Evening whispers through the forests beneath the harvest moon
The faint sounds of laughing children begin to leave the room
And each one shares a memory with the others who come to play
In the back yard of a forest in the breath of this new day.
 
Little hands that touch the sky hold the light of this new day
And breathe the breath of life onto a world that lost its way.
 
Laughing at the sunshine as the children find their way into the back yard forest
And the breath of this new day, Every dreamer tells a story
a lesson to show the way but every little hand reaches up beneath the harvest moon
to save this world with a new day.
 
So, that was then, can you see the light as it moves across the forest floor
Can you still hear the children laughing in the evening beneath the harvest moon
Have you given a thought to the things that you’ve left outside
As you look inside your window drying the tears that you’ve cried.
 
Go back and be that child that ran across the forest floor
It’s the only way to find that place where your dreams can live forever more
A place to see the sunshine, a place to share a memory with the friends you’ve left behind
Go back, I’ll be waiting for you there.


Hollywood

I’ve never been to Hollywood she said with a smile
But I’ve seen the movie and it’s time for me to go
Now I just need a ride
And she says…honey can we go.
 
She said she’s never seen the Milky Way
But she’s always counting stars
Any chance to touch the sun she said
Any chance at all.
 
in the nights of Aurora borealis she reaches into the sky
touching the colors that pass through the night
that come to rest inside her eyes
 
nobody knows her name but everyone wants to know
what she says when she talks to the sky in the evening during the northern glow
she always speaks with a smile as if she has a secret she cannot share
but just one look at the colors in her eyes will tell you things she already knows.
 
I’ve never been to Hollywood and I’ve never touched the sky
But if you want to jump inside I’d love to give you a ride.



Jeff Nesvig is a writer living in Florida.

The thing he noticed first was how lurid his dreams were becoming.

They seemed louder, more crowded, iced with an extra helping of that particular dream anxiety where something or some action has been forgotten and has to be completed NOW. That was one thing. There was also the sensation of clawing yourself up to reach the surface of wakefulness and then spending minutes under the covers convincing yourself that it was only a dream, there is no crisis, it wasn’t real, your mother, who died in 1994, hadn’t lost her luggage at the airport and was going to miss her flight to Johannesburg to meet with Joan Blondell.

Soon he was experiencing things much more stressful than the Mom/Joan Blondell dream. He was caught up in the sort of panic inducing scenarios that kept him from falling back to sleep for fear the dream would pick up right where it left off.

They were his dreams, he recognized that, but there was the sense of someone or something stirring the cauldron, pouring in hot sauce laced with LSD. They were photographed at closer range and with a disturbing wide-angle lens. And the things revealed in the dreams, the appetites… He was surprised by what he seemed to want, experiences he was open to, desires without precedent.

Or maybe not. Maybe these were things he always wanted. He started to look back and began to see moments when he seemed much closer to the figure in his dreams than he thought he’d been. He started to remember moments, slices of moments, looks and gestures, errant thoughts. Not even complete thoughts, but something like the subway platform idylls that come in those empty moments of watching the lights of the local collect on the tunnel walls. When’s the last time he waited for a subway?

Flickers of things. What if that happened? What if this presented itself? What if she said she wanted to kiss you? What if the glass rolled off the table? What if you fell off the bridge or down the elevator shaft? What if you were being pulled under the waves, ignored by the people on shore like the man in the Stevie Smith poem? ”…not waving but drowning.”

The dreams were rummaging through forgotten boxes of memory and aggressively re-mixing the contents so that the falling of the glass was the thing that made the girl ask if it would be all right to kiss him. Now the front of the house he grew up in was suddenly attached to his second apartment in Floral Park.

At first he thought it must be a factor of quarantine and the endless roiling of the crisis. Other people were telling him their dreams were getting increasingly weird and strident. The world was turning into a vulgar nightmare, why shouldn’t the same thing happen while he was trying to get some sleep?

But then he thought, “What if my dreams are getting more fantastic because my life is getting so dull?” All his missed opportunities were coming back with a vengeance as he clocked more and more years and everything went gray. His hair as well as his outlook. His dreams were welling up like banshees to torture him for all his prudence, all his careful, well considered judgements.

He came to the grim conclusion that it was only a matter of time before V. showed up to join the punishing chorus. Chorus nothing. V. would have a solo. An aria.

Like so many men…maybe even most men…he was guilty of looking at a woman and being willfully unaware of her history and all those relationships and events that orbit a woman’s life like invisible asteroids and comets, warping their personal gravity.

V. was at the center of a particularly unstable solar system. He ignored that, to both their regrets.

It ended very badly. Very selfishly. Too often men get into relationships misinterpreting their greed as an act of charity. “What she needs is me.” When the truth is what he wants is her and what she needs doesn’t enter into the discussion. He wasn’t a terrible man. He was probably better than most. At least he felt bad about what happened.

What he did, unfortunately, was try to bury the memory of his blunders. Nobody wants to be revealed as a selfish, unfeeling jerk, least of all to himself. He pushed the memory away, eventually pushing away the entire geographical area associated with the affair and moved to the other side of the country.

But now disease and an incompetent federal government had conspired to bring a vast assortment of his chickens home to roost during his nightmares. He anticipated V. every night, and while those nights were filled with magnified childhood shame and amplified examples of his cowardice, V. did not appear.

And every morning, he feared what was to come.

He moved through the day, one Zoom meeting to the next in that sort of daytime sleepwalking we all seem to be doing now. He would have a drink in the evening, followed by another drink, followed by looking at the news on the internet and having another drink. It had become the structure of his life. No wonder his dreams were attacking him.

•

He didn’t realize he was dreaming at first. He was at his desk, working on the computer when the doorbell rang. He got up from his desk and left his den, stepping not into his house in North Hollywood, but into his apartment in Jackson Heights. As is the way with dreams when we’re in them, this didn’t seem unusual at all.

He opened the door and saw V. standing on the other side. She was smiling. She was wearing her black velvet coat with the fur collar. There was fresh snow on the collar and on her blonde hair. She was wearing her red leather gloves and offered him a sack of White Castle cheeseburgers. And since this was a dream he didn’t question any of it. And he wasn’t afraid of her.

He remembered the coat and the snow in her hair, but she hadn’t arrived with the cheeseburgers. They had gone out together to walk up to Northern Boulevard to buy them. It was snowing and the snow pulled the sound from the air. The streetlights turned the snow on the branches of the trees a sort of sepia tone. Like a tintype.

In the dream V. came into the apartment and the bag of cheeseburgers was left on the kitchen counter. She took off her coat. She was wearing black jeans and a sweater that changed color from green to pearl to rose each time he turned and looked away. She sat down on the sofa and unzipped her boots. He took the boots and put them on some newspaper near the door.

At this point the dream edited out the part about eating some of the cheeseburgers and smoking some grass and went directly to the two of them naked, making love on the floor in front of the sofa. He was on his back looking up at her as she looked down at him. She was on her haunches, straddling him.

And the world fell away.

There was nothing but the two of them. Nothing but what she felt like in his arms, the sound of her breathing, the thin draft he felt on his side, coming through the bottom of the window above them. The light coming through the window was from the streetlights that turned everything…V.’s face shadowed by her tousled hair, the edge of the sofa at the corner of his vision, the ceiling a mile or so above them…all the color of amber.

No regrets, no confusion, no concerns, no questions about the husband or the other lovers she had or why she had them.

