I sat next to a girl on the bus, thin and blond. She was reading a paperback. “Where are you going?” I asked. She glanced at me. “What?” “I’m going to Albany,” I said. “What’s in Albany?” she said. I laughed. “Not much. My mother died. That’s why I’m going to Albany.” She went back to her book. “That’s why I’m going there,” I said. The bus was passing through countryside, a low ridge of wooded hills on one side, on the other a swampy field with scrub brush, a few bare trees. “I’m sorry about your mother,” she said, not looking up from the page. “It’s all right,” I said. “She was old. Her time had come.” “No one’s time has come,” she said. She looked at me. Clear, gray blue eyes, like I’d fallen through the sky on a winter’s day. “Who reaches the end?” she said. “What gets finished? There are moments. That’s about it.” “My name’s Chip,” I said. “Jim. James, really.” She turned on her side away from me. I …

“I don’t believe in ghosts.” “Why?” “Because it doesn’t make any sense.” “What?” “Everything.” “About ghosts?” “No, everything about everything.” “OK, so you’re saying you don’t believe in anything?” “Kind of, but mostly ghosts.” “So you like to pick on ghosts?” “They just never appear.” “They do to a lot of people.” “But people who are drunk. Or high. Or a little stupid.” “My Dad saw a ghost.” “Well, he was probably drunk.” “He doesn’t drink.” “Or high.” “He doesn’t get high.” “Well, I’m just saying that I don’t care about ghosts. There’s other things. Like wars.” “Which turn people into ghosts.” “Yeah, they would. If ghosts were real, but ghosts are nothing. You know how someone says they’re going to ‘ghost’ you. What’s that mean? It means you’ll never hear from them again. That’s what ghosts are. Just nothingness. They bore me.” “That’s probably why they don’t appear to you.” “Why? Ghosts only like to appear to people who get scared?” “I’ll give an example. I used to work at a haunted house. Years …

“Aaaaaaah!” I yell as Tess flings herself, beaming, onto my mattress, all giggles and smiles, her blond hair brushing my cheeks. “Mama!” She laughs. When Tess laughs, my heart wells up with joy, light and giddy with the love I feel. When the time comes for her to fly back to the U.S. to begin a new semester at the University of Wisconsin, we drive to Lisbon airport. And after every visit, as she proceeds to passport control, she turns back for one last look, and I glimpse the sadness and regret on her face. This time, though, the departure is different. “It is what it is,” Tess says, her suitcase in the hall. We are ready to leave for the airport. Fall semester begins next week. “What does that even mean?” I ask. She doesn’t answer. I just know it’s nothing good. Like it or not, and as hard as you may try to avoid it, the past will always catch up with you—an ugly hag clawing at your door, coming to reclaim what …

She picked me up one autumn evening in the Wien Reference Room of Columbia’s Butler Library. The year was 1940. I was beavering away at an essay for which, after a momentary glance at what I’d done (not much), she provided the thesis statement that was eluding me, succinctly formulated, even a little provocative, ready to be placed at the head of my shaky introduction, which she then revised with my pen. I asked her if she’d tutor me and she made me her lover. “She” was Joan Adams Vollmer, a sophomore at Barnard College and future common-law wife of William S. Burroughs, killed by his .38 caliber during a drunken game of William Tell eleven years later. “I” was a Columbia freshman teetering on the cusp of a world hitherto only imagined while reading naughty pulp novels from my father’s basement stash in leafy Brooklyn Heights. Joan looked nothing like the ideal of womanhood pictured in my post-adolescent mind’s eye, which I later realized had been assembled from the lingerie sections of store catalogues. …

Barricade the doors and prepare your materials. For the head, a clutch of cables stripped down to their raw copper cores carrying shudders of memory. For eyes and ears, a twist of coaxials and a flicker of fiber optics. Zip tie at random to provide an illusion of control. No mouth because you never spoke out even when you thought you might. Craft fingers from the cheap cigarettes you bought though split peas were cheaper and the soup would have nourished you at least a little. For lungs, a handful of the split peas you ought to have bought, closed up in a tin. They should rattle. For the belly, a wad of diary pages. Use gloves, they will be mucky. For legs, stack the contents of your worst-day bedroom floor, from books up to bottles. Determine that whatever direction they tilt is forward. For feet, use the boots, the ones that could coax a tango from a tilt. For the heart, an envelope to enclose the shadows you loved. Their subjects were only distractions. …

