WILL NEUENFELDT

She Has Notifications Silenced

One purple crescent
sent into sky
where my blue cloud
wafts above, alone,
aware it’s been seen
yet lingers to be heard.
Rain clicks from fingers
before droplets dry
to admire characters
we typed across night
and the stories they
tell twinkle white.
Through the window
drafts of our last chat
whisper in stereo
and lull me to dream
to awake in overcast.
I reply with more
blue into the heavens
so another afternoon
of bubbly clouds scroll by.

Will Neuenfeldt studied English at Gustavus Adolphus College, and his poems are published in Capsule Stories, Months to Years, and Red Flag Poetry. He currently lives in Cottage Grove, MN. IG: @wjnpoem

ELIZA HAYSE

To Know Everything (on the Camino de Santiago): A Story of Connection

Outside the chapel of lost souls, we eat overripe nectarines, bruised from our bags. Two days prior you mocked me for buying them, telling me they would go bad quickly, that I should opt for a sturdier fruit. I’d ignored you, and now we hold the bruised fruit in our hands as we sit on exposed stone, the sun pounding on our shoulders. I peel away some of the skin with my teeth and the juice, which had been longing to burst, collects on my lips, dribbling down my chin. You use your fingers to split the fruit open at the suture, nectar spilling from your fingers.

“See? They’re nearly rotten.” You take a bite, and I watch your jaw move.

“They’re sweeter this way.” You look at me and grin, and I don’t meet your eyes but I can feel them. We sit quietly, the stone wall cool, the chapel shadow leaning left in front of us. We eat around the dark bruises in the white flesh. You take the pit out of your nectarine and place it between us, like an offering to the God we mock.

“What makes a soul ‘lost?’” I break the silence, and the words sink in the humidity. I can feel them settle on the lobes of my ears, on my hairline, on my shoulder blades.

You laugh, but it catches in your chest. “A soul that is here.” This time, I look at you. Your nose and cheeks are burnt, and your curls are flattened from sweat. I pick up the pit you placed on the stone. It is cracked, so I split it open with my thumbnail and reveal the seed inside.

“You know the seeds of stone fruit like this contain cyanide?”

“Why do you know that?”

“I know everything, remember?” I place the open pit down, the seed revealed. Next to me, you tear off a piece of bread and hand it to me.

"Then you tell me, what makes a soul lost?" You gaze ahead and tear another piece of bread off, this time for yourself.

"Then you tell me, what makes a soul lost?" You gaze ahead and tear another piece of bread off, this time for yourself. The way you speak is stilted, not because you are uncomfortable but because English is still unfamiliar, and so your tongue is too heavy in your mouth and on the back of your teeth. I want you to meet my gaze, but when you glance at me, my eyes find the sky and I squint. I take a few minutes to respond, my jaw feels stiff and marionette-like.

“I don’t think anyone can know that until they are being prayed for.” This response seems to be satisfactory to you, and the smile on your face is almost too soft to see, but I know it well.

“I think maybe we are lost souls.”

“Yeah, that part is obvious.” I rest my hand on the bench next to me, centimeters from yours, calculating the space like I am considering a math problem. My brow is furrowed. Both of us gaze straight ahead at the long grass; the chapel doors closed, the steel gates rusted. I wonder what it is like inside, and I wonder if you wonder that too.

When we met, I liked the way your shoulders moved when you walked. You seemed so at ease like the air was cradling you. You smiled like you had a secret, and I liked that too. The first thing you told me was that I seemed scared. I don’t think you knew how much that was true. You were rolling a cigarette so gently, looking at me sideways. Your t-shirt was dirty and hung on your frame like ivy on wet stone. I was leaning against the wall, looking past you, through you, not even remembering your name. My hands were shaking, I think. They always do.

Outside the chapel, I was thinking about how much cooler it had been then. Now my body is damp, sweat and sunscreen making me sticky. My hand, still so close to yours. If I was to move it just a little bit, would you notice? You reach for the pit, peeling the almond-like seed away and holding it up to the sky. We both look up, noticing the way the sun’s rays make it almost translucent.

Earlier that day, I'd spun in circles in the middle of the road, the early morning light catching on my eyelashes, my freckled arms outstretched. You stood there, unmoving, a portrait that would flash before my eyes with every turn. At one turn, I let myself catch a glimpse of your face. I think your expression was too much to bear. I squeezed my eyes shut as I turned faster, thinking that if I scrambled the fluid in my ears enough maybe I could learn how to make my bones hollow like a bird’s. When I finally stopped, I thought that I would stumble. Instead, I walked straight ahead, focusing on the way my boots struck the asphalt.

“How many seeds would it take to kill a man?” You ask me, setting the seed down, placing your left hand back on the stone, even closer to mine.

“I think, like, 12, maybe?” I respond.

“Perfect. Maybe that’s how I’ll join the 27 club.” You reference the conversation we’ve been having about the artists who created beautifully only to die young. We both idolized them, their inability to weave any peace into their pain; their deaths, so tragic and complete. I swallow and my throat feels tight.