Back then, the grass they smoked worked to make things feel like a dream, so having it all come back to him now in a dream seemed to reverse the process and made it vivid and real and precise. Time stretched in all directions. Slowed by the grass, compressed by the dream.

There was the feeling of things being pulled toward their centers, something magnetic. He bent his head back as the sensation grew and when he did this he could see out the window and saw, upside down, how the snow had collected in an even drift-let along the fire-escape railing. The snow was as amber as everything else.

He woke up then and sat on the edge of the bed and was, a moment later, crying. Weeping. The sort of weeping you associate with grief.

In pushing away his shame, he had pushed away the memory of what was one of the few perfect moments he’d ever had.

He was sure she hated him when it ended. The parting left a sour aftertaste and was not accomplished with any grace or respect. It was like dropping a cinder-block on a two-by-four. The board breaks apart, but the ends are a mess of shards and splinters and spikes. Like crude weapons. He was frightened by the letter she wrote to demand he return all the photographs he’d taken of her. He had no right to her image. He returned the photographs and for weeks afterward kept looking over his shoulder expecting…he wasn’t sure what.

To survive he built a wall between himself and the end. But that meant walling off what had come before: What he thought the first time he saw her, the way they stumbled toward each other, how grateful they both seemed at the start of things. He was bold back then…bold or stupid, they often achieve the same goal…and he had won her. At least some of her. At least for awhile.

Regardless of how it ended, regardless of how he bungled things, there had been that one night. There had been a couple of hours when everything rhymed.

And while that was gone, it had happened. He was part of it.

He did not know where she was. He did not know if she ever thought about him, remembered him, cursed him. It was such a long time ago. Forty years. They were both old now. He didn’t know if she was even alive, if the virus had found her. After all, they were both members of a “vulnerable population.”

If he didn’t have the right to keep the photographs of her, did he have the right to remember that night?

He stood up, went in the bathroom and washed his face. Then he went into the dark living room and looked out at the street through the front windows. He could see the streetlights. They were a cold, blue-white. They were not amber.



Joseph Dougherty is a writer living in California.

“Temperatures will be moderate today and unemployment numbers are improving,” the newscaster said with a parenthetical of relief in her voice. “Thank God,” I thought, “Finally this heat wave is done.”

“But the big news breaking overnight, the President and First Lady…,” click. I turned the radio off – I wanted it to be a good news day.

I pulled into a spot near my favorite coffee shop and got out of the car feeling a little more upbeat than I had in a long time, “Maybe the heat is done, maybe COVID is coming to an end, maybe….”

“Hey Clark!” the shrill but muffled voice of my longtime friend Tina belted from behind her industrial grade shield and mask, ‘Where’s your mask?”

“Oh! Got it right here in my pocket!” I said, having for a brief moment forgotten we were in a bizarre re-make of the Andromeda Strain.

“Well put it on! You don’t want to end up like you-know-who!” She yelled as she shook her finger at me causing her Biden-Harris button to shake violently on her collar, “It’s so good to see you! It’s been ages!”

“Yeah crazy times, isn’t it?” I said, honestly glad to see her. She was really a fun, smart and cool friend.
“Well with that orange-headed idiot running things what do you expect? He got his Karma didn’t he?”

I had no idea what she was talking about and didn’t care to. “How is Bill? Where is he?” I asked. Bill was her longtime significant other – they had been together for so long they may have been the first “significant other” couple that ever was.

“He’s inside having some argument about writing with a moron who thinks he knows something about writing. It’s all bull shit, I tell him ‘Bill, it’s all bullshit why do you bother?’ But does he listen?... First act this, crisis climax that… God if I hear the term character arc again in my lifetime…”

“I see,” I said noting that Tina had stopped and was looking at the bumper of my car.

“What?” I asked.

“Huh?” she said.

“What are you looking at? Did someone hit my car?”

“Oh no I just noticed you don’t have your Biden bumper sticker on yet – you know this election is no joke we have to get the vote out. I have an extra in my car, if you want, I can get it for you.”

“Oh no that’s OK, I’m just going to go grab my coffee. Don’t bother.”

“You don’t want a Biden sticker for your car?”

“Well… I… it’s just…”

“Clark! You aren’t voting for Trump, are you?” she queried, her eyes wide and the only part of her face I could see behind the shield and mask… or wait …two masks! She was double covered. And yet her voice was still being felt in spots on my spine which I haven’t been able to reach since I was 17.

“Oh, no I don’t think so.” I said trying to inch away to what I really wanted, my coffee.

“You don’t think so?! That is not an answer! That’s not good enough!” she belted at me as if she were auditioning for The View. “We have to get rid of that asshole! He’s a fucking idiot! A moron! A liar!”

“Well I….”

“You ‘don’t think so’? Clark! Are you a Republican?...”

“No.”

“…One of these hidden racist, gun toting Nazis who let Hilary down last time? Need I remind you we are standing south of Ventura Blvd?”

“No… no…,” I said thinking it was none of her business but not daring to say it. “Look I’m a moderate, right in the middle and I really don’t like talking about politics… I… I… didn’t vote for him last time.” I finally conceded breaking my rule of not talking about my politics but hoping it would appease her.

“Did you vote for Hillary?”

“No…. but I live in a state she carried...” I offered hoping I’d be let off the hook.

“OH MY FUCKING GOD! You are! You are a right-wing prick! You are the problem!!!”

“I am?” I said, having never considered being in the middle and always desperately trying to be accommodating and even minded as the problem.

“You sure as hell are! Oh god, oh god oh god….” She repeated as if we had been married 30 years and I had just told her I liked men – no - that’s not right - THAT she would have probably accepted. Suddenly she turned, grabbed me by the arms, “SILENCE IS VIOLENCE!!!” she screamed as she shook me so hard, I felt a filling loosen.

“So is breaking my neck! Look Tina, I think Biden seems like a fine guy… but he has been in politics for 45 years and not the strongest choice they could have put forward, but if he wins, he’ll be my President just like Trump is now and Obama was. And that will be OK, we will all get through it.”

If her mask wasn’t acting as a mouth-bra, her jaw would have hit the pavement. “Did you just say ‘Trump is your President’???? You right wing Nazi prick! You support him as your president?

“Well, he is the President – I support the office, I don’t know that I would say I support him. I think he has done some awful things; I don’t like his personality much – he’s an egotist, pompous and should keep his mouth shut. But there are a couple of things he’s done – stood up to China, re-negotiated some bad trade deals. He’s ending wars, bringing troops home. We are all still alive – we will be OK. I DIDN’T VOTE FOR HIM… I just don’t think…”

“Right! Exactly right! You don’t think! Unbelievable that’s what you are! I had no idea what a fucking idiot you are! To think I liked you and respected you!... So, you are in favor of Police killing innocent people and immigrant babies dying in captivity?” she screamed, her head shaking as if it were reaching critical mass.

“No, of course not. Tina, I’m an independent. I just think things would be better if all the noise were turned down and we tried to get along and thought about the whole picture without being so extreme. You know, compromise and reason.”

“You can’t reason, compromise or get along with a hater Clark!” she bellowed as her hand hit the trunk of her Mercedes with a thud and crows flew off high voltage wires above, “How can you like a hater? He is a fucking hater and I hate him! And I hate you if you even think that hater has done anything right! He’s got to be fucking removed and someone with love, care, and compassion needs to be in that office – that’s what we stand for! Reason, logic, love and compassion. We are trying to be inclusive! Everybody has a place with us! And there is no room in our movement for people like you who don’t get it and don’t denounce him outright!!!!"

