Foliate Oak May 2018

Fiction

Purple Monkey Balls
By Matthew Dexter

Smoking a Siamese spliff of Purple Monkey Balls on the roof of our garage, my
brother blew his head off with a firework mortar. Frank placed the tube—soggy dud
coagulated with vomit and urine—on his forehead. Shrapnel from Frank’s skull rained on
our family with the kaleidoscopic inertia of candy from a freshly burst piñata. The canoeing
roach landed on Grandma’s wig. Nobody thought to catch Frank’s decapitated body as it
rolled off asphalt shingles onto dying grass. Frank’s brain barbecued, hippocampus a hunk
of charcoal, a burning briquette, cerebellum melted, oozing through a smoldering crevice of
ballooning blood and cartilage.

“Holy, Jesus,” Grandma said.

Grandma’s wig was on fire. She jogged in a circle waving it above her bald skull,
smooth as a bowling ball. She hurled it onto the rusty rabbit cage we were using as an
improvised beer pong table. Ten empty plastic Solo cups fell like bowling pins.

“Damn, Mom—handsome strike,” Dad said.

“Can you spare another Natty Light?” Grandma asked.

Dad swayed away from Frank to inspect his mother’s liver-marked cranium with
grimy fingers, vigilant and anxious like a blind dipsomaniac reading braile on her embossed
squamous cell carcinoma—illuminated by a tiki torch as if searching for clues on an ancient
treasure map.

“Got a spare wig?” Grandma asked, tears rolling down her cheeks into a Solo cup
filled to the brim with Jose Cuervo.

Mom tossed Dad a can of Natty Light. He cracked it for Grandma. Foam dribbled
down her lips and camouflaged the overgrowth of ectopic sebaceous glands orbiting,
ornamenting her vermillion borders with the clandestine dignity of broken bulbs on a
desiccated Christmas tree. Frank was a bashful kid with a beautiful face. A gorgeous silent
reminder of how Fluffy Landing is the death roll of childhood torments. Jolly Bay isn’t
deep enough to hold the flotsam of my brother’s sunken secrets—the evening we skinny-
dipped together with rainbow trout, largemouth bass nibbling at our pruned toes—the night
Frank duct-taped me to the splintered wall. Nothing prepared me for what I’d learn after his
orgiastic pyrotechnic somersault into oblivion. We buried him in the graveyard where I
gave my first blowjob behind tombstones to my second cousin, Bubba the third.

“Dilly, Dilly!” Frank said for nine months whenever we were alone in the kitchen.

This innocuous phrase impregnated his spirit.

Frank guzzled Natty Lights and funneled Bud Light in the hours leading to his
destruction. Cheap American beers lubricated Frank’s soul as much as his esophagus. Frank
became boisterous. He vanished for an hour in the attic of our parents’ garage—sunburned
ears and appendages rubbing the labyrinthine pink insulation—immersed in a marathon
session of Seven Minutes in Heaven with eight inebriated adolescents hovering on the
splintered steps—waiting for Frank to collage their necks with hickeys—itching to climb to
paradise, following in the promise of swallowing spit with the most beautiful tween in
Fluffy Landing.

“Dilly, Dilly!” Frank said, waving the fluorescent lighter above his nostrils,
singeing his eyelashes.

Frank’s face flawless in the kaleidoscopic glint of Roman candles and bottle rockets
aimed at his groin, girls giggled as he squirmed and moaned high above an army of popular
tweens. I had a bad feeling in my belly. Tonic on my pierced tongue. The same sensation as
the second before Uncle Jumbo lost his leg in his homemade panga taking a piss--
chomped by the alligator on Christmas Eve—eggnog in his hand as he went overboard.
Jumbo never resurfaced.

“Don’t worry—it’s the dud from earlier!” Frank said.

Frank lost his noggin. I wonder if Frank saw his eyeballs shooting from their
sockets. If time stood still as the burning fuse evaporated into the haze of gunpowder and
Purple Monkey Balls.

“Holy shit!” I said.

After we buried Frank, Mom and Dad refused to touch anything in his bedroom. I
snorted a pyramid of flakka and fire ants after the kegger in Dead Women’s Woods and
snatched Frank’s sticky Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 from his bed. No passwords protected his
secrets—thousands of bookmarked porn pages—eternal and sacred—bulging with
bestiality: Frank riding camels, horses, pigs, roosters, zebras. I skimmed the contents of
donkeys drinking breast milk from pregnant gypsies, men gripping humongous udders,
wrestling alligators, deformed faces fuming with euphoria and quivering lips in dimly lit
bowling alleys. Frank found his voice in the cesspool beneath the dark web.

“Who am I?” I asked.

I watched Frank ejaculating onto flowers, flamingos, peacocks, llamas, ostriches,
Siamese dwarfs, tanks of tropical, ant farms, firework fuses seconds before explosions--
smoke sifting into the frame and then mortars coming to life. Frank pioneered an emerging
genre of pornography: Pyrotechnic Bestiality. Hundreds of mysteries flashed through the
brain we once shared. Where the hell did Frank procure all the fireworks and animals? Who
owned the majestic sport fishing yacht: Bob Marlin? A boat capable of entering shallow
marshes and not getting bogged down.

“Who were you, bro?” I asked.

I came across a highlight reel of Frank, professionally edited and synchronized with
smorgasbords of songs and obscenities, as if Frank were a seventh-grade baseball star
hoping to catch the eye of college scouts for an athletic scholarship.

“My GPA is 3.6 and I want to be a star,” Frank said, before mounting dozens of
exotic animals to the screams of Eminem, Tom Petty, Gloria Estefan, Jim Morrison, 2 Live
Crew, Marilyn Manson, Deborah Harry, and Lynyrd Skynyrd. Frank strutted behind a
beaver. I studied my brother making love to a porcupine, a raccoon with rabies, a baby
chicken, a marlin—explaining his philosophies with soft polite words—his eyes sober and
bright. None of the animals were hogtied, caged, or restrained in any way. I figured they
were under duress but none of the animals looked harmed; none attempted to fight. Some
seemed to enjoy it. They didn’t look drugged.

