Dictator in Carne
By Willem Myra 

The wife is a people-watcher, a non-place connoisseur. Lately she'd go to Termini once a week and stand in the middle of the train station, arms crossed over her chest, eyes scanning the crowds. I asked her why. I know some people like to get surrounded by the masses because that puts their lives in perspective, allowing them to better cope with everyday problems. Others, more on the creative side, prefer to make up backstories for everybody they meet, to invent a name, a past, a career, a future death cause for every unknown face they encounter. Me, I engage in a little game I like to call soul swapping. I picture others in my shoes--how would that muscley gentleman react were he to experience one of my boss's tantrums--or me in other people's lives--would I be able to deal with that many children, with thinning hair, with living in a country that wants me to leave or worst to die.

"None of the above," the wife answered.

"Then what do you do," I asked, standing there, like a nail planted in the middle of a river?

"I listen to myself," she said. "To my selves," she added. "It's still difficult to wrap my mind around the fact that I'm not one but a multitude. A few months back I read about these experiments on split brains. Some epileptic patients have had the neurons connecting their hemispheres cut off for medical purposes. What doctors found out is that no longer connected, the hemispheres started acting like two different persons. As though each with its own, distinctive consciousness. Asked a question regarding something the patient had done, each hemisphere motivated the action in an unrelated way--the left hemisphere did this through talking, because that's where the linguistic area resides; the right hemisphere through writing. How terrifying is that? If I gave you two completely different reasons as to why I went driving today, and if both were true for me, or for the me's that make up who I am. And the split brain is not the only experiment that sent me on an introspecting journey. For example, did you know that you have a second brain? It's located in your guts and, among its various tasks, it supervises the digestion and it influences your mood, too. It's a fully operative brain, with way more neurons than a rat's. This is the cause of much of your stress-induced reactions. Those butterflies in your stomach? That's where they originate. Doesn't that give you goose bumps? Viruses, bacteria, ovaries. Who knows how many consciousness reside in my body whose existence I completely ignore. Who am I really? The sum of all these entities, or just the one who got lucky enough to dominate them? I'm an anthropomorphic collection of bubbles--they each want to float a different direction but I'm forcing them to stay here, to do my bidding, which causes them to burst in soapy drops and me to go hunt for more. I'm a poetic tyrant with power of life and death over my parts. Which reminds me. I once read about a philosopher who thought suicide was a natural impulse. I was a sophomore in high school, so it must've been someone from Ancient Greece. Empedocles or Leucippus. Or, or, or maybe Democritus. Yeah, Democritus makes sense. He divided--this philosopher whose name I can't quite put my finger on--reality into two categories: organic and inorganic. He stated that everything is inorganic at first and organic in a second time, that there is a process through which matter gains consciousness. That's how life appeared on Earth. I'm oversimplifying it, but basically given enough time a rock could change its composition by ways of weather agents and become part of a living being. Maybe it was Freud who said it. Anyway, suicide, to him, whoever he was, is nothing more than a vibration, an atomic whisper prompting now-living matter to go back to the previous phase in which it was still and unaware of itself. That's because with self-awareness comes pain. The organic matter deep down on a cellular level remembers when it used not to suffer and wants to go back to that state. This desire clashes with the entire organism's need to survive, eat, and procreate, generating mental problems such as depression. I might have butchered a little the whole concept, but to me it sounds reasonable. Modern science refuses the idea of cells having a will, but I believe otherwise. Granted, my words carry no weight, I'm no expert, I'm only speaking based on what I personally experience. Yet it would make sense that cells were in their own way self-aware. It'd explain cancer. Where most of the cells forming an organism feel the need to reverse to a non-being state, some of them get influenced by the organism's will to live, and try to obtain immortality. And they do. They split and split and split until they're everywhere, causing, involuntarily, for the organism to get ill and for the suicidal cells to get a step closer to their goal. It's scary. A part of you wants to die. A part of you wants to live forever. And you have the ability to satisfy both, yet either path comes with a tremendous cost. I frequently ask myself if I'm somehow a dictator. If I'm enslaving all these consciousnesses inferior in size to mine, or to the one I identify myself with, making them do what they don't want to. If my arm wants to be gravel again, who am I to oppose it? And if my colon longs for immortality, should I fight it off with chemo or let it fulfill its desire even if that means the end of me? And would it really be the end of me, or would I also live forever as my DNA gets passed around inside millions of cancerous cells? That's what I do in Termini every Sunday. I ponder about self and life in general. I try to understand if I truly exist. If there's any real difference between life and death. Sometimes I scan the crowds in search for someone else as equally aware and terrified of this whole situation. I search for people wandering aimlessly, looking for a way to cope with the conflicts and contradictions making up their many selves. For people whose tissues and organs and minds all scream different things. Though, to be honest, I'm not always strong enough to watch multitudes struggle. Sometimes Termini is not the right place for me to mentally be. In those days, I go elsewhere, to some long-forgotten train station. Like Zagarolo. I sometimes go to Zagarolo. It's refreshing being there. It's got something to it, that place. Standing in the middle of the second platform, music pumping in my ears, staring away from the one or two souls awaiting there for a raison d'être. Staring at the emptiness and the endlessness of the railroad. The nobodiness of it. The blotted out parts of the city and the sky framing the background. Makes me feel one. Atom-sized. Unimportant. Driver of my own existence and dictator of none. Yeah, I like it there. I like Zagarolo. In this day and age of ubiquitous uncertainty, Zagarolo puts me back together and tells me I don't have to make my mind about anything right now, that I do have the time to close my eyes and just enjoy the cicadas sing their melody of confusion."
 
