Illustration by Sally Deskins

In those days when the town was still young, a river cut between gray-green mountains and lazied along a postal road, murmuring fool’s-gold secrets. At the water’s edge on a cul-de-sac, a sturdy ranch house materialized, built by the pub’s new manager, who was married to an aspiring preschool teacher. The newlyweds carpeted the rooms in a medium beige and papered the walls in sunflowers.

That summer Layna arrived amid screams. Her mother was glad to have another presence in the house, a bright focal point, a baby-cheeked distraction. She breathed easier and carried her daughter like a breastplate or an amulet. Layna’s father doted on his only child. As she grew older, he often had her sit with him on the sofa and watch the television on his days off and at night when he couldn’t sleep. On those nights, Layna watched the fan blades blur, blinking round baby eyes.

*

She liked to laugh. Bugs made her laugh, the watching part—the teasing part. She would push them with the edge of her finger in tiny fits, especially the biting ones, too quickly for them to hurt her. Her mother told her it was wrong to squish bugs, but Layna would giggle away at even the sound of the word. “Squish, squish!” she would shriek out, and dissolve into giggles. Her mother tried to teach her other words for when a bug went splat, but Layna would shake her head. “Not crush. No kill!” Her mother made fists with her hands and turned away, easier to turn than to press the issue.

Layna did not like to kill bugs, only to squish them. For her, this was an important distinction. It made her angry when her mother insisted there was no distinction at all.

*

Layna laughed when she and her father played in the autumn leaves. Mountains of red and gold, and when you jumped in one pile the rest went up like feathers or like impossible raindrops floating back into the sky. When her father joined her, rolled with her, he squashed all the leaves. Squish, squish. Once, when she was feeling rebellious, she told him not to roll with her. He took her into his lap, nuzzled her, asked her why. She wiggled to free herself, but he held on tight.

“You squish them,” she said. “Leaves don’t like to be squished.”

He held her tighter and promised to be more careful.

*

Layna laughed at tickles. Her mother tickled her feet to get her out of bed on school mornings. If she giggled too long, her mother would tickle harder or swat her feet and toes. Then Layna would laugh even when it hurt because she knew if she cried it would hurt more. Her father tickled her belly with his mustache. Layna found his mustache immensely funny. She would pull on it when he bent over her belly, his arms coming down like tree trunks on either side of her head. He’d throw a leg over hers to prevent her moving. He’d bite if she pulled, so she made a game of pulling only when she felt his leg go soft enough; then she’d pull and wiggle out from beneath him and let loose a series of high-pitched squeals as she fled behind the sofa, peaking to make sure he was not angry.

Sometimes he was. And though she tried, she could never laugh when he was angry.

*

Today Layna’s father was angry. She knew it because of the way he closed the front door. Not the usual thump when he kicked it shut with his foot on the way in, and not the slam after a long day at work. Today was the slow slip of a creak at the joints and the mush between rubber and pith and wooden frame. The sound Layna had learned meant running.

She was in her room putting her dolls safely away when she heard that small, deliberate sound. Her muscles bunched tight like a caterpillar encountering a fingernail. She heard his footsteps and the sound of her mother turning. A glass broke. Their voices together were the voices of two things that weren’t meant to sound at the same time.

She knew why they were fighting. Her mother had been out last night long past teaching hours. Layna had barely been able to keep her eyes open by the time her mother came home. She dared not fall asleep while she and her father sat on the sofa watching the late-night shows: she’d been startled awake once by his mustache, and had learned to count fan blades as others counted sheep.

Another glass.

When they fought, Layna had learned to slip out and dart for the woods. Today, though, her bedroom window wouldn’t give. She pulled and pulled as their voices rose. It was unlocked, wasn’t it? Yes. But still, it wouldn’t come. She considered breaking it but knew that would only make it worse for her by the time she returned.

Finally, she decided to sneak out through the bathroom window. It would require getting out of her room without being seen. Without being heard. She must be only a tremble down the hallway where beyond there was yelling and hurling and bodies blooming with bruises in places only the walls ever witnessed. She tightened the laces on her shoes. She opened her bedroom door. Its spine groaned.

Don’t breathe.