“Sick, bro,” I said.

Above Frank’s head, filling the sky and the camera, fireworks floated between the
earth and ether. I caught spotlights and the moon; the sun lighting a barren beach; a sport
fishing yacht; marshes consumed by alligators; cobalt, black, and white cumulonimbus;
ominous anvil clouds shaped like baboons with raindrops where firework mortars vanished
or burst or drizzled or drooped from the sky with the majesty of sleeting rainbows. I jotted
notes with a ballpoint pen ‘til my thumb and index left crimson fingerprints on the
pillowcase. In every instance, Frank lit the fuse prior to ejaculation, snorted Flakka, smoked
a bowl of flakka, and finished a second before the mortars fired from his skull or nipples,
borne by the glory of a madman. Frank became a mystic, a magician, an aberration.

“This is nuts,” I said.

I read Frank’s emails. He drafted an empty email with the subject:
May as well blow my face off with fireworks on 4th of July. I felt Frank in my belly, under the sheets, crawling
through the hairs on the back of my neck and arms like the presence of invisible spiders
laying eggs in the mind of a fentanyl fiend battling withdrawal. I folded my nose into
Frank’s wrinkled pillow, catching residual whiffs of an ogre with the face of an angel. I
shut my eyes as animals begged for mercy in frayed cotton. I collected crisp chunks of
rheum with the foolish wisdom of a food server combing crumbs from a tainted tablecloth,
filthy fingernails inking into Jolly Bay, snorted jagged labyrinthine fragments ‘til tequila-
tinged blood gushed from hairy nostrils.

“Yippee-ki-yay,” I said as my mother swaggered into the bedroom in her tattered
bra and granny panties.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, ice cubes clanking in a chilled glass of gin
and tonic.

“Searching,” I said.

“Searching?” she asked.

“Yup,” I said.

“Oh Honey,” she said. “Your nose is bleeding.”

Mom ushered me across the gunpowder-dusted floorboards, nails beneath bare feet,
warped wood creaking in unison beneath the obstinate fungus of our putrid soles, the small
house trembling—rotting in a toxic state—bleeding, sobbing, sweating through her pink
insulation.

“Get some sleep,” Mom said.

“Can’t you hear the house bucking?” I asked.

“It’s all in your head,” Mom said.

Frank never thought he’d die. I returned in the whisky blood of dusk and curled
beneath my brother’s covers, reading the secrets of the boy dubbed “The Dumbest Dude in
Fluffy Landing” by illimitable clickbait headlines and comment sections commandeered by
pimpled imbeciles and senior citizens spewing rudeness. No commiseration existed on
those pages. I couldn’t get rid of Frank. We’d been connected at the skull for almost three
years. We shared the same brain and I felt Frank within, penetrating soft flesh and in
puckered orifices, calloused, engorged, blood gushing through familiar organs, his blushing
beautiful shadow dancing on the splintered wall. I gazed out the cracked window toward
the garage and saw bloodshot eyes cutting through cobwebbed glass of dying dawn, flayed
face licking dewy pane.

The fire curled through the house that night. It crept from the attic where Frank
connected fireworks with fuses, sitting Indian style in his tighty-whities. Nobody knew
what started the blaze but Mom swears she saw flames coming through her ceiling. The
orgiastic howl of incinerating wood, the termites roasting in their shells, Dad soaked in a
gasoline-ragged tequila stupor, oblivious, his obese body too humongous to save.

“Dilly, Dilly!” said the night manager when we walked into Live Oak Landing.

Mom shared a bed with me in the loft. It was all they had. It was all we had. Mom’s
toenails sliced my ankles, her snores so braying I was certain the people in the adjacent
room would be banging on the walls. The scent of my father’s rotting flesh clung to Mom’s
granny-panties and bra. Everything was lost in the fire. Mom borrowed a bathrobe and
some clothes from the fire-crotched black window next door. The only neighbor we had--
the one with the humongous tonsils and the addiction to Super Chunk Extra Crunchy
Peanut Butter who warned Frank never to climb the roof.

“I’m too exhausted to shower or change my underwear,” Mom said.

Mom passed out soon as her head hit the pillow. She farted like a lumberjack. The
trendy cottage filled with flatulence. The loft grew smaller. I could feel Frank flowing
through my veins. The smoke in my stomach—afraid to exhale because Dad would whip us
with his alligator belt if he knew we were stoned—and even if we weren’t. The resin of
those nights Frank crept into my bed. I imagine Dad in his death roll as the flames engulfed
his ballooning flesh. Humongous spiders bouncing from webbed corners of rotting wood,
racing for their lives—nimble, doomed. His bones spun through the rusty springs in the
mattress. His lungs filled with smoke. The room smelled of Purple Monkey Balls. The siren
from the fire truck wailed in my ears.

“Yippee-ki-yay,” I said.

I swaggered outside and walked into the RV park where meth heads were roasting
marshmallows and shrooms.

“You wanna ride kayaks?” someone asked.

I sat on a log and watched hollow faces swallowing the tangerine moon.

“Here comes a hot piece of ass,” a drunken man said.

“Fly your freak flag,” a woman said.

I sensed seven or eight irises boring into my breasts and face. Cyclical warmth
hallowed chiseled dimples. I spewed fifty-six obscenities in my mind—each filthier than
the last—three dozen personalities battling and maneuvering to emerge at the same second.