“It would be quite a romantic way to go, I think.” You look at me, and I close my eyes so I can picture the smile on your face without looking at you. When I open them, I meet your eyes and try not to smile back. The effort makes my cheeks hurt. “It only gives you two years to make something beautiful, though.” I am joking, mostly.

“I only need one.”

The day we bought the nectarines, you told me that my eyes unsettled you. “They’re too clear.” I laughed and told you how many people had said the same. I liked making you feel like you weren’t special. You asked me if I thought they skewed the image of the world: "Maybe they make everything too bright to bear." Nobody had mentioned that before, and I didn’t say so, but I knew you were probably right.

We’d finished our bread and our fruit and so we sit, quietly, watching the birds perched on the roof of the chapel. The sun makes the tall grass smell saccharine. I can feel the part of my scalp exposed by the part in my hair burning but I don’t mind. The heat coming off of our bodies mixes in the little space there is between us, and the slight breeze blows it away. The air feels so heavy, but maybe it’s just me. Maybe I am feeling things that aren’t there.

A few days later I would walk away from you. It would be easy, my feet carrying me quickly and softly. In my head, I would turn over these moments again and again as the space between us increased. Your arms that always moved with intention, the lines around your eyes that made me feel so much younger than you, the life-is-easy-for-me smile that I knew had gotten you through so many awkward moments. The ocean, the sand stuck beneath my fingernails, brutal truths almost as bitter as the coffee we drank together. But most of all, the moment I am in now: outside of the chapel of lost souls, where I said a quick prayer, hoping we would meet there again someday. And two pinkie fingers, finally pressed against one another, a tiny declaration of something we both knew but could not understand.

Eliza Hayse is a 22-year-old studying her master's in botany. She likes strong coffee and her dog, Sage. Twitter: @elizahayse

WENDY K. MAGES

Redheaded Angel

Afraid and hyper-focused, I’m riding shotgun, staring straight ahead. Phone in hand, I hesitate to text my sister an update.
We’re in the ambulance now. Send.
My 93-year-old mom is moaning and whimpering as the paramedics try to comfort her. With each sound she makes a dagger pierces my heart. I hear myself saying, “It’ll be okay, Mom. It’ll be okay.” Tears well in my eyes; I wonder if I’m lying.
The siren wails, lights flashing we ride through the streets, but there’s traffic. The cars around us don’t (or won’t) pull over to let us pass. It takes an eternity to go even a few blocks.
Arriving @ hospital. Send.
Finally! Send.
I’m walking beside the gurney as the paramedics roll her down the hospital corridors. My mom’s child-sized hand is holding tightly onto mine. We’re taken to a small glassed-in room. Once they have transferred my mom onto the examining table, the paramedics leave and the hospital staff takes over.
We’re in a room in the ER. Send.
Doctors ask a barrage of questions and I am trying to answer when someone in scrubs with a syringe says, “This will help the pain.” I see my mom flinch, but her moaning stops almost instantly. I take a deep breath, relieved she’s no longer suffering. Suddenly, we’re all alone. The doctors seem to have vanished, perhaps called away to attend to a more urgent case. The room is unnervingly quiet, save for the incessant rhythm of beeping monitors.
“Who’s the lady?”
“What lady, Mom?”
“The one in the window.”
“Mom, there’s no lady in the window.”
My mom came in with abdominal pain and now she’s talking crazy talk. Waves of panic cascade through my body.
“My mom may be 93 but she doesn’t hallucinate,” I explain to anyone who will listen. No one seems to believe me.
“You said she had a stroke in March?” a nurse oozes dulcet condescension, treacle meant to remind me that my mother’s brain is not what it once was.
“Yes, but she doesn’t hallucinate. This just started.”
"Mmhmm," she nods, placating what she clearly believes are my "delusions" and my inability to acknowledge my mother’s cognitive impairment. Yet, I’m more than keenly aware of the impact of her stroke, the skills that were impaired, and those that were left intact. Before we arrived in the ER my mother did not hallucinate. Her perception of reality has drastically changed in the short time since we arrived, and I’m concerned she’s having another stroke. I poke my head out of the room, but no one will talk to me. I’m told to be patient. So, reluctantly, I return to the chair in my mom’s glassed-in fishbowl.
A sweet redheaded boy appears in the doorway wearing a white coat. “Hi, I’m Danny,” he says, using his first name. I smile and nod. He begins to check on my mom.
My finger moves across my phone.
Doogie Howser just walked in…. Looks about 12. Send.
I stare at the message. It says:
Doofus Howser just walked in….
In my hyper-focused, hyper-vigilant state, this antithetical autocorrect strikes me as hilariously funny. Like a volcano, tremors begin to quake deep inside. I try to suppress this eruption, but I am no longer in my body. I am high above the scene watching the madwoman sitting in my chair convulse into hysterical laughter. I’m appalled!
I look at poor Doogie. I can’t think of a single sane thing to say. I hear myself mumbling something about autocorrect, but Doogie’s not judging. His voice—knowledgeable, kind, and comforting—emanates calmly from the visual epitome of a young choirboy or a redheaded angel all in white. His youthful appearance belies the depth of his expertise.
Danny explains medical procedures like an old pro, but he’s different: he’s listening. When I describe the sudden onset of my mom’s hallucinations, he believes me.
“Don’t worry. It’s the morphine talking.” Danny’s deceptively naïve countenance all but conceals his true wisdom. Unlike the others, he doesn’t discount what I tell him, enabling him to quickly quell my concerns as he shares the etiology of Mom’s hallucinations.
“Oh, okay. It’s just the morphine.”
I’m so relieved! I feel my body relax into the chair as he talks with my mom, quietly explaining to her all the things the doctors are trying to do to help her, all the things the other doctors never bothered to mention.
Love Doogie! Send.