As my wife concluded her confession, I didn't know how to respond. I was flabbergasted. Ever since, whenever she goes out, I rummage the house in search of further proof that she's become a pothead. 
 
WM is a Rome-based author. His work has appeared in Geometry, Litro, The Airgonaut, formercactus, and elsewhere.

* * * 

Cherry Cheese Knish
By Rochelle Shapiro

There’s this older woman who walks the boardwalk, no matter the season or temperature, wearing a long, black Borgana coat buttoned to the collar. Her face is barely lined, but there’s a dark, amoeba-like sunspot on her left cheek where she used to pencil in a beauty mark. Her eyes are the blue of the crayon children choose to color a lake. Her cheekbones are high, her nose straight. “Fineness of features,” they used to call it. But you can’t see her face very often. She mostly looks down at her weather-beaten shoes, as if someone might snatch them off her feet.

​The woman always stops at the knish concession.

“Cherry cheese,” she says in a voice raspy from cigarettes. She offers the counter guy whatever she has in her pocket—a crumpled pack of M&M’s, a linty tissue, but sometimes she gives him a twenty, so it all evens out, and she always gets the salty, sweet, greasy knish that she’s so eager for. Each time she burns her lips, her tongue, and winces.

The hardy winter walkers say that they’ve seen her stop at the boarded-up knish stand and ask for a cherry cheese knish. She will wait and wait there. Some, speaking among themselves, worry that she’s hungry, but no one stops to tell her about the local soup kitchen. There are so many people sleeping on boardwalk benches, on the beach, curled up on the porches of abandoned bungalows, or slumping around in ill-fitting, mismatched clothes, gesticulating wildly as if they have some gripe with the air. Passersby have trained themselves to keep going. Soon the wind blows thoughts of the indigent and addled right out of their heads.