Their shadows crawled on the back wall of the living room, monsters with claw hands and snarling mouths. Creep down the hall, now into the bathroom. The door was ajar. She went through, soundless. The bathroom window opened too swiftly, thumped at the top. She bit her lip, heart in throat, pushed out the screen, dropped to ground, heels hitting, and ran.

*

Who knew if it was rain or dusk? The sky was overcast, and weeds were sandpaper on her bare calves. Her stomach growled, but she hushed it. No supper to miss. Mama would be in her bedroom with a liquor glass, smoky stuff yellow as piss in the toilet bowl. And him. He would be sitting on the sofa calling, calling for Layna.

These were the parts she had to run from: her mother’s chalky hands after the glass was emptied two or three times, and her father’s hands when he called for her. His gentle hands all over her. He would tell her to laugh; and since the anger had simmered out of him, she could laugh easily, loudly even. She didn’t understand why gentle hands made her more afraid than rough ones, why they made her laughter louder.

*

Layna found the path without trouble. In winter, she knew, it would be harder to follow, but now, in summer, she traced the smooth river stones and chunks of sparkling fools’ gold with ease, uphill through the forest, zigzagging above the town, hiking, hiking, as the sun sank and the stars muttered in the low sky.

She found the place. Near a short cliff face, she’d posted three sturdy sticks as thick around as her thighs and balanced a large sheet of corrugated metal on top for a roof. Last time, she’d put a blanket in a banker’s box and put a rock on top of the box to keep it from blowing out from under the metal.

Good, there was the rock surrounded by leaves; and underneath, the box; and inside, the blanket.

She climbed into her shelter, huddled, chilled, and squished the first bug that came by. A fat black beetle. She couldn’t figure out why squishing, when she was up here, never made her laugh.

*

She woke and uncurled. Woke stiff and cold all the way down to her toes, stuffed sockless in ragged shoes. She could hear the town below. A vague almost-quiet. It had not rained. That was a blessing. She knew from other times that her hideout roof would keep out the downpour but not the slush and seep of rainwater. The understated gray sky was nearing sunrise. Her back and shoulders ached.

She rolled up the blanket and returned it to its box, which she sealed with a rock and covered with leaves. Standing slowly, she let the pain from sleeping outdoors settle into her spine and thighs and hips. That was good, too, that settling. That pain of being alive, being here, now; not floating somewhere just outside the curled shell of her sleeping self, heaped in blankets on a too-large bed beside a too-large body. It was good, instead, to be here.

The trip back was slow. She didn’t run. She crossed the river and skipped a stone over it. Watched it sink, blink back at her from the mudbelly bottom of the riverbed. By the time the sun broke over the eastern mountains, she was just descending her trail to the point where she could no longer hear the river. The town was a machine, humming.

*

When she finally approached her house, lights glowed in her parents’ bedroom. The television flashed through the sliding patio door. Among the sweet, musty morning smells was that of her mother’s cooking leaked through thin walls. Bacon on the air, and coffee.

She wound back to the bathroom window, reached up to crawl through.

But the screen was back in its place. Beyond the screen, the glass was closed and locked from the inside.

For a moment, she stood looking dumbly at the window. Then, she went round to her bedroom window—

—and found the obstruction that had prevented her from opening it last night: a wedge of wood stuck firmly between the top fixed half and the bottom sliding half. Only a pair of gentle hands could have secured it there. Her throat and chest tightened. No. Do not be afraid.

She tested each window, walking slowly around the house, sweat sticking her short red-orange hair to her neck. They were all locked. All the windows and doors.

Finally, she walked up the steps to the front. Locked. She stood frozen. Her core contracted, closed in on her. She was a block of wood wedged between unmovable forces, not a little girl.

She knocked. No one could hear her. Thump, thump this time, to the rhythm of her heart. She waited, glanced right, left, back at the door. She thought suddenly with a gasp so deep it pounded in her head: the car! The new red car that sat sleek and animal-like in the driveway. She could have curled up in the back, small as a beetle, and waited until her mother drove into town to work. Unseen, Layna could have waited a few more minutes until her mother had gone inside the building. Then, she might have popped out of the trunk and slinked to her classroom and sat at her desk with its fire-engine nametag, stomach don’t you growl, armpits don’t you stink, face, oh, please don’t be dirty.

