoked in the subway or drank beer on the edge of a flowerbed, because that’s not allowed and they’ll misread you, misfile you, misplace you like a bad bet, and maybe you’re out here dancing naked and wild, maybe you’ll get jumped and spend the rest of your life drooling skyward, that happens too — ugly, yeah, but who’s to say, and maybe your buddy’s wrong but you still only have one answer: this or nothing, maybe something filthy with a wink, and maybe I’ll be hauling busted jaws and bricks to the ER later to cover up what’s obvious on the warehouse floor, and you’ll come with me for cheap tea at La Grenouille and tell me how your bones ache from being handled too rough in this city and how your teeth still shine, and you’ll say it without shame and it’ll all pass by Monday, just like everything else, because here, dead fates sit in the corners of skyscrapers and mops shake from applause in the basement, so take your pick of exposed adolescence before fate skips you at the intersection of desire and steel, where the cars will hit you hard enough to make you see stars and your eyes’ll scatter like loose change, and that’s why I’m wrapping this up — because in New York, everything’s an accident: the rain, the snow slipping off a stranger’s shoulder, the legs that go on forever, the stupid plans over dinner, the insomnia, the shameless ones, the natural beauty dangling in your face like someone’s earring, like a birch tree in the wind, so stop sulking — worse shit has gone down here when the wine got too bold.

Oleg Olizev writes like New York bleeds — messy, fast, and full of things no one wants to talk about.

Photo by Oleg Olizev.