“Wait….what? ”

She grabbed her phone and fumbled with it.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m unfriending you! If Facebook had a hate icon I’d be sending it your way.”

“Tina….”

“Look,” she said adjusting her 50 pound purse on her shoulder like a gunfighter straightening his holster for the draw. “Once Biden is in Office and that fucking idiot is gone and we run the White House and Congress, then this country can heal and be unified – because the stupid asshole fucking republicans will be out and reasonable people will be leading - but not till then!”

I stared at her, dumbfounded and also feeling so bad things had come to this. “Tina, I’m sorry…” I said, not sure why I was apologizing, I guess I just didn’t like to think that I could have anything to do with making her upset.

“Don’t, Clark,” she said holding up her hand and walking away, “And don’t you dare show up at the house next week for our party – you are not welcome until you can be inclusive and loving. Knowing what an idiot you are you probably got COVID like he did, and you deserve it!”

I stood for a long time dazed, stunned and sad. What a world we have evolved into. And the President has COVID? Wow, that’s just what we needed – the election period was feeling sort of boring and uneventful! I decided to avoid my favorite coffee shop and walk down the street to the other option – not as good, but probably no one I knew was there and that was rapidly becoming my desire these days – avoid everyone!

No luck.

As I approached, I saw a long-time friend, Daryl standing on the corner wearing a red MAGA ball cap. “That takes balls,” I thought, “Geez, he’s on Ventura Blvd in Studio City…”

He turned and saw me, a quizzical look on his face. “Hey Clark! Don’t tell me you’ve bought into this whole COVID media bullshit.”

“What?” I asked.

“That mask! You aren’t one of those ‘Oh god we’re all going to die’ types, are you?”

“Oh, no. No. It the law so I wear it….. Wait. I just heard that Trump has COVID.”

“And you believe that? What are you stupid? It’s the old rope a dope buddy – Ali versus Foreman – Trump pretends he has COVID – kicks back in the hospital, everybody feels for him, he’s about to die…but wait! A week before the election. BOOM! He’s back like Rocky Balboa in the 15th – swinging and hittin’… he’s James Brown thrownin’ off the cape… he’s…."

“Michael Meyers in the third act? Never dead and always dangerous?” I inserted.

Daryl smiled and pointed at me. “Michael Fucking Meyers! That’s perfect! It will scare the shit out of the lefties. Fucking asswipes with their COVID panic. It’s pathetic isn’t it?” He looked at me and sneered again at my face, “Take off the mask, Clark, show some sack, man. Before you know it, you’ll be wearing a dress and joining Transgenders for Biden.”

“That’s hilarious.” I offered, not thinking it was hilarious at all, “Good to see you, Daryl. I’m just going to go in and get coffee.”

“Hey, Trump is coming for a rally in Orange County at the end of the month, you want to go see Rocky Balboa – Michael Fucking Meyers??”

“No thanks.”

“Come on, man we have to show support. Somebody has to save California from the Newsome nightmare. If you just stay silent you are part of the problem.”

“Yeah I’ve heard that.”

“More people like us got to stand up. We can’t let Creepy Joe win.”

“Well….”

“Well what?”

“What makes you think I’m voting for Trump?” I asked.

“Wait, you aren’t a fucking lefty, are you?”

“No…”

“I always thought you were one of us.”

"One of what?”

“A true American.”

"I am an American, yes.”

“Oh, thank God, for a minute you scared me I thought how can a guy who looks like this be a fucking socialist.”

“Excuse me? Looks like what?”

“Like you! Tall, white, blue eyes…”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

He looked at me as if he were seeing me for the first time.

“Don’t tell me you are voting for Biden! Clark, really? You own a German Shepard for Christ-sake.”

“So, Biden has a German Shepard. And by the way James Brown wasn’t white. Or Ali for that matter”

“Jesus… oh my god, you are! You are a fucking liber-tard. You limp dicked asshole. Do you really want the socialists to take over? You know who supports Biden? The fucking socialists and the anarchists. Seen them riots? – They are coming for us – You won’t have a pot to piss in if Biden wins.”

“Well Trump hasn’t exactly been the greatest role model as President.”

“Listen to you! A fucking left wing commie – after all these years – let me guess – oh boo-hoo the cops are mean – boo-hoo the immigrants won’t get to take all our services that we pay for if mean old Trump is in office. What the fuck is wrong with you? Don’t you support the police and military?"

“Yeah – I think the good police are great. But..”

“Don’t you believe in America?”

“Yes, but Daryl…”

"But nothin! End of story – Get out of my face you left wing asswipe. You probably jack off watching Don Lemon on CNN. Mark my words, the libertards will take your guns!”

“I don’t have guns.”
“Jesus this just gets better and better, well when Kamala becomes President when Creepy Joe dies, don’t come running to me to buy a gun cuz my 50 are not for sale.”

“I won't.”

“Fucking left-wing idiot – You know, Clark, I can’t believe I liked and respected you all these years. Had I known what a radical you were I’d never let you in my house. How can you line yourself up with those haters? They hate everything – they hate me, you and America – and the fucking media is all about them and their agenda. If Biden wins there will be no safe place – they will crush us – and destroy the country. Our only chance is to get Trump re-elected and then we can heal and unite because people with brains will be in control.”

So, there was my Tuesday – life as a moderate in today’s world. My friends on the right think I’m a socialist and my friends on the left think I’m a Nazi – so I have no friends. And I’m beginning to like it that way.


Donald Biden is an annoymous writer living at the center.

P:  Slim Dunlap.   
Dunlap became a Replacement in the starting rotation for former Minnesota Twins wild man, Bob Stinson who moved on in 1995 to play with the Angels.

C: Lou Barlow.  
Barlow has a strong arm and is a solid hitter and is often referred to as a “Dinosaur” for his used of an older model
catcher’s glove.

1B:  Jeff Ament.  
First baseman Jeff Ament hail hails from Havre, Montan though is often credited with being from Green River, Wyoming.  Ament is know for his athletic ability to stretch in order to make great plays on his base.

2B:  Carlos Santana.  
Santana is a fine second baseman with quick hands.  He is well known for having various talismans that he keeps in his locker, including a bobble head of Guru Sri Chinmoy.

3B:  Steve Wynn.
Known for frequently singing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” during the teams seventh inning stretch, Wynn was considered a “Dream” find when picked up by the organization.

SS:  Cesar Rosas.
An adept player, Rosas is well known for looking cool on and off the field in his ever present shades.

LF:  Tommy Stinson.  
Brother of former pitcher Bob Stinson, Tommy shocked the world of baseball by becoming the first professional player at the age of 13.  Stinson is known for making great leaping catches at the fence.

CF: John Fogerty.  
Fogerty was picked up from the minor league but not given a chance to take the field until one day when he emphatically stated, “Put in me in coach, I’m ready to play.”  Due to his outstanding performance, Fogerty secured his position in Centerfield.

RF:  Gary Clark Jr.
Hailing from Austin, Texas, center fielder Clark has a spotless record of making no errors, catching balls hit under Bright Lights or stormy weather.

Manager:  Bruce “The Boss” Springsteen.  
Known for his impassioned love of the game, Springsteen was dubbed “The Boss” out of respect from his players and has long remained a solid figure in the sport of baseball.