But the front door opened, toweringly full of Layna’s mother, whose clothes were freshly laundered and whose face was powdered and pretty; you almost couldn’t see the sleepless circles or the cut at the edge of her smile. She bent down and hugged Layna hard and said she was sorry about the windows but Daddy wouldn’t let her leave them open. And now, Angelface, there was breakfast on the table. Then off to the bath before school. And better be lickety-split, or they’d be late.

So, Layna went inside.

Post-MFA in Tucson, LORA RIVERA worked as a literary agent, children’s biographer, and crepe maker. Today, she develops online trainings for child welfare professionals. In her spare time, she serves as Vice President of a climbing advocacy nonprofit where she is the senior editor of Stories from the Drylands: A Southern Arizona Climbing Anthology. She’s Asian-Indian, queer, and happily partnered. Her creative work is forthcoming from Reckoning and Ink in Thirds, and has recently appeared in Gravel, The Voices Project, Speculative 66, FLAPPERHOUSE, The Chattahoochee Review, and Eastern Iowa Review.  Learn more at www.lorarivera.com

SALLY DESKINS is an artist, writer and curator. All of her work focuses on women, feminism and curating issues in art. Her artwork has been exhibited nationwide and published in Masque and Spectacle and Extract(s) among others. Her 2014 illustrated book, Intimates and Fools, with poetry by Laura Madeline Wiseman, won the Nebraska Book Award for illustration and Design. She also created art for Leaves of Absence (2016). She is founding curator of Les Femmes Folles, an organization for women in art.

‘Trees and Fingers’ by Christopher Noble Davis

The old man held my left hand, briefly, then set it palm-down on a worn piece of plastic the size and shape of a fist and a shade of blue-green associated with futurism forty years ago. Underneath the plastic fist was a metal tray.

In the man’s hand appeared a small tool with a plastic handle the same blue-green and a circular blade with tiny teeth. Holding the tool with his right hand and resting his left hand on my wrist, the man pressed the blade on the ring, hard enough to make the ring dig into my finger, and began to run the blade carefully back and forth on the narrow surface.

He worked for a minute or two. He said, The blade is dull. I am sorry.

He had a strong Polish accent and a wonderfully full head of white hair, like the actor John Marley.

An older woman—the man’s wife, I assumed—attended to a customer nearby.

He worked steadily. I thought I saw a tiny groove forming, but I may have been imagining that. He pressed harder, making my finger hurt.

I am sorry, he said. The blade is dull. I must sharpen it.

Time passed in the way that time passes when responsibility has shifted from your hands to the hands of a professional. There is a sense of loss, but also a peace and lightness that come from being temporarily relieved of options, of the need to make decisions. A tiny amount of gold dust began to form on the ring. It slid onto the tray without touching my finger. The man removed his hand from my wrist, and I missed it immediately.

I said, I saw on the internet about using dental floss, slipping it under the ring and twisting it around your finger. Your finger turns purple, but then you pull on the dental floss and the ring comes off. I saw a video. I tried it, and my finger turned purple, but the ring stayed on.

The man paused and looked up. Oh, no, he said. Your finger should not be purple.

His correctness was instantly apparent. What had seemed so logical on the internet now seemed ludicrous when confronted with the firmness of his reason.

He returned to sawing. He asked if it hurt. Although it did hurt, I told him no, recognizing that no matter what I replied, I had no options.

The blade looked very old.

The amount of dust grew, but only slightly. I could not see a groove, but it might have been obscured by the dust. The ring was very narrow.

I felt I had to speak, but did not know what to say. I heard myself say this: Thirty-five years.

He stopped working and looked up at me suspiciously. His left hand returned to my wrist. He asked, How old are you?

I told him.

No, he said. He called to his wife. How old do you think he is?

She looked away from her customer and studied me grimly. After a moment, she stated my age accurately.

No, he said, not in disagreement, but in surprise.

She said, I look at the skin, the neck.

She returned to her customer.

He continued to saw, digging the ring harder into my finger. His wife spoke to the customer, a young man in a black suit.

In one motion, the man stopped sawing, released his pressure, and removed the ring. I was not aware of the actual removal; the ring was on and then it was off.