Wendy K. Mages, a Professor at Mercy College, is a storyteller, researcher, and educator who performs her original stories at storytelling events and festivals in the US and abroad. website: https://www.mercy.edu/directory/wendy-mages

LINDAANN LOSCHIAVO

Boardwalk Soda Fountain Shop

My bare feet warmed to burning from the sand,
I’d wave to you, obscured by boardwalk crowds.

Did you greet everyone the same as me?

I watched as you’d extend a palm beneath
A ripe banana, tenderly, as if
To ask permission. Or you’d let me tuck
Wildflowers into cleavage held aloft,
Slick, sweaty, suntan oiled, flecked with sand crumbs.

You like it dirty — even though your hands
Are spotless when you mix strawberry shakes.

You’re wondering how sugar hits my lips,
Eye my reflection showing that pale crack,
Tanned flesh that’s poured inside blue fitted jeans.

Now you’re hunched over the cracked countertop,
Sweeping a butterknife across burnt toast.
“I’m just so hungry. I’ll eat anything!”

Your words and steady gaze have made me blush.
I drop five dollars in your jar and leave
Without my shake because I’m staying here
Two more weeks and imagining how we
Will taste right after, mixed in with the dark.

LindaAnn LoSchiavo: Native New Yorker LindaAnn LoSchiavo, a four time nominee for The Pushcart Prize, has also been nominated for Best of the Net, the Rhysling Award, and Dwarf Stars. Elgin Award winner, "A Route Obscure and Lonely," "Women Who Were Warned,” Firecracker Award, Quill and Ink, and IPPY Award nominee. Messengers of the Macabre [co-written with David Davies], Apprenticed to the Night [Beacon Books, 2023], and Felones de Se: Poems about Suicide [Ukiyoto Publishing, 2023] are her latest poetry titles. In 2023, her poetry placed as a finalist in Thirty West Publishing's "Fresh Start Contest" and in the 8th annual Stephen DiBiase contest.

LindaAnn Literary: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHm1NZIlTZybLTFA44wwdfg https://messengersofthemacabre.com/

socials: @Mae_Westside

ZACH BENAK

Scene(s) from a Chain Restaurant in Papillion, Nebraska

On a Wednesday night in July of 2014, I washed my hands after a final sweep of the concession stand, patting them dry on my cargo shorts. I clocked out at 8:30 on the dot and walked out the front entrance, listening to the lifeguards hose down the bathhouses as I twirled my car key lanyard around my fingers. Once I reached my 2001 Ford Taurus, I ignited the squeaky engine and rolled down the windows, letting out the stiff, hot air that’d accumulated through my nine-hour shift. I texted my mom a reminder that I’d be home late and drove through Halleck Park, speeding by the baseball fields to catch a breeze. I turned north on 84th Street, whipping through downtown and past the light pole banners that read One of America’s Best Places to Live!

When I reached my destination, slivers of sun were still lingering over Tara Hills Golf Course. I walked in and looked around the restaurant, seeing where my friends had been seated for the night. I slinked into the booth, letting its cool touch kiss my back through my canary yellow work t-shirt, basking in the air conditioning while I waited for a Mountain Dew. I looked toward the bar to see if I recognized the current karaoke performer, then scoped out the rest of the venue, searching for co-workers who had the same plans as me, or friends who came with a different group, or acquaintances from the area Catholic schools that I should say hello to later in the evening. The front entrance slowly crowded with people who’d come too late to secure a table. The environment smelled like fried food and sounded like an off-key Maroon 5 performance. I was officially in my element, talking shit with friends and topping off a long day in the sun with a greasy meal, seated at the center of Papillion’s social hub.

This Wednesday night in July of 2014 was not specific, not dissimilar to a Wednesday night in June of the summer before, or August of the summer after. Details from this night are interchangeable, as this was a regimen as typical as a morning commute. I don’t remember which friends were in my booth. (It was probably Sam, Megan, and Libby, or could have been Ambi and Alaina.) I ate some combination of queso blanco, boneless chicken wings, mozzarella sticks, or cheeseburger sliders. (The wonton tacos were phased out of my rotation because they tasted like nail polish on one occasion.) The karaoke DJ was either the one who liked me or the one who didn’t. (One praised my performance of “Just a Friend” by Biz Markie; the other said I ruined “Africa” by Toto forever.)