There’s something admirable about the woman’s persistence. If not for the onset of mental illness, her drive might have led her to the rain forests of the Amazon to bring back a plant that would heal all human ills instead of to the boardwalk, once in a blizzard, to buy a cherry cheese knish.
                                                                                       * * *
This woman is Violet’s mother. Violet is persistent too. Each morning, just before she opens her eyes, she is a child again, and her mother is as she once was—sitting at her vanity table in a full white slip, the bodice and straps trimmed with lace. Violet stands so close to her that both of their reflections are in the round mirror circled with light bulbs on its frame. With a big, white puff, her mother puts on the powder specially blended to match her pink, cream, and peach complexion. She dabs on rouge. Once again Violet stretches her lips as her mother does to put on her red lipstick. Violet studies the way her mother curls her lashes, applies mascara with a tiny brush, and pencils on that beauty mark. With prickles of excitement running through her, Violet waits as her mother spritzes her neck and wrists with Evening in Paris. Then, smiling, sprays a bit on her. Roses, vanilla, apricot, musk.

When Violet was eight-and-a half, her mother became pregnant, could barely hold down food, and often stayed in bed. Violet began to hate the baby who was already taking her mother from her. The day that her mother forced herself to go for a walk on the boardwalk, the high heels she insisted on wearing getting caught between the wooden slats every few steps, she first smelled cherry cheese knishes, and her appetite came rushing back like high tide. Each day she had to have one. Fall, when the concession stand closed, Violet’s father began making them for her. He was a tall man, and his back curved as he stood over the kitchen counter, mixing the farmer cheese, egg, cream cheese, and sugar. He let Violet stir in the canned cherries. Her breath quickened watching the pink swirls.

As her mother ate the knish, she would break some off and feed it to her.

“You’re my birdling,” her mother would say, making kissing noises.

Violet’s brother was born with ginger hair in a dark-haired family.

“It’s all those cherry cheese knishes,” her father said, laughing.

Her parents named her brother Russell. Violet loved giving him bottles of formula, his snorty sounds, the way he’d pat her cheek with his dimpled hand, and the suction pop when she took the bottle out of his mouth to burp him. When her mother walked her to school, Violet proudly pushed the big, shiny, black-chassis Silver Cross carriage with the canopy that cost nearly as much as their used Ford.

One day it was Violet’s father who came to pick her up from school. The way his face trembled made her too scared to ask where her mother was. Holding her hand tightly, he said, choking back tears, “The angels took Russell from us.”

“Call the police!” Violet shouted.

Violet wasn’t allowed to go to the funeral, and her mother refused to go.
It took weeks for Violet to piece together what happened from listening in on her father’s whispered phone conversations.

The last time her mother had gotten home from walking her to school, the baby was strangely stiff, heavy. It took a few moments to realize he wasn’t breathing. He had to be pried from her mother’s arms by the ambulance attendants.

After Russell’s death, the only family activity her mother engaged in was making Violet’s father drive them every Sunday to the small grave where her mother knelt, shrieking and tearing at her clothes. She no longer spoke to Violet, her husband, or anyone else. Her life was in that coffin.

At first other mothers brought over casseroles and volunteered to walk Violet to school. But after a couple of years, when Violet’s mother still stayed indoors, her keening heard through an open window, it was as if her mother had been transformed into the witch in the gingerbread house who ate children. The neighborhood parents wouldn’t let their children go to Violet’s house.

A few parents, to be kind, insisted their children invite Violet to birthday parties. But why would she want to go? Kids twirled their index fingers at their temples when she neared them or coo-cooed like a clock.
                                                                  * * *
There isn’t a waking moment that Violet doesn’t wish that she could banish her mother from her life, but she forces herself to take off a day a week from work, put her two children, Allegra, eight, and Noah, six, on the bus, and drive forty-five miles, crossing a long drawbridge to get to her mother’s apartment, which is ten blocks from the beach. The building is rundown. All the furniture was stolen from the lobby, even the big wall mirror.

Violet brings her mother prepared food, takes her to the dentist, the psychiatrist. She carries her mother’s laundry back to her house and returns with it clean and folded the following week. She hires aides but they never stay more than a few days.