He set the ring on a scale that I had not noticed previously. My lack of awareness of my surroundings has been a subject of good-natured kidding in my workplaces over the years. Once I inherited an office with a huge, tacky, and rather ominous poster of a lion on the wall behind me. Why do you keep that poster? a co-worker asked. I said that I didn’t like it, but didn’t notice it and didn’t want to go to the trouble of figuring out what to do with it. My co-worker pulled the poster from the wall, pulling off some paint, and carried it out of the room. At my next job, a coworker hung on my bare office walls a picture of Uncle Sam, finger extended, with the caption, I want YOU to decorate your office. But two years later, the walls were still bare, except for her sign.

The man removed the ring from the scale, wrote on a small piece of paper, punched the keys of a well-worn calculator, and said, Fifty.

I nodded, and he dropped the ring through a slot into a square metal box that I also had not noticed previously.

With my thumb, I rubbed the underside of my finger on the spot where the ring had been. On the top of my finger, I could feel the ache of where he had pressed down on the ring. I did not rub this spot, not wanting the man to know he had hurt me.

The man stood, pulled a roll of bills from his pocket, counted off two from the outer portion and one from within, and handed them to me.

I thanked him, turned, and thanked his wife.

I wanted to shake the man’s hand, but somehow we weren’t positioned correctly.

Light pushed in from the windows that surrounded us. As I turned to leave, I could feel the business of the store resuming, no longer involving me.

ROBERT FROMBERG‘s fiction has appeared in Indiana Review, Bellingham Review, Tennessee Quarterly, and other magazines, and a short book, Blue Skies, was issued by Floating Island Publications. He taught writing at Northwestern University. This story is the second written after a 20-year break. He edits a website called Imperfect Fiction.

CHRISTOPHER DAVIS is a visual artist who grew up in Oak Park, Illinois. As a Sophomore in high school, he began to paint and draw every day.  His math teacher referred to him as “Crayon Boy.” The painting “Trees and Fingers” was produced in high school. He was admitted into the Maryland Institute College of Art with the highest awards offered, including MICA’s Presidential Scholarship. While in college, he majored in painting, minored in general fine arts, and experimented with many different art disciplines. He now lives in Chicago. He states: “I have a fascination with functional art. With painting, I tend to focus on color, composition, perspective, iconic imagery, and emotion like ecstasy and joy, and fear and greed. I am obsessed with the freedom of abstract expressionism. While I was in high school, my art was very psychedelic, and throughout college I was interested in the unconscious, or what the darkness beneath the surface might be portrayed as–possibly looking like intuitive biomorphic images, faces and patterns and subliminal imagery. In 2015, I made a series of paintings that seemed blocky, like a juxtaposition of rectangular colors. This year I made a series of paintings focusing on exterior images of Frank Lloyd Wright architecture.”

Illustration by Alexandria Heather

 
Richard has told you his version of things—most of which is accurate—but believe me, what I’m going to tell you now is the key to undoing this mess. Richard, please stop. You’ve said your piece, now just let me add this one thing.

Here, do you see this bottle? I got it from Maggie, the manager of Stacy’s Natural Foods down on First Street, a friend and trusted resource for many years, so certainly I had no reason to doubt her—I mean, the capsules looked so much like those bulky multiple vitamin-mineral supplements that one would be hard-pressed to detect a visual difference in—who could have guessed the hell they would bring down on my family? Although it’s true that Maggie couldn’t vouch for them one hundred percent since they were new to the marketplace, not yet FDA approved, meaning that she had no customer testimonials with which to reassure me, and yet if you looked on the Internet, plenty of parents and doctors alike were raving about this Angeliva treatment, better known as Angel Pills, and since I was at the end of my rope, I figured what the hell. It’s worth a try.

Okay, so in retrospect yes, it does seem somewhat risky, but I assure you that I resorted to the pills only after the more orthodox parenting techniques had failed: lecturing, pleading, threatening, grounding, taking away of the car keys and the iPhone and the Internet, rearranging of her bedroom according to the principles of feng shui—all  of these exhausted before I turned to Dear Amy, that advice columnist, who apparently had no time for the likes of me, and to Jesus Christ himself, atheist although I am and have been for the past twenty years, which just goes to show you how desperate I had become, with sleep deprivation also a factor—but all of these I tried, I swear to you, before I slipped that capsule to Jenna one morning at breakfast, passing it off as a new vitamin/mineral supplement for vegans, which she and I both are in spite of Richard’s constant ragging about riboflavin and iron. Please don’t stare at me like that. I had to do something, didn’t I?