I worry about Charlie. Every morning, he complains about the drone rush hour noise. And he’s been getting worse since the twins left us empty nesters. “Isn’t it better than hearing the whirring all day?” I say. “We have twenty hours of quiet now. We can hear the birds again.” “Who needs all this crap?” Charlie presses his palms into his ears. “Breakfast delivered? Lattes? Newspapers! Who even reads the newspaper anymore?” He’s worse during the 5-7 slot for evening deliveries. Not sure why I answer. It never helps. “People like to hold something in their hands, I guess.” “What’s next? Milk bottles? Ice like in our great grandparents’ day?” Our phones ping like a string of firecrackers. “They have it,” I say. “Borden’s® milk.” A parachute delivery lands outside the window. “They’ve sent a free sample. Must use that NewGlass®, so it doesn’t break.” “More like Lizzy Borden” Charlie shivers, “It’s all so creepy.” His phone pings. “Lizzie Borden® milk! Jesus!” The drones certainly are spooky–buzzing 40 feet over the road in tight formations. …

She does not know he is there, sitting behind her, close enough to smell her perfume; out of sight, out of mind, as if still imprisoned in the dank 6 x 8 ft shit hole she sent him to eleven years ago. This newfound café with its restored Palladian windows, factory height ceiling, and industrial hardwood plank flooring, has become her safe space; her therapist had suggested incremental steps, and this one is working. Quiet and sparsely populated when she arrives. Mellow light streaming in, illuminating the grand Venetian plaster wall opposite in a Vermeer lead-tin-yellow glow. It all coheres. By mid-afternoon, when the lunch crowd has gone back to work, she focuses on her writing, losing herself in world-building. Only the soft hissing of the espresso machine, and wafts of aromatic fresh coffee grounds filter through. No one has told her he has been released. On a technicality. She has not received the requisite status update. This was never supposed to happen. She has spent the past decade putting her life back together. Shattered, …

A paper silhouette fades into the light. You move forward, carefully putting each step in front of the previous one. On the ground there are dirty papers lying around, pieces of plastic, and urine stains from yesterday’s pissers. The light from a clothing store illuminates a window, a little further away, where rigid mannequins set up an absurd vigil, in order to display some sportswear there. Finally, a blind wall blocks the alley that you have just taken. So you turn around, and walk back your steps leaving this dead end littered with rubbish. Once on the avenue, you actually find yourself stuck in a compact crowd of people, made out of a mixture of passersby, tramps, and seated folks busy sipping their drinks at café terraces. You walk by a few dowdy couples, which seem to be just out there in order to set up some sort of a competition, about who will turn out to be the most ridiculous of the bunch, in the end. This to such an extent that it could …

We were hitchhiking to Montana from Rhode Island, and after a few short rides with backwoods psycho-types, Cal and I got lucky. We got picked up by a guy in a big trailer truck who was going all the way to Chicago. His name was Sylvester, and he looked kind of like Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction. He was a former Black Panther. At least that’s what he told us. And he had Polaroid photographs of his various “ladies” from around the country all taped to the dashboard. They were all naked in the photos. Sylvester said the pictures kept him awake and focused while he drove. And he smoked a good deal of the pot we had brought along with us. He chain-smoked joints the way my Aunt Sophie smoked Winstons. Every half hour or so Sylvester would just smile and say, “Whyn’t you twist up another one of those fatties for us.” But, he was a good storyteller, and the miles flew by. Then, about three or four in the morning, Sylvester …

She felt a promising sensation reach for her core and opened her dark eyes with soft anticipation. She found his blue eyes not gazing into hers but into the upper corner of the room, up over her left shoulder, with a look of something like boredom mixed with purposeful indifference. All sensation fled. Later, alone, she sometimes wondered if it would have been better to simply have kept her eyes closed. Beate Sigriddaughter, www.sigriddaughter.net, lives in Silver City, New Mexico (Land of Enchantment), where she was poet laureate from 2017 to 2019. Her poetry and short prose are widely published in literary magazines. Recent book publications include a poetry collection, Wild Flowers and a novel, Soleil Madera.