A woman from the West Indies says, “Your mother is too unmannersable,” before she walks out, slamming the door.

A nursing home is what Violet dreams of for her mother. Even the sound of it is like the soughing of the sea. Nurs-ing ho-me. Psych wards take patients in for a week or two, give them drugs or shock treatments, and cast them out to roam and defecate in doorways, sometimes squatting at curbs, eating from garbage cans. A home, please God.

Violet fills out applications but there is red tape, waiting lists.

“If you slip me cash,” one nursing home owner says in a gruff tone, “I can put your mother’s name high on the list.”

She’s so desperate that she wants to give him the $4,500 in cash he’s asking for, but Nick, her husband says,
“Never give in to a crook.”

Nick is her North Star. She was sure that if a building collapsed on her, he would hear her faintest cry, dig with his bare hands, and never give up until he had unearthed her. In fact, he already had…
                                                                                   * * *
When Violet met Nick in college, even after they had been dating six months, she still insisted on meeting him at diners or at a movie or museum. She lived in dread of him ever having to meet her mother. At thirteen she’d felt boys’ eyes on her, like heat that ran through her new breasts. But their parents would warn them, “Like mother, like daughter.” The New Year’s Eve Violet was sixteen, a boy stood her up an hour before their date.

“He heard about your mother,” his sister told Violet at school. She didn’t want to risk losing Nick.

“Look, what’s with all this secrecy?” Nick had said. “We’re not having an affair. You can’t keep me from your family forever. I want to marry you.”

She knew her heart should have been fluttering. Instead it sank to her stomach. Finally she decided to have Nick come over when her father wasn’t home. She had told him about Russell’s death, the effect on her mother, but if he was going to marry her, he had to experience the nightmare with open eyes.

Before Nick arrived, Violet’s mother sat down at her vanity table for the first time in over a decade, combed her dark hair, and applied lipstick. She didn’t choose one of the black dresses she wore on Sundays to Russell’s grave. Instead she put on a salmon-colored, button-down dress hemmed just over the knee that she hadn’t worn in ages. She even clasped her pearls around her neck.

Violet, seeing the effort her mother was making on her behalf, thought, She does love me.
When Nick came in, her mother drew herself up and jutted out her chin. “What are you doing here?” she’d demanded. “My daughter is nine. How dare you try to court her!”

Violet had been nine when her brother had died.

Those words were the last her mother spoke to Nick, but never once did he say anything unkind about her. If her mother needed money, he would always agree to help out without a huff. Although Nick had wanted a big wedding, he’d spared Violet having to explain to guests why her mother wasn’t there by marrying her in City Hall with only his parents and two brothers attending. And he never intimated that Violet could end up like her, even when she felt herself going crazy from worrying about her mother.
                                                                               * * *
Violet’s mother is found, wandering and lost, by the police, who phone Violet. Violet is called at noon, at midnight, at 3 a.m. She’s called after the fire department comes when her mother tries to cook a raw chicken by putting it right on a lit burner, no pot.

Violet can no longer confine her visits to a half-day once a week. From those nearly daily runs to rescue her mother, she is too tired to put her children on the school bus. She forgets to pack their lunches and misses school plays and loses her job as a botanist at the Botanical Gardens because she is out so many days that even the stalwart rhododendrons wilt. Nick grows sick of Violet yawning in his face, of her not having the energy to go on a date with him or even have a short cuddle after he puts the kids to bed. He begins to tap his foot, harder, harder.

Each day what is happening to her mother burns in Violet’s heart like dry ice. She is frozen and burning as if she is on the boardwalk in a blizzard. But what can she do? She imagines the lightness that will come to her when her mother dies, like a whoosh.

Wrestling with herself one day, she looks at her children sitting cross-legged on the couch in the den, their dark, curly heads touching as they watch Dora the Explorer on the iPad. What if one of them died? Violet asks herself. Would I turn away from the other, and Nick? She suddenly runs to them, grabbing both children, holding them against her.