Many factors informed this practice: the novelty of karaoke initially attracted us; the proximity to home made it easy; and the half-priced appetizers kept us coming back. We ate with the world’s fastest metabolisms and least-refined palates. Week after week, we watched an older man in a cowboy hat belt Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York,” cheered on by his much younger girlfriend sitting at the bar. The perennially pregnant server never charged us for soft drinks, and we’d tip the bill in return, still spending no more than $14 from our summer job paychecks.

We observed but didn’t address the politics that can only play out when dozens of teenagers in a small town are crammed into one restaurant. Existing cliques would publicly crumble, a preview of drama to come when we went back to school in the fall. Classmates we hadn’t seen all summer showed up startlingly thin, sipping Diet Pepsi and making us quietly wonder what was going on. We’d actively avoid rivals and exes and friends-turned-foes seated two tables over. I’d balance my feelings when openly flirting with the girl I’d pined after my entire junior year, while secretly hoping the hot male lifeguard I worked with would show up and notice me, catching adrenaline as I negotiated who I was in public with what I longed for in private.

When the karaoke DJ packed up around 11pm, and wait staff started doling out tickets with promises of “no rush,” and conversations got deeper as the restaurant got emptier, an air of melancholy quietly permeated, though I’m not sure everyone felt it. Maybe it was just me, unable to live in the moment, already looking ahead to the next Wednesday in July, which would soon become August, which would bring summer to a close, which would constrain Wednesday nights with homework and college applications and practices and rehearsals, and things would change, something I struggled with then but excel at now, far away from my hometown, away from the people and social dynamics that shaped me.

Kicked out of the restaurant after midnight, we finished our conversations and shared final burning desires in the parking lot. I drove across 84th Street, past the high school and into my neighborhood, replaying moments from the night or second-guessing something I shouldn’t have said. I got home and found my dad asleep in the recliner and my mom in bed upstairs, a distance I didn’t think much of at the time. I threw my work shirt in the laundry hamper and retrieved a fresh one from my dresser to lay out for the next day.

The caffeine from the soda had no effect as I stuck my phone on the charger and laid my head on the pillow, completing a routine that I look back on and think maybe every young person needs a ritual as simple and certain, and innocent as this one.

Zach Benak lives in Ravenswood, Chicago. His nonfiction appears in GASHER, Thirteen Bridges Literary Review, 45th Parallel, and Sweeter Voices Still: An LGBTQ Anthology from Middle America (Belt Publishing 2021).

RUBY MARGUERITE

The Ritual of Killing the Crab

I buy a crab-stuffed pretzel after therapy. A treat after an hour of crying. I don’t know the name of the man who runs the pretzel store, but he remembers everything about me. He asks how the job hunt is going. I give him a noncommittal answer. This was the question I was fearing, a reminder of failure. But he doesn’t know that, he wants only to make idle conversation while the pretzels cook, rolling slowly through the oven on their metal racks.

In my room, I tear open the cavity that he’s filled with crab. I dig into it with the other bready limbs I’ve ripped off in an animalistic haze, scooping out the crab dip methodically. My ancestors ate food like this. Tearing bread, fruit, meat, open. This is the ritual, sitting in my two-bedroom apartment, fighting off the apex predator—my cat—who wants to taste the seafood. Eventually, I submit and give her a piece, and in this way too, we are both connected to our ancestors. The ritual of sharing the spoils of the hunt.

I am the creature form of ancient souls. I can taste the bloodshed of loss, victory, and food. This is a gift, to be handed a crab dip pretzel in exchange for four pieces of green paper. It is a gift to make conversation with the man who crafts it.

Yet we are both so removed from our food, from our conversation.

I wish to cut into something. I wish to crush the crab with a heavy stone as it scuttles sideways away from me. To feel the grit and shards and juice and blood. To taste the stone and sinew.

***

Growing up, my family was vegan. I never found it strange when I was small. I never knew the taste of meat, dairy, egg. I’ve heard you can’t miss what you’ve never had.

Yet still, I loved watching my mother prepare a pomegranate. She would plunge it into our mottled stone bowl—the one with the cracks—filled with water. I watched as bubbles rose from the submerged fruit, spilling out in columns. She tore the thing apart with her fingers, familiar and soft to me, and the cracking red skin echoed in our chipped kitchen.

When she’d finished, she’d fill little teacups with seeds so red I would’ve thought she named them after me. And I would take the little cups and methodically pick out one seed at a time. Tearing the juicy flesh off the hard white bone with my front teeth. Seeing myself a wolf, deep in the woods up the mountain where they used to live, finally, finally eating after a long hunt.

And lastly, I would crush the pomegranate bone between my molars. Savoring the feel of the shatter. Praising the animal inside me.