An agoraphobic girl I hadn’t seen since my father fisted me in fifth grade was weeping wet
witch-woven words. Why did Dad decide to touch me for the first time the night I shaved
my pubes and pits for the first time? How did he know? I wasted hundreds of hours and
years searching for a clandestine camera in the bathroom. I started showering with a
bikini and a pendulum around my neck—but this did little to stop Dad from coming in my
bed when Mom was passed out from the Pinot grigio he brought her from the vineyard in
Bunker Hill. I sneezed and cleared the phlegm from my throat, swallowing a loogie which
weighed more than my heart. Wizards stalked from falling clouds. I scratched an infected
pimple underneath my armpit. I pet the fresh hairs conditioned with complimentary cottage
conditioner, the visceral freedom of a fledgling red-wing blackbird flying for the first
time—beyond stubble at last, Frank’s coffin a raison melting into sinking sun. Dad said “a
hairy girl is a dead daughter—same as a snitching one.” When they lowered the chiseled
mahogany into the Earth, I swore never to shave or wax again—as if the hair would bring
me closer to being on the same molecular level as my brother again—an equal playing
field. My temples throbbed as mourners prayed to the vanishing casket.

“What a tight piece of ass,” the drunken man said.

The constitution of the campers changed as a stranger entering their mist of
Marlboros and camel toes. The air grew thick, more humid with every twig which snapped
beneath my toes. I ambled out from oak trees with Spanish moss, obstinate beams from
flashlights bouncing yards in front of my bare feet, humid cumulonimbus moonlight
making love to my shadow. My sinuses clogged from smoke, carbon dioxide, and the
obstinate cold I caught the night after Frank’s funeral when I sat on the roof of the garage in
the rain, pissing myself—puffing piff mixed with the last blunts of Purple Monkey Balls
my brother rolled.

“You hear about The Dumbest in Fluffy Landing?” asked a man with seven toes.

I munched kaleidoscopic caps and took a bump of flakka from his fist.
“That dumb dude and the rocket mortar on his head,” said a woman with a face
covered in hickeys.

I grabbed the stone, as if seeing my fingers for the first time, fisting this brain-
shaped weapon, rocking back and forth with the wisdom of a mystic on a mountaintop.
Their giggles engulfed me. I was too cute and young and innocent to harm anyone. They
gazed at my bellybutton as my arm raised my halter top perpendicular. They were stoned. I
bashed the mineral into the drunken man’s face. His friend rose and they were in top of
me—all four—curling toward the water in a death roll.

“What a hot piece of ass,” the hickey woman said.

I was naked, bloody, hogtied to a tree. I caught a whiff of myself and didn’t
recognize anything. They gagged my mouth. Their trailer was filled with flakka and cases
of Bud Light.

“Dilly, Dilly!” said the woman.

She grabbed a lacrosse stick and inserted it. They took turns all night but by dawn
they passed out and I gnawed my hands free from their duct-taped cocoons and sprinted
over their ballooned bodies straight for the hunting rifle on the wall next to the picture of
Bob Marlin and the card table with the dissected red-winged blackbird covered with
maggots and fire ants. They didn’t wake—but I was silent—lifting the firearm from its
furry mount. Frank taught me how to hunt shadows and I chased them around the trailer,
praying the gun was loaded. I aimed at the drunken man’s wounded face.

“Sweet piece of ass,” I said.

His eyes opened and six more winked in desperate unison. They rose faster than
drug addicts—as if they had done this many times before. Not rapid enough. The man’s
head blew off into the bearskin carpet of their motor home.

“Not a dud,” I said.

His friend lunged at me shredded kneecaps and a second shell entered his eye
socket—tearing into the forehead of the beautiful woman in the Britney Spears tank top.
She flopped on the bearskin rug, in the midst of a seizure, gurgling blood. Her friend
screamed yet the rifle clicking gave her confidence and she giggled at my worthless trigger
finger. She rose with the fury of a Siamese dragon stirring from hibernation in a flaming
moat—roman candles irises firing on all cylinders, bloodshot sclarae, biceps sculpted with
the layers of a humongous sandcastle in Key Largo, muscles bulging from a bloody wife-
beater.

“Dilly, Dilly!” I said.
​
My jaw snapped in the blink of a dying white dwarf. She was on top of me, yanking
my hair, poking my eyeballs with anvil-inertia fingers ‘til there was no more vision—only
voices and the supine warmth of sunlight on my cheeks and the cool wind on my wounds. I
gorged on their faces and necks—hair, moles, squamous cell carcinoma, basal cell
carcinoma, melanoma, everything. It was the most delicious meal of my life. I rolled over.
Free for the first time, connected at the skull, rising with the glory of a mortar shooting into
smoky sky. Coagulated blood-matted hair stinging in the acoustics of festering alligator
dawn, I walked into the dark—naked, alone, unafraid.
​​
Matthew Dexter lives in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. He is the author of The Ritalin Orgy (Perpetual Motion Machine). His second novel, Hero Custodian, will be published in 2019.

* * * 

The Mischief-Makers
By Malina Douglas

There's a feud in our house. At night I drag a heavy chair against the door. I crouch there, listening for footsteps, and when I'm sure there's nothing, I can sleep.
 
Climbing the stairs is dangerous. If I'm not quick enough I can feel little hands snatching at my ankles. Bryce waits there like a troll to jump up and grab me. I kick him and make my escape. Sometimes he demands tribute.
 
“Give me all your toffees.” His arm latches onto the banister like a vice. I pound against it. It's as solid as stone.
 
I take a few steps back and attack him with a running charge, kicking and pounding, but he wrestles me to the ground. I surrender two toffees.
 
“I'm sure you've got more than that.” He shakes me upside down until five toffees and an iridescent marble fall out. He captures the spoils.
 
There are raids. I wait until he's safely absorbed by a video game in the blue placating light of the screen downstairs. I dash up to his door. I pause, breathe deeply, and open it. The walls are puke-green. Clothes, action figures and dinosaurs lie scattered over every surface. A Lego tower rises between the piles.
 
I have a feeling I know where he keeps his horde. My heart is pounding.
 