Brian Lux is a writer living in California.

“I’m wearing pants.” That’s the first thing he says.

She’d stalked him on social media so she knew what he looked like. He’s cuter in motion though, a smile that curls up at the edges like a cartoon.

He stands up and looks down. “Well, not pants exactly. Shorts. That’s okay, right?”

“Shorts are fine. I’m wearing leggings, I’ve worn them like every day since this started. I wash them. Really.” She sticks her leg up in the air. Uh-oh, is he going to think she has fat legs? Has he stalked her on social media? Oh, man, he probably saw the photos from her trip to Zuma with her high school friends last summer, why did they have all those Moscow Mules and why did she post the photos, dumb dumb dumb. He’s probably totally regretting this blind date, who even has blind dates any more?

“I’m Chris,” he says, settling back into his chair. “I know you know that already. That my name is Chris. Because that’s what Barry told Elana, right, so this isn’t a surprise or anything. I’m talking too much, you can tell me to shut up or maybe you can pretend you dialed the wrong number.”

He smiles again and his goofiness makes her laugh out loud. “Elana told me you have a great sense of humor. I’m Katlyn, pleased to meet you, Chris.” She holds her hand in front of the camera and waits until he does the same. They pretend to shake. “Are there people who don’t wear pants?”

“You mean when they’re doing this or on Zoom? Yeah, probably. I’m wearing what I’ve been wearing all day. No offense or anything.”

“Me, too,” Katlyn says, hoping her face doesn’t betray the lie. The lie of changing her clothes at least a dozen times. Spending way too much time on makeup, thinking about borrowing her roommate’s ring light.

“It’s going to be weird to go back,” he says. “I was working in an office before all this and we could wear jeans, but no t-shirts. I wore khakis a lot. Now – I’m used to shorts.”

“Are you working now?” She hopes she doesn’t sound judgmental. About half her friends are looking for full-time work. It’s tough – a year out of college, finding a job in the middle of a pandemic. She thanks her lucky stars every night she’d started a job six months before the quarantine locked everything down.

“I’m doing some production accounting – but I’d been thinking about law school. Now... who knows?”

Katlyn nods. “Yep. I was happy being back in L.A., wow, I’m going to work at this little talent agency and maybe I’ll be an agent one day, at a big place, like CAA.” She sighs. “Who knows?”

“You have pretty eyes,” he says. “They’re blue, right?” He moves closer to the camera on his computer.

“Blue grey. Do you think we’re going to go back, I mean, soon? Sometimes I worry it’s always going to be like this.”

He takes a sip from his water bottle. “I don’t know how soon, but I’m sure things will be back to normal. Unless it’s an alien invasion and they’re taking over the world. That would really suck.”

He’s funny. And smart and cute. Does he smell good? Suppose they continue to date on FaceTime and the quarantine continues and they meet for picnics and cocktails, but they maintain social distancing and so she’s never close enough to smell him. And they fall in love and the quarantine ends and they’re together, face to face, and he smells like… bacon.

Or old eggs. Or socks. Or he’s one of those guys who doesn’t use deodorant to save the environment so he smells like b.o.

“Did I lose you?” he’s saying and she realizes she’s dropped out of the conversation.

“I’m just trying to wrap my head around the weirdness of this. Elana says you have a couple roommates.”

“Yeah, Jeff and Dave. They’re cool. Dave makes me a little nervous sometimes – he thinks the mask stuff is government control and we shouldn’t be breathing in our own CO2.”

“One of my roommates says masks destroy your immune system. People are weird.”

He laughs. “People are really weird. Is that a System of a Down poster?”

He’s looking at her room. “My big brother gave it to me. He was totally into metal. It’s sort of a joke.”

“You strike me more as a Taylor Swift fan.”

She mock gags. “I have to end this call, I thought we were really connecting – Taylor Swift? That’s the meanest thing anybody ever said to me.”

He’s teasing and she knows he’s teasing. This is going well, this is going very well.

“What posters do you have?” She looks at his room. Pale green walls, a bookshelf behind him. The edge of a poster. “I see it, cool, BTS.”

He clutches his chest and falls to the floor. Sits up quickly. “Actually it might be fun to go to a K-Pop concert. Except for all the screaming tweens.”

“We’d probably be screaming, too. Let’s do it. When the quarantine is over.” Whoa, is she asking him on a date?

She checks out his book shelf. Sees Stephen King, Jon Krakauer, a Harry Potter collection. Excellent. Some textbooks, a few baseballs, a single white sock, a box of animal crackers, a hairbrush.

“I used to eat animal crackers,” she says.

His face changes. “What you mean?”

“The crackers, my grandmother used to get them for me.” She points to his shelf. “It’s so cute, the box.”

He grabs the box and pulls it down. “That wasn’t supposed to be there. Sorry.”

“You’re going to hoard your animal crackers? Is it a thing, like toilet paper and disinfecting wipes?”

“No, not like that.” He won’t look at the camera.

“Hey, I didn’t mean to get snoopy or anything. I promise I won’t take your crackers.”

“They’re not crackers,” he says. His face is serious. “My girlfriend, this girl I was dating…” A long pause. “She died. Her parents scattered most of her ashes, but they gave some to me. So they’re in the box. Of animal crackers. She loved them, she loved circuses and zoos, she was old fashioned, it was kind of nice. She liked the camels the best.”

Shit, shit, he seemed so normal and nice and funny and he’s a fucking crazy guy who has his dead girlfriend’s ashes in an animal cracker box. Who does that? How did she die? He probably murdered her. Danger danger, get out now. But he seemed so nice.

Except he’s going to kill her, he’s a serial killer and didn’t Elana know she was setting her up with a killer, thanks for nothing, Elana.

He’s watching her. Not talking. Probably thinking about how he’s going to end her life. Strangulation? Something clever like poisoned berries in her komboucha?

“Um,” she says. “Maybe I should… ” What excuse is she going to come up with to end the call? Wash her hair, call the police?

And he grins again. “Kidding,” he says. “Just wanted to see if you’d fall for it. It’s so much fun to goof on people. Ha ha, the look on your face – it was fantastic.”

“Fantastic,” she says. Fantastically strange like everything these days. Living in quarantine, dating online, nobody knows anything, maybe it is an alien invasion.

He’s got that maybe I’m a killer/maybe not smile again. She smiles back, but she’s mentally chopping him up in her mouth like a cracker, biting him over and over again until he turns into crumbs.


Ann Lewis Hamilton is a writer living in California.

Let’s talk. I don’t say that lightly. Let’s talk about anything and see where it leads us. Let’s talk about things we didn’t even know we wanted to talk about. I’m on my knees, which I’ll prove to you on Zoom.

I put this out there for a reason, on another day where it seems hard to find a reason to do anything. Six months into the Grayness I see I don’t miss movie theaters, restaurants, even most of my friends; I miss conversation. I miss how you fall in love someone you’ll never see again through a conversation you didn’t expect to have. Zoom calls are a marvelous invention, although as with most Modern Breakthroughs the only truly marvelous thing about it is finding out you can do it at all. After that, it — whatever it is — pales, and you go back to the old way (which hasn’t happened yet). True conversation doesn’t demand a level of presentation, flattering lighting, fiddling with controls and crying I lost you! I hate this thing!Can you hear me? True conversation, like a true friend, doesn’t mind if you wander, and in fact encourages it, as the wandering is a good sign that you feel free enough to wander, to relax in the just being with someone that conversation inspires.