Ruby Marguerite is, and always has been, a lover of stories. She is a poet and nonfiction writer whose work focuses on family, heritage, and the meaning of being human.

SANDRA KOLANKIEWICZ

She Wolfs

In my sister’s current job, she pours her
love down the drain. She asks questions, is told
lies, smiles back. She regularly distributes
to the unappreciative who just
expect, kinder than I who think at least
thank you is due. In foreign countries, she
buys cans of tuna to feed the stray cats,
though the women bang their pot lids at her.
She waves to them, smiles even in her sleep,
never learned to cook, lost her hair in
menopause, uses a cane for mushroom
hunting even when on wet days the tip
sinks in with the weight of her limp till she’s
bound to fall on the soft ground, lying in
wet leaves and giggling like a girl. We had
the same parents, but she favors neither,
someone’s crazy aunt, the one that’s really
adopted. Hand me a jar of that stuff
you’re always eating, I say, which she does,
right away. To me it tastes bad. She wolfs.

Sandra Kolankiewicz is the author of Even the Cracks, Turning Inside Out, Lost in Transitions, and The Way You Will Go.

LILLIAN LIPPOLD

Oxnard

- A hybrid-genre contemplation about returning to one's hometown

I’m sitting on an abandoned play structure in Oxnard. Nothing is difficult when we are together, so here, things look strange. We haven’t been like this in a while. I’m obsessed with taking pictures on disposable film. You’ve got a new cell phone. There’s a car in the parking lot, fifteen feet from me, but I’m not expecting trouble because that isn’t you, Oxnard, is it? The view from here is astounding. I’ve got chills. The Ventura city lights on the mountain are pretty gorgeous now that I look at them.

I swear I’m with you though, Oxnard, my vantage point, growing up, falling down, metaphor. It has been difficult getting by without your emptiness to companion me.

This is the set for enough horror movies, me and the car and the undeveloped camera to protect me, so I face the parking lot, never avoiding the fact that I could be killed if someone tried. I’m hoping the New Year will be kind enough for me to survive it, but then again, I haven’t been sleeping, so how good has it been really? You tell me I look for omens far too often, and I do.

The car has a headlight out, and I’m raising my eyes to check on it every few seconds while listening to the same song again about a river I’ve never seen. No US state looks the same as the next of them. Would someone know to look for me if I left right now for Alabama, told no one, just caught a Greyhound with the 200 dollars I’ve got and no phone charger? There’s a couple, emerging from the car watching me, who’s had some deep conversation. Obviously, it’s not the first because during that, their right headlight went out.

My coffee’s getting colder, and my dad only eats meat and blueberries these days. Oxnard. Sour blueberries, a taste like the lake water from the little pond in the house where I grew up second. I’m getting better at fueling my body, not good enough, but this city-town is beautiful, beautiful and distracting. I’m trying to be more in the where that I am in. No one knows truly how much I love being in associated place, my body in my body in my shoes.

Anyway, Ventura is beautiful, and Oxnard is probably much more than a metaphor if I ever took the time to know it correctly or learn to drive. The drought-resistant trees are still green despite the desert, and I find myself surprised that so many people own raincoats here. It is uncharacteristically cold for the season.

My hands are freezing. The people in the car have climbed together into the backseat. I just felt a patch of warm in the air, drifting through me, but I’m not sure where it’s come from. They’re having sex, that couple in their car with the missing headlight. I know what car sex looks like. The last time someone fucked me in a car, she parked outside the fire-station-turned-speakeasy across two streets from my too-crowded, wealth-infested college dorm, and I fingered her below me until 3 in the morning. I’m nearly positive she faked it. She must’ve been at least a foot too tall for the backseat. Then, when we found ourselves watching Rent in her New Jersey basement bedroom weeks later, she didn’t want it anymore.

Oxnard, the queers have a problem accepting lovers when they’re easy, when you’re not ducking down below the cop-lit windows, pressed together, cheeks and sweat, blending into each other like this, this, this is what our elders fought for, our bad behavior and worse sex in the back of a car and then our silence when we finally find ourselves alone, in bed together with a safely locked door.

I’ve lost the story here. I tend to when sex is involved. There aren’t swings on this playset, which child-me would’ve thought stupid. I write with a wrecking ball and a wide lens nowadays, in three different notebooks for two stupid hours because I can’t say what I mean. I write the way my elders taught me, deathful without absence, opening beyond and beyond still, a wit that crackles into the Pacific.

The car is pulling away now, rocking up and over the speed bump, and I am wishing I gave a little witnessing wave for the sake of good neighborship, a proof that sex doesn’t just tumble off into the abyss once you’ve finished him off. The writer keeps the score. My bluntness is no mistake. It’s been bred into me like a racehorse who’s always willing to say a bit more than that which should be properly allowed.

Attention is difficult for me because I see well and without a quiet enough place to pick the important things and live with them. I miss my own warm body next to yours, you who holds my hips gentle like the violin bows they’ve become. The drought-resistant tree next to me looks like an angel if I glance up too quickly. The car is gone, thank god, because a mother and a son have just walked by me, and I already didn’t know what to say to them.