At the head of the unmade bed, patterned with freight trains, is a chest of drawers. In one of the drawers is a box. Inside the box, cardboard and plastered with Pokémon stickers, are my toffees, a dozen foil-wrapped chocolates, two lollipops, and a pack of strawberry bubblegum. The marble is missing. Still, a good catch.
 
Once I've stuffed my pockets to brimming, I turn up the hem of my T-shirt and dump the rest in, keeping hold of it with one hand while the other replaces the box and slams the drawer. Leaping lightly over a pile of clothes, I give his Lego tower a swift kick and it topples.
I open the door a crack. All clear.
 
I dart across the hall into the nearest doorway—my parents’ bedroom. I slide on sock feet through their room—blue immaculate bed, every cushion in place—and out the door on the other side, which conveniently leads to mine.
 
Safe in my plush pink palace, I stuff a third of the spoils in the safest place I know—my own gut. The rest I conceal variously around the room—in a glittery egg, in the turret of a dollhouse, beneath a plump pillow; in a tiny fluffy purse.
 
At dinner I watch him tear up his tuna sandwiches—he strictly abstains from vegetables—with the fury of a T-rex. I suppress a grin, because he has no idea.
Then there is the dread. My dolls smile at me, as pearly-toothed as ever, but I can't help but feel a wobbly and greenish yellow feeling as if my magic carpet were just about to plunge into a storm-cloud. 
 
The banging on the door starts the very next day.
“Where—“bang—“are—“bang “my—“bang “lollies?”
I resent the intrusion to my inter-species tea party. Rapunzel drops her cup. Esmeralda's goat tries to eat it. Pegasus flutters her wings.
Bang, bang, bang.
“Go away!”
“Not until you come out with my lollies.”
“I'm not coming out!”
This is how the siege begins.
 
Parents, when they're not foisting manners on us, or enforcing strict bedtimes like tyrants, can be useful. Coming home to find Bryce blocking my door atop a fat stack of pillows, they negotiate a truce. It requires giving up his part of the horde, but not before I eat most of it. It requires giving back my marble, but Bryce claims to not know where it is.
 
“Go on,” says mum in a squishy placating voice. “Say sorry to your sister.”
Bryce brings his bushy brows together like an irate bull.
“Sorry,” he says, as quick and sharp as the stab of a lance. I know he doesn't mean it.
“Sorry,” I growl like a cornered bear.
“Good,” says mum in a sickly sweet voice.
“Now shake hands.” I shrink back in alarm.
“But he has cooties!”
“One little handshake isn't going to hurt.” Our hands meet in a brief, weak shake. I'll get you next time, say his sabre-tooth tiger-sharp eyes.
 
The rain has stopped long enough for us to fling ourselves into the garden.
“Don't forget your wellies—" Mum calls, but it's already too late.
 
My feet squish with glee over the cropped spongy grass. I pluck purple geraniums, a few curling yellow day lilies and the silent pink bells of a foxglove, which is taller than I am. Dewdrops fall from the petals as I pick them.
 
Bryce has found the mud and is engrossed in digging. He's pulling up handfuls and slapping them around the sides into the walls of a mud fort.
 
Leaving the dew-beaded flowers on the steps of the porch, I wander into the woods. I'm kicking up clumps of damp leaves, watching them fly and scatter. My foot hits something small and hard. I glimpse a flash of white. It’s the marble, its iridescent surface gleaming like a fallen moon. I rescue it from the damp leaves and wipe off a few brown bits.
 
“Bry-y-y-ce,” I call. I run up the path. He's absorbed in his sloping mud construction, propping the walls up with sticks.
“Bryce!” He looks up.
“Why'd you throw my marble in the garden?”
“I didn't.”
“Yes you did. I just found it.” The marble gleams in my palm. He draws his thick brows together, confused.
“Well that's weird cuz I put it in my room. Somewhere.”
“I don't believe you.”
“It's true!”
“Then how'd it get here?”
“I dunno.” Our eyes lock for a moment in a sullen glare. I hurl an armload of dead leaves at the mud fort and run back into the house. I have flowers to arrange.
 
Mistrust. The brief joy of finding my marble is broken like an egg all over the ground by my hammering mistrust.
Like when Bryce, groggy with sleep, dumps sugar on his cornflakes. He takes a bite and spits it out.
“Ugh!” he sputters. “It's salt! Who switched the salt and the sugar?”
Mum puts her hands on her hips. “Michaela, have you been playing tricks on your brother again?”
“I didn't do it, I swear.” They don't believe me. I feel like the enemy.
 
I reach forward to pick up a doll and a great bumpy toad jumps out from between the cushions.
“Bryce!” I shriek. I fill Bryce's shoes with mud so that when he's running around the house like a Mexican jumping bean, late for school as usual, he crams his fresh starched socks into his shoes and discovers a startling slurp.
            
I'm halfway to the school bus when I hear him roaring after me, 
“I'll get you back, Michaela.”
Once on the bus he ignores me as usual. He pretends to be too cool to talk to his little sister.
Once the bus drops us off and groans out of sight, he stops striding ahead and pauses for me to catch up.
“You know, Michaela, I didn't put that toad in your room.”
“I don't believe you,” I say stiffly.
“Well, I didn't.” Is that hurt in his voice?
“It's exactly the kind of thing you'd do.” He laughs.
“Well, yeah. It is. You know what? I wish I'd thought of it myself but someone else beat me to it.”
“Then who did it? Not mum or dad.” He chews his lip thoughtfully.
“Good question.”
 
I'm skipping in from the garden with a muddy handful of stones. A smooth one, a brown one, and a black one with white flecks, to place on my shelf of treasures. My treasures—they are scattered all over the floor. The shelf has been knocked down, and there are rotting leaves strewn across the bed.
 