“Hey,” they say, wriggling out of her grasp.
                                                                                 * * *
Her mother begins phoning, crying, “I have no shoes.”
Violet, breaking her promise to stay away, buys her mother a pair of sneakers and drives across the drawbridge to bring them to her. When she gets there, she lets herself in with the key because her mother never answers the doorbell. Her mother isn’t there but her rooms are filled with shoes and cockroaches. Roaches in the refrigerator, the tub. Inside her chest of drawers, roaches skittering over beribboned bags of sachet that have lost their lilac scent. They skitter inside and over the pairs of shoes—the high heels, the stack heels, the flats, the clear plastic sandal heels from the fifties, and Violet’s father’s Florsheim pair with the circular design of perforated holes toward the pointed toes. Some shoes had fallen next to their mate that was still standing. A sea of shoes seething with roaches.
                                                                                * * *
The Home is nothing like the one Violet imagined. The air reeks of piss and Lysol and the chattering of the mad. The mother lies in her railed bed, limbs withered to sticks, eyes sealed, mouth opening and closing like a fish. Violet visits so the staff will know that her mother has someone watching out for her. She brings her mother a cherry cheese knish that she holds to her mother’s nose, hoping that she will somehow waken for a bite.
                                                                               * * *
It is spring when Violet gets the call that she’s prayed to Adonoi, Jesus, Buddha, and Allah for. Her mother has drawn her final breath. Violet waits for relief to wash through her, the lightness that would come. She waits, waits.
“Mommy,” she sobs. “Mommy, Mommy, Mommy.”

Rochelle Jewel Shapiro is the author of Miriam the Medium (Simon & Schuster, 2004). Her essays have been published in The New York Times (Lives) and Newsweek. Her poetry and short stories have been published in The Iowa Review, MacGuffin, Permafrost, et. al. She teaches writing at UCLA Extension. You can find her online here.

* * *

Boncuk
By Caroline Swicegood

The call came at three a.m., as so many calls with bad news do; as her phone vibrated and trilled on the nightstand, Sabine sat up, disoriented and trying to recall what city, what country, what continent she was on.  She still hadn’t quite figured it out when she answered and heard her cousin’s panicked voice on the other end.

“I’m so sorry, Sab, I’m so sorry,” Layla said.  “I know it’s early in Italy” – ah, okay, that is it, that’s where I am, Sabine thought—“but I woke up and Boncuk was gone, and I can’t find him anywhere, I’ve looked all over the streets here… does he ever go away and come back?  Please tell me it’s okay,” Layla pleaded.

Sabine felt her chest tighten.  Boncuk was the sweet, almost-grown kitten she’d picked up off the streets of Istanbul, after he’d spent an afternoon twirling around her ankles at a café and then followed her home and stayed patiently outside all weekend; she’d named him after the evil eye beads in Turkey, because he brought her so much peace.  As her family had been flung about the globe, he was the one thing that had remained constant in her life over the past two years.

“Where did he go?” Sabine asked, struggling to fully wake.

​“It was really hot last night so I opened the window to get a breeze,” Layla said.  “I thought it would be no big deal, we’re so far up.  But he must have gone out to the balcony and then gotten down somehow from there.”  Sabine was quiet as she tried to process it.  “I’m really sorry, I never would have done it if I’d known he could get out.”

“It’s okay,” Sabine said, even though it wasn’t, really.

“I’ll keep looking for him,” Layla promised.  “I’ll make posters with his picture and put them around.  We’ll find him.  Oh, Sabine, I’m so sorry, I feel awful.”

Sabine absent-mindedly packed up her things and checked out of the hotel, not noticing when she dropped her passport near the reception desk.  A pregnant woman bent down to pick it up for her, groaning a bit when she straightened up.  “Here you go,” the woman said in an American accent, holding it out.  Her eyes flicked briefly to the words Syrian Arab Republic on the front but she didn’t say anything.  Sabine thanked her and took it back.