Lillian G Lippold (they/them) is an interdisciplinary writer obsessed with Place and queer utopia. Minnesota-born and SoCal grown, they've been published in many university pubs and other mags. They definitely love you, too.

KEVIN CLOUTHER

Strawberries

ANDREA knew it was a bad idea. That wasn’t the question. Sometimes you had to go through with an idea, not to confirm whether it was good or bad but to see what happened. That’s how you knew you were alive, she decided, watching the suitcases spit out of the wall and onto the conveyor belt.

Why had she checked her suitcase? She never checked her suitcase, preferring to haul it through the whole miserable process, so as to avoid the step she’d arrived at now. Maybe she was punishing herself. That made sense, given the circumstance. The circumstance was this: she was going to visit her ex-boyfriend Nick. They weren’t having an affair—she didn’t think so, not yet—but they weren’t exactly friends either. They hadn’t seen each other since high school.

“Excuse me,” a man said. “I just need to get my bag.”

Andrea looked at the man and then the conveyor belt, which was pushing a series of evenly spaced suitcases in her direction. She stepped aside, and he rushed into the space she vacated.

She checked her phone. Nick had offered to pick her up, but she declined, thinking the setting would lead to theatrics they would regret: a messy hug, hands left too long on shoulder blades, all the unfamiliar smells they’d acquired or learned to disguise. Better to rent a car, to be in charge of when she arrived and departed. That car felt a long way away now, which was okay. She wasn’t ready for whatever happened next.

Her suitcase was among the first to appear. She scooped it off the conveyor with one arm. With her other arm, she cut through the air, not realizing everyone had gotten out of her way. Was there something frightening about her here?

She’d taken out her phone to call her husband. It was an instinct. But also she wanted to talk to him. As always, he picked up right away.

“How’s Florida?” he asked.

“Is that where I am?”

“That’s what you said.”

She winced, not because it was an accusation but because it wasn’t. She heard at least one of her boys crying in the background. Or, if not crying, then asking for something in a way that was indistinguishable from crying.

“I’m in the airport,” she said. “I might just stay here.”

“Airports have bars.”

“How are the boys?”

He paused as he debated what to tell her. The longer he paused, the worse the boys’ crimes became in her mind. How much trouble could they have caused since she left? She knew the answer: a lot.

Plus, her husband was permissive. He permitted any number of things she wouldn’t, which made her the bad guy, which she resented. She tried to focus on her resentment as she made her way to the rental car counter.

“The boys are fine,” her husband decided.

“I’ll bring them back something stupid.”

“Bring me back something stupid too.”

Andrea nodded into the empty air. She hung up the phone and placed both hands on the empty rental car counter.

“Is anyone here,” she asked loudly.

Why was nobody else in line? She might have loudly asked that too.

She rubbed the handle of her suitcase and felt suddenly sheepish over its contents, including—humiliatingly—the bra she’d bought. She left on the tags. And there was—it was so stupid—the plastic bag of strawberries, already swimming in their own tawdry juices. She would throw out that bag before she got in the car, provided she got a car.

She unzipped her suitcase, and it was worse than she remembered. Not one but two bathing suits. Three floppy hats. Did she think that by flying back to Florida she would transform into a wearer of floppy hats? The sandals she didn’t regret. She was momentarily overcome with a desire to plunge both feet into hot sand. Then she allowed herself to imagine—just for one moment—the ocean washing over her feet. She felt the sudden cold, the scratch of salt. Already the sun was restoring something. Her skin? That would be good. She reached for the skin beneath her eyes, which was the skin she worried about most. She worried about a lot of skin.

“Sorry,” a woman said, rushing behind the counter.

“I have a reservation.”

“Of course.”

The woman got to work on a computer. Andrea took comfort in the speed of the woman’s typing. It felt good to be taken seriously. Few things bothered her more than being ignored. She consulted her phone to see if her husband had written. He hadn’t. Neither had Nick. Increasingly, she thought of them together, not as competitors but as different aspects of the same life. She shared some things with one and some things with the other. There were few things she shared with both.

Hideously, they had the same name.

“Okay,” the woman said, “I see the problem.”

“There’s a problem?”

The woman produced a look of professional pity. “When your flight is more than an hour late—”

“That wasn’t my fault.”

“No, but when a flight is more than one hour late, the computer—”

So the computer was going to take the heat. Andrea was familiar with—strangely comforted by—this strategy.

“When is the soonest I can get a car?” she asked.

“I might be able to help,” a man said.

The woman looked at him. So did Andrea. She thought she recognized him. Did they sit next to each other on the plane? Did they go to high school together twenty—God, more—years ago?

“You let me get my bag,” the man clarified. “From the thing. What’s it called?”

“Carousel,” the woman said.

Carousel! The whimsy was incongruous. Andrea thought, unwillingly, of her boys at home.