“Bryce!” I roar. I pause. It is possible he didn't do it. That I can no longer blame him for everything that goes wrong. I feel confused.
“Michaela! Why did you kick down my Lego set again?”
“Why did you wreck my room?” He knots his brows like a tangle of thread.
“Something—or someone—must be lurking around the house.”
“Something sneaky.”
“Lets set a trap for it.”            
“Yeah! But how?”
“I have an idea.”
 
The trap. I take two cookies from the kitchen and conceal them. Once mum tucks me in and her soft lavender-scented form disappears, I sit up in bed to keep myself awake. A little while later, Bryce raps on the door. “They're asleep,” he whispers. He unlatches the back door. On the coffee table we set two cookies and a glass of milk. We take our places, Bryce on the stairs just above the coffee table, and me beneath a chair covered with a sheet, facing it.         
 
Waiting. Through the sheet, one dim light glows. It casts shadows in my little space.
I lie on my belly, propping my elbows under my chin.
 
The cookies sit untouched in the light of the lamp. My eyes follow the arcs and swoops of the Turkish carpet. Before long my lids are getting heavy. Keeping them open is like swimming underwater with shoes on. My eyes glide along the contours of the carpet like a fish…
 
A flicker of movement catches the edge of my eye. I blink. Something low and brown and fast scurries across the room and under the sofa. I press my cheek as flat as I can to the floor.
 
Another swift shape streams in and runs up the back of the sofa on all fours. It pauses. It has long knobby limbs, long fingered hands and bony bare feet that curl and grip. Its skin is mottled between tawny brown and swamp green, and seems to be continuously shifting. Around its waist is clothing of woven leaves. It looks at the bowl. Its face is small and bunched and wrinkly like a squashed peach. The nose disappears into the face and flares out into wide nostrils. The ears are long and pointed, the eyes beady and rapid. It crouches like a frog and leaps. It lands lightly on the coffee table and sniffs the cookies. It grins. It circles the cookies with a jaunty skip. And in a shrill little singsong voice, it sings:
          
“Woo-hoo, he-he, I'm filled with glee
That somebody's thinking of little old me
The tricks, they worked, we turned their heads
No need to put any more leaves in their beds!”
          
From beneath the sofa an arm emerges, knobby and mottled. Then a little face, scrunched and pointed. From a moss-covered cap on its head, some stringy hair hangs. It is wrapped in a leaf dress. It crawls up to the table. Grinning, it joins hands with the other and they skip around the cookies, singing shrilly. Then they both sit, legs swinging and dangling. They gobble up the cookies and slurp up the milk and, after picking the last crumbs clean, bound off into the night.
 
I crawl quietly out from the chair. Bryce is stepping down the stairs. We look at each other.
“Don't tell anyone what we saw,” whispers Bryce.
“I won't.”
“It's our little secret.”
 
Somehow, now that we share a secret, I don't have the heart to bash down Bryce's Lego sets. And he doesn't kick me as much. Why do Bryce and I make each other miserable while the little people are delighted by so little? 
 
“Let's make a truce,” I say.
“Okay, truce.” We shake on it. I pretend for a moment that he doesn't have cooties.
 
We are building a mud fort. Scooping up handfuls of mud, slapping and shaping it into walls. I press seashells into the sides and stick yellow day lilies in the battlements. In these  moments, there is joy. 

Malina Douglas has published in Metamorphose V2, Indigo: A Western Australian Journal of Writing, Every Second Sunday: A Seoul Writers' Anthology, and the Jungle Age, a website for writers. Her most recent publications include Writing Writers and the tenth anniversary edition of Consequence Magazine.

* * * 

Shift Supervisor
By  Janet Gool

I hate working as shift supervisor, but no one wins an argument against the Director of Nursing.  On the geriatric psych ward all the players are familiar – the patients, the doctors, the nursing staff.  I am the head nurse and can handle anything.  But shift supervisor?  That means responsibility for the entire hospital, which is an enormous headache. After all, in a two-hundred-bed psychiatric hospital, unbelievable things can happen.

This Thursday evening, like most Thursday evenings, the Director twisted my arm until I agreed to fill in as shift supervisor, and spend my time in the nursing office, rather than in the comfort of my own ward.

The nursing office dominates the Judean Gardens Mental Health Center like the command center on a military base.  The hospital is a collection of old buildings from a historic Arab village.  Even though the Ministry of Health had renovated them in order to serve as wards and offices, sometimes a glimpse of a tiled floor or arched window reveals a different, earlier identity.

I arrived late for the evening shift, hoping the Director would be gone, but no such luck.  She was cloistered in her office when I arrived.  I busied myself reading the patient reports from previous shifts, calling the various wards to assure that all staff members were in place, and straightening up the jumble of pens and paper clips that lay scattered on the conference table.  Eventually the Director stuck her head into the conference room to say hello.  She didn't mention my tardiness.

"Have a good shift, Janet," she wished me.

"Don't worry," I responded.

I waited a few minutes after the door to the nursing office slammed, in case the Director came running back to retrieve a forgotten cell phone or to update me about news in the hospital.  Then I turned on the enormous television set that took up the back wall of the conference room and found the channel that played endless reruns of "Law and Order".

Some Thursdays I managed to squeeze in some creative writing, knowing that at any minute the intercom could summon me and force me to abandon my writing, mid-sentence, and rush to help with a difficult admission or settle an argument between staff members.  One Thursday evening a patient with a campus pass let the air out of all the tires in the visitors' parking lot.  I discovered him roaming around the hospital with an eye-patch over one eye.

"I sure did stop all those tanks, didn't I?" he said to me.  As soon as I arranged to have his campus pass canceled, I hurried back to the nursing office to write an outline for a story about the Moshe Dayan of Judean Gardens.

Creative writing provided an antidote for the burnout that attacked me after thirty years as a psychiatric nurse. 

My patience had waned; sometimes I snapped at one of my elderly charges or at a nurse.  The pharmacist complained that my medication order was late every month.  I sent out blood tests in the wrong tubes or with the wrong forms.  I needed to do something for myself.