They went to work overnight, those angel pills, worked like magic, I swear to God, and oh, what a sweet change from the bitchy, secretive behavior we had been subjected to in the previous months, the surliness, the pouting, we could do not one thing right, could we Richard? And then the very next day, here she is dancing into my studio, asking me to read a story she wants to submit to the high school literary magazine—a quirky little piece about a shopping mall in an alternate universe; kid stuff, sure, but clever enough, and grammatically perfect, as far as I could tell.

Not that it matters much, the writing—although I admit she’s not bad at it; she inherited some of my genes, so naturally she’ll be pulled in a creative direction now and then, but science is really her thing: chemistry, biology, all the classes I struggled with in high school she aces, no problem, so it’s only natural she plans to be a doctor, like Rickard here—and she’s on track, too. Or at least she was, until this recent shit-storm hit, right on track for acceptance at both Stanford and Cal Poly, her top choices,  no easy feat for kids these days, with all the demands placed on them by the universities, as if the hormones and social pressure alone aren’t enough to keep them—and us—constantly on the brink of madness. But it all came easy for our Jenna: the A plus average, the extra-curriculars, the honors and awards, and what a great group of friends, too—nice kids from good homes, just like her: motivated, responsible and well behaved. We thought we’d won the kid lottery, didn’t we, Richard?

So looking back, all was well until the new semester began, kids got shuffled into different classes, and Jenna became lab partners with Cody Hall, this kid we had never heard of until she started complaining about having to do more than her share of the chemistry projects, and he certainly was never a part of her social group, but next thing you know the phone rings at half past three on a school night and it’s the local police—maybe it was one of you two, I don’t remember—letting us know they’ve found Jenna and Cody parked out by the lake with a six-pack.  Richard drove out to retrieve her, assuring me that kids do this stuff, it’s not such a big deal, we’ll just give the lecture about household rules and expectations and ground her for a week, he said. Jenna claimed to be “freaked out” by the whole police thing, said she didn’t know what she could’ve been thinking. It would most definitely not happen again.

Next night I was up until long after midnight overworking a painting for the upcoming local arts festival—a stressful enough time for me even without Jenna’s bullshit—when suddenly I was struck by a gut-wrenching attack of mother’s intuition, so I rushed to Jenna’s room and sure enough, the bed was empty and the window thrown open, no concern for the utility bill or the safety of the rest of us. She didn’t get home until around 4:00 a.m.—I’m pretty sure there was weed involved this time—and after another lecture, this one actually more of a shoutfest, Jenna shrugged and said, “Okay, you win. You’re right. Whatever.”  When she went wandering again the next night, Richard bolted her windows shut, but as we soon learned, that’s nothing a love-struck boyfriend with a screwdriver can’t fix.

This went on for about a month, with Jenna coming in at all hours under the influence of God knows what, along with recorded phone messages from the school reporting that she was skipping classes here and there, and one call from her Advanced Chemistry teacher concerned about the dive in Jenna’s grade, with Jenna hoping to get into Stanford and all. Who could blame me for turning to Maggie and the Angel Pills?

So when Jenna allowed—no, she actually asked me to read her little sci-fi shopping mall story, I was thrilled to see such results from only one pill, but the next day was even better: a red-eyed Jenna came home with the news that she had broken up with Cody, said it was for the best; he was wrong for her, too wild, so she’d decided to focus on schoolwork and hang out with her real friends, and she hoped to win back her father’s and my trust. We crossed our fingers and dared to hope.

Two days later, I was collecting moldy Dr. Pepper cans and other trash from Jenna’s room when I found the Bible. Yep. Oh, I was startled, sure, but then I thought okay, this could be a good thing, even though we’re not churchgoers, Richard and I, because I sometimes worry that maybe we should’ve given Jenna a little more exposure to religion so that she could draw her own conclusions from more than an occasional Christmas pageant. So let her explore, I thought. No harm there.