Her English teacher called her Mousy, perhaps because she often wore a wooden mouse pin with red rhinestone eyes and a thin leather strip for a tail. She didn’t mind. The pin had been her mother’s idea of adorable. There was a lot of confusion in those days. Roman soldiers didn’t particularly float her boat, for instance. All the same, she wrote a story about two of them once, and to her enormous surprise, her teacher, a former Jesuit priest, now happily married to a former nun and teaching at her Lutheran all-girls school, was so impressed with her story, he asked if he could have it. She was flattered and said of course and handed over her exercise book, almost empty otherwise. Since she wasn’t interested in Roman soldiers in the first place and soon couldn’t remember what she had written, she was hardly going to miss the story. Not long afterwards, the school decided to let the teacher go. Some of his views were considered too radical for an all-girls school. This in …

Leaving school at fifteen was a mistake that I couldn’t undo. The teachers had predicted I’d fail every subject I was set to take and my theory was it was better to drop-out early than waste the next few months of my life working towards failure. I spent the following few months in bed watching bad TV shows and lounging around in my pajamas well into the afternoon. It was a perfect time and knowing that I’d somehow managed to dodge hour after hour of miserably dull school classes in exchange for these heavenly duvet days felt like I’d easily made the best decision of my life. It came to a tragic end in July. Around two days after my sixteenth birthday when my Mum came home after work and told me to sit down, she said, ‘You can go back to school or you can get a job,’ I slumped there in dull despair while she continued, ‘what you can’t do is lay around here playing on the computer all day.’ When she finished …

We’re getting rid of my grandparents’ cat, Julius. And when I say we, read my girlfriend, Sarah. After grandpa died, the family entrusted Julius to me, but his favorite game deals with biting the toes of anyone passing by. Sarah’s his usual target because her signature sandals leave her exposed, but he’s tagged my bare feet, too. “We can’t have people over,” Sarah says. News flash, we never had people over before the cat. Yet, her argument wins, and now, the animal rescue center appears on a hill behind a steel mill. The road isn’t even fully paved. The car’s tires bounce over every hole in the gravel path that circles up to the concrete pad in front of the building with a worn awning and tinted double doors. The cat crawls around the fabric crate my grandparents bought for him. His paws press through the bottom and into my lap as the whole car shakes, and I lift the container so that his claws don’t pick at my skin. My grandparents used to always …

We were halfway between McMinnville and Lincoln City when the smell of shit overwhelmed us. It was overwhelming, this smell of shit, when the windows were up more than when they were down. The smell was potent enough to cover twenty years of stale cigarette smoke in the car. It was strong enough to cover the smell that had been affecting us negatively, the smell coming from the trunk. “Fertilizer,” I said. “I guess.” He fussed with the radio’s dial. We picked up a preacher’s sermon and then a talk radio station. “I don’t think I’ve listened to AM radio even once in my life,” I said. “It’s an old car,” Bobby said. “We can walk back from Newport,” I said. “Shouldn’t take too long.” “Four, five days,” Bobby said. He sighed. “I don’t want to do that.” “I don’t really want to either,” I said. It was true, I didn’t even want to walk from my apartment on 23rd Ave to the bar on 17th when Bobby called. It’s not that I’m lazy, it …

It’s your fault we can’t grow old together. I heard you on the radio. If only it had been a production from the golden age! I could have known better. You would have been dead and buried before I heard you. Damn this radio play renaissance that brought you into my living room. It isn’t fair. You sounded young and beautiful. You are beautiful, you know. People probably used to tell you that more often. I imagine now you get called distinguished. Or statuesque, maybe. You’ve had four husbands but I don’t think you’re fickle. All of your marriages lasted years and years and here I am, barely old enough to vote. It isn’t all your fault, but can’t you see why I felt tricked? You sound a quarter of your age! I don’t know what I’d have done if you were as young as the character you played in that production. Propose, I suppose. Though it probably wouldn’t have worked. Once I found your picture online and realized I had been deceived I wavered. …