And for all its wonders there’s none of the necessary just-being-with-someone with Zoom. The technology is the someone; it has no warmth, no comforting human curiousity, and doesn’t pretend to, unlike the social media platforms which pretend to have warmth. The name “Zoom” as much as says no musing, please, get to the point, don’t let the door slam behind you. There’s a Nora Ephron essay in which she describes what starts out as a pleasant evening with friends. Nice dinner, good coffee, a torte but not a cake, general name-droppy-schmoozing in the kitchen while you (or Nora) do the dishes yourself (“Thursday’s our Just us night”) which gives way to trying to remember the name of some wonderful old character actor in some wonderful old movie. Some helpful person does a little Googling and in two seconds has the name — Thomas Mitchell! Franklin Pangborn! Eugene Pallette! — and Ephron points out the answer kills the evening. No one really wanted the answer. They wanted the conversation that circled it; we long for connection, not information.

I tested this theory/observation not too long ago, during a strenuously merry Zoom birthday party. I wrote out a question that I didn’t know the answer to, that could be answered — this was a movie lover’s birthday, one of the guests was even an Oscars Rainman — but would at least lead to interesting speculation and might sprout odd tributaries along the way. The question: who won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in 1954? I dropped it in, casually, and someone said “Who knows? Let’s Google it!” But I stopped them. I told them about the social experiment I had in my mind — to see if not knowing is still bearable? — and the result was a terrific conversation that jumped from Bob Hope to the Vietnam War to Sacheen Littlefeather and on and on. The question was forgotten, and the evening was saved.

And it was Donna Reed, by the way. Yes, that one. In From Here to Eternity, a movie set during WWII that is somehow about a time like ours, when no one knew what was coming and had to live their lives and have conversations that could go where they would go. See it, if you haven’t, and then call me. We’ll talk.



Richard Kramer is a writer living in California.

Once upon a time in a land not so far away is a store that I call Melrose Hack or The Hack for short. Not sure why, as The Hack is located on the esplanades of Olive Boulevard in beautiful downtown Burbank. It is a store filled with heroes and villains. Shadows and substance are indiscernible, and logic vanishes like the wind.

Our story is not a bedtime story, but it could be a nightmare for those who cross the threshold between light and darkness. There are good guys and bad guys and the evil villain, Justin “The Terrible,” stalks the terra with vacuity. This is my story, my descent into the bucket of hell, it is a place called Melrose Hack.

Our society today requires us to be tethered to technology to communicate and function. Industry and culture have created a world where we need to be “plugged in.” So, this is the case, we require our phones and computers in order to be relevant. The alternative is a cabin in the woods, and at this point, that doesn’t sound so bad.

About a month ago, I turned on my MacBook and powered up. As one of my wife’s cooking shows blared in the background, I realized it was taking more time to turn on than being on hold with Spectrum. This barely used laptop, as Lili Von Shtupp said in Blazing Saddles, had gone “kaput!”

Donning my KN95 mask, or at least that’s what it claims to be, I headed over to a local computer store that I call The Hack, to see what was wrong with my MacBook.

I checked the computer in, waited a few days, and was informed it was a logic board failure. That means it’s like Frankenstein’s brain before they plug in the power. It’s going to cost $800, a cheery woman tells me on the phone. Don’t you love it when cheery people give you bad news?

It reminded me of the day a young kid arrived at my house. With a big smile, he held a box out to me and said, “Here’s your mom.” And so it goes.

Back at the Hack I asked the service guy behind the counter, “I suppose it’s out of warranty.”

He smiled at me. “Yeah,” he said, “it went out in January of this year.”

“Are you friggin’ kidding me?” I asked.

He smiled again. “I do not kid.”

Logic board or no logic board, it sure didn’t take any logic to know that this was the end of the line. No use having it fixed when I could get a new computer for a couple of C-notes more. I waited for my computer to be returned.

You know when you watch something develop and know it probably isn’t going to end well? This is the start of a trainwreck.

The cheery woman looked for my broken computer in a line of cabinets behind her. Peering in one cabinet after another, she repeated this five times. She was on her knees and seemed to bow at each cabinet (perhaps a prayer of uncertainty?).

Exasperated, she exited through a side door to the back, came out a few minutes later and continued to look in the cabinets again. It was quite remarkable.

We were fifteen minutes into the Easter egg hunt, and so far, no egg. I thought Godot would appear before my computer would, so I decided to wait outside.

A few minutes later, she emerged, smiling. “Here you go.” The computer sure was beautiful… but so’s Marilyn Monroe, and she’s dead too.

I decided to call Apple and see if they would take my MacBook a for a trade-in and maybe knock a hundred or so off a new computer. Steve Apple is a good guy, said our president, so maybe they would cut me a break.

When the Apple guy came on the line, he said there was nothing they could do with any type of trade-in, then suggested I try eBay. Just as I was about to hang up, he said, “I suppose you didn’t know you have AppleCare Plus, or you wouldn’t have called me? It runs through next year.”

My mouth dropped.

“Yeah,” he said. “Just send it in and we will fix it for no charge.”

“But the Melrose Hack said it expired this year,” I said.

“Tell them to pay more attention,” he told me. “It’s not that hard.”

Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again” crawled out of the deep recesses of my brain as I headed back to The Hack for round 3.

I pushed my dead computer at the same service guy standing behind the desk. “You said this is out of warranty and Apple says it’s not.”

He looked and shook his head. “Nope, expired this year. Sorry about that.” But before I could respond, he looked up at me, surprised “Yeah, I guess you do have AppleCare until 2021.” He sent the computer to Apple for repair.

In the movie biz, this is what’s called the plot turn. It’s when the music goes, “DA-DA-DA,” and the story turns in another direction. So, DA-DA-DA.

Cheery Woman called about a week later and said my computer was back and ready to be picked up. I headed over singing to myself, “On the road again, ain’t it great to be back on the road again.” Back at the Hack, I walked in and nodded to the guy at the reception desk, who reminded me of Winslow Leach from the Brian De Palma cult favorite, Phantom of the Paradise.

Standing in line behind a nice frustrated guy, I began to chat with Winslow about nothing, really. He seemed like a nice enough guy but he was bummed to be working at The Hack instead of writing his master rock cantata based on Faust. I like to assign lives to people when I stand in line and am bored out of my mind. I flashed from Phantom of the Paradise to another movie, Groundhog Day. I’d been in this line several times before.

AH HA!!!! I realized why it was taking so long: they couldn’t find the computer for the guy in front of me. I waited patiently, looking at the same displayed computers that I had already looked at fifty times. The guy in front of me turned and shrugged. “Been there done that,” I said. He snorted, and turned back to stare into space.

A new customer sauntered in. Winslow instructed her to wait outside in line and then turned to me and said, “You have to go outside too.” He lowered his voice to tell me, “We don’t want too many people in the store.”

As my dad would say, “Hold the phone!”

“But there are no more people in the store,” I said. He shrugged.

Now he’s telling me this? Now? Really? I had been standing in line for twenty minutes and now he asks me to move to the back of line which had formed behind me.

There were no more people in the store than when I’d first entered, clearly a logic board fail for Winslow. This made no sense.