“I don’t need my reservation,” the man said.

“What’s your name?” The woman was already typing.

Good news: it was no problem to transfer the reservation.

“How come his car wasn’t given away?” Andrea asked.

The woman gestured toward the computer.

“Glad I could help,” the man said before disappearing forever.

“Do I get the keys from you?” Andrea asked.

“You’ll need to take the shuttle,” the woman said.

The shuttle arrived every fifteen minutes, except when it didn’t. The air outside was thick. Andrea hadn’t prepared herself for how different the air would feel. It seemed a harbinger of all the things she hadn’t considered, which, of course, there was no way to know about in advance. She began to worry about these things, not one by one but all at once.

She’d thought, many times, about seeing Nick for the first time. Or for the first time again. But she hadn’t thought, not really, about the next hour or the hour after that. Her flight back wasn’t until Sunday evening, and it was only Friday morning. The number of hours between now and then seemed larger than anything she’d accounted for at home, where the trip raced from idle flirtation to reality.

She tried, standing at the shuttle stop, to retrace her steps. The only other person waiting was a teenage girl. Andrea wondered why this girl was traveling alone. Where was she going? Andrea didn’t ask. The girl wore enormous black headphones. She moved her head steadily to whatever music moved through them. When Andrea was younger, boys always wanted her to listen to music with headphones. How eager those boys were to share their secrets! So many people told her then how hard it was being a teenager that she began to believe them.

Now she looked back at those years fondly as a time of colossal self-involvement. It was unimaginable to think of her concerns first without denial or compartmentalization. Indeed, denial and compartmentalization—especially that—had accompanied every aspect of this trip, starting with the purchase of plane tickets.

Are we sure this is a good idea, she’d written Nick.

Of course not, he wrote back, and her heart thrilled.

It was a problem. Because she was married. Because he also was married. Because, worse, she liked her husband. Did Nick like his wife? Andrea didn’t ask. They didn’t talk about their spouses. They talked, almost exclusively, about the past.

The shuttle arrived in a huff of exhaust. It made her tired just looking at the shuttle. The door opened loudly, and the girl got in first. She had no suitcases, only a backpack, which she wore with both straps, criminally uncool in Andrea’s day. Andrea sat across from the girl on the shuttle. They were the only two passengers. The driver was an enormous man squinting beneath a translucent green visor like the ones croupiers wear. At least, they wore those visors in movies. Andrea had never been to Las Vegas or any casino. She’d never been to most places. She could drive the rental car anywhere.

No way the girl was old enough to rent a car. Andrea was pretty sure you have to be at least twenty-five. What would she do to be twenty-five again? She thought about it, though doing so was more unpleasant than she’d expected.

At twenty-five, she had her pick. Men wanted to take her on dates. Friends wanted to meet her for drinks. People were always paying for things. She reached into her purse. She would give two dollars to the driver, one for her and one for the girl, who was really jamming out to the headphones now. Andrea smiled at the girl, which she ignored. Surely, it was good that this girl didn’t feel pressure to acknowledge a stranger’s curiosity.

Although it seemed a little rude.

The shuttle opened its door in the middle of an expansive parking lot. Andrea handed the driver two dollars, and he thanked her so profusely, she suspected—but couldn’t confirm—irony. At the edge of the parking lot was a little hut. Andrea followed the girl into this hut. Andrea worked her way to another empty counter. The girl sat in the only chair.

“Where is everybody?” Andrea asked.

The girl didn’t answer, of course.

“I’ll take whatever,” Andrea said. “Whatever color, whatever size.”

She spread her arms, resisting the temptation to put her hands on the empty counter again. There seemed a finality to that repetition. She might be tired, but she wasn’t giving up.

Because things stay the same for so long, it’s easy to forget how quickly—how often—they change. Like that, a woman was behind the counter, retrieving the reservation. Like that, Andrea was inside the sedan with all its comforting scents: fake leather, black rubber, disinfectant. All she had to do was tell the car where to go, and the computer pointed the way. The accent of the GPS was unplaceably—British-adjacent, robot-British?—elegant. The highway was wide open. She was at Nick’s house before she knew it.

Was his house what she expected? It turned out she hadn’t expected anything. You can only expect so much, and she’d directed her attention elsewhere: to his appearance, for one thing. She studied both the photos online and the few photos she’d kept from high school. He didn’t send her any pictures directly, and she didn’t send him any either—their exchanges were shy, even polite in this regard.

Nick’s house was neither big nor small. It was both nice and not, a single man’s house. But he wasn’t single. He had a wife. How hard Andrea had worked not to think about his wife! Andrea parked on the street, though the driveway was empty. Absurdly, she almost checked the mailbox.

What was she doing? The enormity of that question roared into her consciousness. She was sitting behind the steering wheel of a rental car. She was applying lip balm in the rearview mirror. She was depositing keys into her purse, but she wasn’t opening the door. First she needed to decide a few things, such as who she would be when she knocked on his door. It had been a long time since she made that decision.