At dinner one night, almost two weeks exactly after she took that first pill, she mentioned that “by the way” she had joined the First Baptist Church over on East Avenue after accepting Jesus as her personal savior, sending chills through my agnostic heart, I must confess—no offense, if either one of you is religious.

And when she said she probably wouldn’t be going to Stanford or Cal Poly after all, that she was researching a bible college in Texas where she could prepare to serve the Lord as a minister, I knew I had to get her off those damn pills. I didn’t know, I swear to God—oh, I guess there must’ve been a warning somewhere in all that paper that came with the bottle, but nobody reads that stuff, right? I didn’t know, until I spoke with Maggie just a few minutes ago, that you can’t just stop the pills cold turkey; you need to be weaned off, or there can be certain side effects. So as soon as Jenna left the table I stupidly jumped right up and fed the half bottle of remaining pills to the garbage disposal.

Richard has already told you the rest: this morning Jenna was gone, leaving this little note that basically says don’t bother to look, and  Richard suspects she’s run off with Cody. Yes, of course we’ve called his house, but nobody’s picking up, which is par for the course over there.

Richard thinks the sudden withdrawal from the pills has messed with Jenna’s brain chemistry, causing her to revert to the old self-destructive behavior, but on that we disagree. Stop trying to shush me, Richard. They need this information.

What I think is that the side effects caused by the withdrawal might be taking another form. Look right over there, by her bedroom door. Do you see them?  Richard will tell you they’re from the old down comforter that she dragged around as a baby, and that she must’ve rescued it from the attic to take with her on this latest adventure, dropping feathers along the way. But I’m pretty sure I threw away what was left of that rag years ago. I know I did.

And I’ll tell you another thing I’m certain of: those pills were definitely affecting Jenna, and in a good way at first. There were a couple of nights, right after her break-up with Cody, when I awoke in a near-panic and rushed into her room, but each time, I found her smiling in her sleep, so sweet and peaceful, her hair and skin glowing in the moonlight, hands folded under her chin, looking as if she were ready for the “Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep” thing we used to do when she was a little girl.

Oh, I saw that look you just gave each other, but I didn’t imagine any of this, I tell you. Somehow those pills made Jenna want to be good. She was maybe a little confused about what “good” really means, that’s all. And the dosage was probably just a tad too high, which would explain the feathers.

And as you can probably tell by his sour face and the way he keeps trying to cut me off, Richard holds me responsible, points out that I haven’t slept more than a few hours in a row for several months now, and wants to convince me I’m losing it, which just dumps more stress on me and isn’t the least bit productive, in my opinion. I think our only hope is to get Jenna back home and on the pills again, at a reduced dosage of say, half a pill a day, or one every other day; I’ll have to do some research, talk to Maggie. The important thing here—and on this I think we can all agree, even Richard—is that we get our girl home and back on track before the college application deadline.

I see from your faces that you blame me for this mess, maybe because you’re too young to have teenage children of your own. Just wait until you’re on the receiving end of one of those three a.m. phone calls. But please don’t let your judgmental attitudes stop you from doing your job. You are the police, after all, judging by your badges and your guns. It’s your duty to find my daughter and bring her home.

PEGGY SCHIMMELMAN is a writer and poet from Livermore, CA. She is the author of Whippoorwills, a novel, and her short stories and poems can be seen in the Comstock Review, Pacific review, Aleola, 100wordstories.org and others. Her poetry chapbook, Crazytown, is undergoing publication. When not writing, she reads and plays around with percussion.

ALEXANDRIA HEATHER is mostly water.

Illustration by Ashwin Pandya

and all around him, blue points of flame pop up into the air like the tips of pencils, like

the engines of rockets aimed for the earth, but Bobby waits, holding his newly burning

match, still believing that what everyone else has done will somehow be harder for him,

worried that he will be the only one who can’t. His lab partner, Reid, grinning past a

street-broken tooth, lowers the large rock back onto the desktop, concealing again the

dirty message he’d scrawled in marker during some earlier class, tipped up to reveal

proudly now, in secret. The rocks were set around the room to demonstrate the different

kinds — sediment, volcanic, something else — not for graffiti. Bobby wishes the craggy

note at least made sense, that he could take part in the joke, the secret, but he doesn’t

understand. Masturbation Rocks. There had been classes about that last spring, an

entire summer ago, but for all he’s tried to forget since or had only pretended to

understand in the first place, he’s sure that rocks have nothing to do with it. His uncle

had made a joke once about monkeys in the zoo, laughing alone, but they were at least

monkeys, not rocks. Feeling the flame moving down toward his fingertips, Bobby rotates

the metal handle on the counter to point forward and reaches the flame of the match out

toward the top of the rifle-like cylinder, waiting for his too to turn blue, and then maybe