The flight back to Beirut, where the few things Sabine owned were being held and where she had left Boncuk with her cousin, seemed so much longer than the Beirut-Venice flight had been.  Travel had lost its glamour quickly over the past few years.  What do you do when your whole life is uprooted, and everyone you know scatters, landing inside borders far and wide?  This trip to Venice was her last one to see a dear friend before the wheels of her new life really set into motion: she would go back to Beirut for maybe two months, then on to Montreal, Canada, where her passport would be taken away and she’d get a new one; her parents would be joining her within the year.  In her wake would be a long string of small, barely-furnished apartments in three countries and stacks of legal paperwork.  Bouncing around like that felt as if someone had erased her mid-twenties, with only Boncuk to ground her.

Sabine and Layla searched countless alleyways and knocked on neighbors’ doors.  They put up posters and called from the front door of the apartment building.  They left out food, which was eaten by street cats with Boncuk nowhere to be seen.  Sabine sold everything she owned except her clothes and a few select books, which she fit into three big suitcases.  She flew to Montreal.  She was given another small, barely-furnished apartment, and a job translating for other incoming refugees.  It got colder.  It snowed.  Her parents arrived in February and rented an apartment just down the street from hers, and her brother and his wife arrived in April.  The French was different than the French they’d spoken in Aleppo but it sufficed.  Sabine made a point not to watch the news most days.

In May, she received joyous news: Boncuk had been spotted by a neighbor, meowing furiously outside the apartment one day.  Layla ushered him back in, took him to the vet, got all the required vaccinations and paperwork, and posted the story on social media--Refugee separated from beloved cat, who can help?  The post got over 40,000 likes, 3,000 comments, and 6,000 shares.  A doctor who was flying from Beirut to London took Boncuk with her, and then a smiling university student took Boncuk from London to Montreal.  They were met at the Pierre-Elliott-Trudeau International Airport by Sabine, her family, several of her coworkers, and a local reporter and news cameras who were delighted to film such an interesting, heartfelt human interest story.  Sabine took Boncuk out of the carrier and he immediately snuggled his gray face against her.

The journalist allowed her a few minutes of hugging Boncuk and sniffling back tears before approaching her.  He asked her a bit about her journey—where she came from, where she’s been, how long she had been in Canada—and how she and Boncuk had been reunited, and then asked her if she had anything to say about Syria.  “I think we are all just praying for it to be over,” she said, “so that we can go home one day.”

The next night she gathered with her family at her parents’ apartment to watch the local news after dinner.  Boncuk walked back and forth across Sabine’s lap, flicking his tail in her face before settling down and kneading her legs.  She scratched his back and he flopped over, stretching out. 

The news started with a recap of some national sports games, talk of an upcoming music festival, a brief overview of international politics, and then launched into a segment where the reporter Sabine had talked to at the airport walked the streets of Montreal and asked random people whether or not they thought Canada’s refugee program was good for the country or not.  The responses were split about in half.  “I think it’s shameful,” one man said, “when we should be spending the money here, at home, on Canadians.”  Sabine’s mother got up and went to another room.  “Their values aren’t consistent with our values,” another woman said, holding a toddler on her hip.  “Seeing women all covered up like that, how does that fit into our culture?  What kind of message is that sending to our children?”  Sabine’s hand almost unconsciously reached up to smooth over her own non-covered head.  Then a re-run of Jeopardy started.

“Uh, Sab?” her brother asked.  “I thought you were going to be on tonight?”

​“That’s what they told me,” she said.

She watched the news at home the next few days on mute, and when it still didn’t run, she called the station.  The person answering the phone insisted she couldn’t speak to the reporter and that all editorial choices were confidential, but her message must have gone through, because the reporter called her back.  “Yeah, I’m real sorry about that,” he said.  “I felt bad.  It’s just, my boss didn’t think it was a good fit.”