I tried telling my story again, but he cut me off. “You still need to go outside,” he said. I looked at him and asked, “Are you kidding me?” He fidgeted and looked down and said, “I don’t know. This is my first day. I don’t know anything.” Poor shmuck, I thought and then asked for the manager.

This is where the DA-DA-DA happens again and Justin “The Terrible” enters the story. Every good tale needs a villain, and Justin “The Terrible” is our Gene Hackman’s characterization of Lex Luther in Superman II. You know, a goofy kind of bad guy. When Justin “The Terrible” emerged, he looked more annoyed than if I’d interrupted him watching Bachelor in Paradise.

His eyes were glaring before I said a word. I repeated my tale of woe but he was not impressed and showed no sympathy that The Hack had caused the problem in the first place. He didn’t care that their ineptness was going to cost me $1,500 as I sought to sell a perfectly fixable computer for a hundred bucks. I asked if I could just get my computer.

He angrily said that Winslow was right, and I had to go outside. He barked at me, “Go wait outside!”

Taken aback by this order, I asked him for a logical explanation of why I’m being sent out at this point when I wasn’t asked to stand outside when I entered the store twenty minutes earlier. He literally said, “GET OUT OF MY STORE RIGHT NOW!” I had no idea that this was his store, and I’m sure the owners of Melrose Hack didn’t know that, either.

I took a breath and said, “This is a great way to treat a customer.”

“Get out!” he shouted again. I wanted to tell him that Get Out was a pretty good movie, but I thought I might never see my computer again.

As I walked out the door, I turned back and told him, “I’m a writer and I can’t wait to write about this―it’s better than fiction.”

Now, sometimes in this world you see adults regress to their teenage years. And although I didn’t see the synapse misfire in Justin “The Terrible’s” brain, what I can tell you is that he became 14 years old instantaneously. He was not the sweet little boy that Tom Hanks became in the movie BIG, but the total ass bully that can be found on the playground picking on the little kids.

“Oh, you’re a big man, you’re a really big man. I hope that makes you feel like a big man,” he said. The name Biff came to mind from Back To The Future.

Let’s paint the picture. Here’s this 30-something guy, hands on his hips, raising his voice and yelling at me in front of staff and customers, “Oh, you’re big man!” By the way, I had a great retort, but he had me by the balls and I wanted my computer.

I went outside and stood at the back of the line.

In about three nanoseconds and a half, Cheery Woman (who now didn’t look so cheery) came out and told me to come in and get my computer. When I entered the store, everything was exactly the same. Guy was waiting for his computer, Winslow sat at the reception desk and Justin “The Terrible” was staring at a computer. Nothing had changed other than I had been sent outside, I guess so that Justin “The Terrible” could show me that he was the really big man.

The same guy at the service desk handed me my computer and looked at me with sympathy. He knew the story and saw it all happen, but he needed the job so he kept his mouth shut. Computer in hand, I turned to leave. As I passed Justin “The Terrible,” he said, “Big man, you’re a big man."


So, The Hack cost me jack and a hell of a lot of aggravation, plus some dough but, I chalked it up that I got some great material. As Vonnegut wrote, “And so it goes.” I took my computer, mounted my pony, and headed into the sunset to fight another day. So long, Melrose Hack, we shall not meet again.


Power off.



Rocky Lang is a writer living in California.

And finally,
As I wake up and squeeze my eyes
Hiding my face from the sun
I feel free.
The sun that is burning the empty roads
Is feeling shallow and depressed 
It is missing all the human touch

Confined in physical boundaries
Humans are depressed too
Something else has been towering above them
And kicking their ass

It is that time I realize
The time when you know
That destruction is not far away
It is now a distinct possibility 

Acceptance feels unreal
With the infinite potential of mind
Emotionally, we are limited
Fate is standing at our door
And we are not letting it in 

I'm no different 
I feel depressed and shallow 
Like the sun
I am fearful and hopeful 
Like other humans
The only difference being 
That I'm free.

Shreyans Kanswa is a writer living in Ratlam, India.

My neighbor just bought a rooster. Few things live up to “as advertised.” Usually cliches are not true. But at sunrise, believe me, that rooster says, “Cock-a-doodle-doo.” And it isn’t quiet. Also, they don’t just do it at the exact moment the sun rises. They give you some warning. They start about 15 minutes before sunrise. Then about every 40 seconds. They Cock-a-doodle-doo. This goes on for a while. The first morning, we were sleeping with the windows open. When that Rooster Cock-a-doodle-doo-ed I about laid an egg. Why is this the instinct of this bird? Shouldn’t an instinct be something that helps you survive? Wouldn’t announcing the sun, let your predators know exactly where you are? And where the hell do all the roosters have to be? Does their boss check their time cards that closely? Does it think no one should ever sleep-in? These were just some of the thoughts I had as this thing blasted his self-made music into my ear.

I eventually fell back asleep and forgot all about it. Until the next Cock-a-doodle-doo morning. This thing was not giving up. How had I forgotten about it all day? I cannot wake up for 30 minutes between 5:45 and 6:15 every morning. And If i picked up my phone and checked my email or Twitter feed, then I would never go back to sleep. All I could do was sit there and count the 40 seconds between doo-s. And the next day, same thing. That bird wasn’t quieting down.

Here is the thing. That was 3 weeks ago. The windows are still open. The sun is still rising. But I don’t hear it anymore. It doesn’t wake me up. I ignore it. In fact, until I had chicken for dinner the other night, I totally forgot about what happened. That is human. The human instinct is to ignore. No matter how loud the screams are, we can ignore it eventually. Racism. What a scream. But we ignore it after a while. Global warming? It’s coming, hole in the ozone. Ignore it. Health care. Wealth disparity. Banks are stealing from the poor and giving to the rich. Law enforcement agencies with no oversight. Ignore. Ignore. Ignore. You can Cock-a-doodle all day long. The very Human instinct is to ignore. To do nothing. To just sleep through it all and hope that it just all just goes away.



Scott Ryan is a writer living in Ohio.

“She [Melania] left Slovenia around ’92 and between ’92 and ’95 or so, there isn’t, it’s not really clear what she’s doing. The Slovenian documentary filmmakers who did a massive search for photos of her modeling during those years couldn’t find anything…”
• Nina Burleigh, author of Golden Handcuffs: The Secret History of Trump’s Women on the podcast Krassencast
 
“Sorry, but she [Melania Trump] was so stupid. And all the time like a dead fish. It was really hard to work with her. Top model in EU? Please? No, never.”
• Wolfgang Schwarz, fashion agent, in Melania Trump: The Inside Story by Bojan Požar
 