MATTHEW BRENNAN is a writer, editor, translator, and blogger from the Pacific northwest. His work has received several awards and fellowships, and more than 70 of his short fictions and poetry translations have been published in journals, including The Citron Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, Emerge Literary Journal, The Los Angeles Review, and Superstition Review. He earned his MFA in fiction at Arizona State University. Website: http://matthewbrennan.net. Twitter: @MatthewBrennan7 

ASHWIN PANDYA is a sketch-artist and illustrator, whose work has graced many book-covers. Acknowledged for his digital art as well as musical compositions, Ashwin Pandya can sketch given any situation, description or character. You can visit his website here.

Illustration by Ashwin Pandya

There’s a monster in the lake behind our house. Emma and I saw it. Well, we didn’t technically “see” it. We heard a deep growl coming from down there and there was this big dark shadow over the middle of the water. “Look Julie,” Emma cried. “It’s Lassie!”

Dad doesn’t want us going out on the lake when he isn’t watching us. I think he’s afraid Lassie will get us. He doesn’t want to lose any more girls to monsters. We already lost Mom to some monster named Brandon. I never even saw it happen. Emma and I were in school, but I heard my father on the phone with him once. He said, “No person with a heart could possibly steal a woman away from her husband and children.” Every person has a heart, so Brandon has to be a monster.

We only go to the lake on Saturdays or Sundays. That’s when Dad has the time to take us. He’s always busy in his office on weeknights and he says we have to focus on homework then. On school nights, Emma and I sit at the window, staring out at the lake. Lassie comes out when the sun starts to set. He prefers nights and shady days. I asked Dad why that was. “He probably has sensitive skin,” he answered. Emma wanted to throw a bottle of sunscreen in the water for him. I told her no, that it’s safer for us to swim during the day if he’s afraid of the sun.

Loch Ness Monsters also like pickles. I think I learned that during Monster Week on the Discovery Channel. When we go swimming, we sneak pickles from the fridge and sink them in the lake so Lassie isn’t hungry for us. You should never swim without at least three pickles. That is just enough to make us look too large for his stomach to handle. No one misses the pickles. Emma and I hate them and Dad only ever bought them for Mom. Why he never stopped, I don’t know.

The monster came for Mom almost a year ago. I never saw him, but I sometimes hear Dad talking about him on the phone. Brandon’s a hairy giant. He took Mom all the way across the country to a place in the mountains in California. Giants like mountains because they’re both tall. Dad says Brandon is bad, like Lassie, but sometimes he lets Mom send us things in the mail. She says she is happy but she misses us and maybe someday she’ll bring us out there to see her. Emma says she can’t wait. I don’t think it’ll happen though. I think Brandon sends those things to make us believe everything is fine. How could she be happy living with a monster?

I can’t blame Dad for losing Mom. I don’t think he really believed monsters were real before Brandon came along. He wasn’t equipped with the knowledge of monsters’ behaviors and how to keep them away.

After we lost Mom, I started reading books from the school library about all of the different monsters. Our house is surrounded by tree lines, which for all I know, hide all of the worst kinds of monsters in the darkness at night. I recruited Emma to monster-proof the house. I sprinkled garlic powder all over the carpets in the house to keep the vampires away. I read that giants like beans, so Emma started sneaking her green beans from dinner into her pockets and we put them in the yard. The beans would distract the giants and they would forget that they had come to take us away.

I don’t want to lose Emma to another Brandon. Dad played a song once about a Purple People Eater and I didn’t know what to do about that one until he explained that that monster only eats people who are purple. None of us are purple but one night, just to be safe, I gathered all of the purple clothes in the house and threw them away.