Psychotherapy was not the answer – that would be like spending an extra hour each week at work.  Musical instruments were out.  I had attempted to play both the piano and clarinet as a child, but could barely master the basic chords.  A new language, perhaps?  Flamenco dancing?

Two years ago, immersed in my burnout and at loss for a solution, I discovered an advertisement in "The Jerusalem Post".  "So You Want to Be a Writer?" the advertisement asked me.  Yes, yes, yes!  I want to be a writer!  That would be the cure for these burnout blues.

Monday afternoons I joined other wannabe writers, debated the merits of different points-of-view, developed dialogue, and tried to find "my voice".  During the long commute from my home in Beit Shemesh to Jerusalem, I plotted stories in my head instead of planning fights with the Director of Nursing.  My patients, that new nursing assistant with the weird tattoo, the cook who was having an affair with the medical secretary, all became potential characters in a prize-winning story.  Instead of snapping at them, I listened to every word and followed every gesture with as much interest as a first-year nursing student.

It was not just the people at work who suddenly became interesting.  The characters created by my fellow students were as alive to me as my family and friends.  I longed to ask advice from James, the Rhodesian house-servant, and cheered on Sharon in her quest for independence.  Most of all, I was intrigued by the increasing angst of Sam Atlas.
 
This Thursday, however, I was feeling too lazy to write.  I found a container of humus in the nursing office refrigerator that had not yet passed the sell-by date, and some spicy crackers stuffed in one of the cabinets.   

With my nosh ready, I settled down to watch "Law and Order".  This was my payback for working so hard, so long.

My idyll was broken in the middle of the second episode of "Seeds", one of my favorites.  Those clever "Law and Order" lawyers are careful to put a disclaimer at the end of every episode claiming that the "events portrayed have nothing to do with reality", but I know better.  "Seeds", for example, is based on the true story of

Dr. Cecil Jacobson, a slimy ob-gyn from Virginia who used his own "seed" in order to impregnate tens of his patients.  The creep got away with it until a few of the mothers met at the playground and noticed that their children all looked alike!

Anyway, the detectives on "Law and Order" had finished their investigation and the trial was about to begin, when the intercom began to squawk.  Boris, the evening charge nurse in the admission unit, yelled:
"Stat!"  Male back up to the admission unit!  I repeat – stat!"

I flipped off the television and ran to the admission ward.  A man with curly brown hair lay face down in the middle of the day-room floor.  A birthmark resembling a thumbprint was visible on the back of his neck.  Why did that description sound familiar?  There was no time to mull over this question, however.  Boris was half sitting on the patient's back, while a nursing assistant crouched next to him, trying to hold onto the fellow's legs.  Still, the captive managed to twist and turn, yelling the entire time,

"Those damned bitches!  Sneaking around like that!"

In short time six men raced into the ward.  They half-carried, half-dragged the agitated man into the isolation room and laid him on his back on the bed.  Then they looped strong canvas bands around both his arms and legs, secured the loops to the bed, and injected him with strong medication.  The fellow closed his eyes after a few minutes and relaxed his limbs.  Boris and I left the isolation room and returned to the nursing station.  I needed some information from him in order to write up my report at the end of the shift.

"Never saw this guy before," I said to Boris, "Has he ever been hospitalized here?"

"No," answered Boris, "this is the first time we've seen him.  You won't believe what he did."

"Tried to jump off the roof?  Ran around naked through the center of town?  Kidnapped the prime minister's dog?"

"Nope.  He broke into the ritual bath, the mikvah, where his wife was dipping.  Accused his wife and the mikvah lady of having an affair.  The mikvah lady called the police, and they dragged him out and took him to the lock-up at the Russian Compound.  But when the doctor at the jail heard him shouting, he applied to the District Psychiatrist for an involuntary admission."

Now I knew why the patient's brown curly hair and thumb-shaped birthmark seemed familiar.  That was Shimshon's description of his hero, Sam Atlas.  In our last class, Shimshon had presented a new installment of his Sam Atlas stories.  The usually affable Sam revealed a darker side.  Sam had visited his rabbi and insinuated that something peculiar was going on between the rabbi's wife, who served as manager of the local mikvah, and Sam's own wife.  When one of the students commented that Sam Atlas appeared to be losing control, Shimshon said, "Just wait for the next installment.  Then Sam Atlas will really go over the edge.  Be careful, Janet.  He could even end up in your hospital."

We all laughed.

Boris offered me the one comfortable chair in the nursing station and handed me a mug of instant coffee with milk.

"What the patient's name, Boris?" I asked, after a few sips.

Boris slouched on his wooden chair.  "Atlas," he said.

"And his first name?"

"Only an initial," said Boris, replacing the papers in their plastic folder.  "S".

I walked back to the nursing office, fuming with righteous indignation and called Shimshon on the phone.

"You've got a lot of chutzpah!  All this time you've been presenting your stories as fiction, but in reality, you've been exploiting the problem of a very sick person.  You didn't even have the common decency to conceal his identity and give Sam Atlas a fictitious name."

"Whoa, Janet!  What are you talking about?  Where are you?"

"I'm at the Judean Gardens…"

"I know where you work.  And I'm at home, trying to figure out if I want to have a beer and attack the crossword puzzle or replace the faucet in the bathroom sink.  And then you call with some kind of crazy accusation…"

"Sam Atlas just arrived at Judean Gardens on an involuntary admission."

"Former Soviet republic beginning with 'A'", said Shimshon, and I heard the "glug, glug, glug," of beer being poured into a cold glass before I hung up the phone.

My evening of watching "Law and Order" and munching on crackers with humus had been ruined.  Diligently, I trudged from ward to ward around the hospital grounds, enquiring about the health of every patient who had appeared on the nursing office report over the past forty-eight hours.  I responded politely to the complaints of families, and sat in the nurses' station of every ward and gossiped with the staff.  By the time I returned to the admission ward, the shift was almost over.