“Can I ask why?” Sabine said politely.

“Well… he didn’t like what you said at the end,” he said.  “About wanting to go back to Syria.  He said it sounded ungrateful and he thought it might alarm people.”

So you chose to run a piece about whether or not I should even be in the country instead? Sabine thought, but she didn’t say it.

“And you didn’t really look like what a refugee should look like,” he continued.  “It’s nothing personal, my boss is kind of an old-fashioned guy and I think he already had an idea in his mind about the segment, and it just didn’t work out.  Hey, we wish you all the luck with your cat, though.”

She video chatted with Layla later, putting Boncuk in front of the camera and making him wave and dance around until he got tired of it all and squirmed out of her grasp.  Layla laughed.  “I can’t believe it actually worked,” she said.  “That post went viral within a day.  I guess it helps that he’s so cute.”

“The cutest,” Sabine agreed.  “Maybe we should hand out cat ears and whiskers at refugee camps and see if it helps.”

“Oh God, don’t say that,” Layla said.  “That’s awful.”

Sabine giggled, knowing it wasn’t funny but not being able to help herself.  “They wouldn’t put me on the news here because they said I didn’t look like a refugee.  Maybe I should put on a burqa, and one for Boncuk too, and do the interview again.”  She laughed louder, feeling tears gathering in the corners of her eyes.

Layla started laughing.  “How long do you think he’d tolerate that before shredding it to pieces?”

“Whiskers and ears at refugee camps, and cats in burqas,” Sabine gasped.  “Pretty soon the world won’t know who is a cat and who is a refugee and they’ll be forced to let us all in.”

“The cat-refugees are going to take over the world!” Layla said, howling.

​“Oh no,” Sabine said, holding her sides.  “That sounds ungrateful and alarming.  Think of the message that will send our children!”  They laughed until they were laughing just for the sake of laughing, squawking to each other until they felt light-headed and their eyes stung and their cheeks hurt, slowly winding down until the delirium wore off.  But days later, sitting on the couch with a small cup of sweet mint tea and Boncuk curled against her legs, Sabine couldn’t stop her mind from drifting back to that conversation.  She imagined of all the children she used to know in Aleppo wearing warm gray suits and cat ears, lounging in the sunlight in a forest somewhere, batting at play mice or frolicking in catnip; it was a fantasy that in most times would be utterly ridiculous, but right then, right in that moment, it was so much more comforting than reality.

​Caroline Swicegood is an American writer and teacher living in Istanbul, Turkey. Her fiction has appeared in over a dozen literary magazines, including Fiction Southeast and Upstreet. Her nonfiction has appeared in The Literary Bohemian and Compose Journal.

* * * 

Diner
By Kelsey Winter

“Do you want to talk about what just happened.”

“Not really.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t have-”

“Stop right there!” I put my hand up, his words come to an abrupt stop. “Don’t go soft on me now!”

“I’m not! I’m just trying to think logically here for a second.”

“Logically?” I grab his hand and give it a squeeze. “Matthew, there are seven billion people on this planet. Plus, people die every day, so us killing her won’t make that big of a difference, logically speaking.”

“But-”

“Seven Billion. Now stop talking about this and order your food.”

Matthew and I come to this diner every Wednesday after school. We enjoy the idea of ordering milkshakes and cheese sticks until our stomachs are bloated from the mix of chocolate and marinara sauce. The diner is usually empty, and that makes it more appealing because we have become the Wednesday regulars.

Our usual waitress, Annie, has the same routine every Wednesday. She comes to or table pours Matt a cup of dull tasting coffee. Says, “The usual?” Then we nod. And finally, Annie talks our ears off about how we need to stay in school and work hard or we will end up just like her in “this little old dump.” After a while she brings us our food and gives Matt a weird creepy wink and flirtatious smile.