I never found anything to defend against lake monsters though. I once tried to lure Lassie out into the sunlight with a pickle on a string, hoping the rays would burn him up into dust, like vampires in the morning. Emma sat excitedly by my side. Dad asked what we were doing with a pickle and Emma responded, “Fishing for monsters!” He sighed and went back to reading his book. Lassie did not appear. There wasn’t even a ripple in the water. We threw the pickle in and went back up to the house with Dad.

Every attempt made to trap Lassie failed. We could not catch a lake monster. The water was dark below the surface. Even our own bodies disappeared in the lake when we swam. I never made it very deep either, but the water seems to go on forever. It’s impossible to know where Lassie is below the surface. Not even Mystery Inc. could solve the mystery of the Loch Ness Monster in their movie, and they could solve any mystery. Every day he remained was another day we were all at risk.

When it seemed like we would never figure out how to stop Lassie, I asked Mom. I wrote a letter hoping that Brandon would know something, that maybe monsters knew secrets about other monsters. Dad didn’t like us sending things back to Mom when we got stuff from her, so I kept it a secret from him, and from Emma. I found her address on an envelope in Dad’s study while he was busy making dinner. I took a new envelope and copied it on there. The tricky part was getting it to the mailbox without Dad seeing. Every morning he looks through the mail that he is going to send before taking it outside. I just had to slip it in the middle after he checked through them. When he went to the bathroom, I tucked it right in. Emma watched, giving me a questioning look and I just smiled back, letting her know it was our secret.

Things are looking up. I have recruited the help of another monster who seems less dangerous than the one we’re currently dealing with. Since it’s Saturday, Emma and I get ready to go back down to the lake with Dad. I pack my bag with a whole jar of pickles, ready to throw some in the water before jumping in myself. Emma packs her inflatable ring. Dad walks us down the hill, book in hand, and sits himself in the grass while we head straight for the water. We throw our pickles in and follow shortly after them.

The lake feels cold at first, but I warm up as time passes. The sky was cloudy in the morning and the warmth of the sun hasn’t reached below the lake’s surface. The phone starts ringing faintly from the house. Usually Dad ignores it while we are playing in the water. When the ringing ends, it picks back up again and he lets it ring. The third time, Dad gets up. “I’ll be back in a minute,” he says, “Be careful.” Emma and I stay in the water. It’s the first time we’re in the lake and he isn’t right there with us. Emma is excited and starts splashing me harder with water. I return fire and it becomes a full-blown water battle.

Suddenly, Emma starts sinking a little. Her tube is deflating rapidly. Lassie. He has her. He went for her greatest weakness first, the only thing keeping her afloat. As he pulls at her feet, she starts going under water and popping back up, fighting back. She screams for me and I jump out of the water. Running to my bag, I grab the pickles. Opening the jar is difficult. My hands are slimy and pruned from the dirty water. They keep slipping on the cold metal lid. I get the lid loose and throw the whole jar in the water. Lassie doesn’t give up when the pickles hit.

Emma is still going under, disappearing longer each time. Protecting Emma from the monsters was my only job. I yell for Dad. He yells back, “Your mom’s on the phone. What did you send…” He stops when he looks down at Emma struggling in the water. He drops the phone, stumbling back down the hill.

Emma’s head comes up for another breath just as Dad dives into the lake after her. She goes back under into the darkness. I think it’s the end. Lassie will get them both. Seconds feel like minutes while I kneel at the edge of the water waiting. Dad comes bursting out of the water, holding Emma. She’s coughing and rubbing at her eyes. Dirt covers her face. He sets her down on the grass, whispering to her. I stay where I am, confused. Why did Lassie let them go? Mom must have told Dad the secret over the phone just before he came down the hill. I stare out at the water and watch as the flattened plastic of Emma’s tube drifts further and further across the lake.

BECCA BLAUCH, 23, lives in her hometown of Pittsburgh, PA. She earned her BFA at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College in 2015. She is currently completing her MFA at Chatham University. She has served at the nonfiction editor of Behrend’s Lake Effect for two years. Inklette will be her first publication.

ASHWIN PANDYA is a sketch-artist and illustrator, whose work has graced many book-covers. Acknowledged for his digital art as well as musical compositions, Ashwin Pandya can sketch given any situation, description or character. You can visit his website here.