 
(Translated from Slovenian.)
November 1st, 1993
Dear Diary,
It’s November in Paris. The inky clouds descend, leaving a steely sky in their wake. Everyone complains. The dreary cold reminds me of home, which doesn’t help me forget that I left architecture school to pursue a modeling career, pawning my protractor for a tube of purple lipstick, a Ted Nugent cassette, and a ride to the border on an ox cart.
Today: another casting, another rejection. The only real job I’ve booked since leaving my homeland was a shoot promoting Jurassic Park ankle socks for the Oriental Trading catalog. It paid in photos to which I said no thank you.
My agent keeps telling me I have to learn to “move better.” But isn’t the task of a model to be totally frozen in place, like starched clothes on a hanger, a Styrofoam mannequin, or a statue of Stalin?
Still, I must persist. I walk to Place de la Concorde to watch the mimes. A model needs to communicate my agent says. She needs to bring herself to the photograph. These all sound like dangerous games. In my country we were taught to hide personality to avoid deportation to Siberia.
I watch the mime for clues. His ample face paint protects and accentuates his features, makes him attractive. As we say in Slovenia: keep applying layers of makeup and plastic surgery until a shepherd would choose you over his sexiest lamb.
The mime smartly put out a box for tips. Exchanging his skills for cash, capitalism in action. It’s why I came to the West. But what else do I need to learn? I thought high cheekbones and a visible rib cage were all I needed to attract monetary success in the modeling industry.
The mime pretends to pick a flower. Gives it to someone and acts bashful, finally getting a kiss. He then pretends like he’s falling in love. Well, I can see how that can be a useful skill.
The modeling path is hard. There must be an easier way that I’m not seeing. How can I become an overnight success and rewrite my history to one that is more flattering?
There has to be another way. There has to be another way.
Right, Dear Diary, there has to be another way to become a famous model?
I will find him.
XO Melania
____
 
November 20th, 1993
Dear Diary,
Winter is upon us. No modeling work, but I found a job at Les Deux Magots café.
It at least pays. And keeps me busy and away from thinking, a nasty preoccupation, in Slovenia a banish-able offense.
The French don’t bother you too much, but it’s the American tourists who make me work hard. Always more ketchup this, Sweet’n Lo that. They laugh cruelly when I say I never heard of a food they call “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter.”
I try to make joke: can you believe we’re lucky enough to have butter that’s not rancid?
Undaunted, they press on. Their optimistic insistence that there exists butter that is not butter, but tastes so much like butter, that you cannot believe that it is, not in fact, butter gives me a vague hope for the future.
I linger at their tables. It is excites me to see the Americans in their Levis and shirts in splendidly muted colors with the same three letters across the chest. It took me a long time to decipher their meaning. After an evening listening to Ted and dreaming of a better life I intuitively uncovered the solution: G.A.P. = Greatest American Poontang.
If I only I could meet an American to teach me to be as arrogant!
XO Melania
____
December 2nd, 1993
Dear Diary,
I finally got a job, modeling for a painter. If I can’t get in magazines, then I’ll at least become famous on canvas. Like we say in Slovenia: it doesn’t matter where the money comes from as long as the food doesn’t have worms.
Here’s how it happened. I was trying to comprehend the complaints of an American tourist, I think about how our portion sizes were not large enough to leave him feeling nauseous, when I noticed a painter outside. He considered the location, made a decision, and set up his easel.
Every day he returned and painted in front of our café. Then it struck me; like my grandmother always told me: where there are men idling there are business opportunities. So each day for one week at three in the afternoon, when the light is at it’s most flattering, I passed him a stale croissant. Finally on the last day he looked at me and said, “Can I paint you, then decide how much to pay you once we’re done?”
I went to his studio the next day. After I unrobed he asked me to “act happy.” I stood there in confusion. He became less cryptic. “Let happiness come through your facial expressions.” I found that odd, but as I’m a professional I gave him “happy,” channeling the look of ecstasy when my first cousin found the bone six months after losing his pinky in the combine.
Fun and merriment must have shot out of my eyes right onto the canvas because within an hour the painter threw his paintbrush against the wall to end the session.
He paid me a few francs and said we should definitely, totally, absolutely do something again. I haven’t left the apartment in two weeks in case he calls. I think he must be busy finishing our painting.
Plus, it’s Christmas season. I bet he’s tied up planning his Christmas decorations, doing something really Avant-garde and cutting edge. Who knows, maybe he’s going to paint his Christmas trees red???
XO Melania
____
April 13th, 1994
Dear Diary,
Ciao ciao! It’s spring and I am in Milan.
Today I got a job modeling gloves at a prison construction trade show and feel invigorated.
My roommate and I pooled our extra lire and bought a mini-cannoli. I let him take an extra bite. As the Slovenian saying goes, when you don’t have money for food give the men your breast milk.
I feel like I am on a roll. For the past few weeks I’ve been going to fittings for the Greatest European Mega International International fashion show in someplace called Little Saint James Island.
I am not allowed to reveal who is the gentleman who owns the island and is financing the show. In Slovenia we say: writing down a secret is the same as feeding the terminally ill – foolish.
All I will tell you is that his initials are J.E. and his last name rhymes with preteen. I hear when he gives you final approval you get to go to the island on his private plane. He’s so generous. Back home it’s the responsibility of employees to carry their employer’s carriage on their back, to and from work, even if the local wolf pack is on a killing spree.
In the meantime, the designers can tell I’m serious and have been offering me BIG opportunities. In one couture collection I’ll be dressed as a mermaid lobster. In a second I’ll push a wheel as I walk inside it down the ramp — a metaphor for the rat race. And in a third I’ll be carted down the runway in a wheelbarrow and will be wearing Velveteen jumpsuit and wrapped in multi-colored flower-shaped Christmas lights. How chic!
To pass the time before the big show I have been reading Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s book about the Gulag labor camps. Learning about the depths of denial, especially how humans can turn a blind eye to suffering, keeps my hopes up.
Hopefully yours,
XO Melania
____
December 23rd, 1995
Dear Diary,
I’m in Slovenia for Christmas before the big move.
I knew it was time for me to bring my talents to the United States when I graced the covers of Jana, Knitting Daily, and Modern Flyfisher.
Excited. Excited. Excited.
It all started right after I didn’t get final approval for the Mega Asshole Fashion Show on Stupid Shit Island because, at 24, I was twelve years too old. I should have known when the first question on the casting form was if I was accompanied by my nanny.
My birthday was shortly after my rejection. On that day I vowed to prove that 25 is the new 15!
Consequently, I met a man named Paolo at a hand-modeling gig for WC Net, Italian toilet bowl cleaner. I auditioned for him with a few other girls at his apartment and the next morning he said he gets what I offer enough to be able to represent me to his people in the Big Apple!!!
Paolo sees big things for me in the United States like … involving … including …
You know, he doesn’t say specifically anything. He just keeps saying “bella, bella, grande bella” and absentmindedly moving his hand past my butt while he blows anchovy breath in my face. He can afford fish, so he must know what he’s doing.
But does he?
When I asked my mom if I could completely trust a moderately successful middle-aged fat Italian man with my future she just turned her eyes skyward and said, “TRUST?! You’ve spent too much time in the West!”
So off I go to the United States — America or Burst!*
I’m optimistic that my future will be filled with ample modeling work amongst abundant Sweet’n Lo, Levis, imitation butter, and crowds of demanding, rude Americans.
My ambitions are high and my heart is true.
Mark my words, Dear Diary, I will be the next G.A.P.
XO Melania


*Shout-out to Perfect Strangers.

Lauren LoGiudice is a writer living in New York.

It’s time to tell the truth. My time here is coming to an end, true, and I’m a writer now -- not much of one maybe, certainly not a wealthy or famous writer but I am a storyteller -- and a long time ago I served in Operation Urgent Fury, aka the 1983 invasion of Grenada, as a foot soldier with the 75th Rangers. Almost everything else is invented.