She’s not wrong, this place is a dump, and the food tastes like it could have potentially been scavenged out of the dumpster in the ally. I’m sure back in the olden days, this place was the prime hot spot for teens like Matt and me. You can tell underneath the dirt stained floors that they were once polished enough to see one’s reflection. And I bet the music used to be totally cool and hip, but it’s also no longer 1956.

Matthew and I used to come on Friday nights, that way we could stay out as late as we wanted without having the milkshake induced hangover the next day at school. But that was before the new kid in school, Henry Wulf got a job here and worked Wednesday nights as the bus boy.

Henry was the typical all-American boy. He has hazel eyes and a boyish cute smile that sends my stomach into a fit of knots. His hair is sandy blonde, but Matt always argues that he has brown hair. We go into very deep debates about the color of his Hair on the nights he is in the back doing the dishes.

I fell for Henry the moment I saw him walk into the school with his shirt hanging a little too loose and a baseball cap that kept his eyes hidden. Matthew fell for him in math class, he said that he asked for his notes and their hands brushed briefly and that was it, Matt was smitten.

So, Wednesdays have turned into the night of gawking at Henry Wulf. We acknowledge that we both are in love with the same boy, but we figured it won’t matter which one he chooses. He’s either into girls or guys and we can’t change his mind for him, so no hard feelings.

Annie comes up with the coffee pot. “Hey, Kiddos! You having the usual tonight?”

“You know it!” I smile. My eyes shift behind her to see if Henry has clocked in yet. No sign of him.

“Alright, I’ll have those out in a minute.” She smiles, and walks back towards the kitchen. Matt drinks his coffee slowly, making sure to keep eye contact with me.

“Are you absolutely positive he was going to ask Mary to homecoming?” Matt says, his coffee cup is hovering next to his lips.

“Why does it matter?” I say a little louder than I meant to. I look around to makes sure no one is listening and lower my voice so only he can hear me. “Mary is dead now. We killed her, remember?” His face goes pale, so I smile lightly. “I am positive he was going to. I overheard her saying they had been messaging a lot, and if he didn’t ask her then she was going to ask him.”

“But maybe we took it a little too far. I mean just because he was going to ask her doesn’t mean she should get to die.”

“Too far? Matt this is homecoming. This one social event will either make or break the rest of our high school career.” I see Henry walk in. His smile brightens when he sees Annie. “Showing up with Henry would change everything. This is our chance now that we took care of Mary.”

Mary was an exceptionally ordinary girl, with exceptionally average features. Her brunette hair had a layer of frizz, her eyes were the same color brown as every other sophomore girl on the campus. And her voice was shy in class but spirited during basketball games. But despite her conforming appearance she caught the desired attention of Henry Wulf. The attention that Matthew and I spent all of freshman year trying to gain.

Mary didn’t even know what was happening until the knife was lodged in her back and she was tumbling into the ice-cold river. At that point, I guess you could say it was a little too late for her to protest.

“So now what do we just wait for him to hopefully ask one of us?” Matthew said interrupting my thoughts.
“No, we get his attention.” I wave my hand at Henry and his eyes lock with mine. He smiles and heads over to our table. “Play it cool.” I whisper to Matthew.

“Yeah, like we didn’t just a murder a girl he was potentially going to ask out.”

I roll my eyes at his comment, and smile when henry steps in front of our table. “Hey guys, how are you?”

“We are really good!” I give him a big smile. “Are you going to homecoming next weekend?”

“No, I’m actually going to be out of town that weekend.” He smiles and then looks back at the kitchen. “I got to get back to work, but have fun next weekend guys!” He smiles even bigger and heads back to the kitchen.

Matt looks at me his eyes are wider than I have ever seen them. 

Kelsey Winter is a student at the University of Oregon, majoring in Public Relations, with a Creative Writing minor. She has attended the 2017 New York Summer Writers Institute at Skidmore College. She has also been published in The League for Innovation 2017.

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