I think back to falling out that window and sneaking across the open field. Maybe I fell, maybe he did. His golden retriever followed us barking too loudly and we shushed him, as we lit our way with our small red flashlight and parted tall yellow grass which seemed above our heads, but I’m sure was not. After parting the seas, we turned out the light, and took off our pajamas, left only in our under-clothes, so recently stripped of Batman and Wonder Woman emblems. The dark was protective, but still we ran and jumped into the obscurity of the lake. It seemed a lake then, now it seems like a pond, expanding or retracting by the rhythm of summer showers. But we whispered Marco Polo, and tried not to laugh. The dog waded next to us, knowing that we were naïve and alone. There were lights shining. At first we thought they were fireflies, out past their curfew, but then a flame appeared on the water. It did not evaporate, but magnified, and he …

It was intermission and I was descending the stairs from the theatre balcony when I saw her, which was remarkable considering the crush of people in the lobby. After the initial shock, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to say hello or hide in the men’s room until the lights dimmed and the play resumed. I had decided on the latter when she looked up, smiled and twenty years melted away. She’d never been a beauty, but just as age can diminish an attractive woman, it had enhanced her. She walked toward me, piercing eyes, always her best feature, never leaving mine. As in the past, I was enveloped by her presence, my awkwardness countered by her warmth and charm. Though I never understood why, she’d always loved me more than I loved her, and I had basked in the high opinion she held of me. She was attending the performance with her niece. I was there to write a review for an online theatre magazine. She’d heard my wife had died several years ago …

“He acts like a robot,” she thinks. It’s a warm evening in the outdoor area of a nice restaurant. His strong tattooed arms are lying on the table, her black curls are contrasting with her red lipstick. She could fall in love with his slow but steady movements or the depth of his voice, but she doesn’t notice it. She tries to look right under the skin to see all the wires and cables, to find the metal heart pumping electricity behind them. The one with a script inside that repeats in a circle: work, gym, home, friends. Stability. “A bad date,” he thinks, looking at her thin hands with numerous bracelets. “It feels like she’s not alive at all. As if she’s not here, but lost in her ideas about higher matters, in philosophical theories, in art-house movies and books.” “Most people are NPCs,” says a young artist in worn jeans as he walks on the opposite side of the street. “They live in a culture of consumption. Either of goods or of other …

Imagine you were strong. Powerful. Majestic. You can wield your strength naturally, as if it is first nature. Your nature. Your muscles bulge under the thick, leathery skin, intimidating and threatening. Your skin is baked red, soft under the softest of touch, hard under pressure with a pattern of Savannah desert with cracks that move with you. You’re decorated with a leather mohawk down your spine from the top of your head to the tip of your tail. Each triangle spike represents all the times others preyed on you; each spike is a defense mechanism against anyone who dares do it again. The tail is heavy but easy to move. Imagine a snout with nostrils open to sniff out anything. Or deep green eyes beautifully surrounded by thick black lashes, eyes that should have been fiercely orange-red. Your breath is hot enough to burn enemies to a crisp. Imagine being part of a fantasy. A good, beloved fantasy. An admired myth. Imagine people believing you’re part of an old past. Fantasy novels in the middle …

Warmth from the previous shopper’s hands makes me shiver with repulsion as I clang a trolley loose from the line. How can the handle still be warm anyway; the shop is as good as empty this early on a Sunday morning. Although the virus was long gone I dig into my handbag for a Wettie and wipe the trolley handle and my hands clean. The vastness of B&Q swallows me up and I zig-zag past store front displays of special offers all clamouring for attention. A huge advertising photo of a paint-splashed couple decorating their bedroom as if it were the most joyous act in the world, contrasts starkly with my domestic life. Lisa and I had been a team like that. Once. The ballcock valve had been leaking in our en-suite toilet for days, but my partner, Lisa, refused to fix it claiming that Sunday is a day of rest. Lisa worked as a plumber so her inaction was galling. Earlier that morning, deciding to fix it myself with the help of a YouTube …