She could be fun. Wasn’t she fun once upon a time? Didn’t she produce joints from her bra and light them in the passenger seat of cars going very fast? Didn’t the people in the backseat—beautiful people, men and women, all eighteen-, nineteen-, twenty-years-old—bend their slender wrists to retrieve the joints from her? Not two years before she couldn’t hold one without burning her fingertips. She wished she had a joint now, or at least a lorazepam. She considered driving somewhere else, maybe a pharmacy.

She could drive to the apartment where she’d grown up with her mother. Like most people Andrea went to school with, Nick hadn’t moved far. She could get to the apartment, if it still existed, in ten minutes.

Andrea was tired of thinking. She was tired, period. She returned to the rearview mirror to confirm what she already knew, that she looked desperate. That was okay. There was no pretending anymore. Or there wouldn’t be as soon as she knocked.

But there would be no knocking because there Nick was, standing before his door. He was taller than she remembered. Or maybe just taller than her husband. Of course, Nick had been watching her. Everything she’d been worrying about, he’d been worrying about in his own unknowable way.

Andrea hurried out of the car. She smiled or attempted something approximating a smile. He attempted something similar. There were, between her car and his door, about twenty-five feet. At some point he would walk to her, or she would walk to him. Maybe they would walk to each other. Or maybe this was a dream, an entirely reasonable performance of the unconscious mind. She would think, upon waking, that was something.

But it wasn’t anything, not yet. She was still deciding who she would be, and he was deciding too. He couldn’t control how tall he was, but he could control what he said and didn’t. He wasn’t saying anything, and she wasn’t saying anything either. They remained frozen, almost smiling.

Then she realized she’d expected the seventeen-year-old version of him. No matter how many times they texted—they rarely spoke by phone—she carried the high school version of Nick in her mind. What did he see in his private dream? They still weren’t saying anything. Of course, she’d expected to become the seventeen-year-old version of herself, the Andrea who was more than fun, who possessed a brain full of ideas, who wasn’t about to spend the rest of her life circling the same half-empty parking lots. That Andrea was gone first chance she got. So what was she doing back?

“You want to come inside?” Nick finally asked.

Andrea locked the car doors with her keys, and the car produced a conclusive beep, triggering an unexpected panic over the girl from the rental car counter. Before leaving, Andrea had neglected to make sure this girl was okay. What if she were still sitting inside the little hut, waiting with her giant headphones? If nobody came to get her, would she try to rent a car, or would she start walking? When she got where she was going, would she stay, or would she go back to where she started?

“Let me grab this one thing,” Andrea said.

She unlocked the trunk. She hadn’t meant to get to this point. Things had gotten away from her. Everyone had flirtations. They were healthy insofar as they kept you from doing something worse. But here she was, on the precipice of something worse. Her husband was at home with the boys. Nick’s wife was out of town—girls weekend, Nick had said. All of this effort for what? She shook her head, which was inside the trunk. The rest of her body was outside the car. She was sweating more than seemed reasonable for one human body.

“Do you want help?” he called.

She grabbed her suitcase and thought with horror about the strawberries. There was nowhere to jettison them without Nick’s seeing.

“Do you think I could have a glass of water?” she asked. “I’m not used to the heat anymore.”

He disappeared into the house. She closed the trunk and moved quickly to the driver’s seat, where she inserted the keys into the ignition. She turned the radio loud, but only she could hear it. Only she could smell the strawberries. The windows were closed, and she was on her way back to the airport. She could go home, anywhere.

Or she could find the girl. They could get coffee and a donut. Andrea had a few things to say, but first she would listen. The girl had her own story to tell.

Please, take off your headphones. Tell me where you’re going. Tell me what you’re leaving. Maybe I can help. I’ve seen things—I’ve made mistakes! But I’ve fixed them too. Maybe we can help each other.

Read our feature on University of Nebraska at Omaha MFA Program Coordinator Kevin Clouther. ➔

DANIEL NEWELL

Two Poems

BLACKBERRY PICKING

When I remember my mother happy
I go back to her emerging from brambles,
a loaded bucket keeping her from dancing.
How she’d get into it, thumbs and fingers
purpled from berries that also stained
the cutoff milk jug she carried. Handing me
a used ice cream tub, lugging their dark weight.
Some were sour, not ready for the trip.
But the big sweet ones in hot cobbler
with vanilla ice cream melting over an evening
at the bottom of summer. I'm getting ahead of her.
And her scratched shins and hands. Sweaty legs. Sneaking
over the old Battlefield where the best patches were
without competition. Picking half a day of illegal berries.
Dodging the park ranger, dropping in waist-high grass
when his truck would pass, lying belly-down on the stained
shirtfront she’d sometimes flipped up as a makeshift basket.

RODGEY POEM

I hope I get the news late
when you die. That I live a while
more with the thought of you
alive. Maybe the paper misses it,
or you're missing for days
and for all we know, you might
return in a week from the woods
hungry and filthy, crawling with stories.