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.

The basement of the old gym is a good one

By Brendan Todt

Sure, Sarah tells the students, the basement of the old gym is a good one, but the scariest experience she’s ever had was at the Historic Pierce Mansion on Jackson Street at the end of March a few years ago when she was part of a committee raising funds for the symphony, when she got separated from her group and ended up in a second-story bedroom filled with ceramic pigs and origami pigs and needlepoint pigs framed in pictures on the walls and pig dolls with round pink pig faces and pigtails for hair, and the room had too many chairs to be a bedroom, or, plausibly, any kind of room, and on each of the chairs was a knit afghan with a different letter in a bold color in its center, and through the ventilation system—somehow—she was able to hear what must have been every conversation going on in the house, and some of the pig dolls must have been made by children because they did not have mouths, but Sarah was convinced they were speaking to her, the way her new writing students believe the muse will speak to them, and through one vent in the floor Sarah heard a wealthy patron admit how much he would like to fuck the one with the black hair and the bourbon breath—it would just take a few dollars or drinks more—and Sarah remembered that most of the pigs she has seen in real life have not been pink or cute but dark and dirty and hairy, and the voices kept arriving through the bowels of the house—Keep those checks coming, gentlemen, says one of them: the music director—and she remembers that one of the men she loved most, early on, sheepishly admitted his preference for thick pubic hair and unshaved legs, primarily because he had never seen it in person, so Sarah offered herself up to him that way, which she doesn’t tell the students, though perhaps she should, because even this could not satisfy him—More checks, think of the Christmas program, the elementary school visits; think of your legacy, your tax liability, your name over the lobby concessions—and in a room nearby Sarah heard no footsteps but a toilet flush, and then everyone in the house seemed to stop talking, as if they had realized that Sarah was like the house itself, big and empty and spooky and listening, but then they must have figured that couldn’t possibly be the case, no haunted anythings around here, so polite and Midwest they all were, so well-meaning and generous, so they picked up talking and begging and flushing and fucking and still she hasn’t been able to shut them all up or all out.

Brendan Todt, who writes and teaches writing in Sioux City, Iowa, has been working on a series of stories about a character named Sarah--who herself writes and teaches writing--some of which have appeared in Smokelong Quarterly, Necessary Fiction, and elsewhere.

What Kind of Body of Water are You?

By Edmario Lesi

The week I finished begging my dreams for answers, I kissed two boys at a DJ slash artist slash ex-boyfriend’s birthday party, and they both seemed grumpy afterward, I think because the two boys were rival actors in the same performing arts academy, so I decided to only invite the taller boy to my cousin's pondwarming—my cousin who lives near a pond—and although this boy never accepted my friend request on Instagram, he did arrive at the pondwarming the next evening and wander into conversations asking 'What kind of body of water are you?' while I preoccupied myself with a boy I had kissed once last July, whose eyelids were sagging from too much weed, yet there was a voltage between us which meant this pondwarming offered again the mixed pleasure of getting caught between two boys who almost wanted me, or wanted me once just never during the appropriate time, and because neither boy seemed desperate enough, two days later I met with a boy decades older than me, an author of young adult novels, and he told me he’d endured fourteen ex-boyfriends, two of whom had died of drug overdoses, he said 'I really know how to pick them,' which I think was the boy’s only effective joke, because the rest seemed written by God, like the final minutes of our date, when he needed to buy chicken broth from his local supermarket before it closed, and I felt so humiliated he chose broth over me that I abandoned him to sleep with a boy someplace a few hundred metres away, who asked if my name comes from anywhere—it doesn’t—then talked about himself while his cock sluiced out of me, so I learned he was a brand manager for a yogurt company where he worked alongside his boyfriend, who was dating another boy who planned to relocate to Alaska next July, which reminded me of my first evening in Melbourne, when I stayed with a boy who lived inside a converted warehouse that smelled like gum leaves, and I surprised myself by telling this boy about the recurring dream where my boyfriend and I, some non-existent combination, are pissing on the frozen lake beneath us until it smashes apart.

Edmario Lesi is a PhD candidate of English and Creative Writing at The Australian National University; his short stories have appeared in Island, Carte Blanche, The Suburban Review, and elsewhere.

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