Sam Atlas was out of the four-point restraints and less agitated, but still tense.  He sat at a metal table in the day room scooping up the mashed potatoes with a metal tablespoon, banging the plastic plate with such force that it almost fell off the table.

"Hello, I'm Janet Gool, the shifty act, I mean, the acting shift supervisor," I said.

"I know exactly who you are," he answered, without looking up from his plate, "and you are getting awfully tiresome with your warm-hearted stories about your kids and grandkids.  Why don't you write something that requires real imagination for once?"

"Sam, it is Sam?" I asked, "Would it be okay if I checked your pulse?"

Sam dropped his spoon and extended a plump, freckled arm.  I placed my fingers in line with his thumb and searched for the familiar "thump, thump, thump" of the human heartbeat.  Nothing.  I tried his other arm, moving my fingers from the radical to the brachial space, without finding even a faint trace of a pulse.  I glanced at Sam; his color was good, he was breathing normally.  Sam saw the puzzled expression on my face and a sudden boom hit my fingertips.  Sam grinned.

The following Friday and Saturday at home provided some much-needed rest.  My married daughter visited with her family, and my little grandchildren proved to be a powerful distraction from the puzzling situation I had encountered on Thursday.

When I returned to work on Sunday, however, the anxiety that had gripped me most of Thursday returned.  I shut myself up in my office and thought about Sam Atlas and Shimshon.

I called Shimshon.

"Listen," I told him, "Sorry about that weird call on Thursday, but someone named Sam Atlas really did arrive here."

"Janet, I don't know what to tell you," said Shimshon.  "Maybe Sam Atlas isn't really such an unusual name.  Personally, I've never met a real Sam Atlas, but that doesn't mean anything."

"This Sam Atlas looks exactly like your character – brown curly hair, even a thumb-shaped birthmark on the back of his neck."  I didn't tell Shimshon about the weird business with the pulse.

"Like I said, I just don't know what to tell you.  I wish I could help, but I'm an accountant, not really in a helping profession."

Shimshon sounded as if he were telling the truth.  If so, the unbelievable had happened.  Sam Atlas had walked of the page and into the admission ward of the Judean Gardens Mental Health Center.  My nursing school curriculum had not included a single lesson about the care and treatment of characters from stories.  I leafed through  the hospital's policy and procedure manuals, but drew a blank.  It appeared that Sam represented a new frontier in mental health care, and I was its lone pioneer.

I found the nursing reports for the admission ward on my computer and looked up Sam Atlas.  The good news was that he was calmer and cooperating with the staff.  The bad news was that the mikvah lady had filed a complaint against him with the police.  The police asked the medical director of the admission ward not to release Atlas without a psychiatric hearing, since the mikvah lady wanted a chance to testify.

During a mid-morning lull in my work, I walked down the hill to the admission ward and sat with Sam Atlas in the visitors' room.  He was grateful, but not surprised, that I had brought him his favorite sandwich, lox and cream cheese on pumpernickel from Café Aroma.

"I'm sorry I insulted you on Thursday evening," he said between bites.

"And I'm sorry that we put you in restraints," I responded.

"Look, Janet," he continued, after finishing his snack, "you need to get me out of here.  I can't take it.  The ward is so noisy.  One of the guys in my room is a Danish tourist who think he's John the Baptist.  He poured a cup of cold water over my head in the middle of the night."

I told him about the mikvah lady and the psychiatric hearing.

"Won't you testify on my behalf?"

"What could I say on your behalf in a psychiatric hearing?"

Sam balled up the sandwich wrapping and tossed it into the trashcan. 
   
"Just tell them the plain unvarnished truth.  You can't commit a character from a short story to a psychiatric ward.  It just is not logical."

"Sam," I answered, "if I walk into a psychiatric hearing and claim that you are a character from a short story, they'll decided that I've lost my mind after all those years working with psych patients and commit me."

Sam brushed a few breadcrumbs from his knees.  "Well, think of something.  You're supposed to be creative."

I returned to the geriatric psych ward but was unable to work.  Sam's appeal for help was harder to cope with than his anger, but I still could not figure out how to get a character discharged from the hospital.

The Director called me as I was sitting paralyzed at my desk, unable to find a solution.

"I have a favor to ask of you, Janet," she said.  "We ordered a new refrigerator for our house – it was supposed to be delivered this evening.  The deliveryman just called and said he would be there in fifteen minutes.  I know you don't like filling in, but could you just sit in the nursing office until the end of the shift so that I can run home?"

On my way from the geriatric ward to the nursing office I could see the patients from the admissions ward enjoying the afternoon sunshine in the yard adjacent to the building.  A few men kicked around a half-inflated football.  One young fellow in dread-locks and a large crocheted skullcap played Dylan's "I Shall Be Released" on a guitar.  Two mandatory staff members were present, but they didn't appear interested in what their charges were doing.  One was busy texting messages on his cell phone, while the second slumped, half asleep, on a plastic chaise-longue.  Sam Atlas sat alone and forlorn on a folding chair in the corner of the yard.  I waved to him, but he did not see me.

The Director stood in the doorway of the nursing office with her bag over her shoulder.  She hurried towards the exit gate as soon as she saw me, calling back,

"I've taken care of everything – written up the nursing reports, but didn't have time to print them.  That's all you have to do.  And of course, take care of any emergencies that come up."

"Don't worry," I called back, "The hospital is in capable hands."

I sat down at the computer to print out the nursing reports when it hit – the solution to Sam Atlas' problem.

Instead of printing the nursing reports, I opened a new Word document and began to type.

"The patients were all gathered in the yard, when suddenly and with unexpected agility, Sam Atlas leaped on the fence and began to climb towards the top."

The minute I typed the word "top" the hospital intercom began to squawk.