Storytelling is not a game. It’s a form. Right here, now, as I reinvent myself, I want to tell you about why this story is told as it is. For instance I want to tell you how in a lifetime ago I watched a man die as he stood on a burning tank on a verdant hillside in a country no one cares about and as he fired a machine gun toward an unseen enemy as he kept my and many other soldiers lives alive. I did not kill him. That is to say I am not the man-child who fired the bullets which splattered his head into so many pieces which days later I still found the tiniest pieces of him embedded into my uniform. I didn't fire those deadly bullets. But I killed Audie Murphy just the same.

Wait.

Even that story is made up.

I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer than happening-truth.

Here is a happening truth. I was once a soldier. There were many bodies, real bodies with real faces, but I was young then and still capable of hiding truth even from myself. And now, a lifetime later, I’m left with haunting dreams of faceless men lying on a jungle floor who I left faceless responsibility and faceless grief.

Here is the story-truth. He was young, too. Brave as many young men are in war. A soldier calls out to him, “Who do you think you are, Audie Murphy?” And as he turns to answer enemy bullets rip into him tearing his head from his body and sending raindrops of his flesh onto other soldiers as they hide from their own fears.

When the firefight ended, examining the carnage of war, and of what was left of him, his jaw in his throat, half his head gone, his one eye shut. I knew I killed him.

I guess what stories can do is make things present.

I can look at things removed from distance and out from haunting dreams, never examined closely out of fear, and I can face them with a new eye and I can tell the truth without repercussions or grief.

Except I can’t.

Those memories won’t let me go. They haunt me every night because it’s not just one man I killed. It’s my brothers, my closest friend, complete strangers, all dead and killed again in dreams which won’t let me go…

Not once has anyone ever asked me if I killed another human being. If they did, I would tell them a story.  I hope they forgive me.




Jake James is a writer who lives and writes in Grenada.

I was going to become fluent in Spanish. Downloaded a free app and learned how to say cat (gato) and dog (perro) and extra large margarita with no salt (margarita extra grande sin sal).

But I was so exhausted after my language instruction I needed a margarita. Found some tequila in the back of the pantry, wiped the dust off the bottle. Tequila can’t go bad, can it? Miraculously we had some Cointreau. Lime juice? Nope. Was it worth it to risk a trip to the market for fresh limes? We’ve been trying so hard – my boyfriend is the one who makes the once a week trip to Ralph’s. We haven’t risked Costco yet. Thank God you have to wear masks in California.

Tequila, Cointreau, lemon juice (practically the same as lime juice, just a different color, right?), a little simple syrup I made myself (a cup of sugar, a cup of water, heat it up on the stove – voila), ice, no salt (sin sal).

Rick didn’t want a margarita. Too many calories, he said. Sometimes I hate him.

Not really.

Really.

Learn Spanish. Back in March that was the plan. Right now if I ever go to Mexico (if I ever leave the apartment), I can say, Tu perro es bonito (your dog is pretty) or Tu gato es lindo (your cat is pretty) or Date prisa con esa margarita extra grande sin sal (please hurry up with that extra large margarita with no salt).

I was also going to exercise every day. Twice a day. Streaming workout classes plus some yoga and Rick has hand weights and bands and a pull-up bar. And I’ll walk. I’m being realistic, no way am I going to run. I hate running, running sucks monkey balls. But walking – walking feels incredible. I’ll get up early. Walk before breakfast. Up in the hills. I don’t need hiking trails. Sidewalks will be fine. And after a sensible breakfast (fruit, black coffee), I’ll work (thank God I still have a job although Zoom calls with “the team” make me anxious because I know Karyl is after my job and who the fuck brings muffins to a Zoom call, can you say “suck up?”) and after a sensible lunch (tuna, no bread, fruit, black coffee), I’ll walk again. Back to work, a sensible snack (nuts, unsalted), and a final workout (yoga, hand weights) and I’ll make dinner for Rick, a sensible dinner (chicken or fish, a vegetable), and won’t he be impressed? Maybe we can walk together in the mornings.

Who said stay at home has to be bad? It’s going to bring Rick and me closer. Plus, by the time stay at home is over, I’ll be ten (fifteen) pounds lighter and in the best shape of my life. Not to mention fluent in Spanish.

Go me! (Ve a mi!)

A great plan. In theory. Did you know there’s no limit on how many bags of Double Dark Chocolate Milanos you can order from Amazon Fresh?

The best part of Amazon Fresh is how you don’t see the delivery person so they can’t shame you for the seven bags of Double Dark Chocolate Milanos. And Zebra popcorn. And Salt and Vinegar Pringles. And the Screamin’ Sicilian Mother of Meat frozen pizza that probably has 8,000 calories and the day it came Rick was at the market so I popped it in the oven and ate it before he got home.

Oh, well. I’ll work out extra hard.

No, I won’t.

Rick has been waking up at 6:30. To run in the hills. He says running is “exhilarating, a rush.” I think if I watch him closely enough I can actually see his hairline recede.

You could come with me, he says. I pretend I don’t hear him and make a snoring noise. When I finally get out of bed, he’s back from his run and showered and he’s made a healthy breakfast. Yogurt and granola. He doesn’t notice me eat a handful of Zebra popcorn.

“Lost another pound,” Rick announces and to my credit I don’t smash his head in with the cast iron skillet, I should get points for restraint, anybody would agree with me. When he takes his shirt off he says, “I think I’m getting a six-pack.”

I look over at the cast iron skillet. Maybe I’ll make a Double Dark Chocolate Milano omelet. With hot fudge. And tequila.

He exercises every day. “Where’s the pile for Goodwill?” he asks. “I’ve got at least three pairs of jeans I’ll never wear again, they’re gigantic on me now, like clown pants.”

I’m wearing sweats and a Brandi Carlile t-shirt that was possibly washed last week. At first I tried to maintain my routine, a shower every other day, blowing out my hair, makeup, casual clothes – stay at home doesn’t have to mean look like a slob. But after a while, who cares? Nobody sees me, except Rick. And he’s too busy exercising and working – he’s a project manager and everybody loves him and I know that because I can hear people on his Zoom calls, “Rick, you’re the best, what would we do without you?” and “Can’t wait until we’re back in the office and what are you doing during stay at home, Rick? Clearly you’re working out. Yowza!”

Yowza. Who says that?

In my last Zoom call Karyl asked if I’d spilled something on my shirt and I laughed and said, “It must be a shadow,” even though I knew it was grape jelly.

It’s much better for my hair that I don’t shower every day. Something about natural oils. Unless I’m making that up. “When’s the last time you took a shower?” Rick asked at dinner the other night (salmon, kale salad, two Kit Kat bars – me, when Rick had to take a company call). “I don’t smell, do I?” I said and he when he didn’t smile, I sniffed under my armpits and thought, oh, maybe he isn’t making a joke.

Tomorrow I’ll get up and exercise. Hike with Rick. And when we come back, we’ll take a shower together. I can admire his six-pack. I’ll put on clean clothes and look nice for my Zoom meeting and I won’t let Karyl get under my skin, I’ll be polite and tell her it’s sweet how she brings virtual baked goods for us to admire. I’ll go back to my Spanish app, take real advantage of stay at home time. After Spanish I’ll tackle a harder language, like Russian. I’ll throw away all the junk food in the house and exercise twice a day, no, three times a day. Soon I’ll be adding my jeans to Rick’s Goodwill pile.

It’s funny, isn’t it? Stay at home is the best thing that could have happened to me.

I should check my Amazon Fresh order first though. Ghirardelli Chocolate Supreme brownie mix.

Just one box.



Julia Lee is a writer living in California.