I’m not exactly sure what to make of it, to be honest. Sprawled out in front of me lies some sort of “creature”, if I can even call it that. It has a face that might almost look human under a certain light, but just about everything else is foreign and otherworldly: the pondweed hair, the spiny protrusions on its back, the hummingbird-green scales covering most of its body. The most fascinating part of the specimen has to be the fishlike tail that lies where its legs should be, stained with saltwater and tinted a dark cerulean. “And you said you found it like this?” I ask Luca, but he stares at the ground and fidgets with the hem of his raincoat. In a different world, I probably would have told my younger brother some sort of excuse when he asked to explore the beach this late — something about the impending storm, something about how dangerous the ocean can be at night — just so I wouldn’t have gotten into this dreamlike mess. Unfortunately, …

He reads—“New… Naïve… Art”—and snorts. “The hell?” Whenever my father inhabits his Andy Warhol mode, he detests the museum’s humble collections. There had been a Degas exhibit here last year and a Rembrandt one before that, but the local sculpture filling the spaces left by these normally un-gettable exhibits draws only sucks and blows. “It means artists who work outside the lines,” I answer. “Amateur hour with clay.” He strokes a phallic-looking vase. “Hope the divorcée who made this didn’t quit her day job.” “What makes you think a woman sculpted it?” He points to the placard below the clay stalk. “Says here first name’s Leslie.” “Could just as easily be a man. Leslie Nielsen?” “Doesn’t count.” Andy is my father’s favorite dead artist to play. He sounds like a sewer-mouthed Socrates sizing up everything that ever frustrated him: bills, bosses, women, daughters who didn’t know what they were until they weren’t anymore. “Can’t you just appreciate the time it took this person to create that?” I cannot bring my father to museums anymore without …

One bright spring afternoon, my mother convinced my stubborn father to see the doctor. The insomnia, which had blighted much of his adolescence, had returned with a vengeance, and the sleep-deprivation was starting to give him throbbing headaches. Occasionally, the pain was so severe that he would retire to his bedroom and lie there in the absolute darkness. Something had to be done. Chaperoned by my mother, he returned from the appointment as the daylight was starting to fade. “It’s not good news,” he said, slumping down in his armchair. “I’ll just sit down for a moment.’ But, once he was down, we couldn’t lift him back up and we had to summon Dicken from next-door to help lug him upstairs, like hoisting a six-foot-tall bag of cement. After that, his legs were too weak, so in bed he stayed. Well-wishers came to the house in a relentless stream, bringing Tupperware filled with hearty, homecooked meals. But, despite their generous starchy offerings, my father’s strength declined, and his work-hardened hands lay atop the bedsheets, turning …

The angel sat on my left shoulder. The devil sat on my right. Both whispered and cooed and prodded and cajoled. Voices like harps and kettle drums appealed to my finer and baser instincts. Calls to action and pleas to turn aside. Would I take the easy path or the turbulent stream? Two roads diverged in my kitchen before I’d even had my first cup of coffee. Or herbal tea. I couldn’t take the constant bickering between the two of them or the demands and suggestions they were making of me. Finally, when I couldn’t stand it any longer, I tilted my head to the left until I was eye to eye with the angel. She stood barely four inches tall and appeared just as anyone would expect her to, as if she’d stepped out of some religious painting, a living piece of bondieuserie. I asked her, “Isn’t that my sinister side?” The devil on my right cursed out loud. The angel shrank back and grew quiet. First, her face turned red with embarrassment. Then …

Helicopters fly over Portland Harbor. It’s late. A warm summer night in July; and full of flies. The bugs attack the day’s catch and are swatted away by swollen hands. Two weathered Americans carry a body wrapped in blue tarp from cold storage. The first mate trips on his boots, slips his grip, and drops the torso. “Careful, Josh! Christ,” hisses the captain. “That’s my bad,” says Josh, wiping his hands on a pair of overalls. “Bend with your knees, not your back,” says the captain. Josh nods, mindful of his form, and drops into a squat. They count three seconds in silence then haul the corpse up again and carry it to the stern. It reminds Josh of deadlifting at the gym. “What d’you think this one did?” he says. “Same thing they all do,” says the captain. “Piss off the Company.” They chuck the body into the sea, and in the same motion, the captain falls against the gunwale, out of breath. He stares at the black water until his first mate comes …