"Shift supervisor!  Shift supervisor!  Please respond!"

I did not respond, but continued to type.

"Clambering over the top he dropped, uninjured, (and here I took the time to underline the word 'uninjured') on the other side of the fence."

The nurse on the intercom sounded hassled.  "Shift supervisor!  Shift supervisor!  A patient has escaped!  I repeat – a patient has escaped!"

I typed as accurately and quickly as possible.  "Running instinctively away from the main gate, Sam headed up the hill and behind the old rehab building."

"Shift supervisor!  We have an escaped patient!  He ran up the hill…"

I needed just a few more lines.  "Finding a pile of abandoned furniture that provided a foot up, Sam heaved himself over the perimeter fence and into an empty lot in the Har Nof neighborhood.  Brushing off his clothes, he walked down the street, blending in with the residents.  Then he disappeared from the hospital, forever."

Only after typing the words, "The End" (underlined and in bold type) did I respond to the frantic pleas of the nurse on the intercom.

"This is the shift supervisor," I said in my calmest, most reassuring voice, "How can I help you?"

Janet Gool is a retired psychiatric nurse living in Beit Shemesh, Israel. Her work has been published in Madcap Review and Creative Nonfiction, and awarded an honorable mention by Glimmer Train.

* * * 

Isola Bella
By Carly Husick

The summer after college graduation Leah's parents took her on a vacation to Italy. They
flew into Rome and then traveled down the high-heeled boot of Italy to a lake city called
Stresa, stopping in Florence along the way. Leah had never been out of the country
before but her parents had made a habit of leaving the United States every time they'd
dropped Leah back at school - eight times in the last four years. Italy and England and the
British Virgin Islands and once the south of France where they'd sent Leah pictures
through slow loading emails of them sitting on a pastel colored coastline eating shellfish
off a three-tiered dish. Leah had downloaded the picture on her phone and shown it to all
her friends, her Dad's face grinning against the sherbet sunset as he pried the center of an
oyster from its shell and slid it into his mouth.

In Rome, they stayed in a narrow hotel, piled into one room, her father’s portable C-pap
machine occasionally suffocating him in his sleep so Leah would be ripped from dreams
of crashing waves and sand bars and strawberry daiquiris to the sound of her father’s
breath being sucked from his body. His chest and torso rising up underneath the thin
sheet, that was spread across his front and her mother’s back, like his lungs were being
pulled up out of his body through his skin. They ate breakfast in a cavern at the bottom of
the hotel. It was shaped like a six-pointed star, jagged edges narrowing in around their
heads where the stone had formed and stayed millions of years before. Leah ate chocolate
croissants and drank custardy-orange colored passion fruit juice while her parents talked
about the weather. When she went back into the room to use the bathroom before they
went out for the day her father’s C-pap machine had been bundled up and wrapped in its
own chords, zipped away in the case that her father hung over his shoulder and carried
through the airports like a computer bag.

They went to the old Jewish ghetto and walked through a Roman synagogue as grand as
any church Leah had ever seen. The stained-glass windows were the colors of tropical
birds, greens and blues and fuchsias and the ceilings were geometric patterns that wove in
against one another and stretched up so high that Leah had to tilt her head back as far as it
could go just to see to the top. Afterwards they walked through the ruins of the ghetto and
Leah paused in front of a covered plastic sign that gave a description of the site in both
Italian and English. Sprayed over the black words was an ugly gash of paint, dotted and
frail like it had been shakily drawn there, the spidery legs of a swastika clinging onto the
words.

No one said anything.

That evening Leah ate a fried artichoke that melted on her tongue, its muddy flavor
popping against the fizzy water that her parents insisted on drinking while abroad.
Agua con gas her father mimed to every waiter, his voice taking on a high girlish accent that
left his edges curling around his words.

In Florence, they visited a leather school at the back of a church. Leah hadn’t known that
leather working and tanning was something you could study. That people made a career
of it. Became apprentices. She spent forty minutes watching an Italian man with thick
brown hair stitch a rim around the edges of a wallet, his hands working his tools with
methodical certainty, pausing every few minutes to push a lock of hair out of his eyes. In
Florence, for the first time, she tasted wild boar in chocolate sauce and sipped a Nebbiolo
relishing the full bounce of the dry red against the succulence of the exotic meat.

In Stresa, Leah ate gnocchi by the plateful with every kind of sauce she could find on a
menu. She ate it with shredded duck and sausage. She ate it with tomato sauce that sat
tart and full on her tongue. She ate it with a cream sauce that settled on the top of her
stomach like liquid matter forming to the shape of her insides and pressing down. In the
morning, they took a ferry to Isola Bella and wandered through the halls of the castle and
the grounds without a tour guide. Leah’s feet pressed puffs of dust out of the carpet with
every step she took, like a ghost version of herself was hovering just above the dulled
blue carpet. But the real attraction of Isola Bella were the birds that roamed the stone
island, walking along the gravel paths from plush green gardens to the pink lined flower
beds on splayed feet, their tufted white crowns held high, their feathers tucked along their
backs as they waddled and swayed their heads at one another.

Leah spent the afternoon following the peacocks from one end of the island to the other.
They were unusual, these denizens of Isola Bella, white from the dandelion fuzzed tops
of their feathers to the tips of their sloped beaks and when they spread their plumes,
fanning out like a deck of cards being spread, it was like a sunrise unfurled before you,
only drained of color.

And their cries. To Leah their cries sounded like a child’s scream. Like a whooping
cough, high pitched and sonorous. Like the sound paint makes when it’s scraped off a
plastic sign after being forced into a terrible shape. Like her father’s lungs being pulled
out through his chest as he choked in his sleep, his C-pap machine slapping an invisible
hand over his own soundless beak.
​​
Carly Husick is a first year MFA student at the University of New Hampshire studying fiction. She has most recently been published in Rivercraft literary magazine.

* * *